Whatever your station in life, we all get jerked around by, we all get slapped around by the invisible hand of the free markets and we get choked by the not so free markets and every other permutation of that metaphor that you could adapt.
I have been really pivoting away from, shall we say, being hyper focused on emerging technology investment opportunities that have done well for me, and that go in cycles of hype and bubbles and crashes.
Enough time has passed to where it's not the only game in town, and it's starting to be less, starting to become a very demonized game in town.
Looking at the history of investment opportunities, all kinds of penny stocks, the railroads, the early speculators of precious metals and fossil fuels...
They all have their arcs in time, and some of them disappear, never come back.
Or some of them plateau. Some of them find new innovations and have a resurrection of prominence.
I'm at a point where my investment thesis for one of the more volatile emerging tech investment opportunities...it did well enough for me, it did so well for me that it justified consuming a lot of my attention and passion.
I had the rose colored glasses on.
I was not the worst of evangelists who are annoying and actually give poor and illegal investment advice that results in the loss of trust and respect.
In fact, I was lucky in that most of the time, when I was very gung ho and very evangelistic, I actually helped other people do pretty well.
I'm not part of those pumponomics, the people who try to get other people to buy something, whatever it is to increase the market value of whatever that thing is, that widget, whether it's digital or tangible, physical object or product or service, investment contract or whatever.
I never had the urge to manipulate people in such a way that would induce them to rush into an investment so that the supply and demand dynamics created a higher valuation of that asset.
The just wait till it got a certain point, so that I could sell it all and laugh on the way to the bank, knowing that I helped to lather up that interest.
And those people had no idea that it was people who hyped them up who were going to dump on them.
Some such people are just cynical and self interested, and they believe it's a zero sum game, and that's the way it should be.
I would say, if I was at the Pearly Gates and they said, you have one act that you did in your life, to plead your case that you should get into heaven.
You choose what that is, and you tell us what it is.
You don't get to give us your whole life history.
You don't get to bring in character witnesses to talk about how good of a grade school student you were.
No, you get one thing. I've saved lives before, not a million, but I have saved lives before, both literally and figuratively in the sense of people have said that I've helped them not kill themselves and stuff like that, or help them really rescue themselves in different ways from reckless behavior or self destructive behavior.
Those would probably be the obvious things that you would use or choose from to say it was the time that I saved someone from drowning or something like that which is a true story.
But I think we all have moments where we've done very brave and heroic things, at a risk to ourselves and you would think that would be the highest value.
This little cartoon that I'm making here, this little joke cartoon strip I'm making right here.
Well my thought bubble is that it's something of that nature, what ends up being the thing now that that would, that the only one that would work, that would supersede the others, is the fact that I, when I had the opportunity to totally sell out my whole position and take all of my chips off the table, but in so doing I’d be robbing new, enthusiastic believers in an asset that I was preaching about, that I believed in, that I never, in a million years would ever think I would wanna have zero of that…
I would wanna hold on to it because of not just the potential to just be ever more rich in the future…
But the whole thing is like, hopefully you invest in something because you believe that it’s ethical by your standards.
Not everybody invests that way, but I certainly do. You hope that it's going to mature and that it's going to deliver on its promises.
It's going to saturate the market and the opportunities to have gains from that are gonna go to the people who were earlier, they’re gonna be rewarded more, though won’t have the ability to crash the price when they sell back to the market.
But my ethics, the ethics not only of what the asset is and what they do, but the rate at which I'm going to realize gains and harvest from those gains.
I don't wanna say, oh, the fruit tree, just had its first season of finally producing. Now I'm gonna cut it down and kill it and take all of it and run away with it and not share with anybody.
To me, that's the absurdity of being compelled to sell out an entire position because one, you don't know if that's gonna be the all time high.
Maybe for just the most selfish reasons you should say, don't sell more than a certain percentage at any one time, because you never know if you're wrong or you're right over whether it's gonna go up or down tomorrow, or in ten years.
The worst thing you can do is have had a position and then completely got out of it and be wrong, because if you were more moderate…
So to me, the ethical thing and the logical thing, there's a confluence of self interest and public interest and ethics and even altruism, in my mind to say that I might propose to the judge at the Pearly Gates.
I had an opportunity to be ridiculously, absurdly, far more rich at one moment in a market cycle than I possibly ever imagined that I might be.
My ethics held me back, and I said, no, I'm not going to, I don’t wanna call it dumb money, I don't wanna dump on new money, I don't wanna dump on the people who are coming into the awareness of the asset and into the investment of the asset.
I wouldn't be able to list them or name them directly. But because I have been...I wasn't necessarily wearing the t shirt around, but I was talking about what I believed in and people ask me what are you investing in and what do you believe in.
Well I can't give you investment advice but for me, this is what I believe in, I'm in it for the long term.
I'm not trying to dump all of it because of a hype cycle.
It was very hard for me to even sell any of it when I did, but I'm glad I did.
I was forced to by dire circumstances. I was forced by dire circumstances to buy land when I wasn't ready.
I was then later force after buying land, being on that land in even more dire circumstances with higher net worth than ever before in my entire life.
I don't know how many orders of magnitude of my entire earnings of my entire life were represented at that one time during 2021.
But I still didn't sell it all, I was like, this technology has not even mature yet. The people who are coming in now are rushing in because of a hype cycle.
This isn't sustainable. This is parabolic.
I don't feel good about dumping it. I don't believe that this is the top.
I don't believe this is the highest it’s ever gonna hit, because it hasn't even been really been born yet.
It's like we're aware that it's in the womb. But I'm betting that it's gonna be the genius, world saving, best gift from God that ever came out of a womb.
I don't like this analogy, but I think it is sort of humanizing, maybe it's important to think about these things in more human terms.
So we care more and we value and appreciate it more.
It is like the Chosen One. If you were gonna invest money in the security forces that are gonna protect and grow food for the Chosen One, maybe those farmers and those warriors would form enterprises that if you invested in them you would do well owning their stock.
And when you needed to, you could sell them. Maybe when you retire and you don't have income anymore, that's when you sell them.
And that gives plenty of time for other people to catch up and get in and really stabilize the value and get it to a good product market fit and just let it mature over time.
If you have that karmic ethic about investing in something meaningful, you wouldn't just say, okay, well, oh, the Chosen One was born so I'm gonna sell my position. Because now that at least we know they're alive, all these investors are coming in at this time and pumping the value up so I can sell and dump on them now and be one of those factors that makes it actually crash.
I'm gonna completely contradict and lose all my integrity for money.
I did not want to betray my integrity at that moment, because I didn't know if it was the top.
I had no reason to believe it was the top.
I had every reason to believe the opposite.
So I won't say it was because of virtue.
I just listened to some philosophy courses, the Yale Open course sessions and it's interesting the the way that they would break down how you do something virtuous.
But it was almost like an accident, you were just kind of going to the motions, or you're on auto pilot, or just by happenstance, what you did happened to appear heroic from the outside, but really…
I can't think of a good example of what that might be but well let's say, you were texting and driving and you swerved at a moment that would normally be illegal and unsafe.
Though what if that moment was the key factor that prevented someone from dying because they were being knocked across the freeway like a billiard ball from a pile up.
You happened to swerve for that time, and somebody thought that you had been touched by God to know to do that, because if you hadn't, they would have had nowhere to go, they would have died.
And yet, the only reason that happened is because you were doing something totally unvirtuous.
My narrative at that time, at the peak of the market wasn't informed by or influenced by and sort of restrained at a subconscious level, by ethics.
I wasn’t consciously thinking, I’m not one of those people who hype something up only so that I can get other people to buy it and believe in it and have conviction to take a long and large position out of their hard earned, just so I can betray them and be a liar.
How do you stop yourself from from being so greedy that you go to hell and can't get into heaven?
Well, if something is going hockey stick parabolic in value, if you capitalize on that in a manner that you don’t really know if that was all just rich people's money…
Most of the bubbles that I've experienced have really been driven mostly by what they call retail investors, or Main Street not Wall Street.
So for me to have gotten in earlier and for me to dump on people coming later, it's not technically a pyramid scheme.
It's not technically a Ponzi scheme, but it's not that much more respectable.
What can be respectable is a drip irrigation approach, or take one cookie jar out of that cookie jar at a time giving other people a chance to come to the party and participate and enjoy in the development of the asset. As a community let it grow and mature and you will be rewarded.
I wanna have integrity. I would rather have integrity and a little bit of money, having missed opportunities to make big money.
I would rather not trade my integrity for money so that I have a lot of money and a little bit of integrity. I'd rather do the opposite.
Buy a lot low, and sell a little bit when it's high, and just consistently sell to maintain and possibly grow in a sustainable and gradual manner, grow the resources around your life.
Maybe I'm just deluding myself, serious financial delusions about my investment thesis.
Looking back at who I was at that time, I wasn't intending to be heroic by not selling it all.
I just had certain mantras drilled into me. Trade around a core position. Some basic mathematical and financial theoretical axioms that informed me emotionally.
I had good training that made me do the right thing. I did the right thing, not the most lucrative thing and then afterwards of course, I always have to endlessly interrogate myself, what was my mindset? What were my intentions?
How much credit can I really take for it? And honestly, I would say it was a fog of war.
A lot of people would say the same thing and it's that war with your future self.
It's the fog of war with your future self, because you don't really know if it's the top or the bottom, you don't know if you're doing the right thing.
You just have to hope that you fall back to your level of training, whatever that is.
So I think my training was pretty good. My training was, don't puke up your position all at once.
It's always good to have some skin in the game. There's a million little fortune cookies, no pun intended, type mantras that I've had etched into me from people with a lot more experience who've had greater losses and greater gains, and are professionals, and they try to break off nuggets of wisdom for people, up and comers like me.
In terms of financial literacy, most people had no financial literacy outside of academia and actual financial industry professionals.
That's changing and there's a revolution, that's the real soul of it.
That's what I signed up for. I learned a lot.
It's not a libertarian revolution.
It's not a socialist revolution.
It's not a anarcho capitalist revolution.
I think it's really a mathematical revolution and an appreciation and understanding. The democratization of financial literacy and understanding of the mechanics of financial markets and institutions that are puppeteering us and that are manipulating those markets.
It’s just sad and ironic that the most enlightening and liberatory tools for algorithmic integrity also seem to attract the most adept scam and con artists. It's such a paradoxical moment.
Maybe the ability to have a debt based economy was simultaneously the best and worst idea, because it would foster growth and innovation, but also it would attract all kinds of scammers.
So this isn't the first rodeo of us as human society having to deal with disruptive ideas and then disruptive technologies, destructive and disruptive and constructive ways of telling stories about exchanging value and having institutions that try to maintain some sort of consistent order.
But then everything sort of skewing and distorting and leaning and twisting towards corruption. The cycles of boom and bust, of corruption and redemption.
For me, I'm just trying to live simply so others can simply live.
I'm trying not to puke up my position and trade out of fear or greed or any other vice or with any malice.
So I think I've done the right thing. I'm at a point where I've continued to keep the faith and fight the good fight and do the right thing.
While I'm no longer an evangelist for the main asset that I'm continuing to hold and maintain a core position of, it has been my ticket out of the matrix, and I've preserved as much of it as I possibly could.
The bear market and recession and supply chain, post COVID, mid COVID, whatever you wanna call it, these are dark times.
Even that bubble was actually very twisted and apocalyptic.
I'm interested in healthy charts, and I wanna live a life of frugality and simplicity, where all I care about is that I can grow my own organic food and medicine on private land and be relatively left alone and live and let live and not have to work for anybody else if I don't do it on a basis where I have the means to quit anytime if I don't feel like I'm being respected or that I'm in alignment with the direction of the project, or the mission of whatever it is, that's just the freedom of independence I want.
It doesn't have to be that expensive, because if you have natural literacy and you enjoy the beauty of nature, you can find cheap land the way I did.
You can enjoy it, you can feel like you're living on the promised land, paradise and heaven on Earth.
It could have been cheap to buy and cheap to pay the taxes on.
If you know how to grow food, and you can rip away the fingers of strangulation from the big food industrial complex and pharmaceutical industrial complex and the psychiatric industrial complex, you can be self sufficient and divest from all of those attachments to the system and to the matrix.
That's really low overhead. So right now, I don't have to sell big chunks. I can sell relatively small chunks, although it's painful because of the valuation.
I’m had to sell around ten X my entry point, but it ain't a hundred x, which is where it was when I did sell some.
I also have to say I did the right thing by doing that over time.
So it's been a sacrifice and a painful one, but I know it's been doing the right thing.
Today, what was different? I've mentioned this and talked about before, I could just call this my hard, painful lessons to understanding the karmic calculus of ethical investing.
If you're right here with me in this journey of navigating poverty and rags to riches for a day or a week and then back down in the middle between rags and riches. For me, it was financial freedom and independence to where I haven't had to go and work.
I've haven’t had to work for anybody since I left the city, started leasing land for a year, and then bought land I've lived on for the last two and a half years, and I haven't had to work for anybody else.
My income from other sources, other than slowly selling little chunks of my holdings so as to not feel ethically responsible for moving the market...
But just do my part to hold value in the ecosystem and the community of holders of the asset.
The converse responsibility is that you also provide liquidity to that community, and you're willing to buy and sell.
I'm not gonna say I'm a market maker, but over time, I've been in positions to buy. I've been in positions to sell. I try to just find balance for myself.
What all that leads up to is what happened today, which was even more fun.
I don't know how fun it is to hear somebody tell the story the way I have.
It's like lucky for you, if you're still on the hamster wheel, whether you're rich or poor, but you're not free.
It's a very rugged and austere freedom with a lot of sacrifice.
But you experience things that you wouldn't otherwise experience and if you care about those things, and you care about enjoying those things before it's too late, or before you're too old, then to me, that's priceless what I've been able to experience.
Like I said, I'm not glamping. I don't have a mansion. I live the most humble, destitute, tiny home, desert rat existence you could possibly imagine that nobody in their right mind would try to do.
I'm not gonna say that all the famous survival TV show people would have run back to their primitive shelters with their tails between their legs in the face of encountering what I've encountered.
They probably would just say, you're dumb and you're crazy.
If you don't die, it's because you're lucky, because there's no amount of skill that could actually prevent you from dying the way that you're doing it out there.
I would say, I guess, well, to me, freedom, the way that I enjoy it, the way that I have it, it's worth dying for.
It's not tragic to die doing what you love. And I love this place, and I love my freedom and my solitude now, so much that I sacrifice to have it, and the pain and the suffering that goes with the territory, literally.
I'm not trying to sell this lifestyle to anybody. I'm just reporting back what it’s like on the other side of the matrix. That’s the value I'm giving back.
It's not easy. It's not always fun.
The one thing that's very different about the one selling point, for lack of a better term, that is different to the Matrix, is that it's actually quite beautiful.
Although there were scenes in Zion are gorgeous as far as the lair for the revolution.
If anything, here it’s like the Wild West, ghost town, rustic americana, beautiful, full horizon sunsets and sunrises and full starlit skies and mountains and just gorgeous clouds and everything.
Everything that you see in pictures on the walls of places where they're trying to make you feel calm and happy and relaxed.
I get to live in that.
I'm holding on for dear life to the beauty of this place and my freedom to fully enjoy it, even if it means that I am living in what they call below minimum wage. BMW, below minimum wage. I'm doing the early retirement mystique, where I'm not buying anything.
Let's say if I was a billionaire right now and I’m sick of society. All I wanna do is get on a boat, and not even a fancy one, but the most tore up, basic, simple, whatever boat that will get the job done.
I wanna shove off, and I wanna go out to sea for a year and sail around the planet, for a year and then under those circumstances, unless I tap out to get rescued because of some sort of catastrophe, I'm gonna be alone.
And no matter how much my net worth is, all that matters is the planning that went into the kit and the supplies, the gear, the food, the medicine, the books, the manuals.
What's gonna matter more than anything? What's gonna make my net worth mean nothing and the value of my intelligence mean everything?
And my training and my skills and conditioning and fitness, those real things, those things that anybody can achieve, those things that have nothing to do with money other than how much time you can afford to apply to it.
But when most people playing video games and being on the screen all the time, if you're gonna use that screen time to learn stuff and to become a Macgyver, Swiss Army Knife, that can survive anywhere, actually is useful to a community.
But when you're alone, you can survive without a community.
Then I would say even it's not a necessarily privileged thing, if you care about applying yourself.
I always wanted to be like the A-Team. I always wanna be like Macgyver. I didn't wanna join the police force or the military in order to do that, I wanted to do it in a paramilitaristic style, where I fought my own fights. I chose my battles, and I didn't have a commanding officer.
I work in egalitarian collectives and cells of groups and individuals within groups that are autonomous and that have consensus decision making, and that don't have a real hierarchy.
Don't need a hierarchy because they're not a managerial intelligentsia type of political class.
It's not a political party.
I started out as an anarcho punk, and then became a green anarchist, then eventually a crypto anarchist. All those chapters I carry with me and the ethics that we're gonna be warriors we're gonna be militant. We're gonna lace up our boots and put on our fatigues and have our kit.
Some of us are gonna get tactically trained. Some of us are gonna bear arms.
Some of us are gonna do clandestine operations.
But no matter what, we're not gonna boss each other around.
It's gonna be all the squared away, and none of the sir, yes, sir.
Some of us were kind of lacking and posing and just looking the look, but not really doing the actual austerity and the training, conditioning. If you're gonna try to be squared away without a drill sergeant...if you're not gonna accept that sort of dominance hierarchy, well, you gotta do it yourself DIY.
So I'm not saying I could compete in any domain with those squared way folks that were actually brought up in those environments, those strict environments with the chain of command and drill sergeants.
But I know there are some dimensions where it's not the size of the man in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the man.
I've survived things that other people would have killed themselves already if they had to endure.
And I say to myself sometimes that every soldier that killed himself, am I harder than them?
Am I stronger than them because I've endured things that probably some of them wouldn’t be able to?
I don't wanna play that game of comparing who’s got the most trauma. But I will say that at least I had the dignity of all the indignities that I've suffered...I will be able to say that I’m not the hardest warrior that ever walked the Earth, but I'm also not the weakest warrior to ever walk the Earth.
That doesn't get decided by how decorated you are or what your insignia is, or what it says about you on paper, because there are things about me that I know that I have earned having survived and endured and sacrificed and fought battles. Maybe not always won the war, but certainly fought certain battles.
What I have that some people don't have is that I fought wars and I fought in wars and won battles that I don't regret because I've tried to keep that moral compass.
There's not that much that I regret. I regret some bad behavior in relationships, but it wasn't the most egregious behavior.
I made great amends with those people and most of my former lovers are still, in some sense, my eternal lovers and friends.
I think my greatest transgressions have been in my intimate relationships and that wasn't even that bad.
But I never killed a civilian because I was tired and lazy and not doing due diligence or following the letter of the law of the rules of engagement, or the rules of armed conflict.
There's people who have to live with that.
Getting back to this Macgyver concept of no matter how rich or poor I am, or going back to when Macgyver is out there operating, it doesn't matter how much he's getting paid or how much support he has, he's doing the types of behind enemy lines,
covert operator missions, where technical expertise, physical prowess and ingenuity and the ability to get the job done under adverse and unpredictable conditions, where things go wrong, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Plans are nothing, planning is everything.
Those are the smart and hard individuals that always made me perk up the most growing up, wherever I was exposed to them in real life, or on TV or movies, or even video games or whatever.
To me, it was always those people who are intelligent and proficient enough physically, that they were given the most intricate and dangerous tasks to accomplish, because they could be trusted to have the integrity and the resolve to work independently.
There was a former green beret who said in the context of describing some operation, it was the singleton mission we all dream about.
To most civilians, they wouldn't necessarily be able to parse that, but because I have been kind of anthropologically shadowing the military in this paramilitary war college, a project that I've been on for really my whole life, in some way shape or form.
Now I'm doing it in a very concentrated manner. Now I'm thinking of it in a more scholarly manner, and taking my academic training and applying it more fully into paramilitary studies, if you will, if that was gonna be a department or a college or one day a shelf at the bookstore or the university library, paramilitary studies…
Private military companies are very well studied, but I'm not talking about mercenaries.
I'm talking about people who care to be the civilian militia with a moral compass, and they choose not to work for Uncle Sam because they feel like Uncle Sam's corrupt.
They're not trying to go out and intimidate people just by wearing kit and carrying guns in public for culture war reasons.
And they're not trying to go be mercenaries and oppress people in the Third and Fourth World, so that resource extraction can happen without the indigenous people effectively being able to thwart it with bows and arrows, so that you're just another wave of colonization.
No, I don't wanna join those forces.
I don't wanna join the mercenaries, and I don't wanna join the performative militants.
I wanna be developing my own warrior capacity and be implementing all of the real transmissions from those A-Team and Macgyver archetypes.
That means you do the right thing and you work for the land, you work for the people, or if you are gonna contract with agencies, you feel good about what you're doing.
I think, if anything, it may have been a little bit embellished or romanticized, but I don't think Macgyver was ever on a mission that he signed up to to take that was morally questionable, or that was in furtherance of a dark agenda of some agency.
I think it was always, probably unrealistically, a non gray area.
I think it was all very much be a science geek, be tactically proficient, but avoiding killing people. Very good values.
What all that now translates into, as far as the financial stuff, going back to that, it doesn't matter what your net worth is if you get so sick of how fake all of that pageantry and social climbing, the high school prom psychology.
Never ending chasing clout and chasing riches, you get sick of that to a point where you don't care about it.
You wanna just retreat into the wild and test your skills. Know, am I really a man? What am I made of?
Can I run with the wild animals and survive and make it, that's what I wanna know.
I don't care what my portfolio is doing, going up or down.
What the billionaires of the world are doing to kick me in the balls financially at a whim.
I'm just trying to come up, I don't wanna be kept up at night by that. I don't wanna be jerked around by that.
So my thought at this point is, what I enjoy and what I value, and what gives me inner richness, inner wealth is not the feeling that I can just buy anything I can imagine, because I'm so rich with money. That takes all the fun out of building things with your bare hands and doing it with with trash, or doing it in a Macgyver type of situation, or out in the middle of the ocean situation where the only way you're gonna survive is if you use your wits and you live by your wits and you Macgyver and hack something together that saves your life.
That is gonna be a million times more meaningful to you than, oh, well, I just paid for everything I needed along the route that I took across the world.
I just basically paid all of the Coast Guard forces from one jurisdiction or one nation to the next as I went along to have them just basically out out of camera shot, basically be right there behind me as if the whole thing is fake.
Survival people point fingers to each other. Oh, I did this all by myself with no support crew and rescue team breathing down my neck outside of the frame of the camera, a safety net underneath everything...
It is instructive to think about how much pride you can take if you didn't build it yourself, if you didn't grow it yourself, if you didn't do the life hack yourself, if it wasn't a DIY project.
You take pleasure, you take pride in the things that you create, whether it's as gifts to others, or just nice to have things, whether it's origami, or knowing how to survive in the wild by eating a wild plant and identifying it, it's more rewarding.
The most rewarding things...they say, the best things in life for free.
Yes, and I will put to that, the best, the most valuable objects in your life are the ones that you had a hand in creating from scratch.
There's a place for fine dining, and there's a place for fine objects that were crafted by other people, because hopefully you're supporting them in a good way.
It's not just all completely soulless, whatever it is that is fancy that you might be buying.
Back to how this applies to trading, I did an emergency trade today to preempt what I think could be a very devastating turn of events, that would mean I've said to myself before maybe mentioned before:
If I sell now and the price goes up tomorrow or next week or next month, I’ll laugh about it.
But if the opposite happens and I don't sell now and the price goes down any more than it already has, I'm gonna be crying about it.
Because if I still have to sell in order to guarantee that I'm gonna make it for the next stretch of this journey of austerity in the wild, I need to make purchases at a certain bulk level.
There is no convenience store. It's the inconvenience of a once a year water and food resupply.
For all intents and purposes, I am out in the middle of ocean.
I'm out in the middle of the desert.
And my relationship with my with my future self, this war with my future self is such that if I wanna be free and not be in Babylon, not being in civilization, not being in the matrix, and I wanna have my cake and eat it too, be free and not have to go make money and work...
But I also wanna not sell my holdings either. Then I gotta be very frugal, and I gotta sell as little of my holdings as I can.
And I gotta try to be smart about when I do a trade that's going to realize gains, even though I've held out a long time.
I'm not gonna tell you the exact details of the trade, but I will say that as long as I sold at a price higher than the last trade, that's gonna be my rule of thumb.
Just so I don't feel stupider or less fortunate. I wanna feel slightly more blessed and slightly less cursed than the last time. I don’t know if I'll ever be as blessed again as I was in 2021, but that cargo cult of the past will drive you crazy.
All I care about now is one trade to the next.
Do I feel smarter or dumber from one trade to the next?
I don't feel good about any of them because the prices are way below my comfort level. But they're also way above my entry point. So yes, it's all the houses money, it's all profit.
It's just a question of how much risk do you wanna take with your survival?
I could not survive and die holding on like a miser to paper wealth and paper gains that put me into the highest tax bracket.
Let's just put it that way, I don't wanna use any of those other words. I'll just say, yes.
It's a foregone conclusion that if I don't sell anything, and the trends and cycles continue to function as they have for a hundred years, then it's a foregone conclusion that I will end up in the highest tax bracket when I realize significant portions of my holdings.
This year, my income will be less than $5000.
Next year it could be even less, because buying land, buying the truck to get water and some crops to the land, and having some tools and upgrading a couple of things. But I didn't build a house, I didn't install utilities. I'm living in the most austere manner you possibly could, as if you were a lone operator with only your your truck and what you can pack into it to live for a year because that's the mission because you need to do your job your work, your craft.
That's the mission I gave myself in that war with my future self.
You can go back to the city and work and deliver pizzas or do permaculture design and installation like I used to and risk a bunch of covid infections, and have your vehicle break down and eat up expenses, and you could end up being exposed to all the carcinogens.
Just be degraded in all the ways that you're on the hamster wheel, you might even be making a lot of money.
But what if you lose it all to hospital bills because of just the hazards and the horrors.
It started raining now, I hear it on my corrugated metal roof with the solar panel on it, only a few feet above.
You feel and hear the wind and the thunder claps, and you see the lightning, and you feel the mist of the rain spattering in storms, and you get the sand in your keyboard and all those things.
That's the life. That's the real life.
On this cycle of trying to minimize expenses and make every year that goes by, make my the purchases that I made to survive each year, one year at a time.
I should be buying less and less. I should be more efficient with what I buy.
I should be buying things that are durable like my hand crank grinder and stainless steel buckets.
Swapping out plastic with glass, which is more expensive.
Swapping out thin glass with heavy gauge glass. Swapping out jar lids that corrode easily with with stainless steel jar lids.
These are the expenses that make those bigger dents in my holdings upfront, but it's gonna mean I don't have to replace them for a long time, if ever.
If I take big chunks out as long as, I leave giant chunks in place they will regrow, it becomes A perennial investment strategy.
That's the healthy, sweet spot zone of regenerative wealth that I wanna be in.
I should only be compounding my ecological security and food security and ecological diversity and wealth.
I should have to spend less and less money, and just be more and more buffered with emergency funds if I really did have an injury that I needed to get expensive treatment for, and that could happen any moment to anyone at any time.And certainly I'm at high risk for that to happen to me here.
There are things that happen in my body, that are cumulative effects of exposure to the elements, where it's really scary.
I don't know how far I can push certain things. It certainly would frighten people to see what I've allowed myself to endure. I'm not emaciated my teeth aren't falling out.
I tug on my teeth every once in a while to make sure that the first early signs of certain mineral deficiencies are not showing up, as long as my gums are holding my teeth in place. I have muscle mass. And even though I have all kinds of aches and pains and maybe some malnutrition of certain types, in some ways, I feel better than ever.
In some ways, I know I'm just roughing it and that's the way it is. And certainly doing it alone. I can't take a lot of time out to rest, I do rest enough.
If you were out there at sea and you were doing that mission as a billionaire at sea, and you're gonna get knocked out by the spinning of the mast, whatever could happen. You're gonna get flooded. You're gonna freeze from getting splashed with water and storms. You're gonna fear for your life, maybe even get thrown overboard, and you're gonna be tore up.
So I'm definitely tore up, but I'm optimizing as I go along.
So far, the acute conditions of extreme agony and suffering, they tend to cluster around the most devastating summer months of heat, and then they subside.
And I get back to a baseline in the winter where I can lick my wounds and rest and repair properly on all sorts of levels.
So I've just kind of learned to live with that and get used to it.
All that is to say that it's cheap financially to live well and live beautifully and survive.
But you gotta be a glutton for punishment, because the elements will grind you to a pulp in ways that you didn't imagine, in ways you would never know if you were a weekend warrior nature person.
No offense to that. I love you. We need you.
You keep national parks open and trails maintained, but the ones who do the hardcore climbs and the hardcore trail hikes and whatnot, they would know what I'm talking about of just when you start falling apart.
But that's also when you reach enlightenment in ways. If you had to pull somebody out of a vehicle.
You know that you have the fortitude to push yourself through pain, even when you're mechanically failing and exhausted and your body's working totally against you, as long as you understand basic posture and ergonomics, if you're not actually literally technically debilitated, you just feel debilitated from exhaustion or from even exposure, dehydration or heat exhaustion within limits.
I'm not trying to tell people to do anything stupid, but I will say that, I know one thing, most people in the modern world with AC are so pampered compared to what it's like to live without it.
And when it gets up to 125 degrees for days at a time, and the nighttime temperature stays above a hundred, and usually you lose your mind.
I don't know what you have to do to be more hard boiled. Probably be in a country where there's open pit prisons with no shade no shelter no food no, water and they're not putting you in that pit to punish you. That's just general population, unshaded pit with your own urine, feces and whatever critters wanna come and terrorize you in that hole. And you're lucky if you're not also infected, gaping gashes and wounds from being beaten.
When I get through this first full entire year, which is coming up, and now just a couple more months, I’ll be able to say I've been isolated for a year and in naked raw nature, being brutalized year round.
It's gonna be interesting thinking about how all the things that people do who have more money than me, I don't know if they really know themselves.
I don't know if they really found themselves. I don't know if they push their limits.
I know some of them do. Some of them they’re adrenaline junkies, and they can afford to do the the most wild safaris and mountain climbs and whatnot.
But I would say there's more grit and the real additional value for me was the thing that I did today.
There's more internal net worth and self worth. Yes, self worth versus net worth, paper wealth and public wealth and fancy wealth, whatever, performative wealth versus inner true wealth, if you will.
But I like the idea of net worth or a self worth and net worth being not necessarily overlapping on the diagram.
A lot of people say the poorest people in the world are the happiest because they don't have any distractions from each other and from the land.
Permaculturists often work with people who are so much more happy and healthy, mentally and more fulfilled and really engaged in what we're doing with teaching them permaculture so they can survive and thrive in an ecosystem.
And you know why it is that they're so dedicated and so undistracted and so grateful and so humble, it’s that they don't have an identity crisis about ambitions to be rich and famous.
The industrialized nations, the people who are in that myth of progress hamster wheel, who think that going back to the land, or living off the land, subsistence agriculture is backward and primitive.
To have dirt under your fingers to interact with bugs and to actually have to deal with manure, your own manure, of all things.
That is so backwards in the minds of people who wanna be like Barbie, they wanna be the Jetson's completely divorced from nature, completely, sterilized robotic sort of air brushed fantasy of of having no relationship to the planet that they actually evolved from, and whose minerals they're actually comprised of.
They have just this cover boy cover girl archetype that they wanna live out, and it's all furnished to them by the hyper sterilized and hyper plastic and fabricated, totally unnatural synthetic environment.
And the aspiration within that is to be the prom queen or the prom king.
Most of the people who are sold on that dream of aspiring to be ambitious and to rise to the top and to be a star and to be famous and to be rich and to have to keep up with the Jones...
And all this pressure, all of that pressure takes you away from the humility and the joy of just being a member of an ecosystem.
So the people who feel completely disenfranchised and unbanked and cut off from any of that, they're the most liberated because they have no delusions of grandeur about themselves.
They don't feel like, oh, god, with such an opportunity cost to be growing my own food, because I could just do a tech startup and pay someone else to grow my food, and then I could focus full time.
Some people have money and paper wealth that they don't even have time to spend because they’re so neurotic about making more of it.
That's not true wealth. You will never be humble enough. You will always be on your phone.
When other people are planting seeds and turning compost because they don't care to join the rat race.
They know what really matters in life, song and dance and ceremony and birth and death, and caring for people, caring for the land and paying attention to the animals and caring for nature and being a part of all that.
That's actually something that's priceless, and that no shrink, no drug, no psychiatric drug, no pill, and no therapists can give you nature and can give you community.
And that self worth versus net worth for me, the thing was, I was gonna make a bigger trade.
I got a little bit of more nuanced intel that told me that you need to square away next year now. Because if you don't do it now and the price drops any further than it has now, you're gonna feel dumb, not smart about that big trade you gotta do.
It forced me to be even more austere and frugal and it made me scrap plans to buy a lot of new lumber for a small project.
It would have been a thousand dollars for me to just get the Douglas fur lumber, which breaks my heart, because I was a tree sitter.
The trees that I was sitting in, risking my life, the bravest moments of my life, then 20 years later, I'm gonna sell out and buy with money the trees that I was trying to protect in my twenties.
I'm gonna pay to have them cut down in my forties, so that I can build a little platform just to keep the coyotes out of my food and keep the scorpions off my ankles, so that I can do my business in peace.
Right now, that's the back of my truck, my bigger truck. To be able to live out of a truck, that's the Macgyverring. I'm going to drive the wheels off and then put them back on everything.
I have to protect my bags in this war with my future self and to sell as little as I possibly have to.
I've already crossed a line, a red line that I was trying not to cross, and I'm like, I don't wanna get rid of everything that I had the opportunity to get in early on.
I don't wanna lose it all in five years just because I have no income and I'm doing this thing in the middle of nowhere.
I gotta be crafty and I gotta be resourceful, and I gotta mend things like sewing, sewing one devastated pair of underwear, one chunk at a time, onto the next devastated pair of underwear, and continue to hand me down patches on top of patches with my clothes.
Because I'm only gonna buy one replacement per year.
That's the modality I'm in. So back to the task at hand,I budgeted and designed a new platform build out. I wanted to see the breakdown of it and the cost of it and I was Just about to allocate a thousand dollars.
Which would have been a painful chunk but I realized I gotta rebalance into preps and if anything happens in that truck when I have to use it, at least the bare minimum, once a year, I've got to use it to get water and food. That'll last me a year.
That's the deal. There's no way around that. But if anything happens to it, and I gotta let it go when I'm out there, I can't come back here and have no way to escape from coyotes and red ants and scorpions.
I've got to have some kind of platform.
So, lo and behold, just when I was ready, well, I was psychologically preparing myself to slowly soften myself, to be able to be willing to make a bigger trade that was gonna hurt.
I had justified to myself okay, I can. I'll do this. I'm not gonna be happy about I'm not happy about buying lumber. I wanna do everything with bamboo. But do I wanna die?
Do I wanna die with paper wealth? Or do I wanna live having realized gains along the way, even if it's painful.
I would much rather get to the point where I can scavenge and salvage and up cycle and pick apart all the skeletons of this ghost town around me.
It's just a matter of one day eventually getting to know the locals, getting to know the politics, getting to know the who owns the parcels around me so that I can say to them, I'll sign a liability waiver for me to risk injury on your property with no right to sue.
I'll waive my right to sue. You give me permission. So if Johnny Law shows up, I can, I have your signature.
It says, I'm authorized to be here, and I will demolish this eyesore, make the property that you wanna sell that couldn't sell because it made people feel like they were in a ghost town, and they didn't like that aesthetic.
I'm gonna clean it up for you, and I'm gonna drag every splinter off so that I can build my platform and do it in a dignified Macgyver way, and not spend a thousand dollars and sell a bunch of my holdings.
I was able to, since the prices dipped, I was like, there is no way in hell, I'm going to make that trade.
What happened? Well, out of the corner of my eye, a little bit of subconscious and conscious thinking coalesced so that I discovered that there were ways to rearrange certain objects that I had already paid a lot of money for, that do not violate my principles, like galvanized stock tanks that provide a bit of lift.
And then there happens to be, I just recently freed up the availability of this old, rusted out, very sturdy, very robust, heavy duty metal bed frame.
And now I realized I can make a not totally comparable platform between those two and then all of the bits of panel of roof panels that have that are blown all over the place…
I have the tools that I paid for at a more abundant time in the market cycles, and I have those stock tanks that were a couple hundred bucks each, and they were not stacking any functions.
They were storing water for me. It was an experiment the way I did it, and they did well.
Now I'm confident in my strategy thus far, and I have that this old bed frame.
I've got everything I need to have a platform that approximates the function.
So rather than buying, I end up upcycling junk and building.
It's a spiritual war, and it’s life and death and the stakes are high.
I'm suffering not from bullet wounds and mines, but I'm tore up, and I'm bedridden.
I'm not a pencil pusher in this war with my future self. I'm in the field and I'm on the front line of it.
It's real. It's not theoretical. And I'm not in a cushy air conditioned office playing video games and projecting myself into an avatar of a video game character that's actually in the wild doing operations in the field.
I'm doing opera. I'm in the wild doing operations in the field exposed to the elements.
You gotta figure out how to live in balance with things that can kill you.
All kinds of things, living and non living things that can kill you.
So call it whatever you will. What I achieve today was that I did make that emergency trade.
It was a third of the size that I had sort of been psyching myself out for.
So I'm happy that I was able to basically save a thousand dollars and protect a decent chunk.
I've gotta lay low and cut all costs while the prices in the market are what they are, and only only if they ever do come back...
All that matters is that I have something left when the prices come back up.
I could have sold more at the top, but it would have violated my principles and training. I would have been dumping on new money, and I would have been even potentially betraying my own words and being a liar and being a con artist.
I wanna be financially moderate, and if I have to endure periods of extreme austerity, where I'm very impoverished...
I could have done the wrong thing morally and be laughing on the way to the bank, like a lot of people have done.
But I feel like I did the right thing.
And my soul is growing.
And the Macgyver psychology and archetype, that's where I wanna be. That's what I wanna be grounded in.
I wanna choose my battles. I wanna fight a good fight.
I want it to be more my success and my happiness and my so forth, to be based more on my personal development and cultivation.
That's accessible to anyone who can get a library card, anyone who can take a hike and stay fit, even without a gym membership.
Just keep it down to earth and simple and humble.
To me, that's where the real gifts are, and the real meaning of life is to be found as the people who get lost in avarice and debauchery, in decadence they lose the most, and the people who gain the most typically have the least capital to their names.
It distorts you. You get identity crisis. You keep trying to climb and get more and be more recognized.
But when there is a total absence of the potential of that where the real things, the things that matter most, which are not commercial, not commercialized, not monetized, if anything, some degree, lend themselves to bartering, what Bill Mollison said, which introduced me to a term of market gardening not farming.
I don't want much more than I need.
I just wanna feel secure, I wanna feel safe, I don't wanna be in a bubble, I wanna be exposed to the elements. I don't need a lot of money. I don't want a lot of money.
When I do have to buy things like the food I'm gonna buy and the tools I'm gonna replace, and whatever it is, I want that to be a very intelligent operation that gets more and more efficient over time as I learn more.
If I can go a year without buying anything, eventually I'll go two years, five years, ten years, and will all be based on intelligence of designing into the future, how to have what I need, but hopefully be able to hold onto this fierce integrity, to be using the materials that I feel are ethical and that I resonate with, moving away from plastics, moving away from tree farmed lumber mills and being a hundred percent regenerative and eventually never having to buy anything off site again, and only interacting with and subsisting on that which I co created with the land and the sun and the rain and the soil of the land.
And have at least one day before I die, I'll be able to say that this entire day of my life, I wore clothes that I grew the fibers for. I grew the plants and animals I made the meal out of.
I grew the medicines and intoxicants that I heal myself and enjoy myself with right here on this land.
It took a little bit of prosthesis, a little bit of scaffolding from the modern world, the industrial world, to get started.
I will have less regrets looking back from any point in the future to any point in the past.
I will have less regrets.
I'll have less regrets than doing it in a way where I feel like I'm selling out or I'm making excuses to back pedal on my stated values that I care so much about.
That's all I have, all you have is your integrity and it gets eroded every day in such frivolous ways out here under these conditions.
It's not rich people problems, but it's financially free before 40 and trying to stay financially free.