- 2 days ago
My name is Elias Yoda. I am Amish. I have never paid an electric bill in my life, and the upstairs bedroom of the farmhouse my grandfather built in 1934 stays cooler in August than most of yours do with three thousand dollars of machinery fighting for it.
In this video, I am going to show you exactly why.
I will walk you through what my grandfather built into this house, what his grandfather built into the one before it, and what every carpenter in my community still puts into every home we raise. I will tell you about the cupola on the roof, the four-dollar strip of cotton muslin nailed under the rafters, the gable vents your contractor probably sealed shut, and the trick my mother taught me in the summer kitchen when I was eight years old — using a single stove burner to pump cool night air through an entire house for about five cents.
You do not need to live the way I live to use any of this. You need a flashlight, an hour on a Saturday morning, and about ten dollars in materials from any hardware store.
I will also tell you the part that should make you angry: none of this is a secret. None of it. It has been written down for two hundred years. The reason you were never told is
In this video, I am going to show you exactly why.
I will walk you through what my grandfather built into this house, what his grandfather built into the one before it, and what every carpenter in my community still puts into every home we raise. I will tell you about the cupola on the roof, the four-dollar strip of cotton muslin nailed under the rafters, the gable vents your contractor probably sealed shut, and the trick my mother taught me in the summer kitchen when I was eight years old — using a single stove burner to pump cool night air through an entire house for about five cents.
You do not need to live the way I live to use any of this. You need a flashlight, an hour on a Saturday morning, and about ten dollars in materials from any hardware store.
I will also tell you the part that should make you angry: none of this is a secret. None of it. It has been written down for two hundred years. The reason you were never told is
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Your air conditioner has been running since 9 this morning. It is 2 in the afternoon. The thermostat in your
00:07hallway says 76, but you set it to 68 three hours ago, and it has not gotten there, and it
00:14is not going to.
00:16Above your head, in a space you have not climbed into since you bought the house, the temperature right now
00:23is 142 degrees. The plywood of your roof deck is hot enough to burn the back of your hand, and
00:32every minute it sits up there cooking, your electric meter is spinning, and somebody in an office building four states
00:39away is getting a little bit richer.
00:43My name is Elias Yoda. I am Amish. I live on a farm my grandfather built in 1934, and I
00:52have never paid an electric bill in my life. Not one. Not ever.
00:58And the upstairs bedroom where my wife and I sleep on the hottest night of August, with the sun beating
01:05that roof at 140 degrees all day long, stays cooler than yours does with $3,000 of machinery fighting for
01:16it.
01:16I want to tell you why. I am going to tell you why. I am going to tell you what
01:20my grandfather built into this house, what his grandfather built into the house before that, what the carpenters in my
01:28community still build into every new home we raise.
01:32And I am going to tell you why. And I am going to tell you why. And I am going
01:34to tell you the part that should make you angry, which is that none of this is a secret. None
01:41of it. It is written down. It has been written down for 200 years. You were just never told.
01:49By the end of this, you will know exactly what to look for in your own attic this weekend. You
01:56will know what costs $4 to fix. And you will know why the man who sold you your last roof
02:03did not mention any of it. Stay with me.
02:08The first thing you have to understand is that your attic is lying to you about what it is for.
02:14You think of it as part of your house. It is not. In a house built properly, the way my
02:21grandfather built this one, the attic is what we call a buffer. It is the space that takes the beating.
02:28The sun hits the roof. The roof gets hot. The attic catches all of that heat, and then it lets
02:37it go. It hands the heat back to the sky before it can come down into the rooms where you
02:43sleep. That is the whole job of an attic, to breathe the heat out.
02:50But somewhere around the time my own father was a young man, he tells me it was the late 1960s,
02:57the English builders, and forgive me, that is just what we call folks outside our community. No disrespect in it.
03:05The English builders decided they were going to do it different.
03:09They sealed the attic up. They stuffed it full of pink insulation. They cut two small vents in the gable
03:18ends, maybe a strip down the ridge, and they called it good. Then they sold the homeowner a bigger air
03:25conditioner to make up for the heat that had nowhere to go.
03:28That is the trade they made for you, without asking. The attic stopped being a buffer. It became a furnace.
03:38And the furnace sits on top of your bedroom from ten in the morning until ten at night, radiating heat
03:46down through your ceiling, into your sheets, into the walls of your children's rooms.
03:51Your air conditioner is not cooling your house. It is fighting a furnace your builder installed on top of it.
04:00We never made that mistake. We could not. We had no air conditioner to fall back on, so every choice
04:08in our building had to work on its own merits, in the real heat, with no machine to hide behind.
04:16The piece of our houses you have probably seen and never understood is the little tower on top of the
04:23roof. The English call it a cupola. We have always just called it the roof box, or the lantern, depending
04:32on what part of Pennsylvania your family came from.
04:35Mine came from the Palatinate, in what is now southwestern Germany, in 1838. My great-great-grandfather Yoda crossed the
04:46ocean with a Bible, a chest of carpenters tools, and the knowledge of how to build a house that would
04:52not kill his children in August.
04:55The roof box looks decorative. On the fancy houses you see now, the ones in subdivisions with the four car
05:03garages, the little wooden tower on top of the roof is purely for show.
05:08It is nailed shut. It is filled with foam. It is a costume. On a real one, on the kind
05:15my grandfather built, the roof box is the engine of the whole house.
05:20Here is what it does. Hot air rises. That is not a religious claim or a folk saying. That is
05:28just physics. Anywhere on earth, hot air goes up.
05:32In a sealed attic, the hot air rises and then has nowhere to go, so it sits there, pressing down
05:39on your ceiling. In a house with a working roof box, the hot air rises, climbs up through the open
05:46shaft inside the box, and exits through louvered slats on all four sides.
05:52But that is only half of it. The half that matters more is what happens at the bottom.
05:58When that column of hot air leaves, it pulls cooler air in behind it, through the lower windows, through the
06:06cellar door, through any opening near the ground.
06:09The whole house starts to move. The whole house starts to breathe. The engineers have a name for it. They
06:17call it the stack effect, or buoyancy-driven ventilation, and you can find papers about it in any university library
06:26written by serious men with letters after their names.
06:30We just call it building a house right. I went up into the attic of this farmhouse last August on
06:37the hottest day of the summer. It was 93 degrees outside. The attic, which has a working roof box on
06:44it that my grandfather built 92 years ago, was 78 degrees. Seventy-eight.
06:51The roof deck above my head was hot enough you could not hold your palm against it. The air in
06:59the attic was cool enough I did not break a sweat standing up there.
07:04Across the road, my neighbor's house, built in 1971, sealed up tight, no roof box, fiberglass baths crammed against the
07:14rafters, his attic was 136 degrees.
07:19I know because he came over later to ask why his upstairs would not cool down, and I went over
07:26with my thermometer. Same day, same sun, same county. 60 degrees of difference. No machinery on my side.
07:36Now you are thinking, fine, but I cannot put a tower on my roof this weekend. You are right. You
07:43cannot. And that is not what I am going to ask you to do. Because there is something else, and
07:50this is the part I almost did not put in this script, because it is the part the building industry
07:56would prefer you never heard.
07:59Inside the attic of this farmhouse, nailed across the underside of the roof boards where the rafters meet the ridge,
08:07there is a long strip of plain white cotton muslin.
08:11Not insulation. Not insulation. Not vapor barrier. Cotton cloth. The kind you can buy at any fabric store for about
08:20a dollar a yard. My grandfather put it there. His grandfather put it in the old house. My uncle put
08:27strips of it in the barn last spring. We have been doing this for as long as anyone in my
08:33community can remember.
08:35Here is what it does, and you can test this yourself if you do not believe me. When the sun
08:42hits a shingle, the shingle gets hot. The wood of the roof deck underneath that shingle gets hot. And that
08:49wood radiates heat downward in a straight line.
08:54Insulation in your floor does nothing about it, because radiant heat does not travel through air the way regular heat
09:02does. Radiant heat goes in a straight line until it hits something, and what it hits is the top side
09:10of whatever is below it, including your insulation, your wiring, your ceiling drywall, and eventually, your bedroom.
09:19The cotton stops it. It absorbs a little moisture from the cool night air. During the day, as the roof
09:27above heats up, the cotton releases that moisture slowly. It is the same idea as a wet handkerchief tied around
09:35your neck on a hot day.
09:37A man who has worked a hay field in July knows what I mean. The water evaporating off the cloth
09:45pulls heat with it. The cotton stays cool. The air just below it stays cool. The radiant heat coming off
09:55the roof deck never makes it down to where you are sleeping.
09:59Four yards of cotton muslin will cover the ridge of an average house. Four dollars at the fabric store. One
10:06hour of work with a stapler. I am not exaggerating the price. I am not rounding down. Four dollars.
10:14Now, you tell me. In a country where the average household pays more than $2,000 a year to cool
10:21a house, why is this not in every building manual? Why did your father not know it? Why did the
10:28man who re-roofed your house in 2018 not mention it? I will tell you why.
10:34Think about who makes money when your attic runs at 140 degrees. The electric company makes money. Every degree of
10:42heat that pushes through your ceiling makes your air conditioner work harder. A three-ton central unit pulls roughly 3
10:50,500 watts when it is straining against a hot attic.
10:54If your house is fighting that furnace overhead for an extra four or five hours a day in July and
11:00August, you are handing the utility somewhere between $60 and $100 a month that you would not be spending if
11:07your attic were doing its job.
11:09Multiply that by the 140 million single-family houses in this country, and you are looking at billions of dollars
11:17a year in revenue that exists only because the houses cannot breathe.
11:22The shingle companies make money. A hot attic destroys shingles from underneath. The asphalt softens. The granules fall off. The
11:31seal between the layers fails. A roof that should last 30 years lasts 15. You buy a new roof twice
11:40as often as your grandfather did. That is not an accident.
11:43The insulation companies make money. The insulation companies make money. The HVAC companies make money. The spray foam companies make
11:50money. There is a whole industry built on selling you the cure for a sickness that the same industry installed
11:57in your house in the first place.
11:59I am not telling you there was a meeting somewhere. I do not believe in that kind of conspiracy. It
12:05is something worse than a conspiracy. It is a quiet agreement among everybody who profits to not mention the alternative.
12:13To never bring up the cupola. To never sell the cotton. To never explain the stack effect to a homeowner.
12:21They do not need to coordinate. They just need to stay quiet. And they have for 50 years.
12:27We kept this knowledge in our community because we had to. We were not allowed to forget it. When you
12:33cannot plug in an air conditioner, you cannot afford to lose what your grandfather knew.
12:39So we wrote it down in the way that matters. Not in books, but in houses. Every house we build
12:45is a copy of the lesson. The rest of the country forgot because the rest of the country was given
12:51a machine to forget with.
12:53I want to be useful to you, not just preach at you. So let me tell you exactly what to
12:58do, in order, this weekend.
13:01The first thing is your gable vents. Almost every house built in this country between 1940 and 1990 has two
13:10triangular wooden vents up at the peaks of the short ends of the attic.
13:14You have seen them. From the outside, they look like little louvered triangles. From the inside, they should look like
13:21daylight. Get a flashlight.
13:23Pick a cool morning, early, before the attic heats up. Climb up there. And look at those vents from the
13:29inside.
13:30If you can see clear daylight through them, good. That is what they are supposed to do.
13:35If you cannot, and most people cannot, then you have just found the first reason your house has been cooking
13:42itself.
13:42The screens behind those vents are usually clogged with 30 years of dust, paint, wasp nests, and sometimes loose-fill
13:51insulation that was blown in by a contractor who did not know any better.
13:56I have been in attics where the gable vents were completely sealed over with spray foam by a man who
14:02was paid $2,000 by the homeowner to do it, in the name of energy efficiency.
14:07He was sealing the house's lungs. Clean them. Pull out the debris with your hands or a shop vacuum.
14:14If the screen is rusted, peel it off and staple new aluminum mesh in its place.
14:20A roll of aluminum mesh is about $3 at the hardware store.
14:24Eighth-inch openings are what you want. Small enough to keep the insects out, big enough that the air moves
14:30through.
14:31That is step one. It will take you 20 minutes.
14:35Step two is the cotton.
14:37I told you about the muslin we nail across the underside of the rafters.
14:41You can do exactly the same thing in your own attic.
14:45Four yards of plain white cotton muslin, the cheapest kind they sell, and a staple gun.
14:51You staple it across the underside of the roof deck where the rafters meet at the ridge,
14:55in a strip about two feet wide, running the length of the attic.
14:59You do not need to cover the whole roof.
15:02You need to break the radiant heat at the hottest point, which is the top.
15:07Two feet of cotton along the ridge is plenty.
15:10Do not use treated fabric.
15:12Do not use a tarp.
15:14Do not use plastic.
15:16Plain, untreated cotton.
15:18The whole point is that it breathes and holds a little moisture.
15:22Plastic does the opposite of what you want.
15:25I had an Englisher come to my farm three summers ago asking me about this.
15:30He went home, stapled muslin across the ridge of his attic in an afternoon,
15:34and called me a week later.
15:36He said his upstairs bedroom dropped six degrees overnight.
15:41He said his wife slept under a blanket for the first time in July in 20 years.
15:46Six dollars in materials.
15:48One afternoon.
15:50Step three is the night draft,
15:52and this is the one most folks skip,
15:54which is a shame because it ties the whole thing together.
15:58After the sun goes down,
16:00when the outside air gets below 80 degrees,
16:03and even in the worst part of summer it usually does,
16:06late, around 10 or 11 o'clock,
16:08you open the lowest windows in your house on the side that has been in shade.
16:12Not all of them.
16:14Two or three on the cool side opened maybe four inches.
16:18Then go check that those gable vents are clear.
16:21Open the attic hatch-a-crack if you have one.
16:24What happens next is what we have been counting on for 200 years.
16:28The hot air that is built up in your attic all day climbs up and out through the gable vents.
16:34As it leaves, it creates a small, low-pressure zone inside the house.
16:40The cool night air gets pulled in through the low windows you opened,
16:44and it moves up through the house, through the attic, and out the gable vents in a slow, steady draft.
16:50You will feel it.
16:52Stand in the hallway between your living room and your stairs around midnight,
16:56and you will feel a soft, cool current moving past your ankles.
17:00That is your house finally breathing the way it was meant to.
17:04By morning, the wood frame of the house, and this is what people miss,
17:09the wood itself is a thermal mass, every 2x4 in your walls,
17:13has shed most of the heat it absorbed during the day.
17:17Your air conditioner, if you still want to run it, starts the day from a much lower baseline.
17:22It does not have to fight a furnace anymore.
17:25You will see it on your electric bill within one billing cycle.
17:2940 minutes of work the first time.
17:32Cotton, mesh, a flashlight, a staple gun.
17:36$40 in materials at the absolute most, and most of you can do it for under $10.
17:42Now I want to tell you the part that goes against everything a modern builder will tell you,
17:47because if you do not understand this part, the rest will not work.
17:51You have been told to seal your house.
17:54Every builder, every energy auditor, every contractor for the last 40 years has been telling homeowners
18:02to wrap the building in plastic, foam every gap, caulk every seam, and trap the air inside.
18:09And in a controlled laboratory test, with everything else held perfect,
18:13that advice gives you a slightly lower heating bill in February.
18:17In a real house, in a real August, it cooks you alive.
18:21A sealed attic is a heat battery.
18:24The roof absorbs heat all day.
18:27The wood underneath stores it.
18:29And because there is no movement, no breath in and out, the heat just accumulates.
18:34Day after day.
18:36Week after week.
18:37By the middle of August, the wooden structure of a sealed attic is radiating into the rooms
18:43below it 24 hours a day.
18:46It does not cool down at night.
18:48It cannot.
18:49It has no way to.
18:51Our barns are over a hundred years old.
18:54The hand-hewn beams in this kitchen were cut by my great-grandfather in 1868.
19:01The wood is dry.
19:03The wood is sound.
19:04The wood is sweet-smelling when you sand it.
19:07Why?
19:08Because the air moves.
19:11The barn breathes.
19:13The house breathes.
19:15Moving air does not rot wood.
19:18Moving air does not grow mold.
19:21Moving air does not trap moisture.
19:24Trapped air does all of those things.
19:26And a sealed modern attic traps air on purpose.
19:31The English engineers will tell you that ventilation creates moisture problems.
19:37They are wrong.
19:38And the proof is in every Amish farmstead in eastern Pennsylvania that has been standing
19:44through 200 winters and 200 summers with no central air, no vapor barrier, no plastic wrap,
19:52and no problems.
19:55If you have spray foam packed against your roof rafters, get it out.
20:00If you have a plastic vapor barrier stapled to the underside of your roof deck, take it down.
20:07If somebody sealed your gable vents with foam in the name of energy efficiency, cut it out.
20:14Undo those three things in that order and your house will start working the way houses were designed to work
20:21before someone decided to sell you a sealed plastic box and call it a home.
20:29There is one more thing I want to share with you before I let you go, because it is the
20:34thing my mother taught me
20:36when I was eight years old, standing in the summer kitchen behind our farmhouse with the bread dough
20:42rising on the wood counter, and I did not understand what she was doing until I was a grown man
20:49with a wife of my own.
20:51A summer kitchen, for those of you who have never seen one, is a small, separate building behind the main
20:58farmhouse.
20:59The Pennsylvania Germans built them from at least the 1700s, and you can still find them on old farmsteads
21:07all over Lancaster and Berks and Lebanon counties.
21:10It is one room with a wood cook stove and a window on the wall opposite the door.
21:17The point of it, the obvious point, is that you do your hot cooking in there during summer so you
21:23do not heat up the main house.
21:26That is the obvious point.
21:28The point my mother taught me is not obvious.
21:32When she was cooking in the summer kitchen on a hot morning, she would open the door that faced north,
21:38and she would open the window on the south wall, and she would tell me to go into the main
21:43house
21:44and crack open the parlor windows on the shaded side, and then she would light the stove.
21:51The stove heat would rise.
21:53The heat would exit through the south window.
21:57As it left, it would pull air through the open door.
22:01That air would come from the main house, through the back porch, through the kitchen door,
22:07drawn by the suction of the hot stove, pulling its exhaust out through the window above it.
22:14She was using the wood stove as a pump, not just to vent the kitchen, to vent the entire farmhouse.
22:23The whole building turned into one slow current of moving air,
22:29driven by a stove burning maybe two armfuls of wood.
22:33She would cook bread and stew and pies all morning,
22:37and the main house, which was where the babies slept,
22:41where the old folks rested in the afternoon,
22:44stayed ten degrees cooler than the air outside.
22:49You have a stove in your kitchen right now.
22:52You probably have a window above it or near it,
22:56and a window somewhere on the opposite side of your house.
22:59I am not asking you to cook a meal you do not need.
23:03But on a hot evening, when the sun has gone down and the outside air is starting to drop,
23:10turn one burner of your stove on the lowest setting, just one.
23:16Open the window above it three inches.
23:19Open a window on the opposite end of your house three inches.
23:23You have just made the same pump my mother made every morning for 50 years.
23:30The small amount of heat you add to the kitchen is nothing compared to the volume of cool evening air
23:37that gets pulled through the rest of the house.
23:39You will feel it within 20 minutes.
23:42The living room will be noticeably cooler.
23:45The hallway will have a draft you can feel on your skin.
23:48The cost of running one electric burner for 40 minutes is somewhere around five cents.
23:55Five cents.
23:57To cool the house.
23:58Every night.
24:00All summer.
24:01The woman who taught me knew it from her mother,
24:04who knew it from her mother,
24:06and somewhere back along that line was a great-great-grandmother
24:10who carried this knowledge across the ocean from Switzerland in a wagon.
24:15They knew.
24:17They have always known.
24:19And the only reason you do not know
24:21is because there is no profit in five-cent cooling.
24:26Now, I know the questions some of you are forming as you listen to this,
24:30because my brother runs a small store in town
24:33where the English come in and ask,
24:35and he tells me what they say.
24:37The first question is always about moisture.
24:40If you open up your attic and let outside air move through,
24:44won't you get mold?
24:46Won't you get rot?
24:47Won't the humidity ruin the structure?
24:50I have already answered this, but it bears saying again.
24:54Moving air does not cause moisture problems.
24:58Trapped air causes moisture problems.
25:01The reason our barns from 1860 are still sound,
25:05and your 1985 subdivision houses are growing mold in the attic,
25:10is that ours move and yours do not.
25:14Water vapor in moving air goes out.
25:18Water vapor in trapped air settles,
25:21condenses, and feeds whatever wants to grow on the wood.
25:25You are not inviting mold by opening the attic.
25:29You are evicting it.
25:31The second question is about animals and insects.
25:35Bats, squirrels, wasps.
25:38I told you already.
25:40Eighth inch aluminum mesh on the inside of every gable vent.
25:45Three dollars at the hardware store.
25:47Bats and squirrels cannot get through it.
25:50Wasps will not build in a high air flow space,
25:54because they cannot tolerate the wind.
25:57You are protecting the house, not inviting trouble.
26:01The third question is the one that makes me sad,
26:04and I want to address it plainly.
26:07Some of you will tell your contractor what I have said in this video,
26:11and your contractor will tell you that I am wrong,
26:14that this violates code,
26:16that this will void your warranty,
26:18that you should not listen to an Amish man on the internet about your house.
26:23Listen to me.
26:24Passive ventilation is not against code anywhere in the United States.
26:31It predates code.
26:33Modern building code requires a minimum of one square foot of net free vent area
26:40for every 300 square feet of attic floor.
26:43That is a floor, not a ceiling.
26:46You can have more ventilation than that,
26:49and you are not in violation of anything.
26:52As for warranties,
26:54the warranty on your shingles requires adequate ventilation.
26:58Increasing it protects the warranty.
27:01Sealing the attic,
27:03which is what your contractor likely did or recommended,
27:06is what threatens it.
27:08He has it backwards,
27:10and so does the person who taught him.
27:12The man telling you not to listen to me
27:15is the same man who will sell you a new $5,000 HVAC unit
27:20in three years when the old one fails from overwork.
27:25I am not saying he is dishonest.
27:27I am saying he was taught wrong
27:30by people who were taught wrong,
27:32by people who were paid to teach wrong.
27:35That chain goes back 50 years.
27:39You are at the end of it.
27:41You do not have to stay there.
27:44I want to leave you with something my bishop said to me last fall.
27:48We were sitting on his porch after a barn raising,
27:52drinking coffee,
27:53and a young Englisher who had helped that day
27:55asked him why we live the way we live.
27:59He thought we were going to talk about religion.
28:01The bishop did not talk about religion.
28:05He said this.
28:06He said,
28:08The English think we reject technology
28:10because we are afraid of it.
28:13That is not it.
28:14We reject technology
28:16when it makes us depend on people we do not know,
28:20on systems we cannot fix,
28:22on companies that do not care
28:25if our children live or die.
28:27We accept technology
28:28when it makes us more capable,
28:30more able to take care of our own.
28:32The cupola is technology.
28:35The gable vent is technology.
28:37The summer kitchen is technology.
28:40They are just technologies that belong to us.
28:44We built them with our hands.
28:46They will still work when the lights go out.
28:48They are ours.
28:50I have thought about that conversation many times since.
28:53Because the bishop was not just talking about us,
28:57he was talking about you, too.
28:59He was pointing at what you have lost.
29:02You have surrendered the ability
29:04to keep your own family cool
29:06in your own home in your own country.
29:09And you have surrendered it
29:11to a utility company that did not exist
29:13when your grandfather built his first house.
29:16You pay them $3,000 a year
29:19for permission to be comfortable.
29:21And it never occurred to most of you
29:24that there was anything strange
29:26about that arrangement
29:27because you were born into it.
29:29You did not forget this knowledge.
29:32It was taken from you.
29:34Slowly.
29:35One building code at a time.
29:37One sales pitch at a time.
29:39One contractor at a time.
29:41Until you arrived at a house
29:43you cannot ventilate,
29:45a roof you cannot fix,
29:47an attic you have never climbed into,
29:50and a bill you cannot question.
29:53I am not asking you to live the way I live.
29:56I am not asking you to give up your tractor for a horse,
29:59or your phone for a letter,
30:01or your church for mine.
30:03I am asking you to do one thing this weekend.
30:07Climb into your attic with a flashlight.
30:10Look at your gable vents.
30:12Tell me in the comments what you find.
30:15Are they clogged?
30:16Are they painted shut?
30:18Did somebody seal them with foam?
30:21What county are you in?
30:23How old is your house?
30:25I read these comments.
30:27The stories you send back
30:29are the reason I keep recording.
30:31And if what I have said today rings true to you,
30:34if you are the kind of person
30:36who suspects that real wisdom
30:38has been quietly pushed aside
30:40so somebody else can sell you the substitute,
30:43then come back.
30:45The next video I am putting together
30:47is about how my grandfather built a root cellar
30:51under this farmhouse
30:52that holds a steady 54 degrees year-round
30:56in January and August both,
30:59with no machinery,
31:01no electricity,
31:02no insulation in the modern sense,
31:05using nothing but clay,
31:07sand,
31:08and the slope of a hillside.
31:09The technique goes back to the old country
31:12and farther than that.
31:14It is the simplest thing in the world
31:16once someone shows you.
31:18Nobody will show you.
31:20I will.
31:21I will see you there.
31:23Stay cool.
31:24Stay curious.
31:26And remember,
31:27the people who built this country
31:29with their hands
31:30knew things
31:31that we are only just beginning
31:34to remember.
31:35Remember.
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