RPF0299-Jack_Spirko

00:00:00.000 | We're gonna play a little bit of a word association game right now. I'm gonna say a word you think of the response. I

00:00:05.240 | say

00:00:07.000 | survivalist you say

00:00:09.000 | Your answer to that question will reveal a lot about

00:00:14.120 | The way that you think and what you think the word and the term survival or survival list and survivalism. These are not

00:00:22.160 | popular terms today or are they

00:00:26.880 | After all turn on the TV or look at a newsstand and basically everywhere you see a survival show

00:00:33.120 | Well today we're gonna talk with one of the leaders in the modern-day survival movement a man named Jack Spirico

00:00:38.280 | He's founder of the survival podcast and most importantly

00:00:41.400 | He's one of the more sane and rational people that you'll hear talk about the topic of survivalism

00:00:47.280 | And today here's he he is here to teach you how to live a better life if times get tough or even if they don't

00:00:55.240 | (Music)

00:01:11.240 | Welcome to the radical personal finance podcast. My name is Joshua sheets, and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today

00:01:16.640 | This is the show where each and every day we talk about how to live a rich life now and also how you can build a

00:01:23.280 | plan for financial freedom in ten years or less pay attention to the latter part of that actually both parts of that because

00:01:30.960 | Yet again, I'm bringing a guest on who lives a rich life and who has become financially free in less than ten years

00:01:38.680 | My guest is a man named Jack Spirico founder of the survival podcast one of the longest-running and most popular as far as I know

00:01:50.080 | by far the most popular

00:01:52.080 | Podcast on survivalism

00:01:54.000 | He has about a hundred and fifty thousand people a day that tune in for him to talk about

00:01:58.760 | Concepts of modern survival and again how to live a better life if times get tough or even if they don't I've been a long

00:02:04.720 | Time fan of Jack's podcast

00:02:06.520 | I've had a long time interest in the topic of survival even as you'll hear

00:02:10.400 | Me mention in the beginning of the interview today

00:02:12.600 | And I've always just enjoyed Jack's content because he is a creative thinker who applies things in a careful and rational way

00:02:20.760 | He talks about tax planning within the context of planting a tree

00:02:24.040 | which I think is brilliant and as a tax planner and someone who talks day and there thinks a lot about how to

00:02:29.840 | Eliminate taxes. I always find that type of refresh

00:02:32.800 | Thinking refreshing so you're in for a treat. We try to cover a bunch of topics first in today's interview

00:02:39.240 | We cover a little bit of Jack's backstory with his business

00:02:41.960 | then we move into the topic of permaculture and lifestyle design as

00:02:46.360 | Seen through the lens of survivalism, and I hope you enjoy there's many many many important takeaways in today's interview before I play the interview

00:02:54.600 | Sponsor of the day today is trade King trade King is the official brokerage supplier of radical personal finance supplier provider

00:03:00.960 | Sponsor of radical personal finance trade King is absolutely awesome

00:03:05.000 | They have four dollar ninety five cent stock trades

00:03:07.440 | Which if you go and check the fees on your mutual funds and and then go and ask yourself

00:03:12.060 | How much am I actually paying for these things?

00:03:13.980 | Sometimes somebody should actually pull into that account instead of just automatically suggesting index funds somebody should just consider

00:03:20.000 | What if I just bought some stocks and paid a trading fee and that was basically it?

00:03:24.380 | Well trade King is a great place to get a great deal four dollar ninety five cent stock trades

00:03:29.400 | You can do options trades. You can do all kinds of stuff there and most importantly they actually care about you

00:03:34.160 | There's lots of cheap providers trade King is one of the least expensive

00:03:37.840 | Providers trading platforms out there, but they care more than most other people small relatively smaller company

00:03:43.840 | Not in the big five, but still plenty big enough to handle your trading needs and hey if something goes wrong

00:03:48.300 | I can connect with them

00:03:50.060 | They're right here in Fort Lauderdale and I can go down and knock on the door and say listen up

00:03:53.740 | I'm here to make sure you take care of my customers trade King comm slash radical get a hundred dollar bonus into your account

00:04:00.000 | Hundred dollar bonus into your account. That could be a nice little hey

00:04:03.060 | There's a 10% rate of return if you fund it with a thousand bucks and get a hundred dollar automatic bonus trade King comm

00:04:07.720 | Slash radical hundred dollar bonus sponsor of the day. Number two is YNAB. You need a budget YNAB

00:04:13.920 | It's the worst name ever

00:04:15.760 | Except you'll remember it

00:04:17.360 | But the best budgeting software bar none YNAB solves all of the problems of traditional budgeting

00:04:23.880 | By forcing you to do a proactive budget with money that you actually have

00:04:28.380 | I've used just about every single budgeting software system out there

00:04:32.380 | I still continue to play with things that I find and just always trying new things. I always enjoy adjusting things

00:04:37.640 | But I have never found something better than YNAB and it's the way that each and every day

00:04:41.960 | I pull open I pull open YNAB pull up my bank reconcile my transactions check my budget. That's how I do it

00:04:47.900 | I suggest you do it to sign up for a free 30-day trial at radical personal finance comm slash YNAB

00:04:54.100 | radical personal finance comm slash

00:04:56.480 | YNAB free 30-day trial full featured version of the software check it out

00:05:01.520 | And now let's get to the interview with Jack Spirico

00:05:06.560 | Jack welcome to radical personal finance

00:05:09.300 | Hey, man, glad to be here with you today. It's an honor to get to talk to you

00:05:13.640 | Thought I'd first just want to acknowledge to you. Thank you for putting out the show that you do

00:05:18.580 | I've mentioned on my show before but I'll tell you right here at the start of the interview that

00:05:23.280 | Probably the survival podcast has influenced the way I designed radical personal finance probably more than any other show

00:05:31.280 | Out there that I listened to and I owe you a debt of gratitude for your work in that regard. So, thank you

00:05:35.980 | Hey, man, that's why I do what I do

00:05:38.640 | Whatever I can do to help people to get their own thing going is the it's really the biggest motivating factor

00:05:44.160 | I have in my life. Awesome

00:05:45.580 | So I'd like to start briefly with a little bit of the backstory because on radical personal finance

00:05:50.460 | we talk a lot about entrepreneurship and love for you to tell the business story of

00:05:54.720 | How you came to start a podcast and treat it as a business and then we'll get to the main topic of our interview

00:06:01.660 | Sure. Well, I mean I was living the American dream, which means I was on my way to a heart attack by 50 at the latest

00:06:07.380 | probably

00:06:08.580 | I had kind of built a career from nothing. I never went to college or anything like that

00:06:14.340 | But through a combination of luck and hard work. I had managed to move into a sales position in my early 20s. I

00:06:22.460 | Broke that six-figure barrier by the time I was 26

00:06:26.620 | once I did that no one really cared about a degree so I'd become successful in a

00:06:30.580 | In the sales world moved into a VP of sales position for a very large company called fluke

00:06:36.380 | which many of your folks out there probably would have heard of us a Northeast regional VP of sales for fluke fluke networks and

00:06:42.460 | But that wore me out on the travel

00:06:45.980 | so eventually my family and I decided we had moved to Pennsylvania for this to go back to Texas where my family was from and

00:06:53.820 | We came back down here and I took a position in a marketing position for a fraction of what I

00:06:59.180 | Had been making

00:07:01.700 | previously, but it was a way to no longer travel and

00:07:07.220 | Kind of that led through another progression to where I ended up starting my own marketing company

00:07:12.220 | So I went from being basically the the son of a coal miner

00:07:17.140 | making minimum wage straight out of the army to eventually

00:07:21.700 | rising up through various sales positions in telecommunications

00:07:25.680 | breaking that six-figure barrier at about 26 and

00:07:29.620 | ended up is the regional vice president of sales in the Northeast region of a company called fluke networks and

00:07:35.180 | there a division of the company that most people know of is just fluke that if you see the electricians with the

00:07:41.200 | Yellow multimeters that's that's fluke. So that gives you an idea the size of the company

00:07:45.580 | It's a 500 million dollar company and I was there their top salesperson in the in the world as the Northeast regional sales

00:07:52.860 | VP and I

00:07:55.140 | Hated parts of that job though. I hated sitting down to lunches and dinners with people that I really

00:08:02.100 | Wouldn't walk across the street for if I didn't have to and I hated the travel

00:08:06.680 | You know 9/11 I was in Pittsburgh. My family was in Eastern, Pennsylvania. I couldn't get home to him

00:08:13.900 | I'm listening to my wife cry on the phone. My kids scared

00:08:16.100 | He's asking me if a war can come here things like that and I'm not home

00:08:19.360 | So I held on for their couple years after 9/11 and eventually we decided to come back to Texas when we came back to, Texas

00:08:25.740 | I I

00:08:28.620 | Didn't want to be in this kind of gig anymore work because the money in sales is in travel

00:08:34.140 | So I switched from sales to marketing and I had gotten very good at internet marketing

00:08:38.980 | During the the the tech bubble burst of the early 2000s

00:08:43.180 | I had taken up using internet marketing to get leads for my own salespeople to put people into

00:08:47.540 | Seats at seminars and things like that and I had started selling things like long-distance service and things like that

00:08:53.540 | So I'd gotten really good at internet marketing

00:08:56.420 | Especially back in those days if you knew what you were doing you you could drive a hole through the search engines and their algorithms

00:09:01.980 | so I went to work for a search engine marketing firm and ended up as their director of search marketing and

00:09:08.740 | It was okay, but it paid a fraction of what I had made before

00:09:11.940 | I took a step back to go forward ended up with a company called sage telecom as their as their director of internet marketing

00:09:19.100 | And they were acquired by another company. So I was like, I'm so sick of this and I had a friend

00:09:23.660 | Named Neil Franklin who had said, you know, I want to do something with you. So we founded a marketing firm together

00:09:29.820 | Called Franklin Spirko

00:09:31.860 | We even at one time had Donald Trump as one of our clients kind of ironic that the guys were president now

00:09:35.900 | I wouldn't vote for him if you put a gun to my head

00:09:38.500 | But I was pretty proud of that at the time

00:09:40.980 | But but in the end I had just got to the point where I was I was over 300 pounds

00:09:45.060 | I was I was still dealing, you know with all the climate at client entertainment stuff. I was miserable. I was unhappy

00:09:50.060 | We've got this client that said I want to do a blog and a podcast and all this other stuff

00:09:53.580 | So I'm like, okay cool

00:09:55.180 | So I put the bid in for it and we won the job and I take it to my lead developer and I said hey Bobby

00:10:00.460 | I want you to to build this all out

00:10:02.460 | He says I can do all this stuff

00:10:03.620 | But I don't know anything about podcasts and RSS feeds and stuff like that and I'm like, well, I'll figure that out

00:10:08.660 | So I took this $18 Plantronics headset that had tape on it. So it would work

00:10:13.540 | And a $30 mp3 player because I didn't care right?

00:10:17.300 | It was just like I gotta figure out how this works and I plugged it in

00:10:20.180 | I did episode one of the survival podcast that was in June of 2008 and because of my relationship with Neil

00:10:26.140 | I had a lot of insight to the financial industry that people with a standard consumer level financial advisor

00:10:31.940 | don't I think there was a pretty big telegraph punch coming with that recession, but I

00:10:35.860 | really knew like a lot of times I say things financially like I

00:10:39.220 | Think I'm pretty sure

00:10:41.780 | My estimation is in 2008

00:10:44.060 | All I was doing was going get out of the market get out of the market get out

00:10:47.820 | There's a truck coming get out of the market and I started that show and that was like one of my first main themes was

00:10:54.100 | Was you know financial preparedness and I went into all different walks of preparedness

00:10:58.620 | We talked a lot about things like doing drills to understand how weak you really were and stuff like that

00:11:02.940 | And in the first six months, we're going from June to December of that first year. I got about

00:11:07.300 | 2,500 listeners and at that point I was like

00:11:10.620 | You know what? I can make this my walk away from the world. I hate business

00:11:17.140 | a year later at 18 months was when I first monetized the show and

00:11:22.500 | we brought in like

00:11:26.340 | $10,000 in the first week that I monetized the show some and my wife was excited and she's like you're gonna do it

00:11:32.660 | You're gonna be able to quit your job like next week and I'm like, no

00:11:35.540 | No, cuz that's not gonna you know, we got a we got to build this now and

00:11:39.300 | I built it for another year in a year and a half. I did I walked away

00:11:43.940 | Completely walked away sold out my interest in the other companies to my partners

00:11:48.340 | Who thought I was just bat shit crazy, by the way, like how are you gonna make a living at podcasting?

00:11:52.980 | well, I'm already doing it so I think I'll just keep doing that and

00:11:56.020 | The show kind of took off from there and we we went from you know

00:11:59.740 | 2,500 listeners at the end of that first, you know half year and we were like

00:12:04.040 | 2025,000 the end of that next year and today we have a hundred fifty thousand people a day downloading the show and

00:12:09.940 | if you put that in perspective the

00:12:12.540 | The the city of Allentown has about you know in its whole metro area has about a hundred thousand people

00:12:19.060 | so we're one and a half times the size of Allentown, Pennsylvania just in an online radio show and

00:12:25.660 | We've gone into just every facet and walk of life in preparedness and self-sufficiency

00:12:30.500 | Independence and Liberty, I mean that's that's what the show is really all about and though it's called a survival podcast

00:12:37.460 | And we do talk about preparedness. We talk about bug out bags. We talk about you know

00:12:41.980 | prepared for being prepared for anything from a financial collapse to a storm, but we

00:12:48.260 | It's really more of a variety show if it has to do with taking control of your own life taking control of your own money

00:12:55.300 | Being prepared to do without systems of support

00:12:57.420 | providing your own food taking care of your community we talk about it and I

00:13:02.100 | Think it really is the first thing like it that was ever created

00:13:06.860 | I wish I could say, you know that I sat down

00:13:09.220 | Josh and said I'm gonna make this show that I'm gonna start with this survival hook and financial hook and I'm gonna turn it into

00:13:15.820 | This giant variety show on Liberty and Independence and that was the plan all along

00:13:19.820 | I was flying by the seat of my pants in the beginning

00:13:22.560 | but I had a work ethic that I didn't know how to let go of being the son of a coal miner and

00:13:27.020 | During those first year and a half when I still had you understand I didn't just have a company I owned I was serving as

00:13:35.060 | a chief operational officer

00:13:37.060 | For one of Neal's other companies and a chief marketing officer for another company

00:13:43.140 | So I had three companies that I was I was sitting at sea level positions in at the same time

00:13:47.980 | I didn't exactly have a lot of free time

00:13:50.060 | But I would get up at three o'clock in the morning when my wife was still asleep

00:13:52.540 | I would go down to my home office and I would set up my show for the day. I would record it in my car

00:13:57.520 | I would get to the office. I'd lock my door. So everybody leave me alone for ten minutes

00:14:01.180 | I would upload it and I'd walk away from it and I would answer questions when I got home that evening and

00:14:05.260 | That's what it took. But after a year and a half of doing that I decided

00:14:09.840 | What could I do if I actually dedicated my life to this and that's how it became the success that it is

00:14:14.820 | It's an awesome story and it just shows how

00:14:19.580 | Sometimes just simply by being out there and being active you can really find new opportunities and and life is not I don't know

00:14:26.980 | But I mean none of my life has really been all that perfectly planned

00:14:30.620 | It's just been a matter of a lot of action and a lot of hustle and then all of a sudden you start to connect

00:14:35.180 | the dots and in in reverse

00:14:37.180 | when you look at

00:14:40.300 | survivalism

00:14:42.180 | As a topic the thing that makes you different because I grew up with an interest in you know

00:14:47.820 | I would read the SAS survival handbook when I was a kid

00:14:50.100 | I remember that was one of the first books that that I would that was the first type of book that I would buy

00:14:54.160 | When I was a kid and I always grew it up. I'd read these Ragnar Benson like weird fringe

00:14:59.860 | survivalist books, but a lot of that stuff doesn't apply over to

00:15:04.640 | to

00:15:06.380 | Real life and when you're looking at the world of survivalism

00:15:10.420 | There are so many kind of hardcore fringe kooks where it's just I guess kooks is not very nice

00:15:17.580 | There's some people that don't seem to be connected to the reality that I see and one thing I've appreciated about you

00:15:23.220 | Is that you seem to be firmly anchored in reality while also?

00:15:27.500 | Aware of the fact that reality is changing over time

00:15:31.860 | Where did you find your perspective or how did you develop your perspective with regard to your survivalism philosophy?

00:15:39.260 | Well when I started the show

00:15:44.260 | Part of it was just being genuine who I am

00:15:47.340 | And the other part of it was I was a marketer and I knew the preparedness industry

00:15:53.460 | Was about to explode I knew there were a lot of things going on that were concerning people

00:15:58.620 | I knew that the recession I saw coming was gonna create opportunity there

00:16:02.500 | It got actually bigger than I expected with stupid shows like doomsday preppers and all these other horribly

00:16:07.540 | Stupid non-reality TV shows and that helped so I wanted to be able to be in that niche

00:16:13.940 | But I think it's important that people need to understand that you can have an astute understanding of marketing and an astute

00:16:21.780 | understanding of being in the right niche and

00:16:23.940 | Still be true to who you are and if you can do the two together you have a recipe for success

00:16:29.340 | So I chose the angle of what we were gonna do based on that

00:16:34.540 | So as much as I was flying by the seat of my pants

00:16:36.500 | It was also this intrinsic

00:16:38.060 | You know when you do sales and marketing work for 20 years for large companies you get a little bit good at it

00:16:44.540 | So there was a little bit of a foreknowledge

00:16:46.540 | In positioning there now the other thing that I wanted to do is I didn't want to compete

00:16:52.900 | With you know the preparedness board at Backwoods home magazine, though. You know I love their magazine

00:16:58.740 | I'm just saying I didn't want to I didn't want to go out and I and try to capture a piece of a defined market

00:17:04.380 | I actually wanted to create a market

00:17:07.020 | And I thought the best way to do that was to make preparedness

00:17:10.380 | Something that people would go well gee I kind of have to be stupid and irresponsible not to do this

00:17:16.620 | So I came up with what I called modern survivalism and that word in

00:17:21.340 | Phrases everywhere now, and I can't prove that I was the first person to ever use it in any kind of a real thing

00:17:27.900 | But when I decided on it what I did is I went to Google, and I put you know

00:17:32.380 | quote

00:17:34.460 | Modern survivalism end quote so you get an exact math search on Google. I came up with zero results at the time so I was like

00:17:42.380 | Okay, that's what I'm gonna anchor down on and then I decided well

00:17:44.700 | I'm gonna define what that is so then I went totally radical and said to myself

00:17:49.380 | Okay, now you should come up with a tagline to go with the survival podcast. It's the worst tagline in the world

00:17:55.060 | Because it'll be clunky and long and ridiculous, but it'll actually be wonderful because it'll it'll make people go

00:18:03.180 | Gee how would I say no to that so what I came up with was?

00:18:06.100 | Helping you live a better life if times get tough or even if they don't

00:18:11.500 | now

00:18:13.620 | You do have to have a little bit soft point in the skull to say well

00:18:18.180 | I don't want that I mean just just think about that judge right hey

00:18:21.220 | I'm gonna give you a way to live a better life if times get really bad and even if they don't

00:18:26.940 | You'll still be better off. I'm not interested. Okay. I think you need to have a doctor check you out or something

00:18:32.980 | So that was the strapline and then I built this 12-point modern survival philosophy off of that and the first ten of that that guided

00:18:39.660 | Everything was every single thing that you do to prepare for disasters and emergencies in the future

00:18:45.420 | Should improve the quality and stability of your life even if nothing goes wrong

00:18:50.100 | So it was the first tenant was a restatement of the strapline

00:18:53.540 | And I can tell you there were tons of people that came into what we were doing with a little bit of trepidation

00:18:59.060 | And when they heard that it was over they were like okay

00:19:03.540 | This is something I can get behind and because of that they were able to share it with other people

00:19:09.100 | without being

00:19:10.620 | accused of looking for black helicopters flying around in their underpants or hiding a hole in the ground or something like that because it made a

00:19:16.900 | very soft way so

00:19:18.900 | Once I had that tenant down

00:19:21.660 | All I did was just look at the average American and go why do so many people?

00:19:28.100 | Every time something is a hiccup in life get their ass completely kicked

00:19:32.300 | and I walked through it and what it came out to be is you know you mentioned Ragnar and stuff like that and how a

00:19:38.140 | Lot of the things in the the wilderness survival don't translate

00:19:41.420 | They actually translate perfectly if you look at them with the right viewpoint so if I was going to teach a class on

00:19:48.580 | Basic wilderness survival I'm going to talk about your five primary survival needs food water

00:19:56.860 | Fire is what they'll call it

00:19:58.860 | shelter and security and

00:20:01.260 | Because wilderness survival is a short-term thing

00:20:04.980 | The last one gets left out health and sanitation

00:20:07.780 | Well when I looked at the average American

00:20:11.340 | I realized that

00:20:12.740 | Those six things were always the places they got knocked down even when something happened that you didn't think of as being you know a

00:20:19.200 | Cataclysm something that you would hear about on Tuesday preppers if somebody if somebody lost a job

00:20:24.660 | And they weren't prepared to lose a job well

00:20:26.740 | You start worrying about the grocery bills and whether or not you can keep a house where there's food and shelter right there

00:20:33.140 | And then of course you know health and sanitation you no one can afford Cobra right?

00:20:38.460 | So if you started going down that list eventually you realize they were all common and the one thing that was a little bit different

00:20:44.540 | Was money doesn't do you any good in the woods?

00:20:47.660 | Right unless you happen along to find some kind of trading post or something like that

00:20:52.460 | Money's useless in the woods. Maybe you could burn and keep warm for five seconds

00:20:55.900 | But in in the actual functioning economy the functioning world that we all live in money bought all those things

00:21:03.540 | But then I started looking at how people buy those things we buy them all

00:21:07.820 | 100% a la carte and what I mean by that is we pay our electric bill every month we pay our food bill every month and

00:21:15.380 | We sell them by more than we need while it's more affordable

00:21:19.580 | We sell them think about what if I wasn't able to buy it and and these radical ideas these radical preparedness ideas

00:21:26.740 | Really weren't that radical one of the tenants

00:21:29.060 | I used to explain this in the in the formative years was

00:21:32.700 | Look at all the airlines that were in distress back then and I would say you know the one airline is still making money

00:21:38.420 | Southwest Airlines, do you know why they buy their fuel in mass contracts when fuel prices plummet?

00:21:45.380 | So when the fuel prices spiked and all the other airlines went nuts and then uses an excuse to charge charges for bags and everything

00:21:52.020 | Southwest went Nick don't care bought our fuel last year

00:21:54.700 | This is a way of creating a cap on capital expenditures

00:22:00.380 | and taking an unknown into a fixed known and that we could emulate these same things in our lives by

00:22:06.480 | Buying more food than we needed when it was on a lower cost when it was on sale when we had a coupon

00:22:12.460 | Simple things like that and then understanding so now I have a stockpile now the convenience

00:22:16.780 | So I never have to go over to my neighbors and go. Hey, man

00:22:19.620 | Can I borrow a cup of sugar or something like that?

00:22:22.180 | Right, we have basically our own little mini store in our preparedness here in our home

00:22:27.780 | So it's a convenience, but it doesn't cost us any more money. Generally speaking. What direction does the cost of food go over time?

00:22:36.860 | Generally up so if I buy more now and use it later rate their inflation alone and until we move into a deflationary curve

00:22:43.580 | Which I think we're still quite a ways away from

00:22:45.580 | That that that that game works every single time. So these it wasn't just like this one idea

00:22:53.580 | It was all of these little pieces and parts that were assembled together to build

00:22:58.100 | Resiliency into our lives in a way that when you explained it to somebody they'd go. Oh

00:23:03.660 | Well, of course that makes perfect sense and you can imagine my chagrin when they had like the I can't remember what it's called now

00:23:09.560 | But like the coupon reality show come out and like all the things we were talking about

00:23:14.660 | There by the way, those shows are just BS like you can't do it at the level they do it

00:23:20.220 | But the basic tenants of what they're talking about stacking things

00:23:23.540 | Buying more when they're looking for a sale and matching a coupon up to it and I I'll be honest

00:23:29.280 | I can't say that I spent a lot of time clipping coupons

00:23:31.720 | It's not the best use of my time

00:23:33.440 | But when we go into a store and we see something that has a long shelf life

00:23:37.040 | That we use anyway, and it's on sale

00:23:39.840 | We buy the hell out of it and we just put it into our storage in our pantry and you know

00:23:44.680 | Silvers at like 16 bucks. It was kind of creeping way way down

00:23:48.040 | We may be looking for a major drop in commodity prices beyond what we've already seen

00:23:53.280 | Put somebody emailed me the other day and said given you were saying to buy silver when it was $25

00:23:57.880 | If it if it goes to $7, what will you do then? I said I might be on the roof dancing naked happy

00:24:02.760 | Because I'll be I hope he'll be loading up on some silver at seven bucks

00:24:07.360 | And you just change your whole paradigm about the way you look at things

00:24:11.400 | If you're living like so you actually have to do you have to kind of live like

00:24:15.720 | We're in a deflationary economy, even though we're not

00:24:18.880 | So if you were in an inflationary economy debt makes sense

00:24:23.240 | But you have to stay away from debt because sooner or later debt will burn you if you're in a deflationary economy

00:24:29.380 | It makes sense to save because if you say versus risk

00:24:32.480 | The strength of the currency is is retained

00:24:35.720 | But what you figure out is if I start figuring out ways to create more and more inflows of currency

00:24:40.440 | It doesn't make sense to put it at risk

00:24:42.640 | What it makes us to do is spend the energy instead of figuring out which is my next financial play

00:24:46.400 | To actually go out and say how can I generate more income? What can I do online? What can I do with my existing business?

00:24:52.600 | How can I expand the value of what I have? How can I create wealth that the government can't tax?

00:24:58.040 | That sounds crazy, right?

00:25:00.040 | But I've put in over 400 fruit trees on my property the value of that 10 years from now it is

00:25:06.720 | incredible compared to the cost but how does a government tax an orange tree or

00:25:12.200 | Tax a pecan tree or tax, you know an edible dogwood that they don't even understand that such a thing exists

00:25:19.440 | There's no way to do that

00:25:20.640 | There's no way that my property

00:25:22.640 | Actually gets accurately assessed in the future until the day that I decide to sell it and actually send a professional in

00:25:29.080 | To assess it that way a county tax assessor can't get their arms around the way

00:25:32.960 | I've improved my property all of these things have cumulated together to be you know

00:25:37.380 | You're asking me try to condense the whole philosophy. That's been almost 1800 episodes now down into a few minutes

00:25:43.000 | So hopefully that help I know it's kind of long but that's kind of where we're coming from

00:25:46.600 | I think it's it's valuable and one of the things that I've learned is that when you face a problem

00:25:50.760 | Sometimes facing the problem direct head-on is a good way to approach it

00:25:55.240 | But a lot of times you just need to look a little bit left and look a little bit right and come at it from a

00:25:59.160 | lateral perspective and so all of the principles that you just talked about I think are

00:26:03.720 | Are the key they they

00:26:08.040 | Involve creativity they involve you looking and saying how can I provide for my actual needs in a way?

00:26:15.200 | That's creatively appropriate to my situation

00:26:17.800 | I want to ask you about the starting place and then want to move to permaculture as a financial plan

00:26:23.960 | Pretend for a moment that I am an average median income 30 year old

00:26:29.600 | Father of a family. I've got two kids, you know, I've got two young kids and I'm looking around and saying hey

00:26:36.640 | I'm concerned about the economy because I got lots of questions like this

00:26:40.960 | Economic doom and gloom is a common theme if you were giving me a roadmap

00:26:45.840 | How would you tell me to approach starting to make a plan for my own family's security and well-being?

00:26:52.800 | Well, I mean the first place I'm gonna start is eliminating the cancer in America of debt like I

00:27:01.040 | Don't want to talk to you about your investments other than protect your wealth

00:27:04.600 | So we're just gonna take your money and unless you really know exactly why you have it leveraged the way that you do

00:27:10.460 | We're gonna deleverage it

00:27:11.480 | We're gonna put it in completely as safe as we can make it and then you're gonna bust your ass until you have no more debt

00:27:17.400 | And we don't even need it. We don't need to worry about anything else

00:27:20.440 | And if you have to go out and deliver pizzas

00:27:22.440 | Is a part-time job in the evening for the next couple is the number one priority and before we do that

00:27:28.680 | We're gonna stockpile a couple thousand dollars in an emergency fund first and we're gonna have that

00:27:34.960 | So when the car breaks down or whatever, this is very Dave Ramsey ish

00:27:38.080 | Okay, and that this is where Dave Ramsey and I part ways at the end of this this debt snowball type thing

00:27:44.280 | We're gonna pay off all the debt starting on the smallest debt. We're gonna pay that one off

00:27:47.800 | We're gonna roll it to the next one and we're gonna do that and you're gonna watch that cascade happen. And when you decide that

00:27:52.800 | nothing else

00:27:55.800 | matters right now, but that

00:27:58.680 | You'll take debt that you think is gonna take you 10 years to pay off

00:28:02.380 | You'll pay it off in two or less

00:28:03.580 | My wife and I did this and we did it after I left the big paying job

00:28:07.440 | So people go that's easy to pay off debt when you're making, you know, six figures or whatever

00:28:10.800 | I we decided that we had screwed up and we needed to do something about this. I was making

00:28:15.660 | $45,000 a year. We had

00:28:18.240 | $38,000 in consumer debt. We paid it off in 18 months

00:28:21.080 | My wife's a nurse so you can imagine that right you can imagine that she wasn't exactly rolling in the Benjamins either

00:28:27.880 | she's an LVN so like you're not even an RN like, you know a

00:28:32.240 | Pediatric nurse at the time she now works for me

00:28:34.840 | But at the time, you know

00:28:36.060 | She was I think she's making 15 bucks an hour or something like that and we were able to do that in 18 months

00:28:40.360 | Why we decided that we could have all the nights out

00:28:44.900 | We wanted all the nice bottles of wine

00:28:46.620 | We wanted all of that stuff as soon as we were done with this first

00:28:49.060 | and I remember the day we paid off the last bit of that debt we owed $3,800 on a truck and

00:28:54.040 | That was a kind of our last bit of it. We got the thing in the mail and I said, oh 3,800 bucks

00:28:59.980 | Hell we got that in the bank account. Just write a check pay it off

00:29:02.280 | She's like, I don't know if I want to spend all that money right now

00:29:04.980 | I'm like, well if the truck was zero and the bank offered to give us $3,800 of

00:29:09.660 | Of it credit against it. Would you take the money?

00:29:12.540 | She goes damn it just wrote the check, you know, and we got the title a couple days later that

00:29:18.100 | Will take all of that fear all of that angst and just set it up on the shelf

00:29:23.580 | It'll still be there a little bit, but it won't be on your back

00:29:26.340 | It'll be on the shelf in the back of the room. So that's number one get that done. Then the next thing

00:29:30.900 | Start becoming a saver. I

00:29:33.820 | Hear people all the time. I have $5,000. What do I need to invest in?

00:29:37.940 | $100 bills $20 bills $50 bills, but I'm worried about inflation. You're not worried about inflation, right? You have $5,000

00:29:45.900 | You're not worried about inflation. You're worried about more money save your money

00:29:49.700 | Don't even don't even worry about investing

00:29:53.300 | rejectedly crap until you have at least $30,000 saved up in cash and

00:29:58.500 | When you get there, this is the difference when you say to yourself, okay now I want to look for places to invest my money

00:30:06.220 | you will be

00:30:08.100 | Extremely conservative with that money. You will look at that money and you will say my number one duty is to protect that money

00:30:14.340 | Where we've been convinced in America our number one duty with our money is to grow our money

00:30:19.660 | No, you can't grow something once it's been devalued or wiped out

00:30:25.100 | So we should come at the approach of investing with how do I protect myself from losses?

00:30:31.340 | Way too deep a topic to get into today kind of get a technical trading and stuff like that

00:30:36.060 | But I promise you if you save $30,000 in cash before you invest your money

00:30:40.820 | You'll figure it out because it'll matter to you where if it just goes in that automatic drip from your employer

00:30:46.380 | And they give you your 1% match or whatever the hell it is now and you're off in these five little things you can pick

00:30:51.740 | From and all of them suck in general and you have no way to safeguard your money because they've removed the cash option for most

00:30:57.020 | All the 401ks now forcing us into government debt is our conservative option there. You just kind of look at it

00:31:03.060 | It's like well that just happened. It's like Social Security. It's like a someday thing and you don't really own it

00:31:08.260 | So own that savings and then I would say once you get there

00:31:13.260 | It's probably time to try to find a good financial advisor unless you want to become

00:31:17.820 | Financially astute yourself, which I would prefer but I know a lot of people are not going to but I'm gonna be honest with you

00:31:23.300 | It's gonna be very difficult

00:31:24.540 | It's gonna be extremely difficult for a person with a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars invest to find a financial advisor

00:31:30.540 | That's that's any good because most of the really good financial advisors work with accredited investors that have net worths in excess of a million dollars

00:31:38.820 | But there's advisors like that that take people on kind of is is almost like apprentice protege types

00:31:46.220 | And say if I help this guy now when he's doing a little better

00:31:50.140 | He'll stick with me and you can sometimes find that or you just become a student as yourself

00:31:55.140 | You learn how to protect your profits

00:31:57.300 | What people need to learn to do is if you own a security and it makes you?

00:32:02.120 | 15% and you've set a goal to make 7% a year. You just made two years take the profits

00:32:08.540 | Now and that gives you two years to figure out the next cherry-picked place to put that money

00:32:15.380 | What does everybody do dollar cost average don't worry about don't time the market. Don't be a traitor

00:32:19.660 | You know what? You end up being the guy that gets crushed like everybody else when the market falls

00:32:23.500 | So you kind of take that conservative protective approach to your investing but begin to broaden your horizons at that point, too

00:32:30.660 | I think it makes a lot of sense to own property, but don't be stupid. Don't buy property. That's overvalued. Don't buy trendy neighborhoods

00:32:37.300 | Don't buy good schools. I love people. Well, I moved here because the schools are better. My response is always better at what indoctrination?

00:32:43.380 | programming statism

00:32:45.940 | Worship of the government. What exactly are those schools better at if you can if you can

00:32:53.020 | Self-educate your children put them into self-directed learning homeschool unschool

00:32:57.900 | Whatever you want to call it if you can't if you have to rely on the government schools

00:33:01.620 | Start that folks never call them public schools

00:33:04.620 | They're not public schools Sears is a public shopping place. Okay

00:33:08.120 | Albertsons is a public supermarket. You can go there as a member of the public and buy stuff

00:33:13.900 | It's open to the public a school run by our government is a government school

00:33:18.700 | That'll change your thinking right there

00:33:19.980 | If you have to rely on government schools commit as a parent to spending an hour educating your children every day

00:33:26.760 | Don't give me the bullshit. You can't do it

00:33:28.740 | You can spend an hour educating your children to counterbalance the nonsense

00:33:32.260 | They're being taught in schools and you'll learn more by teaching than they'll learn by having you teach them

00:33:36.940 | So you'll be teaching yourself at the same time

00:33:38.460 | Take that kind of approach as well and begin to start

00:33:41.380 | Investing if you can afford it and buy a piece of property buy something a half acre or larger

00:33:46.780 | Start producing your own food plant perennial plantings start to invest in your land. Stop looking at a

00:33:53.740 | Home as an asset when most homes are actually liabilities and start realizing when I first purchase a home

00:34:00.820 | If I do so with debt

00:34:02.300 | I have in fact purchased a liability and my goal now is to begin the conversion process of transmitting that liability into an asset

00:34:10.300 | assets generate profit not necessarily direct cash profits

00:34:15.580 | But if we can start taking our home and start to remove our dependence on energy

00:34:20.120 | By starting at efficiency first and alternative energy second start producing some of our own food

00:34:25.500 | Improve the underlying value of the property if we can do that

00:34:28.780 | We can actually turn the home into a homestead and that's a very very powerful thing and it's something you actually have to ask yourself

00:34:35.420 | Why don't we even hear that anymore?

00:34:38.060 | Why doesn't anybody talk that way anymore because it's not good for the consumer driven economy

00:34:42.780 | What people are taught to do now and you know this find a small home buy it as a starter home

00:34:48.420 | Wait for the equity value to increase sell it capture the equity move to another house a little bit bigger

00:34:54.300 | Do it again do it two or four times?

00:34:56.220 | Then you finally get your dream home in your 50s by the way a 30-year mortgage

00:34:59.940 | You're gonna be there 80s before it's paid off

00:35:01.460 | Just saying and then when you get there take out a giant home equity loan and go on vacation and put a pool in

00:35:08.460 | Where what we should be taught to do is is buy very smart the very first time and make a lifelong

00:35:15.180 | investment in that property and do so in a way that clouds up the

00:35:20.940 | assessment that the government puts on the value of that property to mitigate your property taxes and then pay that property off as quickly as

00:35:28.500 | you can and once you have a debt-free life a

00:35:31.660 | stable family

00:35:33.780 | You've prepared for the basics of emergencies

00:35:37.020 | You can go 30 to 60 days if if somebody took your keys away from you locked you in your house

00:35:42.100 | You might be uncomfortable. You might smell a little bad, but you'd be okay 60 days later

00:35:46.220 | You get to that point, you know, you're educating your children to true education based on the trivium of grammar rhetoric and logic

00:35:53.940 | You own your home. All you have to be able to cover is the property taxes, which yes are theft

00:35:58.700 | But it's a function of modern reality all of a sudden now you have all of this boldness

00:36:04.660 | So what people do is they act bold when they're afraid if that makes sense

00:36:09.740 | So bold is I'm risking my life savings every week with no idea what the hell is going on because it's my 401k and the the

00:36:15.700 | Shiny guy in the suit that came and told me to said it's okay and not to worry cuz I'm young even though I'm 40

00:36:20.100 | Right, so you're acting bold when you're afraid you don't understand everything when you actually take this approach

00:36:25.980 | What you become is very informed very conservative yet at the same time

00:36:30.140 | You become very bold you pick and choose your risks and that allows you to do crazy things like start a podcast in your car

00:36:36.460 | Right or or whatever it is that you do and I think that would be the most important thing somewhere in all of this

00:36:43.180 | Find your passion and build a business based on it

00:36:46.820 | There has never been a time in history

00:36:48.980 | Where it's easier to build a business from the ground up from nothing to something than right now

00:36:54.820 | Anybody that thinks the heyday of the entrepreneur is over has not paid attention

00:36:58.860 | My business could not exist without the internet your podcast. This is becoming its own business could not exist without the internet. I

00:37:06.380 | Believed that I could build a website on anything and make a profit

00:37:11.300 | Maybe not a giant one

00:37:12.260 | But I believe I could make a profit with a website dedicated to nothing but funnels if I had to and I'm not talking about

00:37:19.140 | Sales funnels. I'm talking about plastic and aluminum funnels

00:37:22.060 | I could make a profitable website now it might make 20 bucks a month

00:37:25.660 | But let that sink in that you could take something completely

00:37:29.580 | Preposterous and for a couple bucks in hosting and a little bit of acquired knowledge make a profit with it

00:37:36.420 | I can't remember his name

00:37:37.340 | But the guys the president of Alibaba the drop shipping import company from China said if you live in America

00:37:43.060 | And you're not wealthy by your 30s today. It's your own fault

00:37:45.900 | It might be a bit of an oversimplification, but I believe there's real truth to it because again

00:37:52.060 | You're talking to a guy that when I got out of the army back in

00:37:55.140 | 1993 my first job was packing boxes in a warehouse. It was a hundred and thirty degrees for five dollars and ten cents an hour

00:38:03.300 | I was 21 years old and by the time I was 26 years old

00:38:07.420 | I was making over a hundred thousand dollars here never saw the inside of a college classroom

00:38:10.940 | And it was nothing but hard work

00:38:12.860 | And I'm telling you if what exists today existed then if you could start a podcast

00:38:18.620 | Back then if you could build websites and generate money the way that you can today back then if you could take something like

00:38:25.460 | Homesteading and do all your homesteading stuff put it on YouTube and actually generate an income off of it existed in the 1990s

00:38:32.020 | I would have never spent any time, you know traveling all over the country meeting people

00:38:35.980 | I didn't want I would have done that from ground zero

00:38:38.500 | That's the opportunity that exists today. It's not easy. It's not easy

00:38:44.180 | It's hard

00:38:44.860 | But it's simple and the difference is easy something that anybody can do even by accident

00:38:51.140 | Simple is something you can do if you really want to and and that's the truth. It is a simple thing, but it's not easy

00:38:59.420 | Jack you've become an expert a noted expert in the field of permaculture and I watched your

00:39:05.780 | transition I believe you were the original your show was the original place where I heard the term and

00:39:11.660 | Really captured my interest and attention pretty intensely

00:39:15.420 | I'd like to talk about

00:39:18.700 | designing a lifestyle using permaculture principles and

00:39:23.900 | Let's do a scenario because I think it's useful in the modern world

00:39:29.540 | To have a kind of a pie-in-the-sky scenario just just imagine I sent you an eager young man or woman

00:39:36.940 | You know 15 16 years old 18, whatever age early early adulthood without any hang-ups

00:39:43.940 | No student loan debt anything like that. Now we're giving you a brush

00:39:48.520 | and I'd like you to paint out kind of a just a

00:39:51.940 | independently wealthy self-sufficient lifestyle bait based upon

00:39:55.340 | Integrating the natural world with the financial world and good design to minimize total lifetime costs, etc

00:40:03.300 | Basically, I want you to design Zaytuna farms in in Australia

00:40:07.180 | Okay

00:40:07.780 | Because that's I mean that's okay that I always that I always have in my head of what Jeff Lawton has built as a tuna farms

00:40:14.100 | And I look at I look at his property tours and things like that and I think why on earth

00:40:20.060 | Did someone not teach me how to do this type of thing when I was 15 years old?

00:40:24.220 | So if you were gonna teach somebody how to approach lifestyle design from a permaculture perspective, how would you do that?

00:40:31.000 | Well, I think you have to balance that with the desires of the person

00:40:37.140 | So I'm gonna assume for your example that this young person actually

00:40:40.740 | Wants to have some level of their living come from the land

00:40:44.940 | Directly because all of our livings come from the land all of our every resource we have is a natural resource every

00:40:51.140 | Everything of value if you trace it back came from some sort of a natural resource whether it's an ore or something grown from

00:40:58.580 | Soil or wood or energy that's harvested from the earth, but this person wants what you're talking about

00:41:04.660 | They want to be able to walk out their back door and graze their breakfast on the way to the chicken coop or the duck

00:41:10.260 | the duck holding area

00:41:12.100 | If that's the case, and I think that the first thing that people see is a huge impediment is

00:41:17.020 | access to property

00:41:19.900 | You can do some pretty amazing things with a quarter acre or less

00:41:24.380 | I actually think that like a quarter to a half of an acre for a lot of people's the sweet spot because it will make

00:41:30.820 | you focus on

00:41:32.820 | Efficiency I own a three acre property and I'll be honest with you. I think at my level

00:41:37.860 | I'd be pretty happy if it was 30 and I could deal with 300 though. I'd probably develop 30 and leave

00:41:43.620 | 270 is hunting land. So you've got to crack that nut first. So if they're 18

00:41:47.820 | That can be a problem or the problem can be the solution. So that's a permaculture principle

00:41:53.220 | The problem is a solution. So if you were that young you didn't have money

00:41:57.940 | You didn't have somebody leaving you a farm and you didn't want to go to work as a wage slave and you wanted to learn

00:42:03.380 | The skill set at the same time that you were developing enough financial capability to be able to actually acquire land that you could own long-term

00:42:10.260 | I would say to look at something like Curtis stones doing with urban farming

00:42:14.260 | This is a form of spin farming where what he's doing is he goes into neighborhoods that are located in the right location

00:42:19.060 | And most people could afford to figure out some way to rent a flat or whatever you got to do to live close to that

00:42:24.980 | Location he goes to homeowners and he says hey, how about this? I farm your backyard. I pay you a lease rate on it and

00:42:32.460 | Here's what it'll look like and he has an incredible book on this by the way

00:42:36.220 | It's called the urban farmer and basically he's farming without owning any land and he did that for about four years

00:42:42.860 | And by the time he was done with that he ended up buying one of the houses

00:42:45.380 | That he had been farming. So all the work was done there already

00:42:48.020 | so that put him straight into a business model and

00:42:51.380 | Income and a skill development because if you don't you'll develop the skill because if you don't you get really hungry and really cold and really

00:42:58.100 | Tired right?

00:42:59.060 | so so that would be one way into it if you had a job and

00:43:04.580 | You were looking to kind of edge your way into this then I would say you got to look at buying the right property

00:43:11.340 | I'd really recommend you get over to Jeff Lawton comm and take a look at some of his

00:43:15.340 | free videos and

00:43:17.780 | The property walkthrough and focusing on three things with property when you're developing a property

00:43:23.540 | It doesn't matter if it's a little property or a big one water access and structure

00:43:28.060 | So we want to do a good property assessment when we're buying a piece of property if you take kind of the approach of spin

00:43:34.220 | Farming or leasing land or whatever first

00:43:36.740 | You're gonna do that anyway by that because you're gonna have the experience if you're gonna go straight in

00:43:41.020 | You really need to think about that and I would try if I were 18 19 years old want to do this

00:43:48.620 | I would think about a lot of different ways to do it and see that's the thing

00:43:51.580 | There's not a single answer to this

00:43:52.940 | One of the things you might very well do is is rent rent out your labor in the construction field if you can find and

00:43:59.220 | Travel to do it, you know, they're building houses somewhere frame drywall, whatever work for nothing work for crap gain the skill set

00:44:06.500 | Build a small house or a tiny house on a piece of land own it debt-free

00:44:10.900 | Start out that way

00:44:12.140 | So you have to figure out how do I get into?

00:44:14.140 | the ability to steward land some people don't like the word own and I I

00:44:18.180 | Don't have a problem with the word own, but I also were touched with the fact that I'm mortal

00:44:21.940 | I'm gonna die someday and then like whatever I did to that land. I'm not gonna control anymore

00:44:26.060 | So I see it as like I have a stewardship over a piece of property until the day they put a stone over my head

00:44:30.980 | So you get yourself into that piece of property and then you start looking at how am I gonna provide as much?

00:44:38.540 | Of what I need without reliance on others. So then you're looking at energy efficient construction

00:44:45.360 | My personal biggest limitation on my property today. Is it really financial?

00:44:50.860 | I could put fifty thousand dollars into a solar array for my house

00:44:54.420 | But it's stupid because the the house is not efficient enough to make it worth doing

00:45:00.820 | It really doesn't make it was a built in 1979. Do you know what interest rates were on a mortgage in 1979?

00:45:07.700 | Eight

00:45:11.260 | eighteen point nine percent

00:45:13.260 | Thank You Jimmy Carter eighteen point nine percent

00:45:16.460 | So if you have a house built in 78 79 80

00:45:19.980 | Every shortcut was taken at a time when we were working with 1979 technology, right?

00:45:27.280 | So this is not an energy efficient home and in putting that kind of money into a solar array here

00:45:33.220 | Doesn't make any sense. It's also a place with a

00:45:35.980 | rock slab a few inches under the ground so I can't really put a

00:45:40.420 | Surface contact home in though that would make sense

00:45:43.980 | So I have to work with what I have but if I was 18, I

00:45:46.860 | Mean, I would really be very tempted to look for land that I could buy

00:45:51.380 | For cash if I had to kill myself for a couple years to make the money and and do all the construction

00:45:56.780 | Myself from ground up and that way you're gonna know everything that can go wrong on your property

00:46:03.740 | You're not gonna have to call somebody if something breaks because you built it in the first place

00:46:07.820 | You know how to fix it and I would go as energy efficient as possible and as much of your own

00:46:13.380 | Energy creation as possible. I would look to grow as much of my own food as possible

00:46:18.780 | I would do that very very heavily weighted toward annuals in the first few years

00:46:22.580 | Until I could shift that over to perennial production of fruit and nuts and things like that. I would definitely develop skill sets around

00:46:31.300 | animal husbandry

00:46:33.420 | There's no ROI on

00:46:35.420 | Calories that's better than an animal that eats something you can't eat and turns it into high quality meat

00:46:41.660 | So that's pastured pork. That's pastured poultry. That's pastured cattle

00:46:45.580 | And if you start looking at this, how much does a family of two or three or four really need?

00:46:51.400 | We will this year

00:46:53.920 | We're building a tractor an 8x8 chicken tractor. We're gonna build two of those. We're gonna spend about

00:47:00.780 | 100 bucks apiece on them

00:47:03.340 | will

00:47:04.660 | Kind of nurse through this new group of ducks and geese and we just won't worry about them for right now

00:47:09.460 | But then we're gonna run two groups of 40 chickens. So 80 chickens

00:47:14.300 | We'll have birds that you'd go out and if you bought these birds of this quality

00:47:18.900 | You'd be paying for them 20 to 25 dollars apiece. We'll have like six seven bucks in them in total cost

00:47:24.420 | Okay, that's 80 birds. That's more than a chicken a week just from that little activity alone

00:47:30.760 | That is is an incredibly high value product

00:47:36.180 | And then since you've create you've done this for yourself and you have this

00:47:40.300 | Attachment to the fact that that animal actually gave its life for you. It's not

00:47:44.660 | Breaded crap in a red and white bucket. Okay. It's an animal that you raised

00:47:50.100 | So you're going to say to yourself the only way I can honor this animals life is

00:47:55.300 | To use every single bit of it

00:47:58.460 | So like what we'll do we actually have a processor because I don't have a time to process myself

00:48:02.020 | I'll take these 80 birds down to the processor. I'll have 40 processed as whole birds and 40 parted out

00:48:07.860 | The first thing I'll do is I'll come home and I'll throw 40 chicken backs next hearts livers into a pot and I'll make seven

00:48:14.720 | Gallons of chicken stock. I'm done with chicken stock for the year. I mean, I'm good

00:48:18.780 | I'll can that and I'm good with chicken stock for the year

00:48:22.140 | We'll take the rest of it. We'll cryo back it will freeze it. We'll have

00:48:27.420 | Meals for the you know, probably we'll eat chicken two to three times a year off of that when you start saying things like okay

00:48:34.100 | This bird we cooked whole now. We're gonna go ahead and make soup out of that

00:48:38.140 | That's two meals. Maybe a little bit that's pulled off as tarantulas. That's three meals

00:48:42.500 | So also just that one little thing

00:48:44.540 | That's not that hard to do takes eight weeks to raise those birds, by the way

00:48:48.060 | Same birds the commercial people raise just raised in a humane way that actually makes them a lot more high quality

00:48:54.420 | Flavor and just nutrition. So then you say okay. Well, that's great

00:48:58.540 | So you're gonna meet you but that's not what I'm doing

00:49:00.940 | what I'm actually doing is taking those 80 birds on a dilapidated piece of land and

00:49:04.860 | I'm moving them on a daily basis over an eight-week period and I'm regenerating that piece of land

00:49:10.180 | Next year when we do that process again our feed costs on the next 80 birds will go down

00:49:16.740 | Because the birds from the first year that we had to feed heavily will have provided fertility and disturbance

00:49:23.820 | to improve the pasture for the next group of chickens and

00:49:27.060 | Then depending on our goals

00:49:29.380 | We can just create incredibly lush pasture with that or we could advance a forest behind that there leaves us in a perennial production

00:49:35.740 | If we space the trees, right we can move and pasture chickens right through more of a civil pasture manner with a forest around them

00:49:44.540 | Which in Texas is great because now they're shaded

00:49:46.540 | So they're gonna have a higher survivability rate and if you start looking at that then I can start doing my timings

00:49:52.100 | So over time what we grow trees like persimmons that grow very large and have mast

00:49:57.260 | Overhead that hold their mast and drop their fruit if you don't pick it yourself, they don't drop that fruit until like January

00:50:05.180 | so now I can run chickens in the winter when it's not hot and

00:50:07.820 | I can over graze them on a free yield a high caloric yield

00:50:12.660 | So I mean it's it's difficult for me to answer your question because all of that's just one element in this design

00:50:19.940 | I would say that the individual is gonna have to decide what's most important to them

00:50:25.740 | If you want to make a living on a quarter of an acre, I can show you how to do it

00:50:29.960 | It's called a backyard nursery

00:50:31.960 | Start growing plants learn to graft learn to start trees and bushes from seed

00:50:36.300 | Learn to clone learn to root learn how to do misting beds

00:50:40.280 | That alone could be an income unit that can provide an income for a family

00:50:44.120 | I know a family in New York that employs seven people

00:50:49.680 | On a four acre farm seven people full-time employees paid quite well for what they do. You know what they grow roses

00:50:56.280 | Right. So and people when I brought that up at permaculture voices last year people that blacks not permaculture. I want to grow food

00:51:03.500 | I'm like, well, they're growing organic roses

00:51:05.500 | They're charging a premium for them because of that

00:51:08.200 | Do you know how much pesticides nicotinicides all that stuff goes into?

00:51:12.240 | The production of things like a rose because no one cares because you don't eat it

00:51:16.560 | So here's people that are actually improving land, but they're just smart enough to grow a high-value product

00:51:21.400 | So when it comes to an income source off of a property you have to decide

00:51:25.160 | What it is that you want to focus on for income and I would also say you're gonna have to learn

00:51:30.760 | Basic business acumen and you're gonna have to learn how to do mathematical projections

00:51:36.360 | You're gonna have to increase your financial IQ

00:51:38.360 | You have to know what things like our poo are or average revenue per user in telecom or to make a generic unit

00:51:44.740 | so most people think of like if I have a business and I do

00:51:48.580 | 10,000 units and I make

00:51:51.800 | $10 a unit I make a hundred thousand dollars minus my expenses great if I want to double that well

00:51:56.680 | I need to go and sell twice as many

00:51:58.360 | No

00:51:58.860 | You need to increase your average sale price

00:52:00.440 | That can be done by making the product more premium and being able to charge more for it

00:52:05.000 | That can be done by figuring out other

00:52:07.000 | Adjunctive products that we can add on and stack on and bundle the way the telecom sector does with your phone and your cable and your

00:52:12.960 | You know all that stuff bundled together and you have so you have to learn that you have to learn

00:52:17.000 | The concepts that are to me

00:52:19.600 | I don't get how we have people coming out of college and I've never been and I understand this stuff and they don't

00:52:24.960 | Cogs cost of goods sold. What is it actually people say?

00:52:28.880 | Well, I make $20 a chicken doing pastured chickens

00:52:31.700 | No, you don't, you know, not unless space aliens beam your chicken to you all processed and ready to go

00:52:37.220 | And you still have a marketing expense. What is what is that bird eat? What does it eat?

00:52:42.720 | I don't know anybody that's gotten to a level yet where their birds are a hundred percent pastured their feet

00:52:49.040 | So what's the cost of feed?

00:52:51.040 | What is the cost in energy to get food and water to them? What what are what are you spending in labor hours?

00:52:58.480 | Maintaining those animals if you've built things like tractors, okay

00:53:02.520 | Which a tractor for those that may I realize now I'm on a financial show

00:53:06.320 | So my own attractors basically a large movable pen that lets the chickens have access to the ground so we can control their movements

00:53:13.280 | Well, what did that cost until that things paid back? It's an expense against every bird you sell

00:53:18.660 | so you to design your lifestyle you have to learn to think like a business person and I think if there's

00:53:26.120 | Anything we are totally screwing our young people with today

00:53:30.680 | It's that our universities and our government schools are so dedicated to brainwashing them to the gloriousness of

00:53:38.080 | socialism and

00:53:39.680 | And I'm as politically agnostic as it gets I'm an anarchist

00:53:43.600 | So it's not like I'm preaching Republican here for somebody that might think so

00:53:46.680 | But but our schools are dedicated to teaching our children that socialism is good to the extent that they have

00:53:53.400 | villainized words like profit and

00:53:56.600 | That means that a child or a young adult cannot come out of either high school or university and have any

00:54:02.960 | understanding any fundamental understanding whatsoever of economics

00:54:07.560 | They can't comprehend economics because to comprehend economics

00:54:12.760 | The first thing you have to say is how do I ensure that the effort that put is put here is?

00:54:17.680 | Actually worth doing and we define that with profit if profit becomes a cuss word

00:54:23.480 | How the hell is a person gonna understand economics and I hear all these young people around permaculture

00:54:28.920 | You know what? They say to me Josh. I want to start a company. I want it to be a nonprofit

00:54:32.720 | Okay, and this is I have to give credit to Mark Shepard for this but if you have a nonprofit

00:54:41.280 | Without a profitable entity attached to it first. You are a professional beggar, right?

00:54:48.120 | That's all that you are. The nonprofit is a is a tax

00:54:52.700 | Vehicle so that when you become really successful and have surplus income and you want to do good things

00:54:57.820 | You go out and create a nonprofit. You never call it yours

00:55:01.040 | You put an independent board of directors in place and you take your excess evil profits

00:55:05.680 | You put them in a nonprofit and you get to decide where that money goes

00:55:08.920 | Instead of letting somebody in Washington decide where it goes for you. You'll never hear that in school

00:55:14.120 | Either you know university or high school business courses, whatever

00:55:19.120 | So that person can't design the life that way because they don't have the knowledge

00:55:23.960 | If I ask you, how do you get a nail into a piece of a wood? What you'd say a hammer, okay?

00:55:29.660 | But if you didn't know a hammer existed

00:55:32.360 | I need some sort of heavy use common sense some sort of heavy blunt instrument to bang it in and

00:55:37.680 | If I showed you a hammer, even if you'd never seen one before and you looked at a nail you go

00:55:41.880 | Oh, I don't work. What we've done is we've so

00:55:45.660 | Educated our children that when you show them a hammer in a nail

00:55:49.400 | They can't make the connection anymore because someone told them the hammer was bad because it's mean it's mean to the poor little nail

00:55:56.960 | It creates a microaggression

00:55:59.720 | Seriously, here's a microaggression the nail didn't want to be in that piece of oak

00:56:03.660 | And by the way, some evil bastard cut down the oak tree and made it into a piece of wood. I mean, so

00:56:11.360 | when I get in the permaculture with young people I have to give them a little bit of that brain shock because

00:56:16.600 | Like I don't want to cut a tree down. What are you gonna live it?

00:56:19.840 | Right. What you need to do is make sure for every tree you cut down

00:56:23.240 | You've done enough to make sure three grow back

00:56:26.360 | That that's the way you you handle resource management here

00:56:31.000 | And you you start figuring things out like so another need that we would have if I have a homestead

00:56:35.960 | I'm putting in I need fuel wood. So let's learn efficiency

00:56:39.640 | So let's design something like a rocket stove. So we're gonna do a lot of our cooking on a rocket stove

00:56:45.360 | We can take little handfuls of wood and we can cook full meals on them

00:56:48.960 | So now let's go out and plant a tree like black locust. So we plant black locust

00:56:53.520 | We give it about four or five years

00:56:54.840 | It gets up till it's about you know, eight nine feet high and we go and we just we're evil

00:56:59.460 | We get a chainsaw out burn fossil fuels and cut it right off at chest height

00:57:03.120 | Cut all that up into a bunch of little pieces, you know, what happens it grows back

00:57:07.720 | It grows back incredibly rapidly

00:57:09.720 | We can start cutting that tree for that type of use in five to six year rotations and never actually kill a tree again

00:57:17.520 | Provide all the fuel and heat for our house that we would ever need in a northern climate where I'm using more of a conventional

00:57:23.280 | Wood burning wood burning heat. I might be doing my rotations in 10 or 12 years, but I can use the same tree

00:57:29.520 | just applied differently, so

00:57:31.520 | When you want me to say how a person should design their life

00:57:35.680 | What you're asking me to do is come in and paint your picture for you

00:57:39.200 | And what I what I really prefer to do is say you have the canvas, you know

00:57:45.520 | You you have the the the paint you have the brushes you have the knives. Let me show you how they work and

00:57:53.320 | Then you paint your picture

00:57:56.080 | the way that you want your life to be and

00:57:58.600 | It has to be that way

00:58:00.920 | I mean my last tenant in my modern survival philosophy is my plan cannot and will not work for you

00:58:07.800 | What you do matters and you have to make these decisions for yourself

00:58:12.000 | All that I do is provide you the knowledge to build life the way that you want it

00:58:16.180 | Because what happens is if I say do these 20 things whether it's preparedness or permaculture or lifestyle design

00:58:23.120 | You'll follow it right up to the first one that you don't agree with and then you'll fall out. You won't do anything else

00:58:28.720 | But if I say here's all the knowledge that you need

00:58:31.320 | Here's the way to think about this and I guess that's the biggest thing is to learn systems thinking

00:58:36.120 | To start realizing that every single thing you do whether it's on a property or in your life or in an educational

00:58:42.440 | Program is connected to every other single piece of it

00:58:45.080 | And whenever you do something make sure you're stacking its functionality to do multiple things and make sure you're putting it in the right

00:58:52.320 | relative location and

00:58:54.080 | Then I guess the biggest thing that our young people work so hard for but yet are so frivolous with is

00:59:01.760 | Social capital. I think it the most valuable thing that you can build today is social capital

00:59:07.280 | That's why I call it social networking, right?

00:59:09.280 | Tweeting and Pinteresting and Facebooking all that stuff

00:59:12.480 | And if you think about what the entire life of a teenager or a young adult is around being popular going to the right part

00:59:20.320 | It's all about social capital, but it's worthless social capital

00:59:23.560 | How many people that you wanted to like you in high school?

00:59:27.560 | Whether they did or not where it was important and you made an effort for it Josh. Do you even know today?

00:59:33.960 | Do you even know where they are?

00:59:35.960 | Yeah, right. So we

00:59:38.160 | Say I all those people that somehow seemed important at this point

00:59:43.320 | I think I have two or three friends from high school and that's it

00:59:48.480 | See and you but you spend so much time and people worry about what clothes do I buy on what shoes do I wear?

00:59:53.720 | I also at least he didn't in the 80s when I was in school, right?

00:59:56.680 | That was how you were popular. You looked right you dressed right?

00:59:58.880 | You talked right all this ever in a social capital with no understanding at ever at all what social capital really is. I had a

01:00:06.280 | Not really a friend. He was an old man. That was a friend of my grandfather's

01:00:09.840 | Lived up the road from us. His name was buddy shoemaker in Jonestown, Pennsylvania

01:00:14.560 | buddy made wine

01:00:17.560 | Homemade wine really good wine. I didn't understand the word social capital at the time, but looking back

01:00:24.460 | I recognized it for what it was this guy could call a favor in anywhere. This was buddies deal

01:00:30.200 | You grow grapes you grow raspberries, whatever you pick it you put in buckets you bring it to the buddies house

01:00:35.260 | He writes your name on the bucket you go away when your wines ready. He calls you

01:00:39.800 | He takes half of the stuff that he made wine and gives it to you. He keeps the other half

01:00:44.600 | That was it. That was his whole deal

01:00:47.480 | And if he need if he needed something he usually didn't pay cash

01:00:51.240 | You want parsley wine you want raspberry wine? You want some real sake?

01:00:56.240 | What do you want and he would barter for this stuff?

01:00:59.000 | And if he needed a favor throw a couple bottles of you know, Andrew Andrew Spirko

01:01:03.920 | My my my grandfather Biff's conquer grape wine at you or whatever it was and he could get anything done

01:01:10.160 | and

01:01:12.080 | He was a value to the community and there were a whole bunch of people that lived there that kind of knew how to

01:01:18.680 | Making wines not that hard

01:01:20.560 | I make wines and meads and beers now and I love doing it

01:01:23.640 | But there were a lot of people that went that's that's that's his thing. I just like it's fall

01:01:29.040 | I'm gonna have a harvest I take it to buddy now

01:01:31.680 | I can go deer hunting put meat in the freezer for my family and I know by mid spring

01:01:36.360 | I'll have a few gallons of wine to last throughout the year

01:01:40.560 | That's social capital and it's social capital on steroids

01:01:44.360 | If this guy had wanted to be the mayor of the the little town that was a little bit bigger

01:01:50.280 | That was the actual thing that owned us which was minersville. Guess what people do there, right?

01:01:54.280 | This guy could have been the mayor like that, right? He don't want anything to do with it. So we're not teaching people about

01:02:00.680 | Is Ethan Rowland calls them the eight forms of capital and the chief one being social capital though a little bit more?

01:02:07.320 | Awareness of that is happening just because you see somebody that because of their online presence can

01:02:12.020 | Sell a lot of product or whatever financial capital is the one that everybody thinks of but there's other forms of capital

01:02:19.760 | There's experiential capital. What do you know?

01:02:21.960 | And experiential capital links in a social capital because what you don't know who do you know that knows and if you have a good network

01:02:30.080 | The networks experience becomes your own

01:02:33.400 | Cultural capital is what's the value of the pure culture of what you're involved with if you build a really cool homestead?

01:02:41.080 | Guess what people will pay to come work for you

01:02:44.280 | I know it sounds nuts

01:02:45.680 | But people I have a thing going this this this Saturday and people are gonna pay me

01:02:49.720 | $15 to come here and work for a day and we'll sell out

01:02:53.760 | Okay

01:02:55.560 | We'll get a whole bunch of work done and I'm not taking advantage of because we feed them really good and stuff like that

01:03:00.660 | But that's because we've built a culture around what we're doing at nine mile farm in the survival podcast

01:03:05.680 | Living capital I talked about planting trees on your property living capital is when I have a tree

01:03:11.480 | I have I've taken an appreciating asset and I've taken it off of the tax doll

01:03:16.240 | I put a tree and I pay 20 bucks for if you had a tree on your property

01:03:21.840 | There was an apple tree that's 15 years old

01:03:25.040 | huge dropping hundreds and hundreds of pounds of apples every year and somebody walked up to you and said

01:03:30.920 | I'll give you 200 bucks if I can cut that tree down and take it away

01:03:34.540 | You tell him to piss off right that trees it's gone 20 30 fold over what you paid for it, but it's not taxed

01:03:44.260 | That's a form of living capital back this cultural capital for a second. Why do people want to work for Google?

01:03:50.860 | It's not just financial capital. There's good paying jobs that you can have if you qualify to work for Google

01:03:55.560 | Somebody else would pay you. Well, it's the culture there

01:03:57.980 | intellectual capital is

01:04:01.260 | Beyond experience it's more total knowledge or it could be traditional intellectual capital like a patent or something like that or a trademarked brand

01:04:10.380 | spiritual capital it is an

01:04:13.200 | You can't really put a number on it

01:04:16.060 | but there's a certain value into being at peace with who you are and what your place is in the world and if you start

01:04:22.780 | Blending all these forms of capital together

01:04:25.480 | I mean this should be a required course in high school if we're gonna have schools that the children are forced to go to

01:04:31.800 | Children should be taught about these forms of capital so that they can learn how to actually work with each other rather than constantly

01:04:40.220 | tearing each other apart

01:04:41.500 | The reason people tear each other apart and fight for a pecking order in these social systems and behave more like primates than human beings

01:04:49.100 | Is because they're so limited in their knowledge of the value that other people have

01:04:53.500 | It could be summed up. It was something like what was the saying be careful of the toes you step on today?

01:04:59.540 | They may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow and and that's I mean

01:05:04.580 | Kids don't get this like the guy you're picking on at school today that you're calling a nerd is probably gonna be worth a fortune

01:05:10.380 | in the future and

01:05:11.620 | If we actually started to see each other for the value that we have a lot of these problems that we have would go away

01:05:17.180 | So I don't know if that's really an answer to the question, but I mean that's where it leads to for me

01:05:22.340 | It's a great survey of the topics and I would encourage

01:05:24.340 | listeners who are interested in deep more of a deep dive to go out and just look through the archives of your of your show

01:05:29.860 | to see

01:05:31.380 | To see episodes that interest them and that's what I that's one of the things I appreciate the most about you Jack

01:05:36.140 | I don't

01:05:37.020 | With doing my own podcast

01:05:38.340 | I don't listen nearly as much as I used to when I had when I made more time to listen to audio

01:05:43.100 | but I've always appreciated your your creative creative thinking and

01:05:46.980 | The whole idea of understanding different forms of capital

01:05:50.940 | I mean that was the basic is one of the basic ethics of the US American culture, you know

01:05:55.900 | The whole idea of let's make a deal. What do you got that I want? And what do I got that you want?

01:05:59.820 | unfortunately, many people have lost the

01:06:04.260 | Ability to think in that way and I'll just give a couple of modern practical examples

01:06:08.420 | I mean you talk about your friend with with the wine. I know people who do that all the time

01:06:12.980 | I know somebody who does that with honey. He's got a few hives of honey. He makes some great honey

01:06:17.340 | He does all kinds of deals on Craigslist in jars of honey

01:06:20.980 | I know you think about even in a business you can sometimes offer things

01:06:26.540 | I've bartered all kinds of things to get radical personal finance off the ground when cash flow

01:06:30.780 | When cash inflow is tight you barter what you have that's the end and it forces you to be creative

01:06:35.780 | But you could take a job that you might generally need to pay $15 an hour

01:06:40.180 | but if you can just adjust the deal that you're offering a little bit and allow somebody to do it on a

01:06:45.540 | flexible

01:06:47.140 | Schedule or allow somebody to do it from an off-site location from their from their kitchen computer instead of

01:06:52.460 | Instead of there in your office all of a sudden if that works in your business structure

01:06:57.220 | You can lower your costs and you can create a barter deal out of all kinds of flexible things

01:07:03.460 | It doesn't just have to be apples and honey

01:07:04.900 | It's a matter of looking creatively at what we have and seeing what is this other person want and value?

01:07:10.800 | So we can go away with a win-win deal

01:07:12.800 | Definitely and I think one of the big differences between barter and

01:07:18.380 | Financial transactions and I'm gonna say this when I want to clarify this you can have a transaction that involves

01:07:27.420 | Capital in the form of cash or money that's barter and you can have just a straight financial transaction

01:07:35.100 | for example if you are forced to buy insurance that you don't want and

01:07:40.700 | If you don't do it, there'll be some sort of a penalty

01:07:45.440 | It is a purely financial transaction if you're buying something solely because you have to have it because it's a need it's purely

01:07:53.100 | Financial and in a lot of financial transactions. It's is a tendency that

01:07:58.500 | Either the person that spent the money feels victimized or they were lulled into the false belief that they won

01:08:07.060 | Right, like I showed them I got that car for next to nothing. No, you did they made all the money on the financing

01:08:14.060 | The this is this is the the psychology of money in America today

01:08:17.980 | The first thing a person if I say rich and we play word association, I say a word you say a response to it

01:08:23.820 | Not you probably not your listeners, but the majority of Americans if I say rich they say greedy or something like that

01:08:29.940 | We've been so warped to believe that when you move to a barter mentality

01:08:34.900 | The only way a transaction ever happens is that both sides feel they want

01:08:42.140 | That you have you wouldn't do it and many times you see people bartering stuff that they would have actually been happy to give away

01:08:49.820 | but the reciprocant says I

01:08:53.220 | Feel that since you're willing to give me something of value

01:08:57.700 | I should be willing to give you something of value in exchange

01:09:01.180 | and if you don't want it pass it on to somebody that does and

01:09:06.060 | One of the biggest pieces of my modern education going is if I call my modern education since I started becoming a teacher I

01:09:13.180 | Had a friend named Ron hood. That was an icon in the survival industry

01:09:18.220 | he actually owns the domain survival calm to tell you how long ago he got in the game and

01:09:22.580 | He was like a brother. I never knew the day that I met him and we both had pretty big egos

01:09:29.700 | I was getting started out but a little bit of stardom

01:09:31.820 | Stardom ego going and he had like that establishment ego and he also had this kind of attitude that people in this industry

01:09:37.420 | When they approached him were looking to get something from him and we met and I could tell he was worried about that

01:09:43.220 | it took about two seconds for both of us to drop shields and be brothers and

01:09:46.820 | We had an incredible

01:09:49.740 | Friendship for about two years until unfortunately he passed away

01:09:53.620 | And I only ever actually got to see him in real life face to face and shake hands and break bread with him about three

01:09:59.540 | times but we talked on the phone and by Skype almost weekly and

01:10:03.180 | in one of the events that he ran that I went to I learned about a thing called the barter blanket and

01:10:08.420 | This is where you lay down a blanket

01:10:11.020 | Somebody steps forward lays down an item for barter and then anybody else that's watching can lay down an exchange item

01:10:16.900 | You have to sell it a little bit

01:10:18.300 | Why would you want it that type of thing you have ten people offer ten different things against the one and the guy that laid?

01:10:23.100 | down the first one

01:10:24.700 | Decides I'll take this deal or I don't want any of it or

01:10:28.100 | how about I split it in half and I get this in this, you know, just basic barter and

01:10:32.580 | When I started doing my training events here at my farm, I thought you know

01:10:38.220 | What a great way to honor his memory but to tell his story

01:10:41.640 | Break out a bottle of this crappy gin and he loved that sapphire blue crap

01:10:46.140 | And I keep a bottle here

01:10:48.220 | And if anybody ever comes to this house the new Ron you drink a shot of that whether you want it or not

01:10:52.220 | and I pass that bottle of gin around I tell Ron's story and we start our barter and

01:10:57.580 | You see people

01:11:00.300 | Barter like especially newbies that have never been before barter like they're going to the store at first. It's what I can I get?

01:11:06.780 | what can I get I get and

01:11:08.780 | Then you start to see generosity flow

01:11:11.660 | And you start to see people do things like oh, I have a vacation home, you know on the beach in, California

01:11:18.460 | They usually rents out for two thousand dollars a day

01:11:21.060 | That's an actual item that's been put on my barter blanket and you see a whole bunch of people sit around and go. Yeah

01:11:26.780 | Too rich for my blood and the person go

01:11:29.580 | What do you got?

01:11:32.660 | What do you got I didn't set a price on it

01:11:35.820 | What do you got and you see somebody trade something that maybe has a value of 200 bucks for four thousand dollars worth of time

01:11:44.820 | In a vacation home. Well the person that owns that home knows there's gonna the stipulation is you got to pick a day

01:11:50.420 | I don't have it rented

01:11:51.580 | So is he's gonna sit there empty anyway, but they've thrown that out kind of as a generosity

01:11:56.180 | I've done things where I'll say I'm gonna give away five hours of my time consulting

01:12:00.740 | and as you might imagine I'm pretty stingy with my consulting time anymore and

01:12:05.300 | I'll have two or three people throw down something and I'll go, okay

01:12:11.020 | Everybody pick up your items. I don't want your items. I'm gonna do it for all three of you because you took a shot and

01:12:16.580 | This is what happens when you move in the barter because you start to realize that there's there's more important things than what we initially

01:12:25.300 | get from something building relationships knowing we can come back and

01:12:29.780 | I actually think that you start gravitating more toward what Toby Hemingway describes as a gift based economy

01:12:36.740 | And I don't mean gift schemes

01:12:38.540 | But in permaculture city he talks about the barter that never was like we're told before there was money

01:12:43.460 | Everything was bartered but in in a village, let's say where I was the knife maker and your son needed a knife

01:12:50.260 | Well, I'm the knife maker

01:12:53.100 | So you'd come to me get a knife. Well, that's what I do. I make knives. So when you need a knife here, I

01:12:58.820 | Don't have anything to give you right now. Okay here. I got like 20 of them sitting here on the table

01:13:04.380 | I make knives. That's what I do. I don't have anything else to do

01:13:08.060 | Here and when I needed something it was just there now people start to look at that as like socialism or communism

01:13:14.940 | But those those orders of human interaction were prior to the advent of the state

01:13:21.540 | These were hunter-gatherer

01:13:23.540 | societies that had kind of formed a little bit of stability into a village and they were always

01:13:27.780 | Limited in headcount to about a hundred to two hundred people and it would have to then break off

01:13:31.900 | It would get too big. It would start to become a bureaucracy even without a bureaucracy and

01:13:37.020 | I don't I'm not fanciful. I don't think we can go back to living like that

01:13:40.740 | but I'm also as a modernist a believer that we take the very best of everything that we can assemble together and

01:13:48.020 | We put that together kind of Bruce Lee like right we absorb what is useful

01:13:52.340 | we reject what is useless and we add what is uniquely our own and that we can be building these types of

01:13:58.220 | individual communities all over the country both geographically based on real interactions and

01:14:05.580 | virtually based on online interactions

01:14:07.900 | We can start to develop our own our own our own economies our own forms of money our own systems of value exchange

01:14:15.020 | Bitcoin taught me something money's bullshit money is a fabrication out of thin air

01:14:21.780 | It's an agreement between people to assign a value of energy to an inanimate object. That's really worthless, right? It's a system of accounting

01:14:29.540 | When you come to me and say I want to buy your old iPhone and I say 200 bucks

01:14:35.500 | You give me some paper with some numbers on it

01:14:37.860 | I give you the iPhone and the transaction ends

01:14:40.780 | The only purpose the paper serves is an accounting because now I have the $200 you have your iPhone

01:14:47.300 | You can go reprogram it do whatever you want

01:14:49.300 | But I need something of value that I can go prove

01:14:51.540 | To the next party in exchange that I have actually my value came from something

01:14:57.140 | right and that's all Bitcoin is Bitcoin just keeps an accounting of who exchanged what and puts a value on it and

01:15:04.620 | It's our confidence in that value that actually allows it to propagate and people look at the American dollar and go

01:15:10.740 | It's all based on debt. It has to collapse. Why doesn't it because the confidence is there because people believe that it has value

01:15:16.700 | Therefore they're willing to exchange it and if we can just continue to evolve away from that

01:15:23.620 | And I'm not saying I want to get rid of money tomorrow morning, right because I earn a living mostly in Federal Reserve notes

01:15:30.540 | Quite on I'll take Bitcoin. I'll take silver, but most of my incomes in money and most of my purchases are in money

01:15:36.060 | But wherever I get the opportunity to exchange

01:15:39.460 | Non-monetary barter, I'll do it and I'll do it every single time

01:15:44.060 | Jack I got one final question for you you throw out so many great ideas and

01:15:50.500 | The challenge often with great ideas

01:15:55.060 | Ideas are maybe some ideas have ideas have potential value, but frankly there are a ton of great ideas

01:16:01.120 | everything the real value of an idea is in the execution and the implementation and

01:16:06.180 | I think that's where a lot of people break down. I'm amazed at the business that you run. Not only do you run your podcast with

01:16:13.980 | remarkable frequency and and depth

01:16:17.060 | but you also have your hand in a number of other businesses as a consultant advisor business partner and you still

01:16:24.140 | make the time to get out on your own property and sweat and build your

01:16:28.380 | Garden the way that you desire it to be

01:16:31.100 | How what's your personal time management system? And how do you get everything done that you want to get done?

01:16:38.300 | Well, so it's something I struggle with every day but my basics are this I have living creatures on my property

01:16:48.140 | If I don't take care of them, they'll die. So when I get up in the morning doesn't matter what else I got to do

01:16:52.820 | I do that first. I make sure everybody's gonna live through the day then I come in and I do my show

01:16:57.620 | I that takes precedence over everything else over guest interviews over consultation calls over any of my peripheral businesses

01:17:06.300 | Anything like that the show must go on in the old adage so that gets done when that's done

01:17:12.780 | Then I take a look at do I need to do any marketing for the show?

01:17:16.720 | Are there any commitments that I've made?

01:17:18.140 | Do I have any accounting to take care of stuff like that that gets done if I'm free at that point?

01:17:22.180 | I get out and work the land

01:17:24.180 | Otherwise, it's you know, maybe I have a conference call with a partner in a different business or something like that

01:17:28.700 | But the way I've made this work is a couple things

01:17:31.500 | Number one. I've started saying no to a whole lot of stuff

01:17:35.140 | I have people coming at me all the time want to do something with me. I'm like you go do something

01:17:39.700 | You go do it. You don't need me you think you do and you think because I touch it. It's gonna turn to gold

01:17:45.860 | Trust me. I've had failures too. You go do your own thing

01:17:48.580 | Stop telling me what you're gonna do and go show me what you're doing. All right, so I started saying no to a lot of things

01:17:54.300 | The other thing I've done is when I do get involved with partners in a business like we have a business right now

01:18:00.540 | We're working on to develop a new type of caging so that suburban eyes can raise quail for meat and eggs

01:18:05.900 | I think it'd be a great thing to put that love because you can't love what I said about the chicken tractor

01:18:10.920 | You're not doing that on Maple Street, right?

01:18:13.140 | So we want to do that with quail for people much easier to process higher value nutrition higher value product that you put out

01:18:19.980 | If you want to sell it, but this is what I told my partners in that business. I

01:18:23.580 | Will see to making sure that people know about it. I will market it through my platform

01:18:30.020 | I will test bed it right here because I have quail and I'll make sure that we find all the things that are wrong with

01:18:35.180 | It because I'll just use it you make me prototypes

01:18:37.620 | I'll use it and tell you everything screwed up and we won't release it till it works, right?

01:18:41.620 | Everything else is on your plate. You guys have to worry about accounting. You guys have to worry about tax reporting

01:18:47.340 | You guys have to worry about inventory

01:18:49.340 | If there's some financial investment, I'm willing to put some of that in the game, but overall it's on you

01:18:55.260 | You don't want that deal can't work with you because I don't have any more time and that seems very

01:19:00.940 | kind of hard-lined hard-nosed and

01:19:03.740 | I'll you know part of what got me in trouble in the past and I over extended myself as I always want to say yes

01:19:08.620 | I always want to help people but I also realized a lot of times when you think you're helping people what you're doing is what?

01:19:13.500 | I call trying to breathe for them

01:19:15.180 | right, you're trying to make somebody successful a person that's going to be successful will be successful without my help a

01:19:22.380 | Person that's not going to be successful still will not be successful with my help

01:19:27.540 | All I can do is inspire and you talked about throwing out all these great ideas

01:19:31.620 | I have people all the time say shit. I want to tell you about my idea

01:19:34.820 | But we just signed a non-disclosure agreement get the out of here. I'm sorry go get get get out of here

01:19:40.060 | The dogs looking at me like I'm yelling at him right like

01:19:42.700 | Because because I don't have I don't even have time to talk to you now if you think I have time to steal your idea

01:19:50.220 | Which probably 20 people are other already doing you're out of your mind. I just let my ideas go

01:19:56.220 | Because I know that I come up with some stuff

01:20:00.620 | that could really be good for people and could really be good for both the customer and the producer and that I am

01:20:08.320 | Absolutely not going to be able to get it all done. I'm not going to be able to control everything

01:20:12.540 | I'm not even going to be able to be a part of everything that I can come up with

01:20:15.260 | So I'll just throw it out there and I figure if I throw something out to 150,000 people one person might go you know

01:20:21.660 | that could work if

01:20:24.460 | That's when I think you're going to be successful when you can you take my idea and the first thing you say is yeah

01:20:29.980 | It's not really whole yet

01:20:31.620 | It needs this this and this because that's what I do when I do decide to ferret out an idea

01:20:36.220 | I come up with like I was gonna be great

01:20:37.300 | I map it all out and write up a proposal even if there's nobody to give it to just so I can look at it make

01:20:42.340 | Sure, it makes sense, and I start working through it and go that's wrong

01:20:44.900 | That's wrong that needs an adjustment. Oh gee if you do that with a quail. They break their eggs

01:20:50.300 | That's you find that out when you get a broken egg, okay?

01:20:53.300 | So you're always going to have like an idea is never

01:20:56.820 | Complete when it's first birthed it has to be massaged

01:21:00.540 | And I feel if I can put out you know over the next ten years a thousand ideas and

01:21:05.180 | 250 of them become businesses support families that the

01:21:09.180 | The the ego that I don't want to give this stuff away because someday

01:21:15.060 | I'll get to it is inherently selfish, and it's also just

01:21:18.820 | inherently misguided

01:21:20.940 | I mean we get 24 hours a day

01:21:23.700 | And I feel that I do a better job of making the most of those hours than most people do because it's hardwired into my

01:21:30.300 | Genetics I think my you know I said my dad was a coal miner, but he was a coal miner

01:21:35.580 | He ran you know for years. He ran his own tire shop

01:21:38.180 | He he today. He's doing pallets the guy you know doesn't really have to work anymore

01:21:44.300 | But he's out busting his ass rebuilding and selling pallets

01:21:48.580 | Manual labor, and he's you know in his late 60s. Why because he doesn't know anything else

01:21:54.500 | He doesn't know anything, but work

01:21:56.460 | And I you know I come from a family that has it we're out of the Ukraine and we're just hard-working people

01:22:02.100 | And and I love

01:22:04.740 | Work when it's something that I actually see that I'm producing value in so when I do my podcast

01:22:11.460 | And I get an email from somebody says hey because you we started this little soap business

01:22:15.620 | Here's a couple bars of soap. I'm like that's cool, and I want to hear from him a year later and go yeah

01:22:20.820 | We did a forty five thousand dollars of soap last year my wife's quitting her job now, then I'm like hell

01:22:25.820 | Yeah, and I'm thinking I would never build a business on soap

01:22:29.980 | So that's why I don't want people bringing me like they're like do you think this is a good idea don't ask me

01:22:35.020 | I've been wrong a lot man remember Power Rangers when that came out. I thought it was a billion-dollar blunder

01:22:40.100 | I if I was a TV executive I would have screwed up like kids aren't gonna watch this

01:22:43.900 | I mean, I don't know everything so my time management is I focus on first

01:22:50.060 | What needs to be done, and then second what I want to do and then I don't have time

01:22:55.460 | After that you know

01:22:58.540 | You know we have this little duck business

01:23:01.240 | We produce these eggs, and you know that makes us about I think our gross billing on that's about eleven hundred twelve hundred dollars a month

01:23:07.940 | After two after the expenses it pretty much pays the the base of our mortgage not our you know interest in well

01:23:14.560 | It's like a principal and interest what it doesn't pay is our our tax and our PMI and all that crap

01:23:19.000 | But we're not doing it for that

01:23:20.800 | I could take the same time we put into these ducks and put together one marketing program for the podcast a month to sell something

01:23:27.820 | and make more money, but

01:23:29.820 | My ducks keep me sane. You know I work with co-workers that sing all day and don't talk bad about each other now

01:23:36.380 | They maintain my land I bought a tractor the only thing I've used it for for two years is the little card on the back

01:23:42.380 | To haul stuff around I don't have to cut weeds. I don't to cut grass. I don't have to provide fertility so

01:23:47.780 | That time while not financially the most profitable. I guess what I'm saying is I've built a lifestyle business

01:23:55.700 | It's not just about the income. It's about the lifestyle

01:24:00.180 | There's there's nothing that I want to do that I can't do and

01:24:04.220 | The things that I have to do are things that I don't mind doing and I think that's that's when you when people start looking

01:24:10.540 | At you go. Holy crap. How do you get so much done?

01:24:13.220 | Well if you want to do it, and you're able to just get rid of things that you don't want to do

01:24:18.660 | It's amazing how productive you become

01:24:20.660 | Jack thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it the survival podcast calm your show is listed in iTunes

01:24:27.060 | I knew the websites that you'd like to share with the audience

01:24:29.500 | Yeah, I mean the best website is as you said the survival podcast calm and there's a shortcut to that

01:24:35.780 | You can just go to T SPC coach

01:24:38.180 | T SPC dot co don't put an M on the end of it

01:24:41.900 | It's an actual domain just CEO and that'll link you there when you get there

01:24:45.700 | You can find pretty much everything else. I'm doing you can link over to permit ethos, which is our permaculture initiative

01:24:52.100 | We're doing some really great things with education there

01:24:54.900 | We have a really exciting group now on Facebook called the regenerative agriculture group

01:24:59.420 | It's like permaculture, but I don't have to explain to somebody that's never heard the word what that means and we have a group there of doers

01:25:04.940 | It's all people that are working to get stuff done in their own backyard

01:25:08.780 | Lots of entrepreneurial stuff on that from raising broiler chickens to micro greens to you name it

01:25:15.380 | I really recommend people check out the regenerative agriculture group

01:25:19.180 | And everything else we're doing we have like sub communities

01:25:22.660 | I have a forum that I don't even post too much hardly anymore

01:25:25.860 | That's run by my moderator team of about 25 guys and gals really great people

01:25:30.500 | We have a Zello channel Zello is like ham radio without a ham radio

01:25:35.820 | it's you turn your smartphone or your computer into like a

01:25:38.460 | Push-button radio and we there's like chat groups on it and we have the most the largest

01:25:44.580 | group and most active group on the whole Zello Network the

01:25:49.460 | Zello board of directors have actually met with the people on my group to discuss making Zello a better platform because of the most

01:25:56.260 | Heavy user group on the whole network

01:25:59.020 | Incredible people that look after each other

01:26:01.620 | leverage technology to do we've had women that had to travel across the country by themselves and

01:26:06.460 | They'll put a little app on their phone and the whole Zello group can see where they're at travel along the way

01:26:11.500 | Keep in touch with them. Somebody's always on the network making sure that if anything goes wrong with somebody's there to help them

01:26:16.540 | I mean stuff like that when I start thinking about that and going well

01:26:19.940 | All that was was a thing that I set up and let other people take over

01:26:22.740 | That's what this stuff's all about. So the survival podcast calm is a place to go. I do have a business podcast

01:26:30.500 | I did like 130 episodes and then just went

01:26:32.940 | Until somebody does every single thing in that podcast with their business and need something else. It's intellectual masturbation

01:26:40.380 | So until that happens till somebody brings me their business and goes I've done everything you said

01:26:44.820 | I do and I'm at a sticking point that's on permanent hiatus

01:26:47.660 | I ran out of time to do it

01:26:48.580 | But if you want to build a business, especially online Jack Spiegel calm will tell you how to do it

01:26:53.060 | I can always be reached through my email Jack at the survival podcast calm

01:26:57.740 | if you actually want to see me to see your email put

01:27:00.340 | TSP see in the subject line and that goes into a special folder that gets kind of priority for a review. Awesome

01:27:07.100 | Thanks for coming on

01:27:09.100 | Hey, man, I'm happy to do it

01:27:11.780 | There probably enough ideas in that

01:27:13.780 | Interview that you might want to go back and listen to it again and just find a couple

01:27:18.860 | I mean my favorite and I've heard Jack talk about it before I try not to steal his stuff, but my favorite is

01:27:23.940 | avoiding taxation by planting trees

01:27:26.900 | Or other gardening associated things I've wanted to do a long time

01:27:32.860 | I've talked about in the past the concept of turning your house from a house into a homestead, but

01:27:37.620 | Jack's done a lot of great stuff on that. I'll do more shows on that myself as I've learned how to apply it

01:27:42.060 | But how can you create and apply good planning and design to the things in your life to make them all better?

01:27:48.020 | Go back listen for some of those ideas

01:27:50.820 | Check out all jack stuff at the survival podcast calm

01:27:53.540 | all those resources that he offered and

01:27:57.100 | Hopefully he can benefit you additionally going in the forward in the future

01:28:00.780 | Thank you so much for listening to today's show

01:28:02.420 | if you would like to spend a little bit of time with me

01:28:04.340 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:08.820 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:10.820 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:15.060 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:17.060 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:20.780 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:25.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:27.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:29.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:31.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:35.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:39.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:43.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:47.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:51.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:53.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:28:57.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:01.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:05.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:09.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:13.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:17.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:19.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:21.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:23.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:27.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:29.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:31.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:33.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:35.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:37.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:39.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

01:29:41.380 | I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast

RPF0299-Jack_Spirko_Interview