The One You Feed - Mini Episode- Why Did We Start This Podcast?

Episode Date: March 21, 2014

Eric goes solo for mini-episode two.Hi Everyone....I'm doing another 5 minute mini-episode. This one I talk about why we started the podcast and some thoughts on the Two Wolves parable. The audio quality is not up to our normal standards but I'm doing the recording outside of our studios.As always feedback is very welcome and appreciated.We will release a normal episode on Tuesday as always.  Some of our most popular interviews you might also enjoy:Mike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee 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, it's Eric from the One You Feed podcast, and I am doing another mini episode. I got some pretty good comments back on the last one, so thank you for everybody who got in touch to share what you thought of that. I'd like to start off by just thanking everybody for listening to the show. Chris and I are thrilled with the reception we've got. The

download numbers are really surprising, and more and more of you are starting to reach out to us via email, which I genuinely enjoy. I'd love to hear from you. Love to hear your suggestions on the show. See what you're getting out of it. I'm open to guest suggestions. So feel free to get in touch. I'm at eric at oneufeed.net. The other thing I would ask is if you get a chance, if you could leave us an iTunes review, that's really valuable to us and helps out a lot. So I would be very appreciative of that. And if you're in there and you want to share it with somebody, that's helpful too. Anyway, what I wanted to talk about today was the theme of the One You Feed, because we've gotten a lot of people who come on and say, well, I don't really believe in good and bad, and I don't believe in a dualistic sense of things.

And I wanted to talk about that because, frankly, neither do I. And I'm not really thrilled with the terms good wolf and bad wolf, because I think they have some baggage to them. As I've joked about on the show before, though, if we were to call it a skillful and unskillful wolf, the parable wouldn't really retain its bite. But skillful and unskillful is really a good way to think of. When I do the introduction, I'm saying things like, you know, you've got the bad wolf, which is things like hatred and greed and fear. And I think we can all recognize those are not things that are particularly pleasant to think about. They're not conducive to us living a better life.

They stand in our way. to us living a better life. They stand in our way. And then on the other hand, you've got the good wolf who's got things like kindness and love and bravery and these things that are helpful to us in living a life that's worth living. So I don't mean it in good and bad moralistic terms. I'm not interested in judging anybody. I think we all do the best we can for the most part with what we have at the time. And the question is, how can we do better? And I think that the purpose of the podcast for me is to remember that there's a choice there. And I think that's the biggest problem in any level of personal change a lot of times is remembering because life is very habitual I have become very habitual I think we all have there's so much stimulus things are moving so fast we

become very habitual and very often we don't even realize the choices we're making and so I think that this this idea of which wolf am I feeding is about this idea to be conscious of, I am feeding one of these wolves. Although I suppose there's probably just a neutral wolf. Maybe he's sleeping. I'm not sure. We're feeding one of these wolves. So what are we feeding it? And this gets back to the idea that's pretty popular about positive thinking. And our second episode, we had Oliver Berkman on, who has a book called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Hate Positive Thinking. And in that book, he's sort of rebelling against this idea that if we just think positive all the time, everything will be fine. And I tend to agree with that. I think it goes way too far. But at the heart of it, realizing that what we're thinking about is a large part of

the life we're having is an important skill. And to be able to recognize that we're having those thoughts and be able to question them and get some distance from them really is important. And I know Oliver agrees with that idea. I think where I run into trouble with the positive thinking is the idea that if I just think positively, great things are going to happen to me. The idea of the secret, that I'm going to attract all these things to me by thinking positively, which I don't really believe in. Now, I do believe that thinking positive can make me a more attractive person. It can make me a person who puts more good out into the world, has better relationships,

and those things do lead to better outcomes. But it's not that I am, in my opinion, attracting these things through some magical formula. So I wanted to just, like I said, talk a little bit about what the parable is and why we did it. So, you know, we did it because we wanted to, I wanted to be more conscious of the choices I was making in my life. I wanted to talk with a lot of cool people who were trying to do the same thing. Another big motivation for me is I wanted to spend time with my friend Chris, who is the audio guy and he does the voiceovers and occasionally he's mumbling in the background. This was just a way for us to spend a lot more time together. And that has been wonderful and has been happening.

We've seen each other more over the last several months than we had in years. So that's excellent. And ideally, be able to help some people who are wrestling with these same issues of how to live a good life. So again, thank you so much, everybody, for listening to the show. We're thrilled to have you. We love to hear from you. And we'll talk to you in the next episode. Thanks.