Interview: @Shagbark / County Line Notes
Andrew is a catholic, a writer, and a Ruralist advocating for a traditional lifestyle.
We talked about his online handle shagbark, about his experience living off grid and across the US for 5 years, the collapse of the western civilization, degeneracy and escape, rumspringer, the dark night of the soul, finding optimism in building local communities, rural vs urban life, the Amish, opportunities in the future and the ultimate importance of land, nature, and spirituality for personal fulfillment.
Time Stamps
1:08 > On the Name Shagbark
2:14 > On the Adirondacks
13:49 > On Discovering Kunstler
19:49 > On Hitchhiking
25:07 > On the Goal of Rebuilding Local Communities
33:07 > On the Value and Danger of Freedom
39:07 > On his Rumspringa like experience
46:11 > On Extremes and Self Corrections
56:01 > Rural Vs City Problems / Collapse
1:14 > On the Value of the Eucharist / Religion
1:23 > Connecting with others
Connect with Andrew on Twitter @Shagbark or via his Substack
AI Transcription (Advance apologies for not being 100% accurate)
Leafbox:
Hi everyone. Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Andrew, who goes online by the moniker Shagbark. He's a Catholic writer and a ruralist advocate. He's advocating for a traditional lifestyle and for people to build communities offline. We talked about his experience in the military, his experience living across the US for five years about being totally off the grid, his awakening and movement from a anarchist leftist position to a more traditionalist position, the dark night of the Soul, rum Springer Degeneracy, the collapse of Western civilization, escape, finding optimism and building local rural versus urban life, dating the Amish opportunities in the future, and the ultimate importance of land, nature, and spirituality for personal fulfillment. Thanks for listening.
The first thing I wanted to talk about is your Twitter handle. You've written about that in some of your writing. Maybe you can expand on that and why you chose that kind of handle
Andrew:
Shagbark, like shagbark hickory. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, it is one of my favorite trees because I guess I like the structure of the bark. It's very, I don't know, it's, it's not very inviting. It's kind of a tough manly tree, but the nut that it produces is very rich and oily, and it's a life giving tree because you can build with it and it's sturdy as hell and it burns well, and it gives good shade. It's just a classic American tree. So I've always admired the shag bark, the shag bark hickory a lot because the way I see it, trees sort of have personality in a sense. You can learn from 'em.
Leafbox:
That kind links to your essay you wrote. You have a really great essay, the Paragons on futility, and you kind of really go into the, I'm going to mispronounce this, but the Adju Na Dx, I'm not really
Andrew:
Sure how Adirondacks, yeah,
Leafbox:
Adirondacks. Yeah. And there's kind of a permanent frontier aspect to that, and I'm curious maybe you can elaborate on that and how that links to your handle and the hickory tree and how the environment is really shaping what you're doing and what you're writing about.
Andrew:
Well, it's a lot of components there. The first thing I'll say is that, you know, take certain places in the United States, like you take coastal New England or maybe the Ohio River Valley. It was a frontier at one time, and then the time came where it wasn't, because there's something about those lands that man could actually subjugate, which isn't to say that they don't have their wild moments, but generally speaking, you can do it. You can go to western Ohio, you can cut down whatever's there. You can plant corn, you can build a cabin, you can get everything going, and then all of a sudden one thing leads to another and you're sitting on the interstate at a Dunking Donut. Whereas the Adirondacks is right up there with some other places in the US that they're fundamentally not comparable places in a sense, in that they resist it, or that every effort to put civilization onto those lands is extremely tenuous and it's temperamental.
And you're constantly reminded in environments like that. The projects of human civilization are easily revocable due to this, just the meanness of the land. I might put it that way, and I'm not just thinking of the Adirondacks because I think it actually speaks to a deeper, almost soulful element of the American heart, which is it's not just the Adirondacks, the Alaska's like that. Montana's like that. The Rocky Mountains are like that, or the desert. You go down to Arizona, Southern California, some of those deserts, I mean, you are reminded constantly that you're only there because the electricity went to the pump, which pumps out the little bit of water that's there. Or because you got a half inch of rain last month, that was enough to get you through, and if it weren't for that, you wouldn't be there. The Adirondack epitomized that because the whole northeast was totally settled up by the turn of the 19th century. So much of those places, they were settled up, but the Adirondacks really resisted full on settlement for a tremendous amount of time. I mean, California, the gold rush was already going on by the time. A lot of what we now know today as the school districts and churches and town governments were set up in a lot of the far flung regions of the Adirondack Park, which I find to be very significant. So I think a lot about that sort of thing.
Leafbox:
Could you expand a little bit? I think in one of your essays you wrote about the actual meaning of the word. I think listeners might enjoy that or take meaning and kind of sense.
Andrew:
Sure, sure. And I guess as part of that too, I can kind of comment on why shag bark hickory is significant to me. Even though shag bark doesn't really grow, Hickory doesn't really grow inside the Adirondack Park. It grows at the edges, and I'm really from the edges of the Adirondack Park, and that's where the NoHo people or the Iroquois people lived because it's a fertile valley that's on the edge of the wilderness. And in their language, they had a name for the few of them and neighboring tribes, the few people who were dumb enough in their estimation to spend the winter up in the Adirondacks and that name was Aranda, which to them meant bark eater because they would serve, they would get so socked in with snow up there that hunting became impossible, and the land is, there's just a certain austerity about the land that would make it so that they would wind up surviving by eating pine bark and spruce bark and trekking through 4, 5, 6 feet of snow south to the long houses of the Iroquois to beg them for food to survive. So that was their way of making fun of them and saying, oh yeah, you guys are a bunch of bark eaters. So the name stuck when whites came to the area and asked native guides, well, what is this place up to the north? And they would refer to it as Randa or use that word, and that later became the word Adirondack.
Leafbox:
I think it's just amazing, very interesting writing and just it's so, I'm not going to say, I'm going to be honest. It's kind of exotic for where I live to even write about that. I've been to Ohio, I have some friends who live in on Lake Erie and things, and I think that even is exotic for me living in an island community. So I appreciate the writing and the depth that you're going to link to the different tribes and the different people and even modern era and how that interacts with that. You seem to be a great proponent of rural, I don't know if rural masana, is that the correct term? Is that the town where you're living? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
Andrew:
Yeah, so I'm not going to tell you exactly where I live, but I live in northern New York state, very close to Canada. In fact, my drive home from church, I can see Canada and I live up that way. And I like that too because, and I hesitate to talk about it publicly sometimes because I don't want it to get discovered by people who don't share our values and by predatory developers who they don't care about the local collar of a place and they'll just come in and buy things up and turn 'em into Airbnbs, and then it's downhill fast from there. So I've been online for years, and I have not spoken about it until recently, but that old region up there is a very interesting region because we're on the border with Quebec in Canada and up there, it's so far from all the rest of the United States, and it's in the state of New York, which when I say New York, you probably think of New York City, and you probably imagine that if there is a New York state, even though most people, they don't even think that there could be, to be honest, that it must be like a golf course north of New York City.
Well, where I live, it's about six and a half hours from 34th Street in midtown Manhattan, which is to say you could, from 34th street in midtown Manhattan, if you and I were standing there deliberating over whether to go get a pint in Dublin or whether to go to my house to have dinner, we would be about equidistant. The plane ride to Dublin would take about as long, all told as the drive to where I live. And I like that level of obscurity because obscurity is the protective blanket for original American culture, and probably culture in general in a global sense, if you're not relevant, and not even just by happenstance, but you're almost aggressively antiquarian and physically removed from the convenience of access that so many places have people forget about you, which is a blessing because that means when the regional branch manager of Olive Garden is scoping out a new place to put up an olive garden, they forget that you're there.
So that doesn't go in, which means the mom and pops store is still there. It means that the rent is low enough that the local character who's kind of a drunk, but he sells wagon wheels out of an old storefront and it's all disheveled. And he sits there and rambles incoherently and Shane smoked cigarettes and he's kind of your buddy, and he couldn't survive if that place became hot and rents went up. He couldn't pay a thousand dollars a month for a storefront, but he could pay 300. So he's there. I like it up there because we're wedged between Quebec and the Adirondack Park, and we're unknown and forgotten. And I love that aspect of it, and I don't want to ramble too long about this, but I really could. I write books about it. I'm obsessed with it because another aspect of it that I like is that back quite a long time ago, the premier of the provincial government in Quebec was known as Maurice Dubi, and he was a Catholic traditionalist and very, not even what we would call conservative.
He was reactionary in the classical French sense of the word, and he was the one responsible for putting a crucifix up in the qua house of parliament, very classical old school values. Well, there were many Quebecois immigrants to northern New York state at that time who retained those values, and they kept them on this side of the border, whereas Quebec itself secularized and became very, very, very left-leaning and things really changed. So we have this weird little tendre of a francophone traditionalism just kind of sleeping in the St. Lawrence River Valley, and I find it totally fascinating. So yes.
Leafbox:
Are there people in your region who speak French or is that just totally lost?
Andrew:
When I was a child, and I'm not that old, but when I was a child there, there's still were people who spoke French every day in their household by all that I know. I think that that is being lost. However, Catholicism is still dominant, and there still is a sense about the place that it doesn't feel conservative in the sense of when I go to Reno, Nevada and people are shooting automatic weapons and they're strip clubs and everybody's a Republican, you say, okay, well, it's a kind of conservative place there. It's more reactionary. You almost expect to see a castle in a cornfield. People are almost peasant, like that aspect of old provincial Quebecois culture and old upstate New York culture is still alive there and thriving, which is really an incredible thing to see. So yeah, I'm very enthusiastic about that
Leafbox:
As a teenager, in your first, I said in my email to you that you kind of reminded me of James, how does a teenager in upstate New York discover Koler? I'm just curious how you found his writing. Was it through his kind of long emergency writing or his urbanism? I'm just curious how you found him and what you value in him if there's any value at all.
Andrew:
I had an interesting raise because when I was a kid, I was sort of born and bred to be sort of scholarly. I was a precocious little kid. I was obsessed with reading, and I had many, many political opinions that I was really required to have by my grandfather who's very traditional old school Irishman. And at that time, I read prolifically about all manner of things, but around the time I was a kid, the price of gas was going crazy. So I read anything I could about energy and of course was writing a lot about peak oil, and not in the alarmist tone of the seventies, but he was simply stating the fact that oil C oil wouldn't last forever. And that was a new idea to me as a boy. And that stuck with me. And then later when I found out that he was from upstate New York, it was totally obvious to me how he would be from upstate New York, talking how he is. Because really if you want to understand the decline of western civilization and what might come after or what its preservation might look like on a smaller clustered scale, upstate New York is a place that you want to understand.
So yeah, I read him when I was very young.
Leafbox:
He was left-leaning progressive in San Francisco. I'm curious what your experience was going to the cities and exploring that aspect of engagement.
Andrew:
So I don't know what exactly about me, because I hadn't interacted with you until this interview request, but I spent five years hitchhiking around the United States, occasionally riding freight trains, and I had all the politics of somebody who might do that. I was an anarchist. I had an interest in Arco communism, left-leaning, very, very left-leaning ideas as well as I guess green anarchism. I was always very skeptical of civilization from a political perspective. And so when I traveled the cities, I did it not just as a hitchhiker, but as somebody who was actively engaged in anarchist politics. And so two things would happen. One is when you're hitchhiking, there's different demographics who are attracted to the idea of picking up a hitchhiker. Some of the people are very poor people who are just doing it because it's a nice thing to do. When a Salvadorian immigrant picks me up who can't speak English, he's doing it probably because he's a Catholic and because he wants to do something nice for somebody, even though he doesn't have very much, you seem to have even less than he does.
So he's just picking you up. So you learn about that. Some people pick you up because they want to convert you to their particular flavor of Christianity. Some people pick you up because they have bad intentions, or they might think that you might want to smoke marijuana with them or whatever it may be. But the largest demographic and the most concerning demographic of people who pick you up are people who are desperate. And I don't mean that in a poverty sense. I mean that in an ontological sense. People who are at their wits end, people who would pick me up and say, why I picked you up, I picked you up because tonight I'm about to kill myself. And then I'd have to listen to them because what else can you do? And I'd listen to them and I see how dark the interior life of people in contemporary American society really is by and large.
And obviously I had a biased selection sample, so I might have drawn darker conclusions than were really necessary to draw. I can certainly admit that. But then I would get into the cities and I would look around and I would keep noticing, look at these people. They look so sad. What are they missing? What are they missing? And I would always ask that question, what are they missing? And it eventually forced me to draw more or less reactionary conclusions in the sense that people need, they need God, they need a relationship with God. They need wilderness in their life as an expression of the perfection of God's creation, and they need a human culture that makes sense and is not subject to the whims of fashion or the market or the regulatory environment created by the state. And that is what eventually brought me back home. Even though this place is in what looks like terminal decline, the shreds of something livable that really help you evade the pandemic of sorrow that is a foot in our culture, they're here. So I'm going to work to preserve them and to continue to live inside of them.
Leafbox:
Yeah, I was familiar with your hitchhiking kind of experience and your squatting and things like that. I think it's really interesting. And I'm curious, when that left-leaning, did you go to university or I think you were in the military, what was that kind of conversion into that perspective and then switching over to more of a, you call it reactionary, but I call it more, I guess, traditionalist. I don't know. Reactionary sounds more aggressive and negative. Sure. I found a lot of positive, some in your optimism that's really exciting about your writing is that you're not a dor or kind of a gloom perspective. I think you want to isolate, create, there's a lot of optimism in your writing. So I'm just curious how that shifted. Was it really the kind of seeing humanity on the road or talk about that kind of political awakening that happened, curious.
Andrew:
Oh, I could talk all day and night about that. I use the term reactionary, not without some conflict because it is just factually describes those who were opposed to the French revolution, which today I would be, there was a time where I wouldn't have been, but the key difference that I see between being a communist or an anarchist, or really even just a progressive egalitarian and being a traditionalist or a reactionary, is the admission that that reality exists for good or for bad. And taking a morally neutral position at historical phenomena and sort of saying, well, maybe it's inevitable that there's going to be hierarchy. Maybe it's inevitable that there are going to be differences in human individuals and populations, and maybe by the the present order of things is not entirely terrible. And by present order, I don't mean what's going on in 2023 in the United States, but I mean western civilization, it's really easy to point the finger and to say, oh, well look at all these horrible excesses.
Look at the genocide of the Native Americans, look at the enslavement of Africans, look at these different things. And then you sort of realize, well, we're not talking about characters in a movie. We're talking about ourselves really, we're talking about our great, great, great grandfathers. How could they have done anything different? And that sort of dawned on me concurrently with just maturity in a more general sense of sort of saying, well, yeah, I want these things to be ideal. I want the best. I want a happy world where everything makes sense and there's total equity for all. And who wouldn't want that? In a sense, the idea is very beautiful. But of course, beautiful ideas have led people to do horrible things, and one really only needs to delve into the history of communism to see that. And even as a communist, I was fully aware of that.
And then there was a time where traveling got tiresome for me, and I took up residence in a cabin that I had built in the woods for a girl. And then in the spring, after one winter in the cabin, this girl says to me, she says, you know, really got to do something with your life. At the time, I had never paid taxes. I didn't have an id, I didn't have a bank account, I had no resume to speak of. I had lived totally off the grid and out of a commitment to my ideals. And then at a certain point I said, wait a second, my ideals don't matter as much as my need to get my cavities filled.
They don't matter as much as my need for a new pair of boots. And then I joined the military, and then during the military, it was covid. So I was in effectively solitary confinement during covid. And that really changed me about a lot of things and made me realize that. And not to ramble, I'm so sorry, I'm so long winded, but there's really two ways to view the past. And I noticed like leftists do this a lot where they'll sort of say, oh, well, it was so bad in the era of traditional families because secretly there was domestic abuse and there was drug use and there was all these horrible things, and the son would be gay and he couldn't come out and everything was so bad. And you see this bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. But today we can be good. That's sort of the leftist mindset.
I think the traditionalist mindset is to say, look, it's always been bad. It's always going to be bad. So how do we make it beautiful today? How do we make it make sense today? How do we derive meaning from the things that we do today without necessarily denying reality so much that we're always swimming against a current that we can never gain any ground on? And that was what kind of got me to be more in the traditional mindset, and I really haven't looked back from there. And a lot of that is what also brought me back to upstate New York.
Leafbox:
Are you having success in rebuilding local community or trying to reengage now that you were moved from a nomadic kind of free life to a more based life?
Andrew:
Well, it's a fledgling project still. The hour is early for me, but I know just in the last year where I've been able to be more firmly a about where I want to be, I've seen some great things. I got involved with the Catholic Land movement and who has it on Twitter? Michael Thomas of Sharon, he's kind of been heading this up for years. Hi. Him and his wife bought a farmhouse and they have many kids, and they're devout traditional Catholics. And I fell in with them after finding the Latin mass, and they, they're really making it happen. And I've hopped on board with them. I wound up speaking at the conference last summer, and it was well attended, much more well attended than anybody anticipated it would be. And we're going to have another one here in June. And yeah, I get, it's a chore to go through my dms, to be honest.
There are so many people who are interested. There are so many people who I maintain frequent contact with who are saying, if not, Hey, I want to move in and be your neighbor, at least saying, I am doing the same in my town. And the time is not. And many of these people are former, they might have voted for Bernie before the pandemic. They might have still had some faith in the dominant culture, and it possibly just sort of being gently reformed. Now, I think something happened in Covid where a big shift happened where people said, well, I don't necessarily want to become a nineties style NeoCon Republican, but I have to admit that there are certain realities that need to be engaged with in a practical manner. And that has brought so many people to say, well, the rural world makes sense. The houses are affordable, the culture is not totally experimental, and we can maintain as stasis here that can nourish the heart and the spirit. And I see so many people interested in that, and I talk to them constantly. So yes, I'm extremely encouraged with what's just starting to take root. I hope to think that we're at the cutting edge of what will constitute a major shift in the culture among millennials and even Zoomers.
Leafbox:
Do you think, well, I have two questions. Well, millennials, I think a lot of westerners are depending on your age, I dunno how old you are, Andrew, but there's kind of a failure in the, I guess, American or western dream model. I'm just curious if you feel like, what dream are you trying to build? Are you trying to do your own local American dream or kind of a smaller scale or think's failing in the society? I mean, there's a lot of generosity, like you said, but I'm curious, where do you think the model is that's really failing?
Andrew:
Well, I would say this, the name of the, oh goodness, the name of the book, oh, I wish that I could remember the name of the book. And its author. I read a book recently about Western civilization (The Tyranny of Guilt by Pascal Bruckner) and guilt that basically postulated this idea that after the Protestant Reformation, Christianity sort of fractionalized into a million different denominations with so many different rules, and that often conflicted. And so something important was lost in the Western psyche, which was the mercy of the confessional booth. Baptists don't do confession. A lot of mainline Protestants, they don't do confession, or they didn't or did, and then it sort of fell off, may cease to occupy a prominent position in the western mind outside of Catholicism after a certain point. And I think that's a problem because when you have done wrong in your own life, you know, go to the confessional, you confess your sins and the priest absolves you of guilt, and then you resolve to change and then it's over.
And if that can happen in your own life, then the same principle can be modeled in your society. You can say, I've done wrong. You pay your debt, you do your penance, and then you move on. Western civilization has become unmoored from this aspect of its own original culture. So that now when we look back on our history collectively and we say, well, look at all these horrible things we did, we only focus on the bad out of a sense of maybe guilt. And then there's no reconciliation that is coherent enough to allow us to continue. So we have to engage in a sort of self-flagellation that is totally endless and goes on and on and on and on, and we can never repay the debts. And that's how you wind up turning places like Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.
And I'm not saying Rhodesia was a perfect utopia, it wasn't. However, I think you would struggle to find anybody who would honestly say they would rather live in Zimbabwe than in Rhodesia. Now, just to fill you in on a history, if you don't know, I mean there was just a sort of racial reconciliation idea of, oh, we're we're going to take the white landowners land, we black Africans, and we're going to use it in the way that makes sense. Well, they just wound up driving away all the white people who knew how to farm, and then the farms went fallow and the country descended into chaos pretty quickly. So no actual sins were paid for, and a country that had been functional with hospitals and bridges and schools descended into becoming an a third world country. And I see the same thing happening here in the west today.
And so for me, I'm acting locally, but thinking globally, to use the old kind of lefty phrase just by saying, if I dig my heels in here and I don't say, oh, well, I need to retreat, I need to abscond to Florida. Well, once Florida changes, then where do we go? No, I'm going to stay here. I'm going to build a model that works and hopefully others will repeat that model elsewhere. And it will empower young people in western civilization to retain what's good about the west, to keep it alive and to not lose any more ground because I don't think that that would be best for anybody, to be honest.
Leafbox:
No, I think it's interesting. I think it, it's interesting comparing when your travels. Did you ever travel to Asia?
Andrew:
No, I never left North America as a traveler.
Leafbox:
Got it. Well, it's just interesting to see a society like Japan, they have a very strong cultural basis, and homogeneity of course helps and language and history and culture, but I wouldn't call them a reactionary. And when you go to Japan, everything seems to work, but they're almost like you're saying, trying to keep basis in a traditionalism, but still kind of, they're cosmopolitan in the sense that they import what they want and they adapt it to local needs. So I'm sure you're just as cosmopolitan. I mean, you'll take modern technology. You're not trying to totally revert back to a traditional kind of primitive lifestyle or things. Andrew, could you tell me a little bit about your conversion to Catholicism or is that a reawakening with religion?
Andrew:
Oh, certainly. Yeah. I had grown up Roman Catholic, and probably about the time I was 11 or 12, my grandmother left the church and my family situation changed. And as often happens with young Catholics, they leave the faith. I didn't know why. I didn't really think anything of it. I didn't really even know what was going on at the mass when I was a boy, but I was there for it and I remembered it, and that formed my moral compass as a kid. And thank God that it did. Now later I would lose that interest in that and then start traveling and yeah, you become a punk, you become a communist, you become an anarchist. I became a heavy drinker. I took to chasing women and looking for fights and just generally raising hell and going state to state and doing whatever. And I really valued freedom.
Freedom for its own sake, freedom unto freedom forever and ever and ever without any endpoint in mind. And I actually experienced it to the best degree that I could. Nobody required anything of me. And I was often in remote areas of the country where the law was a distant notion, so I really could do as I pleased, and I wasn't very happy after so long of doing that. In fact, I was really hurting. And I saw a lot of my friends in that world in that kind of underground punk anarchist world. I saw a lot of them get involved in heroin or in pornography or in senseless violence or in political acts, which would put them in long prison sentences and things like that. And I watched so many lives get ruined. I watched some of my friends die right in front of me, and that changed me.
That does something to you to see that because you judge a tree by its fruit. I think this is out of the Bible, but it's also just common sense. So when you're looking around and you see, well, I see chaos, I don't feel very good, and I see brilliant young people ruining their lives with drugs, suicide, pornography, or senseless politics, that really don't make any sense anyway. You have to examine your own values and say, well, what I'm doing doesn't make sense. I can't continue to do it because of pattern recognition. And so some years went on where I was sort of in a fugue because I knew this intuitively, but I was able to distract the senses enough I could go and I could continue to distract myself by drinking and chasing women and moving state to state, but I knew that something was wrong.
And then I had to join the military for healthcare and for some kind of a living. And then covid came and people had a hard time in lockdowns anyway throughout the us but if you were in the military during C O V D, anybody who's reading this or listening to this who was in the military during covid probably can tell you that many of us had a lockdown on steroids. And so for many months I was alone in a room in a government facility bound by law not to leave, and I didn't interact with any human beings, and that took away all the coping mechanisms that could distract me from thinking about God or thinking about correcting my values to be a tree that would yield good fruit. And that was when I started to pray to God and think about the fact that the book of John says that God is love, and then to think of what it means that a God could love us so much that he seeks to become fully human, he becomes fully human and suffers with us, and he makes himself totally meek until he actually dies for us.
I found that to be the most compelling religious vision of any that I read during lockdown. And so I decided to convert to Eastern orthodoxy. Protestantism didn't make any sense to me and to my mind, Catholicism was nothing remarkable because I had left the church. And so finally we get out of lockdown and I begin to become an Orthodox catechumen. And then shortly after that, I meet a young man who always went to Orthodox liturgy, but he never came on Sunday. And I said, Jim, one day, I said, how come you never come on Sunday? He said, well, I'm Catholic. And I looked at him and I said, how could you be Catholic if you're here all the time? Why wouldn't you be Orthodox? He said, oh, because we have orthodoxy. Come see at the Latin mass. And I went to that Latin mass and I never looked back because at that time I was still processing the sort of weird grief of being in total isolation during Covid, and I had just had a horrible relationship that actually resulted in the abortion of our child. And I was processing that at the mass and everything changed for me, and I have not looked back. I've attended Latin mass every Sunday since.
Leafbox:
No, it's in your writing, you write about the Amish, it kind of reminds me of the Rung Springer process that you go through.
Andrew:
Yeah.
Leafbox:
I think some of your nomadic lifestyle was your own kind of dark night of the soul experience.
Andrew:
It was a totally extreme rum springer, there's no question.
Leafbox:
I'm curious, so you got out of the military and then you keep going to church. I'm just curious if other people in the military did, what was that experience? I mean, you were so isolated that you couldn't build friendships or bonds with others, or was it just total prison self-isolation? Just curious, what's the environment and community of the military was at that time? Were people looking for meaning? I mean, aren't there people from Alaska? The one good thing about the military is you have people from all over the US coming together, but maybe not.
Andrew:
Yes, yes. No, exactly. So there were all kinds of people who were going through the same thing. But the thing is, I was a little older than anybody who was the same rank as me because I joined at 25. Most of these guys were 18, 19, 20, and most of them were still at the age where they just sort of said, oh, cool, we don't have to work very much, or We don't have to work at all. I'm just going to play video games. And so they did. No, I didn't see a lot of people experiencing the same thing I was experiencing, although if they were, I guess I wouldn't known it, to be honest. I don't know. But that was a strange time. There was a period of time where the base I was on the mental health situation became so desperate that they had to have a suicide stand down, and the chaplain got involved and all sorts of stuff like this, and I don't know how much I should say about this, but they finally decided to open up the bar.
And I remember we could go in six at a time and have a pint of something and we could have two drinks, and the bartender knew our situation felt bad for us, so he would fill pint glasses up with, and we would just sit there and get totally sauced together in silence, six of us random people, and then stagger back. It was like something out of a dusty jsk novel. It was a very strange, yeah. Yeah. It was a very, very, very strange environment to be in at all. And yeah, that was one of the more difficult things I've had to do because it really was I, and I hate to sound like I'm just a complainer. I hate to sound that way. I, because I'm want to make it seem like I am, but gee, that was just so hard for me to be locked down like that.
Leafbox:
Yeah. Well, on a more optimistic note, Andrew, I think a lot of your tweets and writing, you're trying to encourage people to look, I mean, people are renting thousand dollars squats in Brooklyn, and then you're like, well, you could own this house through three, $400 in three, four hours away and have your own freedom. I'm curious how that's resonating or how are you just people just so clueless to that reality, or what are you experiencing with that?
Andrew:
Oh, people seem to know. I think things, I've been on the internet long enough to know that things move in phases. So right now we're at the phase where there's a handful of people stirring the pot. It's me and maybe a dozen, dozen and a half other accounts who really like to hammer this point of, Hey, get out of the cities. They're filling up with crime. They're not a place to raise your kids. You don't want to be there, come out to the country, buy a cheap house, and let's all be friends. Let's cluster together. Let's not even all move to separate places. Let's all kind of hone in on a region and build a heartland for the dissident set. And we're now at this stage where we're getting our hecklers because we have people's attention, but more and more people are reading about this stuff, and I see it growing, and I think a lot of people are just scared to take the leap because you have to think.
I mean, I bought a house in a town where I'm not from a couple hours away. So I'm from a culturally similar enough area to where it's not hard for me to make friends and be able to be seen eye to eye in that respect. But it's still difficult because I'm not from there. These places are so insular and tiny that you're not easy to be accepted. People will look at you with a lot of skepticism, and in a city you could go out and make some friends in one weekend in the countryside. Sometimes it takes 4, 5, 6 months. Sometimes it takes a couple of years to really figure out who your people are going to be. So the pace of life is a lot slower, which is good. It's less stressful, but it's also kind of a trying thing. So my thought is that a lot of people are watching at the sidelines right now saying, huh, maybe I could see myself doing that, but I don't really know. Once we can all coalesce in a handful of regions with affordable housing and people can say, oh, well, that guy from Twitter, he already lives there, and so does that other guy from Twitter. Well, he lives down the road from him, and there's a house between them that's going for sale for 60 grand. Maybe I'll buy it. It's a lot easier to imagine doing that when others are involved. Then to just say, all right, well, I've read the numbers on what makes sense economically, now I'm going to just go and do it.
So we're just building up that momentum and getting groups of people to say, yes, I'm all in. And that takes time.
Leafbox:
One of the things that I think is interesting about upstate New York and your writing that I wasn't aware of, and maybe Kutzler writes about this too, is that the bones of upstate New York seem pretty solid to a civilizational project, unlike Nevada or something. You have old towns that flourished and now they're depopulated it. So I'm just curious what your experience is with that, or you seem to write a lot about kind of revitalizing town squares or trying to reengage the local importance of a communal city infrastructure, not a city, but a town infrastructure compared to say Nevada or Utah or just somewhere really remote.
Andrew:
Yeah, it's a little bit different because, yeah, there's a lot of people who I, I've said this before elsewhere, that one of the great drawbacks of the Western mind is that we have a tendency to overcorrect on an extreme basis. So people will look at, the example I like to give is factory farming. You learn about factory farming. You say, boy, that's horrible. And so what do you do? You become vegan. And then after so many years of being vegan, you say, oh, my joints hurt because you're not getting enough nutrients. So then you say, all right, well now I'm paleo. Now I'm a carnivore. And then you get gout because you've eaten so much meat. When the whole time you could have really just eaten a balanced diet and gotten some free range beef, that would've been very sensible, but you had to overcorrect and respond as intensely as you could to each problem as you met it.
And I see the same thing happening today with these issues that we're talking about is people look at, oh, well, the rat race of the city, the obnoxiousness of hipster yuppies in the city, or the craziness that happens in these progressive schools and civil unrest and all this stuff. So ergo, I need to move to North Slope Alaska or something very off the grid. And most of these people who attempt that, they either don't attempt it to begin with because it takes money to do that, to be honest, for most people, unless you have the skills which these people don't, or if you do do it, you find very quickly that without a community, things become difficult. So they have a high rate of failure, whereas here it's a little more gentle. There's a town probably every eight or 10 miles, a little teeny tiny tone that might have a feed store or a bar or one church or a general store, and it's a loose grid where there's plenty of space.
Housing isn't expensive, but there's enough people around and in where there's a real culture. If you go into the stone cold wilderness, there's no culture there except for what the beaver does and what the black spruce tree does and what the moss is doing. And if you can get on that level, God bless you, but most people don't because it takes so much effort to learn how to do that. And even then, even if you know how to do it, if you're doing it alone, you'll be alone. And most people are not called to that cross in life. So these rural towns, the infrastructure's still there. You'll go to some of these towns and you'll see my cousin works on a railroad and he works on one of the most remote railroads in the state. He was under a drainage ditch to clear out beaver dams, and he cleared out the beaver dam and went underneath the water when it drained out.
And he said all of the bridges, they were ed bridges with masonry work that was very intricate. And he said he sat out there for a long time thinking about somebody built this beautiful bridge truly in the wilderness where nobody would ever see it. That's how the infrastructure is in the state. There's all these gorgeous houses and libraries and little details on things that all it takes is somebody with a vision to love that little thing back into its full glory. And that is so much more realistic prospect than saying, oh, I'm going to go homestead on a hundred acres in northern Idaho. Some people will do that, but very few.
Leafbox:
Have you read Dimitri Orloff?
Andrew:
I can't say that I have, no.
Leafbox:
Okay. He's a Russian writer who writes about collapse. He's actually Russian American. He grew up in the US or he left the Soviet Union when he was 10, moved to the us, lived in the US for about 30, 40 years, and then he moved back to Russia, and he models that the US and the West is, they're just maybe 40 years behind the Soviet collapse. And he, he's an excellent writer, really worth, he's ta talked to Kunstler a lot. And it's interesting because the place you're writing about in upstate New York has a lot of the bones that are, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it had the infrastructure that it wasn't a total failure of civilization. People had housing, they had education. Even though there was absolute chaos in poverty and economic system, people still had the bones of railroads, of subways, of buildings of, you know what I mean?
If you have collapse in Los Angeles, people aren't connected, you're going to have a police state. It's just not going to work. It's going to be chaos. But you're saying you're little towns and there's enough people, but not too many people that you know, could have a loose civilizational project even if you had a so-called collapse or a decline in oil or food systems or whatnot. So that's an interesting, I mean, you've chosen well or whatnot, and you're kind of choosing your project. I think in one of your essays, you had all the points that you think people should choose. I forget, maybe you could. I was right. I wrote them down. I mean, I guess my question is are you concerned about collapse of civilization or not, or
Andrew:
Certain, certainly.
Leafbox:
And what is certainly
Andrew:
I, yeah, I think it's, I've been primarily concerned with that since I was probably 14 to be, to be totally honest. And there have been times in my life where I thought that it would be some dramatic, spectacular event, and I don't think that it will. I think we're living in the collapse. You'll look at any number of collapsed civilizations, and you can just see that it's less like a dramatic, oh, we're going, going, going, going, and then drop off a cliff. Most of the time it's more like a staircase. John Michael Greer has written about this if you follow him, and I think we're living through that now. I even think, and I don't know I, what exactly I can say or what limits I ought to have in an interview with you, but even things culturally, you know, look at the normalization of the use of hard drugs.
You look at the normalization of a lot of these strange sexual perversions, these are bellwethers that really reflect a material shift that's underlying because people begin to feel the effects of a material shift in their living conditions in some gentle way, in some almost financialized way. And they begin to change their prerogatives in life and distract themselves with something that I don't know, distracts them from the fact that they can't just go and get a great nine to five job anymore. And so then I have to look as a young person in that environment, and I have to say, well, what do I do? Well, I don't do that. I don't go and get high and distract myself. I tried that and I wasn't happy.
What do I do instead? Well, I look at land, and you have to look at land, and you have to understand that land is unequal and what land is going to inherently be fertile ground for a decentralized expression of human civilization. I lived in the desert. All you have to do in certain parts of the desert is turn off the water, turn off the power, and then guess what? You have no AC because there's no power, which means you can't be there, frankly. And if you turn off the water, it means you have no economy because all of the economy runs on water. And so very easily you realize, okay, right, I'm living in a place where if the grid fails, I have to leave and I'll be leaving at the same time as many other people. I don't want to do that here. I could live a lifestyle that could be totally supported by activities that take place within 20 miles of my house.
For the most part, there are a couple things that we might need, maybe salt, but for the most part, we're in a community that will be able to support itself. I'm never going to be able to support myself, not alone. I'm not going to make myself a steel axe and make myself chairs and beds and curtains and beef and milk and chicken and gravel, and you name it. Nobody has that kind of time. We need communities where those things can be redundant, and the only way that that's going to happen in a way that isn't totally reliant on oil is to live on pieces of land that have water, a low incidence of natural disasters, a predominantly homogenous population that's high trust, and hopefully lots of good soil and hardwood forest. That's what is objectively going to be valuable in the future. And that means the northern Northeast is one of the best places you could be. The upper peninsula of Michigan is one of the best places you could be, Wisconsin, Minnesota, these types of places, they're going to thrive in the future, so it's a good bet.
Leafbox:
I'm curious, what do you feel about some of the generosity, the opiate situation happening? Is it worse in the cities or worse in the rural environments, or I'm just curious what you're seeing with that.
Andrew:
Oh, I don't know that it's worse in the cities or in the countryside, to be honest. I think in the cities it's more concentrated, so you see it more if you go to certain neighborhoods in Philadelphia, you'll see it in the countryside. It's still there. But certainly, I don't know. I don't want to get in trouble with anybody, but I think that there are people who are well aware of this situation and they don't care. I think basically, I'm at the point where if the authorities are tolerating this, I almost wonder whether they're doing so deliberately. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but Well, we seem
Leafbox:
To take was that police in San Jose? I think she was just indicted for being a major importer of fentanyl, and she was on the police commission and whatnot. So I wouldn't be surprised. I grew up in South America, in Brazil, Chile.
Andrew:
So
Leafbox:
Yeah, I've already kind of experienced a slow decline of civilizational standards. And the interesting thing about South America is that we're just ahead of the rest of the West, in my understanding.
Andrew:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Leafbox:
And the shift though sometimes comes back and forth. So if you look at El Salvador, I don't know if you've heard of Quele, but he's kind of a hard right kind of Singaporean light dictator, and he's really kind of implementing a no. So you're seeing a swing back. The other, my family, for instance, when they had, I dunno if you didn't know anything about Chile, but there was a Yk who was a socialist president who destroyed the country in three years. The richest country in South America was literally destroyed in three years by terrible communist policies. My family had a business, a factory taken over by the government destroyed, and then you had to switch back to Pinot Che, which was a hard right dictator, and obviously there was fault with that policy, but he normalized normal life for normal people at a cost. So my concern in the US is that if you keep going so left, so left San Francisco, kind of progressive destruction of cities and normalization of life, you're going to eventually have a hard right response and absolutely, the model you're suggesting is not a hard, right, I think it's a traditionalist.
I think it's more not a libertarian, but you just want people to be decentralized and live in their small communities. So do you have worries about a hard right coming in or a hard state, I think where you guys live, maybe you don't even have interactions with the state so much.
Andrew:
No, not so much. What I'll say is, and it's dicey to bring up, and I don't know, you can edit it out if you think it's not great, but what is it? Ted Kazinski wrote a book from prison that I read just for the sake of reading, because I find his work to be interesting, although I will publicly say I disavow the actions that he took. He wrote an essay called Hit Where It Hurts about his whole thing and whatever you could think, whatever you want about him and what he has to say, but he made a good point. He said that there's a difference in the derometer of social systems in the difference between rubber and iron, or you would think that iron is harder than rubber, and it is, but iron also shatters rubber doesn't rubber flexes. That's why Bulletproof made out of Teflon instead of iron, because if you were to shoot iron, it would just shatter and it would be over.
His point was saying that there have been totalitarian states in the past that they failed because they were so rigid. And one of the genius aspects of the modern neoliberal capitalist system is that it's almost made out of rubber in that it just will flex. If you poke it, it moves and it says, oh, no, no, no. If you cast your aspersions, you say, you've done this wrong. They say, oh, have we done this wrong? Maybe we need to make amends, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All while concealing the fact that the same old thing is going on in the machinery underneath, and this is how I view the difference between hard right politics and reactionary or traditionalist politics, is that maybe there are similarities in the ends that people in either camp wish to attain, but one of them is so guilty of the western tendency towards overcorrection that they go so far that then there's a reaction against them.
And that's been the 20th century in so many ways. You know, go left, and then you go so far left that things go crazy. And then you go, right, you go so far that things go crazy and then you go left and it's back and forth. It's ping pong. And I think the way to stop the ping pong that has been found in the 20th century came from the left with a sort of F D R inspired liberal progressivism that just said, well, we're not communists, but we're progressive lefty type people. And no, we disavowed communism, we disavow fashion. We're going to just be a little softer and still get our objectives completed. I feel like that's what traditionalism really has to be. It's a little softer. I don't want to go in, I don't want to be violent for one, genuinely. I don't want to march around and make big gaudy displays.
I want to be a humble peasant. I want to pray. I want to have a simple house. I want to love my family. I want to have a big family, and I want my neighbors to come over for dinner. That's all that I want. I don't need to write some wild manifesto about that. I shouldn't need to be doing the things that I'm doing. These things should be intuitive when, and people should just naturally gravitate towards them because they're in line with our nature, and that is so different from some kind of, I don't know, Matthew Heim, Bach tiki torch thing, and I see why people go that way, but I think it's very naive and I think it's very shortsighted, and I think that the traditions of the church and the traditions that are inherent to the land and to the already existing cultural infrastructure that exists on the land, that's where the real lasting possibilities lay. So no, I'm not a conservative, I'm not right wing in that sense. I'm simply advocating a return to tradition and a reaction against any revolutionary force in the culture, be it from the left or from the right. Anything that's revolutionary is bad to me and is contrary to our nature and is bound to result in a big ping pong game that will cause a lot of unnecessary grief.
Leafbox:
Going back to Ted Kazinski, you really need to read Dimitri ov. He writes a lot about Ted Kazinski as well. Maybe we can talk about technology, and that's one of the main issues with Kavinsky. Are you concerned about the technosphere or the expansion of ai? And I mean, you used to use technology quite well for your community building. I'm just curious what your general thoughts are on that movement.
Andrew:
Yeah, I mean, I was laughing at myself the other night because I'm sitting there in my house. All my lights are gas lights that I use actually on a nightly basis. I have the gas lights, lamp, the gas lamps lit and the Amish are going by with a horse and buggy outside. And I'm on Twitter that might tell you how I feel about technology. The reason I'm on Twitter is that it's a way for me to have real life interactions with people who matter. And I'm not afraid of everybody who's worried about feds and things that I don't advocate for anything illegal. And maybe that's naive of me. And if they take me away, so be it. At the end of the day, I'm trying to meet my followers, I'm trying to meet the people that I follow, and I do frequently. I meet all kinds of people from there.
So that's what I use in lieu of having the robustness of a real original, traditional face-to-face community that I want to build. So for now, it works. But when it comes to technology in general, I am naturally skeptical about everything. And part of that is out of reverence for the wilderness. Part of it is out of reverence for God. I mean, God made day and night, why do I have the lights on? It's time for sleep, it's time for R rest. It's time for reflection, it's time for prayer. It's a distraction. If I have every light in the house on and I'm running around like it's noon, why would I do that? What would I gain by doing that?
I find that I'm happier if I turn the lights off and I light a candle. I dream to live with no vehicle. I don't want to have a car. I don't care about automotive vehicles. I'm not interested in that. I would dream for the day where I could live in a handful of square miles and not leave for years on end or possibly decades on end. And I'm serious about that. And I've earned my right to say it because I've traveled so much. That's how I feel about a lot of these technologies. And so I'll only use them if they make up for a stop gap if I can use them as a stop gap for what has deteriorated in the culture that I live in. You know what I mean?
Leafbox:
Yeah. Because before you're saying that your town square, you'd have the bar and then it would be a full of life and community, and you're finding that online instead.
Andrew:
I Exactly. Yes. Yep, yep. Not like I don't go to the local bar. I do not, I don't go to events. I go to mass sometimes I go every day and that's great, but I want to really kick it up a notch. And I also want to share what we do have with people who are looking for what we have, but I want them to be the right kind of people. That's why I get cagey sometimes. I don't want to tell people where I live, but I do want to advertise to find the right kind of people. So it's my biggest challenge with using the internet is I don't want to go viral unless it's among traditional Catholics or dissident people or homesteader type people who are thinking the right way. So,
Leafbox:
Well, I'm neither of those and I can find your writing. Interesting. So I think if you're branching outside of those communities, I think there's still value. I mean, you could be a Hindu and be value, find value in respecting your traditions and not just absorbing a corporate kind of in top-down cultural norm.
Andrew:
So I think do agree. Right. I do agree. I guess I, I'll be more specific and say that I'm hiding from the people who are all migrating out of California and are bringing their progressive values with them wherever they go or migrating out of New York City and Boston. I want to fly under their radar. But
Leafbox:
In terms of local community, do you have any insights or interest in running for politics or running, taking over the actual civic infrastructure?
Andrew:
I'm not there yet, but I will be.
Leafbox:
Yeah.
Andrew:
Cause I think
Leafbox:
That can help maintain or shape what you want in a community. I think people are so concerned about national politics, but when the local, they don't even know who their local supervisor is, who has dictatorial power over their life,
Andrew:
We're ripe for it because the median age in county and state politics in my state is high for the most part. And the power cartel in the representing the conservative side of upstate New York has proven to be totally ineffectual and people are tired of it. This whole region is ripe for, it's ripe for a sort of JD Vance character or somebody who's going to be young and is going to come at it from a different perspective and know how to interface with the internet in a more effective way than our current representatives do. I'm not saying I'm that guy. I may be not, but certainly we're ripe for that sort of thing. And at a minimum, I would like to get involved in town politics, county politics, but I want to do so gently and gingerly because I don't want to upset any of the locals. I really do want to represent the locals if I get involved in that. But I'm a few years from that for sure.
Leafbox:
In terms of localism, what are the worst downsides of what you're seeing? Just your new project, we're trying to revitalize rural communities. What's your biggest challenges? Is it just economic? Is it political? Is it civic? Just curious.
Andrew:
It's a couple things. The one, just on a personal level, is it lonesome in a sense? Because what I really need right now is I need a hardcore of people who are committed and willing to go all in. And people who I work well with who are in my immediate geographical location, I don't have that right now, and it's starting to blossom. But while I've been waiting for that to come to fruition, there are days where I look up and I say, shoot, I'm just me up here, but that's okay. I'm cheery through that. I'm optimistic through that because I see how things are taking shape. The other difficulty that I have is telling people, Hey, you know, can move up here and watching real estate inventory shrink currently. And more than that, just knowing that the real estate market is really unstable, because a lot of what I'm doing is built around the reality that even through Covid housing remained very cheap here. And that's a huge deal. And as soon as you take that away, the possibility of being able to cluster in the way that I think is necessary sort of goes out the window.
And I see this on the progressive or the leftist side of the house, is a lot of them made their heartlands. I mean, if somebody becomes a socialist and they join the DSA and they say, Hey, I'm moving to a new place where they'll probably go, they'll probably go to Brooklyn or Oakland or Boston or Seattle. And how did those become hubs for that sort of thing? Well, people with those politics went there when housing was cheap and changed the culture of those places. You had squatters in the lower east side of Manhattan and you had the early gentrifiers of Williamsburg and Bushwick and Brooklyn. You had the gentrifiers of Oakland the early days. We need to do the same thing in a rural sense, and we really all need to act while housing is still cheap and we need to act in an organized fashion. And the whole deal is time sensitive because of the way that the housing markets are. And so I do worry that I could go to all this effort and we could miss the opportunity. And then, so the biggest difficulty is trying to get everything orchestrated before the housing cease ceases to be as cheap as it is today.
Leafbox:
What are your interactions, you seem to be near the Amish, do they consider you the English or what are they just going to standoffish or what's their lifestyle then your interactions with them and they seem to be for you? Oh, they're
Andrew:
Completely friendly. Yeah. I mean, if they had the Eucharist and submitted to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, I would be one of them. But sadly, they don't. You can stop by, if you see one in a field, you can pull over and you start talking to him and asking him things and saying, Hey, do you know such and such right now I need a new roof. So you know, pull up, you say, Hey, do you know anybody who does a roof? And they'll say, oh yeah, you go down to such and such road and he should be there if it's a Tuesday. And then you go out there and you talk to him and you get a quote.
They're very respectful, they're very peaceful, and they only seem to do good for the community. Really very little you can say about them. That's negative. I think some people take issue with how they treat their horses. Some people take issue with how they treat their wives and their children, but I don't know. I don't anything about those things. But yeah, they're good neighbors. They're very good neighbors, and they're a good example of why it's good to live in a high fertility rate society. Because if there's work that needs to be done, they have the manpower to do anything. I mean, give them an hour and tell 'em you're giving them lunch and they can go get it done if it really needs doing, which is incredible. And you see the English who just went on birth strike at a certain point and just stopped having kids, they don't have that. Like everybody's fallen all over themselves to find a guy in his thirties who's strong and can show up and isn't already busy doing something. So I've learned a lot from them in that respect. And it has me thinking a lot about how much I want to have a large family.
Leafbox:
Andrew, what are the local, I don't know, the dating scene or what is that project going on? You're not married yet?
Andrew:
I'm not, no. Well, I find myself on Twitter talking to folks from there in that department. And that's an interesting thing that is way better than a dating app. And then locally, I do have trouble with it sometimes because I don't know, people don't, don't trust you if you've left. And anyway, I mean, at my age, if you're single, they sort of say, well, why? There's usually a reason. So all the women who are my age and are single here, most of them are, they already have kids. They already are married or they're doing very badly and they're on drugs. So it's a little bit of a tough, it's a dating scene, but it does exist and it's there. And in the Catholic world especially, there's a lot of good possibilities that exist.
Leafbox:
And then one of my other questions, one of my last questions, Andrew, what is the net migration into these places? I mean, are there salian moving in? Are there Latin communities building? Are there,
Andrew:
No.
Leafbox:
So just because their jobs aren't there or just not supportive of
Andrew:
It? It's a very, very, very ethnically homogenous region. Mean the net migration basically looks like Amish people in my particular place. There are counties that are seeing a certain amount of Latino migration due to farm labor opportunities. And my state has made laws favoring farm workers from elsewhere. So I think some of them are wise to it and have come here for better pay. But it's still minimal. It's still well under a percent of any given township I can think of off the top of my head. But no, it's a very, very homogenous area where if you want to talk about diversity, you're talking about, well, are your neighbors German or Irish or a French descent? And then
Leafbox:
What are the economic prospects? Do you feel like they're growing or not or
Andrew:
No, they're dim. They're certainly dim. And yeah, anybody who really wants to get rich and come here, I don't care about it because I follow Christ. And Christ taught us not to worry about that stuff. As long as you have enough, then you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. And here you can get enough because the housing is so cheap. I'll give you an example. My mortgage is $400 a month. The minimum wage in this state is 1420. So even if I were to work a minimum wage job full-time, one week's paycheck would pay my mortgage.
I, my housing costs are 25% of my post-tax income at minimum wage. You don't have that in most of the United States. That's one of the best value propositions that exists. And I'm not saying I want to work for minimum wage or that I have to, I've gotten job offers that are double minimum wage and I'm not particularly qualified to do much, and I have no degree. So it exists. And a lot of the people who complain about the prospects up here are people who just don't, they don't have it together. They can't pass a drug test, they can't quit smoking weed. They can't show up at seven Monday through Friday and get the job done. If you can do all those things, you'll make it. And especially in this job market. But again, that ties into what I'm saying about how I'm doing is time sensitive because job markets can change, housing markets can change. Right now, presently, the deal is very good, unless you're the type of person who I want to have three BMWs and a 5,000 square foot house. If that's what you want to do, don't come here because you'll have a hard time doing that.
But yeah, I do think that some simplicity in our finances is, it's not a bad thing. It actually liberates us and can often get us more time to spend with our families and to spend in prayer and to spend working on projects like this that don't necessarily pay you anything.
Leafbox:
Well, one of the things, I think you're on your Twitter feed, you were talking about how, I don't know if you're relatives or whatnot, you were all trying to strategize how the best strategies for not working and how all jobs are basically just time sucks. And I thought it was quite funny cause you guys all have your own side projects and it seems more liberating. And I wonder if that you realize that from your times of exploring freedom and time is obviously the most valuable thing we have.
Andrew:
So it is, and it's the glue that holds families together. I mean, how many families have strife because the father is away 60, 70, 80 hours a week between work and commuting, and his wife doesn't feel special anymore and his kids don't know who he is. And then things fall apart. So if the father is the paragon of the success, the household, he needs to actually be physically present as much as possible. And then also you have to do the math. I, if I were to heat my house with heating oil all winter, it would probably cost me $5,000, something like that. And I have a small house, so if I work a job that makes sure that I don't have time to get firewood in and that job pays me $5,000 a year more, then the job that did let me get the firewood in, well then I'm not any better off. Because firewood can be free if you're smart about it and if you have time to go out and find it.
So that's how you do it. You reduce your expenses and make it so that you determine, well, how much do I have to work? And you go from there so that if it comes up and you say, Hey, you know what, we just had a baby. I'm not going and working. I mean, yeah, I'll do the firewood, I'll fix up the house, I'll my little side business. That's the lifestyle. And yeah, my people have been living that way for generations. So that's a tradition worth keeping because it can keep our marriages intact and it can let us educate our children properly.
Leafbox:
Andrew, do you have any final thoughts or how can people find you or connect with you?
Andrew:
Oh yeah. I don't know. It's just little old me. I'm not really anything special. A lot of people find the things I'm saying interesting, but it's not me. I almost feel like I'm just channeling the things that America has taught me. I travel, I pick up what I can from traveling, I put it together and then I start talking. So I don't like it when people are praising me so much and people do sometimes, and that is a lot for me. So it really is just America and it is the Lord. The other thing is you can get ahold of me on Twitter at shag bark underscore hick, and on ck, which is the same username, I think it's shag bark underscore hick or some such. There's a link to it in my Twitter bio. And yeah, my dms are open.