Sunday, August 17th, 2025
Writing to you from Uruguay
As a quick, but extremely exciting announcement: The Preparation book is releasing tomorrow on Amazon!
Two years of hard work and the combined efforts of 3 generations - Doug Casey’s life, work, writing, and ideas being the genesis of the program…my father (Matt Smith) being the developer and writer…and myself acting as the beta tester for the program - has allowed for the creation of something truly special.
A battle-tested, adventurous, fulfilling, and resilient path which can lead any young man to become competent, confident, and dangerous.
So, stay tuned. I’ll be sending out a post with the link to buy the book tomorrow morning.
Moving on to what I did and learned this past week…
Getting the flight hours in
Not many people have garnered 30 flight hours without doing their first solo. I’m at 28 flight hours now and haven’t done mine yet. It’s very unusual, but there’s some reasons for it.
First off, when I started flight school in Colorado, I was bouncing around from one instructor to another in order to find someone who had time on their schedule consistently. So, at least 10 flight hours went by without any real instruction - just instructors treating it as if it was my first or second flight. From there, I was able to find two instructors that could fly with me consistently and we did so until I was just under 18 total flight hours.
Continuing flight school in Uruguay shifted the timeline of things a little bit too…
Of course, not only was I with another new instructor and had little focused instruction prior to coming here, but I have been training under a different set of expectations here.
But, my Uruguayan instructor looked at me on Friday, holding his two fingers close together and said, “You’re this close to flying solo.”
There have been times when I have trouble grabbing the next rung of the ladder towards progress - little hiccups along the way - but overall progress has been made.
My landings have certainly improved a ton from when I first started.
Trust me, you wouldn’t have wanted to be a passenger in the beginning. I was unintentionally holding the plane several feet off the runway until it would drop like a brick. Now, I’ve had a few fantastic landings (the kind you can hardly feel) and quite a few standard landings.
But, as I said, it’s taken a lot of work to improve.
Six out of my seven flights in Uruguay (10.5 hours of flight time) has been solely dedicated to landings. Not the best pilot, but I’m much better than I was.
A Critical Idea
One thought I try to hold in my mind while flying is a passage from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Even if I tried, I couldn’t repeat the text verbatim, but it goes something like this:
I thank the gods for not allowing me to be naturally talented at rhetoric, poetry, and other things of the sort. For if I was, I might have been absorbed in it.
Why do I try to think about this so often?
Well, when you’re reading Meditations it’s clear that he’s thankful for how much effort he had to put into learning new things. It required sincere attention from him and also kept him centered on philosophy - the stuff that matters.
So, I’m thankful that learning this skills requires my sincere effort and attention - that it doesn’t come easy to me.
Drone Mapping
It’s amazing how much money farmers and ranchers waste on seeds and fertilizer for their land. We, on our ranch, have wasted money doing things the old fashioned way too.
I remember dumping bags of dusty fertilizer and seeds into a spreader on the back of a tractor. We (a gaucho and I) headed out into the field to spread the stuff on a few different pastures. It seemed like a good idea at the time - after all, the grass was pretty green a few months later.
But, looking back on it, it doesn’t seem so great…
We were, just as every farmer does, haphazardly spraying needs and fertilizer everywhere. It didn’t matter whether the soil needed fertilizer or more seed - lets spray there anyway!
Neither seed or fertilizer is cheap, especially when you’re spraying hundreds of acres of land. A single farmer can waste tens of thousands of dollars on all of it.
The better way of doing things is already here.
We recently purchased the Mavic 3M drone which can do multispectral imaging. Meaning, it can see several different wavelengths of light bouncing off of the ground.
With the DJI Terra software you can import you’re images from the drone flights into the software that will analyze the light waves and stitch them together to form a final picture of the land.
This drone and software, in combination with a DJI T-40 (seed and fertilizer spreader), can directly pinpoint specific areas that need seed or fertilizer and strategically make drops there.
No need to seed and fertilize already good soil, just hit the areas that need it.
Thousands (if not 10s of thousands) are saved doing things this way. And, once we get the T-40 agricultural drone, I will aim to start my own agricultural drone business down here in Uruguay.
So, to prepare for that, I completed a couple mapping missions and generated the first multispectral map in the Terra software. Next week I’ll interpret the data to get a handle on it. The good thing is, since we have our own land to use, I can more easily get a handle on operating the drones and software.
We need the drone services on our own land too.
Prepping
Getting prepped for the launch of The Preparation has been a great boost to this week. It’s been one of the main focuses of at least the latter half of the week.
There will be much more work to come once the book releases because, as Louis L’Amour says, “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.”
Electives
1 Hour of Spanish Practice (7 out of 7 days)
Still trying to improve my Spanish. I always thought it to be an easy language to learn because that’s what everyone says. No one takes into account that Spanish itself is fundamentally different in every Spanish-speaking country you go to. Once you factor in the use of slang it’s essentially a different language from Spain, to Chile, to Argentina, Costa Rica, or Mexico.
The funny thing is, most people don’t speak the Spanish that non Spanish speakers learn…you know, the “proper” and clear Spanish.
I’m not complaining here - it’s a legitimately funny fact.
Anyway, to continue my pursuit of learning the language, I’ve been using Michel Thomas’ Intermediate Spanish Course. Very helpful in terms of sentence structure.
1 Hour of Guitar Practice (2 out of 7 days)
Guitar skills are improving slowly but surely.
Recently, I’ve been trying to perfect the intro to Metallica’s legendary song, Nothing Else Matters, on the acoustic guitar.
Worked out (4 out of 7 days)
Want to be in a better mood?
Go do a workout. Sure, over time you’ll be in better shape, which is fantastic, but you’ll also maintain a healthy and energetic mind.
Things I Published
Essay on August 13th:
Reading
Continued reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Finished reading The Defining Decade by Meg Jay
I enjoyed reading this book. Figured it would be a good thing to read before I turn 20 since I had heard others say good things about it. Some of the most important points have to do with the realization of the passage of time and economizing that time properly. Without mentioning the economic principle of time preference (low time preference being people who can delay gratification for a better future and high time preference being the exact opposite) she brought it up by speaking on how twentysomethings think that their 20s don’t matter.
They can party, not work, and travel the world to their heart’s content thinking that the serious stuff comes later - it doesn’t. The time for progress is now. Do you want a good and interesting future? Well, get to work. It doesn’t appear out of thin air.
The book does a good job at hitting on universal problems young people face, and giving solid solutions. I will say, this book does seem better for young women. I think young women would have a better time empathizing with some of the stories and points in the book. But, either way, I recommend it.
P.S. Last week I told you that once I finished the Meteorology course I would give you a full report on it. Well, the course is finished, but it’s going to take some time to crystalize the ideas in my mind and make it clear and concise to share to you. So, you’ll get a good report on that course next week!
Are these updates informative? Are they useful? Entertaining?
Leave a comment below if you’ve got any suggestions or questions for me.
And don’t forget to send this to someone who might benefit.
I’ll see you next week.
-Maxim Benjamin Smith
I am acting as a guinea pig for a program which is meant to prepare young men for the future. This program is designed to be a replacement for the only three routes advertised to young men today - go to college, the military, or a dead-end job.
All of these typical routes of life are designed to shape us into cogs for a wheel that doesn’t serve us. Wasted time, debt, lack of skills, and a soul crushing job define many who follow the traditional route.
This program, which we can call “The Preparation”, is meant to guide young men on a path where they properly utilize their time to gain skills, build relationships, and reach a state of being truly educated. The Preparation is meant to set young men up for success.
What appeals to me about The Preparation is the idea of the type of man I could be. The path to becoming a skilled, dangerous, and competent man is much more clear now. I’ve always been impressed by characters like The Count of Monte Cristo, men who accumulated knowledge and skills over a long period of time and eventually became incredibly capable men.
Young men today do not have a guiding light. We have few mentors and no one to emulate. We have been told that there are only a few paths to success in this world. For intelligent and ambitious people - college is sold to us as the one true path. And yet that path seems completely uncertain today.
We desperately need something real to grab onto. I think this is it.
I’m putting the ideas into action. Will it work? I can’t be sure, but I’m doing my best. I’m more than 60 weeks into the program at this point. So far, so good.
You can follow me along as I follow the program. Each week, I summarize all that I did.
My objective in sharing this is three fold:
Documenting my progress holds me accountable.
I hope these updates will show other young men that there is another path we can take.
For the parents who stumble upon this log, I want to prove to you that telling your children that the conventional path - college, debt, and a job is not the foolproof path you think it is.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.