Trial, Error, and Adventure ｜ Eric Edmeades

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You know, one of the things I found really fascinating about generally sales and marketing is that people are so afraid of rejection and I think it’s selfish. I think it’s really selfish to be afraid of that rejection because if you believe in what you’re selling, then you have to ask yourself, is my 30 seconds of rejection feeling more important to me than the pain I might be resolving for this person over the next few decades of their life? Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I’m speaking with serial entrepreneur and public speaker, Eric Ed Meads. We discuss his early experiences with homelessness, the extent and detriment of alcoholism and illness that preoccupied his father, the changes you can make to restructure your physiological responses, especially to fear, the relationship between trust and sales and marketing general communication and the world of possibility that opens up to you if you embrace the unknown, the potentially dangerous and above all, that which calls to you. So we met in Mexico. Yeah, Puebla. Right, we were there for their festival of ideas. We went to an old library afterwards, which was very cool. It was the oldest library I think in North America. I think in all the Americas, yeah. It was super cool building. You know what was fascinating is that they had no electricity in there and no climate control and millions of dollars and more than money, the value of all those books. But the building was built like well enough to do the climate control, the humidity control in the 1500s. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. That was a good trip. That was a cool city and a good festival. Yeah, yeah. So I was looking at your biography today. I figured we might as well walk through it. It said, let’s start with this. Well, living in Canada, your family was, you were born into an apartheid era, South Africa and then immigrated with your family to Canada. But you said, well, living in Canada, your childhood quickly became what can only be described as a rollercoaster ride of experience, including a period of homelessness in Northern Canada at the vulnerable age of 15. Northern Canada is not a good place to be homeless. Actually, I would put to you, and I think you’ll be with me on this, it’s a great place because it forces resolution very quickly. So what happened at 15? You know, my dad and my mom split up when I was very young and it was a very good thing they did to my dad was at that stage having, let’s say, an irresponsible relationship with alcohol. And so they had split up and then he’d sobered up. And my mom and I had a disagreement, a teenage disagreement at some stage that resulted in me rebelling and going to live with my father. And so off to live with my father, after all these years, I’ll finally get to live with my father. And then he found this rebellious teenager very difficult to live with in his two bedroom apartment and sent me to boarding school. And the boarding school that I went to was one of the greatest gifts of my life, but it was also very demanding. Like, you know, at 13 years old, we trained to do a snowshoe race and it was a 26-mile snowshoe race. We’re 13. It’s not a relay race. It’s 26 actual miles. Snowshoes are very difficult to move. Heavy and it’s minus 40 outside. Completely different gait. Yeah, it’s a very different thing. And that’s just a sample of what was tough there. But the bigger thing that was going on at the school is the school was beginning to wake up to the realities of being in Canada. You know, they used corporal punishment and, you know, very harsh winter programs and they were starting to get a lot of flak for being too hard on kids. And so the school was trying to transition to be more acceptable, I suppose. And during that transition, my class in particular was in the wrong space. We got the worst of both sides of that. And so halfway through grade 10, I made the decision to leave, to leave the school. And my dad disagreed with this decision quite heavily. But as I actually, you know, control my body, they were not able to get my body to the school and I just refused to go. And then my dad refused to let me stay in his home. And so my response to that was to walk out the door into Edmondson. And I was 15 years old. And it’s funny, about a week later, my dad tracked me down wherever I was in the city. And he told me that I had apparently won a $2, 000. T hi s i s a l o n g t im e a g o . I t^{'} s a l o t o f m o n ey .$ 2,000 bursary or bursary for leadership skills or something the school had acknowledged me for. And he never told me that before. I don’t know how that had slipped his mind in my, I mean, it might have been good to know at the beginning of the year. But at that point, he offered me $500 in c a s hi f I w o u l d g o ba c k t o t h esc h oo l an d t h eo t h er$ 1,500 of my bursary he would give me in cash once I finished grade 10. And this was in what year? 1986. Right. So that’s the equivalent of about 2,000 Bursary for leadership skills. Maybe there was something inherent. Maybe there was something. I mean, I had a lot of respect with my friends at that stage. Oddly, I was the relationship counselor for everybody. If somebody liked somebody or their relationship, I couldn’t. I had no understanding of women, girls in my life. For me, I couldn’t do it, but I was very good at handling that kind of stuff for other people. So I think that I had a sort of coach attitude anyway. So yeah, I had the respect. I see. Well, let’s go right back to the beginning. Your family moved to Canada from South Africa in the 70s. How old were you? I became Canadian at eight. We kind of went back and forth a few times before I finally became a citizen. Do you have any memories of South Africa? Oh, yeah. And I mean, I feel in many ways, I feel just as much South African as I do Canadian. I’ve maintained a very… My family’s been in South Africa. They were wagon train people. We’re talking ford trekkers. Like, they were original South African settlers. So I have a very strong attachment to the country and very strong memories from childhood and beyond. My mother’s grand… My grandmother’s grandfather was the minister in the parliament in the, I think it’s called 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. And on the other side, my dad’s great-grandfather, T.F. Dreher, was the archaeologist who discovered the Floresbad skull, which is, until very recently, the oldest homo sapien skull ever found. So I had a very deep, deep history there. Right, right, right. So why did your family move to Canada? You know, it’s a funny thing. My grandmother had this little dog, little schnauzer type thing, and it was the most racist little dog you can imagine. It was terrible. 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. But can you blame the dog? I mean, is it the dog’s fault that it’s a racist? No, it’s not. I mean, it was raised that way. It was simply picking up on the fears and racism that my grandparents had in their life. So then that always made me question, because my grandfather was a racist, like a serious racist. He wasn’t a white supremacist. He had an order of things, but he was clearly racist. But is that his fault? It’s not the dog’s fault. Is it his fault? Maybe not. He was brought up that way. But for some reason, my parents, they didn’t like it. They saw it. They didn’t like it. They were opposed to it. And they became involved in the ANC. And my dad was studying law at Witts University. And he became an anthropologist. Do you know, he really wanted to be because of his grandfather. But his parents were insistent that he went to law school. So he went to Witts and then he went to McGill here in Montreal. And then he went to Dow and taught law as a professor at Dalhousie in Halifax. But underneath it all, what he really wanted to do was sciences. And so when he finally kind of left the law, that’s when I gave you a copy of this. I read his book. Yeah, yeah. I forgot about that. Megafauna. It’s a very good book. Yeah, that book details out the, what would you say, the depredations of human beings over about a 15,000 year period. The fact that we were integrally involved with the disappearance of megafauna everywhere around the world, but particularly in the Western Hemisphere, right? Where the animals hadn’t adapted to the presence of human predators because there’s a huge collapse of megafauna species about 15, between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago in the Western Hemisphere, which pretty much corresponds with the arrival of two-legged hunters, right? Who took everything, the mammoths, the big mammals. After having gotten rid of the giant tortoises, your father writes about that. That’s a very good book, by the way. Yeah, I enjoyed reading it. I thought you would like it. And it’s funny about a week after. Megafauna, I think it’s called. That’s right. Megafauna.com, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. Well, and for people who are watching listening, if you’re interested in such things, Megafauna is an extremely interesting book. It’s a jaunt through prehistory on the biological side, but also an analysis of the relationship between human hunting capacity and our particular ecological niche, which is, well, you might say, which is stunningly effective hunter because we hunt together in groups and virtually no animal. Animals had evolved all sorts of protective mechanisms in relationship to other animals, but none of those were particularly useful against human beings. Well, you know, it’s interesting. Sometimes when people debate the megafauna extinction, human hunting kind of thing, they’re like, but then why are there still megafauna in Africa? Yeah. It doesn’t make sense if humans started there, but it’s exactly that because they were the frog in the hot water. Humans evolved that innovative capacity in Africa. And those animals have natural fear avoidance. Elephants in Africa, if you’re, I spent a lot of time in Africa, if you’re walking in the bush, as I’ve done many times, and I came, for example, once walking down into a river bed, and there were 14 lions sitting in the river. Well, those lions, they’re afraid of you. Grizzlies are not afraid of you. If a grizzly is afraid of you, it’s because it learned it in its consciousness, in its experience of humans, but it doesn’t have that DNA thing. That book has actually been a big part of even my journey because my quest into health and nutrition and that kind of stuff really stemmed from my dad’s fascinating with human history. So that book, that’s been a good adventure. Now, did you establish a good relationship with your father after having things broken? How long did that take after the events of your adolescence? You know, very slowly and very quickly. It was one of those things that would happen in fits and starts. I mean, in one sense, it was never really that bad. It was just brutally honest. You know, it was not, I mean, I would say that, you know, during his, I think in alcoholism, we talk about a practicing alcoholic. I’m like, I don’t know what they’re practicing. They’re good enough at that already. But during that window, I would say that at that time, there would have been, say, you know, language or behavior that you might have thought was abusive. But then after that, the discord between us, I wouldn’t have called it abusive. I just would have called it direct. It was like we would disagree on things and strongly and we had our opinions. But we still had respect, you know, a lot of respect. And so that was very easy for us to rebuild a friendship upon. And so we’ve been very close pretty much ever since. Even in the month when I went back to him, at now 16, I had turned 16, I went to him and I said, look, I think you get at this point, you’re not going to win this. I’m not going back to school. But if you don’t let me move back in with you, the school will not let me go to school. They wouldn’t let me go to school without a parent signing off on something. Actually, I was just shy of my 16th birthday. And if I waited any longer, I’d lose that whole academic year. And he found my argument convincing and allowed me to move back in and sign my school paperwork and let me finish grade 10. And despite having missed, despite missing three months of that year or four months of that year. So did you go back to school at that time? Not at that school. Oh, not at that school. I see. And I did finish that. And pretty much from that point on, my dad and I began rebuilding that relationship. But I’d say that relationship was forged by my dad taking us on our canoe trips in Lac L’Orange and taking us up to Yellowknife and taking us into the wilderness. I think that even those things formed the foundation of why we have the relationship even we have today. Mm hmm. Okay. So let’s go back to when you were eight. You said that that was when you became a Canadian citizen. Yeah. Okay. So what is your family doing in Canada at that point? Your dad is in the legal business. Yeah. Then and your mom? My mom at that stage, she was really a mom and then she wanted to go and finish her own education. So she went to DAL as well. She went to DAL and did a master’s in social work. So I had my dad, the at that point practicing alcoholic lawyer or law professor and my mom, the, you know, studying social work. But going back to citizenship, that was kind of interesting because you see, my brother sponsored us for our citizenship ultimately because he was, we, apparently we snuck my pregnant mother into the country and she birthed my brother in Montreal. And so on that basis, we then made our bid for Canadian citizenship. And I have vague memories of this, but I know the family story. We’re facing the judge, you know, at that, I don’t know how it works these days, but you actually had to prove that you knew some things about Canada. And so the judge is asking my dad a bunch of questions, trivia questions about Canada. You guys, are you guys really here? And he says to my dad, how many provinces are there in Canada? And my dad says nine. And the judge goes, and the judge, it turned out the judge is Afrikaans or not Afrikaans. He’s from South Africa, but he’s British and we’re Afrikaans, we’re Boers. Turns out that our relatives would have fired at each other in the Boer war. So weird, you know, two generations later, he’s swearing us in for citizenship in a new country. Anyway, so he says to my dad, I’m going to let you take another shot at that question. And my dad goes, well, and this is 1978, not too long after the FLQ and all that stuff that was happening in early Canada. And my dad goes, well, fine, 10 if you want to count Quebec, but it doesn’t seem like they want to be here, which set up a really fun conversation. The exam was over and we were welcomed into the country. So now your father was a law professor where? At Dell. At Dell. At Dell. And what branch of law did he teach about and practice? Product liability, I think, was a big part of where he went. And then after that, he practiced a lot in contract law, employment law, that sort of stuff. And when he went into practice after sobering up and so forth, then he mostly worked in, you know, business structuring, contract law, employment law, that sort of thing. And was your parents’ relationship when you were about eight at that time, was it starting to shake already? Yeah, yeah. And was that alcohol-related fundamentally? It was. Yeah, yeah. My dad says there were two causes of his alcoholism. One was that my mother used to like to wash her hair with beer, you know, as the tradition was. And she would only ever use half a beer. He had to finish the other half. Oh, yeah. So he likes to blame her for that, an Adam and Eve type situation. But I think the real cause was that, you know, at 20-something years old, being asked to teach law, in a branch of law he didn’t learn despite graduating first in his class, was stressful for him. And he found that, again, half a beer would take the edge off before his lectures. Yeah, well, alcohol is an extraordinarily pernicious drug. And if you’re inclined towards it, you can be inclined towards it because you’re sensitive to its anxiety-reducing properties. Or you can be sensitive to it because it enhances social communication. Or because it produces a psychomotor high like cocaine. Or all of those at once. And if you’re particularly predisposed to alcoholism, you can experience all three at once. And then in Montreal, Frank Irvin, great old guy, looked like Ernest Hemingway. He had a monkey farm on St. Kitts and him and his woman, Roberta, I can’t remember Roberta’s last name. She was quite a piece of work too, a real cool person. They had this monkey ranch on St. Kitts and they used to go down there and study the effects of alcohol on green monkeys, which 5% of whom would drink Tacoma on first exposure. And they had videotapes of these damn monkeys drinking and it looked like a frat party. But 5% of them on first exposure would drink Tacoma. And those were the monkeys that had a biological predisposition to alcoholism. Alcohol is a really bad drug. 50% of murders take place in an alcohol-fueled environment. Either the victim or the perpetrator or both is drunk. It’s almost the sole cause of domestic abuse. It’s almost the sole cause of so-called date rape. You dig into criminal behaviour deeply enough, well hell you don’t have to dig much at all before you find alcohol. It’s also the only drug we know that actually makes people more aggressive. And not merely because they don’t know what they’re doing. We did experiments at McGill showing that if you took drunk people and put them in a competitive environment where they could be aggressive and had them keep track of their aggression so they were actually conscious of it, they became more aggressive even rather than less. So yeah, alcohol is bad news and it can turn perfectly good people into quite the impulsive and dim-witted monsters. Well, if you give people that massive boost of sugar and then suppress their inhibitions, that’s going to happen. I was 21 years old in Prince George and I had a night like that. And I mean it wasn’t terrible. I just woke up in the morning, you know, praying at the porcelain altar. I was making that deal with God. If you just make me feel better, I’ll stop this. I won’t do it anymore. And then I didn’t. I haven’t had alcohol since. Oh really? Since you were 21? I quit drinking when I was 27. You know, I mean northern Albertan culture was pretty damn hard drinking culture like most northern places. And a lot, a number of my friends ended up alcoholic, you know. And all the people that I was in high school with and in college with were extremely hard drinkers. And I drank quite a lot till I was 27. And then I found that I couldn’t, well first of all, my life was taking a pretty professional turn. And second, I found that there was no bloody way I could write seriously and think seriously on an ongoing basis if I was hung over. So and I got married and I was going to have kids and I thought, yeah, enough of this. And so I had a bit of, I thought when I was 50 that I might be able to drink again socially. And I toyed with it for about a year and found out that I was probably just as stupid at 50 as I had been at like 25 and decided to dispense with that too, which was definitely You know, I’ve watched too as I’ve gone around the world, I’ve met very, very many people in many, many social occasions. And because I don’t drink anything at all now, if I go out and watch people drinking, it makes everybody stupid and fuzzy minded. And you know, the problem is, is when you’re drinking, you think you’re cool, but you know, you have those same delusions that Homer Simpson’s friend Barney had when he was drinking that you’re this kind of, you know, elegant and sophisticated comedian. And it just makes everybody stupid. I would argue that the real problem is that it does that. Yeah, well, that’s the first drink does that. My dad tells this, you know, he’s, I hope I get the family story right, but he’s a kid of 17 or 18. And he’s kind of struggling at that point with school. And he goes to a family function and he’s got that one uncle who’s a real jerk. And the uncle pins him down at the dining room table and he says to him, he goes, so Baz, are your grades a function of your inability to commit to work? Or are you just stupid? And it was such a nasty question. And my dad immediately, you know, he blushed and you know, people who blush know that they’re blushing and then that causes more blushing, which of course causes the eye watering. And he just, it was a devastating moment for him. And then about two weeks later, he and his dad are sitting and his dad, unfortunately, was an alcoholic and, you know, didn’t live very long as a consequence, but they’re sitting on the deck having a little bit of a beer. And then he goes in and the uncle does the same thing. So we solved the great mystery. Are you stupid or lazy? And my dad did not blush. And my dad said, you know, I would entertain your question if I thought there was any sincerity in all of this. I recognize that it’s just through your own smallness that you’re attempting to hurt me. I’m going to let it go. And then at that point, my dad is like, it’s socially irresponsible not to go out without at least a beer. Uh huh. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it definitely, it definitely is a confidence enhancing substance. But it’s an illusion. It’s sensitive to that. Damn right. It’s an illusion. And, uh, you know, when I say that as someone who quite enjoyed drinking, I mean, I had quite the blast as a consequence of it. But I also noticed that especially when I was in Montreal and starting to grow up, let’s say, and take on serious responsibilities that every time I had done something or said something that I regretted, it was when I was drinking. And I thought at one point, maybe I don’t want to live a life where I’m continually or even sporadically wishing that I hadn’t said or done something. No, and I’m very much unlikely to do that if I’m sober and clear headed. That’s exactly what happened to me in Prince George. It was exactly that conversation with myself. And initially I decided six months off and I just never went back to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the other thing I think that happened too is I started drinking when I was pretty young, like 14, you know, and I had a certain degree of social anxiety. I mean, I’m very extroverted, but, uh, well, I think everybody has a certain degree of social anxiety when they’re like 14, because like, what the hell do you know? You know, and that’s probably exacerbated around girls and, uh, that alcohol, because it enhances sociability and also suppresses anxiety is a good social anxiety medication. But the problem is, is you don’t learn how to conduct yourself as a sober individual in social circumstances. And you learn very rapidly to rely on the alcohol, not only as a social lubricant, but as the basis of your social behavior. And I would say, you know, the young people who are watching listening, that’s a stupid plan. You should learn how to be in a social group with others when you’re sober so that you bloody well know how to do it. Especially if you’re planning to do anything even vaguely serious and responsible with your life, which is, you know, probably something you should be doing. A good friend of mine, exactly my age within, within a few months, um, I quit at 21, he quit at 31 and we were both 34 or 35. We were out with some friends and we’re dancing and having fun and I’m just me and I’m actually more introverted. So I’m not super outgoing, but I’m still having a great time. I’m dancing, I’m having fun. And he comes up to me and he goes, how do you do that? He goes, I don’t, I can’t do that now without the alcohol. I go, cause I learned to do it without the alcohol. In a world filled with uncertainties, it’s crucial to be ready for whatever comes your way. Whether it’s a natural disaster, a sudden emergency or unforeseen circumstances, having a reliable food storage system can provide you with peace of mind and the assurance that you and your loved ones will be well taken care of. Right now, My Patriot Supply is offering major savings on their four week emergency food kit to help you stay prepared for anything. Go to preparewithpeterson.com and grab this special price before it ends. Your four week emergency food kit provides over 2000 calories each day for optimal strength and energy in stressful situations. You can enjoy a wide variety of My Patriot Supply and can even customize your supply. They offer an ultimate breakfast kit, a mega protein kit with real meat and even a gluten free kit. The best part is each meal is delicious and has a shelf life of 25 years. Don’t wait for disaster to strike before taking action. Invest in your safety and wellbeing by securing your food storage today. Go to preparewithpeterson.com and get major savings on your four week emergency supply kit. Go to preparewithpeterson.com right now. That’s preparewithpeterson.com. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, there’s definitely something to that. Yeah, well, I found that social occasions were somewhat awkward and also, yeah, I would say also that I didn’t exactly know what to do without that false camaraderie that alcohol produces and that inflation of confidence and extroversion as well. Yeah. Not a wise developmental strategy, all things considered. All right, so we’re back to when you’re eight and now you’re a Canadian. Okay, so you’re not in boarding school at that point and where are you living? Halifax, Nova Scotia. In Halifax. How long were you guys on the East Coast? I think I left there to go live with my dad at late 12th. Yeah, so what was happening with you and your mom? Did you idealize the idea of going off to live with your dad? I did. I did. What did your dad’s family say? He’d sobered up and I didn’t get to see him very often. Maybe once or twice a year he would come out to the East. And you know, my dad, I would say that, you know, I read this thing once that you kind of like sort of typecast yourself or you model your personality a little bit on the people that you most admired at the age of say seven, eight, nine, ten. Yeah, that’s what admiration is for. That’s what mirror neurons admiration. You bet, man. You bet. It was like a weird combination of like Indiana Jones and Han Solo and Hogan from Hogan’s Heroes and my dad who encapsulated all of those people. And so when he sobered up and became safe and the idea of going to live with him was possible, yeah, I idealized the idea of it. And that was at what age? That was at 12, like 12, maybe just turning 13. Yeah, well, you know, it’s a real open question exactly when boys and girls as well, for that matter, really most need their fathers, you know, and if your father is a target of emulation, it might well be that you most need him, especially when you’re a boy, about the time that you hit puberty. And I think part of the reason for that, I remember when I lived in Montreal, there was this kid that lived down the street. We lived in poor areas in Montreal and there was this kid that lived down the street, one of the places we live, who was the son of a single mother. She was about 5’4 and he was about 6 feet tall and he was 14. You know, and he was out tromping around the streets in Montreal causing trouble. And we used to hear his mother, we didn’t know them, we used to hear them, you know, fighting in the hallway, for example. And like, what the hell could she do about it? You know, he was 6 feet tall. You know, short of telling him to get the hell out and then potentially enforcing that with the police. He had her cornered, you know, for all intents and purposes, especially when he had his little gang of friends. You know, his mother wasn’t going to be able to do a damn thing. And so, you know, it might well be that when you are around 12 and you’re a boy, especially if you’re, you know, temperamentally inclined to some degree to be challenging, that that’s exactly the right time for you to have a father who can step on you around. I know that there’s some evidence among elephants, for example, that the older males socialize the younger males and that when human wildlife curators have attempted to reformulate elephant societies, which are extraordinarily complex, the young males rampage around like mad unless there are older males to keep them in line. There’s a very good example of that. You know, culling of elephants is an unfortunate necessity. If you put elephants into the Courier National Park without the saber-toothed cats that used to hunt them, they breed like crazy. They breed at a rate of about 12% per year. So then they destroy all the trees. So then the WWF comes along and says, we’ll pay you not to shoot your elephants, which is to say, we’ll pay you to let all your trees get destroyed. So of course they do have to shoot the elephants and it’s a terrible thing. And so they’ve tried different mechanisms. And the one way that they used to do it was to go in and take out the oldest members, the dominant males and so on. But what happened as a result of that is they left young uncultured elephants and those elephants would rampage. They would attack cars. They had never been taught. And so I think it is a really good example of the wisdom of elders, even in the animal kingdom, being very important to the developing community. Well, especially in those complex, I mean, elephants are unbelievably intelligent. They have a prehensile trunk, right? Anything that has a prehensile attachment tends to be extraordinarily intelligent, like octopuses, for example, only live three years, something like that, but appear to be at least as smart as dogs, which is pretty damn smart. And with that increased intelligence comes a necessity for deeper socialization and then the necessity for something like a continuous historical tradition. Because with all that additional brain expanse, that environmental specific programming that’s associated with socialization starts to become increasingly crucial. You see that too, even if you have a particularly smart breed of dog. It’s great to have a smart dog, but a smart untrained dog is a really bad dog. A stupid untrained dog just lays there like a stupid dog and who cares? I always say, especially if you have smart breed border collies, if you’re not training them, they’re training you. Well, that’s the thing about a dog. They’re training you. You have to be smarter than the dog and that’s not always that easy. Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s also the case if you have a particularly pushy child. They can be socialized very well. This question of the role of the father, I think that there’s two distinct phases, at least it feels like to me. There’s the contrast between the nurturing mother energy and the disciplinary sort of structured father energy. I think that that even has to be there, say, some three years old. I was lucky I had that. It may have been better. It could have been better, but I had it. Then there does enter that next phase where it’s not now about boundaries. It’s not now about discipline, but it is about modeling. I was lucky that while I lost my dad for some time, I kind of lost it right in the middle and got it back right at the point that it was necessary again. Yeah, well, that maternal love is a kind of all-encompassing acceptance and that’s precisely necessary in early infancy where the infant can do no wrong. The paternal role is more like boundary setting and encouragement jointly together. That seems somewhat paradoxical that you can encourage people by setting boundaries, but the thing about encouragement is it’s goal-directed and it means that you have to be on the pathway to genuine success and pathways have boundaries. All right, so you’re in the normal school system, I presume, at this time. This is in Halifax. Then you do move to go live with your dad. How long do you live with your dad and when do you start this boarding school process? I’m with him for about half a year before he sent me out. I finished grade seven with him. I started grade seven with my mom, finished grade seven with my dad, and then he put me for grade eight into the, so 13. Okay, now you said it was more difficult for you to live with him and vice versa than you guys had presupposed. Yeah. So you’re seven and you’re 13 and so what makes you hard to get along with? You know, rebellion. Tell me to be home at 10 and I’m not going to be. I don’t know what was going on, but I was in real active rebellion and I’m sure I was rebelling against the divorce. I was rebelling against the alcoholism. What about your friendship? I mean, when I was 13, you know, my friends, like I said, I grew up in a small northern town and it was kind of a rough working class town and there weren’t, all my friends were rough working class kids, hilarious people, extremely good senses of humor. Most of them with fairly damaged relationships with their father, a lot of drinking, a fair bit of misbehavior, although nothing particularly serious, you know, like we weren’t, we weren’t criminal gangs or anything like that, but there was a fair bit of petty shoplifting and an awful lot of drinking and carousing after hours. And my relationship with my dad became somewhat fractured at that point too. And I was a smaller kid and intellectual and I probably overcompensated to some degree on that part by hanging around with the rougher kids, you know, which, which I actually think was a pretty damn good strategy. It served me well, all things considered, but was hard on my relationship with my, with my father, who didn’t necessarily approve of my friends and shouldn’t have, quite frankly, you know, I think he was probably right. I probably thought he was right then even, you know, that didn’t mean you were going to listen. Well, you know, what the hell are you going to do? You know, if you have any sense when you’re 13, and this is the whole issue about being a teenager is that your, your ability to fit in with your peer group is a predictor of your success in your life, you’re going to prioritize fitting in with your peer group over everything else. And you know, the whole point of parenthood in some real sense is to produce a child who’s acceptable to his or her peers because, well, for obvious reasons. And so there is that tension. And then of course, the other thing you’re trying to do when you’re 13 is to start pushing the boundaries with regards to independence. Anyways, you’re doing that apparently, what were your friends like when you were 13? They were exactly, you’re not, my parallels are pretty clear. I was hanging around with a bunch of people. And by the way, I still connect, some of them write to me on Facebook these days, even from back then, you know, and, and, and sorry, guys, but you were unacceptable. But they were unacceptable, but there was a camaraderie. And it was exactly that. I had a peer group and and it just made sense that that I fit in there and that and I felt accepted there and rebellion. You know, that was in Edmonton. That was in Edmonton. That was in Edmonton. So and you’d moved from Halifax. Edmonton was a bigger city. Much bigger city. So more opportunity to get in trouble. Lots more trouble. Yeah. You know, there was a moment there and it was a very big growing up moment for me. And I think it has a lot to do with the transition from being bullied to no longer being bullied. And so first of all, when I was a very small child, five or six years old, my babysitter, Judy Park, she she she disappeared and I had a big crush on her. So her disappearing was a big thing in my life. And about three months later, they found her and she’d been killed. And and her murder has never been solved. You know, it’s one of those things. But Clifford Olson, I’m sure you remember. Oh, yes. He took credit for it, I think because he had a cash for he had a cash for locations program. So he was he took credit for it. But then it turned out it had nothing to do with him. But this was in my awareness. That’s a crooked man. It was crooked. It was to be a serial killer who will also go to the lengths of of confessing to murders he didn’t commit. Well, they’re paying him for body locations. I mean, that’s a whole nother thing. But I grew up with that in my awareness. And and and so here I was in Edmonton and one night and I lived in a actually the part that I’d left out is after my dad and I reconciled, he moved to Vancouver and he left me there. So I was still living on my own, but at least now in an apartment. And one night I was walking home, I’d missed my last bus. It’s three in the morning and I was walking home and I had to walk about three kilometers. And it was this is in East Edmonton. It’s not the safest area in the world. And I’m going up through the alleys because I it’s longer to go on the lit streets. So I just take the alley route and this car pulls up beside me slowly. And there’s a guy in the car doing unacceptable things to himself while watching me as he walked by my car. Oh, fun. And the first thing I did is I went to my back pocket because it was like routine for me to have a switchblade or a butterfly knife. But I had just been out with some friends at a club that had metal detectors. So I didn’t have one. So I’m walking down the street and this guy beside me and I’m freaking out. And I’ve grown up with this awareness, right? Like there’s we all come to that point where you realize life is actually not permanent. And I and I that was six it for me. So I was very aware of this situation. The guy kept circling around a bunch of times. And as I got closer to my house, I didn’t want him to see where I lived. I lived on my own. I’m 15 years old, 16 years old. So I go into the school ground behind because it was floodlit like crazy to keep all the druggies out and stuff. So I go into the school ground and I climb up the spiral slide because I figure if I get to the top of the spiral slide, I’m safe. Like there’s no way he can get up there without coming up face first. Right. Right. So I climb up there floodlit and plus there’s apartment buildings on all sides of me. So there’s witnesses, right? Like I’m in the safest possible place I could be at three o’clock in the morning. And he pulls into the school parking lot. I could and he sat there for quite a while and then he opened his car door. And I don’t. It’s all so vivid to me. Like the car was yellow. That’s a long memory to hold on to. And he walked across the grass. And as he walked across the grass, I contemplated what was going on. And I made a very clear decision. I’m going to kill him. Like I’m not, I’m just, I have no choice. If he comes up the ladder, then I’m going to kick him across the bridge of the nose. And when he falls, I’m going to jump on him and keep jumping until it’s over. I’m done. I’m so scared. He came right to the bottom of the ladder and he put one foot on the ladder, put one hand on the rail and he looked up to me and he goes, are you looking for company? And I’ll save the actual vernacular that I used for him at that moment, but I was unkind. And he turned around, he walked back to his car and he sat in his car for three hours. And I stayed at the top of the slide for three hours. I did not come down. And then eventually, that’s a learning moment. And you know, but the weirdest thing is I was never bullied after that. Ever again. What changed? I’m willing to stand up for myself physically. I just. Yeah. So, but what do you think changed? Like, you said you weren’t bullied. Does that mean you were signaling in a different manner? Right? Yeah. I saw this in my clients sometimes as a clinician. I would see them integrate their shadow, let’s say. And one of the things I really noticed, you can actually see this, by the way, portrayed in the movie, The Lion King. It’s very interesting because Simba, when he’s an adolescent, like a child and an adolescent animated, has a facial expression sort of like this. Right? It’s like everything’s coming in. He’s like a deer in the head, let’s say. Then he has this initiation experience where he realizes his affinity with his father and his father has a very commanding visage, a very commanding face, very differently animated. And these, of course, Disney level animators are bloody geniuses. So they capture these things. And the animators flip Simba’s facial configuration at that point so that there’s a setness and a harshness to the way that he looks at the world. It’s as if he’s coming out instead of things coming in. Right? He’s got a command to him. And I’m wondering if that experience that you had restructured the physiognomy of your facial expression, posture, yeah. Posture, facial expression and reaction. Eye contact. Yeah. And reaction. You know, many years ago, and I read this article and it set the foundation for almost all the work that I do today. And it was like, it influences everything I do. It was an article about two women who were sexually assaulted in Central Park around about the same time. And this investigative journalist followed them after it happened, their recovery and what their lives were like afterwards. The one woman, they both went through it. And of course, there’s a horrible truth about sexual assault is that once you’ve been sexually assaulted once, you are significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted again. And that’s because the kind of people who commit those crimes are spineless, wimpy. They go after the weak. And so if you- Yeah, they’re predators. Parasitic predators. No, they’re not even, they’re the wrong, a predator almost is complimentary. They’re worse. They’re scavengers. Yeah, well, that’s the parasite element. Yeah. And so they, in any event, they both learned this fact that once you’ve, you know, because in the clinics, in the shelters, they tell them these things. You have to be careful because now it might happen again. The one woman hears that news and the meaning she creates is I am now even more of a victim than I was before. And she turns to a prescription and non-prescription medication and suicide attempts and it ruins her whole life. Right, right. So that’s the anxiety route. The other woman, she said, well, why? Why are you attacked a second time? It’s because you’re displaying fear. Fear. You bet. So she went to a self-defense class and she learned some useful things like a credit card held in the right way, swiped across the throat, can accurately cut it. And keys held between the knuckles are an incredibly effective weapon. And she learned these things. And she started walking down the street differently. And in one example, she was out with some friends and they’re like, would you like us to walk you to your car? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. You know, and she’s like, no, I don’t want you to walk me to my car. I will walk myself to my car. And pretty soon her friends were like, would you walk me to my car? Right, right. So she starts a self-defense clinic. It gets franchised. And she opens a few of them. Here’s the telling moment in the interview. The interviewer says to her, if you could go back in time and prevent your own rape, would you do that? She says, no. I am significantly more afraid of the woman that I was before it happened than I am of the event itself. Yeah, right. And when I read that, I thought about what happened. Those parasitical predatory types, you know, especially with regards to predation on children, is they look for children who are uncertain and easily cowed. And so that’s another thing for everyone watching and listening to know. If you teach your children to be afraid as their fundamental response to the world, you are enabling the people who prey on them because the people who do that will watch and they target the children. They think they can intimidate into silence. Yeah, yeah. So that trembling like a rabbit in the evil serpent eye of the predator, that’s a very bad strategy for human beings because we’re not rabbits and we don’t use background camouflage as our defense. Yeah, it’s that calling out of aggression that’s the right response to predation. Now, it’s interesting, you know, that you said that you weren’t bullied again after that, eh? Yeah, yeah. That’s a very interesting transformation. Alright, so now your father has gone off to Vancouver and left you to live alone. Yeah, and so, and you’re how old? 16. 16. And so when do you go off to boarding school? I left boarding school that resulted in my dad leaving. Right. So that was before that. Then I finished grade 10 in Edmonton and then I moved back to live with my mother and finished high school in Halifax. Aha, aha. And how did it go when you moved back to your mother? Much better. You know, we still had conflict. My mom, I think, you know, it was one of those, like, one of her ways of gaining connection was with raised voices. So we would have raised voices and my brother wouldn’t engage in that stuff. So I was the favorite for that. But she and I, we were always very close, but it was a lot of tension and she then, her parents were getting older and she wanted to move back to South Africa. So when I was 18, my mom’s like, I’m going back to South Africa and I’m taking your little brother with me and you’re staying here. And that was the beginning of adulthood for me properly. 18 years old, figuring it out. You were pretty independent. Yeah, she wasn’t worried about me. Yeah, yeah, right, right. And so why did you get along with her better once you moved back to Halifax? You know, I think I was more mature. I’d grown up and she’d grown up. It’s one of those things you, I remember sitting in the guidance counselor’s office of one of my schools and I saw the poster on the wall that says kids move out now while you still know everything. It’s amazing that once you know some things, you realize how much your parents have learned in the meantime. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. That’s for sure. All right, so now you’re, this is when, this is what year? That’s like 88. 88. Now it says here in your bio, you’re very entrepreneurial as a child selling lemonade in front of your house, shoveling stone, raking leaves. You got your first professional job in 91 when you became the first full-time employee of RISEx. So now you’re done high school. Do you go off to college? No, I fell into some strange things at that time in Canada. For example, I was in an industrial accident and I lost, I nearly lost this hand in a fire. And I was pumping gas at Petro Canada on Beers Road in Halifax and my shift boss flicked a lighter at me when I had gas all over me and it was pretty bad. They had to take the skin off my legs to rebuild my arm and I lost a bunch of grade 12 as a result of that. And then of course, because of the way things work sometimes or don’t work with government, I didn’t qualify for, I couldn’t sue the employer because of the Workers’ Compensation Act. And I couldn’t qualify for works compensation payment because I was unemployable because I was in high school. Oh yeah. So I literally got not one dollar or anything. I missed all that time in work school. And so I missed a few credits. So at the end of grade 12, I’m shy a bunch of credits and I’m trying to figure out how to get to university. But now I run into… Shy of the credits you needed to be accepted to university. Yeah, like I was missing one credit or 1.5 credits or something. And that was fixable over summer school. But in the meantime, I’m trying to figure out university entrance. And here’s the tricky part in Canada. I don’t know how it is these days. I haven’t lived here for a long time now. But if your parents earned over a certain threshold, you couldn’t get student loans. You couldn’t get student funding at that stage. My parents traditionally not earned that amount of money. My dad had been an alcoholic, but he had just crossed over. Like he was finally, he was making some good money, but paying off a life of not. So my parents could not afford to send me to go to school. And equally, I couldn’t qualify to get a loan to go to school. So I just literally couldn’t go. And so I didn’t. I went to work. And I guess today I’m grateful. I think you and I talked in public, I said there are times when I wish that I’d had the experience of proper debate with professors and refinement of academic thought processes and research and that sort of thing. But there’s a bigger advantage that came to me as a result of that. And that is that very often our current education is about moving students toward a singular truth, a convergent education. A child can tell you 26 uses for a brick. Somebody who’s learned about bricks can think of one. And that paid off very well for me. Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I’ve noticed in my life is that the most often the most interesting people I’ve met are super smart people who didn’t go to university. And they still have that native intelligence. But the fact that they didn’t go through that upper echelon, echelon intellectual training meant that they had to formulate their own views of the world and really from whole cloth. And you know, there’s some disadvantages to that because there are things you don’t know and avenues of critical thinking that you haven’t mastered. But my impression has been that those people are often extremely original in their thinking, right? They don’t have that native intelligence, but it’s manifested itself in a way that’s very unique to their circumstances. So they have interesting and new things to say rather than the cookie cutter conversation you get that you’re more likely to get among people who’ve been highly educated. You also get this multiple perspective view of a problem. And here’s a great example from from my father. I think he talks about this in Megafauna is that if you go to the Lascaux caves and if you’ve never been, I highly recommend the Lascaux caves. 20,000 year old paintings. I think when Picasso walks through, he looked around these paintings and he said of art, we have invented nothing. 20,000 year old art, but there is a rhino in there. Now, this is the south of France. There’s a rhino in there. Right, right. And there’s four dots behind the rhino on the wall. And symbologists have looked at the dots and determined that it means this is the end of the story or something. I don’t know. Like everybody’s looked at and said, what are these four dots all about? The trouble is, is that if you’ve had this convergent education in say, some or in say symbology or let’s say in art, then you’re looking at it only through that lens. If you’re my father and you’ve been looking, you’ve got your legal training, but then separately you’ve got growing up in Africa, you’ve got your, you know, his father, his grandfather was an archaeologist, zoologist. You look at that and you’ve spent a lot of time with white rhinos in the bush. What you know about white rhinos is that a dominant bull white rhino poops explosive big balls of poop out behind him and he kicks them and he sprays his urine in a huge aerosol cloud and announces his presence. Right. If you, you know that, then you look at the dots and you go, this is a painting of a dominant bull. Nobody else knows that. That happened to me to a large degree because, you know, when I was say 20, I was very sick all the time and I made some adjustments with food and completely turned my life around. But then as I was trying to share those ideas with other people, I found out that people don’t follow rules very well. Food rules, that is. Or any rules for that matter. Or any rules. Well, there’s 12 I think that people are following quite well these days. But then the other thing, because I’ve been involved in entrepreneurship and business and marketing and business coaching, I had learned some things that I would call about practical psychology that allowed me to put my interest in nutrition, my interest in anthropology and my interest in behavioral change together. I wouldn’t be able to do that if I went to university. No, no. Well, it’s also the case too, you know, that people who have particularly interesting things to say tend to be masters of more than one discipline that very rarely overlap. So one of my friends, for example, Jonathan Paggio, he exists at the intersection of fine art, postmodern theory and classic orthodox Christian theology. There’s like, well, he’s like the guy, right? Because there’s no one else like that. There’s probably no one else like that in the world. And so because he has expertise in those, and I’ve recommended, you know, to the people who are watching and listening and reading the sorts of things that I’ve been trying to communicate, that they try to get very, very good at one thing, right? To start with that, right? To develop expertise there. But then if you can expand out and get some expertise in multiple areas and then benefit from the convergence of those, man, you’re really, I think that’s part of what starts to push people up that Pareto distribution curve, you know, that attainment like success or like failure is nonlinear, right? The more you succeed, the faster you succeed. And that’s why a small, that all the money ends up in the hands of a small number of people and a tiny proportion of recording artists have all the records and a tiny proportion of authors sell all the books. I mean, it’s a very, very stable phenomenon. It’s called the Matthew principle, right? To those who have more, much more will be given. And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away. A very harsh reality of life. But I think what happens is that you develop these pockets of expertise, you bring them together and the effects of that are multiplicative rather than additive. And that can really spiral you up the, what would you say, the competence ladder towards higher and higher levels of success. And if you have a society that opens up the possibility for people to do that, then the society also tends to thrive. So anyways, you’re not going to college, you start working and apparently you’re starting at a startup. Is that right? Yeah, I did door to door sales and different like sort of, you know, attempts at life. But then my dad contacted me and he said I had a friend who was starting a tech company or had started a tech company, but he was struggling to move past solopreneur. You know, he hired people and he just, he wasn’t very good at people. And he told this friend, my son can sell ice to Eskimos and you should hire him. So were you a good door to deal sales? I was, I was really good. I sold Kirby vacuums and I was. What did you learn from doing that? I, you know, I just, I learned rapport skills. I learned quickness of thought to trust my speech engine. I remember, for example, knocking on this one door once and this woman says, you guys, like don’t you do any other neighborhoods? You’re like the sixth guy from your company to knock on my door in the last four months. Like why do you guys, I never let anybody in. Why do you keep coming? And one thing I can tell you about sales is that the, everybody has defense mechanisms against sales. Yeah, like pull the hell away. Right. But the stronger your defense is at the outer level, the easier it is to pillage on the inside. So if, if, if somebody is very firmly won’t let you in the door, that’s cause they’re really easy to sell to. It’s just the way it is. If somebody lets you in easily, you’re going 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, very powerful to know. This woman’s really, I can see she’s got the, she’s got the fortress walls up, the draw bridges up. She goes, and she goes, so what makes you any different? And I went, I’m cute. And she busted out laughing. And of course laughter, the orgasm of the brain, you know, and she opens the doors. Her tension all disappears. John invites me in for a coffee and you know, an hour and a half later she’s spending 200,000, 200,000 back again and again and again and I sold it for a retirement. Why hadn’t you done that earlier? Gone out on your own earlier. You know, I’ve often wondered about that because as a kid I did. I mean, as a kid I was watching the news report the minute the snow was happening. I was like, I was out there knocking on the doors like I’m going to, you know, I’m going to shovel your sidewalks. And I’m also more introverted. So that’s not the easiest thing in the world for me to go do. So I was off doing that raking leaves and then one year I came up with this genius plan at the beginning of Christmas or at the beginning of snow season, which in Halifax is usually around Christmas. I sold insurance. I knocked on doors and said, look, you can pay me now because you usually pay me like $10 t o d oyo u r w a l k or$ 5 or whatever it was. But if you pay me $25, I^{'} ll k ee p yo u rc l e a r f or t h e w in t er . B i gg amb l e, yo u kn o w, so m eye a rs in H a l i f a x I w o u l dd o, b u t i tw or k s . P eo pl e w e n t f or i t . S o I c l e a r l y ha d t ha t min d se t . A n d I re m e mb ero n ce d i s t in c tl y, w ha t a l esso n . I w a sr akin g l e a v es f or t hi s gu y, o l d or n ery gu y . A n d I w a s p a y in g b y t h e t r a s hba g f u ll . Y o u kn o w, h e ha d t o p a y$ 2, whatever it was, per trash bag. And I in a huge garden. So I’m raking, I’m making it, I’m filling them up, trash bag, trash bag, trash bag. He comes out and he squeezes one of the trash bags and he goes, no, no, no, no. And he packs it right down. Yeah, yeah, I bet. And he goes, now that’s a trash bag. And he goes, he goes, I’m not trying to be cheap. He says, I’m trying to teach you about value. He goes, you got to know that if I come out here and you got like trash bags, I’m not hiring you again next year. Yeah, right. But if I see that you do it right, and I got to tell you, that guy, massive impact on my life. Everything I do today is about over delivery on that basis. Yeah, right. No kidding, no kidding. Now that was, that was good of him. That’s for sure, man. He paid you for your work that day. He did. He did. Yeah, yeah. Over deliver. You bet. Well, and that’s the thing is you got to remember when you’re selling to people. First of all, you don’t want to sell to the wrong person because you might be in bed with them for a very long time. That’s a good thing to learn if you’re so-called fundraising too. It’s like, you should never fundraise. You should look for partners. And you don’t want to take money from the wrong person. No kidding. That’s a very, very bad idea. So I bought a film studio in Northern California years after all this. And it was originally the Model Shop. It was called the Model Shop. And anybody who’s a Star Wars geek knows what I’m talking about. It’s the original studio of Lucasfilm. This is where Star Wars, well, actually Star Wars is LA. This is Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, all of it. And so I bought the studio. And where was I going with that? Getting in bed with the wrong people. Oh, yeah. So we had these incredible 3D camera systems that we were building. And we did our first, we did a little bit of work on Avatar. And it was really good. But then we needed to raise some capital. We raised capital from a guy, 1.2 million. And he worked for a huge… He was like the second in command of a huge entertainment company. So we thought, and he said, I’ll lend you the money as long as I get to run the company. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I could say he ran it in the ground. Let’s say we ran it in the ground. That particular venture didn’t really work. But then he sued us for his money from the company that he was running. And it was like, I got the lesson. From now on, we’re looking for partners and we vet them as much as we would anybody else. Yeah, well, there’s no such thing as free money. You’re a bloody fool if you think. And then you have to pay whose money is easy to take. First of all, you better make sure that it’s not a lure. Second, if their money is easy to take, that should tell you something about them. It just means you don’t know how you’re going to pay. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so now you’ve established a company in the UK and you did that for how long? Nine years. Nine years. And then I sold it. And you have a family developing at the same time. Yeah, but unfortunately, my wife at the time decided rather unilaterally that she didn’t want to live in England anymore and went on a vacation to Canada and took my son with her. And that’s when I found out that the Geneva or the Hague Convention only applies up until the 90th day. She called me on the 92nd day and said, if you want to be with us, you have to come back to Canada. And I had employees and debts and it would have been personal bankruptcy and ruin. And then it also made me really ask an important question about, and I’ll never know if I did it. That must have been a shock. It was awful. It was really awful. God. But I spoke to my dad and my dad said, what would you want your son to do in the exact same situation? I said, well, I wouldn’t want him to be bullied in a unilateral way like that. And I’d want him to take responsibility for it. If I left, everybody loses their jobs. Most of them were long-term unemployed before I came along because we’re in an impoverished part of the UK. And I would have had to file bankruptcy. It was a massive impact for me to just suddenly close up my business. And as a kid, I was a bit like that. You know, start something, it didn’t work, go to the next thing. Yeah. But you’re really in this phase of you start things, you got to finish them. And so I chose to stay and keep the business. And my wife and I divorced at that point. It was a very, very difficult time. But, you know, I learned a great deal and the business went well in the end. And I sold it. And, you know, this is a very interesting thing about purpose. You know, like, I think that when we look at what we value, you know, initially we value survival. And in our world, that means some level of economic survival, say. But something magical happens if you can transcend the need for money, emotionally or luckily logistically. And that’s really what happened to me at that point is that I became free to actually follow my passion and do things that really drove me. Barcode scanning equipment never drove me as much as I can get fascinated by this. So let me ask you about that. See, I read Joseph Campbell a lot for years and he said and Campbell has some very interesting things to say, although he learned most of them from Carl Jung. He said, follow your passion. And, you know, there’s there’s a couple of things that aren’t right about that. I mean, the first is it’s not that easy to differentiate a true passion from a false passion and impulsivity is passion, but it’s short term. And so is it passion you follow or is it interest or is it the compelling nature of certain problems that grip you or is it responsibility? I think that there’s a mix. Passion by itself could be good or bad, could be vacuous or deep. But passion combined with purpose. And what happened for me is I found a purpose that, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a teacher. I had this great teacher in grade three in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Mr. Kulchinsky. I’m telling you, he was amazing. He really I can still almost word for word repeat some of his classes. And I was eight years old. He was a phenomenal teacher. When I was 25 years old, I found myself back in Halifax briefly. I called the school board and I said, is Mr. Kulchinsky still working? We called him Mr. K because nobody could say Kulchinsky when we were kids. But is Mr. Kulchinsky still working with the school? Yes, he is. I said, can I have his home number, please? No. Fifteen minutes later to use a Star Wars. These are not the droids you’re looking for. I had his phone number and I called him in his house and I said, Mr. Kulchinsky, this is Eric Edmees. And I’m assuming 30 kids a year for all these years. I can remember me. So but before I even finished, I said, hi, this is I said, hi, Mr. Kulchinsky. This is America. Mr. This is Eric Edmees. I don’t know if you remember me. He goes, remember you. I drove past your house a few days ago and wondering, did your parents ever move back to Africa like wow. And we and I just told him that I’m living a phenomenal life and that I believe he was one of the significant contributors to that for me. And that made me want to be a teacher. You bet. I wanted to be a teacher. But then I found out as I was leaving school and I don’t you know, like I feel bad kind of saying this, but I just it seems to me at least in the way it was when I was a kid growing up in Canada, we just we don’t really respect teachers very much, not economically and not in other ways. Or the profession. Or the profession generally. And I was like, I don’t I’m not I want to teach, but I don’t want to be treated like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so now that I’d sold the business, I took a couple of years and traveled around the world and I started doing a little bit of business speaking. People started inviting me to speak about business because I’d sold my company and that sort of thing. But under it under it, I had a much deeper passion. And that was that at 21 years old, I had been really sick. Like not I’m not talking terminal or you know, anything like that. I just mean always on medication, always uncomfortable. What was wrong? Yeah, I had I had a horrible sign of permanent chronic sinus infections, throat infections. My tonsils would be like golf balls in my throat, ear infections, digestive, really serious digestive cramps that were so bad that I couldn’t speak or think. A horrible cystic acne. Oh, yeah. And I always I mean always dripping from the from the nose. It was just generally I was just not a healthy kid. And I wasn’t like that younger. But sometime in somewhere between 12 and 21, that all started developing. And I’d been to see doctors and specialists and needles and pills and injections and even surgery. Finally, they recommended. And, you know, I went to a friend of mine talked me into going to a seminar, a sales seminar. It was Tony Robbins, you know, 21 years old. And I thought I was going to go there and learn about money. And sure I did. But on the last day, Tony spoke about food. And I think he and I would agree on this point that many of the things he shared about food back then are not what he and not what he or I believe about food. But they were a lot better than the way I was eating. And so I made a bunch of changes. And so I made a bunch of changes. And what did you change primarily? You know, process, you know, the reduction of processed food, elimination of dairy products, elimination of meat at that point. And I’ll come back to that later because that was that was wrong. And there’s something about there’s something about that that’s interesting. But and then the increase of good things. And within 30 days, I had lost 35 pounds. 35 days, 30 days. Yeah, it was fast. That must have been a shock. Well, remember, a lot of it’s not fat. It’s inflammation. Right. And which I don’t know that shock. Here’s how big a shock. I go visit my mom. I land in Johannesburg. I come down the back then it was like you came down these escalators into young Smith’s Airport, Johannesburg International. Now you come down and there’s greeting area and my mom and I’m there with my girlfriend and my mom looks at me and looks right through me. Doesn’t even see. Wow. Then she looks at my girlfriend who had like bright red hair. Robin, I know it’s strawberry blonde. I’m sorry. But strawberry blonde. And so my mom saw her and then did the double take back to me and then realized it was me. Such was the change in my face. Like everything had changed. And then I had a fascinating conversation with my doctor because he was kind of he was calling me to say, well, the surgery is coming up. They wanted me to have my tonsils, which is a serious, serious thing to do at 21 years old. And I said, I don’t think I need the surgery anymore. And we’re having this conversation. He goes, why not? I go, I’m not. He goes, yeah, but that happens. You know, the pain goes away and it’ll be back. Yeah. You know, you’ve waited this long. And it was a sales pitch. It was I’m looking at this guy going, 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 not right. And then I said to him, how long did you go to medical school for? Now, you have to know at 21 years old, I looked 18. I was a kid. I looked young. This must have been the most impetuous. Like, what’s this? He goes, six years. And I go, can I just ask, in the six years, how much of that time did you spend studying nutrition? Right. Do you know the answer? Yeah. None. Yeah. And that is consistent. About as much time as they spend studying scientific research. It’s amazing. It is quite stunning. And at that moment, I suddenly felt the only way I could describe it is I felt like I was on a plane and I just found out the pilot didn’t learn how to land. I have better learn this myself. And I went in, I read everything I could. I even finally went to university. I didn’t go very long because it was so painfully slow. But I went to go study archaeology. Why would I study archaeology when I wanted to learn about food? Because I had a very interesting moment where I learned about elephants. And elephants, you know, when you put them in captivity 100 years ago, they would only live 10 years or so. Like, it was a very short-lived life. And the zookeepers and such stumbled upon some, you know, at that point in time, contemporary science. And that said that elephants in the wild lived seven or eight years. And these guys became very concerned about their, well, I’d like to think they were concerned about the elephants. They were concerned about their investment. And so what did they figure out? And I’m reading this article. And the article talks about the elephant’s wild diet and the elephant’s captive diet. And while I can’t look, I’m a little bit of a grammar fascist sometimes. I mean, I shouldn’t be. I don’t have the right to be. I’m dyslexic. And I probably don’t have the right to be. But when I spot something and I look at this wild diet, the elephant doesn’t have a wild diet. The elephant does not have a wild diet. The elephant has a diet. It does not have a wild one. It might have a captive one, but it doesn’t have a wild one. And in that moment, I suddenly realized, wait a second now, the word diet has been stolen. It’s been hijacked like many words get stolen. And what it actually means is way of life. It actually means way of life. The original Greek, Latin, it’s way of life. It’s not temporary alteration to your current eating patterns in order to fit into that outfit for that special occasion. That’s not what it means. Right. And in that moment, I realized that in order to figure out how to… And by the way, they took the elephant’s wild diet and they reintroduced it to the captive diet. Suddenly, the captive elephants were living 30, 40, 50 years. And at that point, I said, what we have to be doing is looking at our own anthropology, our own archeology, our own history, because food science has been so hijacked and adulterated that we can’t trust it. I felt like the roots of the issue were not going to be sold to us by the food pyramid people. They weren’t going to be sold to us by the food manufacturers. The Department of Agriculture. Not helpful, right? No, you can certainly say that. So I wrote this article and then about a year or two later, oh, I read an article by Espoid Eaton and he’d written it in like 1985. And it basically suggested the same thing. He was saying, look, there’s a human diet. There is one. You know, we have less as a population on this planet. We have less genetic variants than the different species of elephant have from each other. We’re very closely related. There’s a human diet. And then Lauren Cordain released the paleo diet around about that time. And I felt partially robbed and also vindicated all at the same time. But that kind of led me to real passion and purpose. The problem was as a teacher, nobody would pay for that. Nobody would pay for me to come and talk to them about anthropological nutrition or what we would now call nutritional anthropology or even food psychology. They weren’t interested in that. But they were always interested in how I built a business and how I and I’d been involved in Hollywood movies and I built a like, for example, this is fascinating. We’re doing Hollywood special effects and creatures and stuff for the movies. And so then the military, through Jamie Heineman from Mythbusters, who used to work at the studio long before I bought it, came to us one day and he said, can we build hyper realistic trauma simulation mannequins for the U.S. Army? Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever done CPR training, but the dummy you do it on is not real. It’s not even as real as a shop mannequin. They are now. They are so real that medics opted out of the training program because interacting with our mannequins was too traumatic for them. It was a fascinating time. Really fascinating. I mean, they were simulating IED interaction to use the vernacular. Sounds like there’s an opening on the sex robot manufacturer. They approached us. The porn industry, we got a strong approach from them. We were like, not at all. Not at all. We knew there was treasure at the end of that rainbow, but there was consequence. I had no way. But in the end, I would get invited to speak about business because I had this most business speakers are either theoreticians or they’ve had one big success in a particular industry or even they’ve had two or three successes in the same industry. But I’d had a success in data capture, mobile computing, wireless networking, then in Hollywood special effects, then in medical simulation, then in military research and development. You’re showing cross-platform. Yeah. And so people are willing to pay for the nice seats in the plane and the good fees for business speaking. And so I started doing that. In fact, I mentioned earlier, I got that call from Tony Robbins and that kind of set me on fire. It was like, holy, I didn’t know. How did he come across you? Did you ever hear of Chet Holmes? Chet Holmes wrote… You want to check out Chet because just because of your fascination in sales and marketing, he wrote a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine, a phenomenal bestseller. And it turned out he and I met at one point and he said, when did you do my program? I’ve never done your program. He goes, but the way you talk and the way you write marketing campaigns, they’re so subtle and they don’t feel like marketing and they’re so converting. Why are they so good if you didn’t do my training program, which is slightly arrogant question, but he was like that. And years later, we were having dinner one day and he was always very inquisitive and he asked lots of questions and he asked me about my history. And I mentioned Kirby and he goes, oh, I get it now. He used to work for Charlie Munger and he had designed all of the marketing campaigns that we were using at Kirby. So I had been trained in sales and marketing by Chet Holmes as a kid, even though we never met. I see. And so he was working with Tony and one day he had told Tony about me a few times, but I wasn’t a speaker. So Tony was never going to put me on stage. But then, you know, weird confluence of events, you know, happened and Chet sadly gets very sick and he ends up passing away. But he always said to me, I’ve given you this last gift. He always told me that and I never knew what the gift was. I never knew. But then about 11 days after he passed away, he was scheduled to speak at a conference in Fiji with Tony. And I get this phone call. Would you come and take Chet’s spot? Uh huh. Uh huh. And I hadn’t been on a stage in three years. I had no business. That’s like, I’m not even driving go-karts and you want me to go race Formula One today? But I said yes and I went and it just, Tony and I hit it off immediately. He was so good to me in every way. We didn’t know about because I’ve been talking to Tony and working with him to some degree over the last, I guess it’s almost six months, two years, something like that. But I don’t think we knew that connection when we met in Mexico. No, I don’t think we knew. No, but he was, he immediately, I remember flying into Fiji and I thought if I really rock this, I mean, if I really rock it, I know it’s an opportunity. I could get on the list. They’d call me again. By the time the plane and taxi to the airport, I said, screw that. That’s not big enough thinking. If I really rock this, I will become the list. And in effect that happened. Tony and I hit it off immediately. They told me he would only stay in the room for 15 minutes. And it was so interesting. He calls me and his team comes says, Tony wants to meet you in the hallway. You know, he’s never met you. And by the way, he’s only going to stay in the room for 15 minutes when you’re on stage. If he leaves, it’s a good sign. He’s either going to leave or he’s going to take you off the stage. Those are the only options. But he wants to meet in the hallway. So I walk into the hallway and I, you know, and, you know, You met the giant. He’s big. And he goes, how are you feeling about your presentation? And the truth is they were asking me to do a presentation on 11 Days Prep with Lying on somebody else’s slides. I don’t even usually use slides. And I said, well, it’s not the ideal circumstance. You know, and I just want to be honest. And Tony goes, well, you could be a lot more confident. And but I remembered, you know, Tony always said some version, if nobody in the history of calming down has ever calmed down because somebody told him to calm down. In other words, me becoming meek was not going to be helpful at that point. So I just said, what the hell? I mean, I mean, oh, yeah, I go, oh, I’m plenty confident. Look, the reason I’m here is that your other business speakers are too busy operating their businesses. I’m a proper business owner. That’s why I could do this on notice. So it might not be exactly the presentation you’re expecting, but it’s going to be fantastic. Oh, yeah. And then Tony goes, well, all right, then. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and and it’s better than the scared rabbit approach. It was then now this leads to kind of a funny little offsuit here where he goes into his team and he goes, I like this guy. I think I want to introduce myself. And he wasn’t planning to introduce me because he didn’t want to be near what could be a train wreck. But now he’s met me. Meanwhile, it’s mostly a Chinese audience. So the guy who’s introducing me is going to introduce me in Chinese, not in English. So they’ve changed the translation. And and so Tony’s like, where’s where’s his bio? They go, well, we threw it out. We we translated to Chinese. We threw it out. What do you mean? We’ll translate it back. Well, I don’t know if you’ve played that game very often, but English to Chinese back to English. So it ends up like the bio says, you know, Eric’s Eric’s not really a speaker. He’s a he’s a business guy. He started his first business and he sold it nine years later. By the time it gets translated back and given to Tony, Tony walks up on stage and he goes, you guys, I just met our next speaker out in the hallway. I’m so excited to introduce you to him. He started his first business when he was only nine years old. I’m like, oh, no, but he stayed in the room for three and a half hours and he didn’t take me off the stage. And then he booked me for a year and he coached me and he was sweet to me and generous to me in every possible way. And that really turned me on and I and and set me off on the path of I’m going to be a professional teacher. I’m going to do this for a living. So OK, so fill me in a bit here on the relationship between the business speaking and your interest in in diet. And also, let’s let’s make a bit of a foray into what the consequences for you and the broader consequences have been of learning to teach and also concentrating on diet. Maybe we can close this this session up with that. Sure. So the the short version is that I believe that the single. Most valuable professional skill that exists in the world is communication. The ability to speak publicly in front of a camera and audience is everything ever. Anybody can add a zero to their to their income by learning to communicate effectively, in my opinion. So that was the first big impact for me when I made that transition. It meant that everything accelerated, every opportunity accelerated, every my network accelerated. Everything changed when I decided that I was willing to do that, put myself at risk, put myself in front of an audience or a camera. In the meantime, of course, I had this health focus that was my biggest passion, but I couldn’t find a venue for it. There was no there was no economic venue for that. So I kept doing it because I wasn’t in it for the money, but I had to do something for money separately. So I kept teaching. But then my clients started asking me, well, wait a minute, where do you get all this energy from? You don’t do jet lag. You’re on stage for 15 hours a day. You know, you never look tired. You never get sick. What’s going on? So I started teaching nutritional principles to my business clients. And what I was basically teaching them was an early version of this concept of the evolution gap. Again, this gap that opens up between our innovation and our genetics. And the food industry has raped and pillaged that gap to no end. And that’s why we have the prolific explosion of type 2 diabetes and obesity and all that stuff that we have. Which is an unbridled catastrophe. And the fact that it’s not on the, you know, if we look at the press today, if the press were forced to cover things equally, minute to consequence, you know, equally, then there’d be a sliver on gun crime. And then there’d be a pie chart of about, you know, 55 percent, it would be about diabetes, obesity. Yeah, it would be pie chart. Meat pie. But, you know, so I started teaching my clients and ultimately teaching them a concept of rewilding, personal rewilding, rather than sort of the Yellowstone National Park ecological rewilding. It’s like, how do you take advantage of the unbelievable things that exist in the modern world, but understand that you’re ultimately a stone-aged human and that your instincts are mismatched with your current environment. And if I started teaching them this, and I was so excited about it and they loved it, but I would see them six months later and they would still be the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then I got to work on… It’s very hard for people to change the manner in which they eat or live because they’re the same thing. Then I solved that problem. And I solved that by developing something that we call behavioral change dynamics. And it sounds a little weird, see, you’re a clinical psychologist and I’m going to talk to you about psychology, but I just, you know, when you grow up in the household I did, you had to become a practical psychologist. It was a survival thing. And I got very good at figuring out why people do what they do, especially around food. So I took this concept of behavioral change dynamics, which is an educational construct that I use for creating programs, but I added it to nutritional principles and I created a 90-day program for people on that. And it runs them through a week-by-week strategically designed process of neurological change and nutritional change at perfect intervals. And so what happened was I did it for eight people and all eight of them got results, which is statistically not likely. Then I did it for another eight people, another eight people, and then one of my clients is a fairly famous author in America named Paul Shealy. And he wrote me one day, he called me and he goes, Eric, what have you done to me? My marketing team just set up a webinar page and the picture on the webinar page doesn’t look anything like me. And we only took it three months ago. And that’s how much people change in 90 days. But the, so he said, you know, where’s your website? I don’t have a website. It’s not a business. It’s a hobby. I just do it for my business clients. And he goes, you better put up a website. I’m about to tell my clients about you. We had about 100 clients a year at that point. They had to come to me to buy it. It was the only way. There was no website. There was nothing. In a week, 200 people signed up. And it was like, and it’s, and it’s $1,500. It’s not a light expense. And then it happened again. A guy named Colin Sprake in Vancouver did the same thing, told his network, 200 people. Then another guy named Vishen Lakiani, who’s the founder of Mindvalley, who’s my digital publisher. He did it. And then he did it for 200 of his employees. And then he told his clients about it. And where can people find out about this? Getwildfit.com. Getwellfit. Getwildfit.com. Getwildfit.com. We’ll definitely put that in the description. Make sure you have your people send the descriptor for the description of the video. We’ll even give them a way to do a two-week trial. We’ll send you the details. Okay, okay. So then 1,100 people signed up, and we got to a place where now 100,000 people in 130 countries around the world have done this program. 100,000. 100,000 people. We have countless cases of type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a fascinating one. We never intended to do that, but it just started happening. And people would call us and go, Eric, I used to be diabetic, now I’m pre-diabetic. And that just irritates me. Remember, I’m a little bit… Yeah. A little bit gramophastic. That irritates me. Pre-indicates direction. Plus, from a prescription perspective, I would put to you… That’s more post-diabetic. Which one day I said that. I was talking to Dr. Mark Hyman, and I said, no, they’re post-diabetic. Yes, absolutely. And so, funny enough, you and I spoke about that book, and you introduced me to Michaela to talk about that book. Yes. So we have a book coming out that I co-wrote with a doctor about reversing diabetes, which was just, again, closing the evolution gap. It’s like when you understand why our cravings put us in a certain direction and why the food industry does certain things, you can find your freedom. Anyway, suddenly this thing that was never about money, that couldn’t pay for itself, has become the Canadian government. I get this letter. Can you come to Ottawa, please? Yes, I can come to Ottawa. I’m standing. I still, again, every now and again, the seven-year-old you looks at your life and goes, holy crap. You can imagine what it was like standing in Kerner Studios when I bought the studios, and I’m standing where Pixar was made, Star Wars, Photoshop. And the seven-year-old in me is going, well, now I’m standing on the Senate floor. The very day that the legalization of marijuana was ascended to law, that day I’m standing on the Senate floor and I’m getting a medal from the Speaker of the Senate. And it’s because of our work in improving the quality of people. The direct quote was improving the quality of people’s lives. So how did it come about that you got a medal for that, and what did that signify? And how did they find out, and why did they believe you? It was a senator came to a presentation that I had done apparently years before in Vancouver, and she just started following my work. And she started following my work and seeing what we were doing in the world, and submitted me for a nomination for this thing. And what was the medal? It was called a Senate 150 medal. They struck a bunch of these medals. Oh, so it was a celebration of the 150? Yeah, and it was for unsung heroes. They said it’s for people that are doing stuff behind the scenes and making big things happen. Which is where things are always done that are real, by the way, behind the scenes, because people just go out and do them. It was a huge gift, and I have to tell you that on one side I felt very… I don’t feel like I go out into the world seeking any kind of recognition, but it felt good. But more than that, it made me feel responsible. I was like, I have to live up to that. I really have to live up to that. And I feel like I am. This work that I’m doing is mission-oriented for me. I can’t name the country at the moment, but I can tell you that a minister of another country’s parliament did my program and did very well with it, and then contacted me to see if we could work in their country to help fight their very serious obesity and diabetes problem. Great, well, congratulations, man. That’s a big deal. And it’s a special country because this country doesn’t have food lobbyists or drug lobbyists, which means that we can do clinical trials there without interference. Oh, oh, oh, oh, well, that’s great. So fingers crossed that that will happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. Well, look, this is a good time and place to bring this section of our discussion to a close. I often, as you people who are watching and listening, know, flip to the Daily Wire Plus side to do something more autobiographical. But we’ve kind of done that here. I think what we’ll talk about instead on the Daily Wire Plus side is your experience with the Hamza people, and your experiences in Africa. So if you’re interested in that, and you should be, I would say go over to the Daily Wire Plus side, so to speak, the dark side, you know, and you might want to consider sending them some support at the moment anyways, because YouTube is on our case in a big way on the Daily Wire Plus platform. You know, they’ve canceled three of my shows in the last month and I think are likely to cancel a few of the ones that I’ve recorded in the last week, by the way. And so that’s not so good. And they’re really on the case, you know, on Shapiro’s case and on Candice Owen’s case. And of course, Matt Walsh, all those people. So it’s a good time to show them some support if you’re inclined to do such things. So why don’t you join us over there? And Eric, we’ll thank you very much for talking to me today. Thank you. You’ve done all sorts of interesting things. Real pleasure. It was fun walking through what you’ve been up to. I’m going to be very interested to watch what happens with you on the diet and politics front, because that’s, you know, if our legacy media, such as it is, had an ounce of sense, there’d be a hell of a lot more front page headlines about the fact that everybody in the whole goddamn West is fat and diabetic and insane because of the diet that they were enticed to eat by by psychopathic marketers on the Department of Agriculture side who were told by the very bloody consultants that they hired that they were going to produce an epidemic of unparalleled magnitude and then proceeded to do exactly that for generations. And here we are. And let’s say this on the other side of the paywall. I’m going to suggest that had they not done that, we would not have experienced the pandemic that we did. Yeah, well, we know that there was almost no death among people who didn’t have comorbidity. And one of the major comorbidities was being obese. And it’s a comorbidity with virtually everything terrible that there is. So that wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Yeah. All right. So everyone off to the Daily Wire Plus side. And thank you again, Eric, for speaking to me today. Thanks for having me. It’s been fun. You bet. You bet. Yeah.

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Trial, Error, and Adventure ｜ Eric Edmeades ｜ EP 374 (pDFJJmFHmyk)

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