How Free Market Wildlife Began
Free Market Wildlife started with a question I had no freaking idea how to answer.
I can’t remember exactly when I came up with the name, but I definitely had it by 2018. I had just started my first year at Grossmont Community College, and I wanted to study wildlife biology so I could work with reptiles and amphibians.
At the time, I was frustrated by how much wildlife conservation, and working with wildlife in general, seemed to be controlled by governments around the world. I was also fully on the libertarian hype train. I thought EVERYTHING could succeed in the free market.
Living in San Diego, I could see the San Diego Zoo offering this phenomenal experience: letting people see incredible wildlife face to face while supporting conservation. To me, that looked like conservation and the free market working together.
But what about the everyday person? How could a small business marry wildlife with the free market? All I could see were governments taking those opportunities away.
Did I have a business plan? Absolutely not. In hindsight, the idea was pretty silly. But that’s where the name came from.
To this day, Free Market Wildlife is a sole proprietorship. What I’ve actually done with it has taken a much wilder route than I expected.
Running Away in May
In 2019, I started Tanoshi and released an album with Mesa called Running Away in May. On May 1 that year, I quit college, drove up to Alaska, and started working seasonal jobs around the country.
I’ll get into those adventures in future blogs. For now, let’s skip ahead to the part where I broke my butt.
A broken butt and a lot of lofi
In 2022, I fell off a cliff in Kirkwood, California, south of Lake Tahoe, and fractured my left pelvic ring. I was bedridden for two months, spending about 22 hours a day in bed.
That’s when I started releasing lofi instrumentals as Tanoshi. No one was listening, but I was having fun. I liked making them, so I kept releasing those little instrumentals every week while I recovered.
Eventually, I got back to working seasonal jobs around the country. I kept making music, too, and by early 2023, I had released my first collaborative Pokémon lofi project: A Journey Through the Hoenn Region ~ Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire Lo-Fi.
It had 35 tracks and a ton of different artists involved. There wasn’t some complicated process behind getting everyone together. I emailed people, messaged them on Instagram, and a bunch of them were down to do it.
We organized and put the project together in a Discord server. By the time we finished, everyone had become friends. I asked if they wanted to keep the server running, and they said yes.
That was when Free Market Wildlife finally started making sense to me.
Finding what the name was for
I realized I wanted Free Market Wildlife to help people do what they love for a living. Where do your passions and talents intersect? What do you love doing, and how could you build a career around it?
At first, I thought this was mostly an opportunity for people in the United States. We’re privileged, right? I figured we were the ones who could afford to think about making a career out of our passions, while people elsewhere wouldn’t have that option.
But as the Free Market Wildlife Discord grew, that assumption started falling apart. The thing opening up those possibilities wasn’t simply being in America. It was having access to the internet.
I came to believe that anyone with internet access could build a good living doing something they love. That’s the possibility that got me excited about Free Market Wildlife, and it still does.
From a Discord server to this website
A few weeks ago, I started doing video editing. As I took on clients, I realized we needed workspaces to organize larger projects.
The Discord server had become a close community with a pretty specific niche of artists. I didn’t want to turn it into a place for every client project, and Discord can be distracting anyway. It wasn’t the right place for that.
So I used ChatGPT’s Codex to build my own website and put the workspaces here.
Now you can click Build a Business on the homepage, sign up, and get in touch with me. We can talk about what you love doing, what you’re good at, and a custom workspace where we can work on turning that into a career.