#763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty

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4:29 Check it out. Optimal minimal. This altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? No seen it kind of. I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

4:46 No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers. From every field imaginable to tease out the habits. routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply.

5:09 And test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about. And past one billion downloads. I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favourites.

5:26 From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these. The Super Combo episodes. Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks.

5:42 But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider Stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

5:56 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests. You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash. combo. And now, without further ado.

6:10 Please enjoy. And thank you. For listening. First up? Margaret Atwood.

6:17 Author of more than fifty books of fiction. Poetry. Critical essays and graphic novels. Including The Handmaid's Tale.

6:25 Winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award. And its sequel. The testaments. Co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. The blind assassin.

6:35 Winner of the two thousand Booker Prize. And her latest. Old babes in the wood. A collection of her short stories. You can find Margaret on Twitter.

6:45 Uh Margaret Atwood. In the course of doing research for this conversation, read about the different ways we could look at the semantics of, say, science fiction. on some other planet with creatures never before seen versus, say, speculative fiction Where you're taking something that exists

7:04 Or is in the process of it becoming and then taking it a few steps out. And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master, in my mind, of boundary walking. What types of structured thinking or observation lend themselves to your ability to write speculative fiction. Okay. You might say. The lack of the qualities that make it difficult for me to write science fiction. Sure. Which I read a lot of.

7:30 Plus uh dragons, you know, I'm keen on dragons. But I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can do that you have the ability to do and other things that you may admire but you cannot do So Dragons outside my range of capabilities in any way, or so Lukay Legwin has kind of sewn up dragons.

7:51 She call it sort of the dragon franchise. Yeah, so Game of Thrones the the dragons are basically sort of like bazooka. But her her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that are usually attributed to dragons. In the

8:10 English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition. We could go on about that, but we won't today. No, you wanted to know he Sort of what's behind it. Yeah, what's behind this becket of fiction?

8:23 What makes you good at it? I grew up in the fifties as a teenager and I read a lot of those things. At that time. So I read nineteen eighty four just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically sleazy cover of the

8:42 early fifties they put classics into these quite What shall we say about those covers? They made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people got enticed into reading like War and Peace and things because they thought it was about Ladies and negligence lying on that. Not much really. So my copy of nineteen eighty four had this woman with an enormous cleavage in the

9:10 foreground and and a guy standing behind her looking down her front. Which does get in there a bit. But that's not the general import. Of the book. So I mainlined all of those books. I've I read Ray Bradbury a lot.

9:26 You'll notice that I ended up writing in one of his obits. Like for the Guardian. I went to Comic Con for the first time because we thought we were on our way to see Ray. But unfortunately it died before we got there, so we ended up having a memorial service at at Comic Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors.

9:47 In several fields, really. So read all of those things. John Wendham I was reading In the fifties. And I think what you read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you are then

10:03 writing when you're able to, you know, when you have the skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to write a A nineteen eighty four only with women. Like that. So meanwhile along comes Ursula K.

10:18 And a number of other people that I was Following. So really it's partly what you're drawn to and partly what you have the skill to do. That's why I can't do dragons.

10:32 Well, I can't do dragons or speculative fiction, so you have me beat I can't do podcasts, you know. Well, you know, podcasts are just uh ephemera in the mist. I think you that your your works will have much more permanence, but I can hope. I can hope that some day the audio will have the same get locked in the amber in the same way that words are. I'm sure it will. I wanna go back in time from your teenage years. I've read about your experience of growing up in a cabin in the woods and some of the benefits of that, the lack of distractions giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later and so on. I'm

11:08 Thinking about having kids in the very near future. And I fantasize about living in the woods because I feel most at home in the woods. Were there any downsides? Would you say? Oh, which ones are you thinking of, Tim? Any I like

11:27 Varied terrain. So I prefer something that isn't flat. So we could think American West. We could think upstate New York. We could think British Columbia in certain locations. I would prefer not to hear or see any neighbors. I would like to have lots of Uh Trails

11:47 that I can explore with my dog or dogs or Family and running water And a lake or a pond, having access to both of those, or one of those at least. I grew up on Long Island, more or less in the woods.

12:03 That's my idealized version, but I don't know what it's like to raise kids in the woods. I'm curious if there are any downsides. Well, you should ask my mum, except She's not here. She is what Jay said. Yeah, she's kind of still here.

12:18 So my mom was an unusual person. In that she Liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic. She grew up in rural Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She

12:33 loved horses, she had horses. She rode them hither and thither and she was also A speed skater. And of course a skier and This kind of thing. So I think she married my dad because he was

12:48 A Mary Bushy guy. And he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia, like really rural. So they were so rural that I don't think they got electricity until the late fifties. I was lucky enough to be able to see a nineteenth century farm operating pretty much the way it would have done. So

13:09 I think she Who didn't like Hats, little white gloves, tea parties. Any of that. He really didn't like it. Didn't fancy it. She liked dancing, like fast and furious waltzing and things like that.

13:24 Square dancing, but she didn't like the frilly part. And up in the woods was great for her because she said you didn't actually have to do much housework, you just Swept the dirt out the door. And you didn't have to worry about, you know, all of them. stuff that people have in their houses usually like

13:42 Breaker Brac and China and Things like that. You don't have to worry about those. So she didn't. And

13:50 She doesn't seem to have had A problem in the woods, except my brother almost drowned once'cause he he got out and fell off the dock, but Apart from that. And a few other

14:04 Somewhat hairy moments. It was probably safer on the whole than being in a city. Anyway. She seems to have managed pretty well, although some of her city friends because they were in cities during the winter.

14:20 My dad was a forest andologist at Mint. He was up in the woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you could take it as almost a hundred percent. They don't do much in the winter. Insects.

14:35 Pretty quiet, insect wise. In the winter. So he they would go up and say April or so. And they would go back in, for instance, November, but this is I think quite a lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods. Tim, I think you're thinking of a more southerly location.

14:52 Yeah. I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that. Uh No, they were not there in the early. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. These were Yeah. Insect to live in trees. It was a forest Endomologist, right? So there had to be a forest. There had to be the forest. Yeah, they had running water, but it was out of a pump. And

15:14 They didn't have electricity. And The transportation was by boat, so no roads. There. you could get to I think by nineteen thirty nine there was this horrible road which I remember very well.

15:28 You don't always get cars going over it. And then you get to a place where you left the car and then you would get in a boat. So then it was during the war, so there there weren't even a lot of uh motor boats because gasoline was rationed. So can use. I would love to

15:46 Here you describe an experience that came up in my reading in preparation for this. And It relates to

15:56 A day you found yourself walking across a football field I don't know if that's enough of uh of a cue. But I would love to hear you expand on this because I did read about it, but I feel like there's probably more to the story. So could you please just provide some color and tell the story? Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway, so I I'll tell you what I made up. But it it's kind of true. Sounds like my life

16:26 Yeah right. It's like that. It's mostly kind of true. Yeah, it's sort of true. Your previous question, what did growing up in the woods have to do with being a writer? There wasn't anything to do. Except. When it was raining, except reading, writing and and drawing.

16:44 So there were no other things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no television, no What else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore I fixed on writing pretty early. And

16:58 It was a narrative family. People told stories. And my older brother was a gung ho writer. He wrote lots of things at at that age. He turned into a scientist, but He was very narrative. When he was a ten.

17:13 Nine. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am. Having written my first novel at the age of seven, it was about an ant Some Structur difficulties there, Tim, because ants don't do anything until they're in the fourth stage of their life. They don't do anything when they're an egg. They don't do anything when they're a larva.

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

17:51 Then I ended up in high school. At slightly too early an age. They skipped people then. I think they've stopped doing that. So I was twelve and some of the people in my class were almost sixteen.

18:05 Because they failed people then, Tim. So it was a slightly daunting experience, but things evened out after that. Yeah, so I was quite short. I'm still quite short. Yeah. Well people got bigger. For a while I was sort of normal size, but that's no longer true. There's all these, you know, enormous kids who drank a lot of Milk with vitamins in it.

18:31 Anyway, there I was in high school. I love my grade eleven teacher. That would be One, two, the third year of high school. What do you call that? I guess junior, junior year. What do you guys call? Fifth form. I don't know if you use the British system. I have no idea. Yeah. No, not English.

18:48 Yeah, what do you guys call it in Canada? Well, we called it different grades, like nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and in those days thirteen, but they've done away with that. Yeah, we would call eleventh or junior year. Junior, yeah, so my great English teacher who I put in a book.

19:04 She was a Peculiar. People go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, Oh yes, I could see instantly great brilliant Sean right out of her head and I could tell she was You know, slated for greatness, but she told the truth. She said she showed no particular ability in my glass.

19:22 Which was true. I d I didn't show any particular ability in her class. Uh and I had no idea then that I was uh gonna be a writer. Didn't strike me. Until the next year. When I had a different English teacher who I've also put into a story because she was a

19:41 A legend in her own time, she took hold of the people in her class and she Yanked them through the curriculum. No matter what. No matter what she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings. And she made the immortal comment'cause I showed her one of my poems.

20:00 He said. I don't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good. So wonderful. I love that is great. Yeah, so I started writing poetry in grade

20:13 twelve And the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field and A pink princess line dress that I had sewed myself. A work of art, Tim. You don't know what that is, do you? Well, I can envision, based on some of the words, what it might look like. Princess one.

20:32 It had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great. Loved it. And had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have. I had made a terrible mistake. I'd gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences, which I should have done.

20:49 Had I known. I would have done that and then I would know how to touch type. Which I don't. And it's too late now to So there I was.

20:58 And my pink Princess Line. dress crossing the football field and A poem occurred to me. Wasn't a very good poem.

21:07 But it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start. You write some pretty terrible poetry that you're very excited about. And luckily there's nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry.

21:22 And then you go on from there. What did it feel like when this poem came to you. I mean the the lie now you can tell me how much of this is uh revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your experience, but quote, a large invisible thumb descended from the sky. It's the Eureka moment, Tim Yeah, big thumb came out of the sky. You believe that? What else would you like me to tell you?

21:46 That you will also believe I already asked about astrology, so you got me. Uh Yeah, you can tell me anything. It was very interesting to me. I had been trying out these potential careers, like I was going to be a painter and then I revised that. I was gonna be a fashion designer and then I revised that and I went into home economics.

22:08 Because in the Textbook that was called Guidance. In grade nine you were supposed to decide what your career was gonna be. Can you imagine? Who knows anything? When they're that old. Oh yeah. Um so the guidance textbook had had five things that girls could do. And they did not include astrophysicists.

22:30 Let's see if you can guess what they were in nineteen fifty two. I think I can, but I'm cheating. Nurse secretary, school teacher. Airline stewardess, as they were known, and home economist. You've read what I wrote.

22:45 I am a bad cheater. I am, or a very good cheater. That's what was on offer, and being a mercenary child, I I looked up what they made. Because I did grow up in a family in which it w it was expected that you would support yourself. So The home economists made the most, believe it or not.

23:11 So I went into that. But then I decided no, this is not for me. I'm gonna be a biologist. was gonna be a botanist'cause I was actually quite Good at it. But then along came this writing.

23:25 Much to my parents' dismay, but being the bite your tongue kind of parents. I think they just hoped it would be a phase. I would grow out of it. It's been a long phase. Yeah, well they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, Well, how are you going to support yourself? I said, You know, I'll get a job. Which I did. I got lots of jobs.

23:47 And then my mother said rather caustically. Ha ha. If you're gonna be a writer, you better learn to spell. And I said, Others will do that for me and you know they have Yeah.

23:57 Now we have spell check. You know, all good things come to those who wait, I guess. You were right. You were right. I did wait a while, but it's it panned out. So you you wrote if I'm getting the chronology right, you wrote for sixteen years before you could make a living out of it. You had all these different jobs as you mentioned, as a cashier in a coffee shop and many others. Over those sixteen years, were you maintaining the belief that someday it would pay the bills and You would be able to make a living out of it, or was it just a labor of love while you did these other things? Oh, the writing? Yes. You mean did I ever think I would make a living out of it? No.

24:40 People in my age group in my country at that time didn't think that way. They might have thought that way in the thirties. And even in the forties where there were a couple of best sellers written My people in our country but right after the

24:59 War during the fifties. A couple of things had happened. And one of them was that the paperback book industry had taken off. I think it started with the penguin in the UK and then it was Pocket books.

25:15 And Canada didn't have It had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks were not included in them. So The

25:26 Glossy magazine. market was also drying up. So a writer like Morley Callahan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the twenties and thirties made a living out of selling two glossies. That was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that They had

25:45 So we weren't really thinking in those terms and there there were no agents in Canada at that time. We we didn't even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they didn't publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn't a market for them.

26:02 So if you wanted to publish a novel. Your publisher would say, Well, we have to get a partner, you know, either in London or in New York. And that was easier. Said than done. So the The book publishing that had been going on in the thirties of cheap hardbacks

26:19 Kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be A little more certain about that. It was gone. Having had paperbacks take its place. So it was hardbacks.

26:30 And I've always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact I was associated with a Small publishing company. And the Late.

26:42 Sixties and early seventies. And a lot of it was about money. Like how many can we sell? What can we publish? To support these works of

26:54 Cutting edge experimental fiction that nobody's gonna buy. What can we publish? So we we did. We published The first book on venereal disease. It was called V D You know idiots guides. These were sort of idiots guides before there were idiots guides.

27:11 We got as far as Wart. But we didn't get two AIDS because nobody knew about it yet. So So let me let me hop in for just a second. When you're writing for sixteen years, not thinking you can make a living from it. What did you get from the writing and did you share your writing with anyone?

27:32 Oh, absolutely. We were all uh sharing our stuff around. Because we were Editing each other's work. We were publishing each other's work. We were

27:43 All of the the poets were connected through this kind of spider web network of little magazines. Uh towards Yeah, both in Canada, the US, England, there were these little magazines. that published uh poetry and people

28:00 Knew each other through them. So they Poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. Oh, the poets were m more peripatetic. They would get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at your door. And uh sleep on your rug.

28:17 And you in your turn might. And turn up at somebody else's door and sleep on their rug. So it was a sort of a Rug exchange. Of poets.

28:27 They would turn up here and there and give readings in out of the way places and Some of them do you remember No, you don't, sorry. Coffee shops. Coffee shop readings. No, I I know coffee shops. No I I do. I do. I have been to a coffee shop reading. Well, a different kind of coffee shops. Let me not say shops, that's it should be houses.

28:48 So They didn't have liquor licenses, so basically people brought flasks and their And bags. Pockets and Things like that. And you had the usually

29:00 Condemned. Warehouse or something. And A little bit. Tables with the Checkered tablecloths, the little

29:08 Uh wine bottles with the candle stuck in them. And the open mic. So poetry night usually on a Tuesday. Sounds great. Yeah. Done part of the week and all the folk singing and Jazz went on on other nights of the week, such as Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

29:28 That's how they you know Supported the poetry meetings. So we did that in the Early sixties. And then the poetry reading spread to

29:39 universities, some of them, and then to bookstores. They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn't start happening until the Mid seventies, I would say. All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around, or you did see it before Covid.

29:59 They didn't exist yet. They sprang up out of the subculture of coffee houses. This is neither here nor there, but I am fascinated actually by the history of coffee houses, especially in the UK, where you have Lloyds of London coming out of one coffee shop and all of this incredible History that I had really. And Uh that that that interchange of ideas and this sort of interstitial tissue in the in the societal fabric of the time. But

30:34 What I'd like to ask you about next is teaching. And uh it's clear reading about your life that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching did you most enjoy? If any of it. I always enjoyed it.

30:48 I think the most intense year of teaching that I did was in Montreal. I taught it's a place that doesn't exist anymore because it's been amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams. And it was a downtown city establishment. You taught your subject to Nineteen year olds in the day.

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

31:25 And really they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something. And the adults were there because they wanted to be couple of reasons they wanted to be there. They wanted to up their credentials. But also they were very

31:41 Engaged and they would argue with you. object to things and not really really give you the old run through and and that was pretty stimulating. So I taught uh nineteenth century novels to those

31:55 people and I also taught American romanticism. And it was they who gave me a a button that said Moby Dick is not a social disease. So they had a sense of humor. I

32:09 I liked them a lot. And it was very instructive because the things that the Nineteen year old liked frequently the grown ups would not like and the things that the Nineteen year olds really didn't like the grown ups thought We're terrific.

32:25 So middle March by George Elliot, the nineteen year old said We don't like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions in their careers and they marry the wrong people and we're not gonna do that. And the adult said. This is the a great book. They make the wrong decisions in their careers, they marry the wrong people, it's just like life.

32:49 So big difference in experience and what's the lesson? The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are. Yeah, the age that you are and the experience that you've had. And it's the same for Everyone. I Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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34:20 Boyd Vardy. Lion Tracker? Storyteller. Wildlife and Literacy Activist. Steward of the Londelosi Game Reserve in South Africa.

34:29 And author of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life And his memoir. Cathedral of the Wild You can find Boyd.

34:38 On Twitter at Boyd Vardy Boyd. Welcome to the show, my friend. Tim, thanks for having me, man.

34:46 Great to be with you. It is great to see you. And I'm sad we're not doing this in person, but I'm also happy that you can share a bit about your surroundings. So where Is this conversation finding you right now?

35:00 Okay, so I'm on the Londerosi game reserve. In the wild eastern part of South Africa. I'm sitting in my thatched cottage. And I'm looking out the window. The river

35:12 Runs below me. And currently there is a herd of elephants that are moving down from the far northern bank of the river to come and feed on the delicious Spongy Palm trees in the river.

35:24 So that should give you a little bit of a sense. They're two huge ebony trees. They kind of frame the house. And A couple of weeks ago a leopard hoisted its kill. into the tree next to the kind of veranda of the house. So that should sort of set the scene for people a little bit.

35:41 You know, I had a dead bird on my porch two days ago and I see a squirrel out to my right. So I feel like we're kind of on equal footing there. Totally. Totally. No Couple things. One I wanna tell you that I don't think I've told you actually. Void. And I'm I'm gonna pack it up front because I

36:00 Think that I am ashamed of not telling you earlier. So here you can see it. And for those who are watching video on YouTube, you can see it. I've got a copy Of your book here. Which you were kind enough to inscribe for me. It's the Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. I've had this for a while now. Full of highlights. I read it again. Yesterday.

36:18 And This is one of only a handful of books that has a dedicated shelf in my Guest bedroom. Yeah. Home. So in other words, when people come and visit

36:29 I have a few shells. So you have The gift. Which is of Hafez poems translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Then you have How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollen. Then you have

36:42 Awareness by Anthony Devello, and then you have The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by Boyd Vardy. So you have an entire shelf That's people are encouraged to indulge in and take books from in my guest bedroom. And I just wanted to let you know that. Wow, I find myself in the company of my heroes there. Thank you. Absolutely. It is it's a fantastic book and we're gonna dig into

37:04 All sorts of stories that are in the book, of course many stories that I have heard and not heard in person. with you, but let's start with one that I haven't heard that I wanted to dig into it a little bit just as part of the Genesis story. Your mom. Could you tell

37:21 Us a little bit about your mom and then I suppose also about your dad, but Specifically the get on with it attitude as I've seen you write it. Well, you know, my parents met when they were Fifteen years old. And

37:35 My grandfather had just died leaving this property. And everyone in in the sort of family advisors had said to my father, Well, first thing you've got to get rid of that property in the wild eastern part of South Africa You know, it's bankrupt Catalan, there's nothing going on there. There's some lions there that you used to hunt, but lion hunting is dangerous. Get rid of that.

37:55 And my father stood up in the meeting of family advisors and he said No, we're gonna keep it and We'll find a way to make it pay. And very soon after that meeting he met my mother And with three mud huts and a broken Land Rover, they launched themselves into starting a safari business.

38:11 This was a time in that you know, the teeth of apartheid South Africa, there was no one coming to South Africa. Like there's a rough if any if it had been an investor pitch and someone was saying we're gonna start a game reserve and You know, here's what we want you to invest in, no one would have invested. But together out of the love that they had for each other and the passion that they had for the land They created this amazing place. It was the love they had for each other, the passion for the land, and a real big dose of

38:36 We can keep going because this is all we have. And so there was this incredible attitude in both of them to just push forward, pioneer, keep going, raise your kids with snakes and no electricity. Bring people from all over the world to come stay in a couple of mud huts, give them an incredible time, flow this amazing energy into them, take them out into the wild for encounters. And so it was that type of get on with it chutzpah attitude that I was raised in, and that was my mother through and through just unbreakable, you know, rub some onica oil on it was the Best we got if you got an injury and you know, only call a doctor if you're bleeding profusely or you're gonna die. Ha ha.

39:16 All right. So I have some follow ups. First of all. Everyone's saying g first thing you have to do is get rid of that land.

39:25 Dad says, nope, we're gonna keep the land. There's gotta be some thought process behind that because of course there are tremendous consequences to that decision in terms of your life trajectory. Why the decision? Why was that decision made? How was that made? Yeah, I think it's a really Good question. I mean there's uh there's a few parts to it. The one is that my great grandfather had bought the land in nineteen twenty six. After drinking too much gin.

39:51 And he heard about these bankrupt cattle farms that were available for sale adjacent to the Kruger National Park. And he was a lion hunter and he was an adventurer and he said, Well, we're gonna buy And so He first came down here in the June of Nineteen Twist. And he set up the camp, you know, just

40:08 Canvas under the trees. And they would hunt lions. That's how my grandfather then grew up. And then that's how my father and uncle grew up. Coming down in the winter months, waking up at dawn, listening for lions to roar, and then going out to hunt lions.

40:23 And I should say with lion hunting, there's only two outcomes. Either a lion dies or a person dies. So that gives you a little bit of a sense for the mentality of it. But through those early days of hunting already a deep passion had started to take root in my father. For the land and and in my uncle they They felt connected to it. It was a place of adventure. It was Already a place that was infused in meaning.

40:46 So when their father died and they were teenagers And the family advisors said, Okay, we'll get rid of it. I think it's a bit of a combination of The brilliance. The arrogance and the stupidity of youth. That just allowed them to stand up and say, Well, we're gonna keep it and we'll make it work.

41:03 I don't think that there was forethought in the decision. They just knew they were grieving. They had lost their father. It was their father's sacred place. He loved to go there, and they knew that if they Somewhere inside of that grieving process they knew that if they let go of the land, they would lose the memory of their father in some way. And so they held onto it and they decided, Well, we'll go make it work. There's so many different branches of this tree that I can go down. It's I'm having trouble with the paradox of choice here. Let me

41:32 Try to prompt A story that will maybe speak to the Get on with it. Make it work. attitude of both of your parents. Could you please

41:43 Tell the story. I'm gonna give you a fragment here. So a little gingerbread crumb and see if you remember what I'm referring to. Plane ride. Bird. Does this

41:55 Okay. I think you're referring to the White Knuckle Charter Company. Yeah. So basically what happened is my parents They launched the Safari business. And

42:08 It slowly started to become successful. But they started to run into a problem as my sister and I were getting older because school started to become an issue. So there was obviously no nowhere to take us to school living out here. Yeah. So they decided that what they would do is

42:23 They would learn to fly. And then they would ferry us in to the nearest town. And we would sort of attend early pre school of whatever it's called, like Monday through Wednesday and then Wednesday we would fly back to the reserve and we would be here through the weekend and we were basically getting three days of schooling. That seemed like enough to them at the time.

42:42 So they took up flying. And my memories of it are When they would pick us up on a Wednesday afternoon To be honest, they weren't great pilots. So they would they were in a bit of a state. You know the the first fifty hours of being a pilot, there's a lot of stress about getting it in the air and then safely getting it back on the ground. So they would we would arrive and they would say to us, we're in flying mode right now.

43:02 And flying mode meant we could not ask any questions. We had to shut up. Kids, you kids shut up. We're in flying mode. And then they had this other sort of drill that they worked up with each other, which was called pilot in command. And When they were up front there in the cockpit, the one would say, I am now pilot in command. And if you h hand it over control, you would say, handing over control and the other would say, I am now pilot in command. Pilot in command, handing over to pilot in command, I am now pilot in command. And they had this whole drill, right? The first crash.

43:33 that we were involved in we came into land and we had a plane, it was a little Cessna that had a quirk And let me tell you, when it comes to aviation, you don't want planes with quirks. You can have a quirky like pickup track, but you cannot have a quirky aircraft. The quirk was But when you pulled the power. Not all power cut off, it kept a little bleed of power on. So my mother was flying the plane, she came into land on the little eight hundred meter

44:01 The plane sort of landed but it just kept on a little too much power and we kept going. And she started to say to my father, and my sister and I are watching from the back in flying mode, I can't get the power off, I can't get the power off, I can't get the speed off. And he says, he's saying to her, You are pilot in command, you are pilot in command. And she's going, I know, but I can't get the speed off. And eventually she kicks the rudder and the plane veers off the runway and we hit a Marilla tree and we stop. That was our that's our first crash. And it's one of those it's one of those ones, Tim, that if you bring it up today.

44:32 Like at dinner? He will say. Will say, Well, you know, I couldn't get the speed off and he'll say my father will say, Well you were pilot in command and immediately a fight will develop at dinner. I know I was pilot in command, but before we hit the tree, do you think you could have pulled the power? You could have so like it's there's a little tension around it. Anyway. The worst one was

44:49 We were flying a short hop, and by this stage My parents had launched You know, a bigger Safari company. And they had decided that when they flew they should actually have a commercial pilot with them. And so the setup was

45:03 It's a commercial pilot in the left hand seat. It's my father in the right hand seat. And then there's Club seating, four seats in the back, but you s sit facing each other like you would on a train, you know, look like looking at each other.

45:15 So we're flying along and I see my mother and her friend are sitting opposite me. And they're looking towards the cockpit, I'm looking back at them. And suddenly we just hear this Outrageous like sound. BAAAAH

45:28 and wind fills the cockpit and it's just this incredible rushing sound. Amazing sound. Looking at my mother and her friend next to her It looks like Pulp Fiction. There is just blood and guts all over them. It looks like someone took a bird. Put it in a blender.

45:47 And made like a bird smoothie and then threw it over them. They've got wing on their head, they've got a foot on their shoulder. They are covered in blood and guts. And so I turn And I look back at the cockpit. The front window of the plane is gone. The pilot

46:03 He's conked out. He's passed out in his seat. And my father is like orientating himself in the madness. And right at that moment, as he sort of as my father got his bearings, I saw him grab the controls. And then he looked back at me. And said

46:19 I am pilot in command. And And so now We realise we've got a situation. What had happened is we had hit

46:28 A stalk. Direct Bird strike. And the bird had come in the window. And

46:35 In fact The bird had hit the pilot. The beak had gone into the skin. Between the pilot's skull and the skin. So he had a beak sticking out of his face and a bit of stork neck sticking out of his face. And he's totally passed out.

46:50 Meantime, my father has taken control of the plane. The woman On the back seat screaming next to my mom is going, Who can And that's when my mother gave her the patented mother slap? Slap her twice and said, We are not gonna die. And then out of nowhere, my mother reaches into her sort of handbag and pulls out a flight

47:10 call sheet and she starts screaming standard emergency practices to my father. Call SOS base, request emergency landing, and he's ticking off things. Now at this point the pilot starts to wake up. And he wakes up and he's slowly gaining his bearings. And

47:29 As he looks around, he has this strange Kind of dot in his vision, and as he's looking around The dot follows him. And he eventually puts his hand up and and what it is, it's the stork's neck sticking out of his face that everywhere he looks, it's in his line of sight because it's connected to his face.

47:49 And it was at that moment that he grabbed the neck and the beak of the stork and he pulled it out of his face and looked at it and then passed out again. And I don't know if you've ever seen a head wound, but head wounds bleed nicely. And so he's bleeding quite intensely. It's pandemonium back there, but my folks have got the controls. They're calling They call the airport My father starts the descent and eventually the pilot wakes up and he comes to and he's actually he's all right and he takes over control of the plane again and we do an emergency landing.

48:18 And the funny thing about it was We were flying from the reserve to go and catch a commercial flight. So we landed at a commercial airport and we got up Covered in stalk, stalk wing and stalk foot and stalk guts. And we walked into the terminal building and I said to my mother, Well what do we do now? She said, just board the flight and look forward. So we got onto the plane looking like we had been in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and just sat down next to regular folks traveling. Covered in guts and blood and just sat there and looked forward and and and flew to our next destination like nothing had happened.

48:53 But it was a you know, we grew up in a real wild way. We grew up in a pioneering way and my parents were Irrepressible, I think is the word. But you kind of have to be to run a Safari business where things You know, running a Safari business, you're out in nature and things are happening And unexpected things are happening almost continuously. So that was kind of the

49:14 my wild youth in some ways, you know, was very very orientated towards that kind of South African wildness. And and also I think that we were we've changed a lot over the years, but And we've been in our own healing journeys. And our own healing journeys have changed us as a family for sure. But for many years there we were just kind of packing on uh You know I guess we were frozen by some trauma ourselves and we were just living as wildly through it as we could.

49:39 Mm. Well I remember the first time Hell was when Hell of the Story, man. I totally forgot about the boarding the the next connecting phone. Yeah. It'd be hard to get past TSA covered in covered in viscera. Good Lord.

50:02 Let's talk about Another element, I believe, of your childhood. You could tell me when this first enters the picture. We're gonna bounce all over the place. And please correct my pronunciation. When did the Shangan trackers How do you pronounce that properly?

50:16 Shangan. There we go. Shangan trackers enter the picture in your life and who are they? If you could answer that in either order. Well Firstly, let me say something about the Shangan people. The Shangan people are The most wonderful

50:32 people that I've had time to spend time with in Africa. They were a splinter tribe of the Zulu people. And basically they They went on a warring party. And they found themselves in southern Mozambique and they decided that they were actually more peaceful people. They didn't want to be involved in the Zulu army's warlike ways and they broke away and they really Pastoral people.

50:53 Amazing storytellers. Incredible trackers because they love to observe things and tell stories. And so from the time my father and uncle were very young and from the time that I was very young I was lucky to spend time with some of the best Shangan trackers in the world, men who had grown up hunting and gathering in the region And the transition that we went through as a family is

51:13 We grew up tracking to hunt and then we once we had a kind our kind of enlightenment experience and we decided We must partner with the land and we must think of the animals as our kin. We continued tracking but it was to find animals for photographic safaris. And so from the time that I was extremely young, I was apprenticed to

51:32 These Master Shangan trackers. And I spent Hundreds of hours. Learning the art form of following an animal across wild terrain. and learning how to be attuned to the language of the wilderness and

51:45 I was listening to your interview with Noah Feltman and he was talking about how language attunes you in a different way to a culture. And if you can think of tracking, tracking is essentially The language of the wilderness. You're learning the signs, the sounds, and As your knowledge as a tracker deepens, it's like you're being let into another level. And the Shangan people were deeply attuned to this and they taught me that from a young age.

52:08 And really the success of Londalosi, one of the major success points for us is To create a bit of context for how the Safari business came together. My father was fifteen, my uncle was seventeen, my mother was about fifteen too, and they were gonna launch this safari business. Most of the land at that time, because the cattle had overgrazed the land, It was kind of an I high scrub.

52:31 And All of the animals were here. But you didn't really see them. And in fact they had been hunted, so any animals you saw were trying to get away from you. My parents struggled to get

52:43 The Safari business going. And then they had a defining moment. And that was the arrival. of a kind of maverick ecologist by the name of Ken Tinley. And

52:55 Ken was an amazing guy. He was a high school dropout. Who got admitted to a biological sciences degree. Because he drew a picture of a muff. With such intricate detail. That the dean of the faculty put him in.

53:08 And he studied his biological sciences degree and then he went to live alone in Mozambique and write a dissertation. And during this time living alone, it's not a little bit of a little Kane had this incredible encounter with wilderness. And he felt deeply attuned to it and the way he described it, he said It felt like

53:25 He could feel the rivers moving through his veins. And he became aware of how the moisture travelled through the terrain and how that informed the flora and how that then informed the fauna. And he was just deeply in tune. And he showed up next to the campfire one day where these young upstarts were trying to get the safari business going. And he said to them, If you want this place to work You must partner with the land.

53:48 You must think of the animals as your kin? And you must make sure that the local Shangan people are invited to participate in this restoration. So they said to him. Well partner with the land, what do you mean? And he said, Come, I'll show you.

54:03 and he walked them out onto the scrub encroached land. When the cattle overgraze the land The moisture falls. But instead of penetrating the soil it runs off in these deep, erosive furrows.

54:17 So what you do is you clear away the scrub. And you take that scrub and you pack it into the furrows. And it's kinda like putting the plug back in the bath. And with that you start to charge the grassland with moisture. And he started to show them how to restore the microcatchments on the property.

54:33 And I really grew up one of the first imprints of my psyche was watching the land being restored. I would go to a place where there was eye, high scrub And then I would see the Destitution as you cut it out.

54:46 And then you would go back there a year later and there would be a herd of water buck on it and a herd of zebra. And then a rhino walking through it in the late evening. And so My first impulses, I believe, as a healer came out of watching The way that life knows how to bring itself forth. And then one day after a day spent working on the land, my father and my uncle were driving home

55:06 And in the late afternoon light. A female leopard stepped out onto the road in front of them. And up until that point any leopard you saw was ears back running to get away from you, they'd been hunted. But this left it stopped. And she turned and she looked at them.

55:23 And for a moment she allowed herself to be seen. And then she growled and they saw that she had this one broken canine. And then she slipped away from there. And they drove home in silence and they stopped the vehicle. My uncle who was a

55:36 A rugged, aggressive, wild type guy. They sat there for a moment in silence and then he looked at my father and he said. Whatever just happened. That's my future. Uhhuh. And I've been deeply interested in that my whole life, you know, to your point, like

55:50 What made them say we're gonna Try and take on the creation of the Safari business. What made my great grandfather after too many ginns say I'm gonna buy? What made my uncle say in that moment, That's my future? How do we know when we know? So what my uncle did is he teamed up with a Shangan tracker, one of the best trackers in the area, man by the name of Almon M Shongo. And Elmon is actually Rainius in the books, brother. It's incredible hunter gatherer, incredibly in tune. Before we get to Elmon, if you could just as context, because people here tracking, good trackers, they might not realize

56:22 Just How far back A lineage of Tracker to tracker to tracker. tradition might extend. Are we talking hundreds of years, thousands of years, tens of thousands of years? I mean, how far back does it go, right? This this type of skill development and

56:39 generational Passing down. I mean th this goes back to our early origins. Some people say The tracking is in some ways the beginning of science because it's the beginning of deduction. It's the beginning, the first time that someone looked at a abstract imprint and started to apply meaning to it.

56:59 Mm-hmm. It's an art form that has been alive, it lives inside of people because it has been passed on through generations. You know, a tracker will teach another tracker the way. And so I think of it as this art form that you can't hang on the wall or it it like literally has to be alive in a person to survive. Didn't mean to interrupt, I just wanted to kinda set the stage, right? Because people think like, Oh my Grandfather did this, my dad did this, I now do this, therefore we have this this extensive lineage, which is true on some scale.

57:27 But When you refer to one of these master trackers it's quite a different level of longevity in terms of the bloodline and the development of that skill. Ancient.

57:40 Back to the origins of humanity. Yeah. And when you are tracking, you are connected To that entire lineage, you know, which is which is amazing feeling. Some w what I'm doing right now Thousands of years ago someone did this very same practice. Yeah. And Elmon was just brilliant in the bush. And so what my uncle and him did is for the next twelve years

58:01 They woke up every morning. And they went out and they tracked that leopard. And Just insane drive and dedication. And sometimes they would go

58:11 Two weeks without seeing her and they would Be putting together the clues, they'd be following the tracks. And then it started to be that They would find her. And she would allow herself to be viewed from two, three hundred yards in a vehicle.

58:24 And then slowly Over time that space, that distance started to close. And eventually after a few years of this it got to the point where they could actually drive one of these old Land Rovers in next to her And she Had developed a relationship

58:37 of trust with them that it was a totally wild leopard and she knew That these men meant her no harm. We called that leopard the mother leopard. Because she went on to have eight letters of cubs. And all of those cubs.

58:50 Grew up. Modelling their mother's trust. And so she was the mother for two reasons. One because She was the mother of all these cubs, and second, because really she was the mother of The birth of the Safari business because word got out

59:04 That there was a place in the middle of South Africa Where no one wanted to go where you could go and see a wild leopard. And that Allure is still alive inside of people today. But it would have been absolutely impossible without the skills

59:19 And the brilliance of the Shangan trackers. To be able to go out into a vast wilderness. And attune yourself to the faint tracks of where this animal had walked, to listen for alarm calls, to listen to bird language, and to start to get to know her movement patterns, her territories, where she liked to den All of that made it possible and it wouldn't have been possible without great trackers. And so that really the legacy of Londolosi is a legacy of relationships between trackers and wild animals.

59:46 You mentioned a name. That comes up a lot. Yeah and the line trackers got to life. who's, of course, a fascinating character in the book, and I'm sure in real life even more so fascinating. Renius? Is that how you say this name properly?

59:59 Renus Matanjana Jampachas Im Songo That's exactly what I was gonna say. That's what I was going to say. I'll stick I'll stick with Radios for short. Now I want to prompt Maybe as a way of of describing Rennius and introducing him. Question that came or Q that came from

1:00:20 One of our mutual friends, Josh Waitskin. And he said, Ask Boyd about Renius. Not returning to camp a few weeks ago when tracking, I think, a male lion when all the clients wanted to come back. Could you tell this story? Are you open to that? Yeah. Well Renius is

1:00:39 Firstly one of the best trackers in the world. I would say that his top Five. He's deeply attempt and what And My definition of mastery is someone who can be themselves in any situation.

1:00:51 And really what makes Renier special is that he's able to totally be himself wherever he goes. And I'm sure you've seen this in other disciplines. He's one of those rare masters who's able to Translate. the intangibles of what he knows how to do. You learn by being around him, you learn by absorbing his presence, watching how he moves, but he's also quite good at teaching.

1:01:14 Which makes him really exceptional,'cause a lot of trackers will t you'll say to them, Well, why did you know to go down there? Why did you know to check that riverbed? And they just sort of say, I just knew. Renius is able to dissect it a little bit for you, but This to me is the level of his mastery. We ran A retreat a tracking retreat. We had

1:01:32 some folks from all over the world who had come on one of our tracking retreats. And it was day four. And we had had an exceptional time. We had found and followed animals Um the night before we had slept out in the bush. And so the next morning we woke up

1:01:46 We found tracks of a of a single male lion and we began to follow. And after two or three hours I could see that The guests who were on the retreat were tiring. They were running out of gas. They'd been keeping watch all night. Could you explain what you mean by that? Keeping watch all night? Afraid that lions are gonna eat them all night? Yeah, on the on the retreat, one of the nights we had slept on the ground in the open, no vehicle, no tents.

1:02:09 And each person. Had been asked. To keep watch, it's this deeply archetypal experience to be awake around the fire. It definitely changes what the fire means to use some Ancient

1:02:20 primordial sense of like fire safety. And each person keeps watch through the night and it's beautiful. You're alone, owls calling, stars above you, and this alertness alive inside of you as you keep watch for your friends. What are you keeping watch I guess I guess but just sorry, not to bog the story down, but just for a second. Like if John from KPMG in Chicago, who's never camped before, comes to tracking retreat. I would be kinda nervous. Trusting John to keep me alive. While I slept, so I probably wouldn't sleep. I'm just wondering what one does when they're keeping watch.

1:02:55 No, that's the KPMG. No John from KP and G taking contact. The minute you get out there And night starts to fall? And some lions roar nearby.

1:03:08 past your camp and comes to investigate. What's pretty amazing, Tim, is that no one misses the gravity of the situation. There's something about nightfalling People switch on.

1:03:23 And I explained to them that if you If you fall asleep or during your watch or you don't do this properly, someone can get badly injured. And so people take it very seriously, and your job on Watch is to be an aware presence. And You get armed with a really good torch.

1:03:40 You listen. That's a flash. You listen and If any animal comes, you have to be aware of its presence. And there's an amazing thing, if you're aware of an animal's presence, it's aware that you're aware of it. And that's the critical safety piece. And we've never in all the years we've been doing it and we've slept out with many, many people, we've never had anyone let us down because people feel the the gravity of it and something does wake up inside of them. So anyway, back to the story. We suffice it to say they didn't sleep very well. They didn't sleep ver very well

1:04:12 So like ten o'clock the next morning, they were flagging and we decided because we'd had such a good time and we've been so lucky with the tracking already. We were gonna call it There, we're gonna say, guys, we're gonna leave this track and we're gonna head back to the camp. Now Rainas has been thirty years

1:04:29 Into guiding people. You know, even more. Thirty five years into guiding people and then another section working as a trainer He says You guys go back to camp, I can't leave this track. And I'm fascinated by that moment because there are so many hundreds of guides, so many hundreds of people who say, You know what, our guests are happy

1:04:49 Eggs Benedict back at the camp. But his mastery is that he can't leave it. There is something laid down in front of him that he's curious about, he's interested, and he has to know. Something in the tracker has to Discover has to find out.

1:05:05 And The scope of the the years of his practice And the fact that he makes that decision to stay out there hot tired Without water, he needs to know. That is his art form. He needs to be in it. There's something very special about that to me. Which?

1:05:19 Animals. Are hardest to track. You mentioned A leopard, right? So a leopard in my mind, I think of solitary animal. As I understand it.

1:05:31 Sleeps in trees at least part of the time as I understand it again. I have no understanding of leopards. So I would think of them as difficult. To track. For a number of different reasons. But which which animals that you track are easiest and which are hardest.

1:05:47 Oh well I think you've nailed it there, leopard By some margin is the most difficult. One It walks it solitary. And it walks incredibly lightly.

1:05:57 And it Its nature is solitary and secretive, it likes to operate in thick terrain. Any time you're seeing a leopard. The leopard is allowing you to see it. Which to me has this

1:06:09 Beautiful mystery that it cloaks it in. So leopard by quite some margin would be the most difficult and And we've had trackers here who've become real specialists at following leopards. We used to have a tracker by the name of Richard Sowella. And Sowena was

1:06:25 He was meticulous in his dress, and he was gruff. And he was hard to get along with. He was rude to most people. He had that kind of That arrogance born of being brilliant. He deserved all the arrogance he had'cause he was so good.

1:06:39 And he used to do this thing where If All the trackers be been out in the morning and they've been following a leopard. They would come back to camp, they had been unsuccessful, they had a last track, but they had lost it, he would go back there. And it used to be my favorite thing. He would go back at twelve o'clock in the afternoon

1:06:56 He would refused to go with anyone else, he wanted to go alone. And he would slowly start to work that track. And then eventually at like six o'clock in the evening you'd get a radio call and it would be Richard and he would say I've located this leopard, he would tell you where it was

1:07:11 And then his final refrain was Richard Sowella. is number one. Ha ha ha. And he did it he did it so consistently.

1:07:21 And Richard Suwila was number one. That's amazing. That is amazing. Technical question. Twelve noon. So I would think that high noon would actually be a hard time to track because It wouldn't Cast shadows as well, but is the reason for doing that that the animals are bedded down due to the heat, so that you're

1:07:41 able to track while they're In one place. Why would you go out at twelve noon? One is he's showing people how good he is. Because you're right, the direct light creates a a flat aspect on the ground. The light is flat, and so you're right, there's no shadow, there's no contrast. When the light is lower, it bounces off where the animal has stepped and it it changes the texture on the earth.

1:08:03 He's going at midday because No one else wants to go out in the heat. He's showing I go out in the heat. He's going at midday'cause the light is flat and he's saying I go out when the light is flat. He's going at midday because he knows that that leopard is gonna be lying up somewhere. And so if he can get a track, he can close the distance on it.

1:08:21 While it's not moving. And all of those So yeah. is number one.

1:08:28 It's so great. I love that. So let me ask, because people will no doubt be wondering. What type of protection does one have when say Renius goes out to track with clientele? Do you have a the equivalent of a SWAT team with you with rifles at the ready in case any danger presents itself. I think I know the answer to this, but I just because I know people may have a question mark in their minds. What type of protection do you guys carry? When we are tracking with clients.

1:08:57 We will carry rifles and always if we're running specifically tracking retreats we will be a two rifle operation. But really the protection is way upstream of that. In all of my years in the bush I've never had to use the rifle. The art form of tracking is what makes you safe. And when you're with someone like Renius.

1:09:16 The safety profile. just becomes exceptionally safe because he's so attuned. And so it's a capacity to read the terrain. To make good decisions. To be attuned to the freshness of the track, where those animals will be, how we should approach

1:09:32 Different terrain. Attun to the birds, bird language. And then Where any of the Is even more exceptional is that

1:09:40 No The way that an animal communicates with you is through a state of presence. If it is unhappy with you, it conveys energy through the way its body shapes. And Really amazing trackers are able to

1:09:53 read that body language and almost speak back to it in the way they move their body. And you can convey a very profound unspoken language. And I think of it as a language of energy or a language of presence And that is really what makes you safe. As that animal, if you see that animal, how you convey your intentions to it, your mood. What you do if it does become aggressive with you, how you meet that

1:10:17 And shape the The sort of the unspoken conversation between you. I want to bring up one of the lines. From The line trackers got to life that

1:10:28 pops to mind quickly when I think about this book. I'm sure it's a line that a lot of people bring up. I know it's a line that Josh has brought up. And I'd love to just hear you Explain. Why this is in

1:10:41 the book and why it matters. Quote, I don't know where we're going, but I know exactly how to get there. I love that, don't you? I love it. Absolutely. It's uh It really if you take a moment to pause and contemplate it the the implications.

1:10:57 A are pretty profound. So I'd love to just Here you riff on this and why And how this ended up. In the book.

1:11:06 Well there were two things that Renia used to say regularly. The one is Hisatikuma, Hishati Kuma. We will get We will get it.

1:11:14 And it was almost like this kind of incredible self talk that he would have when the track was cold or the track was Yeah, we weren't making progress. I would look at him and he would say, Ah, he shot the Kuma, we're gonna get this. And then Often he would say to I don't know where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there. And what he's saying, he he's talking to the dynamic of tracking, which is

1:11:35 It's an interesting energetic dynamic. He is profoundly committed To finding that animal. But he hasn't allowed that commitment to become a burden of some kind. He is working moment to moment on the signs that he's getting. And you can think in a vast wilderness as trackers we also talk about the first track.

1:11:53 In a vast wilderness, three hundred and sixty degrees of wild terrain. All he needs is the next first track. And then the next first track. And then the next first track. And the next first track.

1:12:05 And He's able to dial down the infinite possibilities. Of where that animal could have gone to a moment of knowing and a moment of presence and then another moment of knowing and another moment of presence. And all he needs is that next sign. So he doesn't know where it's going, but he knows how to get there. The next moment of presence, the next thing I know to do.

1:12:25 And It might be a good segue there into just telling you a little bit about how the tracking process changed for me over the years, but uh let me know if you w if you want to go. Dive in. Dive in. So I had these encounters Tim where by I had a childhood following animals and learning this art form and

1:12:43 Really the dynamics and the psyche of the tracker, how a tracker approached the process of finding an animal in the middle of nowhere. And then watching how consistently good trackers delivered an outcome. They found the animal they were looking for. And so that And at that time as a young child I thought I was learning that skill. And then Through my early twenties I had a series of pretty traumatic encounters.

1:13:06 And the result of that was that by the time I was about twenty three or twenty four years old, I had found myself Frozen by trauma. I felt I was depressed. I was uncertain how to move forward and in the way that trauma limits options, I felt myself extremely limited. I did not have access to

1:13:24 emotionality, I did not have access to different choices, I was stuck. And at that time I was very lucky to meet a woman who Came on Safari, she became my first mentor. And the reason I guided her was because Alex

1:13:39 My friend who also features in the book He had guided her a year before and he said to me she's a martial artist. And I was very interested in martial arts as I know you are. And so I went into the guide room and in the guide room there was this board

1:13:53 Well Every guard got their name. put next to the clients who were coming in. And I rubbed off someone else's name and I put my name next to her to guide her. And that moment absolutely changed my life. Her name was Dr. Martha Beck. And she arrived on the Safari and we went out the first two days.

1:14:11 And she said something On the second day that I felt something in me like Really moved. We were driving along and I was telling her about the restoration of the land And she said I really understand this and I believe the restoration

1:14:25 of the planet will come out of a transformation in human consciousness. And the minute she said it, you know, whatever my grandfather knew, or my father knew, or my uncle knew when he saw that lay, but I felt that thing move inside of me, that kind of That idea struck me very deeply. And then

1:14:41 On about the fourth day. I'd driven back to the camp and you know, I'm in my safari gear, I got my rifle, you know, I'm the guide, I'm rugged guy, I'm out there tracking lions. And she turned and she looked at me. And she said I'm ready to talk to you.

1:14:57 And I was sort of taken aback, I said, Well what what do you mean? She said I can see what you're carrying and I can see how stuck you are, and I want you to know that I can help you and I'm here. And I don't know if you've ever had one of those instances where someone sees you when you're in one of those places. But I felt Myself.

1:15:13 becoming really uncertain and then I felt tears starting to come into my eyes and then there was this moment where the you know This woman is hugging the Safari guide and just Consoling me. And she was an incredible healer and she was Exceptionally adept at

1:15:27 Transformational processes. And so she started to Teach me. How to move through the trauma and the suffering that I was stuck in.

1:15:38 And as that happened. my relationship to tracking started to change and I started to see this art form in a different way and I realized But I was looking for something. And all of the skills and the and the mentality of the tracker was highly adept to being in a transformational process.

1:15:56 You know, the first thing that you will have to do if you want to go track a lion in the wild Is you will have to be Unknowns. You'll have to give up

1:16:06 All the ways you try to know what to do and say, I don't know how to do this. All trackers operate Using unknowns to almost bring them to life, you know? You will need to develop your track awareness. Track awareness is

1:16:19 Teaching yourself to be attuned. to a very specific set of signs, metrics But self generated, you know, like when I was a kid, Renus would take me out to a game path and he would say Walk down that game path and tell me what you see. I would come back and I would say to him

1:16:34 I saw Heard of Impala walk there. He would say, I am fun. Famma Uya Languta food, young boy, go look again. And as I was walking away, he would say

1:16:44 So put your head down like it like the way an animal drinks Put your head right down against the trail and look like you're drinking water, like an animal. And I would come back and I would say I can see Where the herd of Impala walked, but they actually walked over the tracks of a leopard. And I can see where a mouse ran across the path and then an owl swooped down and its wing touched the ground.

1:17:04 And each time I walk down that path Under his guidance there was more information. And that idea became very important to me, the idea that there is information in your life if you are looking for transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it. And so, you know, what do you need to attuned to in transformational processes.

1:17:23 Things that make you feel expensive, things that make you feel alive, letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards, noticing what you're curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that make you feel more alive. So I started to see See through the eyes of the tracker the first track. Yeah, the first track. Being the next thing you know to do. Letting go of

1:17:45 Yeah, where that animal up might be or Letting go of where you think you should be and just doing the next thing you know to do and the next thing you know to do. If you watch great trackers they drop into what I call the following state. And it's so beautiful if you watch Alex and Renus in the following state.

1:18:04 The following straight could be defined almost as constant creative response to what is occurring. If the track cuts left, Alex will click And he'll say, I'm on the track. If it cuts right, Rennyas will be on it. They're getting a sense of the mood of the animal. They're using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving and in that way like almost feel the animal as it's walking out ahead of them. At the same time they are vectoring and they are getting a sense of their bearings using waypoints of marula trees up ahead. When you watch them it they they're almost having fun in it. They're playing. They're playing on that track.

1:18:36 And so you will need to develop the following state in your own transformational process. How can you play? How can you be creative with Not knowing what you're trying to create or this place you're trying to get to, but being open and willing and aware and attuned. You will almost certainly lose the track. And sort of saying this to see how the tracker came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing.

1:18:59 Um, you will lose the track. You'll be in the middle of it thinking, I'm deep in the following state, I'm right on track, and then suddenly it'll be gone. And you will need to build community around you of other great trackers, people who are willing to move with you, follow with you. And the core of it is really that there is something inside of you That knows. There is a part of you you might call it your wild self.

1:19:20 You might call it the track of your life, or as native people call it, your medicine way. A part of you that beyond rational thought reacts when you become more in tune with yourself. And shifting away the layers of socialization, all the things you should do, all the things you have to do to start to be able to follow the trail of that place inside of you became really what the core of my own journey to healing was.

1:19:44 And I s I live like that to this day as a tracker. Trying to be present, resting into the unknown, attuning I'm trying to fall into the following state. With what energizes me, makes me curious, and pulls me forward. Thank you for that.

1:19:57 It strikes me also that A lot of people who would Try to help another start. Almost as a hammer looking for nails, right? The

1:20:09 Don't listen enough first, and it just strikes me that What Martha did was Very much. initially demonstrated by

1:20:21 Her powers of observation, awareness, and attunement. And those are sort of like the core fundamental Characteristics. That you need to Develop or resurrect.

1:20:32 Before you can really prescribe anything at all. And The question I wanna ask is actually related to the traumatic events if you're open to it. Would you be willing to share what

1:20:43 happened or some of the examples of what happened in your twenties? Yeah, just one comment on Martha. Once we started to get onto that level with each other when I watched her When I looked at her, what I saw was a superb tracker. She understood

1:20:57 How Trauma patterns us. And she was incredibly adept at first tracking the pattern and then starting to support you in creating a different outcome for yourself. Or providing

1:21:10 tools and options for different ways of doing it. And as I watched her work with myself and with many other people, I saw a tracker who would You know, at first just really observe and get to know what they were working with and be present and attuned and and that's really what most attracted me to her work, I saw a tracker of processes, human processes, and first and foremost, and that's probably what I was mature enough, the frame that I was Able to see through at that time as a tracker.

1:21:37 But yeah, it's a segue into my own My own experiences Yeah, my family, I would say Tim went through a very difficult ten year period. A period of intense suffering. And yet that suffering became the place where we learnt to do the work and go inward and start

1:21:54 to understand how healing processes work and so I've gotten to the place now where I've I fondly look back on those ten years of initiation, you know, university of suffering. But it began for me When My grandmother died.

1:22:08 My father who had Taken the Londolosi model of care of land, care of wildlife, care of people, and he had launched it To thirty other operations around southern Africa. Which Mandela had asked him to do. And so he had there'd been this big sort of expansion. And then in a classic kind of change of founders trap, he got fired from that.

1:22:29 And then very soon into that, South Africa was going through a very, very difficult time. And one night we were in Johannesburg and this was Post elections but it was still The country was still rarely finding its feet and there was a ton of violent crime still happening. And

1:22:44 Yeah, as I said, I was eighteen years old and I I woke up and my sister was shaking me. And immediately as I sat up, I had a gun pushed into my face. And The home that we were staying in in Johannesburg on that occasion had been invaded.

1:23:00 And I just felt the adrenaline pump through my system and All of my work. in healing spaces, Lena, and I know that you're involved in psychedelic assisted therapy has been to try and get a cap on the scope of Where my body goes when it gets a mild trauma because I woke up into my worst nightmare.

1:23:21 And I look to my left and my mother's tied up on the floor and my sister's tied up. And I know kind of stories of how these things go, the violence, the potential danger to women.

1:23:33 And it was just like Absolute red line fair. And just to see the woman in my life, my family like that and So this shocking and then Realising that

1:23:45 You know, I know I can read animals. But I can't quite read people. I I mean I can't quite read them. It's they don't they're they're not as honest as animals, you know, so I just don't know where this is gonna go. And I'm sitting in this tension. And eventually. They took me outside. These guys who had broken into the house and they said to me, We're gonna kill you.

1:24:05 So they pulled me outside. And they put a gun to my head. And they said this is they basically said, Now we're gonna kill you. And You know, the fear was so intense and then I remember looking up

1:24:18 The barrel. At the man who was holding the gun to my head and we we looked into each other's eyes. And in that moment something happened which I can't say what happened. You might call it the peace of God that part us understanding, but I think it was too big for my ego structure to hold and it collapsed.

1:24:38 And as I looked at him, all fear left me. And All concern. For my own bodily safety left me. And I just felt a profound human connection with him.

1:24:52 And as that happened, and there were three of these guys standing around me, as as that moment happened It was kind of this This weird I the only way I can describe it is a kind of a weirdness came over everyone. It was as if everyone had become glimmered. And

1:25:07 They put the guns down and everyone just stood there confused. And I walked back inside, totally un A cost of any way. And I got the car keys and I walk back out and I gave them the car keys and I said, Get in that car and leave.

1:25:22 And they did. And it was just immensely bizarre and And for years I lived with trying to work out both the terror that I felt and the the fear that had flooded me, but also trying to integrate like whatever had happened in that moment. And I'm not sure that I I fully understand it, but

1:25:41 Yeah, I've I felt like I glimpsed. Through the Most terrifying situation, I I glimpse something. That was a a very very sort of that was the first freezing experience that I had.

1:25:54 It's terrifying. And then up on the heels of that. And I think sometimes of Jung's Description of like What is unconscious will be made conscious.

1:26:05 It will manifest into your life until you become more conscious about what you're carrying. Couple of weeks after that. Literally in the same year. Myself and some friends and another tracker called Saliem Slongo, we went down To the river on the reserve.

1:26:20 And it was an extremely hot day and we left the people who we were guiding And we began to walk upstream in the river. And Sully stayed on the bank. And I was actually walking in the water and the the water was knee deep.

1:26:34 Running over sand, and you could see quite clearly. And then there was a place up ahead where a tree had fallen over and its branches were in the water. And it was kind of shadowy. And I when I think of it now, I think like if it had been a horror movie, you know, people in the audience would have started saying, Don't go near the shadowy place. And of course as I walk past a shadowy place

1:26:53 I actually sat down just on the edge of those shadows and my perception was that the water was too shallow for crocodiles. But of course the crocodile was in the hole. And The first thing that you notice when a crocodile grabs you is just the ferocity and the pressure of the bite. I just felt it slam onto my right leg.

1:27:11 And it tries to pull me into the deep section of the water. I throw my arm up and I grab a branch and it starts to shake me. And I see a slick of blood. Appear in the water and then it gets washed downstream. While the crocodile is shaking me, I see Solly, who's on the bank, he sees me

1:27:27 And he sees that I'm in trouble. And he immediately starts making his way towards me. Sully is also a Shangun man, grew up hunting and gathering. The croc goes to bite me a second time and I kicked and By the grace of God my foot went down its throat.

1:27:41 And it spat me out. And I pulled myself up into the branches of the tree. And I have this memory of almost being non local, watching myself Pull myself. Up into the branches of the tree.

1:27:53 I got up into the branches and I remember looking over my shoulder and my leg from the knee down is just absolutely mangled, torn to pieces and Me hanging off. I made a pact with myself in that moment. I could never look at that again. And I made my way through the branches. And I fell onto the bank.

1:28:10 And I knew that I was extremely vulnerable on the bank. Crocodile's an it's an elite predator. If it thinks it can get you and I was on the bank against the water, it's gonna grab me again. At that point Sully coming from the other bank arrives at the deep section of the channel. He's seen me come out of the water. He's seen that my leg is mangled and he knows that in the deep channel of water between him and I Is a crocodile.

1:28:34 And I can tell you that man didn't slow down, not for one second. He plunged into the water, he waded into almost over his hips. And he got to me on the bank and he grabbed me, put me on his shoulder. And he carried me up onto the bank, he took his shirt off, he wrapped it around my leg. Yeah.

1:28:49 We were able to call the folks who are with us and calm them down. radio a plane that was flying over and I was able to get Melivact out and And we were able to stop the bleeding so that I was I survived. So you know, those two experiences were very alive in me. And maybe this is a side point and

1:29:08 And then I'll Slow down for a while, but You know, in the in the months after that I sat many, many times with Sully. And I said to him, Sorry. You know, why why did you come in the water?

1:29:19 And he would look at me with disdain and he'd say. My brother, you're in trouble, I'm in trouble. And at first I thought it was some kind of like You know platitude, he was playing down his actions. But as time went on I really understood.

1:29:36 And I came to see that. In the way that Sully grew up, he grew up in a much more collective consciousness. He grew up with his tribe, he grew up hunting and gathering, he grew up in nature. And He lived in a much more interconnected way. than any of us live. He his he in fact his whole psyche was not formed around individuality

1:29:56 His psyche was formed around a we consciousness, you and me together, a collective consciousness. And to him it was fundamental. If I was in trouble, he was in trouble. And so he did not see it as any kind of heroic action. He just saw it as the most obvious natural thing to do and and that really that moved me and that and that taught me a lot. Yes. I'm gonna come back to a coup on a number of things. First.

1:30:19 Good Lord, I'm sorry both of those things happened, even though it ended up being the university of suffering. Those are too excruciating. Experiences to put it mildly. But just based on what you Said about

1:30:33 This collective Consciousness. Does the word Ubuntu or the concept of Ubuntu tie into this? In any way. Oh absolutely. Could you explain that for folks?

1:30:46 Yeah, Ubuntu is An African philosophy. That says I am because of you. Uh People

1:30:54 are not people without other people. And what Ubuntu is talking to is the relational nature of life. And The point I wanna make about it is that it is In when you spend time

1:31:09 with people with the Ubuntu consciousness is activated in them, where Ubuntu is alive in them. It is actually a kind of structuring in their very psyche. They experience things in relation. They experience each other in a relational way. And

1:31:25 They know that knowing yourself and being yourself is about being connected to people, but also to the broader field. of sentient life. And so Mozali was activating there. was the Ubuntu consciousness. And he was showing that Ubuntu consciousness comes alive in action through courageous action in that case. But very much what he was showing me that day was

1:31:48 How deeply ingrained it was in him the collective nature of life. Another way of saying it, Tim, is like and this gets really interesting and as you start to learn your own psyche But different cultures, the psyches are structured differently. And in a more western setting. You might say that

1:32:06 In a society where the individual self is disconnected from the greater interconnectivity of life. The search for meaning. is reduced to a constant state of comparison. So people will always on some level be saying

1:32:21 How am I doing in comparison? And m so many people are living with that without even knowing that that's how they're trying to orientate themselves. Whereas if you grow up in Africa or if you grew up in nature You grew up relationally. So it's not comparative. It's more like I'm learning about myself through my encounter with the world. Mm.

1:32:40 I'm gonna try to maybe awkwardly tie a number of things together here. When you and I I think it was when we first spent time together. Can't remember. Maybe it was the first time we spoke, but you were just coming off of Living in a tree, if I remember correctly. If you're open to talking about that. And if not, we can certainly cut it later, but since we're talking about it. How many days were you in this tree?

1:33:09 So I was forty days and forty nights in the tree. I went into the tree. You know if you read all the mystical traditions. Including I think your your man Hafiz on your bookshelf, but in all the mystical traditions There seems to be a time when

1:33:24 The mystics are drawn to be alone in nature. And you know, Jesus went for forty days and forty nights, but the Buddha went to the grove. There's accounts of it all. All along the way. And So I wanted to go and have that experience myself and I'm not saying I'm a mystic, but I wanted look my question was Why did all of the mystics go to be in total solitude in nature?

1:33:43 And so with a lockdown in the world, suddenly I had six weeks where I could go and do that you know, go and sit in that question and see what answers that time. The first was that Initially there was a tremendous anxiety You know the first I had a lot of thoughts around

1:34:00 I'm gonna be away, I'm gonna miss something, I'm not attending to and then Dropped. And the I know the aborigin people have this amazing saying that modern culture is three days deep. And after three days I start I felt myself go into a different state of consciousness. I just realized

1:34:17 It doesn't matter. And then I started to attune myself to the natural world. And a few things happened. The one is that A big insight was that

1:34:27 Where your attention goes, your life goes. And if you're constantly putting your attention on living things, There's more aliveness in your own life. That was that was one. The second was

1:34:40 That if you spend time in nature in the same spot Over a period of time it starts to become incredibly personal. So it's not just a bird. Uh That antelope it's That bird that roosts in that bush and flies down the riverbed

1:34:54 in the morning and back up the southern bank, and then it feeds for grubs in this tree. And as you start to become more personally attuned to each animal, you start to see that there's a pattern to their movement. And in fact, then you start to find yourself orientated inside of a series of interlocking intelligences that is really what the natural world is. And then at some point You realise that

1:35:17 I'm not observing this. this intelligence that I'm watching unfold around me, I'm fundamentally a part of this. And it stops being a mental construct and you start to feel yourself inside of that intelligence. And That's a very, very deep experience, or at least it was for me, and I'm I think that that is why at a certain point the mystics went to go and get quiet enough

1:35:38 to feel themselves inside of that incredible field of intelligence that is the natural world. I had Just radical encounters every day. And I think that's another thing about the natural world is Things happen. And as things happen each day.

1:35:53 It almost like it helps you make meaning. And in a society, you know, the societies of the modern world are almost becoming devoid of The structures that allow us to make meaning, but the natural world It's full of encounter. And that encounter generates an aliveness and a relational meaning making quality that just makes life feel very, very rich. And we lived like that for thousands of years. Before we lived on Discord. Were there any other aspects of the experience were particularly surprising to you in any way? Or any other rules that you set for yourself

1:36:25 That Fruitless or fruitful. I mean the one encounter that comes to mind and there were many is w you know lots of solo hours tracking which felt very special. But on one of the nights I got caught in a storm, a thunderstorm rolled in and a and the heat built all through the afternoon.

1:36:43 And I could see the storm building out over the western horizon. And it started to look menacing and then even more menacing. And I was living on a flat platform up in the tree. And eventually the wind started to howl and blow. And then the mother

1:36:59 And the father of a thunderstorm broke around me. And You know The lightning bolts were coming around around me, and I don't know if you've ever been very close to lightning strikes, but the first thing is that you just hear it go like this. And then the blade comes down?

1:37:15 And then the sound goes sonic, but if you're close enough to it, it actually clicks as it hits the ground. And that started to come down around me, torrential rain and blades of lightning lighting up around me. And the sound was just so intense and it I mean it was just monstrous. I was cast into a deep and overwhelming fear. And I realized that I can imagine.

1:37:39 I realized that like true fear is like true fear. Is kind of a rare experience in modern life. Yeah, terror. Terror, right? Like terror is a it's a it's a very distinct thing.

1:37:53 It's so distinct to like all my anxiety. You know, all the things I worry about. But like The Raw I don't know if we make it out of the sphere is actually a very rare encounter in life.

1:38:05 And You know, it would not end. I just kept saying to myself, like you can't be this scared for so long, surely it's just gonna pass. And then like another hour and another hour. And I just kind of weathered it and I felt an incredible Yeah, I mean I I guess

1:38:21 Talked about a lot, but an incredible Fragility. And an incredible humility. And then the next day when I came out of it, I also felt like Oh god, that scared me so much, but I would

1:38:34 I would do it again. You know, just to like on the other side of it to have been like in a storm like that. W felt felt very very very special. I felt Like profoundly like a profound encounter with the force of nature. Do you think You will ever do an extended period.

1:38:51 Solo like that again. I don't know if you were totally solo. I I have no idea if you were solo, solo, solo, or it was like solo most of the time, but a few people would come out and say hi every once in a while, but maybe you could clarify that. But do you think you would repeat An experiment like that, why or why not? Not necessarily in a tree, but that that degree of solitude. I mean without a shadow of a doubt, it is one of the most Beautiful things I've ever done.

1:39:14 And I don't know if I will do six weeks again. But I will certainly try and get Ten days. Solo in nature a year.

1:39:23 With no other people. And in this one I didn't see other people. I was totally by myself and you know, there's amazing things that happen when you're by yourself. One is, you know, getting really into your own energy. Just being in your own energetic field. Then being attuned to nature and feeling your body start to attune to those rhythms. You know, watching

1:39:42 the stars move through the sky all night and feeling yourself naturally wake up at the dawn and go to sleep when it gets dark and feeling your whole circadian rhythm attune to that. What else about it? You know funny things happen like On the one day I banged my head. I had a trunk which ha had dry goods in it, but I banged my hand on the trunk. I was like ah

1:40:01 Gun. You know, damn it. And And I I flew into a rage. I like I flew into rage because it was so painful. And then I realized

1:40:11 That with no one else around I couldn't maintain my state of anger. And it's a really weird thing, like Sulking being angry and sulking and moods and all of that stuff is really for the benefit of other people. It's really so that other people can get tuned in to like what a difficult time you're having. But when you buy yourself, they just do not abide because there's no one around to like stay in the story for. Well, speaking of mood, part of the reason I'm asking

1:40:40 is because I know you and I have both experienced In life. Depressive episodes. And I suppose there's part of me that thinks man, forty days is a long time. to be alone with the voices in your head. But did you find

1:40:55 How did you find that experience? Was that even a concern going into it for you? How did you if you did think about it, how did you think about that? No, I mean it's certainly a concern. And then there's also this weird component of time, right? Like you wake up at four in the morning You meditate.

1:41:10 You go tracking for a few hours, you come back to the camp, you make some coffee, you run You do some more reading and journaling, you meditate again, and it's ten fifteen. And you have thirty nine days to go. The one thing is that I You know, I was not doing like traditional Zen retreat. I allowed myself books.

1:41:32 I allowed myself to do daily recordings of my encounters, like kind of journal entries. And I allowed myself to go tracking. And so actually it was incredibly generative for me. And there's all these like little problems you have to solve. Like you've gotta keep your camp clean and then everything gets wet and then you gotta work out how to build yourself a bit of shelter. And then once you become more present, it becomes so full of life. Like I would make myself this evening shower, I'd go full some full of big cast iron kettle with water, and then I would warm it on the fire.

1:42:01 And then I would pour this kettle of hot water over myself totally alone. Up in the tree. It was the best shower I've ever had, and just It was teaching me presence all the time and Once the anxiety left, there was a lot of introspection and I looked at a lot of things, but I actually didn't feel myself taken by

1:42:18 Anxious or depressive demons. The process felt very generative and alive to me. Yeah, that's something that I've been looking at. very, very closely for myself and I don't think I've yet Perhaps developed the eyes or the awareness to parse it, but

1:42:33 the characteristics or the circumstances that lead to nourishing solitude versus Depleting. Isolation. Right, because those are very different for me, those concepts represent very different things, right? Solitude versus isolation or loneliness.

1:42:52 How does it feel for you now? Like if you went if you went alone for a week to a cabin now, like w how does it land on you now? A week I could do. Week I can do and I could find that I think very restorative. I particularly find it restorative if I am with Molly, my dog. And have that.

1:43:10 Close connection. Going through Wilderness. With Molly. is particularly Nourishing to me. I can also do it solo, but I find that she and I are so attuned at this point.

1:43:23 Because we spend. Almost. all of our waking time together, that she's like my external nervous system. So she's almost like an amplifier. from my own nervous system. So I'm picking up what I'm picking up, but I'm also picking up a lot of what she is picking up just by observing her behavior. And that Is

1:43:43 Very additive. For me. And also deepens my relationship not only with the surroundings and with myself on some level, but with her So weak I would would take no problem.

1:43:55 I think the six weeks starts to get out to a point where I'm like I wonder, right? There's just a question mark because I haven't done six weeks. So that's a that's a pretty good stretch of time. Yeah. I mean I will say that it was largely supplemented by the passion for tracking. And so, you know, your encounter with like feeling the presence of Molly there and

1:44:15 You know, being in this thing together, like My feeling is every time I'm tracking I'm in a a new story. Every time I'm out there following, I'm I'm in a deep In content, it actually feels Like there's this alive sentience awareness.

1:44:30 One of the things that I would say. Is that When I first went out I thought that I part of what I was doing is I wanted to improve my attunement to nature. Like I wanted to know nature. But one of the most profound experiences out of it was

1:44:45 That I started to feel known by nature. Yeah. Yeah. I know that this maybe veers us off a little bit into the esoteric, but there was this feeling that Is this sentient alive consciousness and somehow It was feeling me as I was feeling it. In a really deep way.

1:45:02 And that felt actually That felt incredibly supportive and like I was Touching something really beautiful and special. I think there's a lot to that, but lest we get too far down the uh Rabbit hole into Crazy Town.

1:45:17 Which maybe maybe we'll do on a round two. Uh definitely do around a campfire in person. But I I think there's actually a lot there related to what you just said. I do want to discuss your healing process and this is gonna seem like a very strange way to approach it. Before we get to that I feel like maybe. Like ginger in the sushi meal will just give people a story as a as a quick refresher.

1:45:44 Slash palette cleanser and then we'll then we'll dig into some heavy stuff. So are you willing to tell the story about the bees? Oh absolutely. Um Well, I guess I guess we bonded over the story. People ask me a lot, like what's the most dangerous encounter you've had in nature?

1:46:03 And You know, by this stage of the podcast you know a crocodile tried to ingest me. And that wasn't the worst. Um But I became fascinated By bees.

1:46:14 For a few reasons. The one is that one day I was walking In the wild part of Zimbabwe. And I came across this ancient Bayabab tree, this two story high Bayab tree, and it had been hollowed out When elephant had knocked the branch.

1:46:28 And it was in fact empty. And a swarm of bees had made their hive in the top of it. And the sound of the bees humming was coming down the base of that tree and it was like standing next to this giant Didjury do And just the sort of I could hear the intensity of the bees through this process and I felt their their vibration coming out of this tree and it was it kind of sparked my interest.

1:46:49 There's also an amazing thing. In southern Africa, there's a bird called the honey guide. And literally if you go out in parts of wilderness in Africa and you start banging on trees A bird will come to you and it will start to call incredibly animatedly, very much like Disney's I think he wants us to follow him. And then it will fly in front of you.

1:47:11 And show you where the beehive is. So that Like for thousands of years before, as a hunter gatherer you can rob the beehive and And then you put some honey down next to you and the bird comes and lands next to you and eats the honey it's this incredible ancient Just

1:47:26 You know, s an encounter like that, like it just Takes you back thousands of years. Wait, just just for clarity, this is this is like thousands, tens of thousands, who knows hundreds of thousands of years of co evolution where this bird has a Species memory. Uh

1:47:42 A symbiotic relationship with humanoids. Is that That what I'm hearing? That's it. And when it sees a person, it knows we go and get honey together. Wow. I mean, isn't that amazing? That's cool. And you'll and you'll walk out to remote places and suddenly the birds there and it's like, come on, let's do this. Are we gonna do this? And it it almost appears to get disappointed if you're like, I'm not gonna go and rob the beehive now. Wow.

1:48:08 So anyway, like I was having the the you know, the sort of I was around with this idea and I was like the bees are really fascinating. And then I started reading up on them. And it's this incredible creature, right? They pollinate millions of flowers. They're one of the biggest contributors from the insect world to the economy, honey sales. They can feel electromagnetic fields, they will disappear if a storm is brewing. And then as you watch the hive itself, this incredible kind of

1:48:33 Algorithmic intelligence whereby a single B An individual B responds to localized stimuli Doing what it knows to do. And when enough bees responding to individual localized stimuli all start to attune, an algorithm fires through the hive and they move as one and they know where to go and get food, et cetera. So that idea also gripped me, the idea of individuals attuning to what they know to do can trigger a kind of a collective transformation.

1:49:00 So I got really into this. And I went out into the village behind the camp. All the good stuff. Yeah, just a bit of backstory here before my near death experience. So wait, I should tell you that during the time that I got fascinated about bees There was a couple Who were coming on Safari and they had been writing to me from Singapore and they were saying, listen, we want to come to Africa, but we're terrified of Ebola.

1:49:22 And I had said to them, Listen, a bowler is in North and West Africa, there's no ebola in South Africa. Yeah, but we're very, very afraid of it. We're very concerned that it could travel. I said You really have to trust me, there's no Ebola in South Africa, you're gonna be absolutely safe. So they had come on Safari. Meantime, I walk up into the back of the village. And I f seek out a man by the name of Simon Sambo.

1:49:45 Simon Sambo Yeah, he had a hi himself has a mellifluous voice, very soft lilting voice. And Simon Sambo is the village beekeeper. So I say to him.

1:49:58 Simon, I've got really interested in bees and I know that you have some hives and I would love to come and experience your beekeeping. He says, okay, that's no problem, I can take your beekeeping. I said I'm great. I'm excited about this. He says, You meet me tomorrow in the morning and we will go and meet the bees. Yeah. Great.

1:50:18 Next morning I meet him. And he's got a big sort of black Plastic case. And we drive out to the highs and I'm inappropriately dressed I'm in like shorts and T shirt. And I said him, What do we do now? He says, uh Okay.

1:50:33 The first thing is you must put on your beekeeping suit. So he gives me his suit and I I put it on. And it's a little bit short for me. Like literally between my sneaker and my ankle I have some exposure. So I said him, Simon, the the suit's a bit short for me.

1:50:50 This was his second city says Uh don't worry, you can borrow my socks. So he takes his boots off and he's got thick black socks. And so I sort of feel them and I think, okay, this is gonna be good. And I put the socks on and I like seal up the suit. And I say to him, Cool, Simon, let's get the smoker going now.

1:51:09 He says, Oh no, I don't use the smoker. It makes the bees afraid of a fire. So like a little bell goes off in my head, I'm like, but beekeepers all over the world use the smoker. He says, It's not my style. I'm like, okay, I'm here to learn. And so Simon and I start heading towards the hives. And I'm talking African bees here. Now some amazing thing happens. As you approach the hive

1:51:35 If you just walk past the hive with no intention of doing anything The bees somehow know it, but the minute you put your Intention and attention on them. I don't know how You know, it's maybe too woo, but I'm telling you they feel it.

1:51:50 And as you start walking towards the hive They start changing gears like they're at the Austin F1 track. And you you hear the sound changing. So we get up next to the hive and Simon gets out his crowbar and he cranks the lid off. And seventy thousand of the most enraged African bees rise up in a black cloud around me. And they're shimmering around me. And you can feel the intensity and you can feel their attitude of Oh, you think you can fuck with us. And they're all around you and they start to land on you. And you know, if someone who's grown up around animals, I feel the energy of a single angry aggressive animal. And they're all over me and I say, Simon, this is quite intense, he says

1:52:37 Don't worry, everything's okay. And they start landing on the visor and like blocking the visor out. And it's super intense and right at that moment in the midst of this like Raw buzzing intensity. One B Found My weak sock area.

1:52:55 And It stung me through the sock. And the minute as that A huge pheromonal casc was released to the other bees, and the shimmering swarming dark mass around my head!

1:53:10 It stopped for a second. And then as one, the bees went to my ankles. And they begin to sting me intensely through the socks. The socks do not work. I saw saying, Simon, Simon, they're stinging me. Zhuan! Simon, Simon, they're stinging me, what does I do? What does it do? He says, Okay, uh back away. Zhuan, and they start following me and then now I'm being stung hundreds of times. And then at one stage I look up and there's a bee that has That's inside the suit. So eventually I get into the clearing and now I have a swarm of bees around me. They are still penetrating the soft badly. I say, Simon, what must I do? What must I do? He says uh Hold on! I will help you!

1:53:45 And he runs over and he cuts a large branch of a tree. And then he runs back and he starts beating me with the branch. So now I'm standing in the clear and getting Pounded with the branch. And they're still stinging me, they're still all around me. It's not working, it's not working. He says Okay, I will get the smoker going. And I just the thought ran to my head like

1:54:04 Little late for that. So he grabbed the smoke, he starts putting elephant dung in it, and then he gets it going, and he comes over to me and he starts blasting me with the smoker. And the first blast Went right through the visor of the bookkeeping suit and kind of into my mouth and so I got a big inhale of elephant dung and then my mind I and my chest immediately tightened up. I started thinking, Shit My whole body's going into anaphylaxis. Is it elephant tongue or is it anaphylaxis? And they're still stinging me and it's bad. I said him Simon, they're still singing me, they're still seeing me, he says, uh okay

1:54:36 Run for your life! And this is when two men in beekeeping suits Break into a full run through the wilderness. And we just start running aimlessly at first and then he says, They will chase you forever. Make for the Land Rova So we run to the Land Rover and we jump into it and he just says, Drive, drive, drive, they are enraged And start driving off into the wilderness. Tim, true as nuts, we come around the first corner. And

1:55:06 On the other Safari truck driving towards us is the couple from Singapore who've been afraid of Ebola and they see what they see is the Ebola cleanup crew in full white suits Driving towards them at full speed going, You're gonna die You're gonna die Drive Drive Drive And that was my first encounter with the bees so eventually I make it back to the house. And I remember I got into my my bedroom. And I sat on the bed and I was just trying to feel my own body and I was like Am I dying?

1:55:38 Am I am I dying? Am I okay? Like is it kicking in? And I got into the shower. And I like took all the stings out of my ankles and I made it Back onto my bed.

1:55:49 And that was me for the next five days. I did not move. My feet looked like someone had taken um surgical gloves and just blown them off. And Simon and Simon would come around. And he would say uh Uh hey boyd, how you doing today? Said not good. He said I bought some ice for your feet. Next time we will get you boots.

1:56:12 But you know, I I sat with it and what what I took out of it was number one What the bees taught me is if you wanna know about the bees Respect the bees. And the next thing that I got was I became intrigued by the power of

1:56:29 this collective ability to fire the con like the collective consciousness algorithm, like What would it mean if we all started really attending to states of peace and healing and well being and and if enough of us did that Could we, like the bees, you know, create some kind of Algorithmic transformation for everyone. Yeah, or get out of some invader's ankles. Intensity. They taught me so much about intensity. I think that's what I learned from Independence Day.

1:56:57 If we have aliens invade, that's a great way for us to activate our high of mind to sting the shit out of someone's ankles. Get the bees on them. All right. Well this the segue back to what I mentioned earlier is gonna be a little awkward. Let me find uh like an in between course. To get us there. That'll maybe lead us back. In some odd way.

1:57:18 Could you speak to the moment when a Lion. notices you. And then what happens. At that point.

1:57:28 How does an encounter like that unfold? Well, again, I you know, I wanna come back to that idea of the minute a lion becomes aware of you and you become aware of it, you are in a language dialogue. And it is a language of energy and presence. Now there's usually One of two things that will happen.

1:57:43 Either the lion will get up, and this is Ninety nine percent of the encounters the lions. Natural instinct is to get away from you. Remember People hunted lions for hundreds of years on the plains.

1:57:55 And actually one of the primary ways that Hunter Gatherers got food. And a lot of people don't know this is they track lions and then they would rob them of their kills. And so lions have a long history of being chased by humans, so Normally it'll go away from you, however

1:58:10 That doesn't always happen. Particularly if if a lioness has cubs or if they have meat, they can be aggressive. Now normally what'll happen is the first thing that you will notice Is the animals. Body will tighten.

1:58:23 They'll drop their head And the tail starts to flick intensely and they start to warn and growl at you. Rrrrr. And it sounds like the growl is so intense it sounds like someone started a dirt bike in the bush up ahead of you. And then

1:58:37 If it's a lioness and she's got cubs, she'll stand up. And still with her head low and her ears back and the tail lashing She slowly starts to walk towards you. And she fixes you with a gaze. Of utter intensity.

1:58:51 And the minute she has you in that gaze Your only option Is you have to stand your ground. And you have to communicate an intense presence back to her. So

1:59:01 When that happens to me, if I feel myself starting to come into an encounter where we're gonna have a A more aggressive. Energetic conversation was may I just interject for one second to say when you don't have clients True or false, you guys will often go out with just walking sticks. Yeah, no no rifles without clients.

1:59:21 Okay, please get it. We w what we most believe in is being in this dialogue. And so if that happens, the first thing that you do is you breathe out, a long outbreath. Yeah.

1:59:35 is starting to jack up because the feeling of it is like I'm I'm in you can feel your whole system flush with Adrenaline. So you breathe out, you anchor yourself. And Then you understand that that lion is trying to communicate with you. She walks towards you intensely, intensely, and then she'll growl.

1:59:52 And with that she charges. And then she runs at you. at full speed and it is in it's so fast Snarling. Full gums revealed, teeth revealed, and she comes in.

2:00:03 And then You stand your ground and you look her directly in the eyes. And Mostly what'll happen is she'll stop some distance from you. As she stops, you hold her in your energy and you almost aggressive back to her.

2:00:17 And you're showing that like I'm dangerous too? And then the minute you see her energy drop a little bit,'cause all that she's doing is she's trying to anchor you so that the cubs can run away. The minute you see her energy drop a little bit, you just start dropping away and you give her still facing her, you step back, you give her space. And very quickly you start communicating to her That we know we've come too close, but we're gonna give you space now.

2:00:39 But you can only do that once she has stopped coming at you. If you watch her very intensely and Renas is is really the master of this, as you watch her closely A slight drop in energy and he'll move backwards a little bit. And then you You know, get out of the situation and you just find yourself giggling stupidly.

2:00:56 And doing all the weird things that happen after high tense situations. So you said most of the time they stop some distance from you. So what's what's the alternate scenario? If you get if you're in the alternate scenario you you've got something very, very wrong. Yeah. And the reason that you get into the alternate scenario. Is that you get it wrong in the moment.

2:01:18 You see, as that charge starts happening, you're in the dialogue and your presence is absolutely critical and your ability to project an energetic presence and meet her and then to quickly help her understand that you're not afraid of her, you're dangerous, but you're also gonna give way. And when people get killed is because they get that wrong. They fall over. Their nerve breaks and they want to run. Or they get scared and they start running immediately, that's when dangerous things happen. You know, I don't know if you've ever come across this book, but it's it's one of my favorite nonfiction books of the last ten years.

2:01:47 Which is saying a lot for me because I do read. A lot of books and they already have cleared hurdles, right? I'm not just reading whatever I like randomly pick off of Amazon. I'm getting books that are usually recommended by two or three people first. In a book called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez.

2:02:03 who's won a lot of awards. He's best known for a book called Arctic Dreams, but of wolves and men He talks about The Conversation between predator and prey is the conversation of death.

2:02:16 And he went out with field biologists and also with In you it. And native Americans in North America. At various points.

2:02:26 And observed. Different hunts. And also heard stories from both groups. About this conversation of death. So people listening might think, Well, that doesn't make any sense. A lion is a predator. They can easily overtake you. Why wouldn't they attack you? But

2:02:44 Time and time again, the conversation of death wouldn't always end in death. Sometimes a perfectly capable say pack of wolves would pursue a caribou or an elk or something and then at one point the elk or the caribou doing about face, stand off with the walls, and then they would just part ways. They'd just walk in opposite directions. And it seems to defy explanation, but it does happen and I found that entire segment of the book. It comes up a a number of times, but talking about the nuances in this conversation of death and how these animals Interface. There seems to be some communication and

2:03:18 Sometimes it ends in death and other times it just ends in both parties deciding like Okay. Another day. And then they just Go in different directions.

2:03:29 Something I don't have any real understanding of, but I find Endlessly fascinating. So it's something that you've had more Firsthand. Experience with. I suppose.

2:03:39 I mean there's just there's a there's a knowledge out there that is And if you actually spend Talk to any People, biologists feel like More time you spend in nature.

2:03:49 The more you'll realize how little we know. There is subtlety and nuance and there is things happening out there that is Way beyond our understanding. Yeah. Yeah, there's another example. I think it's in of Wolves and Men, but talking about how

2:04:03 There are recorded instances of Wolf packs that are being tracked. I presumably with radio callers, but maybe with flyovers or something like that prior to the satellite callers,'cause this book was writ written in the seventies. That at some point For no discernible

2:04:19 Well I'll just pick up. And all head off. in a very precise direction, in a more or less straight line, and then four days later they intersect perfectly with a caribou herd that happens to be migrating, but started at roughly the same time moving in a different direction and the two vectors intersect. It's like okay That seems interesting. I I don't know how to explain that exactly, but

2:04:46 the these types of phenomena that get observed over and over again. And all and and and also not to take us too far afield, but these So called the And in some cases there are certainly mythologies, but mythologies About for instance In the case of some North American Indians, the collaboration between Coyote and Badger.

2:05:06 So the joining forces of Coyote and Badger, which for a long time was thought to be this quaint fairy tale, and then during quarantine This is now about a year, year and a half ago, there was Some type of trail cam footage. that was released that showed like a coyote playing with a badger like a dog would, like wagging its tail and jumping around, and then them leading off through a tunnel on

2:05:31 Basically a hunting party. There's just a So much we don't know. Yeah. I mean, even just some of the stuff around orientation.

2:05:40 Yeah, you watch uh You watch a female leopard. Yeah. Five or six. kilometers, leave her cab, walk five or six kilometers

2:05:50 Then hunt in thick terrain. Walking circles, you know, moving in an irregular way. Catching in Parla. Hoisted in a tree. And walk a direct line back to where her cub was.

2:06:02 Which by anyone's standards would just be an incredible piece of navigation, but She doesn't have a verbal mind or a rational mind, but somehow through all of that circuitous movement, she knows where she left the cub. In a more instinctual way almost. Yeah. You know, you ha you find this in in native people too, the capacity for homing.

2:06:22 The ability and I've seen it with trackers who've come down Sam trackers who've come down from the Kalahari. They've come into the Kruger National Park. A terrain they've never been in. We've taken them into the Mapani. Mapani is like an eye high scrub.

2:06:37 And we've walked for a few hours in the Mapani. We have a GPS because we know how easy it is to get lost in there. And then afterwards we've said to them, Okay, take us back to the vehicle. We've got the GPS and they walk on a B line. Directly back to where we left the vehicle. Wow. And it's just like, what is that? Yeah. That's fascinating. It makes me wonder, and I think this uh this might actually be demonstrated, you know, if we have some magnetic homing capability

2:07:03 Or navigational abilities. There's footage people can find of marine biologists studying hammerhead sharks with a baby hammerhead sharks in a aquarium basically and they have top down footage of how the movement changes if they rearrange magnets underneath the encasement. So many unanswered questions, which is very exciting to me, obviously, because if everything were discovered, that would be quite depressing in and of itself.

2:07:30 Let's come back to these traumatic events in your early twenties, eighteen to twenties. And then what followed after that. How did your Healing path.

2:07:40 This might seem like a strange way to lead in, but differ from those of your mom and sister, right? Because they also Presumably. Traumatized by the home invasion. If you're open to to speaking to it. And you could you could just speak to your own personal experience, but I'm curious

2:07:55 how different people have Approached. finding some degree of closure resolution healing after an experience like that. Well, I think for one thing there was a masculine feminine component to that.

2:08:10 They did a lot more post traumatic counselling at the time. And I wasn't open to that. I thought, you know, the way that I'd grown up, I thought like I'm just gonna get on with it and and move forward. Which is uh You know, a naive approach, to say the least. And then

2:08:26 There was also a challenge that I had where In the masculine, it was harder just to process Just process feelings. What I needed was A path that I felt was taking me somewhere. And so where that's

2:08:40 Well, that really took root for me is When I started to understand that if I was willing to look at how I had become frozen, if I was willing to look at how I was anxious and depressed as a result of that. And how that Kind of shut me out from living.

2:08:56 If I was able to start living towards that It actually gave me A kind of map. out of trauma. You know, someone trauma healed.

2:09:05 becomes a kind of medicine. And so it was only really when I started to understand that. There was value to this just beyond myself. And in fact, if I became someone who learned how to be in a transformational process and learned how to heal. It was actually taking me towards what I was meant to do in some very important way. And somehow That structure of meaning had to take root in me

2:09:25 before I was really able to dive into healing spaces and To that type of work. It was different for my mother and sister. They were able to in a more feminine way allow that process earlier. For me th there had to be a structure of meaning that allowed me to engage in healing.

2:09:42 And be soft enough and to learn to soften and to learn to open. And to learn to let myself actually feel what was there and the fear That was there and the uncertainty that was there. And also. A feeling that I didn't know what I really wanted to do.

2:09:58 I had a family legacy in conservation, you know, I had a safari business that I could come into, but I I didn't want to just run Safaris, I knew there was something else for me. And I had to go on that journey to find out what that was. When you say structure meaning, could you elaborate on What that means might seem a little recursive as a question, but how did you find that

2:10:19 Structure meaning. That you needed to move forth. With Contending with what had happened. So what I mean by that is okay so

2:10:28 If you've had a traumatic encounter. In the way that I understand it. It's like a part of you becomes frozen. And almost inevitably where there's been trauma, there is a reduction of options, which means I have less choices.

2:10:43 And that gets laid down. So life starts to become limited and there's less access to different choices. A healthy person could say He has a way of handling this, he has a different way of handling it. A traumatized person has one way of handling it, retreat and isolate. For example And then I was lucky to have Martha and she started to expose me to how a healing process works.

2:11:04 And then very soon after that I found ceremony work. Just for context for people listening, could you Define ceremony work. There are obviously many different ways of being in ceremony. You might say that

2:11:17 A A Is a ceremony space? All the way to Sweat lodge spaces. All the way to gatherings using plant medicines. There's just a an array.

2:11:28 I found myself In spaces using plant medicines that were very well guided. So the first part of the journey for me was Actually acknowledging that I was Frozen. So there was building awareness around how I become frozen.

2:11:44 And then in ceremony watching. Drinking the medicine, being with people who were in a healing energetic, and then watching how that affected my life. Getting to know. How I was when I was frozen. Then making peace with that?

2:12:00 As opposed to thinking there was something wrong with me. That was a big movement, being like This has happened, this is where I'm at, and that's okay. Then starting to give myself Different options.

2:12:12 So instead of just being isolated and frozen, starting to actually be able to share. The things that I was ashamed of, in some ways I was ashamed that I hadn't been able to protect my parents. My sister and my my mother and I was ashamed that I had let

2:12:27 bad guys in the house. I was the man of the house. All these things. I was able to start to be able to share these things that I was ashamed of and I was able to talk to how disempowered I had felt. And Unable. to do what I needed to do. And so I started to generate awareness out of that and then I started to realize that

2:12:44 In sharing that it actually opened me to deeper connection. As opposed to What I thought it would do, which would w was shut me out and shun me. And then I started to because I was well guided. I started to generate a narrative That was supported. And what I mean by that is like the guide started to help me

2:13:03 Generate a narrative of the things that have happened to me can actually be fodder for growth and learning. And that became really important and and then it actually became You know, I have some gifts. in this and if I can find those gifts and share them, that's probably the most healing thing I can do.

2:13:20 And so I was in that process for a long time. And at a certain point in it I started to realise in fact this is taking me to my work. And that's when I started to see the tracker differently and I started to really understand how a transformational process is an intricate unfolding. And as a guide.

2:13:39 You can support it. As a storyteller, you can support it with presence, you can support it by just listening, you can support it by creating spaces that people can actually be open in. And you can actually start to know the way certain trauma patterns work and help people develop awareness and different outcomes for themselves. And so my healing was actually About finding the purpose to help

2:14:02 Healing come into the world. If that makes sense. It does make sense. And I wish at some point I'll show you all the The highlights and underline sections. In your book. And I think I may I might have shown you

2:14:14 A photograph of the index that I created just for the highlights at the front of the book. But one of the lines, this is on page one twenty two of the Lion Tracker's Guide to Life is In these times an authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism. Right? And then you go on to explain Why that's the case. And You know, I think about this a lot. And you actually had another quote way earlier.

2:14:37 Let's find it from the Saint Francis of Assisi. Oh man. Wish I could find this'cause it ties into it right. Wherever you go, spread the gospel. When absolutely necessary use words. Exactly. So don't we all wish more people would follow that advice.

2:14:58 As often or perhaps more often than we give it to anybody else. And I Yeah, I I think this is Critical

2:15:07 to highlight in the sense that And this Day and age in these times. yelling and screaming on the internet and shaming other people or tearing other people down can be mistaken for

2:15:22 Something constructive. Or Activism. But In reality, a very powerful form of activism is being the example that you want to see more of in the world, right? And holding yourself accountable in that way, which is not easy. It's really hard.

2:15:38 oftentimes to do that. And I know both of us have had tremendous Struggles. of different types, although I think they share a lot of common DNA. And

2:15:48 You know, a lot of this Seems to come down to stress testing beliefs. If that makes sense. If a component of yourself kind of along the lines of IFS or internal family systems. If if people are interested in that, they can they can certainly look that up. I did an interview with Richard Swarz, the founder. But if a component of your personality or psyche is

2:16:09 Kind of frozen in time. And compartmentalized and when you are put in circumstances that activate that part of yourself. you get tunnel vision with options and maybe you only you have one option or maybe you have two options. You can often reduce that down to a

2:16:24 Belief, right? A statement of some type. And I'm bringing this up because I would love to hear how Byron Cady's Workshops.

2:16:35 Have been Helpful or not helpful for you? Because I know this is something we've spoken about and If they have been helpful, what specific Worksheets have been helpful for you. Can I talk for a moment to the activism thing and then come back to Byron Katie? You are allowed, sir.

2:16:53 Stage is yours. One thing on the activism thing and I would say it like this, and Tim, you know, you've been on a healing journey. What I notice. Is that a person who heals

2:17:05 has a natural inclination to Want to be of service. And especially if you've had people who've supported you al along the way. And that's not to say That I think I know how you should heal, but is just this desire As someone who heals to support the healing impulse and be there.

2:17:22 And you know that there were moments in your own journey that were very powerful for you and you want y it's almost just like innate when you get in touch with that to want to do that for other people and support that. The way that I think about this is If you can give yourself a transformational process and you go on a journey to discover You know, I would call it the track of your life, the place where you feel whole

2:17:43 Where you feel like you're expressing your essence into the world. The place where you feel just at peace and in tune with yourself. And and it takes time to get to that and It seems to me that at a certain point in every lifetime we get asked like What's it about? And it seems to me it's about that, coming to that place in yourself. But there are some characteristics of people who I see who deeply find that place.

2:18:05 For one, they become inclined towards simplicity. They don't want a lot of things. a feeling of enough comes into them and both like I am enough and I have enough. And they stop wanting to consume more things to feel okay.

2:18:21 There's a natural desire towards service. there seems to be this like inclination that takes them to be pulled into nature. There's a desire to be creative. And support other people. And that's what I mean is that inside of every healing journey And when someone goes on that journey and finds a deeper place of peace, and it's of course it's a continuous journey, but it seems to me that those things take root and that seems to be very important for the restoration movement. In a very individual way we do our own work to heal and come to wholeness.

2:18:51 But a whole lot of people coming into that state of I have enough, I am enough you know, it just changes the desire to consume endlessly and I think that's gonna be very good For nature. And so I see this like The restoration movement as both restoring our relationship to wild places And restoring wild places, but also restoring ourselves, coming to wholeness and healing.

2:19:13 So that we come out of the illusion that more stuff is gonna make us feel okay and realize that's already there in us, we need to discover that gift and share it. Talk how people who Who discover that just become a Embodied activists.

2:19:27 And then um Byron Katie's work, I cannot say enough about it, and I know you've had a lot of people on the show who have brought her up. But There is nothing more profound than being able to identify thoughts that are causing you stress.

2:19:42 And then have a system to question them. And on a certain point on a journey they become absolutely critical because if you are getting touchy with this place inside yourself and it's curious and it knows sort of what it wants to do and you feel drawn to a different way of living, inevitably a number of ideas will come in as to why that's not possible. And so I've done You know, hundreds of worksheets now.

2:20:06 And you name it. I've done Absolutely. Ridiculous ones and she says like You know, I've done my mother shouldn't have

2:20:16 taking my cake away. Like literally like that sort of level of stuff. All the way down to I'm not safe. Oh I'm not gonna live the life that I wanna live.

2:20:28 When you sit in it as meditation. And you You get to know yourself. And that's where the process changed for me when I would come up with a thought like You know, I'm never gonna achieve what I want to achieve. When I actually sat

2:20:43 Like she says to do in meditation and ask the question. Who am I when I believe that thought? And I started to watch. I feel frustrated. I feel Let down.

2:20:57 I don't have confidence in myself. I feel like I'm never doing enough. I feel like I need to do more. I say yes to things that I don't really want to do. I'm afraid of missing something. And when I sat in that and got to know myself there

2:21:11 And then who would I be without the thought? I would be relaxed. I would be open. I would be Really feeling for what's a yes and a no for me.

2:21:23 I would be listening. I would be grateful for where I already am. I would be thankful for what I have. And so for me I did the work for a long time before realizing it was meditation in which I was getting to know myself as someone who believed a thought.

2:21:40 And someone who didn't believe the thought. And only when I really understood it to be meditation. And I could sit and watch myself like that, did I feel a compassion of getting to know myself when I believe a thought and when I don't believe a thought and how powerful that is. And that's when it r the the work really took for me. Yeah. And peop people can find out more about this at the work.com. It's not a panacea, of course, in

2:22:03 Katie used by Katie, right? Um or people call her Katie instead of Byron. is uh a very Unusual woman. Unique woman. Oh. Oh I mean like I'll give you a Katie's story, like she she the first time I ever met her

2:22:17 I was sitting in a conference that she was talking at, and I happened to be sitting in the second row. She sat down next to me, she looked at me. She put her hand out. I took her hand. And we held hands for an hour while other people talked.

2:22:31 And then she turned and looked at me and she said, I liked holding your hand and then she left for the state. Like that was that was like my first and that's Katie, like totally connected, totally wild, and you don't know what's gonna happen. Right. So I suppose I'm saying this all as a caveat that If you watch videos, which I think are worth watching, but you may think, Who is this alien? Get me out of here. But

2:22:54 I would I would also suggest that it's worth investigating the work the work sheets I have found tremendously valuable for myself. If a Belief is a thought we take to be true. having an actual worksheet and structure for

2:23:11 stress testing that belief, right? In the way that you just described, and then also doing turnarounds where If For instance, just as one example. If your statement is I am not safe. having a statement, I am safe, and then being forced to come up with

2:23:26 examples or evidence that you list out that you are safe. And it is incredibly practical and powerful for diffusing the emotional Boiling point, the sort of entropy and

2:23:42 red line emotional state that then puts you into this thought loop where you create this selective attention where you only see evidence for Whatever this belief is that you hold. So Yeah, I highly Recommend people. Check that out. You know, I want to ask you about

2:23:57 Something that I don't know. about which is true for a lot of this and a lot of the follow up questions. The sweat lodge in Arizona. Does this cue anything for you? That was my first

2:24:08 Medicine encounter. All right. Please say more. It happened really early on. I had just been through those two traumatic encounters. And

2:24:20 I was Severely kind of Unsure of what I was meant to be doing. And I was staying in In Arizona with Martha and

2:24:29 Another woman who was apprenticing with her who was a horse whisperer by the name of Coelle Simpson. She had ties to the Navajo community. And she invited me to attend to a sweet. And so I was Yeah, I never

2:24:44 Been exposed to that before, so I was really interested. And so we went to the sweat and we ended up on a kind of a church ground. On the outskirts of Phoenix and it was one of those classic Encounters of like, what do they say, like first the enlightenment and then the laundry type thing. It was like I knew that it was a very big kind of experience I was about to have. It was a spiritual encounter. There was a medicine man coming in, but we were also in kind of this like abandoned church. And then like

2:25:10 The medicine man arrived and he had just like left his job on a Friday afternoon in construction. And I so I was like trying to catch up a little bit with it, but the minute the ceremony started I started to feel the energy. And We went into the sweat lodge. We drank the midson.

2:25:26 So in this case, just could you describe for people, like how tall is the sweat lodge, how many people It's presumably completely dark. I mean once the door closes. Short. Like classic Hogon with blankets over it, you gotta crouch to get into it.

2:25:41 fire area in the middle where the stones come, huge fire outside where the guys are really heating up the rocks. And then over the course of about five hours The stones just keep coming in. And the heat just keeps building and people start to sing and we were joined by various other people who had come to the ceremony And

2:26:01 It was all native people and myself and Coel. And Everyone started singing. And the energy started to build and then more heat and then more singing. And then drum.

2:26:11 And then more heat and it just keeps On building and then People started to let go of things that they were holding. And so people started to scream and people started to cry. And the music builds and the singing builds. And you can almost feel like the energy is like conjuring More and more energy. It's like building on itself and it's getting super intense.

2:26:31 And eventually I the he the heat was getting too hot for me and I could feel like I've been told like don't leave the sweat lodge but I'm like this is too much And then the medicine and then the singing and sudden I found myself In this kind of slideshow, and my eyes were closed, Tim, but I saw The gun in my face, I saw

2:26:49 my sister tied up, I saw the crocodile just break the surface of the water. I saw all of these images and uh the gun to being taken outside, kneeling down, being told you're gonna be killed, the the words and we're gonna kill you, we're gonna kill you, it all just ran through my mind. And and with vivid, vivid imagery. And then eventually it got to the point where it was almost too much and I just started throwing up. And as I started throwing up the entire imagery changed. And Suddenly I was

2:27:20 In the vision I was back home in South Africa. And I was sitting in a clearing in the late afternoon light. And walking across the clearing towards me. Claim the mother leopard. And she walked through the the short grass and she walked directly up to me in the vision and she just bumped me.

2:27:37 As she walked past me. And In the instant that she bumped me. something in me understood that My own healing

2:27:47 And the healing of nature and the healing of the land was somehow connected. And that's why all I've ever done now is try and tell stories from this place of nature has so much to teach us if we can attune to it. And then I passed out. Oh, you passed out in the sweat?

2:28:03 I passed that in the sweat. And there was like this vibrational quality to it. I know you have some experience with these Mid sense, but I it was almost like I could feel the humming of the earth. And then eventually. I came to and I was outside the sweat and I was lying in a pile of leaves that someone had raked up earlier in the day, but I was like in the leaves. And I could feel the earth and I could feel like the leaves all around me.

2:28:25 And I looked up and this Navajo medicine man was pouring water up and down my spine. And I was disorientated and I said to him I I think I'm dying, I think I'm dying and he kneeled down and he put his mouth right to my ear and he said No brother.

2:28:41 You're just being born. And I and it was like I was like And it was weird and I said, But I don't understand what's happening and he said, You'll only understand in the next few weeks. And he was right, like It took long time to integrate that. But that was really the beginning of my understanding that

2:28:58 The restoration of our relationship with the natural world can begin inside each One of us. As each one of us heals, we create an opportunity to create a different relationship with the natural world. And it's somehow that imagery spoke to The freezing, the trauma.

2:29:14 that we all go through and the opportunity to awaken back to our nature. What did you find Unfolded stuck didn't stick for you over the subsequent Weeks. You know that voice.

2:29:27 stayed with me that whisper you're just being born because I felt newborn. I know that You know, you probably know this place and many of your listeners who've had psychedelic experiences will know there can be this sense of being new and Almost baby like sensitized again. You're feeling again. You feel

2:29:48 attuned again, you can feel people's emotions. And for me it was just that. Like I was feeling again after that experience. And all of the armor that I had put on had come off. And I was able to slowly start I felt other people's pain, I felt other people's sadness, I felt my own. And I did feel like brand new inside of that. And it wasn't altogether comfortable. But at least I felt back in some ways.

2:30:10 In fact it felt incredibly uncomfortable. But I knew that it was better than where I was. Recently. Spending time. With a expedition guide. who's spent all sorts of time in

2:30:23 On Everest and Tanali and K two, really fantastic guy. His name is Eli. And we happen to see the Solar eclipse. together. This is a few weeks ago. It was first first time I'd ever seen a solar eclipse. And I think it was the first time he'd ever seen a solar eclipse. And I asked him how it was for him and he said, You know

2:30:40 Friends here at Camp. I said that I'm like. Not sure what this is. It's like I'm wetting my pants, but it's in my chest. I think they might be feelings. Ha ha ha.

2:30:53 It's this warm feeling in my chest. I don't know. It's like I'm peeing my pants in my chest. They might just be feelings. So yes. It's so funny because I had this buddy of mine, he's a navy SEAL. And he says to me, uh So I recently met this dog named Butters. And

2:31:13 I find myself thinking about butters And he's a friend of mine's dog, and I go out and I think about butters and I I'm always worried about butters and I take butters treats and I go over there, I always want to check on butters and What do you make of that? I think that's called love. And he's like, Yeah, I always feel better in my chair.

2:31:33 I think you're I think you're having the experience of loving butters. And he was like, This is in r outrageous Yeah, sometimes we sometimes we have to build the vocabulary, learn the ABCs, uh or just like rebuild them, reactivate them. Leopard in the fire. This is another Q. And just for people who are wondering what the hell I'm doing with these cues, sometimes I will ask people

2:31:56 Or I'll ask my research team to give me cues. will be fun or productive or profound or interesting to explore, but I don't want to know them in advance because otherwise conversation is less fun for me. So Leopard in the Fire. What does Leopard in the Re Fire Refer to.

2:32:14 Leopard in the fire occurred. It's kind of two parts to the story. The first is that When I was very young. I heard a story around a campfire that like stuck inside of me.

2:32:26 And it was a story about a man by the name of Laurence van der Post. And Fundepost, you may have come across some of his work, but he was a tremendous poet and an artist and He had one of those miraculous lives. He was a philosopher really. But Van der Post grew up on a farm in South Africa. He was very connected to The native people, he learned to track when he was young. And then he ended up going to fight in the second world war.

2:32:50 And in fact in the Second World War I He was eventuen prisoner, he was in a prisoner of war camp. And the story as I heard it. was that he returned to South Africa after the war. And he really wanted to go and see his family.

2:33:04 But he felt He couldn't face them after the things that he had seen and that he had done. And so instead of going to see his family, he decided that he would go alone into the Kruger National Park, very near where I grew up. So he packed up his gear.

2:33:19 And he walked out into the reserve. And he set up this little camp. And This is of course. Before the days of diagnosis is like PTSD.

2:33:30 And the story goes on the very first night he was sitting at the base of a Marula tree next to the small water hole. And I can imagine after the war the stillness he must have felt, and somewhere nearby a hyena started calling WOO M And then a nightjar would have called somewhere, you know, Dear Lord deliver us. And I think of him sitting there in that stillness after the war, and on the other side of the water hole a kudu

2:33:54 Started to Come towards the waterhole to drink. And a kudu is like a large antelope. Oh, this beautiful regal animal and and it moves with this incredible elegance. And the kudu

2:34:07 Walk to the edge of the waterhole and then with these huge ears that It's ears listened and you can actually see the the ears moving like satellite dishes as they listen. And it scanned the terrain all around. And then very slowly it put its lips down and it started to drink. And just as I started to drink, a breeze touched Fander Post's back.

2:34:25 And it blew his scent. Over the water hole and straight into the nostrils of the kudu. And it put its head up. And it looked directly at him.

2:34:34 And for a moment their eyes met. And Van der Pass said That in that moment, in the stillness of that gaze, He felt a kind of innocence come back into him after all he had seen and all he had done in the war. And instantly in that moment he knew he was able to go and see his family again.

2:34:51 Well. And As a young kid, I think I was maybe eight or nine when I was sitting round the fire and I first heard the story and I I didn't even know why, but it had struck something in me and Years later, after the crocodile.

2:35:06 Sully and I had been sitting around the fire. We've been talking a lot. And I was recovering and that the experience of being attacked by the crocodile was Profound because really it had brought me closer to Sully and I had learned so much about how he saw the world and his worldview was starting to come into me, a more relational way of relating to nature and to other people. But still I felt myself incredibly anxious and frozen. I I I literally felt like I had this shake in my body. I and I couldn't get it out. Like I would look at my hand and my hand would be shaking. I would wake up at night. I had Pretty severe PTSD.

2:35:40 And into the teeth of this a fire broke out on the reserve. And I don't know if you've ever been in a big bushfire, but the first thing you notice about a bushfire is just the I have not. Is the intensity of the sound. It sounds like It hisses and crackles up ahead of you.

2:35:56 The smoke drifts the sun and it bathes everything in this eerie orange light. And then insects that are escaping the blaze start flying up and what you get is an aura of hawks and eagles hawking insects out the sky. You feel the ground start to shake if you go out to fight it and you look to your right and out of the Smoke comes around. Phew. And it books past you snakes escaping the fire coming past you. And in this instant, Tim

2:36:21 With PTSD I was highly activated. And we fought that fire for three days. On the eve of the third day the fire had burned through And the crews were still fighting it, but I had become isolated from them. I was about a mile or two away from them. And I was in an area that the

2:36:38 Fire had already burned through. And night was starting to fall and I could see the crews on the horizon in the distance and I could still see the fire was lighting the sky in this big orange blaze. And in fact the area that I was in the smoke was still hanging on the ground all around me. And in the darkness to my right. I heard a sound like someone cutting a two by four.

2:37:01 And immediately I knew that there was a leopard in the darkness to the right of me. And so I turned to look and walking out of the darkness into the faint light that the fire was throwing. Came this male leopard. And he was walking directly towards me, which is extremely one, it was strange that he was in an area where there'd been a fire, and two, it was strange that he was walking directly towards me.

2:37:23 And when I saw him And I looked at him and he became aware that I was aware of him. No aggression came into his body. He didn't drop his head, he didn't tighten his shoulders. He just continued to walk towards me. And I in fact dropped down onto my haunches. And part of what I wanted to do is he wasn't being aggressive, so I dropped down

2:37:42 'Cause I wanted to give myself the space to escalate. If he became aggressive I would stand up. And if he became more aggressive, I could put my arms up, I was giving myself room to create more energy. And he continued to move towards me and as I watched him. He was walking through the smoke and the smoke was almost dancing around him, and his eyes were lit by By the fire on the horizon.

2:38:02 And His whole coat, that beautiful rosette coat, was bathed in this beautiful deep orange light from the fire. And he continued to come towards me. And as he walked towards me I felt This very ancient primal energy wake up inside of me.

2:38:18 And then he stopped when he was about Ten yards away. And he was so close to me that I could hear him breathing. Mm.

2:38:27 Yeah. And What it felt like to me. Is that in that moment It was as if I could feel his body in my body.

2:38:36 And I could feel my body almost creating a kind of mimesis to his energy and I felt myself becoming incredibly alert But incredibly still. And There was no thought of the future and there was no thought of the past. There was just an energy circulating between this incredibly beautiful, wild, elusive, dangerous cat and I.

2:38:58 And then slowly he turned to look at me, and then he walked past the front of me and And in a moment he disappeared into the darkness. And as he walked away from me, And I felt into my own body instead of more anxiety and fear. And this shake that I had had, I felt this myself in this profound state of

2:39:19 Oh stillness. And I knew in that moment that that leopard had helped me understand what happened to Fundepast. And I also knew That I had gone to a place in myself That I could never have gone to alone. That leopard had almost

2:39:34 taken me into a state of stillness. And if I think about that Ubuntu consciousness, that relational consciousness What Sully taught me was that The Ubuntu consciousness is activated. Through action.

2:39:48 And what the leopard taught me in that moment, and what I think Fandapast experienced, is that the Ubuntu consciousness, the relational consciousness, is also activated when we in a moment let go. And let someone else take us to a place We couldn't get to ourselves and an or another sentient being. And I think about that a lot as someone who

2:40:08 Tends to be quite controlling. Like there comes a point where I wanna let go and go somewhere where I just can't get to with my own control, my own sense of how it should be, my own sense that I know how this should unfold. And that leopard just took me there in a moment. And so all through my life I've had glimpses of the Of something and I can't exactly say what it is, but I keep living towards it.

2:40:31 It's a beautiful story. God, just the imagery that conjures. It's it's really I see it sort of in slow motion, almost as if it's like you know, shot on film from like a Francis Ford Coppola film. Wow. It's really just a a striking striking story. And it makes it makes me think of a few things also. You mentioned A hoarse whisperer earlier.

2:40:52 And for the last few years, you know, I've been very interested in These natural encounters, of course, but it's very challenging to manufacture those experiences. So I've also spent time looking at, for instance, equine therapy.

2:41:08 And How Horses are used in partnership with patients of different types. for therapeutic purposes. And I think it fascinates me

2:41:21 as many therapies do that are predominantly nonverbal. I think that we overweight the verbal, perhaps. Yeah. Mm. And

2:41:31 So I s I spent time I wish I could remember the name, but a number of equine therapy centers, one in Texas and Oddly, but maybe not oddly. I also learned when I went to a wolf sanctuary and I volunteered there for a period of time. in Colorado and I should explain. It's MissionWolf, missionwolf.org. I recommend people check it out.

2:41:54 in the middle of nowhere in Colorado and uh they are You know, effectively a place of sanctuary for wolves or wolf dogs that cannot be released into the wild. So they're not Captive wolves per se. They're wolves.

2:42:10 or wolf dogs often who were raised in captivity under terrible Atrocious circumstances and then somehow made their way to Mission Wolf. There are other examples. And There are also

2:42:25 kind of second generation or Third generation wolves. who are very much wild, right? Like Arctic wolves and I mean they're all effectively grey wolves but come from different areas and therefore have different coats. And they're in

2:42:38 really large enclosures, like multi-acre enclosures, but there are a few. Who are because of their history prior to getting to Mission Wolf are accustomed or not terrified of human beings. Like they can be near humans because wolves by instinct don't want to be anywhere close to humans. And If they bark, it's usually a fear response, like a fear bark. They're not like dogs at all in that respect. And if if they bark, I mean they'll they'll stay as far away from you as possible on the opposite side of an enclosure. But

2:43:08 When groups come through s say school groups. Or visitors. And they have a limited capacity for visitors, which is why I volunteered. When they come in. There's an opportunity in some instances to meet the ambassador wolves. They're let into an enclosure and then they let

2:43:25 a number of these ambassador wolves in. And I heard repeatedly stories of these wolves going directly to Whoever was most Internal in a group, whoever was most closed off in a group, whether that be

2:43:40 A child with autism. Or a veteran with PTSD. And would go right up to them and look straight into their eyes. And I I heard this story f repeatedly from multiple staff members. And much like

2:43:54 Fander post. And your experience, but in this case with a wolf sort of staring directly into the soul of this animal and more importantly, maybe the animal staring directly into you. Many of those people

2:44:09 reporting that it was the first time they really truly felt see him. And I just feel like there's so much Beauty and value. In that it's something So worthy of exploration.

2:44:23 And it's fascinating that that it can occur not just from another human, not just from a prey animal, like a kudu, but also from a predator. It's very Or a leopard for that matter. I mean it's so deeply interesting and begets so many questions. Uh I just wanted to mention that because it was it's also something You know, looked into the eyes of the A number of these wolves. It's uh

2:44:49 It's very different. Like the Not better or worse, but just fundamentally Different. in a wolf as compared to say that that of a dog. They are very different.

2:45:00 Very different creatures even though the wolf This is certainly the progenitor of the dog. And I haven't read it yet, but I think National Geographic had a cover story at one point called From Wolf to Wolf, which is one of the best headlines I've ever heard in my life. Um but uh for for more for more info on Mission Wolf, people can just go to missionwolf.org and I think they do some very, very interesting work. I would love to ask you Because you brought up the name.

2:45:26 And I can't let you go without asking for this story. So Lauren's Fenderpost, that's the name you mentioned, right? So he described the lion's roar. He said that it It quote. It is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky, end quote, right? Tremendous. It's this Yeah, yeah, you know where I'm going.

2:45:48 It's one of a kind experience. It cannot be replicated. So please take us to At a well known company, you were invited to give a presentation, and could you tell us the story of how that presentation went? Oh my God, from the beauty of Fanipos's quote to my ridiculous life as a storyteller. Yes, please. So this was early on when I first started speaking a lot and and telling stories to people. And I got this gig at

2:46:15 One of these Silicon Valley companies. And normal story, I got there early. And I arrived to meet the tech guy to make sure that we were well set up. A normal story, the tech guy was late here to have a cigarette break. You know, like that archetypal tech guy who's like running the A V. Like it was that guy. And

2:46:33 So Vish him like, listen, man, like I just really want to run through my slides. Like I wanna make sure that we're all good and everything. He's like, listen, I need to upload the system so that we can stream to the whole company. I'll get to you in a second, but we're all good. I'm like Dude, I need to like Get some rips. Anyway. People start filing in. People start filing in.

2:46:53 And before I know it, the auditorium's full and I haven't done the run through. And that I'm in my worst nightmare. No The intro To my the intro to my talk.

2:47:04 Is is a there's a sort of a poetic speech. And then I say, and my story Like many good stories. In Africa begins With a lion roaring.

2:47:15 And then I press my clicker. And on a huge screen behind me. There's an early morning image of a male lion. And he's roaring into the morning, so actually like Mist is coming out of his mouth and what's meant to happen is people are meant to be overwhelmed by this incredible barrow tone audio.

2:47:35 O And it's meant to put them right in the moment and of course The lion is doing the action of roaring, which is a bit of a convulsion, but there's no sound. So so you're in the middle of the presentation and you press click and no sound. Just a convulsing silent lion. And it was at this

2:47:55 And it dawned on me like slow enough for it to be truly painful that I realized I was about to roar at a group of executives. And I grabbed the the lapel mic and I held it close to my mouth and then I synced up My role with the lion Ooooooooooooh Ooooooo And the problem with the damn clip is it went on for a long time.

2:48:19 Ooooooooh And then when a lion winds down he goes Uh Mm. Uh Ha ha.

2:48:30 Oh And so literally the intro, and I was like, Why won't this lion stop? Uh Mm. Oh my god, it was painful. It just went on and on.

2:48:43 Anyway, got through the presentation. And still to this day, Tim, I'm gonna be honest with you, if I lie in bed and I think about that, a wave of shame will travel through me. And I'll have to like curl over on my side and just rock myself. Oh God. Yeah. Did you get any pats on the back or any uh stiff drinks handed to you after that one? Well the thing that saved the whole damn thing is that like eventually when I finished One person started clapping and everyone like went for it and so the whole room ended up clapping and that like kinda like moved the energy and we were into the presentation. I was like thank god. Thank God for Lauren or whoever that was.

2:49:22 To thanks, Lauren. It was like one of those moments also where you realize like you can't half roar at a group of executives. Like you've either gotta not do it or go all in. Ha Like let's go. I'm Thanks, A V guy. Oh such a great story. So I I I gotta say

2:49:43 So first For people listening. Get a copy of The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. I rarely make an endorsement like that. It's a small book. You can read it in one or two nights or afternoons. And as I mentioned, it's one of the few books that I have an entire shelf dedicated to. In my guest bedroom.

2:50:01 It found me at the right time, you know, so maybe it doesn't find everyone at the right time, but for me It really found me at the right time and it's a book I've re read, which is also something I cannot say. For many books. And you work with Individuals.

2:50:16 You work with companies I find your approach to life and sort of your multi Sensory multi modality. Perspective.

2:50:26 on life to be not just fascinating, but very practical. You've spent a lot of time Testing, developing, inheriting, learning. Tools. And I think that, you know, as you mentioned Given the trauma that you've experienced and the

2:50:44 challenges that you've had to overcome. Some people, and I think you have certainly done this, can convert that pain and that university of suffering into part of the medicine that you bring to the world. And I think you do that Not just well, but very Beautifully. So First I just want to thank you.

2:51:03 For that. Ah, thank you, Tim. I really appreciate you saying that. Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanted to know if there's anything I want to leave a couple of stories. I still have a couple of notes, which I don't know the the the context behind, but I wanna save a couple in case we do a round two, although I know you have no shortages. I might ask you about uh Was it your uncle in the boat with the outboard? I can't remember who it was, but that that'll have to s that'll have to be saved for another time. They're all in there, but some of them only get pulled out with a bit of you know scotch and a campfire. But

2:51:38 Is there anything you would like to say any uh Last closing comments for the audience, request, recommendation, anything at all, anything else Something you'd like to point their attention to. Anything at all that you'd like to to share before we wind to a close this time around.

2:51:55 Well, first yeah, just thanks for having me and you know, it's privilege to support a show that has had such an impact on so many people and be a part of it. So I'm just really grateful to you and Been fun getting to know you. I would say a few things. I would say one is I would invite people to come on Safaris in Africa. It's a very unique encounter with a landscape that is still wild

2:52:16 And when people come And Have Safaris at a place like Landalosi or or wherever they go, it has a profound impact on Allowing us to protect these areas and on the local people. And so you know, we've always been I've always been a proponent of the economy of wildlife. We keep these areas wild, we invite people to come and experience them, and that has a huge impact. So

2:52:36 If you're thinking about a holiday, come on a safari. If you're thinking about a safari, come. It's It's a once in a lifetime experience. I would say that if you are interested in tracking you can support the Tracker Academy. trackeracademy.co. Z A They do amazing work. Supporting young people.

2:52:53 From Difficult backgrounds. teaching them to become trackers, they have a nearly ninety percent placement rate. into the tourism industry, so they do amazing work. Those would be the two things that I would offer to people.

2:53:05 Where can people learn more about the Safari side if they wanted to learn more about that? You can get a hold of us at Londelozy dot Come? You can also get a hold of me at boydvarty dot com, my team will point you in the right direction. And Tracker Academy, yes is Tracker Academy.

2:53:23 C O dot Z A. Dot Z A for my fellow Americans out there. Z sorry Z A. I like the Zed. It sounds more dignified. It's nice to see you, boy. I'm glad we did this with with the with a bit of video as well for people who want to see it on YouTube. They can just search for Tim Paris on YouTube and it'll pop right up.

2:53:43 But I know we are many time zones away at the moment. That won't be true. in the not too distant future. So I'm looking forward to spending some time in person. Me too, man. I'm I'm looking forward to getting you out here. We go tracker Rhino. I'm I'm excited to track Rhino and I'm excited not to have any legs eaten by Crocs. And I'm very much looking forward to finally getting feet on the ground at London, getting to meet some of these characters that I have only read about and heard about at this point, both human and animal. A like. So thanks for taking the time today, man. I really appreciate it.

2:54:20 Yeah, thank you, Tim. Thanks for having me. Enjoy it even more than I expected to, and I expected to enjoy it a hell of a lot. So to everybody listening You'll find show notes to everything that we discussed at Tim.blog slash. podcasting just search boyd b o y d and it'll pop right up you can find him online at boydvardy.com we'll link to londaloosi tracker academy.co.z a and everything else in the show notes as well as Boyd on Twitter at Boyd Vardy and all the rest. His books, The Line Tracker's Guide to Life, and his memoir Cathedral of the Wild can both be found everywhere books are sold. And

2:54:54 Until Next time, experiment often. Be safe, be kinder than is necessary, even just a little bit. and see if you can get out in nature. It will be good medicine for the soul. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

2:55:29 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast. guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about. If you'd like to try it out Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.

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