The Good Stuff

[music playing] CRAIG: The power grid is a massive machine, arguably the largest machine ever built.

MATT: It's millions of miles of wire connecting millions of homes to the power plants that generate the electricity we need.

It's hard to imagine living without it.

But there's a man in the high desert of New Mexico who thinks that we can.

[music playing] MICHAEL REYNOLDS: We went through a phase of evolution where we got into centralization, centralized water, centralized power, centralized sewage.

And the infrastructure is phenomenal now.

When I go to a city and I look up, I don't see a sky.

I see wires and power poles and transformers.

And to me, it seems really archaic to be delivering power to millions of houses, when each house is touching the power of the sun.

MATT: This is Michael Reynolds, founder of Earthship Biotecture.

And he thinks we can get off the grid entirely, generate our own electricity, and all we need to do is rethink how we design our homes.

MICHAEL REYNOLDS: A regular house is a box.

Really, no matter how beautiful you may sculpt it out to be, it's still a box that is hooked up to power plants and infrastructure for water and infrastructure for gas and infrastructure for sewage.

It's like you being hooked up in a hospital to life support.

That's what a house is.

And Earthship is like you walking out of the hospital.

MATT: An Earthship is a home just like any other home.

But it utilizes sustainable construction techniques so that it doesn't need to be connected to the grid.

It provides its own heating and cooling, captures and recycles all its own water, produces its own food, and generates its own electricity.

MICHAEL REYNOLDS: That makes them a vessel.

That makes them a machine, not just a shelter, like a tipi or a box or something like that.

MATT: How is this possible?

Well, we're going to find out.

For over 40 years, Michael Reynolds has been building Earthships.

They've been built all over the world in all kinds of climates, from the deserts of New Mexico all the way Siberia.

How do you build one of these?

What is it that goes into that?

Well, I'm looking at a global solution, let's say.

So if I'm going to look at a global solution and build buildings globally, I have to have a global building block.

So I looked around and looked around and looked around.

What do I see all over the planet?

Every country, every city that I've ever been to-- and I've been all over the world-- tires are indigenous to the entire planet.

Bottles are indigenous to the entire planet.

Cans are indigenous to the entire planet.

So I looked at them and played around with them as building materials.

When you look at them as not garbage-- see, I think that's the thing.

We invented the word "garbage."

We invented garbage.

To me, it's a resource.

MATT: Where are we?

What is this?

[laughs] This is a job site.

This is the latest one that we've started.

And this is just some of the foundation work and some of the very first tire work.

MATT: This is Parker.

He works at Earthship Biotecture.

And he gave us a tour of the Earthships they're building.

And these tires, where do they come from?

PARKER SHEBS: They come from the dump.

MATT: Yeah, OK.

So you can see our tire wall.

MATT: Yeah, so what's happening here.

PARKER SHEBS: This is a can wall.

All this is plaster and cans.

And if you try to push it over-- [grunts] Come on, man.

Just can't.

Yeah, it's just a bunch of beer cans, man.

So as you can see, this is building material for the Earthship.

And these Earthships, they produce their own electricity.

Is that right?

Yeah, it's not rocket science.

Everybody knows about photovoltaic electricity.

The thing that we have moved forward on is we make the building through its other encounters need not much electricity.

It's not needed for heating and cooling.

The building heats and cools itself, vastly reducing the amount of electricity needed and making it so that you can provide it from solar or wind.

So the solar energy is stored in batteries?

Batteries, yeah, like a whole battery bank.

And depending on where you live and how much daylight hours you get, even like on the Winter Solstice, and then combine that with how cush of a life you want to live, that will determine how many solar panels, how many batteries you need.

Do you just walk up on the roof?

So our panels are on the front-- the south facing end of our roof.

And they'll feed to our battery bank.

MATT: But the roof of an Earthship isn't just for solar collection.

This whole roof here, when it rains, this entire roof will catch water.

Water flows off the roof down into these big salad bowls and into our cisterns, which we're standing on top on.

From there, it'll feed through here.

Since it's rainwater and it hasn't been injected with chlorine or fluoride or whatever they're using to treat water in cities these days, we've got to treat our own water.

So we go through a few different filters and then a drinking water filter.

And then it's ready to go to the sink.

It's ready to go to the shower.

In your apartment in Chicago, when you shower and your water goes down the drain, where does it go?

Uh, I mean, the sewer, I guess.

[laughter] Right, yeah, it just leaves.

Yeah.

So we have-- and again, you can't see it because we try to make a lot of our house look real fancy and everything.

But the piping will actually go straight out to our greenhouse here.

MATT: The shower water goes to water the plants.

PARKER SHEBS: Yeah, they are being watered just by you showering.

MATT: Because I have a real trouble remembering to water plants.

If it was just when I showered, that would be much easier.

PARKER SHEBS: And we collect it at the end.

And then we pump it to our toilet because who needs the cleanest water to go the bathroom in?

Who would actually say that that's a requirement of theirs?

Yeah, I mean, we don't drink out of the toilet anyway.

At least, I don't.

Where are we going right now.

We're going to another Earthship.

I don't remember the name of it.

PARKER SHEBS: Waybee.

Waybee?

PARKER SHEBS: Waybee.

Waybee, that's the one we're staying at.

PARKER SHEBS: Yeah.

Yeah, we're going to the Earthship we're staying in.

PARKER SHEBS: Yeah.

MATT: Very nice.

This is a great place.

CAMERAMAN: I think this is the nicest place that Gustav has ever stayed in.

Yeah, definitely.

PARKER SHEBS: Yeah, I was going to say, they put you up in four stars or?

CAMERAMAN: Usually, it's four of us in a La Quinta Inn bedroom.

Yeah.

Do you know what the temperature's supposed to be tonight?

PARKER SHEBS: Outside, it's been getting down right around freezing.

So is this going to stay warm in here?

Yeah.

Is it just the insulation that's keeping it warm?

Well, it's the thermal mass that's keeping it warm.

So remember when saw the tires, we saw the dirt pounded in the tires.

Dirt is thermal mass.

If you pound it in thick like that, and when the sun hits it, that dirt traps the heat.

And the other thing is so having the greenhouse and all this glass facing south is solar gain.

So even in your flagstone gets fried by the sun all day long.

You can feel it right now and it's warm.

And all this m when the source of the heat goes away, like in the evening when it's cold, all this heat just escapes to the cold place.

And so to keep that from escaping to the outside, that's what we have installation for.

What about in the summer when it's really hot?

It gets pretty hot here, right?

Mm-hmm.

How does it stay cool?

We have these convection tubes right here.

So remember that the back of this building is buried with dirt, just tons and tons of dirt.

These tubes go through all that.

Air comes in, goes through all of that thermal mass that cools it.

And then you just have this cool air that shoots through the house.

So you open these skylights, you have these cooling tubes open, and it creates convection.

It creates airflow.

And that's how these stay cool in the summertime.

MATT: That's it?

That's air conditioning?

Yeah, it's convection.

It's cool air coming from outside the house, working its way through the house.

You definitely can feel it.

[music playing] MATT: Well?

We spent the night in the Earthship, the crew and I.

And it was great.

I really want to live in one of these.

It was funny.

It was actually really warm in there.

I think it got down into the 30s last night here.

But it was really warm in the Earthship.

I think you, David, had to open the vents at one point?

DAVID: Yeah, I did.

It was actually, like, almost hot in there.

So it is pretty amazing.

And then this morning when we woke up, it just felt like a comfortable-- Oh, yeah, it was very comfortable.

DAVID: --temperature.

So I want to check out the water system and see how that's doing.

So you can see water in the gutter here.

Yeah, and there's water coming down into the salad bowls.

I guess it's just dew or the morning mist.

DAVID: It didn't rain last night.

Yeah, it didn't rain.

This is the desert.

But it's kind of amazing how much water you can get if you're just there to capture it.

MICHAEL REYNOLDS: How are we going to evolve unless we take some chances?

And I take chances.

I know people can live without infrastructure.

And I want to present that that's possible, and actually, that quality of life is better.

You certainly don't have a utility bill.

It's up to the people to have the roadmap of how to get their life straight out of the sky, straight out of the earth, to then render these methods that are destroying the planet useless.

Where can they get that roadmap?

We're trying to do it.

We're trying to draw it.

We're demonstrating it.

So what do you think?

Is going off the grid the future?

Would you want to live in an Earthship?

Or would rather just live in an airship, like in the Final Fantasy video games?

Let us know in the comments.

Also, there's a link in the doobly-doo if you want to rent out the Earthship.

It's basically like an Airbnb.

Yeah, it's awesome.

That's what we did.

I didn't.

You guys didn't want me to come.

Yeah, you totally missed out.

I talk in my sleep.

They can't sleep then.

Thanks for watching.

If you like this show, you could click the Like button.

Or you could subscribe to be notified for more.

Or you can go to Patreon and become a financial supporter of the show and help us make more episodes.

Also, in two weeks, our new playlist starts, all about secrets.

And Mike Rugnetta is one of those videos.

Yeah, we went out to Area 51.

We got about as close as we could without getting shot.

Last week, we talked to Derek from Veritasium about nuclear power.

And this is what you had to say about it.

Afro Samurai said that there are currently 12 nuclear power plants in Germany.

He's responding to when Derek Muller said that Germany's getting rid of nuclear power.

And yes, there are currently power plants there.

We probably should have bee more clear.

But they're phasing them out.

When the Fukushima disaster happened, Germany declared that they were going to get rid of all nuclear power by 2020.

ProfessorPuppet and a bunch of you other non-puppet people asked about thorium, which is another element that could be used to make nuclear power that's theoretically better than uranium.

Thorium is more abundant than uranium so it's easier to mine.

And a thorium reactor would produce less waste than a uranium one.

Also, it's hard to make a nuclear bomb out of it, so the threat of nuclear proliferation is less.

So why aren't we using thorium instead of uranium if it's so much better?

Well, a couple of reasons.

Not being able to make nuclear bombs out of it may be one because with uranium, it's like a two-for-one deal.

You get energy and you get weapons, if you're into that sort of thing.

It's really expensive to make a thorium plant, which is a problem with nuclear power in general.

So if you want to build a nuclear plant, you need the backing of, like, a government.

And that government is probably going to want nuclear weapons.

It does seem like India is investing in thorium reactors.

But we'll have to see how that goes.

So there are a lot of advantages to thorium over uranium.

But there are also some large hurdles to get over before we can make a thorium nuclear plant.

Thanks to a lot of the commenters in the comment threads who actually give a lot of details about how thorium and the advantages and disadvantages.

So if you want more details, actually, just look in the comments.

There's a lot there.

Marcus Rossel is wondering why Derek has such white teeth.

Well, I texted him.

And this is what he said.

And it's more interesting than I thought.

[clears throat] "My front two teeth are fake because I smashed them as a kid and they died, turned gray, and needed to be root canaled.

So I keep them white by replacing them with fake white teeth."

Still, though, kids, I would recommend brushing twice a day instead of smashing your teeth.

Thanks for all your great comments.

In two weeks, our new play list starts, all about secrets.

And if you haven't checked it out yet, we have a new series called Time Capsule, first play list all about the Civil War.

Check it out.

Check it out.

See you there.

Bye.

Bye.

[music playing]