What 99% of Off Grid Projects Get Wrong: Reframing a self-determined community model with Alexis Ziegler | Rock Bottom Ep. 008

Living Off-Grid at Living Energy Farm: Self-Determined Communities, DC Microgrids & Biogas

This episode visits Living Energy Farm to explore a scalable, community-based model of off-grid living that prioritizes self-determination over corporate dependence for food and energy. The conversation critiques mainstream “feel-better” environmentalism focused on electrification, solar subsidies, and electric cars, arguing that real sustainability requires major downscaling, cooperative living (about 10 people minimum), and radically reducing demand through efficient design like straw-bale insulation. The farm’s approach uses a high-voltage DC microgrid and “direct drive” from PV panels to tools and machinery, minimizing batteries to mostly nighttime lighting and cutting costs compared to battery-centric systems. They also describe practical upgrades like using a chest freezer as a fridge and developing warm-climate biogas in a temperate region using solar-heated digesters fed by organic waste, aiming for full energy independence. The guest shares his background from a hostile upbringing in southern Georgia, finding community at Twin Oaks, and emphasizes connection, mutual care, and intentional communities as the path forward.

00:00 Welcome to Living Energy Farm
02:14 Self Determination Politics
05:00 What Communities Mean
06:23 Touring Off Grid Comfort
07:08 Downscaling Energy Reality
08:12 Direct Drive Solar Explained
09:45 Bad Appliances and Fridges
10:59 Resale Value vs Planet
12:18 Spiritual Case for Change
14:08 Village Life and Security
16:48 Heating Cooking Without Wood
18:50 Core Pillars and Microgrid
22:35 Biogas Basics and Warmth
24:09 Biogas and Solar Cooking
24:48 Energy Independence Goals
25:38 Growing Up in Georgia
26:49 Finding Twin Oaks Community
28:13 Faith and Purpose Shift
29:17 Rock Bottom at Seventeen
31:27 Staying Connected to Survive
34:00 Healing Over Decades
35:41 Advice for Feeling Stuck
37:55 Self Determination Over Politics
42:04 Closing Resources and Wrap Up

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Living Energy Farms: https://livingenergyfarm.org/

Transcript

1:18

thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you being here. It's really cool to be visiting Living Energy Farms today. Um, I've heard a lot of people talk about it and to actually see it as really cool. And not only have you kind of built like a bit of a, a, a food forest here, you're actually living off the grid. And I think a lot of people talk about living off the grid, but like a very few people actually do it. And then b, if they do do it, it's like very expensive systems or it's people who have like. Master's degrees in the topics, but I feel like you've kind of found a formula that's pretty scalable. Uh, and it's actually cool to see it in action. And, uh, I think you were saying this, but it's like a lot of people don't believe it's possible, but when you actually see it, you're like, whoa. I'm happy of, for what we've been able to accomplish. I helped a lot of my friends in years past build off grid systems, and I've done. A, a, uh, quite a bit of work organizing around regional environmental issues and political issues in the past. So, for me it all comes together in the sense that, you know, it's not that politics are unimportant. Certainly if we could elect better leaders, that would be great, but if in the bigger picture, that the ecological Foundation sets the place, sets the stage for what's possible economically, and that is really what sort of drives the evolution of human culture over time. Or to say that in a much simpler way, in a way that's relevant to what we have now, uh, you cannot have a democracy built on an economy that's owned by a few people. Mm. And that's really no more than common sense. And yet we're kind of trapped or we feel trapped in that we don't know how to take care of ourselves without these big corporations who provide our energy and our food and everything we need, we complain about them. So I'm a very, uh, deep, uh, believer in self-determination. Mm-hmm. Um, and unfortunately, you know, I mean there's a big overlap with environmentalism, uh, with an environmental perspective. But unfortunately, the mainstream environmental groups have largely gone, taken a shortcut and gone towards what I would call palliative measures, uh, making people feel better. So, you know, instead of talking about consumption, instead of talking about lifestyle, instead of talking about it in a. Broader, more holistic way. They want to talk about windmills and solar panels and government subsidies for windmills and solar panels. That's really unfortunate. You know, like so much of the focus now on electrification in the industrial economies is really misplaced and there's a large and growing body of academic research, academic people who are, you know, documenting how impossible it is to simply fund industrial growth with. Batteries and solar panels and, uh, all of that. Um, just to look at electric cars. You know, 10% of humanity owns a car. So you're calling an electric car, an environmental solution, even at the price of all this degradation that happens for all the mining and whatnot. I mean, it's just unrealistic. And, but nobody really cares about the realism. What they really want is to feel better. So that's kind of the, the what, what we didn't want. Mm-hmm. We didn't want a, a new form of feel better environmentalism. Um, what we wanted, like you said, is scalability. You know, realistically, you know, it's really hard to, I mean, you don't wanna create one model that everybody everywhere is gonna use, but, to, uh, support ourselves in more self-sufficient, self-determined communities. I think is the political foundation of addressing the madness that's overtaking, particularly the United States. Um, you know, wealthy people don't wanna pay taxes and they're gonna, they're willing to kill a lot of people to not have to pay taxes. They do it in indirect ways, very Christian ways and all of that. But that's really the, um. The background for the right wing, uh, stuff that's going on these days. And the alternative is self-determined communities. Mm-hmm. What is a self-determined community for someone who might not know what that is? Uh, it means that you, have as much control as possible over where your food and other necessities come from, and you're networked with other communities doing the same thing. So you get to make real choices instead of being a house slave, as Malcolm X would put it. He talked about field slaves and house slaves. You know, the field slaves are the ones who feel the brunt of oppression and the house slaves are the ones who like their situation, even though they're actually enslaved. And you know, so we can tell Americans that you're free, but what, what Americans really are these days is pretty narcissistic. Or people in middle class industrial societies in general. But we're wholly dependent on the corporations for food, for energy, for everything. Mm. We've, we've all become very comfortable house slaves. Mm. And breaking free of that is not easy. Certainly. And you can't do it alone. Mm-hmm. Um, and the anathema part of it, or the path you just can't talk about is sustainability. You cannot do in a suburban home. You cannot do in a private apartment. Um, what we tell people when I do tours of LEF Living Energy Farm is, you know, it takes 10 people minimum. To even get 10 people to work together in the United States without money or coercion is challenging, but that's the real challenge. You cannot build good thermal systems, good electric systems, renewable energy based, good conservationist systems with less than 10 people. Yeah. Well, what's really interesting, uh, visiting, living Energy Farms, which is, where we're at right now, is just how many systems you've been able to make with just simple solar panels, old school batteries and just like. Everything works. It's completely off grid. There's, there's not a single hookup into the system, but meanwhile you're able to run heavy machinery. The showers are warm. Uh, you know, we just had like a hot lunch and hot coffee. So basically the creature comforts that people expect or want in life. When we think of environmentalism in the United States, we think of like electric cars and solar subsidies and all these other like big projects, but really it seems simple. You mentioned it takes like, these things work better when you have more people living within it. Yeah, you need 10 people. And it's not just a question of work, better, quote unquote, it's, it's, um, you know, the laws of physics don't care about our politics. They really don't. And, uh, you know, so if you take, uh, an ordinary house or a badly built house, I mean, you mentioned, okay, we do have some batteries, we do have some solar panels. But if you add solar panels to an ordinary American lifestyle, to an ordinary American house. You're probably increasing your total footprint. You're certainly not decreasing it. And again, that's anathema to say that, but you know, we consume massive amounts of energy. We've gotten accustomed to it and it's kinda like, you know, it's an addiction among many, and you know, so you've got a friend of yours who's drinking too much. What do you do? Find em a new flavor of beer. I mean, it's really pretty obvious that. We need to downscale, I would say two orders of magnitude. Mm-hmm. So we're looking at, you know, not 90%, but closer to 1% for it to really be sustainable over the long term. Mm-hmm. And I think for most people, that's unfathomable. And you know, LEF has worked out well. Um. And, and we're approaching that. I don't know if we're there exactly, but we, we've, we're close. Um, and you know, we've kind of devised a whole new way of use doing solar, and it's not based on solar panels and batteries. It's based primarily on number one community organization. So I'm not trying to do all this by myself. Not trying to manage a garden and renewable energy systems and a biogas system and all of this by myself. And then we try to do a really good job with the insulation. I mean, the buildings are straw bales, so they're really thick walls, good insulation. The point is to bring your energy use way down. And then once you've got a much smaller energy use, try to do that with renewable energy. And then what we discovered, and it's been really cool, is the direct drive. The fact that we can run a whole lot of equipment. Straight from the PV panels to the equipment. You mentioned heavy machinery, heavy equipment. So I've got a machine shop, we've got farm tools, kitchen tools. It's all direct drive, which means there's, there's, so the PV panels are made by a big, nasty corporation, but we've got like 300 watts per person, not 3000 or 30,000 the way some people do. And, we run, we do the heavy work during the day. So there's the PV panels, not free to make but much smaller scale than what most people have. And then it's a copper wire going to mostly we use what are called permanent magnet motors. They're just copper wire and magnets. So you're talking about a system that my children and grandchildren can use. Mm-hmm. A lifetime energy supply that's about 80% cheaper to build than a battery based kit. Debbie, my partner, calculated the numbers compared to like the Tesla Powerwall approach. Mm. We've got about 2% as much batteries. Mm. Um, 'cause we're only use the batteries for lights at night. DC LED is really efficient. So we have a tiny little battery set. We like nickel iron batteries, but that's not the important part. The important part is the design that gets you there. Mm-hmm. And, and you mentioned that a lot of the appliances that we use today are, are poorly designed. I mean, I think the fridge is the best example. You open up the fridge, cold air fall. So as soon as you open up the fridge, all the cold air is left. Um, it sounds, it's really cool how you've kind of used what we'd con traditionally called like a deep freezer, um, but you're using that as a fridge and it seems like you've also been doing this work in Puerto Rico as well. Yeah, we've got a number of projects overseas and you know, so some things are easy to convert and other things are more difficult. Water pumps are super easy. There's DC so we do everything DC direct current, that's what comes out of photovoltaic panel, so there's no alternating ac, like what's out on the grid. And the advantage of DC it's tremendously flexible. The voltage can go all over the place. Mm-hmm. 500% change and it's fine. And you can't do that with AC appliances. So, yeah, like for a water pump or any kind of like, either, you know, just watering your lawn or if you're a farm and you're wanting to do big scale irrigation, those are super easy. Refrigerators are tougher, and I have to say. It's not just the air rushing out of a fridge when you open the door. The thing just sitting there uses a lot of energy just 'cause they're badly designed. Mm-hmm. I've put meters on fridges and I've found 'em as high as $250 per year. Mm. And electricity use while the label says 40 bucks. Mm. They deteriorate quickly. It's just a really bad machine. I feel like in mainstream American society we're obsessed with this like.. Typical prototypical kitchen where you have the stainless steel fridge and the stainless steel appliances and and I feel like a lot of that just comes down to like, people wanna be able to resell their homes and so they kind of dick locked in with like the status quo. Yeah. Yeah. The resale value of American homes has been pitted against the fate of the whole planet at this point. That's the reason. All the environmental groups and the people who are willing to tell people that you can hold onto your big house and your big car and just put up enough solar panels and it'll all be fine. That message sells really well. You know, those people are rich and famous and leading organizations with, a hundred million, $200 million, uh, budgets and, we have our following, but it's a much harder message to try to, um, tell people to change their whole lifestyle. So that's a big problem. But you know, we're very adaptable creatures. We just have to be inspired to adapt in an intelligent way. You know, wealthy people can buy commercials on television, they can create social movements, and we send our children off to war if need be. Um, but the level of of change people are willing to engage when it hasn't been endorsed by the wealthy powers that be is a much, uh, harder challenge. Um hmm. You know, what I tell people, you know, is that we're going there whether we like it or not, 200 years from now, everybody's gonna be living in self-sufficient communities, whether we like it or not. Laws of physics don't give a damn about any of this political silliness that we engage in. Doesn't care how much we lie to each other, lie to ourselves, you know, I don't want to, I'm not Christian in the traditional sense of, um, well, the mainstream sense of. Course the Christianity's becoming corrupted these days, but I'm a, I do consider myself a very spiritual person, and I think, okay, there's a bigger world out there that we understand by some measure there's this, um, magical mystical creation of the living earth. Is it only the product of 4 billion years of evolution or is it a, some higher intelligence there? It's kind of the same thing to me either way. Um, but it's our obligation to protect it and. I think we could build a, um, a movement around that. I don't see any reason we can't, it's obvious to me, it's kind of a manifest religion right there looking at us. I mean, heaven is right there. You know, our spirits and our ancestors live right there and pointing to the forest. Mm-hmm. Which you can't see from the camera. Um, and you know, that's ultimately the foundation, not the resale value of your fricking house. So in 200 years, we're going, we're going back to that and I mean, our goal now is to ramp it down. To try to land the airplanes instead of crashing it. 'cause it's a pretty big difference. Mm. Um, I think if we crash bad, we're gonna take out most of the megafauna that's left. And it's also a question, you know, we're gonna live in self-sufficient villages eventually. Mm-hmm. But are there gonna be patriarchal, nasty, horrible places? Are they gonna be places where that are better than that, you know? Mm-hmm. Where people mostly get along with each other. I mean, we can choose either one, um, but the laws of physics are not going to be denied. Call it God's will. That's what I've started thinking of. Yeah. That's, that's the will of something bigger than us. Well, it's funny 'cause from the outside, like someone could be like, oh, you know, that's, that's prepping. But as a visitor here, as someone who's been touring communities, like this is just a more enjoyable way to live. Like, you know, you have your family here, there's other other people here. Everyone comes together for lunch and dinner. People take turns cooking. The food's been delicious. Like it's, it's off the land. The vibes and the energy here are so good. So it, it, you know, it's not even about, oh, in 200 years we're gonna have to do it, but, you know, if people can start doing it now and to know that you can do it without having to spend a lot of money on, on energy. I mean, I think one of the scariest parts about, leaving the system, if you will, is security is having like a typical home and then having all this money to pay for the home, but, but it's so expensive just to pay for this thing and then, you know, you gotta replace your fridge every 10 years. My parents are replacing a fridge now, and it's like in some part of the house that's not easily accessible, so I have to cut like a hole and it's like, hey, now it's become, you know, like, what is that for? Um, yeah, I mean, what's all that worth? You twist your ankle and there's nobody to get you a bowl of soup. Um, I mean, humans have always lived in villages and bands and social groups up until, you know, the last, it's really only been the last a hundred years. Of course, it's changed, you know, slowly that we've been told that we should isolate ourselves if necessary for the sake of our jobs and survival in a capitalist small C or big C capitalist society is based on money. Access to wealth. So people wanna hold onto that, but your security is ultimately embedded in how many people care about you. Mm. Uh, and life is far more rewarding if you spend it in the time in the company of people who care about you. So, yeah, I don't, what's all that money gonna buy you if nobody cares? Um, so, and you know, we are comfortable. I mean, I'm a little, I'm, I'm pleased that we have achieved the level of comfort that we have. Because I built a lot of off grid kits for friends of mine over the years, off grid houses. 'cause you know, I work in the trades and all those systems get abandoned over years, over the time because the battery kits are too expensive, people don't wanna replace 'em. So know, we figured out the community scale, the insulation, and then we figured out the direct drive here. And so, yeah, I got a refrigerated lemonade. I don't drink beer. Mm-hmm. But, um, the house is pretty cool in the summer, certainly warm in the winter. I don't have to work too hard a little bit in the fall, certainly, um, pretty comfortable. Um, you know, it's just, it's not social status. It's not what is ordained by the powers that be as, um, uh, you know, the way an American's supposed to live. Yeah. And even on the heating front, you mentioned all this firewood behind us is enough for three years. This particular stack? Yeah, I'd say three years, um, for 10 people. Wow. So we, we, uh, we could live pretty comfortably with never striking a match. Um, we do burn a little bit of firewood in late December, January, uh, to, to heat water, you know, and the solar resources are low, a little bit to cook with potentially. Although actually in the last two years we haven't burned any for cooking. We're running, um, Isaacs insulated solar electric cookers that was developed by. Peach Schwartz out of Cal Poly and we worked with him to, we make bigger ones. He's making cheaper ones to go around the world. Anyway, the combination of the Isaacs and now biogas, we don't burn wood to cook with anymore. So, yeah, the um, some homesteaders call it sustainable to have a big old woodlot and burn a pile of firewood, and oh my God, those outdoor boilers are the worst invention ever created by humanity next to nuclear weapons, perhaps. Um, yeah, so we do not burn gobs and gobs of firewood, and if everybody burned firewood the way modern homesteaders do, then we'd cut the whole forest down pretty quickly. Yeah. Well, it's cool how dialed in you have it. Every system, and I mean, we could probably go into detail. But you know, I, I, I feel like it'd be best to, to steer listeners to. Some preexisting stuff that goes into an in-depth tour. Um, yeah. Well, so the websites, living energy farm.org and living energy lights.com. There's a, a few little articles there about like, how does a DC microgrid work and all of that. And there's a book, a fairly short book, uh, empowering Communities that's linked off of there. Uh, and you can download that as a PDF. Uh, when I see people face to face, we have paper copies, but I don't wanna mail paper copies all over the place. So if you're not here. Just download the PDF and yeah. That, that goes into, it's, um, I revised it pretty significantly in the last year to try to just make it more of a technical manual. Like it was kind of more personal book historically. Mm-hmm. But now it's mostly just a, a, an overview of how all these systems work and how they fit together. So if you wanna understand that, that's the best way to get to that. Mm-hmm. What would you say like, are the core pillars. Sitting atop the community foundation of, well, the community foundation is the biggest part That is the foundation of it. I mean, I can build a solar hot water system for one person or, or a couple for $5,000. And the same solar hot water system can support 10 people. So your cost per capita, obviously plummets. Cooperative use is really the magic bullet that makes renewable energy work. 'cause for renewable energy to work, people want, they want simple, good and evil. Good and evil. Well, solar panels are not good. Mm-hmm. They're very expensive, very resource intensive. But if we use them in such a way that we need, you know, 5% as much as people are using on these big grid ty racks where they tie into the grid and they've got five or 10 kw on the roof. Okay, well, it's not free lunch, but it's much better. So cooperative use is really the magic bullet. It's true for thermal systems, it's true for electrical systems, it's true for biogas. All of those systems. They start to work, not both mechanically, but also financially. The payback, I mean, we can preach, etiology all you want, but if there's no payback there, it doesn't work. If your shower costs 5,000 bucks, you're not gonna, you're not gonna do it. You're gonna go out and get $120 electric water heater if your shower costs, um, you know, a 10th that much, and then it works for a lifetime and you don't have to pay an electric bill. Wow, okay. That starts to work financially. So the numbers work at 10 people. Just ideology aside, just, you know, return on investment, payback, whatever the hell you wanna call it, it works. So beyond that, yeah, we figured out the DC microgrid. That was great. And again, it's integrated across, you know, a whole community. It's not trying to support just one little appliance. The history of solar power is a lot about a low voltage power system that supports one use, and then they try to multiply that up. Keeping it low voltage, keeping it tied, keeping it battery based. What we have is an integrated system, and it's pretty stunning because I learned, um, I did a lot of work on machinery, uh, out there in the big world. And, you know, uh, if you took everything we have at Living Energy Farm, at this point, we have about 16 kilowatts worth of motors. So machine shop, you know, seed grinders, seed blowers, seed cleaners, blenders, uh, choppers for the kitchen cookers where we cook most of our food on solar, electricity, and insulated solar, electric cookers. Um, if you took all that to a big solar kit company, a supplier, and said, all right, I wanna do all this, they'd probably be two or $300,000 worth of equipment to support that we're doing it for 1400 watts. Hmm. Um, in modern terms, you're talking about three, $400 worth of solar panels. To supply 16 kilowatts worth of motors for 10 people for a lifetime. Mm. It is, like I say, we're talking two orders of magnitude cheaper. Mm. It's very different and it works. Mm. I don't wash my clothes at night. Who cares? You know, I adjust my lifestyle a little bit based on the weather. Who cares? You know, if I'm, if I'm gonna cut like this, firewood is cut with a solar driven saw. It's a big, um, buck saw that used to run off of a farm tractor. Um. It's as fast as a chainsaw, but I'm not gonna do it on a cloudy day. It's a cloudy day today. I'm not gonna do it today. I'll wait Lamar, it's gonna be sunny and then I'll run that big saw. Mm. But today I can go out in the machine shop. I was out in the machine shop all uh, this morning running a drill press in LA them fixing a piece of farm equipment. If it's fine in the clouds, our, our motors run in the clouds. People don't understand that, but with the high voltage direct drive, you get less power in the clouds, but we still cruise along. So we do adjust our lifestyle a bit based on the weather, but it's, it's radically cheaper and more effective and more durable than traditional solar kits. And it works. Mm. So yeah, the pillars are cooperative design, good insulation, straw, bale, well designed buildings that just don't dump energy everywhere. And then you stack on top of that, the DC microgrid, the biogas, the sort of actual tools that kind of make it work. Yeah. And then you even have the biogas. So it's like every, every piece of compost, even I. Uh, did my number two in a toilet this morning that I pumped into the, uh, mm-hmm. Yeah. And, uh, even when I turned on the, the, the gas to heat up some water, I, I noticed it was a different type of gas. Can you tell us a little bit more about the biogas? So, biogas is the same thing as methane is the same thing as natural gas. It's, uh, a, a digestion process with ArcHa, which are, uh, microorganisms that existed on the planet Earth 4 billion years ago. They're one of the first. And they can consume any organic matter and emit methane. There's a lot of industrial scale biogas in the United States and in other industrial countries, sometimes tied to the big animal feedlot operations. I mean, those are evil, but you get all that waste. It does make biogas, um, the challenges and they do smaller scale biogas in the tropics. So the challenges for biogas, um, the big one is just needs to stay warm. So the tank, the digester itself. 85 to 110 degrees is kind of the optimal window. You're doing pretty good down to 80. You start getting significantly below 80 degrees inside the tank and it just doesn't work as well. You can get some gas, but a lot less so in a cold climate or temperate climate, you've gotta have a really well insulated tank 'cause you don't have this thing indoors. And then you gotta keep it warm. So we have a solar flat plate, a system just like you'd used to heat hot water for taking showers or whatever, just pumping heat into this digester. And then from there you feed it any kind of organic matter. You don't have to have animal manure. We do put some human waste into our, but. A lot of it's grass clippings, and this time of year there's watermelon, rinds, and all this stuff coming off the farm. Mm-hmm. Delicious watermelon. Right? So the biogas is not time specific. You know, I can cook breakfast at 6:00 AM or cook toast for the kids at 10:00 PM whereas the insulated solar electric cookers, we do probably 70% of our cooking on the solar and the high voltage cookers that we have, they'll cook in moderately cloudy weather. They'll cook in bitter cold weather. And you're in the kitchen cooking with your cooker, not running out in the yard to fuss with some solar cooker. So that kind of solar cooker dramatically better than other solar cookers. And the, and then the gaps, the heavily cloudy days, early, late is all done with the biogas. Mm. And we, and the biogas, it took us a few years to sort that out, but the system we have now is working really well and we're gonna try to power the farm tractors with it. Uh, so our whole system now is fully energy independent without big battery sets, without propane or natural gas or grid power. And we're still burning a little bit of gasoline in the tractors. It's 30, 40 gallons a year. It's not that much. You know, to grow four acres of seeds, that's what we grow for money, open, pollinated seeds, and most of our food, and we're gonna try to do that with biogas. Mm-hmm. We worked with wood, gas and turpentine and now we're working with biogas. Um, so biogas is a very flammable, very, very useful fuel that's pretty easy to make. Um, and it's not so hard when you got 10 people so you can kind of. Again, the systems need to fit together. Yeah. Well, it seems like you have it really dialed in now. Um, I'm, I'm really curious about the origin story. So, uh, you grew up in, in south Georgia or, yeah. Southern Georgia.. uhhuh. Can you tell me what it was like growing up? Well, I, I grew up a county settled by the Salzberg's, uh, just north of Savannah, Georgia. So there's this actually a statue in Savannah to, for the Salzburg from Salzburg, Austria, which means salt city. So my last name is Ziglar. So that county was Ziglar haw Zetler zipper, right down the line. A bunch of salsburger. Anyway, but it was very conservative and my father was crazy, bitterly racist guy who was, uh, pretty bad to his children, basically. Um, pretty fundamentalist Christian. Um, I felt like I was a Martian. I came from somewhere else. It's like, why are you people? And this is crazy. I mean, there's some good sides to it. Certainly. I grew up on a farm. We had good food too. You know, and I had the freedom that country kids have to romp in the woods and do all that stuff. And I learned some skills. but for me, especially as I older, got older, I became quite isolated. it's very conformist culture. I didn't really have any particular support, so I kinda had to do it on my own and that was difficult. By the time I gotta be a teenager, it's like, okay, get me outta here. So I moved to Twin Oaks when I first came there when I was 18. That certainly those who are listening. Twin Oaks is a, uh, the largest, eg the largest secular income sharing community in the country. Um, and it's unique in that it has a very strong social culture there. It's really easy to kind of get to know people. And Living Energy Farm has social connections with Twin Oaks. We are a lot more focused than they are in a lot smaller, but certainly when I was 18 in my early twenties, when it served me well, it was a good place for me to sort of reorient my life. How did you find Twin Oaks? Just, this was pre-internet? Yeah. An classified ad in the back of a magazine. The Humanist magazine. The Humanist magazine, which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist anymore. Um, yeah, just a classified ad and I came and visited him. It was really strange because even though it was culturally kind of the opposite end of the planet. For me, it was all very similar. What I did on the farm was I'd get up and figure out what needed to be done and do it. You know, I'd walk around the farm and fix the fences and make sure the cows were okay and take care of the gardens in the fields, you know, my brothers and family worked with that too. That's what I did at Twin Oaks. I mean, I was started doing a lot more mechanical stuff at Twin Oaks, but it was a get up, okay, what's broken today? What, what needs to pay attention to? So my work was pretty similar in a lot of ways and I learned very quickly and you know, found people to talk to finally. So it was a real, social transition is huge, for me. But I had the environmental, I mean, you know, I, I was raised Christian and to me the good side of Christianity is it gets you past your narcissism. I mean, American narcissism at this point is a disease. It's pretty terrible. Um, of course the consumer society loves to feed that 'cause. The more narcissistic people are, the more crap you can sell to them. True. So the good side of Christianity is it teaches you not to be a narcissist, at least. And of course these days Christianity has been manipulated for all sorts of political measures. It always has historically, uh, as well. But for me, I sort of transposed that over onto the natural world. It's like, what do you mean God up in the sky and a tree there? That's God right there, obviously. Mm-hmm. It's not obvious. Mm-hmm. So I kind of developed my own. I mean, I never thought I was Jesus in any, uh, you know, delusional sort of way, but I think kind of my own Messianic mission, that's what became important to me and that kind of became my roots, which is what got me through. The madness, when, uh, when did you start having, I guess, these visions for a better world? When I was a little kid, I knew I was different and I knew it was my role to like make the world a better place. And when I was second, third grade, I knew that. Would you say your rock bottom then was growing up or just before I left Georgia? 17. Yeah. 16, 17. Can you walk us through like what it felt like to be that 17-year-old? oh, it was bad. It was really quite bad. I mean, it was, it was unmistakably the worst part of my life for sure. Physically I would keep moving and that was good. But, you know, I was going for weeks at a time without sleeping and you read the psychology textbooks, you know, people can't do that, but I did it. Mm. Um, weeks at a time, no sleep. because the environment around me was so hostile mm-hmm. To my belief system. I knew that I couldn't just go to somebody and say, Hey, I'm having a really hard time. They would just use it to destroy me basically ideologically, so that, that I had to hide everything. Um, so that kind of hypersensitized me to feeling like I was under constant threat, which is part of the reason I couldn't sleep. So yeah, it was like, it was like being in a situation with nobody to talk to. Nobody who would just listen to me or talk to me or whatever about my own personal. What was going on in my life. I mean, you know, there's a few people in high school are connected with a little bit, but not much. Um, and then feeling like the entire environment around me was trying to destroy me. And it was, in a sense that's what conservative cultures do is they destroy nonconformist. Mm-hmm. So a lot of people end up dead. Yeah. Suicide is, was common. You know, I mean, I guess that's a blessing of the internet. It is easier to reach out at this point. You know, so when I was in redneck Georgia at 16, 17 years old, it's like I knew these other places existed, but it was kind of an abstraction. I had no idea that I could not in any way sense myself. Being with a different group of people in a different place. And I knew that, you know, I'd ask myself, what do I need? Why is my life such a mess? I just need, I need connection with other people. I knew that there's nothing I could do about it until I got old enough. And finally just, it kind of got for me to the point where I said, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be dead soon. I'm gonna get outta here. Mm-hmm. So I just left and it was, it was hard to leave even then 'cause it was very rooted to that land and very rooted to the place. Um, in spite of the madness. Yeah, getting through that, you know, reaching out, you know, getting out of your bubble, out of your shell is really hard when you're young. 'cause it's just so natural to be in that And since then I've did a lot of support work for people in transition. Crazy people mentally ill. What do we wanna talk about? All of our activist leaders are crazy to a greater degree. I mean, if you're comfortable and happy, you don't get out and risk your neck to change the world. Um, so that's part of the deal. But yeah, eat, work, sleep, keep moving. That's what I tell people are in the midst of a. It's like your spiritual path is gonna take a while. You're not gonna figure this all out in the next week, but in the meantime, eat, work, sleep, and stay connected. I mean, the people who make it are the ones who stay connected. The ones that isolate. Stay connected to what other people. Mm. I could go down the list. I could give you the names of a dozen suicides. I know. And the suicides have all been, and some of 'em are kind of quasi suicides, but the people who die are the ones who let themselves get isolated. Mm. You will not make it on your own. You will not. Mm. I mean, I was that close to not making it. And finally, you know, when I got to Twin Oaks, it just like real people and we just sit down and hang out. Yeah. And suddenly I became a human being. It's like, wow, what a difference. Even now, you know, I walk around the city streets and I dress like a bum Sometimes people try to hand me money. I'm like, it's okay. I just don't wanna buy new clothing. Uh, and I'm not quite a human being in their eyes. I know that because America's so class conscious and you've gotta like dress nicely and look a certain way and have a certain education. I don't care about all that now, but when you're young, it's hard 'cause you do care. Mm. You know, you know, once you're older you can kind of not give a shit. But when you're young, you inherently give a shit about what the people around you think. Mm. You've gotta find people who, you know, were willing to, to listen to you and li and you listen to them. You know, when I first got to Twin Oaks, a friend of mine and we're still good friends, you know, 'cause I was blathering on one day about how difficult the world was and he, he looked at me and said. You want friends, all you gotta do is ask questions and listen to the answers. That's it. And that is it. Just go sit down somewhere and if somebody's willing to sit down, just start asking 'em questions. I mean, make sure they're not up to something else, but ask questions, listen to the answers. It goes from there. And you gotta stay connected. So eat, sleep, eat, sleep, work, stay connected. Yeah, that's what you gotta do. Push through it and it takes time. Changing things up seems to be a common theme on this podcast of, uh. Getting out of a rock bottom situation. And, now you're at Twin Oaks and you know, you start contributing. Were there ever like periods beyond that that were tough or did you feel like just kind of like landing in the right group and like, you know, then the rest was just kind of like upward or upward, but on a long, slow, hard curve? Um, I mean, naturally this is an interview. We're not gonna spend hours talking about my life, but, um. I mean, one measure for me, I mean, and I don't believe in labels if I wanted to be PTSD or whatever, but I don't really believe in all of that. Mm-hmm. But I do watch my dreams. And for the first five years at Twin Oaks, I never had a dream about Twin Oaks or about anybody at Twin Oaks. Mm. Five years. It was all trying to process, um, just what I'd been through as a kid. And a lot of it was a blood bath. It was kind of, um, just constantly under attack in my dreams. And after five years. Um, started, it started to shift a bit. It took about 35 years for me to have present time dreams. Hmm. Um, I'm 50, how old am I? 58, 59. I lose track somewhere. Late fifties. Um, and it's really only been in the last few years that I start dreaming about. So Debbie's my partner. We have two kids. Have a wonderful family. Last night I just had a dream, like me and my daughter Rosa were in Charlottesville or in a town and I'm trying to figure out whether or not I'm building some house somewhere and she's kind of wandering through the city. Is that okay? I think she's old enough maybe, but like a present time dream based on, that's only been in the last few years. How do you get through like blocks today? Do you ever find yourself in, you know, frustrated moments or, oh golly, who's not frustrated while the United States is sinking in into an authoritarian denialist culture? I mean, it's a little better for me because I study the late Roman Empire, and this is exactly what empires do. I maintain some connections with people. I'm very focused on my projects. I feel like I'm having more of an impact on the world than I ever have. That's kind of the balance for me. you know, A lot of young people are feeling very stuck today. What can people do who feel that way and who might be inspired by these people living in communities and living off the grid, where can they start? ic.org is a good, uh, intentional communities is what IC stands for. ic.org as a good site. Of course, we have our website. We don't, we're a very small facility though. I wanna say I've heard that stuck thing. So, you know, I'm not as young as I used to be. The number of people I've had come to me and they're. 50, 60, 70 years old. I'm like, yeah, I've wanted to live in community all my life and I just never could make it work. It's like, what? How stuck are you and what is it that has you stuck? Mm-hmm. Um, you know, it was, you know, at the ripe old age of 18, it was not easy for me to break free and go do, I mean, I kind of had to get to the point where I was gonna end up dead if I didn't. So, I know, I know it's not easy, but don't wait until you're 50 to do what you wanna do when you're 20. I mean, for god's sake, it's your life. Mm. You know? Find the people. Find the place, find the thing, and, and you know what, what you got to lose Gonna spend your life living in the Matrix and look back and say, oh shit, that was a mistake. Mm-hmm. I, a lot of people who say that, I met a lot of older people who like spend their whole life and they're just scared of being poor. Mm-hmm. They're scared of not having money and not having their own private car in their own private house. It's like, give it up dude. Your planet's burning down. Your whole political democracy is coming down around your head. You know, we've got real live Nazis trumpling around pretending to be patriots. You're worried about No, no, no. You need, you need to move through this. Okay, folks. And the funny thing is, is like having the home and having the car is just, is just further isolation from people, which is like, I think further. So it's like the things that we're trying to protect that we, we see as security are just so far from like actual, actual security. Actual security is how many people care about you. That's, that's what matters at the end of the day. I mean, if you have a bunch of people who care about you, then if you have financial difficulties, you have a. Someplace to go to, somebody to turn to. If you get sick, you have somebody to turn to. If you do not have people who care about you, you got a problem. You need to fix it. So that's what you need. Build the relationships. And of course, you need to build relationships with people who can relate to you. You know, whatever your, the core of who you are is. And that's a different, of course for all of us. And dammit, we need to save the planet. We are currently trapped by an imperial culture that wants to destroy the planet for short term profit Obvious. And, you know, there is a better way, and it's not a bunch of wind metals and solar panels on a mountaintop. It's not just voting for the right person and demonizing the wrong person. You know, our society is gonna go through some fundamental economic shifts and we just need to do it on purpose. That's all. You know, imagine the idealist, the, uh, the perfect village. You know, a hundred years from now, they're all working together. You know, it's simpler, but you know, they have some technology, but you know, not automobiles and airplanes. And just do it on purpose. Just do it now. Nothing's stopping us, but our own fear, our own inefficient, our own like, oh, I can't do that. Nobody on television told me to do that. Nobody on TikTok, whatever Facebook told me to do that. It's like, no, you gotta do it. You know? I mean, protest great. Fine, but it's not about good guys and bad guys at this point. I mean, the, the system we have, the economic system is creating the political madness that we have because of the concentration of wealth. Mm. There's a class of people who fund a crazy, messed up media. That lies to people all day long. And then those people believe what they're heard and they're creating a lot of political madness. It's kind of predictable in a sad sort of way. But the antidote to that, I mean, sure, vote for the right person, great vote as much as you can legally vote. That's great. And that is like, you know, it's like such a small part of the actual change. Yeah. It is a tiny, tiny, tiny piece. And you know, we like to be frustrated at demons. I'm so frustrated though, at the point who all of the media now is focused on their chosen demon. This person and that person who's a bad guy, okay, there's a lot of bad guys, but that's not really the problem here. The problem here is that those bad guys are the ones who own corporations, who feed you, who provide your energy, and that's what self-determination comes back to. It all goes, and this is not just me pulling this out of the air. I mean, people who study anthropology history have been saying this for centuries. Carl Fogel back over a hundred years ago, hydraulic societies, you talked about how the, the irrigation based, you know, dynasties from out to. Several thousand years ago, you know, the concentration of economic power made for a concentration of political power. Yeah. And now people are so misunderstanding, like solar panels could have been a good thing. Instead we put 'em out in fields, you know, instead of like bringing 'em home and developing a lifestyle where we live with the energy instead of like trying to, you know, maintain our connection to those big systems. Yeah. Even recycling. God, I hated. I was so opposed to plastic recycling. Back when recycling was beginning to come curbside in the 1990s, everybody was who had a brain? Mm. 'cause plastic's not recyclable, so they mixed in plastic, which is not a recyclable material and takes up a huge amount of space. Mm. So now we have this big, bulky recycling program and it all gets burned. Mm. It's the same thing happened with solar panels. We took something good, not perfect, but good. And we made it bad to appease middle class people and to appease corporations and to appease the big environmental groups who don't wanna sell hard messages. Now you've got plastic in every cell in your body. Yeah. 'cause of appeasement, planet appeasement. You choose planet resale value. Yeah. You know, it's funny what you're saying 'cause I feel like what you're saying is so compatible with both like left wing and right wing people. It's basically how do you become self-sufficient? Um, and when I talk to right wing people, friends and family, like, you know, there's just so much frustration with a lot of these environmental programs and to your point, like a lot of them, yeah, like making a field of solar panels doesn't really, it's just like a drop. Like it doesn't really do much. Um, I mean, it's not that, it's not do, doesn't do much. It's making things worse really. I mean, it's just not an answer. I mean, drill, baby drill, yeah. Is this illusion that we can keep growth going with an infinite, with enough energy. The electrification program is the same thing. It's just solar electricity versus oil, and they're both black and white thinking like there's this good thing and we just need to do more of it. Mm. Instead of like, okay, let's develop this broader, long-term perspective of how do we live on this earth in a sustainable manner. I mean, we can send people to the moon, we can build interstates, we build airplanes, we build all this big stuff. Sustainability is way easier than what we are currently doing. Mm-hmm. Way easier. Mm. It's just not rich people telling us to do it. Yeah. Is there anything you would like to add or, or, or say? Well, the website's, living energy farm.org, living energy lights.com, self-empowered, self-determined communities are the foundation of the solution to everything we need to do at this point. It's not government funding for renewable energy. It's not just good guys and bad guys. No matter how bad the bad guys may seem, they're just acting out the will of, of a concentrated economic system. And the deconcentration of that economic system is up to us to build self-determined communities and it's way easier than what we're currently doing way easier. So, yeah. Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for being here.