- Greg: Wifi. - Mitch: Beer.

Greg: Fast fashion.

Start the clock.

Boys, do what you want with my body.

With this!

Ah!

First, we need to figure out how we're getting wifi.

We stealing.

These are microbes that we cultured from our feet

- to make our off-grid beer. - Oh, look at that.

Mitch: Ew!

I'm gonna take on the fast fashion industry.

Is this a joke?

Science is cool.

Cheers.

Mitch: We're feeling the heat,

and it's not just our sexy good looks.

- It's climate change. - Oh.

Mitch: So we're taking our passion for the environment

out of the classroom and into the country.

Greg: We are going off the grid.

Mitch: One by one, we'll shut off our basic necessities.

- Aah! - Oh, my gosh.

Greg: And with help from our team, we will use science...

Mitch: For a little self-reliance.

Yes! It works!

Mitch: See ya, city, because...

Mitch and Greg: This is "Shut It Off Asap!"

These are our last beers for a while

because we are officially shutting off our vices, like alcohol.

Or wifi! Also known as "wee-fee." I'm addicted to this stuff.

It's also linked to my other vice

which is shopping online for fast fashion.

A gay guy once told me that swim briefs were single use, and I bought three neon ones!

We wanna explore the connection of these vices to the climate crisis

and also so if we can find some off-grid alternatives to them.

Cheers.

In order to make our own off-grid beer,

I'm gonna culture our own microbes to ultimately make a unique beer.

I'm gonna take on the fast fashion industry

by sheering a sheep I can actually see out of this window,

processing it, and dying it

with natural dyes found from plants around this farm.

In the end, I'm gonna make something like this.

Our devices have no wifi signal down here,

which we need to survive and to finish this episode.

But I know that the farm which is around 200 meters away

does have internet and has a wifi signal,

so we're gonna try and steal that.

Greg: Sometimes we forget that wifi use

is linked to climate change.

In fact, watching online video results

in 0.4 kg of CO2 released per hour,

adding up to 1.3 billion kgs of CO2 per year.

This is because the internet relies on data servers

that use fossil fuels for energy,

and they also need energy to be cooled,

as they get really hot.

We need to regulate tech companies

to use only renewable energy for their servers

and encourage them to build servers in colder climates

to decrease the need for cooling.

Some companies have hopped on this trend

and now build their hot, hot servers in Iceland.

The farmhouse wifi is connected to the Internet via radio waves.

old-time technology that we still use today.

Most of our devices, like cell phones, tablets, and laptops,

use omnidirectional antennas to pick up wifi signals.

This allows them to be anywhere in your home

and communicate with your internet,

but they aren't optimal for really long distances.

So I'm gonna make a cantenna

with an added parabolic dish.

I'll build a large reflective dish

that will hopeful catch more of the radio waves,

and the parabolic curvature will focus them towards a can.

The can has a copper wire inside

which acts like the antenna in your phone.

I'll be making something called a Yagi,

which is a unidirectional antenna

that was invented in 1926.

When the wifi signal from the farm reaches my antenna,

this signal will be amplified by a series of metal plates.

A reflector at the back and five directors

all concentrate those waves onto our active element

which ultimately sends an electronic signal

to the dongle and then to the laptop.

While I begin cutting out

the different sized copper plates for my Yagi,

Greg is building the frame for his parabolic dish.

Greg: The first thing I have to do is cut the wood rods

that will hold the cantenna in the center of the parabolic dish.

The dish is made of mesh and plastic

and will collect the radio waves

and send them to that little copper wire in the can.

The copper wire's electrons

will get excited by the farm's focused wifi radio waves

and create an electronic signal that travels down the cable

and into a dongle.

The dongle interprets and translates that signal

into digital data which our computer uses as wifi.

Mitch: The Yagi antenna I'm building also uses copper

because copper will react effectively

with the wifi's electromagnetic waves.

The great thing about the Yagi is that it has the potential

to get a much stronger signal based on its dimensions,

which are specifically calculated

for our wifi wavelength and setup,

but its downfall is that it has to be pointed perfectly

in the right direction to work well

because its focused beam is so narrow.

I'm a little worried,

but if we get the Yagi wrong,

it just won't work at all.

I think this is one of the coolest builds that we've done.

My parabolic dish is ready.

Now I have to figure out

the perfect place to put this monster.

( gasps ) Ay!

The vice that I'm most addicted to sadly is wifi.

Who needs it more? Greg, 100%.

Hands up. You got me, Mitch.

But we both need it in our cabin

to do the work that's necessary for this show.

You sometimes forget how much internet is integrated into your life

until you don't have it.

Greg: Mitch and I have been having one to two beers a night to relax.

So those are being taken away,

which is gonna be harder than usual.

Since this is my first time brewing beer

or brewing anything really,

I've been doing a bunch of research

and realized the first thing we need is something called wort.

Now not the warts that you get on your body.

W-O-R-T.

And it's basically a mix

of boiled barley, hops, and malt extract.

But the most important ingredient we need is yeast.

Humanity's existence is profoundly intertwined with yeast.

It lives on our skin, in our lungs and guts,

and it floats in the air that we breathe.

And regulating yeast through brewing and baking

has made it a key building block

in humanity's transformation from nomadic hunters

to a domesticated agricultural society.

To break down that malt extract into ethanol

we're looking for something called brewer's yeast,

and to find it, we're gonna use our bodies and our environment.

If we find yeast samples,

we can take them and culture them.

( alarm blaring )

We're about to swab our toes, butt cracks, and skin

to hopefully have yeast on them.

- Just doing some science. - Wa-pah!

Aw, gross. What a freak.

So which do you think will actually have the best growth?

Greg: I think it's gonna be one of my skins.

I think the butt crack will show the most growth,

but it may not be what we actually want.

If we can make beer out of the butt crack, we're gonna be rich.

- It's gonna fly off the shelves. - I don't know.

( cash register dings )

Mitch: Greg and I's job has been to find that yeast somehow,

but we also have some wort samples

like this one that we've placed around the farm.

We have this bit of cheese cloth on top so the yeast can get through,

but other insects or animals can't get in.

And the hope is that near fruit and near flowers,

near oak trees, might find some wild yeast

and be able to cultivate that and use it for our beer.

It'll take nine to ten hours,

so we'll leave the wort out overnight to capture the yeast.

- Look what I got. - Ooh. Thank you.

Mitch: Lastly, we streaked a plum

then added it directly into a wort bottle

in order to take advantage of the natural yeast on its skin.

Now we just have to wait two to three days

to see if we have enough yeast growth

to use for brewing our beer.

Greg: To make my swim briefs,

first I'm going to need the wool.

So I'm here with Rachel who's gonna teach me how to shear a sheep with this!

Okay, I'm so sorry. I'm freaking out.

- I trust you absolutely. - Okay.

I trust myself as a teacher.

We are gonna be taking the fleece off of a sheep with a razor.

Rachel: They have to be sheared, because once they're done,

you'll see how much wool comes off,

and that's one year's worth.

They want this fleece off of them,

so that's what I keep thinking.

I'm like, "I'm gonna help cool down the sheep.

I'm gonna help cool down the sheep."

I think we should just get started

'cause I still have to process the wool, dye the wool,

and then, you know, knit it into a swim brief.

You're gonna become a gorgeous swim brief

that a gay guy's gonna wear on the beach.

- ( bleats ) - She just said, "I can't wait."

- Ready? - I love you.

It's like you've done this before.

- Once or twice. - Oh, my God, it's, like,

the most satisfying thing I've ever seen in my life.

- Ready? - I'm ready.

I just don't wanna cut them. I don't wanna cut them.

- So like this? - Yep.

Oh, my God.

Shearing sheep means we're working with natural fiber,

but a lot of our clothes are made with synthetic fibers like polyester,

and that polyester contributes to plastic waste.

For example, one 6 kg load of laundry

releases more than 700,000 microplastic fibers into waste water,

which means washing clothes

produces the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles

of waste per year.

All the way out with that leg again.

There! Beautiful!

My hands feel amazing. I haven't washed them because lanolin is an oil

that comes off the sheep when you're actually touching them

and shearing them, and it's good for your hands.

So I'm just basking in these sheep shearing hands.

Baby, do you feel naked and like a newborn?

Rachel: She says, "Oh, I feel wonderful."

Thank you so much. I never thought I'd do something like this.

Rachel: For the average Canadian sheep farmer,

selling that wool doesn't even pay for me to come shear the sheep.

So it's just something you have to do for the health of the sheep.

Wouldn't that be a good thing, Canadian wool? I don't know.

Yes, you could find it if you looked for it.

There are smaller producers that do have wool sheep,

and the majority of their sales would be private, directly to the buyer.

- Greg: Like making clothing? - Rachel: Exactly.

Greg: Now that we've sheared the sheep,

we need to get it into yarn that I contextualize knitting into a swim brief.

It's really hard to have a strong opinion about responsible production

when you don't understand how things are made.

85% of textiles end up in landfills each year,

which is the equivalent of one garbage truck of clothes

being dumped in a landfill every second.

Fast fashion companies and influencer culture

are constantly trying to make us buy new things,