Today’s episode he survival Podcast and because I have Daniel about building the 80% life as far as income food energy all that how much Freedom we would give you a difference in your life what would your life be introduced are a special guest Daniel brother how you doing man I am doing great so we had to a bunch of other stuff and I love that concept because a person could have just that up forever that you've got self-reliance we measure in time and self-sufficiency you measure in percentage but before we dig into that tell us a little bit about yourself how did you end up living in I think the Chihuahua Desert building are create houses in it and in Far West Texas and living out there in a homestead in the desert probably were born there what what journey through black took you to to this place well you know I started like most of us you know getting our high school education and moving on the College move in the Dallas having a retirement all the normal stuff and no back during the Great Recession of 2008 you know I struck a deal with a guy that was developing quadruplexes and I was acting as a general contractor there and in the course all along this time I'm listening to your podcast I'm learning everything I can I'm adding steal them from putting in the practice you know what I can in between my busy schedule but come the Great Recession 2008 the guy that I was building this quadruplex project for basically embezzled a lot of the money to build his son's home and gymnasium for another organization and so at the end of that. I was left having paid my help having paid all those materials and having charged up all my credit lines to the max suddenly out in the cold with nothing so basically I want him to start life completely over but having been exposed to a lot of great information haven't already got some practice and experience growing my own food I just kind of threw the cell phone in the trash walked away from it all thinking if I was ever going to prosper that I would and so I got a couple years of basically living 100% of what I could and what I had I cashed out the retirement fund and started helping people with alternative building and one thing led to another it got to where you know I was enjoying that a lot more and so what became of just rested or a break from work kind of became a lifestyle and then I made the ultimate decision to sell my property in East Texas cash out the rest of my retirement and I bought some property out here in the in what at the time was the middle of nowhere and move out here because I just of the peace and quiet even though you know it's go pick up an Amazon package it was 168 Mi round trip of being truly off grid and in the back of my mind I just love the idea of that pioneering spirit I love to problem solve and then put my labor my effort into my life where everything that I did benefited me directly and that's kind of what the 80% lifestyle is as you know putting whatever your energy is into benefiting yourself directly as much as possible and remove those parasitical expenses when possible new song about land cuz this is going to revolve somewhat around land near opinion is there such a thing as one of the great things about where you live I would use the words stupid cheap if you don't go relative to something like fertile Plains of Tennessee what the price per acre is ridiculous the difference 1 Tennessee's pretty inexpensive compared to a lot of places in West Texas
Video Transcript from Captions:
always one man's opinion of the changing World The Changing Times and the things we can all do to live a better life if Tom's get tough or even if they don't today is episode 32 23 of the survival Podcast and it's actually gonna be two men's opinion because I have Daniel Allen about to come on with us in just a few moments and we're going to talk about building the 80 life what does that mean the 80 is like an 80 Receiver right now it's imagine if you could produce 80 of everything you need on your property as far as income food energy all that how much Freedom would give you if you're thinking that's a high number it can be done that's what we're talking about today but what if you did 20 30 40 50 what kind of difference in your life would it make what kind of difference would it make to maybe oh I don't know like your retirement or would your life kind of be one long retirement who knows that's we're going to talk about today before and with that I want to go ahead and introduce our special guest Daniel brother how you doing man I am doing great just loving it so we actually had you on quite a while ago and I think we talked about aircrete back then we're going to talk about that again today but a bunch of other stuff in fact like I said we're going to be digging into is what you call building the 80 lifestyle and I love that concept because a person can adjust that up or down and it goes right into what I've taught forever that you've got self reliance we measure in time and self-sufficiency you measure in percentage but before we dig into that tell us a little bit about yourself how did you end up living in I think the Chihuahua Desert build and air create houses in in Far West Texas and living out there in a homestead in the desert I don't you probably weren't born there what what journey through life took you to to this place well um you know I started like most of us you know getting our um high school education and moving on to college moving to Dallas um you know uh having the retirement all the normal stuff and you know back during the Great Recession of 2008 you know I I struck a deal with a uh a guy that was developing quadruplexes and I was acting as a general contractor there and in the course all along this time I'm listening to your podcast I'm learning everything I can I'm adding skills I'm putting into practice you know what I can in between my busy schedule but come the Great Recession 2008 the uh the guy that I was building this quadruplex uh project for basically uh embezzled a lot of the money to build his son's home and a gymnasium for another organization and so at the end of that period I was left having paid my help having paid all those materials and having charged up all my credit lines to the max suddenly out in the cold with nothing so uh basically I wound up having to start life completely over but having you know been exposed to a lot of great information having already got some practice and experience growing my own food uh I just kind of threw the cell phone in the trash uh walked away from it all thinking if I was ever going to prosper if that I would um and so I got a couple years of you know basically living 100 on what I could produce and what I had I cashed out the retirement fund and started helping people with alternative building and one thing led to another it got to where you know I was enjoying that a lot more and so what became just a respite or a break from work kind of became a lifestyle and then I made the ultimate decision to sell my property in East Texas uh cash out the rest of my retirement and I bought some property out here in the in what at the time was the middle of nowhere uh and move out here because I just loved the peace and quiet even though you know to go pick up an Amazon package it was 168 mile round trip um oh that's crazy yeah so you know the joys of being truly off-grid and uh in the back of my mind I just love the idea of that pioneering spirit and I love to problem solve and then put my labor and my effort into my life where everything that I did benefited me directly and that's kind of what the 80 lifestyle is is you know putting whatever your energy is into benefiting yourself directly as much as possible and removing those parasitical expenses when possible so let's talk about land because this is going to revolve somewhat around land and your opinion is there such a thing as perfect land I mean one of the great things about where you live is that land is incredibly affordable it's it I would use the words stupid sheep um if you don't go relative to something like fertile planes of Tennessee but the price per acre is ridiculous to differential in you know Tennessee's pretty inexpensive compared to a lot of places in West Texas it's just very very low cost but it's a harsh environment uh it can be harsh just for water there's plenty of people I'll drill a well it depends on where you are how do you kind of justify like looking for perfect land and looking for what you can afford or what works for you or growing Where You Are okay well you know I would preface it first of all with sometimes you just have to do what's possible uh in your situation and the fact is there's no such thing as perfect period whether it's people or land um you know when I was in East Texas we had eight inches of rain one day in 45 minutes uh and that year we had so much rain that the garden didn't grow well because it leached all the nutrients out of the compost and soil in the desert you can't find water and here in fact there's there's not even technically an aquifer here so you can't drill a well and if you do find water it's usually too salty to garden with so regardless nothing's ever going to be perfect and you know we do workshops here and I get to talk to a lot of people and what you find is that you say you find that most people say well I want a piece of land in the wilderness by the ocean next to a stream with a waterfall in the forest next to a Starbucks uh and a organic grocery store you know probably your expectations are gonna be what prevents you from finding something and I look at it this way it's better to have something imperfect and finished than be looking for something perfect and never get anything done because ultimately you can always sell what you get and I think you have to come with the attitude of you know perfect is really hard to find and no matter what you or where you start you can build something and then sell it and move on later and if you need a forest but all you have is a desert uh you know like I have a video of a bird sanctuary 12 miles from here it's a forest in the middle of the desert in contrast to what looks like warmed over death out here so you can build permaculture systems of support in a desert or you can create a desert type situation in a rain forest so really it's about you taking responsibility and creating the true the elements of what it is that you decide you need or want to make you happy what what is your water solution since the well generally doesn't work are you doing rain catch hauling water in doing both and how does that interact with things like gardening because there's way more water goes into gardening than a lot of people I think realize if they live in a place where the rain gives the most to their their irrigation right so you know obviously it varies a lot with your environment so you have to kind of tune in and see what's already being done but out here we actually have two windmill Wells and they produce one well has so much salt if the water hits the ground it turns white the other one is about 690 parts per millions of magnesium salts so great for bathing in not necessarily great for gardening because the salt builds up so sure we catch rain water but you know when you put up a roof that's an expense and when you talk about gardening and actually collecting enough rain water off a roof it it kind of becomes unreasonable unless you just have money to burn and so our solution here is we have a grade you know basically at the top of our land it looks pretty much flat to the eye but like Jeff Watton says and almost nothing is so we have somewhere in a neighborhood of a 16 inch drop by the time you get to the bottom corner of our land so we put a berm all the way across the the bottom end of our land and even a half inch downpour the water hits that berm and runs down into ponds and basically at the time right now we only have two ponds so we only catch about 13 000 gallons of that water but it only takes one half inch sudden rain event to make that happen and so that water is then you know pumped up into two tanks where we store about six thousand gallons of water in tanks and that water is used as backup after we pump down the ponds themselves into our Gardening System and out here we find that you know because we have to be desert wise and if you pay attention to what Jeff Lawton and his students are doing in Jordan you see that they have pretty much gone exclusively to wicking beds for what you know what gardening does and so paying attention to that and putting it into practice we built a hybrid aquaponics soil system and so there's very little top evaporation so we use about 250 gallon Islands a week in water per you know individual Garden they want to say individual I mean like the garden space that it takes to feed one person okay and so basically you know with 6 500 gallons of water put up plus the ponds we have more than enough water to run our Gardening System gotcha that's very cool and very creative um let's start talking about some building techniques because that's a big part of what you do why might someone choose to build a home using what we would call alternative building techniques because I think it's all cool but it's pretty well known exactly how to build a stick build house right your standard it's it's easy every contractor can frame walls put up drywall what have you these alternative techniques a lot of times you end up more on your own but I think there's some real advantages there too yeah you know um first of all I have to say it's because you want to I mean I think you kind of need a reason Beyond just price to try to build it yourself you know alternative building if you hire a company to do it can cost twice as much as conventional building because everything about it is not normal it's often labor intensive but when you do it yourself then the materials cost a lot less I mean substantially less but typically you know by the time you do cement stabilization and depending on your soil type you may only save about 26 percent on the cost so a lot of times the advantages is the fact that either your Consciousness you choose to live in something that doesn't off gas and isn't built with toxic additives or you just think it's beautiful and it's something that you want to do um so it can't really be cost alone though so for some people that can be but what you generally find is some people have developed autoimmune problems or sensitivities to chemicals and you just decide I I want to live free of that irritant or I want to avoid ever developing some kind of autoimmune response to the over 200 chemicals that off gas in a conventional house and quite frankly a lot of times it's just because it's beautiful and it fits in with the landscape and ultimately a natural house can return to the land the things that people generally look at is Energy Efficiency as well right so if you're trying to get to an 80 lifestyle or hell even a 50 lifestyle and I want to cut my energy requirements by 50 percent I have to think not just power generation I have to think efficiency as well and some of these Technologies and you use aircrete and you can talk about that if it fits in with this are much better insulative wise as far as keeping heat out or keeping cool in or in the winter keeping warm in and cold out yeah um you know it takes um really an ideal alternative house you're going to use thermal mass and you're going to use insulation but if I have to choose one or the other I'm going to choose insulation every time because I want to be able to set the temperature in my house you know I'm just spoiled that way I'm sorry I'm first world I want to choose my temperature uh me too when people say well I can live without air conditioning I'm not sleeping with sweat in my neck in Texas I'm not doing it exactly and it doesn't even work in every climate you know now out here where we're at uh you can open a structure up at night draft the air through close the windows when you get up or use an attic fan and you actually stay comfortable all day um sure and that's great it kind of depends on what your goals are but alternative building like as far as terms of aircrete goes you get insulation and honestly you know the R value the resistance to heat flowing through your wall in or out is actually about 10 percent less than say fiberglass which is so you can kind of sort of compare it to Conventional Construction Wall thickness to get some idea of how aircrete for example would perform uh straw bale building is extremely insulative so if you have if you're in a place and you can have access to straw and you can do it affordably uh it's it's a it's great either one works really great for insulation so you know when it comes to the cost of living for example when you're building alternative building it's not just about the cost of the structure spot well you know what is the operating cost if I'm going to achieve that 80 lifestyle how much am I going to have to spend if I'm going off grid on solar panels you know uh uh the last time I checked a pallet of solar panels um is somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty eight hundred dollars you know am I gonna and I have to buy it by the pallet so you know can I cut you know my operating budget from buying one uh from two two or three or four pallets of panels down to one panel by having enough insulation or by designing a passive system that uses my environment most of the year to achieve you know passive cooling like letting the heat out at night and then closing it up during the day are you off grid fully electrical wise I know you have a ton of solar out there are you relying exclusively on that or do you have grid access no there's no grid access here there's no water access there's no trash service there's no USPS mail service it took almost a year to get FedEx and out here I was able to get UPS because what some people don't they didn't want to deliver out here but what some people don't realize is technically by their operating Charter they had to agree to provide equal service to everyone or they can't operate so with a little arm twisting we finally got package delivery out here and we wound up setting a a locker down on the highway so we don't have to drive quite so far to pick up USPS and so that that's pretty amazing um yeah um can you tell me about some pros and cons of conventional versus alternative building um and specifically when you get into an area like you're in or I'm in honestly we don't have to ask nobody any permission to do anything and I think that also plays into that calculus yeah well you know I want to hit the the biggest point right up front with alternative building if you are in an area where you need permission or you choose to ask for permission you have to realize that when you're asking for permission you kind of sort of are asking for them to take responsibility also because if something goes wrong you could sue them because they let you do it and you ask permission and they gave it so generally if you have to get permits with most alternative construction the the answer is generally going to be no however you can get exceptions and you can push the issue as an owner Builder and you can do it anyway like technically you can't build aircrete in California but we've done it because there are exceptions and exemptions uh you know uh workarounds such as for example well you you can have Plumbing in because it can't be an occupied structure and it has to be under 400 square feet so then we build it like an RV or we conceal plumbing underneath the slab about a quarter of an inch and then after it's clear inspection you do it you go ahead and bust it out and do it but you know so there's a lot of gray areas there and it depends on your personal comfort zone and your your willingness to uh stand up for what's right uh even if that means you have to take it to court without a lawyer and so that's a major problem for a lot of people you know where we're at if you're out in a county in Texas you can pretty much do whatever you want to as long as you don't have sewage leaking onto someone else's property so Sheriff here told me quote until you're cooking meth we don't care exactly that was that was how much they didn't care exactly uh you know out here we're so far an inspection department would spend three hours of his day just driving to and from one or two places and it doesn't even exist here yeah and so unless you're doing if you know you should always be responsible and you should always be conscious of what you're doing to the environment you know in my opinion I think septic tanks are terrible because they pollute groundwater but yeah it's it's official it's allowed so um another Pro though to being uh building off grid is that um my operating expense per month is extremely low and as I'm bringing on more and more food production my grocery bill is going to nothing we couldn't even buy a trash service so the con is I have to haul it out uh once in a while let's go ahead and hit that real quick because I had saved it but we have a question about exactly that how are you dealing with trash okay so you know uh we found that a a aircrete insulated barrel with a leaf blower and an L in it so there's no direct infrared radiation will incinerate anything including a tire with zero smoke oh wow typically anything compostable we compost because that's in the desert that's a big deal organic matter so anywhere we can get organic matter we're going to take it we're going to compost it anything else gets burned if it can burn to reduce the mass and then you know we have a landfill and you know it's it's a long drive away but typically we we synchronize our Supply runs every month or two with hauling off that trash to either a landfill or the city we're in they provide dumpster uh service to the uh the city people so kind of a gray area but no one checks so sometimes we're fortunate enough to be able to dispose of trash there otherwise there are families that are up on a paved Road like the only one in the county and if you can find a a uh somebody to share dumpster costs with and someone who has access to place a dumpster on the road then you can you know just drive a few miles and share a dumpster and so you know that's that's a that's kind of a con is you have to become more responsible but I would say it becomes a pro the more responsibility you learn to handle yourself the more independent you come um it creates if nothing else a certain feeling of self-sufficiency and achievement so it kind of depends on where your mindset is to where some of these are Pros or cons um Supply runs you know like we're saying you know we're talking 170 180 miles round trip because Amazon or sent you a package through USPS and they didn't deliver it yeah um that could be a real problem um uh but the pros are peace uh nobody's disturbing you out here yeah um but there's also a higher cost of living the closer you live to the normal life the more expensive your lifestyle is but then the more Independence you gain the higher that percentage of of Independence uh you have a lower operating cost anyway and then it doesn't matter so it's kind of like that balance between all of these things um also if if you need medical care uh you're not going to go 10 minutes down the road to a hospital you're going to need to know who in the area has a Wilderness medical training you need to have it yourself otherwise you're still talking about an hour and a half to get life-flighted out of here plus a the tremendous expense of that um so you have to take more responsibility you can you can see that as a pro or a con but you know some people as they get older and having lived a conventional life oh gosh you know I got to go to you know people if they haven't taken care of themselves they might have to go to dialysis three times a week how's that going to work when you know it's it's basically a a half to all-day trip to go to somewhere to get care and if you need real Medical Care the nearest real hospital is a three and a half hour drive away at 80 miles an hour so you know you have to consider what your needs are in life I think that really takes a turn too the older we get it does right we tend to need more care the older we get especially the less Community we have right we'll get in the community in a bit uh another question here we'll go ahead and hit on the Fly because if it's raining with what we're talking about Hunter says no septic how else do you deal with poop what what's your well first of all you absolutely can and most people do just do septic out here okay and and you could put in an aerobic system in recent an aerobic system would be way more appropriate in the desert because you could take the output water because everything in the desert's about water and so an aerobic system would allow you could then run that perhaps through a constructed Wetland to polish it up a little more and then you could use it to irrigate either fruit trees or you know Carbon producing crops so that you can mulch and compost but you know we use Worm Composting flush toilets there's zero and I mean zero discharge into the ground or anywhere else and all it produces a carbon-rich compost and then the water is run into a constructed Wetland which if you're here in Texas uh the University of Texas has a basically an approved Wetland guideline that you can follow as a replacement for a septic system so there's lots of the water takes Solid Waste to the worms and then the water continues down into basically a small Lagoon yeah basically it starts it goes into a tank very much like a septic tank and if you happen to have a downhill slope this can all be gravity feed but if it's not then you have to have basically a grinder pump and a separation area to collect the water and pump it out okay give it a lift but basically you have a biological sponge and you have all this life eating everything as it slowly goes through there and they built a system like this a Sylvania Worm Composting system and they got it approved in Oregon and they found that the water discharge is cleaner after going through this biological sponge than what most the cities discharge into the Creeks for your kids to play in but then that water goes into either more composting area or it goes into a constructed Wetland which I believe is the most responsible process plus it's technically approved by the law I mean you could even do the worm composting and put it out into a septic tank to be approved if you just want to be ecologically responsible but you have to realize that when you have a living system it needs regular watch and regular maintenance it's not just set it and forget it kind of thing so it's one more thing for you to do it's amazing what biology will do one of the ways I started working with a highly invasive plant called water Hyacinth was a study that was done with ducks and of course I'm a duck guy and they they built these lagoons and they pushed all the waste water and this is a commercial operation so this is bad duck right and they would put flush the water through a series of lagoons and they said exactly what you said and all they were doing is putting the water hyacin in the lagoons they didn't even have it anywhere near the level you're talking and the water that came out was better than the water the Ducks were drinking yeah which is crazy and then they were feeding the Hyacinth back to the Ducks and like their their egg laying went up the size of their eggs went up their body weight went up and their health issues went down and that was all they did so we can we can take that and we can use that for ourselves as well absolutely the more life you can send it through the better uh you know we use Ducks here and instead of doing aquaponics you know we take their waterfowl right so they're going to file some water and we'll take we'll take the water they swim and poop in every day and we dump it into our hybrid aquaponics system and that drives the fertility for our Gardening System and then the water gets cleaned up the more Cycles it makes through your biological filter sure that Mike's perfect and the other thing we started out talking about waste disposal well it makes me think of when I was a kid in Pennsylvania we had private trash removal and we paid every week like we got a bill once a month you pay by how many bags they took away and they came once a week they counted the bags and like take the Ledger that's how old this is and my grandparents having lived through the Great Depression well if you had to pay an extra 50 cents for a bag that was too much so it was first you better eat it because we paid for it then if well if you can't eat it maybe the dog will eat it if it's not something a dog will eat the chickens will eat it if the chickens won't eat it well it'll go in the compost and the chickens won't eat it out of the compost but it will make compost then will it burn we had a burn barrel like you were talking about and so the amount of garbage that actually left the property was incredibly small versus today and of course we didn't have Amazon bringing boxes of three or four times a week either back then yeah it was amazing that that couple of years that I lived uh without any income and growing my own food completely um neglecting any nutritional deficiencies we might have had um was actually that was one of the epiphanies I had at the end of that it's like man I'm not buying trash packed in trash and I don't need trash service that I have to pay for I don't have to pay to go to the gym because I'm working physically all day yeah you know it's quite a shift and we can learn so much from that that depression experience and when you don't have trash and you put it to use the discharge for you know for example a family of four we Implement all of this process and basically the only thing that really goes out the door is some plastic which could technically even go so far as to be converted back into petroleum products like you know something that would run in a diesel engine yeah or it could be melted down and made in something but basically we just have some some cans some bottles and some trash and you know if you were if you wanted to you could even recycle those things yeah you have a line here that I really like because it's clear you listen to our show uh you said well I take responsibility for all aspects of your life versus just taking the Opium and waiting for a savior so opium is clearly a jackass and what are your thoughts on that well I believe that the powers that be whatever you want to assign that to they use primarily fear and false hope to control everybody and keep you impotent and unable to problem solve and then they have to sell starts that you have to buy so you know I don't think it's wise to put your life uh in ever and as your the aspects and the control of your life uh into someone else's hands I mean when was the last time they actually did something that mattered and benefited your life it's likely almost never or it's in some trivial meaningless way like you know we're going to give 12 trillion to Turkey for transgender studies and then we're going to give the Americans twelve hundred dollars one time while we force you to shut down right yeah so when you put the responsibility in someone else's hands and you wait for a savior to come from outside you're disempowering yourself and so in any area in any capacity that you can you should get in I believe anyway you should get into the habit of becoming self-sufficient in those areas and not trusting I mean like you know you can't trust them to spend your money in any way that benefits you you can't trust them to approve something that isn't going to turn out to be poisonous and have massive lawsuits over it 10 years down the road and so you need to be involved in your own life and make your own choices and not defer that to someone else's judgment who quite frankly at the end of the day don't give two two cents about you that's interesting you brought up the whole lockdown time I I think you've been where you are for quite a while and I'm pretty sure you were already there when all this happened I'm guessing that you and your neighbors didn't give two shits about lockdown oh no the power the power lines because we're so remote the power lines something happened and the power went down up on the main road and you know we didn't even know it went down nor did we care they had lockdowns uh you know during the whole Mass it's like I was living here and other than the occasional trip in the town I even forgot that any of that was going on it just had zero effect on me and then when I did go to town they're like threatening me because I'm I wasn't going to play the game and yeah you're gonna give you a ticket I was like okay whatever I'm not doing it uh but you know that I got a burn barrel at home give me your ticket exactly I could go into a whole way to handle all that without fear and get rid of it through the mail but you know the point being that in my in in my life I think that freedom and choice uh uh Free Will self-determination is one of the most important primary aspects of natural law and it's very important in my heart so I'm just not going to comply uh with stupidity um and I'm not going to accept you know like if you look up the word mandate and find out what that actually means as opposed to just blind obedience you realize that it's quite voluntary anyway so you know but the living way out here and that's one of the pros is there's nobody like running around trying to police you none of the neighbors care or whatsoever and it just has zero impact on our life and probably you know you could even achieve levels of the independence like where you live you know you live far enough outside of that kind of stupidity that you're going to be fine yeah I was going to say during I I feel a lot like you but I realize you had a lot less concern than I did like because I still had to interact with what was around me because we do right so you become dependent on what you have which is a lesson and of itself so I would have to go to a store and like do you want to put a mask on Sir like now or like would you like a mask I already have one and you just walked past them but it was there like where you where it had to be just like like you said you forgot in fact when you said I was thinking that kind of happened for me too I would leave I'm like oh yeah everybody's still doing this weird or it was less because even around here most people like were like yeah we're not doing that but you go 20 minutes south and you hit Fort Worth proper area and everybody was doing it or then even when Texas quit like if we went out of state and you're like oh wait a minute you you're still so I'm not doing this yeah you're like you're the crazy one right it was it was pretty funny um I I kind of reached a point of zero tolerance of BS you know I had to go uh refi I was moving my property out of my name into trust and whatnot and I had to go into the courthouse during this time and you know they got the two corn fed uh uh boys sitting up at the corner you kind of got to do what they tell you there well actually I just asked them I said well you know this you know I've had some paperwork I didn't just walk in there blind it's like well here's what the law says here's what a mandate is and you have have an oath right okay you got an oath to defending cost you so are you going to interfere with my right to contract and my right to do this am I going to have to sue you are going to let me go in here and do my business and they just bow their heads in shame and you know people are following you around griping complaining and threatening the whole way but I was in and out did my business you know I went to a grocery store that came in that was like you know a little bit on the liberal side but they had lots of organic food and you know they had like a little door Century that tried to get in your way and I just kind of darted around and went in they followed me then the manager was griping but I was entering I was adding up all the prices on my phone when I was getting to the checkout the general manager had come out and they were threatening I said well the only question I have is are you going to sell me these Goods or not and if they weren't going to I'd already added it up and I had a body cam on I was just going to add the tax throw the cash on there and walk off and let them keep the change I wasn't even going to give them a choice yeah um but that's just because I have certain beliefs that there's you should resist evil yeah but I also wasn't stupid I was watching the clock yeah and I wasn't gonna stand around till you know Barney Fife could show up man I was thinking a little different you were in like a tax office or something like that I was thinking of a courtroom because the judge will totally throw your ass in the clink like well that's okay that's okay if you want to dismiss the case we're good with that too so um what does life at 80 percent outside the normal systems actually look like and you know people might even think to themselves like could they really be happy in in that environment well I think there there's part of the 80 life comes with a certain adjustment you know like when I was living the normal life I thought I needed you know 3 000 square feet to live in and oddly enough life got more simple and less uh intrusive and less expensive and that brought about a lifestyle that made me feel even better and so I changed my expectations and got happier you know the 80 life is like what does the typical day look like well you know some days I bust my butt and work way harder than I'd work at a job because I'm responsible for providing I can't just do nothing and and wait for that external savior to come I do have to take responsibility but the majority of the days like once the main Gardens up and running the main thing is like oh I'm going to go out I got my plan already made you know I'm looking at my list it's like okay well these Tomatoes or these plants are done we're ripping those out I've already got other transplants ready I have to put them in I have to maybe move some duck water I may have to deal with some pests so maybe on a typical day I spend two hours in the garden which I happen to love anyway the rest of the day honestly is spent uh either building something for my life improving my situation like maybe you know putting some paver stones Down Under the the carport slash water catchment or just coming up with new ideas to improve my life or thinking about something that's going on and make you know formulating a sound decision but basically it amounts to a total of three or four hours of work a day when I say work it's not at all unpleasant to me and that means also there's no drudgery like one day I'm the plumber the next day I'm the mechanic having to figure out how to replace my U-joints or yeah or the wheel bearings or you know figure out why uh what you know like I don't know so I've got to go on the internet and find out why I'm misfiring like I don't know it so I have to solve the problem and then execute on it and finish it but it eliminates boredom and it grows your skills as next day you're the electrician the next day uh you're the the plant expert or you're the the duck Whisperer you know yeah there's always something new but when things are set up and running smooth you're talking about three or four uh enjoyable hours of work a day and then honestly I spend the rest of the time you know just considering how I could maybe start a new online business or expand something because most business you have to adapt and change to what's going on you can't just set something up and then expect it to go on you know because competition comes other people do things better new technology replaces it so it's really more a lifestyle of personal growth honestly you know to me part of the Soul lifestyle of being a homesteader is do you have what you're saying or anything do you have really two kinds of work planned work and emergency work or planned work and required work that wasn't scheduled however you want to phrase it and I love the plan work like today when I get done I'm gonna go work on a drip irrigation system that I've been building and uh actually I'm going to take it from design to build stage at this point and so that's fun what sucks is when you're like so I have this thing planned and then something breaks and you need to fix it first that's suck level one suck level two is the thing breaks and you need to fix it first and it's complicated and or expensive to fix it that suck level two suck level three is and if you don't do it Something's Gonna Die right right so how it moves up the priority list it also moves up the suck level list but it's all part of it and the key is to like you just go okay so I'm going to do the drip irrigation system Thursday right you just move the schedule thing out and you do the immediate need thing and the more maintenance you do and the better you do your design and your upgrades the less of that happens but people have asked me like when will that ever stop and the answers never you can reduce the frequency but not the fact that it occurs no no that that's the thing you become really good at prioritizing it in fact a lot of the things done during depression we can learn from because they developed over time oh priority list these are the things that work because I've been in suck level two and three so many times I've learned how to redo what I do to reduce that but yeah I mean there's always something unexpected so you have to set priorities and everything has to get shifted according to whatever's going on you know like we had this little freeze uh we even got down to 17 down here uh and and in the priorities of doing everything that I did building a structure to insulate my water pumps didn't make the list yet and now suddenly oh crap it's going to be 17 tomorrow oh we're gonna Harvest all the tomatoes cut down all the greens get everything out of the garden that can possibly be put up and preserved and we've got to insulate the pumps or disconnect them and drain them and blow the water line out so yeah sometimes you're just uh all of your plans are just out the window because survival we need water to live so yeah this takes top priority and it's interesting that sometimes you do a thing and it it makes sense that it will work and then it didn't quite work like I had a what I would call a minor failure with exactly what you're talking about blowing pipes out so I have um an array where the water comes out of my water softener and uh pressurized system I have a pressure tank in my garage and it also goes to the irrigation side of the whole property and what I've always done is I cut that water off on the irrigation side but the house still works I have everything wrapped up heat tape all that and everything works but what happens is then I have no water on the property I only have it in the house and the Animals still need water so you turn it back on and you got to blow everything out again so I'm like well dummy put a second cut off valve in and put another hose bib in right there that all gets wrapped up then but then I don't want the water into that hose bib it's all weird shape getting that heat tape on there so like I put in a valve on both sides of it and then I put a t in that would drain the water out of the hose bib piece and just open up a little straight valve of that Tee and the gravity would take care of it there you go but yeah so I did it the first day and it turned out that the water dripped out slow enough that it still plugged the hole in the bottom of the straight valve and then it froze a straight valve so nothing broke and I could run water for the birds but you once you did it you couldn't drain it again and I ended up setting a little space heater there and building a tent around it and melting it off and then I just figured out I have it all there because my air compressor is right in the next door and I have a hose that I hook up and blow out the property so if I would do my thing give them water open that valve and stick that compressor on there for two seconds everything was good but you don't figure that out until it gets tested by Nature you know and it it got tested with like you said it was like sub 20. exactly I mean that's a great example you gave there I mean it's just it's a process of of testing it against nature and realizing oh I got to make some improvements which is kind of an ongoing almost forever sort of thing now you use 80 as your metric so you strive to do that so let's say 80 of your own food how are you approaching that what crops are you growing are you doing any animal products how does that look okay so you know it depends on your lifestyle um like out here um you have to be prepared and it's not necessarily in season but technically if it's for survival they really there's provision to allow that but like you know then spring there's a herd of 200 elk going by and they're about a mile and a half out so what do you do um you're not prepared so you either hop in your truck and try to get ahead of them or you take the long shot with the SKS you know um but if you're not doing any forging and hunting um then what I find and what you know it's kind of like from experience you learn you can't count on designing this for 100 or 80 and actually always getting 80 percent you have to design your life because some things are going to fail maybe you have a maybe one year you planted a whole bunch of tomatoes and you're just going to eat fried green tomatoes all year for whatever reason yeah but then the the horn worms come in or or the shield bugs come in something comes in and wipes out a portion of your crop or you do something stupid or your system breaks in some way because it wasn't robust enough and then you have a failure somewhere so generally over design but if you're talking about terms of what does it take to grow all of your own food you know a lot of people have a flower bed full of vegetables and like I grow all the vegetables I need but what they're saying is I can add something to every meal and that's all I feel like I need but if you depend upon that if your life depends upon that um then I look at what's the most efficient way to do it and therefore that means what's the smallest area that I can do that in and what methods allow me to do that because if you grow if you have enough broad Acres land you have good rainfall you have fertile soil you can just you can put out one to five acres on the ground but out here when everything has to basically be a container gardening wicking bed type style or aquaponics with a wicking bed on top then you need 800 square feet of growing area per person and that only works under the condition that you grow what you need and and you also have to think about okay I'm talking about survival here I'm not talking about thriving and eating everything I want let's just start with survival and we'll expand from there later so what that means to me is I'm if I'm gonna go 80 of my food I aim at the 100 mark because I'll probably get the 80 Mark it's kind of like you know if I if I aim for the moon and land on the Mountaintop it's not so bad but if I if I aim for the mole hill I'm never getting on the mountain sure and so um I grow I find that 800 square feet and by time you put paths in there to walk you're up to around 1200 square feet but 800 square feet of growth per person but then you have to choose crops that may not be the crops you like and we're talking about a 1200 calorie per day survival we're not talking about you know 2 800 calories of going out and working hard we're talking just getting by and so at that rate you have to look at the crops that can actually produce what you need in the least possible space so there's a book out there it's called how to grow more vegetables than you thought possible I think it's on the seventh edition now and the most valuable thing in that book is called the master charts because in the master charts it tells you you know how the spacing and flats the spacing in a a raised bed situation the spacing in rows and it tells you um the calories per pound of food and the calories or the number of crops or the the expected Harvest per square foot in your growing area so what I've learned is that things like sweet potatoes hit very high because you get a lot of calories per square foot and you get to eat the leaves which increases the root production so you have to think in terms of multitasking and then in our case you know we gather organic matter from the landscape and compost things to add back to the system and bring fertility back if you're just doing gardening then you may have to grow a certain like 60 percent of your crop might have to be high carbon crop to produce compostable material so you have to think about what you're doing and the method of growing to get down to this 800 square feet of garden bed requires that you start your seeds in Flats you know you may have 144 plants per square inch which makes them easy to care easy to put them under automatic water and then the last 30 days before they reach maturity your pluck them out of the flat and you're putting them into the garden to finish their last 30 days and produce their crop and that allows you to take this massive area and condense the the nursery care down to a very small area and in this small area it's easy to maintain it's easy to keep an eye on and then it gets expanded out to the large growing area only as it's needed and it requires that you develop the timing so this isn't something you're going to go from I'm going to I'm going to take a bag of survival seeds and put them in my closet to oh craps hit the fan and now I'm gonna go garden and survive you actually have to develop the the discipline like like if you're working a job guess what you may have things for that planting that your job will stop you from doing and you will never succeed at that while you're working a full-time job or you have to be extremely disciplined to be out there gardening by Moonlight which is not so bad actually and um you know so it's this skill set of learning to make this work in that space in combination with growing the most calorie efficient crops meaning what's going to produce the most calories per square foot you could say well gosh I can raise uh a hundred pounds of of uh squash in this area for example but how many calories are there in a pound of squash how many meals do you eat in a day how many people are you feeding and so that's a long answer to basically saying nothing practice the minimum you can do it with discipline and practice and the application that knowledge is 800 square feet and technically it would reach 100 percent but you can't you can't realistically expect that so you always want to put your effort where twenty percent of the effort is going to give you eighty percent of the results without you and what particular crops do you grow on your homestead for your family what are like your top five well you know what we do is first of all we have to supplement so we go you know you have hunting and you have foraging and the meat the meat if you're a vegetarian or a vegan this is extremely hard um I don't know if you've ever seen how much a vegan eats if you if they have to do any physical work versus you don't have to acquire or preach like yeah I got you so um there's a lot of variability here but for us you know like I said we can take the long shot we got a good scope and I can I can I can shoot ahead of the movement so we can't we can you know regardless of the the hunting season we can bring in survival food on that alone but we aim for being able to produce everything we want but we also like to eat things that we just like so for us we do grow a lot of sweet potato which we happen to really like and it fits really well because we eat a lot of the greens in our salads we grow a lot of Swiss chard um I eat I love salad just because I love salad and if you eat it within 15 minutes of picking it it actually is nutritious so you know we have a rotate station set up where we have a couple heads of lettuce that are being planted and harvested every single day so there's a lot of salads and into that salad we mix squash we obviously have lots of tomatoes um uh you know really uh and and depending on the season too the season dictates what would grow like right now the freeze killed every most everything but some of the green onions so we had to replant our cabbage and we had to replant our green onions we had to replant our mustard greens um and so it really we we let the season kind of dictate what we can grow but then we grow watermelon because I love watermelon we grow uh the local cantaloupe here or the Pecos cantaloupe and so we grow things we like but then we learn the efficiency of harvest like when you have a melon you don't just eat the middle out and throw it away you dry the seeds you baste them you roast them you got something better with with oil and protein and then you take the Rind and you shave off the hard part and you throw it either in a 50 gallon drum or you can uh because I don't like I don't like canning canning takes forever but Mass fermentation like for one season you know you you literally would throw onions and carrots and and apples into a 50 gallon drum with a two percent salt solution and lacto ferment the whole stinking Garden at the end of the season and it took two hours to do yeah so um we we tend to have a lot of fermented foods so we make you use of everything but what we grow in the garden for us is primarily sweet potatoes and we and a lot of stuff for salads with add-ins you know of watermelons and fruits and then of course you know we're planting fruit trees but you know that's going to take four years to come into fruition um so that's what I like is the hearty crops I want to grow things like turnips you know because you can bake a turnip and it's actually pretty good it's all right yeah yeah it grows in season I don't really like beets but I know that I need the nutrition and so we'll grow we'll throw beets in there um so we tend to grow just those simplistic crops because that's what we like now we also grow some some Heritage uh pre-1800s wheat because it doesn't my wife kind of got sensitive and got what they call celiac disease which is really leaky gut syndrome which is really leads to the wheat the way it's processed the fact that it's just starch and the fact that it's got a lot of glyphosphate in it and so and it's been manually correct it's not GMO but it's been manually crossed with other grasses that probably wouldn't have happened in nature so when you get a weak pre-1800s you don't give an insulin response like modern wheat you eat a slice of that and it spikes your blood sugar as hard as eating six tablespoons of table sugar so we actually grow wheat uh in in the ground in season and it allows us to get you know maybe 20 to 60 pounds of of wheat that we can turn into our own fresh bread and I know that's not uh really truly paleo per se if you're trying to avoid starches but we tend to eat more practically with what will grow in our climates because you know I could say I want to grow a particular thing but we have to adapt like for example uh zucchini squash the squash bugs pretty much wipe it out all the time so we have to grow a more uh we have to grow a we have an heirloom variety that we grow that's different so we grow lots of squash during the winter lots of turnips lots of greens lots of potatoes lots of melons lots of leeks to add flavors there there it is the The Vines this is a traditional and it you can use it as a summer or a winter squash and the vines of these are just like about as big as your little finger and they're hard and the bugs will go at them but they'll survive in the vine borers they just don't really dig those Vines there's not a lot of a lot of Vine to pour in on those things because they're so hard and fibrous and I'm big on that adapt to what will grow where you are there's so many people like they see a thing like sep holster grew a lemon in the Alps yeah or use of holster no figure out how to feed yourself first and then if you want to do something fancy go do something fancy exactly you start you start with the basics and you learn because a lot of it has to be adapted to your climate and those things that we're growing grow well here there's a book called J Dam natural farming it's you know it's just it's letters that stand for a word I don't remember what at the at the moment but it allows you to basically make your own soap base and then use sulfur and things that are not poisonous at all and then you're able to control mildew and bugs and all of things affordably cheaply and in bulk and then there's things like you know depending on how far you want to go with this you can use ducts like we do for fertility you could put your own urine like we've done experiments in aquaponics and from experience in small systems and just extrapolating the bigger picture with math which I know can not necessarily be perfect but it gives you the idea that it's not impossible to use your own urine to provide almost 100 percent of the fertility or the nitrogen that you need for your garden so you can get really obsessive with this kind of thing and you can go all the way up I I tend to kind of poo poo this immediate attitude that people have they say well you can't do everything yourself and I I say well why don't you say you don't want to do everything yourself because uh in reality what do you think our ancestor did a couple hundred years ago or a few thousand years ago they pretty much did their survival completely themselves and there's always going to be barter and trade and maybe if you're better at business you need to hire some people and put them on a corner of your land in exchange for housing and work and let them produce your food you know there's always barter maybe you need to find the neighbor like in California there's a guy that grows avocados and you know he can have a a CSA Drop Shipping program where you get your avocados from him you get your squash from somebody else like you have to modernize it and realize you don't have to do everything yourself but I guess what I'm saying is avoid the attitude of I can't do it or the automatic program of I can't do it because there's always a way to do it even if that means I am a good businessman and I'm paying someone else to produce my food the way I want it produced like in McAllen Texas there's a lot of Farmland you can go down there to a farmer and say you know what would you charge me for five acres of watermelon or an acre of sugar cane and you can literally in advance it take yep I have to plan a couple years out but you can basically buy an acre of food and then you just have to send a trailer down there to pick it up and so there's lots of ways to do this so don't get stuck into the either or attitude you know there's always creative ways to achieve what you want to that is 100 but yet somehow sometimes it's through other people and depending on how obsessive you are about it it can be 100 on your do-it-yourself kind of thing the real question is do you want to make that happen yeah because I mean I'll be straight up I don't want to do everything so the older I get the less I don't want the less I want to do everything right you know there's people ask me all the time why don't you have rabbits I like rabbits I don't need another thing to do and my wife won't eat the rabbit so I'd be doing it for just me if my wife ain't rabbit I might be willing to do the thing and like everything adapts to your family you know and and your their life let's talk a little bit about the building side of things because you use a uh a thing called aircrete to build structures and you've built quite a few of them now I don't think you've built anywhere near as many as you've built now the last time you're on the show but can we start out and tell people what is aircrete okay so aircrete uh the elevator speech about aircrete is that it's Portland cement that has been inflated with air bubbles six times in volume and why six times is because if you go more than that it becomes weaker if you go less than that it it starts to lose its abilities it insulate you so aircrete is kind of a buzzword for what is codified and known in engineering as cellular cement it's been around since at least the 60s that I can tell but aircrete is the homemade version of what is known as uh aerated autoclave cement or AAC which is a commercial product that they do build with the difference being the homemade version has to be kept moist and it cures at home over the over 28 days and the consistency depends on you and your attention whereas AAC is something that's cured in Steam basically in a in an autoclave under heat and steam so it's a consistent strong product and the homemade version can have a lot of variability um and so typically aircrete's not the code approved version but it's about a quarter of the cost and how do you make it so we take uh typically you know I like to use what's available off the shelf yeah you can go out and buy a 38 000 machine that'll make it for you um but I find that with a an 8 Amp drill a barrel on a pivot and a 30 inch triple blade uh Mud Mixer like this we're able to make it quite effectively and affordably so we add a uh five it depends on your bag if you have 94 pound bags or you have 92 pound bags you either had five and a half uh or six gallons of water and you mix a slurry and then you have a another five gallons of water that has basically you know just help you understand it's like soap you're blowing bubbles so um you can buy an Agricultural Product and like you can use um 14 to 18 ounces of Dawn dishwashing soap or you can go buy an aggregate agricultural foaming solution or you could get foam from the fire department or you can get a purpose made Vermilion foaming agent for cement okay and basically you have a a wand which is a piece of pipe with a whole bunch of fine stainless steel wool in it so when you push that water in the air through there it's like millions of little you know bubble things like the kids have blowing bubbles and what you get out is a very very fine bubble if we blow those bubbles into the bottom of that barrel and we mix it with the mixer until we have six cubic feet so basically we're using soap bubbles to put the bubble into the cement and then it holds it there with the viscosity of the mix until it can set up which you know in about 20 hours depending on temperature it's it's ready to stack another layer on and build or cut and move okay okay so if we were building a structure and we were pouring walls we'd mix as much as we could in one go we'd pour that wall or walls and then we got a white basically a full day 20 you said 20 hours but let's call it a day right right and then we can pour our next layer right and then we got a white and then we can pour our next layer and we can keep doing that until we get our walls up to the height that we wanted exactly and if you're building a big house I know we built tiny houses here and a lot of people are always like why are they so small can I have a big house you can um but if you're doing it yourself you also have to throw in the factor of how much am I going to do in a day so sometimes you're you're pouring those forms and moving them around and then when you come back around then you move up a level and you go back around and so I love slip forming you may see it around you in the city where they're building bridges and they put in these forms they fill it with cement then they move the forms up or maybe they construct the forms all at once um you can also build with blocks but I really like that monolithic structure because it's it's stronger and you don't lose the insulation uh where the mortar joints are the brick because I can pull out my thermal camera and I can see you know heat coming in through those mortar joints so slip forming like you're talking about there is what I like to do it's it's faster it's stronger it's easier if you know um and slip forming means you don't have to buy a a fortune in in forms to form the whole house and import all at once yeah because you can like you said you keep moving up so we filled up to here now we the Wall's done so we move the form up on the wall exactly so we see even that material is reusable it still has an expense right we've reduced the total quantity of material that we need um well thought isn't these small houses and you correct me if I'm wrong my understanding but zerocrete stuff especially before because you coat it with something when you're done right but before you do that it's actually pretty easy to cut so it would seem like if you wanted to build a house it might make sense to build kind of like what would be like your bedroom suite first and then if you wanted to have a bathroom you could like then build that and you cut a hole in the wall now you got a door and now okay now I want a more proper living area so I build a living area adjacent and cut a hole in a wall and then maybe I need a bedroom for the kids so I can a kitchen and so you could go modular with it and that way if you're doing especially like off-grid remote Camp something like that at least when you get the first one done you've got a proper structure to stay inside because I've seen people that do stuff like well we're going to build a house but we'll do get a travel trailer and if it's the middle of summer or middle winter they real quick figure out that sucks right if it's spring or fall or travel trailer is great you know uh a travel trailer in the winter if it's really cold climate is like it's like a it's actually it seems like it's colder in there than it is outside I mean it's yeah it's crazy yeah you're that that's brilliant actually you know modular building and that's my preference because first of all if you haven't been doing construction and you go from working in an office or working in retail or or or working for a corporation and then suddenly you're out there trying to build a whole house I mean I wasn't I I acted as ever from Air Conditioning to electrical to to any part of the job to be in the general contractor and just hiring other people I worked all of that and even as a general contractor just overseeing every single nail and screw and piece of gravel that goes into that job can be overwhelming so when you build modularly like that there's less of an overwhelm I quit kind of situation um and once you get a little win under your belt you're inspired and now you're charged in such a way nothing's going to stop you um but yeah you build the master bedroom with a kitchenette that can stay or come out later and then you basically live in your master bedroom and when you do this intentionally from the very beginning you've maybe you lay the whole slab or maybe you've just planned it out to add your found Foundation later and some that allows you one if you if you're on a limited budget and you cut out all the extras even limited income can can build up to that and typically uh you can you can cut aircrete with a anything you'll cut wood a hand saw a pocket knife uh in fact when it's within the first 24 hours you can carve it with a fork or spoon and people make statues out of it um so it's easy to cut and you can cut it out later but when you plan ahead you go ahead and you put a door frame in because typically where you're placing doors and windows you need a header and something to transfer of the the load above which may be a roof uh to beams or support So typically you build that into the structure even if you um pour it full of aircrete you know where it is and you can come back and and and cut it out and the aircrete itself provides the insulation but it's aircrete is really more like it's a building system so it kind of like in the way you know how sheet rocks all crumbly white gypsum in the middle and has paper on either side or a door made out of fiberglass or a surfboard if you take off the exterior coating it's it's pretty flimsy you know who's who's gonna what front door is going to keep the wind out if it's just styrofoam but then when you put the fiberglass on either side it adds that rigidity you see aircrete is compressively okay to build with but tensile strength you know sideways push yeah it breaks much easier because it's not uh cement as in Sand and Gravel in Portland it's kind of its own thing so you have to think of it that way so you have to add a tensile strength so we typically add a commercial roofing fabric to it or we add fiberglass stucco mesh to it that gives it a tensile strength of 150 plus pounds per square inch and when that's attached and your final coat goes on which is basically a synthetic stucco it glues it to the wall and adds your tensile strength and and so that you can you can literally just drill a hole through it stick a sawz on there you know cut out a hole and there you go either build your next room and you can build yourself as you go just plan and know where everything goes and stick to your blend and modular ability is a great way to go and you don't have to have a tiny house at all what we chose to do here is rather than even like stick the buildings together because we're going to have we have rentals now that when people we hold our workshops people can actually come and stay and live in aircrete that couple weeks and then like if you wanted to just come out and stay in aircrete to you know kick the tires um it's it's here but what we're doing is we're building a courtyard that blocks out that hot dry Desert Wind and we're going to have a food Forest that's also going to be comfortable to hang out in inside of this Courtyard surrounded by these buildings exactly oh cool yeah and we're going to connect each one with a wall in between and have some stairs up to the top so that you can go up and use the the basically the patio space on top of the structures to you know look at the stars if you want so you know sky is the limit it's up to your imagination but modular lets you get a win under your belt it lets you build it as you can afford to and in the time you have me by myself like block building if I'm building a small 450 square foot house that has a small bathroom a small walk-in closet a small bedroom a small living space and a small kitchen or then in in basically uh two and a half hours a day I can go out remove the previous blocks cut up cut them up move them mortar them put them up clean up the molds reassemble and pour with aircrete so and I can go up one foot a day so by myself I go up in height one foot per day and with aircrete you can't I mean 12 inches depending on what foaming agent you're using if you're using dish soap uh 12 inches really is the maximum pour depth if you're using um Vermillion however you can actually go up 19 inches a day so there's a limit to how far you can pour each day anyway so it'll allow like if you really industrious you can go out do this early in the morning and then go do your job or go out after work and do it and so you can get this done in a in a way that is friendly to kind of your lifestyle and what you can realistically do yourself in a day yeah we definitely talked about the timeline last time I had you on and like I said I don't remember when that was it was pre-covered so it's been four years or so um but I what it's always impressed me with this is a building Tech is it's this alternative thing that can be done with a great deal of DIY it has all the stuff going for it and what it immediately makes me think about is totally different is the whole Earthship thing and I've just seen so many of those that I'm doing this and that guy it gets interviewed and he's like halfway built the damn thing like how long you been here oh eight years they're like you're gonna die and maybe your kids will have this thing it just takes forever it seems like and this moves much more quickly and then it does lend itself to modular building which gets somebody under roof and then the courtyard idea that's I've had that design in my head for lots of different applications and I think it makes a tremendous amount of sense definitely in the desert because everybody thinks about wind or I'm sorry everything's about sun and direct evaporate operation but what kills you is wind because wind just takes that moisture away so I think that's a great plan now but nuts is asking here about durability in earthquakes seems like a good time let's cover that I don't know about earthquakes but this is a very durable Building Technology it is like I said the tensile strength isn't necessarily there and then you know places like California really don't like aircrete because it is in fact less seismically sound and yet they still approve AAC commercial buildings you know where they go out there with a crane they lift this giant panel in place and they just bolt it up and suddenly the whole bill the whole store is up and running in two weeks somehow yeah and so aircrete being homemade is much more susceptible to cracking and I know that freaks a lot of people out but um honestly like when you do the math and the engineering on this you already know what it is you've done and so the typical aircrete building has a compression strength of you know somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 ish pounds per square inch um and then when you add up the weight of the roof the snow load and everything you've got three PSI on the bottom of the wall so it's more than capable with staining the load but if you have an earthquake situation that's where aircrete uh is a is the least strong um but you know what what I mean really when an area is hit with an earthquake what really stands up so you have to add something like cellulose fibers to the aircrete or you switch your building method to where you have uh basically using aircrete as a loose fill insulation which can be code approved much more easily by the way and then your loose seal insulation is um not load bearing um but if you added cellulose when it it dries the heat doesn't transfer transfer through if you use say Basalt fibers now you've just killed your thermal insulation and you've kind of defeated one of the main aspects of aircrete but it makes it more capable of withstanding so when you design with seismic considerations you have to add a fiber and that's usually cellulose and quite frankly that's usually that stuff that they use you know they seem to come out the truck and they spray that green stuff all over the side of the road where it grows grass later it's that cellulose that comes in big bundles that you would mix in because it's got a fairly long fiber so you know it is alternative building it's not really code approved and we don't have any buildings we can show you that have stood up to like say you know a six or seven level event you know the data is just not there and that's the issue with anything alternative is we nobody has footed the 150 000 bills and the five years through the legislature to get this a code approved so you kind of take that responsibility into your own hands when it comes to that uh you so again you're kind of on your own there and when you go out looking for an engineer to actually help you with this I have Engineers call me asking me for the data it's like dude it's codified you're the engineer go look it up and you can find very few Engineers who will actually engineer and run the math on things and so if you're in a seismic area and you want to be protected it's good to have the engineering done and if you're going to have it code approved you're going to most likely have to have an engineer anyway yeah yeah what options are there you have a figure in here building a home from the earth for four dollars a square foot and just real quick I ran a real quick calculation here just to uh to see I I bought my first home for 85 000 bucks back in 1990 five right uh and it was around 1800 square foot it's just to make a point of how low that is that was forty seven dollars a square foot when I bought that house and people were like man you got a deal so we start talking about four dollars a square foot we're talking I I think most camping tents cost more than four dollars square foot so yeah is that a thing okay so first of all it's a little click baity um it's a little attention it's a pattern interrupt right so um that's the cost of the walls uh okay so when you talk about actually adding the roof and and with almost any kind of construction unfortunately at the end of the day either either dimensional Lumber or trust work is still going to be it's still going to be a conventional roof and then the question is how are you going to finish the house are you going to you know go get some Pine boards and build your own cabinets or are you going to have a professional come in and build Hickory or walnut Cabinetry for you so highly variable depending on the choices you make so when you're talking about a finished structure let's see I have some notes Here uh you know a finished structure uh built from Earth can be as low as fifteen dollars per square foot if you've done everything you've built your own cabinets that includes the air conditioning that you put in if you have to hire a company that's going to charge you twelve thousand dollars to put in a normal uh split air conditioning system that's going to go up by as much as twelve thousand dollars depending on where you're located if you're going to hire an electrician that's going to go up uh substantially so if you do everything yourself you can you can build it from the earth and now there's another caveat where do you live what is your soil type is it all silt now I'm going to have to buy in clay because to build Good Earth structures because just for everybody in the audience we've just turned the corner we're not talking about aircrete at this point no yeah we just switched to building from the dirt under your feet so if you happen to fall within the range of usable dirt with the ratio of clay and sand and silt is workable you you can build it straight from the earth and you can finish that for fifteen dollars a square foot but typically with modern expectations we don't want a house where we have to go fix cracks in the Natural Earth and wall every single year or every single season so we're typically going to stabilize that with cement and that's going to add some expense and when you're talking about cast Earth which is what I'm talking about specifically here because it's easier than rammed Earth it's as easy as Earth building gets you just literally throw your dirt in the barrel you mix it with as little as 16 to 1 16 part sand one part cement and depending on your site that typically comes down to more like ten or eight to one or if you want to go super if you want to go all the way back to cement that winds up being three to one and so typically if you're going to build a functional house you need a an Earthen wall you need a space that's filled with insulation that can be straw or that can be fiberglass or cellulose or whatever but it can't just be an open space because heat will transfer easily through an open space by heating up an air molecule and then it moves to the other side and transfers its heat so you need lots of little air pockets and so that could be air but that's not air Creed if you put aircrete in there that drives the expense up we're talking about Earthen Wall Gap straw another Earthen wall what that gives you thermal Mass it gives you insulation it gives you an efficient structure that'll actually be functional because if you look at most say Cobb houses or even Earth ships you know like you put them here in Texas not in Taos New Mexico you know like man this is great and then about a month and a half Into Summer it's like you know it's starting to suck in here I think I'm gonna sleep outside because they have no insulation and they over time they ramp up their heat and then winter comes and over and then it starts getting too cold and you have to continuously pump a lot of energy into it so fifteen dollars a square foot is like a a four inch Earthen cement reinforced wall with a foot or more of space case and another four inch wall and so yeah fifteen dollars a square foot is not impossible but again what are you putting into that how much are you going to spend on Industrial materials to finish the house the way you want it yeah it's but it's it just shows like there's another option and I think that's something people need to understand I think the other side of that is what's best for one person is probably not necessarily what's best for another person like you said what's what's the material like where you are what's the climate like where you are what are what are the codes like where you are but I would say that building with Earth is the number one way homes are still constructed in the world today yes we live in a toll we live in a bubble in the Western World we really do we live in a a different world not everybody can just run down to Lowes or Home Depot and uh get get a couple pallets full of yellow pine and start framing walls that's that's it's not like that everywhere we've kind of lost and honestly it's environmentally it's a horrible way to do business what we do in this country at this point instead of growing long-term Timber and building houses that live that last 500 years we grow short-term Timber we mono crop it and we build houses that are ready to fall apart I mean we really do that's what we do today by 20 the modern houses by year 20 you know you're going to need to spend some money to keep it up I had a guy on the dude I can't think of his name now from strong towns and he was explaining how one of the big problems we're having with uh America today suburban and urban America is that because subdivisions are pretty much rolled out over about a year to two and because of the way we built things we're about 20 years in starts falling apart the whole place starts to fall apart at exactly the same time and then when urban planners get involved and say you can't sub what you can't put a tiny house in the backyard the things that people you would normally do which is get somebody else to live there what have you and then make a little extra money and use that to upkeep the house they just kind of do what they absolutely got to do and the quality and the lifestyle just continues to go down so then they dump the house make it somebody else's problem and move to a new one yeah and then so we just have this thing we're like this was a really nice neighborhood and it starts to go downhill across time and it's yeah and yet there's straw there's straw mud houses Like Straw Bale type construction with mud that's still in use 150 years later yeah not even even Lumber built if it's built out of proper material so the house that I grew up in my high school years in my dad still lives in it and it was built around 1897 I want to say but the first house ended up being what we call The Shanty which was like a big shed with an attic and a basement that was the original house that was built in 1840s all right and when I would I remember we used to hang deer down in the basement down in there to to butcher them and we had a particularly good year and we had enough room to hang through deer and so my grandfather said go down there and put two more Nails up in the beam so we could hang that fourth deer up so I went down there proceeded to try to drive a nail into a hundred year old oak planks 150 year old dog planks at the time it did not work uh you could put a nail in them and I ended up getting a drill and pre-drilling them and the drill smoked yeah to drill into these planks that were a good three and a half inches thick not deep thick yeah and that's what we used to build houses out of but we're off topic there but it's it's a reason to start looking at other other ways yeah things for sure yeah I mean it's not like you have to do aircrete or mud or whatever my biggest takeaway is that um I want to just convey the idea that you don't have to settle for not having a home you don't have to settle for rent and mortgages necessarily um if if you're a do-it-yourself kind of person or you just want that Bug out location the point is that if your soil's ripe you could build an arch-shaped house for free burn some bones and mix up some plaster and coat that thing and live for free if you're willing to adjust your expectations uh so don't take no for an answer I guess is what I'm saying and yes it's like the permaculture saying it depends on you and and climate and everything else so what are your thoughts about people that live more in urban spaces and what they can do to adapt because in the end you celebrate from the beginning you got to work with what you got right and so you know you can see a lot of examples I can't remember the name of the people but there's that uh little family uh that's near a stadium I think in Chicago they got six tenths of an acre and on that's a house and yet they can only grow all their own food and they snuck in goats and chickens even against the code and they're able to sell enough Gourmet greens to pay for their lifestyle and feed themselves so it kind of depends on how much you're willing to you know bend the rules or address these people uh in court as you find out that you can't use a lawyer for yourself and that there's already Supreme Court rulings like yeah you can issue a permit you can find a permit you can uh cancel a permit but you can't actually interfere with the activities of conducting life such as Sheltering yourself and there's a lot of nuance in there so you can either deal with it over a year or two of legal headaches and win and do it but what most people are going to do is is they're going to have the chickens until the neighbor tells on them um they're in the most extreme Urban example you know you can get almost free land in Chicago and bad neighborhoods and you can go in you can buy up a block you can knock down the houses build a new duplex put a fence around the whole block and you can farm right there in the middle um a lot of it at the very least if you're going to obey and you're going to follow every suggestion you do what you can do and maybe that means a little aeroponic thing to grow lettuce on your kitchen counter that uses electricity for Life maybe that means you put a wicking bed out on your balcony and you have to put grow lights up during the day so that it can actually get enough light maybe that means you go out and Gorilla garden maybe that means you find a space or a like sometimes you can find you know little cooperatives in the area where you can like pay some little fee and you get a little plot of ground to grow on maybe that means you go out and use the space between the land and the sidewalk or the or the median between the road these common spaces um there's a lot you can do so I think it's important to do what you can do and because as you learn your skills and you get better with working with what you do have access to you'll find more and more ways to expand that and maybe that's using everybody's balcony to grow one planter of food and you just split what you get off of there it's just it's really limited by the imagination and you should never let yourself be told you can't do something because if you can do you know 16 square feet somewhere and perfect your skills on that worst case scenario you're going to be able to take that across the road into a pasture during a hard time and just make it happen anyway yeah yeah and there's always a way too like you know as you're saying I'm thinking of one of my friends you look at the front he lives in a very nice neighborhood I don't think chickens are supposed to be there and it looks like they have this beautiful and it is this is a beautiful rocked in raised bed and there's like plants to the front of it that make it look like the whole thing's a raised bed what it actually is is a chicken habitat right and there's a little chicken house in there and they use a deep litter system and they only keep like three birds but that's plenty of eggs for a family this is a three-person family kid two adults and uh knowing those chickens are there except a couple neighborhoods that are trustworthy and and they make more eggs than they can use so the kids the kids from those family come and get eggs yeah no one bothers them and like you know I had a guy on the show years ago that kept a stack of quail in his one-car garage in in Detroit and he produced 10 000 plus eggs and over a thousand coal Birds a year yeah there's always something you can do it and it's about being creative and keeping the Cairns out of your life you know I I remember back in the 80s when it was illegal to have satellite TV before they came up with a legit way to do it and they had these big dishes and the one who made this dish look like it was an antenna that or not an antenna a big umbrella that had been bent over and then nobody bothered them like it's all about how creative you can be exactly how many ways can you and how much what is your willingness to overcome these things you know and maybe before you I mean there's there's two approaches one just do it until the neighbor complains and then adjust I mean it's kind of like the thing with the homestead you're always okay there's a new problem let's deal with it today um you could potentially get to know your neighbors and kind of you know hint maybe not necessarily directly say you're going to put chickens in the backyard but it would bother you if there were some extra sounds coming over the fence uh yeah you know can you can you mitigate those things can you do sprouts and quail inside of your garage you know yeah it just depends on your situation your willingness you know way to talk to a neighbor about the chicken thing would be man I have this friend and he got a couple chickens that wasn't bothering nothing and his neighbor pitched about it and see what they say to that right yeah they're like oh that's stupid I don't have to worry about Bill right exactly and if and if if Tom on the other side's like well I could see why so well I need to put the chicken silver on the fence line with Bill like you used to be a little bit shrewd you know um you also have a thing here talking about community and having your community separate but together yeah so what do you mean by that okay so you know I get to interact with a lot of people and it amazes me how many people in this space they all want to do this community thing and yet none of them can agree to pick an area because it's not perfect yeah um and um it almost has to be kind of like the way it was in the founding of this country it's like together but separate like you need your space where it's yours it's under your control you have autonomy but maybe you have to do this in a decentralized manner because it's very hard to get a lot of truly like-minded people together on the same piece of land to then buy the land and then split it up accordingly so uh and like you know you had talked about when you initially did uh you know your permaculture thing about creating a community only to find out that subdivision men you had to put in a paved Road and electricity and all this stuff yeah so you either have to sue them and win and buck the system or what's really more practical is where everybody's at you have a decentralized community almost like a virtual community so everybody's apart but what if in a particular city or county or state you have one guy willing to do Hot Shot service who's already doing it who could pick up a instead of just driving with an empty load can take you know farm supplies from one little farm outside the city and then deliver them to a drop spot where everybody could come pick up their CSA box uh what what it what can you mail to other people can you travel and help one another you know I think of a story an old man told me during the Depression you know an old lady an old widow she couldn't really do much but she'd sit around and make quilts and their their family had the right soil and they grew tons of apricots another guy had a ton of corn and so they would get together at the end of harvest seasons and do their little jamborees and they would literally bring all of their Surplus onto the square and just set it out and everybody could swap and exchange freely for whatever they needed and everybody had enough well there's no reason we basically can't do the same thing using UPS or using the mail I mean there is some expense there but it allows us to build these systems of support for ourselves and share the Surplus with other people and that allows us to build community but you have to actually interact with one another you have to actually want to be in community because you know a lot I see so many communities to get together but they don't actually interact they're basically strangers in a suburb or strangers in an area that are always bickering and so it's better when you don't have one person or an organization like an HOA sort of in control it's better to live separately and have your thing and it's and it's less effort to do that you know using the infrastructure of roads and shipping service that we have now and find ways that we can put our own fiefdoms in and build relationships within our community and ship all of this stuff and all of this product and all this Surplus to make it available you know it's kind of like setting up the Agora right but we don't currently have a proper Agora and everybody wants to reinvent the wheel instead of doing YouTube we're going to create bright town or we're going to go over and create another version of it instead of moving to the international or the interplanetary file system where you take responsibility to host your video on your own server or on your computer and then it gets shared then as it's getting shared everyone shares the load you know we have to start thinking about how we can reduce our dependence on the system that can be censored and edited and controlled and so we have to build community even if that Community is just your Facebook group and you're all just making known what you have in excess of or what you're willing to help maybe like we had some people who networked and they found out they all lived in Cochise County Arizona so they were able to then say hey I'm driving over to your the Bill's Place you want to come we're going to have a barbecue and basically have the barn raising see I think we need more of that like Nicole sauce calls them get done weekends and stuff like that and I think it's a great way to go and I think one of the things you know you mentioned kind of back when this country was founded um one of the things about that time is people would move to a new area start to settle it set up a town and settle out around it what they had was churches and it would just work out that pretty much would be kind of a homogeneous faith of that initial settlement so there would there wouldn't be like 27 churches there'd be a church maybe two and you know we have a lot less church-going people now I'm among the non-church going people so I'm not condemning anybody for not going but there was a certain Community aspect in that almost everybody was in one place for a few hours one day a week from town so everybody knew everybody and so if you're going to do something more on a geographic local model I think you are much better off I have my property I don't want to cut it up into little pieces I don't want 37 people living in tiny houses on my three acres I don't want that I'd love to get the six acres from the older gentleman behind me if he ever decides he wants to sell and do something with that but everybody having their own place has worked for Humanity forever but what we need is some kind of common Bond and I think when people the so you are what is my strength so your strength is there are people out where you live they pretty much all leave each other alone because that's why they're there right so getting those people to cooperate is easy because if I don't want to cooperate with you I just don't come one of the advantages that we have though is you get more and more toward the the urban rural fringes there are amenities there are places where people can meet and creating local meetups and stuff like that and maybe those meetups start out as we're gonna we're gonna all hang out and talk about homesteading at a bar and have a couple drinks the first time before we go to anybody's house because maybe people aren't comfortable with that right away and and whatever you can do to build that community and then that way everybody does their own thing but everybody figures out where the overlap is that's kind of the town that I grew up in you know it wasn't a really small town but it was it was small you're talking I think Minersville had 3 800 people in it at the time and that was including like parts that weren't really Minersville um so you didn't know everybody but you knew enough people and there was even then there was more than one church but there was kind of that whole church bonding thing and even people that weren't part of like the church that my family went to we had two big picnics a year and not a lot went on so everybody came to the church picnic and I think we need to try to bring some of that whole vibe back to these communities and I think that the way that things are going with big cities like there's just so much opportunity to kind of the hell of developing a a retreat or something like that we can redevelop small towns all over the Dagon country yeah you really can um you know in the urban space you know you see all these examples of indoor you know hydroponic gardening yeah but there's also roof spaces where you can put little gardens there's little plots of land that the community could use and there does need to be some unifying thing whether it's a maker space or um but yeah there does need to be some commonality because what I see is everybody wants to do community but nobody knows how to get along uh and give a little everybody's kind of self trying to be self-centered and build community at the same time and it just doesn't seem to quite work out and there's a lot of people you know that would go to church but there's a lot of people that won't so you know how do you you have to be willing first of all to kind of inconvenience your schedule and adapt to that that way of like hey you know there's a community thing let's let's go meet our neighbors let's because we're going to go out of our way to build a network of relationships yeah yeah so um last thing you know here's what you got this is on your notes liberty dollar crypto cash gold silver is one of these solutions to conducting private business out of the system do you think that we really need to use one of those or all of those or what well I'm not going to presume to tell anybody what we should do but I look at it this way for every dependence that you have on the system you're going to have to transact back into dollars and if you you look at the corporate structures all the corporations are owned by a few and all those few corporations are owned by even fewer families um and if you're going to play their game you're going to have to interact in their Fiat and when you do you're using the benefit of someone else's intellectual property and and the fact that they've procured the resources and they have provided the supply chain so you're going to have to pay taxes you're going to have to fully comply it is their system and that is their rules for participation but the more you build community the more you become independent um and the more systems of support that you and your community can build into your lives then the less you can't you have to interact with that system and that's when trading gold would be great trading crypto would be great trading uh something else you know liberty dollar allows like say you and I uh to do a quick online transaction and then later when you choose you can redo physical silver but we just did an online little check check click kind of uh thing and you've gotten paid and you know I don't have to haul around silver or risk mailing it through the mail crypto is great but it is subject to Market maker manipulation and big money coming in and big money going out if you had your own Community currency like I kind of like Cloud coin because it's like it's like crypto cash in that you can't you can exchange it offline your encryption happens just on on and within your wallet and you have to decrypt it to send it and it only gets secured when it gets re-encrypted and then using uh something like hard drive technology it then will synchronize it to prevent fraud but there's no blockchain that can be traced down like the way the Silk Road was busted because they looked where something went in and where something came out but nobody uses the best solution so but any crypto any local exchange currency that you can do between yourselves where you don't have to change back into the system is an advantage to you because it's already been through the Supreme Court like look at what the liberty dollar story is they have the the case law listed uh basically inside a PMA private member Association public means anything that's government private means anything that's between individuals one's registered one's not one gets permission one doesn't but they've already ruled it within a PMA I have no obligation if you buy something from me or I pay you for a service there's no obligation for me to report upon you you know I can't say that it's that that means you don't have to pay taxes but it puts it all within our personal control because amongst a PMA we can trade within ourselves it's kind of like the town uh where liquor is illegal and yet I could go buy a private membership at Pizza Hut and get a pitcher of beer on my table right uh so you step out and there's been a lot of businesses during covet who have started pmas uh we even helped a chiropractor set his up to where you put you put the license on park or you hand all the license to your back and when you come in you have to buy a private membership and then somehow magically all of that bother in your life is no longer part of your life so whether you use crypto or cash or liberty dollar kind of depends on where you're at and what you're doing and the more you can build community the more you can meet the needs of the community within the community the more it makes sense to use liberty dollar silver or any kind of crypto because you don't have to exchange back into the dollar because at the end of the day if we do business as usual and someone else who provides all the systems of support and they use a Fiat then it almost doesn't matter honestly because you're going to wind up having to cash back out into a Fiat to get the stuff you need and and and with that comes all the obligations so if you're not outside of that in a private Community maybe it doesn't matter so much maybe you're better off staying in cash parking it and you know investing but also parking your cash in a uh a cash equivalent uh life insurance policy that inquire that occurs no tax liability and can be cashed out in retirement and has no inheritance tax either maybe you're better off borrowing against that maybe you're better off staying in the system if in the system is where you are so again it depends yeah I think it depends the answer that is the short answer because it also is not an all or nothing no like there is a place for each of these forms of currency I always try to do as much business outside the system of the Beast as I can but most people that I want to interact with most people that I want to trade with most people that I want to buy from are in that system and they're firmly entrenched so if you give me the option to deal with Bill over here versus Amazon I'll deal with Bill but if Bill don't have what I need Bill don't have what I need exactly I mean it isn't that I won't pay a little bit more it's that I have to be able to get the thing and this whole parallel economy idea everybody throws that word around but there's not a lot of there's not a lot of action within it for everybody that is and it's doing the same thing like we only need so many people to grow tomatoes it it's not a parallel economy but what it makes me think of is when I lived in Hot Springs Arkansas we moved there I was really excited I found there's going to be a there's actually a legitimate farmer's market right and I'm like that's great we'll go Farmers Market every table of tomatoes and peppers and and squash on it and nobody bought any of it because anybody that cared enough to go to a farmer's market had a garden and everybody grew those things so nobody was you know really out like the dude that sold uh uh pasture chickens and rabbits and all he would do well and there was a guy that was really big into like exotic greens and stuff and he would do well but a lot of those people never sold anything because it wasn't it wasn't Suburban enough it wasn't upscale enough that caring Karen went there so she could say I sourced my tomatoes from a local grower that person didn't live there right and so the people would go to the farmer's market were just people that were like oh cool we'll go to farmer's market well I don't need tomatoes I got you know I got a hundred plants in my backyard I and so we need to think that way like we need to get more creative not everybody can do the same thing and create a valid trading economy I think that because people have to want to make a fundamental change to our systems of support because the issue that I see is I meet so many people like the avocado farmer uh or the you know one's willing to do a box program another one is just like their mind is locked even though they believe in Freedom they will not make the mental leap to put in the infrastructure and use the labor to do a box program and sell directly to the customer where he can make more money and we can save money and we can get a fresh product even in the backyard if we want to build a parallel economy we're going to have to be that change because that means while I'm saying cutting up my mustard greens drying them blending them into powder so they can be added to soups later I'm going to have to make that available and what's truly lacking is a good centralized Marketplace I mean there are solutions out there there's the decentralized web there's ipfs already built into Brave there's open bizarre a a Marketplace that uses your computer to put put it up there over the tour Network so it's not public per se but nobody uses it everybody wants to go create another version of the same old thing and there's no uniting to it and no one's willing to make the effort if enough people make that effort to make if they've got a wrench for sale it should go on on that free market first and people have to make that effort so that more trade and more of a parallel economy can be built in that space and then you have the option to do more cryptocurrency trading uh more just outright barter than you do or you have to exchange back into a dollar and until that happens until everyone's willing to go out of their way to participate in this market and again it's like this centralized decentralized thing and the only way I can see that being uh in a purist perspective is going to be on a decentralized uh platform even though it already exists nobody uses them everybody's still trying to reinvent the wheel yeah yeah and there's a there's a comfort issue there there's an ease of use issue there and there's a vocabulary issue there people hear a word like that oh it's a big deal they'll use HTTP every day right and you don't think about it and it's just about learning new skills but we're at an hour and 50 minutes here so you need to they need to kind of wrap up so I want to give you a chance to tell everybody about your website where they can learn more about you and you said you know for some of the stuff that you offer online you had a discount for members of this audience yeah so um we basically are trying to help people become more self-sufficient and we are we we're in a workshop typically the main workshops are in April and October each year um and at least for the foreseeable future we're trying to pack so much value into these workshops it's honestly ridiculous but we do a week Workshop where you learn everything from foundation and plumbing to building an aircrete structure to put to designing a solar system designing that worm compost flush toilet system uh sizing and putting in your air conditioning basically every skill and every bit of knowledge you need to actually make a functional house not just a shell and then the second week now we're doing kind of like the off-grid homesteading portion where it doesn't cost any more to attend but it takes that second week off where we're going to be building with cast Earth we're going to be showing you the processes that it actually takes to grow seed and seedlings and and your garden and how to swap that out and actually get to see Hands-On eyes on what that space looks like to actually produce all the food for one person we also have a day where we devote it to becoming familiar with what's necessary to start your own online business and kind of where to get the ideas from what value can you offer the world that you can exchange for money so basically trying to help people get started being able to or at least be familiar with building every aspect of their life out and we have online video courses as well as that Workshop so we're offering a 10 discount for tsp listeners and of course the coupon code is tsp and that is for the video courses as well as if you wanted to come out here into the Chihuahuan Desert and check out what it's like actually living off grid and actually you know stay inside of an aircrete room to see you know what's this air creep thing all about then we actually rent rooms uh and we can get 10 and off that if you want to come out and just stay or near the Big Bend National Park and in the fall they have international Chile final cook-offs out here so there's also the Big Bend State Park so it's kind of a big Wilderness out here in the middle of nowhere and outside of our Workshop program those rooms are available very very cool well hey I appreciate you being with us today so it's a great discussion uh thanks for being with us today 
