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June 9, 2013 - Clif High
44:06
20130609 – Clif High Audio #36
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Good morning.
It's 6.07 a.m. on June 9th, year 2013.
Heavily chemtrailed late night here in the Pacific Northwest.
Feeling my age, too.
Sort of starting over here at 6 a.m.
And it's led to a whole lot of different changes.
Got a really wonky knee.
I'm going to go and use the little mini trampoline and bounce out some of the tension in it.
I've been working my old flatbed trailer that I got from some loggers up in Elma.
It's a 20-foot-long trailer they used to use to haul hay and logs and stuff on their farm.
And I converted it to haul the umiac.
Now I'm pulling off all the umiak hauling gear and converting it back to a flatbed trailer.
Well, it's already flatbed, but I mean a non-submersible.
Because it's a dual axle that'll hold 10,000 pounds.
And putting some sides and stuff on it so that I can haul poles for our platform and yurt construction.
Yurts are going to ship here on July 9th, and so I've got to get my act together.
Anyway, I've been so spent about six hours, seven hours, last couple of days using my big Milwaukee drill and driving 3-8-inch holes through the sides of the steel undercarriage on the trailer so I can bolt on the sides.
And the angle and such, I've had to use my knees to push the drill through.
Not a good thing to do when you're 60, let me tell you.
Boy, does that hurt those tendons?
It's not the first one.
It's always that last one at the end of that seven hours that gets you.
Reminds me of the old green chain fallers rule, rules of thumb.
This is something that Nicholas Talib talks about in Anti-Fragility frequently as rules of thumb.
There's this old saying, if you're working green chain, green chain is a term that they use out here, which when I grew up, as I say, when I came up as a kid, this was a resource economy, resource-based economy.
So if you were willing to take the risks and you were physically fit enough, you could go on out and make a living in the resource harvest business, which we have many different resources around here.
We have fishing, mining, and so on.
I was working forestry for a while in what's known as green chain.
And green chain is the falling to the transport chain.
So basically, it's from falling the tree in the forest until it is actually delivered to a transporter into the more infrastructure area.
So a green chain in some area might include sloughs that go for miles.
It might include several different ponds to get the logs from one side to another, to get them to another river, that kind of thing.
So sometimes green chains could be quite extensively long.
A more modern version of green chain would be a helicopter.
And so a helicopter would take half a dozen or more logs in a very remote area and haul them in, and that would be part of the green chain.
Now, I've worked several green chains, some of which were short.
You know, you'd have a boom that would haul the trees up the top of the hill, and you'd be able to get it onto a commercial log hauler at the top of the hill.
So basically, your chain was very short, and you only had to work the falling up until the point that it was retrieved.
But that's what I did as a kid.
I worked in the green chain resource harvest.
We still have some of that around here.
And as you may know, we've got a lot of trees, a lot of trees in the area.
So that was one of the reasons I decided to settle on a pole foundation for our yurts.
A lot of other reasons, which I'll go into in another discussion about the details.
This is more of a sort of a catch-up to date and bitch and moan about my aching knee and all the other crap that's pissing me off.
You know, a lot of things piss off when you're old and when you're hurting.
When you don't hurt, hmm, you can take a, you know, your attitude's a little bit more generous to the faults of the planet.
Anyway, though, you know.
So it's rather not daunting.
What would be the word?
Well, it's interesting, and it's challenging.
And there's some level of trepidation.
I don't really fear failure because failure is just when you decide to stop in your attempt.
It's never really a finite state that's imposed on you from outside.
It's entirely a personal thing.
You know what they say, get knocked down nine times, get up ten, and you haven't failed.
And in Aikido, it's always, you know, end well.
That's all.
All it matters is that you end well.
Doesn't matter how you start, doesn't matter what the beginning or the middle are like.
As long as you end well, you're doing good.
And if you didn't end well that first time, start it over again.
So anyway, though.
So that's kind of what we're doing: we're starting over again.
So I'm getting my trailer ready to haul these poles because we've got to do all the work ourselves.
Can't afford a self-loader.
And most of the self-loading semi-trucks wouldn't haul the kind of distances I need to have these poles moved anyway.
What I'm going to probably do is pick them up at a small pole yard down here in Rochester and take them on over to where we think we're going to get a home site.
We're looking at some areas.
I don't know just yet how to work out.
We're trying to get about 50 to 80 feet higher in elevation and get us a different kind of a perspective.
We've been here too long at the site we're at at the moment.
And the house that we've got is they're really cool.
It's a Justice house, which is a form of a log home where they take the cedar logs and they slice them into basically about a six by five chunk of wood and then they mill it down with a double tongue and groove top and bottom so it's all interlocking and so on.
But basically it's a log home.
And this has all started me living here for 26 years.
I've had a lot of time to think about housing in general and the particulars of humanity and housing and how we ended up with the kind of housing that we've got.
Especially since my housing is annoying me all the time.
Part of the problem with these log homes, I mean, they're great.
Don't get me wrong.
But the problem is, especially, of course, in this environment where it's easy to find logs, and that's one of the ways that humans build, by the way, is whatever material is easily located.
You know, we're a very efficient family.
Early man did not decide to build igloos because it was neat and nifty and he wanted a natural air conditioning.
It was because he had a lot of ice.
Same thing with the people in the tropics.
They don't build the walls out of mats and reeds and stuff because of the aesthetics.
I mean, they like the aesthetics, but that's a secondary issue.
They've got the mats and the reeds and the fibers.
So it's just kind of humans and their habitats are just kind of interesting how we approach all of this.
But up here in the Pacific Northwest, of course, there's all kinds of logs.
Now, this has led to all forms of log housing and all low log housing of any form runs into serious problems after some point.
And the house we're in is probably 50-some-odd years old at this point.
And it's had numerous issues over time that I've got to deal with.
And the problem for us is: A, it's no longer adequate to our needs because our lives are changing.
And B, it's difficult to repair a small house, basically to rehab it when you're living in it.
Because you'd have to haul everything out of the kitchen in order to remove the kitchen and replace it.
And in the meantime, there you go.
You're trying to live with your kitchen where your living room used to be temporarily.
And it gets to be really tedious.
Plus, as I say, this isn't adequate for our needs anymore.
And it's gotten me thinking about housing in general.
And so I've got all these kind of woojos planned about the nature of housing and the derivation and the evolution of it.
If you think about it, it's kind of strange.
There's only really been a recent time in which humans were not living in, at least modern humans, were not living in some form of a cloth structure.
Most of North America, hang on a second there, dog.
Hang on, what's up?
Sorry about that.
Older puppy got stuck underneath a chair.
And a little girl dog had a shower yesterday and it takes away all of the many pounds of dirt out of their fur, which gives them a little traction on the floor when they're lying on their sides.
And he had slid underneath there and couldn't get his back legs out to get up.
Anyway, though, oh yeah, about the issue of housing.
And so, you know, all old log houses run into these problems.
The logs deteriorate.
There's just nothing you can do about it.
Our issue isn't with that so much as the way the guy did that initial construction was quite a little bit odd.
And so it forces huge amounts of extra labor in rehabbing the house.
And after 50 years, it really needs it.
And we're not just not going to be able to do it while we're living here.
Fundamentally, that's what it comes down to: inability to both live here and fix the place up.
And then also, a very large house behind us, our needs have changed.
And so we're looking to relocate, which, you know, at age 60, retirement, all of that kind of stuff looming is not necessarily unexpected.
All of that crap aside, we run into the issue of it's not really a normal world.
And so my thinking about housing is probably a little odd anyway, because I consider, you know, what's the nature of housing.
And I've lived in a lot.
As an Army brat, I've lived in all kinds of housing all around the planet.
And as a result of that, really, and some of my experiences, I decided that, well, I would examine some of the issues that are involved in housing and the mental states that it induces.
And I don't know that living in rectilinear structures is really optimal for humans.
I actually have in the past spent many probably an accumulation of several years over a lifetime, but many months at a stretch living in round structures like teepees.
I used to do this all the time in Alaska.
We'd go out in the summers and live in a teepee basically all summer.
The teepees were even professionally constructed kind of things.
They were offered for rent by Armies, the Army Special Services.
These are the guys that would provide things like aluminum rowboats, that sort of thing.
Anyway, so I wanted to examine the idea of living in a round structure.
Plus, we find ourselves in a situation where all of the kinds of houses that are being built are totally unsuited for basically two people and two dogs.
They're all huge, boxy things, a lot of stairs, a lot of the mansion approach to housing.
I need land, so we're not into, you know, I'm a messy sort of an inventor guy, and I need to, you know, have my boat projects spread out while I'm doing my boat project.
And I've got windmills and the grow dome and all that kind of crap.
So condos, apartments, that sort of thing are out.
But also, in our particular world at the moment, with the huge distortions caused by the less than one-tenth of one percent that control the banks and the currency death and all of the other issues going on, it's an interesting time to think about our own personal housing needs within the grander scope of, you know, basically what the hell else is going on.
Solar system in upheaval, the planets in an upheaval, all this kind of a thing.
Plus, there's issues with resources and costs, and it gets really involved, much more so than boats, oddly enough.
You know, I always thought boats were really the pinnacle of engineering issues for providing habitation for humans because of the harsh environment of the ocean in which you had to engineer your habitat to survive.
However, there's ramifications with engineering regular habitats on the planet, just regular houses, that I hadn't anticipated until I really got into it.
Not only the cost, but the long-term nature of what you want to do with houses.
Think about it.
A lot of the reasons I'm of the opinion at the moment, I haven't really delved into it that deeply, but I'm of the opinion that a lot of the reasons that we do things with houses the way we do has to do with our ideas of inheritance that have been forced on us by the financial structure, which is a replica of the mindset of the power elite.
So think about it.
You know, all the huge investments that go into these houses were really with the idea back from the old feudal days of inheritance, of being able to pass on land-locked, land-based wealth to progeny.
And for the vast majority of people, at least in the modern world, in modernity, who is ever going to get a position, be in a position to do just that.
That amount of people that are in a situation of being able to pass on wealth in that fashion to the next generation is dwindling rapidly.
And plus, previously, the idea was that that next generation would return and live, or if they ever left, in the old manse, in the old mansion, in the old homestead.
And that's just not occurring anymore, this multi-generational approach to living on the same piece of property from an expanding multi-generational family.
That kind of a planet is gone.
Our social structure, A, doesn't support it anymore, but that's reflective of where we are and what we're doing and how mobile we are, and the individual desires and aspirations of each new generation and its differences from the previous generation, and the fact that we're living in a world that could be sliced generationally rather than familiarly or in a tribal fashion across generations.
So, in that sense, the way we think about housing probably needs to be rethunk.
A lot of the things that Butminster Fuller had gotten into in the 20s and 30s in some of his inventions for housing.
He was really fascinated by housing and invented some really cool non-flammable bricks and stuff.
All of these are great ideas, but I think that we need to also re-examine our approach to housing in light of the changing environment we've got around us, the actual physical changes to the planet and the solar system, and the idea that those changes may force on us certain levels of mobility, certain accommodations to things.
So, in other words, I'm quite convinced that we're in an expansion of the planet mode that's going to have weird earthquake effects for a number of years.
Therefore, it doesn't make a lot of sense to bind your housing so fiercely to the planet that when the planet shakes, the house either has to whip back and forth violently, shattering everything inside, or disengage itself from its moorings.
It makes sense to accommodate things in a different way.
So, here we are, we're thinking about housing.
We've spent a year plus looking at houses all over the county, all over multiple counties in the state here.
We don't want to leave the Puget Sound area for a lot of different reasons.
And so, we're stuck with the local environment.
The local environment is such that they're keeping about 70% of the houses off the market one way or another in order to try and force inflation into the remaining 30% of the housing that is, in fact, on the market.
But that 30% has about a core of it, maybe half that simply isn't selling.
So, there's really a very for a lot of different reasons.
So, there's a very small amount of available housing.
And then, even then, we find ourselves here, Kathy and I, in a situation of where most houses wouldn't suit us because of our physical infirmities or because of the nature of how they build these things.
You know, what do I need five bedrooms for where they're little tiny chunky bedrooms?
It just does not work.
And we need different things for the property than most people in an ordinary market.
Now, in an extraordinary market, that makes it even harder on us.
We're just not able to accommodate what few things are available because that few things are intended to go towards the 99% perceived needs is dictated by the building market.
Again, and I think the building market's way out of whack anyway.
So, here we go.
We find ourselves in a situation.
Then, by the way, hey, on top of all of that, we don't have the kind of money it takes to buy houses in a finished, you know, ready-to-move-in kind of state.
And being self-employed, there's not a chance in hell that we can get financed.
And then basically, the powers that be in their banking structure, they don't like us anyway.
So, it gets to be rather interesting.
And it has forced certain accommodations on us.
Now, I had wanted to go towards something atypical anyway.
Kathy and I had looked at actually a number of domes.
I'd looked at a big cement dome out here above ground.
It was interesting.
It had all kinds of issues because of the way they made it.
I like cement in moderation for small amounts of things.
I actually trained as a brickmason in a There was this trade school back east, and you had to take two sets of courses, so you always had a fallback.
They were really smart about that.
I mean, this was a trade school that had put some real thought into it.
And so, my fallback was to be a brickmason because I figured I could go anywhere on the planet, and as long as I knew my fatty mortar and could get in there and make that fatty mortar squish and produce the right noise, I would be able to be employed.
And that turned out to be true.
No matter where I went, I could always get a job temporarily working as a hod carrier or brickmason or some level within the trades.
There wasn't that much opportunity for it up here.
Smart of me to train in Virginia for brick work when brickwork really wasn't working up here and I knew I was moving back.
But in any event, so I like cement at some levels, but I appreciate its usefulness.
But I also appreciate its cost.
It's hugely expensive to produce cement as a resource on the planet in the sense of you've got to burn stone for it.
It takes vast quantities of energy for this.
It's heavy stuff to pack around.
It uses huge amounts of water through the process.
So, every gallon of water I think that is actually put into the Portland cement or concrete mixture that goes into your foundation, I think there's actually close to 140 gallons that are used in the intervening process, not including the creation of the basic chemicals.
So, 140 gallons, you know, to continually wash the equipment, all of that kind of crap, right?
So, it's very resource-intensive.
And even in the 20s and 30s, Buckminster Fuller acknowledged this, and he was trying to reduce some of that with his special fireproof brick that was earthquake-resistant, all of this sort of thing.
Now, I've gone the next stage and really examined the whole point of brick.
Fire is really one of the issues.
The nature of housing is an issue as to why we build these huge structures and invest such huge, giant quantities of labor in merely getting ourselves out of the weather.
There's all kinds of mindset issues, emotional issues tied to property and place and all of that.
But a lot of that goes to the inheritance things that were foisted on us from the nature of the elites in the Western version of Northern Hemisphere social orders.
If you look at the largest empire that ever existed on the planet, this was the largest land empire, land-based empire that lasted the longest.
This was the Mongol Empire.
And it was larger by far than anything the British were ever able to accomplish.
Anybody, I mean, Tamu-Jin, who became known as Genghis Khan, and led to the actually basically to the formation of what we think of as modern China in a roundabout way.
He had the largest land-based empire, and this empire was created by and sustained by people that for all of their multiple hundred generations live in cloth houses, round houses, yurts.
It was such an ingrained part of their nature that they recognized.
And if you go and read in the secret history of the Mongols, this particular book, you'll read about how Tamujin, Genghis Khan, recognized the nature of the mindset of people when they're living in a roundhouse is far different from that when they become institutionalized, so to speak, and live in rectilinear structures.
And so forbade the Mongols from basically relocating to permanent square-based houses and made the whole empire a permanently based, flexible, floating, soft, strong, light empire because they were based on these, everything was cloth and fiber.
And a lot of it had to do with their thinking on resource allocation.
And where should man, a man, put the resources of his life?
If you looked at it one way, if you were to put all of the resources in your life that you put into your house, all of the work, that percentage that goes to pay for the house, that percentage of your actual energy, of your time, if you just said nothing about money and just looked at it as time,
you know, mowing the fucking lawn to represent a weird savanna from Africa because of the ingrained peer pressure patterns that say that this is the way it should be, to the weird combination of materials, the energy you put into even surviving frequently in some of the new houses with all the weird materials that are assaulting you.
If you look at all of that portion of your life that's involved in these structures, at the moment, within Western society in North America, and to a great extent in some areas of Europe and even in Russia, you'll find that you're spending a vast majority of your life to deal with your house.
And then your body's going to die.
And it's like, okay, so you're going to live, say you live 50 years, and you're going to dink around with housing for 30 out of those 50.
And it's like, well, now that was a good investment of my time while I was here on this planet, wasn't it?
Anyway, so not to take up all of your time on my weird thoughts on housing, but I've gone into this very deeply over the past few years, and it's been concentrated, especially this last year, actually, very deeply over the past few decades, especially because of my association with Buckminster Fuller and his approach to housing and the impact of housing on humans and all of it.
Housing is very key, but I think that we are, you know, we're trying to replicate the pyramids and the mortuary tumblery of Egypt, and we ought to be going back, like I think, to the Mongols.
You know, they did really well with this with their flexible houses.
Plus, I have a lot of really solid reasons for thinking that over the next few years, decades actually, probably, the ability to flex on the ground relative to earthquakes in this environment is going to be really good.
We've had numerous problems with the structure I'm in here because of these damn slow earthquakes that are happening at these creepy levels where you never really feel the earthquake takes five, six months to happen, but it's a 7-0 in terms of its final release level.
And we've got foundations cracking all over the place, cement is cracked in driveway, not our driveway, we don't have one, don't have cement driveway.
The runoff issue for me.
But in any event, the foundation on the house here, the guy put tons of money into the cement.
And that's another thing.
If you look at the structure of houses, you can spend up to 40, well, average, 40 plus percent of the money you put in.
So 40 cents out of every dollar you put into your house goes into the cement into the ground that you never really use, never has much value.
And it's just this huge amount of weight that is there as sort of like the keel for your house on the ground.
And it need not be that way.
So my approach is going to be entirely different here.
I'm going to go back to something truly ancient, which is the pole structure.
When we went to Germany in the 60s, we rented this place for a while, and it was just a regular house as far as I knew.
I was just a kid.
And actually, as we were leaving, we discovered that the thing had a foundation of poles that were 400 years old that had been sunk in a marsh that was no longer a marsh that was in the middle of this little town.
But many of the houses around there basically still had poles for a foundation, and the poles had never really rotted.
I'm sure there had been some level of degradation in them, but there was no sign of any kind of structural support.
Nothing was sagging.
You know, the house was quite sound, and it was a brick structure that was built on plastic.
It was a plastered brick structure, and the plaster must have been, geez, two inches thick on the inside.
I don't know how thick the stuccoy stuff was on the outside.
So, really a heavy, heavy building.
And we were in the fourth floor, and this thing was on poles.
So, poles work quite well and have for centuries.
But there's also, they also offer a lot of advantages up here.
First, in cost, because the cost on a pole foundation versus a cement foundation for the same square footage is like staggeringly huge in terms of the difference.
The difference can be from a dollar a running foot for your foundation for poles or less, depending on the kind of structure you're putting up.
And then the level on cement, the cheapest I could get away with in some of these designs, was $30 and $40 a running foot.
So the difference in cost is on an order of 1 to 40.
And the poles last longer, they have less impact on the ground.
They take less time to screw around with.
They're much more accommodating in terms of earthquakes.
The whole house structure will remain rigid, my platform design, and yet it will be able to flex, and the poles will be able to flex within the structure without the structure itself flexing.
It's just a matter of design issues.
And bear in mind, it's not earthquakes that kill people as a rule.
It's been engineering.
And so I wanted to avoid as much bad engineering as possible.
Now I've gotten some questions about won't it be cold up there?
And it's like, yes, it would definitely be cold.
And platform, if you allow the platform to be A, uninsulated and B, unsealed against the weather.
I have really a very elaborate design for the support for the yurts on the platform.
The platform area underneath the yurts is going to be tongue-and-grooved two-inch sub-flooring, so it'll be quite solid, and there won't be any air infiltration when I'm done.
Plus, I'm going to have about a foot of poured-in insulation for a very thick sealed area that's also going to have tubing in it for running hot water through.
So, we'll have, or actually for running water through.
Going to use it to set up a valve and run hot water through the tubing to heat the floors in the winter as one of our three or four heating sources.
I like redundancy.
I like being anti-fragile and I like being robust to various different problems.
And so, we'll be able to heat the floors in winter, but we'll also be able to cool the yurts in the summer by simply redirecting and running cold water through the floors, usually at night, to take any of the heat out that's accumulated during the day.
So, it'll keep the place nice and cool, and it'll act as a form of air conditioning.
The same kind of effect you get with un-air-conditioned adobe kind of houses, where basically the whole point of in the in the southwest where it's very hot, the whole point of the house is to open it up at night, allow the flooring to cool off, and then close it up just before you get into the day.
Then, over the course of the day, as you go in and out and open the house and so on, the floor remains a source of a cool sink, it's called, and gains the heat slowly during the day, and then you just shed that heat at night.
They use many different mechanisms there in the southwest, though, for instance, I know of some designs that where the floors are basically tied into areas of the grounds that are at a constant temperature that's usually lower than the floor, anyway.
So, it'd be tying into the ground where it was like 55 degrees or 60 or something through sort of basically pillars.
But the approach is the same as geoengineering for thermal tech, just sort of reverse heat pumps.
And so, I'm going to use a floor pump.
We're going to have multiple different kinds of heat sources.
You'll find that if you have infrared or radiant heat, heating the air is far less of an issue.
You just don't care.
I've actually been working now for a number of years in my boat shed, which is a fabric.
It's basically a yurt.
It's a rectilinear tent used that you stick RVs, you know, these not remote viewers, but you know, the little big trucks, the little buses you live in and drive around in, those kind of RVs.
And you'd stick those in there.
And so, it's a basically, it's just a sort of a yurt.
It's a tent.
And what we've done there to keep ourselves warm while working on the boat is to put in insulation that's the same foil barrier insulation that we're going to have in the yurts.
And it's been quite nice.
And then I've had radiant propane heat in there.
And no problem.
Middle of the storms in winter and stuff, the structure isn't really affected.
In fact, we'd be working away in there and then after five or six hours and take a break for lunch or something and come out.
And you're quite shocked to see how violent the nature of the stormy weather has been because you're totally oblivious to it within the structure.
It's really an interesting way to live in terms of the tent fabrics.
It'll be very interesting for us to live it in as yurts.
And then the idea was that we're going to live in the yurts and spend a couple of years building all of these kinds of things and then also see how we like living in the round.
And if so, maybe build a structure that is also round as a more permanent, but we'll just have to see as a more permanent housing solution.
But we'll have to see.
These yurts have a 15-year guarantee on the fabrics.
The fabrics are easily replaced and very cheaply relative to the structure of a house.
Think about replacing the skin of your house if you had to.
It's actually kind of a good idea to replace them every 15 years anyway as fabric becomes aged and needs to be renewed.
Again, part of the issue with a lot of the houses is that the degradation in housing can be quite rapid, especially with modern materials.
And yet we don't have a housing recycling kind of an industry set up yet to where we have a more mature idea of how to deal with the houses.
And then there's the whole point of how I'm going to deal with the land because my age at age 60, starting over here again, I don't find that as being too much of a problem, but I want to think about this in a particular way.
I have no real reason to want to impose my lifestyle on any kind of progeny, should I have had them, but I wouldn't want to impose my life on the property on the land, other than I'll make changes as necessary for growing and my science experiments and this kind of a thing.
But I find it suiting or suitable to my way of thinking that on our death, the structure could be easily disassembled, and then somebody else could use the land in an entirely different way.
And they wouldn't be subjected to our view of things.
And also, then, of course, there's the other issue of the yurts or portable houses.
They can be disassembled.
Not particularly easily.
I mean, it's not like a traditional, smaller yurt where you could take it apart in a day.
But I could disassemble it, put it on my trailer that I've been working on with my Zor Knee.
It's got 400 cubic, greater than 400 cubic feet of volume.
It's a 20-foot, actually, it's a 26-foot trailer with a 20-foot bed.
It'll haul 10,000 pounds.
So, you know, I could put the house on there and drive it somewhere else and reassemble it.
Now, of course, we're building out a basically a sort of fully modern house on the inside of these yurts in any event that will be less than temporary.
Let's just put it that way.
Because I don't know how long it'll take us to make further decisions on the housing.
And so I'm planning on at least a five or six years that I want the structure to remain that way.
And so, you know, we'll put in a regular kitchen and all that kind of thing.
And it'll just be, you know, two roundhouses connected in a barbell fashion by central hallway, sitting on a large stable deck with hopefully a view of something other than the neighbor's giant mansion.
Anyway, so all of the thoughts on housing and the poor knees, and now I'm going to get up and actually I'm going to go and set up my little bellicon trampoline and try and bounce out some of the stiffness of this while listening to Max Kaiser rant and rave about the evils of the whatever is annoying him today.
I really like Max.
He's a great guy.
I think he's going to end up being one of the heroes of the planet.
He's actually been able to change.
I give him credit for it because of his presence and his purely human response to things, and he just doesn't take shit from people.
But he's actually been able to change the popular behavior in both Russia and China.
In both cases, Russia specifically, but in both cases, he was able to push certain cultural buttons because they do a heavy translation of Max Kaiser into dialects in Russia and in dialects in China.
And he's able to push the populations into buying gold and being really smart and savvy about what's going on with the Western financial system in a way that had never been able and never been offered to them before, let alone to the rest of us out here.
Now, living in the horror of the Western financial system from the inside, being in the belly of the beast here, we see it in an entirely different fashion.
But the victims of it are really those individuals that live outside of it.
And you've got to give Max Kaiser credit for having aided humanity to be less of a victim to the assholes and the psychopaths.
So anyway, I'm going to sit there and jump up and down and listen to Max Kaiser while trying to get my knee in shape so I'm going out.
Got two more of these 4x6s I've got 2x6s I've got to drill in onto the trailer and then that's it.
That'll be the last of that.
Then I can quickly sheath the inside and get it ready for the polls.
The whole process is really fascinating.
I think I'm going to put GoPro cameras on the trailer from that point on even.
And so we'll have a video record of the whole process of building the structure and all of it.
Ought to be quite fascinating.
Anyway, oh yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry.
The whole point of the Wujo here was to catch up on some of the things that are going on.
We actually are running a test now.
It's Sunday here, the 9th.
It's like 6.53 in the morning.
I suspect that by noon on Monday, we'll know.
But we're running a test that may retrieve actually short and long-term data for us.
I had this process that we'd run across.
We used to have to do it when Igor and I worked in another capacity for a common employer, and it's called IP tunneling.
And it's an interesting process.
They use it in forming virtual private networks, VPNs, and other things.
And we've sort of undone IP tunneling and redone it at a different level, sort of a, instead of a push, we're doing a GIT on IP tunneling.
And so far, we've had some level of success.
We'll know for sure if we can get it going through, like I say, probably about noon on Monday, we'll be able to see if we've gotten enough data and run some processes to do some validation on it.
But if so, then what we've been able to achieve is to sort of fight our way through the trench warfare that's going on in the internet at the router level and create little safe holes that allow us to go in out and get data.
Now, necessarily, I mean, of a necessity, the approach greatly restricts the amount of data we're going to get.
So instead of getting 100, if we were going to do a standard run, instead of getting 100 million, maybe we'd only be able to get a tenth of that.
I don't know.
That's one of the things we have to ascertain tomorrow is, if successful, what is the penalty we're paying in terms of total overall volume.
And does that matter?
We don't know that either.
So basically what we're going to do is to restart the process with the idea of with the IP tunneling as the feed-in in the month of June here.
And so I'll be opening up, it won't be immediacy data.
It'll be the old ALTA reports because we're going to run the full processing regimen.
Now, as a necessity, we lose the amount of data coming through on the IP tunneling, but also because we're losing the amount of data, means we don't have to wait that long to go through the whole thing in a batch process.
And we can do it probably on weekly reports.
We're hoping to do audio because my poor fingers can't take all of the typing.
So that's sort of the plan at the moment.
And I'll open it up here if that's the case.
I'll have some kind of an announcement on the site over Tuesday or Wednesday.
And we'll see if we can't start another go with the ALTA processes, maybe as early as this coming Friday.
If we've got a good set that comes in on Monday, we're going to go through the whole process of working it.
That should take three to four days.
And so probably by Friday, we'll have a shot at an interpretation and see what we get.
It's sort of exciting that way.
The IP tunneling is, you know, we both, Igor and I have done it in the past for a long time.
It just never dawned on us to approach it this particular way.
We were noodling around some ideas and he came up with the idea, well, you know, could we reverse it?
And indeed, we could.
And we did.
So the initial test was quite successful.
Now we just have to see if it's going to be successful in a production vehicle.
By successful, I mean it brought back data.
I don't have any idea.
And the data actually contains short-term and long-term.
But I don't have any idea if we're able to get enough to make it worth the trouble.
So our thinking is that what we'll do at the moment, though, is to have an abbreviated June run that would basically be the last two weeks of the month.
And if that works out, then we'll go full bore for July and press on from there and see how things mature.
We're going to take a different approach to pricing and stuff on it.
We'll see how it's going to work out.
If it's going to be successful, all that will be announced in a web page.
And like I say, we're going to tentatively shoot for Fridays in lieu of Thursday, simply because that's how we ended up with the cycle at this point.
It may shift over time.
We just don't know.
We'll see in a bit here.
The immediacy data processing turned out to be very prescient in terms of a lot of the weather and that kind of stuff.
It'll be interesting to see if we can get some shorter term and longer term data to give us more of a context.
And we'll know by noon on Monday.
And if so, make some kind of announcement one way or another, probably Tuesday morning.
Anyway, that's basically it.
I got to try and get the pain out of my knee and go see what the other dog wants.
Okay, guys.
Talk to you all later.
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