George Swanson – Living, Breathing Buildings

It’s Rainmaking Time!®
Living Breathing Buildings with George Swanson
Host & Interviewer: Kim Greenhouse

Kim: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to It’s Rainmaking Time. This is Kim Greenhouse. I’m very excited today to bring you George Swanson. I don’t know how many of you have had the good pleasure of hearing about him, but he is doing something so remarkable in the area of environmental consulting and design. He is bringing forth a new world housing industry based on no debt and mortgages. The essence of his work is to create living structures that cycle through the air so that what you’re living in is not a cesspool for toxic materials and chemicals. He’s going to talk to us about this and Breathing Walls — a biological approach to healthy building envelope design and construction, written by George, his associate Orr Miller, and Wayne Federer. If there’s anybody you should be listening to about what the housing industry needs, what buildings need, and how to do it properly, it’s George Swanson. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome George Paul Swanson to It’s Rainmaking Time. Good morning.

George: Thank you Kim, and thank you for that great introduction because basically all we’ve been doing for years and years is working in the conventional housing industry and of course dealing with folks with extreme chemical sensitivities that had no choice, that simply had to find alternatives to what’s going on with our highly toxic building materials and finding solutions. So accidentally, in being involved with the building biology movement for years, we finally stumbled into these products that had been used in both India and China for centuries — the magnesium oxide ancient cements, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon — all of it pre-Portland cement that does not retain moisture and cause all these incredible indoor air pollution problems and rotting out of our buildings. So it was very, very humble beginnings and we just feel extreme appreciation to each of our clients who simply had no choice.

George: We had to find alternative materials. And of course, having had the great pleasure of both studying and traveling with Buckminster Fuller for years, we found that indeed a lot of the technologies we’re using today are not proven and have solutions that have been known for centuries that are simply ignored in a culture that bases everything on what patents you can get on it and how you can protect it from your competition. Leading us into some extremely detrimental building materials, including 90% of what we’re building with. And of course our clients simply couldn’t be near them. And so they became, for us, our guiding light on how to approach and find what we’re going to need to do for the future — to not only build for that segment of the population, which is growing immensely by 30% a year, the chemically sensitive, but also the very young and the very old, those most vulnerable to what’s happening in the polluted environments that they’re living in. So we feel it’s really our clients who have done all the research.

Kim: This really goes beyond the concept of sustainable environments. It really is biological buildings and environments, isn’t it?

George: Correct, yes. Using the principles of how information exchanges between all living systems, and basically asking the question — why are our buildings dying so prematurely? In traveling the world, we’ve found buildings 1,100 and 1,400 years old all over Europe and in Asia, three and four thousand years old, with no mold. And obviously it’s the mineral content, the experience of multiple hundreds and even thousands of years, that uses the correct materials and simply didn’t create those problems. So in a deep study of that, we found that all these minerals are still out there, and yet because they’ve been used continuously for multiple thousands of years, you can’t take patents out on them. It’s been completely ignored — what we can do to create buildings that simply don’t hold moisture the way ours do with all our plastic binders, and that will last multiple thousands of years.

George: At first, that seemed like just an incredible statement. How can we create a building that lasts multiple thousands of years? Until I visited — I was hired by the Chinese government, that’s doing the largest restoration program in world history, restoring the ancient temples and monasteries of China, and they refused to use Portland cement or epoxies and urethanes. We’re doing everything with these natural mineral blends, primarily binding with magnesium oxide. And we got involved with these 90-foot columns in the Summer Palace — all wooden construction built 2,800 years ago, originally with a quarter inch of magnesium oxide troweled on the outside of the wood and polished out to look like marble. We chipped into it and the wood was in perfect condition. The magnesium oxide had balanced the pH of the wood and balanced moisture content perfectly for the last nearly 3,000 years.

George: So obviously these people had thought out this process much, much deeper than we do or have in the past. And much we can learn from that. I’ve been very encouraged in how we can create those products right here in America. In fact, they all existed up until the forties here in America when Portland Cement took over the entire industry. But that’s a whole different story — the same wonderful European families that created our Federal Reserve board created the Portland Cement Association. They could get their 1,200 patents. And even at the turn of the century, it was a million dollars to create one pound of that stuff — an extremely unnatural bonding process that uses five times the amount of embodied energy to create than the natural magnesium cements. So we have been very encouraged on the long term of how to get these products back into the mainstream.

Kim: What an honorable effort. What an honorable goal.

George: It’s slow. Obviously there are forces that do not want this to happen, but the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology will win out in the long term. And what’s so encouraging is to see the place on earth where a full 68% of the world’s construction went on — China — has been doing this all along and has virtually banned the use of our plywood, our OSB, and our gypsum based drywall. So those rumors about the Chinese drywall — that was a German company who contracted the Chinese, and none of that ever landed in China. It really is quite false. But we’re being told in the media otherwise. In the big picture of things, it does look very, very positive that these natural materials will win out, and that we really will create a highly automated building industry based on all natural materials.

Kim: It is all about living organisms, isn’t it? And it’s all about living materials. Everything is going to be biology and physics based, isn’t it?

George: Yeah. And merging those two fields in a way that traditionally hasn’t been done. In academia, they all create their own separate languages. But the simple way we explain it is — it’s been proven that if your heart was a pump, it’d be the size of a small house. It’s physically impossible to pump a thousand miles of arteries and veins with these tiny heart pumps. It requires an electromagnetic balance between the clay in your bones and the cellulose in your tissue to create a push-pull charge that lifts blood — literally levitates blood — into your ears. Now, when we clog that system up with the type of foods and everything we do, we put extreme strain on our heart. It makes the heart do what would naturally be done with a mineral balance between our blood, bone, and tissue.

George: So what we’ve created is a situation of massive heart failure and all that. But we use that analogy to explain why our buildings are dying — because that natural plus-minus charge between clay and cellulose that lifts blood to our ears every day is the same charge we want to create inside of a wall. Straw clay being the most obvious example that will simply dehydrate and balance the wall out where it won’t hold moisture. We always point out that if you replace a small section of bone in your body with a plastic bone, blood won’t flow next to it. Your sweat glands will close down in that area, and blood won’t get to your ears. We need these balances to create a living system that will perpetuate itself. And of course, we’re paying extreme consequence for ignoring that in our homes. Literally we have buildings that come apart in 25, 30 years instead of 300 or even 3,000 when these balances are completely acknowledged.

Kim: I know this is kind of a strange question, but do you think that with the shift in materials — I think you said 40 years ago — do you think that buildings have been intended to only last 20 to 30 years?

George: I don’t think anyone intended it. Even in studying ancient cements — when Portland cement was invented in 1860, no one had any idea that it would be environmentally such a disaster. The retention of water was not a measurable thing even back then. There were no ratings on materials in that fashion. And the long-term consequence, especially the electron draining that we see — like when we set a car battery on Portland cement overnight and have a dead battery the next morning — that was not widely acknowledged when that material came out. But the number one fault of Portland cement is simply water retention, which turns the material into something completely conductive for both electromagnetics, electricity, magnetism, heat, and cold. And of course, the moist environment creates mold and an extremely uncomfortable building.

George: And of course it gets much deeper than that — about what it does to the spin of the electrons in your body when you stand on it barefoot for a couple of hours. It can actually be so deadening. It’s not psychological that we feel terrible standing on Portland cement for extended periods of time. Now it’s quite quantified, but not talked about or widely disseminated in our building culture, mainly because it does threaten such large industries. But there is an entire technology of teaching the surface how to breathe properly, how to recreate those balanced electromagnetic charges to pull moisture off a medium in the form of vapor. So that means it can be fully waterproof but vapor permeable — like Gore-Tex, but with natural minerals that will be functional hundreds and hundreds of years from now instead of synthetic ways that may last 15, 20 years and then quit breathing. The experiments are actually over a hundred years old now. And the deep consequences of them are only in the last 20 or 30 years. Being involved with anything in the construction industry makes you painfully aware of how these things are creating secretory situations in our buildings.

Kim: You were in 1992 listed as Who’s Who in America for your contributions to sustainable technology, and you also are a graduate of the IBS International Building Biology and Ecology Program. You’re known as a building biologist. Here’s my question to you. Sometimes when materials are not available or being suppressed, there ends up being a very big cost differential between the existing standard for construction of materials and this living, breathing material that you’re describing. I get the health part and I get how different the buildings are the way you’re describing it, but what is the cost differential of using these incredible materials?

George: Well, yes. Most of my work now is consulting and building factories to make these materials here in America — typically in just four by eight sheets to replace drywall, OSB, and plywood, the main offenders. And even bringing them in from China, where over 4,000 groups are producing these now, it’s extremely competitive. We come in right around $20 a sheet when purchased in full containers — quite a bit less than the price of four by eight Hardy board or comparable plywood. But the big savings come because I’m building very affordable little 10 by 40 foot and up to 14 by 60 foot little trailers in one layer direct with these materials, including the roofing. All the multiple layers on most construction are related to moisture issues — how to create areas that can dry behind different planes that by themselves retain moisture and can cause mold.

George: So we’ve gotten into what we call our green bandaid program — how to make the bad materials work with vapor barriers of all different sorts, more commonly called vapor retarders. Because we found — and to the great credit of the city of Austin, the first city to ban the vapor barrier — that it bleeds on the interior of the wall. There’s a dew point in the wall, and it always bleeds on the wrong side and rots the wall out. So they were adding all these little microscopic breathing channels between the layers because the materials don’t know how to dehydrate themselves properly. Bad magnetic charges — and of course that’s related to the plastic binders and the methods we’ve used to bind our materials. It’s really binding technologies that are at the core of why our building culture is coming apart and why we don’t want to invest in buildings that last 30 years instead of multiple hundreds.

Kim: Do you envision in your lifetime what you’re involved in becoming a standard?

George: Yes, yes. We work really close with what’s called the SIPS industry — Structural Insulated Panels — which right now is the most automated housing going on. And currently it’s using the wrong materials. It’s using types of foams that retain moisture and OSB orientated strand board that retains moisture and requires extreme careful detailing to create air films around all these adjacent materials so they don’t trap moisture and rot everything out. That industry is extremely interested in not being sued in the future. About four years ago, we got involved with FEMA projects in making a FEMA trailer, and we actually won the contest. 285 trailers entered, and we ended up with 30 times cleaner air quality than the second best. We did everything with the magnesium oxide materials — the stuccos, the joint compounds, the grout — every Home Depot product was out.

George: And of course we used the MGO sheeting and even treated the wood with the liquid MGO and clays, making the wood fireproof, mold proof, and waterproof with all natural minerals. And we did it extremely affordably. FEMA said they wanted to do 240,000 of these, but they needed all made-in-America materials. That got several investors involved with what it will take to create these products in America again. And that’s the stage we’re at now — putting that financing together and building the first plants. Even bringing it in from China and from the Middle East, where it’s also very popular, is quite affordable. We always point out that the five largest buildings in the world are covered with magnesium oxide inside and out, ceiling and floors, every square inch — in places like Dubai it’s the only sheeting material that’s been used for the last 12 years. So it’s not a new phenomenon at all. It’s just that in the US we got off to a very bad start with some materials that have extreme problems that we need to make a gigantic shift on.

Kim: How prevalent is accessing magnesium oxide for this type of purpose?

George: Here in America, we have 16 major mines with massive reserves. We feel they’ll all come back online. There are several research groups around the US and of course mining companies that are fully aware of this transition that will be made and quite anxious to get involved with it now.

Kim: It’s almost like you’re creating a new supply chain.

George: Yes. And it does disrupt a few areas of construction. For years I used to build rammed earth, straw clay, and straw bale type homes. And of course those were extremely disruptive to the norm — to what we call the stick and sheeting industry here in America. The hope of this particular technology is that it’s non-disruptive, that it uses the same common carpentry skills that are out there today. We always tell people — if a carpenter put on Hardy board, they know 99% of what they need to do with this board. It’s white instead of gray. We can deal with this. So it’s a practical way to make a massive transition. Now, the SIPS industry — the industry that’s making the prefab walls primarily with expanded polystyrene and urethane and plywood or OSB over it — is extremely anxious to not be sued in the future. The cat is out of the bag.

George: These materials that we’re using commonly everywhere in the US simply retain moisture and are rotting your building out. And the precautions that need to be taken to avoid that from happening can often be far more expensive than using materials that do breathe properly. Our entire book goes into that deeply. It’s basically building biology for North America — what we can do in North America today to build buildings that won’t have these trapped moisture problems. And in Europe, these materials are very, very common. The particular building biology institute that I graduated from has been giving doctorate degrees in this for 55 years in Germany. And it’s a large worldwide movement that’s virtually unknown in America, but rapidly gaining traction.

Kim: We did an interview last year with Rudolph and Amita, the owners of Bio Shield Paint. He’s been for at least 30 years bringing non-toxic paint and clays to the world. I spoke to Rudolph the other day, and he said it’s amazing how slow it’s still going. You would think because of the green industry there would be this surge, but it’s almost like there’s this environmental intent and awareness, but the infrastructure and the implementation is not caught up yet.

George: Yes. If we’re going to make it happen on a large scale, then it has to be basically in a non-disruptive way. We have to have transition technologies that allow people to still make money the first time out when they’re using these new materials. The big lesson we got — even using what I thought were very simple products like faswall clay treated wood chip block and different AAC blocks — it’s an entire building culture that doesn’t do this. And who’s paying these people to learn this now, with the entire building field basically shut down? The new building starts for homes are way down. It’s the perfect time to go back to school, but no one’s being paid to go learn. So we have to have a way through it.

George: And for us, our big breakthrough in affordability was bringing in these four by eight sheeting materials that solve the breathing wall issue with conventional skill sets. Meaning we could make even lightweight trailers — even lighter weight than conventional — because we’re one layer direct on every aspect of the building, including the floors, where we have a three-quarter inch magnesium board that becomes the full finish floor and structure in one layer. We simply full-finish them like gigantic tiles. And with the roofing — where we put it on, it’s nothing underneath it, it’s watertight, it’s everything. Extremely straightforward technology that we’ve proven in literally hundreds and hundreds of buildings now. So it’s a chance to break the stalemate of what we’re doing with today’s modern construction.

Kim: It’s so exciting to be listening to you and talking with you. You’re really made for what you’re doing.

George: I have no choice.

Kim: I know what that’s like.

George: I was once asked in a lecture why I do this, and I said, because it’s so much more difficult not to do this. We just have to do this. It’s so incredibly overdue. But now the conditions are correct. And interestingly, even the first factories that we’re making in both Florida and in Tacoma, Washington are being financed through Canadian companies that get all their money through the Chinese. And our finance people just ask, where have you been? We can’t imagine why this industry hasn’t happened in North America, except the entrenched industry has done everything to make it not happen. But why even bother with North America? Seven or eight percent of the world’s construction was made in America last year and 68% in China. So that’s the good news.

Kim: What about Europe?

George: Europe — it’s down quite a bit too. Only like 11 or 12% of the entire world’s construction was in Europe last year, and a massive depression of their housing and building industry as well. So at least the Asian cultures that are doing far more advanced technologies are dominating the entire construction scene.

Kim: That’s going to aggravate a lot of Americans, but I know what you mean.

George: They show me the video of the six-story hotel that was built in 66 days flat and renting out rooms 66 days after starting construction.

Kim: Where was this?

George: This is in New Guizhou, the third largest city in China.

Kim: Wow.

George: So all of this is possible.

Kim: Sounds like a ninja construction team.

George: Yeah. It was just remarkable to see the level of sophisticated prefabrication. And even though they are using lots of toxic materials in China, basically because they’ve been providing for the West for so long, there are PhD level scientists at the top of the government doing everything to reverse that trend. And luckily, no sheet rock, drywall, or OSB — so big, big advantages to start. And it helps that at the entire top of the government, you have to have a PhD in chemistry, physics, biology, or engineering. No lawyers at the top, no MBAs, no financial manipulators. And of course it is just breathtaking to be involved, especially with the eco-cities in China. Very, very little is being talked about in the American press about those eco-cities. But the 12 most advanced cities in the world are under construction in China now. They’re hiring the best Norwegian, Swiss, and German architects in the world on these completely sustainable future cities.

Kim: Wow. Have you been videoing any of this?

George: I haven’t on the cities. The best reports going on about the cities in China are from the Economist quarterly technology reports. And it’s breathtaking to read about it. The scale involved is very, very encouraging. A lot of it revolves around organic food where all the food has to be grown organically within the city limits on the physical buildings, and transportation systems of electric boats and canals everywhere.

Kim: Very interesting.

George: Incredible livable cities, right? And they’re already being built. We’re completely unaware of it here in this country.

Kim: I hope somebody is capturing this truly.

George: At least you can get it. You just have to look way beyond conventional press here in America.

Kim: How are you viewed in China? Do they love you?

George: Well, I love being there. I’ve built a home in Leshan at the Grand Buddha and have even started a family in China. Yeah. So I go back and forth constantly. And it’s just so encouraging that so many of the ancient concepts of Confucianism and of course Buddhism and Taoism are gaining a huge renaissance in China right now.

Kim: You’d never know unless you talk to people that are going back and forth.

George: Yeah. And it’s simply not in our press at all. Even though the Chinese government is sponsoring millions of monks, putting monks back into all the monasteries, and has the largest restoration program in world history going on, restoring the temples and the monasteries.

Kim: Oh my God. You definitely wouldn’t hear it.

George: The Chinese government — yes. The elderly are just delighted to see this renaissance going on. And because China’s growth is so rapid, and almost frighteningly rapid and so westernized — at the same time, the recognition of the ancient traditions and the restoration of the temples and monasteries is adding a balancing factor to that. It just shows incredible intelligence in very, very high places in the government.

Kim: Is it hard for you to go back and forth because you’re really between very different worlds?

George: Yes, yes. And so concerned about the rate of change here in America being so incredibly slow compared to what’s going on in China, where they have a very clear five-year plan, 50-year plan, 100-year plan, and 500-year plan. In China they know exactly where they’re going with this. And because they will run our banks — easily within five years they’ll own our banks outright — and they’ll simply un-fund hundreds of our polluting industries, which they are systematically doing right now in China. So it’s incredibly encouraging that someplace on earth gets it.

Kim: Many people have said that the Chinese government has polluted the air and the land terribly in China. This is the other side, the underbelly, right?

George: Meaning the Western needs, right? For years and years being this huge exporter of products, they had little or no control to American and European specifications. And now they’re spitting that out en masse as they become their own largest consumer base in the world. And yes, they got through the entire 2008 period virtually unscathed by simply — the exports to America went down over 30 and 40% in some of the years and it didn’t even faze them. They are their own market now. And educated Chinese do not admire — in fact, there’s an incredible resentment for the types of technologies that were propagated in China and that they do not plan on perpetuating. Systematically right now they’re kicking out all the American and European pharmaceutical companies. They’re giving them five or six years to get out. Not one article appears in the Western press. Even the Europeans won’t publish this.

Kim: Nobody would know. This is like a news brief from the inside of —

George: China. How out of our press this is — is mind boggling. When you’re in China, you just can’t fathom what a media bubble we’re living in. How can you keep something this large out of the press? We’ve been effective — the public is not aware of these things at all.

Kim: You say on your website, the largest industry on earth is building construction. Even in North America, it’s double the size of the auto industry, which is the second largest industry in the USA.

George: Two or three years ago that was true.

Kim: And now what?

George: Now our housing — and especially in housing — our entire construction industry has diminished.

Kim: Crashed, right?

George: And of course our auto industry has gone way, way up. So I probably need to change that statement. The auto industry is just slightly larger right now than the total of our construction industry, because we still have a healthy commercial building industry and a healthy renovation industry and reuse of some buildings.

Kim: You know what’s interesting, George, is that there are a lot of people who think and believe and feel that the environmental approach to buildings is simply a political one. And honestly, after reading your website and listening to you, I’m so excited because it has gravity — it has serious gravity.

George: Right, right, right. At the mineral level of rethinking how we do every single part of our construction industry. The laws of nature are going to win and pure science is going to eclipse all the political manipulation that’s gone on — the greenwashing we might call it. Yes, it’s very embarrassing. It has nothing to do with housing the world properly or getting anything that actually works over time. Luckily the science is in. Politically, how we’ve kept this even out of the educational curriculum at the university level is really quite an incredible phenomenon — how educated minds can be kept away from all these fundamentals.

Kim: It’s pretty profound because I think it ends up being more like hypnosis and brainwashing with the permission of people.

George: Right. The paycheck still arrived, so it must be okay. But now when the paycheck stops coming, we have hope because people are not being rewarded for extremely detrimental behavior. And yes, the Chinese are happy not to be paid to do these polluting materials in the future. The consequences have been so severe for China in terms of air and water quality. And we always point out that it was only like six or eight months ago that the last of the old guard guys died — the 1949 revolutionaries that were all about China owning the market and then cleaning up later. That meant they took on whatever they could to raise their economic level up. And now it’s later in China. Now it’s all PhD physicists, chemists, biologists and engineers running the entire show. And they’re completely intent on cleaning up. They’re spending a hundred times more on air and water cleanup per capita than America right now. The scale is really mind boggling — and that they can afford it is a big, big difference between what’s going on there and what’s going on here.

Kim: Some people are very afraid that the United States mortgages have been sold and turned over to China because the United States is in debt to China. Is that what’s —

George: Well, especially on the land issues — yes. With the new Chinese mega-cities that will probably be built here, industrial cities basically making all the Walmart stuff here in the future. Yes. And there are dozens of municipalities around the country vying to get the Chinese in and they’re promising to hire —

Kim: Now you’re talking about in America.

George: Yes. They will own entire cities in America in the future. There’s no question about it. We have no other way to pay off our debt except land. And yes, many are going to be shocked, but many, many more will do anything to get the abandoned factories filled up again.

Kim: Foreign trade zones I noticed have been easily made available to the Chinese business owners and to Chinese companies. I noticed this looking at the list of foreign trade zones around America. I think that your observations and experience, if true, then we Americans can learn a great deal from the good things that the Chinese are doing and take heed.

George: Yes, yes. Especially in the areas of food and medicine, where China is number one, of course, in everything related to organic food and natural medicine.

Kim: I never heard that. We’ve all —

George: By a margin so huge. Even in the area of biomolecules, in the area of solar — China has 10 times the installed solar as Germany, which is number two. Little things we’re just never told in our press.

Kim: Well, you know, in the press, the Chinese have been accused of providing horrible dog food and cat food and animals dying from their food. So that’s what we get.

George: The New York Times published an article that pointed out that the probability of getting a bad product out of China is one-tenth the probability of getting a bad product out of Mexico or India. The scale is so huge that anything can be pointed out as an example. But it’s the safest products on earth of any country, if you talk pure numbers.

Kim: When you talk about modern construction techniques, also on your site, you said the average home exchanges air with the outside environment only 0.5 times every hour. And you say that this low exchange ratio results in a buildup of stale air and potential toxins in every room of the home. Then you talk about breathing walls, which allow complete air exchanges three times every hour. And you say that this extremely high exchange ratio allows toxicity to dissipate right through the wall, ensuring fresh air with a minimum of potentially toxic buildup. And then you explain what set the cornerstone of the breathing wall system — there’s a ceiling, a wall, a floor design that combines with passive solar construction for wintertime heating and draws upon the natural coolness of the earth for summertime cooling. Since these breathing walls are allowing complete air exchanges three times every hour — and since we have significantly more pollution from even the spraying of the air project that’s been going on all over the world for the last 20 years, to electromagnetic pollution, which is very disconcerting, including the restructuring of the grid, our light systems and making everything wireless — what do you think about that and how do you envision that relating to these healthy breathing walls? If it’s exchanging three times an hour, is it still better for us if the pollution outside is worse?

George: Right, right. Well, to clarify one thing — that whole three air exchanges per hour wouldn’t be completely through the wall. That would be combining a natural air exchange, like a cool tower and other natural methods of exchanging air. The wall itself would only exchange 0.2 or 0.3 air exchanges per hour. But when you combine that with natural ventilation, operable windows, and tall cool towers, we get it up to three to five. But the biggest issue is that the air that passes through a clay-cellulose filter like straw clay or clay treated wood chip is purified in the same way a charcoal filter purifies a pool. The studies done in Germany showed that straw bale buildings or straw clay buildings — some of them are over 300 years old — have clean air breathing through them and no one can quite explain the whole phenomenon of how cellulose combined with clay purifies everything it touches, just like packing clay on your skin will draw out the toxins and purify your blood.

George: So it’s an ideal medium that way. In urban environments we will use filtered air that’s processed through mechanical equipment to filter it, because the outdoor air is so bad. But at least we know the air that made it through a foot thick of straw clay or foot of clay treated wood chip is extremely high quality air compared to the air leaking through a poorly built door or window. So the idea of the breathing wall is no air exchange through badly built doors and windows, and most of the air exchange coming through the wall. The makeup air being through extremely well-done filters.

Kim: Very interesting.

George: That part can get expensive, but we often say we can take a huge part of the budget that typically goes into the mechanical system and put it into the wall, where the wall becomes a storage and distribution system as well as keeping out rain and all that. Spend way more on the wall system and reduce the mechanical costs way down.

Kim: If the wall system can function like a filter — you know how eventually with filters you have to throw out your filter.

George: They should clog up, right. And the straw clay buildings in Germany never clogged up. They process poisons like no other materials on earth. So you’re right — they filter. Typically a synthetic filter will clog and it has to be replaced, but straw clay doesn’t. It’s an incredible phenomenon. And even the stuccos can be designed with these natural mineral blends to do that same type of thing. And of course the Germans have taken it much further with companies like Keim Mineral Systems, that create paints and stuccos that teach a surface how to breathe. This is a group that has finished the Vatican, the White House and the Pentagon. The science is absolute. They actually talk about how they can teach a surface how to breathe — like an old bridge painted with all these toxic, pore-clogging materials, that they can charge with the natural minerals and pull moisture off the surface in the form of vapor for the next multiple hundreds of years. They even have a brochure of a building they painted 120 years ago in perfect condition. So these guys are winning. And that’s the good news.

Kim: How extraordinary. That group was on the verge of bankruptcy for 35 years here in America because people bought paint based on low price, right?

George: You’re talking about Keim. And the other group we’re working with is Silicoat, who makes a very similar blend that charges the surface, teaching it how to pull moisture off itself and blow it off as vapor with no water marks on the walls for the next multiple hundreds of years.

Kim: If it blows it off as vapor, are we then going to breathe it?

George: It’s the same way your body blows off two quarts of water a day and you’re not wet. The charge between the clay in your bones and the cellulose in your tissue creates a push-pull that pulls off two quarts of water a day and blows it off as vapor.

Kim: Very interesting. Very, very interesting.

George: So it’s the same principle we’re doing in our walls. That’s why it will last and last.

Kim: I noticed something very interesting. You know, we’ve been talking a lot about entrainment with different guests we’ve had on the show. There’s something on your site — it’s either on geoswan.com or it’s breathingwalls.com. But the question is, what is air-entrained concrete walls?

George: Oh, that’s aerated — it’s all. It’s where they just blow air bubbles into the concrete, and that helps it out a lot. Makes it dehydrate much faster, gives it higher insulated value, and creates a paramagnetic charge next to the diamagnetic clay, creating this more natural dehydration. Now Portland cement itself is very, very difficult when it’s a dense mass to dry out. So aerating it has been very, very helpful. Products like Habel block — you know, that instead of going 110 pounds per cubic foot, goes down to 38 pounds per cubic foot, the rest of that volume being all air bubbles.

Kim: Now Habel block used to be available only in Europe and Asia for 65 years. And you say that it’s now available in the US.

George: Yes, for the last 20 some odd years. And several companies have come from Europe and started up here. All of them have gone into bankruptcy two and three times.

Kim: Don’t you think it’s because everybody’s ahead of their time — they’re standing at the advanced point waiting for society and consciousness to catch up?

George: Well that, and they’re European based where even hundred-year mortgages are common throughout Europe where homes last three to 700 years. So it’s a different building culture. And when those German, Swiss and Norwegian guys came over, they were shocked. Americans replace their own homes every 35, 40 years or have an economic life of like 17 years where maintenance costs go up so high after that. It’s a cultural thing — in Europe you pass the home along to your children. You don’t start life off with a mortgage in the same kind of way. So yeah — I used to think that would change in America, because for about 18 years I only built with straw clay, rammed earth, faswall, clay treated wood chip block or Habel block. Those are disruptive and do add substantial costs to the overall construction of a building. And the culture didn’t change. The good thing is, I used to always joke back in the early two thousands that we needed to take a moratorium on our building and send everybody back to school. And of course it happened — but we didn’t go back to school. So we do have basically a moratorium on building and an excellent opportunity to now really embrace some of these other technologies.

Kim: Who’s buying your new book Breathing Walls?

George: A lot of building biology types. We’re selling more in Australia than any single other country other than America. And we’re not advertising in any way — we’re just servicing a market that is already aware in that area, and what are the steps they can do now to mitigate these issues going on with their buildings.

Kim: So is this for a contractor or is this for architects? Could the general person buy this book and learn something totally different? Or do you have to be very far along?

George: Well, it’s real deep into the physics of how moisture moves through different mediums. And if that becomes your criteria for selection, then automatically you don’t touch the materials that don’t qualify. They don’t work. It’s a huge admission that we have an entire building culture that doesn’t work. It simply comes apart at the seams, burns, molds, and rots.

Kim: Phil Callahan wrote a lot about paramagnetic activity with regard to the soil and agriculture and wellbeing.

George: Right, right. And when we relate those principles to why we can consider, like a solid rammed earth two-foot-thick wall, a breathing wall — the crystals and the mineral content of the soil is completely different than a two-foot thick concrete wall. And it’s alive. It is moving minute amounts of moisture through itself electromagnetically. And yes, they dehydrate much more rapidly than a concrete wall and are vital and alive. So he went deep into the vitality of soils.

Kim: I think he’s made one of the great contributions to humanity — kind of like the Tesla of the soil, agriculture, and health. I don’t think most of us have begun to get a feel for his contribution yet.

George: Yes, yes. And we have to have almost a complete revolution in everything and how we grow food, to bring those minerals back and to bring basically the plus-minus charges — paramagnetism next to diamagnetism, bone next to tissue — creating the push-pulls that levitate blood all day up into our ears.

Kim: Can you give the audience a frame of reference for paramagnetism and diamagnetism?

George: Very electromagnetic charges — ten to the minus six smaller than regular magnetism. So these are like the rudder of the rudder. One of the newsletters that Buckminster Fuller used to put out is called Trim Tab. It’s the four-inch by four-inch piece of metal on the rudder of a boat — the rudder of the rudder. And he talks about how there are rudders of rudders going all the way down to this electromagnetic level, ten to the minus six smaller than the electromagnetic charges, and they run the entire show on the spin of electrons. The trim tab — the four-inch by four-inch little piece of metal at the rudder of the rudder. Yes, that’s the level we want to study because the spin of the electrons is everything to do with creating the basic 92 elements.

George: It’s just tiny angle and frequency changes that create every manifestation in nature. Buckminster Fuller was teaching us that what we always need to study are these angles and frequencies to explain everything — that everything’s 99.99% empty air, just spins and angles slightly changing. And of course that’s what we’re disturbing now with the electromagnetism in our homes, our wifi, and everything going on in our atmosphere. These subtle, subtle changes can create gigantic differences — between the difference of creating an avocado or a Boeing 747. Extremely small changes between those two things on this electromagnetic level. So the trim tab is really a concept of study. A four-inch by four-inch piece of metal on a gigantic five-foot by twenty-foot rudder on an ocean liner is running the entire show.

George: It’s the rudder of the rudder. And now when you study the electron spins inside the metal of the little four by four piece of metal, you understand that it’s running the little four-inch by four-inch piece of metal. So obviously we have a saying in building biology that when we deal with people with chemical sensitivities — 100% of the people with chemical sensitivities have electromagnetic sensitivities. If you handle something on the chemical level, it’s too late. It has to be handled on the electromagnetic level. So cleaning up the environment on these levels is extremely important. And studying ancient mineral sciences gives us a clue of how we can create sustainability on this, at the electron level.

Kim: Since most of us — I would say those of us who are paying attention to the changes structurally with the grid, with wifi, with microwave stations — the grid is being redone and is being turned into a wireless grid. Are you aware of that?

George: Yes, yes. On a massive scale. And to the great credit of the building biology institute, it’s become one of the great vanguards of how and why we shouldn’t be using wifi at all and going deep into the science of what’s happening on the spin of the electron level with this new technology permeating the air everywhere. Studies out of Europe really confirm it. In England they’ve removed all wifi within a mile and a half of every grade school, just from massive complaints of headaches in kids. The neurons in the brain for young people are not formed yet. And these subtle, subtle energy shifts are being shown not to be beneficial.

Kim: The thing that’s so concerning to me is that it’s being done at such a large and high volume scale in terms of the intensity — not just the large scale, but the intensity, the dramatic shift from a grid that’s not wireless to being turned into wireless. This doesn’t even include the microwave stations. We’re just talking about everything else with respect to building biology. Working with mineralized, live buildings and this magnesium oxide for example, and the other materials you work with — how do we defend ourselves?

George: That’s really interesting because we’ve been working with a former NASA scientist, Dr. Jim Beal, who was in charge of protecting the astronauts and the first space capsules from EMFs. He’s our number one advocate. He’s taken our quarter-inch four by eight sheet of our MGO board, tilted it against the window that’s facing a cell tower, and is measuring a full 98% blockage. There’s no other material commonly available and affordable that can block quite like that.

Kim: Wow.

George: So we build with the thicker materials on both sides of a wall and then treat all the wood with the magnesium oxide. We can easily get 95 to 98% blockage — except at the windows and doors. In fact, cell phones don’t work inside these buildings. You have to take your cell phone directly over to a window. So there’s hope on this level.

Kim: That’s great.

George: Yeah. We’re working with a couple of groups in Colorado Springs that have gotten gigantic grants from the US military studying all this EMP shielding from sunspots, and they’re doing a good amount of work with the magnesium oxide as well. And of course we’re copper-coating some of our panels, mainly for aesthetic appeal, but that even enhances the numbers and types of shielding that the board will provide.

Kim: Very interesting. Wow.

George: So yes, the minerals can do it all. We all know that they can work at the level of our foods and our medicines, but it’s wonderful when the actual material surrounding you is also emanating those health-giving fields.

Kim: That’s so exciting.

George: Yeah. One of our favorite books is called the Lekythos, published over 900 years ago in Germany — it simply means sticky mud. What the ancient European cultures did to create these muds that, combined with straw and wood chips, would bind and stay together hundreds of years later. And sure enough, they had a whole chapter on how to mix magnesium oxide with cow blood, cow urine, and cow dung to create these incredible sticky muds that were balancing the pH of the timber frames they packed it next to — without shrinkage — and balanced the moisture content of the wood for multiple hundreds and even up to thousands of years.

Kim: What do you think we should be doing with air conditioning?

George: Not using it at all. Our modern AC should really be considered medically criminal because it heats and cools your tissue and not your bone mass. It’s a short wave. If you’re four degrees off between your bone temperature and your tissue, you go into hypothermia. It’s absolutely harmful. What we do with our modern heating and cooling — we’ve created a building type because it can’t dehydrate properly where we can’t use natural radiant heat and radiant cool in the same ways we did in the past when we had regular good old lath and plaster. You could have steam heat in your building — they all knew you had to have a gap between the lath and a big ball of plaster between that created the thermal mass that could dehydrate properly. Steam heat, hot water, sun, and fire are the only natural heat.

George: They create a long wave that goes straight through your tissue into your bone mass and heats from your bones out. Your bones have three and a half hours of thermal storage and your tissue has 10 minutes. Which one should we be heating and cooling? In other words, we’re constantly turning up our heating and cooling because we’re only heating and cooling our tissue, that eventually will heat your bone mass — but it’s an extremely slow, inefficient process and extremely hard on your body to constantly have a different temperature between your bone and your tissue. And you burn hundreds of calories per minute balancing the temperature between your bone and your tissue. And if you don’t keep it balanced — if you’re four degrees off for 20 minutes, you go into complete brain fog. Every resource in your body has to get those two balanced again or blood won’t gravitate to your ears. The viscosity will change. Everything is dependent on that balancing and the bone mass temperature. And historically, that’s all we ever had was sun, fire, and hot water to heat. And cool is only cold water. And we can introduce cold water cooling into our modern thermal mass building without the walls rotting out.

George: One of the common systems used in Europe is to take ice cold water in a crown molding with a one-inch gap behind the crown molding and put a cold air film created by the cold water against the thermal mass wall. That isolates the thermal mass to the inside of the wall and with cellulose — we don’t have that anymore. Our modern buildings are only kept up with the AC. We have to force the inside of the cavity to dry with our heating and cooling systems, and it has nothing to do with how human physiology works. We’re totally shortchanged in these modern buildings. In fact, that alone justifies the breathing wall — is that we can now use natural heating and cooling in the building again, like the old lath and plaster. And none of that works with drywall, plywood, and Hardy board and materials that are holding moisture in.

Kim: So we wouldn’t necessarily need swamp coolers either.

George: We could reintroduce swamp coolers into our faswall and rammed earth buildings, because the walls can deal with the moisture. They can take on massive amounts of moisture — like a swamp cooler just pouring cold air over a bunch of felt and blowing air through it — and then dehydrate themselves, blowing that moisture off as vapor hours and hours later with no water buildup on the walls or in the air.

Kim: So we don’t really need air conditioning.

George: No, no. Not with a properly designed building. In fact, we have four buildings here in Austin that have no central AC. We have massive eaves, cold water misting on the roof, cool towers, and a minimum one-foot thick thermal mass walls with the thermal mass isolated to the inside. What’s a cool tower? Just a good old fashioned central atrium — typically three foot by three or four foot tower that goes a few feet above the top of the roof, with vents in it, typically with a Venturi fan or a solar fan on top to assist pulling hot air out during the hot afternoon. With vents opened at night, cold air drops like a lead balloon down the tower and sucks into the walls. Works incredibly well in our climate here in Austin. And we even with four inches of thermal mass on the inside of your walls — it will take three or four hours for that to bleed out during the daytime.

Kim: What do you do about floors and carpets?

George: No carpet, of course. No carpet. And of course ceramic floors — or ideally rammed earth field floors. Our book goes very deep into how to replace underneath a conventional slab — putting down clay treated wood chip and dry chips, and then instead of a vapor barrier putting a breathing filter cloth, and then pouring a conventional slab and then capping the slab with a quarter inch of MGO backer board, real similar to Hardy backer. But then you’ve created a full breathing underneath the slab and a medium on top that can exchange moisture. So you can even teach a slab how to breathe. And of course, because the cost of the MGO cements are 12 times higher than Portland cement in North America, we’re still stuck in the large massive areas of the building using Portland cement. But even Portland cement can behave properly, especially used in things like the faswall block that creates a breathing jacket around the cores of the concrete that are isolated toward the inside of the block of the wall, that dehydrate properly when they have a jacket of clay treated wood around them that blows the moisture off as vapor.

Kim: Where are you at about refrigerators?

George: The modern refrigerators are really, really bad. But there are some really good ones — Sun Frost, for example.

Kim: Sun Frost.

George: Yeah. It uses one-tenth the energy. But those are rare and expensive at this time. So ideally we’d go back to ice blocks, built into the walls that are a foot thick with the isolated thermal mass. And of course, even ice cooling for the building where you create like a large ice cube in a separate building or built into the wall that you refreeze at night, and then use that as a cooling medium during the day. We can run that into the troughs along the top of the ceiling and get this wonderful cool. And here in Austin, we can explain it really, really easily — how you can cool by that method. We have these beautiful springs in downtown Austin that have cold water on a big mass of rocks flowing all summer. And on a 110 degree day, you can stand 40 feet away from that wall for 40 minutes. You’ll extract all the heat out of your bones and walk away from that wall and feel like you’re in heaven for three and a half hours. All your bones are cool from your core out to your tissue. And yes, that’s exactly what we want to create in the walls of these buildings.

Kim: This is so exciting. I have to tell you, I’m ready to build something.

George: It actually works. And that’s a great thing. Nothing to do with theory — it actually has worked for multiple thousands of years. Our big challenge is how to create that in a modern building environment where everything’s based on building extremely rapidly and low cost. And we’re making progress. Obviously the little trailers and modular homes we’re making do not have a deep amount of thermal mass on their insides, but at least they dehydrate several times faster and are effectively much, much more insulated. You know, the R-value ratings they use for modern buildings are done under perfect control, low humidity conditions. At 30% humidity, the R-value of fiberglass cuts in half. And at 90% humidity, it all turns into a conductor, not an insulator. So we’re pumping up our AC all day long to dehydrate the moisture in our walls — a terrible way to hold up a building and extremely hard on your health.

Kim: I think most of us feel hopelessly stuck. We’re in artificial lighting.

George: That’s right. We’re all stuck in these 1970s buildings that don’t work. But the health issues alone more than justify the higher cost of a thermal mass wall. But in between, we’re still going to have to build a lot of buildings with sticks and sheathing — simply because there’s an entire building culture built around that. Luckily we’re the only ones on earth doing it. The rest of the world does build with thermal mass and has for centuries — places that ran out of wood a lot sooner than we did. So that’s the good news. There are very few stick buildings being built in China, and those that are being built are at least built with fully breathing materials.

Kim: You’ve traveled a lot. What are some of your favorite places on earth besides China?

George: Parts of Germany are still really steeped in tradition. And the respect I have for the building science and biology institutes that started in Germany over 55 years ago — basically putting high level science around common sense. Now Germany has moved away from a lot of that into extremely high tech solutions for building homes. Typically a common home in Berlin would cost the equivalent of about $500 a square foot to build. So yes, they played around with some extremely exotic ways of building. But it always comes back to these basic natural building technologies, and then simply putting high level science under all that common sense to make it more palatable to the rest of the world. So that’s been a really, really fun place to be where at least that impulse to do that and to put it into the educational system has been in Germany for many, many years.

Kim: They seem to be at the forefront of a lot of great works.

George: Yes, yes. Great hope in that. But the way they’re doing it in this legalistic kind of way is kind of sad. I’ve visited a lot of these multimillion dollar building biology buildings in Germany, and they even regulate what doorknobs you can put on your house. You can be put in prison for hiring your own plumber. Everybody’s got to be union. Are you serious? The guy cleaning up your yard is making the equivalent of $38 an hour. And yes, you’re on a 10-year waiting list to have a home built. Young people don’t get new homes in Germany. They hire top level building biologists in the government. You have to be licensed as both a doctor and an architect to practice building biology in Germany for the government. So extremely well educated, but effectively — too many laws, too much overregulation.

Kim: Yeah. Overregulation.

George: Yeah. We’re trying to do it from the bottom up in America. And of course it’s been very slow. In Germany, it’s simply illegal to build the wrong home in the wrong climate, and only good things can get built. But it means far fewer buildings get built, and young people don’t even have a chance. But now that’s happened in America even with our bad building culture. So there’s a lot to be learned about building buildings that will last multiple hundreds of years and have solid principles around their construction.

Kim: Have you been to Egypt?

George: No, I haven’t. The whole Middle East is very, very intriguing. I think its recovery will be based a lot on these natural sciences. There’s a huge movement throughout the Middle East to reject a lot of Western values and to look at the deep common sense of multiple centuries of experience.

Kim: What are some of the other countries you’ve been to that are very receptive to building biology?

George: Venezuela and Bolivia. I spent a month in Bolivia where they’re building a large magnesium oxide factory. Brazil is really good now. All those countries are basically ascending in a really wonderful kind of way and seriously critical of what’s happened in America. And not so much trying to emulate us. That’s what I’d say is the biggest trend difference in the last 10 or 15 years — there used to be this almost worship for American decadence, our bad foods and our drugs and all that. And very little admiration for that worldwide right now. So there’s great hope that they’ll spit us out.

Kim: You definitely don’t sound like a patriot, if you know what I’m saying.

George: Oh, in one way no. But I see what I’m doing as totally patriotic. In other words, natural capitalism would’ve allowed all of this to happen long ago — would’ve kicked out our pharmaceutical companies based on pure what works. Natural capitalism is about the best coming to the top. And of course we have nothing like capitalism in America at all. Not even close. We’re subsidizing the worst technologies on earth. So to me, this has nothing to do with American capitalism whatsoever. In fact, the joke is they’re far more American in China right now than we are — almost unbridled capitalism. But they did figure out how to put a cap on it called no land ownership.

Kim: Meaning unlike here where anything goes.

George: Yeah. You put a cap on it and you can make all the millions you want, but they only have 106 billionaires in all of China. And until a couple years ago, the richest guy had under 3 billion. Now there is one guy with 11 billion, and the next guy down is 5 billion. Nobody’s rich enough to buy the government. And it could have a lot to do with how they can get top level scientists into the top of the government.

Kim: That’s interesting.

George: Financial manipulators are considered low level work in China. Bankers and all that have far, far lower status and are not allowed in government work.

Kim: You know what though? I totally can understand that.

George: And no lawyers. A thousand to one —

Kim: Throw the lawyers out.

George: Four lawyers per capita in America, 4,000 to one. And they’re doing fine without it.

Kim: Although the Chinese are deep and steeped in metals — gold, silver, platinum.

George: Yes. Because they plan on having a currency that can be backed in the future. Yes. And since 2008, they’ve been privately demanding an audit of our Federal Reserve board. And yes, they’ll eventually get it. And everyone knows that’s absolutely the end of our financial system. They are completely aware of all the manipulations that have gone on. And they have not been the beneficiary of the eastern cabal — or the European bankers, whatever you want to call it. And yes, they will eclipse it completely. And they’re just about to do it now.

Kim: As we get to the end of this first interview with you, talk a little bit about geodesic domes.

George: Yes. That we did for years and years. They have a long ways to go. Right now they’re based on spherical trigonometry and using the six vectors of a tetrahedron to coordinate space instead of X, Y, and Z. And with Fuller’s synergetic mathematics, he was able to define all the triangles that can create a sphere with whole numbers. And it was quite a breakthrough to get a mathematics that can handle all these incredible, what appeared to be odd angles, and basically define a sphere with whole numbers and make it something engineers can deal with. So it held extreme potential. But for years we built what I call wooden spaceships — all the right shapes with the geodesics and all the efficiencies, but all the wrong materials and processes. And Fuller’s life goal was to create a building industry based around the geodesic dome and high technology that would handle all of this in extremely sophisticated kinds of ways.

George: And he built beautiful prototypes that traveled all over the world. And of course none of them really obtained mass production. That was his life’s goal — to free people up from mortgages and have air-deliverable buildings that would literally cost one-tenth of what a site-built building would cost. It’s an extremely humanitarian goal — to get this to happen on a mass scale. He achieved some success for a little while, right after World War II. I think about 1,500 of his Dymaxion homes were made and traveled all over the world to inspire the GIs coming back from the war into automated housing and to take all those factories that had been making the war machine and turn them into housing machines. A lot of it’s been written on why that never succeeded. The nature of how we finance homes and all that — the unstable mortgage markets — really do not finance building one home properly. Even in 1948, he calculated that it would be about six billion of 1948 dollars to tool up to build one house properly, and then of course create millions of homes at one-tenth of the cost. And of course no one invested like that. Now it would be over a hundred billion.

Kim: You mean to establish the blueprint for it, the production level manufacturing?

George: Well, yeah. It all outlined, of course, a lot of the technologies that to do it didn’t even exist. But it outlined what research and development programs would have to go on to create every one of the aspects for self-cleaning homes that grew all their own food, collected water, did all of that. And now a lot of the technology is actually here, but the will and the finance to do that properly is not coordinated at this time. We do feel it can happen incrementally though. And even this little SIPS industry that just prefabs the exterior envelope and interior walls of the house is at least in the direction. And because that industry is thriving right now — it’s one of the only areas of construction that are thriving in America right now — it’s showing great promise. And many of those factories are owned by people with much higher education levels than in the past, and they definitely see an industry that could grow with these natural materials.

Kim: I think you have to have multifaceted levels of commitment from different supply chains in this to make the thing go into a standard. And so if you don’t have really full commitments — many players have to get together and say, that’s it, we’re doing it, we’re bringing it in, we’re creating it. And when you get a certain amount, maybe those players will be the trim tab that sets this into a new standard.

George: Yeah. The critical mass. And that’s coming very, very close now. Having the whole housing industry basically evaporate really, really got people thinking much more clearly. People do not want to see the same housing industry reintroduced. And a lot of young people have no desire for the seven-bedroom home of their parents, nor any practical way of ever seeing that happen again. So people get it this time. This isn’t just a little temporary blip.

Kim: I think this transition, though — so many people are suffering. There’s a lot of suffering and fear and anxiety, and a lot of jobs have disappeared. The vacuum though is ripe for new industrial expressions, new biological expressions, new processes and protocols, and this consciousness to have its way in new types of financing, new structures, and a whole systems approach to living, period.

George: Probably never been a time in our recent history when it’s been better conditions for change. All the temporary uncertainty — what to do during the transition when so many apparent things seem to be coming apart. And government could play a much, much more active role. And they may — it may turn out the most advanced homes in the world are made by FEMA. And that’s largely because of the massive lawsuits and the incredible trauma of having to abandon 120,000 trailers and put people into five-star hotels, and having over 3,000 kids with permanent respiratory and immune system damage that will have to be paid for by the federal government. So yes, at least economically it’s being quantified — the high cost of not evolving industries or protecting polluting industries.

George: But yes, there needs to be a way that people can get onto the new technologies without disrupting their lifestyles. And we just have to show that it’s going to be more profitable to be involved with these technologies even in the short term. And that’s why what I feel the types of things we’re doing now just seem ridiculous — like a bandaid on a cancer victim — but they’re in the direction of putting the foundation down for something that can actually thrive in the future. So there’s more hope now than there’s ever been.

Kim: How well did you know Bucky Fuller?

George: Not real well. I graduated in 1975 from Western Washington University, and there were no jobs at the time. I was lucky enough to know how to live with no money and just hung on. I just traveled around wherever his lectures were and got very inspired on the geodesic dome. Moved back to the Seattle area after a couple years of traveling around his lectures and started a dome company with friends. We ended up building like 300 domes in the Seattle area and really, really got familiar with what was not working about the construction field, even adapting conventional construction to geodesic domes. That was in the early eighties. And we were building them extremely tight — those were in the days when it was all about energy efficiency with zero consideration to materials, and people were getting sick in our domes. It was just becoming crystal clear that conventional materials only work when you build in a sloppy way to allow massive air exchange through doors and windows and poorly built construction.

George: So the irony is that your probability of being poisoned in the building goes up as you spend more and more money on it and tighten up the envelope. And it was many, many years of doing those that made it crystal clear that what Buckminster was talking about — all new materials and processes based on the physiology or biocompatibility with humans — had to take place with a deep study of human physiology and the built environment. Extraordinary. I’m so excited. Buckminster Fuller’s first bankruptcy was his Stockade building system in Chicago, which was MGO bonded straw bales. And he did that in 1927 and even put his father-in-law into bankruptcy on that one. He had four bankruptcies in his lifetime, but died a multimillionaire with — I believe — 48 honorary doctorate degrees, more than any man in world history.

Kim: Wow. Did you read any of his books?

George: All of them. Yes. Over and over.

Kim: Any particular one or two that was more —

George: Integrities is a really good one about his philosophy. And then of course Synergetics One and Two about his mathematics — basically replacing the tetrahedron, the six-axis of a tetrahedron, with the X, Y, Z system. So his goal was to eliminate pi and e and Avogadro’s number. And he described the behaviors of wavy and circular things in nature with whole numbers. He couldn’t stand the number pi. One of the times he was kicked out of Harvard — he was kicked out twice and never had a degree in his life. One of his professors was writing the number pi up on the blackboard — he’s on the seventh blackboard because of course it’ll never resolve. And Bucky pops up in class one day and says, nature can’t be irrational.

George: Only your understanding of it. And they kicked him out of school for it. He invented a new mathematics and proved that all conventional math was a subset of his own. And then later he got involved with meditation because he was very enamored by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and did beautiful talks together with him. And he talked about how the ancient Vedas had a math very, very similar to what Buckminster Fuller was advocating — a holistic math that could describe all the spins and wavy things in nature with whole numbers. So his goal was that you could teach nuclear physics to a first grader without the stupid calculus trying to stair-step nature with an irrational number system that would never work.

Kim: Absolutely fascinating.

George: Yeah. So extreme hope in that — when those technologies are in the industrial equation, what looks like this incredibly complex process of making a full living, functional building will become much more straightforward.

Kim: Okay. Let’s suppose you have unlimited capital and you’re just told right now there’s unlimited capital. You can do anything you want. What do you want done?

George: Well, actually exactly what we are doing — just creating all the factories here in America to first replace our board and stick construction building culture. In other words, a transition where people with the same skill sets they have now can move right into fully non-toxic breathing buildings and create the groundwork for all the other technologies to grow — the fully automated building structures of the future.

Kim: It’s a great pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being with us.

George: And thank you for the opportunity.

Kim: Ladies and gentlemen, we have been talking with, learning from, and listening to George Swanson. You can reach him by going to geoswan.com. You can also go to breathingwalls.com. Thanks again for being here.