Green Living and Efficiency with Max Stadnyk of The Warrior Rising

Hello and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and author of The Conscious Design Book. And with me today, I have Max Stadnick. He's a conscious design or conscious architectural and lifestyle designer, teacher, and a rammed earth specialist. And we'll be talking about alternative building methods and everything that has to do with that. So welcome to the show.

Yeah, well, great to be here, Ian.

Yeah, so first, Max, let's start with how you got into it. How did you get into rammed earth and, and conscious architecture and the design side as well?

Sure, uh, so I guess it goes back to, uh, right after I got out of the military. I was, I was still pretty young, um, And I thought to myself, I want to build my own house. And I thought the best way to do that was to go spend some time with people that did that kind of thing. So spent some time with a carpenter, a plumber, bricklayer, roofer, electrician. And to me, you know, my belief was I could learn all of those things and do it myself. And of course I got into building and I was working in the residential home building industry. And I was— it was the early '80s and I was watching the transition from dimensional untreated lumber in the form of 2x4s and 2x6s and 1x8s and things like that into engineered woods. And then as that was happening, I was watching them actually fail pretty early on, sometimes in spectacular fashion. And thought, wow, these people are spending a lot of money to have this, what I viewed at the time as a subpar building product. So I thought there just has to be a better way to do this. And that sort of began my journey of researching what some people might call alternative building methods. I call them the natural building systems. So in there we have all of the earth systems like adobe and rammed earth and pressed blocks. Then you get into cob, straw bale, timber frames, stone, stack wood. So there's quite a, quite a variety there. And I tried my hand at most of those. And where I was running into problems with some of them was from a code standpoint in North America, right? So we weren't going to get, at the time, straw bale passed by. No engineer wanted to stick a stamp on that. And I came across rammed earth. I come across rammed earth early on and sort of Go on to the next thing and the next thing. And then I came back to it and I went, wow, this is like a rock-solid system. It's about as natural as I could get a product to be or a home to be, and it absolutely had no problems from a code standpoint. It's really, for all intents and purposes, is the same as concrete from a code standpoint. You can proctor a sample, do a crush test.

Interesting.

Right? Like you send it to the lab for strength testing. And we always do that on every build. And it surprised me how little MPa is required to hold up a roof. I believe it's 2, and we're consistently way higher than that. And we shoot for— our failsafe is 10 MPa on our walls, which is more than enough. I mean, for residential and light commercial, more than enough. And so it's bulletproof, waterproof, fireproof, earthquake-proof, pest-proof. It just eliminates a whole bunch of problems that way. And when we remove the formwork, we have a finished wall system. You know, so it's— there's no interior-exterior finish required. The walls themselves are quite beautiful and quite durable, you know. And we're shooting— this is one of the things I was shooting for in my search was you know, can we get some longevity? Like, how are these homes lasting so long in Europe? What are they building them out of, you know, and in other parts of the world? And, uh, you know, coming from the stick-built world, uh, and watching, you know, the problems that we have there, uh, it was, it was a real eye-opener for me. And, uh, it just led me on this journey that I've never stopped. I just, I'm continually jumping down rabbit holes. And then for me on the design side, I decided for myself that the best thing for me to do, rather than go take an architecture degree, was to— because I looked at the programs all over the world, Bartlett and all of these great architecture schools, and I went, they're not really teaching what I want to know, so I'm just going to go learn it myself. And it began this journey of research, going as far back as I could get data on up to the present. Finding out what they did, why it worked, what didn't work, and then marrying that with modern ideas of design. And sort of, you know, that crossroads is where I am. So I was just having a conversation with you the other day and I said, wow, you guys are on the cutting edge of 21st century design. And I would describe myself more as historical forward-thinking design, right? So I'm going— I'm taking it back. One of our principles is low-tech rules. So we're always looking for the low-tech solution first.

Okay.

And then trade-off needs to occur, we'll go, you know, because there's no such thing as a low-tech computer.

Right.

But what a wonderful tool, right? So that's kind of how we look at design and it guides, you know, another thing we were looking at is, you know, what sort of longevity can we get? Because we were seeing these failures occur And we decided that we wanted to shoot for a 500-year footprint on our envelope, right? So envelope being the foundation, walls, roof system. We say if we have a durable, adaptable envelope, then everything else is easy after that, right?

Right.

And that by adaptable, we mean it has to be adaptable to changing technologies and infrastructure. So can I, you know, like if you try to pull the wiring on a modern stick-built house, you're going to have a mess. Whereas with us, it's very simple. Just pull it out of the conduit. The new stuff goes in. Bingo, bango, Bob's your uncle kind of thing. Right. And so we're looking at design from that standpoint. Also, can the occupant do all of the upgrades and repairs themselves? That's another design aspect. So many of our clients come to us from the homesteading world or the wanting to be off-grid or as off-grid as you can get. I think it's impossible to get off the grid just because we have this global supply chain that none of us would describe as sustainable or eco, but it's somewhat necessary, you know.

Right.

Especially if you want a banana, you know, nothing wrong with wanting a banana. But yeah, so that's kind of how we look at it. And so we came up with these 33 principles for natural regenerative design Some of which would be, you know, are mainstream and obvious, like R-value. And then we get into more, you know, I don't want to say esoteric, but less known aspects of architecture that may have been forgotten or aren't as focused on, like the tactile sense. You know, what does this thing, what does this product feel like when you touch it, not just with your hands, but you walk on it with your feet or, you know, or any other part of your body for that matter? You know, that has to be a design aspect for us. Frequency is another one. Energy, sound, all of those things are important. I'm sure you've been in structures where you walk in and they're just not good from a sound standpoint. It echoes, it's loud.

Oh yeah, those are horrible. Nobody likes them.

No, no. And then we get into more, you know, things like color. I mean, the thing you build you're going to see every day of your life. And I can tell you, like, if you take a shot of Mykonos in Greece, you know, and the beautiful buildings on the Mediterranean there, and then contrast that with a shot of downtown Toronto, uh, in the concrete jungle, I can tell you which one people gravitate towards, you know, as a rule.

Yeah, yeah, we know where people want to vacation, right?

I mean, that's right. Right. So when they want to get away from somewhere, they go to these beautiful places with beautiful structures that are often much more organic in nature from a design standpoint. So I just thought to myself, why, why don't we build that way where we live? You know, and we tend to stay focused on residential and often more rural. I have no idea how to make a city sustainable. I'm going to leave that to somebody else. I'm going to stay in my wheelhouse. There's other people working on that. There is, and very smart people too. So when you're approaching that and you have the kind of client base we have, it's not just the structure that— it's really, you know, some people might call it whole systems thinking, where we're going beyond the structure itself into the greenfield now is the popular term, the landscape. How do we design? designed with as little disturbance as possible? And how do we incorporate food sovereignty as part of the equation?

Mm-hmm.

Because all through human history, I find it really fascinating, the ideal Roman citizen was considered to be a self-sufficient farmer, at least for all of the Republican period and into the Empire, that you weren't considered a contributing member of Roman society unless you could self-sustain your farm. and provide for yourself and your family and then have excess. Um, you know, so that idea—

Interesting.

That idea is sort of lost, you know, these, these ideas. Now we've, you know, so we're the antithesis of smart cities, you know, like my belief is that we need to move people back onto rural settings, small farmsteads where they work with the land, um, grow a lot of their own food. Um, that eliminates a lot of society problems. along the way, as you can imagine. And then there's nothing wrong with having a second career, or even a first career, but that, that's that model with our communication system, I think, is, is a good thing to be shooting for. Um, we can certainly repair the land much easier with people on it, you know.

Right.

And maybe not spreading over the whole Earth, but certainly spreading back out into um, farming land more sensibly, right? You know, so that's part of the equation. And then transportation. And, you know, we've, we've, uh, in Canada, like the United States, we've, we dismantled our rail system, which was a great cheap way to move goods, uh, in favor of trucks. And, uh, you know, now we— you know, I heard an architecture critic say that Bulgaria has a, a rail system that makes Right. And now we're seeing the problem with, you know, the way the governments are leaning towards being against gasoline-powered vehicles and everything. Well, wouldn't it be great to have a rail system that you could just hop on and go from here to there? Again, that would be nice. So transportation is certainly part of it. You know, this is all part of what I believe is conscious design, which I think you do too, right?

Yeah, it's very holistic. You gotta look at the, there's a, it's a huge idea. We've probably, industrial age is really where we started to silo everything and then believe. And even just from like a business standpoint, people have finally figured out that siloing your engineers and your marketing and your sales doesn't actually work, right? Like, just, just on a business efficiency level, that doesn't work. So, and people are figuring out it doesn't work in other areas as well. And that's, yeah, very much conscious design. It's all connected, right?

And this is an idea that's been known throughout history, uh, by people in positions of authority. So we can go as far back, at least that we have easy access to information, to the Greeks, who had a very dim view of experts. Uh, they were— they considered experts to be somewhat mentally deficient. They could only master one thing, so they made great functionaries. Um, you know, and, and which is really when you get into the Renaissance where the, where, um, the thinkers then are coming up with this idea of the Renaissance man or woman who, you know, the Da Vincis who are, you know, you're capable of everything.

Yeah.

You're capable of many, many things.

Right.

You don't have to be an expert in everything. It's, you know, I can have an expertise in one area and dabble in lots of things. And when I need somebody that has more expertise in an area, I just go get that person to help me, right? And we trade or we do business with one another. That's a system that makes sense to me. And, you know, and there's certainly, you know, I guess you would call them polymaths, you know. There's a— I saw a great quote, you know, and this speaks to human capability that genius in children is as common as grains of sand on this, on the shore. And as we always— it was Sir Kenneth Robinson, the great British educator, does a great TED Talk on this. Um, you know, we, we hammer creativity out of, out of children in the school system and silo them into, you know, hey, you're going to be this, this, or this, or this. And, uh, there was another great American thinker named John Taylor Gatto, who said, you know, if you listen to your teachers when they tell you, you know, you're not smart or you're— or you're— you should do this, whatever they tell you is only true if you believe it to be true. Right. So within you, you have— and I'm, you know, we're all Da Vincis. You know, I'm an engineer when I need to be. I'm an architect when I need to be. However, if I feel I'm stepping beyond my, my level of knowledge, then I'm going to go speak to someone that's more knowledgeable on that thing than me. But this takes us back to, to, um, design and conscious design, where I came at it early on from the building side, right? What's natural and healthy and good from a building standpoint. And I'm— along the way, I run into someone who came to it through health. You know, what's natural, regenerative, good health? And what's natural, regenerative, and somebody else's food and someone else's Transportation. And what I found was, and I'm sure you found it too, that we all connect at this nexus point where all of those things begin to matter. It's not enough to build a healthy home. You want a healthy diet, healthy lifestyle, all those things, right? And it's just, you know, and we all arrive at the same— we all come to the same conclusions. It's not, you know, as Don Cherry would say, rocket surgery in the old days. It's pretty obvious. And so that's kind of where our 33 principles came in, is we were, we were trying to allow for all of those things, including education. You know, we saw the problems with education during COVID you know, just getting, first of all, kids to school. And then for many parents, did you even want them in school at that point as they saw what the curriculum was? They were like, I think I can provide my child with a better education than the school system is doing. Now, that may or may not be true, but many people came to that conclusion. So shouldn't, as design, we be considering the whole learning aspect, right? So that's an element. And it just keeps— we kept ticking things off and going, from a design standpoint, we just couldn't stop with the structure itself. You know, everything else affected the structure. Are you a musician? Do you need to build your house so that you can have that kind of a room in it that is conducive to you playing music? Or are you an artist? And that goes back also to the, you know, once again, the Romans and the idea of the villa, where the Roman farmer was everything and his estate needed to provide everything, a workshop, a play place, food production, cooking and food preservation, you know, all of those things. And that, that to me is exciting.

Yeah, that's— I love that you're tying back these old, old concepts and, and things. It's something we don't think about. But also I think is that, you know, history repeats. So it's good to be aware, right, right, of these things and be thinking about it. I'm gonna jump way back to really when you've— one of the first things you started talking about was this idea of designing with the thinking that, you know, things will change, right? You're aiming for this 500-year, but you're not just going, Here's a stick, it's not gonna move, it's gonna just permanently be there unchanging for 500 years. It's, well, you might stick some lights on it, you might, you know, whatever it is, like it's going to evolve. And I think that's something we're still struggling with on a, even a design thinking approach in most— products and most brands is we still have this stuck idea of, you know, how it's been for thousands of years where things progress very slowly. We're like, well, 5 generations from now, we'll basically be using the same hoe to dig up the earth and plant with. Like, it's not gonna change. And we're still, as a society, really haven't— clicked. I think maybe the next generation will have it really stuck in their minds that change is quick, but we're still very much in this. It's like we're still struggling with the fact that it is way faster than we want to accept or can fully understand. So this whole idea of let's build for long term and Recognize technology is moving very quickly. Everything is changing. Everything is changing quickly and being able to think through the process of how do you future-proof basically your design instead of locking it in. Because that's one of the things, like you said, like how we design houses and build them now, you can't— you can remodel, but you— it is really hard to completely repurpose.

Right.

a house or upgrading technology without it being very expensive, right? Where should it— I mean, if we put a little thought into it, it wouldn't be that expensive to put in fiber instead of cable. Like, it's just not that hard. But if you don't think about it, then it's very hard.

That was the obvious one out of the gate to me is like when I was helping on renovations and stuff and we were having to rip the house apart, like you're essentially gutting the house. To change the wiring and plumbing. And I went, well, that's, that's not good design.

No, it's terrible.

It's costly. It creates a lot of waste. And now we're using these products like spray foam, and there's going to be a thing down the road which I've termed the foamocalypse, which if you've ever seen this stuff deconstructed, it puts millions, if not billions, of pellets of Styrofoam into the environment. How do you contain that in a deconstruction? Do you have to bag the whole site? I mean, like, just, you know, it's happened to us where we were forced to use a radon barrier XPS. And just the guy who installed it on this eco-development, the wife of the husband got very angry that they were sawing this stuff and it was creating all of these pellets that went into her garden. You know, and that's just from cutting boards. Um, you know, so I, I, I shudder to think what's going to happen when these buildings start to get deconstructed. Um, plastic is going to look like a, an easy problem to solve when that happens.

Yeah.

It floats, floats on the surface of water, right? Styrofoam. Yeah, it's not good. Um, so, you know, we try not to use it, uh, as a product, but sometimes we're forced to just from a design standpoint. You know, like, you win the battles you can win, right? And if we can at least— going back to your point there, which is a really, I think, salient point of longevity in design. So we say, like, the solution to the shortage of housing is to build housing that lasts, right? So if it's a 500-year house, then minimum that requires very little maintenance, that's a win for everybody.

Right.

Even if we're using some cement in there, I mean, I'll certainly make the argument against the anti-cement people that when you're building with that kind of longevity, you're sequestering as— I mean, I don't think you can get into the negative numbers, but you're as close to zero as you can get. And when you're using dimensional lumber in a way that makes sense, then you know, you're not using trees as often. So, I mean, I, I, there's— I love this story. I don't, I don't even know if it's true, but I heard someone tell it. It's a great story about, um, you know, if you've seen the Harry Potter movies and the great feast hall that they have, and there's one, I believe it's King's College in, in, in at Oxford in England, and they're having it, there's this, uh, dinner happening and all the headmasters are at the front, and, and from the open roof drops an oak beetle onto the headmaster's plate. And he turns to the college engineer, whoever it is, he goes, is this a problem? The guy says, yeah, this is a problem. So they go, they get there, bang their heads together, and they go, what are we going to do here? Because this old-growth oak is gone, you know. So they begin to design a steel structure, and they're going to face it with oak boards and everything. And they decide to call the college forester, who's offsite somewhere, you know, somewhere else. And they explained the problem to him and he says, great. He says, when do you want the beams? And they're like, what? And he goes, yeah, when do you— when, you know, we'll have the beams ready when you're ready to put them up. And they go, well, that's impossible. There's, you know, like, there's no old-growth oak anymore. And he says, oh yeah, there is. We've got it right here on this land that was donated 500 years ago by a wealthy patron, planted oak stands for the college. That kind of long-term thinking is something we don't do, right?

That's amazing. I hope that story is true.

I do too. I believe it's true, but I'll have to check it because the fellow who told it was, I believe, an unimpeachable source. But he might have heard it from someone like me too, who doesn't always check the facts on stories like that. I check my data on building, but not so much on anecdotes, right?

But still, I mean, it's a great point though. Like, that's— there's, there's a similar story. I, I believe I, I was reading, and it was, um, I think it was the Swedes about 1700 or so. They, they were building their navy, and so they planted. And so the 1700 ships require these giant Very tall trees, you know, you're talking 100+ feet, takes 200 years to grow. So they put this order, and finally, like, however long it took, but it was about 30 years ago or something, the, the forestry team was like, hey, your order of trees is ready. We can start felling them now to produce the wood for the ocean-going naval vessels we wanted to build. It's like, so much has changed. But like, that kind of planning and just like, well, I don't know, you gotta wait 200 years for it to grow. Like, nothing you can do about it. So you want ships in 200 years? Gotta start now.

And hold the phony, and we may need those masts again, you know, the way things are going. But, uh, um, yeah, this is good. I think going back to when I first started, we were looking— we're, you know, they were bandying terms like sustainable, eco, green, and these to me are throwaway terms. They're not specific enough. Certainly when I say sustainable, it conjures up a set of ideas in my head that's probably different than yours and the next guy and the next guy. So, you know, as Socrates said, we need to define our terms. What are we actually talking about? That's one of the starting points for us is what actually do we mean when we use that word? Because the mainstream building world has one definition and mine is different. So that's fine, but let's just be quite specific. And then understanding that is the first thing, right? Like a common frame of reference, a common understanding of the problem. And the solution we're using or the solutions we use, and then attacking design from all of these different angles that maybe aren't so often considered, at least in North American building. And it's— there's so much to know that you just can't know it all.

Yeah.

As much as I would love to know it all, and I often, you know, You know, my girlfriend says, you know, you talk like you know it all. And, but I certainly don't. And, but I have this like a thirst for knowledge that I never had in school. It's just because my imagination and my, you know, my desire to do this kind of thing was— that's what excited me, right? And it took me quite a while to find my niche in life. What excited me about getting up in the morning is this: the day doesn't go by where I'm not trying to learn something about the built world. That's my, that's my bailiwick, as they say. But maybe get me back on track here.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. No, this is great. I was gonna kind of piggyback that a little bit. There's, um, had a great conversation with a guy working on Solving ocean plastic, but like before it becomes ocean plastic. And one of the things, you know, people throw around a term circular economy, right? But most people mean this hyper-localized circular economy where it's like my town, my city. And he, he had a great point on that. It was like, well, but we're global, right?

Yeah.

And you mentioned this earlier, we can't, You want a banana? That's not something that probably grows in Canada real well or other, many other, you know, there's a place it grows well. So there's even terms like that where people are really like, oh, this is great. He's like, yeah, but we need a global secure circular economy because we're moving trash, we're moving things all over the world. We have products all over the world. We can't disconnect. It's too late. Like we're past that place. And I think it, you know, this all plays into the conscious design part of it's all connected. And yeah, local is great. Like I'm definitely a proponent, be local, don't ship things if you don't have to. And if you hyper-localize to the point where you ignore the rest, it's also bad. Like, you gotta keep the whole thing in perspective, basically, as you're going through this process.

Yeah, I agree. It's, you know, where was I thinking here? Let's see. Boy, I've got so many things going through my head right now about that. Where do you start? Certainly, one of the things we're looking for is what happens when when you get an infrastructure interruption. Right. So in a place like where I'm from in the prairies in Saskatchewan, where it gets -40 or -50 Celsius in the winter, a month-long interruption of your natural gas or electricity can be fatal. Right.

Mm-hmm.

We even saw that down in Texas where they had a snowstorm that they didn't experience this past winter, or, well, I guess it was last winter, and people died. You know, it's not that cold there compared to us. But so how is this structure dealing with that?

Mm-hmm.

You know, and so this is where we get into the ideas of thermal mass. And I'm actually less concerned about hermetically sealing myself in a building. I don't think that's a very good idea, actually. I'd rather get a trade-off occurring where I have actually— I'm exchanging air often by opening the windows of the structure. I think that's the best way to exchange air. That's how my grandmother did it. As a matter of fact, we would get ready for church in the morning and she would do the laundry and in -40 string that laundry out in full sun in Saskatchewan. And off you'd go, you'd come back an hour later, well, the, the long underwear is frozen solid, but by 3 o'clock in the afternoon it was dry and fresh. Power of the sun. So how do we use things like that?

Mm-hmm.

To create structures that first, always the first step of kind of what— this is what I was thinking about when you were talking about that— is how do we reduce first our usage? That's the first thing we can do in every home in America. I think a lot of sustainability people know this. You know, I would say, you know, kick that microwave to the curb, kick that dishwasher to the curb. You know, design, if nothing else, add a few windows. Bring more natural light in and then go to sleep when it's dark. Kind of the obvious things, right? That's step 1, reducing our usage. And that's across the board. It's in your construction, in your occupancy, in your transportation, in your food, all of it. That's it. That's actually things where we can make the biggest impact right now because we can't rebuild everyone's house overnight.

Right.

But when it comes time to build, I'm more on the new side than on the renovation side, right? So that's where my passion lies in. Let's build you a structure. So, you know, and we have some challenges there from a code standpoint. So I think what a lot of people don't understand is that bylaws and codes are guidelines at heart, right? They're there to prevent people from making mistakes. They're there to protect people from a liability standpoint. So like, you can build your own house on your own land, and actually in Canada you don't require a permit to do that. And most people don't know that, but you're accepting all the liability. So if that house falls over, you're responsible.

Right.

But we've abrogated that responsibility in our modern society and said, no, no, I want some house insurance, I want some car insurance. And the government protects you, and as well it should, From unscrupulous people by putting code in place, right? Otherwise—

Right, right.

God help us, right? So however, when we're dealing— when we're coming at it from a, from a conscious design standpoint, so one of the things we're dealing with now, and I know people are all over the map on this, but it's 5G, right? 5th generation electrical producing, uh, infrastructure. Now we know that electricity and electrical production and distribution has a seriously deleterious effect on human health. I mean, just look at a tree beside a high power line. It dies, right? And what we know from an energy standpoint is that when you get 2 oscillating frequencies beside one another, the lower frequency will rise to meet the higher frequency. This is why it's bad for us to live beside power lines, right? It's going to affect your health in a serious way. And so we get clients that have suffered sometimes serious EMF poisoning, and they can no longer be around those high vibrating energy sources. So they want us to design them either a master bedroom suite, say, that is electricity-free, or much of the house is electricity-free.

Right.

It's zoned to just certain areas like the kitchen and maybe a living room. And now imagine yourself having to go up against code in Canada and tell the code people like, hey, we're not putting electricity in this bedroom. Well, good luck, right?

Right.

It's a bit of a fight. So, but when you understand the code's a guideline and that, you know, as long as you can get everybody on board and you can put the data in front of people, you can usually— I don't want to use the word bypass because that's not really what we're trying to do here. What we're trying to do is design smart for what we need. And so the more progressive municipalities will be along for the ride and some of the more stingy ones, not so much.

Right.

So that's a challenge for us, right? Not often, but it is. And so how does a professional— like, these are things that are coming to the fore now that are kind of on the fringe of of architecture and design. You don't hear a lot about it, but for the people that it matters to, it matters. And so that's one of the areas that we don't— and the beautiful thing about earthen structures is that they shield against EMF frequencies, right? And this is all measurable. It's not like we're talking woo-woo land here. I mean, you can measure all of— you can measure EMF and heat and all of those things. So for instance, like if you If you take your cell phone and you talk for 15 minutes on it, we shoot your head with a heat gun, this side of your head is going to radiate red, right? It's overheated. Now, it's going to naturally dissipate over a period of time, but what we find is if you take your socks and shoes off and you go do a thing that's called grounding, where you ground with the Earth's natural frequency, which is, I believe, 432 hertz, It happens very quickly that the earth of you, because you're not besides— how does this work here? Let me see if I'm— I don't want to misspeak myself. So your— that energy is going to dissipate into the earth, I guess, is the easiest explanation of it, right? But to watch it happen, you know, with the gun is interesting, you know. These are 2 people, stay on the phone for 15 minutes, do the test for yourself. These are things— this is why I say I'm not interested in things I can't prove, right? But I can prove that, and we can certainly prove that electricity has some bad effects. So how do we deal with that from a design standpoint? When you're dealing with cementitious materials or even straw, they have an insulating capacity. Right. And I believe it's— well, I don't have it in front of me, but it's somewhere between 8 Hz and 60 GHz. 1 foot of earthing material will reduce it by 80% or something. I'm just paraphrasing the data right now, but this is all things someone can go check out for themselves. So that's something we look at. I know I kind of went on about that, but that's very important to some people. And, um, non— like, so the trend now with a lot of building products is low VOC, low volatile organic compounds, where our goal is zero. We're attempting to get to zero VOCs because to me, that just— why would I want a volatile organic compound in my house, right? And, um, you know, which brings me back to, by the way, we were talking about natural materials. And the transition I first saw from dimensional lumbers to engineered woods. Now, I'm not saying there isn't a place for engineered woods and everything. It's just not something we choose to use, right? We're trying to keep things as natural as possible until we have to make a trade-off somewhere. And I was wondering why these— so do you remember when they introduced vinyl windows? Or plastic windows. And they were, you know, the great claim with them was, first of all, this is a very pricey retrofit of a home for windows and doors, right? You know, it's tens of thousands of dollars usually. And the claim with that product was that it was maintenance-free. What they didn't tell you was that on the sunny side of the building, after 20 years, that stuff, you could put your finger through it. I mean, you know, it wasn't the best product. Yes.

Right.

And so now they've realized that and they're making, you know, they're dealing with it. But at the end of the day, wood actually is still a great way to build a window. What we forgot was how to preserve wood. So what we know is like these windows would rot out. And why did they rot out? Well, they rotted out for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was they got painted. And when you paint wood, you trap moisture in in there and it begins to rot and decay. But if you do it like Grandma did with her hardwood floors, or the British did with a naval ship, like you were talking about the Swedish ships, you oil that wood and wax it. And in the case of a ship, you would tar the outside of it. So regular oiling and waxing— oil repels water, wax puts a nice finish on things. Um, you know, that's how you preserve wood. But people Went, oh, maintenance freak. First of all, I didn't want to— I didn't want to wax and oil my wood, so I painted it. That was just easier, right? Not realizing that my wood was going to rot out when that happened. And then down the road, I opted instead of repairing that and fixing those wooden windows, I opted— you know, I'm just using me as an example, right? You opt for the vinyl window and then it doesn't last, and now you've got another retrofit 20 or 30 or 40 years down the road. And to me, that just didn't make sense, right? So, right, um, these, these are the kind of design problems that I think we should be putting our, our brains towards from a conscious design standpoint. And to me, that's conscious, like, what's happening with my structure, right? Right.

Well, and you're— and you're— it goes back to the long term, right? You're thinking, well, what, what happens in 20, 30, 40? 50 years, which is, you know, you're aiming for 500. That's very small. That's, you know, less than 10% of your lifespan.

Exactly. And so that was part of the, you know, all of these were reasons why we decided we came up with these 33 principles. They're not ours necessarily. I think there's only one I can claim, you know, ownership of. The rest are just garnered information from many sources put into I think an easily digestible format for everybody. And we're attempting to simplify things always. What we find is when we go low-tech and we look for the low-tech solution, it's usually more durable, more beautiful, cheaper to maintain and build, right? You know, what's cheaper than dirt? I mean— We certainly saw during COVID an enormous rise in, in construction material costs, particularly we use for forming, we use what's called MDO, medium density overlay plywood, which is a decorative concrete forming plywood. And it went from $40 for a 4 by 8, 3/4 inch sheet to $140. You know, so now imagine you're building your whole house out of wood products. The costs skyrocketed and people who had bid their, you know, builders who had bid the home in 2018 and were building in 2020, all of a sudden were faced with a big problem because how do you, you know, the client doesn't want to pay more than what you told them it was going to cost. So all of a sudden, us who are traditionally, you know, 5 to 10% higher on the initial outlay of cost, we're on par with the stick-built. because of the cost. And then we can, we can also make the case with these conscious, natural regenerative designs that the savings down the road is significant. Right. You know, when your neighbor's repainting his house or residing it or reshingling it or whatever, you're not going to be doing that. And that's a— that's to me, that's another win. Right. So as one of my business mentors said, he goes, yeah, sustainable and that's all fine and dandy, but unless you can make the financial argument, People aren't going to come along for the ride. And he was right. Right. And it turns out that if you do this right, it's just as affordable as any other home. And who doesn't want an affordable home? Right. We all want an affordable home.

That's always the goal.

Right. Yeah. Even the rich guy wants— the super wealthy guy wants an affordable home, you know?

Yeah. They just want a bigger one.

Yeah, exactly. And power to him if that's what he wants. You know, I'm in the niche I'm in and I'm having fun doing it, and it's it's a never-ending learning curve, right? Because you're like you learn the next thing you go, boy, I wish I'd have done that in the last place, but I'm going to do it in the next one, right? And then passing, so like there's there's a real consciousness with people in the natural building realm of passing knowledge on. I mean, we still have to make a living, but. I'm trying to create as many rammed earth builders as I can, and I hope the same for the cob and straw bale and all those people, because that means we're going to have an impact. But the— let's call it the dark side of building is we're up against powerful construction product lobbies in places like Washington and Ottawa who really would like to keep us on the fringe, right? Because I don't use drywall if I can help it, and I don't use vinyl siding or HardieBoard or any of those things if I can help it, right? So I'm reducing their market share when I build, right? And right now we're such a small portion of that that we're, we're not that noticeable, so they don't bark too much at us. But if we start to make a dent in that, I think we're going to see some big pushback. Right. And it always happens at the code level. It's always at the code level. It's like, oh no, you can't, you know, you can't build that here. Nobody wants it. It'll just fall over. All the things I heard when I first started, right? You'll never get insurance on it. I'm like, hey, my house doesn't burn. How can I not get insurance on it?

Yeah, it's a good feature. No burning is definitely a good feature.

There was one— I want to tell this little anecdote of my own where this was a really like a pivotal moment for me. On making the switch from the way I saw building happening. So there, there was this trend, which I think still exists, of building these little 5-acre country estates on the outskirts of cities, right? Where the McMansion would go up with the 7-car garage and the guy would get a 5-acre lot. And what was happening was this phenomenon of where the kids would graduate from college and the parents would sell their house that they had paid off and they would move to one of these big 5-acre estates, and within 5 years they had moved back to the city. And what was happening was the, the fellow was realizing that he was spending every Saturday on his 5-acre lawn on his riding a lawnmower instead of the golf course or wherever he wanted to be. And that, and that, hey, wait a minute, uh, the county or the municipality actually won't plow the, the half a kilometer up to my front door from the the highway. I have to do that, right? So, you know, this country living isn't all it was cracked up to be for many. They weren't ready for it. So, you know, do you put a— now you have to have a vehicle that can plow snow just to get home. And, and, but anyway, so I was building one of these places, had a walkout basement, and it was the '80s. And at the time they were using a product in plumbing called Poly-B pipe. I don't know if you're aware of it.

No.

It predates PEX. And it was a gray pipe and it was held together with copper fittings that clamped with rings. Right. And there was some sort of chemical reaction occurring that caused the copper fitting to rot. And Dow Chemical was the producer and they had a big lawsuit and you were able to get money back because this went into millions of of structures, or at least hundreds of thousands. And what happened on this particular house is this fellow went away to Hawaii for however long it was, and while he was gone, one of these fittings failed in a wall in the basement, in the walkout basement, and it was 40 below outside, so water began leaking and it began filling up in the basement, right? First it froze in the drain and the drain couldn't handle it. Then as it climbed up the door, it froze in place sealing the door, right? As it went up, knocked out the furnace. Now what have you got? You got a swimming pool happening. And what happens to water when it freezes? Well, it goes like this and the entire house just blew apart. This million and a half dollar home.

Wow.

Gone like that from a $3 fitting. That's my definition of bad design. And I went, I can't, I don't want to build these places. This is crazy. Why are we doing this? So one of the things we try to design for in, in when we're designing is like, if we have a wet room where there's a water, where there's some water infrastructure, like a kitchen, a bathroom or whatever, we're— Making sure that the floor in there is a durable floor, it can withstand water, and it's got a drain in it that can handle any kind of leak. So now that if the plumbing fitting fails and you're not home, it's no problem. That water's just going to drain down the drain and into either yours, you know, wherever it's headed, wherever you've egressed it to. And that's good design to me, right? That means that You're going to replace a $10 plumbing fitting and not a $1.5 million house. Or even in a kitchen, I'm sure you've seen it, you know, the dishwasher goes and it's now a $50,000 kitchen repair. I mean—

Yeah, because your floor is rotted out, things are—

Right.

It's not good.

And we all know how well OSB handles water, you know.

You can ask all the people with mold allergies because their house molded out.

Right, right, even though they'll tell you that they put the anti-mold additives in and the glues and the polymers. It doesn't work. It doesn't work, no, because mold grows on organic material and there's still organic material there. It began with the sheathing of the houses, OSB, then they moved into the roof sheathing, then it went into the floor sheathing, and then we saw the development of the OSB I-Beam. And, you know, I've just seen those things fail. I remember going to a house where This house was about 3 years old and they had a plumbing leak and they had to chainsaw the side of the house and pull 3 of those structural I-beams out and put new ones in, all again for a $3 plumbing fitting, you know. So, so we can do better. We can do better.

Yeah, yeah, we can, we can definitely do better. And it's, it's good that there's people like you that are, are really working on and Creating new, not really new, figuring out old ways of doing things and bringing them up to more modern houses and implementing it and, and giving people an option besides OSB. So it's a, it's a good place to be.

Yeah.

As we're just kind of in, in wrapping up here, I know you shared a couple of stories, but just to open a little bit, anything else you want to add? Before we wrap up, something, anything we missed?

Well, you know, for people, I would say this from a conscious design standpoint, there are a lot of people like you and me out there. So if someone is thinking of building this way, it just requires a little bit of letting your fingers do the walking on the internet and finding those people. And they don't even have to be right next door to you. We work all over the world, you know, because it is such a niche. I can't just stay in one— like, there's not enough call for what I do in one place, right?

Mm-hmm.

That would be great if it was, but we're moving around, and so are a lot of people that do what we do. Um, and so there's architects, there's engineers, there's builders, and, and, um, they're, they're— you just have to find one that's willing to work with you. Like, a lot of times people say, well, I want to build this round earth Or they struggle, but my builder won't do it. He doesn't know what's what. And that's someone that we can work with. Like, luckily with us, with rammed earth, I can go in for 2 weeks to a month and train his crew during the build. So I don't take any work away from the contractor himself and train his crew. And now that's another skill set he has because it really isn't a complicated system. It's quite simple. You know, that's not bad.

A couple, couple weeks training isn't too bad, actually.

Yeah. And I mean, of course, then you want to be available to that person by telephone if they run into any kind of problems, you know. But as you can understand, on residential, it's fairly simple. And, you know, there's not a lot of engineering challenges there that we might have on a bigger structure. So yeah, it's out there for people if they want it. We're certainly out there. You know, I'll do a crash commercial announcement here. You know, you can find me at www.awarriorrising.com, and you can find my business partner at www.rammedearth.info, which is our main rammed earth website. Perfect.

Well, that was gonna be my next thing, is to make sure you share where people can find you. And for everyone listening, we'll have links in the description. That way you can also just click or, you know, go off and search it right now. And yeah, well, I really have appreciated talking with you and having you share everything you're doing. And there's a lot, I'm sure we could keep talking for hours, but yeah, this has been a great conversation and I really appreciate your time. Thanks for being on the show.

Well, thanks for having me. I'll, uh, I'll see you around.

Bye.