The Ohio State Speech
If you’re here today, I assume you know who I am and what I do. But for that ONE asshole in the crowd who got dragged along with his friends doesn’t know who I am, I’ll give a brief intro:
My name is Tucker Max and I wrote a book called I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. It details a series of short stories I wrote about drinking and fucking and being a typical guy in his mid-twenties. It’s sold over 800k copies and spent over 105 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List (for the Comm majors: that’s more than two years). It’s #4 this week, actually. The Times also credited me with starting a new literary genre called “Fratire.” The followup book was sold for what was then record setting advance. The Washington Post said it was the only book that every college student has read. It has become so popular I was just nominated to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009. I also just finished shooting a movie based on the book which will come out this fall, probably September or October.
That’s the story you know, the Tucker Max the public sees. And based off that, if I give a speech, you probably expect me to tell funny stories like the ones in the book, because that’s what Tucker Max does, right?
Well, yeah, actually it is. I mean, shit man, I’ve fucked a midget, and amputee and a set of twins, raise your hand if you’ve ever done that! There’s no question that when I am out drinking with my friends and have fun, that’s me, and that’s who I am, and those stories are what are in the book.
BUT—That’s not what this speech is about.
You can read all about my adventures on your own time. This speech is about the book, but instead of being about the stories, it’s about the lesson I think you should take from I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.
Now, if you just superficially read the book, probably all you focus on is the drinking and fucking and poop jokes, and while those are there, they are only the first level of meaning. There’s more to the book than that. Below all of that is my answer to the fundamental question–What are you going to with your life? Ultimately, THAT is what I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is about:
It’s about living the life that you want to live, not the life others push onto you. It’s about being the person you want to be, not the person other people want you to be, and it’s about enoying the time you have. I convey this message not by preaching it to you, but by showing you how I do it.
I know what you may be thinking, and I actually kinda agree with you: This is not obvious in my reading. All I read was some guy throwing a girls clothes out the window b/c she was so fat he didn’t want his friends to see her. And that’s true, that’s all there, but there’s more to the book than that.
So what I’m going to do is give you some back story to my life and explain the path that led me to write this book, because to understand where I came from is to understand the message of the book:
As a kid, I had an early knack for humor and writing. There was one elementary school teacher in particular who identified it and tried to foster it in me. I also had another teacher in high school who kinda helped me see that I had a talent for writing and told me to pursue it, but I grew up in Kentucky. No one growing up in Kentucky writes or does entertainment for a living. Everyone else around me pushed me to a different path.
Growing up, the expectations around me where that I would be a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman or something that is a typical and easy to understand success like that. So I listened to the people around me and went to hardest academic school I could find to best prepare me for a conventional job: The University of Chicago.
But a funny thing happened as I studied to get that conventional job: I kept writing on my own time. Never because I thought it would go anywhere, but because I loved it.
My freshman year, I started a quote list because one day after I said something really funny at the dinner table, I thought “someone should write that down,” so I did it. I started to think about things I said, and began to try to deliver the best line I could in any situation, so I could have something funny to put on my list.
I also wrote a column for the schools newspaper, The Maroon. The thing I hated about the school newspaper is that if someone wants to read about serious world affairs, they’ll read what the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal says–no one gives a shit about what some idiot 19 year old has to say about world affairs–shut the fuck up.
So instead of being one of those pompous hard-ons, I looked around at the world I lived in and I wrote about that world, calling out specific people and organizations at my school, really not much different than how I write now, just a different subject matter.
Well, the thing blew up. My column became the most read feature the Maroon had produced in as long as anyone could remember. I was a mini-celeb on campus, always causing controversy and getting attention, and even though I graduated top 10% of my class and with highest honors, that column and my quote list are still the things I am most proud of from college.
It came time to figure out what I was going to do after college, for a second I thought about the entertainment business, or something with writing–after all, there was proof I had talent. But this time it took my parents and the other people around me even less time to convince me to not do that, because by then I had really bought into the system, and I let them convince me that to be a writer you had to take writing classes and that being a writer was not an acceptable way to succeed.
So I pushed the thought of writing completely out of my head, and I took their advice and I went to Duke Law School. I even got an academic scholarship to go there.
Well, I hated law school. Not because it was hard, but because it was so easy and boring and pointless. Don’t ever let anyone tell you its hard. It’s not. The only hard part is getting in. I stopped going to class first semester, stopped buying books second semester, and lived in Cancun for six weeks once during my second year.
But, despite the fact that I couldn’t stand the actual school, I really liked my time there because of my friends. I finally had friends who were not only as smart as me, they partied harder than me, and were funnier than me. If you’ve read my stories, you know them by their nicknames; SlingBlade, PWJ, Jojo, GoldenBoy, Hate, etc.
Amazing friends, no real responsibilities, and lots of alcohol and women around. A lot of the stories from my book are from this time in my life, because I was living a life that l loved–doing things I enjoyed and being with people I liked, and it showed.
Maybe because of this, because I wasn’t doing anything besides being the person I’d always wanted to be, writing came back to me with a strength it hadn’t in a long time.
During finals second year, SlingBlade and I were punch drunk in the library after being up all night procrastinating instead of studying, and on a whim I made up a website where girls could fill out an application to date me.
Even though it started a joke, I found myself devoting all my time to it. In one month, I put more work into that crappy little site than I did in all my actual studies over all three years of law school.
Here’s the real kicker: Because I thought it didn’t matter, because I was totally unencumbered by any expectations–because I was free to fail–I let loose on that thing, and my creative energy came forth in way it hadn’t since I was a child. It turned out to be truly, genuinely fucking funny.
Yet despite all this work, despite how happy I was working on site, it never occurred to me that this was a sign of something. I was so blind that a few months later, when we went to our summer jobs in cities all across the country, I took the site down and basically forgot about it. The thing that had brought out the best in me, I ignored. I was completely blind to myself.
But I did keep up with my writing by sending hilarious emails to my friends about all the dumb shit I would do when I was out drinking. If you’ve read my book, you read one of those emails I sent to my friends. It’s in the Charity Auction Debacle Story, the one where I talk about the senior female partner who propositioned me and I turned her down–pretty much the only sex I’ve ever turned down in my life. You know what comes next…
I was fired from the summer associate job.
What was supposed to basically be an extended summer vacation, essentially a no-show job that you can’t get fired from…I got fired from.
Three weeks into my legal career, it was over.
Looking back on it now, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. If they hadn’t fired me, I don’t think I ever would have had the courage to quit being a lawyer, to give up that six figure job and pursue my dreams on my own. But at the time, I was completely devastated. My world was crushed.
Thankfully I did have a back-up plan: I could go work for my father. Since I had trained my whole life for either law or business, if I can’t do law, I’ll just do business, right? My dad owns a successful restaurant company in South Florida, and I had a great idea for how to expand the concept and take it national, so let’s do that.
At first, the challenge of the business and the thrill of something new invigorated me. My dad has a great restaurant concept and we had a fantastic plan to expand it, but there was so much wrong with the way it was run, I had all kinds of problems to solve first.
The biggest were the employees. I wanted to fire most of the people who worked for my dad because they were either incompetent suck-ups or brazen thieves. I thought that because I was right and my name was on the door, my dad would back me. I was still young enough to think that being right was what mattered. You guys are probably still young enough to think that, but you’ll learn your lesson. Long story short, the employees were better at office politics than I was, and my dad ended up backing them.
I got fired. By my own father. From the FAMILY BUSINESS.
Seriously, go to Mizner Park in Boca Raton, Florida. There is a restaurant called Max’s Grill. My dad is in there 5 nights a week, you can ask him about it. Now that I’m such a success, he may hem and haw and make excuses, but make no mistake about it:
My own father fired me.
So there I was. 26 years old. Alone. Living in shitty Boca Raton, Florida. Fucking girls I couldn’t stand, like Miss Vermont. Fired from the entire legal profession. Fired from the family business by my own father. I had failed miserably at the only two things I had trained for in my life. Kicked out of the system I had bought into.
The funny thing is, I was still writing, and not having a job let me read a lot and work on my writing, but I was so brainwashed, it STILL didn’t occur to me that I could just be who I wanted to be and write full time.
It was actually in this period that I wrote the Sushi Pants Story–it ends with me drunk, and I drive to my office and type that story to email to my friends. Whats really funny is that the format I use, the time stamp format, people have lauded me as being a genius for inventing that, but thats bullshit. You know why I wrote it like that? Because I was too drunk to write in complete sentences!
Then, with my world as bleak as it had ever been, three things happened right in a row:
First, I read a book called AHBWOSG by Dave Eggers. At the time it was hailed as a comedic masterpiece, and Eggers was seen as the next big thing in literature. I read the book and thought, “What the fuck? I can do better than this.” But instead of manning up and attempting to actually write a better book, I did what all envious people who abandon their dreams do when they see someone succeed where they are afriad of trying: I hated on him.
Then, my buddy PWJ called me one day, and had a long talk with me. He told me that the site was amazing, and that my stories are the funniest thing he’d ever read. That I could be a writer.
Hearing this from someone else, especially from a guy who I respected, meant something to me. Tucker Max as writer.
I wanted it, I considered it, but I still couldn’t make the leap. I was still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea of taking the path less traveled. I had bought into the system so fully, and abandoned my passion for so long, I no longer believed in it or in myself. It just didn’t seem realistic that I could do it.
Then I read Fight Club. If there is any one singular event that I can point to that set me on the course to who and what I am today, it is reading Fight Club. It woke something primal and fundamental in me.
I had seen the movie when I was in college, but until you have gone out into the world and worked a shitty job and thought to yourself, “Is this it? Is this why I went to school? For this?”, you can’t understand it. But once I read the book after the real world kicked me in the teeth, it clicked. It gave voice to something inside me I had not been able to elucidate before:
I had been sold a lie. Life was not about going to the right schools and getting the right jobs just so I work a job I hate in order to accumulate more crap I don’t want or need. That’s not how life was meant to be lived. There is another way. I can be the man I want to be, I can do the things I want to do and I can live the life I want to live…I just have to stop believing the lies I have been sold, and stop caring what all those people think who don’t matter, and find the courage to go out and do it.
The only thing stopping me…is ultimately me.
One month later, I went to a wedding in Chicago. I stayed with a buddy of mine who had just bought a two bedroom condo, and one of the bedrooms empty. I made a joke about wishing I lived with him, he replied “Sure, you can live here, why not?”
I never went back to Florida. The funniest part is that he was totally not serious about the offer–who the fuck would want to live with me? Disaster–empty beer cans, emotionally broken, funny walking sluts trapsing through the apartment at all hours, strange odors coming from unknown places–who wants to live with that? I don’t even want to live with myself.
On the morning of August 4th, 2002, I sat down at a blank computer screen and started working. It wasn’t even my computer–I had to get my roommate to let me borrow his. I had no money, nothing of value to my name, and no real plan at all. But I wanted to fucking write, so I just started writing.
A month later, on September 9th, 2002, the site went live. I was 26 years old, and for the first time in my life, I was being the man I wanted to be and living the life I wanted to live. I didn’t know how I was going to do it…but, I was going to either find a way, or make one.
The rest is pretty much history. I put up the site, then the book, then the movie, and now I am “Tucker Max.”
So–what the fuck does this have to do with the book? Well, the book is about this journey. It is a written record of me living my life the way I want to live it.
Yes, I write about having sex, and about getting drunk, and about busting on people and about being an asshole sometimes, and about all that shit. All of that surface stuff that people focus on so much is all there, but it’s not really the soul of the book.
Here’s the best way to understand that: Go read all the copycat blogs and books out there. There are so many people who have tried to imitate me, and every single one has failed miserably. Why? Because they think the stories are only about drinking or fucking or acting stupid, and since they think they do the same things I do, they can write about it the same way. But they can’t, because the stories are not about all that shit–they’re about one man’s expression of love for his life.
The specific things I do are just my individual way of expressing myself, but the book is ultimately about having fun, defining your own life, and ultimately, being the person you want to be, and THAT is what you should take from it, because THAT is what I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is about.
Now look: I am not going to stand here and lie to you and tell you that I was thinking about all of this when I started writing the emails to my friends that became the stories in the book. That’s not only fucking ridiculous, it’s patently false. The stories in the book started as nothing more than what they are: My attempt to write something that would entertain me and my friends.
But that’s the point–I wasn’t trying to be anything or do anything aside from the simple things that made me happy, and writing those stories made me happy. I was never trying to invent a new genre or write a massive best seller or create a huge brand or get named one of the most influential people in America.
But guess what? A funny thing happens when you cast off all the bullshit everyone dumps on you, and just live for yourself and follow your dreams: What it takes to get you there shows up in the finished product. When you love what you do, it shows, and people respond.
Now, before I finish, I want to call some of you out. I can tell some of you are getting this, and that’s awesome, I hope this does resonate with you and start you on the right path.
But I know, I FUCKING KNOW, that some of you are sitting there, all skeptical, thinking to yourself “Whatever, this is just some bullshit inspirational speech he is making because he’s getting paid. I am different; this doesn’t apply to me.”
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
I am not some old fart blathering on about pie in the sky bullshit. You and I are almost the same. Ten years ago, I sat exactly where you are sitting, did the same shit you are doing now, and since that time, I have drank more beer, banged more girls and kicked more ass than all of you chewed bubble gum lackwit pussies put together! So don’t fucking try and say this shit doesn’t apply to you–that’s exactly why you love my writing, because you CAN relate to it.
I started where you are now, and I AM who you could be, if you have to courage.
Shit, I DID HEAR THIS SPEECH at 21 from some dope-smoking peacenik, and I told that fucking hippy minstrel to go back to his weed smoking and hating the World Bank and leave the real work to us. AND I WAS FUCKING WRONG. It took me another five years just to realize I wasn’t living the life I wanted.
And don’t you fucking dare get up in the Q&A and say some stupid shit like, “Yeah, that’s all well and good, but you didn’t tell me HOW I am supposed to live my life for myself.”
Man, fuck you too. You think I had a map to get to where I am? I had no fucking idea–I was winging it the whole time. Shit, I had to INVENT A NEW LITERARY GENRE!! There are no directions to life; you have to figure most of it out on your own. You want to live a life you love, you can’t do it in a paint by numbers style–you make it either because you want to free your soul or you don’t.
Make no mistake about it: What you do with your with your life is A CHOICE. You can be who you want to be, you just have to have the courage to go do it.
You don’t hear this from your parents or your teachers or your friends, because they never tell you the other option. You know why? It’s because they don’t know it exists. They tell you that to do what everyone one else is doing, they tell you that you have to get a safe job and be like all of them, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THEY DID.
But you don’t have to do that. There is another way. You can make the choice to do what I did. You can’t be Tucker Max, but you can recognize what you love, then find the courage to commit fully to it.
You can do it, but you have to choose to do it.
I know it can be done, because I did it.
And if I can do it, so can you.
Besides, let me ask you something: What’s the alternative? If you don’t live the life you want, what life are you living? A life you don’t want.
And if you don’t want your life, why are you even getting up in the morning?
Thank you guys, you’ve been great.
FINALLY!