The Tim Ferriss Show - #571: Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

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Starting point is 00:04:24 This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am so supremely excited about my guest today. I have been hoping to have him on for a very long time indeed. His name is Boyd Vardy. You can find him on Twitter at Boyd Vardy, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y. He is the author of two books, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life and his memoir, Cathedral of the Wild. He's been featured in the New York Times, NBC, and other media and has taught his philosophy of tracking your life to individuals and companies around the world. I happen to know quite a few of those individuals. In fact, Boyd is a wildlife and literacy activist who has spent the last 10 years refining the art of using wilderness as a place for deep introspection and personal transformation.

Starting point is 00:05:03 He grew up in South Africa on Londolozi Game Reserve, a former hunting ground that was transformed into a nature preserve by Boyd's father and uncle, both visionaries of the restoration movement. Under his family's stewardship, the reserve became renowned not only as a sanctuary for animals, but as a place where once ravaged land was able to flourish again and where the human spirit could be restored. When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years of imprisonment, he came to Londolozi Game Reserve to recover. Boyd has a degree in psychology from the University of South Africa. He is a TED speaker and the host of the Track Your Life podcast as well. You can find him online at boydvardy.com, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y.com, on Twitter at Boyd Vardy, Instagram at Boyd underscore Vardy. Boyd, welcome to the show, my friend.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Tim, thanks for having me, man. Great to be with you. It is great to see you. And I'm sad we're not doing this in person, but I'm also happy that you can share a bit about your surroundings. So where is this conversation finding you right now? Okay, so I'm on the Londolozi Game Reserve in the wild eastern part of South Africa. I'm sitting in my thatched cottage and I'm looking out the window. The river runs below me and currently there is a herd of elephants that are moving down from the far northern bank of the river to come and feed on the delicious, spongy palm trees in the river. So that should give you a little bit of a sense. They're two huge ebony trees that kind of frame

Starting point is 00:06:30 the house. And a couple of weeks ago, a leopard hoisted its kill into the tree next to the kind of veranda of the house. So that should sort of set the scene for people a little bit. You know, I had a dead bird on my porch two days ago, and I see a squirrel out to my right. So I feel like we're kind of on equal footing there. Totally, totally. Now, a couple things. One, I want to tell you that I don't think I've told you actually, Boyd, and I'm going to pack it up front because I think that I am ashamed of not telling you earlier. So here, you can see it. And for of not telling you earlier. So here you can see it.

Starting point is 00:07:06 And for those who are watching video on YouTube, you can see it. I've got a copy of your book here, which you were kind enough to inscribe for me. It's The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. I've had this for a while now, full of highlights. I read it again yesterday. And this is one of only a handful of books that has a dedicated shelf in my guest bedroom at home. So in other words, when people come and visit, I have a few shelves. So you have The Gift, which is of Hafez poems translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Then you have How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Then you have Awareness by Anthony DiBello.

Starting point is 00:07:46 And then you have The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by Boyd Vardy. So you have an entire shelf that people are encouraged to indulge in and take books from in my guest bedroom. I just wanted to let you know that. Wow, I found myself in the company of my heroes there. Thank you. Absolutely. It's a fantastic book.

Starting point is 00:08:04 And we're going to dig into all sorts of stories that are in the book. Of course, many stories that I have heard and not heard in person with you. But let's start with one that I haven't heard, but I wanted to dig into it a little bit, just as part of the Genesis story. Your mom. Could you tell us a little bit about your mom and then I suppose also about your dad, but specifically the get on with it attitude as I've seen you write it? Well, you know, my parents met when they were 15 years old and my grandfather had just died leaving this property. And everyone in the sort of family advisors had said to my father, well, first thing, you've got to get rid of that property in the sort of family advisors had said to my father, well, first thing,

Starting point is 00:08:45 you've got to get rid of that property in the wild eastern part of South Africa. You know, it's bankrupt cattle land. There's nothing going on there. There's some lions there that you used to hunt, but lion hunting is dangerous. Get rid of that. And my father stood up in the meeting of family advisors and he said, no, we're going to keep it and we'll find a way to make it pay. And very soon after that meeting he met my mother and with three mud huts and a broken Land Rover they launched themselves into starting a safari business this was a time in the you know the teeth of apartheid South Africa there was no one coming to South Africa like a rough if any if it had been an investor pitch and someone was

Starting point is 00:09:21 saying we're going to start a game reserve and you you know, here's what we want you to invest in. No one would have invested. But together, out of the love that they had for each other and the passion that they had for the land, they created this amazing place. It was the love they had for each other, the passion for the land and a real big dose of we can keep going because this is all we have. And so there was this incredible attitude in both of them to just push forward, pioneer, keep going, raise your kids with snakes and no electricity, bring people from all over the world to come stay in a couple of mud huts, give them an incredible time, flow this amazing energy into them, take them out into the wild for encounters. And so it was that type of get on with it chutzpah attitude that I was raised in. And that was my mother through and through, just unbreakable, rub some arnica oil on it was the best we got if you got an injury. And only call a doctor if you're bleeding profusely or you're going to die. So I have some follow-ups. First of all, everyone's saying, first thing you have to do

Starting point is 00:10:25 is get rid of that land. Dad says, nope, we're going to keep the land. There's got to be some thought process behind that because, of course, there are tremendous consequences to that decision in terms of life trajectory. Why the decision? Why was that decision made? How was that made? You know, I think it's a really good question. I mean, there's a few parts to it. The one is that my great-grandfather had bought the land in 1926 after drinking too much gin. And he heard about these bankrupt cattle farms

Starting point is 00:10:55 that were available for sale adjacent to the Kruger National Park. And he was a lion hunter and he was an adventurer. And he said, well, we're going to buy. And so he first came down here in the June of 1926 and he set up the camp, you know, just sort of rugged canvas under the trees and they would hunt lions. That's how my grandfather then grew up. And then that's how my father and uncle grew up, coming down in the winter months, waking up at dawn, listening for lions to roar, and then going out to hunt lions. And I should say with lion hunting, there's only two outcomes. Either a lion dies or a person dies.

Starting point is 00:11:30 So that gives you a little bit of a sense for the mentality of it. But through those early days of hunting, already a deep passion had started to take root in my father for the land and in my uncle. They felt connected to it. It was a place of adventure. It was already a place that was infused in meaning. So when their father died and they were teenagers and the family advisors said, okay, we'll get rid of it. I think it's a bit of a combination of the brilliance, the arrogance and the stupidity of youth that just allowed them to stand up and say, well, we're going to keep it and we'll make it work. I don't think that there was forethought in the decision. They just knew they were grieving.

Starting point is 00:12:15 They had lost their father. It was their father's sacred place. He loved to go there. And they knew that if they, somewhere inside of that grieving process, they knew that if they let go of the land, they would lose the memory of their father in some way. And so they held onto it and they decided, well, we'll go make it work. There's so many different branches of this tree that I can go down. I'm having trouble with the paradox of choice here. Let me try to prompt a story that will maybe speak to the get on with it, make it work attitude of both of your parents. Could you please tell the story? I'm going to give you a fragment here. So a little gingerbread crumb and see if you remember what I'm referring to. Plane ride, bird. Does this mean anything? Okay. I think you're referring to the white

Starting point is 00:13:01 knuckle charter company. Yeah, that's the one. So basically what happened is my parents, they launched the safari business and it slowly started to become successful, but they started to run into a problem as my sister and I were getting older because school started to become an issue. So there was obviously no way to take us to school living out here. So they decided that what they would do is they would learn to fly and then they would ferry us into the nearest town and we would sort of attend early preschool or whatever it's called, like Monday through Wednesday. And then Wednesday we would fly back to the reserve and we would be here through the weekend. And we were basically

Starting point is 00:13:40 getting three days of schooling. That seemed like enough to them at the time. So they took up flying. And my memories of it are when they would pick us up on a Wednesday afternoon, to be honest, they weren't great pilots. So they were in a bit of a state. You know, the first 50 hours of being a pilot, there's a lot of stress about getting it in the air and then safely getting it back on the ground. So we would arrive and they would say to us, we're in flying mode right now. And flying mode meant we could not ask any questions. We had to shut up. Kids, you kids shut

Starting point is 00:14:09 up. We're in flying mode. And then they had this other sort of drill that they worked out with each other, which was called pilot in command. And when they were up front there in the cockpit, the one would say, I am now pilot in command. And if you handed over control, you would say, handing over control. And the other would say, I am now pilot in command, pilot in command. And if you handed over control, you would say, handing over control. And the other would say, I am now pilot in command, pilot in command, handing over to pilot in command. I am now pilot in command. And they had this whole drill, right? The first crash that we were involved in, we came into land and we had a plane. It was a little Cessna that had a quirk. And let me tell you, when it comes to aviation, you don't want planes with quirks. You can have a quirky like pickup truck, but you cannot have a

Starting point is 00:14:49 quirky aircraft. The quirk was that when you pulled the power, not all power cut off. It kept a little bleed of power on. So my mother was flying the plane. She came in to land on the little 800 meter dirt strip. She cut the power. The plane sort of landed, but it just kept on a little too much power and we kept going. And she started to say to my father and my sister and I are watching from the back in flying mode. I can't get the power off. I can't get the power off. I can't get the speed off.

Starting point is 00:15:16 And he says, he's saying to her, you are pilot in command. You are pilot in command. And she's like, I know, but I can't get the speed off. And eventually she kicks the rudder and the plane veers off the runway and we hit a marula tree and we stop. That's our first crash. And it's one of those ones, Tim, that if you bring it up today, like at dinner, he will say, we'll say, well, you know, I couldn't get the speed off. And he'll say, my father will say, well, you were pilot in command and immediately a fight will develop at dinner. I know I was pilot in command, but before we hit the tree, do you think you could have pulled the power? You could have. So like,

Starting point is 00:15:46 there's a little tension around it. Anyway, the worst one was we were flying a short hop. And by this stage, my parents had launched, you know, a bigger safari company and they had decided that when they flew, they should actually have a commercial pilot with them. And so the setup was, it's a commercial pilot in the left-hand seat. It's my father in the right-hand seat. And then there's club seating, four seats in the back, but you sit facing each other like you would on a train, you know, like looking at each other. So we're flying along and I see my mother and her friend are sitting opposite me and they're looking towards the cockpit. I'm looking back at them and suddenly we just hear this outrageous like sound and wind fills the cockpit. And it's just this incredible rushing sound, amazing sound. Looking at my mother and her friend next to her, it looks like

Starting point is 00:16:41 Pulp Fiction. There is just blood and guts all over them. It looks like someone took a bird, put it in a blender and made like a bird smoothie and then threw it over them. They've got a wing on their head. They've got a foot on their shoulder. They are covered in blood and guts. And so I turn and I look back at the cockpit. The front window of the plane is gone. The pilot is conked out. He's passed out in his seat. And my father is like orientating himself in the madness. And right at that moment, as my father got his bearings, I saw him grab the controls. And then he looked back at me and said, I am pilot in command.

Starting point is 00:17:24 And so now we realize we've got a situation. What had happened is we had hit a stalk, direct bird strike, and the bird had come in the window. And in fact, the bird had hit the pilot. The beak had gone into the skin between the pilot's skull and the skin. So he had a beak sticking out of his face and a bit of stalk neck sticking out of his face, and he's totally passed out. Meantime, my father has taken control of the plane. The woman on the back seat screaming next to my mom is going, we're all going to die, we're all going to die.

Starting point is 00:18:00 And that's when my mother gave her the patented mother slap, slapped her twice and said, we are not going to die. And then out of nowhere, my mother reaches into her sort of handbag and pulls out a flight call sheet. And she starts screaming standard emergency practices to my father. Call SOS base, request emergency landing. And he's ticking off things. Now at this point, the pilot starts to wake up and he wakes up and he's slowly gaining his bearings. And as he looks around, he has this strange kind of dot in his vision. And as he's looking around, the dot follows him and he eventually puts his hand up and what it is, it's the stork's neck sticking out of his face that everywhere he looks it's in his line of sight because it's connected to his face and it was at that moment that he grabbed the neck and the beak of the stork and he pulled it out of his face and looked at it and then passed out again and i don't know if you've ever seen a

Starting point is 00:19:01 head wound but head wounds bleed nicely and so he's bleeding quite intensely. It's pandemonium back there, but my folks have got the controls. They're calling, they call the airport. My father starts the descent and eventually the pilot wakes up and he comes to, and he's actually, he's all right. And he takes over control of the plane again. And we do an emergency landing. And the funny thing about it was we were flying from the reserve to go and catch a commercial flight so we landed at a commercial airport and we got out covered in stalk stalk wing and stalk foot and stalk guts and we walked into the terminal building and i said to my mother well what do we do now she said just board the flight and look forward so we got onto the plane looking

Starting point is 00:19:42 like we had been in the texas chains Massacre and just sat down next to regular folks traveling, covered in guts and blood and just sat there and looked forward and flew to our next destination like nothing had happened. were irrepressible, I think is the word, which you kind of have to be to run a safari business where things, you know, running a safari business, you're out in nature and things are happening and unexpected things are happening almost continuously. So that was kind of my wild youth in some ways, you know, it was very, very orientated towards that kind of South African wildness. And also I think that we've changed a lot over the years, and we've been in our own healing journeys, and our own healing journeys have changed us as a family, for sure. But for many years there, we were just kind of packing on,

Starting point is 00:20:35 you know, I guess we were frozen by some trauma ourselves, and we were just living as wildly through it as we could. Well, I remember the first time when Elvis story, man. I totally forgot about the boarding, the next connecting flight. Awkward, bad covered moments. Yeah, it'd be hard to get past TSA covered in viscera. Good Lord. So let's talk about another element, I believe, of your childhood. You could tell me when this first enters the picture. We're going to bounce all over the place. And please correct my pronunciation. When did the Shangan trackers, is it Shangan? How do you

Starting point is 00:21:17 pronounce that properly? Shangan. There we go. Shangan trackers enter the picture in your life. And who are they? You could answer that in either order. Well, firstly, let me say something about the Shungan people. The Shungan people are the most wonderful people that I've had time to spend time with in Africa. They were a splinter tribe of the Zulu people. And basically, they went on a warring party, and they found themselves in southern Mozambique, and they decided that they were actually more peaceful people. They didn't want to be involved in the Zulu army's warlike ways, and they broke away.

Starting point is 00:21:51 And they're really pastoral people, amazing storytellers, incredible trackers, because they love to observe things and tell stories. And so from the time my father and uncle were very young, and from the time that I was very young, I was lucky to spend time with some of the best shungan trackers in the world, men who had grown up hunting and gathering in the region. And the transition that we went through as a family is we grew up tracking to hunt. And then once we had our kind of enlightenment experience and we decided we must partner with the land and we must think of the animals as our kin, we continued tracking, but it was to find animals for photographic safaris. And so from the time that I was extremely young, I was apprenticed to these master shungan trackers

Starting point is 00:22:35 and I spent hundreds of hours learning the art form of following an animal across wild terrain and learning how to be attuned to the language of the wilderness. And I was listening to your interview with Noah Feltman, and he was talking about how language attunes you in a different way to a culture. And if you can think of tracking, tracking is essentially the language of the wilderness. You're learning the signs, the sounds, and as your knowledge as a tracker deepens, it's like you're being let into another level. And the Shangaan people were deeply attuned to this. And they taught me that from a young age.

Starting point is 00:23:10 And really the success of Londolozi, one of the major success points for us is to create a bit of context for how the safari business came together. My father was 15. My uncle was 17. My mother was about 15 too. And they were going to launch the safari business. Most of the land at that time, because the cattle had overgrazed the land, it was kind of an eye-high scrub. And all of the animals were here, but you didn't really see them.

Starting point is 00:23:37 And in fact, they had been hunted. So any animals you saw were trying to get away from you. And really my parents struggled to get the safari business going. And then they had a defining moment. And that was the arrival of a kind of maverick ecologist by the name of Ken Tinley. And Ken was an amazing guy. He was a high school dropout who got admitted to a biological sciences degree because he drew a picture of a moth with such intricate detail that the dean of the faculty put him in. And he studied his biological

Starting point is 00:24:12 sciences degree, and then he went to live alone in Mozambique and write a dissertation. And during this time living alone, Ken had this incredible encounter with wilderness, and he felt deeply attuned to it. And the way he described it, he said it felt like he could feel the rivers moving through his veins. And he became aware of how the moisture traveled through the terrain and how that informed the flora and how that then informed the fauna. And he was just deeply in tune. And he showed up next to the campfire one day where these young upstarts were trying to get the safari business going. And he said to them, if you want this place to work, you must partner with the land. You must think of the animals as your kin. And you must make sure that the local Shanghain people are

Starting point is 00:24:55 invited to participate in this restoration. And so they said to him, well, partner with the land. What do you mean? And he said, come, I'll show you. And he walked them out onto the scrub encroached land. And he said to them, when the cattle overgraze the land, the moisture falls, but instead of penetrating the soil, it runs off in these deep erosive furrows. So what you do is you clear away the scrub and you take that scrub and you pack it into the furrows. And it's kind of like putting the plug back in the bath. And with that, you start to charge the grassland with moisture. And he started to show them how to restore the micro catchments on the property. And I really grew up, one of the first imprints of my psyche was watching the land being restored. I would go to a place where there was eye-high scrub, and then I would see the destitution as you cut it out. And then you would go back there a year

Starting point is 00:25:49 later, and there would be a herd of waterbuck on it and a herd of zebra, and then a rhino walking through it in the late evening. And so my first impulses, I believe, as a healer came out of watching the way that life knows how to bring itself forth. And then one day after a day spent working on the land, my father and my uncle were driving home. And in the late afternoon light, a female leopard stepped out onto the road in front of them. And up until that point, any leopard you saw was ears back running to get away from you. They'd been hunted. But this leopard stopped and she turned and she looked at them and for a moment she allowed herself to be seen and then she growled and they saw that she had this one broken canine

Starting point is 00:26:31 and then she slipped away from there and they drove home in silence and they stopped the vehicle and my uncle who was a rugged aggressive wild type guy they sat there for a moment in silence and then he looked at my father and he said, whatever just happened, that's my future. And I've been deeply interested in that my whole life, you know, to your point, like what made them say, we're going to try and take on the creation of the safari business? What made my great grandfather after too many gins say, I'm going to buy? What made my uncle say in that moment, that's my future? How do we know when we know? So what my uncle did is he teamed up with a Shungan tracker, one of the best trackers in the area, a man by the name of Elmon Mshongo. And Elmon is actually Reneas in the books, brother. It's an incredible hunter-gatherer, incredibly in-tuned.

Starting point is 00:27:18 Before we get to Elmon, if you could just as context, because people hear tracking, good trackers, they might not realize just how far back a lineage of tracker to tracker to tracker tradition might extend. Are we talking hundreds of years, thousands of years, tens of thousands of years? I mean, how far back does it go, right? This type of skill development and generational passing down. I mean, this goes back to our early origins. Some people say that tracking is in some ways the beginning of science because it's the beginning of deduction. It's the beginning, the first time that someone looked at an abstract imprint

Starting point is 00:27:58 and started to apply meaning to it. And it's an art form that has been alive. It lives inside of people because it has been passed on through generations. A tracker will teach another tracker the way. And so, I think of it as this art form that you can't hang on the wall, or it literally has to be alive in a person to survive. Didn't mean to interrupt. I just wanted to kind of set the stage, right? Because people think like, oh, my grandfather did this. My dad did this. I now do this. Therefore, we have this extensive lineage, which is true on some scale.

Starting point is 00:28:36 But when you refer to one of these master trackers, it's quite a different level of longevity in terms of the bloodline and the development of that skill. Ancient. Ancient. Back to the origins of humanity. Yeah. Ancient. Ancient. Back to the origins of humanity. And when you are tracking, you are connected to that entire lineage, which is an amazing feeling. What I'm doing right now, thousands of years ago, someone did this very same practice. And so what my uncle and him did is for the next 12 years, they woke up every morning and they went out and they tracked that leopard. And just insane drive and dedication. And sometimes they would go two weeks without seeing her and they would be putting together the clues. They'd be following the tracks.

Starting point is 00:29:18 And then it started to be that they would find her and she would allow herself to be viewed from two, 300 yards in a vehicle. And then slowly over time, that space, that distance started to close. And eventually, after a few years of this, it got to the point where they could actually drive one of these old Land Rovers in next to her. And she had developed a relationship of trust with them. It was a totally wild leopard. And she knew that these men meant her no harm. We called that leopard the mother leopard because she went on to have eight litters of cubs. And all

Starting point is 00:29:51 of those cubs grew up modeling their mother's trust. And so she was the mother for two reasons. One, because she was the mother of all these cubs. And second, because really she was the mother of the birth of the safari business, because word got out that there was a place in the middle of South Africa where no one wanted to go, where you could go and see a wild leopard. And that allure is still alive inside of people today. without the skills and the brilliance of the Shungan trackers. To be able to go out into a vast wilderness and attune yourself to the faint tracks of where this animal had walked, to listen for alarm calls, to listen to bird language, and to start to get to know her movement patterns, her territories, where she liked to den,

Starting point is 00:30:38 all of that made it possible, and it wouldn't have been possible without great trackers. And so really the legacy of Londolozi is a legacy of relationships between trackers and wild animals. days after the 2008 crisis, you would have missed out on 50%, 5-0% of your returns. Don't miss out on the best days in the market. Stay invested in a long-term automated investment portfolio. Wealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as robo-advising, and they currently oversee $20 billion of assets for their clients. Wealthfront can help you diversify your portfolio, minimize fees, and lower your taxes. It takes about three minutes to sign up, and then Wealthfront will

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Starting point is 00:32:03 a Wealthfront investment account today, and you'll get your first $5,000 managed for free for you. Go to wealthfront.com slash Tim and open a Wealthfront investment account today, and you'll get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. Wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term, and you can get started today at wealthfront.com slash Tim. You mentioned a name that comes up a lot in The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, who's, of course, a fascinating character in the book, and I'm sure in real life, even more so fascinating. Rhenius, is that how you say this name properly? Rhenius Matanjana Jampachasimshongo is his official name.

Starting point is 00:32:39 That's exactly what I was going to say. That's what I was going to say. I'll stick with Rhenius for short. Now, I want to prompt, maybe as a way of describing Reneas and introducing him, a question that came or a cue that came from one of our mutual friends, Josh Waitzkin. And he said, ask Boyd about Reneas not returning to camp a few weeks ago when tracking, I think, a male lion when all the clients wanted to come back. Could you tell this story? Are you open to that? Yeah. Well, Reneas is firstly one of the best trackers in the world. I would say that he's top five. He's deeply attuned. And my definition of mastery is someone who can be themselves in any situation. And really

Starting point is 00:33:26 what makes Renier special is that he's able to totally be himself wherever he goes. And I'm sure you've seen this in other disciplines. He's one of those rare masters who's able to translate the intangibles of what he knows how to do. You learn by being around him, you learn by absorbing his presence, watching how he moves. But he by being around him. You learn by absorbing his presence, watching how he moves. But he's also quite good at teaching, which makes him really exceptional because a lot of trackers, you'll say to them, well, why did you know to go down there? Why did you know to check that riverbed? And they just sort of say, I just knew. Reneas is able to dissect it a little bit for you. But this to me is the level of his mastery. We ran a retreat, a tracking retreat.

Starting point is 00:34:06 We had some folks from all over the world who had come on one of our tracking retreats, and it was day four, and we had had an exceptional time. We had found and followed animals. The night before, we had slept out in the bush. And so the next morning we woke up, we found tracks of a single male lion, and we began to follow. And after two or three hours, I could see that the guests who were on the retreat were tiring. They were running out of gas. They'd been keeping watch all night. Could you explain what you mean by that? Keeping watch all night? Afraid that lions are going to eat them all night? Yeah. On the retreat, one of the nights, we had slept on the ground in the open, no vehicle, no tents. And each person had been asked

Starting point is 00:34:46 to keep watch. It's this deeply archetypal experience to be awake around the fire. It definitely changes what the fire means to you. It's some of this ancient primordial sense of like fire safety. And each person keeps watch through the night. And it's beautiful. You're alone, owls calling, stars above you, and this alertness alive inside of you as you keep watch for your friends. What are you keeping watch? I guess, sorry, not to bog the story down, but just for a second, like if John from KPMG in Chicago, who's never camped before, comes to a tracking retreat, I would be kind of nervous trusting John to keep me alive while I slept. So I probably wouldn't sleep. I'm just wondering what one does when they're keeping watch. No offense to KPMG,

Starting point is 00:35:31 just came to mind. You know what? No, John from KPMG, you're taking contact. Well, the thing is, is that the minute you get out there and night starts to fall and some lions roar nearby and an elephant walks past your camp and comes to investigate. What's pretty amazing, Tim, is that no one misses the gravity of the situation. I bet. There's something about night falling. I watch people switch on and I explain to them that if you fall asleep during your watch or you don't do this properly, someone can get badly injured. And so people take it very seriously.

Starting point is 00:36:08 And your job on watch is to be an aware presence. And you get armed with a really good torch. You listen. That's a flashlight for you, Yanks, listen. Flashlights. You listen. And if any animal comes, you have to be aware of its presence. And there's an amazing thing.

Starting point is 00:36:24 If you're aware of an animal's presence, it's aware that you're aware of it and that's the critical safety piece and we've never in all the years we've been doing it and we've slept out with many many people we've never had anyone let us down because people feel the the gravity of it and something does wake up inside of them so anyway back to the story we yeah suffice to say they didn't sleep very well they didn't sleep very well. They didn't sleep very well. So like 10 o'clock the next morning, they were flagging and we decided because we'd had such a good time and we'd been so lucky with the tracking already, we were going to call it there. We were going to say, guys, we're going to leave this track and we're going to head back to the camp. Now, Arrhenius has been 30 years into guiding people, even more, 35 years into guiding people,

Starting point is 00:37:08 and then another section working as a trainer. He says, you guys go back to camp. I can't leave this track. And I'm fascinated by that moment because there are so many hundreds of guides, so many hundreds of people who say, you know what, our guests are happy, eggs Benedict back at the camp. But his mastery is that he can't leave it. There is something laid down in front of him that he's curious about, he's interested, and he has to know. Something in the tracker has to discover, has to find out. And the scope of the years of his practice and the fact that he makes that decision to stay out there hot, tired, without water, he needs to know. That is his art form. He needs to be in it.

Starting point is 00:37:51 There's something very special about that to me. Which animals are hardest to track at Londoloza? You mentioned a leopard, right? So a leopard in my mind, I think of solitary animal, as I understand it, sleeps in trees, at least part of the time, as I understand it. Again, I have no understanding of leopards. So I would think of them as difficult to track for a number of different reasons. But which animals that you track are easiest and which are hardest? Oh, well, I think you've nailed it there. Leopard, by some margin, is the most difficult. One, it walks, it's solitary, and it walks incredibly

Starting point is 00:38:30 lightly. And its nature is solitary and secretive. It likes to operate in thick terrain. Anytime you're seeing a leopard, the leopard is allowing you to see it, which to me has this beautiful mystery that it cloaks it in. So leopard by quite some margin would be the most difficult. And we've had trackers here who've become real specialists at following leopards. We used to have a tracker by the name of Richard Soella. And Soella was, he was meticulous in his dress and he was gruff and he was hard to get along with. He was rude to most people. He had that arrogance born of being brilliant. He deserved all the arrogance he had because he was so good. And he used to do this thing where if all the trackers had been out in

Starting point is 00:39:19 the morning and they'd been following a leopard, they would come back to camp. They'd been unsuccessful. They had a lost track, but they had lost it. He would go back there. And it used to be my favorite thing. He would go back at 12 o'clock in the afternoon. He would refuse to go with anyone else. He wanted to go alone. And he would slowly start to work that track. And then eventually at like six o'clock in the evening, you'd get a radio call and it would be Richard. And he would say, I've located this leopard. He would tell you where it was. And then his final refrain was, Richard Soella is number one. And he did it so consistently and Richard Soella was number one.

Starting point is 00:39:59 That's amazing. That is amazing. Technical question, 12 noon. So I would think that high noon would actually be a hard time to track because it wouldn't cast shadows as well. But is the reason for doing that that the animals are bedded down due to the heat so that you're able to track while they're in one place? Why would he go out at 12 noon? One is he's showing people how good he is. Because you're right, the direct light creates

Starting point is 00:40:26 a flat aspect on the ground. The light is flat, and so you're right, there's no shadow, there's no contrast. When the light is lower, it bounces off where the animal has stepped, and it changes the texture on the earth. He's going at midday because no one else wants to go out in the heat. He's showing, I go out in the heat. He's going at midday because the light is flat. And he's saying, I go out when the light is flat. He's going at midday because he knows that that leopard is going to be lying up somewhere. And so if he can get a track, he can close the distance on it while it's not moving. And all of those are saying, Soela is number one.

Starting point is 00:41:03 It's so great. I love that. So let me ask, because people will no doubt be wondering, what type of protection does one have when, say, Rennius goes out to track with clientele? Do you have the equivalent of a SWAT team with you with rifles at the ready in case any danger presents itself? I think I know the answer to this, but just because I know people may have a question mark in their minds. What type of protection do you guys carry? When we are tracking with clients, we will carry rifles. And always, if we're running specifically tracking retreats, we will be a two-rifle operation. But really, the protection

Starting point is 00:41:39 is way upstream of that. In all of my years in the bush, I've never had to use the rifle. The art form of tracking is what makes you safe. And when you're with someone like Renius, the safety profile just becomes exceptionally safe because he's so attuned. And so it's a capacity to read the terrain, to make good decisions, to be attuned to the freshness of the track, where those animals will be, how we should approach different to be attuned to the freshness of the track, where those animals will be, how we should approach different terrain, attuned to the birds, bird language. And then where Rhenius is even more exceptional is that, you know, the way that an animal communicates with you is through a state of presence. If it is unhappy with you, it conveys energy through the way its body shapes.

Starting point is 00:42:31 And really amazing trackers are able to read that body language and almost speak back to it in the way they move their body. And you can convey a very profound unspoken language. And I think of it as a language of energy or a language of presence. And that is really what makes you safe. As that animal, if you see that animal, how you convey your intentions to it, your mood, what you do if it does become aggressive with you, how you meet that and shape the sort of the unspoken conversation between you. I want to bring up one of the lines from The Line Tracker's Guide to Life that

Starting point is 00:43:02 it certainly pops to mind quickly when I think about this book. I'm sure it's a line that a lot of people bring up. I know it's a line that Josh has brought up. And I'd love to just hear you explain why this is in the book and why it matters. Quote, I don't know where we're going, but I know exactly how to get there. I love that. Don't you? I love it. Absolutely. It really, if you take a moment to pause and contemplate it, the implications are pretty profound. So I'd love to just hear you riff on this and why and how this ended up in the book. Well, there were two things that Renius used to say regularly. The one is, we will get, we will get it. And it was almost like this kind of incredible self-talk that he

Starting point is 00:43:52 would have when the track was cold or the track was, you know, we weren't making progress. I would look at him and he would say, we're going to get this. And then often he would say too, I don't know where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there. And what he's saying, he's talking to the dynamic of tracking, which is, it's an interesting energetic dynamic. He is profoundly committed to finding that animal, but he hasn't allowed that commitment to become a burden of some kind. He is working moment to moment on the signs that he's getting. And you can think in a vast wilderness, as trackers, we also talk about the first track. In a vast wilderness, 360 degrees of wild terrain, all he needs is the next first track,

Starting point is 00:44:34 and then the next first track, and then the next first track, and the next first track. And he's able to dial down the infinite possibilities of where that animal could have gone to a moment of knowing and a moment of presence, and then another moment of knowing and another moment of presence. And all he needs is that next sign. So he doesn't know where it's going, but he knows how to get there. The next moment of presence, the next thing I know to do. And it might be a good segue there into just telling you a little bit about how the tracking process changed for me over the years, but let me know if you want to go. Let's do it. Dive in. Dive in. So I had these encounters, Tim, whereby I had a childhood following animals and learning this

Starting point is 00:45:16 art form and really the dynamics and the psyche of the tracker, how a tracker approached the process of finding an animal in the middle of nowhere. And then watching how consistently good trackers delivered an outcome, they found the animal they were looking for. And at that time, as a young child, I thought I was learning that skill. And then through my early 20s, I had a series of pretty traumatic encounters. And the result of that was that by the time I was about 23 or 24 years old, I had found myself frozen by trauma. I felt I was depressed. I was uncertain how to move forward. And in the way that trauma limits options, I felt myself extremely limited. I did not have access to a lot of emotionality. I did not have access to different choices. I was stuck. And at that time, I was very

Starting point is 00:46:06 lucky to meet a woman who came on safari. She became my first mentor. And the reason I guided her was because Alex, my friend who also features in the book, he had guided her a year before and he said to me, she's a martial artist. And I was very interested in martial arts as I know you are. And so I went into the guide room and in the guide room, there was this board where every guide got their name put next to the clients who were coming in. And I rubbed off someone else's name and I put my name next to her to guide her. And that moment absolutely changed my life. Her name was Dr. Martha Beck. And she arrived on the safari and we went out the first two days and she said something on the second day that I felt something in me like really moved. We were driving along

Starting point is 00:46:53 and I was telling her about the restoration of the land. And she said, I really understand this. And I believe the restoration of the planet will come out of a transformation in human consciousness. And the minute she said it, you know, whatever my grandfather knew or my father knew or my uncle knew when he saw that leopard, I felt that thing move inside of me. That kind of, that idea struck me very deeply. And then on about the fourth day, I'd driven back to the camp and, you know, I'm in my safari gear. I got my rifle. You know, I'm the guide. I'm a rugged guy. I'm out there tracking lions. And she turned and she looked at me and she said, I'm ready to talk to you. And I was sort of taken aback. I said, well, what do you mean? She said, I can see what you're

Starting point is 00:47:36 carrying and I can see how stuck you are. And I want you to know that I can help you and I'm here. And I don't know if you've ever had one of those instances where someone sees you when you're in one of those places but I felt myself becoming really uncertain and then I felt tears starting to come to my eyes and then there was this moment where the you know this woman is hugging the safari guide and just consoling me and she was an incredible healer and she was exceptionally adept at transformational processes and so she started to teach me how to move through the trauma and the suffering that I was stuck in. And as that happened, my relationship to tracking started to change. And I started to see this art form in a different way. And I realized that I was looking for something and all of the skills and the

Starting point is 00:48:25 mentality of the tracker was highly adept to being in a transformational process. You know, the first thing that you will have to do if you want to go track a lion in the wild is you will have to become super uncomfortable with unknowns. You will have to give up all the ways you tried to know what to do and say, I don't know how to do this. All trackers operate using unknowns to almost bring them to life. You will need to develop your track awareness. Track awareness is teaching yourself to be attuned to a very specific set of signs, metrics, but self-generated. When I was a kid, Renius would take me out to a game path and he would say, walk down that game path and tell me what you see. And I would come back and I would say to him, I saw a herd of impala walk there. And he would say, hey, I'm fine. Young boy,

Starting point is 00:49:14 go look again. And as I was walking away, he would say, put your head down like the way an animal drinks, put your head right down against the trail and look like you're drinking water, like an animal. And I would come back and I would say, I can see where the herd of impala walked, but they actually walked over the tracks of a leopard. And I can see where a mouse ran across the path and then an owl swooped down and its wing touched the ground. And each time I walked down that path, under his guidance, there was more information. And that idea became very important to me, the idea that there is information in your life if you are looking for transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it. And so, you know, what do you need to attune to

Starting point is 00:49:56 in transformational processes? Things that make you feel expansive, things that make you feel alive, letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards, noticing what you're curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that make you feel alive, letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards, noticing what you're curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that make you feel more alive. So I started to see through the eyes of the tracker, the first track, you know, the first track being the next thing you know to do, letting go of, you know, where that animal might be or letting go of where you think you should be and just doing the next thing you know to do and the next thing you know to do. If you watch great trackers, they drop into what I call the following state. And it's so beautiful. If you watch Alex and Renius in the following state, the following state could be defined almost as constant creative

Starting point is 00:50:41 response to what is occurring. If the track cuts left, Alex will click and he'll say, I'm on the track. If it cuts right, Reneas will be on it. They're getting a sense of the mood of the animal. They're using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving. And in that way, like almost feel the animal as it's walking out ahead of them. At the same time, they are vectoring and they are getting a sense of their bearings using waypoints of marula trees up ahead. When you watch them, almost having fun in it they're playing they're playing on that track and so you will need to develop the following state in your own transformational process how can you play how can you be creative with not knowing what you're trying to create or this place you're trying to get to but being open and willing and aware and attuned, you will almost certainly lose the track. And I'm sort of saying this to see how the tracker

Starting point is 00:51:29 came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing. You will lose the track. You'll be in the middle of it thinking, I'm deep in the following state, I'm right on track, and then suddenly it'll be gone. And you will need to build community around you of other great trackers, people who are willing to move with you, follow with you. And the core of it is really that there is something inside of you that knows. There is a part of you, you might call it your wild self, you might call it the track of your life

Starting point is 00:51:56 or as native people call it, your medicine way, a part of you that beyond rational thought reacts when you become more in tune with yourself and sifting away the layers of socialization all the things you should do all the things you have to do to start to be able to follow the trail of that place inside of you became really what the core of my own journey to healing was and i live like that to this day as a tracker trying to be present resting into the unknown att attuning, and trying to fall into the following state with what energizes me, makes me curious, and pulls me forward.

Starting point is 00:52:31 Thank you for that. It strikes me also that a lot of people who would try to help another start almost as a hammer looking for nails, right? They don't listen enough first. And it just strikes me that what Martha did was very much initially demonstrated by her powers of observation, awareness, and attunement. And those are sort of like the core fundamental characteristics that you need to develop or resurrect before you can really prescribe anything at all. And the question I want to ask is actually related to the traumatic events if you're open to it. Would you be willing to share what happened or some of the examples of what happened in your 20s? Yeah, just one comment on Martha. Once we started to get onto that level with each other, when I watched her and I looked at her, what I saw was a superb tracker. She

Starting point is 00:53:31 understood how trauma patterns us. And she was incredibly adept at first tracking the pattern and then starting to support you in creating a different outcome for yourself or providing tools and options for different ways of doing it. And as I watched her work with myself and with many other people, I saw a tracker who would, you know, at first just really observe and get to know what they were working with and be present and attuned. And that's really what most attracted me to her work. I saw a tracker of processes, human processes, and first and foremost, and that's probably what I was mature enough, the frame that I was able to see through at that time as a tracker. But yeah, to segue into my own experiences, my family, I would say,

Starting point is 00:54:18 Tim, went through a very difficult 10-year period, a period of intense suffering. And yet that suffering became the place where we learned to do the work and go inward and start to understand how healing processes work. And so I've gotten to the place now where I fondly look back on those 10 years of initiation, you know, university of suffering. But it began for me when my grandmother died. My father, who had taken the Londolozi model of care of land, care of wildlife, care of people, and he had launched it to 30 other operations around Southern Africa, which Mandela had asked him to do. And so there'd been this big sort of expansion. And then in a classic kind of change of founder's trap, he got fired from that.

Starting point is 00:55:04 And then very soon into that, South Africa was going through a very, very difficult time. And one night we were in Johannesburg and this was post-elections, but it was still, the country was still really finding its feet and there was a ton of violent crime still happening. And yeah, as I said, I was 18 years old and I woke up and my sister was shaking me. And immediately as I sat up, I had a gun pushed into my face. And the home that we were staying in in Johannesburg on that occasion had been invaded. And I just felt the adrenaline pump through my system and all of my work in healing spaces later, and I know that you're involved in psychedelic-assisted therapy, has been to try and get a cap on the scope of where my body goes when it gets a mild trauma because I woke up into my worst nightmare. tied up. And I know kind of stories of how these things go, the violence, the potential danger to

Starting point is 00:56:07 women. And it was just like absolute red line fear. And just to see the woman in my life, my family like that. And so it was just shocking. And then realizing that, you know, I know I can read animals, but I can't quite read people. I mean, I can't quite read them. They're not as honest as animals, you know, so I just don't know where this is going to go. And I'm sitting in this tension. And eventually, they took me outside, these guys who had broken into the house, and they said to me, we're going to kill you.

Starting point is 00:56:40 So they pulled me outside, and they put a gun to my head. And they basically said, this is, they basically said, now we're going to kill you. And, you know, the fear was so intense. And then I remember looking up the barrel at the man who was holding the gun to my head and we looked into each other's eyes. And in that moment, something happened, which I can't say what happened. You might call it the peace of God that path is understanding, but I think it was too big

Starting point is 00:57:09 for my ego structure to hold and it collapsed. And as I looked at him, all fear left me and all concern for my own bodily safety left me. And I just felt a profound human connection with him. And as that happened, and there were three of these guys standing around me, as that moment happened, it was kind of this weird, the only way I can describe it is a kind of a weirdness came over everyone. It was as if everyone had become glimmered and they put the guns down and everyone just stood there confused. And I walked back inside totally unaccosted in any way. And I got the car keys and I walked back out and I gave them

Starting point is 00:57:53 the car keys and I said, get in that car and leave. And they did. And it was just immensely bizarre. And for years I lived with trying to work out both the terror that I felt and the fear that had flooded me, but also trying to integrate like whatever had happened in that moment. And I'm not sure that I fully understand it, but, you know, I felt like I glimpsed through the most terrifying situation, I glimpsed something. That was a very, very sort of,

Starting point is 00:58:24 that was the first freezing experience that I had. It was terrifying. And then on the heels of that, and I think sometimes of Jung's description of what is unconscious will be made conscious. It will manifest into your life until you become more conscious about what you're carrying. A couple of weeks after that, literally in the same year, myself and some friends and another tracker called Solly Mchlongo, we went down to the river on the reserve. And it was an extremely hot day. And we left the people who we were guiding sitting under a tree.

Starting point is 00:59:00 And we began to walk upstream in the river. And Solly stayed on the bank. And I was actually walking in the water. And the water was knee deep, running over sand. And you could see quite clearly. And then there was a place up ahead where a tree had fallen over and its branches were in the water. And it was kind of shadowy.

Starting point is 00:59:19 And when I think of it now, I think if it had been a horror movie, people in the audience would have started saying, don't go near the shadowy place. And of course, as I walk past the shadowy place, I actually sat down just on the edge of those shadows. And my perception was that the water was too shallow for crocodiles. But of course, the crocodile was in the hole. And the first thing that you notice when a crocodile grabs you is just the ferocity and the pressure of the bite. I just felt it slam onto my right leg and it tries to pull me into the deep section of the water. I throw my arm up and I grab a branch and it starts to shake me and I see a slick of blood appear in the water and then it gets washed

Starting point is 00:59:55 downstream. While the crocodile is shaking me, I see Solly who's on the bank. He sees me and he sees that I'm in trouble and And he immediately starts making his way towards me. Solly is also a Shungan man, grew up hunting and gathering. The croc goes to bite me a second time and I kicked and by the grace of God, my foot went down its throat and it spat me out. And I pulled myself up into the branches of the tree. And I have this memory of almost being non-local, watching myself pull myself up into the branches of the tree. I I have this memory of almost being non-local, watching myself pull myself up into the branches of the tree. I got up into the branches and I remember looking over my shoulder and my leg from the knee down is just absolutely mangled, torn to pieces and

Starting point is 01:00:35 meat hanging off. I made a pact with myself in that moment, like never look at that again. And I made my way through the branches and I fell onto the bank and I knew that I was extremely vulnerable on the bank. Crocodiles, it's an elite predator. If it thinks it can get you and I was on the bank against the water, it's going to grab me again. At that point, Solly coming from the other bank arrives at the deep section of the channel. He's seen me come out of the water. He's seen that my leg is mangled. And he knows that in the deep channel of water between him and I is a crocodile. And I can tell you that man didn't slow down, not for one second. He plunged into the water.

Starting point is 01:01:13 He waded into almost over his hips. And he got to me on the bank and he grabbed me, put me on his shoulder. And he carried me up onto the bank. He took his shirt off. He wrapped it around my leg. We were able to call the folks who were with us and calm them down, radio a plane that was flying over, and I was able to get medevaced out, and we were able to stop the bleeding so that I survived. So those

Starting point is 01:01:37 two experiences were very alive in me. And maybe this is a side point, and then I'll slow down for a while. But in the months after that, I sat many, many times with Solly and I said to him, Solly, why did you come in the water? And he would look at me with disdain and he'd say, he said, my brother, you're in trouble, I'm in trouble. And at first, I thought it was some kind of like, you know, platitude. He was playing down his actions. But as time went on, I really understood and I came to see that in the way that Sully grew up, he grew up in a much more collective consciousness. He grew up with his tribe. He grew up hunting and gathering. He grew up in nature. And he lived in a much more interconnected way than any of us live. In fact, his whole psyche was not formed around individuality.

Starting point is 01:02:31 His psyche was formed around a we consciousness, you and me together, a collective consciousness. And to him, it was fundamental. If I was in trouble, he was in trouble. And so he did not see it as any kind of heroic action. He just saw it as the most obvious natural thing to do and and that really that moved me and that and that taught me a lot i'm going to come back to a couple a number of things first good lord i'm sorry both of those things happened even though it ended up being the university of suffering

Starting point is 01:02:58 those are two excruciating experiences, to put it mildly. But just based on what you said about this collective consciousness, does the word Ubuntu or the concept of Ubuntu tie into this in any way? Oh, absolutely. Could you explain that for folks? Yeah. Yeah, Ubuntu is an African philosophy that says, I am because of you, or people are not people is activated in them, where Ubuntu is alive in them, it is actually a kind of structuring in their very psyche. They experience things in relation. They experience each other in a relational way. And they know that knowing yourself and being yourself is about being connected to people, but also to the broader field of sentient life.

Starting point is 01:04:09 And so what Solly was activating there was the Ubuntu consciousness. And he was showing that Ubuntu consciousness comes alive in action through courageous action in that case. But very much what he was showing me that day was how deeply ingrained it was in him, the collective nature of life. Another way of saying it, Tim, is like, and this gets really interesting as you start to learn your own psyche, but different cultures, the psyches are structured differently. And in a more Western setting, you might say that in a society where the individual self is disconnected from the greater interconnectivity of life, the search for meaning is reduced to a constant state of

Starting point is 01:04:52 comparison. So people will always on some level be saying, how am I doing in comparison? And so many people are living with that without even knowing that that's how they're trying to orientate themselves. Whereas if you grew up in Africa or if you grew up in nature, you grew up relationally. So it's not comparative. It's more like I'm learning about myself through my encounter with the world. I'm going to try to maybe awkwardly tie a number of things together here. When you and I, I think it was when we first spent time together.

Starting point is 01:05:26 I can't remember. Maybe it was the first time we spoke, but you were just coming off of living in a tree, if I remember correctly. Yes. If you're open to talking about that. If not, we can certainly cut it later. But since we're talking about it, how many days were you in this tree? So I was 40 days and 40 nights in the tree. I went into the tree. If you read all the mystical traditions, including I think your man Hafiz on your bookshelf, but in all the mystical traditions,

Starting point is 01:05:56 there seems to be a time when the mystics are drawn to be alone in nature. And Jesus went for 40 days and 40 nights, the Buddha went to the grove, there's accounts of it all along the way. And so I wanted to go and have that experience myself. And I'm not saying I'm a mystic, but my question was, why did all of the mystics go to be in total solitude in nature? And so with a lockdown in the world, suddenly I had six weeks where I could go and do that, go and sit in that question and see what answers came to me during that time. The first was that initially there was a tremendous anxiety. You know, the first couple of days I had a lot of thoughts around, I'm going to be away, I'm going to miss something I'm not attending to. And then after three days, that all dropped.

Starting point is 01:06:41 And I know the Aboriginal people have this amazing saying that modern culture is three days deep. And after three days, I felt myself go into a different state of consciousness. I just realized it doesn't matter. And then I started to attune myself to the natural world. And a few things happened. The one is that a big insight was that where your attention goes, your life goes. And if you're constantly putting your attention on living things, there's more aliveness in your own life. That was one. The second was that if you spend time in nature in the same spot over a period of time, it starts to become incredibly personal. So it's not just a bird or that antelope, it's that bird that roosts in that

Starting point is 01:07:27 bush and flies down the riverbed in the morning and back up the southern bank. And then it feeds for grubs in this tree. And as you start to become more personally attuned to each animal, you start to see that there's a pattern to their movement. And in fact, then you start to find yourself orientated inside of a series of interlocking intelligences. That is really what the natural world is. And then at some point, you realize that I'm not observing this intelligence that I'm watching unfold around me. I am fundamentally a part of this. And it stops being a mental construct and you start to feel yourself inside of that intelligence.

Starting point is 01:08:05 And that's a very, very deep experience, or at least it was for me. And I think that that is why at a certain point, the mystics went to go and get quiet enough to feel themselves inside of that incredible field of intelligence that is the natural world. I had just radical encounters every day. And I think that's another thing about the natural world is things happen. And as things happen each day, it almost like it helps you make meaning. And in the society, you know, the societies of the modern world are almost becoming devoid of the structures that allow us to make meaning, but the natural world is full of encounter. And that encounter

Starting point is 01:08:40 generates an aliveness and a relational meaning-making quality that just makes life feel very, very rich. And we lived like that for thousands of years before we lived on Discord. Were there any other aspects of the experience that were particularly surprising to you in any way, or any other rules that you set for yourself that proved either fruitless or fruitful? I mean, the one encounter that comes to mind, and there were many, is lots of solo hours tracking, which felt very special. But on one of the nights, I got caught in a storm,

Starting point is 01:09:13 a thunderstorm rolled in, and the heat built all through the afternoon. And I could see the storm building out over the Western horizon, and it started to look menacing, and then even more menacing. And I was living on a flat platform up in the tree and eventually the wind started to howl and blow and then the mother and the father of a thunderstorm broke around me and you know the lightning bolts

Starting point is 01:09:41 were coming around around me and I don't know if you've ever been very close to lightning strikes, but the first thing is that you just hear it go like this. And then the blade comes down and then the sound goes sonic. But if you're close enough to it, it actually clicks as it hits the ground. And it started to come down around me, torrential rain and blades of lightning lighting up around me. And the sound was just so intense. And I mean, it was just monstrous. I was cast into a deep and overwhelming fear. And I realized that true fear is kind of a rare experience in modern life. Yeah. Terror. Terror, right? Like terror is a, it's a,

Starting point is 01:10:26 it's a very distinct thing. It's so distinct to like all my anxiety, you know, all the things I worry about, but like true raw, I don't know if we make it out of this fear is actually a very rare encounter in life. And, you know,

Starting point is 01:10:41 it would not end. I just kept saying to myself, like, you can't be this scared for so long. Surely it's just going to pass. And then like another hour and another hour. And I just kind of weathered it. And I felt an incredible, yeah, I mean, I guess it's talked about a lot, but an incredible fragility and an incredible humility. And then the next day when I came out of it, I also felt like, oh God, that scared me so much, but I would do it again. On the other side of it,

Starting point is 01:11:12 to have been in a storm like that felt very, very special. I felt like a profound encounter with the force of nature. Do you think you will ever do an extended period solo like that again? I don't know if you were totally solo. I have no idea if you were solo, solo, solo, or was like solo most of the time, but a few people would come out and say hi every once in a while, but maybe you could clarify that. But do you think you would repeat an experiment like that? Why or why not? Not necessarily in a tree, but that degree of solitude. I mean, without a shadow of a doubt, it is one of the most beautiful things I've ever done. And I don't know if I will do six weeks again, but I will certainly try and get 10 days solo in nature a year with no other people. And in this one, I didn't see other people. I was totally by myself.

Starting point is 01:12:02 And there's amazing things that happen when you're by yourself. One is, you know, getting really into your own energy, just being in your own energetic field, then being attuned to nature and feeling your body start to attune to those rhythms, you know, watching the stars move through the sky all night and feeling yourself naturally wake up with the dawn and go to sleep when it gets dark and feeling your whole circadian rhythm attuned to that. What else about it? You know, funny things happen. Like on the one day I banged my head, I had a trunk, which had dry goods in it, but I banged my hand on the trunk. I was like, ah, God, you know, damn it. And I flew into a rage. I like, I flew into a rage because it was so painful. And then I realized that with no one else around, I couldn't maintain my state of anger.

Starting point is 01:12:51 And it's a really weird thing. Like sulking, being angry and sulking and moods and all of that stuff is really for the benefit of other people. It's really so that other people can get tuned in to like what a difficult time you're having. But when you buy yourself, they just do not abide because there's no one around to like stay in the story for. Well, speaking of mood, part of the reason I'm asking is because I know you and I have both experienced in life depressive episodes. And I suppose there's part

Starting point is 01:13:23 of me that thinks, man, 40 days is a long time to be alone with the voices in your head. But did you find, how did you find that experience? Was that even a concern going into it for you? How did you, if you did think about it, how did you think about that? No, I mean, it's certainly a concern. And then there's also this weird component of time, right? Like you wake up at four in the morning, you meditate, you go tracking for a few hours, you come back to the camp, you make some coffee, you run, you do some more reading and journaling, you meditate again, and it's 10.15 and you have 39 days to go.

Starting point is 01:13:59 So the one thing is that I was not doing like traditional Zen retreat. I allowed myself books I allowed myself to do daily recordings of my encounters like kind of journal entries and I allowed myself to go tracking and so actually it was incredibly generative for me and there's all these like little problems you have to solve like you got to keep your camp clean and then everything gets wet and then you got to work out how to build yourself a bit of shelter. And then once you become more present, it becomes so full of life. Like I would make myself this evening shower.

Starting point is 01:14:30 I'd go fill a big cast iron kettle with water and then I would warm it on the fire. And then I would pour this kettle of hot water over myself, totally alone up in the tree. It was the best shower I've ever had. And just, it was teaching me presence all the time. And once the anxiety left, there was a lot of introspection and I looked at a lot of things, but I actually didn't feel myself taken by anxious or depressive demons. The process felt very generative and alive to me. Yeah, that's something that I've been looking at very, very closely for myself. And I don't think I've yet perhaps developed the eyes or the awareness to parse it, but the characteristics or the circumstances that lead to nourishing

Starting point is 01:15:13 solitude versus depleting isolation, right? Because those are very different. For me, those concepts represent very different things, right? Solitude versus isolation or loneliness. How does it feel for you now? Like if you went alone for a week to a cabin now, like how does it land on you now? A week I could do. A week I can do and I could find that I think very restorative. I particularly find it restorative if I am with Molly, my dog, and have that close connection. Going through wilderness with Molly is particularly nourishing to me. I can also do it solo, but I find that she and I are so attuned at this point, because we spend almost all of our waking time together, that she's like my external nervous system. She's

Starting point is 01:16:05 almost like an amplifier for my own nervous system. So I'm picking up what I'm picking up, but I'm also picking up a lot of what she is picking up just by observing her behavior. And that is very additive for me and also deepens my relationship, not only with the surroundings and with myself on some level, but with her. So a week, I would take no problem. I think the six weeks starts to get out to a point where I'm like, I wonder, right? There's just a question mark because I haven't done six weeks solo. That's a pretty good stretch of time. Yeah. I mean, I will say that it was largely supplemented by the passion for tracking. And so, you know, your encounter with like feeling the presence of Molly there and, you know, being in this thing together, like my feeling is every time I'm tracking, I'm in a new story. Every time I'm out there following, I'm in a deep encounter and it actually feels like there's this alive sentience awareness. One of the things that I would say is that when I first went out, I thought that part of what I was doing is I wanted to improve my attunement to

Starting point is 01:17:13 nature. I wanted to know nature. But one of the most profound experiences out of it was that I started to feel known by nature. And I know that this maybe veers us off a little bit into the esoteric, but there was this feeling that there's this sentient, alive consciousness, and somehow it was feeling me as I was feeling it in a really deep way. And that felt actually, that felt incredibly supportive and like I was touching something really beautiful and special. I think there's a lot to that, but lest we get too far down the rabbit hole into crazy town, which maybe we'll do on a round two, definitely do a round of campfire in person.

Starting point is 01:17:57 But I think there's actually a lot there related to what you just said. I do want to discuss your healing process, and this is going to seem like a very strange way to approach it. Before we get to that, I feel like maybe like ginger in the sushi meal, we'll just give people a story as a quick refresher slash palate cleanser, and then we'll dig into some heavy stuff. So are you willing to tell the story about the bees? Oh, absolutely. Well, I guess we bonded over this story. People ask me a lot, like, what's the most dangerous encounter you've had in nature? And by this stage of the podcast, you know, a crocodile tried to ingest me and that wasn't the worst. But I became fascinated by bees for a few reasons. The one is that one day I was walking in the wild part of Zimbabwe and I came across this ancient baobab tree, this two-story high

Starting point is 01:18:59 baobab tree, and it had been hollowed out when an elephant had knocked the branch and it was in fact empty. And a swarm of bees had made their hive in the top of it. And the sound of the bees humming was coming down the base of that tree. And it was like standing next to this giant didgeridoo. And just the sort of, I could hear the intensity of the bees through this process. And I felt their vibration coming out of this tree. And it was, it kind of sparked my interest. There's also an amazing thing in Southern Africa. There's a bird called the honey guide. And literally, if you go out in parts of wilderness in Africa and you start banging on trees, a bird will come to you and it will start to call incredibly animatedly, very much like Disney's,

Starting point is 01:19:41 I think he wants us to follow him. And then it will fly in front of you and show you where the beehive is so that like for thousands of years before as a hunter gatherer, you can rob the beehive and then you put some honey down next to you and the bird comes and lands next to you and eats the honey. It's this incredible ancient, just, you know, an encounter like that. Like it just takes you back thousands of years. Wow. Wait, just for clarity. So this is like thousands, tens of thousands, you know, an encounter like that, like it just takes you back thousands of years. Wow. Wait, just for clarity. So this is like thousands, tens of thousands, who knows, hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution where this bird has a species memory of a symbiotic relationship with humanoids. Is that what I'm hearing?

Starting point is 01:20:22 A type of morphogenic field memory that when it sees a person it knows we go and get honey together wow i mean isn't that amazing that's cool and you'll and you walk out to remote places and suddenly the birds then it's like come on let's do this are we going to do this and it almost appears to get disappointed if you're like i'm not going to go and rob the beehive now wow so anyway like i was having the you So anyway, I was around with this idea and I was like, the bees are really fascinating. And then I started reading up on them. And it's this incredible creature, right? They pollinate millions of flowers. They're one of the biggest contributors from the insect world to the economy, honey sails. They can field

Starting point is 01:21:00 electromagnetic fields. They will disappear if a storm is brewing. And then as you watch the hive itself, this incredible kind of algorithmic intelligence whereby a single bee, an individual bee responds to localized stimuli, doing what it knows to do. And when enough bees responding to individual localized stimuli all start to attune, an algorithm fires through the hive and they move as one and they know where to go and get food etc so that idea also gripped me the idea of individuals attuning to what they know to do can trigger a kind of a collective transformation so i got really into this and i went that's all the good stuff behind the camp all the good stuff yeah just it was a bit of backstory here before my near-death experience. So wait, I should tell you that during the time that I got fascinated about bees,

Starting point is 01:21:48 there was a couple who were coming on safari and they had been writing to me from Singapore and they were saying, listen, we want to come to Africa, but we're terrified of Ebola. And I had said to them, listen, Ebola is in North and West Africa. There's no Ebola in South Africa. Yeah, but we're very, very afraid of it. We're very concerned that it could travel. I said, you really have to trust me. There's no Ebola in South Africa. Yeah, but we're very, very afraid of it. We're very concerned that it could travel. I said, you really have to trust me. There is no Ebola in South Africa.

Starting point is 01:22:09 You're going to be absolutely safe. So they had come on safari. Meantime, I walk up into the back of the village and I seek out a man by the name of Simon Sambo. Simon Sambo. Great name. Simon Sambo himself has a mellifluous voice, very soft, lilting voice. And Simon Sambo is the village beekeeper.

Starting point is 01:22:31 So I say to him, Simon, I've got really interested in bees, and I know that you have some hives, and I would love to come and experience your beekeeping. He says, okay, there's no problem. I can take your beekeeping. I said, great. I'm excited about this. He says, you'll meet me tomorrow in the morning and we will go and meet the bees. Great. Next morning, I meet him and he's got a big sort of black plastic case.

Starting point is 01:22:59 And we drive out to the hives and I'm inappropriately dressed. I'm in like shorts and t-shirt. And I said, what do we do now? He says, okay, the first thing is you must put on your beekeeping suit. So he gives me his suit and I put it on and it's a little bit short for me. Like literally between my sneaker and my ankle,

Starting point is 01:23:20 I have some exposure. So I said to him, Simon, the suit's a bit short for me because he had sort of, this was his second suit. He says, don't worry, you can borrow my socks. So he takes his boots off and he's got thick black socks. And so I sort of feel them and I think, okay, this is going to be good. And I put the socks on and I like seal up the suit. And I said to him, cool, Simon, let's get the smoker going now. He says, oh no, I don't use

Starting point is 01:23:46 the smoker. It makes the bees afraid of a fire. So like a little bell goes off in my head. I'm like, but beekeepers all over the world use the smoker. He says, it's not my style. I'm like, okay, I'm here to learn. And so Simon and I start heading towards the hives. And I'm talking African bees here. Now, Tim, amazing thing happens. As you approach the hive, if you just walk past the hive with no intention of doing anything, the bees somehow know it. But the minute you put your intention and attention on them, I don't know how, you know, it's maybe too woo, but I'm telling you, they feel it.

Starting point is 01:24:25 And as you start walking towards the hive, they start changing gears. Like they're at the Austin F1 track. You hear the sound changing. So we get up next to the hive and Simon gets out his crowbar and he cranks the lid off and 70,000 of the most enraged African bees rise up in a black cloud around me and they're shimmering around me and you can feel the intensity and you can feel their attitude of, oh, you think you can fuck with us and they're all around you and they start to land on you. And you know, someone who's grown up around animals, I feel the energy of a single, angry, aggressive animal. And they're all over me. And I say, Simon, this is quite intense.

Starting point is 01:25:11 He says, don't worry, everything's okay. And they start landing on the visor and like blocking the visor out. And it's super intense. And right at that moment, in the midst of this like raw buzzing intensity, one bee found my weak sock area and it stung me through the sock. And the minute as that sting went through the sock, a huge pheromonal cascade was released to the other bees and the shimmering swarming dark mass around my head. It stopped for a second.

Starting point is 01:25:46 And then as one, the bees went to my ankles and they begin to sting me intensely through the socks. The socks do not work. So I think, Simon, Simon, they're stinging me. Simon, Simon, they're stinging me. What must I do? What must I do? He says, okay, back away.

Starting point is 01:26:02 And they start following me. And then now I'm being stung hundreds of times. And then at one stage I look up and there's a bee that's inside the suit. So eventually I get into the clearing and now I have a swarm of bees around me. They are still penetrating the sock badly. I say, Simon, what must I do? What must I do? He says, hold on, I will help you. And he runs over and he cuts a large branch of a tree. And then he runs back and he starts beating me with the branch. And I'm standing in the clearing getting pounded with the branch. And they're still stinging me.

Starting point is 01:26:30 They're still all around me. I said, Simon, it's not working. It's not working. He says, okay, I will get the smoker going. And I just, this thought ran to my head, like, a little late for that. And he grabbed the smoke. He starts putting elephant dung in it. And then he gets it going and he comes over to me and he starts the smoke he starts putting elephant dung in it and then he gets it

Starting point is 01:26:45 going and he comes over to me and he starts blasting me with the smoker and the first blast went right through the visor of the beekeeping suit and kind of into my mouth and so i got a big inhale of elephant dung and then my mind and my chest immediately tightened up i started thinking shit my whole body's going into anaphylaxis is it elephant dung or is it anaphylaxis and they're still singing me and it's bad. I said, Simon, they're still singing me. They're still singing me. He says, okay, run for your life.

Starting point is 01:27:14 And this is when two men in beekeeping suits break into a full run through the wilderness. And we just start running aimlessly at first. And then he says, they will chase you forever. Make for the Land Rover. So we run to the Land Rover and we jump into it. And he just says, drive, drive, drive. They are enraged.

Starting point is 01:27:34 I start driving off into the wilderness. Tim, true as nuts, we come around the first corner. And on the other safari track driving towards us is the couple from Singapore who've been afraid of Ebola and they see, what they see is the Ebola cleanup crew in full white suits driving towards them at full speed going, you're going to die, you're going to die, drive, drive, drive. And that was my first encounter with the bees. So eventually I make it back to the house

Starting point is 01:28:04 and I remember I got into my bedroom and i sat on the bed and i was just trying to feel my own body and i was like am i dying am i am i dying am i okay like is it kicking in and i got into the shower and i took all the stings out of my ankles and I made it back onto my bed. And that was me for the next five days. I did not move. My feet looked like someone had taken surgical gloves and just blown them up. And Simon would come around and he would say, hey, boy, how are you doing today? I said, not good. He said, I bought some ice for your feet.

Starting point is 01:28:44 Next time we will get you boots. But you know, I sat with it. And what, what I took out of it was number one, what the bees taught me is if you want to know about the bees, respect the bees. And the next thing that I got was I became intrigued by the power of this

Starting point is 01:29:04 collective ability to fire the like the collective consciousness algorithm like what would it mean if we all started really attending to states of peace and healing and well-being and if enough of us did that could we like the bees you know create some kind of algorithmic transformation for everyone yeah or stick a lot out of shit out of some invader's ankles. Intensity. They taught me so much about intensity. I think that's what I learned from Independence Day.

Starting point is 01:29:32 If aliens invade, that's a great way for us to activate our hive mind to sting the shit out of someone's ankles. Set the bees on them. All right. Well, the segue back to what I mentioned earlier is going to be a little awkward. Let me find an in-between course to get us there that'll maybe lead us back in some odd way. Could you speak to the moment when a lion notices you and then what happens at that point? How does an encounter like that unfold?

Starting point is 01:30:05 Well, again, I want to come back to that idea of the minute a lion becomes aware of you and you become aware of it, you are in a language dialogue and it is a language of energy and presence. Now, there's usually one of two things that will happen. Either the lion will get up, and this is 99% of the encounters, the lion's natural instinct is to get away from you. Remember, people hunted lions for hundreds of years on the plains. And actually, one of the primary ways that hunter-gatherers got food, and a lot of people don't know this, is they tracked lions and then they would rob them of their kills. And so lions have a long history of being chased by humans.

Starting point is 01:30:42 So normally it'll go away from you. However, that doesn't always happen. Particularly if a lioness has cubs or if they have meat, they can be aggressive. Now, normally what will happen is the first thing that you will notice is the animal's body will tighten, they'll drop their head and the tail starts to flick intensely and they start to warning growl at you. And it sounds like the growl is so intense, it sounds like someone started a dirt bike in the bush up ahead of you. And then if it's a lioness and she's got cubs, she'll stand up and still with her head low and her ears back and the tail lashing, she slowly starts to walk towards you. And she fixes you with a gaze of utter intensity. And the minute she has

Starting point is 01:31:26 you in that gaze, your only option is you have to stand your ground and you have to communicate an intense presence back to her. So when that happens to me, if I feel myself starting to come into an encounter where we're going to have a more aggressive, energetic conversation with each other. And may I just interject for one second to say, when you don't have clients, true or false, you guys will often go out with just walking sticks. Yeah, no rifles without clients. Okay, please continue. We will, what we most believe in is being in this dialogue.

Starting point is 01:32:02 And so if that happens, the first thing that you do is you breathe out, a long out breath, because everything in your system is starting to jack up because the feeling of it is like, I'm in, you can feel your whole system flush with adrenaline. So you breathe out, you anchor yourself. And then you understand that that lion is trying to communicate with you. She walks towards you intensely, intensely, and then she'll growl. And with that, she charges. And then she runs at you at full speed. And it's so fast, snarling, full gums revealed, teeth revealed.

Starting point is 01:32:36 And she comes in. And then you stand your ground and you look her directly in the eyes. And mostly what will happen is she'll stop some distance from you as she stops you hold her in your energy and you almost aggressive back to her and you're showing that like i'm dangerous too and then the minute you see her energy drop a little bit because all that she's doing is she's trying to anchor you so that the cubs can run away the minute you see her energy drop a little bit you just start dropping away and you give her, still facing her, you step back, you give her space.

Starting point is 01:33:08 And very quickly you start communicating to her that we know we've come too close, but we're going to give you space now. But you can only do that once she has stopped coming at you. If you watch her very intensely, and Reneas is really the master of this, as you watch her closely, a slight drop in energy and he'll move backwards a little bit. And then you get is really the master of this. As you watch her closely, a slight drop in energy and he'll move backwards a little bit.

Starting point is 01:33:26 And then you get out of the situation and you just find yourself giggling stupidly and doing all the weird things that happen after high tense situations. So you said most of the time they stop some distance from you. So what's the alternate scenario? If you're in the alternate scenario, you've got something very, very wrong. Yeah. And the reason that you get into the alternate scenario is that you get it wrong in the moment. You see, as that charge starts happening, you're in the dialogue, and your presence

Starting point is 01:33:57 is absolutely critical, and your ability to project an energetic presence and meet her, and then to quickly help her understand that you're not afraid of her, you're dangerous, but you're also going to give way. And when people get killed, it's because they get that wrong. They fall over, their nerve breaks and they want to run, or they get scared and they start running immediately. That's when dangerous things happen. You know, I don't know if you've ever come across this book, but it's one of my favorite nonfiction books of the last 10 years, which is saying a lot for me because I do read a lot of books. And they already have cleared hurdles, right? I'm not just reading whatever I randomly pick off of Amazon. I'm getting books that are usually recommended by two or three people first. In a book called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, who's won a lot of awards,

Starting point is 01:34:39 he's best known for a book called Arctic Dreams. but of wolves and men. He talks about the conversation between predator and prey as the conversation of death. And he went out with field biologists and also with Inuit and Native Americans in North America at various points and observed different hunts and also heard stories from both groups about this conversation of death. So people listening might think, well, that doesn't make any sense. A lion is a predator. They can easily overtake you. Why wouldn't they attack you? But time and time again, the conversation of death wouldn't always end in death. Sometimes a perfectly capable, say, pack of wolves would pursue a caribou or an elk or something. And then at one point,

Starting point is 01:35:34 the elk or the caribou do an about face, stand off with the wolves, and then they would just part ways. They just walk in opposite directions. And it seems to defy explanation, but it does happen. And I found that entire segment of the book, it comes up a number of times, but talking about the nuances in this conversation of death and how these animals interface, there seems to be some communication. And sometimes it ends in death, and other times it just ends in both parties deciding like, okay, another day. And then they just go in different directions. It's something I don't have any real understanding of, but I find endlessly fascinating. So it's something that you've had more firsthand experience with, I suppose. I mean, there's a knowledge out there that is...

Starting point is 01:36:18 And if you actually talk to any people, biologists, the more time you spend in nature, the more you'll realize how little we know. There is subtlety and nuance and there is things happening out there that is way beyond our understanding. Yeah. Yeah. There's another example. I think it's in Of Wolves and Men, but talking about how there are recorded instances of wolf packs that are being tracked, presumably with radio collars, but maybe with flyovers or something like that prior to the satellite collars, because this book was written in the 70s, that at some point, for no discernible cause, no stimuli that can be identified, we'll just pick up

Starting point is 01:36:59 and all head off in a very precise direction in a more or less straight line. And then four days later, they intersect perfectly with a caribou herd that happens to be migrating, but started at roughly the same time moving in a different direction. And the two vectors intersect. It's like, okay, that seems interesting. I don't know how to explain that exactly. But these types of phenomena that get observed over and over again, and also, not to take us too far afield, but these so-called, and in some cases, they're certainly mythologies, but mythologies about, for instance, in the case of some North American Indians, the collaboration between coyote and badger. So the joining forces of coyote and badger,

Starting point is 01:37:43 which for a long time was thought to be this quaint fairy tale. And then during quarantine, this is now about a year, year and a half ago, there was some type of trail cam footage that was released that showed a coyote playing with a badger like a dog would, wagging its tail and jumping around and then them leading off through a tunnel on basically a hunting party. There's just so much we don't know. It doesn't surprise me. I mean, even just some of the stuff around orientation.

Starting point is 01:38:15 You watch a female leopard walk five or six kilometers, leave her cub, walk five or six kilometers, then hunt in thick terrain, walking circles, moving in an irregular way, catch an impala, hoist it in a tree, and walk a direct line back to where her cub was, which by anyone's standards would just be an incredible piece of navigation. But she doesn't have a verbal mind or a rational mind, but somehow through all of that circuitous movement, she knows where she left the cub in a more instinctual way almost. And then, you know, you find this in native people too, the capacity for homing,

Starting point is 01:38:57 the ability, and I've seen it with trackers who've come down, SAM trackers who've come down from the Kalahari. They've come into the Kruger National Park, a terrain they've never been in. We've taken them into the Mapani. Mapani is like an eye-high scrub. And we've walked for a few hours in the Mapani. We have a GPS because we know how easy it is to get lost in there. And then afterwards we've said to them, okay, take us back to the vehicle. We've got the GPS and they walk on a beeline directly back to where we left the vehicle. Wow. And it's just like, what is that? Yeah, that's fascinating.

Starting point is 01:39:29 It makes me wonder, and I think this might actually be demonstrated, if we have some magnetic homing capability or navigational ability similar to hammerhead sharks. There's footage people can find of marine biologists studying hammerhead sharks, whether baby hammerhead sharks in an aquarium, basically. And they have top-down footage of how the movement changes if they rearrange magnets

Starting point is 01:39:54 underneath the encasement. So many unanswered questions, which is very exciting to me, obviously, because if everything were discovered, that would be quite depressing in and of itself. Let's come back to these traumatic events in your early 20s, 18 to 20s, and then what followed after that. How did your healing path, and this might seem like a strange way to lead in, but differ from those of your mom and sister, right? Because they were also presumably traumatized by the home invasion, if you're open to speaking to it. And you could just speak to your own personal experience, but I'm curious how different people have approached finding some degree of closure,

Starting point is 01:40:38 resolution, healing after an experience like that. Well, I think for one thing, there was a masculine feminine component to that. They did a lot more post-traumatic counseling at the time. And I wasn't open to that. I thought, you know, the way that I had grown up, I thought like, I'm just going to get on with it and move forward, which is, you know, a naive approach to say the least. And then there was also a challenge that I had where in the masculine it was harder just to process just process feelings what I needed was a path that I felt was taking me somewhere and so where that where that really took root for me is when I started to understand that if I was willing to look at how I had become frozen if I was willing to look at how I had become frozen, if I was willing to look at how I was anxious

Starting point is 01:41:25 and depressed as a result of that, and how that kind of shut me out from living, if I was able to start living towards that, it actually gave me a kind of map out of trauma. You know, someone trauma healed becomes a kind of medicine. And so it was only really when I started to understand that there was value to this just beyond myself. And in fact, if I became someone who learned how to be in a transformational process and learned how to heal, it was actually taking me towards what I was meant to do in some very important way. And somehow that structure of meaning had to take root in me before I was really able to dive into healing spaces and be open to that type of work. It was different for my mother and sister.

Starting point is 01:42:09 They were able to, in a more feminine way, allow that process earlier. For me, there had to be a structure of meaning that allowed me to engage in healing and be soft enough and to learn to soften and to learn to open and to learn to let myself actually feel what was there and the fear that was there and the fear

Starting point is 01:42:25 that was there and the uncertainty that was there. And also a feeling that I didn't know what I really wanted to do. I had a family legacy in conservation. I had a safari business that I could come into, but I didn't want to just run safaris. I knew there was something else for me. And I had to go on that journey to find out what that was. When you say structure of meaning, could you elaborate on what that means? It might seem a little recursive as a question, but how did you find that structure of meaning that you needed to move forth with contending with what had happened? So what I mean by that is, okay, so if you've had a traumatic encounter in the way that I understand it, it's like a part of you becomes frozen and almost inevitably

Starting point is 01:43:12 where there's been trauma, there is a reduction of options, which means I have less choices and that gets laid down. So life starts to become limited and there's less access to different choices. A healthy person could say, here's a way of handling this. Here's a different way of handling it. A traumatized person has one way of handling it, retreat and isolate, for example. And then I was lucky to have Martha and she started to expose me to how a healing process works. And then very soon after that, I found ceremony work.

Starting point is 01:43:43 Just for context for people listening, could you define ceremony work? There are obviously many different ways of being in ceremony. You might say that AA is a ceremony space, all the way to sweat lodge spaces, all the way to gatherings using plant medicines. There's just an array. I found myself in spaces using plant medicines that were very well guided. So the first part of the journey for me was actually acknowledging that I was frozen. So there was building awareness around how I'd become frozen. And then in ceremony, watching, drinking the medicine, being with people who were in a healing energetic, and then watching how that affected my life, getting to know how I was when I was frozen, then making peace with that, as opposed to thinking there was something wrong with me. That was a big movement, being like,

Starting point is 01:44:39 this has happened, this is where I'm at, and that's okay. Then starting to give myself different options. So instead of just being isolated and frozen, starting to actually be able to share the things that I was ashamed of. In some ways, I was ashamed that I hadn't been able to protect my parents, my sister and my mother. And I was ashamed that I had let bad guys in the house. I was the man of the house, all these things. I was able to start to be able to share these things that I was ashamed of. And I was able to talk to how disempowered I had felt and unable to do what I needed to do. And so I started to generate awareness out of that. And then I started to realize that in sharing that it actually opened me to deeper connection as opposed to what I thought it would do, which would shut me out and shun me.

Starting point is 01:45:28 And then I started to, because I was well guided, I started to generate a narrative that was supported. And what I mean by that is like the guide started to help me generate a narrative of the things that have happened to me can actually be fodder for growth and learning. And that became really important. of the things that have happened to me can actually be fodder for growth and learning. And that became really important. And then it actually became, you know, I have some gifts in this. And if I can find those gifts and share them, that's probably the most healing thing I can do. And so I was in that process for a long time. And at a certain point in it, I started to realize, in fact, this is taking me to my work. And that's when I started to see the tracker differently. And I started to really understand how a transformational process is an intricate unfolding. And as a guide, you can support it as a storyteller, you can support it with presence, you can support it by just listening, you can support it by creating spaces

Starting point is 01:46:22 that people can actually be open in. And you can actually start to know the way certain trauma patterns work and help people develop awareness and different outcomes for themselves. And so my healing was actually about finding the purpose to help healing come into the world, if that makes sense. It does make sense. And I wish at some point I'll show you all the highlights and underlying sections in your book. And I think I might have shown you a photograph of the index that I created just for the highlights at the front of the book. But one of the lines, this is on page 122 of

Starting point is 01:46:55 The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, is, in these times, an authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism, right? And then you go on to explain why that's the case. And I think about this a lot. And you actually had another quote way earlier. Let's see if I can find it. It's from St. Francis of Assisi. Oh, man. I wish I could find this because it ties into it right. Wherever you go, spread the gospel. When absolutely necessary, use words. Exactly. So don't we all wish more people would follow that advice? And perhaps advice we should give ourselves as often

Starting point is 01:47:34 or perhaps more often than we give it to anybody else. And I think this is critical to highlight in the sense that in this day and age, in these times, yelling and screaming on the internet and shaming other people or tearing other people down can be mistaken for something constructive or activism. But in reality, a very powerful form of activism is being the example that you want to see more of in the world, right? And holding yourself accountable in that way, which is not easy. It's really hard oftentimes to do that. And I know both of us have had tremendous struggles

Starting point is 01:48:17 of different types, although I think they share a lot of common DNA. And a lot of this seems to come down to stress testing beliefs, if that makes sense. If a component of yourself, kind of along the lines of IFS or internal family systems, if people are interested in that, they can certainly look that up. I did an interview with Richard Swartz, the founder. But if a component of your personality or psyche is kind of frozen in time and compartmentalized, and when you are put in circumstances that activate that part of yourself, you get tunnel vision with options. And maybe you have one option or maybe you have two options. You can often reduce that down to a belief, right? A statement of some type. And I'm bringing this up because I would love to hear how Byron

Starting point is 01:49:07 Cady's workshops have been helpful or not helpful for you, because I know this is something we've spoken about. And if they have been helpful, what specific worksheets have been helpful for you? Can I talk for a moment to the activism thing and then come back to Byron Katie? You are allowed, sir. The stage is yours. One thing on the activism thing, and I would say it like this, and Tim, you've been on a healing journey. What I notice is that a person who heals has a natural inclination to want to be of service. And especially if you've had people who've supported you along the way. And that's not to say that I think I know how you should heal,

Starting point is 01:49:50 but there's just this desire as someone who heals to support the healing impulse and be there. And you know that there were moments in your own journey that were very powerful for you. And it's almost just like innate when you get in touch with that, to want to do that for other people and support that. The way that I think about this is, if you can give yourself a transformational process and you go on a journey to discover, I would call it the track of your life, the place where you feel whole, where you feel like you're expressing your essence into the world, the place where you feel just at peace and in tune with yourself. And it takes time to get to that. And it seems to me that at a certain point in every lifetime, we get asked,

Starting point is 01:50:31 like, what's it about? And it seems to me it's about that, coming to that place in yourself. But there are some characteristics of people who I see who deeply find that place. For one, they become inclined towards simplicity. They don't want a lot of things. A feeling of enough comes into them and both like, I am enough and I have enough. And they stop wanting to consume more things to feel okay. There's a natural desire towards service. There seems to be this like inclination that takes them to be pulled into nature. There's a desire to be creative and support other people. And that's what I mean is that inside of every healing journey, and when someone goes on that journey and finds a deeper place of peace,

Starting point is 01:51:14 and it's, of course, it's a continuous journey, but it seems to me that those things take root. And that seems to be very important for the restoration movement. In a very individual way, we do our own work to heal and come to wholeness. But a whole lot of people coming into that state of, I have enough, I am enough, you know, it just changes the desire to consume endlessly. And I think that's going to be very good for nature. And so I see this, like, the restoration movement as both restoring our relationship to wild places and restoring wild places, but also restoring ourselves, coming to wholeness and healing,

Starting point is 01:51:47 so that we come out of the illusion that more stuff is going to make us feel okay and realize it's already there in us. We need to discover that gift and share it. So that's a little talk on how people who discover that just become embodied activists. And then Byron Katie's work, I cannot say enough about, and I know you've had a lot of people on the show who have brought her up, but there is nothing more profound than being able to identify thoughts that are causing you stress and then have a system to question them. And on a certain point on a journey, they become absolutely critical because if you are getting

Starting point is 01:52:24 touchy with this place inside yourself and it's curious and it knows sort of what it wants to do and you feel drawn to a've done absolutely ridiculous ones. And she says like, you know, I've done, my mother shouldn't have taken my cake away. Like literally like that sort of level of stuff all the way down to I'm not safe or I'm not going to live the life that I want to live. When you sit in it as meditation and you get to know yourself, and that's where the process changed for me when I would come up with a thought like, you know, I'm never going to achieve what I want to achieve. When I actually sat, like she says, to do in meditation and ask the question, who am I when I believe that thought? And I started to watch. I feel frustrated. I feel

Starting point is 01:53:29 let down. I don't have confidence in myself. I feel like I'm never doing enough. I feel like I need to do more. I say yes to things that I don't really want to do. I'm afraid of missing something. And when I sat in that and got to know myself there, and then who would I be without the thought? I would be relaxed. I would be open. I would be really feeling for what's a yes and a no for me. I would be listening. I would be grateful for where I already am. I would be thankful for what I have. And so for me, I did the work for a long time before realizing it was meditation in which I was getting to know myself as someone who believed a thought and someone who didn't believe the thought.

Starting point is 01:54:16 And only when I really understood it to be meditation and I could sit and watch myself like that, did I feel a compassion of getting to know myself when i believe a thought and when i don't believe a thought and how powerful that is and that's when the work really took for me and people can find out more about this at thework.com it's not a panacea of course and katie issues by katie right or people call her katie of Byron, is a very unusual woman, a unique woman. Oh, I mean, like, I'll give you a Katie story. The first time I ever met her, I was sitting at a conference that she was talking at, and I happened to be sitting in the second row. She sat down next to me, she looked at me, she put her hand out. I took her hand,

Starting point is 01:55:02 and we held hands for an hour while other people talked. And then she turned and looked at me and she said, I liked holding your hand. And then she left. That was like my first. And that's Katie, like totally connected, totally wild.

Starting point is 01:55:15 And you don't know what's going to happen. Right. So I suppose I'm saying this all as a caveat that if you watch videos, which I think are worth watching, but you may think, who is this alien? Get me out of here. But I would also suggest that it's worth investigating. The worksheets I have found tremendously valuable for myself. If a belief is a thought we take to be true, having an actual worksheet and structure for stress testing that belief,

Starting point is 01:55:48 right, in the way that you just described, and then also doing turnarounds where if, for instance, just as one example, if your statement is, I am not safe, having a statement, I am safe, and then being forced to come up with examples or evidence that you list out that you are safe. And it is incredibly practical and powerful for diffusing the emotional boiling point, the sort of entropy and redline emotional state that then puts you into this thought loop where you create this selective attention where you only see evidence for whatever this belief is that you hold. So yeah, I highly recommend people check that out. I want to ask you about something that I don't know about, which is true for a lot of this and a lot of the follow-up questions. The sweat lodge in Arizona, does this cue anything for you?

Starting point is 01:56:42 That was my first medicine encounter. All right. please say more And so it happened really early on I had just been through those two traumatic encounters And I was severely kind of unsure of what I was meant to be doing And I was staying in Arizona with Martha And another woman who was apprenticing with her, who was a horse whisperer by the name of Coel Simpson. She had ties to the Navajo community and she invited me to attend to a sweat.

Starting point is 01:57:17 And so I was, you know, I'd never been exposed to that before. So I was really interested. And so we went to the sweat and we ended up on a kind of a church ground on the outskirts of Phoenix. And it was one of those classic encounters of like, what do they say? Like first the enlightenment and then the laundry type thing. It was like, I knew that it was a very big kind of experience I was about to have. It was a spiritual encounter. There was a medicine man coming in, but we were also in kind of this like abandoned churchyard. And then like the

Starting point is 01:57:45 medicine man arrived and he had just like left his job on a Friday afternoon in construction. And so I was like trying to catch up a little bit with it. But the minute the ceremony started, I started to feel the energy and we went into the sweat lodge, we drank the medicine. So in this case, just could you describe for people like how tall is the sweat lodge? How many people? It's presumably completely dark. I mean, once the door closes. Short, like classic Hogan with blankets over it, you got to crouch to get into it. Fire area in the middle where the stones come. Huge fire outside where the guys are really heating up the rocks. And then over the course of about five hours, the stones just keep coming in and the heat just keeps building and people start to sing.

Starting point is 01:58:31 And we were joined by various other people who had come to the ceremony and it was all native people and myself and Koel and everyone started singing and the energy started to build and then more heat and then more singing and then drum and then more heat. And it just keeps on building. And then people started to let go of things that they were holding. And so people started to scream and people started to cry and the music builds and the singing builds. And you can almost feel like the energy is like conjuring more and more energy. It's like building on itself and it's getting super intense. And eventually the heat was getting too hot for me.

Starting point is 01:59:09 And I could feel like I'd been told like, don't leave the sweat lodge, but I'm like, this is too much. And then the medicine and then the singing. And suddenly I found myself in this kind of slideshow and my eyes were closed, Tim, but I saw the gun in my face. I saw my sister tied up. I saw the crocodile just break the surface of the water. I saw all of these images, the gun being taken outside, kneeling down, being told you're

Starting point is 01:59:35 going to be killed, the words, and we're going to kill you, we're going to kill you. It all just ran through my mind and with vivid, vivid imagery. And then eventually it got to the point where it was almost too much and I just started throwing up. And as I started throwing up, the entire imagery changed. And suddenly I was in the vision. I was back home in South Africa and I was sitting in a clearing in the late afternoon light and walking across the clearing towards me came the mother leopard and she walked through the the short grass and she walked directly up to me in the vision and she just bumped me as she walked past me and in the instant that she bumped me something in me understood that

Starting point is 02:00:19 my own healing and the healing of nature and the healing of the land was somehow connected. And that's why all I've ever done now is try and tell stories from this place of nature has so much to teach us if we can attune to it. And then I passed out. Oh, you passed out in the sweat? I passed out in the sweat. And there was like this vibrational quality to it. I know you have some experience with these medicines, but it was almost like I could feel the humming of the earth. And then eventually I came to, and I was outside the sweat, and I was lying in a pile of leaves that someone had raked up earlier in the day.

Starting point is 02:00:55 But I was like in the leaves. And I could feel the earth, and I could feel like the leaves all around me. And I looked up, and this Navajo medicine man was pouring water up and down my spine and I was disoriented and I said to him, I think I'm dying, I think I'm dying. And he kneeled down and he put his mouth right to my ear and he said, no brother, you're just being born. And it was weird and I said, but I don't understand what's happening. And he said, you'll only understand in the next few weeks.

Starting point is 02:01:26 And he was right. It took a long time to integrate that. But that was really the beginning of my understanding that the restoration of our relationship with the natural world can begin inside each one of us. As each one of us heals, we create an opportunity to create a different relationship with the natural world. And it's somehow that imagery spoke to the freezing, the trauma that we all go through, and the opportunity to awaken back to our nature. What did you find unfolded, stuck, didn't stick for you over the subsequent weeks? You know, that voice stayed with me,

Starting point is 02:02:03 that whisper, you're just being born, because I felt newborn. And I know that, You know, that voice stayed with me, that whisper, you're just being born, because I felt newborn. And I know that, you know, you probably know this place and many of your listeners who've had psychedelic experiences will know there can be the sense of being new and almost baby-like, sensitized again. You're feeling again, you feel attuned again, you can feel people's emotions. And for me, it was just that. Like I was feeling again after that experience. And all of the armor that I had put on had come off. And I was able to slowly start.

Starting point is 02:02:34 I felt other people's pain. I felt other people's sadness. I felt my own. And I did feel like brand new inside of that. And it wasn't altogether comfortable, but at least I felt back in some ways. In fact, it felt incredibly uncomfortable, but I knew that it was better than where I was. You know, I was recently spending time with an expedition guide who's spent all sorts of time on Everest and Denali and K2, really fantastic guy. And his name is Eli. And we happened to see the solar eclipse together.

Starting point is 02:03:07 This is a few weeks ago. It was the first time I'd ever seen a solar eclipse. And I think it was the first time he'd ever seen a solar eclipse. And I asked him how it was for him. And he said, you know, I went up to some of my friends here at camp and I said to them, I'm like, I'm not sure what this is. It's like I'm wetting my pants, but it's in my chest. I think they might be feelings. It's this warm feeling in my chest. I don't know. It's like I'm peeing my pants in my chest. They might just be feelings. So yes. It's so funny because I had this buddy of mine who's a Navy SEAL. And he says to me, so I recently met this dog named Butters. And I find myself thinking about Butters.

Starting point is 02:03:51 And he's a friend of mine's dog. And I go out and I think about Butters. And I'm always worried about Butters. And I take Butters treats. And I go over there. I always want to check on Butters. And what do you make of that? I think that's called love.

Starting point is 02:04:04 He's like, yeah, I always feel butters right here in my chest. I'm like, I think you're having the experience of loving butters. And he was like, this is outrageous. Yeah, sometimes we have to build the vocabulary, learn the ABCs, or just rebuild them, reactivate them. Leopard in the fire. This is another cue. And just for people who are wondering what the hell I'm doing with these cues, sometimes I will ask people, or I'll ask my research team to give me cues

Starting point is 02:04:33 for stories that they think will be fun or productive or profound or interesting to explore, but I don't want to know them in advance because otherwise the conversation is less fun for me. So leopard in the fire. What Leopard in the Fire refer to? Leopard in the Fire occurred, it's kind of two parts to the story. The first is that when I was very young, I heard a story around a campfire that like stuck inside of me. And it was a story about a man by the name of Lawrence Van der Post. And Van der Post, you may have come across some of his work, but he was a tremendous poet and an artist. And

Starting point is 02:05:11 he had one of those miraculous lives. He was a philosopher, really. But Van der Post grew up on a farm in South Africa. He was very connected to the native people. He learned to track when he was young. And then he ended up going to fight in the Second World War. And in fact, in the Second World War, he was eventually taken prisoner. He was in a prisoner of war camp. And the story as I heard it was that he returned to South Africa after the war and he really wanted to go and see his family, but he felt he couldn't face them after the things that he had seen and that he had done. And so instead of going to see his family, he decided that he would go alone into the Kruger National Park, very near where I grew up. So he packed up his gear and he walked out into the reserve and he set up this little camp. And this was, of course, before the days of diagnoses like

Starting point is 02:06:03 PTSD. And the story goes on the very first night he was sitting at the base of a marula tree next to the small waterhole and I can imagine after the war the stillness he must have felt and somewhere nearby a hyena started calling and then a nightjar would have called somewhere you know dear lord deliver us and I think of him sitting there in that stillness after the war. And on the other side of the waterhole, a kudu started to come towards the waterhole to drink. And a kudu is like a large antelope? Oh, this beautiful regal animal.

Starting point is 02:06:38 And it moves with this incredible elegance. And the kudu walked to the edge of the waterhole. And then with these huge ears, its ears listened and you can actually see the ears moving like satellite dishes as they listen and it scanned the terrain all around and then very slowly it put its lips down and it started to drink. And just as it started to drink, a breeze touched Van Der Post's back and it blew his scent over the waterhole and straight into the nostrils of the Kudu. And it put its head up and it looked directly at him. And for a moment, their eyes met.

Starting point is 02:07:21 And Van der Post said that in that moment, in the stillness of that gaze, he felt a kind of innocence come back into him after all he had seen and all he had done in the war. And instantly in that moment, he knew he was able to go and see his family again. And as a young kid, I think I was maybe eight or nine when I was sitting around the fire and I first heard the story and I didn't even know why, but it struck something in me. And years later after the crocodile, Solly and I had been sitting around the fire. We'd been talking a lot and I was recovering. And the fire. We'd been talking a lot. And I was recovering. And the experience of being attacked by the crocodile was profound because really it had brought me closer to Solly. And I had learned so much about how he saw the world.

Starting point is 02:07:55 And his worldview was starting to come into me a more relational way of relating to nature and to other people. But still, I felt myself incredibly anxious and frozen. I literally felt like I had this incredibly anxious and frozen. I literally felt like I had this shake in my body and I couldn't get it out. Like I would look at my hand and my hand would be shaking. I would wake up at night. I had pretty severe PTSD. And into the teeth of this, a fire broke out on the reserve. And I don't know if you've ever been in a big bushfire, but the first thing you notice about a bushfire is just the intensity of the sound.

Starting point is 02:08:26 It sounds like it hisses and crackles up ahead of you. The smoke drifts across the sun and it bathes everything in this eerie orange light. And then insects that are escaping the blaze start flying up. And what you get is an aura of hawks and eagles hawking insects out the sky. You feel the ground start to shake if you go out to fight it and you look to your right and out of the smoke comes a rhino and it books past you, snakes escaping the fire coming past you. And in this instant, Tim, with PTSD, I was highly activated and we fought that fire for three days. And then eventually on the eve of the third day, the fire had burned through and the crews were the third day, the fire had burned through

Starting point is 02:09:05 and the crews were still fighting it, but I had become isolated from them. I was about a mile or two away from them. And I was in an area that the fire had already burned through and night was starting to fall. And I could see the crews on the horizon in the distance, and I could still see the fire was lighting the sky in this big orange blaze. And in fact, the area that I was in, the smoke was still hanging on the ground all around me. And in the darkness to my right, I heard a sound like someone cutting a two by four. And immediately I knew that there was a leopard in the darkness to the right of me. And so I turned to look and walking out of the darkness into the faint light that the

Starting point is 02:09:45 fire was throwing came this male leopard. And he was walking directly towards me, which is extremely, one, it was strange that he was in an area where there'd been a fire. And two, it was strange that he was walking directly towards me. And when I saw him and I looked at him and he became aware that I was aware of him, no aggression came into his body. He didn't drop his head. He didn't tighten his shoulders. He just continued to walk towards me. And I, in fact, dropped down onto my haunches. And part of what I wanted to do is he wasn't being aggressive. So I dropped down because I wanted to give myself the space to escalate. If he became aggressive, I would stand up. And if he became more aggressive, I could put my arms up. I was giving myself room to create more energy. And he continued to move towards me. And as I watched him, he was walking through the smoke and the smoke was almost dancing around him. And his eyes were lit by the fire on the horizon. And his whole coat, that beautiful rosetted coat was bathed in this

Starting point is 02:10:41 beautiful, deep orange light from the fire. And he continued to come towards me. And as he walked towards me, I felt this very ancient primal energy wake up inside of me. And then he stopped when he was about 10 yards away. And he was so close to me that I could hear him breathing. And what it felt like to me is that in that moment it was as if I could feel his body in my body and I could feel my body almost creating a kind of mimesis to his energy and I felt myself becoming incredibly alert but incredibly still and there was no thought of the future and there was no thought of the future, and there was no thought of the past. There was just an energy circulating between this incredibly beautiful, wild, elusive, dangerous cat and I. And then slowly he turned to look at me, and then he walked past the front of

Starting point is 02:11:37 me, and in a moment he disappeared into the darkness. And as he walked away from me, and I felt into my own body, instead of more anxiety and fear, and this shake that I had had, I felt myself in this profound state of stillness. And I knew in that moment that that leopard had helped me understand what happened to Funderpost. And I also knew that I had gone to a place in myself that I could never have gone to alone. That leopard had almost taken me into a state of stillness. And if I think about that Ubuntu consciousness, that relational consciousness, what Solly taught me was that the Ubuntu consciousness is activated through action. And what the leopard taught me in that moment, and what I think van der Post experienced is that the Ubuntu consciousness, the relational consciousness

Starting point is 02:12:29 is also activated when we in a moment let go and let someone else take us to a place we couldn't get to ourselves or another sentient being. And I think about that a lot as someone who tends to be quite controlling. Like there comes a point where I want to let go and go somewhere where I just can't get to with my own control, my own sense of how it should be, my own sense that I know how this should unfold. And that leopard just took me there in a moment. And so all through my life, I've had glimpses of something, and I can't exactly say what it is, but I keep living towards it. It's a beautiful story. God, just the imagery that conjures. I see it sort of in slow motion, almost as if it's shot on film from a Francis Ford Coppola film. Wow. It's really just a striking story. And it makes me think of a few things also. You mentioned

Starting point is 02:13:25 a horse whisperer earlier. And for the last few years, I've been very interested in these natural encounters, of course, but it's very challenging to manufacture those experiences. So I've also spent time looking at, for instance, equine therapy and how horses are used in partnership with patients of different types for therapeutic purposes. And I think it fascinates me, as many therapies do, that are predominantly nonverbal. I think that we overweight the verbal perhaps. And so I spent time, I wish I could remember the name, but a number of equine therapy centers, one in Texas. And oddly, but maybe not oddly, I also learned when I went to a wolf sanctuary and I volunteered there for a period of time

Starting point is 02:14:21 in Colorado. And I should explain, it's Mission Wolf, missionwolf.org. I recommend people check it out. In the middle of nowhere in Colorado. And they are effectively a place of sanctuary for wolves or wolf dogs that cannot be released into the wild. So they're not captive wolves per se. They're wolves or wolf dogs often who were raised in captivity under terrible and atrocious circumstances and then somehow made their way to mission wolf. There are other examples. And there are also kind of second generation or third generation wolves who are very much wild, right? Like Arctic wolves. And I mean, they're all effectively gray wolves, but come from different areas and therefore have different coats. And they're in really large enclosures, like multi-acre

Starting point is 02:15:15 enclosures. But there are a few who are, because of their history prior to getting to Mission Wolf, are accustomed or not terrified of human beings. They can be near humans because wolves, by instinct, don't want to be anywhere close to humans. And if they bark, it's usually a fear response, like a fear bark. They're not like dogs at all in that respect. And if they bark, I mean, they'll stay as far away from you as possible on the opposite side of an enclosure. But when groups come through, say school groups or visitors, and they have a limited capacity for visitors, which is why I volunteered. But when they come in, there's an opportunity in some instances to meet the ambassador wolves. So you're let into an enclosure, and then they let a number of these ambassador

Starting point is 02:16:01 wolves in. And I heard repeatedly stories of these wolves going directly to whoever was most internal in a group, whoever was most closed off in a group, whether that be a child with autism or a veteran with PTSD, and would go right up to them and look straight into their eyes. And I heard this story repeatedly from multiple staff members. And much like Vanderpost and your experience, but in this case with a wolf sort of staring directly into the soul of this animal, and more importantly, maybe the animal staring directly into you, many of those people reporting that it was the first time they really, truly felt seen. And I just feel like there's so much beauty and value in that. It's something

Starting point is 02:16:55 so worthy of exploration. And it's fascinating that it can occur not just from another human, not just from a prey animal like a kudu, but also from a predator. It's very, or a leopard for that matter. I mean, it's so deeply interesting and begets so many questions. I just wanted to mention that because it's also something, you know, looked into the eyes of a number of these wolves. it's very different. The presence, not better or worse, but just fundamentally different in a wolf as compared to, say, that of a dog. They are very different creatures, even though the wolf is certainly the progenitor of the dog. And I haven't read it yet, but I think National Geographic had a cover story at one point called From Wolf to Woof, which is one of the best headlines I've ever heard in my life. But for more info on Mission Wolf, people can just go to missionwolf.org. And I think they do

Starting point is 02:17:54 some very, very interesting work. I would love to ask you, because you brought up the name, and I can't let you go without asking for this story. So Lawrence Fenderpost, that's the name, and I can't let you go without asking for this story. So, Lawrence Fenderpost, that's the name you mentioned, right? So, he described the lion's roar. He said that it, quote, it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky, end quote, right? Tremendous. It's this one of a kind. I know where you're taking me. Yeah, yeah, you know where I'm going. This one of a kind, it's onea-kind experience that cannot be replicated. So please take us to, at a well-known company, you were invited to give a presentation. And could you tell us the story of how that presentation went?

Starting point is 02:18:36 Oh my God, from the beauty of Van der Post's quote to my ridiculous life as a storyteller. Yes, please. So this was early on when I first started speaking a lot and telling stories to people. And I got this gig at one of these Silicon Valley companies. And normal story, I got there early and I arrived to meet the tech guy to make sure that we were well set up. And normal story, the tech guy was late. He had to have a cigarette break. You know, like that archetypal tech guy who's like running the AV, like it was that guy. And so eventually I said to him, like, listen, man, like, I just really want to run through my slides. Like, I want to make sure that we're all

Starting point is 02:19:13 good. And he's like, listen, I need to upload the system so that we can stream to the whole company. I'll get to you in a second, but we're all good. I'm like, dude, I need to like get some reps. Like classic, like I want to be well prepared. Anyway, people start filing in, people start filing in. And before I know it, the auditorium's full and I haven't done the run through and I'm in my worst nightmare. Now the intro to my, the intro to my talk is, is a, there's a sort of a poetic speech. And then I say, and my story, like many good stories in Africa, begins with a lion roaring. And then I press my clicker. And on a huge screen behind me, there's an early morning image

Starting point is 02:19:55 of a male lion. And he's roaring into the morning. So actually, like, mist is coming out of his mouth. And what's meant to happen is people are meant to be overwhelmed by this incredible barotone audio. And it's meant to put them right in the moment. And of course, the lion is doing the action of roaring, which is a bit of a convulsion, but there's no sound. So you're in the middle of the presentation, you press click and no sound. Just a convulsing silent lion.

Starting point is 02:20:33 And it was at this point and it dawned on me like slow enough for it to be truly painful that I realized I was about to roar at a group of executives. And I grabbed the lapel mic and I held it close to my mouth. And then I synced up my roar with the lion. Whoa. mic and I held it close to my mouth and then I synced up my roar with the lion. And the problem with the damn clip is it went on for a long time. And then when a lion winds down, he goes, and so literally the intro and i was like why won't this lion stop oh my god it was painful it just went on and on anyway i got through the presentation and still to this day tim i'm going to be honest with you If I lie in bed and I think about that A wave of shame will travel through me And I'll have to like curl over on my side and just rock myself

Starting point is 02:21:32 Oh god yeah Did you get any pats on the back or any stiff drinks handed to you after that one? Well the thing that saved the whole damn thing Is that like eventually when I finished roaring One person started clapping and everyone like went for it and so the whole room ended up clapping and that like kind of like moved the energy and we were into the presentation i was like thank god thank god for lauren or whoever that was yeah thanks lauren it was like one of those moments also where you realize like you can't half roar at a group of executives. You've either got to not do it or go all in.

Starting point is 02:22:07 I was like, let's go. Thanks for nothing, AV guy. Such a great story. So I got to say, first, for people listening, get a copy of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. I rarely make an endorsement like that. It's a small book. You can read it in one or two nights or afternoons. And as I mentioned, it's one of the few books that I have an entire shelf dedicated to in my guest bedroom. It found me at the right time. So maybe it doesn't find everyone at the right time. But for me,

Starting point is 02:22:40 it really found me at the right time. And it's a book I've reread, which is also something I cannot say for many books. And you work with individuals, you work with companies. I find your approach to life and sort of your multi-sensory, multi-modality perspective on life to be not just fascinating, but very practical. You've spent a lot of time testing, developing, inheriting, learning tools. And I think that, as you mentioned, given the trauma that you've experienced and the challenges that you've had to overcome, some people, and I think you have certainly done this, can convert that pain and that university of suffering into part of the medicine that you bring to the world. And I think you do that not just well, but very beautifully. So first,

Starting point is 02:23:36 I just want to thank you for that. Thank you, Tim. I really appreciate you saying that. Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanted to know if there's anything, I want to leave a couple of stories. I still have a couple of notes, which I don't know the context behind, but I want to save a couple in case we do a round two. Although I know you have no shortages. I might ask you about,

Starting point is 02:23:59 was it your uncle in the boat with the outboard? I can't remember who it was, but that'll have to be saved for another time. They're all in there, but some of them only get pulled out with a bit of scotch and a campfire. All right, well, round two might be with scotch and a campfire. But is there anything you would like to say, any last closing comments for the audience,

Starting point is 02:24:20 request, recommendation, anything at all? Anything else, something you'd like to point their attention to? Anything at all that you'd like to share before we wind to a close this time around? Well, firstly, just thanks for having me. And it's a privilege to support a show that has had such an impact on so many people and be a part of it. So I'm just really grateful to you and been fun getting to know you. I would say a few things. I would say one is I would invite people to come on safaris in Africa. It's a very unique encounter with a landscape that is still wild. And when people come and have safaris at a place like Londolozi or wherever they go, it has a profound impact on allowing us to protect these areas and on the local people. And so, you know, we've always been,

Starting point is 02:25:03 I've always been a proponent of the economy of wildlife. We keep these areas wild. We invite people to come and experience them. And that has a huge impact. So if you're thinking about a holiday, come on a safari. If you're thinking about a safari, come. It's a once in a lifetime experience. I would say that if you are interested in tracking, you can support the Tracker Academy, trackeracademy.co.za. They do amazing work supporting young people from difficult backgrounds and teaching them to become trackers. They have a nearly 90% placement rate into the tourism industry. So they do amazing work. Those would be the two things that I would offer to people.

Starting point is 02:25:40 Where can people learn more about the Safari site if they wanted to learn more about that? You can get a hold of us at londolosi.com. You can also get a hold of me at boydvati.com. My team will point you in the right direction. And Tracker Academy, yes, is trackeracademy.co.za. Dot Z-A for my fellow Americans out there. Yeah, Z-A. I like the Z.

Starting point is 02:26:05 It sounds more dignified. It's nice to see you, Boyd. I'm glad we did this with a bit of video as well for people who want to see it on YouTube. They can just search for Tim Ferriss on YouTube and it'll pop right up. But I know we are many time zones away at the moment. That won't be true in the not too distant future.

Starting point is 02:26:24 So I'm looking forward to spending some time in person. Me too, man. I'm looking forward to getting you out here. We got to track a rhino. I'm excited to track a rhino and I'm excited not to have any legs eaten by crocs. And I'm very much looking forward to finally getting feet on the ground at Londolozion, getting to meet some of these characters that I have only read about and heard about at this point, both human and animal alike. So thanks for taking the time today, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you, Tim. Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it even more than I expected to, and I expected to enjoy it a hell of a lot.

Starting point is 02:27:00 So to everybody listening, you'll find show notes to everything that we discussed at tim.blogs.com. You can just search Boyd, B-O-Y-D, and it'll pop right up. You can find them online at boydvardy.com. We'll link to Londolozi, trackercademy.co.za, and everything else in the show notes, as well as Boyd on Twitter, at Boyd Vardy, and all the rest. His books, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life and his memoir, Cathedral of the Wilds, can both be found everywhere books are sold. And until next time, experiment often, be safe, be kinder than is necessary, even just a little bit, and see if you can get out in nature. It will be good medicine for the soul. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun

Starting point is 02:27:55 before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something

Starting point is 02:28:42 to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance, so you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since the 4-Hour Body, which was god eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a

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Starting point is 02:30:52 slash Tim. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me in the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end-all be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #571: Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

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