#763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty

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0:04:59 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim
0:05:04 Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field
0:05:09 imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply
0:05:14 and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast
0:05:20 recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion
0:05:26 downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:05:32 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these
0:05:36 super combo episodes. And internally, we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes
0:05:42 because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks,
0:05:48 but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars. These are people who have
0:05:53 transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got
0:05:58 lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went
0:06:05 to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find
0:06:12 that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:21 First up, Margaret Atwood, author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays,
0:06:28 and graphic novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale, winner of the Arthur C. Clark Award,
0:06:35 and its sequel, The Testaments, co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, The Blind Assassin,
0:06:42 winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, and her latest, Old Babes in the Wood, a collection of her short
0:06:49 stories. You can find Margaret on Twitter @MargaretAtwood. In the course of doing research
0:06:54 for this conversation, I read about the different ways we could look at the semantics of, say,
0:07:01 science fiction on some other planet with creatures never before seen, versus, say, speculative fiction
0:07:08 where you’re taking something that exists or is in the process of becoming and then taking it a few
0:07:14 steps out. And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master, in my mind, of
0:07:21 boundary walking. What types of structured thinking or observation lend themselves to your ability to
0:07:27 write speculative fiction? Okay, you might say the lack of the qualities that make it difficult for
0:07:33 me to write science fiction, which I read a lot of, plus dragons, you know, I’m keen on dragons,
0:07:38 but I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can do, they have the ability
0:07:46 to do, and other things that you may admire, but you cannot do. So dragons outside my range
0:07:52 of capabilities in any way or as a Lucala Gwyn is kind of sewed up dragons. She got sort of the
0:07:59 dragon franchise. Yeah, so Game of Thrones, the dragons are basically sort of like bazookas,
0:08:06 but her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that
0:08:13 are usually attributed to dragons in the English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition,
0:08:19 etc. We could go on about that, but we won’t today. Now, you wanted to know
0:08:24 sort of what’s behind it. Yeah, what’s behind the speculative fiction? What makes you get at it?
0:08:30 I grew up in the 50s as a teenager, and I read a lot of those things at that time.
0:08:40 So I read 1984 just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically
0:08:47 sleazy cover of the early 50s. They put classics into these quite, what shall we say about those
0:08:52 covers? They made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people
0:08:58 got enticed into reading like War and Peace and things because they thought it was about ladies
0:09:07 and negligents lying on beds, which partly was, but not much really. So my copy of 1984 had this
0:09:13 woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and a guy standing behind her looking down her
0:09:22 front, which does get in there a bit, but that’s not the general import of the book. So I mainlined
0:09:29 all of those books. I read Ray Bradbury a lot. You’ll notice that I ended up writing in one of
0:09:35 his obits. I think for The Guardian. I went to Comic-Con for the first time because we thought
0:09:40 we were on our way to see Ray, but unfortunately, he died before we got there. So we ended up having
0:09:48 a memorial service at Comic-Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors in several fields,
0:09:56 really. So I read all of those things. John Windham, I was reading in the 50s. And I think what you
0:10:05 read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you were then writing when you’re able to,
0:10:10 you know, when you have these skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to
0:10:20 write in 1984 only with women like that. So meanwhile, along comes Ursula K and a number of other
0:10:26 people that I was following. So really, it’s partly what you’re drawn to and partly what you
0:10:34 have the skills to do. As I say, I can’t do dragons. Well, I can’t do dragons or speculative
0:10:40 fiction, so you have me beat. I can’t do podcasts, you know? Well, you know, podcasts are just ephemera
0:10:45 in the midst. I think that your works will have much more permanence. But I can hope. I can hope
0:10:51 that someday the audio will get locked in the amber in the same way that words are.
0:10:57 I’m sure it will. I want to go back in time from your teenage years. I’ve read about your experience
0:11:03 of growing up in a cabin in the woods and some of the benefits of that, the lack of distractions,
0:11:07 giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later and so on.
0:11:15 I’m thinking about having kids in the very near future. And I fantasize about living in the woods
0:11:20 because I feel most at home in the woods. Were there any downsides, would you say?
0:11:25 Okay, which woods are you thinking of, Tim? Any woods? What sort of woods?
0:11:32 I like varied terrain. So I prefer something that isn’t flat. So we could think American West,
0:11:37 we could think upstate New York, we could think British Columbia in certain locations.
0:11:46 I would prefer not to hear or see any neighbors. I would like to have lots of trails
0:11:54 that I can explore with my dog or dogs or family and running water of some type
0:12:00 and a lake or a pond, having access to both of those, or one of those at least.
0:12:04 I grew up on long islands, more or less, in the woods. That’s my idealized version,
0:12:08 but I don’t know what it’s like to raise kids in the woods. I’m curious if there are any downsides.
0:12:12 Well, you should ask my mom, except she’s not here.
0:12:13 She is not here.
0:12:20 But I can tell you what she said. Yeah, she’s kind of still here. So my mom was an unusual person
0:12:29 in that she liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic. She grew up in rural
0:12:36 Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses. She had horses. She rode them hither
0:12:44 and thither. And she was also a speed skater and of course a skier and this kind of thing. So I think
0:12:53 she married my dad because he was a very bushy guy. And he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia,
0:12:59 like really rural. So they were so rural that I don’t think they got electricity until the
0:13:06 late fifties. I was lucky enough to be able to see a 19th century farm operating pretty much
0:13:15 the way it would have done. So I think she, who didn’t like hats, little white gloves, tea parties,
0:13:22 any of that, she really didn’t like it. Didn’t fancy it. She liked dancing, like fast and furious
0:13:28 waltzing and things like that. Square dancing, but she didn’t like the frilly part. And up in the
0:13:32 woods was great for her because she said you didn’t actually have to do much housework. You just
0:13:39 swept the dirt out the door and you didn’t have to worry about all of the stuff that people have
0:13:47 in their houses, usually like bric-a-brac and china and things like that. You don’t have to worry about
0:13:57 those. So she didn’t. And she doesn’t seem to have had a problem in the woods except my brother almost
0:14:03 drowned once because he got out and fell off the dock. But apart from that and a few other
0:14:11 somewhat hairy moments, it was probably safer on the whole than being in a city.
0:14:17 Anyway, she seems to have managed pretty well although some of her city friends because they
0:14:24 were in cities during the winter. My dad was a forest entomologist. It meant he was up in the
0:14:30 woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you could take it as almost 100%. They
0:14:39 don’t do much in the winter. Insects. Pretty quiet insect-wise in the winter. So they would go up in
0:14:45 say April or so and they would go back in, for instance, November. But this is, I think, quite a
0:14:50 lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods. Tim, I think you’re thinking of a
0:14:56 more southerly location. Yeah. I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that.
0:15:01 No, they weren’t up there. I know. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.
0:15:08 Insects live in trees. He was a forest entomologist, right? So there had to be a forest.
0:15:14 There had to be the forest. They had running water, but it was out of a pump. And they didn’t have
0:15:24 electricity. And the transportation was by boat. So no roads there. You could get to, I think by
0:15:29 1939, there was this horrible road, which I remember very well. You’d always get cars that
0:15:34 going over it. And then you’d get to a place where you left the car and then you’d get in a boat.
0:15:41 So then it was during the war. So there weren’t even a lot of motor boats because gasoline was
0:15:50 rationed. So canoes. I would love to hear you describe an experience that came up in my reading
0:15:59 in preparation for this. And it relates to a day you found yourself walking across a football field.
0:16:06 I don’t know if that’s enough of a cue, but I would love to hear you expand on this because I
0:16:10 did read about it, but I feel like there’s probably more to the story. So could you please
0:16:16 just provide some color and tell the story? Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions
0:16:20 that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway. So I’ll tell you what I made
0:16:29 up, but it is kind of true. Sounds like my life. Yeah, right. It’s like that. It’s mostly kind of
0:16:34 true. Yeah, it’s sort of true. Your previous question, what did growing up in the woods have
0:16:42 to do with being a writer? There wasn’t anything to do except when it was raining, except reading,
0:16:48 writing, and drawing. So there were no other things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no
0:16:56 television, no, what else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore, I fixated on writing
0:17:04 pretty early. And it was a narrative family. People told stories. And my older brother was a
0:17:08 gung-ho writer. He wrote lots of things at that age. He turned into a scientist, but
0:17:16 he was very narrative when he was, say, 10, 9. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am.
0:17:24 Having written my first novel at the age of seven, it was about an aunt. Some structural
0:17:29 difficulties there, Tim, because aunts don’t do anything until they’re in the fourth stage of
0:17:35 their life. They don’t do anything when they’re an egg. They don’t do anything when they’re a larva.
0:17:40 They do nothing when they’re a pupa. And it’s only when you get to, you know, the last part
0:17:46 of the story that they actually have any legs. So I don’t start books that way anymore, Tim,
0:17:53 but I did then. So then I stopped writing. I took to drawing. I drew a lot. Then I ended up in high
0:18:00 school at slightly too early an age. They skipped people then. I think they stopped doing that.
0:18:06 So I was 12 and some of the people in my class were almost 16, because they failed people then,
0:18:15 Tim. So it was a slightly daunting experience, but things evened out after that. Yes, I was quite
0:18:22 short. I’m still quite short. I’m still quite short. People got bigger. For a while, I was sort of
0:18:28 normal size, but that’s no longer true. There’s all these, you know, enormous kids who drank a
0:18:36 lot of milk with vitamins in it. Anyway, there I was in high school. I love my grade 11 teacher.
0:18:40 That would be one, two, the third year of high school. What do you call that?
0:18:45 I guess junior, junior year. What do you guys call it? Fifth form? I don’t know if you use
0:18:50 a British system. I have no idea. No, that’s English. Yeah. What do you guys call it in Canada?
0:18:55 Well, we called it different grades, like 9, 10, 11, 12, and in those days, 13,
0:18:58 but they’ve done away with that. Yeah, we would call it 11th or junior year.
0:19:05 Junior, yeah. So my great English teacher who I put in a book, because she was a peculiar,
0:19:11 people go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, “Oh,
0:19:16 yes, I can see instantly great brilliant Sean right out of her hand.” And I can tell she was,
0:19:20 you know, slated for greatness, but she told the truth. She said she showed no particular
0:19:26 ability in my class, which was true. I didn’t show any particular ability in her class.
0:19:34 And I had no idea then that I was going to be a writer. It didn’t strike me until the next year
0:19:42 when I had a different English teacher who I’ve also put into a story because she was a legend
0:19:48 in her own time. She took hold of the people in her class and she yanked them through the curriculum.
0:19:56 No matter what, no matter what she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings,
0:20:01 and she made the immortal comment because I showed her one of my poems. She said,
0:20:04 “I don’t understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.”
0:20:12 So wonderful. I love it. That is great. That is great. Yeah. So I started writing poetry in grade
0:20:20 12. And the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field and a pink princess
0:20:27 line dress that I had sewed myself. A work of art, Tim. You don’t know what that is, do you?
0:20:31 Oh, I can envision, based on some of the words, what it might look like.
0:20:36 Princess line. It had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great.
0:20:40 Loved it. It had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have.
0:20:47 I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences,
0:20:53 which I should have done had I known. I would have done that and then I would know how to touch type,
0:21:00 which I don’t. And it’s too late now, Tim. So there I was in my pink princess line
0:21:07 dress crossing the football field and a poem occurred to me. It wasn’t a very good poem,
0:21:12 but it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start.
0:21:16 You write some pretty terrible poetry that you’re very excited about.
0:21:23 And luckily, there’s nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry. And then you go on from
0:21:29 there. What did it feel like when this poem came to you? I mean, the lie. Now, you can tell me how
0:21:34 much of this is revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your
0:21:39 experience, but quote a large invisible thumb descended from the sky. It’s the Eureka moment,
0:21:45 Tim. Yeah, a big thumb came out of the sky. You believe that? What else would you like me to
0:21:52 tell you that you will also believe? I already asked about astrology, so you got me. Yeah,
0:21:58 you can tell me anything. It was very interesting to me. I had been trying out these potential
0:22:04 careers, like I was going to be a painter and then I revised that. I was going to be a fashion
0:22:11 designer and then I revised that and I went into home economics because in the textbook that was
0:22:16 called guidance in grade nine, you were supposed to decide what your career was going to be. Can
0:22:24 you imagine who knows anything when they’re that old? So the guidance textbook had five things that
0:22:32 girls could do and they did not include astrophysicists. Let’s see if you can guess what they were
0:22:40 in 1952. I think I can, but I’m cheating. Nurse secretary, school teacher, airline stewardess,
0:22:48 as they were known, and home economist. You’ve read what I wrote. I know I’m a bad cheater.
0:22:58 I have a very good cheater. You didn’t get away with it. That’s what was on offer and being a
0:23:04 mercenary child, I looked at what they made because I did grow up in a family in which it
0:23:11 was expected that you would support yourself. So the home economists made the most, believe it or
0:23:17 not. So I went into that, but then I decided, no, this is not for me. I’m going to be a biologist.
0:23:24 I was going to be a botanist because I was actually quite good at it. But then along came this writing
0:23:30 much to my parents’ dismay, but being the bite your tongue kind of parents, I think they just
0:23:36 hoped it would be a phase that would grow out of it. It’s been a long phase. Who would see them?
0:23:41 A phase. Well, they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, “Well,
0:23:45 how are you going to support yourself?” I said, “You know, I’ll get a job,” which I did. I got
0:23:52 lots of jobs. And then my mother said rather costically, “If you’re going to be a writer,
0:23:56 you’d better learn to spell.” And I said, “Others will do that for me.” And you know, they have.
0:24:04 Now we have spell check. You know, all good things come to those who wait, I guess. You were
0:24:10 right. You were right. That took a while. It’s been panned out. So you wrote, if I’m getting
0:24:15 the chronology right, you wrote for 16 years before you could make a living out of it.
0:24:20 You had all these different jobs, as you mentioned, as a cashier and a coffee shop
0:24:26 and many others. It’s bad at that. Over those 16 years, were you maintaining the belief that
0:24:31 someday it would pay the bills and you would be able to make a living out of it? Or was it
0:24:37 just a labor of love while you did these other things? Oh, the writing? Yes. You mean did I
0:24:44 ever think I would make a living out of it? No. People in my age group, in my country at that
0:24:52 time, didn’t think that way. They might have thought that way in the 30s and even in the 40s
0:24:58 where there were a couple of bestsellers written by people in our country. But right after the
0:25:06 war, during the 50s, a couple of things had happened. And one of them was that the paperback
0:25:13 book industry had taken off. I think it started with the Penguin in the UK and then it was
0:25:22 Pocket Books. And Canada didn’t have, it had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks
0:25:31 were not included in them. So the Glossy Magazine market was also drying up. So a writer like Morley
0:25:36 Callahan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the 20s and 30s, made a living out of selling to
0:25:43 Glossies. That was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that
0:25:50 they had. So we weren’t really thinking in those terms and there were no agents in Canada at that
0:25:56 time. We didn’t even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they
0:26:01 didn’t publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn’t a market for them.
0:26:09 So if you wanted to publish a novel, your publisher would say, “Well, we have to get a partner either
0:26:16 in London or in New York.” And that was easier said than done. So the book publishing that had
0:26:22 been going on in the 30s of cheap hardbacks kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be
0:26:29 a little more certain about that. It was gone having had paperbacks take its place. So it was
0:26:36 hardbacks and I’ve always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact,
0:26:46 I was associated with a small publishing company in the late 60s and early 70s and a lot of it
0:26:54 was about money. Like how many can we sell? What can we publish to support these works of cutting
0:27:01 edge experimental fiction that nobody’s going to buy? What can we publish? So we did. We published
0:27:08 the first book on venereal disease. It was called VD. You know, idiots guides. These were sort of
0:27:14 idiots guides before there were idiots guides. We got as far as warts, but we didn’t get two
0:27:22 aids because nobody knew about it yet. It’s like that. So let me let me hop in for just a second.
0:27:26 When you’re writing for 16 years, not thinking you can make a living from it,
0:27:31 what did you get from the writing? And did you share your writing with anyone?
0:27:39 Oh, absolutely. We were all sharing our stuff around because we were editing each other’s work.
0:27:46 We were publishing each other’s work. All of the the poets were connected through this kind of
0:27:55 spider web network of little magazines. That was both in Canada, the U.S., England. There were
0:28:02 these little magazines that published poetry and people knew each other through them. So the
0:28:10 poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. The poets were more peripatetic.
0:28:17 They would get on the greyhound bus and turn up at your door and sleep on your rug. I knew in your
0:28:23 turn might get on the greyhound bus and turn up at somebody else’s door and sleep on their rug. So
0:28:29 it was a sort of a rug exchange of poets. They would turn up here and there and give
0:28:35 readings and out of the way places and some of them. Do you remember it? No, you don’t. Sorry.
0:28:42 Coffee shops. Coffee shop readings. No, I know coffee shops. No, I do. I do. I have been to a
0:28:47 coffee shop reading. Well, a different kind of coffee shops. Let me not say shops. It should
0:28:53 be houses. So they didn’t have liquor licenses. So basically people brought flasks and their
0:29:02 handbags, pockets and things like that. And you had the usually condemned warehouse or something and
0:29:10 the little tables with the checkered tablecloths, the little wine bottles with the candle stuck in
0:29:20 them and the open mic. So poetry night usually on a Tuesday. Sounds great. Sounds like a lot of fun.
0:29:26 Down part of the week. Well, the folk singing and jazz went on on other nights of the week such as
0:29:33 Thursday, Friday and Saturday. That’s how they supported the poetry readings. So we did that in
0:29:42 the early 60s. And then the poetry readings spread to universities, some of them and then to bookstores.
0:29:50 They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn’t start happening until the
0:29:57 mid 70s, I would say. All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around
0:30:04 or you did see it before COVID, they didn’t exist yet. They sprang up out of the subculture of coffee
0:30:10 houses. This is neither here nor there. But I am fascinated actually by the history of coffee houses,
0:30:16 especially in the UK, where you have the Lloyds of London coming out of one coffee shop and all of
0:30:22 this incredible history that I had. I mean, back in the 18th century. Yes, way back, which I also
0:30:29 don’t remember to be clear, but I have read about it. And that interchange of ideas and the sort of
0:30:36 interstitial tissue in the societal fabric of the time. But what I’d like to ask you about next is
0:30:44 teaching. And it’s clear reading about your life that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching
0:30:51 did you most enjoy, if any of it? I always enjoyed it. I think the most intense year of teaching that
0:30:56 I did was in Montreal. I thought it’s a place that doesn’t exist anymore because it’s been
0:31:03 amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams. And it was a downtown
0:31:11 city establishment. You taught your subject to 19 year olds in the day. And then in the evening,
0:31:17 you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive for me.
0:31:24 The 19 year olds weren’t too sure why they were there, except their mom and dad wanted them to.
0:31:29 And really, they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something.
0:31:36 And the adults were there because they wanted to be. A couple of reasons they wanted to be there,
0:31:44 they wanted to up their credentials. But also, they were very engaged and they would argue with you,
0:31:50 object to things and really give you the old run-through. And that was pretty stimulating.
0:31:57 So I taught 19th century novels to those people. And I also taught American romanticism.
0:32:04 And it was they who gave me a button that said, “Moby Dick is not a social disease.”
0:32:13 They had a sense of humor. I liked them a lot. And it was very instructive because the things
0:32:20 that the 19 year old liked frequently, the grown-ups would not like. And the things that the 19 year
0:32:27 olds really didn’t like, the grown-ups thought were terrific. So Middle March by George Eliot,
0:32:33 the 19 year old said, “We don’t like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions
0:32:36 in their careers and they marry the wrong people and we’re not going to do that.”
0:32:44 And the adult said, “This is a great book. They make the wrong decisions in their careers. They
0:32:52 marry the wrong people. It’s just like life.” So a big difference in experience. And what’s the
0:32:58 lesson? The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are, the age that you are and the
0:33:07 experience that you’ve had. And it’s the same for everyone. Just a quick thanks to one of our
0:33:12 sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront.
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0:34:26 And now, Boyd Vardy, Lion Tracker, Storyteller, Wildlife and Literacy Activist,
0:34:32 Steward of the Londelosi Game Reserve in South Africa, and author of “The Lion Tracker’s Guide to
0:34:40 Life” and his memoir, “Cathedral of the Wild.” You can find Boyd on Twitter @BoydVardy.
0:34:44 Boyd, welcome to the show, my friend.
0:34:47 Tim, thanks for having me, man. Great to be with you.
0:34:54 It is great to see you, and I’m sad we’re not doing this in person, but I’m also happy that
0:34:59 you can share a bit about your surroundings. So where is this conversation finding you right now?
0:35:05 Okay, so I’m on the Londelosi Game Reserve in the wild eastern part of South Africa.
0:35:11 I’m sitting in my thatched cottage, and I’m looking out the window. The river
0:35:18 runs below me. And currently, there is a herd of elephants that are moving down from the far
0:35:24 northern bank of the river to come and feed on the delicious, spongy palm trees in the river.
0:35:28 So that should give you a little bit of a sense. They’re two huge ebony trees that kind of frame
0:35:35 the house. And a couple of weeks ago, a leopard hoisted its kill into the tree next to the kind
0:35:38 of verandah of the house. So that should sort of set the scene for people a little bit.
0:35:46 You know, I had a dead bird on my porch two days ago, and I see a squirrel out to my right.
0:35:48 So I feel like we’re kind of on equal footing there.
0:35:56 Now, a couple things. One, I want to tell you that I don’t think I’ve told you actually,
0:36:02 Boyd, and I’m going to pack it up front because I think that I am ashamed of not telling you
0:36:07 earlier. So here you can see it. And for those who are watching video on YouTube, you can see it.
0:36:11 I’ve got a copy of your book here, which you were kind enough to inscribe for me. So the
0:36:16 Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life. I’ve had this for a while now, full of highlights. I read it again
0:36:24 yesterday. And this is one of only a handful of books that has a dedicated shelf in my
0:36:31 guest bedroom at home. So in other words, when people come and visit, I have a few shelves.
0:36:38 So you have The Gift, which is of Hafez poems translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Then you have
0:36:44 How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Then you have Awareness by Anthony Devello.
0:36:48 And then you have The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Vardy. So you have an entire shelf
0:36:53 that people are encouraged to indulge in and take books from in my guest bedroom. And I just
0:36:58 wanted to let you know that. Wow, I find myself in the company of my heroes there. Thank you.
0:37:06 Absolutely. It’s a fantastic book. And we’re going to dig into all sorts of stories that are in the
0:37:12 book. Of course, many stories that I have heard and not heard in person with you. But let’s start
0:37:18 with one that I haven’t heard, that I wanted to dig into it a little bit, just as part of the Genesis
0:37:24 story. Your mom, could you tell us a little bit about your mom? And then I suppose also about your
0:37:30 dad. But specifically the get on with it attitude, as I’ve seen you write it. Well, you know, my
0:37:39 parents met when they were 15 years old. And my grandfather had just died leaving this property.
0:37:43 And everyone in the sort of family advisors had said to my father, well, first thing, you’ve got
0:37:47 to get rid of that property in the wild eastern part of South Africa. You know, it’s bankrupt,
0:37:51 cattle land, there’s nothing going on there. There’s some lions there that you used to hunt,
0:37:56 but lion hunting is dangerous. Get rid of that. And my father stood up in the meeting of family
0:38:03 advisors and he said, no, we’re going to keep it and we’ll find a way to make it pay. And very
0:38:08 soon after that meeting, he met my mother. And with three mud huts and a broken land rover,
0:38:12 they launched themselves into starting a safari business. This was a time in the, you know,
0:38:16 the teeth of apartheid South Africa, there was no one coming to South Africa, like they’re rough.
0:38:21 If it had been an investor pitch, and someone was saying, we’re going to start a game reserve and,
0:38:24 you know, here’s what we want you to invest in, no one would have invested.
0:38:29 But together, out of the love that they had for each other and the passion that they had for the
0:38:34 land, they created this amazing place. It was the love they had for each other, the passion for the
0:38:41 land and a real big dose of we can keep going because this is all we have. And so there was this
0:38:47 incredible attitude in both of them to just push forward, pioneer, keep going, raise your kids with
0:38:52 snakes and no electricity, bring people from all over the world to come stay in a couple of mud
0:38:56 huts, give them an incredible time, flow this amazing energy into them, take them out into
0:39:02 the wild for encounters. And so it was that type of get on with that chutzpah attitude that I was
0:39:06 raised in. And that was my mother through and through, just unbreakable, you know, rub some
0:39:12 onica oil on it was the best we got if you got an injury. And, you know, only call a doctor if
0:39:19 you’re bleeding profusely or you’re going to die. All right. So I have some follow ups.
0:39:24 First of all, everyone’s saying the first thing you have to do is get rid of that land
0:39:30 that says, Nope, we’re going to keep the land. There’s got to be some thought process behind
0:39:35 that because of course there are tremendous consequences to that decision in terms of
0:39:40 life trajectory. Why the decision? Why was that decision made? How was that made?
0:39:45 You know, I think it’s a really good question. I mean, there’s a few parts that the one is that
0:39:52 my great grandfather had bought the land in 1926 after drinking too much gin. And he heard about
0:39:57 these bankrupt cattle farms that were available for sale adjacent to the Kruger National Park.
0:40:02 And he was a lion hunter and he was an adventurer and he said, Well, we’re going to buy. And so
0:40:09 he first came down here in the June of 1926. And he set up the camp, you know, just sort of rugged
0:40:14 canvas under the trees and they would hunt lions. That’s how my grandfather then grew up.
0:40:18 And then that’s how my father and uncle grew up coming down in the winter months,
0:40:22 waking up at dawn, listening for lions to roar and then going out to hunt lions.
0:40:28 And I should say with lion hunting, there’s only two outcomes, either a lion dies or a person dies.
0:40:33 So that gives you a little bit of a sense for the mentality of it. But through those early days
0:40:39 of hunting, already a deep passion had started to take root in my father for the land and in my
0:40:44 uncle, they felt connected to it. It was a place of adventure. It was already a place that was
0:40:50 infused in meaning. So when their father died and they were teenagers and the family advisors said,
0:40:54 Okay, we’ll get rid of it. I think it’s a bit of a combination of the brilliance,
0:41:00 the arrogance and the stupidity of youth that just allowed them to stand up and say, Well,
0:41:05 we’re going to keep it and we’ll make it work. I don’t think that there was forethought in the
0:41:11 decision. They just knew they were grieving. They had lost their father. It was their father’s sacred
0:41:16 place. He loved to go there. And they knew that if they somewhere inside of that grieving process,
0:41:20 they knew that if they let go of the land, they would lose the memory of their father in some way.
0:41:22 And so they held on to it and they decided, Well, we’ll go make it work.
0:41:28 There’s so many different branches of this tree that I can go down. I’m having trouble
0:41:36 with the paradox of choice here. Let me try to prompt a story that will maybe speak to the
0:41:44 get on with it, make it work attitude of both of your parents. Could you please tell the story?
0:41:48 I’m going to give you a fragment here. So a little gingerbread crumb and see if you remember
0:41:59 what I’m referring to. Plain ride bird. Does this mean anything? Okay. I think you’re referring to
0:42:05 the white knuckle charter company. Yeah, that’s the one. So basically what happened is my parents,
0:42:11 they launched the safari business. And it slowly started to become successful. But they started
0:42:16 to run into a problem as my sister and I were getting older, because schools started to become
0:42:21 an issue. So there was obviously no, nowhere to take us to school living out here. So they decided
0:42:27 that what they would do is they would learn to fly and then they would ferry us into the nearest
0:42:34 town and we would sort of attend early preschool or whatever it’s called, like Monday through Wednesday.
0:42:38 And then Wednesday, we would fly back to the reserve and we would be here through the weekend.
0:42:41 And we were basically getting three days of schooling. That seemed like enough to them at the
0:42:47 time. So they took up flying. And my memories of it are when they would pick us up on a Wednesday
0:42:54 afternoon. To be honest, they weren’t great pilots. So they were in a bit of a state. The first 50
0:42:58 hours of being a pilot, there’s a lot of stress about getting it in the air and then safely getting
0:43:02 it back on the ground. So we would arrive and they would say to us, we’re in flying mode right now.
0:43:07 And flying mode meant we could not ask any questions. We had to shut up. Kids, you kids
0:43:11 shut up. We’re in flying mode. And then they had this other sort of drill that they worked
0:43:16 out with each other, which was called pilot in command. And when they were up front there in
0:43:22 the cockpit, the one would say, I am now pilot in command. And if you handed over control, you would
0:43:26 say handing over control. And the other would say, I am now pilot in command, pilot in command,
0:43:31 handing over to pilot in command, I am now pilot in command. And they had this whole drill, right?
0:43:38 The first crash that we were involved in, we came into land and we had a plane. It was a little
0:43:43 Cezna that had a quirk. And let me tell you, when it comes to aviation, you don’t want planes with
0:43:50 quirks. You can have a quirky like pickup truck, but you cannot have a quirky aircraft. The quirk was
0:43:56 that when you pulled the power, not all power cut off. It kept a little bleed of power on.
0:44:01 So my mother was flying the plane. She came into land on the little 800 meter dirt strip.
0:44:06 She cut the power, the plane sort of landed, but it just kept on a little too much power and we
0:44:10 kept going. And she started to say to my father and my sister and I are watching from the back in
0:44:14 flying mode. I can’t get the power off. I can’t get the power off. I can’t get the speed off. And
0:44:18 he says, he’s saying to her, you are pilot in command, you are pilot in command. And she’s
0:44:22 going, I know, but I can’t get the speed off. And eventually she kicks the rudder and the plane
0:44:28 veers off the runway and we hit a marula tree and we stop. That’s our first crash. And it’s
0:44:34 one of those ones, Tim, that if you bring it up today, like at dinner, he will say, we’ll say,
0:44:37 well, you know, I couldn’t get the speed off. And he’ll say, my father will say, well, you
0:44:41 were pilot in command and immediately a fight will develop at dinner. I know I was pilot in
0:44:44 command, but before we hit the tree, do you think you could have pulled the power? You could have,
0:44:50 so like it’s a little tension around it. Anyway, the worst one was we were flying a
0:44:56 short hop. And by this stage, my parents had launched, you know, a bigger safari company.
0:45:01 And they had decided that when they flew, they should actually have a commercial pilot with them.
0:45:06 And so the setup was, it’s a commercial pilot in the left hand seat. It’s my father in the right
0:45:12 hand seat. And then there’s club seating, four seats in the back, but you sit facing each other
0:45:16 like you were on a train, you know, like looking at each other. So we’re flying along and I see
0:45:21 my mother and her friend are sitting opposite me and they’re looking towards the cockpit. I’m looking
0:45:30 back at them. And suddenly we just hear this outrageous like sound and wind fills the cockpit.
0:45:37 And it’s just this incredible rushing sound. Amazing sound. Looking at my mother and her
0:45:43 friend next to her, it looks like pulp fiction. There is just blood and guts all over them.
0:45:49 It looks like someone took a bird, put it in a blender and made like a bird smoothie and then
0:45:54 threw it over them. They’ve got a wing on their head. They’ve got a foot on their shoulder. They
0:46:00 are covered in blood and guts. And so I turn and I look back at the cockpit. The front window
0:46:07 of the plane is gone. The pilot is conked out. He’s passed out in his seat. And my father is
0:46:14 like orientating himself in the madness. And right at that moment, as he sort of, as my father got
0:46:20 his bearings, I saw him grab the controls and then he looked back at me and said, “I am pilot in
0:46:28 command.” And so now we realize we’ve got a situation. What had happened is we had hit
0:46:35 a stalk, direct bird strike, and the bird had come in the window. And in fact,
0:46:42 the bird had hit the pilot. The beak had gone into the skin between the pilot’s skull and the skin.
0:46:48 So he had a beak sticking out of his face and a bit of stalk neck sticking out of his face.
0:46:54 And he’s totally passed out. Meantime, my father has taken control of the plane. The woman on the
0:46:58 backseat screaming next to my mom is going, “We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die.” And
0:47:03 that’s when my mother gave her the patented mother slap, slapped her twice and said, “We are not going
0:47:09 to die.” And then out of nowhere, my mother reaches into her sort of handbag and pulls out
0:47:15 a flight call sheet. And she starts screaming standard emergency practices to my father.
0:47:22 “Call SOS Base. Request emergency landing.” And he’s ticking off things. Now at this point,
0:47:29 the pilot starts to wake up. And he wakes up and he’s slowly gaining his bearings. And
0:47:37 as he looks around, he has this strange kind of dot in his vision. And as he’s looking around,
0:47:43 the dot follows him. And he eventually puts his hand up. And what it is, it’s the stalk’s neck
0:47:48 sticking out of his face that everywhere he looks, it’s in his line of sight because it’s connected
0:47:53 to his face. And it was at that moment that he grabbed the neck and the beak of the stalk and
0:47:59 he pulled it out of his face and looked at it and then passed out again. And I don’t know if
0:48:03 you’ve ever seen a head wound, but head wounds bleed nicely. And so he’s bleeding quite intensely.
0:48:09 It’s pandemonium back there, but my folks have got the controls. They call the airport. My father
0:48:14 starts the descent and eventually the pilot wakes up and he comes to and he’s actually, he’s all
0:48:18 right. And he takes over control of the plane again. And we do an emergency landing. And the
0:48:24 funny thing about it was we were flying from the reserve to go and catch a commercial flight.
0:48:31 So we landed at a commercial airport and we got out covered in stalk, stalk wing and stalk foot
0:48:35 and stalk guts. And we walked into the terminal building and I said to my mother, well, what
0:48:40 do we do now? She said, just board the flight and look forward. So we got onto the plane,
0:48:44 looking like we had been in the Texas chainsaw massacre and just sat down next to regular folks
0:48:49 traveling, covered in guts and blood and just sat there and looked forward and flew to our
0:48:55 next destination like nothing had happened. But it was a, you know, we grew up in a real
0:49:00 wild way. We grew up in a pioneering way and my parents were irrepressible, I think is the word,
0:49:05 which you kind of have to be to run a safari business where things, you know, running a safari
0:49:10 business, you’re out in nature and things are happening and unexpected things are happening
0:49:16 almost continuously. So that was kind of my wild youth in some ways, you know, it was very,
0:49:22 very orientated towards that kind of South African wildness. And also I think that we were,
0:49:27 we’ve changed a lot over the years, but and we’ve been in our own healing journeys and our own
0:49:31 healing journeys have changed us as a family for sure. But for many years there, we were just kind
0:49:37 of packing on, you know, I guess we were frozen by some trauma ourselves and we were just living
0:49:43 as wildly through it as we could. Hmm. Well, I remember the first time when I was, when I was
0:49:49 sorry, man, I totally forgot about the boarding, the, the next connecting.
0:49:58 All that covered moments. Yeah. It’d be hard to get past TSA, covered in, covered in viscera.
0:50:06 Good Lord. So let’s talk about another element I believe of your childhood. You could tell me
0:50:10 when this first enters the picture, we’re going to bounce all over the place. And please correct
0:50:16 my pronunciation. When did the Shangan trackers say Shangan? How do you pronounce that properly?
0:50:22 Shangan. There we go. Shangan trackers enter the picture in your life. And who are they?
0:50:28 If you could answer that in either order. Well, firstly, let me say something about the Shangan
0:50:34 people. The Shangan people are the most wonderful people that I’ve had time to spend time with in
0:50:40 Africa. They were a splinter tribe of the Zulu people. And basically they, they went on a
0:50:44 warring party and they found themselves in Southern Mozambique and they decided that they were
0:50:49 actually more peaceful people. They didn’t want to be involved in the Zulu armies warlike ways
0:50:56 and they broke away and they really pastoral people, amazing storytellers, incredible trackers
0:51:00 because they love to observe things and tell stories. And so from the time my father and uncle
0:51:06 were very young and from the time that I was very young, I was lucky to spend time with some of the
0:51:10 best Shangan trackers in the world, men who had grown up hunting and gathering in the region.
0:51:16 And the transition that we went through as a family is we grew up tracking to hunt and then we,
0:51:21 once we had a kind, our kind of enlightenment experience and we decided we must partner with
0:51:25 the land and we must think of the animals as our kin. We continued tracking, but it was to find
0:51:31 animals for photographic safaris. And so from the time that I was extremely young, I was apprenticed
0:51:38 to these master Shangan trackers. And I spent hundreds of hours learning the art form of following
0:51:45 an animal across wild terrain and learning how to be attuned to the language of the wilderness. And
0:51:49 I was listening to your interview with Noah Feldman and he was talking about how language
0:51:53 attunes you in a different way to a culture. And if you can think of tracking, tracking is
0:51:59 essentially the language of the wilderness. You’re learning the signs, the sounds, and as your
0:52:04 knowledge as a tracker deepens, it’s like you’re being let into another level. And the Shangan
0:52:09 people were deeply attuned to this and they taught me that from a young age. And really the success
0:52:14 of Londolosie, one of the major success points for us is to create a bit of context for how the
0:52:21 safari business came together. My father was 15, my uncle was 17, my mother was about 15 too,
0:52:26 and they were going to launch the safari business. Most of the land at that time, because the cattle
0:52:33 had overgrazed the land, it was kind of an eye high scrub. And all of the animals were here,
0:52:38 but you didn’t really see them. And in fact, they had been hunted. So any animals you saw were
0:52:44 trying to get away from you. And really my, my parents struggled to get the safari business going.
0:52:51 And then they had a defining moment. And that was the arrival of a kind of maverick ecologist
0:52:57 by the name of Ken Tinley. And Ken was an amazing guy. He was a high school dropout
0:53:03 who got admitted to a biological sciences degree because he drew a picture of a moth
0:53:10 with such intricate detail that the dean of the faculty put him in. And he studied his biological
0:53:15 sciences degree. And then he went to live alone in Mozambique and write a dissertation. And during
0:53:21 this time living alone, Ken had this incredible encounter with wilderness. And he felt deeply
0:53:26 attuned to it. And the way he described it, he said, it felt like he could feel the rivers moving
0:53:31 through his veins. And he became aware of how the moisture traveled through the terrain and how that
0:53:37 informed the flora and how that then informed the fauna. And he was just deeply in tune. And he
0:53:42 showed up next to the campfire one day where these young upstarts were trying to get the safari
0:53:47 business going. And he said to them, if you want this place to work, you must partner with the
0:53:52 land. You must think of the animals as your kin. And you must make sure that the local
0:53:58 Shangan people are invited to participate in this restoration. And so they said to him,
0:54:02 well, partner with the land, what do you mean? And he said, come, I’ll show you.
0:54:10 And he walked them out onto the scrub encroached land. And he said to them, when the cattle overgraze
0:54:15 the land, the moisture falls. But instead of penetrating the soil, it runs off in these deep
0:54:20 erosive furrows. So what you do is you clear away the scrub, and you take that scrub and you pack it
0:54:25 into the furrows. And it’s kind of like putting the plug back in the bath. And with that, you start
0:54:31 to charge the grassland with moisture. And he started to show them how to restore the micro
0:54:38 catchments on the property. And I really grew up, one of the first imprints of my psyche was
0:54:42 watching the land being restored. I would go to a place where there was eye high scrub,
0:54:47 and then I would see the destitution as you cut it out. And then you would go back there a year
0:54:52 later, and there would be a herd of waterbuck on it and a herd of zebra, and then a rhino walking
0:54:58 through it in the late evening. And so my first impulses, I believe as a healer came out of watching
0:55:03 the way that life knows how to bring itself forth. And then one day after a day spent working on the
0:55:10 land, my father and my uncle were driving home, and in the late afternoon light, a female leopard
0:55:15 stepped out onto the road in front of them. And up until that point, any leopard you saw was ears
0:55:21 back running to get away from you. They’d been hunted. But this leopard stopped, and she turned,
0:55:27 and she looked at them. And for a moment, she allowed herself to be seen. And then she growled,
0:55:31 and they saw that she had this one broken canine. And then she slipped away from there.
0:55:36 And they drove home in silence, and they stopped the vehicle. And my uncle, who was a rugged,
0:55:41 aggressive, wild type guy, they sat there for a moment in silence. And then he looked at my father,
0:55:48 and he said, whatever just happened, that’s my future. And I’ve been deeply interested in that
0:55:52 my whole life, you know, to your point, like, what made them say, we’re going to try and take on the
0:55:58 creation of the safari business. What made my great grandfather after too many jinn say I’m
0:56:03 going to buy? What made my uncle say in that moment, that’s my future? How do we know when we know?
0:56:08 So what my uncle did is he teamed up with a Shangan tracker, one of the best trackers in the area,
0:56:13 man by the name of Elmon Amlongo. And Elmon is actually rainy us in the books, brother. It’s
0:56:18 incredible hunter gatherer, incredibly in tune. Before we get to Elmon, if you could just as
0:56:25 context, because people hear tracking good trackers, they might not realize just how far back a lineage
0:56:32 of tracker to tracker to tracker tradition might extend. Are we talking hundreds of years,
0:56:37 thousands of years, tens of thousands of years? I mean, how far back does it go, right? This type
0:56:44 of skill development and generational passing down. I mean, this goes back to our early origins.
0:56:50 Some people say that tracking is in some ways the beginning of science because it’s the beginning
0:56:56 of deduction. It’s the beginning, the first time that someone looked at a abstract imprint
0:57:02 and started to apply meaning to it. And it’s an art form that has been alive. It lives inside
0:57:07 of people because it has been passed on through generations. A tracker will teach another tracker
0:57:13 the way. And so I think of it as this art form that you can’t hang on the wall or it like literally
0:57:17 has to be alive in a person to survive. Didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to kind of
0:57:22 set the stage, right? Because people think like, oh, my grandfather did this, my dad did this,
0:57:28 I now do this. Therefore, we have this extensive lineage, which is true on some scale. But when
0:57:36 you refer to one of these master trackers, it’s quite a different level of longevity in terms of
0:57:42 the bloodline and the development of that skill. Ancient. Back to the origins of humanity.
0:57:49 Yeah. And when you are tracking, you are connected to that entire lineage, which is
0:57:54 amazing feeling. What I’m doing right now, thousands of years ago, someone did this
0:57:59 very same practice. Yeah. And Elman was just brilliant in the bush. And so what my uncle and
0:58:04 him did is for the next 12 years, they woke up every morning and they went out and they tracked
0:58:12 that leopard. And just insane drive and dedication. And sometimes they would go two weeks without
0:58:16 seeing her and they would be putting together the clues. They’d be following the tracks.
0:58:21 And then it started to be that they would find her and she would allow herself to be viewed
0:58:28 from two, 300 yards in a vehicle. And then slowly over time, that space, that distance,
0:58:32 started to close. And eventually, after a few years of this, it got to the point where they
0:58:37 could actually drive one of these old Landrovers in next to her. And she had developed a relationship
0:58:43 of trust with them that is a totally wild leopard. And she knew that these men meant her no harm.
0:58:48 We called that leopard the mother leopard, because she went on to have eight letters of
0:58:54 cubs. And all of those cubs grew up modeling their mother’s trust. And so she was the mother
0:58:59 for two reasons. One, because she was the mother of all these cubs. And second, because really,
0:59:04 she was the mother of the birth of the safari business, because word got out that there was a
0:59:10 place in the middle of South Africa where no one wanted to go, where you could go and see a wild
0:59:17 leopard. And that allure is still alive inside of people today. But it would have been absolutely
0:59:23 impossible without the skills and the brilliance of the Shangan trackers to be able to go out into
0:59:28 a vast wilderness and attune yourself to the faint tracks of where this animal had walked,
0:59:34 to listen for alarm calls, to listen to bird language, and to start to get to know her movement
0:59:38 patterns, her territories, where she liked to den. All of that made it possible and it wouldn’t
0:59:43 have been possible without great trackers. And so really, the legacy of londelosi is a legacy of
0:59:48 relationships between trackers and wild animals. You mentioned a name that comes up a lot in the
0:59:53 line trackers, Guide to Life, who’s, of course, a fascinating character in the book. And I’m sure
1:00:00 in real life, even more so fascinating. Renius, is that how you say this name properly? Renius
1:00:06 Matanjana Jampaches Imlongo. That’s exactly what I was going to say. That’s what I was going to
1:00:15 say. I’ll stick with Renius for short. Now, I want to prompt, maybe as a way of describing Renius
1:00:21 and introducing him, a question that came, or a cue, that came from one of our mutual friends,
1:00:28 Josh Weitzkin. And he said, “Ask Boyd about Renius not returning to camp a few weeks ago
1:00:32 when tracking, I think, a male lion when all the clients wanted to come back.”
1:00:36 That’s great. Could you tell this story? Are you open to that?
1:00:42 Yeah. Well, Renius is firstly one of the best trackers in the world. I would say that he’s
1:00:48 top five. He’s deeply attuned. And what, and my definition of mastery is someone who can be
1:00:54 themselves in any situation. And really, what makes Renius special is that he’s able to totally
1:01:00 be himself wherever he goes. And I’m sure you’ve seen this in other disciplines. He’s one of those
1:01:07 rare masters who’s able to translate the intangibles of what he knows how to do. You learn by being
1:01:13 around him. You learn by absorbing his presence, watching how he moves. But he’s also quite good
1:01:16 at teaching, which makes him really exceptional. Because a lot of trackers, you’ll say to them,
1:01:21 “Well, why did you know to go down there? Why did you know to check that riverbed?”
1:01:25 And they just sort of say, “I just knew.” Renius is able to dissect it a little bit for you. But
1:01:32 this to me is the level of his mastery. We ran a retreat, a tracking retreat. We had some folks
1:01:36 from all over the world who had come on one of our tracking retreats. And it was day four.
1:01:42 And we had had an exceptional time. We had found and followed animals. The night before, we had
1:01:48 slept out in the bush. And so the next morning we woke up, we found tracks of a single male lion,
1:01:54 and we began to follow. And after two or three hours, I could see that the guests who were on
1:01:58 the retreat were tiring. They were running out of gas. They’d been keeping watch all night.
1:02:01 Could you explain what you mean by that? Keeping watch all night? Afraid that lions
1:02:05 are going to eat them all night? Yeah, on the retreat, one of the nights we had slept on the
1:02:12 ground in the open, no vehicle, no tents. And each person had been asked to keep watch. It’s
1:02:18 this deeply archetypal experience to be awake around the fire. It definitely changes what the
1:02:25 fire means to you. It’s this ancient primordial sense of fire, safety. And each person keeps
1:02:29 watch through the night. And it’s beautiful. You’re alone, owls calling stars above you,
1:02:33 and this alertness alive inside of you as you keep watch for your friends.
1:02:38 What are you keeping watch? I guess, I guess, sorry, not to bog the story down, just for a
1:02:45 second. Like if John from KPMG in Chicago who’s never camped before comes to a tracking retreat,
1:02:51 I would be kind of nervous trusting John to keep me alive while I slept. So I probably wouldn’t
1:02:56 sleep. I’m just wondering what one does when they’re keeping watch. No offense to KPMG.
1:03:02 Well, no, you know what? No, John from KPMG taking contact. Well, the thing is, is that
1:03:09 the minute you get out there and night starts to fall and some lions roar nearby and an elephant
1:03:15 walks past your camp and comes to investigate, what’s pretty amazing, Tim, is that no one misses
1:03:22 the gravity of the situation. There’s something about night falling. I watch people switch on.
1:03:28 And I explained to them that if you if you fall asleep during your watch or you don’t do this
1:03:34 properly, someone can get badly injured. And so people take it very seriously. And your job on
1:03:40 watch is to be an aware presence. And you get armed with a really good torch. You listen.
1:03:47 That’s flash. Flashlight for you. Flashlights. You listen. And if any animal comes, you have
1:03:51 to be aware of its presence. And there’s an amazing thing. If you’re aware of an animal’s
1:03:54 presence, it’s aware that you’re aware of it. And that’s the critical safety piece.
1:03:59 And we’ve never, in all the years we’ve been doing it, and we’ve slept out with many,
1:04:03 many people, we’ve never had anyone let us down because people feel the gravity of it.
1:04:07 And something does wake up inside of them. So anyway, back to the story.
1:04:12 We suffice to say they didn’t sleep very well. They didn’t sleep very well.
1:04:17 So like 10 o’clock the next morning, they were flagging and we decided because we’d had such
1:04:22 a good time and we’d been so lucky with the tracking already, we were going to call it there.
1:04:25 We were going to say, guys, we’re going to leave this track and we’re going to head back to the camp.
1:04:32 Now, Ranias has been 30 years into guiding people, you know, even more 35 years into
1:04:39 guiding people and then another section working as a trainer. He says, you guys go back to camp,
1:04:45 I can’t leave this track. And I’m fascinated by that moment because there are so many hundreds
1:04:50 of guides, so many hundreds of people who say, you know what, our guests are happy, eggs benedict
1:04:55 back at the camp. But his mastery is that he can’t leave it. There is something laid down in front
1:05:01 of him that he’s curious about. He’s interested and he has to know something in the tracker has to
1:05:09 discover, has to find out. And the scope of the years of his practice and the fact that he
1:05:15 makes that decision to stay out there hot tired without water, he needs to know that is his art
1:05:20 form. He needs to be in it. There’s something very special about that to me. Which animals
1:05:27 are hardest to track at LONDOLOSI? You mentioned a leopard, right? So a leopard in my mind,
1:05:33 I think of solitary animal, as I understand it, sleeps in trees, at least part of the time,
1:05:38 as I understand it again, I have no understanding of leopards. So think of them as difficult
1:05:46 to track for a number of different reasons. But which animals that you track are easiest and
1:05:51 which are hardest? Oh, well, I think you’ve nailed it. They’re leopard by some margin is the most
1:05:59 difficult. One, it walks, it’s solitary, and it walks incredibly likely. And it, its nature is
1:06:05 solitary and secretive. It likes to operate in thick terrain. Anytime you’re seeing a leopard,
1:06:11 the leopard is allowing you to see it, which to me has this beautiful mystery that it cloaks it in.
1:06:16 So leopard by quite some margin would be the most difficult. And, and we’ve had trackers here who’ve
1:06:22 become real specialists at following leopards. We used to have a tracker by the name of Richard
1:06:30 Soella. And Soella was, he was meticulous in his dress, and he was gruff, and he was hard to get
1:06:36 along with. He was rude to most people. He had that kind of, that arrogance born of being brilliant.
1:06:41 He deserved all the arrogance he had because he was so good. And he used to do this thing where
1:06:45 if all the trackers had been out in the morning and they’d been following a leopard,
1:06:50 they would come back to camp. They’d been unsuccessful. They had a last track, but they had
1:06:55 lost it. He would go back there. And it used to be my favorite thing. He would go back at 12 o’clock
1:07:00 in the afternoon. He would refuse to go with anyone else. He wanted to go alone. And he would
1:07:05 slowly start to work that track. And then eventually at like six o’clock in the evening, you’d get a
1:07:10 radio call and it would be Richard. And he would say, I’ve located this leopard. He would tell you
1:07:19 where it was. And then his final refrain was Richard Soella is number one. And he did it,
1:07:24 he did it so consistently. And Richard Soella was number one.
1:07:28 That’s amazing. That is amazing. Technical question, 12 noon. So I would think that
1:07:35 high noon would actually be a hard time to track because it wouldn’t cast shadows as well. But
1:07:40 is the reason for doing that that the animals are bedded down due to the heat so that you’re
1:07:45 able to track while they’re in one place? Why would he go out at 12 noon?
1:07:52 One is he’s showing people how good he is because you’re right, the direct light creates a flat
1:07:56 aspect on the ground. The light is flat. And so you’re right, there’s no shadow, there’s no
1:08:02 contrast. When the light is lower, it bounces off where the animal has stepped in a, it changes the
1:08:06 texture on the earth. He’s going at midday because no one else wants to go out in the heat. He’s
1:08:11 showing I go out in the heat. He’s going at midday because the light is flat. And he’s saying I go
1:08:16 out when the light is flat. He’s going at midday because he knows that that leopard is going to
1:08:21 be lying up somewhere. And so if he can get a track, he can close the distance on it while it’s not
1:08:26 moving. And all of those are saying Soella is number one.
1:08:33 It’s so great. I love that. So let me ask, because people will no doubt be wondering,
1:08:41 what type of protection does one have when, say, Reneus goes out to track with clientele?
1:08:47 Do you have the equivalent of a SWAT team with you with rifles at the ready in case any danger
1:08:51 presents itself? I think I know the answer to this, but just because I know people may have
1:08:54 a question mark in their minds. What type of protection do you guys carry?
1:09:00 When we are tracking with clients, we will carry rifles and always if we’re running specifically
1:09:06 tracking retreats, we will be a two rifle operation. But really the protection is way upstream of that.
1:09:10 In all of my years in the bush, I’ve never had to use the rifle.
1:09:16 The art form of tracking is what makes you safe. And when you’re with someone like Reneus,
1:09:23 the safety profile just becomes exceptionally safe because he’s so attuned. And so it’s a
1:09:28 capacity to read the terrain, to make good decisions, to be attuned to the freshness of
1:09:34 the track where those animals will be, how we should approach different terrain, attuned to the
1:09:41 birds, bird language. And then where Reneus is even more exceptional is that the way that an
1:09:47 animal communicates with you is through a state of presence. If it is unhappy with you, it conveys
1:09:55 energy through the way its body shapes. And really amazing trackers are able to read that body language
1:10:01 and almost speak back to it in the way they move their body. And you can convey a very profound,
1:10:05 unspoken language. And I think of it as a language of energy or a language of presence.
1:10:10 And that is really what makes you safe. As that animal, if you see that animal, how you
1:10:15 convey your intentions to it, your mood, what you do, if it does become aggressive with you,
1:10:20 how you meet that and shape the unspoken conversation between you.
1:10:27 I want to bring up one of the lines from The Line Tracker’s Guide to Life that
1:10:33 it certainly pops to mind quickly when I think about this book. I’m sure it’s a line that a lot
1:10:37 of people bring up. I know it’s a line that Josh has brought up. And I’d love to just hear you
1:10:45 explain why this is in the book and why it matters. Quote, “I don’t know where we’re going,
1:10:50 but I know exactly how to get there.” Oh, I love that, don’t you? I love it. Absolutely.
1:10:57 It’s really, if you take a moment to pause and contemplate it, the implications are pretty
1:11:05 profound. So I’d love to just hear you riff on this and why and how this ended up in the book.
1:11:10 Well, there were two things that Reneas used to say regularly. The one is, “Hishatikuma,
1:11:17 we will get it.” And it was almost like this kind of incredible self-talk that he would have when
1:11:22 the track was cold or the track was, “We weren’t making progress.” I would look at him and he would
1:11:29 say, “Hishatikuma, we’re going to get this.” And then often he would say to, “I don’t know
1:11:32 where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.” And what he’s saying, he’s talking to
1:11:38 the dynamic of tracking, which is, it’s an interesting energetic dynamic. He is profoundly
1:11:44 committed to finding that animal, but he hasn’t allowed that commitment to become a burden of
1:11:49 some kind. He is working moment to moment on the signs that he’s getting. And you can think in a
1:11:55 vast wilderness as trackers, we also talk about the first track. In a vast wilderness, 360 degrees
1:12:01 of wild terrain, all he needs is the next first track and then the next first track and then the
1:12:09 next first track and the next first track. And he’s able to dial down the infinite possibilities
1:12:13 of where that animal could have gone to a moment of knowing and a moment of presence and then
1:12:19 another moment of knowing and another moment of presence. And all he needs is that next sign.
1:12:23 So he doesn’t know where it’s going, but he knows how to get there, the next moment of presence,
1:12:28 the next thing I know to do. And it might be a good segue there into just telling you a little
1:12:33 bit about how the tracking process changed for me over the years, but let me know if you want to
1:12:41 go. So I had these encounters, Tim, whereby I had a childhood following animals and learning
1:12:46 this art form and really the dynamics and the psyche of the tracker, how a tracker approached
1:12:52 the process of finding an animal in the middle of nowhere. And then watching how consistently
1:12:56 good trackers delivered an outcome, they found the animal they were looking for. And so that,
1:12:59 and at that time as a young child, I thought I was learning that skill.
1:13:06 And then through my early twenties, I had a series of pretty traumatic encounters. And the
1:13:12 result of that was that by the time I was about 23 or 24 years old, I had found myself frozen by
1:13:18 trauma. I felt I was depressed. I was uncertain how to move forward. And in the way that trauma
1:13:25 limits options, I felt myself extremely limited. I did not have access to, you know, a lot of
1:13:31 emotionality. I did not have access to different choices. I was stuck. And at that time, I was
1:13:36 very lucky to meet a woman who came on Safari. She became my first mentor. And the reason I
1:13:43 guided her was because Alex, my friend who also features in the book, he had guided her a year
1:13:48 before. And he said to me, she’s a martial artist. And I was very interested in martial arts, as I
1:13:53 know you are. And so I went into the guide room. And in the guide room, there was this board where
1:13:58 every guide got their name put next to the clients who were coming in. And I rubbed off
1:14:03 someone else’s name and I put my name next to her to guide her. And that moment absolutely changed
1:14:09 my life. Her name was Dr. Martha Beck. And she arrived on the Safari and we went out the first
1:14:16 two days. And she said something on the second day that I felt something in me like really moved.
1:14:21 We were driving along and I was telling her about the restoration of the land. And she said,
1:14:26 I really understand this. And I believe the restoration of the planet will come out of a
1:14:31 transformation in human consciousness. And the minute she said it, you know, whatever my grandfather
1:14:35 knew or my father knew or my uncle knew when he saw that leopard, I felt that thing move inside of
1:14:44 me. That kind of that idea struck me very deeply. And then on about the fourth day, I driven back
1:14:49 to the camp and you know, I’m in my Safari gear. I got my rifle. I’m the guide. I’m rugged guy.
1:14:56 I’m out there tracking lions. And she turned and she looked at me and she said, I’m ready to talk to
1:15:01 you. And I was sort of a take in the back. I said, well, what do you mean? She said, I can see what
1:15:04 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
1:15:09 here. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those instances where someone sees you when you’re
1:15:15 in one of those places. But I felt myself becoming really uncertain. And then I felt tears starting
1:15:21 to come to my eyes. And then there was this moment where this woman is hugging the Safari guide and
1:15:27 just consoling me. And she was an incredible healer and she was exceptionally adept at
1:15:35 transformational processes. And so she started to teach me how to move through the trauma and
1:15:42 the suffering that I was stuck in. And as that happened, my relationship to tracking started
1:15:47 to change. And I started to see this art form in a different way. And I realized that I was looking
1:15:53 for something. And all of the skills and the mentality of the tracker was highly adept to
1:15:58 being in a transformational process. The first thing that you will have to do if you want to go
1:16:05 track a lion in the wild is you will have to become super uncomfortable with unknowns. You will have
1:16:09 to give up all the ways you tried to know what to do and say, I don’t know how to do this.
1:16:16 All trackers operate using unknowns to almost bring them to life. You will need to develop
1:16:22 your track awareness. Track awareness is teaching yourself to be attuned to a very specific set
1:16:28 of signs, metrics, but self-generated. Like when I was a kid, Renius would take me out to a game
1:16:33 path and he would say, walk down that game path and tell me what you see. And I would come back
1:16:38 and I would say to him, I saw a herd of impala walk there. And he would say, I’m fine. From
1:16:45 a long foot, young boy, go look again. And as I was walking away, he would say, put your head down
1:16:50 like the way an animal drinks, put your head right down against the trail and look like you’re
1:16:55 drinking water like an animal. And I would come back and I would say, I can see where the herd
1:16:59 of impala walked, but they actually walked over the tracks of a leopard. And I can see where a
1:17:04 mouse ran across the path and then an owl swooped down and its wing touched the ground. And each
1:17:11 time I walked down that path, under his guidance, there was more information. And that idea became
1:17:15 very important to me, the idea that there is information in your life if you are looking for
1:17:21 transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it. And so what do you need to attune to
1:17:26 in transformational processes? Things that make you feel expensive, things that make you feel alive,
1:17:30 letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards,
1:17:34 noticing what you’re curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that
1:17:39 make you feel more alive. So I started to see, see through the eyes of the tracker, the first
1:17:45 track, you know, the first track being the next thing you know to do, letting go of, you know,
1:17:51 where that animal might be or letting go of where you think you should be and just doing the next
1:17:56 thing you know to do and the next thing you know to do. If you watch great trackers, they drop into
1:18:01 what I call the following state. And it’s so beautiful if you watch Alex and Renius in the
1:18:07 following state. The following state could be defined almost as constant creative response
1:18:12 to what is occurring. If the track cuts left, Alex will click and he’ll say I’m on the track.
1:18:17 If it cuts right, Renius will be on it. They’re getting a sense of the mood of the animal.
1:18:21 They’re using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving and in that way,
1:18:26 like almost feel the animal as it’s walking out ahead of them. At the same time, they are vectoring
1:18:30 and they are getting a sense of their bearings using waypoints of marula trees up ahead.
1:18:34 When you watch them, they’re almost having fun in it. They’re playing.
1:18:39 They’re playing on that track. And so you will need to develop the following state in your own
1:18:44 transformational process. How can you play? How can you be creative with not knowing what you’re
1:18:48 trying to create or this place you’re trying to get to but being open and willing and aware and
1:18:55 attuned? You will almost certainly lose the track and sort of saying this to see how the tracker
1:19:00 came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing. You will lose the track.
1:19:03 You’ll be in the middle of it thinking I’m deep in the following state. I’m right on track and
1:19:08 then suddenly it’ll be gone. And you will need to build community around you of other great
1:19:13 trackers, people who are willing to move with you, follow with you. And the core of it is really
1:19:19 that there is something inside of you that knows. There is a part of you. You might call it your
1:19:23 wild self. You might call it the track of your life or as native people call it your medicine way.
1:19:30 A part of you that beyond rational thought reacts when you become more in tune with yourself
1:19:34 and sifting away the layers of socialization, all the things you should do,
1:19:39 all the things you have to do to start to be able to follow the trail of that place inside of you
1:19:45 became really what the core of my own journey to healing was. And I live like that to this day
1:19:51 as a tracker, trying to be present, resting into the unknown, attuning and trying to fall into the
1:19:55 following state with what energizes me, makes me curious and pulls me forward.
1:20:04 Thank you for that. It strikes me also that a lot of people who would try to help another start
1:20:13 almost as a hammer looking for nails, right? They don’t listen enough first and it just strikes
1:20:22 me that what Martha did was very much initially demonstrated by her powers of observation,
1:20:27 awareness and attunement. And those are sort of like the core fundamental characteristics
1:20:35 that you need to develop or resurrect before you can really prescribe anything at all. And
1:20:40 the question I want to ask is actually related to the traumatic events. If you’re open to it,
1:20:46 would you be willing to share what happened or some of the examples of what happened in your 20s?
1:20:50 Yeah, just one comment on Martha. Once we started to get onto that level with each other,
1:20:59 when I watched her and I looked at her, what I saw was a superb tracker. She understood how trauma
1:21:05 patterns us. And she was incredibly adept at first tracking the pattern and then starting
1:21:11 to support you in creating a different outcome for yourself or providing tools and options for
1:21:15 different ways of doing it. And as I watched her work with myself and with many other people,
1:21:21 I saw a tracker who would at first just really observe and get to know what they were working
1:21:27 with and be present and attuned. And that’s really what most attracted me to her work.
1:21:32 I saw a tracker of human processes in first and foremost. And that’s probably what I was
1:21:36 mature enough, the frame that I was able to see through at that time as a tracker.
1:21:45 But yeah, to segue into my own experiences, my family, I would say, went through a very difficult
1:21:51 10-year period, a period of intense suffering. And yet that suffering became the place where we
1:21:56 learned to do the work and go inward and start to understand how healing processes work. And so
1:22:02 I’ve gotten to the place now where I’ve fondly looked back on those 10 years of initiation,
1:22:07 you know, university of suffering. But it began for me when my grandmother died,
1:22:13 my father, who had taken the londelosie model of care of land, care of wildlife, care of people,
1:22:20 and he had launched it to 30 other operations around Southern Africa, which Mandela had asked
1:22:25 him to do. And so he had been this big sort of expansion. And then in a classic kind of change
1:22:31 of founder’s trap, he got fired from that. And then very soon into that, South Africa was going
1:22:36 through a very, very difficult time. And one night we were in Johannesburg, and this was
1:22:40 post-elections, but it was still, the country was still really finding its feet. And there was
1:22:48 a ton of violent crimes still happening. And yeah, as I said, I was 18 years old and I woke up
1:22:53 and my sister was shaking me. And immediately as I sat up, I had a gun pushed into my face.
1:22:59 And the home that we were staying in, in Johannesburg on that occasion, had been invaded.
1:23:08 And I just felt the adrenaline pump through my system. And all of my work in healing spaces later,
1:23:13 and I know that you’re involved in psychedelic assisted therapy, has been to try and get a cap
1:23:19 on the scope of where my body goes when it gets a mild trauma, because I woke up into
1:23:25 my worst nightmare. And I looked to my left and my mother’s tied up on the floor and my sister’s
1:23:32 tied up. And I know kind of stories of how these things go, the violence, the potential danger to
1:23:39 women. And it was just like absolute red line fear. And just to see the woman in my life,
1:23:47 my family like that. And so just shocking. And then realizing that, you know, I know I can read
1:23:52 animals, but I can’t quite read people. I mean, I can’t quite read them. It’s they don’t they’re
1:23:55 not as honest as animals. You know, so I just don’t know where this is going to go. And I’m
1:24:02 sitting in this tension. And eventually, they took me outside, these guys who had broken into the
1:24:08 house. And they said to me, we’re going to kill you. So they pulled me outside. And they put a gun
1:24:15 to my head. And they said, this is they basically said, now we’re going to kill you. And, you know,
1:24:20 the fear was so intense. And then I remember looking up the barrel at the man who was holding
1:24:26 the gun to my head. And we looked into each other’s eyes. And in that moment, something happened,
1:24:32 which I can’t say what happened. You might call it the peace of God that path is understanding.
1:24:40 But I think it was too big for my ego structure to hold. And it collapsed. And as I looked at him,
1:24:49 all fear left me. And all concern for my own bodily safety left me. And I just felt a profound
1:24:54 human connection with him. And as that happened, and there were three of these guys standing around
1:25:01 me, as as that moment happened, it was kind of this, this weird, I the only way I can describe it
1:25:05 is a kind of a weirdness came over everyone. It was as if everyone had become glimmered.
1:25:13 And they put the guns down and everyone just stood there confused. And I walked back inside,
1:25:18 totally unaccosted in any way. And I got the car keys. And I walked back out and I gave them
1:25:26 the car keys. And I said, get in that car and leave. And they did. And it was just immensely bizarre.
1:25:32 And and for years, I lived with trying to work out both the terror that I felt and the the fear
1:25:36 that had flooded me, but also trying to integrate like whatever had happened in that moment.
1:25:44 And I’m not sure that I fully understand it, but you know, I felt like I glimpsed through the most
1:25:51 terrifying situation, I glimpsed something. That was a very, very sort of that was the first freezing
1:25:59 experience that I had. It was terrifying. And then on the heels of that, and I think sometimes
1:26:06 of Jung’s description of like, what is unconscious will be made conscious, it will manifest into
1:26:11 your life until you become more conscious about what you’re carrying. A couple of weeks after that,
1:26:16 literally in the same year, myself and some friends and another tracker called Solium Longo,
1:26:22 we went down to the river on the reserve. And it was an extremely hot day. And we left the
1:26:27 people who we were guiding sitting under a tree. And we began to walk upstream in the river.
1:26:33 And Solium stayed on the bank. And I was actually walking in the water. And the water was knee deep,
1:26:39 running over sand. And you could see quite clearly. And then there was a place up ahead where a tree
1:26:45 had fallen over and its branches were in the water. And it was kind of shadowy. And I when I
1:26:48 think of it now, I think if it had been a horror movie, you know, people in the audience would
1:26:52 have started saying, don’t go near the shadowy place. And of course, as I walk past the shadowy
1:26:57 place, I actually sat down just on the edge of those shadows. And my perception was that the
1:27:02 water was too shallow for crocodiles. But of course, the crocodile was in the hole. And
1:27:07 the first thing that you notice when a crocodile grabs you is just the ferocity and the pressure
1:27:13 of the bite. I just felt it slam onto my right leg. And it tries to pull me into the deep section
1:27:18 of the water. I throw my arm up and I grab a branch and it starts to shake me. And I see a
1:27:23 slick of blood appear in the water and then it gets washed downstream. While the crocodile is
1:27:28 shaking me, I see Solly, who’s on the bank, he sees me. And he sees that I’m in trouble.
1:27:33 And he immediately starts making his way towards me. Solly is also a Shangan man, grew up hunting
1:27:39 and gathering. The croc goes to bite me a second time. And I kicked and by the grace of God,
1:27:45 my foot went down its throat and it spat me out. And I pulled myself up into the branches of the
1:27:51 tree. And I have this memory of almost being non local watching myself pull myself up into the
1:27:56 branches of the tree. I got up into the branches and I remember looking over my shoulder and my
1:28:02 leg from the knee down is just absolutely mangled, torn to pieces and meat hanging off. I made a
1:28:08 pact with myself in that moment like never look at that again. I made my way through the branches.
1:28:13 And I fell onto the bank. And I knew that I was extremely vulnerable on the bank. Crocodiles,
1:28:17 it’s an elite predator, if it thinks it can get you and I was on the bank against the water,
1:28:23 it’s going to grab me again. At that point, Solly coming from the other bank arrives at the deep
1:28:28 section of the channel. He’s seen me come out of the water. He’s seen that my leg is mangled.
1:28:35 And he knows that in the deep channel of water between him and I is a crocodile. And I can tell
1:28:39 you that man didn’t slow down not for one second. He plunged into the water. He waded into almost
1:28:44 over his hips and he got to me on the bank and he grabbed me put me on his shoulder and he carried
1:28:50 me up onto the bank. He took his shirt off. He wrapped it around my leg. We were able to call
1:28:56 the folks who are with us and calm them down radio plane that was flying over. And I was able to get
1:29:02 medivac out and and we were able to stop the bleeding so that I would I survived. So, you know,
1:29:09 those two experiences were very alive in me. And maybe this is a side point and and then I’ll
1:29:13 slow down for a while. But, you know, in the in the months after that, I sat many, many times with
1:29:20 Soli. And I said to him, “Soli, you know, why did you come in the water?” And he would look at me
1:29:26 with disdain and he said, “Umpho, unan kingan dinan kinga pel.” He said, “My brother, you’re in trouble.
1:29:31 I’m in trouble.” And at first I thought it was some kind of like, you know, platitude. He was playing
1:29:38 down his actions. But as time went on, I really understood and I came to see that in the way
1:29:43 that Soli grew up, he grew up in a much more collective consciousness. He grew up with his tribe
1:29:50 He grew up hunting and gathering. He grew up in nature. And he lived in a much more interconnected
1:29:55 way than any of us live. In fact, his whole psyche was not formed around individuality.
1:30:02 His psyche was formed around a we consciousness, you and me together, collective consciousness. And
1:30:07 to him, it was fundamental. If I was in trouble, he was in trouble. And so he did not see it as any
1:30:12 kind of heroic action. He just saw it as the most obvious natural thing to do. And that really,
1:30:18 that moved me. And that taught me a lot. I’m going to come back to a couple, a number of things.
1:30:22 First, good Lord, I’m sorry both this things happened, even though it ended up being the
1:30:29 University of Suffering. Those are two excruciating experiences to put it mildly.
1:30:37 But just based on what you said about this collective consciousness, does the word ubuntu
1:30:44 or the concept of ubuntu tie into this in any way? Oh, absolutely. Could you explain that for folks?
1:30:55 Yeah, ubuntu is an African philosophy that says I am because of you. Or people are not people
1:31:01 without other people. And what ubuntu is talking to is the relational nature of life.
1:31:10 And the point I want to make about it is that it is in when you spend time with people with the
1:31:15 ubuntu consciousness is activated in them where ubuntu is alive in them. It is actually a kind
1:31:22 of structuring in their very psyche. They experience things in relation. They experience each other
1:31:29 in a relational way. And they know that knowing yourself and being yourself is about being connected
1:31:37 to people but also to the broader field of sentient life. And so what Soli was activating there
1:31:42 was the ubuntu consciousness. And he was showing that ubuntu consciousness comes alive in action
1:31:46 through courageous action in that case. But very much what he was showing me that day was
1:31:53 how deeply ingrained it was in him the collective nature of life. Another way of saying it Tim is
1:31:59 like and this gets really interesting as you start to learn your own psyche. But different
1:32:06 cultures, the psyches are structured differently. And in a more Western setting, you might say that
1:32:11 in a society where the individual self is disconnected from the greater interconnectivity
1:32:19 of life, the search for meaning is reduced to a constant state of comparison. So people will
1:32:26 always on some level be saying, how am I doing in comparison? And so many people are living with
1:32:30 that without even knowing that that’s how they’re trying to orientate themselves. Whereas if you
1:32:35 grew up in Africa or if you grew up in nature, you grew up relationally. So it’s not comparative,
1:32:39 it’s more like I’m learning about myself through my encounter with the world.
1:32:45 I’m going to try to maybe awkwardly tie a number of things together here. When you and I,
1:32:51 I think it was when we first spent time together. I can’t remember, maybe it was the first time
1:32:59 we spoke, but you were just coming off of living in a tree, if I remember correctly.
1:33:05 If you’re open to talking about that. If not, we can certainly cut it later. But since we’re
1:33:12 talking about it, how many days were you in this tree? So I was 40 days and 40 nights in the tree.
1:33:19 I went into the tree. If you read all the mystical traditions, including I think your man Hafiz on
1:33:24 your bookshelf, but in all the mystical traditions, there seems to be a time when the mystics are
1:33:30 drawn to be alone in nature. And Jesus went for 40 days and 40 nights, but the Buddha went to the
1:33:35 Grove. There’s accounts of it all along the way. And so I wanted to go and have that experience
1:33:40 myself. And I’m not saying I’m a mystic, but I wanted that my question was, why did all of the
1:33:46 mystics go to be in total solitude in nature? And so with a lockdown in the world, suddenly I had six
1:33:51 weeks where I could go and do that, go and sit in that question and see what answers came to me
1:33:58 during that time. Initially, there was a tremendous anxiety. The first couple of days, I had a lot
1:34:04 of thoughts around, I’m going to be away, I’m going to miss something, I’m not attending to, and then
1:34:09 after three days, that all dropped. And I know the Aboriginal people have this amazing saying that
1:34:14 modern culture is three days deep. And after three days, I thought I felt myself go into a
1:34:21 different state of consciousness. I just realized it doesn’t matter. And then I started to attune
1:34:27 myself to the natural world. And a few things happened. The one is that a big insight was that
1:34:32 where your attention goes, your life goes. And if you’re constantly putting your attention on
1:34:40 living things, there’s more aliveness in your own life. That was one. The second was that if you
1:34:45 spend time in nature in the same spot over a period of time, it starts to become incredibly
1:34:53 personal. So it’s not just a bird or that antelope, it’s that bird that roosts in that bush and
1:34:58 flies down the riverbed in the morning and back up the southern bank. And then it feeds for grubs
1:35:02 in this tree. And as you start to become more personally attuned to each animal, you start
1:35:07 to see that there’s a pattern to their movement. And in fact, then you start to find yourself
1:35:12 orientated inside of a series of interlocking intelligences. That is really what the natural
1:35:20 world is. And then at some point, you realize that I’m not observing this, this intelligence that
1:35:26 I’m watching unfold around me. I am fundamentally a part of this. And it stops being a mental
1:35:32 construct. And you start to feel yourself inside of that intelligence. And that’s a very, very deep
1:35:36 experience, or at least it was for me. And I think that that is why at a certain point,
1:35:41 the mystics went to go and get quiet enough to feel themselves inside of that incredible
1:35:46 field of intelligence that is the natural world. I had just radical encounters every day. And I
1:35:53 think that’s another thing about the natural world is things happen. And as things happen each day,
1:35:58 it almost like it helps you make meaning. And in the society, the societies of the modern world
1:36:03 are almost becoming devoid of the structures that allow us to make meaning. But the natural world
1:36:08 is full of encounter. And that encounter generates an aliveness and a relational
1:36:12 meaning making quality that just makes life feel very, very rich. And we lived like that for
1:36:19 thousands of years before we lived on discord. Were there any other aspects of the experience
1:36:25 that were particularly surprising to you in any way? Or any other rules that you set for yourself
1:36:31 that proved either fruitless or fruitful? I mean, the one encounter that comes to mind,
1:36:36 and there were many, you know, lots of solo hours tracking, which felt very special. But on one of
1:36:41 the nights, I got caught in a storm, a thunderstorm rolled in and the heat built all through the
1:36:48 afternoon. And I could see the storm building out over the western horizon. And it started to look
1:36:52 menacing and then even more menacing. And I was living on a flat platform up in the tree.
1:37:00 And eventually the wind started to howl and blow. And then the mother and the father of
1:37:07 a thunderstorm broke around me. And, you know, the lightning bolts were coming around around me.
1:37:10 And I don’t know if you’ve ever been very close to lightning strikes. But the first thing is that
1:37:17 you just hear it go like this. And then the blade comes down. And then the sound goes sonic. But
1:37:24 if you close enough to it, it actually clicks as it hits the ground. Boom. And it started to come
1:37:30 down around me, torrential rain and blades of lightning lighting up around me. And the sound
1:37:35 was just so intense. And I mean, it was just monstrous. I was cast into a deep and overwhelming
1:37:46 fear. And I realized that like true fear is like true fear is kind of a rare experience in modern
1:37:52 life. Yeah, terror, terror, right? Like terror is a it’s a it’s a very distinct thing.
1:37:58 It’s so distinct to like all my anxiety, you know, all the things I worry about,
1:38:04 but like true, raw, I don’t know if we make it out of this fear is actually a very rare encounter
1:38:09 in life. And, you know, it would not end. I just kept saying to myself, like, you can’t be this
1:38:15 scared for so long. Surely it’s just going to pass. And then like another hour and another hour.
1:38:21 And I just kind of weathered it and I felt an incredible. Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s talked
1:38:29 about a lot, but an incredible fragility and an incredible humility. And then the next day,
1:38:34 when I came out of it, I also felt like, Oh God, that scared me so much, but I would,
1:38:38 I would do it again, you know, just like on the other side of it to have been like in a storm
1:38:44 like that was felt felt very, very, very special. I felt like profoundly like a profound encounter
1:38:52 with the force of nature. Do you think you will ever do an extended period solo like that again?
1:38:56 I don’t know if you were totally solo. I have no idea if you were solo, solo, solo,
1:39:00 or I was like solo most of the time, but a few people come out and say hi every once in a while.
1:39:05 But maybe you could clarify that. But do you think you would repeat an experiment like that?
1:39:09 Why or why not? Not necessarily in a tree, but that that degree of solitude.
1:39:14 I mean, without a shadow of a doubt, it is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done.
1:39:21 And I don’t know if I will do six weeks again, but I will certainly try and get 10 days solo
1:39:26 in nature a year with no other people. And in this one, I didn’t see other people.
1:39:30 I was totally by myself. And, you know, there’s amazing things that happen when you buy yourself.
1:39:36 One is, you know, getting really into your own energy, just being in your own energetic field,
1:39:41 then being attuned to nature and feeling your body start to attune to those rhythms,
1:39:45 you know, watching the stars move through the sky all night and feeling yourself naturally
1:39:49 wake up with the dawn and go to sleep when it gets dark and feeling your whole circadian rhythm
1:39:54 attuned to that. What else about it? You know, funny things happen. Like on the one day,
1:40:00 I banged my head. I had a trunk which had dry goods in it, but I banged my hand on the trunk.
1:40:08 I was like, ah, God, you know, damn it. And I flew into a rage. I like I flew into a rage
1:40:15 because it was so painful. And then I realized that with no one else around, I couldn’t maintain
1:40:22 my state of anger. And it’s a really weird thing like sulking, being angry and sulking and moods
1:40:28 and all of that stuff is really for the benefit of other people. It’s really so that other people
1:40:32 can get tuned in to like, what a difficult time you’re having. But when you buy yourself,
1:40:36 they just do not abide because there’s no one around to like stay in the story for.
1:40:43 Well, speaking of mood, part of the reason I’m asking is because I know you and I have both
1:40:49 experienced in life depressive episodes. And I suppose there’s part of me that thinks, man,
1:40:54 40 days is a long time to be alone with the voices in your head. But did you find,
1:40:59 how did you find that experience? Was that even a concern going into it for you?
1:41:02 How did you, if you did think about it, how did you think about that?
1:41:07 No, I mean, certainly a concern. And then there’s also this weird component of time, right? Like
1:41:12 you wake up at four in the morning, you meditate, you go tracking for a few hours, you come back
1:41:18 to the camp, you make some coffee, you run, you do some more reading and journaling, you meditate
1:41:28 again, and it’s 10 15. And you have 39 days to go. So the one thing is that I, you know, I was not
1:41:33 doing like traditional Zen retreat, I allowed myself books. I allowed myself to do daily
1:41:39 recordings of my encounters, like kind of journal entries. And I allowed myself to go
1:41:43 tracking. And so actually, it was incredibly generative for me. And there’s all these like
1:41:47 little problems you have to solve, like you got to keep your camp clean, and then everything gets
1:41:51 wet. And then you got to work out how to build yourself a bit of shelter. And then once you
1:41:55 become more present, it becomes so full of life, like I would make myself this evening shower,
1:42:01 I’d go full some full of big cast iron kettle with water. And then I would warm it on the fire.
1:42:06 And then I would pour this kettle of hot water over myself totally alone, up in the tree. It was
1:42:11 the best shower I’ve ever had. And just it was teaching me presence all the time. And once the
1:42:16 anxiety left, there was a lot of introspection. And I looked at a lot of things, but I actually
1:42:22 didn’t feel myself taken by anxious or depressive demons. The process felt very generative and alive
1:42:28 to me. Yeah, that’s something that I’ve been looking at very, very closely for myself. And I
1:42:34 don’t think I’ve yet perhaps developed the eyes or the awareness to parse it. But the characteristics
1:42:45 or the circumstances that lead to nourishing solitude versus depleting isolation, right? Because
1:42:50 those are very different. For me, those concepts represent very different things, right? Solitude
1:42:56 versus isolation or loneliness. How does it feel for you now? Like if you went, if you went alone
1:43:01 for a week to a cabin now, how does it land on you now? A week I could do. A week I can do. And
1:43:06 I could find that, I think, very restorative. I particularly find it restorative if I am with
1:43:17 Molly, my dog, and have that close connection. Going through wilderness with Molly is particularly
1:43:23 nourishing to me. I can also do it solo. But I find that she and I are so attuned at this point
1:43:29 because we spend almost all of our waking time together, that she’s like my external nervous
1:43:34 systems. She’s almost like an amplifier from my own nervous system. So I’m picking up what I’m
1:43:39 picking up, but I’m also picking up a lot of what she is picking up just by observing her behavior.
1:43:48 And that is very additive for me. And also deep into my relationship, not only with the
1:43:55 surroundings and with myself on some level, but with her. So a week I would take no problem.
1:43:59 I think the six weeks starts to get out to a point where I’m like, I wonder, right? There’s
1:44:04 just a question mark because I haven’t done six weeks solo. That’s a pretty good stretch of time.
1:44:10 Yeah. I mean, I will say that it was largely supplemented by the passion for tracking.
1:44:16 And so your encounter with feeling the presence of Molly there and being in this thing together,
1:44:22 like my feeling is every time I’m tracking, I’m in a new story. Every time I’m out there
1:44:28 following, I’m in a deep encounter and it actually feels like there’s this alive,
1:44:34 sentience awareness. One of the things that I would say is that when I first went out,
1:44:39 I thought that part of what I was doing is I wanted to improve my attunement to nature,
1:44:45 like I wanted to know nature. But one of the most profound experiences out of it was that I started
1:44:51 to feel known by nature. And I know that this maybe veers us off a little bit into the esoteric,
1:44:57 but there was this feeling that there’s this sentient, alive consciousness and somehow
1:45:03 it was feeling me as I was feeling it in a really deep way. And that felt actually,
1:45:10 that felt incredibly supportive and like I was touching something really beautiful and special.
1:45:16 I think there’s a lot to that, but lest we get too far down the rabbit hole into crazy town,
1:45:22 which maybe we’ll do on a round two, definitely do around a campfire in person.
1:45:27 But I think there’s actually a lot there related to what you just said. I do want to
1:45:34 discuss your healing process and this is going to seem like a very strange way to approach it.
1:45:41 Before we get to that, I feel like maybe like ginger and the sushi meal will just give people
1:45:47 a story as a quick refresher slash palate cleanser and then we’ll dig into some heavy
1:45:57 stuff. So are you willing to tell the story about the bees? Oh, absolutely. Well, I guess we bonded
1:46:02 over the story. People ask me a lot, like, what’s the most dangerous encounter you’ve had in nature?
1:46:08 And by this stage of the podcast, you know, a crocodile tried to ingest me and that wasn’t the
1:46:17 worst. But I became fascinated by bees for a few reasons. The one is that one day I was walking
1:46:24 in the wild part of Zimbabwe and I came across this ancient baobab tree, this two-story high
1:46:28 baobab tree and it had been hollowed out when elephant had knocked the branch and it was in
1:46:34 fact empty and a swarm of bees had made their hive in the top of it and the sound of the bees
1:46:39 humming was coming down the base of that tree and it was like standing next to this giant digery dew.
1:46:45 And just the sort of, I could hear the intensity of the bees through this process and I felt their
1:46:50 vibration coming out of this tree and it was, it kind of sparked my interest. There’s also an
1:46:57 amazing thing in Southern Africa. There’s a bird called the honey guide and literally if you go out
1:47:03 in parts of wilderness in Africa and you start banging on trees, a bird will come to you and it
1:47:08 will start to call incredibly animatedly, very much like Disney’s. I think he wants us to follow him
1:47:15 and then it will fly in front of you and show you where the beehive is so that like for thousands
1:47:20 of years before as a hunter-gatherer you can rob the beehive and then you put some honey down next
1:47:24 to you and the bird comes and lands next to you and eats the honey. It’s this incredible ancient,
1:47:29 just an encounter like that, like it just takes you back thousands of years.
1:47:34 Wow. Wait, just for clarity, this is like thousands, tens of thousands who knows,
1:47:43 hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution where this bird has a species memory of a symbiotic
1:47:47 relationship with humanoids. Is that what I’m hearing?
1:47:54 And type of morphogenic field memory that when it sees a person it knows we go and get honey together.
1:47:56 Wow. I mean, isn’t that amazing? That’s cool.
1:47:59 And you walk out to remote places and suddenly the bird’s there and it’s like,
1:48:03 “Come on, let’s do this. Are we going to do this?” And it almost appears to get disappointed
1:48:06 if you’re like, “I’m not going to go and rob the beehive now.” Wow.
1:48:12 So anyway, like I was having the, you know, sort of I was around with this idea and I was like,
1:48:16 “The bees are really fascinating.” And then I started reading up on them and it’s this incredible
1:48:21 creature, right? They pollinate millions of flowers. They’re one of the biggest contributors
1:48:26 from the insect world to the economy, honey sales. They can field electromagnetic fields.
1:48:32 They will disappear if a storm is brewing. And then as you watch the hive itself, this incredible
1:48:40 kind of algorithmic intelligence whereby a single bee, an individual bee, responds to localize stimuli,
1:48:46 doing what it knows to do. And when enough bees, responding to individual localized stimuli,
1:48:51 all start to attune and algorithm fires through the hive and they move as one and they know where
1:48:56 to go and get food, et cetera. So that idea also gripped me, the idea of individuals attuning to
1:49:01 what they know to do can trigger a kind of a collective transformation. So I got really into
1:49:05 this and I went up into the village behind the camp. That’s all the good stuff. All the good stuff.
1:49:10 Yeah, just a little backstory here before my near-death experience. So wait, I should tell you
1:49:16 that during the time that I got fascinated about bees, there was a couple who were coming on safari
1:49:20 and they had been writing to me from Singapore and they were saying, “Listen, we want to come to
1:49:25 Africa, but we’re terrified of Ebola.” And I had said to them, “Listen, Ebola is in North and West
1:49:29 Africa. There’s no Ebola in South Africa. Yeah, but we’re very, very afraid of it. We’re very
1:49:34 concerned that it could travel.” I said, “You really have to trust me. There is no Ebola in
1:49:38 South Africa. You’re going to be absolutely safe.” So they had come on safari. Meantime,
1:49:44 I walk up into the back of the village and I seek out a man by the name of Simon Sambo.
1:49:52 Simon Sambo. He himself has a mellifluous voice,
1:49:57 very soft, lilting voice. And Simon Sambo is the village beekeeper. So I say to him,
1:50:02 “Simon, I’ve got really interested in bees and I know that you have some hives and I would love to
1:50:09 come and experience your beekeeping.” He says, “Okay, there’s no problem. I can take your beekeeping.”
1:50:15 I said, “Great. I’m excited about this.” He says, “You’ll meet me tomorrow in the morning
1:50:22 and we will go and meet the bees.” Great. Next morning, I meet him and he’s got a big sort of
1:50:28 black plastic case and we drive out to the hives and I’m inappropriately dressed. I’m in like shorts
1:50:35 and t-shirt. And I say to him, “What do we do now?” He says, “Okay, the first thing is you must put on
1:50:42 your beekeeping suit.” So he gives me his suit and I put it on and it’s a little bit short for me,
1:50:48 like literally between my sneaker and my ankle, I have some exposure. So I said to him, “Simon,
1:50:54 the suit’s a bit short for me.” Because this was his second suit. He says, “Don’t worry. You can
1:51:00 borrow my socks.” So he takes his boots off and he’s got thick black socks. And so I sort of feel
1:51:05 and I think, “Okay, this is going to be good.” And I put the socks on and I like seal up the suit
1:51:12 and I say to him, “Cool, Simon, let’s get the smoker going now.” He says, “Oh no, I don’t use the smoker.
1:51:17 It makes the bees afraid of a fire.” So like a little bell goes off in my head. I’m like,
1:51:23 “But beekeepers all over the world use the smoker.” He says, “It’s not my style.” I’m like, “Okay,
1:51:29 I’m here to learn.” And so Simon and I start heading towards the hives and I’m talking African
1:51:37 bees here. Now, some amazing thing happens as you approach the hive. If you just walk past the hive
1:51:43 with no intention of doing anything, the bees somehow know it. But the minute you put your
1:51:49 intention and attention on them, I don’t know how it’s maybe too woo, but I’m telling you they
1:51:55 feel it. And as you start walking towards the hive, they start changing gears like they’re at the
1:52:05 Austin F1 track. You hear the sound changing. So we get up next to the hive and Simon gets
1:52:13 out his crowbar and he cranks the lid off and 70,000 of the most enraged African bees rise up in a
1:52:19 black cloud around me. And they’re shimmering around me and you can feel the intensity and you
1:52:26 can feel their attitude of, “Oh, you think you can fuck with us.” And they’re all around you and
1:52:30 they start to land on you. And you know, someone who’s grown up around animals, I feel the energy
1:52:36 of a single angry aggressive animal. And they’re all over me and I say, “Simon, this is quite intense.”
1:52:42 He says, “Don’t worry, everything’s okay.” And they start landing on the visor and like blocking
1:52:48 the visor out and it’s super intense. And right at that moment in the midst of this like raw buzzing
1:52:59 intensity, one bee found my weak sock area and it stung me through the sock. And the minute
1:53:05 as that sting went through the sock, a huge pheromonal cascade was released to the other bees
1:53:12 and the shimmering, swarming, dark mass around my head. It stopped for a second and then as one,
1:53:19 the bees went to my ankles. And they begin to sting me intensely through the socks. The socks
1:53:23 do not work. So I think, “Simon, Simon, they’re stinging me. Simon, Simon, they’re stinging me.
1:53:29 What must I do? What must I do?” He says, “Okay, back away.” And they start following me and then
1:53:33 I’m being stung hundreds of times. And then at one stage, I look up and there’s a bee that has,
1:53:38 it’s inside the suit. So if I get into the clearing and I have a swarm of bees around me,
1:53:41 they are still penetrating the sock badly. I say, “Simon, what must I do? What must I do?”
1:53:48 He says, “Hold on, I will help you.” And he runs over and he cuts a large branch of a tree.
1:53:53 And then he runs back and he starts beating me with the branch. And I’m standing in the clearing,
1:53:56 getting pounded with the branch. And they’re still stinging me. They’re still all around me.
1:54:02 I say, “Simon, it’s not working. It’s not working.” He says, “Okay, I will get the smoker going.”
1:54:07 And I just, the thought ran to my head like, “Little late for that.” And he grabbed the smoke.
1:54:11 He starts putting elephant dung in it. And then he gets it going and he comes over to me and he
1:54:17 starts blasting me with the smoker. And the first blast went right through the visor of the beekeeping
1:54:22 suit and kind of into my mouth. And so I got a big inhale of elephant dung. And then my mind
1:54:27 and my chest immediately tightened up. I started thinking, “Shit, my whole body is going into
1:54:32 anaphylaxis. Is it elephant dung or is it anaphylaxis?” And they’re still stinging me. And it’s bad.
1:54:35 I said, “Simon, they’re still stinging me. They’re still stinging me.” He says, “Okay,
1:54:43 run for your life.” And this is when two men in beekeeping suits break into a full run
1:54:47 through the wilderness. And we just start running aimlessly at first. And then he says,
1:54:54 “They will chase you forever. Make for the Land Rover.” So we run to the Land Rover and we jump into
1:55:01 it. And he just says, “Drive, drive, drive. They are enraged.” And start driving off into the
1:55:08 wilderness. True as nuts, we come around the first corner and on the other safari truck driving
1:55:13 towards us is the couple from Singapore who’ve been afraid of Ebola. And they see, what they see
1:55:20 is the Ebola cleanup crew in full white suits driving towards them at full speed going, “You’re
1:55:28 gonna die. You’re gonna die. Drive, drive, drive.” And that was my first encounter with the bee. So
1:55:34 eventually I make it back to the house. And I remember I got into my bedroom and I sat on the
1:55:40 bed and I was just trying to feel my own body. And I was like, “Am I dying? Am I dying? Am I okay?
1:55:46 Like, is it kicking in?” And I got into the shower and I like took all the stings out of my ankles
1:55:54 and I made it back onto my bed. And that was me for the next five days. I did not move. My feet
1:56:01 looked like someone had taken surgical gloves and just blown them off. And Simon and Simon would
1:56:07 come around and he would say, “Hey, boy. How are you doing today?” He said, “Not good.” He said,
1:56:10 “I bought some ice for your feet. Next time we will get you boots.”
1:56:19 But you know, I sat with it and what I took out of it was, number one, what the bees taught me
1:56:26 is if you want to know about the bees, respect the bees. And the next thing that I got was,
1:56:33 I became intrigued by the power of this collective ability to fire the collective
1:56:38 consciousness algorithm. Like, what would it mean if we all started really attending to states of
1:56:44 peace and healing and well-being? And if enough of us did that, could we, like the bees, you know,
1:56:49 create some kind of algorithmic transformation for everyone? Yeah, we’re sticking a lot out of
1:56:55 that shit out of some invaders ankles. Intensity. They taught me so much about intensity. I think
1:57:01 that’s what I learned from Independence Day. If we have aliens invade, that’s a great way for us
1:57:05 to activate our high of mind, to sting the shit out of someone’s ankles. Get the bees on them.
1:57:11 All right. Well, the segue back to what I mentioned earlier is going to be a little awkward.
1:57:18 Let me find an in-between course to get us there that’ll maybe lead us back in some odd way.
1:57:27 Could you speak to the moment when a lion notices you and then what happens at that point?
1:57:31 How does an encounter like that unfold? Well, again, you know, I want to come back
1:57:35 to that idea of the minute a lion becomes aware of you and you become aware of it,
1:57:40 you are in a language dialogue and it is a language of energy and presence. Now,
1:57:45 there’s usually one of two things that will happen. Either the lion will get up and this is
1:57:52 99% of the encounters. The lion’s natural instinct is to get away from you. Remember,
1:57:57 people hunted lions for hundreds of years on the plains and actually one of the primary ways that
1:58:02 hunter-gatherers got food and a lot of people don’t know this is they tracked lions and then
1:58:07 they would rob them of their kills. And so lions have a long history of being chased by humans.
1:58:11 So normally it’ll go away from you. However, that doesn’t always happen.
1:58:16 Particularly if a lioness has cubs or if they have meat, they can be aggressive.
1:58:21 Now, normally what will happen is the first thing that you will notice is the animal’s
1:58:27 body will tighten. They’ll drop their head and the tail starts to flick intensely and they start
1:58:34 to warning Gral at you. And it sounds like the Gral is so intense, it sounds like someone started
1:58:39 a dirt bike in the bush up ahead of you. And then if it’s a lioness and she’s got cubs,
1:58:44 she’ll stand up and still with her head low and her ears back and the tail lashing,
1:58:50 she slowly starts to walk towards you and she fixes you with a gaze of utter intensity.
1:58:57 And the minute she has you in that gaze, your only option is you have to stand your ground
1:59:02 and you have to communicate an intense presence back to her. So when that happens to me, if I
1:59:08 feel myself starting to come into an encounter where we’re going to have a more aggressive energetic
1:59:11 conversation with each other. And may I just interject for one second to say when you don’t
1:59:16 have clients, true or false, you guys will often go out with just walking sticks.
1:59:21 Yeah, no rifles without clients. Okay, please continue.
1:59:28 We will, what we most believe in is being in this dialogue. And so if that happens,
1:59:35 the first thing that you do is you breathe out a long outbreath because everything in your system
1:59:39 is starting to jack up because the feeling of it is like, I mean, you can feel your whole system
1:59:45 flush with adrenaline. So you breathe out, you anchor yourself. And then you understand that
1:59:49 that lion is trying to communicate with you. She walks towards you intensely,
1:59:55 intensely. And then she’ll growl. And with that, she charges. And then she runs at you
2:00:01 at full speed. And it is in, it’s so fast, snarling, full gums revealed, teeth revealed,
2:00:06 and she comes in. And then you stand your ground and you look directly in the eyes.
2:00:13 And mostly what will happen is she’ll stop some distance from you. As she stops,
2:00:17 you hold her in your energy and you almost aggressive back to her. And you’re showing
2:00:23 that like, I’m dangerous too. And then the minute you see her energy drop a little bit,
2:00:27 because all that she’s doing is she’s trying to anchor you so that the cubs can run away.
2:00:30 The minute you see her energy drop a little bit, you just start dropping away. And you give her,
2:00:36 still facing her, you step back, you give her space. And very quickly you start communicating to her
2:00:40 that we know we’ve come too close, but we’re going to give you space now. But you can only do that
2:00:46 once she has stopped coming at you. If you watch her very intensely and Renia is really the master
2:00:51 of this, as you watch her closely, a slight drop in energy and he’ll move backwards a little bit.
2:00:56 And then you get out of the situation and you just find yourself giggling stupidly
2:01:00 and doing all the weird things that happen after high tense situations.
2:01:06 So you said most of the time they stop some distance from you. So what’s the alternate scenario?
2:01:12 If you’re in the alternate scenario, you’ve got something very, very wrong.
2:01:18 And the reason that you get into the alternate scenario is that you get it wrong in the moment.
2:01:22 You see, as that charge starts happening, you’re in the dialogue and your presence
2:01:26 is absolutely critical in your ability to project an energetic presence and meet her.
2:01:29 And then to quickly help her understand that you’re not afraid of her,
2:01:33 you’re dangerous, but you’re also going to give way. And when people get killed,
2:01:37 it’s because they get that wrong. They fall over, their nerve breaks and they want to run
2:01:40 or they get scared and they start running immediately. That’s when dangerous things happen.
2:01:45 You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever come across this book, but it’s one of my favorite
2:01:51 nonfiction books of the last 10 years, which is saying a lot for me because I do read a lot of
2:01:56 books and they already have cleared hurdles, right? I’m not just reading whatever I like randomly
2:02:00 pick off of Amazon. I’m getting books that are usually recommended by two or three people first
2:02:05 in a book called of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, who’s won a lot of awards. He’s best known for a
2:02:13 book called Arctic Dreams, but of Wolves and Men, he talks about the conversation between
2:02:19 predator and prey as the conversation of death. And he went out with field biologists and also with
2:02:30 Inuit and Native Americans in North America at various points and observed different hunts
2:02:37 and also heard stories from both groups about this conversation of death. So people listening
2:02:42 might think, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense. A lion is a predator. They can easily overtake you.
2:02:47 Why wouldn’t they attack you?” But time and time again, the conversation of death wouldn’t always
2:02:53 end in death. Sometimes a perfectly capable, say, pack of wolves would pursue a caribou or an elk
2:02:58 or something. And then at one point, the elk or the caribou do an about face, stand off with the
2:03:02 wolves, and then they would just part ways. They’d just walk in opposite directions. And it seems to
2:03:08 defy explanation, but it does happen. And I found that entire segment of the book, it comes up a
2:03:14 number of times, but talking about the nuances in this conversation of death and how these animals
2:03:21 interface, there seems to be some communication. And sometimes it ends in death. And other times,
2:03:26 it just ends in both parties deciding like, “Okay, another day.” And then they just
2:03:33 go in different directions. It’s something I don’t have any real understanding of, but I find
2:03:39 endlessly fascinating. So it’s something that you’ve had more firsthand experience with, I suppose.
2:03:45 I mean, there’s just a knowledge out there that is… And if you actually talk to any people,
2:03:52 biologists feel, the more time you spend in nature, the more you’ll realize how little we know. There
2:03:56 is subtlety and nuance, and there is things happening out there that is way beyond our
2:04:00 understanding. Yeah. Yeah, there’s another example. I think it’s in of wolves and men,
2:04:08 but talking about how their recorded instances of wolf packs that are being tracked, presumably
2:04:13 with radio collars, but maybe with flyovers or something like that prior to the satellite collars,
2:04:20 because this book was written in the ’70s, that at some point, for no discernible cause,
2:04:27 no stimuli that can be identified will just pick up and all head off in a very precise direction
2:04:32 in a more or less straight line. And then four days later, they intersect perfectly with a
2:04:37 caribou herd that happens to be migrating, but started at roughly the same time, moving in a
2:04:44 different direction. And the two vectors intersect and say, “Okay, that seems interesting. I don’t
2:04:49 know how to explain that exactly.” But these types of phenomena that get observed over and over again
2:04:55 and also not to take us too far afield, but these so-called, and in some cases, they’re
2:05:02 certainly mythologies, but mythologies about, for instance, in the case of some North American
2:05:08 Indians, the collaboration between Coyote and Badger. So the joining forces of Coyote and Badger,
2:05:14 which for a long time was thought to be this quaint fairytale. And then during quarantine,
2:05:20 this is now about a year, year and a half ago, there was some type of trail cam footage that was
2:05:26 released that showed like a Coyote playing with a Badger like a dog would, like wagging its tail
2:05:32 and jumping around and then them leading off through a tunnel on basically a hunting party.
2:05:38 There’s just so much we don’t know. It doesn’t surprise me. I mean, even just some of the stuff
2:05:48 around orientation. You watch a female leopard walk five or six kilometers, leave her cub,
2:05:55 walk five or six kilometers, then hunt in thick terrain, walking circles, moving in an irregular
2:06:01 way, catching impala, hoisted in a tree, and walk a direct line back to where her cub was,
2:06:07 which by anyone’s standards would just be an incredible piece of navigation. But
2:06:11 she doesn’t have a verbal mind or a rational mind, but somehow through all of that
2:06:16 circuitous movement, she knows where she left the cub in a more instinctual way almost.
2:06:23 And then you find this in native people too, the capacity for homing, the ability and I’ve
2:06:28 seen it with trackers who’ve come down, Sam trackers who’ve come down from the Kalahari.
2:06:31 They’ve come into the Kruger National Park, a terrain they’ve never been in.
2:06:38 We’ve taken them into the Mopani. Mopani is like an eye-high scrub and we’ve walked for a few hours
2:06:43 in the Mopani. We have a GPS because we know how easy it is to get lost in there. And then
2:06:47 afterwards we’ve said to them, “Okay, take us back to the vehicle.” We’ve got the GPS and they walk on
2:06:53 a B-line directly back to where we left the vehicle. Wow. And it’s just like, what is that?
2:06:58 Yeah, that’s fascinating. It makes me wonder, and I think this might actually be demonstrated,
2:07:04 you know, if we have some magnetic homing capability or navigational ability similar
2:07:09 to hammerhead sharks, there’s footage people can find of marine biologists studying hammerhead
2:07:13 sharks with a baby hammerhead sharks in a aquarium basically, and they have top-down
2:07:21 footage of how the movement changes if they rearrange magnets underneath the encasement.
2:07:26 So many unanswered questions, which is very exciting to me, obviously, because if everything
2:07:30 were discovered, that would be quite depressing in and of itself. Let’s come back to these
2:07:38 traumatic events in your early 20s, 18 to 20s. And then what followed after that? How did your
2:07:45 healing path, and this might seem like a strange way to lead in, but differ from those of your
2:07:50 mom and sister, right? Because they were also presumably traumatized by the home invasion.
2:07:54 If you’re open to speaking to it, you could just speak to your own personal experience,
2:08:03 but I’m curious how different people have approached finding some degree of closure,
2:08:07 resolution, healing after an experience like that. Well, I think for one thing, there was
2:08:12 a masculine feminine component to that. They did a lot more post-traumatic counseling at the time,
2:08:17 and I wasn’t open to that. I thought, you know, the way that I’d grown up, I thought, like,
2:08:23 I’m just going to get on with it and move forward, which is, you know, a naive approach to say the
2:08:30 least. And then there was also a challenge that I had where, in the masculine, it was harder just
2:08:40 to process feelings. What I needed was a path that I felt was taking me somewhere. And so where
2:08:46 that really took root for me is when I started to understand that if I was willing to look at
2:08:51 how I’d become frozen, if I was willing to look at how I was anxious and depressed as a result of
2:08:58 that, and how that kind of shut me out from living, if I was able to start living towards that,
2:09:06 it actually gave me a kind of map out of trauma. You know, someone trauma healed becomes a kind
2:09:11 of medicine. And so it was only really when I started to understand that there was value to this
2:09:15 just beyond myself. And in fact, if I became someone who learned how to be in a transformational
2:09:20 process and learned how to heal, it was actually taking me towards what I was meant to do in some
2:09:26 very important way. And somehow that structure of meaning had to take root in me before I was
2:09:33 really able to dive into healing spaces and be open to that type of work. It was different for
2:09:38 my mother and sister. They were able to, in a more feminine way, allow that process earlier. For me,
2:09:44 there had to be a structure of meaning that allowed me to engage in healing and be soft enough and to
2:09:49 learn to soften and to learn to open and to learn to let myself actually feel what was there and the
2:09:56 fear that was there and the uncertainty that was there. And also a feeling that I didn’t know what
2:10:02 I really wanted to do. I had a family legacy in conservation. You know, I had a safari business
2:10:07 that I could come into, but I didn’t want to just run safaris. I knew there was something else for me
2:10:10 and I had to go on that journey to find out what that was.
2:10:16 When you say structure of meaning, could you elaborate on what that means? It might seem
2:10:22 a little recursive as a question, but how did you find that structure of meaning that you needed to
2:10:29 move forth with contending with what had happened? What I mean by that is, if you’ve had a traumatic
2:10:36 encounter in the way that I understand it, it’s like a part of you becomes frozen and almost
2:10:42 inevitably where there’s been trauma, there is a reduction of options, which means I have less
2:10:47 choices and that gets laid down. So life starts to become limited and there’s less access to
2:10:51 different choices. A healthy person could say, “Here’s a way of handling this. Here’s a different
2:10:55 way of handling it.” A traumatized person has one way of handling it, retreat and isolate,
2:11:03 for example. And then I was lucky to have Martha and she started to expose me to how a healing
2:11:09 process works. And then very soon after that, I found ceremony work. Just for context for people
2:11:14 listening, could you define ceremony work? There are obviously many different ways of being in
2:11:24 ceremony. You might say that AA is a ceremony space all the way to sweat lodge spaces, all the way to
2:11:32 gatherings using plant medicines. There’s just an array. I found myself in spaces using plant medicines
2:11:38 that were very well guided. So the first part of the journey for me was actually acknowledging
2:11:45 that I was frozen. So there was building awareness around how I’d become frozen and then in ceremony
2:11:50 watching, drinking the medicine, being with people who were in a healing energetic and then watching
2:11:59 how that affected my life, getting to know how I was when I was frozen, then making peace with that
2:12:04 as opposed to thinking there was something wrong with me. That was a big movement, being like,
2:12:10 this has happened. This is where I’m at. And that’s okay. Then starting to give myself different
2:12:16 options. So instead of just being isolated and frozen, starting to actually be able to share
2:12:21 the things that I was ashamed of in some ways, I was ashamed that I hadn’t been able to protect my
2:12:28 parents, my sister and my mother. And I was ashamed that I had let bad guys in the house. I was the
2:12:32 man of the house, all these things I was able to start to be able to share these things that I was
2:12:40 ashamed of. And I was able to talk to how disempowered I had felt and unable to do what I needed
2:12:44 to do. And so I started to generate awareness out of that. And then I started to realize that
2:12:50 in sharing that, it actually opened me to deeper connection as opposed to what I thought it would
2:12:56 do, which would shut me out and shun me. And then I started to, because I was well guided,
2:13:01 I started to generate a narrative that was supported. And what I mean by that is like the
2:13:07 guide started to help me generate a narrative of the things that have happened to me can actually
2:13:13 be fodder for growth and learning. And that became really important. And then it actually became,
2:13:18 you know, I have some gifts in this. And if I can find those gifts and share them, that’s probably
2:13:24 the most healing thing I can do. And so I was in that process for a long time. And at a certain
2:13:29 point in it, I started to realize, in fact, this is taking me to my work. And that’s when I started
2:13:35 to see the tracker differently. And I started to really understand how a transformational process
2:13:42 is an intricate unfolding. And as a guide, you can support it as a storyteller, you can support
2:13:47 it with presence, you can support it by just listening, you can support it by creating spaces
2:13:52 that people can actually be open in. And you can actually start to know the way certain trauma
2:13:58 patterns work and help people develop awareness and different outcomes for themselves. And so
2:14:03 my healing was actually about finding the purpose to help healing come into the world,
2:14:08 if that makes sense. It does make sense. And I wish at some point, I’ll show you all the
2:14:13 highlights and underlying sections in your book. And I think I might have shown you
2:14:18 a photograph of the index that I created just for the highlights at the front of the book.
2:14:22 But one of the lines, this is on page 122 of the Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life is,
2:14:26 “In these times, an authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism.” Right? And then
2:14:34 you go on to explain why that’s the case. And I think about this a lot. And you actually had
2:14:42 another quote way earlier. Let’s see if I can find it from Saint Francis of Assisi. Oh, man,
2:14:45 I wish I could find this because it ties into it right.
2:14:50 “Wherever you go, spread the gospel. When absolutely necessary, use words.”
2:14:57 Exactly. So don’t we always, more people would follow that advice. And then perhaps advice
2:15:01 we should give ourselves as often or perhaps more often than we give it to anybody else.
2:15:12 And I think this is critical to highlight in the sense that in this day and age, in these times,
2:15:20 yelling and screaming on the internet and shaming other people or tearing other people down can
2:15:30 be mistaken for something constructive or activism. But in reality, a very powerful form of activism
2:15:35 is being the example that you want to see more of in the world and holding yourself accountable
2:15:40 in that way, which is not easy. It’s really hard oftentimes to do that. And I know both of us have
2:15:45 had tremendous struggles of different types, although I think they share a lot of common
2:15:55 DNA. And a lot of this seems to come down to stress testing beliefs, if that makes sense.
2:16:01 If a component of yourself along the lines of IFS or internal family systems, if people are
2:16:05 interested in that, they can certainly look that up. I did an interview with Richard Swartz,
2:16:10 the founder. But if a component of your personality or psyche is frozen in time
2:16:16 and compartmentalized, and when you are put in circumstances that activate that part of yourself,
2:16:21 you get tunnel vision with options. And maybe you have one option or maybe you have two options.
2:16:29 You can often reduce that down to a belief, a statement of some type. And I’m bringing this up
2:16:38 because I would love to hear how Byron Cady’s workshops have been helpful or not helpful
2:16:43 for you, because I know this is something we’ve spoken about. And if they have been helpful,
2:16:46 what specific worksheets have been helpful for you?
2:16:51 Can I talk for a moment to the activism thing and then come back to Byron Cady?
2:16:53 You are allowed, sir. The stage is yours.
2:16:59 One thing on the activism thing, and I would say it like this, and Tim, you’ve been on a healing
2:17:09 journey. What I notice is that a person who heals has a natural inclination to want to be of service.
2:17:13 And especially if you’ve had people who’ve supported you along the way, and that’s not to say
2:17:19 that I think I know how you should heal, but there’s just this desire as someone who heals to
2:17:23 support the healing impulse and be there. And you know that there were moments in your own journey
2:17:28 that were very powerful for you. And it’s almost just like innate when you get in touch with that
2:17:33 to want to do that for other people and support that. The way that I think about this is if you
2:17:39 can give yourself a transformational process and you go on a journey to discover, you know,
2:17:44 I would call it the track of your life, the place where you feel whole, where you feel like you’re
2:17:49 expressing your essence into the world, the place where you feel just at peace and in tune with
2:17:54 yourself. And it takes time to get to that. And it seems to me that at a certain point in every
2:17:59 lifetime, we get asked like, what’s it about? And it seems to me it’s about that coming to that
2:18:05 place in yourself. But there are some characteristics of people who I see who deeply find that place.
2:18:12 For one, they become inclined towards simplicity. They don’t want a lot of things. A feeling of
2:18:19 enough comes into them and both like I am enough and I have enough. And they stop wanting to consume
2:18:25 more things to feel okay. There’s a natural desire towards service. There seems to be
2:18:30 this like inclination that takes them to be pulled into nature. There’s a desire to be creative
2:18:36 and support other people. And that’s what I mean is that inside of every healing journey and when
2:18:40 someone goes on that journey and finds a deeper place of peace. And it’s of course, it’s a continuous
2:18:45 journey. But it seems to me that those things take root. And that seems to be very important
2:18:50 for the restoration movement in a very individual way. We do our own work to heal and come to
2:18:55 wholeness. But a whole lot of people coming into that state of I have enough. I am enough.
2:19:00 You know, it just changes the desire to consume endlessly. And I think that’s going to be very
2:19:05 good for nature. And so I see this like the restoration movement as both restoring our
2:19:11 relationship to wild places and restoring wild places, but also restoring ourselves coming to
2:19:16 wholeness and healing so that we come out of the illusion that more stuff is going to make us feel
2:19:20 okay and realize it’s already there in us. We need to discover that gift and share it. So that’s a
2:19:29 little talk on how people who discover that just become embodied activists. And then Byron
2:19:33 Katie’s work, I cannot say enough about it. And I know you’ve had a lot of people on the show who
2:19:40 have brought her up. But there is nothing more profound than being able to identify thoughts
2:19:46 that are causing you stress and then have a system to question them. And on a certain point on a
2:19:50 journey, they become absolutely critical because if you are getting touch with this place inside
2:19:56 yourself, and it’s curious, and it knows sort of what it wants to do, and you feel drawn to a
2:20:01 different way of living, inevitably, a number of ideas will come in as to why that’s not possible.
2:20:08 And so I’ve done, you know, hundreds of worksheets now, and you name it, I’ve done
2:20:16 absolutely ridiculous ones. And she says like, you know, I’ve done my mother shouldn’t have
2:20:21 taken my cake away, like literally like that sort of level of stuff, all the way down to
2:20:29 I’m not safe, or I’m not going to live the life that I want to live. When you sit in it as meditation,
2:20:36 and you get to know yourself, and that’s where the process changed for me when I would come up
2:20:39 with a thought like, you know, I’m never going to achieve what I want to achieve.
2:20:45 When I actually sat, like she says to do in meditation and ask the question,
2:20:50 who am I when I believe that thought? And I started to watch.
2:20:59 I feel frustrated. I feel let down. I don’t have confidence in myself.
2:21:05 I feel like I’m never doing enough. I feel like I need to do more. I say yes to things that I don’t
2:21:10 really want to do. I’m afraid of missing something. And when I sat in that and got to know myself there,
2:21:18 and then who would I be without the thought? I would be relaxed. I would be open. I would be
2:21:26 really feeling for what’s a yes and a no for me. I would be listening. I would be grateful for
2:21:33 where I already am. I would be thankful for what I have. And so for me, I did the work for a long
2:21:39 time before realizing it was meditation in which I was getting to know myself as someone who believed
2:21:43 a thought and someone who didn’t believe the thought. And only when I really understood it
2:21:49 to be meditation, and I could sit and watch myself like that, did I feel a compassion of getting to
2:21:54 know myself when I believe a thought and when I don’t believe a thought and how powerful that
2:22:00 is. And that’s when the work really took for me. And people can find out more about this at thework.com.
2:22:06 It’s not a panacea, of course, in KDA. She goes by Katie, right? Or people call her Katie, instead
2:22:15 of Byron, is a very unusual woman, a unique woman. I mean, I’ll give you a Katie story. The first
2:22:20 time I ever met her, I was sitting at a conference that she was talking at, and I happened to be
2:22:25 sitting in the second row. She sat down next to me. She looked at me. She put her hand out.
2:22:31 I took her hand, and we held hands for an hour while other people talked. And then she turned
2:22:35 and looked at me and she said, “I liked holding your hand.” And then she left for the stage.
2:22:40 Like that was like my first, and that’s Katie, like totally connected, totally wild, and you
2:22:45 don’t know what’s going to happen. Right. So I suppose I’m saying this all as a caveat that
2:22:51 if you watch videos, which I think are worth watching, but you may think, “Who is this alien?
2:22:59 Get me out of here.” But I would also suggest that it’s worth investigating the worksheets I have
2:23:06 found tremendously valuable for myself. If a belief is a thought we take to be true,
2:23:14 having an actual worksheet and structure for stress testing that belief, right? In the way
2:23:19 that you just described, and then also doing turnarounds where if, for instance, just as one
2:23:24 example, if your statement is, “I am not safe,” having a statement, “I am safe,” and then being
2:23:32 forced to come up with examples or evidence that you list out that you are safe. And it is incredibly
2:23:42 practical and powerful for diffusing the emotional boiling point, the sort of entropy and red line
2:23:47 emotional state that then puts you into this thought loop where you create this selective
2:23:51 attention, where you only see evidence for whatever this belief is that you hold. So
2:23:58 yeah, I highly recommend people check that out. I want to ask you about something that I don’t
2:24:04 know about, which is true for a lot of this and a lot of the follow-up questions. The sweat lodge
2:24:10 in Arizona, does this cue anything for you? That was my first medicine encounter. All right.
2:24:16 Please say more. And so it happened really early on. I had just been through those two traumatic
2:24:25 encounters, and I was severely unsure of what I was meant to be doing. And I was staying in
2:24:32 Arizona with Martha, and another woman who was apprenticing with her, who was a horse whisperer
2:24:40 by the name of Coelle Simpson, she had ties to the Navajo community, and she invited me to attend
2:24:46 to a sweat. And so I was, you know, I’d never been exposed to that before, so I was really interested.
2:24:53 And so we went to the sweat and we ended up on a kind of a church ground on the outskirts of Phoenix,
2:24:57 and it was one of those classic encounters of like, what do they say, like first the enlightenment,
2:25:02 and then the laundry type thing. It was like, I knew that it was a very big kind of experience I
2:25:06 was about to have. It was a spiritual encounter. There was a medicine man coming in, but we were
2:25:12 also in kind of this like abandoned churchyard. And then like, the medicine man arrived and he
2:25:17 had just like left his job on a Friday afternoon in construction. And so I was like trying to catch
2:25:21 up a little bit with it. But the minute the ceremony started, I started to feel the energy.
2:25:28 And we went into the sweat lodge, we drank the medicine. So in this case, just could you describe
2:25:33 for people like how tall is the sweat lodge? How many people? It’s presumably completely dark. I mean,
2:25:40 once the door closes. Short, like classic Hogan with blankets over it, you’ve got a crouch to get
2:25:47 into it. Fire area in the middle where the stones come, huge fire outside where the guys are really
2:25:53 heating up the rocks. And then over the course of about five hours, the stones just keep coming in
2:25:58 and the heat just keeps building and people start to sing and we were joined by various other people
2:26:05 who had come to the ceremony. And it was all native people and myself and Koel and everyone
2:26:10 started singing and the energy started to build and then more heat and then more singing and then
2:26:17 drum and then more heat and it just keeps on building and then people started to let go of
2:26:21 things that they were holding. And so people started to scream and people started to cry and
2:26:26 the music builds and the singing builds and you can almost feel like the energy is like conjuring
2:26:30 more and more energy. It’s like building on itself and it’s getting super intense.
2:26:36 And eventually the heat was getting too hot for me and I could feel like I’d been told like don’t
2:26:41 leave the sweat lodge but I’m like this is too much. And then the meds and then the singing
2:26:46 and suddenly I found myself in this kind of slideshow and my eyes were closed to him but I saw
2:26:54 the gun in my face. I saw my sister tied up. I saw the crocodile just break the surface of the water.
2:27:00 I saw all of these images and the gun to being taken outside kneeling down being told you’re
2:27:04 going to be killed the words and we’re going to kill you. We’re going to kill you. It all just
2:27:11 ran through my mind and with vivid, vivid imagery and then eventually it got to the point where it
2:27:16 was almost too much and I just started throwing up and as I started throwing up the entire imagery
2:27:23 changed and suddenly I was in the vision. I was back home in South Africa and I was sitting in
2:27:30 a clearing in the late afternoon light and walking across the clearing towards me came the mother
2:27:35 leopard and she walked through the the short grass and she walked directly up to me in the
2:27:41 vision and she just bumped me as she walked past me and in the instant that she bumped me
2:27:50 something in me understood that my own healing and the healing of nature and the healing of the
2:27:56 land was somehow connected and that’s why all I’ve ever done now is try and tell stories from
2:28:01 this place of nature has so much to teach us if we can attune to it and then I passed out.
2:28:07 Are you passed out in the sweat? I passed out in the sweat and there was like this vibrational
2:28:11 quality to it. I know you have some experience with these medicines but it was almost like I could
2:28:17 feel the humming of the earth and then eventually I came to and I was outside the sweat and I was
2:28:22 lying in a pile of leaves that someone had raked up earlier in the day but I was like in the leaves
2:28:27 and I could feel the earth and I could feel like the leaves all around me and I looked up and this
2:28:33 Navajo medicine man was pouring water up and down my spine and I was disorientated and I said to him
2:28:39 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
2:28:47 said no brother you’re just being born and I was like and it was weird and I said but I don’t
2:28:52 understand what’s happening and he said you’ll only understand in the next few weeks and he was
2:28:58 right like it took a long time to integrate that but that was really the beginning of my understanding
2:29:04 that the restoration of our relationship with the natural world can begin inside each one of us
2:29:08 as each one of us heals we create an opportunity to create a different relationship with the natural
2:29:15 world and it’s somehow that imagery spoke to the freezing the trauma that we all go through and the
2:29:22 opportunity to awaken back to our nature what did you find unfolded stuck didn’t stick for you over
2:29:30 the subsequent weeks you know that voice stayed with me that whisper you’re just being born because
2:29:36 I felt newborn and I know that you know you probably know this place and many of your listeners who’ve
2:29:42 had psychedelic experiences will know there can be the sense of being new and almost baby like
2:29:50 sensitized again you’re feeling again you feel attuned again you can feel people’s emotions
2:29:54 and for me it was just that like I was feeling again after that experience and all of the armor
2:30:00 that I had put on had come off and I was able to slowly start I felt other people’s pain I felt
2:30:05 other people’s sadness I felt my own and I did feel like brand new inside of that and it wasn’t
2:30:11 altogether comfortable but at least I felt back in some ways in fact it felt incredibly uncomfortable
2:30:20 but I knew that it was better than where I was you know recently spending time with a expedition
2:30:26 guide who’s spent all sorts of time and on Everest and Denali and K2 really fantastic guy and his
2:30:34 name is Eli and we happen to see the solar eclipse together this is a few weeks ago it’s first time
2:30:37 I’d ever seen a solar eclipse and I think it was the first time he’d ever seen a solar eclipse and
2:30:43 I asked him how it was for him and he said you know I went up to some of my friends here at camp
2:30:49 and I said that I’m like I’m not sure what this is it’s like I’m wetting my pants but it’s in my
2:30:56 chest I think they might be feelings just warm feeling in my chest I don’t know it’s like I’m
2:31:02 peeing my pants in my chest they might just be feelings so yes it’s so funny because I had this
2:31:14 buddy of mine who’s a navy seal and he says to me so I recently met this dog named butters and I
2:31:18 find myself thinking about butters and he’s a friend of mine’s dog and I go out and I think about
2:31:22 butters and I’m always worried about butters and I take butters treats and I go over there I always
2:31:30 want to check on butters and what do you make of that I think that’s called love and he’s like
2:31:34 yeah I always feel butters right here in my chest I think you’re I think you’re having the experience
2:31:41 of loving butters and he was like this is outrageous yeah sometimes sometimes we have to
2:31:49 build the vocabulary learn the ABCs or just like rebuild them reactivate them leopard in the fire
2:31:54 this is another cue and just for people who are wondering what the hell I’m doing with these cues
2:32:00 sometimes I will ask people or I’ll ask my research team to give me cues for stories that they think
2:32:06 will be fun or productive or profound or interesting to explore but I don’t want to
2:32:11 know them in advance because otherwise conversation is less fun for me so leopard in the fire what
2:32:18 does leopard in the fire refer to leopard in the fire occurred there’s kind of two parts to the
2:32:25 story the first is that when I was very young I heard a story around a campfire that like stuck
2:32:32 inside of me and it was a story about a man by the name of Lawrence Funderpost and Funderpost you
2:32:36 may have come across some of his work but he was a tremendous poet and an artist and he had one of
2:32:42 those miraculous lives he was a philosopher really but Funderpost grew up on a farm in South
2:32:47 Africa he was very connected to the native people he learned to track when he was young and then he
2:32:52 ended up going to fight in the Second World War and in fact in the Second World War he was eventually
2:32:58 taken prisoner he was in a prisoner of war camp and the story as I heard it was that he returned
2:33:04 to South Africa after the war and he really wanted to go and see his family but he felt
2:33:09 he couldn’t face them after the things that he had seen and that he had done
2:33:14 and so instead of going to see his family he decided that he would go alone into the Kruger
2:33:20 National Park very near where I grew up so he packed up his gear and he walked out into the
2:33:28 reserve and he set up this little camp and this was of course before the days of diagnosis is
2:33:34 like PTSD and the story goes on the very first night he was sitting at the base of a marula tree
2:33:40 next to the small waterhole and I can imagine after the war the stillness he must have felt and
2:33:46 somewhere nearby a hyenas started calling whoo whoo whoo and then a nightjar would have called
2:33:50 somewhere you know dear lord deliver us and I think of him sitting there in that stillness
2:33:57 after the war and on the other side of the waterhole a kudu started to come towards the waterhole to
2:34:04 drink and a kudu is like a large antelope oh this beautiful regal animal and it moves with
2:34:09 this incredible elegance and the kudu walked to the edge of the waterhole and then with these huge
2:34:15 ears its ears listened and you can actually see the ears moving like satellite dishes as they listen
2:34:20 and it scanned the terrain all around and then very slowly it put its lips down and it started to
2:34:26 drink and just as it started to drink a breeze touched fundipost back and it blew his scent over
2:34:32 the waterhole and straight into the nostrils of the kudu and it put its head up and it looked
2:34:40 directly at him and for a moment their eyes met and fundipost said that in that moment in the
2:34:45 stillness of that gaze he felt a kind of innocence come back into him after all he had seen and all
2:34:51 he had done in the war and instantly in that moment he knew he was able to go and see his family again
2:34:56 wow and as a young kid I think I was maybe eight or nine when I was sitting around the fire and I
2:35:04 first heard the story and I I didn’t even know why but it struck something in me and years later
2:35:10 after the crocodile Soli and I had been sitting around the fire we’d been talking a lot and I
2:35:15 was recovering and that the experience of being attacked by the crocodile was profound because
2:35:20 really it had brought me closer to Soli and I had learned so much about how he saw the world and his
2:35:26 worldview was starting to come into me a more relational way of relating to nature and to other
2:35:31 people but still I felt myself incredibly anxious and frozen I literally felt like I had this shake
2:35:36 in my body and I couldn’t get it out like I would look at my hand and my hand would be shaking I
2:35:42 would wake up at night I had pretty severe PTSD and into the teeth of this a fire broke out on
2:35:46 the reserve and I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a big bushfire but the first thing you notice
2:35:53 about a bushfire is just the I have not is the intensity of the sound it sounds like it hisses
2:35:59 and crackles up ahead of you the smoke drifts across the sun and it bathes everything in this
2:36:04 eerie orange light and then insects that are escaping the blaze start flying up and what you
2:36:09 get is an aura of hawks and eagles hawking insects out the sky you feel the ground start to shake
2:36:15 if you go out to fight it and you look to your right and out of the smoke comes a rhino and
2:36:22 it books past you snakes escaping the fire coming past you and in this instant Tim with PTSD I was
2:36:28 highly activated and we fought that fire for three days and then eventually on the eve of the third
2:36:34 day the fire had burned through and the crews were still fighting it but I had become isolated
2:36:39 from them I was about a mile or two away from them and I was in an area that the fire had already
2:36:44 burned through and night was starting to fall and I could see the crews on the horizon in the distance
2:36:49 and I could still see the fire was lighting the sky in this big orange blaze and in fact the area
2:36:54 that I was in the smoke was still hanging on the ground all around me and in the darkness to my
2:37:02 right I heard a sound like someone cutting a two by four and immediately I knew that there was a
2:37:08 leopard in the darkness to the right of me and so I turned to look and walking out of the darkness
2:37:15 into the faint light that the fire was throwing came this male leopard and he was walking directly
2:37:19 towards me which is extremely one it was strange that he was in an area where there’d been a fire
2:37:26 and two it was strange that he was walking directly towards me and when I saw him and I looked at him
2:37:31 and he became aware that I was aware of him no aggression came into his body he didn’t drop his
2:37:36 head he didn’t tighten his shoulders he just continued to walk towards me and I in fact dropped
2:37:41 down onto my haunches and part of what I wanted to do is he wasn’t being aggressive so I dropped
2:37:46 down because I wanted to give myself the space to escalate if he became aggressive I would stand up
2:37:51 and if he became more aggressive I could put my arms up I was giving myself room to create more
2:37:57 energy and he continued to move towards me and as I watched him he was walking through the smoke and
2:38:01 the smoke was almost dancing around him and his eyes were lit by the fire on the horizon
2:38:08 and his whole coat that beautiful rosette coat was bathed in this beautiful deep orange light
2:38:15 from the fire and he continued to come towards me and as he walked towards me I felt this very
2:38:21 ancient primal energy wake up inside of me and then he stopped when he was about 10 yards away
2:38:24 and he was so close to me that I could hear him breathing
2:38:35 and what it felt like to me is that in that moment it was as if I could feel his body in my body
2:38:41 and I could feel my body almost creating a kind of mimesis to his energy and I felt myself becoming
2:38:49 incredibly alert but incredibly still and there was no thought of the future and there was no
2:38:55 thought of the past there was just an energy circulating between this incredibly beautiful
2:39:02 wild elusive dangerous cat and I and then slowly he turned to look at me and then he walked past
2:39:08 the front of me and in a moment he disappeared into the darkness and as he walked away from me
2:39:16 and I felt into my own body instead of more anxiety and fear and this shake that I had had
2:39:22 I felt this myself in this profound state of stillness and I knew in that moment that that
2:39:28 leopard had helped me understand what happened to funder past and I also knew that I had gone to
2:39:36 a place in myself that I could never have gone to alone that leopard had almost taken me into
2:39:42 a state of stillness and if I think about that ubuntu consciousness that relational consciousness
2:39:47 what soli taught me was that the ubuntu consciousness is activated through action
2:39:52 and what the leopard taught me in that moment and what I think funder past experienced is that
2:39:57 the ubuntu consciousness the relational consciousness is also activated when we in a moment let go
2:40:04 and let someone else take us to a place we couldn’t get to ourselves and or another sentient being
2:40:10 and I think about that a lot as someone who tends to be quite controlling like there comes a point
2:40:16 where I want to let go and go somewhere where I just can’t get to with my own control my own sense
2:40:21 of how it should be my own sense that I know how this should unfold and that leopard just took me
2:40:28 there in a moment and so all through my life I’ve had glimpses of something and I can’t exactly say
2:40:35 what it is but I keep living towards it it’s a beautiful story god just the imagery that conjures
2:40:41 this is really I see it sort of in slow motion almost as if it’s like you know shot on film from
2:40:48 like a francis for a copula film wow it’s really just a striking a striking story and it makes it
2:40:54 makes me think of a few things also you mentioned a horse whisperer earlier and for the last few
2:41:01 years and I’ve been very interested in these natural encounters of course but it’s very
2:41:07 challenging to manufacture those experiences so I’ve also spent time looking at for instance equine
2:41:18 therapy and how horses are used in partnership with patients of different types for therapeutic
2:41:25 purposes and I think it fascinates me as many therapies do that are predominantly nonverbal
2:41:33 I think that we overweight the verbal perhaps and so I spent time I wish I got to remember the name
2:41:40 but a number of equine therapy centers one in Texas and oddly but maybe not oddly I also
2:41:46 learned when I went to a wolf sanctuary and I volunteered there for a period of time
2:41:52 in Colorado and I should explain it’s mission wolf mission wolf.org I recommend people check it out
2:41:59 in the middle of nowhere in Colorado and they are you know effectively a
2:42:06 place of sanctuary for wolves or wolf dogs that cannot be released into the wild right so they’re
2:42:13 not captive wolves per se they’re wolves or wolf dogs often who were raised in captivity under
2:42:20 terrible you know atrocious circumstances and then somehow made their way to mission wolf
2:42:28 there are other examples and there are also you know kind of second generation or third generation
2:42:34 wolves who are very much wild right like arctic wolves and I mean they’re all effectively gray
2:42:39 wolves but come from different areas and therefore have different coats and they’re in really large
2:42:46 enclosures like multi acre enclosures but there are a few who are because of their history prior
2:42:52 to getting to mission wolf are accustomed or not terrified of human beings like they can be near
2:42:57 humans because wolves by instinct don’t want to be anywhere close to humans and if they bark it’s
2:43:02 usually a fear response like a fear bark they’re not like dogs at all in that respect and if they
2:43:07 bark I mean they’ll they’ll stay as far away from you as possible on the opposite side of an enclosure
2:43:14 but when groups come through say school groups or visitors and they have a limited capacity for
2:43:21 visitors which is why I volunteered but when they come in there’s an opportunity in some instances
2:43:25 to meet the ambassador wolves they’re led into an enclosure and then they let a number of these
2:43:34 ambassador wolves in and I heard repeatedly stories of these wolves going directly to whoever was most
2:43:41 internal in a group whoever was most closed off in a group whether that be a child with autism
2:43:48 or a veteran with PTSD and would go right up to them and look straight into their eyes and I heard
2:43:56 this story repeatedly from multiple staff members and much like Fenderpost and your experience but
2:44:04 in this case with a wolf sort of staring directly into the soul of this animal and more importantly
2:44:10 maybe the animal staring directly into you many of those people reporting that it was the first
2:44:20 time they really truly felt seen and I just feel like there’s so much beauty and value in that
2:44:28 it’s something so worthy of exploration and it’s fascinating that it can occur not just from another
2:44:35 human not just from a prey animal like a kudu but also from a predator it’s very or a leopard for
2:44:41 that matter I mean so deeply interesting and begets so many questions I just wanted to mention that
2:44:47 because it was it’s also something you know looked into the eyes of a number of these wolves it’s
2:44:54 it’s very different like the presence not better or worse but just fundamentally different
2:45:01 in a wolf as compared to say that that of a dog they are very different very different creatures
2:45:06 even though the wolf is certainly the progenitor of the dog and I haven’t read it yet but I think
2:45:10 National Geographic had a cover story at one point called From Wolf to Wolf which is one of the best
2:45:16 headlines I’ve ever heard in my life but for more for more info on Mission Wolf people can just go
2:45:23 to missionwolf.org and I think they do some very very interesting work I would love to ask you
2:45:28 because you brought up the name and I can’t let you go without asking for this story
2:45:35 so Lawrence Fenderpost that’s the name you mentioned right so he described the lion’s roar
2:45:41 he said that it it quote it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky and quote
2:45:47 right tremendous it’s this one of a kind yeah yeah you know where I’m going this one of a kind
2:45:54 this one of a kind experience that cannot be replicated so please take us to at a well-known
2:45:59 company you were invited to give a presentation and could you tell us the story of how that
2:46:06 presentation went oh my god from the beauty of Fenderpost’s quote to my ridiculous life as a
2:46:11 storyteller yes please so this was early on when I first started speaking a lot and and telling
2:46:18 stories to people and I got this gig at one of these silicone valley companies and normal story
2:46:24 I got there early and I arrived to meet the tech guy to make sure that we were well set up and
2:46:28 normal story the tech guy was late he had to have a cigarette break you know like that
2:46:34 archetypal tech guy yeah who’s like running the AV like it was that guy and so eventually I said
2:46:38 to him like listen man like I just really want to run through my slides like I want to make sure
2:46:42 that we’re all good and everything he’s like listen I need to upload the system so that we can stream
2:46:47 to the whole company I’ll get you in a second but we’re all good I’m like dude I need to like
2:46:52 get some reps like classic like I want to be well prepared anyway people start filing in people
2:46:58 start filing in and before I know the auditorium’s full and I haven’t done the run through and I’m
2:47:06 in my worst nightmare now the intro to my the intro to my talk is is a is a sort of a poetic
2:47:15 speech and then I say and my story like many good stories in Africa begins with a lion roaring
2:47:21 and then I press my clicker and on a huge screen behind me there’s an early morning image of a
2:47:27 male lion and he’s roaring into the morning so actually like mist is coming out of his mouth
2:47:32 and what’s meant to happen is people are meant to be overwhelmed by this incredible barotone audio
2:47:43 and it’s meant to put them right in the moment and of course the lion is doing the action of
2:47:48 roaring which is a bit of a convulsion but there’s no sound so you’re in the middle of the presentation
2:47:56 you press click and no sound just a convulsing silent lion and it was at this point and it
2:48:01 dawned on me like slow enough for it to be truly painful that I realized I was about to roar at
2:48:07 a group of executives and I grabbed the the lapel mic and I held it close to my mouth and then I
2:48:17 synced up my roar with the lion and the problem with the damn clip is it went on for a long time
2:48:30 and then when a lion winds down he goes
2:48:35 and so literally the intro and I was like why won’t this lion stop
2:48:45 oh my god it was painful it just went on and on anyway I got through the presentation
2:48:51 and still to this day Tim I’m going to be honest with you if I lie in bed and I think about that
2:48:56 a wave of shame will travel through me and I’ll have to like curl over on my side and just rock
2:49:04 myself oh god yeah did you get any pats on the back or any stiff drinks handed to you after that
2:49:09 one well the thing that saved the whole damn thing is that like eventually when I finished roaring
2:49:15 one person started clapping and everyone like went for it and so the whole room ended up clapping
2:49:19 and that like kind of like moved the energy and we were into the presentation I was like thank
2:49:24 god thank god for Lauren or whoever that was totally thanks Lauren it was like one of those
2:49:29 moments also where you realized like you can’t half roar at a group of executives like you’ve
2:49:41 either got to not do it or go all in like let’s go thanks for nothing AV guy oh such a great story
2:49:48 so I gotta say so first for people listening get a copy of the lion trackers guide to life I rarely
2:49:55 make an endorsement like that it’s a small book you can read it in one or two nights or afternoons
2:50:00 and as I mentioned it’s one of the few books that I have an entire shelf dedicated to in my guest
2:50:04 bedroom it found me at the right time you know so maybe it doesn’t find everyone at the right time
2:50:10 but for me it really found me at the right time and it’s a book I’ve reread which is also something
2:50:19 I cannot say for many books and you work with individuals you work with companies I find your
2:50:27 approach to life and sort of your multi sensory multi modality perspective on life to be not
2:50:36 just fascinating but very practical you’ve spent a lot of time testing developing inheriting learning
2:50:43 tools and I think that you know as you mentioned given the trauma that you’ve experienced and the
2:50:50 challenges that you’ve had to overcome some people and I think you have certainly done this can
2:50:56 convert that pain and that university of suffering into part of the medicine that you bring to the
2:51:03 world and I think you do that not just well but very beautifully so first I just want to thank you
2:51:08 for that thank you Tim I really appreciate you saying that yeah absolutely and I just wanted to
2:51:12 know if there’s anything I want to leave a couple of stories I still have a couple of notes which I
2:51:18 don’t know the context behind but I want to save a couple in case we do a round two although I know
2:51:24 you have no shortages I might ask you about was it your uncle in the boat with the outboard I can’t
2:51:30 remember who it was but that’ll have to be saved for another time they’re all in there but some of
2:51:34 them only get pulled out with a bit of you know scotch and a campfire all right well round two might
2:51:44 be with scotch and a campfire but is there anything you would like to say any last closing comments
2:51:49 for the audience request recommendation anything at all anything else something you’d like to point
2:51:54 their attention to anything at all that you’d like to to share before we wind to a close this
2:51:59 time around well first of all just thanks for having me and you know it’s privileged to support
2:52:03 a show that has had such an impact on so many people and be a part of it so I’m just really
2:52:09 grateful to you and been fun getting to know you I would say a few things I would say one is I would
2:52:15 invite people to come on safaris in Africa it’s a very unique encounter with a landscape that is
2:52:22 still wild and when people come and have safaris at a place like londelosie or wherever they go it
2:52:28 has a profound impact on allowing us to protect these areas and on the local people and so you
2:52:32 know we’ve always been I’ve always been a proponent of the economy of wildlife we keep these areas
2:52:36 wild we invite people to come and experience them and that has a huge impact so if you’re thinking
2:52:41 about a holiday come on a safari if you’re thinking about a safari come it’s it’s a once in a lifetime
2:52:46 experience I would say that if you are interested in tracking you can support the tracker academy
2:52:55 trackeracademy.co.za they do amazing work supporting young people from difficult backgrounds
2:53:00 teaching them to become trackers they have a nearly 90 placement rate into the tourism industry so
2:53:05 they do amazing work those would be the two things that I would offer to people where can
2:53:09 people learn more about the safari side if they wanted to learn more about that you can get a
2:53:18 hold of us at londelosie.com you can also get a hold of me at boidvati.com my team will point you
2:53:27 in the right direction and tracker academy yes is trackeracademy.co.za.za for my fellow Americans
2:53:35 out there I like the Zed it sounds more dignified it’s nice to see you boid I’m glad we did this
2:53:40 with with a bit of video as well for people who want to see it on YouTube they can just search for
2:53:46 Tim Ferriss on YouTube and it’ll pop right up but I know we are many time zones away at the moment
2:53:52 that won’t be true in the not too distant future so I’m looking forward to spending some time in
2:53:58 person me too man I’m looking forward to getting you out so we go track a rhino I’m like I’m excited
2:54:06 to track a rhino and I’m excited not to have any legs eaten by crocs and I’m very much looking
2:54:11 forward to finally getting feet on the ground at londelosie and getting to meet some of these
2:54:17 characters that I have only read about and heard about at this point both human and animal alike
2:54:21 so thanks for taking the time today man I really appreciate it yeah thank you Tim thanks for having
2:54:25 me enjoyed it even more than I expected to and I expected to enjoy it a hell of a lot
2:54:31 so to everybody listening you’ll find show notes to everything that we discussed at tim.blog/podcasting
2:54:36 just search boid boid and it’ll pop right up you can find them online at boidvardi.com we’ll
2:54:43 link to londelosie trackeracademy.co.za and everything else in the show notes as well as
2:54:49 boid on twitter @boidvardi and all the rest his books the line trackers guide to life and his
2:54:56 memoir cathedral of the wild can both be found everywhere books are sold and until next time
2:55:03 experiment often be safe be kinder than is necessary even just a little bit and see if
2:55:09 you can get out in nature it will be good medicine for the soul and thanks for tuning in
2:55:16 hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet
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2:55:31 my super short newsletter called five bullet friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is
2:55:37 basically a half page that i send out every friday to share the coolest things i’ve found
2:55:41 or discovered or have started exploring over that week it’s kind of like my diary of cool
2:55:47 things it often includes articles i’m reading books i’m reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos
2:55:53 all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast
2:55:59 guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then i test them and then
2:56:05 i share them with you so if that sounds fun again it’s very short a little tiny bite of
2:56:10 goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you’d like to try it out
2:56:16 just go to tim.blog/friday type that into your browser tim.blog/friday drop in your email and
2:56:23 you’ll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by AG1 the daily
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