YouSaid · the spoken record

Boyd Varty

lines on the record: 159
first: 2024-08-14
most recent: 2024-08-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And eventually they took me outside, these guys who had broken into the house and they said to me, we're going to kill you So they pulled me outside and they put a gun to my head and they said they basically said now we're going to kill you. And the fear was so intense and then I remember looking up the barrel at the man who was holding the gun to my head and we looked into each other's eyes And in that moment, something happened, which I can't say what happened. You might call it the peace of God that path this understanding, but I think it was too big for my ego structure to hold and it collapsed. And as I looked at him, all fear left me and all concern for my own bodily safety left me. And I just felt a profound human connection with him.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adrenaline pumped through my system and all of my work in healing spaces later and I know that you're involved in psychedelic assisted therapy has been to try and get a cap on the scope of where my body goes when it gets a mild trauma because I woke up into my worst nightmare and I looked to my left and my mother's tied up on the floor and my sister's tied up and I know kind of stories of how these things go, the violence, the potential danger to women. And it was just like absolute redline fear. And just to see the woman in my life, my family like that. And so it was just shocking. And then realizing that, you know, I know I can read animals, but I can't quite read people. I mean, I can't quite read them. They're not as honest as animals. So I just don't know where this is going to go. And I'm sitting in this tension.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Post elections, but it was still the country was still really finding its feet, and there was a ton of violent crimes still happening. And yeah, as I said, I was 18 years old and I woke up and my sister was shaking me. And immediately as I sat up, I had a gun pushed into my face. And the home that we were staying in in Johannesburg on that occasion had been invaded”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My family, I would say, Tim, went through a very difficult 10-year period, a period of intense suffering, and yet that suffering became the place where we learned to do the work and go inward and start to understand how healing processes work. And so I've gotten to the place now where I've fondly looked back on those 10 years of initiation, university of suffering. But it began for me when my grandmother died, My father who had taken the Londolozi model of care of land, care of wildlife, care of people, and he had launched it to 30 other operations around Southern Africa, which Mandela had asked him to do. And so there had been this big sort of expansion. And then in a classic kind of change of founder's trap, he got fired from that. And then very soon into that South Africa was going through a very, very difficult time. And one night we were in Johannesburg. And this was...”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just one comment on Martha. Once we started to get onto that level with each other, when I watched her, when I looked at her, what I saw was a superb tracker. She understood how trauma patterns us. And she was incredibly adept at first tracking the pattern and then starting to support you in creating a different outcome for yourself or providing tools and options for different ways of doing it. And as I watched her work with myself and with many other people, I saw a tracker who would, you know, at first just really observe and get to know what they were working with and be present and attuned. And that's really what most attracted me to her work. I saw a tracker of processes, human processes. And first and foremost, and that's probably what I was mature enough, the frame that I was able to see through at that time as a tracker. But yeah, to segue into my own experiences.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You will lose the track. You'll be in the middle of it thinking, I'm deep in the following state. I'm right on track. And then suddenly it'll be gone. And you will need to build community around you of other great trackers, people who are willing to move with you, follow with you. And the core of it is really that there is something inside of you that knows. There is a part of you, you might call it your wild self, you might call it the track of your life or as native people call it your medicine way, a part of you that beyond rational thought reacts when you become more in tune with yourself. And shifting away the layers of socialization, all the things you should do, all the things you have to do to start to be able to follow the trail of that place inside of you became really what the core of my own journey to healing was. And I live like that to this day as a tracker, trying to be present, resting into the unknown, attuning, and trying to fall into the following state with what energizes me, makes me”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Following straight could be defined almost as constant creative response to what is occurring if the track cuts left, Alex will click and he'll say I'm on the track. If it cuts right, Rennieas will be on it. They're getting a sense of the mood of the animal. They're using their own body to attune to the way the animal is moving and in that way almost feel the animal as it's walking out ahead of them. At the same time, they are vectoring and they are getting a sense of their bearings using waypoints of marula trees up ahead. When you watch them, they're almost having fun in it. They're playing. They're playing on that track. And so you will need to develop the following state in your own transformational process. How can you play? How can you be creative with not knowing what you're trying to create or this place you're trying to get to, but being open and willing and aware and attuned? You will almost certainly lose the track. And I'm sort of saying this to see how the tracker came to me in a different way as I got into my own journey of healing.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know what to do, and the next thing you know to do if you watch great trackers, they drop into what I call the following state. And it's so beautiful. If you watch Alex and Rennios in the following state,”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, walked over the tracks of a leopard, and I can see where a mouse ran across the path and then an owl swooped down and its wing touched the ground. And each time I walked down that path, under his guidance there was more information. And that idea became very important to me, the idea that there is information in your life if you are looking for transformation, but you have to teach yourself to attune to it. And so, you know, what do you need to attune to in transformational processes, things that make you feel expansive, things that make you feel alive, letting go of your rational idea of what you should do and noticing what you move towards, noticing what you're curious about, noticing the people who energize you, the activities that make you feel more alive. So I started to see through the eyes of the tracker the first track, you know, the first track being the next thing you know to do, letting go of, you know, where that animal might be or letting go of where you think you should be and just doing the next thing you.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come super uncomfortable with unknowns. You will have to give up all the ways you tried to know what to do and say, I don't know how to do this. All trackers operate using unknowns to almost bring them to life, you know. You will need to develop your track awareness. Track awareness is teaching yourself to be attuned to a very specific set of signs, metrics, but self-generated, you know, like when I was a kid, Renias would take me out to a game path and he would say, walk down that game path and tell me what you see. And I would come back and I would say to him, I saw a herd of impala walk there. And he would say, I'm fine. Fumbo your languutafoot. Young boy, go look again. And as I was walking away, he would say, put your head down like the way an animal drinks. Put your head right down against the trail and look like you're drinking water, like an animal. And I would come back and I would say, I can see where the herd of impala walked, but they...”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't know if you've ever had one of those instances where someone sees you when you're in one of those places, but I felt myself becoming really uncertain and then I felt tears starting to come to my eyes. And then there was this moment where the, you know, this woman is hugging the safari guide and just consoling me. And she was an incredible healer and she was exceptionally adept at transformational processes. And so she started to teach me how to move through the trauma and the suffering that I was stuck in. And as that happened, my relationship to tracking started to change and I started to see this art form in a different way. And I realized that I was looking for something and all of the skills and the mentality of the tracker was highly adept to being in a transformational process. You know, the first thing that you will have to do if you want to go track a lion in the wild is you will have to be”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then on about the fourth day, I driven back to the camp and, you know, I'm in my safari gear. I got my rifle. You know, I'm the guide. I'm rugged guy. I'm out there tracking lions. And she turned and she looked at me and she said, I'm ready to talk to you. And I was sort of taken aback. I said, well, what do you mean? She said, I can see what you're carrying, and I can see how stuck you are. And I want you to know that I can help you and I'm here.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that moment absolutely changed my life. Her name was Dr. Martha Beck. And she arrived on the Safari and we went out the first two days. And she said something on the second day that I felt something in me really moved. We were driving along and I was telling her about the restoration of the land. And she said, I really understand this. And I believe the restoration of the planet will come out of a transformation in human consciousness. And the minute she said it, you know, whatever my grandfather knew or my father knew or my uncle knew when he saw that leopard, I felt that thing move inside of me, that kind of that idea struck me very deeply.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then through my early 20s, I had a series of pretty traumatic encounters. And the result of that was that by the time I was about 23 or 24 years old, I had found myself frozen by trauma. I felt I was depressed. I was uncertain how to move forward. And in the way that trauma limits options, I felt myself extremely limited. I did not have access to a lot of emotionality. I did not have access to different choices. I was stuck. And at that time, I was very lucky to meet a woman who came on Safari. She became my first mentor. And the reason I guided her was because Alex, my friend who also features in the book, he had guided her a year before and he said to me, she's a martial artist. And I was very interested in martial arts, as I know you are. And so I went into the guide room. And in the guide room, there was this board where every guide got their name put next to the...”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had these encounters to him whereby I had a childhood following animals and learning this art form and really the dynamics and the psyche of the tracker, how a tracker approached the process of finding an animal in the middle of nowhere. And then watching how consistently good trackers delivered an outcome, they found the animal they were looking for. And so that, and at that time as a young child, I thought I was learning that skill.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the next first track and the next first track. And he's able to dial down the infinite possibilities of where that animal could have gone to a moment of knowing and a moment of presence and then another moment of knowing and another moment of presence. And all he needs is that next sign. So he doesn't know where it's going, but he knows how to get there. The next moment of presence, the next thing I know to do. And it might be a good segue there into just telling you a little bit about how the tracking process changed for me over the years. But let me know if you want to go. Dive in.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were two things that Renias used to say regularly. The one ishatikuma, we will get it. And it was almost like this kind of incredible self-talk that he would have when the track was cold or the track was, you know, we weren't making progress. I would look at him and he would say, ah, you shatikuma. We're going to get this. And then often he would say to, I don't know where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there. And what he's saying, he's talking to the dynamic of tracking, which is It's an interesting energetic dynamic. He is profoundly committed to finding that animal, but he hasn't allowed that commitment to become a burden of some kind. He is working moment to moment on the signs that he's getting. And you can think in a vast wilderness as trackers, we also talk about the first track. In a vast wilderness, 360 degrees of wild terrain, all he needs is the next first track and then the next first track.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really amazing trackers are able to read that body language and almost speak back to it in the way they move their body. And you can convey a very profound unspoken language. And I think of it as a language of energy or a language of presence. And that is really what makes you safe. As that animal, if you see that animal, how you convey your intentions to it, your mood, what you do, if it does become aggressive with you, how you meet that and shape the sort of the unspoken conversation between you.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are tracking with clients, we will carry rifles, and always if we're running specifically tracking retreats, we will be a two rifle operation. But really the protection is way upstream of that. In all of my years in the bush, I've never had to use the rifle. The art form of tracking is what makes you safe. And when you're with someone like Renius, the safety profile just becomes exceptionally safe because he's so attuned. And so it's a capacity to read the terrain, to make good decisions, to be attuned to the freshness of the track, where those animals will be, how we should approach different terrain, attuned to the birds, bird language. And then Uranius is even more exceptional is that, you know, the way that an animal communicates with you is through a state of presence. If it is unhappy with you, it conveys energy through the way its body shapes.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is he's showing people how good he is because you're right, the direct light creates a flat aspect on the ground. The light is flat. And so you're right, there's no shadow, there's no contrast. When the light is lower, it bounces off with.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the track has been out in the morning and they've been following a leopard. Would come back to camp. They'd been unsuccessful. They had a last track, but they had lost it. He would go back there. And it used to be my favorite thing. He would go back at 12 o'clock in the afternoon. He would refuse to go with anyone else. He wanted to go alone. And he would slowly start to work that track. And then eventually at like six o'clock in the evening, you'd get a radio call and it would be Richard. And he would say, I've located this leopard. He would tell you where it was. And then his final refrain was, Richard Suella is number one. And he did it so consistently.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, I think you've nailed it there. Leopard, by some margin, is the most difficult. One, it walks it's solitary and it walks incredibly lightly and its nature is solitary and secretive. It likes to operate in thick terrain. Anytime you see a leopard, the leopard is allowing you to see it, which to me has this beautiful mystery that it cloaks it in. So Leopard by quite some margin would be the most difficult. And we'd have trackers here who become real specialists at following leopards. We used to have a tracker by the name of Richard Soela. And Soela was, he was meticulous in his dress, and he was gruff and he was hard to get along with. He was rude to most people. He had that kind of that arrogance born of being brilliant. He deserved all the arrogance he had because he was so good. And he used to do this thing where if...”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm fascinated by that moment because there are so many hundreds of guides, so many hundreds of people who say, you know what, our guests are happy, eggs Benedict back at the camp. But his mastery is that he can't leave it. There is something laid down in front of him that he's curious about. He's interested, and he has to know something. Something in the tracker has to... Discover has to find out. And the scope of the years of his practice and the fact that he makes that decision to stay out there hot, tired without water, he needs to know. That is his art form. He needs to be in it. There's something very special about that to me.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They didn't sleep very well So, like 10 o'clock the next morning, they were flagging, and we decided because we'd had such a good time and we'd been so lucky with the tracking already, we were going to call it there. We were going to say, guys, we're going to leave this track and we're going to head back to the camp. Now Arrhenius has been 30 years into guiding people. Even more, 35 years into guiding people and then another section working as a trainer. Says, you guys go back to camp. I can't leave this track.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You listen, and if any animal comes, you have to be aware of its presence. And there's an amazing thing. If you're aware of an animal's presence, it's aware that you're aware of it. And that's the critical safety piece. And we've never in all the years we've been doing it and we've slept out with many, many people. We've never had anyone let us down because people feel the gravity of it and something does wake up inside of them. So anyway, back to the story.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's something about night falling. Like, I watch people switch on and I explain to them that if you fall asleep during your watch or you don't do this properly, someone can get badly injured. And so people take it very seriously. And your job on watch is to be an aware presence. And you get armed with a really good torch. You listen.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Minute you get out there and night starts to fall and some lions roar nearby and an elephant walks past your camp and comes to investigate. What's pretty amazing, Tim, is that no one misses the gravity of the situation.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, on the retreat, one of the nights we had slept on the ground in the open, no vehicle, no tents. And each person had been asked. Keep watch. This is deeply archetypal experience to be awake around the fire. It definitely changes what the fire means to you. It's some of this ancient primordial sense of like fire safety. And each person keeps watch through the night. And it's beautiful, you're alone, owls calling stars above you and this alertness alive inside of you as you keep watch for your friends.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From all over the world who had come on one of our tracking retreats, and it was day four, and we had had an exceptional time. We had found and followed animals the night before we had slept out in the bush. And so the next morning we woke up, we found tracks of a single male lion and we began to follow. And after two or three hours, I could see that the guests who were on the retreat were tiring. They were running out of gas. They'd been keeping watch all night.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, Renius is firstly one of the best trackers in the world. I would say that he's top five. He's deeply attuned. And my definition of mastery is someone who can be themselves in any situation. And really what makes Renny special is that he's able to totally be himself wherever he goes. And I'm sure you've seen this in other disciplines. He's one of those rare masters who's able to translate the intangibles of what he knows how to do. You learn by being around him. You learn by absorbing his presence, watching how he moves. But he's also quite good at teaching, which makes him really exceptional because a lot of trackers will say to them, well, why did you know to go down there? Why did you know to check that riverbed? And they just sort of say, I just knew. Renias is able to dissect it a little bit for you. But this to me is the level of his mastery. We ran a retreat, a tracking retreat. We had some folks.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Modelling their mother's trust. And so she was the mother for two reasons. One, because she was the mother of all these cubs. And second, because really she was the mother of the birth of the safari business because word got out that there was a place in the middle of South Africa where no one wanted to go where you could go and see a wild leopard. And that allure is still alive inside of people today. But it would have been absolutely impossible without the skills and the brilliance of the Shangan trackers to be able to go out into a vast wilderness and attune yourself to the faint tracks of where this animal had walked to listen for alarm calls, to listen to bird language, and to start to get to know her movement patterns, her territories, where she liked to den, all of that made it possible and it wouldn't have been possible without great trackers. And so really the legacy of Londa Lozi is a legacy of relationships between trackers and wild animals.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Elmon was just brilliant in the bush. And so what my uncle and him did is for the next 12 years, they woke up every morning and they went out and they tracked that leopard. And just insane drive and dedication. And sometimes they would go two weeks without seeing her and they would be putting together the clues. They'd be following the tracks. And then it started to be that they would find her and she would allow herself to be viewed from two, 300 yards in a vehicle. And then slowly over time that space, that distance started to close. And eventually after a few years of this, it got to the point where they could actually drive one of these old Land Rovers in next to her. And she had developed a relationship of trust with them that was a totally wild leopard. And she knew that these men meant her no harm. We called that leopard the mother leopard because she went on to have eight litters of cubs and all of those cubs grew up.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ancient. Back to the origins of humanity. And when you are tracking, you are connected to that entire lineage, which is amazing feeling. What I'm doing right now, thousands of years ago, someone did this very same practice.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this goes back to our early origins. Some people say that tracking is in some ways the beginning of science because it's the beginning of deduction. It's the beginning, the first time that someone looked at an abstract imprint and started to apply meaning to it. And it's an art form that has been alive. It lives inside of people because it has been passed on through generations. A tracker will teach another tracker the way. And so I think of it as this art form that you can't hang on the wall or it literally has to be alive in a person to survive.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've been deeply interested in that my whole life, you know, to your point, like what made them say we're going to try and take on the creation of the Safari business, what made my great grandfather after too many jinns say I'm going to buy? What made my uncle say in that moment, that's my future? How do we know when we know? So what my uncle did is he teamed up with a shangain tracker, one of the best trackers in the area, manned by the name of El Monim Shongor. And Elmon is actually Rennius in the book's brother. It's incredible hunter-gatherer, incredibly in tuned.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for a moment she allowed herself to be seen. And then she growled and they saw that she had this one broken canine, and then she slipped away from there. And they drove home in silence and they stopped the vehicle. And my uncle, who was a rugged, aggressive, wild type guy, they sat there for a moment in silence, and then he looked at my father and he said, whatever just happened, that's my future.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first impulses, I believe, as a healer, came out of watching the way that life knows how to bring itself forth. And then one day after a day spent working on the land, my father and my uncle were driving home. And in the late afternoon light, a female leopard stepped out onto the road in front of them. And up until that point, any leopard you saw was ears back running to get away from you. They'd been hunted. But this leopard stopped and she turned and she looked at them.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partner with the land, what do you mean? And he said, Come, I'll show you. And he walked them out onto the scrub encroached land. And he said to them, When the cattle overgraze the land, the moisture falls, but instead of penetrating the soil, it runs off in these deep, erosive furrows. So what you do is you clear away the scrub and you take that scrub and you pack it into the furrows. And it's kind of like putting the plug back in the bath. And with that, you start to charge the grassland with moisture. And he started to show them how to restore the micro catchments on the property. And I really grew up one of the first imprints of my psyche was watching the land being restored. I would go to a place where there was eye high scrub and then I would see the destitution as you cut it out. And then you would go back there a year later and there would be a herd of water buck on it and a herd of zebra and then a rhino walking through it in the late evening. And so my”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such intricate detail that the dean of the faculty put him in, and he studied his biological sciences degree, and then he went to live alone in Mozambique and write a dissertation. And during this time living alone, Ken had this incredible encounter with wilderness, and he felt deeply attuned to it. And the way he described it, he said it felt like he could feel the rivers moving through his veins and he became aware of how the moisture traveled through the terrain and how that informed the flora and how that then informed the fauna. And he was just deeply in tune. And he showed up next to the campfire one day where these young upstarts were trying to get the safari business going. And he said to them, if you want this place to work, you must partner with the land. You must think of the animals as your kin and you must make sure that the local Shanghai people are invited to participate in this restoration. And so they said to him,”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they were going to launch this Safari business. Most of the land at that time, because the cattle had overgrazed the land, it was kind of an eye high scrub. And all of the animals were here, but you didn't really see them. And in fact, they had been hunted. So any animals you saw were trying to get away from you. And really, my parents struggled to get the Safari business going. And then they had a defining moment. And that was the arrival of a kind of maverick ecologist by the name of Ken Tinley. And Ken was an amazing guy. He was a high school dropout who got admitted to a”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Photographic safaris. And so from the time that I was extremely young, I was apprenticed to these master Shangan trackers. And I spent hundreds of hours learning the art form of following an animal across wild terrain and learning how to be attuned to the language of the wilderness. And I was listening to your interview with Noah Feltman and he was talking about how language attunes you in a different way to a culture. And if you can think of tracking, tracking is essentially the language of the wilderness. You're learning the signs, the sounds. And as your knowledge as a tracker deepens, it's like you're being let into another level. And the Shangan people were deeply attuned to this. And they taught me that from a young age. And really the success of Londalozi, one of the major success points for us is to create a bit of context for how the Safari business came together. My father was 15, my uncle was 17, my mother was about 15, too.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, firstly, let me say something about the Shangan people. The Shanghan people are... Most wonderful people that I've had time to spend time with in Africa. They were a splinter tribe of the Zulu people. And basically they went on a warring party and they found themselves in southern Mozambique and they decided that they were actually more peaceful people. They didn't want to be involved in the Zulu army's warlike ways and they broke away and they really pastoral people, amazing storytellers, incredible trackers because they love to observe things and tell stories. And so from the time my father and uncle were very young and from the time that I was very young, I was lucky to spend time with some of the best Shangan trackers in the world, men who had grown up hunting and gathering in the region. And the transition that we went through as a family is we grew up tracking to hunt. And then once we had our kind of enlightenment experience and we decided we must partner with the land and we must think of the animals as our kin, we continued tracking, but it was to find animals for”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was a, you know, we grew up in a real wild way. We grew up in a pioneering way, and my parents were irrepressible, I think is the word, which you kind of have to be to run a safari business where things, you know, running a safari business, you're out in nature and things are happening and unexpected things are happening almost continuously. So that was kind of my wild youth in some ways. It was very, very orientated towards that kind of South African wildness. And also, I think that we've changed a lot over the years. We've been in our own healing journeys. And our own healing journeys have changed us as a family for sure. But for many years there, we were just kind of packing on, you know, I guess we were frozen by some trauma ourselves and we were just living as wildly through it as we could.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't know if you've ever seen a head wound, but head wounds bleed nicely. And so he's bleeding quite intensely. It's pandemonium back there, but my folks have got the controls. They're call the airport. My father starts the descent. And eventually the pilot wakes up and he comes to and he's actually, he's all right. And he takes over control of the plane again and we do an emergency landing. And the funny thing about it was we were flying from the reserve to go and catch a commercial flight. So we landed at a commercial airport and we got out covered in stalk, stalk wing and stork foot and stork guts and we walked into the terminal building and I said to my mother, well, what do we do now? She said, just board the flight and look forward. So we got onto the plane looking like we had been in the Texas chainsaw massacre and just sat down next to regular folks traveling, covered in guts and blood and just sat there and looked forward and flew to our next destination like nothing had happened.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Request emergency landing, and he's ticking off things. Now, at this point, the pilot starts to wake up. And he wakes up and he slowly gaining his bearings. And as he looks around, he has this strange kind of dot in his vision. And as he's looking around, the dot follows him and he eventually puts his hand up. And what it is, it's the stalk's neck sticking out of his face that everywhere he looks, it's in his line of sight because it's connected to his face. And it was at that moment that he grabbed the neck and the beak of the stalk and he pulled it out of his face and looked at it and then passed out again.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so now we realize we've got a situation what had happened is we had hit a stalk direct bird strike and the bird had come in the window and in fact the bird had hit the pilot. The beak had gone into the skin between the pilot's skull and the skin. So he had a beak sticking out of his face and a bit of stalk neck sticking out of his face. And he's totally passed out. Meantime, my father has taken control of the plane. The woman on the back seat screaming next to my mom is going, we're all gonna die, we're all gonna die. And that's when my mother gave her the patented mother slap, slapped her twice and said, we are not gonna die. And then out of nowhere, my mother reaches into her sort of handbag and pulls out a flight call sheet and she starts screaming standard emergency practices to my father call S.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking at my mother and her friend next to her, it looks like pulp fiction. There is just blood and guts all over them. It looks like someone took a bird, put it in a blender, and made like a bird smoothie and then threw it over them. They've got a wing on their head. They've got a foot on their shoulder. They are covered in blood and guts. And so I turn and I look back at the cockpit, the front window of the plane is gone. The pilot is conked out. He's passed out in his seat and my father is like orientating himself in the madness. And right at that moment, as he sort of, as my father got his bearings, I saw him grab the controls and then he looked back at me and said, I am pilot in command.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, the worst one was we were flying a short hop and by this stage my parents had launched a bigger Safari company and they had decided that when they flew they should actually have a commercial pilot with them. And so the setup was it's a commercial pilot in the left-hand seat. It's my father in the right hand seat. And then there's club seating, four seats in the back. But you sit facing each other like you would on a train, you know, like looking at each other. So we're flying along and I see my mother and her friend are sitting opposite me and they're looking towards the cockpit. I'm looking back at them and suddenly we just hear this outrageous like sound and wind fills the cockpit.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tim, that if you bring it up today at dinner, he will say, well, you know, I couldn't get the speed off and he'll say, my father will say, well, you were pilot in command. And immediately a fight will develop at dinner. I know I was piloted in command, but before we hit the tree, do you think you could have pulled the power? So there's a little tension around it.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We came into land and we had a plane. It was a little Cesna that had a quirk. And let me tell you, when it comes to aviation, you don't want planes with quirks. You can have a quirky pickup track, but you cannot have a quirky aircraft. The quirk was that when you pulled the power, not all power cut off. It kept a little bleed of power on. So my mother was flying the plane. She came in to land on the little 800 meter dirt strip. She cut the power. The plane sort of landed, but it just kept on a little too much power and we kept going. And she started to say to my father, and my sister and I are watching from the back in flying mode, I can't get the power off. I can't get the power off. I can't get the speed off. And he says, he's saying to her, you are pilot in command. You are pilot in command. And she's going, I know, but I can't get the speed off. And eventually she kicks the rudder and the plane veers off the runway and we hit a marulin tree and we stop. That's our first crash. And it's one of those ones.”
2024-08-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #763: Margaret Atwood and Boyd Varty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT