 Hello everybody and welcome to living your value series with Lauren Singer and Rob Greenfield today. Ronald Kloss for these two, they are really inspiring. So you know package brief. So this literally came from her brain and thank you guys for joining us here. Where as your way to play style to help you live your life more sustainably and on that vein, Rob is also leading the way you chose all how to live more sustainably and more just and just better people in general. So really excited for your conversation. Afterwards everything's very personal. And thank you guys so much for being here. Cool. Thanks Joy. So we've done a lot of events and talks here but the last one that we did, I did something different which first I was wondering if people would respond to it in a way that would make them feel uncomfortable but I later learned that it was actually quite nice so you have to bear with me. It was in honor of one of our vendors and one of my best friends who passed about a month ago Vanessa Blay, her and her two children were tragically killed in a car accident in California. She made the Becky blue deodorant. There might be a few left actually here. But what I did was take a moment of silence for all of us to just take a second, think about someone that we love. If you guys were with your family for the holidays we saw things that you don't love about your family because being a real family sometimes does that to us but I think it's important especially during the holidays, during the stress of work if any of you guys work in retail or e-com or anything you might be really overwhelmed so I think just to take a moment, think about maybe something beautiful that happened today and think about someone and some love to someone who maybe you don't get to see all the time but you care about deeply. So just close our eyes and take a quick second. So Rob, Rob and I met how many years ago now? Three years and two months. Three years and two months ago. I don't know how you remember that, that's amazing. I have to do this too. And when I actually, so I met you three years two months ago but I knew about you earlier because before I even started my first company the Simply Co. I had read an article about you that was something along the lines of I didn't shower for a year, these are the lessons I learned and after reading about that I was like whoa this guy is amazing and kind of interesting like how did you not shower and I kind of started reading and I learned that you really didn't, you didn't not bathe but you swam in rivers and you just kind of let the earth take care of your personal hygiene and I actually thought it was really beautiful and I found myself being incredibly envious of this year that you had to kind of celebrate nature and how amazing it could be by just connecting with it. And then we connected for the first time, was the first person when you came to my house? Was that it? Have we met before then? I think it was then, 2016? Yeah, 2016. And we had the most amazing time which we'll get into later Before any of that, I wanted to, before I kind of get into all the fun that we had when we connected I wanted you to kind of give a brief synopsis of who you are and your background kind of what led you to start all of your adventures. Sure, I also want to tell about how I learned about Lauren I was sitting at home and I don't know where I was at the time and my friend Dane sent me, my best friend Dane sent me a message and he said, it was mind-body green story about all your trash at that time it fit into a jar for maybe two years at that time, it was a while ago and my friend Dane said, this girl sounds a lot like you It was around the same time when I did the story of Lessons Learned From You without showering and he said that over and I'm like, you two sound exactly like so it's really nice to be back So, and also this is, I just finished my year of growing and foraging on my food and this is my first beer, so it's cheers of being here with all of you Cheers! It's from Toast which is an awesome company that makes it out of wasted bread Cheers! Cheers! Okay. So just to play about, where are you from? Sure. What was your childhood like? Yeah, so I grew up in Northern Wisconsin and I grew up in a small town in Ashland, population 8,620 and my passion as a kid was just catching frogs and turtles and going out fishing, like all I wanted to do was be outside and even when I wasn't outside I was reading National Geographic and basically yearning of seeing the world I read books like Dr. Seuss and I just wanted to go to these far off places like Fiji and I just always had a deep desire to learn all the animals and so that was kind of my childhood but also the other central theme of my childhood is that we were very low income and that was my mom and me and three siblings in a two bedroom house that was just chipping off and we had an old rusty car and basically my whole childhood I was just embarrassed about being poor and I just basically was living, most of my childhood was kind of like a lie just didn't want people to know who I really was and so I think that's what led me to the next years which was my goal was to be a millionaire by the time I was 30 and I just wanted to fit in with the American dream to have nice things and to be able to impress people and not just impress people but also just to fit in and also just not be different and so that's I guess how I would sum up some of the beginning of my life and then 2011 is when I woke up and decided that realized basically that everything that I was doing the car that I was driving, the garbage that I was making was destroying everything that I loved as a kid Can you talk about what sparked that because your life now is quite the contrast from being a millionaire at 30 so what was the moment or was there a singular moment or an event or anything that made you change the trajectory of your life Yeah, it changed pretty drastically because my goal was to be a millionaire and now my goal is to never have more than $15,000 of possessions and money total and right now everything I own is in a backpack right back there and I have about $6,000 to my name so opposite of being a millionaire sort of actually the opposite would be sort of being extremely in debt I'm not in debt so yeah Anyway, so what was the question again? So yeah, was there a moment that sparked what was your light bulb? So basically for me all I did is I started to watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of books Food Inc. was one of the earliest documentaries that I watched Zeitgeist was another early one and I read a lot of books Michael Pollan was an early wake up and I just realized that my life was a couple of things it was a lie that had been sold to me by corporate America that most of the things that I was doing was just doing because I had bought I had bought their advertising like for example early on Old Spice Deodorant I realized humans have existed for millions of years without Old Spice Could I possibly need Old Spice to fit into society? Do I actually need these things? All the chemicals I was putting on my body and my food all the ways that I was spewing chemicals and toxins into the world and then also just realizing that my actions weren't in line with my beliefs because I always considered myself sort of environmentally friendly because I recycled I had energy efficient bulbs I shut out the water when I wasn't using it like my mom had taught me the basic things so I always considered myself environmentally friendly but then I realized that actually 99% of what I was doing was environmentally destructive and almost nothing I was doing or nothing at all was actually really environmentally friendly because it was all that I just bought into American consumers And so what were the first steps that you started to take when you realized that your values weren't in line with your day-to-day actions? I just realized that we're talking about exactly what the title of this talk is I'm happy we got there Yeah, what were the first things that you did? Because I think for a lot of people they realize, okay maybe I'm not living in alignment with my values but what can I do if I'm just one person and I think what you really embody is doing something and really doing something So what were the first steps that you took to start to align with what you cared about? Yeah, so my thing was that I wanted to drastically and radically transform my life fairly quickly but I also knew that I couldn't do it overnight I'm generally pretty logical and rational and I was deep in the system I had seven credit cards and I had a card, I had maybe 30 or so different bills and I had debt and I had a three bedroom apartment that I rented I was in the system, not as much as others I didn't have a mortgage, for example So I wanted to radically transform my life but I knew that it would take some time So what I did is I basically made a list of 100 ways that I wanted to change and then my goal was that I was just going to check off one positive thing per week or better and as far as the first things I have of visual I remember taking everything toxic out of my bathroom and putting it on the curb and then saying and that was the story of stuff was one of my earliest wake-ups and there's also the story of cosmetics which is another video they put out and I remember just putting all that on the curb and saying I'm either going to not replace it because maybe I don't need it at all or if I'm going to bring something into my house it's going to be something that makes sense to put on my body So that was a really early one I was also dating someone who was practicing traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture and massage therapy and herbalism at the time so that was another reason that I kind of started there and then food like at the time I went to Walmart for all of my food it always shipped around the country or around the world and it was all in plastic and then in two plastic bags and I pretty quickly stopped going to Walmart then I went to Trader Joe's and then I realized that's a scam basically as far as thinking it's environmentally friendly and then transitioning to eating more at the local farmers market another one was riding my bike a lot more I had a beach cruiser at the time so I actually decided I was going to get a bike that I could make a distance on and where were you living at the time? That was San Diego and so stopped driving my cars and watching and then also just slowly but surely got into my garbage can that was a big goal of mine was to not have garbage cans in the house much back then it seemed radical but you know over time it's just normal so I want to talk about that a little bit the word radical because I think there's not many people that would disagree to say that the things that you do are quite radical and quite extremist and I've gotten that myself about going zero waste like you go all the way you never half-ass anything and I guess do you have a reason for why you tackle these projects or these goals in the way that you do and can you speak to some of the projects that you've done from not showering to you know what you just embarked on or just completed I guess So well I do radical things for a few reasons one because I've always been a radical human being it's just the reality it's like deep inside my bones before I was radically stupid basically I just I like to do stupid things that were you know that would get people's attention like in college just like running into a fence as hard as I could and seeing if I could break it you know really stupid things when I was drinking so I've always liked to test the limits and now I choose to test purposeful limits and so there's the reality that I just like to do extreme things and test things now the other thing is that I realized at that time not only that I want to change my life but I wanted to give people an opportunity to change their life and I was always decent about not wanting to tell anybody what to do but just give an alternative you know when in a half hour news segment there's 18 short segments and 15 of them are negative and only three are positive and then in between that's all commercials telling you that if you want to be happy or healthy you need to buy things I just wanted to put out another narrative and give people another option so it was that I wanted to show people another way and then of course I had to compete with mainstream media and so I had to do things that would actually get my message out there because if I just did a little bit if I did things in a really moderate way like you know I started a shop at the farmers market I shower last week yeah that wouldn't be on mainstream media so that was the other strategic aspect of it and then the other thing the other big part of it is that you know you've been called like you said extreme and people generally consider me extreme and I consider myself extreme but the reality is that I'm actually not extreme the only reason that I'm extreme is because I'm being compared to what is already an extreme society so you know the United States has 5% of the world's population but uses 25% of the world's resources so that by definition is extreme the whole world not even close to the whole world could do that and so what I am is I'm sort of the counterbalance to extreme western consumerism and so I only have to go to these extremes because the extreme is already there so yeah can you speak to some of the headlines that you've created from some of the things that you've taken on so we spoke about having showered in a year these are the lessons I learned and actually maybe talk about some of the lessons that you learn from the trashed food and growing a lot of food I'm really curious actually because we haven't caught up in a while so this is kind of more for me than it is for all of you well my first project was to bike across the United States and try to have no negative environmental impact so that meant setting basic ground rules for all of the key aspects of sustainable living the things that we deal with every single day which I consider those to be food water, energy, waste and transportation these are things that every single one of us deals with every single day whether we realize it or not so for example for waste every piece of garbage that I created I had to carry across the United States with me so if I had a candy bar in San Francisco then I had to bike with that plastic all the way to Vermont and so on that trip I made just two pounds of trash in 104 days which is what the average person in the United States makes by about one or two in the afternoon on any given day so on that trip I was doing sort of extreme things all you know about food, water, energy, waste, transportation that was my first project the other one was Trash Me which was right here in New York City and that was a month of living like the average American putting all ethics and morals aside for the month and eating, consuming like the average person but I had to wear every piece of trash that I created did everybody see that? yeah we had it here for a little while it was awesome how did you feel after that? what was the lesson that you learned from there? it's interesting in a way I felt better I have to say it was the most enjoyable month of my entire life not because I was consuming but just because it worked so well I mean basically everywhere that I went for the whole month in New York City I was being chased down the streets by people like it's the trash man people were excited and what makes me what fulfills me is seeing people's wheels turning inside their head and people would walk up to me and it was awesome of all of your trash fitting and your jar so I always try to look for visual ways to help people understand important issues so the idea was I wanted people to look at me and see themselves without me having to tell them anything without me having to tell anyone that they were doing anything wrong because I don't necessarily believe in wrong or right anyway but having to tell anybody that well basically have to tell them anything and so what would happen is people would walk up to me in the street and they would say you know what are you doing and I would just say I'm just living like the average American for a month and I'm wearing all my trash and then they would just look at me and sometimes they would actually say oh that's mean you know sometimes you would see they realize that other times they'd actually say it and so that's you know what my I try to do things in a way that are in people's faces without you know being in their face I think it was a really amazing project for me because like my whole life is focused around talking about trash and how not to make so much trash but actually feeling the weight of your completed suit was unbelievable like guys this shit was really heavy like we needed I think it was like three people to carry it up the stairs like the day we installed it I think I fell like four times it was unbelievable you truly don't realize the this sheer volume of the shit that people create every single day it was I think it was a really important project for me and I'm sure it was for so many other people okay and then the next project after that was what well another project that I just finished was a year of growing and foraging all my food so for one year no grocery stores no restaurants, no drink at a bar nothing package, nothing process nothing shift long distances no beer no even going to the package free shop to get my food or even the farmers market everything that I ate for the year was either from my gardens or that I went out and foraged whether it was out in the countryside or right in the cities that I was in and where was this taking place so that was in Orlando Florida that's right then for the last two years what was that foraging for food in Orlando Florida because I think of Orlando Florida and I think of Disney World and I think of universal studios and maybe like cotton candy but I definitely don't think of sustenance for a year and a half of life so what were the types of things that you found there? well the thing is that's generally we think of what we know and if we aren't thinking about what might be edible around us then we'll walk past those things our entire life without ever thinking about it and the amazing thing is that food is growing everywhere even in New York City I was here three years ago and I was in the park and I saw this guy just picking things out of the tree eating them and I said what are you doing so these are cherries and mulberries now the time I didn't know what they were these were just little cherries little pin cherries or black cherries and so there's food even growing all over New York City it's basically growing everywhere but what I did in Orlando is I turned frontyards into gardens so when I landed in Orlando I had no land I didn't have a place to stay yet and what I did is I found someone and they let me stay in the guest bedroom and I turned the front yard into a garden and then I turned six yards into gardens while I was there and that's where I got all my food that I grew and just front yards that you could walk by and they were all anybody could pick from them there was no fence or anything there were the types of people that opened up their homes and their property and their possessions to you so you could success most of the people who watch me on YouTube how did you come did you recall for them before you started off Stringy or I guess like what community is so important right for you it's a major part of how you live so how are you finding and connecting these amazing people well so that was partially a joke because a lot of the people that I end up doing things with have never heard about me I'm just some crazy guy who wants to build a garden and sometimes they're like that sounds good but you're barefoot I'm usually not wearing a shirt and wearing short shorts around I'm not sure about this guy some people like it enough people do there's 7 billion people so you don't need to please everyone to have plenty of people on your side but so some of it is through these days I think the word is social capital some people base their life around having enough money to get everything they need and that's what I used to do I used to design my life around having enough money so that I would be able to buy whatever experience or product or even sometimes friendship that I might have wanted through my material possessions and the experiences that I could give or share with them so today instead of it being through money I look at it through the reality that we live in a time where together we can pretty much meet all of each other's needs outside of the globalized industrialized systems we live in a very privileged time where just with this group together if we just came up with all of our skills we can pretty much work together to accomplish most of what we need to and so I just kind of look at that and I try to bring that together and it's always about what do you want in life that you don't have what do I want in life that I don't have that's a blank lawn with grass and they want food and I don't have a lawn but I know how to grow food so we can combine our resources to create what we both want okay and then after so where does your tiny house come in that was before yeah so when I lived in San Diego I lived in a 50 square foot tiny house that you built yourself that was one that I bought on Craigslist and it was $950 and it was a I call it a tiny house but it was basically a glorified dog house or like a kids playpen on wheels or basically a box but it was designed to look really nice not a cardboard box but like a wood box that had nice lines that made it look like a little cabin so I bought that for $950 and I lived off the grid in Orlando or in San Diego that was 2015 and 2016 so I built a tiny house out of 99% secondhand materials for about $1300 or did you find a great thing for that house it was mostly left over materials from construction projects the 2x4s and plywood and all of that and how did you know how to build a house I did it I met a guy who knows how to build a house how did you meet that guy he was the self of someone who had been doing photography for the past few years who just liked my work and had been following me and then somehow she wrapped me to build my house for me well it was him without him it wouldn't have worked he was a carpenter but it was 40 different people came together and built the house and basically it looks like a shed 1x10 very simple I am very much a person who doesn't practice altruism in any way some people look at what I'm doing and you might think it is altruistic but I don't actually do it it's not that again how can we meet each other's needs so these 40 people who came out to volunteer to build my tiny house none of them were there for the most part because they were like let's help wrap up they were there because there was an opportunity to learn about tiny houses they wanted to meet like-minded people they maybe just they wanted to make some friends in a new experience or just have a new experience so by making building my house a community event everyone who came out got to benefit from that and at the same time of course I got to benefit because it helped me put together my house I also just want to say I did a lot of the it's not like people just came out and built my house I just slaved away it took 250 hours or so to build so it was a lot of work and you weren't always living there on low yeah so last time you and I met I was with my partner Cheryl at the time and we were building that tiny house together but it took them too long so she left no it did take me too long that's not why she left and it worked out great because had we finished the tiny house we were together for four years and we spent a beautiful four years together it was actually eight because we were involved for four years before before that four years that we were actually in a partnership and we just we always had the belief that if a relationship doesn't serve the individual to the best interest and the partnership to the best interest then there's absolutely nothing wrong with letting those paths go in two different directions and we were at a point where there were things that she wanted in life that were different than me and that I wanted in life that were different than her and we decided that we just weren't going to be together anymore as a in a partnership but she's still I guess my best friend in the world maybe top three best friends and timing wise it worked out great though because had we built the house then we would have been in a tricky situation because we would have had that tiny house together but she basically was left like three weeks before I started building it what it was like being in a relationship and going through all of the different journeys that you went through because I know for myself you know I've been living a zero wage lifestyle for eight years and I've been so lucky to have incredible partners that throughout the journey have supported me in very different and important ways from being counterparts to what I was doing to being people that were absorbing what I was doing and incorporating into their own lives and you know it's a beautiful dance right when you're in a partnership and I think a lot of people have come to me and maybe have come to you saying I'm in this partnership and I have these values but my partner doesn't share those values do you have instances where you experienced that in your partnership and I guess what advice would you give to somebody who for instance wants to reduce their waste or wants to throw their own food but maybe their partner or their family or their friends don't align with it yeah well a couple of things I would say that one thing that people are very afraid to do is leave behind relationships that aren't right just for example my dad unfortunately was not a good person to have in my life for a while he was you know just extremely negative paranoid about things he was as unsupported as he could get always telling me not to do almost everything that I was trying to do and so after years of trying I eventually said to him after many pleadings of let's make things work eventually I said okay well then we can't be friends anymore we can't hang out anymore and so for two years he wasn't a part of my life I had to block his number because it was a toxic relationship and then after two years I don't remember how it happened but at least it started to talk to him again and now it's worked out now we have a much better relationship and so obviously that's kind of a complicated thing but one of the main things is if a relationship isn't providing true value for two people then I think that we need to be able to walk away from that especially if it's a really toxic relationship or an abusive relationship or something like that and that is where it's not that and it's just a matter of friendship one of the easiest things is just accepting them for who they are ideally they can accept you for who you are as well but acceptance starts with ourselves we can't control anyone else so in the past I focused on the people around me like Cheryl's mom I remember I was from Cheryl's family I remember being uneasy because I'd want them to do zero waste type things and even around my aunt Louise I remember we'd go grocery shopping together and she would double plastic bag if you're watching Louise, hello I love you so and there was a toxicness in my relationships because there was an uneasiness where they might be nervous around me I was going to berate them a little bit or I would be uneasy because I wanted to say something but I was holding back and there was a time maybe three years ago that I just said, look there's 7 billion people under it it doesn't matter to me if my mom or my sister or my friends change because there's literally tens of millions of people right now who want to change like this room is an example of that the fact that package free is so successful there's millions of people around the world who want to change so what I decided to do is put my energy into people who are right there who want the help not put 10 times more energy into people who don't want your energy and the amazing thing that happens is when you put energy into people who don't really want it you're sapped and you lose energy but when you put energy into people who want it it actually increases your energy so by giving up the desire to affect any one individual person that's what allows me to basically walk around completely care free it doesn't matter what any individual does as long as overall my actions are helping move people into the direction one of my favorite quotes ever is when you're no longer able to change a situation you're challenged to change yourself and I think you embody that instead of trying to change a whole system you've embodied values you believe in and as such you've influenced and inspired so many people to take on the challenge of thinking about other ways that they can live and I think you've inspired so many people and I'm definitely one of them when we met I want to talk about what we did when we were together for the first time because it was so amazing for me so I too grew up with a single mother and we definitely she was raising me and it was a really hard time for her and we did a lot of things like furniture she would find in the trash and you introduced me to the concept of dumpster diving and the first time that we ever did it was like it was electrifying and as someone that for you like you love thrills, you love excitement and you love like rebellious things right dumpster diving was the coolest shit ever you felt like you were doing something so dangerous and risky and illegal but actually it's kind of illegal but you're actually just like picking through trash to find food that's perfectly edible and can you kind of talk about the night that we went and your experiences because for me that was like earth shattering but for you that was just like a typical dive can you talk about what it's like we were just walking back to your place and we walked past the bagel shop and Cheryl was there and I said let's look inside these garbage bags I bet you there's a bunch of bagels there and for me I was like holy shit we're breaking the law you weren't sure if you wanted to do it because there's also the social stigma and I went through the same thing it's like for example you're running a business do you want to be known as a dumpster diver or even dumpster diving is a cool term do you want to be known as someone who eats garbage and eats out of the trash I'd be like I'm the wrong person to ask that question did you not mind good so I started dumpster diving in 2013 and I did it because I was biking across the country that first time and the rule was I could only eat local organic untimely time that I ever dove into a dumpster it was me and my friend who was biking across the country we went around back we looked in the dumpster and sure enough it was full of food the first thing that I ever ate was a half gallon of ice cream that was still frozen just melted a little bit around the edges spooned with me that day but I had my sunglasses and I used those half box three quarters of a box right there on the spot and for me that was a big moment I saw how much food was going to waste and it's perfectly good food and so since then in 2013 that has definitely been an essential part of my life is eating food that would otherwise go to waste what's the name of the trash art walker she has an Instagram account here I saw her getting tons of fresh sushi from a sushi place they put it out 10 minutes later you go get it it's still perfectly good so I'm definitely going to get some sushi while I'm here but anyway it's just let me know how that goes honestly great, yeah okay yeah so what are some other interesting things that you found because I've seen people find CVS in writing perfectly good makeup and thousands of dollars of stuff so what are some other treasures that you found you just find everything I mean for me as biking across the country the best thing you can possibly find is a case of organic peanut butter more peanut butter as a cyclist that's one of the greatest foods so if you can find organic wheat bread and peanut butter that's perfect another great thing is I found fresh pressed juice on ice in the dumpster where they threw away ice and then they threw away juice and it just happened to land right on top of the ice so it was still ice cold yeah I mean I've dived into about 2,000 dumpsters and there's nothing shocking as far as what individually it is what's shocking is just that it's consistently I've done it in 30 states and everywhere you go rural big cities we're throwing away insane amounts of perfectly good food and for anyone here does anyone want to go dumpster by thing yeah right okay do you have any top tips for what to look for whilst dumpster diving well so New York City is a little bit of a different place then you're actually in a great place for dumpster diving because as you said it's illegal in some places but in New York City when they put bags on the street then it's public domain so dumpster diving isn't you don't actually dumpster dive here you just open bags on a curve and that's completely legal in cities where you're actually going into the dumpster and they're property and they're parking lot and then it's technically not legal but if you are really in the dumpster or if you want to go dumpster diving I have a guide with basically everything you could possibly want to know and that's just at robgreenfield.tv slash dumpster diving and I think I'll be here for a week I'll have to do a dumpster diving outing so if I do that alright I'll post it or should we set it right now I know that Thursday where is he coming? Wednesday night I know I could do Wednesday or Friday or Saturday but I'll post it on my page that way I'll come up with a night alright I'll come up with a night and hopefully there's not more than 30 people not like 500 people there's a group Fregan I think their website is fregan.info and they do dumpster diving tours I'm not sure if they're still active I went on one with them 40 years ago so if you don't end up getting to come out fregan.info and they don't I don't know if they do weekly or monthly dumpster diving tours and they also have tons of information on their website when we went we found like 100 bagels that I kept in my freezer for I don't know like a good 6 months they were like really spicy flavors and anytime someone come over and just like make them a bagel and they eat it and I feel like I got that from the trash it was amazing but I think it really opened their eyes to like wait this is just a bagel and it's still perfectly good so one of the last things that I want to ask you about or talk to you about is one of the reasons why I find you so amazing I mean like you do so many incredible things but you're one of the only active men talking about sustainability which to me is like amazing because you're incredible but also such a bummer why do you think that is and clearly like you know this is probably like the most men we've ever had at one of our events so thank you for being you and kind of expanding the demographic of our space but why do you think that is and how do we get more men to feel comfortable getting involved with sustainability you're right it is mostly women 80 or so percent and yeah you know as far as in the zero waste movement and much of the sustainability sustainability movement it's you know two thirds to three quarters women there are parts of the environmental movement that are far more you know male oriented you know in permaculture for example it's the opposite just out of regional permaculture gathering in Florida and I actually had a woman come up to me afterwards and she said you know your resource list is almost all men and I was like ah there aren't any students she said I realized it so then I had to go and do research and I found that there were actually a lot of women I just didn't I just hadn't put enough energy into finding them so then I added that to my all of them to my resource list and I realized there's a lot more but um as far as zero waste and this element of sustainability it is so much more female than male and I think one reason is I mean I generally feel like women care more than men about these issues like that's just uh I mean I don't know if that's sexist or anything to say but that's generally what I've seen and you see that like throughout cultures where the women are the nurturers and the protectors and so that kind of goes into as well possibly um and then also you know I'm happy to say that I ascended manliness like this idea of manliness like where manliness is sports or old spies steal you into like this certain way like in American culture it's even hugging like most of my a lot of my men friends don't hug because they're worried about the feminine aspect of that and so I think that is another thing is that a lot of this plays more into the feminine than the masculine and a lot of men are it's crazy to say but a lot of men are so afraid of expressing emotions and such even crying it's weird because for me crying is just part of life I love a lot of men crying but yeah I mean to me all those things are it's uncertain that our culture has pigeonholed men into this protective way where they fear expressing their emotions but it's such a real thing and I think that all plays in so as far as getting more men involved one it's a societal structure that creates it in the first place it's of course hard to change societal structures but I think that's what both you and I are all about it's not zero waste, zero waste is what we talk about but really when we get into the deeper part of the conversation it's going way back to the foundation of how our entire structure of society is set up so did that answer the question? I don't know if I have two more quick questions for you and then I'm really excited to open it up to all of you guys I'm sure you have many interesting questions for this incredible human two things first is what or who is inspiring you right now I ask you to see this question but I love to point people towards other people that inspire amazing people so what's inspiring we're motivating you, we're exciting you right now and how can people learn about it? Well I like this guy on this weekend in Swope, Virginia his name is Joel Salatin polyface farm regenerative agriculture and I just spent the weekend with him and he's one of the most legit human beings out there and I think one of the biggest problems with our environmental movement today is that most issues have been made very black and white and it's so much of it's boiled down into viral Instagram posts yesterday I was swiping through Instagram at however I got into environment section and honestly I would say 95% of it was just garbage I mean so much inaccurate information and so much polarization that doesn't tell the real story and this guy I respect people so much in the environmental movement who actually go far deeper than the headlines and these basic black and white ideas of what is the right or wrong or the only way to do it and and so he's one person that really inspires you know of him? When I was in college I decided to be read all about him he was one of the first people approaching he was one of the people that showed me that the world that we see isn't the only world we have to live in so visit his farm see where your food is really coming from because that's another really big thing people think when they think of vegan food or their vegetables they just think of these glorious places where everything is fine but go to any place where almost any of the produce that whole foods down the street is coming from and you will not be there and think oh this is glorious you'll probably be like oh this is a big old factory farm they just have different chemicals that they spray but so anyway regenerative agriculture and that's actually one of the reasons that I think you and I connected so well because that first night when we were talking I quickly got the I quickly saw like okay she actually really knows the story starts with your your jar but you understand the intricacies of the zero waste movement you know extremely well which is what I really respect about you okay last question which is kind of a hard question so if you don't have an answer that is okay but I like to ask this question because it's interesting for me if you could play God for a day and make one change that you believe would affect the system in the most impactful way what would you do okay I'll answer that another I want to mention that's Manona Ladoop she's one of my biggest inspirations right now and she has been known as hemp farm over in Minnesota so she's trying to really use hemp as a way to create regeneration everything about her I mean she's been doing it for like 40 years and as far as the change I think it would be bringing common sense back you know it's all about our minds like the way that we approach the world and the way that we think about things and if we approach the world with basic common sense which the reality of common sense is it's no longer common when I meet people with common sense I'm like yeah because our society and our structures are actually designed to remove our common sense because if they want us to buy everything you don't need to have common sense to earn some money to buy things so I do think that the structures actually benefit from people having less common sense and more just following the system so yeah just common sense if everybody had common sense that would change everything far deeper than anyone individual change because everybody would then question you would just then question everything common sense, common pain oh the I need to read that it's actually really good okay so now I will stop talking so you can start talking I'd first like to give you a mini round of applause before the big round of applause so just a quick thank you we'll open it up to questions from you guys we also have questions from the interwebs so we'll be taking both if anyone has a question and no question is too crazy in fact I encourage the craziest ones the craziest question wins the craziest question wins and I'll decide what first ask me a crazy question I don't know how crazy it is but as far as dumpster goes have there ever been any like negative experiences with it or is it ever a crap shoot where you're not sure whether the integrity of the food is quite there yeah and I should also say don't now feel like you can only ask crazy questions every question is a good question so common sense is actually the number one thing with dumpster diving just like you dump common sense with anything you buy in the store you have to apply common sense to your food now unfortunately we have lost food common sense looking at dates and deciding whether food is still good is not that's not common sense and that's one of the main reasons that we're wasting you know up to half of our food because we've removed common sense and put dates on there instead but so once you get in touch with food you understand the basic biology of how things work for example if you have a bloated package a bloated package is the gas is being created by bacteria eating things breaking it down and fermenting and creating gas now when you want that to happen that's great that's what creates you know beer and kombucha and thousands of different fermented foods but when you don't have the right set up for that like a hot dumpster and milk that's not the kind of fermentation you want so if you find bloated a bloated package in the dumpster then that's something you generally don't want to eat because that's fermented so basically the three things are first you look at it and if it looks good then you proceed then you smell it and then if it smells good you proceed and then if it smells good then you taste it and if it tastes good then you're eating it now you swallow now one of the rules of foraging one of the number one rule of foraging which people call dumpster diving urban foraging but the number one rule of foraging for food is you only eat something if you're 100% sure of what it is and the other thing is you don't eat a bunch of it right away you taste it you try out new foods before eating tons of it because you don't know if you could be allergic so the same if you start tripping I've never tripped out dumpster food like you gotta say I'm sorry I feel like this one beer got I'm a little drunk now it's my first time being a little drunk in like three years I'm trying to keep this up next question do we have anything there's one more here hi I have questions kind of for both of you but I'm a zero waste practitioner but also trying to educate people around it and I started doing a few workshops in New York City but I'm curious what kind of advice we get from a zero waste entrepreneur and how to kind of grow my presence and my business if you will wanna go first you go first because I actually feel like you've done such an amazing job at creating so many different types of communities online well I guess the first thing that comes to mind is is just be yourself you know be the real thing you know people today are so attracted to authenticness is that a word? authenticity authenticity people so attracted to authenticity in this world that's so dominated by politicians who are so inauthentic that's a word right we're gonna just go in there and so that's another weird thing about today is that you look at the spectrum of who is out there and you see I would say a smaller percentage of people are actually truly authentic and so I mean that would just be my number one suggestion to be authentic another one is do what you're really passionate about like do what you wake up and want to do if you're doing that it's not work that's I'm sure Lauren's working like 15 hours a day a lot of times and that's because she really loves this and it's what she's passionate about I don't recommend becoming an environmentalist choosing a topic that you don't really love and so those would be a couple of that I perfectly agree with that I was thinking about this today actually and I think things that have really helped me because to your point I work a lot and there are some days where I'm so tired or don't sleep and the only thing that really keeps me going is my why why am I doing this what's my North Star which my North Star is creating large scale I sleep a dream about it and if you don't know why you're doing something then you maybe should choose something else or think deeply about it so what is your North Star what is the mission of what you're trying to do and what are you trying to accomplish because I think it's important to think about when shit hits the fan and business doesn't go so well which it won't some days like why don't you stay motivated and my North Star is what keeps me inspired how long did it take how long did it take you to like build your like a while to build what like build your empire I mean I've been passionate about this for I mean I've been talking about trash for 8 8 years now and to my dad's dismay he thought it was going to be something very different but I don't know like I think for me this feels like the beginning and I started by saying no to like a conventional job that made me cry every day and that I think was like the start and I think I'm like we're just scratching the surface of what we're doing here and I think if I keep my eye on like my North Star large scale positive environmental change then like every decision that I made is make is centered around that and I think from there like who knows and I have no empire so I can't speak I do want to say that I'm just loving this conversation because like a lot of people would come to something like this and they would think about we're not talking about the individual ways because you're a waste because you don't need to know the individual ways when you look at the foundation of life it's all about questioning your values and living in alignment with your values and once you decide you're going to live in alignment with your values everything else is it's kind of it's still challenging we're still all running across the grain of the side every day but when you're just choosing to live with your values it makes everything a lot a lot easier I think if you think about what you want think about what your values are you're focused on your North Star your body tells you when you're doing something misalignment with that and weird but that's how I live my life and when something doesn't feel good I know that it's not in alignment with my greater goal I don't mean to sound like so handsome but it's worked for me so far so I think to your point, what are your values and are you living them? Ask those two questions how do you travel? I travel sometimes I walk, sometimes I bike sometimes I get in cars, sometimes I take train sometimes I fly occasionally a boat or a canoe so generally if I can I try to not get into planes so it's been two years since I've currently flown but next month I'll be starting a trip around the world where I will be flying and I'll do that across oceans but once I get to Europe for example I'll be doing a speaking tour and then I'll be taking trains, buses and boats around to get here from Florida I caught a ride to Atlanta I was someone who was already going that way then I took the train to Virginia then I took a bus to DC and then a bus here we're very glad you did me too any other questions? I volunteer with City Harvest whenever I can so they're very 9 to 5 Monday through Friday is when they need volunteers usually at work are there any other food rescue organizations that you know that need volunteers? my favorite in the city because I've been using their service for so long is growing I see they always need volunteers at the compost pickup or the clothing like the textile pickup me too it's actually pretty shitty that I've never volunteered and I probably should because I've been dropping my compost off for so long so they're one, thank you to see yeah I'm sure there's a lot of different food rescue programs around I can't think of any off the top of my head but I know there's other smaller ones that's Lucy Biggers yeah she helped me spread my message many times she's at now this so thank you Lucy if you don't follow Lucy follow her you won't work I find myself pretty frustrated like you know trying to you know be more like aligned with zero waste values and also like be in a society that's like more or less on the same page and I understand that we're all like you know progressing in our own ways and also like I agree like we shouldn't waste so much energy on people who you know wouldn't really do it even if there were 24-7 but for those who are already like in a position where other people look up to them for them to be more environment sustainable but yet there's some things like how would you recommend to like approach them about that because like I don't like the most direct ways fall in the mouth but that may not be effective how do you approach people who are leaders who are doing things is that the question well I would generally say well you're going to just have to have some guts probably to do that it's hard to call out people who are sort of leaders or are leaders call them out and like don't judge them or like be negative towards them and like be loving like if there are already leaders they've done something that inspires someone and maybe say like approach them like you approach someone you love and say like I love what you do and this is something I care about like would you like to have a conversation about it yeah I would yeah approach with passion yeah I mean the thing is like even if the person is totally off base if you don't come at them with compassion then it's unlikely you're going to get anywhere so generally I would say approach with compassion and a genuine desire if you strategically actually want to try to get the conversation going because the standard response of someone when they're told that they're doing something wrong whether they're a leader or not is to become defensive so like you know as far as the environmental movement goes I think one of the most important things that we can all do is become psychologists or understand basic psychology because it's all about how people perceive things like that's the way that I always approach things for example wearing my trash around for a month I had to ask how will people perceive this if the answer was that everybody would be turned off then I wouldn't have done it so I try to always design everything that I do around perception so as far as approaching leaders you can't put them on the defense because then they're more likely to go the opposite direction so approaching with compassion is a really important thing and also approaching with the knowledge that's the other thing if you want to be able to explain yourself it's best to know what you're talking about so again this applies to any situation but coming to them with information to help like a lot of times people will if you don't have sort of solutions or alternatives then they'll often write you off and just say if you can't say well what should that person do then they'll often just write you off so that's another thing like sharing the alternatives so I don't know those are a couple things that come to mind for me and then I guess one other thing to mention is most of our leaders do need to be called out in one form or another but also remember that everybody is a hypocrite every single person in this room is a hypocrite I'm a hypocrite the arm is a hypocrite we're all hypocrites it's a matter of reducing our hypocrisy and the problem is if we want to live in society and we want to see positive change in humanity in our environmental situation then we all are required to be hypocrites because if you want to be a part of the change you can't go and live the perfect life so you know realizing that I mean like for example Al Gore flies around the world in private jets personally for me that's something I think you could do a far better job at and not do that so at least so much but there are things that like where leaders really do need to be called out and so but the one thing that I was going to say is that it is important to remember to also look at their situation because I mean just for me personally I can say like I have to always make trade-offs so I mean generally I've done a really good job of living out my values but like for example next year I'm going to fly around the world and I'm going to emit more carbon in that flight that was the traveling around the world than probably 95% of human beings like to call me sustainable would be a complete fallacy in reality so what I have to do is I have to look at the situation and I have to say is what I'm doing worth it to make the impact that is needed so some people would call this you know a transitional society so you can't just look at the current situation to decide which right if we're trying to shift society so if I want to shift society I have to look strategically at everything that I can do and say okay there's a negative impact on this but will it in a sense offset itself so for example wearing my trash for a month some people were very mad of me what are you doing creating garbage for a month like you should be zero waste but by creating garbage for that month and creating that visual thousands and thousands of people stopped creating so much garbage so it was completely worthwhile so I don't know I guess that's the other thing is you know I think understanding compassion and understanding are two central tenants to my life so also trying to be understanding but again I'm not down at all that people do need to be called out because most of us are ultimately pretty delusional so we need to be called out to get out of those delusions so yeah I'll take one I think let's get a temperature check how many do people want one question clap your hand if you just want one more question nobody's going to be affected I want to be respectful of the room and I know you all have places to be but also it's snowing so I just want to give a little bit of gratitude to all of you who are being here in the snow so two more questions is that sound good two more questions I think we have one from cyberspace the internet so the people on instagram live a couple people have asked do you get overwhelmed by the future in the state of the planet do you think we can still create change how do you deal with that anxiety that's a great question okay so I rarely get anxiety as to the state of the world or our future and I think that I'm somewhat of an exception in that way I think what's the word they say like eco-anxiety or something like that I'm not up with this I actually don't even really know how to use instagram to figure it out I don't really know how to do the stories thing but I think Lucy was trying to help me out with that I'm making a story right now I'm making a story about my inability to story so okay so here's why I don't suffer from anxiety and depression the reason is is because for me personally for one I don't take responsibility for the world I take responsibility for my own actions I want to make the positive change in the life that I have but I don't take responsibility for the 7 billion I'm just one person and I can really only take responsibility for myself so that's you know essential to my life the other thing is it doesn't matter what's going to happen 300 years 400 years 500 years from now if you design your life around having a living in a way that's beneficial to the earth your community and yourself now what I do is I look at how can I improve quality of life around me now and be living in a way where if we do have a future I'm positively contributing towards that because basically I just think that life matters like I value my life Lauren's life the life of every person in this room every species you know 4 to 20 million species that there are on earth value life so if I can improve the quality of life around me and not destroy life around me then that's a life worth lived and that's something that I can generally control and the other thing is that we live in very complicated times we don't know what the world's going to be like in 11 years in 11 years it's kind of unfathomable we really don't know so but there are things that we do know and we do know ways that we can make a positive impact impact now to improve quality of life now and do it in a way that doesn't strip quality of life elsewhere or the future I don't know if you guys want to high five like every time he speaks but I do one more question does anyone have a question in the room okay last question why do you cap your cash why do I cap my cash or put it down those exact words so why do I basically I've committed to making less than the federal poverty threshold for life as long as I'm alive and no way am I trying to simulate poverty in fact a little bit of a segue I always like to just acknowledge my privilege because a lot of what I'm doing I can do because of the privilege that I have dumpster diving you know because I'm white and because I'm pretty eloquent if the police show up they're not really going to do something but homeless people are much more likely to get arrested traveling the world with no money western passport white not being you know running from a dangerous situation that's why I can easily do that biking across the country you know so many of the things that I do I can do out of a place of privilege which kind of ties into that question I can choose to live with very little money because it's a choice but if you are just trying to get by day to day then to try to earn as little as possible is not really something that's going to work so some people would call this voluntary simplicity so the reason that I choose to live with a minimal amount of money is because I'm trying as much as possible to live in a more just and sustainable way so in a world where you know one percent of the population has what like 50 percent of the finances I want to stand out you know as the opposite of that I want to live in a way that is more equal with the general population and so it's a way of restricting myself from getting too much like I could be making a lot of money off of what I'm doing the problem is is that often when you have the when you're making a lot of money it can get in the way like there's some people who do a great job at making money plugging it into the places that matter but the reality is that most people when they get a lot of money then they rationalize that flight to Polynesia for vacation or or things like that so it's a way to just force you to live my values if I don't have money I gotta connect with my community that's another thing I am dependent upon humanity because I can't I can't meet my own needs I need other people to meet my needs another thing about that is that's a way to encourage other people to depend on each other because the only societies that I've seen that are somewhat sustainable or are sustainable are societies where people are actually dependent upon their neighbors so currently today in a monetized society where I can just pay for everything I want you don't have to understand your actions and how they affect the world around you but when you don't have money you actually have to understand your relationships and how things get to you so that's just a few there's obviously a lot to it but that's a bit of an idea of why I minimize the amount of money I spend $1 a day living on one have you guys seen that? that's such an incredible film Chris is helpful they're the guys who filmed trashy actually and they've got a new documentary coming out in March do they do a solemn neighbor with Angelina Jolie I think she was associated I might be lying but that's a really interesting documentary on the value of a dollar in different places in the world I just want to say thank you so much for being here I think the radiance that you created and how inspiring you are and how you decided to challenge what the world looks like I know it's motivated me and so many people in our community so many times so I'm grateful that you decided to come here and share your life with us so behalf of me and the team and everyone here thank you guys for being here and thank you for being here I'm so happy I'm sorry for opening up this space to have this and for inspiring me to come to New York and for everything she's doing and for opening up a second shop right? and thank you all for being here because I do nothing without all of you all of us to inspire and last thing we're trying to do more talks with more inspiring people so if any of you know of anyone who you would like to introduce to the Zero Waste Package for your community this woman who's hiding behind here is Joy Joy's in the red so you can't miss her please share their name with Joy we would love to invite them to have a conversation thank you everyone so good so good okay we got time to meet up yeah I'm so happy to see you yeah me too this is just a second I'm so happy I'm so happy I'm so happy I'm so happy I'm so happy I'm so happy I'm so happy yeah it's still going