Helping People to Live Happier and Healthier Lives with a Book featuring Udo Erasmus

Rob Kosberg:

Welcome everybody. Rob here with the Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast, excited to be with you. I have a great author and thought leader in the space of health and wellness, Mr. Udo Erasmus. Let me tell you a little bit about him because you’re going to love the things that we talk about today and I think really enjoy a man of his caliber being able to share his thoughts. So Udo is a pioneer of health and wellness the entire industry having created flax oil and the Healthy Fats Movement, which very, very interesting. And I think we’re going to talk a little bit about that. He’s the co-founder of Udo’s Choice, which is a supplement brand, a global leader in cutting edge health products, having sold tens of millions of bottles of healthy oils, probiotics, as well as digestive enzymes.

Accomplished author, of course, your book, Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill sold over a quarter million copies and still selling. I noticed on Amazon, it was still towards the top of the bestseller list, which is fantastic. And obviously, extensive background master’s degree in counseling. You’ve impacted millions of lives, thousands of presentations, thousands of media interviews. And thank you, my friend for being on with us today on the Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast.

Udo Erasmus:

Thank you for being an amplifier with a message that hopefully will turn out to be a good one.

Rob Kosberg:

Well, I certainly, as I have aged, I’m now 56 and I pay more attention than ever to my health and fitness. I work out every day. I try to really take care of the healthy fats that I’m eating and diet and all of that. And so I’m really interested, the flax oil, this Healthy Fats Movement, it’s not like that’s new. And yet it seems like to me that it is still continuing to gain momentum. Is that what you’re seeing in it as well? Or do you feel like we’ve kind of moved on from that?

Udo Erasmus:

Well, we’re always moving on from things if we’re driven by fads. We’re not going to move on to things that are true once they’ve been established as true if they’re essential.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s good.

Udo Erasmus:

Right? Because you have to have iron in your diet somehow. You have to have omega-3s and omega-6s. You have to have magnesium. These are essential nutrients. These are not fats. At one point they were discovered, but once they’re discovered and it’s established that these are things that you’re going to need for the next million years, they move out of the fad territory. There are things in fads where somebody gets a nice marketing angle like coral calcium. Coral calcium is about the worst kind of calcium there is, the least effective. Calcium of course is an essential nutrient, but it became a huge thing and they did infomercials and they sold, what was it? They sold $500 million worth of it. They made all kinds of claims for it that weren’t true. So that’s a fad.

And then after three years or so, or five years, I can’t remember exactly how long, they got busted by the FDA and the guys who pay attention to that kind of stuff.

Rob Kosberg:

The guys that take you to jail for doing that kind of stuff.

Udo Erasmus:

And then they got fined $50 million, but they made 500 in the meantime. That was a fad. And then it was over, right? And then one year it was melatonin was a fad. And then glucosamine sulfate was a fad. And then the blood type diet, which was quite a bit of BS in that, that was a fad. And every year or two, there’s another weight loss fad. So there are things that are essential that last. And there are things that are fads that are flashes in the pan and that are replaced every year or two. So I like to work on the stuff that is true and basic, and often the most basic things we need to know about health get forgotten in the chase for the fad and the money that can be made on fads short-term.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s a great statement. I want to explore that for just a minute. What do you think are some of the biggest things that have forgotten in this chase for money and in this chase for success in the supplement industry?

Udo Erasmus:

Well, I noticed that when I got involved in it, I wasn’t in the industry. I came in from outside because I got poisoned by pesticides and I was looking for self-help and because the doctors didn’t have anything for it. And I got stuck on fats because fats were misrepresented, misunderstood, confusing, contradictory, and I wanted to make sense of it. And once I realized that most of what we blamed on fats should’ve be blamed on the damage done by processing or by food use, because these are sensitive and they’re damaged by light, oxygen, and heat. And we throw them in the frying pan. And they’re damaged by light, oxygen, and heat all at the same time. And they increase inflammation and cancer as well as do proteins and starches when you overheat them. And then realized they’re the most sensitive nutrients, need the most care. We give them the least care. And more health problems come from damaged oils than any other part of nutrition.

And I was like, oh my God, if we could make them with health in mind and bring them back made with health in mind so they retain their health benefits, we could help so many people. And then omega-3s were established as essential, which means you can’t make them, you got to have them, you got to bring them in from outside. If you don’t get enough, you go down, your health deteriorates, you get deficiency symptoms that are degenerative in nature, they get worse with time. And if you don’t get enough long enough, you die. This is really important stuff for body construction. And if while you’re going down you bring enough back into the diet, that’s too low in it. Then all of the problems that come from not getting enough are reversed and you get your health back because life knows how to make a body work provided you take responsibility for providing, for bringing in the essential building blocks and making sure they land in the body so life continues. And that stuff gets lost because people think, “Oh yeah, well, we know all of that stuff.” And then they get fancier and fancier, and then they say, “Oh, well, we have this thing that called omphalomesenteric vein inflammation. I just made that up. And so let’s make-

Yeah. I know. And so I made up that word out of something that exists in biology and said, okay, let’s make a product that has a whole bunch of esoteric things in it and then we’ll throw that at this problem. And in doing that more and more, taking very specific things and making products supposedly to help, sometimes with scant research evidence, in the process of doing that, because people want to carve out niches for themselves, they lose track of what everybody needs that actually has the biggest mark. And so I came in on the essential part of the fats because that was really, no one was really dealing with the issues. But the same thing is true for other minerals and vitamins and amino acids. And I decided that what I wanted to do is I wanted to build a foundation. What is the stuff that everybody needs whether they’re healthy or sick? To maintain body construction.

Rob Kosberg:

Right. And there’s not one thing.

Udo Erasmus:

Let’s put that together before we get to all of the smallest parts. Because if we get that in place, make sure the foundation is there, then let’s see if we got any problems left that we need to address with something further. So that’s the way I looked at it. And I still think often-

It’s kind of in the city. You build a city and it’s a little town, and then it builds and builds and builds. And as it gets bigger and bigger, all the people who can afford it live in the suburbs, live in the suburbs, live in the suburbs. And in the end, the core of the city is where all the homeless people end up. Why? Because you got more and more into the periphery of the city and you forgot the heart of it. And because you forgot the heart of it, it deteriorated because things do deteriorate when they don’t get attention.

And the same a tree. The bark on the outside, under the bark is the live part. And then the tree gets bigger and bigger, and then it begins to rot out from the middle. So you end up with a hollow tree still alive, but the middle is rotten and it’s not useful for anything.

So, in a way we tend to do that with pretty much on every topic. We get more into the periphery, and more into the symptoms, and more into the specifics, and more into the details deep at finer and finer details. And pretty soon people have forgotten that there’s only a few things you need to know at the core of your existence. And from that, you can figure everything out pretty much. I like to hang out to the core.

And I do that in other arenas that have to do with human nature and health as well.

Rob Kosberg:

I don’t think you’re going to like this question, but I’m going to ask it anyway.

Udo Erasmus:

Okay. We’ll see.

Rob Kosberg:

I know that, well, there’s an interesting thing, right? There’s no question that there’s no secret missing ingredient, that the foundation has to do with all kinds of things as you just said, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, healthy fats, et cetera. But from your research and knowing the average American population and what has happened to the average American, what would you say are maybe the biggest missing ingredients or the one biggest, not that that’s the only thing, I know there are many, but what would you say, do you see more often that boy, this one always seems to be a problem in people?

Udo Erasmus:

And this is the question that I wasn’t going to like?

Rob Kosberg:

I wasn’t sure if you wanted to say that it was six things. I want to know one thing.

Udo Erasmus:

No, no, it’s perfect. It’s perfect. When I finished with oils, which I said is the most neglected area in my assessment of when I learned about it, second one is digestion. And guess what? Digestion happens in your middle. So we’re back to the core that’s been forgotten. And in that arena, digestive enzymes, probiotics, and fiber are the three main, and maybe betas are the four main things that you can do to make digestion to work. Why? Because when we started cooking foods, we killed the probiotics that were on the foods in nature, the way they grew in nature, that’s where cows get them from. They get them from every blade of grass in their mouth and through the system. When we cook our food, we kill those. So they should be replaced. But most people don’t replace.

And then digestive enzymes in raw foods because nature’s mandate was fresh, whole, raw, organic. And for humans, mostly plant-based, that was nature’s mandate. So we cook our foods, we destroy the enzymes in the rough foods that do about 60% of the digestion of the food for you once you’ve chewed them up. And it’s sitting in the top part of your stomach waiting to go into the acid bath. So those two need to be replaced.

Fiber comes from plants. So the more we’ve gone to more animal rich diets, the less fiber we get. Fiber’s really important for the probiotics, the friendly bacteria. So there’s a third one that you need to pay attention, it’s good for bowel regularity and stool consistency and all that kind of stuff. And everybody has problems with their digestive system, either they’re burping or they’ve got gas, or they’ve got bloating, or they have stomach pain, or their breath smells really bad. Because there’s a lot going on there. Because you’re turning living things into poop, right? And in the process, it’s getting hit with acid and hit with alkaline, and hit with enzymes. And there’s bacteria messing around in there. So that, because there’s so much going on there, needs to be done properly and properly is always in line with nature.

We get out of line with nature. And then the more we get out of line, every step we take out of line, we get some problems eventually.

Now if we cook the food and don’t replace the enzymes, our digestive system is forced to do more than twice as much work than it was intended for. Well, you think that wouldn’t catch up with you in five, or 10 or 20 years, of course it’ll catch up with you. And so that would be the next one.

Rob Kosberg:

Got you. You’ve said some interesting things that lead me down a certain path when it comes to thinking about how we should be eating. In this day and age, there’s so much talk around keto, the keto diet, paleo is obviously very similar. Probably they have their foundations in the Atkins diet going way back, probably as far as the ’80s or ’90s, those often don’t seem to be very fiber rich diets. Any opinion on those diets and the likelihood of those producing the kind of health that people want?

Udo Erasmus:

Well, paleo doesn’t have a definition. Doesn’t really have a definition. So just about anybody can call anything paleo.

Rob Kosberg:

Okay. All right. Well, that’s fair.

Udo Erasmus:

And all you say is, well, that’s how people used to eat, but none of the people who you claim who used to eat like that are alive and so you can’t prove it.

Rob Kosberg:

You can’t prove it.

Udo Erasmus:

Right? So that’s convenient. Now, I’m not saying that they’re doing that on purpose, lying to you on purpose. I’m not saying that, what I’m saying it’s convenient and you can’t actually find out because it depends. If you were a native in North America living on the Prairies, you ate a fair amount of meat because you had herds of Buffalo.

Rob Kosberg:

Sure.

Udo Erasmus:

And they were relatively easy to catch because the herds were so big and there were cliffs and there were ways to do that. But in most places where there weren’t that plethora of animals, mostly people ate plants most of the time because plants are really easy to hunt down and kill and they don’t run away and they don’t fight back. Right?

Rob Kosberg:

Well, that’s very true.

Udo Erasmus:

So, if you only had rocks to hunt with, you probably ate a lot of vegetables. Right?

Rob Kosberg:

Right. Well, talk about keto then, because keto we can define.

Udo Erasmus:

Yeah. Keto is defined as you basically dump the carbs and you eat more fats. And there’s very strong camps on both sides. The beans and chickpeas, and lentils, and peas guys, and grains guys, they say carbs are the most important food, but they have to be whole food, plant-based. Whole food plant-based. So we’re not talking margarine and sugar here. Because that’s plant based, but it’s junk. And the other guys are saying, “No, you want to dump the carbs and you want to make fat your fuel.” The problem with keto is that if you don’t make sure that in your diet you get the omega-3 and omega-6 fats undamaged as your first fat priority, the keto diet is not sustainable. And most people like to use butter and coconut and medium chain triglycerides because they’re very stable.

They’re not sensitive to damage by light, oxygen, and heat. And most people don’t want to take the care of perishables. And omega-3 and 6 are perishables. They’re like lettuce. You got to give them care. Most people don’t want to do that. So most keto diets don’t pay enough attention to them. And then the more other fats you eat, the more of the essential fats you need because they compete in certain ways.

It works for weight loss. Part of the weight loss is water, the body dumping water because you get inflammation from eating carbs a little bit, just a little bit of water retention. But the omega-3s actually actively turn on fat burning in the body and actively turn on fat production. And if you make sure that your keto diet is based on omega-3 and 6 in the right ratio made with health in mind, and then you eat tons of vegetables, because that’s basically the best diet. You get energy from the fats, there are higher energy molecules, then you can do quite well long-term on the keto diet.

So, there’s a good keto diet. And there’re lots of not well done keto diets. Me personally, I go both ways. I switch them around. I do, generally speaking, I do better on keto based with lots of vegetables. So I don’t have bread or cookies or sugar or noodles. In my house when I’m here by myself, right now I have my daughter and her son living with me. When I’m by myself, I don’t have any of that stuff in my house. I occasionally go out for some, so I’m not fanatic that way, but I pay attention to it. And now you have to, because so much is available to us, we actually have to eat deliberately with forethought about what we actually need, because our lifestyle has changed. We’re not as physically active. We have so much stuff available to us.

Because we even have to deliberately fast or do an autophagy diet where you eat for eight hours and then don’t eat for 16 hours so that your digestive system gets some rest too.

Rob Kosberg:

Yes. Interesting. I was going to ask you about intermittent fasting and the thoughts on that. But before I do, I have something on my mind because it’s something I’ve been doing for years and I just love it. I always struggled eating breakfast. For whatever reason, it didn’t sit well in my stomach. I ate it only because I was told it was the best and most important meal of the day and blah, blah, blah.

Udo Erasmus:

Most important meal of the day.

Rob Kosberg:

And I discovered Bulletproof coffee probably six, seven years ago. And so I swear by it personally. I have grass-fed butter. I use them, they call it Brain Octane. That’s the Bulletproof brand, but it’s MCT oil. I wonder if you have an opinion or a thought on that.

Udo Erasmus:

I think the only way to improve it would be to put essential fatty acids in it instead of saturated fats.

Rob Kosberg:

Interesting. And how would you do that?

Udo Erasmus:

You just pour oil on. You do the same thing you do with the butter or the MCTs. You put the coffee, you dump the stuff on it. It floats on top. You go and get little whiz and whiz it in. You can do that with the oil. The omega-3s and 6s also float on top. You just whiz them in the same way.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah. You just Nutribullet them in.

Udo Erasmus:

And can you get better results from that because omega-3s actively turn around fat burning. Coffee gives you a little bit of extra push. But the fact that omega-3s will actively turn on fat burning makes it a more effective fat burning guide. I call omega-3s the fat burning fire starter. Because they do that.

Rob Kosberg:

I want that.

Udo Erasmus:

But saturated fats don’t do that. They don’t actively turn on fat burning. Omega-3s do.

Rob Kosberg:

When you say you just put the oil in there, be specific. What do you mean? Are you talking about a really high grade extra-virgin olive oil? What are you-

Udo Erasmus:

No, no, no, no. There’s no omega-3s in olive oil.

Rob Kosberg:

Okay. So what kind of oil would I put in that? Because I’m going to try it right away.

Udo Erasmus:

Udo’s oil.

Rob Kosberg:

Udo’s oil. I’m going to buy it right away then.

Udo Erasmus:

Udo’s oil. That’s the go-to, that’s the Cadillac or the Lexus or the Tesla of the fat’s arena. The two essential fatty acids are the only thing you have to have from fats. And they need to be made with health in mind, and they need to be made with care because they’re so sensitive. And you put them in food after it comes off the heat, you do not use them for frying. And they enhance flavors and they improve the absorption of oil-soluble nutrients.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s fantastic. And how much would I put in in a Bulletproof coffee in a situation, a couple of tablespoons or?

Udo Erasmus:

The same as what you do with the MCTs, you put a tablespoon in, put a tablespoon in. The amounts per day I recommend is a tablespoon per 50 pounds of body weight per day mixed in your foods and intake spread out over the course of the day. That’s the way they work best. So, you look like you weigh maybe 160 pounds.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, 170.

Udo Erasmus:

170. Okay. Not bad enough for just seeing your head. I’m psychic. No, no, I’m not. So you’d be like three and a half tablespoons per day. And then you put some of it in the coffee, whatever, you just spread it out. If you want to get it, you want to get enough to make your skin soft and velvety. If you were a really high metabolizer, you might not be able to do that, but you are not. I can tell that just from looking at you. The high metabolizers-

Rob Kosberg:

Oh, that’s sad. That makes me sad.

Udo Erasmus:

No, no, the high metabolizers are people who are really skinny no matter what they eat.

Rob Kosberg:

Oh, that’s not me.

Udo Erasmus:

I know that. And I’m not either. They might need something on the outside for their skin. It’s only about 5% of the population. But the best way to oil your skin is from within. And you need both essential fatty acids to make that barrier properly. And then your skin becomes soft and velvety. Biggest thing people say about the oil that I work with is, “Fantastic what it did to my skin.” But they also have, improves mood, elevates mood, lifts depression. The body makes endocannabinoids out of omega-3s and protein in the body itself. So, you get high on the food.

Rob Kosberg:

What’s wrong with that?

Udo Erasmus:

And super important for pregnancy, with athletes, 40 to 60% increase in performance if they do their sport to exhaustion within 30 days of starting on a tablespoon per 50 pounds of body weight per day, which is about 25% from day one.

Rob Kosberg:

So, Udo, tell me, when it comes to going to see your doctor and heart health, and I assume the bad fats are bad because of cholesterol, the bad cholesterol, et cetera. Is that where the-

Udo Erasmus:

No.

Rob Kosberg:

No, so explain the difference between the healthy omega-3s and omega-6s versus the unhealthy and how that portrays itself in a doctor’s appointment or in health problems?

Udo Erasmus:

Wow.

Rob Kosberg:

In general.

Udo Erasmus:

Now, that question I don’t like.

Rob Kosberg:

Well, I knew it would eventually get to one you wouldn’t like.

Udo Erasmus:

No, because the reason is because doctors are not trained in nutrition. So whatever advice-

Rob Kosberg:

They’re going to put you on a med, I get-

Udo Erasmus:

Whatever advice they give you about nutrition is not medical advice and it’s advice they stole from somebody else, probably from some hippie in the ’60s. Because they had these-

Rob Kosberg:

I totally think so.

Rob Kosberg:

Rephrase the last part of the question. Forget the medical.

Udo Erasmus:

Well, here’s the thing. If you want to be healthy, don’t go to your doctor because the doctor says you’re healthy when you’re not sick, which means you don’t have any symptoms. Even if the symptoms have been suppressed by a drug that has major side effects, they called you apparently healthy. If you want health, go to nature. If you want symptom management, crisis management symptom suppression, and you want to have somebody monitor your downhill journey into the graveyard, go to the doctor. Health comes from nature. Life invented health in nature.

And that’s because your body is made of light, sun, solar energy, that’s your life, oxygen, water and foods that contain all the 45 essential nutrients. That’s all your body has ever been made from. There’s no such thing as a pharmaceutical drug deficiency, there never will be. And nature was able to do that, but we have to live in line with nature. And we always, we think we’re smarter than nature. And then we do better living through chemistry. That’s what it was called when I was a kid. Better living through chemistry, and look at the mess.

Rob Kosberg:

I know.

Udo Erasmus:

The ocean is so dirty, now fish is the dirtiest meat on the planet now and everything goes downhill. Pesticides and pharmaceutical drugs have side effects because they’re toxic. That’s what side-effects are. Toxic effects of unnatural molecules. And because they didn’t exist in nature, life never made a way to break them down easily. And life was not able to take them and use them in health. And that’s why they have side effects. They don’t belong in the body.

Rob Kosberg:

I agree.

Udo Erasmus:

The word is excuse, well, people don’t want to take the time to look after their own health. Also, we’re going to throw symptom suppression at them, but nothing gets fixed. Who came up with that? 200,000 years of stupid. Right?

Rob Kosberg:

Well, there’s a lot of money behind it unfortunately.

Udo Erasmus:

Whatever it is. I don’t even want to go there. But the thing is, if you want to be healthy, you need to live in line with nature and your nature.

Rob Kosberg:

Very good. Well, you hated the question and you answered it.

Udo Erasmus:

Oh, no, no, I don’t hate the question. No, I’m having a good time here.

Rob Kosberg:

Tell me this, something that’s been on my mind, I’ve read so many studies on longevity. As you get older, you think about that kind of thing. Recently I’ve read more and more about perhaps our generation or even the generation after us perhaps because of the science of longevity and the understanding of longevity, may be the first-generation, the one after us that lives to 150 healthy years, et cetera. Do you have any thoughts or opinion on, I’m sure you’ve done much research and study on that. What’s your thought on that?

Udo Erasmus:

Okay. The best chance to live healthy and as long as possible is to live in line with nature and your nature. Why? Because that’s where you come from. That’s what you’re made of. That’s the stuff that gives you your lifespan. But there are kids that have a genetic mutation or a genetic form of a particular gene. Their maximum lifespan is two years. And maybe by living more in line with nature, you can make that three years, but they’re never going to live 120. And there are people who say, “Oh yeah, 120, that should be normal.” Not for everybody. There are limits that are built into your genetic program.

However, there’s also something in your nature that has no limit because it has no form. It’s called life. It never dies. And consciousness or awareness, no form lives forever. Your body, because it has form will one day lose its form. And the pipe dream of, oh my God, we’re going to find out how to live forever, and there’s been people saying that for a long time. That’s probably in the 13th century, they were always BS-ing you for that. Right? So the fact that it is form means it will lose its form one day, no matter how well you do it. And the question of living forever is a question that is asked or that is pushed to people and maybe by people who are afraid of dying because they haven’t actually spent enough time spending time in the space their body occupies to get connected to what is indestructible and eternal and death-less.

And never get sick. That is part of every human being’s nature.

Rob Kosberg:

So, we’re talking now soul and spirit.

Udo Erasmus:

Of course. Of course. Because that’s also part of you. I could run through it really quickly.

The core is internal awareness. I call it internal awareness. In that core is a perfect piece that you can experience that is real, that isn’t absence of war, but is presence of a presence. And that is the foundation. That’s your source. That’s what you come out of. And that’s what the entire universe comes out of. And when you can bring your awareness to that place, when you bring your focus to that place, you look around and say, “Oh my God.” Peace has always been everywhere in this universe. Always. Always. And if you don’t see it, it means you haven’t gone deep enough because only peace can recognize peace. Okay? So that’s the deepest.

If you don’t have that as your foundation, then you’re living your life without foundation. And imagine if you have a life where peace is not the foundation, then there’s always something going on and there’s always stress and there’s always change. And there’s always reactions instead of proactions. Right?

Rob Kosberg:

Yes. Oh, I talk about the great deal reaction versus proaction. Love that.

Udo Erasmus:

Second part is life energy, which happens to be solar energy. So the sun’s energy goes into green leaves, excites electrons, they then react with other atoms to form bonds, to form molecules. The solar energy is stored in those bonds. Those become your food. You eat the food, you break them down. The sunlight, the solar energy is released. And that is your life. Now I’m talking about science now. So we see light, we look at light, we look at that energy from the outside. But if you actually sit still and you bring your awareness into the darkness that you see when you close your eyes and turn off all the lights, if you sit still long enough and go deep enough, you will discover light there and you are that light.

So now we’ve gone from seeing light to being light. And that’s the light all the masters talked about. When Buddha talks about enlightenment, enlightenment, made up from within. Or when your eye is singled, your body will be filled with light, right? They’re talking about life and they didn’t say I have it, you guys are screwed. They all said, “If you sit still like I do, if you give that time and you make that important in your life, you will experience what I experienced,” because they were talking about human nature and they were fully present in their nature. That’s why they were such good teachers of human nature and why they could heal and why so much wisdom came out of them, and why they gave such good advice, and why people still revere whatever’s left of that 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 years later.

That’s number two, life energy. And you can actually see it, you can hear it, you can feel it, and you can taste it. So that’s number two.

Number three is inspiration or inspired creativity. That’s the shine of the solar energy that is your life and that is your master into the world. And that’s where all the positive mind stuff comes from, right? This is the creative part of mind where all the inventions come from. They’re always about making life better for people. So it’s very positive stuff. Then there’s the body, food, and fitness, water, air, sleep, rest, healing, digestion, and detox. I think that covers most of it. And that’s where we spent most of our focus when we’d focus on health. Then the last one is survival smarts, and that’s the protective part of mind. That’s for protection and procreation. That’s all stuff inside of us. And that one has to do with number one, you want to be calm under fire so you could deal rationally with the emergencies that arise. And it maybe helps to have skills for these crises that you can anticipate because of where you live and what you know about the place where you live.

So earthquakes and volcanoes, and tidal waves, and disaster preparedness to the extent that is possible. You can’t prepare for everything, but you can prepare for the main things. There’s a saying, when the tidal wave hit in Japan, there was a sign on a rock that said, “Do not build below this line.”

Because they knew about earthquakes and tidal waves, because Japan gets lots of them. Right? It was there, but they built below the line.

Rob Kosberg:

No one paid attention.

Udo Erasmus:

Yeah. But they could’ve. And that would’ve been disaster preparedness. So then after that is social group. And social group, we know that other people affect their health. When we were kids on the soccer field, when we didn’t like the other kids we were playing against, we used to yell at them. “You make me sick.” So even as kids, we knew that people affect our health. And then there’s natural environment, what you do to the environment, you do to yourself. I saw a guy who carved in a log on a beach up here in BC, where I live. They had carved into log in letters, one inch deep, one inch wide, and about a foot high. This is a little bit crude. “If you shit in your nest, you will nest in your shit.” It covers every environmental issue. Right?

What you do with the environment. And the thing is what is your state of being determines how you treat other people and treat the environment. So if you’re in peace, you see a very different world and create a very different world than if you’re in anger or you’re in fear. And automatically, whatever it is that is your state of being or your state of emotion comes to expression in how you feel, how you think, how you talk, what you do and what the outcome is of that. Right?

So, what we’ve done to the environment is starting to bite us in the butt pretty extensively. So, the next big thing after COVID is climate change. The climate change, the short answer is, and COVID kind of set us up for that. There are people who want to throw calcium carbonate all over the atmosphere to cut out sunlight. Right?

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah. Bill Gates is planning that or researching it.

Udo Erasmus:

Anyway, let me not go there. But here’s the thing, what we learned from COVID is that if we do less, the air clears, the porpoises, the dolphins come back into the canals in Venice. The water is cleaner. The air is cleaner. The flowers have more color. So how to fix the environment-

Rob Kosberg:

It’s amazing how fast those things actually happened.

Udo Erasmus:

The slogan shouldn’t be, let’s spray calcium carbonate in the atmosphere. The slogan should be, do less. Right? Because what happened? We locked down. Nobody did anything. Oh, there’s a lot of improvements happening.

Rob Kosberg:

In a very short period of time.

Udo Erasmus:

In a very short time. It’s remarkable. So anytime somebody says, “Oh, let’s do this and that, that,” and there’s always going to be big money-making schemes for what we should do to the environment. Just remember, to fix the environment, do less.

Rob Kosberg:

All right. Let’s change here for a moment, Udo.

Udo Erasmus:

Yeah, the last one is-

Rob Kosberg:

Oh, there’s more?

Udo Erasmus:

Yeah, that’s number eight. Number eight is infinite awareness. That’s the big picture. The fact that here I am living in a terminal condition called the human body, no matter how healthy I am, terminal condition in an infinite universe and to be okay with all of that. And the goal is to be fully present in all of my being and my surroundings, not lost in thoughts in my head and be able to live into the environment that I live in. And if the life energy is my definition of unconditional love, because that energy, life loves the body unconditionally 24/7, 365, never have asked for a raise, never goes on strike. Always just does, does, does, does, does no matter what I come up with in my head. So the idea is that if we want to have this heaven on earth kind of planet, if we’re fully present in our being and our environment, we will have that planet, eight billion people can experience that. It’s all built into us.

We are wired for it, but we have to look into the wiring instead of looking away from it. And for 200,000 years, we’ve been looking away from it and wondering why it’s not working and seeing problems when the solution to the problems was sucking back and being present into the space that our body occupies.

That’s my goal for the next, however many years I have. Everybody, eight billion people could live their lives lit up from within if they go in instead of going away from it. They will feel so cared for if they do that that they won’t steal each other’s stuff. When we stop stealing each other’s stuff, we can live in harmony. When we live in harmony, we can make sure that everybody’s basic needs are met on a long-term sustainable basis. And we will not fix the problems until we find our wholeness that is waiting to be discovered within ourselves.

Rob Kosberg:

Well said, my friend, that’s a mouthful We have traversed the entire universe from healthy fats all the way to infinite intelligence.

Udo Erasmus:

Yeah. Why think small? Thinking big is no harder than thinking small.

Rob Kosberg:

I agree. Let me wrap it up with one last question that points it more back externally. And that is, you’ve written amazing books and you have a number of books and you’re not done creating any content. You’re working on new stuff as you’re expressing right now. Tell me, what have your books done for you? How have they helped you to expand your awareness? How have they helped you to grow your brand, get your message out? What has that been for Udo, for Udo’s message?

Udo Erasmus:

You will love this answer certainly because you’re in the biz, right?

Rob Kosberg:

That’s right.

Udo Erasmus:

I was going to make oils with a guy, and I wasn’t thinking about books. We were going to do some writing, but I wasn’t thinking about that. And what happened was that fell through. And so I suck back to say, “Well, I guess I can’t make oils right now.” Oh, but it doesn’t cost me anything, because I was broke. I didn’t have any money. I moved in with my mother.

And I said, well, what I can do that doesn’t depend on anybody else is I can write about what I’ve learned about fats and health, because I learned so much that I never learned in my years of biochemistry that they didn’t talk about processing. They never pointed to processing as the problem in the conditions that oils cause, that are associated with oils or frying or whatever. They never talked about that. So I said, man, there must be other people who can benefit from what I’ve learned in my search for getting healthy. So let me write a book, let me write it down and create a book. That wasn’t a goal for me. Oh, I want to be an author. No. Writing is tedious.

But it’s very good for clarifying my thinking because I would write things down and I’d look at it and say, “I don’t even believe that.” And then I asked myself, “Well, what do you actually really believe?” So I have to write it again. And I wrote the first book three times. First time I got 60 pages into it, and said, “There’s something wrong here. Second time I got 30 pages into it and I looked at it and I said, “I wouldn’t buy this book.” That’s a sign.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, that’s a good sign.

Udo Erasmus:

I wouldn’t buy this book. And so I started over again and it all fell into place. And literally they were 54 chapters. I think I wrote 51 or 52 of them. Literally just started, went to bed, got up, started, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote. It sort of got organized inside of my own head in a way that it just flowed out, flowed out on the third shot. And the book I wrote on the, what I call The Book On Total Sexy Health: The 8 Key Parts Designed By Nature, that came about like that too. I’d been thinking about it and I started writing and it didn’t flow. And then one day it just flowed. And I like getting to the point where I can just write it in that flow. And it’s cosmic almost, it’s almost channeled. I’m not big on that stuff, but it just felt like it was there. I don’t remember organizing it.

It literally organized itself, because I think the mind is self-organizing. And so you spend enough time on a topic and it becomes self-organized and a flow. And then it came out. And then I had to add three chapters because they needed to go somewhere.

Rob Kosberg:

And what have they done for you? How have they helped the quarter million copies sold?

Udo Erasmus:

It did everything. It did everything. It gave me credibility obviously. To write a book that is fairly technical.

Yeah. And that was the expansion of the original book that’s got 91 chapters, and that pretty much flowed as well. One way I look at it is the book is like my calling card, you get a little business card, this is my business card. And authors have more credibility than just about anybody, even though sometimes lousy books, but the fact that it’s written somehow makes it more credible to people.

But the book’s a good book, a lot of work went into it. And people who’ve read it, they got good information out of it. And the way I’ve sold 250,000 copies, I did radio shows, and I’d sell a few. One radio show, I think I sold something close to 1,000 copies. It’s a big radio show. And I was blown-

Yeah, I was blown away. But usually I’d go and do talks and might sell two or three or five or six or 10. And I think the thing I would say to people is writing a book on something that you’re competent in is a really good idea, partly to clarify your own thinking on your topic because when you start writing it down, you see what you know and you notice what you don’t. So it’s a really good way to process your information and make it coherent. And so it’s good from a personal point of view for that, makes me more fluent when I talk because I’ve really gone through it with a fine tooth comb letter by letter, and the book can be sent and the book will find its own audience. Through the book, I talked to so many people that I never ever had personal access to.

And the book went around and then the book found itself, and somebody else has something to say about it. So then it takes on a life of its own. But it’s also important to understand that when the book is published is when the work begins.

Rob Kosberg:

I like to tell my clients that. That’s right.

Udo Erasmus:

And a lot of original authors think the publisher is going to do everything.

Rob Kosberg:

Nope.

Udo Erasmus:

And that’s not, it’s even less that way now than it was when my first book came out in 1986.

Rob Kosberg:

True. Yep.

Udo Erasmus:

And yeah, because it’s my work. It’s my work, so I’m responsible for getting it out. And then the book wasn’t a big moneymaker. I made more money on products than on the book. But the book definitely gave me credibility. And the book was good enough so that I’ve met people who are now in fats research, who have told me at the conferences that I’ve gone to. They said they read my book and that was the book that made them decide to dedicate their research life to fats.

And that’s pretty cool. And I was not a fat chemist. I was not a lipid chemist. I was just a guy who liked biology. I love biology. I love the way things are made by nature. So yeah, it’s serious credibility, but write a good book. Write something. And do it in something you have passion for because you can’t write a really good book without passion. And if you don’t write a really good book, you’re probably not going to be all that excited about telling people that you wrote it. But the book-

So, the contribution that you’re making is really the most important thing. And the book is for that one vehicle, right?

Rob Kosberg:

Wonderful. Udo, thank you. Wise words. I appreciate the time you’ve given us today. Great stuff. I am, as soon as we’re done going to go and buy some of the Udo oil. Where should they best go to learn more about you, buy your books, get your oil, where’s the best place we can send them?

Udo Erasmus:

Okay. Well, there’s a bunch of places. Udoschoice.com is a website for the products and why we made them and how we made them, and all our thinking behind that. I have another site that is theudo.com,  or udoerasmus.com. And we have educational materials and some courses there. I’m on Facebook, I’m on Instagram. I have a YouTube channel. I’ve been at this for quite a while, so I’m not hard to find.

And if you want the book, you can get it. Bookstores can bring it in, it’s in Books In Print, and Amazon has it. And the oils and the enzymes and probiotics, they’re in the natural foods trade, but you can also get those on Amazon. And some of the internet distributors carry them.

Rob Kosberg:

Excellent. Good. Good. Well, thank you, my friend. I certainly enjoyed getting to know you and I love the span of the things that we talked about. And I am absolutely going to try some of Udo’s oil in my Bulletproof coffee. I’ve been doing it every day for, I don’t know, probably seven years now. But I get the idea. And so thank you for that. And thank you for being part of the podcast today.

Udo Erasmus:

Yeah. And thank you for having me on.