What if the system you spent four decades building turned out to not be enough?

David Gottfried is the father of the global green building movement. He founded the U.S. Green Building Council and the World Green Building Council, and helped create LEED, the rating system now used across more than 180 countries and tied to a trillion-dollar green economy. And yet he is the first to say it has not bent the curve far enough. Carbon keeps climbing. The ship is still heading for the iceberg, and we are busy bolting solar panels to the deck.

In this wide-ranging conversation, David takes Peter through the whole arc. A quick 101 on what actually makes a building green, from orientation and glazing to greywater and healthy materials. How LEED grew from a white paper into a global standard. And why he now argues we need to move from sustainability to regeneration, from human to humane, and build a new scoreboard he calls HOPE (Health On Planet Earth).

It is also a deeply personal story. A Stanford engineer who read Siddhartha every birthday and came to see himself as the ferryman. A developer who lost a building in the crash and went looking for purpose. A man who took up kung fu in his late fifties, fly fishes alone in cold creeks, and used AI as a thinking partner to turn 2,400 pages of dog-walk voice notes into his fourth book.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro, Kung Fu & Fly Fishing
9:34 A 101 on Green Buildings…
16:11 ...and a 101 on the LEED System
18:45 Why study engineering?
20:40 Siddartha's Influence on David
26:43 Origins of the Green Building Movement
42:06 Green Buildings aren't enough
50:57 Pushing the needle and finding the correct metrics
1:01:37 A true Human-AI collaboration
1:10:07 David's Hope and Future Vision
1:12:14 Q&A Start
1:12:28 What does innovation mean to you?
1:15:28 Key Event, Book, Person
1:20:13 Time Management
1:24:58 Favourite childhood memory
1:27:57 Greatest Challenge to Date
1:33:04 Advice for young professionals
1:36:16 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:37:01 Where can people find you?
1:38:42 Final Message
1:39:29 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
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