{"id":11781,"date":"2025-10-25T19:31:57","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T23:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-the-return-of-the-lion-tracker-boyd-varty-on-the-wild-man-within-natures-hidden-wisdom-and-how-to-feel-fully-alive-832\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T19:31:57","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T23:31:57","slug":"the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-the-return-of-the-lion-tracker-boyd-varty-on-the-wild-man-within-natures-hidden-wisdom-and-how-to-feel-fully-alive-832","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-the-return-of-the-lion-tracker-boyd-varty-on-the-wild-man-within-natures-hidden-wisdom-and-how-to-feel-fully-alive-832\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Return of The Lion Tracker \u2014 Boyd Varty on The Wild Man Within, Nature\u2019s Hidden Wisdom, and How to Feel Fully Alive (#832)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/hop.clickbank.net\/?affiliate=infohatch&amp;vendor=J1R2C\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10614 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png\" alt=\"Profit Gen\" width=\"400\" height=\"217\" srcset=\"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png 400w, http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px-300x163.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Please enjoy this transcript of <a href=\"https:\/\/tim.blog\/2025\/10\/22\/the-return-of-the-lion-tracker\/\">my interview with Boyd Varty<\/a><strong> <\/strong>(<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/boyd_varty\/\">@boyd_varty<\/a>), the founder of <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/trackyourlife.co.za\/\">Track Your Life<\/a>. As a fourth-generation custodian of <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.londolozi.com\/\">Londolozi Game Reserve<\/a>, Boyd grew up with lions, leopards, snakes, and elephants and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the natural world. 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, meaningful life and to discover their most authentic, essential self.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Boyd is a <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/boyd_varty_what_i_learned_from_nelson_mandela\">TED speaker<\/a>, the author of <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cathedral-Wild-African-Journey-Home\/dp\/1400069858\/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20\"><em>Cathedral of the Wild<\/em><\/a><em> <\/em>and <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lion-Trackers-Guide-Life\/dp\/0358099773\/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20\"><em>The Lion Tracker\u2019s Guide to Life<\/em><\/a>, and the host of the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/track-your-life-with-boyd-varty\/id1505181324\"><em>Track Your Life<\/em><\/a> podcast. Using wilderness as a place for deep introspection and personal transformation, Boyd has taught his philosophy of \u201cTracking Your Life\u201d to companies and individuals all over the world.<\/p>\n<p>Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<div class=\"podcast-player\">\n<div class=\"podcast-player-inner-wrap\">\n<p>The Return of The Lion Tracker \u2014 Boyd Varty on The Wild Man Within, Nature\u2019s Hidden Wisdom, and How to Feel Fully Alive<\/p>\n<p><noscript><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.art19.com\/shows\/58dacbdc-646e-4585-9914-19c3de11d1ba\/episodes\/269bc23d-6e4d-4f2e-8804-4e82826ba80c\/embed?type=micro\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 30px; border: 0 none;\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/noscript><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Additional podcast platforms<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Listen to this episode on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/832-the-return-of-the-lion-tracker-boyd-varty-on\/id863897795?i=1000733017195\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>,\u00a0<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/56dkNXL4ukdFpsORLb371X?si=BlHz051wQi-2LUWJnePLLg\">Spotify<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/overcast.fm\/+AAKebtdq2DE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Overcast<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcastaddict.com\/podcast\/2031148#\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Podcast Addict<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/pca.st\/timferriss\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pocket Casts<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/castbox.fm\/channel\/id1059468?country=us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Castbox<\/a>,\u00a0<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/music.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLuu6fDad2eJyWPm9dQfuorm2uuYHBZDCB\">YouTube Music<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/music.amazon.com\/podcasts\/9814f3cc-1dc5-4003-b816-44a8eb6bf666\/the-tim-ferriss-show\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.audible.com\/podcast\/The-Tim-Ferriss-Show\/B08K58QX5W\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Audible<\/a>, or on your favorite podcast platform. <\/strong> <strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/V7tTxDkGU20\">Watch the interview on YouTube here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS: <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>WHAT YOU\u2019RE WELCOME TO DO:<\/em> <em>You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., <\/em>The New York Times<em>, <\/em>LA Times<em>, <\/em>The Guardian<em>), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and\/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to \u201cThe Tim Ferriss Show\u201d and link back to the tim.blog\/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.<\/em> <\/p>\n<p><em>WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED:<\/em> <em>No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss\u2019 name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another\u2019s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/tim.blog\/media\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>the media room on tim.blog<\/em><\/a><em> or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Boyd-O, good to see you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me back on the show.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Absolutely. And I love your background since you have commandeered my recording office in Austin, it\u2019s pretty surreal.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>I\u2019ve got to say, I like what you\u2019ve done with the place. I might just pull in here for a few weeks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>You know what? You\u2019re welcome to.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>It\u2019s great to see you, man. I think the last time we were together, we were walking in a squall across the Cotswolds.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>That\u2019s right, that\u2019s right. Yes, we had our own 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 woods.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>I was very impressed with your badger track. You did spot a badger track.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Thanks. That is thanks to Boyd and Renias and Alex and all the rest of the actual tracking teachers. So let\u2019s hop into it. Now, this is going to be a lot of improv jazz because I wanted to 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. So we have JV, firefighting, lunch, Toby Pheasant, and then we have a number of others. Where would you like to start? Dealer\u2019s choice?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Well, maybe we\u2019ll start with something you don\u2019t know about me, which is that I was the head of an elite firefighting unit for a period of time in my 20s. And I took over the team from a French Foreign Legionnaire who had some of the most incredible personal power you\u2019ve ever seen in your life. When he would walk somewhere, there would literally be a 20 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And this is in South Africa?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>This is in South Africa. 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. And when I took over from Chris, I was probably about 23. 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\u2019d fly off to 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 literally right off the bat, the first incident we had was, there\u2019s a bit of a setup to it. The setup is that the monkeys had been generally attacking the buffet.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>These are the vervet monkeys?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>The vervet monkeys had been all over the buffet. They\u2019d been stealing things. And so some enterprising staff member had 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 mealtimes, they would trot the paper mache lion out onto the front deck that overlooked the river where people were having food. And the monkeys would see it and they would alarm and stay away. And then the paper mache lion would be picked up and it would be put in the bar for storage. So literally day two, we have a small electrical fire breaks out on a socket in the gym. And my team get down there and we instantly realize that we can\u2019t spray this out. We\u2019ve got to shut the main power down.<\/p>\n<p>So I send one of our team members, who is a guy by the name of Lucky [inaudible], 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. So he had a single viewpoint out of the center of the beanie with his one good eye. And 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 because it was like 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>The paper mache lion.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>The paper mache lion was in the bar. So we lost Lucky for about two and a half hours because to his mind, and valid in the bush, he saw a live lion in the bar and he just disappeared. So I realized we better get down to some training because I felt a certain amount of pressure to make sure that we maintained the standards of the French Foreign Legionnaire. So I decided 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, if you think about it, there was maybe like 10 guys. There was a headman by the name of Isaac [inaudible] who was just incredibly, also physical, maybe like 6\u20195, muscular guy. There was Lucky [inaudible] 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\u2019t quite where we needed to be.<\/p>\n<p>And so randomly in the afternoons I would set up opportunities for us to have drills. And so 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, \u201cStations, stations, stations.\u201d I\u2019d send it out on the walkie-talkies. Everyone would run to their tractors, they would grab their gear and then I would scream, \u201cPositions, positions, positions.\u201d The team would load into the tractors, they would drive out, they would get into positions. And then I would scream, \u201cStart the engines,\u201d and 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, \u201cSpray, spray, spray.\u201d 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 heroes of the entire district.<\/p>\n<p>So 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 built quite a nice bonfire of thatch and it took off a little faster than I had initially expected. So we had quite a sizable fire right off the bat. Got on the radio, I screamed, \u201cStations, stations, stations.\u201d The team scrambled. They got their gear on. \u201cPositions, positions, positions.\u201d 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 giving commanding instructions. \u201cOpen the hoses. Spray, spray, spray.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The hoses open and an absolute trickle of water comes out. By this time, a wind has picked up and the fire is now starting to get some wind under it. And it\u2019s starting to look like actually this fire could get away from us. And so my way of handling the situation, because the pressure was now building, was to repeat all of the commands at a louder volume. \u201cStation, station stations. Positions. Start the engines. Spray, spray, spray.\u201d Still an absolute dribble of water. And it was at that moment that we realized that Lucky [inaudible] in the moment critique had managed to park the back tire of the trailer on the first part.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Shit.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>And he saw 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. 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 nowhere. And that\u2019s when I got my first lesson in what firefighting was actually about.<\/p>\n<p>And in fact, it\u2019s probably the lesson that stayed with me through all of this is that, when something is going that wrong, in the moment, you think to yourself, it can be quite devastating to your ego. It can be quite devastating to your leadership. But I\u2019ve come to see those moments as quite positive because it does force a kind of reflection. And the thing that I definitely learned that day and that has stayed with me through all crisis situations and everything that I\u2019ve faced ever since then is that it\u2019s very few people who know how to bring the energy downwards when the energy is moving upwards. And somewhere beyond trying to do an impressive walk, if you can figure out how to \u2014 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 powerful, energetic jiu-jitsu on things. And so ever since that day, I\u2019ve been focused on when the energy is climbing, trying to slow it down. So that\u2019s in the category of things you don\u2019t know about me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>That is in the category of many things I don\u2019t know about you, which is shocking. Shocking and not surprising at all given how long I\u2019ve known you. But I want to 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\u2019s something that Rich Barton, who co-founded Zillow and many other companies, Expedia, et cetera also said about leadership. This was not that long ago on the podcast.<\/p>\n<p>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 <em>Gilligan\u2019s Island<\/em> of Lando: JV. Do you want to introduce JV? How do you want to do that?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Well, just one comment on what you\u2019re saying. I think a lot about the body of work that I\u2019m involved in now and everything I\u2019m interested in as story hunting. And one thing about \u2014 it\u2019s about Londolozi but it\u2019s not just that. It\u2019s 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 and because it is both \u2014 how would I say it? The natural world is not just <em>where<\/em> meaning constellates. It <em>is<\/em> meaning in some fundamental way. And then incidences occur. Inevitably little things happen.<\/p>\n<p>And one of my ideas is that storytelling is awareness. Actually what storytelling is is paying attention, and the natural world starts to just, every day, generate incredible encounters. If I think of the guests who go out at Londolozi, let\u2019s say 60 guests go out, that\u2019s 60 people who come back with a diverse array of stories and incidences that occur on that day. And some of them will be ridiculous, some of them will be sublime, some of them will be profound, but it\u2019s hard to cast yourself versus modern life, which can sometimes feel very staid and like the same things are happening all the time. The natural world is a story machine. It\u2019s a meaning machine. It\u2019s a symbolic machine.<\/p>\n<p>And people who stare into it, it\u2019s like very un-woo-woo people, people who\u2019ve just come out on safari, they come back and they\u2019ve stared into the natural world and they\u2019ve seen archetypal energies that they recognize. When you see a lioness grooming her cubs or you see her protecting the cubs, when you see them switch into hunting mode, you can\u2019t help but see these profound symbolic energies that are in us functioning all around you. And somehow it permeates you and you feel yourself in relationship to that in some profound way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, for sure. And we haven\u2019t even talked about this, it\u2019s something you don\u2019t know. I spent a week in the Montana wilderness doing outdoor survival training with this just incredible gent who I\u2019ll highlight on the show in probably a month or two. But it\u2019s incredible the density of stories that you come back with, even if you don\u2019t intend to gather anything extreme. So I would say also for city dwellers, it\u2019s so novel at every turn, particularly if you\u2019re injecting any level of shared privation or hardship, which is sometimes done deliberately, sometimes forced upon you in the case of freezing rain and hail and you\u2019re trying to make a fire when your hands are barely functioning, things like that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Let\u2019s, and we\u2019re not going to necessarily belabor the point, but I just have to press on introducing, I\u2019m not sure which character on <em>Gilligan\u2019s Island<\/em> this would be, but JV. Let\u2019s talk about JV and then we\u2019re going to loop back to story hunting and some of the connective tissue that connects all of these things.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Well, I mean of all the people who had a profound influence on me, one of them was my uncle, John Varty, who went by the name of JV. And JV was a wildlife filmmaker. And from the time that I was about 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 hunting was still what they primarily did in that area. And one thing about someone who grew up lion hunting is that it tends to reset your drama meter because if you think about it in lion hunting, there\u2019s really only two outcomes. A lion dies or a human dies. So his sense of danger was dramatically reset by this type of childhood experience that he engaged in as a young boy.<\/p>\n<p>And so at the time that I spent most of my time with him, it was between the age of about 6 and 15, he was making wildlife documentaries, and I remember I would put my clothes out on my bed at night and then at about four in the morning he would show up and he would walk in looking kind of Africa\u2019s version of <em>Texas Walker Ranger<\/em>, .44 on his hip, shirt with cutoff sleeves, and he would open the door of my bedroom. \u201cBuddy, let\u2019s go.\u201d And Tim, if you met him now, he would say to you, \u201cHey, so what do you do?\u201d And you\u2019d say, \u201cWell, I run a podcast.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPodcasting. Okay, let me tell you about podcasting.\u201d He had these sort of arms that stuck out. The Shangaan people called him [foreign language], \u201cthe one with the crooked arms\u201d because he walked \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>He had like a John Wayne walk?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah, totally John Wayne with his .44. His clothes were 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. One was to drive and like a lot of kids who grew up in nature, I learned to drive from the time I was about six years old. And so one job was drive. The second job was camera bearer. The driving job was tough because one morning we found a pack of hyenas that were feeding on the remains of a giraffe, and one of the hyenas picked up a giraffe leg and it started to run across the savanna with this gigantic giraffe leg in its mouth. And he wanted to get the shot because getting the shot was like the primary issue of every moment. He said, \u201cBuddy, we got to get the shot.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now he\u2019s set up in the pickup section of a vehicle where he\u2019s got a tripod up and a camera, and I\u2019m now driving and he\u2019s screaming, \u201cFaster, faster, faster.\u201d And then I\u2019ll speed up, then he\u2019ll scream, \u201cNot so fast, you\u2019re going to hit something.\u201d And he\u2019s screaming, \u201cLeft. Cut left. Cut left. Cut right.\u201d And on one of these instances he said, \u201cCut left,\u201d and I turned to the right, but he was bracing for left. And so he fell off the back of the pickup.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Pickup.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>And the camera hit 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 he would go into a red mist and then he would come to and say, \u201cOkay, get after the hyena. Let\u2019s go find it.\u201d And so most of my trauma was around driving him around as his camera bearer.<\/p>\n<p>Then on another incident he said to me, it was a herd of elephants that were coming down to a water hole. And he said to me, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re going to creep in there. We\u2019re going to get ourselves well positioned on the bank. We\u2019re going to get a nice low angle shot of these elephants drinking.\u201d And so I said, \u201cOkay, let\u2019s go.\u201d So I\u2019m 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 and it starts walking towards us. And I immediately felt my heart rate starting to go up because I could tell the position we were in, not really a lot of places to go. His way of handling the approaching elephant was to simply zoom out on the camera repeatedly. Every time the elephant got closer, he just zoomed out a bit and pushed it back till eventually it was about five or six meters from us standing over us.<\/p>\n<p>And at this point, he looked up from the camera and he turned to me and said, \u201cHey, man, why didn\u2019t you tell me it was so bloody close?\u201d And then we got into this freeze off where it was just a standoff. And at some point he whispered back to me and said, \u201cBuddy, if this elephant comes, I want you to crawl into that hole there.\u201d And there was an abandoned warren where some warthogs had made a hole, and his escape route was for me to crawl in there. And so it was just this constant sense of like, wait, are we okay here or are we in massive danger?<\/p>\n<p>He had film camps all over Africa, and one of his film camps was in Kenya. And I\u2019ll never forget when I was maybe about 10 or 12, he put me on the back of the film van and he gave me a kind of machete. And he said to me, as we drove through the city of Nairobi, he said to me, \u201cBuddy, if anyone tries to grab a hold of any of our camera gear, just hit them on the hand with the machete.\u201d Jesus.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>This is like a <em>Babysitting: Lando<\/em> edition.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Then at a certain stage, he moved up to Zambia and he had a film camp up in Zambia, and he was always trying to get great shots, and he had a knack for it. In the Maasai Mara where the wildebeest would be crossing the river, you would see the BBC, you would see Discovery Channel, they\u2019d all be parked in a certain position. On the other side of the bank would be a million wildebeests, and they all looked like they were about to cross. And then John Varty would be parked 400 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. He had a real profound sense of how animals move and operate, and there was just like a wildness to him. He loved being out there, he loved the wilderness.<\/p>\n<p>He later in his career 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 was involved in a reintroduction of a lion project where he found a lion cub and tried to get it back into the wild. So he did all sorts of things. I mean, when we were living with him in Zambia, I\u2019ll never forget, we were living in the Luangwa Valley with him, and he had a small boat that he would traverse the Luangwa with, and the Luangwa River is the densest population of crocodiles in the world. And the boat he had a tiny two horsepower engine on it, and often it would get \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>So it was just like a dinghy? It was just like a \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>A little dinghy. And the top of the boat from the water line was inches. And he would load it with all sorts of things. Then he would hit the sandbank and he would say to me, \u201cBuddy, you got to get out and push the boat off the sandbank.\u201d And I would look up and down the bank where there were hundreds of crocodiles, and I would say to him, \u201cI don\u2019t want to get out.\u201d He\u2019d say, \u201cHey, man, get out. Stop being a nafta,\u201d is what he would call us. I get out, push the boat. 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. And he decided what he wanted to do was tow 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.<\/p>\n<p>So we get in the boat, he\u2019s got this piece of rope, we get up to the elephant and he says, \u201cOkay, Buddy, tie the rope around the elephant.\u201d 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 45 minutes. And only I realized this because I was looking at the bank and I could see that we weren\u2019t 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\u2019t work. We ran out of gas in exactly the same spot. So then he sent me to the shore to get some spades because we didn\u2019t have oars for the boat. So he sent me get a couple of spades and we used spades and we managed to \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Spades, meaning like a shovel?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Shovels. Yeah. We managed to row the elephant to the shoreline where we tied it to the bank and for the next four days, lay in the long grass there while he shot films of crocodiles feeding on this elephant. So it was just a baptism into the ramblings of an incredibly wild person.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>So here\u2019s a question I may not have ever asked you. I don\u2019t think I have. But listening to these stories, I can\u2019t help but wonder how do you orient towards safety? I think about people, for instance, in a modern environment, doom-scrolling every day. They just have this slow IV drip of cortisol with no real imminent danger, but this perceived threat that is just infused into their daily experience 24\/7. And then you listen to these stories and you\u2019re like, okay. And certainly some of the stories in our first conversation for the podcast where you\u2019re almost dying, being attacked by crocodiles and this, that and the other thing, and there\u2019s no short list of these incidents. And then you listen to your adventures with JV or the firefighting. It\u2019s like, okay, on any given Tuesday you flip a coin and those could have gone sideways in some capacity. How do you orient towards safety or danger? And how has that changed over time?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>It\u2019s certainly something I\u2019ve 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, I remember feeling tremendously out of my depth. And I remember feeling like, wait, what are we doing? And I don\u2019t know how to handle this. And 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, \u201cBuddy, if I get into trouble out there, I\u2019m expecting you to help me.\u201d And so then I would be left with this eight-year-old sense of responsibility and feeling like I am going to need to take action against this, but I\u2019m ill-prepared to take action against this. And so I found myself quite split in some ways.<\/p>\n<p>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. And I\u2019ve thought a lot about that now because I always have a sense that whatever\u2019s going to 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. I can be in pretty high octane situations, but I am nervous of it. I still have a part of me that feels like I\u2019m going to be ill prepared for what is coming. And I feel those two places in myself all the time. And I think a lot about recently, obviously I just had a son, and I think a lot about what it would be like to build capability in him because I feel like I have a sense of capability.<\/p>\n<p>I listened to your interview with Chris Sacca where he was talking about just young people needing to have more incidences in their life, needing to have been in a bar and bumped a car and lived life. And I feel very full of that. But I also feel like some of that stuff was over my head and that I\u2019ve had to manage some of that. So how do I orientate towards it now? I think trying to build a sense of capability and confidence in whatever I\u2019m doing has become ground zero and not just expect things of myself, but actually take the time to realize if I\u2019m doing something new, my approach to it would be like, I should just be able to handle this. And I think what I\u2019ve learned is that I need to go slower and build confidence and build capability. And that has been the ultimate healing on those ones.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Amazing. So I\u2019m looking at this. I want to make sure we layer in stories, but we can intersperse with other things. So we\u2019re going to get to perhaps lunch, maybe Toby Pheasant, no idea what that refers to at all. But there\u2019s one that I want to pull out here just to see where this goes. Learnings from 10 years of wilderness retreats. I mean, you\u2019ve taken so many different types of people on wilderness retreats. Certainly you\u2019ve had many varieties of experiences yourself as a participant, as a guide, as a tracker, as a facilitator. 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?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>I feel like I run the retreats every year through the winter months. And I feel like every year we get more aware of what we\u2019re actually trying to do on the retreats and we get better at them. And I think the primary thing that I\u2019ve come to really value is that the faster we can put people into what I would call the natural state, 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 quickly try and figure out where a person was blocked or where there was a kink in the energy, and try and rapidly help them develop awareness around how that particular blockage, trauma, belief system could be transformed.<\/p>\n<p>I feel like I\u2019ve become way more relaxed with it now. In fact, on our retreats now, the first day is into silence and nature. And the speed at which \u2014 I have this idea that comes from Martha Beck, where her take on the natural world is that it\u2019s a wordless environment. And so if you look at the animals, they don\u2019t have verbal minds. So you don\u2019t see them thinking past and future. You don\u2019t see lions lying there thinking, \u201cOh, Janine messed up that hunt yesterday. And so we can\u2019t trust her going forward.\u201d And so if you can go into wordlessness, then very quickly people start going into oneness. And so the key thing I have found now is get people to be quiet, get them into more wordlessness, create an opportunity for them to interact and receive lessons from the natural world, and then things rapidly start to happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The other thing is that I would say is that, I say now that when people come, they enter into the Londolozi time war, because if you can take away their tech, which we now enforce, I absolutely will not allow any tech, because what happens is, even if a person who\u2019s running a company comes and they go into silence the first afternoon, and then we go out the next morning and we are tracking an animal and then they get back and they pick their phone up, and they\u2019ve got a human resources issue back at the company, they start to pop out, because I also think that there\u2019s a profound chemistry to it.<\/p>\n<p>As people go into wordlessness and the soundscape starts to work on them, as they start to put their attention on living things 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 generally more parasympathetic, and they start to enter into a different state of awareness. In that state, their natural inner knowing starts to spit out by \u2014 I would say within the first 24 hours, something in them will start to know and it\u2019ll start to spit out insights, and you don\u2019t have to work too hard at it.<\/p>\n<p>The other is, if you say to people, \u201cI want you to go and open yourself to receiving lessons from the natural world,\u201d the psyche is so intelligent, especially in a retreat space. It\u2019s funny, if you have a 10-day retreat, people will orientate perfectly to that 10 days and what will need to occur in that 10 days will occur. If you said it\u2019s a two-day retreat, they will get aspects of the same thing, but the psyche will know how much time it has. In the same way, the psyche will start to interact with the natural world and they will start to see and receive messages that are particular to what they are working on. Really, the lesson from 10 years of retreats is don\u2019t work too hard, allow the space, allow people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>If you start saying, \u201cI want to go out into the local park, I want to go out into my garden and I have a specific question,\u201d and you write that question down and you start asking, specifically nature, \u201cCould you help me answer that question?\u201d It\u2019s almost like a Zen koan. You\u2019re holding an intention and a desire for certain answers. Then what you see, your psyche will run that through a specific matrix and insight will start to develop.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. There are a few things that come to mind as you\u2019re saying all this. I took a number of notes. One is that I think people bias, or certainly, I\u2019ll speak for Americans, but this is I think common in a lot of countries bias towards the question of what should I do? It\u2019s an immediate tilt towards 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.<\/p>\n<p>When you were talking about natural state, I was thinking of, for instance, when I was on this Montana trip, I had a few friends with me, some of them had phones, some of them didn\u2019t, even just for taking photographs and I left my phone behind very deliberately, and I feel like if for instance, you\u2019re not in the bush in South Africa, if you\u2019re not in the mountains of Montana, if you simply take a digital Sabbath, remove, say bright light after sundown, do a few things where you\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n<p>It can mean a lot of different things, but one for me at least that I noticed at Londolozi, I noticed it certainly in Montana, you can notice it 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 they\u2019re always online, but the volume is very low, and so you start to notice a lot more, and it just fundamentally changes your perceptual lived experience on a day-to-day basis.<\/p>\n<p>I would say another thing that Londo nails and what\u2019s so cool about it is that it is a function of being synchronized with wildlife activity, 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?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>You want to go out at dawn and you want your circadian rhythm to be affected by that sunrise and the cool of the morning.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>People are generally, to get a bite to eat and a cup of coffee waking up, let\u2019s just call it 30 minutes before sunrise, something like that. 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. Your experiential feels like two or three days because you wake up, it\u2019s dark, then it gets light, then you come back and have a bite to eat and probably take a nap.<\/p>\n<p>Then you wake up, you do another drive, it gets dark and you have this very full spectrum experience that makes a week at Londo as you 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. I just find that natural state, and I\u2019ll shut up in a second, but bringing those very, very mission-critical for millennia faculties online, whether it\u2019s 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, and you carry that back into the modern world with you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>It\u2019s spot on, Tim. A few things on what you said there, one is, so many people arrive on the retreats with a sense of what to do next? Sometimes someone\u2019s built a company and sold it. Sometimes someone is changing careers. Sometimes someone is going through a relationship change and they arrive, as you say, with this desire of what\u2019s next? What has struck me so much is in order to open to the natural state, so often the first thing to do is to let go of needing to know what that next thing is. Often when I say to people, \u201cStop trying to know and stop trying to use this retreat to get the next thing, and in fact let yourself not know and just enter into the circadian rhythm of seeing the sun rise and seeing the sun set, watching it go from stars to stars.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>We work a lot now on this rhythm that you\u2019re describing. I like to go out early, drop into meditation, let the dawn break around you, then intensity. 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\u2019s only this Western culture in which is like level 10 energy all the time. 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 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.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing is that, and I know that you\u2019ve had these experiences. It\u2019s really become quite remarkable to me how many mystical things happen. When I first met Martha and I started to understand transformational processes, I was still like a drink of beer, punch someone in the face type of person. I was 20 years old, South African. I did not consider transformational processes or coaching or inner work. I had no grounding in that. Then also just like the animals are going to bring messages, that was all quite woo for me, but I\u2019ve seen now the most remarkable things.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that comes to mind is, on every retreat there will be magical occurrences with the animals. A woman will sit in the circle and she will say, \u201cI grew up in a family of alcoholics, and when you grow up in a family of alcoholics, it\u2019s incredibly dangerous all the time. So what I learned, I\u2019ve learned to make myself invisible. I\u2019ve learned to hide and I\u2019ve never let myself be seen, because being seen was dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That afternoon we go out and she\u2019s sitting on the back of an open Land Rover, and a male lion that\u2019s been sleeping, rouses himself, stands up, walks towards the back of the Land Rover, stops, and he looks up at her and he looks into her eyes and is just breathing, gazing at her, and it\u2019s so intense to be looked at by a 400-pound serial killer like that. It\u2019s something so kind and powerful and the presence that that animal projects. She looks away initially and I say to her, \u201cYou can look back,\u201d and she turns and she looks back, and I can feel it\u2019s the most profound revealing, psychologically, that she\u2019s ever been involved in. After that, something shifts in her and she\u2019s able to start allowing herself to step forward.<\/p>\n<p>Another one that comes to mind is we had a guy come on a retreat and he\u2019s sitting in the circle and he says to me, \u201cOne thing that has happened is since my father died, I\u2019ve been totally unable to grieve. I know that I want to break open, but I can\u2019t get to it. I just can\u2019t cry.\u201d For the first few days, that\u2019s the case. On the third day, I\u2019m talking to him, I\u2019m checking in on him, and we\u2019re sitting \u2014 Londo\u2019s has these decks that you sit out on, but there\u2019s a thatched area, but it\u2019s open and a bird flies into the thatched area and it lands on the little gum pole over his head. It looks down on him and it starts calling intensely. Very unusual.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes a bird will fly through, but this bird flies into the area where there are people and starts calling. 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, weep, weep, and for 10 minutes he can\u2019t talk. Then he looks at me and he says, \u201cThis is going to sound so weird, guys, but my father was an avid bird watcher, and this bird, the southern boubou, was his favorite bird.\u201d Stuff like that is happening so regularly that I can\u2019t deny it. I just know that things will happen, magic will occur.<\/p>\n<p>Look, we also had one woman who was describing her trauma and how in her life everything gets taken from her. While she\u2019s describing that, she\u2019s eating a piece of toast at breakfast, and a monkey literally jumped down and snatched the toast out of her hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But there\u2019s definitely a sense, and I think that native cultures knew this, and I think it\u2019s woo-woo to us, but if you intentionally start working with the natural world, it knows, on some level, a field of living sentience, it starts to sense that intentionality and that awareness and then things start to happen. I think people need to be re-enchanted.<\/p>\n<p>I think one of the things that we\u2019re afflicted with is that we are dulled down and we are disconnected from magic. Sometimes it doesn\u2019t even have to be that woo-woo, just to see a leopard and her cubs leap up into the branches of a marula tree and to feel like, \u201cGod, this is the beauty of it,\u201d and to have that affect you in some profound way. I\u2019ve just seen so much of it now. I\u2019m a real believer that nature wants us to heal, and nature knows when we come to her with the desire to mend our soul.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>It also strikes me that, and I think I\u2019m speaking to myself as much as anyone else, that sometimes we tend to want to fight fire with fire, and I\u2019ll explain what I mean by that, and it doesn\u2019t 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. It\u2019s like, \u201cWell, if trying harder would\u2019ve solved this, it would\u2019ve been solved by now in some way.\u201d There\u2019s so much canvas to explore that is, as you mentioned, wordless.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re able to even entertain the question of what if the path or the relief could be found outside of words and concepts, what might that look like and what it might look like is spending time in nature.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>One of my favorite experiences at Londolozi, and as you know, I\u2019ve been a bunch of times now, is the silent morning drives. Just to explain that briefly, or do you want to explain that briefly?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. Well, maybe I could say two things about that. The other is a story comes to mind of a very silly anecdotal story, but when I was \u2014 one of the things that led me to probably all the way to this conversation is prior to my firefighting days, when I was on the Londolozi sales and marketing team, I found myself in London and by day I was seeing different agents and I was telling them about Londolozi. Then we got invited \u2014 myself and a friend who I was traveling with \u2014 we got invited to a party that night. At that time I was struggling with very, very severe depression, and we did that childish thing that you sometimes do when you\u2019re in your 20s where we decided we would go to the party and we would make up fake backstories and be in character for the night.<\/p>\n<p>When people asked me what I would do at that time, out of nowhere, I started saying, \u201cI\u2019m a writer.\u201d I hadn\u2019t got even close to writing anything at that stage. I 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. Not in my mind, not a rational sense that this is what you should do. I just literally felt like this little kick of energy, and I decided to follow that little kick of energy. When I got back to South Africa, I sat down at my old computer and I started writing down stories.<\/p>\n<p>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 gray I was carrying around. I would wake up in my bed and I would have that feeling where you wake up and you just feel like, \u201cOh, my God, I\u2019m going to fight to get through this day.\u201d I would do my duties. I would do all the things I needed to do like with this gray cloud around my head. Then I would sit down at the computer and I would start to write out some silly anecdotal story and suddenly something would lift. I would follow that. Literally, everything that has brought me to here has been following that non-rational energy in my body. I\u2019m aware of what makes me feel a little more energized, a little more expansive, and I just figure out how to move towards that.<\/p>\n<p>Now, in order to do that, you do need some stillness. One thing that has become so profound for us is, the safari business is evolving, and I think that we\u2019re working hard to change what it is. It used to be, you come there, 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 the biological sciences. That can be so wonderful, and all of that information can be more information.<\/p>\n<p>What we started to do in the attempt to take people into deeper wordlessness was to say, \u201cYou\u2019re going to go out and you are going to be in silence, and hopefully, that silence pulls you into a deeper place. But what you\u2019re also going to do is you\u2019re going to watch your mind, and you might be looking at something, and you might find yourself saying, what\u2019s going on there? Why is that animal doing it? What animal is that? What\u2019s even happening here? Just be aware of that and try and come out of needing to know which is the primary state of our society.\u201d Only in Eastern philosophy do we find our way to don\u2019t know mind. The whole Western mind is structured around needing to know.<\/p>\n<p>If you find yourself needing to know, let that go and just be in pure experience of it. Let the silence work on you. Feel how everything is unfolding with an intelligence, and you don\u2019t really need to rationally know it. Try and feel it at a deeper level. To a man, people report coming back \u2014 some people report feeling incredibly frustrated. Some people said, \u201cI found my mind wondering to wait, when I\u2019m at home, should I catch the six train or the five train downtime?\u201d Some people\u2019s minds go to, \u201cDid I turn the tap off? Who\u2019s looking after the cat?\u201d But if you can keep them in it, eventually you drop through to a different sense.<\/p>\n<p>Then as you watch the animals, you drop into a different layer of language, and it\u2019s what I would call the first language, and it\u2019s the language of energy. 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 it head, it is conveying energy. You can watch the prey species move through different nervous system states, from totally relaxed, to listening in a way, to attuned to potential danger. 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 is where I think it\u2019s definitely more where native cultures operated. 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 without any words between you feel its energy, feel what it\u2019s conveying to you, you can be in a dialogue like that.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard this, Tim, but in shamanic ceremonies, and when I\u2019ve been around healers, I remember once asking to my teacher in the medicine space, \u201cWill you teach me? Why won\u2019t you teach me?\u201d He said to me, \u201cWell, the feeling is not there yet.\u201d I said to him, \u201cNo. I\u2019m asking you.\u201d He said, \u201cYeah. I can feel your distrust, and whatever you say to me, the feeling you energetically are giving off, there\u2019s still too much distrust and only the feeling is different between us will I start to teach you.\u201d To me, that space was so full of that first language energy, the energy between things.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. I want to also maybe underscore for folks that this might sound very abstract or esoteric, but there are real direct applications of what we\u2019re talking about to everyday modern life as well, and a few names that we know in common come to mind. 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 decisions of various types, for choosing things. It 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\u2019s just say. A pattern on the podcast, people can listen to that episode for more on the Whole-Body Yes, and how to navigate that if we don\u2019t get into it now.<\/p>\n<p>Another that comes to mind as you said, that the \u2014 particularly, I\u2019ll limit it to the United States for now because other cultures are quite different in this respect with CS does and so on. But the idea that you wake up and you just go 10 out of 10 from when you wake up to when you close your laptop is anathema to the natural world. That\u2019s 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. If you go on, let\u2019s just say an elk hunt or something like that, you may spend a few hours doing X, Y, Z, and then just bed down. You\u2019re like, \u201cThe animals are bedded down, we\u2019re not going to find them. They\u2019re inactive. It\u2019s going to be incredibly difficult, so instead of waste our energy, we\u2019re going to have a snack, and take a nap.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I recognize that 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 Waitzkin, another mutual friend of ours, who for those who don\u2019t recognize the name, he was my second ever podcast on this podcast out of 800 something plus \u2014 he\u2019s going to hate this, but he\u2019s known best for <em>Searching for Bobby Fischer<\/em>. 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 push hands, 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. What does Josh say?<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s 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\u2019t think he\u2019ll mind me paraphrasing this, is \u201cAvoid the simmering six.\u201d And avoiding the simmering six is if you look at, say, Marcelo Garcia before he\u2019s going to compete in a world championship mat, they\u2019re running around trying to find him, because it\u2019s five minutes to go time, and where is he? He\u2019s sleeping under the bleachers. He\u2019s taking a nap. He\u2019s at zero.<\/p>\n<p>Then he wakes up, shakes it off, and then in the 200 feet before he gets on the mat, he switches it to a 10, and he\u2019s going from rest to full engagement. He\u2019s not sitting in the middle with that IV drip of 24\/7 cortisol and sympathetic overdrive. That is deliberately what he\u2019s avoiding, and that is in large part how he\u2019s able to partition resources to engage so fully and dominate competitively. That\u2019s also true for people in the finance world who are working in very high-stakes environments for making decisions around placing trades and so on.<\/p>\n<p>What we\u2019re talking about \u2014 this is just my somewhat clumsy way of saying that I \u2014 every day, I\u2019m sitting in New York City for God\u2019s sake. It is the concrete jungle, but it is the city that never sleeps. It is in some ways the antithesis of living at Londo. Nonetheless, I can take a lot of the lessons learned that you see so clearly there, and you have to squint a little bit to apply it here in such an intense environment, but you can, and you actually really could benefit very quickly from doing so. Diana Chapman, Josh Waitzkin, I just want to point out how broadly these themes apply, even if they seem, to some people listening, maybe a bit exotic.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>That\u2019s well said.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Fire, I felt like you were just about to jump into something.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>No. Just the information \u2014 all roads in personal transformation lead to the information inside you. You actually know it\u2019s 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\u2019s in you. It\u2019s subtractive making the space to that information to come forward. A big part of that is just letting yourself follow the energy of the non-rational energy of people, places, experiences where you literally feel your body full of an expansive, alive energy, and getting good at following that is the ultimate tracking.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Full aliveness, another Joshism. Fully alive. Jim Dethmer, too, who\u2019s also been on the podcast, a mutual friend of ours. As promised, we\u2019re going to hop between these tracks. I\u2019ve got Lunch and Toby Pheasant. Where do you want to go? Or we could choose option C, if there\u2019s another one that comes to mind.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Well, let me tell you about my friend Toby and I. Toby was an Englishman, and I\u2019m sure he won\u2019t mind me telling the story to millions of people, but Toby came on safari with his family, and this is quite some time ago now, maybe a good 20 years ago. 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 general hand around the camp. When his family flew off, Toby stayed on, and he immediately got integrated into the village of Londolozi, and he picked up all of the worst jobs. He had to clean the lanterns that get put out every evening. At one stage, he was painting an ablution block and just every time I saw him, he was on some errand around the camp.<\/p>\n<p>One day, Toby and I were sitting down at the staff canteen and a radio called in that some guests had reported that they had seen a snake in their room. Myself and another ranger said, \u201cOkay. We\u2019ll go handle this.\u201d Toby said, \u201cGuys, do you mind if I come along?\u201d I said, \u201cToby, come with us.\u201d We jumped into a golf cart, which is how people get around in the back of house of the Reserve. We jumped into a golf cart and we went up to the ranger\u2019s room to fetch our snake catching stick, which had picked up the name 50\/50, because it was a bit of a Heath Robinson. It was a piece of PVC pipe that someone had run a lamp cord through that had made a noose. The way that it worked is you would get the loop at the end of the stick around, and then you would pull on the cord, and 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\u2019t close all the way, so it had picked up the nickname 50\/50.<\/p>\n<p>We grabbed 50\/50 and a big black dustbin, and we jump into the golf cart and we drive down to the room, Toby\u2019s hanging on the back of the vehicle. We get down to the room and there are two German guests who are looking somewhat shocked, and I\u2019m going to be honest with you, Tim, I gave them my most powerful, \u201cDon\u2019t worry, I\u2019m here now. The safari guide of the year has arrived. You don\u2019t need to worry. I\u2019m going to go in there and sort the situation out.\u201d They were left standing at the door and myself and Toby and the other guide went in, and we\u2019re expecting to \u2014 it\u2019s very rare to have a snake in a room, but sometimes a little house snake or a green variegated bush snake will get in. We are 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\u2019ve ever seen in my life. It levitated out of the case.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Do you want to explain why that isn\u2019t your garden variety [garter] snake?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>A black mamba, not only is an extremely venomous snake, but it is highly mobile and very difficult to handle in a confined space. If it bites, you die quickly. Myself and Toby and the other guide, we went for the door at the same time, and I remember the three of us jammed in it as we were trying to exit the room at high speed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong><em>Three Stooges<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>I might\u2019ve reached forward to grab their faces, to pull myself through. We got outside and I said to the Germans, \u201cThere\u2019s a big snake in there.\u201d They said, \u201cYeah. We told you.\u201d Now, we\u2019re faced with a bit of a dilemma and they\u2019re watching us. We decide, \u201cNo, okay. We know what we are dealing with now. We must go back in.\u201d We make our way back in, and now we are tiptoeing around the room and we\u2019re flipping up cushions and we\u2019re pulling bedspreads off, and what the Germans see standing outside is they see a pillow fly out the room because you don\u2019t want to lift it slowly. You want to rip it open and see what\u2019s under it. Then they see a chair fly out, then they see a duvet come flying past them.<\/p>\n<p>Toby at this stage has positioned himself for maximum discomfort. He\u2019s close enough to be in the way, but he\u2019s not close enough to be fully helpful, and he giving us a running commentary on the dangers of black mambas. He\u2019s saying, \u201cIf they bite you, you will die instantly. Their venom is deadly in tiny quantities.\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cToby, you are not helping the situation. Can you please shut up?\u201d I remember at one stage we pulled the duvet cover off the bed and the bed \u2014 it had an electric blanket on it, and the cable of the electric blanket came off and it made a snake-like motion, and all of us reared backwards. Eventually, we saw the snake under the bed and my friend managed to get 50\/50 down there, and he gripped the mamba.<\/p>\n<p>Now, what you normally want to do is you want to get it behind the head, then you grab it behind the head and then you put it in a bag. He managed to grab it mid-body, and it was maybe a 2 1\/2 meter snake. That mamba went full propeller on the end of the snake catching stick. It was like whipping around, and part of them is they\u2019ve got this incredible elastic, powerful body. It was like a lot of snake whipping around the end of the stick. Then it turned and it curled its way up the stick, but 50\/50 held it, and eventually, its head was about that far from my friend\u2019s hand, but he had it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Like, six inches from the hand?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Terrifying. We decided it\u2019s going to be too much to try and get it into the bucket, so we\u2019re just going to ride it out the camp. Now, we make our way up past the perturbed-looking Germans, and we go to the golf cart and I\u2019m driving, and you have to imagine a standard golf cart. I\u2019m driving, my friend is standing next to me and he\u2019s holding the stick out with the giant snake on it. Then Toby jumps onto the back of the golf cart and we start making our way out of the camp, and we\u2019re bouncing along. Just as you exit the camp, there\u2019s a gateway where there\u2019s an electric fence that keeps the elephants and the buffalo out.<\/p>\n<p>As we approach that, my friend, who\u2019s thinking about the snake that\u2019s 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 looked to his left, the black mamba was now fully adjacent to his face with about three inches between him and the snake. Tim, from where I was driving, I remember looking to my left and the golf cart was going quite fast, and I saw Toby take off in my peripheral vision. And as I looked to my left, his feet were passing where the roof of the golf cart was. He had exploded off the back of that golf cart. It looked like someone had shot a rocket into space. As I drove off, because I kept moving, I looked back, he was still hitting in a vertical direction over a bush. It must have been a good, in a high jump turn, it was a good 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 I 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 began to make our way back into the camp.<\/p>\n<p>And as we came through the gate of the camp, standing in the middle of the road with a look of shock and awe on his face was Toby. And we drove up to him and the first thing he said to me, I\u2019ll never forget it, he looked me dead in the eye and he said, \u201cThat was incredible.\u201d Shortly after that, he went back to England and he had to, I think he went and studied briefly, but very quickly he came back to South Africa and he became a safari guide. And he actually now runs a travel company. You can look him up if you\u2019re in the UK and you want to come to Africa, I think it\u2019s called Bonamy Travel.<\/p>\n<p>And I always think that so often what emerges out of these stories is not what you think. You would think that an encounter like that would be like, \u201cI\u2019m packing up and moving back to the UK.\u201d 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, things that have gone wrong that I would have thought that would be the end of people turn out to be the adventure that everyone\u2019s looking for.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>So just to talk about calibrating danger differently, you like running. Alex, also master tracker, likes running, and you guys just go running outside of the gates. 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\u2019t want to run. Run is what prey do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>This is a strong prey drive signal. But you guys were training very intensely for what? Can you talk about this?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah, we can.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, this is fucking wild. And in any case, I\u2019ll let you introduce it because it\u2019s so, on some levels hard to believe and hard to envision also.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>You mean persistence?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yes, I do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>So my friend Alex is one of the best trackers in the world, in my opinion. He\u2019s authored many books on it. He\u2019s the founder of the Tracker Academy and his singular mission, Alex van den Heever, his singular mission has been to preserve indigenous wisdom, particularly the art form of tracking. And I think in Southern Africa, he\u2019s done more to teach, train and preserve tracking than anyone else. And what started our journey to be with the Bushman people in the Kalahari was he went up and he ended up spending a few days with a group of Bushmen. There\u2019s a lot of different names. Some people refer to them as the San people. They asked us to call them Bushmen. They said, \u201cWe are the Bushman people, please call us Bushmen.\u201d So that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>These guys tracked a porcupine one day for 10 kilometers. They would sleep around the fire at night. Now, normally when you sleep out in the wild at night, someone keeps watch. And so, Alex asked them, \u201cWho\u2019s going to keep watch?\u201d And they were actually sort of perturbed by this. They would say, \u201cWell, why would we need to keep watch?\u201d And this is in a full-on wilderness area. Alex said, \u201cWell, what if an animal comes.\u201d And they\u2019re like, \u201cAn animal will never come here without us not being able to feel it.\u201d And literally if a hyena walks by or something, one of them will wake up. So they\u2019re attuned at a very different level. And Alex saw this and he was blown away by it. And 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.<\/p>\n<p>We wanted to get a sense of what was possible still and what people still knew how to do because the Bushman people are probably the most persecuted native people on the planet. They\u2019ve been displaced from everywhere. And so, it was to go and say, \u201cHas their initial tracking knowledge been lost or what still exists?\u201d So, that was what initially 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. They mostly live in the towns. They\u2019ve been pushed off a lot of their land and they do various jobs in farm labor, et cetera. The governments of some of those Southern African countries provide a stipend of $400 or pula or rand.<\/p>\n<p>So you would think that a lot of the indigenous skills had been lost because a lot of people are on this, like, it\u2019s not the dole, but it\u2019s like a government supplement. And yet about 70 percent of the food that most Bushman communities are still getting, they\u2019re gathering from the desert. And so they\u2019re living in this kind of urban way. And yet underneath the surface, if you connect in, there\u2019s 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 various tribes who would have a storehouse where they kept food. To them, the desert is their storehouse, which is quite an amazing idea. There\u2019s just like there\u2019s no sense of needing to hold or store because it\u2019s an abundance psychology that everything you need is there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And when you say desert, just for people who are trying to conjure an image, I mean it\u2019s desert, it\u2019s like a little scraggly bush here or there, at least based on the video I\u2019ve seen, but it\u2019s very much a desert environment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>There\u2019s areas where it\u2019s like semi-arid where you have these harsh bushes, and then there\u2019s other places where you are in red beach sand. It would be akin to walking on the beach that\u2019s so sandy. There\u2019s places where ground squirrels have these huge colonies. So, as you walk, you fall down because the ground underneath has been hollowed out. So, it can be very, very tough operating there. 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. And they will dig up a tuber or a root, they\u2019ll cut a section of it, everyone will eat some of it, and then they will replant it back into the desert and they will never take a whole piece of food. They\u2019ll take a portion of it and then they\u2019ll put it back under the soil to grow.<\/p>\n<p>And walking, particularly with the woman as they gather, I had this feeling that we could have been 300 years in the past or 300 years in the future. There was such a strong sense that whatever happens, these people are attuned to their environment at a different level.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And then what emerged out of that is we were invited to participate in probably the oldest practice of hunting that exists on the planet, which is persistence hunting. Persistence hunting, there\u2019s accounts of it across many, many different terrains, including in the snow where the snowshoe tipped the advantage 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.<\/p>\n<p>One, you need an unbelievable fitness. You need to be able to move 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 where you\u2019re tracking it at a run. Now, that can be easy in parts of the desert, but man, it is not easy at midday in the \u2014 I thought it would be easier in desert sand, it\u2019s not easy because as the sun gets to 12 o\u2019clock, which is when you want to be doing it at peak heat, it throws no contrast onto the ground.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>I was going to say, no shadows, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>No shadows. So, we were invited to be a part of this, and this is something that, and we were seeing is this still alive? Who knows how to do this?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And just to throw some numbers out there, if you can indulge people with Fahrenheit \u2014 well, we\u2019ll give people Celsius and Fahrenheit if that\u2019s possible. It\u2019s asking a lot. But when we\u2019re talking about a persistence hunt for the Bushmen, what type of distances or time are we talking about? How long does it take? And then what kind of temperatures are we talking about?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Tim, it\u2019s really interesting because I think in the one that Craig Foster filmed, it was around 30 kilometers over about five or six hours, something like that. But what I discovered being there is that there\u2019s this incredible equation and the equation is heat on one axis and time on the other. So, as the heat climbs, the amount of time reduces.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>The distance goes down, yeah right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>The distance reduces. But then there\u2019s also an interesting factor, 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 huge effect. So, one thing that happened while we were there is that they\u2019re on the back end of a number of years of droughts. And so, that was a big kind of factor. So, that\u2019s all going on and what emerged is that we were invited to be a part of this, but it hadn\u2019t been done in a very, very long time. And so there was some discussion around who knows how to do it and whether it\u2019s still alive. People who we had asked around had said, \u201cNo, no one does that anymore. The older generation who knew how to do it was lost.\u201d So there was conjecture around whether anyone even knew if this was still possible. So, we go out on the first day, and what was amazing about it is to the Bushman people, it\u2019s called the Great Dance.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>That\u2019s the name of the doc, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong><em>The Great Dance<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>It\u2019s a spiritual practice.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. Craig Foster, just for people who are like, \u201cDo I know that name?\u201d <em>My Octopus Teacher<\/em> was his most famous work.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>It\u2019s a great dance because there\u2019s a tremendous act of faith in it, and it\u2019s part of the mythology and the spirituality of the Bushman people because it involves being engaged with the animal at a very deep level and transferring the animal\u2019s energy to you. That is ultimately what happens. So, you are moving with the animal, you\u2019re tracking it, you\u2019re running it, and you are with the spirit of that animal, and you are with spirit itself. And then spirit is as you are closing in on the animal, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>And one thing that\u2019ll happen is as guys are involved in it, they won\u2019t \u2014 it\u2019s a very funny superstition, but it\u2019s symbolic. They won\u2019t jump over a log because if you jump over a log, you are expending energy and you\u2019re pushing energy back at the animal, whereas actually you want to be drawing the animal\u2019s energy to you. So there\u2019s this very interesting rhythm that guys get into. So anyway, we go out and we are looking for tracks in this huge area, and there\u2019s no tracks. There\u2019s no tracks, and the energy of everything is kind of dialed down. And there\u2019s one guy wearing a Barcelona FC t-shirt. There\u2019s one guy in full traditional gear. It\u2019s a full mix. It\u2019s not out of some idealized sense of how this is done. It\u2019s like game time, real-life situation. And then we come onto a herd of kudu\u2019s fresh tracks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>What is a kudu? Can you paint a picture?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>A kudu, it\u2019s a very tall, regal antelope, and it has kind of large spiraling horns and kudus, there are desert adapted antelope. A kudu is not that well adapted for the desert. So, there are certain animals that you wouldn\u2019t try and do this with because they\u2019re just too adapted to the desert. For example, a gemsbok, literally the way that it breathes, it cools air through its nose. Kudus are not adapted, so they\u2019re susceptible to the heat. And when this group that we were with of incredible trackers got onto the track of this herd of kudu, the whole energy shifted and it went from quite lackluster to someone had flipped a switch and suddenly these guys started to switch on and they went into archetypal hunting energy. And when I say to you that I\u2019ve become very interested in energetic archeology, I feel like there is so much energy latent underneath anything that modern life allows us to get close to.<\/p>\n<p>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 need, we don\u2019t access it because we don\u2019t need it. And suddenly the first guy shifts into a dog trot, he starts kind of trotting on the track, 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 because the herd quickly breaks and a single kudu breaks away. That\u2019s the weakest one. So, the guys are onto that one. Then you have to navigate, you have to run.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s such an equation, you have to have a sense of where you\u2019re going. And all of this together, at a certain point, it becomes this incredible act of faith because you have to fully commit. \u201cI\u2019m running into that desert, I\u2019m running away from water, I\u2019m going in that direction, and I don\u2019t really know what the outcome\u2019s going to be. I don\u2019t know the condition of this animal, I don\u2019t know the heat, I don\u2019t know the terrain. I\u2019ve got to just go and follow.\u201d So, it becomes a real act of faith. And as I say, you\u2019re running away from water in the desert and that can be a big factor and you don\u2019t know how far you\u2019re going.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And it\u2019s hot.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. And on the day we did it, I don\u2019t know what the Fahrenheit is, but it was 47 degrees when we started.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s hot.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>And so at the front of that group, Tim, there\u2019s an energy that develops amongst that group of hunters. And I can tell you that if you drop out of it, it\u2019s kind of like a Peloton. If you fall out of it, you\u2019ll never catch that group again. But if you find yourself in it, it\u2019s almost like you can ride the energy of the group. How would I describe it? It\u2019s kind of like a ceremony. You don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen once you\u2019re 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 and they\u2019re 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\u2019re working as a team. But as you run, you\u2019re also dropping people because the heat is building too much, and it\u2019s just so intense.<\/p>\n<p>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 a totally neurotic state. I was in my head and I was thinking to myself, \u201cIt\u2019s too hot. I\u2019m going to die of heat stroke.\u201d There was this voice running, \u201cWe\u2019re going too far. We are not going to find our way back. I\u2019m going to get separated from these guys too far out. There\u2019s no water.\u201d It was just total neuroses. 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 go until it couldn\u2019t go anymore.<\/p>\n<p>And it was weird because it\u2019s not often that you \u2014 I mean, great athletes talk about this, which I am not, but there\u2019s kind of like you are reaching for a place and some athletes know how to get to that place. And I felt myself go through the layer of mind neuroses and let go into like, \u201cI\u2019m just going to let my body do what it knows to do.\u201d And 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.<\/p>\n<p>And you just like you\u2019re glowing red, the guys are tracking. At one stage, I found myself on the front of the track, 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 we got a glimpse of the kudu, and then it disappeared for another 40 minutes, and we\u2019re just on the tracks. Then we\u2019ve got another glimpse, and it disappeared for another 40 minutes. And then as it gets closer, the guys start to feel that the energy is transferring. They are starting to get the upper hand. 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 me, which is a classic Alex move.<\/p>\n<p>And what I didn\u2019t realize 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. And it\u2019s quite amazing to witness it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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 and the Bushmen spear it, there is something so profound about it because you can\u2019t be there and not be 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\u2019re not strolling down the meat section at Whole Foods. You are right on the cold face of what it means to take life and to take the energy of another creature.<\/p>\n<p>And after the animal goes down, they put sand on it, which is symbolic of a blessing onto the animal and thanking the animal for what it has given them. But when you eventually emerge out of that energy, it could have been one hour, it could have been 10 hours, you\u2019re in such a different psychological space, and you have been involved in an energetic \u2014 that is totally primal, and that is, it\u2019s ceremonial. There\u2019s no other way to describe it. You are in a current of energy from the earth.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>How much does that particular kudu, how much would you guess it weighed? Any idea?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah, so probably around the 180 kg mark.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Oh, that\u2019s a big boy. Yeah. Okay.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah, I would need to check that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Like 400-ish pounds. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah, a little bit less than that. When it\u2019s cut up, every single piece of that animal is taken and eaten. And it was from the time the guys started working on the carcass, it must\u2019ve been 15 minutes to \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Wow, that\u2019s fast.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>\u2014 every single piece of that animal.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And then are they just carrying it on shoulders? I mean, how are you guys actually getting that back to camp?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. And then you put the haunches on your all different array of carries and everyone and walks it out. And then you still obviously got a long way to go from there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>What happens when you guys get back to home base?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Well, what was amazing about it is there was a strong sense of pride amongst the hunters. They hadn\u2019t done it in a long time, 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 they had done for many, many generations. So, there was a beautiful energy to it. And then back at camp, it\u2019s just immediately that food starts to get eaten.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, I bet.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. So, 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 simmering just under the surface. This incredible ecological knowledge of how to live in harmony with the desert. And if AI does wipe us all out, I\u2019m pretty sure that the Bushman people will just walk back into the storehouse of the desert and be really, really comfortable there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. If you want to see modern polite behavior disintegrate very quickly, just go to a place like San Francisco. I remember the power went out for 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 going to thaw, their food is going to spoil, and agitation and aggression start to percolate very, very, very quickly because people don\u2019t know what to do. They have no idea what to do if the basic architecture of convenience is removed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>I\u2019ve thought about it a lot, and I think that all the things we imagine to happen, people are so much closer to primal wildness than they ever realize. And survival starts to kick in. And then I think there\u2019ll be a wide junction. Some people will go into survival of the fittest, and then others will move into states of collaboration for good reason, protection, food, safety. So, it\u2019ll be interesting to see how it breaks down. You can get into some good prepper stuff.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Exactly. Just pro-tip, make sure you have water. Water is number one. You\u2019re going to need water a lot sooner than you\u2019re going to need canned lentils, just \u2014 or, and by the way, if you have any dried, canned food, you\u2019re going to need some water typically for a lot of that. So, make sure you have your water and your Jetboils or something along those lines.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. It is also amazing to see how little water the Bushmen people can operate on.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Oh, it must be absurd, just like their evolutionary track must have prepared them so well for that. I would be dead within 24 hours.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>We had one morning on the same trip where we found tracks of a cheetah, and we were quite keen to show the guys some of our tracking skills. And it was like a camaraderie amongst trackers. And we were with this 70-year-old man and we\u2019re following this single cheetah, and it kind of turned into mildly competitive at the front to, if someone lost the track, the next person would be on it. And then if you stepped off it, someone else would be on it. And for the first 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 climbing under these thorn bushes, lumbering along, and they were just cruising through the desert. And by 11 o\u2019clock, the 70-year-old guy was walking us off our feet and we had drained our water bottles and we were like, \u201cWe need to get back home because we need to get water.\u201d And he hadn\u2019t had a sip all morning. And we were like, \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Wow. \u201cYeah, you win.\u201d No contest.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. No contest.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Oh, boy. All right. So, I want to hop to two different potential leaping off points. You can tell me if one of these makes sense or if there\u2019s something else we want to hop to, you can follow whichever track is appealing. Being a resolved figure, seeking the wild man. You want to pursue either of these, what do you think? Or we could take option C off menu.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>No, I mean I think the wild man is a powerful theme, and it comes down to this idea that there is so much energy. I\u2019ve come to think of the wild man as awareness, like self-awareness, awareness of all the different layers of energy that are inside you, and then 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 I\u2019m really become interested in conjuring more of that in my own life. How do you liberate different layers of energy in yourself and how do you develop \u2014 in my definition of presence would be access to the moment, and particularly now working in a lot of these men\u2019s groups, the idea of conjuring the wild man is its 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.<\/p>\n<p>And what I mean by that is to have your wild man fully available means that if you are required to front up in some ways and protect something and be 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. And so, trying to figure out how to develop access to as many moments as possible has become 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 how to be available through a full spectrum of the masculine experience to my son, to my wife, to my family. Where do I run into blockages in myself? Where do I start to feel like I really want to be here, but I don\u2019t know how to show up in this moment? And so that\u2019s what that exploration has become primarily about.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Well, let me ask you a question related to that. So, if we think about access to the moment and sort of full spectrum access to these different emotional sensitivities, let\u2019s just say, I know that\u2019s a bit of a clumsy way to word it, but let\u2019s just say that. How do you personally think about co-locating you and your family? And here\u2019s what I mean by that. The way that I have tried to solve for this, what I\u2019ve realized is that in a place like New York City where I\u2019m sitting, and it\u2019s got accosted by this very aggressive, probably mentally unstable person yesterday and huge crowds of people, a lot of a feeling of collective cauterization, if that\u2019s a word, but people have dropped down walls. And I put on sort of a protective 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.<\/p>\n<p>So, whether I wanted to be open or not, I don\u2019t think it would be good for me necessarily in New York City in most places to have that level of openness. So I do spend a lot of time in cities. I find cities exciting, but I block out a few weeks of the year where I\u2019m just completely off the grid and hopefully at the very least, keeping these sensitivities from atrophying too horribly, right? Like I\u2019m working the muscle 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. And it doesn\u2019t need to be the middle of South Africa. It doesn\u2019t need to be in the middle of the mountains in Montana. It could just be in a peaceful suburb. It doesn\u2019t need to be, or in a chiller city than New York City potentially. How do you think about this for yourself?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>I think about it probably through discernment. I think that it\u2019s wise to be somewhat armored in the environments you\u2019re describing, but what I see in groups now a lot, and this has become the core thing, is I see particularly in men\u2019s groups, a desire to be more available, but actually not knowing how to, not having the access and the literacy to know what that would even look like. And so, now you don\u2019t want to go into extreme tenderness 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 to deeper levels in the right context. And you want to know what has kept you out of that, which would usually be some kind of conditioned response, something that you learn to do away. The way you learn to freeze or shut down when things became overwhelming.<\/p>\n<p>And then you want to figure out how to develop more options for yourself in that moment. The trauma to me is freezing, right? Anytime you\u2019ve been forced into some kind of traumatic situation, it\u2019s 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\u2019re frozen and actually be able to feel like, \u201cOkay, in this moment, I want to be more connected, but I don\u2019t know how.\u201d So, first to be present to that, and then second to start to figure out what other choices would look like and literally other things you could do in that moment to move out of the frozen state.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s where I think the men 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\u2019t have to work at it too hard and it doesn\u2019t have to turn into a drum circle, if you take a bunch of guys out into a wild place, their psyche starts to relate to that wild place, and they start saying, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you why. It\u2019s intangible, it\u2019s energetic, but something about this has something to do with me.\u201d I can feel myself in a way here in the presence of that waterfall and that mountain and that lion and the process of being archer, I can feel myself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>The process of being out here, I just feel I can feel myself. And then the conversation starts to open and you\u2019re able to start to say, \u201cOkay, where are the places where we run into blockage?\u201d 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. Leopards are not in their heads. If they want to be aggressive, they\u2019re aggressive. If they\u2019re caring for their young, they\u2019re caring for their young. If they need to set a territory, they do it. It flows out of them. And so creating spaces in which that can naturally start to occur has become really interesting to me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>How do you think about, well, side note for people, I don\u2019t know why this popped into my head, but if you\u2019re like, \u201cMan, I\u2019m never going to see a leopard,\u201d I was like, \u201cYou can get a little whiff of leopard if you go to the movie theater and the popcorn is burnt, it smells like leopard urine.\u201d So that\u2019s just if you want to take a big, big inhale.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. When leopards mark their territory, they spray, and it has the almost exact scent of popcorn.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>That\u2019s really wild. I remember I was like, \u201cNah, that\u2019s not possible.\u201d And then we were driving at one point, and I think maybe it was Sersant, but one of the trackers that we were with was held up a hand to stop the car. And I was like, \u201cHoly shit. There it is. I feel like I\u2019m sitting in the movie theater. That\u2019s crazy.\u201d And in any case, I\u2019ll leave that there.<\/p>\n<p>But what do you think the trappings of some personal development or men\u2019s groups are? And the reason I ask, and this is not a strong position I\u2019m taking, but it\u2019s just a thought, is that there are many side effects to, and many benefits too, of a highly individualistic society. So in the case of the US, you take this Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism, this lionizing of the self-sufficient independent person, there\u2019s a lot of production that can come from that, productivity, but there is frequently some degree of collateral damage and from a collective perspective.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s not too woo-woo. Collective could just mean in your family. If you\u2019ve trained yourself to be sort of a cold-blooded business killer with blinders on, and that\u2019s the gear you learn to use, a sixth gear, if you don\u2019t have some degree of flexibility and you\u2019re 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, compartmentalization. So when you\u2019re able to 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 compromised.<\/p>\n<p>Okay. The reason I\u2019m bringing all this up is that I think about, say, let\u2019s just take, for example, men who want more access to different states and sensitivities. And I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, well, why do they want that?\u201d Well, they might want it because they want to be able to better listen and interact with their partner. And just for the sake of argument, let\u2019s say that\u2019s a female partner. And I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, well, I agree with that,\u201d right? This has been one of my homework assignments for the last two decades is getting better at conflict deescalation, which I never had a good model for. I\u2019ve made a lot of progress, but quite more work to be done. But there\u2019s also, I feel like, maybe that this perceived necessity on the part of men is a reflection of also a society in which you have a couple within which each person expects the other to be kind of everything for them.<\/p>\n<p>So it\u2019s actually, we need more community solutions where it\u2019s like, okay, look, if you expect your man to be just like one of your girlfriends you\u2019re going to have a chat with, you got the wrong animal probably, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And then if the dude is like, \u201cWhy can\u2019t you just be a dude? Let\u2019s be dudes,\u201d it\u2019s like, well, maybe you got the wrong animal, and which is part of the reason why I block out for these weeks when I do these trips. They\u2019re almost always all-men trips, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Because that type of experience in modern-day I think is largely absent or disallowed outside of maybe a few sports context.<\/p>\n<p>And similarly, if a couple is in isolation, putting aside the child-rearing aspect of this and the challenges that entails, I suppose this is very meandering, but I haven\u2019t verbalized this before, to what extent do you feel like personal development for, let\u2019s just take the men\u2019s group as an example, should focus on the individual and that kind of access versus trying to figure out some structural solutions and scheduling and blocking things out so that they have access to more people outside of their partner?<\/p>\n<p>Does that make sense?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah, I think it does. I think there\u2019s steps to it. I think the first step is both partners developing more literacy away from the partnership. So I think it\u2019s first work in the I. There\u2019s an inevitability and a necessity to that.<\/p>\n<p>Then once you start to get more skills in the I, you want to bring that to the we, and you want to start to practice. And I actually think that one of the issues with relationship is that our model for it is still built on the romantic traditions and it\u2019s like you\u2019re going to fall in love and then here\u2019s this beautiful thing. Whereas relationship to me now is way more an active practice space. And so I think \u2014 but you have to be working yourself and together. So those two things have to go together at some stage.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is is that you need your blind spots revealed, and you need 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. And then you bring those awarenesses to the group.<\/p>\n<p>And then I think hopefully what starts to emerge out of that is there\u2019s what the relationship wants to be for others, and 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 start to take that up, that\u2019s where you could see systemic models for change. But I think masculine essence needs other men to liberate itself more, whereas the 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Look, I\u2019m a junkie for personal development stuff, so I feel like I\u2019m in an AA meeting for personal development addicts. But what I would say, I\u2019ll tell just a brief story.<\/p>\n<p>So on this Montana trip, and keeping in mind, I keep using that example because it\u2019s most recent, but this is, I\u2019d say, at least three or four times a year there\u2019s a trip of some type with guys, and in this case, a small group. It\u2019s like four or five guys. And at one point, we\u2019re sitting around a fire at night and just rapping and talking and talking and talking. And then one of the guys said, he\u2019s like, \u201cI just figured out why fire is so important for guys.\u201d And we\u2019re like, \u201cWhy is that?\u201d And he goes, \u201cBecause we don\u2019t have to make eye contact. We just look at the fire and we can have all these really deep conversations,\u201d whereas in most circumstances, if you\u2019re staring deeply into another guy\u2019s eyes, it\u2019s kind of an aggressive, it\u2019s just this ingrained kind of aggressive, defensive dynamic.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah. If you\u2019re staring in someone\u2019s eyes, you\u2019re going to make out or kill each other.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, right. And \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>You know that old joke of you say to your buddy, \u201cHey, do you want to go and sit by the lake and talk for six hours?\u201d It\u2019s like, \u201cNo.\u201d It\u2019s like, \u201cDo you want to go fishing?\u201d \u201cYeah, let\u2019s do that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, right, exactly. And so harkening back to what you said about don\u2019t try too hard, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Like knowing, 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 direct head-on personal work, I wonder what the ratio is between deliberate microscope work, so to speak, and the indirect work, this is going to sound really crass, which is like building a raft and going fishing, which we did with handmade lures and all this stuff, while telling fart and dick jokes. It doesn\u2019t seem serious. No one would put that in a book and be like, \u201cOkay, step number one, come up with three of your favorite dick jokes.\u201d It\u2019s not going to be in any self-help book. But nonetheless, it seems to do a lot of lifting, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Oh, yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And there\u2019s the bonding. And the older I get, the more I think that it\u2019s like, okay, we can look at the 27 different options for improving ourselves. And ultimately, what is all that? Why are we doing that? Well, it\u2019s probably to achieve some emotional state to improve our quality of life and the quality of life of, say, our family members around us. Okay.<\/p>\n<p>Well, having, in the case of these trips that I\u2019m describing, some guy time where you\u2019re not necessarily \u2014 I mean, there is some goofing off, but there\u2019s generally shared projects and shared suffering of some type and a lot of exertion. Like you said, it\u2019s like, \u201cYeah, let\u2019s sit by the lake and talk for six hours.\u201d \u201cNo, thanks.\u201d But, \u201cLet\u2019s go fishing, and by the way, kind of do the same thing.\u201d \u201cOkay, great. Let\u2019s do it.\u201d That the answer is it\u2019s the relationship, stupid, and the content is secondary to the spending of time in a particular way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>A hundred percent. And you don\u2019t have to work hard. Once you get there, and 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\u2019t have to club it. You can mostly be talking shit floating down the river, but then occasionally, with a little bit of context, someone can say, \u201cHey, here\u2019s 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\u2019s how I notice you show up. Do you know that you do that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now, if you just try and weigh in on that, it\u2019s like, \u201cFuck you, leave me alone,\u201d but if you\u2019ve had some time together doing some real stuff, there\u2019s an opening there that I found the rate of download to be incredibly high. And everyone, the community piece is that no one has all the answers. Personal development work for personal development work\u2019s sake is just fucking self-indulgent. But once you add in the dynamic of relationship, as you said, then there\u2019s love and then there\u2019s care. And it\u2019s like, \u201cWhat I\u2019m saying to you is coming out of care, it\u2019s coming out of a piece of my journey,\u201d and what you find is everyone has a piece for everyone then. The community is more intelligent than the individual.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s where the major unlocks start to have, where someone who\u2019s not even in the role of facilitator or leader says, \u201cHey, there\u2019s a way in which you show up that makes me not feel like I can trust you and I\u2019m just telling you by way of feedback. I don\u2019t know whether you want to take that on board or not,\u201d things start to happen, and if you\u2019ve rafted a river together, you tend to take more than you were just jettison.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, and with the example that you just gave, there are lots of ways to communicate that, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>I mean, you might just be like, \u201cHey, man, I could be making this up as a story, but have you ever considered A, B, or C?\u201d Right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>A hundred percent.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Because if you\u2019re going to use the language of, say, the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, you better fucking make sure the other person has an idea of what the hell you\u2019re talking about. Amazing toolkit, but you have to agree on the language beforehand.<\/p>\n<p>So we\u2019re coming up on roughly time, 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\u2019d like to touch on that we haven\u2019t covered. What do you think is a good kind of bookmark story here? I have \u201cLunch the baboon\u201d down.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Let me tell you about Lunch. Lunch was a baboon that picked up the nickname Lunch because he started showing up at lunchtime and he started causing absolute havoc around the camp.<\/p>\n<p>And 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 and the door was literally vibrating. And every time, 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 and he picked up the cake and walked off on his hind legs holding the cake in his hands.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And just for people who don\u2019t have a picture of a baboon, I mean, I find those things pretty fucking terrifying. I mean \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>A baboon is a formidable, he\u2019s like a three-foot muscular, hairy dude with long canines. And there\u2019s this thing in animal intelligence, and you probably even know this better than me, but there are these modes of awareness. There\u2019s \u201cI know,\u201d then there\u2019s \u201cI know you know,\u201d then there\u2019s \u201cI know that you know.\u201d So it\u2019s like the first awareness is just \u201cI\u2019m aware of you,\u201d then it\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m aware that you\u2019re aware of me.\u201d That\u2019s higher level.<\/p>\n<p>So sometimes I would walk through the camp and Lunch would be involved in some kind of mischief. He would be breaking into a guest\u2019s minibar, 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 loitering around, \u201cNothing to see here. Just being a baboon in my natural environment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I remember another day I was going through some notes on my desk and I found a minute from a meeting, and the literal minute was like, \u201cWe 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.\u201d And basically it was like someone deciding that they needed to try and scare Lunch out of the camp.<\/p>\n<p>And so for a period of days, I decided I was going to chivvy him out of the camp, and it was elaborate because every time I tried to chase him, he would hide. He got into the minibar, he drank some booze. I found him sitting in the pool one day. He was just causing general chaos. I had a little BB gun that I decided that I would shoot him with. And the one day I found him, he was sitting on a guest\u2019s Audi that was parked in the car park, and when I aimed the gun at him, he just lay flat against the Audi like, \u201cI dare you.\u201d So he was up to no good.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, one day I\u2019m sitting in the office and the phone rings and my sister picks up the phone and she starts talking in that very intent way, \u201cOh, really? I can\u2019t believe that. Royalty. Yes, of course we can.\u201d And everyone in the room was eavesdropping because it sounded so intense. So she hangs up the phone and she says, \u201cBoyd, a prince is coming to Londolozi,\u201d and this is a tremendous amount of excitement.<\/p>\n<p>And there\u2019s months and months of prep and set up to the arrival of the prince. There\u2019s an endless amount of logistics. A satellite dish has to be put up so that the prince can stream certain sports games. There\u2019s a special chef that has to come in. There\u2019s a whole lot of things that need to come into the boutique so that there can be unique shopping experiences. At one stage, there\u2019s talk of lengthening the runway so that a jet can land going backwards and forwards, and you liaise with these entourage liaisons so it\u2019s all happening.<\/p>\n<p>And eventually the day arrives that the prince is arriving, and we were quite pleased with ourselves because we were on top of all of the logistics. A special face cream had been flown in. 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, \u201cBoyd, you need to run down to the room. Final thing we need to do, and you need to put these cold face cloths in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So I grabbed my radio and I run down to the suite, and as I\u2019m running down, the walkie-talkie\u2019s going off, \u201cThe prince is 10 minutes out, 10 minutes out. The prince has landed. He\u2019s now eight minutes out, eight minutes out.\u201d And 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 lock area where there\u2019s a cupboard into the main bedroom and then into the bathroom. And as I get there, I notice that the door is slightly adjacent. So I think to myself, \u201cIt must just be that the housekeeping had left the door open.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I walk 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, and as he sees me and I block the doorway, he starts downing hand lotion and starts chugging it into his mouth. It\u2019s like mango papaya hand lotion. He even gets a streak of lotion across his top jowl. And then he realizes that he\u2019s in a confined space and he drops the jar of lotion, stands in the glass, cuts his feet a little bit, and launches himself in a full dive across the bathroom at the giant panel of glass across the bath where you can look out onto the river.<\/p>\n<p>He smacks the glass, his hands come down, he puts a bloody handprint on it. He pushes back off the glass, he flies onto the ceiling, and now he starts to make baboon noises. And at the same time, 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 bath salts. He\u2019s standing on the faucet, his hands are bleeding. There\u2019s lotion, there\u2019s crap everywhere. He\u2019s barking at me.<\/p>\n<p>Then he turns and he comes at me. And Tim, I remember I let out a little scream, \u201cAh!\u201d And I leaned back and he flew in slow motion past me. And in midair, he turned and he looked at me as he went past, and he had a look of savage glee on his face and lotion down across his jowl. Then he landed on the bed and he bounded across the bed with these bloody handprints, released another massive turd, and then ripped the front veranda doors open and dived off the front veranda like a stockbroker in a recession, and the whole time he still screams, and he disappeared into the river.<\/p>\n<p>The room, as I looked around the room, I cannot tell you what a baboon in a confined space does, the room looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There is blood and shit and lotion and baboon hair. There\u2019s a turd on the pillow. It smells strongly of baboon, and it looks quite human-like because baboons have very similar pores to humans. So there\u2019s a bloody hand on the wall and like someone\u2019s grabbed the faucet with it, so it looks like someone\u2019s been murdered in there.<\/p>\n<p>And the walkie-talkie goes off, \u201cThe prince is now five minutes out. Five minutes out.\u201d I called my sister on the radio. I said, \u201cBronwyn, you\u2019ve got to get down here with the housekeeping team. This is an absolute shit show.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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 working order. Meantime, a massive pantomime breaks out on the main reception area of the lodge as the staff of Londolozi try and delay the prince from coming to his room. \u201cHello, your Majesty. Could we offer you a quick wine tasting?\u201d He\u2019s like, \u201cNo, I just arrived. I want to go to my room.\u201d \u201cWe would like to take you straight out on a safari right now. There\u2019s a leopard with a kill nearby.\u201d \u201cThat sounds good, but I\u2019d like to go to my room.\u201d \u201cOkay, what about the ladies choir who like to sing songs and do traditional dancing?\u201d He\u2019s like, \u201cNo, I\u2019m going to my room.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And what saved us, Tim, was in the middle of this elaborate <em>Fawlty Towers<\/em>, this pantomime, a hippo walked out onto the rocks in front of the camp in the midday light, and the people of Londolozi acted like they had never seen a hippo in their life. People started screaming, \u201cOh my God, a hippo! We never see hippos out of the water. Someone go and fetch a spotting scope!\u201d Someone brought a telescope down, and that brought us about 15 minutes while the prince took in the hippo. Staff were acting like the hippo was the most amazing thing the world had ever seen.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, eventually we can stall him no longer. 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 suite, and they\u2019ve got mops and buckets and baboon shit in their hair. And as one, they just drop down into the grass. They just disappear and lie there in absolute possum status.<\/p>\n<p>And there\u2019s this incredible moment where the prince comes into his room and it smells of room spray and everything\u2019s clean, and the mirror has been put straight. And he walks out onto the front veranda and he looks out over the river and a hippo calls nearby, and it\u2019s just everything is quiet. And he\u2019s like, \u201cWow, it\u2019s so good to be out here alone for a thousand miles in every direction.\u201d And he turns and walked back into his room and 12 chambermaids rise up out of the grass around his suite.<\/p>\n<p>And that is the day that Lunch really got us.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Lunch the baboon.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Lunch the baboon.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Holy shit. What a story.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>One day we were out, and this is another true story, one day we were out, a bunch of guides. Talking about a bunch of guys out together. And we drive out on the second afternoon we\u2019ve all got off, we\u2019re drinking some beers, and there\u2019s a rocky outcrop. And the rocky outcrop is like a small hill, and it\u2019s silhouetted against the skyline. And we see Lunch literally silhouetted on a rock up against the skyline. And he\u2019s with a lady baboon, and he\u2019s 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 kind of a high five, like \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Oh, Londolozi, protector of all things. There have to be moments when you\u2019re like, \u201cAh, I just want to \u2014 could we just blast him off that rock and be done with Lunch?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>No, it\u2019s amazing to live amongst the animals. The other, I mean, the other day I was sitting watching a warthog. He was grazing up on the runway, and then I literally saw a thought occur to him, and he turned and he began to walk, and he walked like two kilometers down to the camp, and I followed him the whole way. 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\u2019s making this little flush of green grass. And literally, he knows that\u2019s a good place to go and get some green grass.<\/p>\n<p>And so there\u2019s this thing about living close to the animals like that, that you notice there\u2019s an intelligence to it. And it\u2019s almost like your community expands to include the trees and the animals and these unique personalities that you get to know. And it\u2019s not just a random baboon, but it\u2019s like that\u2019s Lunch. And it\u2019s not just a random leopard, but we know this leopard. She allows herself to be seen. We have a relationship with her, and that\u2019s a very, very deep and beautiful way to live.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. And just to underscore what you just said about leopards, if you see a leopard, that leopard is allowing you to see them. And if they want to vanish, even in short grass, snap of the fingers, they\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Gone.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>It\u2019s just beyond incredible to see that happen where you\u2019re like, \u201cOkay, they couldn\u2019t hide themselves if they wanted to. That grass is too short.\u201d And then they turn back and they\u2019re like, \u201cEh, had enough of you guys,\u201d and boom, they\u2019re just completely invisible. It\u2019s remarkable to see.<\/p>\n<p>Boyd, anything you\u2019d like to say before we wind to a close? Where can people find you? Where should people go to learn more about all things Boyd?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Yeah, thanks, Tim. People can go to boydvarty.com to find out about retreats and books, <em>Cathedral of The Wild<\/em> and <em>Lion Tracker\u2019s Guide to Life<\/em>. And yeah, that\u2019s the best place to figure out if you want to come on a safari or if you want to come to Africa, that\u2019s also a good way to do it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Boyd Varty, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y dot-com. Good to see you, buddy. Thanks for making the time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Boyd Varty: <\/strong>Good to see you, man. Thanks so much for having me on.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, absolutely. And everybody listening, we will link to, I\u2019m not sure exactly what we\u2019re going to link to, but we\u2019ll link to some names and other things. We\u2019ll link to the highlight reel of Lunch the baboon. I\u2019m kidding. We\u2019ll link to all things mentioned that can be linked to in the show notes as always at tim.blog\/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.<\/p>\n<p>And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary. Why not? It doesn\u2019t 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 you can work those muscles on both sides. And thank you for tuning in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><script async defer src=\"https:\/\/platform.instagram.com\/en_US\/embeds.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/hop.clickbank.net\/?affiliate=infohatch&amp;vendor=J1R2C\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10614 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png\" alt=\"Profit Gen\" width=\"400\" height=\"217\" srcset=\"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png 400w, http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px-300x163.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Boyd Varty (@boyd_varty), the founder of Track Your Life. As a fourth-generation custodian of Londolozi Game Reserve, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}