Season 2 of the Midlife Revolution! Podcast begins with a discussion with John Larsen- Philosopher, Farmer, Podcaster and Revolutionary!

We talk about the Myth of the simple life, and how failure is an inevitability that we can learn to embrace as we make small changes that change everything!

John Larsen’s final Mormon Stories Episode:   

 • Satan in Mormonism w/ John Larsen | E...  

John Larsen’s current channel:   

 / @johnlarsen1  

The Dabbler Farm Website: www.dabblerfarm.org

Amazon Wish List for the Dabbler Farm: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls...

John Larsen’s Past Podcast, Mormon Expression is hosted at the Open Stories Foundation at www.openstoriesfoundation.org

Visit www.third-verse.com/coaching to schedule a free 20 minute call with Megan!

Join the community to gain access to perks!

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About the Host: 

Megan Conner is the mother of 6 spectacular humans and a breaker of generational trauma cycles. She has spent the last 10 years overcoming the effects of child SA and other abusive relationships and cycles. She is the author of I Walked Through Fire to Get Here, which was written to give support and hope to other survivors. Megan is passionate about helping people make small changes that make their lives better every day.  

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John Larson is a revolutionary.

He's a philosopher, a farmer, a podcaster,

and he happens to be a

former member of the Church

of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

When he was finally leaving post-Mormonism,

I caught up with him on his

last episode at the Mormon

Stories podcast,

where he told a story that

I found to be really interesting.

Here's what he had to say.

How would you live today?

And then suppose that I said,

I'll give you a choice right now.

Over here on the back of

this property is a small

kind of simple house.

It's got a wood-fired fireplace,

plenty of firewood.

You'll always be warm.

It's got a cooling system.

It stays cool in the summer.

There's plenty of basic staples around.

There is just enough to eat.

You have to put things together,

but you'll never be hungry.

There's a coat to keep you warm.

There's a shade tree to keep you cool.

There's some of your

favorite books on the bookshelf.

Nothing excessive.

You really won't get to travel.

but your needs will be met.

And you can choose right now

to go live in that shack.

I think a surprising number

of us would consider it and

a surprising number of us

would take it and say, you know,

you're just going to fill

out your days in simplicity

and just do what you want

to do through the day.

You know,

the chores will take you two

hours a day and the rest of

the time is yours.

And I think many of us would choose that

But of course the irony,

and if you see where I'm

going is you could choose that right now.

There's nothing,

the complexity of your life

and the complexity of your

relationships and the

complexity of what you engage,

what you read, what you listen to,

what you think about is to a degree,

your own choice.

The,

that the ideal life that we want to

live is right there in front of us.

We just refuse to pick it up.

Um,

There is a quote by John

Steinbeck that says,

now that you don't have to be perfect,

you can be good.

And I've applied this in my

life to having left

Mormonism where there is a

strive to be this model of perfection.

And for me,

unshackled from that meant I

could just pursue good in my life.

And I have.

And it makes me happy.

It's almost the old atheist joke.

which is how much rape do

you engage in if God isn't

going to stop you?

And the answer is engage in

all the rape that I want to,

which is none.

That I choose to do good

things in the world because I like them.

I like the result.

I like how it makes me feel.

So after hearing this little

anecdote from John Larson,

I decided to invite him on

to the Midlife Revolution

podcast to have a

conversation about the simple life,

the myths that exist there,

and how we can achieve some

simplicity by making some small changes.

Welcome to the Midlife Revolution.

hello beautiful human beings

welcome to the midlife

revolution i'm your host

megan connor and today i am

joined by the famous and

illustrious and inimitable

john larson thank you so

much for joining me john

hey you're welcome fame

fame is it all right famous

in the right places for the right reasons

I think I'm more infamous.

I think there's more people

who would consider me to be

a villain than a hero.

You know, that's really possible,

although we are all the

villain in someone's story.

If you're doing it right, you are a deed.

You're not pissing somebody off.

You're not trying hard enough.

Exactly, exactly.

And I would say that the

more people who consider you a villain,

I think the better,

because then it means

you're making people think.

I hope so.

Well, John,

I will let you go ahead and

introduce yourself.

I know some things about you,

but I certainly don't know

everything about you.

And I don't know the most

interesting things, probably.

So please tell us all about you.

The most interesting things I never reveal,

right?

You never find those out.

Let's see.

How to introduce myself.

I...

My name's John.

I live in the Pacific Northwest.

I live in Willamette Valley,

which is sort of halfway

between Portland and Eugene

and sandwiched between the

Pacific Coast Mountains and

the Cascade Mountains.

We've been here for coming

up on three years.

We, my family and I,

we lived in Salt Lake City

in the suburbs of Salt Lake

City for a long time.

And when our youngest,

my partner Kimmy and I have

four children betwixt and

amongst the two of us.

And when the youngest was

finishing high school,

we had long decided that we

didn't really like living

in giant cities.

And we also wanted to take a

different approach to life.

You talked about midlife crises,

and we were talking about

it a little bit before we started.

Sometimes you look and say, wow,

I looked at the path I've been on,

what I was told to go on,

what I thought I should be doing,

and it ain't doing it so

much for me anymore.

Maybe it's time to look at something new.

We did that,

so we bought a small farm out here.

Saturday, today, I was just out there.

We harvested turnips this

morning and strawberries

and peas and radishes,

which I fed to the bunny rabbits.

You talked about fame.

I'm most known for the podcast,

Mormon Expression,

which we started in 2009

and ran until 2014.

It was popular in the ex-Mormon world,

and there were a lot of

Mormons who listened to it too,

but they didn't like to admit it.

And in 2014, I kind of stepped back.

Well, I no longer hosted the show,

but I would appear at

conferences and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then this year in January,

I was appearing on the big

podcast in the ex-Mormon world,

the disenfranchised Mormon world,

the Mormon Stories podcast.

I was a monthly contributor.

And I announced,

I told them that I was

retiring from Mormonism.

So I spent, I was a faithful Mormon, um,

um,

until about 2003 when I lost my faith

in God first, actually.

And then I kind of limped

along for a couple of years,

just trying to make it work.

And then I went church last time, 2005.

And then I became sort of a

participant in the

communities that form that

help people transition out of, um,

out of faith or in faith crises,

did the podcasting and did all that.

So that's the phase.

And now I've kind of moved on.

I'll talk to people about Mormonism.

I don't follow it anymore

and I don't research it.

So I was really retiring

from doing research that I said enough.

So I'm in my post-

post-Mormon phase.

Actually,

I did a podcast in 2014 about

becoming a post-Mormon.

So I think I'm in the post, post,

post phase, let's say.

Mormonism three times removed.

Yes.

Which is not quite enough.

Well,

there needs to be a couple more removes,

but we'll get there.

No, it's good.

The longer I studied it,

the longer I've been out

and talking to other people in the world,

the more Mormonism is just

not unique to me.

It was my experience,

my lived experience where I

spent a lot of energy.

But unfortunately or unfortunately,

the experience of Mormonism

is quite common.

um, as,

as one of high demand religions

kind of have cults, um,

on the one end and cult, you know,

you really don't believe anything.

You just kind of believe

whatever the leader tells you to.

So it's very controlling.

And then,

then there's a continuum from

that all the way down to, I don't know,

um, your neighborhood watch.

Um, and then, and,

and so high demand

religions are sort of

cultured being cults.

Uh, but they,

they take a lot out of people and, um,

and mess with their psychology,

as it were.

Is that the introduction you

were looking for?

Is there anything else you

want me to talk about?

No, that's excellent.

That's great.

And it gives me sort of an

opening to what we're going

to talk about today.

So I found you, John Larson,

listening to Mormon Stories podcast.

I left the church

For all of us,

I think it's a gradual sort of thing,

or most of us it is.

For me,

that process started in 2015 with

the November exclusion policy.

But I didn't really allow

myself to look at truth

claims until January of last year.

And once I did that,

it took me three days.

I was done.

Yeah.

So I found you at Mormon

Stories when I was going

through my faith deconstruction.

And I decided to start with the Mormon,

I think it's called Mormon Discussions,

that series that John

Dillon does with Mike and some other,

and Nemo and some various assorted.

But I decided for me,

being an analytical person,

I wanted to pick apart

every single truth claim

from the beginning to the end.

And I so I binged all of

those episodes over the

course of a few weeks and

completely deconstructed

all the way down to

nihilism and then started

to sort of basically build

back some spirituality.

Then I started thinking

about doing a podcast.

And I was trying to figure

out what I wanted to focus on.

And some of the people I talked to said,

you know,

your story of exiting Mormonism

might be valuable in the space.

And there aren't enough

people talking about how

hard it is to leave and how

to rebuild spirituality after that.

And I thought about that for

several weeks.

And then I thought, you know,

I don't want to live there.

That's not where I want to be.

And I came to the conclusion

that Mormons and ex-Mormons

are on the same path.

It's just a parallel path,

and they're both going in

the same direction.

And I decided that I wanted

to step away from that.

And while I do still talk

about my exit from religion and my faith,

my loss of faith,

um it's not the content that

i want to focus on all the

time and about a week after

i made that decision i

turned on mormon stories

and there you were saying

that you were done with

being an ex-mormon so it's

amazing how these things kind of line up

And I did a podcast in the

first season of my podcast

called Satisfied,

where I talked about the

fact that most of us go

through life never feeling

satisfied with what we have

because we've been

programmed to sort of think

that there's a scarcity of resources,

a scarcity of time, a scarcity of people,

a

And how do we get to the

place where we take what we

have and we say,

this is enough for me and

I'm willing to live with

exactly what I have and

maybe even a little less.

And right after that episode,

I did an episode where I

went through some of the

concepts in Marie Kondo's book,

The Magical Art of Tidying Up.

Yes.

Do you say goodnight to your

bags before you hang them up?

Yes.

just completely i i got rid

of so much stuff and i i

found a great place to

donate some some items to a

women's shelter and i

probably ended up with

maybe a quarter of the

amount of clothing that i

had and i ended up with

probably less than a

quarter of the kitchen

items that i had and i just

went through my entire

house and got rid of

everything that was unnecessary

and everything that was

something I was holding on

to for some future day.

And I loved the idea of Marie Kondo saying,

I thank you for your time in my life,

purple shirt that I've

never worn in three months,

and I'm going to pass you

on to the next person.

And also, you know,

even things that I'd been

holding on to for sentimental value,

you know,

I got to hold the object in my

hand and say,

I love the memory of the

time that my sister gave me this book.

And I read it one time and I

will never read it again.

I'm going to pass it on to

the next person.

Thank you and goodbye.

rather than holding onto it

just because at the time I read it,

it meant something to me.

And that downsizing really

created this profound

revolution in me where I thought,

you know, I don't,

there are some times when I

go out into the world

And I don't particularly need anything,

but I see something and I go, oh,

that's kind of cool.

I might like to take that home.

And then I end up with more garbage.

So I've had to shift my mentality from,

you know,

the consumerist society that we live in,

where we just collect

things for no reason.

And we spend our resources

on things that don't bring

us any value at all.

and thinking about the idea

that what is valuable to me?

The only thing that's really

valuable to me right now is

spending time with the

people that I love.

And how can I do more of that?

Well,

I can spend more of my resources

doing that than collecting stuff.

And so when I heard your

exit from ex-Mormonism,

And you gave a poignant and

I think profound

contemplation about living

simply that made me really think.

And that's the conversation

I want to have today.

So if you wouldn't mind

recounting that for us,

I would appreciate it.

Sure.

You know,

you talk about sort of attachment

to things and the pursuit of that.

You know,

the Buddha has a lot to say on this topic,

right?

Yeah.

You know,

you mentioned this mindset of scarcity.

And, you know,

for most of our evolutionary history,

we live in a world that has

changed so quickly.

Our genetics haven't been

able to keep up with it.

And because focusing on that

for a lot of religious

people makes them feel like

you're equating human beings to animals.

which I think is a useful construction,

but a lot of religious

people find that very offensive,

so it gets subdued.

I was just looking at a list

of the books that are going

to be banned in Texas right away,

and the topics, you know,

as they went and redlined textbooks and

And it's just the stuff that

would get us a better

understanding of what it

actually means to be human

is systematically stomped out.

Well,

that desire to solve problems and

fill scarcity is, you know,

you implied that it's sort

of like conditioned into us.

And I think that's true to a degree,

but it really is us.

That's what we evolved to do.

You know,

most humans through most time

have suffered from calorie deficiency.

That was their biggest problem.

So, you know,

you have a lot of people walking around.

I just read recently that

over 70% of the United

States would be considered overweight.

And, of course,

there's something else going on there,

clearly,

because not every country is

suffering from the same problem,

the same grief.

But, you know,

The people's genetics that

make them fat are also

genetics that just mean

they have an efficient metabolic system,

right?

And I'm not excusing any

kind of bad behavior or not

taking care of your health or whatever.

But what I'm saying is

sometimes there are these

conditions that push us there.

It's part of the human condition.

And the reason I bring that

up first is that's an

important thing to understand.

We read these books about

minimalism or there's this thing,

this new diet, this new approach,

and it's going to save the

problem and it's going to make us happy.

And,

but we weren't necessarily evolved to

be happy all the time.

We weren't,

we were evolved to live in

places of scarcity and to solve problems.

And I think human beings,

when they don't have real problems,

they just make them because

they're problem solvers.

So they just,

I saw an interview very recently with a,

with a,

with a woman who was suggesting that,

that, that,

She was kind of doing some

self-evaluation about how

she liked chaos in relationships.

Or no, no, I'm sorry.

She was a psychologist

talking about people who

like chaos in relationships,

both men and women.

And, you know,

they say in part because

that's where they get their

emotional peaks.

You know,

if you have a fight and then a

reconciliation,

you feel these high energy states.

And when a relationship

becomes sort of smoothed out,

the two people kind of

learn to live together.

For some people,

it doesn't feel right

because there's no drama there.

It's just peaceful.

And peace is not happiness.

Contentment is not happiness.

Those are different things.

And I think we're so

stimulated all the time right now.

We're just getting dopamine hits.

like consistently and it's

just like you know doom

scrolling is partly just

looking for that next hit

right yeah and we're all

strung out on that crap um

so is is there a better way

Well,

can I inject one thing that this

makes me think of?

The saying that hard times

make strong men and strong

men make prosperous times

and prosperous times make

weak men and weak men make

difficult times.

And it's this cycle that continues to go.

Yeah.

You see it in people who

have achieved greatness, right?

in thought or in action and invention,

both men and women,

that oftentimes they came

from a place of distress or

pain or overcoming difficulty.

It is one of the central

flaws in our psychology

that we work really hard

and we accumulate wealth and security,

and we say ostensibly for our children,

knowing full well that human

beings that are born into

wealth and security

generally turn out to be

assholes almost universally.

Right.

And we know that,

but there's just something

in our program.

We can't break the cycle of saying,

and I think it's justification saying,

well,

I'm working and earning all this

stuff so I can hand it to

the next generation.

Those are questions we don't,

we don't want to question say, well,

does that,

really help humanity you

know you look at the

history of the aristocracy

and it is you know it

starts with one villainous

tyrant who is bloodthirsty

and psychopathic and then

if they're successful then

there's a couple of good

governors and then it'll

descend into madness oh

always always because

intergenerational like

power is not a good model

for human beings this leads

to what i was saying

which in the podcast,

I was asking the hypothetical question.

If you, if you knew how much time you had,

you know,

you knew you had three years to live,

but you knew you had five years.

It would actually be 40 years.

If you, if you got the date and it was,

it was way out there, 70 years, 80 years.

Now you still have a date

because we always like to

pretend we're immortal.

Um, because our psychology,

I don't think it's fully

evolved to really

understand and accept that.

So, um,

Yeah, if you knew,

then for a lot of people,

they would live their life

completely different.

That's what I'm saying.

They would simplify it.

But we're going to put an

asterisk next to that, simplify,

because it's not as simple as that.

They would simplify it.

They would shed all this stuff.

I've seen things with death doulas,

people who are there,

and they talk about the

things that people say or

things that people talk

about in their last days.

And you hear over and over and over again,

people say they regret how

much time they spent at work.

And I think we get that saying, oh,

I should have spent more

time with the family.

I don't think people are

really getting what people

on their deathbed are saying.

They're looking at their

life and they're saying, my God,

I devoted most of my consciousness,

most of my existence,

which is now passing like

sand through a thing,

to this company for products that

They just don't care about it anymore.

It's not the choice in the

media seat saying I work for my family.

It's that I devoted the

precious gift of

consciousness that I have to this.

And I think a lot of people

face disappointment with that.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what does it look like for me?

Well,

that's one of the reasons we moved

out here.

I realized that I was very fortunate.

I grew up.

kind of at a pivot point in time.

And I don't mean to sound grandiose.

I was born in the early 70s.

I was born in 1973.

So I was the generation of latchkey kids,

the free-range kids, you know,

that we... It was... The

electronics were just

coming online in the 70s.

You could play Pong.

And all that kind of stuff.

There were three channels, you know,

and you had to argue with

your brothers and sisters

of which one you're going to watch.

You often had one TV in the

house and that sort of thing.

And you had to get up to

change the channel.

You had to get up to change the channel.

You had to watch shows when they were on.

Yep.

And so,

but what I got to do and see and

meet was the remnants of the other world,

right?

My grandparents who had

driven teams when they were young,

the people who had lived

without plumbing and electricity,

that sort of stuff.

Not like they're not still around, right?

I think one of the funnest

facts I like to pull out is

there's about 8 billion

people on this planet.

And if you shut down all the electricity,

all the gas, all the coal,

all the oil and the Internet,

about a billion people wouldn't notice.

Which I think is kind of funny.

We think we have all this

stuff and it all belongs to

us and it can't go anywhere.

But it's not even

distributed to the entire population.

So, so, you know,

we came out here and we started our, our,

our little farm with, um,

ostensibly the goal of

growing as much of our own

food as we can.

And I say ostensibly because

it's almost an impossible goal.

Um, but the, the,

the joy and the journey is, is,

is trying.

And in that sense,

living a more simple life

that only goes from one point of view,

um,

Like if I have a dairy goat

in my backyard and I go

milk it and I take and I

bring that milk in and I

use that to make a cake.

On the one hand, you can say, well,

that's simpler because

otherwise you've got all

these dairy yards that are

going to pasteurization,

that are getting trucked to

a central storing place,

but then getting trucked to

a grocery store and it's

loaded in the thing and

it's got put in big plastic

containers and it's been

heat pasteurized and this complex thing.

But from my perspective,

I just go down to the store

and get a gallon of milk

and just walk home, right?

So which of these two things is simpler,

right?

We just harvested garlic.

And this is our second or

third year growing garlic.

You have to harvest it.

You have to watch for these things.

It's going to go to flowers.

You have to trim out the flower.

And then you have to pull it

up and you have to let it dry.

You have to let all the

energy that's in the stock

slowly migrate down to the

bulb and then let it dry up

and all that kind of stuff.

So it's a fairly complicated process.

Well, complicated is not the right word.

It's stepwise.

It takes time.

But, you know, I enjoy that we now,

this year, we did last year too,

we will supply all of our

garlic ourselves and with excess.

But is that simpler than buying garlic?

What do we mean when we say a simple life?

Help me out of this.

What do we mean when we say simplify it?

Well,

I think when you talked about this on

Mormon Stories,

you said if we had the

option to just live in a

small home that was just

enough space and we had

just enough money to cover

our expenses and no more,

nothing extra for travel or

anything like that.

And we had the clothes that

were going to last us for

the rest of our lives and

didn't need to replenish any of that.

And then you said the

reality is that we could do

it right now if we chose to do that.

And so I agree with you.

Complicated and simple are

the same thing applied to

different situations.

There's always going to be

simple and complicated in our lives.

um but i think most people

when they think about

living more simply um and

this is the this is exactly

the reason i want to have

this conversation because i

think a lot of people do

envision what you're saying

that okay then i'm just

going to grow my own food

i'm not going to

participate in society i'm

not going to be on the internet

it's just going to be me and

the couple of people that I love still,

you know,

who are going to stay around me.

We're going to grow our own

food and stay right in our

little homestead and,

and not have to interact

with the rest of the world

and not take any resources

from the rest of the world.

And that's just a fallacy, right?

Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's not just a fallacy.

It's an, it's an absolute impossibility.

I, I,

You know, vegetables take organic material,

right, to grow.

You have to plant them in the dirt.

And the dirt needs to be a

composition of stuff.

And you keep planting them

in that over and over again,

you'll deplete it.

So you have to bring in

material from somewhere else.

Like a garden has to be

supported with multiple things.

They could be fields of grass.

It could be cow manure.

It could be something.

But these tendrils go out on long,

long ways.

I was watching the Vikings,

this series on Netflix or something.

It's mostly dumb,

but it can be kind of funny.

But they were starting a little colony in,

I think,

in Iceland or something like that

in the story.

And then 3,000 more settlers showed up,

3,000.

And the comment was, the guy said,

now we can make it.

And, you know,

I thought about that and I

thought about how true it is.

And we don't even know what

the number is of how many

people it takes to to to to

make something happen.

And we're talking on the simple thing.

But that that goes to to your entire life.

How many people you you rely

on and you need?

There's a game you can play

to see what class you're in.

Are you ready for it?

Yes.

You have to ask yourself.

You can go through perfections.

And you have to ask yourself

if you know or any of the people,

let alone friends.

And if they're doing their

profession for you, it doesn't count.

So if I say, do you know any hairdressers?

Or are you friends with any hair?

Are there any hairdressers

in your social circle?

If you do have a friend who

cuts your hair or does your hair,

that doesn't count.

She doesn't count if she's

doing that service for you.

Does that make sense?

So you can't count anybody

that you're paying.

And then you start asking your question,

well, how many coal miners do I know?

How many sanitation workers do I know?

How many?

And then you can ask the question,

the other thing,

how many investment bankers do I know?

And you can start like

figuring out where you are

by just who you envision.

Well,

why am I talking about this with

simplicity?

Our society is built on the

work of all those people.

The people who work every

day to make your life what it is, again,

sanitation, water,

maintaining cell towers,

pulling out fiber optic cable,

just taking care of children,

teaching kids, feeding the elderly.

There's this whole majority

of what society does that we just ignore.

And if you want to live simply,

You have to start doing those tasks.

I have a lot of people who

come through the farm,

who come talk to me.

And they're really

romantically attached to

the idea of living right

there next to your food.

But I would say 98 out of 100 wash out

Because they don't know how to work.

And that sounds like they're lazy.

But, you know,

if you're going to fertilize

with natural fertilizer,

you have to shovel shit.

And people don't really

think about what that means.

When people talk about living off the grid,

which we are not.

We're not that type of people.

For me,

it's about connection and community.

But they get bogged down in

just how many hours a day

it takes just to maintain

the systems that you and I

in society are paying a $60 or $100 bill.

And then we don't worry about it.

We throw our trash away, right?

As if there is an away.

And that's part of the

illusion of this society.

And I'll kind of drive to a point,

then I'll stop here.

Because that...

What that does is it leaves

us unfulfilled in our time

because we have no actual

idea what life is like on this planet.

We don't even know.

We've lost what it means to be human.

We don't understand.

And to live a simpler life

like this is to work hard,

but oftentimes in ways that

are very satisfying, that are slow.

that take a long time.

It takes a long time to grow a cabbage.

It takes a long time on the calendar.

And we don't even think about that.

So that's what I have to say so far.

Yeah, yeah.

So I started to have my own

garden about 10 years ago or so.

And I live in South Texas.

And so our growing season is

a long growing season,

but it's also complicated.

You have to plant the right

things at the right time.

And you have to be careful

about too much sun and not

enough water and all those things,

which all farmers do, right?

But

I think the first year I

planted beans and squash

and potatoes and my mother

who grew up in Idaho said,

you cannot grow potatoes in Texas.

You just can't do it.

And I said, Oh yeah, watch me.

And I think my first harvest of potatoes,

um,

I did red potatoes and it took me

about four months to grow some potatoes.

And I went out and did my harvest.

And I had an empty dozen egg crate.

And I filled up the dozen

egg crate with all the

potatoes from my garden.

And that was all I got for my harvest.

And at the time,

I had six children at home.

And I said, well,

this will make about half a

dish of mashed potatoes for

one meal for my family.

And I grew enough beans to

make a side dish of sauteed beans twice.

And I grew about two squash

and the rest of the squash

either got eaten by

squirrels or they rotted or

they burned up.

Those two squash,

I could use for one side

dish for my family of eight people.

It took me four or five

months to get that much of a harvest.

I think a lot of people have this,

like you said,

romantic idea that you're

going to just plant all

these different crops and

it's going to be enough to

feed your family or even yourself.

The next spring,

I decided that I was going

to plant things that grew more

in a shorter amount of time

of things that I actually used every day.

So I planted some cherry

tomatoes and I planted some

lettuce and I planted some peppers.

And I had a big,

huge bush of cherry tomatoes.

And every time I wanted to make a salad,

I would go out there and

grab a few cherry tomatoes off of there.

And that one did pretty well.

That was pretty sustainable

as far as a plant goes.

My pepper plant,

I think I grew a total of

12 peppers over the growing season,

which was enough for me to make...

salsa twice,

and to do a couple of marinades.

That was about it.

And, and the lettuce, you know,

I had enough to make a couple of salads,

but eventually, you know, then it,

the growing season wasn't

enough to make more leaves.

And that was that I ended up

with a big tall lettuce

plant with a bunch of

leaves that I couldn't use.

So, you know, even when we,

even when we adjust and

everything like that,

I think people don't

realize how much space, physical space,

it takes to plant enough

plants to produce enough

food to sustain even just a

couple of people i think

that's one part of the

romanticism of like living

a simpler life or trying to

eat more sustainably or

closer to the ground and

then the other thing is

that a lot of people talk

about to me is well if i

grow some of my own food

and i have bees and chickens and goats

Then I'll have some eggs and

I'll have some pollinators.

I can have some honey.

And then, you know,

the goats will make some

milk and everything like that.

Well, you have to realize that, you know,

goats need a huge amount of

acreage and they need a lot

of roughage to eat.

And that's a huge amount of resources.

And then, you know, great.

You want to have some eggs

and they have this romantic

idea that they're going to

go throw some grain on the

ground once a morning and

then go collect eggs every night.

But you don't.

Think about things like

worms and mites and all the

things that happen to chicken.

And then what are you going

to do with all the chicken shit?

Yeah.

You know, so to your point,

I think when people want to

live more simply or they

start to get this idea that

maybe I can do things

differently than they're

being done now and I can

live a life that's a little easier.

And for me, the hard work has never,

ever been the problem.

For me,

it's having the resources where I

am right now and the

calculations that we don't

think to do when we're

trying to live more simply.

And so I want to say that it

starts with a mindset of

having a desire to do that thing,

but then taking it all the

way through to a logical conclusion.

And what practical steps can

you do right now that are

going to make your life, quote unquote,

simpler without necessarily

trying to abandon

everything and go into a

lifestyle that you're not

prepared to live yet?

Mm-hmm.

And I don't know if you have some ideas,

but I've heard you talk a

lot about economics and

sustainability and

civilization as a whole of

where we are on the grand

spectrum of evolution and

late stage capitalism and

all that kind of stuff.

For people who are, you know,

who are dreaming of a

lifestyle that is simpler,

do you have any suggestions

of mindset changes that we

can make that will help us

to be less consumeristic, at least,

and more focused on using

our resources for the things that matter?

Oh, it's a great question.

For

I think my journey,

my most recent journey

started with coffee creamer.

So since I, you know,

I love my morning coffee and I'm ADHD,

so I don't take Adderall.

So coffee is very important

for me to be able to focus.

So, but I also grew up Mormon,

which Mormons have an interesting palate.

It's very limited.

They don't get very much bitter or

or dry, um, um, flavors or tastes in, in,

in their diet.

It's very sweet.

So that's just me blaming

everybody else for the fact

that I put cream and sugar in my coffee.

Um, so I would buy, I would buy the,

you know, industrial creamer.

Um, and you know,

I'd buy one of those a week

and it was kind of

expensive and came in this big plastic,

um, um,

jar whatever thing and you

read the ingredients and it

was just full of like lots

of ingredients so things i

have no idea what they are

what they do or anything

like that and so i was like

well there's got to be a

let's start here so i went

out and i got some like

cute little quart uh

bottles and then i figured

out my perfect ratio i

would just put half and

half and then sugar

in there.

And I also figured that half

and half and sugar don't mix very well.

So I had to shake them three times.

I had learned that I had to

shake it and let it sit.

I had to come back and shake

it again and let it sit and shake again.

And then it would hold.

So I'd have that in the fridge, um,

to cream my coffee.

And you can say, well,

do you still do that?

And I say, no, I just put, um,

I just put cream in my cup

and I put sugar in my cup

and pour the coffee in.

Now,

that's a great example of living simpler.

If you do that, you don't have to stir.

you, the coffee,

the hot coffee just melts

the sugar and it turns it all up.

But we all do it.

We all do it backwards

because everybody does it backwards.

You put the coffee and then

you put the other stuff and

then you have to stir it.

So,

and the reason to bring that up is

sometimes the simpler way

of doing things is right in front of us,

but we just don't, we don't, you know,

grab onto that.

So that,

that opened a floodgate for me

because I started, it was first of all,

interesting to see how things,

I like to pull things apart

and see how they're, they're connected.

and how they're put together.

And,

and there's been a lot of different

things that I've tried, um,

to sort of do home crafty,

like let's start this from

scratch that I've done.

And I'm like, okay, I got that.

That's not worth it.

You know,

it's not worth it to make

mayonnaise in my, in my mind,

but I make my mustard.

I don't,

I don't buy mustard partly because

it has yellow number five in it,

which is like illegal

everywhere in the world,

except the United States.

Cause it's poisonous.

Um,

So but but but making

mayonnaise is just it's

just a lot of work and it

only lasts for a couple of days.

But the mustard will last for six months.

So I use that as an example

of you can find things that you say, OK,

that's meaningful to me.

But that that process.

of making the mustard is, is, is,

is part of it.

Cause when we say simple,

what the hell are we talking about?

What, what do people want?

They're conscious for,

let's say you sleep for

eight hours a night.

So you're conscious 16 hours a day.

And, um,

And what do you want?

I was thinking about this a

couple days ago.

I was thinking about, like, you know,

paintings and photos where

you see a farmer, and he's there,

and maybe the sun's set,

and he's looking out over

his wheat that is just

about ready to harvest and

smoking a pipe or something,

and it's like, I want that.

I want to be that guy, right?

And that's what we have.

We have that moment in our mind.

Oh, well, what do you want?

I want to sit on the porch

and watch the sunset and, you know,

Drink Merlot and laugh with my friends.

We create these things

without really paying

attention to what's above

and beyond that.

That farmer, he might be relaxing,

but he's really thinking is, my God,

is it going to rain?

Because harvesting wheat is

like you have to jump

between the rain cycles.

And it's just a constant stressor.

God bless farmers.

It is one of the most

stressful occupations out there.

But we want to create these

moments without paying for them.

And I think the simplicity

and the joy and the

revolutionary aspect of it

is actually the work.

Because that goes back to

those 16 hours a day.

Well,

if you're going to live a simple life

that is not driven by corporate America,

that is not driven by go-go sort of thing,

what you're going to do is

you're going to spend a

large portion of your time doing labor,

working.

No, not necessarily like hard labor,

you know pulling weeds

mowing the lawn planting

things Pulling weeds seems

like a lot of times you're

pulling weeds So so and

that's what I think we're

not we're our addicts We're

tweakers where we are not

used to just being we

envision that we desire it

We want it but but we

really it has to be

practiced like any other

like mindfulness practice Yeah

I agree with that.

And I think when people talk

about living a simpler life, this is what,

you know,

what I keep coming back to is

because I think so many of us,

and I'm just a year younger than you are.

I was born in 1974.

And, uh,

so I came up in the same era and my,

my mother was raised on a farm in,

in Idaho.

And, um,

my dad was a military

multi-generation military man.

And, um,

I think that in our generation,

we were raised to get good

grades in school and to go

to college so that we could

get a good job and work for

one company and then retire

because that was kind of

our parents' dream.

My grandfather was a county

agent and that's what he

did for his entire career.

And my dad's dad was a pilot

in the Air Force and then

he was a colonel in the Air Force.

That was his entire career.

And I think we got sold this

myth that our parents kind

of handed down that if we got good grades,

we would get into a good

college and then we would

get a respectable degree

and then we would get a job

and that we would work for

one company when the reality is that

Sometime in my 20s or so,

I started to see this shift

in corporate America where

people were not staying at

one company for their

entire career and people

were getting laid off

mid-career and having to go

find something else and

always taking a pay cut in

the interim and then having

to sort of eke out until

they got to a place where

they could retire.

And so when I became a teacher,

I stopped teaching my

students to get ready for college.

College readiness was a huge, huge thing,

and it still is.

And it's still part of our

it's ingrained in our educational system.

But I stopped teaching kids

that because so many of

them couldn't afford it.

And then so many of them

were getting a degree that

they then couldn't use.

And I even observed in my own experience,

you know, I got a master's degree,

but I was only making $100

a month more than the

teachers who just had a

bachelor's degree.

So what good did it do me to

go into $30,000 in debt to

get a master's degree?

Other than that,

I had some fantastic

experiences and learned

some wonderful things.

You know,

other than the the actual learned

experience didn't benefit

my family any more than it

did the people who had

learned life experiences,

not in an institutional way.

So I started teaching my students that,

you know,

you could go to a trade school

or you could go work for.

an entrepreneur,

or you could just go hop

from company to company and

get as much knowledge and

experience as you could and

do it that way.

And I think so many of us

get trained to go to college, get a job,

buy a house, get married, have children,

retire.

And it doesn't happen in

that order for all of us.

And some of it never happens

for some of us.

Not only that,

but it's not necessarily

what is best for you or me or anybody.

And if I had taken the time

to think about it,

If I hadn't been so

programmed that that was

what life was supposed to look like,

I might have made some different choices.

And I think what I'm trying

to help people do is have a

contemplation that your

life could look different

than the picture that was

presented to you of the ideal life.

And even just to have the

contemplation of what is

ideal is better than what

came before you.

Because the people that came

before you didn't even think about that.

They just did it.

And so if you can take the

time to even contemplate, is this ideal?

And if it's not, what is ideal for me?

And then, you know,

do I need to buy a house?

Or do I need to own a car?

Or do I need to get into the

same sort of locked little

box that most people get

into when you have a

mortgage and you have a car

payment and you have insurance payments?

And then once you've locked

yourself into that sort of lifestyle,

there's not a whole lot of

options to get out of that

without making some really

major sacrifices.

and i was listening to you

speak the other day about

um the inevitability of the

debt cycle and you know the

role that that debt can and

does play in the lives of

most people who are living

on the planet and is there

another way the

contemplation that there's

another way and i just think that

We don't ask ourselves

enough good questions when

we're making these big life decisions.

And I love your idea of just

starting with the creamer.

You know, just take one thing.

And this is my mantra

throughout my whole podcast.

Just change one small thing.

And even if it's a tiny change,

you never know where that's

going to lead you.

And look where it led you.

You know,

you've got all this knowledge and