Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Boyd Varty (@boyd_varty), the founder of Track Your Life. As a fourth-generation custodian of Londolozi Game Reserve, Boyd grew up with lions, leopards, snakes, and elephants and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the natural world. He is a lion tracker, storyteller, and literacy and wildlife activist. At the intersection of his two greatest passions, tracking and personal transformation, Boyd uses ancient wisdom to help people create a purpose-driven, meaningful life and to discover their most authentic, essential self. 

Boyd is a TED speaker, the author of Cathedral of the Wild and The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, and the host of the Track Your Life podcast. Using wilderness as a place for deep introspection and personal transformation, Boyd has taught his philosophy of “Tracking Your Life” to companies and individuals all over the world.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss: Boyd-O, good to see you.

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

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And I love your background since you have commandeered my recording office in Austin, it’s pretty surreal.

Boyd Varty: I’ve got to say, I like what you’ve done with the place. I might just pull in here for a few weeks.

Tim Ferriss: You know what? You’re welcome to.

Boyd Varty: It’s great to see you, man. I think the last time we were together, we were walking in a squall across the Cotswolds.

Tim Ferriss: That’s right, that’s right. Yes, we had our own semi-wilderness adventure. I mean, there was some wild there, there was some wild. More cows than I would tend to run into in your neck of the woods.

Boyd Varty: I was very impressed with your badger track. You did spot a badger track.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks. That is thanks to Boyd and Renias and Alex and all the rest of the actual tracking teachers. So let’s hop into it. Now, this is going to be a lot of improv jazz because I wanted to introduce people of course, if they have not heard episode one, which they should listen to, to your eclectic collection of stories. And I have a number of prompts. I do not have any idea what these allude to except for one. So we have JV, firefighting, lunch, Toby Pheasant, and then we have a number of others. Where would you like to start? Dealer’s choice?

Boyd Varty: Well, maybe we’ll start with something you don’t know about me, which is that I was the head of an elite firefighting unit for a period of time in my 20s. And I took over the team from a French Foreign Legionnaire who had some of the most incredible personal power you’ve ever seen in your life. When he would walk somewhere, there would literally be a 20 yard radius around him where he would project this aura of absolute confidence and intensity. And you just felt this is an incredibly capable person.

Tim Ferriss: And this is in South Africa?

Boyd Varty: This is in South Africa. We were part of a team called the Habitat Team. And our job was to do a number of things on the reserve. We had to fix roads, we had to mend fences, we had to make sure that animals were generally safe. We had a controlled burning program. And then we also had to fight fires in the case that you got a runaway fire. And when I took over from Chris, I was probably about 23. I was in the phase where as a family business, I was doing every job. I was the part-time marketing manager and sales manager. So I’d 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.

And I remember that I was so daunted by taking over from Chris that I had actually practiced his walk alone in my room a little bit to try and get the cadence and the presence right. And literally right off the bat, the first incident we had was, there’s a bit of a setup to it. The setup is that the monkeys had been generally attacking the buffet.

Tim Ferriss: These are the vervet monkeys?

Boyd Varty: 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, a paper mache sculpture of a life-size lion. And so they had bought it and in the late afternoons and around mealtimes, they would trot the paper mache lion out onto the front deck that overlooked the river where people were having food. And the monkeys would see it and they would alarm and stay away. And then the paper mache lion would be picked up and it would be put in the bar for storage. So literally day two, we have a small electrical fire breaks out on a socket in the gym. And my team get down there and we instantly realize that we can’t spray this out. We’ve got to shut the main power down.

So I send one of our team members, who is a guy by the name of Lucky [inaudible], he was named ironically because he was incredibly unlucky. He had in fact lost an eye in an incident in the bush. And the way that he handled this is he had bought a beanie and he had cut a single hole in the beanie and he pulled it down over his face. So he had a single viewpoint out of the center of the beanie with his one good eye. And he would rock around the place dressed like this. Anyway, I sent Lucky to shut the power down. So he ran to the bar where the switchboard was and he burst into a darkened bar with its hatches closed because it was like late afternoon, there was no one around. He hit the power and he turned to his left. And in the bar in the darkness was a lion.

Tim Ferriss: The paper mache lion.

Boyd Varty: The paper mache lion was in the bar. So we lost Lucky for about two and a half hours because to his mind, and valid in the bush, he saw a live lion in the bar and he just disappeared. So I realized we better get down to some training because I felt a certain amount of pressure to make sure that we maintained the standards of the French Foreign Legionnaire. So I decided we would get involved in a series of drills and we would keep ourselves at an elite standard. And the team was made up of, if you think about it, there was maybe like 10 guys. There was a headman by the name of Isaac [inaudible] who was just incredibly, also physical, maybe like 6’5, muscular guy. There was Lucky [inaudible] who was the tractor driver with his beanie on. There was myself doing my French Foreign Legionnaire walk. And we believed in ourselves, but we weren’t quite where we needed to be.

And so randomly in the afternoons I would set up opportunities for us to have drills. And so there was a small soccer field at the back of the camp, and I would go and get debris that was lying around. And at random times I would light a fire and then I would send out the call and there were all of these kind of calls. It was first like, “Stations, stations, 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 drive out, they would get into positions. And then I would scream, “Start the engines,” and all of these powerful generator engines on the back of the trailers would start. And then the fire would start to build. And I would scream, “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.

So anyway, the day after the incident with the paper mache lion, I set one of these fires and we get the fire going. And to be honest with you, I had some old thatch that had come off some of the roofs of the lodges. And I built quite a nice bonfire of thatch and it took off a little faster than I had initially expected. So we had quite a sizable fire right off the bat. Got on the radio, I screamed, “Stations, stations, stations.” The team scrambled. They got their gear on. “Positions, positions, positions.” The tractors came rolling in. I was thinking to myself, this is looking incredible. I was walking like a French Foreign Legionnaire around. I was giving commanding instructions. “Open the hoses. Spray, spray, spray.”

The hoses open and an absolute trickle of water comes out. By this time, a wind has picked up and the fire is now starting to get some wind under it. And it’s starting to look like actually this fire could get away from us. And so my way of handling the situation, because the pressure was now building, was to repeat all of the commands at a louder volume. “Station, station stations. Positions. Start the engines. Spray, spray, spray.” Still an absolute dribble of water. And it was at that moment that we realized that Lucky [inaudible] in the moment critique had managed to park the back tire of the trailer on the first part.

Tim Ferriss: Shit.

Boyd Varty: And he saw at the very same time I did, and he rolled forward. The problem was is that the pressure had now built up behind the kink in the hose. And when that hose finally filled with water, not only did it knock the hoseman out, but we totally lost control of it. It was flailing around like a deadly anaconda. The fire was now starting to get away from us. The headman who was meant to be spraying the fire was in a bleeding heap on the floor. And my French Foreign Legion walk was taking me absolutely nowhere. And that’s when I got my first lesson in what firefighting was actually about.

And in fact, it’s probably the lesson that stayed with me through all of this is that, when something is going that wrong, in the moment, you think to yourself, it can be quite devastating to your ego. It can be quite devastating to your leadership. But I’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. And somewhere beyond trying to do an impressive walk, if you can figure out how to — when literally, energy is moving upwards, start to create a slowness and a steadiness about your actions, you can start to actually do a kind of powerful, energetic jiu-jitsu on things. And so ever since that day, I’ve been focused on when the energy is climbing, trying to slow it down. So that’s in the category of things you don’t know about me.

Tim Ferriss: That is in the category of many things I don’t know about you, which is shocking. Shocking and 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 companies, Expedia, et cetera also said about leadership. This was not that long ago on the podcast.

The second thing that comes to mind is I really think somebody needs to write a scripted comedy show based on real life called Lando, just about all of these crazy stories. And I thought I would perhaps introduce a new character who would be on the Gilligan’s Island of Lando: JV. Do you want to introduce JV? How do you want to do that?

Boyd Varty: Well, just one comment on what you’re saying. I think a lot about the body of work that I’m involved in now and everything I’m interested in as story hunting. And one thing about — it’s about Londolozi but it’s not just that. It’s like any time you spend in the natural world, it is like a story-making machine. You can go out on the most simple walk into the woods and because it is both — how would I say it? The natural world is not just where meaning constellates. It is meaning in some fundamental way. And then incidences occur. Inevitably little things happen.

And one of my ideas is that storytelling is awareness. Actually what storytelling is is paying attention, and the natural world starts to just, every day, generate incredible encounters. If I think of the guests who go out at Londolozi, let’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. And 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. It’s a meaning machine. It’s a symbolic machine.

And people who stare into it, it’s like very un-woo-woo people, people who’ve just come out on safari, they come back 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 these profound symbolic energies that are in us functioning all around you. And somehow it permeates you and you feel yourself in relationship to that in some profound way.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And 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 this just incredible gent who I’ll highlight on the show in 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. So I would say also for city dwellers, it’s so novel at every turn, particularly if you’re injecting any level of shared privation or hardship, which is sometimes done deliberately, sometimes forced upon you in the case of freezing rain and hail and you’re trying to make a fire when your hands are barely functioning, things like that. 

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

Boyd Varty: Well, I mean of all the people who had a profound influence on me, one of them was my uncle, John Varty, who went by the name of JV. And JV was a wildlife filmmaker. And from the time that I was about six years old, I became his camera assistant, which to say that he had a streak of wildness, he had grown up in the hunting era when hunting was still what they primarily did in that area. And one thing about someone who grew up lion hunting is that it tends to reset your drama meter because if you think about it in lion hunting, there’s really only two outcomes. A lion dies or a human dies. So his sense of danger was dramatically reset by this type of childhood experience that he engaged in as a young boy.

And so at the time that I spent most of my time with him, it was between the age of about 6 and 15, he was making wildlife documentaries, and I remember I would put my clothes out on my bed at night and then at about four in the morning he would show up and he would walk in looking kind of Africa’s version of Texas Walker Ranger, .44 on his hip, shirt with cutoff sleeves, and he would open the door of my bedroom. “Buddy, let’s go.” And Tim, if you met him now, he would say to you, “Hey, so what do you do?” And you’d say, “Well, I run a podcast.”

“Podcasting. Okay, let me tell you about podcasting.” He had these sort of arms that stuck out. The Shangaan people called him [foreign language], “the one with the crooked arms” because he walked — 

Tim Ferriss: He had like a John Wayne walk?

Boyd Varty: Yeah, totally John Wayne with his .44. His clothes were always torn to pieces and he started wildlife filmmaking and I became his camera bearer from a very young age, and I had two jobs. One was to drive and like a lot of kids who grew up in nature, I learned to drive from the time I was about six years old. And so one job was drive. The second job was camera bearer. The driving job was tough because one morning we found a pack of hyenas that were feeding on the remains of a giraffe, and one of the hyenas picked up a giraffe leg and it started to run across the savanna with this gigantic giraffe leg in its mouth. And he wanted to get the shot because getting the shot was like the primary issue of every moment. He said, “Buddy, we got to 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’ll speed up, then he’ll scream, “Not so fast, you’re going to 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 pickup.

Tim Ferriss: Pickup.

Boyd Varty: And the camera hit him on his head, and this put him into a mild rage which had him chasing me around the vehicle, threatening to punch me in the face, and then eventually he would go into a red mist and then he would come to and say, “Okay, get after the hyena. Let’s go find it.” And so most of my trauma was around driving him around as his camera bearer.

Then on another incident he said to me, it was a herd of elephants that were coming down to a water hole. And he said to me, “Okay, we’re going to creep in there. We’re going to get ourselves well positioned on the bank. We’re going to 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 elephant turns and it starts walking towards us. And I immediately felt my heart rate starting to go up because I could tell the position we were in, not really a lot of places to go. His way of handling the approaching elephant was to simply zoom out on the camera repeatedly. Every time the elephant got closer, he just zoomed out a bit and pushed it back till eventually it was about five or six meters from us standing over us.

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?” And then we got into this freeze off where it was just a standoff. And at some point he whispered back to me and said, “Buddy, if this elephant comes, I want you to crawl into that hole there.” And there was an abandoned warren where some warthogs had made a hole, and his escape route was for me to crawl in there. And so it was just this constant sense of like, wait, are we okay here or are we in massive danger?

He had film camps all over Africa, and one of his film camps was in Kenya. And 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 city of Nairobi, he said to me, “Buddy, if anyone tries to grab a hold of any of our camera gear, just hit them on the hand with the machete.” Jesus.

Tim Ferriss: This is like a Babysitting: Lando edition.

Boyd Varty: Then at a certain stage, he moved up to Zambia and he had a film camp up in Zambia, and he was always trying to get great shots, and he had a knack for it. In the Maasai Mara where the wildebeest would be crossing the river, you would see the BBC, you would see Discovery Channel, they’d all be parked in a certain position. On the other side of the bank would be a million wildebeests, and they all looked like they were about to cross. And then John Varty would be parked 400 yards away, seemingly away from the action. And at the last minute, the entire herd would turn, run downriver and somehow manage to cross right in front of him. He had a kind of magical knack for being in the right place. He had a real profound sense of how animals move and operate, and there was just like a wildness to him. He loved being out there, he loved the wilderness.

He later in his career made a few attempts to rehabilitate cats and get them back into the wild. So he tried to get a young leopard that had been abandoned back into the wild. He was involved in a reintroduction of a lion project where he found a lion cub and tried to get it back into the wild. So he did all sorts of things. I mean, when we were living with him in Zambia, I’ll never forget, we were living in the Luangwa Valley with him, and he had a small boat that he would traverse the Luangwa with, and the Luangwa River is the densest population of crocodiles in the world. And the boat he had a tiny two horsepower engine on it, and often it would get — 

Tim Ferriss: So it was just like a dinghy? It was just like a — 

Boyd Varty: A little dinghy. And the top of the boat from the water line was inches. And he would load it with all sorts of things. Then he would hit the sandbank and he would say to me, “Buddy, you got to get out and push the boat off the sandbank.” And I would look up and down the bank where there were hundreds of crocodiles, and I would say to him, “I don’t want to get out.” He’d say, “Hey, man, get out. Stop being a nafta,” is what he would call us. I get out, push the boat. And then one day he found a young dead elephant. He was kind of maniacal about getting shots. He found a young dead elephant that had been washed down the river. And he decided what he wanted to do was tow the elephant towards the bank where he could tie it to the bank and then he would lie in the grass and he would get great shots of crocodiles coming in to feed on the elephant.

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

Tim Ferriss: Spades, meaning like a shovel?

Boyd Varty: Shovels. Yeah. We managed to row the elephant to the shoreline where we tied it to the bank and for the next four days, lay in the long grass there while he shot films of crocodiles feeding on this elephant. So it was just a baptism into the ramblings of an incredibly wild person.

Tim Ferriss: So here’s a question I may not have ever asked you. I don’t think I have. But listening to these stories, I can’t help but wonder how do you orient towards safety? I think about people, for instance, in a modern environment, doom-scrolling every day. They just have this slow IV drip of cortisol with no real imminent danger, but this perceived threat that is just infused into their daily experience 24/7. And then you listen to these stories and you’re like, okay. And certainly some of the stories in our first conversation for the podcast where you’re almost dying, being attacked by crocodiles and this, that and the other thing, and there’s no short list of these incidents. And then you listen to your adventures with JV or the firefighting. It’s like, okay, on any given Tuesday you flip a coin and those could have gone sideways in some capacity. How do you orient towards safety or danger? And how has that changed over time?

Boyd Varty: It’s certainly something I’ve wrestled with because after all those years with my uncle, there was a double-edged sword to it. On the one side, when I think back of how old I was during a lot of those incidences, I remember feeling tremendously out of my depth. And I remember feeling like, wait, what are we doing? And I don’t know how to handle this. And he was of the mindset that you should be able to handle anything. I mean, he would walk off into a dangerous situation and he would hand me a rifle and he would say, “Buddy, if I get into trouble out there, I’m expecting you to help me.” And so then I would be left with this eight-year-old sense of responsibility and feeling like I am going to need to take action against this, but I’m ill-prepared to take action against this. And so I found myself quite split in some ways.

On the one hand, I would feel very apprehensive about certain things. And then in other instances, the apprehension was always prior to the incident, but then in a situation, I always felt very calm and felt like I actually had capability. And I’ve thought a lot about that now because I always have a sense that whatever’s going to happen, I can handle it. And that is a gift he gave me, a sense that we will figure it out in a very instinctual game time, live way. I can be in pretty high octane situations, but I am nervous of it. I still have a part of me that feels like I’m going to be ill prepared for what is coming. And I feel those two places in myself all the time. And I think a lot about recently, obviously I just had a son, and I think a lot about what it would be like to build capability in him because I feel like I have a sense of capability.

I listened to your interview with Chris Sacca where he was talking about just young people needing to have more incidences in their life, needing to have been in a bar and bumped a car and lived life. And I feel very full of that. But I also feel like some of that stuff was over my head and that I’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 and not just expect things of myself, but actually take the time to realize 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 learned is that I need to go slower and build confidence and build capability. And that has been the ultimate healing on those ones.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. So I’m looking at this. I want to make sure we layer in stories, but we can intersperse with other things. So we’re going to get to perhaps lunch, maybe Toby Pheasant, no idea what that refers to at all. But there’s one that I want to pull out here 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?

Boyd Varty: I feel like I run the retreats every year through the winter months. And I feel like every year we get more aware of what we’re actually trying to do on the retreats and we get better at them. And I think the primary thing that I’ve come to really value is that the faster we can put people into what I would call the natural state, the speedier the uptick of transformation. And I think when I initially started creating transformational spaces in nature, I wanted something to happen. And I felt like my job was to quickly try and figure out where a person was blocked or where there was a kink in the energy, and try and rapidly help them develop awareness around how that particular blockage, trauma, belief system could be transformed.

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.” 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, I say now that when people come, they enter into the Londolozi time war, because if you can take away their tech, which we now enforce, I absolutely will not allow any tech, because what happens is, even if a person who’s running a company comes and they go into silence the first afternoon, and then we go out the next morning and we are tracking an animal and then they get back and they pick their phone up, and they’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 are in the natural world, literally their brain starts to cascade different neurochemistry. Their nervous system starts to go generally more parasympathetic, and they start to enter into a different state of awareness. In that state, their natural inner knowing starts to spit out by — I would say within the first 24 hours, something in them will start to know and it’ll 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 funny, if you have a 10-day retreat, people will orientate perfectly to that 10 days and what will need to occur in that 10 days will occur. If you said it’s a two-day retreat, they will get aspects of the same thing, but the psyche will know how much time it has. In the same way, the psyche will start to interact with the natural world and they will start to see and receive messages that are particular to what they are working on. Really, the lesson from 10 years of retreats is don’t work too hard, 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 very, very quickly, and people can do this at home.

If you start saying, “I want to go out into the local park, I want to go out into my garden and I have a specific question,” and you write that question down and you start asking, specifically nature, “Could you help me answer that question?” It’s almost like a Zen koan. You’re holding an intention and a desire for certain answers. Then what you see, your psyche will run that through a specific matrix and insight will start to develop.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There are a few things that come to mind as you’re saying all this. I took a number of notes. One is that I think people bias, or certainly, I’ll speak for Americans, but this is I think common in a lot of countries bias towards the question of what should I do? It’s an immediate tilt towards addition, if that makes sense, but sometimes you get to where you want to go, or achieve a certain state by removing the obstacles to that state.

When you were talking about natural state, I was thinking of, for instance, when I was on this Montana trip, I had a few friends with me, some of them had phones, some of them didn’t, even just for taking photographs and I left my phone behind very deliberately, 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?

It can mean a lot of different things, but one for me at least that I noticed at Londolozi, I noticed it certainly in Montana, you can notice it simply walking around without a lot of the modern technologies that we are very much ill-adapted for at this point is that these older faculties, these very well-developed capacities that we depended on for so many millennia come back online. Maybe they’re always online, but the volume is very low, and so you start to notice a lot more, and it just fundamentally changes your perceptual lived experience on a day-to-day basis.

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 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?

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

Tim Ferriss: 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. What that means is you are typically jet-lagged, and I think that actually works to the benefit of a lot of folks because you get this incredible time dilation. Your experiential feels like two or three days because you wake up, it’s dark, then it gets light, then you come back and have a bite to eat and probably take a nap.

Then you wake up, you do another drive, it gets dark and you have this very full spectrum experience that makes a week at Londo as you feel like two weeks, which is very similar to being in the Montana mountains, or really anywhere in nature where you are waking up with light, you are going to generally winding down with the sunset. I just find that natural state, and I’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, and you carry that back into the modern world with you.

Boyd Varty: It’s spot on, Tim. A few things on what you said there, one is, so many people arrive on the retreats with a sense of what to do next? Sometimes someone’s built a company and sold it. Sometimes someone is changing careers. Sometimes someone is going through a relationship change and they arrive, as you say, with this desire of what’s next? What has struck me so much is in order to open to the natural state, so often the first thing to do is to let go of needing to know what that next thing is. Often when I say to people, “Stop trying to know and stop trying to use this retreat to get the next thing, and in fact let yourself not know and just enter into the circadian rhythm of seeing the sun rise and seeing the sun set, watching it go from stars to stars.”

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. It’s only this Western culture in which is like level 10 energy all the time. Everything in nature moves through intensity, rest, intensity, rest. And as people feel themselves allowed to rest, another insight is I think we used to try and do too much on retreats, giving people high intensity moments and then spaciousness to be more like an animal. That starts to conjure it, and then sit around the fire at night and then let the natural world be your teacher.

The other thing is that, and I know that you’ve had these experiences. It’s really become quite remarkable to me how many mystical things happen. When I first met Martha and I started to understand transformational processes, I was still like a drink of beer, punch someone in the face type of person. I was 20 years old, South African. I did not consider transformational processes or coaching or inner work. I had no grounding in that. Then also just like the animals are going to bring messages, that was all quite woo for me, but I’ve seen now the most remarkable things.

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, “I grew up in a family of alcoholics, and when you grow up in a family of alcoholics, it’s incredibly dangerous all the time. So what I learned, I’ve learned to make myself invisible. I’ve learned to hide and I’ve never let myself be seen, because 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 looks into her eyes and is just breathing, gazing at her, and it’s so intense to be looked at by a 400-pound serial killer like that. It’s something so kind and powerful and the presence that that animal projects. 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. 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 guy come on a retreat and he’s sitting in the circle and he says to me, “One thing that has happened is since my father died, I’ve been totally unable to grieve. I know that I want to break open, but I can’t get to it. I just can’t cry.” For the first few days, that’s the case. On the third day, I’m talking to him, I’m checking in on him, and we’re sitting — Londo’s has these 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 on him and it starts calling intensely. Very unusual.

Sometimes a bird will fly through, but this bird flies into the area where there are people and starts calling. He looks up at this bird, and at the moment he sees it, I see tears come to his eyes and he starts to weep, weep, weep, and for 10 minutes he can’t talk. Then he looks at me and he says, “This is going to sound so weird, guys, but my father was an avid bird watcher, and this bird, the southern boubou, was his favorite bird.” Stuff like that is happening so regularly that I can’t deny it. I just know that things will happen, magic will occur.

Look, we also had one woman who was describing her trauma and how in her life everything gets taken from her. While she’s describing that, she’s eating a piece of toast at breakfast, and a monkey literally jumped down and snatched the toast out of her hand. 

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 knows, on some level, a field of living sentience, it starts to sense that intentionality and that awareness and then things start to happen. I think people need to be re-enchanted.

I think one of the things that we’re afflicted with is that we are dulled down and we are disconnected from magic. 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 a real believer that nature wants us to heal, and nature knows when we come to her with the desire to mend our soul.

Tim Ferriss: It also strikes me that, and I think I’m speaking to myself as much as anyone else, that sometimes we tend to want to fight fire with fire, and I’ll explain what I mean by that, and it doesn’t always work. In the sense that we have a problem or we perceive a problem through our thinking, and so we want to use more thinking to fix that problem or we think I just need to try harder. It’s like, “Well, if trying harder would’ve solved this, it would’ve been solved by now in some way.” There’s so much canvas to explore that is, as you mentioned, wordless.

If you’re able to even entertain the question of what if the path or the relief could be found outside of words and concepts, what might that look like and what it might look like is spending time in nature. 

One of my favorite experiences at Londolozi, and as you know, I’ve been a bunch of times now, is the silent morning drives. Just to explain that briefly, or do you want to explain that briefly?

Boyd Varty: Yeah. Well, maybe I could say two things about that. The other is a story comes to mind of a very silly anecdotal story, but when I was — one of the things that led me to probably all the way to this conversation is prior to my firefighting days, when I was on the Londolozi sales and marketing team, I found myself in London and by day I was seeing different agents and I was telling them about Londolozi. Then we got invited — myself and a friend who I was traveling with — we got invited to a party that night. At that time I was struggling with very, very severe depression, and we did that childish thing that you sometimes do when you’re in your 20s where we decided we would go to the party and we would make up fake backstories and be in character for the night.

When people asked me what I would do at that time, out of nowhere, I started saying, “I’m a writer.” I hadn’t got even close to writing anything at that stage. I would be totally daunted by the process, but when I said it at this party, this total bullshit story I had made up, every time I said it, I felt a little uptick of energy in my body. Not in my mind, not a rational sense that this is what you should do. I just literally felt like this little kick of energy, and I decided to follow that little kick of energy. When I got back to South Africa, I sat down at my old computer and I started writing down stories.

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 going to fight to get through this day.” I would do my duties. I would do all the things I needed to do like with this gray cloud around my head. Then I would sit down at the computer and I would start to write out some silly anecdotal story and suddenly something would lift. I would follow that. Literally, everything that has brought me to here has been following that non-rational energy in my body. I’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. One thing that has become so profound for us is, 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 the biological sciences. That can be so wonderful, and all of that information can be more information.

What we started to do in the attempt to take people into deeper wordlessness was to say, “You’re going to go out and you are going to be in silence, and hopefully, that silence pulls you into a deeper place. But what you’re also going to do is you’re going to watch your mind, and you might be looking at something, and you might find yourself saying, what’s going on there? Why is that animal doing it? What animal is that? What’s even happening here? Just be aware of that and try and come out of needing to know which is the primary state of our society.” Only in Eastern philosophy do we find our way to don’t know mind. The whole Western mind is structured around needing to know.

If you find yourself needing to know, let that go and just be in pure experience of it. Let the silence work on you. Feel how everything is unfolding with an intelligence, and you don’t really need to rationally know it. Try and feel it at a deeper level. To a man, people report coming back — some people report feeling incredibly frustrated. Some people said, “I found my mind wondering to wait, when I’m at home, should I catch the six train or the five train downtime?” Some 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.

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. You start to feel how when a leopard turns and looks at you with the shape of its body, with the look in its eyes, with the way it moves it head, it is conveying energy. You can watch the prey species move through different nervous system states, from totally relaxed, to listening in a way, to attuned to potential danger. As they move their bodies, every one of those states in their body has a feeling to it, and you can feel that feeling in your own body, and getting to know that feeling is where I think it’s definitely more where native cultures operated. Inside of it is a deep sense of connectivity, because you can feel yourself relating to every creature once you know that language. When you can look at a leopard and without any words between you feel its energy, feel what it’s conveying to you, you can be in a dialogue like that.

I’m sure you’ve heard this, Tim, but in shamanic ceremonies, and when I’ve been around healers, I remember once asking to my teacher in the medicine space, “Will you teach me? Why won’t you teach me?” He said to me, “Well, the feeling is not there yet.” I said to him, “No. I’m asking you.” He said, “Yeah. I can feel your distrust, and whatever you say to me, the feeling you energetically are giving off, there’s still too much distrust and only the feeling is different between us will I start to teach you.” To me, that space was so full of that first language energy, the energy between things.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I want to also maybe underscore for folks that this might sound very abstract or esoteric, but there are real direct applications of what we’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. It could be as simple as something on a menu. Could be something as high stakes as to say yes or no to a potentially huge business partnership with a given person, let’s just say. A pattern on the podcast, people can listen to that episode for more on the Whole-Body Yes, and how to navigate that if we don’t get into it now.

Another that comes to mind as you said, that the — particularly, I’ll limit it to the United States for now because other cultures are quite different in this respect with CS does and so on. But the idea that you wake up and you just go 10 out of 10 from when you wake up to when you close your laptop is anathema to the natural world. That’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. If you go on, let’s just say an elk hunt or something like that, you may spend a few hours doing X, Y, Z, and then just bed down. You’re like, “The animals are bedded down, we’re not going to find them. They’re inactive. It’s going to be incredibly difficult, so instead of waste our energy, we’re going to have a snack, and take a nap.”

I recognize that having a snack and taking a nap may not make sense in between your Zoom calls, but the point is, that if you talk to someone like Josh Waitzkin, another mutual friend of ours, who for those who don’t recognize the name, he was my second ever podcast on this podcast out of 800 something plus — he’s going to 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 applied his learning approach to mastery in a number of different fields. World champion in tai chi push hands, first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, nine-time world champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Now, foiling at a very, very high level on huge waves. What does Josh say?

When he looks at all of these world-class performers in these different disciplines, when he looks at the people he works with directly ranging from sports at a very high level — I don’t know if it’s public yet. I think it is. Yeah. The Celtics, for instance, all the way to the absolute one percent of one percent in, say, the finance world. One of his mantras, and I don’t think he’ll mind me paraphrasing this, is “Avoid the simmering six.” And avoiding the simmering six is if you look at, say, Marcelo Garcia before he’s going to compete in a world championship mat, they’re running around trying to find him, because it’s five minutes to go time, and where is he? He’s sleeping under the bleachers. He’s taking a nap. He’s at zero.

Then he wakes up, shakes it off, and then in the 200 feet before he gets on the mat, he switches it to a 10, and he’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’s avoiding, and that is in large part how he’s able to partition resources to engage so fully and dominate competitively. 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. It is the concrete jungle, but it is the city that never sleeps. It is in some ways the antithesis of living at Londo. Nonetheless, I can take a lot of the lessons learned that you see so clearly there, and you have to squint a little bit to apply it here in such an intense environment, but you can, and you actually really could benefit very quickly from doing so. Diana Chapman, Josh Waitzkin, I just want to point out how broadly these themes apply, even if they seem, to some people listening, maybe a bit exotic.

Boyd Varty: That’s well said.

Tim Ferriss: Fire, I felt like you were just about to jump into something.

Boyd Varty: No. Just the information — all roads in personal transformation lead to the information 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 that information to come forward. A big part of that is just letting yourself follow the energy of the non-rational energy of people, places, experiences where you literally feel your body full of an expansive, alive energy, and getting good at following that is the ultimate tracking.

Tim Ferriss: Full aliveness, another Joshism. Fully alive. Jim Dethmer, too, who’s also been on the podcast, a mutual friend of ours. As promised, we’re going to hop between these tracks. I’ve got Lunch and Toby Pheasant. Where do you want to go? Or we could choose option C, if there’s another one that comes to mind.

Boyd Varty: Well, let me tell you about my friend Toby and I. Toby was an Englishman, and I’m sure he won’t mind me telling the story to millions of people, but Toby came on safari with his family, and this is quite some time ago now, maybe a good 20 years ago. Came on safari with his family, and he had such a great time and he had such a great energy and attitude about him that he managed to convince us to let him stay on as a general hand around the camp. When his family flew off, Toby stayed on, and he immediately got integrated into the village of Londolozi, and he picked up all of the worst jobs. He had to clean the lanterns that get put out every evening. At one stage, he was painting an ablution block and just every time I saw him, he was on some errand around the camp.

One day, Toby and I were sitting down at the staff canteen and a radio called in that some guests had reported that they had seen a snake in their room. Myself and another ranger said, “Okay. We’ll go handle this.” Toby said, “Guys, do you mind if I come along?” I said, “Toby, come with us.” We jumped into a golf cart, which is how people get around in the back of house of the Reserve. We jumped into a golf cart and we went up to the ranger’s room to fetch our snake catching stick, which had picked up the name 50/50, because it was a bit of a Heath Robinson. It was a piece of PVC pipe that someone had run a lamp cord through that had made a noose. The way that it worked is you would get the loop at the end of the stick around, and then you would pull on the cord, and technically it should tighten up and catch the snake in the noose, but it was a little bit niggly in certain places. Sometimes it wouldn’t close all the way, so it had picked up the nickname 50/50.

We grabbed 50/50 and a big 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 going to be honest with you, Tim, I gave them my most powerful, “Don’t worry, I’m here now. The safari guide of the year has arrived. You don’t need to worry. I’m going to go in there and sort the situation out.” They were left standing at the door and myself and Toby and the other guide went in, and we’re 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. We are walking around and I noticed the suitcase on the rack, an empty suitcase, and I flipped the lid open, and what rose out of the suitcase was one of the biggest black mambas I’ve ever seen in my life. It levitated out of the case.

Tim Ferriss: Do you want to explain why that isn’t your garden variety [garter] snake? 

Boyd Varty: A black mamba, not only is an extremely venomous snake, but it is highly mobile and very difficult to handle in a confined space. If it bites, you die quickly. Myself and Toby and the other guide, we went for the door at the same time, and I remember the three of us jammed in it as we were trying to exit the room at high speed.

Tim Ferriss: Three Stooges.

Boyd Varty: I might’ve reached forward to grab their faces, to pull myself through. We got outside and I said to the Germans, “There’s a big snake in there.” They said, “Yeah. We told you.” Now, we’re faced with a bit of a dilemma and they’re watching us. We decide, “No, okay. We know what we are dealing with now. We must go back in.” 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 a pillow fly out the room because you don’t want to lift it slowly. You want to rip it open and see what’s under it. Then they see a chair fly out, then they see 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, and he giving us a running commentary on the dangers of black mambas. He’s saying, “If they bite you, you will die instantly. Their venom is deadly in tiny quantities.” I’m like, “Toby, you are not helping the situation. Can you please shut up?” I remember at one stage we pulled the duvet cover off the bed and the bed — it had an electric blanket on it, and the cable of the electric blanket came off and it made a snake-like motion, and all of us reared backwards. Eventually, we saw the snake under the bed and my friend managed to get 50/50 down there, and he gripped the mamba.

Now, what you normally want to do is you want to get it behind the head, then you grab it behind the head and then you put it in a bag. He managed to grab it mid-body, and it was maybe a 2 1/2 meter snake. That mamba went full propeller on the end of the snake catching stick. It was like whipping around, and part of them is they’ve got this incredible elastic, powerful body. It was like a lot of snake whipping around the end of the stick. Then it turned and it curled its way up the stick, but 50/50 held it, and eventually, its head was about that far from my friend’s hand, but he had it.

Tim Ferriss: Like, six inches from the hand?

Boyd Varty: Terrifying. We decided it’s going to be too much to try and get it into the bucket, so we’re just going to ride it out the camp. Now, we make our way up past the perturbed-looking Germans, and we go to the golf cart and I’m driving, and you have to imagine a standard golf cart. I’m driving, my friend is standing next to me and he’s holding the stick out with the giant snake on it. Then Toby jumps onto the back of the golf cart and we start making our way out of the camp, and we’re bouncing along. Just as you exit the camp, there’s a gateway where there’s an electric fence that keeps the elephants and the buffalo out.

As we approach that, my friend, who’s thinking about the snake that’s six inches away from his hand, he pulled the stick in to allow for us to pass through these two pillars of the gate. When Toby on the back looked to his left, the black mamba was now fully adjacent to his face with about three inches between him and the snake. Tim, from where I was driving, I remember looking to my left and the golf cart was going quite fast, and I saw Toby take off in my peripheral vision. And as I looked to my left, his feet were passing where the roof of the golf cart was. He had exploded off the back of that golf cart. It looked like someone had shot a rocket into space. As I drove off, because I kept moving, I looked back, he was still hitting in a vertical direction over a bush. It must have been a good, in a high jump turn, it was a good solid five to six-foot vertical explosion. And the last I saw of him, he was like petering out and disappearing over the bush like a frisbee falling. And I remember we got out of the camp and we released the snake, and the snake went off into the bush and my friend and I looked at each other, we were absolutely wide-eyed, and we turned and we began to make our way back into the camp.

And as we came through the gate of the camp, standing in the middle of the road with a look of shock and awe on his face was Toby. And we drove up to him and the first thing he said to me, I’ll never forget it, he looked me dead in the eye and he said, “That was incredible.” Shortly after that, he went back to England and he had to, I think he went and studied briefly, but very quickly he came back to South Africa and he became a safari guide. And he actually now runs a travel company. You can look him up if you’re in the UK and you want to come to Africa, I think it’s called Bonamy Travel.

And I always think that so often what emerges out of these stories is not what you think. You would think that an encounter like that would be like, “I’m packing up and moving back to the UK.” But it is actually quite the opposite. He moved back to Africa, became a safari guide, and still runs a safari company to this day. And I think about that often, things that have gone wrong that I would have thought that would be the end of people turn out to be the adventure that everyone’s looking for.

Tim Ferriss: So just to talk about calibrating danger differently, you like running. Alex, also master tracker, likes running, and you guys just go running outside of the gates. You just go for a long, nice run. Now, typically, for instance, if you run into a bear or a wolf or a big cat, you don’t want to run. Run is what prey do.

Boyd Varty: Yeah.

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

Boyd Varty: Yeah, we can.

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

Boyd Varty: You mean persistence?

Tim Ferriss: Yes, I do.

Boyd Varty: So 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 Bushman 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 Bushman people, please call us Bushmen.” So that’s how I will refer to them. And during that time with them, he was blown away by the ecological intelligence of this group of people.

These guys tracked a porcupine one day for 10 kilometers. They would sleep around the fire at night. Now, normally when you sleep out in the wild at night, someone keeps watch. And so, Alex asked them, “Who’s going to keep watch?” And they were 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 a hyena walks by or something, one of them will wake up. So they’re attuned at a very different level. And Alex saw this and he was blown away by it. And so, that was the initial trip. And what resulted in that is a request was made that we would come back as a group, an expedition, and we would assess the skills that were still kind of alive and functioning.

We wanted to get a sense of what was possible still and what people still knew how to do because the Bushman people are probably the most persecuted native people on the planet. They’ve been displaced from everywhere. And so, it was to go and say, “Has their initial tracking knowledge been lost or 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 is quite remarkable because Bushman 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 those Southern African countries provide a stipend of $400 or pula or rand.

So you would think that a lot of the indigenous skills had been lost because a lot of people are on this, like, it’s not the dole, but it’s like a government supplement. And yet about 70 percent 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 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 various tribes who would have a storehouse where they kept food. To them, the desert is their storehouse, which is quite an amazing idea. There’s just like there’s no sense of needing to hold or store because it’s an abundance psychology that everything you need is there.

Tim Ferriss: And when you say desert, just for people who are trying to conjure an image, I mean it’s desert, it’s like a little scraggly bush here or there, at least based on the video I’ve seen, but it’s very much a desert environment.

Boyd Varty: There’s areas where it’s like semi-arid where you have these harsh bushes, and then there’s other places where you are in red beach sand. It would be akin to walking on the beach that’s so sandy. There’s places where ground squirrels have these huge colonies. So, as you walk, you fall down because the ground underneath has been hollowed out. So, it can be very, very tough operating there. And so we spent a few days with different groups of Bushmen and we were taken out into the desert and we watched this incredible energy of people moving very slowly through the desert. And they will dig up a tuber or a root, they’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 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 woman as they gather, I had this feeling that we could have been 300 years in the past or 300 years in the future. There was such a strong sense that whatever happens, these people are attuned to their environment at a different level. 

And then what emerged out of that is we were invited to participate in probably the oldest practice of hunting that exists on the planet, which is persistence hunting. Persistence hunting, there’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 it at a run. Now, that can be easy in parts of the desert, but man, it is not easy at midday in the — 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 want to be doing it at peak heat, it throws no contrast onto the ground.

Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, no shadows, right?

Boyd Varty: No shadows. So, we were invited to be a part of this, and this is something that, and we were seeing is this still alive? Who knows how to do this?

Tim Ferriss: And just to throw some numbers out there, if you can indulge people with Fahrenheit — well, we’ll give people Celsius and Fahrenheit if that’s possible. It’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? How long does it take? And then what kind of temperatures are we talking about?

Boyd Varty: Tim, it’s really interesting because I think in the one that Craig Foster filmed, it was around 30 kilometers over about five or six hours, something like that. But what I discovered being there is that there’s this incredible equation and the equation is heat on one axis and time on the other. So, as the heat climbs, the amount of time reduces.

Tim Ferriss: The distance goes down, yeah right.

Boyd Varty: The distance reduces. But then there’s also an interesting factor, which is what type of season has it been? Has it been dry for a few seasons in a row? Or have you had a rainy season because the condition of the animal has a huge effect. So, one thing that happened while we were there is that they’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 whether it’s still alive. People who we had asked around had said, “No, no one does that anymore. 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 to the Bushman people, it’s called the Great Dance.

Tim Ferriss: That’s the name of the doc, isn’t it?

Boyd Varty: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: The Great Dance.

Boyd Varty: It’s a spiritual practice.

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

Boyd Varty: It’s a great dance because there’s a tremendous act of faith in it, and it’s part of the mythology and the spirituality of the Bushman people because it involves being engaged with the animal at a very deep level and transferring the animal’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 you are with the spirit of that animal, and you are with spirit itself. And then spirit is as you are closing in on the animal, it’s giving its energy to you. And the final act of giving from great spirit and from the spirit of that animal is the actual killing.

And one thing that’ll happen is as guys 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 expending energy and you’re pushing energy back at the animal, whereas actually you want to be drawing the animal’s energy to you. So there’s this very interesting rhythm that guys get into. So anyway, we go out and we are looking for tracks in this huge area, and there’s no tracks. There’s no tracks, and the energy of everything is kind of dialed down. And 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 game time, real-life situation. And then we come onto a herd of kudu’s fresh tracks.

Tim Ferriss: What is a kudu? Can you paint a picture?

Boyd Varty: A kudu, it’s a very tall, regal antelope, and it has kind of large spiraling horns and kudus, there are desert adapted antelope. A kudu is not that well adapted for the desert. So, there are certain animals that you wouldn’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 susceptible to the heat. And when this group that we were with of incredible trackers got onto the track of this herd of kudu, the whole energy shifted and it went from quite lackluster to someone had flipped a switch and suddenly these guys started to switch on and they went into archetypal hunting energy. And when I say to you that I’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 need, we don’t access it because 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 because 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 navigate, you have to run.

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’m running into that desert, I’m running away from water, I’m going in that direction, and I don’t really know what the outcome’s going to be. I don’t know the condition of this animal, I don’t know the heat, I don’t know the terrain. I’ve got to just go and follow.” So, it becomes a real act of faith. And as I say, 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.

Tim Ferriss: And it’s hot.

Boyd Varty: Yeah. And on the day we did it, I don’t know what the Fahrenheit is, but it was 47 degrees when we started.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s hot.

Boyd Varty: 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 kind of like a Peloton. If you fall out of it, you’ll never catch that group again. But if you find yourself in it, it’s almost like you can ride the energy of the group. How would I describe it? It’s kind of like a ceremony. You don’t know what’s going to 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 that someone else will cut onto it. So, they’re working as a team. But as you run, you’re also dropping people because the heat is building too much, and it’s just so intense.

And then also people are going into different psychological states. So, one of the Bushman religious practices is to go into trance and you can feel yourself wanting to go there. For the first hour of it, I was in a totally neurotic state. I was in my head and I was thinking to myself, “It’s too hot. I’m going to die of heat stroke.” There was this voice running, “We’re going too far. We are not going to find our way back. I’m going to get separated from these guys too far out. There’s no water.” It was just total neuroses. And then somewhere in there, I started to feel myself going into a different energy. And I felt that the only way to do this was to let go of these thoughts and let my body just go until it couldn’t go anymore.

And 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 are reaching for a place and some athletes know how to get to that place. And I felt myself go through the layer of mind neuroses and let go into like, “I’m just going to 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 just like you’re glowing red, the guys are tracking. At one stage, I found myself on the front of the track, and you can feel the animal moving up ahead of you, and you have to keep moving. You have to keep it moving. And then we got a glimpse of the kudu, and then it disappeared for another 40 minutes, and we’re just on the tracks. Then we’ve 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.

And what I didn’t realize is the kudu had run in a dog leg. And so, where he had been behind me, suddenly he was in front of me and suddenly the kudu was directly in front of him. And as that happened, the entire energy shifted again and the guys just found another gear. And it’s quite amazing to witness it. 

And then eventually the animal is so tired that it literally just stops and it gives itself to the hunter. And those moments where the animal will run no more and the Bushmen spear it, there is something so profound about it because you can’t be there and not be in a profound state of respect and receiving. And you are also so close to the truth of where your food and the survival of the village comes from. You’re not strolling down the meat section at Whole Foods. You are right on the cold face of what it means to take life and to take the energy of another creature.

And after the animal goes down, they put sand on it, which is symbolic of a blessing onto the animal and thanking the animal for what it has given them. But when you eventually emerge out of that energy, it could have been one hour, it could have been 10 hours, you’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 in a current of energy from the earth.

Tim Ferriss: How much does that particular kudu, how much would you guess it weighed? Any idea?

Boyd Varty: Yeah, so probably around the 180 kg mark.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s a big boy. Yeah. Okay.

Boyd Varty: Yeah, I would need to check that.

Tim Ferriss: Like 400-ish pounds. Yeah.

Boyd Varty: Yeah, a little bit less than that. When it’s cut up, every single piece of that animal is taken and eaten. And it was from the time the guys started working on the carcass, it must’ve been 15 minutes to — 

Tim Ferriss: Wow, that’s fast.

Boyd Varty: — every single piece of that animal.

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

Boyd Varty: Yeah. And then you put the haunches on your all different array of carries and everyone and walks it out. And then you still obviously got a long way to go from there.

Tim Ferriss: What happens when you guys get back to home base?

Boyd Varty: 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 beautiful energy to it. And then back at camp, it’s just immediately that food starts to get eaten.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I bet.

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you want to see modern polite behavior disintegrate very quickly, just go to a place like San Francisco. I remember the power went out for two days, two and a half days, and people were very, very civil in the beginning and walking around the street greeting one another. And then people realize their food is going to thaw, their food is going to spoil, and agitation and aggression start to percolate very, very, very quickly because people don’t know what to do. They have no idea what to do if the basic architecture of convenience is removed.

Boyd Varty: I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think that all the things we imagine to happen, people are so much closer to primal wildness than they ever realize. And survival starts to kick in. And then I think there’ll be a wide junction. Some people will go into survival of the fittest, and then others will move into states of collaboration for good reason, protection, food, safety. So, it’ll be interesting to see how it breaks down. You can get into some good prepper stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Just pro-tip, make sure you have water. Water is number one. You’re going to need water a lot sooner than you’re going to need canned lentils, just — or, and by the way, if you have any dried, canned food, you’re going to need some water typically for a lot of that. So, make sure you have your water and your Jetboils or something along those lines.

Boyd Varty: Yeah. It is also amazing to see how little water the Bushmen people can operate on.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, it must be absurd, just like their evolutionary track must have prepared them so well for that. I would be dead within 24 hours.

Boyd Varty: We had one morning on the same trip where we found tracks of a cheetah, and we were quite keen to show the guys some of our tracking skills. And it was like a camaraderie amongst trackers. And we were with this 70-year-old man and we’re following this single cheetah, and it kind of turned into mildly competitive at the front to, if someone lost the track, the next person would be on it. And then if you stepped off it, someone else would be on it. And for the first two hours we were quite effective. And then these guys just started to put a clinic on us as it got hotter and hotter. We ran out of water. We were climbing under these thorn bushes, lumbering along, and they were just cruising through the desert. And by 11 o’clock, the 70-year-old guy was walking us off our feet and we had drained our water bottles and we were like, “We need to get back home because we need to get water.” And he hadn’t had a sip all morning. And we were like, “Okay.”

Tim Ferriss: Wow. “Yeah, you win.” No contest.

Boyd Varty: Yeah. No contest.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. All right. So, I want to hop to two different potential leaping off points. You can tell me if one of these makes sense or if there’s something else we want to hop to, you can follow whichever track is appealing. Being a resolved figure, seeking the wild man. You want to pursue either of these, what do you think? Or we could take option C off menu.

Boyd Varty: No, I mean I think the wild man is a powerful theme, and it comes down to this idea that there is so much energy. I’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 — 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 is its wildness in the sense that it is in tune with life force, but it is also wildness in that it is access to the moment.

And what I mean by that is to have your wild man fully available means that if you are required to front up in some ways and protect something and be able to be assertive and aggressive, you have access to that. But if the moment is calling for a tremendous amount of softness or tenderness, you also have access to that. And so, trying to figure out how to develop access to as many moments as possible has become kind of a central piece of exploration for me at the moment. And to become resolved within that is now as a father, I think a lot about figuring out how to be available through a full spectrum of the masculine experience to my son, to my wife, to my family. Where do I run into blockages in myself? Where do I start to feel like I really want to be here, but I don’t know how to show up in this moment? And so that’s what that exploration has become primarily about.

Tim Ferriss: 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 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 got accosted by this very aggressive, probably mentally unstable person yesterday and huge crowds of people, a lot of a feeling of collective cauterization, if that’s a word, but people have dropped down walls. And I put on sort of a protective armor that seemingly disallows me to access all of these different sensitivities because it just seems like suicide to be too porous in an environment like this.

So, whether I wanted to be open or not, I don’t think it would be good for me necessarily in New York City in most places to have that level of openness. So I do spend a lot of time in cities. I find cities exciting, but I block out a few weeks of the year where I’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 put out. There are other people, of course, who just live in a more peaceful, perhaps, environment that allows for this type of exploration and expression and experience. And it doesn’t need to be the middle of South Africa. It doesn’t need to be in the middle of the mountains in Montana. It could just be in a peaceful suburb. It doesn’t need to be, or in a chiller city than New York City potentially. How do you think about this for yourself?

Boyd Varty: I think about it probably through discernment. I think that it’s wise to be somewhat armored in the environments you’re describing, but what I see in groups now a lot, and this has become the core thing, is I see particularly in men’s groups, a desire to be more available, but actually not knowing how to, not having the access and the literacy to know what that would even look like. And so, now you don’t want to go into extreme tenderness in the middle of New York City, you probably want to be exactly where you are, but you want to know that you can open to deeper levels in the right context. And you want to know what has kept you out of that, which would usually be some kind of conditioned response, something that you learn to do away. The way you learn to freeze or shut down when things became overwhelming.

And then you want to figure out how to develop more options for yourself in that moment. The trauma to me is freezing, right? Anytime you’ve been forced into some kind of traumatic situation, it’s characterized by a reduction of options. And so, in order to cultivate more presence, one is you have to be present to the fact that you’re frozen and actually be able to feel like, “Okay, in this moment, I want to 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 other choices would look like and literally other things you could do in that moment to move out of the frozen state.

And that’s where I think the men need other men. Then the wild man is somewhat a collective exploration. Men being with men, particularly in wild places, that it just naturally starts to emerge. You don’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 wild place, their psyche starts to relate to that wild place, and they start saying, “I can’t tell you why. It’s intangible, it’s energetic, but something about this has something to do with me.” I can feel myself in a way here in the presence of that waterfall and that mountain and that lion and the process of being archer, I can feel myself.

Boyd Varty: The process of being out here, I just feel I can feel myself. And then the conversation starts to open and you’re able to start to say, “Okay, where are the places where we run into blockage?” And if we want to be wild, we need access to the moment, just like in the way that an innocent animal has access to it knows what to do in any given situation. Leopards are not in their heads. If they want to be aggressive, they’re aggressive. If they’re caring for their young, they’re caring for their young. If they need to set a territory, they do it. It flows out of them. And so creating spaces in which that can naturally start to occur has become really interesting to me.

Tim Ferriss: 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 going to 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, it smells like leopard urine.” So that’s just if you want to take a big, big inhale.

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

Tim Ferriss: That’s really wild. I remember I was like, “Nah, that’s not possible.” And then we were driving at one point, and I think maybe it was Sersant, but one of the trackers that we were with was held up a hand to stop the car. And I was like, “Holy shit. There it is. I feel like I’m sitting in the movie theater. That’s crazy.” And 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 is not a strong position I’m taking, but it’s just a thought, is that there are many side effects to, and many benefits too, of a highly individualistic society. So in the case of the US, you take this Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism, this lionizing of the self-sufficient independent person, there’s a lot of production that can come from that, productivity, but there is frequently some degree of collateral damage and from a collective perspective.

And that’s not too woo-woo. Collective could just mean in your family. If you’ve trained yourself to be sort of a cold-blooded business killer with blinders on, and that’s the gear you learn to use, a sixth gear, if you don’t have some degree of flexibility and you’re very good, which is very common, this applies to, I think, men in a lot of fields, women probably too, but I think especially men, compartmentalization. So when you’re able to increase your pain threshold, compartmentalize certain things, lock certain things away, can make you very, very, very effective as a performer, but in an interpersonal respect, it can be compromised.

Okay. The reason I’m bringing all this up is that I think about, say, let’s just take, for example, 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. 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 is getting better at conflict deescalation, which I never had a good model for. I’ve made a lot of progress, but quite 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.

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 you’re going to have a chat with, you got the wrong animal probably, right?

Boyd Varty: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: And then if the dude is like, “Why can’t you just be a dude? Let’s be dudes,” it’s like, well, maybe you got the wrong animal, and which is part of the reason why I block out for these weeks when I do these trips. They’re almost always all-men trips, right?

Boyd Varty: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Because that type of experience in modern-day I think is largely absent or disallowed outside of maybe a few sports context.

And similarly, if a couple is in isolation, putting aside the child-rearing aspect of this and the challenges that entails, I suppose this is very meandering, but I haven’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 structural solutions and scheduling and blocking things out so that they have access to more people outside of their partner?

Does that make sense?

Boyd Varty: 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. There’s an inevitability and a necessity to that.

Then once you start to get more skills in the I, you want to bring that to the we, and you want to start to practice. And I actually think that one of the issues with relationship is that our model for it is still built on the romantic traditions and it’s like you’re going to fall in love and then here’s this beautiful thing. Whereas relationship to me now is way more an active practice space. And so I think — 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. Very often you need something to offend your own pattern or your own blindness and help you see it in a different way. And then you bring those awarenesses to the group.

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

Tim Ferriss: Look, I’m a junkie for personal development stuff, so I feel like I’m in an AA meeting for personal development addicts. But what I would say, I’ll tell just a brief story.

So on this Montana trip, and 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 and just rapping and talking and talking and talking. And then one of the guys said, he’s like, “I just figured out why fire is so important for guys.” And we’re like, “Why is that?” And he goes, “Because we don’t have to make eye contact. We just look at the fire and we can have all these really deep conversations,” whereas in most circumstances, 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.

Boyd Varty: Yeah. If you’re staring in someone’s eyes, you’re going to make out or kill each other.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. And — 

Boyd Varty: You know that old joke of you say to your buddy, “Hey, do you want to go and sit by the lake and talk for six hours?” It’s like, “No.” It’s like, “Do you want to go fishing?” “Yeah, let’s do that.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right, exactly. And so harkening back to what you said about don’t try too hard, right?

Boyd Varty: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Like knowing, and this is more an open question, but as I get older and as I see some of the trappings and weaknesses or insufficiencies, both the necessity of and the insufficiency of direct head-on personal work, I wonder what the ratio is between deliberate microscope work, so to speak, and the indirect work, this is going to sound really crass, which is like building a raft and going fishing, which we did with handmade lures and all this stuff, while telling fart and dick jokes. It doesn’t seem serious. No one would put that in a book and be like, “Okay, step number one, come up with three of your favorite dick jokes.” It’s not going to be in any self-help book. But nonetheless, it seems to do a lot of lifting, right?

Boyd Varty: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: 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 some emotional state to improve our quality of life and the quality of life of, say, our family members around us. Okay.

Well, having, in the case of these trips that I’m describing, some guy time where you’re not necessarily — I mean, there is some goofing off, but there’s generally shared projects and shared suffering of some type and a lot of exertion. Like you said, it’s like, “Yeah, let’s sit by the lake and talk for six hours.” “No, thanks.” 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 it’s the relationship, stupid, and the content is secondary to the spending of time in a particular way.

Boyd Varty: A hundred percent. And you don’t have to work hard. Once you get there, and the only thing that I would say is a little bit of context to it. If you have a few guys in the group who have done the work of developing a little bit more access and can make reads, then you don’t have to club it. You can mostly be talking shit floating down the river, but then occasionally, with a little bit of context, someone can say, “Hey, here’s what I see you being blind to. You can tell me to fuck off. You can take it on board, it can go any way, but here’s how I notice you show up. Do you know that you do that?”

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, there’s an opening there that I found the rate of download to be incredibly high. And everyone, the community piece is that no one has all the answers. Personal development work for personal development work’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, “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 major unlocks start to have, where someone who’s not even in the role of facilitator or leader says, “Hey, there’s a way in which you show up that makes me not feel like I can trust you and I’m just telling you by way of feedback. I don’t know whether you want to take that on board or not,” things start to happen, and if you’ve rafted a river together, you tend to take more than you were just jettison.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and with the example that you just gave, there are lots of ways to communicate that, right?

Boyd Varty: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, you might just be like, “Hey, man, I could be making this up as a story, but have you ever considered A, B, or C?” Right?

Boyd Varty: A hundred percent.

Tim Ferriss: Because if you’re going to use the language of, say, the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, you better fucking make sure the other person has an idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Amazing toolkit, but you have to agree on the language beforehand.

So we’re coming up on roughly time, but I want to make sure that we do perhaps two things. One is maybe add one more story and then cover anything that you’d like to touch on that we haven’t covered. What do you think is a good kind of bookmark story here? I have “Lunch the baboon” down.

Boyd Varty: Let me tell you about Lunch. Lunch was a baboon that picked up the nickname Lunch because he started showing up at lunchtime and he started causing absolute havoc around the camp.

And Lunch even worked out how to break into the kitchen. And I remember once being in the kitchen and the chefs had barricaded one of the doors with some rocks and the door was literally vibrating. And every time, it was being forced from the outside, every time the rock would slide and the door would open a little bit more, and then this furry hand came in and gripped the handle, and then Lunch burst into the kitchen and he walked across to the counter where there was a cake and he picked up the cake and walked off on his hind legs holding the cake in his hands.

Tim Ferriss: And just for people who don’t have a picture of a baboon, I mean, I find those things pretty fucking terrifying. I mean — 

Boyd Varty: A baboon is a formidable, he’s like a three-foot muscular, hairy dude with long canines. And 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,” then there’s “I know that you know.” So it’s like the first awareness is just “I’m aware of you,” then it’s “I’m aware that you’re aware of me.” That’s higher level.

So sometimes I would walk through the camp and Lunch would be involved in some kind of mischief. He would be breaking into a guest’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 loitering around, “Nothing to see here. Just being a baboon in my natural environment.”

I remember another day I was going through some notes on my desk and I found a minute from a meeting, and the literal minute was like, “We need to get new crockery and cutlery for tree camp. Land Rover number eight needs to be repaired. His troop needs to fear our troop.” 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 going to chivvy him out of the camp, and it was elaborate because every time I tried to chase him, he would hide. He got into the minibar, he drank some booze. I found him sitting in the pool one day. He was just causing general chaos. I had a little BB gun that I decided that I would shoot him with. And the one day I found him, he was sitting on a guest’s Audi that was parked in the car park, and when I aimed the gun at him, he just lay flat against the Audi like, “I dare you.” So he was up to no good.

Anyway, 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, “Oh, really? I can’t believe that. Royalty. Yes, of course we can.” And everyone in the room was eavesdropping because it sounded so intense. So she hangs up the phone and she says, “Boyd, a prince is coming to Londolozi,” and this is a tremendous amount of excitement.

And there’s months and months of prep and set up to the arrival of the prince. There’s an 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 going backwards and forwards, and you liaise with these entourage liaisons so it’s all happening.

And eventually the day arrives that the prince is arriving, and we were quite pleased with ourselves because we were on top of all of the logistics. A special face cream had been flown in. And I remember the first three or four planes that landed were just entourage and luggage. And then eventually the prince was coming into land and Bronwyn said to me, my sister, she said, “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 grabbed 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. The 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 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 had 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, and as he sees me and I block the doorway, he starts downing hand lotion and starts chugging it into his mouth. It’s like mango papaya hand lotion. He even gets a streak of lotion across his top jowl. And then he realizes that he’s in a confined space and he drops the jar of lotion, stands in the glass, cuts his feet a little bit, and launches himself in a full dive across the bathroom at the giant panel of glass across the bath where you can look out onto the river.

He smacks the glass, his hands come down, he puts a bloody handprint on it. He pushes back off the glass, he flies onto the ceiling, and now he starts to make baboon noises. And at the same time, he starts to use the patented baboon technique for getting out of dangerous situations, which is to massively release your bowels. And so for a few seconds, this baboon bounces around causing absolute chaos, knocking over bath salts. He’s standing on the faucet, his hands are bleeding. There’s lotion, there’s crap everywhere. He’s barking at me.

Then he turns and he comes at me. And Tim, I remember I let out a little scream, “Ah!” And I leaned back and he flew in slow motion past me. And in midair, he turned and he looked at me as he went past, and he had a look of savage glee on his face and lotion down across his jowl. Then he landed on the bed and he bounded across the bed with these bloody handprints, released another massive turd, and then ripped the front veranda doors open and dived off the front veranda like a stockbroker in a recession, and the whole time he still screams, and he disappeared into the river.

The room, as I looked around the room, I cannot tell you what a baboon in a confined space does, the room looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There is blood and shit and lotion and baboon hair. There’s a turd on the pillow. It smells strongly of baboon, and it looks quite human-like because baboons have very similar pores to humans. So there’s a bloody hand on the wall and like someone’s grabbed the faucet with it, so it looks like someone’s been murdered in there.

And the walkie-talkie goes off, “The prince is now five minutes out. Five minutes out.” I called my sister on the radio. I said, “Bronwyn, you’ve got to get down here with the housekeeping team. This is an absolute shit show.”

So she comes down with a group of chambermaids and housekeeping ladies, and they start to go ham on this room, trying to get it back into working order. Meantime, a massive pantomime breaks out on the main reception area of the lodge as the staff of Londolozi try and delay the prince from coming to his room. “Hello, your Majesty. Could we offer you a quick wine tasting?” He’s like, “No, I just arrived. I want to go to my room.” “We would like to take you straight out on a safari right now. There’s a leopard with a kill nearby.” “That sounds good, but I’d like to go to my room.” “Okay, what about the ladies choir who like to sing songs and do traditional dancing?” He’s like, “No, I’m going to my room.”

And what saved us, Tim, was in the middle of this elaborate Fawlty Towers, this pantomime, a hippo walked out onto the rocks in front of the camp in the midday light, and the people of Londolozi acted like they had never seen a hippo in their life. People started screaming, “Oh my God, a hippo! We never see hippos out of the water. Someone go and fetch a spotting scope!” Someone brought a telescope down, and that brought us about 15 minutes while the prince took in the hippo. Staff were acting like the hippo was the most amazing thing the world had ever seen.

Anyway, eventually we can stall him no longer. He comes down to the room and literally as he comes in the room, the chambermaids slip out of the sliding door in the bathroom, and they get into the long grass around the suite, and they’ve got mops and buckets and baboon shit in their hair. And as one, they just drop down into the grass. They just disappear and lie there in absolute possum status.

And there’s this incredible moment where the prince comes into his room and it smells of room spray and everything’s clean, and the mirror has been put straight. And he walks out onto the front veranda and he looks out over the river and a hippo calls nearby, and it’s just everything is quiet. And he’s like, “Wow, it’s so good to be out here alone for a thousand miles in every direction.” And he turns and walked back into his room and 12 chambermaids rise up out of the grass around his suite.

And that is the day that Lunch really got us.

Tim Ferriss: Lunch the baboon.

Boyd Varty: Lunch the baboon.

Tim Ferriss: Holy shit. What a story.

Boyd Varty: One day we were out, and this is another true story, one day we were out, a bunch of guides. Talking about a bunch of guys out together. And we drive out on the second afternoon we’ve all got off, we’re drinking some beers, and there’s a rocky outcrop. And the rocky outcrop is like a small hill, and it’s silhouetted against the skyline. And we see Lunch literally silhouetted on a rock up against the skyline. And he’s with a lady baboon, and he’s doing some very naughty things to her. And I swear, Tim, when he saw us, he put his one hand up in the air like this and gave us kind of a high five, like — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Londolozi, protector of all things. There have to be moments when you’re like, “Ah, I just want to — could we just blast him off that rock and be done with Lunch?”

Boyd Varty: No, it’s amazing to live amongst the animals. The other, I mean, the other day I was sitting watching a warthog. He was grazing up on the runway, and then I literally saw a thought occur to him, and he turned and he began to walk, and he walked like two kilometers down to the camp, and I followed him the whole way. And he made his way to where a woman was washing some clothes and she was hanging them on a washing line, and the water is dripping off the clothes onto the ground, and it’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 beautiful way to live.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And just to underscore what you just said about leopards, if you see a leopard, that leopard is allowing you to see them. And if they want to vanish, even in short grass, snap of the fingers, they’re gone.

Boyd Varty: Gone.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just beyond incredible to see that happen where you’re like, “Okay, they couldn’t hide themselves if they wanted to. That grass is too short.” And then they turn back and they’re like, “Eh, had enough of you guys,” and boom, they’re just completely invisible. It’s remarkable to see.

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

Boyd Varty: 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. And yeah, 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.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, absolutely. And everybody listening, we will link to, I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to link to, but we’ll link to some names and other things. We’ll link to 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 because it goes both ways, and you can work those muscles on both sides. And thank you for tuning in.