Please, enter Bernie's world.
Well, Forbes Magazine voted Chena Hot Springs and the Ice Hotel
as the dumbest business idea of the year, in 2004.
Jay Leno had it on his show, as the monologue on his show,
Dumbest Business of the Year. Businessman in Fairbanks, Alaska,
builds an ice hotel at a hot springs. And he wonders why it melted.
And he hit his head, he said, "How dumb can you be?"
I don't know who Forbes is, but I know that his father left him a magazine,
and a newspaper and several things. He was actually born with a golden spoon.
So, I decided I'd rebuild.
I'm the imagineer here, I imagine things. And then we build them.
I have no formal education, but my parents taught us to read.
My dad said if you can read you can do anything.
So I'm whatever I wanna be, on the day I wanna be it.
I truly am one of the best imposters I know.
There's no secret. You just gotta work hard at getting people here.
And you have to have a product that they want.
It's on the Japanese bucket list as one of the most important things to do,
is to see the northern lights.
Now, some people say it's a myth, and I really don't care if it's a myth or not.
That if you conceive a baby under the northern lights, the baby will be brilliant.
Now, I promote that, because if you haven't had sex under the northern lights,
you really haven't had any sex.
Now this just makes you very robust, makes you feel very good.
The northern lights give you a lot of that northern light energy.
And a lot of, it just electrifies you. And it makes for a very, very good evening of sex.
Nature has zero waste. There's no waste in nature.
So really there should be no waste from us.
There really isn't any waste. We turn it into waste, because it's not waste.
Second law of thermodynamics is you can't create energy, and you can't destroy it.
Man can't create energy and we can't destroy it. It just changes fate.
So I try to keep track of energy and where it's going and what you can do with it.
And I've been able to make a living doing that.
I say, sustainable is attainable. Now, what does totally sustainable mean?
It means, taking care of all of our needs, the needs of my employees,
the needs of my guests, but still leaving everything for future generations.
That's what sustainability means. It means taking enough for ourselves,
but leaving enough for others. So how do you do that?
Well, by growing food 365 days a year. By being responsible.
The largest LED array in the state of Alaska, giving the plants the same kelvin
and the same lumens as the sun. Tomatoes growing on February the 8th.
At below zero temperatures. We grow at minus 50, minus 60 below zero.
Every building on the property is geothermally heated.
There's not one nickel's worth of diesel fuel being burnt to heat buildings
or to grow food. The first geothermally heated chicken and goat house,
that we know of in the state of Alaska, giving us eggs 365 days a year,
in a geothermally heated facility.
"Yeah, you're just a big baby, you really are just a big baby."
We want to get very good at what we do.
I want to spark young people's imaginations.
I want young people to realize what made America great.
I want America to lead the parade. I want us to lead again.
I'm not a bunny hugger. I want us to lead.
And I believe that the work I do here, the work that we do,
and the knowledge that we share, will move Alaska into that leading position.
In the world, for sustainability.
I have probably the best employees in the world, because we can do anything.
We don't hire anything to get done here.
When you're 60 miles away from town, you're your own fire department,
you're your own municipal waste. You're your own sanitary system.
You have your own water system. You're the airport manager,
because we have our own airport. You're a roads manager,
because we have all our own roads.
You're your own contractor, your own building manager, your own power company.
This is a small city. There's 274 villages in Alaska, this is a village.
We have 11 different nationalities that work here.
We have Muslims and Jews and Atheists, and Catholics and recovering Catholics,
and Mormons, Southern Baptists, Pentacostals, Scientologists, all work here together.
I could prove to you, we are a microcosm of the world.
And the world could get along. It takes one ingredient.
You can have rules, but you have to treat everyone the same.
And the first time you treat someone different, you're gonna have anarchy.
You could pay someone one million dollars a day, but you can't buy their honesty.
And you can't buy their loyalty. But you can earn it.
My parents did not raise any selfish, or any lazy children.
Especially my dad, put all of his kids on drugs, at two weeks old.
There should be more kids put on drugs.
At two weeks old, my father drug us to be baptized.
He drug us to church on Sunday, he drug us to tassel corn,
he drug us to bale hay, he drug us to clean 600 chickens every week,
he drug us to the neighbor's to do their work, and he'd say,
"You don't need to get paid for everything you do in life."
My biggest gift is energy. I've been blessed with energy, positive energy.
It's only positive. And I'll bet you if I say it once, I say it 100 times a day.
When people ask me how's it going or how am I doing, I've never had a bad day in my life.
And I'm not gonna start today. And that is a fact. Because I've never had one.
It says in Genesis on the third day, there was life-giving water flowing from the earth.
They're talking about Chena Hot Springs. I didn't write the book, I only read it.