Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Boyd and Bronwyn Varty – Track Your Life - [Invest Like the Best, EP.99b]

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

Today’s conversation is a continuation of my discussion on applying the lessons of tracking animals in the wild to tracking in your own life. I encourage to listen to that episode first. In this second part, Boyd’s sister Bronwyn joins and offers perspective on business and life. Given that Boyd and Bron grew up in this wild place, their perspective on the world is refreshing and very different. We discuss a wide range of things, But the section on restoration near the end is just phenomenal stuff. Please enjoy part two of my conversation with the Varty family.   For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes 1:21 - (First Question) – Concept of shame and the role it plays in the lives of the people that visit 3:11 – Bron’s take on shame and if this is uniquely male issue 5:15 – How the Varty’s think about the concept of presence, and time with Nelson Mandela 13:34 – Selfishness as an impediment to presence 20:26 – Tending the cup 20:37 – Life is not a zero-sum game 23:15 – How they run the reserve as a business 30:18 – Importance of motivation as a business 33:55 – Cultivating a culture that makes a business a family 40:15 – How they help other family businesses 45:29 – The idea of restoration as a business and legacy 51:23 -Restoration model in investment 53:49 – The age of restoration will be born on the age of information 54:48 – Places that have given Varty’s deep connections (other than Africa) 1:00:46 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Bron   Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfield guide.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for

investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. Today's conversation is a continuation of my discussion on applying the lessons of tracking animals in the wild to tracking in your own life. I encourage you to listen to yesterday's episode first. In this second part, Boyd's sister Bronwyn joins and offers perspective on business and life. Given that Boyd and Braun grew up in this wild place, their perspective on the world is

refreshing and very different. We discuss a wide range of things, but the section on restoration near the end is just phenomenal stuff. Please enjoy part two of my conversation with the Vardy family. So we were having a conversation at lunch, and I just don't want to lose this thread of this track, so to speak, which is some of the common things that you both see when you're working with people, whether they come here or whether it's somewhere else. And we were talking about shame as an interesting concept and problem that people deal with. I think it would be fun to talk about some of the problems actually and the common threads you see across people with these problems. So I'd love to just get your perspective on the notion of shame and the role that it plays. Shame and guilt are

definitely two of the primary things that people are working with. If the culture is always presenting you with ideals of what you should be and everyone you've been around has been playing to those ideals, then one of the natural byproducts of not living into the ideal is a certain kind of shame that is almost like, even if you haven't been like particularly shamed, it's just there underlying. There's something you should be that you aren't. So that's one I see a lot. And, you know, if you just look at the roles that men are presented with, and usually like male

shame tends to be more around the presentation of roles where as what I've seen is that female shame is usually because of more some kind of incident, something that happened, some kind of abuse that happened, some kind of sexual abuse that happened, something like that creates a lot of shame. And that happens in men too, but it's also very prevalent in the cultural roles that have been presented. So, you know, the minute, and where's the most classic one, the role of provider. and the minute that the role of provider is not met, then some kind of shame flows into it. And all of those ideals that the culture presents you to be, you're never really allowed to be yourself. And so that's one of the primary places.

I wonder how, Bron, how you see this present itself most often. It was kind of interesting to see the two of you guys team up, so to speak, talking to people kind of diagnosing first and then sussing out. So is this one that you see that you think is, you know, more specific to men. Just curious your take on this idea. I think that for men in particular, they have such a limited, their roles are so limited. So as picking up from where Boyd was saying, on providing, not only is the role limited, but then to sort of compound that, the actual, whatever the role is, is even dialed down even more. So for example, not only do you have to be a provider, but the only way to provide normally in our culture for a man is through

protectional money. And that in itself now limits, not only do you have a limited role that you have to try and be, but also the way to provide is limited as well. So I think the place where the shame comes in is that it's actually you could be providing in a completely different way, but no one acknowledges it and no one sees it. And that not being seen again layers the shame, particularly for men. And we, as women and I think as a culture are very programmed into what a man needs to be and therefore not only does as a guy are you well the work that we've done not only do the guys arrive having a very specific idea of what they need to be that idea is incredibly limited then it's limited even further by how to live up to the ideal and then compounded with all of that the people that surround them

are supporting that even stronger because as a wife no one would put any sort of some of the work we've done is, for example, husband would come home and because maybe financially he's not providing, he's considered not to be providing at all. But he may have been providing in a completely different way of sharing his time or taking adventure or expanding the family in a different way. And that's where you start to get the imbalance. So that will be my take. We haven't talked a ton about a lot of our conversations center around some of these words that seem, they're hard because they're so layered and they're so abstracted that it almost becomes like meaningless, like take word like consciousness or something or purpose or some of these big

ideas, which I think can turn some people off or shut them down a little bit because they're expecting like some sort of, you know, magical woo-woo nonsense. But I've been very impressed by the, like the layers of depth to which you guys have thought about some of this stuff. And one of these ideas that you hear most often is presence. Be more present. Attend to the moment. like all these kind of nice sounding things that unfortunately has gotten said so much that I think it's been denigrated. But I'd love to explore this. We were talking, Boyd and I were talking a bit about it at lunch, what that actually means

and the effect that it can have on people is so powerful. So I'd love to spend a little bit of time hearing how you both think about this concept of presence. The only feedback I can give you is that when you have the opportunity to sit with someone who's truly in presence, there's no debilence. there's no debate in your mind anymore. So I think the biggest thing for me is that we as a culture don't even have a place to peg it. But the day that I was lucky enough to sit with Nelson Mandela,

I was very clear on what presence was. And the hard part about it is that it's completely wordless. It is a felt experience and it hits you right between the eyes when you feed it. So that's the first piece that I'd definitely share. sorry there's an elephant making quite a voice in the background i'm not sure if we picked up on the microphone yeah i mean i have been thinking a lot about the notion of power through presence and to me what that is or what i what i have come to see is and in some ways i guess one of my first teachers of this were lions and we spoke about this on the other podcast we did

but you know when a lion rests it rests when the evening starts to cool, it stands up and because of the cool air on its body, it stretches and it starts to move. And when a lion hunts, it hunts. And when a lion goes to kill a buffalo, it goes from 18 hours of the deepest sleep you've ever seen to the most intensity. And then it will go after this animal that's three times its weight and size that has horns, that can throw it miles through the air, that could kill it. And it hunts it with an intensity and it kills it. And the focus and the intensity that goes into that is absolutely unbelievable. And then when the pride feeds, it's every lion for itself.

They're the only sociable cat. They greet each other. They bond. They hunt together. But when they feed, their ears go back. Their teeth go up. And it sounds like someone started a dirt bike in the bush. She's a gr-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h.

And another line encroaches on where that lion is feeding, they smack each other. And that's the time of feeding. And then straight afterwards, they stand up from that. and they rub up against each other, they greet, and they go to sleep. And when I think about the feuds that can form over a family dinner and then linger for weeks and years afterwards, you need to watch Lions feed. But what it started to become to me was access to what the moment is asking for. And the cultural ideal of power is, in men, is like strength, hardness, domination,

the ability to subjugate your own feelings and needs. And I'm like, yeah, I'm down with all of that stuff. If that's what the moment's asking for. I want to have access to the harder parts of myself. I want to know that if the moment is asking me to get in a fight, I can get in the fight. But I also want to know that on the other side of that, if the moment is asking for tenderness,

I'm not afraid of that. Or if the moment is asking for me to, whatever the moment is asking me for, I can drop into it. So powerful presence for me became like a movement around a wheel into what the moment was asking for. And that, to me, is the core of presence, your ability to be at one with what the moment requires. And, you know, Bronwyn spoke about Mandela. When Mandela was in prison, he came to stay here with us after he got out of prison and we had time with him. And he told us a story about when he was in prison, he worked incredibly hard to learn the language of his oppressed.

Afrikaans. He built a connection with his warder in his cell block and he created a lifelong bond with him. He worked well to be polite to all of the gods. He created an energy of connection. Then one day a guard came in who he saw was clearly a bully and he switched straight out of that mode and he went straight at that guard and they got involved in an intense verbal exchange and Mandela gave him a totally different type of energy, a very direct, a very intense, very aggressive energy. And And immediately the guard got into line with, basically with Mandela. And we saw it when he came here, you know, he was staying here with us. And he was remarkably present.

We would take him breakfast in bed. He would eat his food and then he would go for a walk around the garden. And he was in a period of rest and recovery as he came out of prison. And then when he would sit and talk to you, he would be totally with you, open, engaged. We were a white family that he had come to stay with. and he would listen and you would feel yourself go into his energy field. Then one day there was a thing called the cadessa talks. And the cadessa talks were just as the country was going into democracy.

And there were talks about how they would have the talks that led into the elections. And the right wing of the South African government drove an armored car into the middle of these talks. The country was on the brink of war. Mandela walked out of his house and he screamed at my father. He said, you will get me a helicopter. I need to go and be with my people. And it was the first time we had seen this other side. And my father said to him, I won't do that because if you go there, some fool will shoot you.

And with everything that was going on, he was able to be so deeply in the moment that he was like, that's a good point. You know, he just, and then we organized the plane for him to go and he flew there. But, you know, he would meet someone who had been in the apartheid government. We'd meet them in the hallway, greet them by name, speak to them in their own language, inquire about their family. And by being with the person very deeply, it became very clear out of every exchange who was leading. Not out of trying to dominate them, out of being with them very deeply. And that was just a different way of seeing true presence work. because by then he was present he could have dominated but he created this deeper kind of connection

I don't know if that makes sense. To also add to that is no role and no agenda, I think that's the biggest thing about presence. You don't arrive with a particular role and you don't arrive with a particular agenda. And that's a way of, that's a practice you can get into. And every single time you're meeting somebody, you're just arriving. One of the things that I, and I'll project my own kind of experience this past week, little bit can't help it. But the word that I've thought a lot about and talked a lot about with you guys is this notion of selfishness and like selfishness as an impediment to presence because oftentimes

you've got these sort of ideals or these norms and when you violate those things, that's when shame and these other kind of interesting emotions come in. And oftentimes the thing that you want to do, which is more in alignment with kind of the wild self, as you put it, is just very different from what anyone else does or what the playbook is or what the expectations are. And oftentimes, at least for me, that manifests as a feeling of selfishness. Like, I'm doing it for me and not for somebody else. So I'll generalize an exercise that we did together, which was this notion of, you know, more for me might mean less for other people. And maybe hear your thoughts on why that might be completely inaccurate, even though it seems like at surface level that

if you're taking, you're taking from someone and it's like a zero-sum game, I'd love to hear your reaction to that idea. One of the things that I've seen is quite often what happens is that we've been So in everyone else's business. So in the role. So in the responsibility. So in all of these ways we should be that there's usually a period of coming back to what you actually need. And a lot of people don't even know what they need. So the first movements is getting in touch with what you actually need, what actually feeds you, what actually you want to do.

And that can appear selfish at first. But you need the space to get in touch and work out what you actually want. But once you've done that and you start to actually be able to follow what you actually want and get what you actually want, and what I experience is people who actually get in touch with what's calling them, with what they deeply need, with what's being asked of, and start to live on the trail of that thing and nourish themselves, well, immediately they start wanting to serve. Immediately they start wanting to share it. immediately they start wanting to give people what they have. It's this very strange thing. It's

all of us in scarcity are trying to like grab everything that we can. But the minute you actually come into the abundance of being connected to with something that's actually deeply speaking to you and calling to you, we switch. And the human inclination then becomes to share and to offer and to give. And it comes out of this feeling of abundance and enough that only comes when you actually get out of what you thought you wanted into what you actually want. Could you give an example or two? You've seen and talked to so many people. It's helpful to have examples because the ideas make sense,

but to hear an example of somebody that's living a certain way and realizes something and then chases it would be interesting and helpful. Well, here's a really common one. I'm very committed to not being selfish and to serving others because serving others is what I've been told. A good person does. And so I start to give. to other people.

But I hit a point in myself where I feel overrun, where I feel like I don't have something to give, where I feel like I don't have the energy to give. But at that moment, instead of being in touch with myself and being like, I don't have anything to give right now, I keep giving because that's what a good person does. You know, that's what you have to do. You've got to keep giving.

Giving is what is the ideal of what a good person does. And this is where all people's good boys and good girls and compliance has come out and value. Like if I'm giving you something, I'm valuable. I'm worth something to you. And I cross my own boundary a thousand times to be nice and to be good and to do for others and to be a good person. And you know what happens? Inside myself, relationships become dangerous. And so either what I want to do instead of being around people because I'm going to have to give to them is isolate.

or I start shutting down opportunities for genuine friendships because my only way of being in relationship is to give to you to make sure you're okay. It's depleting. It's depleting. So because I don't have access to just being present enough to say, I can't do that right now. I need to go and recharge myself. Then actually less starts to be available.

And I don't want to go places because I'm going to have to give to everyone. And I don't want to explore a new friendship because someone's going to want more than I have to give. you know the other side of that is the people who are able to say i can't do that right now or the people who find a genuine no you know it looks selfish they say no when they actually mean no and they learn to value themselves and take care of themselves well they start to get gas in the tank and then when they are with you you know they really want to be there when they do do something they authentically want to do it for you when they don't you can trust that they'll say to you i can't do that right now And as they restore themselves, they start to serve because they start to give, but not out of the role or the obligation.

They start to give from this genuine wellspring of desire to give. And the feeling of being with someone who's there with no role and no agenda, they're there because they really want to be there. They want to be doing for you is just unquestionably different. And we were exploring this the other day. Here's another classic. the guy who is providing for his family, he's providing for his extended family, and he has to handle the business, handle his family life, handle his personal life, handle all these dimensions. And he just wants to get some time for himself.

And so many of the guys I work with just want some solitude for themselves. I've got all these responsibilities. So when he's with the kids, it's time to be with the kids. It's in that box. It's time for that role to be activated. He's there, but he wishes, and he's saying to his wife, okay, I'll look after the kids. But a part of him is desperate for some solitude. She doesn't hear what she's saying because she lives with him.

She knows his energy field. And what she feels is that he's there and kind of wishing to be somewhere else. So what does she do? She feels that he wishes he was someone else. She says, you need to give more time to the kids. You need to give more time to the kids. Whereas if he could actually go and get the solitude that he needed, charge his battery up a little bit, actually know what he needed, go and get it. Well, then he's going to go back into that.

And when he's with the kids, what she's going to feel is that he's actually there. And he has what he needs. And the presence is going to speak, not the words. And it's just a different thing. I think the other thing is languaging. So the word selfishness, even just saying it immediately makes it feel like. something's gone awry. And I, when I work with a lot of women, and this is a classic issue for mothers and women, is I call it tending the cup and the way I just re-language stuff. So if you can

create a language within a family or within a partnership of tending the cup, and the idea is that each of us have a cup inside of us. And at some point, if you take the time to tend the cup, the cup begins to fill and ultimately it overflows. And ultimately, as your cups, starts to overflow, you move into a state of abundance. If you're in a situation where you have, in your view or in your mind, you have a limited amount in the cup, you immediately start to analyze where you're going to put what in terms of time and energy, and you move into that scarcity of energy. And what you find is that if in the beginning, if you just take the time to really get the cup optimized, to tend to the cup, it starts to overflow. And the minute that starts to

happen. You have more all of the time. And you, in a place where you have an abundance of space, you have an abundance of an ability to be able to share in a really authentic way. We ended that exercise with this idea that the opposite was true. So more for me is actually somehow ends up being more for others. But it's so illogical, like you need to experience that for a while first before you can really see it happen. We are the only people who are exhausted and then lash ourselves. And the ideal of the culture is, you know, the less deep you get the more caffeinated you are, the more busy you are is better. So I wanted to go back to, we think we're doing more in that type of arena.

If we can be up earlier, drink more coffee, stay up later, do more. And the actual output of quality of presence is just going down all the time. Whereas if we actually just listened to ourselves, rested when we were tired, worked when we were inspired to work, ate when we were hungry, there would be a more natural rhythm to it. And I really believe it would be we would have more to give rather than being in like some mad drive. I think this is going to trigger so many people who are listening, because as you're talking, they're like, you don't understand my pressures.

But I think the first question to those guys is to say, what is more? Just let that hang there for a minute. Like, what is more to somebody? And until you already cleared, before you get to needs and you're debating about selfishness, the question is what is more? And you as an individual have to decide what that more is for you. We think, Bronwyn's right. Everyone thinks more, but what we're actually looking for is more.

of what we really want. More time, more meaningful connection with people, probably more quality time with family, more freedom, more solitude, more wildness, more night skies, more, that's the more we're actually looking for, more laughs, more time playing with great people, more time creating something for the sake of creating something amazing. So many people say to us, like, more money, that's where most people start. I just want more money. Because money is like an option on everything else. Money somehow allows you to do all those other things. Yeah, the guys we work with, a lot of people say, well, if I could have more, I'd have more money.

And then we say, okay, go underneath that. What would you do with that? So you've got all this money, right? Now you have more money. Now what? Oh. And that's where you just see people start to go like, well, I don't actually. Well, and that's where the process begins.

Anyway, you know, that's where we're told what to want by the country. culture keeps telling us if you can get the money things sorted, everything else will be fine. And, you know, it makes it easier, but it doesn't sort everything out. One of the things I wanted to spend time on is, is the way that you guys run Lando Luzzi as a business, which is also as a family. One of the interesting things watching that this week is this notion of scarcity and abundance, again, that most business operates with the scarcity mindset of like, we're going to create something, we're going to capture some percentage of that. That's our profit. And, you know, less expense is always good. And it seems like the way that you kind of think about the business is quite different than that

and very counterintuitive, even contrarian relative to how most businesses are run. So maybe starting at like first principles, what the core philosophy or ethos is when it comes to scarcity, abundance, experience, and how you think about the business. Yeah, absolutely. And there's been evolutions of it for sure. I mean, I told you the, when it was still the three mad huts, and it was my father and uncle and mother who did everything. Yeah, one day my uncle rolled in and he's kind of an eccentric character. He was burnt out taking the six guests who would come down on the weekend. And then it became the guest there all week.

He was burnt out dealing with guests. So he said, how do we get less guests? So my father said to him, well, we double our price and then less people will come. He said, double the price and burnt out. We doubled the price and people kept coming. So, I mean, there was like, it was in the early beginnings, there was not a lot of sense in strategy. It was just like a make-it-up as you go along.

But then the idea emerged, and the first movements of it were, when this place was still, it hadn't quite got going yet. The arrival here of this guy, Ken Tinley, who I had mentioned previously. And Ken said if you want this place to work, you need to partner with the land. You need to think of the animals as your kin, and you need to make sure that the local people in this area participate. They must be a part of an economy. of wildlife. They must be tied to making sure that these areas remain wild. He also showed us that it

wasn't about gender and it wasn't about race. It was about us as a species, almost, the shared humanity. Engage with a shared humanity. And I think that was an amazing piece as well. And one of the early philosophies that emerged out of that, those principles were the idea of the Londa Lodi family and that everyone here was a family who was at our course, who was at our call. Doesn't matter the mess that the country was in, everything that was going on. We all here, from all different races, from cultural backgrounds, we were one family being provided for by nature. Ultimately, it was this natural world, it was the leopards, it was the trees, it was the nature here that was looking after all of us. And we were united by that. Nature was caring for us. And so what

was born out of that was the Londa L'Aose model. And then about 12 years ago, there was a shift in that model where we really made a decision that said, our reason for being is to uplift society and nature, is to uplift our area and to protect the natural world and ultimately to become a quiet global force for good. And that notion, and people said stuff that was like, oh, so you're a social enterprise. And we didn't really know what that meant, but we knew our reason for being was to uplift local people. people to protect the natural world and to give people moving transformational experiences. So everyone who touched Landoleuzee, we wanted them to be uplifted in some way.

And that meant that we made decisions from that place. And it was a very different jump-off point. And it meant that we would do some things that were not good business, so to speak, they cost money. We didn't know if we were going to get a return. We were going to put some things in place. but they were right and man we have seen the rewards of that so like i mean one example the tracker academy Alex approached us to have a base for the tracker academy here now for most businesses you would

say that's extra people on site they're going to use extra resources it's going to be another vehicle out on the land and there's no rental payment or anything from it so it's it doesn't really work for us but the tracker academy came here graduates who went through that program started to enter our ranks. And what we got was world-class trackers and people who had been through an amazing program here at Londa Losey. So the unregistible human capital of it just lifted it. And those trackers who came through that program gave guests incredible experiences. They found leopards when other people couldn't find leopards. They interacted with guests. They had been well mentored. So they had this amazing connection. And it became a part of our story. The Good Work Foundation,

we wanted our staff to have access to world-class education, and then we wanted their families to have access to world-class education. And so we set off to create these hubs of excellence learning centers around the reserve. And not just knowledge-based. I think that was the other thing, but these centers, you can have knowledge acquisition in them, mathematics, English, science, but more than that, you also have a very deep human model as well, so that you arrive there and the idea was to create somebody who could compete on a global stage

and could go through a holing process. So if there was any trauma, if there was any abuse, there's also a human factor that came in. So there was the wisdom that is innately African and very us. There is a model there that as Africans we are very passionate about, but we also twin that with the excellence of a first world country. And those two, that ancient wisdom and modern technology fusing was at the center of that particular idea. And at that time we provided some funding for it. It's not core at all to running a safari business. But what we ended up with was staff who put themselves through amazing training

programs, staff whose children went to these centres for excellence. Some of those children came and worked here, beautifully well-educated, had been uplifted by Londa Lose. We had guests who were coming on safari who ended up teaching out in the villages. We had guests. We had who ended up donating to the cause and changing their whole reason for coming out here towards that type of philanthropy. So there were just tons of unexpected that started to come out of it. And you couldn't put it in a return business model. It was heart-centered at first.

And then I should also say that with all of that, we still remained rigorously disciplined about things we were doing. It was not warm and fluffy, but we understood that actually our guest would get so much. much more out of being here and having encounters with different dimensions of what was possible, education, tracking academies, a movement, the restoration of the land. It was making us a stronger product, although it was not at all core to running safaris. One of the things your dad said last night we were talking about this is the frustration at the lack of the ability to measure so many

of the things that matter here. And, you know, I've seen a hundred million investment pitch decks. And this world is obsessed with measurables and returns on investment and numbers, basically. And I was thinking about it this morning after the conversation. And you realize that if you look back at the biggest, what now are the biggest companies or whatever, there are often no measurables at the beginning. You couldn't begin to project out like what was going to happen. Maybe you could tell a story, but it never turned out that way. And that maybe an investing and business, not often enough, there's this tyranny of metrics. We're almost slaves to these metrics all the time and that many of the best opportunities might be, what was your phrase earlier, something like compass rather than

culture applied in the business sense, which is just like go the direction that feels like it plays to the strength of what you can offer to other people and be willing to go past a spreadsheet or a cash flow model or whatever and you'll come up with things that you could have never expected. Particularly in human capital. Yeah, let's talk about that. Like the knock on effect of human capital and where that can take you is it's really hard to try and track that matrix along because the child you invest in today 10 years from now does one thing and then 20 years from now returns back to London. It's it just has so many knock on effects that you have to track over big periods of time. And you know one of the things that's popping for me is if you said

when they started this business in after the death of my grandfather in 69, Three mud huts, you know, on a bankrupt cattle farm, out at the edges of apartheid South Africa, one day this will be a global, iconic luxury safari brand, supporting about 20,000 local people in the area with the impact back into the villages in the area, providing the 14,000 guests who come here over the course of the year with incredible transformational experiences, and have a 40% repeat business, you wouldn't have gone for that investment. No effort way, yeah.

Yeah. But the principles that we had, well, that our parents started with was, you know, the first guests who came down here, drove their vehicles down and stayed in the mud huts, we had a very simple experience, a very simple idea, which was make sure that they have an incredibly fun time

and make sure that you showcase this place as best you can for them. And then when it came time to restore the land, again, there was no return idea on it. It was just like the right thing to do. And so we made these decisions from a different place all the time. And we made them because we loved it and we believed in it. And we felt what happened when, you know, the simplest thing when you just connected people with the opportunity to be a part of something. And so it was so metrically opaque all the way through.

But if you look at it now, we still do the same thing. We give people amazing experiences. and we've evolved that, we connect them with the natural world, we allow them to participate in a movement, and those principles are principles that are like almost principles of the human heart, and the things we were talking about, is what we actually want, and it's a different way of doing business, and it's a different jump-off point for doing business. And at the core, I think, of what this place is delivering now is we are working in the field of abundance. So we want people to be immersed into different scopes of abundance.

So the abundance of time, the abundance of nature, the abundance of experience, the abundance of tracking, the abundance of wild encounters. And once those things are in place, the other stuff sort of takes care of itself. One of the things that you always hear people say when painting an ideal of company culture is this word family, that it's always a positive to say, you know, the company is like a family, you know, the employees are like a family. You really see that here in incredible ways. And I'm curious how you deliberately build that, how you cultivate that. Like, what are the keys, the key ways that you interact with the people that work here, the community, how you recruit,

like really any dimension of this I'd be interested in. Because I think that that is maybe the most powerful thing that I'm taking away from the business house with Ranius around the camp. fire at night, our lead tracker. And he pulled me aside kind of out of nowhere, almost like surprised me. And he said, you know, you're in a family business, right? And you're a business owner. I said, yeah. And he said, okay, something really important to watch for the rest of the week is to make sure that you treat everybody in your, not just in your business, but that interacts with your business, like the Vardis treat the people here. Because the transparency with which they operate and the openness with which they operate, create an alignment between everyone in that community and the

core business, which looks like one thing, but it really, like you said, it affects a lot of people. So he was kind of shaking me, you know, like he wanted to make sure I got this message loud and clear. I certainly did. I'm curious to hear your reaction to that and how you think about maybe being deliberate about it versus just being natural because sometimes it doesn't come naturally. I think, I think as usual, Rinius has nailed it on the head. One of the core principles that we came back with was open, transparent, and honest. That's always been at the center of what we do. And then I think the other thing, which is probably not so known, is we're not afraid to have the hard conversations. You know, in any family, it's not always warm and fuzzy.

And I think that's maybe the big differentiating. We're not trying to be nice all the time. If you, as one of the long-lose family members, go against the values of the family, then there's a sit down that happens. And there's a real explanation as to that's not how we do things around here. There are values and either you're going to be within the family values and you welcome to stay. But if you don't believe in those values, then it's time for you to find somewhere else to go that will suit you better. It's not about right or wrong. It's just about being willing to hold very strongly and not compromise on those values. Yeah, it's a bit of a funny thing though because one of the things I would say is we don't have any rules.

So it's a funny thing that is like we don't have any rules. And our whole thing is this is what we do. We connect with people. We give people amazing experiences and express yourself. You go and do it. Figure out how to do that. And very quickly the culture of the place starts to regulate itself and starts to create itself. And actually one of our rules is break rules.

Break rules to give people a good time all time. do nothing by systematization, do nothing by route, because we want people to genuinely participate in what you're interested in, in what you want to do with them as a guide or a tracker. And what Bronwyn's saying is that within that culture, if someone violates something in there, it very quickly gets handled by the rest of the community. And it's not that they... Self-regulating. Yeah, it's totally self-regulating.

And we want people to have fun with our guests, but we're rigorously disciplined. And I can't exactly tell you how that happens, but it's... But it happens. A lot of the recruitment, all of the recruitment is done within the family almost. So, you know, we hired a lot of people who had no service backgrounds, but they were our type of people and they were interested in being here. And the Rangers who come, a lot of them don't have never studied guiding experience. We'll bring them in if they're the right type of person.

So then... One of them are way overqualified as well. Within the communities around here, we hire within the family. So the families bring, and then the families regulate how we operate in the space. And so it's pretty unusual. Then there's other things like we feed people. We feed people who come here. If a delivery person comes here, we feed them.

If we have to get someone in to fix a air conditioner, we feed them. And it's a funny thing, but on New Year's day when the whole country shut down and you make a call to the one guy who knows how to fix this one thing on an air conditioner that's broken down on a hot summer's day, And he gets in his van and he drives out here. It's not because, you know, you pay his bill on time. He feels connected to the place. So there's things like that. We create gatherings outside of the work that we do. So people work and then we create moments where people can gather to socialize together,

to connect, to talk about things. What's an example of one of those? You know, we do a thing called the 2020 walk-around where once a month, everyone gathers and we go and do something in the village of Londa Lollosie. and it's an act of service although people work here, it's an act of service because we also live together and we go and beautify the space we live

and we go plant trees together and then afterwards we eat some food together and it doesn't have to happen but it's one of those things that you do it enough there's little moments of interaction you know my father and mother myself we end up planting trees with people in departments we maybe don't get to we end up

doing something that's outside of the right of what everyone does every day. And there's a moment of connection there. And then there's also, there's sort of your organizational structure that you run, you have a particular job like your head of marketing or you, a camp manager. And then there's a totally different structure which is based on elders and the role of elders. And so in a very African way, we overlay, you may perhaps today be a camp manager, but the but Butler who's working with you is quite a bit older and he may be on the elders team. So then he would advise an adult different scenario. So it's sort of the two is the organizational business structure, but then

overlaid with that is our African structure, which has a whole lot of different roots and the role of each person and how that plays out. I know you've spent some time with even like as specific as families that are in business together, multi-generational businesses, you know, yourself are an example of that. I'm curious to hear a bit about that experience and those interactions and maybe the most common things that those groups are wrestling with or problems that they've come up against and how you like this the process of working through that with them. Well, I mean, I think at the core of it is to first of all create a space where the family can exchange roles and really communicate. I think our first role is just to to really provide an area,

particularly if you're working together and, you know, in our situation, one minute, are you talking, my mom will often say, are we talking mother and daughter now? Are we talking sort of head of blonde, lozy owner and head of branding, are we talking? So again, it's to language, first of all, to create a common language for that family business and then slowly start to delve into the areas of role clarity and then deeper into that, what is the underlying, what is the underlying vision? And I only want to use the word vision. It's what is the underlying intention as a family? What do you as a family really want to achieve beyond just making, this economic success.

What is it generationally, legacy-wise? What is it that you guys want to stand for? What is it that you guys are passionate about? And really getting a harmonization of energy within the family. Because then ultimately, everyone starts to sort of format and you get this beautiful interconnection between the different partners, different places, et cetera. So everything that we do is underlaid with hard business tactics.

and skills and basics, what I would call business basics, that a consultant would maybe take you through. But then overlaid with that is much more of a, what would nature do, what would the energetics do, and there's sort of an interconnection between those two things. For me, it took me a while to find where I fit, but it became very obvious that, and again, it came down to the language, there were certain places where the business needed impact where I would be placed. And I'm never going to be the sort of person who's going to roll, going head of department. I'm just not ahead of department. I go in, I'm impact, create movement, and then you've got to take me out because my attention span is bad and I'm not going to, I'm not a

manager. So it was learning like where to place people. And again, not to be locked in the roles of, okay, now, because you're the children, you will take over. What's the business asking for? What, you know, what skills do you have? Where do you? And so one of the things is that, you know, I was asked to go out and gather ideas and gather vision and bring it back because it fits and it wouldn't have been right to say, you know, here is what you will now be. So you've got to find out what everyone has and let them bring what they have to the table. And for a lot of families that we work with, it's also just watching another way. You know, in a normal situation, people would say, you know, Boyd is the son. He should be, you know, the CEO. This is his role. He should step into

the shoes of the father. And there should be this whole dynasty thing, rolling out and we just haven't, it just hasn't gone that way because of personality. So again, it's bringing a family back to their sort of their innate knowing within themselves. Because if you bring everybody home to their unique contribution, then the family as a whole begins to understand, okay, as a tribe, here's where our real strengths are. Here's where. And then you start to let everybody re and co-create and reinvent what it is to be the CEO, or the wife or whatever. One of the things that we learned about ourselves is that we're creative.

We want to create something new all the time. And that can be incredibly disruptive, actually, because we want to say yes and do new things. So we had to realize what we needed was a management team, and we have an amazing management team now, who were super grounded in the operations. And that could allow us to create. And then they would say to us, you guys are now trying to do too many things. things. So tell us what the next innovation is. You guys get it going and then hand it over to us to run, but don't just innovate and innovate and ask us to keep picking it up. That's not going to work.

And we had to learn, okay, what we need to bring us into balance and where to say no. And, you know, I think maybe we've said this, but the functionality of the family was our ability to keep changing roles. You know, they say a functional family is that people in the family can play different roles. and the definition of dysfunction is you can only play one role. And so we had to learn how to not be encumbered by roles and to let actually what was deeper, which I guess is everything we're talking about. We had to find what we uniquely had to offer and bring that to the fore. And we had to get help doing that.

I don't think we would have found our way without the arrival of someone else who could facilitate a conversation amongst us that said, you know, don't try and make him that. You don't try and be that. Let's find out what you have and then bring it and share what's essential as opposed to this is now how, you know, as opposed to trying to impose a structure onto what it should be. One of the things that would be fun to talk about is kind of to look to the future a little bit and use, even though this may or may not happen, but use this idea of restoring an island, you know, off the coast of Mozambique and the process that that would require as a means to explain kind of this business model, if you will, this restoration model of doing business.

That would be a fascinating thing to hear about how you think about that, the decision to do it or not, and then if you were to do it, what that would look like, what the actual steps would be and how long it would take and what you would expect to see. It's almost like a restoration perpetuates itself. People see what is possible, and the best example is one that you heard a little bit about earlier in the week. Our friends in the Pantanel, you're doing the most incredible Jaguar Restoration Project. on a former cattle farm.

And they've gone from being at war with the jaguers there, as the cattle farmers have been for years, to one of the most amazing places to go and see wild jaguars and starting to come into harmony with those animals. And as a result, that 50,000 hectares is going back to being wild. And all of the other creatures that live there are finding a home. And people are going there and having amazing experiences. So it perpetuates.

The idea was this model was always sort of a open source shareware model. So the idea of the model that's been created at Long Losey is definitely replicable, and it's something that people could do anywhere. There's now almost a formula to it. And the byproduct is just, you know, I think the biggest thing is conservation as a whole, if you think about how we have to try and save species and people get on a very specific track on that side of things, but it's still very individualistic,

whereas restoration is a returning of something of an island or of a wetland or where rivers rise, and it really is, I think, going to become, since we're all on the same planet and one planet together, it's sort of, if you talk about the future, it is the future of humanity is that at some point we're going to have to start to look at looking after those spaces. But how do we do it in a way,

that everybody wins, that's the question. Well, and also I think you have to say, okay, in a world where the numbers of people are just spiking, wild places are going to be valuable. And maybe that's the intrinsic value. A place where you can go and be in nature away from people is going to become more and more valuable. And I think what we've been saying is it's time for people to stop buying Picasso's and football teams and start finding areas where they can restore. And for those restoration projects to become what investors do with their extra money. So, you know, the island in Mozambique would be, it would be a place where people could come, where the island could be brought back to the mangroves

of the island could be protected, the atoll could be protected. The dugong, which is one of the last outposts of the dugon, could come back to life. A business, a functioning. business that would produce returns could be brought to life there. A community could be uplifted. Learning centers could be placed in the surrounding area so that that community out of the arrival at this beautiful asset of international travelers could start to fund the education of learning centers in the area. So you start to hit a whole lot of different markers. You have a high net worth family coming and having an amazing time. You have a landscape being restored. You have marine animals being saved. You have local people having access to education as a result.

And it all comes out of the core understanding that protecting nature is going to be valuable going forward. I think even more, you know, we were having that debate, what is more? And I think the other piece of it is that if a high net worth family is looking to leave a legacy and a legacy that is generational and a legacy that can bring a family together so that, you know, the grandparents and the parents and the grandkids who are coming in, if they have a joint project that can be passed down that has something that they can tangibly go and see and visit, I think there's a whole lot of returns there, just heart returns that we don't even know what that could hit. And the way that a grandfather and a grandson or a grandmother and a grandson can connect and share something,

like the dugong never gets old. The beach and a sunset never gets old. And the fact that at some level, that is the thing that will join the family across time, across continents. It is the thing that throughout all the legacy projects, that is the thing that the family will ultimately come together on. And I think that's also kind of a powerful thing that I think the new millennial generation will value more than anything else because they have everything else. We go there, the family goes there together to be involved in something that is not about growing the monetary value, but it's about being together, restoring a place, watching the landscape come back to life, and actually doing that work together, that's a kind of

return on investment that people do not see on the balance sheet. But the families who we've seen who've been involved in restoration projects, they are bonded by the work that they have done there in a way that they cannot be bonded by the investing of their money. Yeah, and their 16-year-old son and daughter, 17-year-old son and daughter, have from the minute they open their eyes being exposed to this natural phenomenon. And they are fundamentally moved. And if you speak to their parents, they'll say, at the beginning, this project may not have been the biggest return on investment, but what it has done personally for the family has just completely moved them into a different space. I'm smiling because the ultimate irony in all of this, I was talking with your dad, about this last night is that very often at the end of these things is a huge financial return that by doing things differently and building something truly unique and special, which itself is, it's unknown. You can't measure the rate of return.

You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know how long it's going to take. But at the end of that process could be something that the only way that could be created is by taking that initial step with a mind towards restoration in place versus like, here's the model. And then at the end of that, you have an enormously valuable asset. And it will be fascinating to see I would love to be a part of this happening somehow, if only by spreading the message.

Wouldn't it be neat if that became a common model, the restoration model of investment in places following best practices that families like yours have figured out? I mean, that is like such an appealing concept to me. And I've been thinking about America, actually. I mean, I've been thinking about Africa, but I've been, what do people have to unite behind? What's how we're going to the moon? What is the thing that, what is the rallying call that will tie together this incredibly polarized world of ours to say, you know what, we're going to make, we're going to restore our country. And for these people who can, for these incredible businesses, for these thinkers to start to say, like, how do we take back and restore the wetlands of Louisiana?

Who's going to restore the mountain ranges of the sears? Who's going to go down to the Amazon and make that safe and restore the sanctity of these wild places? Who's going to step up and, you know, there've been people who are moving towards this, but I love the psyche of restoration, the idea that we can start to, you know, and what we've seen here is that if you partner with nature, it will come back. It can be restored. It can be brought back. And what it will do for our own well-being, say, you know, we're going to make our country

pristine again. And it's going to have to come, it's not going to come out of politics. It's going to have to come from the incredible innovators in private sector starting to create pockets of restoration, pockets of light, and inviting people to participate in that. Somehow that's how the age of restoration will be born on the age of information. But if you restore a wild place, something happens emotionally to the people around it. Can you say a little bit more about that, what you just said, the age of restoration will be born on the age. That's an interesting idea. Okay, what do I believe?

And Brod and I talk about this a lot. There is one of the largest social movements, unseen social movements in the world right now, is the desire to restore nature. But it's not connected in some ways. No one has worked out how to fully tell the story of what we humanity could potentially do. I mean, it's a big idea, but I think that if someone, if people at the right levels can start this process and start inviting everyone to participate and start providing avenues to participation in the restoration of the planet and people want to do

it they just if you could fly in a plane that spat out vapor instead of CO2 you would so if if the right people at the right level start working out how to say participate and here's how the restoration could start to be born. It makes me think of a kernel of a conversation we had and it would be a neat place to sort of lead people, which is examples in your life, we were talking about India, just to jog your memory as one example, of places that you have been, natural places that they tend to be in cultures that have given you this like deep intense feeling of connection and aliveness other than Africa. Because I always try to think in these conversations of like what are things that people can take away, maybe go do or think about doing what their feelings.

families or whatever, and you guys have been lucky to travel a lot of interesting places. So I would love a couple examples of other places maybe that have been restored. They don't need to have been restored. Maybe they've always been in good condition. But places that elicit this same sort of connection and feeling in you would be a great place to end. Well, I think one we were talking about earlier is definitely Table Mountain, which is in Cape Town. And that is incredibly, is one of the oldest mountains in the world, and it is magnificent on all levels. Another one would be Lake Titicaca in South America.

There's a group of people there that are still living on floating islands made of reeds, and it's a really remarkably beautiful experience. They are still make the traditional boats, and you can go out on this lake, and it's crystal blue, and it really hits you. It's magnificent. And then Machu Picchu, is one. It's got a lot of tourists, but if you can get your head around that side of things, it is still a remarkably just the size of that mountain range. And the dynamic way that the clouds

move and the light moves and the rainfall and the color green, it is a magnificent place. India is one as well. But you've got to find your way. India is more of a wild journey. It's more just the sheer adventure. And I think it's just the color and the rawness and the in-your-faceness of it that is totally, it just shifts you so aggressively out of your comfort zone that you find yourself immediately in a transformation. Yeah, I'm thinking of the Amazon. Absolutely. If you sit still in the Amazon, life starts to claim you and start to crawl on you. Butterfly start to land on you. Dragonflies start to, it's like the jungle starts to take you back. The minute you become sedentary, That's one, the Atacama Desert, where it's just so dry, one of the driest places in the world where there's just so few people.

And you can feel, you know, one of those great silences we were talking about, and stillness that is just so rare in the world. Then there's a place in Zimbabwe called Monopouls where the Zambezi Valley cuts right through it and you get this beautiful ancient waterway, which has an energy to it. and these floodplains with huge trees on them, Elant, and there's a few little while ago, I spent some time up there, and I was in search of an owl called the Pals Fishing Owl. And what's amazing about the Pals Fishing Ow, it's one of the rarest birds on the planet. And it's rare because it's almost like it's allergic to any kind of human presence, any kind of lights, the sound of engines, the sound of too many people, anything like that, the bird will move out of the area. And so when you're looking for a pulse fishing owl, it's almost like you're looking for

a totem of wildness, a place that tells you this is a place where not a lot of people are. And we spent days looking for it and we would sit around the campfire and we would hear it call at night. And then the next day we would go and look for it during the day in these big shaded trees and we found a feather and then we found a place where it fished at night and then at night it would call again

it was almost like it was just outside of the circle of firelight saying I'm here but you may not get to see me and eventually after four days of looking we eventually saw it and we looked up into this tree beautiful big shaded tree

and it was looking down at us and for a moment that aisle looked at us and it was like we were standing right in that moment you knew you were in a place where maybe a few people in the world will ever go, you know, and you could feel that its presence there was saying to you, you're in a truly wild place.

And just to know that had a kind of energy that just flowed into me. And then there was a second day where we walked way back into the back of the reserve, and there was maybe a thousand-year-old bear-bab. The bear-bab tree, they called it the upside-down tree, and its base had been stripped. and by an elephant, you know, maybe some years ago. And the elephant had opened up a hollow and somehow the inside of the tree over many, many years had been hollowed out by termites. And so it was like this 25 foot tall, empty hollow chamber.

And in the top of the Beirab, a swarm of bees had made a hive. And as they buzzed in the top of the Beirab, the sound of the hum was traveling down this hollow base and coming out this over. where the elephant had opened the tree up. And it was like standing next to a thousand-year-old didgeridoo. And this tree just like a humming, the sound of bees. And as you stood there, like the sound would come out of you and you could feel the vibration on your body. And I have this weird thing now where like somewhere in the world,

you know, New York City or London or somewhere where I'm traveling or on a plane somewhere, I'll just have this thought like that owl is there. and that tree is vibrating silently, you know, in this wilderness where maybe no one will ever see it again, but it's drumming there. It's putting out its frequency in some wild place. And there's something about that that is always kind of calling to me. Braun, since I did it with Boyd, the first time we'll do it with you this time, which is my classic closing question, which is to ask what the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you is. You know, it's so hard for me because I live in such a wave of kindness.

I have this innate idea that everything's happening for me. And so to single out, I mean, kindness for me is, I know days that it's just a look, and that's enough that just completely changes the whole spectrum around me. And having the luxury of being able to notice kindness, no matter how big or small has changed my life fundamentally. It's taken me into a profound state of grace and a profound seeking of grace. And so the moment of kindness that really shifted for me

was probably a kindness in the realization of myself. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but to wake up, I remember waking up one morning here at Lond Lozzi and realizing where I was, and yet I had lived here my whole life. But it was a moment and I remember it so clearly where I walked out of my front door. And in walking out of my front door, I just started to notice the tiniest little details, the way that the light came through the aloes and the way that the little sunbirds were sticking their perfectly formed beaks into the flowers and sucking out nectar.

And the way that every single thing had its moment in time and the way that I had seen them my whole life, but today I was actually seeing them, and how each one of them was totally connected to me and whatever I did would affect them and whatever they did would affect me. And that idea landed kindness for me in a way that just, I was always big on care, and I think what shifted is that in kindness there was a way of being. And so even when someone is not being kind, I find the kindness in them.

So I don't know if that really answers your question, but... It sure does. It's a very fitting answer given the experience of this week, which has been so interesting and formative for me. And as always, I've just had such a blast talking to both of you. So thanks for all your time and your hospitality and an amazing week. We've loved having you. Thanks so much. Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Investors like the best, go to investorfieldguide.com forward slash podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com forward slash book club. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away and then three to four suggestions of new books every month.

You can also follow me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Oshag, Oshag, O, S-H-A-G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.