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

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slash young and profiting. I'll stick the link in our show notes. You're listening to Yap, young and profiting podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host Halitaha, 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 from 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 Medes. Eric is a serial entrepreneur who has owned businesses focused on mobile networking, wireless networking, and Hollywood special effects, working on blockbuster movies like Aptar, 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 WildFit, 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 eat. 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 forward easily? Do you believe in constant transformation? What's the reasoning for you changing your career so often? I don't know if it's so much boredom is curiosity. Once something has satisfied me for my curiosity, maybe we can call it boredom, but then 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. 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 in World War II. But when he was a reporter, he was covering the Boer 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, those lives are long gone. And I think somewhere along the line, 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 breadth of experiences that you have. 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're working 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 him. 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, you know, as happens quite often, founders make certain promises around equity and that kind of stuff that they apparently later don't want to honor in. 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, you know, United Airlines, and Debenams 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 Prince's Trust in the United Kingdom get their business to start. 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 Light and 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 Caribbean. 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 a 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, 17, 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 and 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 this 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 in my throat and say, oh, my God, we have to take your tonsils out.

And, you know, one thing kind of led to another is I shared this with a few of my friends. And, you know, I listened. 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, it sounded 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 through my sinuses. The throat infections were gone.

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 problem's, you know, gone. No, no. Sometimes what happens is that it feels better for a while, but then it'll just come back. And I said, no, 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, they were even curious about how I handled it.

And so that, that began my journey with food and recognizing, you know what, really began it. I'll tell you, what blew me away 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 did you spend studying food and nutrition. And what shocked 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 Bushmen in Africa from my understanding. 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 as an event. So my, you know, growing up, I went through this thing 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, you know, many years before.

But it was kind of in my family, this interest in human history in anthropology and that kind of stuff. And so I had all these, like, 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. And 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 climbing to 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 went on the company, he said to me, and he'd Google me or something, and he's like, wow, you're, you're, you know, you're really interested, interested in this sort of human history, social anthropology, blah, blah, blah. Would you like to visit with some Bushmen? 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 Tom.

We can try and go meet with them. And so we loaded up some four by fours and went 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 Yaczi in East Africa in Tanzania and that the hudds 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 underpin studies and that kind of stuff. So, you know, 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 ever notice this, but a man can come home from work, turn on the TV and just sit down where a woman comes home from work, Tom's 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 stereotype men and women, but these are just my observation. But in any event, what I noticed there is that it's not so much that men are lazy. 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 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 Huzza 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. 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 and said, do you want to go hunting? And, of course, I said, yes, I'd been hunting with them before. But I'd never been out all day. And no kidding, I tracked our hunt. And we did 27 miles that day. Wow. A full marathon.

No training for this. And it's not running track miles. It's thorn trees and cliffs and rocks. And it wasn't even all that successful a hunting trip. And the next day, we wake up in the morning, every born in my body hurts. And the chief comes up to and he goes, you know, are you ready to go again? And of course, this is again where I'm going to have to stereotype a little bit. I swear if I was a woman, I'd have said no, because women are smart.

I have a man, my ego goes, of course I'm going to go again. So off we go. And we did another 17 miles the very next day. Wow. And so one of the things that it really showed me is that our life today is so physically easy that we are underutilizing our body. 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 was phenomenal. Yeah, that's incredible. 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. Yeah. 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 WildFit, 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 WildFit is? Like, what is the premises behind it? So WildFit is effectively a health and fitness coaching company. And the WildFit 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 it. 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 that differentiates us from, quote, 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 has been doing. So our clients a year later are still on track. Yeah. And that's very different from the diet industry. As you said, Mind Valley is our publisher. And they published some, incredible authors, and I'm in very good company on the Mind Valley platform. They're doing incredible work. And I just now was in LA where Wild Fit now for the second year in a row has won the highest rated program award on Mind Valley, which is the customer service rating of clients coming out back end. You know, I'm proud of that, but I also need to observe something. And that is

that our program is 90 days where most other programs are only 30 days. So the longer your program, the harder it is to maintain good customer feedback because people can 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 not do them. Yeah. Where we've differentiated 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. It is absolutely about freedom. And so that means that our clients are conditioned, they're educated and conditioned 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, donuts. 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 me? And what we do is get rid of that.

Okay. So that's really, so when you say I don't eat sugar, that's not true. First of all, sugar is, the English language is complicated because we use one word to describe a million things. So is sugar, is sugar good or bad? Yes. There are terrible sugars and there are good sugars. The sugar good every day? No. So do I eat sugar? Of course I do. Do I eat like processed, refined,

garbage, bleak crap sugar? No. I mean, I can't say it never makes it to me because it's hidden in a million things. But I certainly make a concerted effort to do it. I choose not really to eat dairy products 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 never craving. And so we 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 Hotsa Bushmen, when you're out with them, sugar, you'll see there's very little sugar in 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, sized 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 around 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, we bet get some. 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. The bees in Africa are smart. They hide themselves inside things. The bees in the rest of the world are arrogant. They're like, I'll just put my hive right here where you're. But in Africa, because they've had humans for so long, they bury 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, then 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 sugar's come down. And that insulin is kind of, we'll call it insulin shock. 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. And the reason for that, imagine that you and I are walking along 100,000 years ago in the bush in Africa and we see some food 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 is winter, which is drought. which means we better load up and fatten up as best we can right now. And so that little craving is designed to prepare us for the drought that's coming, prepare us for the winter. We didn't have that craving.

We wouldn't survive. The problem is that mechanism today is lethal. Yep, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. were 60 people all over the world.

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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. In 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. 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 when I first saw that study. She's like, no. No, that can't be right. That can't. 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 a week later, we're at this event. And I'm speaking at the event,

and I'm speaking after President Bill Clinton. And he's on the stage, and then he does some Q&A. And a woman in the audience says, you know, Mr. President, what do you think the biggest dangers are? This is actually in London, England. And this woman says, what do you think the biggest dangers are facing us in the world today? And he stops and he goes, well,

sugar. I read the other day that the average American eats 154 pounds of sugar every year. And my wife's like, did you hear that? And their obesity is seven times more dangerous than smoking a pet. It's like right out of it. And she's like, oh, now it's true. Now that bell fed 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. Natiche 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 it is that we want to replace it. And what I mean by that is what you're trying to replace is probably you think it's the taste,

but it's probably also the emotion, right? A lot of times what's going on is that you fell down, your skin, your knee, you were crying, your parents gave you a chocolate chip cookie. That distracted you from the pain. You felt love. And then at 40 years old, you can want a chocolate chip cookie when you're feeling lonely. Yeah. And so a lot of times our desire to replace sugar, it really is an attempt to it,

achieve an emotional state. What I would suggest is that it's not, 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 chain 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 that's a 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 isn't meant to be seasonal. Sugar is not something that your body is designed to process every single day. Your pancreas is a

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 a refusage. placements 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 evolved relationship with, say, fresh fruit, honey, that kind of stuff. And then I want to eat it occasionally and 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, used to 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 ever change 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, is 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 some that not 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.

Yeah. For example, the Beef Growers Association has absolutely been working to overstate the requirement for protein to drive meat eating. There's no question they've done that. Yeah. But then, you know, PETA 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 disregard it. 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. I was impressions 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 with 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 a vegan because if you are a vegan and you change your position, which, by the way, 85% of vegans will do. 85% will attempt vegan and stop. 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 protest.

So when you change your mind in this world, it can be pretty dangerous 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, have pretty, for all intents and purposes, always eaten 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 NIA right now, and it's not going very well. And so that disturbed me.

And then at the same time, I was researching other primates, and I found out something crazy, and that is that both chimpanzees and bonobos, and by the way, they're incredibly closely related, except we're more genetically related to the one than the other one is. Like, we are more of a chimpanzee than the bonobo. So when I found out that they are incredible meat eaters, they are very good hunters. Yeah. It made me questioning some stuff. And then I had a personal experience.

I was training for the London Marathon. And I was running like 3, 18 mile runs a week in prep for the marathon. And I was waking up in the night, salivating, having dreams about food. 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 a, 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, I know what will happen to me on Twitter and all that stuff after. But vitamin B12 is probably the most propagandized and lied 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 can't, we don't get access to our own B12. So, you know, that's why we get our B12 from animals. And that's where, you know, B12 comes from. Yes, the V12. vegan movement's going to tell you no, no, you get your B12 because when you pull a carrot out of the ground, it's full of soil and you eat it. Okay, do you know what soil is? Rotting feces and flesh, 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, you know, I've been out with the Bushman. I know what happens. If we kill something small, they cook it and eat in 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 is that piece. And so in the weirdest twist of irony, the emotive and nearly violent veganista may well be suffering with B12 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 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 ourselves 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? Like if vegetarianism and veganism was that healthiest path for humans, why would we even have a craving for desire for vegetarian sausage or fake meat or, you know, of these kinds of things. So that's one question, which is provocative, but it's a valid question. But the other thing is that most of the meat substitutes are heavily processed other foods that we're really not supposed to be eating a great deal of. And so I'm not a big fan. You know, somebody wants to become a vegetarian. And incidentally, generally when somebody calls

themselves a vegetarian, it means that they're not eating meat and 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 like meat substitutes per se. That said, if somebody's going to make the choice to become a vegetarian or especially a vegan, they're definitely going to have to give some thought to getting the right amino acids in their life. Yeah.

There's no client 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, you know, 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 pass to eat as drink as much milk as I want because I don't get sick from it? Or does 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 digestive enzyme that breaks down lactose.

And most mammals stop producing lactase when they're weaned, 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 lactates, then they don't go back to drinking milk. Obviously, they stop producing lactase because there was no need. I actually believe that everybody is lactose intolerant. They just have to wait until the lactate clock 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 lactate clock. 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 something. The issue about whether lactose intolerance or not indicates whether milk is good for you or not is irrelevant. 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, dude, what are you doing? Don't put that in me. I am not a cow. I am not planning to grow 1,000 pounds in my first year.

I don't have four stomach. 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 can just keep putting the stuff in. And then I believe that that's going to create consequence, a range from the immediate, which is the lactose and tolerant potential pain to the intermediate, 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 studied that showed that one glass of milk a day or equivalent in excess of dairy products would result in a 300% increase in the likelihood of developing prostate or varying 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 science. We've never done that. Yeah. It's one of the newest things in our behavior.

Our ancestors were not walking up underneath the wildebeest and, you know, trying to milk it. 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 fad 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 walked into a bookstore and you saw a thing that said, you know, the Hala diet, you'd be like, oh, my God, it's the diet for me. 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, do you have a dog? Yes.

What kind of dog do you have? A Maltese. You have a Maltese. So you walk into the store and you see this book and it says how to train your dog in, you know, 30 days or whatever. But then you walk a little further and you see a thing that says how to train your Maltese. 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 Maltese, 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 leash. Can't be done. So there's a chapter.

That's how I view this question with diet. 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, is 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, you know, so for the most part, the personalization comes down to things like male, female or somewhat different, and physical activity are somewhat different, and speeds of metabolism can be different. but that's often an epigenetic 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 one step further. I'll actually publish an infographic on my Instagram account later today so they can actually

see what I'm about to describe you. 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 Sixthangers, 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 seasonal 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 one.

Now that Britain has left the EU, they're going to be totally subjected to eat to American food regulations. This is going to be consistent everywhere. And so one of the things that what'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 do you 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 pottery. They didn't have their fancy gym water bottle, right? So, you know, 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 foods they're eating.

And so when we get dehydrated, our body sends a signal. And that signal is, eke because we used to get water 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, eke. And so one of the things that's important in appetite control is making sure you're well hydrated. And the third one will 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 very 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. You know, people like this woman goes to the bank machine and she drops her wallet and the young man behind her as she walks away, picks up her wallet, runs down the street and gives it to her 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 stop the traffic for her and fake each hand and walk her across the street. 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 personal liberty. So if you want to drink Coke, that stuff, too. I think we should talk the hell out of it. But if I was into banning stuff, Coca-Cola 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 as a kid that even to this day when I see somebody drinking Pepsi, I'm like, shouldn't you be drinking Coke? That's how it's 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 emotional hunger is a big, big part of that. Happy New Year, YAP gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged.

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And then my mastermind subscription is also. on Shopify. I built my site quickly in just a couple of days, payments were set up super easily, and none of the technical stuff slowed me down like it usually does because Shopify is just so intuitive. And this choice of using Shopify helped me scale my masterclass to over $500,000 in revenue in our first year. And I'm launching some new podcast courses and can't wait to launch them on Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person, just like the millions of entrepreneurs that they power. You can build your dream story using hundreds of beautiful templates and set up as fast with built-in AI tools that help you write product

descriptions and edit photos. Plus, marketing is built in so you can create email and social campaigns easily. And as you grow, Shopify can scale right along with your business. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash profiting. Go to Shopify.com slash profiting. Go to Shopify.com. profiting. That's Shopify.com slash profiting. Yeah, fam, hear your first this new year was Shopify by your side. 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 re-rease it. 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 ends of 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, they 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. Well, she didn't, Mark Hyman came up with the term diabetes, but a diabetes and obesity epidemic, right? She basically said, you're going to have a diabetes epidemic within 30, 40, 50 years. And guess what we have? And so, you know, where I'm at right now is not a mystery what we've eaten for most of 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 food companies that are far more interested. in their bottom line and their profit, then 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 inherently evil. I don't believe that McDonald's is inherently evil or Nestle is inherently 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 big, big 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 Hudson Bushman about two weeks ago, and I just did my most recent visit with them. Cry an adventure, let me tell you. I had to have an emergency appendectomy in the middle of the trip.

It was a scary, scary. Oh, wow. But I sat down and did some interviews with the chief and one of the leading women in the tribe. And one of the questions I asked him is, do members of the HUDSA tribe ever not eat intentionally? Do they ever fast? Do they ever? You know, they don't have the words for fasting, but, you know, we can. got this point across. And he looked at me like I was insane. What? Why would anybody ever

intentionally not eat? Now remember, they live in social anthropology. There's this really cool measurement called calories per acre. They live with very few calories per acre, right? Where we, like, you know, the Maasai, 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 app, because we can improve ourselves some food immediately. not them. So when I said to them, do you ever like intentionally not eat?

Absolutely not, not ever. But nature imposes intermittent fasting on them regularly. So the idea of going for many, many hours or even many days without 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. Two examples.

One is that when you, if you had a factory and you wanted to do maintenance on the factory, you would close the factory down. Stop the machines. Go in and do this. the maintenance. So the digestive system occasionally likes a break. You don't put anything in there for a while and then 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, your stomach shrinks 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 to this. But the trouble is, is that our stomachs are expandable because of feast and famine routines in 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 little. You have people, oh, man, I ate too much, right? But the trouble is that for most people in the Western world, the stomach stays stretched 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 of the 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. Everybody, 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, most disease proteins first. Oh, wow. Wow. Intermitt 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, from my understanding, you didn't just learn about diet and things from the Bushmen. You also learned about the importance of stories. And 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 the very, very best way for a human to learn anything is to do it. You just sit them down and make them do it, and then they develop the neuropathways of what we call muscle memory, and they do it. The trouble is, though, if you're a young male Bushman, you know, you're eight years old, you can't do it. You can't go hunting.

It should be dangerous. Like you just, you wouldn't be able to keep up. There's big, 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 method. So we're going to have to fall on the second best learning method. And the second best learning method is storytelling.

And it probably has been for as long as we've had language. And we've had fire for probably two 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 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 sellout. You can't. Make your heart beat faster right now. You can't. 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 salivate. Yeah. A story that would make your heart rate 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 story. 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 the stage, you're telling stories, if they're good at it. If the story's good, you're in all the way. And that's because for the next year, stories have been the primary communication system 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 like have an arsenal of your own story? and be prepared to say them when the time is right. Yeah, absolutely. You've touched on 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 in public speaking, one of the things that we teach all of our clients to have is a story journal. So what that means is whenever something happens in your life, you open up a page to your journal and you just take notes about it. You don't write the whole story out, and I'll come to that 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 and by and da-da.

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'd call them hashtag today, like what the topics of that story are, sales or or influence or rapport or mountain planning or whatever they might be. And what that means now is, let's say you ask me, you book me to come and speak at some conference, I can take out my story journal and I can just leap through it and just, and just, the bottom of the page and I can find all, like, say you asked me to speak for 30 minutes on tails. I used to go, brr-sales, and pick all my sales stories. Now, of course, I'm using a very old-school methodology here because the truth is I teach people to do it that way first and then I show them how to put it in Evernote or One Note because it's

even better. Yeah. So having a bank of stories, and by the way, do you ever plan to write a book? I hope so. And then probably in a couple years. Imagine how valuable it would be for you. Totally. Yeah.

Story Journal is the ultimate weapon for a speaker or author to really co-lester thoughts. Do not trust your memory. You're young enough that you probably still have the arrogance of my memory works all the time. 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 bam, all of a sudden you have a story journal and you're able to say, oh, I remember that story. So that's one very useful tool to have. The reason I say not to write them out

is I can always tell the speakers that write their stories out because they sound like they're remembering the words rather than remembering the experience. And so 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 that 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 is just straight common sense.

All these people want to use notes when they walk up on stage. Yeah. Think about this. If you are remembering the stories and you're planning 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. Why do we do that? Yeah. The other thing you brought up is the actual storytelling.

And storytelling, you know, 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 fright 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. can get rid of it in 40 minutes like bam it's gone you never have to feel that way again i know because i used to be so terrified by the public speaking that i wouldn't be able to eat for days before i had to do a talk it was awesome for and today i have 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 in fantasy and reality well what happens for 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 Bushmen, we're traveling by four by four, and I have to leave the bush to take some of their friends out because they're only with the week. And then I have to pick up two of my friends who are coming with me to spend a week with the Bushmen embedded with the film crew. That's not storytelling. That's setting the scene. That's called an establishment shot.

The point where I go, where I want to drive into storytelling is I go, you know, it's crazy. We got to Lake Minera. 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. And 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 going to, 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 and talked to a doctor. And he did a little abdominal exam. And immediately he's like, you have appendicitis. We've got to go get a CT scan. You have 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, then you have to feel. Whatever 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 of sadness and then you need to be sad. If you want to trigger a feeling of joy

and victory, then you need to feel those feelings of joining 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, you know, we can use the skills that you just talked about? Well, you know, it's very simple. Find places to tell your stories, right? You know, and that can be anything from the dining and table with your friends. Yeah. You know, to going out to organizations like Toastmasters that have speaking clubs or, you know,

StorySlam. You know, there are places where you can go and practice storytelling. And I think that's a great way to do it. Yeah, I'll be clear. I'm a big fan of Toastmasters. 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 influencer 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. Yeah. And to get people to get 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 to Egypt, watch a pictures, contact the local nursing some things. Guys, I'd love to come and I'd love to just give a presentation of my turf

Jesus. Guys, like, everybody, please. I hope you'll all do this if you really want to get some practice because those are, those people are sitting there not a lot of activity in their life. And if you walk in there and share your slides and your stories with them, you're getting practice and they're getting this incredible vicarious experience. Yeah. There's lots of great. Totally. And also social media. 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 Improveting Podcasts, but, you know, you could get different speaking gigs. So speaking of that, how do you prepare for something like a speaking again 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 do and that we share with all our clients is developing a list of

strategic objective. and they, you know, they have content they want to share or they have something they want to sell. You know, there's usually a primary objective. Whenever I am doing something, I have a variety of different objectives. Maybe I'm speaking about WildFit and a very change in those people.

My secondary objective is to maybe get them to come and do our 90-day program or our 14-day reset program or something to get them started. But then I'll have a list of up to me around podcasting. And I just stopped getting it. Like, I still got some at the way down. You know what it was? on me up on YouTube and people became afraid to ask probably too busy he would never say yes and so they wouldn't come up to me at the event and ask and they wouldn't even like so then i started

dropping stories into my talk i got this interview i got this interview at a big event in sardinia italy and we're at sessions to go to the podcast and it's in i realized it's in her suite she wanted to come alone into her suite and do this podcast this is you want to know what it's like to be a guy these days these are the things you have to think about because i'm about to go into the suite. So you know what I did is I turned my phone on and I cried me so I could record everything to happen in the tweet. I don't know this story. I share this story as an example of, hey, you know, we have to think, made sure the audience knew that I'm open to doing podcasts. And every time I do that, I get a thing will happen now, I bet. You'll have, you know,

a bunch of your listeners to go, Eric's approachable for podcasts 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 States, you should be thinking about all the little strategic deck that you have. Are you looking for a book deal? Maybe you should mention you're working on a book. Are you interested in doing appearances? Maybe you should talk about how you've done TV appearances and how well they've gone. So people in the audience, producers, editors, showrunners, know that you're good and that you're open to it. 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 have fun. Here's my example for you on this is that there's all this like, are there, is there an afterlife? Is there reincarnation? Do we go to heaven? Do we go to hell? Like 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 out here. the parental experience that I'm having now.

There may have been a forelife, there may be an afterlife. It doesn't seem to matter. What seems 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 your first guy, you know you get your three men, right, the way the typical video game work, 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. Wouldn't they? They'd end the game and start over again. Their 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 broken 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 plastics 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. 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 is the best way to go. And it's my name. And Eric Hed-Bee. 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 fun and engaging, and I really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Of course. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting 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 you. me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks to the Yap team. As always, this is Hala, signing off.