Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Boyd Varty – The Art of Tracking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.32]

Episode Date: April 11, 2017

This week’s episode is the most unique to date. My guest is Boyd Varty, who grew up in the South African Bush, living among and tracking wild leopards. The main theme of our conversation is tracking, and how the same strategy for pursuing animals in the wild can be applied to all aspects of our lives. Boyd’s family has been tracking animals for four generations, and he is bringing what they have learned to a larger audience around the world.   The episode includes the best answer I’ve ever heard (which comes when I ask Boyd to describe his most memorable experience). We also discuss the dangers of an achievement or goal oriented mindset, and what he learned from spending time with Nelson Mandela as a boy.   This episode is one I hope you share with those you love, because I think Boyd’s ideas will have a profound impact on many who are thinking about what to do with their lives—whether they are young or old.   Please enjoy.   For comprehensive show notes on this episode go to http://investorfieldguide.com/boyd 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'Shaunisee is a principal and portfolio manager at 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'Shaunacy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Oshonasi asset management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

This week's episode is the most unique to date. My guest is Boyd Vardy, who grew up in the South African wilderness living amongst and tracking wild leopards. The main theme of our conversation is the art of tracking and how the same strategy for pursuing animals in the wild can be applied to all aspects of our lives. Boyd's family has been part of the South African safari world for four generations, and he is bringing what they have collectively learned to a larger audience around the world. The episode includes the best answer I've ever heard, which comes when I asked Boyd to describe his most memorable experience. We also discuss the potential dangers of an achievement or goal-oriented mindset and what he learned from spending time with Nelson Mandela

as a young boy. The episode is one I hope you share with those you love. because I think Boyd's ideas will have a profound impact on many who are thinking about what to do with their lives, whether they are young or old. For show notes, visit investorfieldguide.com forward slash Boyd. And now, please enjoy my conversation with Boyd Vardy. Maybe a really fun place to start would be, there's a story in your book about an experience with your dad with a black mamba. Yeah. To give people a sense for what your childhood was like. And then we'll use that as a springboard for everything else we'll talk about.

When I was about nine years old, I went to hunt an impala with my father. And we had sussed out the terrain and the land sort of fell away and there was a termite mound which would have been, which was a perfect position for us. And so we creeped up onto the termite mound and we were laying with our chests on it and our legs sort of, and the mound kind of rose up. So we were leaning up against it. And I looked over the top of the mound and down the clearing, I could see the Impala and I was waiting for the shot and eventually had presented itself. and I took the shot, and as I took the shot, the herd kind of scattered, but they didn't run away. They scattered, and then they stopped, which sometimes they do when they get a little bit stunned. And so my father said to me, just keep looking through the sight and see if you can just be certain that that Impala's gone down.

And so we're lying there, I'm looking through the sight, and I just felt this movement on my leg. And I remember, like, just taking my eye away from the scope and just peering down, and immediately I saw this coffin shape. head and moving over the back of my leg was about a two and a half three meter black mumber and I knew snakes I was passionate about snakes as a kid so I immediately knew this is as bad as it gets if it bites you you know it's a couple of minutes and you just you're gone so I grabbed my dad I said to him oh shit dad there's a mumber so he starts looking around like like where like it's somewhere around us and I said to him no it's honest look down then he looks down and I felt him start to shake and I knew we

mustn't move. So I said to him, don't move. Do not move. So we stayed there really still and it just perused all over us. And then at one point it turned and it started like coming up the mound towards where our sort of heads were and I thought, God, if it gets like up around the face, that's going to be a little bit too much. And I look over at my dad and I can see blood coming out of his mouth and he has bitten the inside of his cheek with so much tension that he's bitten a cut, clean into it. And then the snake turned and it started to move away from us. And he was written. And it started to move away from us. And I remember the way that the mound was shaped. There was the sort of direction to go directly away from the snake had a thick buffalo thorn that had kind of

scragged over the side of the mound. So we watched it get away and its tail was still on my foot and my dad grabbed me. He said, let's go. And he pulled me and I remember he tucked me in behind him and he put his head down and he ran through this buffalo thorn. And when we came out the other side, he had a piece of the thorn and the branch broken off like in his head. It looked like an antler across his face and thorns in his jacket and blood coming out of his mouth and I was completely unharmed because I had been behind him and we got away and we stopped and I remember he just hugged me and then my sister who had been waiting for us in a vehicle we like walked up she said what the hell happened to you two both of us were completely white and then we got home and I thought I would tell

my uncle about it I said to him you know I had this crazy experience he was a wildlife documentary filmmaker I was hoping to get some sympathy and the only thing I got was did you manage to film it A little bit different experience than, you know, my Saturday is going to a soccer game or something like that. Maybe we could back up a touch and give people some backgrounds. So you were just beginning before we hit record to tell me the origins of your family's involvement in South Africa, kind of in the bush. So maybe we could back up there to the early history of what yours. Is it your great-grandfather or your great-grandfather? Yeah.

How that started. Yeah, and it lays a nice foundation for sort of where the psychology of, of my work has gone. But yeah, the story of Londa Lodi where I grew up begins in 1926 with my great grandfather, and it begins like a lot of good stories with the intake of too much gin. And my great grandfather and a buddy of his were playing tennis at a tennis party in Johannesburg. And they heard of these bankrupt cattle farms that lay adjacent to the Kruger National Park that had come up for sale. And they were bankrupt for two reasons. One, the lions were eating the cattle, and two, it was very hard terrain. And sight unseen with a lot of gin and them as adventurers, they decided this was a

great place to go. So they went and bought this for really no money. And that's been our family, it seems to be our family's investment policies ever since. But they went there in the June of 1926, the winter. And at that time, the only way to get there was they caught a train from the town of Petersburg to the town of Comarty Putt. And at a siding post, siding 61, they bribed the train driver to stop the train. They got off with their gear and they walked on a compass bearing directly north. And they had organized for some porters to meet them. Halfway along the way, the porters said that were being led to our death. They didn't know if there was water.

They didn't know if they'd be able to replenish their supplies. And my great grandfather spoke a little bit of Zulu and he could, you know, spoke, cajoled a little bit and he got the porters to go for another hour. And they arrived under this tree, this big, beautiful ebony tree on the banks of the river, pitched their tent, woke up. up the next morning, beautiful mist overlooking the river, this vast wilderness, and that was really the arrival point. And they fell in, and it was instantly, they were in love with the place. But they would come down in the winter months because there was no malaria, and it started off living in little mud huts, sorry, living in tents, and then they built these mud huts, which I'm told on the occasions that it did rain, people would go and stand outside for shelter.

They were just like, you know, see the stars through the roof. And for three generations, my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and then my father and uncle, they would go down there in the winter and they would go to hunt. And the terrain was, because of the cattle that had been overgrazed, there was thick scrub over a lot of the property. The animals were there, but you didn't really see them. So if you look at the old game manuals, you know, you might, if they saw a lion or a leopard during a month there, that would be quite miraculous.

And usually they were trying to hunt it. sparse antelope, not really any elephants. So it was there, but the animals were shy and they tended to try and get away from you. And the actual land had been overgrazed and sort of worked over with the scrubber that had come up as a result of the cattle. And then that went on for three generations. And then when my father was 15 and my uncle was 17, we had a real defining moment. And very suddenly my grandfather died. And the family advisors gathered in Johannesburg, and they told these two.

young teenagers, listen, you've got to get rid of that wild place where you go and hunt lions. It's a dangerous pastime. It was a bad investment. You know, get rid of that place. You knuckle down and you look after your mother. And I think it must have been the arrogance and the genius of youth. And they said, listen, that's place was where our father's spirit was. We're keeping it. And we'll make it pay. That was their declaration. We'll make it pay. We'll work it out. And that's how we got ourselves into the safari business in 1969. And then these two young boys started the safari operation, which was completely rag-tag.

They had one land rover that only turned left. They had these three mud huts. The only thing on the menu was in parlor for breakfast, Impala meat for lunch, in parlor meat for dinner. They decided they would take the whole safari industry in one go. So they started canoe safaris, hunting safaris, photographic safaris, and you name it, they were going to do it. the first canoe safari, they hit a hippo, and the canoe broken half, so they cancelled

canoe safaris. The only guests who they could get to come in 69 was a reform school from Johannesburg, so they ran trails for a reform school for a while. So it was like, really make it up as you go along. And my father and my uncle, and very soon afterwards, my mother lived in these three mud huts during the week. And then when the few guests who they could get would come down on the weekend, they would move out and go and live in a caravan, and the guests would move into the staff accommodations. But they had an encounter early on, which was another real defining moment. They met a guy called Ken Tinley. And Ken was this maverick ecologist. He had dropped out of high school, but then been admitted into a BSC science program at the University of Cape Town because he

drew a picture of a moth with such intricate detail that the dean and the faculty said, okay, we'll give you a try. So he got his science degree. He had worked in the Kruger National park where his thinking was considered too radical by a very close-minded scientific community. He was one of the forerunners of connected ecology. Then he had gone to Mozambique and he had lived by himself for six months, six months a year in this reserve called Gorongosa. And during that time he had walked the reserve. And as he walked it for hours and hours in pure solitude, he would map it by drawing these beautiful pencil drawings of the landscape. And he'd have developed what can only be really be described as a kind of romance with landscape and an intimate

understanding of how a landscape fits together and how the topography informs the soil, which informs the grasses, informs the flow of moisture, how to preserve moisture in the soil, how that informs the animals, the birds, the terrains. He had, and he saw everything as connected. And so whether scientists were studying these trees or grasses or animals, he was feeling the connections between all things. And when he arrived at Londa Losey, he was kind of this, eventually he left Mozambique because the war broke out, Renamo and Frulimo started fighting, and the war washed into his camp, and he literally ran for his life, and he ran back to South Africa. He was a formidable guy. He was like a Clint Eastwood look alike, and he arrived at Londalosie and he met these two young boys, and he said to them,

if you want this place to work, you must partner with the land. You need to consider the land your partner. You need to set an intention to move away from hunting and begin to think of the animals as your kin, and you need to make sure that the local people participate in the well-being, in the preservation of this place. And he said, well, partner with the land. What do you mean? He said, come, I'll show you. And he took them out onto the ravaged overgraze pieces of this property. And what happens is when the cattle overgraze, you get bare soil, rain lands on bare soil, it runs off, instead of going into the ground, and then scrub comes up. So a lot of the property was eye-high scrub.

So he said to them, you clear the scrub, and you go to where you're losing the moisture, these lowest points where the erosion is, you pack the scrub in there. And it's kind of like putting the plug back in a bath, and the grassland starts to return. So they started doing that work, and they started with the psychology of starting to partner with the land,

and over a number of years of restoring, working with the local people, actually physically working on the land, they started to see this transformation, and then suddenly they would go out one day and there would be zebra. And then the next day you would go out, and the land had opened up, so there could be Vilderbeast and Waterbuck. And then they started seeing in Yala. So there was this real sense of, as they worked with the land,

the land responding. And then one day they were driving home, this was a few, this was 10 years into that process of actual physical restoration. They were driving home, and in the late evening light, A female leopard stepped out onto the road in front of them. And she stopped. Now, mostly if you'd seen leopards at that time, they were trying to get away from you. They'd been hunted in that area.

She stopped and she turned and she looked at them. She gave a little growl and they saw she had this one broken canine. And for a moment she let herself be seen and then she moved off. They drove home in silence. I don't know if you've ever had one of those moments where something intense happens in the car and you get home and you turn the car and everyone just sits there. You know, you hold the wheel, no one says anything. you just sit, no one gets out.

They just sat in this old Land Rover for a moment, and then my uncle looked at my father, and he said, whatever just happened, that's my future. That, what, that, just that. And so he teamed up, which was probably a good thing, because my uncle was, he did not endear himself to the guests who were coming to visit because he would take safaris wearing a pair of snorkeling goggles

so that he didn't get grass seeds in his eyes, and he was rude to the guests, he was rude to everyone, basically. A real kind of go-your-own-way type of guy. So he teamed up with this local tracker called Almanlchlongo, and for the next 12 years, all they did was track that leopard. And sometimes they would go for weeks without seeing her, and then they might get a glimpse, and then those glimpses turned into longer glimpses,

and then sometimes she would let them be near, but they would park their vehicle 200 yards away, and they would watch her, and they would watch her body language, and they would see, okay, at this distance she's comfortable. And then that distance started to close, so it went from 200 yards to 100 yards to 50 yards. And then there was a day when they were sitting with her, and she was maybe 10, 15 yards from this land rover, and a cub came out and jumped onto her head and started chewing on her ears. And that was, you know, an incredible moment.

And it was really the establishment of the trust. She began to trust that the vehicle, the land rover, the people in it meant no harm. And we called her the mother leopard because she was really the mother of Landozzi. she was the mother because word got out. She had 12, well, for two reasons, she had 12 litters of cubs. All of those cubs grew up modeling their mother's trust. And so word got out that there was a place in the world where you could go and see wild leopards. And they would allow you to see them.

And that had a kind of, and continues to have a sort of mystical appeal in the human psyche to go and be with a wild leopard. And so the idea of the leopards of Llandalosi was born, and suddenly people started to come. And so through the 80s, the real momentum developed. And as the land improved, the accommodations improved, everything, more people were able to have jobs, the tourism industry started to mature. And so it gave life to the whole place. And then that happened. And then through the 90s, we exported that model of care of land, care of wildlife,

care of people. We started a business that exported that model and set up safari camps that said, look, if you protect these wild places, you can create an economy of wildlife. And the economy of wildlife will support local people, and local people will be invested in the protection of these wild places. So that was through the 90s, and then sometime in the 2000s, I started asking myself, okay, well, what's my part of this story? You know, there's been this incredible act of restoration an industry, the tourism industry has been born, this model has been created. You know, my family is now known as being conservationists. I should be a conservationist, but where do I fit in all of this?

And around that time, I had a few interesting encounters, and one of them, well, some of them were quite traumatic, you know, and we can touch on those a little bit, but one of the things that happened to me was I had been actually over here for a few months, and this question was burning in my mind, what do I want to do? with my life, where do I want to take this? And I'd been in the States for two or three months. I'd actually just started writing the book and was working with an editor out here. And I went home, and when I got home, I was so excited to be home. I just put my bags down. I took my shoes off, and I walked out into the wilderness. And I walked for like two or three kilometers or so.

And it was just this beautiful, you know, still summers day. Out there, the middle of the day is the witching hour, you know, not the middle of the night, the middle of the day. Hot, nothing moves. things tend to be quite still. And I came around a corner and lying on one side of this little waterhole with these two 10-month-old leopard cubs. So they're like sub-adults. They're not grown, but they're big enough that the mother is leaving them for periods of time. And as I saw them, I sort of turned my energy away from them.

I didn't put them directly in my gaze, and I dropped my energy down, and I noticed their body language. Now, though leopards there become very accustomed to seeing you in the vehicle, when you're on foot, it's still a different story. What normally will happen is they see you, they flatten, and then they just disappear. A leopard can disappear. It's like miraculous. But they look at me, and then the one had a pink nose, the one had a black nose. They turn away, the one starts snapping flies out the sky, and the other one lies down. I was amazed by this. It's not normal behavior. I moved a little bit closer, and they would look at me, and then relax again. And the body language

was telling me, we're okay with you. Came a little bit closer. And eventually it got to the point where I was sitting on one side of this little waterhole and they were on the other side. And I'm sure that the water was like a natural barrier. Middle of the day, incredibly quiet. And what was most amazing about it is there was a feeling to the moment. You know, there was a sense of being allowed, of aware of each other,

but with no animosity, with no fear, just present with each other. and I sat with them for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and wild leopards you know it was not and for me in all my years there was incredibly unusual event you know it's not like you do that all the time and I got up and I started to move away and as I started to move away I felt like an elation rise in me and I had I had struggled quite a bit with depression at some at certain points and after some of the traumas I had been quite shut down and this feeling started to move in me and it was not I'm feeling from the mind. It was a felt body sense of this like, just pure joy and excitement. I started to walk a little bit faster. And then at one stage, I started to run. And this thought was, the way that it was coming through,

it was almost landing like a kind of like a download. And I was thinking to myself, my great-grandfather came here to hunt lions and leopards. My grandfather grew up hunting lions and leopards. My father and uncle grew up hunting lions and leopards, but in the space of that one generation, and the decision to partner with the land and restore, it's landed with me being able to have an encounter of trust

and connection with two completely wild leopards. And so what Londa Losey, what the place represented to me, it stopped being a place where we gave safaris, and it became a small microcosm of what we need to do all over the world. Not conservation, not standing at the boundary saying, we need to protect what we have left, but this idea of restoration, actively reclaiming of wilderness. So that landed, the idea of restoration landed in me.

And at first it took root as like this very physical, you know, okay, we must find land and restore it. We must find physical places. We must restore rainforests. We must restore. And I still think we need to do that. And I think we need to seed a psychology of restoration. and we want big companies taking on restoration projects. But on a deeper level, something also occurred,

and I started to see that while those physical projects are important, what we need now is a radical shift in human consciousness. And so the second part of my work in restoration became any kind of healing, any kind of release from trauma, any kind of returning to the self. and what I find is that what we think of as ourself is often a series of patterns of compensation. And I think you talk a little bit about it, this desperate need for accumulation, goals, successes, all of these defining factors that are externally defined, as opposed to a connection of the self that is born of presence.

And when we're actually able to let go some of the roles and the rules and the rules and the things that the culture imposes on us to be someone and find the self, one of the first things that happen is we stop wanting more. And so I believe that's a big part of the restoration movement too, is to, I see it as kind of an infinity sign, work on restoring wild places, because that has an incredible sense that affects people's mindsets, people's well as being, connection to nature,

has a profound effect on human psyche, so we must work externally on that. And as we do that, we become more inclined to heal. And as we heal, as we connect with the self, as we become more present, any way you want to describe it, we become more inclined towards restoring wild spaces. Can you touch on the concept of Ubuntu and use that as a bridge into discussing your thoughts on the village, both literal and metaphorical? Sure. So Ubuntu is the African value that says, I am because of you. I get to experience the deepest parts of myself in relation.

It's like I can't know the deepest acts of love and compassion by myself. It's something about being together that provokes that, that we make each other human. Another way they say it in suitors, people are not people without other people. And so it's very much about this relation. It's about being connected. I've expanded that definition too because the root of the word in Zulu is about people,

but I've gone on to say that it is not only through people that we experience the deepest parts of ourselves, but through our connection with all sentient beings, the natural world too. So Ubuntu is central in Africa, and whilst Africa's, you know, it's a place of so many contradictions, it's harsh, and there's a level of brutality there that is what you see on the news, but it also has this incredible heart. It also has this incredible, much more connected society.

and people really believe that their well-being is tied to the well-being of others. And so it's a much more collective society, and I feel like that is something that we're in desperate need of. Some of the trauma that I see are now running groups and working with people, it's just, it's not even a trauma that we know we have in modern society. It's just an isolation that's born out of hyper-individuality. And what happens in that hyper-individuality is you become separate from everyone, your purpose is defined in comparison to everyone.

And we see that in our relationship with nature too. Instead of thinking of ourselves as a part of nature, nature is something we experience. So the work of Ubuntu is to push away some of this hyper-individuality, to create conversations that are more connected, to create circles where we can share ourselves more deeply, where we can share some of what we're carrying. because people are all carrying, people are struggling.

You know, modern life has its challenges, including things like things that you don't know are a struggle, like I do some mentoring children. So the culture, modern day culture, presents you with an ideal. And then everyone's trying to live up to that ideal. And so you get to do something like mentoring and you run the first few groups and the parents come in with their kids

and, you know, everyone is meant. maintaining the ideal of the good parent, for example, and trying to live up to that, trying to do it right and be very open-minded and have the right conversations. And then the second group and the third group and slowly you're building trust. And then somewhere in the fourth group, someone will stand up and say, I don't know how to do this. I'm exhausted. I'm confused. I don't have a natural connection with my child.

I'm struggling to find, you know, I'll point. I find it difficult. And there's like this collective sigh of relief. in the room. And that's what I mean by we're all carrying stuff. There's a sense of like, oh my God, thank God. And then everyone starts. And I just feel like that is, that's the work of Ubuntu, to be able to be present to what we feel and share it and bear witness to each other and realize that we're in this together. So there's a kind of separation that you don't see that is just natural to modern day life. And so the work of Ubuntu is to just create spaces of

connection. And presence is the core of it. Actually being present to your own feelings needs once, not just doggedly trying to live up to the ideal to achieve the goals, but to actually feel and be fluid in that process and be connected. It's the opposite of the model of it. It doesn't matter what you feel, get it done. It's like it does matter. And if we can be more connected, we can get it done in a different way. I'm sure this is going to be very hard to answer. And I'm not asking for a formula because obviously I know there isn't a formula for this. But I find your idea of building villages extremely appealing at a lot of levels, right? So starting with your small circle of friends, your family, going out, concentric circles out from there. Are there principles

as you've thought about this, this idea of Ubuntu and connection and your experience growing up in a much different feel? And I'll just back up for one second. So I want to explain how we came to be sitting together. So about five years ago, my family and I spent time in South Africa and Botswana for about three weeks and left, frankly, depressed because we had experienced that connection that you're alluding to at such a deep level, along with maybe parts of the west coast of Ireland, with a similar set of wonderful people, was kind of the points and places in my life that I felt the most calm and present to use your word. And so anyway, so we suggested this same trip to Greg, our mutual friend, and that's how

we're here today. But I have a kind of a very limited, but firsthand experience of the kind of connection that you're talking about. And I think what you're saying is figure out sort of the principles that or the circumstances, the connections that allow that to happen and export it. And so I'd love to, as much as we can, without trying to plug it into a formula, explore some of those principles. Like what's wrong?

What creates the opposite of the village, the race that we're all in, the comparisons, the rankings, the achievements, and how can we start to mollify that? How do we get, how do we move the other direction? Just general ideas would be, could be really interesting to explore. Okay, yeah. That will be a fun jump off point. I think one of the things that happens in a consumeristic society, is what is valuable becomes categorized in two very particular ways. So personal value starts to get knocked off its access,

the access that you see in more collective villages. So in a consumeristic society, it seems that value becomes what you can consume. So if you're someone who can consume a lot, you have a lot, then you start to climb the pyramid, or what you contribute to that system. So where you stand on the ladder of adding to the high, level consumerism model. And so within that, people's value becomes like, that ranks me. And the

minute that that gets knocked off kilter, then everything starts to go with it. So I think the first thing is to reestablish what's valuable. There's a great author, Daniel Quinn, he says, you know, not more, but more of what you really want. And you, and if you actually can put aside this idea of the egoic value and start to try and find out what is actually valuable. What you find, what people find is more connection is what they really want. More time, more experiences with family. So in a weird way, that becomes the first foundation to actually get in touch with not what you've been told to want, but what you actually want.

Does that make sense? It does. And so that becomes the first point. then the second is to realize that you can't live in the ideal. And what I mean by that is once you become present to those things, you enter into a creative process. So the straight line of culture will tell you, you hit this marker, you hit this marker, you hit this marker.

Once you said, well, I don't want to live like that, there's other things that I really want. Then you have to become a tracker. I always think of the trackers that I grew up around. And what I mean by that is to create the life. that you actually want to work out how to create more connection in the society, work out how to create more of the things you really want, you have to start to enter into the creative process of living in constant creative response. So starting to find out how you do that and tracking what you need, how you could create it. So it becomes an evolving process. And I always say you are the first villager in your village. And so you have to start to treat yourself, you have to start to connect with the self, you have to start to live on the guidance of the self. And I mean that the real self.

And once you work out what you need, you can start to open the door to creating it. So something like more connection. You can start breaking out of the conversations that are just two people presenting to each other and actually start knowing that you need it to go a little bit deeper. And then finding the people who want to go deeper with you, finding the people who want to go deeper with you, finding the people who want the same things as you, starting to build community around that. A lot of it is cutting away the pretense of what we're told to want. And I was thinking about it the other day.

I know you're a fan of Joseph Campbell. So he says, you know, he says there's the life you were told to want. And then there's the path of following your bliss. And if you watch him on the PBS especially that he says, so everyone into this follow your bliss thing. you know, follow your bliss, follow your bliss, but what they don't know is what he says afterwards, which is, and if you follow your bliss, your life might not be respected, but it will be your life. And what he means is not respected by other people, sometimes because they won't understand it,

but it will be your life, it will be your path. And so you have to create the Ubuntu in yourself. And in order to do that, you have to realize first that the things you were told to want came in the culture. and the remedy is to begin to get present to what you actually want, which I think is really what compelled me so much to connect with you too, is because your inner world really, you're sort of between two worlds, and to me you're a great example of, it's not that you have to give up certain things,

it's not that investing is bad, it's that how do you bring yourself to it in a way that is more full, in a way that is more inclusive, in a way that actually gives you more life. There's a line in, I can't remember which Campbell book. I was just trying to look it up, so I'll butcher it a little bit,

but it's a line that just hit me so hard when I first read it. Something to the effect of, it takes tremendous courage to do what you want. Everybody else has plans for you. I ignored those plans. I went into the woods and I read for five years. And that formed the basis

of what became Campbell. Campbell's career. And more and more you see this. Like anything, when you start looking for something, all of a sudden it pops up everywhere. And one of the things I see over and over again is that same journey or drive or inner compass versus external compass leading to tremendous success. My mom and I were joking about, there's a guy in the States called Mr. Money Mustache. Mr. Money Mustache espouses a life, a lean life without frivolous spending to spend on what you need and brings you joy and live on very little. And all of a sudden, you're much more joyful than people who are chasing millions of dollars. And so he's done this and built a huge, he's built a movement.

And he's a great writer and, you know, really has a fun brand. But of course, the irony is in so doing in creating this huge audience and following completely his own thing, he's built an enormous business. Yeah. And you see this over and over again that people will get sick of me talking about Joseph Campbell's threshold crossing. But it's such an important idea. And maybe is the same idea that you're talking about of the step one is to be the first villager. The only way to do that is to start following this inner compass. And then it's just kind of this world of the unknown and creation.

Yeah. In some ways, it's a deeply challenging path. You know, in some ways it's much easier to have it rolled out, you know, this is how you do it. The minute you go your own way and you commit to going your own way, there is so much written there, but it is challenging because you give up, you give up being able to define yourself by any kind of comparison. And there's a gift in that and a challenge. What happened to me was at some point, while I was working as a safari guide, I met this

woman who was a ex-Harvard professor and she had taught a Thunderbird for a while in Phoenix and she had one day read an article about herself where someone had referred to her as a life coach and she was kind of startled by this idea she said never before has she thought of a more ridiculous thing but that's what they started calling her so she came on safari at londalose i took her out and we really hit it off and we were tracking a lion one morning you know tracking is this incredible fluid process. It's, it's, you drop into the narrative and you have to be present to the next track, but have a sense of what the animal's doing. It's a constant commitment to the unknown. You're stepping forward on the next track. You don't know if you'll find this animal.

You're stringing together a series of clues, and if you string together enough of these very fine clues, you start to get a sense of where this animal might be, what it might be doing. It's the art of noticing, it's subtlety, it's listening, it's using your senses. And while I was tracking this line, I was talking her through the process. And she said to me, you know, you and I do the same thing. And what she was doing was helping people get in touch with their inner guidance, notice, be willing to go into the unknown, be willing to be in a process, to feel more subtlety, to let the feelings be a guide rather than the mind and the ideal. So we really, so we really, realize we were both trackers. And so somehow those two things, that's where my work again began to

evolve into the idea of, well, once you become the first villager, you have to live as a tracker. You have to begin to notice. And of course, in order to notice, you have to have some stillness. You know, if you're frantic, it's very hard to feel the inner tracks, to get a sense of the guidance. You have to be present. You have to be willing to keep stepping into the unknown. One of the things the trackers do is when they lose the track, they'll walk up ahead and check game paths. They try things, you know? You have to be willing to, when you don't know the next move, try a few things. Sometimes if you don't get a track up ahead, you have to be willing to go back to where you had the last clear track and start again from there.

So it's this very evolutionary process, and I see it as a way of living now, and I see it as a way of living more connected to yourself. and I think there's a hunger in people to live in this way. So the process is to firstly realize, and this is so big, what was given to you. And you have to know that some of the things you think that's just what I want came from the outside. I think of the culture as presenting you with a choice like this. You can be anything you want. What do you want to drink? You want to drink?

You can choose. You get to choose. would you like a Coke or a Pepsi? Your choice. Go for it. And then people feel like, oh, I've got this, all this autonomy. I guess I'm a Coke person, you know? And then you define I'm a Coke person, but you weren't given the millions of other options of things to drink, you know? And that's sort of what the culture does. It says, you choose who you are within this, you know, within this parameter. So you have to know that that's gone on a little bit. Otherwise, you'll think I'm a Coke person. So once you start to break away from that, then you learn to live in the process of presence.

Can we go back a bit to your early experiences with tracking? So in reading your book and thinking about this conversation ahead of time, this was the topic that I was most excited for because I think it's the most pervasive. And actually, I think it applies very directly to investing. And what I would say, the overarching truth is that any time you're trying to do something via a playbook or a pre-written set of rules, you're toast. Emerson has this great line that I have pasted, I paste up quotes, places to remind me.

And this one is maybe a top five one, which is simple. It's that imitation is suicide. That if you are trying to just do what made someone else successful, maybe you'll have some nominal success from the external standpoint, but you won't really do anything interesting or maybe true. So the idea of tracking is, I think, one that we can explore, and I'd love to hear the early stages of this.

I don't know how old you were, who you were with, how you learned, can you learn, can you even teach tracking? Or do you just have to kind of watch it and do it yourself? Let's jump off from your early experiences. Yeah, I mean, tracking is really the thing that has become central to me now. And I think of myself as trying to live as a tracker, trying to step away from actually following the footprints of animals and apply those principles to my life for sure. So I got introduced to it at a young age, and there were two brothers, and then they had some half-brothers who grew up south of Londa Lodosie, their names were the Mchongos. And my uncle was very close with this man called Elmond Mchongo, and Almond was a true naturalist. He had grown up hunting and gathering, and he had, from a young age, fed himself off the land, he knew where to get water, he knew how to get a warthog out of a hole, he knew how to rob a beehive, he knew how to find a mokabbee.

I mean, just an incredible naturalist. And so my early experiences were with him because I used to go out every morning. Four am, my uncle would wake me. We would get in the land river. We would go out and we would go and track leopards at that stage because he was a documentary filmmaker. So my first experiences were with Elman. And what struck me was this kind of openness with which he approached every morning. There was a paradoxical openness because he wanted to find a leopard.

But in order to do that, he had to draw. the idea of finding a leopard and work with what was presented to him, work with the track, work with an alarm call, work with some birds calling. And so he was, it was this weird state of incredible, rigorous dedication and yet complete fluidity and openness. So early experiences were with him. He took me hunting a few times. I used to go out.

He started to teach me tracks. He started to teach me how to move in the wilderness, you know, a way of moving subtle things like, you know, the wind, the light, positioning the light so you can see the ground better, making sure you're downwind, just a really just a way of moving. And that was very formative. And then when I was about 19, I had sort of this introduction to tracking. And I had a sense of it, but I wanted to take it to the next level. And then I spent a year with this well-known local bush poacher. The reason I wanted to be with him is because he had some of these old school skills

and he had fed himself off the land for years. And so I spent time with him and that was my tracking went, it took a huge step forward because he would put me in the front and he wouldn't help me. He would say go. And sometimes it would be days and days of, you know, losing the track, going back. And he would just look at me and I would say, him, okay, can you just give me the next track? And then I'd work for it.

and then I'd walk tight circles for a while and eventually I would get it. And then occasionally he would track and I would drop into his rhythm and get a sense of the process. Because some of the great trackers, they follow and then so they go track for track and then they leave the track and they cut ahead. And they'll walk a half circle loop up ahead and just try and cut the track again and they trust themselves to see it. And so then they start to jump ahead on the track and they'll walk big arches, seeing if the animal hasn't cut this way, hasn't cut this way, okay, cut the track again. And they speed up, or they know there's water up ahead. So they have this very, the process is always evolving.

It's not just one thing. Sometimes you're following, sometimes you're using speculation, sometimes you're cutting ahead, sometimes you're using local terrain, sometimes you hear an alarm call. So I really got a sense of that from him. And then finally, these two trackers who have now become my real mentors, this guy called Alex Fendenhief, and Almond's brother, Rhenia Simchongo, they've become the people who I'm now out with all the time.

And they are probably two of the best trackers in the world. I would say they're in the top five or ten in the world. And my tracking has again gone to a different level, just being out with them for hours and being put on the track and being shown what the level of things they're noticing, the details they're noticing, the thought process that they bring to it. And so it's this kind of, as I said, like it often, begins with sitting around a fire and just listening. And then somewhere out there in the wilderness,

a lion roars. And the first act of it is, it could be anywhere out there. You try and get a sense of it, but it's this willingness to go. You know, it's this willingness to try. It's thousands of hectares out there, but we're going after that lion. And even that, you know, that's a threshold in itself, the decision to know, knowing that it's an impossibility to it. And yet, if we go and try, and we use our skill, there's also a chance. And as you practice it more, it becomes more and more likely. You talk about, in a couple spots, two types of confidence, two different types of confidence. I'm going to read something because when I read your line, it made me think of this.

So it says, consider the hypothetical case of two fishermen, both of who must make their living from a river. One fisherman lives by a river where the catch is stable and abundant. The other lives by a river where the catch is variable and sparse, affording only a bear and precarious subsistence. The poorer of the two will clearly have an immediate life and death interest in devising new fishing techniques in observing closely the habits of fish, in the careful sitting in traps and wires, in the timing and the signs of seasonal runs of different species and so forth. And part of what you just said in your description of learning to track was a difficulty, there's an element of difficulty and discomfort. When you've lost it, you're asking somebody to

help you out. Again, that's kind of like the playbook idea. or the set of rules. So how much of it is trying to throw yourself into almost a constant state of strain or difficulty that makes it for a good tracker? I sometimes think that uncertainty is a discipline of aliveness. You know, it brings you to yourself. And the challenge of the track, what do they call it? The challenge of the track brings you to aliveness.

And it's like cracking this code. And then you lose it for a while. So I think of it as aliveness. I think that giving yourself to that process and letting it push you and finding, you know, once it starts to get hot and you're thirsty and you don't know if you'll find this animal, finding the place in yourself that still wants to keep going. And then finding that intensity, finding the rigorousness. And the great trackers, they have a way. And it's also a presence because you just keep responding to the next moment. you keep trying, you keep creating with the moment and letting that keep shaping your idea.

And there's a relentlessness. It's fascinating to watch trackers like Alex and Rennius. There's a relentlessness to them. They will not stop. And yet it's not a burden. It's not a driven strain. There's no criticalness of the stuff. Like, you've got to keep going.

Keep doing this. They're present within it. And they're having a good time. They like being challenged. They like losing the track and trying to work out where it might have gone. They don't consider when they lose the track, you know, this is a failure or not good. They use that as a state of motivation, actually. But it's a motivation that is not critical that is joyful.

Rerinius used to, as he was tracking, he used to say, dashkuma, dashed to himself, we'll find it, we'll find it. He just keep going on it. So yeah, and I think about that a lot, making up your own life, being someone who wants to create a life that is the expression of your essence, there's a lot of uncertainty in it, and also aliveness. So right now, you know, I'm also building my work. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's no standard paycheck. There's no, I'm making up my work, I'm creating my work, and within that uncertainty, I'm tracking the things that feel good, that feel like an expression of my essence. I'm using my inner compass to guide me.

I'm being present, present to the moment and seeing, you know, what it has to offer. And it's uncertain, and I like that. And I think that's some of the psyche of it, this idea of we're not looking for the meaning of life, but the feeling of being alive. And that's what the process of tracking is to me. The idea of the types of confidence is really stuck with me where the first type of confidence is basically that easy, the fisherman that has it easy, you know, confident in the next meal because of, you know, the situation is abundant. The second type of confidence, I can remember the examples you use something like,

you know, you've lived through a broken down plane and been stuck somewhere and been through really difficult situations. Then you develop a true, like inner confidence. I think that everyone's got something for which they can be relentless or in the pursuit of which they will be relentless. The challenges in, like you said, the Coke or the Pepsi. Yeah. Like we're given Coke and Pepsi as the things that you should be relentless for.

make a ton of money, collect accolades, beat other people, things like that. But there's just a much bigger menu. And maybe that's back to where we started. Like that's the challenge that we all face is, or can we be relentless? I doubt I could be a relentless tracker. Maybe there's something that's important. I think you would like it. I'm sure I would.

And I want to come with you and try sometime. But that's an amazing message of find the thing that you can be relentless about because there's something. Yeah. You know, I look at, Alex used to say to me, when I'm tracking, and sometimes it's stop, start, you get a track, and then you go and look up ahead, and an hour goes by, you don't get the second one, and then suddenly you see where it crossed some sandy ground, now you're on this track of a line, it's quite fresh, then the flow comes, now you're seeing the track, that the animal is leading you to a place where you could never have gone. Like, there was no road to go to that part of the reserve, and suddenly you look up and you're in a beautiful ebony grove, on the banks of a river that you would never have gone to. And I think about that, too, within the metaphor. Like, if you begin to live as a tracker,

some of the most beautiful things that will occur in your life, you could not have known to want, you know? And I would say to him, like, tell me about the state you get into. And he would say, when I'm flowing, I'm noticing, I'm feeling the subtle movement of the animal. I'm aware of the track. I feel tapped into everything, a kind of flow state. and he said, I have no experience of being hungry.

I have no experience of being thirsty, sometimes for hours on end. So I always said, I have no experience of time. So I always say to people, you know, the things that make you forget about time are sometimes attract to your most essential nature. You know, the thing that is most to your essence. And then to try and track your way into finding how to live in that, how to live closer to that. So the standard idea of life is like, okay, you know, there's things you like, you put them aside.

You know, everyone, that's what you do. And then you get to them when you can. When you retire. Yeah. You know, you get to those things on the weekends. Go work hard. Yeah. And, you know, I get that.

And it's just for me, I'm trying to live, you know, to try and live in the expression of my essence, which for me is restoration, which is helping people become more present, which is anything where I think there's an opportunity for a more collective conversation. And then to try and say like, okay, I have living like that, yeah, there is the challenge of making a living too. But what I find is that when I'm connected to it, you know, I run retreats. Somehow people keep coming, you know, and it keeps happening. I never know how it's going to happen. But the more I remain connected with it, the more people keep showing up.

So then it's starting to learn to trust it. What's the single most memorable tracking experience that you have? Well, I have one with Alex and Rennius. We tracked a single male lion. We tracked him for three or four hours. And he got to a place where the lion's tracks teed onto the tracks of a herd of buffalo. And right there, he laid down next to a pile of buffalo dung. And this is the track telling you.

And he rolled over into the buffalo dung. and he was covering himself in dung, and he's going to go hunt those buffalo. It's an amazing image. You can see where his tails, shrift, it's all laid out in the sand on the ground. Then he stands up and he starts walking, and Reneas was picking his tracks amongst the track,

like the ground had been churned up by the hooves of the buffalo. He was picking his track, and he was walking zigzags, and he'd get one track, and he'd get a second track, and he was charting a course. And then where he saw the track, he would look up at a tree, and he would use the tree as a marker. That's generally the line that the lion is moving on. And then he would get cut it again.

And he was just saying, I just keep trusting myself. Just keep trusting yourself. And then there was a place where the tracks of three lionesses came in and joined him. So suddenly you saw the males track and then the track of a female and then a second female and a third. And lions are the only sociable cats. So on the ground, suddenly you can see where the tracks are all touching each other. They're walking next to each other and they're rubbing each other as the pride has joined up. And then about maybe a kilometer ahead of us, a Battlier eagle dropped down.

And Renia stopped us and he said, you see when that eagle drops down, it means one of two things. Either a buffalo is given birth to a calf and the eagle is eating the afterbirth or these lions have killed. So we went up ahead and when we got to where the eagle had landed, it flew up and the ground had given way to like scrubby grass. It's very difficult to see tracks. Alex and I were walking around, looking for the tracks everywhere we couldn't find it. Rhenia stood very, very still. And it was interesting to me when he lost the track, he became still for a moment. And because he was standing still, he saw these flies going past him.

Zio, zio, ziom, and then he started to follow the flies. And then he put his nose up and he started sniffing. And literally he caught the scent of meat. And he walked us in on the remains of a small buffalo calf. and immediately as he saw the carcass, the lions that obviously move off, I saw him doing, it's a kind of calculation, but it's in his body, he's not thinking about it rationally. He felt the sun on him, so he feels the heat building. He sees the size of the carcass, it was a small cough.

He knows that there are four lions, one male and three females. And as he was doing it, I realized I was thirsty. So if I'm thirsty, that lion is probably getting thirsty. So it's very alive. And then Alex and I continued to look for the tracks. Where had they gone from the carcass? Renia stood up. He just started walking.

We said, where are you going? He said, I'm going. I know where the water is. So we were about three or four miles from the river. And he walked down through the clearings. He completely forgot about the tracks. Went down to the edge of the river. Cut a game path on the edge of the river, and we started walking along the river's edge.

Walked like that for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. And up ahead of us, through the reeds, we saw this beautiful. canvas, elephant bull was walking towards us. And they kicked the ground and a little puff of smoke came up and drifted, and Alex and Wren stepped in the direction that the sand had drifted, this little puff of dust. They're stepping downwind. They stepped downwind and they got in under a little palm tree. And this elephant bull walked past us maybe two or three meters away. And for a moment, I remember, he's towered over us, his shadow was on us. And on the game path, He smelt where we had walked, and he picked up the sand, and he was smelling our footprints.

And I just felt this incredible energy kind of sensory awakeness. And then he walked past us. As he moved away, we got back on the game path, and now there's these big, beautiful elephant huge tracks on the game path in the soft sand. About 100 meters down the track, the lion tracks come back onto the path, and now on top. top of the tracks of the elephant are the tracks of the lions. And we've just seen the elephant. So we now know we are close. And Renia said to me, come up to the front. So my job now is to follow the tracks. And he's putting me on the tracks because he wants, him and Alex want to look over my shoulders into the brush ahead so that they can see the lions before the lions see us. And we

start to follow in the beautiful lion tracks in powdery sand, the whole pride walking in a line along this game path. And up ahead of us, 200 yards, a monkey starts to alarm. Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. We know that, and I can see the monkey looking down into the river. We know those lines are moving ahead of us. Keep going. Get to where the monkey's over our head. He's still looking down the river, shouting, and then an anayala starts to alarm, one of these antelope. So it's an incredible feeling of being in the story, the narrative, you can see the tracks, everything is talking to you. The monkey's talking to you. The Niala is alarming. Beyond that, a squirrel starts to call, and you're immersed in this unfolding

story, and it's like the sense of you and the tracks start to collapse, and it's one story. And it also occurred to me that you could walk down that trail as a non-tracker, someone who was completely shut down, and all of that could be going on, and you could miss it. You know, this incredible information, language, this whole scape is guiding you. It's telling you, and you could miss it. We go for a... about another 50 meters and then there's this amazing thing, all the tracks are going away from us, and then suddenly, on top of all of the tracks going away from us, there's one set of tracks facing back towards us. And what's happened is the female at the back of this line of lions moving,

she can't smell us, she can't hear us, but as we're tracking her, she's starting to get a feeling, something behind her saying, there's something there. And I think it's because we're dropping into the resonance of the lions. We're moving like them. We're starting to connect in some way. She's feeling something. So she stops and she turns and she looks back down the path. And she doesn't see us, but it's just a beautiful moment in the tracks. You know, she's starting to get a sense that you're back there. And then the tracks cut off the riverbank and they went down into thick reeds. And we had a little bit of a, we called an endaba, a bit of a meeting. We said, are we going down there? And Renier said, let's just take a little look. And so we went down. And so we went down,

on a hippo path where the hippos come in and out of the river and it made like a tunnel in the reeds. So we move, we like crouch down, we crawl through this tunnel. And then it opened up into a little sandy beach. And if you see it, I should tell you, if you see lions on foot, one of two things happens. One, they get a fright, they run away from you. They take cover. Or two, and particularly when they have cubs or meat, you start to hear a growling. It sounds like a dirt bike.

And then you see one of the females or one of the males, usually it's a female if there's cubs, and she just locks you in the most intense, I'm going to massacre you gaze. And slowly she starts to walk towards you. And there's like an intent to the walk. And the head is down and the tail is lashing. And she starts to walk faster and faster and faster. And then it becomes a trot and then it becomes a full on charge. And the whole time she's growling.

she comes in and at that moment your only hope is to stand your ground. So everyone grabs each other, you start shouting, and usually she'll come and stop two or three meters, the sand flies up, you get sand in your teeth, in your eyes is terrifying. And everyone stands and you shout, and then what's happening is while she's got you there growling at you, the other females taking the cubs away. So you stand, my uncle used to say to me, lions are afraid of your courage.

You have to stand your ground, otherwise you'll get eaten. So she turns and she moves away. and then you get away. So this is all going through my mind as I crawl through a hippo path in a thickly reed river. And we come out onto this open beach and we go over to the little stream of water. And I can see where the male lion has come in to drink. And then the first female, there were three females with him. Then the second female, then the third female.

And this is all in the tracks telling you. And this is how it can help you. Then a fourth set of tracks. fourth female. And then I saw tracks of what I thought briefly as I glanced at was a civet. A civet is like a small raccoon-like creature. I saw the tracks of the civet, and then the three of us, all looking at the civet track, realized at the same time,

that's not the tracks of a civet. That's the tracks of a cub. And Alex looked at, Rennius, who's a black shangun man, went completely white. And Alex looked at me, and he mouthed a profanity. And he grabbed the top of his head, and we realized now, we are down in the river, and the pride has joined up with a female with cubs. And all of us just sank down onto our haunches. And we sat there incredibly still, because we know the lions are now very, very close. And you don't want to be in between the mother who stashed the cubs somewhere in the reeds.

Now we're in her way, and it's because it's a terrifying situation. And I saw Rennius, and this is this is experience. I saw him listen very intently to the soundscape around us. And he was listening for subtleties in bird calls that I don't know, that he knows. Little indicators of where the lions might be. Because birds have a very unique language, but it's subtle. Some of it is very obvious when they're alarming. But some of it when the lions have laid down, when they're not moving, is much more subtle. And he heard, he got a sense that they had moved a little bit away from us. And he clicked once and he pointed us back up the path.

And, I mean, our hearts were in our throats. We stood up and we moved up the path and we got to a tree on the riverbank and we looked down and then we saw them down in there with the cubs. And we didn't get charged. No one got bitten. No one got mauled. But the experience of it again was just this incredible alive. And in some ways, again, his experience, there's a chance if we had been by ourselves, we would have blundered on and we would have got badly, badly charged.

But, you know, I watch all these Discovery Channel things and everything is like, death week, deadly snake wig. Like, if you actually are listening, if you're actually aware, if you actually take the time to learn about the wilderness, it talks to you. And it doesn't want to tear you up. that's not the animal's natural inclination. They're actually, if you learn the language, it can be a very, very safe environment. So I like to just pause and recognize the single best answer to any question that I've ever asked anybody. That was incredible. It makes me think of so many other questions.

The first of which is, and I'll transcribe that answer and it'll read like perfectly written paragraphs. But sitting here, listening to it, makes me think, okay, I can't get to the African bush this year, probably, or maybe anytime soon. Maybe I can. And my motivation is significantly high. But I want to do something like what you just described. I want that experience. How can I do that? What should we do?

What should people do that want, recognizing we can't have that exact experience, but the undercurrent of it, the present. the holistic nature of it. How can we get that? Well, I think two things, and then I'll come back to that. The one is, I don't know if you've come across the work of, which was fascinated to me, of it's Otto Schramm. He built on Peter Senge's work at MIT, and he's got this thing called the Presencing Institute. And one of the things they say is presencing, when you really start to touch deeper states of presence,

and he does it for business teams, but you start to be able to lead from the emergent future. And I think about that in tracking, you know, touching back in on this idea that there are signs, not signs in like a, like a, I saw a sign, but like there is, life is intelligent. Life is a guide. Life has, there is, when we become present,

you can start to feel into what wants to happen. It's, there are markers. The tracks are there. if you can be present enough. The tracks are there, is what I'm saying. And I think that I look at a lot of people getting into adventure sports now. So you grind it out nine to five

and then you go and dive out of a plane or throw yourself over a cliff or get by a wing suit and you feel alive for a couple of hours. Live as a tracker is my answer. Live from a state of presence tapping into the emergent future and let it take you.

Remember that our whole culture is geared towards security. And while I think there should be balance, you know, I'm not saying throw out any sense of being, you know, sensible, but security also can be a death now. You know, we're obsessed with it, but uncertainty has some aliveness in it. And we grew up on the land in very uncertain ways, and it is live as a tracker.

Find out what your essence is and then track your way towards it. It is a much wilder adventure than throwing yourself off a cliff or doing weekend wingsuiting. Living like that. Being willing to live on that is extremely exhilarating. Living on your own guidance. Living on your own tracks. I'd like to pause for a minute and collect some follow-up items where people can go, we'll talk a bit about your book, website, before I ask a couple concluding questions.

If people want to learn more about you, what would you recommend the progression be? What should they go read first or watch first? I know you've done a TED talk, which is great. I might suggest starting there. What should people do? What order would you suggest if they kind of want to start to explore this idea, or at least the work that you've produced that's publicly available? Yeah, I would say the book is a great start, Cathedral of the Wild.

I would say if you can, I'm starting to build more workshops in the United States and in South Africa. So I do tracking retreats in South Africa where I take people tracking and we begin to delve into this metaphor. So it's very physical. It's on foot in this beautiful wilderness at Landa Losey. But then we start to talk about, okay, what are you tracking? What is preventing you from getting onto your own tracks? I'm doing a seminar in Deer Valley in early May, which will be, it's a life coaching gathering, but it's all village building. It's all about being in a more collective conversation.

I would read some of the work of my mentor, Dr. Martha Beck, particularly her book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. I think that's a stunning description of getting back in touch with our more natural nature. And I think those would be good places to start. And then, you know, if you keep looking on my website, there'll be more and more offerings coming. And remember, this is, I mean, there's this idea that, and I think this is kind of critical. You know that harm to other sentient beings is harm to yourself. But the other side of that is harm to yourself is harm to other sentient beings. And a lot of people can get behind the not hurting and trying to protect everyone else,

but we have to include ourselves in that. And I mean, what I see in the work I do, I see so much self-criticism. I feel, I see so many people. living with so many rules about how they should be. I see so much disconnection from our innate value. I see so much, so many people who don't think they're of any value. And it's a weird paradox because as people get disconnected from a real sense of value, the definitions, the goals, the accumulations become more important. But we are living in a culture of trauma. And the core of it is disconnection from the value of connection to the self, of presence,

of being able to live in your essence and live comfortably and unashamedly in the expression of your essence. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience with, as a child with Nelson Mandela? Yeah, I mean, Nelson Mandela came to stay with us just after he had gotten out of prison. And that's because my family, my father and uncle had been working with a man called Enos Mabusa. and Enos was, he was appointed by the apartheid government to run the area in which Landoleuze occurs, but he was appointed with a brief from the ANC to say yes and basically do whatever he wanted. So he was working, he was actually an ANC member, a very, very well-established member of the African National Congress.

And he had become close to my parents and he had guided them a lot. and he had said to them, if you want Londa Lodi to work, you must pour the cultures together in apartheid South Africa. You must create a place of unity. And so that had been very central to our philosophy during that time. After Mandela got out of prison, he was, you can imagine, he went into prison a convict, and he came out a global icon. And he was in a period of adjustment to the sudden global icon status,

and he needed a place to rest and to find his way back into life. And so Enos phoned my parents and said, can he come? And my parents said, of course, absolutely. And so he stayed a few times at the camp, and then he started to come and stay at our house. And when he stayed at our house, I must have been eight or nine years old, and I would take him breakfast in bed in the morning. My mom would put together a little tray, and then I would take it through to his room, and we would chat a little bit.

And then he would usually get up. He was very down to earth, incredibly connected to himself. everywhere he went he connected. And he would put on this kind of old track suit and he would go and walk around the garden, very unassuming. And I would see, you know, I had no sense of who he was at that age. I didn't initially understand the scope of it.

And I would just see this very quiet, very humble, very connected man, walk around the garden. And then at night I would watch TV and there would be the images from his release and millions of people around to see him released from prison and I got a sense, you know, this guy is, there's something going on here. And so I really saw how he was creating in himself the things that he most wanted for the country. And I really believe that he had experienced some kind of shift in consciousness during his time in prison.

I think he had experienced some kind of awakening. and he brought out of the force of the scope at which he had established Ubuntu within himself, he was able to bring it to an incredibly divided South Africa. I almost feel like he fractaled his presence into the country. You know, out of him came this vision that was so far away from possible. You know, it was on the brink of war, and somehow he was able to. And, you know, he would meet, he would walk through. through the halls of parliament and meet, you know, dedicated architects of apartheid, people who had

been a part of a regime that had committed, you know, intense atrocities to his people. He would meet them in the hallway, speak to them in their language, and begin to inquire about their wife by name, their children, various, he knew everyone's family tree. He would humanize any encounter just like this. And that was the Ubuntu at work. He cut through the roles and definitions and he felt for the person in the other person. And it was disarming.

And it's why he was able to do what he was able to do. I remember just some funny encounters. He had stayed with my uncle. And so every morning my uncle would go out filming and then he would come back at like nine in the morning and he would have himself breakfast and he had this big table on his veranda. open veranda, open to the bush.

And Mandela would come out, and my uncle would sit at the head of the table and eat his musley with a banana cut into it, and Mandela would sit next to him. And they would chat about whatever might be going on. And this went on for a couple of weeks, and then there was an official lunch at the camp, and all of the ANC's top brass were coming in for lunch. It was a big deal. This was happening at the camp, and my uncle came over, and they all went to sit down for lunch. And now there was, you know, Mandela was like the leader of the party.

so in a rare moment of tact, an incredibly rare moment of tact. My uncle thought, oh, this is a big moment. So he said to Mandela, he said to Mr. Mandela, please, you must sit at the head of the table. And Mandela grabbed him by the hand and said to him, oh, no, John, I would never take your place at the head of the table. And he seated my uncle at the head of the table, and he sat next to him, as was their routine. And so he had, they called it the Mandela effect. He had this, after he got elected, my mom had just authored a book. And so she wanted him to write a forward. But she didn't know exactly how to get in touch with him.

So my mom being my mom, she phoned the union buildings. New South Africa, just this huge change of power. And the security guard at the union buildings answered. And she said, I would like to talk to the president. So the security guards got out his manual. And he looked around and he said he found the number for president's residence. He said, I can't connect you to the president, but I have a number for the residence. So he gave her the president's residence.

So she phoned it, and Mandela answered the phone. And she said, Mr. Mandela, Shandhya, Shandh, Vati, you know, you remember me. He said, oh, Shan, how are you? Great to hear from you. She said, I have a request for you. He says, oh, just, I'll stop you there. I'm watching the news. Could you call me back in 10?

So she hung up. She phoned back in 10 minutes later. She said, look, I'm writing this book. I would love you to write a Ford. And he said, no problem, send it to me. And it was this, everyone in South, or so many people in South Africa have a story like that. It was freakish, the sense of how he was available to you.

It was like he was everywhere. And so, I mean, you go to a room of South Africans, you ask them, 95% of the people in the room will have some kind of personal encounter that felt, like he was directly going out of his way for you. It was really quite amazing. Perfect bridge into my last and always my favorite question that I ask everybody, which is, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? Wow. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a little bit. I think one of the things that, you know, pops to mind and it's, it's maybe not

from a person, but I have felt that having a relationship with nature, has been an act of incredible kindness from the natural world to me. I feel like any time I've had problems, any time I've been unsure, any time I've lost my way, for me, retreating into nature has been an incredible sense of being cared for, of being amongst, in a field of kindness, in a field of presence, in a field of, and maybe it's because it's a non-verbal environment, so you come out of the verbal mind,

and what you come to is what happens is a kind of oneness. And so that has been a big one. The other is I feel like I've been lucky to be mentored. So meeting Martha as a safari guide. And, you know, she met me. I was like driving, taking people out on safari. I was some guy out in South Africa. And she just immediately, with no sense of, you know, with no reason to just started saying,

look, I love what you do and I want to, I'll help you. And so she really grew me. She taught me how to be a coach. She taught me how to work with people. And she just did it. It was just natural to her. So I feel like that was pretty amazing. And then are you allowed to have a few?

Yeah, go nuts. And then I think the other one which really occurs to me is my friend, Sully, who I talk about in the TED talk. He just had a way about him. He was always kind to me, including, you know, coming into some deep order to, to look after me, save my life probably. You tell that story a little bit?

Yeah, sure. So I think it was in 2001. Well, I had this guy who I used to track with. His name was Sully. And he was just a tremendous human being. You know, I think I touch on a TED talk. If you drove past Sully out on the reserve, he was in his car, you and his,

you drove past each other on a dirt road. You just kind of waved at each other. You look up in your rear mirror. He stopped the car. and he's waiting there just in case you need help with anything and you decide like you might want to come back and ask for some we had that one guest who said he would look after people on safari so incredibly well

everything they needed he was so attentive this guy said to him sally you are pathologically helpful but in 2001 we were tracking a leopard together and the tracks ran up the side of the river and it was a hot day and because it was hot I went into the water I had rolled my sleeves up and I was walking in the water. And it was clear water, sort of knee-deep, running over sand. And as I walked upstream, this little sandbank sort of fell away.

And there was a place up ahead where a branch, a tree had fallen over. And the branches were in the water. And it was a little rapid there. And, you know, if it had been a horror movie, people would have been like, don't go in there. But I sat down just on the edge of that rapid. and Solly was on the far bank and the crock was

the crocodile was in this little depression came out, grabbed me by the leg when a crocodile bites you just the force of the bite is the first thing, it was just like I immediately knew I was in trouble and it tried to pull me down into the water and I reached up and I grabbed this branch

and I started shouting and it couldn't get me all the way and it bit me a second time my foot went down its throat spat me out and I started and I kind of pulled myself up into the tree and then over and I looked down on my leg my leg was mangled and then I kind of got over onto the bank and I was in a

I was in quite a dangerous position on the bank I think it probably could have grabbed me again but I was trying to like sort out how to get my leg to stay together and sally who was on the far bank saw me he saw me come out of the water he saw the mangled leg and so he knew that between him and I in this deeper channel there was a crocodile and he just booked straight in. He came straight towards me. He went straight into the channel.

He knew there was a crock in there. He waded across it. And he got to me, he grabbed me, pick me up. He's a freakishly strong guy. He picked me up, and he carried me up onto this bank. And he took his shirt off and he wrapped my leg in the shirt, got me back to the vehicle, and, you know, got me to safety. But just not the blink of an eye, you know?

And when I talk about that to, audiences sometimes I'll say to them, I don't know how many people you know who come into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it that's just try to eat a person. But for him, it didn't even blip on his radar that there was something exceptional about it. And it was like that that to me is the core of the more collective psychology of Ubuntu. It's just if you're in trouble, I'm in trouble. I love the heuristic from prior guest, Peter Atia. where you measure wealth by the number of people that you would give a kidney to. Yeah.

So maybe we'll change that to the number of people you would dive head first into crock-infested waters to try to save. And a great heuristic for the idea, the closing thought on the idea of the village, that people within that village are those kinds of people for whom you would do something like that. And this has been just a total blast. What a just chalk full of fantastic stories and lessons and fresh perspectives on the world. So I deeply appreciate your time. People are going to love this one. Thank you.

Thank you. It's so great to be with you and I appreciate your time. Hey everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of 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

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