He Built the Green Building Movement. Then His Life Fell Apart | David Gottfried

David Gottfried (0:00)

Let it out, face the fear, and even if it blows up, and I've had pretty good crashes, you find yourself, you find your breath, and you can find peace there, and you can let go. You let go, you don't die, and you can find quiet and even enough.

But if you hold so tight and don't face the truth, you won't be yourself, and you won't have these transformations, you won't awaken to become.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

Chip Conley (0:50)

Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis, this is Chip Conley, and I am so excited to have a friend of mine for almost 50 years, David Gottfried joining me for this episode. David was the co-founder of the US. Green Building Council, which created the LEED certification globally. 184 countries now have LEED certification. They're specific to their country. He started this, but he started as a real estate developer out of college. We went to college together, and long story short is his journey, both as he calls himself a zealot, and his journey as a husband and father that had a midlife chrysalis in his own life. I think you're going to find that this is a very human person, a very, this is a human being and a human becoming and less of a human doing, although he and I were both trained to be human doings by our very tough guy dads. So I enjoyed reconnecting with David. I think you will too.

And at the end, I'll tell you about my three key lessons from this. Also just note that David's new book, Regen 360 is coming out October 20th. Highly recommend you order that or preorder that on Amazon, or not Amazon, Burns and Noble. Go to your local bookstore, however you buy books.

David Gottfried, you and I met with our fathers in downtown LA, I think before we even started college, or was it?

David Gottfried (2:23)

Yeah, it was before college, yes. That summer before.

Chip Conley (2:28)

That summer. So the summer of 1978, we were both living in, grew up in Southern California, both going to Stanford. And we had a lunch with our fathers. And then we were in the same dorm complex, Florence Moore.

You were in my girlfriend, my girlfriend, Lynn, was in your dorm, Gavilan, and I was in Mirlo. And, you know, and then we, you know, we stayed, we stayed in touch. But give us a little bit of your history in terms of what led you after Stanford to going into real estate development, which ultimately, as I said in the intro, led you to co-founding the US. Green Building Council. And we'll talk further about that. But what was it, what was it play while you were at Stanford? It said, I think I'm supposed to go into real estate development.

David Gottfried (3:21)

Yeah, those are fun times.

Different hairstyles. And yeah, I started off Stanford pre-med. I don't know if you knew that. And it was crapping. That's right.

Chip Conley (3:35)

Yes.

David Gottfried (3:35)

Organic chem. And I remember the model and my carbons were never in the right place. And it looked pretty.

But it had more chaos, my model. And then I decided I was more businessy.

I'd watched a surgery too at Stanford Hospital. And this guy was doing an ear surgery and kept doing like this to the ear. And I got all queasy.

And I thought, that's not for me. I was more businessy because of my dad. He was a management consultant. And Stanford didn't have business. They had economics, which my older brother did. He said, don't do that. And I tripped into engineering. And I got lucky in engineering. I found a professor, Gil Masters, this kind of wild hippie, when he was in electrical engineering at Civil. And in his early days, he parked a old VW van in the parking lot and slept in that thing. And he taught solar, yeah, he's crazy. He's taught solar engineering. I didn't know what that was, but I took every class he had. That guy woke me up in thousands. And guess what? There's a sun. And you can create electricity and heat and heat water. And we had Paul Erlich at Stanford in those days talking about population control. And then we read a book from the Club of Rome, Daniela Meadows, on carrying capacity of Earth to sustain. Those electrons of the sun just lit me up. I ended up in real estate development after that. Because we had cousins we had met. They had development and construction in Washington, DC.