Mark Sisson in New York City

Last night I schlepped into NYC to see Mark Sisson speak at John Durant's Paleo Meetup.

Sisson's speech was entitled "The Metabolic Paradigm Shift", and he focused primarily on how to get the paradigm to shift, as most of the folks who were that were attending because they were part of Crossfit NYC, a pro-Paleo outfit.  There weren't a lot of beginner questions.

Mark Sisson

Sisson comes across as a very smart, well-educated guy who clearly has spent an enourmous amount of time thinking about the ancestral way of eating, and what that means for our everyday lives.  He's also much better-looking in person than he is on the cover of his book or in the pictures on his site, as was evidenced by the line of attractive young women waiting to have their pictures taken with him at the end of the evening.  Every 57-year-old should look so good.  He's a walking advert for The Primal Blueprint.

His talk focused on a lot of the material presented in the book and on his blog, so I won't focus on that too much, but I will note that he's a terrific speaker.  If you ever wonder where the long, thoughtful posts that Mark's Daily Apple is known for come from, they come directly from Mark.  Several of his answers to the many questions he took could have been turned into posts on his blog just by transcribing his answers.



About 175 attendees

 He also mentioned that the book contract that Denise Minger mentioned is with him.  It's tentatively titled "Death by Food Pyramid", and sounds like it's going to be terrific.

And yes, that means that if you're wondering who to blame for Denise's Wheat Post having gone missing, we can now point a finger.

The one question I wasn't able to ask during the session (I'd asked a couple already, and Mark was spreading the love), was for Mark to explain what his motivation is for doing this.  I've had a number of people on Barefoot Ted's Minimalist Group claim that all he's trying to do is sell supplements, or books.  I don't think this is a valid complaint because I hope he does get rich doing this, it means he's successful in spreading a message I very much believe in; but primarily because he doesn't push his supplements, or his book, on his site.  You can learn all you need to know about Mark's program for free, and implement it without having to buy anything from him. That's a great service.  He clearly knows a thing or two about marketing, and he could much more aggresively monetize his site if he wanted to.

I'd love to see a clear statement of his intent on his site somewhere, which I could point naysayers to.

He did mention that his blog is the second-most popular health blog after Dr. Mercola, and also that he's sold about 100,000 books.  In other words, he's not yet getting rich from the Primal Blueprint.

If you have a chance to see Mark speak, I highly recommend it.  It was well worth my time, and he's clearly mastered a great deal of information about healthy diet and physical activity, and he's very eager to share it.

Oh, and as you might be able to make out in the picture above, he was wearing black Vibram FiveFinger Treks.