Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Eric Edmeades: Join The Food Revolution | E58

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Sponsored by Video Husky. If your’e looking for affordable video editing services to take your marketing to the next level check out /cart.videohusky.com/youngandprofiting and get 30% off your first month! Eat your way into being young and fit!  This week Hala interviews Eric Edmeades, most notably known for being a pioneer in the food revolution as the founder WildFit, a fast-growing nutritional coaching program exclusively offered by Mindvalley. Eric also a very experienced public speaker who has logged over 10,000 hours on stage! In #58, we’ll uncover Eric's perspective on nutrition like what we should and shouldn’t eat, we’ll start to understand the psychology behind our food cravings and we'll get insight from his time spent with the Bushmen tribe in Africa, who live similarly to those from the Stone Age! As a bonus we’ll also learn his amazing tips to tell better stories and prepare for speaking engagements. **Please note: Eric was on the road when we recorded this interview, and as a result this episode has unusually poor audio quality. However, the content is still exceptional. If you liked this episode, please write us a review! Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. Booba one will save you on all your eats. Savings can't be beat. Up to 10% off your order. Join Booba one and save $0.00 delivery fee and percentage off discounts subject to older minimums and participating scores. Taxes and other fee still apply. This episode of Yap is sponsored by Video Husky, a video editing subscription that provides you with unlimited video editing for a flat monthly fee.

I use Video Husky to edit all my videos, including this one if you're watching on YouTube. Your videos have a one-to-two day turnaround and you get your own dedicated video editor and project manager. This is so much more affordable than any other video editing service or freelancer that I've used in the past. And the video editors are so talented, they can do your thumbnails, animated transitions, transcriptions, and more. If you're looking for an affordable video editing service to take your marketing to the next level, head over to cart.videohuski.com, slash Young & Profiting,

and get 30% off your first month. That's cart.videohuski.com, slash Young & Profiting. I'll stick the link in our show notes. You are listening to YAP, Young & Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host Halataha and on Young and Profiting podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life,

no matter your age, profession or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value for my guests, people who are much smarter than me on their given topic by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. Today we're chatting with Eric and Medis. Eric is a serial entrepreneur who has owned businesses focused on mobile networking, wireless networking,

and Hollywood special effects. Working on blockbuster movies like Avatar, Iron Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean to name a few. Eric is most notably known for being a pioneer in the food revolution as the founder of Wild Fit, a fast growing nutritional coaching company exclusively offered by Mind Valley. Eric is also a very experienced public speaker who has logged over 10,000 hours on stage. In this episode we'll uncover Eric's perspective on nutrition, like what we should and should need, we'll start to understand the psychology behind our food

cravings, and we'll get an insight from his time spent with the Bushman tribe in Africa, who lives similarly to those from the Stone Age. And as a bonus, we'll also learn his amazing tips to tell better stories and prepare for our speaking engagements. Please keep in mind that Eric was on the road when we recorded this interview, and so understand that this episode has unusually poor audio quality, but the content was so good, I just had to put it out regardless. Without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Eric.

So I want to know, why have you changed your career so many times? Do you get bored easily? Do you believe in constant transformation? What's the reasoning for you changing your career so often? You know, I don't know if it's so much boredom as curiosity. You know, once something has satisfied me from my curiosity, maybe we can call it boredom, but then, you know, the next thing comes along. Like, when I sold my first business, I'd been in that industry for 15 years. And at that point, I was done.

Like, I just didn't want to do that anymore. And so for me, it's really like what, you know, I'll tell you when I was a kid, I remember reading a biography of Winston Churchill. And I was so blown away by the fullness of his life. Never mind Prime Minister and World War II, but when he was a reporter, he was covering the board war in South Africa, and he was captured and had to escape from prison. And I thought, man, you know, the days of truly rich living are over. Like, you know, those lives are long gone. And I think somewhere along the line, I aspiring to live a life as full as that kind of drove me to take

on a bunch of adventures and live a life of variety. Yeah. So tell us about all the different businesses that you've owned over your life, like just so everybody could understand the breath of experiences that you have. Wow. Okay. So I left high school and was not able to go to university. So immediately went into sales. I was offered a job in a sales organization and Wow, okay, so I left high school and was not able to go to university so immediately I went into sales. I was offered a job in a sales organization and worked there for two or three years learning human nature ultimately when you work in sales. And then one day I was offered a job to work for a small tech startup in Vancouver, Canada.

And it was literally one guy in his bedroom, I think he just moved into his first office and my dad introduced me to and I went to go work for him and I worked for him for six or seven years in the mobile tech world. We were selling mobile computing and inventory management stuff and as happens quite often founders make certain promises around equity and that kind of stuff that they apparently later don't want to honor. So that led to a sort of disagreement with that situation.

And I ended up leaving and starting my own business, which I did in England. We were in the same industry. We did things a little bit differently. We focused a lot on repair. But again, mobile computing, logistics management, that sort of stuff. Our clients were people like United Airlines and Devonums in the UK, JD Sports, like big retail companies and logistics companies. And then I did get bored.

I got bored about six years into that business, but luckily the business was standalone. It didn't need me anymore. So it was okay for me to be bored. And that's when I got into business mentoring. Because my business didn't need me anymore, I took my spare time to help young entrepreneurs through the Princess Trust in the United Kingdom get their business to started. And a couple years later, I ended up selling my business. And then I really, I just took two years off traveling around the world lecturing on business, having fun.

Then I was offered an opportunity to basically visit a movie studio in Northern California on a bit of a tour and one thing led to another on this tour and the next thing you know, I ended up buying it. And this studio was originally part of Lucasfilm. It was the original model shop of industrial-like magic. So immediately, here I am, like, semi-retired from my one business, and all of a sudden, I'm like working on Avatar and Pirates of the Care

Begated, it was super, super fascinating time in my life. We started a couple of other businesses at that time, making 3D camera engineering equipment and military research and development and medical simulation and that sort of stuff. And then I reached the point in my life where I realized that as much as I did enjoy each of those projects, I really, I valued freedom a lot more and I really didn't want to be tied to an office or tied to brick and mortar business anymore.

And I went back to my original goal as a child. When I was 15, 16, 7 years old, I really thought that I'd want to be a teacher. And then I found out, and I don't know what it's like in every country around the world, but I then found out in Canada at least, we don't really seem to pay our teachers what's fair, relative to the importance of their job,

and I didn't become a teacher on that basis. But I was now given the opportunity to do that. And so I teach. That's awesome. You definitely have an amazing range of experience. And I really want to focus this interview on your nutritional content, as well as your public speaking expertise.

We do a ton of research here at Young & Profiting Podcast. And I found out that as a kid, you were actually a very sick kid. You had throat infections and sinus infections, and you went from doctor to doctor, and you were on drugs, and they were almost going to operate on you. But, you know, you discovered something about food that really helped to shape your career later on in life.

So, can you talk about how you were as a child in terms of your health and how food helped you improve your health overall. Yeah, so it's funny at that age, you know, when you're sick, continuously, you don't really think of yourself as sick, you know, so I didn't think of myself as sick. I just was that kid who always had allergies or always had digestive problems or, you know, my parents obviously took a different view and they were sending me to this doctor and the specialist and what have you. And, you know, being prescribed all kinds of different drugs.

And as you say, eventually, at about 21, I had a doctor take a look at my throat and say, oh my god, we have to take your tonsils out. And, you know, one thing kind of led to another as I shared this with a few of my friends. And, you know, I listened. And and 30 days I figured a 30 day experiment I mean what could go wrong and after two weeks into this experiment where I just cleaned up my eating and felt like I was particularly bad with food I just wasn't that good with it and then within two weeks suddenly I was able to bring to my sinuses the throat infections were gone and the doctor's office called me to try to you know confirm the surgery and I canceled it and they were like why would you cancel it? Well because the problems you know gone no no the probably you sometimes what happens is that it feels better for a while

But then it'll just come back and I said no no, it's gone and you know what really disturbed me even at that point was why they didn't ask me how I did it You know you know you were curious about how I handled it. And so that began my journey with food and recognizing, you know what really began, I'll tell you what Plumeaway is asking a doctor one day, how long, you know, it took to become a doctor like how long they went to medical school, and you know, generally, minimally, it's about six years, and then I asked the follow-up question of how much of that time do you spend studying food and nutrition?

And what's shot to me to my core and still disturbs me deeply is that somebody can become a medical doctor and not study food at all. Yeah. And that's when I decided I wanted to study food. Yeah, that's so interesting. And so you put that on the back burner for quite some time, but then you ended up going to spend time with the Bushman in Africa for my understanding. And can you

just tell us how you ended up visiting a tribe in Africa and studying them and researching them? Was it on purpose or was this planned and you kind of knew what you were looking after when you went to spend time with them? It was really a matter of a confluence of coincidence and events. So my growing up by winter this day and suddenly I became really curious about food and that kind of stuff. And at the same time, my father's grandfather had discovered the oldest homo sapiens skull many, obviously, nearly many years before.

But it was kind of in my family this interest in human history and anthropology and that kind of stuff. And so I had all these diverse curiosities and I didn't realize they were going to be related to each other. At that time, I'd also become really fascinated by peak performance and how to create behavioral change in people. And again, these were just separate curiosities of money. And then somewhere along the line, I started marrying them together and really wanting

to study them much more deeply. At this stage, I was running leadership programs, dealing with behavioral change and that kind of stuff, taking people up Kilimanjaro. So my leadership program was a two-week program and one week of it involved in combining the top of Kilimanjaro, which is a little bit more of an intensive workshop exercise than breaking boards or walking on fire. Yeah. And so coming down the mountain one day, the logistics team that I was working with, the guy who owned the company, he said to me, and he'd googled me or something, he's like, wow, you're really interested in this sort of human history, social anthropology, blah, blah, blah.

Would you like to visit with some Bushman? Mm. And I was like, what? That's even possible? Like, it wasn't even, and so he said, yeah, I think I know where we can find him, we can be trying to meet with him, and so he loaded up some four-by-fours, and when crashing through the bush and machetes and no luck, no luck, no luck, and then all of a sudden he'd heard through somebody else that we could get up

to Lake Eoxy in East Africa, in Tanzania and that the the hud of people lived in that area and there was a tribe that we might be able to find and that's what happened the very first time and I've been back visiting them now for over 10 years. That's amazing and for my listeners you want more context into who the bushmen are. They literally live as if they're in the stone age. They make fire by rubbing sticks together. They're nomadic, they follow the water and things like that. So very primitive tribe that Eric spent a lot of time with studying. So what were the top nutritional insights that you found from spending time with the bushman?

You know, it's not so much that I found a lot of nutritional insights from them, but rather observing them confirmed theories or underpinned studies and not kind of stuff. So here's an example. Humans are particularly men, if I can say this, are somewhat lazy. And you know, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but a man can come home from work, turn on a TV and just sit down where a woman comes home from work times on the TV and then does stuff. You know, it's like there's a difference.

And I know these are huge stereotypes. I'm sure I'm going to get people on Instagram going, don't necessarily affect men and women, but these are just my observations. In any event, what I noticed there is that it's not so much that men are lazy, it's that they're incredibly efficient and i think that when you recognize that food used to be incredibly rare and difficult to get it required a significant amount of energy to go get it so you you know you were conserving energy in order to go and hunt and gather which took a huge amount of energy one day i was out

about three years ago i was out with the hudda and the chief came to me I was there for a whole week I was living with them I didn't bring food I brought water because I'm not stupid they you know I don't know how we like I couldn't live on their amount of water but I didn't take food I wanted to be immersed with them and on the very first day he came to me said you want to go hunting and of course I said yes I've been hunting with them before but I've never been out all day and no kidding I tracked our hunt and we did 27 miles that day. Wow.

No training for this and it's not running track miles. It's storm trees and cliffs and rocks and it wasn't even all that Successful that hunting trip and the next day we wake up in the morning every burn in my body hurts and the chief comes up and he goes, You know, are you ready to go again? And of course this this is again where I'm going to have to stereotype a little bit. I surrify as a woman, I've said no, because women are smart. I'm a man. My ego goes, of course, I'm going to go again. So I'm going to go. And, uh, and we did another 17 miles very next day.

Wow. One of the things that it really showed me is that our life today is so physically easy that we are underutilizing our bodies. Mm. And that's dangerous. If you're not out there doing your 7, 8, 10,000 steps a day, you're underutilizing your body. If you don't use it, you'll lose it.

And we know that, but to see it live in action there, we're small. Yeah, that's incredible. That's effective. Yeah, definitely some great stuff around food, around what they eat and the seasonality of what they eat. Because of course, when fruit's in season, it's in season, when it's not, it's gone. Of course, for us, we can go buy a mango pretty much any day of the week at a grocery store.

Yeah. You're the founder of Wild Fed, right? It's a 90-day nutritional program. It's backed by Mind Valley. Lots of people swear by what you do. And essentially, could you just explain what wild fit is? Like, what is the premises behind it? So wild fit is effectively a health and fitness coaching company. And the wild fit 90 program you're talking about is our flagship program. And what that program is, is a marriage between really solid, let's call it nutritional

anthropology or an evolutionary view on food, so solid nutritional education and where we really differentiate behavioral change, behavioral change psychology. So these days there are many, there are many, many good people out there sharing great information about nutrition, but the average person can't follow. They don't have the willpower and they don't understand the manipulative food marketing practices and the food ingredients practices that are aimed at taking away their freedom. What we do the difference, the difference takes us from the diet industry is that we change people's psychology on food.

People will ultimately eat what they want to eat. So we want to educate them as to what that might be. But then what we have to do is often break childhood linkages, change psychological connections, undo the hypnosis that the food industry's been doing. So our clients a year later are still on track. Yeah. And that's very different from the dietary sheet.

As you said, mine values are a publisher. And they published some incredible authors. And I mean, very good company on the Mind Valley platform. They're doing incredible work. And I just now was in LA, where WildFit now for the second year in a row is one the highest rated program award on Mind Valley, which is the customer service rating of clients

coming out the back end. I'm proud of that, but I also need to observe something. And that is that our program is 90 days, and we're most of the programs only 30 days. So the longer your program, the harder it is to maintain good customer feedback because you can't stick with stuff. But also, it's food, which typically doesn't get high ratings

in education platforms because people buy books and don't read them or sign up for programs and don't do them. Where we differentiated it is we have an 85% completion rate and a 85% to 90% success rate which is just not consistent with the diet industry. Yeah, very cool. So, let me pick your brain on food and food choices. So, for my understanding, you don't eat any sugar or dairy or even carbs or caffeine

or alcohol if I remember correctly. It's absolutely not like that. Wild fit is about freedom. even carbs or caffeine or alcohol, if I remember correctly. It's absolutely not like that. Wild fit is about freedom. It is absolutely about freedom. And so that means that our clients are conditioned, they're educated in condition to get to a place where they are absolutely free to eat what they want, when they want as much as they want, any time they want. That's the goal of it. Now, what we want to work with is what the want is because the other thing they need to be free to do is to not eat what they wish they wouldn't eat when they didn't really want to eat it. And that's something most people can't do. They walk into a room and they go, oh look, don't it. And they've got the little angel on one side going, you don't want to eat that. It's going to make you feel awful.

Yeah. So who need, and what we do is get rid of that. So when you say I don't need sugar, that's not true. The English language is complicated because we use one word to describe a million things. Sugar is good or bad. Yes, there are terrible sugars and there are good sugars. Sugar is good every day. No, do I eat sugar? Of course I do.

Do I eat processed refined So do I eat sugar? Of course I do. Do I eat like processed refined garbage bleached crap sugar? No. I mean I can't say it never makes a twin of me because it's hidden in an million things. Yeah. But I certainly make a concerted effort to do it. Yeah. I choose not really to eat dairy products. I for a number of reasons. I occasionally have ghee or butter, but it's rare. I certainly don't drink milk or cheese and that kind of stuff. But these are choices that we help our clients to make, not things that we dictate to them. Yeah, totally, totally. So let's stick on sugar for a little bit.

Could you help us understand why we're so hardwired to enjoy sugar so much? It's a very, you know, evolution just can explain this for us beautifully. One of our theories at WildFit is that the things that we've developed cravings for are things that were nutritionally important and rare. So if it was nutritionally important and not rare, no need for craving, because hunger itself would drive you to go and get some. But if it was nutritionally important and rare or required effort, then you'd are craving. And so have a craving for fat, because it's nutritionally important, and it requires effort to go get it. Yeah. Sugar is very much the same way.

Speaking of the hud's abishment, when you're out with them, you'll see, there's very little sugaring nature. It's incredibly hard to find. There are berries that ripen occasionally, but they're not these genetically modified bread fruits that we have today. A sour plum is a great

size piece of fruit but the pit inside, well the pit inside is 70 80% of the fruit. So there's only a little bit of flesh on the outside. So there's a very tiny amount of sugar per piece of fruit and the fruit is only on that tree for a week. So there's this one week where they can get quite a lot of sugar in and then they can't. And so they have the craving that says when it's available with that gets on. It's full of vitamin C and so we've got to go get some when it's available. And then when it's gone, we lament it. We're probably a little depressed. Same thing with honey. Honey in Africa is incredibly hard to find. Yeah. These in Africa are smart. They hide themselves inside things. The bees in the rest of the world are airmen. They like, I'll just put my hide right here

where you're in there, but in Africa, because they've had demons for so long, they they vary the hive like and so they're hard to find. You can only find it because there's this tiny little wax chimney. And if you can see that little wax chimney on the tree, and you know, there's honey inside. So again, it's incredibly rare and yet important. And so we have a craving for it. And there's one more mechanism that's the reason that people are in so much trouble. Yeah. When you eat fruit sugar, you know, you get this sugar spike and then you start producing insulin. And the insulin then breaks down the sugar. And what you're left with often at the end of that is a little surplus insulin and

your blood sugars come down. And that insulin is kind of, we'll call it insulin shock. And in that moment, you have this craving for sugar. That's why somebody can, like, oh, I'll just have one. No. No, they're going to have one and then the body's going to end the region for that. Imagine that you and I are walking along 100,000 years ago in the Bush and Africa and we see some fruit on the tree We grab some we eat it

We walk away and then we have this weird sugar trading again So we walk back and eat some more well If there are fruits on the trees what that can tell us is the next season that's coming as winter, which is drought Which means we better load up and fat enough as best we can right now and so that we'd better load up and fat enough as best we can right now. And so that little craving is designed to prepare us for the drought that's coming for Paris or the winter. We didn't have that craving, we wouldn't survive. The problem with rock mechanism today is lethal.

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into a reality by listening to the Millionaire University podcast. New episodes drop Mondays and Thursdays. Find the Millionaire University podcast on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, totally. And we have such an addiction to sugar, especially Americans. I read a stat that like Americans consume like 54 pounds to 150 pounds of sugar per year. And it's just increasing and increasing. And like 1915, it was like 17 pounds of sugar per year. And we went so far away from that number.

And it's very scary. I think that a lot of companies really put sugar in things where it really doesn't belong. And we're addicted to it. And a lot of people don't even know that they're addicted to sugar. It's true. And part of it is that it's so insidious, it's so hidden in things that people

are eating sugar. Like, I've shared that statistically. And, as a matter of fact, I went to, I told my wife one day, the average American is eating 154 pounds of sugar. This is like four years ago. I told her this one, I first saw that study. She's like, no, no, that can't be right. That can't be. And then I told her, and obesity is apparently seven times more dangerous than

smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. And she's like, no, if those things were true, they'd be all over the news. And no kidding about it. Weak later, we're at this event. And I'm speaking at the event and I'm speaking after President Wilkman, and he's on the stage, and then he does some q&a and a woman the artist you know mr president what do you think the biggest dangers are this is actually a lot of the limit this one is that what do you think the biggest dangers are facing us in the world today any stops

to go well sugar i read the other day that the average american each one hundred and fifty four pounds of sugar every year in my wife like that and i don't think be a seven times more dangerous than smoking a thing. It's like right out of, and she's like, oh, no, it's true, now that Bell's in it.

You know? That's so funny. Yeah, and like lots of diseases like diabetes are all because of our sugar problem, something that we definitely need to get under control. So we have a question from the audience, and the teach is wondering if there's any replacement for sugar?

Well, it's funny, you know, whenever we want to replace something, we have to ask why does it, from the audience and the t there's any replacement for it's funny, you know, w we have to ask why it is is what you're trying to you think it's the taste right? A lot of times w that you fell down your sc you're crying, your parents gave you a chocolate chip cookie. That's the strategy from the pain. You felt love. And then at 40 years old, you can want to chocolate chip cookies when you're feeling lonely. Yeah.

And so a lot of times our desire to replace sugar really is an attempt to achieve an emotional state. What I would suggest is that it's not so much that we want to replace sugar. It's that we want to choose really two principles when it comes to sugar. Well, maybe three. Reduction, heavy reduction, and quality. Like what kind of sugar are you eating? If you're eating like unrefined cane sugar from time to time, honey, you look good, quality honey.

You know, not this garbage, honey, syrup stuff that a lot of people are eating is honey. But if you're eating good, quality sugar, then not to great step in the right direction but then here's the other one and this is the tough one for a lot of people is that it really is meant to be seasonal sugar is not something that your body is designed to process every single day your pancreas is a dual minimally a dual function organ it has a sugar function and a non-sugar function and if you only ever run it in sugar mode, you're asking for pancreatic problems, right?

Potentially things like diabetes and so on. So I'm not so big on the idea of looking for replacements is rather saying, if I'm going to eat sugar, I want to eat the best quality that I can. The kind of my body has an involved relationship with, say, fresh fruit, honey, that kind of stuff. And then I want to eat it occasionally, I'm not with any regularity.

Yeah, that's great advice and super interesting. So let's switch gears to meat. Meat is one of those things where there's lots of argument on whether meat is good or bad. From my understanding, correct me from wrong, you used to be a vegetarian, you should not eat meat, and then now you do eat meat, right? So could you help us understand like how, what changed your mind in terms of meat? This is a tough topic, because it's now at the point of being political. Let me start with this.

There's a lot of food science out there, studies and research and all this kind of stuff. But food science is an incredibly difficult science because in a really good scientific experiment, you only are changed one variable and you control everything else. So when you do a big study of food, that's just not really possible.

Like if you want to test like his coffee, good or bad, you can't find a whole bunch of people that are living exactly the same and then have some have coffee and have something on it and have coffee, that would be the only way to really, really do the study. So it's really difficult to rely on studies, particularly because most studies are funded by people with agendas, the food industry itself. For example, the Beef Broars

Association has absolutely been working to overstate the requirement for protein to drive meat eating. There's no question they've done that. And the vegan movement have absolutely done manipulative things with studies to convince people in another direction. And so, my rule for food science works like this. Read the study, be intrigued by it, measure it against evolutionary biology, and if it conflicts with evolutionary biology, question it seriously if not disregarded. That's what happened to me with me. I'm a recovering vegan. I was convinced

by the arguments. I was convinced by silly logical fallacy based arguments like if you put an apple and a bunny with your baby on the floor, I'll bet you a million dollars that the baby will eat the apple and play with the bunny. I mean, this is a ridiculous, emotive argument, but at 21 years old, 22 years old, I was impressionable by such things. What basically happened for me was my research, one thing I've been really clear about with this journey that I've been on the food is I'm not interested in being right. I'm interested in knowing the truth. And so that means that I've had theories that I've held really strongly at some point in time. But when the research has come along, I've absolutely been willing to change my position.

And that's really scary when you're vegan time, but when the research has come along, I've absolutely been willing to change my position. And that's really scary when you're a vegan because if you are a vegan and you change your position, which by the way, 85% of vegans will do. 85% of vegans will be stopped. And there's reasons for that. But the challenge is when you change your mind from the vegan world, you face a pretty serious backlash. I was hearing yesterday that Cafe Gratitude here in Los Angeles decided they wanted to

try and serve some eggs from time to time. They're a vegan place and there was protests like protests. So when you change your mind in this world, it can be pretty dangerous, you know, from a PR perspective. But in my case, what happened was very simple. My research was about finding the truth and the more I dug into human history, the more it became absolutely clear to me that our ancestors have always... I have pretty broadened into purposes always eating meat. There's never been a successful

society of vegetarians ever in the history of earth. There's a bit of an experiment going on in the year right now and it's not going very well. And so I got that fist surgery and then at the same time, I was researching other primates and I found out something crazy and that is that both chimpanzees and banovoes and by the way, they're incredibly close related except we're more genetically related to the one than the other one is. Like we are more of a chimpanzee than the banovoes. So when I found out that they are incredible meat eaters, they are very good hunters. Yeah. You made the questioning some stuff and then I had a personal experience. I was training

for the London Marathon. And I was running like 3-8-t mile runs a week in prep for the marathon and I was waking up in the night, salivating, having the names of our communities. I hadn't had it in years. The research, one thing led to another, and I just realized I was on the wrong path. Yeah, and I've even heard that not eating meat can cause you to become aggressive, right? Is that true? You know, it's a little thing that I,

I don't like mentioning it so often. Frankly, I know what will happen to me on Twitter and all that stuff after that. I would be proud. It's probably the most propagandized and light about vitamin there is, but vitamin B12, like humans make their own vitamin B12, but apparently we make it so far back in the hind gut that we don't get access to our own B12. So that's why we get our B12 from animals.

And that's where B12 comes from. Yes, the vegan movement's going to tell you, no, you get your B12 because when you pull the carrot out of the ground, it's full of soil and you eat it. Okay, do you know what soil is? Rodding feces and flasht. So it's hardly vegan. So in any event, one of the symptoms of B12 deficiency, and this is difficult because it's not just simply a matter of, oh, well, I've got my B12 supplement over here. There's some issues around the digestibility and the availability and the source with which the B12 came with.

But B12 deficiency, one of the symptoms is aggression. And I find that ironic because I suspect that it's an evolutionary trait designed to make sure you get your fair share at the kill. So I've been out with the Bushman. I know what happens. If we kill something small, they cook it and eat the bush. They don't bring meat back to camp. But when we kill something big, we bring it back to camp.

And I'll tell you what, the women are ready. And I think it's the ones that have a little extra aggression at that piece. And so, in the weirdest twist of irony, the emotive and nearly violent veganistite is, may well be suffering with B12 deficiency deficiency which is designed to help them get their share at the table. But it's going the other way. Yeah, that's so fascinating and who knows, you know, what's right or wrong in terms of eating meat? How about meat substitutes? Things like beyond meat are really picking up steam right now. My boyfriend's a vegetarian, so I've learned how to cook everything with beyond meat. It's okay, but sometimes I feel like, what am I even eating? What's your

perspective in terms of meat substitutes? You know, I think that one of the, again, one of the things you have to ask your soul is, why do we need to substitute? I mean, if you don't want to eat meat, don't eat meat. Don't eat substitutes. Why would you need to do that? If vegetarianism and veganism was the healthiest path for humans, why would we even have a craving for desire for vegetarian sausage or fake meat or these kinds of things? That's one question, which is provocative, but it's a valid question. But the other thing is, most of the meat substitutes are a heavily processed other foods that we're really not supposed to be eating the regular. And so I'm not a big fan.

Somebody wants to become a vegetarian. And incidentally, generally when somebody calls themselves a vegetarian, it means that they are not eating meat in fish, but they are drinking milk or eating cheese. And to me, that's like the biggest contradiction in the world. If you're going to be a vegetarian for animal rights reasons, you've got to be a vegan. You can't. You can't. Milk has got to be the most inhumane thing that we do to animals anywhere on the planet.

And of course, there are health reasons for not having milk as well. So I'm not a big fan of meat substitutes per se. That said, if somebody's going to make the choice to become a vegetarian or especially vegan, they're definitely going to have to give some thought to getting the right amino acids in their life because there's no prance in the world that has them all. And so they're going to have to really think a lot about how to get that done and get those supplements. Even the vegetarian society of America said,

if you choose to become a vegetarian, there are supplements you're going to have to take. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Let's stick on dairy for a little bit. A lot of people are lactose intolerant, right? And similarly with bread and things like that, gluten intolerant. Can you talk about this trend? And are we, like, let's say for me, I have no trouble eating milk and things like that.

But I don't know if that's necessarily good or bad. Does that mean that I just have a free past? Do you just drink as much milk as I want? Because I don't get sick from it? Or does it not work like that. But I don't know if that's necessarily good or bad. Does that mean that I just have a free past to eat as drink as much milk as I want because I don't get sick from it or is it does not work like that? Okay, here's my opinion for what it's worth. Lactose intolerance. What that basically is the result of is that milk, you know, lactose is the milk sugar. And so people who are lactose intolerant are no longer able to make lactase, which is the degest digestive enzyme that breaks down lactose. And most mammals stop producing lactase when they're weaned. Wait, roughly when they're teeth are coming in or when they're weaned and they're no longer

drinking milk from their mother, they stop producing lactase. Then they don't go back to drinking milk. Obviously, they stop producing lactase because there's no need. I actually believe that everybody is lactose intolerant. They just have to wait until the lactose caught turns off. And for some people, particularly northern people of northern European genetics, they are the largest genetic segment that has an extension on this lactose clogging. In other words, less of them are lactose intolerant than anybody.

And that's because they've had milk for longer than anybody else. They've had milk for about 8,000 years or 7,000 years or so. The issue about whether lactose intolerance or not indicates whether milk is good for the United States to relevant, all that is one step in the process of processing milk. So if you are lactose intolerant, I think you're lucky because it's like you have an alarm system and your body's going, what are you doing? Don't put that in me! I am not a cow! I am not planning to grow a thousand pounds in my first year. I don't have four stomachs. Please don't put this in me and

your body reacts. Don't do this. If you are not lactose intolerant, it's like they've turned the alarm off and you just keep putting the stuff in. And then I believe that's going to create consequence. And the consequences are arranged from the immediate, which is the lactose intolerant potential pain, to the immediate, like skin problems, sinus infections, ear infections, and that kind of stuff, which are very common for people who are taking in a lot of dairy products, and almost always go away when people stop having dairy products. And then the more long-term issues, like Harvard Nurses School that is studying that show that one glass of milk a day or equivalent in excess dairy products

would result in a 300% increase in the likelihood of developing prostate or varian cancer. Another study was just published two weeks ago. I saw in Canadian Press that said something very similar around breast cancer, that the long-term impact of having milk over years is bad. And then again, let's come back to evolutionary sub-time. We've never done that. or that the long-term impact of having milk over years is bad. And then again, let's come back to evolutionary sub-time.

We've never done that. It's one of the newest things in our behavior. Our ancestors were not walking up underneath the wilderness trying to smell good. Yeah. So let's talk about diets. You know, one size fits all diets compared to personalized diets. Do you feel that we need to personalize our diets in any way or is that not necessary? So, I think that yes, there can be a degree of personalization once you've handled your

core diet. The fact at the moment of doing personalized diets is incredibly good marketing. I mean, I'm a marketer, I'm a business guy. I know I understand marketing and it is a lot easier if I come along and say, you know, oh, like if you want me to a bookstore and you saw a thing that said, you know, the Hala diet, you'd be like, oh my God, it's a diet domain.

And you'd buy that book in five seconds. Another way to put this is, let's say you have a dog and you want to buy a training book on dogs and you happen to have You have a dog? Yes What kind of dog you have a multi-s? You have a multi so you walk into the story you see this Vulcan it says how to train your dog in you know 30 days or whatever But then you walk a little further and you see this thing that says how to train your mouthies

You're gonna buy that now. I'll tell you something I know an author that did this they have all these dogs on how to train your husband how to train your mouth you how to train your mouthies. You're going to buy that. Now, I'll tell you something. I know an author that did this. They have all these dogs on how to train your husky, how to train your mouthies, how to train. Fabulous marketing. But you know what's crazy? 90% of the book is the same, no matter what the species.

And then there are slight modifications. For example, if you have a Siberian husky, you just can't train them to walk off the leaves. Can't be done. So there's a chapter. There's that's how I do this question with that. 90% of it is the same. We are all sapiens. There's not a single vitamin nutrient. There's not a single nutritional constituent that you need, that I don't also need, that everybody here in Salt Lake City needs, that everybody in Los Angeles or Mumbai, there's not one.

We all need them. And so that's the core start. It's getting your core sapiens nutrition correct. And then there may be some personalizations, but frankly in my opinion, most of the personalizations are related to food sensitivities. And you'll notice most of those things are dairy, sugar, grain. So for the most part, the personalization comes down to things like male female or somewhat different and physical activity or somewhat different and speeds of metabolism can be different, but that's often a genetic response to the way you're eating anyway. Yeah, that's awesome. Such great insight there. So from my understanding, not all hunger is created equal, right? There's many different types of hunger that we have, and oftentimes it's our mind playing

tricks on us, and we're actually not really hungry or not physically in need of nutrients. So can you talk to us about the different types of hunger that we have? Sure. And I'll go on further. I'll actually publish an infographic on my Instagram account later today so they can actually see what I'm about to describe. Awesome. In Wildfit, we have a thing called the six hungers. And the purpose behind the six hungers is to recognize what is driving your eating decision. So when we look at the six hungers, I won't go through

them all right now because it would take us a little while, but I'll give you some examples and then you can go find the infographic and the explanation. Here's an example. First of all, there's only one true hunger and that's proper nutritional hunger. That's where your body says, wow, I'm low on this, I'm low on that, I'm low on fat, I'm low on this. The trouble with that hunger is that it generates a non-specific desire to eat. It doesn't necessarily tell you go eat this thing.

And the reason for that is that our ancestors didn't have those choices. They didn't have whole foods. They didn't have grocery stores. So when they needed a nutritional constituent, they just basically got this message and said, go eat some stuff because hopefully you'll get it through the course of your season of rotation. That's the only core hunger. And the trouble is that most Americans, and most look, we beat up on Americans a lot, but let's be clear. American food patterns are spreading around the world. Now that Britain has left the EU, they're going to be totally subjected to heat today. To American food regulations, this is going to be consistent everywhere. And so

one of the things that's happening with us here is that as we are eating according to food regulations and the food manufacturing industry, The fact is most of us, not just Americans that are in the Western world, are actually nutritionally hungry every day. So even though we overeat, even though we eat more calories than we need, most of us are missing major nutrients on a day-by-day basis, so we have a constant and pervasive feeling of hunger. Wow. One of the reasons we overeat.

Another form of hunger in the six-hungers is thirst, which sounds weird, right? What would it mean thirst? That's not hunger, except that a huge amount of the water that our ancestors used to ingest came from the food they ate. They didn't have potter, they didn't have their fancy gin water bottle, right? So they drank water when it was available after the rains, they find puddles and rivers and whatever.

But a lot of the time the water they're getting was from the plant who's there eating. And so when we get dehydrated our body sends a signal and that signal is eak because we used to get part of that way. Of course today people go eat a bag of potato chips which of course takes water out of them and then makes them more dehydrated which sends another signal eak. And so one of the things that's important in appetite control is making sure you're well hydrated. And the third one we'll do, and the rest they can get,

I'll publish it so everybody's got it, but the third one is emotional hunger. And this is the one that's devastating. It's devastating because our parents and our teachers and our school and our governments didn't really understand what they were doing when they were raising us around what they were teaching us around food. So they did vary many of the things backwards and created food addictions in us, that then the food industry played upon.

Here's a great example. I saw this great commercial. I mean, I didn't know it was a commercial, but it was the most beautiful collection of CCTV footage of random acts of kindness an awesome viral video that you know people like this woman goes to the machine and she drops your wallet and the young man behind her as she walks away picks up her wallet runs down the street and gives it to her little old lady crossing the street in the middle of a snowstorm somewhere in the Ukraine and two young men come along and they stop the traffic for and take each hand and walk across the street

and you know you're watching this video going, oh, I love people. Oh, I just love people. People are so amazing. Boom. Coca-Cola. Open happy. And you wonder why it is? I can't stand.

Frankly, if I was into banning stuff, I'm into its personal liberty. So if you want to drink Coke, that's up to you. I think we should toss the hell out of it. But if I was into banning stuff, Coca and Coke would be like, top of my list. You know what's really crazy though? The advertising is so effective, I was such a Coke fan at the kid that even to this day when I see somebody drinking Pepsi, I'm like, you should give a drink to Coke. That's how it's done.

The advertising. And so the emotional hunger is something we really have to learn to cope with and learn to create consciousness about because there are linkages and rules that we made as a child and we're still following them. And that's why we have a major diabetes explosion, a major obesity explosion, a major cancer explosion, and the emotional hunger is a big big part of that. Your dog is an important part of your family. Don't settle when it comes to their health.

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And the best part, they offer a money back guarantee. If your dog's tail isn't wagging within 30 days, they'll refund your first order. No fillers, no nonsense, just nom nom. Go right now for 50% off your no risk two week trial at trinom.com slash app. That's trinom and om.com. For 50% off, trinum.com slash app. Yeah, so you sort of touched on it. Let's talk about some of the incorrect information that's out there. So for example, the food pyramid. What's your thoughts on the food pyramid?

And how would you redesign it if you had your way? Well, it's actually really easy. The woman originally designed the food pyramid, designed a very good food pyramid. And then she went away and then she came back. I'm going to have to reread about this. I feel like it was in the 40s. But anyway, she came back and they explained the government, you know, explained to her, well, we've made a few adjustments to your food pyramid because we felt like we didn't

want to just rely on your one opinion. We wanted to get some opinions from the industry, which means the dairy and the company, it means the grain growers and the beef growers. So basically, they went out and they took her pyramid and turned it upside down. They just flipped it. And she said to them at that point, if you flip that like that, within 30, 40 years, you're going to have a diabetes while she didn't more time and came up with the term diabetes city, but a diabetes in obesity epidemic, right? She basically said you're gonna have a diabetes city Epidemic within 30 45 years and guess what we have and so you know

Where where I'm at right now is not a mystery what we've eaten from most our history not a mystery at all But it's being turned into a mystery by profitability It's being turned into a mystery by profitability it's being turned into a mystery by food companies that are far more interested in their bottom line in their profit than they are in the health of the individual people and i want to be clear here i'm not saying that these companies are evil i don't believe that coca-cola is if the here the evil i don't believe that michael does inherently evil or next week and here at the evil but i believe that their

structure is designed around quarterly profitability reports and shareholders that are asking them to drive those numbers and so as a consequence they are manipulating people to eat more than they need to to eat things they shouldn't be eating and then they're putting addictive substances in those things to take away your sense of freedom about eating those things. So we're in danger. Totally, totally. We're going to switch gears and talk about public speaking in a bit. I do want to ask one more question from the audience on diet. And that's from Aurora. She wants to know, what are your thoughts on intermittent fasting?

I'm a great, great believer and fan of intermittent fasting as long as it's intermittent. And I don't mean what I mean is I don't think that we need to control our structure eating that way all the time. Funny enough, I was with the HUD's abutment about two weeks ago, and I just did my most recent visit with them. Cry in adventure, let me tell you, I had to have an emergency appendectomy in the middle of the trip. It was a scary, scary thing.

Oh, wow. But I sat down and did some interviews with the chief and one of the leading women in the trial. And one of the leading women in the tribe. And one of the questions I asked is, do members of the tribe ever not be intentionally? Do they ever fast? Do they ever? They don't have the words for fasting, but we got the point across. And he looked at me like I was insane.

Why would anybody ever intentionally not eat? Now, remember, in social anthropology, there's this really cool measurement called calories per acre. They can live with very few calories per acre, right? Where we, like, you know, the mass eye, they have cattle, so they live with hundreds of thousands of calories per acre, and then the farmers have millions of... And we live with billions of calories per hour, because we can't even work our self-sumptured immediately. Not them. So when I say to them, do you ever intentionally not eat? Actually not, not ever. But nature imposes intermittent fasting on them regularly.

So the idea of going for many, many hours or even many days about food is an absolutely natural phenomenon. And it's not something that's bad for us. It's actually something that's very good for us. To example, one is that when you, if you had a factory and you wanted to maintenance from a factory, you would close the factory down, stop the machines, go in and do the maintenance. So the digestive system occasionally likes a break. You don't put anything in there for a while and then it has a chance to go in there and repair and clean and all that kind of stuff. The other side of this is that when you take a break

from eating, you're some experience back down take a break from eating, your stomach turns back down to its normal size. Your stomach is normally the size of your fit. So if you look at that, that's about how much food you need in any one meal, right? Just the fish. But the trouble is, is that our stomachs are expandable because of teeth and famine, routines and nature. For example, we kill the wildebeest, we're going to eat a lot, or the fruits on the tree, we're going to eat a lot. Then the stomach expands out. Sometimes that even hurts a lot, or the fruits on the tree, we're going to eat a lot. Then the stomach expands out. Sometimes that even hurts a little. You hear people, oh, man, I ate too much, right?

But the trouble is, is it for most people in the Western world, the stomach stays stressed like that. And so it takes a lot of food to give them a full feeling. Whereas intermittent fasting helps to bring that stomach back down. And so that the next meal they eat, they're not tempted to eat as much. So I'm a big, big fan of intermittent fasting and long-term fasting. I think it's incredibly healthy. And there's one other reason which is fascinating.

We know we burn sugar. Yeah. We know we burn fat. What most people don't know is that we also burn protein. When we're in a really stressful situation, for example, fasting, our body will actually switch to burning protein. But our body is so smart. Well, everyone, I don't want to burn my protein.

I'm going to the gym to build. I don't want to burn my protein. I'm going to the gym to build. I don't want to burn my... No! The body is smart. Just like a lion or a wild dog or a hyena, takes out the weakest antelope. When your body burns protein as a fuel source, apparently it burns the oldest, weakest, and most of these proteins first. So wow.

That's a pretty good process. Wow. Intermittent fasting sounds That's a great process. Wow. Intermittent fasting sounds so healthy and so great for you. I'm definitely going to give that a shot. Thank you so much for all your insight and all your knowledge in terms of wild fit and everything that you've learned. Let's move on to public speaking. Now, for my understanding, you didn't just

learn about diet and things from the bushman. You also learned about the importance of stories. they taught you a lot about stories and I would love to hear why stories are so important to humans and why we absolutely love to always hear a good story. Let's talk about learning. I think this is where it really comes in. It's a very very best way for a human to learn anything to do it. You just sit them down and make them do it, and then they develop the neuro pathways of what we call muscle memory, and they can do it. The trouble is though, if you're a young male bushman, you're eight years old, you can't

do it. You can't go hunting. It's just a bit dangerous. You just, you wouldn't be able to keep up. There's big animals. You wouldn't be able to do it. So what are we going to do to make sure that you know how to do it before you have to do it? We can't rely on the best learning methods.

So we're going to have to follow on the second best learning method. And the second best learning method is storytelling. And it probably hasn't been for as long as we've had language. And we've had fire for probably 2 million years. I'm going to guess there's been some form of storytelling going on around that fire for at least that long. And so when we hear a story, what's really fascinating about our nervous system is, is that our nervous system actually can't tell the difference sometimes between fantasy and reality.

Here's an example. If I were to say to you right now, you have to salivate right now. You've got to salivate. You can't. Or if I say to you, you've got to make your heart beat faster right now. You can. There are certain things that are not consciously within your control. If I told you to breathe faster, you could.

That's consciously in your control. But is it conceivable? Is it possible that I could tell you a story that would make you salinate? Yes. A story that would make your heart race and your skin flush, right? So a story can speak directly to the nervous system. And so as these young kids are sitting around the fire hearing the stories, they were developing, quote,

muscle memory before they ever went out on a hunt. That has been the predominant learning methodology of humans for hundreds of thousands of years. And so as a consequence today, we enjoy stories. When you go and see somebody speaking on stage and they lecture, you leave the room. Even if you don't get up and leave the room, you pick up and look at LinkedIn and Facebook, right?

Whereas when there's somebody up on stage you're telling stories, it's so good at it. If the story's good, you're in all the way. And that's because for new, it's clear stories have been the primary communication system or operating system of the brain. Yeah. I just want to say that or operating system of the brain. Yeah. I just want to say that Eric is one of the best public speakers

that I've ever witnessed in my life. That's actually how I found him. I was just trying to brush up on my own speaking abilities and found him on YouTube and was like, I have to get this guy on my show. He's amazing. And you're very talented at telling stories. I felt like I was there with you when you were on stage.

It was amazing. And I want to know, how can we improve our own storytelling abilities? So I've had so many experiences in my life. I almost had a show on MTV. I've done a million things, but I feel like I'm not that great at telling my own story. So is there a way to have an arsenal of your own stories

and be prepared to say them when the time is right. Yeah, absolutely. You've got sort of a number of different issues there. One issue is answered by what we call a story journal. At speaker nation where we teach public speaking and coach people and public speaking, one of the things that we teach all of our clients that have is a story journal.

So what that means is whenever something happens in your life, you open up a picture journal and you just take notes about it. You don't write the whole story out and I'll come to that in a minute. But you just take down some bullet points. You go, oh yeah, there was the time that this happened and I was in Paris in Saturday night and you just write down some bullet points. And I often like to make a note in the top corner roughly how long I think it takes to tell that story. And then in the bottom of the page, I like to make a note about like tags, we've called them hashtag today, like what the topics of that story are, sales or influence

or rapport or mountain planning or whatever they might be. And what that means now is let's say you ask me, book me to come and speak at some conference, I can take out my story journal and I can just leave through it and just the bottom of the page and I can find all, like say you ask me to speak for 30 minutes on sales. I used to go, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr And by the way, do you ever plan to write a book? I hope so, and then you're probably in a couple years. Imagine how valuable it would be for you. Totally. Yeah. The original is the ultimate weapon for a speaker author to really co-less or thought.

Do not trust your memory. You're young enough that you probably still have the arrogance of my memory works all the time. As you older, it's not even that your memory gets worse. It's that you begin to realize there's so much information in there that you can't always recall it when you need it in that moment. And then all of a sudden, you give a story journal and you're like, oh, I remember that story. So that's one very useful tool to have.

The reason I say not to write that out is I can always tell the speakers that write their stories out because they're remembering the words rather than remembering the experience. I don't ever recommend writing out your speeches, I don't recommend writing out your talks or your stories. You bullet point them out so you just have the important issues detailed so you can remind yourself and then every time you tell the story you tell it fresh from experience not trying to memorize the words and by the way, I mean this this is just great common sense. All these people want to use notes when they walk up on stage.

Yeah. Like, look about this. If you are remembering the stories and you're finding to tell four stories, there's four things you need to remember. If you're going to try and memorize the words, that's like 4,000 things you need to remember. So we do that. Yeah.

The other thing you brought up is the actual story telling. And storytelling, I guess there's two sides to it. It's like on one level, some people are nervous of it, or they're, you know, they have a little stage frighter, or a lot of stage fright about walking up in front of the audience. And that's one of my favorite things to help people with, because it can be done, you can get rid of it in 40 minutes. Like, that's gone. You never have to feel that way again. I know because I used to be so terrified by the folks speaking that I wouldn't be able to eat for days before I had to do a talk.

It was awful. And today I zero nerves about that at all and I know how to help people with that. One of the clues that I can offer you about that is that again coming back to the idea that your unconscious mind can't really tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Well, what happens to a lot of people is they get invited to a talk and they immediately start imagining it going badly. Well, no wonder you get nervous, right? If you decide to fantasize about it going really, really well, that will help a great deal. There's more to it than that, but that would help a great deal.

When it gets into the actual storytelling, the best thing I can tell you is that details make a story. So if I share with you, let me give it to you this way. Okay, so three weeks ago, I'm in the bush with all my friends. Now at a high level I might tell you this. I'm in the bush with all my friends. We're visiting with the Hudson Bushman. We're traveling by four by four and I have to leave the bush to take some of their friends out. Is there only way to week? And then I have to pick up two of my friends who are coming with me to spend a week with the Bushman embedded with the film crew. That's my story telling.

That's setting the scene. That's called establishment shot. The point where I go where I want to drop in a story telling is I go, and you know, it's crazy. We got to Lake Vinyarov and I don't know what happened, but I just started having this pain in my stomach. And I thought, you know what? I know that that thing, that soup we had the other night had milk in it.

Now I'm having a reaction. I know it. And I start, but then that night, the pain is so severe that I cannot sleep. A friend of mine is like making hot tea for me taking care of me and then that night she makes me promise promise that I'll talk to the doctor in the morning and I wasn't gonna because it's just a gut pain. Why would I talk to the doctor? Why would I bother? But in the morning I had promised I keep my promise. I went to talk to the doctor and he did a did a little gama exam and immediately,

like, you have a kind of sinus. We got to go get your CT scan, you have that surgery. So you see the difference between, like, at the high level, you're describing the situation. But at the low level, you're getting into the pain, I felt, and the facial expressions, and the description, and the conversation. A story that has the fleshed out details

is real to the audience. And this is really important. If you ever want your audience to feel, A story that has the fleshed out details is real to the audience. And this is really important. If you ever want your audience to feel, then you have to feel. Whenever you want the audience to feel, you have to feel. So if you're going to tell a story that you believe should trigger feelings and sadness and then you need to be sad. If you want a trigger, a feeling of joy and victory, then you need to feel those feelings

of joy and victory. Totally. When you're and victory. Totally. When you're telling us. Yeah. Let's talk about how to practice our stories. What's the best way to start practicing to ensure that we can use this guzzet you just talked about? Well, it's very simple.

Find places to tell your stories, right? That can be anything from the dining room table with your friends. Yeah. And to going out to organizations like Postmasters that have speaking clubs or storieslam, there are places where you can go and practice storytelling. And I think that's a great way to do it. I'll be clear.

I'm a big fan of Postmasters. I think it's a great organization. It's not a style of public speaking that I really recommend if somebody wants to become a real influence or a real professional speaker. But it's a fabulous place to go and get practice and learn their rules and figure out who you are and to get to get some sort of feedback. Also, you know, like retirement homes, nursing homes and stuff like that.

Like you go on a vacation, let's say you go off the Egypt, you can watch a picture, contact you local nursing homes, guys I'd love to come and I'd love to just give a presentation of my surprises. Guys, like everybody, please I hope you all do this if you really want to get some practice because those are, those people are sitting there not a lot of, you know, like if you walk in there and share your slides and your stories with them, you're getting practice and they're getting this incredible, like curious experience. So I think there's lots of great things to practice. Totally. And also social media, like look at what we're doing right now. I can hop

on LinkedIn live and start talking or I have like selfie videos. That's how I've like slowly improved the way that I speak over the years for sure. And even getting on podcast interviews, not everybody has like, you know, a list guests like young and profiting podcasts, but, you know, you could get different speaking gigs. So speaking of that, how do you prepare for something like a speaking gig or even for a podcast like this? How do you prepare? There's a number of different things in preparation. The one thing that I'm doing that we share with all our clients is developing a list of strategic objectives. So most speakers go on stage with one or two main objectives. Sometimes it's just to survive.

Like, I just want to be alive at the end of it. And sometimes they go out there and they have content they want to share, or they have something they want to sell. It's usually a primary objective. Whenever I am doing something, I have a variety of different objectives. And there's the primary one. So yes, maybe I'm speaking about a well fit at a big business conference in Germany and my main objective is to stimulate

dietary change in those people, my secondary objective is to maybe get them to come into our 98 program or our 14-day reset program or something to get them started. But then all our list of other objectives. Like for example, here's something that happened to me around podcasting. For long term, I get requests like people go, can you come to my podcast? And then about three years ago, I just stopped getting requests. It was the weirdest thing. They stopped coming into the website. I just stopped getting, like, I still have some that they went out. And you know what I wanted? But my value had thrown me up on YouTube and people became afraid to ask. It was the weirdest thing.

They just, they were like, oh no, he's probably too busy. He would never say yes. And so they wouldn't come up to me at the event to ask and they wouldn't even like, so then I started dropping stories into my talks about how I did this podcast interview with his one-time life. Here's a good example. In the middle of the only two thing, I got this interview, I got this interview request from this woman and I've done one very short podcast with her a year before.

So she wanted to do a proper, like I think it ever or a 90 minute follow-up. And she first wanted to go on really well. So then, I followed the address where I'm speaking at a big event in Sarvina, Italy and where at this resort. And I followed the instructions to go to the podcast and it, I realized it's in her suite. You are coming alone in her suite and do this podcast. This is you want to know what it's like to be a a guide these days these are the things you have to think about because I'm about to go into the suite and then so you know what I did is I turned my phone on record and stuck up the signing so I could

record everything that happened in the suite. I don't really. Yeah. I share this story as an example of, hey, we have to think about these things these days, but the way I told this story made sure the audience knew that I'm open to doing podcasts. And if we come and do that, I get all these podcasts for us. Same thing will happen now, but you'll have a bunch of your listeners go, eras approachable for podcast, and then they'll come. So when you're getting ready to do a podcast, or when you're getting ready to do a talk on stage, you should be thinking about all the little strategic

objectives you have. Are you looking for a book deal? Maybe you should mention you're looking on a book. Right? I'm interested in doing it in appearances. Maybe you should talk about how you've done TV appearances and how well they've gone. So people in the audience, producers,

and their showrunners know that you're good and that you're open to. Yeah, I love that advice. Thank you for sharing. So a question that we ask all of our listeners on our show is what is your secret to profiting in life? You know, I think that my secret really is recognizing that you have this one life and that on one level you should take it really bloody seriously, but what that means

should be fun. Here's my example for you on this. Is that there's all these like, are there, is there an afterlife? Is there reincarnation? take it really bloody seriously, but what that means is you have fun. Here's my example for you on this. There's all these like, is there an afterlife? Is there reincarnation? Do we go to heaven? Do we go to hell? What's next after we die?

I don't care. I don't care. I draw parentheses around this experience, and I'm here to have as much fun and as much impact with this experience and to help everybody around me have the least amount of pain and the most amount of fun that they can. That's my deal. That's what I'm sure to do. And I don't care what happens outside the parent-daughterhood experience that I'm having

now, there may have been a four-life, there may be an afterlife, it doesn't seem to matter. The same thing to matter is that I want to be the best possible version of me in this one. The way I can describe this is, you're a bit young for this, but in the old days we would walk into a video arcade and put a quarter in the machine and then we'd play the game. And if you're first guy and you know you get your three men right the way the typical video game where you get your three guys. If your first one didn't go very well you still played the second and third one. But then video game consoles came out and what happened now is a kid would start

the game and if they didn't do so well on the first man they'd suicide the game. didn't do so well on the first man, they'd suicide the game. They'd end the game and start over again. There's suicide rates have gone up by 30% in the last 20 years in real world. And that's because we're in this bizarre place of behavioral drugs influencing us and our food system being broke and all that kind of stuff. And frankly, I believe that the best way

for us to profit in this life is to recognize that every one of us has a primary purpose. And that primary purpose is to enjoy ourselves and have fun. Yes, you might have missions. You might want to end starvation over here and get plastic out of the ocean over there. And I want you to have those missions, but I want you to also have fun and enjoy yourself. Yeah, that's a great reminder. And I know a lot of my listeners are such hard workers and we're working all the time to improve ourselves. But it's very important, as Eric said, is to have fun and enjoy your life.

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? Well, my primary website is www.eric.e and I'm on Facebook, of course, and I personally manage my own Instagram. So if you write to me, I'm there. I can't always reply immediately, but it's definitely me Instagram, so that's way to go. And it's my name. And you're amazing.

And I'll stick all his links in our show notes. Thank you, Eric. This was such a great conversation. Hey, thanks very much for having me. It's a real treat to be on a podcast that's researched and funded and engaging, and I really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Of course. to real treat the beyond a podcast that's researched and funded and engaging and I really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Of course.

Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. Follow Yapp on Instagram at Young and Profiting and check us out at Young and Profiting.com. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to write us a review or comment on your favorite platform. Reviews are the number one way to thank us, especially if you write a review on Apple Podcasts. And be sure to share this podcast with your friends and family on social media. You can find me on Instagram at YappwithHalla or LinkedIn, just search for my name,

Halla Tahab. Big thanks to the Yapp team. As always, this is Halla signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben Podcast. My co-host and happiness guinea pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science,

ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences about cultivating happiness and good habits. Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness without spending a lot of time energy or money. Suggestions such as follow the one-minute rule. Choose a one-word theme for the year or design your summer. We also feature segments like know yourself better where we discuss questions like are you an over buyer or an under buyer, morning person or night person, abundance lever or simplicity lever, and every episode includes a happiness hack, a quick easy shortcut to more happy.

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