This is a update on a radical shift that has occurred and has been occurring over the last several months since I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse.
And it's in a sector of my life that I don't talk about much, if at all, in any detail on this platform, because for security and privacy reasons.
But it's part of my life that has contained some of the most important training in what I would consider, very down to earth, very practical guerrilla tactics of survival and of resistance and of organizing.
And so if the broad tent that I'm operating under for this purpose of being tactical, I like the idea that being tactical is universal and applicable to the left, the center, the right, religious zealots, atheists, rich people, poor people, whatever your fight is it it involves tactics and strategies.
And the idea of focusing on the tactical it's all about how you train.
What's your kit? What do you do as the tip of whatever spear you're operating in?
So to me, it's very general and lends itself to a lot of different sectors.
There's people who are tactical in sectors of life that they may not tell me about, and I'll be tactical in sectors of my life that you may not hear about.
But if we come together at the bar and have a beer and talk about being tactical, we don't have to share everything about what that means for us, how we go about it.
But we may look at each other's folding lives, or look at each other's vests or boots and talk shop.
In the spirit of that, I'm going to talk a bit about what I've been up to without hopefully revealing exactly what it is.
Because it may not be something that everybody who's into tactical things would be an alignment with.
And I will say, for political reasons, it is a very extremist psychological warfare activity.
So if we're at the Star Wars bar and we're talking about our trades, I would say, well, I've been a psychological eco warfare mercenary and I'm proud of it. And you may be at that Star Wars bar, and you may be listening to this, and you may go, oh, really, actually, I get paid to counteract your efforts and I'm on the other side.
Oh, well, you know what? Let's call time out and have a beer.
And maybe if we're smart about it, we'll actually do a little bit of counter intel and pick each other's brains for a little bit, get each other a little sauced, so we open up and with that truth serum.
So I'm definitely not drinking anything right now, so I'm not gonna hopefully divulge anything as I go about this.
But I will say there were a lot of applications in the real world, in real life, in real practice, for all the things that I talk about and study that came into play to keep me alive, to keep myself safe, and to accomplish a variety of missions, all of the associations that I have in that world, in that underground movement.
That underground movement aspires to a lot of degrees of self sufficiency and survivability and whatnot.
It was great to be of service and great to have a major shift, which, if you have listened to show at all, you would know that for about almost three and a half years, I lived alone in the baking desert in Southern California.
And did so with very little interaction and support from the outside.
Barely had what it took in a number of situations to barely survive.
But I made it alive through that time. It was a crucible and I had developed a psychology of not imagining that I would ever leave. I felt that I would be happy to die there I would wanna die there.
And I wanted to reject in my extremism, all of civilization and going back to it if I didn't have to, so as long as I could afford to keep myself alive out there and move along the continuum of bringing in water, bringing in food, to capturing and harvesting rain water, to growing my own food, that the idea would be, if I'm happy to stay here and never leave, then I will become ecologically self sufficient, hundred percent, or die trying.
And I got pretty close to dying trying. I got pretty good at survival.
But then I was pulled out, at least for a mission by this underground movement that I used to be more deeply involved with and I had kind of severed ties with quite a while ago.
The pandemic had something to do with that as well but doors were always left open and I was given an offer that I could not refuse, and that gave me the ability to over the course of a couple of weeks, to pack up my entire reality out there in the desert.
Pack it all into a very solid platform that I call my truckstead, folded everything up, packed everything up, barely was able to fit myself with everything, all the tools, all the food preps I had just resupplied for a year's worth of food, so I took it all with me.
I had just built a whole new solar array, and that's on the roof.
So within that couple of week period, I didn't mention on the show, because I didn't wanna talk about this mission until I got back from it.
So I just now got back from it. And now I'm gonna be doing a series where I talk about what it was like doing permaculture in the Pacific Northwest, which is where I grew up, but was not trained in permaculture there.
And so this was really my first rodeo with applying myself as a delegate of permaculture to the Northwest bio region.
So I'm gonna do piecemeal talking about different aspects of what I learned and what I applied, and how the strategies and tactics of permaculture adapt and evolve and shift based on the soil type, the climate type, the landforms, all the things that you learn in the designers manual and the designer course.
These different areas, the rainforest tropics, there's different ecologists have different words that they'll use, but generally dry land, meaning arid regions, deserts.
So places very dry that have very little rainfall. Certain landforms, certain soil typically sand, certain profiles of pests and predators and disease and native vegetation, all that stuff.
So just like the military, carves up the planet into different ecological bio regions so that they can train service people and acclimatize them to what they're gonna experience.
They've got to be training constantly in the desert if they're gonna go fight in a desert.
If they're gonna fight in or on the water, train on water, they gotta train for the jungle, they gotta train for the mountains, etc.
So permaculture is very much the same way. You might take the course and read the manual and be, oh, I'm never gonna have to think about where I build piles of snow so that as it starts to melt, it begins to irrigate ahead of the growing season so you can grow more crops.
You may not think you're gonna do snow, permaculture, or, arctic permaculture, but maybe you will someday.
And for me, that's the name of the game. I wanna have experience in every one of these types of fields.
Most of my permaculture training and experience has been Southern California, which is a little bit of a hybrid.
It's somewhat deserty, but it's also coastal, so it gets enough moisture that there's trees, and you can build soil.
It does require more irrigation and maintenance than places like the Northwest, but now it's interesting because I have what I call this coastal desert experience.
I've been in the mountains. I've been on the lowlands here in Southern California doing permaculture in different environments.
I just spent three years out of in the desert doing extreme desert permaculture.
And then I just got to do four months up in the Pacific Northwest, and I learned a lot from that.
So I'm excited to be sharing these lessons, and I'm going to break them up into smaller pieces.
If you've listened to some of them, if you listen to the last several months of episodes that I've been doing, and you're wondering, why is he not panting? Why is he not suffering and sounding completely destroyed and devastated and immobilized like he had for the last three summers doing this show.
Well, it's because I did not cheat and go and hang out in an air condition location or whatever.
No, I actually did pack up my site, square, everything away there, relocate and get to work in the Northwest.
And now that project site in the desert is really what it’s ultimately destined to be, which is a dedicated bug out location that is, doesn't have valuables left there, and doesn't have livestock or crops that would need a lot of maintenance to keep alive.
I did intend to stay there forever. But the fact that I got pulled back out into a form of duty and service, I had to face my fears have COVID.
And apparently, after all of the exposures that I had during that time, I did not get anything, but a couple days of sniffles.
And so for all I know, I've had covid a million times and never felt it, or I've never had it, but either way, COVID never took me off of my feet.
And I definitely have been exposed in the last few months, million times more than I ever had since the beginning of pandemic.
So I'm not afraid of it now. I'm not hiding from it. I'm willing to accept that the new social contract, the price of admission to society is that you don't live in fear of COVID, and you don't live in guilt about the potential of spreading it unknowingly.
That’s no longer something that I have to be highly ethical about, concerned about as I was for a long time, just myself I would be able to say I'm not immuno-compromised. I feel like I could take it if I get it but my issue was I don't wanna be responsible for spreading it unknowingly.
Exposure is the price of admission to society, and if you're out partying, if you're out of the bar, if you're out in public, then you signed up for that risk at this point until there's another state of emergency.
And then we may revisit that, point being, I'm on my feet, I'm on my wheels. I'm not stuck out in the desert on a mission to die.
I'm freed up to be in service and to be mobile again for the first time in several years, where I did have quite a serious arc of wealth, the best and biggest ever in my life.
A lot of that got consumed by the project that I was doing, but in the aftermath of the shifting financial markets and the fact that I had wealth and I did make use of it, it wasn't just paper gains that evaporated when the market shifted.
But the aftermath leaves me with a very respectable, nice handful of acres in the desert that is a turnkey permaculture survival site that allows me to retreat there as needed and recreate there as needed and continue to develop things there as needed and as desired.
But now I get to have the best of both worlds.
I'm financially free enough not to be desperate for work, so I can take work as I like it as I want it for the right reasons for the right people, mainly because I like the people and I like the work and the money is a bonus.
At this point, I'm not desperate for it. I could get desperate for it, but at least at this moment, I'm accepting tasks and jobs and projects and missions that really speak to me and help me learn, help me evolve, and give me opportunities that I would like to have.
That's a good place to be in. I'm proud of myself at this age.
I say that I became financially free before 40, and now in my forties, I don't have as much money as I did at the peak of that cycle of wealth but I set myself up for a much more comfortable safe secure financial future if I continue to act wisely and continue to hold on to some of my investable wealth.
And therefore be even more enthusiastic about going back to work on my own terms, in my own way.
Because now I'm not just working to pay the man. I'm not working just to pay bills.
I'm working to preserve a nest egg of investable wealth and some assets that I did invest in that have held their value, if not increased in their value.
So it wasn't the best of trades. It wasn't the worst of trades.
But now what's interesting in terms of the show, is that it's not just, oh, some dude stuck out in the desert doing permaculture and almost dying in the process for three years, and then pontificating about all things tactical and philosophical.
Now I'm gonna go over my experience in the Northwest, and that'll be retroactive, catching up on it, but in real time.
And the present, I'm back in LA, and I am doing the urban perma culture, commando lifestyle again, which I have done for many, many years, which gave me the ability to be wise with investing.
I will get into the details of that but basically just think about the hash tag van life and think of that.
If you were a Van Life person, but you're a certified permaculture designer, and you do what I call trucksteading, then you get to have this hybrid experience of, okay, van life meaning, your frugal meaning, you’re nomadic meaning, you figure out where it's safe to sleep and do legal vehicle dwelling.
And you have this mobility platform that you make your living work of art, that you live in a work of art on wheels.
If that's a few kind words about van life, then the hybridization of that with truck life is that I can reorganize my truck bed so that I can use it for work, for jobs.
I can pull a trailer, I can haul stuff. I've got a powerful truck, so I can do a lot more than I did before when I had less powerful trucks, or even was doing this in a car.
Another way to look at that is that I've scaled up in the power, the engine power and the size of my truckstead dwelling now.
The other day as I was driving back down the I-5, I always think about how this interesting niche exists for tractor trailer truck drivers, the truckers that drive semi trucks.
Because, whereas everyone else is subject to the laws of vehicle dwelling, where, essentially I just reread the laws today for LA, and the way that they define the criteria to be considered dwelling in a vehicle, like they will look at the facts and circumstances to determine, do you just have a picnic basket in your car and you were en route to a picnic to happen at a park in a legal manner?
Or are you living in your vehicle and you eat lunch in there every day, and that's why you have food in your car, and the judgment of that police officer is gonna be whether you get a ticket or not, or whether you get run out of town or not.
So it's a very interesting sub culture of people who do vehicle dwelling and what you have to do in order to bounce between, whether it's the national forest or campgrounds or rest stops or industrial zones or the beach, you gotta do a lot of hoop jumping to do vehicle dwelling in a lot of jurisdictions.
And what was interesting, I always notice how the truckers, they have this sort of niche where they can get away with sleeping in a vehicle.
And it's understood, and it's not demonized or criminalized or frowned upon, because all of our merchandise is trucked, most of it at some point.
So there's this sort of, forgiveness, this grace that's given, this pass that's given to truckers.
And then you notice some of them don't have any kind of RV setup behind the seat that they're sitting in the back wall of the semi truck, the front of it, or the cab.
It's just the backseat. The seat back is the back wall, basically.
So every time they gotta use the restroom or eat or do anything, they've got to pull over and go to a truck stop, or whatever.
And then you see the ones that have a little bit of a cab, and then you see ones that have a little bit of an extended cabin.
There's a little window at the top. Oh, they have a little bunk in there, they probably have some form of a latrine setup, and they are able to be more self sufficient in that regard.
However, it's not really a comfortable, full size RV which to me it never made that much sense. If you're gonna be driving a semi all the time why don't you have your own shower?
You have this very long load, I don't see how they don't make a hybrid of those.
And I have seen that they are doing that at a bigger scale.
I saw a semi truck that had a very luxurious extend very long extended, semi cab and I'm like that's the way to it, good for you I was stoked for them.
So for me my little upgrade from going from a tiny truck to a bigger truck, it's not that luxurious, but it is a real game changer.
So I can do a lot more heavy duty work. I can feel a lot safer. And I'm excited to be back in this urban mode, even though I swore against it and I swore off it, and I said, never again, never going back.
The fact is, there are a lot of new developments in my life that give me the freedom to say, I gotta do what I gotta do now, not because I think it's wiser, because I'm using my ego to make these decisions.
I've got some higher callings that are pushing me back into the workforce a little bit, pushing me back into the city.
Now I get to do it with some new gear, some new equipment, a better mobility platform, a better narrative, and then I have this platform to make videos and to talk about my experiences.
So there's gonna be this recap and retroactive series on what I've done in the Northwest.
That's gonna be a number of shows coming up. And then interspersed with that and ongoing it's gonna be back to urban mode, which I only talked about as being in the past.
I only talked about the old stories. But now there's gonna be a lot of news stories.
There will be a whole new set of experiences of me and antics and heroics and close calls and all kinds of stuff.
And I'm excited for this, this new round. There's gonna be some interesting actions taking place in a number of arenas, and I've already got a whole list of things planned out.