What If I Actually Tried?

A Radical Alternative to College

July 5th, 2026

Writing to you from Uruguay

I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted these next few months to look like after my month of wildland fire, ropes, and survival in the states. It was clear to me that I wanted to come back to Uruguay, but this time I wanted to try something a little different.

What if—for 3 months—I spent my time trying to help as many people as I could?

That question lingered in my head for a while. I’ve learned a lot, and done a lot, within these past 2 years and 11 months (I’ll hit the 3-year mark in The Preparation on August 1st) and I want to see how independently useful I can be to others within a short timeframe. It’ll be its own Cycle of sorts.

Being useful could mean helping someone I know with farm chores or using any of the skills I’ve learned to solve a problem. Improving the circumstances for other people is the main goal. It’s also vague. So, I came up with a concrete plan that aligns with a long-term goal.

By the end of my deployment on the South Fork Fire in Nebraska, I knew what I was going to do…

The Long-Term View

Back in mid 2023, my dad, Doug Casey, and I started down a path that would (unknown to us at the onset) lead to the creation of The Preparation program. A culmination of different interests and issues converged at that starting point and pushed on into a greater project.

Thousands—and I’m not kidding you—thousands of hours went into constructing the final product.

There were times we wanted to throw it all away. My time as the beta tester was especially tough in those first 9 months. What I was doing was brand new and no one around me understood the philosophy behind it. I asked my dad what the point of it all was a few times, wanting to throw in the towel. He picked me up and kept me on track when I needed it. On the other side, my dad spent a massive amount of time mulling over the program and the book while also trying to guide me when I needed it. At one point, while writing the book, he was so frustrated by the current draft that he literally threw it in the fire, not knowing what to do or what changes to make.

Why the headache of it all?

It was clear, due to the effect it had on me while being the beta tester for the program, that we had something of real substance…something that blew the conventional paths out of the water. If a lost, anxious, and angry 17-year-old boy could rack up a list of accomplishments, unlock unimaginable opportunities, overcome fear, and set himself up for a better future—anyone could replicate it or even do it better within a shocking timeframe.

Flash forward to today, we have several people going through the program and documenting it here on Substack. Their progress is impressive. I’m always interested to see what they’ll accomplish next.

The book is published and is ultimately the best thing we can do to help people, but we have several goals going into the future…

Not only do we want to see just how many people we can get to actually start The Preparation, but we also want to aid those who actually make the leap. From firsthand experience, I can tell you that it’s not an easy thing to do, but the rewards are impossible to comprehend. Anyway, everything we are going to try to do will be done to smooth out the general path and make it clearer, and more convincing than it already is.

But if this isn’t convincing enough, I don’t know what is: at 20 years old I’ve been able to rack up 4 pages of major accomplishments, 41 pages of total accomplishments within the last 3 years, friends all over the world, serious foundational skills, and wild opportunities. That’s what you can do with The Preparation.

The tough part is (again) to get people to take the leap. The other tough part is getting people to keep pushing forward until the idea of doing anything else seems foolish. It takes about a year to get there. So, some of what I want to do is to help people push through until they catch their stride.

The Forum

This is what I’ve been working on for the past week.

The Forum will be a website for those in The Preparation. It has an actual community forum, a field map that shows the general location of other people so you can connect with them, individual forums for every cycle of the program, a function to create private groups, and a ‘Calls’ feature.

The idea behind this is to solve a few issues:

• -Create a community that extends beyond Substack

• -Easier communication to answer questions, solve problems, discuss cycles, and offer encouragement

• -Make the whole process of going through the program a little less lonely since you’d be able to plan “Group Cycles”

• -Offer the idea of hosting monthly calls on the website than any Prepper could join (the idea being that the group calls would push the community to accomplish more since solutions to peoples’ problems, new cycle ideas, and true encouragement could come from the calls)

The website is still fairly bare bones at the moment and not very aesthetically pleasing, but all of the main features are in place. I have no clue if people would actually use this, but I’m building it anyway. Plus, I think it would make the idea of starting the program a lot easier for some if there was a way to easily access and actual community where the people actually working through the program could share their success stories.

I think it could be something good.

Anyway…

I’ve been putting most of all of my energy into the Forum this past week. I’ve never tried to build a serious website, especially not one with the features I want, so it’s a steep learning curve. My thought is to make the necessary aesthetic and functional changes to have this site up within a week. We’ll see how it goes.

Reading

• -Finished reading The Great Crash 1929 by John Galbraith

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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

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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:

1. Documenting my progress holds me accountable.

2. I hope these updates will show other young men that there is another path we can take.

3. 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.