 For our next speaker, can I get everybody's attention here? OK, thanks. So thanks to our last speaker, James Woodward. Next up, we have Hilary Bromberg. She's going to be talking to us about how do we get out of this modern mess, primality and the sustainability revolution. Hilary Bromberg was trained as a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT in Harvard. She runs a sustainability communications firm and is the founder of Barefoot Provisions, a consciously curated primal online store. She's currently working on her second book, The Birth of Neonatrism, which addresses the primal foundations and cultural implications of the sustainability revolution. There you go, Hilary. OK, thanks a lot. OK, so the modern world has a lot of problems. And today, I'm going to be talking in a very messy place if I can advance the slide. Just not doing anything. I could, but I want to be able to do that right there. There we go. So just closer? OK, OK, cool. OK, so how many times have you heard this? Paleo is just a fad. It's just this weird, fringy thing. It's just the latest diet craze, right? So what I want to talk about today is how paleo is not only here to stay and grow beyond our wildest imaginations. It's actually part of the much broader and deeper shift that's happening in our culture right now. Awesome. So we are living in a time of massive change. And the growth of the paleo diet in the past few years is just one part of this change. It's what I call a cultural indicator. That is something that's happening at the fringes. That's a harbinger of deep changes to come. So this is really important. This paleo thing is about much more than just a diet. It's about an entire way of living. So a lot of people come to paleo to lose weight or to get healthy. But there's so much more to paleo than that. It's about mental health, not just physical health. So it wasn't just our bodies that evolved for millions of years before the present day. It's also our brains. And our brains are not blank slates. Yeah, our environment is critical. But our brains come equipped with all kinds of innate capacities, like how spiders know exactly how to weave a web. And these evolved over millions of years. So once we start thinking about paleo as much more than diet, really interesting stuff starts happening. And we can unlock human potential in incredible ways. So how can we do that? So we've all heard of the standard American diet, right? We've all been there. We've all rejected it. We've all experienced its benefits. So I want to go broader here. It's time to stop living the standard American life. It's not just about getting rid of junk food. Let's get rid of junk ideas and look to our ancestral heritage for clues to how to get out of this modern mess and live well. The standard American diet is not working, but neither is the standard American life. And so here's what I mean by that. As a species, we are not doing well. Most of us are massively disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from the planet. And worse, mainstream culture feeds us these myths that keep us disconnected and discontent. So mismatch theory really comes alive when we look at the modern condition. We're massively disconnected in so many ways. We're disconnected from our bodies. We evolved feeling good in our own skins. But in this modern age, by the way, did you guys see the Photoshop fail here? This is a Victoria's Secret catalog, like literally. So in this modern age, over two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and yet the media tells us we need to look like these emaciated airbrush models that are fake in order to find happiness. So it's no wonder that eating disorders are rampant and that most people dislike the way they look. We're disconnected from our livelihoods. We evolved spending our time doing things that we were connected to all the time. But in this modern age, over 80% of Americans do not like their jobs that they spend all their time doing. And yet this consumerist machine keeps people trapped, work by, consume, die. We spend most of our hours doing stuff that we don't like so we can buy stuff we don't need. All studies show that having more stuff beyond a certain point does not bring happiness, and yet we continue to buy. We're disconnected from others. We evolved around other people, kin, all the time we would die if we were solitary, but at this point, 25% of all adults have no close confidence at all, and yet we spend eight hours a day in front of screens, immersed in social media, reality TV, which only leaves us more depressed and more alienated. So our brains are tricked by mediation, fooled, but left unsatisfied and unfulfilled. We're disconnected from nature, so we evolved, obviously, in a natural environment all the time, and at this point, people are spending almost no time outside. Kids used to play outside all the time, but now kids spend more than seven hours each day in front of an electronic screen. More than half of preschoolers do not get outside at all. And this is taking its toll on our physical and mental health. All studies show that being outside is critical for a healthy body and mind. We're disconnected from ourselves. We evolved to be sharp and alert and alive, survival of the fittest, right? You had to be operating at peak or you were not gonna make it. At this point, over 50% of people are gonna have a mental illness in their lifetime. Suicide rates are rising. Over four billion prescriptions were written in the US in the past year. So ever half of Americans are chronically sleep deprived over a third abuse alcohol. We fuel our restless days with drugs that do not fix our deeper problems. We go crazy. We self-medicate. We try quick fixes. We are failing to reach our human potential. We are not built to spend our days in a daze. So obviously, standard American life, it's not working. It's time to figure out a better way. The awesome thing is that we're actually in a time of massive change. Basically, we've hit and we've way exceeded carrying capacity on this planet. So if we continue with current production and consumption patterns, we're gonna need two planets by 2050 and we have not got two planets. So this is an age of correction, of trying to get back into balance with ourselves, with each other, with the natural environment. So we basically need to rethink everything in order to survive as a species. And my slide presentation just went off. I didn't do anything. Okay, awesome. Am I in danger of it happening again? Okay, we'll give it a try. Okay, so we need to rethink everything, including technology. I'll stand over here. So we call this the Sustainability Revolution. So what is sustainability? This is the official UN definition. It's really simple. It means living today so that we can meet our needs in the future. And sustainability is a huge and rapidly growing movement. I've worked in this area since the dawn of the sustainability era, over 10 years. And it's amazing this shift to witness that pretty much every Fortune 500 company has a sustainability report at this point. And you'd see this new sustainability focus everywhere. Everything from architecture, alternative energy, green investment, to food systems, ecotourism, and personal care. Basically, we are rethinking everything. And sustainability is really about systems thinking at heart. And this is a really crucial concept. So for example, look at this water bottle here. Don't just think about the water bottle. Look deeper. Where did it come from? Where is it going? And what do we do about all these water bottles? What's the alternative? Even bigger, where is our water coming from? Why is it so toxic? How are we gonna overcome these drought conditions? Water is actually gonna be the next big issue, bigger than oil. And that all comes from thinking about this one water bottle. So right now, we are living in a time of dramatic correction. We're reexamining everything. And we're changing deep unsustainable patterns that have developed since agriculture and particularly since the Industrial Revolution. And crucially, these changes are coming from within. So we need to change on a deep psychological level. We need to reexamine our habits, assumptions, goals, everything that mainstream culture holds dear in order to make these external changes that are so critical to our survival as individuals and a species. So systems thinking, sustainability thinking, this is all critical to moving beyond the standard American life. So now I'm gonna show you what this change looks like with a bunch of these cultural indicators that I mentioned before. So this is a broad range of ethnographic data points. Some of them are gonna look pretty fringy, but that's what makes them interesting because it means that's what's next. So before I start this next section of the talk, here's what I mean by next. And this is possibly the most important concept for understanding culture change. Some of you have probably seen it. This is the diffusion of innovations model. It was originally developed to talk about technology and cultural adaptation around technology, but it's used broadly to explain the adaptation of any sort of idea that's new. And what this says simply is that change does not happen to everybody in the population at once. Change comes from the innovators. It goes to the early adopters and so forth. Eventually it reaches the laggards. So when we're trying to understand culture change, we need to look to the innovators and early adopters. What are they doing? Because that's gonna give us a clue to what's coming next. So here's an example. Remember the hippies from the 1960s? They were like crazy, right? They were anti-establishment. They believed in radical things like love and tolerance and feminism, gay rights, civil rights. People said they were totally insane. But look at the United States now, 50 years later. We've got a black president. We've got more women than men graduating college. Gay marriage is legal in many states. So all these radical ideas, they're now mainstream. So if you wanna see what's coming next, you have to look to the hipsters. And so what do I mean by hipster? Broad definition, right? Crazy wacky people, beards, fedoras. Now, so by hipster, I mean young progressive people on the vanguard of culture, way ahead of their time, the same as the hippies were in the 60s. So I'm writing a book about all this right now, so I'm gonna show you a selection of examples. I'm gonna blow through pretty quickly, but these are all extremely revealing. They're all about going forward by looking to the past or heritage, whether it's 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or 100,000 years ago. And just to give you guys a sense of grounding, paleo is here. It's growing, but it's still tiny, it's minuscule. So congratulations, you guys are all innovators. You're all on the bleeding edges of culture. And in all these indicators I'm gonna show you, you're gonna see different aspects of paleo popping up. So let's start with food, we all love food, right? So we're now witnessing this incredible renaissance in small food producers. Everything is artisanal these days to the point where that word is so crazily overused. And you know something is up culturally when you see frozen artisanal pizzas from California Pizza Kitchen, or tostitos offering artisan chips. So why is this so desirable right now? Artisanal is a concept that comes from the past when people actually made things by hand locally with love and skill and dedication. So we're really yearning for that again. Butchery, so we're seeing this incredible butchery revival right now. It used to be that was not a job you aspired towards. You know, imagine some guys really fat, he's got a blood-stained apron, it's a really sordid job. And now we've got this rock star butcher phenomenon. You've got these really cool hip tattooed young people. You've got lots of women going to butchery conferences. There's a lot of energy around this. Basically we're relearning this lost art. We're demanding more than factory farmed, her medically sealed hamburgers and steaks, all these other cuts of meat, nose to tail. So we're getting back to how things used to be. Food trucks, so we've been seeing food trucks sprouting up like mad in urban areas in the past few years. People love them because they're so much more primal. Basically you're eating outside, it's informal. You're being given food directly by someone who's just made it with love and care and they're handing it to you and you're connecting with this person who's making it and you're eating it in the sun or under the stars or just crouching on the ground. Fermentation, so Sandor Ellis Katz, and he's been writing and talking about fermentation for decades. He wrote this book years ago, Wild Fermentation, which was a cult classic. This recent one, New York Times best seller. So fermentation has come a long way. Look at kombucha, it used to be only edgy hippies who had the scoby and the jar in their kitchen. Now it's on tap everywhere. People are finally beginning to embrace microorganisms the way we always used to. So you've seen so many gut health talks here. This is just the beginning. Foraging, so obviously foraging is the most ancient, primal way to get food, right? And now we're seeing this foraging revival at the most popular and edgy restaurants in the world. So this is Renee Redzepi of Noma and Copenhagen, which is considered by many the most influential restaurant in the world right now. You literally have to wait months to get a reservation. It's very difficult. People travel from thousands of miles away, ironically to get completely hyper local food. It's been foraged within like a couple of feet of the restaurant where he makes this stuff. So it's all about things like seaweed and nettles and thistles, hay, even ants. This is totally elemental and wild. It's just like we used to eat, but with a very much higher price tag. And of course, paleo. So it's no accident that the paleo diet is skyrocketing at this time in human history. You know, most Google diet ever, right? So we are craving this connection with the past and we're learning that that's what makes us happiest and healthiest. So moving away from food just a little, we're gonna talk about bodies and how we're reconnecting there. We're seeing a real aesthetic shift towards the natural and it's amazing. The beauty industry is actually acknowledging this and trying to cash in on it, which is really hysterical. So the latest thing is now sombré hair, which is basically what happens to your hair if you're outside in the sun a lot and it just gets bleached. People are doing that, paying a lot of money for that. People are dyeing their hair gray. Frizz is being embraced on runways. So our aesthetic is shifting back to our natural heritage. So this is a fun one, body hair coming back. The porn industry has been getting women to torture themselves with Brazilian waxes for years, but now we're seeing this amazing sea change. So American Apparel, which is a huge mainstream hipster clothing company, they created this bold window display in Soho in New York for Valentine's Day. So they're selling underwear. The models had full pubic hair. This got a lot of press. The interesting thing was that A-list celebrities spoke out for the cause. Cameron Diaz is speaking out. Gwyneth Paltrow, the Guardian actually declared 2014 the year of the bush. So it's a really interesting shift back to the natural. So not to be outdone by the women, men are sprouting beers like it's 1969 all over again. What's going on here? So men are going back to the way we used to be. Beards were always a symbol of masculinity, sexual maturity, and wildness, and they're embracing that again. So urban primality, even though people are living in urban areas, they're embracing plaid shirts, they're going on hunting expeditions, they're getting guns. This is a great article about John Durand and what's going on in New York, which is like the least primal place ever. New Yorkers are yearning to get back into the wild. Mirror fasting, this is fascinating. So we evolved for millions of years without mirrors, right? The only way we could see ourselves was by gazing into a pond of still water, like Narcissus, that's where the myth came from. And mirrors were really only a luxury item until very recently, and they became readily available in the mid-1800s. But it's really destructive to be able to scrutinize ourselves so closely. A lot of people theorize the body of dysmorphic disorder, skin picking, a lot of obsession with perfecting ourselves comes from mirrors. But now you've got mirror fasting, which is such a mainstream phenomenon, you're seeing it in the New York Times. People are trying to break free of mirrors. Reconnecting with aesthetics, massive aesthetic shift we're going through here. So it's all about wabi sabi, which is a Japanese philosophy that says that everything is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. And it really pervades design in everywhere you look. So a way to think about this is think about the 1980s, what was the most coveted dining room table? It would be glass and steel and chrome, and it would show fingerprints. It would be impossible to keep clean. What is it now? Slab of wood, salvaged wood. If it's got a live edge like bark, that's awesome. If it's got some moss on it, that's even better. To exodermy is not just for rednecks anymore. And this goes along with the urban primality indicator I mentioned a moment ago. So you see hip bars, coffee shops, restaurants, private homes, all adorned with taxidermy. You're even seeing playful felt taxidermy for the vegans. And the primal roots of this are pretty obvious. Okay, reconnecting with home and garden. So this is an idea whose time has come. Basically, you have this fetishized American suburban lawn, right, this perfect green carpet. And this is a prime example of what Veblen called conspicuous waste. So people are putting all this time and money into mowing, maintaining, keeping them flawless, drowning them in toxic chemicals to create something that serves no purpose except for ego satisfaction and keeping up with the Joneses. So now we're seeing this cool lawn-to-garden movement in urban areas. It's all about food production, also about returning to a natural wild state. So related to lawn-to-garden, we've got micro livestock. People are bringing chickens and pigs and goats into their lives. And this is not just an edgy Portlandia phenomenon here. We're seeing people in suburbs, relatively conservative suburbs all over the U.S., who are building chicken coops. There's a lot of politics around this actually in communities. But at this point, it's so socially acceptable that you're seeing William Sonoma getting in on the act. They have this agrarian collection where you can spend a thousand bucks on a chicken coop. Permaculture. This is a deep and radical ecological design system all about learning from nature, creating sustainable systems. It's sort of the opposite of monocropped agriculture. Used to be a really hardcore, fringy thing. And now this year, we had the first ever permaculture voices conference. A thousand people came. Michael Pollan gave the keynote. So we've really come a long way here. Tiny houses. This is very cool. It used to be all about the McMansion, right? The bigger the better. And now we're seeing this amazing turnaround. Small footprint homes are the new luxury. We're seeing these wee homes and tumbleweed homes. All these manufacturers of tiny homes. So it's so much more sustainable, so much more human scale. And this is what original shelters were like. They were not McMansions. Okay, reconnecting with transportation. So beyond houses, cars used to be the ultimate American status symbol. But now we're seeing this revolution. People are realizing they don't need to own a car that they don't use most of the time. You see Uber valued at $15 billion as something really powerful happening here. Beyond cars, we're embracing the bicycle at a rapid pace. Urban planners are finally putting in bike lanes. We're even seeing cargo bikes, which are ubiquitous in the Netherlands in some cities in the US. So we're getting closer and closer to moving with our own energy. Going even further, we're seeing a revolution in footwear. You guys probably all know about this one. All the research basically shows that biomechanically, the closer we are to barefoot, the better. Now, there's still a cult of high heels with women, but I think in a few decades, high heels are gonna look so archaic to us, like Chinese footbinding and corsets. Okay, reconnecting with livelihood. So we're seeing this revolution in Gen Y farmers. We're seeing these college-educated, really hip progressive young people going into farming as a cool and important profession. So there's all this energy in the young farmers' movement. Now it's not just about a crusty old guy in overalls. There's a great documentary, The Greenhorns, all about these farmers you guys should check out. So related to the explosion in artisanal food, these are the folks who are making the food. It's similar to Gen Y farming. We're seeing this really interesting shift in all the research that we do. People are dropping out of these traditionally high status professions, doctor, lawyer, investment banker, to make food, to do something with their hands that feels fun and connected and direct like it used to be in the ancestral environment. And along these lines, we've seen a cultural explosion in making things by hands. So crafting is not just about your grandma knitting you some ugly scarf. Crafting is huge. Etsy has been valued at almost a billion dollars. Maker fairs have turned into this massive cultural phenomenon. Reconnecting with each other. So we've got all these new sharing economy companies and systems emerging and they're rewriting the rules and changing entire industries, Airbnb, Yurtle. These companies break through traditional barriers and they pave the way for barter economies and less and less private ownership. Agrihood, so eco-villages have been this fringy movement for a while and now we're seeing agrihoods get more mainstream. So food and community are really coming together in an interesting way. People are building these communities around an agricultural core. Localism, we're seeing this amazing growth of the localism movement and what's key about this is that it's not patriarchal, parochial, maybe hopefully not patriarchal, not parochial or insular. So it's all about realizing that global change starts locally and that when a community rejects chain stores and supports the local economy, everybody benefits. Reconnecting with nature. So people are wired and mediated so much today and people on the bleeding edges are beginning to realize how destructive that is. That being unplugged in a nature helps us on every level. Our creativity, our cognitive abilities, our emotional health all benefit. So now stressed out tech workers are paying thousands of dollars to go to digital detox summer camps where no devices are allowed. I have a couple more minutes. Rewilding, it's a hardcore concept. Green anarchists, deep ecologists have been encouraging rewilding for decades and now we're seeing it going beyond the edge. It's more mainstream. Is he a free, rewild your life challenge? Sign up now. The language that's being used is completely different than what we've seen for decades. Earth things. So we were always barefoot in the savannah, right? But there's a lot of benefits to being in contact with the earth and we're seeing a resurgence in earthing shoes and earthing sheets, products that make it possible to earth even if you're not outside. Okay, reconnecting with ourselves. Alternative medicine. This is a huge umbrella that encompasses a lot from yoga and massage to acupuncture, colonics, even leaching. This is a hundred billion dollar industry with double digit growth every year. A lot of it's woo-woo, but there's a lot that's rooted in deep indigenous wisdom that we need to pay a lot of attention to. Mindfulness. People in the mainstream are becoming aware of meditation. There's this huge and growing Wisdom 2.0 movement with conferences all over the world that embraces the power of meditation. This is a really incredible shift because mindfulness is the first step to real change. And so the final indicator for today is play. So we used to play all the time and now we're starting to reconnect with our lost ability to play. So visionaries like Darryl, who we've all seen here, are unleashing this energy that we've all got inside us. Okay, so I've covered a lot here. I'm just gonna give you a couple quick take-home messages and practical suggestions for moving beyond the standard American life. First, become a systems thinker. This is not so easy. This does not happen overnight. This happens over a lifetime of pushing and pushing. But it's crucial. We have to go deep. We have to start looking at what's related to everything that we come into contact with and do. Reconnect with nature. Rewild at every point. If you're in an urban environment, find nature. Find that path of nature. Look at the moon, look at the grass. Look at what you can possibly find. Look at vacant lots where things are sprouting. But try to get out of an urban area if you can as much as possible. Try to get out into nature. Try to get into a point where you don't even think of it as nature. It's just all of us, right? Nature separates us. So try to eventually get to that point. Get comfortable in your own skin. So this is so important, especially for women. We need to get back to that place of comfort. Do whatever it takes. Mirror fast. Don't wear stuff ever that you could not sprint in at a moment's notice. Ignore all mainstream media images. They're completely destructive. So this may sound a little Marxist, but it's really, really important. We have to get close to the means of production. Make as much as possible yourself with your hands or acquire things if you need things from people who have made them who you actually know. Ideally, try to get to a point of right livelihood where your profession, what you spend your days doing is stuff that you're actually connected to that you directly benefit from and your community and the people around you. And that will be an incredibly profound shift. Reach out to others. So go face to face as much as possible. Put down the phone. Get away from the screen. Connect with people. And when we're trying to talk about the change because we're all change agents here, we cannot create this change alone. So we can actually use technology for good. In some cases, to try to help us come together to create change. And finally, question everything. So for everything that you do, every choice that you make, ask yourself, are you doing this because modern culture says you should or because your ancestral heritage says you should? So it's not always easy to tell the difference, but keep pushing and you'll be able to go beyond the standard American life. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks Hilary. Unfortunately, we don't have time for a question. Oh wait, oh we have one? One question. Okay. Sweet. Awesome. With a beard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a amazing, important question and one I grapple with every day. And sometimes I get extremely miserable thinking about this wall, this cap. Sometimes I feel like there's hope. And I guess I would say that there is a massive alternative economy developing. And it's happening on a local level. And you can only see it by looking at the big picture, but there are all these people, there's so many people like you who have said, okay, I'm gonna get out of this and I'm gonna start bartering. And I'm gonna start getting to know my neighbors. And I'm gonna start, you know, dumpster diving. I'm gonna start doing all of these things that are not part of the standard economy. So it's kind of like this massive edifice, right? And then if you can pull enough blocks away from it, hopefully it'll just come down and collapse. I mean, you know, a lot of people are thinking in terms of climate change, we may be seeing collapse inevitably in a couple of decades. A lot of people on the fringes are saying, okay, let's prepers or whatever, let's prepare now. So in some ways we might be accelerating our own demise with this kind of massive edifice. And it may be inevitable that we'll get to that point. So it may do some of the collapsing for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, that's the, yeah. Yeah, completely, well, that's the standard American life, right? And that's a mythology that's very deep and pervasive. And so it takes a lot to break through that. It's very unsettling, disconcerting at every step along the path that you just have to keep pushing and doing your thing. Thanks, thanks. I wanna try your beef. Yeah, thanks so much, Hillary.