The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:11.300 Today I'm speaking with serial entrepreneur and public speaker Eric Edmeades.

00:01:17.580 We discuss his early experiences with homelessness, the extent and detriment of alcoholism, an illness that preoccupied his father,

00:01:25.400 the changes you can make to restructure your physiological responses, right, especially to fear,

00:01:31.800 the relationship between trust and sales and marketing, general communication, and the world of possibility

00:01:37.640 that opens up to you if you embrace the unknown, the potentially dangerous, and above all, that which calls to you.

00:01:46.460 So we met in Mexico.

00:01:48.320 Yeah, Puebla.

00:01:49.440 Right, we were there for their festival of ideas.

00:01:52.060 Yeah.

00:01:52.200 Right, and we went to an old library afterwards, which was very cool.

00:01:55.580 It was the oldest library, I think, in North America.

00:01:57.580 I think in all the Americas, yeah.

00:01:59.020 It was a super cool building.

00:02:00.320 You know, what was fascinating is that they had no electricity in there and no climate control

00:02:03.900 and millions of dollars and more than money, the value of all those books.

00:02:08.520 But the building was built, like, well enough to do the climate control and humidity control in the 1500s.

00:02:13.900 Yeah.

00:02:14.500 Fascinating.

00:02:15.160 Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

00:02:16.180 That was a good trip.

00:02:17.000 That was a cool city and a good festival.

00:02:19.880 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:20.380 So I was looking at your biography today.

00:02:22.340 I figured we might as well walk through it.

00:02:25.080 It said, let's start with this.

00:02:27.220 While living in Canada, your family was, you were born into an apartheid era, South Africa,

00:02:32.420 and then immigrated with your family to Canada.

00:02:34.880 But you said, while living in Canada, your childhood quickly became what can only be described

00:02:38.580 as a rollercoaster ride of experience, including a period of homelessness in Northern Canada

00:02:45.400 at the vulnerable age of 15.

00:02:47.820 Northern Canada is not a good place to be homeless.

00:02:51.200 Actually, I would put to you, and I think you'll be with me on this, it's a great place to be homeless

00:02:56.060 because it forces resolution very quickly.

00:02:59.700 So what happened at 15?

00:03:01.380 You know, my dad and my mom split up when I was very young, and it was a very good thing

00:03:07.000 they did.

00:03:07.340 And my dad was, at that stage, having, let's say, an irresponsible relationship with alcohol.

00:03:13.320 And so they had split up, and then he'd sobered up.

00:03:16.980 And my mom and I had a disagreement, a teenage disagreement at some stage that resulted in

00:03:21.480 me rebelling and going to live with my father.

00:03:24.280 And so off to, you know, to live with my father.

00:03:26.640 After all these years, I'll finally get to live with my father.

00:03:28.660 And then he found this rebellious teenager very difficult to live with in his two-bedroom

00:03:33.340 apartment and sent me to boarding school.

00:03:36.040 And the boarding school that I went to was one of the greatest gifts of my life, but it

00:03:39.540 was also very demanding.

00:03:42.320 Like, you know, at 13 years old, we trained to do a snowshoe race, and it was a 26-mile

00:03:48.120 snowshoe race.

00:03:48.840 We're 13.

00:03:49.920 It's not a relay race.

00:03:51.000 It's 26 actual miles.

00:03:52.580 Snowshoes are very difficult to move.

00:03:53.960 They're heavy, and it's minus 40 outside.

00:03:55.840 Completely different gait.

00:03:57.280 Yeah, it's a very different thing.

00:03:58.320 And that's just a sample of what was tough there.

00:04:00.680 But the bigger thing that was going on at the school is the school was beginning to

00:04:04.060 wake up to the realities of being in Canada.

00:04:07.160 You know, they used corporal punishment and, you know, very harsh winter programs, and they

00:04:13.840 were starting to get a lot of flack for being too hard on kids.

00:04:16.440 And so the school was trying to transition to be more acceptable, I suppose.

00:04:21.560 And during that transition, my class in particular was in the wrong space.

00:04:24.940 We got the worst of both sides of that.

00:04:27.700 And so halfway through grade 10, I made the decision to leave, to leave the school.

00:04:31.680 And my dad disagreed with this decision quite heavily.

00:04:36.040 And, but as I actually, you know, control my body, they were not able to get my body to

00:04:41.020 the school.

00:04:41.500 And I just refused to go.

00:04:43.700 And then my dad refused to let me to stay in his home.

00:04:45.940 And so my response to that was to walk out the door into Edmonton.

00:04:50.560 And I was 15 years old.

00:04:52.040 And it's funny, about a week later, my dad tracked me down wherever I was in the city.

00:04:56.800 And he told me that I had apparently won a $2,000, this is a long time ago, that's a

00:05:03.440 lot of money, $2,000 bursary or, you know, bursary for leadership skills or something the

00:05:08.440 school had acknowledged me for.

00:05:09.460 And he'd never told me that before.

00:05:11.100 I don't know how that had slipped his mind in my, I mean, it might've been good to know

00:05:15.320 at the beginning of the year.

00:05:16.700 But at that point, he offered me $500 in cash if I would go back to the school and the other

00:05:22.340 $1,500 of my bursary he would give me in cash once I finished grade 10.

00:05:26.040 And this was in what year?

00:05:27.400 1986.

00:05:28.440 Right.

00:05:28.760 So that's the equivalent of about $10,000.

00:05:30.860 Yeah, it's a lot of money.

00:05:31.680 And I said, no, I said, no, I had strong conviction principles about why I didn't want to go back.

00:05:38.080 And I would put to you that had it been summer or had it been Los Angeles and had it been

00:05:43.620 easy to be homeless, then I don't know what would have happened.

00:05:47.540 I don't know what direction I would have gone in, but that wasn't a possibility.

00:05:51.180 It was minus 20, minus 30, sometimes minus 40.

00:05:53.700 Like I had to be smarter than that.

00:05:56.640 So at first I, you know, a little bit of couch surfing where until my friend's parents

00:06:00.420 ran out of patience with that.

00:06:01.600 And then one day there was a video arcade called Games People Play near the University

00:06:09.920 of Alberta.

00:06:11.300 And one of my friend's dad ran the place and I walked up to him one day.

00:06:15.480 And I can't imagine, I was 15 and I must have looked 13 or 12, I was a kid.

00:06:19.700 And I walked up to him and I said, you look really tired.

00:06:22.440 And he goes, I am.

00:06:23.620 And I said, I can fix that for you.

00:06:25.600 And he goes, what do you mean?

00:06:27.880 And I go, well, I, you know, I think part of your tiredness is you're here opening this

00:06:31.700 place for us for at 10 in the morning.

00:06:33.220 And then you're here closing it for us at three in the morning or something.

00:06:36.260 So, and he goes, I'm not hiring anybody.

00:06:38.080 And I said, I'm not looking for a job.

00:06:39.980 I said, but if you let me sleep in here at night, if you let me sleep in here at night,

00:06:44.760 I will take over for you at say six in the evening.

00:06:48.140 So you can have dinner with your family and I'll keep the place running smooth and I'll close

00:06:51.840 it for you at three and you don't have to pay me.

00:06:53.740 And as he had no problem with violating the child welfare,

00:06:56.000 or, you know, the laws, he and I agreed to that deal.

00:07:00.180 And that was, you know, the beginning of my sort of emancipation.

00:07:03.300 It's the beginning of my saying I'm responsible for my existence.

00:07:06.560 And I did that until, for several months until.

00:07:10.860 So that deal worked out.

00:07:12.180 That deal worked out really well.

00:07:13.460 I, you know.

00:07:14.140 How did you manage to maintain order in the arcade?

00:07:17.060 You know, it was, it was an interesting thing as a kid, you know, back then you had to

00:07:22.960 pay for video games, you know, not like now.

00:07:24.700 You had to actually put money in the machines.

00:07:26.560 But if you had the keys to the machines, you didn't have to do that.

00:07:30.640 And so I played a lot of video games, you know, it kind of was very distracting.

00:07:34.120 And I have to say that as computers came out, I was in that generation.

00:07:38.380 We only really got computers in like grade 12.

00:07:40.420 So we were that generation that was like going to be left behind.

00:07:42.920 But I wasn't left behind because I had been like kind of one with the computers.

00:07:46.780 Like when video games and computers are the same thing.

00:07:49.140 The logic is the same.

00:07:51.140 So that time was very, very useful to me later in my life because I was never afraid of computers.

00:07:56.660 I was never afraid of AI, for example.

00:07:58.400 I've been playing it since I was a kid.

00:07:59.940 You should be afraid of AI.

00:08:00.500 Well, that's a good point.

00:08:02.200 I'm afraid of it, but willing also to use it.

00:08:06.380 Not afraid to use it.

00:08:07.040 If you were 15 and you looked 13, why did the other kids that were in the arcade listen to you at night?

00:08:13.080 That's what I was thinking about in terms of order.

00:08:15.520 It's funny.

00:08:16.140 Nobody's ever asked me that before.

00:08:17.340 But I can tell you, my school gave me a $2,000 bursary for leadership skills.

00:08:21.080 Maybe there was something inherent.

00:08:22.400 Maybe there was something.

00:08:24.080 I mean, I had a lot of respect with my friends at that stage.

00:08:26.360 Oddly, I was the relationship counselor for everybody.

00:08:29.140 If somebody liked somebody or their relationship, I had no understanding of women, girls in my life.

00:08:37.960 For me, I couldn't do it.

00:08:39.400 But I was very good at handling that kind of stuff for other people.

00:08:41.840 So I think that I had a sort of coach attitude anyway.

00:08:45.800 And so, yeah, I had the respect.

00:08:48.100 I see.

00:08:48.520 I see.

00:08:48.840 Well, let's go right back to the beginning.

00:08:50.340 Your family moved to Canada from South Africa in the 70s.

00:08:54.880 Yeah.

00:08:55.400 And how old were you?

00:08:56.640 I became Canadian at eight.

00:08:58.140 We kind of went back and forth a few times before I finally became a citizen.

00:09:01.820 And do you have any memories of South Africa?

00:09:03.540 Oh, yeah.

00:09:03.920 And, I mean, I feel, in many ways, I feel just as much South African as I do Canadian.

00:09:08.600 I've maintained a very...

00:09:10.400 My family's been in South Africa.

00:09:12.420 They were wagon train people.

00:09:13.520 We're talking forthrackers.

00:09:14.700 Like, they were original South African settlers.

00:09:16.580 So I have a very strong attachment to the country and very strong memories from childhood and beyond.

00:09:21.420 My grandmother'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.

00:09:37.820 And on the other side, my dad's great-grandfather, T.F. Dreyer, was the archaeologist who discovered the Floristbad skull, which is, until very recently, the oldest Homo sapiens skull ever found.

00:09:51.660 So I had a very deep, deep history there.

00:09:55.360 Right, right, right.

00:09:56.220 So why did your family move to Canada?

00:09:58.780 You know, it's a funny thing.

00:10:02.040 My grandmother had this little dog, little schnauzer-type thing, and it was the most racist little dog you can imagine.

00:10:08.800 Like, it was terrible.

00:10:10.080 You know, 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.

00:10:19.420 But can you blame the dog?

00:10:21.020 I mean, is it the dog's fault that it's a racist?

00:10:22.900 No, it's not.

00:10:23.900 I mean, it was raised that way.

00:10:25.260 It was simply picking up on the fears and racism that my grandparents had in their life.

00:10:30.920 So then, that always made me question, because my grandfather was a racist, like, a serious racist.

00:10:36.180 He wasn't a white supremacist.

00:10:37.320 He had an order of things, but he was clearly racist.

00:10:40.100 But is that his fault?

00:10:41.080 If it's not the dog's fault, is it his fault?

00:10:43.320 Maybe not.

00:10:44.020 He was brought up that way.

00:10:45.640 But for some reason, my parents, they didn't like it.

00:10:49.520 They saw it.

00:10:50.620 They didn't like it.

00:10:51.440 They were opposed to it.

00:10:52.220 And they became involved in the ANC.

00:10:55.980 And my dad was studying law at Witts University.

00:10:59.360 And he became an anthropologist?

00:11:01.300 Do you know, he really wanted to be because of his grandfather.

00:11:04.640 But his parents were insistent that he went to law school.

00:11:06.900 So he went to Witts, and then he went to McGill here in Montreal.

00:11:09.580 And then he went to Dal and taught law as a professor at Dalhousie in Halifax.

00:11:15.040 But underneath it all, what he really wanted to do was sciences.

00:11:18.300 And so when he finally kind of left the law, that's when...

00:11:20.900 I gave you a copy of his book.

00:11:21.680 Yes, I read his book.

00:11:22.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:11:23.020 His book, I forgot about that.

00:11:23.880 Megafauna.

00:11:24.120 That's a very good book.

00:11:25.120 Yeah, that book details out the, what would you say, the depredations of human beings over

00:11:31.700 about a 15,000 year period, the fact that we were integrally involved with the disappearance

00:11:35.780 of megafauna everywhere around the world, but particularly in the Western Hemisphere,

00:11:41.860 right, where the animals hadn't adapted to the presence of human predators.

00:11:45.380 Because there's a huge collapse of megafauna species about 15,000, between 15,000 and 10,000

00:11:53.180 years ago in the Western Hemisphere, which pretty much corresponds with the arrival of

00:11:58.420 two-legged hunters, right, who took everything, the mammoths, the big mammals, after having

00:12:05.900 gotten rid of the giant tortoises, your father writes about that.

00:12:10.480 It's a very good book, by the way.

00:12:11.620 Yeah, I enjoyed reading it a lot.

00:12:12.820 I'm glad you, I thought you would like it, and it's funny, about a week after.

00:12:15.760 Megafauna, I think it's called.

00:12:16.520 That's right.

00:12:16.900 That's right, yes.

00:12:18.300 Megafauna.com, incidentally.

00:12:19.840 Yeah, yeah, well, and for people who are watching, listening, if you're interested in such

00:12:23.140 things, Megafauna is an extremely interesting book.

00:12:25.140 It's a jaunt through prehistory on the biological side, but also an analysis of the relationship

00:12:32.160 between human hunting capacity and our particular ecological niche, which is, well, you might

00:12:38.280 say, which is stunningly effective hunter, because we hunt together in groups and virtually

00:12:42.800 no animal, all animals had evolved all sorts of protective mechanisms in relationship to

00:12:49.120 other animals, but none of those were particularly useful against human beings.

00:12:53.980 Well, you know, it's interesting.

00:12:56.100 Sometimes when people debate the megafauna extinction, human hunting kind of thing, they're

00:13:01.040 like, but then why are there still megafauna in Africa?

00:13:03.260 Yeah.

00:13:03.660 And it doesn't make sense.

00:13:04.680 If humans started there, but it's exactly that, because they were the frog in the hot

00:13:08.700 water.

00:13:09.020 Humans evolved that innovative capacity in Africa.

00:13:12.060 Those animals have natural fear avoidance.

00:13:14.660 Elephants in Africa, if you're, I spent a lot of time in Africa.

00:13:17.780 If you're walking in the bush, as I've done many times, and I came, for example, once walking

00:13:22.660 down into a riverbed, and there are 14 lions sitting in the river, well, those lions, they're

00:13:28.720 afraid of you.

00:13:30.360 Grizzlies are not afraid of you.

00:13:31.800 Right, right.

00:13:32.240 You know, if a grizzly is afraid of you, it's because it's learned it in its consciousness,

00:13:35.580 in its experience of humans, but it doesn't have that DNA thing.

00:13:38.100 And so that book has actually been a big part of even my journey, because, you know, my

00:13:43.500 sort of quest into, say, health and nutrition, that kind of stuff, really stemmed from my

00:13:50.080 dad's fascinating with human history.

00:13:52.540 So that book, that's been a good adventure.

00:13:53.840 Now, did you establish a good relationship with your father after having things broken?

00:13:58.160 And how long did that take after the events of your adolescence?

00:14:03.020 You know, very slowly and very quickly, you know, it was one of those things.

00:14:09.440 It would happen in fits and starts.

00:14:10.700 I mean, in one sense, it was never really that bad.

00:14:13.200 It was just brutally honest.

00:14:14.760 You know, it was not, I mean, I would say that, you know, during this, when they, I think

00:14:22.140 in alcoholism, we talk about a practicing alcoholic.

00:14:24.160 I'm like, I don't know what they're practicing.

00:14:25.720 He's good enough at that already.

00:14:27.260 But during that window, I would say that at that time, there would have been, say, you

00:14:32.120 know, language or behavior that you might have thought of as abusive.

00:14:35.200 But then after that, the discord between us, I wouldn't have called it abusive.

00:14:38.720 I just would have called it direct.

00:14:39.900 It was like we would disagree on things and strongly and we had our opinions and, but we

00:14:45.360 still had respect, you know, a lot of respect.

00:14:47.860 And so that was very easy for us to rebuild a friendship upon.

00:14:52.760 And so we've been very close pretty much ever since, even in the month when I went back

00:14:58.380 to him at now 16, I had turned 16, I went to him and I said, look, I think you get at

00:15:02.400 this point, you're not going to win this.

00:15:03.500 I'm not going back to school.

00:15:04.520 But if you don't let me move back in with you, the school will not let me go to school.

00:15:08.400 They wouldn't let me go to school without a parent signing off on something.

00:15:11.980 Actually, I was just shy of my 16th birthday.

00:15:14.060 And if I waited any longer, I'd lose that whole academic year.

00:15:17.100 And he found my argument convincing and allowed me to move back in and sign my school paperwork

00:15:22.820 and let me finish grade 10.

00:15:23.840 And despite having missed, you know, despite missing three months of that year or four months

00:15:27.600 of that year.

00:15:27.880 So did you go back to school at that time?

00:15:29.360 Not at that school.

00:15:30.140 Oh, not at that school.

00:15:31.300 The school of my choosing.

00:15:32.120 I see, I see.

00:15:32.780 And I did finish that.

00:15:33.840 And pretty much from that point on, my dad and I, you know, began rebuilding that relationship.

00:15:38.680 But I'd say that relationship was forged by my dad taking us on, you know, canoe trips

00:15:44.180 in La Clorange and, you know, taking us up to Yellowknife and taking us into the wilderness.

00:15:50.940 I think that even those things formed the foundation of why we have the relationship

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00:17:34.880 Okay, so let's go back to when you were eight.

00:17:39.840 You said that that was when you became a Canadian citizen.

00:17:42.300 Okay, so what is your family doing in Canada at that point?

00:17:45.160 Your dad is in the legal business then, and your mom?

00:17:48.540 My mom at that stage, she was really a mom, and then she wanted to go and finish her own

00:17:53.720 education, so she went to DAL as well.

00:17:56.000 She went to DAL and did a master's in social work.

00:17:59.720 So I had my dad, at that point, practicing alcoholic lawyer or law professor, and my mom

00:18:05.240 studying social work.

00:18:07.440 But going back to citizenship, that was kind of interesting because, you see, my brother

00:18:12.120 sponsored us for our citizenship, ultimately, because apparently we snuck my pregnant mother

00:18:17.060 into the country, and she birthed my brother in Montreal.

00:18:20.260 And so on that basis, we then made our bid for Canadian citizenship.

00:18:23.060 And I have vague memories of this, but I know the family story.

00:18:25.920 We're facing the judge.

00:18:27.020 You know, I don't know how it works these days, but you actually had to prove that you

00:18:30.040 knew some things about Canada.

00:18:31.720 And so the judge is asking my dad a bunch of questions, trivia questions about Canada.

00:18:35.220 Are you guys really here?

00:18:37.160 And he says to my dad, how many provinces are there in Canada?

00:18:39.760 And my dad says, nine.

00:18:41.500 And the judge goes, and the judge, it turned out the judge is Afrikaans, or not Afrikaans,

00:18:45.140 he's from South Africa, but he's British, and we're Afrikaans, we're Boers.

00:18:48.940 Turns out that our relatives would have fired at each other in the Boer War.

00:18:52.800 So weird, you know, two generations later, he's swearing us in for citizenship in a new country.

00:18:57.500 Anyway, so he says to my dad, I'm going to let you take another shot at that question.

00:19:01.720 And my dad goes, well, and this is 1978, not too long after the FLQ and all that stuff

00:19:06.240 that was happening in early Canada.

00:19:07.300 And my dad goes, well, fine, 10 if you want to count Quebec, but it doesn't seem like they

00:19:11.060 want to be here.

00:19:12.620 Which set up a really fun conversation.

00:19:14.620 The exam was over, and we were welcomed into the country.

00:19:17.140 So, now, your father was a law professor where?

00:19:22.460 At Dell.

00:19:23.360 At Dell.

00:19:24.100 At Dell.

00:19:24.820 And what branch of law did he teach about and practice?

00:19:29.060 Product liability, I think, was a big part of where he went.

00:19:31.600 And then after that, he practiced a lot in contract law, employment law, that sort of stuff.

00:19:37.560 And when he went into practice after sobering up and so forth, then he mostly worked in, you

00:19:45.880 know, business structuring, contract law, employment law, that sort of thing.

00:19:48.540 And was your parents' relationship when you were about eight at that time, was it starting

00:19:54.300 to shake already?

00:19:55.280 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:55.980 And was that alcohol-related fundamentally?

00:19:57.540 It was, yeah, yeah.

00:19:58.940 My dad says there were two causes of his alcoholism.

00:20:02.440 One was that my mother used to like to wash her hair with beer, you know, as the tradition

00:20:05.680 was.

00:20:06.100 And she would only ever use half a beer.

00:20:07.900 He had to finish the other half.

00:20:08.700 Oh, yeah.

00:20:09.120 So, he likes to blame her for that, an Adam and Eve type situation.

00:20:12.320 But I think the real cause was that, you know, at 20-something years old, being asked to teach

00:20:21.080 law in a branch of law he didn't learn, despite graduating first in his class, was stressful

00:20:26.260 for him.

00:20:26.600 And he found that, again, half a beer would take the edge off before his lectures.

00:20:30.220 Yeah, well, alcohol is an extraordinarily pernicious drug.

00:20:33.400 And if you're inclined towards it, you can be inclined towards it because you're sensitive

00:20:37.820 to its anxiety-reducing properties, or you can be sensitive to it because it enhances

00:20:43.000 social communication, or because it produces a psychomotor high like cocaine, or all of

00:20:49.580 those at once.

00:20:50.620 And if you're particularly predisposed to alcoholism, you can experience all three at

00:20:54.820 once.

00:20:55.300 I had a friend in Montreal, Frank Irvin, great old guy, looked like Ernest Hemingway.

00:21:01.760 He had a monkey farm on St. Kitts, and him and his woman, Roberta, oh, I can't remember

00:21:11.240 Roberta's last name.

00:21:12.220 She was quite a piece of work, too, a real cool person.

00:21:14.700 They had this monkey ranch on St. Kitts, and they used to go down there and study the effects

00:21:18.600 of alcohol on green monkeys, which 5% of whom would drink Tacoma on first exposure.

00:21:24.260 And they had videotapes of these damn monkeys drinking.

00:21:27.100 And it looked like a frat party, but 5% of them on first exposure would drink Tacoma.

00:21:34.040 And those were the monkeys that had a biological predisposition to alcohol, to alcoholism.

00:21:38.820 And alcohol is a really bad drug.

00:21:40.940 50% of murders take place in an alcohol-fueled environment.

00:21:45.660 Either the victim or the perpetrator or both is drunk.

00:21:48.440 It's almost the sole cause of domestic abuse.

00:21:51.060 It's almost the sole cause of so-called date rape.

00:21:53.320 If you dig into criminal behavior deeply enough, well, hell, you don't have to dig much at

00:21:59.040 all before you find alcohol.

00:22:00.340 It's also the only drug we know that actually makes people more aggressive.

00:22:05.120 And not merely because they don't know what they're doing.

00:22:09.460 We did experiments at McGill showing that if you took drunk people and put them in a competitive

00:22:15.000 environment where they could be aggressive and had them keep track of their aggression

00:22:19.100 so they were actually conscious of it, they became more aggressive even rather than less.

00:22:23.880 So yeah, alcohol is bad news.

00:22:25.480 And it can turn perfectly good people into quite the impulsive and dim-witted monsters.

00:22:32.340 Well, if you give people that massive boost of sugar and then suppress their inhibitions,

00:22:36.940 that's going to happen.

00:22:37.820 I was 21 years old in Prince George and I had a night like that.

00:22:40.920 And I mean, it wasn't terrible.

00:22:42.600 I just woke up in the morning, you know, praying at the porcelain altar.

00:22:45.620 I was making that deal with God.

00:22:46.920 If you just make me feel better, I'll stop this.

00:22:49.080 I won't do it anymore.

00:22:50.580 And then I didn't.

00:22:52.900 I haven't had alcohol since.

00:22:54.640 Oh, really?

00:22:55.120 Since you were 21?

00:22:56.120 I quit drinking when I was 27.

00:22:58.140 You know, I mean, Northern Albertan culture was pretty damn hard drinking culture,

00:23:01.660 like most Northern places.

00:23:03.820 And a number of my friends ended up alcoholic, you know.

00:23:07.980 And well, all the people that I was in high school with and in college with were extremely

00:23:13.320 hard drinkers.

00:23:14.660 And I drank quite a lot till I was 27.

00:23:16.900 And then I found that I couldn't.

00:23:19.120 Well, first of all, my life was taking a pretty professional turn.

00:23:21.860 And second, I found that there was no bloody way I could write seriously and think seriously

00:23:27.420 on an ongoing basis if I was hungover.

00:23:30.420 So and I got married and I was going to have kids.

00:23:33.460 And I thought, yeah, enough of this.

00:23:34.700 And so I had a bit of I thought when I was 50 that I might be able to drink again socially.

00:23:40.620 And I toyed with it for about a year and found out that I was probably just as stupid at 50

00:23:44.860 as I had been at like 25 and decided to dispense with that as that too, which was definitely,

00:23:52.020 you know, I've watched too as I've gone around the world.

00:23:54.040 I've met very, very many people in many, many social locations.

00:23:58.480 And because I don't drink anything at all now, if I go out and watch people drinking,

00:24:03.100 it makes everybody stupid and fuzzy minded.

00:24:06.040 And, you know, the problem is, is when you're drinking, you think you're cool.

00:24:09.600 But, you know, you have those same delusions that Homer Simpson's friend Barney had when

00:24:14.340 he was drinking that you're this kind of, you know, elegant and sophisticated comedian.

00:24:18.820 And it just makes everybody stupid.

00:24:20.740 I would argue that the real problem is that it does that.

00:24:23.620 Yeah, well, that's the first drink does that.

00:24:25.580 My dad tells this, you know, he's he I hope I get the family story right, but he's a kid

00:24:30.440 of 17 or 18 and he's kind of struggling at that point with school and he goes to a family

00:24:34.880 function and he's got that one uncle who's a real jerk.

00:24:37.320 Yeah.

00:24:37.560 And the uncle pins him down at the dining room table and he says to him, he goes, so,

00:24:41.800 Baz, are your grades a function of your inability to commit to work or are you just stupid?

00:24:50.740 And it was such a nasty question.

00:24:53.120 And my dad immediately, you know, he blushed and, you know, people who blush know that they're

00:24:57.460 blushing and then that causes more blushing, which, of course, causes the eye watering.

00:25:00.960 And he just it was a devastating moment for him.

00:25:03.180 And then about two weeks later, he and his dad are sitting and his dad, unfortunately,

00:25:07.320 was it was an alcoholic and, you know, didn't live very long as a consequence.

00:25:11.300 But they're sitting on the on the deck having a little bit of a beer.

00:25:14.380 And then he goes in and and the uncle does the same thing.

00:25:18.080 So we solve the great mystery.

00:25:19.340 Are you stupid or lazy?

00:25:20.900 And my dad did not blush.

00:25:22.500 And my dad said, you know, I would entertain your question if I thought there was any sincerity

00:25:26.380 in all of this.

00:25:27.020 I recognize that it's just through your own smallness.

00:25:29.040 You're attempting to hurt me.

00:25:29.960 I'm going to let it go.

00:25:31.240 And then at that point, my dad was like, it's socially responsible not to go out without

00:25:35.040 at least a beer.

00:25:36.240 Uh-huh.

00:25:36.780 Right, right, right, right.

00:25:38.080 Yeah.

00:25:38.380 Yeah.

00:25:38.600 Well, it definitely it definitely is a confidence enhancing substance.

00:25:43.240 But it's an illusion.

00:25:44.160 Sensitive to that.

00:25:44.840 Damn right.

00:25:45.280 It's an illusion.

00:25:46.000 Yeah, it it you know, when I say that as someone who quite enjoyed drinking, I mean,

00:25:51.640 I had quite the blast as a consequence of it.

00:25:53.900 But I also noticed that especially when I was in Montreal and starting to grow up, let's

00:25:59.200 say, and take on serious responsibilities, that every time I had done something or said

00:26:06.160 something that I regretted, it was when I was drinking.

00:26:09.400 And I thought at one point, maybe I don't want to live a life where I'm continually or

00:26:15.480 even sporadically wishing that I hadn't said or done something.

00:26:20.700 No, and I'm very much unlikely to do that if I'm sober and clear headed.

00:26:24.620 That's exactly what happened to me in Prince George.

00:26:26.140 It was exactly that conversation with myself.

00:26:28.020 And initially, I decided six months off and I just never went back to it.

00:26:31.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:32.580 Well, you know, the other thing I think that happened, too, is I started drinking when I

00:26:36.420 was pretty young, like 14, you know, and I had a certain degree of social anxiety.

00:26:41.160 I mean, I'm very extroverted, but well, I think everybody has a certain degree of social

00:26:45.040 anxiety when they're like 14, because like, what the hell do you know, you know, and that's

00:26:48.680 probably exacerbated around girls.

00:26:52.960 And that alcohol, because it enhances sociability and also suppresses anxiety, is a good social

00:26:59.640 anxiety medication.

00:27:01.040 But the problem is, is you don't learn how to conduct yourself as a sober individual

00:27:05.380 in social circumstances.

00:27:06.760 Yes.

00:27:07.100 And you learn very rapidly to rely on the alcohol, not only as a social lubricant, but as the

00:27:11.880 basis of your social behavior.

00:27:13.360 And I would say, you know, to young people who are watching, listening, that's a stupid

00:27:16.700 plan.

00:27:17.520 You should learn how to be in a social group with others when you're sober so that you

00:27:21.280 bloody well know how to do it, especially if you're planning to do anything even vaguely

00:27:25.420 serious and responsible with your life, which is, you know, probably something

00:27:28.460 you should be doing.

00:27:29.260 A good friend of mine, exactly my age, within a few months, I quit at 21, he quit at 31.

00:27:35.280 And we were both 34, 35, we were out with some friends and we're dancing and having fun

00:27:39.060 and I'm just me.

00:27:40.280 And I'm actually more introverted.

00:27:42.080 So I'm not super outgoing, but I'm still having a great time.

00:27:45.220 I'm dancing, I'm having fun.

00:27:46.740 And he comes up to me and he goes, how do you do that?

00:27:49.240 He goes, I don't, I can't do that now without the alcohol.

00:27:52.160 I go, because I learned to do it without the alcohol.

00:27:55.600 Yeah, definitely.

00:27:56.560 Yeah, there's definitely something to that.

00:27:58.020 Yeah, well, I found that social occasions were somewhat awkward and also, yeah, I would

00:28:05.380 say also that I didn't exactly know what to do without that false camaraderie that alcohol

00:28:13.100 produces and that inflation of confidence and extroversion as well.

00:28:17.760 So, yeah, not a wise developmental strategy, all things considered.

00:28:22.900 All right, so we're back to when you're eight and now you're a Canadian.

00:28:25.740 Okay, so you're not in boarding school at that point.

00:28:30.800 And where are you living?

00:28:31.920 Halifax, Nova Scotia.

00:28:33.080 In Halifax.

00:28:33.880 Yeah.

00:28:34.040 How long were you guys on the East Coast?

00:28:36.040 Um, you know, I think I left there to go live with my dad at late 12.

00:28:41.780 Yeah, and so what was happening with you and your mom?

00:28:43.840 And did you idealize the idea of going off to live with your dad?

00:28:46.560 I did.

00:28:47.140 I did.

00:28:47.560 I mean, he'd see.

00:28:47.900 Yeah, yeah, that's the problem with split families.

00:28:49.320 Yeah.

00:28:49.980 He'd sobered up and I didn't get to see him very often.

00:28:52.960 Maybe once or twice a year he would come out to the East.

00:28:54.960 And, you know, my dad, I would say that, you know, I read this thing once that you kind

00:29:03.280 of like sort of typecast yourself or you model your personality a little bit on the people

00:29:07.280 that you most admired at the age of, say, seven, eight, nine, ten.

00:29:10.340 Yeah, that's what admiration is for.

00:29:12.380 That's mirror neurons admiration I'm watching.

00:29:14.860 You bet, man.

00:29:15.180 You bet.

00:29:15.520 And so for me, it was like a weird combination of like Indiana Jones and Han Solo and Hogan

00:29:23.640 from Hogan's Heroes and my dad who encapsulated all of those people.

00:29:28.040 And so when he sobered up and became safe and the idea of going to live with him was

00:29:32.820 possible, yeah, I idealized the idea of it.

00:29:35.940 And that was at what age?

00:29:37.020 That was at 12, like 12, maybe just turning 13.

00:29:39.700 Yeah, well, you know, it's a real open question exactly when boys and girls as well, for that

00:29:47.040 matter, really most need their fathers, you know?

00:29:51.920 And if your father is a target of emulation, it might well be that you most need him, especially

00:29:56.700 when you're a boy, about the time that you hit puberty.

00:30:00.020 And I think part of the reason for that, I remember when I lived in Montreal, there was

00:30:03.160 this kid that lived down the street.

00:30:04.600 We lived in poor areas in Montreal.

00:30:06.700 And there was this kid that lived down the street, one of the places we live, who was

00:30:12.360 the son of a single mother.

00:30:14.560 She was about 5'4", and he was about 6 feet tall, and he was 14.

00:30:18.160 You know, and he was out tromping around the streets in Montreal, causing trouble.

00:30:22.920 And we used to hear his mother, we didn't know the mother, we used to hear them, you

00:30:26.220 know, fighting in the hallway, for example.

00:30:28.400 And like, what the hell could she do about it?

00:30:31.600 You know, he was 6 feet tall.

00:30:33.080 Yeah.

00:30:33.680 You know, short of telling him to get the hell out, and then potentially enforcing that

00:30:37.600 with the police, he had her cornered, you know, for all intents and purposes, especially

00:30:43.380 when he had his little gang of friends around, you know, his mother wasn't going to be able

00:30:46.540 to do a damn thing.

00:30:47.440 And so, you know, it might well be that when you are around 12, and you're a boy, especially

00:30:53.820 if you're, you know, temperamentally inclined to some degree to be challenging, that that's

00:31:00.960 exactly the right time for you to have a father who can step on you around.

00:31:05.240 I know that there's some evidence among elephants, for example, that the older males socialize

00:31:10.600 the younger males, and that when human wildlife curators have attempted to reformulate elephant

00:31:19.340 societies, which are extraordinarily complex, the young males rampage around like mad, unless

00:31:24.620 there are older males to keep them in line.

00:31:26.620 There's a very good example of that.

00:31:28.720 You know, culling of elephants is an unfortunate necessity.

00:31:32.840 If you put elephants into the Cougar National Park without the saber-toothed cats that used

00:31:37.540 to hunt them, they breed like crazy.

00:31:39.560 They breed at a rate of about 12% per year.

00:31:41.940 So then they destroy all the trees.

00:31:43.400 And, you know, so then the WWF comes along and says, we'll pay you not to shoot your elephants,

00:31:47.980 which is to say, we'll pay you to let all your trees get destroyed.

00:31:50.580 Right, right.

00:31:51.140 So, of course, they do have to shoot the elephants, and it's a terrible thing.

00:31:54.360 And so they've tried different mechanisms.

00:31:56.160 And the one way that they used to do it was to go in and take out the oldest members,

00:32:00.120 right, the dominant males and so on.

00:32:04.120 But what happened as a result of that is they left young, uncultured elephants.

00:32:08.820 And those elephants would rampage, they would attack cars, they had never been taught.

00:32:14.540 And so I think it is a really good example of the wisdom of elders, even in the animal

00:32:18.980 kingdom, being very important to the development.

00:32:20.640 Well, especially in those complex, I mean, elephants are unbelievably intelligent.

00:32:24.040 And they have a prehensile trunk, right?

00:32:25.920 And anything that has a prehensile attachment tends to be extraordinarily intelligent, like

00:32:30.620 octopuses, for example, which only live three years, something like that, but appear to

00:32:35.500 be at least as smart as dogs, which is, you know, pretty damn smart.

00:32:38.980 And with that increased intelligence comes a necessity for deeper socialization, and then

00:32:45.260 the necessity for something like a continuous historical tradition.

00:32:48.440 Because with all that additional brain expanse, that environmental-specific programming that's

00:32:57.340 associated with socialization starts to become increasingly crucial.

00:33:00.820 You see that, too, even if you have a particularly smart breed of dog.

00:33:04.320 Like, it's great to have a smart dog, but a smart, untrained dog is a really bad dog.

00:33:08.680 A stupid, untrained dog just lays there like a stupid dog, and, you know, who cares?

00:33:12.740 I always say, especially if you have a smart breed border collies, that's right.

00:33:16.000 You have them, if you're not training them, they're training you.

00:33:18.460 Yeah, yeah, well, that's the thing about a dog.

00:33:19.840 They're training you.

00:33:20.480 You have to be smarter than the dog, and that's not always that easy.

00:33:23.560 Yeah.

00:33:23.940 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:24.520 Well, that's also the case if you have a particularly pushy child, and they can be socialized very

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00:34:36.280 This question of the role of the father, I think that there's two distinct phases, at

00:34:47.240 least it feels like to me.

00:34:48.320 There's the contrast between the nurturing mother energy and the disciplinary, sort of

00:34:58.660 structured father energy.

00:35:00.380 And I think that that even has to be there, say, sub-three years old.

00:35:04.140 And I was lucky I had that, you know, it may have been better.

00:35:08.080 It could have been better, but I had it.

00:35:10.000 But then there does enter that next phase, which is where it's not now about boundaries.

00:35:13.680 It's not now about discipline, but it is about modeling.

00:35:16.100 It's about, and I was lucky that while I lost my dad for some time, I kind of lost it right

00:35:20.960 in the middle and got it back right at the point that it was necessary again.

00:35:24.280 Yeah, well, that maternal love is a kind of all-encompassing acceptance, and that's precisely necessary in early

00:35:32.580 infancy, where the infant can do no wrong.

00:35:35.220 And the paternal role is more like boundary setting and encouragement jointly together.

00:35:42.840 And, you know, that seems somewhat paradoxical, that you can encourage people by setting boundaries.

00:35:47.160 But the thing about encouragement is it's goal-directed, and it means that you have to be on the pathway

00:35:53.520 to genuine success, and pathways have boundaries.

00:35:57.960 So, all right, so you're in the normal school system, I presume, at this time.

00:36:02.180 Yes.

00:36:02.520 And this is in Halifax.

00:36:03.860 And then you do move to go live with your dad.

00:36:06.060 And how long do you live with your dad?

00:36:07.440 And when do you start this alternative, this boarding school process?

00:36:11.160 I'm with him for about half a year before he sent me.

00:36:13.680 I finished grade seven with him.

00:36:15.360 I started grade seven with my mom, finished grade seven with my dad, and then he put me

00:36:19.760 for grade eight into the, so 13.

00:36:21.480 Okay, okay.

00:36:22.100 Now, you said it was more difficult for you to live with him and vice versa than you guys

00:36:26.120 had presupposed.

00:36:26.760 And so, you're seven and you're 13, and so what makes you hard to get along with?

00:36:30.880 You know, rebellion.

00:36:33.600 You know, tell me to be home at 10, and I'm not going to be.

00:36:36.820 You know, I don't know what was going on, but I was in real active rebellion.

00:36:40.840 And I'm sure I was rebelling against the divorce.

00:36:42.980 I was rebelling against the alcoholism.

00:36:44.560 What about your friendship?

00:36:46.080 I mean, when I was 13, you know, my friends, like I said, I grew up in a small northern

00:36:51.980 town, and it was kind of a rough working class town, and there weren't, all my friends were

00:36:57.560 rough working class kids, hilarious people, extremely good senses of humor, most of them

00:37:03.140 with fairly damaged relationships with their father, a lot of drinking, a fair bit of misbehavior,

00:37:07.960 although nothing particularly serious, you know, like we weren't criminal gangs or anything

00:37:12.140 like that. But there was a fair bit of petty shoplifting and an awful lot of drinking and

00:37:16.720 carousing after hours. And my relationship with my dad became somewhat fractured at that

00:37:21.980 point, too. And I was a smaller kid and intellectual, and I probably overcompensated to some degree

00:37:29.340 on that part by hanging around with the rougher kids, you know, which I actually think was

00:37:33.520 a pretty damn good strategy. He served me well, all things considered, but was hard on my relationship

00:37:37.560 with my father, who didn't necessarily approve of my friends and shouldn't have, quite frankly.

00:37:43.980 You know, I think he was probably right. I probably thought he was right then, even, you know.

00:37:49.140 Yeah, but that didn't mean you were going to listen.

00:37:50.600 Well, you know, what the hell are you going to do? You know, if you have any sense when you're 13,

00:37:54.920 and this is the whole issue about being a teenager, is that your ability to fit in with your peer

00:38:00.520 group is a predictor of your success in your life. You're going to prioritize fitting in with

00:38:04.900 your peer group over everything else. And, you know, the whole point of parenthood, in some real

00:38:09.940 sense, is to produce a child who's acceptable to his or her peers, because, well, for obvious

00:38:14.840 reasons. And so there is that tension. And then, of course, the other thing you're trying to do when

00:38:19.020 you're 13 is to start pushing the boundaries with regards to independence. Anyways, you're doing

00:38:24.360 that, apparently. What were your friends like when you were 13?

00:38:26.940 They were exactly, you're not, my parallels are pretty clear. I was hanging around with a bunch

00:38:31.740 of people. And by the way, I still can, some of them write to me on Facebook these days, even from

00:38:35.480 back then, you know. And sorry, guys, but you were unacceptable. But they were unacceptable,

00:38:43.000 but there was a camaraderie. And it was exactly that. I had a peer group. And it just made

00:38:48.860 sense that I fit in there. And I felt accepted there. And rebellion, you know.

00:38:54.140 You said that was in Edmonton?

00:38:55.260 That was in Edmonton.

00:38:55.720 That was in Edmonton. So, and you'd moved from Halifax. Edmonton was a bigger city.

00:38:59.160 Much bigger city.

00:38:59.780 Right. So more opportunity to get in trouble, too.

00:39:01.740 Lots more trouble.

00:39:02.600 Yeah.

00:39:03.180 You know, there was a moment there, and it was a very big growing up moment for me. And I

00:39:08.280 think it has a lot to do with the transition from being bullied to no longer being bullied.

00:39:13.780 And so, first of all, when I was a very small child, I was five or six years old, my babysitter,

00:39:20.400 Judy Park, she disappeared. And I had a big crush on her. So, her disappearing was a big

00:39:26.640 thing in my life. And about three months later, they found her, and she'd been killed. And her

00:39:32.120 murder has never been solved. You know, it's one of those things. But Clifford Olson,

00:39:35.660 I'm sure you remember.

00:39:36.560 Oh, yes.

00:39:37.360 He took credit for it, I think, because he had a cash for locations program. So, he took

00:39:43.260 credit for it, but then it turned out it had nothing to do with him. But this was in my

00:39:46.880 awareness.

00:39:47.640 That's a crooked man.

00:39:48.760 It was crooked. It was broken.

00:39:49.780 To be a serial killer who will also go to the lengths of confessing to murders he didn't

00:39:56.700 commit for financial gain.

00:39:57.260 Well, they were paying him for body locations.

00:39:59.180 I mean, that's a whole other thing. But I grew up with that in my awareness. And so, here

00:40:04.940 I was in Edmonton. And one night, and I lived in a, actually, the part that I'd left out

00:40:10.500 was after my dad and I reconciled, he moved to Vancouver and he left me there. So, I was

00:40:14.240 still living on my own, but at least now in an apartment. And one night, I was walking

00:40:18.160 home. I'd missed my last bus. It's three in the morning. And I was walking home. And

00:40:21.840 I had to walk about three kilometers. And it was, this is in East Edmonton. It's not the

00:40:27.340 safest area in the world. And I'm going up through the alleys because I, it's longer to go

00:40:32.580 on the lit street. So, I just take the alley route. And this car pulls up beside me slowly.

00:40:38.160 And there's a guy in the car doing unacceptable things to himself while watching me as he

00:40:44.620 walked by the car.

00:40:44.720 Oh, yeah. Fun.

00:40:46.680 And the first thing I did is I went to my back pocket because it was like routine for

00:40:49.980 me to have a switchblade or a butterfly knife. But I had just been out with some friends

00:40:54.040 at a club that had metal detectors. So, I didn't have one. So, I'm walking down the street

00:40:57.740 and this guy beside me and I'm freaking out. And I've grown up with this awareness, right?

00:41:01.720 Like there's, we all come to that point where you realize life is actually not permanent.

00:41:05.600 And I, and I, that was six for me. So, I was very aware of this situation.

00:41:09.680 The guy kept circling around a bunch of times. And as I got closer to my house, I didn't want

00:41:14.640 him to see where I lived. I lived on my own. I'm 15 years old, 16 years old. So, I go into

00:41:18.880 the school ground behind because it was floodlit like crazy to keep all the druggies out and

00:41:24.220 stuff. So, I go into the school ground and I climb up the spiral slide because I figure

00:41:29.880 if I get to the top of the spiral slide, I'm safe. Like there's no way he can get up there

00:41:34.020 without coming up face first, right?

00:41:35.320 Right, right.

00:41:35.940 So, I climb up there, floodlit. And plus, there's apartment buildings on all sides of me.

00:41:39.300 So, there's witnesses, right? Like I'm in the safest possible place I could be at three

00:41:42.520 o'clock in the morning. And he pulls into the school parking lot. I could, and he sat there

00:41:47.480 for quite a while. And then he opened his car door. And I don't, it's all so vivid to me.

00:41:53.640 The car was yellow. That's a long memory to hold onto. And he walked across the grass.

00:41:59.360 And as he walked across the grass, I contemplated what was going on. And I made a very clear

00:42:03.760 decision. I'm going to kill him. Like I'm not, I'm just, I have no choice. If he comes

00:42:10.300 up the ladder, then I'm going to kick him across the bridge of the nose. And when he

00:42:14.660 falls, I'm going to jump on him and keep jumping until it's over. I'm done. I'm done. I'm so

00:42:19.060 scared. And, and, and he came right to the bottom of the ladder and he put one foot on

00:42:23.800 the ladder, put one hand on the rail. And he looked up to me and he goes, are you looking

00:42:27.100 for company? And I'll save the actual vernacular that I used for him at that moment, but I

00:42:32.960 was unkind. And he turned around, he walked back to his car and he sat in his car for three

00:42:36.680 hours. And I stayed at the top of the slide for three hours. And I did not come down.

00:42:41.220 Oh yeah. That's a learning moment.

00:42:42.940 Learn. And you know, but the weirdest thing is I was never bullied after that ever again.

00:42:48.340 What changed?

00:42:49.260 I was willing to stand up for myself physically. I just.

00:42:52.140 Yeah. So, but what do you think changed? Like you said you weren't bullied. That means

00:42:56.340 you were signaling in a different manner, right?

00:42:58.460 Yeah.

00:42:58.620 I saw this in my clients sometimes as a clinician, I would see them integrate their shadow, let's

00:43:04.460 say. And one of the things I really noticed, you can actually see this by the way portrayed

00:43:08.460 in the movie, The Lion King. It's very interesting because Simba, when he's an adolescent, like

00:43:16.460 a child and an adolescent animated, has a facial expression sort of like this, right?

00:43:21.620 It's like everything's coming in. He's like a deer in the headlights, say. Then he has this

00:43:25.460 initiation experience where he realizes his affinity with his father and who's, and his

00:43:30.820 father has a very commanding visage, a very commanding face, very differently animated.

00:43:35.420 And these, of course, Disney-level animators are bloody geniuses, so they capture these

00:43:39.120 things. And the animators flip Simba's facial configuration at that point so that there's

00:43:44.740 a setness and a harshness to the way that he looks at the world. It's as if he's coming

00:43:49.160 out instead of things coming in, right? He's got a command to him. And I'm wondering if

00:43:53.260 that experience that you had restructured the physiognomy of your facial expression.

00:43:58.320 Posture, yeah.

00:43:59.000 Posture, facial expression, and reaction.

00:44:00.560 Eye contact.

00:44:01.180 Yeah, and reaction. You know, many years ago, and I read this article, and it set the foundation

00:44:08.400 for almost all the work that I do today. And it was like, it influences everything I do. And it

00:44:12.020 was an article about two women who were sexually assaulted in Central Park around about the same

00:44:17.300 time. And this investigative journalist followed them after it happened, their recovery, and what

00:44:21.740 their lives were like afterward. The one woman, they both went through it. And of course, there's a

00:44:26.360 horrible truth about sexual assault is that once you've been sexually assaulted once, you are

00:44:31.560 significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted again.

00:44:33.940 Yeah.

00:44:34.140 And that's because the kind of people who commit those crimes are spineless, you know, wimpy. They

00:44:39.340 go after the weak.

00:44:40.540 And so if you just-

00:44:41.260 Predators.

00:44:41.420 Yeah, they're predators.

00:44:42.400 Parasitic predators.

00:44:42.740 No, they're not even, they're the wrong, predator almost is complementary. They're worse.

00:44:47.900 They're scavengers.

00:44:49.260 Yeah, well, that's the parasite element.

00:44:50.700 Yeah. And so they, in any event, they both learned this fact that once you've, you know,

00:44:55.620 because in the clinics, in the shelters, they tell them these things, you have to be careful

00:44:59.060 because it, you know, now it might happen again. The one woman hears that news and the meaning

00:45:03.080 she creates is I am now even more of a victim than I was before.

00:45:05.900 Yeah.

00:45:06.220 And she turns to, you know, a prescription and non-prescription medication and suicide attempts

00:45:10.820 and it ruins her whole life.

00:45:11.780 Right, right. So that's the anxiety route.

00:45:13.720 The other woman, she said, well, why? Why are you attacked the second time?

00:45:20.360 It's because you're displaying fear.

00:45:22.580 Fear. You bet.

00:45:23.260 So she went to a self-defense class and she learned some useful things like a credit card

00:45:26.820 held in the right way, swiped across the throat, can accurately cut it. And keys held between

00:45:31.400 the knuckles are an incredibly effective weapon. And she learned these things.

00:45:34.720 Yeah.

00:45:35.140 And she started walking down the street differently.

00:45:37.120 Yeah.

00:45:37.720 In one example, she was out with some friends and they're like, would you, would you like

00:45:40.980 us to, would you like us to walk you to your car?

00:45:43.560 Yeah.

00:45:43.820 After what happened?

00:45:45.420 Yeah, yeah, right, right.

00:45:46.400 You know, and she's like, no, I don't want you to walk me to my car. I will walk

00:45:50.300 myself to my car. And pretty soon her friends were like, would you walk me to my car?

00:45:54.200 Right, right, right.

00:45:54.960 So she starts a self-defense clinic. It gets franchised and, and she, you know, she opens

00:45:58.920 a few of them and she, here's the telling moment in the interview. The, the, the interviewer

00:46:03.120 says to her, if you could go back in time and prevent your own rape, would you do that?

00:46:07.340 She says, no, I'm significantly more afraid of the woman that I was before it happened

00:46:12.260 than I am of the event itself.

00:46:14.920 Yeah, right.

00:46:15.700 And I, I, when I read that and I thought about what happened.

00:46:17.880 Those parasitical predatory types, you know, especially with regards to predation on children

00:46:22.260 is they look for children who are uncertain and easily cowed.

00:46:25.040 And so that's another thing for everyone watching and listening to know, if you teach your children

00:46:29.600 to be afraid as their fundamental response to the world, you are enabling the people who

00:46:34.460 prey on them because the people who do that will watch and they target the children.

00:46:38.500 They think they can intimidate into silence.

00:46:40.300 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that, that trembling like a rabbit in the, in the evil serpent eye

00:46:46.520 of the predator, that's a very bad strategy for human beings because we're not rabbits and

00:46:51.240 we don't use background camouflage as our defense.

00:46:54.420 Yeah. Yeah. It's that, it's that calling out of aggression. That's the right response

00:46:59.260 to predation. Now it's interesting, you know, that you said that you weren't bullied again

00:47:02.780 after that. Yeah. Yeah. That's very, that's a very interesting transformation. All right.

00:47:07.960 So now your father has gone off to Vancouver and left you to live alone. Yeah. And so,

00:47:14.300 and you're how old? 16. 16. And so when do you go off to boarding school?

00:47:19.060 That it was, I left boarding school that resulted in my dad leaving. Right. So that was before that.

00:47:24.340 Then I finished grade 10 in Edmonton and then I moved back to live with my mother and finished

00:47:28.280 high school in Halifax. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And, and how did it go when you moved back to your mother?

00:47:33.040 Much better. You know, we still had conflict. My mom, I think, you know, uh, it was one of those,

00:47:38.480 like one of her ways of gaining connection was with raised voices. So we would have raised voices

00:47:42.340 and my, and my brother wouldn't engage in that stuff. So I was the favorite for that, but she and

00:47:46.640 I, I, we were always very close, but it was, it was a lot of tension. And she then, uh, her parents

00:47:51.980 are getting older and she wanted to move back to South Africa. So when I was 18, my mom's like,

00:47:55.880 I'm going back to South Africa and I'm taking your little brother with me and you're staying here.

00:47:59.400 Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And that was, that, that was the beginning of adulthood for me proper. 18 years

00:48:04.460 old, figuring it out. Yeah, but you were pretty independent. Yeah. She wasn't worried about me.

00:48:08.420 Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. And so why did you get along with her better once you moved back to

00:48:12.140 Halifax? You know, I, I, I, I think I was more mature. I'd, I'd grown up and she'd grown up,

00:48:18.980 you know, it's, it's one of those things you, you, uh, I remember sitting in the guidance counselor's

00:48:25.440 office of my, one of my schools and I saw the poster on the wall. It says, kids, you know,

00:48:28.960 move out now while you still know everything now. And it's amazing that once you know some things,

00:48:33.600 you realize how much your parents have learned in the meantime. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's

00:48:37.040 for sure. That's for sure. All right. So now you're, this is when, this is what year? That's like

00:48:42.260 88. 88. Now you, it says here in your bio, you're very entrepreneurial as a child, selling lemonade in

00:48:49.900 front of your house, shoveling stone, raking leaves. You got your first professional job in 91 when

00:48:53.980 you became the first full-time employee of RiseX. So now you're done high school. Do you go off to

00:48:59.660 college? No, you know, I fell into a, I fell into some strange things at that time in Canada. Like

00:49:05.500 for example, I was in an industrial accident and I lost, uh, I nearly lost this hand in a fire and I

00:49:10.740 was pumping gas at Petro Canada on Bayer's road in Halifax. And my shift boss flicked a lighter at me

00:49:15.400 when I had gas all over me. And, uh, it was pretty bad. Uh, they had to take the skin off my legs to

00:49:20.380 rebuild my arm. And I, I lost a bunch of grade 12 as a result of that. And then of course, because of

00:49:25.060 the way things work sometimes or don't work with government, uh, I, I didn't qualify for, um, I

00:49:30.820 couldn't sue the employer because of the workers' compensation act. And I couldn't qualify for workers'

00:49:35.980 compensation payment because I was unemployable because I was in high school. So I literally got

00:49:40.440 not one dollar or anything. I missed all that time work school. And so I missed a few credits. So at the

00:49:45.880 end of grade 12, I've, I've, I'm shy a bunch of credits and I'm trying to figure out how to get to

00:49:49.420 university. But now I run into shy of the credits you needed to be accepted. Yeah. Like I was missing

00:49:53.880 one credit or 1.5 credits or something. And that was fixable over summer school. But in the meantime,

00:49:58.560 I'm trying to figure out university entrance. And here's the tricky part in Canada. I don't know how

00:50:01.980 it is these days. I haven't lived here for a long time now, but if you, if your parents earned over a

00:50:07.060 certain threshold, you couldn't get student loans. You couldn't get student funding at that stage.

00:50:10.980 My parents traditionally not earned that amount of money. My dad had been an alcoholic and,

00:50:15.040 and, and, but he had just crossed over. Like he, he was finally, he was making some good money,

00:50:20.700 but paying off a life of not. So my parents could not afford to send me to go to school. And equally,

00:50:25.440 I couldn't qualify to get a loan to go to school. So I, I, I just literally couldn't go. And so I,

00:50:31.560 I didn't, I went to work and, um, I guess today I'm grateful. You know, I think you and I talked in

00:50:38.140 public, I said, there are times when I wish that, um, that I'd had the experience of a proper debate

00:50:44.240 with professors and refinement of, of academic thought processes and research and that sort of

00:50:48.520 thing. But there's a bigger advantage that came to me as a result of that. And that is that very

00:50:53.160 often our current education is about, um, moving students toward a singular truth, you know, a

00:50:57.640 convergent education. A child can tell you 26 uses for a brick. Somebody who's learned about bricks

00:51:02.680 can think of one. And that paid off very well for me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things

00:51:08.540 I've noticed in my life is that the most often, the most interesting people I've met are super smart

00:51:16.600 people who didn't go to university and they still have that native intelligence. But the fact that

00:51:22.560 they didn't go through that upper echelon, echelon intellectual training meant that they had to

00:51:29.360 formulate their own views of the world and really from whole cloth. And, you know, there's some

00:51:34.400 disadvantages to that because there are things you don't know and avenues of critical thinking

00:51:39.860 that you haven't mastered. But my impression has been that those people are often extremely

00:51:46.500 original in their thinking, right? Because they have all that native intelligence, but it's manifested

00:51:51.180 itself in a way that's very unique to their circumstances. So they have interesting and new things to say

00:51:57.400 rather than the cookie cutter conversation you get that you're more likely to get among people who've

00:52:02.500 been highly educated. You also get this multiple perspective view of a problem. And here's a great

00:52:08.560 example from my father. I think he talks about this in Megafauna is that if you go to the Lascaux

00:52:13.180 caves, and if you've never been, I highly recommend the Lascaux caves, 20,000 year old paintings. I think

00:52:18.600 when Picasso walked through, he looked around these paintings and he said of art, we have invented

00:52:23.400 nothing. 20,000 year old art, but there's a rhino in there. Now this is the south of France. There's

00:52:28.180 a rhino in there. And there's four dots behind the rhino on the wall. And symbologists have looked

00:52:33.900 at the dots and determined that it means this is the end of the story or something. I don't know.

00:52:37.140 Like everybody's looked at it and said, what are these four dots all about? The trouble is, is that

00:52:41.060 if you've had this convergent education in say some, or in say symbology, or let's say an art,

00:52:47.060 then you're looking at it only through that lens. If you're my father and you've been looking,

00:52:51.060 you've got your legal training, but then separately you've got, growing up in Africa,

00:52:55.200 you've got your, you know, his father, his grandfather was an archaeologist, zoologist.

00:52:59.320 You look at that and you've spent a lot of time with white rhinos in the bush. What you know about

00:53:02.540 white rhinos is that a dominant bull, white rhino, poops explosive big balls of poop out behind him

00:53:08.380 and he kicks them and he sprays his urine in a huge aerosol cloud and announces his presence.

00:53:12.980 I remember this from the book.

00:53:13.480 Right. If you, if you know that, then you look at the dots and you go, it's, this is a painting

00:53:18.880 of a dominant bull. Nobody else knows that. That happened to me to a large degree because,

00:53:25.180 you know, when I was say 20, I was very sick all the time and I made some adjustments with food and

00:53:31.100 completely turned my life around. But then as I was trying to share those ideas with other people,

00:53:36.240 I found out that people don't follow rules very well. Food rules, that is.

00:53:40.480 Or any rules for that.

00:53:41.540 Or any rules. Well, there's 12, I think that people are following quite well these days.

00:53:44.700 Yeah, they should.

00:53:45.540 But the, the, but then the other thing, because I'd been involved in entrepreneurship and business

00:53:50.020 and marketing and business coaching, I had learned some things that I would call about practical

00:53:54.220 psychology that allowed me to put my interest in nutrition, my interest in anthropology and my

00:53:59.700 interest in behavioral change together. And I wouldn't be able to do that if I went to university.

00:54:03.440 No, no. Well, it's also the case too, you know, that people who have particularly interesting

00:54:07.900 things to say tend to be masters of more than one discipline that very rarely overlap.

00:54:14.360 So one of my friends, for example, Jonathan Paggio, he exists at the intersection of fine

00:54:19.540 art, postmodern theory, and classic Orthodox Christian theology. There's like, well, he's

00:54:26.120 like the guy, right? Because there's no one else who, there's no one else like that. There's

00:54:29.640 probably no one else like that in the world, right? And so, because he has expertise in those,

00:54:33.880 and I, and I've recommended, you know, to the people who are watching and listening and reading

00:54:37.980 the sorts of things that I've been trying to communicate, that they try to get very,

00:54:41.900 very good at one thing, right? To start with that, right? To develop expertise there.

00:54:45.500 But then if you can expand out and get some expertise in multiple areas and, and then benefit

00:54:51.280 from the convergence of those, man, you're really, I think that's part of what starts to push people

00:54:56.100 up that Pareto distribution curve, you know, that attainment like, like success or like failure

00:55:01.900 is non-linear, right? The more you succeed, the faster you succeed.

00:55:05.640 Yeah.

00:55:06.040 And that's why a small, that all the money ends up in the hands of a small number of people and

00:55:10.520 a tiny proportion of recording artists have all the records and a tiny proportion of authors sell

00:55:15.720 all the books. I mean, it's a very, very stable phenomenon. It's called the Matthew Principle,

00:55:20.020 right? To those who have more, much more will be given. And from those who have nothing,

00:55:23.840 everything will be taken away. A very harsh reality of life. But I think what happens is that

00:55:27.920 you develop these pockets of expertise, you bring them together and the effects of that

00:55:32.680 are multiplicative rather than additive. And that can really spiral you up the, what would

00:55:38.660 you say, the competence ladder towards higher and higher levels of success. And if you have

00:55:43.420 a society that opens up the possibility for people to do that, then the society also tends

00:55:47.860 to thrive. So, so anyways, you're, you're not going to college, you start working and apparently

00:55:52.700 you're starting at a startup. Is that right? Yeah. I, you know, I did door-to-door sales and

00:55:57.480 different like sort of, you know, attempts at, at, at, at life. But then my dad contacted me and he

00:56:03.760 said I had a friend who was starting a tech company or had started a tech company, but he was

00:56:07.660 struggling to move past solopreneur. You know, he hired people and he just, he wasn't very good at

00:56:11.700 people. And, and he told this friend, my son can sell ice to, you know, to, to the Eskimos and you

00:56:17.220 should hire him. So were you a good door-to-door sales? I was, I was really good. I sold Kirby vacuums

00:56:21.340 and, and I was. What'd you learn from doing that? I, you know, I just, I was, I, I learned

00:56:26.000 rapport skills. I learned quickness of thought to trust my speech engine. Yeah. I remember, for

00:56:32.340 example, knocking on this one door once and this woman says, you guys, like, don't you do any other

00:56:36.760 neighborhoods? You're like the sixth guy from your company to knock on my door in the last four

00:56:40.540 months. Like, why do you guys, I never let anybody in. Why, why do you keep coming? And one thing I can

00:56:45.980 tell you about sales is that the, everybody has defense mechanisms against sales. Yeah. Like go the

00:56:51.040 hell away. Right. But the stronger your defense is at the outer level, the easier it is to pillage

00:56:56.200 on the inside. So if, if you, if somebody is very firmly, won't let you in the door, that's because

00:57:01.300 they're really easy to sell to. It's just the way it is. If somebody lets you in easily, you're going

00:57:05.800 to have a tough go of it. It's going to be, so this woman, she's a very sneaky thing. Oh, it's very,

00:57:10.780 very powerful to know is this woman's really, I can see she's got the, she's got the fortress

00:57:14.720 walls up and draw bridges up. She goes, and she goes, so what makes you any different? And I went,

00:57:19.340 I'm cute. Uh-huh. And she busted out laughing. And of course, laughter, the orgasm of the brain,

00:57:24.380 you know, and she opens the door. Muscular tension all disappears. John, she invites me in for a

00:57:28.940 coffee. And, you know, an hour and a half later, she's spending $1,500 on a vacuum she didn't know

00:57:32.440 she needed. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And how long did you do door-to-door sales? Two years, two and a half

00:57:37.800 years. Well, I did, I did about a year of that. And then they put me in recruiting. And so you stuck with

00:57:42.660 it. I did. I did. Did you like it? You know, no, but I just, I knew it was right somehow. Like,

00:57:48.140 I knew that I was developing skills that were useful to me. Yeah, well, man, there's that ability

00:57:54.460 to sell. That's, you know, what did you learn about selling? You just sort of related one of

00:57:58.740 the things you learned. I mean, so selling, marketing, we have sales and marketing, and I

00:58:03.680 don't really like that, either of those terms. I mean, because all of this is communication. And if

00:58:08.080 it's done properly, it's communication in relationship to trust, if it's done well.

00:58:12.660 Were the vacuums you were selling decent vacuums? To this day, if I don't, I live in the Caribbean,

00:58:18.280 we don't have carpets. But if I had carpets, I would have that vacuum, no question about

00:58:21.600 it. So you were selling something? I believed in it, yeah. Okay, okay. Well, that's crucial,

00:58:25.080 right? Like, if you're embarking on a sales career, and you don't believe in what you're

00:58:28.320 selling, you're just a bloody liar, and you're training yourself to be a psychopath. So you

00:58:31.780 need, and this is good advice for people who are listening, who are thinking about doing

00:58:35.420 this, is if you're going to sell, you need to believe that the thing you're selling is

00:58:39.600 actually worthwhile and does its job properly, because otherwise you're just a bloody scam

00:58:42.860 artist. Yeah, if you push me hard enough, I'm going to sell you a Kirby.

00:58:45.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you stuck with that for quite a while. Okay, now you've

00:58:49.640 got an opportunity to join a new company that's based on a good idea. The guy who's established

00:58:54.740 the company isn't a person who has this easy capacity, let's say, or well-developed capacity

00:58:59.760 for communication and sales. So you step in there, what happens?

00:59:02.440 I join him, and the company lifts off. I'm really good at what I do. And I don't really

00:59:08.420 get much training. He basically hands me a binder full of names of people and says,

00:59:11.640 call these people and try to buy or sell barcode equipment.

00:59:15.040 Okay, and what was the equipment?

00:59:16.620 Barcode scanning equipment, data capture equipment, barcode printing, and related technology.

00:59:21.440 And what did it offer the people that you were talking to?

00:59:23.940 You know, what we did a lot of times is we would call companies and buy equipment from

00:59:27.960 them because we refurbished it and resold it. So when they bought it from us, what they

00:59:31.300 were buying is sometimes cheaper. Sometimes they're buying obsoleted equipment that they

00:59:35.400 couldn't get anymore. So we were providing them a valuable service. There were a number

00:59:38.960 of different angles that we took. But one of the things I found really fascinating about

00:59:43.480 generally sales and marketing is that people are so afraid of rejection. And I think it's

00:59:51.640 selfish. I think it's really selfish to be afraid of that rejection because if you believe

00:59:55.220 in what you're selling, then you have to ask yourself, is my 30 seconds of rejection feeling

01:00:00.880 more important to me than the pain I might be resolving for this person over the next few

01:00:05.140 decades of their life?

01:00:05.940 Right, right.

01:00:06.520 So like, you know, in my business in WildFit, we help people, you know, reframe their relationships

01:00:11.640 with food. And we have like literally hundreds of cases of morbid obesity being ended, type 2

01:00:17.000 diabetes being reversed, and so on. If I'm sitting with you, if I've been sitting with you some

01:00:21.040 years ago when you were dealing with all the autoimmune stuff, and I held back from offering

01:00:25.320 you what you now know, but you didn't then. If I held back offering that because of my

01:00:29.240 fear of rejection, how selfish is that? How selfish is it for me to not try to help?

01:00:33.380 Well, that would also, that also I think emerges for people too, when they're selling something

01:00:38.360 they don't believe in, which basically means that they're lying. I mean, I did a lot of sales

01:00:42.880 and marketing, like a lot. And with some success and with a lot of failure for a variety

01:00:49.780 of complex reasons. And I learned that, well, first of all, you're not selling your forming

01:00:55.140 relationships because if you're a salesman and you have even the vaguest clue, you don't lie to

01:00:58.900 your damn customers because you actually want to have a relationship with them for like the next 20

01:01:03.000 years. And so you have to be offering them something genuine and it can't be, it can't be

01:01:07.720 nonsense. And you have to believe, and it has to be the case, that what you're offering

01:01:12.800 them, this partnership, is going to be of clear and outstanding mutual benefit. And then

01:01:19.680 when you're selling, you're actually not trying to sell or convince, you're trying

01:01:22.940 to establish relationships. And I've also learned too that, and I don't know what you

01:01:26.960 think about this, but my sense too is that this wouldn't be exactly the same as doing

01:01:32.020 it door to door, but you know, if you push and inquire and see if there's a fit and you

01:01:36.760 see that there isn't a fit, there's not a lot of sense pushing because if there isn't

01:01:40.960 a fit, you should be going to talk to someone else. Plus, if there isn't a fit and you push

01:01:44.860 it, the fact that there isn't a fit is just going to cause endless trouble as you move

01:01:48.700 forward in the relationship.

01:01:50.360 You know, sales, networking, and dating, they're basically the same function. And we

01:01:56.880 make exactly the same mistakes in one as we do in the other. So very often people try

01:02:01.580 to go for the sale too quickly. In a date, the way that looks is, you're looking at the

01:02:05.200 menu and the one person in the date says, oh, look, they have a kiddie menu for when we're

01:02:08.860 back here next year.

01:02:10.020 Right.

01:02:10.380 That might be...

01:02:11.040 That's a little premature.

01:02:12.080 Or, oh, by the way, I brought the condoms. I mean, either way, that's a little early,

01:02:15.500 right?

01:02:16.320 That's an indicator of a kind of impulsive predatory psychopathy, by the way. That's

01:02:21.260 focused on immediate gratification in the present is a very bad marker of character.

01:02:25.820 Exactly. And we make that mistake... Many people make mistakes like that in dating, but

01:02:29.280 they make that mistake even more commonly in selling. They go for the sale too quickly.

01:02:33.040 Yeah.

01:02:33.360 So one of the ways that I often demonstrate this is, you know, I've done lectures on this

01:02:36.740 all over the world and I've got an audience and I'll generally pick a woman in the front row

01:02:40.380 and I say, can we have a date, please? And I bring her up on the stage. She has a

01:02:43.340 microphone and I'll say, well, I'm so glad that you swiped right so we could be here

01:02:47.240 today. I'm making a bit of a light of it.

01:02:48.840 Yeah.

01:02:49.300 And then I'll go, so let's start the date. I'd like to give you a little bit of my personal

01:02:54.500 background. I'm a partner in a law firm. We do intellectual property law. And by the

01:02:58.360 time I get to that place, there's a camera on her and you can see on the big screen for

01:03:01.580 everybody who's watching, women have two sets of eyelids. There's this one set of eyelids

01:03:06.260 that close, their eyes are open, but they're not, they're gone. And that's, if you talk too

01:03:10.980 long like that, they're gone. They're gone from the conversation. And that again, is

01:03:15.120 the problem of networking and selling. It's like pushing, pushing. Then I go, everybody

01:03:19.780 notices that I've lost her. I go, okay, now you see what I've done. I've lost her. Can

01:03:24.260 I have a, can I have a re, I'm not going to get, I'm not going to get a second date. So

01:03:27.120 can we have a do over?

01:03:28.160 Yeah.

01:03:28.580 So now I start and I go, you know, as much as I'd love to share with you about my, you

01:03:32.340 know, my, my law firm and sense, what I'd really like to know is what do you like to

01:03:35.100 do for fun?

01:03:35.840 Yeah.

01:03:36.460 Eyes light up.

01:03:37.140 Yeah.

01:03:37.220 Yeah. Now, now she starts telling me what she likes to do for fun. And I keep asking

01:03:41.280 I'm not pushing. I'm asking.

01:03:43.120 Yeah.

01:03:43.500 Then invariably, and I've done this countless times in countries all over the world, invariably

01:03:48.140 she will come to some area where she talks about her passion, her hobby, her career,

01:03:51.740 her dreams. And she goes, oh, I have a book I'm working on. And I go, you have a book you're

01:03:55.620 working on. Have you chosen a title yet? She goes, no. And I go, listen, when you start

01:03:58.980 thinking about, are there ideas in the book that might be unique? And she goes, yes. I go, have

01:04:02.160 you, have you considered copyright protections and maybe a registration?

01:04:05.560 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:04:06.340 And she goes, yeah. And I go, well, listen, I'm a partner in it. Now my fictitious law firm

01:04:11.420 matters.

01:04:11.960 When I was, when I was selling, so I started out selling, so to speak, as a professor. And

01:04:17.500 my sense was, and I knew that this was the case, what I was offering to the, to the companies

01:04:22.200 I was attempting to sell to, I knew would produce a staggering economic return for them. And I could

01:04:27.760 demonstrate that statistically and I could demonstrate it through brute fact. And I thought to begin

01:04:32.920 with that my job was to just lay out the facts and not to convince, but to lay out the facts

01:04:40.140 and let people form their own judgment. And what I didn't understand was that people almost

01:04:44.500 never make a judgment based on facts and certainly not on statistical facts. Like, like that just

01:04:49.440 net, that hardly happens with data scientists. It certainly doesn't happen with, with like,

01:04:54.380 say, typical middle managers in a, in a large corporation. That never happens. And what you have

01:04:59.720 to do is exactly what you just described is you have to find out from the person what's,

01:05:05.400 what, what are your problems? Like what's not going well for you at work? What sort of things

01:05:09.380 do you want to address? And the, if the person lays out their problems and you in principle

01:05:14.820 have a solution to one of those problems, and then that's not manipulative. It's like,

01:05:18.900 oh, well there, you know, there's something there I think I could help you with. If they lay

01:05:21.940 out their whole problem set and nothing you're doing has any bearing on that, the probability

01:05:26.980 that you're going to be able to sell to them, in my estimation, is extremely low because they're

01:05:30.840 preoccupied with a whole set of problems for whom you are not the solution. And so the trick

01:05:36.060 often, trick, is to get... It's not a trick. It's not a trick. It's that the, the, the conversation

01:05:42.300 has to be about the person you're talking to and not about you, which is also a very good,

01:05:46.740 what would you say, mode of alleviating social anxiety. Because if your goal in a social situation

01:05:51.420 is to make the other person comfortable, you're not focusing on yourself and you're not anxious.

01:05:55.320 Let me offer you, you know, you said that like facts and statistics aren't the thing that'll

01:06:00.920 drive them. And I would say it depends exactly on how interesting those facts and statistics

01:06:04.340 are to them and when they were delivered. So years ago, I was invited to teach marketing at

01:06:08.860 one of Tony Robbins, you know, big business seminars. And so in the talk, I, I, I'm telling

01:06:13.820 a story and I'm telling a story about hunting with the Hadza people in East Africa, who I've

01:06:18.200 been visiting now for some 15 years. And I, my very first hunting trip with them, I'm out

01:06:22.440 hunting and I'm running and trying to keep up behind them. And it's like hard, they move

01:06:26.800 fast. And, and, and I realized that if I'm on this hunting trip, we're all going to starve

01:06:31.340 to death because I make a lot of noise. They don't. And so I started watching the way they

01:06:35.680 moved and, and, you know, and I thought to myself and I was on Tony Robbins stage. So

01:06:39.340 I used his language and I said, well, what would Tony Robbins say if somebody else was getting

01:06:42.780 the result you wanted? He would say, model them. And so I started looking at the way they

01:06:46.380 were running. That's a pretty good Tony Robbins, by the way. And so, so I started watching

01:06:51.580 they were running. They, they land on the fronts of their feet. And I was like, why do I have

01:06:55.440 to learn this from the Bushmen? That's how I snuck around the house as a child. This

01:06:58.600 is a natural human movement. And then I started thinking to myself, wait a second, I've been

01:07:03.360 running now. I'm, I, I start running with them. I run on the fronts of my feet. I'm silent.

01:07:07.900 I'm, I, I barely make any noise. I'm able to pick my foot's fall better. I don't impact

01:07:12.460 the ground is, and, and, and I know that it was working because one of the Bushmen who was

01:07:15.920 supposed to be keeping track of me turned around to make sure I was still there. It was

01:07:20.080 working. It was working. But then after about an hour and a half of running like this, I

01:07:23.940 realized something else magical. And that was my knee was not hurting. My knee that had been

01:07:28.420 hurt so badly by running the London marathon that I had to give up running at 30. It's way

01:07:33.040 too young to give up running, you know, if you want to run. And, but now my knee wasn't

01:07:36.960 hurting. I'm like, why is my knee not hurting? I can never run this long. What's going on

01:07:41.000 here? I'm running differently. I'm running the way you would run if your running shoes did not

01:07:47.320 allow an improper foot strike. You see, the thing is when you land on your heel, you send all of

01:07:52.780 that foot strike up through your skeletal system. And, and I shared, there's no spring. That's

01:07:57.320 right. And within the heel, the, the, they put in air to protect your heel from the shock, but that

01:08:03.160 doesn't protect your knee or your hip or your neck. And, and I share this whole idea right now.

01:08:07.760 You probably even have forgotten the purpose of why I was beginning to tell this story because

01:08:11.200 stories are like that. Before I told the story, I asked the audience, how many people in this room

01:08:15.680 are we about to buy a new cell phone? 3%. How many are buying a new car in the next few months?

01:08:19.200 3%. Whatever you ask, it's 3%. I had also asked how many are you going to buy new running shoes?

01:08:23.640 It was 3%. At the end of my story, after giving them facts and statistics about heel strikes and

01:08:28.660 barefoot running shoes, I said, now, how many of you are thinking you might need to buy new

01:08:31.260 running shoes? 70%. Right, right, right. Facts and data delivered in the right way create the market.

01:08:37.280 Yeah, well, and you know what the right way is if you're paying enough attention to the

01:08:39.980 conversation. That also means that you can't be concentrating on selling precisely. That's

01:08:44.100 exactly right. And, well, I think that's true in a conversation in general is that it's a mistake.

01:08:50.020 This is part of the reason Joe Rogan is so successful, by the way, is Rogan doesn't,

01:08:53.840 he's not selling his podcast during his podcast. All Joe is trying to do is have interesting

01:08:59.120 conversations, right? And then, and your point is that something, if I've got it right, is let the

01:09:05.320 interesting conversation unfold. And you may see that there are things that you have to offer that

01:09:10.060 will slot into it naturally without being forced, right? That's right. Without any instrumental

01:09:14.300 manipulation on your part. Selling in our world. And that's the so-called sales opportunity.

01:09:18.620 Selling in our world means manipulating. Yeah. And the truth is, when you walk into, you know,

01:09:23.160 you walk into Tim Hortons and buy a donut, nobody manipulated you. Well, we could argue what they did

01:09:27.740 with their advertising and sugar might have been manipulating. Yeah.

01:09:30.020 The transaction was a sale. Selling is solving a problem for people.

01:09:34.060 You're right. Yes, yes. You should, you need t-shirts with that printed on it because that's

01:09:37.540 exactly right. That's, yeah, yeah. And then there's absolutely 100%, nothing corrupt about it either.

01:09:42.800 And, you know, when salesmen have a, they have a bad name in our culture, kind of like politicians.

01:09:46.560 And I think that is because sales can attract narcissists, you know.

01:09:49.500 Like politicians.

01:09:50.700 Yeah, well, well, they're all in sales. Politicians, people in entertainment,

01:09:54.960 people in media, like people who have a public life and who have to communicate to convince

01:10:00.500 that you're going to attract a larger than normal proportion of psychopaths. But that doesn't mean

01:10:05.900 that the bloody endeavor itself is corrupt and immoral at its core. And it's not if what you see

01:10:11.900 as a salesman is that what you're trying to do is to offer genuine solutions to the actual problems

01:10:17.260 that people have, which is what you should be doing if you have something reasonable to sell.

01:10:20.940 That comment on narcissism, you and I talked a little bit about that in Mexico. You know,

01:10:26.880 I told you about my book, The Evolution Gap. And one of the features of that is like comparing,

01:10:32.840 you know, the idea of the evolution gap is that there's this gap that has begun to open between

01:10:37.100 human evolution, which is very, very slow, and human innovation, which is rapidly accelerating.

01:10:42.520 And narcissism is quite an interesting one because if you're living in a hunter-gatherer

01:10:46.220 tribe, narcissism will only get you so far before you're out.

01:10:49.300 Very, very. Yeah, yeah. It'll get a poison dart in your back in damn short order.

01:10:53.800 Here, here in Toronto, in New York, or in any larger community, you can stay put like a spider

01:11:01.040 and you can mess up that relationship with your narcissism and then pick up the next one and pick

01:11:05.500 up the next one. And narcissism in our world actually becomes an advantage. And that's a sort

01:11:10.800 of symptom of that gap.

01:11:12.420 Probably multiplied online. Yeah.

01:11:14.340 This is really frightening me, you know, because my understanding of the psychopathic

01:11:21.080 personnel, or what would you say? The psychopathic proportion of the population, it's about 3%,

01:11:28.100 not very high because it's not a very successful strategy. It has and can run rampant in certain

01:11:35.220 historical epochs. That's what happened during the Russian Revolution, for example. A very small

01:11:39.080 percentage of people can cause a tremendous amount of trouble. Now, we've evolved mechanisms

01:11:44.140 to keep the psychopathic parasites at bay. And a lot of those involve the potential threat

01:11:50.100 of physical force, like the story you told about being on top of the swing. Zero, zero of that

01:11:56.720 applies online. And so there's an immense amount of not even subtle criminal activity online. I don't

01:12:03.300 know how much online activity is criminal, but if you include pornography, it's probably

01:12:06.660 like 40% of the total internet environment is criminal in the broader sense. That's a

01:12:12.700 lot, 40%. It's a lot. And there is zero punishment, virtually zero punishment for psychopathy online.

01:12:19.360 It's also, you know, when we talk about 3% of the world being like that, it's not that 3% of the,

01:12:23.940 I don't think of it that way. I think of it, everybody's on that spectrum. And in one society,

01:12:29.020 3% of the world show up that way. In another society, people who would have been in the fourth

01:12:32.320 or fifth percentile start showing up that way. Yeah, well, definitely.

01:12:36.200 So you don't even have to wait for that to get naturally selected. It starts to awaken.

01:12:39.280 Yeah, yeah. Well, you can imagine that there's a temperamental proclivity to that. It can be

01:12:44.860 fought on behalf of the people who have the proclivity, right? So imagine that wherever

01:12:49.160 you are in the five-dimensional personality space, you have a set of talents and a set of temptations.

01:12:55.180 And the temptation, if you're extroverted and disagreeable, is to be narcissistic.

01:13:00.240 And, but that isn't a necessarily inviolable outcome. Okay, so there's people with that

01:13:06.000 proclivity. Then there's a space that either opens up for them or doesn't. And that space could be,

01:13:11.020 you can get away with it, or the space could be, you get encouraged. If it's encouraged,

01:13:14.700 it's going to grow. It's definitely being encouraged online.

01:13:17.500 It's being encouraged. And funny enough, that's another symptom of this evolution gap. Because,

01:13:22.600 again, for the vast majority of human history, we lived in fear. Can you even imagine what it would

01:13:27.300 have been like to sleep on the savannah without fire? No. It would have been terrifying.

01:13:35.100 Well, I felt that to some degree back country camping in the Rockies, where I know there are

01:13:40.800 grizzlies. But that's just like a tiny taste of that. Yeah, that's after 99% of the megafauna

01:13:45.780 were removed. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the grizzlies are smart enough generally to be afraid,

01:13:49.920 and they won't bother you unless they're starving and old and you stumble across one, right?

01:13:53.580 So if you think that our ancestors lived really very much fearful lives, fearful of things,

01:13:58.960 fearful of conditions, fearful of others, and that's a very natural instinct that we have in

01:14:03.760 us, now you take one of those 3% narcissistic, psychopathic people and put them in a position

01:14:08.280 of power. And then what do they do? They offer us safety. Yeah, yeah. And they foster fear.

01:14:14.320 Yeah, yeah, well. They create the fear. They offer us safety. But we have to sacrifice our freedom

01:14:18.700 for their safety. And our instinct, as frightened primates, is to go for that. And so that...

01:14:24.240 That's the eternal offering of a tyrant. It's like, here, this is why the apocalyptic

01:14:28.400 climate narrative really drives me mad. It's like, well, first of all, I don't think there

01:14:32.900 is a crisis of the proportions that's being purported, let's say, by any stretch of the

01:14:37.640 imagination. I don't think there's any data to support that whatsoever. But also, the problem

01:14:42.560 with it is, is that the apocalyptic fear that that generates justifies the acquisition of power

01:14:49.520 by precisely the kind of psychopathic predators that you're describing. It's like, oh, everything's

01:14:53.780 going to fall apart. Wink, wink, give all the power to us and we'll keep you safe. It's like,

01:14:58.220 yeah, I don't think so. I think you're a bigger threat than the damn climate by a large margin.

01:15:02.420 There's a nice way to look at that, too. You know, climate change, I mean, you'll remember that in

01:15:06.540 the 70s, it was global cooling. Yes.

01:15:08.320 And then it was global warming, now it's climate change. But here's what's really fascinating.

01:15:13.260 First of all, I think that trying to measure our impact on climate and so forth is a little bit

01:15:18.560 like measuring the height of a flea jump on the back of a white rhino running across the savannah,

01:15:24.260 trying to predict where the rhino is going to go. Meanwhile, we have plastic in the oceans,

01:15:30.000 we have air quality problems, we have tangible things that you can agree with, whether you're a

01:15:34.440 Democrat or whether you're a Republican or a conservative or liberal. We're not arguing

01:15:39.460 about those things. We're arguing about this one massive nebulous thing that can't properly be

01:15:43.780 proven and giving up our power for it. Yeah, you bet. You bet. It's a major danger. There's no doubt

01:15:49.160 about it. All right. So now you're making your sales ability more sophisticated. You're working

01:15:54.600 with this company. What happens then? I stay with that company for about six or seven years. And I find,

01:15:59.020 you know, I get to a place where, you know, I've been offered equity a number of times. And,

01:16:06.100 you know, what happens a lot of times with entrepreneurs anyway is that it's easy to

01:16:10.940 give away equity when it doesn't, when it has no value. And then once it has value, it's like

01:16:15.520 harder to keep your promises, apparently, for some people. It's like that.

01:16:18.780 Well, people forget too, you know, when you make these, this is another thing for people watching

01:16:22.740 and listening to understand is even if you have established a trusting relationship with people,

01:16:26.560 don't overestimate the degree to which people can actually remember because things get fuzzy.

01:16:31.960 I agree, but that was not the case here. This was a willful case of manipulating. I'll give you an

01:16:35.160 example. I walk into my office one day and we're trying to bid for some equipment and we don't

01:16:39.800 really want to buy this equipment. We want to keep it off the market. You understand? So my boss goes

01:16:44.700 and he negotiates with this company to buy the equipment from them and he sends them a fax. And the

01:16:49.100 fax is a blank piece of paper. And I go, why did you fax them a blank piece of paper? And he goes,

01:16:53.400 he goes, because we agreed on the phone that I could buy that stuff. So now he can't sell it to

01:16:57.680 anybody. And if he does sell it to one of my competitors in the meantime, I have a telephone

01:17:00.920 record that proves that I faxed a purchase order to him. Oh yeah. So this is not a man who forgot

01:17:05.040 the promises he made to me. This is a man who has a style of thinking that doesn't mesh. Let's call it

01:17:10.000 a tangential relationship with the truth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's very instrumental,

01:17:14.500 right? And the irony is I left that company and he owed me, you know, maybe $200,000, $180,000

01:17:21.540 in back commissions and refused to pay it to me because he was afraid. This is irony. I love

01:17:27.800 irony. I mean, I like proper examples of irony. Like Ronald Reagan was not shot. He wasn't actually

01:17:34.620 shot. He was hit by a bullet that ricocheted off his bulletproof limousine. You know, I like good

01:17:40.740 examples of irony. And so in my case, he won't pay me the money because he's afraid that I will set up

01:17:45.900 a competitive venture. Meantime, one of my mentors has offered me a job as a stockbroker in Grand

01:17:50.500 Cayman, which is my dream to go and live in the Caribbean. But if without that money, I can't,

01:17:55.880 you know, I need some money. So the ironic twist is that one of my clients calls me and he says,

01:18:01.300 you know, can you find some equipment for me? And I'm like, I don't, I'm living in England at this

01:18:04.700 point because I'd been relocated to England to open the European headquarters. I've quit my job.

01:18:08.520 I'm not legally allowed to be in the country for work. I have a pregnant wife. It's a tough time.

01:18:14.040 And my boss won't give me the money so I can relocate. The guy says, can you find this equipment

01:18:17.540 for me? And I'm like, yeah, I go find it for him and I make money and then I do it again and then

01:18:21.240 I do it again. And I'm like, and then I start a company and what kind of company? Direct competitor

01:18:24.560 with my previous. Oh yeah. Yeah. Total irony. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I ran that business in the UK

01:18:29.600 for about nine years and then sold it to private buyers and, you know, moved on with life, got out

01:18:34.920 of the data capture. And how successful were you at that new enterprise? It was, we were, we were,

01:18:39.880 I mean, I'll say I got my $200,000 back again and again and again and again. And I sold it for a

01:18:45.840 entirable somehow. Why hadn't you done that earlier, going out on your own earlier?

01:18:49.540 You know, I've often wondered about that because as a kid I did. I mean, as a kid I was, I was the,

01:18:54.600 I was watching the news report. The minute the snow was happening, I was like, I was out there

01:18:59.000 knocking on the doors. Like I'm going to, you know, I'm going to shovel your sidewalks. And I'm also

01:19:03.240 more introverted. So that's not the easiest thing in the world for me to go do. So I was off doing

01:19:07.640 that, raking leaves. And then one year I came up with this genius plan at the beginning of Christmas

01:19:11.880 or at the beginning of the snow season, which in Halifax is usually around Christmas.

01:19:14.820 I sold insurance. I knocked on doors and said, look, you can pay me now because you usually pay

01:19:20.580 me like $10 to do your walk or $5 or whatever it was. But if you pay me $25, I'll keep your clear

01:19:25.660 for the winter. Big gamble. You know, some years in Halifax I would do, but it works. People went for

01:19:31.640 it. So I clearly had that mindset. And I remember once distinctly, what a lesson. I was raking leaves

01:19:37.840 for this guy, old ornery guy. And I was paying by the trash bag full. You know, he had to pay $2

01:19:44.520 whatever it was per trash bag. And I, in a huge garden. So I'm raking, I'm making it. I'm filling

01:19:49.320 him up trash bag, trash bag, trash bag. He comes out and he squeezes one of the trash bags and he

01:19:53.480 goes, no, no, no, no. And he, and he packs it right down. And he goes, now that's a trash bag.

01:20:00.660 And he goes, he goes, I'm not trying to be cheap. He says, I'm trying to teach you about value.

01:20:05.360 He goes, you got to know that if I come out here and you got light trash bags, I'm not hiring you

01:20:08.580 again next year. But if I see that you do it right, and I got to tell you, that guy,

01:20:12.300 massive impact on my life. Everything I do today is about over-delivery on that basis.

01:20:16.140 Yeah, right. No kidding. No kidding. Now that was, that was good of him. That's for sure, man.

01:20:20.220 He paid you for your work that day. He did. He did. Yeah, yeah. Over-deliver. You bet. Well,

01:20:24.720 and that's the thing is you got to remember when you're selling to people, first of all,

01:20:30.400 you don't want to sell to the wrong person because you might be in bed with them for a very long time.

01:20:35.460 And that's a good thing to learn if you're so-called fundraising too. It's like you should

01:20:40.020 never fundraise. You should look for partners. Yeah. And you don't want to take money from the

01:20:44.760 wrong person. No kidding. That's a very, very bad idea. So I bought a film studio in Northern

01:20:49.180 California years after all this. And, and it was originally the model shop. It was called the

01:20:54.180 model shop. And anybody who's a Star Wars geek knows what I'm talking about. It's the original,

01:20:57.820 the original like studio of Lucasfilm. This is where Star Wars, well, actually Star Wars is LA. This is

01:21:03.340 Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, all of it. And so I bought the studio

01:21:08.160 and, and, and, and where was I going with that? Getting in bed with the wrong people. Oh yeah. So

01:21:14.280 we had these incredible 3D camera systems that we were building and we did our first, we, we did a

01:21:19.360 little bit of work on Avatar and, and it was really good. And, and, but then we needed to raise some

01:21:23.180 capital and we raised capital from a guy, 1.2 million. And he worked for a huge, he was like the second

01:21:27.520 in command of a huge entertainment company. So we thought, and he said, I'll lend you the money as long as I get to

01:21:31.380 run the company. Oh yeah. And, um, you know, I, I, I could say he ran it into the ground. Let's say

01:21:37.040 we ran it into the ground. That particular venture didn't really work, but then he sued us for his

01:21:42.720 money from the company that he was running. And it was like, I, that was, I got the lesson from now on

01:21:48.040 as we're not, we're looking for like partners and we've met them as much as we would anybody else.

01:21:52.180 Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's no such thing as free money. You're a bloody fool. If you think

01:21:55.460 anybody whose money is easy, easy to take, first of all, you better make sure that it's not a lure.

01:22:02.280 Second, if their money is easy to take, that should tell you something about them.

01:22:06.120 It just means you don't know how you're going to pay. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly, that's exactly

01:22:09.520 right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now you've established a company in the UK and you, you did

01:22:14.780 that for how long? Nine years. Nine years. And then I, you have, you have a family developing at the same time.

01:22:19.680 Yeah. But unfortunately my, my wife at the time decided rather unilaterally that she didn't want

01:22:25.880 to live in England anymore and went on a vacation to Canada and took my son with her. And that's when

01:22:31.580 I found out that the Geneva or the Hague convention only applies up until the 90th day. Now she called

01:22:37.100 me on the 92nd day and said, if you want to be with us, you have to come back to Canada. And I,

01:22:40.500 like I had employees and debts and I would have been personal bankruptcy and ruin. And then it also

01:22:44.980 made me really ask an important question about, um, and in this, and I'll, I'll never know if I

01:22:50.100 did a shock. It was awful. It was really awful. But I spoke to my dad and my dad said, what would

01:22:54.900 you want your son to do in the exact same situation? I said, well, I wouldn't want him

01:22:57.840 to be bullied in a, in a unilateral way like that. I, and I wouldn't, and I'd want him to

01:23:02.260 take responsibility for it. If I left, everybody loses their jobs. Most of them were long-term

01:23:06.840 unemployed before I came along because we're in an impoverished part of the UK and, and I would

01:23:11.340 have had to file bankruptcy. It was a massive impact for me to just suddenly close up my

01:23:14.900 business. And I, as a kid, I was a bit like that, you know, start something, it didn't work, go to

01:23:18.840 the next thing. I was really in this phase of you start things, you got to finish them. And so I

01:23:23.680 chose to stay and keep the business. And my, my wife and I divorced at that point. It was very,

01:23:28.780 very difficult time, but, um, you know, I learned a great deal and, uh, and the business went well in

01:23:34.200 the end and, and I sold it. And, um, uh, and, and, you know, this is a very interesting thing about,

01:23:40.580 um, purpose, you know, like I think that when we look at what we value, you know, initially we value

01:23:46.720 survival and, and, and in our world, that means some level of economic survival say, but something

01:23:51.920 magical happens if you can transcend the need for money and emotionally or luckily logistically.

01:23:57.840 And that's really what happened to me at that point is that I, I became free to actually follow

01:24:03.240 my passion and do things that really drove me. Barcode scanning equipment never drove me as much as I can

01:24:09.120 get fascinated by this. So let me ask you about that. Pat, see, I, I, I read Joseph Campbell a lot

01:24:13.920 for, for years and he said, uh, and, and Campbell has some very interesting things to say, although

01:24:18.560 he learned most of them from Carl Jung. He said, follow your passion. And you know, there's, there's

01:24:23.540 a couple of things that aren't right about that. I mean, the first is it's not that easy to

01:24:28.300 differentiate a true passion from a false passion and impulsivity is passion, but it's short term.

01:24:33.840 And so is it passion you follow or is it interest or is it the compelling nature of certain problems

01:24:41.220 that grip you or is it responsibility? I think that the, I think that there's a mix. Passion by itself

01:24:48.180 could be good or bad, could be vacuous or, or, or deep, but passion combined with purpose. And what

01:24:54.840 happened for me is I found a purpose that, that, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a teacher.

01:24:58.400 I had this great teacher in grade three in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Mr. Kolchinsky. I'm telling

01:25:03.680 you, he was amazing. He really, I can still almost word for word, repeat some of his classes. And I

01:25:09.600 was eight years old. He was a phenomenal teacher. When I was 25 years old, I was found myself back

01:25:14.180 in half Halifax briefly. I called the school board and I said, is Mr. Kolchinsky still working? We

01:25:19.240 called him Mr. K because nobody could say Kolchinsky, uh, when we were kids, but I, is Mr. Kolchinsky still

01:25:24.120 working with the school? Yes, he is. I said, can I have his home number, please? No.

01:25:27.000 15 minutes later to use a Star Wars, I like, these are not the droids you're looking for. I had his

01:25:31.800 phone number and I called him in his house and I said, Mr. Kolchinsky, this is Eric Edmonds. And

01:25:36.760 I'm assuming 30 kids a year for all these years. They're not going to remember me. So, but, but

01:25:40.440 before I even finished, I said, hi, this is Miss, I said, hi, Mr. Kolchinsky, this is Mr. Mr. This is

01:25:46.420 Eric Edmonds. I don't know if you remember me. And he goes, I remember you. I drove past your house a few

01:25:50.280 days ago. I'm wondering, did your parents ever move back to Africa? Like, wow. Wow. And we, and I just told him that

01:25:54.960 I'm living a phenomenal life and that I believe he was one of the significant contributors to that

01:25:59.980 for me. And, uh, anyway, that made me want to be a teacher. I wanted to be a teacher, but then I found

01:26:05.620 out as I was leaving school and I, I don't, you know, like I, I feel bad kind of saying this, but I

01:26:11.540 just, it seems to me, at least in the way it was when I was a kid growing up in Canada, we just,

01:26:16.080 we don't really respect teachers very much, not economically and not in other ways. Like the,

01:26:20.020 or the profession or the profession generally. And I was like, I don't, I'm not, I, I, I, I want to

01:26:25.180 teach, but I don't want to be treated like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so now that I'd sold the

01:26:28.760 business, I took a couple of years and traveled around the world and I started doing a little bit

01:26:32.440 of business speaking. Um, people started inviting me to speak, uh, about business because I'd sold my

01:26:37.120 company and that sort of thing. But under it, under it, I had a much deeper passion. And that was that

01:26:42.200 at 21 years old, I had been really sick. Like not, I'm not talking terminal or, you know, anything like

01:26:47.060 that. I just mean always on medication, always uncomfortable. What was wrong? Yeah. I had, I had,

01:26:51.700 uh, horrible sinus, permanent chronic sinus infections, throat infections. My tonsils would

01:26:56.540 be like golf balls in my throat, um, ear infections, digestive, really serious digestive,

01:27:00.980 cramps that were so bad that I couldn't speak or think, um, horrible cystic acne. Um, and, uh,

01:27:07.440 I always, I mean, always dripping from the, from the nose. It was just generally, I was just not a

01:27:12.280 healthy kid. And I wasn't like that younger, but sometime in somewhere between 12 and 21,

01:27:17.500 that all started developing. And I'd been to see doctors and specialists and needles and pills and

01:27:21.860 injections and even surgery. Finally, they recommended. And, um, uh, you know, I, I went to

01:27:27.700 a friend of mine talked me into going to a seminar, a sales seminar. It was Tony Robbins, you know, 21 years

01:27:32.660 old. And, um, I, I, I thought I was going to go there and learn about money and sure I did. But on the

01:27:38.300 last day, Tony spoke about food and I think he and I would agree on this point that many of the

01:27:42.700 things he shared about food back then are, are, um, not what he, not what he or I believe about

01:27:47.100 food, but they were a lot better than the way I was eating. And so I made a bunch of changes and

01:27:52.200 what did you change primarily, you know, uh, process, you know, the reduction of processed food,

01:27:56.700 uh, elimination of dairy products, um, elimination of meat at that point. And I'll come back to that

01:28:00.960 later. Cause that was, that was wrong. And there's something about, there's something about that.

01:28:05.220 That's interesting. But, um, and, and then the increase of, of good things. And within 30 days,

01:28:11.180 I had lost 35 pounds. 35 days, 30 days. Yeah. It was fast. Well, remember a lot of it's not fat.

01:28:18.780 A lot of it's inflammation, right? And which I didn't know that. Still a shock. Here's how big a

01:28:23.400 shock. I go visit my mom. I land in Johannesburg. I come down the, the, the, the, back then it was

01:28:28.620 like you came down these escalators into Young Smuts airport, Johannesburg International. Now you come

01:28:32.140 down there and there's greeting area and my mom, and I'm there with my girlfriend and my mom

01:28:35.900 looks at, at, at me and looks right through me. Doesn't even see. Then she looks at my girlfriend

01:28:41.080 who had like bright red hair. Robin, I know it's strawberry blonde. I'm sorry, but you have

01:28:45.380 strawberry blonde, but she had this bright hair. And so my mom saw her and then did the double take

01:28:50.260 back to me and then realized it was me. Such has was the change in my face. Like I, everything had

01:28:55.500 changed. And then I had a fascinating conversation with my doctor because he was kind of, he was calling

01:29:00.540 me to say, well, the surgery's coming up. Yeah. They wanted me to have my tonsils. Yeah. Which

01:29:03.960 is a serious, serious thing to do at 21 years old. Right. Right. And I said, I don't think I need

01:29:09.120 the surgery anymore. And we, you know, we're having this conversation. He goes, why not? And I go, I'm

01:29:12.380 not. He goes, yeah, but that happens. You know, the pain goes away and it'll be back. Yeah. You know,

01:29:17.120 you've waited this long. Yeah. And it was a sales pitch. It was, I, I'm looking at this guy going,

01:29:22.500 oh my God, it's a sales pitch. This is not about me. This is about revenue. I felt it in my bones. It was just

01:29:28.120 not right. And, and, and, and then I said to him, how long did you go to medical school for? Now you

01:29:32.980 have to know at 21 years old, I looked 18. I was a kid. I looked young. This must've been the most

01:29:37.280 impetuous, like, what's this? He goes, six years. And I go, can I just ask in the six years, how much

01:29:43.100 of that time did you spend studying nutrition? Right. Do you know the answer? Yeah. None. Yeah. Yeah.

01:29:48.020 Yeah. And that is consistent. About as much time as they spend studying scientific research. It's

01:29:52.200 amazing. It is quite stunning. And at that moment, I suddenly felt, the only way I can describe it is I felt

01:29:57.660 like I was on a plane and I just found out the pilot didn't learn how to land. Yeah. I have better

01:30:01.480 learn this myself. And I, I went in, I read everything I could. I went, I even finally went

01:30:06.740 to university. I didn't go very long because it was so painfully slow, but I went to go study

01:30:10.240 archeology. Why would I study archeology when I wanted to learn about food? Because I had a very

01:30:17.640 interesting moment where I learned about elephants and elephants, you know, when you, when you, when you put

01:30:23.400 them in captivity a hundred years ago, they would only live 10 years or so. Like it was a very

01:30:27.380 short lived life. And the zookeepers and such stumbled upon some, you know, at that point

01:30:33.820 in time, contemporary science. And that said that elephants in the wild lived seven or eight

01:30:37.420 years. And these guys became very concerned about their, well, I'd like to think they were

01:30:41.560 concerned about their elephants. They were concerned about their investment. And so what did they

01:30:45.120 figure out? And I'm reading this article and the article talks about the elephant's wild

01:30:49.200 diet and the elephant's captive diet. And while I, I can't look, I, I, I'm a little bit

01:30:56.980 of a grammar fascist sometimes. I mean, I shouldn't be, I don't have the right to be, I'm dyslexic

01:31:00.840 and I probably don't have the right to be, but when I spot something and I look at this wild

01:31:04.420 diet, the elephant doesn't have a wild diet. It doesn't, the elephant does not have a wild

01:31:09.800 diet. The elephant has a diet. It does not have a wild one. It might have a captive one,

01:31:14.080 but it doesn't have a wild one. And in that moment, I suddenly realized, wait a second

01:31:17.860 now, the word diet has been stolen. It's been hijacked. Like many words get stolen.

01:31:23.540 And what it actually means is way of life. It actually means way of life. The original

01:31:27.740 Greek, Latin, it's way of life. It's not, it's not temporary alteration to your current

01:31:31.980 eating patterns in order to fit into that outfit for that special occasion. That's not

01:31:34.800 what it means. And in that moment, I, I, I realized that in order to figure out how to,

01:31:40.160 and by the way, they took the elephant's wild diet and they reintroduced it to the captive

01:31:44.560 diet. Suddenly the captive elephants were living 30, 40, 50 years.

01:31:48.340 And at that point I said, what we have to be doing is looking at our own anthropology,

01:31:52.980 our own archeology, our own history, because food science has been so hijacked and adulterated

01:31:57.700 that we can't trust it. I felt like the roots of the issue were not going to be sold to us

01:32:02.400 by the food pyramid people. They weren't going to be sold to us by the food manufacturers.

01:32:06.020 The department of agriculture.

01:32:08.000 Not helpful, right?

01:32:09.220 No, you can certainly say that.

01:32:11.220 It's, it's so, I wrote this article and then about a year or two later, oh, I read an article

01:32:16.120 by S. Boyd Eaton. And he'd written it in like 1985. And it was, it basically suggested the

01:32:21.120 same thing. He was saying, look, there's a human diet. There is one. You know, we have

01:32:24.880 less, as a population on this planet, we have less genetic variants than, than the different

01:32:29.300 species of elephant have from each other. We're very closely related. There, there's a human

01:32:32.900 diet. And then Lauren Cordain released the paleo diet around about that time. And I felt partially

01:32:38.580 robbed and also vindicated all at the same time. But that, that kind of led me to real

01:32:44.840 passion and purpose. The problem was as a teacher, nobody would pay for that. Nobody

01:32:50.840 would pay for me to come and talk to them about, you know, anthropological nutrition or

01:32:54.740 what we would now call nutritional anthropology or even food psychology. They weren't interested

01:32:57.820 in that, but they were always interested in how I built a business and how I, and I'd

01:33:02.360 been involved in Hollywood movies and I built a, like, for example, this is fascinating.

01:33:06.240 We were doing Hollywood special effects and creatures and stuff for the movies. And so

01:33:10.220 then the military, through Jamie, Jamie Heinemann from Mythbusters, who used to work at the studio

01:33:13.800 long before I bought it, came to us one day and he said, can we build hyper-realistic trauma

01:33:18.240 simulation mannequins for the U.S. Army? Now, I don't know if you've ever done CPR training,

01:33:21.920 but the dummy you do it on is not real. It's, it's not even as real as a shop mannequin.

01:33:25.400 They are now. They are so real that medics opted out of the training program because interacting

01:33:30.300 with our mannequins was too traumatic for them. It was a fascinating time.

01:33:34.180 Wow, really?

01:33:34.300 Really fascinating. I mean, they were simulating IED interaction, to use the vernacular, right?

01:33:40.040 Sounds like there's an opening on the sex robot manufacturing side.

01:33:42.460 They approached us. The porn industry, we got a strong approach from them. We were like,

01:33:46.960 not at all. Not at all. We weren't. We knew there was treasure at the end of that rainbow,

01:33:52.740 but there was consequence. I had no way. But in the end, I would get invited to speak about

01:33:58.640 business because I had this, most business speakers are either theoreticians or they've

01:34:04.180 had one big success in a particular industry, or even they've had two or three successes in the

01:34:08.020 same industry. But I'd had a success in data capture, mobile computing, wireless networking,

01:34:12.420 then in Hollywood special effects, then in medical simulation, then in military research and

01:34:16.380 development.

01:34:16.700 Right, right. You're showing cross-platform generalizability.

01:34:19.700 Yeah, and so people are willing to pay for the nice seats in the plane and the good fees for

01:34:24.100 business speaking.

01:34:25.140 Yeah.

01:34:25.540 And so I started doing that. In fact, I mentioned earlier, I got that call from Tony Robbins,

01:34:29.560 and that kind of set me on fire. It was like, holy, I didn't know.

01:34:32.320 How did he come across you?

01:34:33.940 Did you ever hear of Chet Holmes?

01:34:36.200 Chet Holmes wrote…

01:34:36.920 The name rings a bell.

01:34:37.480 You want to check out Chet because, you know, just because of your fascination in sales and

01:34:41.280 marketing, he wrote a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine, a phenomenal bestseller. And

01:34:45.660 it turned out, he and I met at one point, and he said, when did you do my program? I've never

01:34:50.780 done your program. And he goes, but the way you talk and the way you write marketing campaigns,

01:34:54.380 they're so subtle, and they don't feel like marketing, and they're so converting. Why are they

01:34:58.540 so good if you didn't do my training program? Which is a slightly arrogant question, but he was like

01:35:01.600 that. And years later, we were having dinner one day, and he was always very inquisitive. And he

01:35:07.140 asked lots of questions, and he asked me about my history, and I mentioned Kirby. And he goes,

01:35:11.080 oh, I get it now. He used to work for Charlie Munger, and he had designed all of the marketing

01:35:15.720 campaigns that we were using at Kirby. So, I had been trained in sales and marketing by Chet Holmes

01:35:20.220 as a kid, even though we never met.

01:35:22.160 I see.

01:35:22.800 And so, he was working with Tony, and one day, he had told Tony about me a few times,

01:35:27.600 but I wasn't a speaker, so Tony was never going to put me on stage. But then, you know,

01:35:33.560 weird confluence of events, you know, happen, and Chet sadly gets very sick, and he ends up

01:35:39.280 passing away. But he always said to me, I've given you this last gift. He always told me that,

01:35:42.880 and I never knew what the gift was. I never knew. But then, about 11 days after he passed away,

01:35:47.760 he was scheduled to speak at a conference in Fiji with Tony, and I get this phone call,

01:35:52.520 would you come and take Chet's spot?

01:35:54.100 Uh-huh, uh-huh.

01:35:55.020 And I hadn't been on a stage in three years. I had no business. That's like,

01:35:59.440 I'm not even driving go-karts, and you want me to go race Formula One today? But I said yes,

01:36:03.760 and I went, and it just, Tony and I hit it off immediately. He was so good to me in every way.

01:36:10.380 We didn't know about, because I've been talking to Tony and working with him to some degree over

01:36:14.720 the last, I guess it's almost six months to a year, something like that. But I don't think we

01:36:18.620 knew that connection when we met in Mexico.

01:36:20.400 No, I don't know. I don't think we, yeah. No, but he was, he immediately, I remember flying

01:36:25.260 into Fiji, and I thought, if I really rock this, I mean, if I really rock it, I know it's an

01:36:29.020 opportunity. I could get on the list. They'd call me again. By the time the plane had taxied to the

01:36:32.880 airport, I said, screw that. That's not big enough thinking. If I really rock this, I will become

01:36:36.140 the list. And in effect, that happened. Tony and I hit it off immediately. They told me he would

01:36:40.480 only stay in the room for 15 minutes. And it was so interesting. He calls me, and his team comes and says,

01:36:47.000 Tony wants to meet you in the hallway. He's never met you. And by the way, he's only going to stay

01:36:52.160 in the room for 15 minutes when you're on stage. If he leaves, it's a good sign. He's either going

01:36:56.460 to leave or he's going to take you off the stage. Those are the only options. But he wants to meet

01:37:00.240 you in the hallway. So I walk into the hallway, and I, you know, he's big. And he goes, how are you

01:37:06.240 feeling about your presentation? And the truth is, they were asking me to do a presentation on 11 days

01:37:11.580 prep with lying on somebody else's slides. I don't even usually use slides. And, and, and I said,

01:37:17.860 well, it's not the ideal circumstance, you know, and I just want to be honest. And Tony goes,

01:37:22.940 well, you could be a lot more confident. And, but I remembered, you know, Tony, Tony always said

01:37:30.640 some person, if nobody in the history of calming down has ever calmed down because somebody told

01:37:34.580 him to calm down. In other words, me becoming meek was not going to be helpful at that point. So I just

01:37:39.520 said, what the hell? I mean, I'm in all the way. I go, oh, I'm plenty confident. Look,

01:37:43.300 the reason I'm here is that your other business speakers are too busy operating their businesses.

01:37:47.440 I'm a proper business owner. That's why I could do this on note of notice. So it might not be exactly

01:37:51.240 the presentation you're expecting, but it's going to be fantastic. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And then Tony

01:37:54.860 goes, well, all right then. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and that's better than the scared

01:37:59.300 rabbit approach. It was then now this leads to kind of a funny little offsuit here where he goes into

01:38:04.980 his team and he goes, I like this guy. I think I want to introduce him myself. And he wasn't planning to introduce

01:38:08.800 me because he didn't want to be near what could be a train wreck, but now he's met me. Meanwhile,

01:38:12.680 it's mostly a Chinese audience. So the guy who's introducing me is going to introduce me in Chinese,

01:38:17.640 not in English. So they've changed the translation. And, and Tony's like, where's, where's his bio?

01:38:23.280 Where they go, well, we threw it out. We trained, we translated to Chinese. We threw it out. What do you

01:38:28.180 mean? We'll translate it back. Well, I don't know if you've played that game very often, but English to

01:38:32.620 Chinese back to English. So it ends up like the bio says, you know, Eric's Eric's not really a speaker.

01:38:38.380 He's a, he's a business guy. He started his first business and he sold it nine years later.

01:38:43.240 By the time it gets translated back and given to Tony, Tony walks up on stage and he goes,

01:38:47.140 you guys, I just met our next speaker out in the hallway. I'm so excited to introduce you to him.

01:38:51.740 He started his first business when he was only nine years old.

01:38:57.320 I'm like, oh no. But he stayed in the room for three and a half hours and he didn't take me off

01:39:03.220 the stage. And then he booked me for a year and he coached me and he was sweet to me and generous

01:39:07.780 to me in every possible way. And that really turned me on and I, and, and set me off on the

01:39:13.400 path of, I'm going to be a professional teacher. I'm going to do this for a living.

01:39:16.260 So, okay. So fill me in a bit here on the relationship between the business speaking and

01:39:20.640 your interest in, in diet. And also let's, let's make a bit of a foray into what the consequences for

01:39:27.680 you and the broader consequences have been of learning to teach and also concentrating on

01:39:33.280 diet. Maybe we can close this, this session up with that. Sure. So the, the, the short version

01:39:39.380 is that, um, I believe that the single most valuable professional skill that exists in the

01:39:45.620 world is communication. Um, the ability to speak publicly in front of a camera and audience is

01:39:51.140 everything. Every, anybody can add a zero to their, to their income by learning to communicate

01:39:55.660 effectively in my opinion. So that was the first big impact for me. When I made that transition,

01:39:59.660 it meant that everything accelerated, every opportunity accelerated, every, my network

01:40:04.160 accelerated, everything changed when I decided that I was willing to do that, put myself at risk,

01:40:09.060 put myself in front of an audience or a camera. In the meantime, of course, I had this health focus

01:40:13.440 that was my biggest passion, but I couldn't find a venue for it. There was no, there was no economic

01:40:18.080 venue for that. So I kept doing it because I wasn't in it for the money, but I had to do something

01:40:21.960 for money separately. So I kept teaching, but then my clients started asking me, well, wait a minute,

01:40:26.880 where do you get all this energy from? You don't do jet lag. You're, you're on stage for 15 hours a

01:40:30.360 day. You know, you, you, you, you never look tired. You never get sick. What's going on? So I started

01:40:36.100 teaching nutritional principles to my business clients. And what I was basically teaching them

01:40:43.260 was an early version of this concept of the evolution gap. Again, this gap that opens up between

01:40:48.560 our innovation and our genetics and, and the food industry has raped and pillaged that gap to no

01:40:53.440 end. And that's why we have the prolific explosion of type two diabetes and obesity and all that stuff

01:40:58.460 that we have is that we have instincts. Which is an unbridled catastrophe. It's, it's, and, and the fact

01:41:03.640 that it's not on the, you know, if we look at the press today, if you, if the press were forced

01:41:07.860 to cover things equally, minute, minute to consequence, you know, equally, then there'd be a sliver

01:41:15.780 on gun crime. Yeah. And then there'd be a pie chart of about, you know, 55% that would be about

01:41:21.840 diabetes, obesity. Yeah. It'd be pie chart. Yeah. Yeah. Meat pie. Meat pie. Hopefully. But, you know,

01:41:27.440 so I started teaching my clients and ultimately teaching them a concept of rewilding, personal

01:41:32.120 rewilding, rather than sort of the Yellowstone National Park ecological rewilding. It's like,

01:41:36.300 how do you take advantage of the unbelievable things that exist in the modern world, but understand that

01:41:41.620 you're ultimately a stone-aged human and that your instincts are mismatched with your current

01:41:46.460 environment. And, and so I started teaching them this and, and, and I was so excited about it and

01:41:52.220 they loved it, but I would see them six months later and they would still be the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

01:41:56.200 So then I got to work on. It's very hard for people to change their, their, the manner in which

01:41:59.940 they eat or live because they're the same thing. Then I solved that problem. And I solved that by

01:42:06.040 developing something that we call behavioral change dynamics. And it sounds a little weird. So you're a

01:42:10.280 clinical psychologist and I'm going to talk to you about psychology, but I just, I, you know,

01:42:13.720 when you grow up in the household, I did, you had to become a practical psychologist. It was a

01:42:16.920 survival thing. And I got very good at figuring out why people do what they do, especially around

01:42:22.320 food. So I took this concept of behavioral change dynamics, which is an educational construct that I

01:42:27.360 use for creating programs, but I added it to nutritional principles. And I created a 90 day program for

01:42:32.100 people on that, that runs them through a week by week, strategically designed process of

01:42:37.600 neurological change and nutritional change at perfect intervals. And so what happened was I did

01:42:43.580 it for eight people and all eight of them got results, which is statistically not likely.

01:42:48.880 Then I did it for another eight people, another eight people. And then one of my clients is a

01:42:52.760 fairly famous author in America named Paul Sheely. And he wrote me one day, he called me and he goes,

01:42:57.500 Eric, what have you done to me? My marketing team just set up a webinar page and the picture on the

01:43:00.760 webinar page doesn't look anything like me. And we only took it three months ago. And that's how much

01:43:04.840 people change in 90 days when you, when you, but the, the, the, so he said, you know, where's your

01:43:09.480 website? And I don't have a website. It's not a business. It's a hobby. I just do it for my business

01:43:13.120 clients. And he goes, you better put up a website. I'm about to tell my clients about you. We had about

01:43:17.180 a hundred clients a year at that point. They had to come to me to buy it. It was the only way. There

01:43:20.240 was no website. There was nothing. In a week, 200 people signed up and it was like, and it's, and it's

01:43:25.440 $1,500. It's not a light expense. And then it happened again. A guy named Colin Sprake in

01:43:30.820 Vancouver. He did the same thing, told his network, 200 people. Then another guy named

01:43:35.300 Vishen Lakhiani, who's the founder of Mindvalley, who's my digital publisher. He did it. And then

01:43:40.400 he did it for 200 of his employees. And then he told his clients about it. And then where can

01:43:44.320 people find out about this? Getwildfit.com. Getwildfit.com. Getwildfit.com. Getwildfit.com.

01:43:51.380 Okay. Well, we'll definitely put that in the description. Make sure you have your people send a

01:43:55.020 descriptor for the, for the, for the description of the video. We'll even give them like a way to do

01:44:00.800 like a two week trial. You know, we'll, we'll see. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But the, so, so then

01:44:06.180 he, he, 1100 people signed up and we got to a place where, you know, now a hundred thousand

01:44:10.100 people in 130 countries around the world have done this program. A hundred thousand. A hundred

01:44:14.160 thousand people. Wow. And, and, you know, we have countless cases of type, type two diabetes is a

01:44:18.980 fascinating one. We never intended to do that, but it just started happening. And people would call us

01:44:23.040 and go, Eric, I used to be diabetic. Now I'm pre-diabetic. I'm like, that just irritates me. Remember,

01:44:26.460 I'm a little bit, a little, a little bit grammar fastest, right? That irritates me. Pre-indicates

01:44:30.820 direction. Plus from a prescription perspective, I would put you there. That's more post-diabetic.

01:44:36.340 Which I, which, which I, I, I, I, one day I said that I was talking to Mark Hyman, Dr. Mark Hyman. And

01:44:41.320 I said, no, they're post-diabetic. Yes, absolutely. And so funny enough, that's, you know, you and I

01:44:46.540 spoke about that book in, and you introduced me to Michaela to talk about that book. Yes. So we have a book

01:44:51.240 coming out that I co-wrote with a doctor, um, about reversing diabetes, which was, you know,

01:44:56.020 just again, closing the evolution gap. It's like, when you understand why our cravings put us in a

01:45:00.540 certain direction and why the food industry does certain things, you can, you can find your freedom.

01:45:05.060 Yeah. Anyway, I, suddenly this thing that was never about money that couldn't pay for itself has

01:45:10.820 become, uh, you know, the Canadian government, the Canadian, I get, I get this letter. Can you,

01:45:16.260 can you come to Ottawa, please? Yes, I can come to Ottawa. I'm standing. I still, again,

01:45:20.780 I, I, you know, every now and again, the seven-year-old you looks at your life and goes,

01:45:24.300 holy crap. You know, like, you can imagine what it was like standing in, in Kerner studios when I

01:45:29.460 bought the studios and I'm standing where Pixar was made, Star Wars, Photoshop, you know, and the

01:45:34.200 seven-year-old in me is going, well, now I'm standing on the Senate floor. Uh, the very day that

01:45:39.400 the legalization of marijuana was ascended to law that day, I'm standing on the Senate floor and I'm

01:45:43.980 getting a medal from, from the Speaker of the Senate. And it's because of our work in improving the

01:45:48.820 quality of people. The direct quote was improving the quality of people's lives. Okay. So how did

01:45:51.940 it come about that you got a medal for that? And what did that signify? And how did they find out?

01:45:55.920 And why did they believe you? Um, it was, uh, a Senator came to a presentation that I had done

01:46:01.480 apparently years before in Vancouver and she just started following my work. Yeah. And she started

01:46:05.920 following my work and, um, seeing what we were doing in the world and, uh, you know, submitted me

01:46:10.680 for a nomination for this thing. And, and what was the medal? It was, uh, it was, uh, it was called a

01:46:15.000 Senate 150 medal. They, they, they, they struck a bunch of these medals. They said, um, in celebration,

01:46:18.980 Oh, so a celebration of the 150th. Yeah. And it was for, it was for unsung heroes. They, they said

01:46:24.000 it's for people that are doing stuff behind the scenes and making big things happen. Which is where

01:46:27.420 things are always done that are real, by the way, behind the scenes, because people just go out and

01:46:31.600 do them. It was a huge gift. And I have to tell you that on one side, I felt very, um, I don't feel

01:46:38.060 like I go out into the world seeking any kind of recognition, but it felt good. And, but more than that,

01:46:42.640 it made me feel responsible. I was like, well, I have to live up to that. Yeah. You know, I really

01:46:48.060 have to live up to that. And, um, and you know, and, and I feel like I am, I'm, I, you know, I, this,

01:46:52.940 this work that I'm doing is mission oriented for me. I, I can't name the country at the moment,

01:46:56.880 but I can tell you that a minister of another country's parliament did my program and did very

01:47:01.900 well with it. And then contacted me to see if we could work, um, in their country to help fight their

01:47:06.400 very serious obesity and diabetes problem. Great, great. Well, congratulations, man. That's a big deal.

01:47:10.500 And it's a special country because this country doesn't have food lobbyists or drug lobbyists,

01:47:14.800 which means that we can do clinical trials there without interference. Oh, oh, oh, oh, well,

01:47:18.920 that's great. Yeah. So fingers crossed that that'll happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's for sure. Well,

01:47:22.780 look, this is a good time and, uh, and place to bring this section of our discussion to a close.

01:47:29.180 Um, I often, as you people who are watching and listening know, uh, flip to the Daily Wire Plus side to do

01:47:35.200 something more autobiographical, but we've kind of done that here. I think what we'll talk about instead on the

01:47:39.480 Daily Wire Plus side is your experience with the Hamza people, which, and your experience is in

01:47:44.800 Africa. So if you're interested in that and you should be, I would say go over to the Daily Wire

01:47:48.680 Plus side, uh, so to speak, the dark side, you know, and you might want to consider, um, sending

01:47:54.380 them some support at the moment anyways, because, uh, YouTube is on our case in a big way on the Daily

01:47:59.340 Wire Plus platform. You know, they've canceled three of my shows in the last month and I think are

01:48:04.940 likely to cancel a few of the ones that I've recorded in the last week, by the way. And so

01:48:08.960 that's not so good. And, and, uh, they're really on the case, uh, you know, on Shapiro's case and on,

01:48:13.860 uh, um, Candace, uh, Candace Owens case and, um, and of course, Matt Walsh, all those people.

01:48:21.240 So, um, it's a good time to show them some support if you're inclined to do such things.

01:48:25.300 So why don't you join us over there? And, uh, Eric, we'll thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:48:29.860 Thank you. You've done all sorts of interesting things. It was fun walking through what you've

01:48:32.920 been up to. Um, I'm going to be very interested to watch what happens with you on the diet and

01:48:38.520 politics front, because that's, you know, if our legacy media, such as it is, had an ounce of

01:48:43.600 cents, there'd be a hell of a lot more front page headlines about the fact that everybody in the

01:48:47.860 whole goddamn West is fat and diabetic and insane because of the diet that they were enticed to eat

01:48:54.620 by, by psychopathic marketers on the department of agricultural side who were told by the very

01:49:00.800 bloody consultants that they hired that they were going to produce an epidemic of unparalleled

01:49:05.080 magnitude and then proceeded to do exactly that for generations. And right. And here we are.

01:49:10.380 And let's say this on the other side of the paywall. I'm going to suggest that had they not done that

01:49:14.660 there, we would not have experienced the pandemic that we did. Yeah. Well, we know that there were,

01:49:20.140 there was almost no death among people who didn't have comorbidity. And one of the major

01:49:23.580 comorbidities was being obese and it's a comorbidity with virtually everything terrible that there is.

01:49:28.880 So that wouldn't surprise me in the least. Yeah. All right. So everyone off to the Daily Wire Plus

01:49:34.320 side and thank you again, Eric, for speaking to me today. Thanks for having me. It's been fun.

01:49:37.960 You bet. You bet.

374. Trial, Error, and Adventure ｜ Eric Edmeades

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