My Friend Max

For me, Max’s face was the face. I remember thinking, when I encountered it and him, at a party in Brooklyn in March of 2023, “There it is.” His was a big head with a prominent nose and sad blue eyes that relaxed into crescent moons when he smiled, and a thinking man’s brow bone. His face was strong but kind, chiseled without being sharp. Max often wore a hat because his hair was thinning, but he didn’t have to because it didn’t matter. He had the face; everyone else’s is just more or less close to it. His profile belonged on the side of a coin from an ancient empire. The rest of him, I felt, belonged next to me.

Max and I fell-in fast. When I met him, he lived in Chicago. But we kept in touch, and over FaceTime I invited him to a fancy restaurant in Manhattan I had a gift certificate to. In one fell swoop, we went to dinner, and then he moved into my apartment in Brooklyn for the next two weeks. I quickly picked up that he wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met, let alone like most people.

For starters, he was obsessed with carrots. His hands were permanently dyed orange from them, and he would eat pounds of them per day. “I think these are the perfect snack,” he wrote in a blog post about his odd and oddly specific eating habits. “Maybe too perfect.” The carrot thing was not a bit; it was a constant.

As for work, what Max did was vague. After he graduated from Northwestern, he played poker from 2008 to 2013, all online. Between his winnings, and I assume investments he made with them, he was able to live unconventionally and go deep on his various obsessions. They included tennis; travel; modern art; men’s fashion; and effective altruism, a philosophy that seeks to understand the most amount of good that can be done given constrained resources. He was obsessed with the concept of value. There was the dollar value you get when something’s on sale or when you stumble upon a treasure on eBay, the value one can derive from the credit card and airline point systems. And then there were kinds of value that were harder to assign, like the kind you get from spending time with someone whose ideas you admire. He once took a picture of every page of the menu at The Cheesecake Factory so that he could later calculate which dishes had the most value, which, in that particular case, meant the most calories per dollar (winner: side of french fries). He tried to explain to me concepts like poker odds and game theory, predictive analytics, and how machine-learning models worked, and I nodded, but I never really understood. I did, though, understand that I was in the presence of a mind that was efficient and smooth, expansive in its thinking, genius in its way, and deeply special.

On value: Max assigned low value to trying new foods—as far as seasonings were concerned, he used only pepper, and “only if I remember,” according to one of our first texts—but placed high value in pushing himself. When he was playing poker professionally, he bet friends that he could play three million hands in a year. Max was a varsity procrastinator—it took him nearly seven years to read Infinite Jest—and by the time December rolled a round, he had a million hands to go. He played poker for 17 hours per day that month, hiring a friend to keep him awake and ordering catering to get it done. But he got it done.

Having adventure was also of high-value. When Covid-19 hit, he went to the Central African Republic to seek out elephants, another one of his weird, intense interests. He once walked 20 miles in one day to the town of Tzfat, Israel, not far from the Sea of Galilee, to eat unlimited schnitzel before a religious fast. He rode his bike from Cairo to Cape Town. And in the days before he died, last week, he’d hiked the length of Israel. He’d been travelling for weeks—to Singapore, Senegal, San Francisco, Miami—but he was planning to come back to New York this past weekend.

Max’s approach to life could be frustrating. He barely emoted. A fixed address was something to take or leave. He abbreviated phrases like “Have fun” (HF) and “Miss you” (MU), which kind of defeats the purpose of saying them in the first place. He spent way too much time trawling sales or searching for deep-cut vintage furniture online. I couldn’t figure out why he decided he had to take tennis lessons in Montreal, or how come the dentist he went to was located in Tel Aviv, in a different hemisphere from where he lived, or what was so special about an art fair in Paris. Or what he was even doing last month in Senegal, where a mosquito bit him, and transmitted a rare form of malaria which would, in the following weeks, infect his body, and then his brain, and kill him. There are many questions I had about Max’s life, and I put some to him with less patience than I care to remember, but none are bigger than the one I now carry about his senseless, vicious death. He was 39.

My romantic relationship with Max didn’t last long, ultimately our lifestyles weren’t compatible, but we stayed close and shared friends. We kept in touch. And since the news, I’ve hunted through my devices for messages and pictures, for little shreds of Max that don’t come nearly close enough, but you huff them anyway, over and over. Yesterday I read through an agenda he’d drawn up for us for the time in the Negev desert we spent together in June of 2023—Max was big on deserts, tier systems, decision trees, spreadsheets, agendas—and was struck by the technical tenderness, the honesty he put on the page. Under the Relationship section of the agenda, he had written, “What could do to make other more comfortable” and under Self-Improvement/Productivity: “Gossip–how to stop,” and “How to not drown in The internet/needing to know everything” and “Feeling of wanting to redo things.”

A moment between going over agenda items on a vacation Max and I took to the Negev desert in June of 2023.

Reading through our texts—the last ones we exchanged were around Christmas—there are weird little messages, things that must have occurred to him that he dashed off to share in the moment. Like, “Good tomato is a beautiful thing” or, “A Rich Life can be picking up your kids everyday, buying a $1,000 cashmere sweater, treating all your friends to a round of drinks, or traveling for 8 weeks a year. You decide.” Or, “WHEN A ROOM IS FULL, EMPTINESS MAY SHOW UP IN THE LIVES OF ITS OCCUPANTS.” I found a list I’d kept of “compliments” he’d given me, except they weren’t really compliments at all. One was, “You look nice in casual clothes,” and another, “That was sort of interesting,” and “Those shorts are the coolest thing you own.” We’d laugh about them even after we’d ended things.

The thing is, he didn’t need to give the right, or even real, compliments, because I knew that he knew that I knew that in his way, he loved me. And that I loved him too.

Unlike the vast majority of people I encounter, Max did not run hot. He was not mired in the dramas of the various, and many, worlds he was a part of—he wasn’t tribal. He didn’t need validation from fancy people, though many of them offered it. He was not showy, or flashy, even though he could have been. He gave to causes he cared about, and spent his time charitably, whether aiding a physically disabled neighbor or tutoring a boy in math from thousands of miles away, but he did so quietly.

How many people do you know who are keenly interested in modern art and men’s clothing but aren’t insufferable? Or who have traveled the world and seen its wonders but aren’t braggadocious? Who are quirky but not attention-seeking? Wildly numerate and brilliantly rational, without being harsh? Who think deeply about big questions of applied ethics and utilitarianism but who aren’t too serious? A close friend of Max’s wrote recently that he “lived in a way that seemed at once entirely sincere and entirely a joke.” That was Max.

If all of this sounds contradictory, like too many things, too many polarities, for one person to be, I’m telling you that he wore it all easily, like so many ridiculous T-shirts that I begged him to get rid of, and comically oversized button-downs that I made fun of him for, but loved. He floated through countries like how other people move from room to room. He was at home in the world, and he lived well, if not for nearly long enough.

There is no point to Max’s early death, but there was endless, infinite value to his life. He cherished modern and alternative art, and had a colorful, eclectic collection. He loved his pieces from the artists Al Freeman, Noa Ironic, and Serge Attukwei Clottey, and the works he owned made by artists with intellectual disabilities, especially ones by Ruby Bradford, who he discovered through Project Onward in Chicago. He was working most recently on a project called the AI Safety Awareness Foundation with his friend, Changlin Li, who he met through the Recurse Center in New York, another place he felt at home. He was also developing a poker camp, and was writing a book called Bet Mitzvah to teach poker concepts to kids, since he felt the game was more enriching and applicable to life than chess.

“Just as a Bar/Bat Mitzvah marks the beginning of moral and religious responsibility, understanding betting principles marks an important step in intellectual maturity,” he wrote in his most recent blog post, the last thing he published. In it, he examined God’s commandment to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, in his perpendicular, tender-technical way. “When we’re willing to put our beliefs to the test, whether through actual wagers or thought experiments or sacrificing a child, we begin the process of examining, updating, and refining our model of the world.”

It’s possible to glimpse Max’s particular mind using one of the little online machines he set up, where you could guess the price of a fashion item, or play poker and learn about large language models, or log the countries you’ve been to or that you dream of that whir on in his absence, like magic tricks.

Max loved being Jewish and especially loved Chabad, the religious Jewish movement popularized by the Rebbe, the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whose grave in Queens he often visited. He made yet another website where you could track how many of their global outposts you made it to. Max made it to 36, including locations in Tokyo; Kathmandu, Colombo and Cusco. He hoped to wrap tefillin every day in 2025. Maybe someone else will take up this mitzvah in Max’s honor, since he can’t do it anymore.

Or maybe you can adopt a Maxism: by buying a piece of art, not because it will (necessarily) appreciate in (dollar) value, but because you find it interesting and weird, and you want to encourage the person who made it. Or by getting a piece of clothing, not because it’s flattering or practical, but because it has a sense of humor. Because it’s fun. Delight in your body in the world; treat it well, and take care of it. Take it outside and on adventure. Understand, like he did, that you are alive, right now, and that you weren’t made to do just one thing. Teach someone something—about expected value, a concept that Max believed, if people understood it, would make the world a slightly more rational place, or about swinging a racket—and do it patiently and lovingly.

Max was a great friend, a proud Jew, American and British by birth and an Israeli by choice, a sweet and generous spirit, and a man of sterling character. He leaves behind his parents and his sister, who loved him deeply and whom he loved, and friends by the dozens from discrete, disparate worlds who will miss him. We are all better off for having crossed paths with Max, and, because of him, I hope, with each other. I only got to know Max for a short time. But I was lucky to meet him, and to see and know his magnificent face. I will think of it often.