[00:00:01] Luke: All right. Curtis Stone. Here go, brother. So many things I want to talk to you about today, but I think top of mind is your area of expertise, homesteading, living  off-grid. I've seen a rise in the popularity of this way of life. In recent years, for obvious reasons, people I think are starting to understand that dependency on the state means you get state privileges and therefore fewer rights.

[00:00:28] And so I watch people like you from afar and I'm almost like, "Oh man, I basically live in the country, but I'm still in the suburbs. And it's a huge step toward that from where I was living in Hollywood for many years. But even now, I'm feeling like the encroachment of the system as it were, and I realized how dependent I am.

[00:00:50] But I also see that many people who aspire to get into that way of life, rural living and so on, don't understand the realities of it. And so I'm really excited to talk to you today just to give people an A to Z, comprehensive, what works, what doesn't.

[00:01:07] So a great place to start would be how you got your start doing the urban farming, and give us a condensed version of your trajectory to where you are now. And then we can go into maybe just a linear what to look for in land, a lot of the things you teach of what you look for in the land. Then what do you do to land? Live there for a year or so, figure it out, see what you're working with, all that. But give us just your backstory first.

[00:01:34] Curtis: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Luke. Really cool to be here. And yeah, I've always been-- I grew up as a punk rocker. I was always an anti-establishment guy. I was listening to Dead Kennedys and Noam Chomsky when I was a teenager. And so I was always an anti-establishment kind of guy, angry teenager. Was always really bothered and perplexed why we need to pay rent to live.

[00:02:01] And I think that was the seed planted in me to be, I just want to be a human being, having the human experience, living on this earth, and just exist. Why do I have to pay rent? So that's what led me into farming. I was a touring musician for about 10 years. I lived in Montreal. From British Columbia originally.

[00:02:26] But as my music career winded up, I got really burnt out on the whole lifestyle being in the city. There was one occurrence that happened in 2008. It was February or something like that, 2008, where a freezing rainstorm hit, Montreal. And if you've ever seen a freezing rainstorm, it is something else. It's scary.

[00:02:49] And I saw the city become completely gridlocked because everything is covered in an inch of ice. You can't drive. You can't walk. Telephone poles are falling over. It's crazy. Tree branches are falling from the trees. And I saw over the course of a couple of days, as the city tried to recover from this, trucks weren't coming into the stores. And was this wake up moment I'm looking around and I wanted to get some of the things that I get at the store, and they're not there.

[00:03:15] And I'm going, man, how fragile is this system that we live in that my basic necessities could be compromised very quickly? So that woke me up. And during that time, I was actually reading a lot of books about permaculture and living  off-grid and on the land. And I'd always been interested in that as a child, even from the time I was 12 years old.

[00:03:35] And that was a real motivator for me to do it. I felt really inspired to just change. And so I left the city late March, 2008. I drove back out west, and I rode my bike down the West Coast. I rode my touring road bike to Tijuana from Kelowna. So I went from the Canadian border to the Mexican border.

[00:03:54] It took me two and a half months, and I visited homesteads, permaculture farms, organic farms, you name it. And I was really inspired by what I saw. And by the time I got down to Tijuana, I spent a week in San Diego, and I just felt really motivated to do something. Originally, I wanted to ride all the way to New Orleans and volunteer in the relief effort for Hurricane Katrina. That was my original plan.

[00:04:19] But everybody's like, "Don't ride through Western Texas. You'll die." And so I said, "Okay, fine. I won't." So I went back home and I started this urban farming business basically out of necessity because I didn't have any money to buy land. My parents didn't have money. I had no way to get in. Real estate's been expensive in British Columbia for a very long time.

[00:04:38] And so I started this urban farming thing, farming in people's backyards, and it worked. I pretty much knocked it out of the park right away. I was successful at it. I made a living at it right away in the first year, and all of a sudden I had people reaching out to me around the world.

[00:04:52] And because I had a background in music, I knew how to hype things. I knew how to talk. I was a producer and a booking agent for our band when I was a musician. And so I knew that world in a way. And so I got into urban farming and did that for eight years, wrote a book about it in 2016. Still out there. It's still a very well-known, read book. And I created a model for small-scale farming, taking a lot of things that were already out there, but I just consolidated them into a really practical methodology.

[00:05:24] And so that got me there. All the while I was doing that though, I wanted to be an  off-grid homesteader, doing broad-acre permaculture with ponds and food forests and all that. That's always what I wanted to do. And so I guess that became a vehicle for me to do that because in all of that time, I was building my skill base. I was building my network. I was making money.

[00:05:48] I was building that human capital. And I really am into the eight forms of capital and all that. And so you're more than just your money. The system wants you just to think it's all money, but it's actually your experiences, your knowledge, your spiritual capital, cultural capital, all these things.

[00:06:03] And I was building those, and I looked at my experience with the urban farm as a way to get to my end goal and not necessarily knowing how I was going to get there, but it did. And now I'm living  off-grid on 40 acres and doing all the things that I dreamt about for a long time.

[00:06:21] And the cool thing about it was that by picking at the low-hanging fruit, if you will, with urban farming, I learned a lot. So that by the time I got to my land, and we moved to our land during COVID, we said we're done with the city. People went crazy. I already knew a lot of stuff. I knew how to set up irrigation. I knew how to do earthworks.

[00:06:45] I knew the fundamentals of how water moves and flows and how to build soil. And I understood plants and flora and fauna very well. And so by the time I got to where I am now, it's been four years on this project now, but I had a pretty strong base. So it's how I got to here now. It's really the long short of it.

[00:07:06] Luke: That's perfect, dude. And for those that are unaware of you. By me looking at your social media and stuff, you're not living in squalor, like roughing it either.

[00:07:18] Curtis: No, it's nice.

[00:07:19] Luke: You're living large, dude. I think when many of us think of  off-grid, it just involves all of this suffering and pain. I was telling you, I love these survival shows. Another show I like is Homestead Rescue.

[00:07:31] Curtis: Yeah.

[00:07:32] Luke: These are examples of people that are just failing at doing what you're doing.

[00:07:36] Curtis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:07:37] Luke: So I look at that, I'm just like, "Oh man, I don't think I'm in for that." But they're not following people that are doing it well and living the way you are, where everything works and you have abundance and you have the key ingredient, I think, which is most of us want, is independence and freedom, where it's like, cool, I don't need the outside world to sustain me.

[00:07:58] Curtis: Yes.

[00:07:59] Luke: One thing that you touched on with which I relate so deeply is that attitude that questions why we have to pay to exist on the planet. And I always think about wildlife. You look at a deer. You look at a bear. Every other animal just like exists. They travel where they want to--

[00:08:23] Curtis: They cross the border to Canada and the US no problem.

[00:08:26] Luke: And somehow we have this superimposed matrix system of control that not only controls us, but also embeds scarcity into our psyche that the world is unsafe and that there's not enough resources to go around.

[00:08:43] Therefore, you need a managerial ruling class to handle said resources and dole them out to you if you're willing to pay. So to me, that is such a huge motivation to aspire to the life you're living, where it's like, wow, no, I'm actually just living off my own hard work, ingenuity, intelligence, creativity, and the abundance of nature.

[00:09:07] Curtis: Absolutely. And that's the thing. One thing I like to say is I spend most of my time surrounded by God's creation, not man's creation-- is the creation that I have made on my land, but we live in the boreal forest. We're surrounded by endless forest, trees, animals, wind.

[00:09:26] It's an inspiring way to exist, to get up and just hear the birds, hear the wind. It's almost like I'm in a constant state of meditation being up there. My kids are barefoot outside, day in and day out. It's taken a long time to get there though, Luke.

[00:09:48] Luke: I know.

[00:09:49] Curtis: And people look at my stuff and they just think I just showed up. It's like, man, I grinded for 10 years, working 100-hour weeks to build the skillset, the confidence, and the resources to put it all together.

[00:10:03] Luke: Well, I think that's the thing too, people don't understand, is someone might look at you and go, "Oh, that's easy for you to say because you have the money to buy all these solar panels and do this and that." I know a little bit of your backstory. Just the fact that you're a musician tells me you were broke at one point.

[00:10:20] Curtis: Big time.

[00:10:21] Luke: Because I've been there. And people give me shit too sometimes because I have some 20,000-dollar PEMF machine. I'm like, "Dude, if you would've seen me--" I only finished seven grades in school. My first job was like $3 an hour washing dishes at a pizza parlor. I've had no lucky breaks. You know what I'm saying? In terms of being privileged. It's literally hard work for a very, very long time and a lot of failures and a lot of mistakes, a lot of dark times. So I can only imagine the endeavor that you've taken on.

[00:10:56] Curtis: Oh man, I remember times--

[00:10:57] Luke: You probably have 10 fails for one win, but those are the things people don't see. Oh, he's lucky. He just has the money to do that. It's like, most people don't start out with that kind of advantage. You created.

[00:11:10] Curtis: I remember my first year farming, when I decided to take it on and do it as a commercial enterprise, working 16 hours a day and grinding it was just like 90% mistakes. I remember working myself into a stupor where here I am growing food and I'm not even eating because I forget to eat.

[00:11:32] I have that in me, like a generator, human design generator. I'm just like, go, go, go. But I remember just thinking to myself, I can't wait until I'm good at this and it doesn't suck. Just suffering and not getting sleep. And it wasn't a healthy lifestyle for the first part of it because I Just worked myself into a stupor.

[00:11:53] But yeah, people don't see that because you want to show the things that work. You want to show the success. But I think I've done a fairly good job over the years of promoting and talking about my failures and where I went wrong. I think it's important to highlight those things.

[00:12:07]

[00:12:07] Luke: So let's start at the beginning. We'll speak to the newbies. So someone is out there going, "Okay, I am sick of living in the city or the sub city, and I want to get some land somewhere." And I know this is something that you teach. You have a lot of different courses and all kinds of stuff, which we can talk about.

[00:12:26] What are some of the things you would look for in land in terms of sun exposure, water, the availability of soil? What are some of the key points if right now I'm on Zillow, just perving out on different properties?

[00:12:43] Curtis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first thing is, a cliche, but it's the know thyself thing. So before you go out there looking for stuff, the more you know about yourself and your context and what you really want, that's going to give you a better framework to start from. And so a lot of people do this as couples. I work with a lot of couples over the years. They start farms together, homesteads, have families.

[00:13:10] First you want to get a good idea of how do you want your life to look like. What does homestead look like to you? Do you need to be close to a city? Do you need to be close to family, friends, and relatives? What are your considerations with your children? First, you got to go through those things. And what I say to people is make a list of negotiables and non-negotiables.

[00:13:36] So sit down with your spouse and say, "What are the things that are non-negotiable?" These are musts. So it could be, we have to be within 45 minutes of Austin or something like that. We don't want to have the property visible from the road, things like this. We need to have a pond. Make the list of things that you must have, and then go to the negotiables.

[00:14:01] Okay, maybe we want 10 acres of oak trees, but it's negotiable. If it's five or two. Things like that, go through that. Then that drafts your context. Then that's the lens in which you look. From there, then you start evaluating land, and what we use are called the 11 scales of permanence. So we evaluate the land on these 11 criteria, and the 11 scales of permanence are brilliant because they start at the top, which are the things that are hardest to change to the bottom, which are things that are easiest to change.

[00:14:36] So at the top, it's climate, and at the very bottom it's aesthetics and experience. And aesthetics and experience are a lot easier to change than climate. And there's only so much you can do to change the climate. There's things you can do. You can have greenhouses.

[00:14:48] You can have riparian areas, shelter belts that shelter you from the wind, shade from trees, things like that. But you can only do so much. If you're trying to make a beautiful oasis in the desert of Nevada, you're most likely not going to get it without spending a ton of money.

[00:15:16] Luke: It's pretty tough here, by the way. They have water restrictions in this area because we're in a drought. I wouldn't probably have a lawn anyway, but if I wanted to have a lush garden, which would work with the sun and the humidity here, tropical plants and things like that, there's no water to water them.

[00:15:34] Curtis: Yeah. This is where water collection is very important. We look at the 11 scales of permanence. So climate number one. You got to like the climate. You got to be used to the climate. If you're from Montana and you move down to Mississippi, it's an experience that is very different for you.

[00:15:53] And a lot of people, they don't think about that, especially in America because America's so diverse in its geography. Everything East of the Mississippi is one or two ways, and then everything West is in a few different ways. And so you got to understand and be comfortable with that climate.

[00:16:09] Then you look at the land form. So how's the land shaped? What's the topography like? I prefer properties with topography. I find just flat open land is difficult, especially when it comes to the climate affecting you. And all of these things interchange, so the land form can affect the climate and so on and so forth.

[00:16:28] So you look at land form, then you look at water. Where's the water? What are the water sources? How many are there? Is there water here? Is there water there? Does the property retain water? What's the soil like? So's another one down the list. Then you look at the socioeconomics of it, which involves legal issues, boundaries of the property, even the economics of the local area. That even could include crime statistics.

[00:16:53] And then you go down, you go look at access and circulation. How do you get into the property? How do you get out of the property? Zones of use. How do you move around the property? How do you structure things on the property that lend themselves to ease and flow? A lot of properties aren't designed very well.

[00:17:12] The house is in the wrong place. The barn is in the wrong place. You spend a lot of time moving around in an inefficient way. And so when we go through these, we basically create a profile of what this property is, and we rate it based on that. So starting with those things is a good way, but ultimately knowing your context.

[00:17:35] And the other thing I didn't mention is once you understand your context and you have your list of negotiables and non-negotiables, the first thing you actually want to do before you even get into the 11 scales of permanence is look for threats. So look for threats on the property or off the property.

[00:17:50] You might have a property that is above you topographically. It could be 50 feet above you and it's a slope, but it was logged 20 years ago, and it's just a big open cut block. In a place like Texas or Mississippi or Tennessee or Arkansas where you get lots of rain, it could rain, a big rain event, and then you're getting flooded because that forest is no longer retaining water.

[00:18:13] So that would be a threat. Thinking about the FEMA zones, your hurricane, your tornado zones, your flood zones, and then even thinking about crime statistics. What are the threats? It could even be two miles away there's a Tyson chicken factory that when the wind direction changes, it smells like hell.

[00:18:31] Could even be you don't even want to be within five miles of an airport if the landing strip is orientated towards your property. Because when you're viewing the property on the day of, you don't see the plane. But as soon as you move in, you're seeing it all the time, and it's you driving crazy.

[00:18:46] Luke: Radar too. Radar's an issue.

[00:18:47] Curtis: EMF towers, cell towers. All these things are threats. And so that's really important because those are the deal breakers. So what I advise people to do is identify threats right away so that you can eliminate things off your list. Don't waste time looking at properties that have threats.

[00:19:04] Luke: What about fire? I've been looking remotely at Nevada City, California. I was out there a few months ago, and I just felt good there. So I was like, "Okay, I'm paying attention to that." So I've started to look at some properties out there, and in a lot of the listings there, like fire-ready, fire-prepare. There's lot of emphasis on that. So I'm like, "Hmm. If everyone's like using that as a selling point, it's obviously an issue."

[00:19:30] Curtis: It's an issue. Fire's a big issue. It is up on my property in the boreal forest, Douglas fir and Lodgepole Pine and Ponderosa Pine. It's fire country. So it's a massive consideration for me. It's probably my biggest threat. But I've probably spent the most amount of resources on dealing with that threat.

[00:19:45] Luke: Have you cut fire breaks and things like that?

[00:19:47] Curtis: Yes, fire breaks, water systems to and from. Even people in my immediate area-- I can't see any of my neighbors from my property, but they are in the area. We all have a plan. We have radios tuned to the same channel. During fire season, I fly my drone up in the air, and I do a little scout every few days. And one of my neighbors has a firetruck ready to go. He's been putting fires out in this area for 30 years. And he responds faster than the Fire Department.

[00:20:15] Luke: Did you know that when he got the property?

[00:20:17] Curtis: I did, and it was a big selling point. But I look for these things. And so looking for a property isn't just about the property itself in terms of, say, the 11 scales of permanence. And even the socioeconomics is what are the neighbors doing?

[00:20:30] Luke: Yeah.

[00:20:31] Curtis: Because that's a big deal breaker for people a lot of the times, is you got some Karen living next door who's calling the municipality on you every time you're trying something new.

[00:20:40] Luke: They're building a shed. I'm not sure if they permitted it.

[00:20:43] Curtis: Exactly, that kind of thing. And so you want to look for those things. You want to suss it out. So when we bought our property, I went and knocked on the door. 'Hey, I'm Curtis. I'm thinking I'm moving next door. How are you doing?" And so I got a good sense of who was there. And so made a pretty educated decision when we decided to buy the place.

[00:21:01] Luke: How realistic is my dream of wanting a property that has a hot spring on it? Do those ever come up in any reasonable capacity?

[00:21:10] Curtis: They never come up.

[00:21:11] Luke: Because everyone wants one.

[00:21:12] Curtis: Yeah, of course. We review--

[00:21:13] Luke: Or they're going turn it into a commercial operation.

[00:21:16] Curtis: But you could make it. You could have some solar boiler or something like that, but that's obviously not the same. But yeah, it would be very difficult to find that type of property.

[00:21:27] Luke: Coveted.

[00:21:28] Curtis: Yes.

[00:21:28] Luke: And what about just cold springs?

[00:21:32] Curtis: Yeah. That's more possible. Water's pretty abundant in the earth. Primary water, if you've ever looked that. My well, it's not necessarily a primary to the actual definition of primary water, but I drill the well. I'm on the mountaintop. My well is 100 feet shallower than all of my neighbors who are 150 feet below me.

[00:21:55] Luke: Oh, wow.

[00:21:56] Curtis: So water's everywhere. And the more you talk to well drillers and stuff like that, the more you'll find that nobody actually really knows too much what's going on down there. There's lots of theories, and there's lots of good information, but there's water everywhere.

[00:22:14] And so as far as springs that are just bubbling, it's possible. We see them. We review properties on a weekly basis. We do see them from time to time. It's possible. I've seen some really nice ones, especially in Texas. There's a lot of water in Texas.

[00:22:28] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Big aquifers here.

[00:22:30] Curtis: There's big aquifers.

[00:22:33] Luke: Then what about-- so say someone follows those principles and they get some land. You mention regulations and legality. To me, the situation you have where you're  off-grid enough in terms of zoning that you can just do whatever you want, I didn't even know about that because this is the first home I've owned. But apparently there's things I can and can't do.

[00:22:58] Curtis: Yeah.

[00:22:59] Luke: Which is a whole other topic.

[00:23:00] Curtis: It's a big topic.

[00:23:01] Luke: You don't really own your property, I learned.

[00:23:03] Curtis: You have title.

[00:23:04] Luke: Yeah. So that's another big scam. But now that there's-- I only have half an acre, so there's not a lot I could do here, but there's ideas I have, and I'm like, "Ah, I might get in trouble." It's like, wow, that's really annoying.

[00:23:17] Curtis: There's some first principles there. One of them I like to say is where the money flows, the policy goes. And there's a direct correlation between concrete and tyranny. So where there's more concrete, there's more money, there's more infrastructure, there's more policy, there's more stringent rules. Where there's dirt roads and space, less people, less bridges, less infrastructure, there's just less policy.

[00:23:45] Luke: Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:23:46] Curtis: And it's even so much in the way that bureaucrats are lazy. They like to drive around the areas that are easy to drive around in, where the roads are simple, the roads are straight. But they don't really go cruising around on the dirt roads to find problems. Of course, they have drones and helicopters that can do that too, but it's not quite the same.

[00:24:12] It really just comes down to-- it's like we were talking earlier about privileges and benefits versus rights and responsibilities. And so it's all this tradeoff of do you want the privileges and benefits of the state? If you do, that comes with less rights and responsibilities. But if you want more rights and responsibilities and are willing to accept less privileges and benefits, you can essentially have more freedom.

[00:24:39] So it really just comes down to for the most part-- you can pick a state, say, based on its politics of, is it a Democrat, or is it a Republican state? But you can go to very Democratic states and get way out in the sticks and nobody really cares what you're doing.

[00:24:57] Luke: Right.

[00:24:58] Curtis: So, so much of it comes down to that. Because even Texas, which is a very Republican state, if you're in an area, a metropolitan area or close to it, where there's a lot of bureaucrats just simply by number, you have a greater risk of bumping into them.

[00:25:16] Luke: Yeah. I've learned that here being 35 minutes outside of Austin. This felt like The Boonies when we moved here. And now I'm realizing like, oh, there's a lot of rules out here. And maybe you have some insights on this, but I was looking into the land patents where you can you trace--

[00:25:33] Curtis: Mm-hmm. I got mine.

[00:25:34] Luke: Back to 1840s or whatever.

[00:25:36] Curtis: Yeah. King John, the--

[00:25:37] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you file a land patent, and then there's no property taxes, and you can actually own the land, yada, yada. I was looking into that, and what I discovered, and this may not be accurate in all cases, but basically if you take your property and put it into a trust, you file land patent and you're taking it off the tax roll, then your address essentially disappears from the database. And so you can't get mail. If you call 911, they're like, "We don't see you." And so you'd have to go out and create private contracts with the sheriff's office, the EMT, whatever.

[00:26:11] Curtis: Yeah. It's a big subject of-- where I am, I like to say that I'm 95% free because I'm willing to take the responsibility to get all the rights that are really important to me. At the same time, I'm willing to play the game in the matrix to get some of the things that just make life easier.

[00:26:38] And so the matrix is maybe one day when we have some great awakening and everybody says, we want to transcend this, maybe we'll get to that moment, that critical mass. But I think we're so far from it that if you want to be the maverick who's completely the lone wolf, it's a tough life.

[00:26:57] Luke: Totally. I was all excited to get rid of my driver's license, which is one of the worst adhesion contracts. And then I realized you can't rent a car in the United States unless you have one.

[00:27:05] Curtis: That's a thing.

[00:27:06] Luke: So I was like, "Okay, there's a privilege." So I'll have to keep that contract alive because I want the benefit because I'm not an Uber guy. So yeah, there is a payoff. I think most of us that get into the law space too reach a point where you're like, you're choosing your battles. And some people are more hardcore than others when it comes to their autonomy. And some of us make compromises when the convenience serves us.

[00:27:31] Okay, so we found our property by that criteria, which of course, people take your course and dive deeper into that criteria. And you help people. You have classes and consulting and things like that where if someone--

[00:27:46] Curtis: We have the monthly calls and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah.

[00:27:49] Luke: So if someone's serious about it, don't think you have to learn everything from this podcast. I want to just whiz through this. Okay, so I found a property. We bought it. We closed. In my case, okay, I still have this house. But we got some land somewhere. It seems like it would be wise to go spend intermittent time there to understand the seasons and what actually happens rather than trying to plan it all in advance and build it out and then move there.

[00:28:17] Curtis: Yes.

[00:28:18] Luke: Break that sequence of events for me.

[00:28:21] Curtis: This is so important. If you get to that point where you've made the decision that you're happy with, you've sussed out the threats, you understand the basic parts of the property, where does the water flow when it rains? Where does the snow melt? Things like that. Water flow is super, super important.

[00:28:38] And that's part of the land form, which is the second thing on the 11 scales of permanence. Spending time there is critical because you're going to see things that you don't normally see. To say, spend a year on your property before you move there, that's not really practical.

[00:28:58] So what's a way you can do that in a short period of time? Go on the shoulder seasons when say the snow is melting or when you're in the heavy rains so you see the water move. When it's thawing out, when the snow falls, go and witness the land in the times of change. That will tell you the most amount of what it's like there.

[00:29:25] Luke: Say you get a piece of land. You could go camp there at every season change, right?

[00:29:30] Curtis: That's what we did, essentially.

[00:29:31] Luke: Get a motor home, something like that. Right?

[00:29:33] Curtis: Yeah. And we were originally looking to buy raw land, which I actually don't really advise people to do anymore. You can do it, but to build these days is expensive. It's really expensive.

[00:29:45] Luke: By raw land you mean zero infrastructure, zero roads?

[00:29:48] Curtis: Zero infrastructure. Maybe there's a road. Usually properties have some access in, especially down here. But yeah, to build is expensive. Can do it. I did it. But I tell people all the time, don't do what I did because the amount of money that was spent and wasted is crazy.

[00:30:08] But I always wanted to do as a bucket list thing for me. But yeah, if you can be there and witness the change of seasons, like you said, go and camp there. When we bought our property, it had a cabin on it. We actually ended up living there for three years. I told my wife at the time, was like, "We're only going to live here for a year. I promise, we'll be in the house." Things change.

[00:30:25] But yeah, we would go up there, and we treated it as an Airbnb. So we'd go up there for a couple of weeks in the spring, summer, fall, and winter, and got a real sense of it. I'd always walk the property. We were into cross-country skiing and stuff too, so we ski around the property in the winter and really get to witness things.

[00:30:44] Where do the prevailing winds come from? Where do the prevailing winds change in the seasonal changes? Where do the clouds come from when it's raining and when it's stormy? All these types of things. And sometimes these things aren't even obvious to you at first, but you experience them, and you're going, "Ah."

[00:31:02] But you have to be ready to receive and perceive those things. And so it's just having an open mind and being open to witnessing things. What it comes down to so much is recognizing patterns.

[00:31:18] Jeff Lawton, who's one of the great permaculture designers says it's your pattern eye is really what allows you to implement things on the land-- is witnessing where things happen. Where are the trends? And over time, it's ideal. Not everybody can do it, but certainly, if you can give yourself time, it will make a significant difference when it comes time to build and put an infrastructure.

[00:31:47] Because one of the things you have to do on a property, if it isn't there already, is you put your road in. You need the access. If you can do any type of construction or set up any type of farming operation, you have to put the access in. And where you put your road is probably the most important decision you're going to make on your property. Because if you put it in the wrong place--

[00:32:07] Luke: It'll become a river.

[00:32:08] Curtis: It'll become a river. Exactly. And so you want--

[00:32:12] Luke: You see that when you get out into the mountains sometimes. There's always roads washed out.

[00:32:16] Curtis: Right. They didn't put the culverts in, or whatever it was. Because there's ways to put roads in where you don't have to do culverts if you follow the topography. There is a following the path to least resistance methodology to it. And any good road builder will know that.

[00:32:32] And that's another thing too, is don't hesitate to get expert advice. And I would say something like that, road building, there's nothing wrong with paying a road building crew or even a guy who's a heavy equipment operator who's been doing it for a long time.

[00:32:48] A lot of these old guys who run medium to small size backhoes or excavators have a lot of experience, and their experience is actually even better than their machine work because they'll know how to do the work with the least amount of work and get it done and how it needs to be so that it doesn't have to be redone or fixed.

[00:33:06] Luke: So say you're in a situation where you're not in a position to have two home bases. You got some land. You want to move there. But you don't want to prematurely start building infrastructure and then realize, oops, we didn't understand weather patterns, topography, water, etc. You guys had a cabin.

[00:33:27] You could throw up a temporary structure, and just know it's not your main house. And move in there, start to observe these patterns, recognize the patterns, and start to do your planning before the execution, but still maybe live relatively comfortably.

[00:33:44] Curtis: Yeah. And treat it like a vacation. That's an ideal scenario. Before we found our place, it was a toss-up between a few different properties around different parts of the province. But we were prepared to put a yurt down or get a half decent RV or something like that.

[00:33:59] I'm glad that we settled the way we did, where instead of looking for raw land, we just said, "Let's just find a property that has land but has just a real simple, no frills house." Because it's almost cheaper than-- RVs are expensive, and yurts aren't that cheap either, especially if you want them to be winterized. Down here it's not much of an issue, but you do get the rain, and you need shelter from the rain. And so a lot of prolonged periods of rain really wears on infrastructure.

[00:34:30] Luke: What about this? You find a property that has your desired acreage, that's good land and qualifies based on your criteria that has a super shitty house that you know you don't want to live in, that you're just going to tear down. But you've got heat. You've got climate control and running water and at least the bare essentials. But you just know ahead of time, like, this isn't the dream.

[00:34:55] We're going to live here, get to know the land, and then plan and then start to build out. Then over there, after nine months, we're like, "That's where the house should go." And then you build your real house over there.

[00:35:06] Curtis: We have a program in Freedom Farmers called the Homestead Accelerator, where we actually review up to 30 properties a week all around the US.

[00:35:15] Luke: Oh, wow.

[00:35:16] Curtis: And that's what we do. And we find properties like that all the time. And so we rate properties based on an A property as like a turnkey, banger homestead. It's got everything you need. Food, water, energy, shelter. It's got all the infrastructure there. A B property has the fundamentals, and then some things might need fixing up, like maybe the house needs a new roof.

[00:35:37] Maybe it needs the road improvements or a new fence or things like that. And then we've got bargain properties or sea properties, which usually, it's like a tear down house kind of thing, but maybe it's livable for six months depends on what your wife's willing to tolerate.

[00:35:53] So yes, absolutely. That's more ideal than going out there and just pouring concrete and just going from scratch. If you have a place to live for a while and you're willing to tough it out a bit, it's the most ideal scenario.

[00:36:12] Luke: What about wildlife in the pattern recognition? If we're going super rural, you got potential bears. I was just out in Colorado. They didn't reintroduce because it's not a native wolf, but they got wolves out there.

[00:36:24] Curtis: Oh yeah, we got it too, man.

[00:36:25] Luke: Mountain lions. And then the deer and elk are going to eat all the--

[00:36:29] Curtis: We got all of it. Fences.

[00:36:31] Luke: Fences. Tell me about the fencing strategy.

[00:36:34] Curtis: First piece of infrastructure I put on my property was my fence. $40,000.

[00:36:39] Luke: Yeah.

[00:36:40] Curtis: But I probably went bigger than you need to. I fenced in eight acres. And we really only live on two acres as far as where the primary infrastructure is of our homestead. And I put the fence in this way because I knew this was going to be our forever home. And I wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing in that I wanted to stand on the balcony of my house, and I don't want to see the fence.

[00:37:06] I don't want to feel like I'm in a fence. So I used the topography to basically benefit me. So I went low in places where the topography went down, thinking about my viewpoint of where my house is going to be. And then I went through the forest. And so when you're on my inner circle of my homestead, you don't see the fence at all. You see through it when you come into the gate, but you don't actually see it.

[00:37:28] And so fencing is everything. The first year I bought that property before that fence was finished, because it took a couple of months, two and a half months to finish. I had one guy do it. This New Zealander guy was an absolute powerhouse, did it all himself. And my property's rocky as hell. We're on a ridge top mountain.

[00:37:44] Luke: Did he have to jackhammer--

[00:37:45] Curtis: Oh, he was jackhammering like crazy. He had his little mini--

[00:37:47] Luke: We had to do that here. We didn't realize this house is built on like a giant slab of limestone. So we got the bid and then they're like, "Well, if we have to do any jackhammering on the holes, it's going to be whatever, a couple hundred bucks per hole." They had to do every one.

[00:38:00] Curtis: It ended up adding 15 grand to the quote. And so how do you know that when you started? So before that fence was finished, first two and a half months, I had 20 bear incidents up on my property.

[00:38:16] Luke: Whoa.

[00:38:16] Curtis: Yeah.

[00:38:17] Luke: Are you packing though when you're walking?

[00:38:19] Curtis: Oh, man. I've been charged by bears. You know what though? I grew up in the Canadian bush as a tree planter, so I had probably 50 bear experiences before I moved onto my property.

[00:38:31] Luke: Wow.

[00:38:31] Curtis: 5-0. Yeah. I worked in the Canadian bush as a-- it is a very Canadian job, tree planting. It's a real coming of age job for a lot of kids in college. I put myself through college and funded my music career for a number of years by doing that. And I was pretty good at it. I liked it. But you know what? I don't need a gun with bears. I just know what to do.

[00:38:52] And it's mostly black bears, where we are. There are grizzlies, but they're one in 1,000. But black bears, depends on what they're doing, but as long as you know how to be around them and are confident and don't turn your back to them, they're generally fine.

[00:39:13] Luke: How do you be around them?

[00:39:15] Curtis: Well, it depends what they're doing.

[00:39:16] Luke: Because when we were just in Colorado, and I've lived out there at different times in my life. My dad lived there his whole life. I've never been afraid of bears out there, but I watch too many of these damn reality shows now, and I'm like, "Wait, bears can kill you?" Because my dad used to hunt bears, and he's like, "They're really hard to hunt." He'd have hound dogs. He'd go bait them.

[00:39:33] He's like, "You can't get the bears, let alone are they going to try to get you." But now they're very acclimated around Aspen. They'll be digging in the trash at the park, so they're used to humans.

[00:39:43] Curtis: Yeah. Those are the bad bears. Those are the ones that get you in trouble.

[00:39:46] Luke: So I saw some bear scar in the grass outside our hotel. And when we were hiking down by the river, I was getting a little paranoid. I didn't have bear spray. I obviously don't have a gun. I'm not--

[00:39:56] Curtis: Bear spray is good. Yeah. Bear spray is probably better than a gun. But it depends what the bear's doing. If it's a mama bear with cubs, that's the biggest challenge. But for the most part, if I see a bear, I'm just like, "Hey. Hey, bear." I just talk to them and just let them know. I don't get too aggressive, but I let them know that I see them, and they just, for the most part, don't want a confrontation. But if they're really hungry or they have cubs, watch out.

[00:40:27] But I would say 99% of my bear experiences have just been pretty benign. And I had a bear once when I was tree planting, when I was in my early 20s. I was planting trees up a hill and I had a bear charge me, and it jumped over my head and knocked my hat off.

[00:40:44] Luke: No way.

[00:40:45] Curtis: It was unbelievable. I was in shock what just happened. A dog, one of the dogs on the cut block was chasing the bear. And so he just came at me. He wasn't coming at me intentionally. He was running away from the dog, but he jumped over my head.

[00:40:56] Luke: He cleared you?

[00:40:57] Curtis: Cleared me.

[00:40:58] Luke: That's crazy, dude. Okay, so fencing. Then what about dogs and cats?

[00:41:04] Curtis: Crucial. Dog's crucial.

[00:41:05] Luke: There's got to be a lot of rodent issues.

[00:41:07] Curtis: Totally. I got a dog and a cat. And my dog just had puppies, so I got nine puppies on the go right now.

[00:41:12] Luke: And what's the role of the dogs specifically on a property like yours?

[00:41:16] Curtis: I prefer shepherding dogs. So my dog is this incredible-- she's a healer, Aussie Shepherd and Bernese mix. And she's unbelievable. And I like female dogs too.

[00:41:28] Luke: Me too. We have one. You'll meet her at some point.

[00:41:30] Curtis: Yeah. I love female dogs. If we keep one of the puppies, it'll be another female. But yeah, this dog works. She's up at 4:00 AM. She wants to go out. She does the rounds of the fence. When I built the fence, I actually put two electric lines, 18,000 volts.

[00:41:48] One 18 inches from the top, sticking out 18 inches, and then another one 18 inches from the bottom, sticking out 18 inches. And I don't even use it anymore. It's a pain to manage because you got to continuously brush around it to knock down any sticks that touch it because it can ground out the line. I don't even use the electric fence part anymore. My dog and a good fence, perfect combination.

[00:42:09] Luke: What does the dog do to--

[00:42:11] Curtis: Just barks runs at it.

[00:42:12] Luke: So it discourages any--

[00:42:13] Curtis: Yeah. Bears are the only-- we do have mountain lions too, but they are such top predators that they're over thousands of acres. They're not really coming around. They want the path of least resistance. Most animals do. And so if a bear is coming to a fence and it's looking like it's trying to find a way to climb over, it's going to maybe try to climb a tree and then jump over, something like that. My dog is on it, and then that bear's just sitting there going, "Ah, it's not worth the trouble." So I think the fence and the dog is key.

[00:42:49] Luke: And what about ticks? That's something that--

[00:42:51] Curtis: Oh, we got ticks.

[00:42:51] Luke: We think about having-- ticks freak me out.

[00:42:54] Curtis: We got ticks, man. I've pulled probably 10 ticks out of my kids' heads just this spring alone. And the boreal forest--

[00:43:02] Luke: Does your dog pick up a lot of ticks?

[00:43:03] Curtis: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We're done tick season already though. Tick season for us is only about a month and a half. But yeah, it's a thing. Our ticks on the West Coast don't have Lyme disease. So it's not as big of a deal. My kids are pretty good at figuring that out now. My daughter just checks the dog every day. So yeah, it's a thing. Again, it's like rights and response. Responsibilities are privileges and benefits. Right?

[00:43:31] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:43:32] Curtis: So it's like, where do you--

[00:43:34] Luke: We were in Yosemite a couple of years ago, or a few years ago now actually before we moved here. And we're staying at a cabin out there, just having the greatest time eating mushrooms, just living our best life. And we're in a neighborhood in Yosemite. We're not way out in the bush. And the freaking dog got three ticks being out there. Wife had a couple of ticks. I'm just like, I don't know if I could live in the woods. I'm such a wuss, but just about ticks, they freak me out.

[00:44:01] Curtis: It's really only when you're treading through the bush. When I'm in the garden in my two-acre homestead area, there's no ticks. It's only when my kids go running off in the bush.

[00:44:13] Luke: Got it. Okay. And then do you have a cat?

[00:44:16] Curtis: I got a cat. Yeah, I got a cat. Yeah.

[00:44:19] Luke: Because you don't want rodents in your house.

[00:44:21] Curtis: No, I like the cat. I hate the cat. It's annoying. But the cat does the job.

[00:44:27] Luke: Are rodents a threat when it comes trying to grow your food?

[00:44:29] Curtis: Totally.

[00:44:30] Luke: What do they do?

[00:44:31] Curtis: Field mice, voles things like that, marmots. Yeah, a 22 and appellate gun too can take care of the bigger rodents, like the marmots and stuff. Skunks. Skunks are another one. The dog really does a good job of that though. I'd say my dog takes care of all the medium to large type predators and rodents. And then the cat takes care of the field mice.

[00:44:58] Luke: Got it.

[00:44:59] Curtis: Yeah. And so it's actually a pretty good combination.

[00:45:01] Luke: Okay, so fence, pets, which are, in your case, workers, coworkers.

[00:45:07] Curtis: They're total workers.

[00:45:08] Luke: Yeah. Not so much pets. Do you let the dog and cat indoors?

[00:45:13] Curtis: Yeah. The dog sleeps inside. The cat, no. The cat's in the garage and outside.

[00:45:17] Luke: Got it. Does the cat try to bring in mice and stuff if you let him?

[00:45:23] Curtis: I used to be a cat person. I just don't like the cat's ass-sitting, crawling on the countertop of the kitchen, stuff like that. So it's like the cat's in the garage of the greenhouse. That's fine. But yeah, for the most part it's outside.

[00:45:38] Luke: Okay. So we've got the pets. We've got the fence. Walk me through next step. Obviously, if you're talking strictly  off-grid, because some of this stuff will apply for people that get some land that has power and water going.

[00:45:50] Curtis: Yeah, most land does.

[00:45:51] Luke: I think that the less approachable thing for me is like having to generate your own power. So I guess what would be the next thing? Would it be obviously electricity and climate control, being able to heat your place and cool your place?

[00:46:04] Curtis: Not so much climate control in my house . It depends on the house. My house, I built from scratch. It's passive solar. It's so efficient. It could be 104 degrees Fahrenheit outside and it's like 68 in the house.

[00:46:15] Luke: Really?

[00:46:15] Curtis: Yeah. R80 in the ceiling. Four feet of insulation in our ceiling. And it's a single-pitched roof, windows orientated to the South. So the idea is that in the wintertime, it gets maximum sunlight, so we barely need to heat this house. And then in the summertime, it gets minimal sunlight because, as you know, in winter to summer, the solstice changes.

[00:46:40] And so in the summertime, the sun's behind the roof. So our house cool all summer. I do have a heat pump in it and stuff, but I would say the first-- it depends on what's there. It's just as we talked about figuring out what your context is, what are your negotiables and non-negotiables? Then you need to do an inventory of what's on the land.

[00:47:01] So what's there? What's usable? What's refurbished? What can you refurbish? What do you have to just get rid of and build fresh. On my property, because it was  off-grid, that also was a challenge for mortgages too. If you're  off-grid, a lot of states and provinces won't give you a mortgage.

[00:47:17] So you have to figure that out. I didn't have a mortgage. I bought the property in cash and just cash flowed it for years. But I had to put electricity, and it was the first thing because in order to have gardens, I needed water. In order to pump water, I needed power.

[00:47:32] Because we're on a ridge top, it was more expensive to get power up there from the grid than it was to go  off-grid. Because amount of poles that I needed to get up the hill. And I wanted to be  off-grid anyways. It was always a dream of mine. I don't want Klaus Schwab turning my power off.

[00:47:52] Luke: If you get a place without utilities, without power, one could price out how much it's going to cost to run power to it.

[00:47:58] Curtis: Yeah, you can.

[00:47:59] Luke: And then you weigh that out.

[00:48:00] Curtis: That's right. Yeah. You just call the linesmen or whatever, the local utilities, and they'll come and do a free quote for you, usually. You could do a hybrid system. You could have a grid-tied system. I like  off-grid. I wouldn't change anything about it now. I love it.

[00:48:15] Luke: I hear a lot of people that do the  off-grid thing underestimate the need for power and their solar underperforms or they put it in the wrong place. You can't rotate it, or they put it on their roof.

[00:48:29] Curtis: Yeah, never do it on the roof.

[00:48:31] Luke: Yeah. I wouldn't do that from EMF.

[00:48:33] Curtis: Absolutely.

[00:48:34] Luke: But how do you get the fucking snow off your roof?

[00:48:36] Curtis: That's just the thing. If you're in the boonies, like I am, snow's a big deal. So the first thing when you're thinking about  off-grid is what's your consumption? So just literally total up all the appliances in your home, put them in a spreadsheet. What's the draw? And then put in there, what time do you use those appliances? And then come up with a basic inventory list of how much power you're using and when.

[00:49:02] And then that'll give you a framework on which to build from. So I knew that we needed to have at least 10 kilowatts of solar to live up there and do what we do. I also have a Tesla like you too. And so I charge that from the sun. That's a nice thing too because then you can have a dump load. Because in the summer you're going to produce way more than you do in the winter.

[00:49:23] So I basically came up with that list and then built it from there. And so we have a 20- kilowatt solar array, so there's 48 panels. And there's three different arrays. One faces Southeast. One faces South. The other faces Southwest. And I've got a diesel generator, a diesel backup.

[00:49:44] Every system needs a backup generator because there's going to be times that something goes wrong, and you need to basically be able to just bypass everything and just run the generator from AC and just power everything. That's very important. People think, oh, I'm in the tropics. It's sunny all the time. I can just have solar. No, no. That's irresponsible. Especially if you're married with kids or something and there's no power one day, you're in trouble.

[00:50:09] Luke: Yeah. Is that from equipment failure, a line comes loose, just a list of-- yeah.

[00:50:13] Curtis: Totally. Equipment failure, software updates, all kinds of things. Yeah. You could trip something or-- yeah, there's a litany of different things. There was this one time I was going down to speak at Anarchapulco, and the snow melted early. And so Jeff Berwick, who runs that conference, is a good buddy of mine, and he was like, "Well, do you want to come down now?"

[00:50:36] And I was like, "Yeah, let's do it." I said, "I left my wife and kids and the snow was melted." Because I usually won't leave my homestead during the winter because there's so much to do with snow. But I left. The snow was all melted. The day I left, I'm in Mexico City, six-hour layover. It dumps two feet of snow within 12 hours, and the power went out.

[00:50:58] Luke: Oh.

[00:50:59] Curtis: And so my wife and kids were at home without any power, and I'm in Mexico City. We didn't have cell service on her property, so she got to a certain place where she could get a bit of a bar, and I troubleshooted it with her, and she got it all fired back up. So the key there is, do you have protocols, and do you have a list of to-dos that if this happens, what do you do?

[00:51:23] And so that's very important with off-grid, because there's going to be times where you have to step away. And that's probably the weakest link on my homestead, is me. Because I understand everything on it. I understand the power system, the gardens, the greenhouses, all that stuff, the water, the irrigation, the well. But what happens when I'm not there?

[00:51:41] Luke: Yeah.

[00:51:42] Curtis: And so that's a weak link for off-griders. And so that's the thing that I'm spending the most time on, is those systems, so that my kids understand those systems when the time comes.

[00:51:52] Luke: I imagine it would behoove a person to make sure you have the backup, the generator. But I like that you seem to have so much electricity that you can even charge your car. I would have a hard time, like, "Oh, I feel like taking a sauna." Oh, we don't have enough electricity. That's going to be rough.

[00:52:12] Curtis: Yeah, it does. But it also comes down to redundancies. So in my home, for example, the home that we've built, I can heat it in three different ways. I can heat it with wood, which is the ultimate redundancy because I can just go down, pull deadfall out of the forest and burn wood. I can burn propane for heat with the furnace. Or if I've got lots of solar, I can run the heat pump and get heat.

[00:52:37] So I can pick and choose. And sometimes I'll be blending things. So maybe I'll be running the furnace a bit so I don't have to do so much firewood work. Or maybe in February I'm starting to get sunny days again, so I can run the heat pump during the day, and then maybe I have to have a fire during the night or whatever it is.

[00:52:51] I like to play with those things. So there's a multitude of ways to do it. It's the same thing. I can heat water with electricity, I can heat water with wood, and I can heat water with gas. So I've built in all these redundancies and it's just--

[00:53:05] Luke: With the backup of the propane, is it possible to get a massive tank that just sits there?

[00:53:11] Curtis: Yeah. I'm sitting--

[00:53:12] Luke: If all else failed, you got like a ways to go on the propane.

[00:53:15] Curtis: That way I could take a vacation in Mexico and keep the house warm kind of thing.

[00:53:19] Luke: Absolutely. Yeah. This house, luckily, has a massive propane tank that hardly ever needs to be refilled, but when it does, it's very expensive. It's definitely not like a good full-time-- if this was somewhere that was cold more of the year, it would be a lot.

[00:53:36] Curtis: I like that. I like sitting on a store, a surplus of something than being into utility. Because we can see where the system is going, and they want to throttle us with all kinds of things. And Agenda 21 and 2030, they want to controlled brownouts, rationing everything. Your social credit score is down week. Powers off.

[00:53:58] Luke: We saw that tweet, boom.

[00:54:00] Curtis: Yes, exactly.

[00:54:02] Luke: Let's talk about food. I think this is an idea that many of us have. Wow, I want to be food independent. I've not had a lot of experience trying to grow food, but the little I have has been very difficult and it doesn't go as planned.

[00:54:16] So the idea of going to where it's not necessary to go to the grocery store or buy food on the Internet, that like the land provides for you, whether that's hunting, fishing, growing food, that seems to me like so far out of reach. So give us the rundown of where one would start in terms of gardening, greenhouse, and so on.

[00:54:39] Curtis: Yeah. Like everything, start the path of least resistance. Start with something you like doing. Start with something easy, the low-hanging fruit. Could be a small kitchen garden, one raised. bed. It could be some herbs and lettuce on your balcony. Start with some things like that to just get little wins. I find it so important to have little successes.

[00:54:59] So many people try to just go all the way. They look at my homestead and they just go, I want to do that. I'm going to go all out. And then they have a ton of irons in the fire and then nothing gets done.

[00:55:09] So it's better to say, "Okay, this summer we're going to build a kitchen garden." Maybe it's an 8 by 12 or a 4 by 12 raised bed, and we're going to grow 10 tomato plants. We're going to grow some lettuce and spinach and some herbs, and we're going to just do that and do it successful. Then next year we're going to add a couple of more beds and we're going to do all of our potatoes.

[00:55:31] That's easy to do. Then maybe we're going to do some cabbages, and maybe we're going to start making our own sauerkraut. We're going to start-- then we can build a root cellar. So it's all about just ratcheting up, starting with something simple and achievable so that you get a success, you build confidence, and then you get excited to do more.

[00:55:50] And so the way I like to think about all these things is on a sliding scale of dependency to sovereignty-- is over here we're dependent. You come home, you turn on the lights, you hope they turn on. You go to the grocery store, you hope there's food.

[00:56:04] That time I was in Montreal and I realized there wasn't a lot of food that I wanted. That was a big wake up call for me. So we all start dependent, and then we can take a step to getting a little less dependent by, maybe we have a kitchen garden. Maybe we have seven days of stored food in the pantry or. Maybe we've got a bagel out bag or something like that.

[00:56:21] And then we can go to a form of security. So we go dependency, to less dependency to security. Maybe we've got a big garden. Maybe we've got a second source of water. Maybe we've got a backyard well. We've got a backup generator. Then we go from security to resilience where we can have more systems diversified, other types of food growing systems, greenhouses, so on and so forth, to sovereignty where you've got a whole litany of different things and you can just pick and choose and you have redundancies built into that.

[00:56:50] So when it comes to food production, start with things that are small. Start with things that are easy. Start with things that you like to do, that you like growing, and then go from there. And I would even say after 15 years of doing this stuff, growing my own food and all that, my garden is simpler than it's ever been, as I just grow stuff that we. I used to just do so many different things to just do it and try it.

[00:57:13] Now, my garden is so simple. Two types of potatoes, two types of tomatoes. I got my celery. I got my winter carrots. I got my cabbages. It's really simple. That seems like a lot, but the way the garden is set up is just single beds of one type of crop, just like I did on the farm in my book, I just laid out these little mini monocultures. And they're not monocultures. I call them that for lack of a better term. But yeah, just think about simple things that you can achieve get--

[00:57:44] Luke: When it comes to really being mindful about how you get a piece of land and doing your due diligence and wanting to live there, at least visit there for a while before you start building infrastructure, one thing that would be challenging for me is if I want fruit trees, they're going to take a few years to start producing fruit, so I would be like, "I want to get them shits in the ground right away, but I might put them in the wrong place.

[00:58:10] Curtis: Exactly. That's the catch 22. I know. That is the catch 22. But this is where there's nothing wrong with leaning on the expertise of somebody. There's nothing wrong with paying some local permaculture designer to do a basic land analysis of your property.

[00:58:28] Get on the topographic map, find out where the main water points are, the drainages and all this kind of stuff, and then come up with a basic plan of it makes most sense-- and you might not ask for a full design, but just say, "Give me the basic framework of what it makes sense to put each thing where."

[00:58:45] Where do the buildings and infrastructure make sense to go? Close to the road. First of all, figure out where the road goes. Then the infrastructure, then look at the soil deposits on the property, and then start to plan from there. But you're right. It's important to plant trees first. But I can tell you, over many years of consulting for people on this, how many people come to me and say, "I can't believe I put those trees there. I wanted the trees first because I wanted the three year plan to get the fruit, but I regret."

[00:59:09] And then they're pulling the trees out. But you know what? That's okay. It's okay to have some level of discovery, knowing that you're going to do some things that you might have to change later on. It's not that big of a deal.

[00:59:20] Luke: Yeah. That's good because I've thought about that here. I think, man, we've already lived here three, four years, whatever it's been. If I would've planted trees on day one-- but I've been waiting to do the hardscaping. There's weird elevations here, and I don't know where I want things, because I'm thinking aesthetically first. I want it to look pretty so when I walk out in my backyard, I go, "Ah, it feels good out here." So I've been waiting, holding off. I'm like, "Dude, I could have just planted the fruit trees and built around them. You know what I'm saying?

[00:59:46] Curtis: Oh yeah.

[00:59:46] Luke: So it's funny. This is a very easy property to map those things out. And I think, man, if you had 5, 10, 20 acres, there's a lot more to consider there.

[00:59:57] Curtis: There is. But you know what? You really only need five acres. You can really do it-- especially in Texas. Five acres, you can do it all. You can even have some cows for milk and meat, and you can have big gardens and orchards, ponds. You can do a lot on five acres in Texas. The topography lends itself better towards it as well, in that it's flatter here. So five acres here is a lot more usable than five acres where I'm at.

[01:00:27] Luke: Right, right. Which might be on a steep incline or something like that. Let's talk about livestock. So if we've gotten to the stage where we're growing some food, I think most people probably start with chickens. That seems like an easy one. You get some eggs and layers.

[01:00:42] Curtis: Yes.

[01:00:43] Luke: Maybe eat some wings every now and then. What are your recommendations in terms of the initial steps at some livestock? Which animals? How many? How do you want to scale that out if you have the space and the bandwidth to do it?

[01:00:56] Curtis: It's, again, what will the land support? And then what's low-hanging fruit? So egg layers are the easiest animal to start with. Maybe rabbits could be another one. Quail, quail eggs, duck eggs.

[01:01:13] Luke: You reminded me, dude. I met a guy at the farmer's market here who rents you quails. He will come and set up the little quail house in your backyard and you get this quail eggs. And then at some point if they die, they replace them. It's like rent a quail.

[01:01:27] Curtis: That's brilliant.

[01:01:27] Luke: It's a cool idea.

[01:01:29] Curtis: It's cool because it gets people into it. But yeah, start with that stuff, the small bird livestock. And then go from there. Because what will your land support? My land would not support cows. I had Joel Salatin-- is a pretty good friend of mine-- tell me that.

[01:01:44] Luke: Too rugged.

[01:01:45] Curtis: It's too rugged. It's forest. Cows do well in pasture and low-lying valleys where the soil's built up and the grass grows. I don't have grass on my property. So for me I do chicken layers. I do meat birds. I do a flock of meat birds every year, and I do turkeys. And if I were to introduce new animals, probably some goats.

[01:02:05] Luke: That's what I was thinking.

[01:02:06] Curtis: Maybe some pigs in the forest.

[01:02:08] Luke: Because you see goats on real rugged lands.

[01:02:10] Curtis: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And so it's what will your land support? But the thing with animals that people always screw up is they just take on too much and all of a sudden you can't get off your property because who's going to look after the animals? And so you really got to just do things incrementally with all this stuff. Think about the homestead as this piece of pizza and you got this piece here and this piece here.

[01:02:38] Just add things incrementally. Because the world is so inundated with content now, and there's just so many homestead influencers out there. Everybody just wants to do it all at once. And it is the biggest mistake you'll make because you might jeopardize your marriage. You might jeopardize time with your children. You might jeopardize time at your work. If you take on too much, it's the fastest way to burn out. And then if you burn out, you might just get sick of it and not want to do it. So you really got to like the lifestyle.

[01:03:08] Luke: Have you watched Homestead Rescue, the show?

[01:03:11] Curtis: No.

[01:03:11] Luke: It would probably be too painful for you because you have some expertise. But anytime I start chomping at the bit to go live the life you're living, I'll watch that show and I'm like, "I don't know. I'm pretty cushy right here, in our little house." But yeah, Homestead Rescue, he might be a Canadian guy. It's a family. It's a dad, just real cool guy. OG, just old-timer. And then his son and the daughter.

[01:03:37] People, I guess, contact the producers of the show and they're like, "Ah, we're about to die out on our homestead. And so they travel around, I think mostly here in the States, and they show up at these properties and they just start assessing it day one. Oh, your water's screwed. They have pigs running all over. They're not fenced in.

[01:03:54] And then they implement solutions, just like, what are the most critical areas? And I look at that thing and I'm just like, oh my God. But a lot of it is people from the city that have no experience. They haven't been trained by someone like you, and they show up and try to do everything. And as a result, the whole shit fails.

[01:04:12] Curtis: The whole thing falls apart.

[01:04:13] Luke: Yeah. And to watch these guys come in and try to fix it is, it's just like, oh my God. But it's cool. It's inspiring too because by the end, okay, we got a rain catchment thing now, and they built them a new chicken coop. They do get them to a base level of survivability. But yeah, these people are like, at their wits end. They're just about to give it up. And in many cases, they sold their house and quit their job, and this is their final bet. And if this fails, their ass is on the street.

[01:04:42] Curtis: Yeah. I've seen that a lot. I wonder who makes that show? I had a LA production house once pitch me on that six years ago.

[01:04:49] Luke: That could have been you, dude.

[01:04:50] Curtis: It could have been me. I didn't really want to do it.

[01:04:52] Luke: No, you wouldn't want to do it because what happens too is a lot of the people, they're asking for help, but then they resist the help. Some of the people really get defensive about it and their egos get involved. And it's like I'm watching the show, going, "Dude, you called these experts in to save your ass. You're about to die out here."

[01:05:09] Curtis: A colleague of mine is a lawyer, calls those people ask holes.

[01:05:13] Luke: Ah, yes.

[01:05:14] Curtis: It's because they ask you a question and you give them an answer, and it just goes right into a hole. And they don't take your advice. It's really annoying.

[01:05:20] Luke: Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend the show. We'll put it in the show notes too for those that want to check it out. And we're going to call this one lukestorey.com/ off grid. And we're also going to be putting a link to all your education programs. But you can find them at freedomfarmers.com.

[01:05:40] And if you go to lukestorey.com/startfarming and use the code LUKE, you get 50% off your first month of the Freedom Farmers Pro membership. And we'll talk about what all that entails in a minute. But I have so many more questions.

[01:05:57] Let's go back to the solar thing because I'm a real EMF awareness advocate. For those listening, I'm sorry, I'm going to talk about EMFs again. But it's just one of those things, right? We are addicted to technology. I love technology. I got my Wi-Fi on right here for the iPad. I get it.

[01:06:17] Cell phones are awesome, but they come with a price. And so one of the things that I've looked into a bit, just working with different building biologists is the issues around solar. And you mentioned EMF, one of the issues being that they'll throw off a really big magnetic field on your roof, which will be blasting you inside the house.

[01:06:37] But also there's something having to do with the conversion, the AC/DC conversion, where pretty much if you don't fix it, your house is going to be full of dirty electricity. And so you want to get like a conditioner, a whole house filter. What have you done in that realm?

[01:06:51] Curtis: Actually, I did a video years ago because I made an EMF-proof house in Kelowna that was about four blocks from a cell tower.

[01:07:01] Luke: Oh wow.

[01:07:02] Curtis: And I covered it in a paint called YSheild.

[01:07:04] Luke: Yeah, we did that here.

[01:07:05] Curtis: Yeah. So I did all that. And then I hardwired all my internet, so no Wi-Fi in the house, and all this stuff. What I did when I built my homestead this time is I just completely compartmentalized it. So all the solar inverters and batteries are in the garage, which isn't attached to the house.

[01:07:23] Luke: Oh, cool.

[01:07:24] Curtis: All the bedrooms are on the opposite side of the house. So it's probably 200 feet, 150 feet away from all that. So long ways away from it. The solar is completely separate. It's in its own zone. There's nothing. So it's pretty much EMF-free as you can get. I put conduit in all the rooms to hard wire internet. I still use Wi-Fi for reasons like you have there, but I have it on a timer.

[01:07:56] It turns off a certain time when we go to sleep. Yeah. I didn't have to be as hardcore with the off-grid property. And part of the reason I bought this property is there's no cell service out there.

[01:08:06] Luke: Amazing.

[01:08:06] Curtis: So there's no cell towers anywhere, which sometimes it's a pain. But again, it's like responsibilities versus privileges and benefits. Where's the fine line of lifestyle, health, and convenience?

[01:08:20] Luke: Yeah. When we moved here, one of the reasons was we're right next to Lake Travis, so we're on a little peninsula. So, I know exactly where the cell towers are. Two miles that way, there's one. Two miles that way, there's one. But you barely get service out here. And I was like, yay, this is awesome.

[01:08:35] So I put ethernet plugs in every room with little adapters so you can plug your phone in. I end up turning on our Wi-Fi. You can go on an app on your phone and switch the Wi-Fi on and off. I end up having it on a lot of the time--

[01:08:48] Curtis: Well, it's so convenient.

[01:08:49] Luke: Yeah. It's such a pain in the ass because I can't send text if I'm like-- so, yeah.

[01:08:53] Curtis: You know what's a pain about the hardwired internet too, is when you actually, say, you get that little adapter that goes into your iPad, you're getting radiated when that is plugged in even more.

[01:09:04] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:09:06] Curtis: I started the--

[01:09:07] Luke: Because the ethernet cables will pick up straight voltage.

[01:09:10] Curtis: That's just it. And then you're getting dose of dirty electricity through your hands. I started really hardcore about that stuff. I hired a consultant and everything. But I have found that it's like a lot of things. It's like if you shelter yourself too much from it, could you make the case logically that you're making yourself a bit fragile?

[01:09:32] In the sense where you want your kids to have a good diet, and eat clean and healthy food, whole food. But there are going to be times where they eat crap when they're out with their friends or things like that. And so do you want to make it so that every time they eat that and they never eat it at home, they're having issues because their body isn't used to it. So I think there's something to exposing ourselves to small amounts of these things because they are everywhere. So that's where I'm at with EMF these days too.

[01:10:02] Luke: Yeah. It's ubiquitous. It's unavoidable. I prioritize the sleep sanctuary. That's my no EMF zone where I'm super hardcore about it. And then when I leave the house, it's just like, well, I know at least I had a good 8, 9, 10-hour span to recuperate. And then I go get on an airplane and just get completely radiated, which I did yesterday.

[01:10:29] Curtis: You don't go through the scanner, do you?

[01:10:30] Luke: Oh, hell no.

[01:10:31] Curtis: Okay, good.

[01:10:32] Luke: They can molest me all day long. That happened actually on the way out here. Or no, when we landed out there. Yeah, it's crazy. The whole travel situation is out of control.

[01:10:44] Curtis: I sat next to a radiologist from a flight, from LA once back to Vancouver, and he was reading this radiology book, and I was like, are you a radiologist? He's like, "Oh, yeah." Because he is reading one of those trade magazines. And I said, "What do you think about that scanner that they want everybody to go through?" He's like, "I don't ever go through that thing." I get the pat down every time. He opened up to me. We were just shooting the breeze and he said he had clients, really rich clients who are total hypochondriacs, and they get all kinds of scans and stuff. He's like, they're getting cancer chance is going up every time. He's like, "I tell them." A radiologist told me, "I don't go through that thing ever."

[01:11:22] Luke: Just intuitively, I look at it and I'm like, "No. I don't want--" What are they? The gigahertz going through me.

[01:11:29] Curtis: Yeah, exactly. Blasted.

[01:11:30] Luke: For those listening, speaking of benefits and privileges versus rights and responsibilities, etc., I've had forever the TSA pre-check thing. And for those listening, if you have the pre-check, most of the time you get lucky and they send you through the old-school metal detector, which is also radiation. More radiation, but it's so quick. You don't stand in it. You just pass through.

[01:11:54] Curtis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:11:55] Luke: But I've seen some things on social lately. If you have like global entry or TSA, if you read the fine print of like, I agree. Sign me up. Basically, you surrender all your rights where they can go into your email. It's crazy.

[01:12:08] Curtis: It is crazy.

[01:12:09] Luke: So it's like one of those bait that they throw out, like, "Hey, do you want to have a less difficult time at the airport? Sign here, and you get the special pass." Which again, just like the driver's license, I don't really care because it's worth it to me to lose whatever rights I'm giving up.

[01:12:26] But that is one way that makes getting through the TSA security easier, if you have that. Your likelihood of getting to walk through the metal detector and not have to get your body touched by some weirdo with rubber gloves is higher.

[01:12:40] All right. So explain to us-- man, I wanted to get on the topic of grief, and I'm like, "Okay, it's tough to--" It's going to be tough to sandwich that in, but maybe we can approach it. But before we do, tell us a little bit about your membership and your training and things like that. Because I think this is going to be really useful to a lot of people. And I've looked into some of your stuff, and it seems very affordable.

[01:13:07] When I'm ready to go get a property, there's no way I would do it without first taking your course and getting that guidance. Because I feel like I could save myself some really costly mistakes.

[01:13:21] Curtis: That's the whole premise, is I've always been just a solutions-oriented guy. And so Freedom Farmers is basically a platform that is dedicated to helping people get freedom on the land in many different capacities, whether that's setting up commercial operations with poultry or small farming, market, gardening, setting up greenhouses, all kinds of stuff like that.

[01:13:48] But really, our big thing now is just getting people there. And when I went through my process of finding my land, I spent probably a year really looking. I've visited places all over the province of BC and just put the time in. It was a real grind. And I just remember thinking, there's got to be an easier way to do this for people. Because most realtors don't know anything about land.

[01:14:13] If you're lucky to find somebody who understands farms or topography or water, maybe, but for the most part, realtors don't understand land, even the rural realtors. And being a rural realtor's a tough gig because you got to drive a long way to every showing. Unlike when you're listing condos in Austin, it's just turn and burn.

[01:14:33] Luke: Plus, if you're shopping, think about the amount of time you could save by just being able to vet something online versus driving around. Oh, I want to move to Idaho. Cool. I'm going to be there for three weeks driving around to look at four properties.

[01:14:47] Curtis: It's a real time suck, and it's a big money pit too. This is travel time and a time away from work and family. I built a course a number of years ago called Finding the Perfect Homestead Property, which basically goes through in far more detail that we discussed earlier about contacts, non-negotiables, threats, 11 scales of permanence. How do you evaluate property?

[01:15:09] So that course is up there. But when I published that course, I just had a lot of realtors actually reach out to us and be like, "Why don't you guys just list properties?" And so we said, "Maybe we should do that because it's fun. I like doing it." And so we did. So we built this program called the Homestead Accelerator, where we basically--, I have a team, three people working on this full-time, and we list properties every single week.

[01:15:32] Luke: I didn't know this.

[01:15:33] Curtis: Yeah, we have a team dedicated towards it. We just scrubbed the Internet of rural real estate listings--

[01:15:40] Luke: Dude, that's sick. I had no idea you do that.

[01:15:41] Curtis: And then we go through all the 11 scales of permanence. So you'll see the listing on our website, and it has a map. So we have a map of North America, and we've done properties in Mexico and Australia, and New Zealand, stuff like that in Europe. Mostly North America, mostly the US really. But you go on the map, and you just click on any state, and you'll see it listed. It just looks like Google Earth or Google Maps.

[01:16:01] And then you zoom in, and every single property we list is vetted. So it has its own page that goes-- first of all, it has a review video. So we're on Google Earth looking at the topography, moving the camera around, looking at where the water moves, fully evaluating, zooming out, looking where threats are.

[01:16:18] Oh, look at this. Three miles away, there's this-- things like that. And then we list all the main stuff, like what are the climate considerations. What's the average wind speed? What's the average rainfall? What's the average snowfall, all those kinds of things. And if any property doesn't meet our criteria, it's just not on our list. So every single property that we list is vetted.

[01:16:38] Luke: You don't have a bargain bin? Hey, these suck--

[01:16:42] Curtis: We have a bargain bin, but they're basically properties that have all the fundamentals. Just need the work.

[01:16:48] Luke: Oh, okay.

[01:16:48] Curtis: So you can go to a place like Western New York State, and you can find unbelievable bargains, like five-acre properties for 70 grand of decent homesteads. Arkansas's probably one of the best homestead states right now in the US for value. But yeah, so we list properties, and it has a video and everything. We don't make any money on the listing or on the sale. We just charge for the service.

[01:17:12] And so you can go on there and then it'll take you to that listing. You contact that realtor and go look at it. And we've had so many people buy their properties from our listings now, and they did it in one shot. So they visited one property, and then that was it.

[01:17:26] Luke: Wow. That's dope.

[01:17:28] Curtis: Whereas I traveled around all over, man. I spent months. And it's a grind.

[01:17:33] Luke: It is.

[01:17:33] Curtis: You're getting out there. You're looking for stuff. But what I teach people in that course-- because I want people to learn how to do this themselves. If they don't want to, they can just get into the Accelerator. And we have a monthly call, so people can throw properties at us in real time. And I'll get on there and look at them and say, "No, no, no, no, no." For the most part, I just disregard most things that people show me because they're missing a lot of fundamentals.

[01:17:54] But that's why that course is there, so you can understand it. Because I want people to-- it's like teach man to fish versus give them fish for a day. But yeah, you can get on that list and find a property and go there, and you might look for one or two things that we couldn't see online. You find that, and then you're good to go.

[01:18:11] Luke: Is there a mix of fully off-grid properties and properties--

[01:18:16] Curtis: We sort them that way. So you can filter properties on our list by acreage size. You can filter by acres in farm of arable farmland. You can filter by acres of forest. You can filter by amount of water sources. You can filter by on-grid, off-grid, hybrid. There's a bunch of different filters.

[01:18:36] Luke: Wow. Cool

[01:18:37] Curtis: Yeah. Climate zone. I want temperate places. I want boreal. I want semi-arid or whatever it could be.

[01:18:46] Luke: You mentioned Arkansas. In the US, what are some of the best states for this kind of setup right now?

[01:18:53] Curtis: I would say for value, Arkansas is probably top. Kentucky's pretty good. You can find old Amish properties that are amazing. The Amish really take care of the soil and their buildings, and you can even go and rewire them. Amish buildings often have open basements, so you can just run the wires if you want to put electricity in them right through the walls.

[01:19:20] And so I would say, yeah, Arkansas. Northeast Texas used to be pretty good. Tennessee used to be great, but everybody from California's moving to Tennessee now, so it's difficult to find good deals in Tennessee. Idaho used to be great. It still is great, but for value, it's expensive. Five acres in Idaho, you can get the same property in just North East Washington for half the price.

[01:19:51] Actually, on my way down here, I was chatting with the border guard because I drive across the border and then I fly through Spokane, and they always dick me around when I come in. But the guy knew me, and he liked me. We were chatting, and he was telling me that he's been farming in homestead in East Washington, which I've been recommending for a long time because it's good value.

[01:20:10] It's good old farm boys. But they're putting down some serious regulations in that area. This guy's leaving, He's got 35 acres, kids, and a wife. This is the border guard telling me that the government's getting too in their face, the hunting restrictions and the water restrictions.

[01:20:24] They want to put satellite, well monitors on all their wells. And so he's, "I'm out of here." And I said, "Dude, go to Arkansas." Go to North Central Arkansas. Stone County, Arkansas is where a lot-- ironically, my last name. But a lot of cool stuff happen in there. A lot of freedom people and just people that have had enough and they're coming together and looking at great stuff.

[01:20:46] Luke: I guess that's really one part of the criteria based on someone's mindset. One thing is having great land and value, like getting a good deal on some land and having, like you said, proximity to an airport or whatever might be important to you. But I think for me, it would have a lot to do with the encroachment of the state on what I want to do.

[01:21:06] Curtis: Big time. And that's generally why the Western states are better. 80% of the US population lives east of the Mississippi. It's a better climate. It's temperate. It's green. Go on Google Earth and look at it. It's a very hospitable place to live. There's lots of fresh water, lots of trees, oak trees, beautiful, mild climate, lots of rain, and lots of resources, lots of inventory for real estate and so on and so forth.

[01:21:35] But for freedom, again, like what I said, where the money flows, the policy goes. So the further you're away from infrastructure from the state, generally speaking, you're going to be a lot more free. But the problem in the US is-- think about Western Texas. It's pretty rough. Even Montana Wyoming, most of Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, these are inhospitable climates.

[01:22:06] They only exist from massive forms of government infrastructure. Nobody could live in Nevada or New Mexico without massive water infrastructure because you're not catching enough rainfall. You might be able to drill a well and get into a decent aquifer. And there are some big aquifers underneath those places, but they're brown for a reason. Not a lot of life is there. You look at the map, it's just a barren desert.

[01:22:34] Luke: I don't feel good in places like that. I couldn't live anywhere in Texas where it's not green.

[01:22:39] Curtis: No.

[01:22:40] Luke: Yeah, I get depressed.

[01:22:42] Curtis: Yeah, it's brutal.

[01:22:45] Luke: Some years ago, probably when we were thinking about moving here, I was just sussing out different areas, and I was looking at the potential of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, up there where they meet. And my dad used to spend a lot of time up there, and he said, "Wyoming? Are you crazy man? The wind will kill you there." I was like, "Holy shit." I would've never thought of wind. You know what I mean?

[01:23:07] Curtis: Wyoming's terrible.

[01:23:08] Luke: Is it?

[01:23:09] Curtis: It's one of the worst states.

[01:23:10] Luke: For the wind?

[01:23:11] Curtis: Yeah. It's so exposed. There's parts of it, it is kind of like you said, where they meet. There are some sweet spots. Same with Montana. There are some sweet spots. But for the most part, those states are just barren. They're called step climates, semi-arid deserts. Cold deserts, windy as hell, no trees. It's brutal. Flat.

[01:23:32] Luke: Yeah, I couldn't do it.

[01:23:32] Curtis: No, I like trees and topography and water.

[01:23:35] Luke: Yeah. me too. Me too. You mentioned Mexico. Have you looked into land in Costa Rica or places like that?

[01:23:43] Curtis: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot, actually. My late wife and I wanted to move to Mexico at one point. We were looking at a number of places in Jalisco and Nayarit, even Oaxaca. Another thing that we didn't really touch on all that stuff is community.

[01:24:03] Luke: Oh, duh. People.

[01:24:05] Curtis: People. And that does fit into the socioeconomics, which are on the 11 scales of permanence. The challenge in a lot of those expat-type places is just this, you're always the gringo. I like to be in a place where I feel like I can trust people.

[01:24:23] I find especially too, as times get a little bit more tumultuous politically, geopolitically, economically, trust is almost more important than ever. And so I love those places for the climate. I love the humidity, I love the trees, the tropical plants. But gardening in the tropics actually isn't all that easy.

[01:24:45] Luke: Really?

[01:24:45] Curtis: No. The perennial diet is the diet of the native populations. It's fish and fruit. Which I can actually totally get down with. I don't need to garden. When I go to Mexico, it's all fish and fruit. I'm totally on that stuff. Cool.

[01:24:58] Luke: That's interesting because I think of jungle climates as being like, oh, everything just grows. It's so abundant.

[01:25:05] Curtis: Yeah, but it's perennial stuff. It's not agricultural. I've toured a lot of farms in Mexico, and man, it's pretty rough. They're dumping on the chemicals. They got a lot of nematodes in the soil and the tropics. It makes growing western style vegetables in the tropics very difficult.

[01:25:22] Luke: What are nematodes?

[01:25:24] Curtis: Little soil microbes that can just level your crops. There's good nematodes and there's bad nematodes. But yeah, I've seen a lot of problems. That's why a lot of people in the tropics do hydroponics and aquaponics, like in Hawaii. You go to Hawaii, a lot of people do that stuff because it's just difficult to grow in the soil.

[01:25:41] But then again, that's where you go, "What is the native diet?" The fish and the fruit is key because that's perennial. You're down in Hawaii and there's just papayas and guavas on the trees and avocados. I'm friends with Dave Avocado Wolfe. He's a good buddy of mine. He's down there on his homestead, and he's just picking fruit from the trees.

[01:26:02] Luke: Going, collecting some honey. [Inaudible].

[01:26:05] Curtis: Yeah, yeah, it's lovely. If you go into the tropics with the Western diet, it's harder than you think. You just think, oh, it's warm, therefore I can grow all year. Yeah, but then the pests and disease never go away. Whereas that's what I love about winter.

[01:26:23] And in a way, the boreal climate, which is the region that I live in, the type of climate zone that I live in-- this is a temperate climate down here-- lends itself very well to agriculture. Because the winter's a reset. The winter's a time for the soil to rest, and it kills off all the pests and disease, and then you can start fresh.

[01:26:42] Luke: Right.

[01:26:43] Curtis: That's why there's a lot of big farming in those types of places.

[01:26:46] Luke: Wow. Cool. Is there anything else you want to tell me about that's the courses for people to learn?

[01:26:52] Curtis: Yeah. If they get on there, they can get access to everything that we have, including that Homestead Accelerator. And then they can--

[01:27:00] Luke: So it's like a monthly membership deal.

[01:27:02] Curtis: Yeah, it's a monthly membership. You get access to all the courses, and they can get on our monthly calls and all that, and we'll give 50% off to your audience.

[01:27:08] Luke: Epic, dude. Love it. Well, we'll put all that in the show notes. You guys don't have to remember a million links. It's lukestorey.com/off-grid. Man, I feel like there's so many more questions I have here. Okay, last question on this topic. How about Intenet? I find even living here, poor Jarrod, he has to run to the library to upload these freaking 4K videos of the podcast.

[01:27:31] Curtis: Starlink, dude.

[01:27:31] Luke: Is it okay?

[01:27:34] Curtis: It's great. I could not do what I do without it. Because when I first moved out there, Starlink was just fledgling. I couldn't get it. So I was on this Internet called Xplornet, which I could not upload. So no, it's fully no problem.

[01:27:51] Luke: Wow.

[01:27:52] Curtis: Yeah, it's amazing.

[01:27:53] Luke: Okay. Good to know. I remember when Elon was putting these satellites or saddle loons rather, up there, and I'm like, "Oh, what a dick. He's blasting us all with this EMF." But then on the other hand it's like, I don't know. It's nice to be in the middle of nowhere and be able to pop a dish up and have good internet.

[01:28:11] Curtis: Pretty damn convenient.

[01:28:12] Luke: Yeah. It's another one of those cost to benefit ratio. All right, so we don't have a lot of time, but you and I share a similar experience of loss recently in different ways, and I feel like we could do an entire episode or more just on that. We are like 15, 20 minutes. It's like, I don't even want to open the can of worms on this, but I don't know. I feel like it could also be really useful to people.

[01:28:43] So I think I saw on social media some months ago, "Hey, I just lost my wife." And I don't know the details of it. We talked briefly about it when you came in, and I remember just thinking like, just like most people, you literally can't imagine. And that's what I used to say when someone lost a parent, is like, "Hey, man, I'm here for you, but I don't know what that's like."

[01:29:05] Now I know what it's like. I just lost my dad recently. So it's like, whoa, this is a whole new life initiation that I was ill-prepared for. So how is that process of grief and just coping been for you?

[01:29:21] Curtis: Yeah, it's been quite the journey. I'll tell you, my connection to the Creator has become stronger than ever. I actually had a crazy experience, and I just realized this two days ago, and it put all this together for me. I was down at Confluence last year. I was there this year too, but last year I sat in this sound biofield tuning session with a friend of mine, Eileen McKusick. She's a good friend of mine.

[01:29:50] Luke: Yeah. She's been on the show.

[01:29:50] Curtis: She's coming to the Homestead actually in a few weeks. We're really connected, and she did this session that I sat in, man. And I'd done psychedelics in the past and stuff like that. I had never experienced anything like this in my life. And the long short of it was, is that in this experience, she pulled my soul into the gutter, and she was cleansing in the United States.

[01:30:17] That was this whole theme of this thing she did. And I'd never been exposed to this or anything. I met Eileen there and we really hit it off. We're both generators. We both have the exact same energy. She's like my older sister. We look the same too. It's trippy. But she pulled me into this thing, man, and I came out of it.

[01:30:37] I felt like I'd been entrenched warfare for the soul. And I felt like I had fought a war, lost limbs, was bleeding, everything. I came out of it completely triumphant but injured. And the cool thing about Confluence-- is an event I recommend people go to it. It's probably one of the best events out there.

[01:30:58] It's a lot of really heart-centered men there. You're a heart-centered guy. I consider myself a heart-centered guy. I was so emotionally destroyed, but all these men were there to embrace me. And I felt fucking incredible. And I realized just two days ago in the shower that that whole event thing that I went through was preparing me for the year that I just experienced, which was my wife going through a very brutal, grueling experience with breast cancer.

[01:31:28] And I think part of the reason why I've been able to come back from this so well was a lot of the conditions that happened, which I'll talk about a bit, but also that I felt like I was spiritually prepared. I felt like I had been to war, and I felt strong when I came through it, and I felt like I had support.

[01:31:47] Yeah. So my wife had a long struggle with breast cancer, but she also had a lot of other chronic illnesses, which we believe now-- her mother believes this. Her brother believes this. I believe this. My daughter believes this, is that she had past trauma and anxiety that was never resolved.

[01:32:08] And it manifested itself in a number of different ailments that she had over the years. But breast cancer being the final part of it. And yeah, we tried everything. My wife wanted to do it her way, which was non-allopathic. She wanted to diet, homeopathy, ozone therapy, red light therapy, urine therapy. Man, so many things. Fenbendazole, ivermectin, you name it.

[01:32:45] We did it, man. Anything, everything that wasn't allopathic. At the end, we had to succumb to the allopathic system in a way to just try to keep her alive. But she did it her way. And I was there to just support whatever she wanted to do. And so I pretty much dedicated a year of my life to being a caretaker.

[01:33:05] And for those last four months of her life, her mother also joined us. And it was tough. It was tough because she was so steadfast in what she wanted to do, that there was times where we intervened and I was like, "Why don't we do this? Why don't we get surgery and get this tumor out?" No, she did not want to.

[01:33:26] And so she did it her way, and yeah, she passed in early March. It was, yeah, quite an experience. The thing that in a way allowed me to not be-- you said the question, like, how would you deal with that? Well, she was suffering for a long time. There was four months of pain, and she did not want drugs.

[01:33:58] She didn't want any painkillers, nothing. Not even Tylenol, no aspirin, nothing. The most pain killer she would want was something homeopathic. So we had certain homeopathy that we did that worked for pain levels two, three, maybe four. And then we got into LifeWave, which I actually have continued to do. It's actually changed my life. And that helped for the pain to a--

[01:34:20] Luke: Are you talking about those little--

[01:34:22] Curtis: Patches, yeah. I got one right here, man. I can go on about that forever.

[01:34:25] Luke: They sent me those a couple of years ago. Things like that, it's--

[01:34:29] Curtis: I'm telling you, man.

[01:34:31] Luke: It takes a bit of time to research, so it wasn't something I really got behind, but it was compelling enough where I used up the patches they gave me. But you're a believer, huh?

[01:34:39] Curtis: Oh, I'm full-on now. And I got into it as a remedy for her, one of the solutions for her. A lot of doctor friends of mine who are clients recommended it. And so, yeah, she had a real long period of pain, and it was just crazy because we built this homestead for three or four years.

[01:35:01] I wouldn't have been able to do any of it without her, without her support. And we moved into our house, which we took two years to build, really, because I didn't take on any debt. I just cash flowed the house. We moved into the house December 22nd, right before Christmas, so we could have a Christmas tree in the house and have a Christmas for the kids.

[01:35:19] But pretty much from the time we moved into the house, she was in brutal pain. And it was very difficult for the kids. I'm talking level eight, nine pain 24 hours a day. And she did not want painkillers, nothing. And so when she passed, the pain was gone.

[01:35:45] And there was some moments that really-- we're not practicing Christians, but we had this thing where she-- I think it was about five days before we went to the hospital. Because we had to go to the hospital at one point. Her lungs were full of fluid. We had no choice.

[01:36:03] And she said to me, she had this dream that there was this man in the dream that just loved her unconditionally. And I was like, "Okay, it sounds like what it sounds like." But when we went to the hospital, she kept saying to me-- because she was loose. She'd had very few lucid moments.

[01:36:23] Once we were in the hospital, we got on the drug train. It was watching her go like this, just disappearing, seeing that further and further and further away to a point where it was maybe lucid moments for four hours to lucid moments of 20 minutes in a 24-hour period of time. But she would wake up, and she'd be like, one in the morning or whatever.

[01:36:45] I stayed in the hospital. I was with her the whole time. Her and her brother and I rotated a little bit, but I was mostly there. And I had to go back and be with the kids here and there. But she would say to me, "Curtis, who's behind me?' I'm like, "The wall."

[01:37:00] My daughter came when she came to visit. I think my daughter's some-- she can see spirits, and she's like, "Dad is grandma Julia behind mom? And Katie's grandmother, grandma Julia was a real hardcore Christian, and she died the same day as Katie of the same breast cancer seven years prior.

[01:37:28] Luke: Whoa.

[01:37:29] Curtis: Yeah. So my daughter started to tune me into this, and I started to pay attention to it, and I started to feel that presence. Yeah, I was there when she passed. I played songs to her every day, and just did whatever she needed me to do. But looking back at it now, I think it was actually meant to go this way. I really do believe that. My daughter believes that. Her mother believes that. Her brother believes that. Because there was so much pain for so long.

[01:38:06] It wasn't even just the cancer. It was the pain in the mind of the anxiety and the trauma that she was not willing to move past. And that was the thing that troubled me the most, is that I've always been a mindset guy. I started reading Tony Robbins when I was 16 years old. And so I was right into, we need to change your mind, get you on a positive mindset. But she just couldn't do it.

[01:38:28] She self-medicated with marijuana a lot, and that prevented her from, I think, doing the work. And so when she passed, in a way it wasn't a surprise. I was preparing my kids for it in a way because it was tough. It was pain for a long time. And it was hard on our family. It was very difficult on-- and even our extended family that came to visit and be with us at that time.

[01:38:56] And so when she passed, it wasn't a surprise. And I remember having to deal with all the things you have to deal with when a loved one passes, especially a spouse, which nobody can imagine losing your wife. This is the mother of your children. It's insane. When I think about it objectively, I go, "How is it that I got through this?"

[01:39:23] To be honest, I'm not fully over this. This is my partner of 10 years. I was in love with my wife in high school. We never dated in high school, but I was in love with her. She's hot, blonde girl with a tattoo. This girl's so cool, badass. But I remember being at the funeral home and getting one of those pamphlets on the stages of grief.

[01:39:47] And I remember reading it and I just was like, "Okay, there's anger, abandonment, regret, guilt, sadness, depression, all these stages of grief." And I remember reading that, and her mother was always saying this to me after she passed because her mother stuck around for the month after Katie passed.

[01:40:08] And I became really close with her mom. And she would always say to me, she's like, "Ours is not to question. Ours is to accept." And something I've learned about the law in the last number of years has been acceptance is everything. I don't want to go into law tangent because it would totally derail my point.

[01:40:23] But acceptance is everything in life. And when I read all those stages of grief, I brought that pamphlet home and sat down with the kids, and I was like, "We need to just accept all of these stages and not be afraid to accept them, not be afraid to be angry, not be afraid to--" There was times where I was really angry at my wife, like, you abandoned me.

[01:40:47] You didn't have to go this way. You didn't have to do this. There was many times where I tried to intervene and say, "Why don't we get this surgery? I got this doctor who can freeze the tumor so that it doesn't metastasize." I was always trying to find solutions for her. It was exhausting because she would just shoot them down.

[01:41:04] And so I got to a point where I was just like, "Okay, this is you. This is your journey." But her mom would say, "We just have to accept." And so we accepted all the stages of grief, and we accepted them together. And I think that was the thing that really allowed us to get through it.

[01:41:23] The best is just embrace the anger. Be in the anger for the period of time. Cry. Talk about these things. We would talk about it with Katie's mother and my kids and her brother. We were so close. I inherited her family. Her family are now my family. Her brother is my best friend. He's the reason I'm here, because he's looking after my kids right now. He's at my house with my kids, and they love him. I was trying not to get too emotional about it, but yeah.

[01:42:01] Luke: It's all right. I cry in probably half the episodes.

[01:42:05] Curtis: Yeah. But it was acceptance, man. I try to always pull the lens back in times when I find myself getting into anger or emotions because I grew up as an angry kid. My parents divorced when I was seven. I was traumatized by that. I didn't deal with that until I was probably in my early 30s.

[01:42:22] But the thing that I always find myself saying is, I came into this life for the full human experience, and this is it. It involves loss. It involves pain. It involves suffering. It involves things that are completely out of your control, but this is what you signed up for.

[01:42:40] And so I truly believe that my wife and I had a spiritual contract, that we knew that we were going to come into this life and have this experience at this time, and she was going to leave at this time. And, I truly believe that. My daughter believes that, most importantly.

[01:42:57] My son is too young to really understand a lot of these things. I think he'll be a long time figuring these things out. He's only five. My daughter's eight, and she's very spiritually aware. She says to me the other day, she's like, "Dad, when I want mom, I just hold up my hand, and there she is."

[01:43:12] Luke: Wow.

[01:43:13] Curtis: Yeah. So yeah, it's acceptance because I just look at this as like we're spiritual beings having a human experience. That's what I truly believe. And so what is life without death? And yeah, parts of me are not over it, and I don't know if they ever will be. Nobody's ever going to replace Katie or my children's mother.

[01:43:41] But at the same time, I owe it to myself and my children to move on and be strong because it is so easy to be in grief forever and get into drinking or vices. And I just said, "That's not going to be my path. I'm going to embrace this. I'm going to accept it, and I'm going to move on and move forward and be strong for my children so that they can live a life of abundance that I want them to live."

[01:44:11] Because we have it. We're on this unbelievable homestead. We live in paradise. It's heaven. We're surrounded by God's creation. How jeopardizing would it be for all that we've built, that I built with my wife to just throw it all away and be a sad sack for my kids. And so we have our moments. We talk about mom all the time. Every day we talk about Katie, and we honor her.

[01:44:38] Luke: Beautiful, dude. It's such a powerful modeling for your kids too.

[01:44:43] Curtis: Yeah.

[01:44:44] Luke: You can explain how life works to kids, but nothing is more powerful than actually demonstrating how you walk through life with courage and acceptance and those principles that you're describing.

[01:44:58] Yeah, I think in my very limited experience of loss, which is pretty fresh because I just went to my dad's memorial though he died in January. But three days ago I was on top of a mountain at 11,000 feet, throwing his ashes to the wind. And. I think the most important thing that I'm learning is just that the feelings don't kill you.

[01:45:26] Curtis: No.

[01:45:26] Luke: They feel like they're going to kill you. You know what I mean? And they come up, and it's strong and it hurts. And then as long as I don't resist them, I just go, "Okay, I'm falling apart here on top of a mountain for a few minutes. Then next thing you know, I'm hiking down the mountain. Wow, what a beautiful day.

[01:45:45] It's like nothing lasts forever. The impermanence of our attachments and the things we love, as impermanent are the feelings around their loss. It's like everything has this, is imbued with this impermanence.

[01:46:00] Curtis: Absolutely. We're in a river.

[01:46:01] Luke: Yeah. But it's so easy to forget that.

[01:46:03] Curtis: It is. You have to check in. You have to check in and get back to center. And I just look at this as life is a river. Your energy is a river, and it's flowing. And sometimes there's resistance points and sometimes there's open points where it flows freely. But that's the journey.

[01:46:23] And my faith is stronger than ever. And I believe in the power of the spirit, and I believe in the power of manifestation more than ever. But sometimes your manifestation isn't somebody else's manifestation. And so where I've accepted that, maybe there was a greater plan with this, and there couldn't have been-- there could have been a really bad time for my wife to leave.

[01:46:54] Imagine if one of my children was still breastfeeding and she left. What if she left when the kids were just super dependent? It almost seems like it meant to go this way. And so I've accepted that. Her mother, her brother, who are closest to me have accepted that. My daughter, most importantly, has accepted that. And I'd say overall we're doing pretty good.

[01:47:18] Luke: That's epic, man. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And as I said, I hesitated opening up such a deep portal with a limited amount of time. That's beautiful. One thing that's been really helpful to me too is something I learned from David Hawkins. I don't know if you're familiar with his work.

[01:47:36] Curtis: Oh, yeah. Very much.

[01:47:36] Luke: So he used to do all this muscle testing and calibrate different things as true or untrue, and used that as a research tool. And for his entire career, it's in all his books and all his lectures, he tested it over and over and over again, was the fact, according to him and his research, that every person's moment of death is predetermined when they're born. So it's like the end of a movie is at one hour and 20 minutes.

[01:48:04] We don't know how the movie ends, but we know it ends at 120 minutes. He tests that over and over again, and I've never heard anything he's said that has not ring true to me, except maybe when he calibrated George Bush at 400, which is over the level of integrity.

[01:48:20] But anyway, that's another topic. But very few things did he ever say that sounded crackpot or unfeasible to me. And that's a pretty big leap in terms of one's worldview and just the nature of reality to think, wow, okay, so the moment I die is already predetermined. Then what am I worried about? Most of our fears stem from, ultimately--

[01:48:40] Curtis: Death.

[01:48:40] Luke: It leads to death. But when I think about people I've known that have died, like my dad-- okay, so he had a heart attack. He was in Florida. So in that exact moment, if his moment of death was predetermined, would he have been in a boating accident or-- you know what I'm saying? Fallen down, crossing the street.

[01:49:00] It's like, if that was his moment, it's so interesting. Then what else could it have been? But does give me some solace in my own dealing with my own mortality and facing that. If that's true, which it makes sense to me the cosmic laws universe, in terms of karma, you have a set amount of time here when you incarnate, but you don't know when it is, which for those of us that are spiritually inclined and have that orientation to life, like, wow, I'm here to evolve and grow, it makes sense because I don't how much time I have, therefore I got to get everything I can out of this incarnation in terms of my own evolution.

[01:49:44] So that's helpful to me and also absolves me of the responsibility of wanting to live longer. It doesn't really matter how long I live. It's like, "Oh shit. Did I really squeeze all the juice out of every moment that I was here? Did I live and feel and love fully?" But I find some reconciliation in that as people in my life, I'm sure as I get older, continue to move on, that maybe everyone does just have their time.

[01:50:14] Curtis: I think so.

[01:50:15] Luke: Maybe that's the moment. Boom. It was going to happen that way no matter what choices were made, no matter what path they walked. It's like, that's the end of your movie. It's comforting to me.

[01:50:27] Curtis: It is. It's comforting to me too. I've had a lot of loss in my life. I lost my best friend when I was 18. Watched him die in a diving accident. Lost my dad during COVID. Was at his bedside too. And I think, yeah, what are the lessons you bring back to the source if we're here to have a human experience and come down from infinite abundance and love and creation and come into this vessel and learn lessons and go back?

[01:50:53] And so it brings me a lot of comfort because also too, my wife was in so much pain, and she did not want drugs. My wife was a hero, as a heroine as far as-- we birthed both of our children at home. I delivered them with my bare hands. She didn't have any medical interventions whatsoever. And so she was tough. She was hardcore. She could withstand massive amounts of pain.

[01:51:18] So part of me when we were going through all this was just thinking this is just another experience for her to get through. And I've seen her be a champion before. Why wouldn't she be a champion at this point? But again, life doesn't always go as you expect it to. And my manifestation might not be her manifestation. There's a greater purpose to all of it.

[01:51:43] The level of insights that my daughter has had with this has just grounded me in faith and belief that she is in a better place. And as a guy who-- I've been a truther for 25 years. My dad told me about the Federal Reserve when I was 20 years old. He was so angry about all that stuff. And I've always come to these dichotomies of like, there's the world of God and creation, which you could say represents the Bible in Western law and just like the Western way.

[01:52:14] And then there's Black's Law dictionary. And there's God created the world. The devil administers the world. That's why he needs you to believe, and they need you alive. The devil has no use for you when you're dead. The only use he has for you is when you're alive. And so he needs you alive. He needs you to believe, and he needs you to consent.

[01:52:34] That's why we have to sign everything still. People think we live in a total tyranny. It's not necessarily true. You understand the law more than a lot of people. And so a big comfort for me, because she struggled with some of the pains in the world, COVID was difficult on her. And I sheltered my family from it when we were on the land.

[01:52:53] I went and did all the stuff and sometimes had to put on a mask to go into a store and do this BS. But part of me is comforted by the fact that the pain is gone. And I remember two weeks after she passed, it was actually the day after her memorial, or we called it the celebration of life, we had a beautiful event in the forest.

[01:53:13] We got this beautiful forest location on our property with a pond and this deck. And I woke up the next morning, I had both my kids sleeping in the bed with me, and I woke up, and the sun was rising on us. I just felt incredible. And I was just sitting there with my kids feeling love and just being like, it's quiet. I can hear the birds, and there's no pain, and everything's perfect.

[01:53:40] And so I felt at that moment, it's just a massive resolve. And my kids were there with me just feeling that too. Yeah, death is a hard thing. At the same time, it's part of life. And so if you don't accept, you're just going to fight that, and you're not going to move forward because you can't do anything else until you accept the reality.

[01:54:09] It's like, do you want to accept the past and maybe the bad things you've done in your life? Because if you don't accept them, how are you going to get better? It's like AA, people who are alcoholics. You can't start AA until you accept you're an alcoholic. You can't get through death until you accept death and all that comes with it. And so that was the thing that really has helped us through.

[01:54:34] Luke: Beautiful man. Well, thank you for sharing your heart. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, and I'm so excited to share you with the audience man and have people hopefully avoid some of the mistakes they might've made trying to get out there and do living on their own. So thank you for putting in all the years of work, and thank you for joining me today.

[01:54:54] Curtis: Thanks, brother.