Doug and Stacy are the OG off-grid homestead channel on YouTube. Seventeen years at it, 1.3 million subscribers. And they didn’t plan their way into it.
They sold the 3,000 square foot house. Moved into a one-bedroom apartment to get used to living small and shed everything they didn’t need. Then they bought land with cash, moved out in July, and Doug lived in a tent while he built a log cabin by hand before winter hit.
No running water. No septic. No electricity. No plan past getting a roof up before the cold came.
Doug called that deadline the thing that made it happen. “A lot of people procrastinate. Timelines with the weather really make a difference.”
In this interview from Exit & Build Virtual Summit 1, they get into:
Why overthinking is the thing standing between most people and the life they want. Stacy’s words: “If you just try to study study study, think think think, it’s only going to delay your process.”
How Doug learned to live off-grid by apprenticing with the Amish for four or five years. Working for free, butchering chickens, watching how a house runs without electricity. And how it started with an old neighbor lady climbing over his locked fence to introduce herself.
The pot belly stove they bought that an Amish woman laughed at, because it wasn’t airtight and wouldn’t have kept them warm. And what they learned from walking through every house in that community looking at stoves.
Why Doug says buy the land you can afford, pay cash so you carry no debt, and figure the rest out from there.
Why they’re not benign homesteading influencers. They’re freedomed out and conspiratorial about it, which is exactly why they fit what we’re doing.
Doug put it plainly: “We’re the poster children of this year’s conference.”
They’re coming to Exit & Build 6!
November 5-8 at Mollie Engelhart’s Sovereignty Ranch in Bandera, Texas. Doug and Stacy are hanging out the whole event. Not flying in to speak and leaving. Camping, eating, and staying up late with everybody else.
Also speaking: Joel Skousen, David Avocado Wolfe, Curtis Stone, Alec Zeck, Mike Winner of Qortal, Jeremy Cordon of Goldback, Hakeem Anwar of Above Phone, Andy Schoonover of CrowdHealth, and the full Sacred Honor Educational Fellowship crew.
Plus the implementation zones, where you sit down with these folks and actually do the thing instead of taking notes about it.
If you’ve been overthinking whether to come, go back and listen to Doug and Stacy again.
