Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable Kids Day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Radical Personal Finance, Episode 37. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Thursday, August 7, 2014.

Thank you for being here. Excited to bring you today's show is going to be an interview with Trevor, who writes a personal finance blog, among other projects, at IndiePF.com. Got him waiting on the line. Stay with us. So one of the things that I'm most interested in when it comes to personal finance, in case you haven't figured it out with the show topics yet, is I'm very much interested in getting out of the mainstream of personal finance.

And my reason for that is because I think many of the mainstream topics of personal finance just simply don't work. It seems like a lot of the advice that's given in the personal finance world makes the author of the book wealthy, but it certainly doesn't seem to do much for the adherence to the author's philosophies in many ways.

And so I love off-topic, off-non-mainstream personal finance topics, and that was actually how I found today's guest. Today's guest, his name is Trevor, and he's commented on the show a couple of times, and then based upon that comment, I went and checked out some of his websites and realized that we probably had a lot in common.

So today, I'm looking forward to talking to him, and we're going to talk about some of the ideas that we have found, each of us individually has found most helpful with personal finance, and I hope you enjoy. So Trevor, with that, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate your being here.

Well, hi, Joshua. It's great to be here. I look forward to the discussion that we're going to have today. You know, I think, I'm hoping, we're going to try something new. Usually, when I do an interview, I'm prone to an overly, I'm prone to over-researching things. Usually, I'll read every book someone's written or read everything that someone's done, and a lot of times I've found that when I do that, then I'm kind of leading the conversation, and sometimes it doesn't go in the most interesting ways.

It goes in the ways that I'm trying to guide it. So I don't know very much about you. I know a couple of things. So today, I'd like to just get to know you and pretend that we're sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, a couple of people interested in offbeat topics of personal finance, and let's approach it that way and see if we can learn something together, if that's okay with you.

Hey, that sounds great, Joshua. You'll be doing it live today. Perfect. It'll be fun. So I'd be curious, would you be willing just to share just a little bit of your story, who you are, what you do, in order to introduce yourself to me and also to the audience?

Yep, I'm Trevor. The last name's Van Heemert. I noticed that you didn't try to navigate that. You got that one, huh? And I don't know. I don't think of myself as anything really special. I just sort of go where the winds go, in a way. I hop from one thing to another because I get bored very quickly.

I started in, I guess, web design was really how I started off with my skill development back in 2004 when I was 16. We built our first website, my brother and I, and that sort of led one thing to another. I ended up getting into media, went to the School of Broadcasting here in Vancouver, and went directly from that into a legit job doing web design at a nearby university, also here in Vancouver.

Got bored of that in eight months and went on to become a bicycle compost person. And what bicycle composting is, is basically you are picking up compost from houses. We did this in Victoria, all around Victoria. A company called Pedal to Pedal, and that's how you first heard of me, Joshua, when you heard my interview on the Survival Podcast.

That was a while ago, right? That was at least, what, two, three years? I don't remember exactly. I think 2011 was the interview, was in 2011. So that was three years ago that I gave that interview. Still running. Everything's going okay. The municipality is doing some compost stuff now, so we're sort of being edged out in certain areas.

Even though they are not capable of handling the compost from the city, half of it is being landfilled because it's such a mess over there. Part of being on an island is that you don't really have the space to do that sort of thing, landfill or compost and stuff like that.

Was it your idea? Describe the business and describe the business model, because I do remember a little bit from your interview on TSP. But describe the business and the business model, and whose idea was that company? It wasn't my idea. I got involved sort of, I guess you could say early on.

The idea was birthed by a guy named Chris Johnson, who I've hardly met, and a couple other people who helped sort of start it up. A guy named Matt Schultz, who's still somewhat involved today, was there at the beginning. The business model is premised on the idea that people pay for us to pick up their compost in a five gallon bucket, and then we drop them off a clean one on that same day.

So we just make the waste disappear, and they pay us for the privilege. What's really revolutionary about the model is that we're composting it, we're processing it right in people's backyards. So it's composted in the same city block as it's picked up in, and that keeps everything local, and that keeps vehicles out of the equation.

Except for bicycles, basically. So it's a very low energy system, and necessarily it has to be processed locally. And then it's also used locally. When the compost is finished, we basically donate it. It gets donated to the homeowner in many cases, in exchange for the space to process, so there's no rent exchanging hands.

And it also gets donated, because there's so much of it, to urban farms in Victoria. So it ends up growing the food that appears in the farmer's market. So it's a wonderful circle, low energy circle, carbon sequestration sort of a system. So it's a really, really brilliant system. I can call it brilliant, because I didn't come up with it myself.

So I can call it brilliant without being narcissistic. I think it's brilliant, because just how out of the box it is. I've never heard of businesses like that. But I did a show recently on--well, two shows where this topic has come up. But I did a show on dumpster diving, and I read a couple of books on dumpster divers and freegans, people who get stuff for free.

And one of the things that I was impressed with was how a lot of these people are just finding a waste stream, and figuring out how to make a living on the waste stream. And then I remember talking with--I did an interview with Jacob Lund Fisker from Early Retirement Extreme, and we got into talking about permaculture concepts.

And one of the ideas of permaculture is look for a waste stream and figure out how to repurpose it. And so from a business perspective, it blows my mind that you can say, "Here's a waste stream that people have, kitchen garbage, organic kitchen garbage, and they're willing to pay you to dispose of it." And you can create a business basically with people choosing to pay extra money to give you the materials, and then you go out and turn that business into a valuable product.

And it just seems like a brilliant business idea applied that can be replicated in many different aspects of society. And I'm just amazed that somebody said, "Hey, I bet this would work." Do you know anything about the evolution of the company? Was it somebody just tried to do it for free, or as far as who came up with the idea?

Well, the guy who came up with the idea asked himself, "What can I do for somebody or for people in general that they would pay me five bucks for?" And he has all these different ideas, and one of them was, "Oh, I could pick up their compost for five bucks a week." And that's the idea they ended up running with.

And the startup of the business, the business startup costs were five dollars. That was to rent a voice mailbox, actually. He used, I think, a dumpster bike or a bike he found on the road, and he used a bicycle trailer made of a shopping cart donated temporarily from Food Not Bombs, which is a sort of activist organization that's active in many different cities, I believe.

And that was sort of the beginning. They printed out a bunch of flyers just on quarter sheet regular paper, hung it around the city, and then they got their first customer. And for a long time, it was just the one customer. And then it was two, right? And then it was four.

Today, it's hundreds. So it just grew slowly, organically, no debt ever in our history. Just a very natural, organically growing sort of business. Just people who basically showed up every week, and we just kept showing up. And we had our imitators, but our imitators wouldn't really show up as consistently.

So eventually we were the only ones left really doing bicycle composting in the city. I've never been to Victoria. Is Victoria like a super eco-hippie place? Yeah, it very much is. We were actually the--it's called a riding, and it's sort of like your electoral districts. But our riding was the only one in the entire nation that voted majority Green Party, which really sort of shows you the sort of climate of southern Vancouver Island is very hippie, very eco.

If there was one place this was going to begin, Victoria was it. So you've got a very strong sort of local agriculture culture, and you have a strong farmer's market mentality. And people care. People know not to throw their food scraps away. That really there's a better way. So yeah, it's a very good place to live.

I miss it myself. I don't live there anymore. I wish I did though. But yeah, it's a very eco sort of place, like you say. That's really neat. I live in West Palm Beach, Florida. I cannot imagine that type of business at all functioning here. But I've never tried it, so who knows?

Maybe there would be enough neighborhoods that somebody could create it. But the thing that's just so amazing to me is, and maybe this comes easily to you or to other people, but it never came easily to me until I started hearing people's stories, which is why I wanted to expose the audience to this story, is when I've always thought about starting a business, I came from a formal business school background.

So you start a business, you do a business plan, you do this, this, this, this. You get funding from venture capitalists. Exactly. You get office space. You get all, you know, whatever it is that you're doing. You develop all that great overhead. Exactly. $8,000 a month of overhead that doesn't even include employees that you have to work your butt off to then pay for.

Right. Exactly. And then I read stories, I mean stories like this one, where $5 to rent a voicemail box and a bicycle, and you go start a business. And people who haven't even graduated university. Right. All of these people. And I wonder sometimes if we could see more of these stories, and if we as individuals could just try more things, if we wouldn't be able to achieve greater freedom for ourselves as business owners, rather than persisting in this idea of I've got to work for somebody until I can save enough money to start my business.

Just go out and try ideas until you find something that sticks and that works. I mean there's zero risk to starting a business where you start it for $5 total. There's zero risk to it. If it fails, big deal, do something else. Well, I mean, I think what holds a lot of people back from actualizing this sort of an idea, and everybody has ideas, you know, ideas, you have two ideas before you have your morning piss.

Right. But I think what holds people back is that they still have to make a living somehow. And in any new business, the largest expense by far is you have to pay yourself some kind of salary, and that's just for your own rent, and that's for your own food.

So the people who started Pedal to Pedal were somewhat free from that need. We had one guy who does lumberjacking in the winter, a very Canadian occupation, as I'm sure you know. Sure. And then during the rest of the year, he can be on employment insurance, which is sort of like, it's sort of like unemployment.

And then you have other guys who are essentially homeless, living on a sailboat, which is another thing you can do in Victoria, is live very, very cheaply on a sailboat. So you do have these sort of special cases where people are finding ways to eliminate their own life expenses, which would hold most people back, and does hold most people back.

So Pedal to Pedal was birthed from this sort of freedom, which you normally don't have, especially if you grow up in the mainstream thinking along the lines of, I mean, I live on $1,000 a month. That's a quarter of, I think, what a normal person would live on in Canada, according to Stats Canada.

So there are things holding people back is the long and winding road to the point. Well, I just had lunch. As we're recording this, it's my time. It's 2.20. I just had lunch with my wife, and we were talking about -- I was talking about this as far as a sense of -- the sense of freedom that comes with entrepreneurship and business ownership as compared to being an employee.

And I was just sharing with her how, in some ways, I was always an employee before I became a financial planner. And then when I started working as a financial planner, I considered myself self-employed. I never received a salary. Everything I earned was commissions and fees that I built from nothing.

But I still was working within a large company. I still had management and supervision that was over me. And it's not until I left that, a little over a month ago, that I've kind of been starting to understand a little bit afresh what the sense of freedom is of not having an employer and how amazing that feeling is, just simply to say, "I can get up when I want to.

I can do what I want to," and just this sense of empowerment that comes from doing it. And I believe -- I'm trying to solve this, and one of the things -- one of the problems that I'd like to solve with this show is exactly the problem that you mentioned as far as the overhead that people have.

If I didn't -- I haven't talked a lot about getting out of debt, but one of the things that I think is such an important step on a financial plan is getting out of debt. Because when I was thinking about closing my practice, my practice was perfectly profitable. I was making a very fine living and thinking about starting a new business.

And when I sat down -- and we don't live -- my wife and I live in a normal three-bedroom, two-bath, relatively middle-class house. I don't know how big this house is. I don't know. It's somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 square feet, somewhere in that range. I don't remember how big it is.

But it's a big house. We're not living in an RV, although I've talked to her about it, but we haven't decided to do that. We're not living in a sailboat. We're not living in a car. We're not sleeping in a dumpster, although we've talked about this. Well, you're enjoying the best that society has to offer.

Right, right. But the reality was, because we don't have any debt and because we're relatively skillful at spending money, I sat down and we figured out, I said, "Look, I could deliver pizzas six nights a week, and I could deliver pizzas and keep our family afloat. So therefore, all of the risk of starting a business is non-existent, as long as I'm willing to work two jobs, if I'm willing to build a business in the daytime, which is what I'm doing, and then being willing to work a night job.

But if we had ratcheted our lifestyle up from where it is now, and if we had bought a house right across the street for double the money because it was more impressive, and if we had HOA dues, and if we had car payments, and if we had overhead, there's no chance I'd be able to have made the jump to go and start a business.

And I feel like most people, many people, I try not to overgeneralize, but many people are stuck in this desperate circle of working a job they don't like because they don't have an option. And if you can lower your overhead, all of a sudden all the options open up, and then add your overhead later out of passive income.

And just that business startup story to me is so amazing to prove if you can live a good life without a lot of money, then you can start a business, and then you can buy your freedom, and you don't have to wait until you have $10 million in the bank.

Yeah, and then if you can live like that someday, maybe you can live just like a normal middle class or upper middle class adult once you have, like you say, passive income to support that. But it's like what you don't want to do is compare your beginning to another person's middle.

Like people think backwards about the way that maybe they should, is they want the car that represents the wealth, and they want the house that represents the wealth without having the wealth to support that. Yeah, I think it is, you know, most people live in slave chains of their own creation.

But those are really the best kind of slave chains to have, because you can do something about it, and all it really takes is the knowledge and the willpower to follow through in what you need to do to get rid of your sort of bondage. Right. How do you live on $1,000 a month?

Well, it's funny you mention RVs. I do live in an RV. Awesome! Good for you. I didn't know that. That's awesome. Well, I've also lived in a sailboat for a little while. The RV is wonderful compared to the sailboat. It's leagues better. It's leagues more spacious. The RV is parked on my in-laws' land right now.

Although, I know that you can, we pay $500 a month between us, but I know that you can park in an actual legitimate RV park on the island for under $400. Wow. You can get rent down that low. I think it's $350 probably plus tax a month at this place, and that includes some utilities and doesn't include others.

So, yeah, rent is the biggest one. Just like on early retirement extreme, I think that's his day one of the money makeover is get your rent figured out. He recommends $250 per month per adult, which is what we're at right now. This is the lowest we've ever paid. We're basically living in here during a renovation, and then we'll be moving into one of the new parts of the house once it's finished.

So, yeah, that's a big part of it. It's funny, the $250 a number. I think when many people read that, they say, "Well, that's not possible." But it's interesting. I think it probably is in just maybe not everywhere in the world, but depending on where you're at, you're going to make some choices, and you can figure out a way to do it.

I remember that Jacob, when he said that, he was living in an RV in California, and his point was that he would make on his blog is he says, "I'm not living in an RV necessarily because I want to live in an RV, but that's how I can do it in California." But now he's living in Chicago, and he's no longer living in an RV.

He's living in a house. But the price differential between houses in California versus houses in Chicago are very different. My wife and I, for the first year we were married, we lived in downtown West Palm Beach, which is not an inexpensive place. We lived in downtown West Palm Beach, and we found a studio apartment right in the middle of the city.

It was a garage apartment behind someone's house, and our rent was $500 a month. And it was awesome because we could walk every night. We could walk down to the Intracoastal, walk to the beach. The Intracoastal, if you're not familiar with how it works down here, there's a barrier island that's about three-quarters of a mile wide.

That's Palm Beach. And then there's Intracoastal, and then there's the beach. So we lived about three-quarters, maybe about a mile, less than a mile from the Intracoastal, and a mile and a half from the beach. So an easy walk. We could go out at night and walk over to the beach.

We're right in the middle of everything, and everything around us is incredibly expensive, but we found the deal to live in an apartment for $500 a month. Yeah, that's right. And it was awesome. I mean, we loved it. We really did. And I think those kinds of opportunities are available in many places.

You just have to look for them, and many times we don't look for them. Yep, they are out there, and it's all about making it a top, top priority. And I think making it a top priority isn't something you can really force yourself to do. It has to be sort of--it has to be toward a goal that's so much more important than everything else in your life.

And for me, that goal was time, freedom, and financial--you know, financial independence, but really what that's about for me is about time, freedom. Out of a 40-hour work week, I get to do whatever I want for 38 of that, and I have-- so really only two hours of my week are spoken for as a work week.

So for me, there was nothing really more important than that. When it gets to that point, you really learn what it takes to get there. And once you're there, it's easy. It's just getting there that is the challenge in it. You know, it took me years of trying to find something where we could live on $250 per adult.

It took years to get there, but I think if you make it a priority like that, you can eventually get there. So how do you make your living now? It's on the Bucket site. It's on 5 Gallon Ideas, which was sort of a spin-off from Pedal to Pedal because I had found myself-- So this is 5gallonideas.com, right?

That's right, yeah. So Pedal to Pedal is all built around 5-gallon buckets. We had 1,000 of them company-wide, and you just start using them for everything. And then you start taking pictures of everything you're using them for, and then I started putting them online, and then I started getting links from Lifehacker and stuff like that, and then it was sort of off to the races at that point.

It's maybe the 12th site idea I've tried, and it was the one that happened to work. So I threw enough mud at the wall, and something eventually stuck, and that's how it happened. And advertising off the site, or do you sell some sort of resource? It's AdSense, it's Amazon, and there's sponsored posts we're doing now as well.

And that's enough for sure. And then there's some other sites as well, which are smaller that I don't really pay attention to, like IndiePF, which you mentioned. That's really a site I built for fun. That's for me. It doesn't actually make any money, but it's sort of like how I think is by writing.

And I'm fascinated in finance, but I don't feel like I have enough unique ideas to start my own sort of forum or start my own blog like Money Mustache has, or even a podcast. I don't feel like I have enough unique ideas because I pay too much attention to podcasts like yours or sites like Jacob's.

So my thinking is their thinking. Right. No, I feel the same way. I try to make sure that I'm always focusing on my original content, but it took me a long time to realize that, no, I actually do have something unique to offer. I'm not the early retirement story.

I'm not the Mr. Investment Guru story, but I do know -- like what I know is financial planning, and I do know -- like my mind is always looking for the angle, and I know how to integrate the formal side of financial planning over into the blogging world and kind of how to integrate those two.

And so that's the message that I'm trying to get out is to kind of integrate those two. And it took me a while, though, to build up the confidence to say, no, I do have something to say, and we'll see if it works. So far I'm enjoying it. And I think it's funny that you say it doesn't really matter.

It's just kind of your ideas. I've thought about -- in a couple weeks -- I think it's next month, actually -- I'm going to FinCon, which is a financial bloggers conference out in New Orleans. And as I think about the financial world and the financial blogging world, I've thought, like, why do we need so many financial bloggers?

And then I realized as I was considering it that in reality I wish everybody would write a financial blog. Not that everyone is going to make money off of their financial blog. I think people who are trying to -- a very tiny .00-something percent of blogs -- of financial blogs are going to make money, because you can't just say 50 times over, put money in a Roth IRA and expect that to be a compelling content.

But for the purpose of a journal and for the purpose of tracking what you're doing, what each of us is doing, by writing things down, I think anybody can coach themselves through all of their financial situations. And the process of doing research, the process of clarifying their thinking on paper, can be so valuable that in reality I think all of us should have our own individual personal finance blog, whether it's public or not, to track what we're doing and what's working over time.

So my hat's off to you for that. Oh, well, yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think that was the original intention of a blog, was just basically a public or not journal, so that we don't have to buy notebooks all the time. And it just happened to be that some topics were worthy of advertisement.

So that's sort of how you got the blogging culture of today, where I think more and more people are equating blogging with making money blogging, which does not necessarily have to be the case. I go to a blogging conference almost every year, Northern Voice, and they don't even allow you to submit normally a speech abstract that talks about making money blogging or making a business out of blogging, because it's about the storytelling aspects of blogging, and that's what they've decided to focus on.

So there's a lot more to it than just making money with it. Right. Right. I've got a question, and I've got a few topics that I'd like to talk to you about, but I'm interested. What was it that--why did--like, after you worked with a web programming company, it sounded like, and then you moved to Pedal to Pedal, why did you not want to go and get another job?

Why was that important to you? Was it an idea that you came up with one day all of a sudden, or was it something that grew on you? Why did you not just go get a better-paying job? Well, jobs were something I looked at in Victoria, but I also explored every single other option I could.

Victoria has a great culture of free piles, and one of the things I did was I'd go through free piles and try to resell the stuff I found in free piles on Craigslist or at the consignment store. Blogging was another thing. I was already making a little bit of money from blogging, so I did a little bit of that as well.

I did apply for some jobs that I was interested in. I didn't apply for jobs I wasn't interested in. I think I only applied for two or three. I didn't get them, so I ended up doing Pedal to Pedal. It was always a sort of leaning for me to go into entrepreneurialism.

I think I started my first business when I was five. I sold all my mom's costume jewelry out in our courtyard. After that, I had a pumpkin stand, I had lemonade stands, I resold bagels. I just tried everything that worked. It was just a natural inclination for me from a very, very young age.

I was very fortunate to move to a city like Victoria where self-employment is so common, so normal. The employment market actually is very terrible in Victoria. It's very difficult to land a job. It was sort of just the right climate for me to finally get into something really legitimate.

That was this struggling company, Pedal to Pedal, that wasn't even invoicing its clients, that wasn't doing its financial tracking, that really didn't have any good systems in place. It offered me the opportunity to do that and do some real entrepreneurialism of a real company with a couple hundred clients.

After that, I just couldn't ever go back. I'd rather live on the streets than really go back to a job. I had a good job at UBC when I was doing web design. It was a great job. It paid really well. I'd come home exhausted. I was always a little bit tired.

I'd just come home and play video games all night because that's really all I had the mental energy to do. It was sort of a happy accident that I just moved to the right city that was able to nurture what was already there, what was already a natural entrepreneurial inclination for me.

The reason I'm asking, I'm trying to figure out what it is that causes people to make that jump. I don't know because, as I mentioned, I just spent an hour with my wife talking about it over lunch. It seems to me that once you get out of the cave, to use Plato's allegory, the cave, I've told her I'm not going back.

I can see myself accepting a job with somebody doing something if there were a chance to learn something. If I had a chance to do something really neat and something really cool that I was really interested in learning, I could see myself accepting a job doing something like that.

Something that advances your own agenda. Right. I'd rather have a hot dog cart out in front of the courthouse and do that every day and not even make enough money to save and go back and go into the corporate world. I would rather make less money, and I think I could make lots of money as an entrepreneur.

To me, I don't see it as one or the other. I don't see it as you're destined for poverty if you pursue entrepreneurialism, and you're destined for wealth if you take great jobs. I see it the other way around. If you're the kind of person that's going to do well in your job, then you're the kind of person who could probably do way better as an entrepreneur.

But I don't understand what it is that, in my own mind and in my own path, that made that transition. I've not understood how to help other people, clients, understand that and build the confidence to make that jump. It's a subject I'm interested in researching and trying to figure out what those triggers are.

So if you've got any light on that, share it with me. Yeah, I think part of it is the story of my brother and I is an interesting one. Because I think part of it is that intrinsic motivation, that willpower to kick your own ass and not have somebody else kicking it for you.

My brother and I are both very similar in many, many ways. We're creative in our own ways. We're intelligent, I suppose. But I have the ability to kick my own butt, and he does not. So he does very well at his job. He's a very valuable member of his team.

But when he's working for himself, or even working for me, he doesn't produce, he doesn't ship like he would. Because he gives himself a break all the time. But does he care? Does he care? I find myself getting up earlier every morning, staying up later, working on my show and my other projects because I care.

And I'm working a lot harder now for myself than I did in the past because I didn't care. So is it that he lacks some kind of internal, intrinsic character quality? Or is it that he hasn't found the subject that he cares about enough to do something about yet?

Well, I don't know. You say, you use the word "care," but that can mean a lot of different things, I think. Like, do you care about the subject itself? Do you care about where that's going to take you eventually? Have you tasted the freedom? Have you tasted the fruit and you just crave it again?

Like, tasting the freedom? I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think it can vary a lot, individual by individual. From what I've seen from my own life, the ability to get up early and, like you say, work late on your own stuff, I think that's rare. And I think it's probably--I don't want to get into conspiracies, but I think it could have been something that has been trained out of us through the schooling system.

That ability to really be intrinsically motivated and even to care about what you're doing, I guess. Right. Right. I don't know. I'm interested in trying to figure it out, and you mentioned the school system. To this day, I cannot figure out if--I can't figure out, was it conspiracy or was it not?

Was it happenstance of how our educational system has evolved, or was it designed to have those results? I don't know the answer. I find compelling arguments on either side. At this point, I've just kind of thrown up my hand and said, "Well, it doesn't really matter why or where it came from.

Let's just go with what is, and let's get rid of what is and replace it with something better." Yeah, and deal with it on its own terms. And I know people who loved their school years, and those are the people who make great employees, I think. And I know people like myself who just couldn't wait for summer to roll around and would be happy if every day was a week end.

So, you have different people with different inclinations, I think. And the people least satisfied with the sort of system, the way things are presented, are the ones who are most likely to, I think, succeed doing their own thing. And you see this with people like Steve Jobs, who was so dissatisfied with Western culture that he went on an Eastern mysticism pilgrimage.

He went so far as to do that, and I don't know many people who would go so far as to do that. But that's what he did because he was so dissatisfied. And he came back and he basically stayed true to his own sort of beliefs until the end of his life.

And people like even Bill Gates, who dropped out of school and just did his own thing. Right. It's an interesting theme that I look at, and I wonder, I was listening, I've been trying to figure out what some of the tools and the keys would be to help people make the career shift.

And I've got a lot of ideas on the financial planning side. I've been able to coach some clients through making that shift from the financial planning side. But as far as from the emotional side, I've wondered about it. So, somebody recommended that Dan Miller, a man named Dan Miller, who wrote a book called 48 Days to the Work You Love.

So I went over and I started listening to his podcast. And I had read his book a few years ago, but it didn't really click with me. I didn't find it to be that useful. But I went over and just started listening to his podcast. And I started listening to him as far as how he was coaching people through.

And he had this question from one of his listeners. And one of the questions was, I don't have, and the listener told him, he said, I don't have any passions. And he said, well, what happens is a lot of times we get our passions beat out of us. And I thought about that with regard to school, is that I think that that may be a big impact.

I can't imagine somebody not having something they're interested in. But I can imagine us suppressing the things that we're interested in by being forced to study all the things that we don't really care about. And by somebody saying, this matters, and you know it doesn't matter. I've never used calculus.

But someone says, oh, you've got to learn calculus. And we know that there are people who are illiterate, have complete, they have zero literacy, they have zero numeracy. And yet they're still able to make life go. And so, but yet the whole, like the schooling system says, no, you're supposed to care about this.

You're supposed to learn these basics of geology. And many people just force themselves to do it. And not to get all psychoanalytical. I mean to get all psychoanalytical, I wonder if that doesn't have a big impact. But if you have any more thoughts on that, let me know. Otherwise we'll move on to something else.

Any more thoughts on that before I go on? Well, yeah, the passion one. I mean I never knew that I had any passion for anything when I was growing up. Because I think passion is something that's a result of life experience. You're not born with a passion for, for example, impressionistic art.

It's something that develops through your life, through your experiences, and through basically what you do. You know, you may, my life has been a study in one thing leading to another. And passion has come from the one thing leading to another. And experiencing many different things. And trying out many different things.

I've had all kinds of different jobs. So I think asking a 17 year old what their passion is, is the wrong question. Because they haven't had the life experience to necessarily have one. They don't have to have one. They might. They might have a passion for drama. You know, it's a sort of a myopic curriculum that you have in high school.

So maybe only 10% of the people going through high school are going to find something that really riles them up. So if it takes somebody until their 30s to find their passion, I think that that's perfectly reasonable. Right, right. I have one other thought on that. And it's interesting.

I think one of the reasons I think it's so valuable just to chat about things like this. And to listen to podcasts, to listen to shows like mine. Listen to shows like, to read blogs, to listen to other shows. Is that I think a lot of this is mental.

And it's not financial. I was reading last night, there's an author, I don't know if you're familiar with him. But there's an author, his name is Ernie Zylinski. And he's written various books. Two of my favorites of which are a book called, one is called "The Joy of Not Working." And the other is called "How to Retire Wild, Happy, and Free." And I want to get him on the show, so I was looking at his website last night to send him an email.

And I was looking at his bio. And it said on his bio, it said that, loosely paraphrasing, I don't have it in front of me. It said, "Ernie retired at the age of 31 with a net worth of minus $31,000 to prove that you don't need money to retire." No, I don't think you do.

And he went on to say that since that time, he has refused to work more than four to five hours a day. And at this point in time, he enjoys an income higher than 80% of the general population. And he's done it his way for the last 30 years.

And I was just so struck by that. And because of the fact that I had read his book in the past, let me read this. Here we go. I'm going to read this to you because I wanted to get it right, so I just pulled it up. So I'll read two paragraphs.

"Ernie is an innovative ex-corporate worker who was blessed to have been fired from his job as a professional engineer over 20 years ago and to have leveraged his many years of struggles without a real job into a lifestyle of personal and financial freedom that is the envy of the corporate world.

Ernie's core message that ordinary people can attain out of the ordinary results and make a difference in this world is at the heart of his work. Ernie deeply believes in the powers of creativity and well-intentioned action as the most important elements for personal prosperity and financial freedom. To prove this, Ernie semi-retired when he was 31 years old and had a net worth of minus $30,000.

As a result of his creative efforts, working only four or five hours a day, however, Ernie today is financially well off and makes a better income than 85% of full-time corporate workers." And what struck me about that and then with some of the things I've been reading as far as dumpster divers and hobos and vagabonds and even just guys like you, and you said, "I didn't have a lot of money when I quit," is that it's almost nothing to do with the finance and it's everything to do with the creativity.

And if you're willing to look at creative solutions like getting people to pay you, and I know it wasn't your idea, but I just think it's a good example of a creative solution, getting people to pay you to ride your bicycle over to their house and pick up their compost that they could easily compost in their own backyard.

I mean, there's no reason why you can't just toss your vegetable scraps. You don't even have to turn the pile. You just toss them there and let them rot. But they're willing to pay you a few bucks a week to drive by and pick up their bucket because it helps them to feel good.

And it's that creativity that matters. And so it's almost like I feel like my life is wasted as a financial planner because what I need to teach is creativity because if I teach enough creativity, people can figure it out and then the financial stuff doesn't matter. And I think a really interesting catalyst, your author guy, what's Skzinski?

Zylinski. Zylinski, Z-E-L-I-N-S-K-I. Sorry. I think an interesting aspect of Ernie's life is that he was almost forced in a way because he retired with so much debt, you know, $30,000. Probably when he retired, you know, that was a lot more money. He had sort of the fire in his belly like it's succeed or die.

Right. It's not like he's a trust fund guy with no job and he's thinking of starting a business. He's somebody in a tight spot. And I think, I mean, it's the old adage. What is it? Desperation breeds ingenuity or something similar to that. Right. Where your mind is constantly struggling.

You know, it's an anxiety response. It's not comfortable to be in that $31,000 of debt. It's not comfortable to struggle with ideas that will get you out of that, but it is effective. Right. And I sort of went through the same thing. You know, I graduated with $10,000 in student loans and not $10,000 in savings.

So I had a negative net worth when I stopped working. And so I had to, you know, do something to make the rent. So I had to sort of hustle in a way. And it was really only through that that I managed to make it. If I had just been a trust fund kid, we probably wouldn't be talking today.

I wouldn't have really done anything worthy of note if I didn't have to at the time. Sure. You're right, and I've seen this with people. You sometimes see it if you -- well, you see it with salespeople. I've read lots of studies on salespeople. I mean, you have the quota, you've got the end of the year.

Salespeople are so much more productive when their numbers are coming up and they've got to get something done. And you think, why wouldn't they just apply that same thing the whole year and not do it all in December? Or I've seen this when people -- maybe you have a child that all of a sudden you have a child that has special needs.

And then, you know, dad or mom, they turn their career on overtime and they triple their income because they've got to be able to pay for the treatment that their child with special needs has. And when something becomes a must-do or they get a health condition and they've got to cut back but they've got to stay productive, when something becomes a must-do, then all of a sudden it's like we summon extra creative ability, we summon extra -- I don't know what the word is -- gumption, motivation, and we get it done.

And I wonder if there is a way where you can intentionally cultivate that in yourself. It's a little bit risky, but I've heard it referred to as burning the ships. So if you're an immigrant, you know, in the early -- in the 1700s in America, and you come over on ships with a bunch of your countrymen, those ships, you know, those planks are useful for other things.

You can build houses with them or you can burn them for firewood. But it's also a huge risk because at that point there's no going back. So it's sort of -- if you can intentionally burn your ships to force that creativity out of yourself, I think as an effective strategy, it's also a risky strategy.

Right. And if you do it for yourself, I mean, I've had people -- this is one of the things why automatic savings plans are so effective. If you establish an automatic savings plan, if you have a regular income, and you establish an automatic savings plan where the money doesn't hit your checking account, you're forcing yourself to save the money.

And I've implemented that in my life and I've seen it work wonders for people. When things are forced, this is one of the adages of why some people say you should buy a house, because it forces you to make that mortgage payment, or why there are certain investments where you're forced to make a monthly payment and you don't have a choice about it versus, oh, I should save some money.

So it's something that we can -- Which never works. Right. Right. It's something we can employ, I think, to move us towards our goals. It's a useful technique. I've got two other quick things on my list, and then if there's anything that you would like to share. But I was going to ask you, you are a little bit involved with something called spin farming, right?

Yeah, that's right. Spin farming is a farming method that I know about, yes, and that we exercise in Victoria on a small scale. So share that with the audience, because I'm familiar just through what I've read online and what I've listened to with different people. And I guess the leader seems to be a guy named Curtis Stone, and he's on my list of people to interview for the show.

But give us an introduction to what is spin farming and why, why people should care. Well, Curtis Stone is a guy in Kelowna. He's not the leader, but he is the most well-known spin farmer, and he's the most vocal spin farmer. He actually has a history in concert promotion, which has enabled him to really be good at getting the word out.

So he's almost like they're--he's not the deity, but he is the prophet. He's the evangelist. That's right. So what spin farming is, is it's basically--you can look at it as successful for many of the reasons that pedal to pedal is successful, in that it's urban, it's small scale, it's cheap to start up, and it's profitable.

So what spin farming is, is you're basically farming on backyards. And since one backyard is not enough, you use your neighbor's backyards, with their permission, of course, hopefully. Or you use backyards from people nearby within, you know, driving distance if you choose to have a car. But Curtis Stone runs his spin farm all on bicycle.

So imagine you've got donated backyards, you've got easy commuting distance, you've got no vehicles in some cases. So you've got very little overhead. So unlike traditional farms, you save a lot more of the profit for yourself. And what that means is you're actually able to make money doing it, and you're often able to do it without taking on any debt.

One of the biggest problems with corporate farms--or I shouldn't say corporate farms, but traditional family farms-- is that they lose money every year because they take out huge loans at the beginning of the year. They spend huge amounts of money on equipment. You have to own your land, and oftentimes they are either paying large taxes on overvalued land, or they're paying large leases for leased land.

So they may make $100,000 a year, and they may spend $90,000 a year, or they may spend $113,000 a year. So really they're making no money. It's sort of a lifestyle business. And they're doing what's called farming the brown envelope, which is tax rebates. So spin farming is sort of this elegant alternative where you're using very specific inputs to have very high productivity.

It's labor-intensive, but it's human labor only. So you have high productivity for high-value crops that can be sold locally and fresh. So the most popular crops to grow are something like garlic, which you can sell for $15 a pound. Something like salad greens, which you can sell for unbelievably high prices per pound to restaurants.

Or you'll sell microgreens, or you'll sell--basically you're selling stuff that isn't really a commodity crop. Like there's not really people spin farming potatoes or onions or these cheap carbohydrate staples. And it's a standardized bed. It's a standardized irrigation system. Everything's been standardized by the spin farming people, so that you can make very good estimates of what you can earn on any given land base.

So it's this elegant system. You buy the startup manuals. I think the most you'll ever spend is $100 if you buy all the manuals. And then you're sort of into this--you have the marketing, you have the financials, you have all this infrastructure. It's almost like buying a franchise, because somebody's done all the business planning for you.

And that's why it's such a successful system, because it takes a lot of the guesswork out. And it's urban based, so you can do it right in the city where people are buying your food. When I first heard about it, it was exactly the same way with the idea of pedal to pedal.

Where I thought, "Wow, how is it possible that you can make a business doing something like that?" I thought the same thing with spin farming. And it just blew my mind, the creativity of the solution. All of one side of my extended family is involved in agriculture out in the western US states, out in Nebraska and Wyoming and Colorado.

And my grandfather--both of my grandfathers--one of my grandfathers was a farmer his entire life until he died. My other grandfather was a farmer and a rancher for some of his life, and then he got out of it because it was just unprofitable. And so I've been around it for a while.

And I was thinking to myself, when I heard about spin farming--and so I compare my family's experiences with all of the things you just said. So normally, if you had an interest in agriculture and you want to go into agriculture, you need to go, you need to buy or lease land, you need to buy tractors.

All of this is very expensive, it's very intensive. There's a certain economy of scale that you have to hit to be profitable. And your profitability, if you grow on commodity crops, in the mainstream commodity crops, your profitability is influenced 100% by your tax rebating--by your tax system. That's right.

Farming the envelope. Right. Now if you flip that to spin farming, what spin farming was is that instead of buying land, you're going to borrow land, either in exchange you may pay for it, or you may do some sort of sharing arrangement. Instead of going out to the country where land is expensive, you stay in the city and you borrow people's backyards that they're not really using anyway.

Exactly. Because of the fact that you're there, you have the ability to--I mean, you have all the infrastructure. You don't have to go and buy a $100,000 pivot sprinkler system. You just put a garden hose up to somebody's back wall and pay them for their water bill, for the increase in their water bill.

And get purified water, beautiful water. Right. You're right in the middle of all of your customers. And so when I saw the picture, I think it was Curtis Stone who I saw the picture of, here he is riding his bicycle around the city with a tiller on a trailer.

So you don't even have to buy a big pickup truck. You don't have to go and buy a $40,000 pickup truck. And when I saw the numbers as far as when you take out all those expenses, and yes, it is a labor--it seems to me to be definitely a labor-intensive business.

So you would have to be okay with wanting to do the labor-intensive business of it. But it seems like it could be as profitable--I've done some financial planning for some farmers and some ranchers in citrus and in various crops. Here in Florida. And some of them are incredibly profitable.

Many of them are just barely profitable. And yet the amount of overhead and risk they have is huge. Whereas in this world, you have no overhead and no risk. And I was just struck by the fact, if I could--if there were somebody locally here, where I live, that was interested in spin farming, I've actually gotten together with a group of people and we've talked about it to see if we can do it.

But none of us seem to have the ability to do it at this point. But if there were somebody locally, I would let someone live in my house and I would let them farm my backyard-- I've got a big backyard--just so I could have the crops from it. Or my share of the crops from it.

And I thought, what a creative way to skip the money and look at things alternatively and build a business in a creative way where there's no risk and no overhead by rethinking all of the assumptions. I think it's awesome. And again, to bring it back to earlier in the discussion, you're using a waste stream.

Because yards are often wasted space, they waste water, they're wasteful in so many ways, it's very rare that a yard is fully utilized. So you're using this waste stream, you're turning it productive, and then that productivity is then paying dividends, as it were. When I look--and this is why I am an eternal bull when it comes to economy, to economic goings on.

Not that there's not--there are always going to be times of difficulty. But when you look around and you look at the amount of waste in our society, and you see people doing things like transforming backyards into farms, and you think that--not that everyone--I don't think everyone needs to do it or should do it, but the fact that it's possible, and in my block of--let's say there's 20 houses on my block, if somebody farmed six of them, you could add that would be enough land for them to feed all 20 of us, plus profit with other people.

And there you just created an entire livelihood for somebody, doing something that's incredibly valuable. And it hasn't in the past--the need hasn't been there, so our society has adjusted. But there's people doing it now, and so these are options that are so creative, and these ideas can be applied to any industry.

If we rethink how we do things, there's so many possibilities that we could pursue if we just rethink how we do things. Yeah, I think waste creates--waste, it's a bad thing and everything, but it does create a lot of slack in the system. Even--I just had a thought about all the wasted sunlight that falls on parking lots.

That's a resource, and that's a waste of that resource. Sun falling on a forest isn't wasted, but sun falling on a parking lot is. So can we design parking garages with solar panels or some other kind of garden, some other kind of thing on the roof? So it's just one of many, many, many, many ways we waste in society, because we're so removed from natural systems, and we're sort of removed from consequences from wasting energy, because of fossil fuels, which we primarily run our society on.

We can afford to waste now, but like you say, it's the future. You can be optimistic about the future just because we can figure that out. We can figure out how to use all that waste and end up profiting even in a society where a gallon of gas costs $40.

Right, right, we really can. I saw an idea--it's funny you mentioned parking lots. Maybe you've seen this. I think it was probably Canada. It seems like out in Vancouver you have this culture that seems to support this type of thing, the local culture you talked about from the island.

But I saw where somebody had built a whole farm in container farms, and they had built these large containers that you move with a forklift, but their entire farm was on an urban space underneath an overpass of a highway. Is that soul foods? Maybe. And then they can move the entire thing.

You put the whole farm on semi-trucks and truck it away. And there was all these big containers that they were growing all of these vegetables right in the middle, right on a parking lot because they were using containerized gardens, and they were just renting the land for cheap, and their entire operation was mobile where if they needed to move it, they could just simply rent some semi-trucks and get a forklift and put all of these big containers up on the semi-trucks, and in a weekend they could move their farm to an entirely new location.

And they had a farm in the middle of the city with this idea. I don't remember what the name of the company was, but I was really impressed with it. Yeah, that's pretty remarkable. And then the landowner can't try and screw you because you're not really tied to the land.

You're in a bunch of mobile bins, and the sun's everywhere. The sun's free. Right. Yeah, that's a pretty remarkable idea. I get excited talking about this stuff. Last subject that I had that I wanted to ask you about, because it's a subject I'm not an expert in, and if you're willing to talk about it, you play around or have played around with some of the cryptocurrencies, right?

Oh, yeah. How did you get into that? Well, I got into it because my brother and I talked about it a bit, and everybody sees the reports, "Oh, Bitcoin is $1,000 today, and yesterday it was $30." So it's sort of like this get-rich-quick idea that catches on into the news.

It's a very attractive narrative for viewers. So it's just like lottery winners are a very attractive narrative. So I had known about it from that, and I had been following Bitcoin since quite early on with casual interest. And then I saw a lot of people talking about this new cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, which was popular around Christmas.

And what it is, basically, cryptocurrency is you're solving puzzles, and each solved puzzle is a coin. And you can exchange this coin. You can exchange it for money. You can exchange it for goods and services. What's actually the brilliance behind Bitcoin is how it's a distributed model rather than a centralized model like PayPal or banks.

So the brilliance behind the algorithm is that every computer with a wallet or every smartphone with a wallet holds the entire transaction history of the coin. So that method allows a bunch of people with this transaction history to confirm with each other that transactions are legitimate. And this solves the double spending problem that normally has been solved by centralization of financial power.

Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, these guys all solve the double spending problem. You know, you can't spend a digital currency twice. Bitcoin was brilliant because it solves it by decentralizing rather than centralizing. OK, so that's why Bitcoin exists, basically. But it's also distributed in the way where anybody can print the money.

And you solve the problem of overprinting by making it based on processor power instead of based on, say, mining for gold, which is how you solve the overspending problem, overprinting problem with that currency, or a central bank, which will solve the overspending or the overprinting problem with paper currency.

This kind of currency solves the overprinting problem by having it based on processor power. So you run your processor or you run your graphics card really, really, really fast. You can't like watch YouTube while you're doing this because you're running your graphics card so fast. And what you're doing then is you're solving these puzzles which are printing your coins.

So I got into it because I've got a graphics card, you know, just like almost everybody with a computer has a graphics card. And you can run the graphics card during the night and it will literally print money for you at a small rate. So I got into it because it's a it's passive income, which is very interesting to me.

B, it uses hardware I already have. And C, it's a brilliant distributed system that, you know, I think it's worth supporting. And I think it's it's worth caring about. But you're not printing. You're not you're not mining Bitcoin. You're mining Dogecoin. Yeah, I'm mining Dogecoin because Bitcoin I mean, then this gets into sort of the more nitty gritty politics of it.

Bitcoin is an older hash system that can be exploited and it has been. So basically to play in the Bitcoin game at all, you have to buy cards from this certain one company, ASIC. So it's sort of this hardware manufacturer has almost cornered the market on printing these Bitcoins on this brilliant idea.

So what they're doing is they're re-centralizing the power in a way. So it's all sort of cryptocurrency politics. It's interesting if you care about it. It's not if you don't. But basically Bitcoin to mine Bitcoin, you have to buy this expensive equipment, which is really good for nothing else but mining Bitcoin.

So the great thing about mining Dogecoin when it was when you were able to mine Dogecoin profitably, is that it was based on a new algorithm that requires graphics cards, which is, again, redistributing the power to mine currency to users everywhere, not just to these large hardware manufacturing companies.

So that's why I mined that. And then I would just trade that for Bitcoin in a multi pool. So I have both. I have Doge and I have Bitcoin. But is it still profitable? Like, are you still doing it or is that ship has sailed? It's the same company again, the company that creates the hardware.

So if you buy a hundred dollars of hardware from them, it will perform better than a thousand dollars of hardware from just graphics cards. So you have to I mean, yeah, you have to buy the hundred dollar hardware from this one company. And again, it's not good for anything else.

You can't play games with it. You can't really resell it because it's outdated in six months. So it sort of takes the power away from the people in a way. So that's happened to Dogecoin. Now, there's a new hash for coins like Vertcoin where now, oh, you can now mine Vertcoin.

And, you know, that's good. But I haven't really bothered yet. I haven't even heard of that one. Yeah. So that's the new one that can be mined with graphics cards and hasn't been figured out by this. These big companies like Butterfly Labs that that manufacture the hardware. So, I don't know.

It's fascinating. But when you dig really deep into anything, it's fascinating. Right. I'm so interested in Bitcoin and it took me a while to figure it out. But once I I think I have a better understanding of it now than I never did, than I ever did. And it is I'm not going to I won't go into it now, but it is so exciting.

The possibilities that it opens up that the possibilities that have never existed based upon how monetary systems presently work. And, you know, I don't I wonder if I don't know if Bitcoin will be the will ultimately be the solution that works for the long term. I kind of doubt it because it's hard to imagine the first major one sticking around.

But just as far as the underlying ideas of the cryptocurrency is, it's awesome. And then I love the fact I mean, I do see so much growth as far as the people that are accepting Bitcoin and the and the growth and the merchants and the ability to use it.

And I get excited about it just because it. It solves a lot of problems that people don't really know exist until you start thinking about it and digging into it. I got to I don't know who I got to find somebody to bring on the show to really talk through it.

And because I'm not expert enough to talk it through with the audience, but I'd like to find someone to bring on the show to talk about the just the philosophy behind it and that the barriers that it opens up, that it that it destroys that that are current that are currently exist because of the way our monetary systems and systems of exchange currently function.

So I think it's exciting. I love seeing people do it. I've never I've never gotten into the mining thing. And it seems like it seems like you've got to be on the the the leading edge to make that profitable. And I wish Bitcoin would just be completely stable and be done with this whole growth phase and just be stable.

But we'll see if we'll see if it happens. Well, it's in its infancy. So, you know, 100 years from now, if Bitcoin's still around, I'm I'm I'm sure it will be more stable then. Right. Right. It's hard to believe it will be around in 100 years. But but who knows?

You never know. Who knows anything else that you want to cover, Trevor, as far as any other topics that you think would be interesting for the audience? Well, I just wanted to mention that I found it very interesting that everything we discussed today was basically about decentralized systems, distributed solutions, which is very against the norm to be thinking about things in sort of giving everybody the power.

Another really interesting decentralization is sort of Airbnb, which is, you know, anybody can be a hotel, right. And, you know, we all have computers. Anybody can be a graphic artist. Anybody can build a Web site. Anybody can be a blogger. It's just, you know, for all the extra fascism and totalitarianism that we hear about a lot, we've never really had more power as individuals in a way, because things are you have this amazing in technology.

Primarily, you have this amazing distributive qualities. So the same thing with the Internet. I I think it's just really encouraging that that at least some things in our world are getting better. Right. Right. I mean, that's one of my themes. And I had to think I have to figure out how to express it, because I think sometimes people don't don't get it.

But in a world that it's this weird paradox that you just said, is that it seems like at least from my knowledge of history, there has almost never been a time of greater tyranny, greater restriction and less freedom on a macro scale. And yet for an individual, it seems like in history, I cannot think of a time that was ever better, that has ever been better to live than right now, where there's more opportunities for personal freedom and there are fewer restrictions and fewer chains and fewer bondages, less bondage and the chains all seem to be mental.

It seems to be that exactly like we talked about of the switch from going from employee to entrepreneur. It seems like it's 100 percent psychological and mental and zero percent actual reality. And it's why I go sometimes and I wonder if people understand, but I look at it, I make all these jokes about, you know, go on food stamps, go on unemployment, these kinds of things.

And my point is that we live in a so we live in a increasingly and I guess you're in Canada and I'm in the US. We have a different but they're similar in many ways. We live in an increasingly subsidized socialist state. And if I could remove most of those things, I personally would overnight that gets into a whole conference, but that gets into a whole discussion between what's practical versus philosophically, you know, ain't to shoot at.

But for an individual, it's like how do you possibly fail in life by going for your dreams? You can't go hungry. You can't be without a place to live. You can't like there's never there's no personal danger. There's no personal danger to life and limb. So even if you go entirely bankrupt and you and you're and you're making the switch and you can't figure out how to do it profitably, like you still can't fail.

It's still all this mental construct. And so, I mean, all of these things that we're talking about, the government, I mean, in a world where politicians are being dramatically affected their policies by the connection of information with the social networks, with Facebook, with Twitter, you see it happening all over the world.

You see it happening in the US. I assume it's happening in Canada, although I'm certainly not current on your news. I mean, political power is changing and it is only possible because we've solved the direct person to person communication. And when you realize the ability to have these decentralized systems, I mean, I don't know how to put it in words that people get, but I just I think it's exciting.

It's an exciting time we live in. Yeah, there's no more interesting time to live in for good or bad, really. There's never. Well, I'm sure they've always been saying that. But for me, certainly, it's such a fascinating time to be an observer. And the thing is, you here's my other point with finance.

You said you're living on a thousand dollars a month. You are living a better quality of life on a thousand dollars a month than Rockefeller. Then Rockefeller lived. What was that? Eighty, a hundred years ago, years ago. Yeah. With his with his billions. And you are living a better quality of life.

Entertainment is free. I mean, it is it is free. And so at a thousand dollars a month, your lifestyle and your quality of life is better than the richest person in the world. Fifty years ago, even thirty five years ago. Now, do you live in a palace? No. But who cares about that?

I mean, that's all that's all ego. That's all trying to show off what you can do. You can only be in one place and you can be in one place with a fifty dollar phone and you can have the entertainment of the whole world that has never been better and never been more free.

So this this idea that I somehow that's why I like this. I'm going to I'm going to finish my rant. And like it's all about ego. And so the things that people are sacrificing their life energy for, which I think is a brilliant term. And I don't I want to give credit.

I guess it was Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robbins who wrote Your Money or Your Life. That was where I first read it. Maybe they stole it from somewhere. But the things that people are spending their life energy for are all these status symbols. And they you are spending your life energy, which you never get back for ego, for for status, for things that don't really I mean, maybe they matter to you.

And if they matter to you, I'm not going to say they don't matter. I think that when you gain perspective, they probably don't matter. And the fact is, is that you can spend the world. You can spend your life energy accumulating amazing experiences. And you can do it with with no money, with almost no money.

But you have to see through it. It's like I mean, it's like the Matrix. You've got to see the Matrix and see how it works in order to figure out how to get out of it. So I love that you pointed that out. I'll give you the last word.

Well, it's like it's like I said, it's it's it's never been a better time to be a slave because you can actually do something about it. Right. Right. That's a fitting place to leave. Trevor, where what would you like? What resources or websites or what would you like to plug?

Where would you like people to find you? Plug plug anything you want to plug. Yeah. Well, the main site is fivegallonideas.com. That's a site about buckets. There's a lot of homesteading stuff on there. More. A lot of the prepping stuff is very popular on there, like disaster preparedness. I've got a startup manual for the compost business.

We'd like to see a lot of these growing up. We've already seen a bunch of them start up, especially in Australia. That's super cool. That's something you're selling as a how to manual. Yeah, it's it's similar to the spin farming. I took the idea directly from them. Sell this startup manual so people can do their own.

It's sort of like a like almost free franchising, basically. So for it's it's nine dollars. It's available on fivegallonideas.com as well. That's to help you start up your own compost project if you want to in your city, if you think your city will be receptive to that. And that's really the main stuff for me.

It's pedal to pedal dot com. If you want to read about that company, that's pedal as in a bike to pedal as in a flower dot com. So those are really the main sites that are. Oh, and in the PF dot com, which has sort of my weird ideas.

Anytime I think I have a unique thought about finance, which is rare, I put it there. So, yeah, those are really, I guess, the three sites. And you'll probably put those in the in the show description, whatever it's called. So, yeah, we won't bog down with too many sites.

Those are really the three main ones to our discussion today. Awesome. I'll make sure I have those in the notes. And by the way, thanks for the plug on NDPF. It was cool to see my name above Dave Ramsey's name as far as. Oh, well, I mean, that's my favorite thing to see.

Stream and, you know, mostly uninteresting. But I put him there because his ideas about getting out of debt are for some reason strange. So I have a love hate relationship with Dave Ramsey. I think he is awesome as far as some of the work that he's done in the love hate relationship is because he's the he's the top dog and he's the he's the he's the big guy.

And what happens anytime you become the top dog, then you you're easy to you're easy to criticize. Easy prey. He is amazing at motivating people to get out of debt. And I don't understand how he how he is so effective at it. And I mean, I have a world of respect for him and I try to figure out, like, how does he do it?

And he is awful on certain financial planning topics. And one of these days I'm going to when I decide to to build my audience of haters, I'm going to do a show and try to destroy some of the advice he gives. But yeah, if you if you criticize him enough, he'll demand that you come on his show.

I've seen that happen before. Really? Yeah, I've seen it happen before with just small time sort of Forbes writers. He's had them on the show. He's tried to get them to shred. Yeah, it's very popular. And oh, yeah, right wing radio, which is right. Right wing radio. Yeah. He's doing he's doing more for the average person.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. The average American family than maybe anybody in finance today. So you have to have respect for that. I have. And he was the reason why I got out of debt when I was in college is 100 percent based upon my total money makeover. When I read my total money makeover, I just said, what am I being an idiot here with student loans?

Like I'm just being an idiot. And I. He punches you in the face with his. Exactly. Exactly. And that's what makes him so effective. But on the other hand, one of these days I'm going to write a. I will, you know, not because I want to. That's the problem is I don't want to come across as someone who is I don't I'm not on an agenda against a person like I think he's awesome.

I used to teach his financial piece university class. Like I used to I used to buy cartons of his books and I would give them away to I would give them away to clients. I would carry literally I'd buy them 10 in his cartons of 10 for 100 bucks, 10 bucks a book.

And I would give them away to clients that were in debt because I would tell them I can't walk through this with you. Like I can't spend enough time, but follow this plan. But then over time, I just had to put more and more disclaimers. And I'd say, but you need to ignore this.

You need to ignore this. You ignore this. And then I worked with so many people that told me I'm doing the Dave Ramsey plan. But what they meant by doing the Dave Ramsey plan was, well, I sort of kind of want to get out of debt. And then I realized I was like, it sounds really good, but I don't see enough results from it.

And and then when you get into some specific financial planning recommendations, I mean, when I have a client tell me I'm going to retire with, you know, I'm going to retire. And I'm going to draw 8 percent. I'm going to draw 12 percent return from my portfolio. And I'm going to have eight.

And then there's a 4 percent inflation rate. So therefore, my income is going to be 8 percent of my portfolio. And I would sit there and just like look at them with my mouth ajar and say, do you really believe that? And people really do. And and it's it's it's it's.

So he his safe withdrawal rate, quote unquote, is 8 percent, which is double the percentage of what, you know, somebody like you, a financial planner would. And I wouldn't even use 4 percent is still on the high end. Right. And I wouldn't even use a 4 percent number for most people because the 4 percent number has certain assumptions in there.

It doesn't assume fees. It doesn't assume investment expenses. Most people have fees and investment expenses, whether they should or not. That's up to you. But like and it doesn't assume and it assumes. Yeah, there's lots of assumptions on it. And so it's just it's just crazy. Like when you get into that situation, it's crazy.

But and that was one of the biggest influence. And I haven't even said this on the show, but one of the biggest influences that I said on the show or one of my reasons for starting this podcast is I said, somebody needs to create a podcast to help people have the content that they need, because what happens is that financial planning becomes a cult of personality.

I do what Dave Ramsey says. I do what Susie Orman says. I do what insert your favorite blogger says. And it becomes a cult of personality. And the average consumer doesn't have the level of sophistication to identify. Here's what's going on. Here's what's good. Here's what's bad. Here's how I can take that and use it in my life.

And and so my hope is to say, I don't want to build a cult of personality. I'm going to try to teach you how to think. And I'll point out, you know, why I think the way I do. But don't be drawn to me because of me, my personality.

Don't do anything because I say this is what you should do. Let me teach you how to analyze stuff and let me teach you think to think like a financial planner. So then you can take all of the good from a guy like Dave and you can leave the stuff that isn't going to work for you.

Yeah, you can you can sort of internalize it and make your own decisions based on, I guess, your own personal situation. Right. And this is how politics should work. Like and this is where it's like I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat. I agree. I have I have I do a lot better with some of my friends who are communists than I do with some of my friends who are Republicans.

And but I used to be a Republican, but it took a long time before I realized, wait a second, this is all a bunch of lies like this is not me. I don't I may agree with this and I may agree with that, but but I don't agree with this and this.

And I'm not just going to, you know, toe the party line. And so I see it as this cancer in our society where we say, I'm a whatever your parties are up there. I'm a Green Party or I'm a I don't even know what your your political parties. And the reality is we need to look and we need to evaluate things not on the basis of what party, but on the basis of individual ideas.

And there will still be parties, but we need about eight more of them, but not two of them. Or how many major political parties you guys have in Canada? We have more. Right. We have one major conservative one and many, many liberal ones. And our conservative one is called the Liberals.

It's very confusing. Canadian politics are very odd. But I'd say we have. Four major parties, maybe maybe five major parties and three or four that are likely to win major elections. So, yeah, we definitely have more in Canada. There's not sort of the same false duopoly like you have in the United States.

Yeah, it's tough. And what's funny is that you say names like I am a I am probably the biggest, the most mainstream name that I would probably personally identify with would be a classical liberal. Like I'm a liberal, but I'm not a liberal in the sense that it's understood in 2014.

I'm a classical liberal, which is a libertarian, which is so off on the fringe. Well, these these words have been so poised, destroyed. Exactly. Libertarian is such a poisoned word. It is. I think I think if you call yourself an independent, maybe that one hasn't been branded as much because it basically just means, you know, screw you.

I'm, you know, independent. Independent can mean really anything. But, you know, can you really herd cats and form a political party around independence? I doubt it. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess if we need mass action, there's got to be some kind of brand. I don't know. I think I've been watching a lot of a man.

What's his name? He's a British guy. But he's saying, yeah, we just need more and more governments like I want, you know, independence for Scotland. I want independence for everyone. I want independence for every single neighborhood and let everybody sort of figure it out. We need more, you know, not less.

And that was really the original idea behind the United States was you have states as the supreme sort of entity. Right now, that's not what we have at all. States have to do what the federal government says or they withhold highway funds. Right. So the original idea behind the United States was absolutely brilliant as you you give states their sovereignty.

And then, you know, if you don't like the rules in Florida, well, you you can move and you don't even need, you know, a visa to move to Louisiana and go check out Louisiana. And then you've got sort of this built in evolutionary process. It's the same process you have in biological evolution where each state has to step up because, oh, we're losing people, you know, or we're losing influence.

So really, we have to. So it's a it's a pressure toward what the people want rather than a pressure away from what the people want, which is what we have now with centralized federal power. So I say more of everything, more parties, more state, more, more, more power to, you know, neighborhoods, you know, let us let a neighborhood decide it's building code instead of letting the province decide it's building code.

You know, and that's where I mean, work like you're doing work like I'm doing. I hope I hope it has an impact, because when you recognize the fact that you can build an amazing way, you can live in an RV and be very comfortable and and have it be very posh and you can do it for a lot cheaper.

Or you can build an amazing house that's incredibly eco friendly, that's incredibly energy efficient, that's perfect to your climate for, you know, twenty thousand dollars instead of two hundred thousand dollars. And the only thing standing in your way is the building codes. Then people will compete. And that competition, it matters.

I mean, look at Detroit. Detroit destroyed itself. And then people people just get up and leave. Well, then when people get up and leave, the whole tax base goes away. And then finally, you declare bankruptcy. You start over. And it's a city I mean, I'd like to go there and visit and just see what's going on right now.

But it seems like it's a city that has more challenges, but is experiencing more incredible renewal. Well, it's a renaissance. Detroit is in a sort of in a renaissance phase right now. And that's happened because of the sort of creative destruction. Right. Right. That's exciting. Well, Trevor, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

I really appreciate you being with us. Oh, well, thank you, Joshua. I hope your listeners, you know, enjoyed my experience. I think they will. I'm sure they will. I think this kind of content is valuable. All right. And that's our show for the day. I appreciate Trevor. Thank you for being here with us.

And I appreciate I appreciate your listening. Hopefully, some of the concepts and ideas that we discussed today were were interesting and and inspiring and thought provoking. Let me know how you like this kind of show. I personally really enjoy these show like today of just having a conversation with somebody, because I think there's a creative synergy in a conversation like this that is a creative synergy that allows you to learn something from a different perspective.

And hopefully it's funny. I mean, as Trevor said at the end, it's funny how many of the solutions to problems seem to be similar in so many ways, whether that's distribution and localized presence and and they seem to be similar. So hopefully you found it thought provoking. My goal here is to bring you something thought provoking, educational, entertaining, to bring those things together so that every single day you feel a little bit smarter.

Appreciate you listening today. If you're interested for the show notes for today's show, this is show number 37. You'll find all the show notes at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/37. I will link to all of Trevor's sites. And if you have questions, comments, feedback, feel free to comment on the blog, shoot me an email, Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com.

Reach out on Twitter @RadicalPF. I would love it. I would be thrilled if you leave a review for the show. That's so helpful. We're sitting right now in the, I think last time I checked, we were in like the number two or number three spot in the new and noteworthy section for the investing section on iTunes.

And that wouldn't be possible if it weren't for all of your reviews. And I would be thrilled to make it into the general business section. I don't know if that's possible, but it would be possible with your reviews. So please, if you enjoy the show or if you hate the show, come by the iTunes link and just leave a review.

If you're listening on a mobile device, especially one that you're using the podcast app on Apple, you can do it right on your phone. Just pull up the show in the iTunes store and rate it and leave a review, put a comment. I read every one of those and I appreciate every one of them.

Thanks for listening. Figure out how you can break the mental chains that you're facing because all of us face them and go out and set yourself free. Have a great Thursday, everybody. Done. Get the perfect gift for the wine lover in your life at WineEnthusiast.com Personalized wine openers? WineEnthusiast.com Cheese boards?

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