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EXIT Podcast Episode 12: Johnny Thomas
276 Plays3 years ago
Johnny Thomas is CEO of Ventana Tek, a renewable energy company focused on reducing households’ dependence on the power grid. We discuss:
- how to discern between good & bad grind
- homeschool & deinstitutionalizing education
- entrepreneurship as an ADHD “ideas guy”
- Renewables for liberty-minded people.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Johnny Thomas and Liberty-Minded Entrepreneurship
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:18
Speaker
I'm joined here by Johnny Thomas.
00:00:20
Speaker
Johnny is the CEO of Ventana Tech, which is a renewable energy company focused on helping households reduce their dependence on the power grid.
00:00:28
Speaker
We wanted to have him on the show because he's liberty-minded and he's interested in helping people exit in a way that goes beyond just their professional situation.
00:00:35
Speaker
So welcome to the show, Johnny.
00:00:37
Speaker
Thank you.
00:00:37
Speaker
Appreciate it.
00:00:38
Speaker
Appreciate your time.
Journey to Entrepreneurship
00:00:40
Speaker
So you've worn a lot of hats.
00:00:42
Speaker
You started out in finance.
00:00:44
Speaker
Can you tell me about your first job and how you decided you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:50
Speaker
So the first time I got into the professional world was to study and become a, and this is fresh out of college.
00:00:57
Speaker
It was while I was actually finishing college.
00:00:59
Speaker
I studied and became a loan officer for a company in Utah and started doing mortgage loans.
00:01:05
Speaker
And quickly after two years of that, I realized that I was, I needed to get out and do my own thing.
00:01:10
Speaker
I always tell people I'm too arrogant to listen to someone else, you know, just kind of a joke.
00:01:14
Speaker
But so I, in, it was really 2001 that I started into that world for my first company, started doing mortgage financing.
00:01:22
Speaker
And then at the same time, building and flipping some homes and just doing all those kinds of things in real estate.
00:01:27
Speaker
And then just throughout that, just kind of evolved my company into where I was sending people to go get life insurance with other people when I figured I could do it myself.
00:01:34
Speaker
And then I was sending people to go get investment advice when I can do it myself.
00:01:37
Speaker
So I've since picked up the investment licenses and the life insurance licenses and rounded my company out into a full financial services suite.
00:01:47
Speaker
And that's, you know, that's been 20 plus years that I've been doing that so far.
00:01:50
Speaker
So entrepreneur, the entrepreneurial quest is, is,
00:01:55
Speaker
deep embedded in my soul.
00:01:57
Speaker
I guess.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah.
Education and Practical Credentials
00:01:58
Speaker
How much did your education benefit you from that?
00:02:02
Speaker
Like if you could start it over and just do everything again, how much of your education would you have pursued or how much would you just sort of get, get the credentials or the training sort of piecemeal?
00:02:15
Speaker
You know, I've had this conversation.
00:02:17
Speaker
It's interesting to me.
00:02:19
Speaker
I thoroughly enjoyed my educational experience at Brigham Young University.
00:02:22
Speaker
I hold a linguistics degree, a bachelor's degree in linguistics, and it's done me no good in my professional life other than I can speak a few languages.
00:02:33
Speaker
But I could have done that on my own.
00:02:34
Speaker
An MBA I got just because my father kind of suggested that to me.
00:02:40
Speaker
And I will say this, the perception of credentials
00:02:45
Speaker
having degrees, especially a postgraduate degree, like an MBA has really helped people in their trust because when it comes down to finances, it's about emotions and trust.
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:55
Speaker
So hard, hard to say, not that that hasn't helped me in the trust area, but as far as helping in my professional career, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably go and got a CFP, a certified financial planner and gotten that it's, it's like a nine month course and it's, it's as hard as a master's degree.
00:03:10
Speaker
And, and that's, that's got it.
00:03:11
Speaker
So I'm, I'm torn.
00:03:13
Speaker
I'm torn to the fact that, that if,
00:03:15
Speaker
if I, I'm in, I'm in a career where I don't need those credentials, but it has definitely helped me in some areas where people see and, Oh, MBA, you must be this, that, or the other, even though I'm the same person without that paper on my wall or with it.
00:03:27
Speaker
So yeah, a little torn on that.
00:03:29
Speaker
I don't think nowadays to college is so expensive.
00:03:32
Speaker
I, you know, I have seven kids and I'm not, I'm not telling them all go to college.
00:03:36
Speaker
I'd rather see them get work experience and
00:03:38
Speaker
And get a vocational degree or something like that rather than drop 60 to 100 grand on a meaningless piece of paper.
Defining Success Beyond Finances
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:46
Speaker
So I saw on your website, you said that you decided early on that you're not going to do things you don't want to do.
00:03:52
Speaker
Now, I spent my 20s grinding in an educational career path that I hated because I thought that was what I had to do to raise a family.
00:04:00
Speaker
And it did end up paying well.
00:04:04
Speaker
I know from reading your blog that you believe in doing hard things.
00:04:08
Speaker
So how would you help somebody tell the difference between a good hard thing versus just like a meaningless hard thing?
00:04:15
Speaker
You know, great question because it's so hard to know, you know, when you, when you read about the great entrepreneurs, the people that have changed the world, the Edison's, the Tesla's, Musk jobs, some of, some of these people that have really changed the world with technology.
00:04:34
Speaker
sometimes it really kind of comes down to a gut feel of, is what I'm doing literally going to be able to change people's lives for the better?
00:04:42
Speaker
Because there is a humanitarian aspect in me that's pretty deep inside my psyche and in my ethos where I served a religious mission in South America.
00:04:51
Speaker
And so I saw grinding poverty.
00:04:53
Speaker
And so part of my outlook is, look, if what I'm doing is going to help me be able to help other people,
00:05:00
Speaker
then if I have obstacles and I have things that are kind of kicking me down, then those are the obstacles I need to plow through because those obstacles are going to make me stronger.
00:05:10
Speaker
So it all depends on, to me, it all depends on whether what you're doing is pushing you to be better and will allow you to help other people be better.
00:05:18
Speaker
And if it is, grind it, man, go through those obstacles.
00:05:22
Speaker
I'm a big believer in the stoic stuff, uh,
00:05:25
Speaker
you know, the Aurelius quote, the obstacle is the way it's not, it's not the best way to treat it from the, from the original Greek, but it's basically saying, if you see an obstacle and you're going to, and you need to get to that other side, don't go around it, go through it, bust it up and get it done because that'll teach you the greatest thing.
00:05:40
Speaker
So when you're looking for whether you should grind it out, look for whether grinding it out means you're going to be able to bless other people's lives at the same time as blessing you and your family's life and then go do it and don't be afraid of it, tackle it head on and go.
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, I had a similar experience on my mission where that was basically the first time that I ever had a task that I really believed in.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I've said this before, but I was always, my self-perception was that I was just sort of lazy and unmotivated.
00:06:14
Speaker
But I had big dreams, big vision, things that I cared deeply about.
00:06:19
Speaker
And there was always sort of like, why my, you know, my parents mentors would be like, why is it so hard for you to just do your homework?
00:06:27
Speaker
Just, you know, you know, complete these tasks.
00:06:29
Speaker
And I didn't really have an answer until I went on the mission.
00:06:32
Speaker
I realized it was because
00:06:34
Speaker
I didn't actually care about any of that.
00:06:35
Speaker
I didn't have like a purpose behind it.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so it was really hard for me to find the will.
00:06:43
Speaker
And I always envied people who could do things that they weren't really passionate about because I thought that it made it easier for them to just sort of succeed.
00:06:56
Speaker
But as I'm getting older, I'm seeing a lot of those people who have been very successful, but without any compelling vision.
00:07:04
Speaker
And they're making money, but they're not happy.
00:07:07
Speaker
And they're not, frankly, interesting.
00:07:10
Speaker
Well, and how do you define success?
00:07:13
Speaker
You say successful.
00:07:14
Speaker
What does that mean?
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:17
Speaker
And successful in money, yeah, there are people that have money, but you've heard some of them say that they're living some of the most bitter, unfulfilling lives.
00:07:26
Speaker
And yet I knew people like you, I was in South America and Ecuador and I knew people that didn't have
00:07:32
Speaker
you know, anything to their name, but there were some of the happiest, most fulfilled people.
00:07:35
Speaker
And that really opened up my eyes to finding out, define success.
00:07:38
Speaker
Before you say they're successful, define success in life.
00:07:41
Speaker
And if you define success as money, well, yeah, then that person might be successful.
00:07:44
Speaker
But if you define it as fulfilled and happy, they're a failure.
00:07:47
Speaker
They're an abject failure.
00:07:50
Speaker
And so doing what I want to do has been a focus.
00:07:54
Speaker
And then surrounding myself with people that encourage me
00:07:57
Speaker
to do what I want to do and what I want to do is good.
00:08:01
Speaker
That's how I become successful.
00:08:03
Speaker
And the money just comes along with it.
00:08:04
Speaker
I mean, I've been to the bottom in money.
00:08:07
Speaker
I've hit rock bottom and I'm doing well now, but money just comes along with it when you open up your mind to, I'm going to be successful because I'm going to do what fulfills me and brings peace to other people.
Instilling Values and Homeschooling
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah, and so the distinction between not doing what you want to do is the terminus of what it is.
00:08:29
Speaker
Is that what you want?
00:08:30
Speaker
And I realized maybe four years into my corporate career that I didn't envy myself.
00:08:38
Speaker
anybody that I worked with from the, from my boss to my boss's boss, the director to the CEO, I didn't want to be any of those people.
00:08:46
Speaker
And it's like the reward for working hard in this environment is you get to be one of those people and you get to do more of this kind of work and the pay is better, but the hours are worse.
00:08:56
Speaker
And, and if you just hate that job, yeah, that's, that's, that's not success.
00:09:02
Speaker
Good for you.
00:09:03
Speaker
That's, that's great to hear.
00:09:04
Speaker
I love, I love hearing like-minded people because I feel the same way.
00:09:07
Speaker
Well, I mean, good for me, but it took me, you know, I had to be forcibly expelled from that environment.
00:09:15
Speaker
I didn't, I didn't choose to leave, which, you know, obviously that was a blessing.
00:09:20
Speaker
You still got there.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, still got there.
00:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, you still got there, man.
00:09:24
Speaker
That's okay.
00:09:27
Speaker
You mentioned your kids and, you know, would you like them to go to college or not?
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, not everybody's dream for themselves is necessarily their dream for their kids.
00:09:40
Speaker
Do you feel like entrepreneurship is something that you would encourage everybody to do?
00:09:47
Speaker
Or is this like a certain type of person?
00:09:51
Speaker
So first of all, let me answer the kid question.
00:09:54
Speaker
We homeschool all seven of our kids.
00:09:56
Speaker
We have for 16 years.
00:09:58
Speaker
I have two children that have reached adult age.
00:10:02
Speaker
and the rest are 17 and under.
00:10:04
Speaker
I won't push them to do anything that they don't want to do.
00:10:08
Speaker
And college may or may not be in the future for all or none of them.
00:10:13
Speaker
I don't care.
00:10:15
Speaker
I want them to be successful in the way that I define success, which is fulfilled, happy, able to provide for their needs.
00:10:21
Speaker
So no, I won't push them to do any of it because I think college at this point is an indoctrination camp that costs a whole heck of a lot of money.
00:10:29
Speaker
And I'm
00:10:29
Speaker
as I do mortgages and financial advice for people, I'm seeing people putting themselves in a hole that it takes literally years.
00:10:38
Speaker
I mean, sometimes a decade, a debt more than decade to dig out of.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:42
Speaker
And think of all that waste to waste of time.
00:10:44
Speaker
So no, I won't, I won't force that on him.
00:10:46
Speaker
Two of them have already shown, um, my son that is 18, he's currently serving a mission right now in Arizona.
00:10:53
Speaker
He, before he went, he got his mortgage license and he's shown entrepreneurial ideas.
00:10:58
Speaker
The next step I would say is that my mom brought me up reading and trying to understand the Briggs Meyer personality stuff.
00:11:06
Speaker
And then Jordan Peterson has a website, Understanding Myself, where you figure out what your strengths and your weaknesses are.
00:11:15
Speaker
And it doesn't even necessarily mean that you have to work on your weaknesses all the time.
00:11:21
Speaker
It's simply knowing it.
00:11:22
Speaker
And understanding that entrepreneurs can come, you know, the Briggs-Meyer world, there are four main types of personalities.
00:11:28
Speaker
And then each of those personalities are either introverted or extroverted.
00:11:31
Speaker
All four of them can be successful entrepreneurs, but you have to know yourself.
00:11:37
Speaker
And so my, myself, I'm, I, you know, in the Briggs-Meyer, I'm an ENFP.
00:11:41
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a creative.
00:11:44
Speaker
Cool.
00:11:46
Speaker
I'm a creative entrepreneur.
00:11:48
Speaker
And so I need to surround myself with people that build systems because systems,
00:11:52
Speaker
for me, our routine and it drives me crazy.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yes.
00:11:57
Speaker
And then, and then, but the system entrepreneur needs to surround himself with some creative people because that system entrepreneur will never think outside of the box.
00:12:04
Speaker
And so I, I think the most important part is yes, I do.
00:12:08
Speaker
I do encourage everyone to become an entrepreneur in something.
00:12:10
Speaker
And I don't care what it is, just something if only for the tax breaks, you know, but, um,
00:12:17
Speaker
But to do something, because it also pushes you to be a better person.
00:12:22
Speaker
There's a fine line between order and chaos, and progress comes when you step into a little bit of chaos to push yourself.
00:12:29
Speaker
You mentioned homeschooling.
00:12:32
Speaker
What about that appeals to you?
00:12:33
Speaker
Why do you do it?
00:12:34
Speaker
Why do you encourage other people to do it?
00:12:37
Speaker
Homeschooling for us?
00:12:39
Speaker
No, this is for us.
00:12:41
Speaker
I don't judge in any way.
00:12:45
Speaker
I don't do anything.
00:12:46
Speaker
But homeschooling for us, these have been the fruits of our homeschool.
00:12:50
Speaker
First of all, we teach them what we know to be true.
00:12:52
Speaker
And so many people are worried about, well, I don't know how to do this.
00:12:55
Speaker
I don't know how to do that.
00:12:56
Speaker
Well, there are so many things that you can get online, so many tools and resources to help people.
00:13:02
Speaker
But what homeschooling has done is it has brought the focus that my wife, and she is amazing, she calls herself the hippie mama,
00:13:11
Speaker
You know, she's on Instagram or whatever is the hippie mama.
00:13:14
Speaker
She is amazing because she does not teach the kids.
00:13:19
Speaker
She teaches our kids to love learning and they teach themselves.
00:13:24
Speaker
And so our children within a few years, I mean, I've got a four-year-old right now that is just, just stoked to wake up every morning, do his ABCs and he's learned words and he's starting to read at four.
00:13:35
Speaker
And, you know, most of our kids, my oldest boy is a voracious reader.
00:13:40
Speaker
By the time he was 10, he'd read the Iliad and the Odyssey.
00:13:44
Speaker
All of them have read things like Ivanhoe, Don Quixote.
00:13:46
Speaker
I mean, they study Latin and Greek, and then they have a language they want to learn, you know, Portuguese, Spanish, German, whatever.
00:13:53
Speaker
And so when you, but we haven't necessarily taught them all that.
00:13:56
Speaker
We taught them the love of gathering education and learning and keeping that, you know, a little kid when they're learning something new has that spark of education that is just so,
00:14:05
Speaker
infectious that we lose as we get older.
00:14:08
Speaker
And then the public schools just beat it out of us because you have to sit there for 13 hours a day while an authoritarian person says, do this, do that.
00:14:16
Speaker
By the way, you can't go to bathroom until I say, and it's like, you know, we, we homeschool for three or four hours a day.
00:14:22
Speaker
And our kids are so far ahead that the three oldest kids all graduated, finished their high school age.
00:14:27
Speaker
And they either had a degree or half a college done, you know, and they love it.
00:14:32
Speaker
So for us, it was homeschool has engendered an absolute love of learning and that's continuing on into their adult lives where they're learning more and more things and keeping that infectious curiosity of a child alive and well.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:47
Speaker
And the, the, the confidence to execute homeschooling as a parent, I brought a homeschooling friend of ours on the show a couple episodes ago and
00:14:59
Speaker
And his pitch was basically, if you look at the outcomes from people who do unschooling, where they just make no effort at all, even that is so close to what the public school outcomes are that you almost can't mess it up.
00:15:19
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:15:21
Speaker
If you're actively trying to educate your kids,
00:15:24
Speaker
you're they're going to be ahead of where they would be in public school, like basically guaranteed.
00:15:29
Speaker
And so, yeah, it's, it's, um, we, we've just started and, uh, we, we don't really know what we're doing.
00:15:37
Speaker
And so like, I I'd love to, I'm going to, I'm going to go follow your wife and get her tips and tricks, but, uh,
00:15:44
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a fascinating world to be in.
00:15:48
Speaker
How do you organize that?
00:15:49
Speaker
So like you mentioned that your four-year-old is sort of teaching himself, I can't remember, to read.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, himself, George.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, how do you attack that?
00:16:00
Speaker
How do you make that happen?
00:16:02
Speaker
Well, first of all, my mom back in the early 80s kind of started doing phonics.
00:16:08
Speaker
She taught me to read right before I was four.
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:12
Speaker
She was brilliant.
00:16:13
Speaker
And so she's taught phonics reading to all of us.
00:16:15
Speaker
And then my wife picked up on that from my mom.
00:16:18
Speaker
And so we've taught phonics to our kids ever since they were.
00:16:22
Speaker
And really what it is is, you know, so some people, my wife probably says that she says people are so scared they can't teach their kids.
00:16:28
Speaker
So you can teach a two-year-old to tie their shoes.
00:16:32
Speaker
You can teach them to stay out of the street.
00:16:33
Speaker
Why can't you teach them how to read?
00:16:35
Speaker
Reading's easy.
00:16:36
Speaker
And so even though we've had some that read that are more difficult at learning to read and some that are easier,
00:16:42
Speaker
It's really just, it's not the curriculum.
00:16:44
Speaker
It's again, the love of learning.
00:16:46
Speaker
And so the four-year-old gets going and he just wants to be like his older siblings and read, but it's because he loves to learn new things and all kids have that.
00:16:55
Speaker
So the confidence is that you teach your kids how to do stuff all day, every day.
00:17:04
Speaker
You teach them to eat, you teach them to brush their teeth, you teach them to get dressed, you teach them to
00:17:09
Speaker
You know, whatever you do, when you walk in a parking lot, you hold hands, whatever your rule that you teach them that.
00:17:14
Speaker
So why can't you just add a couple other things in?
00:17:17
Speaker
So when we're going down the road, driving on a family vacation, we, it's so funny.
00:17:21
Speaker
We point right now we're down in Southern Utah in St.
00:17:24
Speaker
George, Utah, and the rocks around here are red.
00:17:25
Speaker
And if you ask, if you ask the question, why are the rocks red?
00:17:29
Speaker
All of them will talk about the iron and oxidation and the dirt and everything down here.
00:17:33
Speaker
And it's just because you just say it out loud.
00:17:36
Speaker
Just talk through it.
00:17:37
Speaker
You're teaching your kids as you go and they're picking it up.
00:17:40
Speaker
They're sponges.
00:17:41
Speaker
So have some confidence.
00:17:42
Speaker
And then, you know, at a certain point, I'm that ENFP personality.
00:17:46
Speaker
We're a bit of a little bit of a, we have a little bit of a donkey hope.
00:17:49
Speaker
And it's where we think we can do, you know, I can do that type thing, you know?
00:17:53
Speaker
So we, we, we latched onto that and the kids you'll get it, man.
00:17:58
Speaker
Not to plug plug for my wife, but at the hippie mama, H I P P I E M A M A.
00:18:04
Speaker
She's got some killer, I mean, some of the wisdom she drops, I just kind of look back in awe because she's got so many kids that she's brought through.
00:18:11
Speaker
But yeah, she's got a lot of tips and things in there for people that are super hesitant, that have homeschool hesitancy.
00:18:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:21
Speaker
Maybe it is just the way that you teach your kids.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:26
Speaker
to brush their teeth and to eat and to do all those things as you, as you, you sort of just establish that this is what we're doing now.
00:18:34
Speaker
And, and so, yeah, maybe just setting aside the time that says this is reading time.
00:18:40
Speaker
We're just going to read.
00:18:41
Speaker
And maybe they start just sort of holding the book and looking at the pictures, but then you, you know, you kind of introduce as so much of it, like you're talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey and Don Quixote.
00:18:50
Speaker
And it's, it's,
00:18:53
Speaker
that's not a question of doing something special other than making those things available to them.
00:18:59
Speaker
Because I think, you know, a public school curriculum just doesn't, it's not even on the radar.
00:19:09
Speaker
That's not even in the universe of what you're going to learn.
00:19:12
Speaker
And so, so yeah, just sort of making it available and setting aside time.
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:20
Speaker
And then the other thing that Megan, my wife's name is Meg, Megan, Meg.
00:19:24
Speaker
The other thing we say all the time is just relax.
00:19:28
Speaker
You might have a kid that may not learn to read until the, my oldest boy, he just reading was not his strongest suit and he wasn't doing it.
00:19:36
Speaker
And then as soon as he hit seven, it clicked.
00:19:40
Speaker
And by 10, he had read the Iliad and the Odyssey.
00:19:44
Speaker
He plowed through the Harry Potter series in less than two weeks and he remembers details.
00:19:50
Speaker
So if we had panicked or been in a public school mindset and he's seven, not reading very well, he would have been in resource.
00:19:57
Speaker
He would have been in these special classes.
00:19:59
Speaker
They would have worked with him and held him back.
00:20:02
Speaker
And instead of doing that, you just relax, step back, breathe.
00:20:07
Speaker
Everybody goes through and learns things on a different level and on a different speed and it'll click.
00:20:12
Speaker
And then if you've got a kid that you just can't get him to sit still, good.
00:20:17
Speaker
That kid is going to change the world.
00:20:19
Speaker
So let that child get up and dance while they learn, which you can't do in
Balancing Creativity and Systems in Business
00:20:24
Speaker
public school.
00:20:24
Speaker
You just can't do that.
00:20:26
Speaker
And so we've got a couple of kids that, Briggy, he's 10.
00:20:31
Speaker
And when he's learning, if he can't figure something out, we have him go run.
00:20:35
Speaker
And he runs and comes back and figures it out.
00:20:37
Speaker
It's just people have different ways of learning.
00:20:39
Speaker
So just relax.
00:20:40
Speaker
You got it.
00:20:41
Speaker
You can do this.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, so much of the school system is organized around the logistics of just controlling that many kids.
00:20:54
Speaker
And yeah, it can't be optimizing for educational outcomes because it has to be optimizing for just order, just basic, like, you know, making sure nothing's on fire and nobody's getting hurt, which is a challenge at that scale.
00:21:12
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:21:13
Speaker
Yeah, there's a really good, there's a gentleman, Sir Ken Price or something like that.
00:21:18
Speaker
He's an English guy that talks about it.
00:21:19
Speaker
There's a really good YouTube video on it about how public school was modeled after the Prussian military school.
00:21:25
Speaker
And it was designed to make children into soldiers and automatons that follow what they're told to do.
00:21:32
Speaker
And it just zaps creativity.
00:21:34
Speaker
So you're right.
00:21:35
Speaker
You're 100% right.
00:21:36
Speaker
The logistics, they just take away all chance to do what needs to be done in education.
00:21:41
Speaker
So that's been our journey.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:45
Speaker
What's your wife's MBTI, if you don't mind my asking?
00:21:48
Speaker
MBTI?
00:21:49
Speaker
Myers-Briggs.
00:21:51
Speaker
Oh, she is actually, I believe she is an ENFJ.
00:21:56
Speaker
So we're kind of similar, but she's a little more, I always tease her, she's a little more cold-hearted than me.
00:22:06
Speaker
The reason I ask is because in my experience,
00:22:10
Speaker
life as an ENFP and as sort of a head in the clouds kind of person, my wife has always been sort of my XO, managing the schedule, making sure that things happen on time.
00:22:23
Speaker
And I wonder if that's been the case for you of sort of shoring up each other's weak points that way.
00:22:32
Speaker
Very much so.
00:22:33
Speaker
Very much so.
00:22:34
Speaker
So if you go follow her, she's got this thing.
00:22:37
Speaker
This has been one of the most amazing things
00:22:40
Speaker
not only for our homeschool, but just for our family, because the logistics of seven children, so nine people in a household are mind boggling.
00:22:50
Speaker
And so she came up with what we've been doing, we call family meeting.
00:22:53
Speaker
And then she came up with a calendar and we follow what we call the FEMSIS, which is financial, emotional, mental, physical, social, and spiritual.
00:23:01
Speaker
And we go through our FEMSIS, and that's kind of a joke, but she has formalized this into a family meeting calendar where you plan out your week,
00:23:08
Speaker
You review how you did on your financial life, your emotional life, your mental life, each child, and you allow them to speak up.
00:23:15
Speaker
And so she, you know, when we talk about systems, you know, I was talking about that earlier about finding people that can create systems around us.
00:23:22
Speaker
She very much is that yin to my yang, as far as my creativity versus her system oriented stuff.
00:23:29
Speaker
So yes, surround yourself with people that feel your weaknesses.
00:23:33
Speaker
Cause the other thing that we found that what happened in public school,
00:23:36
Speaker
And in very many areas is people find your weaknesses and then make you work only on your weaknesses.
00:23:40
Speaker
Whereas if you could find a discipline that allows you to amplify your strengths, then your weaknesses get filled in.
00:23:46
Speaker
And so rather than me trying to force myself to become a systems person, surround myself with people that can create systems for me that I can follow, but then allow my creativity to flourish.
00:23:59
Speaker
Well, then that system person feels fulfilled because they're creating systems.
00:24:03
Speaker
I'm creative.
00:24:03
Speaker
I'm fulfilled because I get to create and we go.
00:24:06
Speaker
And that's, yes, that has very much been my, my, um, experience just like you.
00:24:12
Speaker
And having a gift for bringing people together in itself that allows for that alchemy to take place.
00:24:21
Speaker
And so person like me, you know, my, my, my whole, um, business right now is essentially bringing people together and helping them to make connections and coordinating that kind of, uh, alchemy.
00:24:35
Speaker
It's been amazing how much people crave that.
00:24:41
Speaker
There are things that when something comes naturally to you and it seems easy, I think people tend to undervalue their strengths because they don't realize how much they can offer other people.
00:24:56
Speaker
They don't realize how challenging the thing that comes naturally to them can be to other people.
00:25:02
Speaker
They may be
00:25:04
Speaker
They maybe hold back.
00:25:05
Speaker
They think it's obvious or something.
00:25:06
Speaker
It's not obvious.
00:25:08
Speaker
And so, yeah, you can provide a ton of value that way.
00:25:14
Speaker
I completely agree 100% with you.
00:25:17
Speaker
And if people would focus on their strengths and focus like totally on their strengths and work a little bit on their weaknesses, it just makes everybody around them better.
00:25:28
Speaker
I completely agree with you.
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:31
Speaker
So I want to move to or sort of back to the business side of this.
00:25:36
Speaker
We have a lot of guys in our group who they own their job, but they haven't made the jump to owning a business.
00:25:41
Speaker
You know, they're independent in the sense that nobody signs their checks.
00:25:47
Speaker
But now they're in this place.
00:25:49
Speaker
They want to do some empire building.
00:25:51
Speaker
So tell me about how that transition was for you, how you went from just sort of making money to your family to managing an enterprise.
00:26:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:01
Speaker
Um, you know, it, it, it, it's going to come differently.
00:26:05
Speaker
In my experience, it's going to come differently to different people.
00:26:09
Speaker
Um, again, understanding yourself and how it works.
00:26:12
Speaker
Um, but it all comes from a mindset of, am I going to allow my outside control to control my life or am I going to control it?
00:26:19
Speaker
And it really comes from a little bit of a rebellious streak inside of me that wants to tell the world, you know, go pound Sam, because I can do more than you think I can.
00:26:31
Speaker
And so it's building up a sense of confidence in yourself and in your abilities, even when it's sometimes unfounded.
00:26:39
Speaker
You know, before I left on my mission, it was kind of a joke because I was not good with money.
00:26:46
Speaker
And I came back and when I initially told my parents I was gonna go into to get my loan officer, or sorry, my mortgage license, they're always supportive of me, but they just kind of giggled like, really, you know?
00:26:59
Speaker
But it was more of that.
00:27:01
Speaker
I can show people I can do something.
00:27:03
Speaker
And so it's really, it's a mindset.
00:27:06
Speaker
It's a determination to have self, have control over yourself, to have your own autonomy, to be able to do what you need and can do.
00:27:15
Speaker
And ultimately it's because the end, I'm a top-down thinker.
00:27:20
Speaker
So I think of the big picture first before our details overwhelm me.
00:27:24
Speaker
And the end of what I want to do is I want to get to the point in my life where
00:27:28
Speaker
what I do to provide for my family also blesses the lives of other people.
00:27:34
Speaker
That's how I found my fulfillment.
00:27:35
Speaker
And now I'm able to do that.
00:27:37
Speaker
I was able to set up my, I've always wanted to have a nonprofit.
00:27:40
Speaker
So I was finally able two years ago, set up my 501c3.
00:27:44
Speaker
And part of my, you know, when we get into talking about our renewable energy stuff, part of that, everything I do in there goes into the 501c3 to bless other people's lives.
Mindset and Risk-Taking in Entrepreneurship
00:27:53
Speaker
And so it's really just,
00:27:55
Speaker
Okay, I created a stable base.
00:27:57
Speaker
So you do have to create a stable base.
00:27:59
Speaker
You can't be floating on everything and create a machine that does work.
00:28:03
Speaker
But then it's just like I talked before, that fine line between order and chaos.
00:28:07
Speaker
Okay, I've got a machine going and it's working well.
00:28:11
Speaker
Now it's time to put a little chaos in and go a little bit further and stretch myself.
00:28:15
Speaker
And that's progress.
00:28:16
Speaker
That's how you make yourself a better person.
00:28:19
Speaker
And so if you've got something
00:28:21
Speaker
Let's say you've got a job that you set up.
00:28:23
Speaker
You're a graphics designer.
00:28:24
Speaker
I don't know.
00:28:25
Speaker
I'm just picking anything.
00:28:26
Speaker
And you've got jobs coming in.
00:28:27
Speaker
You've got a system.
00:28:28
Speaker
You've got things going.
00:28:28
Speaker
Okay, what's your true hobby?
00:28:29
Speaker
What's your true love?
00:28:31
Speaker
Well, I truly love motorcycles.
00:28:34
Speaker
I don't know.
00:28:34
Speaker
Whatever it is, expand, grow, step out into that chaos, step that one foot into darkness, one foot into where you still have your base, and then progress and keep going and keep going.
00:28:47
Speaker
I think I told you a little earlier, I'm a little bit of a language nerd and
00:28:52
Speaker
Hebrew has a phrase that I've kind of co-opted and it says, and that's what God said to Abraham.
00:29:00
Speaker
And it's hard to explain exactly what it means, but it means go, go you.
00:29:05
Speaker
And it really means get up and go.
00:29:07
Speaker
Just get going.
00:29:08
Speaker
Quit, quit, quit hesitating.
00:29:11
Speaker
Quit, you know, there are details you have to do.
00:29:14
Speaker
Don't do something stupid.
00:29:15
Speaker
Don't take a financial risk that doesn't have a commensurate reward.
00:29:20
Speaker
But get up and go.
00:29:23
Speaker
And don't be afraid that, you know, failure, people, failure.
00:29:27
Speaker
I've found that failure does paralyze.
00:29:29
Speaker
But what really holds people back is they're deathly afraid of success.
00:29:34
Speaker
They're looking success in the face and saying, I don't know if I deserve it.
00:29:37
Speaker
I don't know if I really should be able to, you know, I remember the first year I made $100,000.
00:29:41
Speaker
And I literally, I remember it was $134,000 that I made.
00:29:46
Speaker
And I sat back and I looked at my tax return.
00:29:48
Speaker
I looked at my receipts and I thought, did I deserve this?
00:29:51
Speaker
That was what was holding me back was my fear of success.
00:29:56
Speaker
Like I wasn't a deserving person in this.
00:29:58
Speaker
And I thought, well, screw that.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, I deserved it.
00:30:02
Speaker
You know, I worked hard and I'm going to bless other people's lives.
00:30:05
Speaker
And from that day forward, I've just kind of kept going.
00:30:07
Speaker
So don't be afraid to take that step into chaos because that's where you're going to progress.
00:30:11
Speaker
Yeah, and so as someone like me who is not a systems person, a big part of the fear of scaling up for me, a big part of my anxiety about how big things can get is will I be able to handle them administratively?
00:30:33
Speaker
Will I be able to keep all the plates spinning?
00:30:35
Speaker
Because a person like you, a person like me, we're kind of like...
00:30:41
Speaker
a scalpel or a laser.
00:30:44
Speaker
And it's like, I can attack one thing really hard at a time.
00:30:47
Speaker
And, you know, things tend to sort of crumble around me as I forget that they're there.
00:30:54
Speaker
But I also, I look at sort of your resume and you've had lots of concurrent hustles, lots of different things going on at once.
00:31:05
Speaker
How did you keep the plates spinning?
00:31:06
Speaker
How did you manage that?
00:31:10
Speaker
Well, first of all, just like you, you and I probably in now today's day and age would be labeled ADHD, autistic, difficult, whatever, because whether you like it or not, you have four, five plates spinning in your head and you can't stop them, right?
00:31:28
Speaker
There's no way.
00:31:29
Speaker
What I'm saying is not only don't stop them, add two more plates.
00:31:33
Speaker
You have a lot to bring this world, man.
00:31:35
Speaker
I heard you on Tom Woods podcast.
00:31:37
Speaker
And your idea is you have a lot to bring in this world and you are important and you need to get your message out there.
00:31:43
Speaker
Thanks.
00:31:44
Speaker
Because the things that fall don't need to be there.
00:31:46
Speaker
I, you know, I have my wife, my wife told me it took her 15 years to realize that when I come up with an, when I come home with an idea that, um, that I just need to vocalize my idea.
00:31:57
Speaker
It doesn't mean I'm going to do it.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:00
Speaker
And, and so, um, and my, and my buddies, some of my close, you know, high school friends, we're still really close now.
00:32:06
Speaker
They still
00:32:08
Speaker
They tease me because some of the ideas I've done, I feel like Kramer on Seinfeld when he has so many ideas of businesses, you know, and that's, they kind of tease me about it.
00:32:16
Speaker
But the ones that fall are the ones that weren't going to fulfill you anyway.
00:32:20
Speaker
So I'm not saying do it willy nilly.
00:32:23
Speaker
If that's the point that's coming across, then I haven't explained myself well enough.
00:32:28
Speaker
What I'm saying is if you have this idea and you know it can be fulfilling, you know it can bless your life and the life of other people,
00:32:36
Speaker
then you need to set up a system, whether it's software, whether it's a person, whether it's outsourcing to someone else to get those systems in place so that you have a track to run on and it's duplicatable.
00:32:47
Speaker
So for example, with my mortgage loans, I am not a, I'm a top-down thinker, details overwhelm me.
00:32:54
Speaker
But when you do a mortgage loan, they say that you have 72 different points of contact on one loan file when you add in underwriting, title, title assistance,
00:33:05
Speaker
insurance, blah, blah, blah, you know, the whole list of people.
00:33:07
Speaker
And so I quickly had to learn how to do details, but to lump them into smaller packages so they didn't overwhelm me and then create a system whereby they could easily be fulfilled.
00:33:18
Speaker
But then once you get that system down, move on to your creative tasks.
00:33:24
Speaker
So again, focus on your strengths to amplify your strengths.
00:33:29
Speaker
If you focus on your weaknesses, your weaknesses will be amplified.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah, no, the way that I made my corporate job bearable was I became the automation person.
Outsourcing and Automation for Business Efficiency
00:33:41
Speaker
Oh, really?
00:33:42
Speaker
Yeah, so I learned, I never thought of myself as like a math person or a code person, but I learned how to code to avoid routine.
00:33:51
Speaker
I learned how to code so that I could kill repetitive processes and never have to do them again.
00:33:57
Speaker
And that turned out to be,
00:34:01
Speaker
Very valuable.
00:34:02
Speaker
And like in the context of that corporate world, it was probably the most fulfilling task I could have done because basically I was killing, I was killing the corporate job, like kind of one, one stroke at a time.
00:34:14
Speaker
Like, and, and, and, you know, what I've, what I've pivoted here too is, is a much bigger picture sort of attack on that whole idea, but you can see the same philosophy of like, people shouldn't have to live this way.
00:34:27
Speaker
People shouldn't have to do this.
00:34:29
Speaker
This should be done by robots because it's robot work.
00:34:32
Speaker
It's soulless, mindless work.
00:34:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:39
Speaker
There's a movie called Snowpiercer where it's this dystopian train that's this really heavy-handed class metaphor.
00:34:46
Speaker
But there's a scene toward the end where a component of the engine of the train no longer functions.
00:34:55
Speaker
And in order to keep the train running because they can't repair that part, they've got a little kid who can fit in that compartment.
00:35:02
Speaker
And his job is just to be that part.
00:35:05
Speaker
And it's one of the, it's just this hellish image that really stuck with me because it was exactly where I was at at my career when that movie came out.
00:35:13
Speaker
And yeah, so my mission then became, I'm going to find everybody who's a human component in a machine and I'm going to build the part that gets them out.
00:35:27
Speaker
Oh man, I love it.
00:35:29
Speaker
And so, you know, I still love,
00:35:34
Speaker
some of that skill set.
00:35:35
Speaker
And there's a part of me that wants to still chase that once this thing is less demanding on my time, if it's ever less demanding on my time, I don't know how it's going to expand.
00:35:46
Speaker
But yeah, the philosophy is always escape.
00:35:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:53
Speaker
And one thing I would suggest too, that took me a long time, and I've learned this over years, that took me a long time is that
00:36:00
Speaker
Don't be, and you have to get there gradually, but don't be afraid to pay for things that automate.
00:36:07
Speaker
So, so for a long, long time, I processed my own loans because paying a processor, you typically pay a processor $350 a file.
00:36:14
Speaker
And it took me a long, long time to get to the point where I would pay that processor.
00:36:18
Speaker
And once I started paying the processor to do that, then all of a sudden I realized it opened up to be creative in my marketing process.
00:36:26
Speaker
And then I created more income because I set that system in place with a person who was a detailed oriented systems person.
00:36:37
Speaker
And that allowed me to go out and expand.
00:36:39
Speaker
So get to the point where you can pay for or set that automation aside.
00:36:47
Speaker
and get to where you can focus on your strengths as fast as you can.
00:36:49
Speaker
And if I would have done that sooner, I wouldn't have been better off.
00:36:52
Speaker
That's what I've learned too.
00:36:53
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:36:54
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:36:54
Speaker
There's, there's a piece of this business right now.
00:36:56
Speaker
That's kind of manual.
00:36:57
Speaker
There's lots of sort of sending boilerplate emails and updating spreadsheets and, you know, just sort of customer relationship management, just tracking the, the, uh, the gears of the course.
00:37:10
Speaker
And, uh,
00:37:11
Speaker
I'm already at that point where I'm like, I need to outsource some of this because I'm finding how much more valuable the stuff I love to do is.
00:37:25
Speaker
Because that's what people are paying for.
00:37:26
Speaker
They're not paying for...
00:37:28
Speaker
me to manage a spreadsheet that they're paying for like there's a particular value proposition that they want um and that i enjoy providing and so like stop being an idiot i'm talking to myself right now i'm actually sort of thinking this through right as we're as we're talking um yeah it could be a good therapy session yeah
00:37:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good therapy session for entrepreneurs.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:37:51
Speaker
But I guess, let me just say this again, let me say this again to you, what the value proposition they're paying for is you, you're the entrepreneur.
00:37:59
Speaker
They want you, not your systems.
00:38:00
Speaker
They want your creativity.
00:38:02
Speaker
So give that to them.
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
00:38:07
Speaker
In that vein,
00:38:09
Speaker
When I was working the corporate job, I was sort of interested in entrepreneurship, but I've always been, I kind of understood myself to be more of like a business-minded, leadership-minded type of person.
00:38:22
Speaker
And it seemed like the corporate sphere was the place where that made money.
00:38:27
Speaker
I'm not particularly technical.
00:38:28
Speaker
And I was always waiting for like,
00:38:31
Speaker
a longer lasting light bulb, you know, some invention to pop into my head, some product that would, that would disrupt a market.
00:38:38
Speaker
And then I would go, you know, sell that thing.
00:38:41
Speaker
Like me, you're a finance guy.
00:38:44
Speaker
You're, you're a, a, a people-minded ideas, minded person, but what you sell right now is this innovative engineering product.
00:38:55
Speaker
So can you maybe tell me how you found that idea and how that got started?
00:39:00
Speaker
Yeah, so it is something that, again, my family and friends kind of tease me about because when it comes to swinging a hammer or building something, I'm about the most useless.
00:39:13
Speaker
I always tease my friends that can build stuff and they're kind of, you know, they'll once in a while complain like, I have to build this or do that.
00:39:19
Speaker
And I always tease them like, so you haven't learned to be incompetent like me, I see.
00:39:24
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:26
Speaker
But so I'm not that.
00:39:28
Speaker
But I can dream and I can envision better than most.
00:39:33
Speaker
And so it was about 10 years ago, as I was kind of branching out with some close friends of mine, they brought to me a project where they had a small wind turbine that had been patented and used for a certain number of years.
Innovations in Renewable Energy
00:39:45
Speaker
And it was very efficient and it was very small.
00:39:48
Speaker
And they brought the project and said, hey, let's get some funding for this because I was a financial guy.
00:39:52
Speaker
And so as I did, all of the partners basically just kind of went away because they couldn't
00:39:58
Speaker
They didn't want to hack it as a bootstrapping entrepreneur.
00:40:01
Speaker
And so the project was left to me.
00:40:04
Speaker
And then we, so with another group I found, I was buying gold and silver from a guy and found out he was a pretty good engineer.
00:40:13
Speaker
And we together took that old design and made it even better and then got a patent on it.
00:40:18
Speaker
So I technically am an inventor.
00:40:20
Speaker
I'm listed as the inventor of the dynamic wind turbine, dynamic with a Q.
00:40:27
Speaker
And so I am the inventor of that if you look up the patent.
00:40:30
Speaker
But I am not an engineer, but again, I can envision.
00:40:34
Speaker
So my strength is the vision.
00:40:37
Speaker
So then I surrounded myself with good, smart engineering people that come up with that.
00:40:42
Speaker
So again, it's really just about focusing on your strengths.
00:40:45
Speaker
And now I can talk the talk.
00:40:48
Speaker
I know the numbers.
00:40:49
Speaker
I didn't know much about electrical engineering.
00:40:51
Speaker
I didn't know much about it.
00:40:53
Speaker
So I delved into it, learned it, and decided that I needed to be able to talk enough
00:40:56
Speaker
to where when you get to a certain point in conversation, I say, you know, that's a better question for my chief technical officer, Braden, or, you know, this, you, you, you float that on over to them when it gets to a certain point, but I can be able to talk that talk.
00:41:09
Speaker
So there is a level of expertise you have to gain, but I don't have the mind for engineering.
00:41:15
Speaker
I just, I can envision it.
00:41:16
Speaker
There are a couple of products I have in my head right now.
00:41:19
Speaker
I was just talking with my partner yesterday about it.
00:41:23
Speaker
There are a couple of products in my head that two people have said,
00:41:26
Speaker
That's impossible, even though I know in my head it's possible.
00:41:30
Speaker
And I'm not going to let that die.
00:41:33
Speaker
If I hear that's impossible, but I know there's some way we can do it, I know we can get it done.
00:41:39
Speaker
And it's not impossible.
00:41:40
Speaker
It's impossible according to the way that they see it.
00:41:42
Speaker
And they're an engineer and they're a systems person.
00:41:45
Speaker
It's impossible in their system brain, but I'm a creative person and I'll come up with a way that it is.
00:41:49
Speaker
And so, again, focus on your strengths because as you do, they'll be amplified.
00:41:54
Speaker
And that's how I got into it.
00:41:56
Speaker
And so now we have one of the most efficient small wind turbines on the market.
00:42:02
Speaker
And it's amazing.
00:42:03
Speaker
And sometimes a systems-oriented person, like we were talking about with the ability to sort of grind and make money without a sort of broader vision, it's about the ability to succeed within the context and framework of order.
00:42:24
Speaker
And it is another person's job to look outside of that order to, to, to, to explore what's in the chaos.
00:42:34
Speaker
And so like, you know, like you said, anybody can be an entrepreneur, you know, whatever temperament you have, but I think someone with our mindset, the task is to,
00:42:49
Speaker
understand why that system is there and what it's intended to do, but then to look outside of it and see what's possible and prospect and explore.
00:42:59
Speaker
And so the more that you're, the more that you're like the way that you vetted this idea in the first place is,
00:43:09
Speaker
and I've done this, you know, a million times just without even thinking about it, but the way a person like you or me vets a technical idea is we just vet the people who vet the idea.
00:43:18
Speaker
Like you just find somebody you trust and that's your, your stepping stone.
00:43:23
Speaker
It's entirely a social exploration.
00:43:27
Speaker
And then, you know, and then once you've, once, you know, like, okay, this thing works and now I have to sell it, then you learn what you need to learn to, to make the pitch.
00:43:34
Speaker
But yeah,
00:43:36
Speaker
but yeah, that, that, that concept of social exploration is really interesting to me.
00:43:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:41
Speaker
That's, that's interesting.
00:43:41
Speaker
I've never heard it worded that way.
00:43:43
Speaker
I like that.
00:43:43
Speaker
You're right.
00:43:44
Speaker
I, I, you and I have got to push the boundaries, but then we've got to have people that can do the, do, I don't want to say dirty work.
00:43:54
Speaker
That's not the correct terminology, but it's, they've got to do the, you know, I can, I can dream all day long and say this, but if it's against the, the
00:44:02
Speaker
physical properties of nature, you know, then you can't do it.
00:44:05
Speaker
Like, yeah, you have to know people you're going to go find things out in the ether and you're going to have, you're going to have no idea independently whether they're good or not.
00:44:15
Speaker
And you have to, you have to be able to bring them back into the system of order and have the order people look at it.
00:44:21
Speaker
And, and, and they'll say, you know, this can be incorporated into the system or no, it can't.
00:44:25
Speaker
And you have to decide, uh,
00:44:29
Speaker
do I believe you that it can't or can, you know, and then, you know, that's, that's kind of your intellectual task.
00:44:36
Speaker
That's right.
00:44:37
Speaker
That's exactly right.
00:44:38
Speaker
And that's what I've done with this company.
00:44:40
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about what's different about this technology.
00:44:45
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:44:46
Speaker
So what, what it's done is, is wind and solar are awesome sources of energy that can really be, but, but I think they've been mishandled.
00:44:56
Speaker
They've tried to scale them up too high and too fast, and they've tried to use them in applications like on-demand massive power, which they can't do.
00:45:03
Speaker
They're not made to do that.
00:45:05
Speaker
And so the wind, specifically for me, was interesting because those big old wind turbines are using the same ideas and technologies, albeit refined, but they've been using it since the 1600s in Holland, where they drained the Netherlands out of, got all the water out of there using wind, you know?
00:45:25
Speaker
And they really haven't tried to upgrade, you know, they've made different materials.
00:45:28
Speaker
They've used some design, but they haven't really thought, what are the major problems?
00:45:33
Speaker
And some of the major problems with wind power is that they have to get too much wind in order to start producing power.
00:45:43
Speaker
Then if you get too much wind, they'll break and they explode.
00:45:46
Speaker
There's some great, on my website, I put a video of a
00:45:50
Speaker
of exploding wind turbines because the blades have to flex in a 50 mile an hour wind.
Decentralization vs Centralization in Energy Solutions
00:45:56
Speaker
And if they don't put a brake on them and slow them down, they'll bend and then clip the tower and explode.
00:46:00
Speaker
And it's kind of amazing.
00:46:02
Speaker
And so they have some of these major problems and nobody thought maybe we shouldn't have scaled up so high.
00:46:07
Speaker
Maybe we should keep wind smaller, decentralized smaller groups like households or small businesses off the grid, keep the fossil fuels for the big manufacturing plants, the hospitals, the things that need
00:46:19
Speaker
power when you need power, which is what fossil fuels so brilliantly do, and then take the wind and do that.
00:46:26
Speaker
So what we did is we took the old ideas that hadn't adapted and fixed as many of the problems as we could.
00:46:33
Speaker
We cannot fix the problem of creating wind because it would create power.
00:46:37
Speaker
It would take power to create the wind to create the power.
00:46:39
Speaker
So we can't solve that one.
00:46:41
Speaker
But what we can do is become as efficient as possible with the wind that we have
00:46:47
Speaker
in order to solve the problems that wind has.
00:46:51
Speaker
And so that's where we've innovated.
00:46:53
Speaker
And that's why we were able to get a full patent on it because we took existing principles of lift, of creating a vortex inside of a scoop and then having it turn a small wind turbine so that our cut-in speed, which is the speed defined at which you have producible power is less than half
00:47:14
Speaker
of what a traditional wind turbine is.
00:47:16
Speaker
So we're at like under four miles an hour for a cut in speed.
00:47:19
Speaker
And then on the other end of it, because we're not, we don't have propellers and we're, our machine is made of steel and it kind of self-regulates.
00:47:27
Speaker
We can, it's engineered to be able to handle 150 mile an hour winds.
00:47:30
Speaker
So if we can put our wind on, we're right now, we're working in the Virgin islands and in Puerto Rico so that when the hurricanes come in and wipe out their power, we, our little wind turbine is made to handle that and continue to produce power throughout it.
00:47:43
Speaker
So we're just trying to,
00:47:44
Speaker
Really part of an entrepreneurial idea is what is the problem that the world has?
00:47:49
Speaker
What is that problem?
00:47:50
Speaker
And how can I solve that in a cost-effective, amazing way?
00:47:54
Speaker
And that's what we did is we tried to take the old technology, fix it, and then see the power problems that people have and adapt our technology to
00:48:02
Speaker
Yeah, and like not to own the libs here, but I think that there's an ideological component to this.
00:48:10
Speaker
And I want to talk about kind of how you're marketing this differently in a little bit.
00:48:15
Speaker
But...
00:48:16
Speaker
ideologically, their framework for how they want to understand almost everything is in terms of enormous scale.
00:48:25
Speaker
And it's global.
00:48:27
Speaker
We want to hook everything up to this hyper-efficient, universal, centralized grid.
00:48:33
Speaker
We want to make centralized economic decisions.
00:48:35
Speaker
You know what I'm saying?
00:48:36
Speaker
That's almost the divide.
00:48:40
Speaker
The political divide now is it's not so much about exactly economics.
00:48:44
Speaker
It's not so much about exactly culture.
00:48:46
Speaker
It's almost about centralization versus decentralization.
00:48:50
Speaker
And so I wonder if the idea of making people energy independent
00:48:58
Speaker
just would not have occurred to people within that system.
00:49:03
Speaker
And so maybe it took somebody with a little bit of a different ideological persuasion to spot this idea.
00:49:11
Speaker
I definitely believe my libertarian streak that was ingrained into me from when I was a kid from my father.
00:49:20
Speaker
My father was just a brilliant independent libertarian thinking mind.
00:49:25
Speaker
And it definitely dawned on me that, and what you're saying is exactly correct.
00:49:31
Speaker
They tried to take solar and make it into this gigantic behemoth and do what they did with the other power.
00:49:39
Speaker
And it just makes no sense to do so.
00:49:42
Speaker
There's a story that when Tesla was coming up with his, you know, he and Edison were fighting about ACDC versus just DC.
00:49:49
Speaker
And Tesla had come up with a way
00:49:51
Speaker
to put a little box on people's houses and they can have power free for the rest of their lives.
00:49:57
Speaker
And he had come up with this way to decentralize, just like you're talking about, decentralized power so that people were independent.
00:50:03
Speaker
And he brought it, he needed funding for it.
00:50:05
Speaker
And he went to JP Morgan and Morgan looked at it, loved it.
00:50:08
Speaker
And the urban legend, but maybe it's real, I've read it several times, is that Morgan said, where's the meter?
00:50:17
Speaker
And Tesla said, what are you talking about?
00:50:19
Speaker
He said, well, can you put a meter on it to build them?
00:50:20
Speaker
And he said, no, this is to give it.
00:50:21
Speaker
He said, sorry.
00:50:22
Speaker
So he went to Edison.
00:50:23
Speaker
Edison put a meter on it.
00:50:24
Speaker
And that's why we pay for power.
00:50:26
Speaker
And so what we're trying to do is that Tesla idea, Nikola Tesla, not Tesla, even though I drive a Tesla, I love Tesla, but Nikola Tesla, that idea of decentralizing from the grid, realizing that the larger scale stuff
00:50:43
Speaker
The renewables right now are not made for those.
00:50:46
Speaker
And I don't think they ever were, but solar and wind can power a house.
00:50:52
Speaker
And if you don't have either one of those at a time, then we've also branched out into fossil fuel generators that can run for a little bit.
00:50:59
Speaker
And it brings that independence that I truly believe that every human needs and craves, even though they run into collectivization so many times just out of fear.
00:51:11
Speaker
And they're afraid to be out on their own.
00:51:13
Speaker
Again, it's that step in the chaos.
00:51:15
Speaker
I think there's so many people that are afraid of chaos.
00:51:17
Speaker
They don't realize that that's where progress comes.
00:51:20
Speaker
And so ideologically, it is.
00:51:22
Speaker
It's decentralized from the grid on your home or small business.
00:51:27
Speaker
And even though we have large projects, and we have huge projects going in Africa and Virgin Islands and West Virginia, a couple of these other places that are large and handle that.
00:51:38
Speaker
We do focus a lot of our stuff on just decentralizing.
00:51:41
Speaker
Energy independence is a mantra of ours.
00:51:43
Speaker
That's one of the three things that we offer to our clients.
00:51:45
Speaker
Lower your power bills.
00:51:47
Speaker
Decentralize from the grid so that you have energy reliability and energy independence.
00:51:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:56
Speaker
Tell me a little bit about how you're marketing this product differently as you approach.
00:52:02
Speaker
I'm sure your customers, some of them are prepper-minded or homestead-minded.
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:52:09
Speaker
How does your branding or your marketing change as you approach those people versus sort of your standard Green New Deal type of market?
00:52:19
Speaker
Yeah, so there is the, and that's a great question.
00:52:21
Speaker
So the preppers, it's pretty easy.
00:52:24
Speaker
Do you want energy reliability and do you want to be off the grid?
00:52:26
Speaker
And you explain it to them.
00:52:28
Speaker
They already have the idea.
00:52:29
Speaker
They just know how to do it and they don't know if it's possible.
00:52:31
Speaker
And then once you show them how it can be possible, and on the second hand, part of it is,
00:52:39
Speaker
how to explain this, the greed of chasing after a giant solar project that is a $1.5 billion project versus I'm going to sell a hundred homeowners a package that gets them off the grid.
00:52:56
Speaker
There are certain people that don't see the value in that lower stuff.
00:52:59
Speaker
And so I'll take it.
00:53:01
Speaker
I'll take it because like we talked about earlier, I'm fulfilled when people
00:53:07
Speaker
really like my stuff because it really blesses their lives.
00:53:10
Speaker
And because I do it, they're willing to pay me so that I can provide for my family and other people.
00:53:14
Speaker
So I see the value in the smaller stuff in a quantity.
00:53:18
Speaker
And that's where I saw my value.
00:53:19
Speaker
So we have a distributor model.
00:53:21
Speaker
So we went out and signed up some distributors and people and then we teach them to go sell.
00:53:27
Speaker
And then they market in different ways.
00:53:29
Speaker
We also do, I mean, we're on Twitter, Insta and Facebook, of course, you know, everybody's on that.
00:53:35
Speaker
I'll be
00:53:36
Speaker
I'll be doing, we've got a YouTube channel.
00:53:39
Speaker
I heard that you know that you've arrived in when someone attacks you.
00:53:45
Speaker
And so I had a, I did a video about my wind turbine and then I had this snooty English professor from across the pond do a video take down of my wind turbine and say this, that, and the other.
00:53:56
Speaker
And there's no way it can produce this.
00:53:58
Speaker
So I took a video of my wind turbine in the wind with a power meter on it and said, you said this is impossible.
00:54:05
Speaker
sent it to him and he never answered back, you know, but I took that as a compliment that somebody's seeing what I'm doing and disrupting and saying, Hey, we got to fight this.
00:54:15
Speaker
And I thought, well, good.
00:54:16
Speaker
I'm here.
00:54:17
Speaker
That means that that's an obstacle I need to go through.
00:54:19
Speaker
That's great.
00:54:20
Speaker
So our distributor model gets out there and gets it to, to people.
00:54:24
Speaker
And then social media is huge.
00:54:25
Speaker
And you just, if I put out something, um, you know, I'm going to blast this podcast out.
00:54:29
Speaker
And if I put it out there, I'll have a bunch of people call me about it.
00:54:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:32
Speaker
Um, so that, that's, that's how our model
00:54:35
Speaker
takes on the world as a part.
00:54:37
Speaker
And the other thing that we've tried really hard to do, and I think this has been the biggest fault of solar is solar has, is probably about, um, I would guess it's 80% more expensive than it should or needs to be right now.
00:54:51
Speaker
And the reason is, is because there are so many layers from the manufacturer of the solar panel to the end user of the solar panel.
00:55:00
Speaker
And everybody has to get paid
00:55:03
Speaker
And so we've tried to keep our distributor model to where we are only two layers away from at the most from the end user.
00:55:09
Speaker
And when we do that, we do that with our batteries.
00:55:12
Speaker
So we have whole home battery management systems.
00:55:15
Speaker
We have propane or liquid or natural gas generators.
00:55:20
Speaker
You know, some people need those.
00:55:22
Speaker
We are direct to the manufacturer.
00:55:25
Speaker
And then that goes to our distributor who sells to the end user.
00:55:28
Speaker
Hmm.
00:55:28
Speaker
And solar, when you get a solar company that comes out and gives you a bid and you're like, holy crap, it's $50,000 from a house.
00:55:36
Speaker
That's because it went from the solar manufacturer to a wholesale group, to a wholesale retail group, to the retail group, to the distributor, to a salesman.
00:55:46
Speaker
And they've all made a 10% markup or a 12 or a 15% markup.
00:55:51
Speaker
And by your time you get to the end user, you've got an 80 to 90% markup.
00:55:54
Speaker
So cutting that out
00:55:57
Speaker
has made a huge difference to our clients.
00:56:00
Speaker
And then we make the same money as we would as if we sold it to someone else who then five people later got to the end user.
00:56:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:08
Speaker
I saw the video, one of the videos that you posted of this turban in action and...
Practical Benefits of Wind Turbines
00:56:15
Speaker
One of the challenges, so Tesla, and we're talking about Elon Musk Tesla, they talk a lot about how the problem they solved with their cars was the batteries are longer lasting and they're more powerful and all that stuff.
00:56:33
Speaker
And I think that's part of the answer.
00:56:36
Speaker
But I think a huge problem that Elon solved was aesthetics because electric cars up to that point were ugly and he made a beautiful one.
00:56:46
Speaker
And so I, one of the things that I noticed about this turbine and that I was thinking about was like, this is going to be in my yard.
00:56:53
Speaker
My wife has to sign up to have this in my yard.
00:56:56
Speaker
Right.
00:56:57
Speaker
And it's this kind of pretty sort of hypnotic little art piece that, um,
00:57:04
Speaker
So I wonder, was there a design decision on your part to make the thing more attractive?
00:57:12
Speaker
Or does it look exactly the way it looked sort of when you found it?
00:57:16
Speaker
I'll be honest with you.
00:57:20
Speaker
It was not.
00:57:21
Speaker
It was part of the reason we were attracted to it was the design because it is hypnotic.
00:57:27
Speaker
And it's so funny the words you just used.
00:57:30
Speaker
I just sent an email the other day to a group.
00:57:34
Speaker
and said, you don't know how many times we've had a husband come to us and say, I want to do this in our yard.
00:57:42
Speaker
And my wife said, oh, that kind of looks like art and signed off on it.
00:57:46
Speaker
It's so funny that you would use those words because we get that all the time.
00:57:50
Speaker
But I don't think it would be we designed it with art in mind.
00:57:54
Speaker
It fell to us that way.
00:57:56
Speaker
OK.
00:57:58
Speaker
Well, that's great.
00:57:59
Speaker
And we recognize that.
00:58:01
Speaker
But, but it wasn't, it wasn't a design piece.
00:58:03
Speaker
It does though.
00:58:04
Speaker
It looks like it's kind of, they call it a helical design.
00:58:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:07
Speaker
It's kind of like a helix, but it is when the wind's blowing constant, it's, it is, it's like, it's almost like a hypnotic.
00:58:13
Speaker
You just kind of fall asleep watching it.
00:58:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:17
Speaker
Uh, what kind of wind environment do you need to be energy independent with this turbine?
00:58:24
Speaker
Well, two things on that is how energy efficient is what we're powering.
00:58:29
Speaker
So if you have an old leaky home that uses older lighting technology and other things, then it's going to require more.
00:58:36
Speaker
So that's an obvious answer, right?
00:58:37
Speaker
So we always kind of do an energy consult and say, hey, look, if you replace your LED lighting into that, you know, you put your LED lighting in so you're not using as much power in this, that, and the other windows that make you not have to use your power.
00:58:49
Speaker
So all of that is a factor, but
00:58:52
Speaker
Given that fact, I'll give you just a few numbers.
00:58:56
Speaker
Our wind turbine starts producing power four miles an hour.
00:59:00
Speaker
It's not much, but it's, but it's producible.
00:59:02
Speaker
When you get up to nine, 10 miles an hour of wind for an hour, let's say it has that for an hour, then we produce roughly one and a half to two kilowatts of power.
00:59:14
Speaker
Now the average American home uses 24 to 30 kilowatt hours per day.
00:59:18
Speaker
So it's roughly one to one and a quarter kilowatt hours per hour.
00:59:21
Speaker
that an average American home consumes.
00:59:22
Speaker
And so when you look at your wind, if you can, we can just kind of do the math with the table and say, you know, based upon your wind, how much it would produce to help take you off the grid.
00:59:33
Speaker
And so we have some clients in Laramie, Wyoming, for example, and the wind blows there just constantly.
00:59:39
Speaker
And she sent us videos of 80 mile an hour wind gusts and the little thing just keeps spinning.
00:59:44
Speaker
You know, it's just, it's just so fun to see.
00:59:46
Speaker
But so she's, when she's got a, she's got a pretty constant, like 20 mile an hour wind.
00:59:51
Speaker
And we're, we're looking at three and a half to four kilowatts and that kind of speed.
00:59:54
Speaker
And if you do that 15 hours a day and you're getting three, let's say, let's just say three kilowatts, that's 45 kilowatt hours of power a day.
01:00:01
Speaker
That's way more than her home is going to need.
01:00:03
Speaker
So a wind environment like that is great.
01:00:06
Speaker
Now, Laramie is a, is an exception.
01:00:08
Speaker
So you just kind of have to look at where you are.
01:00:11
Speaker
You know, we're on the, our, our turbines only 13 feet tall.
01:00:16
Speaker
16 at the highest, you know, if you want to bump it up to put it up a little bit.
01:00:18
Speaker
So we're pretty low profile.
01:00:22
Speaker
And, you know, putting it in a non windy area is like putting solar in seaside Oregon.
01:00:28
Speaker
It's just not going to do anything because you don't have the wind to push it.
01:00:31
Speaker
So we don't always say that we don't always say that a wind turbine is going to work.
01:00:35
Speaker
But if you live in the mountains, for example, and you get the laterals off the side of the mountain, live at the mouth of the canyon,
01:00:43
Speaker
what people forget because solar only produces about six to eight hours a day.
01:00:48
Speaker
Right.
01:00:49
Speaker
And the wind can blow all night.
01:00:51
Speaker
And if it blows all night, then you put it in.
01:00:52
Speaker
And the next concept that I would tell you is part of the problem with renewables too, is that people up to this, up to the last few years have not been able to find a suitable reservoir for their power and they haven't had good enough batteries for it.
01:01:07
Speaker
So now we've, we've entered into that world of batteries and we've got the best
01:01:12
Speaker
whole home energy system that you can get in our minds for keeping the power so that if you go a day without wind, you have enough power to power your house.
01:01:22
Speaker
Or a lot of people don't know if you're net metered with your solar, if you bought your solar and it was to offset your bill, well, then if the power goes out, you can't put power back onto a grid that is down that will fry their grid.
01:01:36
Speaker
So they have a, they have a nice switch that automatically stops it from putting the power back on grid.
01:01:42
Speaker
So we sell batteries to solar people all the time because now they have backup for when the power goes out.
01:01:51
Speaker
And if you don't think that happens, go talk to people in Southern California, go talk to people in Texas that over the last year and a half have had rolling blackouts that, you know, those people in Texas that had the Texas freeze.
01:02:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:04
Speaker
Those were serious issues.
01:02:06
Speaker
So we've, that's a big issue with renewable.
01:02:08
Speaker
And so we've solved that with our, we call it a dynamic power pack.
01:02:13
Speaker
where we use the best battery tech you can.
01:02:16
Speaker
And again, we're direct to the manufacturer.
01:02:18
Speaker
We're only one layer away from the end user.
01:02:21
Speaker
Our costs are significantly better than our competition.
01:02:24
Speaker
And actually, so is our tech.
01:02:29
Speaker
And so that coupled with the renewables is how we help people become energy independent.
01:02:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:34
Speaker
And not to get too apocalyptic about it, but one of the things that I think about a lot is...
01:02:44
Speaker
There are a lot of preppers who their mindset is, I'm going to buy 100,000 rounds of 5.56.
01:02:52
Speaker
And that's my prep, right?
01:02:56
Speaker
And it's like, there's a huge array, a huge spectrum of outcomes that are way more likely than the Mad Max scenario in which your 100,000 rounds is not going to help you.
01:03:10
Speaker
And so I look a lot, I look hard for intermediate options that make varying degrees of decline or collapse more livable.
01:03:22
Speaker
And so, you know, is it likely that like a Chinese EMP is going to destroy the global power grid and you're going to have to produce power for yourself all the time?
01:03:33
Speaker
Maybe not.
01:03:35
Speaker
Is it likely that just sort of as things socially and politically get worse, we may have problems with regular power where like the beef in your freezer is going to go bad?
01:03:47
Speaker
That seems a lot more likely.
01:03:48
Speaker
And so these intermediate solutions...
01:03:52
Speaker
that can be valuable to you across a broader domain of possibilities.
01:03:58
Speaker
That's interesting to me.
01:04:00
Speaker
And this seems like the kind of thing that like, you know, it's useful to me, even if nothing goes wrong, but as things start to go wrong, or it becomes more useful.
01:04:10
Speaker
And those seem like really good investments at the present time.
01:04:14
Speaker
I completely agree.
01:04:15
Speaker
Let me give you two real world examples that have hit home to me.
01:04:18
Speaker
One is far away.
01:04:19
Speaker
One is right, right.
01:04:20
Speaker
One on one of our clients.
01:04:22
Speaker
first one jump on, I think it was Reuters, Germany and a couple of those countries in Europe, powerhouses, first world, very rich countries made this premature jump to renewables and set these unrealistic goals to renewables that are just ridiculous for their big stuff, not for their little people to decentralize, but for the big stuff.
01:04:46
Speaker
Sure.
01:04:47
Speaker
And right now, if you look at the article on Reuters that I read yesterday morning, I think it was Reuters, it may not be Reuters, but if you look it up, Germany is buying as much coal from Russia as they can because they don't have the power to not allow old people in their country to freeze to death this winter.
01:05:03
Speaker
And so when you think that, I'm not laughing at that situation, I'm laughing at people that think that that can't come to America.
01:05:10
Speaker
That's crazy because we've got collectivist people running our country and we have for
01:05:16
Speaker
Well, since Woodrow Wilson.
01:05:18
Speaker
And so for over a hundred years, we've had people that have had the socialist collectivist mindset to lump people into groups and they just don't see individuals and individual freedom and sovereignty as anything important.
01:05:31
Speaker
And they'll take that away.
01:05:32
Speaker
And energy independence is one way that they can take that away.
01:05:35
Speaker
And so that's a big thing.
01:05:37
Speaker
Now, you just literally said, beef in the freezer.
01:05:41
Speaker
Right now, we just bid out for a client of ours
01:05:45
Speaker
who lost $10,000 of elk, meat, and beef in his freezers because of a home, a cabin he had where they just shut the power for no reason.
01:05:56
Speaker
And he lost $10,000 of meat.
01:05:58
Speaker
Wow.
01:06:00
Speaker
He's sick of that.
01:06:01
Speaker
So now he's building a battery system we're building for his home.
01:06:04
Speaker
So that will never happen again.
01:06:06
Speaker
And we'll just put a little bit of solar on it.
01:06:07
Speaker
And we can actually tell it to say, hey, look, if the power goes out, shut down the air conditioning, shut down everything, but leave the freezer on.
01:06:14
Speaker
And leave this on and leave this on.
01:06:16
Speaker
And then they'll never have that happening again.
01:06:19
Speaker
And so I agree with you.
01:06:20
Speaker
The Mad Max scenario to me, the Mad Max scenario is not on my radar.
01:06:25
Speaker
But when you see rolling blackouts in Southern California and you have old people that are on oxygen and now they don't have power.
01:06:31
Speaker
Right.
01:06:32
Speaker
Or you see the blackouts in Texas because of one little thing and people have a $17,000 power bill and all they needed was a 20 kilowatt battery system to get them through that demand charge.
01:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, people are waking up.
01:06:44
Speaker
I mean, it's hitting people real fast.
Decentralized Technology and Smart Homes
01:06:47
Speaker
And that's why we found that problem.
01:06:50
Speaker
And entrepreneurially, we're solving that problem.
01:06:53
Speaker
So that's, I'm right on track with you of the 556.
01:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's great.
01:07:00
Speaker
I mean, of course, I lost all my guns in a boating accident.
01:07:03
Speaker
But the 556 stuff is important.
01:07:08
Speaker
But you know what?
01:07:09
Speaker
So I was going to say this.
01:07:10
Speaker
This may be a little bit of a tangent.
01:07:11
Speaker
But I read a report of a guy that was in
01:07:14
Speaker
I think it was Bosnia back in the early 90s when they had that civil war and they were without utilities for two years.
01:07:20
Speaker
And he wrote a report of what were the most valuable commodities.
01:07:23
Speaker
And it had nothing to do with ammo, had nothing to do.
01:07:26
Speaker
It was lighters so that they could build a fire because they were cold.
01:07:31
Speaker
Of course, in Europe, everybody smokes and drinks.
01:07:33
Speaker
So they had cigarettes and tobacco and alcohol.
01:07:37
Speaker
But then it was just the little things like lighters and even hygiene products like tampons and deodorant, things like that.
01:07:44
Speaker
He said, if you had a bunch of lighters, you would have been a millionaire.
01:07:48
Speaker
Excuse me.
01:07:48
Speaker
So yeah, it's, it's not the things you expect.
01:07:50
Speaker
It's the things you don't think about that will get you.
01:07:52
Speaker
And that's why we're trying to make energy independence on afterthought.
01:07:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:56
Speaker
Right.
01:07:56
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:07:58
Speaker
And I mean, as things decline, yeah, there's so much, there's so much sort of creature comforts that, uh,
01:08:08
Speaker
that go into our lives that we're not even thinking about.
01:08:10
Speaker
And, and, and yeah, to be prepared on that level is, is, is super important.
01:08:16
Speaker
So how do you get these systems built?
01:08:19
Speaker
Do you have a factory and then like for the installation, do you contract out to a local concrete guy to lay it down or how does that work?
01:08:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:28
Speaker
So the distributor model, we, we expect our distributors to help with all of that because we are basically a manufacturer and equipment provider.
01:08:37
Speaker
So sourcing the equipment with batteries and others, we have our sources of the direct to the manufacturers.
01:08:44
Speaker
We've vetted them.
01:08:45
Speaker
We've bought from them.
01:08:46
Speaker
We've used their machines.
01:08:47
Speaker
We know what they are.
01:08:49
Speaker
And that's for the batteries and the generators.
01:08:51
Speaker
The wind turbines.
01:08:54
Speaker
So let me go back.
01:08:55
Speaker
Let me make a comment about the batteries and generators.
01:08:57
Speaker
Batteries, unfortunately, because the best batteries now have lithium in them.
01:09:01
Speaker
And unfortunately, China controls 90% of the world's lithium.
01:09:03
Speaker
It is a fact.
01:09:04
Speaker
It's nothing you can get away from.
01:09:06
Speaker
So that's where those are sourced.
01:09:08
Speaker
They have to be.
01:09:09
Speaker
And anybody that says that their batteries are lithium and they're made in USA are either lying or ignorant.
01:09:14
Speaker
They brought them here and put two wires together and said made in USA, but they came from the source there.
01:09:20
Speaker
Same with generators.
01:09:21
Speaker
Generators are basically made there, Kohler and Cummins and all those big boys, they get them made in China and then assemble them here.
01:09:29
Speaker
So now the wind turbine is a different story.
01:09:32
Speaker
The wind turbine is manufactured here in Utah.
01:09:35
Speaker
And it's just steel.
01:09:38
Speaker
It's, I think it's 11 gauge steel.
01:09:40
Speaker
I think that was the last determination.
01:09:44
Speaker
And so we make it in a steel manufacturing group here in Pleasant Grove, Utah, and it can be shipped anywhere.
01:09:50
Speaker
And then it's a relatively easy setup.
01:09:52
Speaker
And then the cement pad is just a local contractor that does it.
01:09:55
Speaker
Electrician, it's pretty simple.
01:09:57
Speaker
Electrician, it comes off of the power that comes off of the turbine.
01:10:01
Speaker
We have a,
01:10:03
Speaker
an alternator generator at the bottom of it and it spits off power in AC.
01:10:08
Speaker
And that just, you know, you just pump that into a battery where it has to be inverted to charge your batteries or if you don't have a house.
01:10:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's just done on a local level.
01:10:19
Speaker
So we're trying to keep as much of the work here around us and then the local people can know the grid and know the local codes and everything like that.
01:10:28
Speaker
We just allow them to deal with that.
01:10:30
Speaker
Got it.
01:10:31
Speaker
I wanted to ask you also about, you mentioned replacing your LEDs and wiring things up so that things shut down in the proper order.
01:10:43
Speaker
I have often thought I would love to have a lot of the smart home tech that could make my home more energy efficient or allow me to monitor things, allow me to change things from my phone, but I'm not going to do
01:11:00
Speaker
I'm not going to do that through Amazon or Google.
01:11:02
Speaker
I don't trust them.
01:11:04
Speaker
And I wonder if you've looked into exploring that space from like a decentralized, maybe even using blockchain where,
01:11:14
Speaker
the, the, the customer's right to manage their home is not beholden to a corporate interest.
01:11:22
Speaker
I just, I think, I think that there's a lot of potentially like you're, you're courting sort of the same market of, of people who, who want to take advantage of, of the, the technical capabilities of what's out there, but they don't want to participate in sort of the, the bigger sort of ideological projects.
01:11:41
Speaker
Is that something you've looked at at all?
01:11:44
Speaker
Yes, but as you say it, blockchain is one that has not hit my head and you just triggered it.
01:11:49
Speaker
And I think we just found a way to work together.
01:11:54
Speaker
Blockchain is, I mean, I'm heavily involved in crypto and everything.
01:12:01
Speaker
Amazon and Google, definitely we stay away from.
01:12:05
Speaker
But even then you say that, but then where do you get your internet?
01:12:08
Speaker
I mean, most people's internet is through a major supplier of some sort.
01:12:11
Speaker
So I don't know if you can stay away from them completely.
01:12:14
Speaker
But boy, if we could come up with a blockchain.
01:12:16
Speaker
So I do know that we have, technologically, we have moved into all of our products.
01:12:21
Speaker
We try to stay on that edge where they have it.
01:12:24
Speaker
So for example, our inverter has an app on your phone so that you can actually control your whole home or see your whole home power output and consumption on your phone.
01:12:35
Speaker
And then the smart home stuff, usually it's usually fairly open source because if you go with Amazon or Google, then they
01:12:42
Speaker
do fully control you.
01:12:43
Speaker
And I do have a couple of people working on monitoring and observational, but blocking stuff, that's intriguing.
01:12:51
Speaker
Maybe that's something we need to talk about offline.
01:12:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:56
Speaker
I think it's, you know, that's going to touch so many things, so many things that people want.
01:13:02
Speaker
They want to coordinate.
01:13:03
Speaker
They want to have, you know, access to bigger resources than it's efficient to provide for them individually.
01:13:14
Speaker
but they don't want to be monitored and they don't want to be in a panopticon.
01:13:17
Speaker
And yeah, blockchain makes those kinds of arrangements possible where, you know, you're providing this visibility into their system without you having visibility into that system, if that makes sense.
01:13:33
Speaker
For sure.
01:13:33
Speaker
I was actually listening to a podcast just yesterday talking about
01:13:38
Speaker
setting up, you know, leaving the current HTTP internet as the corporate internet and then having your private internet be some sort of a blockchain type, you know, private internet that isn't the corporate one, it's the private one.
01:13:50
Speaker
And boy, if we could tap into that, I'd be not only ideologically, but also just ease of use and privacy.
01:13:58
Speaker
Those are huge things to me.
01:14:00
Speaker
I mean, those are, you know, that's part of what we set up to be able to be paid in Bitcoin if people want to pay us for these things because, you know,
01:14:08
Speaker
I just don't.
01:14:09
Speaker
I mean, from the time I was born, my dad taught me and brought me up that individual sovereignty and liberty and privacy are among the most important things in our lives.
01:14:20
Speaker
And the people that want to take them away from you are the ones that want to control you.
01:14:24
Speaker
And so, you know, if we can develop stuff that does it and does it legally and does it responsibly, heck yeah, man.
01:14:31
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:14:33
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:14:34
Speaker
It's a really exciting time.
01:14:36
Speaker
You know, there's lots of risk and lots of worry, but there's also really cool things coming out.
01:14:44
Speaker
And I think there's reason to be optimistic.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
01:14:48
Speaker
Well, this has been a fantastic conversation.
01:14:51
Speaker
I'm so glad that you came.
01:14:53
Speaker
Johnny is the CEO of Ventana Tech.
01:14:56
Speaker
Check them out at ventanatech.com.
01:14:58
Speaker
If you're interested in what we do here at Exit, look us up at exitgroup.us.
01:15:03
Speaker
We are helping people to get out of the corporate environment, make themselves independent, and we'd love to see you in the group.
01:15:10
Speaker
So thanks a lot, Johnny.
01:15:12
Speaker
Hey, thanks for having me.
01:15:13
Speaker
Appreciate it.
01:15:14
Speaker
It's been a fun time.