HS 87 – Explaining Permaculture With Paul Wheaton

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My pleasure to welcome Paul Wheaton to the show. He is an expert on permaculture and we have mentioned that word a few times on prior episodes, but we're going to dive deep into it today and talk about it. Paul is the founder of richsoil.com and also permes.com and he has a big following in terms of this topic, so I'm looking forward to learning more about it. Paul, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me on the show. Thanks. Always appreciate the opportunity to infect more brains with Mike Goldiguke.

Fantastic. So first of all, Paul, what is permaculture Many people have heard of the word, many listeners to this show, but many haven't as well. So what is it? And maybe how old is that term?

I think the term came from the early 70s. The term was first made up by Bill Mollison in the early 70s. And then, of course, there's another guy that David Holmgren that may have contributed to that. And then for each permaculture person that you ask, I think you'll get a different answer to what is permaculture? The answer I like these days is creating a more symbiotic relationship between myself and nature so I can be lazier.

That's great. Okay, so you've got the benefit statement right in there, which is fantastic. So what do people who practice permaculture, what do they do? How do they live?

Wow. Well, I'd say that some people are just getting started, and the changes that they have are going to be fairly slight. I mean, they're going to be focusing more on how do I get more food that I raise myself. And then as you get more and more advanced, I think once you've really mastered a permaculture system, like in a garden, because permaculture covers how you build your buildings, how you consume energy, a lot of different things, social interaction. But most people think of the horticultural aspects. But I think once you get a permaculture system going in your garden, then you shouldn't have to do anything other than harvest. When it's working correctly, you'll be able to grow all the foods that you want to grow that you would normally grow in your garden. Only you no longer have to irrigate, you no longer have to weed, you no longer have to fertilize, you no longer are concerned about buds. All you do is harvest.

So this is growing in a way that just alleviates all of these concerns. How do you do that?

So there's a variety. I mean, a lot of it is through observations. Like, if you look at nature, I mean, all this stuff, all the things that we grow in a garden originally occurred in nature, and they were able to survive and reproduce without any human help whatsoever. And then we started breeding them in special ways to get more flavor and things of that nature. But it's kind of like, what do we do in our garden to kind of get it to grow on its own without any help from us. So a lot of it, if you kind of look at nature, like, if you go and you find a raspberry out in nature, because raspberries are very Cold tolerant. And so people will grow raspberries in their gardens, but they know that in their garden, if they don't water it, it'll die, but they'll go out in nature just a few hundred yards away and look, there's a wild raspberry plant. And if you taste the raspberries from the wild raspberry plant, they taste so much better. Then you start to observe and ask, why. Why does that raspberry not know that it shouldn't be living without help from me? Why is it living? Why is it not dead? And my raspberries back in my garden would die if I don't water them. Why is the flavor so much better than the raspberries I grow in my garden? So there's a lot of observation. Now, of course, we've got a long list of, of tricks on how we can go about doing that, which are not tricks to nature. It's what nature does. The whole concept of the hose and the bucket is not something that's part of the nature repertoire. And so these are artificial means that we've come up with to bring water to a scenario. And basically, when a plant is clearly dying of thirst or dying from a lack of water, it's our brute force attempt, it's our quick solution to bring it water, as opposed to like, let's think about how did it get to be without water to begin with? Why is it needing water, but the plant over there doesn't need water? And that's where we get started. So I've been able to come up with about 17 different things to explain how a raspberry gets water over there. And we're not getting. And it's not getting it in our garden.

That would be a, that would be like a two hour podcast right there, just talking about that.

But permaculture involves a lot more than gardening. I mean, what is it? In the broadest sense?

I'm going to say that it's going. I mean, the word comes from permanent agriculture, which later got massaged to be permanent culture. And so the idea is that this is going to be a collection of ideas on how to move forward, not just sustainably, but in a way that we can all thrive to better get along with each other, to be able to be safe. I mean, isn't being prepared all about personal safety? We want to have a more predictable future. I think permaculture is very much that. How do we have a more predictable, reliable, comfortable future? So does this answer your question or.

Am I just baffling no, it answers the question. It's great. So how should people dive into permaculture? What are some of the steps that one should take to have this more predictable, safer, better future and sustainable future? Obviously?

Well, a lot of people think that when they want to jump into permaculture, they're going to do something. But I really think that the path is to build the stuff in your head and to start getting your head wrapped around this stuff. It's a different. It's a different way of thinking. I mean, it's much. It kind of takes a lot of stuff from hundreds of years ago, plus a lot of stuff that's from the last couple of years and trying to make a best of. From all of these things to move forward. I mean, really, it's about using your brains instead of brawn. When we make a garden, it's like we have a recipe that will get food to come out of the ground, and it requires a huge amount of brute force and oftentimes materials from off site and things like that. Permaculture is more about. If you have this knowledge, then you can make your life a lot easier on yourself. I think a really great example when we're talking about permaculture, what's an example of permaculture is hugelkultur. This is a very simple thing where we're doing nothing more than just burying wood. This comes from the observation of a nurse log in the wild, bottom of the wild. And it's like, why are all these trees growing here but they're not growing over there? You'll find that there's this great big log that fell over and it rotted probably 20 years ago. Now when the winter rain comes, that log gets saturated with water. And then these surrounding plants and trees are able to tap into that water when the summer hits. That's why this patch over here is doing so much better than that patch of weeds over there that's all brown and dormant over the summer.

It's amazing how nature has just set all this up so well. It just works, doesn't it?

It does. I like to think of when you look at a patch of ground that's entirely untouched, it's never been touched. And if we were to think of it as sound, I think what we usually see in an untouched field is basically like static. It's just a white noise. Then when we look at a field that is a field of corn, to me, that sounds like a dial tone. That's just one big monocrop. Nothing else is growing in there. I kind of think of permaculture as being able to make symphonies in seed and soil. When we combine things just right and we put them in the right place and we add the right kind of texture to the soil, then we get this wonderful collection of plants and life coming from the ground.

That'S going to sustain us. And that's what I think permaculture is.

Tell us about cast iron cookware. Why is that important?

Well, I gotta say that I think a lot of people elect to not use cast iron because they've tried it before and something stuck. And it's one of those things where with just a little bit of knowledge, a cast iron pan will really work great. It'll be a nonstick surface, and it will last hundreds of years. As opposed to Teflon, where we're throwing these pans out every six months with regular use. Not to mention the fact that it's like when the Teflon's not on the pan anymore. Well, where did it go? And then we've got.

It went into your eating it.

Yes. And it's like, boy, that doesn't seem to be a substance that occurs in nature. It's not on the US rda. Don't forget to get your Teflon.

But listen, I bet dupont would recommend it in our diets. I think dupont invents Teflon. Right? Not that I trust them, or Monsanto, for that matter.

You know, now that you mention it, I wouldn't be surprised if someday in the future there was a US RDA amount for Teflon. Make sure you get 5 grams of Teflon every day.

Yeah, well, you know, that'll happen when Obama, or whoever the administration is at that time, gets into bed with the chemical company that invented it. And I believe that that's DuPont. So it is ridiculous as that sounds, folks. It's highly possible because there have been more ridiculous things already that have happened in real life.

You mean like the fact that organic, the word organic right now is regulated by Monsanto?

How convenient.

I mean, you got Phil Sack, who's in charge of the Department of Agriculture, right?

He was president of Monsanto, right?

Yeah. There's like 200 Monsanto people currently working in the Department of Agriculture under Vilsack.

It's unbelievable that people look at our current administration, the Obama administration, as though they're here for the little guy and they're not in bed with the big corporations. I mean, it's just as bad as. It's probably worse than any other administration. Really, it's just ridiculousness, you know, so.

Basically what you've got is you've got Monsanto telling us what organic means and then you're talking about this administration and it's kind of like, well, I mean, isn't it? I can't even think about different parties anymore. I mean, they're all a bunch of. They're all the same big circuits made of scary clowns and they're all puppets and there's just one puppet master above all the parties. So like, what does it matter? Because you're right, it matters a little.

Bit, but it doesn't matter that much. It's just not that significant. The two party system is a scam. You look at the fact that the media is just shunning Ron Paul and he's so popular, but the media won't let him become popular.

Right? And so I think as you sit down and you start thinking about all this political stuff and how scary it is and bad and wrong and gives you a stomach ache and everything. The good news is all roads lead to permaculture. You start thinking about permaculture and homesteading and then it's kind of like, you know what, you can go and get this going and set this up and then it doesn't matter what kind of crazy goes on out in the bigger world because you've got your stuff set up, you've got your resilient system set up that will continue to be resilient no matter what goes on outside of that chunk of land. So true. They could come up with all kinds of new kinds of crazy things. And it's like if you just start focusing on the crazy and the politics, I believe you just get a stomachache.

Yeah, well, I don't want to get off on the government topic or sort of the conspiratorial topic either and talk about the Bilderberg Group. We've done that before. But the one thing I will say though is that what really scares me is this government intervention where they are trying to make it very difficult for people to grow their own crops, to grow their own food. They do it as window dressing when Michelle Obama puts a garden in the White House. But in real life, in practice, they are trying to make that kind of stuff difficult. There are various movements to try and make it impossible for people to capture their own rainwater from the roof. I mean, folks, this is scary stuff. The government wants us to be a bunch of dependent shills so that they can control the prices of our resources and control nature. I mean, the fact that they let big companies patent things that occur naturally is insanity to me. I mean, that you can patent a part of the genome or a seed like Monsanto has, and you can restrict what nature does naturally. It's ridiculous.

I don't think it's the government that's doing it, dude.

Well, it may be. It's above the government is what you're saying, right?

That's the distraction that's put in front of us. We're supposed to think that it's them then.

I'll give you a minute to talk about that, please. Because, you know, I can't let that go on unheard. But I want to get back to permaculture, but go ahead.

Well, first I've got to qualify by saying, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. But it just seems to me like there's just a lot of scary going on that make any sense. But then when you start taking into account that there's a bunch of people way above the government and pulling all the strings on the government, then it starts to make a lot of sense. So I think there's people that are pulling the strings on the government, and they happen to own Monsanto and some of the chemical companies and own a lot of the things that you would think aren't able to be owned by people. And they do. It's like. No, no, no. I think. I think that's what's going on, man. As far as, like. And all the chemicals and all the nasty and all the toxicity, it's like. Yeah, I imagine that if you went to their house, they don't have that, but for the rest of us, we're expendable. And so I think permaculture is one way to be able to get us out of that expendable path.

Good point, good point. Okay, so the cast iron cookware, you're basically saying that the reason one should use that is because the Teflon is not leaching into your food. Other reasons.

It'll last a hundred years, hundreds of years. You buy it, and then you're not going back to the store every six months to buy another. Damn pride van. You're all set for life. So that's. I think that's probably the biggest one. I think that there's a lot of other benefits as far as, like, you know, health benefits from cooking your food in cast iron. And, I mean, there's a long list of debatable benefits, but I do think that there's some serious issues with the toxicity of Teflon and all of the Teflon esque things that they've come out with lately.

Yeah. Well, it's just amazing to see the amount of disease going on in our culture today. When you look at the cancer rate. I mean, whether it's electromagnetic, whether it's the Teflon or the hormones in the food and the antibiotics, the combination of all of this stuff, we're just in this bath of dangerous things all the time.

Absolutely. Well, I'm going to stand right up and say when you cook in cast iron, it is possible to generate carcinogens from the smoke. But I think that that's going to be 100, maybe even 1,000 times less than the carcinogens that are going to come from the Teflon esque materials. So I mean, it's all a matter of not. I mean, it's going to be very difficult to eliminate all carcinogens from all of our lives. But I think it's not too hard to cut it by a factor of 100 and really cancer if you want to. And that's the most obvious one to examine. We all have cancer every day, all of us. It's just a matter of most of us have such a tiny amount that our immune systems are able to get rid of it.

Right. And what you mean when you say that is we all have various cell replication that isn't the ideal form of it. You know, where it's out of control to some extent, but it doesn't get so out of control that it becomes a dangerous cancer. That's what you're, you're meaning when you say that. Right?

That's, that's true. So I mean you're. So we all start off with what is technically cancer inside us. We all have it all the time. And it's just a matter of like when a glob of it kind of gets way out of hand, then that's when it's like, so it can kill us. And so I think this is a great way. This is a great example of how permaculture is different and just how you think permaculture is going to be. I mean, conventional techniques are going to be all about like, you have cancer. So we're going to try and let's talk about a cancer ectomy. Let's talk about getting the cancer out of you. Permaculture is going to be more like let's talk about keeping you healthy and not getting sick from anything. Because once your general health starts to degrade or it gets compromised in some way, like you're bombarded with so many different toxins. Well, then something's going to get you. Permaculture is going to be more about how do we improve your overall health. I mean, this is kind of like the whole colony collapse disorder thing. I mean, people are coming out saying, oh, we found out what's causing colony collapse disorder. Well, you know what? You abuse bees long enough, they're going to die of something. And so rather than like focusing on the virus and the fungus that are the official new cause for what's Colony Collapse Disorder, Instead, how about this? Why don't we stop torturing those poor little bees and let them do their thing without so much compromise in their health, and then they'll be able to not only fight off colony collapse disorder, but fight off other things. People who are raising their bees without any toxins in an area that's free of pesticides, they don't have colony collapse disorder. The reports are anecdotal yet pretty substantial to show that not having problems and it's all about, you know, have a little bit of care for the bees and then none of the diseases seem to affect them. No mites, no colony collapse disorder. All the different things that the more traditional, conventional beekeepers are struggling with are not a problem with the people that are doing things in a far more organic fashion.

A lot of times money becomes the motivator and it can be in a positive way too. We've talked about the corporatocracy in the negative ways and the political elite too. But how can someone listening make money with permaculture?

I think that you can easily make a lot more money with permaculture than you can with conventional systems. A lot of conventional farmers right now are tied in to, you know, have a thousand acres, they plant it full of corn, they take off to the commodity mill, and then they get their checks from the government for having, for.

Subsidies and ridiculous failure, the subsidy.

I agree, I agree. And they net $14,000 a year. In the meantime, Sepp Holzer, who I believe is the premier example of permaculture in action, I'm going to speculate without having looked at his taxes or anything like that, I want to speculate that this guy is making a million dollars a year. And granted he is crazy famous now and makes buku bucks traveling the world and greening deserts and stuff like that, but the big thing is that just off of his hundred acre farm, I imagine that he probably gets half a million dollars A year from that. And talk about all the concerns that you have with all these different organizations making all kinds of laws to make it so a small farmer can't make a go of it.

He just stays one step ahead of him, like every step of the way, because he used to sell seeds, but then they made laws against that, and then he would do this thing and that thing and the other thing, and then they would make laws against that, which favor great big companies. But the little guys, it's way too expensive to be involved in it. So now what he does that, he says, because he lives in Austria, and he says it's €95. So it's about, what, 120 bucks, 130 bucks to come onto his land, to just come on in and look around. And if you steal a bunch of food and then leave, that's your own business. He doesn't care. He's not going to police that. So then if you were to try and sell you food, then income, a whole bunch of laws and headaches and regulations and stuff like that. But if you're stealing food, I mean, there's no regulations there. In fact, who's ever taken the food, they probably ought to be like, what, arrested or something.

It is. And what you're getting at is what another scary thing that the government is doing. It would look something like this. Say I have a farm and I harvest a bunch of food and I invite my neighbors over and we have a collective, a little co op, and maybe they bring me some of the food they grow or some other items of barter, or they just bring me money. If I sell it to them, then I am a business and I am under all sorts of regulations and it is illegal for me to do that without licenses and inspections and regulations and all this stuff. Even though these are my neighbors, they know me, they trust me, and we have a community. You can't do it.

The government is attacking all of these little co ops, all of these little groups of friends in small communities that are creating permaculture type environments. The government is trying to just shut them down.

That's true. It's a real threat because it's awesome. You know, okay, I have never in my life ever done any drugs whatsoever. I've never smoked pot. But I kind of wonder, wow, are we on the verge of people selling food the way pot is sold? I mean, is there any black market food? Because here's another big thing is like if you go to your best, your favorite, your most organic grocery store and you buy their most organic food, it's still monocrop food. And I really believe that that food sucks.

What does monocrop mean?

So monocrop would be like, you've got this big hundred acre field and there's only corn growing in it. Or you get this big hundred acre field and there's only carrots growing in it. So that's all there is. And I believe that that's not the way nature intended and that what's a superior form of food, a real health food, is going to be something where you go and you get your carrots and it's growing in a space with like 50 other species. So there's trees and shrubs and things that people call weeds, all growing together in the middle of the carrot. And the key thing is, is the mycelium in the soil and the nutrition. And this is such a huge part of permaculture for the horticultural aspect. And that is, if you think about it, mycelium is very sugar hungry. And yet mycelium has no green leaves, so it can't do that photosynthesis trick to get sugar from the sun. So what mycelium does is that mycelium kind of makes things that look like root esque and they touch, literally touch the roots of plants that have green leaves. There's a symbiotic relationship between the mycelium and the soil and the plant. The mycelium will find nutrients and trade them via water with the plants to get sugar. And then the mycelium, now when it got that sugar from the plant, like if it's a carrot, that carrot has a whole bunch of nutrients that it has in excess. But the carrot also has nutrients that it does not have an excess that it needs. Because the way the carrot is designed and the way any plant is designed, they're specialists. They're able to get like a carrot has a deep taproot, it's able to find things from down deep and collect certain kinds of nutrients that other taprooted plants are not so good at getting. But the carrot will basically poop out its excesses of stuff that it has too much of. The mycelium picks that up and the mycelium will then use that to trade effectively with other plants that don't have enough of that.

Nutrients are being traded between plants through the mycelium. So, well, that's one of the ways that you would no longer need to fertilize. I mean, we're able to track that. There are some things that a carrot needs. If we have A big field of nothing but carrots. We've got a pretty good idea of what to plant in there to make it so that the carrots don't turn out really pathetic.

We'll put that there. However, we're only just getting started in trying to understand what a carrot needs in order to not turn out to be pathetic. There's all kinds of nutrients that we learn about every year for just carrots. So now if you go into a polyculture system, all the needs of that carrot are being met. Now we have a carrot that's far richer in nutrients that did not come from a chemical petroleum source, but instead came from its natural source of other plants through mycelium in a rich soil that's teeming with microorganisms.

Yeah, it works. It works. It's a. Permaculture just makes sense. I mean, there are motivations and as we've alluded to, but there's a battle against permaculture. Right. There's a war on it from the corporatocracy and the government. Right. Because these companies see themselves as in competition with permaculture. I would assume.

Well, I would have to say that. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say I go along with what you're saying. I do believe that there is something. I don't have a lot of evidence. I believe we're seeing a lot of corporate trolls. I think that we're. Paul Stamets is doing a lot of work with funguses and he's getting a lot of death threats. He's come up with a fungus that will basically take out colonies of ants or bees. That's just a naturally occurring fungus.

He's trying to get it to market, but of course he's being impeded by those people that are supposed to help us. And of course it'll impact the profit margins of chemical based solutions. And so you can imagine where the death threats are coming from. Fortunately, Paul Stamets is still alive and he's still pushing. But yeah, we do see some ugliness, but nothing like, I would call it a war. It's not like I'm not seeing a lot of permaculture people getting shot in the head.

Yeah, well, when I say war, of course I'm using it metaphorically too. I'm not saying it's a, it's a war like a real war, but it's a, you know, it's a war of words. It's a war of the legal system and the regulatory system and that type of Stuff. That's the war.

Oh, definitely, yes. We're seeing a lot of that. We're seeing. And it's amazing how they'll come up with new laws to make it harder to do well, even even certain forms of self sufficiency. And, and then it's like sometimes the laws are made and it's, it's like you're not sure if it really applies to you. And I suppose at some later date you could find yourself in jail because you, what, ate an apple off of your own apple tree.

I don't know. It's unbelievable. You know, that is the. By the way, just have to comment on that. That is the ugly, dirty trick our government plays on us. And of course, governments all around the world do this. But the US government now engages in it more and more and it's really scary there. John Stossel did a great documentary news report recently called Illegal Everything. And basically I was brought up and I remember my mother telling me when I was a child, she said to me, jason, ignorance of the law is no excuse. And I agree with that philosophically. That's absolutely. It has to be true because each citizen has to be responsible for knowing the laws so that they can act in a legal way. But here's the deal. What we've got now, we have got mountains of laws. We have got so many laws in this overly legalistic country that nobody can possibly know the laws. And the laws don't even obey common sense anymore. When my mother told me that years ago. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back then, of course, even then, nobody could know every law. There are too many. For many, many years, there have been too many laws for any one person to know them all. But at least back then, it seems like you could use common sense and the Golden Rule to govern your actions and obey the law. But now some of these laws are so obscure and ridiculous and nonsensical that you can't even use common sense to try and obey the law anymore. And so what happens is the government identifies people as people they want to harass, people who are targets, maybe people who don't agree with the zeitgeist of the time or the current administration, or someone who gets into an argument with some stupid bureaucrat about something and then they find something to attack them for. It's insanity what's going on. And they'll levy them with fines. They might even levy them with arrest, like these people in the co ops I talked about. It's just ridiculous.

Sepp Holzer has Paid more agricultural fines than any other farmer in all of Europe. Just kind of, you know, go on what you're saying. And I thought I heard something about how as of January 1st of 2012, 40,000 new laws took effect.

40,000 new laws. This is what I heard.

I don't really know.

Those are those. And remember, are those federal, state, local?

I mean it was just federal.

That's just at the federal level, folks. So now you've got state laws also. They never repeat, they always just make more of them. Okay, it's just, it's ridiculousness. Let me take a brief pause. We'll be back in just a minute.

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So 40,000 new laws, let's just assume they're federal, okay? We don't know, but we're just for purposes of conversation. It's such a ridiculous number anyway. So there's 40 new thousand federal laws, for example. And how many thousands of new state laws are there? And they vary from, from state to state and then municipal laws in each city and county. Folks, this is insanity. What is going on. The bottom line is everybody on both sides of the aisle, they will agree government is corrupt. There's too much corruption in government. Everybody will say that you could be a leftist, liberal, socialist, communist and you'll probably agree with that. And you can be a right wing conservative Republican and you'll agree with that. Everybody agrees with that, right? So the only solution in my eyes is that you just got to know that in any human organization such as government, you're going to have corruption. It's just the way it is. It's human nature. Nobody's going to change it. No series of laws are going to change it. No great president is going to change it. It's going to happen. Corruption will happen. And the only way to deal with it is to minimize its impact on our lives. And the only way to minimize it is to just simply minimize the size of government. So if a smaller government, smaller level of corruption, a larger government, larger level of corruption, more government equals less freedom. Less government equals more freedom. Period. End of discussion. Nobody can argue with that. I don't know. You care to argue with it? Go ahead. There's my rant for the night.

No, I'm not arguing with It I think that based on, without really any knowledge, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a politician, I avoid politics like the plague. I just can't help but think that, I speculate that right now every one of your listeners, each and every one, and you and me, probably breaking some kind of law, if anybody got a burr under their saddle, they want to come out and put you or me or any of your listeners in jail, there's probably a law out there that would validate that.

And you know, especially if you own a business, if you own business, I guarantee you you are breaking more laws than you can imagine. Because if you have a physical business, what's the height of the countertop in your little kitchenette area? What's the level of the opening of the door of the dishwasher? What is the weight on the hinge tension on the bathroom doors? Are the aisle ways wide enough between your furniture? Has your fire extinguisher been checked recently? You are breaking more laws than you can possibly imagine if you have a business with a physical location. And those laws I was referring to hide a countertop hinge tension dishwasher. I've dealt with them all because they're under the ada, the Americans with Disabilities Act. You know, a well intended thing. I mean, my aunt has multiple sclerosis, she's in a wheelchair. I certainly understand the need for that. But folks, all this does is it ends up into more restrictions of freedom.

A lot of the work that I do is with the idea of like, okay, all that stuff you're talking about, really, really scary, depressing and suffocating. And so a lot of the work that I do is where it's like, okay, let's set all that aside for a moment and how can we move forward despite all of that? And so it's like, okay, you've got hardly any money, you are a wage slave.

And you just gotta get out and get onto some land and build your safety net. Because the scenario that you're describing is there and it does not feel safe. And so basically what can you do? And so then a lot of the work that I'm doing is all about things that you can do for yourself to try and build your own safety net, to be able to build a better world for yourself, for your friends, for like minded people, and possibly even for the larger world. One of the things I write about is the rocket mass heater. This is something where you can heat your home using 10 times less wood than a conventional wood stove.

Tell us about that.

It's a whole different way of burning wood. With a conventional wood stove, you'll see the smoke going out the chimney at 300 to 600 degrees. But the rocket mass heater, what it does is that you have exhaust going out the side of your wall like a dryer vent at about 70 to 100 degrees. And that's almost exclusively steam and CO2.

A lot less waste.

Yeah. And the preppers are keen on it because it does not. They can be out in the woods and have one of these to heat their home. And it doesn't give away their position because there's no smoke. But on top of that, ten times less wood. The thing is, I don't think that there's a form of heating your home that is more sustainable. I mean, there's people that are heating their homes eating nothing but the twigs that fall off their trees in their yard. And there was one guy that heated his home one winter using nothing but junk mail.

That's just a funny commentary, you know, right there. Just all the. All the junk mail, the wasted junk mail. Heat your home with it. It's great.

The key is that energy is one of those big government, big picky business kinds of things. It's. Energy is the reason why, you know, behind most of our wars and behind most of the corruption and stuff like that. So, you know, one of the things that I looked at is with the rocket mass heater is, wow, what if. What if half the people that lived in cold country had one of these? I mean, wow, I think that would completely change the world. It would change everything. If half the people out there had one of these, then that would vastly reduce the amount that's used for gas, electric heat, oil heat, all these other forms of heat that are basically energy.

We've got to get wrapping up here. But I want to ask you, I got two more little topics I want to cover with you, which is about water harvesting ponds and alternative energy and early retirement. But just explain how this heater works real quickly, if you would. What is it? It's a rocket mass heater, Is that what you're saying?

Right. So it. I mean, the first time it was described to me, I was adamant that it's a piece of fiction from fairy tales. And then I saw him in action and it was such a bizarre thing to actually see. I made a whole bunch of YouTube videos so other people could like actually see it doing this and, and see that it's real.

There's a Wikipedia entry on it too, by the way. I just Looked it up. Go ahead.

So then the idea is that you stack your sticks vertically and it's just a few, it's just hardly any. Just a handful of twigs vertically. Only the bottoms burn, the fire burns sideways. And then there's a chimney that's only like 3ft tall. But the chimney is super insulated, so it gets super hot in the chimney. And the thing that you do is you try to create a chimney fire every time. And that chimney fire burns all. Re. Burns all the smoke. So you burn the wood and you burn the smoke. Everything gets burned.

Yeah, it's like a big, it's like sort of a vertical pipe. It's maybe the size of a barrel or thinner. It's interesting. I'm looking at some pictures of this online.

A lot of people will use a 55 gallon drum to be the bell. That redirects the smoke from the chimney back into a thermal mass. The mass is typically a bench, but other people will use other things. Some people use a floor.

Now, do people always make these things or can you just buy one?

I have yet to hear of one that's being available for sale. Everybody, everybody makes them. But I mean, like, I, I can't help but think that if, I mean, first of all, it wouldn't ship. It's way too heavy. There's. There's too much math. But, but I've heard of people building them for as cheap as 20 bucks. Usually it's more like people will spend like a couple hundred bucks to get one, but it takes about a weekend to build it.

And on Amazon.com there is a rocket stove.

Oh, there are. So a rocket stove is going to be about cooking and it's cooking outdoors. A rocket mass heater is about heating your home.

This actually looks like a heater, though, even though it says stove. You know, some people that's interchangeable, like the old pot belly stoves, they're really heaters, you know. So. Yeah. Oh no, this is for cooking, by the way. I confirmed that. Sorry. Okay, go ahead.

Right, so with the rocket stoves, I mean, it's going to burn in such a way that the exhaust is going to end up in your house, which.

Will come up and it's not good.

Yeah, but the rocket mass heater is going to direct the exhaust outside. So I think it's important that we, you know. So, yes, it's true. In fact, in fact, the rocket mass heater was derived from, from the rocket stove which was invented by the same guy. So he actually went down to Africa where they were building fires in their homes, and to let the smoke out, they would just open the door. Their homes would fill with smoke, and they had all these eye problems and lung problems. And so then he came up with a rocket stove so that they could continue to burn to cook their food with wood, but yet they used ten times less wood. And on top of that, it had hardly any smoke at all. So then it alleviated a lot of the problems that they were having.

So I also want to make sure I give out your website, because it is up now, which is richsoil.com and there's a picture of you looking sharp in your overalls there.

Yeah. Two more topics I want to cover just real quickly here. Number one, water harvesting ponds.

Okay. Water harvesting ponds, that can mean so many different things.

Well, for all kinds of.

I do know that we just released two podcasts that were about natural swimming pools, about the idea of having a swimming pool. And rather than cleaning it with chlorine, you would have plants and other life forms that would basically work in symbiosis with cleaning the water like a good clear lake would.

There's that. I've written extensively about ponds and how to seal ponds and ponds for farms, aquaculture versus aquaponics.

All that kind of stuff. When it comes to water harvesting, I mean, permaculture is a collection of all kinds of things to get your winter water. So all that rain and the spring and winter and fall that falls when all the plants are dormant, to get all that to stick around through the summer. So ponds are indeed a part of that strategy. Is that what you had in mind?

Yeah, well, I'm just kind of looking at some of your bullet points in your outline and asking you that question. So that's fine. Early retirement, the extreme version of it.

Okay, so there's a website called earlyretirement extreme.com and the guy wrote a book there, and it's brilliant. It's got a lot of stuff in common with the book Mortgage free. But basically what this guy did is, of course, whenever anybody thinks about retirement, they think about, okay, what's my monthly expenses, how little can I live on, and how much money do I have in the bank? Am I debt free, et cetera? When can I retire? Let me plan out when I can retire. And then you could talk about early retirement. Okay. Like, if I cut my expenses in half, I could retire even earlier. And Jacob takes it even further to early retirement extreme. He has cut his expenses per month down to $510 per month.

Unbelievable. Yeah, he said save 75% of your net income. You know, this just does not sound very appealing to me. I like living.

Well, he. Oh, yeah, absolutely. He wrote a book. I mean, basically, if you think about it, if you are working in a job or even a career that you no longer care for, then it's kind of like, what are your alternatives? And so are you willing to continue this, this grind day after day with the idea of this is what pays for your fancy pants car and your big house and your fancy education and all these fancy things that you, you know, elected that you opted in for? And then so basically, the book kind of lays out a path of like, okay, how much are you willing to give up? How low are you willing to go? And so it's not saying to go all the way down to where he went. And I've heard of people who've cut it even further. Like, they live on $100 a month. So, I mean, basically, it's like depending on how low you're willing to go determines how quickly you can retire. Now, now, granted, it's about extreme, right? Early retirement extreme. Some people will do some crazy things. I mean, some crazy sense. There's this thing called the Olympics, I'm sure you've heard of it, in which they will push themselves far beyond what anyone else will push themselves to for the sake of just being there. So granted, for most of us, that level of running or that level of athleticism is beyond our own personal comfort zone. You might find something that's halfway between where we are and there. And so I think it's really great to be able to be aware of what our options are that we may not have considered. And for a lot of people, it's like, oh, I'm going to go cut my expenses, so I'm going to eat half as much pizza. Well, guess what? That really doesn't change the big picture all that much. It's like that's just phoning it in. On the other hand, some people are saying, I'm going to cut my living expenses by a factor of five. And by doing that, they can retire within four or five years, as opposed to retiring 20 years from now.

See, you know, that's interesting. And I'm looking at this guy's website and I'm going to kind of look through it just because I want to challenge myself to think in a new way. But my philosophy is nobody ever got rich saving money, and there's a limit to what you can save. And this is really extreme. What you're talking about, but there's no limit to what you can earn. And it just seems like this is a scarcity way of thinking rather than an abundance way of thinking.

Well, that's true. And granted, if you can have both, that could be better. But I'm with you. There are certain comforts that I enjoy.

I mean, it says live on 6,000 a year. Gosh, I can't live for two weeks on $6,000.

I think that there are many, many schools of thought and, and on the. You know, and frankly, people, I don't know what the word capitalism is supposed to mean anymore, but what capitalism means to me is I can go and work hard for six months and take three years off goofing off. And. And I like that idea. And so on some people, I said, oh, that's not capitalism, or whatever. I don't care. But the thing is that this guy is. Now, he. He followed his own recipes, and after like three or four years, he stopped working as a physicist. And. And now last time I talked to him, I did a podcast with him, and he was talking about being on a crew for yachting. And that was his. That was his passion now. And it's like. It's like he can have a new passion every other week and go do all these new things. And he didn't have to go and work for however many years in order to build up enough money to be able to do whatever it was he wanted to do. It is a path. It's not the path, but a path. I think it's admirable. Rather, you know, he chose the path. And the other thing is, is I kind of think as I listen to him and he talks about what about this path is. It's kind of like he can. He can now go on any new path that he wants to go on. I mean, he can go out and earn millions of dollars a year now and not be a physicist. He's not. He's not tied into the wage slave thing now.

Well, he's out of the rat race, as Robert Kiyosaki puts it. So there are multiple ways to get out of the rat race. No question about it. Well, hey, give out your website one more time and any other resources you want to share with people. And this has been very interesting, Paul.

RichSoil.com is where I keep my podcasts and my articles. Permease.com is where we have a community of permaculture enthusiasts. It's the largest permaculture site in the world. And both of those sites will have links to to. I've got about 150 different YouTube videos about permaculture.

Fantastic. Well, Paul Wheaton, thank you so much for sharing this with us today and it's definitely something to think about. It's really amazing when I got in, when I became interested in sustainability and survivalism, modern survivalism, sort of amazing how it really impacts the environment on such a positive way. I really didn't consider that before I became interested in this topic. So it's good to hear you tie a lot of this together as it relates to permaculture and keep up the good work out there. Appreciate you being on the show.

Thanks for having me. Jason.

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