And then we'll slowly get into the dating so you can be more comfortable.

No, I'm not worried.

It's unusual.

but I've been a green building guy since the beginning of that movement.

Starting in the U S I jumped in, in 1991, I was a real estate developer in Washington, DC.

I'm an engineer by education at Stanford, fell in love with the sun and solar engineering.

And I, I helped to build, but I did found a nonprofit out of my development years, uh, called the u.s green building council and that purpose was to define green building for the u.s and that definition became the lead green building rating system led on buildings all over the world you see a plaque and it says lead silver gold that's us i wrote the white paper for that in 93 and then We created a Green Building Council, a collaboration nonprofit of the whole U.S. building industry, architects, engineers, contractors, owners, tenants, manufacturers, scientists.

It's too

it lit the light bulb that, wait a second, um, we got some other problems to deal with here.

Yeah.

So in the green building movement, and I jumped in in '91, pretty close to the start of it in the, in the world and the US, that's a lot of years, 35 years.

Uh, I learned about it, uh, through a project in New York by Bill McDonough, uh, one of the first green architects in the US.

But and then I learned that England had a rating system called BREEAM, and Canada was trying one.

And I went to the AIA conferences and sat in daylighting lectures, and soon there's indoor air quality lectures and waste, and you start gluing it together.

You can get green building.

Mm-hmm.

So tell us why and tell us what we should expect with your book coming soon.

Yeah, thanks.

Well, my third book you might have read is Explosion Green.

Each book launches at Greenville.

Smart.

This new one will be October in New York.

I hope you'll be there.

Yeah,

What was the pivoting point?

Sure.

Well, while I was a developer, we also had a construction company I worked for in Washington, D.C. We were looking to pivot our construction company into new areas.

And they gave me this title like, I don't know, director of special projects.

We were hunting for what were the special projects.

And at that time, Our construction firm was building out all the tenant improvements in one building on Connecticut Avenue.

And one of the spaces we were building out, our president came in and said, hey, Godfrey, you're into this green stuff.

Tell me about your experience, what it was like.

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

Yeah.

Well, we've had those conversations.

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.

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

Buckminster Fuller standing on a stage in the 60s.

Now that we have technology, we can all have.

And that's much of what this is about, isn't it? It's an outcome of all of that, those thoughts and ideas, how you synthesized and brought them together.

Mm.

And those seeds can grow, and those trees can pull CO2 out of the air and kick out fresh oxygen.

But as I studied it more, I learned this came from the 16th century Kabbalah, this guy named Isaac Luria, and he's a f- he's a famous guy i- i- in the tradition, and that's when it was first mentioned.

I knew it later under this person named the Baal Shem Tov in the 1700s, and he started a branch of Judaism called Hasid- Hasidism, and that's brings in more spirit, more soul.

Uh, and this show is called Soul Mirror, and that's very much front and center of all of those writings and teachings.

But it goes deeper mythically that there was a sacred divine light, and the light of God or whatever you know God as, it could just be, uh, a divine spirit.

Uh, but that, that divine light used to shine and radiate in this glass structure brightly.

Mm-hmm

Could you tell me about your seven steps to success for building a movement, please? Yeah.

Out of my second book, it was called Explosion Green, and that was a 20-year memoir of some of the items you're hearing of the green building movement, how we started it.

In the very back, it said, why us, in bold letters.

And then it went through certain categories of how did we assemble? How did we build the U.S.

Green Building Council and then the World One and become the biggest green building movement in the world? And I synthesized those experiences into seven steps because our brain can't handle eight and made it as simple as I could on plane.

I like complicated things, so sometimes making it simple is smart.

But I called it Build Move.

What's up with us as a human race? Why don't we treat our home planet as home? You know, how does this happen?