Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Eric Edmeades discuss his early experiences with homelessness, the extent and detriment of alcoholism, the changes you can make to restructure your physiological responses, the relationship between trust and sales, and the world of possibility that opens when you embrace the unknown, the potentially dangerous, and above all that which calls to you. 

Eric Edmeades, a globally recognized keynote speaker, prolific entrepreneur, and recognized authority in health, practical psychology, and behavioral transformation, has made significant strides in the health and wellness industry. His revolutionary program, WILDFIT®, has positively transformed the lives of over a hundred thousand individuals across more than 130 countries, underscoring his innovative and impactful approach to health. Edmeades is in the process of releasing his forthcoming book, "The Evolution Gap: A Survival Guide for Modern Civilization". This enlightening work explores the growing disconnect between our slow-moving biological evolution and our remarkable ability to innovate at a breakneck pace. Edmeades suggests that this gap is the root cause of much of today's pain, suffering, and disease, and he provides practical strategies to bridge this divide and enhance our collective wellbeing. 


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For Eric Edmeades:

The Evolution Gap (Book): www.ericedmeades.com/Jordan

♪ Hello everyone watching and listening.

Today I'm speaking with serial entrepreneur and public speaker Eric Edmeades.

We discuss his early experiences with homelessness, the extent and detriment of alcoholism, an 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.

Right, we were there for their Festival of Ideas.

Right, and we went to an old library afterwards, which was very cool.

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

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 well enough to do the climate control, the humidity control in the 1500s.

That was a cool city and a good festival.

So I was looking at your biography today.

I figure we might as well walk through it.

While 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, while 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.

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

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

And my dad was at that stage having a, 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.

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 1 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.

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

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 very 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.

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.

And, but as I actually, you know, control my body, they were not able to get my body to the school.

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 Edmonton.

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, this is a long time ago, that's a lot of money,

bursary for leadership skills or something the school had acknowledged me for.

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

But at that point, he offered me $500 in cash if I would go back to the school and the other $1, 500 of my bursary he would give me in cash once I finished grade

Right, so that's the equivalent of about $10, 000.

I had strong conviction principles about why I didn't want to go back.

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

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.

So at first, a little bit of couch surfing, until my friend's parents ran out of patience with that.

And then 1 day there was a video arcade called Games People Play near the University of Alberta.

And I walked up to him 1 day, and I can't imagine, I was 15, and I must've looked 13 or 12, I was a kid.

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

And I go, well, I think part of your tiredness is you're here opening this place for us for at 10 in the morning, and then you're here closing it for us at 3 in the morning or something.

I said, but if you let me sleep in here at night, if you let me sleep in here at night, I will take over for you at say 6 in the evening so you can have dinner with your family and I'll keep the place running smooth and I'll close it for you at 3 and you don't have to pay me.

And as he had no problem with violating the child welfare laws, he and I agreed to that deal.

And that was the beginning of my sort of emancipation.

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

How did you manage to maintain order in the arcade?

You know, it was an interesting thing as a kid.

Back then you had to pay for video games.

Not like now, you had to actually put money in the machines.

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

It was very distracting and I have to say that as computers came out, I was in that generation.

We only really got computers in 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 1 with the computers.

Like when video games and computers are 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'm afraid of it, but willing also to use it.

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

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 $2, 000 bursary for leadership skills.

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 no, 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.

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

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

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 Forts Reckers, 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 grandmother's grandfather was the minister in the parliament in, I think it's called Volksgrad, but he was the minister in Paul Kruger's cabinet that proposed the formation of the Kruger National Park, which is, in my mind, 1 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 archaeologist who discovered the Florisbad skull, which is, until very recently, the oldest Homo sapiens skull ever found.

So I had a very deep, Deep history there.

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

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.

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

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 had an order of things, but he was clearly racist.

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

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

And they became involved in the ANC, and my dad was studying law at Wits University.

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 Wits and then he went to McGill here in Montreal.

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 book.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

Elephants in Africa, 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 were 14 lions sitting in the river.

Well, those lions, they're afraid of you.

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 so That book has actually been a big part of even my journey because my sort of quest into, say, health and nutrition, that kind of stuff, really stemmed from my dad's fascination with human history.

Did you establish a good relationship with your father after having things broken?

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

I mean, in 1 sense, it was never really that bad.

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

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

They've been 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've thought of as abusive.

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

It was like we would disagree on things strongly and we had our opinions, but we still had respect, 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 gonna 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 3 months of that year or 4 months of that year.

So did you go back to school at that time?

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, you know, canoe trips in La Clarange 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.

Okay, so let's go back to when you were 8.

You said that that was when you became a Canadian citizen.

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

Your dad is in the legal business 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.

She went to Dallas and did a master's in social work.

So I had my dad, 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 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.

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

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, 2 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.

The exam was over and we were welcomed into the country.

So, now your father was a law professor where?

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

And was your parents' relationship when you were about 8 at that time, was it starting to shake already?

And was that alcohol-related, fundamentally?

My dad says there were 2 causes of his alcoholism.

1 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.

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 3 at once.

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

Kitts, and him and his woman, Roberta, oh, I can't remember Roberta's last name.

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

Kitts and they used to go down there and study the effects of alcohol on green monkeys, which 5% of whom would drink to coma 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 to coma, And those were the monkeys that had a biological predisposition to alcohol, to alcoholism.

And alcohol is a really bad drug, you know.

It's 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.

cause of domestic abuse, it's almost the sole cause of so-called date rape.

If you dig into criminal behavior 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's bad news and it can turn perfectly good people into quite the impulsive and dim-witted monsters.

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.

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

If you just make me feel better, I'll stop this, I won't do it anymore.

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, well, 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 hungover.

So, and I got married and I was gonna 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 as 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 the problem is when you're drinking, you think you're cool, but you have those same delusions that Homer Simpson's friend Barney had when he was drinking that you're this kind of elegant and sophisticated comedian.

I would argue that the real problem is that it 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 1 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 people who blush know that they're blushing.

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374. Trial, Error and Adventure | Eric Edmeades