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 say survivalist you say Your answer to that question will reveal a lot about The way that you think and what you think the word and the term survival or survival list and survivalism.

These are not popular terms today or are they After all turn on the TV or look at a newsstand and basically everywhere you see a survival show Well today we're gonna talk with one of the leaders in the modern-day survival movement a man named Jack Spirico He's founder of the survival podcast and most importantly He's one of the more sane and rational people that you'll hear talk about the topic of survivalism 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 (Music) Welcome to the radical personal finance podcast.

My name is Joshua sheets, and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today 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 plan for financial freedom in ten years or less pay attention to the latter part of that actually both parts of that because Yet again, I'm bringing a guest on who lives a rich life and who has become financially free in less than ten years 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 by far the most popular Podcast on survivalism He has about a hundred and fifty thousand people a day that tune in for him to talk about 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 Time fan of Jack's podcast I've had a long time interest in the topic of survival even as you'll hear Me mention in the beginning of the interview today And I've always just enjoyed Jack's content because he is a creative thinker who applies things in a careful and rational way He talks about tax planning within the context of planting a tree which I think is brilliant and as a tax planner and someone who talks day and there thinks a lot about how to Eliminate taxes.

I always find that type of refresh Thinking refreshing so you're in for a treat. We try to cover a bunch of topics first in today's interview We cover a little bit of Jack's backstory with his business then we move into the topic of permaculture and lifestyle design as 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 Sponsor of the day today is trade King trade King is the official brokerage supplier of radical personal finance supplier provider Sponsor of radical personal finance trade King is absolutely awesome They have four dollar ninety five cent stock trades Which if you go and check the fees on your mutual funds and and then go and ask yourself How much am I actually paying for these things?

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That could be a nice little hey 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 Slash radical hundred dollar bonus sponsor of the day. Number two is YNAB. You need a budget YNAB It's the worst name ever Except you'll remember it But the best budgeting software bar none YNAB solves all of the problems of traditional budgeting By forcing you to do a proactive budget with money that you actually have I've used just about every single budgeting software system out there I still continue to play with things that I find and just always trying new things.

I always enjoy adjusting things But I have never found something better than YNAB and it's the way that each and every day I pull open I pull open YNAB pull up my bank reconcile my transactions check my budget. That's how I do it I suggest you do it to sign up for a free 30-day trial at radical personal finance comm slash YNAB radical personal finance comm slash YNAB free 30-day trial full featured version of the software check it out And now let's get to the interview with Jack Spirico Jack welcome to radical personal finance Hey, man, glad to be here with you today.

It's an honor to get to talk to you Thought I'd first just want to acknowledge to you. Thank you for putting out the show that you do I've mentioned on my show before but I'll tell you right here at the start of the interview that Probably the survival podcast has influenced the way I designed radical personal finance probably more than any other show Out there that I listened to and I owe you a debt of gratitude for your work in that regard.

So, thank you Hey, man, that's why I do what I do Whatever I can do to help people to get their own thing going is the it's really the biggest motivating factor I have in my life. Awesome So I'd like to start briefly with a little bit of the backstory because on radical personal finance we talk a lot about entrepreneurship and love for you to tell the business story of 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 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 probably I had kind of built a career from nothing. I never went to college or anything like that But through a combination of luck and hard work.

I had managed to move into a sales position in my early 20s. I Broke that six-figure barrier by the time I was 26 once I did that no one really cared about a degree so I'd become successful in a In the sales world moved into a VP of sales position for a very large company called fluke which many of your folks out there probably would have heard of us a Northeast regional VP of sales for fluke fluke networks and But that wore me out on the travel 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 We came back down here and I took a position in a marketing position for a fraction of what I Had been making previously, but it was a way to no longer travel and Kind of that led through another progression to where I ended up starting my own marketing company So I went from being basically the the son of a coal miner making minimum wage straight out of the army to eventually rising up through various sales positions in telecommunications breaking that six-figure barrier at about 26 and ended up is the regional vice president of sales in the Northeast region of a company called fluke networks and there a division of the company that most people know of is just fluke that if you see the electricians with the Yellow multimeters that's that's fluke.

So that gives you an idea the size of the company It's a 500 million dollar company and I was there their top salesperson in the in the world as the Northeast regional sales VP and I Hated parts of that job though. I hated sitting down to lunches and dinners with people that I really Wouldn't walk across the street for if I didn't have to and I hated the travel You know 9/11 I was in Pittsburgh.

My family was in Eastern, Pennsylvania. I couldn't get home to him I'm listening to my wife cry on the phone. My kids scared He's asking me if a war can come here things like that and I'm not home 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 I I Didn't want to be in this kind of gig anymore work because the money in sales is in travel So I switched from sales to marketing and I had gotten very good at internet marketing During the the the tech bubble burst of the early 2000s I had taken up using internet marketing to get leads for my own salespeople to put people into Seats at seminars and things like that and I had started selling things like long-distance service and things like that So I'd gotten really good at internet marketing 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 so I went to work for a search engine marketing firm and ended up as their director of search marketing and It was okay, but it paid a fraction of what I had made before I took a step back to go forward ended up with a company called sage telecom as their as their director of internet marketing And they were acquired by another company.

So I was like, I'm so sick of this and I had a friend Named Neil Franklin who had said, you know, I want to do something with you. So we founded a marketing firm together Called Franklin Spirko We even at one time had Donald Trump as one of our clients kind of ironic that the guys were president now I wouldn't vote for him if you put a gun to my head But I was pretty proud of that at the time But but in the end I had just got to the point where I was I was over 300 pounds I was I was still dealing, you know with all the climate at client entertainment stuff.

I was miserable. I was unhappy We've got this client that said I want to do a blog and a podcast and all this other stuff So I'm like, okay cool 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 I want you to to build this all out He says I can do all this stuff 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 So I took this $18 Plantronics headset that had tape on it.

So it would work And a $30 mp3 player because I didn't care right? It was just like I gotta figure out how this works and I plugged it in I did episode one of the survival podcast that was in June of 2008 and because of my relationship with Neil I had a lot of insight to the financial industry that people with a standard consumer level financial advisor don't I think there was a pretty big telegraph punch coming with that recession, but I really knew like a lot of times I say things financially like I Think I'm pretty sure My estimation is in 2008 All I was doing was going get out of the market get out of the market get out 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 Was you know financial preparedness and I went into all different walks of preparedness We talked a lot about things like doing drills to understand how weak you really were and stuff like that And in the first six months, we're going from June to December of that first year.

I got about 2,500 listeners and at that point I was like You know what? I can make this my walk away from the world. I hate business a year later at 18 months was when I first monetized the show and we brought in like $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 You're gonna be able to quit your job like next week and I'm like, no No, cuz that's not gonna you know, we got a we got to build this now and I built it for another year in a year and a half.

I did I walked away Completely walked away sold out my interest in the other companies to my partners Who thought I was just bat shit crazy, by the way, like how are you gonna make a living at podcasting? well, I'm already doing it so I think I'll just keep doing that and The show kind of took off from there and we we went from you know 2,500 listeners at the end of that first, you know half year and we were like 2025,000 the end of that next year and today we have a hundred fifty thousand people a day downloading the show and if you put that in perspective the The the city of Allentown has about you know in its whole metro area has about a hundred thousand people so we're one and a half times the size of Allentown, Pennsylvania just in an online radio show and We've gone into just every facet and walk of life in preparedness and self-sufficiency Independence and Liberty, I mean that's that's what the show is really all about and though it's called a survival podcast And we do talk about preparedness.

We talk about bug out bags. We talk about you know prepared for being prepared for anything from a financial collapse to a storm, but we 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 Being prepared to do without systems of support providing your own food taking care of your community we talk about it and I Think it really is the first thing like it that was ever created I wish I could say, you know that I sat down 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 This giant variety show on Liberty and Independence and that was the plan all along I was flying by the seat of my pants in the beginning but I had a work ethic that I didn't know how to let go of being the son of a coal miner and 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 a chief operational officer For one of Neal's other companies and a chief marketing officer for another company So I had three companies that I was I was sitting at sea level positions in at the same time I didn't exactly have a lot of free time But I would get up at three o'clock in the morning when my wife was still asleep 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 I would get to the office. I'd lock my door. So everybody leave me alone for ten minutes I would upload it and I'd walk away from it and I would answer questions when I got home that evening and That's what it took.

But after a year and a half of doing that I decided What could I do if I actually dedicated my life to this and that's how it became the success that it is It's an awesome story and it just shows how 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 But I mean none of my life has really been all that perfectly planned 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 the dots and in in reverse when you look at survivalism As a topic the thing that makes you different because I grew up with an interest in you know I would read the SAS survival handbook when I was a kid I remember that was one of the first books that that I would that was the first type of book that I would buy When I was a kid and I always grew it up.

I'd read these Ragnar Benson like weird fringe survivalist books, but a lot of that stuff doesn't apply over to to Real life and when you're looking at the world of survivalism There are so many kind of hardcore fringe kooks where it's just I guess kooks is not very nice 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 Is that you seem to be firmly anchored in reality while also?

Aware of the fact that reality is changing over time Where did you find your perspective or how did you develop your perspective with regard to your survivalism philosophy? Well when I started the show Part of it was just being genuine who I am And the other part of it was I was a marketer and I knew the preparedness industry Was about to explode I knew there were a lot of things going on that were concerning people I knew that the recession I saw coming was gonna create opportunity there It got actually bigger than I expected with stupid shows like doomsday preppers and all these other horribly Stupid non-reality TV shows and that helped so I wanted to be able to be in that niche But I think it's important that people need to understand that you can have an astute understanding of marketing and an astute understanding of being in the right niche and Still be true to who you are and if you can do the two together you have a recipe for success So I chose the angle of what we were gonna do based on that So as much as I was flying by the seat of my pants It was also this intrinsic You know when you do sales and marketing work for 20 years for large companies you get a little bit good at it So there was a little bit of a foreknowledge In positioning there now the other thing that I wanted to do is I didn't want to compete With you know the preparedness board at Backwoods home magazine, though.

You know I love their magazine 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 I actually wanted to create a market And I thought the best way to do that was to make preparedness Something that people would go well gee I kind of have to be stupid and irresponsible not to do this So I came up with what I called modern survivalism and that word in 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 But when I decided on it what I did is I went to Google, and I put you know quote 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 Okay, that's what I'm gonna anchor down on and then I decided well I'm gonna define what that is so then I went totally radical and said to myself Okay, now you should come up with a tagline to go with the survival podcast.

It's the worst tagline in the world Because it'll be clunky and long and ridiculous, but it'll actually be wonderful because it'll it'll make people go Gee how would I say no to that so what I came up with was? Helping you live a better life if times get tough or even if they don't now You do have to have a little bit soft point in the skull to say well I don't want that I mean just just think about that judge right hey I'm gonna give you a way to live a better life if times get really bad and even if they don't You'll still be better off.

I'm not interested. Okay. I think you need to have a doctor check you out or something 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 Everything was every single thing that you do to prepare for disasters and emergencies in the future Should improve the quality and stability of your life even if nothing goes wrong So it was the first tenant was a restatement of the strapline And I can tell you there were tons of people that came into what we were doing with a little bit of trepidation And when they heard that it was over they were like okay This is something I can get behind and because of that they were able to share it with other people without being 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 very soft way so Once I had that tenant down All I did was just look at the average American and go why do so many people?

Every time something is a hiccup in life get their ass completely kicked 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 Lot of the things in the the wilderness survival don't translate They actually translate perfectly if you look at them with the right viewpoint so if I was going to teach a class on Basic wilderness survival I'm going to talk about your five primary survival needs food water Fire is what they'll call it shelter and security and Because wilderness survival is a short-term thing The last one gets left out health and sanitation Well when I looked at the average American I realized that 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 Cataclysm something that you would hear about on Tuesday preppers if somebody if somebody lost a job And they weren't prepared to lose a job well You start worrying about the grocery bills and whether or not you can keep a house where there's food and shelter right there And then of course you know health and sanitation you no one can afford Cobra right?

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 Was money doesn't do you any good in the woods? Right unless you happen along to find some kind of trading post or something like that Money's useless in the woods.

Maybe you could burn and keep warm for five seconds But in in the actual functioning economy the functioning world that we all live in money bought all those things But then I started looking at how people buy those things we buy them all 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 We sell them by more than we need while it's more affordable We sell them think about what if I wasn't able to buy it and and these radical ideas these radical preparedness ideas Really weren't that radical one of the tenants I used to explain this in the in the formative years was Look at all the airlines that were in distress back then and I would say you know the one airline is still making money Southwest Airlines, do you know why they buy their fuel in mass contracts when fuel prices plummet?

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 Southwest went Nick don't care bought our fuel last year This is a way of creating a cap on capital expenditures and taking an unknown into a fixed known and that we could emulate these same things in our lives by Buying more food than we needed when it was on a lower cost when it was on sale when we had a coupon Simple things like that and then understanding so now I have a stockpile now the convenience So I never have to go over to my neighbors and go.

Hey, man Can I borrow a cup of sugar or something like that? Right, we have basically our own little mini store in our preparedness here in our home 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?

Generally up so if I buy more now and use it later rate their inflation alone and until we move into a deflationary curve Which I think we're still quite a ways away from That that that that game works every single time. So these it wasn't just like this one idea It was all of these little pieces and parts that were assembled together to build Resiliency into our lives in a way that when you explained it to somebody they'd go.

Oh 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 But like the coupon reality show come out and like all the things we were talking about There by the way, those shows are just BS like you can't do it at the level they do it But the basic tenants of what they're talking about stacking things Buying more when they're looking for a sale and matching a coupon up to it and I I'll be honest I can't say that I spent a lot of time clipping coupons It's not the best use of my time But when we go into a store and we see something that has a long shelf life That we use anyway, and it's on sale We buy the hell out of it and we just put it into our storage in our pantry and you know Silvers at like 16 bucks.

It was kind of creeping way way down We may be looking for a major drop in commodity prices beyond what we've already seen Put somebody emailed me the other day and said given you were saying to buy silver when it was $25 If it if it goes to $7, what will you do then?

I said I might be on the roof dancing naked happy Because I'll be I hope he'll be loading up on some silver at seven bucks And you just change your whole paradigm about the way you look at things If you're living like so you actually have to do you have to kind of live like We're in a deflationary economy, even though we're not So if you were in an inflationary economy debt makes sense But you have to stay away from debt because sooner or later debt will burn you if you're in a deflationary economy It makes sense to save because if you say versus risk The strength of the currency is is retained But what you figure out is if I start figuring out ways to create more and more inflows of currency It doesn't make sense to put it at risk What it makes us to do is spend the energy instead of figuring out which is my next financial play 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? How can I expand the value of what I have? How can I create wealth that the government can't tax? That sounds crazy, right? But I've put in over 400 fruit trees on my property the value of that 10 years from now it is incredible compared to the cost but how does a government tax an orange tree or Tax a pecan tree or tax, you know an edible dogwood that they don't even understand that such a thing exists There's no way to do that There's no way that my property Actually gets accurately assessed in the future until the day that I decide to sell it and actually send a professional in To assess it that way a county tax assessor can't get their arms around the way I've improved my property all of these things have cumulated together to be you know You're asking me try to condense the whole philosophy.

That's been almost 1800 episodes now down into a few minutes So hopefully that help I know it's kind of long but that's kind of where we're coming from I think it's it's valuable and one of the things that I've learned is that when you face a problem Sometimes facing the problem direct head-on is a good way to approach it 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 lateral perspective and so all of the principles that you just talked about I think are Are the key they they Involve creativity they involve you looking and saying how can I provide for my actual needs in a way?

That's creatively appropriate to my situation I want to ask you about the starting place and then want to move to permaculture as a financial plan Pretend for a moment that I am an average median income 30 year old 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 I'm concerned about the economy because I got lots of questions like this Economic doom and gloom is a common theme if you were giving me a roadmap How would you tell me to approach starting to make a plan for my own family's security and well-being?

Well, I mean the first place I'm gonna start is eliminating the cancer in America of debt like I Don't want to talk to you about your investments other than protect your wealth So we're just gonna take your money and unless you really know exactly why you have it leveraged the way that you do We're gonna deleverage it 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 And we don't even need it.

We don't need to worry about anything else And if you have to go out and deliver pizzas Is a part-time job in the evening for the next couple is the number one priority and before we do that We're gonna stockpile a couple thousand dollars in an emergency fund first and we're gonna have that So when the car breaks down or whatever, this is very Dave Ramsey ish Okay, and that this is where Dave Ramsey and I part ways at the end of this this debt snowball type thing We're gonna pay off all the debt starting on the smallest debt.

We're gonna pay that one off 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 nothing else matters right now, but that You'll take debt that you think is gonna take you 10 years to pay off You'll pay it off in two or less My wife and I did this and we did it after I left the big paying job So people go that's easy to pay off debt when you're making, you know, six figures or whatever I we decided that we had screwed up and we needed to do something about this.

I was making $45,000 a year. We had $38,000 in consumer debt. We paid it off in 18 months My wife's a nurse so you can imagine that right you can imagine that she wasn't exactly rolling in the Benjamins either she's an LVN so like you're not even an RN like, you know a Pediatric nurse at the time she now works for me But at the time, you know 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 Why we decided that we could have all the nights out We wanted all the nice bottles of wine We wanted all of that stuff as soon as we were done with this first and I remember the day we paid off the last bit of that debt we owed $3,800 on a truck and That was a kind of our last bit of it.

We got the thing in the mail and I said, oh 3,800 bucks Hell we got that in the bank account. Just write a check pay it off She's like, I don't know if I want to spend all that money right now I'm like, well if the truck was zero and the bank offered to give us $3,800 of Of it credit against it.

Would you take the money? She goes damn it just wrote the check, you know, and we got the title a couple days later that Will take all of that fear all of that angst and just set it up on the shelf It'll still be there a little bit, but it won't be on your back It'll be on the shelf in the back of the room.

So that's number one get that done. Then the next thing Start becoming a saver. I Hear people all the time. I have $5,000. What do I need to invest in? $100 bills $20 bills $50 bills, but I'm worried about inflation. You're not worried about inflation, right? You have $5,000 You're not worried about inflation.

You're worried about more money save your money Don't even don't even worry about investing rejectedly crap until you have at least $30,000 saved up in cash and 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 you will be Extremely conservative with that money.

You will look at that money and you will say my number one duty is to protect that money Where we've been convinced in America our number one duty with our money is to grow our money No, you can't grow something once it's been devalued or wiped out So we should come at the approach of investing with how do I protect myself from losses?

Way too deep a topic to get into today kind of get a technical trading and stuff like that But I promise you if you save $30,000 in cash before you invest your money You'll figure it out because it'll matter to you where if it just goes in that automatic drip from your employer 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 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 All the 401ks now forcing us into government debt is our conservative option there.

You just kind of look at it 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 So own that savings and then I would say once you get there It's probably time to try to find a good financial advisor unless you want to become 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 It's gonna be very difficult It's gonna be extremely difficult for a person with a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars invest to find a financial advisor 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 But there's advisors like that that take people on kind of is is almost like apprentice protege types And say if I help this guy now when he's doing a little better He'll stick with me and you can sometimes find that or you just become a student as yourself You learn how to protect your profits What people need to learn to do is if you own a security and it makes you?

15% and you've set a goal to make 7% a year. You just made two years take the profits Now and that gives you two years to figure out the next cherry-picked place to put that money What does everybody do dollar cost average don't worry about don't time the market.

Don't be a traitor You know what? You end up being the guy that gets crushed like everybody else when the market falls So you kind of take that conservative protective approach to your investing but begin to broaden your horizons at that point, too 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 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? programming statism Worship of the government. What exactly are those schools better at if you can if you can Self-educate your children put them into self-directed learning homeschool unschool Whatever you want to call it if you can't if you have to rely on the government schools Start that folks never call them public schools They're not public schools Sears is a public shopping place.

Okay Albertsons is a public supermarket. You can go there as a member of the public and buy stuff It's open to the public a school run by our government is a government school That'll change your thinking right there If you have to rely on government schools commit as a parent to spending an hour educating your children every day Don't give me the bullshit.

You can't do it You can spend an hour educating your children to counterbalance the nonsense They're being taught in schools and you'll learn more by teaching than they'll learn by having you teach them So you'll be teaching yourself at the same time Take that kind of approach as well and begin to start Investing if you can afford it and buy a piece of property buy something a half acre or larger Start producing your own food plant perennial plantings start to invest in your land.

Stop looking at a Home as an asset when most homes are actually liabilities and start realizing when I first purchase a home If I do so with debt I have in fact purchased a liability and my goal now is to begin the conversion process of transmitting that liability into an asset assets generate profit not necessarily direct cash profits But if we can start taking our home and start to remove our dependence on energy By starting at efficiency first and alternative energy second start producing some of our own food Improve the underlying value of the property if we can do that 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 Why don't we even hear that anymore?

Why doesn't anybody talk that way anymore because it's not good for the consumer driven economy What people are taught to do now and you know this find a small home buy it as a starter home Wait for the equity value to increase sell it capture the equity move to another house a little bit bigger Do it again do it two or four times?

Then you finally get your dream home in your 50s by the way a 30-year mortgage You're gonna be there 80s before it's paid off Just saying and then when you get there take out a giant home equity loan and go on vacation and put a pool in Where what we should be taught to do is is buy very smart the very first time and make a lifelong investment in that property and do so in a way that clouds up the 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 you can and once you have a debt-free life a stable family You've prepared for the basics of emergencies You can go 30 to 60 days if if somebody took your keys away from you locked you in your house You might be uncomfortable.

You might smell a little bad, but you'd be okay 60 days later You get to that point, you know, you're educating your children to true education based on the trivium of grammar rhetoric and logic You own your home. All you have to be able to cover is the property taxes, which yes are theft But it's a function of modern reality all of a sudden now you have all of this boldness So what people do is they act bold when they're afraid if that makes sense 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 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 Right, so you're acting bold when you're afraid you don't understand everything when you actually take this approach What you become is very informed very conservative yet at the same time 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 Right or or whatever it is that you do and I think that would be the most important thing somewhere in all of this Find your passion and build a business based on it There has never been a time in history Where it's easier to build a business from the ground up from nothing to something than right now Anybody that thinks the heyday of the entrepreneur is over has not paid attention My business could not exist without the internet your podcast.

This is becoming its own business could not exist without the internet. I Believed that I could build a website on anything and make a profit Maybe not a giant one 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 Sales funnels.

I'm talking about plastic and aluminum funnels I could make a profitable website now it might make 20 bucks a month But let that sink in that you could take something completely Preposterous and for a couple bucks in hosting and a little bit of acquired knowledge make a profit with it I can't remember his name But the guys the president of Alibaba the drop shipping import company from China said if you live in America And you're not wealthy by your 30s today.

It's your own fault It might be a bit of an oversimplification, but I believe there's real truth to it because again You're talking to a guy that when I got out of the army back in 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 I was 21 years old and by the time I was 26 years old I was making over a hundred thousand dollars here never saw the inside of a college classroom And it was nothing but hard work And I'm telling you if what exists today existed then if you could start a podcast Back then if you could build websites and generate money the way that you can today back then if you could take something like Homesteading and do all your homesteading stuff put it on YouTube and actually generate an income off of it existed in the 1990s I would have never spent any time, you know traveling all over the country meeting people I didn't want I would have done that from ground zero That's the opportunity that exists today.

It's not easy. It's not easy It's hard But it's simple and the difference is easy something that anybody can do even by accident 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 Jack you've become an expert a noted expert in the field of permaculture and I watched your transition I believe you were the original your show was the original place where I heard the term and Really captured my interest and attention pretty intensely I'd like to talk about designing a lifestyle using permaculture principles and Let's do a scenario because I think it's useful in the modern world To have a kind of a pie-in-the-sky scenario just just imagine I sent you an eager young man or woman You know 15 16 years old 18, whatever age early early adulthood without any hang-ups No student loan debt anything like that.

Now we're giving you a brush and I'd like you to paint out kind of a just a independently wealthy self-sufficient lifestyle bait based upon Integrating the natural world with the financial world and good design to minimize total lifetime costs, etc Basically, I want you to design Zaytuna farms in in Australia Okay 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 And I look at I look at his property tours and things like that and I think why on earth Did someone not teach me how to do this type of thing when I was 15 years old?

So if you were gonna teach somebody how to approach lifestyle design from a permaculture perspective, how would you do that? Well, I think you have to balance that with the desires of the person So I'm gonna assume for your example that this young person actually Wants to have some level of their living come from the land Directly because all of our livings come from the land all of our every resource we have is a natural resource every 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 Soil or wood or energy that's harvested from the earth, but this person wants what you're talking about 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 the duck holding area If that's the case, and I think that the first thing that people see is a huge impediment is access to property You can do some pretty amazing things with a quarter acre or less 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 you focus on Efficiency I own a three acre property and I'll be honest with you.

I think at my level I'd be pretty happy if it was 30 and I could deal with 300 though. I'd probably develop 30 and leave 270 is hunting land. So you've got to crack that nut first. So if they're 18 That can be a problem or the problem can be the solution.

So that's a permaculture principle The problem is a solution. So if you were that young you didn't have money 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 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 I would say to look at something like Curtis stones doing with urban farming This is a form of spin farming where what he's doing is he goes into neighborhoods that are located in the right location 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 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 Here's what it'll look like and he has an incredible book on this by the way It's called the urban farmer and basically he's farming without owning any land and he did that for about four years And by the time he was done with that he ended up buying one of the houses That he had been farming.

So all the work was done there already so that put him straight into a business model and 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 Tired right? so so that would be one way into it if you had a job and You were looking to kind of edge your way into this then I would say you got to look at buying the right property I'd really recommend you get over to Jeff Lawton comm and take a look at some of his free videos and The property walkthrough and focusing on three things with property when you're developing a property It doesn't matter if it's a little property or a big one water access and structure 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 Farming or leasing land or whatever first You're gonna do that anyway by that because you're gonna have the experience if you're gonna go straight in You really need to think about that and I would try if I were 18 19 years old want to do this I would think about a lot of different ways to do it and see that's the thing There's not a single answer to this 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 Travel to do it, you know, they're building houses somewhere frame drywall, whatever work for nothing work for crap gain the skill set Build a small house or a tiny house on a piece of land own it debt-free Start out that way So you have to figure out how do I get into?

the ability to steward land some people don't like the word own and I I Don't have a problem with the word own, but I also were touched with the fact that I'm mortal I'm gonna die someday and then like whatever I did to that land. I'm not gonna control anymore 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 So you get yourself into that piece of property and then you start looking at how am I gonna provide as much?

Of what I need without reliance on others. So then you're looking at energy efficient construction My personal biggest limitation on my property today. Is it really financial? I could put fifty thousand dollars into a solar array for my house But it's stupid because the the house is not efficient enough to make it worth doing It really doesn't make it was a built in 1979.

Do you know what interest rates were on a mortgage in 1979? Eight eighteen point nine percent Thank You Jimmy Carter eighteen point nine percent So if you have a house built in 78 79 80 Every shortcut was taken at a time when we were working with 1979 technology, right?

So this is not an energy efficient home and in putting that kind of money into a solar array here Doesn't make any sense. It's also a place with a rock slab a few inches under the ground so I can't really put a Surface contact home in though that would make sense So I have to work with what I have but if I was 18, I Mean, I would really be very tempted to look for land that I could buy For cash if I had to kill myself for a couple years to make the money and and do all the construction Myself from ground up and that way you're gonna know everything that can go wrong on your property You're not gonna have to call somebody if something breaks because you built it in the first place You know how to fix it and I would go as energy efficient as possible and as much of your own Energy creation as possible.

I would look to grow as much of my own food as possible I would do that very very heavily weighted toward annuals in the first few years Until I could shift that over to perennial production of fruit and nuts and things like that. I would definitely develop skill sets around animal husbandry There's no ROI on Calories that's better than an animal that eats something you can't eat and turns it into high quality meat So that's pastured pork.

That's pastured poultry. That's pastured cattle And if you start looking at this, how much does a family of two or three or four really need? We will this year We're building a tractor an 8x8 chicken tractor. We're gonna build two of those. We're gonna spend about 100 bucks apiece on them will Kind of nurse through this new group of ducks and geese and we just won't worry about them for right now But then we're gonna run two groups of 40 chickens.

So 80 chickens We'll have birds that you'd go out and if you bought these birds of this quality You'd be paying for them 20 to 25 dollars apiece. We'll have like six seven bucks in them in total cost Okay, that's 80 birds. That's more than a chicken a week just from that little activity alone That is is an incredibly high value product And then since you've create you've done this for yourself and you have this Attachment to the fact that that animal actually gave its life for you.

It's not Breaded crap in a red and white bucket. Okay. It's an animal that you raised So you're going to say to yourself the only way I can honor this animals life is To use every single bit of it So like what we'll do we actually have a processor because I don't have a time to process myself I'll take these 80 birds down to the processor.

I'll have 40 processed as whole birds and 40 parted out 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 Gallons of chicken stock. I'm done with chicken stock for the year. I mean, I'm good I'll can that and I'm good with chicken stock for the year We'll take the rest of it.

We'll cryo back it will freeze it. We'll have 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 This bird we cooked whole now. We're gonna go ahead and make soup out of that That's two meals.

Maybe a little bit that's pulled off as tarantulas. That's three meals So also just that one little thing That's not that hard to do takes eight weeks to raise those birds, by the way Same birds the commercial people raise just raised in a humane way that actually makes them a lot more high quality Flavor and just nutrition.

So then you say okay. Well, that's great So you're gonna meet you but that's not what I'm doing what I'm actually doing is taking those 80 birds on a dilapidated piece of land and I'm moving them on a daily basis over an eight-week period and I'm regenerating that piece of land Next year when we do that process again our feed costs on the next 80 birds will go down Because the birds from the first year that we had to feed heavily will have provided fertility and disturbance to improve the pasture for the next group of chickens and Then depending on our goals We can just create incredibly lush pasture with that or we could advance a forest behind that there leaves us in a perennial production 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 Which in Texas is great because now they're shaded So they're gonna have a higher survivability rate and if you start looking at that then I can start doing my timings So over time what we grow trees like persimmons that grow very large and have mast 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 so now I can run chickens in the winter when it's not hot and I can over graze them on a free yield a high caloric yield 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 I would say that the individual is gonna have to decide what's most important to them If you want to make a living on a quarter of an acre, I can show you how to do it It's called a backyard nursery Start growing plants learn to graft learn to start trees and bushes from seed Learn to clone learn to root learn how to do misting beds That alone could be an income unit that can provide an income for a family I know a family in New York that employs seven people On a four acre farm seven people full-time employees paid quite well for what they do.

You know what they grow roses Right. So and people when I brought that up at permaculture voices last year people that blacks not permaculture. I want to grow food I'm like, well, they're growing organic roses They're charging a premium for them because of that Do you know how much pesticides nicotinicides all that stuff goes into?

The production of things like a rose because no one cares because you don't eat it So here's people that are actually improving land, but they're just smart enough to grow a high-value product So when it comes to an income source off of a property you have to decide What it is that you want to focus on for income and I would also say you're gonna have to learn Basic business acumen and you're gonna have to learn how to do mathematical projections You're gonna have to increase your financial IQ You have to know what things like our poo are or average revenue per user in telecom or to make a generic unit so most people think of like if I have a business and I do 10,000 units and I make $10 a unit I make a hundred thousand dollars minus my expenses great if I want to double that well I need to go and sell twice as many No You need to increase your average sale price That can be done by making the product more premium and being able to charge more for it That can be done by figuring out other 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 You know all that stuff bundled together and you have so you have to learn that you have to learn The concepts that are to me 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 Cogs cost of goods sold.

What is it actually people say? Well, I make $20 a chicken doing pastured chickens No, you don't, you know, not unless space aliens beam your chicken to you all processed and ready to go And you still have a marketing expense. What is what is that bird eat? What does it eat?

I don't know anybody that's gotten to a level yet where their birds are a hundred percent pastured their feet So what's the cost of feed? What is the cost in energy to get food and water to them? What what are what are you spending in labor hours? Maintaining those animals if you've built things like tractors, okay Which a tractor for those that may I realize now I'm on a financial show So my own attractors basically a large movable pen that lets the chickens have access to the ground so we can control their movements Well, what did that cost until that things paid back?

It's an expense against every bird you sell so you to design your lifestyle you have to learn to think like a business person and I think if there's Anything we are totally screwing our young people with today It's that our universities and our government schools are so dedicated to brainwashing them to the gloriousness of socialism and And I'm as politically agnostic as it gets I'm an anarchist So it's not like I'm preaching Republican here for somebody that might think so But but our schools are dedicated to teaching our children that socialism is good to the extent that they have villainized words like profit and That means that a child or a young adult cannot come out of either high school or university and have any understanding any fundamental understanding whatsoever of economics They can't comprehend economics because to comprehend economics The first thing you have to say is how do I ensure that the effort that put is put here is?

Actually worth doing and we define that with profit if profit becomes a cuss word How the hell is a person gonna understand economics and I hear all these young people around permaculture You know what? They say to me Josh. I want to start a company. I want it to be a nonprofit Okay, and this is I have to give credit to Mark Shepard for this but if you have a nonprofit Without a profitable entity attached to it first.

You are a professional beggar, right? That's all that you are. The nonprofit is a is a tax Vehicle so that when you become really successful and have surplus income and you want to do good things You go out and create a nonprofit. You never call it yours You put an independent board of directors in place and you take your excess evil profits You put them in a nonprofit and you get to decide where that money goes Instead of letting somebody in Washington decide where it goes for you.

You'll never hear that in school Either you know university or high school business courses, whatever So that person can't design the life that way because they don't have the knowledge If I ask you, how do you get a nail into a piece of a wood? What you'd say a hammer, okay?

But if you didn't know a hammer existed I need some sort of heavy use common sense some sort of heavy blunt instrument to bang it in and If I showed you a hammer, even if you'd never seen one before and you looked at a nail you go Oh, I don't work.

What we've done is we've so Educated our children that when you show them a hammer in a nail 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 It creates a microaggression Seriously, here's a microaggression the nail didn't want to be in that piece of oak And by the way, some evil bastard cut down the oak tree and made it into a piece of wood.

I mean, so when I get in the permaculture with young people I have to give them a little bit of that brain shock because Like I don't want to cut a tree down. What are you gonna live it? Right. What you need to do is make sure for every tree you cut down You've done enough to make sure three grow back That that's the way you you handle resource management here And you you start figuring things out like so another need that we would have if I have a homestead I'm putting in I need fuel wood.

So let's learn efficiency So let's design something like a rocket stove. So we're gonna do a lot of our cooking on a rocket stove We can take little handfuls of wood and we can cook full meals on them So now let's go out and plant a tree like black locust.

So we plant black locust We give it about four or five years It gets up till it's about you know, eight nine feet high and we go and we just we're evil We get a chainsaw out burn fossil fuels and cut it right off at chest height Cut all that up into a bunch of little pieces, you know, what happens it grows back It grows back incredibly rapidly We can start cutting that tree for that type of use in five to six year rotations and never actually kill a tree again 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 Wood burning wood burning heat.

I might be doing my rotations in 10 or 12 years, but I can use the same tree just applied differently, so When you want me to say how a person should design their life What you're asking me to do is come in and paint your picture for you And what I what I really prefer to do is say you have the canvas, you know You you have the the the paint you have the brushes you have the knives.

Let me show you how they work and Then you paint your picture the way that you want your life to be and It has to be that way I mean my last tenant in my modern survival philosophy is my plan cannot and will not work for you What you do matters and you have to make these decisions for yourself All that I do is provide you the knowledge to build life the way that you want it Because what happens is if I say do these 20 things whether it's preparedness or permaculture or lifestyle design 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 But if I say here's all the knowledge that you need Here's the way to think about this and I guess that's the biggest thing is to learn systems thinking To start realizing that every single thing you do whether it's on a property or in your life or in an educational Program is connected to every other single piece of it 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 relative location and Then I guess the biggest thing that our young people work so hard for but yet are so frivolous with is Social capital.

I think it the most valuable thing that you can build today is social capital That's why I call it social networking, right? Tweeting and Pinteresting and Facebooking all that stuff 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 It's all about social capital, but it's worthless social capital How many people that you wanted to like you in high school?

Whether they did or not where it was important and you made an effort for it Josh. Do you even know today? Do you even know where they are? Yeah, right. So we Say I all those people that somehow seemed important at this point I think I have two or three friends from high school and that's it See and you but you spend so much time and people worry about what clothes do I buy on what shoes do I wear?

I also at least he didn't in the 80s when I was in school, right? That was how you were popular. You looked right you dressed right? 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 Not really a friend.

He was an old man. That was a friend of my grandfather's Lived up the road from us. His name was buddy shoemaker in Jonestown, Pennsylvania buddy made wine Homemade wine really good wine. I didn't understand the word social capital at the time, but looking back I recognized it for what it was this guy could call a favor in anywhere.

This was buddies deal You grow grapes you grow raspberries, whatever you pick it you put in buckets you bring it to the buddies house He writes your name on the bucket you go away when your wines ready. He calls you He takes half of the stuff that he made wine and gives it to you.

He keeps the other half That was it. That was his whole deal And if he need if he needed something he usually didn't pay cash You want parsley wine you want raspberry wine? You want some real sake? What do you want and he would barter for this stuff? And if he needed a favor throw a couple bottles of you know, Andrew Andrew Spirko My my my grandfather Biff's conquer grape wine at you or whatever it was and he could get anything done and He was a value to the community and there were a whole bunch of people that lived there that kind of knew how to Making wines not that hard I make wines and meads and beers now and I love doing it But there were a lot of people that went that's that's that's his thing.

I just like it's fall I'm gonna have a harvest I take it to buddy now I can go deer hunting put meat in the freezer for my family and I know by mid spring I'll have a few gallons of wine to last throughout the year That's social capital and it's social capital on steroids If this guy had wanted to be the mayor of the the little town that was a little bit bigger That was the actual thing that owned us which was minersville.

Guess what people do there, right? 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 Is Ethan Rowland calls them the eight forms of capital and the chief one being social capital though a little bit more?

Awareness of that is happening just because you see somebody that because of their online presence can Sell a lot of product or whatever financial capital is the one that everybody thinks of but there's other forms of capital There's experiential capital. What do you know? 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 The networks experience becomes your own Cultural capital is what's the value of the pure culture of what you're involved with if you build a really cool homestead?

Guess what people will pay to come work for you I know it sounds nuts But people I have a thing going this this this Saturday and people are gonna pay me $15 to come here and work for a day and we'll sell out Okay 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 But that's because we've built a culture around what we're doing at nine mile farm in the survival podcast Living capital I talked about planting trees on your property living capital is when I have a tree I have I've taken an appreciating asset and I've taken it off of the tax doll I put a tree and I pay 20 bucks for if you had a tree on your property There was an apple tree that's 15 years old huge dropping hundreds and hundreds of pounds of apples every year and somebody walked up to you and said I'll give you 200 bucks if I can cut that tree down and take it away 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 That's a form of living capital back this cultural capital for a second.

Why do people want to work for Google? It's not just financial capital. There's good paying jobs that you can have if you qualify to work for Google Somebody else would pay you. Well, it's the culture there intellectual capital is 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 spiritual capital it is an You can't really put a number on it 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 Blending all these forms of capital together 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 Children should be taught about these forms of capital so that they can learn how to actually work with each other rather than constantly tearing each other apart 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 Is because they're so limited in their knowledge of the value that other people have It could be summed up.

It was something like what was the saying be careful of the toes you step on today? They may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow and and that's I mean 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 in the future and 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 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 It's a great survey of the topics and I would encourage 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 to see To see episodes that interest them and that's what I that's one of the things I appreciate the most about you Jack I don't With doing my own podcast I don't listen nearly as much as I used to when I had when I made more time to listen to audio but I've always appreciated your your creative creative thinking and The whole idea of understanding different forms of capital I mean that was the basic is one of the basic ethics of the US American culture, you know The whole idea of let's make a deal.

What do you got that I want? And what do I got that you want? unfortunately, many people have lost the Ability to think in that way and I'll just give a couple of modern practical examples I mean you talk about your friend with with the wine. I know people who do that all the time I know somebody who does that with honey.

He's got a few hives of honey. He makes some great honey He does all kinds of deals on Craigslist in jars of honey I know you think about even in a business you can sometimes offer things I've bartered all kinds of things to get radical personal finance off the ground when cash flow When cash inflow is tight you barter what you have that's the end and it forces you to be creative But you could take a job that you might generally need to pay $15 an hour but if you can just adjust the deal that you're offering a little bit and allow somebody to do it on a flexible Schedule or allow somebody to do it from an off-site location from their from their kitchen computer instead of Instead of there in your office all of a sudden if that works in your business structure You can lower your costs and you can create a barter deal out of all kinds of flexible things It doesn't just have to be apples and honey It's a matter of looking creatively at what we have and seeing what is this other person want and value?

So we can go away with a win-win deal Definitely and I think one of the big differences between barter and Financial transactions and I'm gonna say this when I want to clarify this you can have a transaction that involves Capital in the form of cash or money that's barter and you can have just a straight financial transaction for example if you are forced to buy insurance that you don't want and If you don't do it, there'll be some sort of a penalty 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 Financial and in a lot of financial transactions.

It's is a tendency that Either the person that spent the money feels victimized or they were lulled into the false belief that they won Right, like I showed them I got that car for next to nothing. No, you did they made all the money on the financing The this is this is the the psychology of money in America today The first thing a person if I say rich and we play word association, I say a word you say a response to it Not you probably not your listeners, but the majority of Americans if I say rich they say greedy or something like that We've been so warped to believe that when you move to a barter mentality The only way a transaction ever happens is that both sides feel they want 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 but the reciprocant says I Feel that since you're willing to give me something of value I should be willing to give you something of value in exchange and if you don't want it pass it on to somebody that does and One of the biggest pieces of my modern education going is if I call my modern education since I started becoming a teacher I Had a friend named Ron hood.

That was an icon in the survival industry he actually owns the domain survival calm to tell you how long ago he got in the game and He was like a brother. I never knew the day that I met him and we both had pretty big egos I was getting started out but a little bit of stardom Stardom ego going and he had like that establishment ego and he also had this kind of attitude that people in this industry When they approached him were looking to get something from him and we met and I could tell he was worried about that it took about two seconds for both of us to drop shields and be brothers and We had an incredible Friendship for about two years until unfortunately he passed away 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 times but we talked on the phone and by Skype almost weekly and in one of the events that he ran that I went to I learned about a thing called the barter blanket and This is where you lay down a blanket Somebody steps forward lays down an item for barter and then anybody else that's watching can lay down an exchange item You have to sell it a little bit 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?

down the first one Decides I'll take this deal or I don't want any of it or how about I split it in half and I get this in this, you know, just basic barter and When I started doing my training events here at my farm, I thought you know What a great way to honor his memory but to tell his story Break out a bottle of this crappy gin and he loved that sapphire blue crap And I keep a bottle here And if anybody ever comes to this house the new Ron you drink a shot of that whether you want it or not and I pass that bottle of gin around I tell Ron's story and we start our barter and You see people 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? what can I get I get and Then you start to see generosity flow And you start to see people do things like oh, I have a vacation home, you know on the beach in, California They usually rents out for two thousand dollars a day 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 Too rich for my blood and the person go What do you got? What do you got I didn't set a price on it 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 In a vacation home.

Well the person that owns that home knows there's gonna the stipulation is you got to pick a day I don't have it rented So is he's gonna sit there empty anyway, but they've thrown that out kind of as a generosity I've done things where I'll say I'm gonna give away five hours of my time consulting and as you might imagine I'm pretty stingy with my consulting time anymore and I'll have two or three people throw down something and I'll go, okay 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 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 get from something building relationships knowing we can come back and I actually think that you start gravitating more toward what Toby Hemingway describes as a gift based economy And I don't mean gift schemes But in permaculture city he talks about the barter that never was like we're told before there was money Everything was bartered but in in a village, let's say where I was the knife maker and your son needed a knife Well, I'm the knife maker 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 Don't have anything to give you right now. Okay here. I got like 20 of them sitting here on the table I make knives. That's what I do. I don't have anything else to do Here and when I needed something it was just there now people start to look at that as like socialism or communism But those those orders of human interaction were prior to the advent of the state These were hunter-gatherer societies that had kind of formed a little bit of stability into a village and they were always Limited in headcount to about a hundred to two hundred people and it would have to then break off It would get too big.

It would start to become a bureaucracy even without a bureaucracy and I don't I'm not fanciful. I don't think we can go back to living like that but I'm also as a modernist a believer that we take the very best of everything that we can assemble together and We put that together kind of Bruce Lee like right we absorb what is useful we reject what is useless and we add what is uniquely our own and that we can be building these types of individual communities all over the country both geographically based on real interactions and virtually based on online interactions We can start to develop our own our own our own economies our own forms of money our own systems of value exchange Bitcoin taught me something money's bullshit money is a fabrication out of thin air 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 When you come to me and say I want to buy your old iPhone and I say 200 bucks You give me some paper with some numbers on it I give you the iPhone and the transaction ends The only purpose the paper serves is an accounting because now I have the $200 you have your iPhone You can go reprogram it do whatever you want But I need something of value that I can go prove To the next party in exchange that I have actually my value came from something right and that's all Bitcoin is Bitcoin just keeps an accounting of who exchanged what and puts a value on it and It's our confidence in that value that actually allows it to propagate and people look at the American dollar and go 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 Therefore they're willing to exchange it and if we can just continue to evolve away from that 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 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 But wherever I get the opportunity to exchange Non-monetary barter, I'll do it and I'll do it every single time Jack I got one final question for you you throw out so many great ideas and The challenge often with great ideas Ideas are maybe some ideas have ideas have potential value, but frankly there are a ton of great ideas everything the real value of an idea is in the execution and the implementation and 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 remarkable frequency and and depth but you also have your hand in a number of other businesses as a consultant advisor business partner and you still make the time to get out on your own property and sweat and build your Garden the way that you desire it to be How what's your personal time management system?

And how do you get everything done that you want to get done? Well, so it's something I struggle with every day but my basics are this I have living creatures on my property 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 I do that first.

I make sure everybody's gonna live through the day then I come in and I do my show I that takes precedence over everything else over guest interviews over consultation calls over any of my peripheral businesses Anything like that the show must go on in the old adage so that gets done when that's done Then I take a look at do I need to do any marketing for the show?

Are there any commitments that I've made? Do I have any accounting to take care of stuff like that that gets done if I'm free at that point? I get out and work the land Otherwise, it's you know, maybe I have a conference call with a partner in a different business or something like that But the way I've made this work is a couple things Number one.

I've started saying no to a whole lot of stuff I have people coming at me all the time want to do something with me. I'm like you go do something 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 Trust me.

I've had failures too. You go do your own thing 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 The other thing I've done is when I do get involved with partners in a business like we have a business right now We're working on to develop a new type of caging so that suburban eyes can raise quail for meat and eggs I think it'd be a great thing to put that love because you can't love what I said about the chicken tractor You're not doing that on Maple Street, right?

So we want to do that with quail for people much easier to process higher value nutrition higher value product that you put out If you want to sell it, but this is what I told my partners in that business. I Will see to making sure that people know about it.

I will market it through my platform 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 It because I'll just use it you make me prototypes I'll use it and tell you everything screwed up and we won't release it till it works, right?

Everything else is on your plate. You guys have to worry about accounting. You guys have to worry about tax reporting You guys have to worry about inventory If there's some financial investment, I'm willing to put some of that in the game, but overall it's on you You don't want that deal can't work with you because I don't have any more time and that seems very kind of hard-lined hard-nosed and 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 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?

I call trying to breathe for them right, you're trying to make somebody successful a person that's going to be successful will be successful without my help a Person that's not going to be successful still will not be successful with my help All I can do is inspire and you talked about throwing out all these great ideas I have people all the time say shit.

I want to tell you about my idea But we just signed a non-disclosure agreement get the out of here. I'm sorry go get get get out of here The dogs looking at me like I'm yelling at him right like 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 Which probably 20 people are other already doing you're out of your mind.

I just let my ideas go Because I know that I come up with some stuff that could really be good for people and could really be good for both the customer and the producer and that I am Absolutely not going to be able to get it all done. I'm not going to be able to control everything I'm not even going to be able to be a part of everything that I can come up with 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 that could work if 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 It's not really whole yet It needs this this and this because that's what I do when I do decide to ferret out an idea I come up with like I was gonna be great 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 Sure, it makes sense, and I start working through it and go that's wrong That's wrong that needs an adjustment.

Oh gee if you do that with a quail. They break their eggs That's you find that out when you get a broken egg, okay? So you're always going to have like an idea is never Complete when it's first birthed it has to be massaged And I feel if I can put out you know over the next ten years a thousand ideas and 250 of them become businesses support families that the The the ego that I don't want to give this stuff away because someday I'll get to it is inherently selfish, and it's also just inherently misguided I mean we get 24 hours a day 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 Genetics I think my you know I said my dad was a coal miner, but he was a coal miner He ran you know for years.

He ran his own tire shop He he today. He's doing pallets the guy you know doesn't really have to work anymore But he's out busting his ass rebuilding and selling pallets Manual labor, and he's you know in his late 60s. Why because he doesn't know anything else He doesn't know anything, but work 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 And and I love Work when it's something that I actually see that I'm producing value in so when I do my podcast And I get an email from somebody says hey because you we started this little soap business 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 We did a forty five thousand dollars of soap last year my wife's quitting her job now, then I'm like hell Yeah, and I'm thinking I would never build a business on soap 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 I've been wrong a lot man remember Power Rangers when that came out.

I thought it was a billion-dollar blunder I if I was a TV executive I would have screwed up like kids aren't gonna watch this I mean, I don't know everything so my time management is I focus on first What needs to be done, and then second what I want to do and then I don't have time After that you know You know we have this little duck business 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 After two after the expenses it pretty much pays the the base of our mortgage not our you know interest in well It's like a principal and interest what it doesn't pay is our our tax and our PMI and all that crap But we're not doing it for that 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 and make more money, but 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 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 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 That time while not financially the most profitable. I guess what I'm saying is I've built a lifestyle business It's not just about the income. It's about the lifestyle There's there's nothing that I want to do that I can't do and 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 At you go.

Holy crap. How do you get so much done? Well if you want to do it, and you're able to just get rid of things that you don't want to do It's amazing how productive you become Jack thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it the survival podcast calm your show is listed in iTunes I knew the websites that you'd like to share with the audience Yeah, I mean the best website is as you said the survival podcast calm and there's a shortcut to that You can just go to T SPC coach T SPC dot co don't put an M on the end of it It's an actual domain just CEO and that'll link you there when you get there You can find pretty much everything else.

I'm doing you can link over to permit ethos, which is our permaculture initiative We're doing some really great things with education there We have a really exciting group now on Facebook called the regenerative agriculture group 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 It's all people that are working to get stuff done in their own backyard Lots of entrepreneurial stuff on that from raising broiler chickens to micro greens to you name it I really recommend people check out the regenerative agriculture group And everything else we're doing we have like sub communities I have a forum that I don't even post too much hardly anymore That's run by my moderator team of about 25 guys and gals really great people We have a Zello channel Zello is like ham radio without a ham radio it's you turn your smartphone or your computer into like a Push-button radio and we there's like chat groups on it and we have the most the largest group and most active group on the whole Zello Network the Zello board of directors have actually met with the people on my group to discuss making Zello a better platform because of the most Heavy user group on the whole network Incredible people that look after each other leverage technology to do we've had women that had to travel across the country by themselves and They'll put a little app on their phone and the whole Zello group can see where they're at travel along the way 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 I mean stuff like that when I start thinking about that and going well All that was was a thing that I set up and let other people take over That's what this stuff's all about.

So the survival podcast calm is a place to go. I do have a business podcast I did like 130 episodes and then just went Until somebody does every single thing in that podcast with their business and need something else. It's intellectual masturbation So until that happens till somebody brings me their business and goes I've done everything you said I do and I'm at a sticking point that's on permanent hiatus I ran out of time to do it But if you want to build a business, especially online Jack Spiegel calm will tell you how to do it I can always be reached through my email Jack at the survival podcast calm if you actually want to see me to see your email put TSP see in the subject line and that goes into a special folder that gets kind of priority for a review.

Awesome Thanks for coming on Hey, man, I'm happy to do it There probably enough ideas in that Interview that you might want to go back and listen to it again and just find a couple I mean my favorite and I've heard Jack talk about it before I try not to steal his stuff, but my favorite is avoiding taxation by planting trees Or other gardening associated things I've wanted to do a long time I've talked about in the past the concept of turning your house from a house into a homestead, but 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 But how can you create and apply good planning and design to the things in your life to make them all better? Go back listen for some of those ideas Check out all jack stuff at the survival podcast calm all those resources that he offered and Hopefully he can benefit you additionally going in the forward in the future Thank you so much for listening to today's show if you would like to spend a little bit of time with me I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast and I'm gonna be doing a podcast called the survival podcast