This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
As unbelievable as my life’s experiences have been, Dennis Lee’s have been ten times as unbelievable. I have written about his journey plenty, and this will be a very short version of his life before we met. Dennis was born in 1946 to migrant farmworkers, when white people still did that in the USA. Dennis manifested his genius long before I met him, and my guess is that his high intelligence is what kept him going to school after he was kicked out of his home at age 13 because his parents could no longer afford to feed him, which was not unusual in those times. He was expelled a few weeks before his high school graduation when he was caught sleeping on campus, and he soon joined the military, which was practically a rite of passage in his social class.
His first religion was American nationalism, he got in fistfights with fellow soldiers who disparaged the USA, and he was soldier of the month on his base in Germany. He was a paratrooping medic who planned to become a surgeon after his army days. A month before his discharge, he was drafted into a Special Forces mission to clean up a CIA operation gone bad in Cambodia, to help keep the fiction of the “secret” war in Cambodia alive a few more years. His job was accounting for the bodies, but he killed many people on that mission on the way back to Saigon. After his discharge he moved back to his home town of Yakima, Washington, and went to college. One day in a bank lobby, his American nationalism religion went up in smoke and he nearly killed himself before a voice in his head stopped him. During a summer working on a radar base in Alaska, Dennis helped the FBI bust the local mob, and they tried to kill Dennis twice. He fled to New Jersey, of all places, and went to Farleigh Dickenson University, studied social psychology and Utopian civilizations, and rubbed shoulders with the Eastern Oligarchy.
In his last year of college, he worked at Sears as an aluminum-siding salesman and made more than the president of Farleigh Dickenson did, but he was too good, was soon fired, and never worked as an employee again. He was at the top of his classes, and just before he was scheduled to graduate, he attended a conference hosted by B.F. Skinner, and when it became obvious that the conference was about brainwashing the public, Dennis left the conference in disgust and dropped out of school.
Dennis then pursued his Utopian dreams by founding a home-improvement business that was soon wiped out in the mayhem of the USA’s first oil crisis. His first marriage, to a member of the oligarchy, ended and he had a child who died as an infant. Dennis then engaged in a bout of automatic writing that invented a way to unite the consumer in the marketplace (the company was called United Community Services – “UCS”), and a watered-down version of his idea was marketed by his former employer, known as the Discover Card. Dennis became a Christian in those days and he tried to give the failing business to Pat Robertson, who instead invested in it but soon pulled out when his advisors thought that Dennis’s multilevel marketing plan looked too much like a pyramid scheme, but the multilevel plan was what made it work. Dennis met his future wife, Alison, during those days, as she fell in love with what Dennis was trying to achieve – in short, a Utopian civilization.
After the failure of that business, Dennis then got into energy conservation, first with low-flow showerheads, and later with foam insulation. With those showerheads, Dennis invented the first shared-savings plan in the energy field, which became one of his financial-engineering hallmarks. From UCS onward, his business associates constantly tried to steal his ideas and companies. Because he was in New Jersey, he constantly fended off attempts by the Mafia to steal his companies, and he again survived murder attempts.
In the foam insulation business, the field was stuck at the craftsman level, as it was installed by a man with a bucket, hose, and foam mix. That resulted in poor quality control and improperly mixed foam was a health hazard. Dennis industrialized the business with computer-mixed foam that could be applied in the “battlewagon” concept that could insulate an entire neighborhood in a day. That was the kind of explosive programs that Dennis developed that not only attracted attempts to steal his companies, but the fiberglass-insulation interests were threatened, and Dennis also began to experience organized suppression from those interests, and the media would smear him on behalf of those interests.
In the midst of those days, Dennis got Guillain-Barre syndrome, was treated at a Veteran’s Administration Hospital (VA), and the VA’s negligence nearly killed Dennis three times and left him a paraplegic.
While Dennis was recovering, he serendipitously got involved with a new kind of heating system. It was a heat pump with huge evaporator arrays that produced twice the heat at three times the efficiency of air-to-air heat pumps. As with the foam business, however, it was stuck at the craftsman stage, as half of the buyers installed it themselves. With that kind of poor quality control, few of those heat pumps worked very well.
When Dennis got involved, he brought his talent to bear in two particular areas:
1. Professionalize the installation to get consistently good performance;
2. A shared savings plan which, combined with Jimmy Carter’s energy tax credit, removed all customer risk.
Dennis essentially put the world’s best heating system on people’s homes for free. It was the most brilliant and benevolent business strategy that I ever saw, but almost none of his business associates ever understood, as they were blinded by their greed. Dennis’s marketing programs gave his companies such explosive growth, but when his companies were invariably stolen, the first thing that the thieves did was discard Dennis’s “crazy” marketing plans, and they all swiftly went out of business, as they killed the golden goose. It was suicidally stupid, but the USA’s entrepreneurial waters are filled with that kind of idiocy.
The company that invented and sold that heat pump had only sold a few systems a year on the East Coast, and in his first month in one county in Delaware, Dennis sold 280 systems. That became Dennis’s typical effect when he got involved. There is a popular mythology about “rebels,” that they are naturally “rebellious.” But what usually happens is that the “rebels” tried to work within the Establishment to make things better, and only when the Establishment began attacking them as a threat to their wealth and power did they “rebel.”
Dennis immediately tried to attract the interest of air-to-air heat pump makers, but they were part of a racket of providing their shoddy product that did not threaten fossil-fuel interests (the Detroit car companies do the same thing with the oil companies). So, Dennis had to go it alone and he naturally attracted mobster interest, his business associates stole his company, and Dennis once again survived murder attempts.
But just before his company was stolen, Dennis finally found somebody who understood: the chairman of the board of American Express, who was about to devote $1 billion to Dennis’s program to carpet the USA with his heat pump. When Dennis’s business associates and mobsters stole his company, it killed the deal.
Dennis went home for Christmas, 1983, to Yakima, with his wife and three children. His youngest child died of crib death while there, and with his East Coast company stolen, Dennis stayed. Not only that, but Washington State traditionally had the lowest electric bills on Earth, at one penny per kilowatt-hour because of all of the hydroelectric projects. But the state’s electric companies formed a consortium that floated billions of dollars of bonds to build five nuclear power plants, only one of which was completed, which resulted in the biggest municipal bond default in American history to its time. Dennis could not sell energy-saving equipment in his home state when energy was so cheap, but when he visited his family that Christmas, electricity costs were skyrocketing because of that bond default, and Dennis saw full-page ads from the electric companies that encouraged conservation.
Dennis’s heat pump saved about two-thirds of the cost of fossil-fuel heating, and more than 80% of the cost of electric heating. Air-to-air heat pumps did not save over fossil fuel heating, and only saved about 50% over electric heating, and the electric companies were promoting air-to-air heat pumps. Dennis thought that if the electric companies were happy with saving 50% with air-to-air heat pumps, they would be ecstatic over 85% savings. Dennis reckoned incorrectly, and he had unwittingly stumbled into one more industrial scam of the public with those shoddy air-to-air heat pumps.
After wasting a year with an oligarch in Yakima, in the autumn of 1984, Dennis moved to Seattle to finally turn his heat pump into an industry before Carter’s tax credit expired at the end of 1985. When his company was stolen in 1983, the technology ended up with a Seattle bank that had learned none of the lessons that Dennis had. Dennis was prepared to rescue them, but it treated Dennis like a beggar and soon went out of business.
The Seattle area was full of all-electric homes, and his heat pump would save all-electric customers 85% of their skyrocketing heating costs. It was a gold mine for his heat pump. Dennis still thought that the electric companies would give him a tickertape parade for bringing the conservation that their full-page ads begged for. Instead, they gave Dennis the cold shoulder and surreptitiously began sabotaging the business deals that Dennis was putting together. All that the electric companies could see was the end of their scam and billions of dollars of lost revenues.
Dennis finally had to leave the area to find a banker who was not part of the conspiracy against his company, and he found a finance company in Spokane, whose owner understood what Dennis was doing and committed $10 million of financing for 20% ownership of Dennis’s company. A factory in California could make Dennis’s heat pump, Dennis had the Spokane financing company lined up, and by June 1985, Dennis sold a thousand systems with his shared-savings plan and was planning to carpet Seattle with his heat pump and finally build an industry.
Just then, the local electric companies unmasked themselves, publicly called Dennis’s company a scam, and called for an Attorney General’s investigation of his company. A the same time, the Rockefellers’ bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, “coincidentally” wiped out Dennis’s California manufacturer, and Dennis had to build his own factory. Also, the federal electric agency that ran the hydroelectric dams infiltrated a corporate hit man into Dennis’s company. Dennis cooperated with the farce of the Attorney General’s “investigation,” and while he was on a business trip to Indiana, to explore moving his operation to a business-friendlier state, the Attorney General struck in a media splash while the hit man tried to foment a mutiny. That hit man’s machinations eventually led to the death of one of Dennis’s employees, which radicalized Dennis.
The local oligarchy pulled out all of the stops to wipe out Dennis’s company, which included the IRS and other agencies, the federal bankruptcy court, the fire department, and so on. Dennis had received so many death threats that he had a bodyguard the day that I met him. That was the situation that I walked into. Against all odds, Dennis heroically installed 400 of those systems by the end of 1985, and what happened in 1985 was the greatest attempt that I know of to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace. In early 1986, the company was slowly being strangled by a fraudulent bankruptcy suit that the hit man had filed, and that was when I came into the picture in March, 1986. My wild ride with Dennis was about to begin.
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