Architect David Hertz Explains How Recycled Materials Are Transforming Modern Architecture

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, an author of the Conscious Design book. And today I'm excited to have David Hertz. He's an architect, founder of SEA. He's worked with SkySource, with XPRIZE. He also has resilience fund and foundations around sustainability and investments. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

So you do a lot of things, but let's— everybody loves a good origin story, so let's wheel back time a little bit. What got you into architecture and sustainability?

Yeah, it's an interesting question because I started off really as an environmentalist, mainly just because I had a lot of connection to nature. I grew up really fortunate as a kid to grow up in Malibu. And one of the things to do in Malibu is to surf and to hike. It's a very long city that's bordered by ocean and mountains. So I grew up very much in contact with nature. And, but I also really loved to build things and design things and grew up in an artistic And so at some point, I had to rationalize my place in the world as being part of the built environment. And how do I square that with its impact, its known impact on the natural environment?

And so from that, right, you went into architecture and you run your own architecture group. Let's talk a little bit about some of the projects. You have a lot of really interesting projects, quite a few you focused around sustainability, what was honestly one of your early bigger projects that really got you, right? Because you get into anything. What was something that you worked on and you said, oh, I'm doing it and I really love it and I want to just keep going into the many more projects you've had?

Sure. Every new project is your favorite project. And, you know, And then they just leave.

It's a good place to be.

Another one, right? I mean, I think so. It was an incremental process. You know, being in architecture school was, you know, very, very challenging, but also very rewarding and kind of learned to work all night and work hard. And I had a great opportunity to intern with an architect named John Lautner, who has worked with Frank Lloyd Wright as one of his, you know, disciples and was really a visionary. Iconoclastic LA architect, and that was very formative in, in the framework of organic architecture that Wright espoused and a kind of uniquely American architecture. And then I worked for Frank Gehry, who, you know, really blurred the definitions between art and architecture. And being in Venice for many years, I worked a lot with different artists As well. So the art of architecture. And then actually, interestingly, I had done a lot of work in construction early on, and I found a fascination with concrete as a material. So my actually early work evolved from construction and concrete, and a lot of the houses that John Lautner built were concrete. You know, as a young architect, also kind of coming outta school after the oil embargo energy crisis of the '70s was very, much aware of our dependence on foreign oil and very interested in alternative energy systems and the impacts that buildings have and the whole process of what we take, make, and waste as part of our whole kind of ecosystem of building. I started to experiment with concrete and I started to build concrete furniture in the early '80s. That was a pretty radical idea. And I started to do commissions for public sculpture and private commissions that were all like little mini architectural projects. They involved construction, fabrication, design. And, you know, I think when anyone dedicates themselves to kind of one practice over and over, they're learning a lot about themselves in the process, but also learning About a material. I felt limited with the weight of the material and ultimately invented an advanced cement-based composite called SindaCrete. That was in the early '80s, and I started to do precast concrete surfaces, high-end surfaces like kitchen counters and sinks and bathtubs and tiles, and that led to panels and accessories and a lot of different things. And I actually ran that company reluctantly because I never really started off as a company. I was interested in finding a material that didn't exist in the marketplace, and I liked the humility of concrete versus marbles and granites and the synthetic materials. And so I was very interested in concrete and I sold that company after 20 years to a large public company. But what was interesting about it, it was all comprised of recycled materials. I lowered the embodied energy of concrete by displacing cement with fly ash and post-consumer carpet fiber to reinforce it. And then I use materials extracted from the waste stream as decorative aggregates, everything from broken bottle glass to computer parts, garment kind of waste, like buttons and closures and zippers. And for a record store, I, you know, record corporate office, I did all discontinued records, cassettes, and VCRs and broke them up with nonprofit groups like inner-city gang intervention programs. So there was a really interesting integration in the way in which Syndicrete was a kind of a global gumbo of materials extracted from the waste stream that didn't have a recycled value, but had a very interesting aesthetic value. It was like a terrazzo, a contemporary terrazzo out of society's waste. And I began to be very fascinated about what we waste and how for every truckload of goods that we order, 32 truckloads on average of waste are made. So, you know, we have a very technical system And so I was interested in how we think about repurposing, and that, that of course led to some early interest in radical reuse and repurposing and recycling. And, but all of my work at SEA, which stands for the Studio of Environmental Architecture, has been about innovations within sustainability, both in the way that the buildings are built, but also how they're kind of operated.

It's such an interesting concept. You mentioned it really briefly, the cosmetic value, right? We oftentimes focus on, oh, can we, you know, if we recycle something, can we turn it into raw material? And, you know, can we extract gold out of it and use it somewhere else? But there is a value, and I'm glad you mentioned it because it's not really thought about very much is, well, yeah, it may not work, but like people hang records up on their wall, right? There's aesthetic value to something that may not, even if it's broken, right? It can't work how it originally was supposed to. It has, there's other ways to value something rather than just how much gold is in it. Can you use, melt the plastic down and reuse it? There's another layer to that. I feel like it gets overlooked Most of the time. That was a very— I love that concept of how can you extract value, not just in a technical way, but cosmetic aesthetic way.

Where ideally it's not something that's hidden, it's the progenitor of the building's form. So one of the best examples of that is my 747 Wing House. It's about radical reuse and repurposing, but it's absolutely a design determinant that to convince my client to buy a used 747, to cut the wings off and then turn it into a house, it was certainly about radical reuse, but it was also about making a really sublime architecture that is very aerodynamic and thin and works with the ridgeline. And, you know, when you're upcycling something like a, An airplane is a good example. I mean, it only has a certain amount of service life and then there are thousands of them just desiccating in the desert of obsolescence and they're then downcycled into a beer can again, you know, just melted down into a beer can. So you're taking an airplane, which is, you know, technical achievement of form and the efficiency and strength of materials, And devaluing it to a beer can, which, you know, once it's devalued to a beer can, then it kind of, it's just diluted. So upcycling and reuse, it short circuits. Like when you're making aluminum, which is a very energy-intensive material, you start with clear-cutting rainforests in South America to mine bauxite, and then you take that bauxite and transport it about 3 times around the world. Through smelting and then, you know, operating. So there's this huge amount of energy involved in extraction of raw materials and a whole series of cascade of negative consequences. And so if you bypass all of that, then you are saving a tremendous amount of energy. And, you know, it's, I couldn't build a roof that had the efficiency and the structural strength and the lightweight materials that a wing has already. So that's a pretty good visual example of what I think how design is formed by the idea of repurposing.

Yeah, it's an integrated way you're looking at things, not just as how can I extract the material? It's If I want a really strong roof, what are the things out there that are already really strong that I could just use rather than trying to create? You know, we can do it with trusses and right, we can do it. But I love that idea of, well, what's, what's already out there? I'm really curious, how long did it take you to convince that owner to buy a wing? And go for making a house out of a wing. I don't think anybody has tried that before your project.

Maybe a few subsequent that have— they've just basically reused airplanes, which are cool, but it's an airplane that somebody's living in, not cutting it up and making a sculpture out of it. Because this house is made out of the 2 wings of a 747 and the 2 horizontal tail stabilizers, and that's the wing house. And then since we bought the entire plane, actually I have under construction now for the same client a fuselage building that's like a section of the fuselage. So it didn't take very long to convince the client. That was probably the easy part, to her credit. I mean, she's— I modeled it. I proposed the idea. She said, let's go look at these wings because you never really get under them and see the scale. And she loved the idea. And it actually was more convincing the 18 municipal authorities in the hills of Malibu about it. And that included Homeland Security when they came to visit me after making a lot of inquiries about the structural properties of of a Boeing 747 after 9/11. So they wanted—

What I can—

You know, that we were not a terrorist cell. It included the FAA, so it's not— it's mapped, so it's not a downed air— it doesn't look like a crash if, you know, pilot is flying over it. And it included obviously a lot of building agencies, the Coastal Commission. So, but that's part of the process. I think that's, that's actually Part of the challenge of doing anything. It's one thing that you could have an idea, you can make a rendering, but to actually implement it and to go through the system, kind of a rational system, and still get something that's fairly radical out the other end, you know, that's a system that is inherently risk-averse, is the challenge.

You mentioned making sure that it doesn't— it's marked as with the FAA as not a downed aircraft, which I would not have thought of, but it makes perfect sense. As soon as you said it, I was like, oh yeah, it's a massive 747 wing just sitting there. Of course it would look like a crashed plane that you would call in if you're a pilot. It shouldn't be there on the ground in the neighborhood.

It's a requirement of aviation that if you were ever to see anything that looked like that, you're required to report it. So that's why it has to be mapped.

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's things you just don't even think about, right? You just get into it and you're like, let's do this. And then somebody says, hey, you gotta, you gotta make sure nobody, nobody thinks it's a downed airplane.

Right. Or the transport. You know, just what is it really like to cut up a 747? We closed 5 freeways in Los Angeles to get it to a local airport, Camarillo Airport, cut the wing in half and use this Korsky Skycrane helicopter to transport it to the site. So that was a kind of a large burst of carbon, one would say, but it was a short burst of carbon. That's the difference is that this is a very remote site. And the way that we build buildings today, we tend to make them of lots of little pieces that require lots of transport, and none of those pieces really fit.

Mm-hmm.

So then you end up with like 30% of them is in construction and demolition waste, then they're hauled back out. And it's a very inefficient way to build. This I refer to as a large-less strategy. These large pieces are transported in a very short period of time. And yes, there's a burst of carbon. We actually calculated it that, you know, we saved tremendous amounts of carbon by one, repurposing, two, creating something that was very large with very few materials. So the embodied energy of the transport was a fraction of what it would be had it been a normal house.

That's interesting. So it was overall your carbon footprint for that, even though, right, you think of like a Sikorsky helicopter, those are not small. Those are, right, that feels like a lot of energy. And carbon output that's actually less because it's recycled material and you're not, as you said, you're not wasting bringing materials in, chopping it up and sending a bunch of it back. It's actually cheaper carbon-wise to do that.

Correct. Yeah, it was cheaper carbon-wise and it was cheaper than conventional building to get a roof like that because again, the Yeah, the airplane was not very expensive. It was about $35,000 to, you know, buy an entire 747.

That was the whole frame for—

Yeah. Then obviously we had labor and cutting and transporting it, but still when compared, and the client did have it compared to trying to build it conventionally, and it was a fraction of the cost of trying to build something that looked like a wing out of steel and wood and aluminum or whatever. The wing is an incredibly strong structure. Of course, the gas tanks, it carries about 300,000 pounds of jet fuel and it's supporting 500 people. And it's so, it's an incredibly strong and light structure. It was actually incredibly lightweight. The whole building is a fraction of the weight that's part of You know, if you analyze a building, the lighter the building is, the less materials it has and the less embodied energy it has. Right.

So you were able to actually build less. You didn't need as much structure to hold that. If you had done that out of steel and wood, you wouldn't need to build that built-up foundation and structural components more to be able to even hold that roof.

Correct.

I think we've talked about that project a lot. That is just such a cool, such a cool thing. But kind of moving to other areas, right? This is one area that's improving sustainability. I believe you've worked with some green roofs, solar. What are the technologies and things that you, when you're looking at a project, what are some of the other things that you look for to integrate that you use to make a site building more sustainable, more eco-friendly?

Yeah, I think there's a kind of a holistic approach that starts with really understanding the site, looking at what nature affords you at the site, right? I mean, depending on your climate. So it's bioclimatic, it's hyperlocal, and kind of understanding its context. Is there What is the path of travel of the sun? How much of free energy is there? How much natural air conditioning is there in terms of prevailing breeze patterns? Where are there shadows? Where is there, you know, nature that can do the work? And starting there is the first step, and then augmenting that for comfort, you know. But if Rather than just saying, well, I'm, you know, this building could be anywhere and it's not site-specific and I'm just going to, you know, use a ton of energy to heat it or cool it. And I don't care. All sides of the building look the same. They're not really responsive to the, the sun or— So those are the primary forms. I mean, trying to minimize site disturbance as much as possible. So not just, you know, cutting a hill to make a big flat site, to working kind of more with the topography. And then looking further from the site, what materials— like, if we are going to dig foundation, you know, are there— is there rock that we could use from the site? You know, is— are there— is there wood we could use from the site? Then what other resources are there as close to the site as possible? Because the closer that you can source materials, then the lower The energy is to get them there, except for, you know, projects. Well, like, I did one project in— on a remote island, and everything is coming by boat. So then it was a question of how do we make something, you know, as efficient as possible that can fit in a container and not have a lot of wasted space and, you know, be very strong. And that That project was interesting because it was all made out of custom aluminum extruded structures that I designed and built and engineered, and a giant folded tensile roof membrane so that that whole roof, which is a massive area in the Caribbean, folds up into a container and then it unfurls like a sail and it tensions and it captures water and directs water into that. That's the Sail House project. With that project, you know, it started with buying a pier in Borneo and a disused pier that was made out of ironwood and then extruded aluminum as the structure because it kind of comes together like a kit of parts where, you know, you don't need skilled labor to assemble it because you kind of can't make a mistake because everything's, you know, square and ID and pre-fit. The whole building was pre-assembled, including electrical and plumbing and furniture and all the finishes and then disassembled, flat-packed into containers, and reassembled on the site. That was a full international project with clients that are British, with engineers that were German, with fabrication in Indonesia and assembled by Indonesian and Peruvian workers. So that's a case where, yes, there were some long distances, but then it was all about how do we If they're going to come long distances anyway, let's ship the most efficient way to get most amount of materials to the site. And that was an interesting exercise.

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An island is a great metaphor for our planet. I mean, it's just the scale. You know, the problem generally is that we look and we think, oh, it, you know, we could just, where is away? You know, oh, a dump truck comes and it's away. You know, but on an island, it's just, it's away, but it's just a little bit closer. On a spaceship, you're very acutely aware of what you take, make, and waste. And we've had kind of a cowboy, if you will, mentality in America because we've had vast resources and things look infinite. And we're only realizing that there are massive consequences that things that we think are are infinite or can absorb lots of things turns out to have massive consequences. We're the only known living thing in the entire universe. So we're on a spaceship, you know? So—

Yeah.

We think, oh, you know, okay, this little plastic's not going to matter. And then we end up with the Pacific Gyre that's larger than the state of Texas that's floating in the ocean. And almost every amount of water on the planet, there's more plastic than plankton. You know, then that has an impact. You know, if we think, oh, well, we're putting, you know, CO2 into the atmosphere, oh, but, you know, I don't really see it. The atmosphere looks huge. You know, there's not going to be a consequence. But then you think, oh, well, if I ride my bike for 10 minutes, it goes 6 miles. That's the entire thickness of the skin that supports all life on the planet. It's incredibly thin. So I think it helps to have That perspective, an island just makes you more aware of what we really all should be aware of. And most of us are not aware of what the consequences are of our actions.

Yeah, that is a good— island is close. It's, yeah, when you can't hide it, right? You can't just like dump it over a hill. You are, you are the hill, you're the island. There's no, there's nowhere else to go. You're going to wherever you are. I think that greatly influences, right, people that live on the ocean even, right? And you growing up, right? It's really hard to ignore that when it's right there. You can see the impact that people are making daily. When you wake up every morning, you see it. It's a lot harder to ignore it than when you're other places and it's not as visible to you.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, If you're literally on the water, like on a boat, that would be another really good example of, you know, being acutely aware of your energy use, your waste, you know, what you have. Everything there is, you know, you've gotta, you've gotta be very efficient with. So that's, it's very helpful. And I think we're largely disconnected in the kind of technosphere that we live. You know, we're not totally aware of the kind of causality of what we take, what we make, and what we waste. And, you know, it just is out of our sight. And, but that whole kind of anthropogenic metabolism is a construct. It's a design construct, which is a consumerist construct, which is based on capitalism, which drives the world of everything that we do. So planned and perceived obsolescence is a huge part of that, and it's very, very consumptive, and that includes resources. And that's why we kind of are overshooting and usurping primary resources that the planet carrying capacity has to regenerate. And as we increase our population to almost 9 billion people soon, there's more and more need for these primary resources. And so we're experiencing a force multiplier with climate change as we are going to have more and more competition for resources. This is my 40th year as an architect practicing in sustainability, and I don't think we've ever really achieved sustainability. I think now we're at the resilience imperative. The imperative is that How do we respond to stressors and react to stressors? And how do we even maybe move from resilience to a regenerative or restorative methodology where we undo some of the damage that we've done in the past? And there's an interesting term, one called antifragility, which is stressors that actually make a system better. Right. So good example of that would be our muscles, for instance. If we, if we exercise the right amount, we actually, those are stress, that's stressors that are making us better. If it's too much stress, it's not good. And if it's too little stress, then that's not good. And we atrophy. A, a tree is just like that. If you restrict a tree too much and then it has a stress, it's not gonna be resilient enough. But if you allow the tree to kind of keep moving to a certain extent, then you're building up the kind of muscular system or the lignins of a tree to withstand stress. So I think our architecture, our cities, our infrastructure needs to really think about resilience. And unfortunately, I think it's not based on resilience. It, you know, these are large central infrastructural systems that have vulnerabilities because they're single large systems and they're either one point of failure, like let's say the case of Puerto Rico and you have one hurricane and the entire, you know, grid is down versus a redundant, repetitive, you know, distributed system where it's inherently more resilient. Even if it was a mobile system where it could swarm to, if one side of the island was hit, you could swarm, you know, move things to the other side because they're distributed, nimble systems, not one giant system. And right now, these large infrastructural systems are too slow moving to keep up with the pace of climate change that is happening at a faster rate than even all scientists universally agree I think it's an interesting piece because we, like you said, we try to focus on be sustainable.

And it's— I personally agree, we should be looking at regenerative. That's the time for like achieving sustainability was a while ago. That was before we started doing real damage. That could have been sustainable right now if we were to just sustain where we're at. It's not like the whole— that's the whole problem. So we have to hit that level of regenerating and then, and then maybe down the road, once we've repaired, recovered, then we can, we can talk about sustaining. But at that point, I think, I really think that regenerative is sustainable because if you're always regenerating resources, Land, right? All these things—you're going to be fine. You're going to never—we'll never hit this point again where we're burning more than we have, just and not resource managing, right? And it reminds me when you're talking about resource management, there's a story I heard about. I think it was in the '90s that the Swedish government. Got a notification, like a letter basically from their forestry department saying, hey, your trees are ready for your Navy because they had placed an order back in the 1800s and they knew it was going to take— we want to build 100 new ships. Great. We're going to plant the trees now. And in about 130 years, we're going to have trees to build those ships. So, you know, Obviously technology changed. They didn't need that wood to build ships in the '90s. That's past. But that kind of resource management and planning, like they were, that idea, I feel like we've lost in a lot of ways. We're not thinking out that far ahead, which means it's impossible to resource manage if you're only looking 6 months or quarterly, really. We're looking quarterly.

Right.

Right. Everything is quarterly at this point.

That's right. Because it's all perceived as a resource that we could just, you know, as a resource, that word in a way, I mean, it is one has to think about because if everything is a resource for us and the economic system, and Paul Hawken writes about this in Natural Capitalism, but we don't even factor in the cost of nature. You know, right now, if you cut down a forest that quarter and you export it, you're— that quarter's looking good, but the next quarter you have nothing, you know? And then you have a whole cascade of problems from the—

There's no balance sheet that's like the planet and us. We just pretend— I mean, there is. If we deforest everything, there will be no Over here on the Earth side, there'll be no forests, but we don't really balance that out and keep— I feel like there's no true reconciliation resource-wise.

That's true. And, you know, and I think that needs to change in our economic models. And I think it is, you know, I think that there's, you know, seen, I mean, there's environmental resource goals of the UN, there's, you know, there are corporate mandates, there's, you know, yeah, there's a lot of greenwashing there, Everywhere. Yeah. But, you know, I think that there's awareness and concerns and shareholders are making demands and accountability. And I think that just, you know, look, if you're a doctor, I mean, the first step is you diagnose the patient before you know how to treat it. And I think we still have some people that are in denial of the illness, you know, and that That it's hard to get treatment when you are being fed, you know, misinformation or believe misinformation or don't want to acknowledge it because it's a diffused, you know, and complex problem. But that we're still somewhat in that first step, unfortunately, with a lot of people where we could be making more progress if we acknowledge that we've got a sick patient and we need some critical help in a directed way. I mean, we're on a path of potentially being a self-terminating civilization. That's, you know, we're just arrogant enough not to think that it could happen to us, but it's happened 6 times on the planet so far. So, you know, it's a question of, you know, how can we survive the journey in time to recorrect? I'm personally optimistic. I mean, as negative as all that sounds and, you know, science is, the world's greatest problems are the world's greatest opportunities. And that's where I get very, very enthusiastic about innovation. And, you know, I think it just has been that humankind just hasn't either been aware or hasn't applied technology. But look, look at where we've evolved. I mean, okay, we had coal, right? And we had, you know, Fossil fuel. And then, you know, now we have light that turns with a photovoltaic cell, it turns it into electricity and, you know, and we could store it in batteries. I mean, that's pretty advanced. And, you know, if we look at, and as I was saying, if we look at the planet as a site, like we look at what nature has to offer, I mean, we've got incredible nuclear energy that's just about the right distance away. that we want nuclear energy, and there's more abundant energy that falls on the planet every day than we would need. We just need to use it efficiently. And, and that's the same for water. And why I got so interested in atmospheric water generation is because it's kind of a planetary system and there's a lot of water in the air and we don't have to move water long distances. And there's Water is often unevenly distributed geographically on the planet.

Right, but we are, what is it, 70% covered in water? So there's a lot of water.

Yeah, we're, well, the planet is about 76% covered in water, but almost all of that water is saltwater and it's not drinkable. We have 0.22% of the planet is freshwater, and of that freshwater, a lot of it's frozen. And it's unavailable in different areas. I mean, it could be groundwater, it could be in other locations. And the hydrologic cycle deposits most of that water back into the ocean if 76% of the surface area is water.

Right.

And what's interesting is that, you know, that ocean and all trees and plants are redistributing that water in the form of water vapor back into the atmosphere. And of course, we know that when we see clouds, and then we know that when those clouds get seeded with enough particles that the water turns to droplets, it turns from a vapor to a solid and then binds to that particle and then drips off that particle, and we know it as rain. Those are tied to weather systems that used to be more predictable because those weather systems were tied to ocean temperatures that were pretty predictable. And that, so the jet stream and the currents of the ocean were somewhat parallel and now they're meandering, which is why we have these extreme weather events that, you know, are because we have this meandering jet stream. So that means water from rain is totally not predictable anymore. And the past is no longer prologue with weather projection. Can't use the Farmer's Almanac anymore. The future is totally different. So what is known is that there's about 6 times more water in the form of vapor in the atmosphere than all the rivers on the planet. And so the challenge is, how do you get it? How do you extract that? And how do you extract that efficiently? That's where my fascination with atmospheric water came from. comes into. Because if you could make point of use, right? If you're not taking coal from one state and then shipping it to another and then burning it and then distributing it, you know, 5 states away through, you know, energy lines, losing energy all the way.

Right.

Or even in the case of water, taking water long to, like in California where we used 17% of our cal— of our water budget, you know, of our energy budget pumping water long distances. So I think point of use, if we take light and that hits our roof and we make the energy and more energy than we even need at that point of use, that's just like we were saying, it's closer, you know, and you have less waste, less energy. So in the same way, what if every building made its own water, or in even better mode, if it made more water than it needed, then we could have a more verdant planet, which would, you know, we'd have more landscape, not less landscape, and that would then contribute more to atmospheric moisture.

Right, because it's— I didn't realize that 17% of California's energy budget is moving water. A lot of power just to move water around, which is— we're losing one resource just to move around one resource, which is inefficient. You know, you have power loss just to get the power to the pump, and then we use it to move the water.

Right. And the other thing is, think about— we talk about vulnerability. California is dependent upon foreign water. And from other states that are growing rapidly and have demands. And we're at the end of that pipe, so to speak. And those major energy systems are hydrologic systems that are based on dam resources. And those dams, as they get lower and lower, now you've lost not only your water, you've lost your power too.

Those 2 resources are very, very at And how we've set up our system so far, at least.

Yeah, the energy-water nexus is fascinating. And it's the same with atmospheric water because a lot of systems for atmospheric water require energy to extract the water out of the air. So at that point, then, you know, it's all about which, which system uses the least amount of energy.

Yeah, that's a whole Whole thing just on its own, figuring out how to do that. But I love the point of use, right? That's where like solar power comes into play, right? Is why I can put Solar Roof on, I get power right to my house. I don't have to transport it from some power plant far away. I don't have to buy it from a dam in a different country or a different city, different state.

Mm-hmm.

I can actually have it localized. To me, which is way more efficient.

Efficient and resilient, right? Because if there's terrorism or climate change or disaster, you know, one, again, one point, I mean, there were like 5 states were tied together with one energy grid and there was one lightning strike in Colorado that hit transfer station and shorted out 5 states. So if there's a problem, you still have energy. You know, if part of, you know, your house goes down, your neighbor still has energy. You know, they're not tied together. That's why a distributed system and these kind of microgrids is even where the utilities are going because they're realizing it. And of course, like you say, if it's more efficient, then it drives— the bottom line of economics for the providers of that energy too.

Yeah, I think efficiency is good for everyone, even though sometimes we don't always go for the most efficient because it doesn't, for whatever reason, doesn't always seem to make sense. But it does long run a lot. In the long run, efficiency always will win out. It's the whole, what is it, the hare and the tortoise?

Yeah, I think so. And like taking this full circle back to that, from a design perspective, if you could marry those 2 together, so like I would think arguably a Tesla is a pretty beautiful machine and people might buy it just based on its aesthetic or the, you know, way in which it drives. It also happens to be you know, a very efficient resource, and it's better, faster, cheaper. So it doesn't have to be at the expense of design. It could actually inform design.

And that is a very important piece, the design component. I feel like that's changing. That's definitely, you know, when Tesla came out with their cars, this whole idea of kind of moving Sustainability from this hippie, you're around the country or it's the farmer's market. Nobody really thought it was well designed, but it just, you know, it's sustainable, so I'll do it because it's the only option. And we've really, I think we're in the middle of this shift that I think we need to accelerate, but really applying design to it and going, yeah, instead of picking it looks nice, Or it's sustainable. How about it looks nice and it's sustainable? And really putting our design brains to that and making that happen. I think that's where— that is part of why I'm more positive. Like, yes, everything sounds pretty negative, but I think at this point where as that happens, more people will want it. And as it, it just makes it an easier transition over to things that are sustainable. Sustainable, and they're beautiful.

Right. And I think you could look at a tree as being pretty beautiful. It's not, if you look at it from a design perspective, it's pretty amazing. I mean, it generates its own energy, it absorbs, collects water, it sequesters carbon, it's timeless. You know, it doesn't go out of fashion. It has a whole series of ecosystem benefits. And I think you could take almost anything that's in nature, has inherent character and beauty to it. And those, those are— nature's had billions of years of research and development. Their waste equals food. There's no, you know, no species that are unemployed. And, all right, I mean, it's a—

It's true. That's true.

Yeah. We're just kind of out of sync, you know, in some way. And part of that is this kind of creation myth in a way that we have dominion and we are separate from all other species. It's kind of a platonic view of the world that, you know, we're somehow up there and have this all— we're— but, you know, we're, we're really a predatory species on the top of the trophic cascade, which is, you know, what's happening now with depredation of species at a faster rate than they can be identified. We're the apex predator at the top of this entire system. And we are different in some ways because we feel like we have a kind of an intellect and we have this anthropocentric view of our place in the world. And we do have tremendous consequences for our actions. We also have tremendous responsibility and I think ingenuity and I think mankind could do a lot better in its use of resources. And I think we are moving that way. You know, I think we're generally moving that way. And these things, as I mentioned before, they become force multipliers to be more efficient, you know, when you have less and less resources.

Yeah, agreed. Well, we are getting to the end here. I wanted to, before we wrap up though, at least talk a little bit about your fund and foundation that you're currently running. So just for everyone listening and watching, kind of give a rundown on— you mentioned to me, right, you're working on the sustainability side primarily, but I'll have you dive into that a little bit more on what both those organizations do.

Sure. So, you know, I maintain my architecture practice intact. I have SkySource, which, you know, we won the Water Abundance XPRIZE and pursuing atmospheric water in systems that are exactly that point of use distributed, you know, kind of community-owned micro utilities and resilience hubs. And resilience kind of became the, as I mentioned before, you know, really to me that this is the imperative that we need to operate on. And I felt like we have an urgency to act and part of that urgency is to foster additional innovation in climate technology and water, food, carbon transformation, and energy. So we have a resilience fund which invests in these emerging technologies, and that we hope to do well by doing good with those things and help kind of entrepreneurs in a— where other people are not investing so much. And then part of that also is that my wife and I have a very small nonprofit called the Resilience Foundation, which funds other nonprofits to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And we use that to fund some of our water projects. So we just funded a project, a water kiosk in a Ghetto, massive ghetto, one of the world's largest ghettos, slums outside of Nairobi, Kenya, called Kongawe. They just opened this water kiosk that is distributing water to people that otherwise would have to walk, you know, 6 to 10 kilometers, mainly women that have to walk long distances to carry water that's not necessarily even safe to drink. So that's very meaningful for us. So it's kind of a combination between helping to fund startups in innovative technology space and then to seed nonprofits that are doing things as well as innovating ourselves.

Amazing. Well, I really appreciate you taking some time. I feel like we could talk for hours on all of this. So maybe we'll do another episode, but I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me and have this chat and go through your projects and what you're doing. So yeah, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Perfect. And for anybody that wants to connect with you, what would be the best way to find you?

Oh sure, just go to our website at davidhertzarchitect.com or just Google David Hertz Architect and you could find me and email me, you know, right through the website.

Perfect. And for everyone listening, we'll have all those links and everything in the description. We'll make it easy for you to click. And yeah, really appreciate it.

Thank you.

And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable 7-figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.