How to Thrive in Uncertainty

Alright, oh, is this on?

I don't know. It is on, Brad. It is on. It's on, but it's not focused. It is focused. Hey guys, if you're seeing this part, you're a replay viewer, and we thank you so much for tuning in. We got a good show, we got a good program for you guys tonight. We're gonna talk about our story in the sense of maybe some uncertainty we went through sort of alone that we're all maybe now going through together. Where we had health uncertainty, we had financial uncertainty. We're getting, uh, let's say we're getting vulnerable with you guys tonight and just want to take this time to share with you live. And I think this would be a good format to do it in. We can interact with you, talk about it as we go. Folks are rolling in now, so let's make sure everybody can hear us. Tin Chapel in the house! Hey, you want to greet some people, Rebecca?

Hey guys, I saw I saw Erlene Permaculture is here. Stephanie.

Oh, Cindy's here.

Cindy.

I know Jason from So the Land's gonna pipe in. We're gonna just take a minute, guys, get some tea, get some—

Gold Shaw Farm's here.

Rebecca made some— Gold Shaw in the house. Gold Shaw Farm. Glad to see you, buddy. I made some cookies yesterday. We want to get you guys, get you some tea, get you some cookies. We're gonna be— Rebecca and I are gonna share our story tonight. We're gonna give you some ideas about how we thrived in a time of ill health and financial uncertainty. And I know many of you may be going through something like that now, and we just want to help. We just want to serve you guys in the best possible way. We're giving you extra content during this time. A lot of people are at home. We're staying at home. It's kind of normal for us. Like, North Carolina said don't go out, only the essentials are open. But that's all that we— it's like, oh, that's all we ever did anyway. So it's kind of like, okay world, now you get to feel what it's like to be a homesteader. Yep, stay home and you only go out for the essentials and you order everything else.

I love staying home. I am a homebody.

So who's like— who's, who's getting drove nuts staying at home? Put that in the chat. Or are you like Rebecca and you're a homebody?

No, I love it.

It's a success in homesteading though, y'all. You gotta just stay home. So make this a practice.

That's what Joel Salatin says in one of his books.

Absolutely.

He was saying in one— is it—

and you farm.

And he was saying, like, becoming a homesteader, you have to— or a farmer, you have to stay home. You know, you have to say you can't be the social butterfly, and you, you need to get things done here.

So, uh-oh, somebody wants to see Teddy. Jason, so the land's in the house. The Macs are here. Thank you, Jason and Ken, for— and Cindy's here. I hope Maybe she can moderate for us. Thank you guys for moderating for us. This is a place of comments, questions, even derogatory remarks, but just don't get too ugly or we'll kick you off. Our 3 moderators will boot you. Oh look, they're responding. Are they excited about seeing Teddy or are they talking about being home? We got a bunch of homebodies. That doesn't necessarily surprise me. Some folks are bored.

Oh, Cindy said that Mike and her are both considered essential, so they're not staying staying home.

Okay, so it's still going.

Work, one of the essentials.

Heirloom permaculture here. All right, so the Mabel's Homestead is here. That's good. Okay, we got Gold Chocolate Roots.

It's been nearly 2 weeks since I left the farm. Life is good.

I'm with you, bud.

I did have to go to the grocery store. I know Justin's on like 3 weeks. Which I'm slightly—

Okay, so who stayed longer? Who stayed home longer than 3 weeks? You really like that. He's really looking at me as I use my— you like that hand motion there?

Yes.

Okay, we're gonna ask this one question, we're gonna jump into the content, guys. I've got like 10, 11, 12, 2 dozen tips for you tonight inside of our story of how we thrived in uncertainty. It's our story, and hopefully maybe it can apply to someone here tonight in many ways. So Rebecca will probably be spending a lot of time in the chat. She's on the chat side and be filling your questions. Then towards the end, I'm going to talk about what Rebecca and I are trying to do to help, and hopefully it will encourage you guys to speak up and talk in the chat about how you guys might help others in this. No matter what you're going through, one thing we've learned, even being at the rock bottom, there's always something you you can do to help somebody else, and in the end, that helps you.

Okay, Teddy wants to get down.

Teddy's not having it. So you guys ready to get into it? 600 people in this living room. Uh, we may be self-quarantined, but we can all hang out here online, thank goodness. So anyway, let's jump right into it, Rebecca.

Oh, someone's been home a month. That's mine.

He's always stealing. No wonder it tastes so good. Mucho honey in that. Okay. Let's jump right in. Rebecca and I, years ago, 4 or 5-ish, 7-ish years ago, we were living happy frugal lives. That means what, what for us meant frugal. And this might give you guys some ideas on how to live. Maybe, maybe you're out of work for a couple of weeks or whatever, and maybe this is some ideas on how to save some money, live more frugally. So one thing we did when we were living is we worked for rent. I've always paid rent even though this is family property. I paid my dad and I paid him for rent, but I was able to work out with him, my landlord, trades. So I mowed the grasses for his other rentals, I took the trash, and that would cut down on our rent bill. So anytime we could work out a trade is what we would do. We had one phone between us for years. Jason, Southern Land, you guys got one phone? They got two phones.

They do.

Okay, we had one phone between us. Who's got one phone between you and your spouse? We had one car. Now that may not be as— it's at least about around our friend circle, and they got one car. Yeah, we still have one car.

Most of our friends have one car.

But Jason, you guys have just one car.

But that used to be Amy and her roommates. In our other friend circle. Yeah, before our homesteader friend circle.

Yeah, um, this is another one. We worked from home, and you don't necessarily have to be an entrepreneur to work from home, although it's great. I'm going to speak to that a little bit later. But, uh, a friend of Rebecca's— well, mine too— Krista in Florida gets up early in the morning, 5:30, and teaches, uh, Chinese children how to speak English. So English as a second language, online in the morning. So there are all different data entry, all kinds of stuff that you can do from home. How is that frugal? Well, goodness, if you count your cost of travel to somewhere, especially if you're living in the country, and then the wear and tear on the car being— the tax man allows 54 cents a mile is what he's saying it costs you to drive your car, counting fuel, tires, all that stuff. That's a lot. If we were to drive to town and back, that's 30 miles. That's $15. It's gonna cost us $15 to go to town, long run. So we stayed at home and we farmed our food. And I say farmed our food because back in those days we didn't just grow it. We said, you know what, if we're gonna grow beef for ourselves, we're gonna grow beef for us, and we're gonna grow beef for sale. If we're gonna grow eggs for us, we're gonna grow eggs for sale. If we're gonna grow vegetables, we're gonna grow vegetables for sale. And what happened was we at least paid for our own production. We had to put in the labor, but all the expenses were paid— the feed, the seeds, the tools. It was all paid for. And that's one of the most direct ways, um, to live frugal on the homestead is to— it's not that much harder to grow 24 chickens than 12. It's really not. It's not that much harder to grow 50 Cornish Cross than $25 and sell some to some friends. And in fact, raising beef, we were able to profit $1,000 a head. So, I mean, for us, we couldn't run many— 3, 4 in a season. You buy them in the spring and then you harvest them in the fall, and we'd profit $1,000. Not bad, especially if you could lease, rent some pasture next to you do 20, 40, 75 acres. Dude, you have a job there. $50,000, $75,000 a year. But we'll get into that, more of that in a second. So basically, we had this mindset of if you didn't spend it, you didn't have to earn it. So we just didn't spend much. And then we lived debt-free. We had gotten completely debt-free, no mortgage. We were renting. And that caused for a more frugal lifestyle. Then, uh-oh, so what happened to our happy little life? You know, we were living well below what the average income was. We probably qualified— we were probably below the poverty line.

Oh, we definitely were.

But we were happy and we were doing good and we had, we even had extra money. We saved up some money and we took down this wall here. This used to be a wall. We're sitting in the loft.

I remember we ate rice and beans. We worked with Randolph.

We ate a lot of rice and beans to save money. You know, I don't recommend than that though, because to save money, we cut down on healthy foods like clean organic meats, and we started eating more rice and beans, salads, stuff like that, and I think that actually ended up backfiring on us because it caused bodily stress, and that gets us to our next point, Lyme disease. So I came down with the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease, and we can say whatever it caused it, if it was the root canal, if it was just the stress of our life just weakened our immune system, and finally Lyme rising up in me, the symptoms, we could say it was from the diet. There was a number of things. It was like a perfect storm coming into place. It doesn't matter why.

Right. Yeah.

But what matters is we increased, we became, we started having to spend more money on health because at first we didn't know what it was. We were spending all kinds of money trying to figure out what's wrong with me. At first it was physical muscular pain. And we're like, it felt like I had a, a sports injury. It was a groin injury like I used to get when I ran track. So it was like, or mountain board, I would get a groin injury every once in a while mountain boarding. So we thought it was healthy. But anyway, we went down this rabbit hole.

No, I mean like, because the way it came on, he was a runner, and then like we were walking and he had this pain in his groin. And so we were like, oh, you'll just rest, you won't run, it'll go away. And then like 30 days later it's worse. And it's not going away. And we're like, what's wrong? So we started changing our diet. I mean, we were already eating a pretty good diet, but lots of grains. And so we took out a lot of— we took— we just changed our diet. And then like, you weren't able to work much. You were able to work some.

You were not able to work as much.

I mean, like, you know, bills went up, working ability went down, doctor bills went up. Income went down. It was super stressful and it was really scary and it was like, what are we gonna do when we can't pay our bills? Like, and it was really scary and yeah, a lot of people are resonating. Not a fun time.

Primal said he ate potatoes for 3 months.

Yeah, so you do what you have to do.

So in this spending more, spending more money working ability went down. So the market farm's ability is going down. Guys, we started out— we, we, it wasn't above us to dumpster dive. We used to get wonderful scores dumpster diving. And if you don't know what dumpster diving is and you're curious, look up the movie Dive. It's a documentary about it. And, uh, people are throwing away perfectly good food. And if it was too bad for us to eat, we would just feed it to the chickens.

Yeah, but we ate, and we, we would get, and we would donate it to our friends. We would have our friends over, they would go shopping, they would go grocery shopping.

Would we tell them it was from the dumpster?

They totally knew.

But we actually got smart and we're like, hey, let's catch it before it goes in the dumpster. And this is how you got to do this. You go to the health food stores, not Whole Foods, not these big chains, because they're like liability, they have to just put it in a trash compactor. I mean, you might get lucky if you've got a cool manager at the Whole Foods, but you go to the local co-op the little small co-op and say, hey look, I've got a farm. Don't tell them you're going to eat it. I've got a farm. If you've got any produce you're going to throw away or anything in the grocery store, I would be happy to take it and feed it to my chickens. And you'd say— and I could pick up as many times as 3 times a week. And I would just go in and say, hey, I'm here. You got anything? And most of the time they would. And most of the time, I think at first we were doing it for the animals. And then we're like, sorry. Right. Yeah, we did start doing it.

What are you talking about? Explain to me. Well, so at first we started We were just dumping it to the animals, but then we would be like, wait a minute, that lettuce looks perfectly fine, and that tomato, there's like one bad spot on that, we can cut that off and eat the rest of it. And so then we started bringing it in the house and we would like have it on our dining room table. This was not our dining room table at the time, it was a little bit smaller. And we would have these gigantic bags of produce and going through it. And like, I remember one, one time we got a whole bunch of peppers that just had like little spots on them. So we would cut those spots out and we made a ton of stuffed peppers. And that's what we ate that a lot. You know, we ate that until it was gone and we just, we ate what we could get there. I mean, I would still go to the grocery store and buy things like salt and things like that. But for the most part, we—

Were you answering somebody there?

I was.

Yeah.

We would do it.

So the land saying, uh, did I vlog the dumpster diving? No, sorry, that was way before that. And Cindy had a good point, you could go to restaurants too and maybe get their stuff, especially the more mom-and-pop stuff.

Yes, yes, that's the key is when it's— if you know somebody in, in their— like the co-ops and like the, the little or mom-and-pop grocery stores that are locally owned are much easier to get food from than a corporation. Yeah, luckily, I mean, Earth Fare is local to Asheville, so we had a little bit.

This, this, this was a trick we did because what we, you know, we would go to the grocery store and we say to them, hey, you got, you got any food? We'll take it with us. We'll take it. But we would also take that time to grocery shop. So all along, this has been our whole lifestyle, is when the homesteader has to go to town, make all the stops, like go do everything. So at this grocery store, we might pick something up and then we would shop. But guess when we would shop? It had to be Thursday.

Because that's when we would pick up—

because kids eat free. Oh, that's right, on Thursday. And our kids would not eat it all. This is the— this is the—

this is when they were real small.

They would not eat it all. And then now we have something, so we only had to buy Rebecca's meal. So these are the hacks we went through. We accepted help on this farm. I had a friend— I mean, this farm might not have made it. We were down to our chickens and the dairy cow.

No, yeah, this guy came.

He came and he said, hey, I got a youth group, I want to bring some boys out there, girls, and help you on the farm. I said, all right, come on. And he spent it as a time of connecting with these youth and building relationship with them, and we got our compost pile is turned during this time. And may very well say, so you have to humble yourself. It was very hard for us to accept it because normally we're the ones giving. So it was hard to receive. And this next one, it was embarrassing to even admit it at times. But, and it took us a while to even accept it, but eventually we took food assistance. And we figured if we qualified for it, it was okay. It's not like we were cheating and saying, lying about income or whatever. And we took that, and our goal was to get off of that. And, you know, long jumping ahead, we eventually did. And I hope— hopefully I touch base on that later. Hopefully I don't skip that in my notes. But another thing that we— well, okay, so then there came a turning point, guys. So here we are at the bottom of the barrel. We're spending more money than we're making. We're, uh, we're going we have the ability— we have less ability to produce, what's gonna happen? I don't have much time because I'm just doing the best I can healing. A mentor gave me a book called The 4-Hour Workweek, and it's by Tim Ferriss. It actually ended up being pretty popular, and basically the takeaway for me, the interest I had in it was first, it's like, The 4-Hour Workweek, okay, good, because that's about all I have got to spend on a business. Anyway, I read it and the takeaway for me was the idea that you create a product that is both informational and it's a video and a companion book. Long story short, we explored all different kinds of business ideas. Finally, we came up with permaculture chickens. We sat down and said, "What do I know most about?" What could I create content about? And it was chickens. And what do I want to learn more about? And at the time it was chickens.

And so hold on, I just want to say this. First of all, I'm trying to answer questions on here, but it's hard. So if I— if you feel ignored, I'm not trying to ignore you, I promise. I'm just answering questions the best I can. My brain only goes so fast.

So The Mangles Homestead wants to know more about how to become a member I'll give you a little tease on that now. We'll talk about it more later.

I've got to find it.

Because he wants to get in on our private Facebook group. He wants to get in on our instructional videos. He might even want to get on premium and get text access and live webinar access to us. Aha, there it is. Next week we are launching our free summit. I know that's not the member area, but we're launching the free summit and it's how to grow your own food in 60 days, like how to grow your own groceries. I'm putting a little Easter egg in there, guys. If you pay attention, it's a little Easter egg, and I'm just giving it to you guys here on the live show. I don't think I'm emailing this out. I'm just going to tell you guys. If you go to the summit page, we'll link that in the show notes. Shoot, and you don't know how to go do that. We'll have to get to where a point where you can talk and I'll link this in the show notes. But we'll put a link to the show notes to the summit in just a little bit. I wonder if Jason could go grab one. Jason, will you go to one of my later YouTube videos? And any of the last ones, I think I've linked in the description. Oh, the very last one that we just put out has the link to the, to the summit. If you get in on the summit and you're watching the summit, there's gonna be a little Easter egg. I'm not gonna tell you where it is, but you'll be able to find it. It's not that hard. and you can actually sign up early for our member area, because we're not launching our member area till not this week, but next, but you can get in early, and there's a little bit of a discount there, early bird discount. So anyway, that's how you can do it, Mabels. Let's get back on track, we'll talk more about that in a minute. So we got the 4-Hour Workweek, we had this product concept, we wanted to teach chickens, we came up with this idea to make a chicken video, and a companion. Now listen, going into permaculture chickens, I had 7 people in my audience. I literally had 7 emails, and that was from— at this point I had started studying the online business guys. A great place to start for that if you're interested in this is Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn. You get exposed to so many different online business guys that are really brilliant and smart. Like, I would spend I would be washing dishes listening to Smart Passive Income and taking what they're— and I think somebody had said, just get on Facebook and just ask people to join your email, something like that. And I did that and I got 7. Okay, so I went into— so how do you launch a Kickstarter? And just jump into the end of the story. We launched a Kickstarter and with 7 people in our audience, many of you guys on here have 7, more than 7, 7 email in your audience. And we raised $30,000 in just 30 days. How do we do it? I went to the library, I got a book, How to Do a Successful Kickstarter. I don't know if that's the exact name. I also looked up what Tim Ferriss, the guy who wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, had to say about a Kickstarter. And then I looked up one more article on how to do a successful Kickstarter. I read those 3 things, I put together my own plan, I worked pretty much full-time a month going into the Kickstarter, and then launched the Kickstarter. And $30,000 in 30 days. So I think what we feared about the Kickstarter is we get just enough to be successful on Kickstarter and have to do this project, but how are we going to live through the 6, 7 months it was going to take us to do the project? So we ended up maxing out credit cards. Like, I don't even know how many cards we had. Remember in our frugal life, we were debt-free. It was a conviction of ours. We had to throw that all out the window. When you get hungry, guys— before you get hungry, you want spend money, even if it's on a credit card. I'm not saying to do that. I'm just saying for us, we were like, well, it's better than going hungry. So we had the food assistance, but it still wasn't enough. We had the dumpster dive and it still wasn't enough. We ended up maxing out credit cards. And I'm telling you, I was like, I don't want to get an 8th credit card. And we're going into this— we had already produced Permaculture Chickens. We're coming into the launch. It's going to be finished editing. It's going to be finished Getting to DVD, what are we going to do? And I was listening to Smart Passive Income, studying these online business guys. I got to come up with a plan. And I finally heard about this guy named Jeff Walker and his book Launch. And so I went to this book Launch and it— I got it at the library, guys, and I did exactly what it said. And I'm telling you, going into our launch, the product's finally here, we did just as good as we did on the Kickstarter. And I'm telling you, going into that launch, we were like I'm telling you, Rebecca, next week— I didn't tell her this though because I didn't want to freak her out. She knew none of this. She knew none of this till well, well after. Yeah, we did this Kickstarter, or it was all online, guys, because guess what? We're gonna have to sell part of the farm. I had no other ideas, and I was gonna sell part of the farm and still not have an answer to how to be sustainable here and how to get out of this completely. And so the launch did good, thank goodness. And we're like, okay, we're on to something. And long story short, it's cranking out the content. It's just keeping on putting out the content, most of it free, just cranking it out, building an audience, and then discovering what that audience wants and needs and creating a business product around that. Guys, that's what good business is, really— solving people's problems. Think about it. People have problems, they want them solved. You can be that for other people, and that's what we were. And what was happening though is this was taking my mind off of Lime. It was giving me something different, was out of my whole realm, guys. I, I knew at this point I knew internet had changed so much from back in the days when I was a pro mountain boarder and selling mountain boards online. Internet had changed so much. There was Facebook, there was Kickstarter, there was all these things that were new and exciting to me. So now Rebecca spoke out about it in a short film someone made of us one time. We were in a dire— you even cried in the film. And did Jason ever link that? Grab that?

I don't know if it's still available.

I'll do that in a minute. But we were needing more than we could give at some point, and I remember Rebecca crying and saying in that short film, "People help us. One day I cannot wait until I write the checks." And so eventually, we went from having to receive to being able to give again. Because we were producing, we were adding so much value to the world. And in return, we were getting paid for it. and we were then in a place to write the check. So for us, it was awesome to go through that cycle, create so much value that then we can create even more value by hiring folks to help us in the business. I have a part-time assistant in the business. We can help people from time to time to come and hire and give them a job on the farm. That's our business. and it's a wonderful feeling. So, you know, to recap, you saw some— we're gonna— let's talk about some ideas that we discovered with health issues, and let's talk about some ideas we discovered with financial issues for those of you who are going through those struggles. Maybe you're going through both, and then let's get right into that. I guess if I can— how can I get you caught up on something? Maybe Rebecca, on the health talk. Yeah, because this is kind of your section. So I'm going to say with health, what time are we looking at? We got— we're about halfway through, and we're about halfway through my notes, so we're right on time. So keeping with our health, we, we kept looking, and you want to tell them about how maybe, um, we kept looking, we weren't— and we explored different things.

Yeah, so basically when Justin's health went down, like, we were already on a health journey of like thinking about eating differently and doing things differently. So we were like already in a way doing some things that were health, but then when he got sick and we were like, what is this? You know, like, who knows? And, um, we had no idea. And so we just kept looking. Like, we went through 5 or 6 doctors because like they would, you know, oh, it's this, oh, it's that, and then they would do some tests, or they would do this, or they would do that, and then it wasn't that. And then sometimes they would just be like, I can't help you, and be kind about it. And then sometimes they would be, um, jerks.

I got a therapist, you know. I know we got reference to it.

He did. He got, uh, he got referred to a psychotherapist. Because it was all in his head, which was crazy. And then that doctor led us to the doctor who discovered that was Lyme disease, and he was only 34 at the time, and he was just like, I feel so— like, I feel so— I have so much pain. Like, I don't feel like a 34-year-old person should be in this much pain. And, you know, he felt so guilty because we were spending a ton of money and trying to figure out what was wrong with him and hoping that somebody could lead us in some way of like knowing. And so then when we found the doctor who diagnosed him with Lyme disease, that was like, yes, you know, finally we have a name for this. Like finally we know what this is. And that took us down many roads. And thank goodness you're like 75% better than you were at the time. But this took us just down like a lot of crazy ideas. But one thing that, um, well, I want to say this about the health thing is one thing is that we were, um, I remember Justin saying like he, he read a book about health and the guy was talking about like a certain diet. It was, it was close to the paleo diet. So we started kind of eating that way. And I remember like getting really frustrated about that because like the kitchen is my domain and like I come up with the menu and I would grocery shop. And now all of a sudden he's coming in and being like, we're not— I don't want to eat these things. And I was like really upset about that and probably exasperated by the whole situation because we— our life was so uncertain at that point. You know, we just felt like there was so much uncertainty. And he said to me, he said, there's so many things uncertain in my life right now. I can control what I put into my mouth, and that's why I want to do this. And that really helped me realize where he was coming from. And so like with uncertainty, you know, like we're all in this like uncertain times is what everyone keeps calling it. And so like there are things that you can control. And so I, I urge you to take control of those things that you can control. We can't control the virus. We can't control if we're gonna get it or not. So those— that's, that's kind of just where I'm going, is that really helped me with Justin, like, understanding where he was coming from, because he was going on— I mean, it was hard for me, but it was happening to him, you know, the pain and the sickness and everything. So, so, but we were super thankful in that time, and we just always stuck with like attitude of gratitude and just trying always to find things to be thankful for and things to be, just things to be thankful for. And so we would either talk about them or you can do a journal and just being thankful. And then we ended up finally, after a long time, we found the GAPS diet because of me. And so we did that and that was super helpful for me. I'm not saying— I, I have heard that it doesn't help for everybody, but most of the people who do it, it does help. It is a very intense diet. So, um, and you can do, um, what is it called, like, you can do— you don't have to do the GAPS diet itself. Um, you can do like a hybrid of it. And so that's just something that you guys are You know, capable. You can do whatever you want. So do you want to take—

yeah, so guys, I updated the show notes. Some of you guys were wanting in on the summit and the member area. That's one way to get early access. So I'm leaving the links for that down in the description. And another thing we found that we needed to do was detox, and so we bit the bullet. We saved some money, we got the asana. I do CBD every night. Guys, I'm not a health practitioner.

This is just what he's doing.

I'm not giving you medical advice. Also, the cold plunges, that's immunity boosting, that's clearing your mind. This— and sleeping, guys, sleeping. I felt guilty for sleeping longer than 7 hours. And I don't know if it's the way I was growing up, the burnin' daylight mantra, but I always felt guilty. And finally I heard a guy on one of these podcasts, I was listening to a business podcast, he said, I learned that sleeping in wasn't lazy, it was smart. And I took that to heart. And getting a good amount of sleep, even though it sounds like, hey, you could be working, No, you just need to be working smarter. Guys, I remember the librarian mocking me when she read the title of that book as she was checking me out, and I'm pretty sure librarians aren't supposed to comment on your checking books you're checking out. But anyway, I guess she didn't— she said something like, "Oh, that must be nice," or something like that. Yeah, right. So it was along those lines. And I believed that for a while until— sure, I don't know if you could do it on 4 a week. I think Tim Ferriss himself works 80 hours a week.

So, but it's an idea book, it's a theory book.

We were managing it to where we're only working on the computer office 20 hours a week. Now then we're going out and working on the farm. It is possible because what happened to me, guys, is because I had so little time— you guys wonder why I'm rushing around on the vlog all the time, why I'm always such a hurry to get it done by this and that. This is why. Because if you give yourself blocks of time, so if you have this amount of time to do chores in the morning. You have 1 hour to do chores in the morning before you go to work. You have to fit it in. So if that's all you have, you need to sit down and say, I only have 10 hours a week. What should I prioritize to make that happen? Can I do dairy cows if I only have 10 hours a week? Probably not. So you would want to think about Cornish Cross, a garden, Easier things like that, quicker, shorter seasons. Pigs, pigs would be wonderful for somebody on 10 hours. Easy pigs, 15 minutes or less a day. So, uh, you want to think about that. 2 sheep in a, uh, a sheep pen moved around on pasture, super, super easy and quick. So then you think, if I only have 10 hours to do business or to do farming What is the most important thing I could do? So I would every day write in my journal my goal, and if my goal was to grow the audience or whatever, or to grow 75% of my own food, what is the most effective thing to do that? So you see me on the vlog, what I'm prioritizing is, for us, it is the dairy because I'm getting 30 pounds of food a day. So that's why I'm willing to spend that time there. We're doing the high efficiency things, and we've prioritized what we like to eat. What is— you want to grow what's right outside your door, but I say right outside the door of your heart. Like, what's right there? What do you want? For us, when we were going through this struggle, we looked at what we were spending money on at the grocery store, what we should have been spending money on at the grocery store, and it was meats. But it was also organic vegetables. Well, that's the very things that you can grow. So I got going there. But anyway, sleep. I get to there from sleep. This is a fun one. Amish hour. What's Amish hour? An hour before you go to bed, get off the screens. The screens have the blue light, it's stimulating your brain. You think it's noonday. Your brain thinks it's noonday. Get off the screens. Read a book. Read some books.

Yeah, read some books.

Read some books. We read a book in the sauna. We're knocking two birds out with one stone. We're knocking three birds out with one stone. We're Amishenowering and we're reading a book and we're detoxing. All in one. If you don't have a sauna, no worries. We didn't have a sauna for years. We got in the bathtub with some Epsom salt bath. I even have a kit on my kit.co. I call it Bathtub Books and I was supposed to update it with all kinds of my favorite fiction and nonfiction books. But anyway, we're almost done here, guys, and we've got 20 more minutes. I think we'll knock it out and maybe we'll answer some questions we weren't able to answer in the chat. So those are some tricks, guys, for health. But what about some tricks for finances? Frugal living. We already talked about a lot of those earlier, you know, cutting, cutting back food costs. I don't think I need to be the guy that tells you how to live frugally. Except I think you gotta ask Mr. Google Pants to find out, except they might not tell you the dumpster dive, so I gave you that one.

Mr. Google Pants won't tell you.

No, he won't tell you that. How to save money. Ask Mr. Google Pants how to save money. I guarantee you dumpster diving isn't coming up.

I would say that dumpster diving—

Have one car. Have one cell phone, sorry.

That there was a point when you went once and a policeman stopped you and took your information down just in case something was around.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I guess that's that issue. Uh, I mean, police stopped me and he didn't, he didn't arrest me or anything.

No, he just said like in case there's something—

he didn't even tell me to get out of there—

out of place. Yeah, he didn't say you have to stop. He just said I just need to have your info to make sure that if we get a report that something's happened at this time, we know where to come to.

There was a warehouse of one of these health food stores, a warehouse, y'all. Like, if a pallet— if they damaged one box in the pallet of 40 boxes, they had to throw out all the pallet. Oh yeah. They had to throw it all out.

One time we got like over 100 pounds of butter, and we couldn't figure out why. And all we can think of is that they busted the box.

We would get 50-pound bags of flour.

They busted it.

That's when we were eating flour.

They busted the box of butter.

I made biscuits every morning, didn't I? No. So I was getting the flour from the dumpster and I'd be having biscuits and eggs from our backyard every morning. But anyway, where were we? So yeah, the manager, I said, you know, I went into the whole warehouse manager and I said, hey, is there something we can do to work it out where you don't throw it in the dumpster and I come pick it up? And he said, no, we just can't do it. And I said, well, do you mind if I dive in the dumpster? And he's like, no, just go ahead, just do it after hours.

Yeah, he was just like, it's totally fine. But we were trying to hope to bypass that dumpster.

Anyway, do that at your own risk. I don't know how legal— I'm not a lawyer. Yeah, I don't do that anymore. But so anyway, you have frugal trips, but here's what a lot of people don't realize. And somebody said this, and I remember the other day, what are some ways I could save money on the farm? And that's great, but let's go to a perfect extreme. Say you make $50,000 a year and you want to save some money. If you want to go to the most extreme, you could actually abandon it all, become a homeless person, and and actually spend no money. In this county, you could go and find a meal for all 3 days of the, the week. I know because I've seen the handout they'll give homeless people in this town, and it'll tell you where you can find a meal, all 3 meals. There are shelters. Anyway, the point is you can save $50,000 a year, put in the bank, invest it, whatever. There's a limit though, because you could only save $50,000. You couldn't save $51,000. Because you'll have it. There is no limit on the amount of money you can earn. There's no limit on the value you can create for this world, especially in this digital era where you can share what you know, you can entertain, you can whatever. Guys, I can't believe it. When I got back into this internet thing, I could not believe it that you could— down at the time it was Periscope— you could download Periscope on this phone and and go live and chat to people. You had your own live network. Oh my word. So there is no limit. So I encourage that member to actually think, hey, if you're wanting to save money, you can only save so much money on feed, okay? So if a bird— if you have 10 birds and they're eating a pound a day or a couple pounds a day and you free-range them and you don't feed them, you can free-range 12 chickens on an acre and not feed them at all, and you, but you've only saved so much. You've only saved what you would have been feeding them, but if you were to grow chickens, if you were to, so I encourage this person to say, okay, if you're growing 25 meat chickens, how about growing 50 and selling those, and that pays for the feed, and you see where that's going? So if you did that with beef, you needed 1 beef for a year, and you raised another and sold it. You sold it to 4 buddies. You guys all split that. They all split that other one. And then you're like, hey, I made $1,000 on that. Wow. What if I lease some property, like Greg Judy leasing 1,600 acres? And for Greg Judy, there's no limit. He can lease more acres. He can hire managers. How could he even scale up? He could scale up with some branding, some training others to do it in other places. He could ship. There's all different kinds of ways that you've got to be thinking. So you can only save so much. And that was one of our tricks early on is we learned, guys, we can only— I remember we tried to cut our grocery bill and we're like, we're not going to get greater dates. There's these rolled-up dates. They're kind of a treat. And what we say, $5, and we're like, and we can't have a greater date. Get the greater dates and focus our time on creating value. Okay. Yeah. You agree?

Well, I mean, yeah, that's a different—

Good comment there, Becky. That's my category.

That's your— Yeah, I don't, I don't get involved.

Should we talk, go back to health on you? We're moving on from that. So selling farm goods, creating— I'm telling you, creating content. Now guys, you guys are at home. You could make the worst of it. You could say, I'm bored, this is boring, boohoo, poor me. This is one unique opportunity actually because we're all going through this together. Yeah. When you and I went through our struggles, we were quite alone.

We were.

So this is kind of neat in the sense that that the whole world is going through this, but you have a decision to make. What am I going to do with this time? And it can be study, it can be create value, start telling your stories, start teaching what you do know. And you think, I'm not an expert. You don't have to be an expert, you just have to know something. Uh-oh. Okay, maybe we're going in and out of streaming, so I'm almost going to wrap this up. Rebecca, you got any questions we want to surface?

Somebody wants to know, lots of people want to know—

Well, hold on, let me finish and then we'll bring that up, unless it's related to the finances here.

Okay, it's not related to finances.

We're keeping it on topic. We'll take ideas from you on how to save money, how to earn money, how to improve health. We're keeping it on topic, so we want you to surface any of those we didn't get to talk about. Will you do that for me, Rebecca?

What was I supposed to— I'm sorry, I'm reading comments. It's so hard to listen.

Look for comments that are related to what we're talking about.

Okay.

All right. Okay. And, um, so I would say the last thing is one thing that we took away from that and that helped us is we actually helped people. Even in that, I can remember even when we were destitute, we still volunteered. We volunteered at a food pantry. Do you remember that? Yes, talking to you. Hey, I'm talking to you guys.

It's so hard because like I have to—

I got you having to do too many.

I know you do have me.

You're doing a good job. Okay, so even at the time we volunteered. Yeah, we volunteered at food pantry. We helped feed homeless people. This is one reason I know that they can find a meal all 3 days of the week.

Yeah, every Sunday night you would go and do—

helping somebody else makes you feel better.

Yes. I mean, obviously right now we can't do it in person, but find a way that you can help. Excuse me. So find a way that you can help in this time. There's lots of ways. Like, I've seen people on Instagram are sewing masks for healthcare workers so that they can be able to change their masks.

People will be delivering food to the firemen and police officers.

Yeah, so like, you— there's just lots of things to do to help this. And it might not be that you're helping hundreds of people. It might be that you're checking in on your elderly neighbor, you're making a phone call and you're saying, do you need me to buy you anything at the store? I'm on my way there. I can drop it off at your front doorstep and not even see them. It's, you know, maybe cooking. I saw some people on Instagram, they were cooking food for their family who is older and maybe can't do that for themselves at this time. So like, there are so many ways to help other people right now. It doesn't have to be about, you know, going to a food pantry and helping that, or doing this or doing that.

So Adam, Adam Link's helping out a neighbor who's a nurse with her tomato starts. That's perfect. We're helping, uh, Grandma get her garden start.

Rose from Wholesome Roots says give away your extra eggs.

For sure.

Yeah, there's so many things right now.

Good job. Uh, so some things that we're doing to step it up is you've noticed we're putting out more content. Not only are our vlogs longer, we're putting out content on the weekend. We're not guaranteeing the weekend, but we're trying, and so far we've done it for the last 3 weeks. Content every day over the weekend. And we going— so our spring registration for our Do It Yourself Abundance member area, it was coming up and we had a whole plan for it. And then all this happened and we're like, shh, throw it out the window. How can we better serve people? And so that's where I came up with that summit, the summit idea. I was totally not— we weren't gonna do that. We're putting out 5 videos next week on top of our vlog. So we have our vlog plus the 5 videos that are going out in the summit. On what is it on? It's on something very relevant that's going to be very helpful in this time. Guys, we surveyed our audience, you guys, and we said, how many of you want to grow more food now because of what's happening, what's going on? Over 80% of you want to grow more food now because of what's happening. And we want to be there, and we want to help people just like Adam. He's going to help his neighbor. We're helping our direct neighbors. We're also helping our broader direct neighbors. And I'm saying this so maybe you guys can glean some ideas from this, but we're normally, because we add so much value into the member area, because we continually add value between launches, launches, we have to raise our prices. We're not going to do that. Another thing that we're adding, and it's the first time I've mentioned it, and you guys are getting a special, I mean, first peek inside of it. Inside of our member area, now in the past, if anybody's emailed me and they said, you know, I'm a single mom, my husband's in the, he's off and he's in the military, whatever, I can't afford it but I would really like to have it, I could really use it, we've granted them a scholarship. But this year, we're making it public. It's gonna be on the sales page, it's gonna be at the bottom of the sales page, and if somebody truly can't afford it, We're granting 20%, not just 10, that's been our rule in our hearts in the past. I'm not even sure we reached that, but it wasn't public. Now it's public and we'll take as many as 2 out of 10 people on a complete free ride scholarship. So we promote 2 ways of getting in free. One, you can try the member area for free for 30 days, totally get in there, consume it, get out, no hard feelings to me, I'm free. Okay? So that's the kind of stuff that we can do and that I'm excited about. I'm interested to see maybe what some of you guys have done. The summit's coming up. It's a great way to get some free information. It's starting tomorrow morning. There's a little Easter egg in there to an early bird discount. If you get in there, you can There's an easy way, you'll see it, on how to get in the member area early. And that's one thing we're doing. Oh, and I forgot, we're adding books, Rebecca. And we were going to add my Intro to Permaculture book, like a physical workbook, that as a bonus for the member area. And we said, you know what, let's also add the Attainable Sustainable, a book that big from National Geographic. We bought books at wholesale and got them. We're going to send them to members. Seeds. We were not going to do this, but we bought 3 different seed packs to send out as bonuses when people sign up for the member area. And even at the— even if you sign up for a monthly level, you get a bonus. And quick-growing seeds like spinach, lettuce, and kale. Did I say that right? Spinach, lettuce, and kale. Fast-growing stuff. Food in 60 days. We want to help as much— that was not in the plan, but we're like, what do we got to do? Rebecca, let's talk. Let's figure out what we're going to do. So do we have any other ideas from folks in the chat? What, as we wrap this up, on what people can do to help in this situation?

Oh, so there's lots of—

or what did you think maybe we should talk about for this last 5-10 minutes?

Well, I can share what people have said that they're doing. Um, there is somebody on here who's a nurse and she is working overtime to help out with this mess, as she put it. Um, let's see. I'm giving my dad extra eggs even though he didn't believe in me homesteading.

Who believe in it now?

Um, let's see.

Um, am I ever gonna raise meat rabbits? Yes, but not right now.

Um, let's see, where is it? I gotta go back up to it. My neighbor watered my new veggie garden while I was in the hospital.

Jennifer's growing extra plants to help people.

Sharing neighbors with— sharing eggs with the neighbors. Let's see, where, where is everything? You guys told us all so many good things. Sharing our extra milk and eggs, donating funds to local food pantry, calling to chat. With nervous neighbors. We're making and giving away food boxes to the shut-ins near us. Someone's been sharing our vlogs on Facebook so people know where to get help.

Oh, that's nice, that's nice. Thank you. Sheila Fleming is giving away some eggs.

Let's see.

Were there any questions, Rebecca? Any burning questions that we should answer?

Yes, somebody wanted to know what tea I was drinking.

Important stuff.

It was— it's called rooibos chai. Sorry, it's called rooibos chai and it's by Numi Organics, I believe. And it is delicious. It is so good. Put a little honey in that. All my kids love it too, and so does this guy. Everybody's— I, I just was like gonna try it. I love rooibos tea, so I was like, hmm, this is a nice addition.

Mr. Glenn Johnson is shoveling his his elderly neighbors' driveways of snow.

Oh, that's nice.

Tim has been cooking by fire for elderly family nearby. That's nice, Tim. Yes, we're just reading the comments, guys. Just answer a few questions. Yeah, we get off here. Somebody— Sean's gonna start his garden soon. He's pumped. That's awesome, Shawn.

I think the people that buy— this is from Jeannie Whitaker. I think the people that buy my house will be putting surplus supplies, but the thousand beets and buy the thousand beets in the flower beds. That's awesome. That is awesome.

For our surplus food, we give it away to friends and family. Hey, I remember, let me see if I can find it, back in the day when we were doing the CSA. We would, uh, sell a basket of produce every week to people who had already paid. They meet us every week and they come pick it up, whatever is in season. Well, they wouldn't always show up, so we would just go down to the lower-income part of the town and give it away. And that's kind of the same thing we do now with a lot of our produce, is, uh, is give it away.

Okay, here is— I'm, I'm linking the tea The tea, it's from Amazon, but you can get it at like a health food store. You might be able to get at a regular grocery store. I have no idea. But, um, that's so you know what to look for.

Cat G just got her Am I a Gardener seeds. Yeah, she must be a member. Thank you, Cat. We sent out seeds and books to our current members.

These people bought more chickens to try and help their friends and family with eggs. That's awesome.

Ken has gifted shoveling for his nose. He's, he shoveled his nose. All right, so I guess I should say thank you guys for coming and hanging out. It was awesome. I hope you benefit from the story. You know, the key takeaway is, you know, let's be frugal, let's think of ways to save money, but that's also— we can only go so far with that. Let's also think about how we can add value into into the world with our homegrown goods, but let's also think about how could we add value in the world through creating content. It doesn't have to be on YouTube. There's podcasting, there's blogging, there's writing books. There's all kinds of different ways. And if you don't know how to do something, all you gotta do is ask Mr. Google Pants and usually you can find the answer. I think a key takeaway here too was the The food, don't you notice that it was the underlying answer to a lot of these? If you're wanting to save money, food is the underlying answer. If you're wanting to earn money, food is a way to do that. If you're wanting to be healthier, if you're ill, food certainly won't help, it won't hurt you in that, like homegrown fresh food. It's hard to grow junk food. Yeah, isn't it? You're pretty safe eating whatever you grew. I guarantee you if I only ate what we had, what we grew, I bet you the health implications would be meaningful.

Yes.

Less inflammation.

Well, I don't think we really— well, I mean, besides those chocolate chip cookies that we, um, all right, did, that we made yesterday. Was it yesterday that we made chocolate chip cookies? It was. Wow.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, I think that That eating homegrown food is definitely not going to hurt. It's not going to hurt the situation.

I want to end this with I'm proud of you guys. I'm thankful that we're all in this together. I'm thankful that you're here, that you're in the right place, you're interested in growing your own food, whether you're doing it for health or stability or knowing the story. It doesn't matter. We're all in this together. I got your back, you got my back. Thank you for coming to the show. Hopefully you got something out of it. Um, the link. I did manage to get the link into the summit. You'll get the vlog next week, but you'll also get all the 5 extra videos. Uh, they're coming out tomorrow morning. We'll highlight one each day, but you'll actually get them all out. Okay, one more question.

Well, I should say this, on last week's live we answered the homeschooling question. Somebody was wondering what we do for homeschooling. We answered that on last week's question, um, or on last week's live, so I don't want to re-answer it here. But, um, as far as them joining a school program at a later time, I don't have any plans for that. But of course, I don't know what the future holds, so I'm not saying I'm not going to, but I'm also don't have any plans to do it. So we'll just see what the future holds. Yes, we just don't know. So.

Alright guys, thank you guys. We love you guys. We appreciate you. We will see you tomorrow in the vlog.

Yes. Oh, I gotta end it. Alright.

What did I do wrong right there with the frozen? Nothing. Okay.

But that's just not a popular thing.