I’ve learned to take pride in my work doing extreme sprawling spreadsheet formula wizardry magic and sort of psychologically gamifying an experience that most people would consider to be a nightmare.
There’s a risk to outsourcing that fine grain personal finance, small business, self employed, freelance, entrepreneur, book keeping.
I know people who were crushing it, as they say, as far as being thought leaders and finding their tribe and building their sales funnel and all that Web 2.0 era stuff, just to end up ultimately being drained by an embezzling, contractor or hired employee.
In-sourcing as much as possible as a tactic and strategy for reducing attack surface on all levels of physical, cyber, financial, ethical, professional security...all levels of security.
It’s better to have less of that black box, unknown unknowns, off site, off premises activity going on beyond your scope of awareness.
I’m trying not to be victimized and be resilient and perennial all aspects of life, not just in the glamorization of militancy or martial arts.
Bruce Lee said you can be really fancy and cocky as a fighter with all of your prowess, but to express yourself honestly, that is very hard to do.
This was part of the deeper essence he gets into, a lot of philosophy in his book, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do.
I was influenced profoundly by his works.
But beyond that sort of mystique of the tactical like they say, tacti-cool, like it's a poser kind of thing, or a clout kind of thing, one-upmanship and all that stuff.
I'm not interested in that but I am interested in centering the need to escalate every dimension of life in this moment.
Geopolitics, epidemiology, financial markets... raise the alert level a bit higher and be a little bit and take less for granted.
In-source, more things, and take responsibility for more things.
Doing homework for the weekend on Friday night, so that you could enjoy the weekend, that level of discipline.
So the tax cycle and the effort needed to have it not be a stressful nightmare.
I got an early start. I pretty much got all of my documents and all of my calculations, all my spreadsheets, generating the reports they need to generate, gathering everything up very early in January.
I didn't wait till last minute to do the filing, but didn't want to file too early.
That applies to a lot of things tactically speaking. Do you prepay or do you post pay?
What's the tipping point? I was prepared to file very early, and I did not wait til the last minute.
I gave some time in between being ready to file and filing.
I'm just continuing to iterate and optimize the standard operating procedures, the instructions to myself.
So much business logic gets baked into the formulas spanning tens of columns and hundreds of rows on spreadsheets and that's just a small guy in the grand scheme of things with what are called complex sales of commodities that are treated as having capital gain and loss reporting requirements.
So basically not being a day trader, but being an investor and making fewer trades, that’s me hustle.
It's just trying to time the market well.
They say, time in the market is better than timing the market.
And the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
All these bits of wisdom I've ingested over the last few years, my early retirement is a factor of having a basic command of trading within a niche, within the greater financial market ecosystem.
It's behoved me to go on extreme spreadsheet crash courses and financial markets courses from the open courseware from Yale and MIT. Backfill a lot of financial education that most people do not get unless they're really groomed in that culture of academics, venture funding, venture capital, startup culture, all that stuff, they call them tech bros.
It was not a foregone conclusion that I would get into this industry at all. I was a rebel who was against capitalism and even had a band where part of the logo was a crossed out dollar sign.
So I kind of cursed myself to be destitute forever but to be adaptive and eventually go feral and rewild and live in the wealth and abundance of nature.
You can play the game, work within the system enough and figure out a way to purchase land where you can start to rewild, then it comes full circle for me that I wanna have less and less to do with money and entrepreneurialism, turning every social interaction into a elevator pitch, and just being a walking business card, and all the things that I have done in earlier chapters of life.
Every bit of that experience got me to a point where I could say, now that, the fruition of all those years of street hustling and cubicle hustling and working in venture funded startups, corporate, all that stuff, it was always against my true nature.
I always did it in a guerrilla fashion, working in the corporate office, but sleeping in the trunk of my car a couple blocks away just to save money on not paying rent and not commuting, but taking my street and forest defense guerrilla adapted lifestyle into the rat race.
For a lot of people, vehicle dwelling is the only pathway to upward social mobility, because there's a lot of people who make it work to be a vehicle dweller.
I was a very compliant legal dweller. Even printed out giant 11x17 color maps of the permitted areas to not be hassled or be criminally liable for car camping.
In La County, there was a law that came out that was contested, but it did cut both ways. It provided carve outs for people to be protected to be vehicle dwellers, but it marginalized those people into places that were possibly less safe for for them, or for us, I should say, but more hygienic and aesthetically buffered from the the larger community.
Navigating the game of life and living and working in the belly of the beast, developing enough of a basic command of trading, being savvy enough within financial markets to make the trades that got me out of the system and then the trade off being, well now you're so far from the system…
You got to be careful what you wish for.
You better hope you can make those trades last. Because the state of the financial markets has turned against me.
They did not give me a long stretch or plateau of being at the top.
I had, like many people, a couple of cycles where I have made life changing trades at the top, or near the top, close enough to the top, to where the trend line since I've been involved has resulted me being unimaginably freer and more self sufficient, more living the dream that I've always dreamed.
A rustic, rugged, rewilding American dream. That's post having the majority of my life energy going into commercialization of my own time, my own relationships.
I never went to Burning Man, but the ethics of it, and I have a lot of Burner friends, that idea of basically, they're getting off of that monetary hamster wheel and living in a gift economy.
That is a gift economy of one at this point where I'm at.
But I've been spoiled by community, and I've been deep in many different movements and tribes of people in the modern world, from music scenes to activist scenes. All kinds art communities and co ops and urban compounds and rural everything.
I'm not burnt out or jaded, parts of me miss parts of it. But I'm okay being in lone wolf mode now.
I explore this idea of being at war with your future self and digging into positions.
As an experienced permaculture designer and builder with a lot of skepticism towards technology and digitization of everything and the e-waste and all of the energy costs and everything.
I'm not the most techno optimist, techno utopian, singularity, transhumanist.
But I also recognize the need to use every tool in the tool box to get free and to get empowered and to be able to resist effectively, efficiently.
It wasn't in my nature to be a tech bro or an entrepreneur or study financial mathematics, understanding charts on stuff, that will be antithetical to my true nature.
If at the end of the day the ends justify the means that I'm not stepping on people's throats, I'm not harming anyone...
I even consider and factor in the what can be a zero sum dynamic in trading in financial markets, where there's always somebody on the other side.
If you're losing, if you feel like you lost in a trade, someone else won. And if you feel like you won, someone else lost.
It does come down to that base level of nasty, brutish, short selling.
I wanted to avoid that and so I've developed investment strategies that are in alignment with the ethics of permaculture as much as possible.
My investment portfolio is limited to assets that I feel are ecologically responsible and are socially responsible.
This idea of the war with the future self, it's very difficult to have peace of mind with exposure in a portfolio, your net worth is being jerked around by all kinds of forces beyond your control.
In my heart of hearts, I would love to just be running a nursery where I do a small part in the chain of events that leads to having an extreme abundance of fruit and nut trees growing comfortably with everything they need to get a good start in life.
Then I have just an absurd amount overflowing from a very small number of acres, all to the point where I almost just wanna give it away.
I don't need the price gouge and I can have one of those honor system farm stands and just let people come by and make donations and I'm just there to do a little bit of maintenance and push nursery stock from the back end to the front end.
I don't even have to talk to anybody. That's the direction I'm going ultimately, but until then, I am subject to being jerked around by forces beyond my control in the financial markets.
But I have been blessed, though it’s a mixed blessing. I don't know if I coined the term, but I hadn't heard it before I said it, a former lover of mine we joked about this concept of “helven” and this sort of best of both worlds convergence of living in very a paradisical circumstance, but situated in a very hellish set of circumstances beyond our control.
So we did our best to make it a more beautiful paradox.
This is definitely an arc of adventure.
I made some key life changing trades that liberated me from a lot of risk in the belly of the beast, hustling and playing those games.
One of my favorite quotes, is treat both the bear markets and bull markets, the highs and the lows as what they truly are: impostors.
That is a very simple way of making a poignant statement that the average between those extremes is what is more statistically probable.
That would be what you want to rely on or build strategies upon.
It's always when to sell, how much to sell, when to buy, how much to buy.
Since getting into this journey, previously I had rarely felt so much inner turmoil.
I've had my share of moral dilemmas and awkward moments and traumatic moments, but this journey is like a never ending roller coaster of gut wrenching heart, blood pressure increasing stress.
So to mitigate that and to treat it in as Taoistic of a sense of as possible, the simplest thing that I've been taught to do is to keep a journal so that you can have a reference point to know what you were thinking last time this scenario came up. Just some record that you can look back on. So I made that a habit.
Today, after doing taxes and looking at this sort of score card of how good my trading has been in the last about five years since I've been in the game, so to speak...
What came to me today for that journal, trying to simplify, find the lowest common denominator way to simplify the equation.
It's been a story of making a few life changing big trades near the top, and a lot of life sustaining small trades at the bottom or at lows, so it could be highs and lows but most importantly not making big life saving trades at the bottom.
When there is a bull run, and you were blessed enough to have bought in earlier than whoever is buying into a rally, into the green candles, into a hype cycle, into a bubble, whatever you wanna call it...the opportunity exists to do what can be extremely gut wrenching and difficult.
Which is to take money off the table when you don't know if it's going to continue to rise in this parabolic manner, and you're getting off only halfway through.
It is very difficult when you get into those new, all time high territories because you you tried to prepare yourself and psych yourself out to no matter what follow your plan.
You have to execute on trades that cut through whatever you're feeling and thinking at the time. You just have to execute based on your plan.
It's gonna be hard, because you can't silence that voice that says, but what if, what if my net worth is going to quadruple next week, and I preclude that possibility by making a big trade too early.
The sentiment is that you should be comfortable at the bottom and uncomfortable at the top. I can relate to that.
Because if you were uncomfortable at the top and you pushed yourself through that, and you did the uncomfortable thing, which is take money off the table, knowing that it could still go up and it might...
I made the biggest trade to take money off the table around the all time highs that were the all time highs of the moment, all time highs of my life, of the cycle that I was in, only to have a week later, the value of that main asset double.
So basically, whatever you buy with that money from that trade, better be worth double what you pay for it, so that you can feel good about it.
As a matter of fact, I feel like what I bought with that trade was priceless.
I said to a friend who I've been commiserating with over the years with this stuff, and they asked me, what's the number that I’d would start selling at?
What would you buy? And so I said, you know what, it's gotten to a point of, we're just off the rails, where I feel like, because of the horror stories that I know about, people impoverish themselves later, because they sold everything and they got out of the markets, and then they had no exposure later when it when it did, eventually ten X on them.
So someone spent tens of thousands of dollars to remodel their basement in a rundown neighborhood, when they could have bought a building in that neighborhood while living in a mansion in the hills, if they would have waited one more year.
It's a total mind F to be in certain, not all markets, but certain markets.
So you probably know what I'm talking about, but they're so demonized at the moment that I don't even wanna say the word at this point.
But this is all more general philosophy of life. It applies to many other things outside of this, but certainly your wits and your resolve and your discipline and your training.
Being supported by narratives and training psychologically, to be living from these very simple but very potent, little snippets of linguistic code so that you don't stray from a plan, you don't panic.
Where I'm at now, I'm on a plateau. I'm still in the green. I'm still profitable. I already playing with the house's money in the sense that my principle into my investments, I already realized, it's not just paper gains. I realized gains orders of magnitude in excess of what I put in.
Nothing is underwater. So there's no pain in that regard. It's only good problems to have. How many orders of magnitude above...
Now it’s that tug of war with the future self over how frugal you should be now.
For me, it's not going to be extravagant. How much do you shrink and cut costs and go into your shell financially in a bear market so that you don't end up with no holdings and no exposure to the gains of the eventual return of the bull market, even if it's years away? That's the discipline.
It's easy to say the best things in life for free.
I said the other day to a friend, talking about these markets and things saying, you know, the things at the times in life that are the most meaningful…if you wanna know what you're made of, if you want the missions, the operations, the adventures, whatever you wanna call it, whether you like this sort of tactical mystique or not, whether you're a mountain climber or you are Captain Willard on a mission to terminate Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
My analogy that I used with my friend was to say it's like Captain Willard, the price tag for his training. The value on paper of him as an operator with the SOG in the secret war. The archetype of him as an operator, on paper, to Uncle Sam and the Pentagon, what his value was, must have cost a pretty penny to get him trained up to that level.
You wouldn't put him in the front line infantry operations with the skill sets that he had been trained to have and the resolve and the discipline and the mastery that he proved to have in order to get an assignment of that caliber.
But once he leaves the wire, once he's not on the base, and once he's out there in the field behind enemy lines and ultimately alone, then it doesn't matter how much money he's making on paper, how much is stacking up in his bank account, how much money and power and resources on the rest of the the spear.
If he's the tip of the spear, none of that money matters at that point, at the heart of the the mission, the heart of the operation, the dude comes out of a swamp in his underwear and gets the job done and goes to work.
At that moment, it didn't matter if he was the richest man in the world or the poorest man in the world, whether there was a bull market or a bear market.
When he was in that abundance and that wealth, he used that time, that opulence, that privilege of being spoiled by the resources of the entire US government, US military, the entire nation state.
Sheltered in that, within all of those resources, all of that immediate medical attention, he used that time to make himself proficient for the times that are gonna matter the most, that are going to push him to the farthest extremes, at which point none of that luxury, none of that privilege, none of those forms of power are relevant. All that is relevant is the training, the skills and the will power.
A wise man once said, being a trader in financial markets is like being a sniper.
A sniper stalks their target and is going to be willing to live in a hole for however long it takes living next to their own sh*t to get the job done.
For him, that's what trading is like. It's not high frequency trading. It's waiting and digging in a position and having a plan and a strategy and knowing exactly what you're gonna do and doing it when the opportunity arises.
I don't like the idea of using war and military technical metaphors loosely.
I think it's a disservice to the people who are in service.
But what I will say is that whether you're a mountain climber or a backpacker or on a Marine reconnaissance mission, or whatever it is...there is this sort of mindset that operates in people who push themselves to the extremes into austerity.
The best moments and the most invigorating and affirming moments in life are the ones that are facilitated by or they could be set up or enabled by financial resources. But that is just the scaffolding. That's probably the best way to put it.
That is the shuttle to get you into the zone where you're doing things and living in a way that are sort of post or transcendent of money.
So for me, it's about having made those critical, big, life changing trades at the top so that I could weather and survive and sustain myself in a bear market, sideways market, and be out there in the field doing the survivalist thing, knowing that eventually...the way an operator is going to have faith, that if they're successful in their mission and they're successful at getting reunited with the support services that are gonna extract them by whatever means, according to whatever plan or contingency, that they'll get back to being sheltered. But when they're on the job in the field, doing the mission, they're doing what they have to do to survive at a very animalistic and primal level.
And if that's what you enjoy, and you are living for that...for me, I'm living for this tactical permaculture dream of building my land based micro one man human ecology and defending it from all of the destructive forces of nature and all the destructive forces of humanity.
I derive a lot of medicine from studying the fictional and real life elite operators because I know that they are the embodiment, for different purposes with different objectives...
But the base layer of it all is getting into that deeper, more primal part of the brain and reveling in crawling around in the dirt, knowing that it doesn't matter how much money you have in a bank account or how many people you have that would protect you or care for you, back on your line, in front of enemy lines.
But to be deep in the field, doing the craft that you're trained to do, living that dream.
And so the joke is that for a lot of people who have high costs of living, have high overhead just to maintain themselves. If they're surfing the financial markets and it turns against them, they're gonna be in extreme agony, because they're gonna have to demean themselves in less fulfilling employment.
They're gonna have to take a step back in their career. They're gonna be laid off and have to be demoralized and depressed and go through all kinds of embarrassment.
But if you're the opposite, and you say, man, for me, I just got to a point on the other side of that.
Last year, the 2021 tax filing was orders of magnitude more money than I ever had in my life.
And that's what I used to buy myself up to the next level. Ratchet up to the next level. And on that next level, what did I do?
I've been crawling around in the dirt, dug in position.
Living like one of the poorest people on Earth, but being rich in my relationship with surviving in nature, rich in so many ways that are immeasurable and almost unspeakable or impossible to put into words.
Being at war with your future self and having to drop, be downwardly socially mobile because of shifts in financial markets, and still be a city slicker that is forced to endure all the indignities that go along with that and all the expenses.
For me, I'm living in a way where I don't know what day it is. I don't know what gas prices are. I don't know what food prices are.
The plan was for this year to have been squared away by the end of last year, so that I would not have to leave this property that I own now, and that I would be able to push forward on a path of growing more of my own food, capturing more and more of my own rain water, and slowly burning through my food supplies and my water supplies that I imported and that I purchased the during the bull run, so that I could be a guerrilla, close to the earth, living on paper below the poverty line.
So my tax return this year was like, so negligible it's absurd. And my expenses and my overhead have been cut to the bone, and I don't feel like I'm deprived of that much.
I’m at peace with the future self, because the future self does not get diminished.
I’ve minimized the opportunity cost to the future self of me behaving in a way that forces me to sell out of all of my positions at the bottom, so that when the markets go back up, I'm not only dead broke and not going along for the ride again, but hating myself for the mistakes I made at this moment right now.
But what does it take to have the resolve to do that?
Well, you have to love nature. You have to be a little bit like, I don't wanna say antisocial, but post social in a sense, because I don't need to be around people, I'm not chasing girls anymore.
It took me a While out put to rest my unsatiated burning desire to be intimate with love with beloved but I was able to really catch up on a lot of lost time over the last decade before the pandemic. I had plenty of past love memories to get me through hard times.
Now I'm able to be postsocial and live in that operator mentality.
The mission is not to terminate Colonel Kurts, but it is to live basically the way that those kind of operators are trained to live, where they eat things that make billy goats puke, and they like working alone. They’re not gonna get homesick and tap out.
Being brutalized by the forces of nature and exposure to the elements, but feeling invigorated by it, and knowing that actually, the more wealthier I get, the more money I make, the further away from money I'm gonna live for longer periods of time.
I think there are a lot of people who are nature lovers, whether they're again into a tactical mystique or in the service or not, or whatever walks of life.
A holistic approach to happiness I’ve learned is that it is process of managing health, wealth, relationships and experiences. Wealth is the means to enrich those domains, to give you more options.
I would like to have more freedom and more discernment and more financial empowerment so that I can have more meaningful, deeper and richer experiences in relationship and health.
To be an investor of last resort, was how it was once framed for me. That this is like a long, grueling, arduous, dirty, nasty, cold, hot, everything mission.
You would have to have the resilience of someone who was trained to not tap out, to not be a quitter, to have a long term perspective and be willing to endure a lot of sacrifice, a lot of hardship, a lot of aloneness.
It's not for everyone, but for the people who value those qualities and cultivate them, even if they weren't born with them or brought up with them, there are things to learn and know about the world that would make you want to spend some time developing some degree of resilience.
So I'm at a point where markets are down, markets are sideways. But I did what I was trained to do, and I will say it again, in this war with my future self, the modus operandi, the sort of marching orders I distilled today in my trade journal...
After I filed my taxes, which were below the radar, they I didn't even have to file that's how strategically folded up...
I folded up and put into my financial rucksack for the mission to move forward, that's how detached that I have become so that I can be agile in these extreme conditions.
But the marching orders for surviving these times, like in Apocalypse Now, whereas between refueling and resupplying, there's this sort of pendulum, or this gradient between being highly exposed to danger and risk, and being more sheltered and more protected.
So if I draw that analogy of financial markets, and I say when the gravy train’s flowing, the musical chairs seem like they're never gonna run out.
When the music is playing, I have to dance. Everybody's ratcheting up the everything else. And that's the time to be the ant versus the grasshopper, so to speak.
Because I was able to do that now, in this time, I'm able to persevere, knowing that the mission is going to involve this oscillation between those extremes.
But in order to get to the ultimate destination, or to fulfill the mission, or to accomplish the mission, I have to be psychologically and financially and physically always prepared to endure the sacrifices and hardships and seductions and everything between those two extremes.
To average out and persist.
This mantra of sorts, what I will keep in mind, as my operating principle, is this idea of a few big trades at the top that are life changing trades.
With acknowledgment, that when the markets go down and the opportunity of those life changing gains at the top, when the prices are high...
Eventually what goes up must come down. And when it comes down. Extend the range of survivability from that top and make incremental small trades to maintain a plateau of sustenance across that stretch to where markets will go up again.
But the most critical and important thing, the thing to avoid, the most catastrophic pitfall that is eminent at all times is the unavoidable possibility…
don't make big trades at the bottom out of the necessity to get out of a legal or financial liability meaning some sort of accident or calamity or tragedy because it would wipe you out.
It can wipe you out at the bottom whereas at the top, very few things could wipe you out, because even the most catastrophic things that can happen might only just barely put a dent in your net worth at that point.
But this is what I've discovered. That's the double edged sword that's so mortifying and terrifying is that if you screw up that risk.
Putting life and limb and finances and legal status, and taking any risks with your life and your freedom when you don't have the marked to market net worth to really fight legal battles or fight medical battles, or have teams that can support you.
Like you're a car racer, and you can have people come and service you at a pit stop.
That sort of luxury happens at the top, but at the bottom, when you're looking at you're net worth evaporate as I am now, really appreciate being adapted to an austere lifestyle.
Disease, infectious disease.
I don't wanna risk exposure to vehicular accidents.
I don't wanna risk exposure to violence.
I don't wanna risk exposure to nebulous entanglements with asymmetrical warfare, with people who could wanna pick fights with me online or drag me into court or whatever.
There's like a million things that I do not do anymore, that I've done in the past that were not flippant or criminal, but they were uncalculated risks, risks that were just baked into living in the city, baked into being an entrepreneur, baked into being an activist or whatever.
I would rather just squat in the Bush like Charlie now and get stronger.
Wait for the opportunity to take that big, life changing trade at the top that will ratchet me up to a new level. And at that new level, I will be laying low, treating the tops and the bottoms, the bull and bear markets as what they are: impostors.
Charlie Mike continuing the mission to average out those extremes and avoid excess and make peace with that future self.
The Yin and Yang, the polarities of what I've experienced from relatively astronomical net worth, a micro fortune, if you will, for the first time, coming out of nowhere, worked hard for it, dug into position for it to make the trade I needed to make at the bottom, to have it be worth as much as it was at the top.
Take enough of it out of the top...
But just like some people will say about what it means to do permaculture, it's like you're trying to smooth the edges of the extremes of what happens on a sites, climate, ecology, mitigate the destructive impact of droughts and floods, the destructive effects of too much moisture versus not enough moisture.
Create an equilibrium that's habitable and more sustainable and more resilient and robust and diverse.
That helps really bring this all together with tactical permaculture.
I don't wanna be talking about finances that much anymore, but it's part of the world we live in.
One of my former Green Beret mentors has made the comment because he's such an outdoors man, being a Ranger, an Army Ranger, his sentiments about not wanting to be in the city and feeling at home in the outdoors and just knowing in his every cell how much it's night and day, how fulfilling it is to be in the wild.
He said, you know, in the modern world, you have to be very successful financially to be able to even afford to get back to doing the things that are the cheapest that our ancestors did, who had nothing, you had no money or money didn't even exist.
Paraphrasing that a bit, but that is the quintessential sentiment that I'm trying to express.
Is it like, man, how much money does it take to get free from money and to just live beyond money as a rewilding feral animal among all of the riches and all the wealth that is organic abundance, that is all of the natural resources, the sun, the rain and the soil and everything that grows freely and thrives and flourishes without lawyers and banks and regulators and financial markets and all of that stuff.
I don't live to be in those worlds. I fight within those worlds so that I can live beyond them, which is what I'm doing now.
So it takes a lot of money to live a life where you don't need money, and you live beyond money.