Freedom Twenty-Five

I finally got around to reading a book that’s been on my pile for quite some time now. In fact, it’s the one book I carried with me during the entirety of the 2012 End Of the World Tour through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.

 Freedom Twenty-Five: A 21st Century Man’s Guide To Life, is an ambitious book.

I don’t know of any comparable attempts to capture a snapshot of the best advice across the disparate fields of fitness, entrepreneurship, personal finance, game, men’s rights, productivity and information addiction, in a product that young men can use to immediately start improving their lives. The greatest asset of this book is that the author has identified and summarized the wisdom of great men who have developed alternatives to the mainstream advice in each of these fields.

Frost has also done a fine job of distilling what he’s learned from his sources into a core of practical, actionable ideas. The author has received many emails from readers about how his book has improved their lives, and I have it on good authority that such emails make him feel warm and fuzzy inside.

But while Freedom Twenty-Five: A 21st-Century Man’s Guide To Life is a useful resource, reasonably well-written, and occasionally infused with the author’s rakishly charming personality, it is flawed in several ways.

The problems begin at the cover itself.

The titular phrase ‘guide to life’ betrays the high regard in which the author holds himself, and hints at the arrogant, authoritative tone he often strikes throughout the book. As a reader, I was frequently moved to smack Frost, and remind him that he is mortal. This occasionally condescending tone (which, I also have on good authority, is quite prominent in his ‘real-life’ conversations with friends and significant others) is a mild irritant throughout the book.

Related to that, the author frequently commits the fatal literary flaw of narcissistic self-indulgence. Frost would be well-advised to consider that his readers are far more interested in relevant information that they can use to improve their own lives, than they are in an A&E biography of his short and unextraordinary life. Sections with valuable advice must be sifted out from amid paragraphs of biographical exposition. Few will be more interested in the author’s life story than this reviewer, and even I was moved to skim some of the more long-winded parts.

Freedom Twenty-Five: A 21st Century Man’s Guide To Life would also greatly benefit from the stern pen of an editor, as its effective length should be about half of what it is now. Finally, at $14.99, it is priced quite high for the 75-100 pages of quality content that would remain, once the necessary edits are made.

Overall, this was an admirable attempt for a first-time author, and I urge him to take pride in that achievement, while acknowledging the many problems the book has. Indeed, with some scorched-earth editing; the revision of a few sections; the addition of some new material; a substantially diminished price point; and a generous plan to compensate the loyal early readers who shelled out ‘finished-product cash’ for what was, in retrospect, a first draft with a lot of potential…

It could be big.

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Hilarity Ensues is far and away the worst installment in the Tucker Max canon. It is the Phantom Menace of Fratire.

This is a difficult review for me to write. I’ve been following Max and his work for almost a decade now. I really wanted to like his latest. Tucker Max’s earlier books (I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell and Assholes Finish First) were both excellent, and I’ve been following his career since he was nothing more than a guy with a few stories on his website. I might not have even started writing if it weren’t for Max’s influence on my teen-age self (readers can decide for themselves is this is a good or a bad thing).

So I was really hoping to be impressed with Hilarity Ensues. Instead, reading it was like the first Christmas you realized Mom and Dad used the same wrapping paper as Santa Claus: Disillusioning, and disappointing.

The first section in Hilarity Ensues is a collection of stories from a month Max spent in Cancun during law school. Most of them are pretty funny, and would have held their own next to the material in his earlier works. Hilarity Ensues also contains a re-telling of IHTSBIH’s Miss Vermont story, with details that he previously had to omit for legal reasons. Parts of the revised story are absolutely beyond the pale of believability – until you see the pictures. This book had me laughing out loud in a few places, which is more than can be said for most attempts at literary humour.

Beyond that though, the book drags:

- Tucker goes to the bachelor parties and weddings of his friends, most of which are completely pedestrian

- Tucker’s friend ‘Hate’ gets disproportionately angry because Jimmy John’s put mayo on his sandwih

- Tucker goes out with the cast of Deadliest Catch and has a good time, despite getting seasick

Most painful of all, about a tenth of the book consists of text message exchanges between Tucker and random girls. Perhaps there were some gems later on in these sections, but I didn’t make it far before I started mashing my next-page button like it owed me money.

The downfall of Hilarity Ensues is not just the quality of the stories, though. Some of Tucker Max’s best work in earlier books recounts nights and events that really aren’t all that crazy. The infamous Sushi Pants Story, for example, can be fairly summarized as: Tucker buys a breathalyser, gets really drunk, eats sushi, and throws up in a bush. Eminently believable? Yes. but good luck reading it in public without making a scene.

Years ago, someone told me that the most important characteristic of good writing is honesty. An author must do his best to portray himself, his characters, and the world as he sees it, as authentically as possible. Readers may not agree, or even relate – but they will empathize. And that’s what makes for good storytelling.

Hilarity Ensues fails because it’s a dishonest book.

I don’t mean that the stories themselves are fake. Rather, the perspective from which Max writes about them is contrived. He has forced himself to write Hilarity Ensues with enthusiasm that he just doesn’t feel anymore. As he makes clear in this interview with Forbes, Tucker Max is living a very different life than he was a decade ago. More importantly, he sees his early debaucherous escapades in a different light:

“I know some of the stuff I did is, um, beyond the pale or f***-up sometimes, or mean to other people or destructive to myself. But I still did it anyway.”

…

“I understood intellectually in my twenties that this had something to do with unresolved parental, emotional issues. But I didn’t process it. I could look at other people and see these kinds of issues playing out in them, but I didn’t apply it to myself, because that’s the hardest thing to do for anybody. I couldn’t do that then.”

…

“I was a ridiculous narcissist in my twenties. It’s not even that I didn’t care about other people. It’s way beyond that. I just didn’t even understand that other people even existed or mattered. I do not believe I was a true NPD [narcissistic personality disorder] in the clinical sense. But, dude, I was close.”

…

“I ended up hurting a lot of people and not even realizing it. Because of that narcissism, I didn’t connect well to other people. I used a lot of people a lot of times, in ways I didn’t understand.”

…

“Listen I’m 35 now, I can look back on my writing and I can say this. This is something I’ve never really said before in public or admitted on the record, and I’ll admit it now: I didn’t realize this when I was writing it, but I think if you read between the lines a little bit, in between all the bravado, you can see a lot of self-loathing.

“I knew it was inevitable that I would have to look into this stuff eventually. In some vague sense, I understood the whole time that a lot of my extreme acting out came from unresolved emotional issues. And I knew deep down at some point I was going to have to face them.

“So many people describe my book as just pure id. What I’m trying to do now is to connect my ego and my superego to my id. I’m trying to understand, why was I doing all this stuff? Why was I acting this way? Through understanding all of that, you start to resolve the underlying problems that you’re acting out, in a healthier, more productive way.

“And I’ve found that, what I now want the most in a woman is—I want a partner. I want someone who is my partner in life. Who supports me, and I support her. I can share all my experiences in life with her, and she can share hers back with me. Not only do we love each other, but we accept, embrace, nurture, and care for each other.”

So Tucker Max has come to realize that his old lifestyle wasn’t quite as awesome as he thought it was while he was living it.

Which is fine. We all grow, adapt, and change throughout life. Hell, I’m only twenty-six and I’m already passing on some big nights out so I can wake up at 06:30, throw a wheatgrass shot in with my protein shake, and hit the pads for an hour before work. Good on Tucker, for making changes to his lifestyle that he felt were necessary.

But in terms of how these changes affected the quality of his writing:

Grown-up Tucker Max can no longer write the character he created based on himself, because he no longer understands him. 

The end product is the inauthentic and uninteresting Hilarity Ensues. Buy it if (like me) you’ve been following Max’s work long enough that you have to. Otherwise, just pick up new copies of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and Assholes Finish First, and pretend the series ended there.  

* * *

If you haven’t already, check out the rest of the series:

The Rise And Fall Of Tucker Max: Part 1

The Rise And Fall Of Tucker Max: Part 2

The Rise And Fall Of Tucker Max: Part 3:

And who knows? There may be a part 4 and 5 somewhere down the line as well. Tucker Max’s Blog has just launched, with this as its mission statement:

“From here, this blog will go onto other issues and I will write about a ton of other things, but I’m going to keep coming back to this again and again:

How does someone who has a little bit of talent and a lot of motivation succeed in life?

It’s the question I faced and answered in my life, I think it’s the question that a lot of other people want answered, and I have some perspective on that issue that can help other people.”

Which sounds interesting as fuck to me.

So the unfortunate Hilarity Ensues is headed straight to page 20 of my Kindle library, and there it will linger. IHTSBIH and AFF will retain their status as classics. As for the future – Tucker Max will determine the direction his career takes from here.

I’m hoping for the best.

* * *

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HYPE! HYPE! HYPE!!!!

This week is going to be pretty epic, and I don’t want to be excused of overloading you with excitement. Elderly readers, small children, pregnant women, and anyone from a family with a history of heart problems, I strongly advise that you unsubscribe from Freedom Twenty-Five right now.

The rest of you should subscribe to the RSS Feed, follow me on Twitter, and sign up for the Mailing List.

Do it now, or I sacrifice this kitten:

Here’s the posting schedule for the upcoming week. Write it down, tell your friends, hide yo kids, hide yo wife:

Monday – My Review of Tucker Max’s Hilarity Ensues

Tuesday – My Review of Jonathan Frost’s Freedom Twenty-Five

Wednesday – Epic Announcement #1

Thursday – Epic Announcement #2

Friday – Epic Announcement #3

Saturday -Epic Announcement #4

Sunday – And on the seventh day, he rested, for what he had done was good.

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What is Trust? Dr. Phil tells us it’s the most important part of a healthy relationship, but I’m not so sure.

Is Trust the belief that your partner is honest and faithful? Most would say yes. But then, what if I were to install a GPS tracking device on my wife which relayed her coordinates to me 24/7? Or interview her with a lie detector every night when she got home? In either situation, I would know with 100% certainty that she was being honest and faithful. But I don’t think Dr. Phil would approve.

So we can see that trust only counts if it is irrational. Seeking to confirm or refute a partner’s honesty with evidence – say, by going through their phone, email, stalking them, etc, is actually a sign of mistrust.  Real trust is when you catch your girlfriend out for dinner with an ex, or your husband starts getting calls late at night from that tart secretary of his, and you believe the innocent explanation hastily offered up.

Traditional societies don’t have this romantic idea of trust. They send Chaperones on dates, they don’t allow their wives and daughters to go somewhere alone with a strange man, and they have social conventions in place demanding that women avoid even the appearance of potential infidelity or promiscuity. They don’t trust – they verify.

Now, it’s generally a good idea to be suspicious of any ideas that came out of the western world post-WW2, and I think our romantic, Dr. Phil-esque idea of the all-importance of trust fits this criteria. let’s evaluate the idea of trust from that most useful of perspectives: Cui Bono?

The answer is, the same people who bono from the myriad other social and cultural innovations introduced during the sexual revolution: Alpha males and promiscuous women:

- It’s girls night out! We’re just going to dance! Come on, don’t you trust me?

- It’s grad trip, me and the girls are going to Cancun! Come on, don’t you trust me?

- Honey, that girl is crazy! I don’t know why she keeps calling me. Don’t you trust me?

- Baby, you know I just go out and flirt a bit, nothing more than that. Don’t you…

And so on.

According to our culture, if you’re a regular dude with a regular girlfriend, and you understandably don’t want her going out and getting hit on by guys who are more desirable than you – you have trust issues. You are the one in the wrong. Most people in most eras would consider it a no-brainer that you are not OK with your girl going out with her girlfriends, traveling alone, or otherwise putting herself in a position where she can easily and covertly cheat on you. But in 21st-century America, anything less than complete, unfounded faith in a person’s fidelity is socially unacceptable.

Similarly, if you’re a girl dating a man with options, you would be a fool to trust him unconditionally. And yet, you’ve been primed you to go on the defensive if a man accuses you of not trusting him, regardless of how valid your mistrust might be.

Some observations on this from my personal experience:

1) If a girl is traveling alone or with girlfriends, she will almost certainly cheat on her boyfriend without a second thought.

2) If a girl is in a club with her girlfriends, she will probably cheat on her boyfriend if your game is tight.

3) If a girl is anything less than 100% satisfied with her relationship, there are men who she would have sex with behind your back, if the stars align and the chance is there.

And keep in mind, I am not some one-in-a-million guy who can seduce any woman you put in front of me: I am just a decent-looking guy with sloppy game. I’m not the coolest or the smoothest guy in the room. Still, I’ve banged quite a few cute girls with boyfriends or husbands in my life.

And men, we’re even worse. Chris Rock is a wise man:

So now we see the idea of Trust, stripped of its pretensions and laid bare in front of us: Just one more piece of social conditioning to ease the transition from the outdated western ideal of monogamy, to our natural, tribal state of polygamy and soft harems. The sword of Trust can be used to shame the beta men who wish to protect their wives, and the alpha females who wish to monopolize one desirable man.

*

So what to do, now that trust is seen for what it is? Abandon it? Abandon love?

Not necessarily.

We can still love, without trust. We can choose mates who seem ‘trustworthy’ in the sense that they don’t give off the tell-tale signs of the slut/player. We can structure our lives to minimize the chance that our partners will violate our (rational) trust – don’t feel obligated to let your significant other to go on their weekly girls/boys night out, get those kids paternity tested, and so on.

We could also just inject ourselves with GPS trackers, and have a central database make all of our sexual activity publicly available. I’m partially kidding, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see traditional communities – say, Mormons and Muslims – doing something like this in a decade or two.

I take my relationships one day at a time. I refuse to have expectations for the behaviour of girls I date, and I encourage them not to develop any expectations for me. My eventual children will be paternity tested, and I’ll do my best to protect my rights to them and my assets in the event that their mother(s) go off the deep end.

Trust? I’ll save mine for my lawyer, my Swiss bank manager, and a DNA testing lab.

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First up: How do ya’ll like the new header? (Hey, if you can do better, why don’t you? There’s a free book in it for you, and I’d be happy to pimp your blog/website/flickr account.)

Second, I’ve got a new name: Jonathan Frost!

It’s kind of funny, changing your name on a whim. After a year and a bit of blogging as Frost, signing off half my email correspondence as Frost, and meeting a dozen or so people for the first time in real life with: “Hi, I’m ____. Uhh, you know me as Frost.”

I may just unmask myself completely at some point. But until then, I want a first name. I like how “Jonathan Frost” sounds, and it reduces to Jack Frost – which is clever! Very clever in fact, because I live in the great northern hinterlands of America! Get it? Ahh, forget it.

Anyways.

As of last week, I’m back in Chiang Mai, and if you’re looking for a new temporary home, I can’t recommend the city highly enough. It’s a great place to train Muay Thai. The bars are, fun, laid back, and full of cute girls passing through for a few days at a time. The quality, variety and price of food is incredible. It scores way above average on the cheap/nice scale, which is to say it’s cheaper than anywhere nicer, and nicer than anywhere cheap. Every expat I meet has some sort of interesting hustle going on – webmasters, bloggers, internet marketers, business owners, e-commerce guys, exporters, pornographers, life coaches.

I’ve been spending most of my time working on some new projects that I’ll be announcing soon – a couple of new websites, a new book, and one mega-project that won’t be rolled out for probably another year or so – while learning everything I can about building and running online businesses. Critics of the Four-Hour Work Week approach to life may have some fair points, in that a lot of proponents make location-independent businesses sound easier to build than they are. Still, the gold rush is on for anyone who can create content, write and design good marketing materials, or leverage the technical skills to actually make websites work.

Are you looking for a career change? Stay tuned for an upcoming post in which I lay out my Online Business 101 curriculum .

I’m training at the same gym (check them out if you’re interested in Muay Thai in Chiang Mai), but only 2-3 sessions a week instead of the 10+ I was doing in December. I’m also hitting the weights again with a one-month membership to a fitness club in a five-star hotel, with an outdoor pool, sauna, and yoga classes, for about $30. Again – Chiang Mai, not a bad city to live in. Thai massages can be had for $5/hour as well.

My itinerary for the next six months is partly up in the air. I’ll definitely be in Italy for May, and Austria/Germany for June and July, and back home shortly thereafter. As for March and April – Bali? Burma? Nepal? Turkey? The Balkans? Barcelona and the south of France? I change my mind on a daily basis.

Not to be a dick or anything, but my life rocks pretty hard right now. Sure, I’m slowly hemorrhaging money. Sure, the majority of the relationships I form won’t last longer than a month, or a week. And yes, there are occasional moments of fear and doubt. There’s the suspicion that I’m kidding myself with this whole “writing” thing. There’s the extremely valid concern that my odds of dying in a horrific motorcycle accident are about fifty-fifty.

I think that I’ve made a smart choice, walking away from a ‘safe’ career so I can travel and write full time. I think that I’m much more likely to be happy, make money, and actually do something worthwhile with my life.

But sometimes, I have my doubts. Maybe I’m just running away from adulthood, partying it up while my years tick away, and rationalizing it to myself as something bigger. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing – but I wouldn’t, would I? It’s easy to look around at the people you meet, and wonder why they’re making such stupid, counterproductive decisions with their lives. The answer tends to be, that they don’t know any better. They don’t see how their actions are self-destructive. So I wonder – am I any different? How do I know I’m not just as deluded as them?

Good friends are a valuable reality check. So is having a blog, and writing about your life and goals and motivations publicly. But the people in our lives (including blog readers) are a self-selected group. If I’m deluded, you probably are too.

So I can’t fully excise the fear that I’m a complete idiot for retiring at the age of 25 to fly across the world and try to make it as a writer. But when those doubts creep up, there’s still one certainty that I can always hold on to: I love my life.

I love writing, I love having this blog, and I love the little coffee shop that I work at from 8-3 every day. I love kicking the shit out of pads and bags, sparring, and pushing my body to the limit in the afternoon. I love going out to eat every night with friends, meeting random people from all over the world, hitting on backpacker girls, and waking up in the morning excited to do it all over again.

Maybe there’s more to life than fun. Maybe there’s a lot more. But is there a lot a lot more? I don’t think so.

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(What, can’t a guy write a little poetry when the mood strikes him? In this case, the mood is a vague desire to write something, coupled with the knowledge that sleep deprivation and a red-wine hangover means I should avoid any of my more serious projects.)

*

There once was a girl
When she spoke, I would hurl
But her vagina was reasonably tight

She opened her mouth,
But my attention went south,
Where her breasts were looking quite nice

She would talk about work,
But since I’m a jerk,
I’d squeeze my hand over her lips.

She asked about my day,
But I just wanted a lay,
Not sarcasm, bad jokes and dry quips.

This woman would speak,
Noise poured from her beak,
Apparently with no end in sight.

I yelled “Keep your mouth shut!”
“I’m just here for a nut!”
“Woman, you must not be very bright!”

After I’d shouted,
She sulked and she pouted
And said, “You know, I’m really quite smart!”

So I patted her head,
Threw her down to the bed,
And gave her some love – almost a quart.

She couldn’t harangue,
After so thorough a bang,
So I explained to her serotonin-addled brain:

“I know that you’re bright,”
In your day-to-day life,
Compared to most of these dames.”

“I know that at work,
You’re much more than a clerk,
But with me, keep your tongue and your lips tightly furled.

“For here in this bed,
And keeping me fed,
Is where you fit in to my world.”

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‘Twas the day before Valentine’s and all through the house,

Not a creature was thinking about his girlfriend or spouse.

Playstation controllers hung in chargers with care,

In hopes that new high scores soon would be there.

 

One man-child slept, with his eyes tightly shut,

Having booted out a chick, after busting a nut.

She put up a fuss, begging him to stay,

But he’d kicked her out still, fearing how she’d look in the day.

 

Then out on the lawn, there arose such a clatter,

He sprang from his race-car bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window he flew like a flash,

Tripping over his action figures, weed and porn stash.

 

The moon on the breasts of his freshly-banged ho,

Gave the lustre of beer goggles to the creature below.

She plodded in the frost, and stumbled up near

Like a clumsy, retarded, overweight rein-deer.

 

Now she wasn’t the prettiest, and she wasn’t too quick,

But that night she’d been worthy of some man-child dick.

They’d met at a bar, on Tuesday Cheap Night

Her looks were the sort best kept out of the light.

 

But with alcohol and darkness working on her side,

She’d found a willing man, with too little pride.

He’d overlooked her muffin top, and total lack of grace

But dude, you gotta admit – at least she’s got a cute face!

 

He opened his window and she called out his name,

And pleaded for him to stop being so lame.

“I just don’t understand, I thought we had a good night!

Can we just start over? Can we try and set this right?”

 

The man-child giggled and pulled down his shades,

This girl was insane, like most that he’d laid.

Why would he ever want to settle down now?

With so many women a-waiting to be plowed?

 

The girls that he banged, expected nothing from him

And so nothing they got, while they lived at his whim.

Though thirty years old, and with money to spare,

He swore not to marry ’till he’d lost all his hair.

 

So the man-child yawned, and returned to his bed,

With visions of pizza pops dancing in his head.

His Valentine trudged all the way back to her place,

With disappointment and confusion still etched in her face.

 

The twenty-first century! The Age Of The Man-Child!

The callous, carefree cad with whom women are beguiled.

But they ask: What has become of men we could respect?

The men with better lines, than “Hello – are you wet? ”

 

The answer is, that man is dead. The Man-child is his heir.

Commitment and monogamy? Not while they have their hair.

Now ladies, you may think this world to be a bit macabre,

But happy Valentine’s anyways! Now how ’bout a blowjob?

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Addendum: Check out my Review of Hilarity Ensues

This is a guest post I wrote for In Mala Fide. Please read and comment on it here.

(Part 1 and Part 2)

It’s never fun to watch your heroes fall. I have zero shame in admitting that, for many years, Tucker Max was a hero to me.

At the age of 20, when I first came across Max’s website, I was already a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing asshole. I didn’t need someone to teach me that those choices were OK.

But at that point in my life, I had stopped reading, stopped writing, and in a lot of ways, stopped thinking. I was living an unexamined life, largely because that’s just what a cool guy does in college. Life was fun, but I was incomplete.

At a first glance, Tucker Max had some funny stories. As I read more though, I noticed that they were peppered with references to literature, history and science. Slipped in behind all the stories, was a reading list that kept me busy for the better part of a semester, and reawakened a habit – compulsive reading – that has benefited my life more than any other.

I had already figured out that I didn’t need to apologize to anyone for being an asshole. But I hadn’t realized that I didn’t need to be ashamed of having intellectual interests. Ironically, Tucker Max didn’t teach me that it was OK to get drunk and hook up. He taught me it was OK to read books that weren’t in my course syllabi and write for my school paper. For that influence, I will always be grateful, regardless of what the man has become, or will become.

But let’s take a step back, and consider the recent twist that Tucker Max’s career and outlook appears to be taking.

From 2002 until 2008 or so, Tucker Max was a cult hero to millions of college-aged American men. He achieved this status by writing stories about his adventures as an asshole completely unconcerned with the feelings and expectations of those around him. Who are the interesting characters in this story?

Tucker Max’s answer is that he is. Hence, psychotherapy, introspection, and ruminations on how his alcoholic mother and absentee father lead him to lead the life he did.

But explanations that centre around the experiences and characteristics of Tucker Max ignore the real story: The legions of young men who followed him. Did they all have absentee fathers, etc, as well? No? Then perhaps the Tucker Max phenomenon is better explained in broader terms – what is it about our culture that made Tucker Max a star?

- Why are Millennial men so eager to jettison society’s expectations of them?

- Why are they spending their early twenties in a haze of boozing, partying, chasing slutty girls, becoming pick-up artists, and playing video games? 

- How would Tucker Max have been received in virtually any culture outside of early 21st-century America? What is it about the present that makes us uniquely receptive to an ethos of nihilistic hedonism?

These are big questions. Tucker Max 2.0 doesn’t seem to be interested in them. And that’s fine, I suppose. I wish him all the best, with his yoga and psychotherapy. It’s just disappointing to see that one of the first distinct voices to truly speak to the young men of the 21st century is putting down his pen.

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Addendum: Check out my Review of Hilarity Ensues

(This is a guest post I wrote for In Mala Fide. Please read and comment on it here.)

This is the boilerplate on TuckerMax.com. It hasn’t changed since I found the site, sometime in 2005:

” I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.

But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way. I share my adventures with the world. They are known as…The Tucker Max Stories.”

At the start of his writing career, Tucker Max – or at least the slice of his personality that he portrayed in his writing – was the ultimate embodiment of raw, unfiltered id. He completely rejected the social and moral constraints that society tried to impose on him – on all of us – and lived his life according to no laws other than those which the natural world imposed on him

As I explained in Part 1, this was the core of his appeal to my generation. Young Millennial men had been offered a bum deal of a social contract, and it’s no mystery that the first man who gave us permission to leave it on the table sold two million books.

So what does a man who has completely rejected society’s expectations look like?

Well, that really is the question of the hour. Possibly of the decade. Tucker’s answer was to get obscenely drunk, mock idiots and posers, etc. Was such a lifestyle immature, pointless, and self-destructive? Sure. But it was preferable to the emasculation prescribed to my generation by mainstream culture. Tucker Max’s fundamental message is that there are alternatives to obedience. You don’t need to spend your life tip-toeing around the self-serving expectations of others.

That was the message that resonated with millions of young men (and women) during the height of Max’s fame. It was a message many of us desperately needed to hear.

But now Max has retracted that message, and replaced it with an ethos of apology, submission, and approval-seeking. He is sorry for what he’s done! It’s not his fault, his family was mildly dysfunctional! He’s undergoing psychoanalysis to address his issues!

More generally, he is done with giving the middle finger to mainstream society. He is ready to tuck his chin down, avoid the hard questions about the culture that made him a celebrity, and live out his twilight years chasing wheat grass shots with hot yoga classes and blurry-eyed, quivery-lipped talk therapy sessions. He is returning to the mainstream media, hat in hand, begging for forgiveness in the most fashionable way – striking the pose of victimhood. Switch out a few details in his Forbes interview, and he could be mistaken for a repentant Lindsay Lohan.

Why the switch?

I’m no psychoanalyst, but here’s the theory I’m working with until something better comes along:

At some point over the past five years, Tucker Max gave up his faith in himself. His first book, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, sold 1.6 million copies. For a relatively unknown internet writer, this was ridiculously impressive.

After that:

1) He started Rudius Media. It folded.

2) The IHTSBIH film bombed, losing six million dollars

3) Assholes Finish First sold a quarter as many copies as IHTSBIH: “…around 1.6 million for the first one, and around 400,000 for the second”

Other than that, I don’t really know what Tucker Max has been working on over the past decade. Maybe he has ongoing projects that he keeps to himself, but he has been poison to pretty much everything he’s (publicly) touched since IHTSBIH. I don’t know how he’s doing financially, but G Manifesto makes a pretty convincing case that his bankroll might be getting thin.

Whatever the details – Tucker Max followed up the initial success of his first book, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, with a string of cataclysmic failures that shook him to his core.

IHTSBIH was supposed to be the humble beginning of Tucker Max’s career. Instead, it was his peak. The unstoppable force of Max’s ambition ran up against an immovable object – the cold reality of the anticlimactic follow-up to his initial success. He didn’t survive the ensuing collision.

Stay tuned for part 3.

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