 The technology today, you might want to say, oh, you know, it's evil, but it's also leveled the playing field. It means a little guy like me can compete and go against big guys. And I don't need, I don't need a bank. I don't need a corporation. I don't need a publisher. I can go to the crowd. Hey, crowd, do you want this? If you want it great, put some skin in the game and let's create this together. Justin Rhodes is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Justin is a permaculturist, film producer, author, and teacher. He helps folks learn to work with nature to produce their own sustenance so they can live a more abundant life. Justin is a seasoned homesteader having enjoyed many years of practicing beyond organic and permaculture methods on a 75-acre family farm near Asheville, North Carolina. Justin trained under the highly accredited Joff Lawton of PRI Australia for his permaculture design certificate and has studied natural chicken care under popular author Pat Foreman. Justin found an abundant permaculture out of a love of teaching and the sustainable movement. Where you'll find exhaustive permaculture articles, plentiful photos, cinematic educational films, and business tips and tricks through Abundance Plus. We're here to talk about a couple things today. So Abundance Plus for sure, and Justin's upcoming book, The Rooted Life, comes out March 2022. So next year, only three months away, really. Now we're three, four months away. Now we're heading into December. And I am just so excited that you took the time out of your busy life to join us here today. Welcome to the show, Justin. Hey, thanks for having me. It's so good that you could make it. If anybody who has seen your vlog, your YouTube channel, no, you're a busy man. Very busy. So is a family of five? Am I right on that? Oh, seven. Five kids. Seven. About, yeah. Five kids. Yeah. Wow. My goodness. Okay. So family of seven and a big farm to run. I have to start out with the usual question. How in the heck have you weathered this two years of craziness on the farm? Has it affected you a lot? Has it come in at all? Not just COVID, not just the crazy inauguration, not just all the other stuff, just in general? I laugh at that because there was quarantines all over the world, right? And I guess still are, but I'm just like welcome to my world. We've been quarantined for 15 years. Welcome to homesteading. I mean, you stay at home. We do everything at home. I mean, we've home school. I work from home. We even home birth. And we grow most of our own food, pretty much all of our own meat. And even Whole Foods delivers out here. So where do we got to go? I mean, if we could get the dentist to come, we'd be set. But otherwise, we got to go to town for the dentist. And I mean, I'm telling you, the last two years is funny, because we'll buy the kids town shoes is what you call them. And then they have their farm shoes where they go barefoot, but we have town shoes. They have literally grown out of the town shoes before they maybe wore them once. You know what I mean? So that's our last two years. So we're happy. We are the most socialized homebodies, you know, but just because you're homesteading and staying at home, though, doesn't mean you don't have this rich, abundant lifestyle. So once a month, we'll invite our homesteading friends and our homesteading friends are within 45 minutes to an hour to come over and we'll have a once a month to get together. And that's about right. When you're 40 years old, it doesn't take long for a month to come around. And you were busy enough running the farm that that's kind of a perfect once a week is too much. But once a month is good. And it fills the soul. So, you know, with what we do, we're very open in our lives. And so we have people coming in and out of our lives even more than once a month. But we just bring the social party to us. And because I've had the fortunate blessing to to watch your episodes and that I know with your with your health issues and stuff and things you've gone through. Are you doing okay? Are we say it's on the upward battle or is it still a daily struggle? How are you doing just yourself and the family? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for asking that. And for those that don't know, I got food. What is it? GI infection, Rebecca Campio Bacter from handling raw poultry not washing my hands properly. I'm sure, you know, just having some a newer on that or some somehow getting in my mouth and came down with Campio Bacter. And then there's a rare one to five percent chance you can get what you call reactive arthritis from that, which is like a severe case of arthritis. And it went through a tour throughout my entire body, pretty much all the joints, at least all the major joints. And there were points where I could literally not walk. I mean, I had to there was a point where I had to use a walker to get outside, to get in my cabota, to go out and supervise the chores, literally. And that was months. That was where we're on month five. And I still have a lot of pain in my feet. But it's very doable. And I will have I'm starting to have or have good days, like my joints will move now. Maybe there's some pain in my feet. I'm milking again. I mean, there was two, three months, I wasn't able to milk. We milked by hand. So my kids had to step it up. And I am doing much better. Slowly and surely, at least I'm walking, thankful for that. Sure, there's some pain there. I have some good days. And so I see some light at the end of the tunnel, even though we're at that like, you know, five months, what is supposed to take? I mean, I've heard you know, I could still continue to have symptoms for a year. But I'm already accustomed to living with pain because I have chronic Lyme disease. And that's where it accumulates in my feet. So it's probably feeding off of each other a little bit there is my guess. And there are moments now that the pain is quiet enough that I can ignore it. I mean, there was a point where I could be I would go out and do on the farm, but it was constantly nagging me. But there are there are points now where I'll be out on the farm and be like, Oh, hey, I just did this in that chore or project. And I didn't think about my pain. So that's good. Because living and thinking about pain all the time is just miserable. I love your tips that you give on on abundance plus courses. And when you talk about it in your episodes as well of how to deal with that and also manage it and get through it. And you have a wonderful support structure around you surrounding you. And I love that you come out and said, you know, this this homesteading lifestyle is not only home schooling, it's home birthing, it's home staying. It's, you know, you guys are 24 seven. But you also have that social aspect. A lot of people, you know, get on these social media thing, viewings where they view a vlog or something on social media. And then all of a sudden, oh, that's what I got to do. And they don't see the full picture. And what I love about your whole family. I see you back on the couch back there. Hello. And it's so good to to see the interaction. And that matter of fact, I'm so jealous of you guys as Thanksgiving. It was I'm in Germany. So there's not a lot of Thanksgiving celebrated here was looked absolutely fabulous. All your cooking and what you guys did. So hats off to that. But but that you really give that behind the scenes, here's the reality. But the reality is really good. Come on over because it's it's not that but you're also saying it's not a bed of roses, you know, I've got some other things that most people don't have. So I'm like that, that honesty and the behind the scenes kind of glimpse into your life that you you've given many because many don't get to see that. I as well do grew up six generations of agricultural agriculture and organic farmers. And and I've dealt with some of the same issues you have as well, Lyme disease and arthritis in Germany, they call it classic arthritis. It's a son of a gun. It's really, it's really rough. And so it's nice, nice to see those things. This whole journey for you began around 2015. Am I correct as far as vlogging and moving in that direction or clear me up on that? Yeah, you're pretty close to that. Because we started vlogging in 2016, January. So yeah, we would have launched our business in 2015 with our first course, which was permaculture tickets. And we launched a Kickstarter for that. And that came from, you know, we we had this Lyme disease, we were doing market farming, we're done five of them, the symptoms of Lyme disease essentially slowed me down. And I'm like, I still want to be in this movement, though. So what can we do? And a mentor had given me the book four hour work week by Tim Ferriss, which is a business book about online business and creating content as a business. And I'm like, Oh, that that this could work. And eventually led to a Kickstarter. You know, you mentioned training, or in my intro, you talked about training with Jeff Lawton. And you've you spent some time with him too. So when I actually got into permaculture, because I was not able to do it all the way I was homesteading the chickens over here, the garden over here, the cow over there and them having really nothing to do with do with anything else, that's like the classic homestead permaculture or classic homestead stamp, you know, if you go pick up a homesteading book, you know, it's kind of compartmentalized. And that was a lot. And I felt in my heart that these things, I really even maybe used the word connected, I feel like these things could be connected. But I had no idea how or why or what that meant. And to a friend show me a Jeff Lawton video. And then he's got the chickens in a, in a temporary electric net, tilling and scratching and pooping. And then they move on and then he plants the garden. So then it's like, Oh, whoa, okay, that's what it is. It's one, it's one thing. It's so connected. It's one thing. It's not the chickens over here and the garden over here. They're actually one, you see. And so the chickens have benefit for the garden and the garden garden has benefit for the chickens. And I went and I said, eventually, we like bit the bullet, like we got to go study this and have a career change. We went to Jeff Lawton's age, you couldn't get any further away. I'm in North Carolina, literally, if you dig a hole through the, through the earth, you don't come out in China. You come out in Australia. And that's where I literally, I took a tax tax, we had no money at the time. So I took a tax refund, a tax return and went to Australia. And you get trained there as a permaculture designer. But one night they showed a movie called Permaculture Orchard. And it made an impression on me because it was so educational, but it was also cinematic and beautiful and entertaining. And I thought, oh, you know, that kind of planted a seed in me. And then getting home, the mentor handed me the four hour work week and we're like, the concept of four hour work week is create a piece of content that is a video and a companion ebook and go for it. And we came down to chickens. I've been doing chickens for a long time. And so, you know, thanks to that inspiration, we launched our first product 2015 on a Kickstarter. And to give people hope, you know, I had seven people following me at the time. I had seven people on my email list. And that was just from posting it on Facebook or something. But going into this Kickstarter, that's the tools we have today. That's one thing that the four hour work we taught me is the technology today. You might want to say, oh, you know, it's, blah, blah, blah, but it's also leveled the playing field. It means a little guy like me can compete and go against big guys. And I don't need, I don't need a bank. I don't need a corporation. I don't need a publisher. I can go to the crowd. Hey, crowd, do you want this? If you want it, great. Put some skin in the game and let's create this together. And if you don't, nobody gets charged, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I didn't know how to do a Kickstarter. When I picked up the four hour work, I didn't, at the time Facebook was popular. I didn't have a Facebook. I mean, I was just not connected. I was just not online to give you an example. And so you know what I did? I said, well, how do you do Kickstarter? I went to the library, guys, you remember those? Went to the library, checked out a book on how to do a Kickstarter. I also went online and picked a couple of articles. And between two articles and a book on how to do a Kickstarter, I formulated a plan. And 30 days before my Kickstarter, it was basically my job. I would do the farm chores, but then I would come in and start working on this launch and then going into this launch. And remember, I knew nothing. I was just going off these books and articles and went into this launch. And then 30 days from seven people on my email list to 1200 people on my email list, because we had 1200 customers through Kickstarter, something like that, and raised like $35,000. And from there, just continually studying online business and things like that. And if I had a question, we are in the time of, you can go ask Mr. Google Pants or Mrs. Boob Tube. The world information is at our fingertips, and we can play with the big dogs with very little money. Exactly. I love how you phrase that. Those are also inspirational four-hour work week from Tim Ferriss. It's pretty well known, but I think it's the combination of the way you look at it and that you find those resources, whether they're the library or Google Pants online, that you made yourself wise enough and had the support of a great family and wife to really say, hey, let's do this. We've got our support. Let's make it happen. I absolutely love that. There is that journey. And now, last I look at your YouTube channel, it's 900 and something thousand subscribers. You're pushing that one million mark. I mean, you probably already received numerous little plaques from the YouTuber Pants company. What is the drive in the story that you're getting from these subscribers? What is keeping you going? What is the response? What are you seeing? What are those 900,000 people coming over and over to your site for? We touched on it a little bit before. The concept is getting from the four-hour work week is basically an online marketing. If this is going to be a career, you crank out content and it's free. It's a wonderful business model because you're getting all this content for free. It could be on YouTube. Before YouTube, it was a blog. So I was writing a blog. It could be podcast. What do you like to do? You like to talk in the interview? Okay, you're doing a podcast. Somebody else might like to make movies, then think about YouTube. Then you like to take pictures and write really nice, poetic, thoughtful things, then it's Instagram. You're basically putting out this content and we were blogging with a B. Remember that? That's not so popular anymore, but I would write these epic articles and it was great. I found ways to market those articles and get it out there. At the bottom of each article, I'd have a way for people to join my email list. I was building the audience and eventually what you do is discover a need. I always say selling is a service. You find needs in the world. Great business is solving problems. It's not this use car lying, scheming type of things. If you're a good businessman, if you're a gentleman, you do the right thing and you solve problems and people trade you for that, often in a monetary way. So going into that, writing these articles, but then what happened was I would write these and it was good and we were getting traction. Rebecca would edit those for me and it was kind of like, Hey, Rebecca, did you edit that? Oh, yeah. Okay. I forgot. When you edit something written, it's just not fun. She never smiled or laughed or whatever. I have young kids. This is my office, guys. I'm not into the office. It's got to be in a separate room. This is the dining room. You see the people in the living room and I like it that way. I'm okay with the distractions. I'm the man who will insist that my kids go to work with me. My dad used to take me, he was a traveling salesman in orthodontics and he would take me and we'd just wait in the waiting room or out in the car or when we were older at six flags, which is like an amusement park. Maybe that rubbed off on me and so the kids have got to be here, but when I'm writing, you're deep in thought, writing is difficult and a kid comes up and interrupts. It's difficult. It's difficult to get back on track. When we found out Rebecca caught a viral video, somebody, some family vlogger had put out a video where the man had snuck a pregnancy test in the toilet and found out that they were pregnant. And so usually the woman is revealing to the man we're pregnant, but this was backwards and he had found out. And so this video had gone viral and she had become interested in these people and saw that they had some other content. It was on YouTube and every day they put out this video and it was just about their life. It wasn't this epic story. It wasn't well put together. When I looked at it, it looked like he was filming on his iPhone or something. And we're like, we could maybe do that. And long story short, we got us a little camera. I think it was a Canon, what was it, Rebecca? A Canon G7X. And we said, let's just try it. And our goal was to make people laugh and that they would learn something. And so we just documented our lives. We didn't really create, but we documented. We just documented what we were already doing on the homestay because we thought it was interesting. We would have FedEx drivers have to stop in the middle of the road. We're on a dead end road. Stop in the middle of the road because we're bringing the cows in for the milking or whatever. And I'm at a calf bust the lane and you get out in a run out and hurt it. This really happened. And he's like, oh man, this is so interesting. I don't know if he said you film out or something like that, but he was so interested and he wasn't inconvenienced. He was entertained that he was stopped in the road. And it was kind of like, oh, this life is interesting, even though we've been living it for 10 years and it can be awful boring sometimes. So we put the chickens up, let them out every morning, move the cow every single time. That can only be exciting for so long. But somebody who's not used to that, that is exciting. And we put our vlogs up and you spoke to it earlier. I think what, how people resonate with us is we went from permaculture chickens, which was very textbook. I mean, if you watch it, well, one, it was my first performance. So it wasn't that great. But seriously, it's hard to. And if you watch a vlog of us now, you are going to learn something, but you're also going to laugh. You're also going to emerge. You're also going to win. You are also going to like win every once in a while, you know, because I don't know everything. I might be really good at chickens, but every once in a while I'll still even mess up with them. We just got rabbits. I knew nothing about rabbits. So all the people with rabbit experience, I'm sure, are like, I even have a cooking segment on our show called, I call it the Burn It Up Cooking Show. Because I'm always like, you always see these Martha Stewart cookie cutter shows where the ingredients are already in a glass bowl and it's all ready to go. But come on, everybody's struggling to find the oregano. Where was it? The kids took it off over there. The kids coming in and spilling it. The kid wants to help and they're dumping all this in there. You, I'm really not that great of a cook. I just know how to read. So I follow the instructions. And sometimes I got to ask Rebecca and that putting that in there, I can remember, here's the apron wearing permaculture chicken ninja master. You know, I'm supposed to be this expert. And we're documenting our lives on YouTube and a chicken gets ill and it's raining and the one, all the chickens are up and the one chicken's out. And if you know anything about chickens, they do not like the rain. So something's wrong. What's wrong with this chicken? And we go and, you know, we kind of look at her and feel her and, you know, she feels like maybe she's a little clogged up there. And we go online and we talk to Mr. Google pants and he says, she's egg bound. And what do you got to do for that? Well, you got to do all of oil bags. You got to put them in warm water. She still might not make it because the egg's stuck or something. And we thought, you know, well, this chicken's old. It didn't happen to anybody else. You know, everybody else seemed fine. Why is it having her? Okay, let's let's call this chicken. Well, we open that chicken and it's just this weird material. You know, it's just like this weird soft enough to fill up a soft ball full of just this yellow soft. I was thinking tumor or something. And so I mean, we didn't need her. We didn't, we didn't know. We didn't feel like it was safe. I think we put her in the woods and we, we published that video. And I think I, well, I know I called it putting this fat hen out of her misery. And that I went after I published that video, I had to take a nap. I was so sick. It was so vulnerable. It was so like, I shouldn't, that shouldn't happen to an expert that shouldn't, that shouldn't happen to me. You know, long story short, find out we, that chicken had probably Lily was sneaking into the feed and feeding the chickens extra and that chicken was actually fat. I mean, we, so that really shouldn't but still, I mean, it happened to the one chicken. It didn't happen to the other. So I was okay with it because she couldn't handle everybody else could. So, you know, but still, at the time, you don't know all that you're looking back and you just have to post this uncertainty. But you know what happened when I woke up from a nap and went to the comments, I was dreading, I was like, oh, they're, they're gonna, I thought it was going to be this big exposure video. Like you fake, I'm leaving, you act like you know everything. It was not that. You know what it was? It was, thank you. I appreciate this so much. It's good. It makes me feel empowered. It makes me feel less bad because people's plants, people's animals, they die. It happens to everybody and sometimes it's your fault. Sometimes you don't know whose fault it is or what, what it is. And that gave people permission to fail. This is Lilly everybody. Hi Lilly. We just heard your chicken story. Yeah. Remember when you were feeding those chickens? Sneaking into the band and she was little, she was a little tiny. Gosh, that was five years ago. You overfed the chickens. All right. So that was fun. But that, that, that I think is key. That, that, that happened for the first time and on, on YouTube for homesteading. So there was a lot of textbook stuff there, but I think we were the first to bring in the real life and people were really related. And even to this day, Rebecca and I will follow health experts or something like that in a semi related field. And it'll be so frustrating if, if, if, when they don't share that they cheat, that they have a cheat meal or that they failed and went for the peanut butter and chocolate, you know what I mean? It would bring me great comfort if they knew, if, if I knew they too struggled, you know, if I, if I'm trying to stick to a certain diet because of my lime, you know, where I'm eating mostly carnivore. So I mean a lot of meat, a little bit of fruit, but I like the peanut butter and chocolate, you know what I mean? And I feel like sometimes when I'm watching an expert and they don't share those moments, it's actually defeating and it actually feels unachievable. So now I'm seeing it from both perspectives. And I appreciate when Joel Sallison or Jeff Lawton or somebody like that could say, you know what, the cows got out because we forgot to turn on the fence. You know what I mean? And this is what happens. We've seen that many times, you know, where, where they sometimes do that. It's rare in some of the bigger stars, obviously, but that really sounds like you're building a community and it's a back and forth. It's not just a one way street that a lot of them are saying, Hey, thanks for, for sharing that honesty. And I'm sure many others are coming back and saying, Hey, I've experienced that same thing. What if it was this or what if it was that, you know, and people like that engagement to know that they're not alone in their universe or wherever they're at. The only one is experiencing that because we, we tend to go to the Google pants and say, Hey, does anybody else have this issue? I mean, I'm sure as you, you, in one of your episodes, Becca was really saying how she went out to help you research Lyme disease and it was reading the books and just, I mean, it's overwhelming the amount of information. It's, you know, a doctorate degree just in Lyme disease to figure out, you know, what's going on in some of these, these things. So yeah, that I appreciate you sharing how, how that community and the response and, and how that works. I want you to tell us a little bit more about why abundance plus what it's set up to do and designed for and what the resonance is coming out. How's it going so far and how, how many different channels or I don't even know if you call them channels creators you have in our other farmers that are probably also part of this group of homesteaders that you mentioned earlier in our discussion. Yeah. Well, it came from a pain point, of course. And so when I'm starting out, it's even before Mrs. Boo-Doobe and Mr. and Google band, the, it's before all that. And all we've got is books. I mean, we were fortunate enough to pick up the right books. Joel Salatin, Elliot Coleman, Bill Mollison, we were fortunate enough to find the right books. But reading those books and then going out and doing them, there's still some gaps, there's still some specifics. I mean, we had somebody on our video podcast the other day, and they were talking about bringing it was it was a roots and refuge they had talked about bringing a cow home. And in the trailer and she had slipped in her own manure on the way home and was down by the time they go home. There's no textbook that tells you what to do in that situation. That's a great example of what I'm talking about here. So there's these gaps there. So you need this information. And now the information's there. So for me, it was in books, but sometimes I wanted to see it. All right. And sometimes I needed to fill in these gaps. So I felt like after I had done lead, sweat and cried enough and figured this thing out, that now the technology is there. I can create videos to help and give people that visual. And now with the internet, you know, I could create a video every day. A book can be I mean, Joel's cranking them out more than anybody I know. And it's maybe one a year, one or one every year and a half. So compared to what we can do with did digitally, though, I could make almost 400 videos to one book. Okay. So a lot more visual there to be able to help people. But then what about those gaps still? Because you can't, I don't think Mrs. Boobtoob's got any book, any videos on what to do with your cows slipping around and poop and she's laying down, you know, and getting up. So I needed it. I wished I had an uncle. I wished I had a food growing uncle that I could call or text or talk to at the family reunion. Actually, I wish Joe Salatin was my uncle. And he wasn't. So I learned the hard way. And eventually got to a point where I could put out the I was putting out the content, helping others still being vulnerable and real and admitting I don't know everything. And if somebody asked me something, I don't know. Or I look it up myself and help them out, help them with some research. But the idea here is you, you talked about it. If you if you asked Google a question about you had a concern, can I leave my eggs out on the count or how long do eggs last before they go bad? Well, you're going to get probably well, you're going to get millions of answers. There's going to be millions. There's going to be literally millions. And so who do you trust? What do you trust? So you have to there's a need to have an authority that you can trust. So often, I remember I would maybe type in a recipe or some health remedy. And then I would add the blogger. So early on, when we found the Prairie Homestead or other Homestead fresh eggs daily or somebody like that fresh eggs daily is like doing chickens and stuff. So I might say, why are my chickens not laying eggs? And then I would add fresh eggs daily so that I would only get those results. So you have to like pick this. You have to pick away because you'll get experts brilliant genius people that disagree. And they both might be right. One might be right. One might be wrong. The most be might but might both be wrong. But for your sanity, you have to place your trust somewhere and follow something. So you see what's happening here. You need video. You need to fill in holes in the gap. You need an authority. And so I finally got the guts to even though I didn't know everything to establish myself as authority by producing these videos and encouraging people to come along, come along on a journey. And there'll be many comments. I'll sometimes ask. I don't know anything about mechanics. And I'll know that. And it's to the point where I can even say, I'm sure someone will tell me in this video, you know, right now we're trying to find springs on our property. I don't know anything about that. I don't know how to, you know, get it into the spring box and get it down to the house and have that be an alternative because we do have the well, but it would be nice to have a shut off and be able to tap into the spring if we had to or something happened to the electricity. Well, somebody in the community reached out and said, I was in 30 years in water and he had all the right terms and he's come out and we funded springs and he knows exactly what to do when we find the spring. The point is I created abundance plus to meet that video needs. So our blogs are entertaining. They're, they're edutainable. Okay. You go there and you're entertained and you learn something and you laugh, but really if you, if you watch us water our pigs, it's entertaining and fun. And we fill up this fifth gallon barrel and we got a nipple water on it. But if you actually want to do that, it would be helpful to have a one minute video how to set up a pig water. If you really want to do that, if you want to go beyond entertainment, you're inspired and now you want to do it, go to abundance plus and type in how to make a pig water. It comes up with plans and link. The video comes up, but then with plans and links to all the parts to go and get it. And then if you're in there building that pig water and you have a question like, oh, well, this didn't say, does it go, does, do you put the nipple, maybe somebody doesn't, aren't sure. Do you put the nipple water a foot up four inches up? Does it matter a foot and a half? Does it matter? Well, then that's when you need a food-growing uncle. So folks in abundance plus have the option at the premium level to literally text me. They can text me and I check it every 24 hours and they can say, does it matter how high up the nipple water is? I mean, nobody's ever asked me that, but I could see how that might could be a question for somebody and maybe that's a good example. And so then I've become their food-growing uncle. So we've solved it, we've given video, we've given them and we filled in these gaps and I've been this authority and what abundance plus has become is met these major problems. So there are some major problems. You need inspiration to get started, sure, and that may or may not have been me, but you've been inspired, but as Zig Ziglar would say, he's a motivational speaker, you know, motivation is like bathing. You have to continually do it for it to work. You can't take one bath and be clean forever, right? You got to do it every day or once a week or whatever it is, go get your bath. So get your dose of inspiration. So you've said you've been in abundance plus and you've, it sounds like you've watched our show rooted. So that's very inspirational. We showed another show that's in there called Wilder Still. We showed it this weekend at our party and there was somebody there that just has some chickens, you know, and I don't know if they would call themselves a homestead or anything, but when we got done watching Wilder Still, they were like, this makes me want to really go do that. But for those people that are doing it, it also makes you want to continue because it gets real old putting the chickens up every night, letting them out, you know, leaving the, and then, and then you have another problem. So once gardening socially acceptable, Oprah has a garden. It's totally cool. It's not weird. It's even at the White House. Okay. Yeah. And what happens though? Yeah, it used to be at the White House. Now there's a tennis quarter or something. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. I think the Obamas had a garden, didn't they? Yeah, they did. I think they had a lower organic garden. So once you go from, you have some success in the garden, then you get a chicken, you get some chickens. And like Pat Forman says, chickens are a gateway drug to homesteading. So then you're on the run, but you need that continual inspiration. And now you've been inspired, but now you need some know how. You need, all of a sudden you get pigs, you know, and you need to know how to do this, set up a water or set up a fence or whatever, or how to harvest on farm or whatever. And you need to know how to design. So you want to take my permaculture design course in there. And then there's one more. And we've talked about it a little bit here. So you've got inspiration, but then you've got know how there's one more. And it's very important. And this is the key to lasting. And that's community. Because in its nature, homesteading can be lonely. Because homesteading, home, you got to stay home to be successful. Joel will talk about this all the time to be a successful market farmer. You really need to be home. Because if you're off and going and doing things, you know, and the cows get out, you're going to have bigger losses as if you were there and able to nip it in the bud. And there's also advantages to not having to drive to work. And, you know, if you're 30 minutes to work and 30 minutes back, well, that's an hour. So there's some advantage of gaining another hour and maybe even monitoring that, you know, with that extra hour gain, helping offset some of the loss of giving up the town job. But and now, you know, people can work from home more than ever. I mean, you're German. I'm in North Carolina. And this is coming through clear. And we're going to share this with thousands and thousands of people. And we're actually creating community right here. And people need that they they feel like you're crazy. Because if you start around here anyway, I don't know what's like in Germany. But if you if you start to grow your if you get chickens, your bats, okay, you you're all your friends are like, huh, you know, your friends and family. And all of a sudden you're just you're go ahead. Except for the ones that have had fresh chicken eggs and fresh chicken meat and and been there for the harvest and and and seen that they're like, Oh, you got any extra eggs? Can I come over and then they'll set up the schedule because they they realize it's a lot fresher than the market. Yep, you're gonna you're gonna win those folks over when you feed them and then they'll understand it. And it's coming around actually, if if if there's anything good coming from COVID is it's making homesteading cool again. Okay, because one it's been necessary, because for the first time in in my American experience, food shortages have entered my vernacular, I'm 43 years old, and that's never been an issue. I mean, very privileged in that way. But and I'm not talking like individual like for individual impoverished families. I'm talking about like, there's no chickens at the grocery store for anybody. Okay, that's happened. And that was one of the first times. So now, you know, that's a real issue. And suddenly, if if you don't know if chickens will be there next week or this night, it's not so weird that your friend is growing meat chickens. It's actually cool. So but as we transition to us actually being the cool people, what will happen is you feel weird, you feel strange, you feel crazy. You know, I call all our members crazy chicken ladies, we're all the crazy chicken ladies, okay. And just embracing that a bit, but finding community in that. So all us crazy chicken ladies can get together now on abundance plus. And it's we have a new format in there that looks just like Facebook, it's not Facebook, doesn't have those rules or restrictions and you know, canning posts aren't going to get labeled as extreme and we don't have any of the censorship, you can go in there and feel a little less crazy. Because everybody gets it. We went to homesteaders of America this year, which is an event that happens every year in America. And there are people bare walking around barefoot. Well, to a homesteader, that's nothing strange that somebody's not wearing shoes, right. But to their friends and family back home, maybe that's a little weird that they would have chickens. So when you get around other people like that, and you feel less crazy, and you feel like, oh, these are my people, they get me. It's frustrating when people don't get you. And when you find a crowd that gets you, that gets you through it. That keeps you sustainable. Joel Salton says that the average homesteader doesn't make it seven years. So I think if we're going to get past that seven-year mark, we got to find some other crazy chicken ladies. And hang out with them online, that's where it starts. But then do intern to the real world. Ask your crazy chicken ladies, friends to come over and help you harvest, feed them really nice, and get together once a quarter, once a month. And we're doing that on a bonus plus. We have the online avenue, but we just did a worldwide film showing where our members were a host. We had 77 hosts worldwide, and we invited the broader community to come to these parties. There were 30 states represented. There were like seven countries, and people could get together in these little parties across the world. And that's getting more appropriate right now to where we're not having these big events, but we're having these little parties, and these people would come together and just feel a little less crazy. I absolutely love that. You've touched on so many things. So although the blogging to blogging, that transition and how you did that started around 2015, it is your family farm. It used to be your grandfathers and your dads and connection there. And it was in the family, and you actually at one point bought it. So you've been one way or the other surrounded in some respects to that, but didn't really realize the potential or what could have happened to that. And there is this thing that you brought up that was really interesting, the crazy thing. During this pandemic, there's been a lot of people who want to be crazy. They have started to get in these mobile homes and turn vans into living spaces, buying up in Europe. They're going a lot to Denmark and Sweden. They're finding properties, these old abandoned beautiful historical properties in Italy and different places and say, hey, I can get space for inexpensive and just get away from the rat race, the hustle and bustle of big cities. These infrastructures are not working for me anymore. They're not doing it for me anymore. I want to be able to have to grow my own food. And there's a key in all this madness. A lot of people are realizing growing your own food is like printing your own money. There is a not only sustenance, but there's a sense of security when you have the tools to be able to know to get your basic resources from. And that's the thing is you've seen the broad spectrum and I don't want to give away too much of your episodes and all the tips and tricks because you give away a lot for free. I encourage everybody to go out to abundance plus and if they're at all thinking about homesteading or even want to get the bug, go and get in there and watch a few episodes and look around, look at the resources. And there's even episodes in there from, I can't remember his name, on how you can buy property, how you can get your own property and how, and I think he calls it for free. How can you find your land and stuff? What do you need to do? So there's a lot of good tips and tricks, but we think or somehow this craziness, all your neighbors say, oh, he's got farmer, he's homesteading, he's doing his own thing. I told you at the beginning of our podcast, I'm kind of a biodynamic organic farmer certified. So the crazy guy there, I don't know if you've heard of Rudolph Steiner. Have you ever read or studied Rudolph Steiner at all? I haven't, I haven't. Tell me more. He is the basic, the founding father of homesteading. He's the founding father of biodynamic organics and is a German guy. He started the whole organic movement and that's what Demeter now does as their organic standard biodynamic organics throughout the world and they're very big in the US. But the crazy thing is, he did, I don't know if you've heard about the Waldorf School. Waldorf School is a schooling system in Europe, but they're all over the world. That is just huge. So not only did he teach farming, he taught homesteading, sustenance, he taught schooling. It was in a different way and people looked at him like esoteric and really weird and crazy. If you read his things, the one image on this one book is on the agriculture course from him. This shows him bearing the cow horns, right? I love it. And people are like, oh, that's voodoo, esoteric, that's kind of out there. But there was a reason for that and it goes back to permaculture. You talked about the same place you have the garden, it's where the chickens are, but that's where you have the ducks. That's where you have your rabbits poop and have the ducks and the chickens scratching that into the ground. You have your sheep and your cattle come close as well. Even somehow when you do your pigs as well, that's all turning into cleaning up the soil, to making it full of a healthy biome with mycorrhiza and getting that soil health back up to speed. You mentioned in all of this in abundance plus, you've said it a couple of times now, sustainable. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by sustainable? Help us to find that word because I think I heard it out, but I really want to hear it from you again. Yeah, well, that's a tough word, isn't it? Because I think everybody has a different definition of it, just like everybody would have a different definition of homesteading. I'll tell you, my most recent journey and my most recent thoughts as a voracious animal lover and eater. I love them and that's okay. I name them and that's okay. I harvest them and appreciate them and try to use as much as them. Well, none of it goes to waste. If I don't eat it, the pigs or the chickens or the forest eats it. But as I think about building redundancy and resiliency, I was reading Joel's new book or edited his newest book for him in the sense of like trying to bring it down to like a homestead. Polly micro? Yes, Polly face micro because he's written from a marketing standpoint, has been doing that for 60 years. He wanted a little bit of help, just making sure we're talking homesteading and not going above people's heads. Well, he mentioned that and I asked him, I asked him right there. He said right there and I'm getting to the point where I'm closer to 60, I'm 43. So I'm closer to 60 than 20 and now have success financially. So I think about the future and investment and hey, Joel, do you invest in the stock market? Oh heck, no. If I get any extra money, I'm building a pond. So this is what he's telling me right there. And I'm thinking, well, you know, that represents he's investing back into the land. And so in his book, he said he invests in resiliency. So that let if I underlined it, I put a star by it and I said this is probably a pivotal moment in my life. And I hope it is. And so now I already mentioned you, we're looking into, we're trying to find springs on our property high enough up. What is that about? I mean, we have a wonderful well, we've had to test that it's clean, because I'm looking into resiliency and redundancy, redundancy and resiliency. Because if, because these food shortages have then gone to metal shortages, or lumber is really high, you know the story. Ships not being able to come in with their containers of goods. Do you mind if I interject for just a second? So you're telling us sustain, and you kind of mentioned it, you said to sustain sustainability or sustainable, sustain oneself or family with resources well into the future beyond the generations of your kids and their kids, your grandkids. It's to sustain oneself, sustenance farming as well. But then you jumped right in on the resilience. The great thing is, is it does not matter how sustainable you are. If a climate catastrophe, a natural catastrophe comes, that sustainability could be wiped out in one day, in one hour. And it takes on a farm, especially takes a long time to build up. So that you tickled the word resilience from Joel is so amazing. Because if you have resilience, what does that have? That has automatic sustainability built into it. And that means the very next hour, you've got energy, you've got water, you've got food, you've got storage, you've got all those things that are giving that resilience. And I'm not talking dystopian resilience, that if that happens, we can all don a space suit or a gas mask and we're still living. That's not living for me or for you. I don't think, but there's one step beyond that. And I think you've already touched upon this as well, not only in the videos that I've seen. And that was my follow up question to sustainable. And that is regenerative, which is beyond resilience. And it's not just farming. There's many ways to be regenerative beyond farming or agriculture. And so that's what I, if you don't mind, I hope I'm not, I don't want to lead or put any words in your mouth, but I, that's what I hear out when I hear you speak. Sustainability is kind of like, to me, it sounds like equal, equal, like you're not giving or taking less. I mean, we're getting to a whole nother thing if we talk about regenerative, because that means you're giving back more than you're taking. Sustainability to me, as my definition, seems like it's at least level. Like you're not giving more than you're taking, you're not taking more than you're giving. So probably, you know, a well is not sustainable because it's getting piped in through an electric line to be able to run the well. Okay. So we're having to bring in this energy, bring this, this outcoming energy, even, even like solar panels. I mean, you're going to eventually have, I'm into investing thing into things that make me not even need electricity. Skip alternative energy. How about I don't need energy, that kind of energy. So I mean, if we're talking about spring, I feel like that if, if, if getting our water on the farm was to be completely sustainable, we found a spring, it's coming out of the water, it's coming out of there, literally in a pinch. Armageddon's come, whatever. We can walk up there with our hands, clasp our hands together and drink from that spring. Okay. Now nobody wants to, you know, we're going to invest in some resiliency and hopefully, you know, while we can put in some PVC pipes and get this thing piping down to our house, gravity, gravity fed. We don't need no power. Our well needs power. We have a generator to run if our power goes out. You could have some solar panels, but those things corrode and go bad. And are you going to be able to replace them? You know, people say, well, plastics with us for 450 years. Yes, but plastics also with us for 450 years. So put that PVC under the ground, it'll last even longer. That's even better. How many generations is that that spring water could feed? How many generations could that spring water then gravity feed our family? So then I would love to give you this example. If you want to know what I think sustainability is, I think it's a rooster. I think it's a boar. I think it's a bull and a ram. In other words, for those that don't know what I'm talking about, breeding animals, like the males of the breeding animals. So if we have a rooster and somewhere to happen, we're going to have to a grain of shortage or supply chain issue and we couldn't get grain anymore. We couldn't order chicks from the hatchery anymore. We got a rooster. And of course we have egg laying hands. They can get together and have chicks. And definitely they don't care. They don't care. The sun is shining. The grass is growing. They don't care. They keep going. They don't watch the news. Listen to the radio or any of that. They just keep going. And the sun does too. And as long as the sun keeps going, we're all right. So we're on this journey of growing what's closest to our heart. And since we are eating a lot, since we're animal lovers, we're going to grow in all the ways in affection and sustenance. We're going to, what we're looking at is, well, pigs use a lot of grain. Chickens take a lot of grain. Well, the ruminants, the cows, the sheep, let's look at the cows. Because I think it's king. I think the cow is king because they eat grass. We cannot eat grass as humans. I mean, we could, but it takes more energy to consume it than it would give us. So sun and grass, and the cow can eat this grass and give you our cows, two cows, 100% grass, three to three to four or five gallons a day. Just three gallons is 24 pounds of food. For a family of seven, we could not only survive, we could actually thrive. If push came to shove and all we could consume was this meal, we would actually not just survive. We would thrive. And I believe, and they give you 40 pounds of manure every day, which feeds the pasture and regenerates it, not just equalizes it, makes it better. And then they give you a calf every year, at least every year, really every 10 to 11 months. A calf, well, so what? Well, you can sell that calf or trade it and you've got some tradage going on, or you can eat it. Once it gets one or two years old, one and a half. So you get in a continual flow. And because you have that bull, he can replace himself with his offspring. So it's this closed loop. You're not needing this outside thing. And I don't think I'm not sure anything beats the cow. So it's then like, oh, how do we get more pasture on our lands? We can make that happen. So then we can be less dependent on hay. When you're sure we're grass fed, but the amount of cows we have, we do have to import some hay. So the next step is then how do we get more pasture so we can graze them all winter. And then within this next step, so we take care of water, we have the spring, we have this amazing, I mean, if you eat the entire beef, the beef liver is the most nutrient dense, beneficial food in the world, hands down. And you eat in the organs, you have the hideous, you can do things with the hide. And I don't know if anything beats it. And because it's going on grass and doesn't need a lick of grain actually does better without grain. I don't know if anything. Oh, now, now you're looking at, okay, we've gotten our water. We've gotten our breeding stock now. How do you, how do you harvest that animal without electricity? Well, it's very possible, but learning how to do that, you know, getting hand saws instead of a saws all to have them. How do you, how do you harvest them without a gun? You know, if, if there was ammo shortage or something like that. So, you know, in Honduras, they would to harvest a pig, they would, there's no guns there. It's just not available. It's just an impoverished country. They know how to humanely knock out that pig with a sled chairman. This pig never knows it's coming drops, you know, jolts the brain enough, they don't ever feel anything and then, and then slip, slip it. So looking into that, you know, the chainsaw could maybe be argued the most efficient use of fossil fuels. There is, I mean, it's so efficient, like, like that's, that'd be the last power machine that true environmentalists would give up because it's so efficient. And, and so you wouldn't give up your chainsaw, but it wouldn't hurt to have, to learn how to saw by hand, if you had, have some axes on hand, have some splitting malls, make sure you have a wood stove to keep warm. You see where I'm going with this? Like a chainsaw makes sense until it doesn't make sense until fuel is just astronomical or not available. And it's, it's, that's, that's where we're going with this redundancy. But if you want a picture of sustainability, it's, it's the cow. And then learning how to harvest that cow with electricity. And, and look, learning how to harvest that cow electricity, and then preserve it. We just learned because we love the grid. I'll admit it. We love it. We have seven freezers. I know that there's a conflict there. I know, and I feel it in my heart, but some, at some point, we've just got to say, we love having this conversation, don't we? And we couldn't do it without the grid. I mean, so can't do it without the grid, not today. I mean, there is a solution for everything. It's, it's how, how far do we want to go? I mean, even where you're at in North Carolina, there's, you could use ground stores. There's even things that you could bury deep enough that would give you the temperatures you need for, for the beef and, and the meat that you, that you store in those, in those seven freezers. The other thing is jerking, you know, if you, if you really don't have electricity, but we're not talking about making people survivalists. We're making, talking about homesteading and, and there's much smarter ways. I mean, you're talking about this water on your property. And I immediately think, well, what about rainwater cisterns? What about ambient water harvesting? How can you support that natural watershed cycle just on your property of, of running down for the wells to give it an extra support every year? One of your episodes you, you had, you're standing out in the rain. And I guess it was a period of some, some major rain instead of, instead of just letting it take its course. What about putting some in some rainwater cisterns or making sure it's channeled? When you were at Jeff Lawton's course, he has, I think it was last time I was there, there was seven ponds, big ponds that it was using. They all fall, fall funneled down from one another. And when it rains there, it's a tarantial tropical rain for days. And it's like a flood. And so he waits till one of the ponds up high gets ready to overfill. And then he takes that PVC pipe and he knocks it down and runs it into the next one and into the next one. And so with that design that you learned, I think that's the great thing. You can, that's, the world's your oyster. You can make that farm and that pearl, however you need it to be. And it's just about, well, it's actually cheaper than it would be to go off of other options. So I think, I mean, and I see that's the process that you're on. And I see that's what you're, you do. And when you find a new measurement, you actually go that way. So I absolutely love, you know, what you're talking about there. Yeah, well, we just had a workshop. So, you know, we're in this, loving the grid and appreciating the freezers and, and, 60 bucks a year run one of those things. But knowing that I want to invest in resiliency and redundancy, we got to have an alternative to the freezer. And so we've got this, we've got a bore, which is a male pig breeding these staff. So we've got that and they're going to have these piglets. And, but you go to harvest them. And you can, let's say you can, you can do a pig easy enough without a track for anything like that, hand saws, knives, sledgehammer if it came down to if you didn't have a gun. And, but then how you go store it without the freezer. So we get stuck in this like, like it's impossible, but it's not impossible. It's only been possible to do it the way we're doing it for the last few decades, few decades. So we got Brandon Sheard, Master Butcher to come out here and, and he taught us how to cure it with salt. Forget canning even. Like we were going to go there, like let's learn how to can our meat. But you don't even have to go there. Evidently, you could just, what do we do to cure it? We just cured a whole ham. And you just saw, you just liberally salt it. Salted, jerk it can. I mean, there's so many options. The problem here, here's here, I will address this problem because you can go down this rabbit drum and finally say, where'd you get salt? Yeah, because I'm not getting, I'm not getting that amount of salt off my land. So at some point, and it's totally okay to rely and depend on a community and have trade. Now 100 years ago, before they had the grid here on this farm, what wasn't even 100 years is more like 70. No, not even 50 or 60. And where they get salt, I mean, they walk or ride their horse carriage down to town and trade for salt. So I think that's okay, I think there's a place for, for relying on community and trade. But then you could go even further and say, where did the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee are the Native Americans who lived in this area? How'd they do it? What'd they do? They survived and thrived. What can we learn from them? And you know, maybe that's where we find some of our redundant resiliency ideas. It's too easy to get caught up in this. We got to go to the grocery store. We got to, we could just look back and try to give ourselves some context of how, how, how did our ancestors do it and pull it off? And like you said, for 16 sisters, we have this amazing advantage because we have this information available to us and resources. Yeah. And I'm talking about invest in resiliency. It wouldn't hurt to invest in a sister that would last hundreds of years into some PVC piping to bring the, the spring down. I can totally justify that. That's totally a compromise I'm willing to take, knowing that plastic will be here for a very long time. Yeah. And that's a different type of plastic. So I mean, I don't think we need to get rid of plastic. We just need to make sure it doesn't end up in our waterways and our oceans. If it's, if it's buried in the ground, hold in rainwater, if it's, if it's using something of value, that's okay. If it's ending up in our air and in the bellies of our fish that we eat, you know, that's, that's not good. But I don't have, you know, no problem with PVC and all that. I think there's definitely some, some tools there. We've kind of diverted, but we really, before we're done here, we need to talk about The Rooted Life, your new book, March 2022 is coming out. And I got a little advanced copy and notification. You're taking pre-orders. And I, and I believe because of your, your vlog and, and your episodes and abundance plus, I have a good understanding of what it's about. But I still don't know the full picture. And I'd like you to tease enough without giving the book away before we could even pre-order it or before we can get a copy. Tell us a little bit about it. What led you to that? And what was that journey been like? Yeah, that's good. That's good. So I'm a filmmaker, film producer first, and it was DVDs. But who has DVDs anymore? Nobody. I mean, DVDs came and went. VHS is before that. Books, books have been with us. I don't know what, couple hundred years. They're not going anywhere. And maybe this, all the advances, this new technology and all this metaverse talk and all this, this technology is maybe even driving us deeper into books. And there's nothing, there's ebooks, scrollers, but there's nothing that can replace the smell, the smell, you know, seeing something you like and underline it. When my dad passed away two years ago, I went first for his books. And I wished he was more of a reader. He just wasn't. And I found one book, and he, all the books I searched, it was like he had never read it. I really don't think he did. But I found one and he had one underlined thing in there and I gravitated towards that because I know I go to underline something. We're voracious readers. Probably a book a week. And we'll, I'll underline things. And I'll tell my kids, when I pass, if you want a piece of my soul, go to my bookshelf and find the underlinings. And that's why I write a book, because it's timeless. It's a piece of my soul. And it will way outlive me, a book. And so this book is a, it's the rooted life, cultivating health and wellness. This is just like a printed out PDF, like real copies are not available yet, even to like folks like you. So we're working on, it's a long process, but it's a good process. And it's a whole team. And it's frustrating how slow it can be sometimes, but it's going to be better because it's this huge collaboration. And it's going so much better than if I did it myself, as much as I would want to, and as much as I can, I could totally self publish. It's been good to have a team, a good to have different perspectives, like my representative at the publisher, husband thought of this name. I wish I could tell you I thought of the name, but the real life, it's perfect, because homesteading is a lifestyle. This, just like our vlog, is really the first time. This, this is a book, but it's not a textbook. It's half. I like to think of the half was lifestyle and practical, like, what are you doing? Your spouse isn't on board. How do you expose your kids to butchering? How do you communicate with your wife? And how do you deal with people thinking you're crazy and stuff like that? But it also got like, it's, it's also the no excuse book. So there's, there's a chapter on gardening and it talks about the container garden. Like when we went on the Great America Farm Tour in 2017, it didn't stop us from growing. We were on a converted school bus. We literally bought a five inch terracotta pot, put some velcro on the bottom of it. So it went slide around and put it in the dashboard. And we got some potting soil and put it in there. And we literally bought some basil seeds and we grew basil. And that was in, where was that Rebecca? Connecticut? Iowa. And by the time we zigzag across the U.S., going west, we had us some basil. In Wyoming, we harvested the basil and had it on some pizza. And we were eating off the land. And so no excuse container garden to the bulletproof garden, which is inspired by permaculture. It's basically a mulch garden, which totally bulletproof. Anybody can do it. It's totally cheap. Put it on top of any kind of soil, sand, whatever, it works. And to the bigger garden, the crop garden, I want to grow more garden. I want to have some chickens. We're going to have some chickens at a gateway. So you could totally, but then there is a permaculture, there's a permaculture chapter in here. I think it's called a smart start. It's called smart start. It's this, yeah, smart start, starting smart. I don't know if there's a glare there, but it's all about the mistakes I made planting the garden 130 feet away. And now my garden's 10 feet away. As Bill Mollison would say, start right outside your door. But I take it a step further and say, start outside out the door of your heart. So also grow what you like to eat. We get into it and we think kale's cool. So we grow kale, but in our hearts, we don't really like kale. So we don't really tend it and take good care of it. You seem like a freak if you don't like tomatoes. If you don't like tomatoes, don't grow tomatoes. Throw them at the bad performance. I don't know. Feed them to the chickens. Don't fall into this pressure. So it's starting smart. And then, so you don't build a house without a plan. So just like you really don't need to do a garden or home, certainly not a homestead without a plan, but it's not that hard. I walk you through making a plan, getting started with a garden, getting started with the chickens. And the hope is then that, because once you start with it, once you start with the, I'll say that again. Once you have gone into the chickens, you're off to the races. You've become certainly a homesteader. I'm not saying you can't be before that. In my opinion, you can be a homesteader and not grow anything. You want to, it's in your heart. So you want to be a homesteader and you're in an apartment in New York City and there's not even a window in your apartment. Go to the store and buy a whole chicken and an acorn squash and go talk to Mr. Goopvance to see how to cook that thing. I mean, that's a start. If you won't cook whole foods, then you won't grow whole foods, you know? So there's a progression there and you can start even without land or without a seed. And if you've got that acorn squash and that chicken, and you do have a bit of plot of land, you could save some of those seeds from the acorn squash and plant it. You don't have to buy any seeds or anything like that. So this will, I've had some people come visit and they've read it and aren't, they're in Washington, they were actually in Washington DC and don't have a gardener thing, but she's reading it and the impression is it makes me feel like I can do this. So she had it, the spirit of this is maybe unattainable. This is something I can't do or think of, but after reading that, no, this is something I can do. And even if you can do it and you've been doing it, you're going to still have fun reading this because there's fun stories. It's not just a guide and a text. A lot of fun stories and you're definitely going to learn something. I don't care how much you know. I think I know who that was. Is she a doctor? It's not, it's not a secret. No, no, who came there? That was Holistic Hilda. Holistic Hilda. It was her daughter from the Wellness, no, Wise Traditions podcast. From Wise Traditions podcast. Okay, awesome. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. I want to know, so you're going to actually sign probably a thousand copies or something, the first thousand or something. How can people pre-order this? Yeah. How can they get a signed copy? They want to have a little piece of Justin history there. I'll put the links in the show notes for sure, but can you kind of tell them a little bit about that as well? Yeah, we're signing the first 5000, but we've already done it. I mean, this thing is taking off. I mean, we've already sold that many. This thing is hotcakes. This thing is coming in at the right time. This is a very large publisher. This is a mainstream publisher, and that's our hope with it too, is that we would reach the mainstream. Somebody who's, you know, not even necessarily thinking about gardening or homesteading and being in a lifestyle or a home section of the bookstore and see this and pique their interest and get it, but there are advantages to pre-order. If you go to therootedlife.com, although we've probably signed the first five, we sold the first five. For sure, because there's so many different retailers and all that stuff. I can't promise signed at this point, but there are pre-order bonuses. If you go to therootedlife.com and you go there, you have a variety of retailers that you can choose to buy from. Amazon, Barnes and Noble books a million others, and then that would be step one. And then step two, you fill in your email address and submit that and we will get you some pre-order bonuses. We're still working what that is. I think it's going to at least be a chapter from the book before it comes out because the book doesn't come out till March. We'd like to get you something now. We also did an audio book version of it. I just spent a week every afternoon doing the audio. That was a lot of fun. And so this is exciting and your community, Mark, the people listening to this, this is what's really exciting about this. This needs to be, it already is. I've gotten word from the publisher that we've got orders for 20,000. So like this is crazy. When we launched this to my audience, we were number 50 in all of Amazon and books. We were number one in three different categories. That's hot. And what I'm saying is we can leverage our audience. It's my audience, your audience. There's people listening to this to come together and make this big, not for my, I don't make that. The monetary value here, I could do much better with abundance plus, right? So it's not about the money for me. I'm at the point where we're successful. We want significance. We want to reach the world for this. And when folks like your audience and my audience get in there and we get top 50 on Amazon, well that, and that gets the attention of the Walmart's and the targets and the home depots. And so then it goes into these mainstream places, the tractor supply. And then somebody picks it up that might not have heard about it before. And suddenly, you know, we have a lot of problems in this world. But what is, what is, is it Jeff Lawton or Bill, Bill Molson, forgot which one said it, but the answers to these problems start in the garden. So this is our way. When our community goes and pre-orders this, and it's all about the pre-orders in the publishing business, the, the, I think it goes to the, how many books are ordered pre-order up to a week? I'm not sure. This is my first publish up to a week after the launch is what like the New York Times bestseller looks at and all these, all these, these bestseller lists. But if we can get on those because of our, us as an audience banding together and spending the 25 or 28, whatever it is, whichever retailer you're going to, that then gets the attention of the mainstream. And then we get into that mainstream. And all of a sudden, more and more people are turning off the news and building gardens. And the world is a better place. Absolutely. I'll be in the US come the first part of the year. And I'd like to swing by and see if we could do a live podcast setup. That would be nice. And definitely when, when you're big and you're famous and your book makes all the big bestseller lists, I want us to stay in touch and keep our listeners up to, up to speed. I love abundance plus and definitely will link all those things in the show notes. I have really three, four more questions for you. One more. That's probably hard. I don't know if you've ever answered it before. It's the hardest question I have for you today. And it's really, it's for you. And you only you to answer. I don't want to hear what you think political leaders or family or whoever else. I want to know specifically Justin's answer. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you, Justin? I think that's a world. The first thing that came to my mind is abundance. I'm big on shifting away from this poverty mindset and going into abundance. I think the world has enough for us all. And so to, to, to for that to happen, I imagine it, it starts with us as individuals. That's our biggest realm of influence. We can't change the big scheme. We can't tackle all these big problems. We can't control that, but we can control ourselves like I hinted to you and as Lucas Nelson seems, turn off the news and build a garden. So it's, it's starting with us. And I'm taught, I'm preaching to myself, not looking at the world's problem and looking at my problems. When, when somebody on the team messes up saying, well, me as a leader, as a communicator, or as a subordinate, how did I, how could I have done things different to make that better the next time? Sure, this person may have wronged me or made a mistake, but also at least looking and saying, well, what could be my part in that? And kindness, it can be easy to forget. Sometimes we get caught up in feelings of revenge, spite, and we just have to try and remember kindness. And that doesn't mean kindness doesn't confront or face hard things or set up boundaries. It just means we keep that in our mind. And I think as I visited and talked about in my last episode of rooted root of 10, the secret of happiness. I think we have to definitely take care of ourselves before we can take care of others. If you're on an airplane and you're in a disaster and the oxygen masks come in, you've got to put your mask on first as backwards as it sounds so that you can help your child and help others. So we have to take care of ourselves. And I mean getting enough sleep, I mean eating well. I mean trying to live stress free. I mean getting sunshine and getting cold exposure and being active. But I also mean being happy, which is not money, which is not health, which is not success or even significance. It's just being content and thankful. Thank you so much. The last three questions are for my listeners. And they're really, if there was one or two messages that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change your life, what would it be, your message, your or messages? Don't be a canter. Eliminate can't from your mentality. I understand Shokiloneal, massive, probably 350 pounds, giant, is not going to race a horse in the Kentucky Derby because those horse riders are like 100 pounds or less. He can't. He can't win the Kentucky Derby. Oh, or can he? Shokil needs to say, instead of I can't win the Kentucky Derby, it's actually true. Like there are limits. But instead he should say, how can I? Because you might track with me already and you might see how Shokiloneal can win the Kentucky Derby. I know how he can. He owns the team, right? He owns the horse. He hires the jockey. He does the things to win it. So instead of saying, and I learned this through my chronic illness and and struggling, I can't go out in the chores. I really can't. I really cannot walk. Oh wait, grandma's got a walker. I'm serious. I'm barring a walker from grandma. And it was really like, I can't. I could totally justify this. I could say it to the vloggers, you know, my fans. I really can't go do the chores today and nobody would blame me for it. I really can't. But wait, how can I? Okay, grandma's got a walker. Oh, come on. Give me that side by side. Rebecca, can you bring the side by side up front? I'll use the walker. I'll get out there and I'll sit in this. I literally did chores from the side by side, probably for a month, just going out there and being a support, making sure the kids did it right and all that stuff. So instead say, not I can't, but how can I? And your mind is a wonderful thing. It's a very powerful engine. And it loves these exercises and mull over it and force yourself to say six ways. Oh, I can't go do chores because I'm 76. Well, how can I go to chores? There's a lady named Gigi that emailed me during these times when I was talking about this. Her name was Gigi. You'll never forget her name. She said, I put an end to 76. I put an end to it. Is she really not 76? She's really 76. There's no getting around that. She put an end to it. And in her nice development and apartment complex, like probably HOA rules out of the yin yang. This house looked like what is next to a golf course. It's that nice. She sent me a little picture of her green stock garden, which if you don't know, it's like a tower garden that has 36 planters on it. And it looks beautiful. If gardening is against the rules, nobody's going to say anything about this tower garden. You got to put an end to 76. And you got to stay. Oh, I can't have a garden because it gets the rules. And you got to say, well, how can I? Well, I could petition. Well, I could sneak and have a garden. Well, I could have a container garden. I could grow something in my window. So I could have lights inside the house and have a, what do you call those? What are those garages? Sprouting indoor farms. Yeah. Yeah. So then you see where I'm going. I could have it. I could go to a community. Is there a community garden in my area? I could go to one of my friends who's out in the country and see if we could collab in a way. Do you see what's happening? Your brain loves those exercises. And chances are, you'll find a way and force yourself to write six ideas and four and a half of them might be stupid. But one might be great. And you might be able, you actually will be able to do it. What have you experienced or learned in your journey so far in life that you would have loved to know from the start? Yay. Nobody likes the sensor. Start documenting now. I wish I could go back. It'd be really neat if I had a plethora of content and documentation from when we started. I know people are getting at, well, what did you do wrong that I could learn from going forward? And I think that's a legit point. I made plenty of mistakes in farming. But one major one was that I didn't document. For one, it serves as our journal, and it doesn't have to be through YouTube. It doesn't necessarily even have to be public, but it solves so many of our problems, just like the garden can solve so many of the world's problems. So did documenting. Well, one, we're documenting our family and we have these amazing home videos, but we also have this journal to go back to Rebecca. We're supposed to harvest the ducks at seven weeks. When did we get them? We'll go back and literally look at the vlog to figure out when the ducklings arrive. So we harvest them in the right window. But there's also monetary possibilities that may happen because Joe Salton talks about the centerpiece of your farm. Well, the centerpiece of our farm, our main farm product is not eggs or beef or pork in our exports. Our main farm product is content. That's what we're producing and selling on from this farm. So it could turn into a monetary possibility for you and free you up and get you home and be home, be home with the kids. You might reach way more people than you ever imagined, but you also will find, even if you're on Instagram and you have 100 people following you, this sense of community through comments, but also through, as we started, and this was when we were small, people emailing and saying, I really related to that. Hey, I'm only two. You just said I'm going to swing by and now I'm hanging out with a German little North Carolina hillbilly. It's a rich life. That's why we're the most socialized homebodies anybody know, is because we've been willing to put our life out there. You have to be the change. You can't just sit and mope and wonder and look for another community. You have to create it. And that can happen as evil or as some might claim addictive or whatever social media could be. It could be used for that, but it can also be used for the good. And you'll find that people were emailing us. I'm swinging by. Can I come meet you? Yes. I mean, we were accepting total strangers. Guys, don't even go to social media. Put your spare bedroom on Airbnb. We did bring your working boots and working gloves. Exactly. We put our spare bedroom on Airbnb to pay the rent. Okay. That's how struggling we were. I was jumping in dumpsters. I was living on food growing our own food, everything you name, everything you can think of. That spare bedroom paid the rent. And we used to have a mat. Well, where is it? We have a map on top of our roof. It was on the wall right here behind me. And right over here. And we would put tax on it from our visitors. And we had visitors from all, we had visitors from Germany. Okay. With a very different perspective on life and culture and social studies. That's the best word I can think of for it. So it's my history and perspective on what's happened in Germany's history and all this kinds of things. So we've had people from Asia and all kinds of places and all over the US. And it paid the rent. And we found community and even kept up with some of those people and had them come back and visit. So thinking outside of that. And so that, putting my, putting a room on Airbnb and just getting some community. And that was an option. They could come and milk with us. And when you're milking every day, it gets boring. But just yesterday, we had Rory Feig, a singer, songwriter, and his team come and some of his team came and milked with us. And they had, they had no experience with it. And even though we're teaching something, we teach on the blogs or whatever and just sharing with them, they're bringing a new perspective, asking fresh questions. And it's just a rich life. And you don't have to have 901,000 followers. You even have to be more careful when you get to that point. And you have to guard your time a little bit. But when we're starting off, just saying yes. Oh, this somebody had picked us up from blah, blah, blah, and they're from Kansas and they happen to be over here visiting grandma. Can they come by? Yes. Because then you're going to sit there with me while I'm milking. And I'm going to have somebody to talk to. I love it. Justin, thank you so much for letting us all inside of your ideas. It's been a sure pleasure. That's all I have for you today. We've actually went way, way over. Is there anything else you'd like to contribute or anything you didn't get to say before I say goodbye? Man, I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it. What about you, Rebecca? Yeah, I think it's great. No, you did great. Good job. Thanks so much, Justin. And I hope we can see each other soon and have a talk once again. Okay.