The School of Greatness - 131 How to Overcome Fear and Dive Into Flow with Donald Schultz

Episode Date: January 28, 2015

"If we quit everything that we didn't enjoy the first time, we wouldn't do anything." - Donald Schultz If you enjoyed this episode (and want to see amazing videos of what we talk about), visit www.lewishowes.com/131 for show notes.

This is episode number 131 with adventure seeker Donald Schultz. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Now I want to introduce you guys to a very special guest on the School of Greatness today.

His name is Mr. Donald Schultz, and he is born in South Africa. He is a filmmaker, animal expert, writer, photographer, and extreme adventurer that just loves to have fun in life. He started to work with reptiles at the age of 13 and was fortunate to have an internship at the world-famous Fitzsimmons Snake Park, where he received a sound schooling in herpetology. His love affair with dangerous activities extends beyond just his work, and he tries to incorporate the two whenever possible. He is an avid skydiver, base jumper, and highly specialized scuba diver,

having been certified as the youngest class two commercial diver in Africa. Very interesting guy, and I'm excited to dive into this episode with Donald as we cover a wide range of topics. And one of the topics that I'd like to talk about in this specific episode is about fear and the fears we have in life, how to overcome fear, and what's necessary in order to reach flow states whenever our biggest fears come up. And I think this is something that we can all learn to tap into is how to overcome our fear and embrace our fear and really tap into that flow state whenever fear arises. So I'm very excited to dive into this episode with Donald because he's just such an interesting guy and the stories he's going to share with you right now, some of them

are going to blow you away. So make sure to pay attention and listen all the way through. So let's go ahead and dive into this episode, episode number 131 with the one and only Donald Schultz. Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about today's guest. His name is Mr. Donald Schultz. What's up, Donald? Hey, Lewis. How's it going? It's good, man. And the more I met you originally through Aubrey Marcus down in Austin, Texas with Onnit and love him and the whole team and what they're up to. And the more I've been researching about you and the more videos I watch, it's like this mesmerizing, I don't know, trance just watching your videos because you do so much. It's not like you just do one thing really extremely well. You do all these different things at a high level and it's

mesmerizing because it's so dangerous. So I want to talk about all these things that you're up to and really dive into fear a lot. I want to cover fear a lot in this because I feel like you've mastered fear, but maybe you haven't mastered fear and it's just something you learn to manage every time you undertake one of these things. So can we talk about specifically, just give a rundown of all the different things you do. In our introduction, I'm going to talk about you as well and and let people know all the things you've done but can you just give a rundown of like

in your point of view what are all the things that you do okay well i mean the best best way to probably go through it is chronologically uh first of all thank you so much for chatting to me it was absolutely mesmerizing watching you and what you do and i was like wow who is this guy and obviously researching you i'm like oh holy shit like there's some really really cool people out there and a lot of them are friends with aubrey which is which is handy um so so basically i was born and raised in south africa hence the funny accent uh started working with animals when i was about six years old and that's you know catching snakes and whatnot um and then professionally when i was 12 or 13 at a snake park. So I got a really good schooling in snakes and deadly animals. Became a commercial diver in South Africa right after apartheid fell.

So I was diving with the military, diving with the police force, doing some pretty high level underwater work, underwater explosives and welding and body recovery and things like that. explosives and welding and body recovery and things like that. Moved to the States in 2002, decided to pursue my love of animals more and started working in a veterinary hospital, then a specialty hospital, then started going to college to become a veterinarian and realized that I preferred being in the field. So I kind of went back to working with animals in their natural environments and using what I'd learned at the animal hospital. That all then came full circle to me, getting a TV show about what I was doing. So in doing that, I learned more about photography, videography, and so on. And then during one of these shows, the executive producer was like, would you jump out of a plane? I'm like, in a

heartbeat. So cut to two years later, I'm jumping out of planes and wingsuiting and all sorts of things. And then the general take home from all of this is I'm a storyteller. So everywhere I go, I either have a video camera or a camera where I write about it or just tell people about what I'm doing. And having grown up in South Africa, you kind of get to realize that no one's an expert in anything. Everyone starts off as a novice. So I'm like, well, why can't I do that? If that guy can do it, he didn't get born with that skill. He obviously acquired it.

So some of the things I do is make film. Some of the topics range from conservation to rhinoceros poaching to wingsuit proximity flying, which is when you jump off rocks and fly next to them really close with wingsuits. I've been a cameraman on Shark Week. We're doing a bunch of documentaries now with Aubrey with regards to entheogens or sacred medicine. I work in the largest animal hospital potentially in the world, in Los Angeles, when I'm not traveling. And then the rest of it is kind of, as my attention grabs it,

then I sort of pursue it until I feel like I've done all I can do and I move on to the next thing. So, yeah, wingsuiting, rebreather diving, shark filming, snake catching, base jumping, filmmaker would probably be the most accurate. Just a couple of days. Yeah. It's a funny one because I've got a manager and an agent and my

manager hates me because he doesn't know how to sell me. And you go into a room and people are like, well, what do you do? I'm like, well, what do you want me to do? Because I mean, I, it's hard to pigeonhole a human being. And I think that's one of the big tragedies of our day and age. Everyone either has to be an accountant or a mechanic or an adventurer. Why can't you do everything? It's bullshit. I like that. I mean there's a few things I want to speak into there.

And I'm going to have a couple of videos linked up on the show notes. I'll let you guys know what this link is at the end of this episode to see Donald's videos of this. But there's like a video of you getting like bitten by a shark underwater and like just letting the shark bite you. I think it looks like that. I'm like, what is happening here? You're catching like black mambas with your bare hands. You also did a show where you had lived with like 100 snakes in a box in Vegas Strip for like a week or something like that, right? So there's all these crazy things you do and I'll have links to all of them.

And before I ask you my first question, which I originally I planned, I feel like I'm in some ways similar to you, really not into what you do, but in some ways I like to do it all. I like to master it all. I like to be curious about everything that's exciting to me or interesting to me. And then I like to take a three to six months and throw my entire soul into that passion or hobby or experience so that I can become the best that I can become at that experience or passion or thing in that amount of time. And then I move on to the next and I'll constantly use that skill that I learned or use that experience and add flavor

to the next experience that I build upon or to the relationships I have in my life. And I find that the most enjoyable thing to do in life is to have multiple talents and multiple hobbies as opposed to one thing, like you said, most people want you to be able to do. So I feel like we're in some ways similar there. And I think it's the best way to live life don't you oh absolutely and you know the there's the bruce lee saying i fear the man more that's practiced one kick ten thousand times

than the man who's practiced ten thousand kicks one time which is true you don't want to be totally like oh i'm doing this and i'm doing this but. But the three to six month part is a really good getting your feet wet rather than doing something like, oh, that's not for me. If we quit everything that we didn't enjoy the first time, we wouldn't do anything. A lot of things aren't enjoyable the first time. But I look at it as like a bell curve. In the beginning, it's kind of slow to start. Then you have this exponential rate of growth, and then it levels off and then the gains are really, really small. So usually what I do is kind of like you is I fixate on something when I get to that meaty

part of the bell curve when it's really good and when I get to the point where it's a lot of effort for not much increase in return, I'm like, okay, cool. I did that. It was amazing. I think I'm above the average person when it comes to the skill and I'm going to steal all this information and use what I've learned in scuba diving and skydiving. Use what I learned in skydiving in filmmaking and using what I'm doing in filmmaking in reptiles. You have all these different worlds merging. Male minds look at things as parts. Female minds look

at things as wholes. And I think one of the big problems with us now is we're looking at the world as pieces instead of this big whole. And people battle to understand things because they're so well driven and so well versed in this area of expertise, but they have no clue how to do anything else. And that's where it becomes hard to have this renaissance man kind of multimodal worldview, kind of like a Google Earth view. Everyone's on the street level. That's a good way to look at it.

Interesting. One of the things that I found about you when I was researching you, or at least I think it's true, you can speak into this, is that you're actually afraid of spiders and heights. Is that correct? Yeah, I'm afraid of a few things. And that's the weird, like, it's a classic, you know, Hollywood producer thing. People hear I'm scared of spiders. Like, will you work with spiders? I'm like, well, yeah, of course I'll work with them. But you know, if it's a choice between cuddling a puppy and catching a spider, I'm like, I'm going to go after the puppy. You don't want a tarantula on your face at night?

No. Yeah. It's one of those things. Like I i had a scary incident as a kid my dad and i were catching looking for snakes we saw a baboon spider which is like the african you know toxic aggressive version of of a tarantula and it scared the daylights out of me and that stuck with me you know my whole life and and once i became older and i understood the mechanics of spiders because you know now it's not a phobia anymore it's just like i don't want to work with them. The reason I don't like working with them in, you know, in my current form is they're really fragile. Like if a tarantula falls two or three inches, it will die. It actually split his abdomen. So I'm very, with animals, I'm either, you know, hands off or hands on. Like I'm either at a close distance and I know what

they're going to do, or if they're getting away, grab them and handle them safely. And with a spider, that's really difficult, both for yourself and the spider. So it's one of those things where it's not so much a phobia anymore, where I'm like, ah, spiders are so scary. But it's like, it's a real, you know, working knowledge. I'm like, well, out of all the things, it's not, it's not, you know, I'd rather take a tiger on to a show than a tarantula, to be totally honest. Wow, interesting. What do you think creates fear for people? What do you think we have fear?

What do you think? Do you think there's always an experience when we're younger that defines the fears we have for the rest of our lives? And how does one overcome it if they ever can? So fear is interesting because, you know, Bill Hicks famously said, there's only two emotions in the world, love and fear. And you go between those. And if you read the Emerald Tablets of Thoth,

who's Hermes Trismegistus, like one of the greatest thinkers of our mind, he said in polarity, there's no positive or negative. It's all the same thing. So if you look at temperature,, there's no positive or negative. It's all the same thing. So if you look at temperature, you don't have hot or cold. Everything is degrees of the same temperature. Everything is temperature. So if you look at love and fear, it's the same thing. It's just a negative form of love. So for me, fear is an unsubstantiated love. It's like kind of a perverted form of love.

And most of it comes from ignorance or misunderstanding. So a lot of people will fear things that they don't know. And that's a famous saying. And a lot of times, if you look at how we're raised, we are programmed to fear certain things. Other things are ingrained in our DNA. So some of it's nature, some of it's nurture. But if you go back as far as the Bible, people are bagging on snakes in the

Bible saying snakes were the reason for the death of humanity. It's like, well, if you want to program a child, put it in potentially the most influential book in their young life and have everyone say the snake is evil. And that's a pretty good way to get a fear out of it. Other things like, it's a really interesting experiment they did with kids, is they showed three old kids stuffed bear, lion, shark toys, and then stuffed crocodile toys. And the children had an ingrained fear of crocodiles. And that's not a nurture thing, because not many people see crocodiles in their daily life. That's a nature thing where we've been predated upon up until

this day by crocodiles and their ancestors. So we have a very functional working fear of crocodiles. And that makes sense. But most of our fears are parents, society, people that we're around instill something in us that we don't understand. We never go to further educate ourselves on what that fear is. So it always is this dark enigma thing behind the closet door that could kill us. The perfect example I draw is people say that they're chased by snakes. I've been working with snakes for 20 30 years now

i've never been chased by a snake and i've done some pretty gnarly things with some pretty gnarly snakes um and just this this past december i got married in south africa on new year's eve and the day before i got married a black mamba went into our bar and um and they were like when i arrived like don't kill any snakes i'll catch them i. I'll move them. Don't worry. And they called me. They said, there's a snake in the bar. It's probably a mamba. So I was in flip-flops and board shorts. It's the middle of summer in Africa.

Went and caught the snake and brought it out and threw it on the grass. And I said to, there was probably 30 or 40 local people there. I'm like, this is a black mamba. Why isn't it chasing? They're like, oh, no, you're doing something special. I'm like, no, it's a snake that once you pull it out of the darkness and you look at it, you're like, oh, you've got the same goals as I have. It's stay alive, eat food, reproduce, and be happy. If you run at it with a shovel and start chopping it up, of course,

it's going to bite you and come after you and strike at you. But if you ran up to a human and start hitting them with a shovel, it'll probably do the same thing. So for me, at least, it's about education. And that's kind of the me at least, it's about education. And that's kind of the TV show I did in Vegas. I'd finally had enough of people being like, snakes want to chase you, snakes want to kill you. You know, mambas will bite you in your sleep and rattlesnakes will hunt you down. And I pitched a show to Animal Planet a few years ago where I lived in that box in Vegas in full view of the public

for 10 days with 100 snakes, with the biggest, gnarliest snakes in the world, you know, puffeters, gaboon vipers, rattlesnakes, mambas, green and black mamba, you know, spitting cobras, all sorts of things to say, well, what's the worst snake you can imagine? Everyone's like, oh, puffeter, gaboon viper, or rattlesnake. I'm like, well, here I am walking around barefoot, you know, in a box where I have a shower, a laptop um and full view of the public like these things should attack and kill me and and after 10 days i had

people you know saying i'm cured like i thought snakes would try and we didn't even see a snake in there i'm like well that's what they do they make their living from being invisible they got no business messing with human beings interesting so in this box, were they hiding and getting away from you? They weren't trying – We set it up. There were some hides. There were some trees. Obviously, a bed for me to sleep and a couple of snakes tried to get into the bed a few times.

But it's one of those – once you understand – once you look at the world through a snake's eyes, and it's really easy because they've got such a simple brain, is they want to be warm. They want to eat. They want to reproduce and that that's ultimately it that's the same reptilian brain we share with them that's that's the core driving you know ethos to them um their venom is expensive to make if they are venomous it's it's like a complex protein that takes energy it's like if you make something you're not just going to throw it at a bird flying by throw it at cars it goes by they they preserve that and they'll bite usually as a last defense. Usually they use what's cryptic and confusion which is they either look like something else

or they don't look like anything at all. So a snake tries to make itself invisible. It tries to make itself get away so it tries to escape. Then it will strike, like fake strike, and then it will actually strike. They've got no interest in killing or eating humans. It's a waste of an expensive protein. I've tried it. I've done it.

I've been bitten by snakes, and that was my fault. But for the most part, if you see a snake in the wild, and we saw a bunch of mambas in the last few weeks, they just run away. The only time that they don't is when they'reed and then they freak out because they cornered. It's no different to a house cat or a dog. So it's really easy to understand once you start researching these things. Sharks are another really good one. People think sharks are coming straight for us. The human mind has an issue, you know, working out probability.

And that's, you know, you think, oh, I'm going to get eaten by a shark. You've got a 1 in 400,000 chance of being eaten by a shark. You've got a 1 in 50,000 chance, that's 10 times as likely of being executed by the state of California. 1 in 500,000 chance of being hit by an asteroid. So you're almost as likely as being hit by an asteroid as by eating by a shark. But you can get hit by an asteroid anywhere in the world. But people still think sharks are coming straight for you. So it's a weird human

dilemma being in this place where, you know, we just can't, you know, can't process the probability of something that's going to hurt us. When we're in an experience of a dangerous animal, or let's say a venomous or an animal that could attack and harm us what is the thing that we should do should and couldn't they can they sense the fear like people say they sense fear um i think and this is a working hypothesis i think you know just like everything that animals are vibratory creatures and they pick up on vibes without getting too new age and hippie and all that but um the best way to describe vibrations is the way you and I are communicating right now is vocal or audio vibrations.

So if you think of fear as like, oh God, I'm so scared, that's not necessarily it. But if your vibration changes from one of just not understanding anything to attack and kill, the animals can definitely sense that. You can see it so, so blatantly with dogs. If you stand up and reach down to touch a dog, oftentimes they won't like it because flip the paradigm around,

you're suddenly got this 20-foot tall creature reaching for your face. It's not exactly cool. Drop to your knees, put your head down, and touch a dog on the bottom of its chest. And you'll see its entire demeanor change. And obviously we've got a longer relationship with dogs than we do with other animals, but understanding that vibratory thing is a big, big one. And you can feel it with humans. You know, you walk into a room of humans and there's someone that's just weird and I can feel it. I'm like, Ooh, that's, that's a strange, you know, energy.

And whether it's the person is, you know, on their own rant or very self-absorbed or whatever it is, you can definitely feel that. So when it comes to dangerous creatures, I think of it in two ways. It's like, what do they want out of the situation? How can I view the situation through their eyes? And then when, you know, everything goes amiss, which is, you know, elephant charging you, lion charging you and all that, then the opposite becomes true. Whatever you want to do, you want to give off a vibration. Scream. Yeah. B, don't run.

That's the funniest thing. You never run away from a dangerous animal. We're some of the slowest moving creatures in the world. And definitely in the savannah, we are this far, so it's moving creatures next to tortoises. So it's one of those things where if an animal charges you, if you run, you get its attention even more. And I've worked with big cats where you'll be laying with them, playing with them, they're all mellow, and you turn around and run away, and they can't help but charge you and grab you because it's built into their DNA. You know, creature running, I must chase.

And you can see this with dogs and, you know, normal pet dogs very, very well. If a kid runs away, dogs are just, you know, it's ingrained in them to chase it. So dangerous situations, you know, I look at them, you know, sort of in time quanta. You know, what can I do immediately? What can I do in the next few seconds? What can I do in the next few seconds? What can I do in the next few minutes? And oftentimes, you can change the whole situation by what you're doing right now. And I think the biggest thing is not panicking. Panic is one of those overreactions

to fear that it often doesn't make you do the right thing. So usually with deadly animals, whatever I think I should do, I do almost exactly the opposite. So if I think I should run, I stand still. If I think I should be quiet, I make myself loud. There's all these things that are totally counter to what we think is okay that really, really help. With snakes, it's a really easy one. If there's a deadly snake, you take a step back. It's not deadly anymore. It's like pretty easy to deal with.

So that's my general thing on deadly animals. But with, you know, other situations like base jumping and skydiving and motorcycles and all that, you know, the general mantra of, you know, panic slowly is a really good one. Because generally when you start panicking and freaking out and moving quickly and doing you know it never works out well it usually usually is pretty bad interesting what's one of the scariest moments you've had with animals um it's scary where you were like oh crap like this is really this is really bad i don't know how to get this one oh yeah okay well there is one that was it was a kind of a lonely one too i was bitten by a snake in in in africa um it was a research animal and i was it was an american snake that i was working with in south africa and i bit me really badly on one hand and i immediately knew it was really bad so i put a tourniquet on which you shouldn't do um in most

snake bites i know the deal so so it was a different situation but i tourniqueted went to the hospital wrote down what bit me i wrote down my doctor's name and i collapsed i woke up uh three days later in icu with the urinary catheter on a on a ventilator um naked in the icu yeah i'd been on the ventilator for three days and the story goes that i drove there parked my car on the curb, left the door open, ran inside, collapsed. They chewed me and then drove me to another hospital that had a ventilator. And a friend of mine was driving past the hospital and saw my car parked on the curb. And he's like, huh, that's not good. Goes inside and they thought I was dead. Like I collapsed and stopped breathing. So, you know, my family found out about it. They all came to visit me and three days later, they, they used some experimental antivenom and I woke up, um, and I could breathe,

but every time I fell asleep, I'd stop breathing. And that was one of those situations. I'm like, man, this is, this is not good. You know, this is not a good place to be, but you know, in, in surviving that and in, it teaches you such a huge lesson. You're like, okay, well, tomorrow's not promised. You're not invincible. You need to be a little bit safer. You need to understand these things a little bit better so you're never in that situation again. So that was probably the gnarliest experience for me.

The gnarliest experience where things went really well was probably that elephant encounter we had last year that was was really it was one of those you know hectic situations that went from really good to really bad it's really good within the course of about 10 seconds so you didn't really have time to to process how bad things are going because it turned out so well what happened we were in kenya working with um kenya wildlife services who manages one of the biggest wild areas in Africa, the Tsavo National Reserve, which is famous for elephants and man-eating lions. That movie, Ghosts in the Darkness, was based on the Tsavo elephants. So we were there working with them. There's a massive elephant-rhino poaching situation going on in Africa, essentially. Elephants and rhinos being killed for their horns and tusks so we're out there filming um what the work that

these guys were doing and this elephant had a poisoned arrow in its knee so the host of the show that that we produce uh dominic monaghan we went and dodged the elephant fixed it found the arrow pulled the arrow out recovered the animal um and was having a hard time getting up. So it was one of those situations. Everyone got off the ground, cleared the area. They reversed the animal and couldn't stand up. And in the hot temperatures in the African sun, you want to make sure this creature moves because if it doesn't, it's going to die.

So we went back, tied a strap to its tusk to pull it up so it could help it on its way. And in doing that, the crew got closer and closer and just started inching in. And I saw this happening and then eventually I was like, this is way too close. So I started walking in to tell them to get back. As I got within about six feet of them, the elephant jumped up and stormed the cameraman. And it was one of those situations where he started standing up so everyone turned to run and and the elephant just fixated on the cameraman like just saw him and he located from the elephant's point of view he's walking around he's been hit by a poison arrow in his knee his knees rotting off by humans and he knows it's humans and suddenly he

falls asleep wakes up and he's surrounded by humans again. He thinks he's being killed. So we're running away. And the cameraman, because he's carrying a big camera, is like lagging behind. And I'm running. I get to the getaway car, which is our planned point of rendezvous. And as I'm getting closer, the guy points AK-47 at my face. I'm like, oh, this isn't good. Like, mm-mm. This isn't part of the plan.

And as I look back i see our cameraman fall and go basically fetal like what i saw is he balled up and i was like oh man and in the worst thing you can do say what is that the worst thing you can do go fetal or what um well at that point no i mean it's it's just you don't want to be fetal in front of a charging bull elephant like it was one of those things where we're running and you can just hear the elephant stomping behind you because it's an elephant. And then it trumpeting.

It felt like an anxiety dream. The faster you're running, the closer it's getting. And this is happening. And in the footage, the footage is shot on an iPhone because our executive producer was in the field. So it's really bad, but you get the gist of it. And I turn around and I see Frank fall and i'm like man so what went through my head is this guy's got an ak-47 he's gonna shoot the elephant which if you unless you're an absolute precise marksman with ak-47 you're not

gonna kill elephant you're just gonna piss it off so i'm like okay frank's dead the elephant's gonna get hit by an ak now there's 20 odd people in the field with the getaway cars leaving i'm like this is gonna be a massacre like this is this elephant's 20 odd people in the field with the getaway cars leaving. I'm like, this is going to be a massacre. Like this is this elephant's going to kill people until it gets stopped, you know, and I don't see anyone with the elephant gun. Everyone's got AK-47s. So I turned around, I ran back to the elephants. You talk about these vibrational things. I ran back to the elephants. I saw Frank. I'm like, okay, well, if I can get to Frank, that's awesome. But Frank's probably dead. okay, well, if I can get to Frank, that's awesome, but Frank's probably dead. So I started screaming to get the elephant's attention and ran up,

and we stopped about two or three feet away from each other. And I'll never forget because, yeah, I stopped between his tusks, and he stopped looking at me, and his eyes were about two feet above the top of my head. And, you know, minutes before, I'd been rubbing him and, like him and like filming him and like telling him that he's going to be okay. And we stopped and I stopped and like, I'm going to cuss now. And it's, it's, it's, uh, uh, just because that's what happened. And, and I said to him, you get the F out of here. And like, it's in the audio. Like I basically had a conversation. I'm like, dude, you need to leave. Like these guys are going to shoot you. And he stopped, he looked at me and he almost sighed and turned around and walked away i was like wow that's that's interesting and the footage and the stills i'm standing between

his tusks with my hand between his eyes like and it was one of those those afterwards i was like and i spoke to frank i'm like frank you okay he's like yeah um the audio guy had tripped and grazed his knees i put some antibiotic ointments on his knee and then we kind of you know decompressed and shook it off and then we watched the footage and was like it's kind of like i remembered it i ran up when we stopped our dust hit each other so like full-on cartoon style where your cloud of dust like you know his kind of dust hit me my cloud of dust hit him and i'll never forget because when he was laying on the ground, his tusks were so big, they were as tall as I was standing and I'm six foot one. So laying down, so you can imagine sideways, he had a six foot gap and I was standing in that six foot gap. So that was one of those

situations where I think, you know, if I'd thought about that, then it would have been too late. Like my gut is run away. So the only thing left to do is run towards. This running away thing is obviously not working. Plus having a guy point a gun in your face is a really good incentive to turn around and run the other way. Wow. Is that video online? Yeah.

It's actually in the episode a lot better because the video I've got online, I sent you a link to it. It's just an iPhone video. In the episode, in this Wild Things episode, you actually see the whole going out, finding the elephant, darting him, fixing his knee, and then the aftermath. Afterwards, we found out, this is after we had this happen, this elephant's name is Jacob. He's been living in the area for 40-odd years. Everyone knows him. They've been poached so heavily in Savo that they've actually been going into this little area

where people go and stay. It's like a little hotel area. And breaking down the walls to get inside because they figure that they're safe inside there, that they're not safe out in the savannah. And you hear that. You're like, like man it shot in front of me it would have been one of the most terrible if frank had died in front of me it

would have been the most terrible situations ever but you know it was it was you know kind of follow your heart without being too hippie and new age but it seemed to make the most sense i'm like i don't want the elephant to get hurt i don't want frank to get hurt if i'm you know if i'm pretty certain that this is the reason i'm doing it i I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get hurt. And it worked out. Amazing. Now, do you think – and I'm going to have that linked up on the show notes as well for people because that's incredible. So thanks for sharing that story.

Do you think someone can conquer their fears or do you think you can conquer all of your fears or do you just have to learn how to push through the uncomfortableness um i think anyone can conquer any fear but it's it's up to it's a personal you know personal choice thing um if if someone has a fear and they they sort of attach to that fear and it's better for them to to use that than to to educate themselves i think that that's a that's a personal choice. But I'm scared of heights as most human beings are. And I've base jumped a bunch of times. And that was interesting because the scariest part is right before you do it, once you do it, then everything's fine.

It's almost like a release. So you're like, oh, wow, that's great. Even before the parachute opens, you're like, this is the best feeling in the world. So I think anyone can get themselves through any fear. It's just if they want to do it. It's like anyone can get in shape, but you can't force a person to go to the gym. It's either a choice. I guess it's down to intention.

If someone's really intent on conquering a fear, I think anything is possible. And I think that the answer is through through you know education understanding what they're scared of you think it's also just practicing it like facing the fear and then doing it over and over while you're educating yourself or is there another process some sometimes immersion is the best thing you know i've found that if if a person is scared of snakes sometimes just like having a snake around their neck is like one of those things with like oh oh yeah this is not that i expected to be wet and slimy and kill me and you're like and and that's you know wherever i go i try and educate people on at least snakes because they they're pretty ubiquitous um but but a lot of fears are are they once they pulled out into the light and examined warts and all, they aren't that bad.

It's a mental cage for ourselves to be like, oh, I can't do that. That's way too scary. Sure. Do you think it's the fear of it, of whatever we're doing that makes things more exciting or can something be super exciting without having the fear of it? You're asking the wrong person.

What's the right question? No, you're asking the wrong person. A lot of that is just kind of fear-based. And I think it's understanding how our bodies work chemically is an interesting one because everyone's like, you're an adrenaline addict. So I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm like, adrenaline is the unfun one. If we're going to go down to like how your body reacts, adrenaline, you know, makes you all fidgety and irritable and fast reactions and dilated pupils and like basically fight or flight.

I'm like, I hate that. That was like the elephant story. I'm like, that's not where I want to be. Like, I like the opposite of that. You know, if you look at it as a gas and brakes analogy, the gas is adrenaline, which is the scary one, and then dopamine is the brakes, which slows you down. It's the reward hormone. It's called the hug hormone.

When you get hugs and give hugs, it's how you feel. It's a sense of accomplishment. That's more what I'm attached to. So bathing in fear is not necessarily where I go. what I'm attached to. So bathing in fear is not necessarily where I go. It's sometimes a side effect or it's a knock off of these accomplishments that I do. But obviously, if you're working with a house cat or you're working with a tiger, there's certainly a lot more sense of accomplishment once you finish working with a tiger. But I think a decent amount of fear in someone's life is probably a good thing. And not necessarily fear, maybe the unknown. And people often, they fear change,

they fear, you know, breaking status quo. You know, the human condition is we want consistency, yet seek new experiences. So we want everything to stay the same, but we want change. And that's the duality of it. And, you you know if we just care on doing what we're doing we'll get what we've always got which is fine for some people but sometimes it's going to a new gym or meeting a new person or striking up a conversation with someone you normally never would um or jumping off a mountain or you know swimming with sharks um you know as a collective consciousness the things that we're doing in the last five years have totally blown away what human evolution has done before that.

People are able to go from not having ever done anything athletic to being world-class wingsuit base jumpers in two years. This collective consciousness thing is absolutely amazing. We've got kids at 13 years old doing things on skateboards Tony Hawks still can't do. And you're like, well, what is this? How is that even possible? So fear is justified. Obviously, we still find out mortal human beings and we can die. But at the same time, we're doing things that up until a year ago or two years ago or five years ago were impossible. I just saw a kid do a front flip on a motorcycle

down in New Zealand for Nitro Circus. And up until 10 years ago, back flips were almost impossible. Now guys are doing front flips. They look physically impossible. You look at it and you're like, how is this even possible in this reality? And kids are doing it.

Insane. What do you think drives you to push the limits of physical and mental performance and endurance? Anytime people say I can't do something, it's like a red flag ball kind of thing. I think that we get most accomplished and we accomplish most when we resonate with our true potential. And if our true potential is doing one thing our whole life and becoming an absolute samurai, an absolute master, that's fine. But I feel like there's a lot of people out there that are going out and experiencing a lot of

things and trying to resonate to the highest frequency. And that's it for me. I want to experience the world from as many different points of view as possible. And if that means I have to experience the world from as many different points of view as possible. And if that means I have to have four or five different lives I live in, it's absolutely perfect. But there's an old proverb, if you want to see the whole world, look at it through everyone's eyes. And it's totally true. If I understand the world from a person who lays carpets to a guy who does motorcycle repairs to a guy that you know buses food and then jumps out of planes and then you know there's a pa on a on a set and there's a host on a set you you understand the world so much better rather than this myopic sort of oh this is you know the world according to donald well this is the world according to

donald and all his friends that's interesting i'm curious to think about uh you know we had a conversation in austin about this about some of your friends who have had near-death experiences who have died some of your friends have died working with animals and working with uh you know venomous snakes and different things in the wild um and you also mentioned that there are some people who you think are a little reckless in this kind of extreme animal caring field one in particular the line whisperer which i think he's awesome and i love like i love the photos and videos and things he does i'm like dude this is amazing like who wouldn't want to like snuggle with a you know a tiger or a lion or whatever, you know, and, um, what is it about some of these people who have, uh, I guess slipped up and made these mistakes where it's been fatal for them?

I want to, what I want to talk about in this moment is how to get in the flow and the zone, because I feel like as an athlete, as an entrepreneur, when I'm speaking, flow is the most valuable, I guess, asset that I can have or tap into in order to get the best out of my performance in the moment. And it sounds like all the different things that you do, you know, base jumping, skydiving, motorcycles, everything you do, you've got to be in flow. Otherwise, you're going to get hurt. Otherwise otherwise you're going to get bit or something fatal could happen so i'm trying to figure out the best way to ask this question but i want to talk about flow how you get in how you get into it and why is are people not in flow when fatal things happen so it's a combination of things because

i've you know through through base jumping i, a lot of my friends have died a lot more than certainly in animals. And that's a, it's a rough one. Actually, I lost a friend about 10 days ago in Michigan that died. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's not unforeseen, you know, if you're jumping off of a, you know, 2000 foot rock with some fabric and trying to fly inches above the ground, there's a certain attrition rate, which is understandable. But the flow thing is a really interesting one. I was very much of this world and thought that everything happens when I make it happen and that's it.

And that's a very childish point of view because you understand the whole universe. Talk about vibration, talk about flows and waves and that. It works in that. And either you can be in the flow and surf the wave just like a surfer or you can try and force a wave when there's no surf and then you end up paddling a hell of a lot

and looking like an idiot. And that's certainly the way it goes with everything I do. I try and be in flow as much as possible. Intuition is a huge thing that people have turned their minds and their backs and their entire lives on. If I don't feel something, I'll just walk away. I've been on exit points. I've been working with animals where I'm like, I'm not feeling it.

And this animal's not going anywhere. The mountain's not going anywhere. The shoot is not worth it. There's no video that's worth my life. I'd rather walk away than do it. And then the other big thing that comes into statistics, I talked about probability and shark attacks. There's a certain safe level where you do things and then there's that chance level where there's a chance things will go wrong. And when you talk about working with animals, if you're shooting 10 episodes of a show a year, that's fine. When you start shooting 20, then you're doubling the chance of being hurt. When you start doing additional things while you're doing that, that increases the chances. Taking it back to the shark analogy, if you're swimming in the ocean in Southern California, you're probably safe.

If you're swimming in the ocean at sunset in Florida in murky water, you're like, well, then your probability has gone through the roof. And that's not the shark's fault. That's your fault. You've chosen this. So if you're working with a deadly animal and you're tired in a difficult situation, that's when it gets gnarly. And if you're doing a lot of dangerous things, then statistically it goes up.

So guys have been hurt with working with dangerous animals. It's a combination of bad luck, which, which sounds terrible because, you know, we have no control over luck. You know, like Irwin is a perfect example of being hit by a stingray. Like that's, you couldn't script that. Like if someone told me that as a, as a Hollywood script, just not plausible, you know, then you have people getting complacent, which it's difficult to do because you work with animal after animal and every animal is getting, you're learning that flow more and more. And then one day you're going into your normal flow with an animal and this animal has got no experience with human beings or got no experience with you or your situation.

And you take a liberty that this animal is not okay with and it bites you. If my little wiener dog has a bad day, he growls at me. If I'm working with an orca and it has a bad day, it kills you. So that's where the difference comes into it. But if I walk into a situation and things don't feel quite right, I'm like, okay, what is wrong? Is this me? Is it someone else? Is this the situation?

Why am I not feeling this? And if I can't quantify it and say, I can just be like, I'm not doing it. It just doesn't. And I always think of things, funnily enough, from the point of view of testifying in court. Well, Your Honor, it seemed like a great idea at the time. We're on an exit point and it's windy and it's about to start raining, but we done a two-hour hike so we're up here so we might as well just try and jump because otherwise we have to hike back down and then you know in retrospect you're like why why it's not even an option you know that these perceived pressures are not not even they're

not real so with a tv show it's not worth it yeah it's not worth a video like we've become so and especially in the base jumping world people have become so obsessed with the video or the selfie or the still or it's like well what about the experience like it changes the entire experience when you bring cameras into it so you know instead of me going at 90 which is what i usually do as soon as cameras are there i dial it back to 75 to give some sort of of a buffer area. And then if there's more variables, I dial it back more and more and more. And a lot of guys that get hurt, especially in extreme sports stuff, it's Kodak courage. I've had friends die trying to get a shot, trying to film someone so they're not looking where they're going and they fly into a wall. And that's – for a video, it's just not worth it.

Have you ever backed out on a jump? Many times, many, many times I'd say, um, towards the end of my career, cause I quit base jumping about a year and a half ago. It was a, it was a rough time. Um, just before that, seven of my friends had died in seven days or seven guys had died in seven days. Three of them were friends of mine. Um, and then, you know, it was one of those things where the circle got smaller and smaller. At first in base jumping, you hear about someone dying and then you know a guy that dies and you know a guy well that dies and then one of your friends dies.

And then two of my best men from my wedding, both of them got really badly hurt. They probably both should have died. And I was like, oh, this is not good. It's only a matter of time. Yeah, it's not an accident. So I decided to back out of base jumping. And it was the best decision that's happened because we've lost so many friends. You still do skydiving?

Yeah, I still do skydiving. I still do skydiving. And one of the things I'm doing now is wingsuit proximity flying out of helicopters. So, you know, cost-benefit analysis. One of the things I'm doing now is wingsuit proximity flying out of helicopters. At cost-benefit analysis, I looked at what's the most deadly thing in base jumping, and it's usually the exit. You jump off a rock and you try and start to get flying, and it takes about three or four seconds. If you don't, then you often hit the rock, and that's where most of my friends have been dying. I was like, well, I can do this out of a helicopter, do all the things I still want to do.

It's still dangerous because it's proximity flying, but you're taking out the most dangerous variable. And I get to still do all the amazing things I want. It's still flying like you're in a dream, flying over hillsides and through trees and over grassy meadows and that. So I kind of looked at where the benefit was, where the biggest cost was and alleviated that. And it seemed to make sense. And as you get older, the juice has to be worth the squeeze. And I think with base jumping, it's one of those situations. Like most things in life, it's just very apparent base jumping where you're sitting down at a table, putting all the chips on the table and you're like, okay, cool, let's go.

And people don't realize the small things that they do that are like that like getting in a car or texting or you know things where they're like okay here's all the chips and if this works out i get a small benefit but if it doesn't i lose everything and that's that's a when you start looking at like that it definitely changes your perspective yeah i'm interested when i was in college i did an an internship at a life insurance company, and I became licensed to sell life insurance back then. And you basically do everything against what you're supposed to do to get a good premium for life insurance. So I'm curious, do you have a policy or even insurable? And if so, what is your premium? It's interesting that you ask that

because like insurance i think some of the stuff that they just don't get like through through production insurance i'm insured for all of this um and and one of the things that they the gnarliest about believe it or not is scuba diving um but the rest of the stuff you know obviously don't play up the level but i'm like yeah skydiving wingsuiting shark diving yeah wildlife expert yeah i'm not i'm not i'm just not giving you know more information but that's pretty much it and one of the things i did too is i stopped riding motorcycles on the street um i just ride motorcycles on the track and you know it's one of those where's where do you get the most benefit from it where can you push the hardest safely? Is it more fun riding down the 405 in rush hour? Or is it more fun riding

on a track in full leathers with a medic standing by? It's like, well, obviously on the track. So why not just do that? That's funny. Let's get to know you are insurable what is your what does your wife think about all this and how does it play in your relationship with uh you being gone you know you traveled you know six to twelve months at a time doing these adventures and experiences and filming and traveling all over the world what is uh her you know connection with you like when you're gone and how does that affect the decisions you make um it affects him greatly and and you know we we've been dating we just got married in december but we've been dating for it will be five years would have been five years this march and when when we met you know i was already wingsuiting i was already base jumping i was

already working with animals she actually worked at the company I was working at in post-production on one of the shows I was producing. So we met at work and, you know, through the production offices, posters of me and all sorts of things because we had done a bunch of shows. So she thought I was the typical Hollywood, you know, sort of hosting douchebag kind of dude. And, you know, I had a Ducati, I had a Porsche, which is totally unlike me. Like the Porsche had camo car seats and the ducati was a track bike like it was weird because she had this perception of me um and i'm totally not like that i just i like doing fun things and as we started dating it got more and more serious and then she she realized that you know that i do certain things i take a certain amount of risk, but everything's calculated.

And as we started dating, the risks became more calculated, less sort of random, and sort of more, I want to say work-based, like doing less things just to do them and doing more things for real purpose. So I did an interview with Men's Health a few years ago where I said to the reporter that once I get married, I'll stop base jumping. And once I have kids, I'll stop wingsuiting. But yeah, it came to a point about a year and a half ago where I was like the base jumping isn't – it's not like it's going to get that much better. I feel like I've passed the meaty part of the bell curve and like it's just sort of tiny little improvements now. It's just not worth it. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.

So I quit that and other things, standing about to do something, you ask yourself, is it worth it? Is it worth playing for all the marbles? And that's not a fear thing. I guess that's an experience thing. A guy once said that when you start base jumping, and this is true for life, you have two jars. One's empty, one's full. And the empty one is experience and the full one is luck.

And every time you do something, you take one coin out of the luck jar and you put it into the experience jar. And at some point, you're going to be really, really experienced, but you're going to run out of luck. And at some point, you're going to be really, really experienced, but you're going to run out of luck. So my feeling is before I run out of luck, I try and just tap out on some of these things. That's interesting. I want to ask you a couple final questions before we wrap it up. What is the most interesting thing you've learned about yourself throughout this entire journey of life? We get exactly what we want.

Sometimes not only what we want, but what we want. Um, sometimes not only what we, what we want, but what we need. Um, and there's a big difference. So, you know, a couple of times I've been standing on a helicopter skid over, you know, a mountain somewhere about to jump off, scared out of my, my, my, you know, sort of living being and asking myself, why am I there? And it hits me like a ton of bricks. It's because like you wanted this, like you, you, you made this happen. I guess this didn't happen by accident. It is because like you wanted this. Like you made this happen. This didn't happen by accident. It wasn't like you're walking down a passageway somewhere and you turn right and you're on a helicopter skid. So I think that we get – as beings, we manifest everything that we sometimes want

and sometimes need. And if we want something really badly, it doesn't mean necessarily it's going to happen. But if we need something, oftentimes those lessons will reveal themselves. That's a great one. I like that. What is next for you in your journey and is there anything you won't try? Next for me, we're doing this amazing documentary about PTSD and using ayahuasca to treat it. And we've been working on this for the last six months or so, and we're in production for the next 18 months or so.

So that's going to be a big one. And that's a departure from what I usually do. I feel like as a human being, I went out and explored the whole world. I wanted to see everything, experience everything, try everything, do everything, touch everything. Um, and after, you know, whatever it's been 37 years of, of doing that, um, I reached a point where I'm like, Oh, okay, that that's cool. And I think I have a working, you know, hypothesis for the outside world now what's inside. Um, and so doing a lot more research into, into, you know, the, the evolution, research into the evolution of human beings based on antigen.

So sacred medicines like mushrooms and ayahuasca and peyote and all that. And that led me down a path to some people that are doing amazing work using ayahuasca to treat PTSD in war veterans. So that's kind of my next big thing is we're doing a documentary about PTSD war veterans getting treated with sacred medicine. Mad Fientist Interesting. That's pretty cool. Peter Bell Yeah. And then what I won't do, I won't do I guess the best way to put this without sounding

conceited because I hate – there's friends of mine, you know, base jumpers that will be like, oh, I can't believe people have a nine to five job and sit behind the desk. They're such idiots. I'm like, well, that's not an idiotic point of view. That's just someone else's point of view. And I could see myself doing that. But I think, you know, one of the things I won't do is settle. You know, I won't settle for something just because it's what I have. Some of the most amazing things have come to me when I'm sitting on a sidewalk, broke, nothing on the horizon, feeling like the whole world's turned its back on me.

I'm like, oh, I can't get any worse than this. And that's when the most amazing things happen. So I'll never settle. I don't think I'll ever be happy to just be – like I'm always going to be happy, but I'm always going to strive for the, for the best. I like that. Yeah. I think, uh, you know, guys like me and you, we have, we have unconventional lives and careers, let's say, I mean, yours is a little more unconventional than mine, but mine is not the typical nine to five. And I, and then when I speak to people about this, it's not about like, you know, you're, you're wrong or something or

bad if you're, or you're not living a fulfilled life. If you're living a fulfilled life if you're doing the nine to five. I think if you're doing the nine to five and you're going after something you're passionate about and working with a bigger brand or cause and there's a bigger mission that you're on board with and that fulfills you, then cool. Just make sure you're not settling for what you're up to if it's kind of the quote unquote

conventional way of going about it. But I think some people like that. They like the structure. They like having a team that they get to be around constantly and they like to have a bigger mission that they're a part of. So nothing wrong with it. It's just not what guys like you and I do. Well, I mean the easy way around that is to make your – and I took this from this podcast that we attended in Austin. Make your passion your profession and it's not work. and and i took this from this podcast that we attended in austin make your your um passion

your profession and it's not work you know then you want to get up and you want to go to work and you you're stoked to do it and rather than being ah i'm doing this again that's just sucks yeah exactly yeah don't settle for sure yeah um okay two final questions sure the first one is what are you most grateful for in your life lately being alive like you know the inside it sounds so hippie cliche and and but like the idea that if you look at human evolution four billion years to get our planet to where it is whether you're a creationist or evolutionist or believe a bit of both like i am like there's a there's a grand mathematician behind all of this making it happen. We're on a knife's edge. We've come through all this evolution to planet Earth, to go through all

this evolution, to come to this point now where we are literally on a knife's edge. There's the most incredible things happening scientifically, spiritually, mentally, people are doing things that we couldn't even imagine. And it's not like it's, we know the outcome, you know, the world could implode, you know, we could die out, we could not, you know, there's all these, these amazing people doing amazing things. And as long as you're, as long as you wake up in the morning, and you're alive, and you're breathing, there's still a chance, There's still a chance to do good, to make change, to see stuff, to influence the universe. And it sounds really, really corny hippie, but the fact that I'm alive, it's a huge gift and I never, ever take that for granted. I love that.

Thanks for sharing that. Well, before I ask the final question, Donald, I want to acknowledge you really quickly for the courage that you have had your entire life because even though it may not seem like courage to you in some senses for everyone else, what you're doing is very courageous and brave to serve. You're serving animals

and you're serving by educating humans on how to interact and live and experience with these animals. And also through, I acknowledge you for living a fulfilled life and chasing your dreams and jumping for everything that you want to go after, literally. literally. And I think it's so cool that there are people like you who are examples of this in the world because there are, you know, 90 something percent of people probably aren't going after what they're, what fully makes them alive. And I can see that when I talk to you and connect with you and through watching your videos that you definitely go after what you want. And it's so refreshing to experience that and see that you're doing that. So thank you.

Well, thank you so much. And I acknowledge you for that. Yeah. So the final question, this has been a fun interview and we're going to have everything linked up on the show notes. I'll let people know what that is here in a second. We'll have videos with Donald doing crazy things all over the world. So make sure to check out those show notes and follow Donald everywhere.

But the final question is, what is your definition of greatness? Well, Schrodinger, who famously did the whole alive dead cat sign out experiments and talked about superposition and all that, he said that the sum of the conscious minds of the world is one, of the universe is one. So we all share the same consciousness. And that's, you know, echoed in religions and, you know, mythologies and all that. And I think the understanding is that we're all, you know, leaves on a tree, we're all the same tree, but we yet to have our exclusive, important, you know, unique experience. I think greatness isn't something you quantify based on someone else's frame of reference. I think greatness is accomplishing

what you set out to do before you came here and then set out to accomplish while you were here. And that isn't necessarily like, I want to cure cancer, I want to go to the moon. It's a day-to-day accomplishment of, I'm going to capitalize and do the most I can in this one day. Tomorrow is not promised.

Yesterday is gone. I think greatness is each person resonating to their highest frequency and accomplishing as much as they can do in their lifetime. That's greatness. Someone said that there's only two days a year you can't work and that's yesterday and tomorrow. That's kind of the way I see it. Greatness isn't like, one day I'm going to climb Everest, one day I'm going to do this. It's a moment to moment expression of happiness. That's truly enlightenment too. It's not going to

Tibet or Peru or meditating for 10,000 hours. It's not, you know, not going to Tibet or Peru or, you know, meditating for 10,000 hours. It's the moment to moment realization that this is, this is, this is a gift. This is amazing. This is great. Um, and, and that's the way I try and try and live my life, you know, not too much in the past, not too much in the future, really, really in the now. Um, and then trying to make this now as amazing as it can be. I love that answer. Thanks so much, Donald. I appreciate you, man. And we'll have to bring you back on after your next adventure.

Thank you, Lewis. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I'd love to catch up in time. There you guys have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please go back to the show notes at lewishouse.com slash 131. There's going to be some videos over there that you're going to want to check out of Donald doing some crazy things that we talked about. So make sure to check that out. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your friends again, lewishouse.com slash 131. And also let me know what is your biggest fear.

So in the comments section below this episode, type in what your biggest fear is and what you learned about how to overcome fear from this episode. Again, big shout out to Donald. Make sure to follow him all over online and social media and see what his next adventure is and what he's up to. I appreciate you guys so much.

We've got some awesome interviews coming up soon. If this is your first episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and start listening to some of the previous episodes. We have some incredible people on this podcast. We just hit our two-year anniversary and we've got some great guests coming up. So again, thank you so much for coming on. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great សូវាប់បានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបាូវាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប� Outro Music