I hesitate to throw this out here, because it goes against the "do it as a business" ethos here on HN. However, if you are really interested in some topic, why

I hesitate to throw this out here, because it goes against the "do it as a business" ethos here on HN. However, if you are really interested in some topic, why not trade your knowledge for the knowledge you seek? In centuries past, if there were a mathematician who wanted to know more about botany, it was the most normal thing in the world for him to contact a botanist interested in math and trade the knowledge. This usually involved one going to stay at the home/studio/estate/whatever of the other for what today would be considered a long period of time. The upside was that you could learn all you needed to know from what was as good a source as you were likely to ever find. If you think about a modern version of this model, you could get all the information you need on the subject you're interested in and it wouldn't cost you a nickel. We have the internet, they didn't. Might even get a pretty good friend out of the deal. Of course you need knowledge to trade, and pretty deep knowledge at that. At the same time, if there is an arborist out there looking to learn programming, and you have heaven only knows how many fruit trees on your property, what do you have to lose by checking his/her clients for references? You can teach him/her programming. They can teach you what you need to know to care for your property. You guys can each contact each other's references to make sure you're actually experts in your respective fields. There doesn't seem to be any risk in trying? (Unless I'm missing it?) It just seems a really easy fix to the money problem. And you can access knowledge from everyone from arborists and physicists to dance teachers and electric motorcycle engineers to international development experts and nanotech engineers. The sky would be the limit.