all right well it's very nice to be here with you
all this is actually the third time i've come to stevens point to talk 2016 2019 and here we are
again so thank you uh to steven's point for having me back so often i feel like it's a sign that we
probably have some things in common how many of you were at either of those talks all right not
many that's ideal because i really don't like saying the same thing twice to anybody i find
that to be kind of boring so i'm glad that most of you haven't been before um so and uh thanks to
dave for putting this on and to the sustainability department and yeah so so glad that we're here
in this room together rather than on zoom it is so much more enjoyable um so i'm going
to share some of my projects with you and some of you have seen some of my work before
that kenzie mentioned and some of you will be the absolute first time um so i'm going to
start by introducing some of those projects and one of my goals tonight is to share uh simple
things that you can do to get involved in living living a life where your actions are in alignment
with your beliefs so um i guess before getting started i'll give one little disclaimer and that
is that i take on sort of extreme endeavors i do things that are really designed to catch people's
attention catch mainstream media's attention um and get people to stop and self-reflect
in these times that we live in so the purpose of these is not that other people do by any means
exactly what i do it's not that other people uh need to do extreme things it's really just
about you know competing with the multi-billion dollar advertising budgets to get these
other messages out there and show people how far you can go at the same time um so if
you know just remember that tonight not to get overwhelmed by like uh you know how much you can
do but starting with what you actually can do now so one of my campaigns is called the
food waste fiasco so i've dived into a couple thousand dumpsters across the united
states a good number of them in wisconsin from the mississippi over to lake michigan and the
reason why is we waste about half of all the food that we produce in the united states while
about one in seven americans are food insecure so i wanted to create a visual that would
help people to understand this issue so what you see here is just two days worth
of dumpster diving in madison wisconsin at mostly grocery store dumpsters and this is
just a sampling of the type of food that we find so i could tell you that in the united states
the amount of food we waste is equivalent to the budgets for every national park public library the
fbi the fda and veterans healthcare combined it's a massive number but it's hard to really picture
that so that's the idea is to create visuals that help us to understand the big picture and then
plug into solutions what we can do about it another one of my projects was to bike across
the united states on a bicycle made out of bamboo and i've done that three times actually and the
first time was the intention was to try to live out sustainable living to the extreme um when i
was like most of your age i actually wasn't into sustainable living yet so i had to dive into it
and like really immerse myself once i started to get into it um so this was uh 2013 and the idea
was to bicycle across the united states off the grid and try to use as little resources as i
possibly could in another one of my projects i wanted to create a different narrative to one
that you commonly will see if you turn on the mainstream news and that is that the world is this
place to fear that everybody outside of the united states everybody who's not american is someone
to to fear or to to compete with or something of that sorts so for a lot of my experience when you
turn on the mainstream media there is this idea that the world is this dangerous violent place
and i haven't watched tv too much lately but for a while it was you know when i was it was like
mexico is this bad place it's this dangerous place um so i want i i just i didn't think that was true
and i wanted to show people so what i did is i i i flew to panama with no money with
just the clothes on my back and passport and i had to travel home on the kindness of others
through central america through mexico back to the united states and uh 37 days about 4 000 miles of
traveling and the only words that i could mutter out of my mouth when i got home were just people
are good that is that was the main central feeling that i experienced through the whole trip one of
my projects was called trash me this was 2016. and we we live in a time where our waste systems
have made it very convenient for us to waste and not see it for most of us garbage is out of sight
out of mind we simply put it into the garbage can the garbage truck comes and picks it up and we
really don't have to think about it again but what you start to learn when you look into our waste
systems there's this idea that we're throwing things away but you realize there is no a way this
is one earth and everywhere we put our garbage is somewhere there's another name for the landfill
and that's just organized littering just because we decided to put it out of this one space doesn't
mean it's not basically littering this earth so the idea of this project was inspired by
morgan spurlock's super size me where he ate only mcdonald's for 30 days and i said well
how can i get this that obviously works so well and use this concept to apply to getting uh us
to think about how much waste we create and so i decided instead of eating mcdonald's for 30 days
i would live like the average u.s american eat shop consume like the average person but the
catch was is that i had to wear every single piece of garbage that i created so this is day
about 30 of the project the average american u.s american creates about four and a half
pounds of garbage per day which is 135 pounds per month this is about 87 pounds of garbage
that i was wearing on my body for that month and then over the years one of my big
focuses has been on simplifying my life so this picture here is 2019 and this was after eight
years of working on downsizing and simplifying my life i got myself down to just 44 possessions
all of which fit in that backpack on my back uh that was literally everything that i owned
nothing stored anywhere of of any sort just 44 items down to the single the passport uh you know
the two pairs of underwear the one pair of socks um you know a postcard every
single item counted as an item and one of the reasons for this is that we live
in a time when um one of the main narratives is that by having more stuff you'll be happier and
healthier you'll you'll be a important member of society that's what we're often told when we we
see these commercials and we watch these movies but one of the things that we've seen
actually is that for the first time even though we have more stuff than
ever and we have bigger houses than ever our material wealth is increasing you see
that our health and happiness is actually decreasing so while our house sizes have doubled
by from about fifteen hundred to three thousand square feet you would think okay maybe maybe
contentment would have doubled or or purpose or or happiness but in fact we're actually seeing
those things on the decline so it's about the purpose of this is not for anyone to own
just 44 possessions but it's about um asking how do we feel about our stuff is our stuff
making us happier are these things giving us purpose are we living the lives that we
want or are potentially they actually a trap that doesn't allow us to to be who we really
want to be and do what we really want to do um and then i've lived in two tiny houses the one
on the top was in san diego california and i lived there for a year and then the one the bottom
is in orlando florida so the first house was 50 square feet so it was about five feet wide so
i couldn't quite stretch my arms out sideways and it was about 10 feet long so about from here to
i don't know like about here and then it was just just tall enough for me to like not fully stand
but quite a bit stan but then the second tiny house this was built out of a 99 uh secondhand
materials for about thirteen hundred dollars and it looks like a shed because i was illegally in
a backyard in orlando and i wanted to look like a shed so most people would see it would just assume
that it was a shed so i was kind of blending in and then lastly one of my most recent projects was
embarking on a year of growing and foraging all my food so when i first got into sustainability
in 2011 food was one of the the gateways for me learning about our food system and i kind of
always had the question would it be possible to get away from that food system the global
industrial food system and is it possible in the 21st century in a western society to actually
live off the land to you know grow and forage all your food and not have to ever take a trip to the
grocery store that was a question i had for a long time and it wasn't until the end of 2017 that i
decided to finally answer that question for myself and so for one year i decided no grocery stores no
restaurants nothing packaged or processed nothing shipped long distances um not a drink at a
bar even my salt i harvested from the ocean my vitamins and minerals i had to harvest that
as well down to the oil everything no gifts of food from others and no dumpster diving because
i had already proved that i could live off the in the waste of the industrial food system the
purpose of this was seeing is it possible to live independently of it um so that's what i set out
to do and that was in 2018 to 2019 and originally i gave myself just six months to go from not
growing any of my food i arrived in orlando with my backpack of possessions and basically
very little money and no land and i gave myself six months to be growing and foraging all of my
food it took me a little longer than six months i met a lot of great people in the community
this for example is one of the gardens that i created and this is in somebody's front yard so
i didn't own any land what i did is i just made connections with people in my community and i had
six front yard gardens throughout the community um so one year uh was successful it had
up its ups and downs but i didn't see i did indeed see that it that it is possible to
step away from the global industrial food system so um you know a lot of people see this work and
as i mentioned a lot of these projects are you know a little a little bit extreme um so some
people assume that maybe i've always been an environmentalist you know always been uh in this
in this field but i want to rewind a little bit and this is me uh at university of wisconsin
lacrosse when i was in university the one right here um and so what what you see here this is
called a duck bong which is a plastic ornamental lawn duck with a hole cut in the beak and one
of the feet cut off and you could fit about five beers inside of this so this is largely what i was
doing in university i was very passionate about alcohol you know binge drinking partying and
and the likes and the reason that i was partly doing that is because i saw that as the way to
like be normal to fit in um in this picture i am seeing making out with a christmas tree and so you
could maybe say i was always a tree hugger but not exactly in the same way i'll leave that one up
there no i'll take that down so um the reason that i show those is that i just want to share a
little bit about where i started and i think it's probably similar to most of you in this room i
grew up in northern wisconsin in ashland three and a half hours north of here and um so as many of
you i grew up in a in a society where there's kind of just one way there's this is the way that life
is the normal way um and i never really quite felt like i fit into that um so i grew up pretty low
income my mom raised us four kids and we made um my mom made you know something around 15 or 18
000 a year we did have a lot of support from from others but you know definitely i was const
i felt very poor and i found myself constantly comparing myself to to others who weren't poor
my best almost all my best friends happened to be had parents who had money and so that was what
i was comparing myself to also uh i'm jewish and in northern wisconsin there's not many jewish
people and so the only exposure that i had to um jewish people was through like mostly stuff
on the media and that was like mostly watching south park and he never i think it was kyle he
never said anything nice about jewish people so i actually grew up thinking that jew was a bad word
like i actually thought jew was like a slanderer so because because of you know these feelings
of being different one other one is that in northern wisconsin you a lot of people have a lot
of relatives well the green fields they were just the five of us and there wasn't a single other
one in the state of wisconsin so you know i was felt like an outsider someone that way so i had
a lot of reasons that i felt different and that in my in my younger days um basically that
that led to me wanting to belong which for me in wisconsin belonging meant basically being
relatively normal so um i decided at a fairly and i decided in my teen late teens or early 20s
that my goal was to be a millionaire by the time i turned 30 years old i was pretty focused
on material possessions and financial wealth um even you know when i got my my first new car
i would spend like up to two hours every sunday shining it cleaning every little little part
like i was very materialistic very ego based and it was really just wanting to belong
ultimately which is i think what most of us are are trying to do on on a daily basis is
be loved love others feel loved belong have purpose but and that was the way that
i that was the way that i i had learned through just osmosis from society around me
whether it's tv or at school or what whatever but then something happened and i realized i had
to or that i wanted to radically transform my life and um a lot of people would expect okay
there must be some sort of big moment of enlightenment or some sort of like aha moment
but i didn't have anything like that i just started to watch a lot of documentaries and
read a lot of books and i learned that almost every single thing that i was doing was causing
destruction to the earth the food that i was buying that was coming from factory farms that
was being shipped halfway around the world the cheap junk that i was buying that was being made
by people working in horrible conditions that i did not support but was buying from the um the
trash that i was creating that was filling up our landfills or making it to our oceans and rivers
and forests um the gas that i was pumping into my car was part of the military industrial complex
my tax dollars were part of the prison industrial complex and police brutality and all these
inequalities and in in injustices my money was in chase bank which is a huge investor in all sorts
of destructive projects and my investments were in iras which included cigarettes and fossil fuels
you know even the water that i was drinking in san diego was being pumped a couple hundred miles
across the desert where half of it was sinking into the desert or evaporating off so to the
point where the sea of cortez is running dry and i'm this is every single thing i'm doing
every single thing that i'm doing is is causing destruction to the earth
to people and to other species so i was 25 when i learned that i had been
fairly oblivious to that point of this and at that point i could have felt a
lot of doom and gloom i could have felt very hopeless and helpless like i'm guessing
most people in this room have experienced dave mentioned the term climate anxiety which is i
haven't heard that many times but apparently that's something a lot of people experience
today and i can understand and relate to that but i actually wasn't feeling much of that because
i was actually feeling excited and i was feeling empowered because as i was learning about all
these problems i was learning about solutions i was learning that there was another way
of doing things and that it was possible i was young enough to take advantage of that
and change my life i didn't have a mortgage or kids or you know things that were tying
me down i was free to change my life so what i decided to do was
basically take it one step at a time i saw where i wanted to get to but i knew that
i couldn't just get there magically so i set practical goals and what i decided to do was
make a list of all the changes that i wanted to make i was always a goal-oriented person so i was
going to take that goal-oriented person i was and put it towards something beyond myself the earth
humanity and all our plant and animal relatives so i made a list of changes that i wanted
to make i hung it up in my kitchen um did i talk so long that this thing went to sleep or am i just pressing the wrong button there we go
well this was this was my kitchen so i made a list of the changes that i wanted to make and i put
them up in my kitchen right by the front door so that everybody who came over would see them which
would keep me accountable and then i taped a pen uh to a piece of string and hung that up next
to my list of changes that i wanted to make and um that's what my goal was just
to make one positive change per week so imagine if you woke up tomorrow in like
12 hours and you were doing a hundred things differently that would be pretty radical you
know it'd be pretty crazy to be walking around and being like whoa this and this and this all
these things i'm doing differently like who am i but but by taking it one step at a time my
goal was to make one positive change a week for two years that would be a hundred positive
changes in a relatively short period of time so for example this is uh going to the farmers
market i stopped buying my food at walmart and double plastic bagging it and i started to go to
the local farmers market this is uh you'll also see cash in my hand i stopped you know swiping
that credit card every single time and instead making local transactions um starting to eat
whole foods rather than the packaged processed foods starting to buy local foods from people that
actually grew the food rather than from places that i had no idea where it was from this was
my food shelf you can see all this food in jars so i learned about well i knew about this already
because there's a co-op in ashland where i grew up but i started to buy food from the bulk section so
i could fill up my own containers and not have any garbage one of the nice things about doing that
is that it's a lot harder for corporations to hide ingredients that you don't want in whole foods
once the food is packaged and processed they can slip a whole lot of things in there but
with whole foods if and i'm not talking about the grocery store just like lowercase
whole foods you just eat simple ingredients that are that are more connected to the land
one of the early changes that i made too was not wanting to be covering
my body with toxic chemicals as well as my counters and my floors and my
bathroom so i took all these toxic toxic toxic toxic uh products out of my house you
could see um you know the lip balm and the uh moisturizer and the clorox bleach oh i haven't
looked at this picture in a long time the uh lucky cologne and then i think that's the oat
that's the old spice deodorant so you know why was i using most of this stuff because i had seen it
on tv or i had seen my friends why was i wearing old spice because they have millions of dollars
to sell me on the idea that i need their old spice but as i was waking up i was thinking about it i
thought yeah haven't human beings existed for like tens of thousands of years without old spice isn't
it possible that maybe after all i don't need old spice so i stopped using deodorant 10 years ago
and you're welcome to to come share a hug and see what 10 years of not wearing deodorant smells
like and i think you'll find it very pleasant um so a lot of this is it's about thinking
holistically so um a lot of this exists because of what we're putting into our body when our bodies
are off balance we're more likely to be creating some off-balance smells but when you are eating
whole foods and you're exercising and you're spending more time outside and you're doing a lot
of these things your body doesn't need it anymore so another thing that i started to do was just
start to get involved in my community a little bit more i one of my you know big changes was um
in 2013 i stopped drinking alcohol um and i found that to be one of the absolute biggest changes
because instead of going out drinking at night to meet my you know sense of belonging and
my socialization with others um i started to do things that were more productive like for
example doing trash cleanups with people where we're socializing we're having fun but we're
actually doing something for our community and what happened as i was doing this i found that
being a less hung over not being hung over anymore gave me a lot more motivation to do most
of the things that i wanted to and just made everything so much easier you know starting
to ride my bike more and more and drive the car a lot less and a lot easier to eat healthy
because you know when i was drunk it was just very common that i'd be eating you know all
those greasy junk foods that i didn't want to be eating and all of that so another early
change was getting involved in my community so um there were i asked about what people wanted
to hear about um before coming and there were a few things that were shared so i'm going to touch
on a few of each of these things and then i'm going to open it up probably and we'll see 10 15
minutes for questions and i want to leave a lot of time for questions because i'd really like to
just hear whatever it is you're most interested in and my guess is that most of you will take
joy in the questions that others ask as well so one of the things that people were interested
in learning about is how to live a more zero-waste lifestyle um well actually i think before i
mention that just i want to finish up with with the changes so what happened was i found it
easier and easier to make more of these changes and as i as i built the foundation of a more
sustainable life by doing one step at a time what i found is that the bigger changes that
i thought to be not sure if they were possible became in the realm of thinking so for example
one of the you know things that i really had been intrigued by was the idea of existing
without a car how many of you don't own a car so maybe like 10 percent or so um so yeah
it's a pretty wisconsin thing to own a car i mean it's a pretty us-american thing to
own a car but here in wisconsin it's you know living in the countryside a lot of us
it's it's like kind of our lives the cars um to the point where you know even i remember
growing up if you saw an adult uh man or woman riding a bicycle but wearing plain street clothes
like not spandex i would assume they had a dui that was the reason they were driving because
riding a bike because they weren't allowed to drive a car like that was my social stigma around
it so having a car was early on it was my freedom from parents from uh being tied to a place and
being able to get out and explore it was freedom but it was also cars for many of us our
image we're often identified by our car so the idea of being an adult who doesn't own
a car also the social stigma is kind of like you don't own a car like what are you poor or
do you have no ambition or you know things like that that's the mindset that i had but after
a year or so of making changes i decided i was gonna get rid of my car and so the thing
that i did was i simply parked it for a month the idea was i was going to pretend for a month
that i didn't have a car and see how it went and it went great and after a month i said okay i can
do this so then i then i sold my car and after i sold my car i checked you know i beated myself
on the chest and i called my friends and they answered and i was like okay i'm still here
you can't exist without a car this is great um so then that's after about about a year and
a half or two of that that's when i decided to start doing activism the things that i mentioned
earlier with the idea of showing people that another way is possible um and so my life has
been a balance between just being who i want to be living my belief system i had gone from maybe
a level ten or nine hypocrite down to maybe a level five hypocrite when i started that activism
i felt like sure i still have a lot of hypocrisies but i'm in a place where i can show people that
another way is possible and teach um and so that's you know some of the balances that i have in life
is just being who i want to be live in a living a good life but also being out there and um showing
up showing people that another way is possible so um one of the things that people are interested
in hearing about tonight is a little bit about um living a more low waste lifestyle you might
have heard the term zero waste and that can be a little daunting sometimes to have it
be zero but it's a hip term that you know it's out there and i still use it but a better
way to put it is low waste because nobody goes zero waste in all on all reality so a more low
waste lifestyle so when i lived in san diego this bag represents the amount of trash i would
generally create in a month so if you compare that to me in that trash suit that was a month so one
little bag or 135 pounds and so you can see that there's a spectrum you know 135 pounds a bag
but there's also in between and depending on our situations we can get somewhere in that
range so one of the really important uh like i'm less of someone to give exact tips because
those are all out there for me it's more about a little bit of the philosophy and the inspiration
behind it and uh you know when it comes to waste we we live one of the things that i i see in our
society is that it can be a very polarized society basically there's sort of this one way of doing
it there's like a right or wrong a black and white and one of the really important
things that i've learned is that the reality is that things are generally
a shade of gray not black and white and so what a lot of us have what a lot of us are is
we are a creation of the normalcy around the normal situation around us and what i started to
realize you know when it comes to zero waste and many of these other things is that ultimately um
normalcy is is pretty much an illusion um because i just lost my train of thought um yes so when it
when it comes to waste so in the united states we have about five percent of the world's population
so about five percent of the people in the world live in the united states but we consume
about 25 percent of the world's resources so basic math says that that's not normal it's
actually very extreme to have five percent of the world's population and consume 25 of
the world's resources yet to us it can feel absolutely just normal and the reason it's
normal it's because that's what we've seen by most of the people around us day after
day week after week year after year so the idea for some people of going from you know
creating a lot of waste down to creating none can seem basically impossible but that's because
they're basing it on their frame of reference of doing it the way that everybody else around
them has done so one of the most important things if you want to make shifts whether it's
zero waste or minimalism or growing your food and getting away from the grocery store
or living in a tiny house is just stepping away from that that feeling that you have to do
things the way that other people have done them so a little bit about downsizing
i i mentioned that i grew up very or that i wanted to have a lot of material
possessions when i was a kid i actually had 700 beanie babies so i was very into stuff and when i
had woken up in 2011 that was one that i that was when i realized ultimately that the more stuff
that i had the harder it was to really live the life that i wanted that i was basically stuck
to my stuff continuously updating all of the applications getting the newest computer or phone
paying all of my bills and all of these things so a couple of the big recommendations i have
for those of you that are trying to simplify and downsize is to simply start by looking at your
stuff looking at what you have and how i started was you probably have all heard of marie kondo
the what she says uh does it spark joy well when i started in 2011 i'm sure marie kondo was at it
for a long time but i hadn't heard of her yet so but what i was asking was simply um does this add
value to my life or does it take away i would look at an item and i say is my life better with this
in it or would be my or my would my life be better without it so one of my recommendations is to go
through your stuff and ask that about each item and if the answer is no i don't want this and it
doesn't improve my life that's where you can start that's the easy stuff to downsize and get rid of
now the ones that you look at and say these add incredible value to my life and i love them
there's no reason to not have that so start with the things that are extraneous that are
actually taking away from your quality of life the other question that i ask is have i used this
in the last 6 months or 12 months or so and so what i started to do i lived in a three-bedroom
apartment and i had the biggest bedroom in the apartment plus a closet i started to go through
everything and ask these two questions and one of them was have i used this in the last six to 12
months and if the answer was no i'd get rid of it and i did that every six or 12 months
and each time i cut my stuff in about half and then half and half eventually i got
it down to where i was living in the six by six closet of my three bedroom house and then
eventually i got to living in the tiny house and then eventually i got down to 111 possessions
and then eventually i got down to 44 possessions so it was a little bit at a time and that's
another really important thing with with with all of this is just remembering you can only be you
you can't be anyone else you can only be in the moment that you're in and you can only be where
you are at that time so you have to start there you can't start as someone else you can't start
somewhere else you have to start exactly with who you are in that time and and you can't look at
someone else and say i want what they have 10 year you know and but they started at some point so
starting where you are and focusing on that um and a little tip with getting rid of things that
might have sentimental value but actually you don't want this is a question that people
often ask me like for example what about you have a guitar you never play it you don't
really want it but you love it and you hold that sentimental value so a recommendation for
that is find somebody who would love that guitar and share it with them and that way you can get
joy out of giving it away and even follow up with them every month and say and and you know have
them send you a tune on occasion on the guitar okay so a little bit about growing food how many of you have interest in growing some
of your own food almost everyone here and how many of you are growing a little bit of your
own food all right so not nearly as much so um i want you know i mentioned that when i when i
grew and foraged all my food for a year i started with basically no experience my mom had some mint
and some chives and some snapdragons growing up and in san diego i grew a little bit of food but
when i started this project i was basically asking i was going to the internet and typing in how much
sunlight does kale need how much water to put on a carrot seed do i put my plants in a greenhouse or
do i put them directly into the ground uh how much sun just in general is goes on a garden like all
of the absolute basics and um one of the big tips that i would say is that you know i was just i
started off just going to google and asking these questions but one of the most important things is
to connect with your local resources and here in stevens point you have a lot of local resources
so one of my big recommendations for starting to grow food is not to do it alone volunteer at a
local farm get a plot at a local community garden find a friend who has a garden and split the work
with them in their garden and start with them you don't have to do it alone there's so
many people that are doing it already and you will become a great friend to any gardener
if you're happy to weed that's something all gardeners need is someone to help them with
weeding their garden and a little wake-up call gardening requires work a lot of people go into
it with this like magical idea that is just fun but the reality is that you know it doesn't take
long to plant the seeds most of the time is spent weeding or working with your soil or you know
the thing the things that people don't take the glory in so like knowing that in advance could
definitely be pretty helpful but yeah so getting involved and starting to grow with others um
and then finding local resources as well so the key one of the big keys to success is growing
what grows well in your area so here's what i don't recommend doing walk down the grocery
store aisles and look at all the foods you like and just say that's what i'm going to grow
because those grocery store aisles are from a globalized industrialized food system where
that food could be coming from anywhere on earth grown in any different season so the key
is instead go to the local gardens and gardeners and farmers and ask them what grows
so ridiculously well that you can't kill it what food becomes a problem because you just end
up with so much of it and start with those a lot of people start gardening and then they walk away
calling them saying that they have a black thumb but i think if you if you focus on some of these
sorts of things rather than just saying i want giant tomatoes because sure that's cool but maybe
giant tomatoes don't grow well in your area so finding out what grows really well in your area
is another is another way to do it and now you so this i wish i had a before picture but before
i started this was just a a blank front yard a just grass front yard and this is two this is
two years later so it went from a grass front yard to producing hundreds of pounds of food but
you don't have to have a whole front yard to be able to grow some food it's amazing what can be
grown just on a balcony or a small backyard or um even just a window sill with with herbs um
so definitely i recommend starting small it's great to have a garden of your dreams but
the only way you'll get to a garden of your dreams is by starting a little bit at a time and my
recommendation is the first year just grow like a half dozen or so different plants things like some
of the easy ones like some basil some greens some herbs tomatoes and such and then each year you can
add on more and more and one of the absolute ways that i recommend starting is with greens they're
one of the easiest to grow and they can produce a lot so a little bit on that we can talk more about
that at the end so i want to talk a little bit about societal norms this here is a compost toilet
how many of you have pooped into a compost toilet all right not as many people and how many
of you want to poop into a compost toilet more people than have done it so that's a good
sign i wish i had one here for you right now so you could you could do it um so uh in some places
you know pooping into a compost toilet is actually pretty cool like you might score some points with
your friends for doing that but in a lot of places it's pretty it's considered to be a
pretty low thing to do in society like our society has basically said we don't want to
deal with any of our waste we want to flush that down the toilet and have someone else deal with it
have it be someone else's problem and boy is it a problem i was in vero beach florida back in 2016
and i picked up the local newspaper and it said three million gallons of raw sewage spilled
into the river and i was like wow that's a lot and underneath it it said fourth
largest spill in two years and i i was i was a bit shocked i i did not
realize i had been i had bought the idea that our that our uh that our um sewage systems and our
our water cleaning systems were doing their job but not so much when we poop into that water a lot
of times that makes it into our waterways so uh the whole like for me this was the the pooping
into a bucket and dealing with my own waste that took me about five years from the time that i woke
up and i started making those hundred plus changes this took me a while one of the main
reasons is because of the social stigma because i didn't one i didn't know like if
people would still take me seriously if they knew that i was crapping in a bucket um and then
two just uh the the ego element of it dealing with your waste in many societies is considered to be
something that people that are less than you do so one of the things that i wanted to talk a bit
about is about a little bit about social norms so i was uh i was doing some math um when i was
thinking about how i was spending my life based on people thinking about me and i used to spend you
know a decent amount of time gelling my hair uh i remember when i back and i had wings i would like
get my hair wet put a hat on and bike around the block just to have my hair you know going out like
that or uh all you know putting on the clothes not liking them putting on other clothes and i
realized that if you just spend one hour every day thinking about what other people are thinking
about you and designing your life based on that that that's five years of your life five entire
years of your life if you just do that for one hour a day so i said whoa what could i do with
that one hour a day which is five years so instead of thinking of life from what will other
people think i decided to think about life through the lens of is this beneficial to the earth
is it beneficial to my community and is it beneficial to myself and by changing that single
frame of reference that was really what set me free to be able to do a lot of the activism work
that i've done and simply be myself in a society that doesn't always make it easy to be yourself so
there's a lot of ways to do that dumpster diving is a great way to humble yourself reduce your ego
so is crapping in a bucket that'll definitely help um but i did pro i did little experiments like
even one week for a for a week i only ate with my hands whether i was at a restaurant or at home
or at a friend's house because it got me out of my comfort zone and it had me doing different things
the more times you do things differently the more it becomes normal to you to be different and the
more normal it is to be different the easier it is to go against the grain of society because what
most of us in this room are doing is we're kind of consistently going up the grain of society which
makes it very hard to be who we really want to be but the more you get used to going against the
grain of society the more you realize you could never going back never go back to that like my
hell would be waking up and all of a sudden being normal that would be a bad day but that wasn't
the way before so you know um okay so um i think the last thing i want to share before we take time
for here and everything that you want to ask is um so i've definitely heard
from a lot of people recently that they experience a a bit of anxiety because
of the state of the world which is very reasonable because the state of the world is a little bit
crazy a lot of the time and so because of that and you know i know for a lot of college students
and and people my age as well like our demographic we're waking up to these problems and we
we don't want to be the problem we want to actually have a chance at a sustainable
future and that's that can be daunting and so there's a lot of there's a lot of
anxiety out there and there's a lot of stress so one thing that i want to say is just because
you were born in this time doesn't mean that the weight of the world belongs on your shoulders
we don't have to solve the world's problems we don't have the responsibility to solve the world's
problems and none of you can solve all the world problems it's nice to know that actually rather
than live in a delusional state of believing that you can solve all the world's problems because
that creates a lot of stress so so you know a lot of people ask you know being one in billions
of people i think it might be eight billion now close to that you know can you can you actually
make enough difference where it's worth it because we don't need to just stop using plastic straws
if we're talking about living in an equitable just regenerate you know sustainable world we
need much bigger changes than that a lot of people because of that they can get their head focused
on only the the big picture but they forget that they are a part of this world so my recommendation
both for the sake of being able to make an impact and also for the sake of maintaining your
sanity is to start with yourself if you can focus on the things that you can control
rather than on the things you can't control you can work on becoming a more empowered human
so many of these changes in themselves are they're small and they they certainly
are not changing the world like starting to use you know a reusable water
bottle that in itself is not going to save the world but when you do do when you do that
and you've made hundreds of other changes it's much more than those individual changes
what it is is its empowerment because what corporations and governments don't want
corrupt governments and corporations is empowered people because when you can actually stand up to
a corporation and say i don't need you because you know deep inside yourself that you don't need them
that's powerful and i believe that by becoming the change we wish to see in the world there's
the actions but then there's also that empowerment that become that comes behind it and that is a
way that you can help galvanize people around you and that's where you can really stand up to the
corporations and the people that need to be stood up to so it's really important to remember to look
at things in a in a holistic manner rather than piecing little things out so this was um the last
day of the the month of wearing all of my trash and i was in union square park and i started you
know i had a bit of a realization i started to think of my to myself imagine this is how
much garbage one person creates in a month now imagine a year now imagine 10
years and now imagine one lifetime in a lifetime you can create a small mountain of
trash to leave behind for future generations or no mountain of trash at all that to me is proof
that our actions really do matter and do add up and that's just one of the ways that we interact
with the world now if you look at if you expand that out to all the ways that we interact with
the world and then you apply it to maybe we're entrepreneurs and we start a business or maybe
we're politicians maybe we're teachers maybe we're in healthcare uh maybe we clean places maybe
we're activists maybe we're people that that just live if we then apply that into these places
then we can even have even more of a change so there are about a billion hungry people in the
world are any of us going to make sure everybody is fully fed no can we solve world hunger
as individuals no but can you start a garden and provide food to a few of your neighbors that
don't have access to healthy food absolutely will that change the world no but will it change
their world it very much could can we clean up all of the garbage in the ocean probably not but
can we come together as a community to clean up the nearby lake or river to be able to enjoy it
and improve quality of life for ourselves for the plants and animals that we share this earth
with and for our communities absolutely we can do that so i don't know what's going to happen in
10 years 100 years 300 years 500 years i don't know how long humanity will be around but whether
humanity's around for one more day or one million more years doesn't affect for me the simple belief
that life matters and that's what drives me every day i believe that my life matters i believe that
the life of everyone here matters that the life of all of the millions and plant and animal species
out there matter and if we simply believe that life matters it's reason enough to wake up each
day and do our part to live the lives that we fully want while helping others on earth to
be able to live that as well so that's it so uh questions any question uh is is on the table
i'd love to hear one that i've never heard any for any before so maybe pop something creative up um
but any uh i just want to say that for me like my work my life is my message so anything
you're interested about when it comes to sustainable living or anything you're welcome
to ask there's no weird questions right here so the question was how do i do what
you do for a living well what do i do okay how do i do what you do for a living
my answer to that is find what you love and do that because i'm just doing what i want
to be doing and the reason that i do it well is because i'm doing what i what i love so if what
i loved was uh taking people on fishing trips that's what i well i'd like to do that as well but
not as much as this that was my childhood dream but anyway my my recommendation today is if
you have a way that you thoroughly enjoy life and you feel like you can apply that to also
improving the world around you that's the path that i would recommend going on rather than
trying to fit yourself into a framework of what other people are doing like truly find
your little niche niche in the world um so it really depends on the person
everybody's in very different scenarios um so yeah i think i'll leave it there so the question was out of all the projects
that i've done which has been the most impactful um i would say trash me where i wore
all my trash for a month i know that that had about a billion media impressions
and every i every day it was just interviews all day long with media all over the world
and that message really people got it it was simple you know that's one of the things
today is that like simplicity can be a big uh big tool for for getting messages out there the
more complex you get them a little bit harder it is to get people's attention um you know
people need a break a lot of the times and so seeing a guy covered in trash kind of does the
job like you don't have to be interested in sustainability to wonder why this guy's covered
in trash so that was a really good one and then the year of growing and forging all my food was
also definitely one of the most impactful as well yeah yep yeah so the question was
uh have i ever felt pressure you know from people close to me and what
do i do about that so yes yes i grew up in wisconsin uh around the concept of like just
simply not having meat at lunch people would be like where's the beef you know you would get beef
for everything um so i've definitely experienced a lot of pressure and when i left was i when
i really started to change my life i had only been gone from wisconsin for about a year so i
was still coming but i still come back a lot but um lot lots of i've definitely faced a lot
of pressure um there's been a few important things for that and one for me really has been to
step away from the pressure uh you we're all free humans and we all have the choice to step away
from relationships that are not serving our best interest and ultimately the best interest
of the other person because if they're not serving our best interest they're probably
not serving the best interest of them either so to give a bigger example my dad who has never
been a big part of my life when i was about 25 all of a sudden decided to take up problems with most
of what i was doing he was living from a place of fear he watched the mainstream media a lot and he
took fear to almost everything that i was doing which was ironic because he's a hippie and he
grew up well here's the problem he do he was doing a lot of the things that i was doing but he
was doing a lot of drugs too and he made a lot of mistakes and he lives in a lot of regret so he
was associating what i was doing with that but i wasn't doing all that stuff i was actually
making a difference and so he was nagging me for enough time and i told him politely enough
times that i wasn't going to continue that to 2013 i finally blocked him his phone his email
and from social media i think for two years or so i had completely blocked him um and
because that that was not serving me and it wasn't serving him at all either and
um well he learned and now we're at least a little bit friends um that i wasn't going to uh
to have a toxic relationship um but that's more of a little bit more of an extreme example um i
think maybe potentially the most important thing is to simply like work on yourself to to build
yourself up to the belief that you are a complete human being because when you're a complete human
being it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks the thing that most of the time when we think people are thinking
something about us they're not it's in our heads most of these things are in our heads so if
we can simply drop that even just start there and not be making up things that other people are
thinking about us that's a huge amount of freedom but if we can get to the place where we actually
believe that we are complete whole human beings then it doesn't matter in the slightest what
anybody else thinks and it really doesn't matter what other people think now the really good
news about that is that today people are actually seeking authentic genuine human beings so as
you do that sure you might lose some friends but there's like seven or eight billion other friends
that you could possibly have out there there's so many people and today people really are wanting
authentic quality deep relationships and that's absolutely out there so another big thing would
be surrounding yourself with like-minded people finding people that are supportive where when
you're together you're growing rather than being torn down and the more time you spend around
people you know i believe the saying you are your surroundings to a large degree surround yourself
with who you want to be as much as you can um and like one little tidbit an opportunity i'll
mention is that there's a website called woofing worldwide opportunities on organic farms
and you can go work on an organic farm generally five hours a day five days a week
in exchange for food and lodging and get to immerse and growing food on an organic farm
you get the education so that's one way to like get outside and go somewhere you can do
that all over the united states of the world there's so many opportunities to get
out there but there's also so many opportunities within your own community to
surround yourself with like-minded people yeah so the question was when i was downsizing
and going off the grid how did it feel like kind of getting rid of things and not you know
not having some of the things that i had before generally it was almost always liberating because
that was my path i wanted to really simplify and i wanted to break free from a lot of the lies that
i was that i was living and that i was taking part in so for the most part every bit that i downsized
and simplified it was was very liberating um it was definitely also challenging too but the
really for me one of the the big things is that a lot of people when they think of simplifying
minimalism downsizing they think of getting rid of things and when they think of getting rid of
things they think of like an emptiness a space potentially a void that's been created where
something once was but that's not my strategy my strategy is getting rid of what i don't want to
make space for what i do want so i wasn't living any void i was filling it with exactly what i
wanted i was getting rid of all the possessions i didn't need all the bills that i didn't need
so that i could do exactly what i wanted to be doing which for me was pursuing a more sustainable
life it was activism it was quality relationships with other people it was cycling and swimming
and being outside so i was filling my life as i was emptying it of the things that i didn't
want so for the most part it felt really good sometimes daunting sometimes challenging
but for the most part very liberating uh yeah did i have to work any jobs well a lot of people
think i must be some trust fund hippie that's what i see on the websites like breitbart and stuff
like that i am indeed not a trust fund hippie um i hope that being said the last job well i had the
last job i worked was at human resources at uw-la crosse in 2011 2009 as like my part of my grant
after that i actually in my summers of college i worked for a book sales company called
southwestern selling educational books door-to-door i did that for like three years
and i was pretty good at sales um and i made like about 18 000 every summer doing that so i
learned to be pretty like financially independent from you know a pretty young age and after
college i started my own marketing company so i haven't had a job so much but i did
work a lot and then in about two thousand uh 15 is when i dissolved my marketing company and
i guess you could say i haven't had a job since then public speaking is uh what i do to make the
little bit of money that i need um i've committed to making less than the federal poverty threshold
per year which is eleven thousand dollars the reason why is because i've committed not paying
federal taxes ever again because so much of that goes to you know the military-industrial complex
and police brutality and all of these things um so because of that but also just because i
don't want to have a lot of money so i don't need to work a lot for money because i've simplified
my life enough to not need a whole lot of money hmm what kind of so yeah what kind of going
against the societal grain what kind of uh daily problems do i face oh i just want to mention
one thing before i answer that before i forget philosophy what is it the philosophy uh club is
having a little uh discussion afterwards where do you see basement brew house and so if anybody
wants to join i'll join for a half hour or 40 minutes or so and i look forward to that so
we can continue the conversation over there what time is it oh so we got like 15 more minutes
that's great so uh the daily challenge is yes so i have removed a lot of challenges from my life
by removing myself from consumerism because i find that consumerism creates a lot of just completely
unnecessary problems day after day after day but i have definitely created by by living the way that
i do i have problems i think that one day i will become obsolete from society as i have no credit
card or bank account or debit card or driver's license or cell phone and all of these many things
i do have a computer though so i'm very keep you know very able to stay in touch but you know
going to places and wanting to buy something and they only take credit card and i only care carry
cash is just a you know one of the examples of the types of little nuisances i deal with being
barefoot a lot of places kick me out or don't want me on um definitely you know some days when i'm
not feeling my best um i can notice when people are looking down on me like walking bare stor
foot and people think i'm you know homeless or something like that whether in their mind they're
thinking oh this guy is some bum or something like that and i can i can feel that um that is uh
you know that can be challenging at times um by trying to bike everywhere as much as possible
you know the whole going against grain of society definitely can be challenging
every single day but for the most part i keep doing it because i know that the other
way is challenging too i pretty much believe that life is hard whatever we do life is going to
be hard so it might as well be hard doing what we actually love and feeling good about it because i
know what would be way worse would be going back to that way of life i would be miserable and i
don't think i'd ever become unmiserable again like i don't think i'd be able to transition back
to that i would just be committing to a life of not feeling so great um so the challenges
are always worth it um whatever they are yeah so the question was when i was biking across
the country how many miles a day was i biking and how sore would i get the average day was about 70
miles which at first seems very far but you are you would be amazed at how powerful the tool the
bicycle is in fact the third time i biked across the country my partner at the time uh joined me
and the first two times she had zero interest no way it was happening had not done almost anything
athletic in the last decade or so she biked all the way across the country it was absolutely
amazing and i was i was i was astounded by it and um i've met people you just never would have
expected and the the lengths that they bicycle and it's bicycles are very powerful and efficient
tools um and then so 70 miles is a normal day 50 miles was was common and then like 100 would
be a decent day the longest i ever did was 194 miles and that was from ashland to minneapolis
and the reason i did that is because there was a group of us biking and i decided to stay back for
three days and then just do four days in one day but i paid for that for the next four weeks
i was in a lot of i was in a lot of pain um but as far as pain i remember on the first bike
trip i would be sitting down and just to stand up it was so much pain that i'd have to scream
as i was standing up and that was the seat on the the area from the front to the back
what would that be called anyone perineum yeah that region hurt a lot it takes a little
while to get used to your bike seat and i remember my partner cheryl into on the third bike
ride she was dealing with a lot of butt pain for the first like 1500 miles then she got the right
seat and that changed things big time if i recall i know it got better i think it's because
you got the right seat so yeah it it can be pretty it can it can hurt quite a bit but
you get used to it as you do most things whoever wants to that's an interesting question
when i pass where as when i die how do i want to be remembered
and do i want to be remembered i definitely do want to be remembered i still
have enough of an ego to want to be remembered so how do i want to be remembered
well what i want to say is that my one of my absolute top goals in life is to time
things right where i can walk into the woods and and die that's one of the that would be like
the absolute success in life if i managed to do that and of course it would be an all-natural
fiber clothing so that i would both me and my everything on me would biodegrade back to the
earth and i'd also like that to be the case for my house where if i was to walk out
of my house one day and leave basically the earth could take it back and it wouldn't be
littering at all so i would say that for me like an impermanent design to my life is very important
to me and i do think about death a fair bit um but as far as how i'd want to be remembered well okay
i'd want to be remembered as a person whose values and actions were in alignment where i where i was
the person who i projected myself to be that i i lived in integrity and honestly and
authentically um definitely for someone that makes people self-reflect that it makes people
think and challenge the status quo um definitely not normal do not want to be thought of as as
normal so definitely doing things differently um i think those you know i'm ideally a nice guy
it'd be better if people didn't hate me you know i'm working on my communication skills uh
i'm taking non-violent communication right now also called compassionate communication
which is something i have been really loving and just yeah having good relationships is
another one of the most important thing where we where my relationships are are healthy and
we all uplift each other not everyone of course i'm going to have problems but as much as possible
so those are some of the things that come to mind yep yeah yeah so my thoughts on uh you know
sustainability um and uh the intersection with disabilities well so my belief system is that
we don't actually like okay so the large focus of tonight has been the focus on my different way of
being different from society but the truth so the true solution is not in individualism at all the
true solution is in community i believe that just about every one of our problems can be solved
through community not through individualistic thinking so we absolutely need structural
change and societal change if we don't do that we're on well i really don't think we
can solve our problems without doing that so my belief is that we need that if we're
talking about a sustainable just equitable future what we need to do is change is shift
our systems and they have to be systems that are that exist in a way that work
for the diversity of our humanity so that leaves room for every person of every
type in order to be a part of that site and i really do think that's that's possible with that
being said it's not necessarily possible within the confine of the current way that we exist i
think a lot of the progressive ideas that we have uh are actually extremely destructive and not
possible on a society that would be um that would actually be equitable or just um there
are challenges like for example in our western health care system where ninety percent of health
care goes into the last ten percent of human life um so there's the challenges there of some
people's opinion would be yeah you put all the energy into that last 10 for people to get those
last years and that would be the fair thing to do other people might have the perspective that that
last that 90 going into the last 10 is actually what's killing us as a humanity is trying to hold
on to every last day that we can and that that may be what's actually robbing from future generations
where those they won't get any of the days because because of our of the way that we
are existing as society so it's uh basically when it comes to that my belief
though is that we need to shift society and we need to shift our systems in a way that
things are accessible and when you you know another big part about that is by say community
but another part about that is actually getting back to intergenerational communities where people
actually take care of each other because it is a fact that before corporations we existed and we
took care of each other in which whichever situ in whichever way we were and so um i really think
the solution lies in people caring about each other depending upon one another and changing
our structures and in our society so back there yeah so my thoughts on uh when i'm older
um if i become older time will tell so uh well i i i yeah one little note is that i've
definitely experienced a fair number of people who are decades older than me that say okay you can
you can do this because you're young and in good health and that's a reasonable statement time
will tell whether i was a young delusional kid spouting this stuff off time will tell once i'm
older and we'll we'll see what happens if i live through with my belief system but my belief my
simple belief as far as my my time when i'm older is that community will take care
of me as i take care of community i believe that if i dedicate my you know i don't
have health insurance i don't have a savings fund of any sort i just have the cash and an envelope
back in my drawer um and i don't but i have a massive life insurance and that is community
it's also skills and community is not just humans it's it's my community with this earth
and with the plant and animal relatives so i but i truly believe that if i dedicate my
life to humanity as i am that when i am in need i will also be taken care of i don't consider that
mooching i don't look at the world in a linear way of i give you that so you give me this and that it
has to be a linear transaction i truly believe in living in a way of giving and receiving where is
just through whether it's reciprocity or whether you never see anything in return and that may go
very well for me i think most likely it will or i die alone in a ditch somewhere and nobody cares
but i highly doubt that's going to happen and if you're a complete human being it's fine you
know you'll be ready to go if you like if you become a complete human being which is definitely
one of the things that i that i like to focus on yeah good question thank you and oh i write
about more about that at rob greenfield.org health insurance that's a blog called on an old i
think on age uh healthcare and death or something like that and there's a video on that as well
it's about 45 minutes so i go more into it there right here where do i live now and how do i find places
to live well i currently live in asheville north carolina i've lived there since june and um
so right now i run a non-profit it's called regeneration equity and justice and through that
non-profit i rent a house for a team of about four people that work with me and i wasn't planning
on living there but there's a little mud room and i put a bed in there and
that's where i'm living right now just makes sense like i'm working with them and
um and uh there was an unused little spot so um but i want to get back to living
in a tiny house my next tiny house i want to build completely out of almost
completely out of materials from the land and i might do that in the next year or so in
in asheville but um so that's where i currently live and how do i find places to live sometimes
i'm work trading like i'm just doing an exchange sometimes i have a tiny house in someone's
backyard and that's generally a work trade as well um as i'm traveling i generally stay with
people so it kind of varies a lot i think do we have time for one more question what time
is it now all right one more question right here so the question was when i'm foraging for food
do i ever run into problems with local law and do you mean dumpster diving foraging or
foraging for like plants and mushroom cool yeah so for for plants and such so there
are places where it is illegal to forage i pretty much uh focus primarily on
following earth code rather than city code and that doesn't mean that i don't follow any
laws but when they're absurd and they actually don't protect anything and actually can do the
opposite i simply am not going to to do that so there are different national well state
parks or national forests or places like that where foraging may be completely
illegal and i'm not going to go in there and forge something that harms that forest i'm
not going to be pulling plants that are scarce but if there's an invasive species
that i can eat in there for actually i don't want to use the term invasive
species but a non-native species that is over competing and really crowding out the forest
like garlic mustard for example me going in there and eating that is beneficial so i think one of
the most important things is critical thinking it's not looking at a black and white rule and
saying that means that one thing's right or wrong it's always about thinking critically so
um i've never had any trouble with foraging at all i know some people that have
and definitely when you're foraging mushrooms that can be a little trickier because
there's definitely some old-timers who think all mushrooms means you're tripping on psilocybin
which 99 of them aren't well maybe not 99 but the most aren't most most of the mushrooms we are
are great you know lobsters chicken in the woods maitaki uh bolites like chanterelles they don't
they don't they don't well they do get you high on life because they're so amazing but um so
i haven't been in any trouble for that but i think that that i do want to acknowledge one thing
that i always i like to uh have an opportunity to and that one of the reasons that i haven't i do
believe is being a white male in this society i am generally considered to be by this socie by the
society the way it's been sort of the status quo which means that i get away with a lot of
things that other people wouldn't get away with and i've i've talked to a lot of people
and i was very resistant to this idea first growing up in wisconsin being poorer than
some other people being jewish being different i never saw myself as privileged because i was
always comparing myself to other people i see other people in society they they compare
themselves even they might have two houses but they can pair themselves to the people with
the mansion and they say well i'm not privileged and i see that what we can do is we can compare
ourselves to the people around us or the people above us and then say oh i don't i don't have any
privilege and enough people kept posting you know commenting on things that i was doing from 2011
to you know 2015 and i was resistant generally to the idea of having privilege because i don't
know exactly if that meant that i didn't earn everything that i thought i did but eventually
enough people said it and i checked myself enough times they started to understand it whether it's
you know dumpster diving where uh the people most likely to get harassed by the police are
people experiencing homelessness the people who actually would benefit the most from the food and
then i both being a white man but also being you know having being very fairly eloquent with my
words fitting generally their idea of what's safe all of these things have made it a
lot easier for me to do what i'm doing so that's why again it's so important for
us to positively impact society to create a so that it's not just people that passes the
status quo that are able to do these things but i just think it's really an important
thing for us to acknowledge and in no way shape or form is it a matter of having shame
for oneself it's not any form guilt i don't feel either of those two things it's simply just
acknowledging who i am in the situation that i'm that that i am in and i believe that
one of the most important things today is for those with privilege and wealth is
to utilize it properly to redistribute it to create more equity and as college students a
lot of us may feel broke but the reality is that all of us in this room are the top few percentage
of the wealthiest people on earth when you really look at it and we're pretty much in the top
percentage of the most privileged people on earth and so i do believe that it's it's our job to to
take control of our lives and to do our part to exist in a way that instead of stealing from other
cultures and future generations we can actually be living in a way that that is in reciprocity so
i feel like we could talk for another hour and a half but that's the that's the end um but come on
over to that spot but and what's it called again basement of the brew house and uh come
share a hug oh i'll hang out here for a little while so come up and share a hug
and uh anything like that that you'd like and so yeah i love you all very much and
thank you all for being here and uh yeah
