 Hey everyone. Thanks for being here and thanks for having me. Is this all sound good? Cool. So awesome to be here. I had met Erlinda in San Diego about two years ago and that's how I ultimately ended up here. So tonight, hoping to inspire you to make some positive changes when it comes to the environment and the human race as a whole. So I'll give you a little bit of a background on some of the things that, some of the projects that I've been working on and what I've been doing. But I'll give you a little bit of a disclaimer although this room's probably pretty full of radical people. So it's less needed but I do a lot of very extreme things and the idea is to catch people's attention, get them to stop and self-reflect and think about things that they maybe have never thought about. So the things that I do often are very extreme but my message is actually one of moderation, of treating people with respect, treating the earth with respect. I just go about it in attention grabbing ways of doing it. So one of my projects is the food waste fiasco. So we waste about a third of all the food we produce around the world, about half of all the food we produce in the United States where I live. And so one of my campaigns I've dived into about 2,000 dumpsters across the United States and about 29 states and a handful in other countries like the UK, but mostly the United States and the idea is to create a visual that helps people understand how much food is being wasted. So this is about two days of dumpster diving in Madison, Wisconsin. You might have seen one of my videos that was called People Are Good. So I landed in Panama with just the clothes in my back and my passport, which was seven countries away from San Diego. So I landed there with the sandals on my feet, some shorts, a shirt, a jacket, a hat and my passport. And that's literally everything I had. And I had to make it back to San Diego and the idea was to put myself out there and show the world that, and by doing that, show that there's actually an incredible number of good people out there. And if you put yourself out there, people will help. Mainstream media often portrays the world as this very dangerous crime-ridden place, but the reality is that generally people are actually pretty good. So that turned into a TV show that was on Discovery Channel. I think it played here. But with that one I flew to Brazil and had to travel to Panama. One of my most recent projects was Trash Me. So this one was inspired by Morgan Spurlock's Super Sides Me, where he ate just McDonald's for 30 days. So I tried to look at some of the successful campaigns out there and how I can apply that to environmental activism. So I thought, okay, how can I do something that will really get people thinking about how much trash that they're creating? So here you don't create nearly as much trash as we do in the United States. It's still a fair amount, but nowhere near as much. In the United States the average person creates about four and a half pounds of trash per day, about two kilos. And we throw it in the garbage can and we never think about it again. Most people never think about it again. So I wanted to create a visual that shows people how much it really adds up to. So this is me for 30 days just living like the average American. I ate, shopped, and consumed just like the average American does. And I had a specially designed suit to hold every piece of trash that I created for the entire month. So this right here is actually about one third less trash than the average American creates in a month. So that's the idea of that. And then for the last 13 months I've been traveling the United States and parts of the world. This is every single possession that I own. So everything that I own is here with me tonight in the car. Hopefully it's still there. Because that's everything, even my birth certificate, passport, all of that stuff. So every possession I own. And again, so the things that I do are often pretty extreme. But the idea of this is that the average person in the United States and a lot of Europe has tens of thousands of possessions, most that we never use. And so by owning just 111 possessions it gets people to stop and think about how much they have. And really it's about getting people to think about am I happy? Am I healthy? And are there things that I could do to change my life to be happier and healthier, more purposeful, more passionate, and live in a way that's better for the earth? So those are a couple of my campaigns. And really my life is my campaign. Just leading by example and showing ways of doing things. But I definitely have not always been an environmentalist, an environmentally minded person, a conscious person. If we rewind about 10 years, this is me here on the left. I was a pretty drunk dude. I know Belgians get pretty drunk, but I rivaled everyone in the room. So this was a typical night drinking cheap beer out of plastic cups. And during college or university I was very passionate about drinking, women, material possessions, money. My goal was to be a millionaire by the time I was 30 years old. So very focused on that. My car, I would shine it for like two hours every Sunday spotless. And I had a part-time job which was basically just going to the library and talking to every girl in my path, telling her to come to my parties. So that's what I was doing during college. This is another typical night. This is what you call a duck bong. I don't know if it's made its way to Belgium, how it works. It's like a beer bong except you cut the beak and the foot off of an ornamental lawn duck, which is hollow. And then you fill it up with beer and that thing can fit like maybe five, six beers in it. You fill it up with vodka as well if you feel like it. So that was another typical night. And as I said, I spent, you know, 20, 30 hours a week pursuing women. And I wasn't always successful on this particular night. This is a Christmas tree that crossed my path when there was no woman that wanted to come home with me that night. So I have not always been very caring about the environment. I did go to school for biology with a chemistry minor and then aquatic science was my concentration. So I actually always cared about the environment and was, you know, when I was growing up fishing and out playing in the ponds and things like that. But the thing was I always felt like I was actually living an environmentally friendly life during this time. Because my mom had taught me the basic things like recycling, you know, shut off the water when you're not using it. I would occasionally get in a fight with my roommates about leaving the water running or the lights on. And so I was doing some of those things. But what happened was I realized in about 2011 after I had graduated university and it was about two years later, I started to watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of books. And I realized that for the most part my life was actually causing environmental and social destruction. I was doing a couple of things that were sort of good for the environment. But the reality was I realized by watching these documentaries, the food I was eating that was coming from factory farms, the gasoline that I was pumping into my car, all of the trash that I was creating, all the cheap products that I was buying at the big box markets. All of this stuff was causing environmental destruction both in my community but also because of globalization all the way on the other side of the world. But also it was causing social destruction by people working in really crappy conditions so I could have my $4 toaster and things like that. So at that point I really decided that I wanted to change my life from, you know, drunk dude to someone that was living for something beyond myself. And so a lot of people at this point feel a total sense of doom and gloom, like what can I do now? I mean at that time I was 25 years old, I'd been doing this whole way of life for quite a while and so you can have that feeling of what can I possibly do? But I actually at that point felt extremely empowered and the reason was these documentaries that I watched and these books that I was reading, they taught me how I could change my life. So what I did is I just made a long list of all the changes that I wanted to make and I hung it up in my kitchen in a really prominent place and then I taped a pen next to it so that each week, that pen would be there and my goal was to check off one thing each week. So some examples of things that I did early on. I mean at that time I was shopping at Walmart, filling up my cart with everything and using plastic bags and all that sort of stuff. So I was doing very little. So one of the big changes early on that I made was just starting to go to local businesses. This is a farmers market, just buying my food locally from the local farmers market or going to the local tool shop rather than the big Lowe's or Home Depot or Walmart or things like that. I changed my, you know, realized the food I was eating, changed my diet, started to eat more whole foods, more unpackaged processed stuff, and actually started to look at the ingredients on things and see like, whoa, this isn't even really food that I'm eating. So I started to eat actual food, switched to a more plant-based diet. And then the other thing is that when I started to really unravel my life, I started to realize that I had just been sold a whole lot of things. Sold this concept of what the human body needs to exist, what we need to be successful or happy or healthy. And so the story of stuff was an early short film that really inspired me. And they had another one called the story of cosmetics. And I learned that all these things I was using, like all of the shampoo, the conditioner, the face wash, the body wash, the deodorant, the listerine mouthwash, the lip balm, like all of these things, a lot of them were made with fossil fuel byproducts, petroleum byproducts. And I was just putting all this nasty stuff on me. And I just really started to think, wow, you know, human beings have existed for millions of years without this stuff. So it must be possible to live without it. So I put it all on my curb. And for the most part stopped using most of those things, but found natural alternatives for the things that I did want to continue to use. Got rid of plastics and things like that, got rid of my microwaves that actually cook real food. So I was just, I just continued making positive changes in my life for about two years. And what happened was the more positive changes I made, the more happy and healthy I became, and a lot of it wasn't something that I would necessarily realize, but there were all sorts of connections. Like, for example, when I got rid of my car and I no longer had a trunk, I was no longer able to fill it up with stuff, which meant I bought less stuff. There were all these ways that I didn't realize how one change would ripple into other changes as well. So after a year and a half or so of doing all of that, I decided that I really wanted to take sustainable living and bring the message out to people and do it in a way that was kind of fun, would get people excited and hopefully inspire people to make positive changes as well. So in 2013, I made my website for $100 online and made a Facebook page and decided I was going to be an adventure making, you know, doing adventures for the environment. So my first big adventure was called Off the Grid Across America, and I biked across the United States on a bamboo bicycle, and the idea was to bike from west coast to east coast, having no environmental impact whatsoever, no negative environmental impact. While deeply immersing in sustainable living and learning myself, because they say that it takes 21 days to form a habit, so I thought if I do this for 104 days, which is how long the ride was, then I'll really deeply form this habit. So I set rules for all of the basics of sustainable living. So the key things of sustainable living that we deal with every single day, food, water, energy, waste, transportation, are the things that every single one of us in this room deals with basically every day. We eat every day, we drink water every day, usually we have transportation if it's wherever we're going. We create waste every day, whether it's garbage or something out of our body, and then energy we're using electricity pretty much every day. So diving into these key things that a lot of us, like for me in the past, I never thought about in a given day. For food the rule was I could only eat local, organic, unpackaged food. So that meant food from whatever state that I was crossing through. Organic just meant that it didn't mean necessarily that it was certified, but it just came from the farmer and I talked to them. And then lastly unpackaged, so nothing wrapped in packaging. But I knew that this was going to be really hard because a lot of places that food just doesn't exist. So I had made one exception and that was that I could eat any food that was going to waste. And the reason being is, of course, if it's already in the garbage, the dumpster, what do you call it over here? Bin, yeah, bins. Huh? Volvak. I find your language quite funny. So if it's in the garbage the environmental impact has already happened. So if it's in the garbage I figured, that sounds weird, if it's in the garbage I might as well eat it, but that's what I was doing. So I found the first dumpster that I ever looked into, I was crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was about seven days in and I looked in there. I was really nervous at this time because I still had a pretty good sized ego at that time and for someone to know that I was eating out of the trash would have damaged that ego. But I had come up with this trip and I had to do it. So I looked inside the dumpster and sure enough it was filled with perfectly good food. And that particular dumpster, the first thing I ever ate was a still frozen half gallon of Moose Tracks ice cream. It was just melted a little bit around the edge of eight, like three quarters of it. I didn't have a spoon so I just used my sunglasses and they were quite sticky for a week or two. And so basically for the rest of the trip instead of going into the grocery store and asking, do you have anything local? Because the answer was, what do you mean? Most of the time they just had no clue where any of the food was from so I got tired of that. So instead 70% of my diet that summer ended up coming from the dumpster. It was about three pounds a day worth of food, 280 pounds. So for water the rule was I could only use natural bodies of water. So for the entire summer I couldn't have turned on a faucet, used a flush toilet, taken a shower, any way that we use water in a given day in the house I wasn't able to do. So instead I had to use natural bodies of water like lakes and rivers, purify the water myself, go swimming even in some pretty dirty ponds. But the exception again with that was that I could use water that was going to waste. So this is a fire hydrant in Brooklyn. The leak is right here. And so I lived off this fire hydrant for five days while I was in Brooklyn. I bathed in it, that's what I'm doing here. I went over there to brush my teeth, did my laundry in it. Used it for cooking, all of that. And so this one leak alone is waste, I timed it and it was wasting two gallons of water per minute. So that's about eight liters per minute. So what that means is that it's 770 gallons of water per day, which is enough to meet the drinking needs of 1,440 people just out of this one fire hydrant alone. So over the entire trip I only used 160 gallons of water, which is what the average person in the United States uses in about two days. For energy I could only use electricity that I created myself for the entire summer. So I wouldn't have been able to give this presentation. I wouldn't have been able to touch this or use any of this stuff. Couldn't turn on a light switch or use someone's refrigerator or open an electric garage door. Basically every way that electricity was involved in life I had to stop and think about it. And so there was the challenging ones like for example if I wanted to go into a store and there was only automatic doors I'd have to wait there until someone goes through the automatic door and then go in or if I was biking and it was night and an automatic light would go off I'd have to go over there and unscrew that light bulb and hope that they would figure it out like the next day why it's not going off. So it was a really deep immersion and what I learned is that my life is totally electrified at all points of my life basically I was consuming electricity. 70% or more of electricity in the United States is from fossil fuels so I was basically burning fossil fuels at most times but only by really deeply immersing into this was I really able to start understanding it more. So for example my exception with electricity was I had a computer and I had a cell phone and they were both charged by the solar panels but my exception was I could log on to the internet and I knew that by doing that I was probably using some electricity via the router probably using a little more electricity. But what I didn't know and that I learned on that trip I visited a business called Renewable Choice Energy in Boulder, Colorado and their job is to get companies like Facebook and Google to switch over their servers so the servers are the places that host the computers where all of the data is stored. So their job is to get them to switch over to solar and wind powered farms to produce the electricity for that. And so what they taught me was that when we're storing stuff on the cloud what the cloud really is is just someone else's computer somewhere else. And so what I learned is that every single time that I uploaded a blog or a YouTube video or a picture to Facebook that all of that was being stored somewhere else so every second of my life whether I was asleep or I was awake was actually burning electricity and so only by really deeply going into it was I able to start to understand more deeply my interaction with the earth. So for waste the rule was I had to carry every piece of garbage that I created all the way across the country with me. So if I had a candy bar in San Francisco that wrapper was coming all the way to Vermont with me and anyone who bikes which I'm guessing a lot of you do or if you've done long distance hiking you know like a little weight really adds up. So I tried really hard to create as little trash as I could and this is what I created in 104 days. So this is two pounds which is what the average American creates by about one o'clock in the afternoon on any given day. And then lastly for transportation the rule of course was that I could only bike or walk the entire way so even on my off days I couldn't use public transportation and so what I learned during this time which is a lesson that I'm sure a lot of people here in Belgium know you're far ahead of us when it comes to cycling but really I learned that cycling is for everyone. On that trip I met 60 and 70 year old women cycling all the way across the United States. I met 10 year olds cycling to school. I met people that were way larger than you ever would imagine would fit on a bike that were biking hundreds of miles or biking 30 miles back and forth between work and so I really learned on that on that trip that cycling is something that's accessible to so many people. So after that adventure I went back to San Diego and I was in my apartment that I had still and I still was still at this time after a couple of years still constantly picking up on ways that I was causing environmental destruction. So for example when I got back to San Diego one of the things that I learned is that I had my money in Chase bank account JP Morgan Chase I realized wow what's going on with my money well they invest in largely in fossil fuel infrastructure projects so here I am trying not to use fossil fuels but my money is being used to invest to make fossil fuels more accessible. So I had to take my money out of the big banks I had to take my money out of any investments like I learned that my mutual funds were invested in cigarettes and fossil fuels among other things so taking my money out of those and then by this time I was creating so little trash that I was able to take the garbage can out of my house. So then in 2015 in January it was New Year's Day I decided that I wanted to move out of my apartment and live in a tiny house so that I could live off the grid and not have any bills or any debt to my name so I went on to Craigslist New Year's Day and I was going to buy myself a little camper so that I could live in that while building a tiny house and I found this online it said it said it was $950 and I thought surely that must be a typo I mean $950 that's like one month's rent for a lot of people so I put $950 in my pocket well actually $1000 in my pocket and I biked up to this guy's house it was about six miles away and I said I wasn't going to buy it but I don't know why I had the $1000 in my pocket if I wasn't going to but I realized why it was only $950 because it was basically just a little wooden box on wheels it was five feet wide so this is actually larger this screen right here is larger than the actual size of the house because five feet wide is substantially shorter than this and also it was about five feet tall so I couldn't quite stand in it but I thought okay this is much smaller than I was intending to live in but I like to do extreme things and one of the things that really stuck out to me in the United States and in many parts of Europe the average house size has actually doubled in the last couple of decades so in the States it's gone from 1,500 square feet to 3,000 square feet so this is where house size has been going and at the same time happiness and health is just crashing so just trying to show that correlation between having a larger house and actually being healthier and happier a lot of times I see an opposite correlation with that so here I practiced sustainable living also to the extreme to really again do things that would really catch people's attention get the news to come out and report and be able to bring this stuff to people that maybe have never thought about any of these things before so for food I grew some of my own food you here in Belgium have plenty of rain I'm assuming but San Diego was a desert and it was in a mega drought so it wasn't exactly easy living off the grid being completely dependent on rainwater and growing food but one way I was able to do that is there's something called wicking bed gardens and how these work is you fill you create a little reservoir on the bottom and then you fill it through a pipe and then the water wicks up through the roots so that there's no evaporation at the top so by using tricks like that I was able to grow more food with less water so while I was there 100% my water came from harvesting rainwater and so the average American uses about 80 to 100 gallons of water per day the average European uses about 50 gallons of water per day and the average African uses about 2 to 5 gallons of water per day so I was using 2 to 5 gallons of water but the same as the average person in Africa and so a lot of people would think that this is most Americans would think that this is really extreme using so little water and one of the things that I've really learned over the last 5 years of really diving into sustainability is that everything is totally a matter of perspective so in this scenario for example an American would see that using just 2 to 5 gallons of water per day to be a really extreme thing but if you took someone from Africa that's been doing that their whole life and you brought them to the United States and they saw that we're using 100 gallons of water just pouring it down the drain to them that would be extreme so the more that I looked at all of these things really everything is always a matter of perspective and when you change your perspective you can totally change the world around you just simply by changing your mindset so I was able to live on 2 to 5 gallons of water per day by using it really wisely and really just not wasting any of it and then so for energy the rule was for energy I was just living completely off of solar there so the reason I was able to do that was by living pretty simply so another thing that I've really come across a lot is that a lot of people think that sustainable living or environmentally living is really something you can only do if you're wealthy or privileged to be able to do that and so there's elements of that where I understand where people are coming from and some truth to that but what I've learned is that the more that you simplify your life and live based on what you need and everything that you think you want the more accessible it becomes to everyone so for example with solar if I needed, if I had a huge refrigerator and a flat screen TV in every room and a hair dryer and all these electrical items then I wouldn't have been able to afford to live off the grid with just solar because I would have needed a 10 or 15 thousand dollar system but by simplifying my needs I was actually able to live just off of solar so this is funny we're talking about poop for the second time tonight after the first documentary that's great did you plan that? no? okay so this is actually my favorite thing to talk about and I feel actually very much the same with the short film that we just watched so one of the things that I've really learned is that anytime something is easy I've learned to stop and think why is this easy where is the ease where, basically what I've learned is that every time something is easy what that typically means is that the burden is being placed elsewhere so for an easy example for example everyone here has probably driven a car and you know that when you are driving a car imagine this is your ankle you're going zero miles per hour and then you just move your ankle slightly forward and all of a sudden you're going 60 miles per hour and if it's biking or walking you actually have to use energy to do that so where is the burden being placed in that scenario it's being placed on many things the extraction of fossil fuels causing oil spills there's 10,000 oil spills per year as an example it's climate change it's the emissions of all of the greenhouse gases it's the people that are getting sick working in those conditions the animals that are dealing with those sorts of things and that's an example of how the burden is being placed elsewhere so I started to think flushing the toilet okay where does it where does it really go what actually happens to my poop and pee and so the toilet is an example of one of those things that's really easy you just hit that lever and then it's gone so I started to think about what really happens to it and look into it and what I learned is that it's easy because the burden is being placed elsewhere so for example of the flush toilet you have all the chemicals that are used to clean the water before you poop in it and then all the chemicals that are used to clean the water again after you poop in it you have all of the electricity that's used so 20% of all electricity is used just to pump water so you have actually are using electricity indirectly to flush the toilet you have the pollution that happens from it because a lot of times it overflows into our lakes and rivers so all of these things were happening and then ultimately you have a waste product something that people have to deal with that's actually a problem so when I learned about what we call human manure as in human manure I realized that instead of waste becoming a problem it actually is a resource so one of the sayings in permaculture is that waste is just a resource out of place so rather than using 1.6 gallons of water each time which I obviously didn't have to flush I was able to turn into a valuable resource so this is the compost pile and so a lot of people would who here has ever pooped in a 5 gallon bucket couple some back there yeah so for me this was kind of the holy grail of sustainable living because it was taking responsibility for all of my actions and so a lot of people you know they have social media and so on there a lot of people said things like oh worry like first of all they would assume I was gonna die and if I wasn't gonna die I was gonna kill the entire city of San Diego and so one of the things about composting how it works is when you a compost pile whether it's human waste or not what you have is you have microorganisms like bacteria and then you have macro organisms like beetles and larvae and worms what they do is they're eating these all of the contents in there and one of the byproducts from all that is heat so a compost pile can heat up to about 160 degrees so all of the bacteria and the pathogens that are in our body are designed to live at about body temperature so once they're in the compost pile the heat that's created by all of that movement of the micro and macro organisms actually kills all of that off so it's really safe so I was at least able to tell people that that I am not indeed going to kill the city of San Diego but the thing that I didn't know about the time is that people still would say you know this guy's eating food grown off of poop and I was like yeah but I don't have a good response because I'm assuming you're not doing that but then I read a book called Wasteland when I was doing Trash Me this fall and I finally really learned where our poop goes as I looked into it deeper so like New York City for example where I was at the time what you have is you have million, well you have 8 million people or so there so about 8 million poops a day maybe more depending on how people are doing what's that anyway so so what happens is all of that all of that goes into the wastewater treatment plants but what you have going along with that the average person in the United States has like 13 prescription meds total I mean some people have zero, some people have 20 but it averages out to billions of prescription medications so you have all of that going with it but you also have all the things like the bleach and the Drano and things like that so all that's getting mixed together so what you have is an extremely toxic poop slurry that ends up with you know millions of poops mixed with all of this toxins but then you also have companies that are improperly disposing of things like motor oil and things like that that's even more toxic that then is bio digested in part and then what's left was turned into fertilizer and where that fertilizer went is it was shipped down to Texas on rail so this very still toxic fertilizer and then that was used to grow the food that people that were commenting on YouTube and Facebook saying you this guy eats food growing from poop well what I learned was at least I was eating off of fairly clean one person's not one million New Yorkers toxic sludge poop so for on to the next thing we're done with poop now might come up again though so for trash I created a little more trash than I did on my bike ride this was this would be about a normal two to four weeks worth of trash so it was a couple pounds a month usually and for transportation one of the things that I learned is that the average person in the states and it's similar over here in Europe spends about seven to nine thousand dollars per year on their vehicle so what that means is that the the normal kind of the median income is about fifty two thousand dollars a year so that means that the average person is working just is working January and February of every single year just to own their car so imagine what you could do for January and February of every single year instead of owning a car and that's the reason that I got rid of my car because growing up I thought that a car was freedom you know is how to get away from the parents be able to go wherever you wanted whenever you wanted but what I learned is that the car was actually the thing that was holding me back the most it's what tied me to having to work to pay that to pay the bills of the car so getting into the car was actually one of the most freeing things that I ever did in San Diego there's something called car to go which is an electric car share program that made it easier for me there because when I did need a car I could get one but a lot of cities have things like Zipcar and things like that how a car to go works is there's a little you have your own little a card here and then you touch it up to the window here and then you just get in it lets you in you put in a code and then you drive it away and then when you're done you just park it in a parking spot and it just fills you by the amount of time that you're in there but for the most part I would ride my bike the car to go is for mostly when I was feeling lazy the whole idea of a lot of this stuff is to create visuals that help people to understand things so talking about food waste as I was starting to dumpster dive I mentioned that early on I was pretty timid about talking about that not knowing what people would think about me and things like that but the thing was the more that I the more that I did it the more I realized that this issue is far more important than me so I started to talk about it and I was amazed that after a short period of time I realized that generally when you're passionate about something and when you're authentic about something what I found is that you don't lose friends you actually gain more friends and so the food waste was what ended up being something that I became really passionate about and I didn't realize going into it how important of an issue it is but I've learned that it's actually one of the most pressing environmental and social issues of our time so worldwide we throw away one third of all of the food we produce while over a billion people are in food poverty so we actually have enough food on earth to feed every single person not all of it's healthy food there's a lot of cheetos and things like that but we have enough food to feed the entire world in the United States we produce enough food to feed another entire American population while one in four Americans are food insecure so this is San Diego, California I was trying to come up with a way to really help people understand how much food is going to waste so in the United States it's $165 billion worth of food per year so to put that into perspective that's more than the budgets for every national park, every public library all the veterans healthcare, all the federal prisons the FBI and the FDA combined so it's a massive number but a lot of times it's still hard to wrap your head around numbers so this is two days worth of dumpster diving in San Diego, California and I mentioned you know when I was early on I was very timid about the idea of dumpster diving and one of the reasons was this girl here four years ago this was 2013 I was very much in love with her and she was very much like you know get away from her I'm not interested in you right now and so she was actually someone who told me don't tell anybody you're a dumpster diving so I kind of listened to her because I was just kind of taking her advice and so this is us four years later she obviously came around and what I learned is that you can eat your trash and have the girlfriend too so this project it was called Trash Me this is the one that I just finished up in September and as I said with so many of these things we just never think about it because the infrastructure is there that takes things away and then we never have to think about it again so the average American creates four and a half pounds of trash per day throws it in the garbage can and then where's it really go so the idea of this visual was to just really help people to think about these things on a daily basis so you have the frozen pizza here you have like the Starbucks cups and the red beer cups and the packaging from buying stuff the batteries the plastic bottles and the idea was just you know to create that association in people's mind and help people to actually think about that so the whole idea of all of this is to just really just get people to self reflect and think about what positive changes that they can make in their life and so these are some of the things that I think that I've been making over the last five years that I've found to be really beneficial and so just some of the suggestions for anyone who is inspired to make positive changes I broke these down into the basic aspects of sustainable living food water energy waste and transportation and each one of these is on my website there's a guide for all of these so food is for example robgreenfield.tv slash food and it goes more in depth there but so for food some of the things that are eating as much local food as possible so eating as much food that's grown in Belgium or if not Belgium more like Spain rather than New Zealand or Chile eating as much organic natural food as possible stuff that's not sprayed with pesticides unpackaged foods is there any grocery stores in here that sell unpackaged what are they called? Una so so going to stores like that where you can buy food you bring your own containers and fill them up whole foods so not the grocery store but just foods that grow foods that look basically like they did when they came from the earth so for example apples rather than applesauce or potatoes rather than potato chips growing your own food so life changing just planting a seed and actually seeing that turn into food and then eating it it can be a very life changing experience eating seasonal so stuff that grows that's growing in season so if it's middle of January and you see strawberries at the store thinking where are these strawberries actually from another one of the simplest things we can do with food is actually eat it so the average person waste about 25% of all of their food so simply eating the food rather than throwing it away and then another big one is eating a lot more fruits and vegetables nuts, seeds, grains and a lot less meat this actually is the one that causes the most environmental impact eating meat and animal products so that one actually should be more at the top which leads into the next one which is water so the average sorry to create one hamburger takes about 160 gallons or about 3,000 liters of water so to put that into perspective on my bike right across the country I went 104 days without showering so imagine 104 days without showering now imagine turning that into entire year which is what I did in one year of not showering that was the equivalency of six hamburgers worth of water so two months of showering is equivalent to one hamburger that's how much water it takes to produce meat so that's particularly beef that's the most most water intensive so other things you can do flush the toilet less if it's yellow let it mellow if it's brown flush it down do you have that saying here oh it's new I brought it to Belgium take shorter showers every minute off the shower is about two gallons grow food not lawns that's one of the most enjoyable things is rather than growing grass actually just growing food instead so using that water to grow food instead of grass harvesting rainwater some people make these things really complicated one thing about all of these things that I'm naming off they're all designed to decrease your environmental impact but the nice thing is they don't actually cost you money they're all designed to save you money which means that you can work less and spend more time doing the things that you want and then lastly besides the fact that most of these make the earth healthier they also make you healthier which is a nice thing about it so harvesting rainwater some people make that really complicated and they get like a $300 system and I did that when I first started harvesting rainwater but then I realized you literally just have to stick a bucket under your gutter and collect that water just as simple as that installing efficient faucets so you can get little faucet heads they cost about $3 they use 75% less water so switching those things out takes a couple of minutes and then you're saving a gallon and a half per minute they have it on planting native so planting things that naturally grow in the area installing gray water another thing that you can do really simple is for example put a 5 gallon bucket under your sink and unscrew the thing so it goes into the bucket and that's the simplest form of gray water switching to CFL or LED bulbs so LED bulbs they cost more but usually after 3 months to a year they've already paid for themselves in the amount of electricity that you're using finding an electricity-free alternative for example getting a juice press that's like a hand juice press rather than an electric one or investing in alternative energy you can put solar panels on your roof just in an energy co-op that uses the co-op money from people to create basically investing in an alternative energy co-op and then lastly nature so simply the more time that you're out in nature the less time that you're burning energy and then for waste the 5 Rs are refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle but one of the things that I never knew is that well even the 3 Rs reduce, reuse, recycle are actually in that order for a reason at first it's reduced then reuse and then lastly recycle so people like Bea Johnson or Lauren Singer some of the leaders of the zero waste movement and people that are practicing zero waste the idea isn't actually to recycle more it's actually to recycle less because recycling is a very energy intensive process that's why it's at the bottom carrying a reusable water bottle one of the big ones is saying no to disposable items so anything that you look at and you would say well I use this just one time and throw it away instead finding a reusable alternative for example carrying your own plate or bowl or utensils rather than disposables buying unpackaged food buying used stuff so what kind of websites do you have here for buying used stuff they have like Gumtree, FreeCycle in the UK do you have those here as well so buying used stuff which means no virgin materials are needed for you to have something repairing things so when something is broken or slightly unfunctioning fixing it rather than throwing it away and getting a new one donating stuff that you don't need anymore giving it to friends or a thrift shop rather than throwing it away buying quality stuff hosting and then for transportation which is the last one so one of the huge ones is going car free not owning a car joining a car share program if you still need to drive a car driving less is a simple one if you are going to own a car still just simply driving less makes a huge difference if you ride a bike which there's no point in even talking about this here I mean I saw like a million bikes but this is unique for me to see actually when I got here when I got into the train station that was the most bikes I've ever seen in my entire life in the United States if there's like six bikes in the same space it's like whoa, bikers so it's pretty cool to see what's going on here but so I will take the lesson from you on that one and be quiet about the biking public transportation which I think is pretty good in Belgium I mean even when you're complaining about public transportation just imagine being in the United States for a little while because it sucks over there and think about it that way living near the places that you spend your time so you spend less time banging your head or you know being depressed in the car and public transportation being closer to places and then simply walking and then one of the last ones is supporting environmental organizations supporting environmental non-profits so as far as philanthropy goes only 90% of all philanthropic donations go to environmental non-profits 97% goes elsewhere so donating to non-profits that are working on environmental issues goes a huge way and the other thing is just volunteering with them just getting involved a lot of times that's much that can be much more beneficial than money to them just getting involved and volunteering so there's a really awesome non-profit which was started by Nagonia the clothing company about 10 years ago and so if you own a business you can join 1% for the planet and your company gives 1% of all of the revenue to environmental non-profits you donate directly to the non-profits not to 1% and they certify it like Rainforest Alliance but just a month ago they started that for individuals so now we can donate 1% to different non-profits and again it doesn't go to them certify you as a 1% for the planet donor so just supporting environmental non-profits by volunteering or donating and so that's everything and we have plenty of time for questions right so who has questions forwarding oh voting so the question is is there a reason why I don't put voting in the things that you can do no I think that voting is a tool in the arsenal of making positive changes but it's not my it's definitely not my focus by any means so I think especially on the local level voting can be extremely effective by I don't know what the political situation is like here but I know that voting at the local level is where often it can be the most beneficial for your community I didn't I enough people vote and aren't doing these things too so actually the biggest thing that any of us can do to make the largest environmental impact is to eat a lot less meat and eat a lot more fruits and a lot more plants so one thing is that as I said many times I do a lot of very extreme things but when it comes to all of this my message is very much moderation it's not go 100% zero waste maybe it's not be 100% vegan maybe it's not never get into a car but it's do things more moderately so eating a lot more plant based is the largest thing that we can do environmentally really I mean that's kind of that would be the biggest one plus often you know most people eat way too much of it and they become a lot healthier without it so you start to feel better too yeah so everything's been a transitional process so back in 2011 I started a marketing company and so I was at that time still fairly money oriented and so my first campaign the bike ride across the country I had money from running a marketing company so my earlier projects cost more money because the more you have the more you spend but during this whole time I've been transitioning away from having a lot of money so currently my yearly annual salary cap is $5,000 a year to keep myself as minimally involved with money so now my adventures are funded by being really simple adventures you can bike across the country living simply without without spending a penny doing that for example dumpster diving for a lot of my food wherever I stay I always just stay with friends or family I carry a tent so I can camp outside never you know never staying in hotels and so by focusing on the very basic needs in life like this year I'm doing a project where I'm not buying anything new or being given anything new for an entire year so the less you need the easier and so now with my campaigns they are mostly about how you can live more simply so as I've learned early on I had that money from the marketing company but over time they've become less and less necessary to have money and also largely by living a life that's about relationships because the more that the thing is everyone in this room if we work together we can meet most every single one of each other's needs so by sharing stuff sharing resources sharing time sharing skills there's so much more that we can accomplish for example with my videos a lot of times I work with videographers who want to make a positive difference through their films so and I'm able to do something where they're going to get you know good viewership on it and feel good about it so can I answer the question cool yeah so I still fly I try to minimize my flying I've flown twice or in the last 12 months or so or maybe three times and so what I'm doing now is that whenever I'm doing so for me personally the more that I find the more that I give to others the more that I live in the service of others often the more my basic needs are met which has been one of the really positive things in life is seeing that when you put yourself out there and you help others that they're more likely to help you as well so as far as flying my current trips like for example this this Europe tour that I'm doing so I'm doing a TEDx talk in Paris and so they covered my flight to get here so that's how so currently I only fly when I'm invited somewhere to come do a campaign or speaking or something like that dumpster diving so the question is it legal to dumpster dive in the state so it's not illegal but it's not something people want most people don't want you in their dumpsters so in very few places it's actually illegal but they can give you a trespassing ticket or something like that and how it basically works is the dumpster is technically on their property so but the ticket's like $200 so the way I look at it is I mean you can get a thousand dollars for the food going dumpster diving in one night so in a year you can collect $10,000 of the food and if you get a ticket for $200 well that ticket pretty well paid for itself so you can get in trouble for dumpster diving but it's extremely rare rare enough where two years ago I put out a blog saying that if anybody gets arrested for dumpster diving in the United States I'll get them out of jail I'll pay all of their fees and I'll bring media attention and it's only happened once in the last two years and I did that and the police ran away with their tail between their legs and they didn't get any fines or they got off without any problem and now they're back to dumpster diving in their town so if you get caught for dumpster diving and you get arrested in Belgium that applies to everyone in this room just let me know we'll take care of ya it's the dumpster diving defense fund is what it's called dumpster divers defense fund lock in the dumpsters I don't recommend breaking dumpsters open but if you are crafty you might be able to squeeze in that I endorse squeezing in you might need to just get a really small person for that another thing is that actually a lot of people when you know crafty dumpster divers they find someone who works at the store and they get the combination lock from them I know a lot of that people do that I've never personally done that because I just ride my back to the next dumpster but yeah and also just as far as questions go don't be hesitant to ask any question whatsoever I live a 99.99% transparent life so money, any of those sorts of things I'm happy to talk about if it's something that would be beneficial in any way yeah well underwear wise mine will be good for the whole year so did you say underwear? I've been wearing the same underwear for like 2 years now or something like that I think they'll last another couple of years yeah so I'm the current camp the project that I'm doing this year is just buying nothing new so I can buy second hand anything it's just about not having virgin materials being used for me so I can buy anything used I can also just not wear underwear which is in the ideal days just you know yeah other questions? is that a hand up or is that just a roof-fundling okay I'm just traveling through yeah I'm here for 2 days how do I survive? well so as far as how I survive which so I do some of the public speaking I do I get paid for that so as I said my salary cap is $5,000 a year so I have money by living simply to meet my very basic needs and because I live very simply $5,000 goes a really long way so again it's all about community you know we can like you know all of us have a floor that someone else can sleep on for example rather than burning $100 on a hotel so even when places want to pay to put me up in a hotel room I'm just like why would I do that instead donate the money to a non-profit and I'll just sleep on someone's couch other questions? none? yeah I've only got about 3 years left I'm just planning on you know my life going so my goal is to continue doing this you know basically until I die but in one not necessarily in the exact same fashion so one of my next big projects that I'm really excited about is for one year I'm going to grow forage or hunt every single thing that I eat down to the salt to the herbs so that's going to be a really great project for really learning to you know I believe that the earth has the resources we need to exist in a way that isn't based around a monetary system and where we can be much healthier and happier and that's a project that I'm really looking forward to and then down the line within the next so a couple ways a couple things this summer I'm doing a bike ride across the country from New York City to Washington and we're planting gardens across the country it's called Good Deeds on Bikes and anyone is totally welcome to join so far there's about 40 or so riders starting in New York and going all the way to Seattle and the nice thing is it's 82 days so it fits exactly into your 90 day visa so if you feel like biking across the country this summer it's going to be an awesome crew of people who are going to be visiting farms and permaculture centers and all sorts of stuff like that and then ultimately so that's robgreenfield.tv slash green riders tour if you do want to come and you can come for all of it or even just parts of it and then ultimately my long term plan is to develop a simple living institute of sorts where people can come learn all of these things in person and so in 2018 I'll be doing that small scale with my urban garden project so if you're in Orlando in 2018 you can come have some veggies with me yeah well my earlier dream was to have a lot of money have a nice house have a nice car get married have kids I grew up really low income my mom made $15,000 a year and there was four of us kids so it was pretty minimal amount so as a young person I my dream was to be normal you know like that that tour sort of like American dream just to live that sort of normal lifestyle so that was my dream for at least a decade or more but as I started to wake up to the world and that there's so much more my dream is exactly what I'm doing yeah my dream was to live a free life where I can be a positive impact on the world well so well two things with that so well my girlfriend's coming on the next bike ride yeah she doesn't dump I but she stands next to the dumpster and I pass the food to her we make a really good team well my girlfriend has become we started to live a more so two years ago my girlfriend was living in an apartment she still had a lot of bills and so as we've been together two years and a quarter she's been starting to wrap her head around like for example but when I got rid of my cell phone she realized oh I could maybe get rid of my cell phone but it still took her about two years before she ever decided to do that so she got rid of her car so yeah my girlfriend lives a similar life and then one of the really we about done okay cool one of the really nice things that I've seen is that a lot of people have a very gloomy outlook on the world and there's plenty of good reason to but one of the nice things that I've seen is that everywhere I've gone I've been to 49 states just not Alaska about 40 something countries and everywhere I go it's just so many people who have woken up to what's going on on earth and who are making positive changes millions of people are becoming more conscious about these things and everywhere I go there's more community bike programs there's more community gardens there's more people that are just taking the time to feed people who don't have enough food and everywhere I go there's more and more of this happening so that's actually one of the things he said is that a lot of people like me and everybody has their own different way of doing things but yeah there are real success to me is living a life that's not always but living a life full of happiness health and freedom and living in a way that's beneficial to the community and myself so dying knowing that I made a positive impact on the world in whatever way that would be and that ideally when I die a mountain lion eats me and nobody has to deal with my body and I have no stuff that would be success is that when I die I'm gone I've left a positive path and I don't have a mess for people to clean up when I'm gone that's partial success and success for me is clean water fresh air healthy food the more of that that can be created and I guess maybe taking down some major corporations would be huge success as well so what was it? ecou.org what is it? okay oh sure yeah you're welcome to put me on it oh sure yeah of course you know I don't own anything that I do yeah absolutely question was how would I do everything I do with kids I wouldn't I would live yeah okay so much so the good news about all of this and I didn't mention this is but all of these things are things that can be done whether we're 80 years old or 10 years old whether we have kids or we don't have kids it's just a matter of applying it to our situation so one of the good ways I always try to look at life is that you always have to look at the scenario and then apply it best to your life so all of these things are ways that a human being does not by nature create piles of trash that's only because that's the system that we are choosing to be a part of so for example with children one of the big ones is using disposable diapers rather than disposable diapers as an example what's up well the thing is the reason that thanks for coming translator so here is my best suggestion speak to the people who are raising kids I'm personally not having kids Bea Johnson has a book called Zero Waste Home she has two kids and Oliver Trash fits into a mason jar none of this is easy yeah but the system is against every single thing that I talked about tonight so the system is generally stacked against doing any of this stuff because the system is designed to keep us buying and consuming and buying and consuming so it's easy to look at any of these things and say it's impossible but it does come down to dedication it does come down to putting a lot of time into these things so maybe for example raising kids it's more you might have to totally reframe your way of thinking but I would really recommend talking to the parents who raise kids and who are living proof that it's totally possible to live a waste free life while living a very purposeful life they can do it a lot better so I personally chose not to have children because I saw the challenges that that entailed and thought that there was personally better ways that I could spend more time than raising a kid personally any other questions I don't have any particular any particular title basically I just eat in a way where I try to cause as little harm to the earth harm to my body harm to my community so it depends on the scenario and that's one of the things that to me existing on earth is about adapting so for example you know for me personally and sometimes vegans I think really really dislike me because I'm not because you know going plant based is one of the biggest positive changes you can make but for example like when I was in Florida I was camping for ten days I caught fish and I ate fish that was to me much more environmentally friendly than going to the grocery store and buying beans that were raised you know maybe across the other side of the country I eat minimal meat and I for the another thing like I was driving down the road in Totness UK last week and I saw a pheasant on the side of the road and I was like I like to move animals off the side of the road so they can you know they can integrate into the soil and rest in peace and I picked it up and it was still warm it had just died within the last probably half hour or so and it wasn't bloody at all so I took it home and I cooked it you know I think that was the number of really mad vegans at me that day but the way I looked at it is that was a great usage of resources and rather than letting it die on the side of the road so that's my way of doing things as far as food goes do I see a question over here yeah how angry do I get is the question actually minimally angry typically I find that like saying positive it's a couple of things one well how many people in the room like want to make the world a better place most everyone so strategically I've realized that being angry is not going to do it being pissed off and yelling at people is rarely going to make them want to change because what happens is when you are angry with someone they get defensive and once someone is defensive they put that wall up there's no there's a wall between you and you're not going to be able to affect that positive change because I'm a logical and rational thinker I know that I have to be positive to create positive change because you create what you are so there's that aspect just remembering staying positive is what's more likely to make people make positive changes like Cheryl's mom for example is my girlfriend Cheryl's mom super unconscious about any of this stuff has no desire to do it whatsoever three years of Cheryl just being not like hounding her with it but by Cheryl being happier and healthier over the last five years now her mom is saying man Cheryl's so happy and healthy what is she doing and now she's starting to do those things more so that's a big part of it and then another thing is that I personally believe that life is precious like all lives whether it's anyone in this room whether it's a duck that's flying over even an ant I believe that all life is precious I believe that water and air all of these things are precious and so the way I look at life is if each day I can just have one positive impact whether it's making one person happier and healthier or maybe it's just cleaning up a duck pond so there's less trash in it by knowing that I made a life better that way I can stay positive so just by focusing on the smalls I'm saying think globally act locally so by focusing on the positive impact you can make in your community to the people and to the animals around you that's also how I stay positive so you want to think at the big level but make sure that you're focusing on yourself and the other thing is focusing on yourself so all of this stuff the aim is to not be selfish but it's not to be selfless so by doing things that make yourself happier and healthier it makes the world happier typically as well so a lot of these things are extremely rewarding volunteering at nonprofits doing random acts of kindness growing food all of these things that are better for the earth are also extremely rewarding so by focusing on living a rewarding life that you actually enjoy also you're less likely to be pissed off so yeah yeah so the question is do I aspire to inspire companies to change I do you know I think so I work on a bottom up you know approach rather than the top down approach because the top down approach will never be successful without the bottom up as well I believe because you need the people to rise up to make positive changes but at the same time when a corporation when a corporation makes a positive change that's something that can be so massive more massive than all of us combined making positive changes today so but my way of doing that is is realizing that everybody who works at a corporation is a human being so simply by reaching human beings you can get them to hopefully light little fires inside of them and have them make positive changes but I also do speak at corporations I spoke at Deloitte which is like insurance firm in what consultant firm I think they are they the devil or are they alright anyone know devil okay so I spoke there yesterday and then I spoke at 2e group the day before that which is like one of the larger travel agencies around so definitely speak at corporations other questions last one did you say cool yeah that's not off topic at all because the fact that we're so stuck to our screens is to me one of the largest contributing factors to the destruction of society and and the earth so I struggle with that as well I spent a lot of time on screens hence the glossy eyes a little bit today because I was up last night working on the screen till about 2 2 30 in the morning so for me I think that one of the most important things we can do is spend less time on screens and so that doesn't mean that you can't be on it at all but it means moderation so what I when I'm at my happiest what I do is I have a about I have a set of sort of guidelines one is that I turn off all electronics at least one hour before bed and then I wait at least a half hour after waking up before turning on any electronics so no rolling out of bed and looking right at the emails so waiting a half hour instead going outside taking a breath of fresh air stretching for five minutes maybe drink drinking a glass of water and then limiting it to eight hours per day five days a week so 40 hours per week on the screen which is still a lot but by limiting it to eight hours a day you actually have 16 hours possibly where you're actually off of it and then another big one you know a life changing thing for me is you know I haven't had a cell phone for about two years and I didn't think almost thought it was impossible to live without a cell phone but what happened what I did is when I decided to get rid of my cell phone I put it first into a drawer at my house and said I wouldn't use it for just one month and that way I was able to like not jump fully off the deep end and see how it was and it totally changed my life but before that the thing I did was just for 24 hours I turned my phone off and left it at home and actually left my house without a cell phone which was the first time I had done that basically since having a cell phone besides like camping but actually being out in San Diego without one so yeah those are some of my tips there's awesome applications you can use like there's websites that once you use the internet for a certain amount of time all those sites will be blocked until the next day there's also Trump blocker that blocks him completely from your internet which is really a way to stay not pissed off and then you can block your Facebook news feed like I recently unfollowed everyone in my news feed and when I decide I want to follow people I'm going to individually choose what so a big thing is being conscious of what the information we consume so okay maybe you want to be on top of politics but doesn't mean you need to have it infiltrating your head every 15 minutes so consciously choosing to consume information rather than just consuming whatever happens across your screen at that moment so that's some of my thoughts on that how do you really just do the same probably talk about it like a lot of people have never even thought of the idea of leaving their phone at home for 24 hours so talk to your friend and say hey let's go out for 24 hours let's go out for 6 hours today without our phones let's go on an adventure without our phones so starting with small steps would be you know I would say leading by example and coming up with fun ways to get your friends involved in doing that sort of thing so we got zero more questions right zero more questions yeah so but what time is it sing nothing I'll never sing um yeah my name's really greenfield I guess and we'll take your question what is it hmm I yeah the question was do I feel like I'm creating a religion no because all of this is don't don't listen to just one of my things is don't just listen to anybody who tells you something go online do the research and make sure that you're making positive making changes for the reason so do I feel like I'm making religion no I just feel like I'm speaking some common sense to the world and uh ideally just what you figured me out who wants to join my cult what's the initiation for the cult never mind cancel that yeah big up big up um people say by the way that I look like Jesus Christ um I think it's time for a little break you know drink something get out there you know get some fresh air get some fire but then stick around cause we still have some funky fresh stuff stuff coming up okay so yeah I can I can I try to okay so stay around stay cool stay chill kapao you know kapao is now Rob Greenfield is now we're all now the future is now