Boyd Varty – Live Like a Tracker - [Invest Like the Best, EP.99a]

An interesting question that I think about a lot: how do you balance exploring the new with savoring what you already know and love? Most of the time I prefer to explore, but the best part of this podcast experience for me has been meeting people who become close friends. For episodes 99 and 100, I’m bringing back two of the most popular past guest who are both now dear friends. This week’s episode is split into two parts, today and tomorrow. Today’s episode is with Boyd Varty and tomorrow is with both Boyd and his sister Bronwyn. The incredible Varty family hosted me in South Africa, so you’ll hear birds and elephants in the background as we talk. This conversation with Boyd is about our shared experience called “track your life” which I couldn’t recommend more highly. We tracked animals on foot for five days, and learned a lot from the environment itself. While we discuss our time together, this is much more about how to live. My original conversation with Boyd had a huge impact on me, and this continues the exploration of Boyd’s idea that we should all be going our own way, in the right way, instead of simply following well trodden paths. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Boyd and check back tomorrow for another conversation with the Vartys. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Show Notes 1:55 - (First Question) – Encounter with five wild dogs 10:19 – The idea of a perfect day on the track 15:59 – The importance of silence 19:42 – Why we could all benefit from the power of silence 21:37 – Side effects of being on the track 23:49 – Following the smaller paths 25:20 – How culture can keep us from forging our own path 29:34 – The stress he puts on the watch at night 33:34 – The power of going from alert to rest and back again 35:11 – Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers 38:25 – Disconnecting from the modern world and reconnecting with your life’s purpose 41:42 – How much does skill play into finding your life’s calling 43:23 – Common objections to what they do 49:58 – Importance of end of day on the track 52:33 – Silence and feeling of thousands of years of time passing through hallucinogenic 56:22 – His experience with bees Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is the CEO of O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  An interesting question that I think about a lot. How do you balance exploring the new with savoring what you already know and love? Most of the time I prefer to explore, but the best part of this podcast experience for me has been meeting people who have become close friends. For episodes 99 and 100, I'm bringing back two of the most popular past guests who are now both dear friends. This week's episode is split into two parts, today and tomorrow. Today's episode is with Boyd Varty and tomorrow is with both Boyd and his sister Bronwyn. The incredible Varty family hosted me in South Africa, so you'll hear birds and elephants in the background as we talk. This conversation with Boyd is about our shared experience called Track Your Life, which I could not recommend more highly. We tracked animals on foot for five days and learned a ton from the environment itself.

• 2:05Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  While we discuss our time together, this is much more about how to live. My original conversation with Boyd had a huge impact on me and this continues the exploration of Boyd's idea that we should all be going our own way, in the right way, instead of simply following well-trodden paths. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Boyd and check back tomorrow for another conversation with the Vardis.

• 2:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I thought a fun place to start, given that it was definitely the most profound of the many profound experiences that we had this past week, would be to hear through your telling of it, the story of our encounter with the five wild dogs. And from there, we'll explore all sorts of interesting stuff.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the things that I see happen is that the group arrives at Landalosi and everyone's working on something. Everyone's got a piece. And very quickly, I notice things in the natural world start to show up as teachers. And the arrival of the wild dogs on this property was immediately I knew, okay, something's going to happen here. Because one of the things about wild dogs is they cover huge distances and we can go weeks without seeing them, sometimes months without seeing them. So suddenly, you know, the group's together, we arrive here and a pack of wild dogs runs on to Landalosi. And then we hear about it via someone who was driving into the reserve thinks they

• 3:25Speaker 03

  saw some dogs, a school group that had some school kids with them, that there were like reports, we think we saw them. So it's a bit, all a bit up in the air. We go out that afternoon and one of the other guides finds a pack of sleeping dogs. We get ourselves into that position and the dogs are fast asleep and just in this deep state of rest. And I'm looking at them and I'm thinking, oof, you know, these dogs may be well fed. They may just sleep here through the entire afternoon. And as I'm thinking that, like basically, it's nice to see them, but nothing's going to happen. One dog gets up and he starts stretching. And they're just these beautiful creatures, like this painted color, the big ears, the athletic body. One dog stretches.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Immediately as that dog starts to stretch, the second dog gets up and starts to trot off. And then the other three get together and they start greeting each other. And what I was struck by is that pack mentality. The first thing that they do when they get up and they look like they're going to start to get mobile is they connect first. First, it's about the relationship of the pack. There's the greeting, there's the connection, they rub up against each other, they jump on each other. And it's like, we're a team. You can see the bond is primary. And, but I'm still thinking, maybe they're going to just move a little bit. And you'll remember, they moved and sat down.

• 4:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Okay, they're just moving to shade.

• 4:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  We almost left.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, we almost left. I mean, we literally started the engine, we were going to drive, and another dog stood up and he started to move. And as he started to move, I could feel his energy shift. And I realized, okay, this dog is gonna get on the move. And when wild dogs move, they're hunting. You know, when they're on the move, they start to hunt. And so he started that dog trot. The other dogs fell in. And then there was some impala up ahead. And immediately, the whole energy went up a gear. And the one dog broke away from us. And then these dogs that had been like right around the vehicle for a few minutes. Suddenly, they were on the move. They were moving fast and they were into a thicket and gone. But I knew they're now moving into intensity. So we drive around the thicket. We cut back. We can't see them. Everyone's looking for the dogs.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Another vehicle arrives looking for the dogs. We can't see them. Then we get report of one dog that has broken out of the thicket on the far side. So we drive around there at high speed. And now we see them moving fast across a clearing. And one of the things that I was thinking about was how one of the definitions of presence is being in constant creative response to what is happening. So they're just moving and they're in constant creative response. They're just dealing with whatever happens in front of them. So there's no prey in front of them. They trot, they spread out. And then you'll remember, just shifted into pure like pandemonium after that. Chaos. The dog saw some impala. They broke after the impala. One dog ran down to the water's edge. There was a bull hippo that broke out. The hippo ran out of the water.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Then the dogs chased the hippo. Then a herd of waterbuck broke across us. We saw some of it. Then they were into a thicket. Then we drove around the thicket. And then there was that moment where we were seated. We parked on the airstrip and we can hear just commotion in the bush around us. A waterbuck breaks cover. The hippo is still honking. Guys are calling in on the radio. I've seen one dog break right. I've seen one dog break left. And then I remember a guy came on the radio. He says, there's a dog that is highly mobile after a young inyala. And as he said it. The Anyala broke cover right near us and ran flat out across the airstrip with one dog behind it. And we turned, and I think we got that Land Rover from like naught to, you know, sixty miles an hour rapidly, just beaming across the airstrip because that

• 6:59Speaker 03

  dog was now in full hunt mode. And it broke into cover, we lost sight of it. And then you'll remember, Renia said, turn the engine off. And I turned the engine off and we heard the dog actually hit the antelope and the antelope's alarm called. You heard that like, like a meh meh meh type sound. And at that moment, we start, we turned the vehicle back on, we start screaming there. Two other Land Rovers drive past us and the, and was it four other dogs? Four. Four other dogs break at high speed. Unbelievable. Full on into the thicket. And Alex screamed, just follow those dogs, they'll take you straight to the kill. So we start powering down. People are getting slapped by branches. There's dust everywhere. You know, you can't quite get into the thicket.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  So we swing around and we pull in and there's five dogs and they're now on their kill. It's half gone. And it's half gone. It's, and it's been, they've been on it for thirty seconds. And I mean, we, we just got in there. It was so real. They were covered in blood. They were intense on eating. The smell was. The smell of, of meat. And it was just so raw. And what I was struck by was just the intensity of the transition. When it was time to rest, they rested. When it was time to get up and bond, they bonded. And then they shifted across into this open, intense, it was a kind of intensity, but it was like play. They were on the move. This was now, and you got the feeling that they were, they had an objective, but they were playing.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  And there was a lightness to their movement. Their awareness was open. And in a way, it was an amazing kind of tracking, you know? They were, they were moving through the brush. They were on the lookout. They were using their ears. They were tuned in. They were using their sense of smell. There was a cohesion between them, but there was a lightness. And then they ran into the prey. And that play turned into absolute intensity. But there was a feeling of pure aliveness and joy coming off them. And I had a few guys in the group say afterwards that for them, it was this, and I would love to hear, obviously, your impressions, but, you know, there are a few guys in the group who said, those dogs just showed me. How to play on an objective and actually how the intensity of enjoyment and lightness

• 9:08Speaker 03

  that if you can bring it into presence can make you exceptionally effective. And I knew that already the natural world was starting to teach. It was teaching rawness. It was teaching presence. It was teaching intensity. It was teaching play and it was teaching that in teams first focus on the connection, on the bond and the intensity will come out of that.

• 9:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, what's amazing about it is that it all happened in almost exactly an hour. And the first 15 minutes was that kind of stretching and playing with each other and messing around. And then maybe 40 minutes was trying to find them, right? Like, and just seeing the complete pandemonium that they were causing in the park. Like, the fact that this massive hippo is out of the water, like terrified and just running around. And everywhere we went, we would just see things breaking out, just terrified. And then it comes to a close and all of a sudden it's closed. Even the lead dog was so tired from the catch that he was sort of off the animal when we got there and you could see just completely exhausted. And then you could sense like they were just going to go back into this state of rest.

• 10:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And for me, the reason that it was so profound as so many things here are, watching these animals in this habitat, is that way that they moved between states, which is very much for me at odds with how a lot of my life is, which is this steady state of intensity all the time. Everything's very structured and scheduled when maybe it doesn't need to be that way, that there's a more kind of natural flow to follow, that these dogs just did perfectly. And I actually went and bought these beautiful little figurines of two wild dogs, one for myself, one for my wife, that I'll put right front and center on my desk because I just think that was, of all the experiences we had, maybe the most powerful reminder. We talked a lot about it that night, you know, at camp.

• 10:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I would love to hear about this concept you have of a full day on the track, like from morning to night, the transitions that matter, sort of the archetypal movement throughout a day. Because I just think that's a beautiful kind of concept and I know it's one that you've been thinking quite a lot about recently. So maybe tell us a little bit about that kind of perfect day of morning to night on the track.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and one of the things we've tried to do on the Track Your Life Retreat is I wanted it to be an experiential space and I wanted it to be a metaphorical space the entire time. So everything that we do throughout the day is talking about

• 11:31Speaker 03

  The dynamics of creating, the dynamics of finding your way back onto being on track, the dynamics of finding what you're looking for. And so the first thing is waking up. You know, literally, we wake up earlier than anyone else at four thirty in the morning. And one of the things that I've realized, working with people over the last ten years, is that if you're a human being, as a matter of course, you will fall asleep in your own life. It will happen. It's part of being human is there'll be a place where you sort of, you go off track and you fall asleep in your own life. And I've had a lot of men say to me, I just, I feel like I've been automatic. I haven't even been awake in my own life.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  And so the first dynamic of tracking is, okay, waking up. And we literally wake up really early. And we wake up really early, get in the vehicle, it's four thirty, the stars are still out, the night is still still. And we head out for the next metaphorical movement, which is waiting for the call. And in the hero's journey, the call is always the first thing. But there's a kind of preparation that has to happen for the call. And so we get ourselves out into the wilder parts of the park. And the guys get off the vehicle and we make our coffee and we sit. And usually waiting for the call is actually being in stillness and the act of tuning back in. It's actually, we sit there in the dark, we drink our coffee and we listen

• 12:57Speaker 03

  and we pay attention to what's going on around us. And inevitably, what happens if we're doing that is that we will hear the call because we've prepared ourselves, now we tuned in, we're actually on the lookout for it. And attention is a kind of magical thing. Part of waking up in your own life is saying, I want to wake up in my own life. Part of hearing the call is just saying, okay, it's time for me to start listening again. It's time for me to tune in. And if that happens, that's where attention is magical. Something will cross your path if you turn your attention back on. And normally we'll hear a call or we'll hear the movements of animals. Something starts to speak to us in that space. And then the call for me is also like the thing you know that if you don't do it,

• 13:41Speaker 03

  you'll go out of integrity with yourself. So if you're sitting there in the darkness and dawn is just starting to break and we hear a lion call nearby. If we don't go look for it, there's something off inside of us. So we know it when we see it. And then if you get the call, that gives you something to aim at. We now have an intention. We heard rhinos moving in this area. We heard a lion roar. We've got a broad idea of what to aim at. So that's sort of like the broader vision. Then we've got to move towards it. And what we'll need then is a first track. We need a place to start. And the first track is, you know, and it's so magical when you're driving around and you you want to get on a trail then boom. There's the track of a rhino that's crossed your path. Boom, there's the track of a of a lion that's moved through the area.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  And like on that first morning, we tracked rhinos. And you know, the park is huge. Somewhere out there is the rhinos. But if we have the first track, we have the first small movement towards what we're looking for. And what I say to people all the time, this movement towards yourself is going to start with the smallest thing you can do to take you more towards yourself. Most people want to say like, okay, well, you know, I want to move to being the best version of myself. Or when I know exactly what the next move for me is, I'll do it. But actually, you've got to break it down into a series of much smaller moves. Things that take you a little bit closer to what you're looking for.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  And if you can identify enough small movements, enough first tracks towards what you're looking for, it's going to start to take you. And so that rhino out there could be anywhere and we dial that infinite possibility down to a first track. And then a next first track, and then a next first track. And then we start to string that trail together. And as you saw, guys like Alex and Renias and the trackers we were working with and yourself and the other guys in the group. At first, you don't know what the trail is because you're learning the characteristics of the track. And then. You know, in the space of a few hundred yards, it starts to pop. You start to know what you're looking for. And that I call track awareness, where you're actually training your brain,

• 15:49Speaker 03

  you're training your eyes, and you're training yourself to see the subtle signs of your trail. You're training yourself to see your path forward. And that's why body tracker, one of the exercises we do is so important. Because in the metaphor, you've got to train your body to feel when it's on track, and it will speak in emotions and sensations. When you run into a feeling of expansion, you've got to know, that's my track. When you meet someone who's inspiring and you have that feeling as you're talking to them, like you, you, you, you, you've got to see that track. And you can train yourself to feel how life is speaking to you. So that becomes the next movement, developing track awareness, and then we start to follow.

• 16:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Before we go on the follow part and maybe talk about the rhinos a little bit, because that was such an interesting first track that we followed. I don't want to lose the opportunity to talk about, I don't know what to call it, like that pre-call stage in the morning when it's silent. And because of the treehouse that we're sitting in and an experience you told me a little bit about of being up here just in complete silence yourself for a long period of time. And the importance of silence, I guess, is the topic I just want to touch on for a couple of minutes before we get back to the actual track. Talk about what that means to you and why it's such a key part of the process, not just at the beginning of the day, early in the morning, in the dark, but as a general tool for this whole metaphor.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  I think there are a couple of parts to it. The one is, and we spoke a little bit about this, there's this notion of the great silence. And that is, for thousands of years before this planet was inhabited by people, there were forests that stood in silence. There were oceans that stood in silence. There were wild places where the silence was so deep and profound that it held a kind of presence almost to it. It was a silence that was so alive and so ancient. And that silence is still here, but we don't know how to look for it anymore. So for myself, what I've found is that the natural world is a wordless environment. It's a silent environment.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  And one of the things that starts to happen when you spend a lot of time in solitude is that the mind and the thinking starts to slow.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  And as you spend more time just by yourself, there's no one to talk to. There's no words to be spoken and that silence starts to sit on you. And the momentum of the verbal mind starts to slow down. And as the verbal mind comes off. What happens is a still open awareness. And you aren't naming everything or having to talk about it or try and describe your experience. It's just pure experience. And in that state. As the verbal mind comes off, there's a feeling of oneness that starts to develop. Because you're not trying to capture everything. You're just having the experience. And in that kind of silence, you become more at one with the experience.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  So the wordlessness of the natural world. Is the doorway into presence, is the doorway into stillness. And in that stillness, there's a kind of intelligence that operates. And it's different, you're not thinking about all the things you should do. It's more like the way that an animal knows what to do. And you feel a different way of knowing flow into you. And you feel a different way of knowing what you're meant to do flow into you. And it's not all rational concepts or thoughts or ideas. It's coming from this really deep knowing inside of you. And if that. In the way that a lion knows how to be a lion. And a tree knows how to bloom in the spring.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  And a leopard knows that it likes to be solitary and secretive. As the mind slows and we feel ourselves in that union. One, we know in a different way and. We've experienced ourselves not as Boyd or Patrick. But we experience ourselves much more relationally. We experience ourselves as a part of, in union with, in the felt experience of. You know, so the tree is not the tree, the tree is. The sound of the breeze, the tree is the shade it throws on us, the tree is what's holding us. So it's a relational state. That to me is it's my spirituality.

• 20:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  There's a lot of that that requires you be in a connected environment. That the power of the silence, and this is just my own experience, but the power of the silence is amplified in that state when you're outside. I feel like if you could just prescribe that to everybody, everywhere in the world, things would get better.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like what you said on the first day. You said to me, like, I realized a few years ago that my level of happiness is directly correlated to how much time I spend outside.

• 20:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yep.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  And one of the things that I say is we wake up, most of the time in modern life, we wake up in a box. We get in a box, we drive to a box, to sit in a box and stare at a box. And there's something about being outside, like even just something like the effect of horizon. When you stare at a broad horizon, something happens in you. There's like a possibility, there's a vastness that can come into you. And one of the things about the retreat is I just want people to be in, and men in particular, to have the experience of watching the stars phase and the sun come up and to feel themselves moving through a vast landscape and to feel their own vastness within that and to feel

• 21:28Speaker 03

  the way that their body was meant to move over a landscape and to feel what happens to a group of men when they move together on the trail of an animal. There's a cohesiveness that develops, there's a bond that is naturally formed. And so I'm trying to awaken certain things that are naturally in us, but we don't, that don't just sort of naturally come to us in modern life. But the feeling of being out all the time is the feeling of being a part of something mysterious that you can't quite name and you can't quite know. And I feel like a lot of the anxiety and depression that we see in the world is actually just an undiagnosed homesickness for knowing ourselves in a natural place.

• 22:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  No, it's remarkably true and it's actually a good excuse to get back to the morning hours that we spent trailing the rhino because first of all, there's all these different kinds of states and we would take turns as lead tracker, meaning it's on us to find the next track and follow this thing for all sorts of weird, different little environments. And that's a profoundly different feeling than being at the back of the line, where it honestly feels more like a walk, a beautiful walk, than something where your attention needs to be incredibly focused. And it's amazing how quickly you can pop between those states, kind of like the dogs we talked about at the beginning. Talk a little bit about that experience where, and I'm thinking here specifically about this obsession with goals that we all have, and in this case, the goal is a rhino.

• 22:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And the important point here is, in the morning, we didn't find them, right? Like, we had to stop because it was getting really hot and we had to go eat and we were on the trail for five hours or something like this and we didn't find them. And you had some interesting thoughts at the end of that, that despite the lack of achievement or whatever, to take a look back and realize what happened. So talk about like the side effects, I guess, of what happens on the track.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  The one thing is, is that, once you start tracking and there's an intention, you're not just walking through the woods, you're moving forward with intention. And then, and every person who gets on the front feels that. It's like, there's a story that's being told on the ground. And every time you see a little bit of the rhino's side toe, a little bit of its front toe, where it's turned, where it's cut, where it laid down, the story continues to unfold. And up front, there's this amazing feeling of you're being led forward and your eye scans the ground, boom, there's the track, you move forward in that direction, your eye scans the ground, you don't see anything, and then suddenly you see it and you move forward. And then you see where the calf had walked close to the mother, and then you see where

• 23:55Speaker 03

  the mother had rubbed her nose on that log where she had scratched. And there's this whole narrative, and you are being led. And you'll remember, we dropped down into that little Tamburti Grove, and it was just this beautiful area, the trees, the way, the steep banks of the riverbank, and the way they had moved down there and they'd slept for a while. There was no ways in a thousand year that you could have just walked there. There was this really strong feeling that the rhinos were taking us to places that we could never have gone.

• 24:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And by the way, a place that a car could never have reached. So that's something I've been thinking about it as well, which is we're here, there are paths. There are well trodden paths and then there are smaller game trails. And it's interesting to see the sizing of the paths. And obviously the Range Rovers form these, these big paths. But in, in certain ways, that limits you so much to what you can see. And I, I can't stop thinking about that because we never would have seen that little grove in a car.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the metaphor is so strong because in life, there are big pathways. You know, when, when Joseph Campbell says, if you can see your whole life laid out before you, it's not your life. The culture presents us with the roads of where we should go, but the tracker goes somewhere else. The tracker is guided by a different set of trails. And they let themselves go where they don't know to go on the track. They go where the track takes them. And so if you can identify your inner tracks, what really speaks to you and follow those, it's going to take you somewhere totally unexpected. And that's why I believe people who live like trackers, they innovate, they create new ways of living.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  They're original because they're moving forward on a different guidance system. And it's not one where the culture is presenting to them. And it will take you to unknown places, just like every track we followed here took us to a place we could never have thought we should drive there to check. There were no roads to the places we went. We went to parts of the reserve by following the tracks that no people, no other people will go to.

• 25:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can we expand a little bit on this notion of culture and the role that it plays in our decision and our living? And how you think about it? That was one of the more interesting topics that we covered kind of again and again. And the contrast, because there's positives to culture.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 26:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And I think we all kind of know those, but maybe talk about the negative aspects to culture and how it, it kind of stands in conflict to this way of living as a tracker.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Let me sort of maybe lay down my sort of core principle, which is like really the center of the, the tracking metaphor. I believe that inside of you is a wild self. And the wild self, it's coded into you almost. It's like a part of your DNA in some ways. And it knows what you're here to do. It knows your purpose. It knows uniquely for you, and it's different for every person. What brings you to life? What nourishes you? What inspires you? So that is in us. It doesn't have to be created. It's there. Overlaying the wild self is the social self. And we need some social self because we're social animals.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  But in a heavily consumeristic culture, and in the structuring of modern society, the social self becomes so dominant that it overwhelms the wild self. And we find ourselves trying to be all the things that the culture tells us to be. And it's so pervasive from the time you're young, you know, whether it's media, whether it's how to live a good life according to the culture, what's valuable, what's meaningful. And in a consumeristic culture, that's a lot of the time structured around what you have or attaining what you have or getting what you need. So most of us, the social self, you'll know the social self because it's full of shoulds. Well, I really should. This is what I should do. And it's full of have tos. Well, you have to do that.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  And as I said, we need a little bit of it, but most of it has overrun the wild self. And the wild self, it has tracks. And those tracks are in sensations in the body, things that make us forget about time, the feeling of expansion, joy, peace, or the way it speaks. And usually it'll also speak in like the movement of the body, you know, a kind of contraction or a kind of expansion. And so it knows, as I said again, in the way that like a leopard knows how to be a leopard and a lion knows how to be a lion. And we have to shift our attention onto those tracks and learn those tracks and begin

• 28:25Speaker 03

  to follow the tracks of the wild self and it will start to take us to unexpected places. It will start to guide us away from all the rationals of what we should do to a deeper dimension of what we're here to do. And that's how I think you really find your way to your own tracks and the understanding that you actually know, you actually know what's calling you. If you could shed the roles, if you could shed all the things that the culture told you to be, there would be something else inside of you that could guide you. Then we add in being out in nature, sleeping out on the ground. Then we add in what happens to a group of men when they're out in nature, you know. You know, if you sit around, if you just arrive in a boardroom or something and you sit down and you say to a group of

• 29:10Speaker 03

  men, okay, let's all open up about our feelings. It doesn't happen. But you put the guys on the trail of a pride of lions and they track those lions together and they have to operate together and they have to watch out for each other. Well, that night around the fire, you don't have to say, let's open up around our feelings because there's a natural bond there. And people start to be able to share openly about what they're looking for, what they're trying to let go of and the transitions that they're going into. And it just starts to happen, you know? And I think men, men were meant to be out together in a shared endeavor. You know, that was one of the core principles of the retreat is like to go and do something difficult together and operate together and work together and have successes

• 29:54Speaker 03

  together and have failures together and for there to be consequences. If we get it wrong out there.

• 29:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Get mauled.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can get mauled. So there's, it's real life and that brings something alive in guys.

• 30:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Let's go to the extreme of that, which was the night that we spent outside and this concept of watch, people being on watch. Describe your thinking for why you set the whole thing up the way you did because maybe after the wild dogs, that was the most interesting and kind of crazy feeling of aliveness that we had together. So talk about the intention behind watch specifically.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  On one of the nights, we go and sleep out on the ground.

• 30:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  No tents, nothing.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. One of our goals is to have nothing between you and the wilderness. You sleep on the ground, you stare at the stars, there's no vehicle to get into, there's no tent to go into. If wild animals come around that night, and there's a good chance that they will, we are gonna have to, number one, be aware of it, and number two, handle it as a group.

• 30:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Just real quick, we showed up when it was still light, and instantly, there was a massive bull elephant 10, 20 meters away from us in Musk, or Must, rather, and you and Alex grabbed your rifles, like you were getting between us and him, not sure what direction it would go, maybe you could talk about that. And then 20 minutes later, there was a leopard clearly, like literally next to the camp, calling. So this is no joke.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's this phenomenal moment, late evening, you walk into the camp, it's surrounded by that beautiful ebony tree, there's a drainage line nearby, slight opening and a clearing, and there's nothing there except some sleeping bags. You know, so there's sort of this moment of like, okay, this is happening.

• 31:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Shit.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  And night is falling, and literally, and I've had this experience myself, is like, as night starts to fall out there, and there's nowhere to go, and awareness comes alive inside of you. And then, as we were talking, we were doing the safety briefing, I mean, that elephant just hit a leadwood tree, bah, and we looked across and he was like 30 meters away, huge bull, and he walked in towards us. And you'll remember, I said, okay, guys, just come together, Alex got his rifle. Because normally what'll happen is he walks in and he looks at us, but in Must like that, his testosterone levels are up, and he can be problematic, he can start to wanna push us, he can start to wanna chase us, he can charge at us. So there was an interesting moment there, and also just the size of that elephant on foot.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  And that's why it's like, as I say to people before we go and steep out, things are gonna happen to you tonight, inside of you, that I can't really describe. You have to have the experience, but something is gonna wake up in you. And then we make that fire and there's that feeling of that fire is our friend. And you can feel for thousands of years, people were around fires in places where there were wild animals and that fire was a friend. The fire, also the smoke and the light says to the animals, you know, we're here. And then there's the watch and it's like all through the night, someone in the group has to keep watch. And that person is responsible for the well-being of the other people in the group.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  But it's, there's so many dynamics to it because number one, everyone's life is in your hands. Someone, a hyena can come in and bite someone's face off if you don't pay attention. Number two, so there's like, there's awareness that comes with that. Number two, it's just you awake in a wild place, you and the fire and the stars and those creatures. And there's an archetypal feeling to that and taking care of everyone else. So there's, there's a really deep union that happens at that time as you sit there. And I would, you know, I'd be interested to hear how it was for you. There's an aliveness that is there. And there is a feeling with nothing between you and the wilderness of being a part of it.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  You know, in the middle of the night, a pride of lions could walk in and there's nowhere else to go. So you are in it. It's not, you're not sitting in a Land Rover viewing it. You're not watching it on TV. You are in it and it's real. And people are not looking for the meaning of life. They're looking for the feeling of being alive. That, that's it. You're in it.

• 34:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My experience was, so I had first watch and honestly, I was pretty scared. So much so, actually, my next question's gonna be about Rainius and his sort of state of being, which we'll describe in some detail, you know, one of the best trackers in the world. But ahead of it, so as the night started to wind down, we were finished telling stories and laughing our asses off. Probably thirty minutes ahead of everybody else, I kinda quieted down because I was thinking about this like, shit, like this is gonna be. Kind of stressful. And so I started and within probably 20 minutes, a hyena came and was, you know, five feet away from me. And you had told us beforehand, you know, my inclination would be to like kick you and like, you know, get your rifle or something. But you had told us, look, unless they're really coming into the camp, don't wake us up, deal with it yourselves and

• 34:52Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  just get up and see what happens. And so I kind of walked towards this thing, which, you know, a week earlier, I would never would have done that. And he just kind of trotted away and kind of stalked us for 20 more minutes, but then eventually went on his way. And it's amazing how the animals don't, I don't think their inclination is to mess with you. Like if you give, if everyone gives each other enough space, Alex said at some point on the, on the trip, I think many of the world's problems could be boiled down to like a lack of proper space, whether that's, you know, literal or figurative that people have. And so it was just, it was a crazy experience. And I think everyone thought like, oh, this is going to be this great time to reflect and look at the stars. That wasn't it at all. Like you are super vigilant, like peaks of stress come, like when the hyena came, I was really nervous.

• 35:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And then you learn to settle back down into it. A friend of mine, this guy, Michael Mobison, who's, you know, extremely thoughtful, well-known guy, told me about this book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And the reason is that us humans tend to be in this constant like state of low-grade stress. But you don't need to. And that kind of brings us to Rhenius, which is like, what was amazing about watching him was that he seemed so at ease all the time until he needed to not be anymore. And then he could spike up into a different state. And I would love to hear kind of your view of him, having spent so much time with Rhenius over the years, and learn from him about the power of, of that like elevated watch back down to, to rest.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, you, you don't look at a pride of lions that's resting. They're not lying there going, oh, God, we missed a, we missed yesterday's kill, or I hope we're gonna get a buffalo tomorrow. You know, that's one of the things about being human is we have a verbal mind. We tell the story of the past and the future. And the animals don't, they're just in the present. And one of the things I see with, with Ren, and all of, with Ren is like, he's so in touch with himself, that he has this incredible presence. And I feel like, he just handles what is happening in the moment. He's deeply landed in the moment. And his energy output is in line with what's required of the moment. And

• 36:56Speaker 03

  I think that comes from hours and hours and a lifetime being out in the wilderness and being wild. And if an animal, if an animal becomes aggressive or is unsure, he communicates back to that animal in the moment with his energy. And then the minute it's done, he drops back into that state. And I, I'm not sure how you, how presence takes root in you. But I think it has something to do with letting go of roles and expectations of ourself. I go into the retreat and I always have some expectations of what I want people to get out of it. He goes into it just with no expectation, letting, he, he's going to work with whatever nature gives us.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  And it's, and it flows out of him in that he's, he's just at one with what is happening. Whereas I'm always thinking, where do we need to take this? And he's not trying to take it anywhere. He's just being with it as it is in the moment. I think in the, in the east, people do meditation to come into deeper presence. And out here, I think the tracks take it into presence. So I think his 10,000 or probably 20,000 hours of tracking have put him into this place of just being present to the thing he's in and then letting it flow out of that. I mean, it's hard to talk about, you know?

• 38:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It, it, two really interesting thoughts there. So one of the guys that was with us, Andrew, at the very end said something which was, after watching Ren, when you, when he showed up the first day, his expectations were really high. Like, we gotta go see stuff. Like, and we hadn't seen something in an hour. He's like, god damn it, you know, I want to see some animals. And at the end, not only are you not doing that, you don't care at all. You just want to be out there. That's it. And I think what we all learned from watching Rainius, who also will not give up. Once he's on something, you know, we had to break for lunch and you told several stories about him like, nah, go ahead. I'm going to stay on this thing. His intensity and focus when he found something was remarkable. And he just seems so damn at ease, so much more at ease than anybody I know.

• 38:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And content in, in many interesting ways. I, I, he's just a remarkable guy. And Alex too, that we could all learn from. Amazing. I mean.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Ren in the bush, he's just pure gold. He's in touch with, everything is talking to him. He's in touch with the tracks. He knows when to let go and when to, when to keep pushing. But there's another piece which is this, and we spoke about a little bit. They say modern life, you know, modern culture is three days deep. And if you come out into the bush, it takes three days for all the things that you thought were incredibly important and that would do or die. And if you didn't do them, you would, things were never gonna happen for you. All of that stuff just falls away. And you realize that for hundreds and maybe thousands of years, we lived out here in these environments and we just didn't think about all the things that are so important now.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  And we just lived in a much more open field of awareness. We lived in a deeper stillness. We lived in deeper connection with each other, with other people. I remember once someone saying to me, all the things that native people did are the things that we now do for recreation. Fishing, hunting, hours of weaving, being together. It's like all recreational. That's just how people lived for hundreds of years. When you come out here, you realize there's just a different way of being. And a funny thing happens, or I see a funny thing happen is, and I said this, is that people who start to get in touch with the tracks of the wild self and start to follow,

• 40:25Speaker 03

  one of the things that happens is they start to want different things. They start to, and there's, if you start to live on your purpose, if you start to get in touch with what you really wanna do, there's a real feeling of enough that comes. You're not trying to get something to feel okay. By being deeply involved in what really speaks to you, there's an abundance to it. And then that state, it's natural idea is to share and to connect. And when you're really fulfilled in that way, you don't want more things. And that's why this work for me is a, and I live like this and I'm trying to share it because it's a kind of activism to me. Because more people who get in touch with a wilder part of themselves and get in touch

• 41:09Speaker 03

  with what they're truly called to and let themselves follow the trail to a life that is more of an expression of who they are on the inside, those people will literally start living differently and they will literally, and they will want to share that way of living. And we need a different way of living right now because. What we're doing is destroying our home and that's just what we're doing. But it's so hard to get out of the momentum. But people who do will be original drivers of a new way of living. And that's why I think that it's important, this work is more important than just going on a retreat and finding out your life's purpose. It has, that's important.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  But deeper than that, it's what the discovery of your life's purpose will do. Your life can then become, people will look at your life and say, wait, he's not doing it how I've been told it has to be done. That means there's a possibility that everything I thought about how you have to do it to be successful may not be true. And that kind of possibility is what could take us into something else.

• 42:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of the things, the phrases that we used a few times through the week and something I think a lot about is the ordering of chaos on behalf of others. And it makes me think of another term we've used, you and I, which is like funny Venn diagrams or goofy Venn diagrams where you have these weird intersection of interests or of talents or whatever. That might be another way of thinking about tracks. I think people, they feel that they should be doing a certain thing. But I'm curious what you think about what happens when that person is not good at that thing. So, you know, Ren loves what he does, but he's also incredibly good at it. And I think that's where real magic happens. How much of this pursuit do you think needs to be the intersection of those two things?

• 42:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Not just your wild self and what you're interested in, but what you're actually like naturally inclined to be good at as well?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  I think that there will be a correlation though. I think that there will be, if you listen to that thing that is speaking inside of you, it will be something very fundamental to you. So it won't be a case of like, let's take you for example. I don't believe that what calls you from the inside, you'll have an inclination towards and you'll, you'll tend to be good at it. This podcast, for example, you love connecting with people. You love learning. You're naturally interested. You're naturally curious. So it pulled you into something that was a correlation of all of those parts of yourself. And because you're naturally into it. I mean, you're gonna get better at it continuously, but because it's your natural inclination.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  So I don't think the wild self will pull you into something that is not, you're naturally not inclined to. That's more the social self that says, okay, here's what you should be good at. The wild self will not pull you into something that is not in you. Does that make sense?

• 43:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It does. I'd love to take the position of a cynical listener out there. And maybe talk about the most common objections that you think about yourself or that you hear from others. That are like, ah, you know, this sounds great, but like, it's not realistic, it's not pragmatic. Culture is culture, society is society, we've built up this massive edifice and this is what we've got. Not everybody can go do this. So what are the sort of the most cynical takes that you've heard on some of these ideas? And how do you respond to them?

• 44:22Speaker 03

  The most classic thing is 100% of the time, well, I would do that if I had the money, if I could. That's like the base level. And that's where I, I think the design element does come in. Okay, fine, stick with that then. But how do we find, is that fulfilling you? No. Okay, well then how do we find what is, what would be a little more fulfilling? Well, you know, I like being outdoors. Okay, well then let's start by bringing a little bit more of that in. But yeah, I mean, here's the bottom line is in my twenties, I was like a zealot. I would convince everyone else that it was possible. Now I don't, you know, I maybe don't try and convince the cynic. I, because, you know, fine, be cynical, do what you want to do.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  But if something else is calling, if you have another longing. And if you feel that there is something else you're meant to be doing. Well, then why not start? If you don't and you're like, this is how it is and this is what it is, cool, I'm not gonna try and convince you. You know, I mean, I'm, I think what I'm saying is that we begin these journeys.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  When we decide to begin them and not a moment before. And sometimes a catalytic event will start it. You get sick, you have a heart attack, you get divorced, you get fired. And suddenly it's like, okay, well, what now? And sometimes that will, suffering will start the journey. Sometimes you just have a calling inside of you. And if you have the calling, then you may as well start tracking. You know, you may as well start tuning your attention. You may as well start trying things. You may as well start going out there into the unknown. You may as well move into the wilderness of life. Start to find something that's more fitting to you. And if you're a total skeptic and you don't believe it and you're happy, then cool. You're not gonna, you're not, if you're happy, you're not gonna be inclined to look.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  If you're a total skeptic and you're unhappy and you're just in the grind and it's eating you alive. Well, then that's on you, you know?

• 46:25Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned money. Having done this a few times, I think everyone would agree like, wow, great. I wish I could flip a switch and, and be in a, you know, better alignment or higher integrity, as you say. What are the other major excuses or barriers that you see as most common to letting this happen? So money is a big one, you know, I don't have the money. If I had the money, I would do it. What are the other like big excuses that you see?

• 46:50Speaker 03

  I'm not sure I would call them excuses, barriers. I mean, one is that we live in a culture that people really wanna know. So when I know what I'm meant to be doing, then I'll make a move. That's when I'll take the big leap. You know, everyone's always talking about the big leap. And that's, that's not how it works. You've got to be willing to move forward into the unknown and make the space and be in a state of unknown for a while. Because that's where you're gonna find, you're gonna find a first track and a first movement. And great entrepreneurs know this, you know? They know you, you find out one thing, then you find out another thing, then you don't know how to do it for a while. Then you do know how to do it. So that's one thing.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  The other thing is, is people wanna know every movement. They wanna know all the pieces that they'll have to do before they do it. So like, once I was coaching a guy, I remember, he said, I'm totally burnt out. So I said to him, but he said, you know, I've got all these responsibilities. I've got all these, I've got family, I've got all this stuff. So I said to him, okay, cool. What, and he's like, I don't know what I, I don't know how to move forward. I don't know what it is. I said to him, okay, cool. Just go quiet for a moment, go inside yourself and just feel for one thing you need. One thing you need. So he's like, oh, man, I don't know if I wanna do this. So I said to him, just shut up, go quiet, just, and, and here with me, tell me one thing you need.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Goes quiet for a few minutes, he looks up and he says,

• 48:22Speaker 03

  I need some time completely by myself.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  You know, but how does that help me? I mean, that, that's not gonna take me anywhere. Where's the, and I said to him, you know, that's the first track. You gotta go and get some of the, the one thing you know you need. That's the, that's one track. And then be- because you go and take some time, another thing will arise out of that. And then another thing, but you can't know the whole, you can't know the whole process. But if you can know the one thing you need and go and get it, the next thing will open up. The next thing will open up. But we're so, we wanna know, we wanna know the whole way forward. We wanna know how to do this. You know, I'm, I mean, I don't know if you've ever spoken about it before, but,

• 49:08Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, you, this podcast that you started, I was struck by your story because it was such a great example of inner tracking.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  You know, you had these interests, you were curious, you wanted to talk about investing, but you also wanted to talk about deeper dimensions of life, which is kind of a weird combination. You know, it's the strange Venn diagram. You wanted to learn and you wanted to share. And so you set off to start this thing. And you just started it because you were curious in it. You were interested. You had these things. You wanted to connect people. You wanted to have a conversation that could be shared. And you set off to do it. And there was no money in it. There was, there was no. And then you said, when you were telling us the story of how you got going. You know, now I do make some money from this podcast, actually a fair amount of money from the podcast. But you set off totally into the unknown.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  You set off on your own tracks. You, you were willing to be in the uncertainty. You were willing to not know how to do it for a while. And, and now it's become what five million downloads or something? And so you've got to give yourself the space. I mean, that to me is in attracting. You got on a track. You put a whole lot of different tracks together. You had a, a big vision. You took all the small steps and you just started with no guarantees.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  That's the whole process.

• 50:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  We didn't talk yet about the end. So there's this kind of circle behind all of this. And you know, you do your thing during the day. We talked a lot about following the tracks and some of the key lessons there. But then night comes, we talked about night watch, but love any other thoughts on sort of the end of a particular chapter? And any other observations on the importance of the end of the day? Kind of to use that morning to night arc that we began with any, any, any thoughts there?

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, after a day of following.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  What I see.

• 51:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Tiring.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  It's tiring, but there's something about having moved all day and paid attention like that, that you feel more presence is more, more life. Like I said to you, we're going to go into a time warp because after a full day out there. You've watched the sun come up. You've watched the stars. You've been on the trail. You've lost the trail. You've gotten the first track. Now it's sunset. Whether you found the animal or not, you've, you know, guys have joked with each other. We've told stories. People have dulled inward. We've been in union with nature. By the end of the day, it feels like you've lived 10 lives. And then, and then you can look back over the day and see what did the trail teach us? What did the animals teach us?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  And realize that whether we found the animal or not, living as trackers, being out there and living in creative response to what the ground is telling us, what the trail is telling us, what the birds were telling us, where we got taken by tracks. It doesn't really matter what the outcome was because the experience of doing it, of being in it was so full. And then the, you know, naturally the lightness that starts to develop in the group and guys start to tell stories. And, you know, if you think about the amount of private in-house jokes we developed over a four-day period.

• 52:20Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Never laughed so hard.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  I mean, just one guy saw a lion and called it a warthog by mistake. I mean, we had like fifty private jokes and that's what happens. A bunch of guys out there together, it's like having done something difficult and challenging and then been willing to like talk about some of the things we were looking for in parts of our lives. By the end of it, there's this bond, there's this lightness and there's the community. So it's just, it's all there. It's all there whether we found what we were looking for or not. By living like that, the aliveness was there. And that's actually what we were looking for. By living like that, the presence is there. By living like that, the connection has been built. And in a way, the externals are not what we're actually looking for. It's those things that develop in the process.

• 53:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So the first day, we also had a chat about some very interesting experiences that you've had and specifically coming back to this notion of silence. And there's this, there's this example that I'll, the only thing I'll lead you with is this notion of like a feeling of thousands of years of time passing. So maybe talk a little bit about that experience.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  It's definitely separate to this retreat, you know. But, and I, it's just, it's part of my personal journey is that I have used some of the traditional plant medicines that I guess you would refer to as having hallucinogenic psychedelic qualities. And, and I've used them with a lot of intention and I've used them to learn about my own psyche. And one of my really early encounters was as a young, a young man, you know, I was maybe twenty-three or so. And I had such a deep pain inside of me around the state of the natural world. I had grown up in the natural world.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  I had grown up very connected to nature and I loved it. And for me to see what was going on on the planet was, it was eating me. And one of my first encounters with the medicine is I took the medicine.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  And I closed my eyes, I was around a fire. And it was like the spirit of nature came to me. And I mean, it definitely, when you start exploring these realms, you enter the realms of Wu. But, but the spirit of nature came to me. And I just had this incredible experience of I would be shown the silent presence of a mountain range. And it would sort of boom into my inner vision and I would almost hear it go like

• 54:55Speaker 03

  and this, this range of mountains would appear. And this voice inside of myself would say, look how old I am. Just look how old I am. And then, dum. This forest would appear with mists hanging over it. And the voice would say, ah, look how old I am, child. You know, like, look how old I am. And it just, it was like a six, six hours. This voice just said to me, you're so sweet. You know, the, the sort of the feeling of it was like, you're so sweet to care. It's so beautiful that, that you care about this. And it's just so sweet. And what you think is hurting me, what you think is

• 55:38Speaker 03

  the destruction of the planet, it just is the wink of an eye to the kind of time or timelessness that I exist in. You know, the expanse of the dimension that, that I exist within is something that you just won't comprehend it. You could all wipe yourselves out in a hundred years. That would be fine, it would be, it's nothing to me. And it's not that I felt like, okay, cool. I don't have to do anything about that anymore. I just, I just felt that I could come from a more healed place. I could come from a trust that I wanna serve from, from what calls me. But it's not like, if we don't do this, everything will fall apart.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Like, nature will be fine, we might wipe ourselves out. But man. To know yourself with the mystery. And instead of it being conceptual, and I think this is where psychedelics are interesting. Instead of it being like, there's a mystery, you are feeling it. You know, McKenna used to call it the felt experience of the mystery. So, and it's your experience. So it's not being told, there's something divine out there. I'm, I'm in the divinity. And that's, that's a very fundamentally different experience.

• 56:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  There's something I'm dying to ask you because the nature of you telling the story was really for fun around the campfire and not with any sort of like underlying meaning behind it. So I'd love to hear what the like major lessons or takeaways that you had from your experience with bees.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And maybe a bit of backstory is required.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So, um, so I became, I was gonna do a presentation, uh, in the States. And I wanted to talk about shifts in human consciousness. That was sort of gonna be the core of my, what I had to say. And so I was really excited to do this presentation. And I started to look around in the natural world for the most obvious kind of markers of, of, of things that can shift consciousness. And what I came across was bees. And, you know, we hear this idea of the hive mind all the time. And the reason that people talk about it is because bees are phenomenal creatures. They are the only insect that contributes to the economy.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  The way that they operate is single bees react to stimuli. And when enough individual bees react to the direct stimuli that they are receiving, when enough of them start to do that, an algorithm fires almost through the hive. And as one, the hive will move. You know, so there's this, this incredible shift that comes out of individuals. And that really grabbed me. And then there's also things, you know, they do interpretive dance. A nurse bee will take a, a young bee on training flights. You know, it'll take it out and teach it how to, how to forage. They vibrate at a perfect, I think it's an A on the musical scale. So they're just phenomenal. They can sense electromagnetic currents. They know where to go in the hive.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  They create a negative charge all over their body by buzzing their wings so that when they land on a flower, the flower literally shoots pollen onto them via like a kinetic kind of energy. Some people say that.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Bees and flowers are one entity. The bee is the pollen delivery system for the flower and the flowers are the nutrient creation system, but actually they're one entity, which I, which is kind of like the plants created a micro nano technology to deliver. I mean, it's like, it starts to get amazing. So I was blown away by this. I decided I really needed to like dive into this. Meantime, and this is kind of a side story, there was some people who had wanted to come on safari at Llanda Lozzi, but Ebola had broken out in North Africa and there were a couple from Singapore. So they had been writing to me saying, you know, we were going to come on safari, but we're afraid of this Ebola outbreak now. And I had been writing back saying, listen,

• 59:37Speaker 03

  please don't be afraid. It's thousands of miles away. There's no Ebola in South Africa. You're absolutely welcome to come here. And it had been a lot of backwards and forwards and eventually they had decided to come. And that's sort of a bit of a side story, but they arrived at Llanda Lozzi on the day that I teamed up with the local beekeeper, a guy called Simon Sambo. I said to him, Simon, I want you to take me beekeeping. He said, oh, okay. He has this like, almost like a very light honey like voice, mellifluous voice. He said, I can take you beekeeping. So I was like, cool. So I went for a run in the bush and then I met up with Simon and we drove out to where he had some hives out in the bush. And he, he pulled out this black box and he opens the box and he says,

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  our first thing is you must put on your beekeeping suit. So I was like, okay, no problem. I put the suit on with the big weird oval shaped head and the mesh. And I noticed that the suit was slightly short for me. It was made, it was designed for a shorter person. So I said, Simon, you know, it's a bit short for me. He said, oh, okay. Don't worry. You can borrow my socks. He took his shoes off and he gave me his socks. So now the suit was sort of sealed by a pair of black socks. Meantime, I'm thinking to myself, look, bees can sense energy and I've got amazing energy. So like, as I move in there, I'll just hit them with my like powerful soothing woo energy and I'll just tap into their field and I'll

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  just create a sense of connection between us. I'm going to be fine. Like I'm just going to work in the field of energy between us. No problems. So we start walking into the hive and. I'm talking African bees here. And I should have known, because as I started to move towards them, I noticed that their pitch just started to change. I mean, like,

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  as we got closer, they were basically saying like, back off, back off. So we get close to them and Simon cranks the lid off the first hive. And seventy thousand of the most enraged bees rose up in a black cloud around me.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  And the energy coming off them. And people sometimes say to me, like, all your years in the bush, what's been the most scary thing that's happened to you? Literally, these bees surrounding me was the scariest thing that ever happened.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  And they're like all over me. They start landing on the visor. Then I saw one inside the suit. And I was like, oh, that can't be good. But it was only one. And I'm going like, okay, use your energy, be cool, be cool.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  And then, right at that moment, one stung me through the sock that Simon had lent me. And this shimmering swarm of bees went,

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  and they stopped. And for a moment, they're like hung, suspended in the air. And everything went silent. And then, as one, they went to my ankles. And they started to sting me. Gunk, one sting, two stings, three stings, like fifty stings in like seconds. And I started saying, Simon, Simon, they're stinging me. Simon, they're starting to sting me. Simon, Simon, what should I do? Okay, use my energy, be cool. Simon, how do I handle this? Be cool. And then I started to walk really fast away from the hive. Because, and they're just all over you. And then I started to run. So I ran out into the clearing. I'm thinking, Simon, they're stinging me, they're stinging me, you gotta help me, what should I do? And I ran away from the hive into a clearing. He says, don't worry, I will help you. And he runs off. And he cuts a branch, like a long branch.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  And he runs up to me and he starts to lash me with the branch. So I'm standing in a clearing in a beekeeping suit, getting beaten by the local beekeeper. Stand still, bah, bah, bah. And he's just smashing me with this branch. I'm saying, Simon, it's not helping, they're still stinging me. He says, oh, wait, I should get the smoker. He had forgotten to bring the smoker with him. He says, let me get the smoker. So now, while I'm still getting stung, he gets the smoker and he starts running around looking for elephant dung. He sets the elephant dung on fire, gets it in the smoker. By now, I'm at like two hundred stings. He runs back over to me and he starts pumping the smoker onto me.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  And the first puff of smoke went into the visor and it was pure like a white, thick elephant dung and it hit me square in the mouth and went down into my lungs. Now I'm getting stung to death by bees, but I'm also being slightly asphyxiated. And I started and it burnt in my lungs so much and I was starting to think like, I wonder, is that just the smoke or am I starting to get paralyzed because I've been stung so much? My lungs starting to burn and shut down. So, and I'm still getting absolutely mad. Juah, they're all over me. I say, Simon, it's not working. What should I do? He says, I don't know. Maybe run for your life. So now we are running in our beekeeping suits across the clearing. I say, where do I run to? He says, run to the Land Rover.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  So we run over to this Land Rover and we jump into it and we start to drive away at high speed. And the bees are still around, but we slowly start to lose them. And he's still screaming, go, go, go, run for your life. In the meantime, we come around the corner, wearing full beekeeping suits, screaming, run for your life. And here on another Land Rover out on safari is the couple who are afraid of Ebola. They check us and they think that the Ebola cleanup crew in their hazmat suits is driving past them at high speed screaming, run for your life. Anyway, I get back to my house and I walk into my house and I remember I sat down on the bed and I had this moment where I was like, uh, okay.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  Am I dying? Like, I was like breathing in, like, can I breathe? I think, I mean, I think I'm okay. I don't know though. I'm obviously hurting. I got in the shower and by the time I got out of the shower, my feet looked like if you had blown up a surgical glove, you know? And that was me for the next five days, lying on my back, icing my feet, stung hundreds of times. But, I mean, the thing that I got out of it was, well, number one, the first thing that I got was, respect the bees and.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Then what it also led me to is the incredible intensity and efficiency of that collective. And so I thought about it a lot afterwards and I realized, you know, we can do this if enough of us, when you look at the bees and you look at what they're capable of and you get attacked by them and you feel that intensity and you realize that individuals are shifting the whole algorithm of that hive, I walked out of there with the respect that we could do this because we're also, as a collective, we're intense. And if enough of us start to do this, I think we'll amaze ourselves. And this is where people are so interesting, like we could amaze ourselves with what we could do, sort of as the human endeavor.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  And somehow we don't, you know, we put our energy in all the wrong places. But if, I mean, I'm just going to bludgeon the metaphor, if we live as trackers, we can do this. We could do it. And that, I still believe that.

• 1:06:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It was a unforgettable week experience. We're going to spend a little bit more time later today with your sister Bronwyn, talking about some other really interesting things that we've explored this week, including the business itself and the way that you guys have brought this mentality, this way of being into a business setting, which I think is absolutely fascinating now having watched the business in action. But thank you so much for an awesome week and we'll keep the conversation going this afternoon.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It's great to be with you as always.

• 1:07:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter, @Patrick_OShag, O-S-H-A-G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.