Hunting With African Bushmen + Creating Community With Eric Edmeades

I just think there's a next level of capability which comes with passion, enjoyment, happiness, fulfillment. The things that we're doing around affecting people's decisions around food buying are contrary to some people's very serious capitalistic views of the world. And that worries me at times. I was so terrified of speaking. Say, he called me on Monday and said, eric, could you do a talk on Friday? I would say no, and then I would be unable to eat until Friday was over. A lot of people don't recognize that there is a truly unconscious, powerful level of influence that is given to people who are willing to stand in front of an audience and put themselves at risk. I am aware that every single person in the audience has stories that are as valuable or more than mine are. And the only difference between them and me is a skill set. Once I recognize that, it put me in a position where I could never, ever talk down to an audience. Because every single person in that audience has life experiences as valuable as mine. I offer them one of my core principal beliefs of life, and that is that you shouldn't weigh into any argument until you can argue both sides equally. And boom, unconscious modeling begins to kick in, which means they're going to pick up every little belief that he talks about. Every little nuance is going to. And I remember thinking, that's dangerous if we don't take the responsibility and study influence and A, use it for good and B, know it to disarm it from being used on us. We're just sheep.

That's a good start.

Yeah, I like that. How you doing, brother? Great. How you doing?

All right?

I'm good, I'm good. So we're just talking about Africa.

That's right.

Now, hunting in Africa with the Bushmen. You just came back not long ago.

Yeah.

And why don't you talk a little bit about that adventure and then we'll tell our listeners. Viewers why.

Talking about why, why I'm out there doing that kind of crazy stuff. So I'll tell you that.

Not this last trip, but the trip before. I woke up in the morning and the chief says, hey, it's time for us to go hunting. And I think it's really important to say these are not like Maasai warriors with cell phones tucked in the robes. These are effectively Stone Age living, hunter gatherer, nomadic Bushmen. So hunting is quite a thing. And so anyway, I head off and I grab my little, like, satellite tracking device thing to figure out how far we're going to, and we don't. We're not that successful that day. Like, it was really an interesting exercise in reality, because we were out all day and we did 27 miles. It's over 100 degrees, and we got very little of anything. And I was thinking, man, like, if. Like, what would a day of work be like if it was like that all the time? It was really tough.

Well, that, and you can always buy a pound hamburger for a couple of bucks.

There's all that. They don't have that, right. So it's kind of quite a thing to expend that kind of energy. And, you know, in social anthropology, they talk about this concept of calories per acre, and that is the best way to really get a sense of calories. Breaker. Here we are in Southern California. We live in billions of calories per acre. In fact, we live in billions of calories in our living room because of Uber Eats and stuff, right? Those guys live with sparse calories per acre. And so we go out and do 27 miles, and they got a couple of little birds. And not like, I mean, it was not enough to feed anybody. And the next morning, having done 27 miles, and it's. Remember, these are not like, I did the London Marathon some years ago, and they warned me about the cobblestone streets section of the marathon. How hard that is. No, that's a breeze. This is up and down cliffs and thorns gouging holes out of you. And I mean, it's the toughest 27 miles. And the next morning, the chief and I have a little bit of a banter because we've known each other for a while. And he's like, you ready to go again? 17 more miles. 17 more miles. And this time, we do score. We've been tracking a couple of bush pigs, which are kind of like Pumbaa from the Lion King. I hate to personalize them, but they.

Almost look like warthogs. They're like warthogs.

They've got big, only much bigger. All right, and how much do they weigh? Maybe 150, 180 pounds. Like, they're big, big, big. And so we're tracking a pair of them, and we managed to get one of them. And I say we. By we. What I mean is they managed to get one of them. You're watching them shoot the served, and. But then kind of stopped, right? Because he goes, they're tracking two of them, and they want to try and get the other one. So the pig's here, and he goes, stay here with the pig. Why keep the hyenas away?

Yeah, yeah. Make sure nothing eats it. And they leave me with two 12.

Year old Bushmen and a pig and me. Yeah.

And do you have some sort of a weapon or something?

Well, I, I had one of their bows and some arrows. I mean, made out of wood, like.

Are you a good shot?

Not that good.

I don't.

I've never been tested with an actual hyena coming at me. Luckily, no hyenas came. But it really. I will never forget that event. It was really, truly like. Doc Brown pulled up in the DeLorean, dropped me off in the African bush 200,000 years ago, and there I was. It was fascinating.

Very nice. So I think the reason why, one of the reasons I wanted you to be here and interviews. We've known each other. I'm trying to think of. We met because of Vivian. I think you met her at a tlc. That's right, yeah.

Okay.

And she told me right away she came back, she says, I'm gonna go climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Cause you've climbed it how many times?

Seven.

Right, right. And she got very inspired. She's like, okay, that's what I want to do. And I'm like, jesus, that's. To be totally honest with you, my idea of hell is to climb any. I just don't like mountain climbing in general. It doesn't especially, like, anytime I hear someone say, yeah, he died on Mount Everest, I'm like, yep. So what, you know, Mike, is that. Is that it? I'm like, he deserved it. That was stupid. It's a stupid thing to do. Who wants to be out in the winter and cold and climb? I mean, you just know the odds. It's like, it doesn't seem like a fascinating. Anyway, the reason I have you here is.

You'Re all about designing a great life and living a great life. And also you have a lot of adventure. You got a fascinating background, You've done a lot of stuff. So I thought in the spirit of capability amplifier, I want to give our viewers, listeners a capability upgrade and an insight into Eric and Meadi's brains. So with that.

Comments, I'm excited.

I really, I enjoy the work you're doing. And frankly, when you think about capability amplification, I would suggest that every single person's capability would be amplified by them enjoying their life a great deal. Right. You know, I don't think you have to do that. I see plenty of people that are not enjoying their lives and they're incredibly capable. I just think there's a next level of capability which Comes with passion, enjoyment, happiness, fulfillment.

Right, right. So just getting specific.

I think, you know, you've done so many things just to contextualize this a little bit. Why don't you talk a little bit about growing up? Because you've got some pretty interesting little short story about growing up in Canada and lugging around canoes and almost dying when. I don't know, how old were you?

Well, first I was born in South.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah. So we, we immigrated to Canada when I was quite small and. But we continue to keep close ties to South Africa. So I'm kind of a. They're both home to me. But I think you're talking about. I went to the craziest boarding school in the history of boarding schools. I mean, what's it called for people? St. John's School of Alberta. And they had one in Manitoba and they had one in Ontario as well. They're all three closed at this point. But it was really intense. So I, I'll give you an idea. The very first day at school, the very first day they go, well, we're going for a run today. And so we go for a run. And I'd been out for a run with my dad, so I knew running. I was 13, I could run. And then all of a sudden we're like running down this hill and there's this beaver dam with the thick algae on the surface. And the teacher just runs into the beaver dam and swims across it and it's bloody cold. Like, this is northern Alberta, it's cold. And all we, all the students, we all look at each other. It's our first day of school. We're like, we're supposed to do that. And so one by one, we had to go through this like freezing cold water. It was like. And then still run another five miles after that.

That's nasty green swamp water.

Nasty green swamp water. Like, awful. And, and that was the easiest, lightest, gentlest thing that we did for the next three years of that school. Our, you know, a lot of schools have like graduation events. You know, you go on, go to Paris. Let's go to Paris. For our graduate. No, we didn't. We drove to Lac La Ronge in northern Saskatchewan and we grabbed a bunch of war canoes and we did a 900 mile, three week canoe trip through northern Canada, retracing the original fur trade routes. It was intense. Our winter sports program, you know, you were in Minnesota, you played some hockey or you watched it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, we played a lot of hockey there. Yeah. I mean, seriously, we played street hockey.

And yeah, yeah, so we're Canadians, we that we were obliged to do that. But that was not even close to the backbone of our winter program. Our winter program was you got home from school, you got to school from home because of boarding school, and then they go, go get a pair of snowshoes and they teach you how to tie them on and stuff. And then you go out and do six miles on snowshoes, which may not sound so intense to you, but it's six miles with heavy snowshoes on your feet. That's Wednesday. On Saturday you do 13 miles and over the next sort of five to six weeks, you train at the age of 13 years old to do a 26 mile snowshoe race in northern Canada at minus 30 degrees. I mean, it was an intense school.

Sounds horrible.

It was horrible as a kid. But I don't know how to put it to you. It's like I hated it, only I am so grateful for it.

Sure, of course, of course. So since then now, and I'm going to jump all over the place here because why not live in the Dominican Republic? One of the things that we talk about a lot is quality of life, creating simplicity. You've got a business, but you've gone through quite a few transitions along the way. So let's talk about now and what you're most fascinated by and into.

When it comes to creating an optimal life. So if you're God for a day or a week or a year was I like to say, you know, I'll just frame this. Let's do the Dan Sullivan question right now. If you and I were here.

And a year's gone by, sitting right back here in this place and I were interviewing you about your year and you get to design a perfect life. Holy cow. I just realized we're opening up a giant can of worms here. But what would that look like and what would be going on knowing, you know, you've been studying a lot about the body, nutrition, fitness, lifestyle, money, entrepreneurship, and also looking at crazy stuff's happening worldwide. What's it look like?

I guess on a personal level it would be to a large degree more of the same. I live in the tropics for a reason. I kiteboard, I enjoy being in fresh air, I enjoy having healthy doses of sun on my skin. I enjoy having control over my food supply. My little girl is almost three years old. She's never had refined sugar. She's never seen a McDonald's logo. So you know, that part of My life, I would say that a year from now it would be more of that and it would be the same and more. We have been contemplating, for example, a move to Costa Rica. Our intention there is to build a community style resort where we have friends that live there, but it's also a boutique style resort. So it's the combination of us being able to hold our intensive programs there, but it's also home and it's home to our community. And I think that that's a big deal these days because, you know, here we are cliched at this point, the most connected, you know, generation in the history of ever. And yet we're more lonely than ever and we're missing community. And so I feel like a second.

What did you say? I you wanted to quickly check your Instagram feed.

While we're talking about interconnectivity or honestly, if you're a bloody alien and you showed up in any airport in America, you'd think everybody that would wonder who actually was in control, you would take a look and say these things are in control and we're just the slaves that carry them around. It's insane. And I don't want that for my little girl or for me or for my family. And so that's why I've kind of constructed my life the way it is now. And I think that a year from now, on a personal level, it would be more of that and more community, you know, attracting more people to be around us on a more regular basis and that sort of thing.

So funny you haven't told me before about the idea of.

Facility that I'm aware of the resort, but I've talked to an enormous number of people who doctors, business owners. That is one of the most common dreams is this is what I want. And community obviously comes up an intentional community. So that leads me to right now. What do you see as being the, the biggest, biggest dangers you're facing in either realizing that dream or what you're observing because you're serving at this point, it's a couple hundred thousand clients, right, who are in wildfit.

The biggest dangers really are where I hate. I don't even like voicing them. I don't like putting the energy and focus onto them. But the things that we're doing around affecting people's decisions around food buying are.

Contrary to some people's very serious capitalistic border, you know, views of the world. And, and, and that worries me at times. You know, when you come out heavily against any industry, that industry is going to Defend itself. And that bothers me at times. You know, it's like, sure, we have freedom of speech, you know, in most of our countries around the world these days, in most of the free countries around the world, we have some version of freedom of speech. But that's changing. And that really worries me. I will tell you that the, the dairy industry, for example, basically convinced a bunch of congressmen about a year and a half ago to write a letter to the FDA asking the FDA to de facto enforce a trademark, a non existent trademark on the term milk. So they basically wrote to the FDA and said, you can't let almond have milk. You can't let hemp be milk. Milk is just one single thing. And of course, they've already probably made their attempt at the trademark office, which they're never going to get that as a trademark. So now they're going to the FDA and asking them to enforce a rule around it. And what I would say to you, Mike, is if we go outside and cut one of your trees and cut the leaf off that tree, there's going to be some white fluid that comes out of that. And that has always been that plant's milk. The word has a meaning. But the dairy industry is fighting like crazy. They're plummeting sales and the realities of what their products do to the world. And they will fight free speech.

I think what we need is almond juice then. And juice.

Yeah, then the fruit growers will come.

Whoa, only apples can have juice.

No, that's okay. And yeah, that is fascinating. So what do you want to do about it?

Well, I thought a lot about the best way to create influence in this space. When we created Wildfit, it was really a hobby business for me. I was really just simply doing it to help our business clients live better qualities of life. My business clients are often asking me, how can I travel the way I do? How can I do 15 hours on stage? Where do I get all the energy from? And so I started talking to them about an interesting combination of, let's call it nutritional anthropology and food psychology. And WildFit was born out of that. And then one day I started recognizing, you know.

That I was more bothered by that whole thing than I really realized I was. That I was more angry and more upset and more disturbed by the food manufacturing industry and food regulation than I really realized I was. And so then I had to ask myself, where, where does the influence, where is it best to create influence? Should I go and run for government? Should I go and an MP or should I Be here in the US and become a congressman. Like, where. Where can I have the greatest influence? And I recognize it's not going to happen at the political level because it's a bought and paid for game. And. And then I thought, well, we're next. And I realized, I think it has to be a broad spectrum approach, and I think it has to start with the consumers. Look, a client of mine wrote to me a year or so ago, and she said, hey, I've been ordering custom sausages from my local butcher. So she's getting the most ethically raised meat that she can. She wants to be the most. She's going to be a meteor. She wants to be conscious about it, but she also doesn't want any sugar in the sausage. So she's been ordering them this way. And then her butcher called her one day and said, we won't. We don't have your custom order for you. And she said, why not? And she goes, because after three weeks of you ordering them this way, we decided to try one of the batches without the sugar in it. And we loved it. And we're like, why were we ever putting sugar in it in the first place? And so we now no longer put syrup. Syrup, sugar or syrup, or what's the other thing? They were putting honey in some of them. She goes, we just don't do that anymore. So you no longer need your customers order. And she says, oh, my God, what made you do that after three, four, five weeks of me ordering it that way? And she goes, because there's another one of you crazy wildfit people that's coming in and ordering without sugar all the time. So that got us asking the question. So it says to me, we have to influence at consumer, we have to influence at production, and we have to influence at regulation, but really we have to.

It's got to start with the consumer level, for sure. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So let's go down that crazy world of influence right now. Something that interests both of us. And again, I think it'd be reasonable to frame this up because you've spent a lot of time on a lot of stages. But what I haven't asked you before is how'd you get started speaking in the first place? What got you on stage? How long ago was it?

I've had a couple of iterations. I was a phobic. I was one of those. I was so terrified of speaking that if you asked me to do a talk, say, he called me on Monday and said, eric, could you Do a talk on Friday at 2 o'. Clock. I would say no. Categorically, I would have a million good justifications for my no. You know how fear works, right? And then I would be unable to eat, I would be sick until Friday was over, even though I'd said no. And I only years later realized why that was. And that was, you're only really, truly afraid of the things you want to do. I wanted to do it. And the reason that I couldn't eat after saying no is I was deathly afraid I might change my mind. And so one day a friend of mine, a guy named Mike Barry from Scotland, said to me, hey, would you come up and speak at my not for profit group on nutrition? Because he'd heard me talk about it at the dining room table. This is 20 years ago. And I was like, in my head, I'm hell no, I don't, I can't do that. I'm terrified of it. But it was six months out and you know how fear works further away the thing is, the less scary it seems. And so six months out, it seemed reasonable. And so I agree to do it. And as it got closer and closer, I had to deal with my fears. And I walked out on that stage and I gave a talk and I had people come up to me and say to me, I will change the way I eat, I will change the way I shop. And I was born, I was in that. That just got me. But even then it was still very hobby based. And I did that for a number of years, teaching business and nutrition around the world and spoken about, I don't know, 20 countries over two years, just by accident, like really, truly by accident. I showed up and I did a talk in London and a guy walked up to me, he goes, could you do that same talk in Singapore on Friday? And I turned to my wife and I go, do you want to go to Singapore? Like, it was literally like that. And then. But I needed a bit of a revival because I bought a film studio and got out of speaking completely. Like, I spoke at the odd film festival in Shanghai and. But no inspiration, influence type stuff. It was different. And then after about three years, I got the weirdest phone call in the world. Like, I totally thought it was a practical joke. A guy called me up and he goes, eric, can you be in Fiji in 11 days to teach business and marketing at Tony Robbins business mastery seminars?

I really, yeah. And it took him about 20 minutes to convince me that it was a genuine request. And 11 days later, I was on A plane to Fiji, speaking for the first time in three years at a private Business Mastery event. And Tony and I just, like, we just hit it off. And he booked me for a year and a half, and I. That's. That's when I really. I would call everything I did before that is amateur practice time. Getting kind of used to the idea of it. But what Tony gave me at that point was the rocket ship kick in the ass that said, you love this and you're good at it, and you. And this is the primary way you're going to create influence.

Yeah. And what a platform, too. You know, he's. You know, this, I mean, profoundly changed my life and given me access that I couldn't have, but you can't pay for it.

Yeah. I always say, like, I'm probably one of the very few people on Earth, maybe 20 people on Earth that have actually had, like, speaking training by him, because he doesn't do it. After my very first talk, he sat me down, we had lunch, my wife and I, and he and Sage sat in his house and had lunch for, like, four hours in Fiji. And for the first 35 minutes, he just kept going, oh, I love the way you did this and the way you did that, and you made this happen and then you did this and you wore you and you created rapport with the audience. And he was like. And eventually I got overwhelmed by the praise, and I finally said, like, you got to know. I was listening to him on tapes in my car at 17 years old. I don't really get starstruck, but this was enough.

Now you get used to that voice.

Yeah. And so he goes. He goes. I finally go, great impersonation, by the way. Thank you. I go, tony, I can't take any more, but I do have one question for you. How could I make it better? And he went, oh, well. And took my journey at journal out and just started. And that's. That started that. That. You're right. It was like the best platform kickoff I could possibly have.

And there.

Let's talk a little bit about influence persuasion and.

Ethical influence persuasion. Like, right now I'm super fascinated by.

Well, really how social media has changed influence persuasion, the whole influencer movement. And also how what I would consider the infectious mainstream has devalued the value of authenticity because it's faked in huge volumes. And now we've got metrics. So you, you know, sales messages are basically the same. It's. To me, it's not fun to spend time on it at all. It's just there's nothing interesting about it. But at the same time I recognize, acknowledge and celebrate the success of so many people including like Khloe Kardashian, 23 year old billionaire. But I'm curious what your perspective is in social world and influence. And then I think we'll open up this, this rabbit hole.

I, I kind of hate to start with a joke, but, and you might want to cut it out later, whatever. But I, I just, I'll never forget this, like young poli sci student is at a conference and he has an opportunity to meet this grizzled old senator. And he goes up and all excited, he's like, oh, Mr. Senator, Mr. Senator, like what would you, I, I, I, I like I have aspirations to the highest office in the land. What advice would you give to a young poli sci student that has these aspirations? And he goes, well son, first thing you got to watch out for is that their social media, you know, the stuff that you guys are up to today in your college parties and stuff, that stuff will come back and bite you in the ass. So you got to watch out for that. And the kid's like, I'm all over it. I don't go to those parties. I'm really watching that stuff. I get that what you do online now is forever. What else have you got for me? He goes, well.

Honesty, integrity, authenticity, once you can fake those.

And I just see a whole bunch of that in the, in the, in the influencer space. Freaks me out. And one of the reasons is a lot of people don't recognize that there is a truly unconscious.

Powerful level of influence that is given to people who are willing to stand in front of an audience and put themselves at risk. And I think it dates back to the, you know, I'm working on this. I have a book coming out in the early part of next year called One Talk Away. You're one talk away from everything you wanted, Brendy Brown. Like, there's so many examples of people who've like done one talk and it's kicked everything.

Yeah, yeah. And in the research, TED Talk, man, huh?

Yeah. And in the research for that, I really like identified a bunch of reasons why it's so powerful. And one of them is, is that I often think of the brain as having, you know, you know, we use the brain computer metaphor. Like, you know, we have ram. That's our immediate consciousness. We have rom our instincts, you know, whatever. Right. But I think of it also another way. And it's like that the primary way for Humans to learn is to do. The very best way for us to learn is to do. But if you're a three year old bushman, you can't go hunting. Like things will eat you. So, so how are you going to learn before you get to do? You sit around the fire and you.

Listen, listen to stories and you pretend.

And we've had fire for arguably 2 million years. So we could argue that for hundreds of thousands, maybe a million plus years we've been sitting around fires listening to stories. So I would argue that stories are the primary operating language of the brain. It is the fundamentally most effective way of putting information in. So now you have another issue. If you're around my fire and I share a story about how I saved myself with the lions came, and then the next day you go hunting and the lions come and you use what you learned from me, whose fire do you want to sit around for the rest of your life? My fire. And so the influence that we have is really powerful. But the trouble is, and this is the light and dark side to what you said earlier, what I don't think we sometimes understand is that we have a hard coded instinct and that is to look up, to admire and unconsciously model alpha. If somebody is achieving in an outstanding way in any field that we're curious about, we can consciously attempt to model them. We can say, oh, look what they wear, look how they talk, look what they do, look who they hang out with. But what we don't understand is that we're unconsciously modeling them. So we're seeing behaviors of theirs, we're picking up language patterns of theirs, beliefs of theirs, and we're just letting them straight into our subconscious and not realizing they're influencing us. And that scares the hell out of me when I see that we hold rap stars and sports people that are snorting coke off. Whatever, they're snorting their coke off. And we're what's wrong with kids?

Yeah.

And our kids are unconsciously modeling and the dark side of influence. And this whole influencer movement freaks me out.

It's really interesting. You know, I was trying to decide whether I was going to tell this story, but I'm going to tell it just because you're so damn special. And who knows again, how deep and raw we can get here. So we can influence people to model us and then. Yeah, but I got a message today from someone, you know, this person, pretty famous person who's worked for very famous people. And this person has an opportunity to work with someone who is an international Star who I happen to know. And.

And I also know someone who knows this person really, really well. And like not long ago we were having a conversation, I go, hey, how's so and so? And this guy says, well.

Total train wreck. You know, on the surface everything's great. Super popular type of individual who's spent a ton of time around rock stars, celebrities and achieved celebrity status because of that. And anyway, this person wants help with a part of the business that's decaying, but this person has no interest in continuing to maintain it. But it's a source of revenue and there's other projects going on and the audience that buys the product are people who want to be like the perception of this influencer, right? And so it's sort of like this friend of mine is being asked to create, maintain a charade for.

A perception that isn't real and it's also not honest. And I communicated this. And literally as we were sitting here, I got a message saying, the deal's off the table, it ain't going to happen any longer.

But what you just shared, I hadn't thought through that lens before about how we model.

Not just mentors or figureheads, but also it is about the perception. And I know we were just at TLC this, this weekend and I remember there was someone there who's again, very famous who said something along the lines of, you don't want my life, you don't want anything to do with it. And you know when you get. Once you're a celebrity and you get attacked for something you do that's very human and someone's attacking you for not being like the way they perceive you to be, and then that turns into a social shitstorm.

It is very fascinating. So anyway, I know I'm all over the place here, but I hadn't thought through the lens of the modeling. And also going back this notion of if you think of the human brain as a computer and here you are as a child running simulations which are play based upon a story, and then our story, our life ends up modeling the story. And.

It'S really good. It's really good.

Well done. It is fascinating, the unconscious modeling thing. I'll tell you the first time I really saw it, I saw it because generally I've been a practical psychologist since I was 6. I grew up in a pretty alcoholism and all that stuff and survival was up to me. So I kind of became a practical psychologist as a kid. So I was always curious about why people did what they did. Because you, when you're at the. Like, when you feel as though your survival is dependent on people's behavior, you kind of figure out that you need to know why they do what they do.

Pain avoidance is.

Yeah, it's a powerful motivator. And so I, I would watch this stuff a lot, and what I would begin to notice, especially in peer groups, is that the minute you have. The minute you either look up to somebody or you're jealous of them, which is a form of looking up to them, there this unconscious modeling thing comes in. And this is why parents who smoke and say, don't smoke, the kids smoke. It's not the words, it's the action, it's the modeling. So I saw this guy in London teaching a seminar about wealth psychology, not unlike the kind of stuff that Harv Eker might do around millionaire mindset type thing. And frankly, I think that, you know, one of my favorite expressions is if you truly, truly are not a millionaire and you want to become a millionaire, you have to do it twice. First in your head and then it'll follow. You know, it doesn't work the other way around. In fact, we've seen countless times then.

If you want to keep it, you got to lose it and then give it back.

Yeah, you got to do it three times. Right. But if you think about it, how many stories do we have of the lottery winners who do it in reverse and they lose all the money? Right? So it's got to be up here. So this guy's on stage teaching wealth psychology, right? How to think. He on the stage, somebody asks him what his net worth is, and his answer is, my self worth is $30 million. Most of it is still out there in the world, but I'm working on it. But he knows extremely well. He's a hypnotist. He understands language patterns. He knows that the audience is going to hear him say that he's worth $30 million. Now the audience is going, holy shit, this guy's in front of an audience, 900 people, huge stadium lights, all this stuff, and he's worth $30 million. And boom, unconscious modeling begins to kick in, which means they're going to pick up every little belief that he talks about. Every little nuance is going to. And I remember thinking, that's dangerous. That's really dangerous. It would be okay even if he stood on stage and said, look, I'm busted, broke, but I have some ideas about how to make this stuff happen. Then they could learn the content, but they wouldn't engage the unconscious modeling.

Yeah, well, that is the that is the dirty little secret about.

Influence too is how honest are you really going to be? Because I knew.

I think of his last name. I know his first name's Bill and he's dead now, so I can talk about this. I remember.

He was a billionaire. He lost it all. I can't remember exactly how, but it was a series of unfortunate events, lawsuits, ignorance, mismanagement. And he came to me and he wanted help. And this is probably 15 years ago, maybe not even quite that long ago. It was right when I was having a pinnacle of success, so probably like 12 years. And we met at an event and I met with him because he was trying to figure out online marketing and he wanted to do teaching and training when his vision was to be a multi billionaire again. And I can remember his biggest challenge he had was gaining traction because.

No one wants to be around success turned failure when they're still, when they're not back up but as soon as they return to their Phoenix state. And this is something that Dan talks about is Americans love heroic journeys. They love hero stories, they love people who fall down on their faces totally. It's, it's. And.

I know internally I had that same kind of like oh, what do I, you know, is this, is this, is this failure gonna rub off on me? And you know, it's like we avoid sick and, and it's just the way we're fundamentally wired is really interesting that way. And I've thought a lot about it. But anyway, he wound up getting going again and created a, I think it was a couple hundred million dollar business based upon coaching and some other stuff. I remember it was maybe, I better not say a couple hundred million. It was very successful, generated a ton of money and he was at the right, perfect, right place to use a combination of print advertising and online marketing right before social took off. And then not long ago he died. So anyway, fascinating story. Comments? Yeah, I think it keep on going on the influence. This is interesting.

One of the things, you know, you're saying you're kind of worried it would rub off, right? I think that when we are aware more fully of the full circumstances of the influencer, we're less susceptible to the unconscious modeling.

Absolutely.

So like I said, the guy who's teaching the seminar, if he says look I'm broke but I'll teach you some ideas about money that I've learned, then you go, let me learn the consciousness content but not the behavior. So I think that in a case like that where you take a client on and they've got this massive failure vibration about them because you know about it. I don't think you have to pick it up. You, you can learn the good stuff from them, but not. You're gonna, there's gonna be a part of you that's gonna filter out. Oh, that's part of what contributed. I won't pick that. I won't take that. And I think that what that tells me is, you know, God, like, I really, I like Brene Brown. I, I, I love her message. I think it's fantastic. The only challenge is that now there's all those people out there that are being authentic. Like, they're being authentic. No, you can't. Like, I don't know how to put that in another way. There's authentic and there's inauthentic and active being.

Authentic.

Yeah, they're authentic. Authentic. And that, you know, and, and so one of the things I've attempted to do, and I can't pretend to get it right. I'm not. I, like, I have crap in my life that doesn't go exactly where I want to, and I don't jump onto the next stage and go, hey, guys, everything's falling apart around me right now. And I still think that I'm pretty open about that stuff generally. And one of the reasons is exactly that I, I don't want to hold myself up when I'm on stage teaching health and nutrition or business or public speaking, for that matter. I don't hold myself up as an example of any pinnacle I want to hold myself up as. You know what, here's the way I think about it. I, and from having taught so many people how to find their voice from a speaking perspective, I am aware that every single person in the audience has stories that are as, as valuable or more than mine are. And the only difference between them and me is a skill set that they might not yet have the skillset to stand up in front of a room and share their stories and influence people effectively. And once I recognize that, it put me in a position where I could never, ever talk down to an audience because every single person in that audience has life experience that's as valuable as mine.

Well, that reminds me of question I have for you, which is I'd like you to think about a story where you took it too far, you got too honest, and that ended up being a disaster. Can you think of a time where you actually lost the audience's trust because something you did was too honest and too raw and too revealing, and it, it backfired because that is, you know, one of the key things that anyone has on their mind when they, especially if it's current. You know, it's always nice to talk about a past. You know, there's, there's a certain recency as to when the mistake is no longer.

Poisonous. And I can think of like, yeah, I got a, I got out of prison yesterday for murder. And people would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. But if it was like five years ago, it'll probably be a pretty good story at this point. There's a little Phoenix Rising opportunity here.

But quirky little sidestep. You know, Kathy Lee Crosby, the original Wonder Woman, and I were walking down Santa Monica Pier 10 years ago. She's a really good friend of mine. And this, this guy comes up to her and he's clearly a little like colorful character with tattoos and all the. And he comes up and he goes, you're Christie Brinkley. Like, she's not. She's Kathy Lee Crosby. But she's like, yeah, can I have your autograph? She's like, no problem. So she, no kidding, takes out the paper and signs Christie Brinkley. And then the guy goes, this is amazing. I got out of prison yesterday after seven years and I meet Christie Brinkley. We're like, you served seven years in an American penitentiary. That means you were, you were sentenced to 30. Like, we're leaving now. In terms of me sharing something that's gone too far. I don't know that I've ever fully had that experience because.

Any context where I would share that openly, I have established such an incredible level of rapport with the audience that I've got a tremendous amount of permission. I've tread the line every now and again.

So you've been able to pre frame an event. So maybe that's what we'll talk a little bit about is your pre frame programming. I'm very curious how you set stuff up. So can you think of, think of the best pre framing you've done? And also for folks who don't know exactly what a pre frame is, that I don't know, is that an NLP term?

I think it's used a lot in nlp.

Okay, yeah. I've heard it so often for so many years. But the bottom line is if you're pre framing, you're setting up enough data to get someone in the mood to be able to accept and receive something and usually have an outcome at the end of the table. So it shortcuts the teachings, the lessons, and you can get Someone in a proper state of mind.

I think, frankly, before NLP came along, we just called it framing a conversation. We just happened to do it before, so we can pre it. And I do that. I'm really careful about that if I'm going to go to controversy. So a couple of things that I talk about is that I fully believe that the degree to which you are offendable, you are controllable.

The easier you are to offend.

That's awesome.

The easier you are to offend, the easier you are to control. So simple. And I just bring that up right away when I'm going in.

Thank you, American politics.

It's very helpful. And so then I start talking about button pushing. And my view is that if you have buttons that can be pushed, you created and manufactured those buttons for your own spiritual development. And thank you, I'll push them for you. So they're your buttons. If I say something and it pushes your button, it doesn't push theirs. What's the difference? Your button, not what I said. And so I frame these ideas to begin with, and then what I do is I offer them one of my core principal beliefs of life, and that is that you shouldn't weigh into any argument until you can argue both sides equally, there's just no point. If you can't argue for Trump, don't argue against him because he'll win. You need to be able to argue both sides of any argument. And so then I use an example like this. Should men and women like, why not? Let's go to the controversy, right? Should female and male tennis players get equal pay? Should they get equal pay?

So here's what my answer is. I look at the advertising and I look at the revenue and the income. So should. Of course they should. And then I'd say, let's see what the market can bear. And anytime these conversations come up, it's like, everyone should be a trillionaire.

Let's talk about the value you present, what the market will offer. And whether something is moral or not or right or not is not how capitalism in a market economy works.

Right? You can't fully make that argument as a middle aged white guy. Like, you can't really argue that. And I'll tell you partly why. Because the immediate defense against that is we created the market conditions that valued men's tennis more than female tennis. Therefore, the fact that there's more advertising revenue for men's tennis is actually part of the problem. Therefore, women should get equal pay. Wait.

Yeah, there you go.

Women only play three sets Women only play best of three. Men play best of five, and that's not equal pay. So therefore, men should actually be allowed to make more money because they play best of five set more money per event, per game because they play. Exactly. Except for one problem. The women have petitioned the WTA and they've petitioned Wimbledon to play five sets and they won't let them. So therefore, that's unfair equal pay. Now, what I do is I introduce that idea to show them that you can be so right in one moment and so very wrong the next. I don't even remember.

I played right into it. I foiled again.

Foiled again. It's almost like we rehearsed that. Yeah, another one. And I wish I could credit where I heard this from, but this is a very interesting thing, and that is that if you are African American, or I shouldn't even say African American, if you are of African origin, if you have a darker pigmentation than you are, it's five times harder for you to get a taxi in New York than it is if you're white.

Yeah, I've heard that before.

This is clearly racism. This is clearly racism.

You know what? This. I think I know the source, but tell the story and then I'm going to tell you.

Then you can.

One of the best sources ever for this kind of thing, but keep going.

So, of course, that's clearly racism. Except for now, the problem is, is that a taxi driver is literally, statistically five times more likely to be robbed by someone of African origin, someone with darker pigmentation. And so is this person a racist or a pragmatist? And so now I'm in trouble with the left, and then I'm in trouble with the right, and then you. Then there's the next thing. Most of the cab drivers aren't even white. So it's now not a matter of racism. It's a matter. What is it a matter of? And then there's another twist to it entirely, because now you get into this issue of, well, wait a minute now. If the. If the black community is allowing this to happen, isn't it their fault? You know, because the argument is, is that when the Jewish and the Italian and the Irish people moved to New York, if you as a Jewish person or as an Irish person shoplifted, the Irish community would. The Irish elders would haul you in and say, don't do that. You'll make Irish people look bad. So that's why they don't do that as often. So is it, Is it, is it black people's fault that they don't do that, or is it the fault that none of them know their culture, that none of them know what country that they even come from, that they didn't have a tight Irish, Italian, they didn't have that. And so at the end of the day, at every junction, you can, you can be on the right, or then you can be on the left, you can be on the right and the left. And so I typically, when we're going through this at our. Particularly in our communications programs, we're showing people you got to be able to argue both sides. And that puts me in a position where then when we talk controversial stuff, it's much harder for the audience to be offended.

Really good pre frame. That's awesome. Now. So I'll tell you, one of the best sources, and I think he's the best.

Definitely the best debater that I'm aware of is Jordan Peterson. So if you haven't. Have you watched Jordan's stuff? Yeah, that one might not be a.

Jordan one, but it does certainly follow his sort of line of reasoning and logic, which is why it's tight.

Yeah. And so what I've seen him do, I studied a ton of his content. Dan and I have had a lot of conversations. Actually. One of my goals, I'm going to get him on this podcast. But.

First of all, he is so tight and what he'll do with the opposition, and I don't think with any ill intent, but he's smart enough that when he's being attacked, he knows precisely how much to reveal. So the other person corners themselves in their own bias box and winds up making themselves look like the racist they are. So, you know, it's usually the person who's calling, shouting the names is in fact that. And they're suppressing their dark side. And when you look at Jungian psychology.

Debbie Ford originally wrote the book Dark side of the Light Chasers, Ariel's sister who passed. But that's really. It had a lot to do with the culture of the. The evolved community, the enlightened community, and what was really going on. And she got a big run out of that.

But.

Jordan could. The thing with Jordan Peterson is he could argue either side. That's the beauty of it is. And that's why he can set them up like that. That's why he can set the trap, because he knows their side. And you know, the one time when I did go a little too far, I was in Sweden and Sweden and Norway. Norway in particular. But even Sweden has. They're Very egalitarian. And you're not really allowed to express any opinions about gender differences, particularly in Norway and to a large degree in Sweden. In fact, John Greg, good friend of both of ours, off to Norway some years ago and went on a speaking tour talking Mars, Venus, male, female stuff. And the live audiences loved him, but the networks re edited what he did and vilified him. And, you know, they took the. They had a panel with a feminist over here and somebody over here, and they edited the conversation to make him look terrible because he was making very powerful arguments for the fact that, like, I don't know if you've noticed this, but men and women have differences. Yeah, there are some.

Tell you what, I like them. I like them.

I prefer it with the differences. But in any event, I. The very same week that Tony Robbins got himself in trouble with the MeToo movement, I didn't know he was getting himself in trouble, but I did the same thing. I was in Sweden and I made a comment about to movement being an incredibly powerful force for good, but like any powerful force, it can be used for bad. And I made a comment about the fact that I thought it was going to cause damage, maybe even more damage than it was, than the repair it was causing. And that was a tough thing for me as a white guy to say on stage in a Swedish audience where gender differences aren't really supposed to be discussed. And one of the women raised her hand with that way, you know, the way where if you don't. If I don't answer her like I'm. It's going to be a problem. She was really annoyed. And she goes, are you justifying all this behavior? And I said, no, no. I said, I'm talking about impact. I'm talking about the fact that in most of our cultures around the world, men are asked to take the initiative. Men are the ones that are supposed to ask for the first date. Men are ones that are supposed to go for the first kiss, hold the first hand, ask for marriage. We are supposed to be taking the initiative, and because there are a small percentage, but because there are people out there abusing what MeToo stands for, it's hurting initiative. And then I gave an example that a very good friend of mine, who is a very good looking, successful guy who's single, and I was visiting with him, and I said, how's your dating life? And he goes, I don't date anymore. I go, why not? He goes, it's too dangerous. And so when I put it back in those terms, she sat down she, she said, I get it, I get it. You're not, you're not slamming the movement. You're talking about the full spectrum of impact of a movement. So I think that I'm always willing to go too far because.

I understand both sides of it and I'm not so entrenched in one position that I can't be empathetic to both sides.

Good. I'm curious, when we look at this, I'm curious to what degree you've thought about deconstructing.

The process of how much information do you intuitively know how to assemble these arguments or do you think a lot about them?

And if you and I were going to create a formula right now to frame biases and create a cascade and a story structure that would drag the audience on one side or the other, first of all, activate the button and then drag them so they would experience outrage in whatever biased direction only to have resolution. Because I was just thinking about this actually yesterday and Vivian and I were walking.

And I can't remember the exact context, but I referenced. Was it the. Who's the Dr. Seuss who's. When you had the pink button and the bite button. And it's basically a great story about racism.

The Sneetches. The Sneetches on the beaches. Some had stars on DARs.

Great. And Seuss did some of the best.

Work on unraveling bias, racism and predisposition.

Did you see his work before that Nazi propaganda cartridge? No wonder he was able to unwind it because he was on both sides of the argument, right?

Yeah, I did.

I grew up with the Sneetches on the beaches because I was a white South African and I've, you know, my parents read that stuff to us as kids because they were supporters of the ANC and we really needed to get that stuff. But Seuss was able to do it because both sides.

Right. So here's the point I haven't spent, Yeah. I haven't spent time thinking through structuring something. If I were going to create a bias construction or deconstruction kit, what would that look like?

So again, story I think is always important and I think metaphor always really helps. Like when you can, when you can take somebody.

I'm not a big fan of the current Brexit movement. I, I, I, I, I don't call myself a full on globalist, but what I'm really, really clear about is that as long as countries are competing with each other, then they're going to be willing to take shortcuts that they, that, that are damaging to the, to the environment and, and what have you. And so I'm not a big fan of that. I'm a big fan of the world coming together. And, and, and so how do I try and explain that to somebody? So you know, I, I, I think metaphors, when things are so big and so complex, it's hard for somebody to see it. And so the metaphor that I've been using, that which was brought up at the last TLC meeting is, you know, you're a 17 year old kid and you're a swimmer and you decide, hey, this swimming business is like rife with sports enhancing drugs. And I think it's disgusting and I'm going to change it. I'm going to be the force. I often think about my parents in this light. My parents, my grandparents were racist. I don't blame them. They grew up as racist. My grandmother's dog was a racist little schnauzer that barked at black people. It's not the dog's fault. The dog learned the racism from my grandmother who learned it from her grandmother. How did my parents break that? How did my parents break, how did they not allow themselves to be influenced by every racist thing around them and, and support the anc? And I, I, I'm so proud of my parents for that. And so I think about that 17 year old kid going, I want to be that person. I'm not gonna, I'm gonna change this industry. So he starts investigating how to change the industry and he realizes that the position of greatest influence would be for him to become chairman of the organizing body of the Sport. So at 17 he makes the decision like Arnold Schwarzenegger deciding he wanted to be a Hollywood actor. So he decided, I'll become Mr. Universe because that'll get me the contacts in Hollywood. Like this kid's like that determined. So he starts doing the research and he finds out that most of the chairman of the board positions have been held by people in their 40s. So he knows he's got some years to go. And then he looks at the resumes and he finds that almost every single one of them was a multiple meddler and a multiple national champion. And so it's that day that he decides that he has to use steroids. It's the only way he's going to get to the position that he wants to get to, to create the change that he wants to create. And so I think that metaphor speaks to so many of the environmental problems we have at the moment. It speaks to exactly what's wrong with Brexit that we have. And so I think that the formula for creating the ability for people to see both sides of the argument is to tell stories that have them viscerally feel the emotion from both sides of the argument.

Sure, that makes a ton of sense. So even that story you just told right now, where did you pull that from? Do you remember where it came from?

I just think in metaphors, they just come to me on stage or somebody like. I don't know why. I've always thought, you know, I always liked that Einstein expression that if you don't understand something well enough to explain it to a five year old, you don't understand it. And so I often thought that the best way to explain something to a five year old is to reduce it to a metaphor at the level of the understanding of a five year old. My favorite definition of relativity, Einstein said relativity was why you could. Why sitting on a park bench beside. But why sitting on your bare bum on a hot stove for two minutes feels like an eternity and sitting on a park bench beside a pretty girl for two hours feels like two minutes. I just like thinking that way. Putting it into this.

Yeah, that's an awesome one. That's an awesome one. And what I'm interested in doing is. And I'll set this up for the reason why. So right now I'm really fascinated with comedy. I've been studying comedy construction and.

I don't. Have you looked@masterclass.com? have we talked about that? So for 180 bucks a year, you get access to some of the brightest and most successful actors, actresses, writers, screenwriters.

Everything's incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I watched Steve Martin doing comedy. And the way he got me right from the start. So I was on a plane and so to make this horrible. I'm on the plane's wifi. So I got to wait for this. Right? That made it all that more delicious. And of course it's stopping and starting, but finally it downloaded the first chapter. And the way he begins the program is by making a whole bunch of mistakes and starting and stopping and starting and stopping. And then it wasn't. I got it, but I didn't get it. And then it was like, this is so Steve Martin, he did such a great job. And Steve's one of these guys, has had quite a life, like a lot of people his age. I have a philosophy that anyone who did comedy in the 70s probably snorted several truckloads full of coke. And eventually that affects your brain. Okay. Robin Williams is That why his hair.

Went white like that so fast.

It's always been that way. It's always been that way. So he goes through. And by the time I had watched the series, which was one flight, I watched the whole program. I constructed two or three what I think were really good, poignant jokes based upon what he shared is because he broke it down into such little chunks. And so the reason I'm so fascinated with capability, amplification, breaking stuff down, coming up with the formulas right now is I've arrived at the conclusion that right now, if we want to create the greatest shift in change on the planet, to do it through comedy, storytelling and community, physical community, part of that's just because the social media.

More and more is becoming less and less trustworthy. And I talked about this at tlc, this whole notion of AI is going to be able to generate fake video, fake audio. You can construct any reality. You simply won't be able to tell what is real, what isn't real, and.

The masses are going to be affected by it. I think the.

And they're willing to believe anything already.

Yeah, yeah.

And.

And it's. I mean, they always have, right?

No, but I mean, let's look at the electoral process. There are things that certain candidates and certain political people say, they know it to be a lie, and they say it knowing that their base won't Google the truth. Truth. So imagine how much more powerful that becomes with Deepfake, how much more powerful it becomes when. I mean, that's just frightening.

Yeah, totally. So that brings us back to whoever has the best stories wins. I think the thing that you said, which is, if I can activate as many of your buttons as quickly as possible. That's the genius of Trump, quite frankly, is he just goes right for the raw sores, test something out. And he can always lie later and say, I didn't say that, or that's not. You know, he can backtrack however he wants or. But he tests it out, got real time data with polling. He knows if it's activated as bass or not, it's pure, unadulterated genius. And if that were backed up with, you know, press the button and then tell a joke, make them laugh and tell a story. That really is the winning formula for deep persuasion. Yeah. And.

Take that one and run with it. I'm curious what you think.

Story. To me, it is all about story. And this is kind of silly, but, like, I've been asked many times, like, what movies have influenced me the most in terms of, like, my. The Way I think what movies and books and that kind of stuff. And this is really crazy, but at a basic level, like I'm sorry, do or do not, there is no try. Size matters not. Those stories mattered to me at 11 years old, right? They mattered to me. I thought about them. But the deeper one, the one that matters, not the one that really matters, not the one that really got me was so sorry to go Star wars here, but Luke Skywalker being brought into the chamber by Darth Vader and the emperor. And what does the emperor do? Pushes his buttons. That entire exercise is an object in the con in Invader and the Empire trying to control Luke by pushing his buttons, making him angry. If someone can make you angry, they can control you. And that was the whole thing that I learned watching that movie is if I allow people to make me angry, they own my ass. And that's what happened. Suddenly Luke reaches out and tries to kill him. He's gone into anger. And then they try to push the anger into rage and into hatred. And the further you go into anger, rage and hatred, the more controlled you are. And of course we're seeing that in the political system now. The last, like what happened in Britain, what happened in America was a lot of anger and hatred control dynamics. So stories are. And listen, you know, in the research for One Talk Away, I like, I, I found lots of positive examples. I found Mr. Rogers saving PBS with a six minute talk.

My favorite. He, he's still my, my favorite television guy. That and Bob Painter.

Bob the Painter. Well, I. Green Giant was pretty cool. No, I'm kidding. But, but like there's lots of positive examples, but here's the really shocking one. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that every great revolution has been started by powerful oration. He knew that over 10 years before he knew and he gave over 10,000 speeches. Like this thing you're talking about comedy, storytelling, metaphor, allegory. That is our primary tool of influence and it's incredibly powerful. And I'm at the point now where like, I love teaching this stuff, but I'm careful about who I teach it to when we run our academies. I'm selective about that. You know, I had this woman, she did our level one program on this and she wanted to come to the deep stuff that we do.

Fantastic exclusivity insertion there that makes me want it even more.

I didn't think we're already sold out for next year, so don't even worry about it. That's actually true. But I'm just playing the game. But this woman came up to me having come to one of our speaking academy programs. She goes, I don't think you're going to let me come to level two. I really want to come, but I don't think you'll let me. And I said, why not? And she goes, I work for, and I won't say the name of the company. I'll just tell you it was one of the largest tobacco manufacturers. And I said, you're right, I won't. I. I said, wait, wait, what do you do there? And she goes, I work in marketing. And I said, you absolutely can't come, and if I'd known, you wouldn't have been at this first one in the first place. And she goes, but wait. My job in the company is to move people to smokeless tobacco. My job is to get people to quit smoking. Now, I know that you don't agree with the smokeless tobacco and the. And the E cigarettes and shit, but that's my job, is to get people to move in that direction. And I would be using what you teach me to get people off cigarettes. And I. I let her come. And three months later, she quit her job. It was one of those things, like, the influence that we had on her was not simply to give her the tools and resources to have the influence she wanted. It was to recognize that wasn't the best place to put the influence.

Okay. And what I. So I'm going to rip apart this example right now because it's really interesting. So I was paying attention to my own reactions and knowing enough about persuasion influence.

What you displayed there in the story is a fantastic activation tool. So it creates, first of all, exclusivity.

Elevates you and your brand by saying, only people who do moral things are allowed to come here. And we were joking earlier, but it's like all my events are sold out for the next year. Nothing better than creating desire, demand, and maybe they can squeeze one in. We'll put you on the waiting list.

Right.

And also.

Let'S see, there was one other thing that you did that was really interesting and whether it was intentional or not, but it's super fascinating.

There's only one thing that was intentional. The rest of it was me just telling the story. Yeah, yeah.

And it's a great story and no matter what. But I like thinking through this process, which is how can I ethically tell stories that influence, persuade, create desire, create demand, create a sense of exclusivity and feeling special as you listen to it. And the fact that the human condition is such that most of those activators are common amongst all people. It's really interesting, right?

It is. And, you know, I see a lot like when NLP became also, you know, famous and popular, really largely because of Tony Robbins, I became really fascinated by it. And so I studied it and I went and studied with Richard Bandler and I, I very quickly decided there was never, I became a specialist, certified trainer in nlp. Never taught a single person, never once taught a single person. And I, because I recognized that the majority of the people I saw going to learn about it were in deep need of their own psychotherapy, not needing to learn powerful tools of psychotherapy to use on others. But there's something else I recognize, and that is.

Coca Cola's using it, Donald Trump is using it, Hostess is using it. And if you don't learn what they're doing, then you are powerless to defend yourself against it. I, I one of my favorite commercials, but it's one that I think is one of my least favorite, in truth, because of what it sells, is somebody went and bought all kinds of CCTV footage of random acts of kindness, just bank machines and street, you know, just random acts of kindness. The most gorgeous things. Like this woman walks away from the bank machine, her wallet drops out of her pocket. The guy behind her picks it up, taps her on the shoulder, gives it back. All real, all real CCTV woman trying to cross the road in the, in the middle of winter in the Ukraine, and two young men come and they grab her by the arms, stop the traffic and walk her through the blizzard across the road. Story after story after story, and you're feeling good and your humanity is being restored, and you're feeling good, and you're feeling good and you're feeling good. And at the peak of feeling good, boom. Coca Cola open. Happiness. Do you know, I don't hate a lot of things, but I quite literally hate that substance. I was addicted to it until I was 18 years old. It ruined my teeth, my life. Like it was, it was, it was destroying me. And what's really crazy to this day, when I see somebody drinking Pepsi, I wonder, why aren't they drinking Coke? Like, I am still a Coke fan, despite my absolute opposition to the substance as a substance. I noticed that when I travel around Africa where Coke completely won the battle over Pepsi, I see Coke signs and I feel good. I can't stand the substance. I don't. If I was into banning stuff, I'd ban that before I ban half the other stuff that's been banned. But the advertising is so good that the Pavlovian link up to pleasure has been created. So for if we don't take the responsibility and study influence and A, use it for good and B, know it to disarm it from being used on us, we're just sheep, right?

I don't know if I told you this before. So one of the reasons I studied it and I got into all this stuff is because I am a total sucker. I just believe people naturally like, oh, really? Yeah, I just fall for everything. You know, if there was a and and I am like growing up, there'll be a thousand people. The street scammer picks me. It's just something about me, right? And they're just like, boop, there you are. Hey, there's a sucker. And I use it as a defense mechanism. And one of the things that I've done, my adapted skill and I. So I did this for a reason. I did it at first as an as by accident. So here's, here's the way it works would be I'd get on stage and I'd say, what I'm about to do right now is very persuasive. And I'm actually going to deconstruct step by step how I persuade and influence an audience to want to buy something. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to present something to you and is this. And I had a million dollar day doing this and I was teaching people how to influence, persuade, do their own events and create products. And the way I present it is I'm about to make a product for you. I'm going to present an offer, I'm going to show you step by step and I will interrupt myself periodically and show you exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it in the order that I'm doing it. At the end, I'm going to make an offer. And here's based upon what I've done in the past, probably 30 or so of you are going to stand up and run to the back of the room even before I, you know, I, I tell you what the price is and then by the time we're done, about 35% of the room is going to end up investing in this course. So I just want you to know that up front and just because these things just flat out work and they work very consistently. So you're ready to go. I asked for permission. Da da da da. And of course everything happened exactly the way I described it, which could have been seating for this whole thing, you know?

Right, yeah. But hypnotic suggestibility.

Yes. And so what I found, and my rule always has been, I'm not going to use any of this stuff on someone who I. Without talking about it and revealing that that's what I'm doing. And.

Also, I'm not going to manipulate someone.

That I don't think is capable of. And manipulate isn't the word I'm looking for. But I'm not going to use these tools with folks who just aren't ready to learn them too and use them in their own lives. Because I just think that if there is such a thing as karma, that's bad karma.

Okay, I have a couple ahead. One is the word manipulation. It gets a bad rap.

It does, it does. I found myself trying to decide one way or another if I was going to use it.

It. I just manipulated those glasses. Yep. It simply means to effect I've manipulated. The issue is not whether you manipulate or not, it's why. To me, that's it. So if. If you and I are in a theater and we notice that it's on fire and people don't believe us, we're going to use whatever tools of influence we can to manipulate them to get out of the building. So I'm. I'm not against that. If the intent is absolutely pure.

I totally understand what you mean.

So then the other issue is, I would put to you, I have a theory as to why it is that the guy picks you out of the room and why it is that you were gullible. My experience of you is that you do what you say you're going to do. My experience of you is that you do what you say you're going to do. And so that makes you a victim of something they call in psychology, the problem of the other mind. Because you cannot see the world through somebody else's eyes. You can only see the world through what you imagine to be their eyes, but still through your own value construct, your own values. Construct means that if you are talking to this dude over here and he says what he's going to do because you do what you say you're going to do, your assumption is he's going to do what he says he's going to do, but he's not. And the kicker is, is that he knows that he's not, so he doesn't trust you. So people who are not very trustworthy don't trust and don't get burnt. People who are very trustworthy, they get burnt because they assume that people are operating with the same understanding of honesty, integrity they are. And that's where I think when we learn these tools of influence and so on, I think that the biggest responsibility, I think it's incredibly valuable. What you said is tell them what you're going to do. I tell people, guys, I'm going to be talking about Wildfit today. And the reason I'm going to be talking about Wildfit today is some of you are type 2 diabetic or you're headed that way, or you're overweight, or you're sleeping in the afternoons and you wish you weren't, or you've got fertility issues. And my job is to help you improve that. So I'm going to do that two ways. I'm going to give you enough information right here, right now, so that you could make lasting change for yourself. And then I'm going to do my level best to get you to do one of our programs so that over the next 90 days, I can make the change happen for you. I have no problem telegraphing the punch because I'm not here to manipulate from the dark side. And so I like the way you put that.

That's a well done. I mean, you did that in about 30 seconds. 40 seconds. Yeah. Really nicely packaged. Good job.

There's something that we teach in our business program that we call inceptive marketing or inception marketing. And inception marketing is based on the movie idea of. In the movie, they would put people into a sleep state and then go in bed, thoughts in their dreams, and then they would wake up as though the idea was their own idea idea. So we developed inception marketing to create a model of marketing that would do the same thing, that would create marketing campaigns that were so good, that were so.

Engaging, that didn't even look like marketing, but would leave the client with the desire to buy without ever having sold them. And I, when I landed my first contract with Tony Robbins, I did an inceptive story on the stage. That's what got the deal. Like, they told me Tony would never stay in the room for my presentation. He's not going to do that. He stayed in the room for three and a half hours, hours. Every seventh, every second sentence I said was being said in Chinese live. It wasn't headset translation. There was a guy on the stage and, man, those guys are good. They're not translators, they're impersonators. When Tony's up there and he's going, if you want to make massive changes in your life, you've got to make a decision and then the guy goes.

Like, they're really good. But he stayed in the room for three and a half hours for me to talk with this guy doing every second sentence. But that's because there was a structure of a story I told. And I now realize this was actually the answer to the question you asked me. What's the formula? The formula is to tell a story that is so engaging and so interesting.

Just tell the story that it will.

Pull the client through and it will guide them through the decision process. That allows them to come to the realization that they want or need your product without you having to tell them. Short version of the way I did this was I told a story about one of my first times going hunting with the Bushmen. And I recognized something about hunting with the Bushman. And that was that if I'm hunting with them, they're going to starve because they're quiet. And I'm not. Not like, I, I. I'm a pretty good bush guy, but, man, they are quiet. Running through the bush, and I'm snapping twigs and banging the ground. And so then I thought to myself, and I'm on stage, I want to keep Tony in the room. So first step of influence, keep Tony in the room. Because if I can keep in the room, I think he'll book me. So what do I do? I go. So here I am, I'm with the Bushman, and I realize I'm making all this noise, and they're really quiet. And I realized, if you see somebody else getting the result that you want, what do you do? You model them. Tony goes his material, right? So then I've modeled them. What were they doing? Running on the fronts of their feet.

Just like any kid would, trying to be quiet, running around the house. And so I switched to running on the fronts of my feet. And I was quiet, not just because my impact was reduced on the ground, but also because I was able to pick my steps on the ground more carefully because I'm springier. I got so quiet that the Bushman that was in front of me actually turned around to see if I was still there. Like, it worked. And then after three hours of running like this, I realized something monumentous, and that was that my knee didn't hurt. Because years before, I'd run the London Marathon and damaged my knee so badly that at the age of 30 years old, I'd had to give up running permanently. I couldn't run anything more than a mile and a half without excruciating pain. But here I'd been Running for three hours and I had no pain in my knee. And so I started thinking about that, like, why, why do I not have pain in my knee? What's different? Well, I'm running on the fronts of my feet, need. And I started thinking like, okay, so.

What'S going on right now? Deconstruct this.

Well, tell me what's going on for you. Let me finish it and you tell me, what are you thinking?

Oh yeah, well, stop right now.

What are you thinking?

Well, so obviously I want to hear what's going to go on. And you're revealing step by step, little nuggets that might be useful for me because, shoot, maybe what if either, if I have a bad knee, this might be useful. And if someday I am old and I have a bad knee, I might as well remember this and I'll have a good tool in my tool chest. Right, Right. So I'm learning new capabilities.

Yeah. Plus, it's entertaining. Plus I've taken you into a place you've never been before. I've. You can see the trees, of course, on stage I flesh the story out and you can hear the birds calling in the day. I mean, it's. I'm taking them there. So then I begin wondering why my knee's not hurting. And I realized that I'm running on the fronts of my feet. And I realized that I'm landing on the ground with lower impact. And I realized that when I was running on the backs of my feet, I was landing on my heel. And that was causing my skeletal system to absorb the shock rather than skeletal.

System, if you're an American.

I'm not an American.

It's aluminum. No, I'm kidding. It's aluminum.

I think. Isn't he a judge or a former judge who passed away not long ago?

I have no idea.

Skeleta.

It's the skeletal system, if you prefer. But the fact is, if I'm landing on my heels, my skeletal system is taking the. Is taking the shock. When I land on the fronts of my feet, my ligaments, my muscles, my cartilage, my soft tissue is taking a shock. And I started thinking, maybe I never had a bad knee, maybe I had a bad style of running. And then that got me thinking about those dumbass. You've seen them, right? Those dumbass toe shoes, you know, the fingers, like, I, I started thinking about those.

You mean the things that really, really stink when you wear them?

Yeah, I started thinking about those. And then I went home after that trip and I went into a store and I went into the store and I waited. Have you ever gone to a new store and you like wait for everybody to leave before you buy the thing you're there to buy? Yeah.

You mean I don't know what you were buying for condoms and maxi pads?

Well, in my case, I was buying those stupid ass running shoes and I went and bought them and I went out for a run and I ran 10km and my knee didn't hurt. And I'm now 49 years old and I run regularly. Now what happens after I finish telling the story is I break down for them what I did. And what's crazy is I, I do not sell barefoot running shoes. I'm not invested in a bear shirt running shoe company. But I have literally sol thousands of pairs of those shoes without ever selling them, without ever discussing a feature benefit, without ever creating a scarcity, without ever saying you have to sign up now, without ever doing any of that stuff. Because what I simply did is had them realize on their own it might be a good idea.

Right, right. So the bottom line is you told the story that they could project themselves into and, and you painted it by activating all their primary senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch. See, so I was tasting my feet. No, no, no. Okay. But anyway, I get it. And in the midst you gave me some tools. Present tools, future tools, potentially an insight for. Well, maybe that's the reason why. So I gave you a new positive reality, a future reality. What are some of the other elements of this that you think are going on?

The biggest challenge there exists in marketing today is noise. Right? Like just even getting people's attention. Attention. So the minute you start and we've are, we've become incredibly good at deleting anything that looks like sales. We can delete them with our software, we can delete them with our mind. You just don't even see it anymore because it's so noisy. So the minute you are trying to sell something, people are deleting, deleting, deleting. But what happens in this case is you're saying, I want to share with you a compelling story about this time I went hunting with hunter gatherer Bushman. That's not a sales pitch, that's a story. And everybody is paying thousands of dollars for stories. The reason Hollywood will spend $300 million making a two hour movie is love stories. And so you offer them a good story, you tell that story really well. And then the key thing is that the story is constructed to have them realize. See, when somebody realizes they want to buy something, it's totally different than when you convince them. They don't cancel, they don't ask for their money back. They don't have buyer's remorse because it was their own idea. In fact, you can tell the difference because if you've done it really well, they say to you, I've always wanted to do that. That that's when you know you've done it inceptively, that you've incepted the concept. Because they go, it was my idea. You didn't convince me. You didn't convince me. You didn't sell me. You didn't feature benefit me. I just arrived at the realization on my own, it was my idea, therefore I have not been influenced. I've done this for myself.

So good. That's so good. So keep on deconstructing it. And then I'm going to show something to our audience. Hopefully they'll be able to see it. It. This is one of my favorite.

Hopefully you can see this friends at home. So it says, real eyes realize real lies. And that was that Burning man.

Drawn on a. I don't even remember what it was. It was a building and it really grabbed me.

Oh, my cat helped me out. I'm having major fomo. I wanted to go. And then we decided not to go. And now I want to go.

I saw that in the. In the WhatsApp thread. So here's what I can tell you.

So I'm gonna go for my fifth, and I think it's gonna be my last time.

Oh, you're like, look at this. Scarcity's in.

Yeah.

Where do I sign up?

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's actually true because I've. It's. It's life changing.

And.

And at this point in my life, I'm more interested in community, pleasure. Not like that. Yeah, it didn't. But I mean, going somewhere that's extraordinary, that is warm and clean and not a dust. And.

I invested more in my costume this year than I ever had before. I'll actually show it to you before you leave. It is so freaking badass. It's like right out of Dune badass. And.

It is. It's life changing.

I think it would be a game changer and a life changer for you. You. But just for closing this loop here, back to the stories and the formulas, what I'm imagining as I'm listening to you right now, which is confirmed. So confirmation bias set in.

You know, this is why I'm enrolling in stand up and.

Improv. And I'm going to get voice lessons.

I've never done vocal training.

You want to go up and see Roger Love with me? Me?

Yeah.

I was going to go. I was going to go see him tomorrow, but we couldn't make a.

Okay. All right. So I actually was just about to reach out to him because he and I have had a relationship, but I Any and I. He's. He's given me. He's granted me a day anytime I want. I just haven't taken him up on it though. For those of you listening right now, Roger Love is the guy who is taught. Oh. Who is Bradley Cooper. And a star is B born. You go backwards. Wow.

The Sam Elliott voice.

No, I'm talking about Bradley.

Bradley Cooper did Sam Elliott for. For Sarsborne. It's phenomenal. I. I couldn't believe it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. He talks like Sam Elliott the whole way through and all of a sudden Sam Elliott walks out. And then later in an interview it. Bradley apparently tried to get Sam for a long time and Sam kept saying no. And then when he did his voice, he like the whole thing about stealing his brother's voice to sing. Oh, I didn't know that Roger was involved in that. That's awesome. Him.

And the next one he was involved in was whoever. Oh, it was Joaquin Phoenix singing like Johnny Cash taught him. And who's. Who sang alongside Joaquin. Pretty famous actress. Our smart people who are listening right now and watching. No, anyway, she. I can bring it up online but. But she was taught by him and apparently had never sung before. Like Judy Cash, whoever Johnny's ex wife is or former wife. But yeah, he's the real deal and he's worked with tons and tons of rock stars. I mean, you know his story. He's an amazing, amazing guy. So yeah, top on top on the list because these are to me the most important.

Capabilities to learn when you get right down to it, are. Are entertainment. And comedy is a great way to hook them. If they, if they. You make them laugh, they'll love you.

Yeah.

If you can storytell your way. And improv, meaning get past the fears. Now this is something else really interesting. I, I came across.

I'm gonna.

I'll find the data for this. There's a whole bunch of new brain research that's been released and it's very recently and it is about.

How someone who practices improv and standup comedy, specifically the brain's ability to.

Essentially event based upon a empathic reaction and response that is reading an audience and to be able to.

Very, very quickly speak or entertain their way out of a circumstance. In other words, if your fear of losing someone's energy or love or like or attention gets triggered, it's 17 times faster than normal. And it happens to be a lasting skill that sticks for quite a long time, even as you start to age. So. And again, I went down this rabbit hole of research because I just again started studying and thinking through this lens of how do you do this? And the formula for comedy and, and also voice control and comedic expression. And when you get right down to it, look at Disney. If you haven't looked at the number of businesses Disney owns, the properties, the value, Fox and Hulu and $4.2 billion.

To buy a space opera. They spent $4.2 billion to buy things. Star Wars Universe.

I know that.

Yeah.

And so tell me again through your lens here, I'm curious what your perspective is on the formula. It comes from an authentic place, but the formula for creating great entertainment. What do you think of this?

Well, I think that it comes down to one fundamental thing, and that is that if you ever want to influence anybody, if you ever want to influence anybody, you have to know something about them. You have to know what their values are or what they're curious about or what they're interested in. And, you know, like, for the most part, people live in this kind of zone of boredom, and they're willing to pay a huge amount of money to break out of that zone of boredom with TV or books or drugs or alcohol or lots of fun positives.

It comes down to state changing.

It really does. And so in that case, it's like whether the good side with comedy is that it releases all these beautiful endorphins and it makes people feel good. And I think that it allows you to say challenging, politically questionable, potentially triggerable things in a way, with permission, and then therefore causes anything in rapport.

Right?

Yeah. And so suddenly you have the permission to say stuff that you might not be able to say in a lecture because you've taken the risk. Right. And it's interesting. My team often talks to me about comedy because many of my talks are really funny. But the joke is, is the joke is I don't plan them that way. And, and I, I. One of the things I really want to do is exactly what you're doing. I want to start understanding how I do that. Why. Why was that talk? We, we measure our talks in our speaking academy based on, we call IPMs. So how many impacts do you create per minute? And humor is one of those things that's an impact. Why are some of these talks running four or five IPMs? Like, I didn't plan those jokes. Where did they come from?

Yeah, part of it is because you read, you knew in your loot, losing the audience or you know what. I do. I mean, I'm looking at how, how much attention. What's the word? Engagement. Yeah, you can feel engagement. You learn. I happen to believe that speaking is in fact a spiritual act and that people project energy and feelings and we become sensitive. It is. There's no question that it activates a new sense. And everyone who I know, who I can talk about this with would agree, you know, and. And it feeds you spiritually as well. And so once you learn to sensitize and, and it's like, why do you, why do so many people, many people that we know, they're stage addicts really. They're just energy, attention, engagement addicts. And you're activating parts of your brain that simply don't get moving without something like this. But after studying and listening to and knowing quite a few comedians, I've talked to them about this and I found that as far as I can tell, stand up improv comedy provides the highest degree of massive.

Brain spirit food. Because like, if you think, I think to me, for example, the idea of being Mick Jagger, someone would be like, wow, it'd be awesome. But to me, singing the same freaking song for 50 years is my. That's unadulterated hell.

Yep, I'm with you.

Yeah. So.

Back to this. And you know, if you want to persuade, you want to educate, you want to entertain, you learn these mechanisms, you sensitize this part of your brain.

I can't think of a better capability. And then from there, it's easy to create products and it's easy to write books, it's easy to serve, it's easy to contribute. You first have to be granted access and permission and this is the easiest way. And it doesn't require any real estate.

Yeah. And it's tough because the minute people start to recognize that, and I think the careful line I want to walk is I don't want to get so tied into that result that I become scripted and formulaic. And I. And that's the difficult, that's the difficult thing because, you know, like, I've had many of my friends attempt to convince me to go do comedy. Like go, go do open mics at comedy clubs and such. And what I found is that laughter for me is super fun. My ego enjoys that. But what feeds my soul is transformation. So if I go do a talk that's really, really funny, but doesn't facilitate a great deal of transformation, my ego likes that a great deal, and I could get addicted to that. I could. In the short term, my. But that's interesting. I wouldn't sleep that well. But if I did a talk, got a few laughs, but people walked up to me and said, oh, my God, I will never eat that way again, or, oh, my God, I will never talk to my child that way again, or whatever it is that I've influenced in them, that's what feeds my soul, okay? And so if I can use humor, you know, to get there, then. Then it's powerful.

So I have a client right now. I'll just tell you. I. I know. I don't think he'd mind this story because he's. He loves this kind of attack attention. His name's Charlie Epstein, and it turns out he's been trained. He's done theater, he did plays, he's been on Broadway. He's funny as hell. He studied standup, and he's been in the financial services business for a long time. And we're just talking about how can he grow, because he's got a great business. As far as I can tell, he probably doesn't need to work anymore. But I'm like, so what would light you up? And we went back and forth because he came to me and says, do you think we can work on your business?

And. And.

Bottom line is we spent a day brainstorming. And I said, I got the answer for you. Just become a financial comedian. And he's got these amazing stories. And once I heard a little bit of just his natural, normal self, I said, wrap you around your message, and not only are you going to be able to go somewhere and light up an audience, but it's going to be on purpose. And you're going to get more enrollments, but you're going to do it in a way that lights you up in a mat. And so anyway, he said absolutely yes. And that was what caused him to raise his hand and say yes. And.

What I've done is I've already talked to some comedians who are friends, who are professional comedians and said, hey, you want to come and work with us? So. So bottom line is we're going to put together a comedy brainstorm. It's sort of like writing tv, comedic tv. And it just came out of this little conversation. So the reason I'm telling you this, which isn't. It's perfectly obvious, is Just think if you could change and transform lives in a 10 minute or a 30 minute set. So we're talking about time, compression, value compression all in one place. And I can just again, hear a lot of people going, I could never.

And.

The thing is, bear in mind, the minute you got somebody laughing, their guard is down.

Right?

Their guard is down. And that's the awesome opportunity. Like I. Okay, this is kind of cute. I am planning a comedy book and I probably will put together a comedy 90 minute kind of comedy show that'll go along with the book. And this is probably about two years.

90 minutes is a damn long time. You know, the pros do it for six, 60.

I know it's a year, eight months.

To do 60 minutes of material.

Yeah. Watch the way I write material. But I won't know until I actually begin. But what happened in my case was I will often talk about parenting. I don't consider myself any expert in parenting. I think I have a 22 year old son and a 3 year old girl and I talk about parenting. And so people ask me, how do I get my kids to eat this way, in that way? So one day somebody in the audience said to me, how do you feel about attachment parenting? Parenting? And attachment parenting was this, you know.

Is that, is that the one where you let your kids sleep with you?

It's, it's everything. It's like the kid should be attached to the mother.

I'm gonna say officially, it's the stupidest thing ever in the universe. I know. We have friends who did it and they never had sex. Men eventually almost divorced them. Horrible problems. It's stupid. Okay. And that's okay if someone doesn't like that. All right, keep on going.

Well, there you go. So somebody asked how I felt about attachment parenting.

And what was your answer?

My answer was. Was somewhat more measured. My answer was that the intention behind attachment parenting is exactly right. The child should feel a constant and continual sense of attachment to its community. But that shouldn't be solely the mother. It should be a continual feeling of security and attachment to the community. And I said, as a flippant comment, I said, which is why I'm writing a book right now called Detachment Parenting. Why Suboptimal Parenting is Optimal. And then I registered detachmentparenting.com and said, I'm doing it because I'm not writing it from the perspective of, of a expert. But it's funny. There are so many hilarious stories about parenting.

It's good. And I'm going to just insert my observational What I believe to be a fact. Needy mother, she had some sort of distorted problem going on into the game. And again, I have a limited window. This is not scientific data. I'm not a scientist.

I'll put it in a slightly nicer way.

Nice, nice way. Go.

Being a mother is an incredibly scary and uncertain thing. And every expert out there is trying to tell you exactly what to do. And somehow the most powerful bloody experts came along and said, this is how you're supposed to do it. And gave them a tremendous amount of certainty and then created a community where women started competing with each other to see who could be the most attached parent. And it just fed on itself. And it's. I don't think it's healthy for mother or baby. But now I figure the best way to deal with that is not quite as like, vehemently as you, but with humor. You're making my point for me here.

Well, and I've. So I've got one, one completely random but horrible story. So I know of two women who practice this and.

And their seven year old would come up and breastfeed.

Right in. Like they'd be around people and a 7 year old would go underneath the shirt.

You jealous?

It. It's creepy. It's just so creepy. And man, I just. It was very hard to. To know.

Yeah. And so, you know, and I'll tell you, a lot of people in attachment parenting would say, that's not attachment parenting. And somebody else would say, that is. And I'm like, you know what, what we. Here's one of my big parenting realizations. Are there things that happened to you as a child that you would protect with violence your children against experiencing?

Yeah, of course there are things that happened to me as a child that I would, with violence, protect my children from experiencing. Only I am grateful for every single one of them and the spiritual development they gave me. I like my life. I like who I've become. And so those things are the greatest gifts. In other words, as patients, parents, our inclination is to protect our children against spiritual development.

Yeah.

And that's. That's attachment parenting. Yeah.

Yeah. I just had the very similar conversation with Vivian today about this very topic. It's so strange how this comes around. So. Well, let me ask you this question. I think we can land our spaceship here. I'm curious.

If you have, first of all, any interesting summary statements you'd like to make before I ask you the magic question, which is where do people go to learn more about you, et cetera, et cetera.

All Right. I have one. And it's a theory I have. And.

The theory operates like this, that almost all individualized suffering, almost all the pain that we create for ourselves in our world, almost all the suffering that we experience as people, people result from something I call the evolution gap. And it's the gap between our physical and psychological evolution, the evolution of our DNA, and the pace of change in our society. And so, so many of the things that we've talked about today, when we talk about amplifier amplification of capability, when we talk about increased quality of life, increasing our experience of being here, I believe that our job is to notice that most of our dissatisfaction is because our systems, we're living in a society that our instincts don't match. Match. And so our job now becomes to close that gap wherever possible, to close that gap nutritionally, to close that gap socially. We, we've, we've put ourselves in a place where we're supposed to be social, tactile beings. And now we live in small, like, you know, you know, nuclear family type structures without a community around us. And that causes a bunch of issues. And that just goes on and on and on. So my job, as I see it in my life for me, is to close that gap wherever I can, to not let my instincts, not let my body hurt because of soc, not let my instincts be triggered by the things in society that I didn't evolve for. And that's, I think, at the underpinning of just about everything we talked about today.

Nicely done. Good. All right, well, final question. Where do you want to send people to learn more about you, Your programs, courses, WildFit, et cetera, et cetera, et Cetera?

My website, www.eric.ee and of course, if people want to find out more about WildFit, that's getwildfit.com and I'm actually really only active on Instagram. I have a Facebook here, but other people might be involved in doing that, but I'm, I am on Instagram personally.

All right, that's good. So let's take this baby home. I'm gonna feed you. I've got something special.

I'm in.

I, I, I brought back some fresh Alaska seafood salmon I caught myself. My son caught too. So I'm gonna feed you on the barbie tonight and who knows, you'll see, just get more interesting from there.

Let's do it.

Appreciate you, man.

Me too. Thanks very much. This has been fun.

You got it.