#832: The Return of The Lion Tracker — Boyd Varty on The Wild Man Within, Nature’s Hidden Wisdom, and How to Feel Fully Alive

0:00:04 Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode
0:00:09 of The Tim Ferriss Show. And my guest today is an all-time favorite. A lot of people come
0:00:16 up to me and say, my God, that episode with Boyd Vardy. WTF, that was amazing. And he’s
0:00:20 back. And you don’t need the context of the first episode, but you should check it out
0:00:24 if you have the chance. Boyd Vardy is the founder of Track Your Life, which offers a
0:00:29 limited number of premium retreats in South Africa’s Buschwald. And author of one of my
0:00:34 favorite books of the last few years. It’s an easy, fast read. The Lion Tracker’s Guide
0:00:40 to Life. As a fourth-generation custodian of Londolosi Game Reserve, Boyd grew up with lions,
0:00:44 leopards, snakes, and elephants, and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the natural world.
0:00:50 His stories are effing bananas. And we have a whole bunch of new stories. Example given,
0:00:55 Lunch the Baboon. Oh, you’ll hear all about that and much more. He is a lion tracker, storyteller,
0:01:00 and literacy and wildlife activist. At the intersection of his two greatest passions,
0:01:06 tracking and personal transformation, Boyd uses ancient wisdom to help people create a purpose-driven,
0:01:11 meaningful life. If you can spend time with Boyd, trust me, take the opportunity and do it.
0:01:16 He is also the host of the Track Your Life podcast, which is definitely worth checking out. You can find
0:01:26 him online at trackyourlife.co.za, on x at Boyd Vardy, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y, on Instagram,
0:01:32 Boyd underscore Vardy. And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and fun conversation
0:01:36 with Boyd Vardy.
0:01:40 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:01:42 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:01:44 Now would it seem a perfect time?
0:01:46 What if I did the opposite?
0:01:50 I’m a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
0:01:54 The Tim Ferriss Show.
0:02:00 Boyd-O, good to see you.
0:02:02 Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me back on the show.
0:02:09 Absolutely. And I love your background, since you have commandeered my recording office in
0:02:11 Austin. It’s pretty surreal.
0:02:15 I’ve got to say, I like what you’ve done with the place. You might just pull in here for a
0:02:16 few weeks.
0:02:17 You know what? You’re welcome to.
0:02:21 It’s great to see you, man. Yeah, I think the last time we were together, we were
0:02:24 walking in a squall across the Cotswolds.
0:02:29 That’s right. That’s right. Yes, we had our own semi-wilderness adventure. I mean,
0:02:34 there was some wild there. There was some wild. More cows than I would tend to run into in
0:02:35 your neck of the woods.
0:02:38 I was very interested in your badger track. You did spot a badger track.
0:02:45 Thanks. That is thanks to Boyd and Rhenius and Alex and all the rest of the actual tracking
0:02:50 teachers. So let’s hop into it. Now, this is going to be a lot of improv jazz because I wanted
0:02:55 to introduce people, of course, if they have not heard episode one, which they should listen to,
0:03:03 to your eclectic collection of stories. And I have a number of prompts. I do not have any idea what
0:03:08 these allude to except for one. So we have JV, firefighting, lunch, Toby Pheasant, and then we have
0:03:13 a number of others. Where would you like to start? Dealer’s choice.
0:03:18 Well, maybe we’ll start with something you don’t know about me, which is that I was the head of an
0:03:26 elite firefighting unit for a period of time in my twenties. And I took over the team from a French
0:03:31 foreign legionnaire who had some of the most incredible personal power you’ve ever seen in
0:03:37 your life. Like when he would walk somewhere, there would literally be a 20 yard radius around him where
0:03:44 he would project this aura of absolute confidence and intensity. And you just felt this is an
0:03:47 incredibly capable person. And this is in South Africa.
0:03:52 This is in South Africa. And our job was, we were part of a team called the Habitat team.
0:03:57 And our job was to do a number of things on the reserve. We had to fix roads. We had to mend fences.
0:04:03 We had to make sure that animals were generally safe. We had a controlled burning program. And then we
0:04:09 also had to fight fires in the case that you got a runaway fire. And when I took over from Chris,
0:04:16 I was probably about 23. I was in the phase where as a family business, I was doing every job. I was
0:04:22 the part-time marketing manager and sales manager. So I’d fly off to various travel shows in the world
0:04:27 and sell safaris. And then I would come back to South Africa and I would be on the firefighting team.
0:04:32 And I remember that I was so daunted by taking over from Chris that I had actually practiced his walk.
0:04:37 alone in my room a little bit to try and get the cadence and the presence right.
0:04:42 And like literally right off the bat, the first incident we had was, there’s a bit of a setup to it.
0:04:47 And the setup is, is that the monkeys had been generally attacking the buffet.
0:04:49 These are the vervet monkeys?
0:04:52 The vervet monkeys had been all over the buffet. They’d been stealing things.
0:04:58 And so some enterprising staff member had been driving down the road and they had seen
0:05:05 a sculpture, a paper mache sculpture of a life-size lion. And so they had bought it. And in the late
0:05:11 afternoons and around mealtimes, they would trot the paper mache lion out onto the front deck that
0:05:14 overlooked the river where people were having food and the monkeys would see it and they would
0:05:20 alarm and stay away. And then the paper mache lion would be picked up and it would be put in the bar
0:05:28 for storage. So like literally day two, we have a small electrical fire breaks out on a socket in the
0:05:34 gym and my team get down there and we instantly realized that we can’t spray this out. We’ve got
0:05:40 to shut the main power down. So I send one of our team members, who was a guy by the name of Lucky
0:05:46 Mkanzi. He was named ironically because he was incredibly unlucky. He had in fact lost an eye
0:05:51 in an incident in the bush. And the way that he handled this is he had bought a beanie and he had
0:05:57 cut a single hole in the beanie and he pulled it down over his face. So he had a single viewpoint out
0:06:01 of the center of the beanie with his one good eye. And he would rock around the place dressed like
0:06:08 this. Anyway, I sent Lucky to shut the power down. So he ran to the bar where the switchboard was and
0:06:12 he burst into a darkened bar with its hatches closed because it was like
0:06:17 late afternoon. There was no one around. He hit the power and he turned to his left and in the bar
0:06:23 in the darkness was a lion. The paper mache lion. The paper mache lion was in the bar. So we lost Lucky
0:06:29 for about two and a half hours because to his mind and valid in the bush, he saw a live lion in the bar
0:06:36 and he just disappeared. So I realized we better get down to some training because I felt a certain
0:06:40 amount of pressure to make sure that we maintained the standards of the French foreign legionnaire.
0:06:46 So I decided that we would get involved in a series of drills and we would keep ourselves at an elite
0:06:53 standard. And the team was made up of, if you think about it, there was maybe like 10 guys. There was a
0:07:00 headman by the name of Isaac and Contour who was just incredibly also physical, maybe like 6’5″, muscular
0:07:06 guy. It was Lucky Mkanzi who was the tractor driver with his beanie on. There was myself doing my French
0:07:11 foreign legionnaire walk. And we believed in ourselves, but we weren’t quite where we needed to
0:07:18 be. And so randomly in the afternoons, I would set up opportunities for us to have drills. There was a
0:07:22 small soccer field at the back of the camp and I would go and get debris that was lying around.
0:07:27 And at random times, I would light a fire and then I would send out the call. And there were all of
0:07:31 these kind of calls. It was first like station, station, stations and send it out on the walkie
0:07:36 talkies. Everyone would run to their tractors. They would grab their gear. And then I would scream
0:07:41 positions, positions, positions. The team would load into the tractors. They would drive out,
0:07:46 they would get into positions. And then I would scream, start the engines. And then all of these
0:07:53 powerful generator engines on the back of the trailers would start. And then the fire would start to
0:08:00 build and I would scream, spray, spray, spray. And the hoses would open and a blast of water would
0:08:05 come out. And the fire would be out in moments and we would be the heroes of the entire district.
0:08:11 So anyway, the day after the incident with the papier-mâché line, I set one of these fires
0:08:17 and we get the fire going. And to be honest with you, I had some old thatch that had come off some of
0:08:21 the roofs of the lodges. And I built like quite a nice bonfire of thatch. And it took off a little
0:08:26 faster than I had initially expected. So we had quite a sizable fire right off the bat.
0:08:32 Got on the radio. I screamed, station, station, stations. The team scrambled. They got their gear on.
0:08:38 Positions, positions, positions. The tractors came rolling in. I was thinking to myself, this is looking
0:08:42 incredible. I was walking like a French foreign legionnaire around. I was giving commanding
0:08:50 instructions. Open the hoses. Spray, spray, spray. The hoses open and an absolute trickle of water comes out.
0:08:55 By this time, a wind has picked up and the fire is now starting to get some wind under it.
0:08:59 And it’s starting to look like actually this fire could get away from us. And so my way of handling
0:09:04 the situation, because the pressure was now building, was to repeat all of the commands at a louder
0:09:13 volume. Station, station, stations, positions. Start the engines. Spray, spray, spray. Still an absolute
0:09:19 dribble of water. And it was at that moment that we realized that Lucky Mkanzi, in the moment critique,
0:09:26 had managed to park the back tire of the trailer on the hose pipe. And he saw it at the very same time
0:09:32 I did, and he rolled forward. The problem was, is that the pressure had now built up behind the kink in
0:09:38 the hose. And when that hose finally filled with water, not only did it knock the hoseman out,
0:09:42 but we totally lost control of it. It was flailing around like a deadly anaconda.
0:09:47 The fire was now starting to get away from us. The head man who was meant to be spraying the fire was in
0:09:52 a bleeding heap on the floor. And my French foreign legion walk was taking me absolutely nowhere.
0:09:58 That’s when I got my first lesson in what firefighting was actually about. And in fact,
0:10:03 it’s probably the lesson that stayed with me through all of this is that when something is going that
0:10:08 wrong, in the moment you think to yourself, you know, it can be quite devastating to your ego.
0:10:13 It can be quite devastating to your leadership. But I’ve come to see those moments as quite positive
0:10:18 because it does force a kind of reflection. And the thing that I definitely learned that day,
0:10:23 and that has stayed with me through all crisis situations, and everything that I’ve faced ever
0:10:31 since then is that it’s very few people who know how to bring the energy downwards when the energy is
0:10:37 moving upwards. And, you know, somewhere beyond trying to do an impressive walk, if you can figure out
0:10:44 how to, when literally energy is moving upwards, start to create a slowness and a steadiness about
0:10:50 your actions, you can start to actually do a kind of a powerful energetic jujitsu on things.
0:10:55 And so ever since that day, I’ve been focused on when the energy is climbing, trying to slow it down.
0:10:57 That’s in the category of things you don’t know about me.
0:11:04 That is in the category of many things I don’t know about you, which is shocking, shocking and not
0:11:09 surprising at all, given how long I’ve known you. But I want to say a few things. So first,
0:11:16 what you just said about mastering the ability to bring the energy in a full circle back to calmness,
0:11:21 that’s something that Rich Barton, who co-founded Zillow and many other companies, Expedia,
0:11:29 et cetera, also said about leadership. This was not that long ago on the podcast. The second
0:11:36 thing that comes to mind is I really think somebody needs to write a scripted comedy show based on real
0:11:45 life called Londo, just about all of these crazy stories. And I thought I would perhaps introduce a
0:11:51 new character who would be on the Gilligan’s Island of Londo, JV. Do you want to introduce JV? How do you want
0:11:51 to do that?
0:11:58 Well, just one comment on what you say. You know, I think a lot about my kind of like the body of work
0:12:06 that I’m involved in now and everything I’m interested in as story hunting. And one thing it’s about Londo
0:12:13 Lose, but it’s not just that it’s like any time you spend in the natural world, it is like a story
0:12:20 making machine. You can go out on the most simple walk into the woods. And because it is both, how would I
0:12:26 say it? The natural world is not just where meaning constellates, it is meaning in some fundamental way.
0:12:34 And then incidences occur. Inevitably, like little things happen. And, you know, one of my ideas is
0:12:39 that storytelling is awareness. Like actually what storytelling is, is paying attention. And the
0:12:44 natural world starts to just every day generate incredible encounters. Like if I think of the guests
0:12:52 who go out at Londo Lose, it’s a 60 guests go out. That’s 60 people who come back with a diverse array
0:12:57 of stories and incidences that occur on that day. Some of them will be ridiculous. Some of them will
0:13:04 be sublime. Some of them will be profound, but it’s hard to cast yourself versus modern life, which can
0:13:10 sometimes feel very staid and like the same things are happening all the time. The natural world is a
0:13:15 story machine. It’s a meaning machine. It’s a symbolic machine. And people who stare into it’s
0:13:21 like very un-woo-woo people, people who’ve just, you know, come out on safari. They come back and they
0:13:28 stared into the natural world and they’ve seen archetypal energies that they recognize. When you
0:13:35 see a lioness grooming her cubs or you see her protecting the cubs, when you see them switch into
0:13:40 hunting mode, you can’t help but see this, these profound symbolic energies that are in us
0:13:47 functioning all around you. And it’s somehow it permeates you and you feel yourself in relationship
0:13:52 to that in some profound way. Yeah, for sure. And we haven’t even talked about this. It’s something
0:13:58 you don’t know. I spent a week in the Montana wilderness doing outdoor survival training with
0:14:03 this just incredible gent who I’ll highlight on the show in probably a month or two. But
0:14:11 it’s incredible the density of stories that you come back with. Even if you don’t intend to gather
0:14:18 anything extreme, it’s so, I would say also for city dwellers, it’s so novel at every turn,
0:14:25 particularly if you’re injecting any level of shared privation or hardship, which is sometimes done
0:14:30 deliberately sometimes forced upon you in the case of like freezing rain and hail. And you’re trying to
0:14:38 make a fire when your hands are barely functioning, things like that. Just a quick thanks to our
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0:17:21 So let’s, and we’re not going to necessarily belabor the point, but I just have to press on
0:17:27 introducing, I’m not sure which character on Gilligan’s Island this would be, but JV. Let’s talk about
0:17:34 JV, and then we’re going to loop back to story hunting and some of the connective tissue that
0:17:39 connects all of these things. Well, I mean, of all the people who had a profound influence on me,
0:17:47 one of them was my uncle, John Varty, who went by the name of JV. And JV was a wildlife filmmaker.
0:17:55 And from the time that I was about six years old, I became his camera assistant, which to say that he
0:18:00 had a streak of wildness, he had grown up in the hunting era when, you know, hunting was still what
0:18:06 they primarily did in that area. And one thing about someone who grew up lion hunting is that it
0:18:11 tends to reset your drama meter. Because if you think about it, in lion hunting, there’s really
0:18:18 only two outcomes, a lion dies or a human dies. So his sense of danger was dramatically reset by this
0:18:25 type of childhood experience that he, that he engaged in as a young boy. So at the time that I spent most
0:18:30 of my time with him, it was between the age of about six and 15, he was making wildlife documentaries.
0:18:36 And I remember I would put my clothes out on my bed at night. And then at about four in the morning,
0:18:42 he would show up and he would walk in looking like kind of like Africa’s version of Texas Walker
0:18:49 Ranger, 44 on his hip shirt with cutoff sleeves. And he would open the door of my bedroom and be like,
0:18:54 buddy, let’s go. Like Tim, if you met him now, he would say to you, hey, so what do you do? And you’d say,
0:18:59 well, you know, I run a podcast, podcasting. Okay. Let me tell you about podcasting.
0:19:06 He had these sort of arms that stuck out. The Shungan people called him Makokwan, the one with
0:19:11 the crooked arms. Cause he like walked this little, like a John Wayne walk. Yeah. Totally John Wayne with
0:19:18 his 44. Um, his clothes are always torn to pieces and he started wildlife filmmaking and I became his
0:19:24 camera bearer from a very young age. And I had two jobs. The one was to drive. And like a lot of kids
0:19:29 who grow up in nature, I learned to drive from the time I was about six years old. So one job was drive.
0:19:35 The second job was camera bearer. The driving job was tough because like at one morning we found a pack
0:19:41 of hyenas that were feeding on the remains of a giraffe. And one of the hyenas picked up a giraffe leg
0:19:46 and it started to run across the savannah with this gigantic giraffe leg in its mouth.
0:19:51 And he wanted to get the shot because getting the shot was like the primarily issue of every moment.
0:19:57 He said, buddy, we got to get the shot. Now he’s set up in the pickup section of a vehicle where he’s
0:20:03 got a tripod up and a camera and I’m now driving and he’s screaming faster, faster, faster. And then I
0:20:07 will speed up and then you’ll scream, not so fast. You’re going to hit something. And he’s screaming,
0:20:14 left, cut left, cut left, cut right. And on one of these instances, he said, cut left. And I turned
0:20:21 to the right, but he was bracing for left. And so he fell off the back of the pickup and the camera
0:20:27 hit him on his head. And this put him into a mild rage, which had him chasing me around the vehicle,
0:20:32 threatening to punch me in the face. And then eventually like he would go into a red mist and
0:20:37 then he would come to and say, okay, get off to the hyena. Let’s go find it. And so most of my trauma
0:20:41 was around driving him around as his camera bearer. Then in another incident, he said to me,
0:20:47 it was a herd of elephants that were coming down to a waterhole. And he said to me, okay,
0:20:51 you’re going to creep in there. We’re going to get ourselves well positioned on the bank.
0:20:57 You’re going to get a nice low angle shot of these elephants drinking. And so I said, okay,
0:21:03 let’s go. So I’m carrying the camera. He sneaks down to the edge and he grabs the camera and he starts
0:21:10 to film. And this big bull elephant turns and it starts walking towards us. And I immediately felt
0:21:14 my heart rate starting to go up because I could tell the position we were there, not really a lot
0:21:21 of places to go. His way of handling the approaching elephant was to simply zoom out on the camera
0:21:29 repeatedly. Every time the elephant got closer, he just zoomed out a bit and pushed it back till
0:21:34 eventually it was about five or six meters from us standing over us. And at this point,
0:21:39 he looked up from the camera and he turned to me and said, Hey man, why didn’t you tell me it was so
0:21:43 bloody close? And then we got into this freeze off where we basically, it was just a standoff. And at
0:21:49 some point he whispered back to me and said, Barry, if this elephant comes, I want you to crawl into that
0:21:53 hole there. And there was like an abandoned warren where some war togs had made a hole. And his escape
0:21:59 route was for me to crawl in there. And so it was just like this constant sense of like, wait, are we,
0:22:05 are we okay here? Or are we in massive danger? He had film camps all over Africa. And one of his film
0:22:11 camps was in Kenya. I’ll never forget when I was maybe about 10 or 12, he put me on the back of the
0:22:17 film van and he gave me a kind of machete. And he said to me, uh, as we drove through the city of Nairobi,
0:22:23 he said to me, buddy, if anyone tries to grab a hold of any of our camera gear, just hit them on
0:22:31 the hand with the machete. This is like a babysitting Londo edition. Then at a certain stage, he moved up
0:22:39 to Zambia and he had a film camp up in Zambia and he was always trying to get great shots and he had a
0:22:43 knack for it. You know, like in the Maasai Mara where the wildebeest would be crossing the river,
0:22:48 you would see the BBC, you would see Discovery Channel, they’d all be parked in a certain
0:22:52 position. On the other side of the bank would be, you know, a million wildebeest and they all looked
0:22:59 like they were about to cross. And then John Varty would be parked 400 yards away, seemingly away from
0:23:04 the action. And at the last minute, the entire herd would turn, run down river and somehow managed to
0:23:09 cross right in front of him. He had a kind of magical knack for being in the right place in a real
0:23:15 profound sense of how animals move and operate. And there was just like a wildness to him. He loved
0:23:22 being out there. He loved the wilderness. He later in his career had made a few attempts to rehabilitate
0:23:26 cats and get them back into the wild. So he tried to get a young leopard that had been abandoned back
0:23:32 into the wild. He involved in a reintroduction of a lion project where he found a lion cub and tried to
0:23:36 get it back into the wild. He did all sorts of things. I mean, when we were living with him in Zambia,
0:23:44 I’ll never forget. We were living in the Luangwa Valley with him and he, he had a small boat that
0:23:49 he would traverse the Luangwa with. And the Luangwa River is the densest population of crocodiles in the
0:23:54 world. And the boat he had had a tiny, like two horsepower engine on it.
0:23:56 So it was just like a dinghy, right?
0:24:01 It was just like a dinghy. It had like a tiny, like the top of the boat from the waterline was inches
0:24:06 and he would load it with all sorts of things. Then he would hit a sandbank and he would say to me,
0:24:11 buddy, you got to get out and push the boat off the sandbank. And I would like look up and down the
0:24:15 bank where there were hundreds of crocodiles. And I would say to him, I don’t want to get out. He’d
0:24:20 say, Hey man, get out. Stop being a NAFTA is what he would call us. But get out, push the boats. And
0:24:26 then one day he found a young dead elephant. He was kind of maniacal about getting shots. He found a
0:24:31 young dead elephant that had been washed down the river. And he decided what he wanted to do was
0:24:37 tow the elephant towards the bank where he could tie it to the bank. And then he would lie in the grass
0:24:42 and he would get great shots of crocodiles coming in to feed on the elephant. So we get in the boat,
0:24:47 he’s got this piece of rope. We get up to the elephant and he says, okay, buddy, tie the rope
0:24:54 around the elephant. And then he heads off upstream in the boat. And Tim, when I tell you, he took full
0:25:01 throttle of the boat and with the drag of the elephant, we went absolutely nowhere for 45 minutes.
0:25:07 And only I realized this because I was looking at the bank and I could see that we weren’t going
0:25:12 anywhere. The boat was in a full plane and he was just rigorously committed to trying to get the
0:25:17 elephant to the bank. So eventually that didn’t work. We ran out of gas in exactly the same spot.
0:25:24 So then he sent me to the shore to get some spades because we didn’t have oars for the boat. So he
0:25:28 sent me to get a couple of spades and we used spades and we managed to paddle. Spades meaning like a shovel?
0:25:35 Shovels, yeah. We managed to row the elephant to the shoreline where we tied it to the bank and for the
0:25:42 next four days lay in the long grass there while he shot films of crocodiles, you know, feeding on this
0:25:47 elephant. So it was, it was just a baptism into like the ramblings of an incredibly wild person.
0:25:52 So here’s a question I may not have ever asked you. I don’t think I have, but listening to these
0:25:58 stories, I can’t help but wonder how do you orient towards safety? Because I think about people,
0:26:04 for instance, in a modern environment, doom scrolling every day, they just have this slow IV drip of
0:26:12 cortisol with no real imminent danger, but this perceived threat that is just infused into their
0:26:17 daily experience 24 seven. And then you listen to these stories and you’re like, okay, and certainly
0:26:22 some of the stories in our first conversation for the podcast, you’re almost dying being attacked by
0:26:29 crocodiles and this, that, and the other thing. And there’s no short list of these incidents. And then you
0:26:35 listen to your adventures with JV or firefighting. It’s like, okay, on any given Tuesday, you flip a
0:26:44 coin and those could have gone sideways in some capacity. How do you orient towards safety or danger? And how has that
0:26:45 changed changed over time?
0:26:50 It’s certainly something I’ve wrestled with because after all those years with my uncle,
0:26:55 there was a double-edged sword to it. On the one side, when I think back of how old I was during a lot of those
0:27:02 incidences, I remember feeling tremendously out of my depth. And I remember feeling like, wait, what are we
0:27:07 doing? And I don’t know how to handle this. He was of the mindset that you should be able to handle
0:27:11 anything. I mean, he would walk off into a dangerous situation and he would hand me a rifle and he would say,
0:27:17 buddy, if I get into trouble out there, I’m expecting you to help me. And so then I would be left with this
0:27:22 like eight-year-old sense of responsibility and feeling like I’m going to need to take action
0:27:29 against this, but I’m ill-prepared to take action against this. And so I found myself quite split in
0:27:35 some ways. Like on the one hand, I would feel very apprehensive about certain things. And then in other
0:27:41 instances, the apprehension was always prior to the incident. But then in a situation, I always felt very
0:27:47 calm and felt like I actually had capability. And I’ve thought a lot about that now, like,
0:27:52 because I always have a sense that whatever’s going to happen, I can handle it. And that is a gift he
0:27:58 gave me, a sense that we will figure it out in a very instinctual game time live way. Like I can be in
0:28:04 pretty high octane situations, but I’m nervous of it. I still have a part of me that feels like I’m going
0:28:11 to be ill-prepared for what is coming. I feel those two places in myself all the time. And I think a lot
0:28:17 about recently, obviously, I just had a son. And I think a lot about what it would be like to build
0:28:24 capability in him. Because I feel like I have a sense of capability. I feel like I listened to your
0:28:28 interview with Chris Sacker, where he was talking about, you know, just like young people needing to
0:28:33 have more incidences in their life, needing to have been in a bar and bumped a car and like
0:28:39 lived life. And I feel very full of that. But I also feel like some of that stuff was I was over my
0:28:45 head and that, you know, I’ve had to manage some of that. So how do I orientate towards it now? I think
0:28:52 trying to build a sense of capability and confidence in whatever I’m doing has become ground zero. And not
0:28:58 just expect things of myself, but actually get, take the time to realize like, if I’m doing something
0:29:03 new, my approach to it would be like, I should just be able to handle this. And I think what I’ve
0:29:09 learned is that I need to go slower and build confidence and build capability. And that, that has
0:29:15 been the ultimate healing on those ones. So I’m looking at this, I want to make sure we layer in stories,
0:29:20 but we can intersperse with other things. So we’re going to get to perhaps lunch, maybe Toby
0:29:27 pheasant, no idea what that refers to at all. But there’s one that I want to pull out here just to
0:29:31 see where this goes. Learnings from 10 years of wilderness retreats. I mean, you’ve taken
0:29:37 so many different types of people on wilderness retreats. Certainly you’ve had many varieties of
0:29:46 experiences yourself as a participant, as a guide, as a tracker, as a facilitator. What are some of the
0:29:53 kind of main entries in the diary of lessons learned after a decade of doing these types of retreats in
0:30:01 the bush? You know, I feel like I run the retreats every year through the winter months. And I feel like
0:30:08 every year we get more aware of what we’re actually trying to do on the retreats and we get better at
0:30:16 them. And I think the primary thing that I’ve come to really value is that the faster we can put people
0:30:24 into what I would call the natural state, the speedier, the uptick of transformation. And I think when I
0:30:31 initially started creating transformational spaces in nature, I wanted something to happen. And I felt like
0:30:38 my job was to quickly try and figure out where a person was blocked or where there was a kink in the
0:30:46 energy and try and rapidly help them develop awareness around how that particular blockage trauma belief
0:30:52 system could be transformed. And I feel like I’ve become way more relaxed with it now. In fact, on our
0:31:01 retreats now, the first day is into silence and nature. And I have this idea that comes from Martha Beck, where
0:31:06 her take on the natural world is that it’s a wordless environment. And so if you look at the animals, they
0:31:12 don’t have verbal minds. So you don’t see them thinking past and future. You don’t see lions lying there thinking,
0:31:19 oh, Janine messed up that hunt yesterday. And so we can’t trust her going forward. And so if you can go into
0:31:25 wordlessness, then very quickly people start going into oneness. And so the key thing I have found now
0:31:32 is get people to be quiet, get them into more wordlessness, create an opportunity for them to
0:31:38 interact and receive lessons from the natural world. And then things rapidly start to happen. The other
0:31:43 thing is that I would say is that I say now that when people come, they enter into the Londalosi time
0:31:50 war, because if you can take away their tech, which we now enforce, I absolutely will not allow any tech,
0:31:55 because what happens is, is even if a person who’s running a company comes and they go into silence the
0:32:01 first afternoon, and then we go out the next morning and we’re tracking an animal, and then they get back
0:32:07 and they pick their phone up and they’ve got a human resources issue back at the company, they start to pop
0:32:14 out. Because I also think that there’s a profound chemistry to it. As people go into wordlessness and
0:32:21 the soundscape starts to work on them, as they start to put their attention on living things and start to
0:32:28 feel those archetypal energies that are in the natural world, literally their brain starts to cascade
0:32:35 different neurochemistry. Their nervous system starts to go more, generally more parasympathetic,
0:32:41 and they start to enter into a different state of awareness. And in that state, their natural inner
0:32:48 knowing starts to spit out by, I would say, within the first 24 hours, something in them will start to
0:32:55 know, and it will start to spit out insights. And you don’t have to work too hard at it. The other is,
0:33:01 if you say to people, I want you to go and open yourself to receiving lessons from the natural world,
0:33:07 the psyche is so intelligent, especially in a retreat space. It’s funny, like if you have a 10-day
0:33:15 retreat, people will orientate perfectly to that 10 days and what will need to occur in that 10 days
0:33:21 will occur. If you said it’s a two-day retreat, they will get aspects of the same thing, but the psyche
0:33:27 will know kind of how much time it has. In the same way, the psyche will start to interact with the natural
0:33:35 world and they will start to see and receive messages that are particular to what they are working on. And so
0:33:46 really, the lesson from 10 years of retreat is don’t work too hard. Allow the space, allow people’s psyche to start to
0:33:52 be in relation with the natural world, and then insight will start to naturally develop very,
0:33:57 very quickly. And people can do this at home. If you start saying, I want to go out into the local park,
0:34:03 I want to go out into my garden, and I have a specific question, and you write that question down and you start
0:34:07 asking specifically, nature, could you help me answer that question? It’s almost like a zen koan.
0:34:14 You’re holding an intention and a desire for certain answers, and then what you see,
0:34:19 your psyche will run that through a specific matrix, and insight will start to develop.
0:34:25 Yeah, there are a few things that come to mind as you’re saying all this. I took a number of notes.
0:34:34 One is that I think people bias, or certainly I’ll speak for Americans, but this is, I think, common in a lot of
0:34:43 countries bias towards the question of what should I do, right? And it’s an immediate tilt towards
0:34:51 addition, if that makes sense. But sometimes you get to where you want to go or achieve a certain state by
0:34:58 removing the obstacles to that state. So when you were talking about natural state, I was thinking of,
0:35:03 for instance, when I was on this Montana trip, I had a few friends with me. Some of them had phones,
0:35:09 and some of them didn’t, even just for taking photographs. And I left my phone behind very
0:35:09 deliberately.
0:35:10 Smart.
0:35:17 And I feel like if, for instance, you’re not in the bush in South Africa, if you’re not in the mountains
0:35:25 of Montana, if you simply take a digital Sabbath, remove, say, bright light after sundown, do a few
0:35:31 things where you’re simply removing modern conveniences that are actually very unnatural from an evolutionary
0:35:37 perspective, you start to access this natural state. And what the hell does that mean? That can mean a lot
0:35:42 of different things. But one, for me, at least, that I noticed at Landalozzi, I noticed it certainly
0:35:52 in Montana, you can notice it simply walking around without a lot of the modern technologies that we are
0:36:01 very much ill-adapted for at this point. Is that these older faculties, these very well-developed
0:36:08 capacities that we depended on for so many millennia, come back online. Maybe they’re always online, but the
0:36:13 volume is very low. And so you start to notice a lot more. And it just fundamentally changes your
0:36:20 perceptual lived experience on a day-to-day basis. I would say another thing that Lando nails,
0:36:29 and what’s so cool about it is that it is a function of being synchronized with wildlife activity.
0:36:35 And that is really early morning drives. So you have the game drives, which are typically what time would
0:36:41 you say? People are waking up in the morning. You want to go out at dawn, you want your circadian rhythm to
0:36:44 be affected by that sunrise and then, and the cool of the morning.
0:36:51 Yeah. So people are generally to get a bite to eat and a cup of coffee, waking up, let’s just call it
0:36:59 30 minutes before sunrise, something like that. And what that means is you are typically jet lagged. And I
0:37:05 think that actually works to the benefit of a lot of folks because you get this incredible time dilation,
0:37:11 like your experiential day feels like two or three days because you wake up, it’s dark. Then it
0:37:17 gets light. Then you come back and have a bite to eat and probably take a nap. Then you wake up,
0:37:26 you do another drive, it gets dark and you have this very full spectrum experience that makes a week at
0:37:31 Lando as you feel like two weeks, which is very similar to being in the Montana mountains or really
0:37:38 anywhere in nature where you are waking up with light. You are going to generally winding down with the sunset.
0:37:47 And I just find that natural state and I’ll shut up in a second, but bringing those very, very mission
0:37:53 critical for millennia faculties online, whether it’s by turning them on or just simply turning up the
0:38:00 volume. So you notice them to be nurturing and recharging in a way that is hard to put words to
0:38:03 right. And you carry that back into the modern world with you.
0:38:08 It’s spot on. I mean, the other thing that I would say, a few things on what you said there,
0:38:15 the one is so many people arrive on the retreats with a sense of what to do next. You know,
0:38:19 sometimes someone’s built a company and sold it. Sometimes someone is changing career. Sometimes
0:38:25 someone is going through a relationship change and they arrive, as you say, with this desire of like,
0:38:34 what’s next. And what has struck me so much is in order to open to the natural state,
0:38:39 so often the first thing to do is to let go of needing to know what that next thing is.
0:38:46 So often when I say to people, stop trying to know and stop trying to use this retreat to get
0:38:53 the next thing. And in fact, let yourself not know and just enter into the circadian rhythm of
0:39:01 seeing the sunrise and seeing the sunset, watching it go from stars to stars. We work a lot now on this
0:39:07 rhythm that you’re describing. I like to go out early, drop into meditation, let the dawn break around you,
0:39:13 then intensity. We need to switch on and track. And we need to operate well on our feet. We need
0:39:19 to be tuned in. We need to listen, then get back to the camp and drop the energy again. It’s only
0:39:24 this Western culture in which is like level 10 energy all the time. Everything in nature moves through
0:39:31 intensity rest, intensity rest. And as people feel themselves allowed to rest, another insight is,
0:39:36 I think we used to try and do too much on retreats, giving people high intensity moments and then
0:39:42 space to be more like an animal that starts to conjure it and then sit around the fire at night
0:39:48 and then let the natural world be your teacher. The other thing is, is that, and I know that you’ve
0:39:53 had these experiences, it’s really become quite remarkable to me how many mystical things happen.
0:39:57 When I first met Martha and I started to understand transformational processes,
0:40:02 I was still like a drink a beer, you know, punch someone in the face type of person. You know,
0:40:08 I was 20 years old, South African. I did not consider transformational processes or coaching
0:40:14 or inner work. I had no grounding in that. And then also just like, oh, the animals are going to bring
0:40:19 messages. That was all quite woo for me. But I have seen now the most remarkable things. You know,
0:40:25 one thing that comes to mind is on every retreat, there will be magical occurrences with the animals.
0:40:32 A woman will sit in the circle and she will say, you know, I grew up in a family of alcoholics. And
0:40:38 when you grow up in a family of alcoholics, it’s incredibly dangerous all the time. And so what I
0:40:45 learned, I’ve learned to make myself invisible. I’ve learned to hide. I’ve never let myself be seen
0:40:50 because being seen because being seen was dangerous. That afternoon, we go out and she’s sitting on the
0:40:59 back of an open Land Rover. And a male lion that’s been sleeping rouses himself, stands up, walks towards
0:41:06 the back of the Land Rover, stops. And he looks up at her. He looks into her eyes and is just breathing,
0:41:14 gazing at her. And it’s so intense to be looked at by a 400-pound serial killer like that. It’s
0:41:20 something so kind and powerful and the presence that that animal projects. And she looks away initially
0:41:25 and I say to her, you can look back. And she turns and she looks back. And I can feel it’s the most
0:41:32 profound revealing psychologically that she’s ever been involved in. And after that, something shifts
0:41:37 in her and she’s able to start allowing herself to step forward. Another one that comes to mind is we
0:41:43 had a guy come on a retreat and he’s sitting in the circle and he says to me, “One thing that has happened
0:41:50 is since my father died, I’ve been totally unable to grieve. I know that I want to break open, but I can’t
0:41:58 get to it. I just can’t cry.” And for the first few days, that’s the case. On the third day, I’m sort of
0:42:03 talking to him. I’m checking in on him. And we’re sitting, you know, Londo’s has these kind of decks
0:42:10 that you sit out on, but there’s a thatched area, but it’s open. And a bird flies into the thatched
0:42:16 area and it lands on the little gumpole over his head. It looks down at him and it starts calling
0:42:21 intensely. Very unusual. Sometimes a bird will fly through, but this bird flies into the area where
0:42:26 they’re people and starts calling. And he looks up at this bird and at the moment he sees it,
0:42:33 I see tears come to his eyes. And he starts to weep, weep, weep. And for 10 minutes, he can’t talk.
0:42:38 And then he looks at me and he says, “This is going to sound so weird, guys, but you know, my father was
0:42:46 an avid bird watcher. And this bird, the southern booboo, was his favorite bird.” And, you know,
0:42:55 stuff like that is happening so regularly that I can’t deny it. I just know that things will happen,
0:43:01 magic will occur. I mean, look, we also had one woman who was describing her trauma and how in her life
0:43:06 everything gets taken from her. And while she’s describing that she’s eating a piece of toast at
0:43:10 breakfast and a monkey literally jumped down and snatched the toast out of her head.
0:43:16 But there’s definitely a sense, and I think that native cultures knew this, and I think it’s woo-woo to us,
0:43:25 but if you intentionally start working with the natural world, it knows on some level. A field of
0:43:30 living sentience, it starts to sense that intentionality and that awareness, and then things
0:43:35 start to happen. And I think people need to be re-enchanted. I think one of the things that we’re
0:43:42 afflicted with is that we are dulled down and we are disconnected from magic. And sometimes it doesn’t
0:43:49 even have to be that woo-woo just to see a leopard and her cubs leap up into the branches of a marula tree
0:43:55 and to feel like, “God, this is the beauty of it,” and to have that affect you in some profound way.
0:44:03 I’ve just seen so much of it now. I’m a real believer that nature wants us to heal. And nature knows when we
0:44:06 come to her with the desire to mend our soul.
0:44:13 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:45:30 You know, it also strikes me that I’m speaking to myself as much as anyone else, that sometimes
0:45:36 we tend to want to fight fire with fire. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. And it doesn’t always
0:45:42 work in the sense that we have a problem or we perceive a problem through our thinking. And so we
0:45:51 want to use more thinking to fix that problem. Or we think, I just need to try harder. And it’s like,
0:45:55 well, if trying harder would have solved this, it would have been solved by now in some way.
0:46:06 And there’s so much canvas to explore that is, as you mentioned, wordless. If you’re able to even
0:46:16 entertain the question of, you know, what if the path or the relief could be found outside of words and
0:46:20 concepts? Right? What might that look like? And what it might look like is spending time in
0:46:26 nature. And one of my favorite experiences at Lantalozian, as you know, I’ve been a bunch of times
0:46:37 now, is the silent morning drives. And just to explain that briefly, do you want to explain that briefly?
0:46:41 Well, maybe I could say two things about that. The other is a story comes to mind,
0:46:47 a very silly anecdotal story. But one of the things that led me to probably all the way to this
0:46:54 conversation is when I was, prior to my firefighting days, when I was on the Lantalozian sales and
0:47:01 marketing team, I found myself in London. And by day I was seeing different agents and I was telling them
0:47:05 about Lantalozian. And then we got invited myself and a friend who I was traveling with,
0:47:11 we got invited to a party that night. And at that time I was struggling with very, very severe depression.
0:47:16 And we did that childish thing that you sometimes do when you’re in your twenties, where we decided we
0:47:21 would go to the party and we would kind of make up fake backstories and like kind of be in character
0:47:28 for the night. So when people asked me what I would do at that time, out of nowhere, I started saying,
0:47:35 I’m a writer. And I hadn’t got even close to writing anything at that stage. I was, would be totally
0:47:41 daunted by the process. But when I said it at this party, this total bullshit story I had made up, every
0:47:48 time I said it, I felt a little uptick of energy in my body, not in my mind, not a rational sense that
0:47:56 this is what you should do. I just literally felt like, oh, this little like kick of energy. And I decided to
0:48:02 follow that little kick of energy. And when I got back to South Africa, I sat down at my old computer
0:48:09 and I started writing down stories. And I noticed that whilst I was engaged in the process of writing,
0:48:16 the depression would lift, or I would not be aware of how much just gray I was carrying around.
0:48:21 I would wake up in my bed and I would have that feeling where you wake up and you just feel like,
0:48:27 oh my God, I’m going to fight to get through this day. And I would do my duties, I would do all the
0:48:32 things I needed to do, like with this gray cloud around my head. And then I would sit down at the
0:48:37 computer and I would start to write out some silly anecdotal story, and suddenly something would lift.
0:48:44 And I would follow that. And literally everything that has brought me to here has been following that
0:48:49 non-rational energy in my body. I’m aware of what makes me feel a little more energized, a little
0:48:55 more expansive, and I just figure out how to move towards that. Now, in order to do that, you do need
0:49:02 some stillness. And one thing that has become so profound for us is, you know, the safari business is
0:49:08 evolving. And I think that we’re working hard to change what it is. It used to be, you come there,
0:49:12 you have your guide who gives you an interpretive wilderness experience. He tells you about all the
0:49:19 animals. He describes their habits, their gestation periods. He taps you into the biological sciences.
0:49:25 That can be so wonderful. And all of that information can be more information.
0:49:33 So what we started to do in the attempt to take people into deeper wordlessness was to say,
0:49:39 you’re going to go out and you are going to be in silence. And hopefully that silence pulls you into a
0:49:44 deeper place. But what you’re also going to do is you’re going to watch your mind. And you might be
0:49:48 watching, looking at something, and you might find yourself saying, what’s going on there?
0:49:53 Why is that animal doing it? What animal is that? What’s even happening here? Just be aware of that
0:50:00 and try and come out of needing to know, which is the primary state of our society, right? Only in
0:50:05 Eastern philosophy do we find our way to don’t know mind. The whole Western mind is structured around
0:50:11 needing to know. So if you find yourself needing to know, let that go and just be in pure experience
0:50:18 of it. Let the silence work on you. Feel how everything is unfolding with an intelligence and you don’t
0:50:26 really need to rationally know it. Try and feel it at a deeper level. And to a man, people report
0:50:30 coming back. Some people report feeling incredibly frustrated. Some people said, you know, I found my
0:50:36 mind wandering to wait. When I’m at home, should I catch the sixth train or the five train downtime?
0:50:41 Like people’s minds go to, did I turn the tap off? Who’s looking after the cat? But if you can keep them
0:50:51 eventually you drop through to a different sense. And then as you watch the animals, you drop into a
0:50:57 different layer of language. And it’s what I would call the first language. And it’s the language of
0:51:03 energy. And you start to feel how when a leopard turns and looks at you with the shape of its body,
0:51:09 with the look in its eyes, with the way it moves its head, it is conveying energy. And you can watch
0:51:15 the prey species move through different nervous system states from totally relaxed to listening and
0:51:21 aware to attuned to potential danger. And you can feel how as they move their bodies, every one of those
0:51:26 states in their body has a feeling to it. And you can feel that feeling in your own body. And getting to
0:51:34 know that feeling is where I think it’s definitely more where native cultures operated. And inside of it
0:51:40 is a deep sense of connectivity because you can feel yourself relating to every creature once you know
0:51:47 that language. When you can look at a leopard and without any words between you feel its energy, feel what
0:51:52 it’s conveying to you, you can be in a dialogue like that. And I’m sure you’ve had this, Tim, but in
0:51:59 shamanic ceremonies and when I’ve been around healers, you know, I remember once asking to my teacher in
0:52:06 the medicine space, will you teach me? Why won’t you teach me? And he said to me, well, the feeling is
0:52:12 not there yet. And I said to him, no, I’m asking you. He said, yeah, but I can feel your distrust.
0:52:18 Whatever you say to me, the feeling you energetically are giving off is still, there’s still too much
0:52:24 distrust. And only when the feeling is different between us, will I start to teach you. And to me,
0:52:29 that space was so full of that first language energy, the energy between things.
0:52:38 Yeah. I want to also maybe underscore for folks that this might sound very abstract or esoteric,
0:52:45 but there are real direct applications of what we’re talking about to everyday modern life as well.
0:52:53 And a few names that we know in common come to mind. One is Diana Chapman, who we both know,
0:53:00 of course, and the whole body. Yes. And really tuning into your kinesthetic, your bodily sensations
0:53:07 for making decisions of various types for choosing things could be as simple as something on a menu
0:53:13 could be something as high stakes as to say yes or no to a potentially huge business partnership with a
0:53:19 given person, let’s just say. And I’ve had her on the podcast. People can listen to that episode for
0:53:23 more on the whole body. Yes. And how to navigate that. If we don’t get into it now, another that
0:53:29 comes to mind, as you said, that the particularly, let’s just, I’ll limit it to the United States for
0:53:34 now, because other cultures are quite different in this respect with CS does and so on. But the idea
0:53:40 that you wake up and you just go 10 out of 10 from when you wake up to when you close your laptop is
0:53:48 anathema to the natural world. That’s just not how things work at all. And if you engage in, say,
0:53:53 going on safari, if you spend time in the natural world, certainly if you do any type of hunting,
0:53:59 you realize there are these natural rhythms. So if you go on, let’s just say, an elk hunt or something
0:54:04 like that, you may spend a few hours doing X, Y, and Z, and then just bed down. You’re like,
0:54:08 the animals are bedded down. We’re not going to find them. They’re inactive. It’s going to be
0:54:12 incredibly difficult. So instead of waste our energy, you’re going to take a nap, have a snack and take a
0:54:17 nap. And I recognize that, you know, having a snack and taking a nap may not make sense in between your
0:54:22 Zoom calls. But the point is that if you talk to someone like Josh Waitzkin, another mutual friend of
0:54:27 ours, who, for those who don’t recognize the name, he was, he was my second ever podcast on this
0:54:34 podcast out of 800 something plus. And he’s going to hate this, but he’s known best for searching for
0:54:39 Bobby Fisher. He was a very high level chess player beginning at a very young age, but has applied his
0:54:45 learning approach to mastery in a number of different fields, world champion in Tai Chi push
0:54:49 hands, first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, nine time world champion in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
0:54:58 Now foiling at a very, very high level on huge waves. And what does Josh say when he looks at all of these
0:55:03 world-class performers in these different disciplines, when he looks at the people he works with directly
0:55:09 ranging from sports at a very high level, I don’t know if it’s public yet. I think it is. Yeah. The Celtics,
0:55:18 for instance, all the way to the absolute 1% of 1% in say the finance world. One of his mantras, and I don’t
0:55:25 think he’ll mind me paraphrasing this is avoid the simmering six and avoiding the simmering six is if
0:55:29 you look at say Marcelo Garcia before he’s going to compete in a world championship mat, they’re running
0:55:34 around trying to find him because it’s five minutes to go time. And where is he? He’s sleeping under the
0:55:42 bleachers. He’s taking a nap. He’s at zero. And then he wakes up, shakes it off. And then in the 200 feet
0:55:50 before he gets on the mat, he switches it to a 10. And he’s going from rest to full engagement. He’s not sitting in the
0:55:59 middle with that IV drip of 24/7 cortisol and sympathetic overdrive. That is deliberately what he is avoiding. And that is
0:56:21 in large part how he is able to partition resources to engage so fully and dominate competitively. And that’s also true for people in the finance world who are working in very high stakes environments for making decisions around placing trades and so on. So it has what we’re talking
0:56:50 about. This is just my somewhat clumsy way of saying that I every day I’m sitting in New York City, for God’s sake, this is I mean, it is the concrete jungle, but it is the city that never sleeps, right? It is is in some ways the, the antithesis of living at Londo. Nonetheless, I can take a lot of the lessons learned that you see so clearly there. And you have to squint a little bit to apply it here in such an intense environment, but you can.
0:57:03 And you actually really benefit very quickly from doing so. So Diana Chapman, Josh Waitzkin. I just want to point out how broadly these themes apply, even if they seem to some people listening, maybe a bit exotic.
0:57:06 Yeah, I know that’s well said.
0:57:09 Fire. I felt like you were just about to jump into something.
0:57:20 No, I mean, just the information, all roads in personal transformation lead to the information is inside you. You actually know it’s in you in the way that lions
0:57:44 know how to be lions and leopards know how to be leopards. If you want to find your way to your fullest expression, it’s in you. It’s subtractive, making the space to allow that information to come forward. And a big part of that is just letting yourself follow the energy of the non-rational energy of people, places, experiences where you literally feel your body full of an expansive, alive energy. And getting good at following that is the ultimate tracking.
0:57:47 Full aliveness, full aliveness and other Josh-ism.
0:58:03 Fully alive. Jim Detmar, too, has also been on the podcast and a mutual friend of ours. Let’s, as promised, we’re going to kind of hop between these tracks. I’ve got lunch and Toby Pheasant. Where do you want to go? Or we could choose option C if there’s another one that comes to mind.
0:58:12 Let me tell you about my friend Toby and I. So Toby was an Englishman. And I’m sure he won’t mind me telling the story to millions of people.
0:58:21 But Toby came on safari with his family. And this is quite some time ago now, maybe a good 20 years ago.
0:58:34 Came on safari with his family and he had such a great time and he had such a great energy and attitude about him that he managed to convince us to let him stay on as a kind of general hand around the camp.
0:58:47 And so when his family flew off, Toby stayed on. And he immediately got integrated into the village of Londalozzi. And he picked up all of the worst jobs. He had to clean the lanterns that get put out every evening.
0:58:54 At one stage, he was painting an ablution block. And just every time I saw him, he was on some kind of like errand around the camp.
0:59:02 One day, Toby and I were sitting down at the staff canteen and a radio call in that some guests had reported that they had seen a snake in their room.
0:59:08 So myself and another ranger said, OK, we’ll go handle this. And Toby said, guys, do you mind if I come along?
0:59:16 I said, Toby, come with us. And so we jumped into a golf cart, which sort of is how people get around in the back of house of the reserve.
0:59:24 We jumped into a golf cart and we went up to the ranger’s room to fetch our snake catching stick, which had picked up the name 50-50.
0:59:34 Because it was a bit of a Heath Robinson. It was a piece of PVC pipe that someone had run a lamp cord through that had made a kind of noose.
0:59:39 And the way that it worked is you would get the loop at the end of the stick around and then you would pull on the cord.
0:59:45 And technically, it should tighten up and catch the snake in the noose. But it was a little bit niggly in certain places.
0:59:48 Sometimes it wouldn’t close all the way. So it had picked up the nickname 50-50.
0:59:56 So we grabbed 50-50 and a big kind of like black dustbin. And we jump into the golf cart and we drive down to the room.
1:00:04 Toby’s hanging on the back of the vehicle. We get down to the room and there are two German guests who are looking somewhat shocked.
1:00:11 And I’m going to be honest with you, Tim. I gave them my most powerful don’t worry. I’m here now.
1:00:16 The safari guide of the year has arrived. You don’t need to worry.
1:00:18 I’m going to go in there and sort the situation out.
1:00:24 And so they were left standing at the door and myself and Toby and the other guide went in.
1:00:31 And it’s very rare to have a snake in a room, but sometimes a little house snake or a green variegated bush snake will get in.
1:00:35 So we were walking around and I noticed the suitcase on the rack, an empty suitcase.
1:00:42 And I flipped the lid open and what rose out of the suitcase was one of the biggest black mambas I’ve ever seen in my life.
1:00:44 It kind of levitated out of the case.
1:00:48 Do you want to explain why that isn’t your garden variety gardener snake?
1:00:56 A black mamba is not only is an extremely venomous snake, but it is highly mobile and very difficult to handle in a confined space.
1:00:59 And if it bites you, you die quickly.
1:01:03 So myself and Toby and the other guide, we went for the door at the same time.
1:01:08 And I remember the three of us kind of jammed in it as we were trying to exit the room at high speed.
1:01:09 The three stooges.
1:01:13 And I might have reached forward to grab their faces to pull myself through.
1:01:17 We got outside and I said to the Germans, there’s a big snake in there.
1:01:18 And they said, yeah, I’ll be told you.
1:01:23 And so now we’re faced with a bit of a dilemma and they’re watching us.
1:01:25 So we decide, no, okay, we know what we’re dealing with now.
1:01:26 We must go back in.
1:01:28 And so we make our way back in.
1:01:35 And now we are tiptoeing around the room and we’re flipping up cushions and we’re pulling bedspreads off.
1:01:40 And what the Germans see standing outside is they see like a pillow fly out the room because you don’t want to lift it slowly.
1:01:43 You want to kind of like rip it open and see what’s under it.
1:01:45 Then they see a chair fly out.
1:01:48 Then they see like a duvet come flying past them.
1:01:53 Toby at this stage has positioned himself for maximum discomfort.
1:01:56 He’s close enough to be in the way, but he’s not close enough to be fully helpful.
1:02:00 And he’s giving us a running commentary on the dangers of black mumbus.
1:02:03 He’s saying, if they bite you, he will die instantly.
1:02:07 Their venom is deadly in tiny quantities.
1:02:09 I’m like, Toby, you are not helping the situation.
1:02:11 Can you please shut up?
1:02:17 And I remember at one stage we pulled the duvet cover off the bed and the bed had a, it had an electric blanket on it.
1:02:23 And the cable of the electric blanket came off and it made like a snake-like motion and all of us like reared backwards.
1:02:31 And eventually we saw the snake under the bed and my friend managed to get 50-50 down there and he gripped the mamba.
1:02:38 Now what you normally want to do is you want to get it behind the head and you grab it behind the head and then you put it in a bag.
1:02:41 He managed to grab it mid-body and it was maybe a two and a half meter snake.
1:02:46 And so that mamba went full propeller on the end of the snake catching stick.
1:02:51 It was like whipping around and part of them is they’ve got this incredible, elastic, powerful body.
1:02:54 So it was like a lot of snake whipping around on the end of the stick.
1:02:58 And then it turned and it curled its way up the stick.
1:03:01 But 50-50 held it.
1:03:04 And eventually its head was about that far from my friend’s hand, but he had it.
1:03:06 Like six inches from the hand.
1:03:12 And we decided it’s going to be too much to try and get it into the bucket.
1:03:14 So we’re just going to ride it out the camp.
1:03:20 And so now we make our way out past the perturbed-looking Germans and we go to the golf cart and I’m driving.
1:03:24 And you have to imagine a standard sort of golf cart.
1:03:24 I’m driving.
1:03:30 My friend is standing next to me and he’s holding the stick out with the giant snake on it.
1:03:38 And then Toby jumps onto the back of the golf cart and we start making our way out of the camp and we’re kind of like bouncing along.
1:03:45 Just as you exit the camp, there’s kind of a gateway where there’s an electric fence that keeps the elephants and the buffalo out.
1:03:51 So as we approach that, my friend who’s thinking about the snake that’s six inches away from his hand,
1:03:58 he pulled the stick in to allow for us to pass through these two pillars of the gate.
1:04:10 When Toby on the back looked to his left, the black mamba was now fully adjacent to his face with about three inches between him and the snake.
1:04:16 And Tim, from where I was driving, I remember looking to my left and the golf cart was going quite fast.
1:04:20 And I saw Toby take off in my peripheral vision.
1:04:26 And as I looked to my left, his feet were passing where the roof of the golf cart was.
1:04:30 He had exploded off the back of that golf cart.
1:04:33 It looked like someone had shot a rocket into space.
1:04:36 As I drove off, because I kept moving, I looked back.
1:04:40 He was still heading in a vertical direction over a bush.
1:04:47 It must have been a good, like in a high jump term, it was a good, a solid five to six foot vertical explosion.
1:04:53 And the last I saw of him, he was like petering out and disappearing over the bush, like a frisbee falling.
1:05:00 And remember, we got out of the camp and we released the snake and the snake went off into the bush.
1:05:02 And my friend and I looked at each other.
1:05:06 We were absolutely wide eyed and we turned and we began to make our way back into the camp.
1:05:13 And as we came through the gate of the camp, standing in the middle of the road, with a look of shock and awe on his face, was Toby.
1:05:15 And we drove up to him.
1:05:17 And the first things he said to me, I’ll never forget it.
1:05:22 He looked me dead in the eye and he said, that was incredible.
1:05:36 Shortly after that, he went back to England and he had to, I think he went and studied briefly, but very quickly he came back to South Africa and he became a safari guide.
1:05:38 And he actually now runs a travel company.
1:05:41 You can look him up if you’re in the UK and you want to come to Africa.
1:05:42 I think it’s called Bonomi Travel.
1:05:48 And I always think that so often what emerges out of these stories is not what you think.
1:05:53 You would think that an encounter like that would be like, I’m packing up and moving back to the UK.
1:05:54 But it was actually quite the opposite.
1:05:59 He moved back to Africa, became a safari guide and still runs a safari company to this day.
1:06:08 And I think about that often, like things that have gone wrong that I would thought that would be the end of people, turn out to be the adventure that everyone’s looking for.
1:06:13 So just to talk about calibrating danger differently.
1:06:16 You like running.
1:06:19 Alex, also Master Tracker, likes running.
1:06:23 And you guys just go running outside of the gates, right?
1:06:25 You just go for a long, nice run.
1:06:32 Now, typically, for instance, if you run into a bear or wolf or a big cat, you don’t want to run.
1:06:33 Like run is what prey do.
1:06:36 This is a strong prey drive signal.
1:06:41 But you guys were training very intensely for what?
1:06:42 Can you talk about this?
1:06:43 Yeah, we can.
1:06:45 This is fucking wild.
1:06:53 In any case, I’ll let you introduce it because it’s just so, on some levels, hard to believe and hard to envision also.
1:06:54 You mean persistence?
1:06:56 Yes, I do.
1:07:00 My friend Alex is one of the best trackers in the world, in my opinion.
1:07:02 He’s authored many books on it.
1:07:03 He’s the founder of the Tracker Academy.
1:07:12 And his singular mission, Alex van den Heerfer, his singular mission has been to preserve indigenous wisdom, particularly the art form of tracking.
1:07:18 And I think in Southern Africa, he’s done more to teach, train, and preserve tracking than anyone else.
1:07:27 And what started our journey to be with the Bushman people in the Kalahari was he went up and he ended up spending a few days with a group of Bushmen.
1:07:29 There’s a lot of different names.
1:07:31 Some people refer to them as the Sand People.
1:07:35 They asked us to call them Bushmen.
1:07:36 They said, we are the Bushman people.
1:07:37 Please call us Bushmen.
1:07:39 So that’s how I will refer to them.
1:07:46 And during that time with them, he was blown away by the ecological intelligence of this group of people.
1:07:50 These guys tracked a porcupine one day for like 10 kilometers.
1:07:51 They would sleep around the fire at night.
1:07:55 Now, normally when you sleep out in the wild at night, someone keeps watch.
1:07:58 And so Alex asked them, who’s going to keep watch?
1:08:02 And they were like actually sort of perturbed by this.
1:08:04 They would say, well, why would we need to keep watch?
1:08:06 And this is in a full-on wilderness area.
1:08:08 Alex said, well, what if an animal comes?
1:08:13 And they’re like, an animal will never come here without us not being able to feel it.
1:08:17 Literally, if a hyena walks by or something, one of them will wake up.
1:08:19 So they’re attuned at a very different level.
1:08:21 And Alex saw this and he was blown away by it.
1:08:23 So that was the initial trip.
1:08:29 And what resulted in that is a request was made that we would come back as a group, an expedition,
1:08:34 and we would assess the skills that were still kind of alive and functioning.
1:08:38 We wanted to get a sense of what was possible still and what people still knew how to do.
1:08:43 Because the Bushman people are probably the most persecuted native people on the planet.
1:08:45 You know, they’ve been displaced from everywhere.
1:08:51 And so it was to go and say, like, has their initial tracking knowledge been lost or what
1:08:51 still exists?
1:08:55 So that was what initially called us to the area.
1:08:59 And we spent a few days starting to assess that process.
1:09:05 And it was quite remarkable because Bushman people now are living in a very interesting
1:09:05 way.
1:09:08 They mostly live in the towns.
1:09:10 They’ve been pushed off a lot of their land.
1:09:14 And they do various jobs in farm labor, etc.
1:09:20 The governments of some of the Southern African countries provide a stipend of like $400 or
1:09:22 pula or rand.
1:09:27 So you would think that a lot of the indigenous skills had been lost because a lot of people
1:09:31 are on this kind of like, it’s not the dole, but it’s like a government supplement.
1:09:39 And yet about 70% of the food that most Bushman communities are still getting, they’re gathering
1:09:39 from the desert.
1:09:42 And so they’re living in this kind of urban way.
1:09:48 And yet underneath the surface, if you connect in, there’s still this way that they are living
1:09:49 in tune with the desert.
1:09:52 One thing about the Bushman people is that they never stored food.
1:09:57 Unlike other, you know, various tribes who would have like a storehouse where they kept
1:09:57 food.
1:10:02 To them, the desert is their storehouse, which is quite an amazing idea.
1:10:05 There’s just like, there’s no sense of needing to hoard or store because it’s an abundance
1:10:06 psychology.
1:10:08 There’s everything you need is there.
1:10:11 And when you say it’s desert, just for people who are trying to conjure an image, I mean,
1:10:12 it’s desert.
1:10:18 It is like a little scraggly bush here or there, at least based on the video I’ve seen, but
1:10:19 it’s very much a desert environment.
1:10:23 There’s areas where it’s like semi-arid, where you have these harsh bushes.
1:10:26 And then there’s other places where you are in red beach sand.
1:10:28 It would be akin to walking on the beach.
1:10:29 It’s so sandy.
1:10:33 There’s places where ground squirrels have these huge colonies.
1:10:37 So as you walk, you fall down because the ground underneath has been hollowed out.
1:10:40 So it can be very, very tough operating there.
1:10:47 And so we spent a few days with different groups of bushmen and we were taken out into the desert
1:10:53 and we watched this incredible energy of people moving very slowly through the desert and they
1:10:56 will dig up a tuber or a root.
1:10:57 They’ll cut a section of it.
1:11:01 Everyone will eat some of it and then they will replant it back into the desert.
1:11:03 They’ll never take a whole piece of food.
1:11:06 They’ll take a portion of it and then they’ll put it back under the soil to grow.
1:11:11 And walking, particularly with the women as they gather, I had this feeling that we could
1:11:15 have been 300 years in the past or 300 years in the future.
1:11:21 There was such a strong sense that whatever happens, these people are attuned to their environment
1:11:22 at a different level.
1:11:29 And then what emerged out of that is we were invited to participate in probably the oldest
1:11:32 practice of hunting that exists on the planet, which is persistence hunting.
1:11:38 Persistence hunting, there’s accounts of it across many, many different terrains, including
1:11:45 in the snow where the snowshoe tipped the advantage towards people, but it is the pursuit of an animal
1:11:46 until the animal tires.
1:11:51 And so in order to do it, you need an incredible skill set.
1:11:53 One, you need an unbelievable fitness.
1:11:59 You need to be able to move for a long period of time and in the peak heat of the desert.
1:12:05 Two, you need to be able to track at a level where you’re tracking it at a run.
1:12:09 That can be easy in parts of the desert, but man, it is not easy at midday.
1:12:11 I thought it would be easier in desert sand.
1:12:16 It’s not easy because as the sun gets to 12 o’clock, which is when you want to be doing it
1:12:19 at peak heat, it throws no contrast onto the ground.
1:12:21 I was going to say no shadows, right?
1:12:21 Yeah.
1:12:22 No shadows.
1:12:27 We were invited to be a part of this and we were seeing, you know, is this still alive?
1:12:29 Is this, who knows how to do this?
1:12:33 Just to throw some numbers out there, if you can indulge people with Fahrenheit, well, give
1:12:35 people Celsius and Fahrenheit if that’s possible.
1:12:36 It’s asking a lot.
1:12:44 But when we’re talking about a persistence hunt for the Bushmen, what type of distances
1:12:46 or time are we talking about?
1:12:48 Like how long does it take?
1:12:50 And then what kind of temperatures are we talking about?
1:12:57 You know, Tim, it’s really interesting because I think in the one that Craig Foster filmed,
1:13:02 it was around 30 kilometers over about five or six hours, something like that.
1:13:09 But what I discovered being there is that there’s this incredible equation and the equation is,
1:13:13 is heat on one axis and time on the other.
1:13:17 So as the heat climbs, the amount of time reduces.
1:13:18 The distance goes down.
1:13:19 The distance reduces.
1:13:24 But then there’s also an interesting factor, which is what type of season has it been?
1:13:27 Has it been dry for a few seasons in a row?
1:13:31 Or have you had a rainy season because the condition of the animal has a huge effect?
1:13:36 So one thing that happened while we were there is that they’re on the back end of a number
1:13:37 of years of droughts.
1:13:39 That was a big kind of factor.
1:13:41 So that’s all going on.
1:13:46 So what emerged is that we were invited to be a part of this, but it hadn’t been done
1:13:47 in a very, very long time.
1:13:52 And so there was some discussion around who knows how to do it and whether it’s still alive.
1:13:56 People who we had asked around had said, no, no one does that anymore.
1:13:59 The older generation who knew how to do it was lost.
1:14:05 So there was conjecture around whether anyone even knew if this was still possible.
1:14:08 So we go out on the first day.
1:14:13 And what was amazing about it is to the Bushman people, it’s called the Great Dance.
1:14:15 That’s the name of the doc, isn’t it?
1:14:15 Yeah.
1:14:16 The Great Dance.
1:14:20 Craig Foster, just for people who are like, do I know that name?
1:14:24 My Octopus Teacher was his most famous work.
1:14:28 It’s a great dance because there’s a tremendous act of faith in it.
1:14:37 And it’s part of the mythology and the spirituality of the Bushman people because it involves being
1:14:43 engaged with the animal at a very deep level and transferring the animal’s energy to you.
1:14:44 That is ultimately what happens.
1:14:50 So you are moving with the animal, you’re tracking it, you’re running it, and you are with the spirit of that animal.
1:14:52 And you are with spirit itself.
1:14:57 And then spirit is, as you are closing in on the animal, it’s giving its energy to you.
1:15:03 And the final act of giving from Great Spirit and from the spirit of that animal is the actual killing.
1:15:10 And one thing that will happen is as guys are involved in it, it’s a very funny superstition, but it’s symbolic, they won’t jump over a log.
1:15:21 Because if you jump over a log, you are expending energy and you’re pushing energy back at the animal, whereas actually you want to be drawing the animal’s energy to you.
1:15:24 So there’s this very interesting rhythm that guys get into.
1:15:29 So anyway, we go out and we’re looking for tracks in this huge area.
1:15:31 There’s no tracks, there’s no tracks.
1:15:35 And the energy of everything is kind of like dialed down.
1:15:40 And, you know, there’s like, there’s one guy wearing a Barcelona FC t-shirt.
1:15:42 There’s one guy in full traditional gear.
1:15:44 It’s like, it’s a full mix.
1:15:47 It’s not out of some idealized sense of how this is done.
1:15:49 It’s like, you know, game time, real life situation.
1:15:53 And then we come on to a herd of kudu’s fresh tracks.
1:15:54 What is a kudu?
1:15:55 Can you paint a picture?
1:15:59 A kudu is a, it’s a very tall, regal antelope.
1:16:03 And it has kind of large spiraling horns.
1:16:07 And kudus, they’re a desert adapted antelope.
1:16:09 A kudu is not that well adapted for the desert.
1:16:14 So there are certain animals that you wouldn’t try and do this with because they’re just too adapted to the desert.
1:16:18 For example, a femspark, literally the way that it breathes, it cools air through its nose.
1:16:20 Kudus are not adapted.
1:16:22 So they’re susceptible to the heat.
1:16:29 When this group that we were with of incredible trackers got onto the track of this herd of kudu, the whole energy shifted.
1:16:53 And when I say to you that I’ve become very interested in energetic archaeology, I feel like there is so much energy latent underneath anything that modern life allows us to get close to.
1:17:01 And when you see these guys switch into hunting energy, you feel this energy that is in every single one of us, but we never, we never need.
1:17:03 We don’t access it because we don’t need it.
1:17:06 And suddenly the first guy shifts into a dog trot.
1:17:08 He starts kind of trotting on the track.
1:17:12 And then the second guy starts to run and these guys start to move.
1:17:17 And now you have to do a lot of complex things.
1:17:19 One, you have to track.
1:17:24 You have to stay on your kudu because the herd quickly breaks and a single kudu breaks away.
1:17:25 That’s the weakest one.
1:17:28 So the guys are onto that one.
1:17:29 Then you have to navigate.
1:17:31 You have to run.
1:17:32 There’s such an equation.
1:17:34 You have to have a sense of where you’re going.
1:17:42 And all of this together, at a certain point, it becomes this incredible act of faith because you have to fully commit.
1:17:44 I am running into that desert.
1:17:45 I’m running away from water.
1:17:47 I’m going in that direction.
1:17:49 And I don’t really know what the outcome is going to be.
1:17:52 I don’t know the condition of this animal.
1:17:53 I don’t know the heat.
1:17:54 I don’t know the terrain.
1:17:56 I’ve got to just go and follow.
1:17:57 So it becomes a real act of faith.
1:18:01 And as I say, like you’re running away from water in the desert.
1:18:03 And that can be a big factor.
1:18:04 And you don’t know how far you’re going.
1:18:05 And it’s hot.
1:18:12 And on the day we did it, I don’t know what the Fahrenheit is, but it was 47 degrees when we started.
1:18:18 And so at the front of that group, Tim, there’s an energy that develops amongst that group of hunters.
1:18:23 And I can tell you that if you drop out of it, it’s kind of like a peloton.
1:18:26 If you fall out of it, you will never catch that group again.
1:18:30 But if you find yourself in it, it’s almost like you can ride the energy of the group.
1:18:32 How would I describe it?
1:18:33 It’s kind of like a ceremony.
1:18:35 You just, you don’t know what’s going to happen once you’re in it.
1:18:41 And so I managed to find myself on this occasion in the center of the group.
1:18:45 And these guys were tracking so fast and they’re running.
1:18:50 And as a group, if the animal cuts one way, someone on the left will pick up the track.
1:18:53 And as it cuts to the other way, that someone else will cut onto it.
1:18:54 So they’re working as a team.
1:18:59 But as you run, you’re also dropping people because the heat is building too much and it’s
1:19:00 just so intense.
1:19:03 And then also people are going into different psychological states.
1:19:07 So one of the Bushman religious practices is to go into trance.
1:19:10 And you can feel yourself wanting to go there.
1:19:16 For the first hour of it, I was in a totally neurotic state.
1:19:20 I was in my head and I was thinking to myself, like, it’s too hot.
1:19:22 You know, I’m going to die of heat stroke.
1:19:23 There was this voice running.
1:19:25 This is, we’re going too far.
1:19:27 We’re not going to get, find our way back.
1:19:30 I’m going to get separated from these guys too far out.
1:19:30 There’s no water.
1:19:33 It was just this, just total neuroses.
1:19:40 And then somewhere in there, I started to feel myself going into a different energy.
1:19:47 And I felt that the only way to do this was to let go of these thoughts and let my body
1:19:51 just go until it couldn’t go anymore.
1:19:56 It was weird because it’s, it’s not often that you, I mean, great athletes talk about this,
1:20:01 which I am not, but there’s kind of like, you’re reaching for,
1:20:04 a place and athletes, some athletes know how to get to that place.
1:20:10 And I felt myself go through the layer of mind neuroses and let go into like, I’m just going
1:20:13 to let my body do what it knows to do.
1:20:18 From that place, I tapped into a level of energy that felt like it was coming out of the earth,
1:20:22 that felt like it was coming from the group, that felt like it was coming from the animal.
1:20:26 And we went for about another two and a half hours from there.
1:20:28 And you’re just like, you’re glowing red.
1:20:29 The guys are tracking.
1:20:35 At one stage, I found myself on the front of the track and you can feel the animal moving
1:20:37 up ahead of you and you have to keep moving.
1:20:39 You have to keep it moving.
1:20:43 And then you’ll get a glimpse of the, we’ve got a glimpse of the kudu and then it disappeared
1:20:44 for another 40 minutes.
1:20:45 We’re just on the tracks.
1:20:49 Then we got another glimpse and it disappeared for another 40 minutes.
1:20:53 As it gets closer, the guys start to feel that the energy is transferring.
1:20:55 They are starting to get the upper hand.
1:21:00 And as they feel themselves getting the upper hand, the younger guys start to run harder
1:21:01 and faster.
1:21:06 And at this stage, I had lost my teammates, my friend James and Alex.
1:21:07 I had lost them.
1:21:12 And then suddenly Alex was in front of me, which is a classic Alex move.
1:21:16 And what had happened is, is what I didn’t realize is the kudu had run in a dog leg.
1:21:21 And so where he had been behind me, suddenly he was in front of me and suddenly the kudu
1:21:22 was directly in front of him.
1:21:27 And as that happened, the entire energy shifted again and the guys just found another gear.
1:21:30 And it’s quite amazing to witness it.
1:21:37 And then eventually the animal is so tired that it literally just stops and it gives itself to
1:21:38 the hunter.
1:21:45 And those moments where the animal will run no more and the bushman’s spirit, there is
1:21:50 something so profound about it because you can’t be there and not be in a profound state
1:21:51 of respect and receiving.
1:21:58 And you are also so close to the truth of where your food and the survival of the village comes
1:21:58 from.
1:22:02 You’re not strolling down the meat section at Whole Foods.
1:22:08 You are right on the coalface of what it means to take life and to take the energy of another
1:22:09 creature.
1:22:17 And after the animal goes down, they put sand on it, which is symbolic of a blessing onto
1:22:20 the animal and thanking the animal for what it has given them.
1:22:26 When you eventually emerge out of that energy, it could have been one hour, it could have been
1:22:27 10 hours.
1:22:32 You’re in such a different psychological space and you have been involved in an energetic
1:22:36 energetic that is totally primal and that is ceremonial.
1:22:37 There’s no other way to describe it.
1:22:40 You are in a current of energy from the earth.
1:22:43 That particular kudu, how much would you guess it weighed?
1:22:45 Any idea?
1:22:50 So probably around the 180 kg mark.
1:22:51 Oh, that’s a big boy.
1:22:52 Yeah.
1:22:53 Okay.
1:22:53 Yeah.
1:22:55 I would need to check that.
1:22:57 But 400-ish pounds.
1:22:57 Yeah.
1:23:01 When that kudu is cut up, a little bit less than 400, maybe.
1:23:06 When it’s cut up, every single piece of that animal is taken and eaten.
1:23:11 From the time the guys started working on the carcass, it must have been 15 minutes to
1:23:12 Wow, that’s fast.
1:23:14 every single piece of that animal.
1:23:17 And then how are they, are they just carrying it on shoulders?
1:23:19 I mean, how are you guys actually getting that back to camp?
1:23:20 Yeah.
1:23:25 And then you put the haunches on your, like all different array of carries and everyone
1:23:26 and walks it out.
1:23:29 And then you’ve got still obviously got a long way to go from there.
1:23:32 What happens when you guys get back to home base?
1:23:38 Well, what was amazing about it is there was a strong sense of pride amongst the hunters.
1:23:44 They hadn’t done it in a long time and they wanted to show that they still knew how to do it.
1:23:49 And it was almost like that they had remembered an aspect of something that they had done for
1:23:50 many, many generations.
1:23:53 There was a beautiful energy to it.
1:23:57 And then back at camp, there was, it’s just immediately that food starts to get eaten.
1:23:59 Yeah, I bet.
1:24:05 What I came away with is that if you were to look at Bushman culture now, on the surface,
1:24:11 it appears very diffuse, but the actual skills are very much alive and they, they simmering just
1:24:12 under the surface.
1:24:17 This incredible ecological knowledge of how to live in harmony with the desert.
1:24:23 And if, if AI does wipe us all out, I’m pretty sure that Bushman people will just walk back into
1:24:27 the storehouse of the desert and be really, really comfortable there.
1:24:30 Yeah.
1:24:38 If you want to see modern polite behavior disintegrate very quickly, just go to a place like San Francisco.
1:24:42 I remember the power went out for two days, two and a half days, and people were very,
1:24:46 very civil in the beginning and walking around the street, greeting one another.
1:24:53 And then people realize their food is going to thaw, the food is going to spoil and agitation
1:24:58 and aggression start to percolate very quickly because people don’t know what to do, right?
1:24:59 They have no idea what to do.
1:25:03 If the basic architecture of convenience is removed.
1:25:04 I’ve thought about it a lot.
1:25:09 And I think that all the things you imagine to happen, people are so much closer to primal
1:25:10 wildness than they ever realize.
1:25:14 And survival starts to kick in.
1:25:16 And then I think there’ll be a wide junction.
1:25:23 Some people will go into survival of the fittest and then others will move into states of collaboration
1:25:27 for like good reason, protection, food, safety.
1:25:30 So there’ll be like, it’ll be interesting to see how it breaks down.
1:25:32 You can get into some good prepper stuff.
1:25:37 Just pro tip, make sure you have water.
1:25:38 Water is number one.
1:25:42 You’re going to need water a lot sooner than you’re going to need canned lentils.
1:25:46 And by the way, if you have any dried canned food, you’re going to need some water typically
1:25:47 for a lot of that.
1:25:51 Make sure you have your water and your jet boils or something along those lines.
1:25:56 It’s also amazing to see how little water the Bushman people can operate on.
1:25:57 It must be absurd.
1:26:00 Their evolutionary track must have prepared them so well for that.
1:26:02 I would be dead within 24 hours.
1:26:06 We had one morning on the same trip where we found tracks of a cheetah.
1:26:11 And we were quite keen to show the guys like some of our tracking skills.
1:26:13 And it was like, it was a camaraderie amongst trackers.
1:26:19 And we were with the 70 year old man and we following the single cheetah.
1:26:21 And it kind of turned into like mildly competitive at the front.
1:26:25 So if someone lost the track, the next person would be on it.
1:26:28 And then if you step off it, someone else would be on it.
1:26:31 And for the first like two hours, we were quite effective.
1:26:35 And then these guys just started to put a clinic on us as it got hotter and hotter.
1:26:37 We ran out of water.
1:26:42 We were like climbing under these thorn bushes, lumbering along, and they were just like cruising
1:26:42 through the desert.
1:26:48 And by 11 o’clock, the 70 year old guy was walking us off our feet and we had drained our
1:26:48 water bottles.
1:26:52 And we were like, we need to get back home because we need to get water.
1:26:54 He hadn’t had a sip all morning and we were like, okay.
1:26:55 Wow.
1:26:55 Yeah.
1:26:56 You win.
1:26:57 No contest.
1:26:58 No contest.
1:26:59 All right.
1:27:04 So I want to hop to two different potential leaping off points.
1:27:08 You can tell me if one of these makes sense or if there’s something else we want to hop
1:27:11 to and you can follow whichever track is appealing.
1:27:14 Being a resolved figure, seeking the wild man.
1:27:17 You want to pursue either of these?
1:27:17 What do you think?
1:27:21 Or we could take option C off menu.
1:27:28 No, I mean, I think the wild man is a powerful theme and it comes down to this idea that I’ve
1:27:34 come to think of the wild man as awareness, like self-awareness, awareness of all the different
1:27:39 layers of energy that are inside you and then also access.
1:27:44 And so when those two things start to come together, you start to see a real type of presence,
1:27:47 the type of presence that you see in the natural world.
1:27:52 And I’m really become interested in conjuring more of that in my own life.
1:27:57 How do you liberate different layers of energy in yourself?
1:28:01 Like in my definition of presence would be access to the moment.
1:28:07 And particularly now working in a lot of these men’s groups, the idea of conjuring the wild
1:28:14 man is it’s wildness in the sense that it is in tune with life force, but it is also
1:28:17 wildness in that it is access to the moment.
1:28:24 And what I mean by that is to have your wild man fully available means that if you are
1:28:30 required to front up in some ways and protect something and be able to be assertive and aggressive,
1:28:31 you have access to that.
1:28:38 But if the moment is calling for a tremendous amount of softness or tenderness, you also have
1:28:39 access to that.
1:28:47 So trying to figure out how to develop access to as many moments as possible has become kind
1:28:50 of a central piece of exploration for me at the moment.
1:28:58 And to become resolved within that is now as a father, I think a lot about figuring out how
1:29:07 how to be available through a full spectrum of masculine experience to my son, to my wife,
1:29:08 to my family.
1:29:11 Where do I run into blockages in myself?
1:29:16 Where do I start to feel like I really want to be here, but I don’t know how to show up in
1:29:17 this moment?
1:29:20 That’s what that exploration has become primarily about.
1:29:21 Well, let me ask you a question related to that.
1:29:27 So if we think about access to the moment and sort of full spectrum access to these different
1:29:34 emotional sensitivities, let’s just say, I know that’s that’s a bit of a clumsy way to word it,
1:29:35 but let’s just say that.
1:29:41 How do you personally think about co-locating you and your family?
1:29:43 And here’s what I mean by that.
1:29:47 The way that I have tried to solve for this, what I’ve realized is that in a place like New
1:29:54 York City where I’m sitting and it’s like got accosted by this very aggressive, probably
1:29:58 mentally unstable person yesterday in huge crowds of people, right?
1:30:05 A lot of feeling of like collective cauterization, if that’s a word, but just people have dropped down
1:30:14 walls and I put on sort of a protective armor that seemingly disallows me to access all of
1:30:20 these different sensitivities because it just seems like suicide to be too porous in an environment
1:30:21 like this.
1:30:26 So whether I wanted to be open or not, I don’t think it would be good for me necessarily in
1:30:31 New York City in most places to have that level of kind of openness.
1:30:33 So I do spend a lot of time in cities.
1:30:35 I find cities exciting.
1:30:39 But I block out, you know, a few weeks of the year where I’m just completely off the
1:30:45 grid and hopefully at the very least keeping these sensitivities from atrophying too horribly.
1:30:51 Like I’m working the muscle in these blocks of time that I put out.
1:30:58 There are other people, of course, who just live in a more peaceful, perhaps, environment
1:31:02 that allows for this type of exploration and expression and experience, right?
1:31:04 And it doesn’t need to be the middle of South Africa.
1:31:07 It doesn’t need to be in the middle of the mountains of Montana.
1:31:09 It could just be in a peaceful suburb.
1:31:10 It doesn’t need to be.
1:31:14 Or in a, like a chiller city than New York City, potentially.
1:31:16 How do you think about this for yourself?
1:31:20 I think about it probably through discernment.
1:31:25 Like I think that it’s wise to be somewhat armored in the environments you’re describing.
1:31:33 But what I see in groups now a lot, this has become the core thing, is I see, particularly
1:31:39 in men’s groups, a desire to be more available, but actually not knowing how to, not having
1:31:45 the access and the literacy to know what that would even look like.
1:31:51 And so you don’t want to go into extreme tenderness, you know, in the middle of New York City.
1:31:56 You probably want to be exactly where you are, but you want to know that you can open to deeper
1:32:03 levels in the right context and you want to know what has kept you out of that, which would
1:32:07 usually be some kind of conditioned response, something that you learned to do, a way you
1:32:11 learned to freeze or shut down when things became overwhelming.
1:32:17 And then you want to figure out how to develop more options for yourself in that moment.
1:32:21 So the trauma to me is freezing, right?
1:32:26 Anytime you’ve been forced into some kind of traumatic situation, it’s,
1:32:28 characterized by a reduction of options.
1:32:34 And so in order to cultivate more presence, one is you have to be present to the fact that
1:32:38 you’re frozen and actually be able to feel like, okay, in this moment, I want to be more
1:32:39 connected, but I don’t know how.
1:32:45 So first to be present to that, and then second, to start to figure out what other choices would
1:32:51 look like and literally other things you could do in that moment to move out of the frozen
1:32:52 state.
1:32:58 And that’s where I think the men need other men than the wild man is somewhat a collective
1:33:04 exploration, men being with men, particularly in wild places, that it just naturally starts
1:33:05 to emerge.
1:33:09 You don’t have to work at it too hard and it doesn’t have to turn into a drum circle.
1:33:16 If you take a bunch of guys out into a wild place, their psyche starts to relate to that
1:33:21 wild place and they start saying, I can’t tell you why, it’s intangible, it’s energetic,
1:33:24 but something about this has something to do with me.
1:33:31 I can feel myself in a way here in the presence of that waterfall and that mountain and that
1:33:34 lion and the process of being out here.
1:33:35 I feel, I can feel myself.
1:33:41 And then the conversation starts to open and you’re able to start to say like, okay, where
1:33:44 are the places where we run into blockage?
1:33:48 And if we want to be wild, we need access to the moment.
1:33:53 Just like in the way that an innocent animal has access to, it knows what to do in any given
1:33:55 situation, like leopards are not in their heads.
1:33:57 If they want to be aggressive, they’re aggressive.
1:33:59 If they’re caring for their young, they’re caring for their young.
1:34:01 If they need to set a territory, they do it.
1:34:02 It flows out of them.
1:34:07 Creating spaces in which that can naturally start to occur has become really interesting
1:34:07 to me.
1:34:11 How do you think about, well, side note for people, I don’t know why this popped into my
1:34:14 head, but if you’re like, man, I’m never going to see a leopard.
1:34:20 I was like, you can get a little whiff of leopard if you go to the movie theater and the
1:34:24 popcorn is burnt, it smells like leopard urine.
1:34:28 So that’s just a, if you want to take a big, big inhale.
1:34:33 When leopards mark their territory, they spray and it has, it has the almost exact scent of
1:34:33 popcorn.
1:34:35 It’s really wild.
1:34:38 I remember I was like, I was like, nah, that’s not possible.
1:34:42 And then we were driving at one point and I think it might, maybe it was Sir Sant, but
1:34:46 one of the trackers that we were with held up a hand to stop the car.
1:34:49 And I was like, holy shit, there it is.
1:34:50 I feel like I’m sitting in the movie theater.
1:34:51 That’s crazy.
1:34:54 And in any case, I’ll leave that there.
1:34:59 But what do you think the trappings of some personal development or men’s groups are?
1:35:04 And the reason I ask, and this is not a strong position I’m taking, but it’s just a thought
1:35:09 is that there are many side effects to a, and many benefits too, of a highly individualistic
1:35:11 society, right?
1:35:15 So if you, in the case of the US, you take this Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism,
1:35:21 this lionizing of the self-sufficient independent person.
1:35:24 There’s a lot of production that can come from that, right?
1:35:25 Like productivity.
1:35:30 There is frequently some degree of collateral damage from a collective perspective.
1:35:32 And that’s not too woo-woo.
1:35:34 Like collective could just mean like in your family.
1:35:41 Like if you trained yourself to be sort of a cold-blooded business killer with blinders
1:35:45 on, and that’s the gear you learn to use is sixth gear.
1:35:50 If you don’t have some degree of flexibility and you’re very good, which is very common, this
1:35:56 applies to, I think men in a lot of fields, women probably too, but I think especially men
1:35:57 compartmentalization.
1:36:01 So when you’re able to like increase your pain threshold, compartmentalize certain things,
1:36:05 lock certain things away, can make you very, very, very effective as a performer.
1:36:09 But in an interpersonal respect, it can be compromised.
1:36:09 Okay.
1:36:14 The reason I’m bringing all this up is that I think about, say, let’s just take, for example,
1:36:20 like men who want more access to different states and sensitivities.
1:36:22 And I’m like, okay, well, why do they want that?
1:36:27 Well, they might want it because they want to be able to better listen and interact with
1:36:29 their partner, right?
1:36:32 And just for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s a, that’s a female partner.
1:36:36 And I’m like, okay, well, I agree with that, right?
1:36:39 This has been one of my homework assignments for the last two decades.
1:36:43 It’s getting better at conflict de-escalation, which I never had a good model for.
1:36:45 I’ve made a lot of progress and quite more work to be done.
1:36:54 There’s also, I feel like maybe that this perceived necessity on the part of men is a reflection
1:37:02 of also a society in which you have a couple within which each person expects the other to
1:37:04 be kind of everything for them.
1:37:09 So it’s actually, we need more community solutions where it’s like, okay, look, if you expect your
1:37:14 man to be just like one of your girlfriends you’re going to have a chat with, like, you got
1:37:16 the wrong animal probably, right?
1:37:18 And then if the dude is like, why can’t you just be a dude?
1:37:19 Let’s be dudes.
1:37:24 It’s like, well, maybe you just have, you got the wrong animal, which is part of the reason
1:37:28 why I block out for these weeks when I do these trips, they’re almost always all men trips,
1:37:29 right?
1:37:36 Because that’s that type of experience in modern day, I think is largely absent or disallowed
1:37:38 outside of maybe a few sports context.
1:37:45 And similarly, if a couple is in isolation, right, putting aside the child rearing aspect
1:37:50 of this and the challenges that entails, I suppose this is very meandering, but I haven’t
1:37:51 verbalized this before.
1:37:57 To what extent do you feel like personal development for, let’s just take the men’s group as an
1:38:04 example, should focus on the individual and that kind of access versus trying to figure
1:38:09 out some like structural solutions and scheduling and blocking things out so that they have access
1:38:10 to more people outside of their partner.
1:38:12 Does that make sense?
1:38:13 Yeah, I think it does.
1:38:14 I think there’s steps to it.
1:38:22 I think the first step is both partners developing more literacy away from the partnership.
1:38:26 So I think it’s first work in the eye.
1:38:29 There’s an inevitability and a necessity to that.
1:38:38 Then once you start to get more skills in the eye, you want to bring that to the we and you
1:38:41 want to start to practice.
1:38:47 And I actually think that one of the issues with relationship is that our model for it is
1:38:50 still like built on the romantic traditions.
1:38:54 And it’s like you’re going to fall in love and then, you know, she has this beautiful thing,
1:38:59 whereas relationship to me now is way more an active practice space.
1:39:03 But you have to be working yourself and together.
1:39:06 So those two things have to go together at some stage.
1:39:15 The problem is, is that you need your blind spots revealed and you need people who have more
1:39:19 access to help guide you into new choices and new ways of being.
1:39:23 You need something from the outside to help you see what your blind spot was.
1:39:29 Very often you need something to offend your own pattern or your own blindness and help you
1:39:30 see it in a different way.
1:39:33 And then you bring those awarenesses to the group.
1:39:40 And then I think hopefully what starts to emerge out of that is there’s what the relationship
1:39:42 wants to be for others.
1:39:48 And ideally it should turn into a place of service, not just for your direct family, but for the
1:39:52 larger community where you start to know we have something unique to give to the community.
1:39:59 And I think when enough people start to take that up, that’s where you could see like systemic
1:40:00 models for change.
1:40:06 But I think masculine essence needs other men to liberate itself more.
1:40:09 And same with feminine essence needs other women to liberate itself more.
1:40:14 And then to bring those two together with more awareness becomes part of the funness of the
1:40:14 game, I think.
1:40:18 Look, you know, I’m a junkie for personal development stuff.
1:40:23 So I’m kind of like, I feel like I’m in an AA meeting for like personal development addicts.
1:40:27 But what I would say, I’ll tell just a brief story.
1:40:32 So on this Montana trip, keeping in mind, I keep using that example because it’s most recent,
1:40:34 but this is, I’d say at least three or four times a year.
1:40:37 There’s a trip of some type with guys.
1:40:40 And in this case, small group, it’s like four or five guys.
1:40:47 And at one point we’re sitting around a fire at night, just rapping and talking and talking
1:40:47 and talking.
1:40:51 And then one of the guys said, he’s like, I just figured out why fire is so important
1:40:52 for guys.
1:40:53 And we’re like, why is that?
1:40:55 And he goes, because we don’t have to make eye contact.
1:40:58 We just look at the fire and we can have all these really deep conversations.
1:41:03 Whereas in most circumstances, like if you’re staring deeply into another guy’s eyes, it’s
1:41:09 kind of an aggressive, it’s just this ingrained kind of aggressive, defensive dynamic.
1:41:12 If you’re staring in someone’s eyes, you’re going to make out or kill each other.
1:41:13 Yeah, right.
1:41:19 You know that old joke you say to your buddy, hey, do you want to go and sit by the lake
1:41:20 and talk for six hours?
1:41:21 It’s like, no.
1:41:22 It’s like, do you want to go fishing?
1:41:23 Yeah, let’s do that.
1:41:25 Yeah, right.
1:41:25 Exactly.
1:41:29 And so hearkening back to what you said about like,
1:41:31 don’t try too hard, right?
1:41:37 Like knowing, and this is more an open question, but as I get older and as I see some of the
1:41:44 trappings and weaknesses or insufficiencies, both the necessity of and the insufficiency
1:41:52 of like direct head-on personal work, I wonder what the ratio is between sort of deliberate
1:41:55 like microscope work, so to speak.
1:42:00 And like the indirect work, this is going to sound really crass, which is like building
1:42:06 a raft and going fishing, which we did with like handmade lures and all this stuff while
1:42:08 telling like fart and dick jokes, right?
1:42:10 It’s like, it doesn’t seem serious.
1:42:14 Like no one would put that in a book and be like, okay, step number one, like come up with
1:42:15 three of your favorite dick jokes.
1:42:23 It’s not going to be in any self-help book, but nonetheless, it seems to do a lot of lifting
1:42:29 and there’s the bonding and, you know, the older I get, the more I think that it’s like,
1:42:36 okay, we can look at the 27 different options for improving ourselves and ultimately, why
1:42:37 are we doing that?
1:42:41 Well, it’s probably to achieve like some emotional state to improve our quality of life and the
1:42:44 quality of life of say our family members around us.
1:42:44 Okay.
1:42:49 Well, I having in the case of these trips that I’m describing, right?
1:42:53 Some guy time where you’re not necessarily, I mean, there is some goofing off, but there’s
1:42:59 generally shared projects and like shared suffering of some type and a lot of exertion.
1:43:02 Like you said, it’s like, yeah, let’s sit by the lake and talk for six hours.
1:43:04 No thanks, but let’s go fishing.
1:43:06 And by the way, kind of do the same thing.
1:43:06 Okay, great.
1:43:07 Let’s do it.
1:43:14 That the answer is like, it’s the relationship stupid and the content is secondary to like
1:43:16 the spending of time in a particular way.
1:43:18 A hundred percent.
1:43:20 And you don’t have to work hard.
1:43:23 The only thing that I would say is a little bit of context to it.
1:43:28 If you have a few guys in the group who have done the work of developing a little bit more
1:43:33 access and can make reads, then you don’t have to club it.
1:43:38 You know, you can mostly be talking shit floating down the river, but then occasionally
1:43:43 with a little bit of context, someone can say, Hey, here’s what I see you being blind to.
1:43:44 You can tell me to fuck off.
1:43:45 You can take it on board.
1:43:49 It can go any way, but here’s how I notice you show up.
1:43:50 Do you know that you do that?
1:43:54 Now, if you just try and weigh in on that, it’s like, fuck you, leave me alone.
1:44:00 But if you’ve had some time together doing some real stuff, like there’s an opening there
1:44:03 that I found the rate of download to be incredibly high.
1:44:07 The community piece is that no one has all the answers.
1:44:12 Personal development work for personal development work’s sake is just fucking self-indulgent.
1:44:19 But once you add in the dynamic of relationship, as you said, then there’s love and then there’s
1:44:19 care.
1:44:23 And it’s like, you know, I’m, what I’m saying to you is coming out of care.
1:44:25 It’s coming out of a piece of my journey.
1:44:28 And what you find is everyone has a piece for everyone.
1:44:31 Then the community is more intelligent than the individual.
1:44:37 And that’s where the major unlock start to have where someone who’s not even in the role
1:44:42 of facilitator or leader says, Hey, you know, there’s a way in which you show up.
1:44:46 That makes me like, not feel like I can trust you.
1:44:50 I’m just telling you that by way of feedback, I don’t know whether you want to take that on
1:44:51 board or not.
1:44:53 You know, things start to happen.
1:44:58 And if you’ve rafted a river together, you tend to take more than you would just jettison.
1:45:01 With the example that you just gave, there are lots of ways to communicate that, right?
1:45:05 I mean, you might just be like, Hey man, I could be making this up as a story, but like,
1:45:06 have you ever considered A, B or C?
1:45:11 Because if you’re going to use the language of say the 15 commitments of conscious leadership,
1:45:15 you better fucking make sure the other person has an idea of what the hell you’re talking
1:45:16 about.
1:45:19 Amazing toolkit, but you kind of have to agree on the language beforehand.
1:45:26 So we’re coming up on roughly time, but I want to make sure that we do perhaps two things.
1:45:33 One is maybe add one more story and then cover anything that you’d like to touch on that we
1:45:34 haven’t covered.
1:45:39 What do you think is a good kind of bookmark story here?
1:45:42 I have lunch the baboon down.
1:45:44 Let me tell you about lunch.
1:45:52 Tim, lunch was a baboon that picked up the nickname lunch because he started showing up at lunchtime
1:45:56 and he started causing absolute havoc around the camp.
1:45:59 Lunch even worked out how to break into the kitchen.
1:46:03 And I remember once being in the kitchen and the chefs had barricaded one of the doors with
1:46:06 some rocks and the door was literally vibrating.
1:46:11 And every time it was, it was being forced from the outside, every time the rock would
1:46:13 slide in, the door would open a little bit more.
1:46:18 And then this furry hand came in and gripped the handle and then lunch burst into the kitchen.
1:46:23 And he walked across to the counter where there was a cake and he picked up the cake and walked
1:46:26 off on his hind legs, holding the cake in his hands.
1:46:30 And just for people who don’t have a picture of a baboon, I mean, I find those things pretty
1:46:31 fucking terrifying.
1:46:38 I mean, a baboon is a formidable, he’s like a three foot muscular, hairy dude with long canines.
1:46:38 Yeah.
1:46:39 Yeah.
1:46:43 There’s this thing in animal intelligence, and you probably even know this better than me,
1:46:45 but there are these modes of awareness.
1:46:54 There’s I know, then there’s I know, you know, then there’s I know that you know.
1:46:58 So it’s like the first awareness is just, you know, I’m aware of you, then it’s I’m aware
1:46:59 that you’re aware of me.
1:47:01 That’s like higher level.
1:47:05 So sometimes I would walk through the camp and lunch would be like involved in some kind
1:47:06 of mischief.
1:47:12 He would be breaking into a guest’s minibar and then he would see me and he would know that
1:47:17 I knew that he was up to mischief and then he would kind of pretend to just be like loitering
1:47:17 around.
1:47:20 Nothing to see here, just being a baboon in my natural environment.
1:47:25 I remember the other day I was going through some notes on my desk and I found a minute
1:47:26 from a meeting.
1:47:31 And the literal minute was like, we need to get new crockery and cutlery for tree camp.
1:47:34 Land Rover number eight needs to be repaired.
1:47:37 His troop needs to fear our troop.
1:47:41 And basically it was like someone deciding that they needed to try and scare lunch out
1:47:42 of the camp.
1:47:47 And so for a period of days, I decided I was going to like chivvy him out of the camp.
1:47:51 And it was elaborate because every time I tried to chase him, he would hide.
1:47:53 He got into the minibar.
1:47:54 He drank some booze.
1:47:56 I found him sitting in the pool one day.
1:47:58 He was just like causing general chaos.
1:48:01 I had a little BB gun that I decided that I would shoot him with.
1:48:06 And the one day I found him, he was sitting on a guest’s Audi that was parked in the car
1:48:10 park and when I aimed the gun at him, he just lay flat against the Audi like, I dare you.
1:48:12 So he was up to no good.
1:48:18 Anyway, the one day I’m sitting in the office and the phone rings and my sister picks up the
1:48:23 phone and she starts talking in that very intent way.
1:48:24 I said, really?
1:48:26 I can’t believe that.
1:48:27 Royalty.
1:48:29 Yes, of course we can.
1:48:33 And everyone in the room was like eavesdropping because it sounded so intense.
1:48:38 So she hangs up the phone and she says, Boyd, Prince is coming to Londalozzi.
1:48:42 And this is like a tremendous amount of excitement.
1:48:47 And there’s like months and months of prep and setup to the arrival of the Prince.
1:48:49 There’s like endless amount of logistics.
1:48:54 A satellite dish has to be put up so that the Prince can stream certain sports games.
1:48:56 There’s a special chef that has to come in.
1:49:00 There’s a whole lot of things that need to come into the boutique so that there can be
1:49:02 unique shopping experiences.
1:49:06 At one stage, there’s talk of lengthening the runway so that a jet can land.
1:49:10 But going backwards and forwards and, you know, you liaise with these kind of like entourage
1:49:10 liaisons.
1:49:12 So there’s like just, it’s all happening.
1:49:19 And eventually the day arrives that the Prince is arriving and we were quite pleased with
1:49:23 ourselves because we were on top of all of the logistics, a special face cream had been
1:49:23 flown in.
1:49:28 And I remember the first three or four planes that landed were just entourage and luggage.
1:49:34 And then eventually the Prince was coming into land and Bronwyn said to me, my sister, she
1:49:36 said, Boyd, you need to run down to the room.
1:49:38 Final thing we need to do.
1:49:41 And you need to put these cold face cloths in the room.
1:49:44 So I grabbed my radio, I run down to the suite.
1:49:49 And as I’m running down, the walkie talkies going off, the Prince is 10 minutes out, 10
1:49:49 minutes out.
1:49:51 Prince has landed.
1:49:53 He’s now eight minutes out, eight minutes out.
1:49:59 And I get down to the suite and I open it and it opens into a kind of living room.
1:50:04 And then you go through a kind of a lock area where there’s a cupboard into the main bedroom
1:50:05 and then into the bathroom.
1:50:09 And as I get there, I noticed that the door is slightly adjacent.
1:50:12 So I think to myself, it must just be that the housekeeping had left the door open.
1:50:15 I walk through, I come through the bedroom.
1:50:23 And as I get to the bathroom, standing at the bathroom counter with a bottle of papaya hand
1:50:25 lotion in his hand is lunch.
1:50:30 And as he sees me and I block the doorway, he starts downing hand lotion.
1:50:32 He starts chugging it into his mouth.
1:50:34 It’s like mango papaya hand lotion.
1:50:37 He even gets a streak of lotion across his top gel.
1:50:44 And then he realizes that he’s in a confined space and he drops the jar of lotion, stands
1:50:50 in the glass, cuts his feet a little bit and launches himself in a full dive across the
1:50:55 bathroom at the giant panel of glass across the bath where you can look out onto the river.
1:50:59 He smacks the glass, his hands come down, he puts a bloody handprint on it.
1:51:01 He pushes back off the glass.
1:51:03 He flies onto the ceiling.
1:51:05 And now he starts to make baboon noises.
1:51:05 Bah!
1:51:06 Bah!
1:51:06 Bah!
1:51:13 And at the same time, he starts to use the patented baboon technique for getting out of
1:51:16 dangerous situations, which is to massively release your bowels.
1:51:22 And so for a few seconds, this baboon bounces around, causing absolute chaos, knocking over
1:51:23 bath salts.
1:51:25 He’s standing on the faucet.
1:51:26 His hands are bleeding.
1:51:27 There’s lotion.
1:51:28 There’s crap everywhere.
1:51:29 He’s barking at me.
1:51:29 Bah!
1:51:30 Bah!
1:51:32 Then he turns and he comes at me.
1:51:35 And Tim, I remember I let out a little scream.
1:51:35 Ah!
1:51:40 And I leaned back and he flew in slow motion past me.
1:51:44 And in mid-air, he turned and he looked at me as he went past.
1:51:49 And he had like a look of like savage glee on his face and lotion like down across his jowl.
1:51:55 He landed on the bed and he bounded across the bed with these bloody handprints, released
1:52:02 another massive turd, ripped the front veranda doors open and dived off the front veranda like
1:52:04 a stockbroker in a recession.
1:52:05 And the whole time, he still creaked.
1:52:09 He disappeared into the river.
1:52:14 The room, as I looked around the room, like, I cannot tell you what a baboon in a confined
1:52:15 space does.
1:52:17 The room looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
1:52:23 There is blood and shit and lotion and baboon hair.
1:52:25 There’s a turd on the pillow.
1:52:31 And it smells strongly of baboon and it looks quite human-like because baboons have very similar
1:52:33 black pores to humans.
1:52:38 So there’s like a bloody handprint on the wall and like someone’s grabbed the faucet with it.
1:52:40 Like, so it looks like someone’s been murdered in there.
1:52:42 And the walkie-talkie goes off.
1:52:46 The prince is now five minutes out, five minutes out.
1:52:48 I called my sister on the radio.
1:52:51 I said, Bronwyn, you’ve got to get down here with the housekeeping team.
1:52:53 This is an absolute shit show.
1:52:59 So she comes down with a group of chambermaids and housekeeping ladies and they start to go
1:53:03 ham on this room, trying to get it back into working order.
1:53:11 Meantime, a massive pantomime breaks out on the main reception area of the lodge as the staff
1:53:15 of Londalozzi try and delay the prince from coming to his room.
1:53:16 Hello, your majesty.
1:53:18 Could we offer you a quick wine tasting?
1:53:20 No, I just arrived.
1:53:21 I want to go to my room.
1:53:24 We would like to take you straight out on a safari right now.
1:53:26 There’s a leopard with a kiln nearby.
1:53:28 That sounds good, but I’d like to go to my room.
1:53:33 Okay, what about the ladies’ choir who like to sing songs and do traditional dancing?
1:53:34 He’s like, no, I’m going to my room.
1:53:40 And what saved us, Tim, was in the middle of this elaborate faulty towers-esque pantomime,
1:53:45 a hippo walked out onto the rocks in front of the camp in the midday light.
1:53:50 And the people of Londalozzi acted like they had never seen a hippo before in their lives.
1:53:53 People started screaming, oh my God, a hippo.
1:53:54 We never see hippos out of the water.
1:53:56 Someone go and fetch a spotting scope.
1:54:02 Someone brought a telescope down and that brought us about 15 minutes while the prince took the
1:54:03 a hippo.
1:54:06 Staff were acting like a hippo was the most amazing thing the world had ever seen.
1:54:08 Anyway, eventually we can stall him no longer.
1:54:16 He comes down to the room and literally as he comes in the room, the chambermaids slip out
1:54:20 of the sliding door in the bathroom and they get into the long grass around the suite and
1:54:23 they’ve got mops and buckets and baboon shit in their hair.
1:54:26 And as one, they just drop down into the grass.
1:54:31 They just like disappear and lie there in absolute possum status.
1:54:36 And there’s this incredible moment where the prince comes into his room and it smells of room
1:54:39 spray and everything’s clean and the mirror has been put straight.
1:54:44 And he walks out onto the front veranda and he looks out over the river and the hippo calls
1:54:44 nearby.
1:54:47 And it’s just, everything is quiet.
1:54:52 And he’s like, it’s so good to be out here alone for a thousand miles of every direction.
1:54:57 And he turns and walks back into his room and 12 chambermaids rides up out of the grass
1:54:57 around his suite.
1:55:00 And that is the day that lunch really got us.
1:55:02 Lunch the baboon.
1:55:04 Lunch the baboon.
1:55:05 Holy shit.
1:55:06 What a story.
1:55:07 One day we were out.
1:55:09 This is another true story.
1:55:12 One day we were out, a bunch of guides talking about a bunch of guys out together and we
1:55:15 drive out and it’s like an afternoon.
1:55:16 We’ve all got off.
1:55:20 We’re drinking some beers and there’s like a rocky outcrop and that the rocky outcrop is
1:55:24 like a small hill and it’s silhouetted against the skyline.
1:55:28 And we see lunch literally silhouetted on a rock up against the skyline.
1:55:33 And he’s with a lady baboon and he’s doing some very naughty things to her.
1:55:38 And I swear to him, when he saw us, he put his one hand up in the air like this and gave
1:55:39 us like kind of a high five.
1:55:47 Oh, Londelose, protector of all things.
1:55:53 There have to be moments when you’re like, oh, just want to blast him off that rock and
1:55:54 be done with lunch.
1:55:57 It’s amazing to live amongst the animals.
1:56:00 The other day, I mean, the other day I was sitting watching a warthog.
1:56:02 He was grazing up on the runway.
1:56:07 I literally saw a thought occur to him and he turned and he began to walk.
1:56:13 He walked like two kilometers down to the camp and I followed him the whole way and he made
1:56:16 his way to where a woman was washing some clothes and she was hanging them on a washing line.
1:56:22 And the water is dripping off the clothes onto the ground and it’s making this little flush
1:56:23 of green grass.
1:56:27 And literally he knows that’s a good place to go and get some green grass.
1:56:33 And so there’s this thing about living close to the animals like that, that you notice there’s
1:56:34 an intelligence to it.
1:56:40 And it’s almost like your community expands to include the trees and the animals and these
1:56:42 unique personalities that you get to know.
1:56:48 And it’s not just a random baboon, but it’s like that’s lunch and it’s not just a random
1:56:50 leopard, but we know this leopard.
1:56:51 She allows herself to be seen.
1:56:56 We have a relationship with her and that’s a very, very deep and beautiful way to live.
1:57:03 And just to underscore what you just said about leopards, like if you see a leopard, that
1:57:04 leopard is allowing you to see them.
1:57:10 And if they want to vanish, even in short grass, snap of the fingers, they are gone.
1:57:16 It’s just beyond incredible to see that happened where you’re like, okay, they couldn’t hide
1:57:17 themselves if they wanted to.
1:57:19 Like that grass is too short, da, da, da.
1:57:23 And then they turn back and they’re like, eh, I had enough of you guys.
1:57:25 And boom, they’re just completely invisible.
1:57:26 It’s remarkable to see.
1:57:31 Boyd, anything you’d like to say before we wind to a close?
1:57:32 Where can people find you?
1:57:36 Where should people go to learn more about all things Boyd?
1:57:37 Yeah, thanks, Tim.
1:57:44 People can go to boydvarty.com to find out about retreats and books, Cathedral of the Wild
1:57:46 and Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life.
1:57:52 And yeah, that’s the best place to figure out if you want to come on a safari or if you
1:57:52 want to come to Africa.
1:57:54 That’s also a good way to do it.
1:57:58 Boydvarty, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y.com.
1:57:59 Good to see you, buddy.
1:58:00 Good to see you, man.
1:58:02 Thanks so much for having me on.
1:58:02 Yeah, absolutely.
1:58:06 And everybody listening, we will link to, I’m not sure exactly where we’re going to link
1:58:09 to, but we’ll link to some names and other things.
1:58:12 We’ll link to the highlight reel of Lunch the Baboon.
1:58:12 I’m kidding.
1:58:17 We’ll link to all things mentioned that can be linked to in the show notes, as always,
1:58:19 at tim.blog slash podcast.
1:58:22 If you just search Boyd, B-O-Y-D, both episodes will come up.
1:58:23 This is episode number two.
1:58:26 Definitely, if you enjoyed this, also listen to episode number one.
1:58:31 And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary.
1:58:32 Why not?
1:58:35 It doesn’t take a whole lot of extra effort, and the payoff is enormous.
1:58:41 Kinder to others, and also just a tad bit kinder to yourself, because it goes both ways.
1:58:43 And you can work those muscles on both sides.
1:58:49 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
1:58:54 Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday.
1:58:58 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before
1:58:59 the weekend?
1:59:04 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short
1:59:06 newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
1:59:08 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
1:59:14 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve
1:59:17 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
1:59:19 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
1:59:25 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,
1:59:29 and all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
1:59:31 of podcast guests.
1:59:37 And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I
1:59:38 share them with you.
1:59:43 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head
1:59:45 off for the weekend, something to think about.
1:59:53 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog.friday,
1:59:55 drop in your email, and you’ll get the very next one.
1:59:56 Thanks for listening.
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