 To Moments with Melinda, I want to invite you to meet my dear friend David Sellers, who is internationally acclaimed architect, radio host, industrial designer, community visionary, educator, museum director, and a very good golfer and a dear friend of mine. Hi David. Hi Melinda. How are you today? You know, it's sunny and I'm all excited about Halloween. I can't figure what my pumpkin is going to look like yet. What are you going to look like? Well, I usually look like a crown I wear, but I got from a Burger King shop one time. It's really cool. Good. Well, do the kids come to your house to trick or treat? Over 350 kids come across my bridge. Rain or shine, snow, don't make any difference. It's unbelievable. 350. It is so exciting. And what do you give them? I make popcorn. Oh good. I have four or five of us. So they get fresh popcorn, a little bit of syrup in it, lots of butter. They love it. What a healthy meal. Now listen, let's get started because I only have a half an hour. And David, you have a lifetime worth of accomplishments and acclimations. So I'm going to start right out by asking you to tell us about your childhood and who most inspired you. No, seriously. Now David, we have to take this seriously. Tell me about your childhood and who most inspired you to pursue your dreams. Okay, my child, I grew up in Wilmet, Illinois, which is right near Lake Michigan. And I was, and I believe I grew up within three houses of a community golf course, which surrounded the sewage system where they used to pump the sewage into the lake. And they put it pumped and it now goes into Mississippi River. But my inspiration as a child was really more as my Boy Scout leader. It was, I had so much fun in Boy Scouts, I gotta admit. We went all over the country. Canada, California, it was just a blast. I didn't get kicked out either. Well, I never took you as a Boy Scout. That's so fabulous. See, I'm going to learn so much about you today in this interview, David. I never, I never thought of you as a Boy Scout. That's so interesting. Well, let's, tell us, tell us a little bit about coming to Vermont and beginning to develop what is known today as Prickley Mountain in Warren, Vermont. Okay, this, this is a, I'll try to make it brief, but I went to, to a college in Connecticut, went to Yale University, coming out of Nutri High School in Chicago. It turns out the only college I applied to, I didn't know you should have applied to a lot of them. And I never been to East of Indiana in my life. My dad put me on a train with East Coast. I couldn't believe it. There I was. And I went to graduate school in architecture, mainly because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I, my aunt gave me a thousand bucks to travel around the world by myself when I got out of college. So I did it. And so I've got a motorcycle driver in Europe, had an accident in France, in Avignon, France. And they repaired my bike and fixed me up and they put me in a house where somebody spoke English and this, this fabulous woman is cooking for me. I said, my son is studying architecture, he's coming back from the Beaux-Arts. The cool guy had a scooter at a motorcycle, we drove around Southern France and he was sketching things. So I said, wow, what's it take to be a really great architect? He said, you have to know your math and science. That was my degree, math at Bingo, I got that. And you have to have a good imagination. Hey, talking to Mr. Imagination. Then he said, you have to be good at drawing. I looked at his drawings, said, hmm, give me a piece of paper. I started doing my own sketching. I said, wow, my drawings are just as good as this guy's. So I said, hmm, maybe I should go to architecture. I knew that Yale had a graduate program. And so I said, well, hell, they never take attendance. So I just said, I went back and started just taking classes. And I realized I liked it. So I finally had to own up to them that hadn't applied. I was just taking classes. They let me in. And I decided that you could, you know, pull your way through architecture school with nice drawings and a good verbal delivery and fake it and not know anything. So I decided I had to get, I guess, let's build something. So five of us just said we're gonna make something. Graduated. And all five of us said, where should we do something? Where should we build a little house? Well, nobody in the right mind would buy a house for a couple of kids right out of school. So it had to be a vacation house. So where would be a vacation? And I said, well, if you want to get out of a place, let's say you want to get out of a city, a manmade mountain is Manhattan. Where would there be a natural valley the size of Manhattan? That's where somebody would go, who might buy whatever the heck we do. So I started looking around. There's two valleys in the United States, or East Mississippi, the size of Manhattan, one in Maine, and the Med River Valley in Vermont. The Med River Valley, it's a wow. This is it. So I fumbled around and managed to get some land with $1,000 down. I got all my friends together. We started building these buildings. You know, I came up for one year. I was going to sell this house and go around the world, have a great time. The year's not up yet. It's taking 40 trips around the sun. I still have yet to have my year in Vermont. It's continuing. It's unbelievable. Well, there you have it, my friend. Well, for all any of my viewers who are interested in learning more about David Sellers, it's David S-E-L-L-E-R-S. Just Google his name. It all comes up. There's interviews. There's tons of articles. You're a genius of a human being. So that is such a great story. Now, you got your start as well starting Northwind Power, which was a company that you founded with Don Mayer, who we all know very well from small dog electronics and Apple computers. And this company, Northwind Power, develops turbines. Talk to us a little bit about these. That was one of your first really entrepreneurial businesses, correct? Exactly. I was at Goddard College. I was asked to start a design program, and Don Mayer, who was at Goddard, was in it. So we were kind of laughing and yucking it up, and I decided that there weren't any good products, because this is the oil embargo right there. This is the 70s. So I said, there's no good products out there. There's no wood stoves, no windmills. Solar collectors. So Don and I decided, hey, why don't we round up some old windmills we used to have in the Midwest and then refurbish them and get windmills going? So and Don was a genius at this. He put a couple of ads in the various papers in Montana, you know, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa. Did anyone have any cool old windmills they'll sell us? And there's a huge amount that said, yeah, we got them. So this is so much fun. So we got a $50,000, I don't know how Don pulled this off, SBA grant to round up used windmills in the Midwest. And we went wandering all over the place, found these farms. We took them down off the towers, brought them back, fixed them up. And that was a hugely wonderful adventure. But we thought we thought we could improve on it. And so Don basically, I'm giving a lot of credit to Don. And I was kind of like backstepping his deal. But we decided to apply for some design grants, because the Department of Energy said, we need windmills. Nobody's making them. So they put RFP requests for proposals. We submitted one for a type of windmill we thought would be really great. And we got a call from the Department of Energy said, you got you won first place. But we're not going to give you the money. So I said, what, what do it? He said, you beat out Westinghouse, they got 20,000 employees, you beat out Hamilton standard with 300,000 employees, you have eight people in more in Vermont. And you beat these guys out if we give you your gold bankrupt. So we're not going to give you the money. They called a week later said, you know, we have to give you the money. There's a small business set aside, we have to do it. But if you fail, we look bad. So we're going to give you our engineers. So this is amazing. They gave us the engineer for the B1 bomber and the lunar landing module coming out of Hamilton standard. These guys came up to ward Vermont and showed us how to do a technological advanced research project. We did it. So we started making these, we started producing windmills called Hyber Liability for Microwave Repeaters. They put them in Antarctica up in Canada and Alaska, mountaintops. It was so much fun. That was, that was it. What an incredible project you were, you were, you were birthing the wind, the wind movement that was actually an ancient movement that you brought back to war in Vermont. Well, you also co-founded the Vermont Iron Stove Works and Four Elements Corporation, developing solar aquatic waste treatment systems. I would call you in some ways a serial entrepreneur. What do you say about that? You know, I think you're right. Once you start messing with the economy, it was making things and selling them, you realize this is an enormous opportunity for trying things out. And so if you try something out and you figured how to do it, hey, let's do another one, another one at the serial idea. So we realized there were no good wood stoves out there. The best one was, he actually made a tin stove. It didn't work or buy these old antique ones that were no good. So we did some research. We found out there's a guy that did research in World War II for the government saying, what if we run out of oil? We may have to do something out of wood. All the research for combustion was done back at that time. I found the research data and so I got hold of Duncan Syme and Richard Travers said, let's make some stoves. Well, they end up being Vermont castings in the Elm and they end up being the biggest stove companies in the world. That's very cool. And you know, David, this is back in the days when there wasn't Google and you could Google the research at the end of your fingertips. You literally had to go out in the world and do research by looking through books and articles and meeting with people because Google did not exist back then. Totally right. I went going into the research libraries at Yale University to find from the Forestry Department, this research was done in the 40s and it was so much fun to find it. I finally found the technician who did it all and he was in a nursing home. He had all his sacks of papers with him. He broke into tears because he thought all that research was going to go to waste. When I said, hey, we're going to do something, he said, oh my god, take it all. So you're right. So without Google, we invented our own kind of alternative to Google, which is wandering around and having a lot of fun. There you have it. Well, you are someone who knows how to have fun. Now talk to me about your vision for architecture because you are unique and I would say borderline genius in how you approach the built environment. I really do. One of the things I found in making buildings and when we came to Vermont, I had this idea because I saw an example which was really bad. The dean of Yale Architecture School, Paul Rudolph, had designed this giant concrete parking garage and I got a job as the assistant engineer and we're on top of the car parking garage with time and said, the architect's coming, the architect is my student. I said, oh my god, here's this so cool, the architect's going to be there. He lays the papers out on the table and all the contractors, the electric, concrete, steel, and my job was to get donuts and coffee for everybody so I could listen to see what he says. And while in the middle of discussion, the head concrete guy was standing behind the architect doing this with his finger. And I said, oh my god, how can you do that? So after everyone left, I said, what was that? He said, this guy can draw a picture but he can't, doesn't know how to make a building. We could have done it at a half the price if he only knew how to make it. I said to myself, okay, that's it. I don't want to ever have a contract to tell me, hey, you don't know how to make this thing. So I realized I had to, so for the first five or six years, everything I designed I also built so that nobody could ever say, hey, you can't do this. So yeah, I can. Here's how you do it. And bingo, I would take the contract to do it. And I realized that's no big deal. That's the concept of the master builder that's been going on for 10,000 years. That's why people flock to Europe and they see these great buildings that were built that way. There were no architectural contracts. They're the contractor, the master builder and designer. The great cathedral is all of them like that. I think that's the future of design. Well, I do too. And I think, you know, Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. I mean, just, I think it's one of my favorite books. I encourage everyone to read it because that's all about that. And that's back in what the 11th century. Now listen, you are a many time award winner and a focus of great attention all over the world. You are a unique personality whose work has defied the norm to transform the way we look at our built environment. And yet, you are very understated and you lack any kind of ego in so many ways, David. You are deeply, you are a deeply evolved human being. And I have never met anyone like you. Talk a little bit about what makes you that way because you're not a product of the 60s. You weren't a Timothy Leary kid. You were the generation before that. So you weren't, you know, hyped up on, you know, psychedelics and seeing the world in a whole different way. This all came from just who you are in your DNA and in your flesh. Talk to us a little bit about what makes Dave Sellers Dave Sellers. You know, that's, I've asked that question a lot. And I think it has to do with curiosity that somehow I maybe started as a Boy Scout. Or even before that, I remember one time my dad got upset because I found a rock in the backyard. And I got his favorite hammer out of the basement. And I was smashing the rock. And I looked inside the rock was all these little crystals that looked just amazing. And she grabbed the hammer away says, don't break out the rocks. But I realized that symbolically that's a sense what we do a turnover right to look at the animals worms and the bugs underneath it. You try to look at a flower closely, but how does that how is that made? And I think that's the curiosity that that that fascinates me. So when we came up to Vermont, what people said you guys were on LSD and so on. We might have been at some a different frame time, we didn't need it. The the narcotic was the idea we could make things. Just getting out there making things with so exciting tools and materials and and other people helping and do it and designing it is so much more fun to design something that you're inside of, as opposed to giving somebody pictures that you designed that. So that that part of that's part of what my my kind of enthusiasm is. I'm constantly figuring out some way to make something special. Were you ever were you ever able to share that with your dad because I have I haven't my my son Eli when he was four years old after Rick built this beautiful stone arch and stairway took some blue paint and went over and painted one of the rocks and Rick was furious with Eli and and he brings it up. He's 50 years old now and he brings it up about how mad Rick was. I'm going to make him listen to this interview because I think that that and he's a great, you know, cabinet maker. And I think at the end of the day it is that creativity, but sometimes adults don't understand that in children. I think it's such a shame. So I hope you were able to make peace with your father later on when he saw your work. Yeah, I did. The thing was amazing about my dad. He was constantly, you know, he worked for a printing company in the south side of Chicago and would take the L commute all the way to the north side because he'd get us into this really great high school. I mean, he did that for 20 years and I had no idea why he was so tired every like three hours a day of it on the train, just so we could live in this town that had a great education. And I finally got back and talked to my dad about that, you know, and he he was like almost 90 and he broke into tears. You know, and we it was just terrific. Well, I want you to share with us your vision for sustainable transportation and creating hubs of livability around transportation centers, which is really how towns and cities were created since the beginning of time. But you are a visionary in community design. Can you talk about that? Okay, this is really critical. And once we started evolving solar systems and windmills and wood stoves and, you know, electric power for all kinds of activities, I realized that we're potentially making a big mistake, you know, having an autocentric world. And so I started looking at the train tracks, basically abandoned train tracks all over the state of Vermont. Nobody's on them. They're just train tracks everywhere. So I got the Norwich Architecture School, convinced them to do a program on the future of settlement in Vermont, using trains as access waste. We started White River Junction. We did White River Junction to Burlington, and then Burlington down to Manchester. These are all trains. And if you listen, if you go to White River Junction and you go to these beautiful little towns, all along the train track, that don't have access to the trains, it's not this freight trains. I said, let's imagine you had commuter rail there, but every half hour there'd be a train zinging up and down. You wouldn't need the cars in these towns to become really active, wonderful pedestrian communities. So I looked at that, I said, wait a minute, we could have a sprawl-free Vermont concept if you actually activated real live commuter rails for everybody. And they have it in Germany, in England, in France. It's so cool. I got a chance to go to Germany to do some, I don't know why I was asked to go there, but I went there. And we took a trip on a train from one little town to the next. All the windows were open. And the trains, you look at the window, we stopped at a train station, and somebody came along selling pastries. And they'd hand up a big bag of pastries, and you reach out the window and you buy one. I said, oh my god, that is so cool. Well, your rail, well, we had Standard Oil who basically had all of the rail lines ripped up to make way for Standard Oil to pump gas into our, into our automobiles. So we are, we are moving back to rail. And now we have the train from Burlington to New York. I encourage everyone to get your ticket and take that train out of Burlington, Nellis. And we're coming. There's a dinner train, isn't there? Oh, it's, there is a dinner train, but this is actually the train that takes you. I know, I know. So, so I want to, I just want to, we only have eight minutes here, and I could talk to you for four days and not cover what I want to cover. You are a sustainable and green thinker and designer, and you've been that way your entire life. You are a carer of our planet, and you've been that way for decades. Why David Sellers are humans unable to understand the connection between our planet and the future of our species? Wow. That's a puzzle which I think of almost every day. Why do we make so many stupid decisions that don't get us to a place where we could be? You know, this, our planet is likely to last for another 500,000 years because without any disturbance. The only way it could get wrecked is for, because we screw it up and being aware of our daily progress toward ruining the planet or making it better is, is, is ridiculous. So, to me, the only way to reconnect on a daily basis is to actually grow some food, to talk to your friends, get out of your car, walk, you know, turn over the rock to see what's living in it. Wonder why do we have clean water? Go to a meeting and say, clean it up, forget about that stuff, be a participant. We only have that, that's our only choice. Well, thank you, unfortunately, half of our country doesn't believe that and who knows what's going to happen in a week or so. So, thank you for that wisdom. Tell us about what you are doing now, David Sellers. You have your radio show and your Mad River Museum and knowing your level of energy. I am sure you still have so much more you want to do in your lifetime. What are some of the, one of the, some of the things you'd like to do with what's left of your extraordinary lifetime? Well, one of, one of the things I really want to do is, I have some land, when I started with a whole group of people at Prickley Mountain, now it's gone for like almost 50 years, I had set aside a chunk of land for something which I didn't know what we would do with it and I've decided what it is. I want to make a very small little neighborhood. I call it an agri-hood where people are, because there's a lot of common land around, well, people can make things, but it has little houses, but around the house is a tabernacle. I call it that. It's some kind of a community building where you can work on your car, you can do some pottery, you can build a library, you can have an exercise machine, you can play basketball, you know, so that you don't have to have all that stuff in your house. Right now, the kind of suburban model is you get on a road, everybody's got a washing machine, a car, a dryer, you know, a camera, a chainsaw, lawn mower, a pickup truck, a boat. We don't all have to have that stuff. If the consumer mentality is a dead end, it doesn't go anywhere. Well, I'm saying, why don't we have a community building that's like 30 seconds away from your house, where you can join with your friends, make stuff, explore things, kids can have a lot of fun with as opposed to the individual house and the individual lot separated. They sort of did that with Ten Stones in Shelburne years ago, where they created that community with the families that had, and then also in South Meadow, where Will Rapp got involved with the agriculture with the homes there. So there is this in people's minds, so I think it's, but you'll take it, I have no doubt that you will take it beyond, way beyond miles, beyond what anybody else has done. Those are great footsteps, and you go past the footsteps. What Ten Stones did was great. Tim Montgomery's guys are terrific. We want to jump off where they stopped. Right, exactly. So I have no doubt that you will make that happen, and keep me apprised of that. So what advice and wisdom, David, would you give the younger generation facing all the tough issues of today, climate change, the pandemic, income inequality, racial and reproductive injustice? How do we in our generation, I am part of your generation, meet them and provide the wisdom for them to take on these issues long after we're gone? I'm dealing with three grandkids and two neighbor boys, and my sense is they need to develop passion in something. Don't think of it as what it is. Passion is a multiplier. If you're interested in bugs or mosquitoes or baseball or soccer or color, don't make a difference. Be the best you could possibly be in that because it generalizes and creates a sensitivity in your mind that the sensitivity is, I'm not going to break things. I'm not going to destroy things. I'm going to create things. And I think it's that, to me, the doorway to a sensible world is individual passion. You really care about something. If you care about it, you're not going to wreck it. Well, we live in a bubble here in Vermont, and we have opportunities for our children to be creative, whether it's through the arts or through building or through their own intellectual pursuits. But there are places in the country where there's so much suffering that kids don't have that opportunity. And I know our generation, or at least some of our generation, really care so deeply about the next generation. So I'm sure you will be involved in working with the youth. I know there's Yester Mara, which is helping people to learn how to build and how to do great work. I only have two minutes left and of an interview that I, for my guest, I'm David Sellers. I could talk to you for all time. So I want to just ask, is there anything else that you would like to share with my viewers about your life, you? And if not, we can always talk about why you always win in our golf tournaments, because we play once a year together. And David always kicks butt and ends up, he and Don Mayer, the great team of Northern wind power, end up beating me and Lars Lars. And is there anything else you'd like to share with my viewers before I have to sign on? Yeah, there is. It has to do with the museum. And the museum is a collector of really beautiful things. Humans get involved in all kinds of things in their lives. But there's one activity which freezes the world's resources and it's design. You can, okay, take this thing, whatever this is. Somebody has to make the plastic. Somebody makes the paper. Somebody makes this thing. Those are all ways to make a living. But somebody has to design the final configuration that lasts forever. And if it's beautiful, if there's a beautiful thing, take a look at this. It's really cool looking item. If it's beautiful, it's going to last. So let's make a museum of the things which people have made which are really significantly interesting and successful. And the more I put up this museum or realize it's a lesson. So we have a little classroom. We're now studying to get kids to come in and learn how to design. And having respect for this, the final configuration, you know, if you take all the resources of the planet and say, as a designer does, you're something really cool. Let's make this. If it's affordable, if it works and so on, but if it's butt ugly, bingo goes to the dump. And we can't do that for thousands and thousands of years. We're stuck. And I think that plastic bottle is pretty darn ugly. It's really polluting our world. But listen, this is the end of our show. And David Sellers, I thank you for your time. I can't wait to see you in person again, probably on the golf course, if not before. And to my viewers, I want to thank you for joining me and David Sellers for this half hour. And I wish you well. And I wish you a good day. And I will see you next time. I see you. Well, Linda, I love talking to you. I would continue anytime we want. Ready to go. I agree. We need to spend more time together, don't you think? Absolutely. Yes, my friend. All right. To my viewers and to you, David, thank you and have a good day. Thank you, Melinda. Bye, bye, darling.