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0:02:31 I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had the experience of traveling overseas and I
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0:02:42 is happening to me.
0:02:49 I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops
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0:02:53 How about that?
0:02:57 And it suggests an alternative and I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service
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0:05:33 Boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.
0:05:36 Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with
0:05:41 world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite
0:05:46 books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.
0:05:50 This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its tenth
0:05:56 year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion downloads.
0:05:59 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best.
0:06:05 Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade, I could not be more
0:06:10 excited to give you these super combo episodes, and internally we’ve been calling these the
0:06:14 super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household
0:06:20 names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider
0:06:21 stars.
0:06:26 These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many
0:06:27 of you.
0:06:31 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode, just trust
0:06:36 me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:06:44 And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo, and now without
0:06:49 further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:55 First up, Edward Norton, philanthropist, environmentalist, director, producer, and
0:07:01 Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning actor, who has starred in more than 50 films, including
0:07:09 Primal Fear, American History X, Fight Club, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Birdman, and Motherless
0:07:13 Brooklyn, which he also wrote, produced, and directed.
0:07:19 You can find Edward on Twitter @EdwardNorton.
0:07:23 When were you introduced to acting, or how did that come to be?
0:07:27 And I did do a fair amount of reading, and for whatever reason, wasn’t able to pin it
0:07:28 down exactly.
0:07:32 I mean, the summer camp came up, but I don’t know where things began.
0:07:36 I mean, mostly, my mother was an English teacher, she was a high school English teacher, and
0:07:38 was a real theater aficionado.
0:07:43 Both my parents were theater aficionados and film lovers and stuff like that, and they
0:07:51 exposed me very early on to theater and plays, and I had a strong pull toward that.
0:07:57 In the time I was five years old, even, I started, a babysitter of mine went and I signed
0:08:01 up at the theater arts program outside of school that she was involved in, and that’s
0:08:04 how I got involved in it.
0:08:06 And I went through ebbs and flows.
0:08:07 I loved it.
0:08:10 It wasn’t like I knew I wanted to be an actor, I just liked doing it, and I loved writing
0:08:11 stories.
0:08:16 I made up my own comic books, and I made little VHS camcorder films where you use the pause
0:08:20 button as your cut, and I mean, just all that stuff I loved, not exclusively, not in a way
0:08:23 where I knew it was my life as an adult.
0:08:26 And then I got really self-conscious about it in high school, like I went to a public
0:08:27 high school.
0:08:29 It didn’t seem cool to me at all.
0:08:31 I was doing my athletics.
0:08:33 And the athletics were, at that time, what?
0:08:38 I did a lot of, I played tennis, I played baseball, I played ice hockey.
0:08:39 Where was that?
0:08:41 I ran track in Columbia, Maryland.
0:08:42 Okay.
0:08:43 Yeah.
0:08:45 It’s like half an hour south of Baltimore.
0:08:49 Who were your first then mentors in the world of theater acting?
0:08:58 Well, the woman who created this local theater art school in our community in Columbia, Maryland,
0:09:03 her name was Toby Ornstein, and it’s crazy to say, but she really was, I still think
0:09:09 she’s one of the great minds I ever encountered on theater, the craft of theater, the craft
0:09:10 of acting.
0:09:13 She was not a regional theater hobbyist.
0:09:17 She was my Stella Adler, really, like when I was young, and infused us when we were really
0:09:24 young with, I don’t know, a sense of seriousness about it, and told us to read and told us
0:09:28 to be erudite on plays, and it was really interesting.
0:09:34 And then, like I said, in my teens, I got self-conscious about it, and then I saw Ian
0:09:38 McKellen do a one-man show in Washington, D.C. when I was about 17.
0:09:43 It had such a huge impact on me that I thought, “Wow, this is something you could actually
0:09:45 do as an avocation.
0:09:50 This is something that you can do as an adult, and it’s like big, and important, and meaningful.”
0:09:51 That’s how I felt about it.
0:09:56 And then I still didn’t really have a notion that I was going to commit myself to that until
0:09:57 a couple of years after college, even.
0:10:00 A couple of years after college, what was your major in college?
0:10:06 I got a degree in history, with a focus on Asian studies and languages and stuff.
0:10:09 If we go back to, and I’m blanking, I apologize, what was her name again?
0:10:10 First woman, the–
0:10:11 Toby Ornstein.
0:10:12 Toby.
0:10:13 Yeah.
0:10:14 I mean, I think she just had–
0:10:19 A story or given example of what type of thing she would emphasize when she was working with
0:10:20 you guys, or are we particularly–
0:10:21 I mean, I think she just had–
0:10:22 Memories of her.
0:10:29 Mostly, I think a lot of people would say that someone in their early life, if you’re
0:10:35 lucky you have someone when you’re young who doesn’t talk down to you, who speaks to you
0:10:43 as a serious person, and exhorts you to take something seriously, to take work seriously,
0:10:44 and–
0:10:45 Definitely.
0:10:48 And if a person does that in the right way, you feel elevated.
0:10:49 As a young person, you feel elevated.
0:10:53 You feel like someone’s saying to you, hey, you want to be taken seriously, then take
0:10:59 things seriously, do the work, don’t coast, and I’d say that’s what she gave.
0:11:04 Later, when I was in New York, I had a teacher named Terry Schreiber, who ran a terrific
0:11:07 theater studio in New York, acting studio in New York, and I’ve often said about him
0:11:13 that the thing I admired most about him was that he was a pluralist, and by that, I mean,
0:11:21 he basically kind of rejected this notion that has infused, I think, a lot of the training
0:11:25 of actors that one methodology holds the key to anything.
0:11:31 He was like, all of these things are a forehand, a backhand, a volley, a serve, or to a tennis
0:11:37 player, that is the Lee Strasberg method, the Stella Adler imagination focus, the Sandy
0:11:39 Meisner exercises.
0:11:44 He basically just said, if you don’t get yourself conversant with a lot of shots, you’re just
0:11:45 not going to be great.
0:11:51 You’re not going to be able to address material with diverse skill sets as called for that
0:11:56 really resonated with me because I was really turned off by dogma.
0:11:57 Right.
0:12:03 It sounds like the Bruce Lee of acting and performance, and that’s sort of the, except
0:12:07 what is useful, reject what is useless, and that is uniquely your own type of approach.
0:12:08 Exactly.
0:12:11 I never thought of it that way, but I agree.
0:12:17 When you hear the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why?
0:12:26 Now in my life, when I meet people who seem like they’ve got their aspirations and their
0:12:37 engagement in balance with a lot of time for contemplative time, family time, personal
0:12:43 health, physical health, I tend to look at that and go, wow, I want to be that guy or
0:12:45 that woman.
0:12:52 I definitely have seen more than enough people with success as defined by notoriety or money
0:12:59 or whatever who look like the specter of despair to me.
0:13:06 I’ve seen, as I’m sure you have, lots of people with the albatross of success around
0:13:11 their neck that seem like an intense cautionary tale to me.
0:13:16 It’s more my sense of what constitutes a successful person is probably more defined now by what
0:13:18 looks like a healthy person.
0:13:23 What books or book have you given most as a gift to other people?
0:13:28 There was a period where I really liked Antoine, this Santa Xupri’s book.
0:13:30 It’s called Wind, Sand, and Stars.
0:13:31 I haven’t read that one.
0:13:33 That’s a great, great one.
0:13:36 Were you interested in him because he was a pilot or did you?
0:13:37 Yeah, both.
0:13:39 I was reading a lot of books about flying.
0:13:42 Real innovator and I guess what, postal delivery or something like that.
0:13:43 Yeah.
0:13:48 I’ve been reading the mail from the Sahara to Paris and from Patagonia to Paris, which
0:13:49 is crazy.
0:13:54 For those people who don’t recognize the name, I also wrote the Little Prince.
0:14:01 Wind, Sand, and Stars is as much a book about the philosophy of life as it is about flying.
0:14:06 It’s like zen in the craft of flying, but it’s just beautiful.
0:14:07 We were talking about this earlier.
0:14:09 I really liked that book, The Black Swan.
0:14:12 I gave that to friends of a certain type.
0:14:15 I really enjoyed that book too.
0:14:16 Yeah.
0:14:21 I think it’s an extremely … If you absorb it right, it’s got a really amazing capacity
0:14:25 to prick certain bubbles of delusion or help you realize bubbles of delusion that we all
0:14:26 operate in.
0:14:28 I think it’s really, really cool.
0:14:32 You mentioned two essays and we don’t have to go too deep into the … I’ll just name
0:14:37 them and then link to them in the show notes, but there was Second Wind, which was by the
0:14:42 former Czechoslovakian president, I’m not going to get his first name right.
0:14:43 Vaslav Havel.
0:14:47 Havel, H-A-V-E-L, and then The Catastrophe of Success.
0:14:48 The author is …
0:14:49 Tennessee Williams.
0:14:50 Tennessee Williams.
0:14:52 Any context that you’d like to provide for folks for those two?
0:14:53 Just great.
0:14:58 The Catastrophe of Success is one of the great essays by a creative person about exactly what
0:15:06 you’re just talking, the traps that follow on achieving anything really that you were
0:15:10 aspiring to achieve and then what happens after that happens.
0:15:14 Second Wind is sort of the same from a different perspective, more like how do you have the
0:15:20 courage to kind of not repeat yourself, put yourself out of your comfort zone in a creative
0:15:22 sense but also in a life sense.
0:15:26 I think what I like about Second Wind is as a playwright, he’s sort of saying that you
0:15:32 kind of disgorge a point of view and you can keep doing that, but at some point, if you
0:15:39 don’t stop and go back into like absorption mode, you’re going to be repeating yourself
0:15:46 and you have to dare yourself to stop, listen, live, absorb, and then try again from scratch.
0:15:47 You know what I mean?
0:15:49 That that’s like … It’s a great essay.
0:15:50 It’s really, really great.
0:15:52 Do you have any favorite documentaries?
0:15:53 Many.
0:15:56 I love Bennett Miller’s film, The Cruise.
0:15:57 The Cruise.
0:16:03 In Bennett, people know he directed Capote and Money Ball and Fox Catcher, a brilliant
0:16:08 filmmaker, but I think almost my favorite film of his is a documentary called The Cruise.
0:16:09 What is that about?
0:16:13 It’s about a guy who’s a … He’s a tour guide host on the open double-decker buses
0:16:18 in New York City who’s a poet and who … You just have to see it.
0:16:19 It’s great.
0:16:22 I really like that one.
0:16:26 I really like Adam Curtis’s films, great British documentarian.
0:16:32 He’s got that four-part film called The Century of the Self, and then a three-part one called
0:16:34 The Power of Nightmares.
0:16:41 I think those are absolutely brilliant films, dense, but really eye-opening.
0:16:44 Are there any other underrated movies that you think people should say they’re not necessarily
0:16:48 documentaries, any particular movies that come to mind for you?
0:16:54 Of late, I think I’m a huge, huge fan of this French filmmaker Jacques Odiard, who I think
0:17:01 in the last few years, he put up a hat trick of films that beat my heart skipped and then
0:17:02 a profit.
0:17:03 Okay.
0:17:05 That is one of my favorite films.
0:17:06 Amazing.
0:17:09 I personally put a profit as one of the three best gangster films ever made.
0:17:10 So good.
0:17:11 Oh my God.
0:17:16 For me, the Godfather, Goodfellas, and a profit are at this point my three … If I had to
0:17:17 pick three gangster films, I think they’re the best ones.
0:17:18 Yeah.
0:17:22 If for those people who haven’t seen a profit, I don’t speak French, but I guess it’s un
0:17:23 profet.
0:17:27 And the poster, if you’re looking at it on Netflix or Amazon or iTunes or whatever,
0:17:31 it’s red and black, but it’s about, I want to say, a Middle Eastern …
0:17:32 Algerian.
0:17:33 Algerian.
0:17:34 Yeah.
0:17:35 That’s right.
0:17:37 Algerian young male who goes to prison and about his ascension.
0:17:38 Don’t say anything more.
0:17:39 Oh my God.
0:17:40 I won’t say anything more.
0:17:48 And after that, Rustin Bone was his next film, and it’s just a brilliant film.
0:17:49 Marion Cotillard.
0:17:55 It’s one of the great performances in the last few years, and I love all those films.
0:17:59 And I think, excusing the fact that I happen to be in one of them, but I think Alejandro
0:18:09 Iniridu’s last three films in a row, Beautiful, was an extremely, extremely under-seen masterpiece.
0:18:13 It was Iniridu’s film prior to Birdman, and it’s a masterpiece.
0:18:14 It’s just called Beautiful.
0:18:15 Yeah.
0:18:16 Spelled wrong.
0:18:19 It’s a masterpiece, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
0:18:24 And again, one of the greatest performances in a long time.
0:18:27 And the third in his triptych, I think, is the Revenant out right now.
0:18:32 I think the Revenant’s one of the great films I’ve seen in the last many years.
0:18:35 It’s an absolute, unqualified masterpiece.
0:18:42 It’s like a Native American spirit myth, or straight out of a Joseph Campbell myth or
0:18:43 something.
0:18:45 It’s just a magnificent, magnificent piece of filmmaking.
0:18:49 We could have a whole separate conversation about Birdman, which we won’t do today, but
0:18:52 also one of my favorite films in the last few years.
0:18:55 What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self, and could you displace where you were
0:18:56 at the time?
0:19:01 I was on the last two days of shooting a film as directing when I turned 30, and I think
0:19:12 I might tell myself at that phase to commit myself to a few fewer things than I did at
0:19:18 that time that I’m still feeling obligated to, and that maybe I wish I had a few less
0:19:20 of those things.
0:19:26 I think my aspiration and my sense of my own energy and time was limitless at that time,
0:19:35 and now some of that has become a cage of obligation that I would like to unlock.
0:19:38 But I’ll get there.
0:19:42 Senior year in college, what advice would you have given yourself?
0:19:44 I might have told myself to go live abroad right then.
0:19:47 I should have done it right then, for a year or two.
0:19:49 I had lived abroad a little bit.
0:19:50 I should have gone in.
0:19:56 That’s like when you think everything’s about to get started, and it’s not.
0:20:01 I should have gone somewhere and lived somewhere interesting or different that I would be much
0:20:03 harder to do later.
0:20:04 Where would you choose for yourself?
0:20:05 I don’t know.
0:20:06 No.
0:20:07 I don’t know.
0:20:09 Just take a trip to Japan together, get you back to Japan.
0:20:13 Last real question is, do you have any ask or request of the audience, people listening,
0:20:18 things they should do, ponder or otherwise?
0:20:21 What I think is cool about what you’ve assembled is I think it’s driven by people’s desire
0:20:28 to not hack life, but be proactive and participate and not be apathetic.
0:20:29 And I like that.
0:20:32 I think that’s a positive community, and I think we all get really tired.
0:20:36 I think modern life is stressful and tiring and confusing.
0:20:42 And I think Nietzsche has that great thing, that idea of self-overcoming, that the overman
0:20:44 is not like a perfect person.
0:20:48 It’s actually the person who’s perpetually trying to self-overcome.
0:20:49 And I really like that idea.
0:20:54 I think staying engaged in the idea of evolving yourself is really cool.
0:20:57 So I think it’s awesome that you’ve got this many people kind of linked up together around
0:20:58 those ideas.
0:20:59 Yeah.
0:21:04 I really hope people listening, no matter how small you might feel or isolated you might
0:21:05 feel.
0:21:10 I know not everyone out there has a community like you or I might have in New York or SF.
0:21:16 It’ll make this year the year that you astonish yourself with what you can do or be a part
0:21:17 of.
0:21:23 And look back on December 31st of this year and just hope to say, “Holy shit, I can’t
0:21:27 believe I was part of X,” or “I did X to yourself,” because I think it’s a lot easier
0:21:32 than people might think.
0:21:36 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
0:21:41 This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that
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0:21:47 I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement.
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0:21:51 It simply covers a ton of bases.
0:21:56 I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.
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0:22:23 Go to drinkag1.com/tim.
0:22:29 That’s drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim.
0:22:33 Last time, drinkag1.com/tim.
0:22:37 Check it out.
0:22:44 And now, Dr. Martha Beck, described by NPR and USA Today as the best-known life coach
0:22:52 in America, host of the Gathering Room podcast, creator of Wayfinder Life Coach Training, and
0:23:00 author of 11 books, including her upcoming “Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity,
0:23:02 and Finding Your Life’s Purpose.”
0:23:08 You can find Martha on Twitter and Instagram @themarthabeck.
0:23:13 Martha, it is so nice to finally connect and to see your face, and I really appreciate
0:23:14 you taking the time.
0:23:15 So thank you.
0:23:16 It’s my honor.
0:23:19 I gave your four-hour work week to my then-teenage children.
0:23:22 I said, “I want you to learn the way this man thinks.”
0:23:27 Whatever you do, just study his mind, it is your new Bible.
0:23:28 Thank you for that.
0:23:32 Maybe it didn’t turn them to the dark side, didn’t take them…
0:23:33 Oh, they’re atrocious, yes.
0:23:36 That was the beginning of the end, so thank you.
0:23:40 Thank you, Tim, for derailing the development of my children.
0:23:46 Well, let’s talk about mutual friend briefly, because our connecting point, the way we directly
0:23:52 connected, even though I had observed you from afar for quite some time, is Boyd Vardian.
0:23:56 For people who don’t know, Boyd is the author of “The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life.”
0:23:57 He has been…
0:23:58 There it is, right behind you.
0:24:04 It’s a beautiful little book, which I’ve read multiple times, and he is one hell of a guy.
0:24:05 He’s one of a kind.
0:24:06 He really is.
0:24:14 And I wanted to ask you to perhaps begin with describing how the two of you connected.
0:24:16 It was such a strange thing.
0:24:20 I mean, he’s told me the story from his side since.
0:24:23 All I knew was that I was in a weird period of my own life.
0:24:27 I’d written a book about leaving Mormonism, and a lot of people didn’t like it, and I
0:24:29 was getting death threats and legal threats.
0:24:35 And I sort of ran away to do a book tour in South Africa, and I went to my favorite place
0:24:41 there, which is a game preserve called “Londelosi,” where I’d been once before, and it was like
0:24:44 the thing I had saved up for and the thing I’d been looking forward to.
0:24:50 And I felt safer there with the lions and the rhinoceroses and whatnot than I did anywhere
0:24:52 at among people.
0:24:53 I was terrified of people at the time.
0:24:57 I still sort of am, but I was really terrified at that time.
0:25:02 So all I knew is that I had a certain ranger who was supposed to be taking me out on safari,
0:25:04 and the guy who showed up was a different guy.
0:25:05 All right.
0:25:06 I didn’t really care.
0:25:13 But we got talking as we drove around, and here I am, like he’s 23, I’m 43, I think.
0:25:22 So we start talking housewife to game ranger, just like a heart to heart would be.
0:25:23 I don’t know how.
0:25:28 Within five minutes, we were in such an intense conversation, and we were laughing at each
0:25:34 other’s jokes, and we were having this amazing time, and we went back to the game preserve
0:25:39 place to the camp, and we had tea together, and he told me, “My family’s been going through
0:25:41 some difficult times.
0:25:46 They’ve had really strange legal things happening,” and it kind of paralleled what I was going
0:25:48 through in some ways.
0:25:52 So I felt really understood, but I also thought, “Oh my gosh, he doesn’t understand really
0:25:56 what the dynamics of what’s going on,” and I’m a sociologist.
0:26:01 I study psychology as my trade, so I started talking to him about it, and he says, “You
0:26:02 have to meet my family.”
0:26:07 I didn’t know that his family was the family that owned the game preserve, and had started
0:26:10 it, and like reforested it and everything.
0:26:15 Before I knew it, I was at their house with his sister Bronwyn and his parents, Dave and
0:26:21 Shan, and I was talking to them as fast as I could about how to deal with attacks from
0:26:22 psychopaths.
0:26:29 They can handle attacks from almost anything, but psychopaths were new to them, and I was
0:26:30 supposed to leave on this small plane.
0:26:35 They held the plane for an hour, so we could keep talking.
0:26:40 And I got on the plane, and I had a copy of Dave’s book, Dave is Boyd’s father, and he’d
0:26:45 written a memoir, and I got on the plane, and they shouted after me, “Next time you
0:26:46 come back, you can stay with us.”
0:26:52 And I got on the plane with my head spinning, and I thought, “I just met my best friends.”
0:26:58 And I read Dave’s book on the plane, and there’s a place where Boyd, his sister Bronwyn, and
0:27:05 his mother and their teacher were all at home together, and there was a break-in, and Boyd
0:27:08 woke up with the gun in his mouth.
0:27:12 The guy had shoved the barrel of a gun in his mouth and woke him up that way, and they
0:27:16 were tied up for five hours, they were threatened with death.
0:27:23 So I’m on the plane, and I’m sobbing hysterically, because this is happening to my best friends.
0:27:28 And I was like, “You could have been killed!”
0:27:29 You know what, Tim?
0:27:33 It’s a good thing that flight was really long, because I was out of my mind.
0:27:39 I felt so close to Boyd and his family, and I have ever since.
0:27:41 It’s been like 20 years.
0:27:45 And I’ve gone back and gone back, and we’ve done things together, and he’s become this
0:27:48 incredible coach, and I taught him what I could teach him.
0:27:51 He’s learned so much more from other people.
0:27:57 But it was just this incredible bond that formed between the most unlikely pair of friends,
0:28:01 and yeah, he’s one of the best people in the world, in my humble opinion.
0:28:06 Yeah, he’s amazing, also an incredible storyteller, and as you mentioned, well adapted to dealing
0:28:11 with certain types of threats, and I suppose this will probably segue into other things
0:28:18 that we talk about, but he almost was eaten alive by a crocodile, and his leg still bears
0:28:19 incredible scars from that.
0:28:25 He’s got a gun barrel in his mouth, and yet there are certain things we’re not particularly
0:28:30 well-evolved to handle, like modern-day psychopaths, as one example.
0:28:32 Psychopaths of any era, really.
0:28:37 Psychopaths of any era, and there are a few things that I took from Boyd just to continue
0:28:42 to give a kind of hats off to Boyd, who’s also one of the best storytellers I’ve ever
0:28:43 heard in my life.
0:28:44 He’s magnificent.
0:28:48 I think he might be the best storyteller in the world.
0:28:52 So for those who haven’t heard my podcast with Boyd, I encourage you to check that out.
0:28:57 There’s a line from his book, From the Line Tracker’s Guide to Life, which has stuck with
0:28:58 me ever since.
0:29:03 And I think of it often, which is a line from Reneus, this master tracker, who says, “I
0:29:07 don’t know where we’re going, but I know exactly how to get there,” and I think that’s
0:29:08 resonating with a lot of people.
0:29:13 There’s another line, which I’m less familiar with, but in the process of doing homework
0:29:18 for this conversation, I came across this on your website, actually, and it’s referencing
0:29:19 Boyd.
0:29:20 I know.
0:29:21 We all have a lot on our websites.
0:29:24 We’re both obsessed with Boyd, and we just need to accept it.
0:29:25 Yeah, exactly.
0:29:28 We’ll have to come up with a custody plan.
0:29:33 So he has the name for the experience of getting lost, the path of not here.
0:29:35 Now, I have not heard him say that.
0:29:37 What does that mean, the path of not here?
0:29:41 Well, we’re out wandering around trying to track, I remember once tracking a porcupine
0:29:46 with Boyd, and it was easy on the road because the quill drags are easy to see.
0:29:50 And then the porcupine left the road, and it was just scrub and rocks and everything.
0:29:55 And I didn’t know what he was looking at, but he kept walking.
0:30:01 And I said, “I haven’t seen anything for a long time, and I’m completely lost.”
0:30:03 And he said, “No, you’re never lost.
0:30:07 What you’re getting is the information that the place you are now and the way you’re going
0:30:10 isn’t the way you want to end up.”
0:30:15 And that is an incredibly important place called the path of not here.
0:30:21 And every time you realize you’re in it, you have the option of shifting, of going somewhere
0:30:25 else without recognizing that this is the path of not here.
0:30:26 You can’t shift.
0:30:31 So when I coach people, they’re almost always way into the path of not here.
0:30:36 They hate their job, their marriage is awful, whatever, and they’ve just kept going and
0:30:42 going and going and going, and they haven’t woken up and seen that there’s not been a
0:30:44 footprint for a very long time.
0:30:50 And then, by the way, Boyd found the damn porcupine den in the middle of a flight.
0:30:57 How he tracked this thing over a rock, I don’t know how, but he was quite pleased.
0:30:58 I’m sure he was pleased.
0:31:09 Now, watching these expert trackers track is akin to having some type of ethereal experience
0:31:12 on a different plane, but for them, it’s very scientific, right?
0:31:14 There’s nothing mystical or very little mystical about it.
0:31:17 It’s very much deductive, Sherlock Holmes type.
0:31:21 I call it the technology of magic, because it looks like magic to us.
0:31:26 If you showed someone from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and iPhone, they would
0:31:30 say, “Oh, magic,” and we’d say, “No, no, technology.”
0:31:34 When people from, are using these ancient forms of wisdom that we don’t have, it looks
0:31:35 like magic.
0:31:38 And we say, “Magic,” and they say, “No, no, technology.”
0:31:42 And I remember the first tracking lesson I ever had with Ranius, who was, I couldn’t
0:31:47 believe he would be so generous, especially to a female, because they don’t usually train
0:31:48 women as trackers.
0:31:52 We’re just walking along, he’s not saying anything, he picks up a stick and makes a
0:31:56 circle in the sand, and then he just stands there, doesn’t say a word.
0:32:02 And I look down and there’s a huge paw print, and it’s obviously a lion, so I’m like, “It’s
0:32:08 a lion,” and he was like, “Mm-hmm,” and he just stood there, and I kept looking at it,
0:32:11 and then he held up his hand and he did this.
0:32:16 He just shifted it like a quarter inch to one side, and I looked down and I saw that
0:32:21 the print had been disturbed in exactly that way, and suddenly I felt myself as if I was
0:32:28 down on all fours, and I shifted that left paw, that left hand, just that little bit,
0:32:34 and I realized the lion had looked over his left shoulder, and that had made a slight
0:32:39 little swish in the track, and so the lion was either looking at something, one of his
0:32:45 pride mates or one of his potential prey, and he was going to go around to that spot
0:32:49 so we could cut over there, because the lion had looked at that significantly.
0:32:53 And I remember it’s like learning to read for the second time, even when you only know
0:32:54 a couple of words.
0:32:55 It’s magic.
0:32:56 Yeah, totally.
0:32:58 Rhenius is something else.
0:33:00 There are levels, and then there are levels.
0:33:07 And as you were talking, I thought of a quote that I really enjoy from the very much storied
0:33:09 science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.
0:33:10 One of my faves.
0:33:11 All right.
0:33:12 So yeah.
0:33:13 I bet I know the quote.
0:33:17 I’ve read a lot of books, and the quote you know is, “Any sufficiently advanced technologies
0:33:19 indistinguishable from magic.”
0:33:20 Is indistinguishable from magic.
0:33:21 Exactly.
0:33:23 So let’s talk about the path of not here.
0:33:29 If we could talk about a practical example, because in the email introduction, Boyd credits
0:33:37 you with, in a way, rescuing him or helping him rescue himself from a period of great
0:33:38 difficulty.
0:33:40 It was mutual.
0:33:46 And I would love to know what that intervention looked like or maybe to be more specific.
0:33:53 What are some of the questions, cues, things that you did with Boyd that might be instructive
0:33:57 in terms of helping someone get off the path of not here?
0:33:58 Okay.
0:34:03 So the first thing is, for me, and I want to be delicate about this because people get
0:34:07 worried when we talk about it, but I watched your TED Talk doing homework for this.
0:34:09 I watched it again.
0:34:14 And you start out very courageously in one of your TED Talks, talking about being in
0:34:18 a depressive period and thinking you might want to end your life.
0:34:21 I was so surprised to hear that there are people who haven’t been there.
0:34:25 I just thought that was how you spend a Thursday, you know?
0:34:31 So I remember sitting in the Lamont Library at Harvard when I was 17.
0:34:35 I call it the Lament Library, because all these people had carved their woes into the
0:34:36 heralds.
0:34:38 It was a freshman library.
0:34:39 Not surprising.
0:34:40 Yeah, not surprising.
0:34:41 And I was like, “Why stick around?
0:34:42 We’re all getting off the bus.
0:34:46 We’re all going to die, so why not get off the bus now?”
0:34:51 And I remember sitting there and thinking, “The only possible reason for sticking around,”
0:34:57 and I remembered Emerson’s statement that beauty is its own excuse for being.
0:35:02 And I thought, “Joy is its own excuse for being.”
0:35:06 That is the one thing I can experience that makes it worth sticking around for the suffering
0:35:07 this life entails.
0:35:14 So I shifted my entire life toward a sort of very simple test.
0:35:16 Does it bring me joy or does it not?
0:35:19 And joy became the track I was following.
0:35:25 So Boyd had learned to track animals, but he’d lost the track of his joy a long time
0:35:26 before.
0:35:32 And I remember feeling, well, jumping ahead, taking some people out in a seminar and having
0:35:37 him turn and tell the group that you track your life the way you track an animal, but
0:35:42 the track you’re looking for is joy in the body.
0:35:44 And it’s so simple to put it that way.
0:35:49 And I think that’s the first thing where we really connected.
0:35:52 And I said, “Boyd, you have to find joy in your body.”
0:35:54 He’d been through so much trauma.
0:35:58 I mean, good, God, it wasn’t just the break-in.
0:36:03 I mean, he tried to rescue a man from a hot spring, a guy had fallen in, the guy died.
0:36:05 He was basically boiled alive.
0:36:08 He was almost eaten by a crocodile.
0:36:13 He’s been attacked by more deadly animals and snakes and all kinds of things than you
0:36:14 can even imagine.
0:36:15 So here was this guy.
0:36:20 He was tough and strong and brave, and he had long ago gone numb.
0:36:24 And the funny thing is that there are a lot of people who haven’t had such a wild life
0:36:29 we’re sitting under fluorescent lights somewhere, and they’re just as far off their track as
0:36:30 he was.
0:36:31 They’re almost as miserable.
0:36:33 If you can’t find joy, you can’t find joy.
0:36:35 It’s like oxygen.
0:36:36 You need it.
0:36:40 It doesn’t matter how you lose it or what it looks like to you, you need it.
0:36:45 So I remember when Boyd and his sister came to Phoenix to visit me shortly after we met.
0:36:52 And I put them through a kind of American therapy, which is I made them lie down on the living
0:36:59 room floor and watch Eddie Izzard routines on TV while I brought them ice cream for about
0:37:01 three days.
0:37:07 And they had just worked like mules their entire lives, physically worked, psychologically
0:37:08 worked.
0:37:09 And they were like, “When do we start working?”
0:37:14 And I had to say, “Sit, eat, laugh.”
0:37:20 And at the end of the three days, I saw them start to be able to access relaxation, which
0:37:23 is the first step toward joy in the body.
0:37:29 And our culture is so cerebral when we think that thinking is superior to the physical
0:37:30 being.
0:37:35 But our thinking process is very late in evolution.
0:37:39 Our cognitive minds process about 40 bits of information per second.
0:37:44 The nervous system of our entire bodies is processing about 11 million bits of information
0:37:45 per second.
0:37:48 The body is smarter than the mind.
0:37:52 That is a very long answer to a very good question.
0:37:53 But if you haven’t found joy in the body…
0:37:55 That’s why this is a long podcast.
0:37:56 We’ve done.
0:37:59 You didn’t say you wanted me to tell stories.
0:38:06 So yeah, I think when I could see him relax and I saw his shoulders open and I saw him
0:38:10 smile spontaneously instead of should be polite, I said, “There you go.
0:38:11 That’s the track.
0:38:13 That’s what we’re tracking.”
0:38:17 And that’s what we’ve done ever since in years and years of wonderful conversations.
0:38:21 So I’m going to come back to Boyd, probably just as an instructive case study.
0:38:28 And we’ll probably come back to Boyd, but I would love to ask you about reattuning the
0:38:31 body to the nervous system.
0:38:37 And specifically, I’m asking because as I’ve done research for this conversation and listened
0:38:45 to interviews and read so much, I’ve noticed that you have a prodigious ability to recall
0:38:48 quotes as one example.
0:38:53 You mentioned Harvard and 17, which is not an age that most people associate with Harvard.
0:38:58 So you seem to have a lot of horsepower between the ears.
0:38:59 Generally…
0:39:04 Now, I don’t know this about you, but generally when I encounter that, and to maybe a lesser
0:39:12 extent I encounter that myself, you get rewarded for using this analytical workhorse and you
0:39:15 end up perhaps a little less attuned to the physical body.
0:39:20 So I’m curious how you have reconnected with that intelligence.
0:39:26 And specifically, this may or may not be related, but I would love for you to discuss equine
0:39:32 therapy or interactions with animals and if that is related.
0:39:35 The first place I’ll go, I learned to brutalize my body.
0:39:39 That year at Harvard, I was running 100 miles a week and trying to eat less than a thousand
0:39:41 calories a day.
0:39:44 I did not have any regard for my body at all.
0:39:45 I got sick.
0:39:49 I got very sick with a multitude of our immune diseases.
0:39:53 My body correctly figured out that I was the greatest threat to my own health.
0:39:56 So I was actually on crutches in a back brace.
0:39:58 I was in a lot of pain for a long time.
0:40:05 I went back to Harvard after a year off for this issue and got engaged to another, I have
0:40:06 an ex-mormon.
0:40:08 We get engaged very young.
0:40:14 So I got engaged and married another guy from my hometown and I stayed at Harvard for my
0:40:19 master’s and my PhD and we had a daughter and then my second child was conceived when
0:40:22 I was halfway through my PhD.
0:40:26 And I was caught in an apartment fire right in the middle of the pregnancy and because
0:40:31 of that, they ran a bunch of tests and they came back and told me that the fetus had Down
0:40:34 Syndrome and I had two weeks to terminate.
0:40:36 I was like six months along.
0:40:39 So I don’t know if you’ve ever been pregnant, Tim, but …
0:40:40 Not that I’m aware of.
0:40:41 Yeah.
0:40:44 I have suspected though at points.
0:40:46 People say I’m glowing recently.
0:40:47 I don’t know.
0:40:48 Maybe.
0:40:50 You do look really flush.
0:40:51 Yeah.
0:40:56 I had the one baby already and I had bonded so strongly with the second one that even
0:41:02 though I’m very pro-choice saying he’s got to go, he was already my child.
0:41:10 I’d seen him sucking his finger on the ultrasound and everything and I couldn’t do it.
0:41:11 I’ve advised other people.
0:41:15 I’ve helped other people go on and terminate their pregnancies in similar situations.
0:41:17 I just couldn’t do it.
0:41:23 And I remember the head of gynecology and obstetrics at Harvard at the time because
0:41:25 I was part of that university system.
0:41:27 There were five of them.
0:41:31 They all thought that I was making a huge mistake to not terminate.
0:41:36 And the head honcho came in and told me this is like having a malignant tumor and not letting
0:41:38 me remove it.
0:41:44 And I remember looking at him and I was being rehydrated because I couldn’t stop vomiting
0:41:45 and stuff.
0:41:46 Oh, it was such fun.
0:41:47 How I laughed.
0:41:51 I was looking at this guy and he’s saying, “You need to do this.
0:41:52 You’re going to ruin your life.”
0:41:53 I said, “You’re throwing your life away.”
0:41:59 And I looked at him and suddenly it appeared he had two faces and I was really curious.
0:42:03 And it was as if there was a face that he was presenting that was his stern Harvard
0:42:04 doctor.
0:42:09 And then right behind it was this terrified face, terrified.
0:42:14 And I didn’t sort of terrify myself, but when I saw this, I was like fascinated.
0:42:18 I just watched him and I said, “Do you know anyone with Down syndrome?”
0:42:19 He was very flustered.
0:42:22 He was like, “No, I wouldn’t bother with that.”
0:42:28 And I just watched him and I thought, “Oh, he’s not telling me to do this because he
0:42:32 thinks I’m making a mistake to keep the stupid little boy inside of me.
0:42:37 He thinks that there’s a stupid little boy inside him and he’s trying to kill that.”
0:42:40 And I thought, “Oh, he didn’t end up at Harvard because he knew he was smart.
0:42:43 He ended up there for the same reason I did.”
0:42:44 He thought he was stupid.
0:42:46 He wanted to prove he wasn’t.
0:42:50 And at that moment I looked at him and I thought, “You know, the reason for my life is joy.
0:42:56 I don’t see joy on either of this man’s faces.
0:43:02 And I don’t think he understands his own path to joy at all.”
0:43:08 And I remember, I said, “I’ve heard that people with Down syndrome can experience joy.”
0:43:09 And he said, “I wouldn’t know about that.”
0:43:12 And I was like, “Yeah, no, I think they can.”
0:43:16 And right then everything changed for me.
0:43:19 I waddled around Harvard, pregnant out to here.
0:43:20 Everybody knew.
0:43:24 And I would go into my professor’s offices and they’d be like, “You’ve got to put this
0:43:25 child in an institution.
0:43:27 You’re throwing away your career.”
0:43:31 And I’d look at their little offices and their little piles of books and I’d just, I’d look
0:43:34 at them and think, “Are you in joy?
0:43:37 Do you live in joy?”
0:43:41 Because if you don’t, you can’t tell me where it is.
0:43:47 And I lost the obsession with intellect that I had learned not only at Harvard, but in
0:43:49 all of Western culture.
0:43:51 That’s when it really shifted for me.
0:43:58 I mean, that’s a powerful story and I’m sure we’ll come back to pieces of it.
0:44:06 How do you then elicit that realization or teach people to re-engage with sensitivities
0:44:12 that they’ve perhaps neglected or accidentally put offline or deliberately put offline?
0:44:13 How do you cultivate that in some way?
0:44:14 I can’t teach it.
0:44:15 I can’t cultivate it.
0:44:16 I can’t do it.
0:44:24 But I have an unfailing ally and its name is suffering because when we lose the track
0:44:30 of our joy, we suffer and that’s the only thing that gets our attention enough to make
0:44:37 us stop and say, “Maybe, just maybe, I need to find another path here.”
0:44:38 You’ve had it yourself.
0:44:39 I’m sure.
0:44:40 Oh, for sure.
0:44:45 I promised I would book Marguerite and come back to it just to give Boyd a little sloppy
0:44:47 kiss on the cheek again.
0:44:52 Something else that I’m pretty sure was in that book, it certainly was in the curriculum
0:44:57 when I’ve spent more time there with Renia’s and Alex and other incredible trackers.
0:45:01 Finding the track is part of tracking.
0:45:02 That is always part of tracking.
0:45:07 You are almost never going to A to Z track something perfectly.
0:45:09 You always lose the track.
0:45:15 Part of good tracking is finding the track again or finding a proper track.
0:45:23 In the case of Boyd, he’s on the path of not here, unsure of what to do with himself.
0:45:27 I’m sort of imposing a narrative that I don’t want to…
0:45:28 He’s not here.
0:45:29 He can’t defend himself.
0:45:30 Let’s just do this.
0:45:31 Yeah.
0:45:32 He can’t defend himself.
0:45:33 You’re welcome, Boyd.
0:45:34 Just using him as a stand-in for the audience.
0:45:37 No, because we love him so much.
0:45:38 We love him so much.
0:45:39 What are some of the things?
0:45:44 Once you’d fed him ice cream and had him relax, you see the shoulders open.
0:45:45 What happens then?
0:45:46 What do you do with?
0:45:50 Once you see that opening, that change, what do you do?
0:45:54 The first thing that happened for me when Boyd took me tracking, we went to look for
0:45:55 a rhinoceros.
0:45:59 They’re fairly easy to track, surprisingly difficult, though, at the same time.
0:46:04 The first thing they do is they show you what a rhinoceros track looks like, clear, plain
0:46:06 and simple and really good terrain.
0:46:10 Now you know what a rhinoceros’s whole foot looks like, and you’re going to go out through
0:46:14 grass and rocks and trees and everything, and sometimes you’ll just see the side of
0:46:21 one toe or an imprint where the palm has pressed a leaf down or a bit of mud on a stick.
0:46:25 But until you’ve seen that first track, you don’t know what you’re looking for.
0:46:28 So that’s why I fed him ice cream for three days.
0:46:32 And when I saw the relaxation, I could say, “That’s your track.
0:46:35 Now let’s look at the things you’re doing in your life.”
0:46:39 His mom was telling him, she thought, “You should get a PhD.”
0:46:42 And I said, “Okay, hold that thought.
0:46:44 More joy, less joy, less.”
0:46:47 Okay, don’t go there.
0:46:49 So take over Londolosie for the rest of your life.
0:46:50 More joy, less joy.
0:46:51 I don’t know, it’s not clear.
0:46:53 Okay, we don’t go there yet.
0:46:55 It’s like going to the optometrist at that point.
0:46:58 You know suffering and you know joy.
0:47:01 And if it’s more like suffering, it’s the path of not there.
0:47:04 And there are a million ways to suffer.
0:47:07 And if it’s joy, you know it’s the path of yes.
0:47:12 And there’s actually only one path that takes you straight along the line of joy.
0:47:15 And it’s your individual destiny, I believe in that stuff.
0:47:16 All right.
0:47:18 I’m going to be keeping track of a lot of bookmarks.
0:47:19 I knew I would.
0:47:21 So I came prepared, pen in hand.
0:47:23 For those of you who can’t see us, I cheat.
0:47:24 I use a pen.
0:47:30 The pen is, I know the weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory, therefore, blue
0:47:31 pen.
0:47:34 So individual destiny, that’s my note I’m taking.
0:47:38 And I didn’t even add a question mark because I probably agree with you on some levels.
0:47:41 Let’s talk about your own chronology a bit.
0:47:47 And I believe it was at 29, correct me if I’m wrong, you decide to not tell any lies
0:47:49 for an entire year.
0:47:53 Now my understanding is that led to losing your family of origin, your religion, your
0:47:54 job, your marriage.
0:47:57 So it was an eventful year.
0:48:02 My home, my career, my entire industry, yeah, it was quite a brisk year.
0:48:03 It was brisk.
0:48:07 So it was like the flamethrower approach to personal development.
0:48:15 Why did you do this and what did you take away from it that other people can use?
0:48:16 Why did I do it?
0:48:17 Yeah.
0:48:19 I’d like to say I had noble intentions.
0:48:20 I was unhappy.
0:48:22 I was very physically ill.
0:48:25 I’d been sick at that point for 12 years.
0:48:28 So in chronic pain for 12 years.
0:48:32 And I had this baby with Down syndrome and I thought, nobody at Harvard is going to,
0:48:34 I just didn’t want them all staring at me.
0:48:38 So to finish my dissertation, I went back to Utah where I knew that everybody would
0:48:43 be thrilled with me not having an abortion, which they were, but then they assumed that
0:48:51 I was super Mormon and I tried to fit in just out of respect for my culture of origin.
0:48:55 Can you just say a quick, quick sidebar on your father and who your father was?
0:48:57 I think this is useful context.
0:48:59 Not just any run of the mill.
0:49:01 No, he was not.
0:49:07 My father was an apologist, which is a word for somebody who defends the principles of
0:49:08 a religion.
0:49:12 So Mormonism makes a lot of truth claims about things like the American Indians are descended
0:49:19 from a group of Israelites that came over in a ship in 600 BC and lots of like real
0:49:22 archeological anthropological truth claims.
0:49:24 They don’t stand up well under modern science.
0:49:28 And my father, he was asked to be an apologist for the church.
0:49:33 He was a professor at Berkeley and they brought him back to BYU Brigham Young University and
0:49:38 he started defending Mormonism against all attacks.
0:49:44 And he became very well known in the church and he is the foremost apologist of Mormonism,
0:49:46 I think in the church’s history.
0:49:50 So I was considered Mormon royalty.
0:49:53 They have a whole structure there.
0:49:59 So I went back to Utah and tried to be a good Mormon.
0:50:03 At the time, they came out and said there was a lot of unrest.
0:50:07 People were just learning too much and the internet wasn’t a thing yet, but there were
0:50:13 just too many scientists doing too much research and finding out too much stuff that was disproving
0:50:15 Mormonism’s claims.
0:50:21 So the church got very, very upset and came out and said that three greatest threats to
0:50:28 God’s kingdom in the latter days were feminists, intellectuals and gay people.
0:50:32 So turned out I was all three.
0:50:34 I didn’t identify as gay at the time.
0:50:37 I was married with children, so I was closeted to myself.
0:50:41 That involves a lot of suffering that you don’t understand when you’re going through
0:50:42 it.
0:50:46 I had sexual abuse issues from my father when I was a child.
0:50:52 Those were bashing their way to the surface and coming out in flashbacks and it was gnarly.
0:50:58 And the one thing I knew is that when I heard the statement, “The truth will set you free,”
0:51:01 it brought me a sense of joy, a sense of peace.
0:51:06 So I thought, “I don’t know exactly what to do or what the truth is, so I’m just not
0:51:09 going to lie for a year and we’ll see what happens.
0:51:11 We’ll find out what the truth is.”
0:51:15 And I found out that mostly what I was lying about, I didn’t tell lies about my taxes or
0:51:20 anything, or in my personal life even, I was telling lies about how I felt.
0:51:22 I feel fine.
0:51:23 I wouldn’t say that anymore.
0:51:28 People would say, “How are you?” and I’d say, “Not well.”
0:51:33 And you start to do that, try it for a couple of days.
0:51:37 Don’t tell a single lie not to anyone for any reason.
0:51:44 And pretty soon, every relationship you have, professional or personal, where there’s any
0:51:48 level of secrecy or untruth, begins to fall apart.
0:51:50 And then it starts to explode.
0:51:52 And that’s what happened to me.
0:51:57 I just kept seeing what I believed until I realized I’m not Mormon.
0:51:58 I don’t believe in it at all.
0:52:02 So I actually committed the once-in-worse-than-murder.
0:52:03 I laughed.
0:52:05 I said, “Please take my name off the church records.
0:52:06 I am not Mormon.”
0:52:08 So everyone thought I was going to outer darkness.
0:52:10 They probably still do.
0:52:16 So my family stopped speaking to me and then I realized I was gay.
0:52:17 So was my husband.
0:52:18 That was sort of convenient.
0:52:25 So it was very amicable, but I also realized that I loved to learn, but I hated being caught
0:52:28 up in academic politics.
0:52:30 So I left my job.
0:52:32 Everything went away when I stopped lying.
0:52:37 And everything that was left was the path of joy.
0:52:43 Now, this may not be the right question, but what gave you the courage to risk burning
0:52:45 it all to the ground?
0:52:46 Or was it not courage at all?
0:52:51 It was just, “This is suffering, and I want something other than this suffering.”
0:52:55 And so you were just kind of rolling the dice on door number two.
0:53:00 The suffering was bad, but it wasn’t bad enough to make me endure the suffering of losing
0:53:01 my family.
0:53:07 I mean, seven siblings, all their wives and husbands and my nieces and nephews, and everyone,
0:53:09 every friend I’d made growing up.
0:53:16 I couldn’t have done that, but right, I think I made that pledge the day after I came out
0:53:19 of an emergency surgery.
0:53:24 And I’ve been told that you are willing to entertain woo-woo things.
0:53:25 It’s Wednesday, right?
0:53:26 Yes.
0:53:27 It’s a skeptic’s eye.
0:53:28 Woo-woo Wednesday.
0:53:29 It’s woo-woo Wednesday.
0:53:32 So I’m rushed in for surgery.
0:53:37 Actually, I was teaching a psychology class, and I was behind a one-way mirror, and the
0:53:42 students started to talk about, it was a free discussion I was observing.
0:53:46 And they started to talk about a number of the women had been raped.
0:53:54 And I suddenly got really hot and feverish, and I ran into the hall and passed out cold.
0:53:55 I fell down.
0:53:56 I looked up.
0:53:57 All the students were around me.
0:54:03 I got rushed to the hospital, and they thought I had a tumor in a very intimate place.
0:54:10 They immediately put me in surgery, and while I was lying there, I woke up and looked at
0:54:15 the surgical lights, which is odd because my eyes were taped closed.
0:54:18 And then I thought, this is odd that I can see.
0:54:22 And I sat up, which was strange because my body was on the table.
0:54:25 And I looked around, and I watched them operating on me.
0:54:26 And they said, there’s no tumor.
0:54:27 It’s just blood.
0:54:31 This is scar tissue from old trauma.
0:54:36 And then I lay back, and I thought, I don’t know what’s happening to me.
0:54:41 And between the surgical lights, another light appeared.
0:54:44 And it was about the size of a golf ball when I first saw it.
0:54:50 And they say we can only see about a trillionth of the available light spectrum.
0:54:53 And I think this light had all of it.
0:54:55 You can’t describe it.
0:54:58 It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
0:55:01 It was absolutely captivating.
0:55:05 And as I looked at it, it grew, and it seemed to sort of penetrate things instead of bouncing
0:55:06 off them.
0:55:10 And when it touched me, this incredible warmth.
0:55:15 I mean, talk about going from 12 years of chronic pain, a lot of psychological suffering,
0:55:24 to no suffering, zero absolute joy, beauty, warmth, physical, emotional, every kind of
0:55:27 warmth you can imagine, and laughter.
0:55:30 There was so much joy in this light.
0:55:32 And I was laughing with it.
0:55:40 And I heard the surgeons say to the anesthesiologist, she’s crying, and I started crying from happiness.
0:55:46 And they could see tears coming out, and they thought that I could feel the pain.
0:55:51 So the anesthesiologist was going to give me more medication, and I talked to him the
0:55:54 next day to make sure it wasn’t a drug event.
0:56:00 And he said that a voice had told him, don’t increase the anesthesia, she’s crying because
0:56:01 she’s happy.
0:56:04 And he said, did I do the wrong thing?
0:56:06 That never happened to me before.
0:56:07 So that was odd.
0:56:12 Anyway, basically, the light was saying to me, you totally bought this whole thing about
0:56:14 you’re just a physical thing, and then you die.
0:56:18 And I was like, I know, I said I wasn’t going to forget, and then I totally forgot.
0:56:22 And we were laughing and laughing and laughing.
0:56:25 And then it said, look, you’re going to go through something really horrible that I’m
0:56:26 always here.
0:56:27 I’m right here.
0:56:28 I’ve always been here.
0:56:30 I always will be.
0:56:35 And I woke up in the recovery room, and there was this guy who was there from the prison on
0:56:40 some sort of work detail, and he was mopping the floor in this room where I woke up and
0:56:43 I looked at him and I said, I love you so much.
0:56:48 He’s like, I’m not even getting paid for this.
0:56:52 He went to get the nurses.
0:56:53 Yeah.
0:56:57 And I was just, I was like, do people cry?
0:56:59 And they said, yes, surgery is traumatic.
0:57:02 And I’m like, no, do they cry because they’re happy?
0:57:05 And they were like, no, really.
0:57:14 So yeah, the next day, the big thing was I’m never doing anything that makes me feel separated
0:57:16 from that light, not ever.
0:57:18 And lying was the first thing to go.
0:57:22 There’s still, to this day, one of the weird things about experiences like that is they
0:57:29 don’t fade is always right there with you in every choice you make.
0:57:32 And that’s what gave me the ability to do everything else.
0:57:35 All right, I have quite a few follow-up questions.
0:57:36 Thank you for sharing that.
0:57:39 The broadest question is what do you make of that experience?
0:57:46 The other, and you can tackle these in whichever order, but did you talk to the surgeon and
0:57:50 other personnel about what you observed them saying?
0:57:58 Yeah, the surgeon came in and was oddly tender with me, I mean, really, really tender.
0:58:01 And I think the reason was that what had happened was I was bleeding internally from a lot of
0:58:06 scar tissue that had happened when I was sexually abused, very young.
0:58:10 And they knew that some kind of violence must have caused that.
0:58:15 So they said, yeah, we don’t really understand why you suddenly started bleeding internally,
0:58:19 but it was putting pressure and we just had to drain the wound and leave it open.
0:58:23 And so that’s what I said, do you know anything about the anesthesia?
0:58:29 They went and got the anesthesiologist and he came back and I started just quizzing
0:58:30 him.
0:58:31 So what did you give me?
0:58:32 What are the effects?
0:58:33 What do people report?
0:58:34 What are the side effects?
0:58:35 Can I have some more?
0:58:42 Finally, he just said, look, just tell me what happened in there because this thing happened
0:58:43 to me.
0:58:47 And that’s when he told me about the voice telling him, don’t give her more anesthesia.
0:58:50 And I said, yeah, you did the right thing.
0:58:54 And he said, you know, how many times this has happened to me in 33 years of medical
0:58:55 practice?
0:58:56 I said, no.
0:58:57 And he said, once.
0:59:02 And then he kissed me on the forehead and left and wrote me a letter later about it.
0:59:05 He said it was not a drug effect.
0:59:07 Plus, he had a woo-woo experience as well.
0:59:08 So take that.
0:59:09 Got it.
0:59:11 So what do you make of that experience?
0:59:16 I have been making of it, you know, I started meditating and thinking about it.
0:59:20 And I think about it every single day and it’s been many years since then.
0:59:24 And what I make of it right now, first of all, I love, it’s kind of like the path of
0:59:25 not there.
0:59:27 Don’t know mind.
0:59:33 I believe in the Zen or any Buddhist concept of don’t know mind that in the beginner’s
0:59:35 mind, there are many possibilities in the expert’s mind.
0:59:38 There are few and that none of us really knows anything.
0:59:42 And in particular, we have no idea what consciousness is.
0:59:48 I’ve studied physics, I’ve studied philosophy, theology, nobody has a clue what consciousness
0:59:49 is.
0:59:53 And neurologist said nobody even knows what it would be like to have an idea about what
0:59:55 consciousness is.
1:00:01 So what I make of it now is that consciousness is the primary reality of the universe.
1:00:07 And I do believe in the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics that the observation
1:00:13 of consciousness is making what is merely energetic appear physical.
1:00:18 And I believe that everything is full of consciousness and that light was a representation
1:00:19 of consciousness.
1:00:26 But I also believe that this glass is a representation of consciousness and that you are and that
1:00:32 a tree is and then a rock is everything is brimming with that light.
1:00:38 My son actually 19 years after they told me he was going to ruin my life, we were going
1:00:45 home from the funeral of his friend’s mother, his best friend’s mother, she died.
1:00:46 And I was horrible.
1:00:49 And he said, “Mom, I didn’t cry at the funeral.”
1:00:55 And I said, “Yeah, but you can cry, strongmen cry when things are sad and this is sad.”
1:00:57 And this is a kid who barely talks.
1:01:02 He said, “Well, it’s not so bad once the light comes and opens your heart.”
1:01:03 And I said, “What?
1:01:05 A light came and opened your heart?”
1:01:06 And he said, “Mhm.”
1:01:08 I said, “Well, when did this happen?”
1:01:11 He said, “May 10th.”
1:01:15 This was in February and I was like, “So, what happened?”
1:01:19 So he told me he was in his room, he was having a struggle, he was 13 years old, this was
1:01:25 years before and a light appeared in his room and touched him and he said, “It told him
1:01:27 you can do this.”
1:01:30 And I said, “Well, I’ve seen that light too.”
1:01:33 And he looked at me like, “Wow, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
1:01:39 And I said, “And it told me that it’s always with us even though we can’t see it.”
1:01:42 And he said, “Oh, I can see it.”
1:01:44 And I said, “You can?”
1:01:45 He said, “Yeah.”
1:01:47 I said, “Like right now?
1:01:48 Of course.”
1:01:49 He was like, “Yes.”
1:01:51 I said, “Well, where is it?
1:01:52 Is it like up there?
1:01:53 Is it down here?
1:01:54 Is it in your heart?”
1:01:58 And he just shook his head at me and he said, “Mom, it’s everywhere.
1:01:59 That’s the world I live in.”
1:02:00 All right.
1:02:03 So, yeah, I feel like you and I are probably going to have quite a few conversations.
1:02:05 Ooh, I hope so.
1:02:12 Not enough records, so to be continued, I’m going to maybe just take a slight side step
1:02:15 to integrity cleanse.
1:02:21 If somebody wanted to do an integrity cleanse or attempt what you did, but with the lessons
1:02:29 learned, maybe they are not willing to go full throttle, how would you suggest they
1:02:30 do that?
1:02:34 Because most people listening, myself included, have never attempted something like this.
1:02:38 And just as a quick, humorous sidebar, I’ll say if people want to read something very
1:02:43 funny, there is an article, it’s an old article from Esquire called, “I Think You’re Fat”
1:02:48 by a friend of mine, AJ Jacobs, and it’s about his experiments with radical candor.
1:02:51 And his wife was like, “How do I look on this?”
1:02:52 And he’s like, “I think you’re fat.”
1:02:56 And you can imagine, it didn’t go super well.
1:02:57 Oh, goodness.
1:03:00 He learned a lot, but ultimately it was a pretty tough experiment.
1:03:02 So what would you suggest to people?
1:03:07 And what is an integrity cleanse and what’s the kind of like white belt, blue belt, black
1:03:10 belt version or however you would like to answer that?
1:03:12 Let’s do the white belt first.
1:03:13 Take a smaller time period.
1:03:21 I said a year, take three days a week, and you don’t have to say everything you think,
1:03:26 but you do have to be aware when you’re saying something that you don’t believe.
1:03:33 So have a little journal or something so that you can, when you lie to someone else and
1:03:41 most lies are told to smooth social interactions and nobody says you look fat.
1:03:47 So just note in a little book, okay, I said this, but what was I actually thinking?
1:03:52 So somebody said to me, “Oh, we’d love you to come out and visit.”
1:03:54 And I said, “Sure, sometime.”
1:03:57 But you write down, okay, that was a lie.
1:04:01 I would rather die a thousand times than go to stay with these people, whatever.
1:04:04 Write the truth down in your little notebook for yourself.
1:04:06 That’s the path of the truth.
1:04:07 Everything else is the path of not there.
1:04:08 It’s just mushy.
1:04:13 I wrote a whole book on this based on the divine comedy because Dante starts that book
1:04:17 just saying, “In the middle of my life, I found myself just wandering through this horrible
1:04:22 dart wilderness and I had no idea how I got there or where to go because I’d lost the
1:04:26 true path and then he shows how you find the true path.”
1:04:30 So most of us are doing that and the way you find the true path is to start writing down
1:04:34 the things that are true after you’ve said the things that are not true.
1:04:37 Just do that for three days.
1:04:39 That’s the white belt.
1:04:45 Blue belt, pick a month and have a friend where you speak the whole truth to another
1:04:49 person, even if it’s a therapist or at a 12-step group or something.
1:04:51 You want to go black belt all in.
1:04:54 This is what I try to do.
1:04:59 No lying ever, but you don’t have to say much.
1:05:02 Consider if what you have to say is an improvement upon silence.
1:05:04 It can be mute for a month.
1:05:10 No, you end up finding out that you say it if it’s true, kind, and useful and not very
1:05:12 few things are all three.
1:05:18 But don’t lie even with your actions or with your facial expression or anything.
1:05:20 Don’t eat a bite of food you don’t want.
1:05:21 Don’t lie.
1:05:23 I like to be tough on these things.
1:05:25 I used to run 100 miles a week.
1:05:29 Now I will be like, “I will never do anything false.”
1:05:31 And it’s fun and rigorous.
1:05:36 It is rigorous, I would imagine.
1:05:43 All right, so quick tactical question for people who want to maybe get somewhere between
1:05:44 the blue and black.
1:05:49 They’re going to make an attempt at fewer lies, more truth, so not just becoming aware
1:05:52 of it but actually changing some behavior.
1:05:55 You mentioned defensive, you mentioned rigorous.
1:06:00 Somebody who is being truthful is going to say no in some form a lot more than someone
1:06:02 who’s being untruthful.
1:06:10 What are some of your go-to phrases or the language that you like to use that is, I don’t
1:06:14 know if I think you’re fat, maybe it is.
1:06:20 In terms of saying no to the many things that would otherwise consume your time and your
1:06:21 life.
1:06:26 Most people when they want to say no and they don’t know how to say it will try to become
1:06:30 victim to me and say, “I can’t because of this, this, and this,” which is horrible because
1:06:33 the person always thinks of a way out of those things.
1:06:38 I love this quote from Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where his wife says, “Don’t go
1:06:42 to the Senate, I had a horrible nightmare, you’re going to get stabbed.”
1:06:48 So the guy comes to get him and he says, “Go tell the council, Caesar will not come.
1:06:52 That I cannot is false, that I dare not, false or still.
1:06:57 No, go tell the council Caesar will not come.”
1:07:00 Boom, that is my model.
1:07:04 And there have been really good studies that show that to get out of depression, one study
1:07:09 had control group, a group that had therapy, a group that had meds, and a group that did
1:07:13 nothing but eliminate the words, “I can’t and I have to,” from their responses.
1:07:18 Instead, they had to say, “I choose not to, I choose to, I will, I won’t.”
1:07:22 And they came out of their depression faster than any of the other groups.
1:07:28 Every verbal thing we say that is not true hurts our bodies, hurts our psyches and leads
1:07:30 us to anxiety and depression.
1:07:36 So in that case, keep a book that says you’ll have to deal with the people who don’t like
1:07:39 you saying, “No, I’ve lost a lot of friends this way.
1:07:42 Friends that perhaps needed losing.”
1:07:48 But I always say, just think, know what you really know about something, okay.
1:07:50 Feel what you really feel.
1:07:54 Say what you really mean, at least to yourself in your notebook, and then do what you really
1:07:55 want.
1:08:01 And that sounds so self-serving, but in fact, it’s quite stoical.
1:08:04 I know you follow the stoics and the hedonists, they were weirdly similar.
1:08:11 Like, they’ll do what is true, because it’s more felicitous to them in every way.
1:08:16 So have a notebook where you write down what you would do if you were being really honest.
1:08:21 And then after a while, once you know what you’re dealing with, start to become that
1:08:25 person in the way you actually conduct your life.
1:08:30 And as you make mistakes and as you don’t keep your commitments, forgive yourself.
1:08:38 Because one of the things I’ve found is that it’s never true to hate yourself or to condemn
1:08:39 yourself.
1:08:40 It’s never true.
1:08:41 What do you mean by that?
1:08:44 We are such little monkeys, you know.
1:08:49 I just got back from Costa Rica and we had a fabulous monkey encounter.
1:08:52 And they had this fear expression.
1:08:54 And they were afraid of so many things.
1:08:56 And I just thought, “We had this far from them.
1:09:00 All we’ve got is shoes to differentiate us from them.”
1:09:03 And we’re terrified of everything all the time.
1:09:07 And most of us are really doing our best, and we have all kinds of socialization, weirdness.
1:09:10 Our brains get reconditioned and rewired for fear.
1:09:15 If you’re not an integrity and you didn’t manage to pull it off and be honest in a
1:09:20 hard situation, kindness and gentleness are the truth.
1:09:24 I actually wrote a book that’s coming out next year after I wrote The Way of Integrity,
1:09:30 because I was so tough on myself in the integrity thing, and it was making people anxious.
1:09:37 And there’s a level beyond just telling the truth, and it is called compassion.
1:09:39 And it’s truer.
1:09:46 So forgive me while I get really nitty gritty with maybe a mundane question, but it’s building
1:09:48 on what we were just talking about.
1:09:49 And I’ll give an example.
1:09:56 So we were first corresponding via email, and I was exploring the potential for maybe
1:10:00 doing something in person, which is not to say you didn’t want to do that.
1:10:04 But the logistics were going to work out, and you had a line that was something along the
1:10:10 lines of, “I would love to do in person, but I can’t do it a life Tetris,” something
1:10:11 like that.
1:10:12 And I was like, “Life Tetris?
1:10:13 Do it a life Tetris?”
1:10:15 That is a good phrase I’m going to steal.
1:10:20 And so I’m wondering- You can’t steal it because I give it to you freely.
1:10:21 Oh, thank you.
1:10:23 I will gratefully receive then this phrase.
1:10:31 I’m wondering if, let’s just say, hypothetical example, really close friend of yours, and
1:10:39 his wife, so a male friend, his wife invites you to a costume party on a Thursday night.
1:10:43 And in your mind, you’re like, “I’d rather throw myself face first through a play class
1:10:47 window than go to a costume party on a Thursday night.”
1:10:48 For any number of reasons.
1:10:49 Right?
1:10:50 Like perfectly nice person.
1:10:51 You do not want to go to this thing.
1:10:55 What do you know would be meaningful to her?
1:10:59 You know it would therefore be meaningful to the husband who might have to deal with
1:11:03 some flak who knows, like back channel if you say, yada, yada, yada, but you really
1:11:04 don’t want to go.
1:11:05 What do you say?
1:11:09 I would say something like, “What else could we do together?”
1:11:12 This actually is a really effective thing when you’re raising a child.
1:11:15 If you just say no, it leaves them with no options.
1:11:19 They don’t know what to do with their feelings and none of us ever really grows up.
1:11:24 So when somebody says that, you say, “Ah, what else could we do together?”
1:11:29 If you love them and you care about them, you want to do something with them.
1:11:30 It’s just not that.
1:11:34 If you don’t want to be around them at all, it’s time to say no to the costume party
1:11:38 and get rid of those people and not get rid of them, but, you know, cut them loose.
1:11:45 So when I started asking people to do things with me that I wanted to do, everybody’s
1:11:47 life got better.
1:11:51 I had so much fun and I didn’t have all the awful things where I was pretending to have
1:11:53 fun when I wasn’t.
1:11:56 Could you give an example of just what that looks like?
1:12:00 Somebody comes to you and they’re like, “Let’s do A,” or, “Please do A,” and you’re
1:12:03 like, “Ah,” and you’re minding, “Body, I don’t really want to do A.”
1:12:04 What might be an example?
1:12:05 It could be made up.
1:12:06 No, it doesn’t have to be made up.
1:12:11 I’ve been actually working this through, have you interviewed Liz Gilbert?
1:12:12 I have.
1:12:13 Yeah.
1:12:14 It’s been a few years.
1:12:15 We’re going to talk you down.
1:12:16 She’s so much fun.
1:12:21 We’re going to figure out how to do live events and our schedules haven’t jived very much
1:12:26 and we had the same speaking agent and there was some conflict over that and I finally
1:12:32 had to just go to her and say, “I don’t think it works for us to have the same speaking
1:12:34 agent when we go and we’re creating events together.”
1:12:40 It was kind of hard to say that because we both really love this agent, but Liz and
1:12:45 she are really, really close so I thought it might upset her and maybe it did, but the
1:12:51 fact is it was true and so she didn’t bat an eye.
1:12:57 She just said, “Whatever makes it more fun and gives us more ease when we’re together,
1:12:58 great.
1:13:02 We want our friendship to be as much fun, as joyful as it can be.”
1:13:05 That was the track and it was a little awkward but it worked.
1:13:09 Last time I won’t beat this dead horse any further, but any other language that you find
1:13:10 helpful?
1:13:14 For people who have trouble saying no, is there any starter language, we’re like, “Try
1:13:15 this on for size.”
1:13:20 For some reason, when you said any other language, I literally thought of Chinese.
1:13:24 Yeah, exactly, just respond in a different language.
1:13:26 Right, I don’t speak a language.
1:13:27 What?
1:13:28 I’m showing when.
1:13:36 I remember the most awkward, oh, Tim, when I was freaking out about my family and the
1:13:40 sexual abuse and everything, my mother called me and said, “We hadn’t seen you for a while.
1:13:42 We’d really let, we miss you.”
1:13:47 I had just taken this pledge and I said to her, “I miss the concept of having parents.”
1:13:48 Oh, wow.
1:13:52 Because it was the truest thing I could say.
1:13:53 Whoa!
1:13:54 Return volley strong.
1:13:57 Yeah, but I didn’t want to hurt her.
1:14:02 I had to tell the truth because that light was still right there and I hadn’t gotten
1:14:04 any experience being skillful.
1:14:06 Here’s another bit of language.
1:14:08 Know what you really know and feel, what you really feel.
1:14:12 For me, it might be something like, “Oh, you know what?
1:14:13 Lunch sounds great.
1:14:15 Breakfast is just too early for me.
1:14:16 I’d be miserable.”
1:14:17 That’s just the truth.
1:14:19 I’m not being a victim.
1:14:20 I’m just telling them the truth.
1:14:21 I’m not a morning person.
1:14:28 So you sort of claim your right to joy and you make it really clear that you want them
1:14:33 to have joy and you expect yourself to have joy and no one has to keep secrets or cross
1:14:38 boundaries that are hurtful in order to make the other person feel good.
1:14:39 It’s not true.
1:14:44 And a relationship built on that, it isn’t a real relationship, it’ll fall apart.
1:14:50 There’s so much manipulation going on where people are pretending to do things that each
1:14:53 other like and both of them are miserable.
1:14:59 Yeah, there was a piece and I think it was McSweeney’s, well, there was a tweet and then
1:15:04 there was an actual written piece that resembled this, but it said, “Being an adult,” this
1:15:05 was a tweet.
1:15:10 I wish I had the attribution, “Being an adult is saying, “So sorry for getting back to you
1:15:15 so late over and over again until both of you die,” something like that and sorry for
1:15:17 the delayed response.
1:15:21 I like the cartoon where the guy is holding the phone and going, “What about never?
1:15:22 Does never work for you?”
1:15:24 Yeah, the New Yorker, that’s amazing piece.
1:15:28 So when there is someone where you’re like, “You know what, this is just not a relationship
1:15:33 I want in my life,” how do you break up with those people?
1:15:35 You do what you really want to do.
1:15:39 I remember I had one friend, she wanted to come stay with me, I didn’t want her to come
1:15:45 and I remember saying, “Let me think about it,” and then we had a conversation later
1:15:50 where she was very, very upset and she said, “You paused and you had to think about it
1:15:56 and we were friends,” and I said, “Yeah, sometimes I have to think about it.”
1:16:00 And she said, “Well, is it that you had something else going on or did you really not want me
1:16:01 there?”
1:16:06 And I was pinned to the wall and it was physically painful to speak the truth, but it would
1:16:08 have been more painful not to.
1:16:12 So I said, “Yeah, I really, I wasn’t in a place where our energies were going to work
1:16:13 well together.
1:16:17 I just did not feel like it would be good for either one of us.”
1:16:22 After a while, a few of those and they’ll break up with you, I promise.
1:16:27 You just tell the truth and people go away.
1:16:29 That’s joy.
1:16:34 All right, so I am going to ask you about anxiety.
1:16:36 I want to ask quite a few questions about that.
1:16:40 Before we get to that, so you had some Mandarin pop up, I feel like we should give people
1:16:41 a little bit of context.
1:16:49 So you’ve lived in Asia, you’ve studied not just East Asian languages, but also philosophies.
1:16:54 This is just the sidebar that I thought you might find entertaining, which is I was in
1:16:58 Greece many, many, many years ago.
1:17:03 And when something is completely foreign alien, unintelligible in English, you say, “Wow,
1:17:04 it’s all Greek to me.”
1:17:10 And then I realized, well, if you’re a Greek person, in Greek, you see something you don’t
1:17:11 understand.
1:17:13 You can’t say it’s all Greek to me because that’s your native language.
1:17:14 So what do you guys say?
1:17:16 And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, good question.”
1:17:20 It’s all Chinese to me.
1:17:25 So if you’re Greek, it’s all Chinese to me, which I thought was great.
1:17:28 That’s fabulous.
1:17:36 How has your experience with Asia, Asian languages, philosophies influenced who you are or what
1:17:37 you do?
1:17:39 Let’s just say in a coaching capacity.
1:17:43 Yeah, this was before I had kids or any of the other stuff happened.
1:17:49 I went over and spent a year studying Chinese at a research center in Singapore, and then
1:17:53 I worked in Japan and studied that for a while.
1:17:59 And I wasn’t particularly interested at the time in the philosophy, in the deeper wisdom
1:18:01 of the Asian cultures.
1:18:06 I just saw people offering oranges at little stands on the road and thought, “Oh, that’s
1:18:07 weird.”
1:18:09 And I went back to Harvard.
1:18:14 So I did my junior year in Singapore, and I went back to Harvard.
1:18:21 And I remember sitting in classes and thinking, “Why do you people assume so much?
1:18:24 You just assume so much.”
1:18:30 Like there’s this edifice of stuff you believe that I see no evidence for.
1:18:35 And as I went on studying the languages and philosophies of Asia, they have a reverse
1:18:37 idea of perfection.
1:18:43 So in the monotheistic Western religions, you are born imperfect, you’re an imperfect
1:18:48 original sinning mess, and your job is to get better and better and more godlike until
1:18:50 you can be godlike.
1:18:52 You have to get better and better and learn more and more.
1:19:01 In Asia, the idea is you’re formed completely perfect, and you accrue illusions as you
1:19:02 grow up.
1:19:08 So a baby comes in completely innocent and sees that people react nicely when the baby
1:19:12 smiles and they don’t like it when the baby cries, and suddenly they start betraying themselves
1:19:14 by smiling when they want to cry.
1:19:20 As the dawn of the loss of integrity, everyone does it, we’re a social species.
1:19:25 But in Asia, when you set out to be free from suffering, you drop your illusions.
1:19:29 So like the illusion, “I should be cheerful all the time.”
1:19:32 If it causes suffering, it has to go.
1:19:37 In the Daudijing, my very favorite book, it says, “In the pursuit of knowledge every
1:19:41 day something is added, in the pursuit of enlightenment of a Dau, every day something
1:19:43 is dropped.”
1:19:49 So you know less and less until you arrive at non-action, and when nothing is done, nothing
1:19:50 remains undone.
1:19:58 I remember thinking, “That is so cool, but I don’t know why.”
1:20:01 And yeah, that was even before the white light and everything.
1:20:03 I was already sort of on that path.
1:20:06 And now everything appears to me to be illusion.
1:20:09 All my thoughts are illusion.
1:20:16 And truth is something that I can feel or participate in as consciousness, but I’ve just been dropping
1:20:20 and dropping and dropping my illusions, and I try to do that every day.
1:20:25 So we’ve been jointly baking a nice conversational cake, I just want to put a little icing on
1:20:29 the top and then we’re going to segue to anxiety, and then we’re going to make, who
1:20:33 knows, we’ll make a meringue pie or a key lime pie maybe, a carrot cake perhaps out
1:20:34 of anxiety.
1:20:41 You would probably go on The Great British Baking Show and out bake everyone in Britain.
1:20:46 Well, you know, sometimes when kids go through or people go through culinary school, they’re
1:20:49 trying to decide on the sweet or the savory path.
1:20:53 So do you become a chef or are you going to become a pastry chef, sweet or savory?
1:20:59 And for people who are having a tough time deciding, I remember hearing when I was working
1:21:03 on For Our Chef, someone who’s involved in one of these very, very well-known schools
1:21:09 said, well, one question we sometimes ask these students is, do you fold your socks?
1:21:11 Do you have the mini rows in the shelf?
1:21:19 If so, maybe sweet and baking is for you because it’s so OCD friendly and precision oriented.
1:21:24 So yes, based on that at least, I think I would really enjoy, I would find baking very
1:21:25 satisfying.
1:21:26 I love that.
1:21:28 I want to eat what you bake.
1:21:29 You know?
1:21:30 There may be a day.
1:21:36 So the first is a story that I would love you to tell and tell me if this is enough of
1:21:37 a prompt.
1:21:40 So that’s a story of an audience, you’re on stage.
1:21:41 Are you comfortable?
1:21:42 Oh yeah.
1:21:43 This is a question.
1:21:44 Could you tell this please?
1:21:45 I do this over and over.
1:21:50 I speak in various places, all rooms and theaters and places.
1:21:54 And I’ll be talking about how to do better at work, whatever I’ve been hired to talk
1:21:55 about.
1:21:59 And right in the middle, I’ll stop and say, wait, wait, is everyone comfortable?
1:22:04 And they all look at me as if I’m crazy and I say, no, seriously, are you really comfortable?
1:22:06 And they start to say, yes, we’re fine.
1:22:07 Go on.
1:22:08 I’m like, no, I mean it.
1:22:11 Are you really comfortable?
1:22:15 And the whole audience will get quite angry, yes, we’re comfortable, just talk.
1:22:19 And then I ask them, okay, so now I answer this question.
1:22:24 If you were home alone in your bedroom right now, how many of you would be sitting in exactly
1:22:27 the position you’re in at this moment?
1:22:32 And maybe one hand goes up in a room full of hundreds of people.
1:22:35 And then I say to them, why would you be in a different position?
1:22:39 And they literally have to think.
1:22:42 And then it comes to them after about five seconds.
1:22:45 This isn’t comfortable.
1:22:52 And then I say, it’s okay that you’re not comfortable because we’re tough, we’re a tough species.
1:22:55 We’re tolerating discomfort so we can be together in this way.
1:23:00 But I do have a problem with the fact that you all just looked me in the eye in clear
1:23:04 daylight and repeatedly lied to me.
1:23:09 And you thought you were telling the truth, but you knew you were lying.
1:23:10 And they’re like, what?
1:23:11 What?
1:23:14 And like your body is telling you the truth.
1:23:17 That’s how cut off we are from our bodies and that’s the first thing you ask yourself
1:23:20 when you need to know the truth is, am I comfortable?
1:23:23 That’ll give you everything else.
1:23:25 The next, that would be the icing.
1:23:27 And there’s the cherry on top.
1:23:32 I’d love for you to expand on a question because these words will be words people recognize,
1:23:36 but I think the context, I would like to hear more about the context.
1:23:39 What do you want versus what do you yearn for?
1:23:44 And that may not be the exact wording that you use, but okay, what is the significance
1:23:45 of that question?
1:23:49 It’s interesting that you made the comment about, is it the exact language?
1:23:53 That’s one of the few places where I’m very exacting about language because somehow we
1:23:59 divide that conceptually when we use language, I ask people what they want.
1:24:04 They make me a list of things, a better job, better relationship, a better car, whatever.
1:24:10 And then I say, when you wake up at night and it’s dark and there’s no one around, what
1:24:12 do you yearn for?
1:24:14 And the list is completely different.
1:24:19 And it’s very short and almost everyone lists the same things.
1:24:28 Peace, belonging, freedom, love, happiness, it’s kind of it.
1:24:30 Everybody wants them.
1:24:34 And all the lists of things they want, those are all, I call it the difference between your
1:24:40 social self and your essential self, the essential self yearns, the social self wants.
1:24:43 You’ve gotten a lot of stuff you wanted.
1:24:44 It doesn’t make you happy.
1:24:45 Yeah.
1:24:46 Nice.
1:24:47 That’s true.
1:24:52 But if you get what you yearn for, it actually does make you happy.
1:24:53 I can’t resist the bait here.
1:25:03 So when you have something like a car, right, okay, so-and-so wants, you know, the newest
1:25:08 Tesla model, so-and-so wants the XYZ car.
1:25:14 It’s very cleanly discreet in the sense that it costs $88,000.
1:25:19 I can finance it for this much a month, therefore, I know how much I need to work to earn a bonus
1:25:21 to get this to do that.
1:25:25 It’s actionable in a convenient way, kind of like the drunk guy looking for his keys
1:25:30 under the lamp at night, even though he knows it’s in the bar somewhere, because that’s
1:25:31 where the light is.
1:25:37 How do you help people, and this might not be the right way to phrase it, but to actualize
1:25:44 something like peace or belonging, which at least at face value is much more amorphous?
1:25:51 I mean, it’s a thing that people know, but it’s not as easy to slice and dice and then
1:25:54 maybe work backwards from, like the new Tesla.
1:26:00 It’s not as cognitive, it’s not analytical, because it’s not physical, so it’s not measurable.
1:26:05 Our particular science doesn’t believe that it exists, even though we all want it, so
1:26:06 a couple of things.
1:26:12 The first thing, it’s something I call jumping the tracks, and it’s jumping the tracks between
1:26:18 seeing your life in purely physical terms and then opening your mind to the possibility
1:26:24 of all non-physical realities, and as we know from physics, all physical things are ultimately
1:26:25 not physical.
1:26:31 So, that’s the first thing is to say, “I live in a world that is not just made up of objects.
1:26:35 I live in a world where I deal in energies.”
1:26:39 When you track the joy through your body, it is a physical sensation, but it’s also
1:26:44 an energy, so then you start looking for the energies that bring you the essence of what
1:26:50 you yearn for, and I’ve found the simplest exercise, and I’ve been doing it with people
1:26:55 since the pandemic to calm people down, speaking of anxiety, I’d love to do it just a little
1:26:56 bit with you.
1:26:57 Let’s do it.
1:26:58 I would love to.
1:26:59 It’s so simple.
1:27:05 So, I have you write down whatever your concerns are, then tell me, honestly goodness, three
1:27:07 things you love to taste.
1:27:08 Okay.
1:27:10 You don’t want to go for it?
1:27:11 Or I guess should I write that?
1:27:12 I should write down.
1:27:13 No, no, just tell me.
1:27:14 I mean, you can find it if you want.
1:27:18 Cheesecake, it’s really thick frosting, for sure.
1:27:29 I would say barbecue brisket would be there, and then I would say really cold, slightly
1:27:31 sweetened iced tea on a really hot day.
1:27:32 Okay.
1:27:38 So, as you say that, can you remember the sensation of tasting those three things?
1:27:43 So, focus your attention on the actual experience of the taste.
1:27:47 Now, tell me three things you love to hear.
1:27:48 Definitely not leaf blower.
1:27:49 I love those fucking things.
1:27:52 They’re everywhere in Texas.
1:27:55 I don’t know what it is with the compulsive leaf blowing.
1:27:56 All right.
1:28:00 So, that’s just a bit of a mini rant based on this morning.
1:28:02 You and I are very much like it this way.
1:28:03 What are these people doing?
1:28:06 It’s like, I think there’s a racket where they like, it’s like Tuesday, they blow the
1:28:11 leaves to one side, and then Wednesday, they blow the leaves back to the other side.
1:28:13 It does make any sense, but it blows.
1:28:14 It blows, right.
1:28:15 It blows, exactly.
1:28:16 All right.
1:28:17 So, three sounds.
1:28:20 Yeah, three things you love to hear.
1:28:30 I would say acoustic guitar, so instrumental, say like classical guitar, like Segovia, that
1:28:34 type of guitar, I find really soothing.
1:28:36 I find, what else do I like to hear?
1:28:39 You know, thinking of all sorts of obscene things.
1:28:41 Go for it.
1:28:42 Yeah.
1:28:45 Very responsive female partner, let’s call it.
1:28:52 Certainly, it would be high on the list, and then the sound of my dog, Molly, when I get
1:28:59 home, and she’s so happy to see me, she’s just doing corpus calls and happiness wines
1:29:00 left and right.
1:29:01 I’d say those are three that come to mind.
1:29:02 Okay.
1:29:06 So, the task here is you’re going to try to hold all these sensations in your memory.
1:29:08 You’re going to activate them all at once.
1:29:12 So, you’ve got cheesecake, you’ve got the tea, you’ve got the brisket, you’ve got the
1:29:13 dog, you’ve got the female.
1:29:17 It’s a drug that can help me to get all of these things felt at the same time.
1:29:18 I do.
1:29:19 I’ll be first in line.
1:29:20 All right.
1:29:22 So, I’m trying to hold all of these things.
1:29:23 That’s the challenge.
1:29:24 Yeah.
1:29:26 And the left side of the brain, I’ll give you a hint, can’t do it.
1:29:30 So, it’s forcing you to use the right side of your brain more than you usually do.
1:29:35 So, maybe you can’t remember all of them, but like cheesecake, the guitar, whatever it
1:29:36 is.
1:29:38 Now, we’re going to go through the other senses.
1:29:39 You know we are.
1:29:44 One of the three things you love to feel with your skin.
1:29:45 Feel with my skin.
1:29:48 Or with, you know, you’re, can you feel anything with up?
1:29:49 Yeah.
1:29:53 I didn’t foresee this conversation going here this morning, but I’m into it.
1:29:54 Yeah, right.
1:29:55 Yeah.
1:29:56 Got it.
1:29:57 Got it.
1:29:58 All right.
1:30:00 So, I would say it’s my skin.
1:30:01 Textures.
1:30:02 Yeah, for sure.
1:30:09 A very, very saturated epsom salt bath where there’s almost like a silky residue.
1:30:10 Yeah.
1:30:12 When you move around, that would be one.
1:30:17 Another, I’ll try to keep this family friendly for the moment.
1:30:22 Another would be definitely dog kisses, for sure.
1:30:23 Yeah.
1:30:24 That’s super high.
1:30:31 And then, I would say, hot stone massage with a small amount of oil.
1:30:32 Fantastic.
1:30:34 So, those would be three.
1:30:35 Okay.
1:30:39 So, we’re going to do three things, non-food, that you love to smell.
1:30:42 Non-food, I would say.
1:30:43 There’s a tree.
1:30:45 I don’t know how to pronounce this word, actually.
1:30:52 It’s called cananga in Spanish sometimes, but a lang-lang, the Y-L-A-N-G-G or whatever.
1:30:53 Yeah.
1:30:54 Yeah, that one.
1:30:55 Yeah.
1:30:56 Yeah, that one.
1:30:57 Yeah, that one.
1:31:02 That particular tree, the scent of the flowers on that tree, second, it would be really on
1:31:03 a dog kick.
1:31:07 Partially because I’m getting a second dog this summer.
1:31:08 Oh.
1:31:09 Just that puppy smell.
1:31:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:31:11 True as babies, too.
1:31:15 A lot of people tell me the smell of dogs’ feet is one of their favorite things.
1:31:16 Oh, weird.
1:31:17 I’ve never tried that.
1:31:18 I know, right?
1:31:19 I’ve never even smelled a dog’s foot.
1:31:20 Yeah, I haven’t gone for the feet, but I…
1:31:21 I think we need to try.
1:31:24 We need to go take that step.
1:31:25 Yeah, yeah.
1:31:29 I’m more like a softier smelling guy with the pups.
1:31:30 But then there’s like puppy breath things.
1:31:33 So let’s just say puppy’s more in general.
1:31:34 So it’s two.
1:31:35 Is that two?
1:31:36 And yeah.
1:31:47 And then I would say non-food, number three would be the smell of cedar saunas.
1:31:48 Nice.
1:31:49 Cedar.
1:31:52 Okay, one sense to go, three things you love to see.
1:31:54 Three things I love to see.
1:32:03 Look over at mountains dotted with trees, I would say babies laughing, kids laughing.
1:32:09 Just got a nice dose of that with my friend’s family over the last few days.
1:32:19 And then just to showcase my OCD, when things are just like really lined up nicely, so like
1:32:23 a bookshelf or stacks of things, perfectly parallel.
1:32:28 Like if there’s like a certain uniformity or symmetry, maybe if I want to give it a
1:32:33 highfalutin label and sound fancy, I’ll say symmetry, different types of symmetry.
1:32:34 Okay.
1:32:40 So now your job, and as you’ve been thinking of these things, because there are so many
1:32:43 of them and they’re activating the parts of your brain that are sensory, and that’s
1:32:49 taking you away from the analytical cognitive part that’s so overdeveloped in most people
1:32:53 these days, because everything we do develops it more and more.
1:33:01 So now your job to learn to be happy is vividly imagine a scene with as many of these components
1:33:02 as you can put together.
1:33:09 So imagine sitting in a perfectly symmetrical, gorgeous cedar sauna on a snowy mountain looking
1:33:15 out, you’ve got your dog on one side, you’ve got a response of female partner on the other,
1:33:20 you’ve got cheesecake, you’ve got like someone’s playing the guitar.
1:33:27 I have a guitar player with a blindfold, playing Spanish guitar, but daddy’s not here.
1:33:34 And you start to drop in to a space that you’ve created in your mind, but not the part of
1:33:36 your mind that we talk about as mind.
1:33:39 It’s the sensory experience of being human.
1:33:41 Right, the sensory of our spreadsheet.
1:33:48 And in, yes, as you start to go into that, what you’re doing is you’re accessing the
1:33:53 part of you that is capable of feeling the things you yearn for, because everything we
1:33:56 actually yearn for is a feeling state.
1:34:00 And you can start with these very simple, small things.
1:34:04 When I have somebody do this, I have people do this on Zoom calls and put it in the chat
1:34:09 and hundreds of words are going by of different beautiful things.
1:34:12 And I’ll start by saying how nervous, anxious, and depressed are you.
1:34:14 They give me a number from one to 10.
1:34:17 Everybody’s nervous and depressed after they do this for a while and everybody’s looking
1:34:25 at everyone else’s delights, everybody is in a completely different energy state.
1:34:28 And that is how you get to the things you yearn for.
1:34:34 You jump the tracks from the way we’re taught to think to a sensory based experiential way
1:34:37 of thinking, which is for me more real.
1:34:43 And so jumping the tracks, does that refer to doing this exercise as an example, establishing
1:34:48 this like emotional landmark, like, okay, remember this feeling.
1:34:52 You’re in the sauna with the snow cat peaks, the dog that this to that.
1:35:00 Remember this and this is now your sort of homing direction from a sensory perspective.
1:35:01 It’s a track.
1:35:02 Yeah.
1:35:06 And it may just be the side of the rhinoceros’s toe.
1:35:10 It’s very likely you’ve been on the path of not there for so long.
1:35:14 You don’t know what the real, for me, that white light thing was the whole track.
1:35:15 Bam.
1:35:18 I could not miss it after that experience.
1:35:23 But what you just did is an experience of moving into that territory and seeing sort
1:35:28 of, you feel the shape of it or that I end up having difficulty describing it in words
1:35:30 because it’s not a verbal experience.
1:35:37 And the fact that it’s not a verbal experience is part of the reason it can fulfill your
1:35:38 yearning.
1:35:41 And it’s also part of the reason you’ve never gone there.
1:35:48 Stephen Hayes, who founded Act Therapy, he set out to figure out why humans commit suicide
1:35:50 and no other animal seems to deliberately do that.
1:35:57 And his answer is language, where the only species that can create a reality with words
1:36:04 in our minds that is so terrifying that an unknown future is worse than the fear of death.
1:36:10 If you stop thinking in terms of language and logic, which we call that thinking intelligence,
1:36:13 it’s just, it’s like a pair of scissors.
1:36:15 It’s good for certain tasks.
1:36:18 It’s not great when you need to stay warm, right?
1:36:24 When you jump the tracks into your entire nervous system, which is all part of, it’s
1:36:27 not disconnected from the brain.
1:36:31 Then you’re in the territory where you can actually experience joy.
1:36:34 I want to go to two places.
1:36:41 One is going to be a complete non sequitur, but just for purposes of trivia, I want to
1:36:43 tell people something about rhinos.
1:36:46 So you mentioned rhinos and the toe of the rhino.
1:36:52 Part of the reason, as you alluded to, rhinos are a good starter animal for tracking, at
1:36:57 least in South Africa, where you and I were in the Sobby Sands Reserve at different times
1:37:03 with Lantelosi, which coincidentally means the protector of all things, I believe it’s
1:37:04 in Zulu.
1:37:07 But it has this large front toe.
1:37:12 You can imagine it like the edge of your big toe toenail, and then there are these two
1:37:20 side toes, and I mean, it just goes back to Pangea and it raises all sorts of great questions,
1:37:21 but it’s so weird.
1:37:28 So there is an order called perisodactyla, which is an order of ungulates, so you could
1:37:32 think elk, deer, et cetera.
1:37:36 The order includes about 17 living species divided into three families.
1:37:40 You have equidae, which comes back to the equine therapy, maybe at some point.
1:37:47 That’s horses, asses, and zebras, rhinos, and tapirs, which you find in South America.
1:37:50 So those are all related, which is pretty wild to think about.
1:37:55 Rhinos, tapirs, and say zebras or horses, but if you look at the tracks, I mean, there
1:37:56 are some similarities.
1:38:01 So I just wanted to mention that briefly because it was just, I needed to get out of my head.
1:38:07 And then the second is related to a book you mentioned earlier, the Tao Te Ching.
1:38:14 And I was wondering if you could speak to Stephen Mitchell and Byron Katie and what
1:38:16 you have learned from them.
1:38:20 It could be related to integrity, it could be related to other things, but what have
1:38:24 you modeled from them or learned from them?
1:38:28 Speaking of the concept of having parents, I mean, they’re friends more than parents,
1:38:33 but I really do feel like they kind of re-parented me with their books.
1:38:38 I read Stephen’s version of the Tao Te Ching right around the time I had the white light
1:38:39 experience.
1:38:40 That’s when it was first published.
1:38:42 And it was such an intense…
1:38:46 It was like my nervous system caught fire when I read that version.
1:38:48 And I’d read other versions and they weren’t…
1:38:52 They didn’t float my boat as much, but there was so much energy in my body that I felt
1:38:56 like I was going to literally physically explode.
1:39:00 And I drove to a place where I knew I could hike to a waterfall.
1:39:03 Oh, they’re going to say “safely explode,” got hiked to.
1:39:10 I literally ran along this mountain path to this large-ish waterfall, ran under the
1:39:12 waterfall and just stood there.
1:39:17 And then the cold water beating down on me equaled the sort of heat that was rising.
1:39:22 I mean, my connection to that book was so overwhelming and I know it’s been powerful
1:39:24 for a lot of people.
1:39:28 So I memorized it, took it around, gave it to everyone I knew.
1:39:35 Then I was on a book tour and I saw this book by a woman named Byron Katie and it said,
1:39:39 with a foreword by Stephen Mitchell, “Never would have looked at it if I hadn’t seen that.”
1:39:46 And then I found out on the book leaf that they were married and I was like, “Wow, okay.
1:39:47 Now I’m interested.”
1:39:49 So I bought the book, got on a plane, read the book.
1:39:53 And she had a series of four questions, which are very simple.
1:39:55 Think of a thought that makes you upset.
1:39:56 Is it true?
1:39:57 Can you know that it’s true?
1:39:58 What happens when you think it?
1:39:59 Who would you be without it?
1:40:02 It seemed very, very simple and I applied it.
1:40:09 I started applying it and there on the plane, I had an injury on my knee and my thought
1:40:12 was I’m mad at my knee because it won’t let me work out.
1:40:16 And Katie has this way of reversing everything that’s causing you suffering.
1:40:21 After reading her stuff and doing her work forever, I actually believe that the direct
1:40:26 verbal opposite of your worst fear is your next step toward enlightenment.
1:40:27 I truly believe that.
1:40:28 Okay.
1:40:29 Can you say that one more time?
1:40:34 So I have some familiarity with your workshops and worksheets and just for people who want
1:40:37 to find this, they can find the work by Byron Katie online.
1:40:43 The work of Byron Katie and you can go online and download free things and she’s very generous
1:40:44 with it.
1:40:46 Could you say that one more time because this seems like an important point.
1:40:49 It will sound odd if you haven’t been doing the work for a long time, but this is what
1:40:51 I’ve realized.
1:40:54 The exact verbal opposite of my worst fear.
1:41:00 So the opposite, take your worst fear, find the direct opposite of that.
1:41:03 That is your next step toward enlightenment.
1:41:08 So for example, when I wrote my book about Mormons and I said to the publisher, don’t
1:41:12 tell anyone until it’s published and they said, you’re afraid of the Mormons.
1:41:13 How cute.
1:41:16 Then the galleys went out and I started getting calls from New York.
1:41:19 Why didn’t you tell us these people are insane?
1:41:22 We’re all going to die.
1:41:23 You mess with a religion.
1:41:25 You get some weird responses.
1:41:27 So I’m on this, this is a different time.
1:41:33 I’m on this plane again and I’m thinking something terrible is going to happen to me because
1:41:34 I wrote that book.
1:41:38 Something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book and this thought
1:41:39 just dogged me.
1:41:43 So I did Byron Katie’s work on it and she picks it apart for you.
1:41:50 And then you get the reverse and the reverse of my worst fear here was I’m going to happen
1:41:54 to something terrible because I wrote that book instead of something terrible is going
1:41:56 to happen to me.
1:42:01 It became I’m going to happen to something terrible and something in my psyche just went
1:42:03 click, click, click, click.
1:42:06 And I was no longer afraid.
1:42:08 I thought I might get killed for sure.
1:42:11 I just, I know I was doing what was right for me, period.
1:42:14 I never went into a welter over it again.
1:42:16 That was just true for me.
1:42:23 So that gives you a little tiny, weird backwards taste of the way Byron Katie’s work affects
1:42:25 you when you do it.
1:42:30 And she was doing her work and some people who were into it said to Stephen Mitchell,
1:42:35 you’re a great translator and writer, you’ve got to write a book about this woman.
1:42:40 And he said, no, and they said, no, you really, really have to, and he’s like, I hate gurus.
1:42:43 I don’t like, oh my gosh, she’s living in California.
1:42:44 Ugh, ugh.
1:42:48 Stephen is very picky, very picky.
1:42:53 He said, all right, I’ll go to Barstow where she lives, but she wasn’t living in Barstow
1:42:54 anymore.
1:42:55 She just had lived there.
1:42:56 She was living in LA.
1:43:00 But he said, she will meet me in Barstow and we will sit down on the floor and we will
1:43:02 look into each other’s eyes for an hour.
1:43:06 And then I will tell you whether I will write her book or not.
1:43:12 So the way I tell the story, which is not far off the truth, but it’s my story, not
1:43:14 theirs.
1:43:19 But they went to Barstow and Katie was thinking, why does he want to go to Barstow?
1:43:25 And they sat in a hotel, I believe they sat on the floor, knee to knee, and they looked
1:43:28 into each other’s eyes without speaking for an hour.
1:43:30 And then they got married.
1:43:31 That’s not quite right.
1:43:34 But he said to Katie, I’ve got to go back to New York now.
1:43:37 And she just said, why would you go back to New York?
1:43:39 He said, because I live there.
1:43:42 And she was like, so?
1:43:45 And he said, well, I have to go deal with my affairs.
1:43:52 And she said, but you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s of my species.
1:43:56 And they talk about two kids in love in their 80s.
1:44:03 They are in love with life, in love with each other, in love with the world, in love with
1:44:06 that itself, like in love with everything.
1:44:10 And their work has just mothered and fathered me through my life.
1:44:12 And they’ve done it themselves as people now.
1:44:14 So I love them dearly.
1:44:17 I encourage people to check out the work for sure.
1:44:23 And I have a, I guess, technical question about the opposite that you landed on.
1:44:27 So I am going to happen to something terrible because of my book.
1:44:30 Is that an example of a turnaround?
1:44:32 And could you have ended up on a different version?
1:44:37 For instance, something wonderful is going to happen to me because of my book or some
1:44:38 alternate.
1:44:40 There could have been a number of varieties.
1:44:43 Did that happen to be the one that of several resonated with you?
1:44:44 Yeah.
1:44:48 That was the one that really hit the gong in my mind, but I did have several.
1:44:50 And very often you can come up with a bunch of them.
1:44:51 And some of them are just playing wrong.
1:44:53 They don’t feel right at all.
1:44:57 Some of them are okay, but it’s not changing my life.
1:45:00 Like nothing terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote this book.
1:45:03 I thought, I don’t believe that.
1:45:05 And actually terrible things did happen to me.
1:45:08 Death wasn’t one of them, but some things are going to happen to me for sure.
1:45:11 So maybe if I hadn’t believed it, it wouldn’t have happened, but it did.
1:45:13 So that one didn’t work.
1:45:16 Wonderful things are going to happen to me because I wrote that book.
1:45:20 I did think that one seemed truer and it ended up being truer.
1:45:22 I just couldn’t know what was going to happen.
1:45:29 And then I got, often for me, it’s the one that’s strange and not grammatically normal
1:45:36 that will break the construct in my mind because I think of the strange verbiage.
1:45:41 And it sort of breaks open an assumption and I’m in that space of don’t know mind.
1:45:44 It’s a little satori, right?
1:45:48 And it’s really fun to take your fears, put them through Byron Katie’s questions and
1:45:56 then look at the turnarounds and it can really, really change your life just sitting in a chair.
1:46:06 I have seen people in 15 minutes doing this exercise live with Katie reframe 20 years
1:46:10 of resentment towards a parent because of x, y, n, z.
1:46:20 And they do a 180 and seemingly it just evaporates or transforms into something completely different
1:46:23 with at least some durability.
1:46:26 And I expect for some folks a lot of durability.
1:46:30 I’ve been really impressed and it’s not that this happens to everyone every time.
1:46:36 That’s not the case, but you do see some really remarkable changes.
1:46:38 But I’ll tell you something.
1:46:45 The work itself is incredibly powerful, but the reason people have these massive shifts
1:46:52 with Katie in person, this one guy was, he was in a house that was bombed to smithereens
1:46:56 in Poland during, I think it was in World War II and his whole family died and a roof beam
1:46:59 fell on him and it was winter.
1:47:03 And so he gets up and he’s haunted by this moment.
1:47:10 And for 50 years he’s carried this and she says, “Can you find the nine-year-old boy
1:47:14 in that scenario with that roof beam on his head who was just fine?”
1:47:18 And he thinks for like literally two seconds and goes, “Oh, yeah.”
1:47:22 And things like this happened around Katie all the time.
1:47:27 And the reason is that she has jumped the tracks and to understand why it’s so powerful to
1:47:30 do the work with her, you have to jump the tracks.
1:47:36 You have to start believing that there’s an energetic field that is connecting all of
1:47:37 us.
1:47:38 And you can feel people’s energy.
1:47:42 I know I start to sound all new age and Steven wants to slap me in the face.
1:47:43 He doesn’t.
1:47:44 He never would.
1:47:45 But he gets very grumpy with me.
1:47:46 I don’t believe any of that stuff.
1:47:47 He would stare at you for an hour, very intensely.
1:47:48 He’s like, “I don’t believe any of that stuff.
1:47:49 It’s just phony.”
1:47:53 And I’m like, “Explain this, Steven.”
1:47:55 And I show him something Katie’s done.
1:47:56 He just laughs.
1:47:58 He says, “All right, I can’t explain that.”
1:47:59 But it’s really nice.
1:48:08 He’s such a super hardcore, analytical, he doesn’t believe anything because everything
1:48:10 can be disproven.
1:48:15 And she is a field of transformation.
1:48:16 She just is.
1:48:18 She really is a different species.
1:48:19 It’s just a different thing.
1:48:22 And I’m not making any claims, I’m not deifying her.
1:48:26 She just, she’s a very, and I mean this in the most calmer way, but very…
1:48:31 I have now a lot of people who claim to be gurus and self-helpers and everything, and
1:48:32 she’s the only one.
1:48:34 I’ve spent quite a lot of time around her.
1:48:39 I have never seen any reason to disbelieve what she says about the fact that she lives
1:48:41 in perpetual joy.
1:48:42 Yeah.
1:48:43 Yeah.
1:48:46 I mean, it’s pretty wild to see her in action.
1:48:51 And I have not spent a lot of time with her, but I spent a few days in a workshop with her.
1:48:53 And you’re just like, “Is this an act?”
1:48:57 Does she go home and just like yell on the phone?
1:49:00 And you just, at least, I was not able to see any deviation.
1:49:03 I did not see any deviation whatsoever.
1:49:04 No, I’ve never seen it.
1:49:08 And I’ve been around her when she’s exhausted, when she’s sick, when she’s jet lagged.
1:49:13 She’s never in psychological suffering, ever, as far as I’ve seen.
1:49:16 So let’s chat about another great for a second, Goethe.
1:49:24 So the German writer, innovator, polymath of every possible variety, I’m wondering
1:49:31 why what you find most striking about Goethe, but there are a couple of quotes that popped
1:49:36 up that I think may resonate with you, that I think you’ve mentioned in conversation before.
1:49:38 But when you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
1:49:39 That’s one.
1:49:42 Another, never hurry, never cease.
1:49:46 That’s one I’ve heard permutations of in Buddhism as well, right?
1:49:49 No hurry, no pause, all these things, which I quite like.
1:49:52 Any others that come to mind or any aspects?
1:49:53 From Goethe himself?
1:49:58 Or anything, I mean, that doesn’t need to be specifically to, we can meander as we want
1:49:59 to meander.
1:50:02 I love the stuff about self-trust.
1:50:05 I’m blanking, actually, which I rarely do.
1:50:11 All I can think about is Faust now, and how he talks about the bargain with the devil.
1:50:19 I think we all make a bargain with the devil metaphorically because we’re forced to confront
1:50:24 the question, will we do what it takes to be admired and approved of by humans or will
1:50:27 we follow the soul?
1:50:31 Will we trust ourselves or will we trust what other people want us to be?
1:50:35 So the Faustian bargain is the only thing that’s really coming to mind right now.
1:50:37 Is Goethe a particular favorite of yours?
1:50:44 I have a collection of aphorisms and lived in Berlin for a period of time, became really
1:50:49 infatuated by Goethe just because, and for those wondering what the hell we’re talking
1:50:54 about, lots of different pronunciations in English, but G-O-E-T-H-E, there’s the Goethe
1:51:00 Institute and certainly, I don’t know if it’d be fair to call him like this, the Shakespeare
1:51:04 plus of Germany, but that’s one way to think about it.
1:51:06 I know why you’re into him.
1:51:07 Tell me.
1:51:08 He’s just like you.
1:51:09 He’s just like me.
1:51:10 Yeah.
1:51:11 I mean, there aren’t many people like you.
1:51:12 Bald and handsome?
1:51:15 There really aren’t.
1:51:19 And I love the way you’re so incredibly generous with all your life hacks and everything,
1:51:24 but I’m like, okay, so you can learn 12 sentences and then know a language.
1:51:26 Not everybody can.
1:51:29 You can learn the tango and be an Argentine champion.
1:51:31 Not everybody can.
1:51:33 But you’re, you are kind of a freak.
1:51:38 You gotta admit that because you don’t just pick up hobbies.
1:51:42 You pick up hobbies and then become a Japanese translator.
1:51:48 It’s kind of insane the kind of equipment you were born with and it must be a heavy
1:51:56 burden in some ways and quite lonely because as much as you try to help people be the same,
1:51:58 they probably rarely are.
1:52:04 And I think good is good as life might have been similar.
1:52:06 You are America’s good to know.
1:52:07 Wow.
1:52:08 There you go.
1:52:09 I appreciate that.
1:52:10 That is high praise.
1:52:13 I would say for a multitude of reasons, definitely feeling lonely.
1:52:15 I mean, that’s something I’m familiar with for sure.
1:52:16 I do have different hardware.
1:52:21 I’d say that it manifests in maybe unpredictable ways.
1:52:26 I did a bunch of cognitive assessments recently because that’s kind of thing that I do.
1:52:34 And for instance, for digit recall, just doing five and six digit recall.
1:52:39 When I don’t have the ability, I don’t have the time to use a crutch of, say, a mnemonic,
1:52:40 I am terrible.
1:52:46 I’m like lowest, decile in the US for sure, like bottom 10%.
1:52:50 But then there are other things like the Stroop test where you’re looking at, say, the word
1:52:56 red, but it’s displayed in green and you have to either indicate red or green, depending
1:52:57 on some parameter.
1:52:58 And it’s very fast.
1:52:59 Stroop test, I’m like top 1%.
1:53:00 I have no idea why.
1:53:03 I don’t know what that translates to.
1:53:05 And it kind of goes on and on.
1:53:09 There are super abilities and super weaknesses.
1:53:12 Oh, tell me, this is fascinating.
1:53:20 Well, I mean, they’re very, in my experience, often right side by side.
1:53:22 They’re very adjacent, right?
1:53:28 So I would say, you can see how this would cut both ways.
1:53:29 I can walk into a room.
1:53:34 I was doing a remodel at one point, for instance, and I had never seen this entire room built.
1:53:40 And I walked in and there was a mirror 10 feet away, and I said, it’s 1/8 of an inch too
1:53:41 far to the left.
1:53:42 I’m talking about symmetry.
1:53:44 I was like, it’s 1/8 of an inch too far to the left, and they’re like, what?
1:53:47 And I was like, yeah, yeah, it’s not centered.
1:53:51 And they went over and measured it and lo and behold, within a fraction of a second, I was
1:53:52 like, yeah, that’s off.
1:53:53 Wow.
1:53:55 You can see how that would drive me fucking bananas too, though.
1:53:56 That would be hard to live in the world.
1:53:58 Very monkish.
1:54:03 Beauty is such a, what did I say?
1:54:05 It’s so gratifying to me that…
1:54:07 It’s its own excuse for being.
1:54:09 It’s its own excuse for being.
1:54:17 So when there is something that lazily violates beauty, it bugs the shit out of me.
1:54:22 And I’m not proud of that, I’m not saying it is enabling.
1:54:25 Most of the time, I would say it is distracting.
1:54:28 At worst, it would be disabling.
1:54:30 But it enables me to do certain things, right?
1:54:34 Like I can draw the floor plan of almost any restaurant I’ve ever been in.
1:54:38 It doesn’t matter if it’s once, twice, if I’ve only been there for five minutes.
1:54:40 That’s just something I can do.
1:54:46 And then there are a lot of things that normal people can do that I just seem unable to do
1:54:55 in terms of, let’s just say, on one hand, I have like a great creative capacity because
1:54:56 I will ruminate.
1:55:01 On the other hand, that same rumination can manifest as lifelong on Saint Somnia.
1:55:02 Oh, yes.
1:55:03 Yes.
1:55:05 I’m in treatment for this right now.
1:55:06 I just found someone.
1:55:07 Yeah.
1:55:08 Oh, wow.
1:55:09 All right.
1:55:10 So it goes both ways.
1:55:14 And I will say there are examples where I can’t teach someone to replicate what I’ve done.
1:55:21 There are, thankfully, more examples of where I can help someone actually get beyond where
1:55:25 I arrived after X point in time, mostly because I would say the vast majority of teaching
1:55:28 has a lot of fat on it.
1:55:35 And logical sequences aren’t particularly prevalent and old methods persist for a really
1:55:36 long time.
1:55:39 So I mean, the way that we, as an example, teach languages, since you mentioned languages,
1:55:44 the way we teach languages in most schools is the equivalent of saying, “Okay, you want
1:55:47 to learn how to ski and you’re excited to learn how to ski?
1:55:48 Great.
1:55:53 We’re going to have you take a six-month avalanche course and they’re going to memorize meteorological
1:55:57 tables and historical weather patterns for the first six months.
1:55:59 Who is going to want to do that?
1:56:00 Nobody.
1:56:01 Everyone’s going to drop out.
1:56:05 Maybe there are one or two people who survive and then they get called good at languages.”
1:56:08 That’s a failure of the method, not a failure of the students.
1:56:09 Right.
1:56:14 And then so if I’m able to suffer through that and then break it down, rearrange it,
1:56:20 remove 90% of it, then I can teach people to go further than I did in a lot of ways.
1:56:25 However, then I have an unusual ability to mimic.
1:56:26 I just do.
1:56:30 And for whatever reason, even though I’ve done audiological exams because I like to know
1:56:37 what I’m dealing with, I do not seem to have any greater range, any greater sensitivity
1:56:43 than the average person, but my brain, for whatever reason, interprets these sounds and
1:56:47 signals and I can mimic accents, I can mimic tones, I can do these things.
1:56:50 I don’t know why, but that does give me an advantage.
1:56:54 So have you ever been given a word for your neurodivergence?
1:56:55 No.
1:57:05 And I’m grateful in this sense that I was not of a generation where, say, overprescription
1:57:12 was common or even really existent for things that didn’t have labels, constellations of
1:57:17 symptoms or characteristics that didn’t have labels until later, because I for sure would
1:57:19 have been medicated to the gills.
1:57:23 And I’m not saying there is a place for medication, but I would have been given everything under
1:57:24 the sun.
1:57:31 I mean, I was hyperactive, rambunctious, bouncing all over the place, refused to learn the alphabet
1:57:34 for a while, and then I was stupid and then I was going to be held back.
1:57:39 And I mean, I would have been just saturated with pharmaceuticals.
1:57:40 Oh my God.
1:57:43 So no, I haven’t been given, I have not been given a word.
1:57:45 Is there a good word that comes to mind?
1:57:46 I don’t know.
1:57:50 I mean, my oldest child is self-identified as autistic, so I went in and looked at all
1:57:54 the symptoms and I’m like, “Oh, that’s what’s been wrong with me this whole time.”
1:57:58 I truly believe, I believe this thing about destiny and I remember thinking even as a
1:58:03 child, if my destiny is to go to the top of, climb to the top of Everest and someone else’s
1:58:10 destiny is dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the equipment that I need would actually
1:58:13 make them unable to fulfill their mission.
1:58:18 Like if I’m climbing, that would not be good in diving and I couldn’t haul an aquatic set
1:58:20 of tools up Everest.
1:58:23 So I thought, “All right, there are things I wish I could do that I can’t and things
1:58:24 I can do.”
1:58:30 I don’t know, I just can do them and it’s really easy for me and weirdly easy.
1:58:35 And I just thought, “Well, this must be in some way a description of what I’m meant
1:58:37 to do with my life.”
1:58:40 I remember thinking that when I was eight or nine years old and I look at you and you’ve
1:58:44 done so many things that, “What do you do if you’re good at dancing?
1:58:45 You become a champion.
1:58:47 Yay, you can do that.”
1:58:53 But your brain is so different and I hope they never medicate it unless it’s something
1:58:59 that makes you happier, but I am really curious about your brain because it’s clearly, I actually
1:59:06 think the future of our species depends on people who are neurodivergent in ways that
1:59:13 make them unable to fit the culture that Western colonizers created, the weird cultures, right?
1:59:17 And that’s an oversimplification and there are many, many cultures, but the overall culture
1:59:24 that we have of hierarchical capitalism, whatever, is destroying the planet and teaching people
1:59:28 languages by putting them in avalanche courses.
1:59:34 And then there are people who just will not because their brains work differently.
1:59:36 And you’ve just got the most unusual brain I’ve ever seen.
1:59:38 Oh, thank you.
1:59:43 It’s, I think about the slot, but it’s like, I don’t know if I want to paint this broadly,
1:59:48 but superpowers come with costs or just powers.
1:59:50 Powers come with weaknesses.
1:59:57 It’s the two sides of the same coin coming in different varieties and so I think that,
2:00:04 for instance, a lot of my abilities almost certainly would not exist without also a propensity
2:00:08 towards depression, a propensity towards anxiety and hypervigilance.
2:00:17 And there are times certainly when I would trade it all for the ability to get to sleep
2:00:22 easily, the ability to look at the glasses half full instead of half empty.
2:00:27 I mean, there are times and I’m like, you know what, I’m not sure right now if someone
2:00:31 was like, here’s your list of abilities and disabilities.
2:00:34 And if you strike out one, you have to strike out something from the other column, like
2:00:38 I might erase a number of things arrived at a good place.
2:00:44 I feel that number of recent experiments have been particularly interesting, but I’d love
2:00:46 to hear from you.
2:00:47 And this stuck out.
2:00:53 In some prep notes, and I’d like you to take this wherever you would like to take it, but
2:00:54 this is a line.
2:00:57 I’m just going to use it as a prompt.
2:01:00 So the opposite of anxiety isn’t calm, it’s creativity.
2:01:01 I like that.
2:01:06 I’ve never heard it before, but there’s part of me that’s like, even without dissecting
2:01:07 it, it makes some sense to me.
2:01:10 Could you elaborate on that, please?
2:01:14 I came to this conclusion, I was noticing this huge spike in all my clients of anxiety
2:01:20 and I was reading about this massive, mostly in the pandemic, but anxiety just went bananas
2:01:24 and it didn’t come down when things eased a little bit.
2:01:28 And at the same time, I got to be friends with Jill Bulty Taylor, the woman who had
2:01:32 the left hemisphere stroke when she was a Harvard neuroanatomist.
2:01:36 It was the first TED talk to go viral.
2:01:42 And she lost all language and analytical cognition while her left hemisphere was offline, took
2:01:47 her eight years to rebuild her brain, but she experienced things with only the right hemisphere
2:01:54 that she’d never experienced before, this incredible joy, bliss, awe, the feeling of
2:01:58 being completely a field of energy, no barriers between physical objects.
2:02:01 It was a very different view of the world.
2:02:07 If she hadn’t been a neuroanatomist, she probably would be sitting in a vegetating somewhere.
2:02:11 But fortunately, she was among people who knew how to help her rebuild.
2:02:16 So now she goes around telling people, “We’re overusing the left hemispheres of our brains.
2:02:19 We need to be able to access the right.”
2:02:21 And so I’d been talking to her about this endlessly.
2:02:23 I love talking to her.
2:02:26 And I was reading a lot of brain science, always have, always will.
2:02:32 And I noticed that there were tons of studies that showed that the moment someone is even
2:02:35 slightly stressed, their creativity goes to shit.
2:02:42 They do these creative tests and then they say, “We’ll pay you $5 if you get the answer.”
2:02:46 Instead of motivating them, they get that little bit of anxiety, can’t do it.
2:02:51 All these studies showing that little kids happily create things and adults can’t do
2:02:52 the same things.
2:02:53 Why?
2:02:56 It always boils down to social anxiety.
2:03:01 So there’s this spaghetti and marshmallow test, have you heard of it?
2:03:02 This is a game of height, right?
2:03:06 Yeah, you’re trying to build the tallest tower possible using uncooked spaghetti, a
2:03:08 marshmallow, some string and some tape.
2:03:13 And they gave this problem to a whole bunch of engineers, groups of MBA students, groups
2:03:15 of lawyers, all these people.
2:03:17 They all had similar results.
2:03:21 Then they gave it to a group of five-year-olds who won by a country mile.
2:03:26 Five-year-olds do better by far at so many creative tests.
2:03:31 And why do they stop doing well as they get older?
2:03:34 It boils down to socialization and social anxiety.
2:03:40 So then I looked at the brain structures and what Jill told me was you basically have
2:03:43 two brains, they’re symmetrical, but they don’t work the same.
2:03:47 The left hemisphere has this alarm signal that goes into fear.
2:03:52 And then immediately the brain starts to, the left hemisphere starts to try to control
2:03:58 whatever’s going wrong, whatever makes you afraid and telling verbal stories about it.
2:04:04 Even as the verbal stories that you tell feed back into the amygdala and as environmental
2:04:05 realities.
2:04:10 So if I’m afraid something’s going to jump at me from the dark, it’s as if something
2:04:13 really is going to jump at me from the dark.
2:04:17 So when I say I may have a fatal illness, there’s no evidence, but I can literally go
2:04:19 into a panic over that because of language.
2:04:24 The left hemisphere is also unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the right hemisphere’s
2:04:27 perspective exists at all.
2:04:31 Like if people have a right hemisphere stroke and they’re only in the left hemisphere and
2:04:36 you tell them to draw a clock, they’ll draw the side of the clock from 12 to six and they’ll
2:04:37 say that’s finished.
2:04:39 And there’s nothing wrong with their eyes.
2:04:43 They will not acknowledge anything the right brain is observing.
2:04:49 When Jill only had a right brain, zero anxiety, zero time, zero physical reality really.
2:04:55 On the right side, the amygdala is afraid, ah, but it starts to get curious.
2:04:58 Do you said something about curiosity really early on in this interview?
2:05:00 And I was like, oh, that’s the trick.
2:05:05 Because if something scares you, if you go to control, you’re in anxiety.
2:05:08 If you go to curiosity, my mind is open.
2:05:14 I have no pre assumptions and I want to know what this is about.
2:05:17 Instead of anxiety, you get creativity.
2:05:22 So it depends which side and one side shuts off the other.
2:05:23 So it toggles.
2:05:27 So when I asked you to talk about these things that you were sense, the things you love with
2:05:32 all five senses, you had to go into the right hemisphere of the brain and it had to shut
2:05:35 down the part of the brain that produces anxiety.
2:05:37 That’s just the machinery.
2:05:42 So my premise was anxiety kills creativity.
2:05:44 Maybe creativity kills anxiety.
2:05:49 So I started designing things to test that and it tests amazingly well.
2:05:54 Even though I haven’t seen any direct studies on it yet, if you put together the science
2:05:58 around it, it’s kind of an unavoidable conclusion.
2:06:03 And when I try it myself, oh my God, the results are ridiculously powerful.
2:06:06 What types of exercises do you do for yourself?
2:06:11 Oh, for example, if you were to write your name, Tim, that’s cheating because it’s short,
2:06:12 Tim Ferriss.
2:06:13 Are you right handed?
2:06:15 I’m right handed.
2:06:19 So I would have you write your name, then put your pencil just to the left of your name
2:06:22 and write it backwards in mirror writing.
2:06:24 So mirror your signature.
2:06:28 Then you put your pencil under your signature and do it upside down and then upside down
2:06:29 and backwards.
2:06:32 Leonardo da Vinci used to write in mirror writing.
2:06:37 Yeah, that is a wild example of people go back and look at this extensive backwards
2:06:38 writing.
2:06:41 I used mirror writing constantly as a kid.
2:06:44 It was amazing to me that other people couldn’t read it.
2:06:50 I totally maxed out this IQ test once when I was five because the guy had the test right
2:06:51 in front of him.
2:06:53 He was giving it to me orally.
2:06:56 And I thought, doesn’t he know I can read it upside down?
2:06:58 I mean, I’m fine here.
2:07:00 I aced that one anyway.
2:07:05 But just because I can read mirror writing, but try doing that and staying anxious at the
2:07:06 same time.
2:07:08 Can’t do it.
2:07:13 Then I decided, okay, I’m going to take January 2023.
2:07:18 I’m going to give myself an entire month in lockdown because the conditions are very
2:07:19 controlled.
2:07:21 So this is a good time for an experiment, the pandemic.
2:07:26 I get up every morning and do things that are purely right brain function.
2:07:34 So I started withdrawing and painting and I thought, I’ll just go from there.
2:07:38 I drew and painted like a maniac.
2:07:39 I didn’t want to sleep.
2:07:40 I didn’t want to eat.
2:07:43 I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
2:07:45 I was in pure heaven.
2:07:50 And the problem was at the end of the month, stopping was horrible.
2:07:54 It was like some kind of suicide right there.
2:07:57 And now since I finished, I had to get back into my left hemisphere to write the book
2:07:58 about it.
2:08:01 But as soon as I sent the manuscript away, I just started painting.
2:08:05 I get up every morning at like between four and six and paint until 11.
2:08:07 And I’m just like completely blissed out.
2:08:13 Yeah, I find drawing to be a real self and I wanted to be an illustrator for a long time
2:08:18 when I was a kid and paid some of my expenses in college by being an illustrator.
2:08:23 I actually illustrated a few books long time ago.
2:08:29 And getting back into that, even just going to, you do not need to be good.
2:08:30 It’s not about being good.
2:08:36 It’s about using different circuitry, patterning, a different type of awareness.
2:08:39 There are many different ways you could frame it.
2:08:46 Gesture drawing, going to live classes where you have nude subjects posing and just in
2:08:48 case there are a bunch of guys who are like, “Awesome.”
2:08:51 You’re like, “No, you’re going to get some like obese naked dudes, too.”
2:08:52 Yeah, it’s not awesome.
2:08:53 So it’s dealer’s choice.
2:08:56 So just realize you got to be there for the drawing.
2:08:58 It’s not a singles bar.
2:09:03 And the fact, just for people who’ve never been, the way this works, gesture drawing
2:09:07 is so-called because you’re intended to capture at least the essence of a pose.
2:09:10 The pose automatically changes with a timer.
2:09:16 The timer could be one minute initially and the model will change his or her position
2:09:17 every 60 seconds.
2:09:20 And then it might go to two minutes and then to say five minutes.
2:09:26 But the point I want to make as part of the beauty of this is when things are changing
2:09:34 that quickly, I really like gesture drawing live classes as an introduction because you
2:09:35 just cannot.
2:09:38 You do not have the space to overanalyze what you’re doing.
2:09:39 Yes.
2:09:45 Whereas if I’m like, “Draw this apple on a table and you have two hours to do it,” you
2:09:50 can scrutinize and tie yourself up and not every which way from Sunday.
2:09:54 But if it’s a pose that changes every 60 seconds, you just have to draw in any case.
2:09:56 I find it’s so deeply therapeutic.
2:10:02 I used to put like a silk scarf in front of a fan and try to draw it.
2:10:04 That sounds like the word true potential.
2:10:11 No, it’s like it’s heaven because I had this massive depression and anxiety and you know
2:10:14 from experience and it’s when you do it for the joy of it.
2:10:17 The moment you’re doing it for money is just work.
2:10:22 The reason I went so deeply into it this last January is that I’d always been doing it
2:10:24 for the result for a long time.
2:10:25 I was doing it for money.
2:10:32 I was doing it to give to someone, whatever, to teach and this was just to activate the
2:10:33 right side of my brain.
2:10:34 That was it.
2:10:37 I would be obsessed with a drawing or a painting and when it was done, I would just throw it
2:10:38 in.
2:10:39 I don’t even know where they are anymore.
2:10:42 They just started littering the floor.
2:10:46 I was in pig heaven and it really does.
2:10:50 When I’m anxious, this is what I tell myself, “Make something.
2:10:51 Make something.
2:10:53 You can’t stay anxious if you’re making something.”
2:10:54 Yeah, for sure.
2:10:55 I’d say two quick comments.
2:11:03 The first is for people who want a great reinforcement of this, make good art, a commencement speech
2:11:09 by Neil Gaiman is unbelievably good and watch the actual delivery.
2:11:15 Watch the video because his malifluous dulcet tones add so much to it.
2:11:17 His delivery is so good.
2:11:21 The second thing I would say is for those people who are like, “What, how am I going
2:11:24 to find a naked person in a class and this, that, and the other thing?”
2:11:31 There are websites and we’ll put some in the show notes where you have effectively gesture
2:11:34 poses that change and you can set the duration.
2:11:36 You can mimic this at home.
2:11:40 You don’t need to do a class, but the class asks so much more to it.
2:11:42 You’re doing it with other people.
2:11:43 You’re probably standing.
2:11:47 You’re actually moving your body and getting away from a staring at something 18 inches
2:11:50 at a fixed location in front of your face.
2:11:51 There’s so much more to it.
2:11:56 What you just described is the way the right hemisphere moves with people in motion with
2:12:03 the body versus the left hemisphere moves, fixed, rigid, in space, got to get this right.
2:12:08 There’s an over-emphasis in our entire culture, again, an oversimplification, but there’s
2:12:14 a huge over-emphasis on left hemisphere functions to the point where this, I love this guy Ian
2:12:19 McGill-Christ at Oxford, he says the whole culture functions like someone with a right
2:12:22 hemisphere stroke.
2:12:28 We’ve lost half our brain and it’s the part that includes that nurtures, that finds meaning,
2:12:29 that finds joy.
2:12:31 I mean, we have left out the best part.
2:12:32 Yeah.
2:12:33 Yeah.
2:12:36 There are many different ways of knowing different modes of living.
2:12:44 So these types of exercises, I’ve just found so important as certainly joy-inducing, but
2:12:47 just a critical vitamin.
2:12:52 If you’re deficient in this, the consequence is psychologically or just as dire as if you
2:12:56 were deficient in essential amino acid or something like that.
2:13:02 Let me ask you in a slightly different context, as it relates to, it doesn’t need to be specific
2:13:08 to anxiety, but I’m very curious because Boyd had mentioned this in his long list of potential
2:13:10 topics that we could discuss.
2:13:14 So I’m wondering if this ties in in any way or if you could just speak to, he put down
2:13:19 IFS, so parts work, internal family systems.
2:13:21 How have you used that?
2:13:22 What do you find it best for?
2:13:23 We don’t have to spend a lot of time on that.
2:13:28 I’m just wondering if there’s an intersection in the same way there might be an intersection.
2:13:33 If thoughts are beliefs we take to be true, something like that, or beliefs are thoughts
2:13:34 we take to be true.
2:13:42 If the work, Byron Katie’s, the work can have such a dramatic impact on people by helping
2:13:47 them to re-author beliefs, I’m wondering if IFS also has a role.
2:13:50 And if so, what that role is in, say, the work that you do.
2:13:51 I think so.
2:13:55 IFS is going bananas because it works so damn well.
2:13:57 And I got really curious reading about it.
2:14:01 So I signed up, I tried to get a training course, but there’s a waiting list, signed
2:14:06 up with my own IFS therapist, ended up meeting Dick Schwartz, who created IFS and having
2:14:08 conversations with him about it.
2:14:11 And the way he puts it, he was a family therapist.
2:14:15 And there were times when he’s working with a group of people and say the dad was really
2:14:20 aggressive and a child didn’t want to talk in front of the dad, he’d ask the dad to
2:14:24 step out of the room and then the child could talk, could speak more freely.
2:14:29 And then he was working with just one patient and he heard them using a very critical angry
2:14:30 voice.
2:14:34 And he had this odd thing of, could I ask whoever just said that to step out of the
2:14:35 body for a minute?
2:14:37 Not literally.
2:14:41 And to his surprise, the patient said, sure.
2:14:45 And then the critical part stepped out and he said, I’d like to talk to whoever is behind
2:14:50 this critical voice or whoever disagrees with the critical voice.
2:14:55 And different parts of the patient would start to express themselves.
2:14:59 It’s not a shift in identity, it’s not multiple personalities or anything like that.
2:15:04 It’s just that we all know we have parts as a part of us that loves to go out dancing
2:15:07 in a part that likes to stay home and go to sleep.
2:15:10 There’s a part that feels little, there’s a part that feels strong, whatever.
2:15:15 So the thing is, the Byron Katie work, for example, if you do it, but only one part of
2:15:21 you does it, there may be another part that is just not down with it.
2:15:25 And that part needs to have its experience.
2:15:31 What Dick found was that the parts have their own unique and whole identities.
2:15:38 And if you respect them, they come together and they start to integrate with each other
2:15:42 and solve the problems that make your life miserable.
2:15:44 And it works really, really well.
2:15:46 Did he use that with clients?
2:15:51 Yeah, I’m not trained, but he’s also very generous with his theory and there are books
2:15:52 out there.
2:15:56 One is called Self Therapy by Jay Early with little illustrations and everything to tell
2:15:58 you how to use it.
2:16:02 And the biggest thing I found, especially to relate to anxiety.
2:16:05 So there’s a part of you that gets anxious and depressed, yeah?
2:16:09 Or maybe there are two different parts, one anxious, one depressed, I don’t know.
2:16:15 So when you think about your anxiety or your depression or your insomnia, how do you think
2:16:16 about it?
2:16:17 Like, what are the thoughts you think?
2:16:19 What are the thoughts, I think?
2:16:21 Yeah, when you’re thinking about insomnia.
2:16:27 Yeah, I mean, remarkably, I’ve seemingly fixed a lot of that for the first time in 30 years.
2:16:34 But I would say if we’re talking about anxiety or depression, I’d say the most common type
2:16:36 of thought pattern.
2:16:43 And I did do a live, I had Dick on the podcast, Dick Schwartz and we did a live kind of demo.
2:16:45 Or he asked me if I’d be willing to do it.
2:16:49 So we did do a live walkthrough, but I’d say to answer your question, the most common thoughts
2:16:55 that I have are even related to depression, fear-based.
2:17:00 So for instance, if I don’t get sleep for one or two days, I’m like, catastrophizing.
2:17:03 I can feel myself slipping.
2:17:04 I don’t want to go into this state.
2:17:10 I need to do everything to avoid it, because if I end up in the spiral, ABCDE, EFNG, and
2:17:14 all these catastrophe scenarios might ensue.
2:17:21 So there’s a lot of fear around slipping into a persistent depressive or anxious state, especially
2:17:27 depressive state, because the anxious state I’ve brute-forced through so many thousands
2:17:37 of times that I have a greater degree of confidence in my ability to just by sheer will and overpowering
2:17:43 my psyche, I can compensate, whereas the depressive stuff is more handicapping.
2:17:45 But there’s a lot of fear around it, I would say.
2:17:46 Yeah.
2:17:52 So there’s fear, there’s avoidance, there’s dread, there’s catastrophizing.
2:17:57 Now what I’ve found is that when people talk to me about anxiety, they’re like, “I hate
2:17:58 it.
2:17:59 I want to get rid of it.
2:18:00 I’d do anything to be rid of it.”
2:18:06 So I had this theory that the part that holds the insomnia or the part that holds the anxiety
2:18:12 or depression is a part that wants to be included.
2:18:14 Everything wants to belong, right?
2:18:20 So when you’re saying, “Get away, I don’t want you,” the part of you that does insomnia
2:18:27 and depression goes into a kind of panic, because it’s now being told it can’t belong.
2:18:28 You don’t want it.
2:18:29 You’ve rejected it.
2:18:33 And so it ups the ante, and all it knows how to do is keep you awake and make you depressed.
2:18:35 So it starts to spiral upwards.
2:18:41 I had this huge breakthrough when I was meditating, and sometimes when I have a negative thing
2:18:45 that won’t seem to leave, I just use this little let go, let go mantra, and it wasn’t
2:18:47 letting go.
2:18:50 And I thought, “Okay, how would Byron Cady do this?”
2:18:52 And I said, “Let’s stay.”
2:18:56 So I said to my anxiety at the time, “Stay.
2:18:57 Don’t go anywhere.
2:18:58 Please come and sit down.
2:18:59 Stay here.
2:19:01 I want you exactly the way you are.
2:19:04 I accept you exactly the way you are.
2:19:06 I want you with me.
2:19:08 I care about you.
2:19:09 I care about your welfare.
2:19:11 I want to know all about you.
2:19:13 I want to know everything about you.
2:19:15 Come sit by the fire with me.”
2:19:18 And in a way, it’s what I do with every client.
2:19:22 It’s what I did with Boyd when we were getting to know each other.
2:19:27 Sit by the fire with me and tell me your worst fears, your worst stories, because I have room
2:19:29 enough in my heart for all of them.
2:19:34 And I said being creative is the opposite of anxiety, but you can’t get to creativity
2:19:42 if you don’t start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness toward the self, toward
2:19:47 the parts of the self that are doing the things you can’t stand.
2:19:54 And that was a really dramatic shift for me in my insomnia, for one thing.
2:19:58 But in all the negatives, when I started saying, “Stay.”
2:19:59 Love that.
2:20:03 You know what it also makes me think?
2:20:07 Man-O-Man is a time for me to go back and re-read Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock.
2:20:08 Probably.
2:20:09 Yeah, that’s a great book.
2:20:10 Probably.
2:20:12 It’s probably time for me to get back on that horse, too.
2:20:13 I love that.
2:20:17 Adelaide Field, “Do you have a favorite animal?
2:20:20 Is there a small set of animals, birds, or otherwise?”
2:20:21 We’re like, “You know what?
2:20:22 Yeah, I do.
2:20:26 I particularly like or find these animals interesting.”
2:20:28 Yes, I do.
2:20:29 Cheetahs.
2:20:30 Cheetahs.
2:20:31 All right.
2:20:32 Yes.
2:20:38 I love big cats anyway, but cheetahs are delicate and scared and skittish because they’re built
2:20:39 for speed.
2:20:45 They have those long legs and stuff, and if a lion or a leopard or a hyena gets to them,
2:20:46 they’re toast.
2:20:50 I had a chance to meet an orphan cheetah, an adult cheetah.
2:20:57 You know how dogs have this energy that is just dog genius and horses have this energy,
2:21:03 which is like, “I’m not about this far away from wild, and I’m scared of everything.”
2:21:08 Dogs have this energy like serial killers because they are.
2:21:15 But cheetahs, I came upon a cheetah that was throttling an impala, and it held on until
2:21:20 the animal had suffocated, and then it looked up at me and it said, “Pew.”
2:21:25 I’m not this adult cheetah.
2:21:28 The energy, Tim, you’ve got to meet cheetahs.
2:21:30 They have dog energy.
2:21:32 If you put a ton of sugar in it.
2:21:36 They are the sweetest animals.
2:21:39 What do you mean by putting a ton of sugar into it?
2:21:40 They are sweet.
2:21:41 Just throwing donuts out of the car?
2:21:46 Not in the wrought-your-teeth way, but just like how dogs love you.
2:21:48 Cheetahs love you twice that much.
2:21:53 They love each other twice that much, and it started licking my arm, and it was taking
2:21:57 off a layer of skin with every lick because they have these really raspy tongues.
2:22:00 I literally had a scar for months, and I don’t care.
2:22:01 It could have eaten my arm.
2:22:06 As far as scar stories go, it’s up there with the grates.
2:22:08 What happened to your arm?
2:22:09 Oh, nothing.
2:22:12 Just a cheetah licked my skin off.
2:22:13 You never know.
2:22:14 Yeah.
2:22:15 Okay, cheetahs.
2:22:16 Yeah.
2:22:21 I have not been that close to a cheetah, but I was really overjoyed.
2:22:31 I think it was my last outing at Londelosie, like in the trackers and rangers and with
2:22:35 the whole kitten caboodle where they could actually use the radio, so we weren’t on foot,
2:22:37 at least not initially.
2:22:39 I really wanted to see a cheetah.
2:22:44 As it happens, you probably can identify with this maybe, but I was so jet-lagged at one
2:22:45 point.
2:22:47 I skipped one morning drive, so of course, they see all these cheetahs.
2:22:48 Right.
2:22:49 They’re like, “You missed the cheetahs.
2:22:56 I’m like, ‘Oh, you got to be kidding me,’ and then luckily, because just the technical
2:23:02 abilities of these rangers and trackers is so otherworldly, we’re able to find a cheetah
2:23:09 who’s just killed Nimpala and was resting in the shade and had just eaten a bunch, so
2:23:10 it wasn’t going anywhere.
2:23:15 They’re like, “Yeah, don’t worry about it,” and we’re able to get probably within 30 or
2:23:23 40 feet and just lock eyes, and for those people who haven’t done this, which I’m guessing
2:23:30 is a pretty large percentage, they have very different eyes from lions or leopards.
2:23:37 They have this, at least the cheetah eyes saw this deep amber-orange eyes and a very
2:23:45 square brow, like a very straight brow line, and it’s so distinct.
2:23:50 As you pointed out, so delicate, I mean, certainly, if push came to shove, they could rip your
2:23:51 face off.
2:23:52 Oh, they can kill you six times from something.
2:23:54 But they’re very, very skittish, right?
2:23:58 They are going to run away from everything because every other cat can steal, prey from
2:24:00 them or kill them so that they are built for speed.
2:24:04 They’ve made a lot of compromises in optimizing for speed.
2:24:07 Quick side note for people who may not realize this.
2:24:10 If you look at, say, a leopard’s tail, it’s kind of like a squirrel tail.
2:24:13 It’s built for balancing at height, so it’s very round.
2:24:18 It’s very bushy, and a cheetah tail is actually very rectangular.
2:24:19 It’s almost like a rudder.
2:24:26 They are a beaver tail turned 90 degrees on its side because they use it for maneuvering
2:24:30 aerodynamically when they’re traveling at high speeds, so wild.
2:24:33 But I’ve not, I don’t have a cheetah-licking scar.
2:24:35 I’m actually very, very envious of this.
2:24:40 It really goes what you said about every superpower has its cost, though, and I think you would
2:24:41 identify with cheetahs.
2:24:44 Yeah, I mean, I love cheetahs.
2:24:45 I love, love, love cheetahs.
2:24:53 I’ve only seen them that close that one time, but what a wonderful experience.
2:24:58 Let’s hop to this far from wild, and I’m afraid of everything.
2:24:59 Horses.
2:25:00 Yeah, yeah.
2:25:06 I want to say, did at one point you own a ranch, am I making that up?
2:25:07 North Star Ranch.
2:25:08 Yeah.
2:25:09 Do you still own the ranch?
2:25:10 Nope.
2:25:11 Okay, but you did.
2:25:12 You moved down to Pennsylvania.
2:25:13 Okay, but you did.
2:25:16 This was in San Luis Obispo, slow for six years.
2:25:17 Yeah, for six years.
2:25:19 It actually was in a national park.
2:25:26 I mean, the nearest grocery store was an hour’s drive, and there was no road going past it.
2:25:29 There was us and a national park.
2:25:30 Okay.
2:25:33 I packed a lot of bears and a lot of mountain lion.
2:25:35 I bet you had a lot.
2:25:42 So equine therapy was, now I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in that context.
2:25:47 The reason I’m asking about it, I spent one afternoon here in Texas on a farm that specializes
2:25:54 in equine therapy for people with PTSD, kids with different neurodiversion conditions,
2:26:00 including autism, and I wanted to have the experience of interacting with horses.
2:26:07 I’ve ridden horses before, but being in a pen, interacting without any objective to
2:26:09 ride a horse is foreign to me.
2:26:15 Could you describe what this is, and if I’m kind of barking up the wrong tree, please stop
2:26:20 me, but I’m just curious what your, the broad question is kind of what you gain from interacting
2:26:27 with animals at large, but since horses will not are less inclined to eat your face, then
2:26:31 say big cats, it’s a little more approachable for folks.
2:26:37 That is a huge avalanche of word salad of a non-question, but would you like to take
2:26:38 on the challenge of doing something with it?
2:26:39 I love it.
2:26:40 Yeah.
2:26:43 I got that ranch because I got the chance to work with some equine therapists and I made
2:26:49 a sort of amalgamation of the way I coach people with what they were doing and we ran
2:26:53 seminars and put like work teams through it and everything.
2:26:59 And the reason it’s so amazing is that I talk about people exuding an energy or cheetahs
2:27:00 exuding an energy.
2:27:06 Horses are responding to that energy and they respond in a way that is undeniable.
2:27:11 So we’d have a team of people and their boss would go into the pen.
2:27:14 They were all too frightened to tell the boss that he was terrifying.
2:27:19 The horse would just start to gallop and gallop and gallop and rear and the guy would be,
2:27:22 “I’m being nice to him.”
2:27:27 And you could correct for the posture and you correct for, there’s a way to speak horse
2:27:30 and you speak it with your physical body.
2:27:34 And you basically have to learn to stop acting like a predator, which we are, and start moving
2:27:36 more like a prey animal.
2:27:42 So gentle energy, eyes down, eyes soft, these sort of wishy-washy sounding things.
2:27:47 But when you’re in there in the pen with the horse and your eyes aren’t soft, the horse
2:27:48 is afraid.
2:27:52 And then you learn how to soften your eyes and the horse goes, “Oh,” and like physically
2:27:54 drops its tension.
2:28:03 And if you get to a place where you are in really calm, really connected state of being,
2:28:11 so calm but also open, the horse will make you the leader of the herd.
2:28:16 And I had a few experiences with that where I was taught to act like a herd leader in this
2:28:18 one time.
2:28:21 Some horse whispers took me to a herd and they said, “We want you to join up with this
2:28:23 one little palomino mare.”
2:28:28 And there were like 20 horses in this pasture and this one was the most skittish, the hardest
2:28:30 to get close to at work.
2:28:34 I had to get my energy so soft and do everything just right.
2:28:37 But eventually I got to the place, there’s something called, we used to call it join
2:28:43 up where you walk past the horse and you sort of brush past it with your shoulder and walk
2:28:47 away and it follows you and you are now its leader.
2:28:50 I’ve done this with individual horses.
2:28:55 I finally got this little palomino to join up with me and I walked past her and she came
2:29:00 with me and then you walk for a while together just to establish the connection.
2:29:06 And she was walking with me but I heard something weird behind me and so after we’d walked
2:29:11 and I looked back and I just looked down and over, not over my shoulder, sort of under
2:29:14 my shoulder because you don’t want your eyes to be up and staring.
2:29:19 And she was the herd matriarch and when she joined up with me, the whole herd did.
2:29:23 And they were all walking with me, holy shit.
2:29:25 Yeah, that’s amazing.
2:29:29 That’s why I bought a ranch in California, I’m like, “I bought a ranch!”
2:29:35 And what happens is you start to realize that these horses are just more sensitive to stuff
2:29:38 that people are seeing in you all the time.
2:29:42 And we’d put people in with horses and the horses would force them to tell the truth.
2:29:45 And then the other people, the boss would say, “Am I really that scary?”
2:29:52 And everybody would go, “All five horses are afraid of you and we are too.”
2:29:56 And it’s a very, very quick way to learn to tell the truth.
2:29:58 There was this one woman who kept trying to do it.
2:30:00 She was having no success at all.
2:30:04 The horse just kept bopping up against her and she hated it.
2:30:08 She said she was getting nothing out of the seminar, I was panicking inside.
2:30:13 And finally, she said, after three days of this, she said, “All right, I’ve been working
2:30:16 on all these stupid little things, but the real thing is I’m getting a divorce and I
2:30:18 haven’t told anybody.”
2:30:22 And she started to cry and it was obvious that was her real issue.
2:30:26 So we said, “Just go in with the horse and do whatever, but be honest.”
2:30:31 So she went into the pen and she just stood there and started to cry and the horse came
2:30:38 up and walked up and touched her with his shoulder and then wrapped his head back around
2:30:43 so that his nose was touching his flank and just held her.
2:30:47 And it was a genuine hug.
2:30:50 This is not me anthropomorphizing.
2:30:56 When you realize that nature is available to you as a companion, if you just tell the
2:30:59 truth, it really is worth giving everything else up.
2:31:02 So why did you sell the ranch?
2:31:07 Because I felt like it was time, like I’m following this energy through the world.
2:31:11 And I had written a novel about a woman who goes into the forest of California and has
2:31:14 all these experiences.
2:31:17 And then I was going to write a sequel that happens in the eastern forest, the little
2:31:21 piece of the eastern ancient forest that still survive.
2:31:24 It was going to be about a plague that affected New York City.
2:31:30 So I moved to a little patch at the ancient eastern forest in Pennsylvania and then there
2:31:33 was a plague that affected New York City.
2:31:40 And I’m writing a sequel now, but I go through life tracking and saying, “I have a ranch
2:31:41 now.
2:31:42 I’m a rancher.”
2:31:43 No, I don’t know.
2:31:47 I could sell this house and move tomorrow if I felt like I should.
2:31:48 And I would.
2:31:56 Okay, so what was the view, if you flashback to the day or the week or the conversation
2:32:00 or the walk in which you’re like, “I’m done.
2:32:01 No more ranch.
2:32:02 What did that look like?”
2:32:05 Oh, it was much more gentle than that.
2:32:08 It was like, it was like a death.
2:32:12 It was like an animal dying, have you ever had to put down a dog?
2:32:14 Yeah, unfortunately, yes.
2:32:19 Unfortunately, and yeah, it’s such a clean pain, right?
2:32:23 Death in nature is not the horror we make it.
2:32:30 Death in nature is this deep gratitude for physical experience and then this profound
2:32:36 release of the physical form of what you loved and it teaches you how to die.
2:32:40 And when you really know how to die, then you can live without any fear.
2:32:47 And I felt the ranch dying for me and something else coming to life.
2:32:48 And I grieved.
2:32:49 How did that…
2:32:53 Just because I think that might sound hard to grasp for some folks.
2:32:54 Yeah, it is.
2:32:55 I know.
2:32:56 Yeah.
2:32:57 So like, what does that feel like?
2:33:00 It was… this was exactly the place I was supposed to be.
2:33:03 And now, well, Liz said it and eat, pray, love.
2:33:07 Now it is time for something that is beautiful to change into something else that is beautiful.
2:33:14 And I knew that if I stayed there, the beauty of it would decay because the real beauty,
2:33:18 it’s like I said to myself in that month of my right hemisphere stuff, it’s not about
2:33:21 the picture I’m painting, it’s not about the painting, it’s about painting.
2:33:27 It’s about the process of being in continuous creative response to whatever is present.
2:33:29 That state of mind.
2:33:30 And it said buy a ranch.
2:33:31 So I bought…
2:33:36 I literally on my 50th birthday spent every penny I had on a ranch and six years later,
2:33:37 I sold it.
2:33:41 And you know something great, we had a wonderful massage therapist who used to come out and
2:33:42 work on people there.
2:33:47 And, you know, she’d have her massage table in her car, but I’m sure she was living kind
2:33:50 of paycheck to paycheck her hand to mouth when we decided to leave.
2:33:54 She inherited a whole bunch of money and bought the ranch.
2:33:55 That’s wild.
2:33:57 And Boyd loves her.
2:33:58 We all love her.
2:33:59 That’s amazing.
2:34:00 Yeah.
2:34:05 And then this place, there were wild turkeys and deer and everything in the place we came
2:34:06 here.
2:34:10 The first thing that happened when I saw this house was a whole flock of wild turkeys walked
2:34:11 out of the forest.
2:34:12 And I’ve never seen them since.
2:34:16 It was just like I was being welcomed.
2:34:18 You know how londelosie is?
2:34:20 Nature’s like that everywhere.
2:34:26 And that’s why it’s worth it to tell the truth and let people hate you because nature loves
2:34:28 you when you tell the truth.
2:34:32 And it tells you to go places and have adventures.
2:34:33 I just went to Costa Rica.
2:34:35 We didn’t see any monkeys for six days.
2:34:37 So I went and I energetically called monkeys.
2:34:39 I know it’s stupid.
2:34:41 We got mobbed by monkeys.
2:34:48 They were everywhere until my son got scared of them and I had to ask them to leave with
2:34:51 my mind.
2:34:52 The monkey whisper.
2:34:53 I don’t see that in your bio.
2:34:56 It was just last week.
2:34:57 Oh, wait.
2:34:58 No.
2:34:59 Here it is on your LinkedIn.
2:35:00 That’s right.
2:35:01 Okay.
2:35:02 Yeah.
2:35:06 This is 2020 to present monkey whispering ink.
2:35:07 I like it.
2:35:12 Monkeys also look, I mean, all of the fables about monkeys, there’s something to it.
2:35:16 Those beautiful creatures can also be mischievous rat bastards.
2:35:17 Scary animals.
2:35:18 They are scary.
2:35:19 Oh my God.
2:35:23 Boyd’s stories about baboons are the most hilarious.
2:35:25 Baboons are especially terrifying.
2:35:26 Yeah.
2:35:27 Oh boy.
2:35:28 I was listening.
2:35:29 You know, it’s funny I mentioned baboons.
2:35:33 I was listening to recordings from Lottolosie two days ago.
2:35:38 I shouldn’t have done it right before bed because I had some terrifying dreams but listening
2:35:40 to baboon alarm calls.
2:35:41 Yeah.
2:35:42 Don’t listen to baboon.
2:35:46 Don’t listen to baboon alarm calls right before you go to bed.
2:35:47 Yeah.
2:35:48 Not good.
2:35:49 Novice mistake.
2:35:50 Don’t do that.
2:35:51 But yeah.
2:35:52 Costa Rica.
2:35:53 Were they spider monkeys?
2:35:54 Howlers?
2:35:55 No, they were cappichins.
2:35:56 Oh, nice.
2:35:57 They’re cute.
2:35:58 Yeah.
2:35:59 Yeah.
2:36:00 And they can get a little scary.
2:36:02 Well, Martha, we’ve covered a lot of ground.
2:36:10 Is there anything else that you would like to chat about before we land the plane for
2:36:12 this first conversation?
2:36:19 This might sound so yarfy but I’m really grateful for you and for the life you’ve lived and
2:36:26 for your differences and how you’ve pushed them and then you’ve given them to the world
2:36:35 just so generously and completely and you’ve given me so much time today and I feel an enormous
2:36:41 joy and okay, I love your presence, your energy, your being.
2:36:48 I am awash in wonder the way I am when I’m in nature and I made a really interesting
2:36:49 creature.
2:36:50 Thank you.
2:36:53 Thank you so much.
2:36:58 I’ve been a fan from afar for a long time so it’s really nice to finally connect and
2:37:05 Boyd has been sort of patiently waiting, I guess, for me to make the connection I’ve
2:37:09 wanted to do for quite a while and the story is certainly that he tells now we’ve gotten
2:37:11 to pay him back with stories about Boyd.
2:37:12 That’s right.
2:37:13 But he can’t find himself.
2:37:16 And we should all hang out and make some more stories because I will tell you one thing.
2:37:22 If you go wherever you feel you’re supposed to go to maximize your joy, your adventure
2:37:23 is just increased.
2:37:24 Yeah.
2:37:32 I feel like I’m in a liminal phase right now between one thing and the next and there’s
2:37:36 probably quite a bit running in parallel but I’m excited, I have no idea what that next
2:37:37 big thing is.
2:37:44 In some traditional cultures in like Europe, for example, probably Europe before civilization,
2:37:48 the threshold is the place of magic because it’s not one place or another and when you’re
2:37:55 on it, you’re not anyone, anywhere, your liminal phase is the place where you’re completely
2:37:58 informed but that’s why it’s a place you can do magic.
2:38:03 So maybe you should just stay in the liminal phase and hang out here, hang out in the waiting
2:38:13 room for a little bit, the custom, yeah, the customs office between territories, yeah,
2:38:17 the boundary walking, I enjoy just walking on it as opposed to crossing over it.
2:38:19 So maybe I’ll hang out here for a bit.
2:38:21 That’s where the shamans live.
2:38:24 Oh, Trixie Trixie shamans, yes.
2:38:26 The monkeys of the human race.
2:38:29 Oh yeah, oh yeah, that’s for sure.
2:38:34 When you’re like, why did so many cultures murder so many shamans, you’re like, well,
2:38:38 you know, they can be rascals, they can be very Trixie.
2:38:44 There is a really fun book, just you may have already come across this, but Trickster makes
2:38:50 this world, or made this world by Lewis Hyde, fascinating, really fun book if people want
2:38:57 to get into Trickster mythology and of course, it’s tricky and of course how these archetypes
2:39:02 are present in all of us in some more so than others, but I’ve been spending more and more
2:39:03 time with mythology.
2:39:04 There’s a lot there.
2:39:10 If you stay in the liminal phase and tell the truth all the time instead of being Trixie,
2:39:14 if you learn the magic and tell the truth, you have to use it in ways that are for good
2:39:16 and not evil.
2:39:21 And that is like, I think maybe that’s what we’re supposed to, we’re all humans are supposed
2:39:22 to do that.
2:39:25 I don’t know, Byron Katie does it.
2:39:29 And by Trixie, I don’t mean necessarily bad, I just mean Trixie.
2:39:30 Really Trixie.
2:39:36 Probably doesn’t help very much, but I mean, if you look at like Coyote or Raven or any
2:39:44 number of, exactly, these Trickster deities, it’s like usually they are incredible creators,
2:39:49 they’ve stolen something from the gods and bestowed it to humans, they’ve done a lot
2:39:54 of good and they’re constantly getting themselves into trouble.
2:39:57 Oh, it’s just a nightmare.
2:39:58 Yeah.
2:40:04 So I’m going to try to avoid some of the trouble, but I do like, I think there’s some liminal
2:40:08 mischief that might be right on the doorstep that could be fun to explore.
2:40:09 So we’ll see where that goes.
2:40:10 I want to hear about that.
2:40:11 Yeah.
2:40:15 That might be a show don’t tell kind of situation, so that would be my show until we’ll see
2:40:16 where it goes.
2:40:19 But it’s been such a pleasure to spend time with you today.
2:40:25 Thank you again for taking the time and your recent book is The Way of Integrity, Finding
2:40:30 the Path to Your True Self, New York Times bestseller, Oprah’s book club selection.
2:40:35 I found your thinking on integrity and your writing on integrity incredibly powerful.
2:40:41 Your upcoming book is Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life’s Purpose.
2:40:43 That is forthcoming.
2:40:45 So people have that to look forward to.
2:40:51 And they can find you and all things Martha Beck, I would imagine, at marthabeck.com.
2:40:57 And the Martha Beck is your account on Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, and then we’ll link
2:41:00 to all these things in the show notes for everybody at TimDubbLog/podcast, so we’ll
2:41:04 put everything in one place, including everything we talked about.
2:41:11 And I’m very grateful to have this opportunity to bake some conversational cake with you
2:41:12 today.
2:41:15 I love the cakes you make.
2:41:17 Let’s bake more someday.
2:41:18 Yeah, let’s bake more.
2:41:19 Thank you.
2:41:25 Thank you for this opportunity to get to know you and also to be on the podcast in that
2:41:26 order.
2:41:27 Yeah, for sure.
2:41:28 Absolutely.
2:41:29 My pleasure entirely.
2:41:33 And for everybody listening, as usual, I mentioned where you can find the show notes.
2:41:38 And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself.
2:41:40 Don’t forget the last part.
2:41:42 And thanks for tuning in.
2:41:46 Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off.
2:41:49 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
2:41:53 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
2:41:54 before the weekend?
2:41:58 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short
2:42:01 newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
2:42:03 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
2:42:08 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve
2:42:11 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
2:42:13 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:42:19 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos,
2:42:24 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
2:42:29 of podcasts, guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field.
2:42:33 And then I test them and then I share them with you.
2:42:37 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you
2:42:40 head off for the weekend, something to think about.
2:42:44 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday.
2:42:49 Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very
2:42:50 next one.
2:42:51 Thanks for listening.
2:42:56 I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had the experience of traveling overseas and I
2:43:02 try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere and it says not available in
2:43:07 your current location, something like that, or creepier still if you’re at home and this
2:43:08 has happened to me.
2:43:14 I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops
2:43:17 up and it says you might be searching for this.
2:43:18 How about that?
2:43:22 And it suggests an alternative and I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service
2:43:27 provider is tracking my searches and what I’m typing into the browser.
2:43:33 Yeah, I don’t love it and a lot of you know I take privacy and security very seriously.
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2:44:08 Also with the example that I gave of you can’t access this kind of that content wherever
2:44:11 you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it and all
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0:04:36 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:04:40 Can I also ask you a personal question? No, I would have seen it in my lifetime.
0:04:46 I’m a cybernetics organism, living this year over a metal endoskeleton.
0:04:59 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim
0:05:04 Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field
0:05:09 imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply
0:05:14 and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast
0:05:20 recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion
0:05:26 downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:05:32 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these
0:05:36 super combo episodes. And internally, we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes
0:05:42 because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks,
0:05:48 but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars. These are people who have
0:05:53 transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got
0:05:58 lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went
0:06:05 to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find
0:06:12 that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:21 First up, Margaret Atwood, author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays,
0:06:28 and graphic novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale, winner of the Arthur C. Clark Award,
0:06:35 and its sequel, The Testaments, co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, The Blind Assassin,
0:06:42 winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, and her latest, Old Babes in the Wood, a collection of her short
0:06:49 stories. You can find Margaret on Twitter @MargaretAtwood. In the course of doing research
0:06:54 for this conversation, I read about the different ways we could look at the semantics of, say,
0:07:01 science fiction on some other planet with creatures never before seen, versus, say, speculative fiction
0:07:08 where you’re taking something that exists or is in the process of becoming and then taking it a few
0:07:14 steps out. And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master, in my mind, of
0:07:21 boundary walking. What types of structured thinking or observation lend themselves to your ability to
0:07:27 write speculative fiction? Okay, you might say the lack of the qualities that make it difficult for
0:07:33 me to write science fiction, which I read a lot of, plus dragons, you know, I’m keen on dragons,
0:07:38 but I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can do, they have the ability
0:07:46 to do, and other things that you may admire, but you cannot do. So dragons outside my range
0:07:52 of capabilities in any way or as a Lucala Gwyn is kind of sewed up dragons. She got sort of the
0:07:59 dragon franchise. Yeah, so Game of Thrones, the dragons are basically sort of like bazookas,
0:08:06 but her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that
0:08:13 are usually attributed to dragons in the English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition,
0:08:19 etc. We could go on about that, but we won’t today. Now, you wanted to know
0:08:24 sort of what’s behind it. Yeah, what’s behind the speculative fiction? What makes you get at it?
0:08:30 I grew up in the 50s as a teenager, and I read a lot of those things at that time.
0:08:40 So I read 1984 just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically
0:08:47 sleazy cover of the early 50s. They put classics into these quite, what shall we say about those
0:08:52 covers? They made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people
0:08:58 got enticed into reading like War and Peace and things because they thought it was about ladies
0:09:07 and negligents lying on beds, which partly was, but not much really. So my copy of 1984 had this
0:09:13 woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and a guy standing behind her looking down her
0:09:22 front, which does get in there a bit, but that’s not the general import of the book. So I mainlined
0:09:29 all of those books. I read Ray Bradbury a lot. You’ll notice that I ended up writing in one of
0:09:35 his obits. I think for The Guardian. I went to Comic-Con for the first time because we thought
0:09:40 we were on our way to see Ray, but unfortunately, he died before we got there. So we ended up having
0:09:48 a memorial service at Comic-Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors in several fields,
0:09:56 really. So I read all of those things. John Windham, I was reading in the 50s. And I think what you
0:10:05 read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you were then writing when you’re able to,
0:10:10 you know, when you have these skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to
0:10:20 write in 1984 only with women like that. So meanwhile, along comes Ursula K and a number of other
0:10:26 people that I was following. So really, it’s partly what you’re drawn to and partly what you
0:10:34 have the skills to do. As I say, I can’t do dragons. Well, I can’t do dragons or speculative
0:10:40 fiction, so you have me beat. I can’t do podcasts, you know? Well, you know, podcasts are just ephemera
0:10:45 in the midst. I think that your works will have much more permanence. But I can hope. I can hope
0:10:51 that someday the audio will get locked in the amber in the same way that words are.
0:10:57 I’m sure it will. I want to go back in time from your teenage years. I’ve read about your experience
0:11:03 of growing up in a cabin in the woods and some of the benefits of that, the lack of distractions,
0:11:07 giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later and so on.
0:11:15 I’m thinking about having kids in the very near future. And I fantasize about living in the woods
0:11:20 because I feel most at home in the woods. Were there any downsides, would you say?
0:11:25 Okay, which woods are you thinking of, Tim? Any woods? What sort of woods?
0:11:32 I like varied terrain. So I prefer something that isn’t flat. So we could think American West,
0:11:37 we could think upstate New York, we could think British Columbia in certain locations.
0:11:46 I would prefer not to hear or see any neighbors. I would like to have lots of trails
0:11:54 that I can explore with my dog or dogs or family and running water of some type
0:12:00 and a lake or a pond, having access to both of those, or one of those at least.
0:12:04 I grew up on long islands, more or less, in the woods. That’s my idealized version,
0:12:08 but I don’t know what it’s like to raise kids in the woods. I’m curious if there are any downsides.
0:12:12 Well, you should ask my mom, except she’s not here.
0:12:13 She is not here.
0:12:20 But I can tell you what she said. Yeah, she’s kind of still here. So my mom was an unusual person
0:12:29 in that she liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic. She grew up in rural
0:12:36 Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses. She had horses. She rode them hither
0:12:44 and thither. And she was also a speed skater and of course a skier and this kind of thing. So I think
0:12:53 she married my dad because he was a very bushy guy. And he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia,
0:12:59 like really rural. So they were so rural that I don’t think they got electricity until the
0:13:06 late fifties. I was lucky enough to be able to see a 19th century farm operating pretty much
0:13:15 the way it would have done. So I think she, who didn’t like hats, little white gloves, tea parties,
0:13:22 any of that, she really didn’t like it. Didn’t fancy it. She liked dancing, like fast and furious
0:13:28 waltzing and things like that. Square dancing, but she didn’t like the frilly part. And up in the
0:13:32 woods was great for her because she said you didn’t actually have to do much housework. You just
0:13:39 swept the dirt out the door and you didn’t have to worry about all of the stuff that people have
0:13:47 in their houses, usually like bric-a-brac and china and things like that. You don’t have to worry about
0:13:57 those. So she didn’t. And she doesn’t seem to have had a problem in the woods except my brother almost
0:14:03 drowned once because he got out and fell off the dock. But apart from that and a few other
0:14:11 somewhat hairy moments, it was probably safer on the whole than being in a city.
0:14:17 Anyway, she seems to have managed pretty well although some of her city friends because they
0:14:24 were in cities during the winter. My dad was a forest entomologist. It meant he was up in the
0:14:30 woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you could take it as almost 100%. They
0:14:39 don’t do much in the winter. Insects. Pretty quiet insect-wise in the winter. So they would go up in
0:14:45 say April or so and they would go back in, for instance, November. But this is, I think, quite a
0:14:50 lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods. Tim, I think you’re thinking of a
0:14:56 more southerly location. Yeah. I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that.
0:15:01 No, they weren’t up there. I know. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.
0:15:08 Insects live in trees. He was a forest entomologist, right? So there had to be a forest.
0:15:14 There had to be the forest. They had running water, but it was out of a pump. And they didn’t have
0:15:24 electricity. And the transportation was by boat. So no roads there. You could get to, I think by
0:15:29 1939, there was this horrible road, which I remember very well. You’d always get cars that
0:15:34 going over it. And then you’d get to a place where you left the car and then you’d get in a boat.
0:15:41 So then it was during the war. So there weren’t even a lot of motor boats because gasoline was
0:15:50 rationed. So canoes. I would love to hear you describe an experience that came up in my reading
0:15:59 in preparation for this. And it relates to a day you found yourself walking across a football field.
0:16:06 I don’t know if that’s enough of a cue, but I would love to hear you expand on this because I
0:16:10 did read about it, but I feel like there’s probably more to the story. So could you please
0:16:16 just provide some color and tell the story? Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions
0:16:20 that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway. So I’ll tell you what I made
0:16:29 up, but it is kind of true. Sounds like my life. Yeah, right. It’s like that. It’s mostly kind of
0:16:34 true. Yeah, it’s sort of true. Your previous question, what did growing up in the woods have
0:16:42 to do with being a writer? There wasn’t anything to do except when it was raining, except reading,
0:16:48 writing, and drawing. So there were no other things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no
0:16:56 television, no, what else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore, I fixated on writing
0:17:04 pretty early. And it was a narrative family. People told stories. And my older brother was a
0:17:08 gung-ho writer. He wrote lots of things at that age. He turned into a scientist, but
0:17:16 he was very narrative when he was, say, 10, 9. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am.
0:17:24 Having written my first novel at the age of seven, it was about an aunt. Some structural
0:17:29 difficulties there, Tim, because aunts don’t do anything until they’re in the fourth stage of
0:17:35 their life. They don’t do anything when they’re an egg. They don’t do anything when they’re a larva.
0:17:40 They do nothing when they’re a pupa. And it’s only when you get to, you know, the last part
0:17:46 of the story that they actually have any legs. So I don’t start books that way anymore, Tim,
0:17:53 but I did then. So then I stopped writing. I took to drawing. I drew a lot. Then I ended up in high
0:18:00 school at slightly too early an age. They skipped people then. I think they stopped doing that.
0:18:06 So I was 12 and some of the people in my class were almost 16, because they failed people then,
0:18:15 Tim. So it was a slightly daunting experience, but things evened out after that. Yes, I was quite
0:18:22 short. I’m still quite short. I’m still quite short. People got bigger. For a while, I was sort of
0:18:28 normal size, but that’s no longer true. There’s all these, you know, enormous kids who drank a
0:18:36 lot of milk with vitamins in it. Anyway, there I was in high school. I love my grade 11 teacher.
0:18:40 That would be one, two, the third year of high school. What do you call that?
0:18:45 I guess junior, junior year. What do you guys call it? Fifth form? I don’t know if you use
0:18:50 a British system. I have no idea. No, that’s English. Yeah. What do you guys call it in Canada?
0:18:55 Well, we called it different grades, like 9, 10, 11, 12, and in those days, 13,
0:18:58 but they’ve done away with that. Yeah, we would call it 11th or junior year.
0:19:05 Junior, yeah. So my great English teacher who I put in a book, because she was a peculiar,
0:19:11 people go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, “Oh,
0:19:16 yes, I can see instantly great brilliant Sean right out of her hand.” And I can tell she was,
0:19:20 you know, slated for greatness, but she told the truth. She said she showed no particular
0:19:26 ability in my class, which was true. I didn’t show any particular ability in her class.
0:19:34 And I had no idea then that I was going to be a writer. It didn’t strike me until the next year
0:19:42 when I had a different English teacher who I’ve also put into a story because she was a legend
0:19:48 in her own time. She took hold of the people in her class and she yanked them through the curriculum.
0:19:56 No matter what, no matter what she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings,
0:20:01 and she made the immortal comment because I showed her one of my poems. She said,
0:20:04 “I don’t understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.”
0:20:12 So wonderful. I love it. That is great. That is great. Yeah. So I started writing poetry in grade
0:20:20 12. And the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field and a pink princess
0:20:27 line dress that I had sewed myself. A work of art, Tim. You don’t know what that is, do you?
0:20:31 Oh, I can envision, based on some of the words, what it might look like.
0:20:36 Princess line. It had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great.
0:20:40 Loved it. It had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have.
0:20:47 I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences,
0:20:53 which I should have done had I known. I would have done that and then I would know how to touch type,
0:21:00 which I don’t. And it’s too late now, Tim. So there I was in my pink princess line
0:21:07 dress crossing the football field and a poem occurred to me. It wasn’t a very good poem,
0:21:12 but it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start.
0:21:16 You write some pretty terrible poetry that you’re very excited about.
0:21:23 And luckily, there’s nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry. And then you go on from
0:21:29 there. What did it feel like when this poem came to you? I mean, the lie. Now, you can tell me how
0:21:34 much of this is revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your
0:21:39 experience, but quote a large invisible thumb descended from the sky. It’s the Eureka moment,
0:21:45 Tim. Yeah, a big thumb came out of the sky. You believe that? What else would you like me to
0:21:52 tell you that you will also believe? I already asked about astrology, so you got me. Yeah,
0:21:58 you can tell me anything. It was very interesting to me. I had been trying out these potential
0:22:04 careers, like I was going to be a painter and then I revised that. I was going to be a fashion
0:22:11 designer and then I revised that and I went into home economics because in the textbook that was
0:22:16 called guidance in grade nine, you were supposed to decide what your career was going to be. Can
0:22:24 you imagine who knows anything when they’re that old? So the guidance textbook had five things that
0:22:32 girls could do and they did not include astrophysicists. Let’s see if you can guess what they were
0:22:40 in 1952. I think I can, but I’m cheating. Nurse secretary, school teacher, airline stewardess,
0:22:48 as they were known, and home economist. You’ve read what I wrote. I know I’m a bad cheater.
0:22:58 I have a very good cheater. You didn’t get away with it. That’s what was on offer and being a
0:23:04 mercenary child, I looked at what they made because I did grow up in a family in which it
0:23:11 was expected that you would support yourself. So the home economists made the most, believe it or
0:23:17 not. So I went into that, but then I decided, no, this is not for me. I’m going to be a biologist.
0:23:24 I was going to be a botanist because I was actually quite good at it. But then along came this writing
0:23:30 much to my parents’ dismay, but being the bite your tongue kind of parents, I think they just
0:23:36 hoped it would be a phase that would grow out of it. It’s been a long phase. Who would see them?
0:23:41 A phase. Well, they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, “Well,
0:23:45 how are you going to support yourself?” I said, “You know, I’ll get a job,” which I did. I got
0:23:52 lots of jobs. And then my mother said rather costically, “If you’re going to be a writer,
0:23:56 you’d better learn to spell.” And I said, “Others will do that for me.” And you know, they have.
0:24:04 Now we have spell check. You know, all good things come to those who wait, I guess. You were
0:24:10 right. You were right. That took a while. It’s been panned out. So you wrote, if I’m getting
0:24:15 the chronology right, you wrote for 16 years before you could make a living out of it.
0:24:20 You had all these different jobs, as you mentioned, as a cashier and a coffee shop
0:24:26 and many others. It’s bad at that. Over those 16 years, were you maintaining the belief that
0:24:31 someday it would pay the bills and you would be able to make a living out of it? Or was it
0:24:37 just a labor of love while you did these other things? Oh, the writing? Yes. You mean did I
0:24:44 ever think I would make a living out of it? No. People in my age group, in my country at that
0:24:52 time, didn’t think that way. They might have thought that way in the 30s and even in the 40s
0:24:58 where there were a couple of bestsellers written by people in our country. But right after the
0:25:06 war, during the 50s, a couple of things had happened. And one of them was that the paperback
0:25:13 book industry had taken off. I think it started with the Penguin in the UK and then it was
0:25:22 Pocket Books. And Canada didn’t have, it had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks
0:25:31 were not included in them. So the Glossy Magazine market was also drying up. So a writer like Morley
0:25:36 Callahan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the 20s and 30s, made a living out of selling to
0:25:43 Glossies. That was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that
0:25:50 they had. So we weren’t really thinking in those terms and there were no agents in Canada at that
0:25:56 time. We didn’t even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they
0:26:01 didn’t publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn’t a market for them.
0:26:09 So if you wanted to publish a novel, your publisher would say, “Well, we have to get a partner either
0:26:16 in London or in New York.” And that was easier said than done. So the book publishing that had
0:26:22 been going on in the 30s of cheap hardbacks kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be
0:26:29 a little more certain about that. It was gone having had paperbacks take its place. So it was
0:26:36 hardbacks and I’ve always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact,
0:26:46 I was associated with a small publishing company in the late 60s and early 70s and a lot of it
0:26:54 was about money. Like how many can we sell? What can we publish to support these works of cutting
0:27:01 edge experimental fiction that nobody’s going to buy? What can we publish? So we did. We published
0:27:08 the first book on venereal disease. It was called VD. You know, idiots guides. These were sort of
0:27:14 idiots guides before there were idiots guides. We got as far as warts, but we didn’t get two
0:27:22 aids because nobody knew about it yet. It’s like that. So let me let me hop in for just a second.
0:27:26 When you’re writing for 16 years, not thinking you can make a living from it,
0:27:31 what did you get from the writing? And did you share your writing with anyone?
0:27:39 Oh, absolutely. We were all sharing our stuff around because we were editing each other’s work.
0:27:46 We were publishing each other’s work. All of the the poets were connected through this kind of
0:27:55 spider web network of little magazines. That was both in Canada, the U.S., England. There were
0:28:02 these little magazines that published poetry and people knew each other through them. So the
0:28:10 poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. The poets were more peripatetic.
0:28:17 They would get on the greyhound bus and turn up at your door and sleep on your rug. I knew in your
0:28:23 turn might get on the greyhound bus and turn up at somebody else’s door and sleep on their rug. So
0:28:29 it was a sort of a rug exchange of poets. They would turn up here and there and give
0:28:35 readings and out of the way places and some of them. Do you remember it? No, you don’t. Sorry.
0:28:42 Coffee shops. Coffee shop readings. No, I know coffee shops. No, I do. I do. I have been to a
0:28:47 coffee shop reading. Well, a different kind of coffee shops. Let me not say shops. It should
0:28:53 be houses. So they didn’t have liquor licenses. So basically people brought flasks and their
0:29:02 handbags, pockets and things like that. And you had the usually condemned warehouse or something and
0:29:10 the little tables with the checkered tablecloths, the little wine bottles with the candle stuck in
0:29:20 them and the open mic. So poetry night usually on a Tuesday. Sounds great. Sounds like a lot of fun.
0:29:26 Down part of the week. Well, the folk singing and jazz went on on other nights of the week such as
0:29:33 Thursday, Friday and Saturday. That’s how they supported the poetry readings. So we did that in
0:29:42 the early 60s. And then the poetry readings spread to universities, some of them and then to bookstores.
0:29:50 They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn’t start happening until the
0:29:57 mid 70s, I would say. All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around
0:30:04 or you did see it before COVID, they didn’t exist yet. They sprang up out of the subculture of coffee
0:30:10 houses. This is neither here nor there. But I am fascinated actually by the history of coffee houses,
0:30:16 especially in the UK, where you have the Lloyds of London coming out of one coffee shop and all of
0:30:22 this incredible history that I had. I mean, back in the 18th century. Yes, way back, which I also
0:30:29 don’t remember to be clear, but I have read about it. And that interchange of ideas and the sort of
0:30:36 interstitial tissue in the societal fabric of the time. But what I’d like to ask you about next is
0:30:44 teaching. And it’s clear reading about your life that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching
0:30:51 did you most enjoy, if any of it? I always enjoyed it. I think the most intense year of teaching that
0:30:56 I did was in Montreal. I thought it’s a place that doesn’t exist anymore because it’s been
0:31:03 amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams. And it was a downtown
0:31:11 city establishment. You taught your subject to 19 year olds in the day. And then in the evening,
0:31:17 you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive for me.
0:31:24 The 19 year olds weren’t too sure why they were there, except their mom and dad wanted them to.
0:31:29 And really, they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something.
0:31:36 And the adults were there because they wanted to be. A couple of reasons they wanted to be there,
0:31:44 they wanted to up their credentials. But also, they were very engaged and they would argue with you,
0:31:50 object to things and really give you the old run-through. And that was pretty stimulating.
0:31:57 So I taught 19th century novels to those people. And I also taught American romanticism.
0:32:04 And it was they who gave me a button that said, “Moby Dick is not a social disease.”
0:32:13 They had a sense of humor. I liked them a lot. And it was very instructive because the things
0:32:20 that the 19 year old liked frequently, the grown-ups would not like. And the things that the 19 year
0:32:27 olds really didn’t like, the grown-ups thought were terrific. So Middle March by George Eliot,
0:32:33 the 19 year old said, “We don’t like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions
0:32:36 in their careers and they marry the wrong people and we’re not going to do that.”
0:32:44 And the adult said, “This is a great book. They make the wrong decisions in their careers. They
0:32:52 marry the wrong people. It’s just like life.” So a big difference in experience. And what’s the
0:32:58 lesson? The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are, the age that you are and the
0:33:07 experience that you’ve had. And it’s the same for everyone. Just a quick thanks to one of our
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0:34:26 And now, Boyd Vardy, Lion Tracker, Storyteller, Wildlife and Literacy Activist,
0:34:32 Steward of the Londelosi Game Reserve in South Africa, and author of “The Lion Tracker’s Guide to
0:34:40 Life” and his memoir, “Cathedral of the Wild.” You can find Boyd on Twitter @BoydVardy.
0:34:44 Boyd, welcome to the show, my friend.
0:34:47 Tim, thanks for having me, man. Great to be with you.
0:34:54 It is great to see you, and I’m sad we’re not doing this in person, but I’m also happy that
0:34:59 you can share a bit about your surroundings. So where is this conversation finding you right now?
0:35:05 Okay, so I’m on the Londelosi Game Reserve in the wild eastern part of South Africa.
0:35:11 I’m sitting in my thatched cottage, and I’m looking out the window. The river
0:35:18 runs below me. And currently, there is a herd of elephants that are moving down from the far
0:35:24 northern bank of the river to come and feed on the delicious, spongy palm trees in the river.
0:35:28 So that should give you a little bit of a sense. They’re two huge ebony trees that kind of frame
0:35:35 the house. And a couple of weeks ago, a leopard hoisted its kill into the tree next to the kind
0:35:38 of verandah of the house. So that should sort of set the scene for people a little bit.
0:35:46 You know, I had a dead bird on my porch two days ago, and I see a squirrel out to my right.
0:35:48 So I feel like we’re kind of on equal footing there.
0:35:56 Now, a couple things. One, I want to tell you that I don’t think I’ve told you actually,
0:36:02 Boyd, and I’m going to pack it up front because I think that I am ashamed of not telling you
0:36:07 earlier. So here you can see it. And for those who are watching video on YouTube, you can see it.
0:36:11 I’ve got a copy of your book here, which you were kind enough to inscribe for me. So the
0:36:16 Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life. I’ve had this for a while now, full of highlights. I read it again
0:36:24 yesterday. And this is one of only a handful of books that has a dedicated shelf in my
0:36:31 guest bedroom at home. So in other words, when people come and visit, I have a few shelves.
0:36:38 So you have The Gift, which is of Hafez poems translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Then you have
0:36:44 How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Then you have Awareness by Anthony Devello.
0:36:48 And then you have The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Vardy. So you have an entire shelf
0:36:53 that people are encouraged to indulge in and take books from in my guest bedroom. And I just
0:36:58 wanted to let you know that. Wow, I find myself in the company of my heroes there. Thank you.
0:37:06 Absolutely. It’s a fantastic book. And we’re going to dig into all sorts of stories that are in the
0:37:12 book. Of course, many stories that I have heard and not heard in person with you. But let’s start
0:37:18 with one that I haven’t heard, that I wanted to dig into it a little bit, just as part of the Genesis
0:37:24 story. Your mom, could you tell us a little bit about your mom? And then I suppose also about your
0:37:30 dad. But specifically the get on with it attitude, as I’ve seen you write it. Well, you know, my
0:37:39 parents met when they were 15 years old. And my grandfather had just died leaving this property.
0:37:43 And everyone in the sort of family advisors had said to my father, well, first thing, you’ve got
0:37:47 to get rid of that property in the wild eastern part of South Africa. You know, it’s bankrupt,
0:37:51 cattle land, there’s nothing going on there. There’s some lions there that you used to hunt,
0:37:56 but lion hunting is dangerous. Get rid of that. And my father stood up in the meeting of family
0:38:03 advisors and he said, no, we’re going to keep it and we’ll find a way to make it pay. And very
0:38:08 soon after that meeting, he met my mother. And with three mud huts and a broken land rover,
0:38:12 they launched themselves into starting a safari business. This was a time in the, you know,
0:38:16 the teeth of apartheid South Africa, there was no one coming to South Africa, like they’re rough.
0:38:21 If it had been an investor pitch, and someone was saying, we’re going to start a game reserve and,
0:38:24 you know, here’s what we want you to invest in, no one would have invested.
0:38:29 But together, out of the love that they had for each other and the passion that they had for the
0:38:34 land, they created this amazing place. It was the love they had for each other, the passion for the
0:38:41 land and a real big dose of we can keep going because this is all we have. And so there was this
0:38:47 incredible attitude in both of them to just push forward, pioneer, keep going, raise your kids with
0:38:52 snakes and no electricity, bring people from all over the world to come stay in a couple of mud
0:38:56 huts, give them an incredible time, flow this amazing energy into them, take them out into
0:39:02 the wild for encounters. And so it was that type of get on with that chutzpah attitude that I was
0:39:06 raised in. And that was my mother through and through, just unbreakable, you know, rub some
0:39:12 onica oil on it was the best we got if you got an injury. And, you know, only call a doctor if
0:39:19 you’re bleeding profusely or you’re going to die. All right. So I have some follow ups.
0:39:24 First of all, everyone’s saying the first thing you have to do is get rid of that land
0:39:30 that says, Nope, we’re going to keep the land. There’s got to be some thought process behind
0:39:35 that because of course there are tremendous consequences to that decision in terms of
0:39:40 life trajectory. Why the decision? Why was that decision made? How was that made?
0:39:45 You know, I think it’s a really good question. I mean, there’s a few parts that the one is that
0:39:52 my great grandfather had bought the land in 1926 after drinking too much gin. And he heard about
0:39:57 these bankrupt cattle farms that were available for sale adjacent to the Kruger National Park.
0:40:02 And he was a lion hunter and he was an adventurer and he said, Well, we’re going to buy. And so
0:40:09 he first came down here in the June of 1926. And he set up the camp, you know, just sort of rugged
0:40:14 canvas under the trees and they would hunt lions. That’s how my grandfather then grew up.
0:40:18 And then that’s how my father and uncle grew up coming down in the winter months,
0:40:22 waking up at dawn, listening for lions to roar and then going out to hunt lions.
0:40:28 And I should say with lion hunting, there’s only two outcomes, either a lion dies or a person dies.
0:40:33 So that gives you a little bit of a sense for the mentality of it. But through those early days
0:40:39 of hunting, already a deep passion had started to take root in my father for the land and in my
0:40:44 uncle, they felt connected to it. It was a place of adventure. It was already a place that was
0:40:50 infused in meaning. So when their father died and they were teenagers and the family advisors said,
0:40:54 Okay, we’ll get rid of it. I think it’s a bit of a combination of the brilliance,
0:41:00 the arrogance and the stupidity of youth that just allowed them to stand up and say, Well,
0:41:05 we’re going to keep it and we’ll make it work. I don’t think that there was forethought in the
0:41:11 decision. They just knew they were grieving. They had lost their father. It was their father’s sacred
0:41:16 place. He loved to go there. And they knew that if they somewhere inside of that grieving process,
0:41:20 they knew that if they let go of the land, they would lose the memory of their father in some way.
0:41:22 And so they held on to it and they decided, Well, we’ll go make it work.
0:41:28 There’s so many different branches of this tree that I can go down. I’m having trouble
0:41:36 with the paradox of choice here. Let me try to prompt a story that will maybe speak to the
0:41:44 get on with it, make it work attitude of both of your parents. Could you please tell the story?
0:41:48 I’m going to give you a fragment here. So a little gingerbread crumb and see if you remember
0:41:59 what I’m referring to. Plain ride bird. Does this mean anything? Okay. I think you’re referring to
0:42:05 the white knuckle charter company. Yeah, that’s the one. So basically what happened is my parents,
0:42:11 they launched the safari business. And it slowly started to become successful. But they started
0:42:16 to run into a problem as my sister and I were getting older, because schools started to become
0:42:21 an issue. So there was obviously no, nowhere to take us to school living out here. So they decided
0:42:27 that what they would do is they would learn to fly and then they would ferry us into the nearest
0:42:34 town and we would sort of attend early preschool or whatever it’s called, like Monday through Wednesday.
0:42:38 And then Wednesday, we would fly back to the reserve and we would be here through the weekend.
0:42:41 And we were basically getting three days of schooling. That seemed like enough to them at the
0:42:47 time. So they took up flying. And my memories of it are when they would pick us up on a Wednesday
0:42:54 afternoon. To be honest, they weren’t great pilots. So they were in a bit of a state. The first 50
0:42:58 hours of being a pilot, there’s a lot of stress about getting it in the air and then safely getting
0:43:02 it back on the ground. So we would arrive and they would say to us, we’re in flying mode right now.
0:43:07 And flying mode meant we could not ask any questions. We had to shut up. Kids, you kids
0:43:11 shut up. We’re in flying mode. And then they had this other sort of drill that they worked
0:43:16 out with each other, which was called pilot in command. And when they were up front there in
0:43:22 the cockpit, the one would say, I am now pilot in command. And if you handed over control, you would
0:43:26 say handing over control. And the other would say, I am now pilot in command, pilot in command,
0:43:31 handing over to pilot in command, I am now pilot in command. And they had this whole drill, right?
0:43:38 The first crash that we were involved in, we came into land and we had a plane. It was a little
0:43:43 Cezna that had a quirk. And let me tell you, when it comes to aviation, you don’t want planes with
0:43:50 quirks. You can have a quirky like pickup truck, but you cannot have a quirky aircraft. The quirk was
0:43:56 that when you pulled the power, not all power cut off. It kept a little bleed of power on.
0:44:01 So my mother was flying the plane. She came into land on the little 800 meter dirt strip.
0:44:06 She cut the power, the plane sort of landed, but it just kept on a little too much power and we
0:44:10 kept going. And she started to say to my father and my sister and I are watching from the back in
0:44:14 flying mode. I can’t get the power off. I can’t get the power off. I can’t get the speed off. And
0:44:18 he says, he’s saying to her, you are pilot in command, you are pilot in command. And she’s
0:44:22 going, I know, but I can’t get the speed off. And eventually she kicks the rudder and the plane
0:44:28 veers off the runway and we hit a marula tree and we stop. That’s our first crash. And it’s
0:44:34 one of those ones, Tim, that if you bring it up today, like at dinner, he will say, we’ll say,
0:44:37 well, you know, I couldn’t get the speed off. And he’ll say, my father will say, well, you
0:44:41 were pilot in command and immediately a fight will develop at dinner. I know I was pilot in
0:44:44 command, but before we hit the tree, do you think you could have pulled the power? You could have,
0:44:50 so like it’s a little tension around it. Anyway, the worst one was we were flying a
0:44:56 short hop. And by this stage, my parents had launched, you know, a bigger safari company.
0:45:01 And they had decided that when they flew, they should actually have a commercial pilot with them.
0:45:06 And so the setup was, it’s a commercial pilot in the left hand seat. It’s my father in the right
0:45:12 hand seat. And then there’s club seating, four seats in the back, but you sit facing each other
0:45:16 like you were on a train, you know, like looking at each other. So we’re flying along and I see
0:45:21 my mother and her friend are sitting opposite me and they’re looking towards the cockpit. I’m looking
0:45:30 back at them. And suddenly we just hear this outrageous like sound and wind fills the cockpit.
0:45:37 And it’s just this incredible rushing sound. Amazing sound. Looking at my mother and her
0:45:43 friend next to her, it looks like pulp fiction. There is just blood and guts all over them.
0:45:49 It looks like someone took a bird, put it in a blender and made like a bird smoothie and then
0:45:54 threw it over them. They’ve got a wing on their head. They’ve got a foot on their shoulder. They
0:46:00 are covered in blood and guts. And so I turn and I look back at the cockpit. The front window
0:46:07 of the plane is gone. The pilot is conked out. He’s passed out in his seat. And my father is
0:46:14 like orientating himself in the madness. And right at that moment, as he sort of, as my father got
0:46:20 his bearings, I saw him grab the controls and then he looked back at me and said, “I am pilot in
0:46:28 command.” And so now we realize we’ve got a situation. What had happened is we had hit
0:46:35 a stalk, direct bird strike, and the bird had come in the window. And in fact,
0:46:42 the bird had hit the pilot. The beak had gone into the skin between the pilot’s skull and the skin.
0:46:48 So he had a beak sticking out of his face and a bit of stalk neck sticking out of his face.
0:46:54 And he’s totally passed out. Meantime, my father has taken control of the plane. The woman on the
0:46:58 backseat screaming next to my mom is going, “We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die.” And
0:47:03 that’s when my mother gave her the patented mother slap, slapped her twice and said, “We are not going
0:47:09 to die.” And then out of nowhere, my mother reaches into her sort of handbag and pulls out
0:47:15 a flight call sheet. And she starts screaming standard emergency practices to my father.
0:47:22 “Call SOS Base. Request emergency landing.” And he’s ticking off things. Now at this point,
0:47:29 the pilot starts to wake up. And he wakes up and he’s slowly gaining his bearings. And
0:47:37 as he looks around, he has this strange kind of dot in his vision. And as he’s looking around,
0:47:43 the dot follows him. And he eventually puts his hand up. And what it is, it’s the stalk’s neck
0:47:48 sticking out of his face that everywhere he looks, it’s in his line of sight because it’s connected
0:47:53 to his face. And it was at that moment that he grabbed the neck and the beak of the stalk and
0:47:59 he pulled it out of his face and looked at it and then passed out again. And I don’t know if
0:48:03 you’ve ever seen a head wound, but head wounds bleed nicely. And so he’s bleeding quite intensely.
0:48:09 It’s pandemonium back there, but my folks have got the controls. They call the airport. My father
0:48:14 starts the descent and eventually the pilot wakes up and he comes to and he’s actually, he’s all
0:48:18 right. And he takes over control of the plane again. And we do an emergency landing. And the
0:48:24 funny thing about it was we were flying from the reserve to go and catch a commercial flight.
0:48:31 So we landed at a commercial airport and we got out covered in stalk, stalk wing and stalk foot
0:48:35 and stalk guts. And we walked into the terminal building and I said to my mother, well, what
0:48:40 do we do now? She said, just board the flight and look forward. So we got onto the plane,
0:48:44 looking like we had been in the Texas chainsaw massacre and just sat down next to regular folks
0:48:49 traveling, covered in guts and blood and just sat there and looked forward and flew to our
0:48:55 next destination like nothing had happened. But it was a, you know, we grew up in a real
0:49:00 wild way. We grew up in a pioneering way and my parents were irrepressible, I think is the word,
0:49:05 which you kind of have to be to run a safari business where things, you know, running a safari
0:49:10 business, you’re out in nature and things are happening and unexpected things are happening
0:49:16 almost continuously. So that was kind of my wild youth in some ways, you know, it was very,
0:49:22 very orientated towards that kind of South African wildness. And also I think that we were,
0:49:27 we’ve changed a lot over the years, but and we’ve been in our own healing journeys and our own
0:49:31 healing journeys have changed us as a family for sure. But for many years there, we were just kind
0:49:37 of packing on, you know, I guess we were frozen by some trauma ourselves and we were just living
0:49:43 as wildly through it as we could. Hmm. Well, I remember the first time when I was, when I was
0:49:49 sorry, man, I totally forgot about the boarding, the, the next connecting.
0:49:58 All that covered moments. Yeah. It’d be hard to get past TSA, covered in, covered in viscera.
0:50:06 Good Lord. So let’s talk about another element I believe of your childhood. You could tell me
0:50:10 when this first enters the picture, we’re going to bounce all over the place. And please correct
0:50:16 my pronunciation. When did the Shangan trackers say Shangan? How do you pronounce that properly?
0:50:22 Shangan. There we go. Shangan trackers enter the picture in your life. And who are they?
0:50:28 If you could answer that in either order. Well, firstly, let me say something about the Shangan
0:50:34 people. The Shangan people are the most wonderful people that I’ve had time to spend time with in
0:50:40 Africa. They were a splinter tribe of the Zulu people. And basically they, they went on a
0:50:44 warring party and they found themselves in Southern Mozambique and they decided that they were
0:50:49 actually more peaceful people. They didn’t want to be involved in the Zulu armies warlike ways
0:50:56 and they broke away and they really pastoral people, amazing storytellers, incredible trackers
0:51:00 because they love to observe things and tell stories. And so from the time my father and uncle
0:51:06 were very young and from the time that I was very young, I was lucky to spend time with some of the
0:51:10 best Shangan trackers in the world, men who had grown up hunting and gathering in the region.
0:51:16 And the transition that we went through as a family is we grew up tracking to hunt and then we,
0:51:21 once we had a kind, our kind of enlightenment experience and we decided we must partner with
0:51:25 the land and we must think of the animals as our kin. We continued tracking, but it was to find
0:51:31 animals for photographic safaris. And so from the time that I was extremely young, I was apprenticed
0:51:38 to these master Shangan trackers. And I spent hundreds of hours learning the art form of following
0:51:45 an animal across wild terrain and learning how to be attuned to the language of the wilderness. And
0:51:49 I was listening to your interview with Noah Feldman and he was talking about how language
0:51:53 attunes you in a different way to a culture. And if you can think of tracking, tracking is
0:51:59 essentially the language of the wilderness. You’re learning the signs, the sounds, and as your
0:52:04 knowledge as a tracker deepens, it’s like you’re being let into another level. And the Shangan
0:52:09 people were deeply attuned to this and they taught me that from a young age. And really the success
0:52:14 of Londolosie, one of the major success points for us is to create a bit of context for how the
0:52:21 safari business came together. My father was 15, my uncle was 17, my mother was about 15 too,
0:52:26 and they were going to launch the safari business. Most of the land at that time, because the cattle
0:52:33 had overgrazed the land, it was kind of an eye high scrub. And all of the animals were here,
0:52:38 but you didn’t really see them. And in fact, they had been hunted. So any animals you saw were
0:52:44 trying to get away from you. And really my, my parents struggled to get the safari business going.
0:52:51 And then they had a defining moment. And that was the arrival of a kind of maverick ecologist
0:52:57 by the name of Ken Tinley. And Ken was an amazing guy. He was a high school dropout
0:53:03 who got admitted to a biological sciences degree because he drew a picture of a moth
0:53:10 with such intricate detail that the dean of the faculty put him in. And he studied his biological
0:53:15 sciences degree. And then he went to live alone in Mozambique and write a dissertation. And during
0:53:21 this time living alone, Ken had this incredible encounter with wilderness. And he felt deeply
0:53:26 attuned to it. And the way he described it, he said, it felt like he could feel the rivers moving
0:53:31 through his veins. And he became aware of how the moisture traveled through the terrain and how that
0:53:37 informed the flora and how that then informed the fauna. And he was just deeply in tune. And he
0:53:42 showed up next to the campfire one day where these young upstarts were trying to get the safari
0:53:47 business going. And he said to them, if you want this place to work, you must partner with the
0:53:52 land. You must think of the animals as your kin. And you must make sure that the local
0:53:58 Shangan people are invited to participate in this restoration. And so they said to him,
0:54:02 well, partner with the land, what do you mean? And he said, come, I’ll show you.
0:54:10 And he walked them out onto the scrub encroached land. And he said to them, when the cattle overgraze
0:54:15 the land, the moisture falls. But instead of penetrating the soil, it runs off in these deep
0:54:20 erosive furrows. So what you do is you clear away the scrub, and you take that scrub and you pack it
0:54:25 into the furrows. And it’s kind of like putting the plug back in the bath. And with that, you start
0:54:31 to charge the grassland with moisture. And he started to show them how to restore the micro
0:54:38 catchments on the property. And I really grew up, one of the first imprints of my psyche was
0:54:42 watching the land being restored. I would go to a place where there was eye high scrub,
0:54:47 and then I would see the destitution as you cut it out. And then you would go back there a year
0:54:52 later, and there would be a herd of waterbuck on it and a herd of zebra, and then a rhino walking
0:54:58 through it in the late evening. And so my first impulses, I believe as a healer came out of watching
0:55:03 the way that life knows how to bring itself forth. And then one day after a day spent working on the
0:55:10 land, my father and my uncle were driving home, and in the late afternoon light, a female leopard
0:55:15 stepped out onto the road in front of them. And up until that point, any leopard you saw was ears
0:55:21 back running to get away from you. They’d been hunted. But this leopard stopped, and she turned,
0:55:27 and she looked at them. And for a moment, she allowed herself to be seen. And then she growled,
0:55:31 and they saw that she had this one broken canine. And then she slipped away from there.
0:55:36 And they drove home in silence, and they stopped the vehicle. And my uncle, who was a rugged,
0:55:41 aggressive, wild type guy, they sat there for a moment in silence. And then he looked at my father,
0:55:48 and he said, whatever just happened, that’s my future. And I’ve been deeply interested in that
0:55:52 my whole life, you know, to your point, like, what made them say, we’re going to try and take on the
0:55:58 creation of the safari business. What made my great grandfather after too many jinn say I’m
0:56:03 going to buy? What made my uncle say in that moment, that’s my future? How do we know when we know?
0:56:08 So what my uncle did is he teamed up with a Shangan tracker, one of the best trackers in the area,
0:56:13 man by the name of Elmon Amlongo. And Elmon is actually rainy us in the books, brother. It’s
0:56:18 incredible hunter gatherer, incredibly in tune. Before we get to Elmon, if you could just as
0:56:25 context, because people hear tracking good trackers, they might not realize just how far back a lineage
0:56:32 of tracker to tracker to tracker tradition might extend. Are we talking hundreds of years,
0:56:37 thousands of years, tens of thousands of years? I mean, how far back does it go, right? This type
0:56:44 of skill development and generational passing down. I mean, this goes back to our early origins.
0:56:50 Some people say that tracking is in some ways the beginning of science because it’s the beginning
0:56:56 of deduction. It’s the beginning, the first time that someone looked at a abstract imprint
0:57:02 and started to apply meaning to it. And it’s an art form that has been alive. It lives inside
0:57:07 of people because it has been passed on through generations. A tracker will teach another tracker
0:57:13 the way. And so I think of it as this art form that you can’t hang on the wall or it like literally
0:57:17 has to be alive in a person to survive. Didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to kind of
0:57:22 set the stage, right? Because people think like, oh, my grandfather did this, my dad did this,
0:57:28 I now do this. Therefore, we have this extensive lineage, which is true on some scale. But when
0:57:36 you refer to one of these master trackers, it’s quite a different level of longevity in terms of
0:57:42 the bloodline and the development of that skill. Ancient. Back to the origins of humanity.
0:57:49 Yeah. And when you are tracking, you are connected to that entire lineage, which is
0:57:54 amazing feeling. What I’m doing right now, thousands of years ago, someone did this
0:57:59 very same practice. Yeah. And Elman was just brilliant in the bush. And so what my uncle and
0:58:04 him did is for the next 12 years, they woke up every morning and they went out and they tracked
0:58:12 that leopard. And just insane drive and dedication. And sometimes they would go two weeks without
0:58:16 seeing her and they would be putting together the clues. They’d be following the tracks.
0:58:21 And then it started to be that they would find her and she would allow herself to be viewed
0:58:28 from two, 300 yards in a vehicle. And then slowly over time, that space, that distance,
0:58:32 started to close. And eventually, after a few years of this, it got to the point where they
0:58:37 could actually drive one of these old Landrovers in next to her. And she had developed a relationship
0:58:43 of trust with them that is a totally wild leopard. And she knew that these men meant her no harm.
0:58:48 We called that leopard the mother leopard, because she went on to have eight letters of
0:58:54 cubs. And all of those cubs grew up modeling their mother’s trust. And so she was the mother
0:58:59 for two reasons. One, because she was the mother of all these cubs. And second, because really,
0:59:04 she was the mother of the birth of the safari business, because word got out that there was a
0:59:10 place in the middle of South Africa where no one wanted to go, where you could go and see a wild
0:59:17 leopard. And that allure is still alive inside of people today. But it would have been absolutely
0:59:23 impossible without the skills and the brilliance of the Shangan trackers to be able to go out into
0:59:28 a vast wilderness and attune yourself to the faint tracks of where this animal had walked,
0:59:34 to listen for alarm calls, to listen to bird language, and to start to get to know her movement
0:59:38 patterns, her territories, where she liked to den. All of that made it possible and it wouldn’t
0:59:43 have been possible without great trackers. And so really, the legacy of londelosi is a legacy of
0:59:48 relationships between trackers and wild animals. You mentioned a name that comes up a lot in the
0:59:53 line trackers, Guide to Life, who’s, of course, a fascinating character in the book. And I’m sure
1:00:00 in real life, even more so fascinating. Renius, is that how you say this name properly? Renius
1:00:06 Matanjana Jampaches Imlongo. That’s exactly what I was going to say. That’s what I was going to
1:00:15 say. I’ll stick with Renius for short. Now, I want to prompt, maybe as a way of describing Renius
1:00:21 and introducing him, a question that came, or a cue, that came from one of our mutual friends,
1:00:28 Josh Weitzkin. And he said, “Ask Boyd about Renius not returning to camp a few weeks ago
1:00:32 when tracking, I think, a male lion when all the clients wanted to come back.”
1:00:36 That’s great. Could you tell this story? Are you open to that?
1:00:42 Yeah. Well, Renius is firstly one of the best trackers in the world. I would say that he’s
1:00:48 top five. He’s deeply attuned. And what, and my definition of mastery is someone who can be
1:00:54 themselves in any situation. And really, what makes Renius special is that he’s able to totally
1:01:00 be himself wherever he goes. And I’m sure you’ve seen this in other disciplines. He’s one of those
1:01:07 rare masters who’s able to translate the intangibles of what he knows how to do. You learn by being
1:01:13 around him. You learn by absorbing his presence, watching how he moves. But he’s also quite good
1:01:16 at teaching, which makes him really exceptional. Because a lot of trackers, you’ll say to them,
1:01:21 “Well, why did you know to go down there? Why did you know to check that riverbed?”
1:01:25 And they just sort of say, “I just knew.” Renius is able to dissect it a little bit for you. But
1:01:32 this to me is the level of his mastery. We ran a retreat, a tracking retreat. We had some folks
1:01:36 from all over the world who had come on one of our tracking retreats. And it was day four.
1:01:42 And we had had an exceptional time. We had found and followed animals. The night before, we had
1:01:48 slept out in the bush. And so the next morning we woke up, we found tracks of a single male lion,
1:01:54 and we began to follow. And after two or three hours, I could see that the guests who were on
1:01:58 the retreat were tiring. They were running out of gas. They’d been keeping watch all night.
1:02:01 Could you explain what you mean by that? Keeping watch all night? Afraid that lions
1:02:05 are going to eat them all night? Yeah, on the retreat, one of the nights we had slept on the
1:02:12 ground in the open, no vehicle, no tents. And each person had been asked to keep watch. It’s
1:02:18 this deeply archetypal experience to be awake around the fire. It definitely changes what the
1:02:25 fire means to you. It’s this ancient primordial sense of fire, safety. And each person keeps
1:02:29 watch through the night. And it’s beautiful. You’re alone, owls calling stars above you,
1:02:33 and this alertness alive inside of you as you keep watch for your friends.
1:02:38 What are you keeping watch? I guess, I guess, sorry, not to bog the story down, just for a
1:02:45 second. Like if John from KPMG in Chicago who’s never camped before comes to a tracking retreat,
1:02:51 I would be kind of nervous trusting John to keep me alive while I slept. So I probably wouldn’t
1:02:56 sleep. I’m just wondering what one does when they’re keeping watch. No offense to KPMG.
1:03:02 Well, no, you know what? No, John from KPMG taking contact. Well, the thing is, is that
1:03:09 the minute you get out there and night starts to fall and some lions roar nearby and an elephant
1:03:15 walks past your camp and comes to investigate, what’s pretty amazing, Tim, is that no one misses
1:03:22 the gravity of the situation. There’s something about night falling. I watch people switch on.
1:03:28 And I explained to them that if you if you fall asleep during your watch or you don’t do this
1:03:34 properly, someone can get badly injured. And so people take it very seriously. And your job on
1:03:40 watch is to be an aware presence. And you get armed with a really good torch. You listen.
1:03:47 That’s flash. Flashlight for you. Flashlights. You listen. And if any animal comes, you have
1:03:51 to be aware of its presence. And there’s an amazing thing. If you’re aware of an animal’s
1:03:54 presence, it’s aware that you’re aware of it. And that’s the critical safety piece.
1:03:59 And we’ve never, in all the years we’ve been doing it, and we’ve slept out with many,
1:04:03 many people, we’ve never had anyone let us down because people feel the gravity of it.
1:04:07 And something does wake up inside of them. So anyway, back to the story.
1:04:12 We suffice to say they didn’t sleep very well. They didn’t sleep very well.
1:04:17 So like 10 o’clock the next morning, they were flagging and we decided because we’d had such
1:04:22 a good time and we’d been so lucky with the tracking already, we were going to call it there.
1:04:25 We were going to say, guys, we’re going to leave this track and we’re going to head back to the camp.
1:04:32 Now, Ranias has been 30 years into guiding people, you know, even more 35 years into
1:04:39 guiding people and then another section working as a trainer. He says, you guys go back to camp,
1:04:45 I can’t leave this track. And I’m fascinated by that moment because there are so many hundreds
1:04:50 of guides, so many hundreds of people who say, you know what, our guests are happy, eggs benedict
1:04:55 back at the camp. But his mastery is that he can’t leave it. There is something laid down in front
1:05:01 of him that he’s curious about. He’s interested and he has to know something in the tracker has to
1:05:09 discover, has to find out. And the scope of the years of his practice and the fact that he
1:05:15 makes that decision to stay out there hot tired without water, he needs to know that is his art
1:05:20 form. He needs to be in it. There’s something very special about that to me. Which animals
1:05:27 are hardest to track at LONDOLOSI? You mentioned a leopard, right? So a leopard in my mind,
1:05:33 I think of solitary animal, as I understand it, sleeps in trees, at least part of the time,
1:05:38 as I understand it again, I have no understanding of leopards. So think of them as difficult
1:05:46 to track for a number of different reasons. But which animals that you track are easiest and
1:05:51 which are hardest? Oh, well, I think you’ve nailed it. They’re leopard by some margin is the most
1:05:59 difficult. One, it walks, it’s solitary, and it walks incredibly likely. And it, its nature is
1:06:05 solitary and secretive. It likes to operate in thick terrain. Anytime you’re seeing a leopard,
1:06:11 the leopard is allowing you to see it, which to me has this beautiful mystery that it cloaks it in.
1:06:16 So leopard by quite some margin would be the most difficult. And, and we’ve had trackers here who’ve
1:06:22 become real specialists at following leopards. We used to have a tracker by the name of Richard
1:06:30 Soella. And Soella was, he was meticulous in his dress, and he was gruff, and he was hard to get
1:06:36 along with. He was rude to most people. He had that kind of, that arrogance born of being brilliant.
1:06:41 He deserved all the arrogance he had because he was so good. And he used to do this thing where
1:06:45 if all the trackers had been out in the morning and they’d been following a leopard,
1:06:50 they would come back to camp. They’d been unsuccessful. They had a last track, but they had
1:06:55 lost it. He would go back there. And it used to be my favorite thing. He would go back at 12 o’clock
1:07:00 in the afternoon. He would refuse to go with anyone else. He wanted to go alone. And he would
1:07:05 slowly start to work that track. And then eventually at like six o’clock in the evening, you’d get a
1:07:10 radio call and it would be Richard. And he would say, I’ve located this leopard. He would tell you
1:07:19 where it was. And then his final refrain was Richard Soella is number one. And he did it,
1:07:24 he did it so consistently. And Richard Soella was number one.
1:07:28 That’s amazing. That is amazing. Technical question, 12 noon. So I would think that
1:07:35 high noon would actually be a hard time to track because it wouldn’t cast shadows as well. But
1:07:40 is the reason for doing that that the animals are bedded down due to the heat so that you’re
1:07:45 able to track while they’re in one place? Why would he go out at 12 noon?
1:07:52 One is he’s showing people how good he is because you’re right, the direct light creates a flat
1:07:56 aspect on the ground. The light is flat. And so you’re right, there’s no shadow, there’s no
1:08:02 contrast. When the light is lower, it bounces off where the animal has stepped in a, it changes the
1:08:06 texture on the earth. He’s going at midday because no one else wants to go out in the heat. He’s
1:08:11 showing I go out in the heat. He’s going at midday because the light is flat. And he’s saying I go
1:08:16 out when the light is flat. He’s going at midday because he knows that that leopard is going to
1:08:21 be lying up somewhere. And so if he can get a track, he can close the distance on it while it’s not
1:08:26 moving. And all of those are saying Soella is number one.
1:08:33 It’s so great. I love that. So let me ask, because people will no doubt be wondering,
1:08:41 what type of protection does one have when, say, Reneus goes out to track with clientele?
1:08:47 Do you have the equivalent of a SWAT team with you with rifles at the ready in case any danger
1:08:51 presents itself? I think I know the answer to this, but just because I know people may have
1:08:54 a question mark in their minds. What type of protection do you guys carry?
1:09:00 When we are tracking with clients, we will carry rifles and always if we’re running specifically
1:09:06 tracking retreats, we will be a two rifle operation. But really the protection is way upstream of that.
1:09:10 In all of my years in the bush, I’ve never had to use the rifle.
1:09:16 The art form of tracking is what makes you safe. And when you’re with someone like Reneus,
1:09:23 the safety profile just becomes exceptionally safe because he’s so attuned. And so it’s a
1:09:28 capacity to read the terrain, to make good decisions, to be attuned to the freshness of
1:09:34 the track where those animals will be, how we should approach different terrain, attuned to the
1:09:41 birds, bird language. And then where Reneus is even more exceptional is that the way that an
1:09:47 animal communicates with you is through a state of presence. If it is unhappy with you, it conveys
1:09:55 energy through the way its body shapes. And really amazing trackers are able to read that body language
1:10:01 and almost speak back to it in the way they move their body. And you can convey a very profound,
1:10:05 unspoken language. And I think of it as a language of energy or a language of presence.
1:10:10 And that is really what makes you safe. As that animal, if you see that animal, how you
1:10:15 convey your intentions to it, your mood, what you do, if it does become aggressive with you,
1:10:20 how you meet that and shape the unspoken conversation between you.
1:10:27 I want to bring up one of the lines from The Line Tracker’s Guide to Life that
1:10:33 it certainly pops to mind quickly when I think about this book. I’m sure it’s a line that a lot
1:10:37 of people bring up. I know it’s a line that Josh has brought up. And I’d love to just hear you
1:10:45 explain why this is in the book and why it matters. Quote, “I don’t know where we’re going,
1:10:50 but I know exactly how to get there.” Oh, I love that, don’t you? I love it. Absolutely.
1:10:57 It’s really, if you take a moment to pause and contemplate it, the implications are pretty
1:11:05 profound. So I’d love to just hear you riff on this and why and how this ended up in the book.
1:11:10 Well, there were two things that Reneas used to say regularly. The one is, “Hishatikuma,
1:11:17 we will get it.” And it was almost like this kind of incredible self-talk that he would have when
1:11:22 the track was cold or the track was, “We weren’t making progress.” I would look at him and he would
1:11:29 say, “Hishatikuma, we’re going to get this.” And then often he would say to, “I don’t know
1:11:32 where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.” And what he’s saying, he’s talking to
1:11:38 the dynamic of tracking, which is, it’s an interesting energetic dynamic. He is profoundly
1:11:44 committed to finding that animal, but he hasn’t allowed that commitment to become a burden of
1:11:49 some kind. He is working moment to moment on the signs that he’s getting. And you can think in a
1:11:55 vast wilderness as trackers, we also talk about the first track. In a vast wilderness, 360 degrees
1:12:01 of wild terrain, all he needs is the next first track and then the next first track and then the
1:12:09 next first track and the next first track. And he’s able to dial down the infinite possibilities
1:12:13 of where that animal could have gone to a moment of knowing and a moment of presence and then
1:12:19 another moment of knowing and another moment of presence. And all he needs is that next sign.
1:12:23 So he doesn’t know where it’s going, but he knows how to get there, the next moment of presence,
1:12:28 the next thing I know to do. And it might be a good segue there into just telling you a little
1:12:33 bit about how the tracking process changed for me over the years, but let me know if you want to
1:12:41 go. So I had these encounters, Tim, whereby I had a childhood following animals and learning
1:12:46 this art form and really the dynamics and the psyche of the tracker, how a tracker approached
1:12:52 the process of finding an animal in the middle of nowhere. And then watching how consistently
1:12:56 good trackers delivered an outcome, they found the animal they were looking for. And so that,
1:12:59 and at that time as a young child, I thought I was learning that skill.
1:13:06 And then through my early twenties, I had a series of pretty traumatic encounters. And the
1:13:12 result of that was that by the time I was about 23 or 24 years old, I had found myself frozen by
1:13:18 trauma. I felt I was depressed. I was uncertain how to move forward. And in the way that trauma
1:13:25 limits options, I felt myself extremely limited. I did not have access to, you know, a lot of
1:13:31 emotionality. I did not have access to different choices. I was stuck. And at that time, I was
1:13:36 very lucky to meet a woman who came on Safari. She became my first mentor. And the reason I
1:13:43 guided her was because Alex, my friend who also features in the book, he had guided her a year
1:13:48 before. And he said to me, she’s a martial artist. And I was very interested in martial arts, as I
1:13:53 know you are. And so I went into the guide room. And in the guide room, there was this board where
1:13:58 every guide got their name put next to the clients who were coming in. And I rubbed off
1:14:03 someone else’s name and I put my name next to her to guide her. And that moment absolutely changed
1:14:09 my life. Her name was Dr. Martha Beck. And she arrived on the Safari and we went out the first
1:14:16 two days. And she said something on the second day that I felt something in me like really moved.
1:14:21 We were driving along and I was telling her about the restoration of the land. And she said,
1:14:26 I really understand this. And I believe the restoration of the planet will come out of a
1:14:31 transformation in human consciousness. And the minute she said it, you know, whatever my grandfather
1:14:35 knew or my father knew or my uncle knew when he saw that leopard, I felt that thing move inside of
1:14:44 me. That kind of that idea struck me very deeply. And then on about the fourth day, I driven back
1:14:49 to the camp and you know, I’m in my Safari gear. I got my rifle. I’m the guide. I’m rugged guy.
1:14:56 I’m out there tracking lions. And she turned and she looked at me and she said, I’m ready to talk to
1:15:01 you. And I was sort of a take in the back. I said, well, what do you mean? She said, I can see what
1:15:04 you’re carrying and I can see how stuck you are. And I want you to know that I can help you and I’m
1:15:09 here. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those instances where someone sees you when you’re
1:15:15 in one of those places. But I felt myself becoming really uncertain. And then I felt tears starting
1:15:21 to come to my eyes. And then there was this moment where this woman is hugging the Safari guide and
1:15:27 just consoling me. And she was an incredible healer and she was exceptionally adept at
1:15:35 transformational processes. And so she started to teach me how to move through the trauma and
1:15:42 the suffering that I was stuck in. And as that happened, my relationship to tracking started
1:15:47 to change. And I started to see this art form in a different way. And I realized that I was looking
1:15:53 for something. And all of the skills and the mentality of the tracker was highly adept to
1:15:58 being in a transformational process. The first thing that you will have to do if you want to go
1:16:05 track a lion in the wild is you will have to become super uncomfortable with unknowns. You will have
1:16:09 to give up all the ways you tried to know what to do and say, I don’t know how to do this.
1:16:16 All trackers operate using unknowns to almost bring them to life. You will need to develop
1:16:22 your track awareness. Track awareness is teaching yourself to be attuned to a very specific set
1:16:28 of signs, metrics, but self-generated. Like when I was a kid, Renius would take me out to a game
1:16:33 path and he would say, walk down that game path and tell me what you see. And I would come back
1:16:38 and I would say to him, I saw a herd of impala walk there. And he would say, I’m fine. From
1:16:45 a long foot, young boy, go look again. And as I was walking away, he would say, put your head down
1:16:50 like the way an animal drinks, put your head right down against the trail and look like you’re
1:16:55 drinking water like an animal. And I would come back and I would say, I can see where the herd
1:16:59 of impala walked, but they actually walked over the tracks of a leopard. And I can see where a
1:17:04 mouse ran across the path and then an owl swooped down and its wing touched the ground. And each
1:17:11 time I walked down that path, under his guidance, there was more information. And that idea became
1:17:15 very important to me, the idea that there is information in your life if you are looking for
1:17:21 transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it. And so what do you need to attune to
1:17:26 in transformational processes? Things that make you feel expensive, things that make you feel alive,
1:17:30 letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards,
1:17:34 noticing what you’re curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that
1:17:39 make you feel more alive. So I started to see, see through the eyes of the tracker, the first
1:17:45 track, you know, the first track being the next thing you know to do, letting go of, you know,
1:17:51 where that animal might be or letting go of where you think you should be and just doing the next
1:17:56 thing you know to do and the next thing you know to do. If you watch great trackers, they drop into
1:18:01 what I call the following state. And it’s so beautiful if you watch Alex and Renius in the
1:18:07 following state. The following state could be defined almost as constant creative response
1:18:12 to what is occurring. If the track cuts left, Alex will click and he’ll say I’m on the track.
1:18:17 If it cuts right, Renius will be on it. They’re getting a sense of the mood of the animal.
1:18:21 They’re using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving and in that way,
1:18:26 like almost feel the animal as it’s walking out ahead of them. At the same time, they are vectoring
1:18:30 and they are getting a sense of their bearings using waypoints of marula trees up ahead.
1:18:34 When you watch them, they’re almost having fun in it. They’re playing.
1:18:39 They’re playing on that track. And so you will need to develop the following state in your own
1:18:44 transformational process. How can you play? How can you be creative with not knowing what you’re
1:18:48 trying to create or this place you’re trying to get to but being open and willing and aware and
1:18:55 attuned? You will almost certainly lose the track and sort of saying this to see how the tracker
1:19:00 came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing. You will lose the track.
1:19:03 You’ll be in the middle of it thinking I’m deep in the following state. I’m right on track and
1:19:08 then suddenly it’ll be gone. And you will need to build community around you of other great
1:19:13 trackers, people who are willing to move with you, follow with you. And the core of it is really
1:19:19 that there is something inside of you that knows. There is a part of you. You might call it your
1:19:23 wild self. You might call it the track of your life or as native people call it your medicine way.
1:19:30 A part of you that beyond rational thought reacts when you become more in tune with yourself
1:19:34 and sifting away the layers of socialization, all the things you should do,
1:19:39 all the things you have to do to start to be able to follow the trail of that place inside of you
1:19:45 became really what the core of my own journey to healing was. And I live like that to this day
1:19:51 as a tracker, trying to be present, resting into the unknown, attuning and trying to fall into the
1:19:55 following state with what energizes me, makes me curious and pulls me forward.
1:20:04 Thank you for that. It strikes me also that a lot of people who would try to help another start
1:20:13 almost as a hammer looking for nails, right? They don’t listen enough first and it just strikes
1:20:22 me that what Martha did was very much initially demonstrated by her powers of observation,
1:20:27 awareness and attunement. And those are sort of like the core fundamental characteristics
1:20:35 that you need to develop or resurrect before you can really prescribe anything at all. And
1:20:40 the question I want to ask is actually related to the traumatic events. If you’re open to it,
1:20:46 would you be willing to share what happened or some of the examples of what happened in your 20s?
1:20:50 Yeah, just one comment on Martha. Once we started to get onto that level with each other,
1:20:59 when I watched her and I looked at her, what I saw was a superb tracker. She understood how trauma
1:21:05 patterns us. And she was incredibly adept at first tracking the pattern and then starting
1:21:11 to support you in creating a different outcome for yourself or providing tools and options for
1:21:15 different ways of doing it. And as I watched her work with myself and with many other people,
1:21:21 I saw a tracker who would at first just really observe and get to know what they were working
1:21:27 with and be present and attuned. And that’s really what most attracted me to her work.
1:21:32 I saw a tracker of human processes in first and foremost. And that’s probably what I was
1:21:36 mature enough, the frame that I was able to see through at that time as a tracker.
1:21:45 But yeah, to segue into my own experiences, my family, I would say, went through a very difficult
1:21:51 10-year period, a period of intense suffering. And yet that suffering became the place where we
1:21:56 learned to do the work and go inward and start to understand how healing processes work. And so
1:22:02 I’ve gotten to the place now where I’ve fondly looked back on those 10 years of initiation,
1:22:07 you know, university of suffering. But it began for me when my grandmother died,
1:22:13 my father, who had taken the londelosie model of care of land, care of wildlife, care of people,
1:22:20 and he had launched it to 30 other operations around Southern Africa, which Mandela had asked
1:22:25 him to do. And so he had been this big sort of expansion. And then in a classic kind of change
1:22:31 of founder’s trap, he got fired from that. And then very soon into that, South Africa was going
1:22:36 through a very, very difficult time. And one night we were in Johannesburg, and this was
1:22:40 post-elections, but it was still, the country was still really finding its feet. And there was
1:22:48 a ton of violent crimes still happening. And yeah, as I said, I was 18 years old and I woke up
1:22:53 and my sister was shaking me. And immediately as I sat up, I had a gun pushed into my face.
1:22:59 And the home that we were staying in, in Johannesburg on that occasion, had been invaded.
1:23:08 And I just felt the adrenaline pump through my system. And all of my work in healing spaces later,
1:23:13 and I know that you’re involved in psychedelic assisted therapy, has been to try and get a cap
1:23:19 on the scope of where my body goes when it gets a mild trauma, because I woke up into
1:23:25 my worst nightmare. And I looked to my left and my mother’s tied up on the floor and my sister’s
1:23:32 tied up. And I know kind of stories of how these things go, the violence, the potential danger to
1:23:39 women. And it was just like absolute red line fear. And just to see the woman in my life,
1:23:47 my family like that. And so just shocking. And then realizing that, you know, I know I can read
1:23:52 animals, but I can’t quite read people. I mean, I can’t quite read them. It’s they don’t they’re
1:23:55 not as honest as animals. You know, so I just don’t know where this is going to go. And I’m
1:24:02 sitting in this tension. And eventually, they took me outside, these guys who had broken into the
1:24:08 house. And they said to me, we’re going to kill you. So they pulled me outside. And they put a gun
1:24:15 to my head. And they said, this is they basically said, now we’re going to kill you. And, you know,
1:24:20 the fear was so intense. And then I remember looking up the barrel at the man who was holding
1:24:26 the gun to my head. And we looked into each other’s eyes. And in that moment, something happened,
1:24:32 which I can’t say what happened. You might call it the peace of God that path is understanding.
1:24:40 But I think it was too big for my ego structure to hold. And it collapsed. And as I looked at him,
1:24:49 all fear left me. And all concern for my own bodily safety left me. And I just felt a profound
1:24:54 human connection with him. And as that happened, and there were three of these guys standing around
1:25:01 me, as as that moment happened, it was kind of this, this weird, I the only way I can describe it
1:25:05 is a kind of a weirdness came over everyone. It was as if everyone had become glimmered.
1:25:13 And they put the guns down and everyone just stood there confused. And I walked back inside,
1:25:18 totally unaccosted in any way. And I got the car keys. And I walked back out and I gave them
1:25:26 the car keys. And I said, get in that car and leave. And they did. And it was just immensely bizarre.
1:25:32 And and for years, I lived with trying to work out both the terror that I felt and the the fear
1:25:36 that had flooded me, but also trying to integrate like whatever had happened in that moment.
1:25:44 And I’m not sure that I fully understand it, but you know, I felt like I glimpsed through the most
1:25:51 terrifying situation, I glimpsed something. That was a very, very sort of that was the first freezing
1:25:59 experience that I had. It was terrifying. And then on the heels of that, and I think sometimes
1:26:06 of Jung’s description of like, what is unconscious will be made conscious, it will manifest into
1:26:11 your life until you become more conscious about what you’re carrying. A couple of weeks after that,
1:26:16 literally in the same year, myself and some friends and another tracker called Solium Longo,
1:26:22 we went down to the river on the reserve. And it was an extremely hot day. And we left the
1:26:27 people who we were guiding sitting under a tree. And we began to walk upstream in the river.
1:26:33 And Solium stayed on the bank. And I was actually walking in the water. And the water was knee deep,
1:26:39 running over sand. And you could see quite clearly. And then there was a place up ahead where a tree
1:26:45 had fallen over and its branches were in the water. And it was kind of shadowy. And I when I
1:26:48 think of it now, I think if it had been a horror movie, you know, people in the audience would
1:26:52 have started saying, don’t go near the shadowy place. And of course, as I walk past the shadowy
1:26:57 place, I actually sat down just on the edge of those shadows. And my perception was that the
1:27:02 water was too shallow for crocodiles. But of course, the crocodile was in the hole. And
1:27:07 the first thing that you notice when a crocodile grabs you is just the ferocity and the pressure
1:27:13 of the bite. I just felt it slam onto my right leg. And it tries to pull me into the deep section
1:27:18 of the water. I throw my arm up and I grab a branch and it starts to shake me. And I see a
1:27:23 slick of blood appear in the water and then it gets washed downstream. While the crocodile is
1:27:28 shaking me, I see Solly, who’s on the bank, he sees me. And he sees that I’m in trouble.
1:27:33 And he immediately starts making his way towards me. Solly is also a Shangan man, grew up hunting
1:27:39 and gathering. The croc goes to bite me a second time. And I kicked and by the grace of God,
1:27:45 my foot went down its throat and it spat me out. And I pulled myself up into the branches of the
1:27:51 tree. And I have this memory of almost being non local watching myself pull myself up into the
1:27:56 branches of the tree. I got up into the branches and I remember looking over my shoulder and my
1:28:02 leg from the knee down is just absolutely mangled, torn to pieces and meat hanging off. I made a
1:28:08 pact with myself in that moment like never look at that again. I made my way through the branches.
1:28:13 And I fell onto the bank. And I knew that I was extremely vulnerable on the bank. Crocodiles,
1:28:17 it’s an elite predator, if it thinks it can get you and I was on the bank against the water,
1:28:23 it’s going to grab me again. At that point, Solly coming from the other bank arrives at the deep
1:28:28 section of the channel. He’s seen me come out of the water. He’s seen that my leg is mangled.
1:28:35 And he knows that in the deep channel of water between him and I is a crocodile. And I can tell
1:28:39 you that man didn’t slow down not for one second. He plunged into the water. He waded into almost
1:28:44 over his hips and he got to me on the bank and he grabbed me put me on his shoulder and he carried
1:28:50 me up onto the bank. He took his shirt off. He wrapped it around my leg. We were able to call
1:28:56 the folks who are with us and calm them down radio plane that was flying over. And I was able to get
1:29:02 medivac out and and we were able to stop the bleeding so that I would I survived. So, you know,
1:29:09 those two experiences were very alive in me. And maybe this is a side point and and then I’ll
1:29:13 slow down for a while. But, you know, in the in the months after that, I sat many, many times with
1:29:20 Soli. And I said to him, “Soli, you know, why did you come in the water?” And he would look at me
1:29:26 with disdain and he said, “Umpho, unan kingan dinan kinga pel.” He said, “My brother, you’re in trouble.
1:29:31 I’m in trouble.” And at first I thought it was some kind of like, you know, platitude. He was playing
1:29:38 down his actions. But as time went on, I really understood and I came to see that in the way
1:29:43 that Soli grew up, he grew up in a much more collective consciousness. He grew up with his tribe
1:29:50 He grew up hunting and gathering. He grew up in nature. And he lived in a much more interconnected
1:29:55 way than any of us live. In fact, his whole psyche was not formed around individuality.
1:30:02 His psyche was formed around a we consciousness, you and me together, collective consciousness. And
1:30:07 to him, it was fundamental. If I was in trouble, he was in trouble. And so he did not see it as any
1:30:12 kind of heroic action. He just saw it as the most obvious natural thing to do. And that really,
1:30:18 that moved me. And that taught me a lot. I’m going to come back to a couple, a number of things.
1:30:22 First, good Lord, I’m sorry both this things happened, even though it ended up being the
1:30:29 University of Suffering. Those are two excruciating experiences to put it mildly.
1:30:37 But just based on what you said about this collective consciousness, does the word ubuntu
1:30:44 or the concept of ubuntu tie into this in any way? Oh, absolutely. Could you explain that for folks?
1:30:55 Yeah, ubuntu is an African philosophy that says I am because of you. Or people are not people
1:31:01 without other people. And what ubuntu is talking to is the relational nature of life.
1:31:10 And the point I want to make about it is that it is in when you spend time with people with the
1:31:15 ubuntu consciousness is activated in them where ubuntu is alive in them. It is actually a kind
1:31:22 of structuring in their very psyche. They experience things in relation. They experience each other
1:31:29 in a relational way. And they know that knowing yourself and being yourself is about being connected
1:31:37 to people but also to the broader field of sentient life. And so what Soli was activating there
1:31:42 was the ubuntu consciousness. And he was showing that ubuntu consciousness comes alive in action
1:31:46 through courageous action in that case. But very much what he was showing me that day was
1:31:53 how deeply ingrained it was in him the collective nature of life. Another way of saying it Tim is
1:31:59 like and this gets really interesting as you start to learn your own psyche. But different
1:32:06 cultures, the psyches are structured differently. And in a more Western setting, you might say that
1:32:11 in a society where the individual self is disconnected from the greater interconnectivity
1:32:19 of life, the search for meaning is reduced to a constant state of comparison. So people will
1:32:26 always on some level be saying, how am I doing in comparison? And so many people are living with
1:32:30 that without even knowing that that’s how they’re trying to orientate themselves. Whereas if you
1:32:35 grew up in Africa or if you grew up in nature, you grew up relationally. So it’s not comparative,
1:32:39 it’s more like I’m learning about myself through my encounter with the world.
1:32:45 I’m going to try to maybe awkwardly tie a number of things together here. When you and I,
1:32:51 I think it was when we first spent time together. I can’t remember, maybe it was the first time
1:32:59 we spoke, but you were just coming off of living in a tree, if I remember correctly.
1:33:05 If you’re open to talking about that. If not, we can certainly cut it later. But since we’re
1:33:12 talking about it, how many days were you in this tree? So I was 40 days and 40 nights in the tree.
1:33:19 I went into the tree. If you read all the mystical traditions, including I think your man Hafiz on
1:33:24 your bookshelf, but in all the mystical traditions, there seems to be a time when the mystics are
1:33:30 drawn to be alone in nature. And Jesus went for 40 days and 40 nights, but the Buddha went to the
1:33:35 Grove. There’s accounts of it all along the way. And so I wanted to go and have that experience
1:33:40 myself. And I’m not saying I’m a mystic, but I wanted that my question was, why did all of the
1:33:46 mystics go to be in total solitude in nature? And so with a lockdown in the world, suddenly I had six
1:33:51 weeks where I could go and do that, go and sit in that question and see what answers came to me
1:33:58 during that time. Initially, there was a tremendous anxiety. The first couple of days, I had a lot
1:34:04 of thoughts around, I’m going to be away, I’m going to miss something, I’m not attending to, and then
1:34:09 after three days, that all dropped. And I know the Aboriginal people have this amazing saying that
1:34:14 modern culture is three days deep. And after three days, I thought I felt myself go into a
1:34:21 different state of consciousness. I just realized it doesn’t matter. And then I started to attune
1:34:27 myself to the natural world. And a few things happened. The one is that a big insight was that
1:34:32 where your attention goes, your life goes. And if you’re constantly putting your attention on
1:34:40 living things, there’s more aliveness in your own life. That was one. The second was that if you
1:34:45 spend time in nature in the same spot over a period of time, it starts to become incredibly
1:34:53 personal. So it’s not just a bird or that antelope, it’s that bird that roosts in that bush and
1:34:58 flies down the riverbed in the morning and back up the southern bank. And then it feeds for grubs
1:35:02 in this tree. And as you start to become more personally attuned to each animal, you start
1:35:07 to see that there’s a pattern to their movement. And in fact, then you start to find yourself
1:35:12 orientated inside of a series of interlocking intelligences. That is really what the natural
1:35:20 world is. And then at some point, you realize that I’m not observing this, this intelligence that
1:35:26 I’m watching unfold around me. I am fundamentally a part of this. And it stops being a mental
1:35:32 construct. And you start to feel yourself inside of that intelligence. And that’s a very, very deep
1:35:36 experience, or at least it was for me. And I think that that is why at a certain point,
1:35:41 the mystics went to go and get quiet enough to feel themselves inside of that incredible
1:35:46 field of intelligence that is the natural world. I had just radical encounters every day. And I
1:35:53 think that’s another thing about the natural world is things happen. And as things happen each day,
1:35:58 it almost like it helps you make meaning. And in the society, the societies of the modern world
1:36:03 are almost becoming devoid of the structures that allow us to make meaning. But the natural world
1:36:08 is full of encounter. And that encounter generates an aliveness and a relational
1:36:12 meaning making quality that just makes life feel very, very rich. And we lived like that for
1:36:19 thousands of years before we lived on discord. Were there any other aspects of the experience
1:36:25 that were particularly surprising to you in any way? Or any other rules that you set for yourself
1:36:31 that proved either fruitless or fruitful? I mean, the one encounter that comes to mind,
1:36:36 and there were many, you know, lots of solo hours tracking, which felt very special. But on one of
1:36:41 the nights, I got caught in a storm, a thunderstorm rolled in and the heat built all through the
1:36:48 afternoon. And I could see the storm building out over the western horizon. And it started to look
1:36:52 menacing and then even more menacing. And I was living on a flat platform up in the tree.
1:37:00 And eventually the wind started to howl and blow. And then the mother and the father of
1:37:07 a thunderstorm broke around me. And, you know, the lightning bolts were coming around around me.
1:37:10 And I don’t know if you’ve ever been very close to lightning strikes. But the first thing is that
1:37:17 you just hear it go like this. And then the blade comes down. And then the sound goes sonic. But
1:37:24 if you close enough to it, it actually clicks as it hits the ground. Boom. And it started to come
1:37:30 down around me, torrential rain and blades of lightning lighting up around me. And the sound
1:37:35 was just so intense. And I mean, it was just monstrous. I was cast into a deep and overwhelming
1:37:46 fear. And I realized that like true fear is like true fear is kind of a rare experience in modern
1:37:52 life. Yeah, terror, terror, right? Like terror is a it’s a it’s a very distinct thing.
1:37:58 It’s so distinct to like all my anxiety, you know, all the things I worry about,
1:38:04 but like true, raw, I don’t know if we make it out of this fear is actually a very rare encounter
1:38:09 in life. And, you know, it would not end. I just kept saying to myself, like, you can’t be this
1:38:15 scared for so long. Surely it’s just going to pass. And then like another hour and another hour.
1:38:21 And I just kind of weathered it and I felt an incredible. Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s talked
1:38:29 about a lot, but an incredible fragility and an incredible humility. And then the next day,
1:38:34 when I came out of it, I also felt like, Oh God, that scared me so much, but I would,
1:38:38 I would do it again, you know, just like on the other side of it to have been like in a storm
1:38:44 like that was felt felt very, very, very special. I felt like profoundly like a profound encounter
1:38:52 with the force of nature. Do you think you will ever do an extended period solo like that again?
1:38:56 I don’t know if you were totally solo. I have no idea if you were solo, solo, solo,
1:39:00 or I was like solo most of the time, but a few people come out and say hi every once in a while.
1:39:05 But maybe you could clarify that. But do you think you would repeat an experiment like that?
1:39:09 Why or why not? Not necessarily in a tree, but that that degree of solitude.
1:39:14 I mean, without a shadow of a doubt, it is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done.
1:39:21 And I don’t know if I will do six weeks again, but I will certainly try and get 10 days solo
1:39:26 in nature a year with no other people. And in this one, I didn’t see other people.
1:39:30 I was totally by myself. And, you know, there’s amazing things that happen when you buy yourself.
1:39:36 One is, you know, getting really into your own energy, just being in your own energetic field,
1:39:41 then being attuned to nature and feeling your body start to attune to those rhythms,
1:39:45 you know, watching the stars move through the sky all night and feeling yourself naturally
1:39:49 wake up with the dawn and go to sleep when it gets dark and feeling your whole circadian rhythm
1:39:54 attuned to that. What else about it? You know, funny things happen. Like on the one day,
1:40:00 I banged my head. I had a trunk which had dry goods in it, but I banged my hand on the trunk.
1:40:08 I was like, ah, God, you know, damn it. And I flew into a rage. I like I flew into a rage
1:40:15 because it was so painful. And then I realized that with no one else around, I couldn’t maintain
1:40:22 my state of anger. And it’s a really weird thing like sulking, being angry and sulking and moods
1:40:28 and all of that stuff is really for the benefit of other people. It’s really so that other people
1:40:32 can get tuned in to like, what a difficult time you’re having. But when you buy yourself,
1:40:36 they just do not abide because there’s no one around to like stay in the story for.
1:40:43 Well, speaking of mood, part of the reason I’m asking is because I know you and I have both
1:40:49 experienced in life depressive episodes. And I suppose there’s part of me that thinks, man,
1:40:54 40 days is a long time to be alone with the voices in your head. But did you find,
1:40:59 how did you find that experience? Was that even a concern going into it for you?
1:41:02 How did you, if you did think about it, how did you think about that?
1:41:07 No, I mean, certainly a concern. And then there’s also this weird component of time, right? Like
1:41:12 you wake up at four in the morning, you meditate, you go tracking for a few hours, you come back
1:41:18 to the camp, you make some coffee, you run, you do some more reading and journaling, you meditate
1:41:28 again, and it’s 10 15. And you have 39 days to go. So the one thing is that I, you know, I was not
1:41:33 doing like traditional Zen retreat, I allowed myself books. I allowed myself to do daily
1:41:39 recordings of my encounters, like kind of journal entries. And I allowed myself to go
1:41:43 tracking. And so actually, it was incredibly generative for me. And there’s all these like
1:41:47 little problems you have to solve, like you got to keep your camp clean, and then everything gets
1:41:51 wet. And then you got to work out how to build yourself a bit of shelter. And then once you
1:41:55 become more present, it becomes so full of life, like I would make myself this evening shower,
1:42:01 I’d go full some full of big cast iron kettle with water. And then I would warm it on the fire.
1:42:06 And then I would pour this kettle of hot water over myself totally alone, up in the tree. It was
1:42:11 the best shower I’ve ever had. And just it was teaching me presence all the time. And once the
1:42:16 anxiety left, there was a lot of introspection. And I looked at a lot of things, but I actually
1:42:22 didn’t feel myself taken by anxious or depressive demons. The process felt very generative and alive
1:42:28 to me. Yeah, that’s something that I’ve been looking at very, very closely for myself. And I
1:42:34 don’t think I’ve yet perhaps developed the eyes or the awareness to parse it. But the characteristics
1:42:45 or the circumstances that lead to nourishing solitude versus depleting isolation, right? Because
1:42:50 those are very different. For me, those concepts represent very different things, right? Solitude
1:42:56 versus isolation or loneliness. How does it feel for you now? Like if you went, if you went alone
1:43:01 for a week to a cabin now, how does it land on you now? A week I could do. A week I can do. And
1:43:06 I could find that, I think, very restorative. I particularly find it restorative if I am with
1:43:17 Molly, my dog, and have that close connection. Going through wilderness with Molly is particularly
1:43:23 nourishing to me. I can also do it solo. But I find that she and I are so attuned at this point
1:43:29 because we spend almost all of our waking time together, that she’s like my external nervous
1:43:34 systems. She’s almost like an amplifier from my own nervous system. So I’m picking up what I’m
1:43:39 picking up, but I’m also picking up a lot of what she is picking up just by observing her behavior.
1:43:48 And that is very additive for me. And also deep into my relationship, not only with the
1:43:55 surroundings and with myself on some level, but with her. So a week I would take no problem.
1:43:59 I think the six weeks starts to get out to a point where I’m like, I wonder, right? There’s
1:44:04 just a question mark because I haven’t done six weeks solo. That’s a pretty good stretch of time.
1:44:10 Yeah. I mean, I will say that it was largely supplemented by the passion for tracking.
1:44:16 And so your encounter with feeling the presence of Molly there and being in this thing together,
1:44:22 like my feeling is every time I’m tracking, I’m in a new story. Every time I’m out there
1:44:28 following, I’m in a deep encounter and it actually feels like there’s this alive,
1:44:34 sentience awareness. One of the things that I would say is that when I first went out,
1:44:39 I thought that part of what I was doing is I wanted to improve my attunement to nature,
1:44:45 like I wanted to know nature. But one of the most profound experiences out of it was that I started
1:44:51 to feel known by nature. And I know that this maybe veers us off a little bit into the esoteric,
1:44:57 but there was this feeling that there’s this sentient, alive consciousness and somehow
1:45:03 it was feeling me as I was feeling it in a really deep way. And that felt actually,
1:45:10 that felt incredibly supportive and like I was touching something really beautiful and special.
1:45:16 I think there’s a lot to that, but lest we get too far down the rabbit hole into crazy town,
1:45:22 which maybe we’ll do on a round two, definitely do around a campfire in person.
1:45:27 But I think there’s actually a lot there related to what you just said. I do want to
1:45:34 discuss your healing process and this is going to seem like a very strange way to approach it.
1:45:41 Before we get to that, I feel like maybe like ginger and the sushi meal will just give people
1:45:47 a story as a quick refresher slash palate cleanser and then we’ll dig into some heavy
1:45:57 stuff. So are you willing to tell the story about the bees? Oh, absolutely. Well, I guess we bonded
1:46:02 over the story. People ask me a lot, like, what’s the most dangerous encounter you’ve had in nature?
1:46:08 And by this stage of the podcast, you know, a crocodile tried to ingest me and that wasn’t the
1:46:17 worst. But I became fascinated by bees for a few reasons. The one is that one day I was walking
1:46:24 in the wild part of Zimbabwe and I came across this ancient baobab tree, this two-story high
1:46:28 baobab tree and it had been hollowed out when elephant had knocked the branch and it was in
1:46:34 fact empty and a swarm of bees had made their hive in the top of it and the sound of the bees
1:46:39 humming was coming down the base of that tree and it was like standing next to this giant digery dew.
1:46:45 And just the sort of, I could hear the intensity of the bees through this process and I felt their
1:46:50 vibration coming out of this tree and it was, it kind of sparked my interest. There’s also an
1:46:57 amazing thing in Southern Africa. There’s a bird called the honey guide and literally if you go out
1:47:03 in parts of wilderness in Africa and you start banging on trees, a bird will come to you and it
1:47:08 will start to call incredibly animatedly, very much like Disney’s. I think he wants us to follow him
1:47:15 and then it will fly in front of you and show you where the beehive is so that like for thousands
1:47:20 of years before as a hunter-gatherer you can rob the beehive and then you put some honey down next
1:47:24 to you and the bird comes and lands next to you and eats the honey. It’s this incredible ancient,
1:47:29 just an encounter like that, like it just takes you back thousands of years.
1:47:34 Wow. Wait, just for clarity, this is like thousands, tens of thousands who knows,
1:47:43 hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution where this bird has a species memory of a symbiotic
1:47:47 relationship with humanoids. Is that what I’m hearing?
1:47:54 And type of morphogenic field memory that when it sees a person it knows we go and get honey together.
1:47:56 Wow. I mean, isn’t that amazing? That’s cool.
1:47:59 And you walk out to remote places and suddenly the bird’s there and it’s like,
1:48:03 “Come on, let’s do this. Are we going to do this?” And it almost appears to get disappointed
1:48:06 if you’re like, “I’m not going to go and rob the beehive now.” Wow.
1:48:12 So anyway, like I was having the, you know, sort of I was around with this idea and I was like,
1:48:16 “The bees are really fascinating.” And then I started reading up on them and it’s this incredible
1:48:21 creature, right? They pollinate millions of flowers. They’re one of the biggest contributors
1:48:26 from the insect world to the economy, honey sales. They can field electromagnetic fields.
1:48:32 They will disappear if a storm is brewing. And then as you watch the hive itself, this incredible
1:48:40 kind of algorithmic intelligence whereby a single bee, an individual bee, responds to localize stimuli,
1:48:46 doing what it knows to do. And when enough bees, responding to individual localized stimuli,
1:48:51 all start to attune and algorithm fires through the hive and they move as one and they know where
1:48:56 to go and get food, et cetera. So that idea also gripped me, the idea of individuals attuning to
1:49:01 what they know to do can trigger a kind of a collective transformation. So I got really into
1:49:05 this and I went up into the village behind the camp. That’s all the good stuff. All the good stuff.
1:49:10 Yeah, just a little backstory here before my near-death experience. So wait, I should tell you
1:49:16 that during the time that I got fascinated about bees, there was a couple who were coming on safari
1:49:20 and they had been writing to me from Singapore and they were saying, “Listen, we want to come to
1:49:25 Africa, but we’re terrified of Ebola.” And I had said to them, “Listen, Ebola is in North and West
1:49:29 Africa. There’s no Ebola in South Africa. Yeah, but we’re very, very afraid of it. We’re very
1:49:34 concerned that it could travel.” I said, “You really have to trust me. There is no Ebola in
1:49:38 South Africa. You’re going to be absolutely safe.” So they had come on safari. Meantime,
1:49:44 I walk up into the back of the village and I seek out a man by the name of Simon Sambo.
1:49:52 Simon Sambo. He himself has a mellifluous voice,
1:49:57 very soft, lilting voice. And Simon Sambo is the village beekeeper. So I say to him,
1:50:02 “Simon, I’ve got really interested in bees and I know that you have some hives and I would love to
1:50:09 come and experience your beekeeping.” He says, “Okay, there’s no problem. I can take your beekeeping.”
1:50:15 I said, “Great. I’m excited about this.” He says, “You’ll meet me tomorrow in the morning
1:50:22 and we will go and meet the bees.” Great. Next morning, I meet him and he’s got a big sort of
1:50:28 black plastic case and we drive out to the hives and I’m inappropriately dressed. I’m in like shorts
1:50:35 and t-shirt. And I say to him, “What do we do now?” He says, “Okay, the first thing is you must put on
1:50:42 your beekeeping suit.” So he gives me his suit and I put it on and it’s a little bit short for me,
1:50:48 like literally between my sneaker and my ankle, I have some exposure. So I said to him, “Simon,
1:50:54 the suit’s a bit short for me.” Because this was his second suit. He says, “Don’t worry. You can
1:51:00 borrow my socks.” So he takes his boots off and he’s got thick black socks. And so I sort of feel
1:51:05 and I think, “Okay, this is going to be good.” And I put the socks on and I like seal up the suit
1:51:12 and I say to him, “Cool, Simon, let’s get the smoker going now.” He says, “Oh no, I don’t use the smoker.
1:51:17 It makes the bees afraid of a fire.” So like a little bell goes off in my head. I’m like,
1:51:23 “But beekeepers all over the world use the smoker.” He says, “It’s not my style.” I’m like, “Okay,
1:51:29 I’m here to learn.” And so Simon and I start heading towards the hives and I’m talking African
1:51:37 bees here. Now, some amazing thing happens as you approach the hive. If you just walk past the hive
1:51:43 with no intention of doing anything, the bees somehow know it. But the minute you put your
1:51:49 intention and attention on them, I don’t know how it’s maybe too woo, but I’m telling you they
1:51:55 feel it. And as you start walking towards the hive, they start changing gears like they’re at the
1:52:05 Austin F1 track. You hear the sound changing. So we get up next to the hive and Simon gets
1:52:13 out his crowbar and he cranks the lid off and 70,000 of the most enraged African bees rise up in a
1:52:19 black cloud around me. And they’re shimmering around me and you can feel the intensity and you
1:52:26 can feel their attitude of, “Oh, you think you can fuck with us.” And they’re all around you and
1:52:30 they start to land on you. And you know, someone who’s grown up around animals, I feel the energy
1:52:36 of a single angry aggressive animal. And they’re all over me and I say, “Simon, this is quite intense.”
1:52:42 He says, “Don’t worry, everything’s okay.” And they start landing on the visor and like blocking
1:52:48 the visor out and it’s super intense. And right at that moment in the midst of this like raw buzzing
1:52:59 intensity, one bee found my weak sock area and it stung me through the sock. And the minute
1:53:05 as that sting went through the sock, a huge pheromonal cascade was released to the other bees
1:53:12 and the shimmering, swarming, dark mass around my head. It stopped for a second and then as one,
1:53:19 the bees went to my ankles. And they begin to sting me intensely through the socks. The socks
1:53:23 do not work. So I think, “Simon, Simon, they’re stinging me. Simon, Simon, they’re stinging me.
1:53:29 What must I do? What must I do?” He says, “Okay, back away.” And they start following me and then
1:53:33 I’m being stung hundreds of times. And then at one stage, I look up and there’s a bee that has,
1:53:38 it’s inside the suit. So if I get into the clearing and I have a swarm of bees around me,
1:53:41 they are still penetrating the sock badly. I say, “Simon, what must I do? What must I do?”
1:53:48 He says, “Hold on, I will help you.” And he runs over and he cuts a large branch of a tree.
1:53:53 And then he runs back and he starts beating me with the branch. And I’m standing in the clearing,
1:53:56 getting pounded with the branch. And they’re still stinging me. They’re still all around me.
1:54:02 I say, “Simon, it’s not working. It’s not working.” He says, “Okay, I will get the smoker going.”
1:54:07 And I just, the thought ran to my head like, “Little late for that.” And he grabbed the smoke.
1:54:11 He starts putting elephant dung in it. And then he gets it going and he comes over to me and he
1:54:17 starts blasting me with the smoker. And the first blast went right through the visor of the beekeeping
1:54:22 suit and kind of into my mouth. And so I got a big inhale of elephant dung. And then my mind
1:54:27 and my chest immediately tightened up. I started thinking, “Shit, my whole body is going into
1:54:32 anaphylaxis. Is it elephant dung or is it anaphylaxis?” And they’re still stinging me. And it’s bad.
1:54:35 I said, “Simon, they’re still stinging me. They’re still stinging me.” He says, “Okay,
1:54:43 run for your life.” And this is when two men in beekeeping suits break into a full run
1:54:47 through the wilderness. And we just start running aimlessly at first. And then he says,
1:54:54 “They will chase you forever. Make for the Land Rover.” So we run to the Land Rover and we jump into
1:55:01 it. And he just says, “Drive, drive, drive. They are enraged.” And start driving off into the
1:55:08 wilderness. True as nuts, we come around the first corner and on the other safari truck driving
1:55:13 towards us is the couple from Singapore who’ve been afraid of Ebola. And they see, what they see
1:55:20 is the Ebola cleanup crew in full white suits driving towards them at full speed going, “You’re
1:55:28 gonna die. You’re gonna die. Drive, drive, drive.” And that was my first encounter with the bee. So
1:55:34 eventually I make it back to the house. And I remember I got into my bedroom and I sat on the
1:55:40 bed and I was just trying to feel my own body. And I was like, “Am I dying? Am I dying? Am I okay?
1:55:46 Like, is it kicking in?” And I got into the shower and I like took all the stings out of my ankles
1:55:54 and I made it back onto my bed. And that was me for the next five days. I did not move. My feet
1:56:01 looked like someone had taken surgical gloves and just blown them off. And Simon and Simon would
1:56:07 come around and he would say, “Hey, boy. How are you doing today?” He said, “Not good.” He said,
1:56:10 “I bought some ice for your feet. Next time we will get you boots.”
1:56:19 But you know, I sat with it and what I took out of it was, number one, what the bees taught me
1:56:26 is if you want to know about the bees, respect the bees. And the next thing that I got was,
1:56:33 I became intrigued by the power of this collective ability to fire the collective
1:56:38 consciousness algorithm. Like, what would it mean if we all started really attending to states of
1:56:44 peace and healing and well-being? And if enough of us did that, could we, like the bees, you know,
1:56:49 create some kind of algorithmic transformation for everyone? Yeah, we’re sticking a lot out of
1:56:55 that shit out of some invaders ankles. Intensity. They taught me so much about intensity. I think
1:57:01 that’s what I learned from Independence Day. If we have aliens invade, that’s a great way for us
1:57:05 to activate our high of mind, to sting the shit out of someone’s ankles. Get the bees on them.
1:57:11 All right. Well, the segue back to what I mentioned earlier is going to be a little awkward.
1:57:18 Let me find an in-between course to get us there that’ll maybe lead us back in some odd way.
1:57:27 Could you speak to the moment when a lion notices you and then what happens at that point?
1:57:31 How does an encounter like that unfold? Well, again, you know, I want to come back
1:57:35 to that idea of the minute a lion becomes aware of you and you become aware of it,
1:57:40 you are in a language dialogue and it is a language of energy and presence. Now,
1:57:45 there’s usually one of two things that will happen. Either the lion will get up and this is
1:57:52 99% of the encounters. The lion’s natural instinct is to get away from you. Remember,
1:57:57 people hunted lions for hundreds of years on the plains and actually one of the primary ways that
1:58:02 hunter-gatherers got food and a lot of people don’t know this is they tracked lions and then
1:58:07 they would rob them of their kills. And so lions have a long history of being chased by humans.
1:58:11 So normally it’ll go away from you. However, that doesn’t always happen.
1:58:16 Particularly if a lioness has cubs or if they have meat, they can be aggressive.
1:58:21 Now, normally what will happen is the first thing that you will notice is the animal’s
1:58:27 body will tighten. They’ll drop their head and the tail starts to flick intensely and they start
1:58:34 to warning Gral at you. And it sounds like the Gral is so intense, it sounds like someone started
1:58:39 a dirt bike in the bush up ahead of you. And then if it’s a lioness and she’s got cubs,
1:58:44 she’ll stand up and still with her head low and her ears back and the tail lashing,
1:58:50 she slowly starts to walk towards you and she fixes you with a gaze of utter intensity.
1:58:57 And the minute she has you in that gaze, your only option is you have to stand your ground
1:59:02 and you have to communicate an intense presence back to her. So when that happens to me, if I
1:59:08 feel myself starting to come into an encounter where we’re going to have a more aggressive energetic
1:59:11 conversation with each other. And may I just interject for one second to say when you don’t
1:59:16 have clients, true or false, you guys will often go out with just walking sticks.
1:59:21 Yeah, no rifles without clients. Okay, please continue.
1:59:28 We will, what we most believe in is being in this dialogue. And so if that happens,
1:59:35 the first thing that you do is you breathe out a long outbreath because everything in your system
1:59:39 is starting to jack up because the feeling of it is like, I mean, you can feel your whole system
1:59:45 flush with adrenaline. So you breathe out, you anchor yourself. And then you understand that
1:59:49 that lion is trying to communicate with you. She walks towards you intensely,
1:59:55 intensely. And then she’ll growl. And with that, she charges. And then she runs at you
2:00:01 at full speed. And it is in, it’s so fast, snarling, full gums revealed, teeth revealed,
2:00:06 and she comes in. And then you stand your ground and you look directly in the eyes.
2:00:13 And mostly what will happen is she’ll stop some distance from you. As she stops,
2:00:17 you hold her in your energy and you almost aggressive back to her. And you’re showing
2:00:23 that like, I’m dangerous too. And then the minute you see her energy drop a little bit,
2:00:27 because all that she’s doing is she’s trying to anchor you so that the cubs can run away.
2:00:30 The minute you see her energy drop a little bit, you just start dropping away. And you give her,
2:00:36 still facing her, you step back, you give her space. And very quickly you start communicating to her
2:00:40 that we know we’ve come too close, but we’re going to give you space now. But you can only do that
2:00:46 once she has stopped coming at you. If you watch her very intensely and Renia is really the master
2:00:51 of this, as you watch her closely, a slight drop in energy and he’ll move backwards a little bit.
2:00:56 And then you get out of the situation and you just find yourself giggling stupidly
2:01:00 and doing all the weird things that happen after high tense situations.
2:01:06 So you said most of the time they stop some distance from you. So what’s the alternate scenario?
2:01:12 If you’re in the alternate scenario, you’ve got something very, very wrong.
2:01:18 And the reason that you get into the alternate scenario is that you get it wrong in the moment.
2:01:22 You see, as that charge starts happening, you’re in the dialogue and your presence
2:01:26 is absolutely critical in your ability to project an energetic presence and meet her.
2:01:29 And then to quickly help her understand that you’re not afraid of her,
2:01:33 you’re dangerous, but you’re also going to give way. And when people get killed,
2:01:37 it’s because they get that wrong. They fall over, their nerve breaks and they want to run
2:01:40 or they get scared and they start running immediately. That’s when dangerous things happen.
2:01:45 You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever come across this book, but it’s one of my favorite
2:01:51 nonfiction books of the last 10 years, which is saying a lot for me because I do read a lot of
2:01:56 books and they already have cleared hurdles, right? I’m not just reading whatever I like randomly
2:02:00 pick off of Amazon. I’m getting books that are usually recommended by two or three people first
2:02:05 in a book called of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, who’s won a lot of awards. He’s best known for a
2:02:13 book called Arctic Dreams, but of Wolves and Men, he talks about the conversation between
2:02:19 predator and prey as the conversation of death. And he went out with field biologists and also with
2:02:30 Inuit and Native Americans in North America at various points and observed different hunts
2:02:37 and also heard stories from both groups about this conversation of death. So people listening
2:02:42 might think, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense. A lion is a predator. They can easily overtake you.
2:02:47 Why wouldn’t they attack you?” But time and time again, the conversation of death wouldn’t always
2:02:53 end in death. Sometimes a perfectly capable, say, pack of wolves would pursue a caribou or an elk
2:02:58 or something. And then at one point, the elk or the caribou do an about face, stand off with the
2:03:02 wolves, and then they would just part ways. They’d just walk in opposite directions. And it seems to
2:03:08 defy explanation, but it does happen. And I found that entire segment of the book, it comes up a
2:03:14 number of times, but talking about the nuances in this conversation of death and how these animals
2:03:21 interface, there seems to be some communication. And sometimes it ends in death. And other times,
2:03:26 it just ends in both parties deciding like, “Okay, another day.” And then they just
2:03:33 go in different directions. It’s something I don’t have any real understanding of, but I find
2:03:39 endlessly fascinating. So it’s something that you’ve had more firsthand experience with, I suppose.
2:03:45 I mean, there’s just a knowledge out there that is… And if you actually talk to any people,
2:03:52 biologists feel, the more time you spend in nature, the more you’ll realize how little we know. There
2:03:56 is subtlety and nuance, and there is things happening out there that is way beyond our
2:04:00 understanding. Yeah. Yeah, there’s another example. I think it’s in of wolves and men,
2:04:08 but talking about how their recorded instances of wolf packs that are being tracked, presumably
2:04:13 with radio collars, but maybe with flyovers or something like that prior to the satellite collars,
2:04:20 because this book was written in the ’70s, that at some point, for no discernible cause,
2:04:27 no stimuli that can be identified will just pick up and all head off in a very precise direction
2:04:32 in a more or less straight line. And then four days later, they intersect perfectly with a
2:04:37 caribou herd that happens to be migrating, but started at roughly the same time, moving in a
2:04:44 different direction. And the two vectors intersect and say, “Okay, that seems interesting. I don’t
2:04:49 know how to explain that exactly.” But these types of phenomena that get observed over and over again
2:04:55 and also not to take us too far afield, but these so-called, and in some cases, they’re
2:05:02 certainly mythologies, but mythologies about, for instance, in the case of some North American
2:05:08 Indians, the collaboration between Coyote and Badger. So the joining forces of Coyote and Badger,
2:05:14 which for a long time was thought to be this quaint fairytale. And then during quarantine,
2:05:20 this is now about a year, year and a half ago, there was some type of trail cam footage that was
2:05:26 released that showed like a Coyote playing with a Badger like a dog would, like wagging its tail
2:05:32 and jumping around and then them leading off through a tunnel on basically a hunting party.
2:05:38 There’s just so much we don’t know. It doesn’t surprise me. I mean, even just some of the stuff
2:05:48 around orientation. You watch a female leopard walk five or six kilometers, leave her cub,
2:05:55 walk five or six kilometers, then hunt in thick terrain, walking circles, moving in an irregular
2:06:01 way, catching impala, hoisted in a tree, and walk a direct line back to where her cub was,
2:06:07 which by anyone’s standards would just be an incredible piece of navigation. But
2:06:11 she doesn’t have a verbal mind or a rational mind, but somehow through all of that
2:06:16 circuitous movement, she knows where she left the cub in a more instinctual way almost.
2:06:23 And then you find this in native people too, the capacity for homing, the ability and I’ve
2:06:28 seen it with trackers who’ve come down, Sam trackers who’ve come down from the Kalahari.
2:06:31 They’ve come into the Kruger National Park, a terrain they’ve never been in.
2:06:38 We’ve taken them into the Mopani. Mopani is like an eye-high scrub and we’ve walked for a few hours
2:06:43 in the Mopani. We have a GPS because we know how easy it is to get lost in there. And then
2:06:47 afterwards we’ve said to them, “Okay, take us back to the vehicle.” We’ve got the GPS and they walk on
2:06:53 a B-line directly back to where we left the vehicle. Wow. And it’s just like, what is that?
2:06:58 Yeah, that’s fascinating. It makes me wonder, and I think this might actually be demonstrated,
2:07:04 you know, if we have some magnetic homing capability or navigational ability similar
2:07:09 to hammerhead sharks, there’s footage people can find of marine biologists studying hammerhead
2:07:13 sharks with a baby hammerhead sharks in a aquarium basically, and they have top-down
2:07:21 footage of how the movement changes if they rearrange magnets underneath the encasement.
2:07:26 So many unanswered questions, which is very exciting to me, obviously, because if everything
2:07:30 were discovered, that would be quite depressing in and of itself. Let’s come back to these
2:07:38 traumatic events in your early 20s, 18 to 20s. And then what followed after that? How did your
2:07:45 healing path, and this might seem like a strange way to lead in, but differ from those of your
2:07:50 mom and sister, right? Because they were also presumably traumatized by the home invasion.
2:07:54 If you’re open to speaking to it, you could just speak to your own personal experience,
2:08:03 but I’m curious how different people have approached finding some degree of closure,
2:08:07 resolution, healing after an experience like that. Well, I think for one thing, there was
2:08:12 a masculine feminine component to that. They did a lot more post-traumatic counseling at the time,
2:08:17 and I wasn’t open to that. I thought, you know, the way that I’d grown up, I thought, like,
2:08:23 I’m just going to get on with it and move forward, which is, you know, a naive approach to say the
2:08:30 least. And then there was also a challenge that I had where, in the masculine, it was harder just
2:08:40 to process feelings. What I needed was a path that I felt was taking me somewhere. And so where
2:08:46 that really took root for me is when I started to understand that if I was willing to look at
2:08:51 how I’d become frozen, if I was willing to look at how I was anxious and depressed as a result of
2:08:58 that, and how that kind of shut me out from living, if I was able to start living towards that,
2:09:06 it actually gave me a kind of map out of trauma. You know, someone trauma healed becomes a kind
2:09:11 of medicine. And so it was only really when I started to understand that there was value to this
2:09:15 just beyond myself. And in fact, if I became someone who learned how to be in a transformational
2:09:20 process and learned how to heal, it was actually taking me towards what I was meant to do in some
2:09:26 very important way. And somehow that structure of meaning had to take root in me before I was
2:09:33 really able to dive into healing spaces and be open to that type of work. It was different for
2:09:38 my mother and sister. They were able to, in a more feminine way, allow that process earlier. For me,
2:09:44 there had to be a structure of meaning that allowed me to engage in healing and be soft enough and to
2:09:49 learn to soften and to learn to open and to learn to let myself actually feel what was there and the
2:09:56 fear that was there and the uncertainty that was there. And also a feeling that I didn’t know what
2:10:02 I really wanted to do. I had a family legacy in conservation. You know, I had a safari business
2:10:07 that I could come into, but I didn’t want to just run safaris. I knew there was something else for me
2:10:10 and I had to go on that journey to find out what that was.
2:10:16 When you say structure of meaning, could you elaborate on what that means? It might seem
2:10:22 a little recursive as a question, but how did you find that structure of meaning that you needed to
2:10:29 move forth with contending with what had happened? What I mean by that is, if you’ve had a traumatic
2:10:36 encounter in the way that I understand it, it’s like a part of you becomes frozen and almost
2:10:42 inevitably where there’s been trauma, there is a reduction of options, which means I have less
2:10:47 choices and that gets laid down. So life starts to become limited and there’s less access to
2:10:51 different choices. A healthy person could say, “Here’s a way of handling this. Here’s a different
2:10:55 way of handling it.” A traumatized person has one way of handling it, retreat and isolate,
2:11:03 for example. And then I was lucky to have Martha and she started to expose me to how a healing
2:11:09 process works. And then very soon after that, I found ceremony work. Just for context for people
2:11:14 listening, could you define ceremony work? There are obviously many different ways of being in
2:11:24 ceremony. You might say that AA is a ceremony space all the way to sweat lodge spaces, all the way to
2:11:32 gatherings using plant medicines. There’s just an array. I found myself in spaces using plant medicines
2:11:38 that were very well guided. So the first part of the journey for me was actually acknowledging
2:11:45 that I was frozen. So there was building awareness around how I’d become frozen and then in ceremony
2:11:50 watching, drinking the medicine, being with people who were in a healing energetic and then watching
2:11:59 how that affected my life, getting to know how I was when I was frozen, then making peace with that
2:12:04 as opposed to thinking there was something wrong with me. That was a big movement, being like,
2:12:10 this has happened. This is where I’m at. And that’s okay. Then starting to give myself different
2:12:16 options. So instead of just being isolated and frozen, starting to actually be able to share
2:12:21 the things that I was ashamed of in some ways, I was ashamed that I hadn’t been able to protect my
2:12:28 parents, my sister and my mother. And I was ashamed that I had let bad guys in the house. I was the
2:12:32 man of the house, all these things I was able to start to be able to share these things that I was
2:12:40 ashamed of. And I was able to talk to how disempowered I had felt and unable to do what I needed
2:12:44 to do. And so I started to generate awareness out of that. And then I started to realize that
2:12:50 in sharing that, it actually opened me to deeper connection as opposed to what I thought it would
2:12:56 do, which would shut me out and shun me. And then I started to, because I was well guided,
2:13:01 I started to generate a narrative that was supported. And what I mean by that is like the
2:13:07 guide started to help me generate a narrative of the things that have happened to me can actually
2:13:13 be fodder for growth and learning. And that became really important. And then it actually became,
2:13:18 you know, I have some gifts in this. And if I can find those gifts and share them, that’s probably
2:13:24 the most healing thing I can do. And so I was in that process for a long time. And at a certain
2:13:29 point in it, I started to realize, in fact, this is taking me to my work. And that’s when I started
2:13:35 to see the tracker differently. And I started to really understand how a transformational process
2:13:42 is an intricate unfolding. And as a guide, you can support it as a storyteller, you can support
2:13:47 it with presence, you can support it by just listening, you can support it by creating spaces
2:13:52 that people can actually be open in. And you can actually start to know the way certain trauma
2:13:58 patterns work and help people develop awareness and different outcomes for themselves. And so
2:14:03 my healing was actually about finding the purpose to help healing come into the world,
2:14:08 if that makes sense. It does make sense. And I wish at some point, I’ll show you all the
2:14:13 highlights and underlying sections in your book. And I think I might have shown you
2:14:18 a photograph of the index that I created just for the highlights at the front of the book.
2:14:22 But one of the lines, this is on page 122 of the Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life is,
2:14:26 “In these times, an authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism.” Right? And then
2:14:34 you go on to explain why that’s the case. And I think about this a lot. And you actually had
2:14:42 another quote way earlier. Let’s see if I can find it from Saint Francis of Assisi. Oh, man,
2:14:45 I wish I could find this because it ties into it right.
2:14:50 “Wherever you go, spread the gospel. When absolutely necessary, use words.”
2:14:57 Exactly. So don’t we always, more people would follow that advice. And then perhaps advice
2:15:01 we should give ourselves as often or perhaps more often than we give it to anybody else.
2:15:12 And I think this is critical to highlight in the sense that in this day and age, in these times,
2:15:20 yelling and screaming on the internet and shaming other people or tearing other people down can
2:15:30 be mistaken for something constructive or activism. But in reality, a very powerful form of activism
2:15:35 is being the example that you want to see more of in the world and holding yourself accountable
2:15:40 in that way, which is not easy. It’s really hard oftentimes to do that. And I know both of us have
2:15:45 had tremendous struggles of different types, although I think they share a lot of common
2:15:55 DNA. And a lot of this seems to come down to stress testing beliefs, if that makes sense.
2:16:01 If a component of yourself along the lines of IFS or internal family systems, if people are
2:16:05 interested in that, they can certainly look that up. I did an interview with Richard Swartz,
2:16:10 the founder. But if a component of your personality or psyche is frozen in time
2:16:16 and compartmentalized, and when you are put in circumstances that activate that part of yourself,
2:16:21 you get tunnel vision with options. And maybe you have one option or maybe you have two options.
2:16:29 You can often reduce that down to a belief, a statement of some type. And I’m bringing this up
2:16:38 because I would love to hear how Byron Cady’s workshops have been helpful or not helpful
2:16:43 for you, because I know this is something we’ve spoken about. And if they have been helpful,
2:16:46 what specific worksheets have been helpful for you?
2:16:51 Can I talk for a moment to the activism thing and then come back to Byron Cady?
2:16:53 You are allowed, sir. The stage is yours.
2:16:59 One thing on the activism thing, and I would say it like this, and Tim, you’ve been on a healing
2:17:09 journey. What I notice is that a person who heals has a natural inclination to want to be of service.
2:17:13 And especially if you’ve had people who’ve supported you along the way, and that’s not to say
2:17:19 that I think I know how you should heal, but there’s just this desire as someone who heals to
2:17:23 support the healing impulse and be there. And you know that there were moments in your own journey
2:17:28 that were very powerful for you. And it’s almost just like innate when you get in touch with that
2:17:33 to want to do that for other people and support that. The way that I think about this is if you
2:17:39 can give yourself a transformational process and you go on a journey to discover, you know,
2:17:44 I would call it the track of your life, the place where you feel whole, where you feel like you’re
2:17:49 expressing your essence into the world, the place where you feel just at peace and in tune with
2:17:54 yourself. And it takes time to get to that. And it seems to me that at a certain point in every
2:17:59 lifetime, we get asked like, what’s it about? And it seems to me it’s about that coming to that
2:18:05 place in yourself. But there are some characteristics of people who I see who deeply find that place.
2:18:12 For one, they become inclined towards simplicity. They don’t want a lot of things. A feeling of
2:18:19 enough comes into them and both like I am enough and I have enough. And they stop wanting to consume
2:18:25 more things to feel okay. There’s a natural desire towards service. There seems to be
2:18:30 this like inclination that takes them to be pulled into nature. There’s a desire to be creative
2:18:36 and support other people. And that’s what I mean is that inside of every healing journey and when
2:18:40 someone goes on that journey and finds a deeper place of peace. And it’s of course, it’s a continuous
2:18:45 journey. But it seems to me that those things take root. And that seems to be very important
2:18:50 for the restoration movement in a very individual way. We do our own work to heal and come to
2:18:55 wholeness. But a whole lot of people coming into that state of I have enough. I am enough.
2:19:00 You know, it just changes the desire to consume endlessly. And I think that’s going to be very
2:19:05 good for nature. And so I see this like the restoration movement as both restoring our
2:19:11 relationship to wild places and restoring wild places, but also restoring ourselves coming to
2:19:16 wholeness and healing so that we come out of the illusion that more stuff is going to make us feel
2:19:20 okay and realize it’s already there in us. We need to discover that gift and share it. So that’s a
2:19:29 little talk on how people who discover that just become embodied activists. And then Byron
2:19:33 Katie’s work, I cannot say enough about it. And I know you’ve had a lot of people on the show who
2:19:40 have brought her up. But there is nothing more profound than being able to identify thoughts
2:19:46 that are causing you stress and then have a system to question them. And on a certain point on a
2:19:50 journey, they become absolutely critical because if you are getting touch with this place inside
2:19:56 yourself, and it’s curious, and it knows sort of what it wants to do, and you feel drawn to a
2:20:01 different way of living, inevitably, a number of ideas will come in as to why that’s not possible.
2:20:08 And so I’ve done, you know, hundreds of worksheets now, and you name it, I’ve done
2:20:16 absolutely ridiculous ones. And she says like, you know, I’ve done my mother shouldn’t have
2:20:21 taken my cake away, like literally like that sort of level of stuff, all the way down to
2:20:29 I’m not safe, or I’m not going to live the life that I want to live. When you sit in it as meditation,
2:20:36 and you get to know yourself, and that’s where the process changed for me when I would come up
2:20:39 with a thought like, you know, I’m never going to achieve what I want to achieve.
2:20:45 When I actually sat, like she says to do in meditation and ask the question,
2:20:50 who am I when I believe that thought? And I started to watch.
2:20:59 I feel frustrated. I feel let down. I don’t have confidence in myself.
2:21:05 I feel like I’m never doing enough. I feel like I need to do more. I say yes to things that I don’t
2:21:10 really want to do. I’m afraid of missing something. And when I sat in that and got to know myself there,
2:21:18 and then who would I be without the thought? I would be relaxed. I would be open. I would be
2:21:26 really feeling for what’s a yes and a no for me. I would be listening. I would be grateful for
2:21:33 where I already am. I would be thankful for what I have. And so for me, I did the work for a long
2:21:39 time before realizing it was meditation in which I was getting to know myself as someone who believed
2:21:43 a thought and someone who didn’t believe the thought. And only when I really understood it
2:21:49 to be meditation, and I could sit and watch myself like that, did I feel a compassion of getting to
2:21:54 know myself when I believe a thought and when I don’t believe a thought and how powerful that
2:22:00 is. And that’s when the work really took for me. And people can find out more about this at thework.com.
2:22:06 It’s not a panacea, of course, in KDA. She goes by Katie, right? Or people call her Katie, instead
2:22:15 of Byron, is a very unusual woman, a unique woman. I mean, I’ll give you a Katie story. The first
2:22:20 time I ever met her, I was sitting at a conference that she was talking at, and I happened to be
2:22:25 sitting in the second row. She sat down next to me. She looked at me. She put her hand out.
2:22:31 I took her hand, and we held hands for an hour while other people talked. And then she turned
2:22:35 and looked at me and she said, “I liked holding your hand.” And then she left for the stage.
2:22:40 Like that was like my first, and that’s Katie, like totally connected, totally wild, and you
2:22:45 don’t know what’s going to happen. Right. So I suppose I’m saying this all as a caveat that
2:22:51 if you watch videos, which I think are worth watching, but you may think, “Who is this alien?
2:22:59 Get me out of here.” But I would also suggest that it’s worth investigating the worksheets I have
2:23:06 found tremendously valuable for myself. If a belief is a thought we take to be true,
2:23:14 having an actual worksheet and structure for stress testing that belief, right? In the way
2:23:19 that you just described, and then also doing turnarounds where if, for instance, just as one
2:23:24 example, if your statement is, “I am not safe,” having a statement, “I am safe,” and then being
2:23:32 forced to come up with examples or evidence that you list out that you are safe. And it is incredibly
2:23:42 practical and powerful for diffusing the emotional boiling point, the sort of entropy and red line
2:23:47 emotional state that then puts you into this thought loop where you create this selective
2:23:51 attention, where you only see evidence for whatever this belief is that you hold. So
2:23:58 yeah, I highly recommend people check that out. I want to ask you about something that I don’t
2:24:04 know about, which is true for a lot of this and a lot of the follow-up questions. The sweat lodge
2:24:10 in Arizona, does this cue anything for you? That was my first medicine encounter. All right.
2:24:16 Please say more. And so it happened really early on. I had just been through those two traumatic
2:24:25 encounters, and I was severely unsure of what I was meant to be doing. And I was staying in
2:24:32 Arizona with Martha, and another woman who was apprenticing with her, who was a horse whisperer
2:24:40 by the name of Coelle Simpson, she had ties to the Navajo community, and she invited me to attend
2:24:46 to a sweat. And so I was, you know, I’d never been exposed to that before, so I was really interested.
2:24:53 And so we went to the sweat and we ended up on a kind of a church ground on the outskirts of Phoenix,
2:24:57 and it was one of those classic encounters of like, what do they say, like first the enlightenment,
2:25:02 and then the laundry type thing. It was like, I knew that it was a very big kind of experience I
2:25:06 was about to have. It was a spiritual encounter. There was a medicine man coming in, but we were
2:25:12 also in kind of this like abandoned churchyard. And then like, the medicine man arrived and he
2:25:17 had just like left his job on a Friday afternoon in construction. And so I was like trying to catch
2:25:21 up a little bit with it. But the minute the ceremony started, I started to feel the energy.
2:25:28 And we went into the sweat lodge, we drank the medicine. So in this case, just could you describe
2:25:33 for people like how tall is the sweat lodge? How many people? It’s presumably completely dark. I mean,
2:25:40 once the door closes. Short, like classic Hogan with blankets over it, you’ve got a crouch to get
2:25:47 into it. Fire area in the middle where the stones come, huge fire outside where the guys are really
2:25:53 heating up the rocks. And then over the course of about five hours, the stones just keep coming in
2:25:58 and the heat just keeps building and people start to sing and we were joined by various other people
2:26:05 who had come to the ceremony. And it was all native people and myself and Koel and everyone
2:26:10 started singing and the energy started to build and then more heat and then more singing and then
2:26:17 drum and then more heat and it just keeps on building and then people started to let go of
2:26:21 things that they were holding. And so people started to scream and people started to cry and
2:26:26 the music builds and the singing builds and you can almost feel like the energy is like conjuring
2:26:30 more and more energy. It’s like building on itself and it’s getting super intense.
2:26:36 And eventually the heat was getting too hot for me and I could feel like I’d been told like don’t
2:26:41 leave the sweat lodge but I’m like this is too much. And then the meds and then the singing
2:26:46 and suddenly I found myself in this kind of slideshow and my eyes were closed to him but I saw
2:26:54 the gun in my face. I saw my sister tied up. I saw the crocodile just break the surface of the water.
2:27:00 I saw all of these images and the gun to being taken outside kneeling down being told you’re
2:27:04 going to be killed the words and we’re going to kill you. We’re going to kill you. It all just
2:27:11 ran through my mind and with vivid, vivid imagery and then eventually it got to the point where it
2:27:16 was almost too much and I just started throwing up and as I started throwing up the entire imagery
2:27:23 changed and suddenly I was in the vision. I was back home in South Africa and I was sitting in
2:27:30 a clearing in the late afternoon light and walking across the clearing towards me came the mother
2:27:35 leopard and she walked through the the short grass and she walked directly up to me in the
2:27:41 vision and she just bumped me as she walked past me and in the instant that she bumped me
2:27:50 something in me understood that my own healing and the healing of nature and the healing of the
2:27:56 land was somehow connected and that’s why all I’ve ever done now is try and tell stories from
2:28:01 this place of nature has so much to teach us if we can attune to it and then I passed out.
2:28:07 Are you passed out in the sweat? I passed out in the sweat and there was like this vibrational
2:28:11 quality to it. I know you have some experience with these medicines but it was almost like I could
2:28:17 feel the humming of the earth and then eventually I came to and I was outside the sweat and I was
2:28:22 lying in a pile of leaves that someone had raked up earlier in the day but I was like in the leaves
2:28:27 and I could feel the earth and I could feel like the leaves all around me and I looked up and this
2:28:33 Navajo medicine man was pouring water up and down my spine and I was disorientated and I said to him
2:28:39 I think I’m dying I think I’m dying and he kneeled down and he put his mouth right to my ear and he
2:28:47 said no brother you’re just being born and I was like and it was weird and I said but I don’t
2:28:52 understand what’s happening and he said you’ll only understand in the next few weeks and he was
2:28:58 right like it took a long time to integrate that but that was really the beginning of my understanding
2:29:04 that the restoration of our relationship with the natural world can begin inside each one of us
2:29:08 as each one of us heals we create an opportunity to create a different relationship with the natural
2:29:15 world and it’s somehow that imagery spoke to the freezing the trauma that we all go through and the
2:29:22 opportunity to awaken back to our nature what did you find unfolded stuck didn’t stick for you over
2:29:30 the subsequent weeks you know that voice stayed with me that whisper you’re just being born because
2:29:36 I felt newborn and I know that you know you probably know this place and many of your listeners who’ve
2:29:42 had psychedelic experiences will know there can be the sense of being new and almost baby like
2:29:50 sensitized again you’re feeling again you feel attuned again you can feel people’s emotions
2:29:54 and for me it was just that like I was feeling again after that experience and all of the armor
2:30:00 that I had put on had come off and I was able to slowly start I felt other people’s pain I felt
2:30:05 other people’s sadness I felt my own and I did feel like brand new inside of that and it wasn’t
2:30:11 altogether comfortable but at least I felt back in some ways in fact it felt incredibly uncomfortable
2:30:20 but I knew that it was better than where I was you know recently spending time with a expedition
2:30:26 guide who’s spent all sorts of time and on Everest and Denali and K2 really fantastic guy and his
2:30:34 name is Eli and we happen to see the solar eclipse together this is a few weeks ago it’s first time
2:30:37 I’d ever seen a solar eclipse and I think it was the first time he’d ever seen a solar eclipse and
2:30:43 I asked him how it was for him and he said you know I went up to some of my friends here at camp
2:30:49 and I said that I’m like I’m not sure what this is it’s like I’m wetting my pants but it’s in my
2:30:56 chest I think they might be feelings just warm feeling in my chest I don’t know it’s like I’m
2:31:02 peeing my pants in my chest they might just be feelings so yes it’s so funny because I had this
2:31:14 buddy of mine who’s a navy seal and he says to me so I recently met this dog named butters and I
2:31:18 find myself thinking about butters and he’s a friend of mine’s dog and I go out and I think about
2:31:22 butters and I’m always worried about butters and I take butters treats and I go over there I always
2:31:30 want to check on butters and what do you make of that I think that’s called love and he’s like
2:31:34 yeah I always feel butters right here in my chest I think you’re I think you’re having the experience
2:31:41 of loving butters and he was like this is outrageous yeah sometimes sometimes we have to
2:31:49 build the vocabulary learn the ABCs or just like rebuild them reactivate them leopard in the fire
2:31:54 this is another cue and just for people who are wondering what the hell I’m doing with these cues
2:32:00 sometimes I will ask people or I’ll ask my research team to give me cues for stories that they think
2:32:06 will be fun or productive or profound or interesting to explore but I don’t want to
2:32:11 know them in advance because otherwise conversation is less fun for me so leopard in the fire what
2:32:18 does leopard in the fire refer to leopard in the fire occurred there’s kind of two parts to the
2:32:25 story the first is that when I was very young I heard a story around a campfire that like stuck
2:32:32 inside of me and it was a story about a man by the name of Lawrence Funderpost and Funderpost you
2:32:36 may have come across some of his work but he was a tremendous poet and an artist and he had one of
2:32:42 those miraculous lives he was a philosopher really but Funderpost grew up on a farm in South
2:32:47 Africa he was very connected to the native people he learned to track when he was young and then he
2:32:52 ended up going to fight in the Second World War and in fact in the Second World War he was eventually
2:32:58 taken prisoner he was in a prisoner of war camp and the story as I heard it was that he returned
2:33:04 to South Africa after the war and he really wanted to go and see his family but he felt
2:33:09 he couldn’t face them after the things that he had seen and that he had done
2:33:14 and so instead of going to see his family he decided that he would go alone into the Kruger
2:33:20 National Park very near where I grew up so he packed up his gear and he walked out into the
2:33:28 reserve and he set up this little camp and this was of course before the days of diagnosis is
2:33:34 like PTSD and the story goes on the very first night he was sitting at the base of a marula tree
2:33:40 next to the small waterhole and I can imagine after the war the stillness he must have felt and
2:33:46 somewhere nearby a hyenas started calling whoo whoo whoo and then a nightjar would have called
2:33:50 somewhere you know dear lord deliver us and I think of him sitting there in that stillness
2:33:57 after the war and on the other side of the waterhole a kudu started to come towards the waterhole to
2:34:04 drink and a kudu is like a large antelope oh this beautiful regal animal and it moves with
2:34:09 this incredible elegance and the kudu walked to the edge of the waterhole and then with these huge
2:34:15 ears its ears listened and you can actually see the ears moving like satellite dishes as they listen
2:34:20 and it scanned the terrain all around and then very slowly it put its lips down and it started to
2:34:26 drink and just as it started to drink a breeze touched fundipost back and it blew his scent over
2:34:32 the waterhole and straight into the nostrils of the kudu and it put its head up and it looked
2:34:40 directly at him and for a moment their eyes met and fundipost said that in that moment in the
2:34:45 stillness of that gaze he felt a kind of innocence come back into him after all he had seen and all
2:34:51 he had done in the war and instantly in that moment he knew he was able to go and see his family again
2:34:56 wow and as a young kid I think I was maybe eight or nine when I was sitting around the fire and I
2:35:04 first heard the story and I I didn’t even know why but it struck something in me and years later
2:35:10 after the crocodile Soli and I had been sitting around the fire we’d been talking a lot and I
2:35:15 was recovering and that the experience of being attacked by the crocodile was profound because
2:35:20 really it had brought me closer to Soli and I had learned so much about how he saw the world and his
2:35:26 worldview was starting to come into me a more relational way of relating to nature and to other
2:35:31 people but still I felt myself incredibly anxious and frozen I literally felt like I had this shake
2:35:36 in my body and I couldn’t get it out like I would look at my hand and my hand would be shaking I
2:35:42 would wake up at night I had pretty severe PTSD and into the teeth of this a fire broke out on
2:35:46 the reserve and I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a big bushfire but the first thing you notice
2:35:53 about a bushfire is just the I have not is the intensity of the sound it sounds like it hisses
2:35:59 and crackles up ahead of you the smoke drifts across the sun and it bathes everything in this
2:36:04 eerie orange light and then insects that are escaping the blaze start flying up and what you
2:36:09 get is an aura of hawks and eagles hawking insects out the sky you feel the ground start to shake
2:36:15 if you go out to fight it and you look to your right and out of the smoke comes a rhino and
2:36:22 it books past you snakes escaping the fire coming past you and in this instant Tim with PTSD I was
2:36:28 highly activated and we fought that fire for three days and then eventually on the eve of the third
2:36:34 day the fire had burned through and the crews were still fighting it but I had become isolated
2:36:39 from them I was about a mile or two away from them and I was in an area that the fire had already
2:36:44 burned through and night was starting to fall and I could see the crews on the horizon in the distance
2:36:49 and I could still see the fire was lighting the sky in this big orange blaze and in fact the area
2:36:54 that I was in the smoke was still hanging on the ground all around me and in the darkness to my
2:37:02 right I heard a sound like someone cutting a two by four and immediately I knew that there was a
2:37:08 leopard in the darkness to the right of me and so I turned to look and walking out of the darkness
2:37:15 into the faint light that the fire was throwing came this male leopard and he was walking directly
2:37:19 towards me which is extremely one it was strange that he was in an area where there’d been a fire
2:37:26 and two it was strange that he was walking directly towards me and when I saw him and I looked at him
2:37:31 and he became aware that I was aware of him no aggression came into his body he didn’t drop his
2:37:36 head he didn’t tighten his shoulders he just continued to walk towards me and I in fact dropped
2:37:41 down onto my haunches and part of what I wanted to do is he wasn’t being aggressive so I dropped
2:37:46 down because I wanted to give myself the space to escalate if he became aggressive I would stand up
2:37:51 and if he became more aggressive I could put my arms up I was giving myself room to create more
2:37:57 energy and he continued to move towards me and as I watched him he was walking through the smoke and
2:38:01 the smoke was almost dancing around him and his eyes were lit by the fire on the horizon
2:38:08 and his whole coat that beautiful rosette coat was bathed in this beautiful deep orange light
2:38:15 from the fire and he continued to come towards me and as he walked towards me I felt this very
2:38:21 ancient primal energy wake up inside of me and then he stopped when he was about 10 yards away
2:38:24 and he was so close to me that I could hear him breathing
2:38:35 and what it felt like to me is that in that moment it was as if I could feel his body in my body
2:38:41 and I could feel my body almost creating a kind of mimesis to his energy and I felt myself becoming
2:38:49 incredibly alert but incredibly still and there was no thought of the future and there was no
2:38:55 thought of the past there was just an energy circulating between this incredibly beautiful
2:39:02 wild elusive dangerous cat and I and then slowly he turned to look at me and then he walked past
2:39:08 the front of me and in a moment he disappeared into the darkness and as he walked away from me
2:39:16 and I felt into my own body instead of more anxiety and fear and this shake that I had had
2:39:22 I felt this myself in this profound state of stillness and I knew in that moment that that
2:39:28 leopard had helped me understand what happened to funder past and I also knew that I had gone to
2:39:36 a place in myself that I could never have gone to alone that leopard had almost taken me into
2:39:42 a state of stillness and if I think about that ubuntu consciousness that relational consciousness
2:39:47 what soli taught me was that the ubuntu consciousness is activated through action
2:39:52 and what the leopard taught me in that moment and what I think funder past experienced is that
2:39:57 the ubuntu consciousness the relational consciousness is also activated when we in a moment let go
2:40:04 and let someone else take us to a place we couldn’t get to ourselves and or another sentient being
2:40:10 and I think about that a lot as someone who tends to be quite controlling like there comes a point
2:40:16 where I want to let go and go somewhere where I just can’t get to with my own control my own sense
2:40:21 of how it should be my own sense that I know how this should unfold and that leopard just took me
2:40:28 there in a moment and so all through my life I’ve had glimpses of something and I can’t exactly say
2:40:35 what it is but I keep living towards it it’s a beautiful story god just the imagery that conjures
2:40:41 this is really I see it sort of in slow motion almost as if it’s like you know shot on film from
2:40:48 like a francis for a copula film wow it’s really just a striking a striking story and it makes it
2:40:54 makes me think of a few things also you mentioned a horse whisperer earlier and for the last few
2:41:01 years and I’ve been very interested in these natural encounters of course but it’s very
2:41:07 challenging to manufacture those experiences so I’ve also spent time looking at for instance equine
2:41:18 therapy and how horses are used in partnership with patients of different types for therapeutic
2:41:25 purposes and I think it fascinates me as many therapies do that are predominantly nonverbal
2:41:33 I think that we overweight the verbal perhaps and so I spent time I wish I got to remember the name
2:41:40 but a number of equine therapy centers one in Texas and oddly but maybe not oddly I also
2:41:46 learned when I went to a wolf sanctuary and I volunteered there for a period of time
2:41:52 in Colorado and I should explain it’s mission wolf mission wolf.org I recommend people check it out
2:41:59 in the middle of nowhere in Colorado and they are you know effectively a
2:42:06 place of sanctuary for wolves or wolf dogs that cannot be released into the wild right so they’re
2:42:13 not captive wolves per se they’re wolves or wolf dogs often who were raised in captivity under
2:42:20 terrible you know atrocious circumstances and then somehow made their way to mission wolf
2:42:28 there are other examples and there are also you know kind of second generation or third generation
2:42:34 wolves who are very much wild right like arctic wolves and I mean they’re all effectively gray
2:42:39 wolves but come from different areas and therefore have different coats and they’re in really large
2:42:46 enclosures like multi acre enclosures but there are a few who are because of their history prior
2:42:52 to getting to mission wolf are accustomed or not terrified of human beings like they can be near
2:42:57 humans because wolves by instinct don’t want to be anywhere close to humans and if they bark it’s
2:43:02 usually a fear response like a fear bark they’re not like dogs at all in that respect and if they
2:43:07 bark I mean they’ll they’ll stay as far away from you as possible on the opposite side of an enclosure
2:43:14 but when groups come through say school groups or visitors and they have a limited capacity for
2:43:21 visitors which is why I volunteered but when they come in there’s an opportunity in some instances
2:43:25 to meet the ambassador wolves they’re led into an enclosure and then they let a number of these
2:43:34 ambassador wolves in and I heard repeatedly stories of these wolves going directly to whoever was most
2:43:41 internal in a group whoever was most closed off in a group whether that be a child with autism
2:43:48 or a veteran with PTSD and would go right up to them and look straight into their eyes and I heard
2:43:56 this story repeatedly from multiple staff members and much like Fenderpost and your experience but
2:44:04 in this case with a wolf sort of staring directly into the soul of this animal and more importantly
2:44:10 maybe the animal staring directly into you many of those people reporting that it was the first
2:44:20 time they really truly felt seen and I just feel like there’s so much beauty and value in that
2:44:28 it’s something so worthy of exploration and it’s fascinating that it can occur not just from another
2:44:35 human not just from a prey animal like a kudu but also from a predator it’s very or a leopard for
2:44:41 that matter I mean so deeply interesting and begets so many questions I just wanted to mention that
2:44:47 because it was it’s also something you know looked into the eyes of a number of these wolves it’s
2:44:54 it’s very different like the presence not better or worse but just fundamentally different
2:45:01 in a wolf as compared to say that that of a dog they are very different very different creatures
2:45:06 even though the wolf is certainly the progenitor of the dog and I haven’t read it yet but I think
2:45:10 National Geographic had a cover story at one point called From Wolf to Wolf which is one of the best
2:45:16 headlines I’ve ever heard in my life but for more for more info on Mission Wolf people can just go
2:45:23 to missionwolf.org and I think they do some very very interesting work I would love to ask you
2:45:28 because you brought up the name and I can’t let you go without asking for this story
2:45:35 so Lawrence Fenderpost that’s the name you mentioned right so he described the lion’s roar
2:45:41 he said that it it quote it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky and quote
2:45:47 right tremendous it’s this one of a kind yeah yeah you know where I’m going this one of a kind
2:45:54 this one of a kind experience that cannot be replicated so please take us to at a well-known
2:45:59 company you were invited to give a presentation and could you tell us the story of how that
2:46:06 presentation went oh my god from the beauty of Fenderpost’s quote to my ridiculous life as a
2:46:11 storyteller yes please so this was early on when I first started speaking a lot and and telling
2:46:18 stories to people and I got this gig at one of these silicone valley companies and normal story
2:46:24 I got there early and I arrived to meet the tech guy to make sure that we were well set up and
2:46:28 normal story the tech guy was late he had to have a cigarette break you know like that
2:46:34 archetypal tech guy yeah who’s like running the AV like it was that guy and so eventually I said
2:46:38 to him like listen man like I just really want to run through my slides like I want to make sure
2:46:42 that we’re all good and everything he’s like listen I need to upload the system so that we can stream
2:46:47 to the whole company I’ll get you in a second but we’re all good I’m like dude I need to like
2:46:52 get some reps like classic like I want to be well prepared anyway people start filing in people
2:46:58 start filing in and before I know the auditorium’s full and I haven’t done the run through and I’m
2:47:06 in my worst nightmare now the intro to my the intro to my talk is is a is a sort of a poetic
2:47:15 speech and then I say and my story like many good stories in Africa begins with a lion roaring
2:47:21 and then I press my clicker and on a huge screen behind me there’s an early morning image of a
2:47:27 male lion and he’s roaring into the morning so actually like mist is coming out of his mouth
2:47:32 and what’s meant to happen is people are meant to be overwhelmed by this incredible barotone audio
2:47:43 and it’s meant to put them right in the moment and of course the lion is doing the action of
2:47:48 roaring which is a bit of a convulsion but there’s no sound so you’re in the middle of the presentation
2:47:56 you press click and no sound just a convulsing silent lion and it was at this point and it
2:48:01 dawned on me like slow enough for it to be truly painful that I realized I was about to roar at
2:48:07 a group of executives and I grabbed the the lapel mic and I held it close to my mouth and then I
2:48:17 synced up my roar with the lion and the problem with the damn clip is it went on for a long time
2:48:30 and then when a lion winds down he goes
2:48:35 and so literally the intro and I was like why won’t this lion stop
2:48:45 oh my god it was painful it just went on and on anyway I got through the presentation
2:48:51 and still to this day Tim I’m going to be honest with you if I lie in bed and I think about that
2:48:56 a wave of shame will travel through me and I’ll have to like curl over on my side and just rock
2:49:04 myself oh god yeah did you get any pats on the back or any stiff drinks handed to you after that
2:49:09 one well the thing that saved the whole damn thing is that like eventually when I finished roaring
2:49:15 one person started clapping and everyone like went for it and so the whole room ended up clapping
2:49:19 and that like kind of like moved the energy and we were into the presentation I was like thank
2:49:24 god thank god for Lauren or whoever that was totally thanks Lauren it was like one of those
2:49:29 moments also where you realized like you can’t half roar at a group of executives like you’ve
2:49:41 either got to not do it or go all in like let’s go thanks for nothing AV guy oh such a great story
2:49:48 so I gotta say so first for people listening get a copy of the lion trackers guide to life I rarely
2:49:55 make an endorsement like that it’s a small book you can read it in one or two nights or afternoons
2:50:00 and as I mentioned it’s one of the few books that I have an entire shelf dedicated to in my guest
2:50:04 bedroom it found me at the right time you know so maybe it doesn’t find everyone at the right time
2:50:10 but for me it really found me at the right time and it’s a book I’ve reread which is also something
2:50:19 I cannot say for many books and you work with individuals you work with companies I find your
2:50:27 approach to life and sort of your multi sensory multi modality perspective on life to be not
2:50:36 just fascinating but very practical you’ve spent a lot of time testing developing inheriting learning
2:50:43 tools and I think that you know as you mentioned given the trauma that you’ve experienced and the
2:50:50 challenges that you’ve had to overcome some people and I think you have certainly done this can
2:50:56 convert that pain and that university of suffering into part of the medicine that you bring to the
2:51:03 world and I think you do that not just well but very beautifully so first I just want to thank you
2:51:08 for that thank you Tim I really appreciate you saying that yeah absolutely and I just wanted to
2:51:12 know if there’s anything I want to leave a couple of stories I still have a couple of notes which I
2:51:18 don’t know the context behind but I want to save a couple in case we do a round two although I know
2:51:24 you have no shortages I might ask you about was it your uncle in the boat with the outboard I can’t
2:51:30 remember who it was but that’ll have to be saved for another time they’re all in there but some of
2:51:34 them only get pulled out with a bit of you know scotch and a campfire all right well round two might
2:51:44 be with scotch and a campfire but is there anything you would like to say any last closing comments
2:51:49 for the audience request recommendation anything at all anything else something you’d like to point
2:51:54 their attention to anything at all that you’d like to to share before we wind to a close this
2:51:59 time around well first of all just thanks for having me and you know it’s privileged to support
2:52:03 a show that has had such an impact on so many people and be a part of it so I’m just really
2:52:09 grateful to you and been fun getting to know you I would say a few things I would say one is I would
2:52:15 invite people to come on safaris in Africa it’s a very unique encounter with a landscape that is
2:52:22 still wild and when people come and have safaris at a place like londelosie or wherever they go it
2:52:28 has a profound impact on allowing us to protect these areas and on the local people and so you
2:52:32 know we’ve always been I’ve always been a proponent of the economy of wildlife we keep these areas
2:52:36 wild we invite people to come and experience them and that has a huge impact so if you’re thinking
2:52:41 about a holiday come on a safari if you’re thinking about a safari come it’s it’s a once in a lifetime
2:52:46 experience I would say that if you are interested in tracking you can support the tracker academy
2:52:55 trackeracademy.co.za they do amazing work supporting young people from difficult backgrounds
2:53:00 teaching them to become trackers they have a nearly 90 placement rate into the tourism industry so
2:53:05 they do amazing work those would be the two things that I would offer to people where can
2:53:09 people learn more about the safari side if they wanted to learn more about that you can get a
2:53:18 hold of us at londelosie.com you can also get a hold of me at boidvati.com my team will point you
2:53:27 in the right direction and tracker academy yes is trackeracademy.co.za.za for my fellow Americans
2:53:35 out there I like the Zed it sounds more dignified it’s nice to see you boid I’m glad we did this
2:53:40 with with a bit of video as well for people who want to see it on YouTube they can just search for
2:53:46 Tim Ferriss on YouTube and it’ll pop right up but I know we are many time zones away at the moment
2:53:52 that won’t be true in the not too distant future so I’m looking forward to spending some time in
2:53:58 person me too man I’m looking forward to getting you out so we go track a rhino I’m like I’m excited
2:54:06 to track a rhino and I’m excited not to have any legs eaten by crocs and I’m very much looking
2:54:11 forward to finally getting feet on the ground at londelosie and getting to meet some of these
2:54:17 characters that I have only read about and heard about at this point both human and animal alike
2:54:21 so thanks for taking the time today man I really appreciate it yeah thank you Tim thanks for having
2:54:25 me enjoyed it even more than I expected to and I expected to enjoy it a hell of a lot
2:54:31 so to everybody listening you’ll find show notes to everything that we discussed at tim.blog/podcasting
2:54:36 just search boid boid and it’ll pop right up you can find them online at boidvardi.com we’ll
2:54:43 link to londelosie trackeracademy.co.za and everything else in the show notes as well as
2:54:49 boid on twitter @boidvardi and all the rest his books the line trackers guide to life and his
2:54:56 memoir cathedral of the wild can both be found everywhere books are sold and until next time
2:55:03 experiment often be safe be kinder than is necessary even just a little bit and see if
2:55:09 you can get out in nature it will be good medicine for the soul and thanks for tuning in
2:55:16 hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet
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2:55:31 my super short newsletter called five bullet friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is
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2:55:53 all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast
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2:56:05 i share them with you so if that sounds fun again it’s very short a little tiny bite of
2:56:10 goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you’d like to try it out
2:56:16 just go to tim.blog/friday type that into your browser tim.blog/friday drop in your email and
2:56:23 you’ll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by AG1 the daily
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