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

0:00 Well, boys and girls, ladies and gyms. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. And my guest today is an all-time favorite. A lot of people come up to me and say, My God, that episode with Boyd Vardy. WTF that was amazing, and he's back. And you don't need the context of the first episode, but you should check it out if you have the chance. Boyd Vardy Is the founder of Track Your Life, which offers a limited number of premium retreats in South Africa's Buchweld and author of one of my favorite books of the last few years. It's an easy, fast read, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. As a fourth generation custodian of Londalosi Game Reserve, Boyd grew up with lions, leopards, snakes, and elephants, and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the natural world. His stories Are effing bananas. And we have a whole bunch of new stories. Example given, Lunch the Baboon. Oh, you'll hear all about that and much more. He is a lion tracker, storyteller, and literacy and wildlife activist. At the intersection of his two greatest passions, tracking and personal transformation, Boyd uses ancient wisdom to help people create a purpose driven.

1:06 driven, meaningful life. If you can spend time with Boyd, trust me, take the opportunity and do it. He is also the host of the Track Your Life podcast, which is definitely worth checking out. You can find him online at trackyourlife.co.za on X attack. Boyd Varty B O Y D V A R T Y on Instagram Boyd underscore Varty. And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging and fun conversation with Boyd. Vardy.

1:34 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then also do those questions. No it is. a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endocrine. Me.

1:53 Boido, good to see you. Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me back on the show. Absolutely. And I love your background since you have Commandeered my recording office in Austin. It's pretty surreal. I gotta say, I like what you've done with the place.

2:14 We might just pull in here for a few weeks. You know, you're welcome to. That's great to see you, man. Yeah, I think the last time we were together we were Walking in a squall across the Cotwalds. That's right. That's right. Yes, we had a we had our own

2:27 Semi wilderness adventure. I mean, there was some wild there. There was some wild. More cows than I would tend to run into. In your neck of the way. With your your badger track. You did spot a badger track. Thanks. That is thanks to Boyd and Renus and Alex and all the rest of the Actual tracking teachers. So let's Hop into it. Now this is gonna be a lot of improv jazz because I wanted to

2:51 introduce people, of course, if they have not heard episode one, which they should listen to. to your eclectic collection of stories and I have A number of prompts I do not have any idea what these allude to, except for one.

3:04 So we have J V Firefighting Lunch Toby Pheasant. And then we have a number of others. Where Would you like to start dealers choice? Well, maybe we'll start with something you don't know about me, which is that

3:17 I was the head of an elite firefighting unit for a period of time in my twenties. And I took over the team. from a French foreign legionnaire who had some of the most incredible personal power you've ever seen in your life. Like

3:33 When he would walk somewhere, there would literally be a twenty yard radius around him where he would project this Aura of Absolute confidence and intensity and you just felt this is an incredibly capable person. And this is in South Africa.

3:47 This is in South Africa and our job was we were part of a team called the Habitat Team. And our job was to do a number of things on the reserve. We had to fix roads, we had to mend fences, we had to make sure that animals were generally safe. We had a controlled burning program and then we also had to fight fires. In the case that you got a runaway fire.

4:07 And When I took over from Chris, I was Probably about twenty three I was in the phase where as a family business I was doing every job. I was the part time marketing manager and sales manager, so I would fly off.

4:20 Various travel shows in the world and sell safaris. And then I would come back to South Africa and I would be on the firefighting team. And I remember that I was so daunted by taking over from Chris that I had actually practiced his walk. alone in my room a little bit to try and get the cadence and the presence right and like literally right off the bat, the first incident we had Was

4:41 There's a bit of a setup to it. And the setup is that the monkeys had been generally attacking the buffet. These are the Vervet Monkeys. The Vervet Monkeys have been all over the buffet, they've been stealing things And so some enterprising staff member Had

4:56 been driving down the road and they had seen A sculpture, a paper mache sculpture of a life size lion. And so they had bought it. And In the late afternoons and around meal times.

5:07 They would trot the paper mache lion out onto the front deck that overlook the river. But people were having food and the monkeys would see it and they would alarm and stay away. And then the paper mache line would be picked up and it would be put in the bar for storage. So like literally day two we have A small electrical fire breaks out.

5:27 On a socket. In the gym. And My team get down there and we instantly realize that we can't spray this out. We've got to shut the main power down. So I send one of our team members who is a guy by the name of Lucky Mkunzi.

5:41 He was named ironically because he was incredibly unlucky. He had in fact Lost an eye in an incident in the bush. And the way that he handled this is he had Bought a beanie. And he had cut a single hole in the beanie and he pulled it down over his face.

5:55 So he had a single viewpoint out of the center of the beanie with his one good eye. And he would He would rock around the place dressed like this. Anyway, I sent Lucky to shut the power down, so he ran to the bar. where the switchboard was and he burst into a darkened bar with its hatches closed'cause it was like

6:12 Late afternoon there was no one around. He hit the power and he turned to his left and in the bar In the darkness was a lion. The paper mache line. The paper mache line was in the bar, so we lost Lucky for about two and a half hours'cause to his mind And valid in the bush, he saw a live lion in the bar and he just disappeared. So I realised

6:32 We better get down to some training. 'Cause I felt a a certain amount of pressure to make sure that we maintained the standards of the French Foreign Legionnaire. So I decided that we would Get involved in a series of drills and we would keep ourselves at an elite standard. And the team was made up of

6:49 If you think about it, there was maybe like Ten guys. There was a headman. By the name of Isaac and Contor, who was Just incredibly f also physical, maybe like six five, muscular guy.

7:01 It was Lucky Mkunzi who was the tractor driver with his beanie on. There was myself doing my French Foreign Legionnaire walk. And we believed in ourselves, but we weren't quite where we needed to be. And so Randomly in the afternoons. I would set up opportunities for us to have drills.

7:17 There was a small soccer field at the back of the camp and I would go and get debris that was lying around. And at random times I would light a fire and then I would send out the call and there were all of these kind of Calls it was first like Station, station, stations and send it out on the walkie talkies. Everyone would run to their tractors, they would grab their gear, and then I would scream, positions, positions, positions. The team would load into the tractors.

7:40 They would drive out they would get into positions And then I would scream, Start the engines. And then all of these powerful generator engines on the back of the trailers would start. And then the fire would start to build and I would scream. Spray, spray, spray.

7:56 And the hoses would open and a Blast of water would come out. And the fire would be out in moments. And we would be the hero of the entire district. So

8:07 Anyway, the day after the incident with the paper mache lion, I set one of these fires. And we get the fire going. And to be honest with you, I had some old thatch that had come off some of the roofs of the lodges and I had built like quite a nice bonfire of thatch. And it took off a little faster than I had initially expected. So he had quite a sizable fire right off the bat.

8:28 Got on the radio, I screamed, station, station, stations. The team scrambled, they got their gear on. Positions, positions, positions. The tractors came rolling in. I was thinking to myself, this is looking incredible. I was walking Like a French foreign legionnaire around, I was given commanding instructions. Open the hoses, spray, spray, spray. The hose is open. And an absolute trickle of water comes out.

8:51 By this time a wind has picked up and the fire is now starting to get some wind under it and it's starting to look like actually this fire could get away from us. And so my way of handing the situation, because the pressure was now building, was to repeat all of the commands at a louder volume. Station, station, station, Positions. Spray spray spray Still an absolute dribble of water.

9:14 And it was at that moment that we realized that Laki Mkanzi, in the moment critique, had managed to park the back tire of the trailer on the And he saw it at the very same time I did, and he rolled forward. The problem was is that the pressure had now built up behind the kink in the hose. And when that hose finally filled with water Not only did it knock the Hoseman out, but we totally lost control of it. It was flailing around like a deadly anaconda.

9:42 The fire was now starting to get away from us. The headman who was meant to be spraying the fire was in a bleeding heap on the floor. And my French Foreign Legion walk was taking me absolutely no That's when I got my first lesson in what firefighting was actually about. And in fact it's probably the lesson that stayed with me through all of this is that

10:01 When something is going that wrong. In the moment you think to yourself You know, it can be quite devastating to your ego, it can be quite devastating to your leadership. But I've come to see those moments as quite positive because it does force a kind of reflection. And

10:16 The thing that I definitely learned that day. And that it stayed with me through all crisis situations. And everything that I've faced ever since then is that It's very few people who know how to bring the energy downwards. When the energy is moving upwards.

10:32 And you know, somewhere beyond trying to do an impressive walk, if you can figure out how to When literally energy is moving upwards. start to create a slowness and a steadiness about your actions. You can start to actually do a kind of a powerful energetic

10:48 Jiu Jitsu on things. And so ever since that day I've been focused on when the energy is climbing, trying to slow it down. That's in the category of things you don't know about me. That is in the category of many things I don't know about you. Which is Shocking. Shocking and not surprising at all.

11:06 Given how long I've known you, but I wanna say a few things. So first What you just said about mastering the ability to bring the energy in a full circle back to calmness. That's something that Rich Barton, who co founded Zillow and many other company, Expedia, et cetera.

11:23 also said about leadership. This was not that long ago. On the podcast. The second thing that comes to mind is I really think somebody needs to write a scripted comedy show based on real life. Called Lando. Just about all of these. crazy stories and I thought I would perhaps introduce a new character who would be on the Gilligan's Island of Lando.

11:48 J V. Do you want to introduce J V? How do you want to do that? Well, just one comment on what she's saying. You know, I think a lot about my kind of like the body of work that I'm involved in now and everything I'm interested in as story hunting. And

12:04 One thing. It's about Londolosi, but it's not just that, it's like any time you spend in the natural world. It is like a story making machine. You can go out on the most Simple walk into the woods.

12:18 And because it is both How would I say it? The natural world is not just where meaning constellates, it is meaning in some fundamental way. And then incidences occur. Inevitably. Like little things happen.

12:31 And You know, one of my ideas is that storytelling is awareness. Like actually what storytelling is is paying attention. And the natural world starts to just every day generate incredible encounters. Like I if I think of the guest who got a John D Losi It's a sixty gas go out. That's sixty people who come back with

12:51 A diverse array of stories and incidences that occur on that day. Some of them will be ridiculous, some of them will be sublime, some of them will be profound. But It's hard to cast yourself versus Modern life which can sometimes feel very stayed and

13:07 Like the same things are happening all the time. The natural world is a story machine. It's a meaning machine. It's А симболік машин. And people who stare into it's like Very unwoo woo people. People who've just, you know, come out on Safari

13:20 They come back and they steered into the natural world and they've seen archetypal energies that they recognize. When you see a lioness grooming her cubs or you see her protecting the cubs. When you see

13:34 Then switch into hunting mode. You can't help but see the profound symbolic energy зара і нас. functioning all around you and it somehow it permeates you And you feel yourself in relationship to that in some profound way. Yeah, for sure. And uh we haven't even talked about this. Something you don't know. I spent a week

13:54 In the Montana Wilderness doing Outdoor survival training with this just incredible Gent, who I'll highlight on the show, no. Probably a month or two, but It's incredible the density.

14:07 of stories that you come back with. Even if you don't intend to gather anything extreme, you can It's so I would say also for city dwellers, it's so novel at every turn, particularly if you're injecting any level of shared privation or hardship which

14:24 is sometimes done deliberately, sometimes forced upon you in the case of like freezing rain and hail and you're trying to make a fire when your hands are barely functioning, things like that. I Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I asked millions of you about Gusto on social media, and I've never seen such overwhelmingly positive responses. It was kinda bonkers, honestly, because I've done this dozens of times. And it makes sense. More than four hundred thousand small businesses already trust Gusto and it's been named the number one payroll software by G2 for fall twenty twenty five.

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17:05 You can enjoy a one hundred day risk free trial, free shipping, and free returns. Check it out. From our place dot com slash Yeah. Let's and we're not going to necessarily belabor the point, but I just have to

17:20 Press on introducing I'm not sure which character on Gilligan's Island this would be, but J V. Let's talk about J V and then we're gonna we're gonna loop back. Two Story ending and some of the connective tissue that that connects all of these things.

17:36 Well, I mean of all the people who had a profound influence on me, one of them was my uncle John Vati, who went by the name of J V And J was a wildlife filmmaker. And from the time that I was about

17:50 Six years old, I became his camera assistant. Which To say that he had a streak of wildness, he had grown up in the hunting era. When you know hunting was still what they primarily did in that area. And

18:03 One thing about someone who grew up lion hunting is that it Tends to reset your drama meter. 'Cause if you think about it in lion hunting there's really only two outcomes. A lion dies or a human dies. So he his sense of danger was Dramatically reset by this type of

18:19 childhood experience that he that he engaged in as a young boy. So At the time that I spent most of my time with him, it was between the age of about Six and fifteen. He was making wildlife documentaries.

18:31 And I would Put my clothes out on my bed at night. And then at about four in the morning he would show up. And

18:39 He would walk in looking like kind of like Africa's version of Texas Walker Ranger. Forty four on his hip. Shirt with cut off sleeves. And he would open the door of my bedroom and Baddy, let's go. Like Tim, if you met him now, he would say to you, Hey so what do you do? And you'd say, Well, you know I

18:56 Run a podcast. Podcasting. Okay. Let me tell you about podcasting. He had these sort of arms that stuck out. The Shangan people Called him McCookwan, the one with the crooked arms'cause he like walked the wheel.

19:10 Yeah, totally John Wayne with his forty four. Um his clothes are always torn to pieces and He started wildlife filmmaking and I became his camera bearer from a very young age. And I had two jobs. The one was to drive. And like a lot of kids who grow up in nature, I learned to drive from the time I was about six years old. So one job was drive, the second job was camera bearer. The driving job was tough because like one morning we found a pack of hyhenas that were feeding on the remains of a giraffe.

19:38 And one of the hyena picked up a giraffe leg. And it started to run across the savannah with this Gigantic giraffe leg in its mouth. And he wanted to get the shot. 'Cause getting the shot was like the primarily issue of every moment. But he we gotta get the shot.

19:53 Now he set up in the pickup section of a vehicle where he's got a tripod up and a camera. And I'm now driving. And he's screaming, Faster, faster, faster and then I will speed up and then he'll scream, Not so fast, you're gonna hit something. And he's screaming, Left, cut left, cut left, cut right. And on one of these instances he said cut left and I turned to the right, but he was bracing for left.

20:17 And so he fell off the back of the the pickup. And the camera hits him on his head. And this put him into a mild rage which had him chasing me around the vehicle threatening to punch me in the face. And then eventually like he he would go into a red mist and then he would come to and say, Okay, we're gonna get after the hyena, let's go find it. And so l most of my trauma was around driving him around as his camera bearer. Then another incident he said to me.

20:42 It was a herd of elephants that were coming down to a water hole. And he said to me Okay. Gonna creep in there.

20:49 We're gonna get ourselves well positioned on the bank. Gonna get a nice low angle shot of these elephants drinking. Um and so I said, Okay, let's go. So I'm carrying the camera. He sneaks down to the edge. And He grabs the camera and he starts to film and this big bull elephant turns

21:06 And it starts walking towards us. And I immediately felt my heart rate starting to go up'cause I could tell the position we were, there're not really a lot of places to go. His way of handling the approaching elephant is Was to simply zoom out on the camera. Repeatedly. Every time the elephant got closer.

21:26 He just zoomed out of it and pushed it back till eventually It was about Five or six meters from us, standing over us. And at this point he looked up from the camera and he turned to me and said Amen.

21:38 Why didn't you tell me it was so bloody close? And then we got into this freeze off where we basically it was just a standoff and at some point he whispered back to me and said Three. This elephant comes. I want you to crawl into that hole there. And there was like an abandoned warren where some war toggs had made a hole.

21:53 And his escape route was for me to crawl in there. And so it was just like this constant sense of like Wait, are we are we okay here, or are we in massive danger? He had film camps all over Africa and one of his film camps was in Kenya. I'll never forget when I was maybe about ten or twelve. He put me on the back of the film van.

22:11 And he gave me a kind of machete. And he said to me, uh As we drove through the the city of Nairobi. He said to me, Daddy. If anyone tries to grab a hold of any of our camera gear, just tip them on the hand with the machete.

22:26 This is like uh babysitting Lando edition. Then at a certain stage he moved up to Zambia. And he had a film camp up in Zambia. And

22:36 He was always trying to get great shots and he had a knack for it, you know, like In the Masai Mar where the Vildebeast would be crossing the river, you would see the BBC You would see discovery channel that all be parked in a certain position. On the other side of the bank would be you know, a million Vuldebeasts and they all looked like they were about to cross and then John Varty would be parked.

22:56 Four hundred yards away. Seemingly away from the action. And at the last minute the entire herd would turn, run downriver, and somehow manage to cross right in front of him. He had a kind of magical knack for being in the right place, in a real profound sense. Of how animals move and operate.

23:13 And there was just like a wildness to him. He loved being out there, he loved the wilderness. He later in his career. And made a few attempts to rehabilitate cats and get them back into the wild. So he tried to get a young leopard that had been abandoned back into the wild. He involved in a reintroduction of a lion project where he found a lion cub and tried to get it back into the wild.

23:34 He did all sorts of things. I mean, when we were living with him in Zambia, I'll never forget um We were living in the Luangua Valley with him. And he He had a small boat that he would traverse the Luangua with. And the Luango River is the densest population of crocodiles in the world. And the boat he had had a tiny like

23:52 Two horsepower engine on it. So it's just like a dinghy, right? It's just like the total dinghy. It had like a tiny Like the top of the boat from the waterline was inches. And he would load it with all sorts of things. Then he would hit a sandbank and he would say to me, Betty You gotta get out and push the boat up the sandbank.

24:09 And I would like look Up and down the bank where there were hundreds of crocodiles and I would say to him. I I don't want to get out. He's Hey man, get out, stop being a A naphtha is what he would call us. They get out, push the boats. And then one day he found a young dead elephant. He was kind of maniacal about getting shots. He found a young dead elephant that had been washed down the river.

24:29 And he decided what he wanted to do was To the elephant. towards the bank where he could tie it to the bank. And then he would lie in the grass and he would get great shots of crocodiles coming in to feed on the elephant. So we get in the boat, he's got this piece of rope.

24:44 We get up to the elephant and he says, tie the rope around the elephant. And then he heads off upstream in the boat. And Tim, when I tell you he took full throttle of the boat. And with the drag of the elephant. We went absolutely nowhere for forty five minutes.

25:02 And only I realized this because I was looking at the bank. And I could see that we weren't going anywhere. The boat was in a full plane. And he was just rigorously committed to trying to get the elephant to the bank. So eventually that didn't work. We ran out of gas. In exactly the same spot.

25:18 So then he sent me to the shore to get some spades'cause we didn't have uh oars for the boat. So he sent me to get a couple of spades and we use spades and we managed to get a spades meaning like a shovel? Shovels, yeah. Well she row the elephant to the shoreline where we tied it to the bank

25:35 And for the next four days lay in the long grass there while he shot films Of uh crocodiles. You know, feeding on this elephant. So it was It was just a baptism into like the ramblings of an incredibly wild person. So here's a question I I may not have ever asked you. I don't think I have, but listening to these stories, I can't help but wonder How do you orient towards safety?

25:57 'Cause I think about people. For instance, in a modern environment, doom scrolling every day, they just have this slow ivy drip of cortisol. With no real imminent danger, but this perceived threat. that it's just infused into their daily experience twenty-four-seven. And then you listen to these stories and you're like, Okay, and certainly some of the stories in our first conversation for the podcast, you're almost dying being attacked by crocodiles and

26:24 This, that, and the other thing, and there's no short list of these. incidents and then you listen to your adventures with JV or firefighting. It's like okay on on any given Tuesday you flip a coin and those could have gone sideways in some capacity. How do you orient her? Toward safety or danger and how is that

26:44 Changed over time. It's certainly something I've wrestled with because after all those years with my uncle There was a double edged sword to it. On the one side, when I think back of how old I was during a lot of those incidences

26:57 I remember feeling tremendously out of my depth. And I remember feeling like Wait, what are we doing and I I don't know how to handle this. He was of the mindset that you should be able to handle anything. I mean, he would walk off into a dangerous situation and he would hand me a rifle and he would say, Buddy I get into trouble out there.

27:14 I'm expecting you to help me. And so then I would be left with this like Eight year old sense of responsibility. And feeling like I'm gonna need to take action against this, but I'm ill prepared to take action against this. And so I found myself quite split in some ways. Like

27:30 On the one hand. I would feel very apprehensive about certain things. And then in other instances. The apprehension was always prior to the incident, but then in a situation I always felt very calm. And felt like I actually had capability.

27:45 And I've thought a lot about That now, like'cause I always have a sense that whatever's gonna happen, I can handle it. And that is a gift he gave me. A sense that we will figure it out in a very instinctual game time live way. Like I can be in pretty high octane situations.

28:01 But I'm nervous of it. I still have a part of me that feels like I'm gonna be ill prepared for what is coming. I feel those two Places in myself all the time. And I think a lot about Recently uh obviously I just had a son.

28:14 And I think a lot about what it would be like to build capability in him.'Cause I feel like I have a sense of capability. I I feel like I listened to your interview with Chris Sacker where he was talking about You know just like Young people needing to have more incidences in their life, needing to have Been in a bar and

28:33 bumped a car and like lived life. And I feel very full of that, but I also feel like some of that stuff was I was over my head and that You know, I've had to manage some of that. So How do I orientate towards it now? I think

28:46 trying to build a sense of capability and confidence in whatever I'm doing has become Ground zero. And not just expect things of myself, but actually get Take the time to realise like if I'm doing something new, my approach to it would be like

29:01 I should just be able to handle this. And I think what I've learned is that I need to go slower and build confidence and build capability. And that That has been uh the ultimate healing on those ones.

29:12 So I'm looking at this I wanna make sure we layer in stories, but we can interspurse with other things. So We're gonna get to perhaps lunch, maybe Toby Pheasant, no idea what that refers to at all. But There's one that I want to pull out here.

29:27 Just to see where this goes. Learnings from ten years of wilderness retreats. I mean, you've taken So many different types of people on wilderness retreats. Certainly you've had many varieties of experiences yourself. As a participant, as a guide, as a tracker. As a facilitator.

29:44 What are some of the kind of main entries in the diary of Lessons learned. After a decade of doing these types of retreats in the bush. You know, I feel like I run the retreats every year through the winter months.

29:59 And I feel like every year we get More aware of what we're actually trying to do on the retreats. And We get better at them.

30:08 And I think the primary thing that I've come to really value Is that The faster We can put people into What I would call the natural state.

30:20 The speedier the uptick of transformation. And I think when I initially started creating transformational spaces in nature, I wanted something to happen. And I felt like My job was to

30:33 Quickly figure out where a person was blocked or where there was a kink in the energy. And try and and rapidly help them develop awareness around how that particular blockage, trauma belief system could be transformed.

30:48 And I feel like I've become way more relaxed with it now. In fact on our retreats now The first day is into silence. And nature. And I have this idea that comes from Martha Bick.

31:01 Where her take on the natural world is that it's a wordless environment. And so if you look at the animals, they don't have verbal mind, so you don't see them Thinking past and future. You don't see lions lying there thinking Uh, Janine messed up that hunt yesterday, and so we can't trust her going forward.

31:17 And so if you can go into wordlessness Then very quickly people start going into oneness. And so the key thing I've found now is get people to Be quiet, get them into more wordlessness.

31:30 Create an opportunity for them to interact and receive lessons from the natural world. And then things rapidly start to happen. The other thing is that I would say is that I say now that when people come they enter into the Londolosi time walk Because if you can take away their tech, which we now enforce, I I absolutely will not allow any tech because What happens is is even if a person who's running a company comes

31:54 And they go into silence the first afternoon. And then we go out the next morning and we're tracking an animal. And then they get back and they pick their phone up. And they've got a human resources issue back at the company. They start to pop out.

32:08 Because I also think that there's a profound chemistry to it. As people go into wordlessness and the sounds starts to work on them. As they start to put their attention on living Things

32:20 and start to feel those archetypal energies that are in the natural world. Literally their brain starts to cascade different neurochemistry. their nervous system starts to go more generally more parasympathetic. And they start to enter into a different state of awareness and

32:39 In that state their natural inner knowing starts to spit out But I would say within the first twenty four hours, something in them will start to know. And it will start to spit out insights. And

32:53 You don't have to work too hard at it. The other is if you say to people I want you to go and open yourself to receiving lessons From the natural world. The psyche is so intelligent, especially in a retreat space. It's funny, like if you have a ten day retreat People will orientate

33:10 Perfectly to that ten days and they will What will need to occur in that ten days will occur. If you said it's a two day retreat, they will get aspects of the same thing, but the psyche will know kind of how much time it has. In the same way the psyche will start to

33:26 Interact with the natural world and they will start to see And receive messages that are particular to what they are working on. And so really the lesson from ten years of retreat is don't work too hard.

33:41 And now The space. Allow people's psyche to start to Be in relation with the natural world. And then insight will start to naturally develop very, very quickly. And people can do this at home if you start saying

33:55 I want to go out into the local park. I wanna go out into my garden and I have a specific question. And you write that question down and you start asking specifically nature, could you help me answer that question? It's almost like a Zen Coan. You're holding An intention.

34:11 And then A desire for certain answers and then what you see Your psyche will run that through a specific matrix and insight will start to develop. Yeah, there are a few things that come to mind as you're saying all this. I took up a number of notes. One is that I think people bias or certainly I'll speak for Americans, but this is

34:33 I think common in a lot of countries bias towards The question of what should I do? Right. And it's in Immediate Tilt towards.

34:44 Addition, if that makes sense. But sometimes you get to where you want to go or achieve a certain state by removing the obstacles to that state. So when you were talking about natural state, I was thinking of, for instance, uh when I was on this Montana trip. I had a few friends with me.

35:02 Some of them had phones, some of them didn't, even just for taking photographs. And I left my phone behind. Very deliberately. Smart and I feel like If for instance you're not in the bush in South Africa, if you're not in the mountains of Montana.

35:19 If you simply take a digital sabbath, remove, say, bright light after sundown, do a few things where you're simply removing modern conveniences that are actually very unnatural from an evolutionary perspective. you start to access this natural state. And what the hell does that mean? That can mean a lot of different things, but one for me at least. That I noticed at Londalosi. I noticed it's certainly. in Montana, you can notice it.

35:46 simply walking around without a lot of the modern technologies that we are very much ill adapted for at this point. Is that these older faculties, these very well developed capacities that we depended on for so many millennia. Come back online. Maybe there is online, but the volume is very low. And so you start to notice a lot more.

36:12 And it just fundamentally changes your s perceptual lived experience on a day to day basis. I would say another thing that Lando nails And What's so cool about it is that it is a function of being synchronized with wildlife activity.

36:30 And that is really early morning drives. So you have the game drives. Which are typically what time would you say? People are waking up in the morning. You want to go out at dawn. You want your circadian rhythm to be affected by that sunrise and then

36:43 And the cool of the morning. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So people are Generally. to get a bite to eat and a cup of coffee, waking up, let's just call it thirty minutes before sunrise, something like that. And

36:56 What that means is you are typically jet lagged. And I think that actually works to the benefit of a lot of folks because you get this incredible time dilation, like your experiential day feels like two or three days because You wake up, it's dark. Then it gets light. Then you come back. and have a bite to eat and probably take a nap. Then you wake up, you do another drive, it gets dark.

37:20 And you have this very full spectrum experience. That makes a week at Londeleusie feel like Two weeks. Which is very similar to being in the Montana Mountains or really anywhere in nature where you are waking up with light you are going to generally winding down. With the sunset.

37:39 And I I just find that natural state and I'll shut up in a second, but bringing those Very, very mission critical for millennia. faculties online, whether it's by turning them on or just simply turning up the volume so you notice them. to be nurturing and recharging in a way that is hard to put words to.

38:01 Right, and you carry that back into the modern world with you. It's spot on I mean the other thing that I would say a few things on what you said there. The one is So many people arrive on the retreats with a sense of What to do next? You know, sometimes someone's built a company and sold it, sometimes someone is changing career, sometimes someone is going through a relationship change.

38:22 And they arrive As you say, with this desire of like what's next? And What it struck me a So much as in order to

38:31 Open Two The natural state. So often the first thing to do is to let go of needing to know what that next thing is. So often when I say to people stop

38:42 Trying to know? And stop trying to use this retreat to get the next thing. And in fact, let yourself Not no. And just enter into

38:52 the circadian rhythm of seeing the sunrise and seeing the sunset. Watching it go from stars to stars. We work a lot now on this rhythm that you're describing. I like to go Out early, drop into meditation, let the dawn break around you. Then intensity.

39:09 You need to switch on and track. And we need to operate well on our feet. We need to be tuned in, we need to listen. Then get back to the camp. And drop the energy again. It's only this Western culture in which it's like level ten energy all the time.

39:23 Everything in Nature moves through intensity rest intensity rest. And as people feel themselves allowed to rest. Another insight is I think we used to try and do too much on retreats. Giving people

39:35 high intensity moments and then spaciousness. To be more like an animal. That starts to conjure it and then sit around the fire at night. And then let the natural world be your teacher. The other thing is is that And I know that you've had these experiences. It's really become quite remarkable to me how many mystical things happen. When I first met Martha and I started to understand transformational processes

39:58 I was still like a drink of beer. you know, punch someone in the face type of person. You know, I was twenty years old, South African I did not Consider transformational processes or coaching or inner work. I had no Grounding in that.

40:12 And then also just like oh the animals are gonna bring messages, that was all quite woo for me. But I've seen now the most remarkable things, you know, one thing that comes to mind is on every retreat There will be magical occurrences with the animals. A woman will be Sit in the circle and she will say

40:30 You know, I grew up in a family of alcoholics. And When you grow up in a family of alcoholics, it's incredibly dangerous all the time. And so what I learnt I've learned to make myself invisible.

40:42 I've learned to hide. I've never let myself be seen'cause being seen was dangerous. That afternoon we go out. And she's sitting on the back of an open Land Rover. And a male lion that's been sleeping.

40:55 Rouses himself, stands up, Walks. Towards the back of the land rubber stops. And He looks up at her.

41:03 He looks into her eyes. And it's just breathing, gazing at her, and she it's so intense. to be looked at by a four hundred pound Serial killer like that. There's something so

41:15 kind and powerful and the presence that that animal projects And she looks away initially and I say to her, You can look back and she turns and she looks back. And I can feel it's the most profound revealing psychologically that she's ever been involved in. And after that

41:31 Something shifts in her and she's able to start Allowing herself to step forward. You know, another one that comes to mind is we had a a guy come on a retreat and He's sitting in the circle and he says to me, You know, one thing that has happened is since my father died, I've been totally unable to grieve. Like I know that I want to break open.

41:49 But I can't get to it like I just can't cry. And For the first few days that's the case. On the third day, you know, I'm sort of talking to him, I'm checking in on him. And We're sitting

42:02 You know, Londas has these kind of decks that you sit out on, but there's a thatched area, but it's open. And a bird flies into the thatched area and it lands on the little gum pole. Over his head. It looks down at him and it starts calling intensely. Very unusual. Sometimes a bird will fly through, but this bird flies into the area where they're people and starts calling.

42:23 And he looks up at this bird and at the moment he sees it I see tears come to his eyes. And he starts to weep. We We and for

42:32 Ten minutes he can't talk. And then He looks at me and he says, This is gonna sound so weird, guys, but you know my father was an avid bird watcher. And This bird, the southern boo boo, was his favorite bird.

42:45 And You know Stuff like that is happening so regularly that I can't deny it. I just know That's

42:53 Things will happen, magic will occur. I mean look, we also had one woman was describing her trauma and how in her life everything gets taken from her And while she's describing that she's eating a piece of toast at breakfast and a monkey literally jumped down and snatched the toast out of it. But there's definitely a sense And I think that native culture is mule this and I think it's woo woo to us.

43:17 But if you intentionally start Working with the natural world. It knows on some level. Then things start to happen and I think people need to be re enchanted.

43:34 I think one of the things that we're afflicted with is that we are dull down And we have disconnected from magic. And Sometimes it doesn't even h have to be that woo woo, just J

43:46 A leopard and her cubs leap up into the branches of a Marula tree and to feel like God, this is the beauty of it. And to have that affect you in some profound way. I've just seen so much of it now, I'm a I'm a real believer. That nature wants us to heal and nature knows

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45:25 You know, it also strikes me that I'm speaking to myself as much as anyone else that Sometimes we tend to want to fight fire with fire. And I'll explain what I mean by that. And it

45:35 doesn't always work in the sense that we have a problem Or we perceive a problem through our thinking, and so we want to use more thinking to fix that problem. Or we think. I just need to try harder. And it's like, Well, if trying harder would have solved this, it would have been solved by now. In some way. And absolutely. And there's so much Canvas to explore that is

46:03 as you mentioned, wordless. If you're able to even entertain the question of, you know, what if The path. Or The relief.

46:13 Could be found. outside of words and concepts, right? What might that look like and what it might look like is spending time in Nature. And one of my favorite experiences at Lantalosi and I've, as you know, I've been a bunch of times now. Is the

46:29 Silent. Morning drives. Mm-hmm and Just to explain that briefly, do you want to explain? That briefly.

46:38 Well, maybe I could say two things about that. The other is a story comes to mind of a very s silly anecdotal story, but One of the things that led me to probably all the way to this conversation Is when I was Prior to my firefighting days when I was on the London Losey sales and marketing team, I found myself in London. And

46:58 By day I was seeing different agents and I was telling them about Mondalozy. And then we got invited, myself and a friend who I was travelling with, we got invited to a party that night. And at that time I was struggling with very, very severe depression. And we did that childish thing that you sometimes do when you're in your twenties where we decided we would go to the party

47:17 And we would kind of make up fake backstories and like kind of be in character for the night. So when people ask me what I would do. At that time. Out of nowhere I started saying I'm a writer.

47:30 And I hadn't got even close to writing anything at that stage. I was would be totally daunted by the process, but when I said it at this party This total bullshit story I had made up. Every time I said it. I felt a little uptick of energy in my body.

47:46 Not in my mind, not a rational sense that this is what you should do. I just literally felt Like oh this little like kick of energy. And I decided to follow that little kick of energy and when I got back to South Africa I sat down at my old computer and I started

48:03 Writing down stories. And I noticed that whilst I was engaged in the process of writing The depression would lift. Or I would not be aware of how much just

48:14 Grey I was carrying around. I would wake up in my bed and I would have that feeling where you w wake up and you just feel like oh my God, I'm I'm gonna fight to get through this day. And I would do my duties, I would do all the things I needed to do, like with this gray cloud around my head, and then I would sit down

48:32 at the computer and I would start to write out some silly anecdotal story. And suddenly something would lift. And I would follow that and literally Everything that has brought me to here has been Following that non rational energy in my body.

48:46 I'm aware of what makes me feel a little more energized, a little more expansive, and I just figure out how to move towards that. Now in order to do that you do need some stillness. For us is it you know.

49:01 The Safari business is evolving and I think that we're working hard to change what it is. It used to be You can uh You have your guide who gives you an interpretive wilderness experience. He tells you about all the animals. He describes their habits, their gestation periods. He taps you into

49:17 Yeah, the biological sciences That can be so wonderful. And All of that information can be more information. So what we started to do

49:29 in the attempt to take people into deeper wordlessness. Was to say you're gonna go out. And You are gonna be in silence. And hopefully that silence pulls you into a deeper place.

49:40 But what you're also gonna do is you're gonna watch your mind. And you might be watching looking at something And You might find yourself saying, What's going on there? Why is that animal doing it? What animal is that? What's even happening here?

49:52 Just be aware of that and try and come out of needing to know. Which is the primary state of our society, right? Only in eastern philosophy do we find our way to don't know mind. The whole Western mind is structured around needing to know. So if you find yourself needing to know, let that go and just be in pure experience of it. Let the silence work on you.

50:13 Feel how Everything is unfolding with an intelligence that And you don't really need to rationally know it. Try and Feel at a deeper level. And

50:24 To a man people report coming back. Some people report feeling incredibly frustrated. Some people said, You know, I found my mind wandering to wait. When I'm at home is should I catch the six train or the five train downtime. Like people's minds go to Did I turn the tap off who's looking after the cat? But If you can keep them in it, eventually you drop through.

50:44 To a different sense. And Then as you watch the animals. You Drop into a different layer of language.

50:53 And it's what I would call the first language, and it's the language of energy. And you start to feel how when a leopard turns and looks at you With the shape of its body, with the look in its eyes, with the way it moves its head, it is conveying energy. And You can watch the prey species move through different nervous system states from

51:13 Totally relaxed to Listening in a way. to attuned to potential danger. And you can feel how as they move their bodies, every one of those states in their body has a feeling to it. And you can feel that feeling in your own body and getting to know that feeling

51:27 Is where I think It's definitely more where native cultures operated. And inside of it is a deep sense of connectivity because you can feel yourself relating to every creature once you know that language. When you can look at a leopard and with Any words between you feel.

51:45 It's energy, feel what it's conveying to you. You can be in a dialogue like that. And I'm sure you've had this Tim, but in shamanic ceremonies And when I've been around Healers.

51:57 You know, I remember once asking to my teacher in the medicine space Well will you teach me? Why won't you teach me? And he said to me, Well, the feeling is not there yet. And I said to him, No, I'm asking you. He said, Yeah, but you I can feel your distrust. Whatever you say to me.

52:14 The feeling you energetically of giving off is still there's still too much distrust. And only when the feeling is different between us What I start to teach you. And to me that space was so full of that First language energy, the energy between things.

52:31 Yeah. I I wanna Also, maybe underscore for folks that this might sound very abstract or esoteric, but there are real direct applications of what we're talking about. to everyday modern life as well, and a few names that we know in common come to mind.

52:50 One is Diana Chapman, who we both know, of course. And the whole body yes, and really tuning into Your kinesthetic, your bodily sensations. for making

53:02 Decisions of various types for choosing things. Could be as simple as something on a menu, could be something. as high stakes as to say yes or no to a potentially huge business partnership with a given person, let's just say. And I've had her on the podcast, people can listen to that episode for more on the whole body S and how to navigate the if we don't get into it now. Another that comes to mind, as you said, that the particularly let's just I'll limit it to the United States for now because other cultures are quite different in this respect with CS does and so on, but

53:34 The idea that you wake up and you just go ten out of ten. from when you wake up to when you close your laptop is anathema to the natural world. That's just not how things work at all. And if you engage in say going on Safari, if you spend time in the natural world, certainly if you do any type of hunting, you realize there are these natural rhythms. So if you go on let's just say an Elk Hunt or something like that. You may spend a few hours.

54:02 doing X, Y, and Z, and then just bed down. You're like the animals are bedded down. We're not gonna find them. They're inactive. It's gonna be incredibly difficult. So instead of waste our energy, we're gonna take a nap have a snack and take a nap. And I recognize that You know, having a snack and taking a nap may not make sense in between your Zoom calls, but the point is that if you talk to someone like Josh Waitskin, another mutual friend of ours,

54:23 who, for those who don't recognize the name, he was he was my second ever podcast on this podcast out of eight hundred something plus. And he's gonna hate this, but he's known best for searching for Bobby Fis. He was a very high level chess player beginning at a very young age, but has applied his learning approach. to mastery in a number of different fields, world champion in Tai Chi Pushhand's first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, nine time world champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. now foiling at a very, very high level on huge waves. And what does Josh say?

54:57 When he looks at all of these world class performers in these different disciplines, when he looks at the people he works with directly, ranging from sports at a very high level. I don't know if it's public yet. I think it is. Yeah, the Celtics, for instance. all the way to the absolute one percent of one percent in say the finance world. One of his mantras, and I don't think he'll mind me paraphrasing this, is avoid the simmering six.

55:22 And avoiding the simmering six. is if you look at say Marcelo Garcia, before he's going to compete in a world championship mat, they're running around trying to find him because it's five minutes to go time. And where is he? He's sleeping under the bleachers. He's taking a nap. He's at zero. And then He wakes up, shakes it off, and then in the two hundred feet before he gets on the mat, he switches it to a ten.

55:46 And he's going from rest to full engagement. He's not sitting in the middle. With that. Ivy drip of 247 cortisol and sympathetic overdrive. That is deliberately what he is avoiding, and that is in large part how he is able to partition resources to engage so fully and dominate competitively. And that's also true.

56:09 for people in the finance world who are working in very high stakes environments for making decisions around placing trades and so on. So it has What we're talking about. This is just my Somewhat clumsy way of saying.

56:25 That I every day I'm sitting in New York City, for God's sake. This is I mean, it is the concrete jungle, but It is the city that never sleeps, right? It is is in some ways the The antithesis of living at Londo nonetheless.

56:41 I can take a lot of the lessons learned that you see so clearly there. And you have to squint a little bit to apply it here. in such an intense environment, but you can. And you actually really could benefit very quickly from doing so. So Diana Chapman, Josh Waitskan, just want to point out how broadly these themes apply. Even if they seem

57:01 To some people listening may be a bit exotic. Perfect. Yeah, it's felt said. Fire. I felt like you were just about to jump into something. Yeah, I mean just the information

57:12 All roads in personal transformation lead to the information is inside you. You actually know. It's in you in the way that lions know how to be lions and leopards know how to be leopards. If you want to find your way to your fullest expression, it's in you. It's subtract of making the space to allow that information to come forward.

57:30 And a big part of that is Just letting yourself follow the energy of the non rational energy of people, places, experiences where You literally feel your body full of an expensive alive energy. And getting good at following that is the ultimate tracking.

57:45 Full aliveness, another Joshism. Fully alive. Jim Tetmar, too, has also been on the podcast and uh and a mutual friend of ours. Let's, as promised, we're gonna kinda hop between these tracks. I've got lunch and Toby Pheasant. Where do you want to go? Or we could choose option C if there's another one that comes to mind. Let me tell you about my friend Toby and I So Toby was an Englishman. And

58:10 I'm sure he won't mind me telling the story to millions of people, but Toby are Toby came on Safari with his family. Um This is quite some time ago now, maybe good twenty years ago.

58:22 Came on Safari with his family and He had such a great time and he had such a great energy and attitude about him. That he managed to convince us to let him stay on. As a kind of General hand around the camp.

58:34 And so when his family flew off Toby stayed on. And He immediately got integrated into the village of Londaloty. And he picked up all of the worst jobs. He had to clean the lanterns that get put out every evening.

58:47 One stage he was painting an ablution block. And just every time I saw him, he was on some kind of like Here and around the camp. One day Toby and I was sitting down at the staff canteen. And a radio call in that some guests had reported that they had seen a snake in their room.

59:02 So myself and another ranger said Okay, we'll go handle this. And Toby said, Guys, do you mind if I come along? Tby. Come with us.

59:11 And so we jumped into a golf cart, which sort of Is how people get around in the back of house of the reserve. Jumped into a golf cart and we went up to the Rangers room. To fetch our snake catching stick, which had picked up the name fifty fifty. Because it was a bit of a Heath Robinson, it was a piece of P V C Pi.

59:29 And lamp cord through. that had made a kind of noose. And the way that worked is you would get the loop at the end of the stick around and then you would pull on the Cord and it's Technically it should tighten up and catch the snake in the noose. But it was a little bit niggly in certain places. Sometimes it wouldn't close all the way. So it had picked up the nickname fifty fifty.

59:49 So we grab fifty fifty and a big kind of like um black dustbin. And we jump into the golf cart and we drive down to the room. Toby's hanging on the back. Uh the vehicle. We get down to the room And there are two

1:00:02 German guests who are looking somewhat shocked. And I'm gonna be honest with you, Tim. I gave them my most Powerful, don't worry. I mean now.

1:00:12 Safari guide of the year has arrived. You you don't need to worry. I'm gonna go in there and sort The situation. And so they were left standing at the door, and myself and Toby and the other guide went in. And

1:00:25 It's very rare to have a snake in a room, but sometimes a little house snake or a green variegated bush snake will get in. So we're walking around and I noticed the suitcase on the rack. An empty suitcase. And I flipped the lid open. And what rose out of the suitcase was one of the biggest black mambas I've ever seen in my life. It kind of levitated out of the case.

1:00:45 Do you wanna explain why that isn't your uh garden variety, gardener snake? A black mamba is it not only is it an extremely venomous snake, but it is highly mobile and very difficult to handle in a confined space. And if it bites you, die quickly. So Myself and Toby and the other guide, we went for the door at the same time. And I remember the three of us kind of jammed in it as we were trying to exit the room at high speed. Three stages. I might have reached forward to grab their faces to pull myself through. We got outside and I said to the Germans.

1:01:16 There's a big snake in there. And they said, Yeah, we told you. And so now we're faced with a bit of a dilemma and they're watching us. So we decide, no, okay, we know what we're dealing with now, we must go back in. And so we make our way back in and now we are Tiptoing around the room. And we're flipping up cushions.

1:01:33 And we're pulling bed spread off. And what the Germans see standing outside is they see like a pillow fly out the room because you don't want to lift it slowly, you wanna kinda like Rip it open and see what's under it. Then they see a chair fly out. Then they see like a do they come flying past them.

1:01:48 Toby at this stage has positioned himself For maximum discomfort. He's close enough to be in the way, but he's not close enough to be fully helpful. And he giving us a running commentary on the dangers of black members, he's saying If they bite you, he will die instantly. The venom is

1:02:06 Deadly in tiny quantities. I'm like, Toby, you are not helping the situation. Can you please shut up? And I remember at one stage we pulled the duvet cover off the bed. And the bid had a It had an electric blanket on it and the cable of the electric blanket came off. And it made like a snake like motion and all of us like reared backwards. Eventually we saw the snake under the bed.

1:02:27 And my friend managed to get fifty fifty down there. And he gripped the mumba. Now what you normally want to do is you wanna get it behind the head. And you grab it behind the head. And then you put it in a bag.

1:02:38 He managed to grab it mid body, and it was maybe a two and a half meter snake. And so that mumber went full propeller. On the end of the snake catching stick. It was like whooping around. And they're part of them is they've got this incredible elastic powerful body. So it was like a lot of snake whipping around on the end of the stick, and then it turned And it curled its way up the stick.

1:02:59 But fifty fifty held it. And eventually its head was about that far from my friend's hand, but he had it. Like six inches from the hand. Terrifying. And we decided it's gonna be too much to try and get it into the bucket, so we're just gonna ride it out the camp. And so now we make our way out past the perturbed looking Germans and we go to the golf cart

1:03:19 And I'm driving And you have to imagine a a standard sort of Golf card. I'm driving. My friend is standing next to me and he's holding the stick out with the giant snake on it.

1:03:31 And then Toby. Jumps onto the back of the golf cart. And we start making our way out of the camp and we're kinda like bouncing along. Just as you exit the camp, there's kind of a gateway. Where there's an electric fence that keeps the elephants and the buffalo out.

1:03:46 So as we approach that My friend who's thinking about the snake's six inches away from his hand. He pulled the stick in. To allow for us to pass through these two pillars of the gate. When Toby on the back

1:04:00 Look to his left. The black member was now fully adjacent to his faith. With about three inches between him. And the thing and Tim, from where I was driving, I remember looking to my left The golf cart was going quite fast.

1:04:16 And I saw Toby take off. In my peripheral vision. And as I look to my left His feet We're passing the where the roof of the golf cart was.

1:04:27 He had exploded off the back of that golf cart. It looked like someone had shot a rocket into space. As I drove off,'cause I kept moving. I look back, he was still heading in a vertical direction. Over a bush. It must have been a good like in a high jump term, it was a good

1:04:44 A solid five to six foot vertical explosion. And the last I saw of him, he was like Petering out and disappearing over the bush. Like a Frisbee falling. And

1:04:55 Remember we got out of the camp. And we released the snake and the snake went off into the bush. And my friend and I looked at each other, we were absolutely wide eyed and we turned and we begin to make our way back into the camp. And as we came through the gate of the camp, standing in the middle of the road With a a look of shock and awe on his face was Toby.

1:05:14 And we drove up to him. And the first things he said to me, I'll never forget it, he looked me dead in the eye and he said That Was Incredible.

1:05:25 Shortly after that, he went back to England and he had to I think he He went and studied briefly. But very quickly he came back to South Africa and he became a Safari guide. And he actually now runs a travel company. You can look him up if you're in the UK and you want to come to Africa. I think it's called Bonami Travel. And I always think that

1:05:45 So often what emerges out of these stories is not what you think. You would think that an encounter like that would be like I'm packing up and moving back to the UK, but it is actually quite the opposite. He moved back to Africa, became a Safari guide and still runs a Safari company to this day. And I think about that often, like The things that have gone wrong that I would thought that would be the end of people. Turn out to be the adventure that everyone's looking for.

1:06:09 So just to To talk about Calibrating danger. Differently. You

1:06:15 Like running. Alex also master tracker. Like running and you guys Just go running outside of the gates, right? You just go for a long, nice run. Now typically, for instance, if you run into a bear or a wolf or a big cat, you don't want to run. Like run is what prey do. This is a strong fray drive signal.

1:06:37 But you guys were training very intensely. For what? Can you talk about this? Yeah, we can. This is fucking wild.

1:06:45 In any case, I'll let you introduce it because it's just so on some levels hard to believe and hard to envision also. Yeah, you mean persistence? Yes. I do. My friend Alex is one of the best trackers in the world, in my opinion. He's authored many books on it. He's the founder of the Tracker Academy.

1:07:04 And his singular mission, Alex van den H His singular mission has been to preserve indigenous wisdom, particularly the art form of tracking. And I think in southern Africa he's done more to teach, train and preserve tracking than anyone else. And what started our our journey to be with the Bushman people in the Kalahari

1:07:23 Was he went up? And he ended up spending a few days with a group of bushmen. There's a lot of different names. Some people refer to them as the Sand people. They Asked us to

1:07:34 call them Bushmen. They said, We are the Bushman people. Please call us Bushmen. So that's how I will refer to them. And During that time with them, he was Blown away by the ecological intelligence of this group of people. These guys tracked a porcupine one day for like ten kilometers. They would sleep around the fire at night. Now normally when you sleep out in the wild at night

1:07:54 Someone keeps watch. And so Alex asked them Who's gonna keep watch? And they were like actually. Sort of

1:08:01 Perturbed by this, they would say, Well, why would we need to keep watch? This is in a full on wilderness area. Alex said, Well what if an animal comes? And they like An animal will never come here without us not being able to feel it. Literally if if a hyena walks by or something, one of them will wake up. So they're they're attuned at a at a very different level. And Alex saw this and he was blown away by it.

1:08:22 So that was the initial trip and what resulted in that is A request was made that we would come back. as a group, an expedition, and we would assess the skills that were still kind of alive and functioning. We wanted to get a sense of what was possible still And what people still knew how to do because

1:08:39 The Bushman people are probably the most persecuted native people on the planet. You know, they've been displaced from everywhere. And so it was to go and say, like, has their their initial tracking knowledge been lost or What still exists. What initially

1:08:54 Called us to the area. And we spent a few days. Starting to assess that process. And it is quite remarkable because Bushman people now are living in a very interesting way.

1:09:06 They mostly live in the towns. They've been pushed off a lot of their land. And they do various jobs in farm labour, et cetera. the governments of some of the southern African countries. Provide a stipend of like four hundred dollars or pool or rand. So you would think that a lot of the indigenous skills had been lost'cause a lot of people are on this kind of like

1:09:28 It's not the doll, but it's like a government supplement. And yet About seventy percent of the food that most Bushman communities are still getting their gathering from the desert. And so they're living in this kind of urban way, and yet underneath the surface, if you

1:09:45 connect in, there's still this way that they are living in tune with the desert. One thing about the Bushman people is that they never stored food. Unlike other You know, various tribes who would have like a storehouse where they kept food. To them. The desert is their storehouse.

1:10:00 Which is quite an amazing idea. There's just like there's no sense of needing to hold or store because it's an abundance psychology. There's everything you need is there. And when you say desert, just for people who are trying to conjure an image, I mean it's desert. It is great. Like a little scraggly bush here or there. At least based on the video I've seen, but it's very much a desert environment.

1:10:20 There's areas where it's like semi arid where you have these harsh bushes, and then there's other places where you are in red beach sand. It would be akin to walking on the beach, it's so sandy. There's places where Ground squirrels have these huge colonies, so as you walk you fall down'cause the the ground underneath has been hollowed out. So It can be very, very tough. Operating there.

1:10:40 And so we spent a few days With different groups of bushmen. And We were taken out into the desert and we watched This incredible energy of people moving very slowly through the desert.

1:10:52 And They will Dig up a tuba or a root, they'll cut a section of it, everyone will eat some of it and then they will replant it back into the desert. They'll never take a whole piece of food. They'll take a portion of it and then they'll put it back under the soil to grow.

1:11:07 And walking particularly with the women as they gather, I had this feeling that We could have been a little bit more than Three hundred years in the past or three hundred years in the future? There was such a strong sense that whatever happens, these people are attuned to their environment at a different level. And then what emerged out of that is we were invited to

1:11:26 Participate in Probably the oldest practice of hunting that exists on the planet, which is persistence hunting. Assistance hunting. There's accounts of it. Across many, many different terrains, including in the snow, where the snowshoe tipped the advantage.

1:11:42 Towards people. But it is the pursuit of an animal until the animal tires. And so in order to do it, you need an incredible skill set. One You need an unbelievable fitness. You need to be able to move

1:11:55 For a long period of time. And in the peak heat of the desert. Two You need to be able to track at a level Well, you're tracking it at a run.

1:12:05 That can be easy in parts of the desert, but men, it is not easy at midday. I thought it would be easier in Desert Sand. It's not easy because as the sun gets to twelve o'clock, which is when you want to be doing it at peak heat. It throws no contrast onto the ground. I was gonna say no shadows, right? Yeah. No shadows. We were invited to be a part of this.

1:12:25 And we were seeing, you know, is is this still alive? Is this who knows how to do this? Just to throw some numbers out there, if you can indulge people with Fahrenheit. Well give people Celsius and Fahrenheit if if that's possible. That's asking a lot, but When we're talking about a persistence hunt for the Bushmen What type of distances or time are we talking about? Like how long does it take? And then what kind of temperatures are we talking about?

1:12:52 You know Tim, it's really interesting'cause I think In the one that Craig Foster filmed, it was around thirty kilometers over about five or six hours, something like that. But What I discovered being there is that there's this incredible equation

1:13:08 And the equation is Is heat? On one axis and time on the other. So As the heat climbs, the amount of time reduces. The distance goes down. Yeah. Distance reduces. But then there's also an interesting factor

1:13:22 Which is what type of season has it been? Has it been dry for a few seasons in a row, or have you had a rainy season because the condition of the animal has a a huge effect. So one thing that happened while we were there is that they're on the back end of a number of years of draughts. That was a big kind of factor.

1:13:39 So that that's all going on in the What emerged is that we were invited to be a part of this. But it hadn't been done in a very, very long time. And so there was some discussion around who knows how to do it and Whether it's still alive, people who we had asked

1:13:54 Around had said no, no one does that anymore. The older generation who knew how to do it was lost. Um so there was uh there was conjecture around whether e anyone even knew If this was still possible. So we got on the

1:14:08 First day. And what was amazing about it is to the Bushman people it's called the great dance. That's the name of the dock, isn't it? Yeah. The great dance, yeah. Craig Foster, just for people who are like, Do I know that name? My octopus teacher.

1:14:22 With this. Most famous work. It's a great dance because there's a tremendous act of Faith in it. And it's part of

1:14:31 the mythology and the spirituality of the Bushman people because it is It involves being engaged with the animal at a very deep level and transferring the animal's energy To you. That is ultimately what happened. So

1:14:45 You are moving with the animal, you're tracking it, you're running it, and you are with s the spirit of that animal and you are with spirit itself. And then Spirit is as you are closing in on the animal, it's giving its energy to you and the final act of giving From great spirit and from the spirit of that animal is the actual killing. And one thing that'll happen is as guys

1:15:06 are involved in it, it's a very funny superstition, but it's symbolic. They won't jump over a log. Because if you jump over a log You are expending energy and you're pushing energy back at the animal, whereas actually you want to be drawing the animal's energy to you. So there's this very interesting rhythm that guys get into so Anyway, we go out and we we're looking for tracks in this huge area. There's no tracks, there's no tracks.

1:15:31 And The energy of of everything is kind of like dialed down and You know there's like There's one guy wearing a Barcelona F C T shirt, there's one guy in full traditional gear. It's like it's a full mix.

1:15:44 Not out of some idealised sense of how this is done. It's like You know, game time real life situation. And then we come on to A herd of Kuros Fresh Tracks. What is a kudu?

1:15:54 Can you paint a picture? Oh, True is a it's a very tall regal antelope. And it has Kind of large spiraling horns. And

1:16:05 Kudu's there are desert adapted antelope, but kudu is not that well adapted for the desert, so There are certain animals that you wouldn't try and do this with because they're just too adapted to the desert. For example, if Kem Spock Literally the way that it breathes, it cools air through its nose. Kudos are not adapted, so they're susceptible to the heat. When this group that we were with

1:16:24 Of incredible trackers got onto the track of this herd of kudu. The whole energy shifted. And it went from quite lackluster. A switch.

1:16:35 And suddenly these guys started to switch on and they went into archetypal hunting energy. And when I say to you that I've become very interested in Energetic archaeology. I feel like there is so much energy latent. Underneath

1:16:51 Anything that modern life allows us to get close to. And when you see these guys switch into hunting energy, you feel this energy that is in every single one of us, but we never we never need. We don't access it'cause we don't need it. And suddenly the first guy shifts into a dog trot. He starts Kind of trutting on the track.

1:17:10 And then the second guy starts to run and these guys start to move. And Now you have to do a lot of complex things. One You have to track. You have to stay on your kudu'cause the herd quickly breaks and a single kudu breaks away.

1:17:24 That's the weakest one. So the guys are onto that one. Then you have to navigate. You have to run. There's such an equation, you have to have a sense of where you're going. Then all of this together.

1:17:36 At a certain point. It becomes this incredible act of faith because you have to fully Commit, I'm running into that desert. I'm running away from water. I'm going in that direction and I don't really know what the outcome's gonna be. I don't know the condition of this animal. I don't know the heat. I don't know the terrain. I've got to just go.

1:17:56 And follow. So it becomes a real act of faith. And As I say, like you're running away from water in the desert, and that can be a big factor. And you don't know how far you're going. It's hot. And on the day we did it, I don't know what the Fahrenheit is, but it was forty seven degrees when we started.

1:18:13 And so at the front of that group, Tim There's like a there's an energy that develops amongst that group of hunters. And I can tell you that if you drop out of it. It's kinda like a peloton. If you fall out of it, you will never catch that group again. But if you find yourself in it, it's almost like you can ride the energy of the group.

1:18:31 How would I describe it? It's kind of like a ceremony. You just you don't know what's gonna happen once you're in it. And so I managed to find myself on this occasion in the center of the group. And These guys were tracking so fast.

1:18:45 And they're running and as a group If the animal cuts one way, someone On the left will pick up the track. And as it cuts to the other way that someone else will cut onto it. So they're working as a team. But as you run.

1:18:56 You're also dropping people'cause the heat is building too much and it's just so intense. And then also people are going into different psychological states. So one of the Bushman religious practices is to go into trance. And you can feel yourself wanting to go there. For the first hour of it. I was in

1:19:14 A totally neurotic state. I was In my head. And I was thinking to myself like It's too hot.

1:19:21 You know, I'm gonna die of heat stroke. There was this voice running. This is We're going too far, we're not gonna get find our way back. I'm gonna get Separated from these guys too far out. There's no water. It was just this Just total neuroses.

1:19:34 And then somewhere in there I started to feel myself going into a different energy. And I felt that the only way to do this was to Let go of these thoughts and let my body Just

1:19:49 Go until it couldn't go anymore. It was weird because it's it's not often that you I mean great athletes talk about this, which I am not. But There's kind of like You're reaching for a place and athletes, some athletes know how to get to that place. And I felt myself go through the layer of mind neuroses.

1:20:09 And let go into like I'm just gonna let my body do what it knows to do. From that place I tapped into a level of energy that felt like it was coming out of the earth, that felt like it was coming from the group, that felt like it was coming from the animal. And we went for about another two and a half hours from there. And you're just like you're glowing red. The guys are tracking at one stage I found myself on the front of the track.

1:20:33 And You can feel the animal moving up ahead of you and you have to keep moving. You have to keep it moving. And then you'll get a glimpse of the we got a glimpse of the kury and then it disappeared for another forty minutes. We're just on the tracks. Then we got another glimpse and it disappeared for another forty minutes. As it gets closer, the guys start to feel that the energy is transferring. They are starting to get the upper hand.

1:20:56 And as they feel themselves getting the upper hand, the younger guys start to run Harder and faster. And At this stage I had lost my teammates, my friend James and Alex. I had lost them. And then suddenly Alex was in front of

1:21:10 Which is a classic Alex move. And what had happened is is what I didn't realise is the kudu had run in a dog leg. And so where he had been behind me, suddenly he was in front of me. And suddenly the kudu was directly in front of him. And as that happened, the entire energy shifted again and the guys just found another gear.

1:21:27 And It's quite amazing to witness it and then eventually The animal is so tired that it literally just stops. And it gives itself to the hunter. And those moments where the animal will run no more

1:21:42 And The Bushman Spirit. There is something so profound about it because you can't be there and not be in an in a profound state of respect and receiving. And you are also so close to the truth of where your food and the survival of the village comes from. You're not strolling down the meat section at Whole Foods. You are

1:22:03 Right on the coal face of what it means. to take life and to take the energy of another creature. And After the animal goes down. they put sand on it, which is symbolic of a blessing onto the animal and thanking the animal.

1:22:19 For what it has given them. When you eventually emerge out of that energy. It could have been. One hour, it could have been ten hours. You're in such a different psychological space and you have been involved in an energetic

1:22:33 That is Totally primal and that is ceremonial. There's no other way to describe it. You are in a current of energy from the earth. That particular kudu, how much would you guess it weighed? Any idea?

1:22:45 So probably around The hundred and eighty K G mark. Oh, that's a big boy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I I would need to check that, but four hundred ish pounds. Yeah. Yeah.

1:22:58 When that could have is cut up. A little bit less than four hundred, maybe. When it's cut up, every single piece of that animal is taken and and eaten. From the time the guys started working on the carcass, it must have been fifteen minutes to Wow, that's every single piece of that animal. And then how are they are they just carrying it on shoulders? I mean, how are you guys actually getting that back to camp? Yeah, and then you put the haunches on your

1:23:23 Like all different array. of carries and everyone and walks it out. And then you've got still obviously got a long way to go from there. What happens when you guys get back to Well, what was amazing about it is there was a strong sense of pride amongst the hunters.

1:23:38 They hadn't done it in a long time, but And they wanted to show that they still knew how to do it. And it was almost like that they had Remembered an aspect of something that's they had done for many, many generations. There was a beautiful energy to it. And then back at camp there was

1:23:55 It's just immediately that food starts to get eaten. Yeah, I bet. What I came away with is that if you were to look at Bushman culture now, on the surface it appears very diffuse. But the actual skills are very much alive and they They simmering just under the surface.

1:24:13 This incredible ecological knowledge of how to live in harmony with the desert. And if If AI does wipe us all out, I'm pretty sure that Bushman people will just walk back into the storehouse of the desert. And the Really, really comfortable there.

1:24:29 Yeah, if you wanna see modern Polite behavior disintegrate. Very quickly, just go to a place like San Francisco. I remember the power went out for

1:24:39 Two days, two and a half days. And people were very, very civil. In the beginning. And walking around the street greeting one another, and then people realize their food is gonna thaw, their food is gonna spoil. And agitation and aggression start to percolate very quickly because people don't know what to do. They have no idea what to do. If the basic

1:25:01 Architecture of convenience is removed. I've thought about it a lot and I think that All the things you imagine to happen, people are so much closer to primal wildness than they ever realise. And Survival starts to kick in.

1:25:14 And then I think there'll be a wide junction. Some people will go into Survival of the fittest. And then others will move into f states of collaboration. For like good reason, protection, food, safety. So there'll be like

1:25:28 It'll be interesting to see how it breaks down. You can get into some good prepper stuff. Just pro tip. Make sure you have water. Water is number one. You're gonna need water a lot sooner than you're gonna need canned lentils. And by the way, if you have any dried canned food, you're gonna need some water typically for a lot of that. Well make sure you have your water and your jet boils or something along those lines.

1:25:52 It's also amazing to see how little water The Bushman people can operate on it must be absurd. Their evolutionary track must have prepared them so well for that. I would be dead within twenty four hours. We had one morning on the same trip where we found tracks of a cheetah. And We were quite keen to show the guys.

1:26:10 Like some of our tracking skills and it was good it was a camaraderie amongst trackers. And we were with the seventy year old man And we're following the single cheater and it kind of turned into like mildly competitive at the front. So if someone lost the track. The next person would be on it.

1:26:26 And then if you step off it, someone else would be on it. And for the first like Two hours we were quite effective. And then these guys just started to put a clinic on us as it got hotter and hotter. We ran out of water. We were like climbing under these thorn bushes, lumbering along, and they were just like cruising through the desert.

1:26:43 And by eleven o'clock the seventy year old guy was walking us off our feet and we had drained our water bottles and we were like we need to get back Um'cause we need to get water. He hadn't had a sip all morning and we were like okay Wow, yeah, you win. No contest. No contest.

1:26:59 Alright, so I wanna hop to two Difference. Potential leaping off points. You can tell me If one of these makes sense or if there's something else we wanna hop to. You can follow whichever track is appealing. Being a resolve figure.

1:27:13 Seeking the wild man. You wanna pursue either of these? What do you think? Or we could take Option C off menu. No, I mean I think the wild man is a Power theme.

1:27:26 And it comes down to this idea that I've come to think of the wild men as Awareness. Like self awareness. Awareness of all the different layers of energy that are inside you. And then

1:27:38 Also access And so when those two things start to come together You start to see a real type of presence. The type of presence that you see in the natural world. And

1:27:49 I'm really become interested in conjuring more of that in my own life. How do you Liberate. different layers of energy in yourself. Like in my definition of presence would be access to the moment. And particularly now working in a lot of these men's groups.

1:28:05 The idea of conjuring the wild man Is It's wildness in the sense that it is in tune with Life force. But it is also wildness in that it is access to the moment.

1:28:18 And What I mean by that is To have your f wildman fully available means that If You are required to front up in some ways and protect something and be

1:28:28 Able to be assertive and aggressive, you have access to that. But if the moment is calling for a tremendous amount of softness or tenderness, you also have access to that. So trying to figure out how to develop access To as many moments as possible has become

1:28:47 kind of a central piece of exploration for me at the moment. And to become resolved within that is Now as a father I think a lot about Figuring out.

1:28:58 How to be available. Through a full spectrum. Uh masculine experience to My son, to my wife, to my family.

1:29:09 Where do I run into blockages in myself? Where do I start to feel like I really want to be here, but I don't know how to show up in this moment. That's what that exploration has become primarily about. Well let me ask you a question related to that. So if we think about access to the moment, sort of full spectrum access to These different

1:29:29 emotional sensitivities, let's just say. I know that's that's a bit of a clumsy way to word it, but let's just say that. How do you personally think about co-locating you and your family. And here's what I mean by that. The way that I have tried to solve for this, what I've realized is that in a place like New York City, where I'm sitting, and it's like got accosted by this very aggressive

1:29:53 probably mentally unstable person yesterday. in huge crowds of people. Right. A lot of a feeling of like collective cauterization, if that's a word, but just people have dropped down walls and I put on sort of a Protective.

1:30:10 Armor. That seemingly disallows me to access all of these different sensitivities because it just seems like suicide to be too porous in an environment like this. So whether I wanted to be open or not, I don't think it would be good for me necessarily in New York City and most places to have that level. of kind of openness.

1:30:32 So I do spend a lot of time in cities. I find cities exciting. But I block out, you know, a few weeks of the year where I'm just completely off the grid. And hopefully at the very least keeping these sensitivities from atrophying too horribly. Like I'm Working the muscle.

1:30:49 in these blocks of time. that I put out. There are other people, of course, who just live In a more peaceful, perhaps, environment that allows for this type of exploration and expression and experience, right? And it doesn't need to be the middle of South Africa. It doesn't need to be in the middle of the mountains of Montana. It could just be in a peaceful suburb. It doesn't need to be. Or in a like a chiller city than New York City, potentially. How do you think about this for yourself?

1:31:17 I think about it. Probably through discernment. Like I think that it's wise to be somewhat armored in the environments you're describing. Bad. What I see in groups now a lot.

1:31:28 This has become the core thing. Is I see Particularly in men's groups. A desire to be more available.

1:31:37 But actually not knowing how to, not having the access and the literacy to know what that would even look like. And so You don't want to go into extreme tenderness. You know, in the middle of New York City, you probably want to be exactly where you are, but you want to know that you can open

1:31:56 to deeper levels in the right context. And you wanna know What has kept you out of that, which would usually be some kind of conditioned response, something that you learn to do. A way you learn to freeze or shut down.

1:32:10 When things became overwhelming. And then Do you want To figure out how develop more options for yourself in that moment.

1:32:18 So the trauma to me is freezing, right? Any time you've been forced into some kind of traumatic situation, it's characterized by a reduction of options. And so in order to cultivate more presence, one is you have to Be present to the fact that you're frozen. And actually be able to feel like okay, in this moment I wanna be more connected, but I don't know how. So first to be present to that.

1:32:41 And then second, to start to figure out what other choices would look like. And literally other things you could do in that moment in to move out of the frozen state. And that's where I think the N

1:32:54 Need other men. Then the wild man is somewhat a collective exploration, men being with men. Particularly in wild places. That it just naturally starts to emerge. You don't have to work at it too hard and it doesn't have to turn into a drum circle if you take a bunch of guys

1:33:11 out into a wild place. The psyche starts to relate to that wild place and they start saying I can't tell you why. It's intangible, it's energetic, but something about this Has something to do with me.

1:33:25 I can feel myself in a way Yeah, in the presence of that waterfall and that mountain And that lie and and the process of being out here. I feel I can feel myself. And then the conversation starts to open.

1:33:39 And you're able to start to say like okay, where are the places where we run into Blockage. And if we want to be wild, we need access to the moment, just like in the way that an innocent animal has access to it knows what to do in any given situation. Like Leopards are not in their heads. If they want to be aggressive, they're aggressive. If they're care caring for their young, they're caring for their young. If they need to set a territory, they do it. It flows out of them. Trading spaces in which that can naturally start to occur.

1:34:06 Has become really interesting to me. How do you think about well, side note for people, I don't know why this popped into my head, but if you're like, man, I'm never gonna see a leopard, I was like, you can get a little With leopard. If you go to the movie theater and the popcorn is burnt It smells like leopard urine.

1:34:25 So that's just uh If you want to take a big, big inhale. When leopards mark their territory, they spray and it has it it has the almost exact scent of popcorn. It's really wild. I remember I was like I was like, nah, that's not possible. And then we were driving at one point. I think it might maybe it was Sursant, but one of the trackers that we were with. held up a hand to stop the car and I was like, Holy shit. There it is. I feel like I'm sitting in the movie theater. That's crazy.

1:34:52 And uh in any case I'll I'll leave that there. But What do you think the trappings of some personal development or men's groups are? And the reason I ask. And this is not a strong position I'm taking, but it's just a thought is that There are many side effects to uh And many benefits too of a highly individualistic society.

1:35:11 Right. So if you in the case of the US, you take this Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism, this lionizing of the self. sufficient independent person. There's a lot of production that can come from that, right? Like productivity. They're is frequently some degree of collateral damage.

1:35:29 From a collective perspective. And that's not too woo-woo like collective could just mean like in your family. Like if you trained yourself to be sort of a Cold blooded business killer with blinders on. And that's the gear you learn to use is sixth gear.

1:35:46 If you don't have some degree of flexibility. And you're very good, which is very common this applies to I think men in a lot of fields, women probably too, but I think especially men, uh compartmentalization. So when you're able to like increase your pain threshold, compartmentalize certain things, lock certain things away, can make you very, very, very effective as a performer. But in an interpersonal Respect it can be.

1:36:09 Compromise. Okay, the reason I'm bringing all this up is that I think about say let's just take, for example, like men who want more access to different States and sensitivities. And I'm like, okay, well why do they want that? Well, they might want it because they want to be able to better listen and interact with their partner, right? And just for the sake of argument, let's say that's a that that's a female partner.

1:36:33 And I'm like okay. Well, I agree with that, right? This has been one of my homework assignments for the last two decades. Getting better at conflict de-escalation, which I never had a good model for. I've made a lot of progress, and quite more work to be done. There's also, I I feel like, Maybe that this perceived necessity on the part of men is a reflection of also

1:36:56 A society in which you have A couple within which each person expects the other to be kind of everything for them. So it's actually the the we need more community solutions where it's like, Okay, look, if you expect your man to be just to like one of your girlfriends you're gonna have a chat with, like You got the wrong animal, probably, right? And then if the the dude is like, Why can't you just be a dude? Let's be dudes, it's like, Well, maybe you just have the you got the wrong animal, which is part of the reason why I block out for these weeks when I do these trips, they're almost always all men trips.

1:37:29 Right, because that's that Type of experience. in modern day, I think is largely absent or disallowed outside of maybe a few sports context.

1:37:40 And Similarly. If a couple is in isolation, right, putting aside the child rearing aspect of this and the challenges that entails. I suppose this is very meandering, but I haven't verbalized this before. To what extent do you feel like personal development for let's just

1:37:57 Take the men's group as an example. should focus on the individual and that kind of access versus trying to figure out some like structural solutions and scheduling and blocking things out so that they have access to more people outside of their partner. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think it does. I think there's steps to it.

1:38:15 I think the first step is Both partners. Developing more. literacy away from the partnership. So I think it's w first work in the eye.

1:38:27 There's an inevitability and a necessity to that. Then Once you start to get more skills In the eye. You wanna bring that

1:38:37 To the we. And you want to start To Practice. And I I actually think that

1:38:44 One of the issues with relationship is that our model for it is still like Built on the romantic traditions. And it's like you're gonna fall in love and then you know, he has this beautiful thing. Where his relationship to me now is way more An active practice space. But you have to be working yourself.

1:39:02 And together. So those two things have to go together at some stage. The problem is is that You need Your blind spots revealed. And you need

1:39:13 People who have more access to help guide you into new choices and new ways of being. You need something from the outside to help you see what your blind spot was. Very often you need something to offend your own pattern. Or your own blindness and help you see it in a different way.

1:39:31 And then you bring those awarenesses to the group. And then I think Hopefully what starts to emerge out of that is there's What the relationship wants to be for others. And

1:39:43 ideally it should turn into a place of service not just for your direct family but for the larger community where you start to know we have something unique to give. To the community. And I think When enough people So to

1:39:56 take that up, that's where you could see like systemic models for change. But I think masculine essence needs other men to liberate itself more. And same with feminine essence needs other women to liberate itself more. And then to bring those two together with more awareness becomes part of the funness of the game, I think.

1:40:15 Look, you know I'm a junkie for. personal development stuff. So I'm kinda like I feel like I'm in an AA meeting for like Personal development addicts. But What I would say, I'll tell just a brief story. So on this Montana trip.

1:40:29 Keeping in mind I keep using that example because it's most recent, but this is I'd say at least three or four times a year, there's a trip of some type. with guys. And in this case, small groups like four or five guys. And

1:40:42 At one point we're sitting around a fire. At night. Just rapping and talking and talking and talking. And then one of the guys said, He's like, I just figured out why fire is so important for guys. And we're like, why is that? And he goes, because we don't have to make eye contact. We just look at the fire and we can have all these really deep conversations. Whereas in most circumstances, like if you're staring deeply into another guy's eyes, it's kind of an aggressive It's just this ingrained kind of aggressive defensive

1:41:09 Just stare in someone's eyes, you're gonna make out or or kill each other. Yeah, right. You know that old joke? You said your buddy Hey, do you wanna go and Sit by the lake and

1:41:19 Talk for six hours. No. It's like do you want to go fishing? Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, right, exactly. And so if Harkening back to what you said about like Don't try too hard.

1:41:31 Right. And this is more an open question, but As I get older and as I see some of the trappings and weaknesses or insufficiencies, both the necessity of and the insufficiency of like direct head on personal work.

1:41:47 Mm-hmm. I wonder what the ratio is. between sort of deliberate like microscope. work, so to speak. And like the indirect work, this is gonna sound really crasp, which is like building a raft and going fishing, which we did.

1:42:03 with like handmade lures and all this stuff. While telling like fart and dick jokes, right? It's like it doesn't seem serious. Like no one would put that in a book and be like, okay, step number one, like come up with three of your favorite dick jokes. It's not gonna be in any self-help book. But None the less

1:42:20 It seems to Do a lot of Lifting. And there's the bonding and you know, the older I get, the more I think that's like, okay, we can look at

1:42:30 the twenty seven different options for improving ourselves and Ultimately. Why are we doing that? Well, it's probably to achieve like some emotional state to improve our quality of life and the quality of life of, say, our family members around us. Okay. Well having in the case of these trips that I'm describing, right? Some guy time where you're not necessarily I mean, there is some goofing off, but there's generally shared projects and like shared suffering of some type.

1:42:58 And a lot of exertion. Like you said, it's like, Yeah, let's sit by the lake and talk for six hours. No thanks. Yeah. But let's go fishing and by the way, kinda do the same thing. Okay, great, let's do it. that the answer is like it's the relationship stupid. And the content is secondary to like the spending of time in a particular way. A hundred percent. And you don't have to work hard.

1:43:20 The only thing that I would say is a little bit of context to it. If you have a few guys in the group who have done the work of developing a little bit more access and can make Reads. Then you don't have to club it. You know, you can mostly be talking shit floating down the river. But then occasionally

1:43:39 With a little bit of context, someone can say, Hey Here's what I see you being blind to. You can tell me to fuck off, you can take it on board. It can go any way, but here's how I notice you show up. Do you know that you do that? No

1:43:51 If you just try and weigh in on that, it's like fuck you, leave me alone. But if you've had some time together doing some real stuff Like there's an opening there. that I found the rate of download to be incredibly high. The community piece is that No one has all the answers.

1:44:08 Personal development work for personal development work's sake is just fucking self indulgent. But Once you add in the dynamic of relationship, as you said, then there's love. And then there's K. It's like you know, I'm what I'm saying to you is coming out of care, it's coming out of a piece of my journey.

1:44:25 And what you find is everyone has a peace for everyone then the community is more intelligent than the individual. And that's where the major unlock start to have where someone who's not even in the role of facilitator or leader says Hey, you know, w there's a way in which you show up that makes me

1:44:44 Like not Feel like I can trust you. I'm just telling you that by way of feedback, I don't know whether you want to take that on board or not. You know, things start to happen. And if you've rafted a river together, you tend to take more than you were just jettisoned.

1:44:59 With the example that you just gave. There are lots of ways to communicate that. Right. I mean you might just like Hey man, I could be making this up as a story, but like have you ever considered A B or C? 'Cause if you're gonna use the language of say the fifteen commitments of conscious leadership, you better fucking make sure the other person has an idea of what the hell you're talking about. Amazing toolkit, but you kinda have to agree on the language beforehand. So we're coming up on roughly time.

1:45:23 But I want to make sure that we do perhaps two things. One is maybe add one more story and then cover anything. that you'd like to touch on that we haven't covered. What do you think is a Good.

1:45:37 Kind of bookmark. Story here. I have lunched the baboon. Down. Yeah, let me tell you about lunch.

1:45:45 Okay. Tim Lunch was a baboon that picked up the nickname Lunch because he started showing up at lunchtime. And you started causing absolute havoc around the camp. Lunch even worked out how to break into the kitchen. And I remember once being in the kitchen and the chefs had barricaded one of the doors with some rocks.

1:46:04 And the door was literally vibrating. Ga. And every time it was it was being forced from the outside, every time the rock would slide and the door would open a little bit more. And then this furry hand came in and gripped the handle. And then lunch burst into the kitchen. And he walked across to the counter where there was a cake.

1:46:21 And he picked up the cake and walked off on his hind legs. Holding the cake in his hands. And just for people who don't have a picture of a bad boon, I mean, I find those things pretty fucking terrifying. I mean, a bad boon is a formidable he's like a three foot Muscular, hairy dude with long canines. Yeah.

1:46:39 Yeah. There's this thing in animal intelligence and you probably even know this better than me, but there are these modes of awareness. There's I know Then there's I know.

1:46:51 You know. Then there's I know that you know. So it's like the first awareness is just You know, I'm aware of you, then it's I'm aware that you're aware of me. That's Like higher level. So

1:47:02 Sometimes I would walk through the camp and lunch would be like involved in some kind of mischief. He would be breaking into a guests. Maniba and then he would see me And He would know that I knew that he was up to mischief. And then he would kind of pretend to just be like

1:47:17 Loiting around. Nothing to see here, just being a baboon in my natural environment. I remember the other day I was going through some notes on my desk and I found a minute from a meeting And the literal minute was like we need to get new crockery and cutlery for tree camp. Land Rover number eight needs to be repaired. His troop needs to fear our troop.

1:47:37 And basically it was like Someone deciding that they needed to try and scare Lunch out of the camp. And so For a period of days I decided I was gonna like chivy him out of the camp and it was elaborate'cause every time I try to chase him he would hide.

1:47:51 He got into the mini bar, he drank some booze. I found him sitting in the pool one day. He was just like causing general chaos. I had a little B gun that I decided that I would shoot him with and the one day I found him he was sitting on a guest's Audi. That was parked in the car park. And when I aimed the gun at him he just lay flat against the Audi like I dare you.

1:48:11 Team's up no good. Anyway, the one day I'm sitting in the office and The phings and my sister picks up the phone. And she starts talking in that Very intent way.

1:48:23 In reality. I can't believe that. Royalty. Yes, of course we can. And everyone in the room was like eavesdropping because it sounded so intense. So she hangs up the phone and she says

1:48:36 Boy. Prince is coming to London Lazy. And this is like a tremendous amount of excitement. And there's like months and months of prep and set up to the arrival of the prince. It's like

1:48:48 Endless amount of logistics. A satellite dish has to be put up so that the prints can stream certain sports games. There's a special shift that has to come in. There's a whole lot of things that need to come into the boutique so that there can be unique shopping experiences. At one stage there's talk of lengthening the runway so that a jet can land. But going backwards and forwards and you know, you liaise with these kind of like entourage liaison so there's like just

1:49:11 It's all happening. And Eventually the day arrives that the prince is arriving. And We were quite pleased with ourselves'cause we were on top of all of the logistics. A special face cream had been flown in.

1:49:24 And I remember the first three or four planes that landed were just entourage and luggage. And then eventually the prince was coming into land. And Bronwyn said to me, My sister, she said, Boyd You need to run down to the room. Final thing we need to do and you need to put these cold face cloths.

1:49:40 In the room. So I grab my radio. I run down to the suite and as I'm running down The walkie talkie's going off. The prince is ten minutes out. Ten minutes out.

1:49:50 Prince has landed, he's now eight minutes out. Eight minutes out. When I get down to the suite and I open it. And it opens into a kind of living room and then you go through a kind of a lock area where there's a cupboard. into the main bedroom and then into the bathroom.

1:50:06 And as I get there, I notice that the door is slightly adjacent. So I think to myself, it must just be that the housekeeping had left the door open. I walked through I come through the bedroom and as I get to the bathroom Standing at the bathroom counter. With a bottle of papaya hand lotion in his hand is lunch.

1:50:26 And as he sees me and I block the doorway He starts downing hand lotion. He starts chugging it into his mouth. It's like the mango papaya hand lotion. He even gets a streak of lotion across his top jarl, and then he realizes that he's in a confined space. And he drops. Jar of lotion. Cuts his feet a little bit and launches himself.

1:50:49 In a full dive across the bathroom at the giant panel of glass across the bath where you can look out onto the river. He smacks the glass, his hands come down, he puts a bloody hand print on it. He pushes back off the glass. He flies onto the ceiling, then now he starts to make baboon noises. Bow B And at the same time

1:51:08 He starts to use The patented baboon technique for getting out of dangerous situations, which is to massively release your bowels. And so for a few seconds this baboon bounces around Causing absolute chaos, knocking over But salt.

1:51:24 He's standing on the faucet, his hands are bleeding, there's lotion. There's crap everywhere. He's barking at me. Bah b then he turns and he comes at me. And Tim, I remember I let out a little scream. And I leaned back. And he flew in slow motion past me.

1:51:40 And in midair he turned and he looked at me as he went past. And he had like a look of like savage glee on his face and lotion like down across his jaw. He landed on the bed. And he bounded across the bed with these bloody hand prints. Released another massive turd.

1:51:57 The front veranda doors open. And dived off the front veranda like a stockbroker in a recession and the whole time it still creeped. They disappeared into the river. The room as I looked around the room, like I cannot tell you what a baboon in a confined space does. The room looked like the Texas chains for massacre.

1:52:18 And Blood and shit and lotion And baboonhead. There's a turn on the pillow. Did it smell strongly of baboon.

1:52:28 And then it looks quite human like because baboons have very similar paws to humans. So there's like a bloody hand on the fall and like Someone's grabbed the faucet with a like s it looks like someone's been murdered in there. And the r the walkie talkie goes off. The prince is now five minutes out. Five minutes out. I called my sister on the radio, I said, Bradwin, you've got to get down here with the housekeeping team. This is

1:52:52 An absolute shit show. So she comes down with a group of chambermaids and housekeeping ladies and they start to Go ham on this room trying to get it back into Uh working order.

1:53:04 Meantime. A massive pantomime breaks out on the main reception area of the lodge. As the staff of Londalosi try and delay the prince from coming to his room. Hello, your Majesty, could we offer you a quick wine tasting? No, I just arrived. I want to go to my room. We would like to take you straight out on a safari right now. There's a leopard with a kill nearby.

1:53:26 That sounds good, but I'd like to go to my room. Okay, what about the ladies' choir who like to sing songs and do traditional dancing? And what saved us, Tim, was in the middle of this elaborate faulty towers is pantomime. A hippo walked out. Onto the rocks in front of the camp in the midday light.

1:53:46 And the people of London acted like they had never seen a hippo before in their life. People started screaming, Oh my god, a hippo. We never see hippos out of the water. Someone go and fetch a spotting scope. Someone brought a telescope down and And that brought us about fifteen minutes. While the prince took in the the hipper. Staff were acting like the hippo was the most amazing thing the world had ever seen. Anyway eventually we can stall him no longer.

1:54:09 He comes down to the room and literally as he comes in the room. The chambermaids slip out of the sliding door in the bathroom. And they get into the long grass around the sweet and they've got mops and buckets and baboon shit in their hair. And as one, they just drop down into the grass. They just like disappear.

1:54:28 And lie there in absolute possum status. There's this incredible moment where the prince comes into his room and it, you know, smells of rum spray and Everything's clean and the mirror has been put straight and he walks out onto the front veranda and he looks out over the river The hippo calls nearby. Oh, oh, oh. And it's just everything is quiet and he's like

1:54:48 So good to be out to Alone for thousand miles of every direction. And he turns and walk back into his room and twelve chambermaids rise up out of the grass around his suite. And that is the day that lunch really got us. Lunch the baboon. Lunch the baboon. Holy shit. What a story. One day we were out this is another true story, one day we were out bunch of guides talking about a bunch of guys out together.

1:55:12 Do we drive out When it's like an afternoon we've all got off, we're drinking some beers. And there's like a rocky outcrop. And that the rocky outcrop is like a small hill and it's silhouetted. Against the skyline.

1:55:24 And we see lunch literally silhouetted on a rock up against the skyline. And he's with a lady baboon. And he's doing some very naughty things to her. And I swear, Tim, when he saw us, he put his one hand up in the air like this and gave us a kind of a high five like Yeah.

1:55:41 Oh Montalusi, protector of all things. There have to be moments when you're like uh Just We just blast him off that rock and be done with lunch.

1:55:55 It's amazing to live amongst the animals. The other day I mean The other day I was sitting watching a war talk, he was Grazing up on the runway. I literally saw a thought to him. And he turned and he began to walk.

1:56:08 He walked like two kilometers down to the camp and I followed him the hallway. And he made his way to where a woman was washing some clothes and she was hanging them on a washing line. And The water is dripping off the clothes onto the ground and it's making this little flash of green grass. And literally he knows that's a good place to go and get some green grass.

1:56:28 And so there's this thing about living close to the animals like that that you notice there's an intelligence to it and it's almost like your community expands. To include The trees and the animals and these unique personalities. That you get to know.

1:56:43 And it's not just A random baboon, but it's like that's lunch and it's not just a random leopard, but we know this leopard she allows herself to be seen. We have a relationship with her And that's a very, very deep and and beautiful way to live. Yeah.

1:56:57 And uh Just uh Underscore you just said. About leopards. Like if you see a leopard, that leopard is allowing you to see them. And if they want to vanish. Even in short grass.

1:57:08 Snap of the fingers, they are gone. It's just Beyond. Incredible to see that happened. Where you're like, Okay, they couldn't hide themselves if they wanted to. Like that grass is too short, da da da and then Dig.

1:57:21 Turn back and they're like eh. Enough of you guys and boom, they're just completely invisible. It's remarkable to see. Boyd. Anything you'd like to say before we wind to a close? Where can people find you? Where should people go? To learn more about all things boid.

1:57:36 Yeah, thanks, Tim. People can go to boydvati.com. To find out about retreats and books, Cathedral of the Wild and Lion Trekkers. Guide to life. And yeah, that's the best place.

1:57:49 To figure out if you want to come on a safari or if you want to come to Africa, that's also a good way to do it. Boyd Vardy, B O Y D V A R T Y Dot com. Good to see you, buddy. Good to see you, man. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. And everybody listening, we will link to I'm not sure exactly where we're gonna link to, but We'll link to some names and other things. We'll link to uh the the highlight reel of Lunch the Baboon, I'm kidding. We'll link to all things mentioned that can be linked to.

1:58:16 In the show notes, as always, at Tim.blog slash podcast. If you just search Boyd B O Y D, both episodes will come up. This is episode number two. Definitely, if you enjoyed this, also listen to episode number one. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary. Why not? It doesn't take a whole lot of extra effort and the payoff is enormous. Kinder to others and also just a tad bit kinder to yourself, because it goes both ways. And uh you can work those muscles on both sides. And Thank you.

1:58:46 Turning 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. 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 kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading,

1:59:22 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. Thanks for listening. A lot of non-stick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals.

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