#58: Join The Food Revolution with Eric Edmeades

Hala Taha:

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You're listening to young and profiting podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Hala Taha. And on young and profiting

[00:01:00] podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world.
My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life. No matter your age, profession, or industry, there's no fluff on this podcast and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value for my guests. People who are much smarter than me on their given topic, by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. Today, we're chatting with Eric Edmeades.
Eric is a serial entrepreneur who has owned businesses focused on mobile networking, wireless, networking, and Hollywood special effects. Working on blockbuster movies like avatar, Ironman, 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

[00:02:00] episode, we'll uncover Eric's perspective on nutrition, like what we should and should need. We'll start to understand the psychology behind our food cravings, and we'll get an insight from his time spent with the Bushman tribe in Africa who lives similarly to those from the stone age, and as a bonus, we'll also learn his amazing tips to tell better stories and prepare for our speaking engagements.
Please keep in mind that Eric was on the road when we recorded this interview. And so understand that this episode has unusually poor audio quality, but the content was so good. I just had to put it out regardless without further do enjoy my conversation with Eric. So I want to know why have you changed your career so many times?
Do you get bored easily? Do you believe in constant transformation, what's the reasoning for you changing your career so often?
Eric Edmeades: I, I don't know if it's so much boredom is curiosity, once something has satisfied my curiosity, maybe we can call it for them, but then, the next thing comes along.
Like when I sold my first business,

[00:03:00] I've been in that industry for 15 years. And I and at that point I was done. Like I was, I just didn't want to do that anymore. And so for me, it's really like what, 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.
Nevermind prime minister and 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, the days of truly rich living are over, like we don't, those lives are long gone. And I think somewhere along the line, I aspiring to live a life as full as that kind of drove me to take on a bunch of adventures and live a life of variety.
Hala Taha: 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.
Eric Edmeades: Wow. Okay. So I left high school and was not able to go to university. So immediately went into sales. I was offered a job in a sales organization and worked there for two or three years, learning human nature, ultimately.
And when you're working in sales and then one day I was

[00:04:00] 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. 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, as happens quite often founders make certain promises around equity and that kind of stuff that they apparently later don't want to honor. And so that led to a disagreement with that situation. And I ended up leaving and starting my own business, which I did in England.
We were in a very, in the same industry. We did things a little bit differently. We focused a lot on repair and, but again, mobile computing, logistics management, or that sort of stuff. Our clients were people like, United airlines and Devin hymns 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 businessmen. Because my business didn't need me anymore. I took my

[00:05:00] spare time to help young entrepreneurs through the prince's trust in the United Kingdom, get their business to started.
And a couple of 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 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, 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

[00:06:00] tied to brick and mortar business anymore.
And I and I went back to my original goal as a child when I was 15, 16, 7 years old. I really thought that I'd want to be a teacher. And then I found out, and I don't know what it's like in every country around the world, but I then found out in Canada, at least we don't really seem to pay our teachers
what's fair relative to the importance of their job. And I didn't become a teacher on that basis that I was now given the opportunity to do that. And and so I teach.
Hala Taha: 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 discovered something about food that really helped to shape your career later on in life.

[00:07:00] 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?
Eric Edmeades: Yeah. So it's funny at that age, when you're sick continuously, you don't really think of yourself. So I didn't think of myself as sick. I just was that kid who always had allergies or always had digestive problems, or, my parents obviously took a different view and they were sending me to this doctor in this specialist.
And what have you, and, being prescribed all kinds of different drugs. And as you say, eventually at about 21, I had a doctor take a look at my throat and say, oh my God, we have to take your tonsils out. And one thing led to another, as I shared this with a few of my friends and, I listened and 30 days I figured a 30 day experiment.
What could go wrong? And after two weeks into this experiment where I just cleaned up my eating, it's not like I was particularly bad with food. I just wasn't that good with it. And then within two weeks, suddenly I was able to bring to my sinuses and throat infections were gone.

[00:08:00] The doctor's office called me to try to, confirm this surgery and I canceled it.
And they were like, why would you cancel? Cause the problems, gone. No. The pro, we get sometimes what happens is that it feels better for a while, but then it'll just come back and I said 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.
I'm curious about how I handled it. And so that, that began my journey with food and recognizing, what really begin. I'll tell you that blew me away is asking a doctor one day, how long it took to become a doctor, like how long they went to medical school and, generally minimally it's about six years.
And then I asked the followup question of how much of that time did you spend studying food in 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. And that's when I decided I wanted to study food.
Hala Taha: 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. And can you just tell us how you ended

[00:09:00] up visiting a tribe in Africa and studying them and researching them? Was it on purpose or was this planned, and you knew what you were looking after when you went to spend time with them?
Eric Edmeades: It was really a matter of a confluence of coincidence in event. So my, growing up by Windsor, 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 homosapien skull, many obviously melting, many years before, but it was 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 are just separate curiosities of mine. And then somewhere along the line, I started marrying them together and want 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. I'm taking people up Kilimanjaro. So my

[00:10:00] leadership program was a two week program. And one week of it involves climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro, which is a little bit more of an intensive workshop exercise than breaking boards or walking on fire.
Hala Taha: Yeah.
Eric Edmeades: And so coming down the mountain one day, the logistics team that I was working with, the guy that owned the company text me. And he'd Googled me or something and he's wow you're, you're really interested in this sort of human history, social anthropology, blah, blah, blah.
Would you like to visit with the 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 them in which I will meet with them. And so we loaded up some four by fours and went crashing through the Bush and machetes and no luck.
And then all of a sudden, he'd heard through somebody else that we could get up to Lakey Oxy in east Africa in any in Tanzania. And and that the Hadza 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.
Hala Taha: That's amazing. And for my listeners, you want more

[00:11:00] 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 bushmen?
Eric Edmeades: It's not so much fit, I found a lot of nutritional insights from them, but rather observing them confirm theories or underpin studies and that kind of stuff. Here's an example.
Humans are particularly men. If I can say this are somewhat lazy and I would give her notice this, but a man can come home from where turn on the TV and just sit down where a woman comes home from work turns on the TV and then does stuff, the 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. These are just my observations. But in any event, what I noticed there is that it's not so much that men are lazy. It's that they're

[00:12:00] incredibly efficient. And I think that when you recognize that food used to be incredibly rare and difficult to get, it requires a significant amount of energy to go get it.
So you, you know, you were conserving energy in order to go and hunt and gather, which took a huge amount of energy. One day, I was out about three years ago, I was out with the hadza and the chief came to me. I was there for a whole week. I was living with him. I didn't bring food. I brought water. Cause I'm not stupid.
They, I don't know how 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. That I'd never been out all day and no kidding.
I tracked our hunts and we did 27 miles that day.
Hala Taha: Wow.
Eric Edmeades: A full merit, 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. It's a hunting trip. And the next day we wake up in the morning, every bone in my body hurts and the chief comes up and he goes, are you ready to go again?
And of course, this is again where I'm going to have to stereotype a

[00:13:00] little bit. I'm sure, if I was a woman I've said no, because women are smart. I am a man, my ego goes up. Of course, I'm going to go again,
And we did another 17 miles the very next day.
Hala Taha: Wow.
Eric Edmeades: And so one of the things that it really showed me is that our life today it's so physically easy that we are under utilizing our body. And that's dangerous if you're not out there doing your seven, eight, 10,000 steps a day, you're under utilizing 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.
Hala Taha: Yeah, that was incredible.
Eric Edmeades: 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. For us, we can go buy a mango pretty much any day of the week at a grocery store.
Hala Taha: Yeah. You're the founder of WildFit, it's a 90 day nutritional program. It's spot it's backed by mind valley. Lots of people swear by what you do. And essentially, could you just explain what WildFit is? What

[00:14:00] is the premises behind it?
Eric Edmeades: So WildFit it 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 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 psychology. So these days there's many, there are many good people out there sharing great information about nutrition, but the average person can't follow.
They don't have the willpower and they don't understand the manipulative food marketing practices and the food ingredients practices that are aimed at taking away their freedom. What we do that's different that differentiates us from the diet industry is that we change people's psychology around 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

[00:15:00] hypnosis that the food industry has been doing. So our clients a year later are still on track and that's very different from the dieniche.
I just said, mine valley is our publisher. And they published some incredible authors and very good company on the mind valley platform. They're doing incredible work. And I just know it was in LA where WildFit now for the second year in a row is one the highest rated program award on mine valley, which is the customer service rating of clients coming out the backend.
I'm proud of that, but I also need to observe something. And that is that our program is 90 days and where most other programs, only 30 days. So the longer your program, the harder days to maintain good customer feedback cause you need to stick with that, 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 they'll move them, where we differentiate it is we have an 85% completion rate and a 85 to 90% success rate, which is just not consistent to die in industry.
Hala Taha: Yeah, very cool. So let me pick your brain on food and

[00:16:00] 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.
Eric Edmeades: It's absolutely not like that. Whilst it 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, anytime 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 wished 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. And what we do is get rid of that.
Hala Taha: Okay.
Eric Edmeades: So that's really so when you say I don't eat sugar, that's not true. I, first of all, sugar is the English language is complicated because we use one word to describe a million things.
So sugar is sugar good or

[00:17:00] bad. Yes. There are terrible sugars and there are good sugars, but sugar good every day. No. So, do I eat sugar? Of course I do. Do I eat processed, refined, garbage bleeds, crap sugar. No, I can't say it never makes it any because it's hidden in a million things and 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 di 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.
Hala Taha: Yeah 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?
Eric Edmeades: It's a very evolution. It 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 creating cause hunger itself would drive you to go and get some.

[00:18:00]
But if it was nutritionally important and rare or required effort, then either craving. And so we have a craving for fat because it's nutritionally important and it requires effort to go get it. Sugar is very much the same way. Speaking of the Hadza bushmen, when you're out with them, the sugar, you'll see there's very little sugar in nature.
It's incredibly hard to find there is other berries that ripe in occasionally, but they're not these genetically modified breadfruits that we have today. A sour plum is a great size piece of fruit, but the pit inside, the pit inside is 70, 80% of the fruit. So there's only a little bit of flesh on the outside.
So there's a very tiny amount of sugar per piece of fruit and the food 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 gets on it's full of vitamin C. And so we've got to go get some when it's available.
And then when it's gone, we lament it. And we're probably a little depressed. Anything with honey in Africa is incredibly are defined. Bees in Africa,

[00:19:00] smart. They hide themselves inside things. The bees and the rest of the world are arrogant. They like, I'll just put my hide right here because they've had demons for so long.
They vary the hides like and so they're hard to find. You can only find it preserved this tiny little wax chimney. And if you can see that little extra mint on the tree and 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. When you eat fruit, you get this sugar spike and then you start producing insulin and the insulin then breaks down the sugar. And what you're left with often at the end of that is a little surplus insulin and your blood sugars come down and that insulin is we call it, insulin shock.
And that in that moment you have this craving for sugar. That's why somebody can like I got, oh, I'll just have one. No, they're going to have one. And then the body's going to end the reason for that, imagine that you and I are walking along a hundred thousand years ago in the Bush in Africa. And we see some food on the tree.
We

[00:20:00] grabbed some, we eat it, we walk away and then we have this weird sugar trading again. So we walked back and eat some more. If there are fruits on the trees, what that can tell us is the next season that's coming as winter, which has drought, which means we'd better load up and fatten up as best we can.
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.
Hala Taha: Yeah, totally. And we have such an addiction to sugar, especially Americans. I read a stat that like Americans consume like 54 pounds to 150 pounds of sugar per year.
And it's just increasing and increasing. And 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.
Eric Edmeades: It's true. And part of it is just that it's so

[00:21:00] insidious. It's so hidden in things that people are eating sugar, like I've shared that statistically, a matter of fact, I went to, I told my wife when they, the average American is eating 154 pounds of sugar. This is like four years, five years ago. I told her this, when I first saw that study, she's no, that can't be right.
That can't be. And then I told her, an obesity is apparently seven times more dangerous than smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. And she's 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 and a woman in the audience says, Mr. President, what do you think the biggest dangers are? This is actually in London, England. And this woman says to her, what do you think the biggest dangers are facing us in the world today? And he stops and he goes, sure I read the other day that the average American eats 154 pounds of sugar every year.
And my wife like "Did you hear that?" And they're obese is seven times more dangerous than smoking. It's like, It's like right on. And she's like "Oh now it's true, now that Bill said it" you

[00:22:00] know
Hala Taha: 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, Anatish is wondering if there's any replacement for sugar.
Eric Edmeades: It's funny, 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 when, 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're 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. And so a lot of times our desire to replace sugar is really is an attempt to achieve an emotional state. What I would suggest is that it's not so much that we want to replace sugar it's that we want to choose really two principles when it comes to sugar.
Maybe three, reduction, heavily heavy reduction and quality. What kind of sugar are you eating? If you're eating like unrefined, changed sugar from time to time, honey, to look good

[00:23:00] quality, honey. Not this garbage honey syrup stuff that we, that a lot of people are eating as 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 dual minimally, a dual function organ. It has a sugar function and a non-sugar function.
And if you only ever run it in sugar load, you're asking for pancreatic problems, right? Potentially things like diabetes and so on. So I'm not so big on the idea of looking for replacements is rather saying, if I'm going to eat sugar, I want to eat the best quality that I can to kind of, my body has an involved relationship with say, fresh fruit, honey, that kind of stuff.
And then I want to eat it, occasionally and not with any regularity.
Hala Taha: 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 if I'm

[00:24:00] 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?
Eric Edmeades: This is a tough topic because it's now at the point of being unpolitical. So least 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 change one variable and you control everything else.
So when you do a big study of food, that's just not really possible. If you want to test is coffee good or bad? You can't find a whole bunch of people that are living exactly the same and then have some half coffee and have some that don't have coffee. That would be the only way to really do the study.
So it's really difficult to rely on studies, particularly because most studies are funded by people with agendas, the food industry itself. For example, the beef growers association is absolutely been working to overstate the requirement for protein to drive meat eating. There's

[00:25:00] no question they've done that then, yeah. 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 evolution neurology questioning, seriously, if not this regarded.
That's what happened to me with me? I was, I'm a recovering vegan. I was convinced by the arguments. I was convinced by silly logical fallacy based arguments. 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.
This is a ridiculous emotive argument, but at 21 years old, 22 years old, I was impressionable by such, I was impressioned 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

[00:26:00] that I'd held really strongly at some point in time. But when the research has come along, I've absolutely been willing to change my position. And that's really scary when you're vegan, because if you are vegan and you change your position, which by the way, 85% of vegans will do 85% of vegan wil 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, 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, I have pretty, for all intensive purposes, always eat meat, and 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 here right now and it's not going very

[00:27:00] well. And so I, 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 the chimpanzees and Bonobos. So when I found out that they are incredible meat eaters, they're very good hunters, made me to 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 that was easy, having dreams about I hadn't had in years, the research is one thing led to another, and I just realized I was on the wrong track.
Hala Taha: Yeah. And I've even heard that not eating meat can cause you to become aggressive. Is that true?
Eric Edmeades: It's a little thing that I don't like mentioning it so often, frankly.
I know what'll happen to me on Twitter and all that stuff you're asking for it, is

[00:28:00] probably the most propagandized and light about vitamin there is, but vitamin B 12, 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. That's why we get our B12 from animals.
And that's where, you know B12 comes from. Yes, the vegan move is going to tell you, no, you get your B12 because when you pull the carrot out of the ground, it's full of soil and you eat it and okay. Do you know what soil is? Rotting, feces, and flush. So it's hardly venient. 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 I've got my B12 supplement over here.
There's some issues around the digestibility of the availability and the source for with which to be through chemo, 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. I've been out with the bushmen.
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

[00:29:00] kill something big, we bring it back to camp and I'll tell you what, the women are ready. And I think it's the ones that have a little extra aggression at that piece. And so in the weirdest twist of irony, the emotive and nearly violent veganista is, may well be suffering with B12 deficiency, which is designed to help them get their sheriffs to the table. And I bet, it's going in
Hala Taha: Yeah. That's so fascinating and who knows, what's right or wrong in terms of eating meat? How about a meat substitutes? Things like beyond meats are really picking up steam right now. My boyfriend's a vegetarian, so I've learned how to cook everything with beyond meat and it's okay. But sometimes I feel like, what am I even eating?
What's your perspective in terms of a meat substitute?
Eric Edmeades: I think that one of the, again, one of the things you have to ask yourself is why do we need to substitute it? If you don't want to eat meat, don't eat meat, don't eat substitutes. Why would you need to do that? If vegetarianism and veganism was the healthiest path for humans, why would we even have a craving for desire for vegetarian sausage

[00:30:00] or steak meat or, 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 how they process other foods that we're really not supposed to be eating to great dealer. And so I'm not a big fan. Somebody wants to become a vegetarian and incidentally, generally, when somebody calls himself a vegetarian, it means that they're not eating meat and fish, but they are drinking milk, not 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 got to be a vegan. You can't milk has gotta be the, like 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 is going to make the choice to become a vegetarian or especially vegan, they're definitely going to have to give some thought to getting the right amino acids in their life because there's no brand in the world that has them all.
And so they're going to have to really think a lot about how to get that done and get those stuff on. Even the

[00:31:00] vegetarian society of America said, if you choose to become a vegetarian, there are supplements you're going to have to take.
Hala Taha: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Let's stick on dairy for a little bit. A lot of people are lactose intolerant, and similarly with bread and things like that. Gluten intolerant, can you talk about this trend and are we like, let's say for me, I have no trouble, eating milk and things like that, but I don't know if that's necessarily good or bad. Does that mean that I just have a free pass feed us drink as much milk as I want because I don't get sick from it or is it does not work like that?
Eric Edmeades: Okay. Here's my opinion for what it's worth lactose intolerance. But what that basically is the result of is that milk is lactose is the milk sugar. And so people who are lactose intolerant are no longer able to make lactase, which is a digestive enzyme that breaks down lactose. And most mammals stopped producing lactase when they're weaned, we roughly when their teeth are coming in or when they're weaned and they're no longer drinking milk from their mother and they stopped producing lactates, then they

[00:32:00] don't go back to drinking milk.
Obviously they stopped producing lactase cause there was no need. I actually believe that everybody is lactose intolerant. They just have to wait until the lactase cough 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 lactase 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 thousand 7,000 years or something. The issue about whether, lactose intolerance or not indicates where their milk is good for you, that is irrelevant. All that is one, 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, yeah what are you doing? Don't put that in me. I am not a cow. I am not planning to grow a thousand pounds in my first year. I don't have four stomachs, please. Don't put this in your body reacts.
Don't do this. If you are not lactose

[00:33:00] intolerant, it's like they've turned the alarm off and you can just keep putting this stuff in. And then I believe that's going to create consequences. And the consequences are ranged from the immediate, which is the lactose-intolerant 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 your products.
And then the more long-term issues like our nursing school did a study that showed that one glass of milk a day or equivalent in excess to dairy products would result in a 300% increase in the likelihood of developing prostate or ovarian 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. Sometimes we've never done that. It's the newest, it's one of the newest things in our behavior. Our ancestors were not walking up underneath the wilderbeast and trying to smoke it.
Hala Taha: Yeah. So let's

[00:34:00] talk about diets, 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 necessarily?
Eric Edmeades: 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 diet is incredibly good marketing. I'm the market on the business guy.
I know, I understand. It is a lot easier if I come along and say oh if you walked into a bookstore and you saw a thing that said, the highlight 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 dog, a training book on dogs.
And you happen to have, you have a dog?
Hala Taha: Yes.
Eric Edmeades: What kind of dog you have a multi, so you walk into the store and you see this book and it says how to train your dog in 30 days or whatever. But then you walk a little further and you see this thing that says how to train your Maltese.
You're going to buy that. Now, I'll tell you

[00:35:00] something. I know an author that did this. They have all these dogs on how to to train your Husky, how to train your monkeys, how to train, fabulous marketing. 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. There's, that's how I view this question of diet. 90% of it is the same. We are all sapiens. There's not a single vitamin nutrient. There's not a single nutritional constituents that you need that I don't also need that everybody here in salt lake city needs and 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 personalization, but frankly, in my opinion, most of the personalization 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

[00:36:00] 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.
Hala Taha: Yeah, that's awesome. Such great insight there. So from my understanding, not all hunger is created. 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?
Eric Edmeades: 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. 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 decisions.
So when we look at the 600, 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, the here's an example,

[00:37:00] first of all, there's only one true hunger and that's proper nutritional hungry, hunger.
That's where your body says, wow, I'm low on this. I'm low on that. I'm low, on, on fat and low on this, the trouble with that hunger is that it generates a non specific to ready to eat. It doesn't necessarily tell you, go eat the 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 world. Now that Britain has left the EU, they're going to be totally subjected to American food regulation. This is going to be consistent everywhere. And so one of the things that's happening with us here is 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

[00:38:00] actually nutritionally hungry everyday.
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.
Hala Taha: Wow.
Eric Edmeades: One of the reasons we over eat, another form of hunger in the six hungers is thirst, which sounds weird.
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? They drank water when it was available. After the rains, they find puddles in 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 the hydrated, our body sends a signal and that signal is eat because we used to get in 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 eat. And so one of the things that's really important in appetite control is making sure you're well hydrated.
And the

[00:39:00] third one will do. And the rest of 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 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 a transfood.
So they did very many of the things backwards and created food evictions in us that then the food industry played upon. Here's a great example. I saw this great commercial. I didn't know it was a commercial. But it was the most beautiful collection of CCTV footage of random acts of kindness, awesome viral video.
People like this, one 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. Little old lady crossing the street in the middle of a snow storm, somewhere in Ukraine. And two young men come along and they stop the traffic for and take a chance and walked across the street.
And you're watching this video going, oh, I love people. I just love people. People are so amazing. Boom, Coca-Cola

[00:40:00] open happy. And you wonder why I can't stand. I frankly, if I was into banning stuff, it's personal Liberty. So if you want to drink Coke, that's up to you. And if we should talk the hell out of it, but if I was into banning stuff, Coca-Cola would be like top of my list.
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, should you be drinking Coke? That's the fact of 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 need 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 part of that.
Hala Taha: Yeah. So you 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?
Eric Edmeades: It's actually really easy. The woman originally designed the food pyramid,

[00:41:00] designed a very good food pyramid, and then she went away and then she came back. I'm going to have to reread about this. I feel like it was in the forties. But anyway, she she came back and they explained the government, explained to her 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 that dairy infant company, it means the grain growers and the beef growers. So basically they went out and they took her pyramid and turn it upside down. They just, they flipped it.
And she said to them, at that point, if you flip that like that, we didn't 30, 40 years, you're going to have a diabetes. She didn't mark Hyman came up with the term diabetes, but it's diabetes and obesity epidemic, she basically said, you're going to have a diabesity epidemic within 30, 40, 50 years.
And guess what we have. And where I'm at right now is not a mystery what we've seen for most of our history, not industry 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

[00:42:00] profits than they are in the health of the individual people. And I'm already 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 as a consequence, they are manipulating people to eat more than they need 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.
Hala Taha: 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?
Eric Edmeades: I'm a big believer and fan of intermittent fasting as long as it's intermittent. And I don't mean that, 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 hides of Bushman about two weeks ago.

[00:43:00] And I just did my most recent visit with them, quite an adventure. Let me tell you, I had to have an emergency appendectomy in the middle of a trip. It was a scary, but I sat down and did some interviews with the chief and one of them, one of the leading women in the tribemen.
And one of the questions I asked him is do members of the house to try to ever not eat intentionally. Do they ever fast? Do they ever, they don't have the words for fasting, we got the point across and he looked at me like I was insane. What, why would anybody ever intentionally not eat?
Now remember, they land in in, 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, the math side, they have cattle. So they live with hundreds of thousands of calories per acre. And then the farmers have millions and we live with billions of calories per app, because you can sell some food immediately. Not them.
So when I said to them, do you ever like intentionally not eat? Absolutely not ever. But nature imposes, intermittent fasting on them

[00:44:00] regularly. So did I did going for many hours or even many days without food is a, 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 want to do maintenance on the factory, you would close the factory down, stop the machines, go in and do the maintenance. So the digestive system occasionally likes a break. You don't put anything in there for awhile 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 and your stomach is normally besides of your fit. So if you look at that's about how much food you need at any one meal, right? Just to say this, but the trouble is that our stomachs are expandable because it's decent sammond routines in nature.
For example, we killed the wilderbeast. We're going to eat a lot or the fruits on the tree. We're going to eat a lot. And this stomach extends out. Sometimes that even hurts a little bit. We people, oh, man, I ate too much, right? But the trouble is that for most people in Western world, this stomach stays stretched like that.
So it

[00:45:00] 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 don't, they're not tempted to eat as much. So I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting and long-term fasting. I think it's incredibly healthy.
And there's one of the reasons which is fascinating. We know we burn sugar. We know we burn fat, but 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 the burning protein, but our body is so smart. 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 hyena takes out the weakest inselot. When your body burns protein as a fuel source, apparently it burns the oldest weakest and most disease proteins first.
Hala Taha: Wow. Intermittent fasting sounds so healthy and so great for you.
I'm definitely going to give that a shot. Thank you so much for all your insight and all your, knowledge in terms of WildFit and everything that you've learned.

[00:46:00] 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.
Eric Edmeades: Let's talk about learning. I think this is where it really comes in is that the very, very best way for a human to learn anything is to do it. Either you sit them down and make them do it.
And then they develop the neural pathways, what we call muscle memory and they do it. The trouble is though, if you're a young male Bushman, your 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 this big animals. You wouldn't able to do it.
So what are we going to do to make sure that you know how to do it before you have to do it? We can't rely on the best learning methods. So we're going to have to fall on the second best learning method. And the second best learning method is storytelling. And it probably hasn't been for as long as we've had language and we've had fire

[00:47:00] for probably 2 million years.
I'm going to guess there's been some form of storytelling going on around that by her for at least that long. And so when we hear a story what's really fascinating about our nervous system 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 us out. 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 a story, that would make your heart race and your skin flush? So it's story can speak directly to the nervous system. And so as these young kids are sitting around the fire and 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

[00:48:00] hundreds of thousands of years.
And 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, whereas when there's somebody up on the stage, they're telling stories. If they're good at it, if it's good, you're in all the way.
And that's because familiar exterior stories had been the primary communication system or operating system of the brain.
Hala Taha: 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 ability? So I've had so many experiences in my life. I almost had a show on MTV. I've done a million things, but I feel like I'm not that great at telling my own story.
So is there a way to have an arsenal of your own

[00:49:00] stories and be prepared to say them when the time is right?
Eric Edmeades: 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 Patriot journal and you just take notes about it. You don't write the whole story out and I'll come to that in a minute, but you just take down some bullet points.
You go, oh yeah, there was the time that this happened and I was in Paris. And you just write down some bullet points. And I often like to make a note and it's not going to 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 hashtags today. Like what the topics of next story are sales or influence or rapport or mountain climbing or whatever they might be. And what that means now is let's say you asked me, book me to come and speak at some conference. I can take out my story journal and I can just leave through it.
And just the bottom of the page and I can find all, say

[00:50:00] you asked me to speak for 30 minutes on sales. I used to go sales and take all my sales stories. Now, of course, I'm using a very old school methodology or the food is I teach people to do it that way first. And then I show them how to put it in Evernote or OneNote because it's even better.
So having a bank of stories and by the way, do you ever plan to write a book?
Hala Taha: I hope so. And probably in a couple of years.
Eric Edmeades: Imagine how valuable it would be for you.
Hala Taha: Totally, yeah.
Eric Edmeades: It, story journal is the ultimate weapon for a speaker author to really collect their thoughts. Do not trust your memory. You're young enough that you probably still have the arrogance of how mind
memory works all the time, but it's not even that your memory gets worse. It's that you begin to realize there's so much information in there that you can't always recall it when you need it in that moment. And then all the set and you have a story journal and you're like, oh, I remember that story. So that's one very useful tool to have, the reason I think not to write that out is I can always tell the speakers that write their stories out, because it sound like they're remembering the words rather than

[00:51:00] remembering the experience.
So I don't ever recommend writing out your speeches. I don't recommend writing out your talks or your stories. You can bullet point them out. So you just have this, the important issues detailed so you can remind yourself. And then every time you tell the story, you tell it fresh from experience. Not trying to memorize the words.
And by the way, this is just common sense. All these people want to use notes when they walk up on stage. About this, if you are remembering the stories in your posts, I need to tell four stories. There's four things you need to remember. If you're going to try and memorize the words, that's 4,000 things you need to remember.
The other thing you brought up is the actual storytelling and storytelling, I guess there's two sides to it. It's like on one level, some people are nervous of it or they're, they have a little stage frighter or a lot of stage fright about walking up in front of the audience.
And that's one of my favorite things to help people with because it can be done. You can get rid of it in 40 minutes like that it's gone. You never have to feel that way again. I know because I used to be so terrified by the phone speaking that I wouldn't be able to eat for days before I had to do a talk.
It was awful. And today I have zero nerves about

[00:52:00] that at all. And I know how to help people with that. One of the clues that I can offer you about that is that again, coming back to the idea that your unconscious mind can't really tell the difference between fantasy and reality. What happens for a lot of people is they get invited to a talk and they immediately start imagining it going badly.
No wonder you get nervous, right? If you decide to fantasize about it going 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 this, 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'll visiting with the Hadza Bush in weeks. Traveling by four, and I have to leave the Bush to take some of their friends out to the only way of 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 went storytelling. That's setting the scene. That's called the establishment shot, the point where I go, where I want to drop into storytelling as I go. And what's crazy. We got to lake when you're off

[00:53:00] 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 NetSuite 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 a doctor? Why would I bother? But in the morning I had promised, I keep my promise. And I went talked to the doctor and he did a little abdominal examined immediately. You have appendicitis, we got to go get your CT scan.
You have to 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 [00:54:00] 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. You want to trigger a feeling of joy and victory.
Then you need to feel those feelings of joy and victory.
Hala Taha: Totally.
Eric Edmeades: When you're telling us.
Hala Taha: Yeah. Let's talk about how to practice our stories. What's the best way to start practicing to ensure that, we can use the skills that you just talked about?
Eric Edmeades: It's very simple find places to tell your stories, that can be anything from the dining room table with your friends to going out to organizations like Toastmasters that have speaking clubs or a, story slam, 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 postmasters. I think it's a great organization. I'm not a silo of public speaking that I really recommend if somebody wants to become a real influence or real professional speaker, but it's a fabulous place to go and get practice and learn their rules and figure out who you are and to get feedback. Also, like retirement homes and nursing homes and stuff like that.
Like

[00:55:00] you go on a vacation, let's say you go off to Egypt. Contact the local nursing homes game. Guys, I'd love to come and I'd love to just give it you guys. Everybody says, I hope you all do this if you really want to get some practice, because those are those people are sitting there, not a lot of activity, 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.
There's lots of agreements to that.
Hala Taha: Totally. And also social media look at where, what we're doing right now. I can hop on LinkedIn, live and start talking. All right. 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 podcasts interviews, not everybody has a list guests like young and profiting podcasts, 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?
Eric Edmeades: There's a number of different things in preparation. The one thing that I do in that we share with all our clients is developing a list of

[00:56:00] strategic objectives. So most speakers go on stage with one or two main objectives.
Sometimes it's just to survive. Like I just want to be alive at the end of this. And sometimes they go out there and they, they have content they want to share, or they have something they want to sell. It's usually a primary objective. Whenever I am doing something, I have a variety of different objectives.
And there's the primary one. So yes, maybe I'm speaking at a big business conference in Germany. And by my main objective is to stimulate dietary change in those people, my secondary executives to maybe get them to come and do our 90 days program or our 14 day reset program or something to get them started.
But then, our other objectives. For example, here's something that happened to me around podcasting. From long time, I used to get it. I get requests that people go, can you come to my podcasting? And then about three years ago, I just stopped getting requests. It was the weirdest thing. They stopped coming into the website. I just stopped getting you know what it was, but mine valley had warm me up on YouTube and people became afraid to ask. It

[00:57:00] was the awareness thing.
They just, they were like, oh no, he's probably too busy. He would never say yes. And so they wouldn't come up to me at the event and ask and they wouldn't even like, so then I started dropping stories into my talks about, I did this podcast. Interview is one time. Like here's a good example in the middle of the whole, me too thing.
I got this interview request from this woman. And I had done one very short podcast with her a year before. So she wanted to do a proper like I think it's ever a 90 minute follow up and the first one had gone really well. So then I follow the address where I'm speaking in a big event in Sardinia, Italy, and we're at this resort and I follow the instructions to go to the podcast and it's, I realized it's in their suite.
So I was coming alone into her suite news 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. And then what I did is I turned my phone on, record and stuck it beside me so I could record everything it happened in suite. And I don't know why.
I have this story as an example of, Hey, we have to

[00:58:00] think about these things these days, by the way I told the story nature of the audience knew that I'm open to doing podcasts and it's every time I do that, I get all these potheads, same thing will happen now I bet, you'll have, a bunch of your listeners go, Eric's approachable on podcast?
And then they'll talk. So when you're getting ready to do a podcast, or when you're getting ready to do a talk on stage, you should be thinking about all the little strategic deck that you have. Are you looking for a book? Maybe you should mention you're working on a book. I'm interested if you really had, if your access, maybe you should talk about how you've done TV appearances and how well I've gone. So people in the audience, producers, editors, showrunners, knowing that you're good at it. You're open to it.
Hala Taha: 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?
Eric Edmeades: 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 to you or fun. Here's my example for you on this, is that there's all these are there, is there an afterlife? Is there reincarnation?
Do we go to heaven? Do we

[00:59:00] go to hell? What's next after we die? I don't care. I don't care. I dropped parentheses around this experience and I'm here to have as much fun and as much impact that 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 here to do. And I don't care what happens outside the parentheses that are experienced that I'm having now, there may have been a for life. There may be an afterlife. It doesn't seem to matter, what seems the matter is that I wouldn't 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, and you get your three men, right? The way that 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.
Okay. And end the game and start over again. Their suicide rates have gone up

[01:00:00] 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, 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 here. And I want you to have those missions, but I want you to also have fun and enjoy yourself.
Hala Taha: Yeah, that's a great reminder. And I know a lot of my listeners are such hard workers and we're working all the time to improve ourselves, but it's very important as Eric said, is to have fun and enjoy your life.
Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do?
Eric Edmeades: My primary website is www.eric.ee and I'm on Facebook, of course. And I personally manage my own Instagram. So I'm, if you write to me on there, I don't reply. I can't always reply immediately, but it's definitely me. Instagram's the best way to go. And it is my name

[01:01:00] @ericedmeades.
Hala Taha: Amazing. And I'll stick all his links in our show notes. Thank you, Eric. This was such a great conversation.
Eric Edmeades: Hey, thanks very much for having me. It's a real treat to be on a podcast. It's researched and find it engaging. And I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Hala Taha: Of course. Thanks for listening to young and profiting podcast. Follow YAP on instagram @youngandprofiting and check us out at youngandprofiting.com. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to write us a review or comment on your favorite platform. Reviews are the number one way to thank us, especially if you write a review on apple podcasts and be sure to share this podcast with your friends and family on social media, you can find me on Instagram @yapwithhala or LinkedIn, just search for my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks to the YAP team as always, this is Hala signing off.