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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Today is Monday, December 22, 2014. And today I have a great interview show for you with Ben Falk from Vermont. Ben is a really great guy. He runs a planning firm called Whole Systems Design.

And he is involved in fairly comprehensive, I would call him a permaculture designer, but if you're scared off by that word, just call him basically a comprehensive designer, where he brings a comprehensive perspective about designing the needs for human habitat into our current context. Ben has written a book on the subject, and it's one of the most beautiful, well-integrated books that I've ever read.

I've looked for people to bring on the show who are living more independent, self-sufficient lifestyles, and Ben is one of those people that I think is a really great example of how to do this in a modern context and to integrate all of the great things about the current, highly technological world that we live in, but also to benefit from some of the old world technology and benefits that we simply don't probably respect very much today.

It's a really great show. We go over a comprehensive perspective on designing for heat, for housing, for food, and also a little bit of more, I guess, intellectual theory, a little bit of theory behind design. And we also talk about Ben's story. So I hope you enjoy this interview.

I'm going to skip coming back at the end with any closing notes, so the interview will simply end. If you'd like to reach me, my email address is joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I thank you, each and every one of you who gets in touch with me. Twitter @radicalpf, Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Thank you to those of you who have joined the Irregulars program.

As I'm releasing these shows while I am away, I am working hard on increasing the bonus content for you guys in the Irregulars program and also on really building that value. So I'm working hard at that while I'm away this week, and I'll be back on January the 5th with some, with the normal, regular content of the show.

Enjoy. So Ben, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. Thanks a lot. It's great to be here. I've brought you on to talk about design and design from a more integrated holistic perspective. And as a beginning point, I think the name of your company is a perfect place to start.

Your company is called Whole Systems Design. So let's kick off with that. What does Whole Systems Design mean and what do you do as a firm? Sure. Well, to me, Whole Systems Design is, well, just the term Whole Systems is, denotes the idea that we're thinking about and hopefully, that we're thinking about the whole that we're working with, that we're thinking about all parts of a set of features and processes, a set of conditions that are interrelated, right?

So that's a system. And since we're saying Whole Systems Design, design denotes an idea of intending something and responding to something, a challenge, a solution to a challenge in very simple terms. So Whole Systems Design is just the name that I put to this idea when I was in college.

I was working as a carpenter and a builder and saw firsthand a lot of, and had before that, really for my whole life, but especially more acutely when I was building houses in college, many responses, many design responses that were lacking, very severely lacking because specialists were involved throughout the process and everyone was looking at their little piece of the elephant.

And as the adage goes, no one really realized they were looking at an elephant. They were just looking at one part of this huge beast and doing the one part to their best ability. And sometimes even that one part really well, whether it's the architect or the guy pouring the foundation or the people putting up the timber frame, which was the part of it that I often worked on.

But the whole, the result of the whole process and the net result was, at best, usually very, very weak and incompetent and inadequate to solve the challenges of the site or of the people living in the home or usually both. What's interesting to me is that you came at it from the perspective, it sounds like, of construction and architecture.

And I came at it from the perspective of financial planning, because I noticed the same thing in financial planning, where oftentimes in the field of financial planning, there are many specialists and people are thinking that they're looking for a specialized answer. And there is a need for specialists who are experts, who have a deep level of expertise in an area.

But what happens if you only go to a specialist, you only get that specialist's answer. It seems to me, it's more likely that if you go to a surgeon, that the surgeon is going to recommend surgery than that somebody who might be a natural, I don't know what the term is, but a naturopathic physician.

And so it's not that there's, if you have a need for surgery, you need a surgeon who has an in-depth level of knowledge. But in our society, we seem to have lost much of the ability to integrate different aspects of design and to essentially meeting our needs and to bring them together in a holistic way.

Yeah, just to tag onto that, I think that's absolutely right on. I think it really emerges more often than not from failing to be able to ask the right questions and ask the, you know, come at it from a broad picture. Like you said, if you're a surgeon, you know, your answer to it is how do we do surgery?

Or if you're, you know, you're someone who, you know, subscribes, you know, supplements, that's the answers within what supplements are best. But we tend to fail to ask, to kind of back up and ask the most broad, kind of most holistic questions about why, you know, why is the problem what it is to begin with?

And that's exactly, I think, where we'll, where we find the most effective answers, which is usually requires many specialists to come up with that, that holistic answer, not just one. So share with me your career path. You start noticing these things at working as a builder. How did you get from where you were then to where you are now working as a designer of human habitats?

Sure. Well, I think first for me, it's rooted in, you know, I don't know, at some point growing up, maybe middle school or high school, I started to be able to, to recognize it, just a recognition that there's just so much failure in the world around us. There's so much inadequate and just poor response to a problem that, that, you know, around me, but I grew up in the suburbs and I just, just see this everywhere, whether it was just, you know, in roads or, or buildings certainly, or, or organizations.

And so that was kind of the formative experience was kind of witnessing, you know, failed responses to challenges. And then, yeah, I got to college and I think for me, what was probably the first real series of events was meeting Dr. John Todd, who's a father of modern day ecological design is that keep credit as the inventor of the living machine, you know, biological way to treat wastewater, just, you know, a forerunner in imitating how nature works really, you know, an early, early pioneering, you know, by a near and really defining that field.

So I was lucky he was teaching at the university of Vermont where I was in school. And I was actually thinking about quitting and going to be a rock climbing bum. I did for a little while, cause that's what I liked to do a lot more than, you know, what I've studied in college.

It wasn't very compelling for me. And then I took his course and I realized that there was actually a hands-on creative response to problems that could be very direct and we could do ourselves. And we didn't, if we wanted to solve big problems or even small problems, we didn't have to, you know, petition someone to do it.

We didn't have to get a politician to do something for us necessarily. We could actually kind of take on a problem directly and really change the rules of the game and address a problem through, you know, thinking, thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and then making that solution, actually building it with our own hands like he did with the living machine.

So that I think kicked me off and more formally in the direction that I've been on ever since, which is just to, if I see something wrong, you know, make a different way as Buckminster Fuller is often quoted, you know, don't, something to the effect, I'm sure I'll butcher it right now, but you know, there's no resisting, you know, fighting something that's wrong.

You make a different system that makes the old system that you don't like obsolete, you know, don't just try to put up walls and resist something you don't like, but make something else instead. And so I think that's what, I guess what my whole life has been becoming for the last 15 to 20 years.

And my work is just an organic outgrowth of that lifestyle. And we now work for people who want to kind of, I guess, undertake those same, that same approach to some extent or similar approaches themselves in their own life. And they're often coming from very different backgrounds than I came from, for sure.

So how do you label yourself? So do you call yourself a designer, a permaculture designer, a human habitat system designer? Do you have a label that you apply to yourself? Yeah. I, you know, I have called myself, you know, a land designer or, you know, human habitat system designer.

That's a little bit of a mouthful, so I don't really use that. But that is really what we're getting at is a whole, you know, the idea of my business and of, I think, my lifestyle is whole human habitats. You know, we're looking at all, you know, we're not going to shy away from anything that's involved with keeping us alive here and having a good life.

So anything that's in that purview, let's think about those systems, those needs, and let's try to meet needs in a hopefully very non-detrimental way and as much as possible in a regenerative and enhancing way. So, you know, yeah, it's a bit beyond obviously what most architects or what any architect tends to do or what a just a landscape architect tends to do or I don't know, there's no, there's really no good term, but I think more and more what we're doing and I think what a lot of us are doing in the permaculture space is just, it's really about lifestyle redesign.

I mean, I think I keep coming to the word lifestyle more and more in the last handful of years when I think about my own work, when I sit down with clients and I sometimes have a kind of clarifying moment of how we're really helping people we work with, I realize it's often, it's most often a lifestyle thing.

It's rooted in people adjusting their lifestyles and it's also all about empowerment. So I think more and more, I don't have a good label, but it's about, it's a, you know, a personal empowerment consultant to fix problems in your own life and hopefully in the landscape and the living world around you.

You know, that's kind of a long, a long, I don't know if they all have capitals at the beginning or what, but that's, that's, that's kind of what it's about for us. I'm glad you put the label lifestyle design onto that. That label has been popularized among the, some of the online world of young men and women working to essentially create a business to, to fund their lifestyle with the idea that if I can create some sort of virtual or online business that requires a minimum effort from me, that, that will set me free.

And I think that's certainly a great, a viable aspect, but the problem is that's only a financial solution. I don't view that as an integrated solution. It only maybe solves one aspect of life, which is a financial aspect of life. And the only point of the financial aspect of life is to fund, you know, the, the needs that we have on a daily basis.

And so I think that by approaching the problem at every level, maybe we can find better solutions. I'd love for you to kick off and share with me how, if I came to you as a consulting client and I were going to say, Ben, listen, you know, my family, I'm trying to create a better lifestyle for myself and my family.

How would you think through that from a design perspective? Where would you start? What components would you consider and how would you guide me through that process? Yeah, I think I would start the same way someone, you know, is the same way someone who would want to design or be able to help you design an off-grid house would start.

And this is how Amory Lovins always talks about, you know, energy challenges is what are the needs? You know, what are the loads in the system? Like when we think about making a house independent of the power grid, for instance, you start by thinking, well, not how am I going to make all the power I need?

You start by thinking, how am I going to have, how am I going to get by on as little power as possible because it's expensive and contains a lot of compromises to make power. So what are my loads? You know, what do I need to run in the home, whether it's a freezer or a refrigerator or different lights?

And then how do I get around? How do I need as few of those as possible? Or how do I reduce the amount of electricity that each of those things uses? So in the same way, analogous to that, I would want to understand what's that person need? What do they think they need?

Of course, the answer you'll get is what they think they need usually in the beginning of the conversation. And then we facilitate a conversation where we try to get at, okay, what are the core needs truly that you have to be happy? And often, well, always, if someone says, you know, I need a car and I need $50,000 of income a year and a 33,000 square foot house or whatever it may be, whatever the physical needs are, as you start drilling down to, bro, really what really keeps you satisfied and what really makes you psyched about life?

It has nothing to do with those physical things. And so we start moving into a space where we can think about, okay, what is the minimum of the physical needs to support those more, call it spiritual needs or whatever we want to call it. And so we start drilling down on that and thinking about with people how they can reduce their quote unquote load.

Because once you reduce your load, the less economic inputs you need to live, the more freedom you have off the bat to actually design your landscape building system and really your lifestyle as a whole. I mean, there's really no one who has more leverage over their lifestyle than that person who's kind of simplified things down as much as possible.

So that's a great starting point. People are willing to work in that practice to very different degrees. I'm kind of hardcore compared to a mainstream American suburbanite, but I'm actually not hardcore at all as far as my own physical needs in my life compared to some people I know who live with far less physical resources.

So it varies. Where people are willing to attack that problem varies greatly. And then we look at, okay, how do you supply for the load? So if you defined I need 2000 kilowatts a month or whatever, 10,000 kilowatts a year, whatever it might be, how do I come up with those kilowatts?

In this context, it'd be how do I come with that money? And that also always revolves around a conversation about what do you love to do? What do you love to do and what are you great at doing? Because I think those two things are central. If you're not doing something that you're not really good at, particularly talented at, you're probably not going to like it that much and vice versa.

If you don't like it that much, you're probably not going to be that good at it. And I see so many people doing something that doesn't even meet either of those criteria. And I think it seems to me that people, anyone that thrives is usually meeting both of those criteria, at least most of most days, not all the time for sure, but most of the time.

Would you describe your personal lifestyle and how you have built intelligent design into your personal lifestyle? I'd love to. I think it's emerged quite organically. Just to contextualize things, I'm standing outside my wood shop right now and I'm watching the snowfall really hard. And I'm looking out at a landscape that basically every tree I see we've put in the ground at some point in the last 10 years.

And most of those have started to give us food and looking at a greenhouse that I just picked kale out of for a salad a couple hours ago. And kind of looking around at a system that I haven't created, but I've helped create very heavily, co-created is probably a better term.

And I think there's a lot of simple ways I could say that happened. I did this and this and that, and I did this and then the other thing. I put one step in front of the other and did this very logical progression. But really, I think, to be most honest, I would have to start by saying where my life is now, and I'm very thankful for where it is now, if they think it's working out very well for me, I wouldn't really want it any other way.

It is that way because I think I've just followed what I love to do. I've also had a lot of, you know, a good community of family and friends, and I've relied on that community. But really, I've just done what I love to do, and I've used the resources, whatever they are around me, to do what I love to do every day.

And I think in somewhat of an uncompromising way, I mean, I hated school the first 12 years of my life. I absolutely hated more than most anyone else who was sitting in those rooms with me. So I had to be very, I had to actually really rebel from the structure that I was in because it wasn't what I wanted to do, and it wasn't what I could be good at either necessarily.

So I think another piece of that, I know this is a little bit imprecise what I'm saying, but another piece of that is I guess I'm thankful for a pretty significant lack of self-discipline in the way, if self-discipline is doing something you don't want to do day after day and kind of undertaking the grudgery that seems all too common in the world, I just somehow very instinctually just wasn't okay with trading my days away, sitting inside doing something I didn't want to do.

I had a very, very low tolerance for that. And I think I'm glad I did because if I didn't, I wouldn't be here right now, and I can't imagine being in a better place. Maybe I would be, but I certainly am very happy for where I am right now in life and the opportunities I'm afforded.

And I think a lot of that has to do with staying very focused on what it is that one loves. For me, that was being outdoors. I didn't know anything more than that until I got to college. I just knew I wanted to be outside. I mean, the sun would come out on like a November day in Rochester, New York, where I grew up, and I would just pick up my bag and walk out of class.

And it was obvious I wasn't going to the bathroom because I was taking my backpack with me, and the class had started 10 minutes earlier. And I knew the sun was coming out for two hours, and that's it, maybe the whole week in November. And I wasn't going to spend those two hours indoors and not be kind of part of what was happening on the earth at that time, in the outdoor world.

That's where I felt alive and still do. So I think all of this whole permaculture regeneration thing is all just chasing that same line of kind of instinctual reasoning down. For me personally, now there's a lot of other more precise steps that I've taken, but I think that's at the core of it.

For my own story anyway. Yeah. So I have the advantage of having read your book, which by the way, of all the books I've read, your book is called The Resilient Farm and Homestead, might be the most beautiful book on the subject that I've ever seen. It's absolutely gorgeous.

I'm sure you put a lot of work into that. Thanks a lot. That's great to hear. It was a bit of work for sure. And also just your designs. And I don't know if you're the one actually producing them, or if you have an artist working with you, but your designs are just stunningly beautiful.

Thanks. Yeah. Cornelius Murphy, who's my main colleague in the business, whole system design, is the illustrator for that book. And I give him all my rough chicken scratch and he makes it look really compelling. It really makes a big difference. So having read your book and being familiar a little bit with your work, where I'm trying to lead you is actually to discuss some of the practical details of how you have integrated designing for your own needs into your lifestyle.

So my perspective, and I'd like you to give some specifics and walk people through essentially how it works, but you've designed for your food needs, your nutrition needs, your shelter needs, you've brought all of the physical human needs together. Because often what I get as a financial planner is people just say, "I need X amount of dollars per month." And that's a useful goal.

But sometimes you need to look at, "What do I need the X number of dollars per month to do?" So I'd like you to describe how you think about your lifestyle and how you've designed it to meet your fuel needs, your housing needs, all of these things together in an intelligent way.

Sure. Well, I think that's also emerged organically, but it's definitely come from a focus first and foremost on the hierarchy of needs, putting the most basic needs before needs that aren't as basic. So for instance, I still don't have a solar photovoltaic system. Most of the time you want to have a "sustainable" lifestyle in this culture.

And the first thing you do is put up solar panels. Well, solar panels will still be the last thing I end up doing. I plan to actually put up some more photovoltaics. But the electricity is not as basic of a need as food. So what we've started with is our food and water systems and our shelter systems.

Because if the order of operations is staying warm, not freezing to death, and where I live in Vermont, that's basic. You're not going to freeze to death in Southern California, but you are in a good chunk of the world. So you got to have a shelter that keeps you warm with a minimal amount of input going into it.

For us in a forested region of the world like New England, you can't beat wood heat. And if you really insulate your house well, and you detail it pretty well, and you have a good amount of mass, you can actually cut your fuel wood need, no matter what fuel you're using, drastically right off the bat.

So we started with that. We started with getting our buildings in order, getting everything wood powered. The first thing I did when I bought the house here, which existed and isn't a very well insulated house, we actually built this kind of secondary space near it. So it could be very high performance, because there's only so much renovation you can do necessarily, unless money's no object.

And the first thing I did was put a wood stove in it, and started collecting firewood and meeting my own basic heating needs. I mean, I think the house that I moved into went from probably the woman who lived in it before me spent $2,500 a year to $3,000 on heat and hot water.

And immediately we were spending less than $1,000. So that was slashed. And now we spend less than $400 or $500 on that house. And our other living space, it's really essentially free. I mean, it's the cost of chainsaw gas, which might be $10 to $15 to harvest and process the firewood we use to heat 1,500 square feet.

And that gives us all our heat and hot water. So heating was central. Food, water is central. We're fortunate to have pretty good access to water in this part of the world, but we started collecting rainwater and also managing water in the landscape better, which there's a lot to it.

But it's a pretty basic approach. I outline it in my book, and a lot of people in the permaculture space are all about that already. And then we started getting on top of our food system. So basically started ripping up my lawn within the first couple of years of being here.

And now we grow most of our own calories for most of the year. And we might spend, I don't know what we spent on food beforehand, but we've cut it by 80% to 90%. Now when we go to the co-op, the food store nearby, every now and then we get some chocolate or coffee, although we've really given up coffee for the most part.

We get some spices here and there. Sometimes we'll buy some apples if we don't have any. But we're not buying much of our staples anymore, or really almost any vegetables. So we've gotten those aspects in order, shelter, heat, water, food. And now in the last few years, we're really working on the health, on the other health aspects, like the medicinal aspects in particular, growing more herbs, expanding our herbal medicine, kind of the home apothecary, and really expanding the opportunities for that in the landscape, both through learning plants and fungi better, so we can just go wildcraft them in the woods for free.

And also actually dedicating garden space and time to growing a lot of just baseline herbs in the garden, which help keep us healthy as human beings, have relied on these plants for thousands of years to do the same. And we're starting to just re-recognize those basic needs in the modern era now.

So we're working on that a lot more in the last few years. My wife is a naturopathic doctor and clinical herbalist, and she's made a living doing holistic health work for about almost 20 years. And so she's been a big resource on that front to expand the homestead and farm in that direction.

Yeah, so those are some of the basic needs. We've gotten our heads around and our hands around. And all of that, just like you said, I mean, that opens up the door to more freedom for us. It takes a lot of time, and people always say that. They're like, "Well, but doesn't that take a lot of time?

Couldn't you just be going and making money instead of being in the garden, then you could go buy the food?" Absolutely. I mean, I could go make enough money in the time I spent in the garden, I can make enough money to buy way more, way greater quantity of food than I grow in the garden.

But A, it's not the same quality of food. It's incomparable. The food you harvest in your front yard, you just can't buy food that good. And B, it's what would you rather spend your time doing? And for me, being in the garden, harvesting fruit around in the yard, or going looking for mushrooms up in the woods, that's really what I'm alive to do.

I'm not doing it to save money. It does save a lot of money, but that's not my main motivation. I'm just doing something that I love to do. So I often tell people, "Don't do this out of feeling like it's a chore, or you're trying to get to some destination by doing this.

Do it if you like to do it. If you don't like being in the garden with your hands in the dirt, then don't grow food." In some ways, it's very, very simple. It probably always hasn't been that simple, because sometimes you have to grow food just to survive in certain contexts, in certain places in the world still.

But luckily for me, I actually like meeting my basic needs. It's just something that's very, very satisfying. One of the things that most appeals to me about intelligent design is the ability to A, think ahead, and B, stack functions together so that many things can be met with the same resources, to try to use resources in the most efficient manner.

I actually love to do this on the financial engineering side of things, basically thinking, "How can I use this money and get multiple benefits off of it?" But that can be applied, in my mind, at every level of life. That's what really appeals to me about the work that you guys are doing.

I think of it as a way to get people to think ahead. You have that, let's see, I think it was in your book that I read about, you have your wood stove built where it heats your house and it cooks your food and it warms your water, all the same three functions, right?

Absolutely, yeah. You have bacon in it and it dries clothes. It's a clothes dryer. It does five core functions. Describe how that works and how you have that set up. Sure. Well, that's just an old wood cook stove. They've been making the same wood cook stove or a similar stove to it for more than 100 years, probably maybe 200 years.

The one I happen to have is made in Ireland and I got it used for 750 bucks on Craigslist. If you just put that in your house, that would save the average person about $15,000 to $2,000 a year right off the bat in the first year. From a financial planning perspective, there's not a lot of things that are much smarter than, "Oh, I'll make an investment of one X and save three X in the same year." There's not a lot of things that are that quick of a payback, I think.

Just from that perspective, it's great, but for us, it has a lot of other benefits. It's totally resilient. It's basically a break-proof system. The power was flickering last night in this major snowstorm we've been getting. Erica, my wife, was like, "Oh, I feel so bad for people who don't have a wood stove because when the power goes out, their house freezes." We're looking at a system that's just so basic, it's really a no-brainer.

The wood stove doesn't know if the power's on or not. It just keeps doing its thing. The simplicity of it and the resilience of that system is really as big of a benefit as its financial function. There's those two key functions. Then the functions that it performs for us, like you said, cooking hot water, which is a really exciting function because a lot of people know you can heat your house on a wood stove.

Cooking on a wood stove, that's not too new of an idea, but heating hot water with it is just not something we see very often. All it is is there's just a little water jacket in the back of the stove, a little stainless steel tank that holds about a gallon.

You plumb from the bottom of that tank into a water...I got a free hot water tank that my neighbor was throwing away, an electric hot water tank. Everyone knows what those 40-gallon electric hot water tanks look like. You get one of those, you mount it behind the stove or above the stove.

You can put it on a floor above the stove if you want, like on the second floor if the stove's on a first. You basically connect that to this water jacket in the back of the stove. You can hook up any stove with one of these water jackets, but the one we happen to have is made...some of these stoves actually come with a water jacket, but any stove you could retrofit to have a water jacket.

It's just a way of that firebox heating hot water. As the hot water rises, it...excuse me, as it heats up, it expands, so it rises, becomes less buoyant or more buoyant, excuse me. And so hot water rises just like hot air. And so you can create a system called a thermosiphon, a convection loop, where the hot water moves through the stove into the tank and back through the stove perpetually, cycling itself with no pump.

So it's moving itself without the need for a pump. So again, no need for electricity there or some piece of the system that can break or will break like a pump eventually will. And so within three, four hours of firing up this wood stove, we have enough heat to heat a 1500 square foot building, and we have like 40 gallons of water at 140 degrees.

So there's enough water for you know, two very luxurious showers, essentially for free. So that hot water system is just using the excess heat of the stove and giving you a whole nother core function, hot water. In a cold climate, in a cold climate, hot water is no joke.

I mean, being able to take a hot shower is really, you know, it's almost as important as eating in some ways. It's a pretty core function. So that particular system is really spectacular. I'm just amazed, you know, as people come through our permaculture courses and we show this system or in tours, and they're like, "Well, why don't more people have these?" We've never, you know, most people in our permaculture courses have never seen that system before.

And I hadn't really until I built one. I'd seen one once in college, but it was a little different. And you know, I always have to say, I really don't know. I, you know, don't have any idea why these aren't in every home in a cold part of the world.

Well, I mean, I do have an idea. I don't have a sensible idea about it. The only idea I have about it is that, you know, people aren't focused on that. They go flip up their thermostat and they pay $2,000 or $4,000 heating bill every year. And that's just how it is.

You know, it's not like, well, let's do this a different way. And for us, you know, that different way is a kind of core part of our lifestyle. We're very interested in meeting our basic needs and not just burning up a bunch of, you know, fracked propane to have a hot shower.

You know, for us, it's like, why do I need to destroy an aquifer to take a hot shower? You know, like propane mining does to heat your hot water, right? There's that kind of direct consequence. And I'm just not someone who can put gas in my car or feel hot water come out of the tap and not think about, all right, what am I doing to some place to have this water be hot?

You know, what's my role in that impact? And that's just, you know, maybe it's a blessing, maybe it's a curse, but it's something I always have thought about for most of my life. It's not something I can kind of avoid thinking about just how my, maybe how my head works.

And I think a lot of people who are into taking care of, taking charge of their own resource use in their own life are probably wired the same way. They just, they want to know, you know, what goes into keeping them alive. But strangely enough, it doesn't seem most people, it seems that most people have an interest in that.

So we have the world we live in today, I guess. You said you bought your wood stove used. Do you know how old it is? It's, I think mine's probably from the seventies. It's a Waterford Stanley. What intrigues me about it is if I look at it just from a sheer efficiency perspective.

So if you have a wood stove, that's 40 years old, let's say, and it still is working perfectly fine today. And I would assume if it's anything like the wood stoves I've seen, there's no reason why it couldn't be working perfectly well a hundred years from now, perhaps the water tank would rust out and you'd have to fix that, you know, and replace that.

But the basic, the basic stove should maintain its integrity for a century or a couple of centuries. And I think about the efficiency of that design. Now it does have drawbacks, but I was just sitting here thinking like all the ways that you can stack functions. So you're heating your house, heating your water, drying your clothes, baking, you know, baking your bread, cooking your vegetables on that same, that same stove system, system, plus even just to, to fire it.

So you can grow your own wood and growing your own wood has multiple benefits. You can grow your own wood and improve the ecosystem because you are planting and harvesting a tree. You can do that in an intelligent way, whether that's, you know, the systems that have existed for centuries of coppicing the wood, you know, it's simple, low maintenance makes the thing grow, makes the, makes the trees grow.

You get your exercise, chopping the wood. I would assume that certainly can be a chore, but I would imagine it's less of a chore based upon how efficient the house can be designed to where you probably don't need 18 cords of firewood every, every winter to, to heat your home.

So you can apply all these benefits and to go and get the, to go and get the wood. It doesn't cost you anything other than the labor involved. And you can hire that done if you need to. But even if you hire the labor done, you buy your wood from a local person who, or pay somebody to come and harvest it on your property.

If you have the property, it's still so much more efficient than a system of purchasing, you know, liquid petroleum products from hundreds of miles away, if that, or maybe shipped across the ocean in a, in a tanker ship to heat your house with. It just makes sense to me.

It's more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. And like you said, the multipliers are really there. I mean, I didn't think about, I'll use that actually from now on. I think in our permaculture courses, one of the yields of the wood stove of wood heat is that you save however many hundreds of dollars a year on a gym membership.

You're absolutely right. You don't, you know, it's, it's a gym membership saved to process your own firewood. Not that I'd go get a gym membership, but if you did, you know, hauling, cutting, splitting, stacking, hauling again, and burning firewood, you know, Robert Foss, the famous quote about wood warms you twice, you know, I actually like to say he'd probably didn't process his wood completely because if it only warmed him twice, then he must've had his wood at least delivered.

And then he stacked it and hauled it inside. But, uh, so it warmed him, you know, it warms you when you burn it and haul it. So for us, it warms us. Yeah. About five times, let's say. So yeah, the functions are, are really endless. Like you, like you just illustrated so well.

I think just the, the big reason we don't see this more is the one, the one major cost, if you can call it a cost, is it just demands a whole different lifestyle approach to really leverage it fully. You know, it's not, you don't flick a switch and have the wood stove load, load itself and, and dry your clothes for you.

It's, it's not, it's not automated. It's a much more manual lifestyle and you can do a more, and we have worked with a lot of clients who are engaging a more manual, direct lifestyle part-time. They're still, you know, they're not like a kind of almost full-time homesteader like myself.

They're still business professionals or teaching professionals or whatever else they do, but they're taking on a more manual lifestyle part-time. So you can make great headway part-time and still let's say have wood heat or certainly wood backup heat. But I think to really engage the full, what I see as the full benefits of the manual lifestyle, it's probably like a 20 hour a week thing.

You know, I don't, I don't think you need to be super hardcore and do a 40, 50, eight hours a week. Like some people certainly do, but I find that there's a, there's a threshold of a, once you're about able to about put about 20 hours a week in, you can really have most of your food, almost all your heat and have this very, and all your med, most of the med, if you're healthy, all your medicine, or if you're not very, very sick, all your medicine and have most of everything you need most days from the landscape around you.

You know, without having to be a full-time thing, once you get set up, which does, you know, take, it takes multiple years. It's not something that happens overnight. But it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a whole bit of a different lifestyle. That's for sure. And I do try not to romanticize the things that were hard.

You know, I know that my grandmother grew up or she, she, my, my father grew up on a ranch in the upper high mountains of Colorado. And, you know, she cooked on a wood stove and cooking on a wood stove is nowhere near as convenient, although I'd never done it, but I'm certain it's nowhere near as convenient as simply firing up the electric stove.

But if you see the benefits of it, what I think of is all of that is coming from one piece of equipment that can be purchased once and never has to be purchased again. Whereas if I, you know, I need to replace my water heater this, this month. I need, you know, a clothes dryer.

What's the length of the potential lifespan of a good clothes dryer? Five years, 10 years, maybe a water heater. All of these things have a life cycle. So now I'm permanently needing to replace these appliances over time. Why don't we apply the same design intelligence that we have applied to other areas of life, to some of the traditional technologies and improve those technologies without losing some of the things that are good about them.

So let's design a better wood stove that works more efficiently, more effectively, that keeps heat more easily so that it's easier to cook on and keep the benefits without just going to a completely different technology. Yeah. And that brings up a huge point, which I think about a lot, which is this kind of the hybridization of the old and new.

We tend to, our brain tends to think of old ways and new ways and keep them in very separate categories. And think that to learn in old way, you know, to know how to grow your own food or heat your house with wood means you can't, you know, be on the cutting edge of new technologies coming out.

Or I saw an amazing, it wasn't a spoof, but it should have been a YouTube video of a woman who was thanking Steve Jobs for kind of what she put as re-working the operating system for a child. And it was a video, YouTube video of her kid looking at a magazine and being bored with it because it didn't do anything when she kind of swiped her fingers across the magazine.

And then she gave the child, probably like a two-year-old, a, you know, iPad or some tablet thing. And the kid was very engaged. And she was like, isn't this awesome. My kid now has no need for a magazine. And I see that, like, why not learn both? Like, can't modern human beings, shouldn't we be able to learn new things without retreating from and becoming illiterate of the old ways.

And if they're old and they're still, and they were around for thousands of years, there's some inherent value to them that chances are they're actually might not be to something new, which hasn't stood the test of time yet. So it's like, well, you know, we tend to just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And it seems to me, it's like, why not keep all the parts, why not keep all the literacies on the table to see what proves themselves over time. And, you know, personally, I use a computer. I mean, I'm on an iPhone right now talking with you. I still utilize modern technology greatly if it has leverage that seems to be life enhancing in terms of my lifestyle or in terms of helping manifest the work I'm trying to manifest in the world to help others.

But it doesn't mean I still can't learn how to butcher a deer or a goose and keep literate with some of the very old ways of what it's meant to exist as a human being on this planet for a hundred thousand years. Right. Yeah. In my mind, that's, that is the key is to appreciate and learn the lessons of the past without romanticizing them and then integrate the developments without losing the benefits of the past.

I find having sat in hundreds of meetings with clients about their lifestyle, you know, one of the most common financial goals that I hear is people say, I want to spend more time with my family and I want to spend more time with my kids, with my grandkids. And I grew up as a boy, I enjoyed reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder series.

And my favorite of the series was Farmer Boy. And it was an account of, you know, a traditional farming family. And I thought to myself, I've always thought, how much time did that father and that son spend together? Well, they spent a good amount of time, but they also had a lot of time doing hard work, but they were together, at least in that hard work.

So here we were making this transition of, I like spending time with my family. Now we all, the whole family is disintegrated and now people are wanting to get back to it, but it's not that hard to get back to it. You just got to make some conscious decisions and different choices to follow through and think about what the direct way to meet your goals would be.

Yeah. Yeah. And it is, it's a very good point. I mean, a lot of the trade, the trade we've made, the kind of the gamble we've made in the modern lifestyle is that we'll have more of what we love, we'll be more and we'll get more and that will make us be more by, you know, kind of specializing our lives to the extent that we have and essentially working always through the medium of money to have the life we want.

And I think, I think we're going to see, we're already starting to see an era herald in now where the belief in that promise is fading because I think we're realizing just like you said, most of your clients want to just have that basic need to spend more time with their family.

You know, that, the promise that was put out there post-World War II with like, you know, science and tech, the convenience, the utter convenience of science and technology is, you know, there's pieces of it, but it's just not that simple. It's not, it can't deliver in such a simple way.

And I think we're, we're starting to realize this and that is where I think the modern homesteading movement is just one, one of many responses to that, to that place in history. We find ourselves now where we have some very basic needs that are going unmet, even, you know, even in a family where the parents make, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year or more, you know, which should be completely adequate to have like a lot of personal freedom to do the things we love to do.

But, but it's that, you know, the rat race is a really good term for it. You know, it's a pretty, pretty precise term. There are two themes I'd like to explore with you as we kind of start to wrap up here. And the first theme is the concept of resilience.

You, obviously that's an important feature to you in that it was the part of the title of your book, the resilient farm and homestead. And it really impressed me the way that you approach that of simply in your design thinking of saying, I don't know what changes are going to come, but how can I prepare a design that will handle those changes?

And that's a question I get a lot with financial planning is what's going to happen. And I think, well, I don't know what's going to happen. So how can we plan so that no matter what happens in the future, that our needs are cared for? Could you go over first, some of the reasons why you think of, you try to think about resilience in your planning and then some of the methods that you employ to deal with that?

Sure. Yeah. Well, I agree with you. I think I'm one who tends to believe that, you know, I'm not going to gamble on predicting the future because it seems like it's somewhat unpredictable. Even things like global warming. You know, I don't like the term global warming. I like the term global weirding because it's a complex system.

The Earth's climate, things could get colder. I like to take the approach of let's plan for all scenarios. And we call that in our books scenario planning, which is actually a term I've become aware of since writing the book is actually a term that that other systems thinkers have already used.

But the idea being let's plan for as many scenarios as possible. Think of the most likely events you think might transpire and plan for those first. I'm certainly not saying plan for the least likely events first, plan for the most likely events first, for sure. But that doesn't mean wipe all the other possibilities off the table.

You know, plan for those as well, especially once you get, you know, your proverbial together, once you get your house in order, once you get your home. When I say house, I don't mean a house necessarily literally, although I mean it literally and figuratively. Once you get your own economics in order, your own basic lifestyle in order, then you can start drilling down the long list of other possible future scenarios that you might want to have your life be resilient in the face of.

Now, that could be any number of things. I mean, it could be a large bump in how our global industrial food system functions, because we know you don't have to be someone who studies up on it every day to realize there's major vulnerability to the global food system, whether it's with pests or, you know, plant diseases or supply and distribution, supply chain problems, whatever it might be, fuel supply problems, there's a vulnerability there.

So if you're interested in engaging that possibility, you start looking at solutions like maybe developing some local food system that's not from, that's not a thousand miles away, maybe it's a hundred feet away in your front yard. Same with your heat, you know, your firewood, or same with your water, hopefully, because we all need water, you know, most every day.

Same with financial resources, you know, could be tools and skills versus just a lot of money in the bank account or along with a lot of money in the bank account. So I guess just to circle back to your question, I mean, we look at it in a lot of different ways, but mainly from a scenario planning perspective.

And a lot of our clients who we assist come to us already, the way I put it is they're kind of pre-sold, they're already, they already see what they think is the writing on the wall and they see a global techno-industrial system, call it whatever you like, that when it works just right, it's pretty awesome for the people who are at the top.

But when it, if it's not working just right, which they think might be the case here and there for at least periods of time, it might not be so great for anyone. And so they're kind of working, as I say, to get their house in order in the face of those potential challenges.

But I guess, you know, I would also define risk too, to try to answer in a roundabout way your question, hopefully, risk being the likelihood of an event happening times the severity of the consequences of those, of an event happening. So like, I think the example I use in my book is a meteor, you know, comet hitting the earth, right?

It's hopefully not very likely, but if it happens, it's very severe, you know, game over, change of epochs, right? We'll have to wait a billion years or something for maybe millions for some other, you know, next chapter to unfold, but it's not very likely. So the risk of that is relatively low, hopefully, if it's unlikely, which we don't really know, versus something like I lose my job, you know, I get fired at some point in the next 20 years.

The consequences of that are not as high as the comet, but it's much more likely to happen, or just I get sick or I break my leg. Consequences are lower, although they're real, but the likelihood is higher. So maybe overall risk is higher in those situations. So just basic risk assessment and risk planning is something that we bring into our process as well when it comes to resiliency.

And then there's a lot of other principles which I elaborate on in the book, but just a basic principle of redundancy and having multiple ways to meet very basic needs, like water. You need water. So we have a well. If and when the well pump fails, well, we have rainwater off the roof.

If that's not working for some reason, we have ponds, we can cut a hole in the ice with a handful of different tools we have on site to get water out of the ponds. You know, we could melt snow on a wood stove, which we have multiple stashes of dry wood for, and they don't need electricity to run, etc.

So there's a lot of, you know, redundancy in the system is very important, and the simplicity of a system is very important. And there's a lot of other pieces as well I get at in the book, but things like legibility, which often aren't thought about, like how legible is whatever system you're depending upon to you?

Do you understand it? Do you know how to fix your furnace if it breaks, right? Or do you know how to deal with a system when it fails? Because we've built in, in our specialized modern world, we've built in so much illegibility, right? If your iPhone breaks, you don't think, "Oh, well, I could probably fix it.

You know, let me open it up. Maybe I could fix it this time. It might be a small problem." It's just like, I go back to the store and get a new iPod because there is no fix. You know, there is no legibility in like the maintenance of that type of system.

Now, sometimes that's inherent in very high technology, but it's certainly, if it's inherent in technologies we need to meet our basic needs, then we have a very brittle situation, and we're in a very vulnerable situation then, which I don't think is very attractive to anyone. The last theme, and I'm actually might add one more after this, but the last thing that I wanted to ask you about is the concept of how to design for your needs from a financial perspective and from a, basically, a building financial resilience.

I often get asked, there is more fear than I've ever seen in my life, but more people have fear of potential failures in financial systems, and we've seen some failures over past years. People are concerned about failures of monetary systems, failures of banking systems, etc. I've been asked about this dozens and dozens and dozens of times, and I have some ideas, but ultimately I find that when people are very fearful of massive failures in financial systems, my answer to them has been, "There's not a financial solution to a financial system failure," and their ultimate solution is to get out of the financial system.

Financial wealth, financial assets are not real assets. They're a system that we've invented to account for real assets, for real wealth. So, don't look to the financial system to protect yourself if you're concerned about a failure of the financial system, because you're just doing this self-reinforcing problem where you're depending on a system that you're saying, "I'm concerned about it failing." If you're really concerned, think through it from an out-of-the-box perspective.

If somebody came to you with that fear from your perspective as a whole systems designer, where would you start them on the road as far as saying, "How can I protect myself and my family and my wealth?" How would you guide them on that road? Yeah, let me just think about that for a second, because that's quite...

There's a lot of levels to that. I think, as with a lot of things, I think it would highly depend upon who that person was and what resources they had and what inclinations and what talents they'd have. So, I guess the first thing I would look at is, just like we talked about with the loads analysis of an off-grid building at the beginning of our conversation, what resources do you have available to you?

Do you have a large family that lives in the town that you live in? If so, great, that could play into this resiliency picture that we're trying to get at through your question. If not, if everyone's dead or lives somewhere else, okay, that's not a resource. Maybe you have a resource that you're a roofer and you could fix your neighbor's roofs in a certain situation.

You have something you can offer the people that live around you, or you're a farmer or a plumber, or you're really great at taking care of kids or taking care of animals or organizing people. They can be soft skills too, but essentially just firstly asking the question, what are your resources?

What do you really have to capitalize on? And capitalize on, in other words, capitalize being a poor choice of words, capitalize on as in manifesto, in a non-financial way, in a more direct human to human relationship way. So I think I would start the conversation on that front to really understand a little bit of analysis, like what are the resources that people have to bring to the table?

And then we all have very similar needs as human beings. So that's where being a permaculture designer is kind of handy because we all need to eat. It's seemingly most of us need to eat most days. So that's a basic need we all share, no matter who the client is, the fictitious client we're referring to right now.

They'll need to eat, they'll need water, they'll need warmth, they'll need shelter, housing, community, safety. So all of those are common needs. So we have to also think about how to provision for those basic needs. And then you start getting into some of the things we've already talked about in this conversation, I think, about those basic systems.

But I think there's a lot to that. That's a difficult question. I mean, maybe, is there some particular part of that question you're thinking of that you'd like me to hit on? No, I think that's good enough. And to respond to how I've told people, I've said, "Listen, if you are really concerned, because today there's a lot of fear about this, then you've just given the answer that I've given." I said, "If you're really concerned about it, there's not a financial solution that can help you.

The key is provide for your needs. And then, as far as wealth, you need to invest your wealth that you currently have into a way where it has the potential to multiply. So then you have to go through a self-analysis perspective and say, 'What skills and abilities and knowledge do I have?

Then what are the needs and the desires of the marketplace? And how can I find the intersection between these things to meet the skills and the desires of the marketplace?' And one of your constraints might be that you build into your plan. You might put a constraint in, depending on what your focus is.

So if you are, in your situation, you're a designer, that's a very useful skill set. And your remuneration can be in the form of dollars, and it can also be in the form of other forms of wealth, whether that's labor, whether that's gifts, whether that's the needs of life.

This is how humanity's developed, is by paying attention to these basic needs and then finding ways to fulfill them. And the monetary system is, in many ways, a marvel of efficiency. And yet it does have weaknesses. So exploit the weaknesses and take advantage of the other things, but see through it and then look at it from a design perspective.

Businesses that provide value, no matter what the monetary system is, no matter what the question is, no matter what the currency denomination is, those businesses and the people that control them will always accrue wealth because ultimately the money is a system of measuring the things that are really important.

You can either grow the wood on your lot and you can go out and cut it, or you can grow the wood on your lot and you can pay somebody to cut it, or you can have somebody else grow the wood and cut it and bring you the wood, or you can do it with something else.

They're all meeting the same basic human need, we're just meeting them in different ways depending on what resources we have. Absolutely. Yeah, I certainly agree with that. So I guess the last question, and almost a corollary of the previous one, I find myself, this is for me personally, not a fictitious person, me living with my family here in West Palm Beach, I find myself continually inspired by what other people have been able to do and the resilience they've been able to build into their lives and the improvements in their lifestyle and their security and their health and their homestead and all of that, but I find myself struggling to figure out how to actually do it in my situation.

So I'm not in a cold climate and I'm in a subtropical warm climate, and so I don't have a problem of heating a house, I have a problem of cooling a house. So I'm continually stuck trying to figure out what do I actually need to do, what's the next thing for me to focus on.

For me or for someone like me who's inspired but doesn't know where to turn next, what thoughts would you have as far as how to lay out a system of self-education and also how to lay out a learning process, like how to coach myself through learning and acquiring the skills that I need to learn to improve my homestead?

Right. Well, I think there's a few ways. I think there's three things that maybe would be identified right off. The first would be like maybe the last or it would be woven throughout, you just brought that up. What's the learning process? How can you learn the most important things you need to know to increase your resiliency in your own lifestyle where you are in your context, like you're saying?

And the other two things, so those might be like books, people, videos, whatever. And the other two things that I think I've read off the bat are local resources, which is connected with the learning piece, but it's also inspirational as well as informational. So who around you seems to have a better situation?

If you're thinking, "Oh, I want something that I don't have. I want to move in some direction that I'm not far enough along in right now," when you're saying, let's say, resiliency, do you know anyone around you in Southern California, and I'm sure you probably do, who is further along in that path than you are and what do they do?

Spending time with them, spending time with their systems, learning as much as you can from those systems, identifying what's great about their systems and maybe what's not, and just being able to hear from those people, learning with those people. And then the other piece, which is what we do with clients quite often is what I would call like a resiliency audit, which is just looking at your own basic lifestyle needs, whether it's money, water, food, cooling or heat, shelter, your basic systems, and how resilient are each of those systems and drilling down each one.

So, okay, where I live in Southern California, let's say in an urban context, where's my water coming from? I can already know from being in Southern California before, that's not going to be the best picture of resiliency right off the bat. Could it be? Maybe not. But how could it be improved?

That might be actually a real tricky one, for sure, because some places you're not even allowed to collect the rainwater off your roof, or if you do, it might be kind of polluted, or you don't maybe own the roof, so you can't collect the rainwater off the roof. So sometimes a resiliency audit may lead someone to actually move, and that's okay if it does.

If someone wants to be serious about it, you may look into food and maybe you have a small front yard that gets some sun, so you may realize, okay, I could have some food production here. Or you may realize, actually food production isn't the way I could be most food resilient, and maybe actually becoming friends with a farmer might be.

It's not always as simple as well, I want food resiliency, thus I should grow more food. Often that's the case, but only in certain contexts. If you don't have land in your urban area, that's probably not the solution. But it doesn't mean you can't get closer to food resiliency, albeit with a little bit of a disclaimer that there are certain resiliency sweet spots, if you will, that are probably found best in a relatively rural place, but where there's a lot of community and some density of people.

It's not the full backwoods-y shotgun shack situation, and it's probably not the uptown Manhattan or downtown Los Angeles situation either. So there are some contexts which certainly are inherently more resilient than others, that's very important to mention. That being said, it doesn't mean we all can't improve our resilience greatly, no matter our context.

Ben, I appreciate you making the time to come and allocate your time to share with us and to teach us. I really appreciate it. So your website is wholesystemsdesign.com. And then also, aren't you doing a Kickstarter right now? We are. It's actually about to end in a few days, but one more week or so.

We're doing it on our permaculture courses to make them available in video. It's called Permaculture Skills. If someone were to Google that Kickstarter, they'd find it. Has it been fully funded enough yet? Or are you still needing it? Yeah, it's actually, they just made a stretch goal to translate the courses into, or the lessons, into French.

And they actually met that stretch goal, I think, recently as well. But the courses are happening every summer, so people can check that online as well. That's exciting. If it's anything like any of the rest of your work, I'm sure it'll be beautiful. Thanks a lot. Thank you. It'll be really cool.

So thanks again so much for coming on today. I appreciate it. Hey, thank you. And thanks for the work you do as well. And we'll be in touch. Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert or live event unforgettable? Let Sweet Hop take your game to the next level.

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