Eric Edmeades | The Conflict Between the Modern World and Our Ancient Wiring

There are microplastics all over the planet. There are air quality problems in most major cities around the world. There are water quality issues all over the planet. There are, you know, depleting natural resources all over the planet. We have mass extinctions happening on a regular basis, and that's very serious. Now, all of those things are black and white measurable. There's no argument about them. Instead, what we've done is we've picked another topic that there is argument about. We've picked something that's nebulous and incredibly difficult to prove, and we spend all of our time arguing about that one thing. So that we don't have to take any action on it, or so that we can take taxable action on things that don't really have much impact.

What if your own biology is actually working against your goals? In this episode, Eric Edmeades and I explore how our evolutionary instincts, limiting beliefs, and modern comfort zones shape performance, success, and even wealth. We break down practical ways to align your biology with your ambitions so you can step out of your comfort zone, overcome old patterns, and start thriving in a world full of opportunity. My name is Dr. Fleet Maull, your co-host for this session, and I'm really happy to be here today with Eric Edmeades. How are you, Eric?

Fantastic. Glad to be here.

So let's start with your WildFit program. So it's impacted the lives of over 100,000 people globally and counting. I'm sure maybe the number's larger now. And I wonder if you could share some of the core principles behind WildFit and how behavioral change dynamics play a role in helping people overcome limiting beliefs that are related to health and wellbeing. And we'll, we'll go on to talk about that in terms of performance and success as well.

Sure. I think in order to understand why it's been so successful, I think it's important to understand what doesn't work. And in the sort of concept of transformation, there are many different sectors. There's, you know, financial stuff, relationship stuff, business stuff. One of the most difficult places to facilitate transformation is in people's food relationships. Just about every person on the planet has attempted to change their food relationship at some time or another and failed to do so. And so we know what doesn't work. We know it doesn't work to focus on getting rid of your favorite foods. It doesn't work to starve yourself. It doesn't work to try to outrun your calories. And it doesn't work to white-knuckle your way through any kind of a program on a willpower basis. So what we did is we developed a program that was built as basically the opposite of that. It's based on what you're supposed to be adding into your relationship with food. It's based on incremental changes. It's based on self-esteem reconstruction. And as a result of that, we have an unbelievably high stick rate. We have about an 85% completion rate on a 3-month training program, which is fairly unheard of in the world of digital training. And that's really the first key. The first key to getting somebody to transform is to actually get them to finish the program.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, this is important 'cause our health and wellbeing is foundational, everything. And I agree with you, it's really the food thing is so primal, right? And you know, I think we understand from current neuroscience and even, you know, kind of deeper looks into cellular biology and mitochondrial health that our, until we build up neural architecture to kind of buffer us from the more primitive aspects of our system, our system's operating as if we're about to starve to death at all times.

Yeah.

And then of course there's all the addictions that happen with sugar and sugar products and the, the biome and bacteria. But it is a very primal thing and difficult to work with. And so your WildFit program focuses mostly on shifting people's relationship to food, or as they have other aspects of health and wellbeing as well.

I'll back up a little minute and I'll put it in a sense this way. It's not simply that we are, our instincts are kind of living on the edge of starvation. It's that our biological evolution took place in a environmental set of environmental conditions that are very different from the way we live today. One way to look at this is that if we take wild animals and put them in zoos, one might suppose that with the additional medical support and the, 'cause they have veterinarian coverage and they have like consistent food supply, they don't have to compete, they're not being hunted by predators. It would be fairly safe to assume that animals could live longer in a zoo than they do in the wild. But That doesn't play out. Elephants, elephants live much shorter in a zoo than they do in the Kruger National Park where they're fighting with lions, other elephants, and poachers. Yet they live longer. And I would put to you that we kind of have the same problem, is that we have been removed from our natural habitat and we now live in a zoo. And that zoo is controlled by 7 big food manufacturers and a bunch of big pharma manufacturers and what have you. And our outdated instincts, our outdated cravings, our outdated biological directives are struggling with that mismatch. And so a big part of what WildFit is about is helping people close that gap to understand that mismatch and bring their consciousness to bear. So that, for example, sugar, the craving for sugar is not a flaw. It's not a defect of the human condition. It's a perfect design for an animal that needed to survive the coming winter. We needed to fatten up. We needed to develop a relationship with carbohydrate foods wherein our cravings would step up. Our metabolism would slow down and our energy would start getting stored as fat. That was very important to our survival. Only now there's no shortage of carbohydrates. There's no seasonal fluctuation. They're readily available on a constant basis, and most of them are of a terrible quality. And so what we now need to do is figure out how to bring consciousness to the conversation so that we can override our natural instincts and defend ourselves from the predatory practices of food manufacturers that are trying to take advantage of those things.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's the point I was making is that, you know, evolutionarily we're set up to have a certain relationship with food that no longer works in the current environment.

And that's right.

And you're right. The food industry definitely manipulates that. So it's great to have that foundational program for health and wellbeing, and I've gotten very interested in it myself, so I'm gonna check it out myself. I love the name as well. But today we're focused on performance and success, and this is a big area for you. So your upcoming book, The Evolution Gap, is it out yet or is it still upcoming?

It is in pre-release Kindle on Amazon for testing certain things. It's not officially there, but people can go get it and it will go through a proper launch later this year. So there is a version of it sitting on, and I'll tell you, there's two reasons it's there. One is I wanted to do some content testing and the other one is we saw a press release. I've been using that name for lectures and stuff for years, and you probably are aware you can't, you, there's no trademark protection on book titles. We saw a press release that some social scientist from Oxford or somewhere was planning on releasing a book called The Evolution Gap. And I was like, holy, I own the dot com. I've been doing lectures for years. I'd better get the book out a little more quickly. So we released a version of it, which is much longer. What will get published will be much abridged from that. It'll be more condensed and I'm probably a little more concise and maybe a little easier to read, but there is a compelling copy of it out there now.

Oh, so if people want the unabridged version, they can get the Kindle copy now.

Yeah.

So that's your upcoming book, The Evolution Gap. And in there you explore the disconnect between our evolutionary biology and modern civilization, which we've kind of been talking about already.

Yeah.

And I wonder how this influences our beliefs around performance and success, and what are some of the strategies you'd use to help people align their basic biology with, you know, with the beliefs that will drive performance and success in whatever area of our life is important for us? Because if we don't align ourselves with our basic biology, we're really fighting a big battle all the time, right?

Yeah, you're totally nailing it. So, you know, we humans are generally lazy. I say that a little bit tongue in cheek, but the fact is we've spent the last several thousand years trying to develop technologies to make life easier and safer and less effort. You know, the bow and arrow instead of the spear, the wheel, the fire, and then cars and pretty soon rocket ships and stuff. So we've been constantly trying to make life simpler and easier, and that mentality is actually part of the problem. You know, these days when you talk to people about increasing their performance or their longevity, they immediately looking, they immediately start looking at technology and, you know, the, at shortcuts, the supplements they should be taking, the red light therapy they should be undertaking, the biohacking that they should be doing. But there's a neat way to look at this, and that is that if you look at the, the 100, say, meter dash at the international level, and you look at the improvements that we've made on the timing, of that, you know, on the world record of that. You know, when you consider all the advancements in running shoes, you think about what running shoes look like today compared to 20 years ago, and then compared to 100 years ago, and the nutritional information that we have, and just the variety of technology that we've developed to make it so that we can run even faster. And with all of that, we've shaved about 1 second off the time in 100 years. And so what I would suggest is that the core of what we should be looking at when we're talking about increased performance is not shortcuts, biohacks, hacks of any kind. It's basic biology. And at the end of the day, your body has a series of, you know, arguably about 10 physical needs. And if you satisfy those needs in a functional way, you will get better performance. If you don't satisfy those needs in a functional way, you'll either have a system breakdown or you'll develop cravings to satisfy those needs in dysfunctional ways, which will have their own set of consequences. And where that kind of becomes even more complicated is that many people begin to realize that they're not satisfying one of those needs. And rather than attempting to satisfy in a way that's compatible with our evolution, they try to find a technological solution. A good example would be somebody finding out that they're low on vitamin D, and so they start taking a vitamin D supplement instead of getting a convertible. And I would argue that getting additional sunlight might have been a better way to deal with that problem than taking some pill from a lab.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a very different perspective and one that ultimately maybe is more accessible. So could you describe these sort of basic biological needs we need to support optimal performance and success?

Yeah, sure. I mean, in order of, let's say, urgency, right? You know, cuz they're all important, right? So in order of urgency, we might start with air and that might seem like a redundant thing to say because most people don't forget to breathe, right? Like, see, well, they're breathing so they don't, but it's not just a matter of breathing, it's a matter of quality and then a matter of methodology. And so if we consider quality, I live in the Dominican Republic. I live on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. And so the wind that blows here, the last time it passed over land was Africa 3 weeks ago, which means that it has spent the last 3 weeks being buffeted and rained on and cleansed before it arrived at my house. I am breathing what is probably among the cleanest air on the planet, and I choose that with intent. But then there's also the methodology. Now, most people, you know, there's all these fads about, you know, breathwork these days. You gotta get your breathwork. And there are other people like, I've seen people go, well, what do you need breathwork? I've been breathing since I was born. Why do I need breathwork? Well, if you look at the average life of, say, your ancestors and 99% of them up until the present day, their normal day would involve a variety of different styles of breathing. There would be calm, quiet breathing when they first woke up in the morning. Then there's sprint breathing because they ran out of camp. Then there's long-distance enduro breathing because they're out on a, say, on an attrition hunt, or they're out hunting or they're gathering. And then there might be, you know, panic breathing or fear breathing at some point. They, in any given day, they would've used all these different breathing modalities and those breathing modalities would've resulted in different things happening in the body. What happens for most people today is they spend most of the time sitting on their butts in their car, in their office, on their couch, not moving, crunching their lungs up and not breathing deeply. And so as a consequence, they are, you know, creating a variety of problems, including being slightly oxygen-starved and also raising their cortisol levels. Because when you breathe really quietly, you're breathing like a prey animal who's afraid of being hunted. So your body feels a bit nervous about the whole thing. And so that first need is a matter of making sure that one gets the right quality, but also that one has the right methodology. And if they're, if your physical lifestyle doesn't demand a variety of breathing methods, then you need to use consciousness to do breathing exercises to make that happen. Another example on urgency would be water. I mean, you can live with minutes, only minutes without air, but you know, you can go a day or two without water. In urgency, water's next. And again, most people drink, but what they drink is deplorable. I mean, they drink soft drinks thinking they're hydrating when they're doing the exact opposite. They drink coffee thinking there's water in it. Well, okay, technically there's water in it, but it's diuretic, so you're passing that water out. It's not to say you can't drink those things, but it's to say that we really do need to be properly hydrated. I have this sort of tongue-in-cheek expression that if we are 70 or 80% water, and you're dehydrated, then what that means is you're operating on less of you. And so one of the principles that I would offer to people is don't drink to address your thirst, drink to prevent it. Good timing.

Yes. And there's guidelines per body weight, drink so many ounces of water, and most people don't drink enough water. I work really hard at making sure I do, but yeah, I think most people don't.

Yeah. And I, I mean, I can keep going. I wanna leave some space there, but you know, sunlight is clearly an important physical need of the body. And what's really tragic about this is that, you know, you have a bunch of people that are phobic about the sun. Apparently in roughly the '60s, the sun became very dangerous and we had to start protecting ourselves and we had to start covering our skin with clothes and weird creams and stuff to protect us from this evil sun. And I won't dispute the fact that the sun is capable of burning you and that if you're living in a place that has more, you know, more strength than you genetically evolved to be defended against, you need to be careful of it. But I want to put something else on the table here. If the sun suddenly became dangerous in 1962, according to the big marketing campaigns for sunblock and what have you, then why elephants not sprouting cancer all over the place? And hippos and rhinos? And what about the leaves that are under the exact same sun the entire day? Why are they not getting sick? How did the sun get dangerous only for people? And what I would argue is that it wasn't ever about the sun. It was, or it was only ever tangentially about the sun. Look, if you're genetically from Norway and you move to Nigeria, you better be a bit careful about the sun. And if you're from Nigeria and you move to Norway, you better do everything you can to get enough sun. It's not that the sun is dangerous, it's that we have to have a good and conscious relationship with the sun. But then I think it is a lot more about, for example, the incredible increase in garbage oils, seed oils, vegetable oils, highly processed foods. And now, let me put it this way, if we started feeding elephants all that stuff, I think they'd be getting skin cancer too.

So we don't necessarily need to go through all these, but I assume you would be talking about nutrition, about sufficient exercise and things like these. Things that are gonna make us basically support having a healthy organism, which is gonna support performance and success. And today's focus is performance and success. We have a day focused on longevity and healthy aging and so forth. We have a day focused on wealth and financial freedom. So this idea of beliefs, and when we talk about beliefs, then naturally we're gonna talk about limiting beliefs and the common limiting beliefs that very often we've inherited from our family, from our culture that get reinforced by this consumerist society. A lot of 'em had to do with either I'm not enough or there's not enough to go around and all the various extrapolations of all that. So I wonder if you could talk about that and kind of the world we're in today with all this rapid technological advancement and where people are with the kind of human condition that we all have to work our way through and whatever limiting core beliefs they've inherited and what we're up against today in terms of being able to optimize our performance and success. Even I've found that even having a conversation about performance and success people have a, they don't even want to go there. There's a lot of people that, you know, that just sets them up for feeling like self-shaming and evaluation and comparison, and they just don't want to deal with that. And so we end up kind of withdrawing and living basically limited lives where we're in some kind of comfort zone. But for me, that's kind of sad because I think we're all designed to thrive and we all have tremendous possibilities. So how do you work with that and this notion of limiting beliefs and Yeah. What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently but feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This heart-mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience, and expanded awareness. That's why I created the HeartMind All Access Membership and Community, a space designed to help to rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1,000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs, you'll learn from world-renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists, and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions, and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart-centered, connected, and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and start your journey today.

It's a fascinating conversation, particularly in light of the contrast between a sort of more ancestral lifestyle and the way we live today. I'm gonna say this, that the idea of competition is quite interesting. And so the minute you start talking to people about peak performance, there are some people that will recoil and pull back from that. It feels very competitive and there's very high pressure. I was married years ago and to my first wife, and after we divorced, we were having a conversation about this and she says, well, I think you're teaching our son too much about competition. And I said, I'm not really, but I mean, what do you mean? And she goes, well, competition's bad. And I said, it's bad? And she goes, yes, it's bad. And I said, okay. I said, if I remember correctly, you're currently studying a fine arts degree. You're trying to get a, a fine arts degree. She goes, yes. And I said, and what do you plan to do with that? And she goes, well, I'm gonna get involved in maybe interior design or something like that. And I said, when you graduate and you start your business, will you start a website? She goes, well, yeah, of course I will. And I said, will you use the advanced education you've had to make sure that your website is more attractive than say other websites? And she goes, okay, fine. Some competition is reasonable, you know? But the fact is that competition has kind of become out of vogue, but in reality, it's an incredibly important part of the human condition. And what I would say is that one of the reasons that we have limiting beliefs today is that we can. And what I mean by that is that the Hadzabi people don't have limiting beliefs that I've ever bumped into because there's no space for that. They don't raise their children in an environment of entitlement, like we are currently living what Elon Musk might call with this like woke mind virus that's going on. Well, I would say that to a degree, at the heart of that woke mind virus is this sense of entitlement, this sense of I just get a trophy because I showed up for this thing. I'm entitled to everything. And a Hadzabe child is not brought up that way. You know, I asked the chief once, I said, do you guys have depression? He didn't have a word for that. The translator couldn't give him a word for that. So, so I said, okay, do you have long-term sadness? Oh yes, yes, we know about long-term sadness. And I said, well, tell me about long-term sadness. He goes, well, sometimes, sometimes people can be sad for even 2 or 3 days. I thought that, that's long-term sadness. And he goes, yeah. And I go, well, why? How do they snap out of it? You know, how do they snap out of it? And he goes, well, after 3 days of sadness, you start getting hungry.

Right?

Like, 'cause you're not a very good hunter when you're sad. And so guess what? Hunger drives you to get up and move your body, which as we know, has a huge impact on our state of mind and moves the, You know, beautiful chemicals around our body and all of a sudden we're not sad anymore. And that may sound like an oversimplification, but it also describes the first 5 billion years of human existence to some degree. So I think one of the big things that we want to consider about limiting beliefs is where they come from. And I'm going to tell you, one day I'm sitting with the Hadzabe people and I see a small child of maybe 2 years, maybe 18 months walking toward the fire. And I'm thinking that's a bad idea. As somebody who's burnt myself a number of times quite badly, once requiring skin grafts and 6 weeks in the hospital, I was like, not. Keen for this child to burn themselves on the fire. And I felt myself getting very stressed and anxious as the child's moving toward the fire. I turned to the guide. I go, Gasper, you got to stop that kid. And he goes, that's not how it works around here. I go, what do you mean? And they go, well, you know, the kid, the kid lives with the fire. He's going to have to learn how fire works. What? You'd let him burn himself? Yeah. And the kid walked right up to the fire and leaned down and it took a stick. This is a 2-year-old kid and started poking around the fire. The kid did not burn themselves at all. And later on I go, well, he didn't burn himself. He just walked away. And he goes, yeah, but go look at his hand. Guess what? There's little scars from when he did. And so we, now that sounds like a very cruel model of parenting in our world, right? A very cruel model of parenting. But there is a truth in there. And I think the truth in there is that we now are protecting our children so strongly. I think you've got a few years on me, but I think you remember sticks and stones may break my bones, but words would never hurt me. Now words hurt us. Words are violent. You know, I'm easily offended. Don't offend me. Don't push my buttons. My buttons. And that is all part of this. It interferes with performance. It interferes with performance mentality. It rewards people for a victim-type mentality, which supports those limiting beliefs. So I think it's interesting to look at it first from the perspective of how that stuff comes up. And I think it largely comes up by overprotecting people. If we don't let our kids run and jump and experiment and play, and we don't let them skin their knee, and we don't let them try and fail, then we're gonna raise some pretty entitled, delicate children. And I think that's a lot of what we're dealing with now.

Yeah, I think that's a major cultural trend. And as you said, that sense of entitlement then combines with the victim mindset and it's very disempowering. And you know, of course we all want to, I think, have compassion and want to try to create as even of a playing field as we can in life and support people. But I had a, one of my first spiritual teachers had an expression called idiot compassion. It was compassion without wisdom, right? And you know, that mindset is actually disempowering to people. It's, it's irritating to people, you know? Yeah. So I think it's a major cultural trend that hopefully can turn around. My book, Radical Responsibility, is all about how to take a different view, the power of choice and the power of taking ownership for our own circumstances.

I had an interesting conversation just a few days ago about feminism, chauvinism, and, you know, masculine, feminine, all this kind of stuff. I feel like I grew up at a time where I missed the '60s, so I never saw, well, I saw the movies, but by the time I saw the misogynistic James Bond movies, they were already a little rough. Like if you look at the way Sean Connery treated women, you're already looking at, hey dude, that's a bit much. But we watched over the years where we went from that in the '60s to a James Bond in the '80s that you couldn't even respect as a human being, like just no personality. And so men have been kind of asked to walk this careful line of, yeah, I think of it as this very thin border between chivalry on one side and chauvinism on the other. And the damn border switches decade by decade. So we were talking about this and I said, well, you know, hang on a second now. Should I or should I not help a woman lift her bag up into the overhead bin on the plane? Like, should I do it or not? Now I can already tell you if you're in Norway and you do it, you're asking for some trouble because the Norwegian women are like, yeah, I don't need your help. Like they're very, there's a very egalitarian thing going on there, but I still prefer the chivalrous version of look, if she looks like she's not as tall as me and she looks smaller than me and she's lifting a heavy bag. I'd like at least to offer, right? I'd like at least to offer. But here's a twist though. If I lift it for her and she could have lifted it, then I just prevented her from getting stronger. And so I don't know the answer. I don't know. I don't know the answer. I want to do it. And I think about that a lot with our kids. Like, at what point am I, do I want to help them? Do I want to assist them? Do I want to make it easier? I think about the stuff that I went through as a child, and I can tell you right now, I would fight with violence to protect my children from some of the things that I was subjected to as a child with violence. And yet I'm grateful for them because I'm living the life I am today because I faced those adversities. There's a dichotomy.

Yeah, there certainly is. And I think, you know, we're living in a more and more competitive world with current technology. Like it's more and more important to really educate yourself and really train yourself and really embrace whatever opportunities you can create for yourself. Or economically, we're gonna be left behind. Training people to have a sense of entitlement and a victim mindset and like somehow somebody's gonna provide 'em with all this, it's always been doing people a disservice. But I think it's even more so today because I think the bar is being raised for taking ownership for our circumstance. I mean, the possibilities are, in my view, the possibilities for performance and success and entrepreneurship and career success. They've never been more open, more broad, and now we're dispersed and more democratic, but you still gotta step up and do it. And if you don't, yeah, there's gonna be this huge gap between the worlds of the technologically educated and those who are not.

Yeah, I completely agree. We are simultaneously living with more, more equal opportunity than we've ever had and also more disparity than we've ever seen. And it's tough to try to sort of figure out what's causing that one way or the other at times. But I do believe that the self-direction piece is a big part of it. Just the other day I was reading a story about a kid. I don't remember in what country, but somewhere in Central East Africa, Central East Africa, somewhere in that region. The story basically was that, you know, these kids are all going to school, but they don't have power in their homes, so they can't do their homework. So what was happening is many of the kids were going to the local football fields where there were floodlights up for the football games and they could do their homework there. And then he figured out a way of creating these solar lights that they could put in the villages where the kids would be able to study. And it's like, wow, that's phenomenal. Like, that's like saying, okay, I know that I was born into adversity. I know that I'm in a challenging situation, but I'm not going to sit back and complain about it. I'm going to do something about it. And I find that amazing. You know, there's a lot of discussion in America and I'm Canadian, so I'm not going to, I don't have an opinion on the, on elections and such, or more to the point, if I did, it wouldn't matter, but What I have noticed though, is that what we seem to be wanting to do at the moment is it's like we seem to be wanting to divide people up and we want to be able to, we want to like, you know, create a group of people that feel very entitled and then we want to promise them that we're going to take care of everything for them. And then we have another group of people that are saying nobody should get anything. Everybody should be completely self-directed. And I'm like, I don't know where that balance is, but I do feel like if people are completely struggling and suffering, then it's hard for them to break out of that. But at the same point in time, if you hand them everything, they never will.

Yeah, I think that's one of the big— it's been a longstanding issue in here. And I'm an American, and I think it's been a long— it's gotten worse and worse and worse. And the left-right divide, you know, on the right, especially the further you go to the right, everybody's on their own, you know, you don't get nothing, right? And on the left, you know, on the right, it's like they don't want to hear anything about causes and conditions, right? It's all about choice. And then On the left, they don't want to hear anything about choice. They find that an offensive word. It's all about causes and conditions. Obviously it's both. Obviously we want to, as a society, try to create the best causes and conditions we can for everyone, knowing that it's never going to be perfect, but at least it's a level of opportunity to get it more and more equalized. And then at the same time, it comes down to choice. In the end, for every individual, it comes down to choice. So clearly it's a blend of the both, but it's gotten so divided that you can't even have conversations anymore. It's only in the podcast world that I like to go where you can have people kind of center-right, center-left people having really intelligent conversations about what we're talking about. But when you get into the mainstream anymore, it's just like they, you know, they can't even talk to each other. It's gotten so extreme. Let's talk about in the world, you're a business mentor, advisor, consultant, trainer. In the world of coaching business professionals and entrepreneurs, what do you find are some of the limiting beliefs that most get in their way and how do you help them transform those?

You touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think one of the biggest ones is I'm just, I'm not good enough. I'm not enough. People don't understand the depth of their own magnificence very often. And I'm always sort of bemused by that. I've been very fortunate in my life. I've owned companies in a variety of industries, in a variety of different countries. I've lived in 7 countries now. I've traveled to 75. But if you knew me at 15 years old, you would not have, that was not the trajectory you would've predicted for me. At 15 years old, I was quite literally homeless for a time. I, I was at, I mean, the idea that I would even finish school was in question, never mind go on to do great things. And I've been very lucky to do that. If I look now and I, and if I were to go back and have a conversation with myself at 20, the 20-year-old me would be blown away by my life, like blown away. There's no way I owned a movie studio that used to belong to Industrial Light and Magic. I worked on Avatar, Pirates of The Caribbean, I sat on one of our main stages with an entire World War II POW camp constructed millimeter by millimeter for accuracy. And I'm sitting in a director's chair and we're shooting scenes in there and I have George Lucas sitting beside me. If I went back and explained that to the 10-year-old version of me, there's no chance that kid believes that. The fact though is, and I'm using some extreme examples here, every one of us have things like that. Like there are things that we've achieved now that a younger version of us thought to be impossible. but somewhere along the line, our version of impossible became actually impossible. And I, I think that's one of the biggest things is that I see people really, you know, overestimating. I think Tony Robbins says it really nicely. He says they overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can achieve in a lifetime. That's, I think that's one of the biggest areas of limiting belief that really holds people back.

So, you know, you referenced that the 10-year-old Eric, or even the 20-year-old Eric, wouldn't believe what has unfolded for you in your life. As we begin to experience some success, a lot of people suffer from what's known as imposter syndrome. And I've had my challenges with that over time. I managed to get beyond most of it, I think, but it comes up every now and then when I step up to the next level and I find myself with peers that I once thought were way up there somewhere, and here I am, you know, like, what am I doing here? You know, it comes up, that imposter syndrome. I wonder if you could talk about that.

I think that we have to recognize that imposter syndrome is, it's like many things. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a matter of how it applies. Imposter syndrome is really designed to prevent you from being a charlatan. It's to prevent you from overstating your capacities for— it's a form of shame. It's designed to protect you and society from your potential dishonesty. Like, you know, it's designed to, to stop somebody from overstating their ability to get things done. The challenge is that most people don't even get to that level that where the imposter syndrome would be protecting them. They allow it to trigger for them way lower down. And as a result, this thing that's actually designed to protect them from overstepping their capacity is preventing them from achieving their capacity, achieving their potential. So I'll give you a very good example from my own life is that when I first started WildFit, I started it because I had spent some 20 years researching nutritional anthropology, behavioral psychology, and I had stumbled upon some functional ideas about nutrition and food, and they worked. I launched the company initially just with 8 clients and it worked for them, and then it worked for the next 8, and then they started telling their friends and the whole thing just grew organically. Like it was the easiest thing I'd ever done. And then one day I'm at a mastermind event with a bunch of my friends and there's a woman there and she's like a, you know, I don't know, she calls herself a psychic business consultant or something and it's not really my thing, you know, but she starts asking me about the company and where I see it going and I go, I don't know, you know, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a certified nutritionist. All my limiting, and these are facts. It doesn't mean they're not limiting beliefs. They're facts as well though. The limiting belief is that they matter, that me not having those things mattered in some way. And she looked at me and she goes, I've spoken to many of your clients and you're talking about, you know, diabetes reversals, cancer remissions, weight loss that could never be lost, menopause symptoms, fertility created where there was none, sex drive returned. You're getting results. That are off the charts. It doesn't matter that you're not a doctor. Your results is what speaks. She goes, in fact, I can already see it now. Doctors will come to you for training. And at this point, I knew she's a nut bar. I mean, she's, doctors are going to come to me for training. She's insane. Of course, here we are now, you know, 5, 6 years after that conversation. And many doctors come to us for training. My book, Post-Diabetic, that came out last year was co-written by a doctor who I helped him reverse his diabetes when medical school didn't do that for him. The foreword of that book was written by Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the most recognized doctors on the planet. The woman was absolutely right. What I suggest to people about imposter syndrome is recognizing that it's not an on-off issue. It's a matter of gradient. And what I think most people are doing is allowing it to kick in too early. You shouldn't try to turn it off all the way because you do want it to, you don't want to make claims that are unsubstantiated or make claims that you can't live up to. but most people are preventing it from even putting themselves out there. And I'll just finish on this idea that most countries have a, some form of social breaking, you know, some form of socially holding back their populations. In Scandinavia, they call it Jantelag. You shall not think you're special. You should not seek to teach others. They have this whole thing. And in, in Australia and New Zealand, they call it tall poppy syndrome. The idea being is, you know, as a poppy farmer, you want if you see one poppy that grows a little too tall, that's not gonna fit in the harvester. So you wanna cut that off so it doesn't breed. Well, they have the same idea. If you are too full of yourself, you're too bragging, then they gotta cut you down to size, right? Tall poppy syndrome. In Britain, they, there's no real name for it, but in Britain what happens is you start talking about some great, you know, your book's suddenly a bestseller and what have you, and the minute you turn your back, somebody's gonna go, oh, it's all right for some people, isn't it? You know, there's this judgment. And I think many of us are trying to protect ourselves from that. And that's why we have the fake version of imposter syndrome. We gotta shut that down, but not turn it off, 'cause it is there to protect us.

Yeah, I think that, uh, a lot of people that talk about, you know, really if we're interested in really optimizing our talents and optimizing really our contribution to life, that's what success really is, ends up being, is our contribution to life. We have to get to a point where we're a little bit thicker skinned around all that kind of stuff. Like if we're constantly thinking about what other people think about us and what other people say about us, it's gonna be very limiting. So, you know, this idea of performance and success, as we've discussed, immediately brings up like your ex-wife, as you mentioned, it was like competition's just bad. It's just categorically bad. And you know, this whole idea of, you know, performance, it brings up a lot of stuff for people in our current culture. There's a lot of people that have been enculturated to think performance and success are somehow bad. Anybody that does succeed is egotistical or somehow bad, or they're stepping on other people, all these kinds of things. So there's all these mindsets. That need to be worked with. And then this is also tied into our mindsets around our own income and our own level of financial security or financial freedom or wealth, which we can have a lot of limiting mindsets around. And so all these things are really just energy and possibility and, you know, but we build all these other things into it. So I wonder if you could talk about maybe what you see are some important mindsets, shifts, mindset shifts people need to make so that they, we can get into a place where we are able to take whatever talents we have and life experience and take that into the world and really make a valuable contribution with it and therefore begin to experience some success and probably begin to experience some financial reward and wealth creation and so forth. What are some of the basic mind shifts we need to make if that's not happening for us? If we find ourselves boxed in, even if we wanna do that, sometimes we find ourselves just hitting a wall or, It's two steps forward, one step back, or worse, one step forward, two steps back. So what are the kind of mind shifts that we need to embrace or try to cultivate?

So, you know, there are a lot of people who have spoken about the limiting beliefs and how they affect our relationship with money. Harv Eker has done some phenomenal work in that area. And I've spoken to a lot of people about that stuff over the years. And very often they're like, oh, I don't really see how these beliefs are affecting me. I mean, I go and I do my job and I get my salary and I get my pay rise and I invest in, you know, and so on. I mean, what I believe one way or the other about money isn't going to have that big an impact. And I would argue very strongly against that. I would say in one example, if you have a fundamental belief that rich people are bad, evil people, which is a very popular narrative, then on some level, your subconscious mind is going to want to prevent you from becoming one of those people. Here's a funny little thing for you is that if we look at all the superheroes in the world, you know, all the superheroes that have been created, DC, Marvel, and the rest. Here's something you might not have noticed before, but all of them are orphans.

All of them.

It's just the deal. The deal is if you want to be a superhero, you got to lose your parents. And that's just the way it is. And then, but then there's another trend. And the other trend is that with 3 exceptions, none of them have money. Even Superman, who can create diamonds from coal, lives a moderate life as a reporter living in his little apartment. He doesn't have any money. Why? But the 3 that do have money, they're very telling. They have money, but they're also not particularly good guys. I mean, Batman is this vigilante dark soul at odds with the police. You got Iron Man who's a misogynistic drug abuser. You got Green Arrow who's even worse. They're the only 3 that have money. But you know what else is interesting about them? They don't have any superpowers. They're the only superheroes that don't have superpowers because rich people buy their privileges. Like the hatred or disrespect or distrust of rich people has been baked into our literature, baked into our entertainment, and baked into our society. And that's a problem because as you grow up and you start trying to find your own way financially, those subconscious beliefs are going to have an impact. If you have a belief that rich people are bad and evil, you don't want to be bad and evil. Therefore, something might get in the way. But I can give a more tangible example of that I bumped into recently, and it's very important. The more wealth somebody develops, the more money and power they attract, the more opportunities they attract. Clearly. And that's an interesting thing because what happens is that the average person might have 2 or 3 or 4 amazing opportunities in their year, and they either say yes or no to those things and move on. But the more money you have, the more power you have, the more of those opportunities find their way to you. So let's use Richard Branson as an example. I'm a big fan. I was just with him a couple of weeks ago, and I'll share a little bit about that in a second. But if you think about Richard Branson, on any given day, Who can he not have lunch with? I mean, if you want to have lunch with Chris Martin or Mick Jagger or a president or a prime minister or any CEO, I mean, what concert could he not go to? What event could he not have immediate tickets to? There's literally, on any given day, he has to say no to 9,000 amazing opportunities that most of us would feel heartbroken if we simply had to choose between two of them. You know, the average person has this ridiculous situation where, you know, they get invited to two great events. This happened to me many years ago. Funny enough, speaking about Richard, I was invited to go to his private reserve just outside the Kruger National Park in South Africa, which is my spiritual home, the Kruger Park. But I also was invited to speak at this incredible event that I'd wanted to speak at for years, and they're on the same weekend. So the way most people will deal with that is that they will do one with their heart in the other. They will do one and lament with sadness where they're not. And in other words, they don't get to do either of them. What I would suggest is one of the most powerful things that we want to do is we want to figure out how to just simply be present in the one that we're present at with. And so funny enough, I was actually with Richard a couple of weeks ago on Necker and we were having a big conversation. I asked him outright, I said, Richard, I use you as an example all the time for this concept of How dangerous the fear of missing out can be. I think the fear of missing out can be one of the greatest psychological and subconscious blocks to wealth that exists on the planet today. And you must be really good at that because on any given day you could be with anyone doing anything. I said, for example, you're here with us right now, but you could be anywhere else. He goes, I said, how do you deal with that? And he says, oh, it's really simple. You just be where you are with the full gratitude of where you are and you let go of what you didn't do. That sounds really simple, but the average person can't master that. The average person gets invited to two parties. They go to the one party and they lament the one they're not at. And if we can change just that one shift in our mindset, I think it opens all kinds of massive doors for upgrade of attraction of wealth and power and so on.

Yeah, that's fascinating and a fascinating example. So these challenges, I mean, with performance and success and if that's associated with wealth creation, it raises the bar for many aspects of our life. There's challenges. It's like living in the challenge. One of my first teachers talked about living in the challenge. We gotta step up and step up to the challenge. And for many of us, you said you were kind of naturally lazy. I don't, I think I agree with, not in a pejorative sense, but you know, even our brain is constantly economizing what it does with its energy, right? And so we're set up to economize and to biologically remain comfortable. So I think for a lot of us, the, we may have a lot of limiting core beliefs, but one of our real limitations is kind of an addiction to comfort. And that sort of, we think, as long as I'm comfortable, I'm gonna be okay. Right? When we step out, we're stepping out of our comfort zone. And so unless we learn to thrive on that, you know, being outside our comfort zone, it's gonna be kind of hard to really, really progress.

I make this very important point right in line with what you're saying, and that is that we are today without question, living in the time of the greatest safety and ease, security and comfort that we have ever lived in. I realize that CNN and Fox and the news networks want to tell us all the time how scary it is, but on every level except perhaps our, you know, our environment, we can talk about that as a separate issue. But on the personal level, we live with greater financial security, greater food security, greater home security. Life for children is literally twice as safe from crime today as it was in the '70s. In the '70s, we were allowed to run around and play and do what we want. Now we wrap our kids up in bubble wrap, and yet the streets are twice as safe as they ever were. Females now are almost completely at parity with primary education and are getting better education at secondary level than men in many cases. Like, we are living in a time of the best times in the history of Earth to be alive, and yet there's more addiction, more psychotropic drug prescription, more anxiety, more alcoholism, and more suicide than ever before. And those numbers are growing.

Why?

How is it possible that in the easiest, best times ever, more people are depressed and opting out than ever before? And that's because, just to your point, comfortable isn't better.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you could say something about the role of identity in all this. So you take all of our beliefs, limiting or otherwise, even our positive, whatever sets of beliefs and mindsets we have, you wrap all this together, it can be kind of our identity. And for me, one of And you know, we start off as these little creatures that have to develop some kind of individual self to navigate the world. And the alternative to that is just complete impermanence, fluidity, groundlessness, which actually is the nature of life, tremendous uncertainty. But we develop that. And as adults, we arrive in adulthood with whatever level of functional self we have, depending on how loving and stable our upbringing was or lack thereof. And, but that identity can also become a big liability because If I change dramatically, well then who am I? It can be very unsettling. And I can even have, I can know that I do a lot of things that are not in my own interest, but I've just always been that way. And the world has kind of always been that way. And I think a lot of us just don't think the world's going to change or that we can change. And we have a, we build an identity around that, that we actually would defend to the death in some cases, rather than step into the possibilities of it changing. So I wonder if you could talk about the role of identity and what we're talking about?

It's a very important conversation. In a sense, you know, humans are these pattern spotters. Like we, from the very earliest times, we were trying to spot patterns. Like, oh, look, you and I were eating over there last season and we dropped a bunch of seeds and now there's plants growing there. You don't think we could do that? Like, and then of course agriculture gets born. We spotted a pattern. We created a belief or let's say initially a theory. The theory is if we put the seeds there, maybe we can grow plants. Once it worked, we then had a belief. Now we have a belief that we can grow things, but then soon what happens is that we transcend the belief and we move to identity. We become farmers. You know, you have to ask yourself the question, is that a good or a bad thing? And I would argue it could be both. I mean, if it wasn't for our capacity to develop agriculture and become farmers, we would never be able to grow the kind of civilizations and cities that we have today and the kind of technology that we have today. But on a personal level, I would say that the shift of identity to a farmer was a shift to an identity that was not a match with our normal instincts and our normal normal biology and it came with a bunch of consequences ranging from cavities to bone disease to depression. So identity really, you know, in a sense is like, well, let's think of it this way. First you have, you spot patterns, you develop a theory, you test the theory, you create a set of beliefs. Then those beliefs become so solidly formed that they, they become a conviction and those convictions ultimately form your identity. And the idea then is that that means that's now in theory unchangeable. And that can be a really powerful thing or a really dangerous thing. In a powerful way, you know, if you imbue in your kids a sense of identity that they are champions, that they're successful, that they can achieve real things, then that sense of identity will shortcut their decisions in the future. There's a great story about a kid who was given the wrong SAT scores, told that his SAT scores were way higher than they really were. The kid goes on and does really well in school and because he believed how smart he was. Turned out he'd completely failed the SAT scores, but his identity wasn't that because he wasn't told that, right?

I wonder, you know, we're coming to the end of our time here. This has been really illuminating, Eric. And I wonder what you envision in terms of, you know, overall human potential, where we are. We realize, you know, there's trends that are not helping us out and there's a lot of trends that are, and we are up against the limitations of human-caused climate change. That's one of the things that's not better. And we're going to have to find a way to deal with that, but I don't think we're going to deal with that through victim mindset thinking. I think we're gonna deal with it through tremendous creativity and what I call radical responsibility, taking ownership and so forth, is how we're gonna find the solutions. But I'm curious about what you see in terms of the kind of mindset and heartsets that we could embrace that are really gonna allow us to participate in creating and manifesting the future of humanity on this planet in the best possible way.

It's a big topic.

Maybe I'm also asking you if you're an optimist or a pessimist.

I'm decidedly both. And I, you know, what I'm going to, let's use the climate conversation as a, as an envelope for that discussion. I find it to be an endlessly interesting conversation to have. And the reason I find it endlessly interesting is I always ask myself, if we are arguing about something, why are we arguing about it? Like, why? You know, I think it's interesting to take a look at who are the forces that would like us to keep arguing about this. And so if we look at the environment as a larger conversation, Here are some things that are undeniable. There are microplastics all over the planet. There are air quality problems in most major cities around the world. There are water quality issues all over the planet. There are, you know, depleting natural resources all over the planet. We have mass extinctions happening on a regular basis, and that's very serious. Now, all of those things are black and white measurable. There's no argument about them. There's no argument that there's microplastics everywhere. There's no argument that we have air quality problems. There's no argument. So therefore we don't discuss them. Instead, what we've done is we've picked another topic that there is argument about. We, we've picked something that's nebulous and incredibly difficult to prove and incredibly difficult to predict the outcome of. And we spend all of our time arguing about that one thing so that we don't have to take any action on it, or so that we can take taxable action on things that don't really have much impact. If we took all of the effort that we put into this conversation about climate change and we put it into, say, the reduction of plastics in our environment, I imagine we could have a measurable impact that would probably also positively impact our impact on climate. To give you an idea of how, like, how crazy I think this is, I don't know if you happen to know the answer to this. It's an interesting trivia question. When did the last ice age end? And I'll give you a clue. It's a trick question. So when did the last ice age end?

Well, I guess the trick question is maybe it hasn't ended yet, but I would think it's like 10,000, 15,000 years ago.

No, no, it hasn't ended yet. No, it ha— you are right. You're right the first time. It has not ended yet. Now, now if you're watching CNN, they keep talking about the last ice age. We are in it. And an ice age is defined as a period of time where the polar caps are encapsulated in ice. And a non-ice age is when they're not. And then during an ice age, you have these periods of glaciation, and then you have these interglacial periods. So we are currently in an interglacial period. Of the current ice age, and those interglacial periods run every 15,000, 20,000, 30,000 years. We happen to be in— normally we happen to be in a cycle where that might be coming to an end. But now what nobody can tell us is, are we coming to the end of that interglacial and going back to glaciation, or are we coming to the end of that glaciation and the end of our entire ice age?

We don't know.

We have no idea. We can't possibly predict it. And yet We dedicate almost all of our media to that debate and that discussion when we can't possibly know the answer. What we do know is we're cutting down our forests. We know that we're polluting our air. We know that we have plastic everywhere. We, we know all that. We could be fixing all of it, but instead the media wants us to argue about something that can't be answered. I think this is largely where we need to start the conversation about human potential is we need to start getting informed and we need to start getting realistic about what really the problems are that we can agree on instead of looking for what we can't agree on. We gotta seek out what we can agree on. In terms of—

I agree. I think all those very specific things are things we could do something about, and in the end they would possibly, probably also impact any contribution that we're making to human-caused climate change.

Yeah. In terms of the personal journey, when we take a look at our own personal direction, I think the biggest problems that we're facing today are quite literally that we have a biology, a set of instincts, a set of cravings, a set physical directives that are different from the environment that we find ourselves living in today. And I would put that almost all of the pain, suffering, anxiety, depression, disease that we suffer with today is as a result of the gap, this evolutionary mismatch, or let's call it nature deprivation syndrome, or what we call the evolution gap in the book. And what I would suggest is that our job now is to create a synthesis of understanding that combines really solid ancestral wisdom, learning from our evolutionary design, from evolutionary biology, and then combining that with the best that we can learn from modern civilization and modern technology to create the best life experience. And I think that's the opportunity that's in front of us today.

I completely agree with you. You just voiced one of the ways that we voice, articulate our mission at HeartMind Institute is the integration of current science with ancestral wisdom to increase wellbeing and benefit for everyone. So this has been illuminating. Thank you very much. Where can people find out more about your work, about your WildFit program, your book, and so forth?

Absolutely. They can go to theevolutiongap.com. The book is there. Actually, actually gapfinder.com is now up and it's a, it's an evolutionary mismatch evaluation that you can go through. It asks you a bunch of questions about various areas of your life and then produces a report that kind of helps you to understand where your evolutionary mismatch are and the steps you can take to close that and improve the conditions. WildFit is at getwildfit.com. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, I manage my own Instagram account and they can find me there. And I'm simply @ericedmeads.

Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Eric. This really has been really enriching and illuminating and empowering conversations.

Thanks for having me.

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