Max McFarlin – Detailed Biography

Max McFarlin is a popular travel YouTuber.

He is the man behind the YouTube channels Daily Max, Mắc Ơi, Homebody Max and Max’s Massage.

Introduction

Max McFarlin was born on 8 January 1993 and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States.

His parents are farmers. His father also had a factory.

Max has two elder brothers, Mickey and Matt.

Max grew up in a log cabin and used to work long hours on his family’s remote farm in Arkansas. The farm was so remote that Max didn’t have any neighbours.

He also raised cattle and his family has owned 125 acres of farm and many cows. He loved Pokémon and anime.

Max didn’t travel much outside his farm until 24 due to the farm work and cows. Also, he didn’t have access to the internet until 18.

He studied at a small high school and graduated with just 29 fellow students.

Born foodie

The young Max loved food and at four, wanted to grow up to become a chef.

He grew up in a kitchen with his grandmother Honey and used to help her in cooking.

Once, Max received an Easy-Bake Oven as a Christmas present. He started cooking in it and he used to dress up as a chef during Halloween.

He watched food and travel shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern growing up. He was impressed by these shows and wanted to produce such shows.

Later, he didn’t pursue his dream of becoming a chef as he believed that chefs work for very long hours, including on holidays, don’t get paid well and are confined to the kitchen.

Also, at the time, the schools near Max focused only on French culinary but he was interested in Asian cuisine.

He was an overweight child and was bullied for his weight.

He worked in Whole Foods Market and a few other jobs. Then, he worked as a model at The Sculp Agency LLC in Little Rock.

Love for Vietnam

The teenage Max used to work in his father’s factory in summers. There, he met Tai, a Vietnamese man and an employee of the factory and started working with him.

Tai wasn’t able to speak English but only Vietnamese. Max was fascinated by him speaking Vietnamese and his method of working.

His family too was influenced by Tai, as they started eating rice for every meal after observing him consuming a lot of rice.

Max befriended Tai and started inviting him to his birthday parties and other celebrations. Tai used to generously gift money to Max for the birthdays.

Thanks to all these, Max fell in love with Vietnam and wanted to travel there.

He also fell in love with Asia and Asian cultures and used to watch Jackie Chan movies. He loved the Chinese American buffet and trying new flavours and flavour combinations.

Pre-med & stress

After graduating from high school, Max joined the University of Arkansas but was dismayed as he was far from home and was in a class of 4,400 people.

He felt the class to be too big as he graduated from high school with less than 30 students.

As Max didn’t fit in there, after a year, he transferred to University of Central Arkansas, which was smaller and a little closer to his home. There, he studied three years for a kinesiology degree.

Later as he felt this degree to be not of much utility, he decided to go to a medical school.

So, Max studied biology as a kinesiology major, at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, to apply to medical school at the UAMS Medical Center and also studied for MCAT.

He was a science nerd and was good at math, science, organic chemistry, physics and anatomy and physiology.

At the time, he was working in 2-3 jobs, saving money and getting ready for medical school but was stressed and unhappy.

Depression, travel & tattoos

At 24, in 2017, while prepping for medical school, Max grew depressed, started feeling purposeless and started receiving therapy for depression.

He had no interest in studying medicine.

Until that point, Max didn’t travel much except to Chicago and Florida and never travelled solo and as he was stressed, he travelled to New York and Chinatown.

He fell in love with Chinatown and enjoyed exotic American Chinese buffet, bakeries, roast meats and noodles there.

After spending an entire week in Chinatown, Max decided to drop all his previous plans and travel to Asia.

As Max wanted to move to Asia, he applied for an English teacher job in Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea and Hong Kong.

He chose to move to Hong Kong as it had one of the most diverse foods in the world. Also, he was attracted by the sheer number of food stalls and restaurants.

Max moved to Hong Kong in three months and started working as an English teacher at Monkey Tree International Group in Hong Kong in January 2018.

He taught kids and worked 12-hour workdays on a modest salary. At the time, he also wanted to work on his YouTube channel.

The long hours at the work weren’t an issue for him as he used to work long hours on the farm.

The old and small apartments in Hong Kong were expensive.

Nonetheless, Max enjoyed living in Hong Kong as it gave him a chance to learn about Asia and its culture.

He saved a lot of money by working for long hours, working six days a week and not partying.

After paying rent, Max used to spend money on eating out and invest on his YouTube channel.

Even though he was able to speak only a little Cantonese, it wasn’t an issue as most of the people in Hong Kong were fluent in English. He also felt it was very easy to travel around the country.

Also, thanks to the British influence in Hong Kong, he didn’t experience culture shock.

Max loved the food and restaurants in Hong Kong so much that he got a tattoo of a traditional-style Hong Kong dragon with the names of his favourite food and restaurants in Cantonese on his arm.

He got this tattoo and another one from Venus Tattoo in London which is run by a lady of Hong Kong descent.

Taking the leap

Even though Max started his YouTube channel in November 2017, he published the first video on this channel, “DELICIOUS congee at Fa Yuen cooked food market in HONG KONG!”, only in April 2018.

His food and travel channel was initially christened My Kind of Eats, which he later renamed to Max McFarlin followed by Mắc Ơi.

Max spent all his free time, while working as an English teacher, on his channel.

At the time, he used to also write on his MyKindofEats blog. He was living modestly and used to not travel outside of Hong Kong to be frugal.

Initially, the growth of his YouTube channel wasn’t impressive but he persisted. After working on his channel for six months, he had around 20,000 subscribers.

After living in Hong Kong for a year, in 2019, Max quit his job and invested his savings from the US and teaching job and went backpacking, chasing his dream of becoming a full-time YouTuber.

Even though his channel wasn’t profitable at the time and he was surviving on savings, he was confident that sooner or later his channel would become profitable.

As Max wasn’t earning much from YouTube, he used to stay in capsule hotels.

During his full year of backpacking, he lived in a different city every week.

Max visited many places like Hanoi, Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Jeju, Manila, Pampanga, Davao, Cebu, Penang and Bali.

In his full year of backpacking in Asia, his channel wasn’t profitable but he didn’t have too many expenses.

Fortuitous mistake

After shooting a few videos in Hong Kong, Max travelled to China and then to Malaysia to shoot videos.

While in Malaysia, he mispronounced the name of a few foods, in the video, “An AMERICAN’S love for the food in Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA!”.

People started pointing out the pronunciation mistakes and the video blew up.

Then, Max shot videos in various countries like Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Nepal, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Laos, Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar, United States, Peru, Pakistan, Australia and Turkey.

Initially, he used to shoot videos with a DSLR camera but later switched to Sony X3000 action camera, and later to GoPro, as he didn’t want to bother people at eateries with big DSLRs.

Max was worried about the drop in video quality due to switching to an action camera but it didn’t affect his channel’s performance as viewers cared only for good content, not the video resolution.

He currently uses DJI Action, DJI Osmo and his mobile.

Currently, Max has over 720K subscribers on Mắc Ơi and over 1.80 million subscribers on Daily Max.

He finances his trips through the earnings from his YouTube videos.

Making Vietnam his home

After becoming a full-time YouTuber, Max backpacked around Asia for a year and then moved to Vietnam and started living in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).

And just three months later, COVID hit and he stayed in Vietnam. He lived in that country for around five years, with occasional visits to the US.

Before making Vietnam his home, Max had been to that country twice.

He loved Vietnam and in 2020, he bought an apartment in Saigon.

While living in Vietnam, he started publishing a lot of Vietnamese food content on his channel. So, he later renamed his channel to Mắc Ơi.

Homecoming

In July 2024, Max left Vietnam to settle in Arkansas to be closer to his ageing parents, who are in their seventies.

While he was in Vietnam in 2024, his mother suffered from an illness. Initially, he decided to visit her every three months but as it was difficult, he shifted to Arkansas.

Also, Max felt living in Vietnam had become difficult and stressful after COVID as the cost of getting the business visa increased manifold and it became difficult to get longer term visas.

He loved living in Dalat during COVID times but eventually it became more touristy and overpopulated.

Also, Max used to travel around the country mostly on a moped but this became hard in his last year as he used to get pulled over very often for money.

Before settling in an Arkansas farm, he considered South Korea and Japan but wasn’t attracted to their digital nomad visas.

Then, Max thought about Paris, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, Portland, New York, Seattle, Austin, Texas and Chicago.

He ruled out living in Canada and Mexico considering visas and living costs.

The final two choices were living in American cities and Paris.

So, Max travelled to Paris but found that while it was a great city to travel, it wasn’t so great to live in.

He also ruled out living in American cities as he wasn’t okay with paying thousands of dollars rent.

So, Max decided to settle in the small-town Arkansas and build his house and be close to his parents. He chose to live here instead of New York as he could save a lot of money with which he can travel the world.

He is currently working on his house and loves the space and nature around his house.

New chapter

Max became popular for his food and travel videos on Mắc Ơi channel.

But around 2024, he lost interest in making big food videos. However, his love for travel wasn’t affected.

Constantly eating almost all round the year, for many years, took a toll on his health. He started feeling difficulty to frequently travel and eat.

Also, Max was frustrated with the food and travel videos as those videos had a country specific audience. YouTube used to often recommend his videos to the viewers in wrong countries by which he used to not get proper engagement.

So, he started sharing his other interests on his YouTube channels Daily Max and Homebody Max.

On his Homebody Max channel, he is currently creating content on his homestead, farm, monthly purchases, daily life and thoughts.

The farm videos rekindled his passion for YouTube.

Max’s goal is to also shoot videos on fashion and cooking.

He also wants to make paint colours, have a cut flower farm, British garden and greenhouse and grow a lot of fruit and nut trees.

Personal life

Max had a Vietnamese girlfriend but he broke up with her and is currently single.

He is six feet tall.

Tidbits

• Max loves home style cooking, spicy foods, mam tom (fermented shrimp paste) and American barbecue.
• His favourite places to travel are Asia and Mexico. He also loves New York City.
• Max loves learning languages and knows Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese. He tried to learn Cantonese but couldn’t.
• He loves running and calisthenics.
• Max’s astrological sign is Capricorn and his Chinese zodiac sign is monkey.
• He is interested in interior design and architecture. His favourite colour is red.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Max McFarlin?

Share with me in the comment section below.