The Hat

My father wore a U.S. Green Building Council hat on the golf course at Brentwood Country Club in Los Angeles.

This was a man who, when I told him in 1992 I was leaving real estate development to start a nonprofit for something called green building, looked at me and said: “Son, that’s a good gimmick. But don’t come home when you’re starving.”

I’ve never taken a harder shot. His approval had organized my entire life, and he had just dismissed the thing I was about to give everything to as a gimmick.

I moved to San Francisco anyway and started USGBC out of a borrowed office from Jeff Davis, my best friend from Stanford, sleeping on his floor in the Marina in a sleeping bag.

Every few months I’d drive down to see my parents. A round of golf with my father was sacred. I’d gotten better than him by then, so we bet and I gave him strokes. He always rode a cart. Afterward we’d have a drink in the clubhouse with his golf buddies — the same men he’d been playing with for years, who knew what I did for a living because he told them.

Somewhere between the year he thought I’d lost my mind and the year the thing had a name, a logo, and a board, he came downstairs and said let’s go. He was wearing the hat.

He said nothing about it. I lost my breath for a moment and smiled quietly. He never announced it. He just showed up wearing it.

In the trailer below, you’ll meet my father at the end of his life — three years tethered to an oxygen machine, in a Brentwood house that held everything success was supposed to buy, with the money still in the bank. That’s true, and it’s part of why I wrote this book. A scoreboard that lets a man accumulate everything and lose his breath is measuring the wrong thing.

But the oxygen machine isn’t the whole man, and I don’t want to introduce him to you that way and stop.

The hat is the part the scoreboard never recorded. Ira Gottfried taught me to dream big, speak honestly, and measure a life by results rather than effort — and then, without a word, he changed his mind in public about his own son.

There’s no line item for that. He kept his own kind of scoreboard: Red Cross work, Angel Flight in his own plane, the people he mentored. It counted a lot. He put solar on the roof early, for the money. He loved big cars, and owned seven planes over fifty years, never more than one at a time.

His scoreboard counted service, achievement, generosity, and money. It never counted his own health, or the planet’s.

The other question I’ve carried for decades is why we don’t treat the Earth as home. Why do we take more from a living planet than it can give back and call it growth?

That’s what Regen360 is about — fifteen codes, and an attempt to build a scoreboard that counts what his didn’t.

The hat. And his breath.

Regen360 launches October 20 at Greenbuild in New York.