with Wendy Jehanara Tremayne, author of The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands On Living

This is the true story of how (and why) one couple ditched their high-pressure lives and moved to rural New Mexico to make, build, invent, forage, and grow everything they need to live self-sufficiently. After mastering life in the modern age as successful working professionals in New York City, Wendy Jehanara Tremayne and her husband Mikey began to reflect on their choices. Inspired by their experiences at the Burning Man Festival with its “gift economy” (no commercial transactions of any kind except the purchase of ice and coffee) and observing that her generation is the first to witness the whole world for sale, Wendy asked herself some questions: Am I limited and mechanistic, a consumer? Or am I unbounded and creative, a creator? Answering these questions became a journey of discovery and evolution as she and her husband sought a middle ground between living in the material world, and satisfying their need for a broader definition of what it is to be human. Their journey is chronicled its lessons distilled in Wendy’s new book The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living. Our conversation goes into details on what they have learned by doing, as they forged a creatively and ecologically satisfying post-consumer lifestyle in building a compound – in effect a laboratory – that gives new life to used materials and offers many solutions on how to do much more, with much less. The many ideas and insights shared here are likely to inspire that same infectious do-it-yourself spirit that Wendy and Michael came to embody.