RPF0124-Ben_Falk_Interview
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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host.
00:00:33.840 | Today is Monday, December 22, 2014.
00:00:37.680 | And today I have a great interview show for you with Ben Falk from Vermont.
00:00:42.560 | Ben is a really great guy. He runs a planning firm called Whole Systems Design.
00:00:47.680 | And he is involved in fairly comprehensive, I would call him a permaculture designer,
00:00:53.040 | but if you're scared off by that word, just call him basically a comprehensive designer,
00:00:56.800 | where he brings a comprehensive perspective about designing the needs for human habitat
00:01:02.880 | into our current context.
00:01:05.680 | Ben has written a book on the subject, and it's one of the most beautiful, well-integrated books that I've ever read.
00:01:11.920 | I've looked for people to bring on the show who are living more independent, self-sufficient lifestyles,
00:01:17.840 | and Ben is one of those people that I think is a really great example of how to do this in a modern context
00:01:23.840 | and to integrate all of the great things about the current, highly technological world that we live in,
00:01:29.120 | but also to benefit from some of the old world technology and benefits that we simply don't probably respect very much today.
00:01:39.840 | It's a really great show. We go over a comprehensive perspective on designing for heat, for housing, for food,
00:01:47.200 | and also a little bit of more, I guess, intellectual theory, a little bit of theory behind design.
00:01:55.520 | And we also talk about Ben's story.
00:01:57.520 | So I hope you enjoy this interview. I'm going to skip coming back at the end with any closing notes,
00:02:02.240 | so the interview will simply end.
00:02:04.240 | If you'd like to reach me, my email address is joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.
00:02:08.800 | I thank you, each and every one of you who gets in touch with me.
00:02:13.200 | Twitter @radicalpf, Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance.
00:02:16.240 | Thank you to those of you who have joined the Irregulars program.
00:02:18.880 | As I'm releasing these shows while I am away, I am working hard on increasing the bonus content for you guys in the Irregulars program
00:02:26.640 | and also on really building that value.
00:02:29.040 | So I'm working hard at that while I'm away this week, and I'll be back on January the 5th with some,
00:02:37.040 | with the normal, regular content of the show. Enjoy.
00:02:39.920 | So Ben, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. I appreciate you being with me today.
00:02:46.160 | Thanks a lot. It's great to be here.
00:02:47.760 | I've brought you on to talk about design and design from a more integrated holistic perspective.
00:02:55.920 | And as a beginning point, I think the name of your company is a perfect place to start.
00:03:01.840 | Your company is called Whole Systems Design.
00:03:04.560 | So let's kick off with that.
00:03:06.000 | What does Whole Systems Design mean and what do you do as a firm?
00:03:12.080 | Sure. Well, to me, Whole Systems Design is, well, just the term Whole Systems is,
00:03:17.040 | denotes the idea that we're thinking about and hopefully, that we're thinking about
00:03:24.240 | the whole that we're working with, that we're thinking about all parts of a set of features
00:03:33.280 | and processes, a set of conditions that are interrelated, right?
00:03:37.200 | So that's a system. And since we're saying Whole Systems Design, design denotes an idea of
00:03:44.320 | intending something and responding to something, a challenge, a solution to a challenge in very
00:03:51.120 | simple terms. So Whole Systems Design is just the name that I put to this idea when I was in
00:03:58.960 | college. I was working as a carpenter and a builder and saw firsthand a lot of, and had before that,
00:04:06.000 | really for my whole life, but especially more acutely when I was building houses in college,
00:04:10.080 | many responses, many design responses that were lacking, very severely lacking because
00:04:18.400 | specialists were involved throughout the process and everyone was looking at their little piece of
00:04:24.400 | the elephant. And as the adage goes, no one really realized they were looking at an elephant.
00:04:30.800 | They were just looking at one part of this huge beast and doing the one part to their best
00:04:36.080 | ability. And sometimes even that one part really well, whether it's the architect or the guy pouring
00:04:40.560 | the foundation or the people putting up the timber frame, which was the part of it that I often
00:04:45.200 | worked on. But the whole, the result of the whole process and the net result was, at best, usually
00:04:55.680 | very, very weak and incompetent and inadequate to solve the challenges of the site or of the people
00:05:05.120 | living in the home or usually both. What's interesting to me is that you came at it
00:05:10.480 | from the perspective, it sounds like, of construction and architecture. And I came
00:05:15.600 | at it from the perspective of financial planning, because I noticed the same thing in financial
00:05:20.960 | planning, where oftentimes in the field of financial planning, there are many specialists
00:05:25.520 | and people are thinking that they're looking for a specialized answer. And there is a need
00:05:30.400 | for specialists who are experts, who have a deep level of expertise in an area. But what happens
00:05:36.960 | if you only go to a specialist, you only get that specialist's answer. It seems to me, it's more
00:05:42.800 | likely that if you go to a surgeon, that the surgeon is going to recommend surgery than that
00:05:47.840 | somebody who might be a natural, I don't know what the term is, but a naturopathic physician.
00:05:54.080 | And so it's not that there's, if you have a need for surgery, you need a surgeon who has an in-depth
00:05:59.040 | level of knowledge. But in our society, we seem to have lost much of the ability to integrate
00:06:04.640 | different aspects of design and to essentially meeting our needs and to bring them together
00:06:09.600 | in a holistic way. Yeah, just to tag onto that, I think that's absolutely right on. I think it
00:06:15.600 | really emerges more often than not from failing to be able to ask the right questions and ask
00:06:23.760 | the, you know, come at it from a broad picture. Like you said, if you're a surgeon,
00:06:28.160 | you know, your answer to it is how do we do surgery? Or if you're, you know, you're someone who,
00:06:32.800 | you know, subscribes, you know, supplements, that's the answers within what supplements are
00:06:40.240 | best. But we tend to fail to ask, to kind of back up and ask the most broad, kind of most
00:06:47.280 | holistic questions about why, you know, why is the problem what it is to begin with? And that's
00:06:53.760 | exactly, I think, where we'll, where we find the most effective answers, which is usually
00:06:58.720 | requires many specialists to come up with that, that holistic answer, not just one.
00:07:04.080 | So share with me your career path. You start noticing these things at working as a builder.
00:07:13.920 | How did you get from where you were then to where you are now working as a designer
00:07:19.200 | of human habitats? Sure. Well, I think first for me, it's rooted in, you know, I don't know,
00:07:26.000 | at some point growing up, maybe middle school or high school, I started to be able to,
00:07:30.400 | to recognize it, just a recognition that there's just so much failure in the world around us.
00:07:36.400 | There's so much inadequate and just poor response to a problem that, that, you know, around me,
00:07:42.880 | but I grew up in the suburbs and I just, just see this everywhere, whether it was just,
00:07:46.480 | you know, in roads or, or buildings certainly, or, or organizations. And so that was kind of
00:07:54.720 | the formative experience was kind of witnessing, you know, failed responses to challenges. And then,
00:08:03.200 | yeah, I got to college and I think for me, what was probably the first real series of events was
00:08:09.680 | meeting Dr. John Todd, who's a father of modern day ecological design is that keep credit as the
00:08:15.680 | inventor of the living machine, you know, biological way to treat wastewater, just,
00:08:21.280 | you know, a forerunner in imitating how nature works really, you know, an early, early pioneering,
00:08:28.880 | you know, by a near and really defining that field. So I was lucky he was teaching at the
00:08:33.440 | university of Vermont where I was in school. And I was actually thinking about quitting and going
00:08:38.400 | to be a rock climbing bum. I did for a little while, cause that's what I liked to do a lot
00:08:43.040 | more than, you know, what I've studied in college. It wasn't very compelling for me.
00:08:46.320 | And then I took his course and I realized that there was actually a hands-on creative response
00:08:54.560 | to problems that could be very direct and we could do ourselves. And we didn't, if we wanted to solve
00:09:00.960 | big problems or even small problems, we didn't have to, you know, petition someone to do it.
00:09:06.720 | We didn't have to get a politician to do something for us necessarily. We could actually kind of take
00:09:12.240 | on a problem directly and really change the rules of the game and address a problem through,
00:09:21.280 | you know, thinking, thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and then making that
00:09:26.160 | solution, actually building it with our own hands like he did with the living machine.
00:09:31.040 | So that I think kicked me off and more formally in the direction that I've been on ever since,
00:09:36.800 | which is just to, if I see something wrong, you know, make a different way as Buckminster Fuller
00:09:44.000 | is often quoted, you know, don't, something to the effect, I'm sure I'll butcher it right now,
00:09:49.200 | but you know, there's no resisting, you know, fighting something that's wrong. You make a
00:09:55.200 | different system that makes the old system that you don't like obsolete, you know, don't just try
00:10:01.600 | to put up walls and resist something you don't like, but make something else instead. And so I
00:10:07.520 | think that's what, I guess what my whole life has been becoming for the last 15 to 20 years. And
00:10:18.000 | my work is just an organic outgrowth of that lifestyle. And we now work for people who want to
00:10:28.240 | kind of, I guess, undertake those same, that same approach to some extent or similar approaches
00:10:34.640 | themselves in their own life. And they're often coming from very different backgrounds than
00:10:38.880 | I came from, for sure. So how do you label yourself? So do you call yourself a designer,
00:10:47.520 | a permaculture designer, a human habitat system designer? Do you have a label that you apply to
00:10:51.600 | yourself? Yeah. I, you know, I have called myself, you know, a land designer or, you know, human
00:11:00.160 | habitat system designer. That's a little bit of a mouthful, so I don't really use that. But that is
00:11:05.200 | really what we're getting at is a whole, you know, the idea of my business and of, I think,
00:11:09.840 | my lifestyle is whole human habitats. You know, we're looking at all, you know, we're not going
00:11:16.320 | to shy away from anything that's involved with keeping us alive here and having a good life.
00:11:22.000 | So anything that's in that purview, let's think about those systems, those needs, and let's try
00:11:30.320 | to meet needs in a hopefully very non-detrimental way and as much as possible in a regenerative and
00:11:38.480 | enhancing way. So, you know, yeah, it's a bit beyond obviously what most architects or what
00:11:44.080 | any architect tends to do or what a just a landscape architect tends to do or I don't know,
00:11:49.680 | there's no, there's really no good term, but I think more and more what we're doing and I think
00:11:54.640 | what a lot of us are doing in the permaculture space is just, it's really about lifestyle
00:12:02.000 | redesign. I mean, I think I keep coming to the word lifestyle more and more in the last handful
00:12:08.320 | of years when I think about my own work, when I sit down with clients and I sometimes have a kind
00:12:13.440 | of clarifying moment of how we're really helping people we work with, I realize it's often, it's
00:12:21.600 | most often a lifestyle thing. It's rooted in people adjusting their lifestyles and it's also
00:12:29.040 | all about empowerment. So I think more and more, I don't have a good label, but it's about,
00:12:34.560 | it's a, you know, a personal empowerment consultant to fix problems in your own life and
00:12:42.640 | hopefully in the landscape and the living world around you. You know, that's kind of a long,
00:12:47.600 | a long, I don't know if they all have capitals at the beginning or what, but
00:12:51.360 | that's, that's, that's kind of what it's about for us. I'm glad you put the label lifestyle design
00:12:59.280 | onto that. That label has been popularized among the, some of the online world of young men and
00:13:04.960 | women working to essentially create a business to, to fund their lifestyle with the idea that if I
00:13:11.840 | can create some sort of virtual or online business that requires a minimum effort from me, that,
00:13:16.880 | that will set me free. And I think that's certainly a great, a viable aspect, but the problem is that's
00:13:23.840 | only a financial solution. I don't view that as an integrated solution. It only maybe solves one
00:13:28.560 | aspect of life, which is a financial aspect of life. And the only point of the financial aspect
00:13:33.920 | of life is to fund, you know, the, the needs that we have on a daily basis. And so I think that by
00:13:41.520 | approaching the problem at every level, maybe we can find better solutions. I'd love for you to
00:13:46.080 | kick off and share with me how, if I came to you as a consulting client and I were going to say,
00:13:53.440 | Ben, listen, you know, my family, I'm trying to create a better lifestyle for myself and my
00:14:00.160 | family. How would you think through that from a design perspective? Where would you start?
00:14:06.320 | What components would you consider and how would you guide me through that process?
00:14:11.440 | Yeah, I think I would start the same way someone, you know, is the same way someone who would want
00:14:21.280 | to design or be able to help you design an off-grid house would start. And this is how
00:14:26.400 | Amory Lovins always talks about, you know, energy challenges is what are the needs? You know, what
00:14:30.880 | are the loads in the system? Like when we think about making a house independent of the power
00:14:35.360 | grid, for instance, you start by thinking, well, not how am I going to make all the power I need?
00:14:41.280 | You start by thinking, how am I going to have, how am I going to get by on as little power as
00:14:45.920 | possible because it's expensive and contains a lot of compromises to make power. So what are my
00:14:52.160 | loads? You know, what do I need to run in the home, whether it's a freezer or a refrigerator
00:14:57.440 | or different lights? And then how do I get around? How do I need as few of those as possible? Or how
00:15:03.120 | do I reduce the amount of electricity that each of those things uses? So in the same way, analogous
00:15:08.480 | to that, I would want to understand what's that person need? What do they think they need? Of
00:15:13.920 | course, the answer you'll get is what they think they need usually in the beginning of the
00:15:17.840 | conversation. And then we facilitate a conversation where we try to get at, okay, what are the core
00:15:26.000 | needs truly that you have to be happy? And often, well, always, if someone says, you know,
00:15:33.440 | I need a car and I need $50,000 of income a year and a 33,000 square foot house or whatever it may
00:15:42.880 | be, whatever the physical needs are, as you start drilling down to, bro, really what really keeps
00:15:48.880 | you satisfied and what really makes you psyched about life? It has nothing to do with those
00:15:55.360 | physical things. And so we start moving into a space where we can think about, okay, what is the
00:16:01.200 | minimum of the physical needs to support those more, call it spiritual needs or whatever we
00:16:11.600 | want to call it. And so we start drilling down on that and thinking about with people how they can
00:16:18.560 | reduce their quote unquote load. Because once you reduce your load, the less economic inputs you
00:16:25.520 | need to live, the more freedom you have off the bat to actually design your landscape building
00:16:32.880 | system and really your lifestyle as a whole. I mean, there's really no one who has more leverage
00:16:40.160 | over their lifestyle than that person who's kind of simplified things down as much as possible.
00:16:48.080 | So that's a great starting point. People are willing to work in that practice to very different
00:16:56.960 | degrees. I'm kind of hardcore compared to a mainstream American suburbanite, but I'm actually
00:17:04.480 | not hardcore at all as far as my own physical needs in my life compared to some people I know
00:17:10.480 | who live with far less physical resources. So it varies. Where people are willing to attack that
00:17:18.560 | problem varies greatly. And then we look at, okay, how do you supply for the load? So if you defined
00:17:24.960 | I need 2000 kilowatts a month or whatever, 10,000 kilowatts a year, whatever it might be,
00:17:34.880 | how do I come up with those kilowatts? In this context, it'd be how do I come with that money?
00:17:41.920 | And that also always revolves around a conversation about what do you love to do? What do you love to
00:17:49.680 | do and what are you great at doing? Because I think those two things are central. If you're
00:17:55.600 | not doing something that you're not really good at, particularly talented at, you're probably not
00:18:00.880 | going to like it that much and vice versa. If you don't like it that much, you're probably not going
00:18:06.960 | to be that good at it. And I see so many people doing something that doesn't even meet either of
00:18:13.280 | those criteria. And I think it seems to me that people, anyone that thrives is usually meeting
00:18:19.120 | both of those criteria, at least most of most days, not all the time for sure, but most of the time.
00:18:29.760 | Would you describe your personal lifestyle and how you have built intelligent design into your
00:18:37.760 | personal lifestyle? I'd love to. I think it's emerged quite organically. Just to contextualize
00:18:49.360 | things, I'm standing outside my wood shop right now and I'm watching the snowfall really hard.
00:18:56.480 | And I'm looking out at a landscape that basically every tree I see we've put in the ground at some
00:19:04.240 | point in the last 10 years. And most of those have started to give us food and looking at a
00:19:09.680 | greenhouse that I just picked kale out of for a salad a couple hours ago. And kind of looking
00:19:16.240 | around at a system that I haven't created, but I've helped create very heavily, co-created is
00:19:22.560 | probably a better term. And I think there's a lot of simple ways I could say that happened. I did
00:19:32.240 | this and this and that, and I did this and then the other thing. I put one step in front of the
00:19:36.800 | other and did this very logical progression. But really, I think, to be most honest, I would have
00:19:42.080 | to start by saying where my life is now, and I'm very thankful for where it is now, if they think
00:19:49.280 | it's working out very well for me, I wouldn't really want it any other way. It is that way
00:19:55.360 | because I think I've just followed what I love to do. I've also had a lot of, you know, a good
00:20:01.840 | community of family and friends, and I've relied on that community. But really, I've just done what
00:20:07.760 | I love to do, and I've used the resources, whatever they are around me, to do what I love to do
00:20:14.960 | every day. And I think in somewhat of an uncompromising way, I mean, I hated school the
00:20:20.960 | first 12 years of my life. I absolutely hated more than most anyone else who was sitting in those
00:20:27.680 | rooms with me. So I had to be very, I had to actually really rebel from the structure that I
00:20:34.400 | was in because it wasn't what I wanted to do, and it wasn't what I could be good at either
00:20:42.720 | necessarily. So I think another piece of that, I know this is a little bit imprecise what I'm
00:20:49.760 | saying, but another piece of that is I guess I'm thankful for a pretty significant lack of
00:20:55.360 | self-discipline in the way, if self-discipline is doing something you don't want to do day after
00:21:02.400 | day and kind of undertaking the grudgery that seems all too common in the world, I just somehow
00:21:10.400 | very instinctually just wasn't okay with trading my days away, sitting inside doing something I
00:21:19.040 | didn't want to do. I had a very, very low tolerance for that. And I think I'm glad I did because if
00:21:24.400 | I didn't, I wouldn't be here right now, and I can't imagine being in a better place. Maybe I
00:21:32.640 | would be, but I certainly am very happy for where I am right now in life and the opportunities I'm
00:21:40.800 | afforded. And I think a lot of that has to do with staying very focused on what it is that one
00:21:48.000 | loves. For me, that was being outdoors. I didn't know anything more than that until I got to
00:21:52.320 | college. I just knew I wanted to be outside. I mean, the sun would come out on like a November
00:21:56.480 | day in Rochester, New York, where I grew up, and I would just pick up my bag and walk out of class.
00:22:02.880 | And it was obvious I wasn't going to the bathroom because I was taking my backpack with me, and the
00:22:06.320 | class had started 10 minutes earlier. And I knew the sun was coming out for two hours, and that's
00:22:12.880 | it, maybe the whole week in November. And I wasn't going to spend those two hours indoors and not be
00:22:20.400 | kind of part of what was happening on the earth at that time, in the outdoor world. That's where I
00:22:27.840 | felt alive and still do. So I think all of this whole permaculture regeneration thing is all just
00:22:35.600 | chasing that same line of kind of instinctual reasoning down. For me personally, now there's a
00:22:43.200 | lot of other more precise steps that I've taken, but I think that's at the core of it.
00:22:50.320 | For my own story anyway. Yeah. So I have the advantage of having read your book, which by the
00:22:55.440 | way, of all the books I've read, your book is called The Resilient Farm and Homestead,
00:23:00.000 | might be the most beautiful book on the subject that I've ever seen. It's absolutely gorgeous.
00:23:04.480 | I'm sure you put a lot of work into that. Thanks a lot. That's great to hear. It was a bit of work
00:23:10.320 | for sure. And also just your designs. And I don't know if you're the one actually producing them,
00:23:16.480 | or if you have an artist working with you, but your designs are just stunningly beautiful.
00:23:21.280 | Thanks. Yeah. Cornelius Murphy, who's my main colleague in the business, whole system design,
00:23:28.240 | is the illustrator for that book. And I give him all my rough chicken scratch and he makes it
00:23:32.400 | look really compelling. It really makes a big difference. So having read your book and being
00:23:39.840 | familiar a little bit with your work, where I'm trying to lead you is actually to discuss some of
00:23:44.480 | the practical details of how you have integrated designing for your own needs into your lifestyle.
00:23:51.280 | So my perspective, and I'd like you to give some specifics and walk people through essentially how
00:23:56.640 | it works, but you've designed for your food needs, your nutrition needs, your shelter needs,
00:24:03.520 | you've brought all of the physical human needs together. Because often what I get as a financial
00:24:11.120 | planner is people just say, "I need X amount of dollars per month." And that's a useful goal.
00:24:15.760 | But sometimes you need to look at, "What do I need the X number of dollars per month to do?"
00:24:20.800 | So I'd like you to describe how you think about your lifestyle and how you've designed it to meet
00:24:25.360 | your fuel needs, your housing needs, all of these things together in an intelligent way.
00:24:30.000 | Sure. Well, I think that's also emerged organically, but it's definitely come from
00:24:38.640 | a focus first and foremost on the hierarchy of needs, putting the most basic needs before
00:24:46.480 | needs that aren't as basic. So for instance, I still don't have a solar photovoltaic system.
00:24:53.360 | Most of the time you want to have a "sustainable" lifestyle in this culture. And the first thing
00:24:59.200 | you do is put up solar panels. Well, solar panels will still be the last thing I end up doing. I
00:25:05.120 | plan to actually put up some more photovoltaics. But the electricity is not as basic of a need as
00:25:11.920 | food. So what we've started with is our food and water systems and our shelter systems. Because if
00:25:17.280 | the order of operations is staying warm, not freezing to death, and where I live in Vermont,
00:25:24.320 | that's basic. You're not going to freeze to death in Southern California, but you are in a good
00:25:31.520 | chunk of the world. So you got to have a shelter that keeps you warm with a minimal amount of
00:25:36.480 | input going into it. For us in a forested region of the world like New England, you can't beat
00:25:42.320 | wood heat. And if you really insulate your house well, and you detail it pretty well, and you have
00:25:47.040 | a good amount of mass, you can actually cut your fuel wood need, no matter what fuel you're using,
00:25:54.240 | drastically right off the bat. So we started with that. We started with getting our buildings in
00:26:00.640 | order, getting everything wood powered. The first thing I did when I bought the house here, which
00:26:06.480 | existed and isn't a very well insulated house, we actually built this kind of secondary space
00:26:11.200 | near it. So it could be very high performance, because there's only so much renovation you can do
00:26:16.320 | necessarily, unless money's no object. And the first thing I did was put a wood stove in it,
00:26:22.800 | and started collecting firewood and meeting my own basic heating needs. I mean, I think the house
00:26:27.520 | that I moved into went from probably the woman who lived in it before me spent $2,500 a year to $3,000
00:26:34.240 | on heat and hot water. And immediately we were spending less than $1,000. So that was slashed.
00:26:39.840 | And now we spend less than $400 or $500 on that house. And our other living space, it's really
00:26:47.760 | essentially free. I mean, it's the cost of chainsaw gas, which might be $10 to $15 to harvest and
00:26:54.880 | process the firewood we use to heat 1,500 square feet. And that gives us all our heat and hot water.
00:27:01.920 | So heating was central. Food, water is central. We're fortunate to have pretty good access to
00:27:07.280 | water in this part of the world, but we started collecting rainwater and also managing water in
00:27:12.000 | the landscape better, which there's a lot to it. But it's a pretty basic approach. I outline it in
00:27:18.560 | my book, and a lot of people in the permaculture space are all about that already. And then we
00:27:23.840 | started getting on top of our food system. So basically started ripping up my lawn within the
00:27:28.640 | first couple of years of being here. And now we grow most of our own calories for most of the year.
00:27:35.200 | And we might spend, I don't know what we spent on food beforehand, but we've cut it by 80% to 90%.
00:27:44.960 | Now when we go to the co-op, the food store nearby, every now and then we get some chocolate
00:27:52.960 | or coffee, although we've really given up coffee for the most part. We get some spices here and
00:27:58.480 | there. Sometimes we'll buy some apples if we don't have any. But we're not buying much of our staples
00:28:04.960 | anymore, or really almost any vegetables. So we've gotten those aspects in order, shelter,
00:28:12.080 | heat, water, food. And now in the last few years, we're really working on the health,
00:28:18.480 | on the other health aspects, like the medicinal aspects in particular, growing more herbs,
00:28:25.680 | expanding our herbal medicine, kind of the home apothecary, and really expanding
00:28:30.240 | the opportunities for that in the landscape, both through learning plants and fungi better,
00:28:36.640 | so we can just go wildcraft them in the woods for free. And also actually dedicating garden space
00:28:42.640 | and time to growing a lot of just baseline herbs in the garden, which help keep us healthy as human
00:28:49.760 | beings, have relied on these plants for thousands of years to do the same. And we're starting to
00:28:56.080 | just re-recognize those basic needs in the modern era now. So we're working on that a lot more in
00:29:02.880 | the last few years. My wife is a naturopathic doctor and clinical herbalist, and she's made
00:29:10.960 | a living doing holistic health work for about almost 20 years. And so she's been a big resource
00:29:19.440 | on that front to expand the homestead and farm in that direction. Yeah, so those are some of the
00:29:26.880 | basic needs. We've gotten our heads around and our hands around. And all of that, just like you said,
00:29:34.480 | I mean, that opens up the door to more freedom for us. It takes a lot of time, and people always say
00:29:41.760 | that. They're like, "Well, but doesn't that take a lot of time? Couldn't you just be going
00:29:45.520 | and making money instead of being in the garden, then you could go buy the food?"
00:29:49.440 | Absolutely. I mean, I could go make enough money in the time I spent in the garden, I can make
00:29:55.680 | enough money to buy way more, way greater quantity of food than I grow in the garden.
00:30:00.880 | But A, it's not the same quality of food. It's incomparable. The food you harvest in your front
00:30:07.440 | yard, you just can't buy food that good. And B, it's what would you rather spend your time doing?
00:30:14.640 | And for me, being in the garden, harvesting fruit around in the yard, or going looking for mushrooms
00:30:21.280 | up in the woods, that's really what I'm alive to do. I'm not doing it to save money. It does
00:30:30.000 | save a lot of money, but that's not my main motivation. I'm just doing something that I love
00:30:34.800 | to do. So I often tell people, "Don't do this out of feeling like it's a chore, or you're trying to
00:30:43.840 | get to some destination by doing this. Do it if you like to do it. If you don't like being in the
00:30:49.120 | garden with your hands in the dirt, then don't grow food." In some ways, it's very, very simple.
00:30:58.320 | It probably always hasn't been that simple, because sometimes you have to grow food just
00:31:01.600 | to survive in certain contexts, in certain places in the world still. But luckily for me,
00:31:08.080 | I actually like meeting my basic needs. It's just something that's very, very satisfying.
00:31:15.120 | One of the things that most appeals to me about intelligent design is the ability to A,
00:31:21.120 | think ahead, and B, stack functions together so that many things can be met with the same
00:31:28.560 | resources, to try to use resources in the most efficient manner. I actually love to do this on
00:31:36.640 | the financial engineering side of things, basically thinking, "How can I use this money and get
00:31:44.080 | multiple benefits off of it?" But that can be applied, in my mind, at every level of life.
00:31:50.240 | That's what really appeals to me about the work that you guys are doing. I think of
00:31:57.600 | it as a way to get people to think ahead. You have that, let's see, I think it was in your book
00:32:01.760 | that I read about, you have your wood stove built where it heats your house and it cooks your food
00:32:06.480 | and it warms your water, all the same three functions, right? Absolutely, yeah. You have
00:32:11.280 | bacon in it and it dries clothes. It's a clothes dryer. It does five core functions. Describe how
00:32:17.520 | that works and how you have that set up. Sure. Well, that's just an old wood cook stove. They've
00:32:23.440 | been making the same wood cook stove or a similar stove to it for more than 100 years, probably
00:32:29.920 | maybe 200 years. The one I happen to have is made in Ireland and I got it used for
00:32:35.040 | 750 bucks on Craigslist. If you just put that in your house, that would save the average person
00:32:44.640 | about $15,000 to $2,000 a year right off the bat in the first year. From a financial planning
00:32:53.040 | perspective, there's not a lot of things that are much smarter than, "Oh, I'll make an investment of
00:32:58.960 | one X and save three X in the same year." There's not a lot of things that are that quick of a
00:33:04.960 | payback, I think. Just from that perspective, it's great, but for us, it has a lot of other
00:33:11.600 | benefits. It's totally resilient. It's basically a break-proof system. The power was flickering
00:33:17.760 | last night in this major snowstorm we've been getting. Erica, my wife, was like, "Oh, I feel
00:33:23.680 | so bad for people who don't have a wood stove because when the power goes out, their house
00:33:29.200 | freezes." We're looking at a system that's just so basic, it's really a no-brainer.
00:33:34.640 | The wood stove doesn't know if the power's on or not. It just keeps doing its thing.
00:33:42.000 | The simplicity of it and the resilience of that system is really as big of a benefit as its
00:33:49.280 | financial function. There's those two key functions. Then the functions that it performs for
00:33:55.280 | us, like you said, cooking hot water, which is a really exciting function because a lot of people
00:34:01.200 | know you can heat your house on a wood stove. Cooking on a wood stove, that's not too new of
00:34:07.840 | an idea, but heating hot water with it is just not something we see very often. All it is is
00:34:12.800 | there's just a little water jacket in the back of the stove, a little stainless steel tank that
00:34:17.040 | holds about a gallon. You plumb from the bottom of that tank into a water...I got a free hot
00:34:25.520 | water tank that my neighbor was throwing away, an electric hot water tank. Everyone knows what
00:34:30.000 | those 40-gallon electric hot water tanks look like. You get one of those, you mount it behind
00:34:34.160 | the stove or above the stove. You can put it on a floor above the stove if you want, like on the
00:34:38.560 | second floor if the stove's on a first. You basically connect that to this water jacket
00:34:42.640 | in the back of the stove. You can hook up any stove with one of these water jackets, but the
00:34:46.960 | one we happen to have is made...some of these stoves actually come with a water jacket, but
00:34:53.360 | any stove you could retrofit to have a water jacket. It's just a way of that firebox heating
00:34:59.040 | hot water. As the hot water rises, it...excuse me, as it heats up, it expands, so it rises,
00:35:05.280 | becomes less buoyant or more buoyant, excuse me. And so hot water rises just like hot air.
00:35:11.120 | And so you can create a system called a thermosiphon, a convection loop, where the hot
00:35:15.840 | water moves through the stove into the tank and back through the stove perpetually, cycling itself
00:35:22.320 | with no pump. So it's moving itself without the need for a pump. So again, no need for electricity
00:35:27.280 | there or some piece of the system that can break or will break like a pump eventually will. And so
00:35:33.360 | within three, four hours of firing up this wood stove, we have enough heat to heat a 1500 square
00:35:38.400 | foot building, and we have like 40 gallons of water at 140 degrees. So there's enough water for
00:35:44.320 | you know, two very luxurious showers, essentially for free. So that hot water system is just using
00:35:51.120 | the excess heat of the stove and giving you a whole nother core function, hot water. In a cold
00:35:57.520 | climate, in a cold climate, hot water is no joke. I mean, being able to take a hot shower is really,
00:36:04.480 | you know, it's almost as important as eating in some ways. It's a pretty core function.
00:36:08.160 | So that particular system is really spectacular. I'm just amazed, you know, as people come through
00:36:15.360 | our permaculture courses and we show this system or in tours, and they're like, "Well, why don't
00:36:20.640 | more people have these?" We've never, you know, most people in our permaculture courses have never
00:36:23.920 | seen that system before. And I hadn't really until I built one. I'd seen one once in college,
00:36:29.040 | but it was a little different. And you know, I always have to say, I really don't know. I,
00:36:34.960 | you know, don't have any idea why these aren't in every home in a cold part of the world.
00:36:42.720 | Well, I mean, I do have an idea. I don't have a sensible idea about it. The only idea
00:36:48.560 | I have about it is that, you know, people aren't focused on that. They go flip up their thermostat
00:36:52.560 | and they pay $2,000 or $4,000 heating bill every year. And that's just how it is. You know,
00:36:59.040 | it's not like, well, let's do this a different way. And for us, you know, that different way
00:37:05.040 | is a kind of core part of our lifestyle. We're very interested in meeting our basic needs and
00:37:10.160 | not just burning up a bunch of, you know, fracked propane to have a hot shower. You know, for us,
00:37:16.480 | it's like, why do I need to destroy an aquifer to take a hot shower? You know, like propane mining
00:37:26.240 | does to heat your hot water, right? There's that kind of direct consequence. And I'm just not
00:37:31.520 | someone who can put gas in my car or feel hot water come out of the tap and not think about,
00:37:37.760 | all right, what am I doing to some place to have this water be hot? You know, what's my role
00:37:45.040 | in that impact? And that's just, you know, maybe it's a blessing, maybe it's a curse,
00:37:49.280 | but it's something I always have thought about for most of my life. It's not something I can
00:37:52.880 | kind of avoid thinking about just how my, maybe how my head works. And I think a lot of people
00:37:57.440 | who are into taking care of, taking charge of their own resource use in their own life
00:38:01.840 | are probably wired the same way. They just, they want to know, you know, what goes into keeping
00:38:06.560 | them alive. But strangely enough, it doesn't seem most people, it seems that most people
00:38:12.080 | have an interest in that. So we have the world we live in today, I guess.
00:38:15.440 | You said you bought your wood stove used. Do you know how old it is?
00:38:19.520 | It's, I think mine's probably from the seventies. It's a Waterford Stanley.
00:38:26.000 | What intrigues me about it is if I look at it just from a sheer efficiency perspective.
00:38:33.120 | So if you have a wood stove, that's 40 years old, let's say, and it still is working perfectly fine
00:38:41.600 | today. And I would assume if it's anything like the wood stoves I've seen, there's no reason why
00:38:46.800 | it couldn't be working perfectly well a hundred years from now, perhaps the water tank would rust
00:38:51.600 | out and you'd have to fix that, you know, and replace that. But the basic, the basic stove
00:38:56.560 | should maintain its integrity for a century or a couple of centuries. And I think about
00:39:01.520 | the efficiency of that design. Now it does have drawbacks, but I was just sitting here thinking
00:39:06.240 | like all the ways that you can stack functions. So you're heating your house, heating your water,
00:39:10.880 | drying your clothes, baking, you know, baking your bread, cooking your vegetables on that same,
00:39:16.480 | that same stove system, system, plus even just to, to fire it. So you can grow your own wood
00:39:25.520 | and growing your own wood has multiple benefits. You can grow your own wood and improve the
00:39:30.320 | ecosystem because you are planting and harvesting a tree. You can do that in an intelligent way,
00:39:35.760 | whether that's, you know, the systems that have existed for centuries of coppicing the wood,
00:39:40.640 | you know, it's simple, low maintenance makes the thing grow, makes the, makes the trees grow.
00:39:45.200 | You get your exercise, chopping the wood. I would assume that certainly can be a chore,
00:39:50.720 | but I would imagine it's less of a chore based upon how efficient the house can be designed
00:39:55.520 | to where you probably don't need 18 cords of firewood every, every winter to, to heat your
00:40:02.240 | home. So you can apply all these benefits and to go and get the, to go and get the wood. It
00:40:06.960 | doesn't cost you anything other than the labor involved. And you can hire that done if you need
00:40:11.760 | to. But even if you hire the labor done, you buy your wood from a local person who, or pay somebody
00:40:17.200 | to come and harvest it on your property. If you have the property, it's still so much more
00:40:22.480 | efficient than a system of purchasing, you know, liquid petroleum products from hundreds of miles
00:40:30.320 | away, if that, or maybe shipped across the ocean in a, in a tanker ship to heat your house with.
00:40:37.040 | It just makes sense to me. It's more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. And like you said, the multipliers
00:40:41.920 | are really there. I mean, I didn't think about, I'll use that actually from now on. I think in
00:40:46.400 | our permaculture courses, one of the yields of the wood stove of wood heat is that you save however
00:40:52.560 | many hundreds of dollars a year on a gym membership. You're absolutely right. You don't, you
00:40:56.800 | know, it's, it's a gym membership saved to process your own firewood. Not that I'd go get a gym
00:41:02.320 | membership, but if you did, you know, hauling, cutting, splitting, stacking, hauling again,
00:41:08.480 | and burning firewood, you know, Robert Foss, the famous quote about wood warms you twice,
00:41:12.880 | you know, I actually like to say he'd probably didn't process his wood completely because if
00:41:17.200 | it only warmed him twice, then he must've had his wood at least delivered. And then he stacked it
00:41:20.880 | and hauled it inside. But, uh, so it warmed him, you know, it warms you when you burn it and haul
00:41:26.320 | it. So for us, it warms us. Yeah. About five times, let's say. So yeah, the functions are,
00:41:32.320 | are really endless. Like you, like you just illustrated so well. I think just the, the big
00:41:38.000 | reason we don't see this more is the one, the one major cost, if you can call it a cost,
00:41:44.320 | is it just demands a whole different lifestyle approach to really leverage it fully. You know,
00:41:51.360 | it's not, you don't flick a switch and have the wood stove load, load itself and, and dry your
00:41:56.640 | clothes for you. It's, it's not, it's not automated. It's a much more manual lifestyle and
00:42:02.480 | you can do a more, and we have worked with a lot of clients who are engaging a more manual, direct
00:42:07.120 | lifestyle part-time. They're still, you know, they're not like a kind of almost full-time
00:42:12.000 | homesteader like myself. They're still business professionals or teaching professionals or
00:42:16.720 | whatever else they do, but they're taking on a more manual lifestyle part-time. So you can make
00:42:21.520 | great headway part-time and still let's say have wood heat or certainly wood backup heat.
00:42:25.440 | But I think to really engage the full, what I see as the full benefits of the manual lifestyle,
00:42:31.360 | it's probably like a 20 hour a week thing. You know, I don't, I don't think you need to be
00:42:39.440 | super hardcore and do a 40, 50, eight hours a week. Like some people certainly do, but I find
00:42:44.480 | that there's a, there's a threshold of a, once you're about able to about put about 20 hours a
00:42:49.920 | week in, you can really have most of your food, almost all your heat and have this very, and all
00:42:57.120 | your med, most of the med, if you're healthy, all your medicine, or if you're not very, very sick,
00:43:01.200 | all your medicine and have most of everything you need most days from the landscape around you.
00:43:09.360 | You know, without having to be a full-time thing, once you get set up, which does,
00:43:13.840 | you know, take, it takes multiple years. It's not something that happens overnight.
00:43:17.440 | But it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a whole bit of a different lifestyle. That's for sure.
00:43:25.920 | And I do try not to romanticize the things that were hard. You know, I know that my grandmother
00:43:36.240 | grew up or she, she, my, my father grew up on a ranch in the upper high mountains of Colorado.
00:43:42.640 | And, you know, she cooked on a wood stove and cooking on a wood stove is nowhere near as
00:43:48.000 | convenient, although I'd never done it, but I'm certain it's nowhere near as convenient as simply
00:43:52.080 | firing up the electric stove. But if you see the benefits of it, what I think of
00:43:57.280 | is all of that is coming from one piece of equipment that can be purchased once and never
00:44:02.160 | has to be purchased again. Whereas if I, you know, I need to replace my water heater this,
00:44:06.320 | this month. I need, you know, a clothes dryer. What's the length of the potential lifespan of
00:44:11.760 | a good clothes dryer? Five years, 10 years, maybe a water heater. All of these things have
00:44:16.560 | a life cycle. So now I'm permanently needing to replace these appliances over time. Why don't we
00:44:22.160 | apply the same design intelligence that we have applied to other areas of life, to some of the
00:44:30.560 | traditional technologies and improve those technologies without losing some of the things
00:44:35.360 | that are good about them. So let's design a better wood stove that works more efficiently,
00:44:41.520 | more effectively, that keeps heat more easily so that it's easier to cook on and keep the
00:44:47.840 | benefits without just going to a completely different technology.
00:44:50.960 | Yeah. And that brings up a huge point, which I think about a lot,
00:44:57.280 | which is this kind of the hybridization of the old and new. We tend to, our brain tends to think of
00:45:04.640 | old ways and new ways and keep them in very separate categories. And think that to learn
00:45:12.400 | in old way, you know, to know how to grow your own food or heat your house with wood means you can't,
00:45:19.440 | you know, be on the cutting edge of new technologies coming out. Or I saw an amazing,
00:45:25.680 | it wasn't a spoof, but it should have been a YouTube video of a woman who was
00:45:29.600 | thanking Steve Jobs for kind of what she put as re-working the operating system for a child.
00:45:35.840 | And it was a video, YouTube video of her kid looking at a magazine and being bored with it
00:45:42.240 | because it didn't do anything when she kind of swiped her fingers across the magazine.
00:45:46.240 | And then she gave the child, probably like a two-year-old,
00:45:51.760 | a, you know, iPad or some tablet thing. And the kid was very engaged. And she was like,
00:45:56.400 | isn't this awesome. My kid now has no need for a magazine. And I see that, like, why not learn
00:46:02.480 | both? Like, can't modern human beings, shouldn't we be able to learn new things without retreating
00:46:10.160 | from and becoming illiterate of the old ways. And if they're old and they're still, and they were
00:46:16.720 | around for thousands of years, there's some inherent value to them that chances are they're
00:46:21.280 | actually might not be to something new, which hasn't stood the test of time yet. So it's like,
00:46:26.000 | well, you know, we tend to just throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it seems to me, it's like,
00:46:29.760 | why not keep all the parts, why not keep all the literacies on the table to see what proves
00:46:36.480 | themselves over time. And, you know, personally, I use a computer. I mean, I'm on an iPhone right
00:46:42.480 | now talking with you. I still utilize modern technology greatly if it has leverage that seems
00:46:49.840 | to be life enhancing in terms of my lifestyle or in terms of helping manifest the work I'm trying
00:46:57.600 | to manifest in the world to help others. But it doesn't mean I still can't learn how to butcher
00:47:05.520 | a deer or a goose and keep literate with some of the very old ways of what it's meant to exist as
00:47:15.680 | a human being on this planet for a hundred thousand years. Right. Yeah. In my mind, that's,
00:47:21.760 | that is the key is to appreciate and learn the lessons of the past without romanticizing them
00:47:28.560 | and then integrate the developments without losing the benefits of the past. I find having sat in
00:47:34.640 | hundreds of meetings with clients about their lifestyle, you know, one of the most common
00:47:40.800 | financial goals that I hear is people say, I want to spend more time with my family and I want to
00:47:46.560 | spend more time with my kids, with my grandkids. And I grew up as a boy, I enjoyed reading the
00:47:53.440 | Laura Ingalls Wilder series. And my favorite of the series was Farmer Boy. And it was an account
00:47:59.040 | of, you know, a traditional farming family. And I thought to myself, I've always thought,
00:48:03.520 | how much time did that father and that son spend together? Well, they spent a good amount of time,
00:48:10.160 | but they also had a lot of time doing hard work, but they were together, at least in that hard work.
00:48:16.800 | So here we were making this transition of, I like spending time with my family. Now we all,
00:48:23.120 | the whole family is disintegrated and now people are wanting to get back to it, but it's not that
00:48:27.440 | hard to get back to it. You just got to make some conscious decisions and different choices
00:48:31.920 | to follow through and think about what the direct way to meet your goals would be.
00:48:38.240 | Yeah. Yeah. And it is, it's a very good point. I mean, a lot of the trade, the trade we've made,
00:48:45.440 | the kind of the gamble we've made in the modern lifestyle is that we'll have more of what we love,
00:48:53.440 | we'll be more and we'll get more and that will make us be more by, you know, kind of specializing
00:49:03.760 | our lives to the extent that we have and essentially working always through the medium of
00:49:09.040 | money to have the life we want. And I think, I think we're going to see, we're already starting
00:49:14.400 | to see an era herald in now where the belief in that promise is fading because I think we're
00:49:23.040 | realizing just like you said, most of your clients want to just have that basic need to spend more
00:49:27.680 | time with their family. You know, that, the promise that was put out there post-World War II with
00:49:32.240 | like, you know, science and tech, the convenience, the utter convenience of science and technology is,
00:49:38.080 | you know, there's pieces of it, but it's just not that simple. It's not, it can't deliver in such a
00:49:44.320 | simple way. And I think we're, we're starting to realize this and that is where I think the modern
00:49:48.960 | homesteading movement is just one, one of many responses to that, to that place in history.
00:49:55.040 | We find ourselves now where we have some very basic needs that are going unmet, even, you know,
00:50:02.000 | even in a family where the parents make, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year or more, you
00:50:07.920 | know, which should be completely adequate to have like a lot of personal freedom to do the things
00:50:12.560 | we love to do. But, but it's that, you know, the rat race is a really good term for it. You know,
00:50:19.200 | it's a pretty, pretty precise term. There are two themes I'd like to explore with you as we
00:50:26.320 | kind of start to wrap up here. And the first theme is the concept of resilience. You,
00:50:33.120 | obviously that's an important feature to you in that it was the part of the title of your book,
00:50:39.520 | the resilient farm and homestead. And it really impressed me the way that you approach that
00:50:44.000 | of simply in your design thinking of saying, I don't know what changes are going to come,
00:50:51.280 | but how can I prepare a design that will handle those changes? And that's a question I get a lot
00:50:56.640 | with financial planning is what's going to happen. And I think, well, I don't know what's going to
00:51:00.320 | happen. So how can we plan so that no matter what happens in the future, that our needs are
00:51:05.840 | cared for? Could you go over first, some of the reasons why you think of, you try to think about
00:51:12.080 | resilience in your planning and then some of the methods that you employ to deal with that?
00:51:17.760 | Sure. Yeah. Well, I agree with you. I think I'm one who tends to believe that,
00:51:22.400 | you know, I'm not going to gamble on predicting the future because it seems like it's somewhat
00:51:27.920 | unpredictable. Even things like global warming. You know, I don't like the term global warming.
00:51:32.080 | I like the term global weirding because it's a complex system. The Earth's climate,
00:51:36.880 | things could get colder. I like to take the approach of let's plan for all scenarios. And
00:51:43.200 | we call that in our books scenario planning, which is actually a term I've become aware of since
00:51:47.600 | writing the book is actually a term that that other systems thinkers have already used.
00:51:52.000 | But the idea being let's plan for as many scenarios as possible. Think of the most likely
00:51:59.600 | events you think might transpire and plan for those first. I'm certainly not saying plan for
00:52:05.200 | the least likely events first, plan for the most likely events first, for sure. But that doesn't
00:52:11.440 | mean wipe all the other possibilities off the table. You know, plan for those as well, especially
00:52:16.800 | once you get, you know, your proverbial together, once you get your house in order, once you get
00:52:22.720 | your home. When I say house, I don't mean a house necessarily literally, although I mean it literally
00:52:28.160 | and figuratively. Once you get your own economics in order, your own basic lifestyle in order,
00:52:35.600 | then you can start drilling down the long list of other possible future scenarios that you might
00:52:42.400 | want to have your life be resilient in the face of. Now, that could be any number of things. I mean,
00:52:48.080 | it could be a large bump in how our global industrial food system functions, because we know
00:52:53.360 | you don't have to be someone who studies up on it every day to realize there's major vulnerability
00:53:00.880 | to the global food system, whether it's with pests or, you know, plant diseases or supply and
00:53:08.880 | distribution, supply chain problems, whatever it might be, fuel supply problems, there's a
00:53:15.600 | vulnerability there. So if you're interested in engaging that possibility, you start looking at
00:53:21.040 | solutions like maybe developing some local food system that's not from, that's not a thousand
00:53:28.720 | miles away, maybe it's a hundred feet away in your front yard. Same with your heat, you know,
00:53:34.560 | your firewood, or same with your water, hopefully, because we all need water, you know, most every
00:53:40.000 | day. Same with financial resources, you know, could be tools and skills versus just a lot of
00:53:46.720 | money in the bank account or along with a lot of money in the bank account. So I guess just to
00:53:52.800 | circle back to your question, I mean, we look at it in a lot of different ways, but mainly from
00:53:58.000 | a scenario planning perspective. And a lot of our clients who we assist come to us already,
00:54:04.160 | the way I put it is they're kind of pre-sold, they're already, they already see what they
00:54:08.480 | think is the writing on the wall and they see a global techno-industrial system, call it whatever
00:54:16.960 | you like, that when it works just right, it's pretty awesome for the people who are at the top.
00:54:26.400 | But when it, if it's not working just right, which they think might be the case here and there for at
00:54:32.400 | least periods of time, it might not be so great for anyone. And so they're kind of working, as I
00:54:39.360 | say, to get their house in order in the face of those potential challenges. But I guess, you know,
00:54:46.880 | I would also define risk too, to try to answer in a roundabout way your question, hopefully,
00:54:52.240 | risk being the likelihood of an event happening times the severity of the consequences of those,
00:55:02.960 | of an event happening. So like, I think the example I use in my book is a meteor, you know,
00:55:09.120 | comet hitting the earth, right? It's hopefully not very likely, but if it happens, it's very severe,
00:55:15.360 | you know, game over, change of epochs, right? We'll have to wait a billion years or something for
00:55:21.120 | maybe millions for some other, you know, next chapter to unfold, but it's not very likely. So
00:55:28.080 | the risk of that is relatively low, hopefully, if it's unlikely, which we don't really know,
00:55:33.760 | versus something like I lose my job, you know, I get fired at some point in the next 20 years.
00:55:41.040 | The consequences of that are not as high as the comet, but it's much more likely to happen,
00:55:48.320 | or just I get sick or I break my leg. Consequences are lower, although they're real,
00:55:53.680 | but the likelihood is higher. So maybe overall risk is higher in those situations. So just basic
00:55:59.600 | risk assessment and risk planning is something that we bring into our process as well when it
00:56:06.080 | comes to resiliency. And then there's a lot of other principles which I elaborate on in the book,
00:56:11.360 | but just a basic principle of redundancy and having multiple ways to meet very basic needs,
00:56:18.640 | like water. You need water. So we have a well. If and when the well pump fails, well, we have
00:56:24.960 | rainwater off the roof. If that's not working for some reason, we have ponds, we can cut a hole in
00:56:29.840 | the ice with a handful of different tools we have on site to get water out of the ponds. You know,
00:56:35.840 | we could melt snow on a wood stove, which we have multiple stashes of dry wood for,
00:56:42.240 | and they don't need electricity to run, etc. So there's a lot of, you know, redundancy in the
00:56:47.440 | system is very important, and the simplicity of a system is very important. And there's a lot of
00:56:52.320 | other pieces as well I get at in the book, but things like legibility, which often aren't thought
00:56:58.000 | about, like how legible is whatever system you're depending upon to you? Do you understand it? Do
00:57:05.760 | you know how to fix your furnace if it breaks, right? Or do you know how to deal with a system
00:57:11.920 | when it fails? Because we've built in, in our specialized modern world, we've built in so much
00:57:17.120 | illegibility, right? If your iPhone breaks, you don't think, "Oh, well, I could probably fix it.
00:57:22.480 | You know, let me open it up. Maybe I could fix it this time. It might be a small problem." It's just
00:57:27.120 | like, I go back to the store and get a new iPod because there is no fix. You know, there is no
00:57:32.400 | legibility in like the maintenance of that type of system. Now, sometimes that's inherent in very
00:57:38.560 | high technology, but it's certainly, if it's inherent in technologies we need to meet our
00:57:45.120 | basic needs, then we have a very brittle situation, and we're in a very vulnerable
00:57:49.760 | situation then, which I don't think is very attractive to anyone. The last theme, and I'm
00:57:57.840 | actually might add one more after this, but the last thing that I wanted to ask you about is the
00:58:03.520 | concept of how to design for your needs from a financial perspective and from a, basically,
00:58:12.320 | a building financial resilience. I often get asked, there is more fear than I've ever seen in my life,
00:58:17.120 | but more people have fear of potential failures in financial systems, and we've seen some failures
00:58:24.800 | over past years. People are concerned about failures of monetary systems, failures of
00:58:29.280 | banking systems, etc. I've been asked about this dozens and dozens and dozens of times,
00:58:36.320 | and I have some ideas, but ultimately I find that when people are very fearful of massive failures
00:58:45.120 | in financial systems, my answer to them has been, "There's not a financial solution to a
00:58:52.080 | financial system failure," and their ultimate solution is to get out of the financial system.
00:58:59.360 | Financial wealth, financial assets are not real assets. They're a system that we've invented
00:59:04.880 | to account for real assets, for real wealth. So, don't look to the financial system to protect
00:59:12.000 | yourself if you're concerned about a failure of the financial system, because you're just doing
00:59:16.640 | this self-reinforcing problem where you're depending on a system that you're saying,
00:59:22.640 | "I'm concerned about it failing." If you're really concerned, think through it from an
00:59:27.200 | out-of-the-box perspective. If somebody came to you with that fear from your perspective as a whole
00:59:33.440 | systems designer, where would you start them on the road as far as saying, "How can I protect
00:59:38.960 | myself and my family and my wealth?" How would you guide them on that road?
00:59:43.040 | Yeah, let me just think about that for a second, because that's quite...
00:59:52.000 | There's a lot of levels to that. I think, as with a lot of things, I think it would highly depend
00:59:59.680 | upon who that person was and what resources they had and what inclinations and what talents they'd
01:00:04.800 | have. So, I guess the first thing I would look at is, just like we talked about with the loads
01:00:09.200 | analysis of an off-grid building at the beginning of our conversation, what resources do you have
01:00:13.760 | available to you? Do you have a large family that lives in the town that you live in? If so, great,
01:00:21.040 | that could play into this resiliency picture that we're trying to get at through your question.
01:00:29.120 | If not, if everyone's dead or lives somewhere else, okay, that's not a resource. Maybe you
01:00:36.160 | have a resource that you're a roofer and you could fix your neighbor's roofs in a certain
01:00:43.600 | situation. You have something you can offer the people that live around you, or you're a farmer
01:00:49.120 | or a plumber, or you're really great at taking care of kids or taking care of animals or organizing
01:00:56.880 | people. They can be soft skills too, but essentially just firstly asking the question,
01:01:01.040 | what are your resources? What do you really have to capitalize on? And capitalize on,
01:01:06.480 | in other words, capitalize being a poor choice of words, capitalize on as in manifesto,
01:01:11.680 | in a non-financial way, in a more direct human to human relationship way.
01:01:21.360 | So I think I would start the conversation on that front to really understand a little bit
01:01:28.000 | of analysis, like what are the resources that people have to bring to the table?
01:01:31.440 | And then we all have very similar needs as human beings. So that's where being a permaculture
01:01:38.640 | designer is kind of handy because we all need to eat. It's seemingly most of us need to eat
01:01:45.520 | most days. So that's a basic need we all share, no matter who the client is, the fictitious client
01:01:52.720 | we're referring to right now. They'll need to eat, they'll need water, they'll need warmth,
01:01:57.760 | they'll need shelter, housing, community, safety. So all of those are common needs.
01:02:04.560 | So we have to also think about how to provision for those basic needs.
01:02:08.560 | And then you start getting into some of the things we've already talked about in this conversation,
01:02:13.920 | I think, about those basic systems. But I think there's a lot to that. That's a difficult question.
01:02:22.000 | I mean, maybe, is there some particular part of that question you're thinking of that you'd like
01:02:28.160 | me to hit on? No, I think that's good enough. And to respond to how I've told people, I've said,
01:02:35.280 | "Listen, if you are really concerned, because today there's a lot of fear about this,
01:02:41.760 | then you've just given the answer that I've given." I said, "If you're really concerned about it,
01:02:46.080 | there's not a financial solution that can help you. The key is provide for your needs. And then,
01:02:52.240 | as far as wealth, you need to invest your wealth that you currently have into a way where it has
01:02:58.880 | the potential to multiply. So then you have to go through a self-analysis perspective and say,
01:03:03.520 | 'What skills and abilities and knowledge do I have? Then what are the needs and the desires of
01:03:10.320 | the marketplace? And how can I find the intersection between these things to meet
01:03:14.480 | the skills and the desires of the marketplace?' And one of your constraints might be that you
01:03:19.680 | build into your plan. You might put a constraint in, depending on what your focus is. So if you
01:03:25.760 | are, in your situation, you're a designer, that's a very useful skill set. And your remuneration can
01:03:33.600 | be in the form of dollars, and it can also be in the form of other forms of wealth, whether that's
01:03:40.720 | labor, whether that's gifts, whether that's the needs of life. This is how humanity's developed,
01:03:46.720 | is by paying attention to these basic needs and then finding ways to fulfill them. And the
01:03:52.000 | monetary system is, in many ways, a marvel of efficiency. And yet it does have weaknesses.
01:03:59.520 | So exploit the weaknesses and take advantage of the other things, but see through it and then look
01:04:04.240 | at it from a design perspective. Businesses that provide value, no matter what the monetary system
01:04:10.320 | is, no matter what the question is, no matter what the currency denomination is, those businesses and
01:04:15.360 | the people that control them will always accrue wealth because ultimately the money is a system
01:04:22.400 | of measuring the things that are really important. You can either grow the wood on your lot and you
01:04:27.360 | can go out and cut it, or you can grow the wood on your lot and you can pay somebody to cut it,
01:04:32.800 | or you can have somebody else grow the wood and cut it and bring you the wood, or you can do it
01:04:37.920 | with something else. They're all meeting the same basic human need, we're just meeting them in
01:04:42.480 | different ways depending on what resources we have. Absolutely. Yeah, I certainly agree with that.
01:04:50.480 | So I guess the last question, and almost a corollary of the previous one, I find myself,
01:04:57.040 | this is for me personally, not a fictitious person, me living with my family here in West
01:05:01.840 | Palm Beach, I find myself continually inspired by what other people have been able to do and the
01:05:08.400 | resilience they've been able to build into their lives and the improvements in their lifestyle and
01:05:13.440 | their security and their health and their homestead and all of that, but I find myself struggling to
01:05:18.880 | figure out how to actually do it in my situation. So I'm not in a cold climate and I'm in a
01:05:24.320 | subtropical warm climate, and so I don't have a problem of heating a house, I have a problem of
01:05:30.720 | cooling a house. So I'm continually stuck trying to figure out what do I actually need to do,
01:05:37.280 | what's the next thing for me to focus on. For me or for someone like me who's inspired but
01:05:42.960 | doesn't know where to turn next, what thoughts would you have as far as how to lay out a system
01:05:49.280 | of self-education and also how to lay out a learning process, like how to coach myself through
01:05:58.800 | learning and acquiring the skills that I need to learn to improve my homestead?
01:06:03.920 | Right. Well, I think there's a few ways. I think there's three things that maybe would be identified
01:06:10.160 | right off. The first would be like maybe the last or it would be woven throughout, you just brought
01:06:16.720 | that up. What's the learning process? How can you learn the most important things you need to know
01:06:22.800 | to increase your resiliency in your own lifestyle where you are in your context, like you're saying?
01:06:30.080 | And the other two things, so those might be like books, people, videos, whatever.
01:06:36.480 | And the other two things that I think I've read off the bat are local resources, which is connected
01:06:44.720 | with the learning piece, but it's also inspirational as well as informational. So who around you
01:06:51.040 | seems to have a better situation? If you're thinking, "Oh, I want something that I don't
01:06:56.880 | have. I want to move in some direction that I'm not far enough along in right now," when you're
01:07:01.200 | saying, let's say, resiliency, do you know anyone around you in Southern California, and I'm sure
01:07:07.040 | you probably do, who is further along in that path than you are and what do they do? Spending
01:07:14.400 | time with them, spending time with their systems, learning as much as you can from those systems,
01:07:18.880 | identifying what's great about their systems and maybe what's not, and just being able to hear from
01:07:25.840 | those people, learning with those people. And then the other piece, which is what we do with
01:07:30.800 | clients quite often is what I would call like a resiliency audit, which is just looking at your
01:07:36.400 | own basic lifestyle needs, whether it's money, water, food, cooling or heat, shelter, your basic
01:07:48.400 | systems, and how resilient are each of those systems and drilling down each one. So, okay,
01:07:55.120 | where I live in Southern California, let's say in an urban context, where's my water coming from?
01:08:01.520 | I can already know from being in Southern California before, that's not going to be the
01:08:06.960 | best picture of resiliency right off the bat. Could it be? Maybe not. But how could it be
01:08:12.400 | improved? That might be actually a real tricky one, for sure, because some places you're not
01:08:18.000 | even allowed to collect the rainwater off your roof, or if you do, it might be kind of polluted,
01:08:22.160 | or you don't maybe own the roof, so you can't collect the rainwater off the roof. So sometimes
01:08:27.200 | a resiliency audit may lead someone to actually move, and that's okay if it does.
01:08:33.600 | If someone wants to be serious about it, you may look into food and maybe you have a small front
01:08:40.400 | yard that gets some sun, so you may realize, okay, I could have some food production here.
01:08:46.720 | Or you may realize, actually food production isn't the way I could be most food resilient,
01:08:52.080 | and maybe actually becoming friends with a farmer might be. It's not always as simple as
01:08:57.040 | well, I want food resiliency, thus I should grow more food. Often that's the case, but only in
01:09:01.680 | certain contexts. If you don't have land in your urban area, that's probably not the solution.
01:09:08.160 | But it doesn't mean you can't get closer to food resiliency, albeit with a little bit of
01:09:15.360 | a disclaimer that there are certain resiliency sweet spots, if you will, that are probably
01:09:24.880 | found best in a relatively rural place, but where there's a lot of community and some density of
01:09:31.920 | people. It's not the full backwoods-y shotgun shack situation, and it's probably not the
01:09:38.000 | uptown Manhattan or downtown Los Angeles situation either. So there are some contexts which
01:09:47.600 | certainly are inherently more resilient than others, that's very important to mention.
01:09:53.440 | That being said, it doesn't mean we all can't improve our resilience greatly, no matter our
01:10:00.160 | context. Ben, I appreciate you making the time to come and allocate your time to share with us and
01:10:07.520 | to teach us. I really appreciate it. So your website is wholesystemsdesign.com. And then
01:10:12.080 | also, aren't you doing a Kickstarter right now? We are. It's actually about to end in a few days,
01:10:17.600 | but one more week or so. We're doing it on our permaculture courses to make them available in
01:10:24.400 | video. It's called Permaculture Skills. If someone were to Google that Kickstarter,
01:10:34.080 | they'd find it. Has it been fully funded enough yet? Or are you still needing it? Yeah,
01:10:38.080 | it's actually, they just made a stretch goal to translate the courses into, or the lessons,
01:10:44.320 | into French. And they actually met that stretch goal, I think, recently as well. But the courses
01:10:49.600 | are happening every summer, so people can check that online as well. That's exciting. If it's
01:10:55.440 | anything like any of the rest of your work, I'm sure it'll be beautiful. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
01:11:00.320 | It'll be really cool. So thanks again so much for coming on today. I appreciate it.
01:11:03.840 | Hey, thank you. And thanks for the work you do as well. And we'll be in touch.
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