Trial, Error, and Adventure | Eric Edmeades | EP 374

You know, one of the things I found really fascinating about generally sales and marketing is that, um, people are, uh, so afraid of rejection. And yeah, 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, um, 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? Oh, [Music] 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, right, 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, yeah, right? 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 a 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. Um, it said, uh, let's start with this. Well, living in Canada, your family was, you were born into an apartheid era in 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 roller coaster 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, I would put to you, and I think you'll, you'll be with me on this, it's a great place to be homeless because it, uh, it forces resolution very quickly.

So what happened at 15? You know, um, my, uh, my dad and my mom split up when I was very young and it was a very good thing they did. My dad was, um, at that stage, uh, having a, let's say, an irresponsible relationship with alcohol. And, um, 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, you know, to live with my father after all these years, I 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 were 13. It's not a relay race, it's 26 actual miles. Snowshoes are very difficult, very heavy, and it's minus 40 outside. Completely different game, 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, and, and, you know, very, um, harsh winter programs, and they were starting to get a lot of flack 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, 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, quite heavily. And, uh, but as I actually, you know, controlled my body, they were not able to get my body to the school and I, I just refused to go. And then my dad refused to let me just stay in his home. And so my response to that was to walk out the door into Edmonton. 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, and he told me, um, that I had apparently won a two thousand dollar, this is a long time ago, that's a lot of money, two thousand dollar, uh, bursary or anniversary for leadership skills or something the school had acknowledged me for. And he never told me that before I don't know how they, you know, 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, he offered me 500 in cash if I would go back to the school and the other fifteen hundred dollars of my bursary he would give me in cash once I finished grade 10. And this was in what year? 1986. Right, so this is about equivalent to about ten thousand dollars. Yeah, it’s a lot of money. And I said no. I said no, I had strong conviction principles about why I didn't want to go back.

And, and, um, I would put to you that had it been summer or had it been Los Angeles and had it been easy to be homeless, then I don't know what would have happened. Uh, I don't know what direction I would have gone in, but that wasn't a possibility. It was minus 20, minus 30, sometimes minus 40. Like I had to be smarter than that. So at first, I, you know, a little bit of couch surfing, where until my friend's parents ran out of patience with that. Yeah, and then one day there was a video arcade, um, called Games People Play, and not inside, in, in, near the University of Alberta. And I, and one of my friend's dads ran the place, and I walked up to him one day, and I can't imagine, I was 15 and I must have looked 13 or 12. I was a kid, and I walked up to him and I said, you look really tired, and he goes, I am. And I said, I can fix that for you. And he goes, what do you mean? And I go, well, I, you know, I think part of your tiredness is you're here opening this place for us at 10 in the morning, and then you're here closing it for us at three in the morning or something.

So, and he goes, I'm not hiring anybody. And I said, I'm not looking for a job. I said, but if you let me sleep in here at night, if you let me sleep in here at night, I will take over for you at say six in the evening so you can have dinner with your family, and I'll keep the place running smooth and I'll close it for you three, and you don't have to pay me. And as he had no problem with violating the child welfare, you know, the laws, he and I agreed to that deal. And that was, you know, the beginning of my sort of emancipation. It's the beginning of my saying I'm responsible for my existence. And I did that until, um, for several months until, uh, so that deal worked out really well. I, you know, um…

How did you manage to maintain order in the arcade? You know, um, it was, uh, it was an interesting thing as a kid, you know, back then you had to pay for video games. You know, not like now, uh, you know, to actually put money in the machines, but if you had the keys to the machines you didn't have to do that. And so I played a lot of video games. You know, it kind of was very distracting and I have to say that as computers came out I was in that generation. We only really got computers in like grade 12. So we were that generation that was like going to be left behind. But I wasn't left behind because I had been like kind of one with the computers like when video games and computers, the same thing, the logic is the same. So that time was very, very useful to me later in my life because I was never afraid of computers. I was never afraid of AI, for example. I've been playing it since I was a kid.

Well, that's a good point. I’m afraid of it but willing also to use it. Not if you, if you were 15 and you look 13, what did the other kids that were in the arcade listen to you at night? Like that’s what I was thinking about in terms of order. It's funny, nobody's ever asked me that before, but I can tell you my school gave me a two thousand dollar 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. I had none. 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 like coach attitude anyway. And so, yeah, I had the respect.

I see. I see. Well, let's go right back to the beginning. Your family moved to Canada from South Africa in the 70s? Yeah. And 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. And 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 fourth records. 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 grandmother's grandfather was the minister in Parliament in, in the I think it's called Foxcraft 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 one of the most important pieces of land on the planet.

And on the other side, my dad's great-grandfather, T. F. Dreyer was the, uh, archaeologist who discovered the floor spad skull, which is until very recently, the oldest Homo sapiens 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, um, you know, it's a funny thing. My grandmother had this little dog, um, a little schnauzer type thing, and it was the most racist little dog you can imagine, like it was terrible. You know, you'd go to the gas station and the guys would come to fill up the gas station, and they were of course black, and they would fill up the car, and this is apartheid era South Africa, and the dog would go ballistic. 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? If 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 Vitz University, and he became an anthropologist. Do you know he really wanted to be, because of his grandfather, but his parents were insistent? Then he went to law school. So he went to Vitz, and then he went to McGill here in Montreal, and then he went, uh, then he went to Dal 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 wrote this book. Yeah, book. I forgot about it. Very good book. Yeah, that book details out the, what would you say, the depredations of human beings over about a fifteen thousand year period: the fact that we were integrally involved with the disappearance of megafauna, yeah, everywhere around the world, but particularly in the Western Hemisphere, right? Where 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, the after having got rid of the uh giant tortoises.

Your father writes about that. Very good book, by the way. Yeah, I enjoyed reading it. I'm glad you— I thought you would like it. It's funny about a week after megafauna I think it's, that's right, that's right. Yeah, 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, um, 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 hunters because we hunt together in groups and virtually no animal, all animals had evolved all sorts of protective organisms in relationship to other animals, but none of those were particularly useful against human beings.

Well, you know, it's interesting. Sometimes when people, uh, debate the megafauna extinction human hunting kind of thing, they're like, but then why are there still megafauna in Africa? Yeah, and 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. Those animals have natural fear avoidance of elephants. In Africa, if you're—I've 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 riverbed, and there are 14 lions sitting in the river. Well, those lions, they're afraid of you. Grizzlies are not afraid of you, right? Right. You know, 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.

And, and so that book has actually been a big part of even my journey because, um, you know, my, my sort of quest into say health and nutrition that kind of stuff really stemmed from my dad's fascinating with human, uh, human history. So that book that's been a good… Did you establish a good relationship with your father after having things? How long did that take? After the events of your adolescence, you know, um, you know, very slowly and very quickly. You know, it, 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, it was not, it was not—I mean, I would say that, uh, you know, during his—when they—I think in alcoholism we talk about a practicing alcoholic. I'm like, I don't know what they're practicing. They think it's 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 of as 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, and, um, but we still had respect, you know, a lot of respect. And so that was very easy for us to, to rebuild a friendship upon.

And so we've, 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, uh, sign my school paperwork and let me finish grade 10 and despite having missed, you know, despite missing three months of that year or four months of that.

So did you go back to school at that? Not at that school, and I did finish that, and pretty much from that point on, uh, my dad and I, you know, began rebuilding that relationship, but I'd say that relationship was forged by my dad taking us on, uh, you know, canoe trips in, in Lac La Ronge and, and, you know, it's taking us up to Yellowknife and, and taking us into, uh, into the wilderness. I think that even those things formed the, the foundation of why we're, we have the relationship even we have today.

Okay, so let's go back to when you're eight. You said that that was when you became a Canadian citizen. Okay, so what is your family doing in Canada at that point if your dad is in, in the legal business? Yeah, then and your mom? My mom at that stage, um, she was really a mom, and then she wanted to go and finish her own education, so she went to, uh, Dal as well. She went to Dal and, uh, did a master's in social work, uh, so I had my dad, the, at that point practicing alcoholic lawyer or law professor, and my mom, 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 versed 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, we at that—I don't know how it works these days. I haven't lived here for a long time now, but if you—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, and, 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, I just literally couldn't go. And so I, I didn't, I went to work and, um, I guess today I'm grateful. You know, I think you and I talked in public. I said there are times when I wish that, um, 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, you know, 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, 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 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, because they have all that native intelligence but it's manifested itself in a way that's very unique to their circumstances.

Yeah, 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, um, multiple perspective view of a problem. And here's a great example from my father. I think he talks about this in Megafauna. 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 walked through, he looked around these paintings and he said, “Of art, we have invented nothing.” Twenty thousand-year-old art. But there's a rhino in there. Now this is the south of France. There's a rhino in there, 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 and say some, or… yeah, in, say, symbology or, or let's say an 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 all growing up in Africa, you've got your, you know, his father—his grandfather was an archaeologist, a 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, you know, I remember this present book, right? If you know that, then you look at the dots and you go, this is a painting of a dominant bull. Nobody else knows that. That happened to me to a large degree because, you know, when I was, say, 20, I was very sick all the time. And I made some adjustments with food and completely turned my life around. 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.

Well, there's 12, I think, that people are following quite well these days. Yeah, they should. But the, uh, 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. Yeah, and I wouldn't have been 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 Pajot, he exists at the intersection of fine art, post-modern theory, and classic Orthodox Christian theology. There's like, well, he's like the guy, right? Because there's no one else who—there's probably no one else like that in the world, right? And so, because he has expertise in those… and I’ve recommended to the people who are watching and listening and reading these 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 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 non-linear, right? The more you succeed, the faster you succeed. Yeah. 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, 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, so anyways, you're, you're not going to college. You start working, and apparently, you're starting at a startup. Is that right? Yeah, I, you know, I did door-to-door sales and different, like, sort of, you know, attempts at, at life, but then my dad, uh, 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 the Eskimos, and you should hire him. So, were you a good door-to-door sales? I was—I was really good.

I sold Kirby vacuums, and— What did you learn from doing that? You know, I just—I learned rapport skills. Um, I learned, uh, quickness of thought to trust my speech engine. Yeah, um, 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 everybody has defense mechanisms against sales. Yeah, like, like, 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 somebody is very firmly—won't let you in the door, that’s because they’re really easy to sell to. It's just the way it is. If somebody lets you in easily, you're gonna have a tough go of it. It's going to be interesting. This woman, she's a very sneaky thing to know, very, very powerful to know. This woman's really…I can see she's got the, she's got the fortress walls up, the drawbridge is up. She goes and she goes, so what makes you any different? And I went, I'm cute. Uh-huh. And she busted out laughing, and of course laughter, the orgasm of your brain, you know? And she opens the door, muscular tension all disappeared, invites me in for a coffee, and you know, an hour and a half later, she's spending fifteen hundred dollars on a vacuum she didn't know she needed.

Uh-huh. And how long did you do door-to-door sales? Two years, two and a half years. Well, I did about a year of that, and then they put me in recruiting. And so… So you stuck with it? I did! I liked it! You know, no, but I just—I knew it was right somehow. Like, there— I knew that I was developing skills that were used. Yeah, well, man, there's that ability to sell. That’s so… What do you learn about selling? You just thought you related to—one of the things you learned, I mean, so selling and marketing, we have sales and marketing, and I don't really like that either of those terms mean because all of this is communication, and if it's done properly, it's communication in relationship to trust.

If it's done well—were the vacuums you're selling decent vacuums? To this day, if I—I live in—I live in the Caribbean; we don't have carpets. But if I had carpets I would have that vacuum, no question about it. So you were selling something you believed in? Yeah, okay, okay. Well, that's crucial, right? Like if you're—if you're embarking on a sales career and you don't believe in what you're selling, you're just bloody liar, and you're training yourself to be a psychopath. So you need—and this is good advice for people who are listening who are thinking about doing this, is if you're going to sell, you need to believe that the thing you're selling is actually worthwhile and does its job properly because otherwise, you're just a bloody scam artist, and you push me hard enough, I'm going to sell you a Kirby.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you stuck with that for quite a while. Okay, now you've got an opportunity to join a new company that's based on a good idea. The guy who's established the company isn't a person who has this easy capacity, let's say, or well-developed capacity for communication and sales, so you step in there. What happens? I join him, and it's with the company lifts off. I'm really good at what I do. Like, he tells me, and I don't really get much training, he basically hands me a binder full of names of people and he says, call these people and try to buy or sell barcode equipment, you know?

Okay. And what was the equipment? Barcode scanning equipment, data capture equipment, barcode printing, uh, you know, and related technology. And what did it offer the people that you were talking to? You know, um, what we did a lot of times is we would call companies and buy equipment from them because we refurbished it and resold it. So when they bought it from us, what they were buying is sometimes cheaper. Sometimes they're buying obsoleted equipment that they couldn't get anymore, so we were providing them a valuable service. There were a number of different angles that we took, but you know one of the things I found really fascinating about generally sales and marketing is that people are, uh, so afraid of rejection.

And yeah, 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, um, 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? Right, right. So like, you know, in my in my business, in WildFit, we help people, you know, reframe their relationships with food. And we’ve—we have like literally hundreds of cases of morbid obesity being ended at type 2 diabetes being reversed and so on. If I'm sitting with you—if I've been sitting with you some years ago when you're dealing with all the autoimmune stuff, and I held back from offering you what you now know but you didn't then, if I held back offering that because of my fear of rejection, how selfish is that?

How selfish is it for me to not try to—well, that would also—I think emerges for people too when they're selling something they don't believe in, which basically means that they're lying. I mean my then, a lot of sales and marketing—like a lot—and, um, and with some success and with a lot of failure, um, for a variety of complex reasons. And I learned that—well first of all, you're not selling, you're forming relationships. Because if you're a salesman and you have even the vaguest clue, you don't lie to your damn customers because you actually want to have a relationship with them for like the next 20 years, and so you have to be offering them something genuine, and it can't be—it can't be nonsense, and you have to believe, and it has to be the case that what you're offering them, this partnership is going to be of clear and outstanding mutual benefit.

And then when you're selling, you're actually not trying to sell or convince, right? You're trying to establish relationships. And I've also learned too that—and I don't know what you think about this—but my sense too is that this wouldn't be exactly the same as doing it door-to-door, but you know, if you push and inquire and see if there's a fit and you see that there isn't a fit, there's not a lot of sense pushing because if there isn't a fit, you should be going to talk to someone else. Plus, if there isn't a fit and you push it, the fact that there isn't a fit is just going to cause endless trouble as you move forward in the relationship, you know. Sales, networking, and dating, they're basically the same function, and we make exactly the same mistakes in one as we do in the other.

So very often, people try to go for the sale too quickly, and the way that looks, you're looking at the menu and the one person in the date says, oh, look, they have a kitty menu for when we're back here next year. Right? That might be—that's a little premature. Or, oh, by the way, I brought the condoms. I mean, either way, that's a little early, right? That's an indicator of a kind of impulsive, predatory psychopathy. By the way, that focus on immediate gratification in the present is a very bad marker of character. Exactly, and we make that, many people make mistakes like that in dating, but they make that mistake even more commonly in selling, yeah. For the sale too quickly.

Yeah, so one of the ways that I often demonstrate this is, you know, I've done lectures on this all over the world, and I've got an audience, and I'll generally pick a woman in the front row and I said, can we have a date, please? And bring her up on the stage. She has a microphone, and, and I'll say, hello, I'm so glad that you swiped right so we could be here today, you know, making a bit of a light of it. Yeah. And then, uh, and then I'll go, so let's start the date. I, uh, um, I’d like to give you a little bit of my personal background. I'm a partner in a law firm. We do intellectual property law, and by the time I get to that place, there's a camera on her, and you can see on the big screen for everybody who's watching, women have two sets of eyelids.

There's this one set of eyelids that close. Their eyes are open, but they're not, they're gone. Yeah. And that's if you talk too long like that. They're gone. They're gone from the conversation. And that, again, is the problem of networking and selling. It's like pushing, pushing. Then I go, and everybody notices that I've lost her, and I go, okay, now you see what I've done? I've lost her. Can I have a re- I’m not going to get a second date. So can we have a do-over? All right, yeah. So now I start to go, you know, as much as I’d love to share with you about my, you know, my law firm and steps, what I'd really like to know is what do you like to do for fun?

Yeah. Yeah. Now she starts telling what she likes to do for fun, and I keep asking. If I’m not pushing, I’m asking. Yeah. Then invariably—and I've done this countless times in countries all over the world— invariably, she will come to some area where she talks about her passion or hobby, her career, her dreams, and she goes, “Oh, I have a book I'm working on.” And I go, you have a book you're working on? Have you chosen a title yet? She goes, “No.” I go, “Listen, when you start thinking about are there ideas in the book that might be unique?” And she goes, “Yes.” I go, “Have you—have you considered copyright protections and maybe a registration?” “Oh, yeah, yeah.”

And I go, “Well, listen, I'm a partner in it now.” My fictitious—when I was when I was selling, so I started out selling, so to speak, as a professor, and my sense was—and I knew that this was the case—what I was offering to the companies I was attempting to sell to I knew would produce a staggering economic return for them, and I could demonstrate that statistically, and I can demonstrate it through brute fact. And I thought, to begin with, that my job was to just lay out the facts and not to convince but to lay out the facts and let people form their own judgment. And what I didn't understand was that people almost never make a judgment based on facts and certainly not on statistical facts.

Like that just net—that hardly happens with data scientists. It certainly doesn't happen with, like, say, typical middle managers in a large corporation. That never happens. And what you have to do is exactly what you just described is you have to find out from the person, um, what's—what are your problems? Like what’s not going well for you at work? What sort of things do you want to address? And the, if the person lays out their problems and you in principle have a solution to one of those problems, then that's not manipulative. It's like, oh well, you know, there's something there I think I could help you with.

If they lay out their whole problem set and nothing you're doing has any bearing on that, the probability that you're going to be able to sell to them, in my estimation, is extremely low because they're preoccupied with a whole set of problems for whom you are not solution. And so the trick—often trick—is to get—it's not a trick, it's not a trick—is that the conversation has to be about the person you're talking to and not about you, which is also a very good, what would you say, mode of alleviating social anxiety because if your goal in a social situation is to make the other person comfortable, you're not focusing on yourself and you're not anxious.

But, okay, so you let me offer you, you know, you said that, like, facts and statistics aren't the thing that'll drive them, and I would say it depends exactly on how interesting those facts and statistics are to them and when they were delivered. Yeah. So years ago, I was invited to teach marketing at one of Tony Robbins' you know, big business seminars. And so in the talk, I’m telling a story, and I'm telling a story about hunting with the Hudson people in East Africa who I've been visiting now for some 15 years. And my very first hunting trip with them, I'm out hunting, and I'm running—I'm trying to keep up behind them, and it's like hard. You can move fast, and, um, and I realized that if I'm on this hunting trip, we're all going to starve to death because I make a lot of noise; they don't.

And so I started watching the way they moved, and, you know, and I thought to myself—and I was on Tony Robbins’ stage, so I used his language—and I said, well, what would Tony Robbins say? If somebody else was getting the result you wanted, he would say model them. Yeah. And so I started looking at the way they were running. That's a pretty good Tony Robbins. Not bad, by the way. Yeah. And so I started watching, they were running—they land on the fronts of their feet. And I was like, why do I have to learn this from the Bushmen? That's how I snuck around the house as a child. This is a natural human movement.

And then I started thinking to myself, wait a second, I've been running now—I start running with them. I run on the fronts of my feet, I'm silent. I barely make any noise, I'm able to pick my foot falls better, I don't impact the ground as—and, and I know that it was working because one of the Bushmen who was supposed to be keeping track of me turned around to make sure I was still there. It was working! It was working! But then after about an hour and a half of running like this, I realized something else magical, and that was my knee was not hurting. My knee that had been hurt so badly by running the London Marathon that I had to give up running at 30. It's way too young to give up running, you know, if you want to run.

And, uh, but now my knee wasn't hurting. I'm like, why is my knee not hurting? I can never run this long. What's going on here? I'm running differently. I'm running the way you would run if your running shoes did not allow an improper foot strike. You see, the thing is when you land on your heel, you send all of that foot strike up for your skeletal system. Yeah, and I—I sure there's no spring. That's right. Within the heel. The—the—they put in air to protect your heel from the shock, but that doesn't protect your knee or your hip or your neck. And I share this whole idea. Right now you probably even have forgotten the purpose of why I was beginning to tell this story because stories are like that.

Before I told the story, I asked the audience, how many people in this room are about to buy a new cell phone? Three percent. How many are buying a new car in the next few months? Three percent. Whatever you ask, it's three percent. I had also asked how many are you going to buy new running shoes? It was three percent. At the end of my story, after giving them facts and statistics about heel strikes and barefoot running shoes, I said, now how many of you are thinking you might need to buy new running shoes? 70%. Right, right. Facts and data delivered in the right way create the market.

Yeah, well—and you know what the right way is? If you're paying enough attention to the conversation, that also means that you can't be concentrating on selling, precisely. That's exactly right, because—and well, I think that's true in a conversation in general is that it's a mistake. This is part of the reason Joe Rogan is so successful, by the way, is Rogan doesn't—he's not selling his podcast during his podcast. All Joe is trying to do is have interesting conversations, right? And then your point is that something, if I've got it right, is let the interesting conversation unfold, and you may see that there are things that you have to offer that will slot into it naturally without being forced, right? That's right.

Without any instrumental manipulation on your part. Selling in our world called sales opportunity, selling in our world means manipulating. Yeah, and the truth is when you walk into, you know, you walk into Tim Hortons and buy a donut, nobody manipulated you. Well, I would—we could argue what they did with their advertising and sugar might have been manipulating. Yeah. The transaction was a sale. Selling is solving a problem for people. You're right. Yes, yes, you should—you need t-shirts with that printed on it because that's exactly right. That's—yeah, yeah.

And then there's absolutely 100% nothing corrupt about it either. You know, when salesmen have a—they have a bad name in our culture, kind of like politicians, and I think that is because sales can attract narcissists, you know? Yeah. Well, they're all in sales—politicians, people in the entertainment, people in media, like people have a public life and have to communicate to convince. You're going to attract a larger than normal proportion of psychopaths, but that doesn't mean that the bloody endeavor itself is corrupt and immoral at its core, and it's not if what you see as a salesman is that what you're trying to do are is to offer genuine solutions to the actual problems that people have, which is what you should be doing if you have something reasonable to sell.

That comment on narcissism, you and I talked a little bit about that in Mexico. You know, I told you about my book, The Evolution Gap, and, um, one of the features of that is like comparing the idea of the evolution gap is that there's this gap that has begun to open between human evolution, which is very, very slow, and human innovation, which is rapidly accelerating, and narcissism is quite an interesting one because if you're living in a hunter-gatherer tribe, narcissism will only get you so far. Yeah, yeah.

Not very— Yeah, not very. You can dart in your back, and Derek, here, here in Toronto, in New York, or in any larger community, you can stay put like a spider and you can mess up that relationship with your narcissism and then pick up the next one and pick up the next one. Yeah. Yeah. 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, that, um, you know, culling of elephants is an unfortunate necessity. If you put elephants into the Kruger 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, and you know, 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. Right, right. So, of course, they do have to shoot the elephants, and it's a terrible thing.

And so they've tried different mechanisms, and one way that they used to do it was to go in and take out the oldest members, right, the dominant males, and so on, but what happened as a result of that is they left young, uncultured elephants, yeah, and those elephants would rampage. They would attack cars. They—they had never been taught, and, uh, so I think it is a really good example of, um, the wisdom of elders even in the animal kingdom being very important, especially in those complex, I mean elephants are unbelievably intelligent, yeah, and they have a prehensile trunk, right? And 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, you know, pretty damn smart.

And, and with that increased intelligence comes a necessity for deeper socialization and then the necessity for something like a continuous historical tradition. Yeah, 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, like it's great to have a smart dog, but a smart, untrained dog is a really bad dog. Yeah. A stupid, untrained dog just lays there like a stupid dog, and you know who cares? But I always say, especially if you're a smart breed, border collies. That's right. You have them. If you're not training them.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing about it. 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, and they can be socialized very well, but this, this, uh, you know, this question of the role of the father, I actually, I think that there's, um, there's two distinct phases, at least. It feels like to me there's the, there's the, um, the contrast between the nurturing mother energy, um, and the, uh, disciplinary, um, you know, sort of structured, uh, father energy. And I think that that even has to be there, say, sub three years old.

Yeah. And I was lucky. I had that. You know, it may have been better—it could have been better, but I had it. But then there does enter that next phase, which is where it's not now about boundaries, it's not now about discipline, but it is about modeling. It's about—and, and I was lucky that while I lost my dad for some time, I kind of lost it right in the middle and got it back right at the point that it was necessary again. 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, and the paternal role is more like boundary setting and encouragement, jointly together.

And it, you know, 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. So, so, alright, so you're in the normal school system, I presume at this time? Yes, and this is in Halifax. And then you do move to go live with your dad, and how long do you live with your dad, and when do you start this alternative, this boarding school? I'm with him for about half a year before he sent me.

I think I finished grade seven with him, started grade seven with my mom, finished grade seven with my dad, and then he put me for grade eight into this, so 13. Okay, okay. Now, you said it was more difficult for you to live with him and vice versa than you guys had presupposed. And so you're seven and you're 13, and so what makes you hard to get along with? You know, um, rebellion. Tell me to be home at 10 and I'm not gonna be. You know, I—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 alcoholism.

What about your friendship? No, I mean, when I was 13, you know, my friends, I know, 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, uh, intellectual, and I probably overcompensated to some degree on that part by hanging around with the rougher kids.

Yeah, you know, which, which I actually think was a pretty damn good strategy. It served me well, all things considered, but was part of my relationship with my father, who didn't necessarily approve of my friends and—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 gonna 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 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. And anyways, you're doing that apparently. What were your friends like when you were 13? They were exactly—you know my parallels are pretty clear. I was—I was hanging around with a bunch of people, and by the way, I still can—I—some of them write to me on Facebook these days even from back then, you know, and—sorry guys, but you were unacceptable.

Um, 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, and I felt accepted there. And, and rebellion, you know, so that was in Edmonton. That was in Edmonton. So, and you'd move from Halifax to Edmonton? It was a bigger city? Much bigger city, right? So more opportunity to get in trouble too, lots more trouble. Yeah. You know, um, 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, uh, transition from being bullied to no longer being bullied.

And so first of all, when I was a very small child, I was five or six years old, my babysitter, Judy Park, 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 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 confessing to murders he didn't commit.

Well, they were paying him for body locations. I mean, it's Christ, that's a whole nother thing. But I grew up with that in my awareness, and, and so here I was in Edmonton, and one night, and I lived in a—um, actually, the part that I'd left out is after my dad and I reconciled, he moved to Vancouver and 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 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 street, so I just take the alley route, and this car pulls up beside me slowly, and there's a guy in the car, um, doing unacceptable things to himself while watching me as he walks.

Oh, yeah, 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 have 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 that was fix-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, and so I go into the school ground behind because it was flood-lit 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 just climb up there, flood-lit, 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—I don't—I—it's all so vivid to me. Like I—I—the car was yellow. That's a long memory to hold on to, but, 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—I’m just—I have no choice. If he comes up the ladder, then I'm gonna—I'm gonna kick him across the bridge of the nose, and when he falls, I'm gonna jump on him and keep jumping until it's over. I'm done. I'm done. I'm so scared.

And, and 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. He goes, are you looking for company? And, uh, I'll save the actual vernacular that I used for him at that moment, but I was unkind. Yeah. 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, and I did not come down. And then eventually, that’s a learning moment. Learn, and you know, but the weirdest thing is I was never bullied after that ever again.

What changed? I was willing to stand up for myself physically. I—I just—yeah. So, but what do you think changed? Like you said you weren't bullied. Did that mean you were signaling in a different manner? Right? Yeah, see 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, um, Simba, when he’s an adolescent, like a child in 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 headlights, say.

Then he has this initiation experience where he realizes his affinity with his father, and who’s—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 expression, posture, facial expression, and reaction, eye contact.

Yeah, and reaction. This, you know, many years ago, and this—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, and it was an article about two women who were sexually assaulted in Central Park around about the same time, and this investigative journalist followed them after it happened, the recovery and what their lives were like after them. 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. Yeah.

And that's because the kind of people who commit those crimes are spineless, you know, wimpy. They go after the weak, and so if you—yeah, they’re predators. No, they're not even— they're the wrong predator, almost is complementary. They're worse. They're scavengers. But, um, yeah, well, that's the parasite element. Yeah, and so they—uh, 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 it, you know, 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, you know, 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, um, she said, well, why—why are you— yeah, attack the second time. It's because you're displaying fear. Fear. 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, yeah, and she started walking down the street differently, and, yeah, 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, what happened? 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. Yeah, and pretty soon her friends were like, would you walk me to my car? Right, right, right. So she starts a self-defense clinic; it gets franchised, and, and she, you know, she opens a few of them, and she hears 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 I—I, when I read that, I thought about what those parasitical, predatory types, you know, especially with regards to predation on children, as 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 their children they think they can intimidate into silence. Yeah, yeah.

So, so that that trembling like a rabbit in the in the evil serpent die 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, 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 near, how old? 16? 16. And so when do you go off to boarding school? That it was—I left boarding school that resulted in my dad leaving, and right, so that was before that then, right? I finished grade 10 in Edmonton, and then I moved back to live with my mother and finished high school in Halifax. 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, uh, it was one of those like—one of her ways of gaining connection was with raised voices.

So we would have raised voices, uh, and my, 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—it was a lot of tension. And she then, uh, her parents are 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—that was the beginning of adulthood for me properly, 18 years old. Yeah, but you were figuring it out pretty independent. Pretty? 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, I—I’d grown up, and she’d grown up. You know, it's—it's one of those things. You—you— I remember sitting in the guidance counselor's office of my one of my schools, and I saw the poster on the wall that says, kids, you know, move out now while you still know everything. You know, and it's amazing that once you know some things, you realize how much your parents have learned in the meantime.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. Alright, so now you're—this is when, this is what year? That's like '88? '88. Now you, it says here in in your bio you're very entrepreneurial as a child selling lemonade in front of your house, shoveling snow, and raking leaves. You got your first professional job in '91 when we became the first full-time employee of Rice-X. So now you're done high school. Do you go off to college? No. You know, I fell into some strange things at that time in Canada, like for example, I was in an industrial accident and I lost—I nearly lost this hand in the fire.

And I was pumping gas at Petro Canada on Bayers Road in Halifax, and my shift boss flicked a lighter at me when I had gas all over me, and, uh, it was pretty bad. They had to take the skin off my legs to rebuild my arm, and I—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, um, I couldn't sue the employer because of the Workers Compensation Act, and I couldn't qualify for Workers' Compensation payment because I was unemployable because I was in high school.

That's why I literally got not one dollar or anything. I missed all that time, work school, and so I missed a few credits. So at the end of grade 12, I've, 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. 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 you—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, and, 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—I just literally couldn't go. And so I—I didn't. I went to work, and, um, I guess today I'm grateful. You know, I think you and I talked in public. I said there are times when I wish that, um, 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, you know, 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, 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 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, because they have all that native intelligence but it's manifested itself in a way that's very unique to their circumstances.

Yeah, 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, um, multiple perspective view of a problem. And here's a great example from my father. I think he talks about this in Megafauna. 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 walked through, he looked around these paintings and he said, “Of art, we have invented nothing.” Twenty thousand-year-old art.

But there's a rhino in there. Now this is the south of France. There's a rhino in there, 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 and say some, or… yeah, in, say, symbology or, or let's say an 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 all growing up in Africa, you've got your, you know, his father—his grandfather was an archaeologist, a 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, you know, I remember this present book, right? If you know that, then you look at the dots and you go, this is a painting of a dominant bull. Nobody else knows that. That happened to me to a large degree because, you know, when I was, say, 20, I was very sick all the time. And I made some adjustments with food and completely turned my life around. 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.

Well, there's 12, I think, that people are following quite well these days. Yeah, they should. But the, uh, 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. Yeah, and I wouldn't have been 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 Pajot, he exists at the intersection of fine art, post-modern theory, and classic Orthodox Christian theology. There's like, well, he's like the guy, right? Because there's no one else who—there's probably no one else like that in the world, right? And so, because he has expertise in those… and I’ve recommended to the people who are watching and listening and reading these 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 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 non-linear, right? The more you succeed, the faster you succeed. Yeah. 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, 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, so anyways, you're, you're not going to college. You start working, and apparently, you're starting at a startup. Is that right? Yeah, I, you know, I did door-to-door sales and different, like, sort of, you know, attempts at, at life, but then my dad, uh, 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 the Eskimos, and you should hire him. So, were you a good door-to-door sales? I was—I was really good.

I sold Kirby vacuums, and— What did you learn from doing that? You know, I just—I learned rapport skills, um, I learned, uh, quickness of thought to trust my speech engine. Yeah, um, 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 everybody has defense mechanisms against sales. Yeah, like, like, 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 somebody is very firmly—won't let you in the door, that’s because they’re really easy to sell to. It's just the way it is. If somebody lets you in easily, you're gonna have a tough go of it. It's going to be interesting. This woman, she's a very sneaky thing to know, very, very powerful to know. This woman's really—I can see she's got the fortress walls up, the drawbridge is up. She goes and she goes, so what makes you any different? And I went, I'm cute. Uh-huh. And she busted out laughing, and of