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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. Let's keep things practical today and talk about saving money on utility bills. ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Tuesday, October 21, 2014. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. Today we have an interview with a man named Stephen Harris, who is an expert at all things energy.

And we're going to talk about very practical and straightforward ways to save money on utility and energy bills. I hope you find this useful. ♪ I don't know about you, but as we're just coming back off of the summer here, living down here in South Florida, this is our expensive period of time with energy bills.

And I have a renewed motivation and focus to really work on saving my energy bills and decreasing them. And I've wanted to bring you a very practical resource on the thought process of actually thinking through how to do that. There are a lot of people probably that could talk to you about it, but one of the people that I thought of 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.

And Stephen Harris is an energy expert. He works now as a consultant, and if it's related to energy, he has some pretty intense knowledge on it. Currently he is the founder and CEO of a company called Knowledge Publications, which is the largest energy-only publishing company in the USA. And as far as his work history, he came to his current work position to do full-time work on the development and implementation of hydrogen, biomass, and solar-related energy systems after spending a 10-year career in the aerothermal dynamics department of the scientific labs of Chrysler Corporation, where he focused a lot on some very new types of development of automotive technology.

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 called the Survival Podcast. I think he's the number one all-time appearing guest over there. And at the end of the show today, I will send you over to some links where you can hear those shows, where he's done a lot of work on emergency preparedness, very, very practical emergency preparedness.

But his expertise is in the area of energy production. 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 that are probably pretty low-hanging fruit for many of us. I know I've got some low-hanging fruit in my house and in my household to be able to save on energy bills.

And so my goal is to focus on those things and really build out some savings in that area. I think what I've succeeded to do is basically create a primer, an introduction in today's show with Stephen. And it's certainly not exhaustive, but it is a good start. It's a very good start.

I do want to give you just a quick outline of what the interview covers. My approach in doing the show was basically to use it as a way for me to ask my personal questions of Steve and then allow you to listen in. And so I tried to do this in a format of what's appropriate for my personal situation.

I recognize that many of you will have a very different situation, but I want to have the expertise to be able to create a comprehensive outline for everybody. So there's a lot of information in here on warm climates, how to save money on energy bills in warm climates, which is where I live.

And there's also a good bit of information on cooler climates. And we talk a lot about insulation, what are the most effective ways to do insulation, what's the low-hanging fruit, where should you start. We talk a lot about appliances, what is the low-hanging fruit for appliances, what are the appliances that have a quicker payoff than not.

We ran through some calculations of how to actually calculate the savings. We talked at the end about light bulbs, which I had no idea. Just I'll give you the intro in case you don't get there in the full interview. But towards the latter part of the interview, we talked about light bulbs, and I thought light bulbs were kind of, "Do them when you can." Steve ran through the actual energy calculations, and it certainly seems like the biggest, fastest payoff comes from swapping out light bulbs.

I never would have thought that. I thought it was a bunch of hooey and just do it when you get around to it. But he ran through the calculations, and I was very impressed. So this interview is going to be--I hope you enjoy this interview. If you're interested in more information about Steven and about specific topics, I want to real quick--he sends you a couple of times over to one of his websites called knowledgepublications.com, and this is his company, where they have a number of books that they've pulled together, many that they've published on all kinds of different topics.

So Steve is a hydrogen energy expert. There are a number of books about hydrogen, how to implement it in a practical way, solar energy, fuel cells, how to make fuel at home and make energy at home, methanol, alcohol, methane, biomass, heating and cooling your home. I would direct you--we didn't talk a lot about heating your home in a cool climate.

We talked a little bit about it. But I would recommend to you--there are a couple of interesting books that he has. I haven't read them. I have ordered his "How to Really Save Money and Energy in Cooling Your Home" book from my house. But he's got a book called "Solar Air Heating Systems," and it seems like it's a very thick, pithy book.

Go and check it out on Knowledge Publications. There will be a link in the show notes to that specific book. For many of you who are getting ready to head into the winter climates, I think this might be a way that you might be able to take advantage of the free solar heat that falls on your house during the winter to be able to heat your home a little bit.

And he also has an interesting book called "Movable Insulation." So specifically because we're going into the winter season, go check those books out on his site and take a look at some of the ideas that he has. They're fairly comprehensive, and they go through a lot of information of some very simple and inexpensive things that you can do to retrofit your house.

So hopefully that information will be helpful to you. Stay tuned at the end. We talk a little bit about emergency preparedness in the context of preparing for natural disasters, things like that, hurricanes, winter storms, blizzards, things like that. I'll mention a couple more comments on that toward the end of the show, but I think you'll be interested in those resources as well.

Here's Steven. So Steven, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being here. Well, I'm thrilled to be here. It's the first time I've ever been on a personal finance podcast, but you know what? With what I know about energy and how I talk to people, it really makes sense to be on a financial podcast and to look at it through a pair of financial eyes, which is what I do and tell people so that people can make intelligent decisions now on their house.

I'm sure, as you know, you've told people with building wealth, it's not the thunderstorm that comes by that drops all the water or the wealth into your bucket. It's the slow and steady drizzle of the rain that fills up your bucket full of wealth. And doing things on your home through lighting and heating and cooling changes can very much be those very nice steady drops of rain that go into your bucket.

Right. So around here, we're pretty hardcore about trying to optimize everything in life. There are only three things that you can adjust to build wealth. It's how much you earn, how much you spend, and what you do with the difference between them. But we can do a lot with those things.

So I feel pretty confident in how to save money in a lot of areas, but I feel entirely incompetent when it comes to how to save money on energy bills. And so today's show, I'm going to accomplish two things. A, it's going to be a little self-serving, is that I need help with this area because my house-- I live in a house that was built in 1959, and I live in South Florida.

And we've just come through the summer season. My house is very poorly insulated. It's poorly designed from an energy perspective. I've got old appliances. I've got a 23-year-old hot water heater. I've got an old air conditioner. I've got an old refrigerator and an old dishwasher, all of which work.

But I don't have a clue. So my electric bills were over $200 each month through the summer, and one of them was substantially over $200. It was like $260. So I've got a lot of room for improvement, but I don't have any idea where to start. So it's going to be self-serving for me and also going to help the audience.

Where do we start as far as saving money on energy bills? How many square feet is your house? It's about 2,000. About 2,000. In fact, let me check that while a little under that. I can't remember whether that's under air or over air. I'm not sure. I'll check that for you.

That's fine. That's fine. So where do you want to start? Well, where--so if I'm looking at--what I want to do is I want to provide a framework. And if I'm looking at an older house, older appliances, and all of those-- I need air conditioning for the comfort of myself and my family.

How do I figure out what's going to give me the best bang for the buck? Should I go buy a new high-energy air conditioner and invest the money into that? Should I go swap out my 23-year-old hot water heater for a tankless system? Should I swap out my light bulbs for LED bulbs?

Or should I go and put insulation in the attic because the attic is poorly insulated? Or should I do some other crazy thing? 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, how would I start?

Where do I even begin? Well, you have a forced air furnace for your air conditioner? Yes. Yes. Does that work fine for you in the wintertime? We don't use it in the wintertime. We just open the windows and we--I don't ever turn on the heat in the wintertime. Okay.

So you are in Florida, and this is really critical to the people listening. You're very much in an air conditioning-dominant market. Right. Where I live in Pittsburgh, we have a distinctive heating season and we have a distinctive cooling season. Okay. I'm going to try to address this from both the point of view of someone in Minnesota, someone in Pittsburgh, and someone in Florida, and hopefully we can really help your listeners.

Now, the first thing is insulation. Keep the heat out. Okay? Okay. And now, let's say you were living in your house and your AC bills were $100 a month, okay? And you've got to look at that and say, "Well, a new air conditioner outside is $2,000, and that will go into my existing furnace if my furnace is working okay.

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." So you're looking at like $2,000 for a furnace and $2,000 for an AC. In your case, you would be looking at $2,000 for a new AC because you would keep it in your existing furnace.

So you have to ask yourself, "Am I comfortable with the amount of money that I'm spending every month?" Now, I'm guessing that if your AC bill was $100 a month, you'd go, "I'm okay with that." If your AC bill is $270 a month, you're saying, "I'm not okay with that." This is where we are with you right now.

You're saying, "I'm not okay with that." So tell me about--is your house a single-floor ranch-style house? Right. Single-floor ranch-style house. 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.

And then it's got an additional side to it on the north side that has a garage and a laundry room. The south side of the house is actually somewhat shaded, which is nice. There's some big trees there, but then just the south wall, but the rest of the house gets hit with the sun.

There's no shade on the house. You can really feel it. 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. 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.

Okay, okay. That makes sense. Now I have a book for you. It's called How to Really Save Energy and Money in Cooling 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. And the, it's purpose for cooling your house is one we'll get to in a little bit. But the diagrams of how your house heats up in the book are just precious.

And they'll tell you right away what the answer is. I know right away what one of your answers is. You're telling me your attic is a sauna. The first thing we gotta do is keep the heat from getting into the house. And right now you only have two inches of insulation and you have no insulation.

So the least expensive dollar input would be to have someone blow in more paper insulation, which is ground up newspaper insulation. It's really good for trapping heat. You don't want to have to go to the expense of rolling out the fiberglass and everything else. For what you want, blown cellulose is your least dollar in to help reduce your heating bill.

And I'm talking six inches a foot thick. We really want to keep the air from going from the attic, the heat from going from the attic and into the house. But that's not the real good answer. The real good answer is to prevent the heat from even getting past the roof.

And most people don't think of this. When I say you insulate your attic, I don't mean you insulate the floor of your attic. You're doing that with the blown cellulose I just mentioned. If you really want to lower your AC bill, you get someone to come in with a spray foam system.

They'll have two long hoses going to a truck, and they'll go up in your attic and wear a suit. And they will spray foam. It's the same stuff you get at Home Depot that comes out of a can. Spray it and it foams up, it grows, and then it's real sticky and then it's super insulated and it's hard.

You have someone come in and you spray foam your attic. And I mean the roof of the attic, what your head would knock into. This keeps the heat from getting into the attic in the first place. So if you went up in your attic, it would be almost the same temperature as down in your house minus the air conditioning.

It would be something near outside temperature. And this costs a little bit of money. It's more expensive than blown cellulose, but it's a lot better because like I said, we're keeping the heat out in the first place. And some people go, "Oh, my shingles will get too hot and they'll..." Oh, shut up.

People who know nothing about shingles in this world do that. When your shingles are getting hit by the sun and they're cooling down with the attic and everything, they're expanding and contracting. When you have insulation below them, they expand and they stay expanded. There's less thermal stress on your damn shingles.

It's the worst roofing choice in the world than if you don't. So don't listen to the guy who's going to say, "Oh, your shingles are going to..." I know lots of people have done this and their shingles have outlasted other people's houses. So go up there and blow in and spray in polyurethane foam.

Companies will be happy to do it. You can have them do it when it's off season and get it even cheaper. It is the way to go. And if you want to, you can have them spray foam the roof and you can have them spray foam the floor of the attic as well.

And you're really doubly insulated. Now, here's something for you people in Florida what this does. This spraying the foam on the attic turns your entire roof into a composite material. It's a sticky glue that hardens, as I mentioned. So it's holding together all your roof joists and the roof itself and everything that's nailed in.

It holds it all together so your attic is now one piece. And think of this when it becomes hurricane time. You now have a super strength roof. The asphalt shingles might get peeled off, but if your roof is adequately attached with hurricane straps to the frame of the house, you're golden.

You're really golden. It's going to take a lot to rip that roof off. And if you're doing new construction, it's like I'm building my house right now and I'm in Florida, I would spray foam the walls. I would pay the extra money because you'll get your money back in less than five years with spray foam.

I would spray foam all the walls. I would spray foam the floor. I would spray foam the attic. I'd spray foam everything with spray foam. It will pay itself off. You'll get all your money back in less than five years. Your house will be airtight to the point that you'll probably have to crack a window to get some fresh air in.

It'll be so airtight that if you've got a fireplace, it won't draft properly. People have to open a window so their fireplace will draft. That's the secret to a really efficient house when it comes to heating and cooling is cut out all of the air cracks. It's not a bad thing.

It's a good thing. So spray foam the entire house. And I would do this on a new construction whether I was in Minnesota. Boy, especially in Minnesota, you'll save on your heating bill like crazy. Whether you're in Pittsburgh, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Los Angeles, new construction, do spray foam everywhere.

How would you figure out? Do you know any way to figure out? If I'm trying to compare the rate of return between going and getting bags of cellulose from Home Depot, putting them in the hopper and just blowing them in the attic versus hiring a crew to come and do the spray foam, is there any way for me to figure out which is a better move?

Or do I just have to go with, "Okay, I've got $5,000 to hire the stuff done," or, "I've got $1,000 to go and buy the bags of foam?" Is there any way for me to do calculations on that and know? Yes, but they're very complicated calculations. And I only know of one guy, if he's still alive, that does those type of calculations and is really good at it and teaches other people how to do it.

And I can't think of his name, but trust me, even I don't do all of his calculations. And I used to be in a thermal group at Chrysler. So the answer really is no, there isn't. But you can do it by experiment, because the blowing in of the cellulose is your least, lowest dollar cost entry.

It's not that expensive. So I would go in and blow in my cellulose into my attic and then watch my AC bills. And on my electric bill, they actually show me this year and last year. So I know whether I used more this year than I did last year.

Of course, this year was a very cool summer up here in the Midwest and the East Coast, compared to last year, which was pretty hot. But still, if you blow cellulose up there and your AC bill goes from $150 down to $110, and it stays at $110, and it doesn't go above $110, except for like, you run into August, and you're like, "Oh my God, August was so hot," and it goes to $140, well, you probably have made a return on investment with your AC bill.

Have you seen any calculations done as far as what the return on investment could be with improving insulation? I have a gut feeling that it very well could be higher than me investing my money in some other places. But I don't know how to actually calculate it. Have you seen anybody who's calculated it and come up with any best guesstimates on the subject?

It all depends upon your instrumentation. Your instrumentation is everything. And your instrumentation is what tells you real numbers versus guessing. So right now, your only instrumentation is your electric bill. And that's the only piece of information you need now. If you go down to Sears, and you get yourself a $50 temperature meter, the one with the little laser beam on it, so you can point it at your ceiling, it's a good thing.

You can walk around, you can point it at your ceiling, and go, "Wow, my ceiling is 105 degrees Fahrenheit. That's radiating right down in here into my room that I'm cooling." Or you might point it up there and go, "Wow, my ceiling is 78 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's what's in the room." Then you know your ceiling is not radiating heat down into your house.

And you can actually walk around with a little IR thermal gun that's just giving you a temperature in Fahrenheit, and you can find out where your heat's coming in. It might be coming in your windows. Your windows might be a significant input of heat into the room. Now, what do you do for that?

Well, you can put an awning outside over the window that prevents the sun from hitting it, or you can put curtains on the window and close off the heat that way. But if you got some type of instrumentation, it will be your little spyglass, although you might be looking like you're looking through a toilet paper tube.

It's still a little spyglass into the world of thermal that you're trying to go find and detect. So I would definitely tell people, "Go get a little $30, $40 IR thermal device." They sell them at Home Depot too and Lowe's. And go see on a hot day what's the temperature of your roof inside the house.

What's the temperature in the attic? What's the temperature of the roof in the attic? And go get the temperature of the roof in the attic, and you go, "Wow! The wood on my roof in my attic is 155 degrees, and the temperature of the blown insulation in the roof is 125 degrees." And the other thing you might look at as well is you have ventilation in your attic.

You have like gable vents at the peaks of the roof. You have vents there. Because one way of decreasing the heat from... The heat's going to go from the sun to the shingles to the wood of the roof to the attic to the insulation to the roof of your room, into your room, into you.

That's the path of the heat. You want to find out where can you break that path with the least amount of money or with the best return on investment. So going up there and finding that, it's like, "Wow! My attic is an oven. It's 130 degrees up here." But you get no ventilation.

Putting in gable vents with fans that's going to move in 95-degree Florida air into your attic. Your attic is now no longer 120, 130-degree oven. It's now going to be the temperature of the outside Florida air moving through your attic. So what's going to transfer more heat into... Through the insulation into the roof of your home?

Is it going to be 95-degree humid Florida air? Or is it going to be 130 degrees of sun from the oven that's up there? Right. If you can get even to the 95-degree air, it's going to be better. Yeah. Like I said, the first thing you do is you keep the heat from getting in.

And that would be putting up spray foam on the roof of the attic. The next thing is keeping the attic as cool as possible through a variety of methods. And one of those is going to be ventilation. Another one would be a whole house fan. But a whole house fan is really only used generally when it gets cool outside.

A whole house fan generally goes into the entrance to your attic. And it's like three feet in diameter. And if you're right next to it, it sounds like an airplane motor. It's going really fast. Right. And what you do is you open up your doors and your windows. And it's 65 degrees outside.

You turn on the whole house fan and it sucks all that air outside inside the house real quick and blows it up into the attic and out these troughs. Do you know if I can integrate... So I actually have a whole... An attic fan, a whole house fan. I have both.

I have some of those passive things on my roof that spin when the heat is escaping as the wind blows them a little bit as well. And then the eaves are vented and the gable ends are vented. And then I have a whole house fan as well that is set into a central hallway.

My understanding on the research that I've done is that if I do the spray foam insulation, that I have to turn the attic into a sealed attic. That I can't keep a vented attic, which would eliminate my being able to use the whole house fan. Is that accurate? Is there a reason why that would be the case?

No. You do not want to seal the attic. You want your attic to be able to breathe. You want moisture to be able to get out of the attic. You want hot air to be able to get out of the attic. So let me tell you, when you make a solar oven, you seal it completely.

You got two layers of glass. You got metal and you got foam insulation all the way around it. You point it at the sun and it'll get so hot you can bake a cake in it. The number one enemy of a solar oven is air leaks. If I have an air leak, I won't reach 350, I'll only hit 250.

Your attic is a solar oven. And you want your attic to be a very poor solar oven. So you want all of the air leaks, you want all of the ventilation in your attic that you can possibly get. All the spray foam is doing is preventing the heat from going from the shingles to the wood to the attic.

And that's all it's doing. Plus it's making a darn strong roof. Right. Which is nice. Which is valuable. I've been through a number of hurricanes. You mentioned keeping the heat out. My understanding from third grade science class is that there are three different types of heat. There's conductive, convective, and radiant heat, right?

Does the spray foam, that would merely address the conductive heat? And do I need to put up additional radiant barriers? They sell the foil barriers. Would I put those up in addition or is that overkill? Those foil barriers are almost scams. Really? Yeah, they really are. I mean, because the majority of your heat coming in is conductive and convective.

It's conductive going through the roof, then it's convective going from the roof to the air in the attic. And both of those are very strong heat transfer methods. And the radiant barrier only prevents the heat from, the radiating heat from going out. It's like, okay, it's zero degrees Fahrenheit outside.

You've been exposed outside for 30 minutes. You're going into hypothermia. I'm an EMT and I come by and I give you a space blanket. An ultra-thin space blanket of nothing but mylar. How quickly do you think that's going to heat you up? Not very quickly. Not very quickly at all.

It's all it's going to do is take your little bit of radiating heat from your body and bounce it back into your body. And it's going to try to create some dead air space in there to help your convection. But no, I would not recommend going with a radiant barrier at all.

If you wanted a radiant barrier, it would be outside above your shingles. That's where you would block the radiation from coming in. Is there any way to do that? No. Okay. No, but theoretically... I guess I could plant trees and I could shade the shingles and that would eliminate the shade, would eliminate the radiant heat.

Is that right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yep. I've gone through, I've tried to design to figure out how to put a latticework of fencing across my roof and grow vines over my house and how to get trees growing over it. I've thought through as much as my design capabilities have had, but I haven't come up with a good solution yet.

Turn your roof into a garden. Right. I look at these online, I look at these guys who have living roofs and I mean, it's a couple feet thick of dirt sometimes, or they've just got the green roofs. And I think that is brilliant. Like, why don't we do more of that?

But I can't figure out how to retrofit my house in an intelligent way to incorporate some of those technologies that are being developed. Yeah. A roof full of grass. That will stop the heat coming in just beautifully. And it seems like it can be in many ways far more durable than asphalt shingles in some cases.

Oh, by far. Your shingles will love it. Right. I think asphalt shingles are one of the worst curses ever placed upon a house. Why are they so popular then? Because that's the way we've been doing it for 35 years. What's the best type of roof? Well, the best type of roof is a structurally insulated panel roof, which is a piece of OSB glued to six inches of styrofoam glued to a piece of wood.

That's the best construction for a roof, is a structurally insulated panel house in total. But you just put a metal roof on top of that. That's all you do. Yeah. I look at the metal ones and I seriously, I mean, my shingles are still good, but I will probably lean that direction because it just seems to solve so many problems.

And the thing I don't understand that I've never gotten the answer to is you can find barns from the early 20th century that have metal roofs. And so why is it that if this technology of building a metal roof has been around for a century plus, why do we not use it more frequently?

And it's growing dramatically here in Florida, but it's still not standard. Yeah, because it lasts forever. Now, if you want to talk about life of a metal roof, you can go to the Roman cathedrals around Europe and in Rome and they will have a copper roof. And some of those roofs are a thousand years old problems.

Wow. That's amazing. Copper roof is really expensive, but you can basically do the same thing with a standard metal roof. Now, in your case, when it comes time to put down the metal roof, what's the biggest expense in a roof? Generally, it's the material and the time involved. You've got shingles and everything else, a big dumpster.

When it comes time to have a metal roof, they put the metal roof down on top of your shingle roof. And so now you've got two layers of sealant there. You've got a metal roof, and if the roof leaks, you've got a working shingle roof below it. It might be a 20-year-old shingle roof, but you're putting on a metal roof before the shingle roof leaks.

So the metal roof is going to turn your shingle roof into a 50-year, 60-year roof on its own. And so you've got two as one, one as none. And the metal roof goes up in a day, and the old shingles didn't have to come off. And there's your money savings right then and there.

Made a note. That's a good point. For new construction, we'll diverge just for a second here. For new construction, all you people looking to build, if you can find a builder, if you can find a company, there's something called structurally insulated panels, SIPs, SIPs. What they are is they are a composite.

They are a big sheet of OSB, which is like plywood, and it's super glued to a sheet of foam, which could be 2 inches, 4 inches, 6 inches, 8 inches, 12 inches. It doesn't matter. And with another sheet on its side, it's like an ice cream sandwich. And they're made in big sheets at the factory.

What they do is they take the design for your house, and they take the computer, and it cuts out the walls and windows and everything for your house. It goes onto a semi. They bring it out to your house location. They have a crane there, and your house is up in 2 days or less.

And it's up with a carpenter and 4 helpers. It's not up with 4 or 5 carpenters swinging hammers. It goes together very quickly. And then it's more expensive than a conventional house. But where's your money in a conventional house? It's the idiots with the swinging hammers, punching the nails to do stick and frame construction.

So it costs you about 10% more, but your house is up in 2 weeks, ready for the plaster, sorry, in 2 days. It's up in 2 days, ready for the drywall people and flooring people to come in. And you're in your house in a week or 2 versus waiting 6 months for the idiot builders to do their stuff to construct your house.

So structurally insulated panels, SIPs. And the other one that you might be able to find out there is called insulated concrete forms, ICFs. That's where they literally build your walls with Lego pieces of foam, put in rebar, have the concrete truck pull up, and they fill the insides all with concrete.

And your basement walls and the walls of your house are done in a day. And then they start the rest of the construction on top of that. Those are 2 very good things for you to look at and to contrast with conventional building if you're trying to make a decision on what your next house is going to be and you want it to be financially viable both in construction, time, and return on investment when it comes to furnace and AC bills.

I think I'm glad to see some of those technologies being developed because I think a lot about, I don't know if you're saying I'm a financial planner, I think a lot about the cost of houses. And the biggest cost, I mean there's the initial cost, but then there's also the ongoing cost.

And I think where it seems like much work has been done is in the more eco-friendly older or alternative technology world. So just this week I interviewed a man named Rob Roy and he lives up, he wrote a book called Mortgage Free and he teaches classes on cordwood building methods where they take round log ends and they stack them together with mortar and they don't connect, there's mortar on either end of the log end but there's an air space in the middle.

So the house is very well insulated and 16 to 18 inch thick walls. And he lives in the northern Maine border, excuse me, northern, I think it's upstate New York, excuse me, up by the Canadian border. And his heating costs are, he buys his firewood and spends about 800 bucks a year on heating costs in the northern border.

Now he doesn't need air conditioning costs, which is another thing. But I look at that and I say, but I can't do that in West Palm Beach, Florida with Palm Beach County Municipal Building Codes. There's no chance. So I'm glad to see some of these new technologies that will fit into more mainstream looking houses coming out.

But it seems as though the demand just isn't there. I still see people, I still see them building houses with concrete blocks around here a lot of times. And I don't understand why the building industry hasn't progressed more quickly. Do you have any insight on why it seems like some of these technologies are so slow to be adopted?

Abject stupidity. You're kind of, you make the nice radical sweeping statements like I do sometimes. Absolute abject stupidity. Well this is the way we've been doing it, this is the way I learned it, this is the way everyone else is doing it, this is the way we're going to continue to do it.

Building codes might not allow it to the newer construction, construction people are not going to be familiar with it. Look, the majority of the construction people are not the sharpest nail in the box. Some of the people who run the company and everything else might have really good vision and really good understanding, but they're all about getting the job and doing the job.

They're not a research and development engineer. They're a worker. They're not about implementing change because change is risk and what do they want when they're building? They want no risk. And it's a variety of factors like that, but they all come together to conspire to make it such that it is hard to get new construction.

Now in new construction, if someone tells you this house is eco-friendly, grab hold of your wallet and run away as fast as you can. If they start off telling you, saying you're going to have the lowest heating and cooling bills you've ever had with this house, continue to listen.

But if they start off with this eco-friendly crap, run. Which means they've spent a lot of money on some stuff that probably won't work and they're going to pass on that cost to you. One of the biggest ones for me is people often get lumped into camps as far as when it comes to environmental things.

And on the one hand, I think I'm probably one of the most environmentally conscious people. In the sense of it seems stupid to me to destroy the beauty that surrounds us and to continue, and it seems smart to me, to preserve it in every way possible. But what I don't get is why the environmental people haven't simply chosen self-interest as their marketing method.

And it's essentially become that, well, we have to appeal to someone's sense of altruism to sell environmental eco-friendly stuff and play a guilt trip. Well, that's not going to do it. Don't tell me my house saves the polar bears. Frankly, I care a little bit about the polar bears, but I care as far as I can do it for free.

I don't care that much to actually start spending money on the polar bears. But if you can just tell me this house is going to cost you half the money that the other house does, and the alternative benefit of it for "the environment" is better, great, fine, that's an ancillary benefit.

That's how I think about things, is that everything should be win-win. And without launching all of the nuance of that argument, I don't see any reason to market energy efficiency as eco-friendly or environmentalist in nature. Market it as intelligent design. After all, that is what we should be seeking to do, is to engineer everything in our lives to a higher level of quality.

And that will mean better in every regard for every stakeholder. You got that 100% correct. I could not have said it better. Environmentalism is a green religion and it's motivation by guilt. It's motivation by making you feel stupid. And it's the only thing you've ever known. It's the only thing you've ever been doing.

And they're telling you that you're stupid, that you're bad, and you're wrong, and you need to do this. That is not the way you market and get new ideas and new methods involved. You do exactly what you say. You build it on its positives and its advantages and what it can do and its benefits.

And that's the way it should be done. But nope. There's this girl who's got this really nice, cool little green light that replaces light sticks. And she's done a real good job of having some LEDs in there. The LEDs go blink every four minutes just to keep the green light sticks glowing really well.

And it's a really good design. And she's marketing it saying, "Oh, we have this tremendous waste on light callum light sticks. They're horrible for the planet. They fill up the landfill." And it's like, "Shut up. There are more milk cartons and diapers thrown away in the landfill in one day than there have been of callum light sticks in their entire history, in the last decade, just thrown away." And she's motivating by making you feel guilty about using a callum light stick and making you think you're filling up the dumpster with the thing when there's bigger fish to fry if you're trying to reduce landfill waste.

You don't do it by going after the callum light stick. So, just another method of motivation by guilt to get you to throw yourself on your sword so that you'd be paying her money for her thing. >> Well, that's what doesn't--one more on the same note. What bugs me is when people get into what are the emissions of cars and they get into, you know, "Oh, these cars are very unfriendly." And then I go and read some of the papers and read some of the studies and you've got--I don't remember, maybe you know this, but I read a paper one time that was comparing the pollution emitted by the 50 largest cargo ships in the world is greater than--was greater than all of the pollution emitted by all of the cars.

And I've completely made that actual number up, but it was some statistic similar to that. And that's what bugs me is that instead of--if--I'm a pretty environmentally sensitive guy and--because I think it's intelligent to be that way. But if you want to get me on board, talk--focus on the 80%--excuse me, focus on the 20% that makes 80% of the difference instead of trying to guilt people into changing their behavior on things that make very little difference in the grand scheme of things.

And there's a grand paradigm shifting the cargo ships over to a new fuel method solely because of economics. They're changing their cargo ships to run off of liquefied natural gas, not because of the emissions or anything else, because it doesn't matter what their emissions are, people will still attack them.

Right. You turn over liquefied natural gas to run in their engines, which they can do very easily. They just have to add the tanks and the control system, because liquefied natural gas is by far many times cheaper than diesel or bunker fuel. Right. So-- Well, it'll work out. Let's switch to appliances.

So I have a number of very energy inefficient appliances. They're old. They all technically work, although my insurance companies require me to replace my hot water heater, so I probably will have to start there just for that. But I don't like to spend money I don't need to spend.

But I would like to know, how could I figure out and run some calculations on my appliances to figure out whether I should upgrade them before they break for the sake of energy efficiency? Is there a general rule that no, just generally let things live their lifespan, or is there a way to actually calculate it?

How would I make those decisions? Well, again, it comes back to instrumentation. And the point is, you basically got none. Right now, there's stickers on all new things that come. There's stickers on hot water heaters, or stickers on refrigerators, or stickers on freezers that tell you the average number of kilowatt hours, or BTUs, this thing uses in a year.

You can use that to compare and contrast devices you're looking at, but if you don't have that sticker on your hot water heater, it's kind of hard to contrast that with your hot water heater and to see how much money am I going to be saving. If your hot water heater is 20 years old, and mine is, and it still continues to work just fine, let me think, how could you measure that?

I do have a fluke meter. I don't know how to use it. It's my dad's, but he's an electrical guy. He can probably help me use it. Can I measure something with that? Or getting one of those kilowatt volts? I mean, that wouldn't work on the higher voltage stuff.

Your hot water heater is electric? It's electric, yes. Oh, I thought it was gas. Do you have the option of going with propane or natural gas? I could, yeah. I have a gas dryer. Oh, go natural gas. Without question. Without question. It takes one kilowatt of energy is 3,412 BTUs.

We're talking about your hot water heater is 240 volts, and it's multiple kilowatts of energy. One BTU heats up one gallon of water, one degree Fahrenheit. Let's say we got 3,412 divided by 100. It would take you one kilowatt of energy to heat up 34 gallons of water, 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Let's say your bath was bigger than that. Let's say it'll take approximately a kilowatt of energy with the losses to heat up one full bathtub of water for you, being rough in numbers here. Well, that will cost you 10 cents right there, or 12 cents per kilowatt hour, because you're using that kilowatt hour to heat up your bath.

I've done this for a friend of mine for his hot tub. I said, "Pat, every time you fill up your hot tub, it's costing you 50 cents." It would take two or three hot water tanks to fill up his hot tub. There's your return on your investment. All you've got to do is look on the hot water heater, and something will tell you that it's a 5 kilowatt or 4 kilowatt hot water heater.

Let's do this number intelligently for you. 100,000 BTUs, which is called the therm, divided by 3,412 is 29 kilowatt hours. Let's call it 30 kilowatt hours. 30 kilowatt hours times 12 cents is $3.60 per 1,000 BTUs. The number we use the most is MMBTUs, which is million BTUs. Your hot water heater at 12 cents per kilowatt hour costs you 36 cents per MMBTU.

Natural gas pricing, with all the piping and the delivery charges and everything else, comes out to be between $8 and $10 per MMBTU, per million BTUs. There's your cost savings right in front of you. I just did it with a calculator dramatically. Going to natural gas with your furnace will be a dramatic savings, a savings that you'll see get your money back in two years versus going with electric heat.

Electric heat is the most expensive form of heat you're ever going to get. I also have an electric stove. Is that blanket rule? Electric heat is going to be the most expensive. If you have a choice between natural gas and electric heat, go with natural gas. Is it a blanket rule?

Yes, it is a blanket rule, especially when you're doing new construction. Go with natural gas on everything and electric on as little as you possibly can. You're looking at replacing your electric stove. You have to look at it like, "I use hot water every day. I use hot water in everything that I do every day." There's a real big expense right there.

How often do I turn on the stove? Most of the time I use the microwave. How often do I bake? How often do I use the countertop? What's a new stove going to cost me? A nice stainless steel GE natural gas stove is going to cost you $1,000. Then you're going to have to have a plumber run a natural gas line to where your stove is.

This will increase the value of your house slightly, if you're considering resale value of your house, by having electric and natural gas at your stove. Some people love to cook on stove burner on gas and bake on electric. There's even ovens out there that do that. Some people are gas lovers.

Some people are electric heat stove lovers when it comes to cooking. You've got to look at it like, "How often do I use my stove?" My stove might take 2.5 kilowatts of power every time I turn on the burner, but I'm only turning on the burner to cook something for 20 minutes.

When I'm baking in the oven, I'm baking and it's taking a lot of energy, but the stove is not on all the time. It just heats the oven up to 350 and then maintains it. It's not like it's sitting there sucking 25 cents an hour in electricity all the time, because it's going on and off, on and off, on and off to maintain the heat.

Your return on investment on replacing your electric stove with natural gas is pretty low. It would be 10, 20 years to get your money back doing that. If you look at your hot water system, your return on investment is going to be pretty darn quickly. How many people in your family?

My wife and I and our one-year-old son. You're not using a great deal of hot water. You don't have four teenage girls. You have one bathroom or two? Two. With showers? Yes. You might consider what's called an on-demand hot water heater. They cost just a few pennies more than a regular hot water heater, but they're simpler to install.

They go on the wall. They vent directly outside, through the chimney. They keep only a quart of water hot all the time. The second you turn on the hot water faucet, that water rushes out to give you your instantaneous hot water. The burner comes on and it's instantaneously heating the cold water to hot water to continually give you hot water for as long or for as little as you want it.

If you're just trying to do the dishes for 10 minutes, you're not heating up a 50-gallon hot water tank all the time, every time, just to do the dishes for five gallons of water. Does that make sense to you, to use an on-demand system versus... It does. In fact, that was going to be the next question.

Would you still go natural gas in that scenario? Yes, of course. So it's always the same, just natural gas but go with on-demand instead of a tank? Right. And let's say you were stuck with electric heat. There are houses in the South that are all electric. You really have a high electric bill and you have a lot of people using hot water in the house.

I would look at an on-demand system that could handle that many people versus your existing hot water tank because it'll heat up dramatically. If you go to the Dominican Republic and some of the other islands in the Southern Caribbean, they actually have a shower head with a 240-volt line running right to it.

And it heats the water up in the shower head before it sprays it on you. I've showered under one of those many times. Suicide shower. It's a little freaky when you look up there and see two wires going into your shower head. But I'm sure that they work. And I've wondered if they're even possible to get and have in the US because it just seems so simple to me.

You put the hot water where you need it and you just create it only when you need it where you need it. If there's under-sink hot water heaters too, if you're in an apartment or something, there's hot water heaters that will go underneath your sink. They run off 120 volts and they'll heat up the water just for the sink for you.

And that's a good way to go. The other thing for hot water heaters is a cozy. If you can go to Home Depot or Lowe's and get a blanket to go around your hot water heater, that'll pay itself off pretty quickly. Just a little bit better insulation and keeping that thing insulated and warmer.

Question because I know you're not just an engineer on traditional ideas. You're also kind of Mr. Alternative Energy guy. Here's what doesn't make sense to me. I look at my house and I say, "I've got all this heat outside and I'm keeping the heat outside, cooling the inside. And then I've got this water and I'm going to heat the water up so that in my cool house I can put hot water on me." I've tried to figure out how on earth I could design some kind of way to use some kind of solar hot water system and integrate it with my normal plumbing.

Even if I had cold water in the morning, if I could take a shower in the evening and I've got the heat all day long and I know it's relatively easy to heat water with the sunshine, I can't figure out any way to engineering-wise make that happen. Do you know any way to do that and integrate it with the house?

The simplest way is you get an old hot water heater. You strip off all of the insulation off of it. All the metal, all the insulation, so it's a bare hot water heater. And you paint the thing flat black. Put the thing outside into the sunshine. And your municipal water runs into that tank that gets heated up to ambient temperature.

And then it goes into your hot water tank inside your house. So instead of heating up water that was 60 or 70 degrees Fahrenheit up to 120 for your bath or for your shower, you're taking water that has gone up to ambient temperature, let's say 90 degrees Fahrenheit, that is going inside of your house.

So that's one of the easier ways to do it. Now if you take the thing and lay on its side, you can build a box around it. You can make a solar oven for it. And you'll have hot water that way. I have a book called The Complete Handbook of Solar Air Heating Systems.

And it's at www.knowledgepublications.com. It shows you how to do that. And it does it very well. But it's a real small savings in energy. It's not like you think. It's not like a big increase in energy. So let's say, how many gallons a day do you think you use in your house?

I have no idea. Let's say you are using a total of 120 gallons in your house a day for your showers. Sound reasonable? Times 8.3 pounds per gallon, multiplied by a temperature difference of 30 degrees. That is 29,000 BTUs saved. Let's see, for natural energy, 29,000 is 30,000. If that was for electricity, 30,000 divided by 34.12 times 12 cents.

That would be a savings of $1 a day for electric heat. By doing that, so there's $1 a day. 30,000 divided by the number of BTUs I have. Let's see, 1,000,000 BTUs. 0.3 times 8. That would be a savings of 24 cents if you had natural gas. So does that kind of put it in perspective for you?

Yeah, it definitely does. It definitely does. And in the cost-benefit analysis, I use a little shortcut in financial planning of how big of a portfolio you need to provide a monthly expense. And I don't actually know, and this is one of the things I've been trying to figure out, I don't actually know how to apply a financial calculation to what is "worth doing" versus what is not worth doing and where the break-even point is.

But I do apply a calculation of where basically there's a simple rule called the safe withdrawal rate from a portfolio. And the simplest way to do it is to plan that you can basically take 4% of a portfolio of assets off under normal conditions. You can basically take 4% of assets off essentially into perpetuity.

So for every $100,000 of assets, you have a $4,000 annual income essentially into perpetuity. So when you're planning for financial independence and financial freedom, if you need $40,000 a year to live on, then you need a million dollars of assets. But if you can go from needing $40,000 a year to needing $30,000 a year, instead of needing a million dollars of assets, you only need $750,000 of assets.

And oftentimes, it's easier to cut out the $10,000 of expense than it is to increase, than to save the extra $250,000 to be financially independent. So the way I think about it, I use the monthly number. And so saving $1 a day really doesn't sound like that big of a deal.

It's really not. But if you say $30 a month and you multiply that times $300, you need $9,000 in an investment portfolio in order to pay that $30 a month expense. So if it costs you $250 to retrofit something, and that $250 saves you $30 a month, that, you can either spend the $250 and not have to save the $9,000, or you can just keep on paying the extra dollar and have to save an extra $9,000.

And that's the closest I've gotten to figuring out a way to calculate what's worth it and what's not. But I've really struggled to actually have any idea of how to approach these scenarios to figure out what's smart to do and what's not smart to do. Yep. And see, electric hot water heat is not a smart way to go.

It might be the way you're stuck with. So if you've got electric hot water heat, go with on-demand electric hot water heat. If you can switch to natural gas or propane, switch to natural gas or propane for your hot water heat. If you can't do that, then take an old hot water heater and put it outside during the summertime and let the water flow through it in the summertime so it gets heated up to ambient before it goes into your hot water tank so you've got that savings of that 30 degrees that you don't have to heat up.

Just don't forget to drain the tank and reroute it in the wintertime, otherwise it's going to freeze up on you and you're going to have a mess. Speaking of that, because I've never drained a water line in my life worried about the freeze, is there anything different about how you've been talking with my situation?

Anything different between the subtropical south versus up north where you are as far as how to think it through and where to focus on as far as attention to save money on utilities? Well, a lot of focus up here is on heating. From Pittsburgh north, there's a lot of focus on heating.

In our old house, the furnace gave out, actually the gas control gave out and the gas control was going to cost $600 to replace and we're looking at $2,000 for a new furnace. So we switched out the old regular forced air furnace for a new high efficiency multi-stage furnace.

It actually vents outside with a PVC pipe. It's called a condensing furnace. When you burn something like natural gas, you get heat, carbon dioxide and water vapor. Well, that water vapor is steam. You just don't see it and it carries a great deal of heat. It carries 950 BTUs per pound of steam.

So if you take that and you run it through another heat exchanger to condense it down to a liquid, then you're getting all that energy back. That's what a condensing furnace does and that's why it's got a water drain on it. Just like your furnace has a water drain on it, your condensing furnace has a water drain on it.

To get rid of the water that it condenses out of the flue vapor. And then your flue vapor is like only 140, 150 degrees Fahrenheit and they run it outside via PVC pipe rather than an insulated chimney going up to your roof. So we got one of these and our heating bills went from like $150 a month down to $60 or $75 a month.

It's not so much that we would have done it on its own for saving money because we weren't staying in the house for a long time. So if I didn't have to do it, I wouldn't have done it. But it kept the house a lot warmer because it's a multi-stage furnace.

So when it's not really cold outside and it just needs to keep the house warm, it's running on low. So you got this continual gentle heat coming out of the air ducts all the time. And if it gets colder outside it'll increase this a little bit more. And if it's minus 20 outside it'll be going full like a full blown furnace.

Burners going all the time, full burner, full fan, blowing out of the air ducts and it's still condensing. So it's still a very efficient furnace. But we noticed the change significantly in our old house. And now we're in a newer house and a much bigger house. Went from like 1400 square feet to 3000 square feet house.

And it's got its original 20 year old furnace in it. But our heating bills are only like $150 a month, maybe $200 at most during the polar vortex of last year. And that's acceptable to us for a heating bill versus having a $2000 furnace installed. But I tell you when time comes and it gets close, I'm not going to wait for it to break.

We're going to wait for the off period of the season like spring time or summer and say, "Hey, I need a new furnace. Okay, we'll be there tomorrow." And we'll get a good price on a furnace by buying it off season. We make the decision of when to do it rather than letting the furnace make the decision for us when to do it.

And amazingly, it's been a very cool summer here in Pittsburgh. Our AC bills, both last year and this year, have not been too outrageous. Our highest AC bills have maybe been about $300. And it's averaging some place in the low $200s. And that's with the furnace set on, the temperature set on 77, not 73 or 72.

77 with the ceiling fans going and everything. And it just really hasn't crossed that threshold. Even though it's a 20-year-old AC unit, it's still functioning within our budget. You factor in our taxes, what we paid for the house. We're paying $8000, $9000 a year in just taxes to live where we are living.

My goodness, man, move! It's a very nice area. Everything is convenient. We actually have the cheapest house in the neighborhood. Both of the houses in the neighborhood are a lot more, two, three, four times the price of ours. So that's always a good thing to have the cheapest house in the neighborhood.

That's good for financial investment. I say that somewhat jokingly. I have heard of many tax bills that may be many times that. I've been in houses on Palm Beach where the property tax bill is a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. But I guess I'm so cheap that property taxes are just one of those fixed expenses that they're never going to go down.

And it makes me think a lot about other places where they're cheaper. If I did a new AC system and a new furnace system, I could probably lower my monthly bill by $100 a month. Which means I would be saving $1200 a year. And that's $4000 of expense. That's $2000 of expense for a new high efficiency air conditioning system.

And $2000 for a new furnace to be installed into my system. So that's a $4000 increase. And $4000 divided by, conservatively, $100 is going to be $40. So we're looking at, well, maybe I should do this. $4000 divided by $100 is 40 months. 40 months divided by 12. I could be looking at a return on investment in three years.

So where as I've been going, wow, I don't really want to do that at this moment. That's a 3.3 year return on investment. So I should probably be changing my mind and thinking about putting in that new furnace and AC system as soon as possible. Thanks! There we go.

That's a good outcome for a personal finance show. I'm glad I got you to do the numbers. So this is an area, and what I try to do with clients is talk through all these different options. And this is an area that I don't know how to run these calculations of how to help figure it out.

So this has been helpful. I want to close with two questions, though. Oh, we're not closing yet. We got more to go on. You got more questions. Yeah. Okay. Here's the question that I'm interested in. And I'm going to spring it on. You may not know. So I have a concept that I think a lot about.

And the concept is how can I buy the luxuries of life, as in a roof over my head, a comfortable environment, whether those are the necessities or the luxuries of life, for an upfront cost that makes sense, but focus on technologies that will last forever with a minimum amount of maintenance and a minimum amount of cost.

The problem is that I don't have the scientific background to really be able to analyze some of the different things. So I spent a lot of time on -- I have spent a lot of time on YouTube just kind of looking through different technologies. And I look, for example, I look at something, you know, just A, designing a house with good solar design for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer.

Designing a heating system maybe based -- maybe it's based on -- I mean, I never lived up north. But I look at, you know, the videos that I find on, you know, rocket mass heaters and efficient wood stoves with well-built insulated houses all around. I look at some of the technologies of building design that where instead of -- where it seems much more enduring.

I think about the idea of putting on a copper roof that may last a thousand years. Like, how could I build a house that would last for a thousand years that wouldn't -- isn't just going to be degrading in 30 years? And I think about how could I design a system that -- I guess just better design.

If you were going to design a house and I gave you the task, knowing what you know about engineering and design, if you were going to design a house, and I gave you the goal, I said, you know, "Steven, I'm going to live here for the rest of my life.

I don't mind spending now on the things that I need to spend now. But I want these things to be enduring technologies that aren't going to break, that are going to be very low maintenance, that are going to be very low ongoing cost." And the goal of this, by the way, is to get -- is to be able to stave off the effects of inflation on my expenses.

So if I'm depending, for example, on a high electric bill, well, that electric bill is going to be driven by the cost of the energy by the power plant and also by the cost of keeping the power plant employees employed. So that means that over time, if I'm planning on how to be financially independent -- excuse me -- I have to provide for increasing cost of energy.

And if that happens, maybe I have decreasing cost of energy, maybe things transition from coal to natural gas. I don't know. But I have to plan for that. And I also have to plan for increasing wages for the workers involved. So I think, "Well, how can I just buy the system now that's going to keep it and just pay for the technology so I can eliminate the effects of inflation over time?" How would you design a house, given that design framework?

What specific technologies would you focus on? One answer. A monolithic dome. Buckminster Fuller's invention. No, no. I was thinking geodesic. What's a monolithic dome? Monolithic dome. I've had the $1,000 one-week-long contractor course for it down in Italy, Texas. It's monolithic.com. They're the greatest, most honest people in the world.

And they will help you design or they'll help you find a builder and/or they will build the monolithic dome for you. Anywhere from the size of a house for one person all the way up to an entire school or church. They'll do it. And a monolithic dome, what it is, is you get a rubber form for your dome.

First thing you do is you pour the floor. You've got rebar sticking up out of the floor. And then you attach down your form. And then you put a great big fan to inflate the form. And there's an airlock, like a two-door airlock, so you can lock in and lock out.

And you can walk on the inside of this dome. So you're inside this great big balloon. And you have a, first thing you have is you have a foam gun. And you are going to spray three to four inches of foam all the way around on the inside of the dome.

And I'm talking three to four inches, okay? That is a big hefty amount. Then you're going to go put up the rebar. And you put all the rebar up right next to the foam and everything. Then you come in with a shotcrete pump. And you are shooting concrete onto the wall three inches thick.

So all the concrete is on the inside. The concrete's not on the outside. This is a house. Well, one, it's done in less than a week. You literally got interior people going in, doing walls and drywalls in one week. Okay? That's how fast these things go up. You're looking, when they do mega churches and mega schools, they have the numbers, solid numbers that they showed us.

This multi-million dollar, ten million dollar school pays for itself in 17 years in Texas on the AC cooling alone. Wow. Okay? Alone. Wow. That's awesome. You have no roof. You have no shingles. Okay? It's made out of concrete. They did some of the storage facilities in Iraq prior to Desert Storm.

And the generals actually had to call up and say, "How did you make this thing? What's it made out of?" And they said, "You're going to need two bombs to get through it." And they would drop one bomb to break a hole in it and drop another bomb to go through the hole and blow up what's on the inside.

Wow. These are literally 400 year houses or longer or more. That's how long these things are going to last because they are a concrete house. And when they build the small, they build rental units for people. And so you can come in as an investor, you can have 24 rental units put on a piece of commercial property, you can collect the rent from the people, and it's a one person thing.

It's about 400 square feet with a living room open to a kitchen and then a bedroom and a bathroom parked away behind a wall. In Texas, they literally cool this with a small 5000 BTU air conditioner. And it'll turn that room ice cold chilly. Wow. And the only heat for the house is a standard plug-in-the-wall 1500 watt electric heater.

And it will keep that as toasty warm as you could want in the coldest Texas temperatures. So they are the ultimate when it comes to heating and cooling efficiency. In fact, insurance companies won't insure them because they're just so strange. The insurance company doesn't know what to do. You probably can't finance them either.

Yes, you can finance them depending upon where you're going. But it's going to cost about $200 per foot per square foot, which is not bad. And it's about twice the cost of a normal house to do. But your return on investment on this thing is in single or double digit years.

Look, you've got no roof to go on there, you've got no labor for the roof, you've got no maintenance of a roof. The insurance company, you don't need them to insure the structure because what's going to happen? You insure the contents of the house is what you insure. So if you had a fire happen inside the house, big deal.

You clean everything out, bring in a fire hose, clean all the scorches off of the concrete, and then rebuild the interior of the house. It's 100% tornado proof, it's earthquake proof because it's all one unit. It's attached. If the ground fell away below half the house, the house is going to sit there as a single monolithic piece of equipment with half the earth underneath the house missing.

So you can shake and bake and rattle these things all around all you want because the dome is attached to the slab and the slab is attached to the earth. It just is not going anywhere. That's cool. I've never heard of it. I thought I'd spent enough time researching this stuff to see most things, but I'd never heard of this.

And the cool thing about this is unlike some of the technologies I've seen, I'm looking on their website, there are enough different designs that have plenty of windows. So that would keep my wife happy to have plenty of light, unlike some of the things I've proposed to her. You can have a whole house with windows if you want.

In fact, if you want, you can have an 11-sided house or a 10-sided house. You can have an 8-sided house. They're called stem walls. They're vertical walls that go up. It looks like a regular part of a house to you. You've got flat walls, you've got windows and doors and everything.

It's not curved. And then the dome is the ceiling. That makes a lot of people who go, "I don't want a dome like that." It makes a lot of people look at it and go, "I'd have a dome like that because it's got vertical walls and then a dome ceiling." And so it's endless with what you can do with a monolithic dome.

If you were building a house for the first time and you could afford to get the mortgage and you could afford to pay twice the price, and you were going to be there for long term, this is where you're going to raise your three or four children and everything, a monolithic dome would be the way to go from a financial point of view because it would pay for itself within 10 to 15 years on heating and cooling alone.

Maintenance alone, you figure in maintenance costs... I have re-roofed, I'd have no idea, but I must have re-roofed 15 to 20 houses over my lifetime. If I never had to re-roof an asphalt shingle roof again the rest of my life, I would be a happy man. And just even that.

The other thing that strikes me about this is that with a structure built with great strength, then you could much more confidently retain the risk of natural weather events and drop the insurance. And that is a massive savings right there, especially for where I am. You can't drop the insurance when you have a mortgage, but if your house is not built to take it, then when you think about retaining the risk, you have to really consider it.

And so you're usually going to transfer it to the insurance company, but if your house is built to take it, you can much more comfortably just retain the risk of the weather events. What's your insurance risk in Florida? How much are you paying per year for insurance because you live in a hurricane zone?

Right, so it winds up being about $4,000 a year right now for my house. My dad was able, I mean, with his insurance, mine doesn't just split this out, but with his, he dropped hurricane coverage and it saved him something like $5,000 to $6,000 a year just by dropping insurance coverage.

I'm sorry, dropping hurricane coverage and keeping everything else. I'm paying $1,000 a year for insurance on a house in Pittsburgh. Wow, so there's the difference. Oh yeah, there's a big difference right there. Huge. And the thing is, it's very difficult for me to work through because if you actually sit down and intellectually approach the insurance question and you think, "Okay, can I retain this risk?" When you actually look at the deductibles a lot of times that you have, and I've been through enough hurricanes, I've seen enough houses that have been impacted by hurricanes, and it is possible that you may have a completely destroyed house.

But in general, if your house is up to code, it would be pretty unusual for your house to be destroyed by the wind. And so I've repaired the houses that have been hit by hurricanes. And it's hard though, because you're sitting there kind of thinking, "Well, how do I look at this rationally versus the deductibles and all of that?" And I very well may drop mine at some point in the future, because I'm pretty confident in my ability to recover from it and my ability to retain the risk, but it sure would feel better with a differently designed structure.

So last question I'd like to ask you today is, I get questions a lot of times even on providing for energy. And so you've got the question of saving energy that we've talked about. How do I do heat? How do I figure out what appliances? Should I swap out my incandescent light bulbs and buy LED light bulbs?

So that's all the saving side. Oh, we didn't talk about light bulbs. I knew we were missing something. Light bulbs. Okay. Here's the thing with light bulbs. A regular incandescent light bulb that provides you X amount of light. But the thing is, it provides you also 20 times the amount of heat that it does light.

And so every BTU you put into the house with your light bulb has to be removed by the air conditioner. Now the air conditioner is working on a coefficient of performance of three to one. So if you put 100 BTUs per hour of light, actually let's say 350, because 100 watt light bulb will put off 350 BTUs per hour of both light and heat.

And all the light is turned into heat anyways. So you put in 350 BTUs an hour with 100 watt light bulb and incandescent. Then your furnace AC system is running, it's running on what we call a coefficient of performance of three to one. And remember, it's moving heat. It's pumping heat.

It's not taking the same amount of energy to remove it. So it takes one third of the amount of energy to remove that light. So it would take just over 100 BTUs of AC pumping to remove that 350 BTUs per hour from your 100 watt light bulb. So everything you do in your house, your AC has to work.

When you have a refrigerator and you open the door and put stuff into it, the refrigerator kicks on, it's moving the heat that you just let into the refrigerator out of the refrigerator through the back of it with a heat pump and it's doing it in a ratio of about three to one.

So you're taking heat, putting it in the refrigerator and the refrigerator is moving the heat out of itself. And at the same time, it's making a little bit of heat to heat up your house. So everything you do in your house is making heat that the AC system is going to have to remove.

So what you want to do is you want to minimize your heat. So there are compact fluorescent bulbs and there are LED bulbs. And it's year 2014 right now and LED bulbs have fallen in price dramatically. Now generally, right now, compact fluorescents are a little cheaper than LED light bulbs.

And compact fluorescents are the ones that have mercury on the inside of them to a very slight amount. Break one, you spill an infinitesimal amount of mercury that you'll never detect. But that's the big war. There's always a war on something every time they want you to change. When they changed from incandescent to compact fluorescent, it was like incandescents are killing the planet.

And now they want you to go to LEDs, they're saying incandescents have mercury in them. When they want you to go from LED to something else, they're going to tell you LEDs have arsenic in them. And LEDs do have arsenic in the silicon to form the silicon gap that makes the light.

So anyways, the thing with compact fluorescents and all fluorescent bulbs, they don't like to be turned on and off all the time. If you're going downstairs, flip it on, come back upstairs, flip it off, you do this 10 times a day, compact fluorescent is not going to like it.

It is going to burn out before it reaches its life of like 8 years, is what they say. So if you have a place like every night you're going to turn on this lamp, great place to put a compact fluorescent bulb. And it's either 60 watt equivalent or 100 watt equivalent or whatever size that you so desire.

It's a great place to put one. If you have lights that you are turning on and off all the time, LED bulbs don't care. They can go on and off 100 times a second and it won't affect their life one iota, one bit. So they're great to put into locations like that.

LED bulbs also give you all the light instantaneously the second you turn them on. They don't have to warm up. Some compact fluorescents aren't what they call instant on. If they are instant on, they'll say so on the package. But you turn them on and as they warm up, they give you a better glow and it takes about a minute.

So if you want a place where you want the light to come on instantly, you're going to put in an LED bulb in there. And actually at Home Depot right now, there's these LED bulbs, I forgot the name of the company that's making them, I think it's Philips. They look like lollipops.

They look like suckers with a rim around them where the LEDs are. And Home Depot is selling the 60 watt equivalent bulb for $4. It's funny, the 40 watt equivalent bulb is $8. But they're really pushing them out at $4 a piece. Your 100 watt equivalent LED light bulb, which is just new on the market from Cree, C-R-E-E, Cree light bulbs, 100 watt light bulb will cost you $15.

Now the question is, how long would it take you to get your money back on this? And I did the calculation some time ago. If you had a 60 watt incandescent light bulb, you left it on all the time, 24 hours a day. And then you had a 60 watt equivalent light bulb that was compact fluorescent, how long would it take you to get your money back?

If you ran them both side by side, 24 hours a day? Well, these 60 watt compact fluorescent light bulbs were going for about $2.50 when you were buying like a pack or 12 of them. The answer to that question is, with 10 cents per kilowatt hour electricity, which is normal in the United States, California, Seattle, they even inflated theirs through taxes to 25 cents a kilowatt hour.

So for a normal kilowatt hour rate for the United States, it would take two weeks of 24 hours a day for that $2.50 compact fluorescent light bulb to pay for itself. So if you have a place where you want that 100 watt bright light bulb, and you're paying $15 for the LED light bulb, rest assured, you're going to get your money back in less than a year.

And then you're not going to have to replace it, because the LED light bulb is literally going to last upwards to 20 years. So that's pretty compelling. So it sounds like of all the places to start, light bulbs would be one of the simplest places to move the needle as far as energy use.

It would be the easiest place to move the needle as far as the energy goes. And the LED bulbs are a little bit slightly more efficient. They say they're 25% more efficient than the compact fluorescents. So the better the light bulb, the less heat it is going to be putting out into that room, which means the less heat the air conditioner is going to be moving, which means the lower your electric bill.

So you're going to save money on electricity on the bulb, and you're going to save money on electricity when it comes to air conditioning if you're in an air conditioning dominant environment like you are in Florida. Now if I'm in a cold dominated environment, is that an efficient source of heat as far as to accomplish both things?

Would that decision be different if I'm in northern Canada? What did we cover earlier? What's the most expensive form of heat? Electric. There you go. That's your answer. So it's like a little electric heater. And if you got an incandescent bulb there, yeah, it's going to be offsetting your heat, but it's going to be heating at the same cost of electricity.

So if you had electric heat up in the Midwest or the northern portions of the climate, it wouldn't matter if you left your incandescent bulb on or not as a source of heat, because it would only be heating your house with electricity. But up in the Midwest and in the North, all the homes have propane or natural gas, so that is a moot point to begin with.

Got it. Now there's one other thing we should cover while we're talking about houses. Heat pumps. Explain. A heat pump is popular in the southern United States pretty much. And what it is, any air conditioner can become a heater. And what happens in air conditioning mode, it's moving heat from the inside of the house to the outside of the house.

So the evaporator is inside the house where everything gets cold and the condenser outside gets warm. Well, you reverse the pump and do a few other things, and it's wintertime, the condenser on the outside of the house will get cold. So if it's 40 degrees outside, it's going to be 20 degrees on the condenser.

It's going to be moving heat to the evaporator in your furnace, and you're going to be running the furnace, and it's going to be blowing hot air through the house. That is a heat pump. And they generally are more complicated than what I just described, and they cost a lot of money.

I'm talking $15,000 for a heat pump. But people say, "Oh, I get my money back on them and everything else." Well, a lot of people get suckered into these things. And briefly, there's three main types. There's the air-to-air heat pump that I just described, which is your box sitting outside.

Those are very low in efficiency. There is the ground loop one, where they dig four feet down. Have you ever seen this? And they bury 200 feet of tubing around your yard. I've heard of it. So what they're doing is they're using the ground heat as a source of heat and cooling for your heat pump.

So depending on where I'm at, the ground temperature is always 65 degrees Fahrenheit, four feet. So the heat pump in the wintertime is taking the 65 degree temperature and it's compressing it, and it's making it 95 degrees to heat your house to 75 degrees. And in the summertime, it's taking that 65 degrees, making it cooler down to 50 degrees, and it's using that to cool your house.

So it's pumping the heat from the earth to the house, and it's pumping the heat from the house into the earth, depending upon the time of year. Now both these are expensive, and the ground loop is better than the air to air one, but the ground loop one sucks compared to a well one.

If you got well water on your property, you can use this as fluid to fluid to heat exchange. It's as good as it gets. Air to air, air is an insulator. It's very bad. Buried loop in the ground, you're conducting the heat between a pipe with air in it and the ground.

Not a good heat conductor, but it does conduct. When you got well water, you got well water coming up, going into your heat exchanger for your heat pump, you got really good heat conduction from one side of the heater to the other side of the heater. And this becomes very efficient.

This is the most efficient type of heat pump, and it's the only type of heat pump I'd recommend someone getting is if you have ground water or you got like a big pond on your property, several acre pond, then using a water loop or a water up and down, you have a well going up, you have a well going down.

I've even seen people do it with just a well up. They got like a gallon per minute of water spilling out onto the grass from their well, no big deal. Then you can get into a savings, especially if you're in the south because you're dominated by cooling. Heat pumps, although they are installed in the north, they don't work anywhere as near as good because the ground temperature is so much lower and the outside air temperatures are so much colder.

So if you're looking at a heat pump and you think, oh, you're a salesman telling you all these great numbers, you look at the numbers real carefully and look at your initial cost expenditure versus your estimated return on investment because they generally are not going to be a good investment for you.

Many times if you got natural gas, it'll never beat it. Natural gas will always win. It might compete with propane. It definitely is a lot better than straight electric. But that's the story on that. There's one other thing we should cover, that's solar panels. Yes. That was actually what my last question was going to be, is on the creating energy side, then you say, okay, we've conserved, now can I create?

And for the same reason why I'm attracted to why I described the scenario I described about house, I'm attracted to the idea of if I could create the energy and just buy the equipment and then provide that energy for myself going forward, that would eliminate the inflation of the bill over time.

How would I figure out if that were smart to do or not? It's not smart to do. Dream on. You're going to make some of my listeners very unhappy because I interviewed Jacob Lundfisker who wrote the book Early Retirement Extreme, and he said solar panels stink. And I had at least one comment on the post from people saying, well, I figured it, I did it and I had a break even in five years due to my, in my situation, maybe due to the tax incentive or something.

So why do you say that? Well, first of all, these are called grid-tie solar panels. So they're up on your roof, they're tied to the grid, and when your power fails, they will do nothing for your house. You got no battery system, you got no backup system, they will not power your house, they have to power the grid, they use the grid as the battery.

So you're putting them up there for economic purposes only. Now, some socialist states, they are taking your money and my money, they're stealing it from us, and they're handing it to these people who are putting solar up in terms of rebates. And that's lowering their cost to put up their solar panels.

Then, they've taken a knife and put it into the back or held it to the neck of the utility, and saying, instead of paying these people a deferred rate of 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour, which is the deferred rate is the cost of electricity they'll have to pay for their next utility plant, they're forcing them to pay you 10 cents per kilowatt hour, in some cases 20 cents per kilowatt hour because of your solar, you're selling back solar energy.

Now, when you use these falsely inflated numbers that are done by coercion and corruption, your return on investment might be 5 to 8 years on the system. However, if you look on CNBC, I just sent an article to a friend of mine who just asked me the same question, utilities are saying to government, this is not fair that you are making us pay these people this exorbitant amount of money because it only costs us 2.8 cents to make it and you're making us pay them 20 cents per kilowatt hour.

We want to control the rates and we want the rates to go lower. So, all great, you've just taken $40,000 of your life savings, installed solar panels on your house, and you've gotten your rebate, and now you're getting your monthly check from the utility company, and halfway through your return on investment, the law changes, the rug is pulled out from underneath you, and you're sitting there with that feeling in your stomach like you're ready to puke.

Solar panels are the most expensive form of electricity you will ever find. Even with the recent decreases in cost, as I understand it? Yep, it takes over 30 years. Solar panels are made with high temperature electricity. You grow the silicon, and it's done with very pure heat, which is high temperature electric heat, and then the wafers are sliced, the wafers are doped, and they're turned into solar panels.

So, your solar panels are made with inexpensive nuclear electricity in Japan and moved over here, and you put them out in the sunshine, and it will take over 30 years of Arizona sunshine in August at noon, with the panel pointed directly at the sun, for it to output the same amount of electricity that it took to make the panel.

Really? So, solar panels are for energy independence. If you want to be off the grid, if you want to be disconnected from the man, if you want to be your own power company, solar panels will work for you. However, be it known, you are paying the highest price there is for electricity.

But you own it. It's yours. No one's going to take it away from you. When everyone else is black, you're not going to be black. You're going to have lights on in your house and everything else. But keep in mind, generally you don't size the solar panels to the house.

You size the house to the solar panels that you purchase. So, you're not going to have your whole house AC system running, because that is like 5 kilowatt hours, 5 kilowatts of electricity at 240 volts. And that's an awful lot of panels being installed over an awful lot of surface area.

So, you just aren't going to have it the way you think you're going to have it. You're going to be living like the clamp-its. You're going to have to buy a very efficient refrigerator. One of the brands is called Sunfrost. You may not even have a freezer. You're going to have all LED lighting throughout the house.

And even then, you're going to turn them on and off when you're not using them. You're not going to have a 70-inch TV screen going, maybe not even a 42-inch. You're going to be real miserly with all of your energy usage. You're going to have a battery bank. You've got to monitor your battery bank and have a computer on it and know how many times you've discharged it to 50% depth of discharge, how many times you've gone down to 80.

Because discharging a battery actually hurts the battery. And batteries are rated on the number of discharges they can take to a certain depth of discharge. So, is it better if I have the opportunity to always keep my cell phone plugged in? Will that make the battery last longer? Yes.

Okay. I've always wondered about that, and I've never known how to figure out the answer. Okay. So, keep going. Sorry, I interrupted you. So, you're going to become a little guru on your solar power independent system, and you're going to learn all about batteries and charging and electrolytes and watering the batteries and your inverter and what you're running in your house.

And you'll be yelling at your kids saying, "Turn off that light!" and everything else. So, you're just not going to put solar panels up on your house and expect to live the same way that you are living right now. That embedded energy thing is interesting. I'll have to research that more.

I'm a total novice when it comes to this area, but I'm generally skeptical of most of what I read. I'll give you an example. I think recycling programs are extremely stupid in the way that they're run. Every Monday morning, the recycling truck comes down my road, and I look at this plastic bin of plastic that it picks up.

My wife and I dutifully put our little blue bin in, and we put the stuff in. I think, "How is this even relevant at all to make a difference?" Recycling is me using my milk container for another purpose. That makes sense to me. The rest of this just seems like a bunch of crap.

Why can't you just make the package, create the products and don't surround them with so much plastic? If I could buy it without the plastic and get cardboard that I could recycle in my backyard, that would be much more... I would do that. I look at these things, and half of them don't make sense.

The solar thing bothers me, because I don't understand it very well. But if you tell me that it takes 30 years to get the embedded energy out, then how is it even a gain? From an environmental perspective, if I've got so much embedded energy in it that I've got to get out, it's like the whole thing with buying a new hybrid car so that it's energy efficient.

No, drive the old one that was already made and just drive it more carefully. If you need a new car, fine, go with one that's more efficient. That's totally different. But don't go out and do something new to get something better. Am I right? Am I wacky in that thinking?

I don't have the engineering background. Recycling is done for only one reason. It makes the waste management company money. That's the only reason they do it, is because they make money off of it. You're going to have a war on your hand with that one. But I'm inclined to agree with you, just because it doesn't make sense to me when this guy with his big diesel truck goes...

He's got to be paid a salary of, what, $30,000, $35,000 bucks a year, I don't know, every year to go pick up this blue bin. And I think, "How on earth can you get any energy out of this? It doesn't make sense." Well, the energy is already in the plastic.

And it takes one-tenth of the energy to recycle the plastic as it does to make new plastic. And plastic is an extremely recyclable material. Steel is almost 100% recycled. Copper is like 80 or 90% recycled. Those are very, very recyclable items. And plastic recycles very well. Indeed, when you're putting it in the blue bin, or in our case, the blue garbage can, you're saving them on the sorting of it.

They no longer have to sort it from the trash. All they have to do is separate the different types of plastic. There's like 10 different types of plastics you're throwing out. High-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate. So they just have to separate those out and put those into different bins back at the recycling center.

Then those can be chopped up and those plastics can be resold, cleaned up, and reused. But it's only being done for one reason, and that's because waste management, or whoever your company is, they make money on it. They sell it. And it makes people feel good. And I just say, eliminate the whole thing.

My wife and I, we eat a lot of eggs. We mainly shop at Publix, although there is not a single carton of eggs that I can buy that has a cardboard container. And I think, how ridiculous to make an egg container out of plastic when I can't reuse it in any way.

And why can't, when a cardboard one seems to work just as well to me, and then I can put that out in my garden and mulch my flowers with it and take care of my trash myself. Because styrofoam containers can be made at the egg location. Is that what it is?

You bring in a big truck full of polystyrene beads, which are like the size of BBs, and then they're inflated with steam and pressure, and it creates the carton right then and there on the location. They don't have to bring in, your volume is going ten to one. One is being brought in, and ten volume is going out because it's inflated.

If you brought in all the paper to make paper egg cartons, you're bringing in a volume of one for a volume of one going out. Or you're bringing in the cartons pre-made and everything else. And think of the number of eggs that they're handling and everything else. It makes more economic sense for them to do that type of cartoning at that location because it's under their own control.

And think of how expensive it would be to bring in a semi-truck full of styrofoam egg cartons, rather than just making them on that site, on that location. But if we're going to subsidize it, we should subsidize it in that way. So subsidize that truck going there with that.

You make the cardboard out of paper. Paper is the ultimate new renewable resource. You're growing trees. Everyone says that's what you want to do. You were supposed to be growing trees. What eliminates carbon dioxide in the atmosphere better than anything else is the trees. So why do we subsidize...

I don't understand the... I apologize. I'm displaying my ignorance. It's just so much doesn't make sense and I can't figure out how to get a straight answer from the people that know about this stuff. Well, first of all, there's no such thing as man-made global warming. The science is clear.

The sun's output is up. What drives everything on this planet? The sun. The sun's output is up, so our temperature is up. It's not because of our CO2. That's, again, just guilt motivation. Throw yourself on your sword. Give money. Be green. Do this. Do that. Change industries all over this incredible fallacy that's being perpetrated upon us.

So, yeah, these trees... you know what eats carbon dioxide is crops. Because of our CO2 increase, we are actually having more and better crops grown every year because it's like, what happens if you eat two helpings of steak every day? You're going to get fat. What happens when you have more carbon dioxide?

Every carbon atom in you, you're organic, so you're pretty much C6H10O5 out of your atoms in your body. Organic cellulose. So, you know where all that carbon comes from that is the building block of your body that gives you structure? Where all that comes from? That all comes from carbon dioxide in the air.

That's the only source. Carbon dioxide in the air through photosynthesis is what grows plants. It's what makes the carbon in the plant that gives it its structure for its organic molecules that makes it grow. Now, when the cow... now, you eat your lettuce, you're eating that plant and you're getting its carbon.

When you have a cow that eats the grass that was grown by the carbon dioxide, and then you eat the cow, you're getting the carbon from the cow. But the root source of every piece of carbon that is grown in this world is carbon dioxide. Someday we're going to have to do another show and you can be my back pocket scientist because science is my weak subject.

I went through all the science classes and the standard kind of curriculum, but I just didn't enjoy them. And now I wish I had spent more time studying it because I often find myself unable to actually translate things very well. And so I have to rely on what I can look at, which is kind of human behavior a little bit, and then I use that.

But, I mean, there's just so much it doesn't seem to make sense when I look at it. And you make good points. Maybe we'll do that another time. Yeah, think about it. Everything you're breathing right now builds the world. If you didn't mine it from the ground, then it was made with carbon dioxide that you're breathing out right now.

Interesting. I've never thought about it in that way. That's a hell of a statement. Yeah. I've never thought about it in that way. That cardboard box your eggs came in was made with carbon dioxide from the air. What a fun thing to think about. Wow. The paper you're writing on, the plastic in your computer was not, but the paper you're writing on was.

The toilet paper you wipe your rear end with, that comes from carbon dioxide. It comes from trees. I mean, when you start looking at the tree that all the science comes from, it's just absolutely fascinating. It puts things in perspective and makes you do exactly what you did. You say, "Wow.

I didn't realize that. I didn't think about that." Too often, these environmentalists and people of any political motivation, they want you to look at an issue through a toilet paper tube and only see that issue. They don't want you to see the big picture and the whole picture. They don't think you're intelligent enough to understand the whole operating system that's going on, that's affecting the issue.

They just want you to look at it through this one narrow point, because they think that that's all they can sell you. That's all that you can digest. It's the same in all of our society. If I do that with finance, I can bamboozle anybody in the world on anything if I just focus on one specific issue.

I know my finance, and so you give me any product. I can make it sound like it's going to fit somebody's situation, or I can make it sound like it's the worst thing in the world, all based upon how I present the information. It's not an ethical way to approach it.

Those of us who know our subjects, our job is to teach people how to think about things in the aggregate and help people build a holistic framework so that then they can look at the individual issue and say, "Here's what it is." But it's like everything in our society is so compartmentalized and segmented, and people feel like they need an expert.

Well, they do, because they're taught that nothing is connected, and I see everything as connected. It's all connected. It is. Thank you for coming on today. I've really enjoyed this. I do want to real quick give a plug. You who created a resource that is one of the most valuable resources that I've sent to many people here in hurricane country, you have a family of class on family preparedness, and you've done a lot of work.

I've listened to all of your shows. I think you've done 10 or 15 shows or something with Jack Spierko over on his show, The Survival Podcast, on energy, on home energy. I have found the work that you've created to be incredibly useful, and especially your emergency preparedness class as far as just figuring out how do I prepare my family for an intelligent—for us, it's hurricane season.

How do I prepare for hurricane season? For you guys, maybe it's ice or tornado season or whatever you deal with up there. Where can people go if they want to read more of your stuff? Plug your websites and your preparedness class and make sure people can find out more information.

Okay. In my family class, I will teach you everything you could possibly want to know about food and water. I'm not going to tell you to go out and buy MREs or buy freeze-dried food. Everything in my class is around white flour, oil, sugar, water. I will have you making emergency bread, white flour tortillas, in 30 seconds.

And doughnuts. I made the doughnuts. And doughnuts. I have this class and people go, "Okay, emergency food time." They go, "Okay, what are we going to eat?" I go, "Doughnuts." "No, no, an emergency. What are we really going to eat?" "Doughnuts." And they're going, "Yay!" I'm going to say, cooking in oil is a very fast way of cooking.

You're taking heat in the form of a flame, you're putting it in a pot, it's going into oil, and your food is going directly into that oil. So it's getting cooked very quickly and very fast because the oil is in contact with it. And I take these recipes for Indian fry bread and naan and everything else, and they're just simple white flour recipes, and I show you how to put it on top of a skillet and cook it that way and eat it, or I show you how to put it into the hot oil and fry it, and it comes out real delicious.

Put a little cinnamon and sugar on it, and you're going to be loving it. And people go, "What about nutrition and everything? It's not nutritious." And my response to them is, "Shut up and take a multivitamin. One penny a day multivitamin will give you all of the nutrition you want." When you're in a disaster, you need calories.

You need calories to walk. You need calories to lift up your destroyed house and start rebuilding it. You need calories to find other people, and you need calories to keep warm or to keep cool. You need calories in a disaster. And I address that real intelligently in the family class.

Then I have how to power your house from your car, which is so simple. You take an inverter, you plug it into your car. I go over all the details of what the car can and cannot power inside your house. Will it do your refrigerator? Will it do your freezer?

I have another class on how to keep your refrigerator and freezer cool with and without electricity. I tell you very intelligent things you can do before a disaster, like with hurricanes three days out. I tell you how you put stuff in your freezer that will keep it cool, so you don't have to worry about it that long.

I have a class on how to buy a generator. There's seven main types of generators out there. I cover each one, so you can make a decision on which one you want. I tell you how to hook up your generator to your house, both the illegal and the legal ways, the safe and the unsafe ways.

That way, if your neighbor goes, "Hey, George! I got my generator running over here. You want some power? I can plug this into your dryer outlet, and your house will be powered." Well, you'll know right away that that's called a suicide cable, and you'll know what to do if you want to plug your house into your neighbor's generator to do that.

You might say, "No, that's too dangerous for me. I don't want to do that." Or you might have a mother-in-law with you who has oxygen that runs off an oxygen pump that runs off electricity. You might be real desperate for electricity. "Yeah, I'm going to do that. I'm going to take that risk.

I know to turn off the main breakers, turn off the generator, plug everything in, and then turn on the generator." I explain that to you so you're enabled intellectually to make those decisions. I have my battery bank classes, how to go buy a marine battery or golf cart batteries and then put them in your house so when the power fails, you got your own little power station there.

It'll power all your electronics and everything for as long as you want. I show you how to recharge this off of your car. I show you how to recharge this off of a generator. I even begrudgingly show you how to re-power this off of solar panels. My take on solar panels is you should never buy a solar panel until you have at least three months of food and water storage.

Because what's the purpose of having a solar panel that will power your phone for 50 years and you only got five days worth of food and water. Your money is much better spent on the food and water. You can power your house for about two months plus off of your car with stored gasoline, which leads to another class I have called fuel and fuel storage.

I show you how to fill up 15-gallon HDPE food-grade containers with gasoline and store them. They're stored real safe and not smelly and everything else rather than using those horrible 5-gallon gasoline containers. I have a lot more. I have a good 12 classes up there. You can find them all at Stephen1234.com.

That's www.steven1234.com. It's all free. You can just go up there and with one click you can listen to any of the classes. Stephen1234 will lead you to solar1234 and battery1234. First Aid1234. I got a great first aid course that the Red Cross would never ever dare give you. It will lead you to radios1234.

It's everything about communications, scanners, CVs, ham radio, GMRS, FRS, anything that was a radio, AMF from shortwave. It teaches you everything that you could ever possibly want to know about radios. Stephen1234.com is the hub to all the other 1234 websites. Up there I got all the people send me the best comments and the nicest endorsements and I put those up on Stephen1234.

You can see right then and there what other people have said about the classes and stuff that I've done and hopefully get you excited and enabled and listening to them. Hopefully it will be of great assistance to you both in your financial future and in your disaster future. Let's face it, an ounce of prevention, a few dollars in disaster prevention can save you thousands of dollars when a disaster comes by.

I can literally make the difference. With some of my power classes and how to power your house from a car, I can make your house very livable in a complete blackout and you'll be able to tolerate it for a couple weeks easily. Now what would a couple weeks in a hotel a hundred miles away from you cost?

It's massive. Yeah, at least a hundred dollars a day. So there's $1400 to $2000 in saved money for less than $100 spent at home. Right. I mean I've been, I got my ham radio license when I think I was, before I was a teenager or something like I was 12 and so ever since then, so for I said almost 20 years, almost 20 years, I was a member of Aries and I've been through the hurricanes and just the ability to be at home after the, you know, maybe you got to evacuate for a storm, but just the ability to stay at home and not have to, you know, and you can't stay at home unless you have an ability to, you know, stay a little cool and have some light.

It just is not livable in Florida and it's not livable anywhere even if you don't have a way to stay cool or stay warm and have some food. And the thing that I'll say about your stuff, and I just want to thank you for it, is that it is practical, it's doable, it's cheap, and it's easy.

And so every time I see something, whether it's, you know, as mundane as, okay, it's, you know, it's June, it's time for hurricane season, or as extreme as, you know, what's going on right now as we record this on October 17th, you know, we're dealing with Ebola and for some reason it's just like massive news everywhere.

That can strike just like every single thing. You're dealing not necessarily with facts, you're dealing with an emotion, and if this thing is not quieted down, it could be stupid. And so when someone's worried about it, though, if they figure out, okay, I've got to go buy 800 pounds of wheat that I don't know what to do with versus Stephen Harris says, "Go buy some flour, some sugar, and some oil." And when I first heard that class, I went straight to the grocery store, I bought white flour, sugar, and oil, and I went home and made donuts for my family.

And it works. And you say, "Okay, well, I can at least have a plan B in case this hysteria, you know, takes off." And so it works. So thank you for putting the work into those shows, and I'd encourage people, go to Stephen1234 and check them all out. They're all worth listening to.

And if there's a pandemic, whether it's Ebola, bird flu, SARS, something's going to come along and be widespread in the United States at some point. The best way to catch it is not to be around anyone who's got it. So if you've got enough food to stay in your house for a month or two, and just knock at, if someone knocks at the door, you go to the door and go, "Uh-uh, you can't come in, sorry.

I'm not letting you in because I don't want to be exposed." That is something that you can do if you are prepared, and it'll keep you prepared from all of the disasters, all of the pandemics, because you don't have to go out and leave. You don't have to go out to the grocery store.

You don't have to get a grocery cart that 100 other people have touched. You don't have to go pick up food and packages that other people had to handle and touch to put them there. You don't have to go use the ATM that absolutely everyone has used at the checkout.

You don't have to use the pen that everyone has used to sign for your credit card on a little electronic screen. And you don't get exposed to all those people around you. You don't have to have masks and goggles and everything on you to do that, because you got your food and your water and your power at home.

It's under your own control, therefore you own it, and therefore you can exercise it at your free will without the permission from anyone, and you are prepared and you are a heck of a lot safer. Right. And this is core to every bit of financial planning, whether it's core.

It's absolutely core, and it's what allows people to be free-thinking if you're not dependent on other people and you can look and care for yourself. Steven, thank you for coming on. I have really enjoyed this and I think we've created a valuable resource. I appreciate your time and I appreciate your being willing to come on the show.

Well, thanks, Joshua. It was a pleasure being here. And that's the interview. Told you it'd be fun. And hopefully that's a good start. I know this is an area where I have very little background in. I have very little experience, so I need to really seek out people who know what they're doing and seek out experts on the subject.

And I feel like I've got a better game plan as I get started on my renovations. We're going into the cool season here in South Florida, so now is the time where I think I'll be able to get some better deals on various aspects of saving money on insulation.

Real quick, I want to give one plug for the emergency preparedness information that Steve went over, which you can find all of this at, I think it said steven1234.com. Make sure you go and check out his site, steven1234.com. Steve has really done an amazing job with extremely practical and easily implementable emergency preparedness, family emergency preparedness from that perspective.

I have sent his resources to many people as being extremely practical. I live in hurricane country, some of you live in earthquake country, some of you live in winter ice storm country. And the trouble when you start getting into thinking how can I prepare my family for some sort of natural disaster, some sort of weather event, some sort of power outage, things like that, it can be very overwhelming because there's so much information out there that you could tackle.

You've got everything from the advice of have a flashlight in your house to everything to here's how to survive the end of the world as we know it for the next 10 years and live off the grid and build a battle hardened castle. And it's really overwhelming when you get into that.

And the challenge is that if you're just starting to figure out how to build out an emergency preparedness plan for yourself, you've got to do it in a practical, low cost way that is focusing on what actually matters first. You don't immediately, I mean, you don't go out and start buying guns and bullets when what you really need is a flashlight and some rechargeable batteries.

Steve's resources, which you can find them all at steven1234. The resources that he has put together are so practical and they are awesome. Everything works, everything is cheap, and it's incredibly detailed. He has incredibly detailed explanations. Start with his family emergency preparedness class. I'll put a direct link to that.

Start with that. It's about a two hour class that he delivered to, I think it was a CERT group. CERT stands for Civil Emergency Response Team, which is a response team that your local county or municipal government may have. It's a volunteer association. I haven't been involved with CERT myself personally.

I've always been involved on the communication side with amateur radio and all that and past work. But CERT is just a volunteer aspect. But he was doing a CERT training. And you will find in that training the cheapest, most straightforward, practical advice on how to prepare your family in case of a tornado or hurricane, an ice storm, something like that.

That moves on to, then the next place you'll want to go is, well, you'll want to start at steven1234. That will send you over to his site called solar1234. And on that site, he has listed on there seven free classes. And there is an incredible amount of information there.

He has a class called How to Power Your House from Your Car, which he mentioned. That's the key place to start if you don't want to have a big, noisy generator. You already have one. It's sitting in your driveway. And he gives specific instructions for how you can get a cheap inverter and you can use your car to run your refrigerator and your freezer.

The coolest thing about it is I watched, he has testimonials on his site of when Hurricane Sandy was coming toward New York City. And there's millions of people that are going to be affected. You could go on, if you knew a hurricane were coming to your area, you could go on solar1234, follow his recommendations, order everything for next day delivery from Amazon, spend 100 or 200 bucks, and you would be far ahead of anything else, as far as, of everybody else, as far as being able to stay in your house.

And this is an incredibly, incredibly important aspect of financial preparedness. Because as he mentioned toward the end of the show, if you can save money on not having to evacuate your family for two weeks because there's a hurricane coming. Now again, there's a category five direct hit, get out.

You know, have some common sense. But I've been through a bunch of these things. And if you don't have the ability to live comfortably for a week or two without power in Florida, that's expensive. So it's a very important aspect of financial preparedness, of financial planning, is just some basic, straightforward family preparedness.

This is one of those areas, just like getting your will established and just like buying life insurance. This is one of those areas where we're all told constantly to take care of things. And go to ready.gov is the government website. Your state, your county, all of this has their own website.

But you still see that in our society, when there's a storm coming, the gas lines get long, the shelves empty out. Now is the time to do it before the storm comes. So I always, you know, I've said in a recent show, I did a show on preparedness as a mindset.

When we get to the end of hurricane season, which is what's coming up for us, then that's the time to sit down and say, "Okay, how did everything go this season? Do I need to do anything different?" I had a bit of an advantage that I was paying attention to that from a very young age because I always enjoyed being involved in emergency response and preparedness from the communications aspect as a hobby when I was younger.

And so that helped a lot. But I've noticed that in many ways, financial planning, good financial planning and financial preparedness is very much about simply avoiding the big mistakes. So I want to really commend his emergency preparedness resources to you. He's done a bunch of shows on that and he has some awesome information there and awesome classes.

So you'll find all that at Steven1234. I encourage you to start there with your own personal emergency preparedness information. A little bit different than what we're talking about energy savings, but I encourage you to start there. That's it for today's show. I know that outro was a little bit long, but I wanted to share that resource with you and the best way to do it was in the context of what Steve has already created.

I'd love to hear about any projects that you've done. I want this show to be a really great mix of the practical and I want to have a lot of practical, actionable information. Concept theory is valuable in many aspects, but remember concept and theory is only part of it and practical application is another part of it.

So in my goal of creating a show that you can come back to every single day, I don't want to overwhelm you with a bunch of academic theory every day. I want there to be something that will go between academic theory and very practical application. So I'm going to be out shopping for a water heater because I need to get one to swap out my homeowner's insurance.

I got to get a new one. So now I have a better place to start and that helped me a lot. Maybe that will help you as well. If you know of people like Stephen Harris that you think would be an excellent source of information that would have practical information, I would love to get that resource from you.

I'd really love to hear from you about that. You all can help me so much. I've had a number of people as guests recommended from the show. I have plenty of people on my list, but as the show has been growing and as the audience has been growing, I would ask you for your help.

If you know of somebody that you think would be an interesting guest that would have some valuable information, please send me an email about them and I'll contact them or if they're a friend of yours, ask them to get in touch with me because I want to make sure that this show is packed with value for you every single day.

So that's it for today's show. I hope you enjoyed that. Make sure if you're not subscribed to the show, make sure you subscribe in iTunes or on Stitcher. Those are probably the two easiest apps to use or whatever app it is that you use. We'd love to have your reviews on Stitcher.

If you're a Stitcher listener, we haven't been getting many reviews of the show there. I would love to ask you to go to Stitcher and leave a review on the show. That would mean the world to me. Thanks everybody. Have a great Tuesday. With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices and with a money back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite.

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