➡ Jeff from the Gridlessness YouTube channel shares his journey of living off-grid. He explains how he and his family learned to be self-sufficient, starting with a small property and gradually moving to larger ones. Jeff encourages others to consider this lifestyle, offering advice on choosing land and learning necessary skills. His goal is to show people that living off-grid is a viable and rewarding option.
➡ The text discusses living off-grid, using wood for heating and cooking, and harvesting resources from crown land. The speaker also talks about using a wood mill to create lumber for building, and collecting rainwater for domestic use. They mention using a ram pump to move water from a beaver pond to a tank on a hill, and the benefits of living in a rural area where land is relatively cheap.
➡ The text discusses how to make black powder using charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulfur. Potassium nitrate, which can be found in garden stores, is essential for the process due to its oxygen content. It can also be naturally produced by breaking down straw and manure, a process that takes about a year. The text also mentions a future project of building an earth-sheltered dome that doesn’t require heat to stay warm in winter.
➡ The text discusses the journey of a person who chose to live off-grid, focusing on self-sufficiency and financial freedom. The person shares their experiences, including the challenges and rewards of this lifestyle, emphasizing that it’s not an all-or-nothing game but a series of steps. They highlight the importance of assessing one’s needs, making concessions, and embracing the lifestyle’s demands, such as physical labor and giving up certain comforts. Despite the challenges, they find the freedom and autonomy it offers, including being debt-free and having control over their life, to be worth it.
➡ The text discusses the benefits of a self-sufficient lifestyle, where the author has chosen to live debt-free by making strategic sacrifices, such as using a composting toilet and a rainwater system, instead of expensive septic systems and wells. This lifestyle allows the author to save money, avoid debt, and have more time to spend with family and on personal interests. However, the author acknowledges that this lifestyle may not be for everyone, as it requires a willingness to step away from modern comforts and take on new challenges. The author encourages others to consider this lifestyle, emphasizing that it’s possible to start small and gradually become more self-sufficient.
➡ The text discusses the benefits of living off-grid, focusing on self-reliance and autonomy. It highlights the ability to choose which technologies to engage with, and the importance of being less reliant on large systems like the power grid, natural gas network, and banking system. The text also discusses the mental health benefits of this lifestyle, and how it has positively impacted the author’s family, particularly his five daughters who have grown up with a rich variety of life experiences and skills.
➡ The text discusses the benefits of an alternative lifestyle, such as living off-grid or homeschooling children. The author shares personal experiences, highlighting that this lifestyle can lead to a healthier, more fulfilling life, despite societal fears about isolation or cultural shock. They also emphasize that while this lifestyle may not prepare you for every scenario, it can provide a sense of preparedness and independence, especially in uncertain times. The author encourages others to consider this lifestyle, reminding them that it’s possible to live differently and still thrive.
➡ The text discusses the concept of ‘prepping’ or preparing for self-reliance in case of emergencies. It outlines three stages: micro, meso, and macro preparedness. Micro preparedness involves immediate survival needs like a 72-hour kit, while meso preparedness involves stockpiling resources. Macro preparedness is about creating a self-sustaining lifestyle. The text also discusses the differences between urban and rural survival skills, and the potential challenges each group might face in an emergency situation.
➡ The speaker discusses his varied career experiences, from a traditional 9 to 5 job to various entrepreneurial ventures in smaller communities. He mentions working remotely, operating a multipurpose homestead machine, selling handmade leather goods, and gold and silver smithing. He also talks about running a successful food truck business and the potential of gold mining, including the process of claiming mineral rights. The speaker emphasizes the many ways one can generate income and encourages taking the plunge into different ventures.
➡ The speaker discusses their hobby of gold mining in British Columbia, particularly in the Fraser river, and how the amount of gold they find varies. They also talk about their interest in silver, and how they’ve started making their own silver coins to encourage a micro economy within their community. They mention the challenges they face in selling these coins, particularly to the United States due to tariffs. Lastly, they discuss their ongoing project of creating a wood gas generator, which they hope to use as an alternative source of energy.
➡ The speaker is discussing the potential of wood gas as a reliable and efficient source of energy. They believe that while the technology is proven and close to being fully functional, it still requires some fine-tuning, particularly in interfacing the gasifiers with generators. They also mention the potential of biodigesters, which use manure to produce methane gas, as another source of energy. However, they note that these technologies are still in the experimental stage and may not be suitable for everyone.

Do you want freedom in your life? Be autonomous? If you’re not interested in that, you’re probably not listening to this podcast. When we live in a world of debt and credit, it’s really hard to actually understand what we’re getting and what we’re paying for that thing. Some of these decisions we kind of just sleepwalk into, oh, the house needs to cost a million dollars. It’s like, well, no, it doesn’t. Like this one cost 25. What we want autonomy from is things that are so big we can’t impact them. Like the power grid, natural gas, banking. We weren’t really looking to go off grid.

We were just looking for a big beautiful property that wouldn’ bankrupt us. I think way more people would choose to do something like this. It’s just that most people don’t see this as an option without having to forge a whole new path. And of course I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to tell people like, you can buy 5 acres and start chipping away, you can move from the suburbs and start to learn how to raise chickens and pigs. And I would say this is the golden age of being off grid. World War three is already happening.

This is a house of cars and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re going to see an economic crisis rare the likes of which we’ve never seen. Jeff from the Gridlessness YouTube channel, welcome again. We just did this. We had an extensive 13 minute conversation. The best golden YouTube content ever. And now we got to do it all again, hopefully in the rerun because I didn’t press record. It’s going to be even better. So let me introduce you again to the audience. Guys, this is Jeff from the Gridlessness YouTube channel. I would strongly recommend you go and subscribe if you want to learn advanced off grid skills.

Okay? This guy has a lot of knowledge to teach. We’re talking about high level different types of skills like gold mining, you know, building hydro generators, wood, gas generators, biodigesters, composting toilets. You, you even have a video on black powder, which I thought was really fun. And putting together guns, reloading. You’ve even started stamping your own silver coins. One of my favorite videos is the monster mosquito zapper because we have a real bug problem where I live, so I’m always looking for solutions. And you just have, you know, so many really advanced topics that you don’t see in and you present the information in such a way that is very accessible, very family friendly.

And you’re here today hopefully to Share the secrets of how you were able to convince yourself, your wife and your five girls to go off grid with you into the wilderness. And they all seem to be having a blast. And we’re going to talk about this book, Gridlessness Today that you wrote while you were bedridden. And it’s an autobiography, slash philosophy, and maybe some, hopefully some life lessons and practical advice on how to live off grid. So again, welcome aboard. Thanks for having me. So you’re in northern B.C. right now, and before we had to repeat this, this whole part of the conversation, you were talking about how you had basically been on several properties.

And the property you’re on now in northern British Columbia is the one where you filmed, you know, the majority of your YouTube content over the last nine years. So maybe just tell us a little bit about your origin story and how you got into this whole off grid lifestyle. Sure. Yep. So our YouTube channel, you’re right, it goes back about nine years and it, it’s on this property that I’m on right now. And we’ve been here, this is our 15th year. And so, you know, a lot of people in that last nine years got a lot of questions about like, you know, how did you get there, how did it start? Like, how did you know, how did you get these skills? Or how did you learn? And that’s what the book is.

It’s our story. It, it tells it right from the beginning. And it goes back to our very first property, I guess 20 years ago. We bought our first five acres, rural, outside a small town. And really we started learning then we started learning that one wasn’t off grid, but we did have our own well water. And we did start learning a lot about growing and raising our own food. And from there we ended up buying a big beautiful 268 acres in 2007. So 18 years ago, our first off grid property. And we weren’t really looking to go off grid, we were just looking for a big beautiful property that wouldn’t bankrupt us.

Were all these properties in the British Columbia region all in bc? Yeah, and in various regions around bc, we’ve kind of floated around a bit over the years. And so, yeah, that property necessarily kind of had to be off grid. That’s how we could afford it. And yeah, in 2007, getting a solar power system was a lot different than now. It was way more expensive. We installed 512 watts of power or 525 watts of solar panels, which right now you get on a single panel, right? Yeah, yeah, that’s. And but it worked. And, you know, we, we, we drilled a well on that property and again, we had gardens and we raised, you know, domestic animals.

And so we’ve kind of just been learning all the time. And yeah, I think at this point we have a lot of fun. Like, we’ve kind of made a homestead that’s productive and enjoyable and beautiful and we get to play around like, like you said, with that wood gasifier. That’s a project I’m still working on. And there’s kind of endless possibilities to explore. Like, I love that whole making the black powder, building a gun, you know, pour some bullets, like, can we make it shoot? And so, yeah, that’s, that’s our story. Well, to prove that you’re off grid, you didn’t get the, the walking Dead reference that I made earlier when I compared you to the mad scientist named Eugene who is the brains in the walking dead universe.

After the zombie apocalypse, they’re trying to rebuild civilization. And this one guy is taking the lead on all of these projects. You know, he’s, he develops a method of building bullets and, you know, getting energy and all of these things. So your services will probably be in great demand in the near future if things keep regressing in the way that they are. So you currently. How many acres do you got? Right now we’re on 40 acres here. And we, we bought it with friends and, and so were the kind of like friends and land partners. So we kind of each took our 20 acre half.

Okay. But the property is also 100% surrounded by crown land. Right. So it’s public land in every direction. And it feels like we got a thousand acres. And that is something that I encourage people to look for in Canada, if you don’t know, because it’s about 65% of our viewers are in the States. We have this thing called crown land here, which is essentially public land, which you can’t buy. I think sometimes they put it up for auction or the lease it out. But if you can find a property, because what I’m finding with my 160 acres here in Saskatchewan in the Aspen parkland pre transitional boreal forest zone, is that a lot of the acreage you just don’t use? You know, I mean, unless you’re grazing animals.

And even then you probably could get, you could lease it from the government or whatever, or you could, you know, graze your animals there for free. The really Goldilocks situation is where you are, where you’re only paying for the land that you’re using, but you have this abundant access to this crown land that nobody’s going to use because most people are perfectly fine in the beehives. So, you know, tell us a little bit about your, about that experience and why you chose that land. Because this is a very difficult thing for, a difficult decision for me personally.

You know, people from the city just go buy like land right away without really thinking about all of the angles of it. You know, you buy this, you think it’s a great deal, but there’s no trees on it, there’s no water on it. You know, a lot of people want to be within a close proximity to the amenities of a larger town or a small city. You know, maybe if you have kids, like how do you reconcile, you know, the work life kind of balance and socializing them. But, but how did you pick the spot that you’re in? What were some of the big things that were important to you? You know, I’d been on a few rural properties, right, for, for years before we bought this one.

And you already mentioned it. I mean, you want, for me, like, privacy was a big deal. I didn’t want to be in a subdivision of five acre lots. You know, I wanted to be able to shoot on my property. And I want to have like, I have a lifetime supply of timber and firewood here, which is, I mean, that’s super important. It’s fuel. Like we actually have a wood cook stove and so we heat 100% with wood in our house and we cook 100% with wood. And so just having wood fuel is amazing. But also having that crown land, like, you don’t have to buy it, but you can use it.

I can go harvest firewood off it. We go berry picking and huckleberries are a thing around here. And we just load up on huckleberries and that’s free. We don’t have to do anything. Can I ask you, what is the law on harvesting firewood in crown land? So you can buy a permit to collect up to like 50 yards of wood essentially. So it’s not hard. Like 50 cubic yards? Yeah, don’t quote me on the numbers, but it’s a lot. Like it’s definitely more than you need. You know, it’s definitely a lot of cords of wood. And I guess the only one potential downside of crown land, and I’m not sure if this is something you’ve encountered is the government could potentially lease that out to a forestry company who would cut it down at some point is have you ever encountered issues like that with.

Oh yeah, we’re in like, you know, most of BC is it’s all about softwood lumber. Yeah. And so there’s logging everywhere out here and they’ve logged not far from us. And of course the loggers are all great. We go out and meet them and, and tell them like, hey, if, if you got any stuff you can’t take with you, you know, just lay it down there and. Yeah, and we’ll appreciate that. And so, yeah, they’re great. I mean, they actually maintain a lot of the roads up in this area. They’re resource roads. And so the logging companies, when they log, they do the grading and the snow removal.

But yeah, you don’t get to control the crown land. You kind of got to roll with it. So if they log an area, then you kind of pivot and turn it into like hunting ground while it’s growing up. You know, the, the game likes that for the first ten years after logging. Absolutely. The clear cuts create a convenient buffer zone for fire breaks, which is a big problem out there. Increasingly more so year after year. So you said that you harvest your own firewood. Do you have a mill or have you experimented with milling your own dimensional lumber and stuff like that? Yeah, for sure.

We have a, a little wood miser LT15 we actually bought this 18 years ago on our first off grid property. We bought this mill and we’ve had it ever since. This thing runs, it’s like a tank. It’s just unbelievable. It just keeps going and it’s easy to use. Like the girls have milled a ton of their own lumber for their own projects and it’s super valuable to just, you know, square up a log. Right. Building with round logs is, you know, a bit tricky and you need certain skills, but as soon as you square it, man, it’s just, you know, a big timber and anyone can put those together like Lego blocks.

And then the other value is you can slice it thin. You know, it’s a, it’s a thin kerf blade, so you only lose an eighth of an inch and you can. So you can slab like half inch boards for board and batten siding. So yeah, we’ve used it lots on this property. And are you harvesting, like, what kind of woods are you harvesting? We can use it all. Like the main species here are pine and spruce. A little bit of fur, but a nice juicy fresh spruce tree. Just mills up like butter. It’s just beautiful, huge glowing white beams.

And yeah, it’s pretty universal. You know, it’s structural. We use it for siding even though it would be better to have cedar, but we don’t have cedar. So I have another. A project just so I don’t forget for you. You can try to do this in your channel. How to make toilet paper out of pulp and paper. Okay. If you do that one. Haven’t tried it. There’s a good video idea for you. I think that’s. That’s definitely got 3 million views written all over it. Especially if we have another March 2020 crisis. Right, right. You said that you drilled your own well.

Did you ever look at how to drill your own well? Like the auger, like the whole thing? Like that, Man. I. I considered that for sure. And, you know, my. My cousin is off grid out in Ontario, and he did a. He. He drove a sandpoint. He, like, dug by hand and then Dr. Point, and he ended up coming up with, you know, a little manual cranking. Well, and. But out here, I just don’t think we were ever in the right geology for that. Too high up, maybe, or. Yeah, just the various properties we’ve had. We’ve.

We’ve drilled wells on two of them, we’ve dug wells on two of them. And on this property, I said, forget it. We’re not. We’re not going down the well route. We actually are totally on rainwater here. Like, all our domestic use is rainwater. And then for animals and for gardens, we. We have a little seasonal creek with beaver ponds that we use. And we’ve also dug a dugout out in the pasture. It’s massive, so it’s got, like, you know, a million gallons of water or something in it. And so did you just fill that with the natural rainwater or is it, like, fed from spring or.

How do you fill that dugout? Yeah, the dugout is just in a low spot, and we’re almost pure clay here. So it just fills up in the spring, and it fills up with any substantial rains normally in the fall. In the spring, it fills up, and even on a really dry summer, like, it goes down a foot or two, but it’s 15ft deep and, you know, 80ft by 60ft or so. So it’s a lot of water for animals, and we pump out of there for the garden. But we also have this little beaver pond. We run a little ram pump.

So I don’t know if you’re familiar, but the ram pump uses the power of falling water to pump water much higher. So the beaver pond comes out and drops about six feet into the ram pump, and then it pumps it 40ft up in the Air and in our case about a thousand feet over into a tank we’ve put on the hill. And that thing just runs automatically, no power for 24, 7. It just keeps that tank on the hill going. Yeah, that whole like siphoning physics is definitely seems like magic when you see it. But is it similar to that or it uses.

It’s not a siphon. I mean you can siphon it. You can actually go up out of the pond and down if you need to. But what it uses is the water hammer effect. So it’s actually using the momentum of the water. So you get the water through the pipe like from the six feet down to like I’ll call it the zero foot level. And the water is moving. Well, it has kinetic energy and so it’s flowing through a flapper valve. And then imagine if you just slam the flapper valve shut, it would like hit. You’d have a water hammer.

Well, that water hammer produces a really high spike in pressure. And that spike in pressure can go through a little check valve. And that can pump it. You know, I don’t know what the realistic limitations are but like I said in our case we’re going six feet down and we’re pumping 40ft up. And so then it resets. So once it squirts a little water up, then it resets, the flapper valve opens, the water flows again, but concentrates the pressure. Yeah. And you don’t get 100% of the water. Like we’re using an existing water flow. So maybe 5 gallons per minute kind of is lost, I’ll say.

Or just is, is the natural flow of your water, your waterway. And then we get like half a gallon a minute, 40ft up and a thousand feet over. Wow, very cool stuff. There’s always, there’s so many, you know, neat innovative ways to do this off grid stuff. And that’s one thing I like about your channel is you really try to show people a lot of the alternatives. This day and age when people are living kind of hand to mouth, it seems in the cities you’re showing people that it’s possible to do this on a budget. And that’s the great thing about kind of the place where you are.

Because when you’re looking around bc, I mean I’m always looking for land in bc Now I’m kind of. Because the gun thing, everybody wants to move to Alberta. That might be the last holdout. When you go into the northern parts of B.C. in particular, land is relatively cheap. Like it’s cheaper than a lot of people think compared to land even out here in parts of Saskatchewan. So do you have any advice on how to get started? Because, I mean, some people might say, well, I can afford to go off grid. And you know, you talk a lot about kind of curating and trying to really, truly assess your necessities in life.

Asking yourself the question, like, what do you really need? Do I need running water? Do I need electricity? Do I need all these things? Do I need a, you know, access to school division? And you know, maybe talk a little bit about the, the money component of this without obviously getting, you know, uncomfortably specific. Sure. And I do, I, I do have, I do talk about that throughout that book. And it, because it’s a common question, like people want to know, how do you afford this? Right. And so I, I talk about our financial journey in there and we made some mistakes for sure.

But in response to your question, I mean, this property was cheap and it’s not particularly special. We’re not in a great growing region. You know, we’re like a zone 2B or something crazy. And, and still we can grow a ton of stuff in, in a zone two. So, you know, the timber on here was logged about 30 years before we bought it. So it had timber, but it didn’t have like, it wasn’t like abundant rich amounts of timber. I mean, now it’s, you know, now it’s 45 years old and there is some like legit, legit trees on here.

But the property itself was affordable. I think that was really the number one thing. Like to go into a bunch of debt for this property would have been a totally bad idea. And, and I talk about that. We, we had a Freedom 35 plan and it was to be debt free and own productive property at the same time. And that was kind of our journey for a long time and we did achieve that. So when I turned 35, we finally paid off our last debt and we had this property and it was productive and we’ve just been making it more productive.

And what I would tell people is this whole self sufficiency thing. I addressed this in a video because it’s kind of this idea, people want to be self sufficient as if it’s like a black, a black and white issue and it’s totally not. So if you, if you’re like the, the most city person in the world and if I called you like a 0% self sufficient, like literally if things went down for 24 hours, you’re gonna die. And then if you put like Dick Parenicki or someone like, he’s a 9 or 10. Like, even he had a float plane come in with flour and sugar.

Right. But you know, that guy was like at the top end of the spectrum for self sufficiency. Well, if you want to, you know, if you’re at a one, like, if you’re zero or one and you move to a two, well, you’ve just like doubled your self sufficiency. You are now twice as self sufficient as you were. And so if you’re just like, you know, I relate to a lot of people who live in the suburbs, but you know, they’re, they’re hunters and fishers. Like, they kind of know how to get around. Like, but they’re not thinking about self sufficiency or prepping.

So I’d put them at like a 1 or a 2%, maybe a 5%. If you could put this on a scale. Well, even for them, if they take a few steps and get to like a 10% level again, they’re doubling. They’re, they’re like twice as self sufficient. So this isn’t like an all or nothing game. These are steps. And, and so to me, I’ve realized, like, and we’re never going to be self sufficient unless you want to be a caveman. You just want to be way more self sufficient than you are. And that is a lot easier to, It’s a lot more encouraging to consider.

Like, hey, I just need to take a step in that direction. So back to the property. It’s like, hey, no one’s going to have the perfect property and ours isn’t the perfect property. If it was, it would probably have an artesian well at the top of the hill here. But it doesn’t. And so it’s kind of like, yeah, but it’s, it’s way better, you know, it’s way better. And, and it was affordable. We don’t have to be in debt for it. So, and so there’s, there’s obvious, like, when you’re coming from the city, there’s concessions that have to be made because there is a tendency on YouTube with some channels to kind of glorify and, and glamorize the lifestyle a little bit because, you know, a lot of people, you know, they’ll look at our, our friend of the channel, Sean, over at My Self Reliance, and they’ll, they’ll look at that and they’ll be like, man, that’s, you know, picturesque, beautiful life.

But they don’t see all the sweat and the tears and the cold and the bugs and the you know, just whatever, right? They don’t see all the. The nasty side of things. So there is a trade off as you move from that zero to a hundred percent. You know, you’re. You’re making kind of concessions along the way and in terms of like the creature comforts. But what is the advantage of that? Because clearly, you know, when I look at you guys, you’re living out there, you’re happy, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, we’re seeing the.

The production end of things. Everybody’s got, you know, problems. But, you know, it seems like generally you guys are having a comfortable life out there and you’re enjoying yourself more than I see a lot of people who are deep in debt enjoying themselves just paying off their. Their lease payment. Just tell us a little bit about that, that whole philosophy. I mean, I think we all fundamentally know that the great things in life have a cost. You know, if you want to be ripped and be in great shape, you’re not just like. It’s not just happening to you.

You know, you’re working out when you don’t want it. When you’re tired, you’re working out. And, you know, if you want a woodshed full of wood, like that romantic woodshed full of split, you know, out here, it’s pine or spruce. Well, you got to like, do. You got to get it right? You got to go fell it and yeah, I’ll tell you, I hate. I hate how this sawdust, you know, kicks off and goes down my boot. Just hate that. So there you go. I’ve always kind of been honest on our channel. We talk about our.

Our limitations here, about carrying water into the house and about using a. An outdoor unheated composting toilet. But at the same time, I mean, I embrace those things because of what they give us. And what they give us is freedom. I’m telling you, like, once you’re out of debt and once you have control over your life, because it’s not just out of debt, it’s out of debt with the means of like, producing. So on this property, you know, like, like you mentioned in spring 2020, we kind of were like, I guess we’re not going to town, right? And it’s like, I guess we don’t really need to.

I mean, we were. We’re always in the habit. Of course, we go to town every week probably, and pick up fresh produce, but it’s like, well, we don’t have to. We. We have like a year’s worth of meat in our freezer at any One time, and we got a garden and we got wild game and domestic animals and, like, just having that freedom to be like, you know, I’m. It’s harder to affect us. And I get to have way more choice. Like, I get to choose the kind of work I want to do and how much work I want to do and what I get to do in my spare time and with my, you know, with my spending money, like, what am I going to investigate? What kind of project am I going to take on? So, to me, those other costs, if you look at them on their own, you’re like, yeah, I don’t want to incur that cost.

I don’t want sawdust down my boot when I have to go cut firewood. But then you look at the reward. You’re like, man, do you want freedom in your life? Like, do you want to, like, be autonomous? If you’re not interested in that, you’re probably not listening to this podcast, right? Yeah. And I think I’m certain that everybody wants freedom in. In their own way. It’s just a lot of people have been. I don’t. I don’t want to say brainwashed out of risk of. Of sounding arrogant or elitist, but I do think that there’s a tendency to move towards creature comforts instead, because people have been conditioned to fear the world that you find yourself in right now.

But as you said, the. There’s, like, regenerative aspects of it. And when you grow a vegetable or when you raise an animal and you realize that nature does provide everything like it, it’s something that can’t be taxed. And that’s why the government doesn’t want people to do what you do, as well as a variety of other reasons. But then when you go and you harvest that piece of lumber and you actually make a piece of dimensional lumber, well, you’re using some technology, let’s be real. But you did it in a way which is regenerative, and it’s in a way that’s renewable.

And you’re getting something just. It’s like piecework based on how much energy you put into it. You see the reward. But there’s also the trappings of modernity where it’s very easy to kind of acquiesce to a life of debt and want to kind of get in that hamster wheel, that rat race. But it is like building your own prison in a way, because you’re just kind of a slave to this debt. And even if you don’t want to continue it, you have To. Right. Whereas you might not have a high speed Internet connection. Well, now you got Starlink.

But there’s other pleasures that you are able to enjoy throughout the day that you know, are missed by a lot of people in the city. Is it, is that a safe assessment of your. Well, you know what like, I mean there are like to pursue the debt free thing, we just did it our way. Right. I realized that I made a video on the, on our quarter million dollar outhouse. And it wasn’t that the outhouse cost a quarter million dollars. It’s that just by having that outhouse we saved a million, a quarter of a million dollars.

And the reason is, is because we didn’t need, you know, we could use a relatively modest rainwater system instead of needing it drilled. Well and, and with an outdoor composting toilet, which is awesome by the way. Everyone loves it. I know other people who are building them and enjoying them as well using the same kind of design. But we also didn’t need a septic system which are super expensive around here. You got to get them engineered. It could cost you 80 grand. And then of course no one has 80 grand sitting around and you know, maybe 40 or 50 for the well and maybe a bigger solar system to power it all.

So then you need it cleaned out every six months. Yeah, yeah. And then by the time you finance all that, you know, a hundred grand turns into 250 grand paid over your lifetime. And so some of these decisions that we kind of just sleepwalk into, you know, oh, the house needs to cost a million dollars. It’s like, well no it doesn’t. Like this one cost 25 and you could build a one that looks. I actually built a totally normal looking house. It had drywall and like it was stick frame and it was normal. It was modest, but it was like a normal thing.

And that one cost like. I mean this was going back now, but it was, it was like 45 grand for all the materials in the house. And it’s like, why does the house have to cost a quarter or sorry, like a million dollars. Like it doesn’t. Right. I mean you can have a way simpler roof line you can go away from. You don’t need crown moldings, you don’t need marble countertops, you don’t need fancy flooring. And in our case we just went the extra mile. I don’t presume most people want to try the things we’ve tried with rainwater and you know, outdoor plumbing.

But, but you know, you also don’t have to go and do it exactly like we did. The point is you can make some strategic sacrifices to avoid the debt. You reap what you sow. Right. Like if you, if you plant that kind of lifestyle of like, I’m not being in debt. Well, now you’re, now you’re rich in time and in money. Like, if I wanted to work full time, I’d be killing it. But actually I wanted to work part time and spend all sorts of time with my kids while they were still at home. So for years now, you know, I’ve been working quarter time because I can, I don’t, I don’t need to work full time.

I didn’t. I chose to not like, serve my career and, and pursue oodles of money. And it was a very clear choice. I made a very hard decision a few years back to do that. The banks hate you. Well, they’re not making anything off me. You know, I guess the question becomes, okay, so you can have a composting toilet. It requires you, though, to, in the middle of the night, if it’s minus 20 out, go and use the composting toilet. Which is not to say that you can’t put some sort of heat source in there. But I guess what I’m trying to say is there’s a bit of a trade off in terms of the luxury and the comfort.

But the question becomes then, is that comfort actually making people happy or is it making us more miserable? Right. Well. And what is the real cost, is the question like, when you, when we live in a world of debt and credit, it’s really hard to actually understand what we’re getting and what we’re paying for that thing. Yeah. And so right now it’s super easy. Like, I could, I could plumb in water here at any moment. We have the ability, but it would come with at a certain cost. I know exactly what the cost would be. One of them is, I always intended this house to be like, I could walk away from it like a dry cabin.

And we’ve done that in the winter. We’ve left it for months. And this thing can just freeze hard and it doesn’t wreck anything. And so that’s one of the benefits. I don’t want to give up. But at the same time, like, if I worked, like, I could choose to work an extra month in a year and then I could just pay for this water system. But it’s just whenever I have that choice, it’s like, or we could go on a road trip and we could go down south and go spearfishing down Baja or, you know, we can go on a hunting trip up in the mountains, go look for some sheep.

Like, you know, these are the. It’s really easy to make those decisions. And we’ve just always. It’s never been the priority to like plumb in the water. So someone else might choose differently. They might be like, man, forget all that adventuring. Let me just like keep chipping away and make this thing super comfortable. And you could do that. So what do you think compels people like yourself to lead this kind of lifestyle? Because obviously this is not the norm, this picture that you’re painting here. Most people, they don’t want to give that lifestyle up. So what is it about you that makes you different from other people, would you say? I actually think a lot of people would love this lifestyle and would do it, no problem.

I think the challenges going from where they are to here is scary. I think once they were here, in fact, we know lots of people who, you know, they come and stay here and they, they live like we do for a while and they’re like, I mean, it’s amazing and they could do it. It’s just for them, like, what are they going to do? Like, are they going to quit their job, sell their house, like, buy a new. Like there’s so many unknowns and it would be scary for people. Do they think it’s amazing because they only see the end result though? Like, they didn’t see what went into you building that place.

Or is that they. They really genuinely appreciate the, the more minimalist approach to life? Well, let me say it differently. Like, I think some, I think I tend to, maybe more than the average person, like, tend to lead and try something on my own. Like, so instead of being kind of scary for me, that’s exciting for me, like an adventure and, and maybe that’s the root of a lot of this. This is kind of like my adventuresome spirit and roses like mothering homestead kind of spirit combined, you know, and, and so we have this like half and half lifestyle of adventure and homestead.

And I think a lot of people aren’t necessarily leaders. Like, they don’t want to try a bunch of new stuff on their own. They’re not as excited about it as me. But if it was clear the way, like if they would have had clear choices along the way, like, oh, this is normal for some people. And that’s normal for some people. I think way more people would choose to do something like this. It’s just that it’s not really an option, right. Like most people don’t see this as an option without having to forge a whole new path.

And of course I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to tell people, like, it’s not a totally new path. People are doing it. And you can, you can buy 5 acres and start chipping away. You can move from the suburbs and start to learn how to raise chickens and pigs, and you can learn how to conserve water if you’re on a well or whatever. So I guess what would you. I’m trying to, you know, rationalize this lifestyle that you lead because it seems to make sense to me intuitively. But there’s always practical considerations. So this is something that seems antithetical to technological progress as a species.

So how do we reconcile these things? Because I was watching a video with Arthur C. Clarke last night. He was a author and futurist and he was talking about from 1964, and he was basically predicting the world exactly how it is today. How we would be all consumed by technology and it would be driving us insane. You know, you have five children and eventually they have to go into the world which is now this technopolis, and they have to find and make sense of this new world. So how do you reconcile these two worlds? But what he was saying in that video was also that one of his predictions, which almost came true during COVID was that communication and satellite communication would allow people to work remotely so they wouldn’t be confined to cities.

But the city has, you know, held on as being where everybody gravitates towards. So maybe we’re just, we’re going to see a de urbanization at some point as a result of, you know, this communication network and Starlink and things like that, which we’re kind of seeing. So now there was a time, I guess, when there was a justification to live in the city because that’s where you got the news other than the radio. But now there’s all these other ways, like you’re out in the grid in the boonies and we’re having this conversation. How do you reconcile the world of technology and being a part of the human evolutionary process and at the same time maintaining your minimalist off grid lifestyle? Well, I mean, they’re actually like, this is like a perfect cohesion between technology and, you know, wilderness.

And I would say this is the golden age of being off grid. Like you can choose certain new technologies. Like we have this awesome solar power system. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty darn new, especially at like consumer prices. Where we can afford to buy it, we can have Starlink so we can stay in communication. Right now it’s easier than ever to choose what types of technology you want to engage with. So we’re not Luddites just for that purpose. We’ve just chosen some low tech solutions, you know, to solve our, you know, to design our ideal life out here.

And people could, would all make their own choices. And I’m not suggesting we reject technology outright. I mean obviously like I, I’m super happy to take video and put it on the Internet. You know, I’m off grid in the sense that I’m less reliant, less reliant on grids like the power grid, the natural gas network, the banking grid. And those are the big, when we say we’re off grid, I think people always think electrical grid, rightly so, but really that’s just a representation like what we don’t want to be. What we want autonomy from is things that are so big we can’t impact them.

So the electrical power grid. For 20 years I’ve worked on utility scale power systems and what I know is if there was a cataclysm that wrecked it all, me and you aren’t going to fix it. Even though I’m actually really skilled at working on utility power systems, me and you are not going to fix it. Me and 10 other people are not going to fix it. These are systems so big they require almost like a whole of society to build them and maintain them. And same thing with the distribution of natural gas. If that thing just was blown to shreds, you and your neighbors can’t fix it.

And the banking system is so complex, same thing. So what I am saying is be self reliant to a certain extent and then be reliant on friends and neighbors and your community as much as possible and really limit your reliance on these supermassive systems, the grid that you can’t impact. You know, if they, if they decided to triple electricity prices tomorrow, no one could do anything but firewood. Hey man, if I like break my leg and can’t get firewood, I can hire a neighbor or a friend and they can get me firewood. You know what I mean? It’s just like you have more control over certain things and we’ve chosen to go that route.

And it really is all about having more control, which is more autonomy, more freedom because I want to do some crazy stuff. And people like if I lived that life where I just kind of had to get a mortgage which meant I needed insurance which blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I don’t get to have those choices. Yeah, I think you’re talking about like resilience from critical infrastructure. If something were to go wrong, obviously, you know, you would be at the whim of the many institutions that comprise that critical infrastructure. There’s also a mental health crisis nowadays that is blatant and it’s not always that apparent to people what the root cause is.

I think it has a lot to do with what technology is doing to people and depriving them of that social human experience. In particular, do you have any thoughts on how raising five girls in the off grid lifestyle, how that will impact them, how they’ve been able to, and how you as a parent have been able to navigate that environment? Because I think this is for people who have children. You want them to be put in activities, you want them to socialize, you want them to be a part of the world. But how are they adapting to the world now that they’re becoming adults and, you know, venturing out into their own? I could tell you all sorts of things about, you know, maybe the things we’ve done right or wrong, and, and you know, I could try and convince you that this is, you know, the right way or a good way or whatever.

But you can also look, I mean we’ve been essentially like a, a case study now for 20 something years. And I think you’re right to look at the overall picture here. Like, let’s consider health and let’s consider family. Like, let’s consider like the whole of your life. And taken as a whole, are these good decisions, like, forget like a micro decision about finances and you know, a well versus rainwater look at the whole thing. Well, this is where I would say, man, you know, marriage is hard, but Rose and I have still had a fantastic 25, 26, 26, 26 years of marriage.

And we’ve got five beautiful healthy girls, two of whom are married now, like the oldest two are married. We have some grandkids, they live not far away. So one of them found a cattle rancher and one of them found a hunting guide. And so two of them are married. You know, we’re definitely not going to win anything, any Trivial pursuit pop culture questions ever. But like really taken as a whole, like, I feel like that’s probably a win, you know what I mean? Like, these girls have all sorts of skills. Most of them are making their own money.

Like, you know, they’ve got their own businesses, they’re doing silversmithing and leather work. And so they’ve remained in the country lifestyle is what you’re saying. They’ve remained in that general environment. Yeah. And, and I, I mean they can do whatever they want. We, we’ve kind of, we’ve traveled and done different things. Like their eyes are open, they can, you know, and we’ve obviously got friends in town and in the city. Like they know what’s out there. None of them have chosen to go there and none of them talk about wanting to go. I don’t think any of them will go there.

Like, it’s pretty great. Like, you know, me and Kezia, my youngest, she just ordered parts. We’re just going to go pick up parts to rebuild her Jeep Cherokee engine. We’re going to build a stroker and take it from a 4.0 to a 4.6. And neither her or I have rebuilt an engine. We’ve done some engine swapping and some mechanicing and. But this is going to be like a real great learning experience for her and for me. And we’re looking forward to doing that this winter. But to me, those kids, because of course they’re our primary concern, right, as parents where we want like to launch our kids in the best possible way.

So yeah, they don’t know what you’re talking about if you’re talking about movies or TV shows. But like they have, they have like all sorts of life experiences that when they get into the workforce or when they get into social settings, man, they’ve got like horseback hunting in the Rocky Mountain stories. They’ve got engine rebuilding skills. They’ve got their own business where they’re selling products. Like to me their life is so much richer for the different things we’ve done. And they’re competing with a lot of people that have the same story like Rose and I were kind of typical suburban story where it’s like, hey, we went to high school and we played sports and maybe music.

And I might be coming across as a little disrespectful, but it’s just that that’s, it’s very normal. And you know what, it doesn’t necessarily give any one kid an advantage to do the exact same thing as everyone else if you give them like this, a different lifestyle. And there’s way more than our lifestyle like our friends. And now my son in law, like he grew up on the ranch, on the farm, you know, they’re driving tractors when they’re six years old. They learn to work really hard. Like that’s a different lifestyle. And you know, you know, he Was.

And our girls were homeschooled, which man. They, they finished their homeschool in like a fraction of the time of normal school. And the rest of the time they can like, flourish as humans develop skills and interests. And I think if you look at the fruit of the whole thing, you know, just generally our health, our family health and our lifestyle, I think the truth is it’s been pretty positive. Well, I mean, statistically, a couple of them should have had mental health issues by now. You know, there should have been some addictions related issue. Yeah. You know, so, I mean.

Yeah. On the whole, you know, clearly this is a huge success for you, so, you know, congratulations on, on doing what you’ve done. Because I mean, that is every parent’s biggest fear is, especially if you’re looking at this from the perspective of an urbanite wanting to go off grid, it’s all these questions about, well, are they going to resent me for me taking them off grid and forcing them to live this life? And like you’re saying, it’s not North Korea, you know, you can go and do what you want. You can see the world and get exposed to it, and maybe in that they, they gain a greater, deeper appreciation for your lifestyle in that they, they see the superficiality of it all.

Yeah. And you know, their only handicap is they don’t know the TV shows and the movies, like that’s really. They. And, and, and there’s a lot of things where they haven’t. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I know, I think that’s not really a handicap, per se. And these are all things now with the Internet. I mean, people are very well connected, so these are things that are very surmountable problems, you know, and I think you’re, you’re a great example of, of what the possibilities could be for people who are wanting to take that step. Because there’s all these, you know, fears about going off grid that are above and beyond.

Just while life is going to be hard, it’s the social aspect, it’s the culture shock, it’s, you know, all of these things. But I think you’re charting a course for people and showing them that, hey, you can do this, you can have a life that is full of positive experiences and not have to chase dopamine down the, the debt hole. And there’s ways to do it. Right. Yeah. And I mean, that’s. People can read the book. I tell our whole story and I kind of tell you my. It’s from, you know, I wrote it. So it’s my perspective But I, I talk about all our kind of life choices and you know, the, our financial story and the different properties and kind of some technical aspects.

And of course there’s a bunch of some, some, some bloopers in there and lots of hunting adventures and outdoor adventures. But people can. What I hope if they read that is that they can be like, hey, like an alternate life is possible, but you don’t have to do it just like I did. But just know that like, man, if you really got that urge to like go do a different thing, it’s like, I think you can do it. I really like your way of looking at things with the percentage scale and looking at it as a 2x, a 10x, know, maybe just be a small step, but for a lot of people, just, you know, getting a little patch of, of land somewhere and going out and camping on it every once in a while, which is very achievable in a lot of places, but not if you’re looking at it through the lens of a classic realtor.

And the way that, that homes and land is appraised by people through the, the prism of know, urban life. You really have to look at it in alternative ways. And you know, one thing I’ve always said is that when the grid goes down, the last will be first and the first will be last. What I mean by that is what is most valuable now will be least valuable. The last place you’re going to want to be is in the heart of Vancouver when the lights go out and they can’t pump water and natural gas and they can’t get electricity.

You know what is. Yeah, because their resources are coming from a thousand kilometers away. Right. Like all that energy and fuel is like nowhere close by. So finding a way to source that stuff locally. Right. If we’re looking at it strictly in technical terms is, is locally acquiring resources, the majority of your resources is a great way of going about it. Initially, when we first talked, you proposed us doing a video where we show how preppers would deal with this situation versus homesteaders and what is the real difference? And you know, you talk about Dick Pronicky who’s maybe, I don’t know, 90 out of 100, maybe the Australian Aborigines are 100 out of 100.

Right. And there’s people over here which are just wholly dependent on the grid. And I think what often happens sometimes in this subculture is that people are discouraged from wanting to enter into it because there’s a bit of, well, obviously as preppers, as off gridders, There’s a stigma against us, but there’s also, you know, people like the city folk or the sheep or whatever are kind of talked about in a disparaging manner. And that can be discouraging for people. But I think the approach that you’re taking is showing people, like, look, I get why you are in the situation that you’re in, but there’s also.

There’s a potential other way here, which is. Might actually bring you more equanimity and peace as an individual. Not sure where I’m going with this, but do you have any thoughts with that or. Well, I mean, yeah, you mentioned that whole prepper versus homesteader thing and. Yeah, I think there’s really something to explore there because, like I said, our, like, I’ve never claimed to be a Prepper, but in 2020, it. We kind of were looking around, scratching our heads, being like, maybe we are preppers, because we felt very prepared. And as time, as it played out, you know, we.

We did not feel a lot of pressure in that time. You know, we. We had all sorts of stuff here we needed. And, And a lot of our, A lot of our community, it’s a lot easier to prep if you live in the city than it is to start gardening and raising domestic animals if, you know, if you’re in a suburb. So there’s like, things that people can do, like small steps people can do. And so the community has this huge overlap. And. And so, yeah, I kind of wondered, I’m like, huh, I wonder what scenarios someone with an off grid homestead would really, like, just fly through, no problem.

But I know there’s scenarios we wouldn’t because I, you know, definitely for me, I haven’t really had that mindset. It’s like, okay, what if this happens? What if this happens? What if this happens? I haven’t gone through those scenarios, like, hey, I need to have this ready. This ready, this ready. So there’s some scenarios where we would be totally unprepared for and other ones that we would probably really shine. And the world events in 2020 were probably a good example of where we would shine, where it’s just kind of like we need to be less reliant on work, on stores and things like that.

And where it’s kind of like, yeah, we could just keep going here. You know, we might not be able to buy the same fresh fruits and vegetables, but we’ll be fine. I’ve always thought that all preppers are aspiring farmers and that if you go on this trajectory long enough, you eventually end up in a situation where you’re in. And maybe when people are coming from the disposition of a city, they call it prepping because it’s so counter to everything that they’ve been told. I mean, the just in time delivery system thrives on you not being prepared.

You know, the system as it’s built thrives on you being in debt, thrives on you constantly trying to keep up with the Joneses, being as dependent as possible in order to maximize gains. So, you know, the more you’re dependent on the grid, then the, the better the payoff is if you’re playing the game versus, you know, what you’re saying is the opposite. So I think prepping manifests as a response to this because people intuitively sense that something is wrong with the way we’re living. So, you know, we call it prepping, which is really just, I want to say a form of posing, but it’s kind of like getting, it’s moving in the direction of self reliance.

And there’s different stages and I had a bit of a typology that I used to classify the different stages and there’s micro, meso and macro preparedness. So micro is when you kind of get into the realization that, okay, shit hits the fan today, I got to get out of the city. So micro preparedness is like the bug out bag focusing like the 72 hour kit. And a meso preparedness is more of, okay, maybe I get into some regenerative systems but on a, on a very shorter time scale. So you’re stockpiling energy. You know, all food, all stuff, all any material tool is just energy that you’ve, that you’ve stockpiled and you’ve amassed and you get into this kind of hoarding kind of mentality with prepping, which is what a lot of prepping is.

It’s consumerist. I mean, those are unfortunately the most popular videos where you go to Costco and you see how much stuff you can buy to prepare for a grid down situation. But then you get into macro preparedness, which was the life that you’re in. And, and it’s weird because that is the life that we came from. So most people, some people like yourself are coming from there and maybe working even backwards. And then the Urbanites are calling it prepping and they’re coming this way. And so we’re kind of now meeting and there’s that overlap. And so, you know, I’ve always aspired to become the macro prepper, but there’s, you know, I’m reluctant Because there’s always, you know, so I’m doing it in a very step wise manner.

It’s happening, but I haven’t gone all in. Although there’s been times when I’m like, man, I should just pack up shop and move out into the woods and take my chances. But you know, I think the problem is you would want to bring all of the baggage with you. Right. So there’s. With preppers you kind of want to approximate the same standard of living as you had while the grid was up. Whereas people like yourself who are coming at from a wilderness bushcraft survivalist mentality is more, you know, you’re keeping it at a certain level where you have this inherent wisdom that you realize to exceed that level will come with more problems than it’s worth.

Does that make sense? Yeah. And I mean again, we just, everyone could do this differently than, than we did and we. I like this little cabin in the woods. I want to, I could invest a lot more here and make it quite modern and make it quite convenient, but I often choose to go on adventures instead. Like, so I, I want to adventure and explore and travel and do things like that. But, but the root is, I think the, the big overlap is, I think Tom Marrazzo, I don’t know if he coined it, but he says do not rely.

And I think that’s our overlap. Like, I want to be less reliant on grid systems and other like monolithic, unaffectable systems. And I think if you’re being prepared, it’s the same thing. You don’t want to be reliant. So you need to have your own systems or your own materials in order to get by and you know, not just survive, but maybe thrive, you and your family. Right. So we end up getting into a lot of the same kind of systems. And I think what’s interesting is if you took away all the systems and material, like if you took me out of this homestead and if you took away the things that I had, like the root cellar full of produce and the freezer full of meat, you know, and all you’ve got is like this, right? And so to be honest, I think that’s the, I think that’s the heart of, or I think that’s the strongest, you know, self sufficiency tool we have is kind of like our ability to innovate and our ability to try things and our ability to build things and kind of our experience in being self reliant is that we’ve had to do it ourselves.

And so man put Us in an awkward situation. Oh, I don’t have my regular stuff, but I can innovate, I can invent some sort of solution to this, and I think that’s what you would hope for, no matter where you’re coming from, from the prepping community or from the homestead or the off grid. It’s kind of like, do I have enough experience and expertise and do I have the mindset to like, innovate and problem solve my way out of this? Yeah. And I think, you know, when comparing preppers to people like yourself, like the average prepper, the average consumerist prepper, they’re not going to fare well in an environment against a person who has, you know, just a lifelong experience of doing the things that you’ve done.

To play the devil’s advocate, I would say that there’s something to be said about street smarts, which I think is something that the people in the country possess, but I’m not quite sure if it’s to the same degree. Because, you know, surviving in a urban environment has its own ecosystem of, of threats. And it’s arguable that when you’re interacting with more people, you have to understand people a little bit better. And so one of my chief concerns for people who live off grid and remote is are they ready for the skullduggery of the, you know, the very criminal mindset of people coming out of the cities when it hits the fan? Like, are they ready to.

Because I don’t. It’s. It’s gotten to the point where it’s so. I don’t know what the word, like schizophrenic. Like, it’s just people are pretty shady nowadays, you know, and that people have a lot of mental illness. So. Yeah. And especially in a circumstance where society gets shaken up, right? Like you shake up a box of bees and they all. They all get angry. And if you shake up society, you know, there’s a lot of people barely holding on, right? And you shake them up and who knows, they become very un, you know, unreliable members of society.

So. So for sure, when, you know, we sit out here, it’s like, yeah, we can totally survive the wilderness. We can raise food. And it’s just like, but what are we going to do? Like, when people come down our driveway, you know, like, what are we going to do about the human threat? Right? Like, people are so incredibly cunning, especially people with, like, addiction problems. I mean, you know, if you think car salesmen are good, you know, you know, just wait until, like, criminals who are really good at what they do try to, you know, smoosh people over and they’re good at it.

And so I, I guess the, the only, there’s very few advantages compared to, you know, urban life. I’m just trying to. Yeah. Pick up whatever I possibly can to. Yeah. To throw the urbanites a bone here. I think the only thing would be just the socializing aspect, understanding how to read people, being comfortable around large groups of people, which is something you’ll never really have to endure. But you know, there’s just something to be said there perhaps. Well, yeah, and you could say that living in small towns and rural areas, it’s actually a really high trust environment.

Like you could go knock on a door in the evening, you’re not going to be met with a gun. Right. Like, people can be like, oh, are you broken down? Like, come on in. Like, well, so there, I mean, that’s true. That’s like that small town feel that people love. But that would be, that would be a weakness in a, in an apocalyptic scenario. Right. Like if you had a high trust little community get infiltrated with a whole bunch of people from a lower trust kind of part of the city. Yeah. They’d get their lunch eaten.

Yeah. The only other thing I can think of which is an advantage to living in the city is obviously that’s where you can accrue the most resources. But that is also something that is changing now with the Internet and the ability to conduct business online. So, you know, you still have physical labor jobs which require you to go on site and do stuff. But there is ways to, you know, cultivate resources and money outside of the city. But I think that’s primarily why people gravitate to the city is if they’re so lucky to be, you know, in the top 10% or whatever, where they’re actually accruing wealth.

It’s possible there, but there’s also many ways to do it. Like you’re saying out in the country where you can build sustainable businesses with a lot of the things that you’re doing, be it in timber or food production, you know, woodwork, you know, is there any things that you’re exploring now that are sources of income besides gold mining? Which is awesome. Yes. So I mean, what’s interesting is I came from again, like kind of like a typical career. You know, for 10 years I worked for BC Hydro, the province’s crown corporation utility. And you know, it’s kind of a regular 9 to 5 union job.

So very familiar to a lot of people’s experience and Most people would just stay in that career and get. Make more and more money and pay off their mortgage over 35 years. And so I saw all that and then. But since we’ve moved around to a few smaller communities and we’ve been here a long time, I’ve definitely done a lot of different things. So I still have that engineering technology capacity and I still contract to do that work. And sometimes that means I can just work from home on the computer and sometimes that means I can travel for work.

So that’s a real possibility for a lot of people is obviously just working on their computer. Starlink is incredibly reliable and it’s totally feasible. But you can also travel for work and if you don’t have to do it for full time, I mean, that’s just better if. If you got like a family that you want to be closer to. But there’s also, yeah, a lot of small town stuff. Like we’ve got a little bobcat tool cat and it’s like a little multipurpose homestead machine. It’s phenomenal. And you can put all the attachments on there like a normal skid steer.

Well, you can hire yourself out. I’ve done that before. It’s like, hey, it’s like a hundred bucks or 130 bucks an hour and I’ll come over and move your dirt or pound your posts or clear your land or whatever. Like that’s a really legit way in a rural area to make money is invest in a little machine and you’re in business the next day. And then, yeah, the girls. Julia does a lot of leather work. She’s been doing it for years now, and she sells it online, but she also sells it in stores. So hunting and outdoor stores in this area are carrying her products like ammo belts and leather wallets and.

And things like that. And Christina’s, you know, we’ve been getting into this gold silver thing and so we’ve got the equipment and she’s really learning goldsmithing and. And gold and silver smithing. So she’s making beautiful little jewelry and ornaments and stuff like that. Or yeah, necklace pendants and things like that. We just made a video actually with Dan Herd where we did it all in one day. We went out and mined the gold and then refined it and alloyed it and we brought the equipment along and on the tailgate of the truck, she like formed this beautiful pendant, this gold pendant for Rose.

So, you know, there’s lots of businesses you can do online, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. And for sure there’s labor and you could use this mill. And Abigail, three years ago, we built a food truck over the winter. And for three years she ran the food truck five months a year, only because it’s frozen the other seven. But for five months of the year she would drive it, you know, to town or wherever, sometimes just to like a park pull off. And she sold fantastic poutine, home cut fries, homemade gravy, cheese curds. Yeah.

So for three years she did that. And it was, you know, again, in hindsight, it was, it was very strong financial business. It did really well. And so now she’s moved on. She sold that and she’s married to hunting guide and they’re off in the mountains guiding. So there’s lots of things, I guess is all I could say is there’s all sorts of ways that you could have a career or a mix of kind of revenue generating activities. Yeah. It’s just taking the plunge and, and going for it. Yeah. I mean, there’s so many projects that you’ve worked on on your channel.

And again, these are all, you know, when you get to my stage in this preparedness thing, these are things that are very intriguing to me. They might be a bit too high level for some people. But you’re, you’re doing gold mining now and is it lucrative? Like, obviously it depends on where you are. But that’s pretty cool that you. And that was one of the first videos I seen of yours, you going out and I think you were trying to make 1,000 bucks in a day or something like that. Yeah. Now with the price of gold, I mean, you know, you’re doing pretty good.

I think at the time of making that video, I can’t remember where gold was at, but I know now it would be worth almost double what it was then. Oh yeah. So just maybe tell us a little bit about that, that whole process. Well, I think it’s only been about five years maybe that we’ve gotten into prospecting. And so from like five years ago, we knew nothing like zero about prospecting about precious metals. And now, yeah, we’ve got a few of our own claims and. And one of them in particular has a pretty like, consistent amount of gold.

So it’s about a, I don’t know, maybe a gram a ton, which is about the same as like a commercial mine. And what does that mean? To have a claim in. In British Columbia, in most jurisdictions, there’s a way to like stake an area and, and that gives me the right to extract the mineral Even on groundland? Yeah, it’s crown land. So I don’t own the land, but I own the minerals. So even if it’s private land, actually you do have rights to the minerals. If you’ve claimed someone else’s private land, you obviously have to respect certain aspects of their land.

Like you can’t go dig up their house. However, they. They actually do have to oblige you in some ways because you have the rights to the mineral. So yeah, if you own land, you might want to claim. Claim the mineral rights to your land. And it’s not expensive like to. To make a claim for about 40 acres over here. It’s about a hundred bucks for the. And you get it for one year, and then every year after that to keep it. You either gotta pay $800 a year to keep it, so it gets a lot more expensive, or you can do work in lieu.

So we actually submit a work report and we just show how much like expense we’ve incurred or how much time we’ve spent. And then, you know, the ministry of Whatever, you know, says, okay, you can keep it and you can extend it. So some of mine are extended out multiple years now because the amount of work we’ve done on it. And so anyway, so we’ve got this claim, means the gold is ours and we can just go dig it up. So wait a minute. You’re saying that somebody can make a claim on your property, private land, and come and start mining it and just disrupt the entire.

The ecosystem? I don’t know people who’ve had to in like, endure a conflict with a mining company, but oil and gas, super common, like in oil and gas country, if there’s oil under your land, you don’t own it and someone does. And if they really need to come on your land to drill it, they basically. You can’t really say no. You can negotiate the price, but if you don’t agree to the price, it just goes to, you know, binding arbitration. And they impose a price and they can come and deforest it and start. Yeah, plugging stuff in.

Wow, that’s crazy. So that works. That’s a great tip. Get those mineral rights, even if it’s only 40 bucks a year. So gold mining. So you were saying you get a gram per how much? Yeah, it’s about a gram per ton in the gravel there, right on the surface. So like I said, that’s about the same as like a functioning industrial gold mine. Right now it’s in the same ballpark. And because this is on the Gravel bar. There’s no overburden, so we don’t have to push down trees or dirt. Like, it’s just, like, in the gravel, and we just got to dig it up.

So, yeah, it’s really interesting. Like, I’m still learning. That’s why I brought up. I’ve only been at this for about five years, but, you know, so I don’t know the extent that we haven’t fully prospected this, you know, our claims. But yeah, I think we went out earlier this year. What did I say? With Hefe. We went out with Hefe and we got. I don’t know, was it 100 bucks an hour? Anyways? It was. It was like a legit amount of gold. And you’re just digging into, like, a little high banker. And that’s not expensive, you know, 500 bucks or something.

You get like a little sluice box and you run a pump and you just dig into it, get the gold out. And is it. Is it just everywhere or do you. Did you have to go out and kind of survey and do all that stuff on this claim? Like, there’s. If you’re in a. In a area of historical gold mining, you’ll. You’ll kind of learn that there’s a little bit of gold everywhere. So on certain creeks, you know, you’ve heard maybe of the Barkerville gold rush, and it was a big deal up in central B.C. right after the California Gold Rush.

So like 1859 or something like that, it kind of really expanded British Columbia at the time. And if you go up into those areas, there’s kind of gold in every creek. It’s just a matter of how much and how hard it is to get. And our claim is. The claim I’m talking about is on the Fraser river, and the Fraser river is the same thing. Like, there’s not a spot on the Fraser river that doesn’t have gold. It’s just a matter of how much gold and how hard it is to get. And that’s where the gram per ton comes in.

It kind of gives you an idea. It’s like, well, if you dig, you know, you know, 1 yard of material or 1 ton of material, if you’re only going to get 0.1 grams, well, you’re making, you know, 5 bucks an hour. And if it’s 1 gram per ton, then you’re getting 100 bucks an hour or whatever. Right. And so do you need an excavator for that, or what are you using for that? Well, no, up till now, we just Kind of it’s hobby level, so we go down there for a weekend and just shovel in there.

But it is permeable. Like a guy could get a permit and I might explore that in the future. But right now it’s kind of fun just being able to go down there and dig up $1,000 of gold once in a while. And are you finding. I know silver mining is a bit more of a complicated process. You don’t mine your own silver? No, I mean we have done some prospecting with, with silver ore and I’m still sitting on some ore and I haven’t made that video yet, but I love, I love that stuff. But no, I could never mine the amount of silver that we are producing into coins.

Right. And man, once I started learning about the precious metals and I saw kind of like the, the accessibility of silver versus gold. You know, you want to buy a piece of gold this big and it’s like you got to fork out five grand. But you know, if you want some silver coins, you know, it’s whatever it is, 50, 50 bucks or it’s a lot more accessible to a lot of people. And what I realized was people didn’t have quarter ounce coins, which at the time were about, you know, $15 and now they’re about $24. But that’s where we started making gridlessness quarter ounce coins.

And our intention was not for people to collect them, but to use them. Like get some silver coins and start like a little micro economy with your neighbors and your community. Like start buying your chicken eggs and silver. Right. Buy, buy beef with silver. Like buy some hay with silver and pay your kids in silver and pay the neighbor kid to shovel your driveway in silver. And like in that way we would all have a tangible amount of silver which has inherent value first of all. So it’s way less susceptible to crazy economic swings. It can’t be controlled and devalued and debased.

Yeah, so that’s where that whole silver coin thing came from. We’re still doing it now. The hang up is most of our sales were to the states and we’re just trying to figure out how to certify it for, for like no tariffs, you know what I mean? Like tariff free. We’re still trying to figure that out, but it’s been on hold for a few months now. We haven’t been able to sell south of the border. Yeah, that’s. You know, some people have wanted to experiment with making coins, like a Canadian prepper coin, kind of just as a, a novelty Thing.

But I, I do think there’s something to be said for trying to get accustomed to using an alternate medium of, of transacting that is independent from the grid and the banking system. And you know, I, I guess its value is always going to kind of be pegged to the dollar, more or less. But there is also, you know, something about silver that is enduring in that, you know, a piece of silver that’s an ounce in weight could get you the equivalent of what it might have gotten you in terms of goods and services in the year 1800.

Or at least that’s the idea. You know, the, the kid shoveling the, the sidewalk for I don’t know, a quarter ounce of silver, whatever that’s going for nowadays would have been the same, you know, hundreds of years ago presumably. So there’s something to say about that. Now is there a lot of premium that people pay to have a gridlessness silver or what does that look like? Every denomination of silver you buy has an increasing like overhead cost. The smaller the size. If we base it all on like the price everyone checks online. If you check the price of silver and I forget but like let’s say this morning it’s $70.

Yeah. Well if you, if you want to buy 100 ounce bar Canadian, yeah, you want to buy 100 ounce bar, you’re going to pay like $2 premium per ounce. So that bar is not going to be $7,000, it’s going to be like 7,200. But if you come down to a 10 ounce bar, the premium is going to be like $3. So it’s going to be 730. Right. And smaller and smaller. So our goal was to make the cheapest quarter ounce coin available. And we have a lot of cost to melt down like we buy like the largest quantities we can and then we melt it all down and we reform it completely re stamp it and strike it with the logo and, and the markings.

So there’s a premium but it’s, it’s the best you can find. And there are some other quarter ounce coins out there, but I don’t actually think the US or Canada makes one. The most common one I’ve seen is Libertad from Mexico which are super hard to get inexpensive. The biggest cost I think comes in shipping. Right. Because the person has to get it shipped to them, which I guess, yeah, which is the same no matter what silver you buy. But, but the more quantity you buy, the shipping percentage decreases. And is there any process that you have to go by because I know you Know, obviously the silver you’re getting is 999, but is there, do you put that on the coin or is there.

Do you have to test for that purity or how do you. Yeah, we’ve tested it. You can, you can go to any pawn shop and they, they usually have an XRF machine that’ll scan it. And like, if you ever wanted to like, fire sale your silver on, I mean, I don’t recommend it, but if you went to a pawn shop, you know, they’ll buy it, but they’ll, they’ll always test it with the, with this machine. So we’ve done that with these coins, but. And it’s come out the same 999. But yeah, no, we’re just buying pure silver.

It’s either 999 or four nines. Yeah. Depending. And so we’re re marking it as 999 and we’re marking it quarter ounce. And so we weigh every single one and they’re all quarter ounce greater. So very cool. So there’s so many different, you know, things that a person can do for alternate sources of income. I know you’ve, you’re looking at wood gas generators and that’s very cool because, you know, that’s one of my, my things as well. I could make biodiesel, but. Right. That’s very. I think that’s even more challenging than what you’re trying to do with.

With wood gas. To run a generator on wood is, you know, if you can accomplish that, then that’s pretty huge. So tell us a bit about that process. How is it going with that? Okay. Yes. Well, I’m still in the middle of it and I know some people are upset that I haven’t like, finished it off, but I’m working on it. And so I kind of just dove in without doing tons of research. Like, I’d read about it for years. I’d been excited about the idea for a long time. And when I just had this opportunity, I guess two years ago now, year and a half ago, I just bought the kit, we welded it together.

Christina welded it for like a month. And the thing is an amazing gasifier, but we had trouble adapting it to the generator. So it would make like a beautiful, clean burning, like gorgeous gas coming out of it when it’s like driven by the fan. Yeah. But then we, we just couldn’t make it reliable on the Jenny. And so. And you’re using a generator that is, is that takes natural gas and propane? No, just a regular gas Jenny. Okay. And so it all you’re doing is you’re basically turning off the gas valve to the gas tank. And, you know, the, the carburetor opens and lets in a mix of wood gas and oxygen.

And so it doesn’t need, you know, gasoline fuel. And these things work. I can say for sure they work. However, they’re. They’re still in the realm, as far as I’m concerned. They’re still in the realm of you kind of need to be, you know, babysitting it. You kind of need to geek out on it a little bit. And to be honest, I’m way more interested in a system that like, my wife can use. Like, I don’t. I. And I know for sure this technology can do that. It’s just there’s no big players invest a million dollars into like making the system.

There’s like a lot of, you know, me and you and other YouTubers like, chipping away at it. And I think we’re so close. Like, the gas is pretty clean. It’s just we’re trying to adapt it to, you know, a cheap Costco generator. And that thing’s not totally reliable on its own, let alone when you hack it up and start pumping it with wood gas. Right. So we’re still working on it, and I’m hoping to actually do a collaboration here this winter and get that thing running a lot more reliably. Yeah. And I mean, there’s. I guess there’s a lot of ways to convert heat into electricity because that’s really what you’re.

You’re trying to do, I guess. And I guess the question is, is wood gas the most efficient way to do that, to convert it into electricity? The, the thing about the wood gas into an internal combustion engine is it’s just so close. Like, it’s so close to working smooth because we know, we know it actually works. It’s just like, it’s just the details. Like, imagine if your gasoline car. Imagine that like if you built it and like you built the linkage not the right length or you used a spring that wasn’t the right strength and it just, it wouldn’t run properly.

And that’s where we’re at. Like, we’re so close. And the beauty is the whole generator. You know, once you have the interface, which is the gap right now, the interface between the gasifiers, which are good, the generators are good, but interfacing them is the challenge. And once that’s solved, it’s like, well, you can use an off the shelf generator, which is very convenient because Many people can get that generator off the shelf in their own hardware store and it’s already ready to plug into their off grid system or backup power for their house. But it isn’t the only way.

There are people are playing around with tags, right. Thermal electric generators. And that’s promising for different reasons. It’s a lot lower power, it’s way less efficient. But if you add it on to an existing heater, I mean there’s potential there. But other than that, I mean you’re talking steam engine and I don’t know, I feel like that’s a bit regressive. Well, I mean they’ve been making wood gasifying vehicles. They were doing that during World War II, weren’t they? Yep. So this I guess would be the other function is that you could potentially attach this thing to your car.

You know, I honestly believe that it might be easier if we had an engine from the 40s. Right. You know, with way sloppier tolerances and you know, the expectations for horsepower were way less and so. But yeah, this is absolutely a proven technology, but no one’s adapted it and built that interface for today’s need. And honestly I think the big opportunity now is for people like myself who want an off grid system or a backup system like at the cabin. Like, how cool would it be to have a wood burning backup electrical source at your cabin? Right? Yeah.

And, and so I think that’s why I’m going to keep working on it because I think we’re actually really close and this wasn’t really a market. I would say 20 years ago there wasn’t people like me trying to or there wasn’t very many people like me trying to run like a kind of a normal household. And I need like a backup power source to my solar. Right. If it’s that interface that you’re talking about that that is the real problem, maybe engineer775, you guys can get working on that. Put your heads together. There’s not a lot of people in this space doing it.

So you know, I mean it’s. There’s a market there for sure. You also, I commended you in, in the part that we didn’t record on getting one of your girls to shovel cow and into the biodigester. And she was doing it gleefully, which is something I could never imagine my daughter doing. So I’m gonna sit. We’re me and my daughter, we’re gonna watch that video video together and I’m gonna see what, what she thinks about that occupation. Talk about this Biodigester technology. For people who don’t know what that is, what is that? Well, this is another super proven technology.

Like there’s nothing emerging about this except. Except not many people are doing it on a very small like homestead scale. So we played around and put this, you know, one of these IBC totes in the greenhouse and just ran it. It’s mostly water. 80% water, 20% cow manure, and some horse manure. And you know, there’s two ways that manure breaks down, anaerobic and aerobic. So if it’s got oxygen, like in a compost pile where it’s dry, and you turn it to get the oxygen in there, it breaks down and makes a beautiful compost. And what it doesn’t do is produce methane.

But when it’s, when it’s anaerobic, when you submerge it in water, there’s a different whole different, you can imagine a whole different culture of bacteria that lives in there. And you know, there’s methanogens, so they actually take that feed and turn it into methane. So CH4, I think, and then it bubbles up and then you got to collect it. So you need like a little system, like a little valve and like, it’ll actually like bloat with methane. And so yeah, we just piped it into a, you know, like an inner tube, a black inner tube. And.

And what are you using that for? That one we just used for fun. Okay. We just played around with it and like burnt it. And it was just like a handheld torch. Okay. And so we’re still waiting for like 2.0 and. And you know, I’m playing around with whether it should be compressed or just stored in. Most people who use them store them in a large bag and just, you know, put it on a burner on their back deck and it’s just like natural gas or propane. It just burns totally clean. And what’s amazing is that it can run like most methanes and propanes, they run at really low pressure.

Right. They’re like half a psi in a lot of burners. So if you have this in a bag and they actually make special bags for this purpose. But you could also. I’m sure there’s a variety of things you could use, but you put a brick on it and it literally produces like the perfect pressure to feed, you know, a stovetop burner. Is there hazards with this? I mean, with all this stuff, it can potentially be a bit dangerous. Or is it pretty risk free when. Well, I mean, it’s a flammable gas. So there’s like some inherent danger there.

It shouldn’t be explosive. Like when you capture it, you want to keep all your plumbing joints tight so that it doesn’t have oxygen in with the methane because then you could come up with an explosive mix. But really like kind of like any pure fuel, it’s, it’s, it’s not at its most dangerous in its pure form. It’s at its most dangerous when it’s diluted in the air or in oxygen. Right. And then. But I mean, yeah, I mean it’s not crazy dangerous. There’s lots of people. This is more of a technology that’s appropriate for warmer regions.

You know, people in Australia, people in the, in the equator where because you’re. This is a biological process and what they really want is like a steady warm temperature, which is why it worked great in my greenhouse. But it’ll only work great in there for like three months of the year for me. Whereas if you’re in a warmer climate and if you do have a big greenhouse, like a year round greenhouse, you could, you could run these and then you could just, you’re just kind of producing gas non stop and you feed it. Once you get it started, you usually want to start it with the cow manure and that is a thing because they actually have naturally the methanogens in them.

But then you can start to use any animal manure and you can use like garden scraps and you can just feed these things and people are doing it all around the world and you know, I don’t believe it’s. It’s super dangerous. Okay. Yeah. Worthwhile to maybe put a disclaimer on there just for people who are tinkering nowadays on the Internet. My whole channel, like yeah, the whole channel deserves a disclaimer. The black powder video was very cool because this is something I’ve always, you know, how do we make bullets when. Yeah. Hits the fan. Which is always a touchy topic up here where we live.

Unfortunately, increasingly more so. But that’s a great video. Also I’d encourage. So you use charcoal and what were the other ingredients you used? So charcoal and potassium nitrate and sulfur. So potassium nitrate is in the States. It’s a lot easier in Canada. Boy, are we locked down. It’s hard to get, but you can find it in the garden store. And it’s like a stump eater. Essentially the nitrate, it’s a KNO3 and what you really want is that O3 you want those oxygens. That’s the Whole value. The nitrogen doesn’t do anything for you. The potassium does burn with the sulfur, but so when you pour it on a stump, the oxygen, just, like, you know, it.

It activates it and breaks it down. Like, oxygen breaks down everything. It’s very corrosive. But, yeah, in the black powder, it just burns alongside the carbon of the charcoal. And anyone can make charcoal. That’s super easy. And anyone can buy the potassium nitrate. Is there a way to get the potassium nitrate from nature using your. Your methane or something? Oh, man, you can read up. I would encourage people who are pumped about this. You got to read up about it, because, of course, there is. Like, in the Civil War in the US they scraped this stuff from the floor of stables and barns and latrines.

Again, it’s made with a biological process. And when you break down, you know, stable, you know, straw and manure, when it breaks down naturally, it produces potassium nitrate. And the only trick is if you’re going to do it intentionally, you kind of, like, rinse that. Like, you keep it dry, and you just wet it enough to keep the process going, but you don’t let it, like, wash away into the soil. And then when you’re ready to collect it, it usually would take about a year or more, and then you would soak it, and all that potassium nitrate would dissolve, and you would collect the liquid, and then you would essentially boil off everything else.

And there’s a way to purify it from that point. But. But in some cases, like in some climates, if you’ve got a chicken barn, if you see the little white crystals growing on the corner of the barn or the chicken hutch or the stable or whatever, and you get down on the ground, like where water maybe washes and then creates a puddle and then dries up, there’s little white crystals, and that’s potassium nitrate. And in the Civil War, they just ran around to, like, every homestead in America, and they scraped up crystals and collected it to make.

To make black powder in the US that’s really incredible that, you know, this is such great knowledge, man. And I got to say, it’s been great having you here today. And I would encourage people to go in and check out the channel. You guys have fun with this, and you won’t be disappointed. I really like the way that you’re. You’re making this information accessible to the average person, and I commend you for what you’re doing. So, you know, thanks a lot for coming out. I know we’re gonna have to come out There one of these days.

And see, I think one of the videos that you were working on, it was some kind of yurt or maybe not a yurt. It was like some kind of. Some shelter. I can’t remember exactly. The dome. The dome, possibly. Yeah. I’ve kind of. What do you call that? I’ve kind of foreshadowed a dome building project. We’ve got a living roof on this house and I love it. But I want to go next level and build something that’s really earth sheltered, something that actually does not need heat to stay above freezing all winter here. So that’s in the future.

Well, if you’re cool, I’ll. I’ll bring a couple communists out there and they’ll have their cameras and we’ll. We’ll shoot some videos. Nice. And who knows, maybe you’ll. Maybe you’ll keep them and they can work for you out there in your own. Get them used to that Siberian, like gulag wilderness. Yeah, I know. They’re itching to get out there. All right, man. Well, guys, if you want to get. Check out the book Gridlessness would strongly recommend. Is there an audiobook? Man, there is an audiobook, an ebook and that soft copy. And the audiobook is available on Spotify.

It’s not quite available on Audible and itunes yet, but like any day now. It’s in process. It’s in their AI review or whatever they do, but it’s available on Amazon and everywhere else as well. Good stuff. Well, we’ll have to check that out as well. All right, well, thanks a lot for coming out, man, and good luck, I guess, winterizing the homestead. And we’ll hopefully see you next season. Maybe we’ll come up for a visit. Yep. Thanks so much, man. It was great. And yeah, anytime. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices.

No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code preppinggear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
[tr:tra].

See more of Canadian Prepper on their Public Channel and the MPN Canadian Prepper channel.