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Show Summary
In this conversation, David shares his journey as an architect with a focus on sustainable living and innovative design. He discusses his background in high-end hospitality architecture and his vision for creating self-sustaining homes that harmonize with nature. David emphasizes the importance of community, environmental responsibility, and the need for a paradigm shift in how we approach architecture and real estate. He advocates for integrating advanced technology into homes to create a more sustainable future.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
David Barnes (00:00)
We need a planet so we can live. We can’t live any way we want to live and destroy the planet in the process, okay? So that’s what really weighs on my mind is how can I introducemeans and methods and systems into natural and our normal daily processes that’s going to eliminate all the trucking and all the smog and all the rubber on the road and the roads themselves and and all the electricity that it takes to pump through the power transmission lines and and all that stuff that it’s just literally waste waste waste waste waste so somebody can make a dime off of your back
Quentin Edmonds (02:09)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds. You know what I’m gonna say? I’m excited to be here. Always excited when I get to interview new people and see things through their lens, from their perspective. And today is gonna be fascinating. He’s talking about something that I quite frankly have never talked and heard of before. And so I’m excited. I’m excited to dig in, to get him to let you see things from his perspective. And so I’m gonna introduce you all to Mr. David Barnes.Mr. David, how you doing today, sir?
David Barnes (02:41)
I’m doing well, Quentin, how are you doing?Quentin Edmonds (02:43)
man, doing good. ⁓ I am excited and fascinated about what you had to talk about. So this is David. I want to dive in, man. I want you to tell people what your main focus is these days. want you to give a little bit of an origin story, kind of like how you got started, how you got into this thought process, how you got into where you are now. And then also, man, tell them what part of the world you went, if you don’t mind. So Mr. David, sir, you have the floor, man.David Barnes (03:09)
Thank you very much. So, and thank you very much for that nice introduction. ⁓ This was my first podcast, so bear with me if I’m a little bit nervous and if I’m, you know, a little bit, if I fumble a little bit, but so as a young man, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. And I decided that I wanted to do architecture because I thought that it would be something that would be constantly changing, always evolving, keep my mind active. And I, as a young man, I found,fell upon Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a famous architect in the thirties and that era. And he was very famous for his homes, his personal custom homes, because of the level of detail. One of them that most people know of is Falling Water. And ⁓ so that home inspired me because it’s literally built on the side of a waterfall. So I saw that home and I thought, this is fantastic. This is the level of detail that I would like to,
doing my architecture. But you get into architecture, you get the jobs that you get. I found myself in the hospitality industry in Las Vegas and under some really great architects, know, Steve Wynn’s master architect for most of his hotels. And ⁓ he taught me a lot about luxury and, you know, luxury materials, just what people expect out of luxury, luxury lifestyle, all that good stuff. So now I want to marry what I
always wanted to with Frank Lloyd Wright into this level of luxury. going along with the times, I also figure I’m looking at society and I’m learning from it and I’m hearing the things in the news and we hear about food shortages and GMO and pesticides in your food and ⁓ digitally printed food and all these crazy, crazy, crazy things.
And I’m thinking, well, you know what? Man used to live.
in a society where we used to live in harmony with nature. And we’ve broken away from that. And now we live in these isolated, sterile boxes that couldn’t support us other than keeping us warm and barely only if the heater works. Okay? And I don’t think this technology is the right level of technology. think we stopped in 1950s, 1960s, 1970s level technology. If you got a dishwasher and a microwave and a trash compactor, you’re happy.
But the reality is your house is supposed to be your castle. It’s supposed to be where you live and you grow and your family has a jumping off point so that they can start their own families and live and grow. And the fact the house, the typical house in the world doesn’t even do that. Doesn’t supply even the bare minimum. It doesn’t even supply its own energy or even its own water, any of its own food. We no longer have backyard gardens. You know, I think this is crazy. You know, in other parts of the world,
a backyard garden is that’s everybody has one. If you’re not, you’re growing half of your own food and you’re going down to the market for the things, you know, the goat that you don’t want, that you don’t want to raise in your backyard, you know? So we need to get some kind of balance. I think that’s my personal opinion. And my architecture is designed around the philosophy that every home should be supplying a bare minimum of energy, water, you know, growing your own vegetables, at least your own herbs for cooking, you know, so you have nice and fresh stuff.
that you know where it came from and what’s in it. So all this technology is off the shelf kind of stuff, but nobody bothered to put it in with the dishwasher and the microwave and the, you know, we got sub-zero freezers, but we don’t have water purifiers. know, houses don’t come with a water purifier. Why? It should have a water source, not a water purifier. So that’s my philosophy in a nutshell and where I came from. ⁓
Quentin Edmonds (07:49)
David, man, bro, thank you for sharing. Thank you for walking us through the journey, man. I love how you took us even back to when you was 12. Wow. Just figuring out how your mind work, it, you know, what you wanted to do. So you got into architecture. And so most people don’t take me all the way back to 12. I normally have to take them back to 12 because I have a saying where I say destiny has no wasted moments. Kind of meaning like as you went through life,There are things that kind of prepare you for where you are now. And if you follow the leaves or the breadcrumbs, you can see how you got your superpower, why you think the way you do, why you have been inspired. And so, bro, I know you was back at 12. So I want you to tell me if you can in language about your mindset. What is it that over time has trained your mind to think the way it does? Does that make sense?
David Barnes (08:44)
Yeah, no, I hear you. hear you. So going back to when I was 12, there was these commercials on TV and it was about ⁓ America and how we were polluting America, the rivers and all this stuff. And they had a famous Native American personality. I think his name was Wild Eyes Cody. And at the end of every, I might choke up a little bit, but at the end of every commercial, a tear would run down his face.stuck with me because it made me never want to throw any, never litter, never litter ever and pick things up sometimes. If I see something, I’ll pick it up. And that’s not even the half of it. The reality is that we have completely polluted the planet. I don’t believe in climate change per se because it just changes too radically. The sun’s too powerful. We can’t really put enough energy into the system, but we are poisoning the planet with toxins, dioxin.
My stepfather died from Agent Orange poisoning, okay, that they used in the Vietnam War, okay? That’s just ridiculous. We should not be doing these kinds of things, okay? So I wanna sit there and dial it back and go, look, let’s really look at it from a holistic point of view.
We need a planet so we can live.
We can’t live any way we want to live and destroy the planet in the process, okay? So that’s what really weighs on my mind is how can I introduce
means and methods and systems into natural and our normal daily processes that’s going to eliminate all the trucking and all the smog and all the rubber on the road and the roads themselves and and all the electricity that it takes to pump through the power transmission lines and and all that stuff that it’s just literally waste waste waste waste waste so somebody can make a dime off of your back
okay well let’s just do commerce amongst ourselves and and
Each person, each little pod of people take care of themselves first. And then when they have enough extra help the pod next to them. And then two or three pods might get together and build a community, you know, whatever a community garden or a community road or a community bridge or a community, you know, festival place or whatever. And then it just expands out from there. Each one starting what it’s being self-sustaining through their own contributions on their own independently, starting with the.
First person, the first family, the first family group, the first neighborhood, and expand outwards. So I’m trying to build that concept in my architecture.
Quentin Edmonds (11:54)
Yeah, man. I thank you so much for your transparency, your honesty, your gift of vulnerability. I greatly appreciate it. And I want to challenge anybody to think David is not onto something. I want to challenge everybody, people that’s listening. Once you go outside, once you go to a tree, now I want you to go on a day when it’s not windy, when, when, it’s nice and calm. And I want you to try to find a tree and find a branch.And I want you to talk to that tree and ask that branch been towards me. I’m being serious now. I thought people was crazy when they said this. I went to a tree, found the branch and I was like, been towards me. Wasn’t no win. And David, when I tell you that tree started, that branch started, the leaves started to come towards me. I stopped, I wait for it was calm again. Cause I thought I was crazy. I said it.
And it started doing it. I’m not talking about the whole branches only, but those leaves started coming towards me. Trees are live organisms. Thank you, it’s live, man.
David Barnes (12:59)
Everything elseEverything, It’s all connected. They get music and it sounds like concert level, you know, that level of choreography to it. It is amazing how detailed and evocative and emotional it even sounds. So I think we ignored that because we wanted to be…
the emperors of our domain and all powerful and we can achieve anything and we we split the atom and we know everything and now we know the DNA and now we know that everything is vibration and it’s like yeah buddy everything’s vibration everything’s vibrating together and if you get something out of sync what happens to a vibration it just blows itself out i mean literally if you get the harmonics wrong everything shatters and i don’t want that i don’t want our ecosystem because
It’s happened five times at least massive, you know, die-offs, entire, you know, 90 % of the planet dies off for, you know, one time it was the asteroid, one time it was too much, no oxygen in the ocean or something like that. It was just crazy stuff. One time it was just a bunch of volcanoes going off, you know, in Russia for like two million years or something like that. So, you know, stuff happens.
And if we don’t protect ourselves and like Elon Musk, you know, he’s really onto it. Okay. The reality is that if we don’t get at least some people, at least a few hundred people on a couple other rocks in this solar system, we are completely vulnerable to the next one that happens. You know, we could come back and build back if we needed to, but there’s no way you’re going to survive it. You know, a dinosaur killing kind of event, you know, yeah. Little patches of people.
Quentin Edmonds (14:47)
Comeon, listen, come on. And listen, if you’re out there asking what does this have to do with real estate? Everything. Because real estate is you putting your property on land. So we talk about land. We’re talking about architecture. All this makes sense. How to create your home to be the oasis that really it can be self-sustaining like it’s supposed to be and really be what it’s supposed to be with you surviving off of nature and nature and natural proponents. So this says everything you need to with real
David Barnes (15:57)
in harmony with nature. And this could be in track developments. All you do is add a little 10 by 10 room on to the back of it and you grow some fish in a tank and you grow some vegetables on some vertical towers and that’s part of your pantry. Okay. And maybe some chicken in the backyard and maybe, maybe the community has a little pig farm out and out where it doesn’t smell too bad or they harvest the methane for fuel for the houses. Okay.Why aren’t we doing these things? mean, why aren’t we just building the whole thing? Because because what the pig farmer didn’t think about it, he ain’t got the money to expand and he doesn’t want to take out a loan. Well, let’s just do what’s right for the community. Let’s go out there and build it for him in a weekend like the Amish do. OK, the Chinese build 50 story apartment buildings in a week. OK, we can do that. We don’t do that. Why?
because we have to worry, everybody’s got to make a little bit in the middle, everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody. We need to think more about our communities and how we manage our lands and how we’re supposed to be stewards of the land. I’m Native American and that’s why the commercial gets to me so much because I feel like, you know, on some level, Europeans came to America and they kind of screwed up a good thing. The Indians were kind of like, for about 10,000 years, they were living a nice little lifestyle, no real major wars, there were squabbles and skirmishes and whatnot.
but there weren’t continent wide, you know, campaigns that lasted a hundred years war, a hundred years war. What the hell? Okay. So anyways, excuse my French, but I want to, I want to get back to a little bit of, know, I’m a philosopher. I’m a futurist. Okay. I’ve looked, I’ve looked at human nature and I know how humans behave. Okay.
If we can control our animal, we need to be animals, we are animals, okay? But we need to control it. Men need to be strong and need to be in control and need to be in charge of their own thing, okay? And be prosperous. They need to have a purpose in their lives so that they can establish a good, strong foundation in family, okay? And that comes from a homestead. That comes from a place that you’ve invested into. And that’s your first home. mean…
When I bought my first home, I danced. I I was so happy. That was, know, but if I had a home that I knew that I’d never have to leave and it would feed me for the rest of my life and I’d never have to pay another power bill, that’s some, that’s some I want.
Quentin Edmonds (18:35)
That sounds like a pretty good investment to me. If you got a home where you don’t have to pay a power bill, you have a home where you are growing your own food, to me that sounds like a substantial investment. I mean, we invest in wood floors. Come on, let’s invest in the right thing that’s going to continue to pay dividends years, decades, for legacy at a time. You know what I mean? SoDavid Barnes (18:58)
will put a $250,000 piece of rolling art into a garage, but they won’t put the infrastructure into their house that might be a couple hundred thousand dollars that would make it completely self-sustaining to the point where they would never have to pay another, that I mean literally your own little castle, your own little castle in your neighborhood that you would never need to leave. You could have Amazon and Grubhub bring you everything.Quentin Edmonds (19:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So man, tell me a little bit more about your architecture. How is it? How is the position to really help solve these problems? Like how can people really expect for you to really help them out?David Barnes (19:37)
So right now I’m licensed in Wisconsin and Arizona and I’m able to get licensed in other states, you know, just depending on if I get a project there and I can partner up internationally, I can do anything. But I mean, I would like to work with developers and help them ⁓ change the paradigm, you know, shift it so that we’re no longer building 1950s, 1960s level of homes. We’re now building 2050 levels of homes because look at how fast technology is changing.I robots are coming, robot maintenance of your home. doesn’t a home come with a robot now? mean, we got the Roomba. Okay, we could include a Roomba with a home. Okay, just like we include a dishwasher. And why doesn’t the home have a CPU? I mean, a CPU that’s upgradable over the years, that’s upward compatible with technology. Okay, we need to start thinking in those terms, okay? Our home is our number one asset.
that we’ll ever own in our entire life. I mean, I know that from personal experience. My net worth rocketed when I first got my first home. It was so much easier to attain anything once I had that. And I’ve even helped people in Cleveland. I helped a lady, she was on paper, she never would have qualified for any loan whatsoever for any real estate anywhere, period. And I saw that she was living in a house and she was using the stove for heat.
And I had, I just fixed a house up. I bank owned back when everybody, was 10,000 of them just sitting, you know, you can go 15 houses on a street, you know, and I’d gotten it fixed up. It wasn’t the greatest, but it was livable. It was really, and it was, she didn’t have to use a stove for heat. And I offered her to deal on the Obama plan that allowed for the 10 % down. And she got in on that and she just paid me off last year. And I cannot tell you how proud I am.
that I was able to help that woman achieve that goal because now I know her entire lot, her generations, three generations are being supported because that house, the security she has in that house is going to help those generations, you know, probably two more generations after that. So.
Quentin Edmonds (21:54)
Hmm,David man, I really, really have enjoyed this conversation man. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can I get in contact with you, sir?
David Barnes (22:06)
Well, my website is davidbarnesarchitecture.com. Pretty easy to remember. Okay. you can see what my really, my goal, my drive it’s, high end luxury stuff, but I would like to work with anybody who wants to, you know, collaborate on these ideas. I also have some land out in, Arizona and Florence, in Florence, Arizona, Penile County. And I’m looking for a developer who might want to, you know, partner up on that. I own the land. I would do the architecture.I’d like to do some kind of a green community, maybe subdivided in like three or four high-end homes that have a common orchard and garden and oasis kind of, you know, community living lifestyle where everybody maintains their own place, but they also maintain the common grounds, you know, something like that, you know, but I’m open to many, many different ideas, you know, just as long as it’s focusing on trying to, you know, improve the systems and not just keep building with the status quo with, you know, sticks and
cement and insulation and you know, because it’s just not working anymore.
Quentin Edmonds (23:09)
David, man, I got to say three things, man. First, thank you for your time. This time is definitely one of our most precious commodities. Secondly, man, thank you for your story. Thank you for your transparency, your honesty, your vulnerability. I put a premium on stories. So thank you so much for sharing your story. Lastly, man, thank you for your perspective, your mindset, the way you think. Thank you for bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you,David Barnes (23:36)
You are welcome and thank you because I rarely hear comments like that. And it does help me because like I might’ve mentioned earlier in our conversation, when you have paradigm shifting ideas, people think you’re the nut job, you’re the fringe, you’re the guy in the tin foil hat, you’re the conspiracy theorist. And I mean, how many conspiracies end up being proven out? I mean, I don’t know, but I do know that…what we’re doing right now is not the best way to do things. And I want to try and not just in the direction of doing things a little bit better. And I think it’s going to be ultimately more economical for people and more beneficial for families and communities in general.
Quentin Edmonds (24:18)
Yeah. Well, David, man, thank you again, man. I really, really appreciate you, sir.David Barnes (24:23)
Thank you.Quentin Edmonds (24:24)
Absolutely. Now listen, you cannot tell me this was not a great conversation. Can’t tell me you didn’t find value in it. So definitely check out Mr. David, check out his website, see our show notes, but definitely make sure you are subscribed here. I keep telling you, we’re going to bring up amazing people just like Mr. David. We’re going to continue to deliver. So Mr. David, thank you again and everyone else. have a fantastic day.
