The One You Feed - Bonus Episode: Eric interviewed on the Life on Purpose Show

Episode Date: August 14, 2016

Get more information on The One You Feed Coaching Program. Enrollment open until August 20th     This is a bonus episode of Eric being interviewed by Greg Berg on his excellent Life on Purpose podcast From Greg's show notes: What is a life worth living? How do change your behavior and establish lasting habits? Which wolf do you feed? For Life on Purpose Episode #35, my guest is podcast host/producer Eric Zimmer from The One You Feed, which was named one of the Best Health Podcasts of All Time by The Huffington Post. Eric has spent the past two years asking these questions of thought leaders, scientists, and teachers such as Simon Sinek, Byron Katie, don Miguel Ruiz, Sharon Salzberg, Bob Proctor, BJ Fogg, Dan Millman, and many more. Eric joins me for a great, in-depth conversation about his own life journey (being addicted to drugs and homeless 20 years ago), what he’s learned doing the show, tools and tips for self-awareness and behavior change, and much more!     Get more information on The One You Feed Coaching Program. Enrollment open until August 20th   The Tale of Two Wolves A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other.  One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear. The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?” The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feed The Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Instead of a mini episode, I'm going to do something a little bit different and present you with a copy of an interview that was done by Gregory Berg in his excellent podcast Life on Purpose. And it's an interview of me. Many of you have asked to hear more from me, and so this is a chance for you to hear me talk a little bit more if that's really your thing.

So if it is, listen on and enjoy. Also, I wanted to let you know that the One You Feed coaching program has opened back up for one week. So between now and Saturday, August 20th, if you're interested, go to oneyoufeed.net slash coaching program and you can get more information there. And the window does close again in a week. The last program sold out in about four days. So if it's something you're interested in, I'd jump on it now. Otherwise, I hope you have a great week and we'll have another episode on Tuesday. Thanks as always for listening. Bye. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Life on Purpose. I'm your host, Greg Berg, and I'm very happy to have

you with us today. A quick show note. If you like what you're hearing here, please check out the Life on Purpose website at lifeonpurposeshow.com, where you can find episode summaries, information about the show, links to past episodes, and much, much more. And if you could pop over to iTunes, we'd love a review there, as that helps the show reach many more people who are interested in living their own lives on purpose. Now, my guest today, he's the host of a weekly podcast called The One You Feed, Conversations About Creating a Life Worth Living. It's based on the parable of the two wolves. We're going to talk all about what that is today, what that means.

One You Feed was recently named one of the best podcasts of 2014 by iTunes. It was also named one of the best health podcasts of all time by the Huffington Post, and it's been the number one ranked podcast in the health, philosophy, and spirituality categories respectively. He's also been helping to build companies for the past 15 years and has been involved in technology for longer than that. He's led major software programs for a Fortune 20 company, and he started a solar energy company called Tipping Point. He's also a musician, a passionate learner, and he loves to

meet new people. We'll talk about all of that today and much, much more. Joining me via Skype from Columbus, Ohio, it's Eric Zimmer. Eric, welcome back to Life on Purpose. Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me back. Yes, very happy. We have a nice, crisp, clear Skype connection. We tried this before a couple of weeks ago, and the technology wasn't working. Our Skype wasn't working for us. So here we are again, and everything sounds great and crystal clear. And I'm very happy about that.

But I want to tell the listeners, I always like to give them a little information up front, some context. And Eric was one of my very first guests here on Life on Purpose when I launched the show at the beginning of 2015. In fact, an episode that we taped last November, it was a roundtable that we did, the first ever Life on Purpose roundtable with Christopher Carter and Amelia and Eric were guests. And we did this really cool, fun little, we just sort of riffed and went around in a circle, if you will, sort of virtual online circle. And it was a great conversation. And I met Eric at Camp Good Life Project back in 2014. And we're fellow musicians and we're fellow podcasters and we have a lot in common.

So I'm really looking forward to diving deeper into your story, Eric. Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you again. Cool. So this is going to be, we're going to set the table right up front, Eric. We're going to kind of knock a big one right out of the park here. But the subtitle of your show, it's called Creating a Life Worth Living. That's a heady subtitle. How on earth do people go about doing that in a very, we'll get into the sort of specifics,

but in a very general sense, how do you live a life worth living, Eric? Well, I think your show title is pretty close, right? It's about, I think it's about doing things on purpose. It's about understanding what works for you, what makes you tick, what drives satisfaction in your own life, and then purposely doing those sort of things and not being on autopilot all the time, which is the default state, certainly for me a lot of the time, and I think for a lot of people I know, is it's very easy for time to get away from us and realize that we're not really living the life that we want to be living. Yeah, I've read different studies. I don't know if anyone has a definitive answer for this, but

different studies have cited the fact that we're on sort of autopilot, as you say, or living unconsciously or on a tape loop or however you want to put it, somewhere between 80 and 95% of our lives, just out of necessity. Because I guess the way that humans evolved and the way that our lives are set up, we just sort of necessity because I guess the way that humans evolved and the way that our lives are set up, we just sort of let things run on this tape loop that goes again and again and again. And it really does take conscious effort to be able to break out of that tape loop and to live purposefully.

And so the first part that you mentioned though, Eric, is really so crucial and that's the self-awareness part is really being aware of how you live your life and the tendencies and the habits that you have. And I'd love to know right off the bat, what are some things that you do to be more self-aware in your own life? I think that doing the podcast for me is one of them because every week I'm talking to somebody about topics of this nature, and I'm usually preparing all week for the guests.

And so my head is sort of in this space a lot, which is helpful. So I think that's one. Meditation is another thing that I have found to be enormously helpful to me. And then some form of self-reflection, whether that be journaling, whether that just be a habit of kind of consistently looking back over your day or over your experiences and going, okay, what was that? And then the other one that I use, probably not as often as I should, but I sit down and I look at all the roles in my life that I play. probably not as often as I should, but I sit down and I look at all the roles in my life that I play.

Father, podcast host, e-commerce consultant, brother, son. I look at all the roles that I play and I try and look at, am I devoting enough time to each of those things? And some of them I'll look at and I'll go, yep, that's pretty much, that's going great. Oh, I've been neglecting that. Maybe I haven't been a great son lately. So then what I'll do is I'll put into some of my daily planning or the things that I try and do very regularly, maybe insert one of those things. So there's been periods of life where I do that every week. And that is a really powerful practice. I would not say that I do it that often now, but I still do it semi-regularly. And I think it's kind of a thing that's sunk into my head to some degree. A lot of these practices, if we do them consistently long

enough, often enough, they start out very tedious and feeling very laborious and very forced. And eventually, it just works its way into your system or into my system. Yeah, I love that concept of sort of looking at all the roles that you play. That's a great way to check in with yourself and a great way to take stock of where your life is and where you want it to go. And if you're not there in those places or you're spending too much time or energy in one particular area of your life. And so what do you do then, Eric? If you're taking stock of these things, you're looking at those roles and you find that you're out of balance.

I think that I then look at how can I change the balance of that in my life moving forward. And so, I use an application called coach.me that tracks things that I think are important for me to do. I track whether I'm meditating every day. I track whether I'm exercising every day. I have things in there about doing gratitude, about connecting with friends, about... I used to have something in there about reading something inspiring, which is not a problem anymore. Hey, you have quite the extensive reading list. Yes, and it's just, it's a lot. Yeah, I mean, because I'm very diligent about preparation, and so it just takes a lot of time. So I use that app to just sort of track things daily. So for example, if I had said that one of the things,

if I looked at one of the roles and said, oh, I'm not being a good son and I need to spend more time talking to my mom, I would put talking to my mom on that list. And then every day when I look at that list, I would see it. Now that's not saying I'm going to do it every day, but it gives me a mechanism to sort of see, am I doing things? I have found once I started actually tracking things like that using, you know, you can use a calendar, you can use a piece of paper, you can use an app like coach.me. There's another one out there, very simple called Joe's goals that I love. But once I started tracking that, it was very, that was one of the things for me that made being consistent with these things a lot better and also allowed me to be off of autopilot a

little bit more. And I think the last piece, and I'm kind of going on a long spiel here, would be just to spend time thinking about how I spend my time. Yeah, that's very meta. Spend time thinking about how you spend time. I like that. going on a daily basis. And that is, as Annie Dillard said, the way you spend a day is the way you spend your life. I mean, I didn't get that exactly right. No, the point is there. Yeah, the basic idea is it's these little moments. It's the day by day. What am I doing today? What am I doing tomorrow? That all adds up over time. And so my experience is if we take care of that, a lot of the bigger things work themselves out.

Yeah. And you also mentioned something as you were talking about how you go about being more self-aware in your own life that we talked about on our run table last time, and which is such a big thing for both of us, it's meditation. And for me, in talking about tracking devices, I use a fantastic app called Insight Timer that our friend Casey, who was also a guest on that roundtable, introduced me to nearly two years ago. And I just passed my 500 days using Insight Timer, which is kind of a fun little, you know, I'm not trying to brag or anything because like, oh, look at me, I'm a meditation

superstar because I'm certainly not. But it's just been an invaluable tool for me because having this thing that I can check in with every day, I log on, I start my meditation, and it's fun to see the statistics. It's fun to say, okay, you've reached 30 days in a row or you've been using Insight Timer for 500 days or whatever. And I like having that as a barometer for me to be able to look back and say, okay, I'm doing great. Or you know what? I'm off the wagon a little bit here. I'd like to be more diligent. I'd like to miss fewer days. Yeah, I love Insight Timer.

I think it's really great. My problem is that I don't always – like I went through a period of time where I was using Headspace or some other meditation thing. So I didn't always put everything in it. So Coach.me is the one where I track. But yeah, I love to go into, you know, just an insight timer alone. There's something like, you know, 150 hours of meditation,

which is just like, wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So yeah, I'm just a believer in accountability, I think is helpful. And self-accountability can be you if you put some of those things in place. It just helps me to see it. Yeah, well, that's excellent. So Eric, I know, I don't know if you've tried to discern this in your own show, and how many episodes

you've done on the one you feed. But, you know, in life on purpose, in my preview show, Radio Enzo, I'm in about 185 episodes, I think. And over the course of that time, four and a half years, I've tried to discern what are the commonalities of my guests. Because they're all over the place. They're a very wide swath topically of the different things that we talk about. And it's always under the umbrella of purposeful living, having a purposeful life. Or my old show was about what I called conscious living. Very similar. But people that did a lot of different things and they were on the show for a wide variety of reasons.

And what I found interesting, and this is holding up now over time since I first made this, since I was first able to discern this and this sort of came to my consciousness, was that the two common threads in almost every one of my guests was, number one, travel had some important – it was important in every one of my guests' number one, travel had some important, it was important in every one of my guests life in some way, shape or form as a motivator or as something that changed their life or broaden their perspective. And almost every one of them meditated in some way, shape or form. And I would have not predicted that. And yet that's been a common theme going on. And I'm always fascinated, especially when there are people that aren't obvious meditators. They don't talk about it publicly or they don't sort of like, hey, look at me, I meditate. And have you found anything similar? Have you thought about that?

I have. I think that certainly a lot of people that have been on the show have been meditators. that have been on the show have been meditators. I think one of the other key things I've seen in the people that are on the show is that they have the ability to not let their mood dictate all their behavior. I would say that might be one overriding feature I've seen in successful people is not that they don't have moods, not that they don't often they're, you know, they wrestle with depression or, or other things. Um, not that they don't feel emotions and have emotions, but the emotions don't become the, the guiding, um, the guiding a lot of their behavior. It seems like the, a lot of the people that I think I admire the most and the most successful find some place between indulging and repressing emotion. They find a sweet spot in there.

So they're pausing before they react. They're not just reacting to the world as it happens around them. Yeah, I think that's certainly part of it. And I think they're also able to look at it and go, I feel like X or Y, but the right thing for me to do is Z. And they have a way to then go and do Z. Because the opposite extreme is you just go into full-on repression mode where it's like no emotion gets in. It's all logic. And that's not the healthy point either. It seems the people certainly that I admire are the ones that find that middle ground where they're able to experience their emotions, but they're also, their life isn't run by them. So how do they do that? Well.

That's a broad question, I know. We probably have an hour-long discussion on how that is. But in your own life, have you been able to do that? Or what are some things that you've been able to discern from your guests who talk about that? I think there's a few things. I think that, and this is why meditation features into this. It's a way of getting better at doing this, but being able to get some separation from thoughts and emotions and to recognize that I am not the thought and I am not the emotion. They might be very strong. They might be there.

I'm feeling them, but that's not the only thing. And to be able to get just enough distance from that, I think helps an awful lot with that. And then I think another one for me is to be able to reference back to what's really important to me. And it's something I think about and I plan. And kind of the higher me thinks that's a great idea. The wise me thinks that's a good idea. Right. But now it's Thursday afternoon and I'm sitting on the couch and I don't feel like exercising.

And that distinction for me is a big one because a lot of times we'll say, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do this. And the reality is that there was a part of us that does want to do it. It's that part of us that says, I do want to exercise this higher self, this wiser part of me said, I want to do this. It's that I don't feel like it right now. And then I'm like, well, that's just a mood and moods pass. And then going back to what did the wiser part of me think? But I think a lot of that is simple learning to give yourself sort of a, for lack of a better word, a command and then follow through on it. I think that's a muscle

to a certain degree. I think the ability to say I'm going to do X and then do it is sort of a, I compare it to a muscle. And so for a lot of us, we don't, that muscle is very, very weak. And so the way to build that muscle is to start very small and slowly but surely make commitments to yourself and keep them. And as that progresses, we start to get some momentum. We start to believe in ourselves again. We start to, there's a feeling of inner congruence, inner rightness, I think, between when we say, I want to do X and then we do it. And so, I think it's building that muscle. And the people that I know that are successful, that muscle is pretty well developed. Yeah, absolutely. It's the old, you know, the neurons that fire together, wire together. It's a bit of cliche, but true. Yeah, it is absolutely true. And I totally believe it's a trainable thing. I mean, I was at one point a, you know, destitute heroin addict. So you can't have much less self-control

than I've had at a couple points in my life. So I do believe that these are skills that you can learn and practice. And I think that a lot of us get hung up on things like, well, I'm just the kind of person that doesn't, I'm the kind of person that doesn't follow through on things, or I'm the kind of person that just isn't disciplined. And I don't think that's really true. I think those are skills and things that't disciplined. And I don't think that's really true. I think those are skills and things that we can learn. I don't think they're personality or character defects necessarily. Yeah, as if we were hardwired one way or the other.

Yeah, and there are stories that we tell ourselves based on our past experience, our past conditions, our past emotions. And I think we talked about this in the roundtable, these stories that present themselves at times. And we can either attach to the story or we could recognize, hey, that's a story and I can get beyond that story or I can rewrite the story or I can change the story.

Right, yeah. Yeah, and I think that story element is really crucial, just having that recognition and being cognizant of the fact that it is indeed a story and it's not something that's hardwired. or frame or lens. And so if the, when we can learn to work with that filter or lens, then life really, you know, that's such a critical skill, I think in, you know, want to talk about living a life that's worth living. That is one of the hugest ones is to be able to learn to work with that filter, um, and adjust it to, and adjust it in ways that, that serve us well. Yeah, because it's another getting back to some of the science part of it, referencing what we talked about earlier, living on autopilot a certain percentage of the time.

Scientists also believe that we filter out somewhere between 95% and 99% of all stimuli. We have to by necessity. We can't. Our brains simply can't handle all the stimuli. And so, as you said, if we've got this filter, we can change the filter, we can adjust the filter, we can move the filter. So if we're only pulling in, you know, two, three, 5% over here, we can shift the filter to be pulling in a different percentage. We can, we can, from an intentional standpoint, we can put our attention elsewhere and it's going to bring different results and it's going to, in the end, it's going to build a different life for us. It's going to create a different life for us. Yeah. I've been reading a guy, a Buddhist teacher, we're going to talk to him here in the near future. And he said, you know, he's talking about Buddhist psychology and in certain schools of Buddhist psychology, thought is considered a sixth sense. It's a sense that you either can, that you learn to either pay attention to or not pay

attention to the same thing with sort of sound or sight right you you might focus on seeing and that comes very clearly into awareness and then you might turn your awareness to hearing and so now you're hearing things more or put your awareness in your you know in your right foot and now you notice what's happening with your right foot it's that ability to move that awareness around that i think is is so helpful and you know that whole that whole story based narrative all the things that are going on in our head that we tell ourselves that is about all we're aware of most of the time at least me you know when i'm not being careful i am there's just a constant inner monologue that is like hooked up to like Eric thermostat. Like, how's it going?

How's Eric doing? Is it warm enough? Is it cold enough? Do I feel this? Do I feel, you know, it's just this and, and learning to unhook from that. That's the term this guy uses, learning to unhook from that and, and move your attention to other parts. Other things is, is a really powerful skill.

I love that. I've never heard it framed quite like that before, that it's the thought being a sixth sense and something you can either choose to pay attention to or not. That's fantastic. Yeah, it's not easy, right? I mean, obviously, it's certainly not easy. You know, we've got lots of years of listening to that, to believe in that voice, but it is possible.

Yeah. And for me, what made all of this make sense for me at some level and it's still a great mystery and i'll never you know spend the rest of my life never really quite figuring it out but it's i remember hearing a number of years back that okay you've got a thought and you're noticing that you've got a thought who's the one doing the noticing right that's it that changed everything for me hearing that and and sort of grasping that even in a very small level it's like wow okay well there's the thought who's noticing the thought that just yeah that was a huge shift for me yeah and it's one of those things that's an exercise that we can do often. One of the things that I try to do, talk about living life on purpose and all that, and not be on autopilot, is I try and stop as often as I can remember to and sort of ask myself, where am I, what am I doing, and why?

am I? What am I doing? And why? Like, you know, just that sort of like come right back into the moment. Where am I? I'm sitting at my desk in front of a computer and I'm talking to Greg. You know, where am I? What am I doing? And why? And that's a great way to, A, practice mindfulness and practice being in the moment, as well as think about, am I using my time in the way I want? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Wow. Eric, that would make a fantastic app, by the way. I would have that on my iPhone or buy like an Apple Watch and have that pop up every so often so that I have that reminder. That's a great idea. Maybe I should do that. I just want a small cut. All right.

If you make your fortune through that app, I'd like a finder's fee or something. No, that's a brilliant idea. I love that. So, Eric, you mentioned a while back that you didn't tell me a time frame, but I know from your biography that 20 years ago, your life was radically different than what it is now. That you were on drugs, you were homeless, you were in a very different place in your life. And I'd love to go back in the Wayback Machine, starting even before that and find out how you got to that point. So where were you born? Where did you grow up? I was born here in Columbus, Ohio, and I grew up here. I was gone for a few years, you know, in my early, you know, late teens, early 20s, but most of my life has been right here. And did you have a happy childhood?

I don't think so. Why is that? I could certainly look at my parents and their parenting style. My mother has wrestled with depression all her life, so I come by it a little bit naturally. Yeah, that's not an insignificant point. Yeah. My wife struggles with anxiety and different things, and biologically, she would say that some of that comes from her mother.

from her mother, you know, when she was in the womb, her mother was struggling with the same things. And that at a neurochemical level, that's transmitted from a mother to a fetus. It's transmitted to an unborn child. You know, the mental, psychological, and chemical state of your biological mother. Yep. Yep. I absolutely, you know, I think that came through. My parents were not happy together. I mean, so a lot of the usual things, I've examined all that stuff in great detail. I don't have any blame towards them. I think they were doing the very best they can. And my son will probably look back at me someday and go, well, he was doing the best he could. And he knows what way I'm screwing him up right now. I don't know. Um, but I know that from a very early age as a child that I was, um, I was just an odd kid. I used to sit and pick at the wallpaper at the wall for hours. And just like, um, I was a kleptomaniac, like hardcore thief by the time I was like nine

years old. Um, I was just always in trouble. I couldn't even tell you why or looking back on it. I don't have a ton of memories from it, but I was not a well-adjusted child. So I did not have, I think, a very happy childhood. What did a young Eric want to do when you grew up? I don't know. Did you have any sense to, okay, as I grow older, this is something that interests me. This is what I want to do with my life. Did you know where you were heading? Let's

say when you were in high school, for instance? No. Nope. High school was an interesting adventure for me. It's kind of the tale of two lives. The first couple years of high school were a disaster. I just never went to class. I never wanted to go to class. And so I was always in trouble and I was always trying to find a way to be excused from class. And after my sophomore year, my guidance counselor said, we're not going to go through another year of this. You can either go to this thing we have called the alternative program, or I'm going to just expel you, but I'm not going to chase you for another whole year. And so I very grudgingly went to this thing called the alternative program,

which was an informal learning environment, very small school, about 160 students that completely changed my life. How so? students that completely changed my life. How so? I think that the informal learning style is really very much like, let's find out what the individual finds interesting and then let's use that to educate them. Let's do that. Let's work on critical thinking. Let's work on how you think. It's just a very different approach to education than the usual, I'm going to lecture at you until you take this thing in. And so after a few months of being there, I ended up starting a nonprofit tutoring program for inner city

children. I started a scholarship fund for them. So I just, my last two years of high school, I completely flourished. I was doing, you know, it was certainly one of the best points, certainly the best point of my life up to then. I mean, I think it was the couple of years where I was really pretty happy and content. And I think I learned a lot of, you know, I learned a lot about myself. I didn't recognize it until later, but I think I learned a lot about what makes me happy and content during that time. I think I found a formula that worked to some degree during that point. But then the wheels kind of came off the train.

I had, as I was doing that, I noticed what alcohol and drugs were doing to all these kids' lives. I mean, their lives were ruined by the alcoholism and drug addiction in their families. And so I pretty much said, no more. I'm not doing any drugs. I'm not doing any alcohol. And I did that through certainly the last two years of high school, very much anti that. And after my senior year in high school, I went traveling for a while. I spent a summer, uh, in LA. I spent several months off the coast of Seattle. I just kind of took a train across the country, just kind of went out and. There, there, there's the travel part. Yeah.

All right. I can check that one off of this episode now. Travel meditation. Check, check. Yep. I haven't done as much of it as I would, I would like, but maybe everybody would say that. But I came back from that time and my girlfriend was dating my best friend, who both were also involved in this organization with me. And I just had no skills to cope with that at all. somebody one day said, do you want to take a drink? And I was just at the point where I was like, I don't care. And I took a drink and kind of everything changed in that moment. I think I was, for whatever reason, I was primed for what happened when I took that drink. Cause I was

very rarely not under the effect of some chemical or other, you know, 24 hours a day for the next, you know, seven years. Wow. I kind of just was off. I found it. I immediately was like, wow, I feel like me. And so I was off to the races and that went from alcohol to marijuana to other drugs and eventually landed me as a heroin addict, 24 years old. As you said, I was homeless. I was living in the back of a van that the restaurant owner that I worked at let me sleep in. He didn't know I was sleeping in it, but I had access to the keys. And I had gotten, I just had been arrested. I had a lot of jail time potentially hanging over my head and ended up walking into treatment and getting sober. So, Eric, in that point of your life, was there a low point, the lowest of the low?

Was your life ever in danger? Oh, I think my life was in danger a lot. I mean, from a health perspective, it was in danger. I weighed about 110 pounds. I had hepatitis C. I mean, I was really sick. My life was in danger a lot because I was traveling. I lived on the East Coast for a while. I made an attempt to get away from doing drugs by moving to a small ocean town in Connecticut, but it didn't take me very long to find a car and then get into the inner city. And I was just going into really bad neighborhoods where a skinny white kid like me should probably just not be hanging out.

There were lots of situations where I went into houses. Just a lot of stuff that I look back on, I'm like, what on earth could I have been thinking? So I think I spent a lot of time in danger. I don't know if there's a particular low. I mean, I think. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's a cumulative low, what you're describing. I mean, you know, it sounds like over time that just doesn't sound like a very, I mean, it's not a sustainable existence. Oh, it's no, it's not. And it's, you know, the thing that I've said before is it's amazing to me how hard I clung to such a

shitty life, you know, like how hard I just kept trying to, to make that work. And when I finally went into treatment to get sober, it wasn't, um, it wasn't like I decided I wanted to, I was going to get my life together. I just was out of ideas. I did not, I knew I was going to get my life together. I just was out of ideas. I knew I was going to be incredibly dope sick. The van that I'd been living in was gone. I had a court date coming up. I mean, just everything fell apart in a life that was already pretty well fallen apart. And I was just too tired to sort it out.

So I said, I guess I can go to treatment. I had gone once before and it didn't work. But this time it was different. And so what worked for you? What were the steps that you started taking to get your life back on track? I went to treatment and I stayed in treatment for a long time. Every time they said, we think you should do X. I just

said, okay. Originally I remember I was in, in detox, you know, detox is like, you know, five day type thing. And, uh, it's, it's what it sounds like. It's simply to get you past that, um, you know, coming off the chemical period. Yeah. And they said, we think you should go into our 28 day treatment program. And I said, no, I don't think that's a good idea. And, um, and then I went back to my room and I just had one of those, you know, in recovery, they call them a moment of clarity, um, where I just realized like, I'm going to die if I go back out there. Like I just knew that it wouldn't work. So I said to them, okay, I'll go, you know, to the 28-day treatment and then they said, we think you should was told would help me to get sober. And I just did it with a real intensity. I think that once I got a little bit of clean time under my belt,

just even in treatment, and once I started to come out of the fog just a hair and I was involved in 12 step recovery and I just started seeing people who's who would talk about living a life just like mine yeah and I would see them and they would be living a life that was very different and I it gave me just enough like okay and they were like if you do what I did you can get here and and um I think that part of me that that part of me that, you know, formed a tutoring program for inner city kids or the started to wake up again and say, wait a minute, like I, I want out. And it's not like I didn't want out, you know, periodically over that whole seven year period. I mean, when you get to the point I get to all, all, all junkies do is

get high and talk about how they're going to stop getting high until you're not high anymore. Then you get high again, and then you talk about what a crappy life it is and how you're going to stop. I mean, it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When you're on the pyramid, you're at the part where food and shelter are your prime directives. It's tough to even think about anything else. It's what inner city students from poverty environments deal with. When they don't know where lunch is going to come from, where dinner is going to come from that night, if the heat's going to be on when they get home, test scores aren't really a priority for them. It's very hard. Yep. And so that was what happened. Basically, I think it was 12-step

recovery that worked for me. I did drink again after about eight years sober. I went out and drank for a couple of years and I've been back about eight and a half years. Oh, well, congratulations. And so at some point, Eric, was there this notion in, did you think at some point like, wow, you know what? I've been able to pull myself from this point way down here to where I am now. Maybe, you know, getting back to those roots that you planted in high school, those seeds that you planted, I can help other people do the same in some way, shape, or form. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think a big part of recovery in a 12-step program is really the idea that there is both a responsibility and a real enjoyment for helping other people get through what you've gone through. It's that working with other people who have the same problem that actually, I think, contributes to contented sobriety about as much as anything.

It's one of the big things is that idea of helping other people. I do it a little bit differently now. Um, yeah, it's more through the show and stuff, but yeah, that's a definite. And that's why I was going to say one of the things I think I learned about myself in that period in high school was that I am really happy when I am building something, you know, when I'm, I'm creating something, I'm really happy when that, that whole process of, and I was in startup companies for years after I got my life together because I love that whole process. So I love that process and I love when it matters, like when what you're doing with it actually matters. And when I have both of those things, I'm in a pretty good spot for myself. Yeah, and I think many of us go through a period when the building something is the priority, and it doesn't really matter what we're building. We sort of, you know, we're energized, we're excited by this building thing. And it can be,

it can be, you know, space leaf sprockets, it can be whatever, we're building something. And then at some point in our life, oftentimes around our middle age, we hit a point where it's got to matter. It's got to mean something. I can't just build anything. I can't just make a widget for somebody and get paid for it and be content for that anymore. And so Wayne Dyer famously wrote about that and made a movie about it, From Ambition to Meaning. And so was there a similar shift for you? Were you making things that maybe at the time you were satisfied with and then looking back, you're like, yeah, that was cool. I made those things. But what does it really matter?

I think to some degree. I mean, I had meaning in my life all through that time because I was very involved in recovery and helping other people. And, you know, I probably sponsored 100 people over the years. So I spent a lot. I had that meaning. And then there was the work side of it. But yeah, when I started a solar company in 2008, and I think that was my first attempt to really bring the two things together, bring my work together with the things that were

important to me in life. Now, there's a lot of reasons why I didn't quite get that right. But that was my first attempt at it. And I think the show now is the, and the associated things that have been flowing out of it is that, is that second iteration of where I really locked into like, here's the thing that I love doing. Here's the thing I'm naturally interested in. Here's the thing that I think is important. And here's the, and I see how I can build it into something. And so I think that's been a progression for me, yeah. Yeah, it all sort of dovetailed together. So let's segue over to the show then. How did you get to the point in your life where you thought, you know what, I want to start a podcast?

How did that work for you? It happened, so I started this solar energy company and we had a few really good years. And then the political climate in Ohio changed on us and solar energy is a very politically, um, it, it, it depends on political support to a certain degree. It's getting better, but you know, it's still, it's still slowly getting there. Um, and so after about five years of that, you know, I spent as, you know, I ended up spending as much time testifying in Senate hearings as I did chasing customers. And I just eventually went like, this isn't it. I do think it's important.

I think energy is an important issue, but I don't think it's my issue. And so I finally said, well, okay, I don't think I want to keep doing this anymore. And what I started to do though, is I thought I'm just going to build an online course for developing solar energy projects. There's a lot of very complicated, um, financial things. And it's, you know, it's a lot more about the money and the deal structure and all that than it is about the solar. The solar is a pretty simple technology. So I decided I wanted to build an online course to do that. And, um, so I started getting interested in how do you, how do you have a business that's online? Because the solar company was the exact opposite. It was, you need to raise huge amounts of capital.

The solar project's going to take $10 million. And so you got to bring investors in. And then it was a lot. It was very, very capital intensive. And so suddenly, once I started looking into that online course, the idea of the opposite of that suddenly really appealed to me. Like, wait, I could just do this? I don't need anything? I don't need another person? That sort of appealed to me. And then as that went on, so I learned about podcasting, and I learned about blogging, and I learned about, I just got more deep into that world. And at some point I decided I didn't want to do, I didn't even want to build a course for the solar energy thing. It just, it kind of fizzled out for me. And so I don't know where the idea came from. I don't know

if I thought I'd like to do a podcast and what's the idea going to be? Or what I remember is just getting this idea to start a podcast called The One You Feed and use that parable and do it with my best friend, Chris, because it would be fun to do and we could spend more time together. And I needed help staying off of autopilot. And so I just remember the idea kind of coming and I called him and we met for dinner the next night and just sort of started. So there wasn't a lot of contemplation. There was no real planning about it. Um, I didn't, I didn't quit doing, um, you know, I do, I do some commerce or some e-commerce consulting work. I didn't quit doing that. Um, I still do some of it, the balance changes, but how much of that I do versus how much of the show I do, but I didn't just, you know, throw everything away. But as is my tendency, you know, I started a solar energy company kind of in the same way. Like, I think I want to do that. You know, and I started a nonprofit tutoring program in the same way. Like, I kind of want to do that. And I just started. And so that's kind of how this happened. It was an idea. And I, I thought, let's, let's start. And we, and, and as I started, and as we, as we progressed, I went, oh, I think there is something

here. I think I do want to do this. You know, I learned more about it. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. Yeah. Well, excellent. And so I'd love to know where you first came to hear the parable of the two wolves and tell people what that is. Cause there are listeners that I'm sure don't know the parable. Yeah, so the parable is there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.

And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So that's the parable. I first came across it in recovery. And, you know, looking at it from the perspective of an addict or alcoholic, it's an incredibly powerful parable. It makes a ton of sense, and it's very life or death, and your bad wolf is a real bad dude in those cases. So that's where I came across it, and it just kind of always stuck with me.

And like a good parable does, I think it conveys a lot in a few short sentences. You immediately get it, and you're like, oh, yeah. It does. you know, in a few short sentences, like you immediately get it and you're like, oh yeah. And so it was very, it was a very powerful thing for me when I heard it and it kind of always stuck with me. And like I said, I don't quite like most ideas. I don't really know where it came from to make a show about it. It just sort of showed up that way. Oh, that's excellent. I love that it just bubbled up that way. And so I'm sure when you look back at your own life, you thought, well, you know, there were times in my own life where I fed the good wolf and there are times in my own life when I fed the bad wolf. Oh, yeah.

And rather, rather extremely in both cases. Voraciously, probably. Yes. Yes. Indeed. And so, yeah, for me, you know, having a simple tagline, having something simple that can explain the sort of umbrella, if you will, under which your show operates is really crucial. It's one of the main reasons why I rebranded my own show, because nobody knew what an Enzo was. It's like, Enzo, what? What is that? What does that mean? And it

was too long-winded of an explanation. Like, okay, life on purpose. People can figure that one out. That's pretty straightforward. It is. And so how does one go from this idea that, oh, I'm going to start a podcast. We're going to give this a try. Okay, hey, this is pretty good. I like this. I'm learning from my guest. To, hey, we're the number one ranked podcast in three different categories in iTunes.

And Huffington Post calls you one of the best podcasts in the health category of all time. That's fantastic. Yeah, I think some of it is luck. I think some of it is, I say the luck thing, not disingenuously. I think there are a lot of great shows out there, your show being an example of it. So bubbling up out of that and getting picked for some of those things is, is certainly, I think to a certain degree luck. Um, it's just that somebody happens to, you know, in my case, it was somebody who worked at Apple in the podcast place for whatever reason decided to listen to it and really liked it. And, um, you know, they were a support to us. And, and so, like I said, I'm not under the illusion that there's not a lot of other good shows, but having a good show is a prerequisite.

So, I mean, I think the thing that, I think the success like that in the external world, being named this or named that, is, you know, you do your best with that, and then kind of what happens, happens. You can't control it much. What you can control is making a show that you feel good about. You can put everything you have into making something that is great. And, and, you know, Jonathan Fields, who we, you know, we met at the camp that he puts on, he has, you know, a line along the lines of, you know, there's no better marketing than making a kick-ass product.

That is absolutely true. And so that's where, you know, that was really my, was and is my main focus was I want to make the show good. So if I have to make a decision between marketing and content, I'm going to focus on the content. Um, and, and the reason I did it was not to, um, become, you know, named as one of the best of 2014 podcasts on iTunes, not iTunes, not that I'm not thrilled by that. Not that I don't love the success of on iTunes. Not that I'm not thrilled by that, not that I don't love the success of the show, not that I didn't have some secret hope that maybe that would happen, but I was very aware that it was probably more likely than not that

that sort of thing would not happen, but that the thing that I was doing, I wanted to do. I wanted to make this show. I wanted to spend time with Chris. I wanted to talk to these people. I wanted to read these books. I couldn't agree more. That's why I do my show. I feel like I should pay my guests. I should send them a check every week. I feel like I'm going to some sort of life class, life university or something. Each week, I'm learning something from every one of my guests and yeah and and you know what i found is that this is a topic that's come up quite a bit on my show over time is that and i've really come to believe this axiom is that we do the work we teach that thing that we most need to learn ourselves oh i i agree we had a guest on his name's justin sullivan he's in a band called

new model army kind of up i love new model army thunder i have i have thunder and consolation like sitting right over here on my shelf one of the best records ever made it is one of the best we have very similar musical taste yeah we'll get to that in a second yeah in a later song he has a line i don't remember what album it is but he has has a line that, you know, it's always the ones who need saved to do most of the saving. And, you know, that's the same thing. You know, you teach what you need to learn. I started the show because I needed it. You know, I needed to help feeding my good wolf and staying on the right track.

And I still do. So when you look back at your show, I mean, have you thought about, hmm, what have I learned from the show? What have I picked up from the guests? What do you learn from each person that comes on the show? You know, learning is an interesting word because it's very rare that anybody comes on and says something that I don't kind of know. I mean, a lot of this personal development, spiritual stuff is not that complicated, right? There are, you know, there's some basic principles to it. So I think what I get is I just get reminded again and again

to work on this thing or to focus on this thing, or I hear something in a slightly different way that drives it deeper into my consciousness. something in a slightly different way that drives it deeper into my consciousness. So I think that there haven't been a ton of times where I've been completely blown away, but it's more of a gradual, I keep trying to hear the same themes. I mean, there's been a couple though. We had a guy named David K. Reynolds who wrote a book called Constructive Living. He took a lot of his philosophy from the Japanese psychologist Morita. But the book Constructive Living is about how do you live constructively. It's very similar

to what we talked about earlier. You have a feeling. You recognize you're having the feeling. You come back to what your purpose is. You accept that feeling. You come back to what your purpose is. You do the next right thing. It's very simple. But one of the things he said was that when you have your behavior in control, you don't have to be afraid of your feelings.

And that really kind of blew me away because for a lot of my life, my behavior was not in control. You know, when we talked earlier, my behavior drove my, or my moods drove my behavior in a lot of cases. Did that lead you at some point to then repress that or repress your behavior out of fear of what it would do if it came out? I think it led me to repress my moods. I was afraid of having certain feelings because those feelings would lead me into very destructive places. And when he said that, it really hit me that as I now know myself much better and I'm not likely to go off on a bender next week because I'm in a bad mood, I'm not likely to not go to work for three days because I'm depressed. I've got enough history at this point and enough internal fortitude for the most part that I kind of keep walking. And so now I don't have to be afraid of emotion.

I can wander into that territory a little bit more comfortably than I think I used to because I was trying to maybe get rid of it via drugs or alcohol, you know, repressing it, working too hard, all those things. And I think that was one thing that, you know, really sticks out to me from the show where I kind of really went, never thought of that. I'm sure there's a lot of others. They're just not coming to mind. No. never thought of that i'm sure there's a lot of others they're just not coming to mind no so when you were saying reminding versus learning i was like waving my hands wildly in the air i didn't

want to interrupt you but i was just like yes that's it for me as you said it's not a new learning thing you know for me oftentimes but it's remember forget remember forget remember that's right and that's the human condition. Yep. We remember and then we forget. And I need to be, and I feel like, you know, I haven't watched it in years, but in the early years I was a big Simpsons fan. I used to watch the Simpsons all the time in sort of late 80s, early 90s when it came on.

I remember there was a Simpsons where Homer famously gets sort of hit over the head by a pot over again. It was a very cartoonish Three Stooges-y sort of a moment. And I feel like I'm Homer Simpson. I need to be sort of whacked over the head again and again over again. It was a very cartoonish Three Stooges-y sort of a moment. And I feel like I'm Homer Simpson. I need to be sort of whacked over the head again and again and again to remember these things. I'll forget. I remember. I forget to remember. Yeah. And I do not know why that is

the case, but it sure seems to be. I think it's just so much of culturally that we are just surrounded by a very different world and mentality and approach and it's kind of swimming against the stream to a certain degree i think yeah there's a very strong pull it's almost like a magnet that's sort of pulling us in these directions and you just sort of let yourself be pulled into those things be sucked into the vortex you're going to be unconscious and so that's what i think the other problem is that like this idea that it's something out there that will satisfy us is i think patently false the problem is that most of those things do for a little bit yeah that's the key for a little

bit for a little bit and so but for most of us and myself included, sometimes I don't know how to do it any other way. So that's all I know to reach for. Um, and that's the, you know, that's the spiritual path for me is learning to build that contentment inside where I don't have to reach for that thing outside. Or when I reach for it, I'm reaching for it in a different way. It's a, it's a very different, it's kind of like the idea of being an artist because you're driven by pain versus being an artist because you love to create. Those are very different things. And they're both ways to make art. Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah. And I think that another part of the equation is, and you sort of referenced this, is reframing things. Sometimes I'll have an idea or a concept in my

head, but I haven't quite framed it or thought about it in a way that helps me really apply it to my life or sort of gives me the sense of like, oh yeah, that works for me. Like, yeah, I can understand. I've heard that before, but I never really thought, how is that relevant to me? And so now I have a tool or I have a way to frame something in a way that's now suddenly relevant to my own life. Yep. Yeah. And that's why I love great interviews. That's why I love this medium, because we're able to have these conversations where I'll hear you say something.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Constructive living. Okay. And it's helping me frame something in a new way for me. Yep. So before we run out of time, Eric, and our hour is flying by, we're almost done here, but we have to talk music, because we're both musicians musicians and we sort of met in the garage, if you will, the garage band of

Camp GLP in 2014. And you had your guitar and I was sitting at a keyboard and our buddy Casey was there on bass and we had a few of his friends on additional instruments and we played some music together in the garage and then that was a blast and i love that you're a guitar player and then you have uh people that i'm big music fans of on this show you're a big water boys fan for instance and yes i've seen the water boys live a couple of times i love mike scott and everything he's done mike scott solo and mike scott under the auspices of the water boys and i love the fact that you're able to incorporate that element as something that you're passionate about you like you had just had mike peters of the alarm a fan i was a big fan of uh back in the 80s

so so how does how does music fit into all of this how does music fit into the one you feed well i think that you know i think i do think of the show sometimes as a, it's a reflection of me to a certain degree. Like what matters to me and what am I interested in? And music as anything in the world, any spiritual practice or meditation. I mean, it's as big a part of what helps me to live a life that's worth living as anything else. And so I've been able to, you know, it's been fun to bring that into the show in two ways. One is we try and make two music breaks during each show and we chris and i make all that music and so that's been really fun to have a way to create music and do something with it um again has been a great joy and then the other one as you've mentioned is i get artists on who i feel like their music is particularly particularly helps me feed my good wolf not that i just just like it. You know, it's not just that I

like the music. It's like, can I find a way to tie that to the theme? Do I think that they're saying something about how to live a better life? And so the artists that I've had on are ones that I think do that. Yeah. And, you know, just sort of scrolling through your recent podcast and you said, you know, you talked to Mike Peters about marching on in the face of difficulties i played in a cover band in the mid-80s that covered marching on one of the one of the alarm songs that you know were big on sort of college radio alternative radio at the time you know and you mentioned new model army you know and 51st state of america and thunder and consolation yeah some of my favorite uh music from that era it's it's stuff that still resonates with me uh today so I wish we lived in the

same town so we could play more because I miss, I mean that I do have music back in my life by making it for the show and all that but what I don't have and I miss is just like we did in that garage, like turning it up and playing with a band.

There's nothing quite like it. No, it's a very visceral experience and something you can't really repeat unless you're in that situation. So we'll have to find a way to make that happen in the future. Yeah, indeed. And so, Eric, before we run out of time here, you also currently, besides doing the podcast and you write at times, you also do some coaching as well, correct? Yeah, I started doing some coaching work. I got asked from a few people on the show, and I was a little bit like, I don't know if I should do that. And I finally decided to do it.

And as soon as I started doing it, I went, oh, wait a minute. This is very much like sponsoring somebody in a 12-step program. And I've done that, like I said, probably 100 times. So I suddenly realized I was very comfortable doing it and really liked doing it. And so far the feedback from clients has been really, really strong. They really, I think are getting a lot out of it. Excellent. And are you taking new people into the program right now? And how does that work if so? Yeah, I am. We are, I've still got, I've got a couple spots open right now. A couple of clients just, you know, ended their time. And so if you go to oneufeed.net slash coaching, you can get the information there.

Cool. You said something earlier, Eric, that I'd love to, as one of my final questions here, get an answer from. You said you were talking about, well, I don't know if that's my issue. You were describing doing businesses online and finding your way into the podcast. What is your issue these days? I think it's, you know, how do we live better lives as humans? How do we, you know, how do we live a life that has as much meaning and purpose and contentment and, you know, minimize the amount of suffering that we have in lives. I think that's what really matters to me.

It's what I've always been interested in. So I think that is my issue. Cool. And how do you do that on a daily basis? I meditate. I talk to people when something's bothering me. And I stay close to ideas that remind me that it's not all out there, that what's happening inside of me is really the primary way that my life either has meaning or doesn't or has a feeling.

That's what spiritual means to me, just that I'm looking inside for things. So I try and do things that help me remember that, that help me wake up from that trance of, you know, it's all about, you know, am I good looking enough? Do I have a nice enough car? Do I have a nice enough money? Do I get to travel enough? You know, waking up from that dream that that's where happiness lies. Yeah, that's excellent. Remember, forget, remember, forget. Yep. Gets back to that. So what's in store for you? What is, what is, uh, what's the next year hold for you and hold for the show? What do you have planned? Um, well, you know, first is just to keep doing the show cause we love doing it. We're also starting to work on, uh, an online program that will, uh, bring some of the things that we're giving people through

coaching to a broader audience. Not everybody can afford to hire a personal coach. I mean, I think I'm extremely reasonably priced, but not everybody can do it. And so I think that, I think there are real, we talked earlier about, there are real skills for how you become the kind of person that can come up with an idea and follow through and execute it. I think that's very much a skill-based thing. So I'm working on some training that will help people to do that. Excellent. And people can find out more about that as it develops at oneufeed.net? Yep, exactly. Excellent. And you're on social media, Twitter, Facebook,

where else can people find you? Yeah, Twitter, at One You Feed, and we're on Facebook. If you search for The One You Feed, you would probably find us. We're not real active there, but Twitter is where we primarily are. And then, you know, the website. I mean, I think listening to the show is the main thing. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, Eric, I really, really enjoyed having a long, in-depth conversation with you and getting to learn more about your life and the show and being able to flesh out some of the concepts that we touched on originally in our roundtable. And this has been great and please keep in touch and hopefully we can do this again sometime. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. It's, it's great to talk with you. I love, you know, I just love listening to you. You've

got such a great radio presence that it's just very fun to talk. Well, thank you very much. And folks, if you like what you're hearing here, we do this about once a week. It's called Life on Purpose, and you can find out more about the show or listen to additional episodes via the Life on Purpose website at lifeonpurposeshow.com. You can also find us on iTunes, the Stitcher Radio app, or all around the web. Until next week, I'm your host, Greg Berg. Take care.