Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life | The Tim Ferriss Show

Boyd Varty joins Tim Ferriss to explore the art of lion tracking and how its mentality maps onto personal transformation and healing. He recounts his pioneering, often dangerous childhood on Londolozi, the family's shift from hunting to conservation, and the Shangaan master trackers who taught him to read the wilderness. Varty shares harrowing trauma, including an armed home invasion and a near-fatal crocodile attack, and how mentor Martha Beck, ceremony work, and Byron Katie's worksheets helped him heal. Threaded throughout are ideas about Ubuntu, the 'following state,' and the notion that an authentic life infused with meaning is a form of activism. He closes with stories of a leopard encounter during a bush fire and a disastrous corporate lion-roar presentation.

• Varty recounts a small-plane disaster where a stork crashed through the cockpit window, knocking the pilot unconscious with a beak stuck in his face, while his father took control and they made an emergency landing covered in blood and guts.
  00:12:03
• His uncle, after a wild leopard paused and looked at them on the road, declared 'whatever just happened, that's my future,' then spent 12 years with Shangaan tracker Elmon following that 'mother leopard' until she trusted them, birthing the photographic safari business.
  00:22:26
• At age 18, Varty woke during a violent home invasion in Johannesburg with a gun to his face; taken outside to be killed, he experienced a profound shift where all fear left him, the attackers became confused, put their guns down, and he gave them the car keys and they left.
  00:51:05
• A crocodile ambushed him in shallow river water, mangling his leg; he escaped when his foot went down its throat, and fellow Shangaan tracker Sully plunged through deep crocodile-infested water to carry him out.
  00:55:18
• Varty spent 40 days and 40 nights alone in a tree during lockdown, emerging with the insight that 'where your attention goes your life goes' and a sense of being 'known by Nature.'
  01:02:03
• In a near-death beekeeping mishap, 70,000 enraged African bees swarmed and stung him hundreds of times through his socks; the beekeeper Simon ended up beating him with a tree branch and blasting elephant-dung smoke into his mouth before they ran for the Land Rover.
  01:21:25
• At his first sweat lodge in Arizona, Varty relived his traumas in vivid imagery, then had a vision of the mother leopard bumping him, understanding that his healing and the healing of nature were connected; he passed out and a Navajo medicine man told him 'no brother, you're just being born.'
  01:55:42
• While fighting a bush fire with severe PTSD, a male leopard walked calmly out of the smoke toward him in the firelight, stopped ten yards away, and left him in a profound state of stillness rather than fear.
  02:08:11

• Varty's great-grandfather bought the bankrupt cattle land adjacent to Kruger National Park in 1926 after 'drinking too much gin' and hearing it was for sale.
  00:06:47
• Tracking is described as possibly the beginning of science, dating back to humanity's earliest origins, and as an art form that cannot be written down but must live inside a person, passed tracker to tracker.
  00:18:51
• Tracker Richard Sella would go out alone at 12 noon, when flat midday light gives no shadow contrast, because the leopard would be bedded down, and consistently located it, signing off radio calls with 'Richard Sella is number one.'
  00:34:23
• When tracking with clients they carry rifles, but Varty says in all his years he's never had to use one; without clients they often go out with only walking sticks.
  00:36:58
• Ubuntu is an African philosophy meaning 'I am because of you' or 'people are not people without other people,' reflecting a relational, collective consciousness rather than comparison-based Western individualism.
  00:59:26
• Aboriginal people have a saying that modern culture is 'three days deep' — after three days alone in nature Varty entered a different state of consciousness.
  01:02:35
• The honeyguide bird in southern Africa will lead humans to beehives, then eat the honey left for it — an ancient symbiotic relationship spanning thousands of years.
  01:16:14
• Barry Lopez's book 'Of Wolves and Men' describes the predator-prey 'conversation of death,' which sometimes ends not in death but with both animals simply parting ways.
  01:31:46
• San trackers from the Kalahari, taken into unfamiliar Kruger terrain for hours, can walk a beeline directly back to the vehicle without a GPS, suggesting a homing/navigational ability.
  01:36:26
• Varty calls Byron Katie's 'The Work' worksheets profoundly useful for stress-testing stressful thoughts, treating the process as meditation; resources at thework.com.
  01:50:25

Books, products and media the guest or host genuinely endorsed here — with the buy link.

Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.