Personal Growth, Dating & Psychedelics - Tucker Max - #136

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Tucker Max, New York Times bestselling author several times over, the man behind Scribe Media and creator of the fratire literary genre. But for a while, he was also a professional asshole. I don't think he'll mind me saying that. And I wanted to ask him about how you transition from being a party guy, sleeping with loads of girls, getting drunk all the time, embarrassing stories, how you grow out of that. It's an archetype that everybody knows, right? Everyone knows a bro who's still drinking and partying a little bit too late into their years. How do you go from being that to being a dad, to being a business leader, to being a figurehead within the industry of writing, all that sort of stuff. And we go real deep today. So we talk about psychedelics, we talk about introspective work, asking yourself hard questions, learning what your truth is. It's absolutely jam-packed. Tucker is a wise old soul trapped in a younger man's body, I think. There's some absolute gold in this episode. So make sure that you give it a share with someone who this could really help. Or if you're new here, press the subscribe button. You will get two episodes with the world's most fascinating humans delivered into your ears every Monday and Thursday. But for now, please welcome Tucker Max.

**Tucker Max** (1:39)
Hold on, oh, there you go, okay, the button is gonna, like if the button didn't come up, then it's not recording, but now it's up.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
I get it. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Tucker Max. Tucker, welcome to the show.

**Tucker Max** (1:51)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:53)
Pleasure to have you on, man. I was saying earlier, I posted out that I was gonna have you on the show, and my DMs have just been on fire all day. Originally, we were just gonna talk about Scribe Media, and we're gonna go into the nuances of book writing and stuff like that. We're gonna get into that, but I think there's some other bits that I'd love to get into first. So to set the scene for people who might not fully know your backstory, how do you get to where you are now? Head of Scribe Media, best-selling author, but how do you get there?

**Tucker Max** (2:24)
Right. So it's a long backstory. So I'll hit the highlights and then you can dive into wherever you want.
Let's see. I went to undergrad at the University of Chicago, law school at Duke, and then got fired from being a lawyer in three weeks. My dad fired me from the family business in six months, then didn't really know what to do, found my way into writing. I was writing emails to my friends that they thought were hilarious, and through a long series of stuff, I ended up putting my stuff up on a website, my stories. They blew up. Got a ton of attention. MTV, Girl Sued Me, it was all the sort of normal controversy. And then, so I ended up writing a book, it became I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which the New York Times had invented a literary genre called Fratire, and it's sold a million and a half copies now or more worldwide, translated into whatever it is, 30 or 40 languages, something. And then wrote two more books. Well, first, there was a movie made about that book, about my life. And then two more books, Asshole's Finish First, And Hilarity and Sued, sorry, and Sloppy Seconds, three more books. Those are all told to have sold, I don't know, three and a half, four million-ish. And then did a few other things. The big thing was Start Scribe. Like I said, a bunch of people asked me, how do I write and publish a book? And so I started a company that helps people do that. And it's five years later and we did David Goggins' book, which is huge, and Tiffany Haddish and a bunch of others. And so here we are.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
Man, what a story. I love how you said all of the normal sort of controversy.
All of us are getting sued by ex-girlfriends and stuff on a consistent basis. That's funny. Yeah, so one of the things that I really wanted to delve into with you, because I think that you've got quite a unique insight on this because you've been so transparent in that journey from going and being a classic party boy, right? The UK has got a big drinking culture, a big party culture. My job, I fill nightclubs. I've run nightclubs for 13 years. That's what I do, bread and butter, right? So I've seen a million drunk people, ish, just over a million drunk people. I know what it looks like and so does everyone that's listening. What I'm really interested in finding out is, what happens when we go from as men, young men, we go from being that guy who is living quite viscerally, party lifestyle, there's a point where it's for some people gradual, for some people sudden, but there's a point where you stop being that and you start to be a simulacrum of the guy that your dad is or was, or you know, a dad-to-be. You get me? Like there's not many dads that I know, even you know, I've got some friends that are pretty loose. I don't know many of the dads that are out on the lash in the same way that a 22 year old is out on the lash. And I really want to get into that.