Growing is Half the Battle In Estate Politics TPS-0014

Estate planning is very painful for a lot of people. It's something that I've heard a lot about. I haven't experienced myself directly the battles that occur over last will and testament, over trust documents, over the dispensement and distribution of inheritance. I happen to know some people who were politicking within the family.

All the kinds of treachery and manipulation, and estates really having this toxic effect of bringing out the worst in people and tearing people apart over mostly material objects and sums of money.

It's to be expected, unfortunately, in a world that is drunk on prosperity, those who have wealth to manage and control the destiny of that wealth, across their heirs. Weaponizing and leveraging the estate plan as a way to extort your loved ones.

I have not experienced that because I have not had wealth handed down to me.

I don't expect to be in that situation either. However, I am now in a situation where I am building a nest egg.

I have real property. I have a vision to manifest continuous financial abundance so that I'm able to add to that personal nest egg and continue to evolve my revocable living trust, so that as people sort of fade in and out of being close to me and, and in alignment with me, that document can just be like any business enterprise.

It's like hiring and firing or letting people go or laying people off, or people deciding they're ready to move on.

You have to grant that freedom to people to choose their own destiny.

And they have to always also understand, as an employee, contractor, they may be replaced, anytime.

I've certainly experienced that. I've certainly been traded, traded out of in corporate positions to where the venture funding that I helped to secure was used to replace me with more qualified people.

I was just a Band Aid or I was just duct tape on a business, I got it to the point where it could afford to hire the right person. It turned out being the best for everybody. It was a very amicable thing.

But it's just interesting, the different emotional...the professionalism versus the family, economics and politics and business, and where emotions and where professionalism and where entitlement and where legality and lawsuits and lawyers, and really a lot of ugliness, a lot of expensive ugliness is lurking behind every verbal and written contract that we get ourselves into.

A lot of people have arrived at the conclusion that managing wealth and trying to control the destiny of that wealth into the future is actually so problematic, it violates religious principles, it may bar you from getting into heaven.

There's a lot of folklore, everything from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, to biblical fables on attitudes of wealth and money.

Parents with wealth, they've got the carrot and the stick. They've got a means to to control, manipulate. I can see it from both perspectives.

Now that I have to think about what happens with what is a very humble and modest nest egg and list of assets that are being retitled into a trust.

Now, for the first time, I can understand the side of the tyrant, the parents who have to for better or worse, to manage the parameters of those estate plans.

That's gonna be an evolving thing for every family.

I would have only ever identified with the rebellious short end of the stick, sort of counter party to the parents and the estate. They don't understand. They're trying to impose their values and their expectations. And it's always about pleasing them or being excommunicated or cut out of a will.

That's been a big theme in people's lives who I've known. There was always that power that you would think would end at some point. It never ends, like the power to at a whim, decide whether or not they're gonna buy you the candy, you never grow out of that.

I see the childishness of the heirs and the sinister, manipulative tyranny of the of the parents. And, and you see that dance continue until the estate planners die. Then people, probably a lot of times regret how ugly things had gotten near the end, when it should have been about honoring life and everybody feeling good about the hard work that people have done.

Not that I believe in hard work, or the work ethic that is imposed upon the poor within civilization.

I've been anti work for a long time.

But whether it's from old money, inherited from generations, or somebody worked really hard and was able to put everybody through college.

They now have properties to hand off and vehicles.

Who gets to sell them or take them? How does all that politicking work out?

The sad thing is that whether you wanna call it human nature, or tragedy of the commons, or human conditioning, or capitalism or whatever, it's rare that you're gonna find families where there isn't conflict over who got the best of the vehicles. Who got the best of the beach houses and, and who got what percentage of the payable on death bank account dispensements.

I'd like to hope we could honor the spirit of the previous wealth holders, the intentions for what they worked to create in this reality.

For some people, that's very clear. It's very mission driven, very purposeful.

For some people, they just want you to be Christian and go to church, and that's good enough for them.

A lot of people have nonprofit projects that they support, and that portions would go to, and that's certainly part of my planning, to take care of the people who are gonna take care of the work that I started on land, the projects I started.

Make sure they're taken care of and compensated for doing the administration of making sure that ongoing royalty payments and ongoing revenues to my name, my assets, my ongoing intellectual property, are managed by the terms of the documentation. All funneling into a trust. And that trust is to be first paid out to those who are working together to maintain the operations, whatever those are, and to administer the donations of the whatever comes in the form of revenue.

For the majority of it to be distributed across a number of nonprofit organizations, then as a sort of rolling backup, if any of those cease to exist, then it would be up to the trustees to find a suitable replacement.

Land projects owned by the trust would have indefinite yields to be managed.

Moving towards, in this exploration of how estate battles go down, and how poorly designed the circumstances tend to be.

If I were a permaculture estate planning consultant, I'm starting with myself.

I'm not a financial adviser. I'm not an a estate planner. I'm not a lawyer. But I am a permaculture designer.

I am in the process of myself, of applying permaculture design principles to designing peaceful pathways for trustees in perpetuity to get along and be incentivized through what's gonna be very advanced game theoretical design, in addition to permaculture design, which has its own sort of innate game theory, sort of ecological game theory.

Now I'm studying game theory proper, and I'm thinking through a lot of new material that's gonna add a lot to my permaculture designs.

Most importantly, for the sake of this topic, how I for myself, create more peaceable pathways to preclude estate battling over what I leave behind...

So here is the thought that came to me after spending some time consoling someone going through some pretty heinous, carrot and stick tactics within their family estate planning journey.

It just came to me, well, it was very obvious that the pattern is, if you open the permaculture design tool kit and look at the problem that you wanna solve, the problem being toxic meltdown of family harmony and cooperation over some people call propertarianism...

Property is theft, that was the sticker, that was the t shirt.

I haven't changed my core idealism, I've had to compromise, hopefully, without selling out. But my core belief is definitely that I don't believe in individual private property.

I believe in an anthropological concept known as usufruct, it's the concept in anthropology of it's mine until I don't need it anymore, and then it's yours, and then it's yours until you don't need it anymore, and then it's somebody else's or it's mine again.

But, but going back to primitivist, there are no staple crops in foraging societies. I can't say bread and butter either, that wouldn't be appropriate, let's say the bulk of the optimal foraging theory yields from being nomadic and carrying only what can fit on your back, and using easy to make, easy to discard and recreate, stone tools and other implements that are very light duty and not not machine made, but handmade.

That elegance, that sweet spot of human paleolithic existence is what informs the idea of usufruct and the idea that the Gods Must Be Crazy, in the sense that, if that means anything to you, it's an old reference, but materialism, sedentism, domestication, civilization, fighting wars over the private property owned by the nation state. All the geopolitics, everything that has led humanity to the brink of another extinction event that's human made through World War Three.

This is all the amplification of the earliest signs of social stratification in graves, the earliest development of class systems of the slaves, the merchants, the warriors and the priests.

I'd like to think I haven't embraced that dark side of the force, and that I have been attempting to live in an egalitarian way, as much of an egalitarian way as possible, and to share what little I have, and to distribute the yields of production.

To operate through voluntary association, not through a coercive state apparatus, but through affinity and mutual aid.

You're not gonna make too much of a mess if you're living a life that is handmade, straight out of wild nature, straight out of a garden, finding that sweet spot of a semi-nomadic horticulturalist society that doesn't fully displace the forest, but tucks its horticulture within the systems and cycles of the forest and actually enhances the ecology.

That's what permaculture is all about. What's necessary for the ancient ancestral human ecology, and by extension, modern, extrapolated permaculture systems to work is ecological designs for human survival.

Key to that it is, one of only three ethics that are the pillars of the permaculture design system's ethical framework. It's the third ethic, and it sometimes is made cute through a rhyme.

So starting with the first, Earth care is ethic number one, people care ethic number two, and then some would say, fair share is ethic number three.

Some people think it's a distortion, a bastardization, a dumbing down, a utopianizing, a way to enforce a sort of socialism within the permaculture design system. I don't care too much for that debate.

The ethics don't have to be perfect, and they don't have to encompass every possible permutation of libertarianism in my mind. So fair share, I don't find it offensive.

The is something to the effect of set limits to population and consumption, and return the surplus of the systems that you design back into the first ethics.

Another way to put it is future care.

It's a regenerative system, just like the cycle of the seasons, just like reproduction, just like producers, consumers, and decomposers. It's a food chain.

It gets trapped and bounces around and percolates up through all kinds of different life forms until it gets to the so called apex predators.

Studying that food chain, that food web, understanding the energy that is conserved throughout that process, how through intelligent, wise nature mimicking design systems, we can elaborate on nature.

we can trap solar energy to get nutrients and basically become artisans, become fine artists with symphonies of seed and soil, as Paul Wheaton likes to say.

If you are striving to live closer and closer to the land, greener and greener, less toxins, less chemicals, less products, less processed anything then there's less of a toxic legacy to leave which is great.

There's less pollution caused by the accumulation of wealth.

So going back to estate planning, looking at estate planning and then looking at the permaculture three ethics, unless you're a hardcore environmentalist family, probably there are no ecological directives that are in the will or in the trust.

But let's say, a green hardened family was gonna say let's not do what everybody else does and set ourselves up for a total toxic meltdown over who gets all of these toxic assets literally toxic, not in that they're financially unviable but they will go in the landfill.

Here's all this crap that's worth a lot of money in the market, but it's all going to the landfill someday, it is all going to be junked. Someday the vehicles will be junked. They'll become a toxic mess. They'll probably not get dealt with in as ecological a manner as they even could. They'll probably just be in a leaky landfill where some parts recycled back into more fossil fuel burning machines.

The house is gonna get tore down, and all of that petroleum based carpeting and paint, nothing is gonna get salvaged. Maybe some of it will get salvaged.

But what if, I've got all this stuff that's worth a lot of money on the market of real estate and vehicles, or property that someone can build their McMansion on, or maybe commercial property, whatever.

But it's all stuff that basically is not gonna make it easier for you to get into heaven if that's what you care to accumulate, if that's what you leave behind.

I like the idea of permifying the estate planning process and really thinking about the third ethic, while leaving the population part of it aside for now, the idea of returning the surplus, and by extension, the idea of what happens if you don't return a surplus?

What happens if any substance, any material, any chemical, anything in the physical world, anything that is not properly redistributed across nature...

So by extension, what's important about the third ethic when it comes to estate planning, is that wealth itself, the power of capital, not distributed across and balanced across a system, an ecosystem which we're all embedded within...

We either participate by the within the framework of nature, or we try to defy it to our peril. But everything is functioning within ecosystems, nested within ecosystems.

So there's a lot of capital, financial capital, real estate, even digital assets, that are not building soil, destined for the landfill, or their very existence is contributing to climate change or pollution.

Even just sitting in a bank for the bank to loan it out, you're not gonna have a lot of control over where that compounding interest even came from, what kind of wars and what kind of mining and resource extraction and enslavement...

Some people are very ethical with their triple bottom line investment portfolios.

I'm sure there are very beautiful souls, a vast number of very beautiful souls who are greening estate plans, helping people give to charitable organizations.

If you have lots of land and you die and you give that land over to a nature preserve or some sort of conservation project, you almost can't do better than that.

Because at that point, you've transcended a lot of the family politics and the hope that they're gonna carry on your passion to save this endangered species or create habitat for this key indicator species, or just keep your gardens alive.

But if you say, hey, I'm gonna build a beautiful, horticultural, human scale, personal garden, I'm gonna devote a lot of land to restoring healthy soil for all life to benefit from, and then leave a lot of it to the wild. Then when I die, none of the heirs even get to look at it, because I don't trust them not to just put a big box store there, so I'm gonna give it over to an existing land trust, which has all kinds of holdings, and all they do is conservation work.

The best permaculture that I'm aware of seems to be mostly abroad, because of how much more you could do with much less, and how much less over-regulated many places are.

In a PDC, there's a story of an Indian man who, I believe, himself became very wealthy and then decided to give it all away and renounce his capital, and then go on foot, living very lightly, being a spiritual consultant to people with vast wealth who were nearing the end of their lives, and actually facilitating their handing over of their assets and their wealth, either directly if it's farmland that they own, giving it to peasant farmers to own for themselves as an act of spiritual redemption while they're alive. Or liquidating assets, so an organization could buy land and give it over to present farmers, if I'm understanding correctly.

I don't remember exactly the name of it. Hearing about that again recently was so beautiful. I realized that seeded within me, the solution to the sort of first world problems of estate battles, where it's a bunch of toxic crap that's gonna go in a landfill, and everyone's gonna fight over and creates psychic toxins to go along with their fight over the material resources that were not in a permaculture design.

The preferable end game would be families pass down non toxic food forest, paradise garden properties that are livable, that are sustainable, that are self sufficient, that are producing no waste, and where every output of every system feeds into another system that adds value.

Within the boundaries of what each site that you own, you have enhanced the quality of the soil, and you have cleaned up the runoff so that less toxins, less pollutants run off of that site and cause problems.

That would end problems like manure piles on industrial farms creating mass dead zones in water ways when storm water runs off.

That's one of the best example of what happens when you don't return the surplus back to the system, where an accumulation of toxins, what would have been a good thing, the manure, which is precious, had it been wisely redistributed and pulsed back into the natural systems that can absorb it as a nutrient rather than an acute poison...

That's the whole idea. So if you can understand that, if you visualize dead zones in the ocean from massive streams of manure run off by the rain that fills storm drains and becomes this massive overdose of nutrient that causes extreme havoc and death in oceans...That's not even to mention the pesticides, but that's the best visual to think about. How farmers, at any scale, can and should be composting and cycling and dispersing and making very intelligent use of that manure as it is freshly produced. Not allowed to just be this accumulation that has nowhere to go, and is then unmanageable.

In a perfect world, a permaculture designer world, there would be no toxic stick frame, McMansion houses. There would be no fossil fuel vehicles made out of all kinds of toxins and plastics, with rare earth minerals and batteries and all that.

In a perfect world, everybody in the First World would be living in completely handmade, earthen structures. They will be surrounded with so much lush food forestry on their property that you barely would even be able to see what structure they lived in, because they'd be tucked away so much in this food forest.

You would hope the love of that land was so deeply instilled in the heirs of that land, that they would be stewards of it indefinitely, and it would be kept in the family. It wouldn't be cleared and commodified, it would be preserved. That's what permaculture is supposed to be about, having something worth making permanent through generations and generations of culture.

That's how our ancestors lived. They cared for the land, they cared for each other.

When there was a yield, it was returned back to the systems, that's how it was for the majority of time that we have been on this planet.

On the scale of being nomadic, immediate return, hunter gathers, just the return of surplus would be if you hunted an animal, you share it with people, simple as that.

And if you try to become the king and the tyrant and not share with people, there's a natural tendency to resist that, and therefore a balance is struck.

That's why 99.9 % of our existence has been as foraging nomadic hunter gathers in small bands of very small numbers of people, relative to settle settlements in cities.

Obviously, there's infinite nuance to different cultures, but it's worth noting that to some extent, there was this notion of pot latch, of returning the surplus in a very ornate, very ceremonial way.

It very much exemplifies the third ethic. It's more subtle for gardeners sharing simply sharing their crops with each other, forming alliances and using the crops as currency between each other for barter and whatnot.

But the pot latch phenomenon is even more of a dramatic. It exemplifies more dramatically the notion of the return of surplus ethic in that would give away or sacrificing their surplus. It's not about accumulating it. It's about surrendering it and showing that you don't need that much, you're abundant enough so that your needs are covered. This is how much extra you have to give back and give away. That is like the party of the year. I'm not doing my best right now to cite the anthropology for this. I'm just speaking abroad in broad terms.

The reason why it's important to have these visuals...what is the shadow of surplus and what is the light of surplus?

The shadow of surplus is the pollution that comes from too much of a good thing being stockpiled or being hoarded or being controlled and therefore being a means to manipulate people or to wreak havoc in the environment or fight wars over.

So this Idea that as surplus begins to accumulate by design. A healthy family a healthy culture, would be very intentionally maintaining, at any given time, a small amount of the surplus item or items so it can be repeatedly tucked away into a regenerative horticultural system.

It happens routinely. There's never any given time of an excess of it. The idea of excess accumulation is precluded by the behaviors, the cultural practices, the horticultural practices. The distribution is as wide as possible over a given area, decreasing the amount, dispersing it as far and wide as possible. Therefore, you have the ability of nature to reabsorb the by-products of of life, to reabsorb the outputs from one level of the food web to another.

Those are the important factors of making sure you don't have a pollution problem, dispersal over space and time, controlling the volume in all of those calculations.

So from the potlatch on the light side to the dead zones in the ocean from farm run off on the shadow side of surplus, then this conversation about a state planning...

And after I'm gone, whatever revenue and cash flow is generated to my name should be redistributed and reabsorbed into the permaculture projects that I initiate with my bare hands myself. So as of this moment, there's one property that I own that I'm working on. If abundance continues to manifest, then there will be multiple properties, and even hopefully multiple properties throughout the world that are in the name of my trust.

I can dream big and still be modest in my ecological ethics. The idea would be to, for myself... I would like to have the experience of establishing permaculture food forests in every biome, meaning desert, tropics, cold areas, subtropics, mountains, beaches, islands, everything in the designers manual.

I would like to have had the experience of actually implementing, with my own hands as many of the diagrams in that book as I can before I die. That would be a dream come true. That would be Heaven on Earth.

That would be the best use of my time, the most healing activities that could be engaged in. When I die there will be these sites left behind.

It will be up to my best judgment to find along the way the people who at the final revision of that revocable trust...when I can't change it after I'm gone...

Who knows if the people on there today... if any of them will be there.

Eventually all of the named trustees will be dead too so in that sense over time it's gonna rotate and roll. The hope is that the spirit of what I'm doing, which is basically, you could take out all of my idiosyncratic spirituality and idiosyncratic politics and just say, this dude bought pieces of land and left them better than he found them, and now there's a lot of wild, edible food and medicine growing, and they seems to attract a lot of wildlife and provide a lot of habitat.

Maybe there's people squatting in them, shooting up and using them as non-composting toilets, or maybe there are people really living it up, like Ewoks and and making eco villages out of them. The future will determine how that goes down.

I'm hoping that there is a legacy that is my work, and that it will be very respectable among the permaculture community.

There are worse things that I could be interested in doing with the rest of my life, and worse things that I could be intending to leave behind or leave behind.

Every day I take more and more landfill stuff out of my daily existence. I'm about to get to a point where I won't touch anything that goes into the trash, hardly at all, very little.

Part of that is bulk buying food products and not having single serving anything in small containers, retail amounts of condiments.

Eventually regenerating everything, eventually growing my own clothes, growing my own tools, growing my own fabrics, everything.

Take it as far as you want to but it can take you all the way back to the paleo and so that's my goal.

When I realize this is gonna be where it all comes together, everything that I have. While I know the average a estate planning first world family is not extremist, primitivist, or a back to the lander type like I am where they don't care to have a house or care to have the types of things that heirs are gonna wanna fight over...I am gonna leave behind things that people will be proud to maintain and that they're not gonna have really a huge financial incentive to sell or to chop down, to basically liquidate and to capitalize and commodify.

The yields of a permaculture food forests are more about hosting potlucks, you know, hosting community gatherings, maybe a you-pick structure of a business.

It's not necessarily like having a farm where, if you own a farm and your heirs they're either gonna run the farm and make their living from running the farm, or they're gonna sell the farm. That's not the scale that I wanna work on. I'm not saying that you can't do permaculture at that level, it applies at all levels and is needed most urgently at all large scale farms.

But for me, it's gonna be market gardens, forest forest gardens that are conducive to healing centers and very micro scale things. That's already a given for me and my permaculture lifestyle.

So for the average first world family estate, maybe an ever increasing amount of what they have would be small holdings.

If I were to put myself in the shoes of parents with high net worth and many heirs to fight over their estate, I don't expect that I would immediately jump to renounce everything, give all of your money to charity, and then spend the rest of your days convincing other people to do the same...

If we all did that, the world would be a better place. I don't expect that most people would do that. So I'm trying to be a little bit realistic here.

Just putting the idea out there, shall we say, an estate holds multi-million dollar homes and there's one or more of those. Then there's a fleet of fancy vehicles. There's commercial properties, there's residential rental properties. There's everything in the Monopoly game. You got all these investments. You got all this investable wealth.

So there's gonna be lots of money going into the lawyers for the heirs to fight over getting the best of the loot, the best of the pillaging of the estate. They're not gonna have much to care to maintain. Maybe there's a family business that they care to maintain. Maybe there's a property that they care to maintain that's lucrative rather than just selling it.

Permaculture estate planning is not very popular at this point, though if I have any role in helping it get more well known, I'll be doing my best at it.

I got Joan Rivers on board with permaculture estate planning, and she was a big fan of me and my work at least as part of the reality tv show plot.

My partner at the time and I did a permaculture survival consultation on her daughter's property. Joan Rivers fought on our behalf to convince her daughter that this was the way to leave the proper legacy for her grandchild, for that property to be made into a regenerative ecosystem.

So that's a pretty good testimonial for the approach that we're taking.

Look at this giant, wasted space of a backyard with a bunch of ornamentals that you can't eat and a bunch of grass that is wasting water and producing nothing, where we could do a makeover of that.

You could have all kinds of food that would heal all of your ailments and give you a beautiful place to spend your golden years in, and for your family to grow.

Everybody wins with permaculture, that is guaranteed.

I thought was a clever hack for those people who are thinking about what to do with their wealth, and maybe it's unthinkable again that they would do something extreme.

But what if they all took a slice of a percentage of all of their overall net worth, and they implemented a strategy that would actually help ensure that their children would not tear each other apart over at least over some of the assets.

Then maybe you extend that, and maybe you do liquidate all of your toxic materialistic crap, and you trade it all for permaculture food forest land, establishing food forests on properties that then become the only thing that is in the estate.

The accumulation of cash flow in your life, you trade it for land and you die with nothing but titles to land that live in a trust and whatever didn't go to your funeral and your medical bills and your final tax return is all dispersed into the capitalization of what we call the Earth Bank.

So there's no fight over who gets how many of the millions of dollars that you left. What if you spent all of that so that there was no money to fight over?

You spent all of it, not on gold, not on stocks, and not on yachts, but you spent it on food forestry. This is the key thing that struck me, and it's what I'm doing.

What I realize is powerful game theory...Your heirs are going to fight for what is in their self interest. You can bet that their self interest is not gonna be ecologically informed, without ecological ethics, and to maximize short term profit for their own self interest, with every other player of that game being their adversary, like the prisoner's dilemma, getting into the nuance of where you find what they call the Nash equilibrium.

Where is that win-win point of maybe you didn't get the best outcome that only favored you, you didn't get the zero sum game outcome. You had to compromise at some point. But you compromise in a way where, even if it's not necessarily perfectly 50/50 percentage of something, but in terms of what you wanted and what you're willing to settle with...

The game theory I'm realizing in my studies is very interesting, because you can take a lot of different circumstances where you're negotiating with people, and you can find hidden synergies and hidden mutually beneficial compromises.

When you do what they call, create an outcome matrix, and you play with...this is very much in the permaculture design course, the idea of making a table of interactions where it's positive, negative, neutral interactions across the species that you would put into a garden design...

So that's a little bit of abstract kind of chalkboard stuff right there.

But to slow it down and to get practical with it, a little more down to earth with it is the idea that, so let's say a family...if I could consult with this family that I'm alluding to, because kids are gonna fight, and one of them wants everything to be a nature preserve, and one of them wants everything to be a mall.

They're gonna fight over parceling out a giant piece of land, who gets to live in the house? Who gets to rent the house?

The parent says, you won't thank me for this now, but eventually, when I'm long gone, you will understand the value of why I'm doing it this way.

Guess what? I'm selling the house, I'm selling the cars, I'm selling the commercial properties. I'm selling the residential rental properties, etc. I'm gonna live in an air stream, and I'm gonna grow my garden here, I'm gonna liquidate everything else and spend that money to just do nothing but fruit and nut trees and the support species that they would need to get established.

I'm gonna start that process here on this property, right here, and then I'm going to upset you because I'm not going to buy a giant farm property and do permaculture on it so that it's a honey pot for you to fight over selling the thing without parcelling it out.

I'm gonna spend the rest of that money establishing food forests on tiny handfuls of acres so that the time it would take you, the bother that you would have to go and try to sell, that you would probably just not even care. It probably wouldn't be worth your time to even put it on the market, to even try to build anything on it.

It'll be a dense food forest, and you will just think you'll just wanna write it off. You certainly won't fight over it, because it won't be worth the time to even do the paperwork work for it, unless you see the value and the true value of the clean air, the clean water, the clean food, the security, the ecological security, the food security, the beauty, the healing. The magic.

If you value that aspect of it, then maybe you will fight over it, because, it has the healthiest, most healing, most magical water, or something.

I would love to know that the heirs or the trustees were fighting over the the most ecologically rich of the properties and not the one with the best view, the one closest to the ocean, the one closest to the hipster district, or that would sell for the most on the market.

So at the end of this journey of romanticizing a permaculture informed estate planning, I'm going to say that the major breakthrough for me was the idea that the game theoretical problem to solve is that the trust has an intention of X. You can preconceive that the intention is going to be counter to intentions A-B-C and D held separately by all of those heirs.

So you put that game theory tick tack toe table on the chalkboard and you put your x in the middle.

How do you construct the game so that the Nash equilibrium of your X variable is arrived on as a matter of rationality? It almost becomes a matter of social science that's almost guaranteed assuming that the actors are rational to the maximum degree.

If all of my heirs were capitalist, greedy bastards that didn't see any of the spiritual value of maintaining a food forest with their bare hands, and all they cared about was extractable wealth, then I would say, okay, how about making some of these food forests really major in high value boutique medicinal herbs, so that they can just own it. They're incentivized to maintain it because of the density of value that's produced by it.

They're not gonna take a one acre boutique, micro green medicinal apothecary, herb garden, permaculture site and try to sell it to a logger.

If you can figure out how to run that game theoretical design to where, assuming that they're gonna just wanna milk the property for profits, how do you do that in a way where they're incentivized not to destroy it, incentivized to maintain the ecological integrity.

Just maintaining the system, harvesting the yields, and knowing that to keep that system yielding at that rate, you have to return the surplus.

If you're extracting things and selling them on the market, then take the profits from what you sell and use that to add soil amendments and try to keep it local, etc.

It can spiral off in many directions. But for the most part, we are never gonna come close to the potential that we could have to capture all the solar energy and to make it into sustainable food for ourselves.

That's infinite possibility, an infinite amount of solar energy to be trapped within the real solar panels, which are photosynthetic green material, living green material, photosynthesizing sunlight.

There's no limit to that. It could be Jack and the Bean Stock forever everywhere.

There's no limit to how much scaffolding you can give to life, which will always and forever climb it until the death of the sun.

Come Global Ice Age, come fire Age. There's a whole documentary series on prehistoric disasters, there was a time when the Earth was completely frozen, so there was no vegetative life on the surface of the planet. There was a time where it was so covered in lava and all of the toxic smoke also killed off vegetative life. There was a time when the moon was so close that it's gravity was so powerful that the tide was miles high.

Could you imagine, the tide going from here to the middle of the continent twice a day? I'm don't remember the exact metrics but it was incredible.

That series makes you look up at the stars and feel small. It's another thing to realize how sweet of a spot we are in in the galaxy.

Even with climate change now, it's nothing compared to how uninhabitable it was during the fire age, the ice age, the tidal wave age, or whatever you wanna call it. We have a pretty forgiving state of nature to be in.

If we're fighting over McMansion's and gold and stocks and cash and cars, man, we are seriously missing out the opportunity to really enjoy paradise on Earth.

The biggest breakthrough for me is the idea of realizing how a large property is gonna be something the heirs are gonna wanna sell the whole thing off because of the high ticket value of that.

But if you were to hack and circumvent that impulse to liquidate your permaculture properties...the smaller you can make them, the more decentralized, the more mycelial those assets become, and the harder it is, the less convenient it would be to just have a real estate agent put one central property on the market, sell it and pocket all of that money and fight over that in court.

So make it very cost prohibitive to sell any of the permaculture sites that I leave behind because they can be so small that they wouldn't even be worth selling unless they were maintained in full production, and really only held value ongoing as a permaculture operation.

If none of them are like a hundred thousand acres or whatever, people that buy these massive holdings of acreage.

Game theory logic would result in people realizing, well, what can I do with this food forest, eye roll, whatever thing that somebody's dad left behind, or Mom, whatever, well, I hear that the herbs that are growing out of it like a weed are pretty expensive to buy.

If you, you lease that permaculture farmland to a really appreciative savvy herbalist they're gonna maintain it for you, you'll get kickbacks and you'll be making money.

That is the elegance of the design that I'm looking at.

Think about all the money that goes into the court to fight over stuff that's all gonna go into a landfill.

While you're fighting over it in court spending half of the value of the estate on court fees, you could have just been living like Balu in the Jungle Book and enjoying the bare necessities.

I pity the fools who are out there living in hell on Earth, fighting over landfill material and not building their souls and building the soil.

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