Introduction

Patrick: [00:00:47] This week's episode is the most unique to date. My guest is Boyd Varty, who grew up in the South African wilderness, living amongst and tracking wild leopards. The main theme of our conversation is the art of tracking, and how the same strategy for pursuing animals in the wild can be applied to all aspects of our lives. Boyd's family has been part of the South African safari world for four generations and he is bringing what they have collectively learned to a larger audience around the world. The episode includes the best answer I've ever heard, which comes when I ask Boyd to describe his most memorable experience.

We also discuss the potential dangers of an achievement or goal-oriented mindset, and what he learned from spending time with Nelson Mandela as a boy. This episode is one I hope you share with those you love because I think Boyd's ideas will have a profound impact on many who are thinking about what to do with their lives, whether they are young or old. For show notes, visit investorfieldguide.com/boyd. And now, please enjoy my conversation with Boyd Varty.

Boyd and the Mamba

Maybe a really fun place to start would be, there's a story in your book about an experience with your dad with a black mamba-

Boyd: [00:01:58] Yeah.

Patrick: [00:01:59] ... to give people a sense for what your childhood was like, and then we'll use that as a springboard for everything else-

Boyd: [00:02:03] Sure.

Patrick: [00:02:03] ... we'll talk about.

Boyd: [00:02:04] When I was about nine years old, I went to hunt an impala with my father and we had sussed out the terrain and the land sort of fell away and there was a termite mound which was a perfect position for us. So we creeped up onto the termite mound and we were laying with our chests on it and our legs sort of ... The mound kind of rose up, so we were leaning up against it. I looked over the top of the mound, and down the clearing, I could see the impala. I was waiting for the shot, and eventually it presented itself and I took the shot. As I took the shot, the herd kind of scattered, but they didn't run away. They scattered and then they stopped which sometimes they do when they get a little bit stunned. So my father said to me, "Just keep looking through the sight and see if you can just be certain that that impala's gone down."

We're lying there and I'm looking through the sight and I just felt this movement on my leg. I remember just taking my eye away from the scope and just peering down and immediately I saw this coffin-shaped head. And moving over the back of my leg was about a two and a half, three-meter black mamba. I knew snakes, I was passionate about snakes as a kid, so I immediately knew this is as bad as it gets. If it bites you, it's a couple of minutes and you just, you're gone. I grabbed my dad, I said to him, "Oh shit, dad, there's a mamba." He starts looking around like, "Where?" Like, it's somewhere around us. I said to him, "No, it's on us. Look down." Then he looks down, and I felt him start to shake and I knew we mustn't move and I said to him, "Don't move. Do not move."

So we stayed there really still and it just perused all over us, and then at one point it turned and it started like coming up the mound towards where our heads were and I thought, "God, if it gets up around the face, that's going to be a little bit too much." I look over at my dad and I can see blood coming out of his mouth. He has bitten the inside of his cheek with so much tension that he's bitten a cut clean into it. Then the snake turned and it started to move away from us and I remember the way that the mound was shaped, there was ... The sort of direction to go directly away from the snake, had a thick buffalo thorn that had kind of scraggled over the side of the mound. So we watched it get away and its tail was still on my foot and my dad grabbed me, he said, "Let's go!" He pulled me and I remember he tucked my in behind him, and he put his head down and he ran through this buffalo thorn.

When we came out the other side, he had a piece of the thorn and the branch broken off, like in his head. It looked like an antler across his face and thorns in his jacket and blood coming out of his mouth. And I was completely unharmed because I had been behind him. We got away and we stopped and I remember he just hugged me and then my sister, who had been waiting for us in a vehicle, we walked up, she said, "What the hell happened to you two?" Both of us were completely white. And then we got home and I thought I would tell my uncle about it. I said to him, "I had this crazy experience." He was a wildlife documentary filmmaker, I was hoping to get some sympathy and the only thing I got was, "Did you manage to film it?" I was like, "Come on."

The Story of Londolozi

Patrick: [00:05:03] A little bit different experience than my Saturdays going to a soccer game or something like that. Maybe we could back up a touch and give people some background. You were just beginning, before we hit record, to tell me the origins of your family's involvement in South Africa kind of in the bush. Maybe we could back up there, to the early history of what your ... Is it your great-grandfather or your [crosstalk] -

Boyd: [00:05:24] Great-grandfather.

Patrick: [00:05:25] Yeah-

Boyd: [00:05:25] Yeah.

Patrick: [00:05:26] ... how that started.

Boyd: [00:05:27] Yeah, and it lays a nice foundation for sort of where the psychology of my work has gone. Yeah, the story of Londolozi, where I grew up begins in 1926 with my great-grandfather and it begins like a lot of good stories with the intake of too much gin. My great-grandfather and a buddy of his were playing tennis at a tennis party in Johannesburg and they heard of these bankrupt cattle farms that lay adjacent to the Kruger National Park that had come up for sale. They were bankrupt for two reasons, one, the lions were eating the cattle and two, it was very hard terrain. And sight unseen, with a lot of gin in them, as adventures, they decided this was a great place to go. So they went and bought this for really no money, and that seems to be our family's investment policies ever since.

They went there in the June of 1926, the winter, and at the time, the only way to get there was, they caught a train from the town of Pettersberg, to the town of Komatipoort and at a siding post, siding 61, they bribed the train driver to stop the train. They got off with their gear and they walked on a compass bearing, directly north. They'd organized for some porters to meet them there. They were halfway along the way, the porters said, "We're being led to our death," they didn't know if there was water. They didn't know if they'd be able to replenish their supplies and my great-grandfather spoke a little bit of Zulu and he cojoled a little bit and he got the porters to go for another hour.

They arrived under this tree, this big beautiful ebony tree on the banks of the river, pitched their tent, woke up the next morning, beautiful mist overlooking the river, this vast wilderness and that was really the arrival point. They fell in ... Instantly, they were in love with the place. But they would come down in the winter months because there was no malaria and started off living in little mud huts. Sorry, living in tents and then they built these mud huts, which I'm told, on the occasions that it did rain, people would go and stand outside for shelter. They were just like, you know, you could see the stars through the roof.

For three generations, my great-grandfather, my grandfather and then my father and uncle, they would go down there in the winter and they would go to hunt. The terrain was ... Because of the cattle that had been overgrazed, there was thick scrub over a lot of the property. The animals were there, but you didn't really see them, so if you look at the old game manuals, you might ... If they saw a lion or a leopard during a month there, that would be quite miraculous and usually they were trying to hunt it. Sparse antelope, not really any elephants, so it was there, but the animals were shy and they tended to try and get away from you. The actual land had been overgrazed and sort of worked over with the scrub that had come up as a result of the cattle.

Then that went on for three generations and then when my father was 15 and my uncle was 17, we had a real defining moment and very suddenly my grandfather died. The family advisors gathered in Johannesburg and they told these two young teenagers, "Listen, you got to get rid of that wild place where you go and hunt lions. It's a dangerous pastime, it was a bad investment. Get rid of that place, you knuckle down and you look after your mother." I think it must've been the arrogance and the genius of youth and they said, "Listen, that place was where our father's spirit was, we're keeping it and we'll make it pay." That was their declaration, "We'll make it pay. We'll work it out," and that's how we got ourselves into the safari business in 1969.

Then these two young boys started the safari operation which was completely ragtag. They had one Land Rover that only turned left. They had these three mud huts. The only thing on the menu was impala for breakfast, impala meat for lunch, impala meat for dinner. They decided they would take the whole safari industry in one go, so they started canoe safaris, hunting safaris, photographic safaris, you name it, they were going to do it. The first canoe safari, they hit a hippo and the canoe broke in half, so they canceled canoe safaris. The only guests who they could get to come in '69, was a reform school from Johannesburg, so they ran trials for a reform school for a while. It was like really make it up as you go along and my father and my uncle, and then very soon afterwards my mother, lived in these three mud huts during the week. And then when the few guests who they could get would come down on the weekend, they would move out and go and live in a caravan and the guests would move into the staff accommodations.

But they had an encounter early on, which was another real defining moment. They met a guy called Ken Tinley and Ken was this maverick ecologist. He had dropped out of high school, but then been admitted into a BSc science program at the University of Cape Town because he drew a picture of a moth with such intricate detail, that the dean of the faculty said, "Okay, we'll give you a try." So he got his science degree, he had worked in the Kruger National Park where his thinking was considered too radical by very close-minded scientific community. He was one of the forerunners of connected ecology.

Then he had gone to Mozambique and he had lived by himself for six months, a year, in this reserve called Gorongosa. During that time, he had walked the reserve and as he walked it for hours and hours in pure solitude, he would map it by drawing these beautiful pencil drawings of the landscape. He developed what can only be described as a kind of romance with landscape and an intimate understanding of how a landscape fits together and how the topography informs the soil, which informs the grasses, informs the flow of moisture, how to preserve moisture in the soil, how that informs the animals, the birds, the terrains. And he saw everything as connected, and so where the scientists were studying just trees, or grasses, or animals, he was feeling the connections between all things. When he arrived at Londolozi, he was kind of this ... Eventually, he left Mozambique because the war broke out, Renamo and Frelimo started fighting and the war washed into his camp, and he literally ran for his and he ran back to South Africa. He was a formidable guy, he was like a Clint Eastwood look-alike.

He arrived at Londolozi and he met these two young boys. He said to them, "If you want this place to work, you must partner with the land, you need to consider the land your partner. You need to set an intention to move away from hunting and begin to think of the animals as your kin, and you need to make sure that the local people participate in the well-being and the preservation of this place. They said, "Well, partner with the land, what do you mean?" He said, "Come, I'll show you." He took them out onto the ravaged overgrazed pieces of this property. What happens is when the cattle overgraze, you get bare soil, rain lands on bare soil, it runs off, instead of going into the ground and then scrub comes up. So a lot of the property was eye-high scrub. He said to them, "You clear the scrub and you go to where you're losing the moisture, these lowest points where the erosion is, you pack the scrub in there, and it's kind of like putting the plug back in a bath and the grassland starts to return.

They started doing that work, and they started with the psychology of starting to partner with the land. And over a number of years of restoring, working with the local people, actually physically working on the land, they started to see this transformation. Then suddenly, they would go out one day and there would be zebra and then the next day you would go out and the land had opened up so there could be wildebeest and waterbuck. Then they started seeing nyalas, so there was this real sense of, as they worked with the land, the land responding. Then one day they were driving home ... This was 10 years into that process of actual, physical restoration ... they were driving home and in the late evening light, a female leopard stepped out onto the road in front of them and she stopped ...

Now, mostly, if you had seen leopards at that time, they were trying to get away from you. They had been hunted in that area. She stopped and she turned and she looked at them. She gave a little growl and they saw she had this one broken canine and for a moment, she let herself be seen, and then she moved off and they drove home in silence. I don't know if you've ever had one of those moments where like something intense happens, in the car and you get home and you turn the car off and everyone just sits there. You hold the wheel, no one says anything, you just sit. No one gets out. They just sat in this old Land Rover for a moment and then my uncle looked at my father and he said, "Whatever just happened, that's my future, that, just that."

He teamed up, which was probably a good thing because my uncle was ... He did not endear himself to the guests who were coming to visit because he would take safaris wearing a pair of snorkeling goggles so that he didn't get grass seeds in his eyes and he was rude to the guests. He was rude to everyone, basically, a real kind of go your own way type of guy. He teamed up with this local tracker called Elmon Mhlongo and for the next 12 years, all they did was track that leopard. Sometimes they would go for weeks without seeing her, and then they might get a glimpse and then those glimpses turned into longer glimpses. Then sometimes she would let them be near, but they would park their vehicle 200 yards away and they would watch her. They would watch her body language and they would see, "Okay, at this distance, she's comfortable." Then that distance started to close, so it went from 200 yards, to 100 yards, to 50 yards.

Then, there was a day when they were sitting with her and she was maybe 10, 15 yards from this Land Rover and a cub came out and jumped onto her head and started chewing on her ears. That was an incredible moment and it was really the establishment of the trust. She began to trust that the vehicle, this Land Rover, the people in it, meant no harm. We called her the mother leopard because she was really the mother of Londolozi. She was the mother because word got out ... Well, for two reasons. She had 12 litters of cubs. All of those cubs grew up modeling their mother's trust and so word got out that there was a place in the world where you could go and see wild leopards and they would allow you to see them. That had a kind of, and continues to have a sort of mystical appeal in the human psyche, to go and be with a wild leopard. So the idea of the Leopards of Londolozi was born and suddenly, people started to come.

Through the 80s, a real momentum developed and as the land improved, the accommodations improved, everything ... more people were able to have jobs. The tourism industry started to mature and so it gave life to the whole place. That happened, and then through the 90s, we exported that model of care of land, care of wildlife, care of people. We started a business that exported that model and set up safari camps that said, "Look, if you protect these wild places, you can create an economy of wildlife, and the economy of wildlife will support local people and local people will be invested in the protection of these wild places."

So that was through the 90s and then sometime in the 2000s, I started asking myself, "Okay, well, what's my part of this story? There's been this incredible act of restoration an industry, the tourism industry has been born, this model has been created. My family is now known as being conservationists. I should be a conservationist, but where do I fit in all of this?" Around that time, I had a few interesting encounters. Well, some of them were quite traumatic and we can touch on those a little bit. But one of the things that happened was, I had been actually over here for a few months and this question was burning in my mind, "What do I want to do with my life? Where do I want to take this?" I'd been in the states for two or three months. I'd actually just started writing the book and was working with an editor out here.

I went home and when I got home, I was so excited to be home, I just put my bags down, I took my shoes off and I walked out into the wilderness. I walked for like two or three kilometers or so, and it was just this beautiful still summer's day. Out there, the middle of the day is the witching hour, not the middle of the night, the middle of the day, hot, nothing moves. Things tend to be quite still. And I came around a corner and lying on one side of this little waterhole were these two 10-month-old leopard cubs, like sub-adults, they're not grown, but they're big enough that the mother is leaving them for periods of time. As I saw them, I sort of turned my energy away from them, I didn't put them directly in my gaze and I dropped my energy down and I noticed their body language. Now, though leopards there, have become very accustomed to seeing you in the vehicle, when you're on foot, it's still a different story.

What normally will happen is they see you, they flatten, and then they just disappear. A leopard can disappear, it's like miraculous. But they look at me and then, the one had a pink nose, the one had a black nose, they turn away. One starts snapping flies out the sky and the other one lies down. I was amazed by this, it's not normal behavior. I moved a little bit closer and they would look at me and then relax again. The body language was telling me, "We're okay with you." Came a little bit closer and eventually, it got to the point where I was sitting on one side of this little waterhole and they were on the other side and I'm sure that the water was like a natural barrier. Middle of the day, incredibly quiet and what was most amazing about it is, there was a feeling to the moment. There was a sense of being allowed, of aware of each other but with no animosity, with no fear, just present with each other. I sat with him for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and wild leopards. It was not ... And for me, in all my years, that was incredibly unusual event. It's not like you do that all the time.

I got up and I started to move away, and as I started to move away, I felt like an elation rise in me. I had struggled quite a bit with depression at certain points, and after some of the traumas, I had been quite shut down, and this feeling started to move in me. It was not a feeling from the mind, it was a felt body sense, of this like, just pure joy and excitement. I started to walk a little bit faster and then, at one stage, I just started to run and this thought was ... The way that it was coming through, it was almost landing kind of like a download and I was thinking to myself, "My great-grandfather came here to hunt lions and leopards. My grandfather grew up hunting lions and leopards. My father and uncle grew up hunting lions and leopards, but in the space of that one generation, and the decision to partner with the land and restore, it's landed with me being able to have an encounter of trust and connection with two completely wild leopards."

So Londolozi, what the place represented to me, it stopped being a place where we gave safaris and it became a small microcosm of what we need to do all over the world, not conservation, not standing at the boundary saying, "We need to protect what we have left," but this idea of restoration, actively reclaiming of wilderness. So the idea of restoration landed in me and at first, it took root as like this very physical, "Okay, we must find land and restore it. We must find physical places, we must restore rainforests, we must restore," and I still think we need to do that. I think we need to seed a psychology of restoration and we want big companies taking on restoration projects.

But on a deeper level, something also occurred and I started to see that, while those physical projects are important, what we need now is a radical shift in human consciousness. So the second part of my work in restoration became any kind of healing, any kind of release from trauma, any kind of returning to the self. What I find is that, what we think of as ourself, is often a series of patterns of compensation. I think you talk a little bit about it, this desperate need for accumulation, or goals, successes, all of these defining factors that are externally defined, as opposed to a connection of the self that is born of presence.

When we're actually able to let go of some of the roles and the rules and the things that the culture imposes on us to be someone and find the self, one of the first things that happen is, we stop wanting more. I believe that's a big part of the restoration movement too, is to ... I see it as kind of an infinity sign, work on restoring wild places because that has an incredible sense that affects people's mindsets, people's well-being, connection to nature has a profound effect human psyche, so we must work externally on that. As we do that, we become more inclined to heal, and as we heal, as we connect with the self, as we become more present, any way you want to describe it, we more inclined towards restoring wild spaces.

Ubuntu and the Village

Patrick: [00:22:36] Can you touch on the concept of ubuntu and use that a bridge into discussing your thoughts on the village, both literal and metaphorical?

Boyd: [00:22:47] Sure. Ubuntu is the African value that says, "I am because of you." I get to experience the deepest parts of myself in relation. It's like, I can't know the deepest acts of love and compassion by myself. It's something about being together that provokes that, that we make each other human. Another way they say it in Sotho is, "People are not people without other people." It's very much about this relation, it's about being connected. I've expanded that definition too, because the root of the word in Zulu is about people, but I've gone on to say that it is not only through people, that we experience the deepest of ourselves, but through our connection with all sentient beings, the natural world, too.

Ubuntu is central in Africa and while Africa is, it's a place of so many contradictions, it's harsh. And there's a level of brutality there that is what you see on the news, but it also has this incredible heart. It also has this incredible, much more connected society and people really believe that their well-being is tied to the well-being of others. So it's a much more collective society, and I feel like that is something that we're in desperate need of. Some of the trauma that I see, in now running groups and working with people, it's not even a trauma that we know we have in modern society. It's just an isolation that's born out of hyper-individuality. What happens in that hyper-individuality is you becomes separate from everyone. Your purpose is defined in comparison to everyone and we see that in our relationship with nature, too, instead of thinking of ourselves as a part of nature, nature is something we experience.

So the work of ubuntu is to push away some of this hyper-individuality, to create conversations that are more connected, to create circles where we can share ourselves more deeply, where we can share some of what we're carrying, because people are all carrying ... People are struggling. Modern life has its challenges, including things that you don't know are a struggle, like ... I do some mentoring children. The culture, modern-day culture, presents you with an ideal and then everyone's trying to live up to that ideal and so you get to do something like mentoring and you run the first few groups and the parents come in with their kids. Everyone is maintaining the ideal of the good parent, for example, and trying to live up to that, trying to do it right and be very open-minded and have the right conversations. And then the second group, and the third group, and slowly, you're building trust.

Then somewhere in the fourth group, someone will stand up and say, "I don't know how to do this. I'm exhausted, I'm confused, I don't have a natural connection with my child. I'm struggling to find our point. I find it difficult." And there's this collective sigh of relief in the room. That's what I mean by we're all carrying stuff, there's a sense of like, "Oh my God, thank God," and then everyone starts. I just feel like that's the work of ubuntu, to be able to be present to what we feel and share it, and bear witness to each other and realize that we're in this together.

There's a kind of separation that you don't see that is just natural to modern-day life, and so the work of ubuntu is to just create spaces of connection. Presence is the core of it, actually being present to your own feelings, needs, wants, not just doggedly trying to live up to the ideal to achieve the goals, but to actually feel and be fluid in that process and be connected. It's the opposite of the model of, "It doesn't matter what you feel, get it done." It's like, it does matter and if we can be more connected, we can get it done in a different way."

Patrick: [00:26:39] I'm sure this is going to be very hard to answer and I'm not asking for a formula, because obviously, I know there isn't a formula for this. I find your idea of building villages extremely appealing at a lot of levels, so starting with your small circle of friends, your family, going out, concentric circles out from there. Are there principles ... As you've thought abut this, this idea of ubuntu and connection, and your experience growing up in a much different feel ... I'll just back up for one second. I want to explain how we came to be sitting together. About five years ago, my family and I spent time in South Africa and Botswana for about three weeks and left, frankly, depressed because we had experienced that connection that you're alluding to, at such a deep level. Along with, maybe parts of the west coast of Ireland, with a similar set of wonderful people, was kind of the points and places in my life that I felt the most calm and present, to use your word. Anyway, so we suggested this same trip to, Greg, our mutual friend and that's how we're here today.

I have kind of a, very limited, but firsthand experience of the kind of connection that you're talking about. I think what you're saying is, figure out sort of the circumstances, the connections that allow that to happen and export it. So I'd love to, as much as we can, without trying to plug it into a formula, explore some of those principles. Like, what's wrong? What creates the opposite of the village, the race that we're all in, the comparisons, the rankings, the achievements? And how can we start to mollify that? How do we move the other direction? Just general ideas could be really interesting to explore.

Boyd: [00:28:29] Okay, yeah, that will be a fun jump-off point. I think one of the things that happens in a consumeristic society is what is valuable becomes categorized in two very particular ways. Personal value starts to get knocked off its axis, the axis that you see in more collective villages. In a consumeristic society, it seems that value becomes what you can consume, so if someone who can consume a lot, you have a lot, then you start to climb the pyramid, or what you contribute to that system, so where you stand on the ladder of adding to the high-level consumerism model. Within that, people's value becomes like, "That ranks me," and the minute that that gets knocked off-kilter, then everything starts to go with it.

Think the first thing is, is to re-establish what's valuable. There's a great author, Daniel Quin. He says, "Not more, but more of what you really want," and if you actually can put aside this idea of the egoic value and start to try and find out what is actually valuable, what people find is more connection, is what they really want, more time, more experiences with family. So in a weird way, that becomes the first foundation to actually get in touch with, not what you've been told to want, but what you actually want. Does that make sense?

Patrick: [00:30:04] It does.

Boyd: [00:30:06] So that becomes the first point. Then, the second is to realize that you can't live in the ideal, and what I mean by that is, once you become present to those things, you enter into a creative process. So the straight line of culture will tell you, you hit this marker, you hit this marker, you hit this marker. Once you say, "Well, I don't want to live like that, there's other things that I really want," then you have to become a tracker. I always think of the trackers that I grew up around. What I mean by that is, to create the life that you actually want, to work out how to create more connection in the society, work out how to create more of the things you really want. You have to start to enter into the creative process of living in constant creative response, so starting to find out how you do that and tracking what you need, how you could create it.

So it becomes an evolving process and I always say, "You are the first villager in your village." You have to start to treat yourself, you have to start to connect with the self, you have to start to live on the guidance of the self, and I mean the real self. Once you work out what you need, you can start to open the door to creating. So something like more connection, you can start breaking out of the conversations that are just two people presenting to each other, and actually start knowing that you need it to go a little bit deeper, and then finding the people who want to go deeper with you, finding the people who want the same things as you, starting to build community around that. A lot of it is cutting away the pretense of what we're told to want.

I was thinking about it the other day, I know you're a fan of Joseph Campbell. He says, "There's the life you were told to want, and then there's the path of following your bliss." If you watch him the PBS special he did, he's says ... So everyone, into this follow your bliss thing, you know? "Follow your bliss. Follow your bliss." But what they don't know is what he says afterwards which is, "And if you follow your bliss, your life might not be respected, but it will be your life." What he means is, not respected by other people, sometimes because they won't understand it, but it will be your life, it will be your path.

So you have to create the ubuntu in yourself. In order to do that, you have to realize first, that the things you were told to want, came in the culture and the remedy is to begin to get present to what you actually want, which I think is really what compelled me so much to connect with you too, is because you're in a world, really ... You're sort of between two worlds, and to me you're a great example of, "It's not that you have to give up certain things, it's not that investing is bad. It's that, how do you bring yourself to it, in a way that is more full, in a way that is more inclusive, in a way that actually gives you more life?"

Inner Drive

Patrick: [00:33:08] There's a line in ... I can't remember which Campbell book. I was just trying to look it up, so I'll butcher it a little bit. It's a line that just hit me so hard when I first read it, something to the effect of, "It takes tremendous courage to do whatever you want. Everybody else has plans for you. I ignored those plans, I went into the woods and I read for five years," and that formed the basis of what become Campbell's career. And more and more you see this. Like anything, when you start looking for something, all of a sudden it pops up everywhere. One of the things I see over and over again is that same journey or drive or inner compass versus external compass, leading to tremendous success.

My mom and I were joking about ... There's a guy in the states called Mr. Money Mustache. Mr. Money Mustache espouses a lean life, without frivolous spending, just spend on what you need and brings you joy. Live on very little and all of a sudden, you're much more joyful than people who are chasing millions of dollars. He's done this and built a movement and he's a great writer and really has a fun brand. But of course, the irony is, in so doing, in creating this huge audience and following completely his own thing, he's built an enormous business. You see this over and over again that ... People will get sick of me talking about Joseph Campbell's threshold crossing, but it's such an important idea and maybe is the same idea that you're talking about, of the step one is to be the first villager. The only way to do that is to start following this inner compass and then it's just kind of this world of the unknown and creation.

Boyd: [00:34:48] Yeah. In some ways, it's a deeply challenging path. In some ways, it's much easier to have it rolled out, "This is how you do it." The minute you go your own way, and you commit to going your own way, there is so much richness there, but it is challenging, because you give up being able to define yourself by any kind of comparison and there's a gift in that and a challenge. What happened to me was, at some point, while I was working as a safari guide, I met this woman who was a ex-Harvard professor and she had taught at Thunderbird for a while in Phoenix and she had one day, read an article about herself, where someone had referred to her as a life coach. She was kind of startled by this idea. She said, never before has she though of a more ridiculous thing, but that's what they started calling her.

She came on safari at Londolozi. I took her out and we really hit it off, and we were tracking a lion one morning. Tracking is this incredible fluid process that's ... You drop into the narrative and you have to be present to the next track, but have a sense of what the animal's doing. It's a constant commitment to the unknown. You're stepping forward on the next track. You don't know if you'll find this animal. You're stringing together of series of clues and if you string together enough of these very fine clues, you start to get a sense of where this animal might be, what it might be doing. It's the art of noticing, it's subtlety, it's listening, it's using your senses, and while I was tracking this lion, I was talking her through the process.

She said to me, "You know, you and I do the same thing." What she was doing was helping people get in touch with their inner guidance, notice, be willing to go into the unknown, be willing to be in a process to feel more subtly, to let the feelings be a guide, rather than the mind and the ideal. We realized we were both trackers and so somehow those two things, that's where my work, again, began to evolve into the idea of, "Well, once you become the first villager, you have to become a tracker. You have to begin to notice." Of course, in order to notice, you have to have some stillness. If you're frantic, it's very hard to feel the inner tracks, to get a sense of the guidance. You have to be present, you have to be willing to keep stepping into the unknown.

One of the things that trackers do is when they lose the track, they'll walk up ahead and check game paws. They try things. You have to be willing to ... When you don't know the next move, try a few things. Sometimes, if you don't get a track up ahead, you have to be willing to go back to where you had the last clear track and start again from there. It's this very evolutionary process and I see it as a way of living now, and I see it as a way of living more connected to yourself. I think there's a hunger in people to live in this way. The process is, is to firstly, realize what was given to you and you have to know that some of the things you think, "That's just what I want," came from the outside.

I think of the culture as presenting you with a choice like this. You can be anything you want. What do you want to drink? You want a drink? You can choose. You get to choose, would you like a Coke or a Pepsi, your choice. Go for it. Then people feel like, "Oh, I've got all this autonomy. I guess I'm a Coke person." Then, you define that, "I'm a coke person," but you weren't given the millions of other options of things to drink. That's sort of what the culture does, it says, "You choose who you are within this-"

Patrick: [00:38:29] Here's your menu.

Boyd: [00:38:30] ... Yeah ... "within this parameter." So you have to know that that's gone on a little bit. Otherwise, you'll think I'm a Coke person. Once you start to break away from that, then you learn to live in the process of presence.

Tracking Lessons

Patrick: [00:38:43] Could we go back a bit to your early experiences with tracking? In reading your book, and thinking about this conversation ahead of time, this was the topic that I was most excited for because I think it's the most pervasive, and actually I think it applies very directly to investing. What I would say the overarching truth is, is that anytime you're trying to do something via a playbook, or a pre-written set of rules, you're toast. Emerson has this great line that I have pasted.

I paste up quotes places to remind me and this one is maybe a top-five one which is ... It's simple, it's that, "Imitation is suicide," that, if you are trying to just do what made someone else successful, maybe you'll have some nominal success from the external standpoint, but you won't really do anything interesting, or maybe true. So the idea of tracking is, I think, one that we can explore and I'd love to hear the early stages of this. I don't know how old you were, who you were with, how you learned. Can you learn? Can you even teach tracking, or do you just kind of have to watch it and do it yourself? Let's jump off from your early experiences.

Boyd: [00:39:50] Yeah, I mean, tracking is really the thing that has become central to me now. I think of myself as trying to live as a tracker, trying to step away from actually following the footprints of animals and apply those principles to my life for sure. I got introduced to it at a young age. There were two brothers and then they had some half brothers who grew up south of Londolozi. Their names are the Mhlongo's. My uncle was very close with this man called Elmon Mhlongo. Elmon was a true naturalist, he had grown up hunting and gathering and he had, from a young age, fed himself off the land, he knew where to get water. He knew how to get a warthog out of a hole. He knew how to rob a beehive. I mean, just an incredible naturalist. My early experiences were with him because I used to go out every morning.

00 AM, my uncle would wake me, we would get in the Land Rover, we would go out and we would go and track leopards at that stage because he was a documentary filmmaker. So my first experiences were with Elmon and what struck me was this kind of openness with which he approached every morning, and a paradoxical openness, because he wanted to find a leopard. But in order to do that, he had to drop the idea of finding a leopard, and work with what was presented to him, work with the track, work with an alarm call, work with some birds calling. It was this weird state of incredible rigorous dedication and yet complete fluidity and openness. Early experiences were with him, he took me hunting a few times. I used to go out, he started to teach me tracks. He started to teach me how to move in the wilderness, a way of moving, subtle things like the wind, the light, positioning the light so you can see the ground better, making sure your downwind, really just a way of moving.

That was very formative and then when I was about 19, I had sort of this introduction into tracking and I has a sense of it, but I wanted to take it to the next level. Then I spent a year with this well-known local bush poacher. The reason I wanted to be with him is because he had some of these old school skills, and he had fed himself off the land for years. I spent time with him and that was ... My tracking took a huge step forward because he would put me in the front and he wouldn't help me, he would say, "Go." Sometimes it would be days and days of losing the track, going back and he would just look at me. I would say to him, "Okay, can you just give me the next track?" He'd say, "No, work for it." Then I'd walk tight circles for a while and eventually, I would get it.

Then, occasionally, he would track and I would drop into his rhythm and get a sense of the process, because some of the great trackers, they follow and then ... They go track for track and then they leave the track and they cut ahead. They'll walk a half-circle loop up ahead and just try and cut the track again and they trust themselves to see it. Then they start to jump ahead on the track and they'll walk big arches, seeing if the animal hasn't cut this way, hasn't cut this way. Okay, cut the track again, and they speed up, or they know there's water up ahead or they ... So they have this very ... The process is always evolving. It's not just one thing. Sometimes you're following, sometimes you're using speculation. Sometimes you're cutting ahead, sometimes you're using local terrain, sometimes you hear an alarm call, so I really got a sense of that from him.

Then, finally, these two trackers who have now become my real mentors, this guy called Alex Van Den Heever and Elmon's brother, Renias Mhlongo, they've become the people who I'm now out with all the time. They are probably two of the best trackers in the world. I would say they're in the top five or 10 in the world and my tracking has, again, gone to a different level, just being out with them for hours and being put on the track and being shown what the level of things they're noticing, the details they're noticing, the thought process that they bring to it. So it's this kind of ...

As I said, it often begins with sitting around a fire and just listening and then somewhere out there in the wilderness, a lion roars and the first act of it is, it could be anywhere out there. You try and get a sense of it, but it's this willingness to go, it's this willingness to try. It's thousands of hectares out there, but we're going after that line. Even that's a threshold in itself, the decision to know, knowing that there's an impossibility to it and yet, if we go and try and we use our skill, there's also a chance. As you practice it more, it becomes more and more likely.

Patrick: [00:44:33] You talk about, in a couple spots, two types of confidence, two different types of confidence. I'm going to read something because when I read your line, it made me think of this. It says, "Consider the hypothetical case of two fishermen, both of whom must make their living from a river. One fisherman lives by a river, where the catch is stable and abundant. The other lives by a river where the catch is variable and sparse, affording only a bare and precarious subsistence. The poorer of the two will clearly have an immediate life and death interest in devising new fishing techniques, in observing closely, the habits of fish, in the careful siting in traps and weirs, in the timing and the signs of seasonal runs of different species, and so forth."

Part of what you just said in your description of learning to track, was there's an element of difficultly and discomfort. When you've lost it, you're asking somebody to help you out, again, that's kind of like the playbook idea or the set of rules. So how much of it is trying to throw yourself into, almost a constant state of strain or difficultly that makes for a good tracker?

Boyd: [00:45:38] I sometimes think that uncertainty is a discipline of aliveness. It brings you to yourself and the challenge of the track ... What do they call it? The challenge of the track brings you to aliveness and it's like cracking this code and then you lost it for a while, so I think if it as aliveness. I think that giving yourself to that process and letting it push you and finding ... Once it starts to get hot, and you're thirsty and you don't know if you'll find this animal, finding the place in yourself that still wants to keep going and then finding that intensity, finding the rigorousness. The great trackers, they have a way and it's also a presence because you just keep responding to the next moment. You keep trying, you keep creating with the moment and letting that keep shaping your idea, and there's a relentlessness.

It's fascinating to watch trackers like Alex and Renias. There's a relentlessness to them. They will not stop and yet, it's not a burden. It's not a driven strain, there's no criticalness of the self like, "You got to keep going, keep doing this." They're present within it and they're having a good time. They like being challenged. They like losing the track and trying to workout where it might've gone. They don't consider when they lose the track, "This was a failure, we're not good." They use that as a state of motivation, actually, but it's a motivation that is not critical, that is joyful. Renias, as he was tracking, He used to say it to himself, "We'll find it. We'll find it." He'd just keep going on it and I think about that a lot, making up your own life, being someone who wants to create a life that is the expression of your essence. There's a lot of uncertainty in it, and also, aliveness.

Right now, I'm also building my work, there's a lot of uncertainty. There's no standard paycheck, there's no ... I'm making up my work, I'm creating my work and within that uncertainty, I'm tracking the things that feel good, that feel like an expression of my essence. I'm using my inner compass to guide. I'm being present to the moment and seeing what it has to offer and it's uncertain and I like that. I think that's some of the psyche of it, this idea of we're not looking for the meaning of life, but the feeling of being alive and that's what the process of tracking is to me.

Patrick: [00:48:10] The idea of the types of confidence just really stuck with me where the first type of confidence is basically the fisherman that has it easy, you know, confident in the next meal because of, the situation is abundant. The second type of confidence ... I can't remember the example we used, something like you've lived through a broken-down plane and been stuck somewhere, and been through really difficult situations, then you develop a true, like inner confidence. I think that everyone's got something for which they can be relentless, or in the pursuit of which, they will be relentless. The challenge is in, like you said, the Coke or the Pepsi. We're given Coke and Pepsi as the things that you should be relentless for, make a ton of money, collect accolades, beat other people, things like that. But there's just a much bigger menu and maybe that's back to where we started, like, that's the challenge that we all face is, where can we be relentless? I doubt I could be a relentless tracker. Maybe there's some part of that-

Boyd: [00:49:07] I think you would like it.

Patrick: [00:49:08] I'm sure I would and I want to come with you and try some time. But that's an amazing message of, find the thing that you can be relentless about because there's something.

Boyd: [00:49:19] Yeah. I look at ... Alex used to say to me, "When I'm tracking, sometimes it's stop/start, you get a track and then you go and look up ahead and an hour goes by, you don't get the second one. Then suddenly, you see where it crossed some sandy ground. Now you're on this track of a lion that's quite fresh. Then the flow comes, now you're seeing the track. The animal is leading you to a place where you could never have gone. Like, there was no road to go to that part of the reserve and suddenly you look up and you're in a beautiful ebony grove on the banks of a river that you would never have gone to." I think about that too, within the metaphor, like if you begin to live as a tracker, some of the most beautiful things that will occur, you could not have known to want.

I would say to him, "Tell me about the state you get into?" He would say, "When I'm flowing, I'm noticing, I'm feeling the subtle movement of the animal. I'm aware of the track. I feel tapped into everything, a kind of flow state and he said, I have no experience of being hungry. I have no experience of being thirsty, sometimes for hours on end." I always said, "I have no experience of time." I always say to people, "The things that make you forget about time, are sometimes a track to your most essential nature, the thing that is most to your essence, and then to try and track your way into finding how to live in that, how to live closer to that." The standard idea of life is like, okay, there's things you like, you put them aside, everyone ... That's what you do and then you get to them when you can.

Patrick: [00:50:58] When you retire.

Boyd: [00:50:59] Yeah, you get to those things on the weekends-

Patrick: [00:51:01] Go work hard.

Boyd: [00:51:01] Yeah, and I get that and it's just, for me, I'm trying to live in the expression of my essence which for me is restoration, which is helping people become more present, which is anything where I think there's an opportunity for a more collective conversation, and then to try and say, "Okay, living like that," yeah, there is the challenge of making a living too, but what I find is that, when I'm connected to it ... I run retreats ... somehow people keep coming and it keeps happening. I never know how it's going to happen, but the more I remain connected with it, the more people keep showing up, so ... Then it's starting to learn to trust it.

Most Memorable Tracking Experience

Patrick: [00:51:45] Yeah. What's the single most memorable tracking experience that you have?

Boyd: [00:51:50] Well, I have one with Alex and Renias. We tracked a single male lion, we tracked him for three or four hours and it got to a place where the lions tracks teed onto the tracks of a herd of buffalo and right there he laid down next to a pile of buffalo dung and this is the track telling you. He rolled over into the buffalo dung and he was covering himself in dung and he thought he was going to hunt those buffalo. There's amazing image, you can see where his tail shift. It's all laid out in the sand on the ground. Then he stands up and he starts walking and Renias was picking his tracks amongst the tracks, like the ground had been churned up by the hooves of the buffalo. He was picking his track and he was walking zig zags and he'd get one track, then he'd get a second track and he was charting a course.

Then where he saw the track, he would look up at a tree and he would use the tree as a marker. That's generally the line that the lion is moving on. And then he would get the ... Cut it again, and he was just saying, "I just keep trusting myself. Just keep trusting yourself." Then, there was a place where the tracks of three lionesses came in and joined him, so suddenly you saw the male's track and then the track of a female, and then a second female and a third. Lions are the only social cats, so on the ground suddenly you can see where the tracks are all touching each other. They're walking next to each other and they're rubbing each other as the pride has joined up. Then about maybe a kilometer ahead of us, a Bateleur eagle dropped down and Renias stopped us. He said, "You see when that eagle drops down, it means one of two things, either a buffalo has given birth to a calf, and the eagle is eating the afterbirth, or these lions have killed."

So we went up ahead and when we got to where the eagle had landed, it flew up and the ground had given way to like scrubby grass. It was very difficult to see tracks. Alex and I were walking around, we're looking for the tracks everywhere, we couldn't find it. Renias stood very, very still and it was interesting to me, when he lost the track, he became still for a moment. And because he was standing still, he saw these flies going past him, zoom, zoom, zoom, and then he started to follow the flies. Then he put his nose up and he started sniffing and literally, he caught the scent of meat. He walked us in on the remains of a small buffalo calf and immediately, as he saw the carcass ... The lions had obviously moved off ... I saw him doing ... It's a kind of calculation, but it's in his body. He's not thinking about it rationally. He felt the sun on him, so he feels the heat building, he sees the size of the carcass.

It was a small calf, he knows that there're four lions, one male and three females, and as he was doing it, I realized I was thirsty. So if I'm thirsty, that lion is probably getting thirsty, so it's very alive. Then Alex and I continued to look for the tracks, where had they gone from the carcass? Renias stood up, he just started walking. We said, "Where are you going?" He said, "I'm going, I know where the water is." We were about three or four miles from the river and he walked down through the clearing, he completely forgot about the tracks, went down to the edge of the river, catch a game path on the edge of the river and we started walking along the river's edge. Walked like that for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and up ahead of us, through the reeds, we saw this beautiful canvas, elephant bull was walking towards us.

They kicked the ground and a little puff of smoke came up and drifted and Alex and Ren stepped in the direction that the sand had drifted, this little puff of dust. They're stepping downwind. They step downwind and they got in under a little palm tree and this elephant bull walked past us, maybe two or three meters away. For a moment, I remember he's towered over us, his shadow was on us and on the game path, he smelled where we had walked and he picked up the sand and he was smelling our footprints. I just felt this incredible energy, kind of sensory awakeness. Then he walked past us. As he moved away, we got back on the game path, and now there's these big beautiful elephant huge tracks on the game path in the soft sand. About a hundred meters down the track, the lion tracks come back onto the path and now on top of the tracks of the elephant, are the tracks of the lions and we've just seen the elephant, so we now know we are close.

Renias said to me, "Come, come up to the front." My job now is to follow the tracks and he's putting me on the tracks because him and Alex want to look over my shoulders into the brush ahead, so that they can see the lions before the lions see us. We start to follow and the beautiful lion tracks in powdery sand, the whole pride walking in a line along this game path. Up ahead of us, 200 yards, a monkey starts to alarm. We know that ... I mean, I can see the monkey looking down into the river. We know those lions are moving ahead of us. Keep going, get to where the monkey's over our head. He's still looking down the river, shouting and then a nyala starts to alarm, one of these antelope. It's an incredible feeling of being in the story, the narrative, you can see the tracks, everything is talking to you. The monkey's taking to you, the nyala is alarming.

Beyond that, a squirrel starts to call and you're emersed in this unfolding story and it's like the sense of you and the tracks start to collapse and it's one story. It also occurred to me that you could walk down that trail, as a non-tracker, someone who is completely shutdown and all of that could be going on, and you could miss it. This incredible information language, this whole scape is guiding you. It's telling you and you could miss it. We go for about another 50 meters and then there's this amazing thing. All the tracks are going away from us and then, suddenly, on top of all of the tracks going away from us, there's one set of tracks facing back towards us. What's happened is, the female at the back of this line of lions moving.

She can't smell us, she can't hear us, but as we're tracking her, she's starting to get a feeling. Something behind her is saying, "There's something there," and I think it's because we're dropping into the resonance of the lions. We're moving like them, we're starting to connect in some way. She's feeling something, so she stops and she turns and she looks back down the path. She doesn't see us, but it's just a beautiful moment in the tracks. You know she's starting to get a sense that you're back there. Then the tracks cut off the riverbank and they went down into the thick reeds and we had a little bit of a, what we called an indaba, a bit of a meeting. We said, "Are we going down there?" Renias said, "Let's just take a little look." We went down on a hippo path where the hippos come in and out of the river and it made like a tunnel in the reeds. So we moved, we crouched down, we crawl through this tunnel, and then it opened up into a little sandy beach.

And I should tell you, if you see lions on foot, one of two things happen, one, they get a fright, they run away from you. They take cover. Or two, and particularly when they have cubs, or meat, you start to hear a growling. It sounds like a dirt bike and then you see one of the females, or one of the males. Usually it's a female if there's cubs, and she just locks you in the most intense, "I'm going to massacre you," gaze. And slowly, she starts to walk towards you, and there's an intent to the walk. The head is down, and the tail is lashing. She starts to walk faster and faster and faster and then it becomes a trot and then it becomes a full-on charge. And the whole time, she's growling. She comes in and at that moment, your only hope is to stand your ground. Everyone grabs each other, you start shouting and usually she'll come and stop two or three meters, the sand flies up, you get sand in your teeth, in your eyes, it's terrifying.

Everyone stands and you shout and then what's happening is, while she's got you there, growling at you, the other female's taking the cubs away. My uncle you to say to me, "Lions are afraid of your courage. You have to stand your ground, otherwise you'll get eaten." So she turns and she moves away and then you get away. This is all going through my mind as I crawl through a hippo path in a thickly reeded river. We come out onto this open beach and we go over to the little stream of water and I can see where the male lion has come in to drink and then the first female ... There were three females with him ... then the second female, then the third female. This is all in the tracks, telling you and this is how it can help you. Then a fourth set of tracks, fourth female, and then I saw tracks of what I thought, briefly, as I glanced, it was civet. A civet is like a small raccoon-like creature.

I saw the tracks of the civet and then the three of us all looking at the civet track realized at the same time, that's not the tracks of a civet. That's the tracks of a cub and Renias, he's a black man, went completely white. Alex looked at me and he mouthed a profanity and he grabbed the top of his head and we realized now we are down in the river. The pride has joined up with a female with cubs and all of us just sank down onto our haunches and we sat there incredibly still because we know that lions are now very, very close. You don't want to be in between the mother who's stashed the cubs somewhere in the reeds, now we're in her way and because it's a terrifying situation and I saw Renais ...

And this is experience, I saw him listen very intently to the soundscape around us. He was listening for subtleties in bird calls, that I don't know, that he knows, little indicators of where the lions might be, because birds have a very unique language, but it's subtle. Some of it is very obvious when they're alarming. But some of it, when the lions have laid down, when they're not moving, is much more subtle. He got a sense that they had moved a little bit away from us and he clicked once and he pointed us back up the path and I mean, our hearts were in our throats.

We stood up and we moved up the path and we got to a tree on the riverbank and we looked down and then we saw them down in there with the cubs. We didn't get charged, no one got bitten, no one got mauled, but the experience of it, again, was just this incredible aliveness and in some ways, again, his experience ... There's a chance if we had been by ourselves, we would've blundered on, and we would've got badly, badly charged. I watch all these Discovery Channel things and everything is like, "Death Week," "Deadly Snake Week," like if you actually are listening, if you're actually aware, if you actually take the time to learn about the wilderness, it talks to you and it doesn't want to tear you up. That's not the animal's natural inclination. They're actually ... If you learn the language, it can be a very, very safe environment.

Patrick: [01:03:01] I'd like to just pause and recognize the single best answer to any question that I've ever asked anybody. That was incredible. It makes me think of so many other questions, the first of which is ... I'll transcribe that answer and it'll read like perfectly written paragraphs. But sitting here, listening to it, makes me think, "Okay, I can't get to the African bush this year probably, or maybe anytime soon."

Boyd: [01:03:29] Hey, come visit.

Living Like a Tracker

Patrick: [01:03:29] Maybe I can and my motivation is significantly high, but I want to do something like what you just descried. I want that experience. How can I do that? What should we do? What should people do that want ... Recognizing we can't have that exact experience, but the undercurrent of it, the presence, the holistic nature of it, how can we get that?

Boyd: [01:03:53] Well, I think two things and then I'll come back to that. The one is, I don't know if you've come across the work, which was fascinating to me, of, it's Otto Scharmer. He built on Peter Senge's work at MIT and he's got this thing called The Presencing Institute. One of the things they say is, presencing, when you really start to touch deeper states of presence, and he does it for business teams, but you start to be able to lead from the emergent future. I think about that in tracking, touching back in on this idea that there are signs, not signs like in a, "I saw a sign," but like there is ... Life is intelligent, life is a guide, life has ... When we become present, you can start to feel into what wants to happen. There are markers, the tracks are there, if you can be present enough. The tracks are there, is what I'm saying and I think that ...

I look at a lot of people who are getting into adventure sports now. Like, so you grind it out 9:00 to 5:00 and then you go and dive out of a plane, or throw yourself over a cliff, or buy a wingsuit and you feel alive for a couple hours. Live as a tracker, is my answer. Live from a state of presence, tapping into the emergent future and let it take you. Remember that our whole culture is geared towards security and while I think there should be balance, I'm not saying throw out any sense of being sensible, but security also can be a death knell. We're obsessed with it, but uncertainty has some aliveness in it and we grew up on the land in very uncertain ways and it is, live as a tracker. Find out what your essence is and then track your way towards it. It is a much wilder adventure than throwing yourself off a cliff, or doing weekend wing suiting. Living like that, being willing to live on that, is extremely exhilarating, living on your own guidance, living on your own tracks.

Patrick: [01:06:01] I'd like to pause for a minute and collect some followup items where people can go, we'll talk a bit about your book, website, before I ask a couple concluding questions. If people want to learn more about you, what would you recommend the progression be, what should they go read first or watch first? I know you've done a TED Talk which is great. I might suggest starting there. What should people do? What order would you suggest, if they kind of want to start to explore this idea or at least the work that you've produced that's publicly available?

Boyd: [01:06:29] Yeah, I would say the book is a great start, Cathedral of the Wild. I would say if you can ... I'm starting to build more workshops in the United States and in South Africa. I do tracking retreats in South Africa where I take people tracking and we begin to delve into this metaphor. It's very physical, it's on foot in this beautiful wilderness at Londolozi but then we start to talk about, "Okay, what are you tracking? What is preventing you from getting onto your own tracks?" I'm doing a seminar in Deer Valley in early May, which will be ... It's a life coaching gathering, but it's all village building. It's all about being in a more collective conversation. I would read some of the work of my mentor Dr. Martha Beck, particularly her book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. I think that's a stunning, stunning description of getting back in touch with our more natural nature.

I think those would be good places to start and then, if you keep looking on my website, there'll be more and more offerings coming. And remember, there's this idea that ... I think this is kind of critical ... harm to other sentient beings is harm to yourself. But the other side of that is, harm to yourself, is harm to other sentient beings and a lot of people can get behind the not hurting and trying to protect everyone else, but we have to include ourselves in that. I mean, what I see in the work I do, I see so much self-criticism. I see so many people living with so many rules about how they should be.

I see so much disconnection from our innate value. I see so many people who don't think they're of any value. It's a weird paradox because as people get disconnected from a real sense of value, the definitions, the goals, the accumulations become more important. But we are living in a culture of trauma and the core of it is disconnection from the value of connection to the self of presence, of being able to live in your essence and live comfortably and unashamably in the expression of your essence.

Patrick: [01:08:45] Can you tell me a little bit about your experience, as a child, with Nelson Mandela?

Boyd: [01:08:51] Yeah. I mean, Nelson Mandela came to stay with us just after he had gotten out of prison and that's because my father and uncle had been working with a man called Enos Mabuza and Enos was ... He was appointed by the apartheid government to run the area in which Londolozi occurs, but he was appointed with a brief from the ANC to say, "Yes," and basically do whatever he wanted. He was working ... He was actually an ANC member, a very, very well-established member of the African National Congress. He had become close to my parents and he had guided them a lot. He had said to them, "If you want Londolozi to work, you must pour the cultures together, in apartheid South Africa, you must create a place of unity." So that had been very central to our philosophy during that time.

After Mandela got out of prison, he was ... You can imagine, he went into prison a convict and he came out a global icon. He was in a period of adjustment to this sudden global icon status and he needed a place to rest and to find his way back into life. Enos phoned my parents and said, "Can he come?" My parents said, "Of course, absolutely." He stayed a few times at the camp and then he started to come and stay at our house. When he stayed at our house, I must've been eight or nine years old and I would take him breakfast in bed in the morning. My mom would put together a little tray and then I would take it through to his room. We would chat a little bit and then, he would usually get up. He was very down to earth, incredibly connected to himself. Everywhere he went, he connected.

He would put on this kind of old tracksuit and he would go and walk around the garden, and very unassuming, and I would see ... I had no sense of who he was at that age, I didn't initially understand the scope of it. I would just see this very quiet, very humble, very connected man walk around the garden. Then, at night, I would watch TV and there would be the images from his release and millions of people around to see him released from prison and I got a sense, "This guy is ... There's something going on here." So I really saw how he was creating in himself, the things that he most wanted for the country and I really believe that he had experienced some kind of shift in consciousness during his time in prison. I think he had experienced some kind of awakening and he brought out of the force of the scope in which he had established ubuntu within himself, he was able to bring it to an incredibly divided South Africa.

I almost feel like he fractaled his presence into the country. Out of him came this vision that was so far away from possible. It was on the brink of war and somehow he was able to ... He would walk through the halls of Parliament and meet dedicated architects of apartheid, people who had been a part of a regime that had committed intense atrocities to his people. He would meet them in the hallway, speak to them in their language and begin to inquire about their wife by name, their children, various ... He knew everyone's family tree. He would humanize any encounter, just like this and that was the ubuntu at work. He cut through the roles and definitions and he felt for the person in the other person, and it was disarming. It's why he was able to do what he was able to do. I remember just some funny encounters. He had stayed with my uncle and so every morning my uncle would go out filming and then he would come back at like 9:00 in the morning and he would have himself breakfast. He has this big table on his veranda, it was open veranda, open to the bush.

Mandela would come out and my uncle would sit at the head of the table and eat his muesli with a banana cut into it and Mandela would sit next to him. They would chat about whatever might be going on and this went on for a couple of weeks. Then there was an official lunch at the camp and all of the ANC's top brass were coming in for lunch, it was a big deal. This was happening at the camp and my uncle came over and they all went to sit down for lunch and now there was ... Mandela was the leader of the party, so in a rare moment of tact, an incredibly rare moment of tact, my uncle thought, "Oh, this is a big moment." He said to Mandela, "Mr. Mandela, please, you must sit at the head of the table." Mandela grabbed him by the hand and said to him, "Oh no, John, I would never take your place at the head of the table," and he seated my uncle at the head of the table and he sat next to him, as was their routine.

They called it the Mandela effect, he had this ... After he got elected, my mom had just authored a book and so she wanted him to write a forward, but she didn't know exactly how to get in touch with him. My mom being my mom, she phoned the Union Buildings. New South Africa, just this huge change of power, and the security guard at the Union Buildings answered. She said, "I would like to talk to the President." The security guard got out his manual and he looked around and he said he found the number for President's residence. He said, "I can't connect you to the President, but I have a number for the residence," so he gave her the President's residence. She phoned it and Mandela answered the phone and she said, "Mr. Mandela, it's Shan Varty, you remember me?" He said, "Oh Shan, how are you? Great to hear from you." She said, "I have a request for you." He says, "Oh just ... I'll stop you there. I'm watching the news. Could you call me back in 10?"

So she hung up, she phoned back in 10 minutes later, she said, "Look, I'm writing this book. I would love you to write a forward." He said, "No problem, send it to me." So many people in South Africa have a story like that. It was freakish, the sense of how he was available to you. It was like he was everywhere and so ... I mean, you go to a room of South Africans, you ask them, 95% of the people in the room will have some kind of personal encounter that felt like he was directly going out of his way for you. It was really quite amazing.

Patrick: [01:15:22] A perfect bridge into my last and always my favorite question that I ask everybody, which is, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

Boyd: [01:15:27] Wow. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a little bit. I think one of the things that pops to mind and it's maybe not from a person, but I have felt that having a relationship with nature has been an act of incredible kindness from the natural world to me. I feel like anytime I've had problems, anytime I've been unsure, anytime I've lost my way, for me, retreating into nature has been an incredible sense of being cared for, of being in a field of kindness, in a field of presence, in a field of ... Maybe because it's a nonverbal environment, so you come out of the verbal mind and what you come to is ... What happens is a kind of oneness and so, that has been a big one.

The other is, I feel like I've been lucky to be mentored, so meeting Martha as a safari guide and she met me, I was taking people out on safari. I was some guy out in South Africa and she just immediately, with no reason to, just started saying, "Look, I love what you do and I'll help you." She really grew me, she taught me how to be a coach. She taught me how to work with people and she just did it. It was just natural to her, so I feel like that was pretty amazing. Are you allowed to have a few?

Patrick: [01:16:56] Yeah, go nuts.

Boyd: [01:16:57] Then, I think the other one which really occurs to me is my friend Solly, who I talk about in the TED Talk. He just had a way about him, he was always kind to me including coming into some deep water to look after me, saved my life, probably, and-

Patrick: [01:17:15] Can you tell that story a little bit?

Boyd: [01:17:17] Yeah, sure. I think it was in 2001. Well, I had this guy who used to track with, his name was Solly and he was just a tremendous human being. I think I touch on it in the TED Talk. He drove past Solly out on the reserve, he was in his car, you were in his, you drove past each other on a dirt road, you just kind of waved at each other. You look up in your rearview mirror, he's stopped the car and he's waiting there just in case you need help with anything and you decide like you might want to come back and ask for some ... We had that one guest said ... He would look after people on safari so incredibly well, everything they needed. He was so attentive and this guy said to him, "Solly, you are pathologically helpful."

In 2001, we were tracking a leopard together and the tracks ran up the side of the river and it was a hot day and because it was hot, I went into the water. I'd rolled my sleeves up and I was walking in the water. It was clear water, sort of knee-deep, running over sand and as I walked upstream, this little sandbank sort of fell away. There was a place up ahead where a tree had fallen over and the branches were in the water. There was a little rapid there and if it had been a horror movie, people would've been like, "Don't go in there." I sat down just on the edge of that rapid and Solly was on the far bank and the crocodile was in this little depression. Came out, grabbed me by the leg. When a crocodile bites you, just the force of the bite, just the first thing is you immediately ... I immediately knew I was in trouble.

It tried to pull me down into the water and I reached up and I grabbed the branch. I started shouting and it couldn't get me all the way. It bit me a second time, my foot went down its throat, it spat me out. And I kind of pulled myself up into the tree and then over ... I looked down at my leg, my leg was mangled. Then I kind of got over onto the bank and I was in quite a dangerous position on the bank. I think it probably could've grabbed me again. I was trying to sort out how to get my leg to stay together. Solly, who was on the far bank, saw me. He saw me come out of the water, he saw the mangled leg and so he knew that between him and I, in this deeper channel, there was a crocodile and he just booked straight in.

He came straight towards me, he went straight into the channel. He knew there was a croc in there, he waded across it and he got to me. He grabbed, me, picked me up. He's a freakishly strong guy, picked me up and he carried me up onto this bank. Then he took his shirt off and he wrapped my leg in the shirt, got me back to the vehicle and got me to safety, but just not the blink of an eye. When I talk about that to audiences, sometimes I'll say to them, "I don't know how many people you know who'd come into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it that's just tried to eat a person?" But that's ... For him, it didn't even blip on his radar, that there was something exceptional about it and it was like ... That, to me, is the core of more collective psychology of ubuntu. It's just, "If you're in trouble, I'm in trouble."

Patrick: [01:20:33] I love the heuristic from prior guests Peter Attia where you measure wealth by the number of people that you would give a kidney to.

Boyd: [01:20:41] Yeah.

Patrick: [01:20:41] Maybe we'll change that to the number of people you would dive headfirst into croc-infested waters-

Boyd: [01:20:46] I like that.

Patrick: [01:20:48] ... to try to save? And a great heuristic for the idea, a closing thought on the idea of the village, that people within that village are those kinds of people for whom you would do something like that. This has been just a total blast, just chock-full of fantastic stories and lessons and fresh perspectives on the world. I deeply appreciate your time. People are going to love this one. Thank you.

Boyd: [01:21:11] Ah, thank you. It's so great to be with you and, yeah, I appreciate your time.

Transcript by @ScarrottKalani