Brian Keane on How to Reduce Your Energy Bills with Solar Panels and Become Greener w/ WeeGreen CEO

Audio Transcription

Today’s guest teaches how to reduce your energy bills with solar panels and how to become greener with we green. His company, he’s the CEO of we green and his name is Brian Keane, which Grimes green, but again, his name is Brian Keen. On today’s show, Brian shares specific ways that you can reduce your energy bills with solar panels. He shares how much it actually costs to install solar panels on your house and how to become greener and practical and specific ways. Ladies and gentlemen, without any further ado, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Brian Keith.

Some shows don’t need a celebrity in a writer to introduce the show, but this show down to my eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the thrive time,

Welcome back to another exciting edition of the thrive time show your radio and podcast download. And on today’s show we’re interviewing the CEO of a company called we greed. You gotta look these guys up. It’s we w e. Dot. Green. We Green. We Green was founded with the mission to create the most complete and easy to use, digital platform and marketplace. So people like you, communities and organizations can more quickly and easily achieve their environmental sustainability goals and make a long term impact. Mr. Brian Green, what? Mr Brian Keen, we’ll come on to the thrive time show. How are you sir?

I’m doing great and it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Do you ever thinking about a change your name to Brian Keane? I mean, think about that, that they would be all in.

If not, if not, if it’s not as, it’s not, not to say it hasn’t crossed my mind. I gotta tell Ya.

Okay. All right. Well, I am excited to have you on the show and we have a lot of business owners out there that, uh, aspire to someday be a CEO of an organization. But, but for the listeners out there that aren’t really familiar with your background, I’d love to hear your story and where you believe your career began.

Oh, absolutely. Sure. So you know, it’s, I’m sure it actually, it’d be Andrew just to say the least. And the um, actually truthfully I grew up in a Boston but my interest has always been in politics and I actually, uh, after college really in three in to college, I actually just grew up doing campaigns, political campaigns. Um, and in part of that I really thought I would wind up kind of doing political, political campaigns for my entire life. I worked on Capitol Hill for a, I did a presidential campaign and it was in the presidential campaign actually that I realized that if you really want to effect change, if you want to make things happen, the political campaigns structure does make things up and actually changes people’s mind. It actually changes behavior. It actually causes people to take an action, that action being voting. But that same process that the best part of politics, if you will, campaign politics can be applied to other issues.

It can be applied to saving the planet. It can be applied to changing people’s minds about what it means to be green and being sustainable. That we actually really have done with. We agree. And so actually when um, the presidential campaigns ended, I wound up several years later starting a nonprofit organization called the smart power and what we wound up doing was taking the same kind of a, if you will kind of attendance of political campaigns in applying it to um, environmentalism. How do you actually get people, real people, just regular people, people who don’t care about the environment, people don’t care about energy issues, how do you get them to want to take an energy action and environmental action. And that really becomes through a political structure through a political campaign. And so it’s been really exciting because what we want to doing was working on the ground neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, peer-to-peer what it is that the way any one of us makes kind of our decisions, environmentalism or kind of on energy issues, on anything like this is really what our friends and neighbors are doing.

It’s actually here at the end of the day. It comes down to peer pressure. The reason, and I’ll try to challenge you with this, you were more likely to buy solar power, not because I say you should buy solar power, but it’s because your friends or neighbors are buying solar power. And so and so at the end of the day, any good campaign if you will, on buying solar power really focuses on getting you and your neighbors to buy solar power. And so, which by the way is how political campaigns work. You’re more likely to vote for a candidate if you know the candidate or you know, who knows that friend, that candidate. And so it’s kind of that same tenant of political campaigns. So anyway, long story short, you know, basically did we spend about 15 years perfecting these, this model of using political campaigns to actually affect kind of behavior change on environmentalism.

How do you actually get people to take an energy action, environmental action to actually, uh, that they don’t even kind of w when they don’t even really believe or understand that they actually want to effect change on an environmental level. And so that’s what’s been so exciting cause you actually see people say, you know, Oh you know what, my goal isn’t to save the polar bear. And it’s like, right, I get it. You live in Arizona. Like you’ve never seen a polar bear, but at the end of the day you do actually want to buy. So you want to buy solar. And that’s what we’ve been able to actually make happen. And so it’s really about actually meeting people where they live, where they work, where they play, where they pray and using the words and actions that they want to use, that they, that they understand in order to effect the change that that needs to happen.

You are my friend have already unlocked a, a treasure trove by a smorgasborg. A plethora of questions here for you. So I haven’t come to the buffet of questions. Um, political campaigns for the listeners out there, all of our listeners are business owners, but they get into the specifics a lot. They want to, they always email in, hey, you know, what political campaign did the guy work on? Or what, which, what campaigns did you work on and what presidential campaign did you get involved with?

Sure. So there’s, this goes back actually to show my age. It goes back to 1992 and it was a, I worked for a guy named Paul Tsongas who was a former senator from Massachusetts, from Massachusetts, and he ran for president in the Democratic primary in 1992. Um, and if you recall one of the members in that primary, I think there was seven Democrats running, uh, Bill Clinton ultimately won. Paul Tsongas was considered, quite frankly, he was considered a joke at the time that, you know, he was a former senator. Um, and in that primary, uh, Bill Clinton was running, Bob Kerry, senator from Nebraska was running Jerry Brown, uh, you know, the governor of California was running, um, bunch of folks who were running. And Paul Sagas literally kind of came out of nowhere and won the New Hampshire primary. He won 10 primaries across the country. Uh, actually before Bill Clinton even won one.

And yeah, it was unbelievable. And, and, um, and really it was all based on kind of through the strength of his message and talking with people, peer-to-peer friend to friend and neighbor to neighbor. And we didn’t have any money to do it. And it really was, it’s kind of what you see today too. And you see kind of some of the strength of the, um, the energy and the messaging specifically on the left today that it’s like, oh, a message when it catches fire, it really does actually work. And so you can kind of see that it actually burns through and you know, and then ultimately, you know, when you get to the kind of, some of the huge states monkey does take over and kind of just tramples but ultimately songs ever became president. But the strength of his messaging at that point, by the way, interestingly enough, uh, his method was an economic message specifically about, uh, limiting.

And this really does take us back eliminating the federal budget deficit in 1992. And his argument was, if we eliminate it, then we can actually fix the economy. And, um, and Clinton at the time was saying, no, know you don’t need to do that. We can actually fix it in another way. And Clinton won and then ultimately adopted all its song. This is, um, a policies and to Queen’s credit then eliminated the federal budget deficit to the point by 1996, 95, I think we actually had a zero deaths in this country. We had no deficit in the federal budget now, but there’s another way. It was kind of interesting. I don’t know. And I did not know anything about devastate politics. So, um, I don’t, you know, like, it’s all kind of very funny. It’s a kind of big crazy words. I didn’t really understand.

I’m not an economist, but what we were able to do is actually help the American people understand what it meant when the government spends more than it takes it. When you’re talking about what it means when ourselves, you know, each one of us actually can actually be part of an environmental solution. And so you look at kind of the climate crisis and you see like, you know, boy, this is such a big challenge. How is it that I could even be part of that solution? And then you realize that, you know what, I actually can be part of that solution. Every single one of us can do a tiny little step today that actually can actually make a bigger impact tomorrow. And that’s really what the geniuses of [inaudible] green w e e specifically means a small, tiny little thing. Each one of us can be tiny, small little steps each every single day that actually have a big impact.

Brian Keane, I want to ask you this because this is something I know our listeners are, are, are gonna I know, I know a listener out there. One wants to ask you this question. Okay. A lot of American families, you know, they can’t run at a deficit. This just in American families cannot print their own money. You know, you can’t just say, hey brother Gutenberg a brother, Hewlett Packard, do you wanna print some money here for me? But the government can, which is asinine. But the point is we have a government, a Republican or Democrat that loves to spend more than they than they bring in. And so we had this devastated. A lot of American families don’t have that luxury, but they want to go. They want to be more green, you know? So someone’s listening out there and they say, you know what? I want to put a solar panel on my house. I have a house, I live in Florida, I live in Mira Zona. I have a house in Oklahoma, whatever. I have a house and I wanna put a solar panel on it. But what are my steps? What’s the first step I can take to put a silver panel? How much does it cost? How many solar panels do I need to support myself to be sustainable? You know, what will help? What? It help us get familiar with the world of solar panel energy on my house.

Exactly. And in historically, by the way, it’s been really difficult, but it’s never been easier than it is right now. And it’s unbelievable. So the first thing that comes to mind is, oh my God, this is gonna be really expensive. The second thing is on my house, you know, my house by the way, is the biggest investment I got. So who’s getting on top of my and how does this work? And like what’s going on here? And then is it going to kill my about the resale value of my house. So what we’ve been able to do at we green is actually make it so easy to be green. You know the historically we’ve always said it’s not easy being green. It’s easy to be green. And that’s really what we know that we green now. So by the way, you go to [inaudible] dot green and you can just basically just say, look, I’d like to, I’d like to buy solar.

And within really by the way, within seconds, in hours, seconds, minutes and hours, if you can know, okay, their house is good, good for solar and it or not. And just for the record, by the way, not every house is good for solar. You know, at the end of the day is not really a, not every single house is good for solar. Lot of houses have a lot of trees over it. And by the way, it was a, for instance, by the way in New England, the number one reason houses can’t get solar is because there’s just too many trees and you don’t want to knock down trees for solar. And you know, the south in the south, the southwest, there is a lot of, a lot of dust from the deserts and stuff and it just doesn’t make sense. It hurts the efficiency. So it’s kind of a lot of different reasons why people can’t get solar. But if you can get solar, we know pretty quickly and then the cost become head big had historically been huge. You know, we started, I started this, uh, you know, to buy solar fee or if you would say quote unquote a typical American house, it was upwards of $50,000 today it’s roughly and protect a, and I think I’d be around now, but it’s less than about $15,000. So less than even buying it,

$15,000 $15,000

correct. And that offsets the cost of your utilities. Okay. So basically it is, it needs to be understood that this is really just an investment in the house, not an add on to the house. And that $15,000 now can simply be as a zero down loan. Put it another way. We’re just getting solar on my house. I have not spent a penny. And so it’s a road download. We’ll get solar on the house.

How’s the zero money down? How’s it zero money to someone saying, how does it, how is it zero money down? How do, how does that work?

So yeah, through a number of different companies that are out there that are thought, that have solar loan programs, right? So you can go to a bank, you could go to, uh, you could do a home equity loan or, uh, because solar market is so strong today, there are actual specific companies out there that actually just sell solar loans. And so their company we’re using is called a dividend finance and dividend says, Hey, look, we’ll give you a loan just to get solar and it’s zero money down. And so for me specifically, I think I spent, we’re going to spend $67 a month for solar now that $67 offsets my utility bill by about $67. So it’s a wash and then that here’s why sold it. And here’s why it’s really important to buy solar now because in the u s we have, uh, a tax credit for buying solar federal tax credit, and that tax credit is going to be going away in about two years.

Okay. And so what happens, I’m going to buy solar now and uh, don’t put on the roof in, in about 14 months are going to get, I’m going to get a check from the federal government of about $40,000 wow. That’s my taxi, right? Real money right now. Dividend solar, dividend finance assumes that I’m going to put that forth. That actually it can be two different plans. They said, now you, you should take that $4,000 and put it towards your a solo alone. But they’ve also said, we know that a lot of Americans, probably myself included, will say, hey, that’s $40,000 maybe we’ll go on a trip or maybe I’ll pay off that credit card with 18 to 22% maybe I should do that instead. And so they’ve kind of said, you know, so if you do that, then my $67 on my soul alone will go up to $98 a month. Okay. And so, or if I pay off, if I give it to my soul alone, then my $67 goes down to $62 a month.

There are many questions that are swirling through my mind right now. And one of them was, again, we have our audience, you know, about a half million folks is, is almost, almost entirely entrepreneurs or they want to be. So they’re always getting into the math of it. You know, how does this work? So I want to ask you this, your, your company we.green. That’s w e. Dot. Green. We, we.green your company. Um, how does, how, how do you make money? If I go on there and I’m looking for solar panels and you would make a recommendation and how do you get paid?

So it’s great, and that’s a great question. And it’s in, here’s what, here’s how it works, which is, um, and it’s so technically redox green is a startup. We started, uh, in March of 2018. Okay. So now what set it nine, 10 months ago. But prior to that, I’d been running a nonprofit organization, smart power for 16 years. So this is, uh, an overnight success. It’s basically taken 16 years to happen. And we smart are, what we’ve been doing is basically, uh, these on the ground outreach campaigns tied to an online platform, uh, to allow that figure there was figuring out how to get people to take these actions, these sustainability actions, and what were the trigger points that actually got people to do this. And within that we started to understand when we worked with Yale University and Duke University and we had, and the United States Department of energy trying to figure out what is it that actually gets people to make a sustainability action.

Okay. And, and what we actually learned was, you know, to this point that like, Yo, you are more likely to buy solar if your next door neighbor buy solar. In fact, you’re, you’re, um, you’re like 70% more likely. It’s peer pressure. It’s the same reason why you’re going to mow your lawn. If your next door neighbor wants your lawn, right? Uh, or rake the leaves, if that type of thing. And if you, if your neighbor buy solar and then you’re like, oh, I have to buy solar. And then you’re like, oh, but I can’t isolate. I have too many trees, or quite frankly, I just don’t have the money. I can’t even get alone. Then you do, you’re more likely to do something as in you are more likely to want to get a better shower head for your, for your shower or you want to buy it.

But light bulbs, you’re more likely to want to do something sustainable. Which is really bringing me to the point of how I make money, which is that if you buy solar, I can get paid by the solar installers and they will pay me a certain amount of money, but not everyone can buy solar. And so what happens is that then it’s like, hey, you know what? I want to do something though. I want to be part of the solution. And we know that actually if you get a hundred people in a room who want to buy solar, only 20% of the 20 20th I’m actually really 10 by solar. And so we’re leaving 80 80 of them quite friendly. You’re walking away saying, well, I want it to buy solar, but I can’t get anything. So let’s capture them. Let’s get them. They want to take some type of action.

Let’s get them something. And so they can then be become part of the solution. They can buy a better power strip their computers. They can, uh, buy a rain barrel, they can do better light bulbs, they can do something. And when they do, that’s how we’re able to get money. So we get a piece of every type of everything that they buy. So you know, we can get, um, and basically through our marketplace, that’s how they’re able to, they’re able to buy things. And that’s how we’re able to find that variable to get things to. But more interesting through our, what we’re able to do, and this is really kind of the premise of the whole organization, is that every fortune 500, every fortune 1000 company, every city and town of the country, every faith’s denomination in the world basically have saving the environment as part of their tenants.

Okay. And yet every single one of them is trying to adapt the reinventing the wheel, trying to do it. Every single, every one of these organizations is trying to, they want to get credit for doing it and every one of these organizations doesn’t have enough money to do it and we green actually solves all three of those problems. We green basically you go to [inaudible] dot green and we are, if you will, TurboTax for green campaigns. We will walk you step by step by step how to actually put together run and succeed and meet and exceed your, your green goals and your sustainability, uh, metrics. We will help you every step of the way. And it’s all branded to your own company, all branded to your own organization, your own city or your own, your own faith community and, and everything that people buy are buying off that marketplace. Your company, your community or faith community or your city. Your town actually gets 20% of the net revenue of everything that’s purchased. And so you actually wind up getting money to, that’s how much the market had changed us so that everybody is now benefiting financially and by and by, uh, by brand as well. You can actually benefit your brand.

I, uh, I have a question for you about the, the, this is, I’m just trying to, um, walk through the linear path on one. You guys have so many ways you can help people out there and I want to kind of walk them through the linear path here. So let’s just say like my wife and I, we have a, uh, a property with about 17 acres. We call it Camp Clark and chicken palace. Tons of trees. Brian Keane and let’s, it’s house about 4,000 square feet, I guess about 4,500 square feet. And we want to reduce our carbon footprint. We want to go all solar. You said that the $67 a month you’re going to spend would reduce your energy bill is how many solar powers, how many solar panels would I need to completely assuming that my house qualified them? How many would I need or how much would it cost me and solar panels to completely eliminate any need for power grid usage?

Oh, that’s a good question. And I can’t, so I can’t answer that. Not knowing where you live in, where that is. I don’t want to say that at this point, but, but it does depend on kind of the, um, kind of the, you know, kind of where the sun is and all that. But I would say this, that, um, so what, and here’s what happens is that in his, so I, I, and you know, I have a, um, so I live just outside of Washington DC and I actually have five kids. So we have the big household, we have a lot of stuff going on in the house. The, in here’s, here’s the psychology that happens when someone gets solar. Okay. That solar goes on the house and you realize that, wow, I want, I want to, you start competing against your own utility bill.

And it’s like, wow. So I’m to, I don’t want to get break even anymore. I want to beat my utility bill. So then you realize like, hey, how come we’re still leaving lights on in the house when nobody’s on anyone? Nobody’s home. And so all of a sudden in kind of that, you know, remember your father was always saying like, turn off those lights. You know, I’m not paying though. You know, air conditioning, the outside, you know, kind of all those, you know, kind of the jokes. We always would make fun of our old man about like wow, now it becomes real until we every single case. And this is true in the research that we’ve always done and it’s true in practice. Everybody that gets solar becomes the best energy manager that we’ve ever seen. They actually become an energy efficiency manager and yeah, they then start driving down the costs there, their own energy use.

And it’s unbelievable to see it happen. So what at wherever you live and wherever you actually, however much solar you get, you will automatically start driving your own energy use down, which is really kinda cool. And so, um, and, and by the way, and not your standard of living, you will actually still increase it. You’ll still have the same wonderful standard of living that you have. You’ll just be do it smarter. And that’s really, by the way, the whole lesson here, which is that we, we are not talking about living in cold, dark houses. We’re not talking about wearing sweaters wherever you go. We’re not talking about turning off the air conditioning in the middle of the summer, right? We’re actually talking about saying, okay, let’s have our creature comforts. Let’s just do it smarter. And by the way, let’s preserve and maintain the environment and the creature, the environment that we’ve all loved because we know that it is not sustainable.

The path that we’re on. And we all have an obligation to actually do things smarter and better. So I don’t mean expecially when it’s easy, because through the technology we have and the smarts that we all have, we can all be part of this solution. It’s not expensive. It’s not crazy. And, and by the way, you don’t even have to believe in climate change at this point. If you don’t believe in climate change, you can at least believe that there are better products out there that can actually give us our energy and give us kind of cooler water supplies and better things, faster, easier, better than it gave us 50 2030 years ago. Why don’t we get them,

you know what I’m going to do? Bryana I have seven questions in seven minutes, so we’re going to go to the lightning round. Okay, great. So back in 2012 you released a book called green is good, save money, make money and help your community profit from clean energy. What first inspired you to write this book?

Ah, good question because I’ll tell you this, which is that I believe strongly that we all can be a sound like a broken record, but we can be part of this solution and green is good. If it’s too long. I think we and I made and myself, because we have marginalized ourselves by the book, letting people think that if you want it to be part of the climate solution, if you want to be an environmentalist, we would conjure up this concept that, oh, you need to be left of center. You needed to kind of, uh, you know, where hemp and biology,

hog tree type person, right?

And, and my argument is, no, we all can be this. We all are this. We every single person will be, I, by the way, Donald Trump can beat this Donald Trump lights, cool gadgets and cool things. Okay. And like, and I’m not defending the guy, but like, just buy better cooler things. And by the way, they can better for the environment. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing. And it’s like we’re all buying better refrigerators today than they had five years ago, 10 years ago, and 50 years ago. And let’s kind of hasten that along. And so green is good and we all can actually help this along faster. And it’s like that. And by the way, it’s kind of the, the, um, Elon Musk is actually all about this. This is the Tesla phenomenon, which is if you make a really, really cool car, people will buy it. Oh, and by the way, it has zero emissions.

You know, I, I’ve been doing some, uh, research here, Brian Keane, very intense research. And this, Justin, I have reason to believe that Donald Trump’s hair is 50% organic. That is just the research that I’ve done.

I’m not sure about that.

Okay. Now, Chap, now the chapter one of your book is titled The Pet Rock Conundrum. What is this all about? The pet rocks.

All right. All right. So here’s my, here’s my, here’s my theory on this, which is, um, you’re too young to remember this, but back in the 70s there, uh, those ingenious and my argument by the way, is that is all about marketing. We have marketed, environmentalism, walled wrong. We’ve marketed clean energy all wrong. Um, and uh, my theory is if we can actually sell ice to Eskimos. And my proof is that there was a very smart man back in the 1970s who actually sold people rocks and he called them pet rocks and he made millions of dollars. And what he did was he the Grok and it and packaged it in a cardboard box and you put a holes in the box air holes if you will, can you put it in Straw? And he sold it as a back rock. And

I’m going to cue up my seventies music real quick here. Let me just queue this up real quick. That way we get, let me kind of get into the vibe. Let me just pull this down a little bit. Okay. Feel free to tell us the story about the pet rock. And they said, we’re going to the seventies with [inaudible] get my bell bottoms on. I’m ready.

But he thought million to these millions of dollars worth of these things and it was just a rock that you can pick up in your backyard or on the street. And it’s an, and people love them and, and it, and it, the point is that if we can sell rocks to people, we can sell solar to people, we can sell better shower heads, feel resolved, better power strips to people. We can sell this stuff. We’re just selling it wrong. And, and that is really kind of the whole point that marketing is so strong. You know, if you look at what cigarettes has done, okay, now cigarettes, by the way, a cigarette is uh, anti social is bad for your health and it’s expensive. And they did it, they sold it. I don’t know how they did it.

That is true. Yeah. That is so true.

It’s unbelievable. And so why can’t we do this with stuff that is actually good for your health? It’s pro social and actually it’s increasingly affordable. Like it’s like this is unbelievable. We have to be able to do this. And yet we’ve gotten kind of tied up and there’s political discussions and our products have, we have allowed our products to get tied up in those political discussions. And that’s really shame on us because, and it, to me it’s all marketing. And what we have said is that, hey, if you want to buy solar, you need to be a certain type of person and you need to live a certain type of vice on you to look a certain type of way. And that’s not true. Everybody can buy solar and it doesn’t matter who you look like or what you want to do or who you vote for.

And that’s, so that’s what we’re trying to break. And you can just go to weed.green. And by the way, you can buy organic food and you can buy better showerheads and better light bulbs and B part and B and by, because of the cooler gadgets they have or any reason you want. You know, we went to Arizona and launched a solar campaign in Arizona, which by the way is not a liberal state and says solar just makes sense. And we didn’t tell them what sense it made. They were able to fill in the blanks themselves and in their mind they said, well, we do live in a desert. You know, like, yeah, it makes sense. Let’s do it and that, and then solar exploded. But if we said by solar, because we got to save a polar bear, I don’t think they’d be buying solar in Arizona. You know what I mean? Like it’s like, right. Don’t, don’t let it, don’t draw the conclusion for that. Let’s let people draw their own conclusions. Every consumer product that’s out there, everything, everything you buy basically is designed to fit in with your lifestyle. It’s designed to fit into my lifestyle, right? So when Coca-Cola sells us coke, right? They say, hey, it’s the real thing.

It’s the real thing.

And, and it means something to you and it means something to me. But we’re totally different people and living totally Devon lives. But by the way, it fits into your life, but they send to my life and we have to do that with sustainable products as well.

You were thinking about just stealing that tagline. Go Green. It’s the real thing. Okay. Or maybe, yeah. Okay, go, go green. It’s as cool as smoking cigarettes. You know, there’s other [inaudible] I live on now. Okay. Here’s, here’s my next question for you. In your book, Chapter Eight of your book is titled Every Person’s guide to clean energy. I think there’s a lot of listeners out there that are saying, here’s the deal. I am looking for some practical steps that I can take to become more green and environmentally friendly at my house. I’m just looking for some specific steps that I can take, enlightened us, my friend, walk us through what do we need to do?

Absolutely. Well, and part of the part of this chapter is, is where I talk about kind of what’s happened, what is happening in our homes. Okay. And if you understand this, which is just take a tour of your house, okay. And understand, um, you know, walk into your kitchen, right? And you walk into your kitchen and you realize that my God, Mike Kitchen, the average American kitchen today has, has four clocks in it, right? And by the way, none of them are telling the same time. So you’ve got the microwave has a clock, the oven has a clock. Uh, we have refrigerators, by the way, today they have clogs.

If you’re, if you remember the 70s well you probably have a VCR that’s still flashing 12

and they’re all flashing different times. It’s like, it’s unbelievable. And so, and by the way, if you think of, you realize every single one of those things is just drawing power all the time. But let’s put this another way. Your microwave oven, the most power the microwave oven uses is to power the clock, not to cook food. Wow. That clock is on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And you’re cooking food in that microwave minutes a year, maybe, maybe a couple of hours. But like it’s a glorified popcorn makers, what it is. And so it’s like, wow. You realize in fact that we have these gadgets that are just drawing power all the time. And that’s what we’re doing. So, so what we’re really kind of focused on so much and what we want to focus on is one of asthma than live in cold dark counters. We want them to understand that we have these gadgets in our houses that are using power when we don’t even know to using power. And that’s really what we should start thinking about first. Not, you know, not worrying about kind of the big things, but understand that you’re a flat screen TV. When you turn it off with your remote control, it’s still on.

Come on.

If it’s still on and it’s pulling power, it’s charging you about a hundred dollars of a [inaudible]. The flat screen TV tied to the cable box tied to your ps four or whatever it is. It’s charging you about it. But $100 a year.

Yeah. How do you, how do you turn it off? How do you turn the microwave clock? How do you do these things?

All right. And so you put them on a power strip, which you can buy at [inaudible] dot green and by the way, the power strips today, they oppressed smart power strips so that in fact it won’t shut off your cable box. It actually keeps your, cause you don’t want to turn your cable box off cause otherwise it has to reboot. But it’ll shut off everything else when you, they know it’s not when you’re not using it. And so it just stretched those thing off so that you’re not pulling what we call a Canton load. So by the way, understand that flat screen TV then is still on. Most American homes by the way, have more flat screen TVs and they have children. So like you’re just multiply it. You have three or four or five TVs in a house. You have real power. That’s real money that’s just being spent. It’s unbelievable. And then think about, by the way, all of those, um, your iPhone, your iPad, your eye, everything, you plug them, Paul, you plug him into the wall and then you take your phone or your went off to work. But You keep that chart.

Oh You keep it in there

and that charger is still pulling power while you’re at work.

Okay, okay, okay. Now you say, now you’re freaking me out. And now we know that everything is sucking all of our power. It’s sucking our wallets, sucking our bank accounts. What are their practical steps? Can we take and get a power strip from you? What else can I do? I want to, I want to do it today. What do I need to do?

Well, so it’s actually, it’s basically not even buying it. It just pulled the charger out of the wall. You know what I mean? It’s like, and it’s Kinda like just all of sudden just start understanding, let’s get aware of what, what’s going on with our power. And it’s like, wow, that’s right. Everything, everything. Understand that when you’re asleep the house is on 24 hours a day, seven days a week during this is five days a year. It’s amazing that we are using power constantly in part of our climate challenge is actually the, how much power are we using? We’re using it all the time. Part of our climate or energy challenge is just we use it versus we just cannot stop using it as people. And I mean, and I’m not saying we need just that like shame, shame lies. It’s just like we have gadgets that we don’t even know they’re using it. It’s amazing, you know? So my computer typed my printer. Okay. I actually don’t remember the last time I printed anything, but I will ask your listeners, check your printer. I bet it’s still on. And it’s like, no, turn off the printer unplugged the printer and the next time you need to print something, just plug it in.

Do you,

well, we’re not really printing a lot these days.

Do you know, do you know Joseph Romm? Are you, are you buddies with Joe Joseph?

No. No, not [inaudible].

Do you know him? Do you know him very well or do you know who he is?

Yeah, I know it is, but no, I don’t know.

Oh really? You guys should connect. We’ve had him on the show twice.

Get out and make, make that connection happen. I’d love that.

Okay. Oh, that’s it. There you go. My, my, uh, commitment to you is I will reach out to Joseph and see if I can make that, that commitment. Having Andrew, uh, email real quick. I’ll send that over to the founder email and I will put it on my list for tomorrow. I’ll see if I can make that introduction. Uh, you guys are, are, are probably brothers from another mother B. You’re familiar with Joseph’s work?

Absolutely.

Well, I asked him this question. This is my final question I have for you today. I want to respect your time is why are you so passionate about this? Like, I’m passionate about free range chickens in my sinky chickens and my, my Turkey and people say why I say I just, I like them. I love them. Can, when was your moment where you thought, man, I am passionate about green being green or man, I’m all in, or when, when did that happen?

Uh, so that’s, uh, that’s a brilliant question actually. And I think because, um, you know, I think these things happen when we’re young and that in fact, um, when I think I was in third or fourth grade and I was in, I was able to, as part of, uh, a recycling back in Massachusetts, in my hometown and we, we didn’t have recycling in my own town. And I must’ve been in fourth grade and we actually started a campaign to get recycling and it worked. And you know how that works, you know, you don’t, you know what I mean? And it kind of, and I was like, wow, that actually worked. We did it. We actually got my town to do recycling at a very young age. And then you realize this actually you can actually affect real change. You could have a real impact and for the better.

And it’s not, um, it’s not hard to make this change. And people actually really appreciate it. And so what’s happened is that then you realize, you know what, as we go along and it kind of, the cycle of life, you realize there is so many opportunities here for all of us to do quick, simple, easy things and improve our quality of lives. Why aren’t we doing that? And so it just kind of becomes a passion. Like, Hey, this is so easy. Why aren’t we doing this? I mean, if you could actually improve somebody’s life every day, wouldn’t you just want to do that? Like if you could just say, hey, didn’t your know that you could actually have the same uh, air conditioning and heat and lights in your house all the time and yet you wouldn’t have to actually be burning fossil fuels. Like what’d you just want that? Because most people just don’t know that. Like it’s like, well yeah I want, I want the lights, I want the, but you don’t have to get some oil guy to show up or something. Like why don’t, don’t you want that? And be like, yeah,

okay, so you can, let’s say, let’s say I’m listening right now and I’m a business owner and I am not an easy walk. I do not hug trees. I do not live in a reclaimed Volkswagen van, but I do want to reduce my carbon footprint. I want to be more responsible with the environment. Final question for you. What action step should all the listeners take today and not, not non political, the word that this is not a political show and you’re not being political. I’m not being political. I’m just saying, what is the action step you would ask our listeners to take today?

Alright, a visit for easiest one, visit we.green w e. Dot. Green. Specifically, email me at beaking, k e a n [email protected]. And I will, uh, I will personally help you put together a campaign to help your company, to help your community, to help your faith community. I’ll cure your school, your church, your whatever, to actually meet your sustainability goals. We will actually help you get there. We’ll help you exceed your goals because all it’s so important. I mean, and we can actually help you not only meet your goals and exceed your goals, but get you the credit you deserve for doing it. I mean, so many organizations have said, hey, yeah, we’re going to be carbon neutral or we’re gonna, you know, be a solar leader. And either they can’t get there or they’re not getting the credit they deserve and we can help you do that. And that’s really what I want you to know is like, it’s so easy to do it and it’s step by step by step. And so email may be king at [inaudible] dot green and we’ll help you get there. And it’s free of charge. There’s no, there’s no charge for it. It’s just, it’s just, it’s simple. It’s easy, and we’ll do it. And it’s personally satisfying. It is if there’s a financial benefit to doing it, and it’s a macro sat satisfaction because if it helps everybody,

Brian Keane, I appreciate you for being not so mean and for being focused on the green. You’ve been an unbelievable guest on today’s show, and we’d like to end each and every show with the boom, which around here, boom stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. So essentially we say three, two, one, and boom. Are you prepared to bring a boom, my friend?

I am prepared.

Okay, here we go. Here we go. Here. Andrew, are you ready? Okay, Andrew’s ready. He’s psychologically ready. We have his mic off so we can’t verify, but here we go. And three, two, one, boom.