The Return of The Lion Tracker — Boyd Varty on The Wild Man Within and Nature’s Hidden Wisdom

1. 0:00 – 0:36

   Preview.

   1. BVBoyd Varty0:00

      All roads in personal transformation lead to the information is inside you. You actually know it's in you in the way that lions know how to be lions and leopards know how to be leopards. If you want to find your way to your fullest expression, it's in you. It's subtractive, making the space to allow that information to come forward. And a big part of that is just letting yourself follow the energy of the non-rational energy of people, places, experiences where you literally feel your body full of an expansive, alive energy, and getting good at following that is the ultimate tracking.

2. 0:36 – 1:51

   Boyd returns.

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:36

      Boydo, good to see you.

   2. BVBoyd Varty0:37

      Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me back on the show.

   3. TFTim Ferriss0:40

      Absolutely. And I love your background since you have commandeered my recording office in Austin. It's pretty surreal.

   4. BVBoyd Varty0:48

      And I gotta say, I like what you've done with the place.

   5. TFTim Ferriss0:50

      [laughs]

   6. BVBoyd Varty0:51

      I might just pull in here for a few weeks. [laughs]

   7. TFTim Ferriss0:54

      You know what? You're welcome to. [laughs]

   8. BVBoyd Varty0:56

      It's great to see you, man. Yeah, I think last time we were together, we were walking in a squall across the Cotswolds.

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:02

      That's right. We had our own semi-wilderness adventure. I mean, there was, there was some wild there. There was some wild. More cows than I would tend to run into in your neck of the woods.

   10. BVBoyd Varty1:12

       I was very impressed with your, your badger track. You did spot a badger track.

   11. TFTim Ferriss1:16

       [laughs] Thanks. That is thanks to Boyd and Renius and Alex and all the rest of the actual tracking teachers. So let's hop into it. Now, this is gonna be a lot of improv jazz because I wanted to 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's

3. 1:51 – 3:06

   Elite firefighting unit: Boyd's French Foreign Legionnaire predecessor.

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:51

      choice.

   2. BVBoyd Varty1:52

      Well, maybe we'll start with, with something you don't know about me, which is that, uh, I was the head of an elite firefighting unit for a period of time in my twenties. And I took over the team from a French foreign legionnaire who had some of the most incredible personal power you've ever seen in your life. Like, 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.

   3. TFTim Ferriss2:25

      And this is in South Africa?

   4. BVBoyd Varty2:27

      This is in South Africa. And our job was we, 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 would 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.

4. 3:06 – 6:48

   The paper mache lion incident and Lucky's dramatic exit.

   1. BVBoyd Varty3:06

      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. Literally right off the bat, the first incident we had was there's a bit of a setup to it, and the setup is, is that the monkeys had been generally attacking the buffet.

   2. TFTim Ferriss3:26

      These are the vervet monkeys?

   3. BVBoyd Varty3:28

      The vervet monkeys had been all over the buffet. They'd been stealing things. And so some enterprising staff member had been driving down the road, and they had seen a sculpture, paper mache sculpture of a life-size lion.

   4. TFTim Ferriss3:40

      [laughs]

   5. BVBoyd Varty3:41

      And so they had bought it. 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, like, 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, we can't spray this out. We've got to shut the main power down. So I send one of our team members, who was a guy by the name of Lucky Mkhize. 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.

   6. TFTim Ferriss4:37

      [laughs]

   7. BVBoyd Varty4:37

      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.

   8. TFTim Ferriss4:57

      The paper mache lion. [laughs]

   9. BVBoyd Varty4:58

      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, I felt a certain amount of pressure to make sure that we maintained the standards of the French Foreign Legionnaire. So I decided that we would get involved in a series of drills and we would, 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 Nkonto who was just incredibly also physical, maybe like six, five, muscular guy. There was Lucky Mkhize who was the tractor, tractor driver with his beanie on. There was myself doing my French Foreign Legionnaire walk. And we believed in ourselves, but we weren't quite where we needed to be. And so randomly in the afternoons I would set up, [laughs] 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 that was first like, "Station, station, stations." I'd send it out on the walkie-talkies. Everyone would run to their tractors. They would grab their gear. And then I would scream, "Positions, positions, positions." The team would load into the tractors. They would, like, drive out. They would get into positions and then I would scream, "Start the engines." And then all of these powerful generator engines on the back of the trailers would start. [imitates engine] And then the fire would start to build and I would scream, [laughs] "Spray, spray, spray." 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. Anyway,

5. 6:48 – 8:43

   Firefighting drill disaster: When 50/50 failed spectacularly.

   1. BVBoyd Varty6:48

      the day after the incident with the paper mache lion, I set one of these fires and we get the fire going. And to be honest with you, I had some old thatch that had come off some of the roofs of the lodges and I had built, like, quite a nice bonfire of thatch. And it took off a little faster than I had initially expected. So we had quite a sizable fire right off the bat. Got on the radio, I screamed, "Station, station, stations." The team scrambled. They got their gear on.

   2. TFTim Ferriss7:13

      [laughs]

   3. BVBoyd Varty7:13

      "Positions, positions, positions." The tractors came rolling in. I was thinking to myself, "This is looking incredible." I was walking like a French Foreign Legionnaire around. I was giving commanding instructions. "Open the hoses. Spray, spray, spray." The hoses open and an absolute trickle of water comes out.

   4. TFTim Ferriss7:31

      [laughs]

   5. BVBoyd Varty7:32

      By this time a wind has picked up and the fire is now starting to get some wind under it and it's starting to look like actually this fire could get away from us. And so my way of handling the situation, 'cause the pressure was now building, was to repeat all of the commands at a louder volume. "Station, station, stations. Positions. Start the engines. [imitates engine] Spray, spray, spray."

   6. TFTim Ferriss7:53

      [laughs]

   7. BVBoyd Varty7:54

      Still an absolute dribble of water. And it was at that moment that we realized that Lucky Mkhize in the moment critique had managed to park the back tire of the trailer on the hose pipe.

   8. TFTim Ferriss8:06

      [laughs] Oh, shit. [laughs]

   9. BVBoyd Varty8:08

      And he saw it at the very same time I did and he rolled forward. The problem was is that the pressure had now built up behind the kink in the hose and when that hose finally filled with water, not only did it knock the hose man out, but we totally lost control of it. It was flailing around like a deadly anaconda.

   10. TFTim Ferriss8:26

       [laughs]

   11. BVBoyd Varty8:27

       The fire was now starting to get away from us. The head man 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. [laughs] That's when I got my first lesson in what firefighting was actually about. And in fact it's

6. 8:43 – 10:39

   Leadership lesson: Bringing energy down when chaos climbs.

   1. BVBoyd Varty8:43

      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, you know, it can be quite devastating to your ego, it can be quite devastating to your leadership. But I've come to see those moments as quite positive because it does force a kind of reflection. And the thing that I definitely learned that day and that has stayed with me through all crisis situations and everything that I've faced ever since then is that it's very few people who know how to bring the energy downwards when the energy is moving upwards.

   2. TFTim Ferriss9:17

      Mm-hmm.

   3. BVBoyd Varty9:17

      And, you know, somewhere beyond trying to do an impressive walk, if you can figure out how to, when literally e- energy is moving upwards, start to create a slowness and a steadiness about your actions, you can start to actually do a kind of a powerful energetic jujitsu on things. And so ever since that day I've been, I've been focused on when, when the energy is climbing trying to slow it down. That's in the category of things you don't know about me.

   4. TFTim Ferriss9:45

      [laughs] That is in the category of many things I don't know about you, [laughs] which is shocking. Shocking or not surprising at all given how long I've 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's something that Rich Barton who co-founded Zillow and many other company, Expedia, et cetera, also said about leadership, this was not that long ago, on the podcast. The second thing that comes to mind [laughs] is I really think somebody needs to write a scripted comedy show based on real life called Londo, just about [laughs] -

   5. BVBoyd Varty10:27

      [laughs]

   6. TFTim Ferriss10:28

      ... all of these crazy stories. And I thought I would perhaps introduce a new character who would be on the Gilligan's Island of Londo, JV. Do you want to introduce JV? How do you want to

7. 10:39 – 13:34

   Story hunting and the natural world as meaning machine.

   1. TFTim Ferriss10:39

      do that?

   2. BVBoyd Varty10:39

      Well, just one comment on what you, what you're saying. You know, I think a lot about my kind of like the body of work that I'm involved in now and everything I'm interested in as story hunting.

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:51

      Mm-hmm.

   4. BVBoyd Varty10:51

      And one thing about, it's about Londolozi but it's, it's not just that. It's like any time you spend in the natural world, it is like a story making machine.

   5. TFTim Ferriss11:04

      Mm-hmm.

   6. BVBoyd Varty11:05

      You can go out on the most simple walk into the woods and because it is both, it's... How would I say it? The natural world is not just where meaning constellates, it is meaning in some fundamental way. And then incidences occur. Inevitably, like little things happen and, you know, one of my ideas is that storytelling is, is awareness. Like actually what storytelling is, is paying attention. And the natural world starts to just every day generate incredible encounters. Like I, if I think of the guests who go out at Londolozi, let's say 60 guests go out. That's 60 people who come back with a diverse array of stories and incidences that occur on that day. Some of them will be ridiculous, some of them will be sublime, some of them will be profound. But it's hard to cast yourself versus modern life which can sometimes feel very staid and like the same things are happening all the time. The natural world is a story machine.

   7. TFTim Ferriss12:02

      Mm.

   8. BVBoyd Varty12:03

      It's a meaning machine. It's a s- it's a symbolic machine. And people who stare into it, it's like very unwoo-woo people, people who've just, you know, come out on safari They come back and they, and they've stared into the natural world and they've seen archetypal energies that they recognize. When you see a lioness grooming her cubs or you see her protecting the cubs, when you see them switch into hunting mode, you can't help but see this, these profound symbolic energies that are in us functioning all around you and that somehow it permeates you and you feel yourself in relationship to that in some profound way.

   9. TFTim Ferriss12:45

      Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. And, uh, we haven't even talked about this. It's something you don't know. I spent a week in the Montana wilderness doing outdoor survival training with-

   10. BVBoyd Varty12:55

       Oof

   11. TFTim Ferriss12:55

       ... this just incredible gent who I'll highlight on the show in a probably a month or two. But it's incredible the density of stories that you come back with, even if you don't intend to gather anything extreme. It's so... I would say also for s- city dwellers, it's so novel at every turn, particularly-

   12. BVBoyd Varty13:18

       Yeah

   13. TFTim Ferriss13:18

       ... if you're injecting any level of shared privation or hardship, which is sometimes done deliberately, sometimes [coughs] forced upon you in the case of like freezing rain and hail and you're trying to make a fire when your hands are barely functioning, things like that. So

8. 13:34 – 15:39

   Uncle JV: Wildlife filmmaker with a dangerous drama meter.

   1. TFTim Ferriss13:34

      let's, let's... And we're, we're not going to necessarily belabor the point, but I just, I just [laughs] have to press on introducing, I'm not sure which character on Gilligan's Island this would be, [laughs] but JV. Let's, let's talk about JV and then we're gonna loop back to [laughs] story hunting and, and some of the connective tissue that, that connects all of these things.

   2. BVBoyd Varty13:57

      Well, I mean, of all the people who've had a profound influence on me, one, one of them was my uncle, John Varty, uh, 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, you know, hunting was still what they primarily did in that area. And one thing about someone who grew up lion hunting is that it has, it tends to reset your drama meter, 'cause if you think about it, in lion hunting, there's really only two outcomes, a lion dies or a human dies. So he, his sense of danger was dramatically reset by this type of [laughs] childhood experience that he engaged in as a young boy. And so at the time that I spent most of my time with him, it was between the age of about six and 15. He was making wildlife documentaries. And I would... I remember I would put my clothes out on my bed at night, and then at about 4:00 in the morning he would show up and he would walk in looking like, kind of like Africa's version of Texas Walker Ranger, .44 on his hip, shirt with cutoff sleeves, and he would open the door of my bedroom here, "Buddy, let's go." And like Tim, if you met him now, he would say to you, "Hey, there. So what do you do?" And you'd say, "Well, you know, I run a podcast." "Podcasting. Okay, let me tell you about podcasting."

   3. TFTim Ferriss15:25

      [laughs]

   4. BVBoyd Varty15:28

      Um, he, he, he had these sort of arms that stuck out. The Shangaan people called him Makokwa, the one with the crooked arm, 'cause he like walked this-

   5. TFTim Ferriss15:35

      He had like a John Wayne walk?

   6. BVBoyd Varty15:36

      Yeah, totally John Wayne with his .44.

9. 15:39 – 19:06

   Camera bearing adventures: Elephants, hyenas, and the red mist.

   1. BVBoyd Varty15:39

      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. The 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 this... So one job was drive, the second job was camera bearer. The driving job was tough because like one morning we found a, 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.

   2. TFTim Ferriss16:19

      Mm.

   3. BVBoyd Varty16:19

      'Cause getting the shot was like the primarily issue of every moment. He said, "Buddy, we gotta get the shot." Now he's set up in the pickup section of a vehicle where he's got a tripod up and a camera, and I'm now driving. And he's screaming, "Faster, faster, faster." And then I will speed up and then he'll scream, "Not so fast, you're gonna hit something." And he's screaming, "Left, cut left, cut left, cut right." And on one of these instances he said, "Cut left," and I turned to the right, but he was bracing for left, and so he fell off the back of the [laughs] pickup.

   4. TFTim Ferriss16:49

      The pickup.

   5. BVBoyd Varty16:50

      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 like he, he would go into a red mist and then he would come to and say, "Okay, we gotta get off to the hyena. Let's go find it." And so most of my trauma was around driving him around as his camera bearer. Then in another incident, he said to me... It was a herd of elephants that were coming down to a waterhole. And he said to me, "Okay, we're gonna creep in there. We're gonna get ourselves well positioned on the bank. We're gonna get a nice low angle shot of these elephants drinking." And so I said, "Okay, let's go." So I'm carrying the camera. He sneaks down to the edge and he grabs the camera and he starts to film. And this big bull, [laughs] this big bull elephant turns and it starts walking towards us. And I immediately felt my heart rate starting to go up 'cause I could tell the position we were in, not really a lot of places to go.

   6. TFTim Ferriss17:49

      Yeah.

   7. BVBoyd Varty17:49

      His way of handling the approaching elephant was to simply zoom out on the camera repeatedly. [laughs]

   8. TFTim Ferriss17:58

      [laughs] Yes.

   9. BVBoyd Varty17:58

      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, and at this point he looked up from the camera and he turned to me and said, "Hey man, why didn't you tell me it was so bloody close?"

   10. TFTim Ferriss18:14

       [laughs]

   11. BVBoyd Varty18:15

       And then we got into this freeze-off where we basically it was just a standoff, and at some point he whispered back to me and said, "Buddy- "If this elephant comes, I want you to crawl into that hole there." And there was like 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 like this constant sense of like, "Wait, are we, are we okay here, or are we in massive danger?" He had film camps all over Africa, and one of his film camps was in Kenya, and I, I'll 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, the city of Nairobi, he said to me, "Buddy, if anyone tries to grab ahold of any of our camera gear, just hit them on the hand with the machete." [laughs]

   12. TFTim Ferriss19:03

       [laughs] This is like babysitting Londo edition.

10. 19:06 – 22:30

    Zambia expeditions: Crocodiles, dead elephants, and shovel oars.

    1. BVBoyd Varty19:06

       Yeah. So-

    2. TFTim Ferriss19:07

       [laughs] Geez

    3. BVBoyd Varty19:08

       ... 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. You know, like in the Masai Mara where the, where the wildebeests would be crossing the river, you would see the BBC, you would see Discovery Channel. They'd all be parked in a certain position. On the other side of the bank would be, you know, 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. 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 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 went, he did all sorts of things. I mean, when we were living with him in Zambia, I'll never forget, we were living in the Luangwa Valley with him and he, 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 had a tiny like two horsepower engine on it.

    4. TFTim Ferriss20:33

       [laughs]

    5. BVBoyd Varty20:34

       And often it would get caught on-

    6. TFTim Ferriss20:35

       So it was just like a dinghy, right? It was just like a-

    7. BVBoyd Varty20:37

       A total dinghy. Like the top of the boat from the waterline was inches.

    8. TFTim Ferriss20:40

       [laughs]

    9. BVBoyd Varty20:41

       And he would load it with all sorts of things, then he would hit a sandbank and he would say to me, "Buddy, you gotta get out and push the boat off the sandbank." And I would like look up and down the bank where there were hundreds of crocodiles and I would say to him, "I, I don't wanna get out." He'd say, "Hey man, get out. Stop being a, a nafta," is what he would call us. But get out, push the boat. And then one day he found a, 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. So we get in the boat, he's got this piece of rope. We get up to the elephant and he says, "Okay, buddy, tie the rope around the elephant." And then he heads off upstream in the boat. And Tim, when I tell you he took full throttle of the boat and with the drag of the elephant we went absolutely nowhere for 45 minutes.

    10. TFTim Ferriss21:41

        [laughs]

    11. BVBoyd Varty21:42

        He was like abs- And only I realized this 'cause I was looking at the bank and I could see that we weren't going anywhere. The boat was in a full plane and he was just rigorously committed to trying to get the elephant to the bank. So eventually that didn't work. We ran out of gas in exactly the same spot. So then he sent me to the shore to get some spades 'cause we didn't have oars for the boat. So he sent me to get a couple of spades and we used spades and we managed to paddle-

    12. TFTim Ferriss22:09

        Spades meaning like a shovel?

    13. BVBoyd Varty22:11

        Shovels, yeah.

    14. TFTim Ferriss22:12

        Yeah.

    15. BVBoyd Varty22:12

        We managed to like 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, you know, feeding on this elephant. So it was, it was just a baptism into like the, the ramblings of an incredibly wild

11. 22:30 – 26:16

    Orienting toward safety: Building capability versus childhood overwhelm.

    1. BVBoyd Varty22:30

       person.

    2. TFTim Ferriss22:30

       So here's a question I, I may not have ever asked you. I don't think I have, but listening to these stories I can't help but wonder how you think about, how do you orient towards safety? Right? 'Cause 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-

    3. BVBoyd Varty22:55

       Mm-hmm

    4. TFTim Ferriss22:55

       ... perceived threat that is just infused into their daily experience 24/7. And then you listen to these stories and you're like, okay, and, and certainly some of the stories in our first conversation for the podcast where y- you're almost dying being attacked by crocodiles [laughs] and this, that, and the other thing and there's, there's no short list of these incidents and then you listen to your adventures with JV or the firefighting. It's like, okay, on, on any given Tuesday you flip a coin and those could have gone sideways in some capacity. How do you orient towards safety or danger and how has that changed over time?

    5. BVBoyd Varty23:33

       It's certainly something I've wrestled with because after all those years with my uncle there was definitely, 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't, I don't know how to handle this." And he, he was of the mindset that you should be able to handle anything. I mean, he would walk off into a dangerous situation and he would hand me a rifle and he would say, "Buddy, if I get into trouble out there I'm expecting you to help me." And so then I would be left with this like eight-year-old sense of responsibility and feeling like I'm gonna need to take action against this but I'm, I'm ill-prepared to take action against this. And so I found myself quite split in some ways. Like on the one hand I would feel very apprehensive about certain things And then in other instances, I would, like, the, 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've thought a lot about that now, like, 'cause I always have a sense that whatever's gonna happen, I can handle it. And I, and that is a gift he gave me, a sense that we, we will figure it out in a very instinctual game time live way. Like, I can be in pretty high octane situations, but I'm nervous of it. I still have a part of me that feels like I'm ill - I'm gonna be ill prepared for what is coming. And I, I feel those two places in myself all the time. And I think a lot about, you know, recently, obviously I just had a son, and I think a lot about what it would be like to build capability in him. 'Cause I feel like, I feel like I, I have a sense of capability. I, I, I feel like I listened to your interview with Chris Sacco where he was talking about, you know, just like young people needing to have more incidences in their life, needing to have kind of, you know, been in a bar and, you know, bumped a car and, like, lived life.

    6. TFTim Ferriss25:35

       Mm.

    7. BVBoyd Varty25:35

       And I feel very full of that, but I also feel like some of that stuff was, I was over my head and that, you know, I've had to manage some of that. So how do I orientate towards it now? I think trying to build a sense of capability and confidence in whatever I'm doing has become ground zero.

    8. TFTim Ferriss25:52

       Mm-hmm.

    9. BVBoyd Varty25:53

       And not just expect things of myself, but actually get, take the time to realize, like, if I'm doing something new, my approach to it would be like, "I should just be able to handle this." And I think what I've learnt is that I need to go slower and build confidence and build capability, and that has been the ultimate healing on those ones.

    10. TFTim Ferriss26:12

        Amazing. So I'm looking at this [chuckles]

12. 26:16 – 28:52

    Wilderness retreat lessons: Wordlessness and natural state.

    1. TFTim Ferriss26:16

       I wanna make sure we layer in stories, but we can intersperse with other things. So we're gonna get to perhaps lunch, maybe Toby Pheasant. No idea what that refers to at all. But [chuckles] there's one that I want to pull out here just to see where this goes. Learnings from 10 years of wilderness retreats. I mean, you've taken so many different types of people on wilderness retreats. Certainly you've had many varieties of experiences yourself as a participant, as a guide, as a tracker, as a facilitator. 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?

    2. BVBoyd Varty26:59

       I run the retreats every year through the winter months, and I feel like every year we get more aware of what we're actually trying to do on the retreats, and we get better at them. And I think the, the primary thing that I've come to really value is that the faster we can put people into what I would call the natural state, the speedier the uptick of transformation. And I think when I initially started creating transformational spaces in nature, I was, 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, and rapidly help them develop awareness around how that particular blockage, trauma, belief system could be transformed. And I feel like I've become way more relaxed with it now. In fact, on our retreats now, the first day is into silence and nature. And the speed at which... I have this idea that comes from Martha Beck, where her take on the natural world is that it's a wordless environment. And so if you look at the animals, they don't have verbal minds, so you don't see them thinking past and future. You don't see lions lying there thinking, "Oh, Janine messed up that hunt yesterday, and so we can't trust her going forward."

    3. TFTim Ferriss28:26

       [laughs]

    4. BVBoyd Varty28:27

       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. The other thing is that I would say is that

13. 28:52 – 37:22

    The Londolozi time war: Tech detox and parasympathetic shifts.

    1. BVBoyd Varty28:52

       I, I say now that when people come, they enter into the Londolozi time warp because if you can take away their tech, which we now enforce. I, I absolutely will not allow any tech because what happens is, is even if a, you know, a person who's running a company comes and they go into silence the first afternoon, and then we go out the next morning and we're tracking an animal, and then they get back and they pick their phone up and they've got a human resources issue back at the company, they start to pop out. Because I also think that there's a profound chemistry to it. 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 you've, that are in the natural world, literally their brain starts to cascade different neurochemistry. Their nervous system starts to go more, generally more parasympathetic, and they start to enter into a different state of awareness. And in that state, their natural inner knowing starts to spit out by literally by, I would say within the first 24 hours, something in them will start to know and it will start to spit out insights. And you don't have to work too hard at it. The other is if you say to people, "I want you to go and open yourself to receiving lessons from the natural world," the psyche is so intelligent, especially in a retreat space. It's, it's funny, like if you have a 10-day retreat, people will orientate Perfectly to that 10 days and they will... What will need to occur in that 10 days will occur. If you said it's a two-day retreat, they will get aspects of the same thing, but the, the psyche will know kind of 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. And so really the lesson from 10 years of retreats i- is don't work too hard.

    2. TFTim Ferriss31:00

       Mm.

    3. BVBoyd Varty31:00

       Allow the space, allow people's psyche to start to be in relation with the natural world and then insight will start to naturally develop-

    4. TFTim Ferriss31:12

       Mm

    5. BVBoyd Varty31:12

       ... very, very quickly. And people can do this at home. If you start saying, "I wanna go out into the local park. I wanna go out into my garden and I have a specific question," and you write that question down and you start asking, asking specifically nature, "Could you help me answer that question?" It's almost like a Zen koan. You're holding a, an intention and an, a desire for certain answers and then what you see, your psyche will run that through a specific matrix and insight will start to develop.

    6. TFTim Ferriss31:42

       Yeah. There are a few things that come to mind as you're saying all this. I took a, a number of notes. One is that I think people bias or certainly I'll speak for Americans, but this is [chuckles] I think common in a lot of countries, bias towards the question of what should I do, right?

    7. BVBoyd Varty32:01

       Mm-hmm.

    8. TFTim Ferriss32:01

       And it's an immediate tilt towards addition, if that makes sense.

    9. BVBoyd Varty32:07

       Mm-hmm.

    10. TFTim Ferriss32:07

        But sometimes you get to where you want to go or achieve a certain state by removing the obstacles to that state. So when you were talking about natural state, I was thinking of, for instance, uh, when I was on this Montana trip, I had a few friends with me. Some of them had phones, some of them didn't, even just for taking photographs. And I left my phone behind very deliberately and I-

    11. BVBoyd Varty32:33

        Smart

    12. TFTim Ferriss32:33

        ... and I feel like if, for instance, you're not in the bush in South Africa, if you're not in the mountains of Montana, if you simply take a digital sabbath, remove, say, bright light after sundown, do a few things where you're simply removing modern conveniences that are actually very unnatural from an evolutionary perspective, you start to access this natural state. And what the hell does that mean? That can mean a lot of different things. But one for me at least that I noticed at 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're always-

    13. BVBoyd Varty33:29

        Yeah

    14. TFTim Ferriss33:29

        ... online, but the volume is very low and so you start to notice a lot more and it just fundamentally changes your s- perceptual lived experience on a day-to-day basis. I would say another thing that Londo nails and what's so cool about it is that it is a function of being synchronized with wildlife activity. And that is-

    15. BVBoyd Varty33:53

        Mm-hmm

    16. TFTim Ferriss33:53

        ... 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?

    17. BVBoyd Varty33:59

        You wanna go out at dawn and you want your circadian rhythm to be affected by that sunrise and the cool of the morning.

    18. TFTim Ferriss34:07

        Mm-hmm. Yeah. So people are generally to get a bite to eat and a cup of coffee waking up, let's just call it 30 minutes before sunrise, something like that.

    19. BVBoyd Varty34:16

        Yeah.

    20. TFTim Ferriss34:17

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

    21. BVBoyd Varty34:41

        Mm-hmm.

    22. TFTim Ferriss34:41

        It gets dark and you have this very full spectrum experience that makes a week at Londolozi 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. And I just find that natural state and I'll shut up in a second. But bringing those very, very mission critical for millennia faculties online, whether it's by turning them on or just simply turning up the volume so you notice them to be nurturing and recharging in a way that is hard to put words to, right? And you carry that back into the modern world with you.

    23. BVBoyd Varty35:27

        It's spot on, Tim. A few things on what you said there. One is, you know, so many people arrive on the retreats with a sense of, of what to do next. You know, sometimes someone's built a company and sold it. Sometimes someone is changing career. Sometimes someone is going through a relationship change and they arrive, uh, as you say, with this desire of like, what's next? And what has struck me, uh, 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. So often when I say to people, "Stop, stop trying to know and stop trying to use this retreat to get the next thing, and in fact let yourself not know and, and just enter into the circadian rhythm of being up, of seeing the sunrise and seeing the sunset, watching it go from stars to stars." We work a lot now on this rhythm that you're describing. I like to go out early, drop into meditation, let the dawn break around you. Then intensity. 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. Nothing... It's only this Western culture in which, in which it's like level 10 energy all the time. Everything in nature moves through intensity, rest, intensity, rest. And as people feel themselves allowed to rest - a- 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. The other thing is, is that,

14. 37:22 – 40:58

    Mystical animal encounters: Lions, southern boubous, and synchronicity.

    1. BVBoyd Varty37:22

       and I know that you've had these experiences, it's really become quite remarkable to me how many mystical things happen. When I first met Martha and I started to understand transformational processes, I was still like a drink a beer, you know, punch someone in the face type of person. You know, I was 20 years old, South African. I did not consider transformational processes or coaching or inner work. I had no grounding in that. And, and then also just like the animals are gonna bring messages, that was all quite woo for me. But I've seen now the most remarkable things. You know, one thing that comes to mind is on every retreat, there will be magical occurrences with the animals. A woman will sit in the circle and she will say, "You know, I grew up in a family of alcoholics, and when you grow up in a family of alcoholics, it's, it's incredibly dangerous all the time. And so what I learned, I've learned to make myself invisible. I've learned to hide, and I've, I've never let myself be seen 'cause being seen was dangerous." That afternoon we go out and she's sitting on the back of an open Land Rover, and a male lion that's been sleeping rouses himself, stands up, walks towards the back of the Land Rover, stops, and he looks up at her and he, he looks into her eyes and, and is just breathing, gazing at her. And sh- it's so intense to be looked at by, you know, a 400-pound serial killer like that.

    2. TFTim Ferriss38:54

       [laughs]

    3. BVBoyd Varty38:55

       There's something so kind and powerful and the presence that that animal projects. And she looks away initially and I say to her, "You can look back." And she turns and she looks back, and I can feel it's the most profound revealing psychologically that she's ever been involved in. And after that, something shifts in her and she's able to start allowing herself to step forward. Another one that comes to mind is we had a, a guy come on a retreat and he's sitting in the circle and he says to me, "You know, one thing that has happened is since my father died, I've been totally unable to grieve. Like I know that I, I want to break open, but I can't get to it. Like I just can't cry." And for the first few days that's the case. On the third day, you know, I'm sort of talking to him, I'm checking in on him, and we're sitting... You know, Londos has these kind of decks that you sit out on, but there's a thatched area, but it's open. And a bird flies into the thatched area and it lands on the little gum pole over his head. It looks down at him and it starts calling intensely. Like very unusual. Sometimes a bird will fly through, but this bird flies into the area where there are people and starts calling. And he looks up at th- this bird, and at the moment he sees it, he, I see tears come to his eyes and he starts to weep, weep, weep. And for 10 minutes he can't talk. And then he looks at me and he says, "This is gonna sound so weird, guys, but you know my father was an avid bird watcher.

    4. TFTim Ferriss40:26

       Mm.

    5. BVBoyd Varty40:26

       And this bird, the southern boubou, was his favorite bird."

    6. TFTim Ferriss40:30

       [laughs]

    7. BVBoyd Varty40:31

       And stuff like that is happening so regularly that I can't deny it.

    8. TFTim Ferriss40:36

       Mm.

    9. BVBoyd Varty40:36

       I just know that things will happen, magic will occur. Um, I mean, look, we also had one woman who was describing her trauma and how in her, in her life everything gets taken from her. And while she's describing this, she's eating a piece of toast at breakfast, and a monkey literally jumped down and snatched the toast out of her -

15. 40:58 – 41:58

    Re-enchantment: Nature's desire to help us heal.

    1. TFTim Ferriss40:58

       [laughs]

    2. BVBoyd Varty40:58

       But there's definitely a sense, and I think that native cultures knew this, and I think it's woo-woo to us, but if you intentionally start working with the natural world, it, it knows on some level. A, a field of living sentience, it starts to sense that intentionality and that awareness, and then things start to happen. And I think people need to be re-enchanted. I think one of the things that we're afflicted with is that we are dulled down and we are disconnected from magic. And sometimes it doesn't 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, God, this is the beauty of it, and to have that affect you in some profound way. I've just seen so much of it now. I'm, I'm a real believer that nature wants us to heal, and nature knows when we come to her with the desire to mend our soul.

16. 41:58 – 49:20

    Following non-rational energy and forays into wordlessness.

    1. TFTim Ferriss41:58

       It also strikes me that, and I think I'm speaking to myself as much as anyone else, that sometimes we, we tend to wanna fight fire with fire. And I'll explain what I mean by that. And it doesn't always work in the sense that we have a problem or we perceive a problem through our thinking, and so we want to use more thinking to fix that problem. [laughs] Or we think, "I just need to try harder." And it's like, well, if trying harder would've solved this, it would've been solved by now, right? In some way.

    2. BVBoyd Varty42:32

       Absolutely.

    3. TFTim Ferriss42:32

       And there's so much canvas to explore that is, as you mentioned, wordless. And so if you're able to even entertain the question of, you know, what if the path or the relief could be found outside of words and concepts, right? What might that look like? And what it might look like is spending time in nature. And one of my favorite experiences at Londolozi, and I've, as you know, I've been a bunch of times now, is the silent morning drives.

    4. BVBoyd Varty43:08

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss43:09

       And just to explain that briefly, or do you wanna explain that briefly?

    6. BVBoyd Varty43:13

       Well, maybe I could say two things about that. The, the other is a story comes to mind of a very silly anecdotal story, but one of the things that led me 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 I was-- By day I was seeing different agents and I was telling them about Londolozi, and then we got invited, myself and a friend who I was traveling with, we got invited to a party that night. And at that time I was struggling with very, very severe depression. And we did that childish thing that you sometimes do when you're in your 20s where we decided we would go to the party and we would kind of make up fake backstories and like kind of be in character for the night.

    7. TFTim Ferriss43:58

       Yeah.

    8. BVBoyd Varty43:59

       And so when people asked me what I would do at that time, out of nowhere I started saying I'm a writer. And I hadn't got even close to writing anything at that stage. I was-- would be totally daunted by the process. But when I said it at this party, this total bullshit story I had made up, every time I said it, I felt a little uptick of energy in my body, not in my mind, not a rational sense that this is what you should do. I just literally felt like, oh, this little like kick of energy. And I decided to follow that little kick of energy. And when I got back to South Africa, I, you know, sat down at my old computer and I started writing down stories. And I noticed that whilst I was engaged in the process of writing, the depression would lift or I would not be aware of how much just 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, oh my God, I'm, I'm gonna fight to get through this day. And I would do my duties, I would do all the things I needed to do, like with this gray cloud around my head, and then I would sit down at the computer and I would start to write out some silly anecdotal story and suddenly something would lift and I would follow that. And I, I-- and literally everything that has brought me to here has been following that non-rational energy in my body. In-- like I, I'm aware of what makes me feel a little more energized, a little more expansive, and I just figure out how to move towards that. Now, in order to do that, you do need some stillness. And one thing that has become so profound for us is, you know, the safari business is evolving and I think that we're 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, you know, the biological sciences and that, that can be so wonderful and all of that information can be more information. So what we started to do in the attempt to take people into deeper wordlessness was to say, "You're gonna go out and you are gonna be in silence and hopefully that silence pulls you into a deeper place. But what you're also gonna do is you're gonna watch your mind and you might be watching, like looking at something and you might find yourself saying, 'What's going on there? Like why is that animal doing it? What animal is that? What's 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, right? Like in-- only in Eastern philosophy do we find our way to don't know mind. The whole Western mind is structured around needing to know. So if you find yourself needing to know, let that go and just be in pure, pure experience of it. Let the silence work on you. Feel how everything is unfolding with an intelligence and you don't really need to rationally know it. Try and feel it at a deeper level. And to a man, people report coming back. Some people report feeling incredibly frustrated. Some people said, "You know, I found my mind wandering to wait, should I-- when I'm at home, is, should I catch the six train or the, the f- five train downtown?" Like people's minds go to, "Did I turn the tap off? Who's looking after the cat?" But if you can keep them in it, eventually you drop through to a different sense and then as you watch the animals, you drop into a different layer of language and it's what I would call the first language and it's the language of energy. And you start to feel how when a leopard turns and looks at you with the shape of its body, with the look in its eyes, with the way it moves its head, it is conveying energy. And you can watch the prey species move through different nervous system states from totally relaxed to listening and aware to attuned to potential danger. And you can feel how as they move their bodies, every one of those states in their body has a feeling to it and you can feel that feeling in your own body and getting to know that feeling is where I think it's definitely more where native cultures operated and inside of it is a deep sense of connectivity because you can feel yourself relating to every creature once you know that language. When you can look at a leopard and without any words between you feel its energy, feel what it's conveying to you, you can be in a dialogue like that. And I'm sure you've had this, Tim, but in shamanic ceremonies and when I've been around healers, you know, I remember once asking to my, my, my teacher in the medicine space, "Will you teach me? Why won't you teach me?" And he said to me, "Well, the, the feeling is not there yet." And I said to him, "Well, no, I'm asking you." He said, "Yeah, but you... I can feel your, your distrust. And what- what- whatever you say to me, the feeling you energetically are giving off is still, there's still too much distrust. And only when the feeling is different between us will I start to teach you." And so, and to me, that, that space was so full of that, that first language energy, the, the, the energy between things.

17. 49:20 – 54:55

    Diana Chapman's Whole-Body Yes and avoiding the simmering six.

    1. TFTim Ferriss49:21

       I wanna also maybe underscore for folks that this might sound very abstract or esoteric, but there are real direct applications of what we're talking about to everyday modern life as well. And a few names that we know in common come to mind. 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. Could be as simple as something on a menu, could be something as high stakes as to say yes or no to a potentially huge business partnership with a given person, let's just say. I've had her on the podcast. People can listen to that episode for more on the Whole Body Yes and how to navigate that if we don't get into it now. Another that comes to mind, as you said, that the, particularly let's just, I'll limit it to the United States for now because other cultures are quite different in this respect with siestas 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 [chuckles] is anathema to the natural world. That's just not how things work at all. And if you engage in, say, going on safari, if you spend time in the natural world, certainly if you do any type of hunting, you realize there are these natural rhythms. So if you go on, let's just say an elk hunt or something like that, you may spend a few hours doing X, Y, and Z and then just bed down. You're like, "The animals are, are bedded down. We're not gonna find them. They're inactive. It's gonna be incredibly difficult. So instead of waste our energy, we're gonna have a snack and take a nap." And I recognize that, you know, having a snack and taking a nap may not make sense in between your Zoom calls, but the point is that if you talk to someone like Josh Waitzkin, another mutual friend of ours, who for those who don't recognize the name, he was, he was my second ever podcast on this podcast out of 800 something plus. He's gonna hate this, but he's known best for searching for Bobby Fischer. He was a very high level chess player beginning at a very young age, but has, 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 jujitsu, now foiling at a very, very high level on huge waves. And what does Josh say when he looks at all of these world-class performers in these different disciplines? When he looks at the people he works with directly ranging from sports at a very high level. I don't know if it's public yet. I think it is. Yeah. The Celtics, for instance, all the way to the absolute 1% of 1% in, say, the finance world. One of his mantras, and I don't think he'll mind me paraphrasing this, is avoid the simmering six. And avoiding the simmering six is if you look at, say, Marcelo Garcia before he's gonna compete in a world championship mat, they're running around trying to find him 'cause it's five minutes to go time. And where is he? He's sleeping under the bleachers.

    2. BVBoyd Varty52:23

       Hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss52:23

       He's taking a nap. He's at zero, and 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.

    4. BVBoyd Varty52:34

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss52:34

       And he's going from rest to full engagement. He's not sitting in the middle with that IV drip of 24/7 cortisol and sympathetic overdrive. That is deliberately what he is avoiding and that is in large part how he's able to partition resources to engage so fully and dominate competitively. And that's also true for people in the finance world who are working in very high stakes environments for making decisions around placing trades and so on. What we're talking about, this is just my somewhat clumsy way of saying that I, every day I'm sitting in New York City for God's sake. This is [chuckles] I mean, it is the concrete jungle, but it is the city that never sleeps, right? It is, is in some ways the, the antithesis of living at Londolo. And 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. So Diana Chapman, Josh Waitzkin.

    6. BVBoyd Varty53:43

       Mm-hmm.

    7. TFTim Ferriss53:43

       Just wanna point out how broadly these, these themes apply, even if they seem to some people listening may be a bit exotic.

    8. BVBoyd Varty53:52

       Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, it's well said.

    9. TFTim Ferriss53:54

       Yeah. Fire. I felt like you were just about to jump into something.

    10. BVBoyd Varty53:58

        No, I mean, just all roads in personal transformation lead to the information is inside you. You actually know it's in you in the way that lions know how to be lions and leopards know how to be leopards. If you want to find your way to your fullest expression, it's in you. It's, it's subtractive getting, making the space to allow that information to come forward. And a big part of that is just letting yourself follow the energy of the non-rational energy of people, places, experiences where you literally feel your body full of an expansive alive energy and getting good at following that is the ultimate tracking.

    11. TFTim Ferriss54:36

        Full aliveness. Another Josh-ism. [laughs] Fully alive. Jim Detmer too, who's also been on the podcast.

    12. BVBoyd Varty54:42

        Fully alive. Yeah.

    13. TFTim Ferriss54:43

        A mutual friend of ours. Let's, as promised, we're gonna kind of hop between these tracks. I've got lunch and Toby Pheasant. Where do you want to go? Or we could, or we could choose option C if there's another one that comes to

18. 54:55 – 1:03:29

    Toby Pheasant and the great black mamba escape.

    1. TFTim Ferriss54:55

       mind.

    2. BVBoyd Varty54:55

       Well, let me tell you about my friend Toby and I. Um, so Toby was an Englishman and I'm sure he won't mind me telling the story to millions of people, but [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss55:07

       [laughs]

    4. BVBoyd Varty55:08

       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 kind of general hand around the camp. And so 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, you know, 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 kind of, like, errand around the camp. And one day, Toby and I [laughs] one day Toby and I were sitting down at the staff canteen and a radio call in that some guests had reported that they had seen a snake in their room. And so myself and another ranger said, "Okay, we'll go handle this." And Toby said, "Guys, do you mind if I come along?" I said, "Toby, come with us." And so we jumped into a golf cart, which sort of is how people get around in the back of house of the reserve. We jumped into a golf cart, and we went up to the ranger's room to fetch our snake catching stick, which had picked up the name 50/50 because it-

    5. TFTim Ferriss56:25

       [laughs]

    6. BVBoyd Varty56:25

       ... was a bit of a Heath Robinson. It was a piece of PV, [laughs] piece of PVC pipe that someone had run a, a lamp cord through that had made a kind of noose. And the way that it worked is you would get the, the loop at the end of the stick around and then you would pull on the cord and it technically it should tighten up and catch the snake in the noose. But it was a little bit niggly in certain places. Sometimes it wouldn't close all the way, so it had picked up the nickname 50/50.

    7. TFTim Ferriss56:50

       [laughs]

    8. BVBoyd Varty56:50

       So we grabbed 50/50 and a big kind of like black dustbin, and we jump into the golf cart, and we drive down to the room. Toby's hanging on the back of the vehicle. We get down to the room, and there are two German guests who are looking somewhat shocked, and I'm gonna be honest with you, Tim, I gave them my most powerful, "Don't worry. I'm here now."

    9. TFTim Ferriss57:14

       [laughs]

    10. BVBoyd Varty57:15

        "The safari guide of the year has arrived. You, you don't need to worry. I'm gonna go in there and sort the situation out." And so they were left standing at the door, and myself and Toby and the other guide went in. And we were expecting to ... It's very rare to have a snake in a room, but sometimes a little house snake or a green variegated bush snake will get in. So we're walking around and I noticed a suitcase on the rack, a sort of a, an empty suitcase, and I flipped the lid open, and what rose out of the suitcase was one of the biggest black mambas I've ever seen in my life.

    11. TFTim Ferriss57:46

        [laughs]

    12. BVBoyd Varty57:47

        It kind of levitated out of the case.

    13. TFTim Ferriss57:49

        You wanna explain why that isn't your garden variety gardener snake? This is [laughs]

    14. BVBoyd Varty57:53

        A black mamba is, it not only is an extremely venomous snake, but it is highly mobile and very difficult to handle in a confined space.

    15. TFTim Ferriss58:01

        [laughs]

    16. BVBoyd Varty58:02

        And if it bites you, you die quickly.

    17. TFTim Ferriss58:04

        [laughs]

    18. BVBoyd Varty58:04

        So myself and Toby and the other guide, we went for the door at the same time, and I remember the three of us kind of jammed in it as we were trying to exit the room at high speed.

    19. TFTim Ferriss58:13

        [laughs] The Three Stooges.

    20. BVBoyd Varty58:14

        And I, [laughs] might have reached forward to grab their faces to pull myself through.

    21. TFTim Ferriss58:18

        [laughs]

    22. BVBoyd Varty58:19

        We got outside, and I said to the Germans, "There's a big snake in there." And they said, "Yeah, we told you."

    23. TFTim Ferriss58:24

        [laughs]

    24. BVBoyd Varty58:27

        And so now we're faced with a bit of a dilemma, and they're watching us, so we decide, no, okay, we know what we're dealing with now, we must go back in. And so we make our way back in, and now we are tiptoeing around the room, and we're flipping up cushions, and we're pulling bedspreads off, and what the Germans see standing outside is they see, like, a pillow fly out the room because you don't wanna lift it slowly. You wanna kinda, like, rip it open and see what's under it. Then they see a chair fly out. Then they see, like, a duvet come flying past them. Toby at this stage has positioned himself for maximum discomfort. He's close enough to be in the way, but he's not close enough to be fully helpful.

    25. TFTim Ferriss59:04

        [laughs]

    26. BVBoyd Varty59:05

        And he's giving us a running commentary on the dangers of black mambas. He's saying, "If they bite you, you will die instantly. Their venom, [laughs] their venom is deadly in tiny quantities." I'm like, "Toby, you are not helping the situation. Can you please shut up?"

    27. TFTim Ferriss59:20

        [laughs]

    28. BVBoyd Varty59:21

        And I remember at one stage we pulled the duvet cover off the bed, and the bed had an electric blanket on it, and the cable of the electric blanket came off, and it made, like, a snake-like motion, and all of us, like, reared backwards. And eventually we saw the snake under the bed, and my friend managed to get 50/50 down there, and he gripped the mamba. Now, what you normally wanna do is you wanna 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 two and a half meter snake.

    29. TFTim Ferriss59:51

        Oh, damn.

    30. BVBoyd Varty59:51

        And so that mamba went full propeller on the end of the snake catching stick. It was, like, whipping around, and they, part of them is they've got this incredible elastic, powerful body. So it was, like, a lot of snake whipping around on the end of the stick, and then it turned, and it curled its way up the stick, but 50/50 held it, and eventually its head was about that far from my friend's hand, but he had it. We had it firmly.
19. 1:03:29 – 1:07:01

    Training for persistence hunting using Bushman Great Dance wisdom.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:03:30

       So just to, to talk about calibrating danger differently. You like running. Alex, also master tracker, likes running, and you guys [laughs] just go running outside of the gates, right? You just go for a long, nice run. Now, typically, for instance, if you run into a bear or a wolf or a big cat, you don't wanna run. Like, run is what prey do, [laughs] right?

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:03:57

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:03:57

       This is a strong prey drive signal. But you guys were training very intensely for what? Can you talk about this?

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:04:08

       Yeah, we can.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:04:09

       Yeah, this is fucking wild. And in any case, I'll let you introduce it because it's, it's just, it's, it's so on some levels hard to believe and hard to envision also.

    6. BVBoyd Varty1:04:22

       You mean persistence?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:04:23

       Yes, I do.

    8. BVBoyd Varty1:04:25

       My friend Alex is one of the best trackers in the world, in my opinion. He's authored many books on it. He's the founder of the Tracker Academy, 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's done more to teach, train, and preserve tracking than anyone else. And what started our journey to be with the Bushmen people in the Kalahari was he went up and he ended up spending a few days with a group of Bushmen. There's a lot of different names. Some people refer to them as the San people. They asked us to call them Bushmen. They said, "We are the Bushmen people. Please call us Bushmen." So that's how I will refer to them. And during that time with them, he was blown away by the ecological intelligence of this group of people. These guys tracked a porcupine one day for, like, 10 kilometers. They would s- 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, "Who's gonna keep watch?" And they were like actually sort of perturbed by this. They would say, "Well, why would we need to keep watch?" And this is in a full-on wilderness area. Alex said, "Well, what if an animal comes?" And they're like, "An animal will never come here without us not being able to feel it." And literally if, if a hyena walks by or something, one of them will wake up. So they, they're attuned at a, 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, as a group, an expedition, and we would assess the skills that were still kind of alive and functioning. We wanted to get a sense of what was possible still and what, what people still knew how to do because the Bushmen people are probably the most persecuted native people on the planet. You know, they've been displaced from everywhere. And so it was to go and say, like, has their initial tracking knowledge been lost or, you know, what, what still exists? So that was what initially called us to the area. And we spent a few days starting to assess that process, and it was quite remarkable because Bushmen people now are living in a very interesting way. They mostly live in the towns. They've been pushed off a lot of their land, and they do various jobs in farm labor, et cetera. The governments of some of the Southern African countries provide a stipend of, like, 400, you know, dollars or pula or rand.

20. 1:07:01 – 1:09:08

    The desert as storehouse: Abundance psychology in action.

    1. BVBoyd Varty1:07:01

       So you would think that a lot of the, the indigenous skills had been lost 'cause a lot of people are on this kind of like, it's not the dole, but it's like a government supplement. And yet about 70% of the food that most Bushman communities are still getting, they're gathering from the desert. And so they're living in this kind of urban way, and yet underneath the surface, if you, if you connect in, there's still this way that they are living in tune with the desert. One thing about the Bushman people is that they never stored food, unlike other, you know, various tribes who would have like a storehouse where they kept food. To them, the desert is their storehouse, which is quite an amazing idea. There's just like, there's no sense of needing to hoard or store because it's an abundance psychology that everything you need is there.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:07:49

       And when you say desert, just for people who are trying to conjure an image, I mean, it's desert [laughs] . It is kind of-

    3. BVBoyd Varty1:07:54

       Yeah

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:07:55

       ... like a little scraggly bush here or there, at least based on the video I've seen. But it's, it's very much a desert environment.

    5. BVBoyd Varty1:08:01

       There's areas where it's like semi-arid, where you have this, these harsh bushes, and then there's other places where you are in red beach sand. It would be akin to walking on the beach, it's so sandy. There's places where ground squirrels have these huge colonies, so as you walk, you fall down 'cause the, the ground underneath has been hollowed out, so it can be very, very tough operating there. 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'll cut a section of it, everyone will eat some of it, and then they will replant it back into the desert, and they will... They'll never take a whole piece of food. They'll take a portion of it, and then they'll put it back under the soil to grow. And walking, particularly with the women as they gather, I had this feeling that we could have been, you know, 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.

21. 1:09:08 – 1:13:02

    Persistence hunt mechanics: Heat, time, and the animal's energy transfer.

    1. BVBoyd Varty1:09:08

       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 has... There's 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. 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're tracking at a run. Now, that can be easy in parts of the desert, but man, it is not easy at midday in the de- I thought it would be easier in desert sand. It's not easy because as the sun gets to 12 o'clock, which is when you wanna be doing it at peak heat, it throws no contrast onto the ground.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:10:07

       I was gonna say, no shadows from anything.

    3. BVBoyd Varty1:10:08

       No shadows. We were invited to be a part of this, and, you know, this is something that... And we were seeing, you know, is, is this still alive? Is this... Who knows how to do this?

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:10:20

       And just to throw some numbers out there, if you can indulge people with Fahrenheit. Well, give people Celsius and Fahrenheit if, if that's possible. That's asking a lot, but when we're talking about a persistence hunt for the Bushmen, what type of distances or time are we talking about? Like, how long does it take? And then what kind of temperatures are we talking about?

    5. BVBoyd Varty1:10:43

       You know, Tim, it's, it's really interesting 'cause I think in the one that Craig Foster filmed, it was around 30 kilometers over about five or six hours, something like that.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:10:54

       Mm-hmm.

    7. BVBoyd Varty1:10:55

       But what I, what I discovered being there is that there's this incredible equation, and the equation is, is heat on one axis and time on the other. So as the heat climbs, the amount of time reduces.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:11:09

       The distance goes down. Yeah, right.

    9. BVBoyd Varty1:11:11

       The distance reduces. But then there's also an interesting factor, which is what type of season has it been? Has it been, you know, dry for a few seasons in a row, or have you had a rainy season, because the, the condition of the animal has a, a huge effect.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:11:25

        Mm.

    11. BVBoyd Varty1:11:26

        So one thing that happened while we were there is that they, they're on the back end of a number of years of droughts, and so that was a big kind of factor. So that's all going on and what emerged is that we were invited to be a part of this, but it hadn't been done in a very, very long time. And so there was some discussion around who knows how to do it and w- like whether it's, it's still alive. People who we had asked around had said, "No, no one does that anymore." The, the older generation who knew how to do it was lost. 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, it, to the Bushman people, it's called the Great Dance.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:12:08

        That's the name of the doc, isn't it?

    13. BVBoyd Varty1:12:10

        Yeah.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:12:11

        The Great Dance.

    15. BVBoyd Varty1:12:11

        It's a spirit practice.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:12:12

        Yeah. Craig Foster, just for people who are like, "Do I know that name?" My Octopus Teacher was his most famous work.

    17. BVBoyd Varty1:12:20

        It's a great dance because there's a tremendous act of, of faith in it, and it's part of the mythology and the spirituality of the Bushman people because it is, it involves being engaged with the animal at a very deep level and transferring the animal's energy to you. That is ultimately what happens. So you are moving with the animal, you're tracking it, you're running it, and it, and you are with s- the spirit of that animal, and you are with spirit itself. And then spirit is, as you are closing in on the animal, it's giving its energy to you. And the final act of giving from great spirit and from the spirit of that animal is the actual killing.

22. 1:13:02 – 1:19:45

    Running into ceremony: 47 degrees and letting the body know.

    1. BVBoyd Varty1:13:02

       And one thing that'll happen is as guys are involved in it, they won't... It's a very funny superstition, but it's symbolic. They won't jump over a log because if you jump over a log- You are extending energy and you're pushing energy back at the animal, whereas actually you want to be drawing the animal's energy to you.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:13:20

       Mm.

    3. BVBoyd Varty1:13:21

       So there's this very interesting rhythm that guys get into. So anyway, we go out and we- we're looking for tracks in this huge area, and there's, there's no tracks, there's no tracks, and the energy of, of everything is kind of like dialed down. And, you know, there's like, there's one guy wearing a Barcelona FC T-shirt, there's one guy in full traditional gear. It's a full mix. It's not out of some idealized sense of how this is done. It's like, you know, game time, real life situation. And then we come onto a herd of kudus fresh tracks.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:13:53

       What is a kudu? Can you paint a picture?

    5. BVBoyd Varty1:13:55

       It's a very tall, regal antelope, and it has kind of large spiraling horns. Kudus, they're a desert-adapted antelope. A kudu is not that well adapted for the desert. So there are certain animals that you wouldn't try and do this with because they're just too adapted to the desert. For example, a gemsbok, literally the way that it breathes, it cools air through its nose. Kudus are not adapted, so they're, they're susceptible to the heat. 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 like 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've 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. And when you see these guys switch into hunting energy, you feel this energy that is in every single one of us, but we never, we never need, we never have access... We don't access it 'cause we don't need it. And suddenly the first guy shifts into a dog trot. He starts kind of 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, 'cause the herd quickly breaks and a single kudu breaks away. That's the weakest one. So the guys are onto that one. Then you have to, you have to navigate, you have to run. There, there, there's such an equation. You have to have a sense of where you're going. And all of this together, at a certain point, it becomes this incredible act of faith because you have to fully commit. I am running into that desert, I'm running away from water, I'm going in that direction, and I don't really know what the outcome's gonna be. I don't know the condition of this animal. I don't know the heat. I don't know the terrain. I'm-- I've gotta just go and follow. So it becomes a real act of faith. And, and, [chuckles] and as I say, like, you're running away from water in the desert, and that can be a big factor, and you don't know how far you're going.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:16:07

       And it's hot. [laughs]

    7. BVBoyd Varty1:16:09

       Yeah. On the day we did it, I don't know what the Fahrenheit is, but it was 47 degrees-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:16:14

       Oh my gosh

    9. BVBoyd Varty1:16:14

       ... when we started.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:16:15

        Yeah, that's hot.

    11. BVBoyd Varty1:16:16

        And so at the front of that group, Tim, there's an energy that develops amongst that group of hunters, and I can tell you that if you drop out of it, it's like a, it's kind of like a peloton. If you, if you fall out of it, you will never catch that group again. But if you find yourself in it, it's almost like you can ride the energy of the group. And so how would I describe it? It's kind of like a ceremony. You just, you don't know what's gonna happen once you're in it. And so I managed to find myself on this occasion in the center of the group, and these guys were tracking so fast and they're running. And as a group, if the animal cuts one way, someone on the left will pick up the track, and as it cuts to the other way, s- someone else will cut onto it. So they're working as a team. But as you run, you're also dropping people 'cause the heat is building too much and it's, it's just so intense. [laughs] And then also people are going into different psychological states. So one of the Bushmen 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.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:17:25

        [laughs]

    13. BVBoyd Varty1:17:26

        I was in my head and I was thinking to myself, like, "It's too hot, you know, I'm gonna die of heatstroke." There was this voice running, "This is-- We're going too far. We're not gonna get, find our way back. I'm gonna get separated from these guys too far out. There's no water." It was just this, just total neurosis. 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't go anymore. It was weird because it's not often that you... I mean, great athletes talk about this, which I am not, but there's kind of like you're reaching for a place and athletes, some athletes know how to get to that place. And I felt myself go through the layer of mind neurosis and let go into, like, I'm just gonna let my body do what it knows to do. 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. And you're just like, you're glowing red. The guys are tracking. At one stage, I found myself on the front of the track, and I was... You can feel the animal moving up ahead of you, and you have to keep moving. You have to keep it moving. And then you'll get a glimpse of the, we got a glimpse of the kudu, and then it disappeared for another 40 minutes, and we're just on the tracks. Then we 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.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:19:27

        [laughs]

    15. BVBoyd Varty1:19:28

        And what had happened is the kudu had run in a dogleg, 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's quite amazing to, to witness

23. 1:19:45 – 1:25:45

    The kudu gives itself: Profound respect at the edge of survival.

    1. BVBoyd Varty1:19:45

       it, and then eventually the animal is so tired that it literally just stops, and it gives itself to the hunter. And those moments where the animal will run no more and the Bushman's spirit, there is something, there is something so profound about it because you can't be there and not be in, 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, you're not strolling down the meat section at Whole Foods. You, you are right on the coal face of what it means to take life and to take the energy of another creature. And after the animal goes down, they put sand on it, which is symbolic of a blessing onto the animal and thanking the animal for what it has given them. When you eventually emerge out of that energy, it could have been one hour, it could have been 10 hours, you're in such a different psychological space, and you have been involved in an energetic that is totally primal, and that is, it's ceremonial. There's no other way to describe it. You are, you are in a current of energy from some, from the earth.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:20:58

       Hmm. That particular kudu, how much would you guess it weighed? Any idea?

    3. BVBoyd Varty1:21:03

       Probably around the 180kg mark.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:21:08

       Oh, that's a big boy. Yeah.

    5. BVBoyd Varty1:21:10

       Yeah.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:21:11

       Okay.

    7. BVBoyd Varty1:21:11

       I, I would need to check that.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:21:12

       Yeah, 400-ish pounds.

    9. BVBoyd Varty1:21:14

       A little bit less than 400 maybe. When it's cut up, every single piece of that animal is taken and, and eaten.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:21:21

        Mm-hmm.

    11. BVBoyd Varty1:21:22

        From the time the guys started working on the carcass, it must have been 15 minutes to-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:21:26

        Wow, that's fast

    13. BVBoyd Varty1:21:27

        ... every single piece of that animal.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:21:30

        And then how are they, are they just carrying it on shoulders? I mean, how are you guys actually getting that back to camp?

    15. BVBoyd Varty1:21:35

        You put the haunches on your, like, all different array-

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:21:39

        Mm-hmm

    17. BVBoyd Varty1:21:39

        ... of carries, and everyone walks it out. And then you've got still obviously got a long way to go from there.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:21:44

        What happens when you guys get back to home base?

    19. BVBoyd Varty1:21:47

        Well, what was amazing about it is there was a strong sense of pride amongst the hunters. They hadn't 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, there was a beautiful energy to it, and then back at camp, there was ... It's just immediately that food starts to get eaten.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:22:13

        Yeah, I bet. [laughs]

    21. BVBoyd Varty1:22:15

        What I came away with is that if you were to look at Bushman culture now, on the surface, it appears very diffuse, but the actual skills are very much alive, and they, they're simmering just under the surface. Like, this incredible ecological knowledge of how to live in harmony with the desert. And if, if AI does wipe us all out, I'm pretty sure that the Bushman people will just walk back into the storehouse of the desert and be really, really comfortable there.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:22:42

        [laughs] Yeah. If you wanna see modern polite behavior disintegrate very quickly, just go to a place like San Francisco. I remember the power went out for two days, two and a half days, and people were very, very civil in the beginning and walking around the street greeting one another, and then people realize their food is gonna thaw, their food is gonna spoil. [laughs]

    23. BVBoyd Varty1:23:05

        Yeah.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:23:06

        And, and agitation and aggression start to percolate very, very, very quickly because people don't know what to do.

    25. BVBoyd Varty1:23:14

        No.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:23:15

        They have no idea what to do if the basic architecture of convenience is removed.

    27. BVBoyd Varty1:23:20

        I've thought about it a lot, and I think that, you know, all the things you 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'll be a Y junction. Some people will go into survival of the fittest, and then others will move into states of collaboration for, like, good reason, protection, food, safety. So there'll be like, it'll be interesting to see how it breaks down.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:23:49

        [laughs]

    29. BVBoyd Varty1:23:49

        You can get into some good prepper stuff.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:23:51

        Exactly. [laughs] Just pro tip, make sure you have water. Water is number one. You're gonna need water a lot sooner than you're gonna need canned lentils.
24. 1:25:45 – 1:27:49

    Seeking the wild man: Access to the full spectrum of presence.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:25:45

       menu.

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:25:45

       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. Like, I've 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'm 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... So, like, in my definition of presence would be access to the moment. And particularly now working in a lot of these men's groups, the idea of conjuring the wild man, it's wildness in the sense that it is in tune with life force, but it is also wildness in that it is access to the moment. And what I mean by that is to have your f- 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't know how to show up in this moment?

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:27:45

       Mm-hmm.

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:27:46

       And so that's what that exploration has become primarily about.

25. 1:27:49 – 1:31:26

    Context and discernment: Armor in cities, openness in wild spaces.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:27:49

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

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:28:27

       Mm-hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:28:28

       A feeling of like collective cauterization, if that's a word. But just people have dropped down walls, and I put on sort of a protective 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.

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:28:48

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:28:48

       Right? So whether I wanted to be open or not, I, I don't think it would be good for me necessarily-

    6. BVBoyd Varty1:28:53

       Mm-hmm

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:28:54

       ... in New York City and most places to have that level of kind of openness, right? So I s- I do spend a lot of time in cities. I find cities exciting, but I block out, you know, a few weeks of the year where I'm just completely off the grid, and hopefully at the very least keeping these sensitivities from atrophying too horribly, right? Like I'm working the muscle in these blocks of time that I, that I put out. There are other people, of course, who just live in a more peaceful perhaps environment that allows for this type of exploration and expression and experience, right? And it doesn't need to be the middle of South Africa. It doesn't need to be in the middle of the mountains of Montana. It could just be in a peaceful suburb. [laughs] It doesn't need to be... Or in a like a chiller city than New York City potentially. How do you think about this for yourself?

    8. BVBoyd Varty1:29:49

       I think about it probably through discernment. Like I think that it's wise to, to be somewhat armored in the environments you're describing. But what I see in groups now a lot, this has become the core thing, is I see particularly in men's groups a desire to be more available, you know? But actually not knowing how to, not having the, the access and the literacy to know what that would even look like. But now you don't want to go into extreme tenderness, you know, in the middle of New York City. You, 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.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:30:31

       Mm-hmm.

    10. BVBoyd Varty1:30:32

        And you wanna know what has kept you out of that, which would usually be some kind of conditioned response, something that you learned to do, a way you learned to freeze or shut down when things became overwhelming. And then you want to figure out how to develop more options for yourself in that moment. Trauma to me is freezing, right? Anytime you've been foist into some kind of traumatic situation, it's characterized by a reduction of options.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:31:02

        Mm-hmm.

    12. BVBoyd Varty1:31:02

        And so in order to cultivate more presence, one is you have to be present to the fact that you're frozen and actually be able to feel like, okay, in this moment I want, I wanna be more connected but I don't know how. So first to be present to that, and then second to start to figure out what, what other choices would look like.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:31:20

        Mm-hmm.

    14. BVBoyd Varty1:31:21

        And literally other things you could do in that moment in, to move out of the frozen

26. 1:31:26 – 1:36:20

    Men need men: Collective exploration around the fire.

    1. BVBoyd Varty1:31:26

       state. And that's where I think the Men need other men. Uh, then the wild man is somewhat a collective exploration, men being with men, particularly in wild places, that it just naturally starts to emerge. You don't have to work at it too hard, and it doesn't have to turn into a drum circle. If you take a bunch of guys out into a natural wild place, their psyche starts to relate to that wild place and they start saying, "I, I can't tell you why. It's intangible, it's energetic, but something about this has something to do with me. 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 out here. I can feel myself." And then the conversation starts to open and you're able to start to say like, "Okay, where are the places where we run into blockage? And if we want to be wild, we need access to the moment." Just like in the way that an, an innocent animal has access to, it knows what to do in any given situation. Like leopards are not in their heads. If they wanna be aggressive, they're aggressive. If they're ca- caring for their young, they're caring for their young. If they need to set a territory, they do it. It, it flows out of them. And so that, creating spaces in which that can naturally start to occur has become really interesting to me.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:32:48

       How do you think about... Well, side note for people, I don't know why this popped into my head, but if you're like, "Man, I'm never gonna see a leopard," I was like, you can get a little whiff of leopard if you go to the movie theater and the popcorn is burnt.

    3. BVBoyd Varty1:33:01

       [laughs]

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:33:02

       It smells like leopard urine. Uh, so that's just a, just if you wanna take a big, big inhale.

    5. BVBoyd Varty1:33:08

       When leopards mark their territory, they spray and it has the almost exact scent of popcorn.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:33:12

       [laughs] Yeah. It's really wild. I remember I was like, I was like, "Nah, that's not possible." And then we were driving at one point, and I think it might, maybe it was Sersant, but one of the, one of the trackers that we were with just like held up a hand to stop the car and I was like, "Holy shit. There it is. I feel like I'm sitting in the movie theater. That's crazy." In any case, I'll leave that there. But what do you think the trappings of some personal development or men's groups are? And the reason I ask, and this, this is not a strong position I'm taking, but it's just a thought, is that there are many side effects and many benefits too of a highly individualistic society.

    7. BVBoyd Varty1:33:50

       Mm-hmm.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:33:50

       Right? So if you, in the case of the US, you take this Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism, this lionizing of the, the self-sufficient independent person. There's a lot of production that can come from that, right? Like productivity. But there are, there is, is frequently some degree of collateral damage and from a collective perspective, and that's, that's not too woo woo. Like collective could just mean like in your family, [laughs] right? Like if you, if you trained yourself to be sort of a cold-blooded business killer with blinders on, and that's the gear you learn to use, a six gear. If you don't have some degree of flexibility, then you're very good, which is very common. This applies to, I think, men in a lot of fields. Women probably too, but I think especially men. Compartmentalization. So when you're able to like increase your pain threshold, compartmentalize certain things, lock certain things away, can make you very, very, very effective as a performer.

    9. BVBoyd Varty1:34:48

       Mm-hmm.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:34:48

        But in an interpersonal respect, it can be compromised. Okay. The reason I'm bringing all this up is that I think about, say, let's just take for example, like men who want more access to different states and sensitivities, and I'm like, "Okay, well, why do they want that?" Well, they might want it because they want to be able to better listen and interact with their partner.

    11. BVBoyd Varty1:35:11

        Mm-hmm.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:35:11

        Right? And just for the sake of argument, let's say that's a female partner. And I'm like, "Okay, well, I agree with that," right? This has been one of my homework assignments for the last two decades.

    13. BVBoyd Varty1:35:20

        [laughs]

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:35:20

        Is getting better at conflict de-escalation, which I never had a good model for.

    15. BVBoyd Varty1:35:24

        Mm-hmm.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:35:24

        I've made a lot of progress, more work to be done. But there's 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.

    17. BVBoyd Varty1:35:44

        Mm-hmm.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:35:45

        So it's actually we need more community solutions where it's like, okay, look, if you expect your man to be just like one of your girlfriends that you're gonna have a chat with, like you got the wrong animal probably, right?

    19. BVBoyd Varty1:35:55

        Mm-hmm.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:35:55

        And then if the, the dude is like, "Why can't you just be a dude? Let's be dudes." It's like, well, maybe you just have the [laughs] you got the wrong animal. Which is part of the reason why I block out for these weeks when I do these trips. They're almost always all, all-men trips.

    21. BVBoyd Varty1:36:08

        Yeah.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:36:08

        Right? Because that's, that type of experience in modern day, I think is largely absent or disallowed outside of maybe a few sports context.

27. 1:36:20 – 1:39:01

    Relationship as practice: Moving from romantic myth to active work.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:36:20

       And similarly, if, if a couple is in isolation, right? And putting aside the child-rearing aspect of this and the challenges that entails. I suppose this is very meandering, but I haven't verbalized this before. To what extent do you feel like personal development for, let's just take the men's group as an example, should focus on the individual and that kind of access versus trying to figure out some like structural solutions and scheduling and blocking things out so that they have access to more people outside of their partner. Does that make sense?

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:36:53

       Yeah. I think it does. I think there's steps to it. I think the first step is both partners developing more literacy away from the partnership. So I think it's first work in the I.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:37:07

       Mm.

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:37:08

       There's an inevitability and a necessity to that. Then once you start to get more skills in the I, you wanna bring that to the we.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:37:19

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BVBoyd Varty1:37:20

       And you want to start to practice. And I, I actually think that one of the issues with relationship is that our model for it is still like, you know, built on the romantic traditions. And it's like you're gonna fall in love and then, you know, here's this beautiful thing. Whereas relationship to me now is way more an active practice space. But you have to be working yourself and together. So those two things have to go together at some stage. The problem is, is that you need your blind spots revealed, and you need 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.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:38:06

       Mm-hmm.

    8. BVBoyd Varty1:38:06

       Like ve- very often you need something to a- 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, and then I think hopefully what starts to emerge out of that is there's 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's where you could see s- like systemic models for change.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:38:46

       Mm-hmm.

    10. BVBoyd Varty1:38:47

        But I think men-- masculine essence needs other men to liberate itself more, and same with feminine essence needs other women to liberate itself more. And then to bring those two together with more awareness becomes part of the, the, the funness of the game, I think.

28. 1:39:01 – 1:44:41

    Dick jokes and raft building: The indirect work that does heavy lifting.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:39:01

       Look, you know I'm a junkie for personal development stuff, so I'm kinda like, I feel like I'm in an AA meeting for, like, personal development addicts. I'll tell just a brief story. So on this Montana trip, keeping in mind I keep using that example because it's most recent, but this is, I'd say at least three or four times a year, there's a trip of some type with guys. And in this case, a small group, it's like four or five guys. And at one point we're sitting around a fire at night just rapping and talking, and talking, and talking. Then one of the guys said, he's like, "I just figured out why fire is so important for guys." And we're like, "Why is that?" And he goes, "Because we don't have to make eye contact. We just look at the fire-"

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:39:41

       Yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:39:41

       ... "and we can have all these really deep conversations." Whereas in most circumstances, like if you're staring deeply into another guy's eyes, it's kind of an aggressive... It's just this ingrained kind of aggressive, defensive dynamic.

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:39:54

       If you stare in someone's eyes, you're gonna make out or, or kill each other.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:39:58

       Yeah. Right. So [laughs]

    6. BVBoyd Varty1:39:59

       You know that old joke like you say to your buddy, "Hey, do you wanna go and sit by the lake and talk for six hours?" It's like-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:40:07

       Yeah. [chuckles]

    8. BVBoyd Varty1:40:07

       ... "No." It's like, "Do you wanna go fishing?" "Yeah, let's do that." [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:40:10

       Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. Right. Exactly. Harkening back to what you said about like don't try too hard.

    10. BVBoyd Varty1:40:16

        Yeah.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:40:16

        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 that both the necessity of and the insufficiency of direct head-on personal work-

    12. BVBoyd Varty1:40:31

        Mm-hmm

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:40:32

        ... I wonder what the ratio is between sort of deliberate like microscope work, so to speak, and like the indirect work. This is gonna sound really crass, which is like building a raft and going fishing, which we did with like handmade lures and all this stuff while telling like fart and dick jokes, right? [chuckles] It's like it doesn't seem serious. Like no one would put that in a book and be like, "Okay, step number one, like come up with three of your favorite dick jokes." It's not gonna be in any [chuckles] self-help book. But nonetheless, it seems to do a lot of lifting.

    14. BVBoyd Varty1:41:09

        Oh, yeah.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:41:09

        And there's the bonding. And the older I get, the more I think that it's 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's probably to achieve like some emotional state to improve the quality of our quality of life and the quality of life of, say, our family members around us. Okay. Well, like having, in the case of these trips that I'm describing, right, some guy time where you're not necessarily... I mean, there is some goofing off, but there's generally shared projects and like shared suffering [chuckles] of some type, and a lot of exertion. S- like you said, it's like, "Yeah, let's sit by the lake and talk for six hours." "No, thanks."

    16. BVBoyd Varty1:41:52

        Yeah.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:41:52

        "But let's go fishing, and by the way, kind of do the same thing." "Okay, great. Let's do it." That the answer is like it's the relationship, stupid, right? And the content is, is secondary to like the spending of time in a particular way.

    18. BVBoyd Varty1:42:05

        A hundred percent. And you don't have to work hard.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:42:09

        Yeah.

    20. BVBoyd Varty1:42:09

        Like once you get there, 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 have, and can make reads, then you don't have to club it. You know, you can mostly be talking shit floating down the river. But then occasionally, with a little bit of context, someone can say, "Hey, here's what I see you being blind to."

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:42:35

        Mm-hmm.

    22. BVBoyd Varty1:42:35

        "You can tell me to fuck off. You can take it on board. You can... It, it can go any way, but here's, here's how I notice you show up. Do you know that you do that?" Now, if you just try and weigh in on that, it's like, "Fuck you. Leave me alone." But if you've had some time together doing some real stuff, like there's an opening there that I found the rate of download to be incredibly high.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:42:58

        Yeah.

    24. BVBoyd Varty1:42:59

        And everyone, the community piece is that no one has all the answers. Personal development work for personal development work's sake is just fucking self-indulgent. But once you add in the dynamic of relationship, as you said, then there's love and then there's care. And it's like, you know, I'm-- what I'm saying to you is coming out of care. It's coming out of a piece of my journey. And what you find is everyone has a piece for everyone then. The community is more intelligent than the individual, and that's where the, the major unlocks start to have where someone who's not even in the role of facilitator or leader says, "Hey, you know, when there's a way in which you show up that makes me Like, not feel like I can trust you

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:43:43

        Mm-hmm

    26. BVBoyd Varty1:43:43

        And, and I'm just telling you that by way of feedback. I don't know whether you wanna take that on board or not. You know, things start to happen

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:43:51

        Mm-hmm

    28. BVBoyd Varty1:43:51

        And if you've r- rafted a river together, you tend to take more than, than you would just jettison

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:43:57

        With the example that you just gave, there are lots of ways to communicate that.

    30. BVBoyd Varty1:44:00

        Yeah
29. 1:44:41 – 1:54:48

    Lunch the baboon: Hand lotion, bloody handprints, and royal delays.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:44:41

       No.

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:44:41

       Let me tell you about Lunch.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:44:42

       [laughs]

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:44:44

       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.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:44:53

       Yeah.

    6. BVBoyd Varty1:44:53

       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, ga-ga-ga-ga-ga. And every time that was... it was being forced from the outside. Every time the rock would slide and the door would open a little bit more. And then this furry hand came in and gripped the handle, and then Lunch burst into the kitchen. And he walked across to the counter where there was a cake, and he picked up the cake and walked off on his hind legs holding the cake in his hands.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:45:24

       [laughs] And just for people who don't have a picture of a baboon, I mean, I find those things pretty fucking terrifying.

    8. BVBoyd Varty1:45:31

       A baboon is a formidable... He's like a three-foot muscular, hairy dude with long canines.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:45:38

       Yeah.

    10. BVBoyd Varty1:45:38

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

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:45:50

        [laughs]

    12. BVBoyd Varty1:45:51

        Then there's I know that you know. So it's like the first awareness is just, you know, I'm aware of you. Then it's I'm aware that you're aware of me.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:45:58

        Mm-hmm.

    14. BVBoyd Varty1:45:58

        That's like higher level. So sometimes I would walk through the camp and Lunch would be, like, involved in some kind of mischief. He would be breaking into a guest's 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, like, loitering around. Nothing to see here, just being a baboon in my natural environment.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:46:19

        [laughs]

    16. BVBoyd Varty1:46:20

        I remember the other day I was going through some notes on my desk and I found a, a minute from a meeting. And the literal minute was like, "We need to get new cro- crockery and cutlery for tree camp. Land Rover number eight needs to be repaired. His troop needs to fear our troop." [laughs] And basically it was like someone deciding that they needed to try and scare Lunch out of the camp. And so for a period of days I decided I was gonna, like, chivvy him out of the camp. And listen, it was elaborate 'cause 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.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:46:57

        [laughs]

    18. BVBoyd Varty1:46:58

        He was just, like, 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's Audi -

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:47:06

        [laughs]

    20. BVBoyd Varty1:47:06

        ... that was parked in the car park. And when I aimed the gun at him, he just lay flat against the Audi like, "I dare you."

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:47:12

        [laughs]

    22. BVBoyd Varty1:47:13

        So he was up to no good. Anyway, the one day I'm sitting in the office and the phone rings and my sister picks up the phone and she starts talking in that very intent way. She went, "Really? I can't believe that. Royalty. Yes, of course we can." And everyone in the room was like eavesdropping 'cause it sounded so intense. So she hangs up the phone and she says, "Boyd, a prince is coming to Londolozi." And this is like a tremendous amount of excitement. And there's like months and months of prep and setup to the arrival of the prince. And there's like endless amount of logistics. A satellite dish has to be put up so that the prince can stream certain sports games. There's a special chef that has to come in. There's a whole lot of things that need to come into the boutique so that there can be unique shopping experiences. At one stage there's talk of lengthening the runway so that a jet can land.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:48:07

        [laughs]

    24. BVBoyd Varty1:48:08

        We're going backwards and forwards and, you know, you liaise with these kind of like entourage liaisons. So there's like just... It's all happening. And eventually the day arrives that the prince is arriving. And we were quite pleased with ourselves 'cause we were on top of all of the logistics. A special face cream had been flown in.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:48:25

        [laughs]

    26. BVBoyd Varty1:48:26

        And I remember the first three or four planes that landed were just entourage and luggage.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:48:30

        [laughs]

    28. BVBoyd Varty1:48:31

        And then eventually the prince was coming in to land and Bronwyn said to me, my sister, she said, "Boyd, you need to run down to the room. Final thing we need to do, and you need to put these cold face cloths in the room." So I grab my radio and I run down to the suite, and as I'm running down the walkie-talkie's going off. "The prince is 10 minutes out, 10 minutes out. Prince has landed. He's now eight minutes out, eight minutes out." 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 kind of a lock area where there's 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, "It must just be that the housekeeping have left the door open." 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.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:49:27

        [laughs]

    30. BVBoyd Varty1:49:28

        And as he sees me and I block the doorway, he starts downing hand lotion.
30. 1:54:48 – 1:56:35

    Living amongst the animals: Warthog intelligence and leopard relationships.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:54:48

       Oh, Londolozi, protector of all things. Y- there have to be moments when you're like, "Ugh, I just wanna ... Could we just blast him off that rock and be done with Lunch?" [laughs]

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:54:59

       Yeah, it's amazing to live amongst the animals. The other day, I mean, the other day I was sitting watching a warthog. He was grazing up on the runway and then he tu- 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's making this little flush of green grass and literally he knows that's a good place to go and get some green grass. And so there's this thing about living close to the animals like that, that you notice there's an intelligence to it and it's almost like your community expands to include the trees and the animals and these unique personalities that you get to know and it's not just a random baboon but it's like that's Lunch and it's not just a random leopard but we know this leopard. She allows herself to be seen. We have a relationship with her and that's a very, very deep and, and beautiful way to live.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:56:04

       Yeah. And just to underscore what you just said about leopards, like if you see a leopard, that leopard is allowing you to see them. And if they want to vanish, even in short grass, snap of the fingers, they are gone. It's just-

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:56:19

       Gone

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:56:19

       ... beyond incredible to see that happen, where you're like-

    6. BVBoyd Varty1:56:23

       Yeah

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:56:23

       ... okay, they couldn't hide themselves if they wanted to. Like, the grass is too short, da, da, da. And then they turn back and they're like, "Eh, had enough of you guys," and boom, they're just completely invisible. It's, it's remarkable to see.

31. 1:56:35 – 1:57:53

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:56:35

       Boyd, anything you'd like to say before we wind to a close? Where can people find you? Where should people go to learn more about all things Boyd?

    2. BVBoyd Varty1:56:44

       Yeah, thanks Tim. People can go to boydvarty.com to find out about retreats and books, Cathedral of the Wild and Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life. That's the best place to figure out if you want to come on a safari or if you want to come to Africa, that's also a good way to do it.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:57:00

       Boyd Varty, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y.com. Good to see you, buddy. Thanks for making the time.

    4. BVBoyd Varty1:57:06

       Good to see you, man. Thanks so much for having me on.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:57:09

       Yeah, absolutely. And everybody listening, we will link to-- [laughs] I'm not sure exactly where we're gonna link to, but we'll link to some names and other things. We'll link to the, the highlight reel of Lunch the Baboon. I'm kidding. We'll 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. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary. Why not? It doesn't take a whole lot of extra effort, and the payoff is enormous. Kinder to others and also just a tad bit kinder to yourself, 'cause it goes both ways, and, uh, you can work those muscles on both sides. And thank you for tuning in

Episode duration: 1:58:14