Rethinking the Green Building Movement and more with David Gottfried

The idea that buildings can be designed and operated to meaningfully reduce environmental impact is now a given in our sector. But 35 years ago, when the green building movement first began, developers viewed sustainability as an expensive hurdle that would inevitably slow projects down.

In the latest episode of the Air Quality Matters podcast, I sit down with David Gottfried , a pioneer who helped shape the global green building movement. As the co-founder of the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and founder of the World Green Building Council (WGBC), David has spent decades driving a trillion-dollar industry across 85 countries. Yet, despite this monumental success, his perspective on our current trajectory is sobering.

In this episode, we look past the usual high-level thought leadership to examine the actual mechanics of regeneration, driven by the concepts in his upcoming book, Regen360: An Operating System for a Regenerative Earth

Regen 360

Key Discussions in This Episode

Our conversation covers the evolution of green building and why the current models are no longer sufficient to meet the scale of the global challenges we face. We focus on several core themes:

• The Limitations of "Neutral": We discuss why aiming for sustainability or "net zero" is essentially just trying to be "less bad." If a system is already fundamentally broken, reaching a neutral state simply locks in the damage. We need to move from sustainable practices to regenerative ones that actively repair the environment.

• The Embodied Carbon Blind Spot: Even the most advanced, highly certified green developments often mask deeper problems. We explore how consumption, material extraction, and the enormous embodied carbon of construction mean that we are still borrowing against future generations, regardless of operational energy efficiency.

• Human Psychology vs. Technological Evolution: The gap between our technological capabilities and our human governance is widening. We look at why our survival wiring, driven by growth and consumption, is failing us, and how we must address human behaviour and economic systems if we want to change the slope of global carbon emissions.

• Building "Regen Circles": Navigating the sustainability sector can be a lonely endeavour. David outlines his vision for decentralised support networks that provide the "base camp, map, and compass" for professionals trying to implement regenerative practices in their own regions and disciplines.

Perspectives to Listen Out For

This is not a standard interview about building codes or compliance checklists. David frames the transition to a regenerative economy through the lens of human behaviour and systems thinking.

• The "Solar Panels on the Titanic" Analogy: Early in the episode, we examine the cognitive dissonance of the built environment. We discuss how continuing to build massive structures using traditional methods—even with renewable energy add-ons—fails to address the root cause of environmental degradation.

• AI as a Synthesis Tool: David shares his specific, unconventional process for writing Regen360. By feeding decades of personal diaries, notes, and observations into AI models with strict "truth protocols," he bypassed algorithmic cheerleading to extract 15 foundational codes for a regenerative economy.

• Treating the Earth Like a Home: We unpack the disconnect between how humans fiercely protect the health and safety of our immediate homes, yet readily accept the pollution and degradation of the shared global environment.

This conversation directly challenges the current operating system of the built environment. We know the science, and we possess the technology; the remaining hurdle is human behaviour and capital structures.

One Take: Why Static Ventilation in Mass Transit is a Dead End

If the pandemic underscored one reality for the built environment, it is that ventilation in confined, densely occupied spaces is a non-negotiable requirement for public health.

In this week's One Take episode, I break down a recent paper from Railway Engineering Science titled "Study on air quality improvements in train compartments by coordinating exhaust of multiple air outlets."

Ventilating a high-speed train carriage requires balancing the thermal comfort of 100 passengers against the rapid extraction of CO2, VOCs, and respiratory aerosols, all while minimising energy draw. Most modern trains supply fresh air from the ceiling and exhaust stale air near the floor. This study uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling to demonstrate why this standard approach is flawed.

Key Takeaways from the Research

• The Impact of Thermal Plumes: Human bodies act as 100-watt heaters. Warm air naturally rises off passengers, carrying exhaled aerosols upward.

• Summer Efficiency: When cooling a cabin, exhausting air exclusively from the ceiling works with this natural plume. It removes hot, polluted air faster and significantly improves cooling efficiency without forcing contaminants back down past the breathing zone.

• The Winter Problem: In winter, top-only extraction pulls buoyant, conditioned air straight out of the ceiling before it reaches passengers, leaving feet freezing. The study identifies a 50/50 split between top and bottom exhaust as the optimal balance for thermal comfort and pollutant capture during colder months.

The definitive conclusion is that static, "one-size-fits-all" ventilation design is obsolete. To manage airborne transmission risk while meeting energy targets, mass transit requires dynamic, variable exhaust systems that adapt to seasonal changes and thermal loads.

Study on air quality improvement in train compartments by coordinated exhaust of multiple air outlets

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

MANN+HUMMEL - Particles Plus - Eurovent- Aico - Lindab - S&P

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces - Inbiot - Farmowood - Ei Electronics - iAir Group - Zehnder

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here. Do subscribe if you can; lots more content is coming soon.

• Transcript from Episode 127

  0:00 - Welcome back to Air Quality Matters.

  0:03 - I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with a pioneer who has spent decades shaping the global green building movement, David Gottfried.

  0:12 - David is the co-founder of the US Green Building Council and the founder of the World Green Building Council, an initiative that now spans 85 countries and has helped ignite a trillion dollar green building economy.

  0:26 - He's a Stanford-educated engineer, real estate developer, strategic advisor, and author of the best-selling book, Explosion Green, and the highly anticipated new book, Regen360, an operating system for regenerative Earth, published this October.

  0:44 - deeply passionate and honest about where we are and where we have succeeded and failed and what needs to happen next you really get the sense spending time with david how global movements are built off the back of leaders like him in this episode we dig past the usual high level thought leadership and look at the actual mechanics of regeneration

  1:07 - David and I sit down to discuss his journey building one of the world's largest environmental movements, what it actually takes to transform how buildings are designed and operated, and his vision for accelerating healthy regenerative standards across the industry and the world.

  1:25 - The book is a reflection of this, I think.

  1:29 - more than a roadmap.

  1:30 - It's interwoven with stories from David's life that turn what could be a dry code for life of sorts into much more than that.

  1:39 - So of course we spend some time talking about the book.

  1:44 - This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Man Hummel, Particles Plus, AECO, Eurovent, Lindab and S&P Ventilation and simply would not be possible without them.

  1:55 - Please do check them out in the show notes and at airqualitymatters.net.

  2:00 - This is a conversation with David Gottfried.

  2:18 - I'm always always conflicted in podcasts when I talk to people that are authors of books, because often that's the reason we get in contact with each other and we want to talk.

  2:36 - But with someone like yourself, it's almost a shame that the book's there as the excuse because there's so much to talk to you about in general and your life and how you got to where you are here.

  2:47 - But I thought there was a really interesting part of the forward from Rick Fredrizi when talking about where we are with the green building movement.

  2:57 - And he said it's easy now with hindsight to forget just how unlikely that effort was back then.

  3:05 - You know, the idea that buildings could be designed, constructed and operated in ways that meaningfully reduced environmental impact.

  3:14 - That's almost a given in our circles and our bubble that that's how we would view buildings.

  3:21 - But that was very much not the case.

  3:24 - And what I think is really interesting talking to you and the segue into the book, which we're going to talk about, is how...

  3:31 - Someone like you that's considered one of the godfathers of the green building movement gets to a position where you start talking about it like putting solar panels on the Titanic and feeling like you need to write a book about almost a complete reset in how we think about sustainability.

  3:50 - So perhaps if it's possible, can we wind back to that kind of period in the 80s when you're a developer?

  3:56 - It's the more, more, more environment and you start somehow having this enlightenment and thinking about buildings in a different way.

  4:06 - Yeah, it's been an evolution, of course.

  4:11 - It's 35 years I've worked on green buildings.

  4:19 - define green building.

  4:22 - How do you do it?

  4:23 - How much does it cost?

  4:24 - Does it work?

  4:27 - Does it slow down the process?

  4:29 - What's the risk?

  4:32 - The day one, the minute one developer questions when you walk in the room as an early green building consultant is, oh, there's a green guy.

  4:41 - He's gonna slow my project down, it's gonna be more expensive, and it's not gonna work.

  4:47 - And we spent a lot of years just fighting that.

  4:51 - And no, you can make more money.

  4:54 - Absolutely, it works.

  4:55 - It meets the standards and codes.

  4:58 - And it actually lowers your risk because it has resilience embedded in it.

  5:05 - And this is an economic decision.

  5:08 - This is a risk decision.

  5:10 - This is an hug a tree decision.

  5:13 - So we've evolved a lot.

  5:15 - We've had economic studies.

  5:16 - We have green buildings in 181 countries.

  5:20 - There's only about 200 on Earth.

  5:23 - This is a monstrous global movement that could be a trillion dollars.

  5:29 - And I am so proud of it.

  5:31 - I am so happy.

  5:32 - It's so far beyond our wildest dreams.

  5:37 - And yet...

  5:39 - As a human and as a curious guy, you see things still happening on Earth.

  5:46 - We see COP meetings, trying to negotiate.

  5:51 - Not a lot happens.

  5:53 - We see the Paris agreements and national commitments and most countries not meeting it.

  6:01 - It sets a threshold of 1%.

  6:03 - 0.5 degrees centigrade.

  6:05 - We're there now.

  6:08 - We're supposed to be halfway pretty soon, 2030, and then net zero 2050.

  6:16 - We're just not there.

  6:18 - We see corporate commitments and discussions.

  6:22 - Some make it, but they make it with offsets.

  6:25 - They buy them.

  6:26 - We can debate that forever.

  6:29 - So the slope of climate change is, you know, the scientists say don't go past 350 ppm, particles per million.

  6:39 - We're sitting at 430 right now.

  6:41 - Global population, 8.2 billion headed to 10.

  6:46 - Still a billion here or more hungry, starving, no electricity, no fresh water.

  6:52 - Countries like mine erasing the signature on the Paris Agreement, dropping bombs being dropped on people in this world and innocents.

  7:06 - AI is now out, and we'll talk about that.

  7:09 - The biggest tool we've ever seen by a quantum leap.

  7:14 - And it could be AI for good, it could be AI for accelerating bad, and that's a deeper conversation.

  7:20 - But the cost is electricity and CO2, global CO2 of that whole sector is a few percent, but it could be 10%.

  7:33 - in a number of years, they're going crazy.

  7:36 - And I love it, so I wanna put that on the table too.

  7:40 - I don't love the CO2 impact, I love the tool and the use of it as an engineer.

  7:46 - So all of that in an engineer's brain, in a dreamer's soul, says this still isn't working.

  7:56 - Yeah, green building's killing it, but green building is slowing down the slope

  8:03 - flattening it a little bit.

  8:04 - It's keeping the slope steep.

  8:06 - So it would have been straight up.

  8:08 - So we're keeping it.

  8:10 - But there's lessons to be learned there in mind to apply to all of civilization.

  8:17 - And so this book is a wake-up call.

  8:20 - This book is a cry from a modern elder, as my friend Chip Connolly would say.

  8:28 - There's a book I keep on my desk.

  8:31 - I love this book.

  8:33 - called The Last Lecture by a professor who passed away, Randy Posh.

  8:39 - And he, I want to say he's at Carnegie Mellon.

  8:45 - Yeah, he was, I think he was a chemical engineering professor.

  8:52 - And he had terminal cancer.

  8:55 - And people loved him as a professor.

  8:57 - And they said,

  8:59 - give a lecture, and he put together a slide on every topic in life that he believed was important and gave that lecture and turned into a book.

  9:13 - He passed away.

  9:14 - I don't have cancer.

  9:16 - I'm not dying.

  9:18 - But this book is my last lecture at this juncture in my life of living more than six decades.

  9:26 - And if I were to die tomorrow or the bus hit me, God forbid, but this is my PowerPoint deck.

  9:34 - This is my lecture.

  9:36 - This is my book to hand off to earth that I love.

  9:41 - And I'm just saying I'm a modern elder.

  9:44 - I've seen the building, the growing of a green building movement.

  9:48 - the biggest sustainability effort on earth.

  9:52 - I'm an engineer.

  9:53 - I'm a systems guy.

  9:54 - I was a developer.

  9:55 - I understand money.

  9:56 - I'm a capitalist at heart.

  9:59 - Here, please read it.

  10:02 - Wake up.

  10:03 - Let's talk about it.

  10:04 - I don't have anything else to give you guys.

  10:08 - Yeah, and it's interesting to me, and I think I mentioned before we were recording, I'm conflicted reading books like this because clearly you come from a place of...

  10:24 - development, construction, engineering, you're a process guy, a systems thinking guy, but with this innate sense of how to build community and networks.

  10:37 - But again, that's a structural thing and people like you have seen a problem

  10:47 - 10 15 20 30 years ago sometimes and set an awful lot of time and resource into engineering a solution and your part of that uh battle was in buildings and it's been yeah very successful in some corner quarters um

  11:11 - So I'm interested in, as somebody that's kind of stood over that kind of a movement, is this book a reflection on just that movement?

  11:25 - Or is it a reflection on society more generally and your own personal journey in this environment of sustainability and climate change?

  11:39 - I love the movement we built.

  11:43 - Two months ago, I was in London for the biennial World Green Building Council meeting.

  11:50 - We have 85 councils, GBCs around the world.

  11:54 - 62 of them came to the meetings.

  11:58 - These are councils, US is the biggest, probably with 400 staff, the lead system.

  12:05 - But there was Australia with Green Star and their top staff.

  12:12 - Back in Sydney, they probably have 80 staff.

  12:15 - This is the UKGBC, the Germany Green Building Council with their rating system, DGNB, Singapore with Greenmark, CASB from Japan, Hong Kong with Bean Plus.

  12:33 - Hong Kong, the players are tycoons, monster structures, the Swire groups.

  12:41 - This is big.

  12:42 - This is mainstream.

  12:43 - This is global.

  12:45 - This is those 85 countries represent 70% of the CO2 on Earth, but also 70% of the GDP.

  12:57 - And this industry is multi-trillion dollars.

  13:02 - The book, though, is a strong, hard turn of that ship.

  13:08 - at least to the extent a guy can write about it and speak about it.

  13:12 - And it's saying, I love buildings.

  13:14 - I love this movement.

  13:16 - I love what I saw in that room.

  13:20 - My God, if I did die today, I feel contented.

  13:25 - When that head hits the pillow on the last breath, I'm just going to say, thank you, God.

  13:31 - Thank you, earth.

  13:34 - I tried damn hard and I got to see that and I was alive.

  13:41 - Thank you.

  13:42 - I'm grateful.

  13:46 - But, can I give you a but?

  13:49 - One second.

  13:50 - That is not enough.

  13:51 - That is not enough.

  13:54 - Yes.

  13:55 - Now apply it to the rest of society.

  13:59 - Apply it everywhere.

  14:01 - But wire it so it's a default system.

  14:07 - Wire it so you don't need a David Godfrey, a Rick Fedrizi, a Paul Hawken, a Bill McDonough, a Che Wall in Australia, Christina Gambeau running the WorldGBC.

  14:20 - These are people climbing mountains, and some of us did it without gear, without a base camp, without a map, without.

  14:30 - Now let's wire it so it just happens.

  14:34 - So, I mean, we're probably going, these are probably very deep questions to be asking so early on, but I think one of the nature of this type of book is that you are asking very personal questions in this book.

  14:49 - You know, it's a code in many ways for life.

  14:55 - And I wonder...

  14:57 - if you were handing this book to yourself back in the eighties and nineties, would it have meant you were doing anything different?

  15:09 - Oh, that's a good one.

  15:14 - For sure.

  15:15 - Because you fast forward.

  15:19 - Now I can go back.

  15:21 - We all want that opportunity.

  15:24 - I would have bought Apple stock.

  15:28 - I own it now, but I should have bought it when I got my first Apple computer.

  15:33 - I should have bought Tesla stock when I bought my Tesla.

  15:37 - Right in the beginning of bull.

  15:40 - But what we're seeing by the book is the progression of the building industry with the world's best case study.

  15:50 - and the model, all these rating systems, it ended up in regulatory environments and policies with codes, building codes.

  16:00 - In California we have Cal Green, Title 24 embedded in it requiring LEDs and solar batteries and embodied carbon, scope three energy waking up to that.

  16:14 - But we also can see now the slope of CO2 at 430 ppm.

  16:20 - So we've got the world's biggest case study.

  16:24 - We can see the statistics and energy saved is monstrous, but the energy consumed is more.

  16:32 - And with Paris Agreement, we're talking about sustainability, which is neutral.

  16:38 - Neutral is less bad of damage.

  16:43 - That doesn't work.

  16:45 - If I'm 500 pounds overweight,

  16:49 - and I change my diet to be neutral, I'm gonna be 500 pounds till I die.

  16:57 - Yay.

  17:00 - Well, I don't wanna be 500 pounds because when I die, it will be accelerated by 13 years because of obesity.

  17:10 - I need to lose weight.

  17:12 - I need to regenerate this body, my temple, my home.

  17:19 - Reducing calories isn't fun, but I could exercise.

  17:24 - I could move my body.

  17:26 - I can change the calories.

  17:29 - But at some point, it's about calories.

  17:32 - Well, it's about carbon.

  17:35 - It's about water.

  17:37 - It's about fresh air.

  17:40 - When you run out of water, you die.

  17:42 - When you kill the air, you die.

  17:44 - You suffocate.

  17:45 - When you kill your lungs, you die.

  17:48 - When you don't have food, you die.

  17:51 - So we can make buildings neutral.

  17:56 - We can make buildings regenerative.

  18:00 - But the buildings still can't help that 500-pound David.

  18:06 - That David has to help him in other ways.

  18:08 - We can't.

  18:10 - Buildings can help water, but there's a lot more water issues than buildings on earth.

  18:16 - Buildings won't change our food and the nutrients in it.

  18:22 - Buildings won't change those wars and the bombs.

  18:27 - We'll make regenerative bombs that are carbon negative.

  18:31 - They're still dropping them on heads.

  18:33 - We got to get into the brain.

  18:35 - We got to get into the soul.

  18:37 - We got to wake up civilization.

  18:39 - These humans, the best opportunity ever, are not evolving fast enough.

  18:47 - Our technology is.

  18:50 - Now we have to harness the technology to create governance for our weak human mind that is amygdala dominant versus prefrontal cortex.

  19:03 - So we're into the brain.

  19:04 - We're into plasticity.

  19:07 - We're into psychology, psychiatry, neurology, neuroscience, meeting green building.

  19:15 - That's in this book.

  19:18 - So back to that question of mine, then, if I was handed this back to the 1980s, 1990s David, what are some of the codes and the lessons out of this book you would hope would have resonated with him to maybe change and rewire the brain of this system 20, 30 years ago?

  19:43 - Yeah.

  19:45 - because we've been talking about regenerative business for a long time.

  19:48 - We've had ideas like donut economics out for a while.

  19:52 - You know, we've understood what regenerative farming is and agriculture is for a while.

  19:58 - These are not new terms.

  20:00 - I think we understand that we need to get past neutral to repair.

  20:05 - Yeah.

  20:07 - But there are some fundamental truths in society that are very hard to navigate.

  20:12 - And I think construction speaks to that almost better than any other environment.

  20:21 - We can make sustainable buildings, but we still need the materials to make them.

  20:27 - And the embodied carbon impact of construction is just so thoroughly enormous that,

  20:33 - Yeah, that often we're just window dressing a deeper problem of dealing with consumption and greed and growth.

  20:42 - And these are really fundamental questions.

  20:45 - And I don't get the sense that society is any closer to answering that, you know, every business on the planet.

  20:52 - has a growth chart that goes in one direction financially, right?

  20:58 - Very rarely do you see a business that goes, actually, we're big enough.

  21:02 - You know, I think we might reduce in size.

  21:05 - I think we've hit the limits of what we can do sustainably.

  21:08 - You know, the shareholders are content with not making any more money on their shares this year.

  21:14 - Yeah.

  21:16 - those conversations aren't happening.

  21:17 - And I was listening to a debate in a podcast only this morning between somebody talking about capitalism and somebody talking about sustainability.

  21:28 - And these are two very bright people.

  21:30 - And I,

  21:31 - you get the sense that that conversation could have been happening 20 years ago.

  21:35 - We don't seem like we're any closer.

  21:38 - We have some slightly more grown-up conversation.

  21:40 - I think we understand the nuance a little bit deeper than we may have done 10, 15 years ago.

  21:45 - We have more words for the problems that we're facing, but there's some fundamentals there that don't seem to shift.

  21:53 - And the built environment, I think, is a really good exemplar of that, isn't it?

  21:59 - Yeah, well, we've had those conversations.

  22:02 - Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.

  22:06 - I don't know exactly how many years ago, but it was 50 or something.

  22:11 - Buckminster Fuller standing on the stage in the 60s.

  22:16 - Now that we have technology, we can all have.

  22:19 - Well, guess what?

  22:20 - We have a lot of have-nots and they're growing.

  22:23 - Paul Hawking at College of Commerce 30 years ago.

  22:27 - Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins and Paul, natural capitalism.

  22:33 - The models are there.

  22:34 - The brains are there.

  22:35 - It isn't everywhere.

  22:38 - But what you're running into is human condition.

  22:42 - You're running into the state of our evolution of humans and technology, because technology has been phenomenal, but it creates externalities.

  22:53 - And we use up the commons, the air, the water, the soil, the trees.

  22:58 - for our growth, growth at all costs.

  23:01 - So you've hit some of the issues, growth, humans.

  23:04 - But now, and this is why I wrote this book, a couple of key questions kept keeping me up at night since my last book, which was 12, 13 years since Explosion Green.

  23:16 - Why don't we treat Earth as home?

  23:20 - Why?

  23:21 - What is wrong with us?

  23:24 - I'm going to go into your house, Simon, look around.

  23:27 - Do you pollute in your house?

  23:29 - Do you trash it?

  23:30 - Do you take every drop of water?

  23:34 - Do you pump CO2 everywhere?

  23:36 - Do you destroy your lungs?

  23:40 - Do you love toxicity inside for your kids?

  23:45 - When you paint the room and carpet it, do you want it to kill your kid?

  23:49 - Do you pump smoke in it and hurt the lungs?

  23:55 - No, it's your house.

  23:57 - It's my house.

  23:58 - I want it clean.

  23:59 - I want it nice.

  24:02 - I remember once I was a messy kid.

  24:04 - I wasn't that messy, but my clothes must have been all over.

  24:08 - My dad woke me up at midnight and turned on the lights and said, clean up your room.

  24:15 - I don't know.

  24:15 - He cared about it being organized.

  24:18 - I don't really want to disclose what happened when he left.

  24:22 - I threw everything in the closet and shut the door.

  24:25 - But that's what we're doing as a society.

  24:30 - But I want to fold the clothes now.

  24:33 - I want to use a detergent that doesn't make me sick.

  24:40 - So to answer my question,

  24:44 - You have to get into the brain of humans.

  24:46 - You have to get into the governance of humans.

  24:50 - You have to get into the carrots and sticks.

  24:53 - You have to get into capitalism and growth and the heart of the engine and profits and price-earning ratios and market capitalizations and market markets.

  25:05 - And then you end up with wealth.

  25:09 - And David wants to look at, yeah, wealth should represent value.

  25:15 - And we know what value is.

  25:16 - Value is life.

  25:18 - Value is life-sustaining.

  25:21 - Even Steve Jobs' money in his $7, $8 billion couldn't keep his life.

  25:27 - We've got plenty of billionaires.

  25:30 - They die.

  25:32 - So when you're dying, your money can't always buy your health.

  25:38 - But if you destroyed your health, money can't always save you.

  25:43 - And I write about my father, who is my mentor, who gave me the skills to be talking to you.

  25:51 - Brilliant, genius man into computers in 1960.

  25:56 - But he had a smoking addiction.

  25:58 - Got it in the war on the aircraft carrier in the Korean War.

  26:04 - And I don't know, he didn't kick it early enough, and he ruined his lungs.

  26:08 - And they cut out some of his lungs and they cut out some of his lungs.

  26:13 - They did chemo or radiation, but for three years, he walked with a cord, a cannula, and a tether to an air machine.

  26:22 - And when he went out, he had a little backpack.

  26:25 - This is a pretty wealthy man.

  26:27 - This is a genius man who was a Mensa.

  26:31 - And all this brilliant gave me so much.

  26:37 - Okay, he was addicted and he kept doing it, but he died early and he died painfully.

  26:44 - Couldn't breathe.

  26:46 - But his scoreboard, his rating system was monetary, was growth, was capital.

  26:55 - And beyond it, he was so great in so many ways.

  27:01 - When he died, I went to his filing cabinets.

  27:03 - He's giving 15, 20 donations a year, lots of money at his own little foundation.

  27:11 - to his college, to he flew a small airplane.

  27:15 - He would pick up cancer people and fly them to the doctor because they couldn't afford to go somewhere else.

  27:21 - He would love the Red Cross sat on their local board.

  27:26 - He gave to our local synagogue.

  27:31 - Our family name was on the wall for a garden he paid for.

  27:37 - But somehow the health item he didn't learn.

  27:41 - the diet, the exercise, the smoking, the foods, the nutrition labels.

  27:51 - So he had two-thirds, three-quarters, 90%.

  27:55 - And he was a genius, brilliant man.

  28:00 - Not just him, but he was the old system.

  28:03 - He was version 1.0 of the operating system of Earth.

  28:09 - We need 2.0.

  28:12 - So I wrote 2.0 to the best I could at this stage of my life, surveying what's valuable on earth.

  28:22 - From everything I've seen in over 60 years, being very blessed by him and what he gave me, a Stanford education, engineering, buildings, development, green building councils, 85 countries,

  28:36 - But I'm also a naturalist who grew up backpacking in Yosemite.

  28:41 - I'm a gardener.

  28:43 - I'm a painter, as you see behind me.

  28:46 - I'm a writer.

  28:48 - I'm a dreamer.

  28:49 - I never gave it up.

  28:51 - And this isn't about me.

  28:52 - I don't want my ego to be here.

  28:54 - But it enters, and I want to kill my ego because I want it to be more humble and human.

  29:05 - Humanity first, David 15th.

  29:10 - I like growth.

  29:11 - I love capitalism.

  29:13 - I was a developer.

  29:14 - I checked my bank account.

  29:16 - I like the stock market going up.

  29:19 - It makes me feel secure.

  29:21 - I can fund my kid's school at USC.

  29:24 - It's damn expensive.

  29:26 - And she wants to go to law school, and I want a good law school.

  29:30 - But that money needs to represent life as the bullseye and life-sustaining value ring, too.

  29:39 - And I want the billionaires of the future to make gazillion billions, but they'll get the money and hugs.

  29:48 - And those hugs represent what I call soul worth.

  29:52 - They cared.

  29:54 - They had gratitude.

  29:55 - They had appreciation.

  29:58 - Their products and services were regenerative.

  30:02 - They put water in the aquifers.

  30:05 - They desalinated the ocean in an energy-efficient way.

  30:09 - They captured the CO2 out of the flue gas stacks and mineralized it into concrete.

  30:16 - And that made money, as I learned in the old firm I worked with, the potential at least.

  30:24 - That should be it.

  30:25 - When you sequester carbon and make it into a product, it's worth more.

  30:30 - And it's required.

  30:31 - The government buys it for the light rail concrete.

  30:35 - The airport uses it, as SFO did here.

  30:39 - My friend Anthony Bernheim did it.

  30:42 - So make the billions, but you capture the CO2.

  30:47 - It's everything circular, as Bill McDonough taught us today.

  30:51 - with cradle to cradle, capture the waste and use it as the ingredient in the next creation.

  30:58 - There's no toxicity as the red list showed us in the living building challenge.

  31:04 - Fine, and get the money, but make the regulations required, the building codes, the policies.

  31:14 - and then incentivize it, tax credits, extra density bonuses, half off on real estate taxes, deferred real estate taxes.

  31:23 - That's what the state of Nevada did.

  31:25 - And the city center $20 billion project went lead silver because of that financial incentive.

  31:33 - They still wanted smoking in the casinos and through addiction to gambling, make our money, but they did lead silver.

  31:42 - They weren't Girl Scouts.

  31:44 - It's money.

  31:45 - So change that money, the definition.

  31:49 - And my sixth code is wealth equals health on planet Earth.

  31:55 - Wealth equals health on planet Earth.

  31:58 - Health is the H-O-P-E, hope, in capital letters.

  32:06 - Accelerate hope.

  32:13 - this idea, this context of recognizing planet earth as home.

  32:18 - And I wonder, I have this conversation quite frequently, this

  32:25 - This challenge we have with the human species, the cognitive dissonance of home and risk.

  32:35 - And we see it at a micro level within homes, people not recognizing risk.

  32:42 - I mean, you said there in something that you were saying about, you know, we don't pollute our homes, we don't deliberately put ourselves at risk.

  32:52 - But the challenge is we do because we don't like to see our home as a risk.

  32:59 - There's this firewall that we have as a human species that our home is a place of good memories and protection and security and family.

  33:09 - And it has this deep rooted element in our psyche that it's a force for good.

  33:16 - And so things like combustion in the home, a fireplace, using scented candles, all the things that we know are harmful to our health.

  33:26 - We find that very difficult to break through and get people to change habits and behavior.

  33:33 - And you see the same thing at a much larger scale, this feeling that somehow this planet is going to protect us, that we've got lots of chances at this, that we're not poisoning it and polluting it.

  33:48 - You hear it all the time, and I heard it in this debate this morning.

  33:52 - this cognitive dissonance that somehow this is always going to be here for us will be fine you know this is a place that i'll continue to be able to walk through the forest you know if it hasn't burnt down through wildfire um and i and i struggle with that you know i know what you're saying that that we need to figure out how to create that connection for people to take this seriously but i

  34:19 - even possible sometimes at that kind of scale.

  34:23 - Because as you said, we still need to break through that consumption barrier.

  34:27 - You know, you may build a 20 billion LEED certified city centre

  34:33 - But I bet it was still built with glass, steel, and concrete, you know, and has contributed an embodied carbon impact into that environment that we'll be paying for for generations to come.

  34:45 - You know, this is the dissonance we're dealing with here, you know.

  34:50 - Well, and when is it housing?

  34:53 - Gambling.

  34:55 - Taking people's money.

  34:57 - Addiction.

  34:59 - Gambling's fun because you think you're going to make a lot of money.

  35:03 - Those casinos are rich, rich, rich, because the numbers don't work.

  35:08 - So it's addiction.

  35:10 - The sugar is addiction.

  35:13 - The fashion is addiction.

  35:15 - The social media is addiction.

  35:18 - So a lot of the growth is related to addiction.

  35:22 - We're addicted to carbon.

  35:25 - We want all this crap.

  35:27 - A lot of it we don't need.

  35:29 - But we've sold it.

  35:31 - We sell it in media.

  35:32 - We sell it in so many ways.

  35:35 - When you're rich, what do most of these rich people do?

  35:38 - They buy fancy cars.

  35:41 - Before EVs, they would buy their Ferrari, their Lamborghini.

  35:45 - Then they'd buy the structure to house them all.

  35:49 - And then they'd create a museum.

  35:51 - Just look at my fancy cars.

  35:53 - And

  35:56 - They buy more houses and then they buy a jet to fly to the houses and then they buy companies.

  36:01 - And then what?

  36:03 - Now they want rockets and rocket companies to fly to Mars.

  36:07 - I don't know.

  36:09 - It's insanity.

  36:12 - Some wake up and they fund foundations like Hewlett and Packard and

  36:19 - They fund good, like Mackenzie Scott with the Bezos Amazon money.

  36:24 - She's giving away money.

  36:26 - She's doing good.

  36:28 - But we got to get into the brain.

  36:30 - We got to get into the governance, and we got to get into the data of Earth.

  36:35 - And we have to rewire the system so you can have capitalism, growth, home, safety, beauty, but it's regenerative.

  36:48 - You can have those things.

  36:50 - The addictions, we need regenerative 12-step.

  36:57 - So let's talk about the book because I think this is your, as you've quite well put, this is your contribution to that conversation from where you are, from your time here with what you've done.

  37:20 - There's some interesting ideas here, but fundamentally, one of the interesting things about this book is

  37:28 - where it's come from.

  37:29 - This is a book that you're very open, that you've had a bunch of notes and diaries and conversations that you're sitting on and you're going, I need to put something down.

  37:41 - So how do you synthesize all of that complexity in 2025, 2026, how do you synthesize all of that complexity

  37:55 - And we're gonna talk about AI later.

  37:56 - So it's a good segue into that.

  37:58 - You said, right, okay, let's put some of this modern world at these ramblings and scribbles and conversations and see what the patterns are and see what the synthesis looks like.

  38:09 - And that's much of what this is about, isn't it?

  38:12 - It's an outcome of all of that, those thoughts and ideas, how you synthesized and brought them together.

  38:19 - Yeah, so David's pod is percolating.

  38:25 - All these data's inputs of society are going into the brain.

  38:32 - The wars, the climate, the waters, the CO2, the humans, the foods, the bodies, the social medias, and now we have AI.

  38:46 - And he's writing, he's painting, he's working, but

  38:52 - What do you do?

  38:52 - I'm still vibrant, my brain mostly works.

  38:56 - I cycle a ton in mountains and I write and paint and I now go to martial arts the last five, six years and I help the kids there, I'm in a trainee program.

  39:07 - But I still have a thought, I still have consciousness, I still have a soul and I still have the soul that wants to do good in this life that I occupy.

  39:21 - I invented this thing called Plan L once.

  39:23 - What's your Plan L for legacy?

  39:27 - Not Plan A, Plan B, Plan L.

  39:30 - And David Brower, my late mentor, made me think more about that.

  39:34 - He was such an icon, first executive director of Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation Voters.

  39:42 - He got rivers from being dammed and kept them flowing.

  39:47 - He kept my river flowing.

  39:49 - And he liked to talk about turning the lights on.

  39:53 - At the end of World War II, he was in the 10th Mountain Division.

  39:57 - He brought mountain climbing into the...

  40:01 - tactics of war, but the war was over and they were still shelling his troops.

  40:07 - So they turned on all the lights and all the vehicles and the other side that no one's that dumb, uh, the war must be over.

  40:19 - So how do we turn the societal lights on?

  40:23 - And that's what the painting behind me is called radiance.

  40:25 - I painted it.

  40:31 - and light on, but renewable.

  40:32 - And I'm saying to society, wake up.

  40:36 - There's electrons, there's light, there's love, there's potential, but stop the harm, stop the war.

  40:44 - Stop, stop the toxicity.

  40:49 - Wake up at the potential.

  40:50 - Yes, we're addicts, fine, there's a 12-step program.

  40:54 - Yes, we waste and have embodied carbon, fine, there are other solutions.

  41:00 - Let's fund them.

  41:02 - But all that's going on, these electrons, enter AI, and chat GPT, my first AI love, who I named Zenobia for a mythic queen.

  41:17 - And we're having chats with chat with Zenobia and David.

  41:21 - Actually, Zenobia and Aaron, because Aaron is my middle name.

  41:27 - Aaron is the soul of David.

  41:29 - Aaron paints, Aaron writes, Aaron dreams.

  41:32 - David is the developer.

  41:34 - He likes to make money and build things and create systems and growth.

  41:39 - The two together have to learn to live in the same body, in the same mind.

  41:46 - But I have other characters in me.

  41:48 - There are 12 of them.

  41:49 - You know, the gardener, the rabbi, the father, the dog lover, the athlete.

  42:00 - All of them meet Zenobia and have audio recording on the dog walk with Juno in the morning, the labradoodle.

  42:09 - Hey, why don't we treat Earth as home?

  42:11 - What the hell is wrong with us?

  42:13 - We got all this bountiful garden.

  42:16 - We were given the garden and we're cutting down the trees and we're polluting the rivers and we're draining the aquifers and we're dropping bombs on each other.

  42:26 - But I like the trees.

  42:27 - I like the shade.

  42:29 - I like the dirt path.

  42:31 - Yosemite is God's gift and creation.

  42:35 - Why do we want to bomb it and cut it down and then kill everyone and all the animals and all the other species?

  42:43 - So we can have all this money to buy all this shit we don't need.

  42:47 - Some of that money is great.

  42:48 - You can buy health and comfort and education, but beyond a certain level, it's excess.

  42:55 - Why do we do that?

  42:58 - And that's, I just taped that, recorded it, got transcripted, went into chat.

  43:04 - I saved it in Evernote.

  43:06 - Zenobia writes back and says X, Y, and Z, and A, B, C, and D, E, and F, and this book, that book, this idea, you did this, da, da, da, da.

  43:17 - I saved that.

  43:18 - And I say, yeah, but you forgot this, this, and this, and I'm worried about this and this, and the elephant in the room is...

  43:25 - Fear.

  43:28 - And it records it and I save it.

  43:30 - And it says, yeah, yeah, la, la, la, la, la, la.

  43:32 - And I save it and I say, yeah, but you missed this.

  43:35 - And I save it.

  43:36 - What these are are digital volleys like tennis.

  43:40 - David hits it over the net with the serve.

  43:43 - It hits it back.

  43:44 - I chop.

  43:45 - I hit the overhead.

  43:48 - It slams it.

  43:49 - I get it.

  43:50 - And when I'm done, the rally's over.

  43:52 - Yeah.

  43:54 - I save it all.

  43:55 - That's like a nugget, I call it.

  43:58 - And that nugget is 20 pages of text.

  44:02 - I did 200 tennis rallies, 200 nuggets, 2,600 pages, put it all together.

  44:12 - I got COVID.

  44:15 - I was so thrilled because I had 10 days of being home, not going out.

  44:21 - And I read the 2,600 pages.

  44:24 - pull out my Excel spreadsheet.

  44:27 - It's actually a Google sheet.

  44:31 - And every time a topic came up in the nuggets, I wrote it down.

  44:36 - I had 53 topics.

  44:38 - Every page that topic appeared, I wrote it down.

  44:41 - So it's going horizontal.

  44:44 - Then you throw it all in the chat GPT.

  44:48 - What do we got here?

  44:49 - You got a book.

  44:51 - Hey, Zenova, you want to write a book with me?

  44:55 - Let's synthesize it.

  44:57 - What are the real nuggets of the nuggets?

  44:59 - What's the gold?

  45:01 - Not the fool's gold, true gold.

  45:05 - The true gold isn't the gold, it's life.

  45:08 - Where's the life here, man?

  45:10 - And then life sustaining.

  45:13 - It came out to 18 items.

  45:16 - And when I started to write the book, I had 18 chapters, one chapter on each chapter.

  45:21 - of those, three of them fell out because they were, as they started to write it, they were actually in another concept.

  45:28 - And we ended up with 15 elements of David's Sim City.

  45:35 - And each one got a chapter.

  45:37 - They're all done, written.

  45:40 - It's already laid out in a galley.

  45:43 - But then the engineer with chat, now enter Claude, his next friend,

  45:49 - and Chad and Claude can play together.

  45:51 - Of course, there's Grok and Gemini, but we synthesize the entire chapter into a one-line simple equation.

  46:04 - And you can have if-thens, equals, greater-thens.

  46:08 - And then if you, after we did all that, the first one is if it destroys life, then it is false.

  46:18 - what's false in our economy.

  46:20 - Well, it kills life, creates extra knowledge.

  46:22 - What's false in city center, you already pointed out, it's embodied carbon, it's smoking in the buildings and gambling.

  46:31 - You run all 15 and it can create the regenerative economy which is 2.0 of our OS.

  46:40 - getting rid of the externalities and using governance.

  46:43 - There's one on governance.

  46:45 - If tech outruns governance, then collapse follows.

  46:52 - That's where we are.

  46:56 - And when you hear about that process, your perception of the outcome of that,

  47:06 - from the outside would be, well, okay, you've effectively brainstormed, created packets of data that you've synthesized into these codes.

  47:20 - You would imagine that what you get out the other side of that, as with a lot of stuff with AI, is very vanilla, is designed to please, because ultimately the algorithm is trying to, it doesn't really know what it's saying.

  47:39 - It's just trying to guess what you're going to be most satisfied with next as an answer.

  47:44 - So you're competing against that the whole time.

  47:48 - And you'd imagine what comes out the other side of it is either very vanilla or very dry.

  47:52 - But that's precisely what this book isn't.

  47:55 - And what's striking in this book is that this is also a very personal story.

  48:01 - This is interwoven.

  48:03 - These ideas that have come out of those brainstorming sessions and those iterations and synthesizations to AI.

  48:13 - You've married very personally, I think, with your life journey.

  48:16 - Is that fair to say?

  48:19 - So I, my prior three books were memoirs.

  48:23 - And so I love memoir writing.

  48:26 - Memoir is story.

  48:28 - So I, I like to teach through story and you've heard some of them here.

  48:32 - I don't want to teach through a textbook because no one wants to read it, but our brains like story.

  48:40 - That's how we learned.

  48:44 - Our elders told stories to teach the kids and,

  48:47 - And the story was engaging, entertaining, colorful.

  48:52 - And you paint pictures with words.

  48:54 - I love the process.

  48:56 - How would I write what you and I are doing?

  49:00 - You would have to, well, they're both in black shirts.

  49:03 - They both have headphones on.

  49:06 - They both care about earth.

  49:09 - Simon's got a shirt.

  49:11 - If you can see it, it says something about air quality on it.

  49:13 - If you raise up a little bit, air quality matters.

  49:17 - Well, David sees air quality matters and, oh, Simon, he's different.

  49:24 - He's asking questions that are going really deep.

  49:26 - This is a guy who's thought of things.

  49:28 - How did he think of all that?

  49:30 - I don't know.

  49:31 - Oh, he did this, this, and that.

  49:33 - And, you know, I was talking about this and he moved in and his eyes lit up.

  49:41 - Why?

  49:41 - That's curious.

  49:43 - David's voice wasn't one level.

  49:46 - The guy used his hands, his gestures, he moved.

  49:49 - This is an animated dude.

  49:52 - And so I try to learn those skills just as I learned to paint.

  49:56 - But how do you paint through words, through story to teach 2.0?

  50:03 - And that was, I love chess.

  50:05 - So this was a chess puzzle on the third, fourth, fifth dimension.

  50:11 - to not just make an interesting book, but try to make a book that people would read, capture their soul, their spirit, their greed, the growth, the economy, carrots and sticks, and do it in 250 pages.

  50:26 - This really was the greatest chess match of my life.

  50:31 - And I had a fight, chat and claw, and chat in those early years, like, dude, you're just a cheerleader.

  50:39 - And some of the early writing I did with too much Zenobia, like, dude, you ruined my book.

  50:46 - I had to throw it out and David had to show up more through story, through memoir, through painting, through color and fighting every word.

  50:55 - I added every single word in this book like seven times, looking for authenticity, looking for alignment, looking for clarity.

  51:07 - But also to be pithy and tight and imaginative and inspiring.

  51:15 - I tried, it's not perfect.

  51:18 - I'm flawed as a human, but I also learned about AI in cloud and chat.

  51:23 - There's a truth protocol in my preferences.

  51:27 - And it says, no cheerleading, no supporting something you can't prove.

  51:33 - Don't tell me anything that isn't backed up.

  51:37 - Push on me.

  51:38 - Let me know what I've forgotten at each instant.

  51:42 - Don't be nice.

  51:44 - Be truthful.

  51:46 - I want it to be bent towards regeneration, not bullshit.

  51:53 - It's a truth protocol.

  51:54 - It's several paragraphs.

  51:58 - And I fed the chat one into Claude and the Claude one into chat.

  52:02 - When I do it in chat, I run into Claude.

  52:05 - And, you know, we're a team.

  52:07 - This is David's book, Every Word.

  52:10 - I'll have you back to the podcast in just a moment.

  52:12 - I wanted to take a minute to introduce you to Particles Plus.

  52:16 - Particles Plus is a manufacturer of airborne particle counters and environmental monitoring systems used in clean rooms, laboratories, hospitals and indoor air quality investigations around the world and increasingly in places that we inhabit every day.

  52:33 - Many know them for their precise handheld real-time particle counters and long-standing reputation in contamination control and air quality monitoring.

  52:43 - More recently, you may have seen their growing work in indoor air quality, building investigations and environmental research, supporting professionals who need accurate, real-time data to better understand the spaces we live and work in.

  52:58 - Their technology is designed to make complex environmental monitoring more accessible, with portable and remote monitoring solutions trusted by researchers, facility managers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and air quality consultants alike.

  53:17 - What stands out to me is how practical their approach is.

  53:21 - They focus on building reliable tools that help people move from simply collecting data to actually making informed decisions about health, safety and environmental conditions.

  53:33 - So whether it's clean room compliance,

  53:36 - airborne contamination investigations or understanding indoor environmental quality, they're helping organisations turn invisible air quality problems into something measurable and actionable.

  53:48 - If you work in indoor air quality, life sciences, healthcare, or controlled environments, they're certainly worth knowing about.

  53:57 - You can find out more details in the show notes and at airqualitymatters.net and, of course, at particlesplus.com.

  54:06 - Now, back to the show.

  54:08 - And having been through a similar process, actually, with my podcast and writing a book, I know where you're coming from on this.

  54:17 - A lot of what you're saying is resonating very deeply with me.

  54:29 - What this has ended up being is this series of codes.

  54:35 - Because people can't read this book yet, it's due out.

  54:39 - When is it released, David, the book?

  54:42 - In 10 weeks, in October.

  54:44 - 10 weeks, yeah.

  54:45 - October 20th at Greenbelt, New York.

  54:49 - So could you perhaps paint a picture of one of the codes?

  54:55 - If you were to pick a code that exemplifies what the book is all about, could you paint a picture of one of those codes for listeners of what you're trying to say through that code without giving away the secret sauce of the book?

  55:08 - But if I was to say to you, pick one of the codes that you've talked about in this book and what you try to do with that code and what you try to say about it.

  55:18 - It's hard.

  55:19 - It's hard to do because they're all parts.

  55:23 - One's the lungs.

  55:24 - One's the heart.

  55:25 - One's my foot.

  55:27 - The other one's my eyes.

  55:29 - I like my nose.

  55:31 - But I have them just to the left here.

  55:34 - I'm staring at them.

  55:39 - I already read two of them here.

  55:43 - So I get another wish.

  55:46 - I don't have to use my two ones up.

  55:49 - But I'm just locking in right now on code three.

  55:57 - Truth, very simple.

  56:00 - Truth equals oxygen.

  56:05 - And what we're trying to talk about is truth.

  56:09 - Truth of the CO2, truth of the oceans, truth of the human condition, truth of showing up.

  56:18 - Air quality matters.

  56:20 - We want fresh air.

  56:23 - So if we're not truthful with transparency, real transparency, not those filters that want to make everything nice and sweet, no sugar coating.

  56:36 - If you search for truth, you end up that most humans want to live.

  56:44 - And if you have the millions or billions, you still want to live.

  56:47 - The real truth is it isn't their money.

  56:50 - They still want to live.

  56:53 - And some of them are more evolved.

  56:54 - They want others to live.

  56:57 - And they want their wealth to help them live.

  57:00 - So they create foundations.

  57:03 - But it all started with truth that they love their own life.

  57:06 - They love life so much they want it for their family and others.

  57:13 - life for all.

  57:15 - If you're real, pretty wealthy.

  57:18 - I read an obituary of someone who was really special.

  57:23 - I didn't know he died, but one of my book talks will be at the David Brower Center in Berkeley in November.

  57:32 - And Peter Buckley funded the Brower Center.

  57:37 - He loved David Brower like me.

  57:40 - He knew I was a green developer guy.

  57:42 - So before all that, we met for coffee.

  57:44 - He said, tell me about green building.

  57:48 - He's a guy who turned around to Spree clothing and made a fortune.

  57:53 - And then he took a lot of his money, didn't just fund the Brower Center, but he bought a lot of Chile.

  58:03 - He bought so much land that he created national parks with what he owned.

  58:08 - But I was reading his obituary on the Brower Center site.

  58:13 - It was so poetic and gorgeous.

  58:14 - I wish you'd go there.

  58:15 - Go to the David Brower Center and find the Peter Buckley, what they wrote.

  58:20 - It was all in nature terms.

  58:23 - But he loved nature.

  58:26 - He loved business.

  58:27 - And he was very fortunate.

  58:28 - But he made his wealth and then put it into national parks and buildings.

  58:35 - There's a quote there.

  58:37 - Yvonne Chouinard from Patagonia gave him the quote.

  58:40 - He used to run rivers with him.

  58:42 - It was close to him as well.

  58:46 - Beautiful soul.

  58:47 - And I didn't know all that when I met him, but truth, he understood capitalism, and he wanted to green it.

  58:55 - Truth, he was wealthy.

  58:57 - Truth, he invested and gave back to advance hope.

  59:02 - Yeah, that's really lovely.

  59:06 - And one of the things that jumped out at me in one of the parts of the book I read was this idea of load-bearing architecture of the human side of sustainability, that it's got to come from a place of love, that love's actually quite a powerful tool.

  59:22 - when we're talking about these challenges.

  59:25 - So there's some lovely framings in this book, some ways of thinking about this problem that I think jump out at you in parts.

  59:36 - And I think that's what's really nice.

  59:38 - This isn't a dry kind of roadmap, a 12-step plan to decarbonizing your home life.

  59:45 - I mean,

  59:46 - What none of us need at this stage is to be fixing our personal finances when the capital systems of the world are burning.

  59:54 - And similarly with sustainability, this isn't this isn't about, you know, not using plastic straws.

  1:00:01 - This is a book about some real fundamentals, some really fundamental ideas.

  1:00:06 - Yeah, you nailed it.

  1:00:09 - And in a way you open the door because code nine, which is what you're referring to, love equals regeneration.

  1:00:19 - And that chapter is called the architecture of love.

  1:00:22 - The emotion of love isn't enough.

  1:00:25 - We have to build the foundation and the infrastructure and we need to repair and renovate love so it doesn't collapse.

  1:00:37 - And I had a 20-year marriage that collapsed.

  1:00:41 - And that came out of why?

  1:00:45 - But I'm a builder.

  1:00:46 - I'm an engineer.

  1:00:47 - Let's get into the structure.

  1:00:51 - Did we repair?

  1:00:52 - Did we renovate?

  1:00:54 - If it seismically was weak, did we come in and put in the rebar?

  1:00:58 - Yeah.

  1:01:00 - And we need this for Earth.

  1:01:01 - But even what I said earlier, the truth equals oxygen, it comes from love.

  1:01:09 - The love wants the truth.

  1:01:11 - The love wants the oxygen for all, for everyone.

  1:01:19 - And some of this comes from caring about this as well and seeing planet Earth as a home and your local community as a home and your local environment as a home.

  1:01:30 - You know, there's some real family values in here of home and love and family and truth.

  1:01:39 - I think with a few changes of words, it could be a good self-help book as well.

  1:01:44 - Well, it is.

  1:01:46 - It is.

  1:01:47 - You've nailed it because I studied 12-step programs deeply.

  1:01:53 - And in the book is Regen Circles.

  1:01:56 - And there'll be a tab that said, do you want to do a regen circle?

  1:01:59 - Which I learned from Sheryl Sandberg's lean in circles for women.

  1:02:03 - She has 9,000 of them, women helping women.

  1:02:07 - I want to have 9,000 regen circles for the regen agents, the change agents who are solo climbing the mountain.

  1:02:17 - David Brower is a mountain climber.

  1:02:20 - It kind of helped invent it.

  1:02:22 - But those mountain climbers of sustainability, which isn't enough, those mountain climbers of regeneration need a base camp.

  1:02:31 - They need the tools and gears.

  1:02:33 - They need the map and compass.

  1:02:35 - Just as the 12 Shepherds for Addiction needed a loving community.

  1:02:41 - I've gone into some of them for food.

  1:02:43 - You walk in, they welcome you.

  1:02:46 - It's, you could,

  1:02:47 - the guest speaker talks about their story of hurting themselves, but how they did better with hope.

  1:02:56 - And the 12 step program is the biggest program on earth.

  1:02:59 - It's helped.

  1:03:00 - I don't know that books, their blue book, they call it sold 30 million copies.

  1:03:05 - So I learned from that and I'm,

  1:03:08 - I'm gonna write the green book next, which is for our region circles.

  1:03:13 - It's 12 steps for the earth, but to help those change agents have a base camp, a map and orientation.

  1:03:20 - So it turns into a 12 step program in these 15 code areas.

  1:03:27 - Each in the back of the book, there's a practice for each reader in the 15 areas.

  1:03:34 - Code one, if it destroys life, then it's false.

  1:03:37 - What's false in your own world?

  1:03:40 - In your food, in your nutrition, in your exercise, in your love, in your marriage, in your work, in the products, in the services you make?

  1:03:50 - Well, city center is false and also great.

  1:03:53 - It's green, super energy efficient, somewhat healthy, but embodied carbon and gambling are in the center of it.

  1:04:01 - So it has some brilliance and some falls.

  1:04:04 - Well, how can, then it's like, okay, how do we do it better in the next one?

  1:04:09 - Well, we have concrete that sequesters carbon.

  1:04:11 - We get the embodied carbon to zero.

  1:04:15 - I'm a very visual person and I can't help but draw mental pictures when you talk about things like climbing and base camps and what that means, you know, the framing of that.

  1:04:29 - And so what you're saying, this book in a lot of ways is the foundation of that base camp for all of these things.

  1:04:36 - into these individuals that work in networks and groups because it's a lonely it can be a lonely fight sometimes in sustainability you know that and look that's climbing at the end of the day everybody's got to put one foot in front of another you know most mountain climbers will tell you the biggest battle is with yourself you know it's putting that one foot in front of another when stuff gets tough

  1:05:02 - But you don't get to do that if you don't have a base camp, if you don't have ropes and safety nets and people around you to keep you going and all of the planning that comes with it.

  1:05:15 - So it will always be tough.

  1:05:17 - It's always going to be a lonely furrow sometimes that you're ploughing.

  1:05:22 - But we need like this 2.0, this re-imagining of what the sustainability movement needs to be, because clearly.

  1:05:34 - just being successful in a green building movement or just being successful in demonstrating regenerative farming or just being successful in reforestation isn't enough, clearly.

  1:05:47 - That we've got to find, somehow find a new way of making this work.

  1:05:54 - Yeah, you've nailed it.

  1:05:58 - It's not just the base camp.

  1:06:01 - And the region circles will be the base camp.

  1:06:04 - But within the circle, they need the gear.

  1:06:08 - They need the map.

  1:06:09 - They need the compass.

  1:06:11 - They need the guides, the Sherpas, to take them up the mountain.

  1:06:16 - Don't go in this month.

  1:06:17 - It's too much snow.

  1:06:19 - Don't go this route.

  1:06:20 - It's dangerous.

  1:06:22 - Go this way in this month with this gear, with this orientation, with these rules.

  1:06:31 - with these crampons, with this food, with this tent, and you have a good chance.

  1:06:40 - We're here to climb the mountain of earth.

  1:06:43 - We're here to do it multiple times.

  1:06:46 - We like our kids to do it and our grandkids.

  1:06:50 - But we don't have the map.

  1:06:52 - We don't have the compass.

  1:06:53 - We don't have the

  1:07:01 - Pitons or whatever they're called, you hit into the, they're not holding.

  1:07:07 - The mountain is eroding itself.

  1:07:12 - We're changing the atmosphere so there's more hot and cold or so much hot.

  1:07:18 - We can't climb the glacier because it's underneath melting.

  1:07:24 - All the system conditions change.

  1:07:28 - So when you climb mountains, you're an idiot if it's a steep one to not learn about it.

  1:07:34 - When I was a backpacker, I got the map.

  1:07:37 - When I went off trail, I had a compass and I would triangulate.

  1:07:43 - When I was out at night and hungry, I had food and heating systems.

  1:07:49 - I had filters for the water.

  1:07:52 - We need that for Earth.

  1:07:54 - We need it for how we live.

  1:07:57 - Yeah, I love the green building.

  1:07:58 - I love the solar.

  1:07:59 - I love my EV.

  1:08:00 - I love the batteries.

  1:08:01 - But they're still made of the metal that has embodied carbon.

  1:08:07 - Or I love my house.

  1:08:08 - It has a slab.

  1:08:09 - So then I worked on carbon capture and mineralization to work on the slab.

  1:08:14 - Let's work on the metal.

  1:08:15 - We have carbon.

  1:08:16 - metal producing steel with fuel cells and recycled steel in it.

  1:08:22 - And there are three or four or five on earth that are low carbon to negative steel.

  1:08:28 - We need that.

  1:08:30 - The concrete thing is intellectually known.

  1:08:33 - It needs billions of dollars and we're a bunch of idiots to not fund it.

  1:08:38 - We fund wars and bombs, but we don't fund carbon sequestration.

  1:08:43 - We're freaking idiots, and that can make money because every road and bridge and airport and building should buy it, and it should be regulated in tax codes.

  1:08:53 - There's a solution right there.

  1:08:55 - Well, no one heard me.

  1:08:57 - No one listened.

  1:08:58 - No one wants to do it.

  1:08:58 - They're all stuck in 1.0.

  1:09:02 - Yeah.

  1:09:03 - And you'd be a fool not to think this stuff isn't all interconnected.

  1:09:06 - And that's why someone from an air quality space is talking somebody from a sustainability space.

  1:09:12 - This stuff is all interconnected and one thing impacts the other.

  1:09:17 - And we're at an interesting point in time where it's changing around us pretty rapidly.

  1:09:25 - And that's a question I had for you, actually.

  1:09:29 - In your mind's eye, when you're writing this book, because it is a book for change, as much as it is a statement of where we are and the stories around it, it is a book, a framework for change.

  1:09:44 - Is it a book written...

  1:09:48 - for before it's too late?

  1:09:50 - Is it a book that's written at a point where it's probably too late for the world that we know as we know it?

  1:10:00 - Because that seems to be where we are in a dynamic at the moment.

  1:10:05 - We're trying to change the course of a very big ship and half of it is already over a waterfall.

  1:10:14 - This stuff is very late in the day.

  1:10:19 - and I do wonder whether we are writing these things and talking about these things from a worldview of people that have been around for several decades, and it's very hard for us to imagine how bad this is going to be very quickly.

  1:10:39 - So what's your sense of it?

  1:10:41 - I mean, when you're writing this book, is this a book of hope?

  1:10:45 - that's being written before it's too late, a last chance saloon, or are you kind of writing a book as we go off the edge?

  1:10:53 - This is a, how do you recenter yourself when we need to land in the new reality?

  1:11:00 - Huh?

  1:11:01 - You're good.

  1:11:02 - I got to time the answer back to your shirt, air quality matters, because first

  1:11:10 - because you started off this question with why is an air quality guy talking to a green dude over here?

  1:11:17 - It goes back to code three.

  1:11:19 - Truth equals oxygen.

  1:11:21 - So air quality is about oxygen.

  1:11:24 - So you care about the quality of oxygen.

  1:11:27 - And to me, that's truth.

  1:11:30 - So that's why we're here.

  1:11:32 - Truth meets oxygen.

  1:11:34 - It's you and me.

  1:11:36 - If you're spiritual, this is a divine meeting here.

  1:11:39 - This is a divine discussion.

  1:11:42 - And I'm going to bring that other dimension here because I'm divinely inspired.

  1:11:46 - And it dates back to the 1600s, a concept in the Mishnah called Tikkun Olam.

  1:11:53 - I didn't pick this.

  1:11:57 - I was wired to be one of those really rich real estate developers buying tons of crap.

  1:12:04 - That's my training.

  1:12:06 - I was good at it.

  1:12:07 - I loved it.

  1:12:08 - And I bought a lot of that stuff.

  1:12:11 - But that's how I was raised.

  1:12:14 - But my dad, as we said, gave back.

  1:12:17 - And my mom's the biggest heart in the world.

  1:12:20 - So it was deeper.

  1:12:22 - But we found each other for some reason here to talk about truth equals oxygen.

  1:12:28 - But my answer is I hope...

  1:12:34 - smaller H-O-P-E, low caps, for HOPE, capital H-O-P-E.

  1:12:42 - I hope for health on planet Earth.

  1:12:46 - And I still hope.

  1:12:47 - It's the emotion of hope meets the framework of capital hope.

  1:12:53 - And they have to meet.

  1:12:55 - This book is both.

  1:12:58 - Gottfried's hoping for hope.

  1:13:01 - Hope meets truth equals oxygen.

  1:13:05 - And code seven, true gold equals soul worth.

  1:13:15 - I hope for hope that our souls wake up to create the structure of love.

  1:13:30 - shrinking down to get to the other side, back to the garden.

  1:13:39 - And I, like Siddhartha, have learned through the stages of life, and the last stage of the Siddhartha book by Herman Hess, which guides me, is he's a ferryman, taking him to the other side.

  1:13:57 - And I'm the backpacker naturalist who loved the garden, fell in love with it, trying to bring the light back into the soul, to ignite it, to get to the oxygen so it's clean, and we can live, whose father couldn't breathe, to get to the truth, to get back to the garden, and wants capitalism to allow the crossing through regeneration.

  1:14:28 - to create the billionaires of the future who get the hugs.

  1:14:33 - And we marry net worth to self-worth with soul worth.

  1:14:41 - That's it.

  1:14:44 - And –

  1:14:46 - I think speaking personally, what I found with this book is I think it's a book that you'll both want to read in the whole, because I think it's a book that is holistic in nature.

  1:15:02 - I think it's something that paints a picture in its entirety.

  1:15:08 - But I also know, having printed off sections of it, that it's also a book that it's going to have scribbles and post-it notes and tabs.

  1:15:20 - And you'll probably be a reference.

  1:15:23 - There'll be parts of this book you disagree with, for sure.

  1:15:26 - There'll be parts of this book you agree with.

  1:15:29 - There'll be framings.

  1:15:30 - in this book that you haven't thought of the problem in that way.

  1:15:37 - And there's some anecdotes and lines in there that I've already made notes of, and I'm sure I will rob in future years to come of ways of articulating what is a very substantial, but often very esoteric risk that we're trying to wrap our heads around.

  1:15:56 - And I think books that

  1:15:58 - frame this problem from a personal perspective from the human perspective are very powerful because that that's the only way I think we have a chance you know we've tried cops and one and a half degrees and global models and capital readjustments and it's made almost no difference to the direction of travel

  1:16:19 - So somehow we've got to find the human purpose to sustainability and regeneration.

  1:16:25 - And I think that's, you know, this book will be a really good contribution to that effort.

  1:16:31 - So speaking personally, thanks David for doing your best to try and articulate it.

  1:16:36 - Cause it's a, it's a, it's a challenging thing to articulate.

  1:16:40 - I'm sure.

  1:16:42 - I appreciate it.

  1:16:43 - Thanks a million.

  1:16:44 - Yeah.

  1:16:45 - Well, you've got, you're really good.

  1:16:48 - You're,

  1:16:48 - You've done journalism for, I think you told me, 30 years or something.

  1:16:52 - But yeah, the statistics aren't driving change.

  1:16:57 - The cops are lovely, but it's a lot of people, parties.

  1:17:03 - I remember once on an early cop website, they put this many people, this many meetings, this many press releases.

  1:17:12 - That was their scoreboard.

  1:17:14 - But...

  1:17:16 - My dad's paperweight is very simple.

  1:17:22 - Do not confuse effort with results.

  1:17:26 - Results, CO2 slope, results of the aquifer slope.

  1:17:33 - How many are hungry, starving, no electricity?

  1:17:38 - How much embedded carbon and concrete and steel, 16%.

  1:17:44 - Totally love AI.

  1:17:45 - I think it's going to help us solve with this conversation.

  1:17:48 - But he's a lot of power, David Zenobia.

  1:17:53 - And I had to buy offsets for my own conversations.

  1:17:58 - But it's not working.

  1:18:01 - Why?

  1:18:02 - So we got to get into our brains and look at brains.

  1:18:07 - And I got into the survival wiring, which is still killing us.

  1:18:11 - The tiger's not chasing a lot of us.

  1:18:15 - We can go to the supermarket if we're fortunate.

  1:18:18 - We can heat and cool our home and maybe have a home.

  1:18:23 - Maybe we have something with two or four wheels.

  1:18:28 - But we need new survival line.

  1:18:31 - And we have plasticity, education, and now AI.

  1:18:35 - AI is...

  1:18:38 - can be the differentiator of the governance of the hot amygdala to move over to the smart prefrontal cortex.

  1:18:46 - So I'm grabbing at everything I can find, 12 step, AI, plasticity, neuroscience, weight watchers, to lose pounds, to pull it into loose, pounds of CO2, to 12 step, the best program ever for your addiction.

  1:19:06 - Honestly, I'm gluing every damn thing I can together.

  1:19:10 - But then I write it with storytelling to get to this human soul and talk about love.

  1:19:20 - That's all I have left to give, to glue these pieces, to try to change so we can have hope for hope.

  1:19:29 - And who do you hope reads this book?

  1:19:32 - Yeah.

  1:19:37 - Everybody.

  1:19:38 - It's a little much.

  1:19:41 - That's a publisher's answer.

  1:19:42 - But it's a little much.

  1:19:46 - If you're a sixth grader, I can teach the Earth Code to a five-year-old in their language, in their vocabulary.

  1:19:58 - I can teach it to an 80-year-old.

  1:20:00 - I can teach it in 12-step meetings.

  1:20:04 - So it's got a lot of,

  1:20:06 - horizontal derivatives.

  1:20:08 - Who do I want to read it the absolute most?

  1:20:12 - College students.

  1:20:15 - Kids.

  1:20:17 - I'd like regulators and policy and all that, but I want the next generation to learn about Earth, capitalism, the value rings, the full equations, as they go to their career.

  1:20:35 - because I want them to do it in their career.

  1:20:37 - I don't care what it is.

  1:20:41 - I want them to embed what we've talked about into the creations.

  1:20:47 - I'm not saying don't get wealthy.

  1:20:49 - I want them to get wealthier.

  1:20:52 - Harnessing the brain, plasticity, AI, biomimicry, nature-based design, human spirit and soul.

  1:21:04 - into that.

  1:21:04 - It's a new type of course.

  1:21:08 - I'll be teaching next spring at Stanford, but it's sustainable finance.

  1:21:13 - I don't know how much of this I'll be able to get into the students.

  1:21:17 - You know it'll happen because you can't contain me.

  1:21:22 - It's not in the syllabus.

  1:21:23 - The syllabus has some of it.

  1:21:24 - Energy efficiency, water health, air quality, your stuff, rating systems, LEED, PREAM, GRASP.

  1:21:33 - But who will David be talking to?

  1:21:36 - The soul in the student.

  1:21:39 - Yeah, the next generation.

  1:21:40 - And, you know, I speak to a lot of people in this space at our...

  1:21:46 - time of life and to a person everybody is very optimistic with the caliber of the young minds coming through that there is a there is a change in this generation that the new generation that they seem to view things very differently their expectations of what good is is

  1:22:10 - seems to be very different and there's a real opportunity.

  1:22:13 - Um, there's real talent in that graduate class coming through at the moment.

  1:22:19 - And I think that's, that's what I think that's where the optimism lies because

  1:22:24 - We had a go at it.

  1:22:26 - We've done our best.

  1:22:27 - You know, I think we're now just having to impart our knowledge of what we've learned, what's worked, what hasn't, some of these ideas and frames.

  1:22:37 - But the reality is this is now the next generation's problem to solve.

  1:22:42 - You know, we...

  1:22:44 - We've made some good structures, built some good structures behind it, but manifestly we haven't been able to change the direction of the ship.

  1:22:53 - They're going to be facing a new reality with some phenomenal assistance with AI and everything that that brings, good and bad.

  1:23:03 - You know, it's very difficult for us to predict what that's going to look like, but...

  1:23:08 - Certainly, it's going to be a profound change.

  1:23:11 - But really, it's them now.

  1:23:12 - They're the new voters.

  1:23:14 - They're the people that are going to be in the positions of power, the positions of the economy.

  1:23:19 - Yeah, and I'm getting chills as you say all that.

  1:23:25 - I have two thoughts.

  1:23:28 - One, I think about Ryan, my neighbor who interviewed me last week, 18 years old.

  1:23:36 - This is our second interview for his podcast.

  1:23:40 - Believe it or not, the first interview was seven years ago.

  1:23:43 - He's 18.

  1:23:45 - Wow.

  1:23:45 - He had an environmental podcast in sixth grade.

  1:23:50 - He's going to Stanford, so I'm thrilled.

  1:23:55 - I think of him.

  1:23:56 - Thank God for a guy like that.

  1:24:01 - But I also think that his whole generation, my daughter's a senior in college.

  1:24:06 - 21.

  1:24:09 - As a modern elder, Chip Conley's term, I also want to say I'm sorry, because I hear what you're saying.

  1:24:19 - What I think of is I'm sorry.

  1:24:21 - I'm sorry we screwed up.

  1:24:23 - We had such an opportunity.

  1:24:26 - We knew this was a problem.

  1:24:28 - We kept the party.

  1:24:30 - We liked the ship so much.

  1:24:31 - We built it bigger and faster.

  1:24:34 - Some of those billionaires want the biggest yacht possible.

  1:24:38 - One of them built his yacht so big they couldn't even sail it into the ocean.

  1:24:42 - They had to cut the bridge in half and open it up, you know.

  1:24:49 - Just brilliant, isn't that, you know?

  1:24:52 - Instead of looking at the ocean itself, it's heating up.

  1:24:56 - It's rising.

  1:24:57 - It's acidic.

  1:24:58 - It's killing the coral reefs.

  1:25:01 - No, I need a big yacht.

  1:25:03 - Aren't you brilliant?

  1:25:07 - Jesus.

  1:25:09 - So I'm sorry for us, but we gave you some good tools.

  1:25:15 - Here's AI.

  1:25:16 - Here's biomimicry.

  1:25:18 - Here's LEED.

  1:25:19 - Here's GBCs.

  1:25:20 - Here's Regen Circles.

  1:25:22 - I'm here.

  1:25:23 - We screwed it up.

  1:25:24 - We're honest.

  1:25:26 - There's truth in the room.

  1:25:27 - I'm sorry, but I'm here to help you.

  1:25:31 - And we built the science as well, we mustn't forget.

  1:25:34 - The reason we are aware of where we are is because people of our generations, that 60s through to...

  1:25:46 - The 80s generation are the ones that have built the climatic models, that have done the environmental science, that have done the sustainable engineering, that have developed the green building councils, that have, you know, put us in a position to know what we're doing wrong, to have the science, the maths, the engineering to start to make the directional change.

  1:26:12 - So there's been a lot of good there for sure, but we haven't been able to fix it.

  1:26:18 - That's the fundamental truth.

  1:26:19 - And like you say, effort does not equal results.

  1:26:22 - I'm sorry.

  1:26:23 - I'm sorry, please.

  1:26:28 - No, no, just finishing off and saying the effort doesn't equal results, and ultimately that's what the measurement will be when the final counter is counted.

  1:26:39 - But you're right, and I don't want to be doomsday.

  1:26:43 - There's a lot of good.

  1:26:44 - There's a lot of invention that science led to helping with cancer, to curing a lot of things, to enhancing life.

  1:26:57 - beautifully to inventing sequestrations and new fields of nature-based design.

  1:27:05 - The problem has been our pace of evolution is too slow.

  1:27:11 - And the evolution of growth and greed and ego has been too slow for the technological progress.

  1:27:21 - So the technology got way ahead of the evolution of the human.

  1:27:27 - The technology could have made everything regenerative in a lower footprint, ecological footprint, and pulled back our carrying capacity of Earth.

  1:27:37 - But the train left the station and we're chasing it.

  1:27:41 - And the caboose of green and regeneration is desperately trying to catch it.

  1:27:48 - Now, it's in an EV and it's fast.

  1:27:54 - But even the EV comes from the electricity of the grid and we're trying to electrify the grid and make it renewable with solar and wind and hydro.

  1:28:06 - So the train left of version 1.0, 2.0 is trying to catch it in the electric train instead of the coal burning one or methane, petroleum.

  1:28:21 - Who's gonna win in time?

  1:28:24 - And the little hope invents the capital H-O-P-E, is trying to accelerate it to catch it, and then it has to, through love and structuring, change 1.0 to 2.0 if we have time.

  1:28:41 - But that CO2, the methane, is going to be up there a long time.

  1:28:46 - We hurt the lungs and the oceans and the fish.

  1:28:51 - And humanity, there's a lot of trauma, PTSD.

  1:28:55 - We have to change the soul.

  1:28:59 - We have to deal with hatred that we've always known on Earth.

  1:29:02 - Always killed each other.

  1:29:04 - Always wanted more.

  1:29:06 - Always had ego and greed.

  1:29:09 - Always had Darwinian, if I have more and conquer and stronger, bigger, better, I will win and not die.

  1:29:19 - So I'll kill you so I can live.

  1:29:24 - But we're killing each other.

  1:29:25 - We're killing the oceans.

  1:29:26 - We're killing the lungs.

  1:29:28 - Back to your air quality.

  1:29:29 - We're killing the lungs of Earth so we can have more shit we don't need.

  1:29:37 - But can we accelerate human evolution?

  1:29:41 - And this book is trying to speed us up.

  1:29:45 - Dude, go faster.

  1:29:46 - Go faster.

  1:29:47 - evolve more, use that technology that evolved faster to help us evolve.

  1:29:54 - That's the opportunity of AI.

  1:29:56 - Yeah.

  1:29:57 - Well, I think if nothing else, the book might help AI with the alignment problem.

  1:30:05 - Because if we keep going on the trajectory where we are on, it's going to look at our behavior and see a significant alignment problem between us and planet Earth.

  1:30:15 - And we'll want to do something about it.

  1:30:17 - So hopefully this book goes a very long way to helping with an alignment question that we need with LLMs, right?

  1:30:26 - Here's a question for you.

  1:30:30 - Why have you done this so long?

  1:30:32 - Why do you have a shirt that says air quality matters?

  1:30:36 - Why are you here with David reading his book and asking incredible questions?

  1:30:43 - Why?

  1:30:44 - What gives you hope?

  1:30:46 - Why are you here?

  1:30:49 - Because I, like a lot of other people on this planet, are optimistic, I think, in nature.

  1:30:59 - You know, for all of the pessimism that we talk about here, which is real, you know, this is not us doomsdaying this 20 years ago.

  1:31:13 - This is the reality of what we see going on around us.

  1:31:18 - But I also, like you, hold great strength in the conversations that I have with people, with the passion and the knowledge that's out there in the communities, with the talent that we've yet to find.

  1:31:37 - You know, the more you speak to people, the more you break out of your echo chambers, the more you realize...

  1:31:43 - This planet we're sitting on is absolutely packed full of talent.

  1:31:47 - And when it matters most, the human species has always generally found a way to survive and to move on and move forward.

  1:31:55 - So I do have that optimism built in, I think.

  1:32:00 - But ultimately...

  1:32:02 - I'm a divergent thinker.

  1:32:05 - I thrive through conversation and I, you know, I enjoy immensely having these conversations with people and understanding their worldview of these big challenges.

  1:32:15 - And they're all existential, global, environmental challenges at the end of the day, whether we're talking about air quality or engineering or energy or sustainability.

  1:32:26 - These are big human problems to solve.

  1:32:33 - At the beginning of my podcast a few years ago, we already have the knowledge and the solutions.

  1:32:44 - It's how we communicate is the important part.

  1:32:48 - It's the conversations we have and how we share that knowledge is the key to our success.

  1:32:54 - I think that we know how to fix this stuff.

  1:32:57 - This is the thing.

  1:32:59 - With all of these things we're coming at, generally speaking, I think we can get into very good places as a species with the knowledge that we have.

  1:33:08 - The challenge is communicating risk.

  1:33:13 - and solutions that's our big problem and we do that best through conversation because you know storytelling is hardwired into the human brain it's something we've been hardwired since the day that we were born to understand the seven or 12 story archetypes and story arcs that that

  1:33:35 - embedded into human history and that's the way we learn that's what we remember from these conversations not models and and climate degree changes and spreadsheets that doesn't touch us in the same way stories do that resonate great great answer

  1:33:58 - Yeah, no, I was going to say I get the sense with you as well that ultimately you're an engineer and you've built great big things both –

  1:34:08 - Buildings, but movements as well.

  1:34:10 - And you don't do that without being a systems thinker, an engineer, but also you don't do that without being able to build relationships and communicate and tell stories and get people to care.

  1:34:23 - And that's what this is ultimately about.

  1:34:25 - You know, you don't get to build a movement like the green building movement if you don't get people to care about it.

  1:34:33 - And one of the legacies of the green building movement is

  1:34:38 - a culture worldwide of people that deeply care about the built environment in a way that wasn't there before.

  1:34:45 - And that's a phenomenal legacy.

  1:34:50 - You know, it's curious in a way.

  1:34:53 - I can see myself through this conversation with you.

  1:34:57 - You're helping me evolve through good questions.

  1:35:03 - But we're also listening to...

  1:35:05 - So there's the conversations, but there's the listening.

  1:35:09 - There's the hearing.

  1:35:10 - There's the respect.

  1:35:15 - And then there's empathy.

  1:35:17 - And out of that can come ideas and action.

  1:35:25 - And then better results.

  1:35:29 - But it's all embedded in this love, love of earth, love of others.

  1:35:36 - love of the shared journey, love of collaboration, friendship.

  1:35:42 - Humans are a herd species.

  1:35:47 - And we like climbing mountains, obviously.

  1:35:51 - And so I see it all almost in the, this has had the totality here of a life existence in one conversation.

  1:36:00 - So I, I'm grateful.

  1:36:02 - But I also see I was a developer.

  1:36:05 - I'm a businessman.

  1:36:06 - I'm a this.

  1:36:06 - I'm an engineer.

  1:36:07 - I'm a writer.

  1:36:09 - But I'm also, maybe I'm a modern day, I don't know the term for it, clergy.

  1:36:17 - Not talking about God, but this is all wrapped in the divine of creation.

  1:36:22 - We're talking about creation.

  1:36:25 - And I love the creation.

  1:36:27 - That's why I hike.

  1:36:28 - That's why I camp under trees.

  1:36:30 - I fly fish in rivers, mostly so I can walk in the rivers.

  1:36:35 - And the trees and the rivers heals my soul.

  1:36:40 - The trauma from the human condition gets healed in nature.

  1:36:45 - So I am the ferryman going to the garden because that's where the healing is.

  1:36:50 - And I'm trying to bring the garden back to the humans.

  1:36:54 - Not just me, but I've learned from Janine Benyus and Bill Browning, biomimicry, and Bill Reed, regeneration.

  1:37:04 - So bring it full circle back to the creation so all can experience the greatness, the grandeur.

  1:37:11 - All can have what we had.

  1:37:14 - And it's here for the future.

  1:37:15 - That water is precious.

  1:37:17 - The oxygen is precious.

  1:37:18 - The flowers are gorgeous.

  1:37:21 - But wake up.

  1:37:23 - to this divine experience we have.

  1:37:27 - Get outside of greed and ego.

  1:37:30 - That's 1.0.

  1:37:32 - And use the tools we have to wake up and re-engineer the system so the dollar of the future restores ecosystems and human spirit.

  1:37:49 - Yeah.

  1:37:53 - I'm always conscious though, in these conversations that we have to be mindful of our perspective and our worldview.

  1:38:05 - And ultimately that's all we can write from, right?

  1:38:07 - I mean, and that's all that we can articulate is our worldview.

  1:38:11 - But one of the things I've been doing a lot recently is spending a lot of time in the global south.

  1:38:16 - And you realize that, you know, it's easy for me to say, you know, people should experience nature, go and sit in the woods, understand the beauty and the nature of the world around you and understand the home.

  1:38:31 - But yeah.

  1:38:32 - For many, many people on this planet, those in conflict, those in poverty, abject poverty, those in poor health and bad environments, that life is about survival.

  1:38:47 - And many of these problems, these are problems that we're articulating from a position of luxury often.

  1:38:55 - And that always challenges me.

  1:38:57 - And I always try and ground myself differently.

  1:39:00 - back to the, and it's one of the things the sustainability movement has suffered on and been beaten over the head with a big stick around, is that often the way that you give people the choice to be sustainable is through economic development and security.

  1:39:17 - And we've never really addressed that very well.

  1:39:21 - Yeah.

  1:39:21 - You know, we've come at it from a Western worldview that doesn't articulate well in many parts of the world.

  1:39:30 - And I think...

  1:39:32 - is that something you wrestle with when you were trying to put pen to paper here that you were talking about a global problem, but it's, it's very difficult to put yourselves in the shoe of somebody in Southern India trying to survive on the street, feeding their family.

  1:39:50 - Right.

  1:39:51 - Boy, that's a good one.

  1:39:53 - It's, I always believe the elephant in the room was fear.

  1:39:57 - Yeah.

  1:39:58 - But the elephant in the room of this dialogue is privilege.

  1:40:05 - And you just tagged it.

  1:40:07 - And I'm privileged writing the book.

  1:40:11 - I'm privileged to have a computer to write the book.

  1:40:14 - I'm privileged to have the education to know how to write.

  1:40:17 - I'm privileged to put it into the world for us to find each other.

  1:40:23 - We're privileged having electricity to host this show.

  1:40:28 - We're privileged to have AI and learn about it.

  1:40:30 - I'm privileged to have gone to a great university.

  1:40:33 - I'm privileged to have my dad.

  1:40:36 - I grew up, I wasn't hungry.

  1:40:40 - And he had the tools to educate his kids.

  1:40:45 - He treated every dinner like a board meeting.

  1:40:48 - He's an early management consultant in computers in 1960.

  1:40:54 - I wouldn't be in Green Building without a pioneering maverick dad and a loving, beautiful, giving mother who sent me to camps to learn about tikkun olam and nature and gave me the freedom to drive to Yosemite and backpack, buy my backpack, buy my tent, buy my compass.

  1:41:20 - So this is a privileged conversation.

  1:41:24 - And a friend of mine, my best buddy, Jeff Davis, I went to Stanford with, he is a filmmaker and many other things, a businessman, but he makes films and goes to Africa and all these parts of it and makes films of clinics, giving them food for malnutrition.

  1:41:49 - He worked with Project Peanut Butter.

  1:41:52 - Beautiful Dr. Maneri invented a formula for all these dying, starving kids and he's helped a million kids.

  1:42:00 - And my friend Jeff has worked with him for filming and telling the story and

  1:42:07 - He just did another one in the clinics of some kind of mental health thing for postpartum mothers who are depressed and methods to help them.

  1:42:18 - I think it was funded by the Gates Foundation.

  1:42:22 - So he's a privileged guy like me, but going into those third world countries to learn about them and film and at least bring the story back so we can bridge the gap more to help.

  1:42:36 - even more than me.

  1:42:38 - I've worked with countries, their countries, to create green building councils and we're greening the buildings.

  1:42:44 - But at that world meeting, some of them are in war countries with bombs on the head.

  1:42:51 - Lebanon and Syria was there and I'm going to do a welcome for an Iraqi green building conference.

  1:43:01 - They can't invite me to come because of what's going on.

  1:43:05 - But,

  1:43:06 - Botswana was Botswana GBC, Kenya GBC, South Africa Green Building Council, Nanibia, they were there at my meeting.

  1:43:17 - But the conversations they want to have are different than, you know, scope three embodied carbon or taxonomy.

  1:43:28 - That was the hottest topic.

  1:43:30 - And those are developed country issues.

  1:43:33 - taxonomies.

  1:43:34 - They want safety, electricity, food, education, shoes.

  1:43:42 - Yet they have green building councils.

  1:43:46 - So we think we have a more established council and rating system.

  1:43:51 - We're here to teach them and we have staff and money and buildings and technologies.

  1:43:58 - And they're like, dude, we don't have water or

  1:44:05 - It's so they taught me.

  1:44:09 - Yeah, it's very grounding, isn't it?

  1:44:10 - And I had a really interesting conversation with a guy called Professor Rangaredi Burry there on the podcast a few weeks ago.

  1:44:18 - He's involved in antimicrobial resistance at a global level.

  1:44:22 - So he represents the global south in a global challenge, not just in the human antimicrobial resistance, but it's a full environmental system collapse all the way through feedstock and agriculture and environment.

  1:44:38 - This changes everything that we know of.

  1:44:40 - You know, this is up there with sustainability, really, with its potential to change human life.

  1:44:46 - And we were talking about India and the global south.

  1:44:49 - And one of the things he was saying was that, you know, emerging economies like those in the global south,

  1:44:58 - can use the knowledge that the likes of the Green Building Council and ASHRAE fellows and all of this knowledge that comes from the West, but it's got to be fit for purpose for those countries.

  1:45:11 - And they have this opportunity to learn from all of the mistakes that we've made.

  1:45:16 - You know, they look across.

  1:45:18 - at the West and they can see the diabetes, the sick building syndromes, the exposure to microplastics, the exposure to chemicals and, you know, and so on and so on and so on.

  1:45:30 - So that, you know, they have this opportunity to build a future for themselves that's right for their country and their demographics and certain culture and so on.

  1:45:42 - So it's not without cause, but I always think, you know, and I think when you're aware and you travel like you, you clearly have and I have been doing more recently in my life, I think you do recognize that sometimes we get stuck in these echo chamber loops of articulating a worldview based on where we're coming from.

  1:46:10 - Go and work in public housing and go and see the problems that people are having there.

  1:46:16 - Go and work in blue-collar states and see the challenge you have articulating sustainable building in the Rust Belt.

  1:46:24 - You know, when people are just trying to survive and work out whether they're going to afford a forklift truck next month or lay people off.

  1:46:32 - and you're coming to them with ideas of PVs and sustainability and using natural materials, you know, you've got to get yourself onto the, I think.

  1:46:43 - And that's always been the challenge of sustainability.

  1:46:46 - We haven't put ourselves on the front line enough.

  1:46:48 - We've stayed within the comfort of our own echo chambers.

  1:46:52 - And we haven't had those hard conversations because it's those hard conversations

  1:46:59 - that actually move the needle.

  1:47:01 - And I think that's the difficulty that we all face.

  1:47:06 - And I think sustainability has learned that lesson more than most parts.

  1:47:11 - And I often refer to sustainability in the air quality community to say that, look, there are lessons here, you know, that we found ourselves being...

  1:47:24 - beat over the head you know doubt is the weapon right um the tobacco philosophy that it doesn't take much if we don't find a way of articulating and having the uncomfortable conversations ultimately this stuff comes back around to bite us well that's back to truth equals oxygen but you've pointed something important out in my own life and maybe to the others here

  1:47:54 - I remember 15 years ago going to India to meet, we met with the Secretary of Energy of India.

  1:48:02 - And we're in the building talking about green building.

  1:48:06 - And we have the India Green Building Council.

  1:48:08 - They license lead.

  1:48:10 - They've done extraordinarily well under CII, the Confederation of India Industries.

  1:48:17 - Lovely group funded by a billionaire, the GBC, the Godridge family.

  1:48:22 - Thank you.

  1:48:24 - But we drove there and we went through streets crowded with people begging, knocking on the window for money.

  1:48:34 - Some of them had a crutch and no leg.

  1:48:37 - And I remember that in school, I went to Cairo in the early 91 and

  1:48:46 - A couple blocks outside of the downtown, it's dirt roads and hungry people and structures that were barely hanging, standing up.

  1:48:57 - I saw that in Mexico.

  1:48:59 - We used to go into Cabo in 1970, and my dad's a little plane, and it was a different world there with hunger and water.

  1:49:10 - I remember water problems.

  1:49:11 - You couldn't drink the water in those days.

  1:49:15 - So I've seen it, but I've seen it coming in as a tourist, as a businessman in a little airplane.

  1:49:23 - So the privileged guy comes in and sees it.

  1:49:27 - But you didn't take away everything I have and make me live there for a year.

  1:49:32 - That would help.

  1:49:35 - That's a missing piece of my education.

  1:49:38 - Take away everything I have and put me there for a year.

  1:49:43 - But I still had education they didn't have.

  1:49:46 - And I probably know after the year I can go home.

  1:49:49 - So it's a part of the education I haven't had enough.

  1:49:55 - Yeah, as a friend of mine always articulates very well to me, it's the kind of the white savior syndrome that often you can come into –

  1:50:10 - other parts of the world with Western worldviews and ideals.

  1:50:15 - And it's the, the, the white savior syndrome and it never works, never has done and never will do.

  1:50:22 - And these solutions have got to be fit for purpose purpose have got to be articulated and,

  1:50:27 - And built from the ground up, localisation is key, understanding local habits, culture, laws, governance, all of this stuff is so important.

  1:50:36 - But that's been one of the successes of the Green Building Council, actually, has been its ability to plant seeds in almost every corner of the world.

  1:50:45 - It's been phenomenally successful in that.

  1:50:48 - And with real local passion, this isn't international...

  1:50:53 - expats you know with a little hobby in country of having a local chapter of the green building these are deeply passionate people about green building i was in singapore with the singapore green building council people they're phenomenal group of people yeah they hope they hosted the indoor isiac indoor air conference there a few months ago yeah deeply deeply passionate have made huge

  1:51:19 - the benefits in singapore really done an amazing thing so i mean that that it shows it can work that that localization local chapters building networks and i think you know that's a big part of your book and your next plans is kind of developing these groups to really take these things on you know we know this stuff can work same in hong kong i went through same in india

  1:51:43 - I too went to Singapore twice.

  1:51:45 - I sat in their green offices and Yvonne is the CEO.

  1:51:52 - She's fantastic and their rating system and the sophistication and their governance, their codes, the BCA there.

  1:52:03 - They were so interested in carbon sequestration and

  1:52:08 - But they have very big problems.

  1:52:10 - It's a flat country with a rising ocean.

  1:52:14 - It's a monstrous problem for Singapore.

  1:52:18 - Yeah, I was chatting to them, and one of the interesting things about Singapore is they do have this culture of one city that they recognize that that's all they've got, so they have to get it right.

  1:52:31 - I mean, for people that have not been to Singapore, it's a unique city in that respect, is that there's a...

  1:52:36 - There's a greening and a level of nature and cleanliness and care and a culture of looking after the heritage of the city that you see almost nowhere else.

  1:52:48 - I mean, and it's deeply, deeply embedded in the DNA there, it seems.

  1:52:53 - And it was articulated to me as this kind of one city.

  1:52:56 - This is it.

  1:52:57 - So we've got to get it right.

  1:52:58 - Right.

  1:52:59 - you know which so there's a lot to be learned i i i found that too i was so impressed with the governments the government in general they educate everyone very high level they had incredible cheap government housing for people and it's prefab it's smart

  1:53:23 - They have smoking, but they make it outside the building in a zone, a little circle.

  1:53:28 - And if you go outside, they find you.

  1:53:34 - so many things, the trees, the Singapore tree plan on buildings integrated is best in the world.

  1:53:43 - Like every vertical and horizontal surface on a building has trees and plants.

  1:53:49 - And I saw the master plan of linking the parks to parks, but to buildings and

  1:53:58 - Oh, even their airport, you got to go to their airport.

  1:54:02 - It's just fantastic.

  1:54:05 - It's a rain forest.

  1:54:08 - Absolutely.

  1:54:09 - And they had, I studied them quite a bit.

  1:54:12 - They have a climate plan and a climate executive board run by their defense department.

  1:54:22 - So they saw climate emergency as a national defense issue.

  1:54:28 - And so impressive.

  1:54:30 - They're designing this thing called Long Island on the eastern end where the flooding occurs to build an island that's up, I don't know, some meters and put housing on it.

  1:54:45 - But they need sand for these reclamation projects.

  1:54:50 - 25% of the country is.

  1:54:52 - is reclamation sand and islands like we have in San Francisco in the Marina or Treasure Island.

  1:55:00 - But they don't have sand.

  1:55:02 - The greatest value there is sand, and they get it from Cambodia and China and Thailand and Vietnam.

  1:55:10 - But those places don't want to give it anymore because they took their river sand or their beach sand.

  1:55:17 - So they have a real problem.

  1:55:20 - Also for aggregate and sand and aggregate goes into concrete and land reclamation.

  1:55:26 - So I wrote an uninvited little white paper to capture their 60 million tons of CO2 a year from Chevron and others.

  1:55:38 - Marathon, I think, had something there and mineralize it.

  1:55:44 - But we needed calcium oxide, which would come from recycled fly ash, which would come from China.

  1:55:55 - But I wanted to do all that to make domestic sand in aggregate to then build the Long Island, which would use five years of the CO2.

  1:56:04 - And that was my vision.

  1:56:05 - And I wrote that.

  1:56:07 - I spent hours and gave it to them.

  1:56:10 - But I don't know.

  1:56:11 - I didn't get traction.

  1:56:14 - That's a big problem you're trying to solve there.

  1:56:17 - David, I knew this was going to happen because, like I said, we could have spent two hours chatting without even mentioning the book, frankly.

  1:56:23 - I mean, because I think it's an interesting conversation anyway.

  1:56:27 - But the book is thoroughly recommended from what I've been able to read so far.

  1:56:32 - I will definitely finish it off and be making notes and maybe emailing you furiously over the next few months.

  1:56:40 - But I can thoroughly recommend people go out and read it.

  1:56:42 - It'd be available in, you said, about 10 weeks from now?

  1:56:46 - Yeah, mid-October.

  1:56:48 - It's already for pre-order.

  1:56:50 - It's on Amazon globally and Barnes & Noble where they're available.

  1:56:57 - Right now you can get it.

  1:56:59 - It'll launch at Green Build in November.

  1:57:02 - And then look for the regen circles.

  1:57:05 - Maybe the listeners in any country could start one.

  1:57:10 - I want you to start one if this resonates, and I'll help you do it.

  1:57:15 - And one reason the Green Building Council ended up in most of the 85 countries is each country owns their own Green Building Council.

  1:57:26 - It wasn't U.S. mandated.

  1:57:29 - You own it.

  1:57:31 - You have to make it a nonprofit, and you can be in the umbrella of the World Green Building Council, who has some guidance, but it's your own.

  1:57:41 - And these circles could be in these countries that are starving and hungry or at war, but get people like us together.

  1:57:51 - Create the base camp.

  1:57:53 - Give them the map and compass.

  1:57:55 - So that's just another invention I hope works.

  1:58:00 - to go from little hope to big hope.

  1:58:03 - Yeah, no, absolutely.

  1:58:05 - David, thanks so much for spending such a big chunk of your busy time with me.

  1:58:09 - It's been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to talk to you.

  1:58:13 - Let's keep in contact, and we'll make sure that all of the links to the books are in the show notes.

  1:58:18 - Thanks a million.

  1:58:19 - I really appreciate your time.

  1:58:20 - Thank you, Simon.

  1:58:22 - Honestly, you give me hope, the bright light in your eyes, and...

  1:58:28 - Thank you for what you do and caring for your tribe who's listening to this.

  1:58:33 - Thank you so much.

  1:58:35 - I appreciate you.

  1:58:37 - Thanks for listening.

  1:58:38 - Before you go, can I ask a favour?

  1:58:40 - If you like this show, please do spread the word and let's keep building this community.

  1:58:44 - Like, share, subscribe, give it five stars if you can.

  1:58:47 - All that stuff really helps with the reach.

  1:58:50 - These shows are not possible without our sponsors.

  1:58:52 - So thanks a million to them as always.

  1:58:55 - See you again next week.

• Transcript from OT 55

  0:14 - Welcome back to Air Quality Matters and One Take. One Take, my take on a paper or report on air quality, ventilation and the built environment. One Take in the, well, it's in one take and tries to summarize for you a scientific perspective on something in usually 10 minutes or less because who has the time to read all these amazing documents, right?

  0:34 - This week, something quite different from usual. We're looking at a space where hundreds of people are packed shoulder to shoulder in sealed metal tubes for hundreds of hours at a time. High speed trains. The paper is titled.

  0:49 - study on air quality improvements in train compartments by coordinating exhaust of multiple air outlets, published in Railway Engineering Science. Who knows what you'd do without Google Scholar, right? It's amazing what pops up. Anyway, if the pandemic taught us anything, it's that ventilation in confined, crowded, mass transit spaces is absolutely non-negotiable for public health. In a train carriage, engineers have a massive complex challenge.

  1:19 - If you think about it, you need to keep 90 to 100 passengers thermally comfortable, not freezing, not sweating, while simultaneously extracting the CO2, the VOCs and potentially infectious respiratory aerosols they are exhaling. All while trying to minimise energy consumption and sending that tube down the tracks at 100 kilometres an hour.

  1:40 - Most modern trains pump fresh conditioned air in from vents in the ceiling. But where does that stale air go? Usually it's exhausted through vents down near the floor. This study used CFD modelling to look at what happens if we rethink that. What if we coordinate exhaust at both the top and the bottom of the carriage? The researchers modelled a fully loaded carriage right down to the heat emitted by the passengers.

  2:10 - Because here is the physics of it. Human bodies create thermal plumes. We are basically 100 watt heaters and warm air naturally rises off us carrying our exhaled breath upwards. In the summer, when the air conditioning is trying to cool the cabin, if you exhaust the air entirely from the top of the carriage, like near the luggage racks, you are working with that natural thermal plume.

  2:36 - The hot, polluted air rises off the passengers and gets sucked right out of the top vents. The study found this significantly improves the cooling of efficacy and efficiency. You aren't forcing hot air down past passengers to reach the floor vents. It also clears out pollutants near the passengers' breathing zones much faster. But interestingly, it's not a magic bullet for all seasons.

  3:04 - In the winter, the scenario flips. You're trying to heat the cabin. If you pull all the air out from the top vents, you are just sucking all that nice buoyant warm air straight out of the roof before it reaches the passengers, leaving their feet freezing. It creates massive temperature stratification and makes people incredibly uncomfortable. The study found that in winter, a 50-50 split using both the top and the bottom exhaust provides the best balance.

  3:35 - The bottom exhaust pulls the warm air down to feet level, maintaining thermal comfort, while the top exhaust still helps capture the rising respiratory pollutants. So what does this mean for our transport infrastructure? Why is this interesting? Well, the.

  3:52 - It proves that static one size fits all vent designs is dead. You cannot have a ventilation system that operates the exact same way in January as it does in July and expect optimal results for both comfort and importantly infection control.

  4:08 - We need dynamic systems. If you want to truly manage the risk of airborne transmission in mass transit, while simultaneously hitting our net zero energy efficiency targets, train manufacturers and frankly designers of any large, densely occupied space, need to implement variable exhaust systems that adapt to the season, the thermal load and the occupancy.

  4:34 - It's a brilliant example, I think, of how nuanced, targeted and responsive our ventilation strategies need to become to protect public health in the built environment, especially technical ones like trains. You can imagine the exact same thinking being applied to buses, to aeroplanes and so on.

  4:56 - Thanks a million for listening. As always, these podcasts are not possible without our partners, Safe Traces, Imbiet, Farmwood, EI Electronics, the IO Institute and Zender. Without them, they just simply wouldn't be possible. Thanks a million. Do check them out in the show notes and I'll see you again next week.