Truth and Transparency: Becoming “Rob Greenfield” Online

Transcript

The following is a transcription of Truth and Transparency: Becoming “Rob Greenfield” Online, which is part of my practice of coming into full truth and transparency.

For the full series and depth to this practice visit: My Commitment to Truth and Transparency.

Hello My Friends,
Today in my series of “Truth, Transparency, and Integrity,” I am going to share with you “Becoming Rob Greenfield, the Character.” The online character, but really the human being. I’m going to share the integrity, some of the truth, the transparency around becoming me online. An online character, as some would say. At the same time, I’m going to share about how I am really just a human being. My struggles, my challenges, and my early lacking of integrity as I became me. Rob Greenfield, and later, back to my original name, Robin Greenfield. I’m going to go back a little, but before I do that, I would like to say: if you haven’t already, please watch the introduction to this truth series. This is a series diving deep into exploring truth, transparency, and integrity. It is a multi-part series exploring different areas of my life. The areas in which I have not lived up to my integrity, the areas where I have not brought myself to the world as fully genuine and authentic. Where I have not been fully truthful and honest.

Right now, I am coming into full truth, full transparency in a lifelong quest to live in a very deep state of integrity. My objective is to get to the point where there’s just one me. I am just me, Robin Greenfield, whether you see me on camera or you see me in person. Whether we’re sharing a hug or whether it’s far off in the distance. I am just me. To give you the full picture and really to dive into this whole becoming Rob Greenfield, the online character, I’d like to go back a little bit to where my relationship with being online and sharing online started. I have my computer here in order to be able to read off of some notes to make sure I capture everything because it’s really important to me that I share all the truth, all the transparency that I would like to. To start, I’ve always been someone who has been writing and sharing messages. From a young age, I figure from around 1996, when I was about ten years old and through high school, when I graduated in 2005, I mostly did that through journaling.

It was in 2005 that I started a blog spot, and then I started writing publicly. Some of it was travels, I would say largely for myself and family in those earlier days. It was in 2005 that I got a Facebook account, just before starting college. It was back when you needed to have a university email to actually be on there. It was long before anything like it is today. So I was on Facebook way back at the beginning. My first many years of Facebook were not a matter of sharing messages. It was just a college student using it for socialization. After I graduated in 2009, I went on a world trip and I started a blog for that on Shutterfly. And that was a world trip for about five months. And I was sharing my adventures of traveling around the world. And that was I would say when I began my more public sharing. Some people started to follow my adventure. During that time, I was using my Facebook profile and sharing some things through there. A lot of people back in college would see the adventures I was on, which were pretty wild for most of my peers at that time.

It was only a few years later, I would say 2013ish, when I actually started to use the Facebook profile to share messages. And it was 2013 when I got YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, but I wasn’t very active on those. It was mostly Facebook. So 2013 is really where it all begins, but I wanted to give you that little bit of a backstory. 2013 was when I was running a marketing company, living in San Diego. And I was waking up to the reality of what was going on in the world and wanting to step away from the whole monetary system and start doing something much more meaningful with my life. I decided that I was going to be a professional adventurer. Shortly thereafter, leave behind my profession as a salesperson, a business person. I chose to be an adventurer because I wanted to reach the masses. I had learned that there were so many problems going on in the world. That the way we were living was part of such destruction, exploitation. We were just destroying the very home that we have. The people that I shared this home with were living in such a level of exploitation and injustice to meet my basic needs as a consumer at the time.

I was realizing that I wanted to live a life of truth; I wanted to live a life of justice, of equality or equity. I didn’t want to meet my basic needs at the expense of others. I wanted to show people that another way was possible like I had been learning. And I chose adventures because I wanted to reach the masses. So my early formula was to entertain, educate, and inspire. And the reason why entertaining came first was because that was how I knew I could reach the most people with this message. First entertain, then bring in the education. Then inspire positive change. But there was another reason why entertaining was such a big one. And that was because that was what I knew how to do. Since I was about 11 years old, or about fifth grade, I had been an entertainer.

I was the class clown of my high school. I was nominated class clown as my “Senior Most.” So I had been entertaining people for a while. Part of my reason for entertaining was because it was a way of belonging, a way of being somebody, of being acknowledged, of having a purpose and meaning, of being loved, being liked. So, I decided to use my, sort of, gift, my skillset of entertaining and to put that to use. And use my entertainment as a way to, again, reach people. I would say early on, I had some core pillars. There was ego. There was me wanting to be somebody. There was wanting to have my place in the world. But at the core also was truth, was equality, was justice, was not destroying this very Earth we live on. So my earlier days, it was always there: these core pillars. Again though, one of those core pillars was ego. And I’m saying that because ego was one of the drivers that resulted in my becoming Rob Greenfield. If I didn’t have such a large ego early on, I’m not sure that I would have been so driven. From the early “get go,” my intention was to reach a whole lot of people.

I started my website in 2013. It was actually Greenfield Adventures. I chose Greenfield Adventures because I didn’t necessarily want to center myself too much out of a place of ego and humility at the same time, I would say. I made a goal early of wanting to have a TV show within five years. At the time, I was very influenced by that way of being. And I remember Bear Grylls was one of my, sort of, models that I was learning from of how to reach a lot of people through adventures and bringing my own twist into it. So, my first adventure was to bike across the United States on a bicycle made out of bamboo. It was called “Off the Grid Across America” at the time. The idea was to cross the country while basically having no negative environmental impact. Living sustainability out to the extreme so that I could be reaching a whole lot of people and sharing this message.

So, that was the first adventure, in 2013. The adventure and my work caught on very quickly in a very organic way. Just solely through authentically living out this experiment that I was on; this quest, this yearning to live sustainability to the extreme. I was so passionate and dedicated and a lot of people gravitated toward that and there was a real, genuine and authentic growth very early on. And I developed a following very early on. But, there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that most people didn’t see and I want to share some of those with you. At the same time I was really deepening into my adventures, I was really not wanting to run a marketing company anymore and not be making money. I was really dissolving my whole desire to be in the monetary system, knowing how destructive it was. Early on, we were selling advertising at grocery stores and hotels. But in 2014, I had a teammate, and I asked him, “What would you like to do?” He was full-time working for me. And he came up with doing social media management and SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. So, that’s what our company became in about 2014. That’s when I shifted from Greenfield Adventures to RobGreenfielddotTV.

The reason I had dotTV was because dotcom was taken. But also Russell Brand had dotTV at the time, so I thought, “Okay, that kind of works.” And also, I thought it established some sort of TV thing because again, my goal was to be on TV. So it was also, ego played a role in that. So my teammate was working full time doing search engine optimization and social media management. We were taking on businesses that had a positive message or a product for the world. We were focused on trying to use our marketing in a positive manner. The other thing we were doing was we were using the marketing company to help me get my message out there. So about half of his time, I would guess, went into sharing my message. So a fair bit of money was being used to spread my message. So, a lot of people were curious about that. Like, early on, “Did you have funds in order to be able to start to get yourself out there?” and the answer was, “Yes.” I funneled a good amount of the money from the marketing company into spreading my messages. And I had a teammate who was spending, I would say, about 20+ hours per week doing that. So we put in a lot of time and energy. Now, some of the stuff we were doing was of high integrity, and what I want to talk a little bit about is that there’s this concept of white hat SEO and black hat SEO. From my recollection, white hat SEO is things that are legit. You’re building up your search engine optimization, which is, search engine would be, like, Google. Optimization is people finding you on there. Being in the first page, the first slot when you type something in, such as your name, like “Rob Greenfield,” or such as “dumpster diving,” or “sustainable living.”

So we were also doing black hat SEO, which is basically what you’d call cheating. Like ways to get yourself ranked but you didn’t actually earn. So, some of the things that I did early on that were not of high integrity that built me up: the first blog that was ever written about my bike trip in 2013 was a blog that I believe we paid $5 for on a website called Fiverr. We used Fiverr quite a bit to boost myself up, to start to get my message out there. We paid for backlinks, which help your SEO or domain authority to increase. So, we paid for backlinks. We actually paid for “likes” on my Facebook page. So when I first started a Facebook page, which might have been 2014, at first I was just using my Profile, we actually paid for “likes,” which you could do. I don’t know if you can still do that, I believe it was on Fiverr. I think we bought about 20,000 “likes” to launch off the Facebook page. We also paid for followers on Twitter. I believe it was about 20,000 or so followers. And that helped establish a huge level of credibility. Because back then, 20,000 followers was a lot. Now, just as important, we actually paid for my verification on Twitter. Back then it was something you could do. I don’t know if you can really do that today. But my Twitter profile verification, which is that “blue” check mark, was paid, and I believe we did that through Fiverr as well, if I recall. I’d like to mention that later, we removed all those paid “likes” from Facebook. We removed all paid followers on Twitter, and I think later, if I recall, the Twitter page was actually genuinely verified. But that was all things we were doing early on.

The other thing is that we also paid was my first dumpster diving video. I think it was called “Dumpster Diving Across America” at the time. We paid for “likes” for that video. Err … views. I think it was 60,000 views, which at that time, again, was way more. It was a different time back then. A lot has changed in the last decade. Now the part that was the hardest time admitting to or never would have admitted to early on would be a big hit to my ego was that I actually paid for my Wikipedia profile to be created. It was also through the website called Fiverr, and I believe it was $50. And so, to put it simply, I paid to have my Wikipedia profile created. And I’d like to share a little more complexity behind that. The thing is that in order to have a Wikipedia profile that is there and stays up is, you have to fit the credibility, to be able to qualify for a page. So, in my case, it’s like a human being of notability. So that required a certain number of, not necessarily a certain number, of media outlets that verify who you are and your credibility in this field, or what have you, but also they have to be primary articles from a certain stature of media. So, I had all that. So although I paid for the Wikipedia profile, the only reason that it could be there is because I met the qualifications of what a profile would require.

One small note that I would like to make is that I have a teammate who helps with updating the Wikipedia page, like for example when I changed my name back to Robin from Rob. The whole idea of all of this was just to build credibility both with people and with the media. And it did. It made an incredibly big difference. People took me so much more seriously. And especially as someone who is raising awareness about environmental issues and doing this in the mainstream, it really helped me to build my credibility with the mainstream media and to be able to reach more people. So there was a genuine design behind all of this lack of truth and fallacies. Like, I really wanted to be respected and build myself up. And the other thing I want to acknowledge is that basically everything beyond that was real. It was just on the earlier place that I created this idea of credibility through paying for some of these things. But they very much did set a foundation that helped me build the future stuff that was from a place of integrity. I’m not going to place any right or wrong, I’m just putting the information out there; you get to decide what you think.

I want to talk a little bit about my early strategy for building my social media and that was that I spent a lot of time online. Not just my social media, but my website, my whole online self. Many days I was on the computer for 12 hours. I remember my eyes hurting a lot at that time, and sometimes not even leaving the house, just morning ‘til night. A part of that was a real drive to get a message out and part of that was that, sort of, egomania I would say I was going through. So one of my early ways of getting my message out and building my page was to post in a lot of Facebook groups. So I was posting on a lot of Facebook groups sharing my message. I was constantly monitoring who was sharing my content, and I would create relationships that way. I would see which pages were sharing my content and then I would message them and connect with them and build relationships. I would be commenting a lot when media was doing stories because I would comment in their feed. I would spend a lot of time networking, and putting myself out there I loved it. I was having a lot of fun and was consistently sharing messages, and again, I was just feeding into that really strong desire to be somebody, largely operating from that place of ego.

So one thing I did early on where there was some stretch of integrity was I created relationships with a lot of these Facebook pages. At the time, it was expanded consciousness, Valhalla movement, “Give a shift about nature,” sustainable human; a lot of pages that were sharing really solid information, and a lot that I was learning from. So we had a relationship where I would share content onto my page of theirs. However, the challenging part was that not all of their content was really of high integrity. It didn’t always have full accuracy. And sometimes it was kind of clickbaity. So one of the challenges was trying to only share their content that was really in alignment. And overall, I did a pretty solid job, but that was an area of integrity that I struggled with at times and would, I would say, bend my integrity some because of wanting to continue that relationship and get my message out there.

How I got media to cover me from the start was in 2013, when I was biking across the country, I would just roll up to the news stations and walk right in and say, “Hey, I’m biking across the country on a bamboo bicycle with a trailer covered in solar panels for sustainability and I thought maybe you’d want to do a story.” And it worked. It started in, I believe, maybe it was Nebraska where I did the first media story. And as I traveled across the country, I got more media to cover my story, and larger media as I got to the East coast where there were larger population centers, like New York City, for example, and we were also sending out press releases and contacting them on social media. So, I would say that was all in pretty high integrity. The way that I started to work with the media. But again, there was that bit of, or maybe more than a bit of false credibility that they saw that helped them to be more apt to tell my story.

For the years ahead, I continued my adventures. And after a couple of years, I transitioned from considering myself a professional adventurer to an environmental activist. My sort of strategy was that I was going to do a lot of these campaigns and set the foundation, show people what I was really all about, show my dedication, prove myself as a leader and as an activist and as a dedicated human being to humanity. So my early adventures included that first bike ride. In 2014, I biked across the country again, dumpster diving to create awareness about food waste, hosting the food waste fiascos in cities across the country. There was my traveling with no money through Central America and showing that most people out there are good people. That was the message at the time. There was living in my tiny house in San Diego. There was getting my life down to 111 possessions. So living sustainability, living simply to the extreme. In 2016, there was my campaign where I lived like the average person for a month and had to wear all the trash I created to create a visual of the truth behind how much waste is created from our consumerism.

What I would like to share is that I was always doing that … yes, there was the attention piece … but it was always genuine. It was always whenever there was attention on me, there would be attention on Earth. There would be attention on issues that were important. And there would be intention going into something beyond me. So, my videos were getting millions of views, my pages were growing by thousands. By around 2016, my Facebook page was up to about a half million followers. I think 2016 is when that happened. That was about three years or so of making that page. In 2015, the Greenfield Group ended. That was the name of the marketing company. Which meant not a whole lot more money being poured into things. So things changed at that time and that’s when I started Happy, Healthy, and Free, a nonprofit. Now that funded some of my videos. So just some transparency on money. There was still money that allowed me to build up this online presence. I started filming my own videos on a 2016 iPod touch, and those were getting millions of views. And we were working on a shoestring budget. I had a teammate, Daniel was a teammate for awhile, he’s over in Australia, and he was editing videos for $50 each. We were working on a very shoestring budget. I had started a Patreon account at that time and I was absolutely loving what I was doing. So much of it was in a very high place of integrity at that time.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about this whole character: Rob Greenfield, the character. I’ve met enough people over the years, and they see me as this character. There’s a lot of people who are confused, like am I real. In fact, one of the more commonly Googled questions I saw is, “Is Rob Greenfield or Robin Greenfield real?” There’s a lot of people who think I just stage all of it: living in a tiny house, foraging and growing all my food for a year. They think it’s all one big thing to make money. I’ll get to this, but I don’t monetize my social media. I don’t make a penny from my social media. I am here to share messages. So that’s absolutely not it. I am me; it’s as simple as that. There is a character, I have created a character, but that character is me. And as I’ve done all this, my thought has always been that I’m designing a character. I’m creating a story. I’m creating a narrative that people can follow. It’s always been about creating these media packages that mainstream media can easily package and share.

So, I’ve always looked at things through the lens of the media and through the lens of people. How they’re going to perceive it. There’s also the reality that I know that I’m living such a different life from so many people that it’s just hard to believe. But, I am, indeed, real. I am a real person behind and in front of this camera. I’ve met so many of you. So many of you know that. So, all that to say, “Yes, there is a character, but this character is me.” Taking things to the extreme is me. Being very outside of the box is me. The authenticity and the genuineness is me. It is all me. And “me” is an entertainer. And “me” is an activist. And “me” is someone who’s just quite weird compared to a lot of people out there. In many ways, just kind of not normal. One area of that is, it’s hard to be your most genuine self. For example, I’m talking to a camera. I’m sitting here alone talking to you through a camera. That’s going to be different from being with a person in the physical realm.

So it is very hard to be the exact same person online as offline. Because there are very real differences. When we’re having a conversation, you’re going to have a different experience with me. When you meet me out on the streets and I’m really tired or I’m anxious, you’re going to have a different experience from the moments when I’m going to film, which is when I’m probably having the most energy, although right now I don’t have that much energy and I’m filming in the time that I have. Now, in 2014, I did my first TV show with the Discovery Channel. I share in depth about that in another video in this truth series. So, you can watch that to learn about the ways in which integrity, truth and transparency were very much a struggle. Where I shined, and where I didn’t in that video. The thing that I want to mention right now, an area that I struggled with, you know, when I did my survival show, and when I did my traveling with no money, just the very idea of doing a show that wasn’t so deeply focused on what was at the core of my being, and at that time, that would have been a series on food waste, for example.
Exploring the truth behind our food system versus Free Ride or Viajero Sin Dinero.

So, that was a challenge. But overall, I think when it comes to reaching the masses, it’s not really possible to live in full integrity. Or it’s possible, but you have to be really, really crafted. And I just … that was the best that I had, I thought at the time. So, I’m just … there’s a few things I want to share right now that are just different notes from the time. I want to mention just a note on using people. Well, it’s not just a note, but I want to mention that. I know over time, there’s been a lot of times where I’ve been in “colleagueships” or relationships where the reason that I’m there is to get something. To get my message out there. Not because I actually want to be with them. And not because I necessarily want to be working with them. And so, that’s something that I’ve certainly done over the years, which isn’t in the highest integrity, which is, you know, using people for their platform. It’s a very common thing in this realm, and it’s something that I’ve done. Not something that I really do today, but it’s something that I’ve certainly done my fair share of in the past.

In 2016, I started to do a lot of videos on others. Sharing their messages, and it was really successful. Millions and millions of views, going into positive messages, uplifting people, organizations and activists that are in alignment, and it was a really beautiful time. I did that for a few years. It also helped to build my page a lot. So, one thing I just want to acknowledge about that is just that there was a lot of covering other people’s work because I was trying to build my own pages. So that’s an area where there wasn’t full integrity. It certainly at the time was not something I would ever have wanted to vocalize: the truth behind that strategy. There was always the desire to be spreading people’s messages just as I was, but there was that element behind it where integrity was lacking. One thing I want to share is I never did clickbait. So many of the people around me, my colleagues in the different pages that I was working, a lot of the content was very “clickbaity.” Something that I held my integrity to very strongly throughout this was never getting into the clickbait. Just titles that said what it truly was, not titles that didn’t tell you what it was. And, yeah, I do design titles that are designed to reach people, and I’ve certainly done that in the past. I’ve had people help me sometimes with making my titles more likely to be something that people would view, but I’ve never gotten into the clickbait and I’m glad to have been able to make it through this whole time without doing that because there’s certainly no way that I ever will, now that I’ve made it this far. One reason that a lot of my colleagues did clickbait is because it was their job.

They were making money. So once money is involved, a lot of people are more willing to cut corners. Maybe they needed to pay their rent, or maybe they just wanted more money and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to live in such integrity online, through social media, through my website, through YouTube, is because I don’t monetize my content. I haven’t monetized my content, I don’t ever want to monetize my content, and that’s really one of the areas where I have been able to hold strong in my integrity. One little note on that, I mentioned that I haven’t monetized my YouTube. I actually did work with a company called BBTV for a few years, and in order to work with them, to help get my YouTube to be more successful, I did have to monetize. But if I recall, I monetized one video, and it was a video that gets, like, no views, so that, technically, I qualified for their program. But I’ve never monetized my videos, never monetized my social media.

What I have done though, and I haven’t made any money off my social media. That’s a commitment of mine. It’s one of my vows to donate 100% of my media income from books, TV, social media, etc., to nonprofits and other activists and organizations. They don’t have to be a nonprofit. So, what I have done though, I have had companies pay to be promoted on my social media where that money went directly to nonprofits. Usually, that was nonprofits that I admired and supported, that I wasn’t actually a part of. And, then once I started my own nonprofit in 2020, Regeneration, Equity and Justice, money went to that nonprofit to fund some of my work. I write about that extensively at RobinGreenfield.org/transparency. I have detailed every paid promotion that’s ever been done on my social media, how much money it was and where it went to, which breaks the rules of some of the contracts, I’m sure, to share those details, but that’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve also shared details of the contracts with Discovery Channel and any time money was generated through my TV appearances, books, etc., all of that is detailed at RobinGreenfield.org/transparency.

So transparency has been a practice of mine for a very long time and I’ve been diving very deep, well beyond any celebrities or people that I see in this realm. And it’s been very deep for me for a very long time and I’m so glad that I’m beginning to go even deeper in these things with you right now. Now one area that has been a struggle with those paid endorsements is keeping up the integrity on only doing paid promotions, not endorsements. Paid promotions that have really been in alignment. And there’s been ones that just were not in alignment. For example, I did one for Acer laptops in 2022. I brought in $32,000, I believe, for the nonprofit from two partial days’ worth of work, and that helped me with planting so many fruit trees, and giving out seed packs to thousands of people, and supporting the team of people I had working together to be able to do this work. Not a penny of it went to me, but it was a huge hit to my integrity because it was a greenwashing campaign to a large degree. Although there was some real truth behind it, there was a lot of greenwashing and they used me. I let them use me.

So, that’s one of the reasons to the best of my ability, I’m trying to minimize my involvement with money because money is where it’s challenging to stay in integrity. And what I want to do, to the best of my ability, is work with individuals who want to work with me directly, not because they want to sell something, but because they have funds and want to use them to make a meaningful difference in the world. The nonprofit, Regeneration, Equity, and Justice, manages the website, video production, media, social media, etc., so the nonprofit funds some of my ability to get my message out there and I cover more of that in my financial transparency. But I just wanted to make a small note of that. So, in closing, I want to share being on social media and being on Google and the whole internet thing has definitely been a consistent test of my integrity.

The whole thing is set up really in a way that brings us out of integrity generally, and social media is set up as a big ego trap, as a big ego driver to keep us on there. Now, a big test of my integrity is this “blue” check mark, the verified “blue” check mark, and then having a million followers on Facebook and a half million on YouTube, and 200,000 or so on Instagram, all with the “blue” check marks. A lot of people look at me and they see, “Oh, wow, you’re something special.” And, of course, I walk around with this feeling of being something special: a verified person with a million followers. I don’t have a million dollars. I’ve made a lifetime commitment to not being a millionaire, but everybody knows that I have a million followers. Well, not everybody, but it’s there. So, it’s a big ego thing, and it’s a challenging one because ego … my belief is that if I’m driven from a place of ego, I’m not going to be of most effective service. I’m grateful to have these tests of my integrity, I’m grateful to exist online in a space that often lacks integrity, in the relative place of integrity that I have, and one thing I want to share is the vows that I have that I’ve held strong to: earning below the federal poverty threshold annually; maintaining a minimal net worth; donating 100% of my media earnings; practicing a very deep financial transparency; and distributing now all of my work under a Creative Commons license. It has been a beautiful journey to be on of practicing truth, integrity, and transparency online and I am excited to continue this journey with you.

As I have deepened into this, I have been a little less effective online, I would say. I’m putting less of my focus online and just being more of a human being out here in the world. So we will see what happens with my online presence.

I am grateful for all the time that we have together, and I love you all very much.

Articles referred to:

My Commitment to Financial Transparency
My Vows to Humanity 2024-2028
My Experience with Nonviolent Communication (NVC) / Compassionate Communication

The above is a transcription of Truth and Transparency: Becoming “Rob Greenfield” Online, which is part of my practice of coming into full truth and transparency.

For the full series and depth to this practice visit: My Commitment to Truth and Transparency.