Passive Aggressive
A podcast by high performance home builder and columnist Jeff Eckes from LDR Group, dedicated to bringing the latest information about Passive House and other High Performance housing in the Hudson Valley and beyond.Each episode includes interviews with the best and brightest in high performance design and building, as well as information on how the average Joe (or Josie) can use these building practices in their own homes, and apartments.
Passive Aggressive
Ken Levenson From The Passive House Network
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Ken Levenson
Welcome to Passive Aggressive, the podcast that brings you, the average citizen, the information you need to answer the questions you have about high-performance housing and electrification. Like what is passive housing? Is it the same as net zero? And what's the deal with all this talk about heat pumps and electrification? We'll meet and get to know the people that design, build, renovate, and test these homes and the systems that they use for easy to understand explanations about how all of this works and how this can actually help us save our planet. I'm Jeff Eckett, founder of LDR Group, an employee-owned high-performance and passive house home builder in the beautiful Hudson Valley, New York. And I'll be your host in this ongoing journey to discover why climate change is very much about housing and how we can all make better choices and have a much larger impact, reducing our own carbon footprint than we ever thought we could. Wow, that's a mouthful, man. Our second uh podcast here. We did a first one with somebody local just in case we fell flat on our faces. Nobody would know. So just what's that thing floating down the Hudson River? I don't know. Something about a podcast. So you're a busy guy. It took a while to set this up, Ken. I'm so glad that I Yeah, you know, one thing after another.
SPEAKER_00:It's um there's a lot going on out there.
SPEAKER_01:Thank goodness. Yeah, we'd all be really bored. I mean, look what happened during COVID. We were all really bored, and we had to form all these online things that just kept going like zombies, and all of a sudden now we have an online community. It's amazing. So it is it is I think we had a pretty good result from pop from COVID, from the lockdown. So I'm fine with that. I want to start off right at the bat right off the bat asking asking the money question, and that is what are you passionate about today? What's what's setting you on fire? What's getting you up in the morning and keeping you up late at night?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, what I love about uh my job, what I love about being involved in the passive house movement um and being involved in high performance construction generally is really just the simple act of connecting people uh with tools to really empower themselves and change the world around us. Uh I think it's really been uh kind of you know mysterious and mystified, and everybody thinks that you know there are all these experts out there and all these tools, and it's all sort of overwhelming. Um and to kind of sift through that, to filter it out, to quiet it down and get people to really just connect with the fundamentals, um, it's always a rush. It's always a rush. I just had a conversation with an architect last week, at the end of last week, um who was new to Passive House and in our course, uh talking about a project that they were working on, and just realizing I don't even know if she appreciated at the moment, but it came out of the conversation, like the way she was approaching the issues and talking about them in the vocabulary, it was new. It was she she was really uh tackling things in a super sophisticated way, was kind of laughing about it, it was like you know, in interacting with different folks, um, asking, you know, more penetrating questions and and identifying key issues. Uh and so just those simple acts of transformation, just so powerful. And I never get sick of it. It's like uh every every time it's a rush.
SPEAKER_01:Watching somebody new to the concept wrap their head around it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, and and and get them set on their way. And it's not um and it's a it's really a lot of fun because there isn't necessarily a lot of baggage. Uh there's not a lot of unlearning which happen needs to happen sometimes.
SPEAKER_01:So they were pretty young. She was pretty young, huh?
SPEAKER_00:Uh young enough, yeah, yeah. You know, I mean Us old folks got a lot of baggage.
SPEAKER_01:Youth.
SPEAKER_00:Younger than me, I'll put it that way. And certainly uh in the lifetime of learning. Um uh well, I think part of it is um, you know, architects coming at this are thinking about buildings in a lot of different ways, and she's an architect, and but they aren't necessarily thinking about the nuts and bolts of performance and and the um you know the technical aspects of that. Um, and it is overwhelming and daunting, and she said um, you know, it was the course is more technical and more intense than she was expecting necessarily. Um she's unsure. It's science. Yeah, the science. Absolutely. But at the end of the day, coming out of the conversation, you could just tell that she was kind of like empowered and and getting a kick out of it, being able to navigate that in a in a I get a real kick out of doing that with builders.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. I there are occasions when I work with subs, builders, other builders that I have, I'm in groups with, things like that, electricians, you know, people that I work with, and when they start to wrap their head around it and realize that it's not just good science, which be honest with you, most of them haven't dealt with in decades, but it's also good business. And and that's what they're realizing. When they when they work, work, walk onto one of my jobs or look at one of my designs, and they're going, You're you're making money with this, right? And I'll go, yeah, I've got more work than I know what to do with, to be honest with you. And so it it when the light bulb, when you see the light bulb go off over somebody who's building houses or doing big renovations, and you go, there's somebody that's going to be doing this now on their own. Like you said, self-launching, boom, I'm out of here. I know what I need to do now. This is cool. You know, now it just meshes with their own personal mission and their own personal beliefs, and out the door they go, and they're they're another evangelical.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and they're on the way, and it's really then becomes a matter of how do you attract the clients who will go on the journey with you? How do you flip the colour?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's what we're all about here, you know, on passive aggressive. You know, we've been doing a lot of talking to each other up here above the clouds, you know, architects and everything else. I mean, less than 2% of the single-family homes that are built every year are designed by architects. How many of those are passive house? You know, so it's a it's a it's a vanishingly small number of these houses that that are that are getting built. And and I'm I'm all for removing, don't take this the wrong way. I'm all for removing the architect for a good portion of this out of the picture. Because you you've got right now, you've got things like you've always had online for these really terrible houses, these ready-made plans that you can buy. And there's there's uh three years ago there was nobody. A year ago there was one person, now there's three or four in the market that are designing passive house. One of them is actually selling it as a kit, like the old Sears houses, you know. Yeah, yeah. Which is very cool. So my thing is if you're gonna get passive house off the ground, you gotta drive it down to the grassroots to the point where people go build their house. It's not like, oh, I gotta get an architect to design this, I can't afford it, it's this and that. And they just go, hey, passive house, sure, I'll do that.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah, it's a it's a tricky thing. Well, certainly with regarding architects, uh, you know, architects have, as you mentioned at the get-go, have been out of the loop. You know, I mean, the the what the statistic is 90% of construction or or so does not involve architects. Um single-family homes, it's even worse than that for single-family homes. Right. Well, and that's the dominant yeah, of the market, right? Um, in terms of structures. Uh, but um we do see the the architects, you know, are still, I think, critical messengers in kind of cultural uh translation and connection making. And we see in these things like where they're kit homes or builders, design builders, architects involved that are you know helping tune it. Um to find it uh scalable.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's what I exactly what I do is I use an architect to tune my designs. You know, I've got I got an engineer that stamps, I've got an architect and a draftsman that look at it. I've got several friends that are architects that that, you know, uh Enrico and a few other people that you know I pass it in front of it, and you know, they say, oh yeah, it looks good, or you know, maybe look at that for a little bit a lot longer and stuff like that. And I think that in order to get the vast majority of people that are actually building these buildings on board, it needs to be driven down into the grassroots. Architects look, early adopters basically got everything in this world started always. And there's that's great. I love them, you know, and and there's a there's a big, big place for them. But if we really want to get this at scale, we've got to get it to the point where it's so simple that like they do in Europe with AAC, couple goes out and buys a truckload of AAC 16 inch deep, puts it up, boom, they got a house. It's like, you know, tinker toys. So it's gotta get down to that level, I think. And I think that's one of the things that I love about passive house network, you know, is that you're you're you're you're a big umbrella for everybody.
SPEAKER_00:And I do think um, you know, in in part of that messaging, I don't know if this I haven't really thought about it in this term exactly, but as in the as the new amenity, um where you have the all the things baked into it, right? The thermal comfort, the the healthy indoor air quality, the resilience, the affordability of the long-term maintenance and operation. Um you know, it's a set of amenities that people aren't accustomed to and they're not aware of that it it exists. And so building that awareness. Um, I was at, I gave a talk at the National Realtors Convention in Anaheim back in the fall, and really about the value of energy efficiency and the kind of misperceptions and kind of unlocking the idea that efficiency, efficiency really underpins the things that they that everybody wants. Um and so looking through the lens, we don't need to sell efficiency, but we do need to connect that if you don't have an energy-efficient building, you're not going to get these other qualities. Um, and so uh kind of like trying to bring that message back around. So if you want comfort, you want your children to be healthy and safe, you want a really energy efficient building, you want a passive house. And you know, just connecting it to those fundamental desires um and and skipping the textbook.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, we gotta do a lot more skipping the textbook, that's for sure. I mean, we only just recently came around to going, wait a minute, these places are really comfortable. Uh, maybe we should sell them that way, you know. So we've only recently come around to that, you know. I find my first go go ahead. No, I was just saying, I find today's buyers is very, very sophisticated with all this stuff, to be honest with you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, that's good to hear. Um, I know my first passive house was not sold on energy efficiency per se, um, that I designed. It was based on comfort and health of the kids, you know, um, in in an old house, an old Brooklyn brownstone. Um and and the resilience, you know, they were at the edge, you know, first adopter types per se, but they weren't like adventurous. It seemed like a pretty conservative bet, actually.
SPEAKER_01:But they did their homework, is what you're saying. Yeah, they did their homework enough, yes. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_00:Well, they knew what they wanted. Fair amount of trust.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. You know, my my dad was a salesman, and I learned from a sales trainer that was really, really good. And one of the things I learned how to do is qualify people. And when you qualify somebody, you find out exactly what it is that they want. You know, and you do it just in a conversation. You have a conversation, you know, and but but you understand where you need to speak, what line you need to take. And after 20, 30 minutes, you wind up with somebody that tells you exactly what they want. And I will tell you without any prompting whatsoever, they want comfort, they want energy efficiency, they want low bills, they want durability, they want ease of ease and efficiency of maintenance. They want all of those things. They also want kitchens and they want space and they want bathrooms and they want bidets and they want smart toilet seats and you know, a million other things. But but you really get that, boil it down. And then what I do is I focus them on the envelope and I go, look, all the things that you want are achievable, but if you don't get the envelope right the first time, all these things are going to be harder to do down the future, you know, and harder to keep. And by the way, the banks are starting to recognize this too. The banks are looking at these buildings and they're saying, wait a minute, if, and not a lot of them, but but they're starting to look at it and they're starting to say, well, if this building doesn't use the$10,000 a year that the average new building uses for energy and maintenance the first year, if it doesn't use that, then they can put that towards a mortgage. So it's just now, the thinking is just now starting to become, you know, hmm, you know, maybe these new buildings, because they cost a little bit more, how do we enable that? And so we're starting to hear.
SPEAKER_00:There's money to be made there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they realize that. They realize that the people that want them, they're dinks a lot of times, dual income, no kids. You know, there it's a second home for a lot of them. They're, you know, the early adopters are always going to be higher earners, you know, almost always. Yeah. Unless they're out there doing it themselves, like I did. You know, getting your hands dirty. You know. Yeah. So tell me something about your job every day. What do you do when you get up every day? What do you do as the head of Passive House Network? Because it sounds pretty darn important.
SPEAKER_00:Um, it's ever shifting. I feel like a lot wear a lot of different hats. So we are a small uh organization. While we are nationally focused, um, and we have a membership of over 400 now. We have nine regional chapters, and um, we have courses running continually, both on demand, not just on demand, but live online, hybrid, some in-person um courses training hundreds and and thousands of people over the years. Uh, there are at the moment three full-time people uh with the organization. And so when you're that small, you wear a lot of hats. Um so from I was trying to, well, very unsuccessfully try to do a little HTML this afternoon. Um, not so good. I need to have somebody else do that. Uh but I really try to.
SPEAKER_01:I rely on GoDaddy's plat uh their platform. I'd say that's yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That sounds good. Yeah, it's easy anyway. Right, right, right. Um, and so you know what's interesting is kind of the mix of micro to the from the bookkeeping and figuring out like you know, bugs in the website or what's happening, to having policy discussions with people from Washington to California, um, to talking with new architects that are coming into it, to new builders, to folks around the world. So we're part of the International Passive House Association, and so I could be on the phone with somebody from the UK, from Germany, um, Italy, and uh, you know, and sharing experiences, working on projects together in terms of you know, knowledge generation and sharing, um, and and getting it out there. Two, I um actually have taught a couple of of courses in a rather simple way. We have expert trainers who are amazing teachers, but I like getting in with the students and joining the classes um and participating uh at all these different levels. So it does by the end of the day, it's been a whirlwind, and I feel like you know the list that I make each morning is just going right off the page, um, and it's a mad dash.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, you just use another page, you just use another page, you know. So let me ask you a question copying it over exactly. Just well, they got a new one now. You take notes, you take a picture of it, it's got a freaking uh uh a code on it, and then you put it in the microwave and the pen, the ink goes away. I'm like, that's like wild. You know, I I'll use my phone. Um so let me ask you a question. You've got 400 members. What does your membership look like? Is it mostly like architects and professionals, or what is it? What's your membership look like?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a mix. It's a mix from students. We have students, we have young professionals um all the way through, a lot of architects. Um, architects are definitely the core of it. Uh, engineers, though, we've had developers, real estate people, um, and and that's the background of the courses as well. Uh range of range of folks too, just enthusiasts, uh, people who are interested. We get a number of people uh involved who are just the homeowners who are looking to maybe uh build the new home, um, you know, uh relocate, slim down, and do something efficient that they'll live in for the rest of their lives. Um is it a good resource for homeowners?
SPEAKER_01:Is it a good resource for homeowners?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it is, but it's it's not an obvious one. It's not uh as frictionless as one would like. Uh you still need to find your team.
SPEAKER_01:That's why you need to that's why you need to get your HTML stuff together, don't you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Find your team. Um it's true. Uh I think the in terms of the programming and what we can do in terms of messaging, I've just, you know, my mind is constantly racing, and I feel like, you know, too many good ideas, not enough hours in the day, um, and trying to focus on step by step how we're getting information out. I'm excited right now we're in the process of putting the final touches on a rather boring document um called, you know, Scope of Services for Building Certification, for building certifiers. So, you know, the interesting thing is in our world of the international passive house standard, there are over a hundred certifiers around the world. There are about 30 actively working across the US and projects, um, many of them based in the US, but also based in Canada, based in Europe. And you know, we need a kind of a unified um uh scope of services. So when customers are coming, architects, developers, homeowners, to um to uh to to to get their services, that they have some scaffold and framework that they compare from one to another, and that the certifiers can say, okay, this is the kind of like the fundamental base work around certification that we're providing, and what the extras might be. That interestingly, that document came from the Passive House Trust in the UK. They put it out in September, and very generously, as the Passive House community is um, you know, said, by all means take it, copy it, translate it into American and into American now.
SPEAKER_01:We used to be British, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Many years ago. Well, but we were, I mean, you know. It's a different language now. Good lord. Yeah. Yeah, and it yeah, it's funny. And and and more different building culture in some ways, you know, in terms of what they how they go about things. There are so many some similarities, though. There's always more similarities and differences um that we can. Take and learn. And so this rather uh prosaic document I think is going to be super exciting in terms of empowering folks to more in a more sophisticated way take on certification.
SPEAKER_01:You know, as a professional estimator, writing scopes, I'm constantly writing scopes of work. And and it's it's daunting. And I gotta be honest with you, I found a new tool recently, and I'm almost ashamed to say it because I I'm somewhat resistant just on a basic Luddite level. Um, but AI, I've been writing scopes with AI, with ChatGPT. And I'll be honest with you, I'm kind of stunned.
SPEAKER_00:I was So what is I'm curious, like I've done only minimal stuff with that. How do you what's the prompt? How do you search?
SPEAKER_01:So what you do is you basically write into it what you want to do. Okay. So if you're saying I've got a scope of work for concrete and it's a 12 by 24 inch uh footing, and it's gonna be on four inches of of compacted soil, and it's gonna be you put all your parameters in there. You say I want to I want to write this to narrative, the concrete CSI code 03.00.16 or whatever the hell the footings are. And you know, you say include this part of the CSI, which is the uh uh design build, you know, blah, blah, blah. You put you basically just list it all. I do it by CSI uh category because CSI is universal enough. It's universal enough all over the world that you get enough of the the the chat bots had a lot of stuff to digest, right? And I'll be information. Here's what's really fascinating about it. If you use a different bot every time, it comes in with a different, you can ask the same exact thing in two different chatbots, right? Not the same, same brand, same chat B GPT, but you open up a different bot every time, right? You can ask the same thing, put the same exact parameters in this one and in this one, and they come out slightly different. They'll come out with a different font, they'll come out with different spacing. Some will explain each section, some won't. It's kind of spooky. That's interesting. Be honest with you. We have to learn, we have to learn the robots. Yeah. So I basically went through and I realized they were all different fonts and stuff, and I went, you know what? Let me look. I like this one the best. I close the rest of them out, and now I just write in that one, and it's all uniform. So it's like, wow. And I gotta, I feel like I'm cheating. I really do. I feel like I'm cheating because it's so easy because scopes are one of those things that you just grind out, you know, it's just you grind and you grind. This is like here's my specifications, here's my model numbers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I go, wow, cut and paste. There you go. Sounds like a good use for it. It is. I'm giving you a secret there. Um, so so tell me something about uh the the history of passive house network. How did it come about? And I know it's been through a couple of iterations just in the time that I've been in the industry. Um exciting stuff.
SPEAKER_00:So the passive house. So it was initially formed as the American Passive House Network. Um, and it was a uh loose um association of independent regional passive house groups that came together um essentially at the at the time of the split between FIS and PHI, and because at the at the time of the split, there was not any clarity about what the relationship would be with the international community and with PHI. Um and there was a big concern. A lot of folks were drawn to Passive House because of its international orientation. It's like we've got a global problem, there are global solutions, um, and strategies, it's physics, like uh, and so you know, and any number of people who are leaders in the Pass House movement at the time were of an international extraction of one form or another.
SPEAKER_01:Well, PHI has been around for a while.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so it's it's 2011, I guess, um, and uh and uh from Passhaus, Maine to Pass Faust California, Northwest, and it wasn't um initially oriented to PHI the way we are today, like we're affiliated with PHI and we teach the international standards and train train to that. Initially, um, it was uh fundamentally agnostic, um, but it kind of self-selected and self-filtered along the way.
SPEAKER_01:As humans tend to do. By the way, I'm gonna interject here for a minute just because we're we're throwing initials around and stuff like that. Terminology. Right, right, terminology. And I want it for the uninitiated, PHI is Passive House International, and that Passive House International started in Germany, and there we'll probably do a podcast on the entire history of Passive House. Um, and then there's FIAS. These are the two certifying agencies of the United States. FIAS is Passive House, what's it, PHI? It's FIAS, what's the I standard?
SPEAKER_00:Well, they changed their name, they changed their name to just FIS now, but it was Passive House Institute US.
SPEAKER_01:Institute US, right.
SPEAKER_00:They were kind of like, you know, there are any number of people around the world created their Passive House Institute, name a place. Right. Um and uh but very few felt we need to brand everything. So the two organizations, right. And so the Pass House Institute's based in Darmstadt, Germany. Um, and uh and so us long story short, essentially uh we start we in we brought in um uh regional organizations from Canada. It was um the Western Canada and Ontario and Quebec. Uh so we became Passive House North North American Passive House Network, NAPHN, which we were for many years. We moved from a loose association of regional groups who are essentially most of them were unincorporated and just um you know uh volunteer um uh yeah deciding to to work together. And we formed a uh cooperative corporation at one point um and kind of set it up formally, and that was kind of unwieldy. Um and so we ended up simplifying, I think in 2018, I want to say, um, to uh nonprofit, to a national nonprofit. So at that time, Passfast Canada had formed and kind of unified in one form or another the Canadian efforts, and we uh reformed as a national nonprofit, still with the NAPHN name, but really moving towards more of an American focus, and then rebranded, I want to say in 2022, um, as the Passive House Network. Um, still not like putting America or the US in our name, but essentially um focusing on the American market, working in conjunction with the Canadians and other folks around the world.
SPEAKER_01:So a shout out to our award-winning design build company, LDR Group, in the beautiful Hudson Valley in New York. LDR is the evolution of my journey as a builder into high-performance housing and passive house. We design, build, and renovate homes that are more comfortable, healthier, and cost far less to operate and maintain than the typical code minimum house produced by the large national builders and even most local companies. We invite you to visit our website at LDRgroup.net or give us a call to discuss your project. Whether you're building new or doing a deep energy retrofit on an older home, we would be happy to spend some time helping you understand the science, the process, and the costs of creating your high-performance dream house. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And PHN is a lot faster to say, too. Yeah, PHN is a lot faster. I also like to just say the network, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Uh doing a bunch of that's sexy.
SPEAKER_00:The network.
SPEAKER_01:Almost makes you sound like secret agents or something. Good lord. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't need that much excitement about it. I don't need that much excitement, I'll be honest with you. Um, well, the passive house network is is pretty important um in the industry as far as a clearinghouse goes. Uh let me ask you a question. If if uh if if homeowners started showing up more, okay, maybe because of this podcast or because Google got it right or something like that. And you say it's not maybe not the perfect resource for homeowners, where would you send them to get that kind of information? Where would it be a place that you'd say to homeowners, here's where you need to go to get a lot more information than I have here?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I mean, I think we um have a certain amount of information that is, you know, comparable to other sources, but I think ultimately they need to connect to people, people who are either local that they can work with or form relationships with, or they could be national or even international for that. I'm always surprised to hear about different folks that are working together across the country or from around the world. Um, but connecting to those resources. And it's one of the things that we say to folks um, if you don't know something, if you're struggling with something, don't suffer alone. Like reach out. And so folks will reach out to us and and email in, and and then it's our job to connect back outward to other so you do that in a bespoke way.
SPEAKER_01:You actually do that for each individual. You don't have like a list of random emails. But you don't have a list of like contractors or a list of architects or stuff like that. Do you have like that on the website?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, we do have a member directory, and um there are, you know, uh lists. We have lists of people that we have trained, um, and then we have kind of the known quantities of who's done what sorts of buildings out there. Um so you know, we try to mix it up and just kind of do what yeah, what seems appropriate. But we have not been able to build like a real infrastructure for clearinghouse. I do think, you know, PHI, Passhouse Institute, and their Pasipedia, which is a great online tool, which has just a lot of in-depth material. It gets pretty technical, pretty quick, but in terms of you know poking around and seeing what might uh you know what might interest people is super powerful. And we really try with our content to have a lot of over the years, particularly videos that are available, that are free, that um are accessible and and organize them in a way, hopefully, that that people can can find them. Put a lot of stuff on YouTube so it's just out there.
SPEAKER_01:Um I really love to see at some point in the case. I'm sorry, we got a delay. I'd really love to see at some point some sort of um maybe a video series or some sort of informational series geared specifically to homeowners and renters to give them, you know, I I would call it training wheel information and and kind of funnel them into a certain place. Speaking of training, let's talk about the training mission for Passive House Network and generally what's out there and and and and passive house as a career. So you guys have you guys are clearing house for trainers, or are you actually training people?
SPEAKER_00:We're training. Um, so and it's really a core, absolutely core mission of ours in what I would generally call capacity building, right? To um to be able to execute uh passive house buildings. And so the the wonderful thing I like to say about passive house is that it doesn't require, I mean, there's always a lifetime of learning, right? And you can always improve and become more sophisticated, but to get into it, to get started, does not require a huge lift, it does not require a massive degree and months and months and months and months of of um investment. Uh there the certified Pass Fast Designer course and consultant course, same course, um lays out over a series of weeks the absolute fundamentals that you know it gets into your blood. And so when you come out at the other end of that course, as we say, you can't look at buildings the same way again, you know. Question everything, you just can't unsee it.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And and so passive house, I think the magic of passive house and why the training works so well is that there is a pathway then um to not only gain more expertise and and keep growing, but to work with other team members, to execute on the buildings, to have the QAQC and have certified buildings and have that ultimate impact. So it's not theoretical, although it starts out quite fundamental. Um, and so we are focused the last few years. We've been focused on how do you scale the certified Pass Fast Designer course because it's in that it's a country, it's a big country. You know, it started out first with just in-person training, but we were able to develop over the years a hybrid online experience that's a mix of on-demand. Well, COVID forced our hand with that.
SPEAKER_01:COVID really forced our hand.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it did. Well, we actually ironically, we had started the um building the online platform before COVID. And so it was kind of very opportune. We were um uh not that it um we still needed to it it pushed us to accelerate, let's say, what we were doing.
SPEAKER_01:Which is exactly what happened with the COVID vaccine. You know that, right? Pfizer. Yeah. 25 years they've been working on it. It's 25 years. It just so happens. Oh, by the way, we happen to have something here. Look at this. We just got a little bit more to go. It was pretty amazing. Um, but yeah, I didn't realize that you guys had already had the platform built out, you're already going in that direction. That's great.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. That was exciting. And so, you know, we have some specialized trainers, we have a lot of on-demand um materials, and we complement, so we love emu, passive Enrico and gang over there. We have some overlap. And it's boot camps, but yeah, the boot camps, yeah, which will be in New York um in April, I believe, and then Boston and Minnesota, um, or or uh yeah, in Colorado, um, or Pittsburgh. They're going to Pittsburgh. Um, so we love to see those classes full. There's nothing better than contractors who have taken the class and and are really can help lift the game and you know push everybody. Um so it's a good it's a good ecosystem, and we're just trying to figure out how to scale it uh so you know and fits and starts here.
SPEAKER_01:Full full declosure, full disclosure, Enrico trained me. Um he also um he's going to be the third guest on this path on the Passive Aggressive podcast. He's wonderful. He's a great guy. He's it takes about five minutes to listen to to get used to his accent. Right.
SPEAKER_00:And then you do need to you gotta dial in. Close captions would be good addition to that one.
SPEAKER_01:You gotta dial it in. Uh, but I gotta be honest with you, uh he's one of the most gifted uh educators and modelers I've I've ever heard of. You know, he's just he's a rock.
SPEAKER_00:He's so good, he's such a great teacher, and he's hilarious. Yes. Um, and uh, you know, in his own understated sort of Italian way, geeky, geeky Italian, you know, and um just brilliant.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love him. No question. Yes, I'm looking forward to like I said, if I could do this full time, I'm like the luckiest guy in the world here. I get to talk to these big brains, talk about all kinds of cool stuff, find out stuff that I tell you something. How many people in the in the industry know your history, you know? And speaking of your history, let's talk a little bit about that, where you came from and and and how you got into this, because you're one of the most um uh evangelical of all the the passive house people I know. And when you use the word agnostic, that's exactly the bright word for Passive House Network, because I found that there is a lot of partisanship um in some of these uh organizations. And you guys are very much like, you know what? If the house gets halfway there, it's better than not getting any of the way there. And that's that's a good attitude. I think it's a good attitude. I think it's the kind of thing we're gonna need soon, you know, if we're gonna have any hope. You know, it is I would just as soon see a million houses out there get halfway there than 10,000 houses get all the way there, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Right, right. No, absolutely. So, I mean, a couple of things to unpack there. I I would say on my um brief uh history, I'll just put out there that I was actually born and raised in Vermont, in southern Vermont, and grew up in a tiny town, loved the city though, always came down at some point um growing up for various things, and came to New York to go to architecture school and never left. And um in the 1980s, which was like a completely different city and um experience, but you know, stayed, built an architecture career over a couple of decades, had my own small firm, modest firm, doing ended up doing you know, brownstone retrofits and and other mix of things. And at in 2006 with an Inconvenient Truth um movie coming out, kind of you know, crystallizing a lot of what we kind of had out there, you know, sort of um knowledge about the climate, but then really like, oh, we we really have to do something now and we have to make our work part of the solution. And as an architect at the time, it was a real struggle to figure it out because you know, lead was making strides and doing things, and it was good, and sustainability was coming along, and there was a history of sustainability, but it was all pretty unconvincing in terms of ecological and climate catastrophe. Well, lead was a little too transaction.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, lead was a little too transactional, you know. It was like it was like I called it, I called it wimpy climate. I'll gladly pay you today or tomorrow for a hamburger today, you know.
SPEAKER_00:It's like you know, it's good for certain things, but in terms of saving the climate and and really driving efficiency, not so much. Or resiliency any number of things, right?
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:But so struggling, and then um I came across passive house on the internet, um, Googling around in 2008, 2009, I guess, and um took there was a class in Massachusetts um like later that year, and so signed up for that immediately and took the class, which was an amazing class. There was like Mark Rosenbaum was in the class. Um Heather Clark uh was in the class, who is now the director for buildings emissions at the White House. Um really uh just a star-studded Jesse Thompson from Maine was in the class. Uh, just amazing. I'm forgetting a bunch of people's names right now, but crazy. I'm sure you'll hear from them at some point. And I was like a nobody, um to be sure, just totally new to this whole thing, but just soaking it up and so exciting coming out of the course. And Katrine, of course, taught the class at the time, and uh um and uh just really was like this is just meshing. This makes so much sense in terms of of um applying you know what's such an important part of all of our lives and what society does and and making it part of the solution or at least helping in a in a meaningful way. So I was able to convince a couple of early clients um doing townhouse retrofits and such to do passive house. Um and out of those early projects, the transformation was, you know, I want everybody to know about it. I you know, we need to is you know, one of those lights going off where you know it's the red pill, the matrix, whatever how whatever analogies you want to do in terms of the science is compelling.
SPEAKER_01:It's as simple as that. The science is compelling.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And um and seeing those connections. So from that uh realized that we needed to uh bring in more components. Needed more hands-on training, needed to connect the dots. So I helped um found New York Passive House as an organization back in the day. I was on the board initially of the um Passive House uh Alliance with uh the the FIAS organization and helped co-found the North American Passive House Network, which became PHN. Um at the same time, along with that uh co-founded 475 High Performance Building Supply. And the big thing there was to do that, we really needed to focus and commit ourselves to that. And um there was no market. I mean, there was just a handful of projects, and there was nothing there, but you could see it. It was like you could see the future, you know, you wanted to run out and tell everybody like what was coming. Um to make it work, I quit my architecture profession and shut down my little firm. Oh, yeah, my wife wants to love that. It was insane. Oh, she was ready to kill me. Um we've just had, you know, uh a young baby at that point. Our oldest was still like very young. And um anyway, it was uh an adventure, but literally like roll of tape after roll of tape, um, just stringing it together and and teaching and using it as a teaching tool and and building that, um, and just working like the Dickens to grow that. And passive house education was absolutely core to that, uh, of course, where it really, you know, synthesized everything.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so out of that, both in the terms of the business and in terms of the organizations and in terms of just seeing that the world has to change, um, it was, you know, I was an act advocate and wanted to be activist about it. It wasn't about making money, although we needed to make money. And we, you know, we needed the business to be successful because that is also how we're going to make the change successful and and hopefully bring on other buildings. Small planet workshop had existed back then. Um, Albert Rooks was really first. Um, but uh uh small planet supply.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Small small planet supply. Yeah, small planet supply, yes.
SPEAKER_00:I'm sorry. Um and uh yes, thank you for correcting that.
SPEAKER_01:And um I was lost for a minute, I couldn't figure it out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should have just said small planet, people will know that. Yeah, exactly. Out of Olympia, Washington. And um uh and so um yeah, just just foot by foot and really in advocacy. I did a talk for Brook uh Massachusetts Passive House, Passive House, Massachusetts. I'm gonna mess up everybody's name now, um back in the day about how we grew New York Passive House in particular, um, because it was definitely the fastest growing group and the biggest and the most far-reaching. Um, and just kind of like the strategies behind that. And it was interesting to unpack it. I need to, I've been meaning to retell that story. I need to dig out that presentation. You need to write a book.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's like uh You really do. Yeah, I don't know. Something. Well, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:You showed me something in your bio here that's actually a really good chapter. Uh, what was it about protesting and and getting out there and getting and ra raising hell? Right.
SPEAKER_00:So, well, that's the next step in my advocacy. So what are you doing with that? I got um after about eight or nine years like going full steam between the volunteering for the uh organizations, New York Passive House and NAPHM, primarily PHN, um, and force and working with 475, I was just like pretty burned out. And I stepped back and and just felt like the climate crush just coming even more heavy, right? It was just it's accelerating, right? And um, so I stepped back from the board of New York Passive House, the board of PHN, and from management of day-to-day management of 475, um, and essentially went into like a premature retirement mode. Um, it wasn't, I don't know, the maybe it was a midlife crisis. I wouldn't call it that at the time, but um uh but my wife was like, you know, so then I I volunteered, I got had gotten into Extinction Rebellion and was like, we need to be more radical, we need to be more aggressive, and we need civil disobedience and um make it painful for people, like without making demands, you know, power does not hand away things on its own.
SPEAKER_01:Power does cannot give away anything at all, ever.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, power will not give it up. So, you know, how do you, and it's really about identifying the pillars of power in our construct, and how do you like go at those? Make them.
SPEAKER_01:You gotta make noise. Yeah, you gotta make noise and make yourself know. You know, our our President Obama said something about that when he first got into office. He went in with a lot of high hopes and a lot of groups and a lot of people going, what are you gonna do about this? What are you gonna do about this? What are you gonna do about this? And he said something that I never forgot, and and I think it's really wise. He turned around, people thought he was kind of arrogant for saying this, but he turned around and he said, make me. And and he meant it like, get in my face. In a good way. Yeah, get in my face. Don't let me forget. Write to me every single day, call me every single month, make me do this. And he the wisdom in that, because that's how it works. You gotta make them do it. And have you heard of something? I talked to you about this when we did a little pre-production about and and I and I interestingly enough, I got an email and started getting involved with a group since then. Have you heard of a thing called Third Act? No, what is that? You should look it up, it's really kind of cool. It's basically it's a it's a project of Bill McKibben and AK Winwood, and it's basically saying that there's a lot of us folks out there over 60. We have a lot of buying power, we have a lot of knowledge, we have a lot of experience, and we have a lot of time on our hands now. And and maybe we're the ones that should stand up and say something because we're probably in the best position to do that right now.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I I was surprised. I mean, it's interesting with Extinction Rebellion. Um, of course, there's a lot of young people coming out um with it, and a fair amount of middle-aged folks, but also older folks, um, and you know, who could really put it out there and um and uh you know had that ability, had that privilege to lay it on the line and and not feel like they were you know giving up.
SPEAKER_01:And and it's keeping involved is staying involved. It's literally the secret to longevity is being engaged in something every single day. You have a reason to get up every morning. That was Ken Levinson, the managing director of the Passive House Network. I had more questions, and fortunately, Ken had more answers. So many, in fact, that the interview ran almost twice as long as we can fit into a single episode. So we had a decision to make. Give you one very long single podcast, edit the episode down and lose some of it on the cutting room floor, or split it into two episodes so that we don't lose a single minute. That's why I'm happy to tell you we will be dropping the second part of this episode with Ken Levinson next Monday at 9 a.m. I'm excited that we didn't lose a bit of this wonderful, wide-ranging interview with a practitioner of such note in the passive house and high performance housing space. I'm your host, Jeff Eckas, and this is Passive Aggressive, the podcast that brings building science to everyone.