Hello

When I was 8 years old, I went to the Rio 92 Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. That was when I first realized that the adults had no idea about what they were actually doing. I have always enjoyed a good challenging puzzle, so I started treating the planet as a puzzle and set sail on a lifelong quest to solve it. I have no idea if I will succeed, but that's beside the point, because I enjoy the challenge.

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By the time I was 10, Brazil was in the midst of an inflationary crisis. I intuitively figured out that there was a problem with the feedback mechanism of pricing due to the size of the economy, so creating local currencies would ultimately be necessary to fix the pricing mechanism. At the time, I could not verbalize that, but I could see it in my mind. I didn't know at the time yet that I am autistic and have a knack for systems. With that local currency idea in mind, I ran for class president on a platform to create a school currency. Of course there were problems with that, I didn't have the authority as class president to do that, and a school is too small of a market, but I was 10, give me a break. I ran against the Teen Party. There entire platform was "Teens are great". I lost the election in a landslide. That was my first experience in politics and it is very relevant to this day.

 

By the time I was 11, I was the freak of the class. I wrote essays about politics and economics, such as my first essay where I argued that we live in a neofeudalist society. I ready my first book about philosophy, Sophie's World, which is a nice summary of the history of philosophy. For the next few years I read about self-development, psychology, mythology, physics, and a variety of subjects. I studied a few languages including French, Italian, and Chinese. I read the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, started meditating, doing Tai Chi Chuan, and becoming increasingly boring. Still, I never lost my sense of humor.

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When I was 16, I knew I was on the clock. I had a reasonable idea of what I needed to do and the outlines of a plan in mind. I was going to go nowhere in Brazil, so I plotted my eventual escape to Canada, where I was to setup my base of operations. My first stop was Nelson, BC, in August 2001. Not only did the city have a good taste in name, but they were a tiny pot-smoking town in the middle of the mountains. The city was the opposite of Rio de Janeiro, which was a nice change of environment. I went to High School in LV Rogers for two years. I then moved to Victoria, BC and went to Camosun College. Soon after, I met my wife and we had two kids.

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When I was 22 I had an idea for a website where people could have profiles about themselves, share their interests, and then I could grab those interests and target ads to them. My plan was to sell ad space to corporations on the front page of the website, which would be curated for each specific user, and then I could use the ad revenue to fund my non-profit for world peace. The website was designed as a mix of what is now Facebook and Amazon. I created a plan for it, for my web design class, and my professor loved it. But I didn't have stacks of cash or connections, so I shelved the idea and moved on.

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In 2006, I graduated from Camosun College with a diploma in Business Administration. I found a good paying accounting  job in Vancouver, BC and moved there with my wife and my first son. In the interest of brevity, I will not share the whole story of the next few years, because a lot happened at the time, but by the end of 2007 the credit crisis started to hit, I lost my job and found myself alone with my wife and kids, in a city where I had no connections and no jobs. I had to start my first business to survive, and it was wild. I learned a lot about what is wrong with our current economic system, back in those days. I learned to think more like a capitalist and why capitalism doesn't work by fully experiencing it. After 3 years in Vancouver, we returned to Victoria, where we have been since.

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Fast forward to 2016, I went to University of Victoria to finally study philosophy. In 2019, I started working on Curbside Community Farms Co-operative with a few friends. We finally incorporated it on October 16, 2022.