RPF0085-Steven_Harris

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00:00:27.300 | Let's keep things practical today and talk about saving money on utility bills.

00:00:35.100 | ♪

00:00:51.100 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Tuesday, October 21, 2014.

00:00:57.900 | My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host.

00:01:00.100 | Today we have an interview with a man named Stephen Harris, who is an expert at all things energy.

00:01:06.100 | And we're going to talk about very practical and straightforward ways to save money on utility and energy bills.

00:01:14.100 | I hope you find this useful.

00:01:16.100 | ♪

00:01:23.100 | I don't know about you, but as we're just coming back off of the summer here, living down here in South Florida,

00:01:29.100 | this is our expensive period of time with energy bills.

00:01:32.100 | And I have a renewed motivation and focus to really work on saving my energy bills and decreasing them.

00:01:40.100 | And I've wanted to bring you a very practical resource on the thought process of actually thinking through how to do that.

00:01:47.100 | There are a lot of people probably that could talk to you about it, but one of the people that I thought of

00:01:52.100 | that I think is probably one of the most expert people I've ever had the opportunity to come across is a man named Stephen Harris.

00:02:00.100 | And Stephen Harris is an energy expert.

00:02:03.100 | He works now as a consultant, and if it's related to energy, he has some pretty intense knowledge on it.

00:02:11.100 | Currently he is the founder and CEO of a company called Knowledge Publications,

00:02:17.100 | which is the largest energy-only publishing company in the USA.

00:02:22.100 | And as far as his work history, he came to his current work position to do full-time work on the development

00:02:31.100 | and implementation of hydrogen, biomass, and solar-related energy systems

00:02:36.100 | after spending a 10-year career in the aerothermal dynamics department of the scientific labs of Chrysler Corporation,

00:02:43.100 | where he focused a lot on some very new types of development of automotive technology.

00:02:51.100 | I first came across him because he has been a guest multiple times on a show that I've enjoyed listening to very much over the years

00:02:57.100 | called the Survival Podcast.

00:02:59.100 | I think he's the number one all-time appearing guest over there.

00:03:03.100 | And at the end of the show today, I will send you over to some links where you can hear those shows,

00:03:08.100 | where he's done a lot of work on emergency preparedness, very, very practical emergency preparedness.

00:03:13.100 | But his expertise is in the area of energy production.

00:03:16.100 | And again, this is a big deal for me because there seem to be a number of areas that we can target with regard to saving energy

00:03:26.100 | that are probably pretty low-hanging fruit for many of us.

00:03:28.100 | I know I've got some low-hanging fruit in my house and in my household to be able to save on energy bills.

00:03:34.100 | And so my goal is to focus on those things and really build out some savings in that area.

00:03:42.100 | I think what I've succeeded to do is basically create a primer, an introduction in today's show with Stephen.

00:03:50.100 | And it's certainly not exhaustive, but it is a good start.

00:03:53.100 | It's a very good start.

00:03:56.100 | I do want to give you just a quick outline of what the interview covers.

00:04:02.100 | My approach in doing the show was basically to use it as a way for me to ask my personal questions of Steve

00:04:09.100 | and then allow you to listen in.

00:04:12.100 | And so I tried to do this in a format of what's appropriate for my personal situation.

00:04:17.100 | I recognize that many of you will have a very different situation,

00:04:22.100 | but I want to have the expertise to be able to create a comprehensive outline for everybody.

00:04:26.100 | So there's a lot of information in here on warm climates, how to save money on energy bills in warm climates,

00:04:33.100 | which is where I live.

00:04:34.100 | And there's also a good bit of information on cooler climates.

00:04:37.100 | And we talk a lot about insulation, what are the most effective ways to do insulation,

00:04:43.100 | what's the low-hanging fruit, where should you start.

00:04:46.100 | We talk a lot about appliances, what is the low-hanging fruit for appliances,

00:04:51.100 | what are the appliances that have a quicker payoff than not.

00:04:54.100 | We ran through some calculations of how to actually calculate the savings.

00:04:58.100 | We talked at the end about light bulbs, which I had no idea.

00:05:02.100 | Just I'll give you the intro in case you don't get there in the full interview.

00:05:06.100 | But towards the latter part of the interview, we talked about light bulbs,

00:05:10.100 | and I thought light bulbs were kind of, "Do them when you can."

00:05:13.100 | Steve ran through the actual energy calculations,

00:05:16.100 | and it certainly seems like the biggest, fastest payoff comes from swapping out light bulbs.

00:05:21.100 | I never would have thought that.

00:05:22.100 | I thought it was a bunch of hooey and just do it when you get around to it.

00:05:26.100 | But he ran through the calculations, and I was very impressed.

00:05:29.100 | So this interview is going to be--I hope you enjoy this interview.

00:05:32.100 | If you're interested in more information about Steven and about specific topics,

00:05:37.100 | I want to real quick--he sends you a couple of times over to one of his websites called knowledgepublications.com,

00:05:42.100 | and this is his company, where they have a number of books that they've pulled together,

00:05:48.100 | many that they've published on all kinds of different topics.

00:05:52.100 | So Steve is a hydrogen energy expert.

00:05:55.100 | There are a number of books about hydrogen, how to implement it in a practical way,

00:05:59.100 | solar energy, fuel cells, how to make fuel at home and make energy at home,

00:06:04.100 | methanol, alcohol, methane, biomass, heating and cooling your home.

00:06:10.100 | I would direct you--we didn't talk a lot about heating your home in a cool climate.

00:06:16.100 | We talked a little bit about it.

00:06:17.100 | But I would recommend to you--there are a couple of interesting books that he has.

00:06:21.100 | I haven't read them.

00:06:22.100 | I have ordered his "How to Really Save Money and Energy in Cooling Your Home" book from my house.

00:06:27.100 | But he's got a book called "Solar Air Heating Systems," and it seems like it's a very thick, pithy book.

00:06:33.100 | Go and check it out on Knowledge Publications.

00:06:35.100 | There will be a link in the show notes to that specific book.

00:06:38.100 | For many of you who are getting ready to head into the winter climates,

00:06:42.100 | I think this might be a way that you might be able to take advantage of the free solar heat

00:06:46.100 | that falls on your house during the winter to be able to heat your home a little bit.

00:06:50.100 | And he also has an interesting book called "Movable Insulation."

00:06:53.100 | So specifically because we're going into the winter season,

00:06:55.100 | go check those books out on his site and take a look at some of the ideas that he has.

00:07:00.100 | They're fairly comprehensive, and they go through a lot of information

00:07:04.100 | of some very simple and inexpensive things that you can do to retrofit your house.

00:07:09.100 | So hopefully that information will be helpful to you.

00:07:11.100 | Stay tuned at the end.

00:07:12.100 | We talk a little bit about emergency preparedness in the context of preparing for natural disasters,

00:07:19.100 | things like that, hurricanes, winter storms, blizzards, things like that.

00:07:22.100 | I'll mention a couple more comments on that toward the end of the show,

00:07:25.100 | but I think you'll be interested in those resources as well.

00:07:27.100 | Here's Steven.

00:07:30.100 | So Steven, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

00:07:37.100 | I appreciate you being here.

00:07:39.100 | Well, I'm thrilled to be here.

00:07:41.100 | It's the first time I've ever been on a personal finance podcast,

00:07:45.100 | but you know what?

00:07:47.100 | With what I know about energy and how I talk to people,

00:07:50.100 | it really makes sense to be on a financial podcast

00:07:53.100 | and to look at it through a pair of financial eyes,

00:07:56.100 | which is what I do and tell people so that people can make intelligent decisions now on their house.

00:08:04.100 | I'm sure, as you know, you've told people with building wealth,

00:08:08.100 | it's not the thunderstorm that comes by that drops all the water or the wealth into your bucket.

00:08:13.100 | It's the slow and steady drizzle of the rain that fills up your bucket full of wealth.

00:08:20.100 | And doing things on your home through lighting and heating and cooling changes

00:08:27.100 | can very much be those very nice steady drops of rain that go into your bucket.

00:08:36.100 | Right.

00:08:38.100 | So around here, we're pretty hardcore about trying to optimize everything in life.

00:08:42.100 | There are only three things that you can adjust to build wealth.

00:08:45.100 | It's how much you earn, how much you spend, and what you do with the difference between them.

00:08:49.100 | But we can do a lot with those things.

00:08:51.100 | So I feel pretty confident in how to save money in a lot of areas,

00:08:55.100 | but I feel entirely incompetent when it comes to how to save money on energy bills.

00:09:02.100 | And so today's show, I'm going to accomplish two things.

00:09:05.100 | A, it's going to be a little self-serving, is that I need help with this area because my house--

00:09:10.100 | I live in a house that was built in 1959, and I live in South Florida.

00:09:13.100 | And we've just come through the summer season.

00:09:16.100 | My house is very poorly insulated.

00:09:18.100 | It's poorly designed from an energy perspective.

00:09:22.100 | I've got old appliances.

00:09:24.100 | I've got a 23-year-old hot water heater.

00:09:26.100 | I've got an old air conditioner.

00:09:28.100 | I've got an old refrigerator and an old dishwasher, all of which work.

00:09:33.100 | But I don't have a clue.

00:09:35.100 | So my electric bills were over $200 each month through the summer,

00:09:42.100 | and one of them was substantially over $200.

00:09:44.100 | It was like $260.

00:09:46.100 | So I've got a lot of room for improvement, but I don't have any idea where to start.

00:09:50.100 | So it's going to be self-serving for me and also going to help the audience.

00:09:55.100 | Where do we start as far as saving money on energy bills?

00:09:58.100 | How many square feet is your house?

00:09:59.100 | It's about 2,000.

00:10:01.100 | About 2,000.

00:10:03.100 | In fact, let me check that while a little under that.

00:10:06.100 | I can't remember whether that's under air or over air.

00:10:09.100 | I'm not sure. I'll check that for you.

00:10:12.100 | That's fine. That's fine.

00:10:13.100 | So where do you want to start?

00:10:16.100 | Well, where--so if I'm looking at--what I want to do is I want to provide a framework.

00:10:22.100 | And if I'm looking at an older house, older appliances, and all of those--

00:10:27.100 | I need air conditioning for the comfort of myself and my family.

00:10:31.100 | How do I figure out what's going to give me the best bang for the buck?

00:10:34.100 | Should I go buy a new high-energy air conditioner and invest the money into that?

00:10:38.100 | Should I go swap out my 23-year-old hot water heater for a tankless system?

00:10:42.100 | Should I swap out my light bulbs for LED bulbs?

00:10:45.100 | Or should I go and put insulation in the attic because the attic is poorly insulated?

00:10:49.100 | Or should I do some other crazy thing?

00:10:51.100 | So how do I even--if I'm looking at a house and I'm recognizing that I need to do an energy audit for it,

00:10:56.100 | how would I start? Where do I even begin?

00:11:00.100 | Well, you have a forced air furnace for your air conditioner?

00:11:04.100 | Yes. Yes.

00:11:05.100 | Does that work fine for you in the wintertime?

00:11:07.100 | We don't use it in the wintertime.

00:11:08.100 | We just open the windows and we--I don't ever turn on the heat in the wintertime.

00:11:12.100 | Okay. So you are in Florida, and this is really critical to the people listening.

00:11:18.100 | You're very much in an air conditioning-dominant market.

00:11:22.100 | Right.

00:11:23.100 | Where I live in Pittsburgh, we have a distinctive heating season and we have a distinctive cooling season.

00:11:29.100 | Okay.

00:11:30.100 | I'm going to try to address this from both the point of view of someone in Minnesota,

00:11:35.100 | someone in Pittsburgh, and someone in Florida, and hopefully we can really help your listeners.

00:11:41.100 | Now, the first thing is insulation.

00:11:45.100 | Keep the heat out. Okay?

00:11:48.100 | Okay.

00:11:49.100 | And now, let's say you were living in your house and your AC bills were $100 a month, okay?

00:11:56.100 | And you've got to look at that and say, "Well, a new air conditioner outside is $2,000,

00:12:02.100 | and that will go into my existing furnace if my furnace is working okay.

00:12:07.100 | If I need a new furnace, which they'll try to sell me, I'll have to say no, it's about another $2,000."

00:12:14.100 | So you're looking at like $2,000 for a furnace and $2,000 for an AC.

00:12:18.100 | In your case, you would be looking at $2,000 for a new AC because you would keep it in your existing furnace.

00:12:25.100 | So you have to ask yourself, "Am I comfortable with the amount of money that I'm spending every month?"

00:12:32.100 | Now, I'm guessing that if your AC bill was $100 a month, you'd go, "I'm okay with that."

00:12:38.100 | If your AC bill is $270 a month, you're saying, "I'm not okay with that."

00:12:45.100 | This is where we are with you right now. You're saying, "I'm not okay with that."

00:12:50.100 | So tell me about--is your house a single-floor ranch-style house?

00:12:55.100 | Right. Single-floor ranch-style house.

00:12:57.100 | It has a wing that's a bedroom, and it has a wing that's a central living room, kitchen, and a dining room, and then a back room type of thing.

00:13:09.100 | And then it's got an additional side to it on the north side that has a garage and a laundry room.

00:13:14.100 | The south side of the house is actually somewhat shaded, which is nice.

00:13:17.100 | There's some big trees there, but then just the south wall, but the rest of the house gets hit with the sun.

00:13:23.100 | There's no shade on the house.

00:13:25.100 | You can really feel it.

00:13:26.100 | Right. If you go up in the attic, it's horrendous, and I can feel the heat coming right through the roof deck or the ceiling right into the house.

00:13:34.100 | So when I go up there, it has some scattered around, blown-in insulation that may be two inches thick in some places and is entirely bare in other places.

00:13:44.100 | Okay, okay. That makes sense.

00:13:46.100 | Now I have a book for you. It's called How to Really Save Energy and Money in Cooling

00:13:52.720 | Your House. And it's at KnowledgePublications.com. That's K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E-P-U-B-L-I-C-A-T-I-O-N-S.com.

00:14:06.720 | And the, it's purpose for cooling your house is one we'll get to in a little bit. But

00:14:13.860 | the diagrams of how your house heats up in the book are just precious. And they'll tell

00:14:20.060 | you right away what the answer is. I know right away what one of your answers is. You're

00:14:25.940 | telling me your attic is a sauna. The first thing we gotta do is keep the heat from getting

00:14:34.080 | into the house. And right now you only have two inches of insulation and you have no insulation.

00:14:43.500 | So the least expensive dollar input would be to have someone blow in more paper insulation,

00:14:54.820 | which is ground up newspaper insulation. It's really good for trapping heat. You don't want

00:15:02.420 | to have to go to the expense of rolling out the fiberglass and everything else. For what

00:15:06.800 | you want, blown cellulose is your least dollar in to help reduce your heating bill. And I'm

00:15:18.460 | talking six inches a foot thick. We really want to keep the air from going from the attic,

00:15:27.300 | the heat from going from the attic and into the house. But that's not the real good answer.

00:15:33.420 | The real good answer is to prevent the heat from even getting past the roof. And most

00:15:42.920 | people don't think of this. When I say you insulate your attic, I don't mean you insulate

00:15:47.900 | the floor of your attic. You're doing that with the blown cellulose I just mentioned.

00:15:53.860 | If you really want to lower your AC bill, you get someone to come in with a spray foam

00:16:00.040 | system. They'll have two long hoses going to a truck, and they'll go up in your attic

00:16:04.900 | and wear a suit. And they will spray foam. It's the same stuff you get at Home Depot

00:16:10.040 | that comes out of a can. Spray it and it foams up, it grows, and then it's real sticky and

00:16:16.200 | then it's super insulated and it's hard. You have someone come in and you spray foam your

00:16:22.380 | attic. And I mean the roof of the attic, what your head would knock into. This keeps the

00:16:29.260 | heat from getting into the attic in the first place. So if you went up in your attic, it

00:16:36.860 | would be almost the same temperature as down in your house minus the air conditioning.

00:16:41.500 | It would be something near outside temperature. And this costs a little bit of money. It's

00:16:48.820 | more expensive than blown cellulose, but it's a lot better because like I said, we're keeping

00:16:54.500 | the heat out in the first place. And some people go, "Oh, my shingles will get too hot

00:16:59.980 | and they'll..." Oh, shut up. People who know nothing about shingles in this world do that.

00:17:09.100 | When your shingles are getting hit by the sun and they're cooling down with the attic

00:17:12.660 | and everything, they're expanding and contracting. When you have insulation below them, they

00:17:17.500 | expand and they stay expanded. There's less thermal stress on your damn shingles. It's

00:17:23.140 | the worst roofing choice in the world than if you don't. So don't listen to the guy who's

00:17:30.220 | going to say, "Oh, your shingles are going to..." I know lots of people have done this

00:17:34.300 | and their shingles have outlasted other people's houses. So go up there and blow in and spray

00:17:42.820 | in polyurethane foam. Companies will be happy to do it. You can have them do it when it's

00:17:48.660 | off season and get it even cheaper. It is the way to go. And if you want to, you can

00:17:56.340 | have them spray foam the roof and you can have them spray foam the floor of the attic

00:18:01.580 | as well. And you're really doubly insulated. Now, here's something for you people in Florida

00:18:07.660 | what this does. This spraying the foam on the attic turns your entire roof into a composite

00:18:14.180 | material. It's a sticky glue that hardens, as I mentioned. So it's holding together all

00:18:20.780 | your roof joists and the roof itself and everything that's nailed in. It holds it all together

00:18:26.940 | so your attic is now one piece. And think of this when it becomes hurricane time. You

00:18:34.100 | now have a super strength roof. The asphalt shingles might get peeled off, but if your

00:18:41.540 | roof is adequately attached with hurricane straps to the frame of the house, you're golden.

00:18:51.020 | You're really golden. It's going to take a lot to rip that roof off. And if you're doing

00:18:56.620 | new construction, it's like I'm building my house right now and I'm in Florida, I would

00:19:03.460 | spray foam the walls. I would pay the extra money because you'll get your money back in

00:19:07.900 | less than five years with spray foam. I would spray foam all the walls. I would spray foam

00:19:13.700 | the floor. I would spray foam the attic. I'd spray foam everything with spray foam. It

00:19:19.300 | will pay itself off. You'll get all your money back in less than five years. Your house will

00:19:24.940 | be airtight to the point that you'll probably have to crack a window to get some fresh air

00:19:32.660 | in. It'll be so airtight that if you've got a fireplace, it won't draft properly. People

00:19:38.980 | have to open a window so their fireplace will draft. That's the secret to a really efficient

00:19:45.580 | house when it comes to heating and cooling is cut out all of the air cracks. It's not

00:19:51.940 | a bad thing. It's a good thing. So spray foam the entire house. And I would do this on a

00:20:00.340 | new construction whether I was in Minnesota. Boy, especially in Minnesota, you'll save

00:20:05.620 | on your heating bill like crazy. Whether you're in Pittsburgh, South Carolina, Florida, Texas,

00:20:13.580 | Los Angeles, new construction, do spray foam everywhere.

00:20:22.860 | How would you figure out? Do you know any way to figure out? If I'm trying to compare

00:20:28.260 | the rate of return between going and getting bags of cellulose from Home Depot, putting

00:20:34.140 | them in the hopper and just blowing them in the attic versus hiring a crew to come and

00:20:38.260 | do the spray foam, is there any way for me to figure out which is a better move? Or do

00:20:43.860 | I just have to go with, "Okay, I've got $5,000 to hire the stuff done," or, "I've got $1,000

00:20:49.620 | to go and buy the bags of foam?" Is there any way for me to do calculations on that

00:20:53.860 | and know?

00:20:54.860 | Yes, but they're very complicated calculations. And I only know of one guy, if he's still

00:21:03.380 | alive, that does those type of calculations and is really good at it and teaches other

00:21:08.500 | people how to do it. And I can't think of his name, but trust me, even I don't do all

00:21:16.340 | of his calculations. And I used to be in a thermal group at Chrysler. So the answer really

00:21:23.380 | is no, there isn't. But you can do it by experiment, because the blowing in of the cellulose is

00:21:31.780 | your least, lowest dollar cost entry. It's not that expensive. So I would go in and blow

00:21:38.980 | in my cellulose into my attic and then watch my AC bills. And on my electric bill, they

00:21:47.500 | actually show me this year and last year. So I know whether I used more this year than

00:21:52.780 | I did last year. Of course, this year was a very cool summer up here in the Midwest

00:21:57.900 | and the East Coast, compared to last year, which was pretty hot. But still, if you blow

00:22:05.860 | cellulose up there and your AC bill goes from $150 down to $110, and it stays at $110, and

00:22:14.900 | it doesn't go above $110, except for like, you run into August, and you're like, "Oh

00:22:20.900 | my God, August was so hot," and it goes to $140, well, you probably have made a return

00:22:28.140 | on investment with your AC bill.

00:22:32.700 | Have you seen any calculations done as far as what the return on investment could be

00:22:38.180 | with improving insulation? I have a gut feeling that it very well could be higher than me

00:22:45.300 | investing my money in some other places. But I don't know how to actually calculate it.

00:22:49.980 | Have you seen anybody who's calculated it and come up with any best guesstimates on

00:22:54.260 | the subject?

00:22:55.260 | It all depends upon your instrumentation. Your instrumentation is everything. And your

00:23:03.700 | instrumentation is what tells you real numbers versus guessing. So right now, your only instrumentation

00:23:11.860 | is your electric bill. And that's the only piece of information you need now. If you

00:23:18.340 | go down to Sears, and you get yourself a $50 temperature meter, the one with the little

00:23:26.060 | laser beam on it, so you can point it at your ceiling, it's a good thing. You can walk

00:23:31.420 | around, you can point it at your ceiling, and go, "Wow, my ceiling is 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:23:39.540 | That's radiating right down in here into my room that I'm cooling." Or you might point

00:23:44.260 | it up there and go, "Wow, my ceiling is 78 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's what's in the

00:23:49.860 | room." Then you know your ceiling is not radiating heat down into your house. And you can actually

00:23:57.100 | walk around with a little IR thermal gun that's just giving you a temperature in Fahrenheit,

00:24:03.460 | and you can find out where your heat's coming in. It might be coming in your windows. Your

00:24:08.980 | windows might be a significant input of heat into the room. Now, what do you do for that?

00:24:14.820 | Well, you can put an awning outside over the window that prevents the sun from hitting

00:24:20.020 | it, or you can put curtains on the window and close off the heat that way. But if you

00:24:28.300 | got some type of instrumentation, it will be your little spyglass, although you might

00:24:33.620 | be looking like you're looking through a toilet paper tube. It's still a little spyglass into

00:24:39.460 | the world of thermal that you're trying to go find and detect. So I would definitely

00:24:48.220 | tell people, "Go get a little $30, $40 IR thermal device." They sell them at Home Depot

00:24:55.100 | too and Lowe's. And go see on a hot day what's the temperature of your roof inside the house.

00:25:03.580 | What's the temperature in the attic? What's the temperature of the roof in the attic?

00:25:08.540 | And go get the temperature of the roof in the attic, and you go, "Wow! The wood on my

00:25:14.460 | roof in my attic is 155 degrees, and the temperature of the blown insulation in the roof is 125

00:25:24.500 | degrees." And the other thing you might look at as well is you have ventilation in your

00:25:30.420 | attic. You have like gable vents at the peaks of the roof. You have vents there. Because

00:25:38.060 | one way of decreasing the heat from... The heat's going to go from the sun to the shingles

00:25:44.300 | to the wood of the roof to the attic to the insulation to the roof of your room, into

00:25:51.980 | your room, into you. That's the path of the heat. You want to find out where can you break

00:25:57.380 | that path with the least amount of money or with the best return on investment. So going

00:26:05.820 | up there and finding that, it's like, "Wow! My attic is an oven. It's 130 degrees up here."

00:26:14.100 | But you get no ventilation. Putting in gable vents with fans that's going to move in 95-degree

00:26:21.340 | Florida air into your attic. Your attic is now no longer 120, 130-degree oven. It's now

00:26:29.700 | going to be the temperature of the outside Florida air moving through your attic. So

00:26:34.380 | what's going to transfer more heat into... Through the insulation into the roof of your

00:26:39.300 | home? Is it going to be 95-degree humid Florida air? Or is it going to be 130 degrees of sun

00:26:46.820 | from the oven that's up there?

00:26:48.220 | Right. If you can get even to the 95-degree air, it's going to be better.

00:26:52.620 | Yeah. Like I said, the first thing you do is you keep the heat from getting in. And

00:26:57.340 | that would be putting up spray foam on the roof of the attic. The next thing is keeping

00:27:05.220 | the attic as cool as possible through a variety of methods. And one of those is going to be

00:27:10.540 | ventilation. Another one would be a whole house fan. But a whole house fan is really

00:27:17.940 | only used generally when it gets cool outside. A whole house fan generally goes into the

00:27:25.140 | entrance to your attic. And it's like three feet in diameter. And if you're right next

00:27:31.180 | to it, it sounds like an airplane motor. It's going really fast.

00:27:34.900 | Right.

00:27:35.900 | And what you do is you open up your doors and your windows. And it's 65 degrees outside.

00:27:42.220 | You turn on the whole house fan and it sucks all that air outside inside the house real

00:27:49.700 | quick and blows it up into the attic and out these troughs.

00:27:54.820 | Do you know if I can integrate... So I actually have a whole... An attic fan, a whole house

00:27:59.180 | fan. I have both. I have some of those passive things on my roof that spin when the heat

00:28:04.340 | is escaping as the wind blows them a little bit as well. And then the eaves are vented

00:28:09.940 | and the gable ends are vented. And then I have a whole house fan as well that is set

00:28:14.420 | into a central hallway. My understanding on the research that I've done is that if I do

00:28:19.420 | the spray foam insulation, that I have to turn the attic into a sealed attic. That I

00:28:23.700 | can't keep a vented attic, which would eliminate my being able to use the whole house fan.

00:28:29.460 | Is that accurate? Is there a reason why that would be the case?

00:28:32.340 | No. You do not want to seal the attic. You want your attic to be able to breathe. You

00:28:39.300 | want moisture to be able to get out of the attic. You want hot air to be able to get

00:28:44.060 | out of the attic. So let me tell you, when you make a solar oven, you seal it completely.

00:28:53.060 | You got two layers of glass. You got metal and you got foam insulation all the way around

00:28:59.140 | it. You point it at the sun and it'll get so hot you can bake a cake in it. The number

00:29:05.300 | one enemy of a solar oven is air leaks. If I have an air leak, I won't reach 350, I'll

00:29:12.260 | only hit 250. Your attic is a solar oven. And you want your attic to be a very poor

00:29:21.660 | solar oven. So you want all of the air leaks, you want all of the ventilation in your attic

00:29:29.100 | that you can possibly get. All the spray foam is doing is preventing the heat from going

00:29:35.780 | from the shingles to the wood to the attic. And that's all it's doing. Plus it's making

00:29:42.260 | a darn strong roof.

00:29:43.580 | Right. Which is nice. Which is valuable. I've been through a number of hurricanes. You mentioned

00:29:49.520 | keeping the heat out. My understanding from third grade science class is that there are

00:29:53.420 | three different types of heat. There's conductive, convective, and radiant heat, right? Does

00:29:58.100 | the spray foam, that would merely address the conductive heat? And do I need to put

00:30:04.380 | up additional radiant barriers? They sell the foil barriers. Would I put those up in

00:30:09.220 | addition or is that overkill?

00:30:12.080 | Those foil barriers are almost scams.

00:30:15.260 | Really?

00:30:16.260 | Yeah, they really are. I mean, because the majority of your heat coming in is conductive

00:30:22.540 | and convective. It's conductive going through the roof, then it's convective going from

00:30:28.700 | the roof to the air in the attic. And both of those are very strong heat transfer methods.

00:30:36.500 | And the radiant barrier only prevents the heat from, the radiating heat from going out.

00:30:44.020 | It's like, okay, it's zero degrees Fahrenheit outside. You've been exposed outside for 30

00:30:50.980 | minutes. You're going into hypothermia. I'm an EMT and I come by and I give you a space

00:30:57.060 | blanket. An ultra-thin space blanket of nothing but mylar. How quickly do you think that's

00:31:04.780 | going to heat you up?

00:31:06.180 | Not very quickly.

00:31:07.940 | Not very quickly at all. It's all it's going to do is take your little bit of radiating

00:31:12.020 | heat from your body and bounce it back into your body. And it's going to try to create

00:31:17.340 | some dead air space in there to help your convection. But no, I would not recommend

00:31:25.220 | going with a radiant barrier at all. If you wanted a radiant barrier, it would be outside

00:31:33.660 | above your shingles. That's where you would block the radiation from coming in.

00:31:39.300 | Is there any way to do that?

00:31:41.020 | No.

00:31:42.020 | Okay.

00:31:43.020 | No, but theoretically...

00:31:44.020 | I guess I could plant trees and I could shade the shingles and that would eliminate the

00:31:49.100 | shade, would eliminate the radiant heat. Is that right?

00:31:52.380 | Mm-hmm.

00:31:53.380 | Okay.

00:31:54.380 | Yep.

00:31:55.380 | I've gone through, I've tried to design to figure out how to put a latticework of fencing

00:31:59.940 | across my roof and grow vines over my house and how to get trees growing over it. I've

00:32:06.860 | thought through as much as my design capabilities have had, but I haven't come up with a good

00:32:11.340 | solution yet.

00:32:12.340 | Turn your roof into a garden.

00:32:14.700 | Right. I look at these online, I look at these guys who have living roofs and I mean, it's

00:32:19.580 | a couple feet thick of dirt sometimes, or they've just got the green roofs. And I think

00:32:24.300 | that is brilliant. Like, why don't we do more of that? But I can't figure out how to retrofit

00:32:28.260 | my house in an intelligent way to incorporate some of those technologies that are being

00:32:32.660 | developed.

00:32:33.660 | Yeah. A roof full of grass. That will stop the heat coming in just beautifully.

00:32:40.100 | And it seems like it can be in many ways far more durable than asphalt shingles in some

00:32:44.740 | cases.

00:32:45.740 | Oh, by far. Your shingles will love it.

00:32:47.900 | Right.

00:32:48.900 | I think asphalt shingles are one of the worst curses ever placed upon a house.

00:32:53.020 | Why are they so popular then?

00:32:55.260 | Because that's the way we've been doing it for 35 years.

00:33:02.060 | What's the best type of roof?

00:33:03.820 | Well, the best type of roof is a structurally insulated panel roof, which is a piece of

00:33:13.620 | OSB glued to six inches of styrofoam glued to a piece of wood. That's the best construction

00:33:22.420 | for a roof, is a structurally insulated panel house in total. But you just put a metal roof

00:33:27.900 | on top of that. That's all you do.

00:33:30.820 | Yeah. I look at the metal ones and I seriously, I mean, my shingles are still good, but I

00:33:36.220 | will probably lean that direction because it just seems to solve so many problems. And

00:33:41.060 | the thing I don't understand that I've never gotten the answer to is you can find barns

00:33:45.220 | from the early 20th century that have metal roofs. And so why is it that if this technology

00:33:50.420 | of building a metal roof has been around for a century plus, why do we not use it more

00:33:55.140 | frequently? And it's growing dramatically here in Florida, but it's still not standard.

00:33:59.220 | Yeah, because it lasts forever. Now, if you want to talk about life of a metal roof, you

00:34:03.420 | can go to the Roman cathedrals around Europe and in Rome and they will have a copper roof.

00:34:09.420 | And some of those roofs are a thousand years old problems.

00:34:14.140 | Wow. That's amazing.

00:34:16.700 | Copper roof is really expensive, but you can basically do the same thing with a standard

00:34:21.860 | metal roof. Now, in your case, when it comes time to put down the metal roof, what's the

00:34:28.100 | biggest expense in a roof? Generally, it's the material and the time involved. You've

00:34:34.100 | got shingles and everything else, a big dumpster. When it comes time to have a metal roof, they

00:34:40.620 | put the metal roof down on top of your shingle roof. And so now you've got two layers of

00:34:47.860 | sealant there. You've got a metal roof, and if the roof leaks, you've got a working shingle

00:34:53.380 | roof below it. It might be a 20-year-old shingle roof, but you're putting on a metal roof before

00:35:00.460 | the shingle roof leaks. So the metal roof is going to turn your shingle roof into a

00:35:05.340 | 50-year, 60-year roof on its own. And so you've got two as one, one as none. And the metal

00:35:13.980 | roof goes up in a day, and the old shingles didn't have to come off. And there's your

00:35:18.020 | money savings right then and there.

00:35:21.900 | Made a note. That's a good point.

00:35:26.860 | For new construction, we'll diverge just for a second here. For new construction, all you

00:35:32.900 | people looking to build, if you can find a builder, if you can find a company, there's

00:35:39.380 | something called structurally insulated panels, SIPs, SIPs. What they are is they are a composite.

00:35:48.940 | They are a big sheet of OSB, which is like plywood, and it's super glued to a sheet of

00:35:56.380 | foam, which could be 2 inches, 4 inches, 6 inches, 8 inches, 12 inches. It doesn't matter.

00:36:02.900 | And with another sheet on its side, it's like an ice cream sandwich. And they're made in

00:36:08.900 | big sheets at the factory. What they do is they take the design for your house, and they

00:36:14.740 | take the computer, and it cuts out the walls and windows and everything for your house.

00:36:21.940 | It goes onto a semi. They bring it out to your house location. They have a crane there,

00:36:28.580 | and your house is up in 2 days or less. And it's up with a carpenter and 4 helpers. It's

00:36:37.460 | not up with 4 or 5 carpenters swinging hammers. It goes together very quickly. And then it's

00:36:46.940 | more expensive than a conventional house. But where's your money in a conventional house?

00:36:53.420 | It's the idiots with the swinging hammers, punching the nails to do stick and frame construction.

00:37:00.500 | So it costs you about 10% more, but your house is up in 2 weeks, ready for the plaster, sorry,

00:37:08.780 | in 2 days. It's up in 2 days, ready for the drywall people and flooring people to come

00:37:14.060 | in. And you're in your house in a week or 2 versus waiting 6 months for the idiot builders

00:37:22.220 | to do their stuff to construct your house. So structurally insulated panels, SIPs. And

00:37:31.460 | the other one that you might be able to find out there is called insulated concrete forms,

00:37:37.380 | ICFs. That's where they literally build your walls with Lego pieces of foam, put in rebar,

00:37:45.860 | have the concrete truck pull up, and they fill the insides all with concrete. And your

00:37:53.580 | basement walls and the walls of your house are done in a day. And then they start the

00:38:00.420 | rest of the construction on top of that. Those are 2 very good things for you to look at

00:38:06.900 | and to contrast with conventional building if you're trying to make a decision on what

00:38:12.900 | your next house is going to be and you want it to be financially viable both in construction,

00:38:20.740 | time, and return on investment when it comes to furnace and AC bills.

00:38:26.980 | I think I'm glad to see some of those technologies being developed because I think a lot about,

00:38:31.500 | I don't know if you're saying I'm a financial planner, I think a lot about the cost of houses.

00:38:36.020 | And the biggest cost, I mean there's the initial cost, but then there's also the ongoing cost.

00:38:41.580 | And I think where it seems like much work has been done is in the more eco-friendly

00:38:48.620 | older or alternative technology world. So just this week I interviewed a man named Rob

00:38:53.340 | Roy and he lives up, he wrote a book called Mortgage Free and he teaches classes on cordwood

00:39:03.060 | building methods where they take round log ends and they stack them together with mortar

00:39:08.940 | and they don't connect, there's mortar on either end of the log end but there's an air

00:39:13.300 | space in the middle. So the house is very well insulated and 16 to 18 inch thick walls.

00:39:18.420 | And he lives in the northern Maine border, excuse me, northern, I think it's upstate

00:39:24.780 | New York, excuse me, up by the Canadian border. And his heating costs are, he buys his firewood

00:39:30.780 | and spends about 800 bucks a year on heating costs in the northern border. Now he doesn't

00:39:35.300 | need air conditioning costs, which is another thing. But I look at that and I say, but I

00:39:40.780 | can't do that in West Palm Beach, Florida with Palm Beach County Municipal Building Codes.

00:39:44.940 | There's no chance. So I'm glad to see some of these new technologies that will fit into

00:39:49.820 | more mainstream looking houses coming out. But it seems as though the demand just isn't

00:39:56.340 | there. I still see people, I still see them building houses with concrete blocks around

00:40:00.900 | here a lot of times. And I don't understand why the building industry hasn't progressed

00:40:05.740 | more quickly. Do you have any insight on why it seems like some of these technologies are

00:40:09.660 | so slow to be adopted?

00:40:11.580 | Abject stupidity.

00:40:13.460 | You're kind of, you make the nice radical sweeping statements like I do sometimes.

00:40:19.460 | Absolute abject stupidity. Well this is the way we've been doing it, this is the way I

00:40:24.260 | learned it, this is the way everyone else is doing it, this is the way we're going to

00:40:27.700 | continue to do it. Building codes might not allow it to the newer construction, construction

00:40:34.700 | people are not going to be familiar with it. Look, the majority of the construction people

00:40:39.420 | are not the sharpest nail in the box. Some of the people who run the company and everything

00:40:45.980 | else might have really good vision and really good understanding, but they're all about

00:40:52.140 | getting the job and doing the job. They're not a research and development engineer. They're

00:40:57.220 | a worker. They're not about implementing change because change is risk and what do they want

00:41:04.020 | when they're building? They want no risk. And it's a variety of factors like that, but

00:41:10.740 | they all come together to conspire to make it such that it is hard to get new construction.

00:41:17.740 | Now in new construction, if someone tells you this house is eco-friendly, grab hold

00:41:24.040 | of your wallet and run away as fast as you can. If they start off telling you, saying

00:41:31.040 | you're going to have the lowest heating and cooling bills you've ever had with this house,

00:41:37.860 | continue to listen. But if they start off with this eco-friendly crap, run. Which means

00:41:44.620 | they've spent a lot of money on some stuff that probably won't work and they're going

00:41:50.300 | to pass on that cost to you.

00:41:56.060 | One of the biggest ones for me is people often get lumped into camps as far as when it comes

00:42:03.060 | to environmental things. And on the one hand, I think I'm probably one of the most environmentally

00:42:10.060 | conscious people. In the sense of it seems stupid to me to destroy the beauty that surrounds

00:42:19.100 | us and to continue, and it seems smart to me, to preserve it in every way possible.

00:42:25.420 | But what I don't get is why the environmental people haven't simply chosen self-interest

00:42:31.940 | as their marketing method. And it's essentially become that, well, we have to appeal to someone's

00:42:38.940 | sense of altruism to sell environmental eco-friendly stuff and play a guilt trip. Well, that's

00:42:44.980 | not going to do it. Don't tell me my house saves the polar bears. Frankly, I care a little

00:42:49.460 | bit about the polar bears, but I care as far as I can do it for free. I don't care that

00:42:55.260 | much to actually start spending money on the polar bears. But if you can just tell me this

00:42:58.980 | house is going to cost you half the money that the other house does, and the alternative

00:43:03.980 | benefit of it for "the environment" is better, great, fine, that's an ancillary benefit.

00:43:11.980 | That's how I think about things, is that everything should be win-win. And without launching all

00:43:18.140 | of the nuance of that argument, I don't see any reason to market energy efficiency as

00:43:22.740 | eco-friendly or environmentalist in nature. Market it as intelligent design. After all,

00:43:28.680 | that is what we should be seeking to do, is to engineer everything in our lives to a higher

00:43:34.480 | level of quality. And that will mean better in every regard for every stakeholder.

00:43:41.180 | You got that 100% correct. I could not have said it better. Environmentalism is a green

00:43:46.300 | religion and it's motivation by guilt. It's motivation by making you feel stupid. And

00:43:51.660 | it's the only thing you've ever known. It's the only thing you've ever been doing. And

00:43:55.340 | they're telling you that you're stupid, that you're bad, and you're wrong, and you need

00:43:58.180 | to do this. That is not the way you market and get new ideas and new methods involved.

00:44:05.040 | You do exactly what you say. You build it on its positives and its advantages and what

00:44:10.260 | it can do and its benefits. And that's the way it should be done. But nope. There's this

00:44:17.380 | girl who's got this really nice, cool little green light that replaces light sticks. And

00:44:24.340 | she's done a real good job of having some LEDs in there. The LEDs go blink every four

00:44:31.100 | minutes just to keep the green light sticks glowing really well. And it's a really good

00:44:37.740 | design. And she's marketing it saying, "Oh, we have this tremendous waste on light callum

00:44:42.980 | light sticks. They're horrible for the planet. They fill up the landfill." And it's like,

00:44:48.940 | "Shut up. There are more milk cartons and diapers thrown away in the landfill in one

00:44:56.860 | day than there have been of callum light sticks in their entire history, in the last decade,

00:45:06.060 | just thrown away." And she's motivating by making you feel guilty about using a callum

00:45:12.100 | light stick and making you think you're filling up the dumpster with the thing when there's

00:45:19.820 | bigger fish to fry if you're trying to reduce landfill waste. You don't do it by going after

00:45:24.860 | the callum light stick. So, just another method of motivation by guilt to get you to throw

00:45:31.020 | yourself on your sword so that you'd be paying her money for her thing.

00:45:34.540 | >> Well, that's what doesn't--one more on the same note. What bugs me is when people

00:45:41.660 | get into what are the emissions of cars and they get into, you know, "Oh, these cars are

00:45:48.340 | very unfriendly." And then I go and read some of the papers and read some of the studies

00:45:53.060 | and you've got--I don't remember, maybe you know this, but I read a paper one time that

00:45:56.740 | was comparing the pollution emitted by the 50 largest cargo ships in the world is greater

00:46:02.900 | than--was greater than all of the pollution emitted by all of the cars. And I've completely

00:46:07.580 | made that actual number up, but it was some statistic similar to that. And that's what

00:46:12.820 | bugs me is that instead of--if--I'm a pretty environmentally sensitive guy and--because

00:46:21.380 | I think it's intelligent to be that way. But if you want to get me on board, talk--focus

00:46:25.740 | on the 80%--excuse me, focus on the 20% that makes 80% of the difference instead of trying

00:46:30.840 | to guilt people into changing their behavior on things that make very little difference

00:46:35.420 | in the grand scheme of things. And there's a grand paradigm shifting the cargo ships

00:46:41.500 | over to a new fuel method solely because of economics. They're changing their cargo ships

00:46:48.020 | to run off of liquefied natural gas, not because of the emissions or anything else, because

00:46:55.340 | it doesn't matter what their emissions are, people will still attack them. Right. You

00:46:59.820 | turn over liquefied natural gas to run in their engines, which they can do very easily.

00:47:05.140 | They just have to add the tanks and the control system, because liquefied natural gas is by

00:47:10.660 | far many times cheaper than diesel or bunker fuel. Right. So-- Well, it'll work out. Let's

00:47:18.780 | switch to appliances. So I have a number of very energy inefficient appliances. They're

00:47:24.340 | old. They all technically work, although my insurance companies require me to replace

00:47:29.340 | my hot water heater, so I probably will have to start there just for that. But I don't

00:47:34.540 | like to spend money I don't need to spend. But I would like to know, how could I figure

00:47:38.880 | out and run some calculations on my appliances to figure out whether I should upgrade them

00:47:43.980 | before they break for the sake of energy efficiency? Is there a general rule that no, just generally

00:47:50.380 | let things live their lifespan, or is there a way to actually calculate it? How would

00:47:54.060 | I make those decisions? Well, again, it comes back to instrumentation.

00:47:57.900 | And the point is, you basically got none. Right now, there's stickers on all new things

00:48:04.420 | that come. There's stickers on hot water heaters, or stickers on refrigerators, or stickers

00:48:09.980 | on freezers that tell you the average number of kilowatt hours, or BTUs, this thing uses

00:48:16.660 | in a year. You can use that to compare and contrast devices you're looking at, but if

00:48:22.980 | you don't have that sticker on your hot water heater, it's kind of hard to contrast that

00:48:28.540 | with your hot water heater and to see how much money am I going to be saving. If your

00:48:35.980 | hot water heater is 20 years old, and mine is, and it still continues to work just fine,

00:48:42.460 | let me think, how could you measure that? I do have a fluke meter. I don't know how

00:48:50.020 | to use it. It's my dad's, but he's an electrical guy. He can probably help me use it. Can I

00:48:53.900 | measure something with that? Or getting one of those kilowatt volts? I mean, that wouldn't

00:49:00.540 | work on the higher voltage stuff. Your hot water heater is electric?

00:49:05.260 | It's electric, yes. Oh, I thought it was gas. Do you have the option

00:49:12.340 | of going with propane or natural gas? I could, yeah. I have a gas dryer.

00:49:17.260 | Oh, go natural gas. Without question.

00:49:22.660 | Without question. It takes one kilowatt of energy is 3,412 BTUs. We're talking about

00:49:33.460 | your hot water heater is 240 volts, and it's multiple kilowatts of energy. One BTU heats

00:49:41.340 | up one gallon of water, one degree Fahrenheit. Let's say we got 3,412 divided by 100. It

00:49:57.980 | would take you one kilowatt of energy to heat up 34 gallons of water, 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:50:06.380 | Let's say your bath was bigger than that. Let's say it'll take approximately a kilowatt

00:50:10.540 | of energy with the losses to heat up one full bathtub of water for you, being rough in numbers

00:50:19.020 | here. Well, that will cost you 10 cents right there, or 12 cents per kilowatt hour, because

00:50:24.980 | you're using that kilowatt hour to heat up your bath. I've done this for a friend of

00:50:30.100 | mine for his hot tub. I said, "Pat, every time you fill up your hot tub, it's costing

00:50:33.380 | you 50 cents." It would take two or three hot water tanks to fill up his hot tub. There's

00:50:43.420 | your return on your investment. All you've got to do is look on the hot water heater,

00:50:47.500 | and something will tell you that it's a 5 kilowatt or 4 kilowatt hot water heater.

00:50:54.580 | Let's do this number intelligently for you. 100,000 BTUs, which is called the therm, divided

00:51:09.420 | by 3,412 is 29 kilowatt hours. Let's call it 30 kilowatt hours. 30 kilowatt hours times

00:51:18.180 | 12 cents is $3.60 per 1,000 BTUs. The number we use the most is MMBTUs, which is million

00:51:37.380 | BTUs. Your hot water heater at 12 cents per kilowatt hour costs you 36 cents per MMBTU.

00:51:46.820 | Natural gas pricing, with all the piping and the delivery charges and everything else,

00:51:56.340 | comes out to be between $8 and $10 per MMBTU, per million BTUs. There's your cost savings

00:52:07.460 | right in front of you. I just did it with a calculator dramatically. Going to natural

00:52:13.220 | gas with your furnace will be a dramatic savings, a savings that you'll see get your money back

00:52:19.500 | in two years versus going with electric heat. Electric heat is the most expensive form of

00:52:26.420 | heat you're ever going to get. I also have an electric stove. Is that blanket

00:52:37.500 | rule? Electric heat is going to be the most expensive. If you have a choice between natural

00:52:42.460 | gas and electric heat, go with natural gas. Is it a blanket rule?

00:52:46.580 | Yes, it is a blanket rule, especially when you're doing new construction. Go with natural

00:52:52.380 | gas on everything and electric on as little as you possibly can. You're looking at replacing

00:53:01.460 | your electric stove. You have to look at it like, "I use hot water every day. I use hot

00:53:10.660 | water in everything that I do every day." There's a real big expense right there. How

00:53:18.060 | often do I turn on the stove? Most of the time I use the microwave. How often do I bake?

00:53:27.020 | How often do I use the countertop? What's a new stove going to cost me? A nice stainless

00:53:34.980 | steel GE natural gas stove is going to cost you $1,000. Then you're going to have to have

00:53:44.100 | a plumber run a natural gas line to where your stove is. This will increase the value

00:53:51.540 | of your house slightly, if you're considering resale value of your house, by having electric

00:53:57.380 | and natural gas at your stove. Some people love to cook on stove burner on gas and bake

00:54:09.940 | on electric. There's even ovens out there that do that. Some people are gas lovers.

00:54:16.580 | Some people are electric heat stove lovers when it comes to cooking. You've got to look

00:54:22.620 | at it like, "How often do I use my stove?" My stove might take 2.5 kilowatts of power

00:54:28.260 | every time I turn on the burner, but I'm only turning on the burner to cook something for

00:54:32.300 | 20 minutes. When I'm baking in the oven, I'm baking and it's taking a lot of energy, but

00:54:42.300 | the stove is not on all the time. It just heats the oven up to 350 and then maintains

00:54:47.580 | it. It's not like it's sitting there sucking 25 cents an hour in electricity all the time,

00:54:55.700 | because it's going on and off, on and off, on and off to maintain the heat. Your return

00:55:00.780 | on investment on replacing your electric stove with natural gas is pretty low. It would be

00:55:08.740 | 10, 20 years to get your money back doing that.

00:55:14.260 | If you look at your hot water system, your return on investment is going to be pretty

00:55:19.580 | darn quickly. How many people in your family?

00:55:23.500 | My wife and I and our one-year-old son.

00:55:27.740 | You're not using a great deal of hot water. You don't have four teenage girls. You have

00:55:34.020 | one bathroom or two?

00:55:36.020 | Two.

00:55:37.020 | With showers?

00:55:38.020 | Yes.

00:55:39.460 | You might consider what's called an on-demand hot water heater. They cost just a few pennies

00:55:46.020 | more than a regular hot water heater, but they're simpler to install. They go on the

00:55:51.540 | wall. They vent directly outside, through the chimney. They keep only a quart of water

00:55:59.540 | hot all the time. The second you turn on the hot water faucet, that water rushes out to

00:56:06.820 | give you your instantaneous hot water. The burner comes on and it's instantaneously heating

00:56:12.900 | the cold water to hot water to continually give you hot water for as long or for as little

00:56:19.820 | as you want it.

00:56:22.620 | If you're just trying to do the dishes for 10 minutes, you're not heating up a 50-gallon

00:56:29.620 | hot water tank all the time, every time, just to do the dishes for five gallons of water.

00:56:39.780 | Does that make sense to you, to use an on-demand system versus...

00:56:42.460 | It does. In fact, that was going to be the next question. Would you still go natural

00:56:45.180 | gas in that scenario?

00:56:46.180 | Yes, of course.

00:56:47.180 | So it's always the same, just natural gas but go with on-demand instead of a tank?

00:56:53.380 | Right. And let's say you were stuck with electric heat. There are houses in the South that are

00:56:57.980 | all electric. You really have a high electric bill and you have a lot of people using hot

00:57:07.780 | water in the house. I would look at an on-demand system that could handle that many people

00:57:15.260 | versus your existing hot water tank because it'll heat up dramatically.

00:57:21.020 | If you go to the Dominican Republic and some of the other islands in the Southern Caribbean,

00:57:26.300 | they actually have a shower head with a 240-volt line running right to it. And it heats the

00:57:32.660 | water up in the shower head before it sprays it on you.

00:57:36.500 | I've showered under one of those many times. Suicide shower. It's a little freaky when

00:57:41.340 | you look up there and see two wires going into your shower head. But I'm sure that they

00:57:47.460 | work. And I've wondered if they're even possible to get and have in the US because it just

00:57:52.180 | seems so simple to me. You put the hot water where you need it and you just create it only

00:57:57.980 | when you need it where you need it.

00:57:59.980 | If there's under-sink hot water heaters too, if you're in an apartment or something, there's

00:58:07.500 | hot water heaters that will go underneath your sink. They run off 120 volts and they'll

00:58:11.500 | heat up the water just for the sink for you. And that's a good way to go.

00:58:17.620 | The other thing for hot water heaters is a cozy. If you can go to Home Depot or Lowe's

00:58:23.360 | and get a blanket to go around your hot water heater, that'll pay itself off pretty quickly.

00:58:31.700 | Just a little bit better insulation and keeping that thing insulated and warmer.

00:58:38.780 | Question because I know you're not just an engineer on traditional ideas. You're also

00:58:46.500 | kind of Mr. Alternative Energy guy. Here's what doesn't make sense to me. I look at my

00:58:52.540 | house and I say, "I've got all this heat outside and I'm keeping the heat outside, cooling

00:58:57.420 | the inside. And then I've got this water and I'm going to heat the water up so that in

00:59:02.720 | my cool house I can put hot water on me." I've tried to figure out how on earth I could

00:59:08.420 | design some kind of way to use some kind of solar hot water system and integrate it with

00:59:15.460 | my normal plumbing. Even if I had cold water in the morning, if I could take a shower in

00:59:22.380 | the evening and I've got the heat all day long and I know it's relatively easy to heat

00:59:27.340 | water with the sunshine, I can't figure out any way to engineering-wise make that happen.

00:59:31.840 | Do you know any way to do that and integrate it with the house?

00:59:35.700 | The simplest way is you get an old hot water heater. You strip off all of the insulation

00:59:42.140 | off of it. All the metal, all the insulation, so it's a bare hot water heater. And you paint

00:59:47.420 | the thing flat black. Put the thing outside into the sunshine. And your municipal water

00:59:54.420 | runs into that tank that gets heated up to ambient temperature. And then it goes into

01:00:04.420 | your hot water tank inside your house. So instead of heating up water that was 60 or

01:00:10.860 | 70 degrees Fahrenheit up to 120 for your bath or for your shower, you're taking water that

01:00:20.500 | has gone up to ambient temperature, let's say 90 degrees Fahrenheit, that is going inside

01:00:26.980 | of your house. So that's one of the easier ways to do it. Now if you take the thing and

01:00:32.060 | lay on its side, you can build a box around it. You can make a solar oven for it. And

01:00:39.740 | you'll have hot water that way. I have a book called The Complete Handbook of Solar Air

01:00:47.900 | Heating Systems. And it's at www.knowledgepublications.com. It shows you how to do that. And it does it

01:01:08.300 | very well. But it's a real small savings in energy. It's not like you think. It's not

01:01:17.260 | like a big increase in energy. So let's say, how many gallons a day do you think you use

01:01:25.220 | in your house? I have no idea. Let's say you are using a total of 120 gallons in your house

01:01:35.540 | a day for your showers. Sound reasonable? Times 8.3 pounds per gallon, multiplied by

01:01:45.700 | a temperature difference of 30 degrees. That is 29,000 BTUs saved. Let's see, for natural

01:01:59.260 | energy, 29,000 is 30,000. If that was for electricity, 30,000 divided by 34.12 times

01:02:11.060 | 12 cents. That would be a savings of $1 a day for electric heat. By doing that, so there's

01:02:25.980 | $1 a day. 30,000 divided by the number of BTUs I have. Let's see, 1,000,000 BTUs. 0.3

01:02:47.260 | times 8. That would be a savings of 24 cents if you had natural gas. So does that kind

01:02:57.260 | of put it in perspective for you? Yeah, it definitely does. It definitely does. And in

01:03:03.740 | the cost-benefit analysis, I use a little shortcut in financial planning of how big

01:03:08.980 | of a portfolio you need to provide a monthly expense. And I don't actually know, and this

01:03:14.980 | is one of the things I've been trying to figure out, I don't actually know how to apply a

01:03:19.220 | financial calculation to what is "worth doing" versus what is not worth doing and where the

01:03:25.900 | break-even point is. But I do apply a calculation of where basically there's a simple rule called

01:03:33.980 | the safe withdrawal rate from a portfolio. And the simplest way to do it is to plan that

01:03:40.500 | you can basically take 4% of a portfolio of assets off under normal conditions. You can

01:03:46.580 | basically take 4% of assets off essentially into perpetuity. So for every $100,000 of

01:03:55.260 | assets, you have a $4,000 annual income essentially into perpetuity. So when you're planning for

01:04:00.340 | financial independence and financial freedom, if you need $40,000 a year to live on, then

01:04:06.220 | you need a million dollars of assets. But if you can go from needing $40,000 a year

01:04:11.140 | to needing $30,000 a year, instead of needing a million dollars of assets, you only need

01:04:17.940 | $750,000 of assets. And oftentimes, it's easier to cut out the $10,000 of expense than it

01:04:25.580 | is to increase, than to save the extra $250,000 to be financially independent. So the way

01:04:31.900 | I think about it, I use the monthly number. And so saving $1 a day really doesn't sound

01:04:39.580 | like that big of a deal. It's really not. But if you say $30 a month and you multiply

01:04:45.380 | that times $300, you need $9,000 in an investment portfolio in order to pay that $30 a month

01:04:53.140 | expense. So if it costs you $250 to retrofit something, and that $250 saves you $30 a month,

01:05:01.860 | that, you can either spend the $250 and not have to save the $9,000, or you can just keep

01:05:06.780 | on paying the extra dollar and have to save an extra $9,000. And that's the closest I've

01:05:12.020 | gotten to figuring out a way to calculate what's worth it and what's not. But I've

01:05:15.660 | really struggled to actually have any idea of how to approach these scenarios to figure

01:05:20.580 | out what's smart to do and what's not smart to do.

01:05:23.020 | Yep. And see, electric hot water heat is not a smart way to go. It might be the way you're

01:05:29.100 | stuck with. So if you've got electric hot water heat, go with on-demand electric hot

01:05:34.260 | water heat. If you can switch to natural gas or propane, switch to natural gas or propane

01:05:40.260 | for your hot water heat. If you can't do that, then take an old hot water heater and put

01:05:46.220 | it outside during the summertime and let the water flow through it in the summertime so

01:05:53.300 | it gets heated up to ambient before it goes into your hot water tank so you've got that

01:05:58.940 | savings of that 30 degrees that you don't have to heat up. Just don't forget to drain

01:06:04.140 | the tank and reroute it in the wintertime, otherwise it's going to freeze up on you and

01:06:08.380 | you're going to have a mess.

01:06:10.700 | Speaking of that, because I've never drained a water line in my life worried about the

01:06:14.660 | freeze, is there anything different about how you've been talking with my situation?

01:06:18.880 | Anything different between the subtropical south versus up north where you are as far

01:06:24.700 | as how to think it through and where to focus on as far as attention to save money on utilities?

01:06:28.900 | Well, a lot of focus up here is on heating. From Pittsburgh north, there's a lot of focus

01:06:42.980 | on heating. In our old house, the furnace gave out, actually the gas control gave out

01:06:49.500 | and the gas control was going to cost $600 to replace and we're looking at $2,000 for

01:06:55.860 | a new furnace. So we switched out the old regular forced air furnace for a new high

01:07:03.940 | efficiency multi-stage furnace. It actually vents outside with a PVC pipe. It's called

01:07:11.820 | a condensing furnace. When you burn something like natural gas, you get heat, carbon dioxide

01:07:20.580 | and water vapor. Well, that water vapor is steam. You just don't see it and it carries

01:07:25.300 | a great deal of heat. It carries 950 BTUs per pound of steam. So if you take that and

01:07:34.060 | you run it through another heat exchanger to condense it down to a liquid, then you're

01:07:39.820 | getting all that energy back. That's what a condensing furnace does and that's why it's

01:07:45.100 | got a water drain on it. Just like your furnace has a water drain on it, your condensing furnace

01:07:49.420 | has a water drain on it. To get rid of the water that it condenses out of the flue vapor.

01:07:56.340 | And then your flue vapor is like only 140, 150 degrees Fahrenheit and they run it outside

01:08:02.300 | via PVC pipe rather than an insulated chimney going up to your roof. So we got one of these

01:08:09.780 | and our heating bills went from like $150 a month down to $60 or $75 a month. It's not

01:08:23.620 | so much that we would have done it on its own for saving money because we weren't staying

01:08:28.300 | in the house for a long time. So if I didn't have to do it, I wouldn't have done it. But

01:08:34.460 | it kept the house a lot warmer because it's a multi-stage furnace. So when it's not really

01:08:41.620 | cold outside and it just needs to keep the house warm, it's running on low. So you got

01:08:47.340 | this continual gentle heat coming out of the air ducts all the time. And if it gets colder

01:08:54.020 | outside it'll increase this a little bit more. And if it's minus 20 outside it'll be going

01:08:59.540 | full like a full blown furnace. Burners going all the time, full burner, full fan, blowing

01:09:06.940 | out of the air ducts and it's still condensing. So it's still a very efficient furnace. But

01:09:16.540 | we noticed the change significantly in our old house. And now we're in a newer house

01:09:26.420 | and a much bigger house. Went from like 1400 square feet to 3000 square feet house. And

01:09:35.460 | it's got its original 20 year old furnace in it. But our heating bills are only like

01:09:42.500 | $150 a month, maybe $200 at most during the polar vortex of last year. And that's acceptable

01:09:53.900 | to us for a heating bill versus having a $2000 furnace installed. But I tell you when time

01:10:03.900 | comes and it gets close, I'm not going to wait for it to break. We're going to wait

01:10:09.140 | for the off period of the season like spring time or summer and say, "Hey, I need a new

01:10:15.860 | furnace. Okay, we'll be there tomorrow." And we'll get a good price on a furnace by buying

01:10:20.420 | it off season. We make the decision of when to do it rather than letting the furnace make

01:10:25.740 | the decision for us when to do it. And amazingly, it's been a very cool summer here in Pittsburgh.

01:10:35.460 | Our AC bills, both last year and this year, have not been too outrageous. Our highest

01:10:41.700 | AC bills have maybe been about $300. And it's averaging some place in the low $200s. And

01:10:51.340 | that's with the furnace set on, the temperature set on 77, not 73 or 72. 77 with the ceiling

01:11:00.820 | fans going and everything. And it just really hasn't crossed that threshold. Even though

01:11:06.020 | it's a 20-year-old AC unit, it's still functioning within our budget. You factor in our taxes,

01:11:17.540 | what we paid for the house. We're paying $8000, $9000 a year in just taxes to live where we

01:11:26.380 | are living.

01:11:27.380 | My goodness, man, move!

01:11:28.380 | It's a very nice area. Everything is convenient. We actually have the cheapest house in the

01:11:38.580 | neighborhood. Both of the houses in the neighborhood are a lot more, two, three, four times the

01:11:44.780 | price of ours. So that's always a good thing to have the cheapest house in the neighborhood.

01:11:49.380 | That's good for financial investment.

01:11:51.860 | I say that somewhat jokingly. I have heard of many tax bills that may be many times that.

01:11:59.940 | I've been in houses on Palm Beach where the property tax bill is a couple hundred thousand

01:12:04.140 | dollars a year. But I guess I'm so cheap that property taxes are just one of those fixed

01:12:12.500 | expenses that they're never going to go down. And it makes me think a lot about other places

01:12:19.460 | where they're cheaper.

01:12:21.780 | If I did a new AC system and a new furnace system, I could probably lower my monthly

01:12:31.220 | bill by $100 a month. Which means I would be saving $1200 a year. And that's $4000 of

01:12:39.980 | expense. That's $2000 of expense for a new high efficiency air conditioning system. And

01:12:45.940 | $2000 for a new furnace to be installed into my system. So that's a $4000 increase. And

01:12:56.060 | $4000 divided by, conservatively, $100 is going to be $40. So we're looking at, well,

01:13:09.100 | maybe I should do this. $4000 divided by $100 is 40 months. 40 months divided by 12. I could

01:13:18.140 | be looking at a return on investment in three years. So where as I've been going, wow, I

01:13:25.620 | don't really want to do that at this moment. That's a 3.3 year return on investment. So

01:13:33.740 | I should probably be changing my mind and thinking about putting in that new furnace

01:13:39.140 | and AC system as soon as possible. Thanks!

01:13:44.100 | There we go. That's a good outcome for a personal finance show. I'm glad I got you to do the

01:13:52.220 | numbers. So this is an area, and what I try to do with clients is talk through all these

01:13:59.140 | different options. And this is an area that I don't know how to run these calculations

01:14:06.300 | of how to help figure it out. So this has been helpful. I want to close with two questions,

01:14:11.300 | though.

01:14:12.300 | Oh, we're not closing yet. We got more to go on. You got more questions.

01:14:16.540 | Yeah. Okay. Here's the question that I'm interested in. And I'm going to spring it on. You may

01:14:22.140 | not know. So I have a concept that I think a lot about. And the concept is how can I

01:14:29.420 | buy the luxuries of life, as in a roof over my head, a comfortable environment, whether

01:14:37.900 | those are the necessities or the luxuries of life, for an upfront cost that makes sense,

01:14:45.580 | but focus on technologies that will last forever with a minimum amount of maintenance and a

01:14:52.020 | minimum amount of cost. The problem is that I don't have the scientific background to

01:14:57.460 | really be able to analyze some of the different things. So I spent a lot of time on -- I have

01:15:01.660 | spent a lot of time on YouTube just kind of looking through different technologies. And

01:15:07.460 | I look, for example, I look at something, you know, just A, designing a house with good

01:15:13.580 | solar design for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Designing a heating

01:15:19.740 | system maybe based -- maybe it's based on -- I mean, I never lived up north. But I look

01:15:25.180 | at, you know, the videos that I find on, you know, rocket mass heaters and efficient wood

01:15:31.120 | stoves with well-built insulated houses all around. I look at some of the technologies

01:15:35.580 | of building design that where instead of -- where it seems much more enduring. I think about

01:15:42.300 | the idea of putting on a copper roof that may last a thousand years. Like, how could

01:15:45.860 | I build a house that would last for a thousand years that wouldn't -- isn't just going to

01:15:51.140 | be degrading in 30 years? And I think about how could I design a system that -- I guess

01:15:58.140 | just better design. If you were going to design a house and I gave you the task, knowing what

01:16:07.140 | you know about engineering and design, if you were going to design a house, and I gave

01:16:11.280 | you the goal, I said, you know, "Steven, I'm going to live here for the rest of my life.

01:16:14.980 | I don't mind spending now on the things that I need to spend now. But I want these things

01:16:20.180 | to be enduring technologies that aren't going to break, that are going to be very low maintenance,

01:16:25.140 | that are going to be very low ongoing cost." And the goal of this, by the way, is to get

01:16:29.540 | -- is to be able to stave off the effects of inflation on my expenses. So if I'm depending,

01:16:36.380 | for example, on a high electric bill, well, that electric bill is going to be driven by

01:16:41.180 | the cost of the energy by the power plant and also by the cost of keeping the power

01:16:45.740 | plant employees employed. So that means that over time, if I'm planning on how to be financially

01:16:52.500 | independent -- excuse me -- I have to provide for increasing cost of energy. And if that

01:16:59.500 | happens, maybe I have decreasing cost of energy, maybe things transition from coal to natural

01:17:03.620 | gas. I don't know. But I have to plan for that. And I also have to plan for increasing

01:17:08.420 | wages for the workers involved. So I think, "Well, how can I just buy the system now that's

01:17:15.060 | going to keep it and just pay for the technology so I can eliminate the effects of inflation

01:17:20.540 | over time?" How would you design a house, given that design framework? What specific

01:17:27.060 | technologies would you focus on?

01:17:29.380 | One answer. A monolithic dome.

01:17:32.420 | Buckminster Fuller's invention.

01:17:34.740 | No, no.

01:17:35.980 | I was thinking geodesic. What's a monolithic dome?

01:17:39.940 | Monolithic dome. I've had the $1,000 one-week-long contractor course for it down in Italy, Texas.

01:17:46.940 | It's monolithic.com. They're the greatest, most honest people in the world. And they

01:17:55.940 | will help you design or they'll help you find a builder and/or they will build the monolithic

01:18:00.980 | dome for you. Anywhere from the size of a house for one person all the way up to an

01:18:07.980 | entire school or church. They'll do it. And a monolithic dome, what it is, is you get

01:18:15.940 | a rubber form for your dome. First thing you do is you pour the floor. You've got rebar

01:18:23.380 | sticking up out of the floor. And then you attach down your form. And then you put a

01:18:30.060 | great big fan to inflate the form. And there's an airlock, like a two-door airlock, so you

01:18:36.700 | can lock in and lock out. And you can walk on the inside of this dome. So you're inside

01:18:43.700 | this great big balloon. And you have a, first thing you have is you have a foam gun. And

01:18:51.420 | you are going to spray three to four inches of foam all the way around on the inside of

01:18:58.140 | the dome. And I'm talking three to four inches, okay? That is a big hefty amount. Then you're

01:19:05.140 | going to go put up the rebar. And you put all the rebar up right next to the foam and

01:19:11.260 | everything. Then you come in with a shotcrete pump. And you are shooting concrete onto the

01:19:16.900 | wall three inches thick. So all the concrete is on the inside. The concrete's not on the

01:19:26.580 | outside. This is a house. Well, one, it's done in less than a week. You literally got

01:19:33.580 | interior people going in, doing walls and drywalls in one week. Okay? That's how fast

01:19:41.780 | these things go up. You're looking, when they do mega churches and mega schools, they have

01:19:50.580 | the numbers, solid numbers that they showed us. This multi-million dollar, ten million

01:19:57.020 | dollar school pays for itself in 17 years in Texas on the AC cooling alone.

01:20:04.020 | Wow.

01:20:06.580 | Okay? Alone.

01:20:08.220 | Wow. That's awesome.

01:20:10.860 | You have no roof. You have no shingles. Okay? It's made out of concrete. They did some of

01:20:18.860 | the storage facilities in Iraq prior to Desert Storm. And the generals actually had to call

01:20:25.860 | up and say, "How did you make this thing? What's it made out of?" And they said, "You're

01:20:32.500 | going to need two bombs to get through it." And they would drop one bomb to break a hole

01:20:36.580 | in it and drop another bomb to go through the hole and blow up what's on the inside.

01:20:40.700 | Wow.

01:20:41.780 | These are literally 400 year houses or longer or more. That's how long these things are

01:20:46.660 | going to last because they are a concrete house. And when they build the small, they

01:20:53.660 | build rental units for people. And so you can come in as an investor, you can have 24

01:21:01.020 | rental units put on a piece of commercial property, you can collect the rent from the

01:21:05.860 | people, and it's a one person thing. It's about 400 square feet with a living room open

01:21:12.740 | to a kitchen and then a bedroom and a bathroom parked away behind a wall. In Texas, they

01:21:19.740 | literally cool this with a small 5000 BTU air conditioner. And it'll turn that room

01:21:29.180 | ice cold chilly.

01:21:32.980 | Wow.

01:21:33.860 | And the only heat for the house is a standard plug-in-the-wall 1500 watt electric heater.

01:21:41.860 | And it will keep that as toasty warm as you could want in the coldest Texas temperatures.

01:21:48.860 | So they are the ultimate when it comes to heating and cooling efficiency. In fact, insurance

01:21:55.720 | companies won't insure them because they're just so strange. The insurance company doesn't

01:22:01.660 | know what to do.

01:22:02.380 | You probably can't finance them either.

01:22:04.860 | Yes, you can finance them depending upon where you're going. But it's going to cost about

01:22:11.860 | $200 per foot per square foot, which is not bad. And it's about twice the cost of a normal

01:22:20.380 | house to do. But your return on investment on this thing is in single or double digit

01:22:27.340 | years. Look, you've got no roof to go on there, you've got no labor for the roof, you've got

01:22:33.740 | no maintenance of a roof. The insurance company, you don't need them to insure the structure

01:22:38.940 | because what's going to happen? You insure the contents of the house is what you insure.

01:22:45.940 | So if you had a fire happen inside the house, big deal. You clean everything out, bring

01:22:52.740 | in a fire hose, clean all the scorches off of the concrete, and then rebuild the interior

01:22:59.300 | of the house. It's 100% tornado proof, it's earthquake proof because it's all one unit.

01:23:06.300 | It's attached. If the ground fell away below half the house, the house is going to sit

01:23:13.780 | there as a single monolithic piece of equipment with half the earth underneath the house missing.

01:23:23.900 | So you can shake and bake and rattle these things all around all you want because the

01:23:28.900 | dome is attached to the slab and the slab is attached to the earth. It just is not going

01:23:34.620 | anywhere.

01:23:35.260 | That's cool. I've never heard of it. I thought I'd spent enough time researching this stuff

01:23:40.900 | to see most things, but I'd never heard of this. And the cool thing about this is unlike

01:23:44.700 | some of the technologies I've seen, I'm looking on their website, there are enough different

01:23:50.060 | designs that have plenty of windows. So that would keep my wife happy to have plenty of

01:23:54.740 | light, unlike some of the things I've proposed to her.

01:23:58.020 | You can have a whole house with windows if you want. In fact, if you want, you can have

01:24:01.580 | an 11-sided house or a 10-sided house. You can have an 8-sided house. They're called

01:24:08.260 | stem walls. They're vertical walls that go up. It looks like a regular part of a house

01:24:16.780 | to you. You've got flat walls, you've got windows and doors and everything. It's not

01:24:23.220 | curved. And then the dome is the ceiling. That makes a lot of people who go, "I don't

01:24:30.220 | want a dome like that." It makes a lot of people look at it and go, "I'd have a dome

01:24:37.140 | like that because it's got vertical walls and then a dome ceiling."

01:24:42.420 | And so it's endless with what you can do with a monolithic dome. If you were building a

01:24:49.420 | house for the first time and you could afford to get the mortgage and you could afford to

01:24:56.180 | pay twice the price, and you were going to be there for long term, this is where you're

01:25:00.900 | going to raise your three or four children and everything, a monolithic dome would be

01:25:05.780 | the way to go from a financial point of view because it would pay for itself within 10

01:25:12.780 | to 15 years on heating and cooling alone. Maintenance alone, you figure in maintenance

01:25:19.500 | costs...

01:25:22.820 | I have re-roofed, I'd have no idea, but I must have re-roofed 15 to 20 houses over my

01:25:29.380 | lifetime. If I never had to re-roof an asphalt shingle roof again the rest of my life, I

01:25:33.420 | would be a happy man. And just even that.

01:25:36.740 | The other thing that strikes me about this is that with a structure built with great

01:25:42.780 | strength, then you could much more confidently retain the risk of natural weather events

01:25:49.580 | and drop the insurance. And that is a massive savings right there, especially for where

01:25:54.660 | I am. You can't drop the insurance when you have a mortgage, but if your house is not

01:26:01.540 | built to take it, then when you think about retaining the risk, you have to really consider

01:26:06.020 | it. And so you're usually going to transfer it to the insurance company, but if your house

01:26:08.860 | is built to take it, you can much more comfortably just retain the risk of the weather events.

01:26:14.300 | What's your insurance risk in Florida? How much are you paying per year for insurance

01:26:19.020 | because you live in a hurricane zone?

01:26:20.780 | Right, so it winds up being about $4,000 a year right now for my house. My dad was able,

01:26:27.780 | I mean, with his insurance, mine doesn't just split this out, but with his, he dropped hurricane

01:26:33.980 | coverage and it saved him something like $5,000 to $6,000 a year just by dropping insurance

01:26:40.100 | coverage. I'm sorry, dropping hurricane coverage and keeping everything else.

01:26:44.820 | I'm paying $1,000 a year for insurance on a house in Pittsburgh.

01:26:50.060 | Wow, so there's the difference.

01:26:51.900 | Oh yeah, there's a big difference right there.

01:26:55.340 | Huge. And the thing is, it's very difficult for me to work through because if you actually

01:26:58.820 | sit down and intellectually approach the insurance question and you think, "Okay, can I retain

01:27:04.980 | this risk?" When you actually look at the deductibles a lot of times that you have,

01:27:09.460 | and I've been through enough hurricanes, I've seen enough houses that have been impacted

01:27:12.540 | by hurricanes, and it is possible that you may have a completely destroyed house. But

01:27:19.100 | in general, if your house is up to code, it would be pretty unusual for your house to

01:27:25.420 | be destroyed by the wind. And so I've repaired the houses that have been hit by hurricanes.

01:27:31.140 | And it's hard though, because you're sitting there kind of thinking, "Well, how do I look

01:27:36.140 | at this rationally versus the deductibles and all of that?" And I very well may drop

01:27:41.460 | mine at some point in the future, because I'm pretty confident in my ability to recover

01:27:46.020 | from it and my ability to retain the risk, but it sure would feel better with a differently

01:27:49.580 | designed structure. So last question I'd like to ask you today is, I get questions a lot

01:28:03.300 | of times even on providing for energy. And so you've got the question of saving energy

01:28:09.180 | that we've talked about. How do I do heat? How do I figure out what appliances? Should

01:28:17.500 | I swap out my incandescent light bulbs and buy LED light bulbs? So that's all the saving

01:28:21.780 | side.

01:28:22.780 | Oh, we didn't talk about light bulbs. I knew we were missing something. Light bulbs. Okay.

01:28:29.620 | Here's the thing with light bulbs. A regular incandescent light bulb that provides you

01:28:34.080 | X amount of light. But the thing is, it provides you also 20 times the amount of heat that

01:28:39.220 | it does light. And so every BTU you put into the house with your light bulb has to be removed

01:28:47.500 | by the air conditioner. Now the air conditioner is working on a coefficient of performance

01:28:52.900 | of three to one. So if you put 100 BTUs per hour of light, actually let's say 350, because

01:29:02.220 | 100 watt light bulb will put off 350 BTUs per hour of both light and heat. And all the

01:29:07.260 | light is turned into heat anyways. So you put in 350 BTUs an hour with 100 watt light

01:29:14.580 | bulb and incandescent. Then your furnace AC system is running, it's running on what we

01:29:19.940 | call a coefficient of performance of three to one. And remember, it's moving heat. It's

01:29:24.580 | pumping heat. It's not taking the same amount of energy to remove it. So it takes one third

01:29:31.420 | of the amount of energy to remove that light. So it would take just over 100 BTUs of AC

01:29:47.540 | pumping to remove that 350 BTUs per hour from your 100 watt light bulb. So everything you

01:29:55.980 | do in your house, your AC has to work. When you have a refrigerator and you open the door

01:30:01.740 | and put stuff into it, the refrigerator kicks on, it's moving the heat that you just let

01:30:06.860 | into the refrigerator out of the refrigerator through the back of it with a heat pump and

01:30:14.380 | it's doing it in a ratio of about three to one. So you're taking heat, putting it in

01:30:18.940 | the refrigerator and the refrigerator is moving the heat out of itself. And at the same time,

01:30:24.820 | it's making a little bit of heat to heat up your house. So everything you do in your house

01:30:30.460 | is making heat that the AC system is going to have to remove. So what you want to do

01:30:37.100 | is you want to minimize your heat. So there are compact fluorescent bulbs and there are

01:30:42.580 | LED bulbs. And it's year 2014 right now and LED bulbs have fallen in price dramatically.

01:30:50.500 | Now generally, right now, compact fluorescents are a little cheaper than LED light bulbs.

01:30:59.620 | And compact fluorescents are the ones that have mercury on the inside of them to a very

01:31:04.780 | slight amount. Break one, you spill an infinitesimal amount of mercury that you'll never detect.

01:31:12.340 | But that's the big war. There's always a war on something every time they want you to change.

01:31:17.060 | When they changed from incandescent to compact fluorescent, it was like incandescents are

01:31:22.060 | killing the planet. And now they want you to go to LEDs, they're saying incandescents

01:31:28.060 | have mercury in them. When they want you to go from LED to something else, they're going

01:31:32.380 | to tell you LEDs have arsenic in them. And LEDs do have arsenic in the silicon to form

01:31:40.500 | the silicon gap that makes the light. So anyways, the thing with compact fluorescents and all

01:31:49.660 | fluorescent bulbs, they don't like to be turned on and off all the time. If you're going downstairs,

01:31:56.540 | flip it on, come back upstairs, flip it off, you do this 10 times a day, compact fluorescent

01:32:02.420 | is not going to like it. It is going to burn out before it reaches its life of like 8 years,

01:32:09.140 | is what they say. So if you have a place like every night you're going to turn on this lamp,

01:32:17.140 | great place to put a compact fluorescent bulb. And it's either 60 watt equivalent or 100

01:32:23.820 | watt equivalent or whatever size that you so desire. It's a great place to put one.

01:32:29.500 | If you have lights that you are turning on and off all the time, LED bulbs don't care.

01:32:36.100 | They can go on and off 100 times a second and it won't affect their life one iota, one

01:32:42.900 | bit. So they're great to put into locations like that. LED bulbs also give you all the

01:32:50.460 | light instantaneously the second you turn them on. They don't have to warm up. Some

01:32:54.940 | compact fluorescents aren't what they call instant on. If they are instant on, they'll

01:33:00.220 | say so on the package. But you turn them on and as they warm up, they give you a better

01:33:05.420 | glow and it takes about a minute. So if you want a place where you want the light to come

01:33:11.300 | on instantly, you're going to put in an LED bulb in there. And actually at Home Depot

01:33:18.380 | right now, there's these LED bulbs, I forgot the name of the company that's making them,

01:33:23.540 | I think it's Philips. They look like lollipops. They look like suckers with a rim around them

01:33:30.100 | where the LEDs are. And Home Depot is selling the 60 watt equivalent bulb for $4. It's funny,

01:33:39.300 | the 40 watt equivalent bulb is $8. But they're really pushing them out at $4 a piece. Your

01:33:48.820 | 100 watt equivalent LED light bulb, which is just new on the market from Cree, C-R-E-E,

01:33:56.620 | Cree light bulbs, 100 watt light bulb will cost you $15. Now the question is, how long

01:34:03.700 | would it take you to get your money back on this? And I did the calculation some time

01:34:08.180 | ago. If you had a 60 watt incandescent light bulb, you left it on all the time, 24 hours

01:34:15.180 | a day. And then you had a 60 watt equivalent light bulb that was compact fluorescent, how

01:34:23.420 | long would it take you to get your money back? If you ran them both side by side, 24 hours

01:34:29.620 | a day? Well, these 60 watt compact fluorescent light bulbs were going for about $2.50 when

01:34:38.060 | you were buying like a pack or 12 of them. The answer to that question is, with 10 cents

01:34:44.500 | per kilowatt hour electricity, which is normal in the United States, California, Seattle,

01:34:50.540 | they even inflated theirs through taxes to 25 cents a kilowatt hour. So for a normal

01:34:56.900 | kilowatt hour rate for the United States, it would take two weeks of 24 hours a day

01:35:05.540 | for that $2.50 compact fluorescent light bulb to pay for itself. So if you have a place

01:35:14.140 | where you want that 100 watt bright light bulb, and you're paying $15 for the LED light

01:35:20.980 | bulb, rest assured, you're going to get your money back in less than a year. And then you're

01:35:28.260 | not going to have to replace it, because the LED light bulb is literally going to last

01:35:32.900 | upwards to 20 years.

01:35:37.980 | So that's pretty compelling. So it sounds like of all the places to start, light bulbs

01:35:43.860 | would be one of the simplest places to move the needle as far as energy use.

01:35:48.460 | It would be the easiest place to move the needle as far as the energy goes. And the

01:35:53.980 | LED bulbs are a little bit slightly more efficient. They say they're 25% more efficient than the

01:35:59.100 | compact fluorescents. So the better the light bulb, the less heat it is going to be putting

01:36:06.740 | out into that room, which means the less heat the air conditioner is going to be moving,

01:36:12.020 | which means the lower your electric bill. So you're going to save money on electricity

01:36:16.420 | on the bulb, and you're going to save money on electricity when it comes to air conditioning

01:36:21.820 | if you're in an air conditioning dominant environment like you are in Florida.

01:36:28.260 | Now if I'm in a cold dominated environment, is that an efficient source of heat as far

01:36:33.340 | as to accomplish both things? Would that decision be different if I'm in northern Canada?

01:36:39.500 | What did we cover earlier? What's the most expensive form of heat?

01:36:42.940 | Electric.

01:36:43.940 | There you go. That's your answer. So it's like a little electric heater. And if you

01:36:49.740 | got an incandescent bulb there, yeah, it's going to be offsetting your heat, but it's

01:36:54.940 | going to be heating at the same cost of electricity. So if you had electric heat up in the Midwest

01:37:04.580 | or the northern portions of the climate, it wouldn't matter if you left your incandescent

01:37:11.060 | bulb on or not as a source of heat, because it would only be heating your house with electricity.

01:37:19.020 | But up in the Midwest and in the North, all the homes have propane or natural gas, so

01:37:24.100 | that is a moot point to begin with.

01:37:27.460 | Got it.

01:37:28.460 | Now there's one other thing we should cover while we're talking about houses. Heat pumps.

01:37:34.100 | Explain.

01:37:35.100 | A heat pump is popular in the southern United States pretty much. And what it is, any air

01:37:45.180 | conditioner can become a heater. And what happens in air conditioning mode, it's moving

01:37:52.180 | heat from the inside of the house to the outside of the house. So the evaporator is inside

01:37:59.900 | the house where everything gets cold and the condenser outside gets warm. Well, you reverse

01:38:06.660 | the pump and do a few other things, and it's wintertime, the condenser on the outside of

01:38:15.220 | the house will get cold. So if it's 40 degrees outside, it's going to be 20 degrees on the

01:38:22.580 | condenser. It's going to be moving heat to the evaporator in your furnace, and you're

01:38:28.620 | going to be running the furnace, and it's going to be blowing hot air through the house.

01:38:33.860 | That is a heat pump. And they generally are more complicated than what I just described,

01:38:40.900 | and they cost a lot of money. I'm talking $15,000 for a heat pump. But people say, "Oh,

01:38:47.820 | I get my money back on them and everything else." Well, a lot of people get suckered

01:38:52.780 | into these things. And briefly, there's three main types. There's the air-to-air heat pump

01:39:02.060 | that I just described, which is your box sitting outside. Those are very low in efficiency.

01:39:07.940 | There is the ground loop one, where they dig four feet down. Have you ever seen this? And

01:39:12.860 | they bury 200 feet of tubing around your yard.

01:39:15.780 | I've heard of it.

01:39:16.780 | So what they're doing is they're using the ground heat as a source of heat and cooling

01:39:22.940 | for your heat pump. So depending on where I'm at, the ground temperature is always 65

01:39:27.940 | degrees Fahrenheit, four feet. So the heat pump in the wintertime is taking the 65 degree

01:39:35.100 | temperature and it's compressing it, and it's making it 95 degrees to heat your house to

01:39:42.900 | 75 degrees. And in the summertime, it's taking that 65 degrees, making it cooler down to

01:39:51.540 | 50 degrees, and it's using that to cool your house. So it's pumping the heat from the earth

01:40:01.100 | to the house, and it's pumping the heat from the house into the earth, depending upon the

01:40:06.660 | time of year.

01:40:08.940 | Now both these are expensive, and the ground loop is better than the air to air one, but

01:40:13.260 | the ground loop one sucks compared to a well one. If you got well water on your property,

01:40:21.940 | you can use this as fluid to fluid to heat exchange. It's as good as it gets. Air to

01:40:28.620 | air, air is an insulator. It's very bad. Buried loop in the ground, you're conducting the

01:40:34.900 | heat between a pipe with air in it and the ground. Not a good heat conductor, but it

01:40:44.220 | does conduct. When you got well water, you got well water coming up, going into your

01:40:50.260 | heat exchanger for your heat pump, you got really good heat conduction from one side

01:41:00.140 | of the heater to the other side of the heater. And this becomes very efficient. This is the

01:41:07.780 | most efficient type of heat pump, and it's the only type of heat pump I'd recommend someone

01:41:12.980 | getting is if you have ground water or you got like a big pond on your property, several

01:41:20.540 | acre pond, then using a water loop or a water up and down, you have a well going up, you

01:41:27.180 | have a well going down. I've even seen people do it with just a well up. They got like a

01:41:31.740 | gallon per minute of water spilling out onto the grass from their well, no big deal. Then

01:41:39.940 | you can get into a savings, especially if you're in the south because you're dominated

01:41:45.420 | by cooling. Heat pumps, although they are installed in the north, they don't work anywhere

01:41:52.820 | as near as good because the ground temperature is so much lower and the outside air temperatures

01:41:59.100 | are so much colder. So if you're looking at a heat pump and you think, oh, you're a salesman

01:42:04.700 | telling you all these great numbers, you look at the numbers real carefully and look at

01:42:10.420 | your initial cost expenditure versus your estimated return on investment because they

01:42:16.900 | generally are not going to be a good investment for you. Many times if you got natural gas,

01:42:24.860 | it'll never beat it. Natural gas will always win. It might compete with propane. It definitely

01:42:30.860 | is a lot better than straight electric. But that's the story on that. There's one other

01:42:38.700 | thing we should cover, that's solar panels.

01:42:41.260 | Yes. That was actually what my last question was going to be, is on the creating energy

01:42:48.340 | side, then you say, okay, we've conserved, now can I create? And for the same reason

01:42:54.460 | why I'm attracted to why I described the scenario I described about house, I'm attracted to

01:43:01.500 | the idea of if I could create the energy and just buy the equipment and then provide that

01:43:07.440 | energy for myself going forward, that would eliminate the inflation of the bill over time.

01:43:15.240 | How would I figure out if that were smart to do or not?

01:43:18.740 | It's not smart to do. Dream on.

01:43:22.740 | You're going to make some of my listeners very unhappy because I interviewed Jacob Lundfisker

01:43:28.900 | who wrote the book Early Retirement Extreme, and he said solar panels stink. And I had

01:43:35.820 | at least one comment on the post from people saying, well, I figured it, I did it and I

01:43:40.300 | had a break even in five years due to my, in my situation, maybe due to the tax incentive

01:43:45.180 | or something. So why do you say that?

01:43:47.140 | Well, first of all, these are called grid-tie solar panels. So they're up on your roof,

01:43:52.460 | they're tied to the grid, and when your power fails, they will do nothing for your house.

01:43:58.060 | You got no battery system, you got no backup system, they will not power your house, they

01:44:02.460 | have to power the grid, they use the grid as the battery. So you're putting them up

01:44:06.780 | there for economic purposes only. Now, some socialist states, they are taking your money

01:44:13.300 | and my money, they're stealing it from us, and they're handing it to these people who

01:44:17.820 | are putting solar up in terms of rebates. And that's lowering their cost to put up their

01:44:24.620 | solar panels. Then, they've taken a knife and put it into the back or held it to the

01:44:30.460 | neck of the utility, and saying, instead of paying these people a deferred rate of 2.8

01:44:37.020 | cents per kilowatt hour, which is the deferred rate is the cost of electricity they'll have

01:44:42.740 | to pay for their next utility plant, they're forcing them to pay you 10 cents per kilowatt

01:44:49.620 | hour, in some cases 20 cents per kilowatt hour because of your solar, you're selling

01:44:56.620 | back solar energy. Now, when you use these falsely inflated numbers that are done by

01:45:02.900 | coercion and corruption, your return on investment might be 5 to 8 years on the system. However,

01:45:09.900 | if you look on CNBC, I just sent an article to a friend of mine who just asked me the

01:45:15.980 | same question, utilities are saying to government, this is not fair that you are making us pay

01:45:23.500 | these people this exorbitant amount of money because it only costs us 2.8 cents to make

01:45:29.940 | it and you're making us pay them 20 cents per kilowatt hour. We want to control the

01:45:35.900 | rates and we want the rates to go lower. So, all great, you've just taken $40,000 of your

01:45:42.220 | life savings, installed solar panels on your house, and you've gotten your rebate, and

01:45:51.300 | now you're getting your monthly check from the utility company, and halfway through your

01:45:57.460 | return on investment, the law changes, the rug is pulled out from underneath you, and

01:46:03.900 | you're sitting there with that feeling in your stomach like you're ready to puke. Solar

01:46:10.700 | panels are the most expensive form of electricity you will ever find.

01:46:16.740 | Even with the recent decreases in cost, as I understand it?

01:46:20.260 | Yep, it takes over 30 years. Solar panels are made with high temperature electricity.

01:46:26.780 | You grow the silicon, and it's done with very pure heat, which is high temperature electric

01:46:33.500 | heat, and then the wafers are sliced, the wafers are doped, and they're turned into

01:46:38.980 | solar panels. So, your solar panels are made with inexpensive nuclear electricity in Japan

01:46:47.340 | and moved over here, and you put them out in the sunshine, and it will take over 30

01:46:52.740 | years of Arizona sunshine in August at noon, with the panel pointed directly at the sun,

01:46:59.740 | for it to output the same amount of electricity that it took to make the panel.

01:47:05.220 | Really?

01:47:06.380 | So, solar panels are for energy independence. If you want to be off the grid, if you want

01:47:14.500 | to be disconnected from the man, if you want to be your own power company, solar panels

01:47:20.980 | will work for you. However, be it known, you are paying the highest price there is for

01:47:27.980 | electricity. But you own it. It's yours. No one's going to take it away from you. When

01:47:36.980 | everyone else is black, you're not going to be black. You're going to have lights on in

01:47:41.820 | your house and everything else. But keep in mind, generally you don't size the solar panels

01:47:47.180 | to the house. You size the house to the solar panels that you purchase. So, you're not going

01:47:54.180 | to have your whole house AC system running, because that is like 5 kilowatt hours, 5 kilowatts

01:48:01.540 | of electricity at 240 volts. And that's an awful lot of panels being installed over an

01:48:11.100 | awful lot of surface area. So, you just aren't going to have it the way you think you're

01:48:18.100 | going to have it. You're going to be living like the clamp-its. You're going to have to

01:48:27.140 | buy a very efficient refrigerator. One of the brands is called Sunfrost. You may not

01:48:34.220 | even have a freezer. You're going to have all LED lighting throughout the house. And

01:48:39.620 | even then, you're going to turn them on and off when you're not using them. You're not

01:48:44.020 | going to have a 70-inch TV screen going, maybe not even a 42-inch. You're going to be real

01:48:51.020 | miserly with all of your energy usage. You're going to have a battery bank. You've got to

01:48:58.100 | monitor your battery bank and have a computer on it and know how many times you've discharged

01:49:05.420 | it to 50% depth of discharge, how many times you've gone down to 80. Because discharging

01:49:11.500 | a battery actually hurts the battery. And batteries are rated on the number of discharges

01:49:16.740 | they can take to a certain depth of discharge.

01:49:19.180 | So, is it better if I have the opportunity to always keep my cell phone plugged in? Will

01:49:22.340 | that make the battery last longer?

01:49:24.140 | Yes.

01:49:24.740 | Okay. I've always wondered about that, and I've never known how to figure out the answer.

01:49:29.300 | Okay. So, keep going. Sorry, I interrupted you.

01:49:32.500 | So, you're going to become a little guru on your solar power independent system, and you're

01:49:38.100 | going to learn all about batteries and charging and electrolytes and watering the batteries

01:49:44.580 | and your inverter and what you're running in your house. And you'll be yelling at your

01:49:49.380 | kids saying, "Turn off that light!" and everything else. So, you're just not going to put solar

01:49:55.660 | panels up on your house and expect to live the same way that you are living right now.

01:50:02.660 | That embedded energy thing is interesting. I'll have to research that more. I'm a total

01:50:06.900 | novice when it comes to this area, but I'm generally skeptical of most of what I read.

01:50:13.900 | I'll give you an example. I think recycling programs are extremely stupid in the way that

01:50:22.740 | they're run. Every Monday morning, the recycling truck comes down my road, and I look at this

01:50:29.740 | plastic bin of plastic that it picks up. My wife and I dutifully put our little blue bin

01:50:35.700 | in, and we put the stuff in. I think, "How is this even relevant at all to make a difference?"

01:50:42.700 | Recycling is me using my milk container for another purpose. That makes sense to me. The

01:50:47.620 | rest of this just seems like a bunch of crap. Why can't you just make the package, create

01:50:53.340 | the products and don't surround them with so much plastic? If I could buy it without

01:50:57.740 | the plastic and get cardboard that I could recycle in my backyard, that would be much

01:51:01.260 | more... I would do that. I look at these things, and half of them don't make sense. The solar

01:51:06.500 | thing bothers me, because I don't understand it very well. But if you tell me that it takes

01:51:10.380 | 30 years to get the embedded energy out, then how is it even a gain? From an environmental

01:51:14.900 | perspective, if I've got so much embedded energy in it that I've got to get out, it's

01:51:19.500 | like the whole thing with buying a new hybrid car so that it's energy efficient. No, drive

01:51:25.460 | the old one that was already made and just drive it more carefully. If you need a new

01:51:30.500 | car, fine, go with one that's more efficient. That's totally different. But don't go out

01:51:34.260 | and do something new to get something better. Am I right? Am I wacky in that thinking? I

01:51:39.100 | don't have the engineering background. Recycling is done for only one reason. It makes the

01:51:44.580 | waste management company money. That's the only reason they do it, is because they make

01:51:50.540 | money off of it. You're going to have a war on your hand with that one. But I'm inclined

01:51:54.300 | to agree with you, just because it doesn't make sense to me when this guy with his big

01:51:57.100 | diesel truck goes... He's got to be paid a salary of, what, $30,000, $35,000 bucks a

01:52:03.260 | year, I don't know, every year to go pick up this blue bin. And I think, "How on earth

01:52:07.020 | can you get any energy out of this? It doesn't make sense." Well, the energy is already in

01:52:13.020 | the plastic. And it takes one-tenth of the energy to recycle the plastic as it does to

01:52:17.780 | make new plastic. And plastic is an extremely recyclable material. Steel is almost 100%

01:52:27.260 | recycled. Copper is like 80 or 90% recycled. Those are very, very recyclable items. And

01:52:36.740 | plastic recycles very well. Indeed, when you're putting it in the blue bin, or in our case,

01:52:45.860 | the blue garbage can, you're saving them on the sorting of it. They no longer have to

01:52:56.020 | sort it from the trash. All they have to do is separate the different types of plastic.

01:53:01.620 | There's like 10 different types of plastics you're throwing out. High-density polyethylene,

01:53:07.420 | low-density polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate. So they just have to separate those out and

01:53:15.260 | put those into different bins back at the recycling center. Then those can be chopped

01:53:20.260 | up and those plastics can be resold, cleaned up, and reused. But it's only being done for

01:53:29.060 | one reason, and that's because waste management, or whoever your company is, they make money

01:53:35.180 | on it. They sell it. And it makes people feel good. And I just say, eliminate the whole

01:53:40.660 | thing. My wife and I, we eat a lot of eggs. We mainly shop at Publix, although there is

01:53:48.100 | not a single carton of eggs that I can buy that has a cardboard container. And I think,

01:53:52.860 | how ridiculous to make an egg container out of plastic when I can't reuse it in any way.

01:53:58.300 | And why can't, when a cardboard one seems to work just as well to me, and then I can

01:54:02.420 | put that out in my garden and mulch my flowers with it and take care of my trash myself.

01:54:09.540 | Because styrofoam containers can be made at the egg location.

01:54:13.740 | Is that what it is?

01:54:16.020 | You bring in a big truck full of polystyrene beads, which are like the size of BBs, and

01:54:22.900 | then they're inflated with steam and pressure, and it creates the carton right then and there

01:54:29.860 | on the location. They don't have to bring in, your volume is going ten to one. One is

01:54:36.820 | being brought in, and ten volume is going out because it's inflated. If you brought

01:54:42.260 | in all the paper to make paper egg cartons, you're bringing in a volume of one for a volume

01:54:47.060 | of one going out. Or you're bringing in the cartons pre-made and everything else.

01:54:53.420 | And think of the number of eggs that they're handling and everything else. It makes more

01:54:57.460 | economic sense for them to do that type of cartoning at that location because it's under

01:55:04.380 | their own control. And think of how expensive it would be to bring in a semi-truck full

01:55:09.940 | of styrofoam egg cartons, rather than just making them on that site, on that location.

01:55:17.500 | But if we're going to subsidize it, we should subsidize it in that way. So subsidize that

01:55:21.580 | truck going there with that. You make the cardboard out of paper. Paper is the ultimate

01:55:27.620 | new renewable resource. You're growing trees. Everyone says that's what you want to do.

01:55:31.620 | You were supposed to be growing trees. What eliminates carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

01:55:36.300 | better than anything else is the trees. So why do we subsidize... I don't understand

01:55:41.220 | the... I apologize. I'm displaying my ignorance. It's just so much doesn't make sense and I

01:55:47.060 | can't figure out how to get a straight answer from the people that know about this stuff.

01:55:52.260 | Well, first of all, there's no such thing as man-made global warming. The science is

01:55:59.060 | clear. The sun's output is up. What drives everything on this planet? The sun. The sun's

01:56:06.060 | output is up, so our temperature is up. It's not because of our CO2. That's, again, just

01:56:12.700 | guilt motivation. Throw yourself on your sword. Give money. Be green. Do this. Do that. Change

01:56:22.900 | industries all over this incredible fallacy that's being perpetrated upon us. So, yeah,

01:56:33.820 | these trees... you know what eats carbon dioxide is crops. Because of our CO2 increase, we

01:56:41.140 | are actually having more and better crops grown every year because it's like, what happens

01:56:48.620 | if you eat two helpings of steak every day? You're going to get fat. What happens when

01:56:55.420 | you have more carbon dioxide? Every carbon atom in you, you're organic, so you're pretty

01:57:02.780 | much C6H10O5 out of your atoms in your body. Organic cellulose. So, you know where all

01:57:12.820 | that carbon comes from that is the building block of your body that gives you structure?

01:57:19.180 | Where all that comes from? That all comes from carbon dioxide in the air. That's the

01:57:24.500 | only source. Carbon dioxide in the air through photosynthesis is what grows plants. It's

01:57:32.620 | what makes the carbon in the plant that gives it its structure for its organic molecules

01:57:39.860 | that makes it grow. Now, when the cow... now, you eat your lettuce, you're eating that plant

01:57:46.900 | and you're getting its carbon. When you have a cow that eats the grass that was grown by

01:57:52.620 | the carbon dioxide, and then you eat the cow, you're getting the carbon from the cow. But

01:57:57.740 | the root source of every piece of carbon that is grown in this world is carbon dioxide.

01:58:05.980 | Someday we're going to have to do another show and you can be my back pocket scientist

01:58:14.780 | because science is my weak subject. I went through all the science classes and the standard

01:58:21.940 | kind of curriculum, but I just didn't enjoy them. And now I wish I had spent more time

01:58:27.860 | studying it because I often find myself unable to actually translate things very well. And

01:58:34.260 | so I have to rely on what I can look at, which is kind of human behavior a little bit, and

01:58:39.380 | then I use that. But, I mean, there's just so much it doesn't seem to make sense when

01:58:44.460 | I look at it. And you make good points. Maybe we'll do that another time.

01:58:49.580 | Yeah, think about it. Everything you're breathing right now builds the world. If you didn't

01:58:56.540 | mine it from the ground, then it was made with carbon dioxide that you're breathing

01:59:02.420 | out right now.

01:59:03.420 | Interesting. I've never thought about it in that way.

01:59:06.700 | That's a hell of a statement.

01:59:08.700 | Yeah. I've never thought about it in that way.

01:59:11.620 | That cardboard box your eggs came in was made with carbon dioxide from the air.

01:59:17.780 | What a fun thing to think about. Wow.

01:59:20.900 | The paper you're writing on, the plastic in your computer was not, but the paper you're

01:59:27.340 | writing on was. The toilet paper you wipe your rear end with, that comes from carbon

01:59:33.020 | dioxide. It comes from trees. I mean, when you start looking at the tree that all the

01:59:41.420 | science comes from, it's just absolutely fascinating. It puts things in perspective and makes you

01:59:48.500 | do exactly what you did. You say, "Wow. I didn't realize that. I didn't think about

01:59:53.660 | that." Too often, these environmentalists and people of any political motivation, they

01:59:59.620 | want you to look at an issue through a toilet paper tube and only see that issue. They don't

02:00:06.020 | want you to see the big picture and the whole picture. They don't think you're intelligent

02:00:10.860 | enough to understand the whole operating system that's going on, that's affecting the issue.

02:00:20.900 | They just want you to look at it through this one narrow point, because they think that

02:00:24.260 | that's all they can sell you. That's all that you can digest.

02:00:28.380 | It's the same in all of our society. If I do that with finance, I can bamboozle anybody

02:00:33.420 | in the world on anything if I just focus on one specific issue. I know my finance, and

02:00:43.660 | so you give me any product. I can make it sound like it's going to fit somebody's situation,

02:00:49.940 | or I can make it sound like it's the worst thing in the world, all based upon how I present

02:00:53.700 | the information. It's not an ethical way to approach it.

02:01:01.000 | Those of us who know our subjects, our job is to teach people how to think about things

02:01:05.720 | in the aggregate and help people build a holistic framework so that then they can look at the

02:01:11.600 | individual issue and say, "Here's what it is." But it's like everything in our society

02:01:16.000 | is so compartmentalized and segmented, and people feel like they need an expert. Well,

02:01:20.640 | they do, because they're taught that nothing is connected, and I see everything as connected.

02:01:26.440 | It's all connected. It is.

02:01:29.440 | Thank you for coming on today. I've really enjoyed this. I do want to real quick give

02:01:33.320 | a plug. You who created a resource that is one of the most valuable resources that I've

02:01:39.160 | sent to many people here in hurricane country, you have a family of class on family preparedness,

02:01:45.960 | and you've done a lot of work. I've listened to all of your shows. I think you've done

02:01:49.600 | 10 or 15 shows or something with Jack Spierko over on his show, The Survival Podcast, on

02:01:55.040 | energy, on home energy. I have found the work that you've created to be incredibly useful,

02:02:01.440 | and especially your emergency preparedness class as far as just figuring out how do I

02:02:06.360 | prepare my family for an intelligent—for us, it's hurricane season. How do I prepare

02:02:12.120 | for hurricane season? For you guys, maybe it's ice or tornado season or whatever you

02:02:15.760 | deal with up there. Where can people go if they want to read more of your stuff? Plug

02:02:21.440 | your websites and your preparedness class and make sure people can find out more information.

02:02:26.720 | Okay. In my family class, I will teach you everything you could possibly want to know

02:02:31.280 | about food and water. I'm not going to tell you to go out and buy MREs or buy freeze-dried

02:02:36.080 | food. Everything in my class is around white flour, oil, sugar, water. I will have you

02:02:44.720 | making emergency bread, white flour tortillas, in 30 seconds.

02:02:50.040 | And doughnuts. I made the doughnuts.

02:02:52.040 | And doughnuts. I have this class and people go, "Okay, emergency food time." They go,

02:02:58.040 | "Okay, what are we going to eat?" I go, "Doughnuts." "No, no, an emergency. What are we really

02:03:03.160 | going to eat?" "Doughnuts." And they're going, "Yay!" I'm going to say, cooking in oil is

02:03:11.040 | a very fast way of cooking. You're taking heat in the form of a flame, you're putting

02:03:17.440 | it in a pot, it's going into oil, and your food is going directly into that oil. So it's

02:03:23.120 | getting cooked very quickly and very fast because the oil is in contact with it.

02:03:29.120 | And I take these recipes for Indian fry bread and naan and everything else, and they're

02:03:35.120 | just simple white flour recipes, and I show you how to put it on top of a skillet and

02:03:41.880 | cook it that way and eat it, or I show you how to put it into the hot oil and fry it,

02:03:48.560 | and it comes out real delicious. Put a little cinnamon and sugar on it, and you're going

02:03:54.720 | to be loving it. And people go, "What about nutrition and everything? It's not nutritious."

02:04:00.200 | And my response to them is, "Shut up and take a multivitamin. One penny a day multivitamin

02:04:08.000 | will give you all of the nutrition you want." When you're in a disaster, you need calories.

02:04:13.680 | You need calories to walk. You need calories to lift up your destroyed house and start

02:04:19.520 | rebuilding it. You need calories to find other people, and you need calories to keep warm

02:04:26.320 | or to keep cool. You need calories in a disaster. And I address that real intelligently in the

02:04:31.600 | family class.

02:04:33.840 | Then I have how to power your house from your car, which is so simple. You take an inverter,

02:04:38.440 | you plug it into your car. I go over all the details of what the car can and cannot power

02:04:44.000 | inside your house. Will it do your refrigerator? Will it do your freezer? I have another class

02:04:49.600 | on how to keep your refrigerator and freezer cool with and without electricity. I tell

02:04:55.120 | you very intelligent things you can do before a disaster, like with hurricanes three days

02:04:59.920 | out. I tell you how you put stuff in your freezer that will keep it cool, so you don't

02:05:05.440 | have to worry about it that long. I have a class on how to buy a generator. There's seven

02:05:11.000 | main types of generators out there. I cover each one, so you can make a decision on which

02:05:14.720 | one you want. I tell you how to hook up your generator to your house, both the illegal

02:05:19.160 | and the legal ways, the safe and the unsafe ways. That way, if your neighbor goes, "Hey,

02:05:24.800 | George! I got my generator running over here. You want some power? I can plug this into

02:05:29.320 | your dryer outlet, and your house will be powered." Well, you'll know right away that

02:05:33.880 | that's called a suicide cable, and you'll know what to do if you want to plug your house

02:05:40.160 | into your neighbor's generator to do that. You might say, "No, that's too dangerous for

02:05:45.320 | me. I don't want to do that." Or you might have a mother-in-law with you who has oxygen

02:05:50.760 | that runs off an oxygen pump that runs off electricity. You might be real desperate for

02:05:54.920 | electricity. "Yeah, I'm going to do that. I'm going to take that risk. I know to turn

02:06:00.480 | off the main breakers, turn off the generator, plug everything in, and then turn on the generator."

02:06:05.960 | I explain that to you so you're enabled intellectually to make those decisions. I have my battery

02:06:13.520 | bank classes, how to go buy a marine battery or golf cart batteries and then put them in

02:06:19.360 | your house so when the power fails, you got your own little power station there. It'll

02:06:24.360 | power all your electronics and everything for as long as you want. I show you how to

02:06:28.560 | recharge this off of your car. I show you how to recharge this off of a generator. I

02:06:33.440 | even begrudgingly show you how to re-power this off of solar panels. My take on solar

02:06:40.440 | panels is you should never buy a solar panel until you have at least three months of food

02:06:44.520 | and water storage. Because what's the purpose of having a solar panel that will power your

02:06:48.920 | phone for 50 years and you only got five days worth of food and water. Your money is much

02:06:54.840 | better spent on the food and water. You can power your house for about two months plus

02:07:01.040 | off of your car with stored gasoline, which leads to another class I have called fuel

02:07:07.080 | and fuel storage. I show you how to fill up 15-gallon HDPE food-grade containers with

02:07:16.000 | gasoline and store them. They're stored real safe and not smelly and everything else rather

02:07:22.640 | than using those horrible 5-gallon gasoline containers. I have a lot more. I have a good

02:07:30.000 | 12 classes up there. You can find them all at Stephen1234.com. That's www.steven1234.com.

02:07:45.520 | It's all free. You can just go up there and with one click you can listen to any of the

02:07:51.160 | classes. Stephen1234 will lead you to solar1234 and battery1234. First Aid1234. I got a great

02:07:59.040 | first aid course that the Red Cross would never ever dare give you. It will lead you

02:08:04.440 | to radios1234. It's everything about communications, scanners, CVs, ham radio, GMRS, FRS, anything

02:08:15.040 | that was a radio, AMF from shortwave. It teaches you everything that you could ever possibly

02:08:20.160 | want to know about radios. Stephen1234.com is the hub to all the other 1234 websites.

02:08:29.440 | Up there I got all the people send me the best comments and the nicest endorsements

02:08:35.520 | and I put those up on Stephen1234. You can see right then and there what other people

02:08:42.040 | have said about the classes and stuff that I've done and hopefully get you excited and

02:08:49.600 | enabled and listening to them. Hopefully it will be of great assistance to you both in

02:08:55.600 | your financial future and in your disaster future. Let's face it, an ounce of prevention,

02:09:01.960 | a few dollars in disaster prevention can save you thousands of dollars when a disaster comes

02:09:08.680 | by. I can literally make the difference. With some of my power classes and how to power

02:09:14.720 | your house from a car, I can make your house very livable in a complete blackout and you'll

02:09:22.840 | be able to tolerate it for a couple weeks easily. Now what would a couple weeks in a

02:09:28.640 | hotel a hundred miles away from you cost? It's massive. Yeah, at least a hundred dollars

02:09:36.440 | a day. So there's $1400 to $2000 in saved money for less than $100 spent at home.

02:09:48.320 | Right. I mean I've been, I got my ham radio license when I think I was, before I was a

02:09:55.040 | teenager or something like I was 12 and so ever since then, so for I said almost 20 years,

02:09:59.840 | almost 20 years, I was a member of Aries and I've been through the hurricanes and just

02:10:05.440 | the ability to be at home after the, you know, maybe you got to evacuate for a storm, but

02:10:09.960 | just the ability to stay at home and not have to, you know, and you can't stay at home unless

02:10:13.900 | you have an ability to, you know, stay a little cool and have some light. It just is not livable

02:10:18.240 | in Florida and it's not livable anywhere even if you don't have a way to stay cool or stay

02:10:22.320 | warm and have some food. And the thing that I'll say about your stuff, and I just want

02:10:27.200 | to thank you for it, is that it is practical, it's doable, it's cheap, and it's easy. And

02:10:33.400 | so every time I see something, whether it's, you know, as mundane as, okay, it's, you know,

02:10:37.600 | it's June, it's time for hurricane season, or as extreme as, you know, what's going on

02:10:43.040 | right now as we record this on October 17th, you know, we're dealing with Ebola and for

02:10:47.560 | some reason it's just like massive news everywhere. That can strike just like every single thing.

02:10:53.280 | You're dealing not necessarily with facts, you're dealing with an emotion, and if this

02:10:59.560 | thing is not quieted down, it could be stupid. And so when someone's worried about it, though,

02:11:05.560 | if they figure out, okay, I've got to go buy 800 pounds of wheat that I don't know what

02:11:09.840 | to do with versus Stephen Harris says, "Go buy some flour, some sugar, and some oil."

02:11:14.640 | And when I first heard that class, I went straight to the grocery store, I bought white

02:11:17.640 | flour, sugar, and oil, and I went home and made donuts for my family. And it works. And

02:11:22.640 | you say, "Okay, well, I can at least have a plan B in case this hysteria, you know,

02:11:28.280 | takes off." And so it works. So thank you for putting the work into those shows, and

02:11:33.960 | I'd encourage people, go to Stephen1234 and check them all out. They're all worth listening

02:11:37.520 | to. And if there's a pandemic, whether it's Ebola,

02:11:41.400 | bird flu, SARS, something's going to come along and be widespread in the United States

02:11:49.440 | at some point. The best way to catch it is not to be around anyone who's got it. So if

02:11:55.200 | you've got enough food to stay in your house for a month or two, and just knock at, if

02:12:01.040 | someone knocks at the door, you go to the door and go, "Uh-uh, you can't come in, sorry.

02:12:05.760 | I'm not letting you in because I don't want to be exposed." That is something that you

02:12:11.720 | can do if you are prepared, and it'll keep you prepared from all of the disasters, all

02:12:18.000 | of the pandemics, because you don't have to go out and leave. You don't have to go out

02:12:21.840 | to the grocery store. You don't have to get a grocery cart that 100 other people have

02:12:25.880 | touched. You don't have to go pick up food and packages that other people had to handle

02:12:29.760 | and touch to put them there. You don't have to go use the ATM that absolutely everyone

02:12:34.960 | has used at the checkout. You don't have to use the pen that everyone has used to sign

02:12:40.720 | for your credit card on a little electronic screen. And you don't get exposed to all those

02:12:45.480 | people around you. You don't have to have masks and goggles and everything on you to

02:12:51.160 | do that, because you got your food and your water and your power at home. It's under your

02:12:57.520 | own control, therefore you own it, and therefore you can exercise it at your free will without

02:13:04.440 | the permission from anyone, and you are prepared and you are a heck of a lot safer.

02:13:10.080 | Right. And this is core to every bit of financial planning, whether it's core. It's absolutely

02:13:17.040 | core, and it's what allows people to be free-thinking if you're not dependent on other people and

02:13:21.640 | you can look and care for yourself. Steven, thank you for coming on. I have really enjoyed

02:13:27.120 | this and I think we've created a valuable resource. I appreciate your time and I appreciate

02:13:32.080 | your being willing to come on the show. Well, thanks, Joshua. It was a pleasure being here.

02:13:39.440 | And that's the interview. Told you it'd be fun. And hopefully that's a good start. I

02:13:42.880 | know this is an area where I have very little background in. I have very little experience,

02:13:46.840 | so I need to really seek out people who know what they're doing and seek out experts on

02:13:51.320 | the subject. And I feel like I've got a better game plan as I get started on my renovations.

02:13:56.600 | We're going into the cool season here in South Florida, so now is the time where I think

02:14:00.560 | I'll be able to get some better deals on various aspects of saving money on insulation.

02:14:06.640 | Real quick, I want to give one plug for the emergency preparedness information that Steve

02:14:12.520 | went over, which you can find all of this at, I think it said steven1234.com. Make sure

02:14:18.840 | you go and check out his site, steven1234.com. Steve has really done an amazing job with

02:14:26.240 | extremely practical and easily implementable emergency preparedness, family emergency preparedness

02:14:34.760 | from that perspective. I have sent his resources to many people as being extremely practical.

02:14:40.920 | I live in hurricane country, some of you live in earthquake country, some of you live in

02:14:44.000 | winter ice storm country. And the trouble when you start getting into thinking how can

02:14:50.040 | I prepare my family for some sort of natural disaster, some sort of weather event, some

02:14:56.280 | sort of power outage, things like that, it can be very overwhelming because there's so

02:15:01.680 | much information out there that you could tackle. You've got everything from the advice

02:15:06.920 | of have a flashlight in your house to everything to here's how to survive the end of the world

02:15:13.000 | as we know it for the next 10 years and live off the grid and build a battle hardened castle.

02:15:19.200 | And it's really overwhelming when you get into that. And the challenge is that if you're

02:15:23.880 | just starting to figure out how to build out an emergency preparedness plan for yourself,

02:15:29.160 | you've got to do it in a practical, low cost way that is focusing on what actually matters

02:15:35.920 | first. You don't immediately, I mean, you don't go out and start buying guns and bullets

02:15:42.680 | when what you really need is a flashlight and some rechargeable batteries.

02:15:47.120 | Steve's resources, which you can find them all at steven1234. The resources that he has

02:15:53.280 | put together are so practical and they are awesome. Everything works, everything is cheap,

02:16:00.240 | and it's incredibly detailed. He has incredibly detailed explanations. Start with his family

02:16:06.120 | emergency preparedness class. I'll put a direct link to that. Start with that. It's about

02:16:09.840 | a two hour class that he delivered to, I think it was a CERT group. CERT stands for Civil

02:16:16.200 | Emergency Response Team, which is a response team that your local county or municipal government

02:16:21.640 | may have. It's a volunteer association. I haven't been involved with CERT myself personally.

02:16:27.200 | I've always been involved on the communication side with amateur radio and all that and past

02:16:32.320 | work. But CERT is just a volunteer aspect. But he was doing a CERT training. And you

02:16:37.640 | will find in that training the cheapest, most straightforward, practical advice on how to

02:16:43.840 | prepare your family in case of a tornado or hurricane, an ice storm, something like that.

02:16:48.160 | That moves on to, then the next place you'll want to go is, well, you'll want to start

02:16:51.960 | at steven1234. That will send you over to his site called solar1234. And on that site,

02:16:57.160 | he has listed on there seven free classes. And there is an incredible amount of information

02:17:04.160 | there. He has a class called How to Power Your House from Your Car, which he mentioned.

02:17:08.880 | That's the key place to start if you don't want to have a big, noisy generator. You already

02:17:12.120 | have one. It's sitting in your driveway. And he gives specific instructions for how you

02:17:16.040 | can get a cheap inverter and you can use your car to run your refrigerator and your freezer.

02:17:23.120 | The coolest thing about it is I watched, he has testimonials on his site of when Hurricane

02:17:27.640 | Sandy was coming toward New York City. And there's millions of people that are going

02:17:30.760 | to be affected. You could go on, if you knew a hurricane were coming to your area, you

02:17:35.400 | could go on solar1234, follow his recommendations, order everything for next day delivery from

02:17:41.920 | Amazon, spend 100 or 200 bucks, and you would be far ahead of anything else, as far as,

02:17:48.040 | of everybody else, as far as being able to stay in your house. And this is an incredibly,

02:17:53.960 | incredibly important aspect of financial preparedness. Because as he mentioned toward the end of

02:17:59.840 | the show, if you can save money on not having to evacuate your family for two weeks because

02:18:04.400 | there's a hurricane coming. Now again, there's a category five direct hit, get out. You know,

02:18:09.480 | have some common sense. But I've been through a bunch of these things. And if you don't

02:18:13.560 | have the ability to live comfortably for a week or two without power in Florida, that's

02:18:20.000 | expensive. So it's a very important aspect of financial preparedness, of financial planning,

02:18:26.680 | is just some basic, straightforward family preparedness. This is one of those areas,

02:18:32.000 | just like getting your will established and just like buying life insurance. This is one

02:18:36.680 | of those areas where we're all told constantly to take care of things. And go to ready.gov

02:18:42.720 | is the government website. Your state, your county, all of this has their own website.

02:18:47.000 | But you still see that in our society, when there's a storm coming, the gas lines get

02:18:51.440 | long, the shelves empty out. Now is the time to do it before the storm comes. So I always,

02:18:57.560 | you know, I've said in a recent show, I did a show on preparedness as a mindset. When

02:19:01.760 | we get to the end of hurricane season, which is what's coming up for us, then that's the

02:19:05.280 | time to sit down and say, "Okay, how did everything go this season? Do I need to do anything different?"

02:19:10.200 | I had a bit of an advantage that I was paying attention to that from a very young age because

02:19:13.840 | I always enjoyed being involved in emergency response and preparedness from the communications

02:19:19.240 | aspect as a hobby when I was younger. And so that helped a lot. But I've noticed that

02:19:27.120 | in many ways, financial planning, good financial planning and financial preparedness is very

02:19:31.760 | much about simply avoiding the big mistakes. So I want to really commend his emergency

02:19:37.320 | preparedness resources to you. He's done a bunch of shows on that and he has some awesome

02:19:43.640 | information there and awesome classes. So you'll find all that at Steven1234. I encourage

02:19:48.200 | you to start there with your own personal emergency preparedness information. A little

02:19:53.120 | bit different than what we're talking about energy savings, but I encourage you to start

02:19:57.920 | there. That's it for today's show. I know that outro was a little bit long, but I wanted

02:20:03.400 | to share that resource with you and the best way to do it was in the context of what Steve

02:20:08.960 | has already created. I'd love to hear about any projects that you've done. I want this

02:20:12.640 | show to be a really great mix of the practical and I want to have a lot of practical, actionable

02:20:19.680 | information. Concept theory is valuable in many aspects, but remember concept and theory

02:20:28.240 | is only part of it and practical application is another part of it. So in my goal of creating

02:20:36.560 | a show that you can come back to every single day, I don't want to overwhelm you with a

02:20:40.800 | bunch of academic theory every day. I want there to be something that will go between

02:20:44.760 | academic theory and very practical application. So I'm going to be out shopping for a water

02:20:49.760 | heater because I need to get one to swap out my homeowner's insurance. I got to get a new

02:20:53.920 | one. So now I have a better place to start and that helped me a lot. Maybe that will

02:20:57.520 | help you as well. If you know of people like Stephen Harris that you think would be an

02:21:02.600 | excellent source of information that would have practical information, I would love to

02:21:07.840 | get that resource from you. I'd really love to hear from you about that. You all can help

02:21:12.400 | me so much. I've had a number of people as guests recommended from the show. I have plenty

02:21:17.580 | of people on my list, but as the show has been growing and as the audience has been

02:21:21.360 | growing, I would ask you for your help. If you know of somebody that you think would

02:21:25.320 | be an interesting guest that would have some valuable information, please send me an email

02:21:30.800 | about them and I'll contact them or if they're a friend of yours, ask them to get in touch

02:21:36.280 | with me because I want to make sure that this show is packed with value for you every single

02:21:41.880 | day. So that's it for today's show. I hope you enjoyed that. Make sure if you're not

02:21:47.560 | subscribed to the show, make sure you subscribe in iTunes or on Stitcher. Those are probably

02:21:52.240 | the two easiest apps to use or whatever app it is that you use. We'd love to have your

02:21:57.400 | reviews on Stitcher. If you're a Stitcher listener, we haven't been getting many reviews

02:22:01.360 | of the show there. I would love to ask you to go to Stitcher and leave a review on the

02:22:05.240 | show. That would mean the world to me. Thanks everybody. Have a great Tuesday.

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02:22:45.920 | (dramatic music)

RPF0085-Steven_Harris_Interview