35 - Kristof Irwin - Positive Energy
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James: Hello, and welcome to the Marketing Passive House podcast, where we hear from architects, designers, builders, suppliers, owners, and other experts in the Passive House and high-performance building space. We'll be talking about what's working and what's needed when it comes to marketing buildings that meet or aspire to the Passive House standard. I'm your host, James Turner, and today I'm joined by

James: Kristof Irwin, director of building science at Positive Energy and host of the Building Science Podcast. Kristof, welcome to the show.

Kristof: Thanks, James. Appreciate the tables turned moment

James: It's great. Yeah, I love this. So before we get into it, and for people who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit more about who you are, what you do, and how you started on your passive house journey?

Kristof: Yes. Who I am is complicated. I have lots of roles like everyone, but in the context of this conversation, I am an MEP engineer and a building science consultant, and I have the great good fortune to work at Positive Energy with a fantastic group of people who are smart, caring, committed.

Kristof: They know their work is both challenging and very significant. Let's see. And how I got connected to Passive House. So I was deep into the ResNet world in the early aughts, I guess you could say early and mid-aughts. And around 2009 or so, I ended up getting into the technical committee and there's other things, other titles and roles there.

Kristof: But I was assigned to be basically the liaison to Phius, to actually to Passive House 'cause they're-- it was pre-split.

James: Prefious

Kristof: And it was like 2010 or '11, I do apologize when it goes back that far, it's in the past. And I was working with John Semmelhack that's how I met him and he's a good friend now and a colleague.

James: Nice

Kristof: And we were doing ResNet-Phius harmonization because ResNet was connected to Energy Star and the DOE, and Phius at that point was not, or Phius was PHI I don't know. You might know better. Like when did the... I think it was just Passive House International. Yeah, I think that's just what it was called. And so I did a couple of presentations, went to the first conferences, and the conferences were like I hope I don't say things wrong, like 100 people, maybe 200 people.

Kristof: And it had this vibe of, I wonder if this is gonna last. This like real passion and,

James: Right

Kristof: and mission, and a real vision of what could be, but maybe with a little more flavor of ephemerality, like the evanescence of it. It was-- was it growing, swelling, shrinking? Yeah, so that's how I got connected to Passive House, and I have not budged ever since.

Kristof: I'm in Austin, and we've had a lot of... Like we have our Humid Climate Conference, which is in its tenth year.

James: Noted.

Kristof: Okay, back to you, James.

James: That's really cool. It's really interesting you talk about the ephemerality. That's something... So when I first heard about Passive House it was totally out of left field for me. I was just getting interested personally in the fact that you could build houses other than standard. I'd never even really considered that there were, like, different, recipes for building.

James: And I heard about earthships, and I got interested in earthships. And then I met this fellow who I should have on this podcast, and I will, I hope named named Garth in Fredericton here. And he just, he wouldn't have it. He he was like, "I hear you about earthships. They're very interesting, but the way forward is Passive House."

James: And he was really into it. But again, this is like 2012-ish, '13, '14, somewhere in there. He was the only person in Fredericton that y- was audibly talking about this. And he had a presentation that m- five people went to. it, it had that sa- I had the same feeling as you. It's just it seems really smart I like what you're saying, but, you're just this one guy your soapbox in a way.

James: And I wondered it would go. And so it's interesting now, 12 years later, it's it worked in, in a lot of way. I've talked to people who've said I don't know if I'd call it mainstream." And I think there's a, an element of being in a bubble, but it certainly is a much larger market than it was that little time ago.

James: So have you, where you are, witnessed the sort of

Kristof: Oh my goodness, yes. What is that quote? First they try to kill you and then you win. Like it goes through all these things, right? Like we haven't won yet. And I think that there's-- that the arc of let's just say Passive House keep it kinda brand neutral. And I think it's great by the way that there's a split in some sense.

Kristof: I,

Kristof: Child of divorced parents, I, I have some triggers about it, and I recognize that for instance, if we try to use legislation as a lever, and I have a c-caveat about that the legislation can't we'll be reluctant to give one organization a monopoly saying, "Oh, if we make this part of code or you get extra points or something, then suddenly your organization has a unfair advantage in the market by this legislative act."

Kristof: So if there's two there's two. You can pick one and go there. And I also think... phius started out as an energy the importance of energy, which was really the importance of greenhouse gas emissions, which was really the health of the geobiosphere and which is us.

Kristof: We are the bio in geobiosphere. There's this subtle form of othering when we say the environment as though it's a thing out there, right? So no, it's me or nature or any of these things. So we need to really s- thinking holistically. But point is, it started as an energy thing, right?

Kristof: Which is, goes way back to gas lines in the '70s and the first Iran crisis and with the hostages. And the whole company got gaga about energy efficiency when in fact, what really mattered was exergy efficiency, meaning using what's available in the geobiosphere in large volumes, right? This is like why heat pumps are ex- are superior to gas, right?

Kristof: You destroy, in gas heating, you destroy a precious finite molecule capable of 3,000-degree flame, and in a heat pump, you leverage an otherwise unusable waste heat in the environment. Huge paradigmatic difference.

James: Yes

Kristof: but the point is that to this day, I think that Phius Passive House is still kinda rooted in conserving energy, and it really, it knows this.

Kristof: It, if it I'm personifying it. They I'll say they. They know, they, those Passive House people know that what's really happening is that they are involved in building a societal movement, and that selling health, comfort, wellbeing, a positive lived experience is what's gonna move, right? You can't just sell energy.

Kristof: I don't perceive energy, greenhouse gas emissions directly, and like just kinda rounding that out, it's We need to talk to people in ways that they can hear us and in ways that matter to them.

Kristof: And basically what we're looking to do is we're make-- we're looking to tell a lot of stakeholders let's start with the owners, that there's a cost to them in building the same way we always have.

Kristof: And that cost is less thermal comfort, poor indoor air quality, in which I, I'm happily an air, indoor air quality enthusiast and nerd. I'd love to go down that path at some point. But acoustic comfort, durability resilient energy and water systems are like the airbag of the home in the sense that it's systems that you enjoy peace of mind and satisfaction just knowing they're there, which is already a benefit to your lived experience, even if you don't use them, right?

Kristof: I don't wanna use my airbag, but I'm glad it's there. So what I'm getting at is there needs to be a holistic understanding of human psychology, of, behavioral psychology, of how large societal systems work. And just one quick plug for posi-positive energy. Like back in 2007 our motto was "Healthy Homes, Healthy Planet."

Kristof: And what we said was our mission was to change the way society thinks about and delivers indoor space to itself. So that's almost 20 years ago now, right? And so already-- and we just, my wife and I just kinda said, "Yeah, that's what it's about." And already you're going to the level of paradigms, are you familiar with the work of Donella Meadows and the concept of paradigms and leverage points? Oh, goodness. I'll do a quick overview. It's interesting. I-I'm sorry. That word interesting is interesting to me. I don't like the word interesting 'cause it almost always points to Something that it's not, it's, you could say fascinating if that's what you mean, but we say it's interesting when we really mean terrible or,

James: I

James: don't

Kristof: grim or dark.

Kristof: Yeah. So if you-- it's actually a good place to put this thought in. So let's say we recognize, you and I, James, that our goal is to use our lives wisely and effectively in furthering our values and preferences, and specifically within the, built environment, right? The AEC, architecture, engineering, and construction.

Kristof: Do we need to invent new wall systems? Do we need to invent, new heat pumps or emitters or filters or... No. It's just such a, like a confident nod that yeah, technology will help, but when it comes to really delivering homes that last hundreds of years and takes the same you with the same stressors and has-- gives you a deeper night's sleep and peace of mind if there's a wildfire or, power outage what we need is to have people think differently.

Kristof: And then you get to Donella Meadows. And so thinking differently means your worldviews, your perspectives, or the word that she uses is your paradigms. Paradigms are the glasses you never take off. And now let's go to Donella for a minute. So Donella was the lead author of Limits to Growth the book that basically, it was like the Silent Spring for the

Kristof: Geobiosphere writ large.

Kristof: It's like planetary boundaries, and it was the beginning of computers and 1970s, and she was this one woman in this group of, white men researchers, and she ended up having... So she wrote this book. She they developed the world w- I'm going too deep into it. There, there's all kinds of history here, and the point is that posthumously published, so then she has this 50-year career of really this wide-angle system lens on society, and she was advisors on a, presidential committees and US government.

Kristof: And she was working at Dartmouth. And so this book was published posthumously, and the book is called "Thinking in Systems," and I think it's chapter eight somewhere, ch- some chapter. It's like leverage points, and she's talking about leverage points in human society. And she basically says, you lever.

Kristof: You, you put the lever, connect it to the load, the thing you wanna move, which for us is the way society thinks about and delivers conditioned space to itself. And then you push it. So you wanna push on the lever as far from the fulcrum as you can, and we're kinda like the fulcrum. Me and you, everyone listening is the fulcrum in the sense that we're close, w- and we're receiving the force from the leverage that we try to apply.

Kristof: So what's farthest from the lever? Let's start quickly. What's closest to the fulcrum? What's closest to the fulcrum is stuff, right? Heat pumps. Wow, the industry doesn't really care. The owners don't really care about heat pumps. They care about, Amory Lovins from Rocky Mountain Institute.

Kristof: At the end of the day, homeowners want a warm house and a cold drink, and they're agnostic as to how those arrive, right? So s- and it, they go up. They go up from products to e-even like codes, right? Codes, and I didn't even finish my thought on codes earlier. Codes is a really powerful force in the industry.

Kristof: However, if you think about doing something because someone says, "You have to do this," versus doing something because it makes you feel good, you know it's the right thing, you can see that codes are actually a not that important. What you want is to create people to want to feel good by knowing that what they're doing is important, by really studying and thinking and weighing the options.

Kristof: So anyway, you move out the lever, and there's seven things she talks about, and I've done seminars on this. I'm happy to share maybe one in a future interview with you. But the farthest one the second to the last one is paradigms, worldviews, right? Let me give you an example of a worldview The geobiosphere exists-- let's say it this way.

Kristof: Nature's resources exist awaiting to be converted to human end uses, right? Like nature as Costco is how I think of that. Like we as a species kinda look out there, and we don't feel a direct connection to out there or impact on it. And so we say, "Oh, can I get trees? Can I get ores? Can I get clean water?

Kristof: Can I get arable soil? Can I get clean air?" And increasingly, the answer is we're actually don't have those in limitless.

James: back order.

Kristof: There you go, permanent back order. Yeah. So I'm blathering a lot. But so she-- And I'll go on to the end. So paradigms, like it's so important for people like me and you and for everyone listening when they're talking to clients to not start with, "You should have a heat pump,"

Kristof: But to start with, "We as a species really care about..."

Kristof: Actually, we should go to the health. You want a healthy, safe, durable place to live for yourself and your family, and later is too late to protect these natural systems that we love and places that we love and people that we love. We gotta do it now. And protection means we need to stop cooking the planet, but not just for the planet's sake, but for our sake,

James: Our sake.

Kristof: for our health and our wellbeing.

Kristof: And so the last one, just to finish out the paradigms thing, the last one is almost the hardest. The farthest force that helps shift societal systems and gives you leverage to cause change is willingness to transcend current paradigms Wow. So that's scary, right? 'Cause you end up in groundlessness. You end up in whoa.

Kristof: And when times get, we're in this time now, like times, they are a-changing, right? We're in this time of craziness, and guess what we don't wanna do? We don't wanna not know. We don't wanna be groundless. We wanna fire our answers out like missiles. Oh, I shouldn't have said missiles. That's a trigger word.

Kristof: But, you get it. Okay,

James: I get it.

Kristof: back to you. Back to you, James

James: Oh, that's just going back to what I said, right? Like I, the Earthship was a kind of paradigm shift for me that houses aren't always the suburban two-story, one-story homes that I grew up with in, suburban Toronto. And then, I lived in Japan for three years, and that, that was definitely changed.

James: I was like, "Oh," "They do things that we would never do, and it's totally normal." And, but it's, but still I hadn't considered you can use non-construction, quote unquote, materials like earth and in the case of Earthships, tires, right? But, just, hey, there's different ways to do this was a big eye-opener, and I suspect that in some ways Passive House works because you don't have to have that paradigm shift if you don't want to.

James: If that makes you uncomfortable, you can just

Kristof: Adhere to those

James: a

Kristof: design principles.

James: just like the high-end version of the normal thing.

James: But there is also a way where it can be this beautiful and high-end and yeah,

Kristof: Yeah

James: way of thinking about what a house can be.

James: Safety, I think that the word safety, the word security, I think that does a lot of work.

Kristof: Yep. Yeah, and so we talk a lot right now about resilience. Actually, let me touch on Earthships, and I-- note to self, come back to resilience. Had a dear friend in Austin who was building Earthships in the '70s, and a tragic, he his son died of basically formaldehyde poisoning because of the crazy materials.

Kristof: They thought of things as materials, and they thought of materials and molecules with this sort of eternalist life. There's a tire, and it just sits over there being a tire. They don't realize that the materials around us are like popcorn, and they're sputtering out particles and gases into the surrounding space all the time.

Kristof: And and it was also Earthship was... Like as you say, the skillful means undern-underneath it is not to be anything other than praised, right? Think differently. It's possible. Better is possible. New ways are possible. And yet it had this energy lens, all about energy. Thou hath sinned against the Earth, and we're using energy.

Kristof: And I think one of the biggest changes, and it's almost like hard for me to say it. It's like I can feel the paramed- parad- the roots of my paradigms, paradigmatic, is that the word?

James: pirate,

Kristof: Going deep in me that I've been trained, we all, most of you listeners, we've been trained to say energy efficiency is good, to bow at that altar.

Kristof: And yet, we're probably building homes today, likely building homes today that are going to exist in a completely different paradigm of humanity's relationship with available energy, right? But getting back to resilience now Let's talk about the difference between adaptation and resilience, right? So you're driving to work, and you encounter a traffic jam, and it's one of those purple traffic jams on Google Maps, like the ones where you turn your key off and and it's a nice day, and you happen to have a little chair-- lawn chair in the car. So you get out, and you sit on the road on your laptop, and you say, "I'm gonna be resilient. I'm gonna make the best of this. I'm gonna get some work done today." Go to work the next day, and the same thing happens. You're resilient again, and you make productive time.

Kristof: Maybe you read a book or make some phone calls or you get your laptop out, right? So you get it. You keep going on. You keep being resilient. At some point, you realize that this situation is something you actually need to adapt to. Not just that y- you know, 'cause resilience is like riding through unexpected events, right?

Kristof: It is true that wildfires, floods, power outages, cold snaps, heat waves, they're unexpected events, but meaning in terms of, like, when will it happen? But they're not unexpected in the sense that as we heat the atmosphere, we're ramping up its energy, and the storms have more energy in them, right? Period.

Kristof: I don't know if you know this, but I heard this recently, and then I did some Googling to look it up. Mount Pinatubo was the largest volcanic eruption in the 20th century, and with known impacts, like it spewed carbon into the sky, which volcanoes have been doing since forever, and known impacts around the world impacting climate, impacting weather and you know there's a difference.

Kristof: Humanity releases per year about 800 Mount Pinatubos every year.

James: Wow

Kristof: and yet there's still adults that refuse to change their paradigm that humanity could have possibly have impact on the planetary scale, right? Right now we have governments saying, "Let's spend a billion dollars to decommission wind turbines and promote gas," right?

Kristof: Let's hasten the demise of future generations. It's just-- To talk about the power of paradigms and how, unfortunately, when times get rough we entrench ourselves in-group loyalty and adherence to tradition. Those are deep mammal kind of characteristics. Okay, back to you.

James: Back to me. I like this tennis style servings.

Kristof: Yeah. And

James: to

Kristof: actually I feel a little self-conscious 'cause I really am an engineer, and I I think I love to think about-- Like right now I'm really on air water heat pumps and source side and load side and all the benefits, and I'm actually making a like a side T-shirt project w-with an R two ninety monoblock enthusiast patch on it, and there's a whole thing there about R two ninety monoblocks.

Kristof: But the point is let's say an engineer's role in society is to help humanity avail itself of better life conditions, right? You could say problem-solving, but I just tried to flip it to a positive, more of a positive energy spin on that. So if that's humanity, if that's our job as an engineer what's the constraint?

Kristof: Turns out it's not the availability of technology. It's not... So it's if an engineer is willing to go there, they can say what is the constraint? Oh, it's human psychology. Oh, it's, behavioral economics and behavioral psychology." These are the areas where forward is possible.

Kristof: And so that's how we ended up here, probably both of us in some sense.

James: Yeah. Y- I was gonna say that really resonates with me 'cause I spent the decade since I heard about Passive House, my work side has been in copywriting, like primarily like writing websites, writing email campaigns, but then

James: marketing in general, so psychology,

Kristof: Yeah

James: these sorts of things. but while at the same time having this sort of on, on the back burner this interest in Passive House, largely fueled by Lloyd Alter's

Kristof: Yay, Lloyd. I'm about to interview him, I hope. I,

James: he's one of like my biggest... He's the connection for me

Kristof: Yeah

James: about it. He's th- when he started talking about it more, that's when I really locked in.

James: And I, in fact, the naming of this podcast was due to one of his articles of whether to call it Passive House, the German single word, or Passive House. And anyway,

Kristof: Oh, can you actually unpack that for a minute for me? Or is it already on the podcast so your listeners are sick of hearing it?

James: I don't know. It's fine. They can just skip this if they want. You can skip this if you want to. No. So Passive House, the German word, is a distinct thing that is not, it avoids the fact that by breaking it into two English words, passive and house, it sounds like it's passive, which it's not, 'cause right off the bat, there's 24/7 fresh filtered air. And then it also sounds like it's only for houses, which it's also not. So by keeping it as a German word, it sounds at least different from those two things.

James: Even if it's, like it, it obviously seems like you can guess what it's related to. So

Kristof: I like it.

James: yeah, that was

Kristof: and

James: final...

Kristof: neutral in some

James: both dot coms, Marketing Passive House and Ma- Marketing Passivhaus.

James: At, it was late, late in the... I think he put an article out just before I committed to the

Kristof: Yeah. Yeah, there's actually a standard called Active House, which is not fundamentally different than Passive House. And Passive House absolutely includes active systems, right? As you-- Yeah. And then you remind me of the word VE, value engineering, which, is...

Kristof: passive House, it's neither passive nor a house, and value engineering is neither about value nor about engineering, and yet it's this term that we bandy about.

Kristof: It really means like value extraction or value elimination or just, just let's just call it what it is. This needs to cost less.

Kristof: What downgrade do you wanna buy if, to or save money on?

James: Yeah

Kristof: and actually that reminds me of Donella haunts me, this idea of thinking in paradigms.

Kristof: And and I really do encourage you and all the listeners to spend a minute thinking about where their ideas come from and their preferences and their values, and 'cause those are where your paradigms are.

James: Yeah

Kristof: important to you and why, and how do you know that? But I'm thinking about kinda re-reframing this value proposition, speaking about value and engineering, and this Trojan horse technique of, as you said, health, safety security, right?

Kristof: Like I, we were on the same wavelength clearly 'cause I said, "Your home is like your airbag. It's charged up with healthy, comfortable conditions, and you don't want it to leak out," right? So I could talk about exergy and elegant thermodynamics, but- or I could just say to a homeowner, "Your house is so well designed and built that it'll stay 70 degrees F for three full days in the winter without power going in, without heat," right?

Kristof: Or so, in the 70s or in com- livable conditions. Of course there's caveats on that. That'll help sell. But right now the value proposition is really entrenched in commoditized I don't know, consumerism, capitalism, materialism, which is like, how many square feet of house do I get per dollar?

Kristof: Or usually it's the other way around. How many dollars to build a square foot of house? Which assumes right there, I've just assumed all houses are the same, and therefore the most value is the one that has the cheapest dollar.

James: Yeah.

Kristof: Talk about a paradigm that is flawed.

James: Yeah.

Kristof: Flawed isn't even the right word.

James: not doing passive house and I-- it could be bigger 'cause I can

Kristof: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right.

James: thing and

Kristof: And then, yeah, so that's a paradigm, right? And then to realize that as mammals, we seek safety all the time, and one of the ways we seek safety is through relational belonging, and homes are manifestations of relational signaling. Look, I have a solar panel on the roof. Look, I don't have a solar panel on the roof.

Kristof: Look, I have a wall of west-facing glass communicating like power, dominion over nature. I have...

James: this.

Kristof: Yeah, gla- like downtown Austin, glass, literally glass curtain walls,

Kristof: Out. And my kids and my grandkids, they groan. But anyway, so I'm off subject there. But so ch- re-re-reframing value

Kristof: Then as you say, like I, I use the term lived experience.

Kristof: Over the long term my health is be there. Over the short term, my comfort, my acoustic, my thermal. My wife's actually quite sensitive to indoor air quality in the near term. She's "Oh, it's feels-- the air feels bad in here." And sure enough, it'll be high CO2 or high PM2.5 or,

James: Yeah, we're better at... I was, I would say that, that's another factor that we're better at knowing what's not good for us than we think we are. And

Kristof: Yeah

James: like what you were, describing as coming-- Oh, that was before we were recording, but you were talking about coming home, being in your body, being present.

James: I feel like that would be a lever that if people were really present, they would be like, "Oh, this

James: doesn't feel good this home,"

Kristof: Yeah. Yeah, if you watch a kid wipe out on their skateboard, you go,

James: You f- yeah,

Kristof: "Pfft," before you even think about it. So what just happened is you were present in your body, you had a bit of mirror neurons or something with that person on the skateboard, and then we'll quickly

James: it

Kristof: that over. Yeah, I love, yeah, just lead-- going in from the lived experience, or as you were saying coming into our bodies.

Kristof: Our bodies are coated with tens of thousands of sensors all over to,

James: Right

Kristof: and, they're basically like these sort of hydronic radiant systems. The blood will go closer to the skin to radiate to the surrounding when we get overheated, and it'll center itself down to the core when we get-- when we need to conserve our heat.

Kristof: But this idea that like one of the ways we can sell Passive House

Kristof: Is through kinda social proof or physical proof, lived experience proof, like the immersive experience of going in one.

Kristof: And your body receives, from these tens of thousands of sensors, your body receives hundreds of thousands of sensory inputs every second Of which we go do some sort of internal math and say, "Oh, the windows are too, are leaky."

Kristof: What we meant was something's not right, and then my ego can tell me what it is. And, this is why systems thinking is so important. But the point is, so I'm-- my wife and I are building a passive house out in the Pacific Northwest, and it's gonna be radiant heated and cooled ceilings and a ventilation system, an ERV.

Kristof: Done. That's it. Just think of all the brain damage we avoided just then. Threading the ducts through the structure, and the sequencing gets so much saner 'cause the panels go on basically just as your sheetrock goes up, and you didn't have to pre-plumb and... But the point is, when you're in a thermally active building, like the interior surfaces are thermally active, radiant heated floors and ceilings, radiant cooled ceilings and floors.

Kristof: You could have heated and cooled walls. Now you've just aligned the building with your body's-- the way it works. Like your body basically says, "I would like to be in a cool environment when it's hot, and I'd like to be in a warm environment when it's cold." And what we've done as a society is we've said, "Oh, I will take...

Kristof: I will fill my hot enclosure with cold air in the summer, and I will fill my cold enclosure with warm air in the winter." That's a different thing, and the mammal in us doesn't relax as well as when the building is warm.

James: Yeah

Kristof: better to be in cool air in the winter inside a warm building.

James: Yes

Kristof: vitality comes out of you. "Ah, it's-- I, I'm not cold, and I'm refreshed 'cause I'm not in this stuffy air."

James: Oh, I really that des- description of filling my hot space with cool air and my cool space with hot air.

James: That's, that is

Kristof: Yeah, it's

James: it

Kristof: so I used to rent boats. I used to teach windsurfing lessons in the summers, and I used to... 'Cause that didn't last, I would rent all kinds of boats, and some of the fishing boats we would send out, I'd have to bale them. I'd say, "The heck with bale them." I'd get a friend and we'd tip it upside down, put it in the water, send it out on a one-hour rental, and it would be like six inches of water in the bottom of this boat, and so we tried putting bilge pumps in as a company, and those little electric bilge pumps, they just couldn't keep up, right? So we joked about, "We need a bigger... We need a V8 engine-powered bilge pump," right? And that's what we do with our homes, right? We don't patch the leaks. We just put in giant heat.

Kristof: Like these furnaces, 100,000 BTUs an hour, right? It's so by the way, one kitchen match, large size, burn start to finish is one BTU, right? So imagine 100,000 kitchen matches burned every hour to... We are leaking. We're hemorrhaging heat out of the enclosure, and we just say, "That's fine.

Kristof: I have available resources from the geobiosphere to hemorrhage this much heat." And I g- I guess the heat pumps are happy 'cause they're like, "That heat that my gas furnace emitted, it's now in the at- atmosphere and my heat pump can pull it out and send it back in."

James: We should-- We could pair people. Oh, that's a good place for a heat pump, between those two.

Kristof: Yeah.

James: Yeah. interesting.

Kristof: I ask you a question for a second?

James: Yeah,

James: let's do it

Kristof: you ma- you did a career change, basically.

Kristof: You were a marketing person, right? And

James: am

James: though

Kristof: yeah, but you're also... okay. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're marketing Passive House. To me, that's different. It's like you're trying to redefine society's relationship with where it lives.

Kristof: But I guess it's still marketing. Or anyway, how did the transition occur for you, James? How did that happen?

James: I just realized that, something that happens if you own a business in marketing and you're connected to all marketing newsletters and this and that and go to conferences, is that everyone's constantly banging on about choosing a niche specializing in this and that.

James: And then there's people who bang on about not doing that and generalizing and being a generalist and that kind of thing. And so I've internally resisted both things, and so therefore just, by not choosing anything, chose nothing for a long time. And I wrote for whoever within reason.

James: Obviously the-- like, I have my personal boundaries or whatever, but, I didn't really have a particular

Kristof: Interesting.

James: And it just

Kristof: So a values kind of thing

James: yeah, I just thought there's probably now... And again, so I would say in where I was 12 years ago, there wasn't really a visible market to serve in terms of Passive House. It just wasn't t-t-to my eyes, viable or to my young experience, I just hadn't thought of it maybe. It just as time's gone by, I thought, I... All this time I spend reading Passive House articles when I sh- you know, maybe should be reading about marketing or whatever.

Kristof: Interesting. So you started to notice, "I actually am interested in this." Yeah

James: yeah, it's these things actually go together.

James: I could combine these two things and I could use whatever I learn to help doing the thing that I care about, which is the built environment, making homes that are comfortable and healthy and, have less dust. That's another thing that, that there's a couple of creature comfort.

James: The

Kristof: Yeah.

James: thing was a big one for me.

Kristof: Huge

James: When I heard about the fact that passive houses are just quieter by virtue of the thicker insulation or

Kristof: And sound can... it actually connects to the mammal too, through security and safety. 'Cause a protected environment is acoustically isolated

James: Yeah, and it-- your nervous system's calmer

Kristof: Yeah.

James: hearing traffic and,

Kristof: Yeah.

James: people's

Kristof: When we sit in a glassy space, And the temperature changes di-diurnally substantially. Our mammalian bodies can read that as this space is pretty flimsy.

Kristof: I'm not really safe. I'm not really secure. And yet we do it. It's funny, we put the, most affluent, powerful people in society up in glass boxes where they would get to breathe the perfumes from the parking garage underneath them.

James: Yeah

Kristof: I can actually see that we're at time.

Kristof: We're very close.

James: True.

Kristof: And

James: We are.

Kristof: I have a little bit of an ax to grind. I realized and in real time that you asked me to introduce Positive Energy in the beginning, and I didn't really say exactly what we are and do. So we are an MEP firm that works on custom residential projects, and we get really hard projects, right?

Kristof: Complicated, large programs off grid top of mountain, middle of nowhere. And so really cutting-edge work. And o-one of the things we get to do, quote is the energy transition, right? Is electro tech, helping on people understand that the way you get power and heat into a building today is not the way you're gonna do it tomorrow, and that to build it as though it is actually a risk factor for your owner.

Kristof: And a lot of times we get those kind of owners, those nerdy, affluent, early adopter owners. And so what we get to do is say, "This is the system, this air water heat pump or this VRF system in a boiler furnace territory," right? This is the system that your owner wants. And furthermore, this is this is like throttle body f- thr- throttle body fuel injection in the era of carburetors going away.

Kristof: What you know now is going away or will become a backup heat source. But the point is, I keep it short we do a lot of advocacy at-- to builders, to trades, even to distributors as part of our job, and it's just really mission-driven, and it's really it's-- we're really lucky that the clients and the architects that we work with, they recognize and, little sometimes challenging at times, but that MEP is a fundamental part of the architectural design process, not an afterthought, right?

Kristof: We're trusted advisors. And point is, we're hiring right now. We're hiring for an MEP PM. And so those of you listening, if any of this sounds like something someone you know would be interested in, we could use I don't know if ex- if LinkedIn is the right mechanism or whatever, but this is one way, right?

Kristof: It just occurred to me like, I could take advantage of this opportunity. And I think the-- one of the coolest things about Positive Energy is our culture and our positivity and the fantastic group of people that we get to work with, internal and external. So please take that as a little commercial and thanks for sharing it, James.

James: Yeah. We don't necessarily have to go immediately, but this also sounds like a good point to ask where people can find for example, that job listing or more about you online. Where would

Kristof: Yeah. So our website is positiveenergy.pro, and you can see the podcast there. It's under Media. We also have a blog. We've actually really for a long time recognized that information flow and working in the realm of behavioral economics, behavioral psychology is where it's at. But our day jobs are as MEP engineers, and that's a, it's a really exciting time to be in MEP.

Kristof: So that's the website, and the-- I think that's it. And, Miguel Walker here would probably say our Instagram handle and all that, but just go to the website. There's a Contact Us page

James: I'd, I would like to shout out that your website I really enjoy especially

Kristof: no, thanks

James: of your website. I find like I, I felt compelled to keep checking each person's bio. Like it-- Just the way it's arranged, like I really felt like I connected with your team

James: without

Kristof: They're a

James: your

Kristof: really fantastic group kinda s-spectacular. And it's funny, we're in the process now of rethinking our website and the approach. But the warm-heartedness we feel toward our staff and our clients is not gonna go away. Like really, w-ultimately we're people working with people, and we want the same things.

James: This is it. Yes.

James: This is it. Yeah. I worked... So most of my work was in B2B, m- more than B2C,

James: Always talked about the fact that just because you're selling to a business doesn't mean you're not still selling to a person.

Kristof: yeah,

James: a,

Kristof: there is no business per se

James: There's still like a guy or a girl or a man or a woman at a company that is going to read this and either resonate with it or not, and is going to, say, "Yeah, you get me.

James: You understand the problems I have," or not.

Kristof: It's really important that that connection,

James: Yeah

Kristof: connection. In fact, I met my wife in an aikido dojo, and aikido is a martial art. Aikido, it means the way of harmony with nature, basically, and or, body's nature. And the thing is that if someone comes and grabs you in aikido, like when you're really kinda marinated in the thinking, you go, "Oh, we're connected."

James: Interesting

Kristof: You don't, think of it as a threat. It's more like a connection. And

James: I

Kristof: so I really appreciated

James: You don't fight against them either, right?

James: Like you,

Kristof: Yeah, you go with I can't go that way. There's a big block, but I can... I have all these other..." You don't focus on the ways you can't move. You focus on the available options you do have.

Kristof: Yeah, we could go into aikido. One of the coolest things in aikido is don't engage in a technique with your partner or with another until you have control of your center. And what they mean is your center of gravity, like overtly, but it also can be in life. "Hey, we should have this conversation later.

Kristof: I'm not in control of my center right now,"

James: good parenting advice to that

Kristof: There you go. Yeah. Yeah

James: We also didn't talk about a podcast. I would love to just just for a second, if you've got the time, I

James: have

Kristof: yeah, I do. I have a meeting coming up, but let's-- So the podcast has been going on unbelievably since 2015, and Miguel Walker, who's here, dear friend, lives across the street from me, basically he's put a cellphone in front of me, and we were doing a a site visit about Aircrete insulation. One of our clients had, chosen to use it, and we were looking at it.

Kristof: We were wonder- we had never seen it in person. And so he just started, he took his iPhone and just started filming me. I'm like: "What are you doing?" He's "Just go with me, just go with me." And he puts it out, and it gets, like, all these people watching it. And

Kristof: Then he just put it in the conference room and said: "Talk to me about air control layers."

Kristof: And as you can see, I can just talk, right?

James: Yep

Kristof: and it gradually grew and grew, and we would go to conferences, and so many people would come up to us and say, "I love it." "Thank you so much." And what they were saying they loved was the meta aspect of it, right? Of course, there's a sci-- of course, we can talk about vapor control and permeance, vapor permeance, and...

Kristof: But we could also talk about why it's important, how to talk to your clients about it, like the, that the expanding ripples through the different societal systems involved in those decisions. And that's just become built in. And yeah, we have, I don't know, hundreds of episodes.

Kristof: And recently I had a couple of people, one was a professor at Penn that I respect a lot. He said, oh, started this email, "Oh, I just want you to know I've just gone through your entire body of work, listened to every podcast episode." And that's all you could see in the preview line before you click on the email, and I'm like, "Oh, golly." And I click on it, and he's "What a tremendous contribution. I have my grad students listening to these episodes." And I was like, "Yay." 'Cause you guys listen to it, and please listen to 'em, James. They're there's some twists and turns that you wouldn't expect on something called the Building Science Podcast.

Kristof: And one last thing, I know we're stretching it here, but one of the things that people appreciate is this thing we have called expanded building science or building science 2.0, or next-level systems thinking. We know systems thinking works, right? How do you arrange these elements, wall, bottom plate, top plate, sheathing, insulation, to get the outcomes you want?

Kristof: How do you arrange architects, engineers, builders, trades, marketing people, distributors, how do you arrange insurance companies? How do you arrange those elements

James: Yes

Kristof: outcomes we want? That's where we need to go.

James: Yeah. And how do we arrange society to

Kristof: To receive what they're willing to

James: is a possibility and

Kristof: Yeah, I bet you get it too, talking to friends and family, and they say, "I didn't know it was so complicated, and I didn't know that the technology was so sophisticated and that homes could be better." Like you started.

Kristof: People just think, "Oh, a production builder home, that's that."

James: Yeah. Ah I don't know. I've never so much felt like a part two was warranted, so hopefully we'll

Kristof: And it went longer than your typical one, I see. I don't know

James: Yep. Yeah, we're in the, we're in the high end for sure. I love that.

Kristof: All right

James: thanks so much. Thanks so much for coming on today and chatting.

Kristof: My pleasure. Thank you very much for the offer, and thank you all for listening. Talk to you next time.

James: You've been listening to Marketing Passive House. I'm James Turner, and I hope you'll join me again next time