Homesteading and Permaculture by Paul Wheaton

Paul Wheaton is not for everybody, and that’s OK. For one, the dude curses. A fair amount. (There’s a reason it’s marked “explicit.”) Next the things he proposes are pretty far from the mainstream. Probably past your comfort level. I like listening to this podcast because it’s about building a better world through learning new things, instead of being angry at bad guys. Lord knows there’s enough to be angry about. Spend some time pondering alternatives.

Having met Paul in person and spent 2 weeks at Wheaton Labs in 2019, I understand that Paul is truly a character and not for everyone. (Who is? Jesus had His haters too!) That being said, his experience and passion about making a better world and experimenting with making life better for those who want that, comes across. Paul has an amazing group of core folks that have found him and agree with his vision. I do find some episodes more of personal interest than others, of course... roundwood structures, working with animals, and community, but when I occasionally find episodes that don’t appeal to me on subject matter I have found the pause and skip buttons DO work. I’m not looking for a podcast that just confirms my biases or regurgitates stuff the dinosaur media tells me. I like the out of the box thinking these guys do. I miss my time at the Lab also... thanks Paul for being you, even with the expressive words you use! ;-) This podcast and the permies site have inspired me to the point that I’ve travelled far in two years, and have as a goal buying rural land in the next year, and just maybe working to become Wheaton Labs (MO department) or something like that... community, more natural systems, loving the land and working to improve living conditions for myself and others.

UPDATE - for a while now most of the episodes have been all about their mission and not about home scale permaculture or, most importantly, building soil and growing plants. So I’ve been skipping more than I’ve been listening. ——- I listen to about 4 four hours of podcasts a day on news,science,software,finance (but all on double speed, so, it is actually only two hours) and I've been gorging on gardening,aquaponics,permaculture podcasts for the past couple months. This podcast is definitely worth a spot in your lineup if you like this kind of thing. It is definitely the best permaculture podcast ever and maybe the best gardening podcast too. I've probably listened to almost one of these a day since I started this podcast a month ago. My favorites so far are the joint book discussions of Sepp Holzer's book and of Gaia's Garden. I wish more of the back episodes were available in iTunes, I would love to hear the whole series of those. Not every episode is a gem, I didn't need three hours of content on electric tractors, and, if you are trying to convince me to give up soap, I need more than two antidotal data points.

Paul’s podcast may appear a little esoteric. That’s because he’s talking about a subject he’s passionate about - permaculture. Permaculture is also a hard subject to get your head around. The fasts way to get that knowledge is listening to these podcasts and heading over to his website, which is what I did. It wont be long before they begin to make so much sense as your head fills with the awesomeness.

I wasn't going to write a review, but then I saw that he chose to call this a science podcast, so lets apply some science. This podcast has a lot of cool ideas in it. But coupled with those cool ideas are a lot of outrageous claims. Paul never bothers to find anything that is actually proof for them. He claims that you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of permaculture, but the examples he points to aren't making money off of raising food, they are making money off of entertaining tourists by how they raise food, often with interns doing the grunt work. He makes claims about productivity increasing off the land, but the only way he ever backs this up is by making a series of loose links "you plant two crops in the same field, you get two harvests" sort of thing. He never attempts to measure anything, so we can never know if the two crops in question are competing with each other and reducing the harvest off each other. He claims that he grew healthy bacon, and that his customers would come to him and say that other bacon would kill them and that his was fine. Well it's bacon, and he is taking the rationalizations of someone who eats soo poorly that their doctor is concerned for their continued survival that his products were safe. That's not science, that's speculation by completely untrained people who have shown that they clearly do not understand how to develop and maintain a healthy diet. If you raise scientific objections to Paul he is going to get angry at you. If you post scientific proof to his forum he is going to delete it. If you complain about it he will ban you, no matter how polite you are. He is an anti-science bully, who makes his money off of selling dreams of success. It's the same formula that MLM marketers and con artists use. Offer them a big reward, and if anyone complains throw them out.