Ryan Levesque: I wanted to exit from the life that I had Yeah. Created, and it felt like a prison. And I was responsible for building that prison and putting myself inside of it. And I tell my kids, I think the secret to joy in life is

Kate Northrup: I am so excited for this episode today. It’s based around a book that I recently read in one day that I have thought about every single day since. It’s called Return to Real, and it is with my friend Ryan Levesque. Ryan is one of the most important voices in our time around the seeming duality between technology and the race to do more and scale bigger with AI and all of these other opportunities and the pull to the ground, literally, to be on the Earth in the realness of being in a body with other human beings living on a planet with plants and animals. And it may seem that it’s not possible to have both, that we actually have to choose.

And what I love about Ryan is his invitation to be all of us and that there’s actually a dual pull and that the very thing your customers want is a match to what your deepest longing is as well in this moment. So if you feel caught between wondering, am I supposed to keep just churning out more stuff? How am I supposed to navigate this world of increasing, automated content and so much spinning and so much production when all I wanna do is go retreat into the woods and never speak to anyone again without a Wi Fi login, then this episode is for you because we don’t have to choose, but not in the way you think. So Ryan, he built a huge business prior to what he’s working on now, and he tells the story of the incredible acquisition of that business in the book. And he was one of Inc’s top growing companies, and he really is a brilliant, brilliant guy.

And what I love about him is that not only is he intellectually unbelievably sharp, he also has one of the biggest hearts I have encountered. And that combo is a beautiful thing, and it is a rare thing for somebody to be able to articulate both their intellect and the language of their heart so beautifully. So I invite you to sit back and enjoy Ryan Levesque and all of his beautiful concepts and invitations in Return to Real. Welcome to Plenty, a weekly recalibration of power, money, and safety for high capacity humans. I’m Kate Northrup, best selling author and creator of Relaxed Money, and this is where neuroscience meets ancient wisdom meets real wealth strategy.

This is the sacred conversation at the intersection of money, the body, and the life you’re truly here to live. If you’re ready to reimagine what’s possible for yourself and for the world, you’re in the right place. Let’s go. Welcome.

Ryan Levesque: Thank you.

Kate Northrup: Thanks for being here.

Ryan Levesque: Awesome to be here.

Kate Northrup: This is so fun. Okay. So I read your book in the last twenty four hours, the whole thing Mitch. Which was really such a delight. First of all, well done.

Kate Northrup: This is so fun. Okay. So I read your book in the last twenty four hours, the whole thing Mitch. Which was really such a delight. First of all, well done.

Thank you. So good. I already have recommended it to several people even though they can’t get it at the time of this recording. But first, I wanna start off with we’re gonna go all over over the place because that’s how my brain works. I was really struck by this little detail where you just kinda mentioned, oh, I inherited $5,000 when I was 10 Yep.

When my grandparents both passed within a year Yep. And I begged my parents to let me invest it in the stock market. Yeah. I so we talk about money here on the show, and I have an eight and 10 year old. And one of the things I really would like to teach them is the power of compounding interest.

And I was like, here’s an example of someone who was into it at 10. Yeah. How did you learn about investing as a child to that extent?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. It’s a great question. So Who

Kate Northrup: taught you?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. When my I mean, I grew up a very, you know, working class, blue collar background. My grandparents didn’t have much, but they left my sister and I each, through my mom a $5,000 inheritance. And my mom said, you can do whatever you want. Can put it in the bank.

You can save it. You can, you know, whatever wanna do. It’s yours.

Kate Northrup: At ten. She said you can do whatever you want with it.

Ryan Levesque: At at ten. I mean, that’s amazing. And and this is right about the time that I think I was starting to learn about investing in the stock market. And at the time, Peter Lynch

Kate Northrup: Yes.

Ryan Levesque: Was the man. So I read, I read one up on on Wall Street. I read all of the Peter Lynch books.

Kate Northrup: When you were 10?

Ryan Levesque: 10 through 11, 12, etcetera. And what I what we also did in I I can actually see it in my mind’s eye. The 1992 S and P Standard and Poor’s Uh-huh. The tear sheet book. It looked like a phone book.

And it was all the one pagers on all the companies.

Kate Northrup: Okay.

Ryan Levesque: And I don’t know why I just became obsessed over thumbing through these things and what do these companies do and what do they sell and how do they work? And I just became really interested in it. And at the time, like the Internet didn’t yet exist. So we would there was an automated phone system where you could pick up the phone and you could dial the ticker symbol and you could see what the stock price was. And I just became, I don’t know, really interested in it.

And I became obsessed. And so I invested the $5,000 in the stock market in a number of different individual stocks. And, I mean, it’s not so much innate aptitude. It was a lot of luck. I invested in 1992 and I had to sell all of my shares in 2000 to pay for college right before the dot com crash.

But I converted the $5,000 into over $8,085,000 dollars, which is like a 165,000, I think, dollars in in, you know, today’s dollars.

Kate Northrup: In eight years?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. In eight years. So it was a meaningful amount of money. Uh-huh. And it’s what paid for my tuition at Brown.

Kate Northrup: I just think that story is so inspiring. It was a bit of a an aside

Ryan Levesque: Sure.

Kate Northrup: In the book, but I really wanted to pull it out. What are you teaching your kids about investing?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. So it’s a great question. So both of our kids have investment portfolios. It’s a bit of a tangent, but I’ll I’ll give you our our process.

Kate Northrup: I love a tangent.

Ryan Levesque: So our process has been as follows. We first started by reading Rich Dad Poor Dad. Mhmm. We did a read aloud when the kids were very young. Oh, Like six and eight years old.

So we did read aloud and we passed the book around and everyone would read. My six year old would read like three sentences because it took a long time. Yeah. You know, dad would read like a a a chapter, but we all read the book together. Then we started playing cash flow for kids.

Yep. And then when the kids mastered that, we played the cash flow adult game. Yep. Then when they mastered that, we took their first they we’d saved a bunch of money for them and they had done work for us in the business, you know, packaging books and helping at events and things like that.

Kate Northrup: Podcast assisting.

Ryan Levesque: Podcast assisting. Podcast producer and helping with talking and, you know, all the things. And so they had they had saved up a few, know, thousands of dollars. And so they learned about the power of investing in real estate and cash flowing real estate. So we found a real estate investment that we together did the due diligence on.

We invested in it as a family. They all put money in it. And that investment spits out a few $100 of free cash flow every single month. They then take that cash flow and they can take 80% of it and invest, 20% they can spend. And the 80% we invest through a platform called Greenlight.

Kate Northrup: Mhmm.

Ryan Levesque: And they build their own portfolios.

Kate Northrup: And that’s the kids one.

Ryan Levesque: That’s the

Kate Northrup: kids one. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: I’ve heard of it. Like my 14 year old has a cell phone now. My my 12 year old does not, but there’s an app. And so with the app, you can actually make your own trades. They have a little a few businesses.

Their biggest business is a is a retail arbitrage business where basically

Kate Northrup: don’t even know what that means.

Ryan Levesque: Like, they go to Sierra and TJ Maxx Okay. And they find stuff that’s, like, 95% off, and then they buy it, and then they sell it on eBay.

Kate Northrup: For higher.

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s like the thing sells on, you know, new is a $100, but it’s like $7 on super clearance. You can sell it for $50. Right.

You know, so you make a bit of profit. So same thing, they take the profit from that, 80% goes into their investments, 20% they get to spend. Then they have goals. Like, they have monthly goals and quarterly goals. And I mean, it’s just all basic stuff, but, like, teaching kids these fundamentals, they start to see the numbers increase.

And it’s cool for them to start learning how to make their own decisions. And it’s, like, it’s simplistic, you know, investment thesis, like but they’re making smart moves. Like, they’re investing in companies that they believe in for different reasons. They

Kate Northrup: Exactly. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: I mean,

Kate Northrup: it’s like not actually complicated. No. You just yeah. You just break it down.

Ryan Levesque: You just gotta do it. And I think to your point, you know, the earlier you start, we all know this, but it’s like, we all wish we planted that tree twenty five years ago. And so like, you know, if you start at 10 or 12 years old, if you’ve got kids or grandkids, like if you start them at that age, like by the time they’re 30,

Kate Northrup: The twenty years math is so good. Yes. It’s very sexy.

Ryan Levesque: Yes, exactly. Part of me wonders like if I had not sold off my portfolio, I mean, have done the math because I know the securities. I mean, was I invested in Microsoft and Intel and Applied Materials and companies like GE and I’ve like, I’ve run the scenarios. It’s millions of dollars Sure. If I had just let it ride for, you know, thirty five years.

Kate Northrup: Well, now I have a question Okay. About education.

Ryan Levesque: Okay.

Kate Northrup: So many of the concepts in Return to Real resonated very deeply with me. And this idea, you know, you said that you were raised in a blue collar family, and what was modeled to you or maybe what was said explicitly or not, I don’t know Yeah. Was it’s better to work with your mind than your hands.

Ryan Levesque: I think

Kate Northrup: that was the Or do you think that was just like what you gathered?

Ryan Levesque: That was what I gathered. So my

Kate Northrup: But nobody told you that?

Ryan Levesque: I didn’t my parents never said I mean, my parents were big believers in education. Mhmm. Neither of my parents went to college. They just graduated from high school. My mom started working almost full time when she was 14 years old and she became a a hairstylist.

So she she she cut hair. And so I just saw her literally working with her hands every single day. And she started first at a salon. And then when we were young, she wanted to be at home. And so my parents converted a half bath that was basically half the size of the room we’re in right now, which is not a big room, so to put it in perspective, into a one chair salon.

And so my entire life, we had people coming to our house to get their hair done. And that was my mom’s little, you know, entrepreneurial endeavor. And my dad, on the total opposite side of the spectrum, was a union worker for the US Postal Service working nights. So he was loading boxes on the back of trucks. He was not a mailman like delivering, but he was like at the big warehouse facility and moving, you know, pallets of mail around that sort of thing.

So he worked nights. And I just saw, my parents exhausted at the end of the day. My mom, her hands basically, arthritis in her hands just like unable to do anything. And my dad just after a ten, twelve hour shift of doing physical labor coming home and just passing out sleeping because he was so exhausted. So I think there was an equation that formed in my mind that was working with your hands is a life you wanna escape, working with your mind is a life that you wanna create.

Kate Northrup: It’s interesting because I was raised, both my parents are doctors Yeah. And hyper intellectual, like super academic, you know, getting into the right school is the the the the the the the Yeah. In the culture as opposed to in our homes because Yeah. People who grew up in very different scenarios end up with the same message. And so I wanna know for you as a dad Yeah.

Obviously being a father is a huge part of your identity. I mean, write about it a lot. It’s Yep. I think I I would summarize and say like this book for you in many ways is about being a dad and your kids. Even though the book is not at all about parenting.

Yeah. At all. Yeah. Maybe a couple pages. But like that’s the heartbeat.

And so as your kids get closer and closer to heading out of the house, going to college, I wanna know what are you thinking about school? What are you thinking about the world of higher education right now as it relates to the concept of your book and having these boys who are on the precipice Yeah. You know, in what, six to eight years, something like that? Because you and I both went to Brown, we didn’t know each other then, but that was kind of a fun thing that I realized. And I think about how much that education has and has not contributed to my life.

You said you sold your portfolio and you’ve done the math Yeah. Of like, oh, it would be worth millions right now that what you Right. What you sold to pay for your education. And I’m just curious, how do you think about, for you, the comparison between the value of your education that you got at Brown versus the value of what that portfolio would be worth now, and then how do you translate that to your kids now thirty, however years later, in a whole different world?

Ryan Levesque: You know, it’s such a great question. So just to sort of take a step back because I think this is important context. Our both of our kids, our two boys were born in suburban Austin, Texas. And that’s where they’re born, family in Texas, grew up. And a few years ago Is

Kate Northrup: your wife from Texas?

Ryan Levesque: She’s from Texas. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And she also went to Brown.

Kate Northrup: Okay.

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. So she’s, same year as me. Cool. So she grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, which is like the Deep South for anyone not familiar with Texas. She grew up basically a mile from the Mexico border.

She’s Mexican American. Her family’s Mexican American and she grew up in a part of the country that’s 99.9% Hispanic. And Spanish is spoken in the household, Spanish is spoken in school. It is that I speak a little bit. I mean, not I’m not a native Yeah.

You know, Spanish speaker. And, so that was her background. And I grew up in New England and we met in in New England in college. And so a few years ago, we decided to make a major life move. And we left Texas, and we decided as a family to start a farm in the Green Mountains Of Vermont.

And so we live on a 140 acres. We raise and grow 80% of the food that we eat as a family, and we do it ourselves. We have had help along the way, but it’s not a lord surf scenario where we just roll in and, you know, we have Right.

Kate Northrup: You couldn’t just, like, leave for

Ryan Levesque: two months. Exactly. Right.

Kate Northrup: Exactly. No. The farm needs you. It

Ryan Levesque: needs us. Yeah. And so, like, my wife and our boys are manning the fort while I’m here having this conversation with you. When I say a farm, like, have cattle, pigs, turkeys, meat birds, meat chickens, laying hens. We have trouts.

Kate Northrup: You aren’t people homesteading who, like, have chickens and It’s it’s buy everything else at Whole Foods.

Ryan Levesque: Exactly.

Kate Northrup: It’s Which is also wonderful. Which is totally fine. Not what

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. It’s it’s just what we had this this vision and this dream that we said, is it possible to raise and grow 80% of the food, 80% of the calories that we consume with our own hands. And what does that look like? And how does one do that? And we had no we had no experience coming into this.

So it was a huge learning experience. So I I say that because some people might think, okay. So are you anti technology, anti school? Are you a Luddite? Or are you like, where do you fall in that line?

At the same time, my older son, for example, he’s learned how to code in Java, which is not an easy programming language. He knows how to build agentic AI systems. He and my younger son are deeply involved in investing and, you know, deeply involved with technology. And I found that it’s the balance of those things that it’s the key. It’s not abandoning one for the other.

It’s not about just going all in into the multiverse and just like living in front of a screen all day. It’s also not abandoning technology and like living in a cave. But I don’t know what future to prepare our kids for. I just don’t know. Like what skills are gonna be most important?

So I’ve decided to hedge. Our kids are learning the skills of raising and growing their own food and building and working with their hands and all of that and everything that’s entailed in that experience. And at the same time, they’re also learning, you know, things like, you know, math and and coding and technology and everything like that. So over the years, we have done probably every educational system under the sun. Our kids have gone to public school.

They’ve gone to Montessori school. We’ve homeschooled. We’ve had a private teacher that we’ve hired to come in and privately educate our kids. My younger son is at a Waldorf school right now. And next year, my older son is actually going to boarding school.

Oh, wow. He’s going to a boarding high school in New England. A very competitive He’ll be freshman? He’ll be a freshman. One of the top schools in the country.

He’s just very intellectually gifted and like that’s the environment that he wanted to be in. And he was always a kid, like when he was younger, who if we sent him to summer camp for a week, he he was like, I wanna be away all summer. Like, he just loved to be away from home. Know, write a letter to mom and dad, like, at least, you know, once or once a week. Yeah.

It’s like the paper was not even pulled out of the backpack. You know what I mean? Like, that that’s that’s who he is. Yeah. So so he’s super excited about that.

We’re really excited for him. Now the cost of tuition of elite boarding schools in New England is is more than undergrad. Yes. It’s I mean, depending on the school, it’s almost 6 figures a year. It is not an inexpensive investment.

Yeah. You really gotta, you know, decide. Are you you know, how committed Yeah. Are you to So I think me more than me saying anything, think that probably speaks Mhmm. Like where your money goes is, you know, where your A values

Kate Northrup: 100%. Yeah. Whether you’re conscious of of it or not, that’s what’s happening.

Ryan Levesque: And what I will say, just like with your girls, like our boys are very different. Yeah. So it’s not like carbon copy kid number one is gonna do this and then kid number two, we’re just gonna put them in the same thing. Our other son, I think is gonna thrive in a very different environment. And we’ve already started having conversations with him about that.

So I think as parents, it’s I think important to recognize our kids as individuals and really pay attention to where they’re best suited to thrive and give them the best opportunity that we can.

Kate Northrup: I love that. That’s beautiful. Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about publishing.

Ryan Levesque: Okay.

Kate Northrup: I’m making a hard left.

Ryan Levesque: I love it. It’s just like I feel like I’m in the the Uber drive that I had coming to a place where it’s just all like over

Kate Northrup: the place?

Ryan Levesque: Here we go. Here we go. He was just a little like, he turned, like, maybe three seconds later than you should start turning. No. I love it.

It’s like being

Kate Northrup: in Miami. Yeah. So you went a different route with your publishing

Ryan Levesque: Yes.

Kate Northrup: This time around. Yes. Are you open to talking about that?

Ryan Levesque: I’d say I’d talk about anything.

Kate Northrup: Okay. Great. So I think you published with Hay House with your first book, or was it had

Ryan Levesque: Well, two my first book, I published with a really small publisher actually here in Franklin Okay. In in Nashville and Dunham Books. And I was an unknown author, had an opportunity, accepted me, and and it was it was great. And then David tragically passed away a few years later. And when he passed away, his estate sold off the rights to all the books.

I bought the rights back of of my first book, Ask. And then I had an opportunity to do a multi book deal with Hay House. Yes. And so they bought the rights to Ask and they bought the rights to at least another book or two. Yep.

And so I published a book called Choose, which is sort of the follow-up. And then I had the idea that we’re gonna do a three book series. It was gonna be choose, ask, then probably build. Choose your market, ask them what they want, build what they need. Like that was gonna be kind of like the three book arc.

And then life throws you curveballs. Yeah. Life change you know, things change and you’ve had, you know, different moves in your life. It’s the same thing. Right?

So that was the original vision. And I had a conversation with Hay House about doing this book. And there was a certain timeliness with this book. And they basically gave me a timeline that I was like, how do we cut this in half? Yeah.

And they basically said, we can’t

Kate Northrup: No. Because in traditional publishing, there’s just so many real constraints. Yes. It just takes a freaking long time.

Ryan Levesque: It does. You know? Now the irony is, unfortunately, the irony is I’m actually gonna be releasing this book at the timeline that they originally suggested. But in my mind, I thought I could do it, like But

Kate Northrup: you know what’s different? Is that you were driving the timeline Yes. Versus Yeah. You know, something that you have no control over.

Ryan Levesque: Totally. Or less. Yeah. Absolutely. And and HAYES is a great publishing company Oh,

Kate Northrup: they’re amazing.

Ryan Levesque: All the Love them. Most positive things to say Yes. About them. So it had nothing to do with that. It was just about like, the right circumstances for this particular book.

Okay. Yeah. So self published it. Worked with a great company called Author Inc. Yeah.

Big fan of Charlie Hohn and his work. And, basically, they provided a lot of the guidance and editing and design process alongside Cool. Me being able to have creative control.

Kate Northrup: Okay. I wanna talk about that curveball Okay. That sent you on the great adventure

Ryan Levesque: Okay.

Kate Northrup: With your family. I find that we make a lot of our decisions based on money. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Was talking to someone over the weekend and they were describing their career to me And these are people who really can sort of buy anything. Mhmm. And yet, she was describing her work schedule, which I just didn’t really know. I don’t know her that well. Yeah.

Oh my goodness. I would survive three weeks Yeah. Maybe Yeah. With that level of how many hours she’s working, how many hours she’s in front of a screen, whatever. And I think that now I’m making things up because I don’t know her that well.

Yeah. But I would surmise that if we were to dig deeper, the reason we would go down and say like, why are you doing that when you have young kids? Because of money. I mean, she gets paid so well. Yeah.

So you had this opportunity that you had planned on crossing over the threshold and I’d love for you to tell a little bit of the story

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. Of that. Sure. And I think you’re spot on about how money drives so many of our decisions. Yeah.

And so I had been building a company that was in hyper growth mode. And I’d really spent about a decade of my life on this decade long sprint. And I built a seven time Inc. 5,000 fastest growing company, generated well over a $100,000,000 in total revenue over that time. And I woke up one day, story that I share in the book, and had a conversation with my business partner and said, I I think we should sell the company.

Let’s sell the company. I’m I’m I’m I’m feeling burnt out. Like, I wanna I wanna get out. And, he was in agreement. And so we worked with the broker, got an offer for the the company.

They changed the terms at the eleventh hour. So we said, we’re rejecting that offer. We’re gonna walk away from it. We fired that broker, and then we hired an investment bank to help us with the sale. And then we got a $70,000,000 offer to purchase the majority of our company.

And, I mean, it was life changing amount of money. We spent about a year going through the process. The buyer spent about $1,000,000 in diligence going through it, and we were literally days away from signing the purchase agreement for the terms of the sale. And this is in 2021 into 2022 when Russia first invaded the Ukraine. And if you remember back at that time, there were fears that there could be World War three.

Like, people didn’t know what Putin was gonna do. Like, how big was this gonna get? Was Putin gonna start invading Europe? There was a lot of fear around it. And so capital markets responded by crashing, interest rates spiked, and the m and a, the mergers and acquisitions market, basically completely dried up.

And these things happen in cycles. And I recognize that I think we missed the window to sell, probably by about, like, six months. Like, we were six months earlier, we probably would have sold and would have been a different outcome. And I kinda had this moment where I just felt so deflated. And it was one summer when our kids were at, summer camp where I had an opportunity just sort of out of the blue to do something that was kind of way out in left field, but I thought I might do it.

And it was to earn my permaculture design certification, my PDC, by living on a farm in Vermont. And so that summer, I lived literally in a tent, bathed in a pond all summer, and learned how to raise and grow food with my own two hands. And it was when I was there that I had this awakening. And it was just something that I had been craving my entire life. I mean, I I grew up in New Hampshire.

I grew up as a boy playing in the woods. I had a garden when I was 12 years old. My first business was a a lawn care, you know, business with my best friend. We’re mowing lawns and raking leaves and doing that sort of thing. So, you know, it’s like we come full circle in life.

And it was sort of like this moment of of realization when I was on this farm where I said, if the sale had gone through, like if we had sold $70,000,000 and, you know, life changing money, what would I have done with the money? And the answer was simple. It was while I have my two boys at home, I wanna live a life immersed in nature and start a farm. That was it. And then I kinda had this second moment where it was like, dude, what is stopping you from doing that now?

Yeah. And I think a lot of us have this sort of this, well, I’ll do it when. Like, thing that I wanna do, and you studied money, so you know this, but the studies show that whatever amount of money you have now, people typically want two x. It’s like we need two x where we are right now, and then I’ll feel comfortable. Same thing with earning.

Like, you know, if if you need $500,000 to live or a $250,000 to live, you’re like, if I could earn a million dollars a year, like, I’d feel good. We just have this sort of this this buffer of what we think we need. And, you know, I looked at our bank account. I look at where we were, and I said, what is stopping us from doing this now? And the answer was absolutely nothing.

So while I was on that on that farm, I texted Tylene, my wife, with one bar of service, and we’d been talking about this. This wasn’t like an out of the blue thing. We’ve been talking about we’ve been watching we watched the biggest little farm and all the documentaries and, Kiss you know the ground. Kiss the ground. And yeah.

Kate Northrup: It changed my life. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: So we went so deep down that and you know, we were deeply involved in farmer’s markets, everything. So this wasn’t like a new out of the blue thing, but I said, I feel it in my bones that this is what we’re meant to do. And I said, put the house on the market. Mhmm. We had lined up a real estate agent.

Said, I just put it on the market. Let’s see what happens. Yeah. And literally that night, I get a text message back and she said, well, first couple to see the place made an offer. I said, okay.

How was it? She said, it’s a full price, all cash, but there’s a catch. They want a fourteen day close. They gotta move in right away. And I said, crap.

Okay. So I’m literally DocuSign ing the HUD on my phone with, like, my finger for, you

Kate Northrup: know Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: Our home. And then I had to rebook my flight, get my butt back from from Vermont to Texas. We put everything we owned into storage and had a moving company out of Boston with a b drive cross country, put our stuff in trucks, put it in storage. We sold one of our cars and then we literally hopped in the back of the truck with suitcase each, two kids, a dog and road trip from Texas to Vermont. We had nowhere to go, nowhere to stay.

We just had a dream and a vision. And we literally spent the next year bouncing around Airbnb to Airbnb. At one point, we’re in the shopkeeper’s apartment above a general store in a small town, And we became known as the crazy family from Texas. Vermont is a small place. Oh, yes.

Yeah. It’s a very small place, so everyone kinda knows everyone. Eventually we found our farm. And as I mentioned, we, you know, now raise and grow most of the food that we eat, and we get to learn everything. You know, I brought in experts to help educate us and teach us how to do all the things that we didn’t know how to do and design the site.

We planted 500 fruit trees and nut trees and berry bushes. We’ve got a massive production garden. We do an annual event on the farm where we do like a real farm to table meal where everybody gets to experience food literally, like right outside where we eat. Like, the food was grown right there. And it’s a cool experience and it’s been a grand adventure.

Kate Northrup: What do you think it is for you about food and dirt and the earth? Obviously, you talk about it in the book, but I just wanna know more. Yeah. Because this is this feels like the thread, right? You you cook, you’re preparing meals for your family, you want to eat 80% of the food that you grew from your own land, you gather people around a table.

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. Tell me more about what that’s about for you.

Ryan Levesque: That’s a really perceptive question. So I don’t say that explicitly in the book but it’s very interesting that you picked up on that. So for me, I had a period of my life where we were literally like, every meal was, like, out of a box. Like, we’re getting food delivered to the house. We had, like, meal delivery, you know, those meal pre prepared meals.

They’re, you know, shipped in boxes and ice packs.

Kate Northrup: Right.

Ryan Levesque: I mean, like, we were I was, like, living in a box, like, traveling in a box, eating food from a box.

Kate Northrup: Looking at a box?

Ryan Levesque: Looking at a box all day. It’s like I had this realization. Was like, we’re not meant to be inside a box, like, unless you’re dead. Right?

Kate Northrup: Right.

Ryan Levesque: And so Even then maybe. But I’ll tell you what what kicked it off. It was was during COVID when everything shut down, I wanted to provide great food for my family. And I just started pulling on this thread. And you go down this path where you start shopping at the regular grocery store and you look at the ingredients, you’re like, this isn’t that great.

And then so you go to Whole Foods and then you’re like, alright, it’s a little bit better, but in some cases it’s actually not, it’s just more expensive. Yes. And then so then you go to farmer’s markets and then you visit the farms and you say, well, they’re kinda doing not great practices. They’re just closer to home. Right.

And so I came to this conclusion that the only logical end to this is we have to grow this food ourselves. And I know that’s, like, not the only path, but that’s just the path that I that I came to. And food was the path that brought us here. When I say here, to to the farm. And I mean, like, I mean, I could go on.

I mean, I I bake sourdough. Like, we have all fresh herbs outside. I mean, it’s like I was picking 10 quarts of raspberries a day right before coming here. You know? I do a, like, a raspberry mint salad with mixed I’m greens coming

Kate Northrup: to dinner.

Ryan Levesque: It’s amazing. It’s so amazing.

Kate Northrup: So good.

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. Depending on what your protein needs. I mean, we I do a fresh chicken every single week and, you know, we do beef. We do pork. We can do trout from our own fish.

Do We a 100% of our sweetener. So everything we do is with our own maple syrup and our own honey. And it’s like you get to that level of real and it becomes almost like this craving where you want real in your life. Like you can taste the difference. And it’s not just food, but I think food is a great metaphor It is.

Because we can all relate to it, where it’s like this is what we’re craving.

Kate Northrup: And creates our entire body. Yes. And our body creates our entire experience of being human.

Ryan Levesque: Well said.

Kate Northrup: So I wanna know how has it changed being in your body since you started eating that way? And also just being in the full cycle of food production on your farm?

Ryan Levesque: Well I think, so a few practical things. We didn’t grow up praying before meals, it wasn’t in our family culture. I cannot sit down and eat a meal without taking a moment to just like appreciate whether or not there’s animal protein. Animal protein is one thing. But even just appreciating the life nourishing aspect of what that food and everyone who’s been involved in the process of harvesting that food, raising that food, cultivating that food.

And so that appreciation is I think a huge, huge difference. And I see it in our kids too. Like our kids have been involved in, we do on farm processing. So that means we process these animals on farm. Our kids have been involved in that process.

They know exactly where food comes from. And they’ve had all the experiences that you can imagine that come with it. My younger son, his big dream one year was he said, I wanna ride a pig this year. Amazing. I wanna ride a pig.

His next year dream was he wanted to do dinner himself. So our kids cook.

Kate Northrup: Oh,

Ryan Levesque: yeah. So he wanted to do dinner himself. He wanted to catch trout from our pond and he wanted to pair the trout, he wanted to cook the trout, he wanted to serve it. He wanted to do the whole thing. That was his like

Kate Northrup: How old was he that year?

Ryan Levesque: So he was 11. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so we set goals each year and we have farm goals and personal goals and reading goals and business goals and everything like that. I don’t know if that answers the answer you’re looking for in the question, but I mean it is

Kate Northrup: I’m never really looking for

Ryan Levesque: a particular answer. I feel it’s, I feel changed as a human being. And our mutual friend, Amy Porterfield, I remember when I did a talk at a thing that she and I were both at and she texted me after this talk and she said, you are like a completely different person. And she meant that in a positive way. She wasn’t like, know, you’re

Kate Northrup: What happened to you?

Ryan Levesque: You’re a horrible human being now so don’t talk to me anymore. And I knew what she meant. So I think what happens is when we allow ourselves, and this is my personal journey, but I think we all have our own version of what real looks like. And for some it’s food, for some it is having time to step away from a screen, for some it is really getting in touch with who you are inside that maybe you’ve, for all sorts of different reasons, you’ve had to be performative in certain ways, you’d had to, and maybe not intentionally, it just happens through a million, you know, small

Kate Northrup: Yes, it does.

Ryan Levesque: Things over time, is getting back to what’s real for you.

Kate Northrup: I’m curious, you talked about that it wasn’t maybe so much that you hated being in your company when you really wanted to sell, but it was actually you hated a little bit the person you had become Yeah. In that. Yeah. And I would love to know what are some of the parts of yourself, the realist parts that you have felt permission to bring out now in this incredible chapter Yeah. Of your life that were sublimated before, suppressed, not even available to you?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. What are some of those things?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. You know, I think, you know, I had a lot of time to reflect on why I wanted to sell the company in the first place. And there’s always like the surface level reason and answer. But what I came to this realization is that I wanted to exit from the life that I had created. And it felt like a prison.

And I was responsible for building that prison and putting myself inside of it. I take like full we were just saying, it’s not like one thing happened one day and all of a sudden it was there. It’s like a million micro decisions where one day you wake up ten years later and say, how did I get here? So I think the one that is most salient is as our company was growing and I built a team, I had over a 100 people working for me. So it was a big Yeah.

I mean, small, you know, it wasn’t Facebook. But I mean, was like in a small business, it was it was a lot It of was big. That’s a lot of pressure. That’s lot of mouth to feed. That’s a lot of head count.

That’s a lot of salary that you’re paying every single month. And as a CEO, your responsibilities, you get stretched in a lot of different directions. And one of the things that we started doing is we would bring in writers who would write in my voice. So we would take a canon of work that I had written years and years and years ago. New writers would come in.

They’d learn that brand voice and then they would write in that voice. And we would sign everything with my name on it, but it reached a point that there was a period of time where every single thing that we put out as a company that had my name on it was actually not written by me. And that was a seven year period. And there was one day when I was so fed up with this that I decided to sit down and write an email to my audience. And I said, I titled it the embarrassing confession.

And basically I I said this. I said, hey. This may come as a shock to you, but it’s been a minute since I sat down and typed an email like this with my own two hands. In fact, every single piece that you’ve seen with my name attached to it has been written by a team of writers and more recently AI for seven years. And I said that stops today.

And And that was one of these things that it bothered me. I mean, I would literally check my email and I’d get our email that’s sent out with my freaking name attached to it and I would slam my laptop shut because I was so cringed out by what it is that we’re putting out there. And I felt like it was so out of integrity. At the same time, this is like the industry standard. It wasn’t like what we were doing was unique.

I mean, can’t tell you how many other people I know that have a writer or a team of writers that write in their voice. And today, it’s using AI to to to write in your voice. And I just felt so inauthentic and out of integrity. And, you know, for years, I just kind of thought that this was just the cost of scaling. Like, there’s no way as CEO of this company, I can also sit down and write every email that comes from you know, that’s just not that’s not feasible.

But I just decided to make a a no compromises move. And that was a hundred and twelve weeks ago. Every single week for a hundred and twelve weeks, and I don’t plan on stopping, I write a an email that comes from me, from my head, from my heart to our audience, typed with these hands that you see here, deeply researched, often vulnerable. And not only was it cathartic to go through that process, but I had more opportunity come my way when I made that shift in the first six months than the last six years of my business. And I’ll tell you the reaction.

And it’s this is what I’m about to say is is almost like supernatural. I just met with a a friend in Franklin yesterday. And on my interview with our friend Amy, I shared the story. I said, do you remember the movie Hook?

Kate Northrup: Yeah. Love that movie.

Ryan Levesque: So there’s a scene in Hook where Pocket, who’s one of the lost boys Yes. Goes up to Robin Williams, and he takes off Yeah. The glasses and he kind of smooshes his face and he says, oh, there you are, Peter. And it just felt like that was what happened in our business. It’s like, oh, there you are.

And so many people just kept coming out of the woodwork and were like, so glad that you’re back. Yeah. And I had just gotten lost for a seven year period. Yeah.

Kate Northrup: That is the biggest bottleneck in our company is the writing Yeah. Because I can’t let it go. Yeah. And I have to tell you that reading that part of your book really helped me realize like, oh, that’s not a bottleneck issue. That’s a protection of my voice.

That’s an authenticity issue. I have never figured out how to get somebody else to be able to do any of the writing, and I thought that was a problem. But that story helped me see that as something that’s really beautiful and worth protecting.

Ryan Levesque: I think so.

Kate Northrup: So thank you for that.

Ryan Levesque: You know, I appreciate that.

Kate Northrup: Yeah. Yeah. You talk about how many of the most valuable things are not scalable.

Ryan Levesque: Yes. Yeah. The best things in life don’t scale.

Kate Northrup: The best things in life don’t scale are relationships with our children Yeah. Going out and touching the ground first thing in the morning

Ryan Levesque: Yeah.

Kate Northrup: And, you know, cooking a meal for your family from the eggs from your farm, from the chickens you fed, you know, all of those things. And it’s a really important message right now, obviously, is why you wrote this freaking book. Not telling you anything you didn’t know. But one of the things that I feel like we really lose track of is asking why am I doing this? Like, when will I know that I’m there?

What is there? And is there any there there? You spoke of you were getting some physical symptoms. So I think for a lot of us, our bodies can be the first sign that there’s a problem, and I love your take on cortisol and what it indicates in our life. So can you talk a little bit about cortisol as an indicator?

I was like, what?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. So, you know, in many ways, this book is an exploration in what it means to be real and how that may just be the last advantage we have left in a world of artificial everything, from the food we eat to the content we consume and everything in between. And one of the lenses that I explore this idea is through the lens of three different neurotransmitters. So dopamine, oxytocin, and cortisol. And I’ll talk about cortisol.

Cortisol in many ways so we know cortisol is a stress hormone. Most people are familiar with that. But in many ways, you can think about cortisol as the molecule of misalignment. When we are living in misalignment, we have actual cortisol spikes in our body. So like the most, you know, sort of visceral way to think about this is imagine if you had to sit down and write something and publish something and send something out that you do not believe.

Your body actually tenses up. Your shoulders get tight. You, like, you have all the stress responses that you would have as if, you know, you’re facing a predator. And when you are living in misalignment, that shows up every single day. It hurts you emotionally.

It hurts you intellectually as well. Like, you’re less creative thinker. You are worse at problem solving. Like, all the things. It actually has, like, very pragmatic negative consequences.

And so by allowing yourself to what I describe as seek and speak truth, That I believe is the path to authenticity. You can’t, you know, say be more authentic. Like, go. Like, you just, like, go. Be authentic.

Like, you can’t. What I think the path to get there is is seek what’s true for you, to learn how to, what I describe as, listen to the contrarian voice of your heart, which is not listening to your market. It’s not listening to your advisers. It’s not listening to talking heads on social media. It’s not listening to us even talking about this right now.

It’s about learning how to listen to the somatic response in your body when you are faced with something. Do I believe this? AI cannot do that for you. Cannot abdicate that to AI. And it is not, to your point, a destination.

Right. It is a process. Like, it is the rest of your life. It’s just checking in with that voice. Do I believe this?

And then having the courage to speak what you actually believe. Not, you know, POV that’s designed to, you know, turn heads and get attention, but what is it that you actually truly believe? And what the data suggests is that we as human beings are incredibly good at detecting authenticity. We can’t articulate why we think someone’s fake, but there are all sorts of micro expressions and probably sub threshold recognition that someone does something. We don’t know why.

It’s like, I don’t quite think that person’s telling the truth.

Kate Northrup: Mhmm.

Ryan Levesque: Or they’re, like, performing or whatever. We’re really good at detecting it. So it’s good for your biology. It’s healthier. Like, it restores your mental health, your emotional health, your physical health.

Kate Northrup: Yeah. I mean, all the opportunities that have come to you through your newsletter are obviously an indication, and I and I wanna point out that there is a difference between something that gets a lot of attention and visibility and something that actually builds connection.

Kate Northrup: Yeah. I mean, all the opportunities that have come to you through your newsletter are obviously an indication, and I and I wanna point out that there is a difference between something that gets a lot of attention and visibility and something that actually builds connection.

Ryan Levesque: Yes.

Kate Northrup: And social media and the digital marketing space are designed to optimize for visibility and attention, not real connection.

Ryan Levesque: Yes.

Kate Northrup: And it is very distracting out

Ryan Levesque: there Yeah.

Kate Northrup: Yeah. With just the ads and the reels and the get more eyeballs on this. But when we really do the math, and I think you do this beautifully in the book, you realize you don’t actually need that many people. No. And you’ve changed your business model quite a bit.

Ryan Levesque: In a major way.

Kate Northrup: Right? So you’re actually I don’t know much about your business model, obviously, beyond like, what I can surmise from your

Ryan Levesque: Yeah.

Kate Northrup: Newsletter and then in the book. But it seems like you are serving in a deeper way

Ryan Levesque: Yeah.

Kate Northrup: Fewer people, but the impact is potentially bigger. So can you talk a little bit about, like, what your current business model is just so folks can get some inspiration about what a really viable successful business could look like

Ryan Levesque: Sure.

Kate Northrup: That is not based on more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more.

Ryan Levesque: For sure. So I think the there’s a model in the book that I describe as the great bifurcation. And what’s happening is that value is migrating to two extremes. So on one hand, you have what’s infinitely scalable, accelerated with AI that’s designed to be free. And there’s a certain segment of perhaps what many in the space that you and I have been in for for many, many years previously sold for money is is free.

It’s expected to be free. That’s the the market forces are pushing it to be free. And the unit of currency that you wanna think about, capturing is attention. You don’t wanna try to capture dollars from a person. You wanna capture attention by giving that away for free.

At the top of that pyramid would be something like a book that maybe you’re not giving away for free, but you’re selling it, you know, the cost that it, you know, cost to print the book and ship it to someone. And and it’s not a a thing just designed to make money. It’s a thing that’s designed to have influence and build trust and build authority and build connection with with another human being. And then on the other end is what I would describe as ultra premium. This is where you’re serving a very small people in a deep way.

Mhmm. And what’s interesting is from a money perspective, if you look at the concentration of wealth that is emerging in the world right now, we are experiencing the greatest concentration of wealth since we’ve been alive, since most people have been alive, over a hundred years. And so what’s happening is wealth is being concentrated in fewer people’s hands. What’s hollowing out is the middle, and I describe it as the void to avoid. What you wanna avoid is the void in the middle where you’re trying to sell something that is for the masses.

Serve the masses by having amazing stuff for free and find a very small number of people who are willing to pay a premium for what it is that you deliver. Okay. So that’s the concept. Let’s talk about some actual examples. So in my business, the very top of my pyramid, I do a, a small amount of advising of companies.

So I advise CEOs. You know, I built a, you know, $20,000,000 a year company and scaled this to all these people. So people who are on that path Yeah. They want perspective from someone who’s been there. So that’s what I do at the very, very top.

I have a mastermind, a small mastermind of very much aligned CEOs, entrepreneurs that are in my world that, you know, we meet on the farm, you know, we meet, in different locations around the world. So I I do that. We have an agency where basically I had a need to get my thought leadership out into the world. I basically wanted a way to take a newsletter that I write every single week, and I want it to be all over the Internet. I want it to be across social media.

I want it to be recorded into a solo podcast and made into videos and short form, long form, etcetera. And so I have one piece of content that I write every single week. I get on video. I record it, and then my team takes it and puts it everywhere. When I started doing that, people heard about that.

Like, how do you do that? You know, jokingly, can I just hire your team to do that for me? I had enough of those conversations. I said, really? Do you really wanna hire my team?

So that kind of organically emerged as a little business.

Kate Northrup: But none of these not

Ryan Levesque: a little business. But well, I mean, relatively speaking. Yeah. Yeah. But none of these businesses serve thousands of people.

You know, these are all relatively small. And what it enables me to do and our family to do is live an incredible life immersed in nature, raising and growing our own food where I’m able to split my time between the digital and the analog, having my hands in the dirt, touching earth before touching a screen, writing, which is one of my true passions

Kate Northrup: You’re so good.

Ryan Levesque: And living a life to your point, to what end, that’s sustainable. Yeah. And so that’s

Kate Northrup: And you’re what really in your life.

Ryan Levesque: Exactly.

Kate Northrup: I mean, I assume. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, it’s it seems like it. Answer this to the degree that you feel comfortable.

Ryan Levesque: It’s a great question. You know, I’m a I’m a pretty simple guy. Like, I don’t have very high material wants or needs. I’ll be honest, running a farm is not inexpensive.

Ryan Levesque: It’s a great question. You know, I’m a I’m a pretty simple guy. Like, I don’t have very high material wants or needs. I’ll be honest, running a farm is not inexpensive.

Kate Northrup: I’m sure.

Ryan Levesque: It’s I mean, everything is crazy. Yeah. You know? It’s,

Kate Northrup: attracting The feed, the hay, the equipment. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque: Exactly. I mean, you know, it’s like it’s I I I make the joke. You wanna start a farm, take a million dollars, light it on fire, and then, you’ll have your first egg is kind of like how it all works. That’s amazing. It’s not quite that bad, but it’s but it’s but it’s like that.

Know, so that’s my one, you know, thing. But you know, I was joking with some the other day. I said, you know, part of me wonders if we just sold everything and I lived in a tiny home out of a single suitcase. And by the way, I’ve lived that life multiple times. Yeah.

When we were in our early mid twenties and I started my company, I was working in finance. We’re living in Asia. And we went through this experience, my wife and I, where we sold everything that we own, moved back to The States, literally a suitcase each and a cat that we had picked up in Hong Kong. Not off, like, the side of the road. Like, it was our pet.

But there’s a cat in two suitcases, and we started over. And I look back at those days with fondness. And when we moved to Vermont before we founded our found our farm, we spent a year literally living out of Airbnbs with a suitcase each. And I can honestly say we were just as happy then as we are now. So we’ve always lived way below our means, and that’s what’s enabled me to have the security and build a nest egg and all the things.

And I tell my kids, I think the secret to joy in life is to seek awe and wonder in the ordinary and every day.

Kate Northrup: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah. We’re gonna end there. Thank you so much for being here.

Ryan Levesque: Thank you.

Ryan Levesque: Thank you.

Kate Northrup: So where would you like people to go to get their copy of Return to Real?

Ryan Levesque: Yeah. If you go to returntorealbook.com, that’ll direct you to all the different options, the different formats. We have a special limited edition hardcover version, audiobook, ebook, all the different versions. But returntorealbook.com is the best place to go, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to share.

Kate Northrup: Thank you. I think I made this clear, but I really loved this book. So go get it.

Ryan Levesque: Thanks, Kate.

Kate Northrup: Thank you. You already know that I am all about doing less so we have more time for life. That’s why I love Callan Faulkner. She has become a good friend of mine, and she has an AI employee boot camp coming up that teaches you how behind the scenes, like in live demos, how she and her company built from zero to 20,900,000 a year in the last two years using AI architecture and a human first model. Because AI is not about automation or humanity.

It actually can be about automation to support your humanity and you living fully alive and fully prosperous. So over three days, she’s gonna take you behind the scenes and do a live demo of the 150 plus AI employees that run with her and her incredible team, many of whom I’ve had the chance to get to know and work with in real time. That boot camp is coming up, and you can check it out at katenorthrup.com/automate. Go learn from Callan. I implore you.

Every time I sit in a room with her, my mind is blown, and she saves me hundreds of hours of time and hands it back to me on a silver platter. And I want that for you too. So go to katenorthrup.com/automate to learn more. The link is also in the show notes.