374. Trial, Error, and Adventure | Eric Edmeades

[0] Hello, everyone watching and listening.

[1] Today I'm speaking with serial entrepreneur and public speaker Eric Edmeads.

[2] We discuss his early experiences with homelessness, the extent and detriment of alcoholism and illness that preoccupied his father, the changes you can make to restructure your physiological responses, especially to fear, the relationship between trust, and sales and marketing, general communication, and the world of possibility that opens up to you if you embrace the unknown, the potentially dangerous, and above all, that which calls to you.

[3] So we met Mexico.

[4] Yeah, Puebla.

[5] Right, we were there for their festival of ideas.

[6] Yeah.

[7] Right, we went to an old library afterwards, which was very cool.

[8] It was the oldest library, I think, in North America.

[9] I think in all the Americas, yeah.

[10] It was super cool building.

[11] You know, it was fascinating is that they had no electricity in there and no climate control, and millions of dollars and more than money, the value of all those books.

[12] But the building was built, like, well enough to do the climate control, the humidity control in the 1500s.

[13] Yeah.

[14] Fascinating.

[15] Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

[16] That was a good trip.

[17] That was a cool city and a good festival.

[18] Yeah, yeah.

[19] So I was looking at your biography today.

[20] I figured we might as well walk through it.

[21] It said, let's start with this.

[22] Well, living in Canada, your family was, you were born into an apartheid era, South Africa, and then immigrated with your family to Canada.

[23] But you said, well, living in Canada, your childhood quickly became what can only be described as a rollercoat of experience, roller coaster ride of experience, including a period of homelessness in Northern Canada at the vulnerable age of 15.

[24] Northern Canada is not a good place to be homeless.

[25] Actually, I would put to you, and I think you'll be with me on this, it's a great place to be homeless because it forces resolution very quickly.

[26] So what happened at 15?

[27] You know, my dad and my mom split up when I was very young, and it was a very good thing they did.

[28] And my dad was at that stage having, let's say, an irresponsible relationship with alcohol.

[29] And so they had split up, and then he'd sobered up.

[30] And my mom and I had a disagreement, a teenage disagreement at some stage that resulted in me rebelling and going to live with my father.

[31] And so off to, you know, to live with my father, after all these years, I'll finally get to live with my father.

[32] and then he found this rebellious teenager very difficult to live with in his two -bedroom apartment that sent me to boarding school.

[33] And the boarding school that I went to was one of the greatest gifts of my life, but it was also very demanding.

[34] Like, you know, at 13 years old, we trained to do a snowshoe race, and it was a 26 -mile snow -shoe race.

[35] We're 13.

[36] It's not a relay race.

[37] It's 26 actual miles.

[38] Snow -shoes are very difficult to move.

[39] They're heavy, and it's minus 40 outside.

[40] Completely different gate.

[41] Yeah, it's a very different thing.

[42] And that's a very different thing.

[43] just a sample of what was tough there.

[44] But the bigger thing that was going on at the school is the school was beginning to wake up to the realities of being in Canada.

[45] You know, they used corporal punishment and, you know, very harsh winter programs.

[46] And they were starting to get a lot of flack for being too hard on kids.

[47] And so the school was trying to transition to be more acceptable, I suppose.

[48] And during that transition, my class in particular was in the wrong space.

[49] We got we got the worst of both sides of that.

[50] And so halfway through grade 10, I made the decision to leave to leave the school.

[51] And my dad disagreed with this decision quite heavily.

[52] And but as I actually control my body, they were not able to get my body to the school.

[53] And I just refused to go.

[54] And then my dad refused to let me to stay in his home.

[55] And so my response to that was to walk out the door into Edmondson.

[56] And I was 15 years old.

[57] And it's funny, about a week later, my dad tracked me down wherever I was in the city.

[58] And he told me that I had apparently won a $2 ,000.

[59] This is a long time ago.

[60] It's a lot of money.

[61] $2 ,000 bursary for leadership skills or something the school had acknowledged me for.

[62] And he'd never told me that before.

[63] I don't know how that had slipped his mind in my, it might have been good to know at the beginning of the year.

[64] But at that point, he offered me $500 in cash if I would go back to the school.

[65] And the other $1 ,500 of my bursary, he would give me in cash once I finished grade 10.

[66] And this was in what year?

[67] 1986.

[68] Right.

[69] So that would be the equivalent of about $10 ,000 now.

[70] Yeah, it's a lot of money.

[71] And I said no. I said no. I had strong conviction principles about why I didn't want to go back.

[72] And I would put to you that had it been summer or had it been Los Angeles and had it been easy to be homeless, then I don't know what would have happened.

[73] I don't know what direction I would have gone in, but that wasn't a possibility.

[74] It was minus 20, minus 30, sometimes minus 40.

[75] Like, I had to be smarter than that.

[76] So at first, I, you know, a little bit of couch surfing until my friend's parents ran out of patience with that.

[77] Yeah.

[78] And then one day there was a video arcade called Games People Play and near the University of Alberta.

[79] And one of my friend's dad ran the place.

[80] And I walked up to him one day.

[81] And I can't imagine, I was 15, and I must have looked 13 or 12.

[82] I was a kid.

[83] And I walked up to him and I said, you look really tired.

[84] And he goes, I am.

[85] and I said, I can fix that for you.

[86] And he goes, what do you mean?

[87] And I go, well, I think part of your tiredness is you're here open to this place for us at 10 in the morning.

[88] And then you're here closing it for us at 3 in the morning or something.

[89] And he goes, I'm not hiring anybody.

[90] And I said, I'm not looking for a job.

[91] I said, but if you let me sleep in here at night, if you let me sleep in here at night, I will take over for you at say 6 in the evening so you can have dinner with your family.

[92] And I'll keep the place running smooth and I'll close it for you at 3.

[93] and you don't have to pay me. And as he had no problem with violating the child welfare, you know, the laws, he and I agreed to that deal.

[94] And that was, you know, the beginning of my sort of emancipation.

[95] It's the beginning of my saying I'm responsible for my existence.

[96] And I did that until, for several months, until...

[97] So that deal worked out.

[98] That deal worked out really well.

[99] You know, how did you manage to maintain order in the arcade?

[100] You know, it was an interesting thing as a kid, back then you had to pay for video games, you know, not like now, you had to actually put money in the machines.

[101] But if you had the keys to the machines, you didn't have to do that.

[102] And so I played a lot of video games.

[103] You know, it kind of was very distracting.

[104] And I have to say that as computers came out, I was in that generation.

[105] We only really got computers in, like, grade 12.

[106] So we were that generation that was, like, going to be left behind.

[107] But I wasn't left behind because I had been, like, kind of won with the computers.

[108] Like, video games and computers are the same thing.

[109] The logic is the same.

[110] So that time was very, very useful to me later in my life because I was never afraid of computers.

[111] I was never afraid of AI, for example.

[112] I've been playing it since I was a kid.

[113] Well, that's a good point.

[114] I'm afraid of it, but I'm willing also to use it.

[115] If you were 15 and you looked 13, why did the other kids that were in the arcade listen to you at night?

[116] That's what I was thinking about in terms of order.

[117] It's funny.

[118] Nobody's ever asked me that before, but I can tell you, my school gave me a $2 ,000 bursary for leadership skills.

[119] Maybe there was something inherent.

[120] Maybe there was something, I mean, I had a lot of respect with my friends at that stage.

[121] Oddly, I was the relationship counselor for everybody.

[122] If somebody liked somebody or their relationship, I couldn't, I had no understanding of women, girls in my life.

[123] I had no, for me, I couldn't do it.

[124] But I was very good at handling that kind of stuff for other people.

[125] So I think that I had a sort of like coach attitude anyway.

[126] And so, yeah, I had their respect.

[127] I see, I see.

[128] Well, let's go right back to the beginning.

[129] Your family moved to Canada from South Africa in the 70s.

[130] Yeah.

[131] And how old were you?

[132] I became Canadian at 8.

[133] We kind of went back and forth a few times before I finally became a citizen.

[134] And do you have any memories of South Africa?

[135] Oh, yeah.

[136] And I mean, I feel, in many ways, I feel just as much South African as I do Canadian.

[137] I've maintained a very, my family's been in South Africa.

[138] They were wagon -trained people.

[139] We're talking fortrekkers, like they were original South African settlers.

[140] So I have a very strong attachment to the country and very strong memories.

[141] from childhood and beyond.

[142] My mother's grandfather was the minister in the parliament, in the, I think it's called Volkskrad, but he was the minister in Paul Kruger's cabinet that proposed the formation of the Kruger National Park, which is, in my mind, one of the most important pieces of land on the planet.

[143] And on the other side, my dad's great -grandfather, T. F. Dreher, was the archaeologists who discovered the Floresbad skull, which is, until very recently, the oldest Homo sapien skull ever found.

[144] So I had a very deep, deep history there.

[145] Right, right, right.

[146] So why did your family move to Canada?

[147] You know, it's a funny thing.

[148] My grandmother had this little dog, little schnauzer type thing, and it was the most racist little dog you can imagine.

[149] Like, it was terrible.

[150] You'd go to the gas station, and the guys would come to fill up the gas station, and they were, of course, black, and they would fill up the car, and this is apartheid era, South Africa, and the dog would go ballistic.

[151] But can you blame the dog?

[152] I mean, is it the dog's fault that it's a racist?

[153] No, it's not.

[154] I mean, it was raised that way.

[155] It was simply picking up on the fears and racism that my grandparents had in their life.

[156] So then that always made me question because my grandfather was a racist, like a serious racist.

[157] He wasn't a white supremacist.

[158] He had an order of things, but he was clearly racist.

[159] But is that his fault?

[160] If it's not the dog's fault, is it his fault?

[161] Maybe not.

[162] He was brought up that way.

[163] But for some reason, my parents, they didn't like it.

[164] They saw it, they didn't like it, they were opposed to it, and they became involved in the ANC, and my dad was studying law at Witts University, and...

[165] He became an anthropologist?

[166] Do you know, he really wanted to be because of his grandfather, but his parents were insistent then he went to law school, so he went to Vutz, and then he went to McGill here in Montreal, and then he went to Dal and taught law as a professor at Dalhousie in Halifax.

[167] but underneath it all, what he really wanted to do was sciences.

[168] And so when he finally kind of left the law, that's when I gave you a copy of this book.

[169] Yes, I read his book.

[170] I forgot about that.

[171] Megafauna.

[172] It's a very good book.

[173] Yeah, that book details out the, what would you say, the depredations of human beings over about a 15 ,000 -year period, the fact that we were integrally involved with the disappearance of megafauna, all everywhere around the world, but particularly in the Western Hemisphere, right?

[174] Where the animals hadn't adapted to the present.

[175] of human predators because there's a huge collapse of megafauna species about 15 ,000 and 10 ,000 years ago in the Western Hemisphere, which pretty much corresponds with the arrival of two -legged hunters, right, who took everything, the mammoths, the big mammals, after having gotten rid of the giant tortoises, your father writes about that.

[176] It's a very good book, by the way.

[177] Yeah, I enjoyed reading it.

[178] I'm glad you.

[179] I thought you would like it, and it's funny about a week after...

[180] Megafauna, I think it's called.

[181] That's right.

[182] Yes, yes.

[183] Megafauna .com, incidentally.

[184] Yeah, yeah.

[185] Well, and for people who are watching listening, if you're interested in such things, megafauna is an extremely interesting book.

[186] It's a jaunt through prehistory on the biological side, but also an analysis of the relationship between human hunting capacity and our particular ecological niche, which is, well, you might say, which is stunningly effective hunter because we hunt together in groups and virtually no animal.

[187] All animals had evolved all sorts of protective mechanisms in relationship to other animals, but none of those were particularly useful against human beings.

[188] Well, you know, it's interesting.

[189] Sometimes when people debate the megafauna extinction, human hunting kind of thing, they're like, but then why are there still megafauna in Africa?

[190] Yeah.

[191] And it doesn't make sense.

[192] If humans started there, but it's exactly that because they were the frog in the hot water.

[193] Humans evolved that innovative capacity in Africa, those animals have natural fear avoidance.

[194] Elephants in Africa, I've spent a lot of time in Africa.

[195] If you're walking in the bush, as I've done many times, and I came, for example, once walking down into a riverbed, and there are 14 lions sitting in the river, well, those lions, they're afraid of you.

[196] Grizzlies are not afraid of you.

[197] Right, right.

[198] You know, if a grizzlies are afraid of you, it's because it learned it in its consciousness, in its experience of humans, but it doesn't have that DNA thing.

[199] And so that book has actually been a big part of even my journey because, you know, my sort of quest into, say, health and nutrition, that kind of stuff really stem from my dad's fascinating with human history.

[200] So that book, that's been a good adventure.

[201] Now, did you establish a good relationship with your father after having things broken?

[202] And how long did that take after the events of your adolescence?

[203] You know, very slowly and very quickly, you know, it was one of those things.

[204] It would happen in fits and starts.

[205] I mean, in one sense, it was never really that bad.

[206] It was just brutally honest.

[207] You know, it was not, it was not, I mean, I would say that, you know, during his, when they, I think in alcoholism, we talk about a practicing alcoholic.

[208] I'm like, I don't know what they're practicing.

[209] They think he's good enough at that already.

[210] But during that window, I would say that at that time, there would have been, say, you know, language or behavior that you might have thought of as abusive.

[211] But then after that, the discord between us, I wouldn't have called it abusive.

[212] I just would have called it direct.

[213] It was like we would disagree on things and strongly, and we had our opinions, but we still had respect, you know, a lot of respect.

[214] And so that was very easy for us to rebuild a friendship upon.

[215] And so we've been very close pretty much ever since.

[216] Even in the month when I went back to him, at now 16, I had turned 16, I went to him.

[217] And I said, look, I think you get at this point, you're not going to win this.

[218] I'm not going back to school.

[219] But if you don't let me move back in with you, the school will not let me go to school.

[220] They wouldn't let me go to school without a parent signing off on something.

[221] Actually, I was just shy of my 16th birthday.

[222] And if I waited any longer, I'd lose that whole academic year.

[223] And he found my argument convincing and allowed me to move back in and sign my school paperwork and let me finish grade 10.

[224] And despite missing three months of that year or four months of that year.

[225] So did you go back to school at that time?

[226] Not at that school.

[227] Oh, not at that school.

[228] The school of my choosing.

[229] I see.

[230] And I did finish that.

[231] And pretty much from that point on, my dad and I began rebuilding that relationship.

[232] But I'd say that relationship was forged by my dad taking us on, you know, canoe trips in La Colerange and, you know, taking us up to Yellowknife and taking us into the willingness.

[233] I think that even those things formed the foundation of why we have the relationship even we have today.

[234] Okay, so let's go back to when you were eight.

[235] You said that that was when you became a Canadian citizen.

[236] Okay, so what is your family doing in Canada at that point?

[237] Your dad is in the legal business?

[238] then and your mom?

[239] My mom at that stage, she was really a mom, and then she wanted to go and finish her own education.

[240] So she went to Dell as well.

[241] She went to Dell and did a master's in social work.

[242] So I had my dad at that point practicing alcoholic lawyer or law professor and my mom, the studying social work.

[243] But going back to citizenship, that was kind of interesting because, you see, my brother sponsored us for our citizenship ultimately because apparently we snuck my pregnancy.

[244] mother into the country, and she birthed my brother in Montreal.

[245] And so on that basis, we then made our bid for Canadian citizenship.

[246] And I have vague memories of this, but I know the family's story.

[247] We're facing the judge.

[248] I don't know how it works these days, but you actually had to prove that you knew some things about Canada.

[249] And so the judge is asking my dad a bunch of questions, trivia questions about Canada.

[250] Are you guys really here?

[251] And he says to my dad, how many provinces are there in Canada?

[252] And my dad says nine.

[253] And the judge, it turned out the judge is Afrikaans, or not Afrikaans.

[254] He's from South Africa, but he's British, and we're Afrikaans, we're Boers.

[255] Turns out that our relatives would have fired at each other in the Boer War.

[256] So weird, you know, two generations later, he's swearing us in for citizenship in a new country.

[257] Anyway, so he says to my dad, I'm going to let you take another shot at that question.

[258] And my day goes, well, and this is 1978, not too long after the FLQ and all that stuff that was happening in early Canada.

[259] And my dad goes, well, fine, 10, if you want to count Quebec, but it doesn't seem like they want to be here.

[260] Which set up a really fun conversation.

[261] The exam was over, and we were welcoming into the country.

[262] So now your father was a law professor where?

[263] At Dell.

[264] At Dell.

[265] At Dell.

[266] And what branch of law did he teach about and practice?

[267] Product liability, I think, was a big part of where he went.

[268] And then after that, he practiced a lot in contract law, employment law, that sort of stuff.

[269] When he went into practice after sobering up and so forth, then he mostly worked in And, you know, business structuring, contract law, employment law, that sort of thing.

[270] And was your parents' relationship when you were about eight at that time?

[271] Was it starting to shake already?

[272] Yeah, yeah.

[273] And was that alcohol -related fundamentally?

[274] It was, yeah.

[275] My dad says there were two causes of his alcoholism.

[276] One was that my mother used to like to wash her hair with beer, you know, as the tradition was.

[277] And she would only ever use half a beer.

[278] He had to finish the other half.

[279] So he likes to blame her for that, and Adam and Eve type situation.

[280] But I think the real cause was that, you know, at 20 -something years old, being asked to teach law, in a branch of law he didn't learn, despite graduating first in his class, was stressful for him, and he found that, again, half a beer would take the edge off before his lectures.

[281] Yeah, well, alcohol is an extraordinarily pernicious drug, and if you're inclined towards it, you can be inclined towards it because you're sensitive to its anxiety reducing properties, or you can be sensitive to it because it enhances social communication, or because it produces a psychomotor high like cocaine, or all of those at once.

[282] And if you're particularly predisposed to alcoholism, you can experience all three at once.

[283] I had a friend in Montreal, Frank Irvin, Great old guy, looked like Ernest Hemingway.

[284] He had a monkey farm on St. Kitts and him and his woman, Roberta, oh, I can't remember Roberta's last name.

[285] She was quite a piece of work, too, a real cool person.

[286] They had this monkey ranch on St. Kitts, and they used to go down there and study the effects of alcohol on green monkeys, which, 5 % of whom would drink Tacoma on first exposure.

[287] And they had videotapes of these damn monkeys drinking.

[288] And it looked like a frat party.

[289] But 5 % of them on first exposure would drink to coma.

[290] And those were the monkeys that had a biological predisposition to alcoholism.

[291] And alcohol is a really bad drug, you know.

[292] 50 % of murders take place in an alcohol -fueled environment.

[293] Either the victim or the perpetrator or both is drunk.

[294] It's almost the sole cause of domestic abuse.

[295] It's almost the sole cause of so -called date rape.

[296] If you dig into criminal behavior deeply enough, well, hell, you don't have to dig much at all before you find alcohol.

[297] It's also the only drug we know that actually makes people more aggressive.

[298] And not merely because they're, not merely because they don't know what they're doing.

[299] We did experiments at McGill showing that if you took drunk people and put them in a competitive environment where they could be aggressive and had them keep track of their aggression, so they were actually conscious of it, they became more aggressive even rather than less.

[300] So yeah, alcohol's bad news and it can turn perfectly good people into quite the, quite the impulsive and dim -witted monsters.

[301] Well, if you give people that massive boost of sugar and then suppress their inhibitions, that's going to happen.

[302] I was 21 years old in Prince George, and I had a night like that.

[303] And I mean, it wasn't terrible.

[304] I just woke up in the morning, you know, praying at the porcelain altar.

[305] I was making that deal with God.

[306] If you just make me feel better, I'll stop this.

[307] I won't do it anymore.

[308] And then I didn't.

[309] I haven't had alcohol since.

[310] Oh, really?

[311] Since you were 21?

[312] I quit drinking when I was 27.

[313] You know, I mean, Northern Albertan culture was pretty damn hard drinking culture, like most northern places.

[314] And a lot, number of my friends ended up alcoholic, you know, and, well, all the people that I was in high school with and in college with were extremely hard drinkers.

[315] And I drank quite a lot till I was 27.

[316] And then I found that I couldn't, well, first of all, my life was taking a pretty professional turn.

[317] And second, I found that there was no bloody way I could write seriously and think seriously on an all.

[318] ongoing basis if I was hung over.

[319] And I got married and I was going to have kids and I thought, yeah, enough of this.

[320] And so I had a bit of, I thought when I was 50 that I might be able to drink again socially.

[321] And I toyed with it for about a year and found out that I was probably just as stupid at 50 as I had been at like 25 and decided to dispense with that as that too, which was definitely.

[322] You know, I've watched too as I've gone around the world.

[323] I've met very, very many people in many, many social occasions, and because I don't drink anything at all now, if I go out and watch people drinking, it makes everybody stupid and fuzzy -minded.

[324] And, you know, the problem is, is when you're drinking, you think you're cool, but, you know, you have those same delusions that Homer Simpson's friend Barney had when he was drinking, that you're this kind of, you know, elegant and sophisticated comedian, and it just makes everybody stupid.

[325] I would argue that the real problem is that it does that.

[326] Yeah, well, that's certain.

[327] The first drink does that.

[328] My dad tells this, you know, he's, I hope I get the family story right, but he's a kid of 17 or 18, and he's kind of struggling at that point with school, and he goes to a family function, and he's got that one uncle who's a real jerk.

[329] Yeah.

[330] And the uncle pins him down at the dining room table, and he says to him, he goes, so, Baz, are your grades a function of your inability to commit to work, or are you just stupid?

[331] And it was such a nasty question.

[332] And my dad immediately, you know, he blushed.

[333] And, you know, people who blush know that they're blushing, and then that causes more blushing, which, of course, causes the eye watering.

[334] And he just, it was a devastating moment for him.

[335] And then about two weeks later, he and his dad are sitting, and his dad, unfortunately, was an alcoholic and, you know, didn't live very long as a consequence.

[336] But they're sitting on the deck having a little bit of a beer.

[337] And then he goes in and, and uncle does the same thing.

[338] So we solve the great mystery.

[339] Are you stupid or lazy?

[340] and my dad did not blush, and my dad said, you know, I would entertain your question if I thought there was any sincerity in all of us.

[341] I recognize that it's just through your own smallness that you're attempting to hurt me. I'm going to let it go.

[342] And then at that point, my dad is like, it's socially responsible not to go out without at least a beer.

[343] Uh -huh.

[344] Right, right, right, right.

[345] Yeah.

[346] Yeah, well, it definitely is a confidence -enhancing substance.

[347] But it's an illusion.

[348] But it's an illusion.

[349] Damn right, it's an illusion, yeah.

[350] It, it, you know, when I say that as someone who quite enjoyed drinking.

[351] I mean, I had quite the blast as a consequence of it.

[352] But I also noticed that, especially when I was in Montreal and starting to grow up, let's say, and take on serious responsibilities, that every time I had done something or said something that I regretted, it was when I was drinking.

[353] And I thought at one point, maybe I don't want to live a life where I'm continually, or even sporadically wishing that I hadn't said or done something.

[354] You know, and I'm very much unlikely to do that if I'm sober and clear -headed.

[355] That's exactly what happened to me in Prince George.

[356] It was exactly that conversation with myself.

[357] And initially, I decided six months off and then I just never went back to it.

[358] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[359] Well, you know, the other thing I think that happened, too, is I started drinking when I was pretty young, like 14, you know.

[360] And I had a certain degree of social anxiety.

[361] I mean, I'm very extroverted, but, well, I think everybody has a certain degree of social anxiety when they're like 14 because, like, what the hell do you know?

[362] you know, and that's probably exacerbated around girls, and that alcohol, because it enhances sociability and also suppresses anxiety, is a good social anxiety medication.

[363] But the problem is is you don't learn how to conduct yourself as a sober individual in social circumstances.

[364] And you learn very rapidly to rely on the alcohol, not only as a social lubricant, but as the basis of your social behavior.

[365] And I would say, you know, to young people who are watching listening, that's a stupid plan.

[366] should learn how to be in a social group with others when you're sober so that you bloody well know how to do it, especially if you're planning to do anything even vaguely serious and responsible with your life, which is probably something you should be doing.

[367] A good friend of mine, exactly my age within a few months, I quit at 21, he quit at 31.

[368] And we were both 34, 35, we were out with some friends and we were dancing and having fun, and I'm just me. And I'm actually more introverted.

[369] So I'm not super outgoing, but I'm still having a great time.

[370] I'm dancing, I'm having fun.

[371] And And he comes up to him, he goes, how do you do that?

[372] He goes, I can't do that now without the alcohol.

[373] I go, because I learned to do it without the alcohol.

[374] Yeah, definitely.

[375] Yeah, there's definitely something to that.

[376] Yeah, well, I found that social occasions were somewhat awkward and also, yeah, I would say also that I didn't exactly know what to do without that false camaraderie that alcohol produces and that inflation of confidence.

[377] and extroversion as well.

[378] Yeah, not a wise developmental strategy, all things considered.

[379] All right, so we're back to when you're eight, and now you're a Canadian, okay?

[380] So you're not in boarding school at that point, and where are you living?

[381] Halifax, Nova Scotia.

[382] In Halifax.

[383] How long were you guys on the East Coast?

[384] You know, I think I left there to go live with my dad at late 12.

[385] Yeah, and so what was happening with you and your mom?

[386] Did you idealize the idea of going off?

[387] to live with your dad?

[388] I did.

[389] Yeah, yeah, that's a problem with split family, say.

[390] He'd sobered up, and I didn't get to see him very often, maybe once or twice a year, he would come out to the east, and, you know, my dad, I would say that, you know, I read this thing once that you kind of like sort of typecast yourself, or you model your personality a little bit on the people that you most admired at the age of, say, 7, 8, 9, 10.

[391] You know, for me that's what admiration is for.

[392] That's a mirror neuron's admiration.

[393] I'm watching.

[394] You bet, man. You bet.

[395] So for me, it was like a weird combination of, like, Indiana Jones and Han Solo and Hogan from Hogan's Heroes, and my dad, who encapsulated all of those people.

[396] And so when he sobered up and became safe and the idea of going to live with him was possible, yeah, I idealized the idea of it.

[397] And that was at what age?

[398] That was at 12.

[399] Like 12, maybe just turning 13.

[400] Yeah, well, you know, it's a real open question exactly when boys and girls are.

[401] as well, for that matter, really most need their fathers.

[402] You know, and if your father is a target of emulation, it might well be that you most need them, especially when you're a boy, about the time that you hit puberty.

[403] And I think part of the reason for that, I remember when I lived in Montreal, there was this kid that lived down the street.

[404] We lived in poor areas in Montreal, and there was this kid that lived down the street, one of the places we live, who was the son of a single mother.

[405] she was about 5 '4 and he was about six feet tall and he was 14 you know and he was out tromping around the streets in montreal causing trouble and we used to hear his mother we didn't know them you used to hear them you know fighting in the hallway for example and uh like what the hell could she do about it you know he was six feet tall yeah you know short of telling him to get the hell out and then potentially enforcing that with the police he had her cornered you know for all intents and purposes, especially when he had his little gang of friends.

[406] Yeah.

[407] You know, his mother wasn't going to be able to do a damn thing.

[408] And so, you know, it might well be that when you are around 12 and you're a boy, especially if you're, you know, temperamentally inclined to some degree to be challenging, that that's exactly the right time for you to have a father who can step on you around.

[409] I know that there's some evidence among elephants, for example, that the older males socialize the younger man. and that when human wildlife curators have attempted to reformulate elephant societies, which are extraordinarily complex, the young males rampage around like mad unless there are older males to keep them in line.

[410] There's a very good example of that.

[411] You know, culling of elephants is an unfortunate necessity.

[412] If you put elephants into the career national park without the saber -tooth cats that used to hunt them, they breed like crazy, they breed at a rate of about 12 % per year.

[413] so then they destroy all the trees and so then the WWF WWF comes along and says we'll pay you not to shoot your elephants which is to say we'll pay you to let all your trees get destroyed right right so of course they do have to shoot the elephants and it's a terrible thing and so they've tried different mechanisms and the one way that they used to do it was to go in and take out the oldest members right the dominant males and and so on but what happened as a result of that is they left young uncultured elephants and those elephants who had rampage, they would attack cars, they had never been taught.

[414] And so I think it is a really good example of the wisdom of elders, even in the animal kingdom, being very important to the developing.

[415] Well, especially in those complex.

[416] I mean, elephants are unbelievably intelligent.

[417] And they have a prehensile trunk, right?

[418] And anything that has a prehensile attachment tends to be extraordinarily intelligent, like octopuses, for example, which only live three years, something like that, but appear to be at least as smart as dogs, which is, you know, pretty damn smart.

[419] And with that increased intelligence comes a necessity for deeper socialization and then the necessity for something like a continuous historical tradition.

[420] Yeah.

[421] Because with all that additional brain expanse, that environmental -specific programming that's associated with socialization starts to become increasingly crucial.

[422] You see that, too, even if you have a particularly smart breed of dog.

[423] It's great to have a smart dog, but a smart, untrained dog is a really bad dog.

[424] A stupid untrained dog just lays there like a stupid dog and, you know, who cares?

[425] I always say, especially if you have a smart breed border collies, that's what you have if you're not training them, they're training you.

[426] Yeah, yeah, well, that's the thing about a dog right now is you have to be smarter than the dog and that's not always that easy.

[427] Yeah, yeah, well, that's also the case if you have a particularly pushy child.

[428] They can be socialized very well, but this, you know, this question of the role of the father, I think that there's two distinct phases, at least it feels.

[429] feels like to me, there's the, there's the, um, the contrast between the nurturing mother energy, um, and the, uh, disciplinary, um, you know, sort of structured, uh, father energy.

[430] And I think that that even has to be there, say, sub three years old.

[431] Yeah.

[432] And I was lucky.

[433] I had that, you know, it may, may have been better.

[434] It could have been better, but, but I had it.

[435] But then there does enter that next phase, which is, where it's not now about boundaries.

[436] It's not now about discipline, but it is about modeling.

[437] It's about, and, and I was, lucky that while I lost my dad for some time, I kind of lost it right in the middle and got it back right at the point that it was necessary again.

[438] Yeah, well, that maternal love is a kind of all -encompassing acceptance, and that's precisely necessary in early infancy, where the infant can do no wrong.

[439] And the paternal role is more like boundary setting and encouragement jointly together.

[440] and that seems somewhat paradoxical that you can encourage people by setting boundaries.

[441] But the thing about encouragement is it's goal -directed, and it means that you have to be on the pathway to genuine success, and pathways have boundaries.

[442] All right, so you're in the normal school system, I presume, at this time.

[443] Yes.

[444] And this is in Halifax.

[445] And then you do move to go live with your dad.

[446] And how long do you live with your dad?

[447] And when do you start this alternative, this boarding school process?

[448] I'm with him for about half of you.

[449] year before he sent me. I finished grade seven with him.

[450] I started grade seven with my mom, finished grade seven with my dad, and then he put me for grade eight into the, so 13.

[451] Okay, okay.

[452] Now, you said it was more difficult for you to live with him and vice versa than you guys had presupposed.

[453] And so you're seven and you're 13.

[454] And so what makes you hard to get along with?

[455] You know, rebellion.

[456] You know, tell me to be home at 10 and I'm not going to be.

[457] You know, I don't know what was going on, but I was in real active rebellion.

[458] And I'm sure I was rebelling against the divorce.

[459] I was rebelling against alcoholism.

[460] I was rebelling.

[461] When I was 13, you know, my friends, like I said, I grew up in a small northern town and it was kind of a rough working class town and there weren't all my friends were rough working class kids, hilarious people, extremely good senses of humor.

[462] Most of them with fairly damaged relationships with their father, a lot of drinking, a fair bit of misbehavior, although nothing particularly serious, you know, Like, we weren't criminal gangs or anything like that.

[463] But there was a fair bit of petty shoplifting and an awful lot of drinking and carousing after hours.

[464] And my relationship with my dad became somewhat fractured at that point, too.

[465] And I was a smaller kid and intellectual.

[466] And I probably overcompensated to some degree on that part by hanging around with the rougher kids, which I actually think was a pretty damn good strategy.

[467] It served me well, all things considered, but it was hard of my relationship with my father.

[468] who didn't necessarily approve of my friends and shouldn't have, quite frankly.

[469] You know, I think he was probably right.

[470] I probably thought he was right then even, you know.

[471] That didn't mean you were going to listen.

[472] Well, you know, what the hell are you going to do?

[473] You know, if you have any sense when you're 13, and this is the whole issue about being a teenager, is that your ability to fit in with your peer group is a predictor of your success in your life.

[474] You're going to prioritize fitting in with your peer group over everything else.

[475] And, you know, the whole point of parenthood, in some real sense is to produce a child who's acceptable to his or her peers because, well, for obvious reasons.

[476] And so there is that tension.

[477] And then, of course, the other thing you're trying to do when you're 13 is to start pushing the boundaries with regards to independence.

[478] Anyways, you're doing that, apparently.

[479] What were your friends like when you were 13?

[480] They were exactly.

[481] You're not, my parallels are pretty clear.

[482] I was hanging around with a bunch of people.

[483] And by the way, I still can, some of them write to me on Facebook these things, even from back then, you know, and, and sorry, guys, but.

[484] You were unacceptable.

[485] But they were unacceptable, but there was a camaraderie, and it was exactly that.

[486] I had a peer group, and it just made sense that I fit in there, and I felt accepted there, and rebellion.

[487] You said that was in Edmonton?

[488] That was in Edmonton.

[489] And you'd moved from Halifax.

[490] Edmonton was a bigger city.

[491] Much bigger city.

[492] Right, so more opportunity to get in trouble, too.

[493] Lots more trouble.

[494] Yeah.

[495] You know, there was a moment there, and it was a very big growing up moment for me, And I think it has a lot to do with the transition from being bullied to no longer being bullied.

[496] And so, first of all, when I was a very small child, I was five or six years old, my babysitter, Judy Park, she disappeared.

[497] And I had a big crush on her.

[498] So her disappearing was a big thing in my life.

[499] And about three months later, they found her, and she'd been killed.

[500] And her murder has never been solved.

[501] You know, it's one of those things.

[502] But Clifford Olson, I'm sure you remember.

[503] Oh, yes.

[504] He took credit for it, I think, because he had a cash for, he had a cash for locations program.

[505] So he was, he took credit for it, but then it turned out it had nothing to do with him.

[506] But this was in my awareness.

[507] That's a crooked man. It was crooked.

[508] To be a serial killer who will also go to the lengths of confessing to murders he didn't commit for financial pain.

[509] Well, they were paying him for body locations.

[510] I mean, that's a whole other thing.

[511] But I grew up with that in my awareness.

[512] And so here I was in Edmonton.

[513] And one night, and I lived in a, actually, the part that I'd left out is after my dad and I reconciled, he moved to Vancouver and he left me there.

[514] So I was still living on my own, but at least now in an apartment.

[515] And one night I was walking home.

[516] I'd missed my last bus.

[517] It's three in the morning.

[518] And I was walking home, and I had to walk about three kilometers.

[519] And it was, this is in East Edmonton.

[520] It's not the safest area in the world.

[521] And I'm going up through the alleys because it's longer to go on the lit street.

[522] So I just take the alley route.

[523] and this car pulls up beside me slowly and there's a guy in the car doing unacceptable things to himself while watching me as he walked by in the car.

[524] Oh, yeah, fun.

[525] And the first thing I did is I went to my back pocket because it was like routine for me to have a switchplate or a butterfly knife, but I had just been out with some friends at a club that had metal detectors, so I didn't have one.

[526] So I'm walking down the street and this guy's beside me and I'm freaking out and I've grown up with this awareness, right?

[527] Like we all come to that point where you realize life is actually not permanent.

[528] And that was six it for me. So I was very aware of this situation.

[529] The guy kept circling around a bunch of times.

[530] And as I got closer to my house, I didn't want him to see where I lived.

[531] I live on my own.

[532] I'm 15 years old, 16 years old.

[533] So I go into the school ground behind because it was floodlit like crazy to keep all the druggies out and stuff.

[534] So I go into the school ground and I climb up the spiral slide because I figure if I get to the top of the spiral slide, I'm safe.

[535] Like, there's no way he can get up there without coming up face first, right?

[536] Right, right.

[537] So I climb up there, floodlit, and plus there's apartment buildings on all side of me. So there's witnesses, right?

[538] Like, I'm in the safest possible place I could be at three o 'clock in the morning.

[539] And he pulls into the school parking lot.

[540] I could, and he sat there for quite a while, and then he opened his car door.

[541] And I don't, it's all so vivid to me. Like, I, the car was yellow.

[542] That's a long memory to hold on to, but, and he walked across the grass.

[543] And as he walked across the grass, I contemplated.

[544] what was going on.

[545] And I made a very clear decision.

[546] I'm going to kill him.

[547] Like I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm just, I have no choice.

[548] If he comes up the ladder, then I'm going to, I'm going to kick him across the bridge of the nose.

[549] And when he falls, I'm going to jump on him and keep jumping until it's over.

[550] I'm done.

[551] I'm so scared.

[552] And he came right to the bottom of the ladder and he put one foot on the ladder, put one hand on the rail.

[553] And he looked up to him and he goes, are you looking for company?

[554] and I'll save the actual vernacular that I used for him at that moment, but I was unkind.

[555] And he turned around, he walked back to his car, and he sat in his car for three hours.

[556] And I stayed at the top of the slide for three hours.

[557] And then eventually...

[558] That's a learning moment.

[559] But the weirdest thing is, I was never bullied after that, ever again.

[560] What changed?

[561] I was willing to stand up for myself physically.

[562] I just...

[563] Yeah, so, but what do you think changed?

[564] Like, you said you weren't bullied.

[565] That means you were signaling in a different...

[566] manner, right?

[567] You see, I saw this in my clients sometimes as a clinician.

[568] I would see them integrate their shadow, let's say.

[569] And one of the things I really noticed, you can actually see this, by the way, portrayed in the movie The Lion King.

[570] It's very interesting because Simba, when he's an adolescent, like a child, an adolescent animated, has a facial expression sort of like this, right?

[571] It's like everything's coming in.

[572] He's like a deer in the head, like say.

[573] Then he has this initiation experience where he realizes his affinity with his father and his father has a very commanding visage, a very commanding face, very differently animated.

[574] And these, of course, Disney level animators are bloody geniuses, so they capture these things.

[575] And the animators flip Simba's facial configuration at that point so that there's a setness and a harshness to the way that he looks at the world.

[576] It's as if he's coming out instead of things coming in, right?

[577] He's got a command to him.

[578] And I'm wondering if that experience that you had restructured the physiognomy of your facial expression, posture, posture, facial expression, and reaction.

[579] Eye contact.

[580] Yeah, and reaction.

[581] You know, many years ago, and I read this article, and it set the foundation for almost all the work that I do today, and it was like, it influences everything I do.

[582] And it was an article about two women who were sexually assaulted in Central Park around about the same time, and this investigative journalist followed them after it happened, the recovery, and what their lives were like afterward.

[583] The one woman, they both went through it, and of course there's a horrible truth about sexual assault is that once you've been sexually assaulted once, you are significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted again.

[584] And that's because the kind of people who commit those crimes are spineless, you know, wimpy, they go after the week.

[585] And so if you just, yeah, they're predators.

[586] Parasity.

[587] No, they're not even, they're the wrong, predator almost is complementary.

[588] They're worse.

[589] They're scavengers.

[590] Yeah, well, that's the parasite element.

[591] Yeah, and so they, in any event, they both learned this fact that once you've, you know, because in the clinics, in the shelters, they tell them these things.

[592] You have to be careful because now it might happen again.

[593] The one woman hears that news and the meaning she creates is I am now even more of a victim than I was before.

[594] Yeah.

[595] And she turns to, you know, a prescription and non -prescription medication and suicide attempts, and it ruins her whole life.

[596] Right, right.

[597] So that's the anxiety route.

[598] The other woman, she said, well, why?

[599] Why are you attacked the second time?

[600] It's because you're displaying fear.

[601] So she went to a self -defense class, and she learned some useful things.

[602] Like a credit card held in the right way, swiped across the throat, can accurately cut it.

[603] And keys held between the knuckles are an incredibly effective weapon.

[604] And she learned these things.

[605] And she started walking down the street differently.

[606] And in one example, she was out with some friends, and they're like, would you like us to walk you to your car?

[607] You know, after what happened?

[608] Yeah, yeah, right, right.

[609] You know, and she's like, no, I don't want you to walk me to my car.

[610] I will walk myself to my car.

[611] And pretty soon her friends were like, would you walk me to my car?

[612] Right, right, right.

[613] So she starts a self -defense clinic, it gets franchised, and she, you know, she opens a few of them.

[614] And she, here's the telling moment in the interview.

[615] The interviewer says to her, if you could go back in time and prevent your own rape, would you do that?

[616] She says, no. I am significantly more afraid of the woman that I was before it happened than I am of the event.

[617] itself.

[618] Yeah, right.

[619] And I, when I read that and I thought about what happened.

[620] Those parasitical predatory types, you know, especially with regards to predation on children, is they look for children who are uncertain and easily cowed.

[621] And so that's another thing for everyone watching and listening to know.

[622] If you teach your children to be afraid as their fundamental response to the world, you are enabling the people who pray on them because the people who do that will watch and they target the children.

[623] They think they can intimidate into silence.

[624] Yeah, yeah.

[625] So that, that trembling like a rabbit in the evil serpent eye of the predator.

[626] That's a very bad strategy for human beings because we're not rabbits and we don't use background camouflage as our defense.

[627] Yeah.

[628] Yeah, it's that calling out of aggression that's the right response to predation.

[629] It's interesting, you know, that you said that you weren't bullied again after that, eh?

[630] Yeah, yeah, that's a very interesting transformation.

[631] All right, so now your father has gone off to Vancouver and left you to live alone.

[632] Yeah, And so, and you're how old?

[633] 16.

[634] 16.

[635] And so when do you go off to boarding school?

[636] That, it was, I left boarding school that resulted in my dad leaving.

[637] So that was before that.

[638] Then I finished grade 10 in Edmonton and then I moved back to live with my mother and finished high school in Halifax.

[639] Uh -huh.

[640] Uh -huh.

[641] And how did it go when you moved back to your mother?

[642] Much better.

[643] You know, we still had conflict.

[644] My mom, I think, you know, it was one of those, like, one of her ways of gaining connection was with raised voices.

[645] So we would have raised voices.

[646] and my brother wouldn't engage in that stuff.

[647] So I was the favorite for that.

[648] But she and I, we were always very close, but it was a lot of tension.

[649] And she then, her parents were getting older and she wanted to move back to South Africa.

[650] So when I was 18, my mom's like, I'm going back to South Africa and I'm taking your little brother with me and you're staying here.

[651] Uh -huh.

[652] And that was the beginning of adulthood for me properly, 18 years old, figuring it out.

[653] Pretty independent, pretty young.

[654] Yeah, she wasn't worried about me. Yeah, yeah, right, right.

[655] And so why did you get along with her better once you moved back to Helmut?

[656] Halifax?

[657] You were probably more mature.

[658] Yeah, I was more mature.

[659] I'd grown up and she'd grown up.

[660] You know, it's one of those things you, you, I remember sitting in the guidance counselor's office of one of my schools and I saw the poster on the wall that says, kids, you know, move out now while you still know everything.

[661] And it's amazing that once you know some things, you realize how much your parents have learned in the meantime.

[662] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

[663] That's for sure.

[664] All right, so now you're, this is when?

[665] This is what year?

[666] That's like 88.

[667] 88.

[668] Now, it says here in your bio, you're very entrepreneurial as a child selling lemonade in front of your house, shoveling snow and raking leaves.

[669] You got your first professional job in 91 when you became the first full -time employee of RISX.

[670] So now, you're done high school.

[671] Do you go off to college?

[672] No. You know, I fell into some strange things at that time in Canada.

[673] Like, for example, I was in an industrial accident and I nearly lost this hand in a fire.

[674] and I was pumping gas at Petro Canada on Bayer's Road in Halifax, and my shift boss flicked a lighter at me when I had gas all over me, and it was pretty bad.

[675] They had to take the skin off my legs to rebuild my arm, and I lost a bunch of grade 12 as a result of that.

[676] And then, of course, because of the way things work, sometimes or don't work with government, I didn't qualify for, I couldn't sue the employer because of the Workers' Compensation Act, and I couldn't qualify for Works Compensation Payment because I was unemployable because I was in high school.

[677] So I literally got not one dollar or anything.

[678] I missed all that time in work school.

[679] And so I missed a few credits.

[680] So at the end of grade 12, I'm shy a bunch of credits and I'm trying to figure out how to get to university.

[681] But now I run into - Shy of the credits you needed to be accepted to university.

[682] Yeah, like I was missing one credit or 1 .5 credits or something.

[683] And that was fixable over summer school.

[684] But in the meantime, I'm trying to figure out university entrance.

[685] And here's the tricky part in Canada.

[686] I don't know how it is these days.

[687] I haven't lived here for a long time now.

[688] But if your parents earned over a certain threshold, you couldn't get sued.

[689] loans.

[690] You couldn't get student funding at that stage.

[691] My parents traditionally not earned that amount of money.

[692] My dad had been an alcoholic, but he had just crossed over.

[693] Like he was finally, he was making some good money, but paying off a life of not.

[694] So my parents could not afford to send me to go to school.

[695] And equally, I couldn't qualify to get a loan to go to school.

[696] So I just literally couldn't go.

[697] And so I didn't.

[698] I went to work.

[699] And I guess today I'm grateful.

[700] You know, I think you and I talked in public, I said there are times when I wish that I'd had the experience of proper debate with professors and refinement of academic thought processes and research and that sort of thing.

[701] But there's a bigger advantage that came to me as a result of that.

[702] And that is that very often our current education is about moving students toward a singular truth, a convergent education.

[703] A child can tell you 26 uses for a brick.

[704] Somebody who's learned about bricks can think of one.

[705] And that paid off very well for me. Yeah, yeah.

[706] Well, you know, one of the things I've noticed in my life is that the most often the most interesting people I've met are super smart people who didn't go to university.

[707] And they still have that native intelligence.

[708] But the fact that they didn't go through that upper echelon, echelon intellectual training meant that they had to formulate their own views of the world and really from whole cloth.

[709] And, you know, there's some disadvantages to that because there are things you don't.

[710] know and avenues of critical thinking that you haven't mastered.

[711] But my impression has been that those people are often extremely original in their thinking, right?

[712] Because they have all that native intelligence, but it's manifested itself in a way that's very unique to their circumstances.

[713] So they have interesting and new things to say rather than the cookie cutter conversation that you're more likely to get among people who've been highly educated.

[714] You also get this multiple perspective view of a problem.

[715] Here's a great example from my father.

[716] I think he talks about this in megafauna, is that if you go to the Lasco Caves, and if you've never been, I highly recommend the Lasco Caves.

[717] 20 ,000 -year -old paintings, I think when Picasso walked through, he looked around these paintings, and he said of art, we have invented nothing.

[718] 20 ,000 -year -old art, but there's a rhino in there.

[719] Now, this is the south of France.

[720] There's a rhino in there.

[721] And there's four dots behind the rhino on the wall.

[722] And symbologists have looked at the dots and determined that it means this is the end of the story or something, I don't know.

[723] Like everybody's looked at it and said, what are these four dots all about?

[724] The trouble is that if you've had this convergent education and say some or, you know, in say symbology or, let's say, an art, then you're looking at it only through that lens.

[725] If you're my father and you've been looking, you know, you've got your legal training, but then separately you've got, growing up in Africa, you've got your, you know, his father, his grandfather was an archaeologist, zoologist.

[726] You look at that and you've spent a lot of time with white rhinos in the bush.

[727] what you know about white rhinos is that a dominant bull white rhino poops explosive big balls of poop out behind him and he kicks them and he sprays his urine in a huge aerosol cloud and announces his present right if you know that then you look at the dots and you go this is a painting of a dominant bull nobody else knows that that happened to me to a large degree because you know when i was say 20 i was very sick all the time and i made some adjustments with food and completely turned my life around.

[728] But then as I was trying to share those ideas with other people, I found out that people don't follow rules very well, food rules, that is.

[729] Or any rules for that.

[730] Or any rules.

[731] Well, there's 12, I think, that people are falling quite well these days.

[732] But the other thing, because I've been involved in entrepreneurship and business and marketing and business coaching, I had learned some things that I would call about practical psychology that allowed me to put my interest in nutrition, my interest in anthropology, and my interest in behavioral change together.

[733] And I wouldn't have been able to do that if I went to university.

[734] No, no. Well, it's also the case, too, you know, that people who have particularly interesting things to say tend to be masters of more than one discipline that very rarely overlap.

[735] So one of my friends, for example, Jonathan Paggio, he exists at the intersection of fine art, postmodern theory, and classic Orthodox Christian theology.

[736] There's like, well, he's like the guy, right?

[737] Because there's no one else like that.

[738] There's probably no one else like that in the world.

[739] And so because he has expertise in those, and I've recommended, you know, to the people who are watching and listening and reading the sorts of things that I've been trying to communicate, that they try to get very, very good at one thing, right, to start with that, right, to develop expertise there.

[740] But then if you can expand out and get some expertise in multiple areas and then benefit from the convergence of those, man, you're really, I think that's part of what starts to push people up that Pareto distribution curve, you know, that attainment, like like success or like failure is non -linear, right?

[741] The more you succeed, the faster you succeed.

[742] And that's why a small, that all the money ends up in the hands of a small number of people.

[743] And a tiny proportion of recording artists have all the records and a tiny proportion of authors sell all the books.

[744] I mean, it's a very, very stable phenomenon.

[745] It's called the Matthew principle, right?

[746] To those who have more, much more will be given.

[747] And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away.

[748] A very harsh reality of life.

[749] But I think what happens is that you develop these pockets of expertise, you bring them together, and the effects of that are multiplicative rather than additive.

[750] And that can really spiral you up the, what would you say, the competence ladder towards higher and higher levels of success.

[751] And if you have a society that opens up the possibility for people to do that, then the society also tends to thrive.

[752] So anyways, you're not going to college.

[753] You start working, and apparently you're starting at a startup.

[754] Is that right?

[755] Yeah, I, you know, I did door -to -door sales and different, like, sort of, you know, attempts at life.

[756] But then my dad contacted me and he said had a friend who was starting a tech company or had started a tech company, but he was struggling to move past solopreneur.

[757] You know, he hired people and he just, he wasn't very good at people.

[758] And he told this friend, my son can sell ice to, you know, to the Eskimos and you should hire him.

[759] So were you a good door to D .S. I was really good.

[760] I sold Kirby vacuums.

[761] And I was, what did you learn from doing that?

[762] I, you know, I just, I was, I learned rapport skills.

[763] I learned quickness of thought.

[764] to trust my speech engine.

[765] I remember, for example, knocking on this one door once and this woman says, you guys, like, don't you do any other neighborhoods?

[766] You're like the sixth guy from your company to knock on my door in the last four months.

[767] Like, why do you guys, I never let anybody in.

[768] Why do you keep coming?

[769] And one thing I can tell you about sales is that the, everybody has defense mechanisms against sales.

[770] Yeah, like go the hell away.

[771] Right.

[772] But the stronger your defense is at the outer level, the easier it is to pillage on the inside.

[773] So if somebody is very firmly won't let you in the door, that's because they're really easy to sell to.

[774] It's just the way it is.

[775] If somebody lets you in easily, you're going to have a tough go of it.

[776] It's going to be.

[777] That's a very sneaky thing to know.

[778] It's very, very powerful to know.

[779] This woman's really, I can see, she's got the fortress walls up, the drawbridges up.

[780] She goes, and she goes, so what makes you any different?

[781] And I went, I'm cute?

[782] Uh -huh.

[783] And she busted out laughing.

[784] And of course, laughed her, the orgasm of the brain, you know, and she opens the doors.

[785] Fuscular tension all disappears.

[786] John, she invites me in for a coffee, and, you know, an hour and a half later, she spent $1 ,500 on a vacuum she didn't know she needed.

[787] Uh -huh, uh -huh.

[788] And how long did you do door -to -door sales?

[789] Two year, two and a half years?

[790] Oh, and you...

[791] Well, I did about a year of that, and then they put me in recruiting.

[792] And so...

[793] So you stuck with it?

[794] I did.

[795] Did you like it?

[796] You know, no, but I knew it was right somehow.

[797] Like, they're...

[798] I knew that I was developing skills that were used to me. Yeah, well, man, there's that ability to sell.

[799] that's, you know, what did you learn about selling?

[800] You just sort of related, one of the things you learned.

[801] I mean, so selling, marketing, we have sales and marketing, and I don't really like that, either of those terms, mean, because all of this is communication, and if it's done properly, it's communication in relationship to trust, if it's done well.

[802] Were the vacuums you were selling decent vacu?

[803] To this day, if I don't, I live in the Caribbean, we don't have carpets, but if I had carpets, I would have that vacuum, no question about it.

[804] So you were selling something?

[805] I believed in it, yeah.

[806] Okay, okay, well, that's crucial.

[807] Right?

[808] Like if you're embarking on a sales career and you don't believe in what you're selling, you're just bloody liar and you're training yourself to be a psychopath.

[809] So you need, and this is good advice for people who are listening who are thinking about doing this, is if you're going to sell, you're going to sell, you're going to sell it.

[810] Is if you're going to sell you a curvy.

[811] Okay, so you're stuck with that for quite a while.

[812] Okay, now you've got an opportunity to join a new company that's based on a good idea.

[813] The guy who's established the company isn't a person who has this easy capacity, let's say, or well -developed capacity for communication and sales.

[814] So you step in there.

[815] What happens?

[816] I join him and the company lifts off.

[817] I'm really good at what I do.

[818] And I don't really get much training.

[819] He basically hands me a binder full of names of people and says, call these people and try to buy or sell barcode equipment.

[820] Okay.

[821] And what was the equipment?

[822] Barcode scanning equipment, data capture equipment, barcode printing, you know, and related technology.

[823] And what did it offer the people that you were talking to?

[824] You know, what we did a lot of times is we would call companies and buy equipment from them because we refurbished it and resold it.

[825] So when they bought it from us, what they were buying is sometimes cheaper.

[826] Sometimes they were buying obsolete equipment that they couldn't get anymore, so we were providing them a valuable service.

[827] There were a number of different angles that we took.

[828] But, you know, one of the things I found really fascinating about generally sales and marketing is that people are so afraid of rejection.

[829] And I think it's selfish.

[830] I think it's really selfish to be afraid of that rejection, because if you believe in what you're selling, then you have to ask yourself, is my 30 seconds of rejection feeling more important to me than the pain I might be resolving for this person over the next few decades of their life?

[831] Right, right.

[832] So, like, you know, in my business in WildFit, we help people, you know, reframe their relationships with food, and we have, like, literally hundreds of cases of morbid obesity being ended at type 2 diabetes being reversed and so on.

[833] If I'm sitting with you, if I've been sitting with you some years ago when you're dealing with all the autoimmune stuff.

[834] And I held back from offering you what you now know, but you didn't then.

[835] If I held back offering that because of my fear of rejection, how selfish is that?

[836] How selfish is it for me to not try to help?

[837] Well, that also, I think, emerges for people, too.

[838] When they're selling something they don't believe in, which basically means that they're lying.

[839] I did a lot of sales and marketing, like a lot.

[840] And with some success and with a lot of failure for a variety of complex reasons.

[841] And I learned that, well, first of all, you're not selling your forming relationships because if you're a salesman and you have even the vaguest clue, you don't lie to your damn customers because you actually want to have a relationship with them for like the next 20 years.

[842] And so you have to be offering them something genuine and it can't be, it can't be nonsense.

[843] And you have to believe, and it has to be the case that what you're offering them, this partnership is going to be of clear and outstanding mutual benefit.

[844] And then when you're selling, you're actually not trying to sell or convince you're trying to establish relationships.

[845] And I've also learned, too, that, and I don't know what you think about this, but my sense, too, is that this wouldn't be exactly the same as doing it door to door.

[846] But, you know, if you push and inquire and see if there's a fit and you see that there isn't a fit, there's not a lot of sense pushing, because if there isn't a fit, you should be going to talk to someone else.

[847] Plus, if there isn't a fit and you push it, the fact that there isn't a fit is just going to cause endless trouble as you move forward in the relationship.

[848] You know, sales, networking, and dating, they're basically the same function.

[849] And we make exactly the same mistakes in one as we do in the other.

[850] So very often people try to go for the sale too quickly and a date the way that looks is.

[851] You're looking at the menu and the one person in the date says, oh look, they have a kitty menu for when we're back here next year.

[852] Right.

[853] That might be that's a little premature.

[854] Or, oh, by the way, I brought the condoms.

[855] I mean, even way, that's a little of predatory psychopathy, by the way, that's focus on immediate gratification in the present is a very bad marker of character.

[856] Exactly.

[857] And many people make mistakes like that in dating, but they make that mistake even more commonly in selling.

[858] They go for the sale too quickly.

[859] So one of the ways that I often demonstrate this is, you know, I've done lectures on this all over the world, and I've got an audience, and I'll generally pick a woman in the front row.

[860] And I say, can we have a date, please?

[861] And I bring her up on the stage.

[862] She has a microphone.

[863] And I'll say, well, I'm so glad that you swiped right so we could be here today, you're making a bit of a light of it.

[864] Yeah.

[865] And then I'll go, so let's start to date.

[866] I'd like to give you a little bit of my personal background.

[867] I'm a partner in a law firm.

[868] We do intellectual property law.

[869] And by the time I get to that place, there's a camera on her, and you can see on the big screen, for everybody's watching, women have two sets of eyelids.

[870] There's this one set of eyelids that close, their eyes are open, but they're not, they're gone.

[871] And that's, if you talk too long like that, they're gone.

[872] They're gone from the conversation.

[873] And that, again, is the problem of networking and selling.

[874] It's like pushing, pushing.

[875] then I go, everybody notices that I've lost her.

[876] And go, okay, now you see what I've done, I've lost her.

[877] Can I have a re, I'm not going to get a, I'm not going to get a second date.

[878] So can we have a do -over?

[879] Yeah, yeah.

[880] So now I start and I go, you know, as much as I'd love to share with you about my law firm in sense, what I'd really like to know is what do you like to do for fun.

[881] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[882] Now, now she starts telling me what she likes to do for fun, and I keep asking.

[883] I'm not pushing.

[884] I'm asking.

[885] Yeah.

[886] Then invariably, and I've done this countless times in countries all over the world, invariably, she will come to some area where she talks about her passion or hobby, her career, her dreams.

[887] And she goes, oh, I have a book I'm working on.

[888] And I go, you have a book you're working on?

[889] Have you chosen a title yet?

[890] She goes, no. And I go, listen, when you start thinking about it, are there ideas in the book that might be unique?

[891] And she goes, yes.

[892] I go, have you considered copyright protections and maybe a registration?

[893] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[894] And she goes, yeah, and I go, well, listen, I'm a partner in it.

[895] Now my fictitious law for matters.

[896] When I was selling, so I started out selling, so to speak, as a professor.

[897] And My sense was, and I knew that this was the case, what I was offering to the companies I was attempting to sell to, I knew would produce a staggering economic return for them.

[898] And I could demonstrate that statistically, and I could demonstrate it through brute fact.

[899] And I thought, to begin with, that my job was to just lay out the facts and not to convince, but to lay out the facts and let people form their own judgment.

[900] And what I didn't understand was that people almost never make a judgment based on facts, and certainly not on.

[901] statistical facts.

[902] Like, like that just, that hardly happens with data scientists.

[903] It certainly doesn't happen with, like, say, typical middle managers in a large corporation.

[904] That never happens.

[905] And what you have to do is exactly what you just described is you have to find out from the person, what are your problems?

[906] Like, what's not going well for you at work?

[907] What sort of things do you want to address?

[908] And if the person lays out their problems and you, in principle, have a solution to one of those problems, and then that's not manipulative.

[909] It's like, oh, well, there's something there I think I could help you with.

[910] If they lay out their whole problem set and nothing you're doing has any bearing on that, the probability that you're going to be able to sell to them, in my estimation, is extremely low because they're preoccupied with a whole set of problems for whom you are not the solution.

[911] And so the trick often, trick, is to get...

[912] It's not a trick.

[913] It's not a trick.

[914] The conversation has to be about the person you're talking to and not about you, which is also a very good, what would you say, mode of alleviating social anxiety, because if your goal in a social situation is to make the other person comfortable, you're not focusing on yourself and you're not anxious.

[915] But, okay, so you did this.

[916] Let me offer you, you know, you said that, like, facts and statistics aren't the thing that'll drive them.

[917] And I would say it depends exactly on how interesting those facts and statistics are to them and when they were delivered.

[918] Yes, yes, yes.

[919] So years ago, I was invited to teach marketing at one of Tony Robbins's, you know, big business seminars.

[920] And so in the talk, I'm telling a story.

[921] And I'm telling a story about hunting with the hods of people in East Africa, who I've been visiting now for some 15 years.

[922] And my very first hunting trip with them, I'm out hunting, and I'm running, trying to keep up behind them.

[923] And it's like hard.

[924] They move fast.

[925] And I realized that if I'm on this hunting trip, we're all going to starve to death because I make a lot of noise.

[926] They don't.

[927] And so I started watching the way they moved.

[928] And I thought to myself, and I was on Tony Robbins stage, so I used his language.

[929] And I said, well, what would Tony Robbins say if somebody else was getting the result you wanted?

[930] He would say, model them.

[931] Yeah.

[932] And so I started looking at the way they were running.

[933] That's a pretty good Tony Robb's in the taste, by the way, yeah.

[934] And so I started watching the running.

[935] They land on the fronts of their feet.

[936] And I was like, why do I have to learn this from the Bushman?

[937] That's how I snuck around the house as a child.

[938] This is a natural human movement.

[939] And then I started thinking to myself, wait a second.

[940] I've been running now.

[941] I start running with them and run on the fronts of my feet.

[942] I'm silent.

[943] I barely make any noise.

[944] I'm able to pick my foot fall better.

[945] I don't impact the ground and I know that it was working because one of the Bushmen who was supposed to be keeping track of me turned around to make sure I was still there.

[946] It was working.

[947] It was working.

[948] But then after about an hour and a half of running like this, I realized something else magical and that was my knee was not hurting.

[949] My knee that had been hurt so badly by running the London Marathon that I had to give up running at 30.

[950] It's way too young to give up running, you know, if you want to run.

[951] But now my knee wasn't hurting.

[952] I'm like, why is my knee not hurting?

[953] I can never run this long.

[954] What's going on here?

[955] I'm running differently.

[956] I'm running the way you would run if your running shoes did not allow an improper footstrike.

[957] You see, the thing is when you land on your heel, you send all of that foot strike up through your skeletal system.

[958] And I share...

[959] There's no spring.

[960] That's right.

[961] In the heel, they put in air to protect your heel from the shock, but that doesn't protect your knee or your hip or your neck.

[962] And I share this whole idea, right?

[963] Now, you probably even have forgotten the purpose of why I was beginning to tell this story, stories are like that.

[964] Before I told the story, I asked the audience, how many people in this room are we about to buy a new cell phone?

[965] 3%.

[966] How many are buying a new car in the next few months?

[967] 3%.

[968] Whatever you ask, it's 3%.

[969] I had also asked how many are you going to buy new running shoes?

[970] At the end of my story, after giving them facts and statistics about heel strikes and barefoot running shoes, I said, now how many of you are thinking you might need to buy new running shoes?

[971] 70%.

[972] Right, right, right.

[973] Facts and data delivered in the right way, create the market.

[974] Yeah, well, and you know what the right way is if you're paying enough attention to the conversation.

[975] That also means that you can't be concentrating on selling precisely.

[976] That's exactly right.

[977] And well, I think that's true in a conversation in general is that it's a mistake.

[978] This is part of the reason Joe Rogan is so successful, by the way, is Rogan doesn't, he's not selling his podcast during his podcast.

[979] All Joe is trying to do is have interesting conversations, right?

[980] And then, and your point is that something, if I've got it right, is let the interesting conversation unfold, and you may see that there are things that you have to offer that will slow.

[981] into it naturally without being forced, right?

[982] Without any instrumental manipulation on your part.

[983] Selling in our world.

[984] Selling in our world means manipulating.

[985] And the truth is, when you walk into, you know, you walk into Tim Hortons and buy a donut, nobody manipulated you.

[986] Well, we could argue what they did with their advertising and sugar might have been manipulating.

[987] The transaction was a sale.

[988] Selling is solving a problem for people.

[989] You're right, yes, yes.

[990] You need T -shirts with that printed on it because that's exactly right.

[991] that's yeah yeah and then there's absolutely 100 % nothing corrupt about it either and you know and salesmen have a have a bad name in our culture kind of like politicians and i think that is because sales can attract narcissists you know like politicians yeah well well they're all in sales politicians people in entertainment people in media like people have a public life and and who have to communicate to convince you're going to attract a larger than normal proportion of psychopaths but that doesn't mean that the bloody endeavor itself is corrupt and immoral at its core.

[992] And it's not if what you see as a salesman is that what you're trying to do is to offer genuine solutions to the actual problems that people have, which is what you should be doing if you have something reasonable to sell.

[993] That comment on narcissism, you and I talked a little bit about that in Mexico.

[994] You know, I told you about my book, The Evolution Gap.

[995] And one of the features of that is like comparing, you know, the idea of the evolution gap is that there's this gap that has begun.

[996] done to open between human evolution, which is very, very slow, and human innovation, which is rapidly accelerating.

[997] And narcissism is quite an interesting one, because if you're living in a hunter -gatherer tribe, narcissism will only get you so far.

[998] Yeah, yeah, not very.

[999] Yeah, yeah.

[1000] It'll get a poison dart in your back in damn short order.

[1001] Here, here in Toronto, in New York, or in any larger community, you can stay put like a spider, and you can mess up that relationship with your narcissism and then pick up the next one and pick up the next one.

[1002] And narcissism in our world actually becomes an advantage.

[1003] And that's a sort of a symptom of that gap.

[1004] That's probably multiplied online.

[1005] This is really frightening me, you know, because my understanding of the psychopathic personnel, or what would you say, the psychopathic proportion of the population, it's about 3%, not very high because it's not a very successful strategy, it has and can run rampant in certain historical epochs.

[1006] That's what happened during the Russian Revolution, for example.

[1007] A very small percentage of people can cause a tremendous amount of trouble.

[1008] Now, we've evolved mechanisms to keep the psychopathic parasites at bay.

[1009] And a lot of those involve the potential threat of physical force, like the story you told about being on top of the swing.

[1010] Zero, zero of that applies online.

[1011] And so there's an immense amount of not even subtle criminal activity online.

[1012] I don't know how much online activity is criminal.

[1013] But if you include pornography, it's probably like 40 % of the total internet environment is criminal in the broader sense.

[1014] That's a lot, 40%.

[1015] It's a lot.

[1016] And there is zero punishment, virtually zero punishment for psychopathy online.

[1017] It's also, you know, when we talk about 3 % of the world being like that, it's not that 3 % of the, I don't think of it.

[1018] I don't think of it.

[1019] Everybody's on that spectrum.

[1020] And in one society, three percent of the world show up that way.

[1021] In another society, people who would have been in the fourth or fifth percentile start showing up that way.

[1022] Yeah, well, that, definitely.

[1023] So you don't even have to wait for that to get naturally selected.

[1024] It starts to awaken.

[1025] Yeah, yeah.

[1026] Well, you can imagine that there's a temperamental proclivity to that.

[1027] It can be fought on behalf of the people who have the proclivity, right?

[1028] So imagine that wherever you are in the five -dimensional personality space, you have a set of talents and a set of temptations.

[1029] And the temptation, if you're extroverted and disagree, is to be narcissistic, but that isn't a necessarily inviolable outcome.

[1030] Okay, so there's people with that proclivity.

[1031] Then there's a space that either opens up for them or doesn't, and that space could be you can get away with it, or the space could be you get encouraged.

[1032] If it's encouraged, it's going to grow.

[1033] It's definitely being encouraged online.

[1034] It's being encouraged, and funny enough, that's another symptom of this evolution gap, because, again, for the vast majority of human history, we lived in fear.

[1035] Can you even imagine what it would have been like?

[1036] to sleep on the savannah without fire?

[1037] No. It would have been terrifying.

[1038] Well, I felt that to some degree backcountry camping in the Rockies where I know there are Grizzlies.

[1039] But that's just like a tiny taste of that.

[1040] That's after 99 % of the megafauna were removed.

[1041] Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[1042] And the Grizzlies are smart enough generally to be afraid and they won't bother you unless they're starving and old and you stumble across one.

[1043] So if you think that our ancestors lived really very much fearful, fearful of things, fearful of conditions, fearful of others.

[1044] And that's a very natural instinct that we have in us.

[1045] Now you take one of those 3 % narcissistic, psychopathic people and put them in a position of power.

[1046] And what do they do?

[1047] They offer us safety.

[1048] Yeah, yeah.

[1049] And they foster fear.

[1050] Yeah, yeah.

[1051] Well, they create the fear.

[1052] They offer us safety, but we have to sacrifice our freedom for their safety.

[1053] And our instinct, as frightened primates is, to go for that.

[1054] And so that And that's the eternal offering of a tyrant.

[1055] It's like, here, this is why the apocalyptic climate narrative really drives me mad.

[1056] It's like, well, first of all, I don't think there is a crisis of the proportions that's being purported, let's say, by any stretch of the imagination.

[1057] I don't think there's any data to support that whatsoever.

[1058] But also, the problem with it is, is that the apocalyptic fear that that generates, justifies the acquisition of power by precisely the kind of psychopathic predators that you're describing.

[1059] It's like, oh, everything's going to fall apart.

[1060] Wink, wink, give all the power to us and we'll keep you safe.

[1061] It's like, yeah, I don't think so.

[1062] I think you're a bigger threat than the damn climate by a large margin.

[1063] There's a nice way to look at that, too.

[1064] You know, climate change, I mean, you'll remember that in the 70s, it was global cooling.

[1065] Yes, yes.

[1066] And then it was global warming.

[1067] Now it's climate change.

[1068] But here's what's really fascinating.

[1069] First of all, I think that trying to measure our impact on climate and so forth, it's a little bit like measuring the height of a flea jump on the back of a white rhino, running across the savannah, trying to predict where the rhino is going to go.

[1070] Meanwhile, we have plastic in the oceans.

[1071] We have air quality problems.

[1072] We have tangible things that you can agree with, whether you're a Democrat or whether you're a Republican or conservative or liberal.

[1073] We have very, we're not arguing about those things.

[1074] We're arguing about this one massive, nebulous thing that can't properly be proven and giving up our power for it.

[1075] Yeah, you bet, you bet.

[1076] It's a major danger.

[1077] There's no doubt about it.

[1078] All right.

[1079] So now you're making your sales ability more sophisticated.

[1080] You're working with this company.

[1081] What happens then?

[1082] I stay with that company for about six or seven years.

[1083] And I find, you know, I get to a place where, you know, I've been offered equity a number of times.

[1084] And, you know, what happens a lot of times with entrepreneurs anyway is that they, it's easy to give away equity when it doesn't, when it has no value.

[1085] And then once it has value, it's like harder to keep your promises, apparently for some people.

[1086] It's like that.

[1087] Well, people forget, too.

[1088] And you make these, this is another thing for people watching and listening to understand is even if you have established a trusting relationship with people, don't overestimate the degree to which people can actually remember, because things get fuzzy.

[1089] I agree, but that was not the case here.

[1090] This was a willful case of manipulate.

[1091] I'll give you an example.

[1092] I walk into my office one day, and we're trying to bid for some equipment.

[1093] And we don't really want to buy this equipment.

[1094] We want to keep it off the market.

[1095] You understand?

[1096] So my boss goes and he negotiates with this company to buy the equipment from them, and he sends them a fax.

[1097] And the fax is a blank piece of paper.

[1098] And I go, why did you fax them a blank piece of paper?

[1099] And he goes, because we agreed on the phone that I could buy that stuff.

[1100] So now he can't sell it to anybody.

[1101] And if he does sell it to one of my competitors in the meantime, I have a telephone record that proves that I faxed a purchase order to him.

[1102] Oh, yeah.

[1103] So this is not a man who forgot the promises he made to me. This is a man who is a style of thinking that doesn't measure.

[1104] Let's call it a tangential relationship with the truth.

[1105] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1106] Well, that's very instrumental, right?

[1107] And the irony is I left that company, and he owed me, you know, maybe $200 ,000, $180 ,000 in back commissions and refused to pay it to me because he was afraid.

[1108] This is irony.

[1109] I love irony.

[1110] I mean, I like proper examples of irony.

[1111] like Ronald Reagan was not shot.

[1112] He wasn't actually shot.

[1113] He was hit by a bullet that ricocheted off his bulletproof limousine.

[1114] I like examples of irony.

[1115] And so in my case, he won't pay me the money because he's afraid that I will set up a competitive venture.

[1116] Meantime, one of my mentors has offered me a job as a stockbroker in Grand Cayman, which is my dream to go and live in the Caribbean.

[1117] But without that money, I can't.

[1118] You know, I need some money.

[1119] So the ironic twist is that one of my clients calls me and he says, you know, can you find some equipment for me?

[1120] And I'm like, I don't, I'm living in England at this point because I'd been relocated to England to open the European headquarters.

[1121] I've quit my job.

[1122] I'm not legally allowed to be in the country for work.

[1123] I have a pregnant wife.

[1124] It's a tough time.

[1125] And my boss won't give me the money so I can relocate.

[1126] The guy says, can you find this equipment for me?

[1127] And I'm like, yeah, I go find it for them and I make money.

[1128] And then I do it again, and then I do it again.

[1129] And then I start a company.

[1130] And what kind of company?

[1131] Direct competitor with my previous time.

[1132] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[1133] Total irony.

[1134] Yeah, right.

[1135] And I ran that business in the UK for about nine years.

[1136] and then sold it to private buyers and, you know, moved on with, like, got out of the data capture.

[1137] And how successful were you at that new enterprise?

[1138] It was, and we were, we were, I mean, I'll say I got my $200 ,000 back again and again and again and again.

[1139] And I sold it for a retireable sum of money.

[1140] Why hadn't you done that earlier, going on your own earlier?

[1141] You know, I've often wondered about that because as a kid I did.

[1142] I mean, as a kid, I was, I was watching the news report.

[1143] The minute the snow was happening.

[1144] I was like, I was out there knocking on the doors.

[1145] Like, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to shovel your sidewalks.

[1146] And I'm also more introverted.

[1147] So that's not the easiest thing in the world for me to go do.

[1148] So I was off doing that, raking leaves.

[1149] And then one year I came up with this genius plan at the beginning of Christmas or at the beginning of the snow season, which in Halifax is usually around Christmas.

[1150] I sold insurance.

[1151] I knocked on doors and said, look, you can pay me now because you usually pay me like $10 to do your walk or $5 or whatever.

[1152] But if you pay me $25, I'll keep your clear for the winter.

[1153] Yeah.

[1154] Big gamble.

[1155] You know, some years in Halifax, I would do.

[1156] But it works.

[1157] People went for it.

[1158] So I clearly had that mindset.

[1159] And I remember once distinctly, what a lesson.

[1160] I was raking leaves for this guy, old ornery guy.

[1161] And I was, and I was paying by the trash bag full.

[1162] He had to pay $2, whatever it was per trash bag.

[1163] And I, in a huge garden.

[1164] So I'm making it.

[1165] I'm filling him out, trash bag, trash bag, trash bag.

[1166] He comes out and he squeezes one of the trash bags.

[1167] And he goes, no, no, no, no. And he packs it right down.

[1168] Yeah, yeah, I bet.

[1169] And he goes, now that's a trash bag.

[1170] And he goes, he goes, I'm not trying to be cheap.

[1171] He says, I'm trying to teach you about value.

[1172] He goes, you got to know that if I come out here and you got light trash bags, I'm not hiring you again next year.

[1173] Yeah, right.

[1174] But if I see that you do it right, and I got to tell you, that guy, massive impact on my life.

[1175] Everything I do today is about over -delivery on that basis.

[1176] Yeah, right.

[1177] No kidding.

[1178] No kidding.

[1179] Now, that was good of him.

[1180] That's for sure, man. He paid you for your work that day.

[1181] He did.

[1182] He did.

[1183] Yeah, yeah.

[1184] Over -deliver.

[1185] You bet.

[1186] Well, and that's the thing, is you've got to remember when you're selling to people.

[1187] First of all, you don't want to sell to the wrong person because you might be in bed with them for a very long time.

[1188] That's a good thing to learn if you're so -called fundraising, too.

[1189] It's like you should never fundraise.

[1190] You should look for partners.

[1191] And you don't want to take money from the wrong person.

[1192] That's a very, very bad idea.

[1193] So I bought a film studio in Northern California years after all this.

[1194] And it was originally the model shop.

[1195] It was called the model shop.

[1196] And anybody who's a Star Wars geek knows what I'm talking about.

[1197] It's the original, the original, like, studio of Lucasfilm.

[1198] This is where Star Wars, well, actually Star Wars is LA.

[1199] This is Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones, Pirates in the Caribbean, all of it.

[1200] And so I bought the studio, and, and, where was I going with that?

[1201] Getting in bed with the wrong people.

[1202] Oh, yeah.

[1203] So we had these incredible 3D camera systems that we were building, and we did our first, we did a little bit of work on Avatar, and it was really good.

[1204] But then we needed to raise some capital, raised capital from a guy, $1 .2 million, and he worked for a huge, he was like the second in command of a huge entertainment company.

[1205] And he said, I'll lend you the money as long as I get to run the company.

[1206] Oh, yeah.

[1207] And, you know, I could say he ran into the ground.

[1208] Let's say we ran it into the ground.

[1209] That particular venture didn't really work.

[1210] But then he sued us for his money from the company that he was running.

[1211] And it was like, I got the lesson.

[1212] From now, as we're not, we're looking for like partners and we vet them as much as we would, anybody else.

[1213] Yeah, yeah.

[1214] Well, there's no such thing is free money.

[1215] You're a bloody fool if you think.

[1216] Anybody whose money is easy to take, first of all, you better make sure that it's not a lure.

[1217] Second, if their money is easy to take, that should tell you something about them.

[1218] It just means you don't know how you're going to pay.

[1219] Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

[1220] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1221] Okay, so now you've established a company in the UK, and you did that for how long?

[1222] Nine years.

[1223] Nine years.

[1224] And then I sold it.

[1225] And you have a family developing at the same time.

[1226] Yeah, but unfortunately, my wife at the time, decided rather unilaterally that she didn't want to live in England anymore and went on a vacation to Canada and took my son with her.

[1227] And that's when I found out that the Geneva or the Hague Convention only applies up until the 90th day.

[1228] She called me on the 92nd day and said, if you want to be with us, you have to come back to Canada.

[1229] And I had employees and debts and it would have been personal bankruptcy and ruin.

[1230] And then it also made me really ask an important question about and I'll never know if I did it.

[1231] It must be a shock.

[1232] It was awful.

[1233] God.

[1234] God.

[1235] But I spoke to my dad, and my dad said, what would you want your son to do in the exact same situation?

[1236] I said, well, I wouldn't want him to be bullied in a unilateral way like that.

[1237] And I wouldn't, and I'd want him to take responsibility for it.

[1238] If I left, everybody loses their jobs.

[1239] Most of them were long -term unemployed before I came along because we're in an impoverished part of the UK.

[1240] And I would have had to file bankruptcy.

[1241] It was a massive impact for me to just suddenly close up my business.

[1242] And I, as a kid, I was a bit like that, you know, start something, it didn't work, go to the next thing.

[1243] I was really in this phase of you start things, you've got to finish them.

[1244] And so I chose to stay and keep the business.

[1245] And my wife and I divorced at that point.

[1246] It was very, very difficult time.

[1247] But, you know, I learned a great deal, and the business went well in the end, and I sold it.

[1248] And, you know, this is a very interesting thing about purpose.

[1249] You know, like, I think that when we look at what we value, you know, initially we value survival.

[1250] And in our world, that means some level of economic survival, say.

[1251] But something magical happens if you can transcend the need for money, emotionally or luckily, logistically.

[1252] And that's really what happened to me at that point is that I became free to actually follow my passion and do things that really drove me. Barcode scanning equipment never drove me. As much as I can get fascinated by the...

[1253] So let me ask you about that.

[1254] See, I read Joseph Campbell a lot for years, and he said...

[1255] And Campbell has some very interesting things to say, although he learned most of them from Carl Jung.

[1256] he said, follow your passion.

[1257] And you know, there's a couple of things that aren't right about that.

[1258] I mean, the first is it's not that easy to differentiate a true passion from a false passion.

[1259] And impulsivity is passion, but it's short term.

[1260] And so is it passion you follow, or is it interest, or is it the compelling nature of certain problems that grip you?

[1261] Or is it responsibility?

[1262] I think that there's a mix.

[1263] Passion by itself could be good or bad, could be very, vacuous or deep.

[1264] But passion combined with purpose.

[1265] And what happened for me is I found a purpose.

[1266] When I was a kid, I wanted to be a teacher.

[1267] I had this great teacher in grade three in Halifax and Oscosa, Mr. Colchinsky.

[1268] I'm telling you he was amazing.

[1269] He really, I can still, almost word for word repeat some of his classes and I was eight years old.

[1270] He was a phenomenal teacher.

[1271] When I was 25 years old, I found myself back in half, Halifax briefly.

[1272] I called the school board.

[1273] And I said, is Mr. Colchensi still working?

[1274] We called him Mr. Kaye, because Nobody could say Koltzinski when we were kids.

[1275] But is Mr. Koltzinski still working with the school?

[1276] Yes, he is.

[1277] I said, can I have his home number, please?

[1278] No. 15 minutes later, to use the Star Wars, these are not the droids you're looking for.

[1279] I had his phone number.

[1280] And I called him in his house, and I said, Mr. Koltensky, this is Eric Edmonds.

[1281] And I'm assuming 30 kids a year for all these years.

[1282] I'm not going to remember me. But before I even finished, I said, hi, this is, I said, hi, Mr. Koltzinski, this is Eric, Edmese.

[1283] I don't know if you remember me. And he goes, remember you.

[1284] I drove past your house.

[1285] a few days ago, I'm wondering, did your parents ever move back to Africa like that?

[1286] Wow.

[1287] Wow.

[1288] And I just told him that I'm living a phenomenal life and that I believe he was one of the significant contributors to that for me. And anyway, that made me want to be a teacher.

[1289] I wanted to be a teacher, but then I found out as I was leaving school, and I don't, you know, like I feel bad kind of saying this, but I just, it seems to me, at least in the way it was when I was a kid growing up in Canada, we just, we don't really respect teachers very much, not economically and not in other ways.

[1290] Or the profession.

[1291] Or the profession generally.

[1292] And I was like, I don't, I'm not, I want to teach, but I don't want to be treated like that.

[1293] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1294] And so now that I'd sold a business, I took a couple of years and traveled around the world and I started doing a little bit of business speaking.

[1295] People started inviting me to speak about business because I'd sold my company and that sort of thing.

[1296] But under it, under it, I had a much deeper passion.

[1297] And that was that at 21 years old, I had been really sick.

[1298] Like, not, I'm not talking terminal or, you know, anything like that.

[1299] I just mean always on medication, always uncomfortable.

[1300] What was wrong?

[1301] Yeah, I had a horrible, permanent chronic sinus infections, throat infections.

[1302] My tonsils would be like golf balls in my throat, ear infections, digestive, really serious digestive, cramps that were so bad that I couldn't speak or think, a horrible cystic acne.

[1303] Oh, yeah.

[1304] And I always, I mean, always dripping from the nose.

[1305] It was just, generally, I was just not a healthy kid.

[1306] And I wasn't like that younger, but somewhere between 12 and 10.

[1307] 21, that all started developing.

[1308] And I'd been to see doctors and specialists and needles and pills and injections and even surgery finally they recommended.

[1309] And, you know, I went to, a friend of mine talked me into going to a seminar, a sales seminar.

[1310] It was Tony Robbins, was 21 years old.

[1311] And I thought I was going to go there and learn about money.

[1312] And sure, I did.

[1313] But on the last day, Tony spoke about food.

[1314] And I think he and I would agree on this point that many of the things he shared about food back then are not what he or I believe about food, but they were a lot better than the way I was eating.

[1315] And so I made a bunch of changes.

[1316] What did you change primarily?

[1317] You know, the reduction of processed food, elimination of dairy products, elimination of meat at that point, and I'll come back to that later because that was wrong.

[1318] And there's something about that that's interesting.

[1319] And then the increase of good things.

[1320] And within 30 days, I had lost 35 pounds.

[1321] 30 pounds.

[1322] 30 days.

[1323] It was fast.

[1324] That must be a shock.

[1325] Well, remember, a lot of it's not fat.

[1326] A lot of it's inflammation, right?

[1327] Which I didn't know that.

[1328] It's still a shock.

[1329] Here's how big a shock in it.

[1330] I go visit my mom.

[1331] I land in Johannesburg.

[1332] I come down the, back then it was like you came down these escalators into Yonsmutz Airport, Johannesburg International now.

[1333] You come down there and there's greeting area.

[1334] And my mom, and I'm there with my girlfriend.

[1335] And my mom looks at at me and looks right through me. Doesn't even see it.

[1336] Wow.

[1337] Then she looks at my girlfriend.

[1338] who had like bright red hair.

[1339] Robin, I know it's strawberry blonde.

[1340] I'm sorry, but you have this bright hair.

[1341] And so my mom saw her and then did the double take back to me and then realized it was me. Such was the change in my face.

[1342] Like everything had changed.

[1343] And then I had a fascinating conversation with my doctor because he was calling me to say, well, the surgery's coming up.

[1344] They wanted me to have my tonsils to do, which is a serious, serious thing to do at 21 years ago.

[1345] Right, right.

[1346] And I said, I don't think I need the surgery anymore.

[1347] And we're having this conversation.

[1348] He goes, why not?

[1349] And I go, I'm not.

[1350] He goes, yeah, but that happens.

[1351] You know, the pain goes away.

[1352] And it'll be back.

[1353] You know, you've waited this long.

[1354] And it was a sales pitch.

[1355] It was, I'm looking at this guy going, oh my God, it's a sales pitch.

[1356] This is not about me. This is about revenue.

[1357] I felt it.

[1358] And my bones.

[1359] It was just not right.

[1360] And then I said to him, how long did you go to medical school for?

[1361] Now, you have to know, at 21 years old, I looked 18.

[1362] I was a kid.

[1363] I looked young.

[1364] This must have been the most impetuous.

[1365] Like, what's this?

[1366] He goes, six years?

[1367] And I go, can I just ask, in the six years, how much of that time did you spend studying nutrition?

[1368] Right.

[1369] Do you know the answer?

[1370] Yeah.

[1371] None.

[1372] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1373] And that is consistent.

[1374] About as much time as they spend studying scientific research.

[1375] It's amazing.

[1376] It is quite stunning.

[1377] And at that moment, I suddenly felt, the only way I could describe is I felt like I was on a plane, and I just found out the pilot didn't learn how to land.

[1378] Yeah.

[1379] I have better learn this myself.

[1380] And I went in, I read everything I could.

[1381] I went, I even finally went to university.

[1382] I didn't go very long because it was so painfully slow.

[1383] But I went to go study archaeology, why would I study archaeology when I wanted to learn about food?

[1384] Because I had a very interesting moment where I learned about elephants.

[1385] And elephants, you know, when you put them in captivity a hundred years ago, they would only live 10 years or so.

[1386] Like it was a very short -lived life.

[1387] And the zookeepers and such stumbled upon some, you know, at that point in time, contemporary science.

[1388] And that said that elephants in the wild lived seven or eight years.

[1389] And these guys became very concerned about their, well, I'd like to think they're concerned about their elephants.

[1390] They were concerned about their investment.

[1391] And so what did they figure out?

[1392] And I'm reading this article, and the article talks about the elephant's wild diet and the elephant's captive diet.

[1393] And while I can't look, I'm a little bit of a grammar fascist sometimes.

[1394] I mean, I shouldn't be.

[1395] I don't have the right to be.

[1396] I'm dyslexic, and I probably don't have the right to be.

[1397] But when I spot something and I look at this wild diet, the elephant doesn't have a wild diet.

[1398] It doesn't, the elephant does not have a wild diet.

[1399] The elephant has a diet.

[1400] It does not have a wild one.

[1401] Right.

[1402] It might have a captive one, but it doesn't have a wild one.

[1403] And in that moment, I suddenly realized, wait a second now, the word diet has been stolen.

[1404] It's been hijacked, like many words get stolen.

[1405] And what it actually means is way of life.

[1406] It actually means way of life.

[1407] The original Greek, Latin, it's way of life.

[1408] It's not, it's not temporary alteration to your current eating patterns in order to fit into that outfit for that special occasion.

[1409] That's not what it moment, I realized that in order to figure out how to, and by the way, they took the elephants wild diet and they reintroduced it to the captive diet.

[1410] Suddenly the captive elephants were living 30, 40, 50 years.

[1411] And at that point, I said, what we have to be doing is looking at our own anthropology, our own archaeology, our own history.

[1412] Because food science has been so hijacked and adulterated that we can't trust it.

[1413] I felt like the roots of the issue were not going to be sold to us by the food pyramid people.

[1414] They weren't going to be sold to us by the food manufacturers.

[1415] The Department of Agriculture.

[1416] Not helpful, right?

[1417] No, you can certainly say that.

[1418] So I wrote this article, and then about a year or two later, oh, I read an article by S. Boyd Eaton, and he'd written it in like 1985, and it basically suggested the same thing.

[1419] He was saying, look, there's a human diet.

[1420] There is one.

[1421] You know, we have less, as a population on this planet, we have less genetic variants than the different species of elephant have from each other.

[1422] We're very closely related.

[1423] There's a human diet.

[1424] And then Lauren Cordane released the paleo diet around about that time.

[1425] And I felt partially robbed and also vindicated all at the same time.

[1426] But that kind of led me to real passion and purpose.

[1427] The problem was, as a teacher, nobody would pay for that.

[1428] Nobody would pay for me to come and talk to them about anthropological nutrition, or what we would now call nutritional anthropology or even food psychology.

[1429] They weren't interested in that.

[1430] But they were always interested in how I built a business.

[1431] and I'd been involved in Hollywood movies, and I built a, like, for example, this is fascinating.

[1432] We're doing Hollywood special effects and creatures and stuff for the movies.

[1433] And so then the military, through Jamie Heinemann from Mythbusters, who used to work at the studio long before I bought it, came to us one day and he said, can we build hyper -realistic trauma simulation mannequins for the U .S. Army?

[1434] Now, I don't know if you've ever done CPR training, but the dummy you do it on is not real.

[1435] It's not even as real as a shop mannequin.

[1436] They are now.

[1437] They are so real that medics opted out of the training program because interacting with our mannequins was too traumatic for them.

[1438] It was a fascinating time.

[1439] Really.

[1440] Wow.

[1441] Really fascinating.

[1442] I mean, they were simulating IED interaction to use the vernacular, right?

[1443] Sounds like there's an opening on the sex robot manufacturer.

[1444] They approached us.

[1445] The porn industry, we got a strong approach from them.

[1446] We were like, not at all.

[1447] Not at all.

[1448] We knew there was treasure at the end of that rainbow, but there was consequence.

[1449] I had no way.

[1450] But in the end, I would get invited to speak about business because I had this.

[1451] Most business, speakers are either theoreticians, or they've had one big success in a particular industry, or even they've had two or three successes in the same industry.

[1452] But I'd had a success in data capture, mobile computing wireless networking, then in Hollywood special effects, then in medical simulation, then in military research and development.

[1453] And so you're showing cross -platform generalizability.

[1454] People are willing to pay for the nice seats in the plane and the good fees for business speaking.

[1455] And so I started doing that.

[1456] In fact, I mentioned earlier, I got that call from Tony Robbins.

[1457] And that kind of set me on fire.

[1458] It was like, holy, I didn't know.

[1459] How did he come across you?

[1460] Did you ever hear of Chet Holmes?

[1461] Chet Holmes wrote, you want to check out Chet because just because of your fascination in sales and marketing.

[1462] He wrote a book called the ultimate sales machine, a phenomenal bestseller.

[1463] And it turned out, he and I met at one point and he said, when did you do my program?

[1464] I've never done your program.

[1465] He goes, but the way you talk and the way you write marketing campaigns, they're so subtle and they don't feel like marketing and they're so converting.

[1466] Why are they so good if you didn't do my training program, which is a slightly arrogant question, but he was like that.

[1467] And years later, we were having dinner one day, and he was always very inquisitive, and he asked lots of questions, and he asked me about my history, and I mentioned Kirby.

[1468] And he goes, oh, I get it now.

[1469] He used to work for Charlie Munger, and he had designed all of the marketing campaigns that we were using at Kirby.

[1470] So I had been trained in sales and marketing by Chet Holmes as a kid, even though we never met.

[1471] I see.

[1472] And so he was working with Tony, and one day, he had told, Tony about me a few times, but I wasn't a speaker, so Tony was never going to put me on stage.

[1473] But then, you know, weird confluence of events, you know, happened.

[1474] And Chet sadly gets very sick, and he ends up passing away.

[1475] But he always said to me, I've given you this last gift.

[1476] He always told me that.

[1477] And I never knew what the gift was.

[1478] I never knew.

[1479] But then about 11 days after he passed away, he was scheduled to speak at a conference in Fiji with Tony.

[1480] And I get this phone call.

[1481] Would you come and take Chet's spot?

[1482] Uh -huh.

[1483] And I hadn't been on a stage in three years.

[1484] I had no business.

[1485] That's like I'm not even driving go -carts and you want me to go race Formula One today?

[1486] But I said yes and I went and it just, Tony and I hit it off immediately.

[1487] He was so good to me in every way.

[1488] We didn't know about, because I've been talking to Tony and working with him to some degree over the last, I guess it's almost a six months, two years, something like that.

[1489] But I don't think we knew that connection when we met in Mexico.

[1490] No, I don't know.

[1491] I don't think pretty, yeah.

[1492] No, but he immediately, I remember flying into Viji, and I thought, if I really rock this, I mean, if I really rock it, I know it's an opportunity, I could get on the list.

[1493] They'd call me again.

[1494] By the time the plane had taxied to the airport, I said, screw that.

[1495] That's not big enough thinking.

[1496] If I really rock this, I will become the list.

[1497] And in effect, that happened.

[1498] Tony and I hit it off immediately.

[1499] They told me he would only stay in the room for 15 minutes.

[1500] And it was so interesting, he calls me, and his team comes, says, Tony wants to meet you in the hallway.

[1501] You know, he's never met you.

[1502] And by the way, he's only going to stay in the room for 15 minutes when you're on stage.

[1503] If he leaves, it's a good sign.

[1504] He's either going to leave or he's going to take you off the stage.

[1505] Those are the only options.

[1506] But he wants to meet in the hallway.

[1507] So I walk into the hallway and I, you know, in, you know, like a way.

[1508] He's big.

[1509] And he goes, how are you feeling about your presentation?

[1510] And the truth is they were asking me to do a presentation on 11 days prep with lying on somebody else's slides.

[1511] I don't even usually use slides.

[1512] And I said, well, it's not the ideal circumstance.

[1513] you know, and I just want to be honest.

[1514] And Tony goes, well, you could be a lot more confident.

[1515] And, but I remember, you know, Tony, Tony always said some verse, and if nobody in the history of calming down has ever calmed down because somebody told him to calm down.

[1516] In other words, me becoming meek was not going to be helpful at that point.

[1517] So I just said, what the hell?

[1518] I'm in all the way.

[1519] I go, oh, I'm plenty confident.

[1520] Look, the reason I'm here is that your other business speakers are too busy operating their businesses.

[1521] I'm a proper business owner.

[1522] That's why I could do this on notice.

[1523] notice.

[1524] So it might not be exactly the presentation you're expecting, but it's going to be fantastic.

[1525] Oh, yeah.

[1526] Oh, yeah.

[1527] And then Tony goes, well, all right then.

[1528] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[1529] And, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and - that's better than the scared rabbit approach.

[1530] It was, then, now this leads to kind of a funny little offsuit here where he goes into his team and he goes, I like this guy.

[1531] I think I want to introduce him myself.

[1532] And he wasn't planning to introduce me because he didn't want to be near what could be a train wreck.

[1533] But now he's met me. Meanwhile, it's mostly a Chinese audience.

[1534] So the guy who's introducing me is going to introduce me in Chinese, not in English.

[1535] So they've changed the translation.

[1536] And Tony's like, where's his bio?

[1537] They go, well, we threw it out.

[1538] We translated to Chinese.

[1539] We threw it out.

[1540] What do you mean?

[1541] We'll translate it back.

[1542] Well, I don't know if you've played that game very often, but English to Chinese, back to English.

[1543] So it ends up like the bio says, you know, Eric's not really a speaker.

[1544] He's a business guy.

[1545] He started his first business and he sold it nine years later.

[1546] By the time it gets translated back and given to Tony, Tony walks up on stage and he goes, you guys, I just met our next speaker out in the hallway.

[1547] I'm so excited to introduce you to him.

[1548] He started his first business when he was only nine years old.

[1549] And he was just, I'm like, oh, no. But he stayed in the room for three and a half hours.

[1550] And he didn't take me off the stage.

[1551] And then he booked me for a year.

[1552] And he coached me, and he was sweet to me and generous to me in every possible way.

[1553] And that really turned me on and set me off on the path of, I'm going to be a professional teacher.

[1554] I'm going to do this for a living.

[1555] So, okay, so fill me in a bit here on the relationship between the business speaking and your interest in diet.

[1556] And also, let's make a bit of a foray into what the consequences for you and the broader consequences have been of learning to teach and also concentrating on diet.

[1557] Maybe we can close this session up with that.

[1558] Sure.

[1559] So the short version is that I believe that the single most valuable professional skill that exists in the world communication.

[1560] The ability to speak publicly in front of a camera and audience is everything.

[1561] Anybody can add a zero to their income by learning to communicate effectively, in my opinion.

[1562] So that was the first big impact for me. When I made that transition, it meant that everything accelerated, every opportunity accelerated, my network accelerated, everything changed when I decided that I was willing to do that, put myself at risk, put myself in front of an audience or a camera.

[1563] In the meantime, of course, I had this health focus that was my biggest passion, but I couldn't find a venue for it.

[1564] There was no economic venue for that.

[1565] So I kept doing it because I wasn't in it for the money, but I had to do something for money separately.

[1566] So I kept teaching.

[1567] But then my client started asking me, well, wait a minute, where do you get all this energy from?

[1568] You don't do jet lag.

[1569] You're on stage for 15 hours a day.

[1570] You know, you never look tired.

[1571] You never get sick.

[1572] What's going on?

[1573] So I started teaching nutritional principles to my business clients.

[1574] And what I was basically teaching them was an early version of this concept of the evolution.

[1575] gap.

[1576] Again, this gap that opens up between our innovation and our genetics.

[1577] And the food industry has raped and pillaged that gap to no end.

[1578] And that's why we have the prolific explosion of type 2 diabetes and obesity and all that stuff that we have, is that we have instincts.

[1579] Which is an unbridled catastrophe.

[1580] It's, it's, and the fact that it's not on the, you know, if we look at the press today, if the press were forced to cover things equally, minute to consequence, you know, equally, then there'd be a sliver on gun crime.

[1581] Yeah.

[1582] And then there'd be a pie chart of about, you know, 55 % that would be about diabetes, obesity.

[1583] Yeah, it would be pie chart.

[1584] Yeah, yeah.

[1585] Meat pie.

[1586] Meat pie.

[1587] Hopefully.

[1588] But, you know, so I started teaching my clients and ultimately teaching them a concept of rewilding, personal rewilding, rather than sort of the Yellowstone National Park ecological rewilding.

[1589] It's like, how do you take advantage of the unbelievable things that exist in the modern world, but understand that you.

[1590] you're ultimately a stone -aged human and that your instincts are mismatched with your current environment.

[1591] And if I started teaching them this and I was so excited about it and they loved it, but I would see them six months later and they would still be the same.

[1592] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1593] So then I got to work on...

[1594] It's very hard for people to change their, the manner in which they eat or live because they're the same thing.

[1595] Then I solved that problem.

[1596] And I solved that by developing something that we call behavioral change dynamics.

[1597] And it sounds a little weird, So you're a clinical psychologist, and I'm going to talk to you about psychology.

[1598] But I just, you know, when you grow up in the household I did, you had to become a practical psychologist.

[1599] It was a survival thing.

[1600] And I got very good at figuring out why people do what they do, especially around food.

[1601] So I took this concept of behavioral change dynamics, which is an educational construct that I used for creating programs, but I added it to nutritional principles, and I created a 90 -day program for people on that.

[1602] It runs them through a week -by -week, strategically designed process of neurological change and nutritional change at perfect intervals.

[1603] And so what happened was I did it for eight people, and all eight of them got results, which is statistically not likely.

[1604] Then I did it for another eight people, another eight people, and then one of my clients is a fairly famous author in America named Paul Shealy, and he wrote me one day, he called me, and he goes, Eric, what have you done to me?

[1605] My marketing team just set up a webinar page, and the picture on the webinar page doesn't look anything like me, and we only took it three months ago, and that's how much people change in 90 days.

[1606] when you, but the, so he said, you know, where's your website?

[1607] I don't have a website.

[1608] It's not a business.

[1609] It's a hobby.

[1610] I just do it for my business clients.

[1611] And he goes, you better put up a website.

[1612] I'm about to tell my clients about you.

[1613] We had about 100 clients a year at that point.

[1614] They had to come to me to buy it.

[1615] It was the only way.

[1616] There was no website.

[1617] There was nothing.

[1618] In a week, 200 people signed up.

[1619] And it was like, and it's $1 ,500.

[1620] It's not a light expense.

[1621] And then it happened again, a guy named Collins Sprake in Vancouver.

[1622] It did the same thing, told his network, 200 people.

[1623] Then another guy named Vishen Lakiani.

[1624] who's the founder of Mind Valley, who's my digital publisher, he did it, and then he did it for 200 of his employees, and then he told his clients about it.

[1625] And where can people find out about this?

[1626] Getwildfit .com.

[1627] Get wildfit.

[1628] Get wildfit .com.

[1629] Get wildfit .com.

[1630] Well, we'll definitely put that in the description.

[1631] Make sure you have your people send a descriptor for the, for the, for the description of the video.

[1632] We'll even give them like a way to do it like a two -week trial.

[1633] We'll send you the details.

[1634] Yeah, okay, okay, yeah.

[1635] But the, so then he, 1 ,100 people signed up, and we got to a place where, you know, now 100 ,000 people in 130 countries around the world have done this program.

[1636] A hundred thousand?

[1637] A hundred thousand people.

[1638] And, you know, we have countless cases of type.

[1639] Type 2 diabetes is a fascinating one.

[1640] We never intended to do that.

[1641] But it just started happening.

[1642] And people would call us and go, Eric, I used to be diabetic.

[1643] Now I'm pre -diabetic.

[1644] I'm like, that just irritates me. Remember I'm a little bit, a little bit grammar fascist, right?

[1645] That irritates me. Preindicates direction.

[1646] Plus, from a prescription perspective, I would put to you there.

[1647] post -diabetic.

[1648] Which I, one day I said that.

[1649] I was talking to Mark Hyman, Dr. Mark Hyman, and I said, no, they're post -diabic.

[1650] Yes, absolutely.

[1651] And so, funny enough, that's, you know, you and I spoke about that book in, and you introduced me to Michaela to talk about that book.

[1652] Yes, yes.

[1653] So we have a book coming out that I co -wrote with a doctor about reversing diabetes, which was, you know, just, again, closing the evolution gap.

[1654] It's like when you understand why our cravings put us in a certain direction and why the food industry does certain things, you can, you can find.

[1655] your freedom yeah anyway i suddenly this thing that was never about money that couldn't pay for itself has been become uh you know the canadian government the canadian i get i get this letter can you can you can you come to ottawa please yes i can come to ottawa i'm standing i i still again i you know every now and again the seven -year -old you looks at your life and goes holy crap you like you can imagine what it was like standing in in kernner studios when i bought the studios and i'm standing where Pixar was made, Star Wars, Photoshop, and the seven -year -old of me is going, well, now I'm standing on the Senate floor.

[1656] The very day that the legalization of marijuana was ascended to law, that day, I'm standing on the Senate floor, and I'm getting a medal from the Speaker of the Senate.

[1657] And it's because of our work in improving the quality of people.

[1658] The direct quote was improving the quality of his lives.

[1659] Okay, so how did it come about that you got a medal for that?

[1660] And what did that signify?

[1661] And how did they find out?

[1662] And why did they believe you?

[1663] Um, it was a, a senator came to a presentation that I had done apparently years before in Vancouver and she just started following my work.

[1664] Yeah.

[1665] And she started following my work and, um, seeing what we were doing in the world and, uh, you know, submitted me for a nomination for this thing and, and, and what was the number?

[1666] It was, uh, it was, it was called a Senate 150 medal.

[1667] They, they, they, they struck a bunch of these medals.

[1668] They said, um, in celebration.

[1669] Oh, so was celebration of the 150.

[1670] Yeah.

[1671] And it was for, it was for, it was for unsung heroes.

[1672] They, they said, it's for people that are doing stuff behind the scenes and making big things happen.

[1673] Which is where things are always done that are real, by the way, behind the scenes, because people just go out and do them.

[1674] It was a huge gift.

[1675] And I have to tell you that on one side, I felt very, I don't feel like I go out into the world seeking any kind of recognition, but it felt good.

[1676] But more than that, it made me feel responsible.

[1677] I was like, well, I have to live up to that.

[1678] Yeah, yeah.

[1679] You know, I really have to live up to that.

[1680] And, you know, and I feel like I am.

[1681] I'm, you know, this work that I'm doing is mission -oriented for me. I can't name the country at the moment, but I can tell you that a minister of another country's parliament did my program and did very well with it, and then contacted me to see if we could work in their country to help fight their very serious obesity and diabetes problem.

[1682] Well, congratulations, man, that's a big deal.

[1683] And it's a special country because this country doesn't have food lobbyists or drug lobbyists, which means that we can do clinical trials there without interference.

[1684] Oh, oh, oh, well, that's great.

[1685] So fingers crossed it, that'll happen.

[1686] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

[1687] Well, look, this is a good time.

[1688] and place to bring this section of our discussion to a close.

[1689] I often, as you, people who are watching and listening, know, flip to the Daily Wire Plus side to do something more autobiographical.

[1690] But we've kind of done that here.

[1691] I think what we'll talk about instead on the Daily Wire Plus side is your experience with the Hamza people and your experience is in Africa.

[1692] So if you're interested in that, and you should be, I would say, go over to the Daily Wire Plus side, so to speak, the dark side, you know, and you might want to consider sending them some, at the moment anyways, because YouTube is on our case in a big way on the DailyWare Plus platform.

[1693] You know, they've canceled three of my shows in the last month, and I think are likely to cancel a few of the ones that I've recorded in the last week, by the way.

[1694] And so that's not so good.

[1695] And they're really on the case, you know, on Shapiro's case and on Candice Owens case and, of course, Matt Walsh, all those people.

[1696] So it's a good time to show them some support if you're inclined to do such things.

[1697] So why don't you join us over there?

[1698] And Eric, we'll thank you very much for talking to me today.

[1699] You've done all sorts of interesting things.

[1700] It was fun walking through what you've been up to.

[1701] I'm going to be very interested to watch what happens with you on the diet and politics front because that's, you know, if our legacy media, such as it is, had an ounce of sense, there'd be a hell of a lot more front page headlines about the fact that everybody in the whole goddamn West is fat and diabetic and insane because of the diet that they were enticed to eat.

[1702] by psychopathic marketers on the Department of Agricultural side, who were told by the very bloody consultants that they hired that they were going to produce an epidemic of unparalleled magnitude and then proceeded to do exactly that for generations.

[1703] And here we are.

[1704] And let's say this on the other side of the paywall.

[1705] I'm going to suggest that had they not done that, we would not have experienced the pandemic that we did.

[1706] Yeah, well, we know that there was almost no death among people who didn't have comorbidity and one of the major comorbidities was being obese, and it's a comorbidity with virtually everything terrible that there is.

[1707] So that wouldn't surprise me in the least.

[1708] Yeah, all right, so everyone off to the Daily Wire Plus side, and thank you again, Eric, for speaking to me today.

[1709] Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're funny.

[1710] You bet.

[1711] You bet.