EP 25: The Billionaires Building Bunkers Have It Backwards - Jim Gale

Jim Gale spent two years reading everything he could find about what's going wrong with the world's food, water and energy, and it nearly broke him. He'd just had his first two daughters. He was living in Costa Rica with money in the bank and nothing to do, and the more he learned the worse it got.

Then he read one sentence from Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture: though the problems of our world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

He sobbed. That was eighteen years ago, and he's spent every year since working on the simple half of that sentence.

Jim's résumé reads strangely on paper. Four-time All-American wrestler. Lived in forty-seven countries. At twenty-nine he wrote down a goal to retire inside three years with three million dollars; four years later the mortgage company he'd started was doing $1.3 billion in revenue and he bought a boat and lived on the ocean until boredom got him. He now lives completely off-grid on a private 430-acre lake outside Orlando, surrounded by three hundred species of food-producing plants, and describes his primary job as steward of the land.

Jim's nonprofit, entirely open source — no patents, no NDAs: https://originsreclaimed.orgWant a food forest designed for your own property: https://foodforestabundance.com

The best idea in this episode is a reversal. The billionaires building bunkers and hiring private security have it exactly backwards, Jim argues, because a fortress full of food is a target and nothing else. The better play is to become the seed of abundance for everyone around you — produce thousands of plant starts and a surplus you give away, until your neighbors are feeding their neighbors and you're the goose laying the golden eggs rather than the man with something worth taking. Security through generosity. It costs less and it scales.

What follows is the most practical hour on growing food you'll hear this year.

You need far less land than you think. A family in California produces six thousand pounds of food a year on a tenth of an acre. On a quarter acre you can run four chickens, a small aquaponics setup, roof water catchment, solar, and a full food forest without crowding any of it.

Jim walks through the seven-layer structure that makes that possible: roots and tubers underground, the herbaceous and ground-cover layer, shrubs, understory and overstory fruit and nut trees, with vines climbing through all of it. In a single thirty-by-thirty patch you're not harvest