#763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Tim Ferriss Show

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty ) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (The Tim Ferriss Show) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

View full AI transcripts and summaries of all podcast episodes on the blog: The Tim Ferriss Show

Episode: #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 03:00:50

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.The episode features

segments from episode #573 "Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More" and #571 "Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Wealthfront high-yield cash account: https://Wealthfront.com/Tim (Start earning 5.00% APY on your short-term cash until you’re ready to invest. And when you open an account today, you can get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.) Terms apply.AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)Timestamps:[00:00] Start [05:11] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:14] Enter Margaret Atwood.[06:48] What drives Margaret's ability to craft engaging speculative fiction?[10:52] The downsides of raising a family isolated in the woods.[15:44] Factors that nudged young Margaret toward poetry.[21:54] How limited options led Margaret to her current vocation.[24:07] How long it took for writing to pay off, and its benefits in the meantime.[30:34] Life lessons learned by teaching.[34:18] Enter Boyd Varty.[34:42] Setting the scene.[37:00] Origins of Londolozi Game Reserve and Boyd's childhood influences.[39:17] Why Boyd's family kept the seemingly useless property.[41:23] Boyd's experiences with The White Knuckle Charter Company.[50:00] Transforming scrubland into a safari business with help from Ken Tinley and Shangaan trackers.[56:04] Shangaan trackers' lineage and wildlife trust in Londolozi's caretakers.[59:46] Renias Mhlongo's supreme tracking skills and work ethic.[1:05:18] Hardest animals to track at Londolozi.[1:08:30] Safety measures in Londolozi's unpredictable environment.[1:10:21] "I don't know where we're going, but I know exactly how to get there." —Renias Mhlongo[1:12:26] Boyd's tracking evolution: from childhood to trauma recovery.[1:30:30] Definition of Ubuntu.[1:32:40] Boyd's 40-day tree-dwelling experience.[1:45:47] Bees, birds, and hive algorithms.[1:57:07] Interacting with lions in the wild.[2:01:41] Death conversations, ancient myths, and inexplicable animal movements.[2:07:30] Comparing trauma recovery paths within Boyd's family.[2:11:08] Ceremony work for trauma healing.[2:14:06] An authentic life as activism.[2:19:27] The impact of Byron Katie's Work on Boyd and me.[2:23:55] Boyd's first sweat lodge experience in Arizona.[2:29:18] Feelings. Nothing more than feelings.[2:31:48] What a close encounter with a beautiful predator taught Boyd about Ubuntu.[2:40:53] The therapeutic value of spending time with animals.[2:45:22] Contrasting lion roar descriptions: van der Post vs. Boyd.[2:49:40] Invitation to Londolozi and parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed.

00:00:14 Speaker_03
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod, and I'm excited to test it out. Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second.

00:00:25 Speaker_03
First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up, depending on which of you is heat sensitive.

00:00:37 Speaker_03
I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

00:00:44 Speaker_03
Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience.

00:00:52 Speaker_03
And for those snore-heavy nights, the Pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring.

00:01:01 Speaker_03
Plus, with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them, because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself.

00:01:09 Speaker_03
They have imperceptible sensors, which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking, as just one example, is at 99% accuracy. So, get your best night's sleep.

00:01:20 Speaker_03
Head to 8sleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra. That's 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com slash Tim, and code Tim, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.

00:01:35 Speaker_03
They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health.

00:01:51 Speaker_03
I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so.

00:02:05 Speaker_03
I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed.

00:02:18 Speaker_03
And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one. supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.

00:02:32 Speaker_03
So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.

00:02:44 Speaker_03
Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients?

00:02:58 Speaker_03
And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market.

00:03:03 Speaker_03
It has a multivitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals.

00:03:17 Speaker_03
That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible, it is not always easy, so part of my routine is using AG1

00:03:32 Speaker_03
daily if i'm on the road on the run it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that i am checking a lot of important boxes so each morning ag1 that's just like brushing my teeth part of the routine it's also nsf certified for sports so professional athletes trust it to be safe

00:03:51 Speaker_03
and each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop.

00:04:04 Speaker_03
So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com slash Tim,

00:04:20 Speaker_03
That's DrinkAG1, the number one. DrinkAG1.com slash Tim. Last time, DrinkAG1.com slash Tim. Check it out. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

00:04:36 Speaker_02
Can I ask you a personal question?

00:04:39 Speaker_00
Now is an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

00:04:46 Speaker_04
Me, Tim, Paris.

00:04:55 Speaker_03
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:04:58 Speaker_03
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:11 Speaker_03
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:21 Speaker_03
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:05:47 Speaker_03
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:05:56 Speaker_03
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:14 Speaker_02
First up, Margaret Atwood, author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels, including The Handmaid's Tale, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and its sequel, The Testaments, co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, and her latest, Old Babes in the Wood, a collection of her short stories.

00:06:43 Speaker_02
You can find Margaret on Twitter at Margaret Atwood.

00:06:49 Speaker_03
the course of doing research for this conversation, read about the different ways we could look at the semantics of, say, science fiction on some other planet with creatures never before seen versus, say, speculative fiction where you're taking something that exists or is in the process of it becoming and then taking it a few steps out.

00:07:09 Speaker_03
And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master in my mind of boundary walking, What types of structured thinking or observation lend themselves to your ability to write speculative fiction?

00:07:23 Speaker_00
Okay, you might say the lack of the qualities that make it difficult for me to write science fiction. Sure. Which I read a lot of, plus dragons, you know, I'm keen on dragons, but I just cannot do them.

00:07:35 Speaker_00
So there are some things that you can do, that you have the ability to do, and other things that you may admire, but you cannot do. So Dragons, outside my range of capabilities in any way, Ursula K. Le Guin has kind of sewed up dragons.

00:07:51 Speaker_00
She's got sort of the dragon franchise. Yeah, so Game of Thrones, the dragons are basically sort of like bazookas, but her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that aren't usually attributed to dragons in the

00:08:10 Speaker_00
English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition, etc. We could go on about that, but we won't today. Now, you wanted to know sort of what's behind it.

00:08:21 Speaker_03
Yeah, what's behind the speculative fiction? What makes you get at it?

00:08:25 Speaker_00
I grew up in the 50s as a teenager, and I read a lot of those things at that time. So I read 1984 just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically sleazy cover of the early 50s.

00:08:43 Speaker_00
They put classics into these quite, what shall we say about those covers? They made you think that you were buying a really trashy book.

00:08:51 Speaker_00
So I think a lot of people got enticed into reading like War and Peace and things because they thought it was about ladies and negligees lying on beds, which it partly was, but not much really.

00:09:05 Speaker_00
So my copy of 1984 had this woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and a guy standing behind her looking down her front, which does get in there a bit, but that's not the general import. of the book. So I mainlined all of those books.

00:09:23 Speaker_00
I read Ray Bradbury a lot. You'll notice that I ended up writing in one of his obits, I think for The Guardian. I went to Comic-Con for the first time because we thought we were on our way to see Ray, but unfortunately he died before we got there.

00:09:39 Speaker_00
So we ended up having a memorial service at Comic-Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors in several fields, really. So read all of those things. John Wyndham, I was reading in the 50s.

00:09:55 Speaker_00
And I think what you read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you are then writing when you're able to, you know, when you have the skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while.

00:10:10 Speaker_00
I would like to write a 1984 only with women like that. So meanwhile, along comes Ursula K. and a number of other people that I was following. So really, it's partly what you're drawn to and partly what you have the skills to do.

00:10:28 Speaker_00
As I say, I can't do dragons.

00:10:32 Speaker_03
I can't do dragons or speculative fiction, so you have me beat.

00:10:35 Speaker_00
I can't do podcasts, you know.

00:10:37 Speaker_03
Well, you know, podcasts are just ephemera in the mist. I think that your works will have much more permanence, but I can hope that someday the audio will get locked in the amber in the same way that words are. I'm sure it will.

00:10:52 Speaker_03
I want to go back in time from your teenage years.

00:10:56 Speaker_03
I've read about your experience of growing up in a cabin in the woods and some of the benefits of that, the lack of distractions, giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later and so on.

00:11:08 Speaker_03
I'm thinking about having kids in the very near future, and I fantasize about living in the woods because I feel most at home in the woods. Were there any downsides, would you say?

00:11:21 Speaker_00
Okay, which woods are you thinking of, Tim?

00:11:24 Speaker_03
What sort of woods? I like varied terrain, so I prefer something that isn't flat. So we could think American West, we could think upstate New York, we could think British Columbia in certain locations. I would prefer not to hear or see any neighbors.

00:11:42 Speaker_03
I would like to have lots of trails that I can explore with my dog or dogs or family, and running water of some type and a lake or a pond, having access to both of those, or one of those at least. I grew up on Long Island, more or less in the woods.

00:12:03 Speaker_03
That's my idealized version, but I don't know what it's like to raise kids in the woods. I'm curious if there are any downsides.

00:12:09 Speaker_00
Well, you should ask my mom, except she's not here. But I can tell you what she said. Yeah, she's kind of still here. So my mom was an unusual person in that she liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic.

00:12:27 Speaker_00
She grew up in rural Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses. She had horses. She rode them hither and thither. And she was also a speed skater and of course a skier and this kind of thing.

00:12:44 Speaker_00
So I think she married my dad because he was a very bushy guy. And he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia, like really rural. So they were so rural that I don't think they got electricity until the late fifties.

00:13:01 Speaker_00
I was lucky enough to be able to see a 19th century farm operating pretty much the way it would have done. So I think she, who didn't like hats, little white gloves, tea parties, any of that, she really didn't like it. didn't fancy it.

00:13:19 Speaker_00
She liked dancing, like Fast and Furious waltzing and things like that, square dancing, but she didn't like the frilly part. And Up in the Woods was great for her because she said you didn't actually have to do much housework.

00:13:32 Speaker_00
You just swept the dirt out the door and you didn't have to worry about, you know, all of the stuff that people have in their houses, usually like bric-a-brac and china and things like that. You don't have to worry about those." So she didn't.

00:13:49 Speaker_00
And she doesn't seem to have had a problem in the woods, except my brother almost drowned once because he got out and fell off the dock.

00:14:00 Speaker_00
But apart from that and a few other somewhat hairy moments, it was probably safer on the whole than being in a city. She seems to have managed pretty well, although some of her city friends, because they were in cities during the winter.

00:14:19 Speaker_00
My dad was a forest entomologist. It meant he was up in the woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you could take it as almost 100 percent. They don't do much in the winter. Insects, pretty quiet insect wise in the winter.

00:14:38 Speaker_00
So they would go up in, say, April or so, and they would go back in, for instance, November. But this is, I think, quite a lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods, Tim. I think you're thinking of a more southerly location. Yeah.

00:14:53 Speaker_03
I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that.

00:14:58 Speaker_00
No, they weren't up there. I know, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. These were insects that live in trees. He was a forest entomologist, right? So there had to be a forest.

00:15:09 Speaker_03
There had to be the forest.

00:15:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, they had running water, but it was out of a pump and they didn't have electricity. the transportation was by boat, so no roads there. You could get to, I think by 1939, there was this horrible road, which I remember very well.

00:15:28 Speaker_00
You'd always get carsick going over it. And then you'd get to a place where you left the car and then you'd get in a boat. So then it was during the war, so there weren't even a lot of motorboats because gasoline was rationed, so canoes.

00:15:44 Speaker_03
I would love to hear you describe an experience that came up in my reading in preparation for this. And it relates to a day you found yourself walking across a football field.

00:16:00 Speaker_03
I don't know if that's enough of a cue, but I would love to hear you expand on this because I did read about it, but I feel like there's probably more to the story. So could you please just provide some color and tell the story?

00:16:12 Speaker_00
Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway, so I'll tell you what I made up. But it's kind of true.

00:16:24 Speaker_03
Sounds like my life.

00:16:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, right. It's like that.

00:16:28 Speaker_03
It's mostly kind of true.

00:16:30 Speaker_00
Yeah, sort of true. Your previous question, what did growing up in the woods have to do with being a writer? There wasn't anything to do except when it was raining, except reading, writing, and drawing. So there were no other

00:16:46 Speaker_00
things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no television, no what else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore, I fixated on writing pretty early, and it was a narrative family. People told stories. And my older brother was a

00:17:04 Speaker_00
gung-ho writer. He wrote lots of things at that age. He turned into a scientist, but he was very narrative when he was, say, ten, nine. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am, having written my first novel at the age of seven.

00:17:20 Speaker_00
It was about an aunt, some structural difficulties there, Tim, because ants don't do anything until they're in the fourth stage of their life. They don't do anything when they're an egg. They don't do anything when they're a larva.

00:17:35 Speaker_00
They do nothing when they're a pupa. And it's only when you get to the last part of the story that they actually have any legs. So I don't start books that way anymore, Tim, but I did then. So then I stopped writing. I took to drawing. I drew a lot.

00:17:51 Speaker_00
Then I ended up in high school. at slightly too early an age. They skipped people then. I think they've stopped doing that. So, I was 12 and some of the people in my class were almost 16 because they failed people then, Tim.

00:18:09 Speaker_00
So, it was a slightly daunting experience, but things evened out after that. Yes, I was quite short.

00:18:16 Speaker_03
I'm still quite short.

00:18:17 Speaker_00
In fact, I'm still quite short. People got bigger. For a while, I was sort of normal size, but that's no longer true. There's all these enormous kids who drank a lot of milk with vitamins in it. Anyway, there I was in high school.

00:18:33 Speaker_00
I love my grade 11 teacher. That would be one to the third year of high school. What do you call that?

00:18:41 Speaker_03
I guess junior, junior year. What do you guys call it? Fifth form? I don't know if you use British system. I have no idea.

00:18:47 Speaker_00
Yeah. No, that's English.

00:18:48 Speaker_03
Yeah. What do you guys call it in Canada?

00:18:50 Speaker_00
Well, we called it different grades, like nine, 10, 11, 12. And in those days, 13, but they've done away with that.

00:18:56 Speaker_03
Yeah. We would call it 11th or junior year.

00:18:58 Speaker_00
Junior. Yeah. So my great English teacher who I put in a book, which is a peculiar people go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, oh, yes, I could see instantly great, brilliant Sean right out of her hand.

00:19:14 Speaker_00
And I can tell she was slated for greatness. But she told the truth. She said she showed no particular ability in my class, which was true. I didn't show any particular ability in her class. And I had no idea then that I was going to be a writer.

00:19:31 Speaker_00
Didn't strike me until the next year when I had a different English teacher who I've also put into a story because she was a legend in her own time. She took hold of the people in her class and she yanked them through the curriculum.

00:19:50 Speaker_00
No matter what, no matter what, she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings. And she made the immortal comment, because I showed her one of my poems. She said, I don't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good. So wonderful.

00:20:08 Speaker_00
I love it.

00:20:08 Speaker_03
That is great. That is great.

00:20:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, so I started writing poetry in grade 12. And the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field and a pink princess line dress that I had sewed myself, a work of art, Tim. You don't know what that is, do you?

00:20:27 Speaker_03
Oh, I can envision, based on some of the words, what it might look like.

00:20:31 Speaker_00
Princess line. It had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great. Loved it. And it had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have. I'd made a terrible mistake.

00:20:42 Speaker_00
I'd gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences, which I should have done, had I known I would have done that, and then I would know how to touch type, which I don't. And it's too late now, Tim.

00:20:57 Speaker_00
So there I was in my pink princess line dress crossing the football field, and a poem occurred to me. It wasn't a very good poem, but it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start.

00:21:13 Speaker_00
You write some pretty terrible poetry that you're very excited about. And luckily, there's nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry. And then you go on from there.

00:21:24 Speaker_03
What did it feel like when this poem came to you? I mean, you can tell me how much of this is revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your experience, but quote, a large invisible thumb descended from the sky.

00:21:38 Speaker_00
It's the Eureka moment, Tim. Yeah, a big thumb came out of the sky. You believe that? What else would you like me to tell you that you will also believe?

00:21:47 Speaker_03
I already asked about astrology, so you got me. Uh, yeah, you can tell me anything.

00:21:54 Speaker_00
It was very interesting to me. I had been trying out these potential careers like I was going to be a painter and then I revised that I was going to be a fashion designer and then I revised that and I went into home economics because in the

00:22:10 Speaker_00
textbook that was called Guidance. In grade nine, you were supposed to decide what your career was going to be. Can you imagine? Who knows anything when they're that old?

00:22:21 Speaker_00
So the Guidance textbook had five things that girls could do, and they did not include astrophysicists. Let's see if you can guess what they were in 1952.

00:22:34 Speaker_03
I think I can, but I'm cheating. Nurse secretary, school teacher, airline stewardess, as they were known, and home economist.

00:22:42 Speaker_00
DG You've read what I wrote. CB I have.

00:22:47 Speaker_03
I know, I'm a bad cheater. Or a very good cheater.

00:22:50 Speaker_00
DG Well, you didn't get away with it.

00:22:55 Speaker_03
CB I know.

00:22:55 Speaker_00
DG That's what was on offer. And being a mercenary child, I looked up what they made. Because I did grow up in a family in which it was expected that you would support yourself. So the home economists made the most, believe it or not.

00:23:11 Speaker_00
So I went into that. But then I decided, no, this is not for me. I'm going to be a biologist. I was going to be a botanist because I was actually quite good at it. But then along came this writing.

00:23:25 Speaker_00
Much to my parents' dismay, but being the bite-your-tongue kind of parents, I think they just hoped it would be a phase. I would grow out of it.

00:23:34 Speaker_03
It's been a long phase. Who would see him?

00:23:37 Speaker_00
A phase, yeah. Well, they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, well, how are you going to support yourself? I said, you know, I'll get a job, which I did. I got lots of jobs. And then my mother said, rather caustically,

00:23:51 Speaker_00
If you're gonna be a writer, you better learn to spell. And I said, others will do that for me, and you know they have. Now we have spellcheck.

00:24:00 Speaker_03
You know, all good things come to those who wait, I guess. You were right. You were right.

00:24:05 Speaker_00
I had to wait a while.

00:24:07 Speaker_03
It panned out. So you wrote, if I'm getting the chronology right, you wrote for 16 years before you could make a living out of it. You had all these different jobs, as you mentioned, as a cashier in a coffee shop and many others.

00:24:23 Speaker_03
Over those 16 years, were you maintaining the belief that someday it would pay the bills and you would be able to make a living out of it? Or was it just a labor of love while you did these other things?

00:24:35 Speaker_00
Oh, the writing? Yes. You mean, did I ever think I would make a living out of it? No. People in my age group in my country at that time didn't think that way.

00:24:46 Speaker_00
They might've thought that way in the thirties and even in the forties where there were a couple of bestsellers written by people in our country, but right after the war during the fifties, a couple of things that happened.

00:25:04 Speaker_00
And one of them was that the paperback book industry had taken off. I think it started with Penguin in the UK, and then it was pocketbooks. And Canada didn't have, it had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks were not included in them.

00:25:24 Speaker_00
So the glossy magazine market was also drying up. So a writer like Morley Callahan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the 20s and 30s made a living out of selling to glossies. That was dwindling by that time.

00:25:40 Speaker_00
Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that they had. So we weren't really thinking in those terms and there were no agents in Canada at that time. We didn't even really quite understand what they were.

00:25:55 Speaker_00
There were some publishers, but they didn't publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn't a market for them.

00:26:02 Speaker_00
So if you wanted to publish a novel, your publisher would say, well, we have to get a partner either in London or in New York. And that was easier said than done.

00:26:14 Speaker_00
So the book publishing that had been going on in the 30s of cheap hardbacks kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be a little more certain about that. It was gone, having had paperbacks take its place. So it was hardbacks.

00:26:31 Speaker_00
I've always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact, I was associated with a small publishing company in the late 60s and early 70s, and a lot of it was about money. Like, how many can we sell?

00:26:50 Speaker_00
What can we publish to support these works of cutting-edge experimental fiction that nobody's gonna buy? What can we publish? So we did. We published the first book on venereal disease. It was called VD. You know, Idiot's Guides?

00:27:07 Speaker_00
These were sort of Idiot's Guides before there were Idiot's Guides. We got as far as warts, but we didn't get to AIDS because nobody knew about it yet. It's like that.

00:27:20 Speaker_03
So let me hop in for just a second. When you're writing for 16 years, not thinking you can make a living from it, what did you get from the writing and did you share your writing with anyone?

00:27:32 Speaker_00
Oh, absolutely. We were all sharing our stuff around because we were editing each other's work. We were publishing each other's work. We were, all of the poets were connected through this kind of spider web network of little magazines.

00:27:51 Speaker_00
That was, yeah, both in Canada, the US, England, there were these little magazines that published poetry and people knew each other through them. So the poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. The poets were more peripatetic.

00:28:11 Speaker_00
They would get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at your door and sleep on your rug. And you, in your turn, might get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at somebody else's door and sleep on their rug. So it was a sort of a rug exchange of poets.

00:28:27 Speaker_00
They would turn up here and there and give readings in out-of-the-way places. And some of them, do you remember? No, you don't, sorry. Coffee shops, coffee shop readings.

00:28:38 Speaker_03
No, I know coffee shops. No, I do, I do. I have been to a coffee shop reading.

00:28:43 Speaker_00
Well, a different kind of coffee shops. Let me not say shops, it should be houses. So they didn't have liquor licenses, so basically people brought flasks in their handbags, pockets, and things like that.

00:28:57 Speaker_00
And you had the usually condemned warehouse or something, and the little tables with the checkered tablecloths, the little wine bottles with the candle stuck in them, and the open mic. So poetry night, usually on a Tuesday.

00:29:18 Speaker_03
Sounds great. Sounds like a lot of fun.

00:29:20 Speaker_00
Down part of the week. Well, the folk singing and jazz went on on other nights of the week, such as Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. That's how they supported the poetry meetings. So we did that in the early 60s.

00:29:36 Speaker_00
And then the poetry readings spread to universities, some of them, and then to bookstores. They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn't start happening until the mid-70s, I would say.

00:29:53 Speaker_00
All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around, or you did see it before COVID, they didn't exist yet. They sprang up out of the subculture of coffee houses.

00:30:05 Speaker_03
this is neither here nor there, but I am fascinated, actually, by the history of coffee houses, especially in the UK, where you have Lloyd's of London coming out of one coffee shop, and all of this incredible history that I had really no clue about.

00:30:19 Speaker_00
You mean back in the 18th century, yeah.

00:30:21 Speaker_03
Yes, way back, which I also don't remember, to be clear, but I have read about it. And that interchange of ideas and this sort of interstitial tissue in the societal fabric of the time. But

00:30:34 Speaker_03
What I'd like to ask you about next is teaching, and it's clear reading about your life that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching did you most enjoy, if any of it?

00:30:47 Speaker_00
I always enjoyed it. I think the most intense year of teaching that I did was in Montreal.

00:30:53 Speaker_00
I taught at a place that doesn't exist anymore because it's been amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams, and it was a downtown city establishment. You taught your subject to 19-year-olds in the day.

00:31:10 Speaker_00
And then in the evening, you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive for me. The 19-year-olds weren't too sure why they were there, except their mom and dad wanted them to.

00:31:25 Speaker_00
And really, they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something. And the adults were there because they wanted to be. A couple of reasons they wanted to be there, they wanted to up their credentials.

00:31:39 Speaker_00
but also they were very engaged, and they would argue with you, object to things, and really give you the old run-through, and that was pretty stimulating. So I taught 19th century novels to those people, and I also taught American Romanticism.

00:31:58 Speaker_00
And it was they who gave me a button that said, Moby Dick is not a social disease. They had a sense of humor. I liked them a lot.

00:32:11 Speaker_00
And it was very instructive because the things that the 19-year-old liked frequently the grown-ups would not like, and the things that the 19-year-olds really didn't like the grown-ups thought were terrific.

00:32:25 Speaker_00
So Middlemarch by George Eliot, the 19-year-old said, we don't like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions in their careers, and they marry the wrong people, and we're not going to do that.

00:32:37 Speaker_00
And the adult said, this is a great book. They make the wrong decisions in their careers. They marry the wrong people. It's just like life. So a big difference in experience. And what's the lesson?

00:32:53 Speaker_00
The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are, the age that you are and the experience that you've had. And it's the same for everyone.

00:33:06 Speaker_03
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now, a lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession?

00:33:19 Speaker_03
Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future, nobody can, but I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront.

00:33:31 Speaker_03
Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. And right now you can earn 5% APY, that's the annual percentage yield, with the Wealthfront Cash Account.

00:33:39 Speaker_03
That's more than 10 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. So why wait? Earn 5% on your cash today. Plus, it's up to $8 million in FDIC insurance through partner banks.

00:33:53 Speaker_03
And when you open an account today, you'll get an extra $50 bonus with a deposit of $500 or more. There are already nearly half a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth. So why wait?

00:34:06 Speaker_03
Visit Wealthfront.com slash Tim to get started. That's Wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront.

00:34:19 Speaker_02
And now, Boyd Vardy, lion tracker, storyteller, wildlife and literacy activist, steward of the Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa, and author of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, and his memoir, Cathedral of the Wild.

00:34:37 Speaker_02
You can find Boyd on Twitter at Boyd Vardy. Boyd, welcome to the show, my friend. Tim, thanks for having me, man.

00:34:46 Speaker_03
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?

00:35:00 Speaker_01
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.

00:35:11 Speaker_01
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.

00:35:25 Speaker_01
They're two huge ebony trees that kind of frame the house. And a couple of weeks ago, a leopard hoisted its kill into the tree next to the kind of verandah of the house. So that should sort of set the scene for people a little bit.

00:35:41 Speaker_03
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. Now, couple things.

00:35:53 Speaker_03
One, I want to tell you that I don't think I've told you actually, Boyd, and I'm gonna pack it up front because I think that I am ashamed of not telling you earlier. So here, you can see it.

00:36:04 Speaker_03
And for those who are watching video on youtube you can see it got a copy of your book here which you're kind enough to inscribe for me the lion trackers guide to life have had this for a while now.

00:36:15 Speaker_03
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.

00:36:31 Speaker_03
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 D'Avello. And then you have The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by Boyd Vardy.

00:36:47 Speaker_03
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.

00:36:55 Speaker_01
Wow, I find myself in the company of my heroes there. Thank you.

00:37:00 Speaker_03
Absolutely, it's a fantastic book, and we're gonna dig into all sorts of stories that are in the book.

00:37:07 Speaker_03
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.

00:37:20 Speaker_03
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?

00:37:30 Speaker_01
Well, you know, my parents met when they were 15 years old, and my grandfather had just died leaving this property.

00:37:39 Speaker_01
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 wild eastern part of South Africa. You know, it's bankrupt cattle land. There's nothing going on there.

00:37:50 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:02 Speaker_01
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 teeth of apartheid South Africa.

00:38:14 Speaker_01
There was no one coming to South Africa. If it had been an investor pitch and someone was saying, we're going to start a game reserve and here's what we want you to invest in, no one would have invested.

00:38:24 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:32 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:40 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:58 Speaker_01
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, you know, rub some arnica oil on it was the best we got if you got an injury.

00:39:10 Speaker_01
and only call a doctor if you're bleeding profusely or you're gonna die.

00:39:14 Speaker_03
All right, so I have some follow-ups. First of all, everyone's saying the first thing you have to do is get rid of that land. Dad says, nope, we're going to keep the land.

00:39:27 Speaker_03
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?

00:39:41 Speaker_01
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.

00:39:51 Speaker_01
And he heard about these bankrupt cattle farms 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.

00:40:02 Speaker_01
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.

00:40:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:40:23 Speaker_01
And I should say with lion hunting, there's only two outcomes, either a lion dies or a person dies. So that gives you a little bit of a sense for the mentality of it.

00:40:31 Speaker_01
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.

00:40:46 Speaker_01
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

00:40:55 Speaker_01
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.

00:41:07 Speaker_01
They had lost their father. It was their father's sacred place. He loved to go there.

00:41:12 Speaker_01
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 on to it and they decided, well, we'll go make it work.

00:41:23 Speaker_03
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.

00:41:42 Speaker_03
Could you please tell the story, and I'm gonna 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?

00:41:57 Speaker_01
Okay, I think you're referring to the White Knuckle Charter Company. Yeah, that's the one.

00:42:03 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:17 Speaker_01
So there was obviously no way to take us to school living out here.

00:42:20 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:34 Speaker_01
And then Wednesday we would fly back to the reserve and we would be here through the weekend. And we were basically getting three days of schooling. That seemed like enough to them at the time.

00:42:42 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:43:02 Speaker_01
And flying mode meant we could not ask any questions, we had to shut up. Kids, you kids shut 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.

00:43:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:43:25 Speaker_01
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.

00:43:40 Speaker_01
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 quirky aircraft. The quirk was that when you pulled the power, Not all power cut off.

00:43:53 Speaker_01
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.

00:44:07 Speaker_01
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. And he says, he's saying to her, you are pilot in command.

00:44:17 Speaker_01
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 was our, that's our first crash.

00:44:28 Speaker_01
And it's one of those, 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.

00:44:35 Speaker_01
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?

00:44:43 Speaker_01
You could have, so like, it's, there's a little tension around it. Anyway, the worst one was we were flying a short hop and by this stage,

00:44:53 Speaker_01
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.

00:45:01 Speaker_01
And so the setup was, it's a commercial pilot in the left hand seat, it's my father in the right hand seat.

00:45:08 Speaker_01
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.

00:45:19 Speaker_01
And they're looking towards the cockpit, I'm looking back at them, and suddenly we just hear this outrageous sound. And wind fills the cockpit, and it's just this incredible rushing sound, amazing sound.

00:45:36 Speaker_01
Looking at my mother and her friend next to her, it looks like 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.

00:45:50 Speaker_01
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.

00:46:06 Speaker_01
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. And so now we realized we've got a situation.

00:46:26 Speaker_01
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.

00:46:42 Speaker_01
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.

00:46:53 Speaker_01
The woman on the backseat screaming next to my mom is going, we're all going to die! We're all going to die! And that's when my mother gave her the patented mother slap, slapped her twice and said, we are not going to die.

00:47:04 Speaker_01
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.

00:47:21 Speaker_01
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

00:47:34 Speaker_01
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.

00:47:58 Speaker_01
And I don't know if you've ever seen a head wound, but head wounds bleed nicely, and so he's bleeding quite intensely.

00:48:03 Speaker_01
It's pandemonium back there, but my folks have got the controls, 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.

00:48:18 Speaker_01
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.

00:48:32 Speaker_01
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.

00:48:38 Speaker_01
So we got onto the plane looking like we had been in the Texas Chainsaw 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.

00:48:53 Speaker_01
But we grew up in a real wild way. We grew up in a pioneering way and my parents were irrepressible, I think is the word. Which you kind of have to be to run a safari business.

00:49:05 Speaker_01
Running a safari business, you're out in nature and unexpected things are happening almost continuously. my wild youth in some ways, you know, was very, very orientated towards that kind of South African wildness.

00:49:20 Speaker_01
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.

00:49:30 Speaker_01
But for many years there, we were just kind of packing on, you know, I guess we were frozen by some trauma ourselves, and we were just living as wildly through it as we could.

00:49:40 Speaker_03
Well, I remember the first time... What a hell of a story, man. I totally forgot about the boarding the next connecting flight.

00:49:52 Speaker_01
Awkward bed covered moments.

00:49:54 Speaker_03
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.

00:50:09 Speaker_03
And please correct my pronunciation. When did the Shangan trackers, is it Shangan? How do you pronounce that properly? Shangan. There we go. Shangan trackers enter the picture in your life. And who are they? If you could answer that in either order.

00:50:25 Speaker_01
Well, firstly, let me say something about the Shangan people. The Shangan people are the most wonderful people that I've had time to spend time with in Africa.

00:50:35 Speaker_01
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.

00:50:46 Speaker_01
They didn't want to be involved in the Zulu army's warlike ways, and they broke away, and they really pastoral people, amazing storytellers, incredible trackers because they love to observe things and tell stories.

00:50:59 Speaker_01
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 Shangaan trackers in the world, men who had grown up hunting and gathering in the region.

00:51:11 Speaker_01
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.

00:51:28 Speaker_01
And so from the time that I was extremely young, I was apprenticed to these master shungun trackers.

00:51:34 Speaker_01
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

00:51:45 Speaker_01
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.

00:51:56 Speaker_01
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.

00:52:08 Speaker_01
And really the success of Londolozi, one of the major success points for us is,

00:52:13 Speaker_01
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.

00:52:24 Speaker_01
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. And in fact, they had been hunted.

00:52:36 Speaker_01
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.

00:52:53 Speaker_01
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.

00:53:08 Speaker_01
And he studied his biological 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.

00:53:21 Speaker_01
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.

00:53:35 Speaker_01
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.

00:53:43 Speaker_01
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 Shangaan people are invited to participate in this restoration.

00:53:57 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:07 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:17 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:28 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:40 Speaker_01
I would go to a place where there was eye-high scrub, and then I would see the destitution as you cut it out.

00:54:46 Speaker_01
And then you would go back there a year 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.

00:54:53 Speaker_01
And so my first impulses, I believe, as a healer came out of watching the way that life knows how to bring itself forth.

00:55:01 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:13 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:26 Speaker_01
And then she growled and they saw that she had this one broken canine. And then she slipped away from there. And they drove home in silence and they stopped the vehicle.

00:55:35 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:49 Speaker_01
To your point, 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 djins, say, I'm going to buy? What made my uncle say in that moment, that's my future?

00:56:01 Speaker_01
How do we know when we know? So what my uncle did is he teamed up with a Shanghai tracker, one of the best trackers in the area, a man by the name of Elmon Mchongo.

00:56:11 Speaker_01
And Elmon is actually Rhenius in the book's brother, just incredible hunter-gatherer, incredibly in tune.

00:56:16 Speaker_03
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?

00:56:30 Speaker_03
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?

00:56:42 Speaker_01
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.

00:56:52 Speaker_01
It's the beginning, the first time that someone looked at an abstract imprint 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.

00:57:06 Speaker_01
You know, 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.

00:57:15 Speaker_03
didn't mean to interrupt, I just wanted to kind of set the stage, right?

00:57:18 Speaker_03
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, 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.

00:57:40 Speaker_01
ancient, back to the origins of humanity. And when you are tracking, you are connected to that entire lineage, you know, which is an amazing feeling. What I'm doing right now, thousands of years ago, someone did this very same practice.

00:57:56 Speaker_01
And Elman was just brilliant in the bush. 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.

00:58:10 Speaker_01
And sometimes they would go two weeks without seeing her and they would be putting together the clues. They'd be following the tracks.

00:58:16 Speaker_01
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.

00:58:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:58:38 Speaker_01
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 of those cubs grew up modeling their mother's trust.

00:58:53 Speaker_01
And so she was the mother for two reasons. One, because she was the mother of all these cubs.

00:58:58 Speaker_01
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.

00:59:11 Speaker_01
and that allure is still alive inside of people today. But it would have been absolutely impossible without the skills and the brilliance of the Shangaan trackers.

00:59:21 Speaker_01
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,

00:59:36 Speaker_01
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.

00:59:46 Speaker_03
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?

00:59:59 Speaker_01
Rhenius Matanjana Jampacha Zimchongo. That's exactly what I was going to say.

01:00:05 Speaker_03
That's what I was going to say. I'll stick with Rennius for short. Now, I want to prompt, maybe as a way of describing Rennius and introducing him, a question that came or a cue that came from one of our mutual friends, Josh Waitzkin.

01:00:22 Speaker_03
And he said, ask Boyd about Rennius not returning to camp a few weeks ago when tracking, I think, a male lion when all the clients wanted to come back. Oh, that's great. Could you tell this story? Are you open to that?

01:00:37 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, Rhenius 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.

01:00:51 Speaker_01
And really 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.

01:01:07 Speaker_01
You learn 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?

01:01:19 Speaker_01
Why did you know to check that riverbed? And they just sort of say, I just knew. Renius 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.

01:01:31 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:44 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:56 Speaker_01
They'd been keeping watch all night.

01:01:58 Speaker_03
Could you explain what you mean by that? Keeping watch all night? Afraid that lions are going to eat them all night?

01:02:03 Speaker_01
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 to keep watch. It's this deeply archetypal experience to be awake around the fire.

01:02:17 Speaker_01
It definitely changes what the fire means to you. Some of this ancient, primordial sense of, like, fire safety. And each person keeps watch through the night, and it's beautiful.

01:02:26 Speaker_01
You're alone, owls calling, stars above you, and this alertness alive inside of you as you keep watch for your friends.

01:02:33 Speaker_03
What are you keeping watch?

01:02:34 Speaker_03
I guess, I guess what, just, 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.

01:02:50 Speaker_03
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, just came to mind.

01:02:57 Speaker_01
No, John from KPMG 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,

01:03:13 Speaker_01
What's pretty amazing, Tim, is that no one misses the gravity of the situation. Yeah, I bet. There's something about night falling.

01:03:20 Speaker_01
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. And your job on watch is to be an aware presence.

01:03:36 Speaker_01
And you get armed with a really good torch.

01:03:40 Speaker_03
You listen. That's a flashlight for you, Jens.

01:03:43 Speaker_01
Flashlights. You listen. And if any animal comes, you have to be aware of its presence. And there's an amazing thing. 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.

01:03:55 Speaker_01
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 gravity of it, and something does wake up inside of them. So anyway, back to the story.

01:04:07 Speaker_03
Suffice to say, they didn't sleep very well.

01:04:10 Speaker_01
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.

01:04:22 Speaker_01
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, you know, even more, 35 years into guiding people.

01:04:33 Speaker_01
And then another section working as a trainer, he says, you guys go back to camp. I can't leave this track.

01:04:41 Speaker_01
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.

01:04:54 Speaker_01
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.

01:05:05 Speaker_01
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. There's something very special about that to me.

01:05:19 Speaker_03
Which animals are hardest to track? At Laundalosa, 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.

01:05:34 Speaker_03
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?

01:05:47 Speaker_01
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 lightly. And its nature is solitary and secretive. It likes to operate in thick terrain.

01:06:03 Speaker_01
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.

01:06:15 Speaker_01
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 Sowella. And Sowelo was meticulous in his dress, and he was gruff, and he was hard to get along with.

01:06:31 Speaker_01
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.

01:06:40 Speaker_01
And he used to do this thing where if all the trackers had been out in the morning and they'd been following a leopard, They would come back to camp. They'd been unsuccessful. They had a last track, but they had lost it. He would go back there.

01:06:52 Speaker_01
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.

01:07:02 Speaker_01
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 Sowella is number one.

01:07:18 Speaker_01
And he did it so consistently, and Richard Sawyer was number one.

01:07:24 Speaker_03
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.

01:07:35 Speaker_03
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?

01:07:46 Speaker_01
One is he's showing people how good he is. Because you're right, the direct light creates a flat aspect on the ground. The light is flat, and so you're right, there's no shadow, there's no contrast.

01:07:57 Speaker_01
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.

01:08:08 Speaker_01
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.

01:08:21 Speaker_01
while it's not moving. And all of those are saying Soela is number one.

01:08:28 Speaker_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, Rhenius goes out to track with clientele? Do you have the equivalent of a SWAT team with you?

01:08:45 Speaker_03
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?

01:08:55 Speaker_01
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 is way upstream of that.

01:09:07 Speaker_01
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 Rhenius, the safety profile just becomes exceptionally safe because he's so attuned.

01:09:22 Speaker_01
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 terrain, attuned to the birds, bird language.

01:09:36 Speaker_01
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.

01:09:50 Speaker_01
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.

01:10:06 Speaker_01
And that is really what makes you safe. 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 unspoken conversation between you.

01:10:21 Speaker_03
I want to bring up one of the lines from The Line Tracker's Guide to Life that 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.

01:10:34 Speaker_03
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.

01:10:51 Speaker_03
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.

01:11:06 Speaker_01
There were two things that Renius used to say regularly. The one is, Hishatikuma, Hishatikuma, we will get, we will get it.

01:11:14 Speaker_01
And it was almost like this kind of incredible self-talk that he 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, Ah, Hishatikuma, we're going to get this.

01:11:26 Speaker_01
And then often he would say to, 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.

01:11:37 Speaker_01
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.

01:11:49 Speaker_01
And you can think in a vast wilderness as trackers, we also talk about the first track.

01:11:53 Speaker_01
In a vast wilderness, 360 degrees of wild terrain, all he needs is the next first track, and then the next first track, and then the next first track, and the next first track.

01:12:05 Speaker_01
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.

01:12:19 Speaker_01
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.

01:12:25 Speaker_01
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.

01:12:35 Speaker_01
So I had these encounters, Tim, whereby I had a childhood following animals and learning this 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.

01:12:50 Speaker_01
And then watching how consistently good trackers delivered an outcome, they found the animal they were looking for. And so that, and at that time as a young child, I thought I was learning that skill.

01:13:01 Speaker_01
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.

01:13:17 Speaker_01
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 lucky to meet a woman who came on Safari.

01:13:34 Speaker_01
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.

01:13:49 Speaker_01
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.

01:14:02 Speaker_01
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.

01:14:17 Speaker_01
We were driving along 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.

01:14:29 Speaker_01
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.

01:14:39 Speaker_01
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 rugged guy. I'm out there tracking lions.

01:14:52 Speaker_01
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?

01:15:00 Speaker_01
She said, I can see what you're carrying, and I can see how stuck you are, and I want you to know that I can help you, and I'm here.

01:15:06 Speaker_01
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.

01:15:16 Speaker_01
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.

01:15:30 Speaker_01
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.

01:15:45 Speaker_01
And I realized that I was looking for something. And all of the skills and the mentality of the tracker was highly adept to being in a transformational process.

01:15:56 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:04 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:18 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:33 Speaker_01
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, go look again.

01:16:41 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:52 Speaker_01
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.

01:17:04 Speaker_01
And each time I walked down that path, under his guidance, there was more information.

01:17:10 Speaker_01
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.

01:17:19 Speaker_01
And so, you know, what do you need to attune to in transformational processes?

01:17:23 Speaker_01
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 more alive.

01:17:36 Speaker_01
So I started to see through the eyes of the tracker, the first track.

01:17:40 Speaker_01
the first track being the next thing you know to do, letting go of 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.

01:17:54 Speaker_01
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 response to what is occurring.

01:18:08 Speaker_01
If the track cuts left, Alex will click and he'll say, I'm on the track. If it cuts right, Renius will be on it. They're getting a sense of the mood of the animal.

01:18:17 Speaker_01
they're using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving and in that way, almost feel the animal as it's walking out ahead of them.

01:18:24 Speaker_01
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, they're almost having fun in it. They're playing. They're playing on that track.

01:18:36 Speaker_01
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

01:18:43 Speaker_01
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.

01:18:52 Speaker_01
And I'm sort of saying this to see how the tracker came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing.

01:18:59 Speaker_01
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.

01:19:05 Speaker_01
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.

01:19:17 Speaker_01
There is a part of you, you might call it your wild self, you might call it the track of your life, 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.

01:19:31 Speaker_01
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.

01:19:44 Speaker_01
And I live like that to this day as a tracker, trying to be present, resting into the unknown, attuning, and trying to fall into the following state with what energizes me, makes me curious, and pulls me forward.

01:19:56 Speaker_03
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

01:20:19 Speaker_03
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.

01:20:35 Speaker_03
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?

01:20:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, just one comment on Martha. Once we started to get onto that level with each other, when I watched her, when I looked at her, what I saw was a superb tracker. She understood how trauma patterns us. And she was

01:21:02 Speaker_01
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.

01:21:12 Speaker_01
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.

01:21:23 Speaker_01
And that's really what most attracted me to her work. I saw a tracker of processes, human processes, 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.

01:21:37 Speaker_01
But yeah, to segue into my own experiences, my family, I would say, Tim, went through a very difficult 10-year period, a period of intense suffering.

01:21:49 Speaker_01
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.

01:21:57 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:08 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:21 Speaker_01
And so he had, there'd been this big sort of expansion. And then in a classic kind of change of founders trap, he got fired from that. And then very soon into that South Africa was going through a very, very difficult time.

01:22:33 Speaker_01
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

01:22:44 Speaker_01
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.

01:23:00 Speaker_01
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

01:23:15 Speaker_01
where my body goes when it gets a mild trauma because I woke up into my worst nightmare. And I looked to my left and my mother's tied up on the floor and my sister's tied up.

01:23:26 Speaker_01
And I know kind of stories of how these things go, the violence, the potential danger to 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.

01:23:42 Speaker_01
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.

01:23:58 Speaker_01
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. So they pulled me outside, and they put a gun to my head. And they basically said, now we're going to kill you.

01:24:13 Speaker_01
And 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.

01:24:29 Speaker_01
You might call it the peace of God that path is understanding, but I think it was too big for my ego structure to hold, and it collapsed.

01:24:39 Speaker_01
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.

01:24:52 Speaker_01
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.

01:25:06 Speaker_01
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 the car keys and I said, get in that car and leave. And they did.

01:25:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:25:37 Speaker_01
And I'm not sure that I fully understand it, but I felt like I glimpsed through the most terrifying situation, I glimpsed something. That was the first freezing experience that I had. It was terrifying.

01:25:56 Speaker_01
And then on the heels of that, and I think sometimes of Jung's description of like, what is unconscious will be made conscious, it will manifest into your life until you become more conscious about what you're carrying.

01:26:09 Speaker_01
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.

01:26:20 Speaker_01
It was an extremely hot day, and we left the people who we were guiding sitting under a tree, and we began to walk upstream in the river. Solly stayed on the bank, and I was actually walking in the water. The water was knee-deep, running over sand.

01:26:35 Speaker_01
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.

01:26:43 Speaker_01
And when I think of it now, I think if it had been a horror movie, you know, people in the audience would have started saying, don't go near the shadowy place.

01:26:50 Speaker_01
And of course, as I walked 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

01:27:03 Speaker_01
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.

01:27:13 Speaker_01
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 downstream. While the crocodile is shaking me, I see Solly, who's on the bank.

01:27:25 Speaker_01
He sees me, and he sees that I'm in trouble, and he immediately starts making his way towards me. Solly is also a Shangaan man, grew up hunting and gathering.

01:27:35 Speaker_01
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.

01:27:45 Speaker_01
And I have this memory of almost being non-local watching myself pull myself up into the branches of the tree.

01:27:53 Speaker_01
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 meat hanging off. I made a pact with myself in that moment, I'd never look at that again.

01:28:05 Speaker_01
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.

01:28:14 Speaker_01
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.

01:28:26 Speaker_01
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.

01:28:38 Speaker_01
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.

01:28:49 Speaker_01
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.

01:29:01 Speaker_01
So, you know, those 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?

01:29:19 Speaker_01
And he would look at me with disdain, and he'd say, umpho, unang kinga, dinang kingapel. He said, my brother, you're in trouble. I'm in trouble. And at first, I thought it was some kind of platitude. He was playing down his actions.

01:29:33 Speaker_01
But as time went on, I really understood, and I came to see that in the way that Salih grew up, he grew up in a much more collective consciousness.

01:29:42 Speaker_01
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.

01:29:56 Speaker_01
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.

01:30:08 Speaker_01
He just saw it as the most obvious, natural thing to do. And that really, that moved me. And that taught me a lot.

01:30:15 Speaker_03
I'm going to come back to 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. Those are two excruciating experiences, to put it mildly.

01:30:29 Speaker_03
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?

01:30:42 Speaker_01
Absolutely.

01:30:43 Speaker_03
Could you explain that for folks?

01:30:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, Ubuntu is an African philosophy that says, I am because of you, or people are not people without other people. And what Ubuntu is talking to is the relational nature of life.

01:31:03 Speaker_01
And the point I want to make about it is that when you spend time with people where the Ubuntu consciousness is activated in them, where Ubuntu is alive in them, it is actually a kind of structuring in their very psyche.

01:31:18 Speaker_01
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.

01:31:34 Speaker_01
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.

01:31:44 Speaker_01
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,

01:31:58 Speaker_01
But different cultures, the psyches are structured differently.

01:32:02 Speaker_01
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 comparison.

01:32:18 Speaker_01
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.

01:32:29 Speaker_01
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.

01:32:40 Speaker_03
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. I can't remember, maybe it was the first time we spoke, but you were just coming off of...

01:32:56 Speaker_03
living in a tree, if I remember correctly. 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?

01:33:09 Speaker_01
So I was 40 days and 40 nights in the tree. I went into the tree, you know, if you read all the mystical traditions, including I think your man Hafiz on your bookshelf, but in all the mystical traditions,

01:33:22 Speaker_01
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.

01:33:36 Speaker_01
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?

01:33:43 Speaker_01
And so with a lockdown in the world, suddenly I had six weeks where I could go and do that, you know, 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.

01:33:56 Speaker_01
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.

01:34:06 Speaker_01
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.

01:34:18 Speaker_01
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,

01:34:34 Speaker_01
this 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.

01:34:46 Speaker_01
So it's not just a bird or that antelope, it's that bird that roosts in that bush and flies down the riverbed in the morning and back up the southern bank, and then it feeds for grubs in this tree.

01:34:59 Speaker_01
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.

01:35:11 Speaker_01
That is really what the natural world is. And then at some point, you realize that I'm not observing this. This intelligence that I'm watching unfold around me, I am fundamentally a part of this.

01:35:24 Speaker_01
And it stops being a mental construct and you start to feel yourself inside of that intelligence. And that's a very, very deep experience, or at least it was for me.

01:35:34 Speaker_01
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.

01:35:46 Speaker_01
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 a society, you know, the societies of the modern world are almost becoming devoid of

01:36:00 Speaker_01
the structures that allow us to make meaning, but the natural world is full of encounter. And that encounter generates an aliveness and a relational meaning-making quality that just makes life feel very, very rich.

01:36:11 Speaker_01
And we lived like that for thousands of years before we lived on Discord.

01:36:17 Speaker_03
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?

01:36:30 Speaker_01
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, a thunderstorm rolled in, and the heat built all through the afternoon.

01:36:43 Speaker_01
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.

01:36:54 Speaker_01
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 were coming around around me.

01:37:07 Speaker_01
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.

01:37:17 Speaker_01
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.

01:37:33 Speaker_01
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 very distinct thing. It's so distinct to all my anxiety, all the things I worry about.

01:37:58 Speaker_01
But true, raw, I don't know if we make it out of this fear, is actually a very rare encounter in life. And it would not end. I just kept saying to myself, you can't be this scared for so long. Surely it's just going to pass.

01:38:12 Speaker_01
And then 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.

01:38:27 Speaker_01
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, I would do it again, you know, just like on the other side of it to have been like in a storm like that was felt felt very, very, very special.

01:38:42 Speaker_01
I felt like profoundly like a profound encounter with the force of nature.

01:38:47 Speaker_03
Do you think you will ever do an extended period solo like that again? I don't know if you were totally solo.

01:38:54 Speaker_03
I have no idea if you were solo, solo, solo, or it 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?

01:39:05 Speaker_03
Why or why not? Not necessarily in a tree, but that degree of solitude.

01:39:09 Speaker_01
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.

01:39:24 Speaker_01
And in this one, I didn't see other people. I was totally by myself. And, you know, there's amazing things that happen when you're by yourself. One is, you know, getting really into your own energy.

01:39:34 Speaker_01
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.

01:39:51 Speaker_01
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, God, you know, damn it. And I flew into a rage.

01:40:07 Speaker_01
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.

01:40:16 Speaker_01
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.

01:40:31 Speaker_01
But when you buy yourself, they just do not abide because there's no one around to like stay in the story for.

01:40:38 Speaker_03
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 of me that thinks, man, 40 days is a long time to be alone with the voices in your head.

01:40:53 Speaker_03
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?

01:41:02 Speaker_01
No, I mean, it's certainly a concern. And then there's also this weird component of time, right?

01:41:07 Speaker_01
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.

01:41:23 Speaker_01
So the one thing is that I, you know, 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.

01:41:40 Speaker_01
And so actually it was incredibly generative for me. And there's all these like little problems you have to solve. Like you gotta keep your camp clean and then everything gets wet. And then you gotta work out how to build yourself a bit of shelter.

01:41:50 Speaker_01
And then once you become more present, it becomes so full of life. Like I would make myself this evening shower. I'd go fill a big cast iron kettle with water, and then I would warm it on the fire.

01:42:01 Speaker_01
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 it was teaching me presence all the time.

01:42:10 Speaker_01
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.

01:42:23 Speaker_03
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 solitude versus depleting isolation, right?

01:42:45 Speaker_03
Because those are very different. For me, those concepts represent very different things, right? Solitude versus isolation or loneliness.

01:42:52 Speaker_01
How does it feel for you now? Like if you went alone for a week to a cabin now, how does it land on you now?

01:42:59 Speaker_03
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

01:43:18 Speaker_03
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 systems.

01:43:30 Speaker_03
She's 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

01:43:42 Speaker_03
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.

01:43:55 Speaker_03
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.

01:44:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, I will say that it was largely supplemented by the passion for tracking. And so your encounter with feeling the presence of Molly there and being in this thing together, my feeling is every time I'm tracking, I'm in a new story.

01:44:21 Speaker_01
Every time I'm out there following, I'm in a deep encounter and it actually feels like there's this alive sentience awareness.

01:44:30 Speaker_01
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 nature, like I wanted to know nature.

01:44:42 Speaker_01
But one of the most profound experiences out of it was that I started to feel known by nature.

01:44:48 Speaker_01
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

01:45:04 Speaker_01
that felt incredibly supportive and like I was touching something really beautiful and special.

01:45:10 Speaker_03
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. But I think there's actually a lot there related to what you just said.

01:45:27 Speaker_03
I do want to discuss your healing process, and this is gonna seem like a very strange way to approach it.

01:45:35 Speaker_03
Before we get to that, I feel like maybe ginger and the sushi meal will 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?

01:45:52 Speaker_01
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.

01:46:12 Speaker_01
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,

01:46:20 Speaker_01
And I came across this ancient baobab tree, this two-story high baobab tree, and it had been hollowed out when an elephant had knocked the branch, and it was in fact empty.

01:46:30 Speaker_01
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.

01:46:40 Speaker_01
And I could hear the intensity of the bees through this process, and I felt their vibration coming out of this tree, and it sparked my interest. There's also an amazing thing in Southern Africa. There's a bird called the honey guide.

01:46:55 Speaker_01
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, I think he wants us to follow him.

01:47:08 Speaker_01
And then it will fly in front of you and show you where the beehive is.

01:47:13 Speaker_01
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

01:47:25 Speaker_01
Just, you know, an encounter like that, like it just takes you back thousands of years in an instant.

01:47:30 Speaker_03
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?

01:47:47 Speaker_01
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 walk out to remote places and suddenly the bird's there and it's like, come on, let's do this.

01:48:00 Speaker_01
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, I was around with this idea and I was like, the bees are really fascinating.

01:48:13 Speaker_01
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 sales.

01:48:24 Speaker_01
they can feel electromagnetic fields, they will disappear if a storm is brewing.

01:48:29 Speaker_01
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,

01:48:47 Speaker_01
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.

01:48:52 Speaker_01
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.

01:49:04 Speaker_03
All the good stuff.

01:49:05 Speaker_01
There's 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,

01:49:13 Speaker_01
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.

01:49:25 Speaker_01
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. You're going to be absolutely safe. So they had come on safari.

01:49:38 Speaker_01
Meantime, I woke up into the back of the village. And I seek out a man by the name of Simon Sambo. Simon Sambo.

01:49:46 Speaker_00
Great man.

01:49:47 Speaker_01
Simon Sambo himself has a mellifluous voice, very soft, lilting voice. And Simon Sambo is the village beekeeper.

01:49:57 Speaker_01
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, OK, there's no problem. I can take you beekeeping. I said, great. I'm excited about this.

01:50:12 Speaker_01
He says, you 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 and we drive out to the hives and I'm inappropriately dressed. I'm in like shorts and t-shirt.

01:50:29 Speaker_01
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, I have some exposure.

01:50:47 Speaker_01
So I said to him, Simon, the suit's a bit short for me. Cause 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.

01:50:59 Speaker_01
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 the smoker.

01:51:12 Speaker_01
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, oh yeah, I'm here to learn.

01:51:25 Speaker_01
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.

01:51:41 Speaker_01
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. And as you start walking towards the hive, they start changing gears like they're at the Austin F1 track.

01:52:00 Speaker_01
And 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.

01:52:17 Speaker_01
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.

01:52:28 Speaker_01
And, you know, as 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. He says, don't worry, everything's okay.

01:52:39 Speaker_01
And they start landing on the visor and blocking the visor out. And it's super intense. And right at that moment, in the midst of this raw, buzzing intensity, One bee found my weak sock area, and it stung me through the sock.

01:52:58 Speaker_01
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, and then as one, the bees went to my ankles.

01:53:14 Speaker_01
And they begin to sting me intensely through the socks. The socks do not work. So I was saying, 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. And they start…

01:53:29 Speaker_01
following me and now I'm being sung 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.

01:53:40 Speaker_01
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.

01:53:51 Speaker_01
And I'm standing in the clearing getting pounded with the branch, and they're still stinging me. They're still all around me. I say, Simon, it's not working. It's not working. He says, okay, I will get the smoker going.

01:54:02 Speaker_01
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 blasting me with the smoker.

01:54:13 Speaker_01
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.

01:54:24 Speaker_01
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, Oh, okay. Run for your life!

01:54:39 Speaker_01
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.

01:54:51 Speaker_01
So we run to the Land Rover, and we jump into it, and he just says, drive, drive, drive! They are enraged! So I start driving off into the wilderness.

01:55:02 Speaker_01
Tim, true as nuts, we come around the first corner, and on the other safari truck driving towards us is the couple from Singapore who've been afraid of Ebola, and what they see is the Ebola cleanup crew in full white suits,

01:55:17 Speaker_01
driving towards them at full speed going, you're gonna die, you're gonna die, drive, drive, drive. And that was my first encounter with the bees. So eventually I make it back to the house.

01:55:30 Speaker_01
And I remember I got into my, 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?

01:55:43 Speaker_01
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.

01:55:59 Speaker_01
And Simon would come around, and he would say, Hey, Boyd, how are you doing today? I said, Not good. He said, I bought some ice for your feet. Next time we will get you boots. But I sat with it. And what I took out of it was, number one,

01:56:19 Speaker_01
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 collective ability to fire the collective consciousness algorithm.

01:56:35 Speaker_01
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?

01:56:48 Speaker_03
Yeah, or sting the shit out of some invaders ankles. Intensity. They taught me so much about intensity. I think that's what I learned from Independence Day.

01:56:58 Speaker_03
If we have 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.

01:57:11 Speaker_03
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?

01:57:30 Speaker_01
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.

01:57:43 Speaker_01
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

01:58:00 Speaker_01
And a lot of people don't know this is they track lions and then they would rob them of their kills. And so lions have a long history of being chased by humans. So normally it'll go away from you. However, that doesn't always happen.

01:58:12 Speaker_01
Particularly if a lioness has cubs or if they have meat, they can be aggressive. Now, normally what'll happen is the first thing that you will notice is the animal's body will tighten.

01:58:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:58:36 Speaker_01
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.

01:58:51 Speaker_01
And the minute she has 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.

01:59:00 Speaker_01
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.

01:59:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, no rifles without clients. Okay, please continue. What we most believe in is being in this dialogue. And so if that happens, the first thing that you do is you breathe out, a long out breath.

01:59:33 Speaker_01
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.

01:59:41 Speaker_01
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.

01:59:52 Speaker_01
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, and she comes in and then you stand your ground and you look her directly in the eyes and mostly what'll happen is she'll stop some distance from you.

02:00:12 Speaker_01
As she stops, you hold her in your energy and you're almost aggressive back to her. And you're showing that like, I'm dangerous too.

02:00:20 Speaker_01
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.

02:00:26 Speaker_01
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.

02:00:33 Speaker_01
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.

02:00:43 Speaker_01
If you watch her very intensely, and Rhenius is really the master of this, as you watch her closely, a slight drop in energy and he'll move backwards a little bit.

02:00:51 Speaker_01
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.

02:01:00 Speaker_03
So you said most of the time, they stop some distance from you. So what's the alternate scenario?

02:01:08 Speaker_01
If you're in the alternate scenario, you've got something very, very wrong. And the reason that you get into the alternate scenario is that you get it wrong in the moment.

02:01:18 Speaker_01
You see, as that charge starts happening, you're in the dialogue, and your presence 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.

02:01:32 Speaker_01
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.

02:01:42 Speaker_03
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.

02:01:54 Speaker_03
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.

02:02:00 Speaker_03
In a book called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, who's won a lot of awards, he's best known for a book called Arctic Dreams. But Of Wolves and Men, he talks about the conversation between predator and prey is the conversation of death.

02:02:16 Speaker_03
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

02:02:33 Speaker_03
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

02:02:50 Speaker_03
say, pack of wolves would pursue a caribou or an elk or something. And then at one point, the elk or the caribou do an about-face, stand off with the wolves, and then they would just part ways. They'd just walk in opposite directions.

02:03:01 Speaker_03
And it seems to defy explanation, but it does happen.

02:03:05 Speaker_03
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

02:03:18 Speaker_03
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.

02:03:34 Speaker_03
So it's something that you've had more first-hand experience with, I suppose.

02:03:39 Speaker_01
I mean, there's a knowledge out there that is – 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.

02:03:52 Speaker_01
There is subtlety and nuance, and there is things happening out there that is way beyond our understanding.

02:03:57 Speaker_03
Yeah.

02:03:58 Speaker_03
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, well,

02:04:23 Speaker_03
We'll just pick up and all head off in a very precise direction in a more or less straight line.

02:04:29 Speaker_03
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.

02:04:43 Speaker_03
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

02:04:58 Speaker_03
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, which for a long time was thought to be this quaint fairy tale.

02:05:12 Speaker_03
And then during quarantine, this is now about a year, year and a half ago, there was some type of trail cam footage

02:05:20 Speaker_03
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.

02:05:33 Speaker_01
There's just so much we don't know. It doesn't surprise me. I mean, even just some of the stuff around orientation. You watch a female leopard

02:05:44 Speaker_01
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, catching impala, hoisted in a tree, and walk a direct line back to where her cub was.

02:06:02 Speaker_01
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.

02:06:16 Speaker_01
And then you find this in native people too, the capacity for homing, the ability, and I've seen it with trackers who've come down, sand trackers who've come down from the Kalahari.

02:06:28 Speaker_01
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.

02:06:39 Speaker_01
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.

02:06:51 Speaker_01
And it's just like, what is that?

02:06:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's fascinating. It makes me wonder, and I think this might actually be demonstrated, you know, if we have some magnetic homing capability, or navigational abilities similar to hammerhead sharks.

02:07:05 Speaker_03
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 underneath the encasement.

02:07:22 Speaker_03
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.

02:07:30 Speaker_03
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?

02:07:46 Speaker_03
Because they also, presumably, traumatized by the home invasion, if you're open to speaking to it.

02:07:52 Speaker_03
And you could just speak to your own personal experience, but I'm curious how different people have approached finding some degree of closure, resolution, healing after an experience like that.

02:08:06 Speaker_01
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.

02:08:14 Speaker_01
I thought, you know, the way that I'd grown up, I thought, like, I'm just gonna get on with it and move forward, which is, you know, a naive approach, to say the least.

02:08:24 Speaker_01
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.

02:08:39 Speaker_01
And so 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 was anxious and depressed as a result of that,

02:08:53 Speaker_01
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.

02:09:07 Speaker_01
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,

02:09:17 Speaker_01
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.

02:09:33 Speaker_01
It was different for my mother and sister. 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.

02:09:42 Speaker_01
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 uncertainty that was there, and also a feeling that I didn't know what I really wanted to do.

02:09:58 Speaker_01
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.

02:10:11 Speaker_03
When you say structured meaning, could you elaborate on what that means? It might seem a little recursive as a question, but how did you find that structured meaning that you needed to move forth with contending with what had happened?

02:10:26 Speaker_01
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 where there's been trauma, there is a reduction of options, which means I have less choices and that gets laid down.

02:10:44 Speaker_01
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.

02:10:56 Speaker_01
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.

02:11:08 Speaker_03
Just for context for people listening, could you define ceremony work?

02:11:12 Speaker_01
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.

02:11:28 Speaker_01
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.

02:11:40 Speaker_01
So there was building awareness around how I'd become frozen, and then in ceremony watching, drinking the medicine, being with people who were healing energetic, and then watching how that affected my life.

02:11:53 Speaker_01
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, this has happened, this is where I'm at, and that's okay.

02:12:08 Speaker_01
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.

02:12:19 Speaker_01
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.

02:12:29 Speaker_01
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.

02:12:43 Speaker_01
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. And then I started to, because I was well guided,

02:12:57 Speaker_01
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.

02:13:10 Speaker_01
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.

02:13:23 Speaker_01
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.

02:13:37 Speaker_01
And as a guide, you can support it

02:13:41 Speaker_01
As a storyteller, you can support it with presence, you can support it by just listening, you can support it by creating spaces 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.

02:13:57 Speaker_01
And so my healing was actually about finding the purpose to help healing come into the world, if that makes sense.

02:14:04 Speaker_03
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.

02:14:18 Speaker_03
But one of the lines, this is on page 122 of 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.

02:14:32 Speaker_03
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.

02:14:46 Speaker_01
wherever you go, spread the gospel. When absolutely necessary, use words. Yeah, exactly.

02:14:51 Speaker_03
So don't we all wish more people would follow that advice? And perhaps advice we should give ourselves as often or perhaps more often than we give it to anybody else.

02:15:03 Speaker_03
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.

02:15:27 Speaker_03
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.

02:15:39 Speaker_03
And I know both of us have had tremendous struggles of different types, although I think they share a lot of common DNA. A lot of this seems to come down to stress-testing beliefs, if that makes sense.

02:15:55 Speaker_03
If a component of yourself, 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 Schwartz, the founder,

02:16:06 Speaker_03
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.

02:16:19 Speaker_03
And maybe you have one option or maybe you have two options. You can often reduce that down to a belief, a statement of some type.

02:16:28 Speaker_03
I'm bringing this up because I would love to hear how Byron Katie's workshops have been helpful or not helpful for you, because I know this is something we've spoken about.

02:16:42 Speaker_03
If they have been helpful, what specific worksheets have been helpful for you?

02:16:47 Speaker_01
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 know, you've been on a healing journey.

02:17:01 Speaker_01
What I notice is that a person who heals has a natural inclination to want to be of service.

02:17:10 Speaker_01
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, but there's just this desire as someone who heals to support the healing impulse and be there.

02:17:22 Speaker_01
And you know that there were moments in your own journey that were very powerful for you. It's almost just like innate when you get in touch with that to want to do that for other people and support that.

02:17:31 Speaker_01
The way that I think about this is, if you can give yourself a transformational process and you go on a journey to discover

02:17:39 Speaker_01
you know, 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.

02:17:52 Speaker_01
And it seems to me that at a certain point in every lifetime, we get asked, 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.

02:18:05 Speaker_01
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.

02:18:21 Speaker_01
There's a natural desire towards service. There seems to be this 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,

02:18:36 Speaker_01
And when someone goes on that journey and finds a deeper place of peace, and 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.

02:18:47 Speaker_01
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,

02:18:56 Speaker_01
You know, it just changes the desire to consume endlessly, and I think that's going to be very good for nature.

02:19:01 Speaker_01
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, 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.

02:19:17 Speaker_01
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.

02:19:27 Speaker_01
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.

02:19:45 Speaker_01
And on a certain point on a journey, they become absolutely critical, because if you are getting 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 different way of living, inevitably, a number of ideas will come in as to why that's not possible.

02:20:02 Speaker_01
And so I've done hundreds of worksheets now, and you name it, I've done absolutely ridiculous ones.

02:20:12 Speaker_01
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.

02:20:28 Speaker_01
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.

02:20:41 Speaker_01
When I actually sat, like she says to do in meditation, and asked the question, who am I when I believe that thought? And I started to watch. I feel frustrated. I feel let down. I don't have confidence in myself. I feel like I'm never doing enough.

02:21:02 Speaker_01
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.

02:21:17 Speaker_01
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.

02:21:31 Speaker_01
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.

02:21:41 Speaker_01
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.

02:21:54 Speaker_01
And that's when the work really took for me.

02:21:57 Speaker_03
And people can find out more about this at thework.com. It's not a panacea, of course. And Katie, I guess she was by Katie, right? Or people call her Katie instead of Byron, is a very unusual woman, a unique woman.

02:22:12 Speaker_01
Oh, I mean, like, I'll give you a Katie story. The first time I ever met her, I was sitting in 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.

02:22:26 Speaker_01
I took her hand, 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.

02:22:36 Speaker_01
That was like my first, and that's Katie, like totally connected, totally wild, and you don't know what's going to happen.

02:22:42 Speaker_03
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.

02:22:57 Speaker_03
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

02:23:11 Speaker_03
Stress testing that belief right in the way that you just described and then also doing turnarounds where if.

02:23:18 Speaker_03
For instance just one example if your statement is i'm 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.

02:23:33 Speaker_03
practical and powerful for diffusing the emotional boiling point, the sort of entropy and red line 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.

02:23:51 Speaker_03
So, yeah, I highly recommend people check that out. You know, I wanna 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?

02:24:07 Speaker_01
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.

02:24:24 Speaker_01
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 Coelle Simpson. She had ties to the Navajo community, and she invited me to attend to a sweat.

02:24:42 Speaker_01
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.

02:24:53 Speaker_01
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.

02:25:04 Speaker_01
There was a medicine man coming in, but we were also in kind of this like abandoned church yard. And then like, The medicine man arrived and he had just like left his job on a Friday afternoon in construction.

02:25:15 Speaker_01
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.

02:25:26 Speaker_03
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.

02:25:35 Speaker_01
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,

02:25:51 Speaker_01
the stones just keep coming in, and the heat just keeps building, and people start to sing. And we were joined by various other people who had come to the ceremony. And it was all Native people and myself and Koel.

02:26:04 Speaker_01
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.

02:26:18 Speaker_01
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 conjuring more and more energy. It's building on itself, and it's getting super intense.

02:26:31 Speaker_01
And eventually, the heat was getting too hot for me. 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.

02:26:41 Speaker_01
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.

02:26:54 Speaker_01
I saw all of these images, the gun being taken outside, kneeling down, being told you're 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.

02:27:09 Speaker_01
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.

02:27:18 Speaker_01
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.

02:27:32 Speaker_01
And she walked through the short grass and she walked directly up to me in the vision and she just bumped me as she walked past me.

02:27:40 Speaker_01
And in the instant that she bumped me, something in me understood that my own healing and the healing of nature and the healing of the land was somehow connected.

02:27:53 Speaker_01
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.

02:28:05 Speaker_01
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.

02:28:13 Speaker_01
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, but I was like in the leaves. And I could feel the earth and I could feel like the leaves all around me.

02:28:26 Speaker_01
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,

02:28:40 Speaker_01
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. And he was right. It took a long time to integrate that.

02:28:56 Speaker_01
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.

02:29:04 Speaker_01
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.

02:29:18 Speaker_03
What did you find unfolded, stuck, didn't stick for you over the subsequent

02:29:25 Speaker_01
weeks. You know, that voice stayed with me, that whisper, you're just being born, because I felt newborn.

02:29:32 Speaker_01
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

02:29:48 Speaker_01
tuned 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.

02:29:57 Speaker_01
And I was able to slowly start, 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.

02:30:10 Speaker_01
In fact, it felt incredibly uncomfortable. But I knew that it was better than where I was.

02:30:14 Speaker_03
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. His name is Eli. And we happened to see the solar eclipse together. This was a few weeks ago.

02:30:33 Speaker_03
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,

02:30:40 Speaker_03
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.

02:30:56 Speaker_03
I don't know, it's like I'm peeing my pants and in my chest, they might just be feelings. So yes.

02:31:00 Speaker_01
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. And he's a friend of mine's dog. And I go out and I think about Butters.

02:31:19 Speaker_01
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. He's like, yeah, I always feel butters right here in my chest.

02:31:33 Speaker_01
I think you're having the experience of loving butters. And he was like, this is outrageous.

02:31:40 Speaker_03
Yeah, sometimes we have to build the vocabulary, learn the ABCs, or just like rebuild them, reactivate them. Leopard in the fire.

02:31:50 Speaker_03
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 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.

02:32:10 Speaker_03
So Leopard in the Fire, what does Leopard in the Fire refer to?

02:32:14 Speaker_01
Leopard in the Fire occurred, there'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 stuck inside of me. And it was a story about a man by the name of Laurence van der Post.

02:32:31 Speaker_01
And Van der Post, you may have come across some of his work, but he was a tremendous poet and an artist, and he had one of those miraculous lives. He was a philosopher, really. But Van der Post grew up on a farm in South Africa.

02:32:42 Speaker_01
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.

02:32:55 Speaker_01
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.

02:33:10 Speaker_01
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.

02:33:24 Speaker_01
And this was, of course, before the days of diagnoses like 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.

02:33:37 Speaker_01
And I can imagine after the war, the stillness he must have felt and somewhere nearby a hyena started calling, woo, woo. And then a nightjar would have called somewhere, you know, dear Lord, deliver us.

02:33:49 Speaker_01
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.

02:33:58 Speaker_03
And a kudu is like a large antelope?

02:34:01 Speaker_01
Oh, this beautiful regal animal, and it moves with this incredible elegance.

02:34:06 Speaker_01
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.

02:34:15 Speaker_01
And it scanned the terrain all around, and then very slowly it put its lips down and it started to drink.

02:34:21 Speaker_01
And just as he started to drink, a breeze touched Fandapoth's back, and it blew his scent over the waterhole and straight into the nostrils of the Kuru. And it put its head up, and it looked directly at him. And for a moment their eyes met,

02:34:37 Speaker_01
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.

02:34:47 Speaker_01
And instantly in that moment, he knew he was able to go and see his family again. Wow.

02:34:52 Speaker_01
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.

02:35:03 Speaker_01
Years later, after the crocodile, Solly and I had been sitting around the fire, we'd been talking a lot.

02:35:10 Speaker_01
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.

02:35:20 Speaker_01
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 shake in my body, and I couldn't get it out.

02:35:34 Speaker_01
Like I would look at my hand, and my hand would be shaking. I would wake up at night, and I had pretty severe PTSD. And into the teeth of this, a fire broke out on the reserve.

02:35:43 Speaker_01
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— I have not. —is the intensity of the sound. It sounds like it hisses and crackles up ahead of you.

02:35:56 Speaker_01
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.

02:36:08 Speaker_01
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.

02:36:24 Speaker_01
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 still fighting it, but I had become isolated from them.

02:36:34 Speaker_01
I was about a mile or two away from them, and I was in an area that the fire had already burned through.

02:36:39 Speaker_01
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.

02:36:48 Speaker_01
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.

02:37:01 Speaker_01
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 fire was throwing, came this male leopard.

02:37:13 Speaker_01
And he was walking directly towards me, which is extremely, one, it was strange that he was in an area where there had been a fire, and two, it was strange that he was walking directly towards me.

02:37:23 Speaker_01
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.

02:37:35 Speaker_01
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.

02:37:47 Speaker_01
And if he became more aggressive, I could put my arms up. I was giving myself room to create more energy.

02:37:52 Speaker_01
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 beautiful, deep orange light from the fire.

02:38:09 Speaker_01
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.

02:38:28 Speaker_01
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.

02:38:45 Speaker_01
And there was no thought of the future, and there was no thought of the past.

02:38:50 Speaker_01
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 me, and in a moment he disappeared into the darkness.

02:39:07 Speaker_01
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.

02:39:21 Speaker_01
And I knew in that moment that that leopard had helped me understand what happened to Van der Post, 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.

02:39:38 Speaker_01
And if I think about that Ubuntu consciousness, that relational consciousness, what Solly taught me was that the Ubuntu consciousness is activated through action.

02:39:48 Speaker_01
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, is also activated when we, in a moment, let go.

02:39:58 Speaker_01
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.

02:40:10 Speaker_01
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.

02:40:23 Speaker_01
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.

02:40:31 Speaker_03
It's a beautiful story. God, just the imagery that conjures. It's really, I see it sort of in slow motion, almost as if it's like, you know, shot on film from like a Francis Ford Coppola film. Wow, it's really just a striking story.

02:40:47 Speaker_03
And it makes me think of a few things also. You mentioned a horse whisperer earlier. And for the last few years, you know, I've been very interested in, These natural encounters, of course, but it's very challenging to manufacture those experiences.

02:41:04 Speaker_03
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.

02:41:25 Speaker_03
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,

02:41:41 Speaker_03
Learned when I went to a wolf sanctuary, and I volunteered there for a period of time in Colorado, and I should explain its mission wolf mission wolf org I recommend people check it out in the middle of nowhere in Colorado and they are

02:41:58 Speaker_03
effectively a place of sanctuary for wolves or wolf dogs that cannot be released into the wild.

02:42:06 Speaker_03
They're not captive wolves per se, they're wolves or wolf dogs often who were raised in captivity under terrible, atrocious circumstances and then somehow made their way to Mission Wolf, there are other examples.

02:42:23 Speaker_03
There are also second-generation or third-generation wolves who are very much wild, like Arctic wolves. They're all effectively gray wolves, but come from different areas and therefore have different coats.

02:42:37 Speaker_03
They're in really large enclosures, like multi-acre 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.

02:42:51 Speaker_03
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.

02:43:02 Speaker_03
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.

02:43:16 Speaker_03
But when they come in, there's an opportunity in some instances to meet the ambassador wolves. They're let into an enclosure, and then they let a number of these ambassador wolves in.

02:43:27 Speaker_03
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.

02:43:47 Speaker_03
And I heard this story repeatedly from multiple staff members. And much like fender post in your experience but in this case with a wolf sort of steering.

02:43:59 Speaker_03
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.

02:44:17 Speaker_03
beauty and value in that. It's something 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 or a leopard for that matter.

02:44:35 Speaker_03
I mean, it's so deeply interesting and begets so many questions. I just wanted to mention that because it's also something, looked into the eyes of a number of these wolves, it's very different.

02:44:50 Speaker_03
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.

02:45:06 Speaker_03
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. For more info on Mission Wolf, people can just go to missionwolf.org.

02:45:19 Speaker_03
I think they do 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 you mentioned, right?

02:45:32 Speaker_03
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.

02:45:44 Speaker_01
I know where you're taking me.

02:45:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, yeah, you know where I'm going. This one of a kind

02:45:48 Speaker_03
It's one of a kind experience that cannot be replicated so please take us to add a well-known company you are invited to give a presentation and could you tell us the story of how that presentation.

02:46:00 Speaker_01
Oh my god from the beauty of the postcode 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.

02:46:17 Speaker_01
And normal story, I got there early. And I arrived to meet the tech guy to make sure that we were well set up. A normal story, the tech guy was late, he had to have a cigarette break. You know that archetypal tech guy who's running the AV?

02:46:31 Speaker_01
It was that guy. And so eventually I said to him, listen, man, I just really want to run through my slides. I want to make sure that we're all good. And he's like, listen, I need to upload the system so that we can stream to the whole company.

02:46:43 Speaker_01
I'll get to you in a second, but we're all good. I'm like, dude, I need to get some reps. Classic, I want to be well prepared. Anyway, people start filing in, people start filing in.

02:46:53 Speaker_01
And before I know it, the auditorium is full, and I haven't done the run through. And I'm in my worst nightmare. Now, the intro to my talk is a sort of a poetic speech. And then I say, and my story, like many good stories,

02:47:12 Speaker_01
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 of a male lion and he's roaring into the morning. So actually like mist is coming out of his mouth.

02:47:27 Speaker_01
And what's meant to happen is people are meant to be overwhelmed by this incredible baritone audio. And it's meant to put them right in the moment.

02:47:39 Speaker_01
And of course, the lion is doing the action of roaring, which is a bit of a convulsion, but there's no sound.

02:47:46 Speaker_03
So you're in the middle of the presentation, you press click and no sound.

02:47:51 Speaker_01
Just a convulsing, silent lion. And it was at this point, and it dawned on me slow enough for it to be truly painful, that I realized I was about to roar at a group of executives.

02:48:03 Speaker_01
And I grabbed the lapel 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.

02:48:23 Speaker_01
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.

02:48:48 Speaker_01
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.

02:48:59 Speaker_03
Oh, God. Yeah. Did you get any pats on the back or any stiff drinks handed to you after that one?

02:49:05 Speaker_01
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's like, kind of like move the energy.

02:49:17 Speaker_01
And we were into the presentation.

02:49:19 Speaker_03
Thank God, thank God for Lauren or whoever that was.

02:49:23 Speaker_01
Thanks, Lauren. It was like one of those moments also, where you realize like, you can't half roar at a group of executives, like you've either got to not do it or go all in. I was like, let's go.

02:49:36 Speaker_03
Thanks for nothing, AV guy. Oh, such a great story. So I gotta say, so 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.

02:49:51 Speaker_03
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.

02:50:03 Speaker_03
So maybe it doesn't find everyone at the right time, but for me, 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,

02:50:15 Speaker_03
Individuals you work with companies i find your approach to life instead of your multi century multi modality perspective. On life to be not just fascinating but very practical you spent a lot of time. Testing developing inheriting learning.

02:50:37 Speaker_03
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.

02:51:00 Speaker_03
So first, 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.

02:51:11 Speaker_03
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, was it your uncle in the boat with the outboard?

02:51:24 Speaker_03
I can't remember who it was. That'll have to be saved for another time.

02:51:29 Speaker_01
They're all in there, but some of them only get pulled out with a bit of scotch and a campfire.

02:51:33 Speaker_03
All right, well, round two might be with scotch and a campfire.

02:51:37 Speaker_03
But is there anything you would like to say, any last closing comments for the audience, 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?

02:51:55 Speaker_01
Well, firstly, just thanks for having me. And, you know, 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.

02:52:05 Speaker_01
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.

02:52:16 Speaker_01
And when people come and have safaris at a place like Landolozi 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, I've always been a proponent of the economy of wildlife.

02:52:31 Speaker_01
We keep these areas wild, we invite people to come and experience them, and that has a huge impact. 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.

02:52:42 Speaker_01
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.

02:52:56 Speaker_01
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. Where can people learn more about the Safari side, if they wanted to learn more about that?

02:53:09 Speaker_01
You can get a hold of us at londolozzi.com. You can also get a hold of me at boidvarti.com. My team will point you in the right direction. And Tracker Academy, yes, is trackeracademy.co.za.

02:53:25 Speaker_03
I like the Z. 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.

02:53:43 Speaker_03
But I know we are many time zones away at the moment. That won't be true. in the not-too-distant future. So I'm looking forward to spending some time in person. Me too, man. I'm looking forward to getting you out so we go track a rhino.

02:53:58 Speaker_03
I'm excited to track a rhino. And I'm excited not to have any legs eaten by crocs. And...

02:54:06 Speaker_03
I'm very much looking forward to finally getting feet on the ground at Londolozian, getting to meet some of these characters that I have only read about and heard about at this point, both human and animal alike.

02:54:17 Speaker_03
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.

02:54:25 Speaker_03
So to everybody listening, you'll find show notes to everything that we discussed at tim.blog.com. in the show notes, as well as Boyd on Twitter, at Boyd Vardy and all the rest.

02:54:47 Speaker_03
His books, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life and his memoir, Cathedral of the Wild, can both be found everywhere books are sold.

02:54:53 Speaker_03
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.

02:55:12 Speaker_03
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 before the weekend?

02:55:22 Speaker_03
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

02:55:33 Speaker_03
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.

02:55:42 Speaker_03
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.

02:55:54 Speaker_03
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 to think about.

02:56:08 Speaker_03
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.

02:56:20 Speaker_03
This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new.

02:56:31 Speaker_03
I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so.

02:56:41 Speaker_03
I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed.

02:56:54 Speaker_03
And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.

02:57:08 Speaker_03
So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.

02:57:20 Speaker_03
Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients?

02:57:34 Speaker_03
And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market.

02:57:39 Speaker_03
It has a multivitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant, immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals.

02:57:53 Speaker_03
That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible, it is not always easy, So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily.

02:58:08 Speaker_03
If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just, like brushing my teeth, part of the routine.

02:58:22 Speaker_03
It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances.

02:58:37 Speaker_03
It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.

02:58:51 Speaker_03
So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. I have been using 8Sleep pod cover for years now.

02:59:13 Speaker_03
Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. 8Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod, and I'm excited to test it out

02:59:26 Speaker_03
Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second.

02:59:32 Speaker_03
First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heatwave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive.

02:59:44 Speaker_03
I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

02:59:51 Speaker_03
Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience.

03:00:00 Speaker_03
And for those snore-heavy nights, the Pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring.

03:00:09 Speaker_03
Plus, with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them, because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself.

03:00:16 Speaker_03
They have imperceptible sensors, which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking, as just one example, is at 99% accuracy. So get your best night's sleep.

03:00:28 Speaker_03
Head to 8sleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra. That's 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com slash Tim, and code Tim, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.

03:00:43 Speaker_03
They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.