Eric Edmeades - Your Diet Is Killing You: How To Reverse Diabetes & Take Control of Your Life

Full transcript: Eric Edmeades on London Real

2:29 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is…

2:40 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Eric Edmeades, the health coach, business speaker, and author. You are a leading authority in the study of behavioral change dynamics and have shared the stage with names like Sir Richard Branson and President Bill Clinton. Your latest book, Post Diabetic, explores the realities of those suffering with diabetes and the dangerous influence of big food manufacturers.

3:03 You then break down a clear method for reversing pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. Ultimately, you believe that by adopting a lifestyle that mimics the seasonal cycles of our ancestors, people can improve their overall health. Eric, welcome to London Real. Thanks for having me. It’s great having you.

3:20 I think we jump right in here, and I’m going to start with a quote that you have said that maybe ruffled a lot of feathers in a lot of places. And you have said that, quote, type 2 diabetes is optional, and in most cases, reversible. This means that if you don’t have to get it, no matter which relatives of yours might have had it, and it means that if you do have it, you don’t have to, end quote. As we hear that, the shock waves go over big pharma, big food, big media, big government.

3:49 Why is that such a dangerous thing to say in this day and age? Managing diabetes is incredibly profitable. You know, managing it works really well. In fact, as an example, I don’t know if you had the experience yet. I’m sure that as you cross through the 40s, and suddenly menus look a little harder to read, and you need those glasses, right?

4:12 Well, the FDA approved recently, an eye drop apparently, that you can drop in your eye, and for about eight hours, you don’t need your reading glasses. It softens the lens, and so on. But you have to take it daily, and I can’t help but wonder how much of the developmental budget for that eye drop was designed to make it daily rather than say monthly or permanent. Now, I know it’s a little bit jaded, but the truth of the matter is that the guy who discovered the principle of exogenous insulin and then how to synthesize insulin, Banting, he sold the patent for that to the University of Toronto for a dollar because he believed that insulin was a right.

4:42 He believed that people who needed it had the right to, and it shouldn’t become a big profit center. And somewhere between that transaction and today, it got lost in translation. Wow. And so, diabetes is probably one of the biggest ailments that requires that regular medication, which is what makes a lot of money for a lot of people. It’s probably that, and blood thinners and statins that is what profits this massive industry.

5:06 And like you said, that regular use of that is something that we should always be suspicious of, maybe for health reasons, but also for this profit reason. Yeah, I think that the profit reason is a big part of it. And then I think there’s also a human problem, and that is that humans very often want the easy path of the shortcut. And so, if you can imagine, if I’m your GP, and I sit down with you and I look, Brian, you’re pre-diabetic now, and what you’re going to need to do is give up some of your favorite foods.

5:36 You’re going to have to start doing some exercise you don’t really want to have to do, or I can just give you these pills. So, people also have to take a little bit of personal responsibility about opting for shortcuts because shortcuts come with costs. So, on the one side, you’ve got this obviously capitalistic drive toward profitability from pharma, which is that chronic diseases are profitable. And on the other side, you have consumers that want shortcuts, right?

6:01 And the stats are pretty shocking. You said that over 100,000 Americans die each year from diabetes complications. 7 out of 10 people in America are on the diabetic spectrum, and a lot of them don’t even know that. And that’s growing. Yeah, yeah.

6:13 It’s growing rapidly. I mean, in the 1970s, which you and I remember, you needed to be over 40 years old to get type 2 diabetes, basically. I mean, it was even at that point called adult onset diabetes, because with the state of the food industry and life in general at that time, it took 30 or 40 years to manifest the condition. Now, I mean, the way the food industry is today and the way life is today, you have teenagers that are pre-diabetic. It’s happening much more quickly, much more widespread.

6:42 And that’s devastating for a number of reasons. One of them is that diabetes is a damaging disease. In other words, the condition itself isn’t really the problem. It’s what the condition does to you over time. It causes circulatory problems and other things.

6:54 So you’re eventually going to lose your eyesight, for example. Well, if you get it in your 40s, it might take another 20 years to damage your eyes sufficiently to lose your eyesight. But if you get it when you’re 15, all that damage is going to be happening much more quickly. And I remember reading this thing recently about that we’re now birthing a generation of children that will have life expectancy, not simply shorter than their parents, but literally shorter than their parents.

7:18 That there are children on the hold now that won’t outlive their parents because of the way things are today with the explosion of diabetes and obesity. That’s crazy because I’ll have people in here like Peter Diamandis and David Sinclair, who are longevity experts, who are now telling me that kids born today are going to live to 120 and 140, except for the fact of what we’re feeding them. Yeah. And that could be actually taking it back down towards zero. That’s right.

7:44 The potential is for that incredible longevity. There’s no question about that. The reality is that with the food industry being the way it is today and with the education and food regulation being the way it is today, we’re seeing a drop. In fact, life expectancy I think in the US has now just downticked two years in a row or something like that. Like it shouldn’t be doing that.

8:03 There’s no reason for it to be doing that, but it is happening. Somebody posted a video on Twitter the other day and it was somebody who had stuck a camera on a tripod I think in New York City in the 50s. And you don’t see many of these things where it was like this kind of non-intentionally made video and it just showed people walking by. And all the comments were fascinating. It’s like, wow, nobody’s overweight.

8:24 It was just really interesting. Yeah. And if you were doing a casting call to reshoot that scene, it wouldn’t be so easy to get the cast lined up. Oh, and it’s just like, so then you then ask these questions. You’re asking a lot.

8:33 Like what was different back then? It’s not like everybody was going to the gym. It’s not like everybody was doing intermittent fasting. So then what are the other culprits? It’s probably what was on the shelves of the supermarket at the end of the day, right?

8:49 And so what has changed and what are the big red flags that people need to be aware of? And I love the fact you also link it back to personal responsibility because just pointing the finger at big food and big pharma isn’t the solution either. One of our big messages, and this is very, very important for anybody who’s carrying extra weight, particularly if they’ve gone out into the obese range or they developed type 2 diabetes. The first message we have for them is actually the opposite of that.

9:13 It’s to say it’s not your fault. It isn’t your fault because you’re living in an environment with education, food regulation, and food production around you that basically makes it very difficult to maintain a healthy lifestyle. So it’s not their fault, but it is their responsibility. Nobody else will take the kind of responsibility for their health that they need to. So once we say, hey, look, this has been done to you, but now you need to do something about it.

9:34 And that’s our job is to help them figure out how to do that. So in order to understand the nature of the problem, one of the things we want to figure out is what caused it. You can’t solve it if you don’t know what caused it. And that’s difficult. I mean, what humans very often want to do is find the one thing.

9:50 Oh, it’s this. It’s sugar caused. High fructose corn. It’s high fructose corn. That’s got to be the problem.

9:55 But I would suggest to you that as the Romans knew about diabetes, and they did, they did because what they would do is line up soldiers in a line and have them pee on the ground. And then they’d know which soldier peed in each spot. And then from the ant’s behavior, they could tell which of the soldiers had too much sugar in their urine. In other words, this is not high fructose corn syrup’s fault. High fructose corn syrup has certainly done some serious damage, but it’s a cumulative effect of many changes.

10:21 And I would say that the beginning of the problem, the beginning of the problem was when we made changes to our food production and supply substantial enough to remove seasonality. Humans evolved. Basically, starvation was the number one threat to humans for most of our history. And so we had to evolve behaviors, but also metabolisms that would allow us to survive the seasonal fluctuations that Mother Nature foisted upon us. She wasn’t very nice.

10:48 I mean, one day she’d come along and go, hey, Brian, look, all the berries are on the tree and there’s lots of fruit vegetables and you know what, there’s even some honey for you. And that would last for a couple of weeks. And then she’d come along and go, no more food for you. Drought. In fact, water is going to be difficult.

11:01 And that would last for some time. And then suddenly she’d go, okay, you can have water again. And with the water, plants are going to come back and the hunting’s going to get good. And we would run through these cycles and we didn’t have to use willpower to do that. They happened to us, but we did have to survive them.

11:15 So one interesting way to look at this is bears, right? We all know that bears fatten up for the winter. How do they do that? Do they have an app? Did Apple produce a app for them?

11:26 Oh, look, it’s time. No. Berries and other carbohydrate foods became very prolific and common during that season. They ate them in abundance. And as they ate them, it stimulated their craving to eat more.

11:38 In other words, the more sugar they ate, the more sugar they wanted. It slowed their metabolism down. It started putting their metabolism into say hibernation, preparing them for real hibernation. And then they went into winter. What do you think would happen to that bear if we left them in that season?

11:52 If we just left them in fall? Obesity and diabetes. So I think that’s where it begins. And it started a long time ago, but then it hit this massive acceleration from 1940 to 1980 and from 1980 today. Matter of fact, I believe that at the turn of like from in 1800, the average American was eating about four pounds of sugar a year.

12:15 By 1900, it was 40 pounds of sugar. That’s already a pretty big jump. But today it’s about 150, 154 pounds of sugar. So sugar is clearly part of the problem. And then you’ve got high fructose corn syrup.

12:26 Then you have seed oils. You know, they sudden vegetable oils that have barely anything to do with vegetables. And all of these cumulative things and additives and preservatives, they’re all contributing. But at the end of the day, we now have metabolic imbalance and it’s dangerous. Wow.

12:41 And the education, there is no education when it comes to food. I mean, you pretty much, you know, well, there’s education, but it’s confusion, right? I mean, the pyramid and all this. And again, you’ve got a lot of the agencies that we’ve now seen from some of what happened during the pandemic that are really in bed or sometimes the same people as self-regulated, right? So food industry, self-regulated, pharma, self-regulated.

13:05 The food pyramid is interesting. So you will remember probably the four food groups. Yeah. That we grew up with in North America. The four food groups were I can guess what they are.

13:14 Like vegetables and fruits and grains, meats, and then I don’t know. Meats and then dairy products. Yeah, okay. And the idea there is, it’s actually a neat metaphor. You remember the game Risk?

13:25 Yeah. So you have your little color pieces and you’re trying to take over the planet. Great game. The food industry has, they play the same game. Only their board is the plate.

13:33 And so you’ve got the meat people trying to get their share of the plate and then you got the carb people trying to get their share. And the only way they can increase their share, there’s only two ways they can do it. The one is to get people to believe that their food is better or that the other food is worse. Right? So anti-marketing.

13:49 So you’ve got all of these little lobbyists that are marketing to build up the value of their food. And at the same time, they’re anti-marketing their competitors. So they’re always trying to win each other’s share. And the best example of this, and this has been discussed on, you know, it sounds conspiratorial, but it’s very common knowledge at this point. But the sugar industry figured out that sugar consumption was correlative and possibly causal for heart disease in the 1940s and 50s.

14:11 And so they realized that was bad for business. And so they hired a couple of Harvard researchers, paid them about 50K in today’s money, and said, could you frame fat for this? And they published an article and they published a study that said fat is the problem and we need to move in. That got published in one of the journals that didn’t require disclosure of funding. And so it became lore.

14:33 And we all, and no kidding, I think the guy’s name was Andrew Haas. I don’t know why the name sticks in my head. And he was like the chairman of the Beat Growers Association or something. In roughly 1954, he’s giving a speech. And he says in the speech, he goes, some interesting news has happened today.

14:49 It turns out that fat is the culprit that’s causing this horrible and prolific expansion of heart disease. And so as the American people turn away from fat, if we can claim half of the fat calories and maintain our current 20%, we’re in for a boon of profitability. I mean, he said this. But what he didn’t say to everybody that day was that he paid for the research. Got it.

15:12 Wow. And that was early. This is the 50s? Oh yeah, it’s been going on a long time. And so my mom had us drink non-fat milk when I grew up in the 70s.

15:20 It was skim milk, skim milk. And that I’m sure was a result of what that study was. Because fat was bad and then we heard about the eggs and then the cholesterol and all that. And then of course, that morphed into the low-fat industry that was really the high sugar industry. And we went through this whole cycle.

15:36 Back when there was no internet and there was no way to put out any alternative media. And it worked. Yeah. I mean, eggs are such a good one. Because right here in this country, the Daily Mail, I mean, what an incredible publication.

15:50 It’s one of the biggest global publications. It is, massively read. Two articles, some time apart from each other. One of them says, you know, eggs are prohibitive there. Eggs are to help to fight against the development of diabetes.

16:02 Another one, headline says, the consumption of eggs tied to risk, increased risk of diabetes. And as I believe that not to be true, I thought, you know, what I’ll do is I’ll do something most people don’t really get to. And that is, instead of just getting my education from the headline, I’ll actually read the story. So in reading the story, I found the study that they talked about. And then I went a step way further than most people.

16:22 I decided to read the study. And so now I’m reading the actual study and the study was 2000 people. And it went on to say that a strange thing was observed. And that was that for some people, they had a slight uptick of blood sugar in the study, but only women. And that was really puzzling to me because men and women have some differences.

16:41 There’s no question about that, but not that different that you would like produce. Your metabolism would run that differently. I’m curious. So I keep reading. Now, no, wait, before I get to keep reading, you have to understand, it said a slight uptick in blood sugar.

16:53 So from there, the Daily Mail goes to increases risk of diabetes. That’s already a pretty big logic jump, right? That’s clickbait. That’s not, there’s something not right there. But then, then you read the disclosures of the study.

17:03 And in the disclosures of the study, it says right there, the women in this study largely did not enjoy the consumption of eggs in boiled, poached, fried, or scrambled form. And so they ate their eggs in the form of baked goods, including muffins. I’m not kidding you. So from women eats muffins causing increase of blood sugar, we go to eggs cause diabetes. That’s insane.

17:29 And what does that teach us? Well, you know, I think I saw Denzel Washington say this and he goes, if you don’t read the news, you’re not informed. And if you do read the news, you’re misinformed. We have to be discerning. Yeah.

17:43 Do you think we’ve all learned to be a bit more discerning in the past four years or not? That’s a really interesting question. I would say that, I would say that many people have and that many other people have even become more locked into not doing that. One of the big things that happened over the last four years is that

18:08 Manipulative marketing campaigns and slogans were designed to shame people for thinking for themselves. So you suddenly had this thing of people chastising you for doing the research. Well, pre-four years ago, if you were going to go buy a car, you would go do the research and see if that was a good car to buy. Especially if it was a second car, you’d go buy the lemonade guide book and you would do the research. But suddenly, starting in the last four years for who knows what reason, in order to do research, apparently you needed to be a PhD.

18:42 And so the minute you wrote, well, I’ve been doing some research about this thing. Oh, you did your research. And so it sort of shamed the idea of thinking for yourself. And I think that’s a dangerous thing. Yeah.

18:53 And then again, a lot of the slogans and some of this, you can now trace back to be this kind of like psychological warfare and really getting you on a team or off a team. And I think some people are aware of it and others aren’t. And now everyone’s getting better at it. Yeah. You have found that when you’re trying to advertise this book and some of your ideas that those are now getting, your ads are getting censored.

19:14 And I thought that was really interesting. Obviously, we’ve gone through some censoring over the years and we know what it’s like. I must say until it happens to you, you always think it’s the weirdo that it happens to. That’s what I thought all my life. It’s like the weirdos get censored.

19:28 And then when it happens to you, you’re like, wow, you really have to rethink what’s going on here. Or what a weirdo is. Yeah, what a weirdo is. Yeah, maybe I like weirdos. What was your experience and what do you think is happening?

19:39 You know, it’s hard to say. One thing that happens when you start getting like blocked or have ad accounts shut down or shadow banned or any of those kind of things is you naturally become a little paranoid. And that doesn’t mean you’re right about everything. But I do like the old quote of just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not plotting against you. Yeah.

19:56 So one of the issues with writing a book like this is I’m not a doctor. And for years, for years, I had people asking me to write books about the work that we’ve been doing. And I chose not to do it because I knew that I would face that attack. But in this case, things changed because a doctor contacted me and said like, it’s actually a fascinating story. He called me on a Zoom call and he said, listen, five months ago, I was in two car accidents in a week.

20:23 So basically what happened was he was 40 pounds overweight, type 2 diabetic, hypertensive, and on 10 prescription medications. And he’s a doctor running three medical clinics in Southern California. He was an assistant professor of medicine at UCLA and a medical internist for many years. And on his way to his clinic twice in one week, he stopped off at Starbucks to get himself some energy because he was so out of energy and still fell asleep behind the wheel of his car twice in a week.

20:47 Luckily, nobody was hurt in either accident, not badly. But he was hurt from a conscious perspective. He went home after this like an accident. Like, how can I be a doctor? Like, I can’t even heal myself.

20:58 Like, how can I do that? And he went online and somehow he found one of my master classes and he went through one of our 90-day programs that this book is kind of written, inspired by. And then he got on the call with me and he goes, I’ve lost 40 pounds. I am no longer type 2 diabetic. I am no longer hypertensive and I’m off nine of my 10 prescription medications.

21:20 It took him a few more months to get off the 10th one. And he said, we need to get this message to the world because I can tell you something right now. I went to medical school for a number of years, many years, and nobody ever talked to me about food and metabolism. Never happened. And as a medical internist working at the hospital every Tuesday or whatever day it was, it was a drug day.

21:38 It was the pharmaceutical companies came and they told us how to look for symptoms in order to prescribe their medication. And we never once had a food day. We never had a metabolism day. And so we need to get this book out in the world. That said, I’m still getting attacked by people saying I have no right to write the book because I’m not a doctor.

21:54 My co-author is a doctor. The forward is written by one of the most well-recognized doctors on the planet. So I think the other side of it is that some of the places that we might want to advertise, well, they sell advertising revenue to companies that sell drugs that people will stop buying when they’re not diabetic anymore. And so it feels as though maybe that’s part of the driving force as well. But then, as I said, you start to feel paranoid.

22:14 Like we shipped a bunch of books into a country. I’m not naming the country because I’m not getting in more trouble than I am. They seize the books. They seize them and they said, you’re not getting them back. And I don’t know what I, again, maybe it was something else.

22:26 Who knows why they seize them, but you start feeling a little like the weirdo. Yeah. So look, so I’ve been here. All right. So April 6, 2020, we had the second largest YouTube live stream in the world.

22:38 And 30 minutes later, the video got banned. And then I started a big public fight with YouTube and it ultimately led to our deplatforming. We had been a partner. I’ve been down to the headquarters. We had made millions of dollars.

22:51 And they said, you can’t talk about masks and distancing and vaccines, et cetera. So I believe in freedom of speech. I didn’t care anyways and we just did our own thing. But I was at the time trying to figure out, like, why would YouTube care about this? And then someone said, oh, they own 3% of this company and never added up to me.

23:10 And now three or four years later, I have people like Mike Benz and people who have spent their careers studying this. And they say, Brian, it’s just much bigger. It’s not just a media company. It’s really a government that is also there to protect all of the big global companies. And they do it as a matter of interests and it’s just bigger.

23:30 And I’m wondering if you think that is possibly going on here because food is big and pharma is big and banking is big and media is big. And the government ultimately is looking out for the interest of these companies. Is it bigger than just, oh, this company is doing this thing? I think George Carlin said this really well. He said that a conspiracy doesn’t require two or three evil people to get into a room and make plans together.

23:56 It just requires them to have convergent interests. And so you could take the position that government is protecting these large corporate entities and that’s part of what’s going on. Or you could look at it the other way that those large corporate entities have their tentacles so deeply into the government that they’re protecting the government the way they want it to be. And so it’s, again, the George Carlin idea is that there’s a capitalist look. I’m a capitalist.

24:20 I don’t believe that there’s a better system of value exchange currently. Maybe one day there will, but I don’t think there is. But capitalism does not work in food production and capitalism does not work in pharmaceutical development. The minute you make, for example, the minute you make disease profitable, well, then you make disease profitable. And so reversing diabetes, like quite literally, think about this.

24:42 I mean, you know, diabetes is going to cost America $400 billion this year. $400 billion. And one thing I really like to do for people because I don’t think, I don’t think people really appreciate what billion means. Like you often see in the press, they talk about millionaires and billionaires. And I think they don’t realize that a homeless person has more in common with a millionaire than a millionaire does with a billionaire.

25:01 To spend a million dollars is to spend $83,333.33 a month for a year. It’s gone. A billionaire would have to spend at that same rate for a thousand years. It’s a lot of money. Diabetes is costing America $400 billion this year.

25:16 The defense budget. Now, I should have checked this before I came on, but I believe the defense budget’s only about $800 billion comparatively. It is a devastating disease. It’s unbelievably expensive. And it’s expensive because it’s profitable.

25:29 The minute you take somebody and run them through an eight or nine week program where they don’t have to be, where they can be post-diabetic, they can reverse the condition, immediately that’s a loss of revenue. Now, I’m not saying there’s any one evil person at a pharmaceutical company that’s thinking about that, but the machine is. You said capitalism breaks down on those two pieces. Is it also because there is government, food subsidies for things that shouldn’t even be produced?

25:54 Is it also true that vaccines have no liability to them? Is that what makes them also not part of this capitalistic system? You know, at the most basic level, at the very most basic level, let’s go back to the eye drop example. Imagine you and I are both scientists working for some pharmaceutical company and I walk in and I go, guys, I figured out reading glasses. I have an eye drop.

26:17 You take it once and your eye is done and it’s clean and it’s over. And you’re like, holy cow, that’s amazing. What’s the market potential? Oh, we’ve done some market testing and people are willing to pay up to $3,800 for the single drop because they don’t want to wear glasses anymore. That’s amazing.

26:30 Then you go in and you make your presentation and you’ve developed a daily and it’s like, you know, it’s a daily and they have to take it every day and they have to take it for the rest of your life. Which of those two products is going to get its funding? I’m sorry, but the subscription based the subscription based medicine is going to get that funding. It’s just that’s the way that’s going to be. And I think that’s the beginning of it.

26:52 Then you build it up from there. Like the idea that pharmaceutical companies can escape liability. I understand the principle. I understand the idea is that, well, look, if you’re trying to develop some, you know, population saving thing, then we have to take the risk away from you. But I don’t, at the end of the day, the risk is there.

27:09 Somebody needs to bear that risk and it shouldn’t be the people and it definitely shouldn’t be the people if they’ve been commanded to take it. Right. Yeah, we can go down that way as well. We can get on that rabbit hole bit and I agree with you on the conspiracy. It doesn’t have to be a bunch of people in a room.

27:22 It just has to be. Oh, wow. This message is going to get people to stop doing this behavior, which is going to hurt our sales, which means I’m going to call up my government guy and say, I’m not contributing to your campaign this year. If you allow this to happen, because we like business as usual and you’ve even talked about someone like the ADA. You said seems more interested in getting millions, you know, from big food and pharma that it actually is from helping these people.

27:46 And ultimately, if you help them, the organization can disappear sometimes. Yeah. So like the problem with government organizations is by definition, they need to survive. And that means they need sick people as well. And we saw with COVID a lot of crazy conflicts of interest that I never knew were possible between the CDC and people owning patents and people with financial interests and all of these places.

28:07 And I just assumed there was a wall or a Chinese wall or a version of a wall, but it doesn’t seem to exist in a lot of these places. No, you know, in a previous book that I wrote before the post-diabetic book, it’s called The Evolution Gap. And in The Evolution Gap, I put forward a theory. And the theory is that our biological evolution, of course, is very slow and our capacity for innovation is very fast. And so we have steadily changed the environment that we live in much more quickly than our genetics could keep up.

28:34 And so in the middle of this, there’s this gap. And that gap is where most of our pain and suffering is. And I would say that even some of the things we’re discussing now are there because you see, for the vast majority of our history, we were living in nature, dealing with the threats of, you know, the environment, threats of wild animals, threats of other tribes. We lived in fear a lot. And all you really need to do to control the population is frighten them enough.

28:56 If you frighten them enough, they will surrender their freedom for security. And we’ve seen a lot of that. And a lot of advertising works that way. Like, here’s a funny thing. We are, I would argue, living in, I would say demonstrably, the very best times in the history of Earth to be alive.

29:11 I mean, did your great grandparents have a hot and cold running shower? Yeah. You know, did they have a toilet inside the house? Like, we live in the very best times. You walk down the street, you’re not likely to get mugged, you’re likely to be alive tomorrow, and you know damn well you’re going to eat and you’re going to sleep safely.

29:27 That’s new. That’s a very new thing. We live in the back. Today, the average girl gets 11 years of education for every 12 that a boy gets. It’s almost a parody.

29:36 And in secondary education, they get better. Like, in every way, life has become better. Less people are in poverty today than ever before. But most people don’t know this. And that’s because the press understands that in order to move people, you have to frighten them.

29:50 And so, we’re constantly being told how terrible life on Earth is. And the truth of the matter is, we are living in the best times ever to have been alive. Yeah. And yet now we have these massive problems. Yeah.

30:01 What is the solution? What do we do here? What can people do? And can you fight against these big entities? You know, I’ve really, I’ve been at this for a very long time and I’ve looked at it from different areas.

30:16 Let’s say you want to make a change at the public health in a given country. You have to look at the way that country is set up. You have to look at the way their healthcare is set up. So, for example, in a country like the United States where healthcare is not an automatic right of every person the way it is here with the NHS. Then you recognize that probably the change you’re going to need to make is going to need to be more consumer led.

30:34 It’s going to be needed to be more consumer led because the government doesn’t benefit in the same way here. The government benefits directly if they’re able to turn a disease like diabetes around. So, in each country, you have to take a slightly different approach. You’re still going to deal with all the lobbyists and all those other interests that we talked about. But looking at it from that perspective, I believe that the change has to come from both ends.

30:55 We first have to work with consumers and get them to understand that type 2 diabetes is first of all much worse than most of them realize that it is. Look, if you go into the doctor’s office and you’ve got the x-ray up there and they go, look, I’m really sorry but we found a mass and this is bad. I mean, they drop that news on you like an anvil. That’s bad news. But if you walk in and you have type 2 diabetes, it’s like, oh, I’m sorry.

31:17 You’re type 2 diabetic now. And so, here’s a pamphlet with some lifestyle recommendations that we make for you and we can definitely manage the disease and here’s your metformin or whatever the solution is. What they don’t tell you is that what this really means is that your body is no longer capable of processing sugar properly and your blood is getting sticky. You’re going to start retaining water. You’re going to develop circulatory problems.

31:38 You’re going to feel tingling in your fingers eventually and that’s probably going to lead to the amputation of at least one of your limbs. You’re going to lose your eyesight and by the way, you’ve upticked the odds of you developing heart disease and cancer through the roof. I think if they told them that, the people would be a little more motivated to make a change. But instead, it’s like, no, don’t worry. We can manage it.

31:55 So, the first thing is people have to understand how bad it is. It’s bad. It is not good. And the younger you are when you get it, the worse it is. Problem number one or message number one.

32:03 Message number two, it’s not your fault. Don’t be ashamed about that. When somebody comes along and says, oh, if you just ate a little more and you just moved a little, you know, if you just ate a little less and moved a little more, you wouldn’t have this problem. No, it is not like that. That is a food industry look.

32:19 The tobacco industry did something very, very smart in the 70s. They noticed, of course, product liability suits were on the way. They knew they were coming and they knew they were coming and they had to prepare for them. There’s only two ways that you can tamper with a jury. One is against the law and the other one is very expensive.

32:34 The one that’s against the law is to find out where the jury members live and bribe them, extort them, threaten them. Not really. That’s frowned upon behavior. But the other way you can do it is you can develop, you can deliver a message into society that is so prolific and so common that when you get your jury pool selection, those people already think a certain way. And so what did they do?

32:53 They propagated the idea that lung cancer was a lifestyle disease. And by calling it a lifestyle disease, the jury was predisposed to blame the consumer immediately. Like, oh, it’s a lifestyle disease. And guess what? For the first 10 or 15 years of those product liability cases, mostly tobacco won.

33:10 They defended themselves well and they won. And then in around about the 80s, that whole lifestyle disease thing stopped working. And then the tobacco company started losing in a major way. And then many of them started turning to investing in the food industry. And now, diabetes and obesity are lifestyle diseases.

33:26 Sure, they have to do with your lifestyle. But when your lifestyle has been educated, regulated, propagated by the food industry, the soft drink industry were the people that invented the idea that if you just did a little more exercise, you can have more calories. But did they? Oh, yeah. It was a brilliant move.

33:40 I mean, they were like, people don’t want calories. They figured that out. People are afraid of calories. What can we do? We can first of all develop disastrous chemicals that can like give us zero calorie drinks.

33:50 And secondly, what we can do is give people justification for having more calories. If you just go for a run, everything’s going to be okay. And you quite literally have people going, well, I’m planning on having a big Mac today, so I better go to the gym. Yeah, that’s crazy. I mean, if you ever talked to an athlete, nobody thinks that way.

34:04 You know, I would never think that. And the more you train, the less you want that nonsense or the less you want to put it in your body. Yeah. Let’s talk about beverages because this, I mean, I know you don’t want to point one thing, but if you had to point one thing, it would probably be high fructose beverages because that’s probably the single biggest damaging thing. Yeah, because it probably on boards more calories cause.

34:24 Yeah, but I wouldn’t start there. You wouldn’t. Okay. Breakfast cereal. Okay.

34:29 And the reason, by the way, is that breakfast cereal is the gateway drug. Most parents, most, are not letting their children get to the high fructose corn syrup stuff that young, but they’re starting with breakfast cereal super young. And look, my first company here in the UK, we sold barcode scanning systems, inventory management, logistics management. So my clients were like Sainsbury’s, JD sports, Devonham’s, and what have you. Okay.

34:50 So I know a fair bit about that side of the business. And what I can tell you is that breakfast cereal companies literally pay grocery stores to put their cereal at kid height. They do that because they understand a very powerful marketing principle is called pester power. So you, your dad, or your mom, and you’re walking through the grocery store with your five-year-old and they’ve put the coolest Star Wars toy inside a box of sugar. And so the kids like, oh man, and by the way, can you buy that Star Wars toy?

35:16 No, that Star Wars toy is not anywhere to be found except in that box. And your kid has to have it. And so the kids like, oh, gotta have it, dad, I gotta have it, dad. Well, next thing you know, you’ve got that box of cereal in the house. And that was the gateway drug that’s going to lead to the rest of it.

35:30 That’s going to, first of all, what’s going to happen? Well, they’re, they’re eating a nuclear flavored sugar. Like they’re eating this unbelievable sweet food, which means suddenly fruits and veggies are just not going to taste very nice. That’s why they don’t like it because their taste buds have been so overwhelmed by garbage that that stuff doesn’t taste very good. And that means later when you say, well here, would you like a glass of orange juice or would you like a glass of sunny delight?

35:52 Well, I mean, orange juice tastes a little off compared to that unbelievable syrup. And so for me, it really starts with breakfast cereal. Okay, wow. So we hit them early. It seems it’s like, again, Trojan horse, it seems healthy.

36:06 They advertise themselves a healthy but massive amounts of sugar. That gets them on the train. And then what comes next? Beverages come soon. You have a great case study on Coca-Cola.

36:14 Yeah, I mean, obviously all the beverages and they are hit with that stuff really young. Here’s one thing I say to parents because I get this a lot. You know, we parents are always asking what do I do with my kids? And I go depends on how old they are. There’s a different approach at different ages.

36:27 So the other day, I’m sitting with some friends of mine and they have a four-year-old boy, such a great kid. And we’re sitting in the restaurant and the father is drinking a Coke, which I’m like, I didn’t know people still did that. I use it for beans out of the toilet. Like, it’s very good at that, but he’s still drinking it. And then he does something that just blows me away.

36:45 He says to his little boy, try this. And the little boy says, no, because four-year-olds don’t like new things very often. That’s why if you didn’t get them introduced to broccoli before they were four, then at four, they don’t want to try it. So they’re stubborn at that point. And the little boy says, no.

37:00 And he goes, no, no, come on. You’re really going to like it. And no kidding. He convinced his little boy to drink the Coca-Cola. And of course, when that little boy drank the first sip of Coca-Cola, this hyper-sweet flavor, the kid loved it.

37:13 What I would say is, the longer you can wait before introducing your children to those things, the better. But you also shouldn’t deny them those things. Because this is also a fascinating thing about child psychology. And I’m no child psychologist, so it’s all theoretical. But my oldest is 25 and my youngest is seven.

37:30 And we’ve got two in the middle. I have some breadth of experience. And I would say that children are rebels. In fact, all humans are actually rebels, as long as they’re allowed to be. But it starts when you’re about one year old, right?

37:43 Like your parents are trying to feed you. And they’ve got the trains coming in, the planes coming into the hangar, all the games you have to play to get the food into the kid’s mouth. And then the kid goes, give me the spoon. They want to do it themselves. And then they promptly put the food in their ear.

37:57 They don’t know how to do it, but the way they learn to do it is by rebelling against you and developing the skills. It’s their job to rebel against you. But the challenge is, when they get to about nine, 10, 11, 12, if you are still the thing they’re rebelling against, then they’re going to vape. And then they’re going to eat junk food. So somewhere in that window, you have to figure out how to join their rebellion.

38:21 And you cannot possibly join the rebellion by denying them those things. So you run into a bit of an irony. And one of the ways that I would suggest dealing with that is what I went through with my little girl quite recently. We went on this horseback trip through the jungles of the Dominican Republic and she loves riding horses. We rode all day and then that night we stopped.

38:38 We had a bunch of friends with us and it’s a campfire. Well, if it’s a campfire, I mean, Brian, there’s got to be marshmallows, right? There’s got to be marshmallows. And I had already agreed that there were going to be marshmallows because all her friends were going to want them. And so what do I do?

38:50 Do I say to her, no, no, if I say no, I am the thing to rebel against. So I say, yeah, you can have marshmallows. Just remember, she goes, remember what? And I go, remember, they don’t always make you feel very good. She goes, okay, Daddy.

39:02 She goes, how many do you think I can have? And I said, I think one would probably be okay. I think beyond that, you know, not such a good thing. So I’m doing my thing and we’re having a campfire and I’m not watching her every second. So it turns out she has three.

39:15 I don’t know this. One reason I find out is that that night at like one o’clock in the morning, she wakes up and she’s ill and she vomits. Yeah, not a major thing, just a little vomit. And then and then she goes, Daddy, I’m feeling really sick and I’m going, and I feel terrible. I don’t know my God, my love.

39:30 I’m so sorry. I really thought one wouldn’t hurt you because I didn’t know she’d had three. She goes, Daddy, I didn’t have only one. I had three and that’s why I got so sick. To this day, she won’t touch marshmallow.

39:41 It was not by restricting her from having them. It was about allowing her to experiment with them with consciousness. And it’s very important that you give that consciousness in advance and not afterward. If another great example, children often have temper tantrums an hour and a half after sugar. Give them a sunny delight or a Coca-Cola or whatever the thing is and then they spike their blood sugar and they produce all this insulin and then they have a blood sugar crash and then they become moody and temperamental and difficult.

40:05 And this is not restricted just to children. But if you do this with a child and they go to a party and they eat lots of cake and ice cream and they eat all that stuff, then they have this crash. If you now say, oh, it was the cake and ice cream, that will not work. That will not work. They won’t believe you.

40:21 They won’t work. But if you predict it, if you predict it, hey, listen, you’re going to the party. I know they’re going to give you cake and ice cream stuff. There’s just one thing I want to remind you about that is that sometimes after that stuff, you have a bit of a meltdown and I just want to remind you. So you can have it if you want.

40:35 But remember that that does happen sometimes miraculously. An hour and a half later, when they start having a temper tantrum and you go, you don’t say anything. You don’t say anything because if you say something, it’s an I told you. So you just kind of let them have it. And then no kidding.

40:48 At some point, your child will look up and go, Daddy, it was the cake and ice cream, wasn’t it? And the next time they go to a party, they will think twice. Wow. Talk to me about these rituals that we’ve now combined with sugar and I think it’s important to talk about them because I don’t think people realize we’re in them. You know, birthday party.

41:08 Here’s a bunch of cake and ice cream. Halloween. Here’s some candy. Campfire. Forgot about that one.

41:13 Marshmallow. I mean, again, these places have inserted themselves into our rituals. Champagne is another one. Celebrate. Pop a bottle of champagne.

41:19 Yeah, another great idea. But talk to me about those and how people can recognize them and then choose if they want to participate in that narrative or not. Because most of the times we don’t even get a choice. Let’s first talk about why. Why they do it.

41:33 Sugar. We have an evolutionary response to sugar and that is that when we eat some sugar, our body deduces from that that we’re in the season of autumn and that the next season is food deprivation of winter. So the minute we eat a little bit of sugar, the body goes, oh crap, winter’s coming and it stimulates your appetite. So eating a little bit of sugar makes you hungry. That’s why somebody can go to a beautiful restaurant, eat the bread, have the pasta and still have dessert.

41:56 Meanwhile, somebody else goes to a steak restaurant, doesn’t eat the bread, has a steak and broccoli. They don’t order dessert. They’re satiated. Carbohydrates stimulate appetite. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m just saying it’s a thing.

42:07 So the food industry has figured that out and so they are now wanting to put sugar in everything that they can because by adding sugar to it, it stimulates your appetite. So that’s a deep manipulation that starts there. So then let’s talk about your direct question and that is how they’re doing it. They hijack emotional states and holidays. They’ve learned how to sponsor certain emotional states and they’ve learned how to sponsor certain family rituals, celebrations and holidays.

42:31 A really fascinating example of this is Easter. I went to an Anglican school and so because we had an Anglican school, there was a lot of Bible study in that school and so there’s that one part with the whole crucifixion and I’ve read it a few times because we had to for Bible study and do you know what I never saw in that part of the Bible? Chocolate. I just I’ve looked. It’s not there.

42:51 It’s not there at all. No chocolate eggs. They didn’t look for them. They weren’t there. But today, you quite literally have people that cannot feel Easter unless they have chocolate.

43:02 And so and that’s at a holiday level but now there’s an emotional level. You know, what happened to us as children a lot of times is, you know, you’ve all seen it, right? Like the kids running along falls, skins their knee, looks up. If there’s no parent, they just keep playing. But if a parent saw, particularly if it’s mummy, they look up and go and the tears come and because they know they can get love from that.

43:24 But part of that relationship very often is as a parent, you want to do anything you can to end that pain. And you know what’s very good about that? Ice cream or chocolate chip cookies or chocolate or something. And so we distract children with those things. And what we don’t realize in that moment is that we are doing something expedient and it’s giving us a short-term benefit in that moment.

43:43 But the child is making a neuro connection. They’re making a connection that this chocolate chip cookie is equal to love and it’s an aesthetic in nature. It takes away my pain. And you wonder why now somebody’s driving through, you know, they go grocery shopping for the family in their 40s and they buy a box of chocolate chip cookies and scarf them down in the car on their way home because they know their kids should meet this stuff. So they do it in secret in the car.

44:05 Why are they doing that? Because somebody gave them a cookie as a pain killer when they’re a kid. So if we can spot those relationships, we can begin to create freedom. This sounds like an impossible task. I’m sure you’ll hear that a lot.

44:17 Yeah, but it is not impossible. I know that it isn’t because we’ve done it for hundreds of thousands of people. Like it absolutely works. And let me give you another one that I think you’ll love this. And it’s so okay.

44:30 My little girl and I are walking through the forest in the Dominican Republic a couple months ago. We were rescuing snakes. We rescue snakes and take them into the wilderness sometimes. And as we’re walking through the forest, we come to one section of the forest where there’s wild cacao trees growing. And the cacao happens to be in season.

44:44 Cacao is the fruit, of course, that we make chocolate from. But what most people don’t know is that the cacao fruit is really edible. It’s really nice. So you break open the cacao and like most wild original fruits, the pit is most of it. And there’s a small layer of sweet flesh around the outside.

44:58 We’ve bred fruit differently now, but that’s how most wild fruit is. So you crack it open, you pop it in your mouth, and you suck the flesh off and spit the seed out. And it is delicious. But of course, it causes a positive neurotransmitter response. Like you reward yourself for finding those calories.

45:15 Memory is stimulated by emotion. If you have a boring day, you don’t remember it. Memory is stimulated by emotion. When you eat that stuff, you have an emotional response. It locks into memory.

45:24 Four hours later, after we’ve rescued the snake, we put the snake back in the wilderness. We’re walking back through the forest. We walk into that section of the forest. Looks absolutely the same as every other section of the forest. And my little girl goes, this is where the cacao is.

45:37 Instantly. Why? Because she has a geosynchronous link on the emotional state that she achieved in that part of the forest. That has been a design of survival that’s built into us. It’s why when you have a very positive association to a restaurant, it’s like in your head immediately.

45:53 If somebody gets addicted to Starbucks, they give you directions around London, according to Starbucks. We’ll just pass that Starbucks and turn left at the next one because we used to do that with fruit trees. So now think of it another way. Imagine that you’re having a very, very bad day and it’s just not gone well. And you go home and you got a tub of ice cream in there and you eat that tub of ice cream or some of it and you produce all the serotonin and dopamine.

46:18 You’re rewarding yourself for this incredible find because in nature, finding that many calories was very difficult. Now your body rewinds and it looks for the strategy that led to the calorie win. And it turns out that the strategy that led to the calorie win was having a bad day. And very soon, your nervous system will learn to create sadness, depression, anger, anxiety. It’ll learn to create those states as the states that lead to the calorie payoff.

46:45 And so rather than ice cream curing the problem, ice cream locks the problem in. And that’s a real thing. Yeah. Wow. And this just takes people spiraling down further.

46:55 Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned Starbucks. I used to joke that Starbucks are just this franchise of drug dealers. And I used to joke about the caffeine but the sugar is probably more dangerous than the caffeine. And it’s incredible.

47:07 And they’ve just got people lining up. You can’t buy crack and heroin but you can buy Starbucks everywhere. And again, you can pack a lot of sugar and calories into those drinks and away you go. I mean, they’ve got bottles of flavored sugar. I mean, they call it hazelnut.

47:23 You know, whatever it is. But it’s just and they’re just dumping it in there. Look, I’m not here to take away people Starbucks. If you want to go have your Starbucks, go have it. But what I would say is it’s what you do every day that’s going to have an impact on your longevity and what the last 20 years are like.

47:36 It’s not the one Starbucks. Look, I haven’t had caffeine for, well, I haven’t had coffee say for 35 years. Okay, that’s not true. I had one coffee at Dave Asprey’s house because he’s a drug dealer. He’s a friend of mine and he convinced me to have one during our podcast, right?

47:49 How was it? It was okay. But otherwise I haven’t. But what’s interesting about caffeine, I think caffeine is fabulous. I think it’s fabulous if you’re using it correctly.

47:59 And what is it? Well, it’s a drug that stimulates you. So the problem for most people is that they need the drug to be human. Whereas for me, I only use it maybe two, three times a year, four times a year. And I can tell you exactly when it happens is I was on Jordan Peterson’s podcast a couple of months ago.

48:13 I landed in Toronto, flew across the world, got there, jet lag, flying all over the place, woke up in the morning, a little dehydrated from flight, slight headache and feeling a little low energy. That’s when I might have one. That’s when I might have it. I’m like, okay, now I need one. By the way, it turned out it was 800 meters away.

48:28 So I put on my running shoes. I thought I may as well go for a bit of a run and end up at the Starbucks to pick up a chai tea. I won’t drink coffee, but I was going to have a chai tea. By the time I ran the 800 meters, I no longer had a headache and I had all the energy I needed and I didn’t buy it. There you go.

48:41 Boom. Yeah, it’s fascinating that link. Michael Pollan wrote a great book on caffeine. I think it’s called Caffeine. And he talks about the history of it.

48:50 And he came off of caffeine while he was writing the book. And then he had a cup like nine months later and he talked about it being like this crazy experience. When I have one, I become like it hits me hard. I think it’s interesting because most people would never assume that it’s such a powerful drug and it’s such a strong drug. And I think when you realize that these things all around you that you consume every day just to be normal, they’re very powerful drugs and maybe you take a look at some of the sugar consumption.

49:18 We talked about what to do with the kids, the adults that are listening. If this is resonating a bit, what are some of the things they can do to talk about it with friends or to make some steps themselves? What do you say? I think the first thing to take a look at is to recognize that they should stop going on diets. There’s no point.

49:36 Diets don’t work. I have this current joke in my head but it’s like if you were an alien, teenager from some other planet and you were sent to Earth to do a homework, to do a project on the human diet industry and you’d come down here and you’d look at the diet programs and you’d go back to your alien planet and you’d give your report to the class and you’d say, Madam teacher and classmates, I’ve done my study on the Earth diet industry and here’s what I’ve determined is that the diet industry purports to be about weight loss. It appears that humans just want to lose weight all the time and so they advertise that that’s what it’s all about.

50:11 But if you dive in to the way they’re built, it seems to me that diets really only have two purposes and one of them is to absolutely obliterate the self-esteem of the people who do them and to completely mess up their metabolisms. And so what I would say is if we take a look at what people can stop doing, they should stop calorie counting. Calorie counting assumes that all calories are equal and it assumes that the law of thermodynamics contains the human body and the calories in calories out argument works.

50:41 It doesn’t. We regulate the way we use energy. So you can quite literally lose weight while you’re eating a calorie surplus because of other mathematical realities of energy. The calories in calories or calorie restriction. When people go on diets and they eat less, like think about this.

50:57 The average American or say Brit is, the average English person or British person is sitting like this. Too much energy in their food and not enough nutrients, right? So they’re overfed and undernourished. They’re literally getting too much energy and starving a little bit. So now what if we get them to eat less?

51:15 So okay, they’re eating less. They start feeling like they’re starving. They feel emotionally deprived and they’re nutritionally starving even worse than they were before, which is going to cause within seven to eight days. It’s going to cause a relapse. And generally speaking, we’re going to relapse so badly that they start binging.

51:30 And by the way, the Telegraph did a story of two years ago. I think it was on a big cross-sectional study on the diet industry and they found that the average person will go on two diets a year throughout their lifetime and they will last on each one for about six or seven days. And so that they should stop. Another thing is, there’s a tremendous focus on like, get rid of the bad stuff. Avoid these seven deadly things or don’t eat white food and what have you.

51:55 And while there’s truth in many of those things, it’s clickbait and it’s emotive, but it violates in a very important principle of human beings. And that is that if I give you rules that are too difficult for you to follow, you will rebel against them. In fact, rebelling against stuff produces feel-good chemicals. You know, I was in an airport. I was in an airport where I’d left my car parked and I couldn’t find a ticket booth.

52:16 I mean, it was, we looked everywhere, drove around the whole thing, could not find a ticket booth, couldn’t find it. Like, we got to leave. We have a four hour drive home. So I just drove out. I drive a Jeep.

52:28 I just found an exit over the curb, up over the grass and out on the street. And as we’re driving around, that felt really good. Rebellion feels good. So a diet that sets up a wall around you that makes you want to escape the diet. Well, immediately there’s a problem.

52:43 What people should focus on is a very core principle. Your health is far more dependent upon you getting your physical needs met than by you eliminating some of the harmful things. If you have a choice between those two things, let’s say you can only do one, then I would say you load up on what your body needs. And the positive effect of doing that is that you’re craving for those other things is often diminished anyway. So, you know, and if people focus on eating the things that they know that they need to be having, and not giving up all the other stuff.

53:16 You want to have the ice cream, have that. But make sure you eat well. Make sure your body’s getting all its vitamins, all its minerals, all its aminos, all its fats, all the water it needs, all the air that it needs, all the movement that it needs. If your body’s getting its physical needs met, you’re incredibly robust. Okay, so don’t do this usual yo-yoing stuff.

53:33 Also, don’t make the mistake that an active lifestyle is going to fix your bad diets. Right? I mean, look, I think it’s an important part of being a human, but you can’t outtrain a bad diet. No, you can’t. And not only that, it’s counterproductive.

53:46 It’s counterproductive for a couple of reasons. The one is that, and particularly for women, this is difficult, is that intensive exercise for women often causes them to raise their cortisol levels, I understand. So, and cortisol, of course, is a stress chemical that basically puts them into this sort of conservation mode. So, if you’re doing this intensive exercise, you’re actually telling your body, I’m in difficult times right now, and I might not want to let go of my fat.

54:07 So, it actually can make the weight loss journey more difficult. The other problem is, is that the average person again is overfed energy and underfed nutrients, which means they don’t have the capacity for repair. They don’t have the optimal capacity for building muscle because they’re malnourished. So, now you take this malnourished person and get them training to run a marathon. That’s a bad idea.

54:24 And I’m kidding about the marathon because most of them aren’t going to go that far, but still driving that person to go to intensive spin classes and exercise classes when they’re malnourished like that is a bad idea. The first port of entry is food. It’s all about that. It’s food, it’s sleep, it’s sunlight, it’s breathing. Those are the things that it’s all built upon.

54:44 And when you’ve started to get that balance correct, then absolutely you need to move your body. And by the way, there’s a very good reason for moving the body that once people understand it, they typically want to do it. And it has nothing to do with exercise. Look, yes, you need exercise. You and I are both in that age category where they’re telling us that we have to start losing our muscle mass.

55:00 No, you don’t. You do not need to start losing your muscle mass. So, what we want to do is take an approach that says, that takes an approach that says, I am going to take care of my body’s needs. And as a result of taking those needs, I’m going to have optimal health and I’m going to start to experience cravings in a very different, honest way. And things will very much change by doing that.

55:25 Yeah, I don’t like these narratives that you’re losing all of this stuff. With everything I know now, I feel like I’m making the best diet decisions, the best exercise decisions that I’ve ever made now at my age. So, sorry, I meant to finish on that because it was about that exercise point. We think we need to go exercise because we need to build our muscle mass or because we need cardiovascular health and flexibility. Yeah, true.

55:49 All of those things are true. But there’s a much bigger reason in my opinion and that is going back to the idea of this evolution gap. We evolved a heart and we evolved a diaphragm. Why? Because the urgency of blood flow and air flow and oxygen in the body is immediate.

56:04 It’s an immediate urgency. So, we needed pumps for that. So, we evolved these pumps. Lymphatic fluid, which is unbelievably important to your health. I mean, it’s zooming around your body and cleansing your cells and keeping you clean from the inside.

56:16 We never evolved a pump for that and that seems to be a defect of some kind. We clearly need a pump because we’re not flowing that lymphatic fluid very well. But it’s not a defect. It’s a change of civilization. Up until five minutes ago from an evolutionary perspective, you needed to walk 10, 20 miles a day to just meet your most basic food and water requirements.

56:37 So, muscular contraction, muscular use, movement of your body, tissue manipulation caused lymph to move around your body. It caused it. And now, we don’t have to move because we have Uber Eats. We have a fridge. We don’t have to move our bodies.

56:53 And so, as a consequence, we’re not moving lymph around very well and we’re not cleansing from the inside very well. And that has serious repercussions. So, even if somebody doesn’t want to go to the gym, they don’t want to go to the spin class and they don’t want to go and lift, which I think they should be doing many of those things. They need to be moving your body and not for an hour a day. I mean, that’s the other side of it.

57:10 You go to, well, I’ve done my hour in the gym. No, no, that’s good for your muscles, but it’s not good. You need to move lymph all day. Right. Right.

57:17 So, that’s the reason to be doing it. Yeah. Um, makes me think of Tony Robbins jumping up and down on the thing moving his lymph, but we could talk about Tony. Um, just to finish up with the book, Food Choices, maybe the last thing I’ll ask you, what’s the rule of thumb for food choices? You know, we talk about what we don’t want to eat, but is it really thinking about seasonal stuff?

57:35 Is it earth grown nutrients? Is this stuff your grandma used to make? Like, you know, do you talk about that? We’re confused about food and the reason we’re confused about food is what we talked about earlier. The food industry is all fighting for their share of our plate and also cognitive dissonance gets people to give up.

57:50 They just go, I can’t, I give up. I’m just going to eat what I want because I’m confused. Bread is good, bread is bad, wine is good, wine is bad, meat is good, meat is bad and the whole story continues. So, what we really, what we need to understand is that there is actually no confusion about that or more to the point, the confusion that is there is bought and paid for, it’s constructed. Scientifically speaking, there is no confusion about it.

58:09 I want you to imagine that you and I go and get an exotic pet. Yeah, we go and get an exotic pet and now we have to figure out how to feed and exercise that pet. Are we going to go to Harvard Medical School and look at research papers that were written by Purina to help us figure out how to take care of our pet or are we going to watch the Big Cat Diaries or the National Geographic Channel for two hours? I think we’re going to learn more from that. So, what we want to do is observe that animal in its natural habitat where it’s following its own instincts in its natural environment and then we’re going to learn a lot from it.

58:35 So, if we take that same logic, then what I would suggest to you is that with humans, we look at the archaeological record. We look at contemporary or say modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes of which there are still a few. And we can even look at our closest genetic relatives on the planet which are chimpanzees and bonobos. And if we look at those three things, what we’ll find is some incredible consistency. Basically, their diets are very similar.

58:59 There are some differences in terms of quantity and season. But in terms of substance, they’re basically the same. Our ancestors, as sapiens, 300,000 years and as presapiums, five, six million years, eating seasonally available, meats, fishes, eggs, poultry, seasonally available, nuts, seeds, fruit. And that’s it. That’s the deal.

59:22 That’s what we ate. We know we need those things. And so, I would suggest that to the degree you can prioritize those things in your life, you’re going to have a better experience. And if you can add one more layer to that and it’s a little bit more complicated, understand that when we eat food, we get nutrients, we get energy, but we also get information. And the information triggers epigenetic response.

59:45 So, what you’re eating tells your body how to run your metabolism. And so, if you eat carbohydrates every day, every day, you’re telling your metabolism to run in fall mode, to develop insulin resistance, to store fat and so forth. If you don’t eat carbohydrates, then your body switches and it switches to another mode and that mode either might be fat burning mode or it could be protein burning mode depending on how you’re living. And it is important that we run all three of those metabolic modes.

1:00:12 If you get stuck in one mode, there’s going to be consequences. Okay, that’s very powerful. You go to Tanzania on a regular basis and hang out with some people that do things in an old school way. Can you talk about what you do and what you learn from that? Very old school.

1:00:27 So, about 15 years ago, I used to, when I lived here in the UK, I, when I first got into speaking and coaching and that kind of stuff, way, way back, I wanted to develop a leadership program. But I looked at all the leadership programs that are out there and they like, they taught stuff theoretically and I wanted to like, do something more. And then, sometimes people included like board breaking as a metaphor. And I’m like, yeah, that’s a great metaphor. I want a metaphor that’s about real leadership.

1:00:48 So, I thought, I know what to do. I had climbed Kilimanjaro with some friends of mine. I thought, what if I created a seminar that had that as the metaphor? So, I created it. I created this program called See You at the Top.

1:00:58 It was a two week like retreat for leadership, communication, mental toughness, and so on. And off to Africa, we would take these clients and we’d climb Kilimanjaro. Fabulous. So, one year, we’ve come down the mountain. Successful trip as always, has been amazing.

1:01:12 And my logistics partner, he goes, hey, I googled you while you’re up on the mountain. And he goes, I’ll bet you’d be interested in meeting some Bushmen. And I was like, excuse me? What do you mean? Because I knew there was a tribe of them living in Namibia, the Khoisan, that you might have seen in The Gods Must Be Crazy if you saw them.

1:01:27 Yeah, great movie. Yeah, fabulous. Show us how old I am. One of the best independent films in my opinion ever. Seriously, yeah.

1:01:33 But as I knew about them, but I didn’t realize there was another tribe of them living in East Africa. And this guy says, look, we can go try and find them if you want. And this is, again, over 15 years ago, we jumped into some Land Rovers, put machetes in, backed our camping year and we went. And about a week later, you know, we bumped into our first ever meeting with the Hadzabi people. And certainly, they’d met many other people before anthropologists come to visit them.

1:01:54 And now, they’ve been turned into a bit of a tourist attraction. So, you can quite literally book a trip to go see them. You’ll get the four-hour tour type thing. But I’ve been visiting them for 15 years. And when you say they’ve been doing things the old school way, it’s true.

1:02:06 I mean, they are, listen, we can’t overly romanticize their life as a perfect representation of our ancestral past. We can’t do that. But I think what we can probably quite comfortably agree is that their life is the closest representation to our ancestral history that we have on Earth today. And so, I went there to visit them the first time. And I knew right then and there that I’d be back.

1:02:30 And I’ve been back almost every year since. And many times, for longer embedded stays, I’ve gone there and taken no food with me. I take water because I’m not stupid. But I’ve taken the chance of not having food and only eating when we’re successful with hunting. And it’s just, it’s been one of the great privileges of my life.

1:02:45 What do you eat when you’re there for two weeks? We hunt. You know, it’s funny because in the, let’s say, the world of sort of biased media production, the Hadza are referred to as a plant-based, you know, they have a plant-based diet. I suppose so in the fact that the animals they eat all eat plants. They might have a plant-based diet, but they are, they’re hunters.

1:03:07 And they prioritize meat above all. When you’re hunting with them, it’s interesting. If you’re not tracking anything but you’re hunting, in other words, you’re looking for tracks and they see some root vegetables, they might stop and dig them up and eat them. But if you’re tracking, they do not stop. Once they’re onto meat, they move forward.

1:03:23 If the tracks are not super fresh and they see honey, they might stop for honey. But if the tracks are fresh, they won’t stop for honey. Interesting. It’s a priority. So when we’re with them, it says it all there, doesn’t it?

1:03:34 It says a lot, right? It says a lot. So when you’re with them, you know, they eat meat and meat is everything from the smallest birds to most people will tell you they’re the bird hunters. In fact, there was even a series of calling them the bird hunters. They are only the bird hunters to the people who do a tourist visit with them.

1:03:48 Because when you go there as a tourist, you don’t know how to hunt. And so you’re noisy. And so all they can get is birds. I’ve been, we’ve eaten hyena, we’ve eaten warthog, we’ve eaten bush pig, we’ve eaten antelope, we’ve eaten baboon. Like they hunt big things.

1:03:59 There’s no question about it. But you can’t get that on the tourist visit generally. So but they eat meat. They eat seasonally available fruits and most of them fresh except for the baobab. They’ll eat that one dry on the ground because it turns into like sponge candy.

1:04:12 It’s really nice. Root vegetables are a big thing. There’s one in particular that we have a lot of and you can eat it raw. But they also cook it. And when you eat it raw, it’s like, well, either way, it’s a bit like a hybrid between a sweet potato and a red onion.

1:04:28 And so it’s kind of got that little bit of bitterness and a little bit of sweetness. And when you cook it, it gets caramelized and it’s incredible. Really, really nice. And that’s pretty much what they eat. Unfortunately, there are now missionaries that are there trying to save them.

1:04:40 Can I italicize that somehow? Can we save them? And in saving them, they’re giving them vegetable oils and refined sugar and that kind of stuff. And their way of life is not long for the world. Wow.

1:04:50 Do they cook their meat? What do they hunt by the way? Bozen arrows. Okay. That they make.

1:04:54 That they make. There’s a particular bush that grows arrows. Okay. Grows quite straight branches and I’ve made bows and arrows with them. It’s quite a project.

1:05:01 It’s not… I have two Hudson hunting bows in my house. In fact, I was there in November. This is really sweet actually. I was there in November.

1:05:09 I took a bunch of my friends to go see them. Did you ever see the West Wing? I’ve heard of it. I’ve never really sat down and watched it. So it’s a great, great series.

1:05:17 I highly recommended it. I really liked it a lot. But one of the actors in there, he’s become a good friend of mine and he and his wife, went through our WildFit program. And he was a type 2 diabetic and he reversed it. And so we connected and became good friends and we took him and we took the two of them and some other people down to go visit the Bushmen and a few of our WildFit coaches came and we’re having a great trip.

1:05:37 We’re there for two weeks. And at one point, in the second week, the chief apparently like summons us to come back to camp because we’d gone back to our hotel or hotel’s a grand word for that. But we’d gone back to where we were staying and we had to go back to the camp. And we got there and it was raining, which is very rare. They live in a very arid part of the country.

1:05:57 And there was this gentle rain and a big fire and everybody is very solemn. And they’re not very solemn, generally. They’re very upbeat and cheerful, lots of storytelling and sound effects and what have you. And then the chief stands up and he starts giving the most compelling speech. I only understand bits and pieces of it.

1:06:14 So the translator is kind of filling in the gaps. And then he takes this piece of jewelry and he puts it around my neck. And he made me an honorary member of the tribe. After 15 years, he gave me a hunting bow and this and then he brought my brought Kirstie up to my partner. He brought her up and he and he gave her some jewelry and he welcomed her, his family.

1:06:33 And then we had one of our daughters there. And this was super cool. Some years ago, I was visiting them and Nona, the chief, it’s properly more pronounced like I can’t quite do the clicks properly. But he he tells stories incredibly well and he uses sound effects for all the animals. So even though you can understand his words, you know what he’s talking about.

1:06:51 He’s so good. But then it reminded me, this is many years ago. It reminded me, my mom had taught me how to do some African bird calls when I was a kid. So we’re sitting around the fire one day and he’s been telling the story and the story finishes. And then I just go like this.

1:07:02 I go and that bird lives there. And all the hunters, no kidding, grabbed their bows because the bird had come into camp like it was like that. Well, then they realized it was me that was doing it. They asked me to teach them how to do it and they could never quite figure it out. But they so then they called me Kukuru.

1:07:20 So they gave me my own tribe name Kukuru. Well, when Simona, our daughter came, somehow she got it. I taught her how to do it and she just got it. So they called it Kukuru 2. I’m not sure if it’s the number two or also, but either way it works.

1:07:33 And so in the ceremony, they recognized her and it was really magical. Wow, that’s super special. What a cool thing to have like a bridge to the past, especially with all the work that you do as well. You mentioned breaking boards and I had a flashback in 1982. I went to something called super camp in California and a very young Tony Robbins taught me how to break a board with my aunt.

1:07:54 And that was my first experience. I’m from San Diego. I think my mom had done the fire walk experience with him, but that’s like the one and only time I think I’ve met him. It was like a seven, eight day camp where they taught us how to speed read and all this crazy stuff. But what’s your relationship and experience been with Tony over the years?

1:08:13 Well, first of all, I’m a massive fan of super camp. Is it still a thing? Oh, it’s still a thing. Is it really? Okay, I didn’t know.

1:08:19 It was, you know, it was really crazy. My mom was into these really revolutionary ideas, but I think it was like 10 days. I was really young. It’s really phenomenal. I’ve had a really interesting history with Tony when I was about 18 or so, 19 years old, my boss had clearly had a problem with insomnia because he was watching one of Tony’s infomercials and bought Tony’s personal power tapes and they sat beautifully in the cupboard of his office.

1:08:43 And I don’t know, they ever got out the plastic. I don’t know. But one day I said, can I borrow them? I was doing, you know, door-to-door sales who were driving all the time. And I just listened to them in the car.

1:08:52 And so I started listening to them and they had a real impact on me. They had a measurable impact. They’re amazing. They were incredible. They still are today.

1:09:00 Really, they’re still. Yeah. And so some couple, two, three years later, a friend of mine called me and he goes, hey, look, Tony Robbins is coming to Vancouver. And I want to come see him live. And I’m like, yeah, that’d be great.

1:09:11 So I come to Vancouver to go see him live. And he does this event called Strategic Influence. It was a one day introductory event. And truthfully, I thought it was good, but it didn’t blow my mind the way that tape series had done. But the very next day, I found out why I had been at the event.

1:09:25 They were using the event as a lead generation. Like you go to see Tony live and then you’re on the list and they can call you. So then they call me and go, you got to come to this three day Tony Robbins seminar. It’s like $1,500. And I’m like, I’m not spending 30 years ago, right?

1:09:38 I’m not spending $1,500 on a weekend with Tony and he goes, oh, no, Tony won’t be there. It’ll be on tape. There’ll be a facility. I’ve spent $1,500 to watch a tape of Tony Robbins. This is insane.

1:09:47 The guy says to me, there’s a money back guarantee. And I looked at it and I said, all right, well, look, I know, I mean, at this point, I’m in professional sales and I know exactly how much money I’m going to make. I’m on commission. And I said, fine. I know my track for the year.

1:09:59 If I make an extra $1,500 this year, I won’t ask for my money back. There’s three months left in the year. The guy goes, the money back guarantee doesn’t work like that. And I go, it’s the only way I’m going to buy. And so Tim says to me, all right, you can do that.

1:10:10 But if you ask for your money back, you can’t tell them that’s why. And I said, done. I sign up and I go. And of course, it was super transformative. It was really powerful.

1:10:22 But fascinatingly, on the third day, there was this section on food. Tony started talking about food and he started talking about the food industry and pharma and saying some things back then that were brand new and novel to me. I mean, and I think brand new and novel in many ways. You know, he had been working with Harvey and Marilyn Diamond on the Fit for Life project. And so that’s what started my food journey.

1:10:44 I was sick. I was overweight. I had terrible acne. I had horrible allergies. I had digestive problems that made eating just about impossible at times.

1:10:51 30 days later, I was 35 pounds down. I was acne free. I had no symptoms. I was off all my medications. And that actually is what started my whole that that moment is what started me in this whole space.

1:11:04 But strangely, about I guess it’s now 13 or 14 years ago, I got a phone call from Tony Robbins office. And this is from a friend of mine. And he goes, hey, Tony would like you to come and teach business at his business mastery seminar. And I really thought this is a wind up. Like they can’t be real.

1:11:25 I’m not even a speaker at that point. Like I haven’t I’ve been running a film studio. I haven’t been on stage for three years. Why would they be calling me? It turns out that what happened was is that the speaker was scheduled to book Chet Holmes had passed away.

1:11:36 He was a good friend of mine. And he passed away 11 days shy of the event he was supposed to speak at. And they couldn’t find anybody. And they’d gone through the entire list of everybody that they could think of and the only reason. And so I said to Mitch, who called me I go, Mitch, Tony doesn’t want me to come.

1:11:50 You want me to go because you want me to represent this content. And and if I say yes, you’re going to call Tony and you’re going to beg him to let me go. That’s what’s really going on here, isn’t it? And there’s a bit of silence and Mitch goes, yeah, but I can convince him. And so I said yes.

1:12:06 And he convinced Tony and I flew to Fiji 11 days later and Tony was unbelievably gracious. He just took such good care of me. He and I hit it off and he then booked me for a year of business mastery events. And and I considered a real honor that they the entire time I was with him, I was the only one that followed him on stage. They put me on after Tony every time because I had figured out how to hold the audience.

1:12:30 And that’s not the easiest project in the world. In fact, one day this is cool here in London. Such a silly story, but I was due to come and speak and I was going to be following Tony. And then I got a promoter calling and saying, hey, we noticed you’re in London. Could you speak at our event?

1:12:43 We want you to follow Bill Clinton. Following Bill Clinton, that’s another big, interesting project, right? But generally when a producer brings you into the country, you kind of have to be careful about accepting other gigs, right? Especially big gigs like that. So I wrote to Tony and I go, look, I got invited to do this other gig.

1:12:58 Is that okay with you? And he goes, yeah, no problem. It’s all good. Then I remembered afterward that Tony and Bill knew each other. And so I then I contacted him.

1:13:07 Hey, there’s the gala dinner that Bill Clinton is going to be at. Can I invite Tony Robbins? So they said yes. So I write to Tony, hey, you want to come have dinner with Bill Clinton. So I go to do my event.

1:13:16 I go to do the event and then my time keeps getting pushed and pushed. So Bill’s time keeps getting pushed and now I’m going to be on stage and the dinner’s happening. So Tony goes to the dinner. Bill Clinton’s there. Tony’s texting me going, where are you?

1:13:30 I’m on stage and I missed the dinner. So but Tony was unbelievably good to me. It was such an interesting experience to have been very influenced by him as a kid and then to actually get to work with him later in life. Does the Netflix movie, I’m Not Your Guru, give it a pretty good snapshot of what it’s like to be behind the scenes? I don’t think so.

1:13:55 Sorry. You know what, let me say that again. I’m your guru more so. I was thinking of the TV series they made before. I didn’t think that that did.

1:14:01 But no, I’m your guru. I think so. Yeah, I mean, you know, look, you and I were talking about Prime Minister Rishi earlier. I had the privilege of meeting him over a lunch the other day and what really struck me about him was I’m not in the UK politics game so I don’t have a vote in the race. But what struck me about him is that the guy that I see up on the press conference and the guy that I saw at an England lunch was very much the same guy.

1:14:25 And I think we value that a lot. And what I would say is that in my experience, Tony is very much the guy that you see up on the stage. You know, that’s not to say that he like you or me or anybody else can have moments or have a temper or what have you. But he is genuinely big-hearted, generous.

1:14:43 He’s just been a massive influence for me. So, yeah, I have a lot of respect. That’s awesome. It’s crazy memories of as a kid. But I broke that board.

1:14:49 And so he took us an hour and we broke the board with my hand and I was a little skinny science geek. So I still remember it. It was amazing. I guess I just wanted to kind of close and ask you a little bit more about this evolution gap. I mean, it’s a big question.

1:15:02 But, you know, I mean, we’re looking forward now to all these crazy things we’ve created. Not only the internet, not only our mobile devices, now we’ve got artificial intelligence, artificial food, all of these things, besides the diabetes too and some of the things you’re working on. What do you see for us as a species going forward that are we going to be able to handle this transition? And it seems like the stakes get upped every single year. And since you spent a long time studying this, I’m just kind of curious what you see as an outlook.

1:15:33 Well, you know, there’s that song there may be trouble ahead. Like, I think we’re headed for trouble. But we’re also headed for the greatest opportunity. And it’s always like that. Many times when people think about ancestral lifestyles or they look at a book like mine or there are other books in the field that suggest similar things, they think that we’re suggesting that you should sell all your crap and move to the forest.

1:15:53 And that’s not at all what we’re saying. At least it’s not what I’m saying. What I’m suggesting is that we have to recognize that our bodies were built to a particular design specification. We were designed to survive the African savanna. And to the degree that we are lifted out of that savanna and put into another alien environment, we have to make modifications.

1:16:12 And we can. And there’s some interesting examples of this that if you walk into a little Thai restaurant or a spa and you hear birds chirping, what you won’t necessarily consciously recognize is that the reason those birds chirping are there is because they’re calming. Well, why are they calming? Well, I would put to you that one of the reasons that they’re calming is that if you are in the felt, if you’re in the African bush and the birds are chirping, it’s because there are no predators near you.

1:16:35 And then if the birds suddenly go silent, it means there’s predators. So the sounds of birds calm your DNA. Now, you don’t have to know this, but your DNA does. Another example, we all saw this, all the biohackers reported on this a couple of months ago when it came out, some research paper was saying that if you spent 15 or 20 minutes a day by an open body of water that you had measurable reduction in cortisol. Yes, of course you did because water represents all kinds of interesting things for our ancestral life.

1:17:02 Like, for example, if you are on the water, you are safe from 180 degrees. There’s 180 degrees of no tribes and no wild animals coming after you for the vast majority of history. So that’s one issue. The other issue is that it’s water, which means it’s abundance. Even if it’s salt water, it’s abundance because salt water produces food, right?

1:17:20 You know, if you go to the, this is a really cool thing. My mom and I and my girlfriend at the time, we were in South Africa, I was born in South Africa and we were at a beach and we were leaving and I suddenly felt this compulsion to run up this trail and we’re walking to the car. Like, I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I can’t not do it. I don’t know why. I don’t understand it.

1:17:38 To this day, I don’t. I just had to. I was like, it was not logical. My legs were running up and I’m going, but they’re going to the car. I can make it.

1:17:44 And I ran up the hill. I got to the top of the hill and there’s a cave up there. And it wasn’t even a very special cave. It was not a very deep cave, but it was a cave. And there was a plaque on the wall and the plaque talked about the people that lived in these caves and they’ve been living in these caves for some 200,000 years.

1:17:56 I found that fascinating. And then it said these caves were originally excavated by T.F. Dreher. And I was like, I don’t know, T.F. Dreher.

1:18:03 That night, we’re having dinner with my grandmother and her name was Erika Edmeades. My grandfather was Erika Edmeades and my grandmother was Erika Edmeades, weirdly. That’s wild. And I said to her, I remember that her maiden name was Dreher. So I said, do you know this T.F. Dreher?

1:18:17 And she’s like, yeah, it was her father. It was my great grandfather. And it turned out to be the same T.F. Dreher that discovered the florist bad skull, which is the oldest homo sapiens skull or now the second oldest homo sapiens skull in history. And then I started exploring all of those caves that he excavated.

1:18:32 And they’re fascinating. You know, humans lived in those caves for some 200,000 years with water at one side of them, because it was abundant and it was safe. And so today, why is beachfront property the most valuable property in the world? Because our instincts like it. So if we can learn those types of things from our ancestral past and we can combine them with the incredible advancements that are coming, we can create unbelievable lives.

1:18:55 But if we think that we can blindly move off into the world of advancement and not suffer the consequences, well, then we would then not answer an important question. And that is, how is it possible that we live in the safest, best and most comfortable times? Everybody’s going to bed in a bed. They got hot and cold running water. They’ve got food around them.

1:19:12 This is new. We live in the safest times in the history of ever. And yet we have more addiction. We have more Netflixing. We have more psychiatry and we have more suicide than ever before.

1:19:25 So yes, there may be trouble ahead. But if we do it with consciousness, we can have the most incredible future ever. Yeah, but it has to happen. I think Tucker was making this point the other day. He’s like, if you look at the metrics, we’re living in one of the worst times.

1:19:41 Again, the suicide, the drug evictions, all these things. But if you look at Steven Pinker’s work, it’s the safest of times. And so it’s a very scary duality here. And you think reminding ourselves of those ancestral pieces is an important way to advance. I’ll give you a tangible I’ll give you a very tangible idea of why life is difficult.

1:20:03 My dad and I are walking through the bush felt one day and we walked down with guides and we walked down an embankment to a driver bed. And there are 14 lions sitting in the bush. We’re not in a car. So I can tell you that at that point, what happens is you take one sharp breath and then you breathe very calmly and quietly because you don’t want to be heard. And you start producing cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline.

1:20:25 And what those chemicals do is they make you faster. They make your blood pump. They make your blood a little sticky because you start producing apparently coagulants in case you get injured. And your intelligence becomes refined. You start losing complex logic and you start becoming very, very focused on just this reality.

1:20:42 So you become kind of dumb. You know, you come very smart about this but very dumb about everything else. And your empathy starts to fade away. And as a bit of a joke about that, my dad says to me, he goes, Eric, are you scared? And I said, no, not.

1:20:54 He said, why not? I said, because I can outrun you. And he did not find that funny at all. He did not find that funny. Later, he was able to laugh about it.

1:21:03 But if you think about all that chemical reaction, now you take a 25-year-old kid driving down in 405 in LA and the red and blues pop off in his rear-view mirror. And he starts producing cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline. Those things are making him faster and stronger and dumber and lack of empathy. And now he has to talk to a policeman. So we have the wrong neurotransmitters.

1:21:25 We have the wrong instincts for the world that we’re in. And if we don’t bring consciousness to that conversation, we’re going to suffer. And that’s why those metrics are off the skirt. Addiction, suicide, and alcoholism and the like. I’m so glad we’re talking about this.

1:21:37 And it’s going to need a lot more talking about over the next couple of decades. Book is post-diabetic. How can people get it, learn more about it, and then find you for programs and all that good stuff? Absolutely. Postdiabetes.com is the core site.

1:21:51 You can find the book and programs, that kind of stuff. Of course, the books on Amazon, hardcover, softcover, Audible, the whole deal, bookstores and so forth. If they want to find me, I’m at www.aric.e. And I manage my own Instagram page and I do my best to answer everybody who writes. What’s your Instagram?

1:22:08 At Eric Edmeades. Okay, gotcha. Fantastic. What’s next for you? Well, a couple more days here in London.

1:22:14 We were going to leave tomorrow, but we decided we’re just having too much fun. So we’re going to stick around until Monday, then back home to the Caribbean for a little while. Okay. And then more projects. Yeah, coming and coming.

1:22:23 Yeah, I mean, one of the big things I’m excited about is doing, we’re sort of in pre-production on a documentary on diabetes reversal. And I’m really excited about it. It’s a big issue. It’s huge. It’s a huge issue.

1:22:34 And I’ll just close by saying I’ve got certain members of family that I’m going to send this to right afterwards. Because I think they’re stuck and they don’t realize there are solutions and they’ve been told that there aren’t a solution and just take this. And it’s just hard to watch someone who could step out of that cage because it’s unlocked. But they don’t realize it is. And this is a huge, huge, huge issue.

1:22:58 And it’s going to be here in the UK in a big way in another four or five years. We don’t see it as much as say when you go to America and then it’s going to migrate all around the world. And I appreciate you bringing attention to it. It’s costing the NHS 1.5 million pounds an hour already. Yeah, there you go.

1:23:14 And maybe like you said, maybe that’s a reason why a country like this can wake up to it. Because it’s right on the bottom line. Eric, thanks for everything you do. Really enjoyed this. All right.

1:23:21 Wishing you all the best. Thanks for having me. All right, thanks. Cheers.