Hi everybody, welcome back to the cabin and welcome to the first episode of the Myself for Lens podcast. I'm your host Shawn James and I'm coming to you from my cabin in the wilderness of Ontario, Canada. Now this podcast is a long time coming. I've been talking about doing this for at least five years.
My channel, my YouTube channel, I started in around 2016. And 2017 is when I started building a cabin and the channel started taking off and quite a number of subscribers have, have come to watch me live a more self reliant lifestyle. to build a cabin and a homestead in the wilderness. So I've grown from, you know, nothing back in 2016 to about two and a half million subscribers over a couple of channels now on on YouTube.
And then of course all the other social media channels got quite a following there as well. So why would I start a podcast at this point? Well, I think... For a couple of reasons, I'm starting to listen to podcasts myself a lot. So whenever I'm driving somewhere, driving into town, it's usually quite a distance that I'm driving.
So instead of listening to music, I turn on podcasts, and I've been on a few podcasts as a result as well. From people just reaching out to me, knowing that I'm listening to their podcasts. So, it's just something I think is it's a much easier... form of communication. It's easier to follow, it's easier to listen than it is to watch something for a lot of people, including myself in a lot of cases, especially when I have bad internet.
There's Callie. You'll meet her and you'll see her quite often throughout the podcast. Because I'm also recording these for the YouTube channel for my Sean James channel, which is a smaller channel. So because this is new to me, I'm not sure exactly how these... This podcast is going to be recorded and they're going to hit the air, like in what, in what order?
Callie's, Callie, cut it out back there. So yeah, so I'm not sure what order they're going to come out in and what I'm going to focus on initially. I do want to hear from you guys. I want to hear what you would like to hear, what questions you have for me or what subject matters you'd like me to address to help you on your path to self reliance.
But I'm going to start by reading the, the dictionary definition. And that is to rely on one's own efforts and abilities, think independently and critically, embrace your individuality. Actually this is not quite the, the definition I've added to it. But to think independently and critically, embrace your individuality, resist modernity to pursue a natural, healthier, more meaningful and satisfying life.
So that's what it means to me. Now of course, there's a lot of things that go into that. So the first thing I'd say, When I frame the categories very, very broadly I, I put them in to acknowledge, adapt, and then prosper. And acknowledge is basically to, to acknowledge that we're not living the life we want to live.
We're not satisfied and I'm, when I say we, I mean probably yourselves if you're watching and listening to me. So, to acknowledge that this modern world is not functioning very well, we have a lot of mental and health, and physical illness as a result, and that I think getting back to nature is the answer, but first we have to acknowledge that there is a problem and that it's addressable.
It's, it's something that we can overcome, and then start, and we can start taking steps to... improve our self reliance but so just acknowledging that's the first thing. So then adapt would be to learn all the skills required and the mindset required to pursue that life of self reliance. And to me it's taking responsibility for your actions and not blaming others and not putting your hand out unless you really need help.
So just take on things for yourself and your family and your community. And then of course the prosper is when you When you learn each of these skills and apply them. So as you apply all these skills that you're learning, you're going to prosper in these different categories. You might not prosper broadly overall at first, but you're definitely going to, first of all, lose that fear as you become more proficient at something.
You're addressing what you've learned, or the problems with the world and your life. You adapt to those things and then you prosper as you apply each of those skills. So I have some tenets that I've kind of developed over my lifetime, but especially over the last 10 years. Now, I'm going to go back later in this, probably in this episode and talk about where I am now, but where I came from and how, how I lost everything and how I had to start over.
And that's why my self reliance became a real passion of mine. So... I've written down these tenets that I have developed over time that I think are basically behaviors that are required in order to, to live a more satisfying, but self reliant and meaningful life. So those are take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
I'm not going to expand on them right now, just say podcasts or a little bit later in this podcast. So take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Stop blaming others. Chances are you are exactly where you are in life as a result of your own decisions and choices. Be accountable. Accept blame.
No excuses. Have faith, but don't expect a higher power to carry your load for you. Don't take everything personally. The world does not revolve around you. I'll come, I'll spend some more time on that in another podcast, because of course your perspective does revolve around you and the way you live your life is generally from your own perspective.
So that's not quite true, but also doesn't anything that happens to you doesn't mean it's your fault and that it's something that, you know, the world's not out to get you. Plan for the future, but live in the present. Live intentionally and in the moment. Control your emotions. Be patient and practical.
Accept and love yourself. All of us are deeply flawed, despite what greatness you think you see in others. Walk softly, but carry a big stick. We are equal parts good and evil. Stay connected to your dark and dangerous side, but keep it under control. And only use it when it is necessary for survival and protection of your family.
Fully express your good nature primarily, if possible. Work hard and then work harder. Carry as big a load as you can handle. Focus as much energy as possible directly on the basics. Food and water, health, shelter, security, reproduction and community. Life is far more meaningful when you do so. Be natural.
Despite what seems like progress, modern life is not good for us. We need to be outside, interacting with flora, fauna, fresh air and water, dirt, solar time, weather and seasons. We don't just need nature, we are nature. Strive to be the best that you can be, always. Acknowledge and accept the world as it is.
Learn how to overcome the challenges inherent with living and apply those learned skills relentlessly. Manifest your true and full potential. Embody your beliefs. Become strong and resilient. Be selfish about getting your daily dose of nature, especially during sunrise and sunset. Now just to quickly go back to my story, so I was born in a small town I'm north of Toronto, Ontario, Canada back in 1970, which makes me 53 at the time of the recording of this episode.
So I lived on the edge of this small town and despite the fact that we were just typical lower middle class family in this small town I did all the traditional things, typical things of a Canadian boy, I would say I did some hunt or some fishing as a kid, some camping with my family. That's me. And played hockey and soccer.
Those were my passions for most of my childhood, until about 18. And just lived on the edge of this town, though. Township to the north of us, which is only a few hundred yards away, was still farmland. So that's where I spent a lot of my childhood, going into that forest and just playing in the forest, basically.
And, you know, making bows and arrows and You know, trapping small game and building shelters, building forts and, you know, sleeping in them, doing all kinds of crazy stuff back there. So that's where I spent a lot of my childhood and where I developed a lot of my skills and where I really developed this passion for the outdoors and for nature.
So because of that passion, my parents really encouraged it. Especially my mother. She really encouraged me to, to spend as much time in nature as possible. So, When I was 17, I was working construction in the summer, so I'm making pretty good money, and they helped me, my parents helped me buy a piece of property.
It was a two and a half acre parcel on an island, on a bigger island, but on an island in a fairly remote lake. In the two and a half hours north of where I was living. So I went up there on weekends and built a small cabin, not a log cabin, just a stick frame cabin on this island. And every weekend that's where I'd spend my time, just fishing and sleeping in the bush and then in a tent or some open air until I was able to build that little cabin.
So that was amazing. I learned a lot of skills, outdoor skills then. And then when, then two years later I ended up selling that property and buying a mainland property, just for more convenience, but a little bit bigger property, five and a half acres. And I bought it with my sister and her boyfriend at the time.
Now things went south pretty quickly with that one. Say sister and her boyfriend split up, I think very soon after we purchased that property. So I was. Kind of stuck with it, but I spent a lot of time there, but I really couldn't afford to keep it. I had paid off my portion with the profit I made from selling that first property, but two thirds of it, so 30, 000 of it was still owing, was still mortgage, so I had to try to carry that, which I did for the next 10 years, which would be a future story.
I had to get out of it. But on that property, I actually built a log cabin, and I lived in that for a short time. And that's really where I was headed with my life. That's what I wanted to do with my life was to just be kind of a hermit and Spend just my whole time hunting and fishing and exploring the wilderness But things didn't work out.
I ended up having to pay that mortgage So I came out of the bush got a job in construction with my dad Took a sheet metal trade. So I was working on rooftops doing commercial sheet metal And and I met my wife and ended up spending 20 years just kind of raising a family and, and being a lot more typical and, and responsible, which I don't regret at all.
That was an awesome time to, and I, I wouldn't you know, family is my priority, still is. But the passion or the attraction of living an outdoor lifestyle never left me. In the middle of that, during that period, I was working like I said, as a sheet metal. Apprentice and then a journeyman, and then I was offered a position in the office of the company that I was working for.
So I ended up getting into the office and worked my way up, became a manager and then a district manager when that company was bought out by a bigger one. And things were just getting crazier, more hectic and more there was more pressure on me to expand that territory of that company and to kind of take it across Eastern Canada.
And it was starting to impact my family life. So what we decided, my wife and I, was that I would start a company, a competing company with that company. I'll keep competing in the same amount, same category of construction. But keep it local, so try to grow it, but, and make a decent living, but keep it local enough that it wasn't impacting my family life.
So that's what I did, but five years later, the 2008 financial crisis hit, it came up to Canada in 2010, all my customers were going out of business and leaving me hanging, and it buried, buried me, buried our company. So... Because it was new, my company was only what, five years old at the time, I had personally guaranteed all of the credit, all of the material purchasing, and the, the equipment and all that kind of stuff, vehicles, personally guaranteed it, so when we went out of business, I couldn't declare bankruptcy, I couldn't walk away from any of that debt, I had to take it on personally.
And the result was about 750, 000 of that I took personally. So that just, that was 2000 and, well it was the end of 2010 when we shut the doors. So 2011, I was just dealing with the fallout from that. Spending just countless time in court, fighting with creditors and trying to be fair with what money we could get from selling equipment and materials.
While I'm still trying to raise my family and, and keep things going at home. Very, very stressful time. And you know, eventually we worked our way through it, I was able to pay off by, by keeping another business going and expanding that. I was able to pay off all that debt, pay off our house so we could keep our family in the same house.
And then move on. Which that took probably, what, three years maybe after? So maybe by 2013 or so, is when we paid off that, that debt. And put Just enough money away after paying all the debt and paying the house off to allow me to focus on something that I was going to be more passionate about and to, that I would be able to continue to do and be happy doing it.
Because the business I was in, to be honest, was just, it was not my passion, it was something I did. And I did a good job of, and I could have recovered, I think, if I had spent more time doing that. But my passion was not there. It was I was losing that meaning in my life. So my family was the only thing I was getting happiness from.
I wasn't having as much time to spend in the outdoors. So it just gave me time to sit back and reflect and figure out exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And during that period where we were, struggling financially. I had to go get a job for somebody and half my wages were garnished.
So I, you know, I was barely bringing any money home, just enough to survive on. But we had made choices. We had sat down and prioritized what meant the most to us. And of course, next to family, the kids came first. Next thing would have been food and, and just staying fairly rural and staying in a small town.
And just becoming more self sufficient. So, we, it's a long story, and I'll get into it, I guess, in more episodes. But basically, we approached a local farmer, and through that farmer met an investor who owned a piece of land within walking distance from our house, 118 acres, and he had bought it as an investment, but it was it used to be an operating farm.
So... He was, he let us basically use the land and just keep an eye on it for him and, and find somebody to rent the house. But the land itself and the barn and everything just let us have full access to it. So I put up electric fencing and, and a little shelter, running shelter and some water. And we raised cattle, Dexter cattle.
Which is a small breed of cow, so it was a good initiation for us. Good way to learn how to raise livestock. And then I had some heritage pigs chickens, like egg laying chickens, which we also had at our house and had for a number of years. Yeah, just in our suburban backyard, half acre backyard.
What else we had? Oh, meat, birds, meat chickens. So I raised a hundred meat chickens at a time. We were selling this meat as well as providing for our own family. And then quail and rabbits and stuff like that. So we learned a lot during that period but when we were, when I got into this business, or I built this solar energy business is what it was, it was something I was pretty passionate about too.
At the time I thought that was a good way to help Deal with some of our environmental issues, but I'll get into that in the future as well. Anyway, during that period, we learned a lot. Just like I said, becoming more self sufficient meant growing our own food, growing a vegetable garden, clearing half the backyard, taking out all the grass and growing you know, what, 10, 000 square feet of what was it?
10, 000 square feet? Yeah, I guess it was. Close to 10, 000 square feet of vegetables and fruit and Still, I went back to doing a little bit more hunting and fishing and raising those livestock, like I said. So we did get a pretty good control of our life. We were able to minimize our costs. We sold a boat that we had, we sold an SUV that my wife was driving, and got the cheapest and most fuel efficient car we could find at the time, which was a Volkswagen, Volkswagen Jetta.
A diesel manual transmission. I still had my truck, but I bought a little Sentra, Nissan Sentra, little old car that I could drive around where the gas was not going to be too expensive. So we made a lot of changes. So we learned how to be more frugal, and then we also learned how to to cut our costs by providing a lot more for ourselves.
So, fast forward that that basically became the MySelfReliance brand as we were working on And becoming more self sufficient ourselves and our, our family. It just made sense to start documenting that. It started by creating a website selling some consulting work that I did for people, other people that were trying to do the same thing, like branding especially, how to build a website.
And like I said, documenting the process of becoming self reliant. And that included a lot of wilderness tripping. You know, I had it set up for solo camping and, and fishing, especially fishing in the backcountry. Started there and then I thought, let's, I gotta keep going with this and relive my childhood and my continue with the passion that I had when I was younger to living more off grid and building a log cabin and building a self sufficient homestead.
We found 50 or 20 acres for 50, 000 which was a deal at the time in an unorganized township and I started building the cabin and that just evolved into a complete homestead where we were able to live in that cabin. My wife joined me living in that cabin for a while which was pretty, pretty interesting.
That was awesome. But anyway, we had some neighbor issues and again if you've been following along on the YouTube channels of course you know all of this. But for anybody that's new to the channel or new to this podcast I'll kind of, I guess in the show notes what I'll do is give links to the videos where you can learn more about this, more in sequence, but I'll also talk more on future podcasts about this.
But basically we had some neighbor issues, ended up selling that place and I'd already bought this property as a hunting property. It's Equally remote, I would say, to the other one but less neighbor, potential neighbor issues. Completely surrounded by crown land, which is our version in Canada of, of public lands.
So those will never be developed. So I'm completely surrounded by that. I have no immediate neighbors. I have one neighbor within walking distance who live here full time. They're, they're an older couple, retired couple. And they're completely self sufficient as well. There's no electricity available in this area, so us and, and them are living completely off grid with no ability to live on grid.
So fires for food and cooking, for cook, or for cooking and heat solar energy for running like the freezer in the basement and the lights and things like that, and some fuel of course for the backup generator and the ATV and snowmobile. But other than that, pretty self sufficient. We could be completely, if we put a little bit more effort into it.
Oh, well, I would say this, we're as self sufficient as we could be, if we didn't have access to modern fuel, we could still survive. This would be slightly less comfortable. So that's where we're, we are now, and that's where we are going to continue to head, is to have two properties completely set up off grid, We're self sufficient and completely able to not just survive, but to thrive on these properties for not just my wife and I, but for our extended family as well, including our two girls.
So that's what I'm documenting. If you're interested in that, I would suggest watching the YouTube channels as well. But if you're just would rather hear it in podcast form, what I'll do is I'll. I'm going to talk, I'll have solo episodes, quite a number of them, where I'll just talk like this, talk to you, talk about what's going on in my life at the time, what I'm working on, probably, of what I've learned.
Let's say I'm doing a solar installation or a water catchment system or something, I'll kind of talk you through what I'm doing here on the podcast. But I'll also film that and document it so that you can watch it on the YouTube channels as well. But I'm gonna try to just make it so that you're not losing anything.
I'm good. So I give you everything you need to do to just listen to it if that's your preferred method of consuming content. But it's, it's gonna be busy. My daughter is helping me. Emily, she's gonna help with the editing of these episodes. and distribution and maybe with the advertising so we can help pay for this thing.
So thank you to Emily for that, and if you're interested in just following along with her perspective too, she also has a YouTube channel, Emily Ashling, and I'll also always provide the link to her channel and my channels in the descriptions or in the show notes or whatever they podcasts. So that's it for this episode.
I look forward to filming a lot more. I look forward to having a lot of guests. Anything that I'm interested in, I'm going to have guests on that are... Hopefully experts in whatever whatever subject matter I'm trying to learn more about and that I think that you would benefit from. So I'll have guests, these solo episodes and a lot more, probably family episodes as well where I have at least one of my daughters, Emily.
Not sure Aaron would be interested in doing this, but Emily certainly would. Maybe I'll even be able to convince my wife to come on. But. Who knows, each week will be a little bit different and that will be the goal would be to get an episode out at least once per week. So that's it. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for watching if you're on YouTube and I look forward to seeing you back at here at the cabin next time. Take care.