2025-10-30 02:19:25
Jack Canfield (@JackCanfield), known as America’s #1 Success Coach, is a bestselling author, professional speaker, trainer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Canfield Training Group, which trains entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, sales professionals, educators, and motivated individuals how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals.
He has conducted live trainings for more than a million people in more than 50 countries around the world. He holds two Guinness World Record titles and is a member of the National Speakers Association’s Speaker Hall of Fame.
Jack is the coauthor of more than two hundred books, including, The Success Principles
: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, The Success Principles Workbook, Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction, The Aladdin Factor, Dare to Win, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, which includes forty New York Times bestsellers and which has sold more than 600 million copies in 51 languages around the world.
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From Jack:
How many things do you need to complete, dump, or delegate before you can move on and bring new activity, abundance, relationships, and excitement into your life? Use the checklist below to jog your thinking, make a list, and then write down how you’ll complete each task.
Once you’ve made your list, choose four items and start completing them. Choose those that would immediately free up the most time, energy, or space for you—whether it’s mental space or physical space.
At minimum, I encourage you to clean up one major incomplete every three months. If you want to really get the ball rolling, schedule a “completion weekend,” and devote two full days to handling as many things on the following list as possible.
Excerpt from The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, ©2005, 2015 Self-Esteem Seminars, L.P. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
“When you were a kid, your grandmother gave you a chicken soup when you were sick. … People’s spirits are sick. They’re in resignation, hopelessness, and fear.”
— Jack Canfield
“When I went off to college, my stepfather, he gave me $20. He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘If you need a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm. There’ll be no more gifts coming from me.'”
— Jack Canfield
“Nobody ever complains about gravity. You’ve never seen an old person walking through the mall, all bent over going, ‘Gravity, I hate gravity. If it wasn’t for gravity, I wouldn’t be all bent over. Gravity sucks.’ Never said that. Why not? Because you can’t change gravity. Everyone knows gravity just is, so we don’t complain about it. So anything you’re complaining about, you have to have a reference point in your mind of something better.”
— Jack Canfield
“[W. Clement Stone] said to me, ‘Do you watch television?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘How many hours a day?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Good Morning America, the news, maybe a movie at night.’ He said, ‘That’s three hours a day. Cut out an hour a day, because that’ll give you 365 additional hours a year to be productive. Divide that by a 40-hour work week, that’s nine-and-a-half weeks. It’ll give you a 14-month year. You’ll be much more competitive than all the people in your field if you do that.”
— Jack Canfield
“E + R = O — event plus response equals outcome.”
— Jack Canfield
On retirement: “I realized there were things I want to do that I haven’t done. I want to become a really good chef cook. I want to learn how to oil paint. I play guitar mediocrely. I want to learn to play the piano.”
— Jack Canfield
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Want to hear another episode with someone who built a publishing juggernaut through consistent principles and daily discipline? Listen to my conversation with bestselling author James Clear, in which we discussed launching a mega-bestseller that’s sold 10+ million copies, building an email list to two million+ people, the power of identity-based habits, strategies for consistent creative work, finding leverage in your life and career, and much more.
The post Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen (#833) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-10-25 13:54:59
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Boyd Varty (@boyd_varty), the founder of Track Your Life. As a fourth-generation custodian of Londolozi Game Reserve, Boyd grew up with lions, leopards, snakes, and elephants and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the natural world. He is a lion tracker, storyteller, and literacy and wildlife activist. At the intersection of his two greatest passions, tracking and personal transformation, Boyd uses ancient wisdom to help people create a purpose-driven, meaningful life and to discover their most authentic, essential self.
Boyd is a TED speaker, the author of Cathedral of the Wild and The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, and the host of the Track Your Life podcast. Using wilderness as a place for deep introspection and personal transformation, Boyd has taught his philosophy of “Tracking Your Life” to companies and individuals all over the world.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Boyd-O, good to see you.
Boyd Varty: Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me back on the show.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And I love your background since you have commandeered my recording office in Austin, it’s pretty surreal.
Boyd Varty: I’ve got to say, I like what you’ve done with the place. I might just pull in here for a few weeks.
Tim Ferriss: You know what? You’re welcome to.
Boyd Varty: It’s great to see you, man. I think the last time we were together, we were walking in a squall across the Cotswolds.
Tim Ferriss: That’s right, that’s right. Yes, we had our own semi-wilderness adventure. I mean, there was some wild there, there was some wild. More cows than I would tend to run into in your neck of the woods.
Boyd Varty: I was very impressed with your badger track. You did spot a badger track.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks. That is thanks to Boyd and Renias and Alex and all the rest of the actual tracking teachers. So let’s hop into it. Now, this is going to be a lot of improv jazz because I wanted to introduce people of course, if they have not heard episode one, which they should listen to, to your eclectic collection of stories. And I have a number of prompts. I do not have any idea what these allude to except for one. So we have JV, firefighting, lunch, Toby Pheasant, and then we have a number of others. Where would you like to start? Dealer’s choice?
Boyd Varty: Well, maybe we’ll start with something you don’t know about me, which is that I was the head of an elite firefighting unit for a period of time in my 20s. And I took over the team from a French Foreign Legionnaire who had some of the most incredible personal power you’ve ever seen in your life. When he would walk somewhere, there would literally be a 20 yard radius around him where he would project this aura of absolute confidence and intensity. And you just felt this is an incredibly capable person.
Tim Ferriss: And this is in South Africa?
Boyd Varty: This is in South Africa. We were part of a team called the Habitat Team. And our job was to do a number of things on the reserve. We had to fix roads, we had to mend fences, we had to make sure that animals were generally safe. We had a controlled burning program. And then we also had to fight fires in the case that you got a runaway fire. And when I took over from Chris, I was probably about 23. I was in the phase where as a family business, I was doing every job. I was the part-time marketing manager and sales manager. So I’d fly off to various travel shows in the world and sell safaris. And then I would come back to South Africa and I would be on the firefighting team.
And I remember that I was so daunted by taking over from Chris that I had actually practiced his walk alone in my room a little bit to try and get the cadence and the presence right. And literally right off the bat, the first incident we had was, there’s a bit of a setup to it. The setup is that the monkeys had been generally attacking the buffet.
Tim Ferriss: These are the vervet monkeys?
Boyd Varty: The vervet monkeys had been all over the buffet. They’d been stealing things. And so some enterprising staff member had been driving down the road and they had seen a sculpture, a paper mache sculpture of a life-size lion. And so they had bought it and in the late afternoons and around mealtimes, they would trot the paper mache lion out onto the front deck that overlooked the river where people were having food. And the monkeys would see it and they would alarm and stay away. And then the paper mache lion would be picked up and it would be put in the bar for storage. So literally day two, we have a small electrical fire breaks out on a socket in the gym. And my team get down there and we instantly realize that we can’t spray this out. We’ve got to shut the main power down.
So I send one of our team members, who is a guy by the name of Lucky [inaudible], he was named ironically because he was incredibly unlucky. He had in fact lost an eye in an incident in the bush. And the way that he handled this is he had bought a beanie and he had cut a single hole in the beanie and he pulled it down over his face. So he had a single viewpoint out of the center of the beanie with his one good eye. And he would rock around the place dressed like this. Anyway, I sent Lucky to shut the power down. So he ran to the bar where the switchboard was and he burst into a darkened bar with its hatches closed because it was like late afternoon, there was no one around. He hit the power and he turned to his left. And in the bar in the darkness was a lion.
Tim Ferriss: The paper mache lion.
Boyd Varty: The paper mache lion was in the bar. So we lost Lucky for about two and a half hours because to his mind, and valid in the bush, he saw a live lion in the bar and he just disappeared. So I realized we better get down to some training because I felt a certain amount of pressure to make sure that we maintained the standards of the French Foreign Legionnaire. So I decided we would get involved in a series of drills and we would keep ourselves at an elite standard. And the team was made up of, if you think about it, there was maybe like 10 guys. There was a headman by the name of Isaac [inaudible] who was just incredibly, also physical, maybe like 6’5, muscular guy. There was Lucky [inaudible] who was the tractor driver with his beanie on. There was myself doing my French Foreign Legionnaire walk. And we believed in ourselves, but we weren’t quite where we needed to be.
And so randomly in the afternoons I would set up opportunities for us to have drills. And so there was a small soccer field at the back of the camp, and I would go and get debris that was lying around. And at random times I would light a fire and then I would send out the call and there were all of these kind of calls. It was first like, “Stations, stations, stations.” I’d send it out on the walkie-talkies. Everyone would run to their tractors, they would grab their gear and then I would scream, “Positions, positions, positions.” The team would load into the tractors, they would drive out, they would get into positions. And then I would scream, “Start the engines,” and all of these powerful generator engines on the back of the trailers would start. And then the fire would start to build. And I would scream, “Spray, spray, spray.” And the hoses would open and a blast of water would come out and the fire would be out in moments and we would be the heroes of the entire district.
So anyway, the day after the incident with the paper mache lion, I set one of these fires and we get the fire going. And to be honest with you, I had some old thatch that had come off some of the roofs of the lodges. And I built quite a nice bonfire of thatch and it took off a little faster than I had initially expected. So we had quite a sizable fire right off the bat. Got on the radio, I screamed, “Stations, stations, stations.” The team scrambled. They got their gear on. “Positions, positions, positions.” The tractors came rolling in. I was thinking to myself, this is looking incredible. I was walking like a French Foreign Legionnaire around. I was giving commanding instructions. “Open the hoses. Spray, spray, spray.”
The hoses open and an absolute trickle of water comes out. By this time, a wind has picked up and the fire is now starting to get some wind under it. And it’s starting to look like actually this fire could get away from us. And so my way of handling the situation, because the pressure was now building, was to repeat all of the commands at a louder volume. “Station, station stations. Positions. Start the engines. Spray, spray, spray.” Still an absolute dribble of water. And it was at that moment that we realized that Lucky [inaudible] in the moment critique had managed to park the back tire of the trailer on the first part.
Tim Ferriss: Shit.
Boyd Varty: And he saw at the very same time I did, and he rolled forward. The problem was is that the pressure had now built up behind the kink in the hose. And when that hose finally filled with water, not only did it knock the hoseman out, but we totally lost control of it. It was flailing around like a deadly anaconda. The fire was now starting to get away from us. The headman who was meant to be spraying the fire was in a bleeding heap on the floor. And my French Foreign Legion walk was taking me absolutely nowhere. And that’s when I got my first lesson in what firefighting was actually about.
And in fact, it’s probably the lesson that stayed with me through all of this is that, when something is going that wrong, in the moment, you think to yourself, it can be quite devastating to your ego. It can be quite devastating to your leadership. But I’ve come to see those moments as quite positive because it does force a kind of reflection. And the thing that I definitely learned that day and that has stayed with me through all crisis situations and everything that I’ve faced ever since then is that it’s very few people who know how to bring the energy downwards when the energy is moving upwards. And somewhere beyond trying to do an impressive walk, if you can figure out how to — when literally, energy is moving upwards, start to create a slowness and a steadiness about your actions, you can start to actually do a kind of powerful, energetic jiu-jitsu on things. And so ever since that day, I’ve been focused on when the energy is climbing, trying to slow it down. So that’s in the category of things you don’t know about me.
Tim Ferriss: That is in the category of many things I don’t know about you, which is shocking. Shocking and not surprising at all given how long I’ve known you. But I want to say a few things. So first, what you just said about mastering the ability to bring the energy in a full circle back to calmness, that’s something that Rich Barton, who co-founded Zillow and many other companies, Expedia, et cetera also said about leadership. This was not that long ago on the podcast.
The second thing that comes to mind is I really think somebody needs to write a scripted comedy show based on real life called Lando, just about all of these crazy stories. And I thought I would perhaps introduce a new character who would be on the Gilligan’s Island of Lando: JV. Do you want to introduce JV? How do you want to do that?
Boyd Varty: Well, just one comment on what you’re saying. I think a lot about the body of work that I’m involved in now and everything I’m interested in as story hunting. And one thing about — it’s about Londolozi but it’s not just that. It’s like any time you spend in the natural world, it is like a story-making machine. You can go out on the most simple walk into the woods and because it is both — how would I say it? The natural world is not just where meaning constellates. It is meaning in some fundamental way. And then incidences occur. Inevitably little things happen.
And one of my ideas is that storytelling is awareness. Actually what storytelling is is paying attention, and the natural world starts to just, every day, generate incredible encounters. If I think of the guests who go out at Londolozi, let’s say 60 guests go out, that’s 60 people who come back with a diverse array of stories and incidences that occur on that day. And some of them will be ridiculous, some of them will be sublime, some of them will be profound, but it’s hard to cast yourself versus modern life, which can sometimes feel very staid and like the same things are happening all the time. The natural world is a story machine. It’s a meaning machine. It’s a symbolic machine.
And people who stare into it, it’s like very un-woo-woo people, people who’ve just come out on safari, they come back and they’ve stared into the natural world and they’ve seen archetypal energies that they recognize. When you see a lioness grooming her cubs or you see her protecting the cubs, when you see them switch into hunting mode, you can’t help but see these profound symbolic energies that are in us functioning all around you. And somehow it permeates you and you feel yourself in relationship to that in some profound way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. And we haven’t even talked about this, it’s something you don’t know. I spent a week in the Montana wilderness doing outdoor survival training with this just incredible gent who I’ll highlight on the show in probably a month or two. But it’s incredible the density of stories that you come back with, even if you don’t intend to gather anything extreme. So I would say also for city dwellers, it’s so novel at every turn, particularly if you’re injecting any level of shared privation or hardship, which is sometimes done deliberately, sometimes forced upon you in the case of freezing rain and hail and you’re trying to make a fire when your hands are barely functioning, things like that.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s, and we’re not going to necessarily belabor the point, but I just have to press on introducing, I’m not sure which character on Gilligan’s Island this would be, but JV. Let’s talk about JV and then we’re going to loop back to story hunting and some of the connective tissue that connects all of these things.
Boyd Varty: Well, I mean of all the people who had a profound influence on me, one of them was my uncle, John Varty, who went by the name of JV. And JV was a wildlife filmmaker. And from the time that I was about six years old, I became his camera assistant, which to say that he had a streak of wildness, he had grown up in the hunting era when hunting was still what they primarily did in that area. And one thing about someone who grew up lion hunting is that it tends to reset your drama meter because if you think about it in lion hunting, there’s really only two outcomes. A lion dies or a human dies. So his sense of danger was dramatically reset by this type of childhood experience that he engaged in as a young boy.
And so at the time that I spent most of my time with him, it was between the age of about 6 and 15, he was making wildlife documentaries, and I remember I would put my clothes out on my bed at night and then at about four in the morning he would show up and he would walk in looking kind of Africa’s version of Texas Walker Ranger, .44 on his hip, shirt with cutoff sleeves, and he would open the door of my bedroom. “Buddy, let’s go.” And Tim, if you met him now, he would say to you, “Hey, so what do you do?” And you’d say, “Well, I run a podcast.”
“Podcasting. Okay, let me tell you about podcasting.” He had these sort of arms that stuck out. The Shangaan people called him [foreign language], “the one with the crooked arms” because he walked —
Tim Ferriss: He had like a John Wayne walk?
Boyd Varty: Yeah, totally John Wayne with his .44. His clothes were always torn to pieces and he started wildlife filmmaking and I became his camera bearer from a very young age, and I had two jobs. One was to drive and like a lot of kids who grew up in nature, I learned to drive from the time I was about six years old. And so one job was drive. The second job was camera bearer. The driving job was tough because one morning we found a pack of hyenas that were feeding on the remains of a giraffe, and one of the hyenas picked up a giraffe leg and it started to run across the savanna with this gigantic giraffe leg in its mouth. And he wanted to get the shot because getting the shot was like the primary issue of every moment. He said, “Buddy, we got to get the shot.”
Now he’s set up in the pickup section of a vehicle where he’s got a tripod up and a camera, and I’m now driving and he’s screaming, “Faster, faster, faster.” And then I’ll speed up, then he’ll scream, “Not so fast, you’re going to hit something.” And he’s screaming, “Left. Cut left. Cut left. Cut right.” And on one of these instances he said, “Cut left,” and I turned to the right, but he was bracing for left. And so he fell off the back of the pickup.
Tim Ferriss: Pickup.
Boyd Varty: And the camera hit him on his head, and this put him into a mild rage which had him chasing me around the vehicle, threatening to punch me in the face, and then eventually he would go into a red mist and then he would come to and say, “Okay, get after the hyena. Let’s go find it.” And so most of my trauma was around driving him around as his camera bearer.
Then on another incident he said to me, it was a herd of elephants that were coming down to a water hole. And he said to me, “Okay, we’re going to creep in there. We’re going to get ourselves well positioned on the bank. We’re going to get a nice low angle shot of these elephants drinking.” And so I said, “Okay, let’s go.” So I’m carrying the camera. He sneaks down to the edge and he grabs the camera and he starts to film and this big bull elephant turns and it starts walking towards us. And I immediately felt my heart rate starting to go up because I could tell the position we were in, not really a lot of places to go. His way of handling the approaching elephant was to simply zoom out on the camera repeatedly. Every time the elephant got closer, he just zoomed out a bit and pushed it back till eventually it was about five or six meters from us standing over us.
And at this point, he looked up from the camera and he turned to me and said, “Hey, man, why didn’t you tell me it was so bloody close?” And then we got into this freeze off where it was just a standoff. And at some point he whispered back to me and said, “Buddy, if this elephant comes, I want you to crawl into that hole there.” And there was an abandoned warren where some warthogs had made a hole, and his escape route was for me to crawl in there. And so it was just this constant sense of like, wait, are we okay here or are we in massive danger?
He had film camps all over Africa, and one of his film camps was in Kenya. And I’ll never forget when I was maybe about 10 or 12, he put me on the back of the film van and he gave me a kind of machete. And he said to me, as we drove through the city of Nairobi, he said to me, “Buddy, if anyone tries to grab a hold of any of our camera gear, just hit them on the hand with the machete.” Jesus.
Tim Ferriss: This is like a Babysitting: Lando edition.
Boyd Varty: Then at a certain stage, he moved up to Zambia and he had a film camp up in Zambia, and he was always trying to get great shots, and he had a knack for it. In the Maasai Mara where the wildebeest would be crossing the river, you would see the BBC, you would see Discovery Channel, they’d all be parked in a certain position. On the other side of the bank would be a million wildebeests, and they all looked like they were about to cross. And then John Varty would be parked 400 yards away, seemingly away from the action. And at the last minute, the entire herd would turn, run downriver and somehow manage to cross right in front of him. He had a kind of magical knack for being in the right place. He had a real profound sense of how animals move and operate, and there was just like a wildness to him. He loved being out there, he loved the wilderness.
He later in his career made a few attempts to rehabilitate cats and get them back into the wild. So he tried to get a young leopard that had been abandoned back into the wild. He was involved in a reintroduction of a lion project where he found a lion cub and tried to get it back into the wild. So he did all sorts of things. I mean, when we were living with him in Zambia, I’ll never forget, we were living in the Luangwa Valley with him, and he had a small boat that he would traverse the Luangwa with, and the Luangwa River is the densest population of crocodiles in the world. And the boat he had a tiny two horsepower engine on it, and often it would get —
Tim Ferriss: So it was just like a dinghy? It was just like a —
Boyd Varty: A little dinghy. And the top of the boat from the water line was inches. And he would load it with all sorts of things. Then he would hit the sandbank and he would say to me, “Buddy, you got to get out and push the boat off the sandbank.” And I would look up and down the bank where there were hundreds of crocodiles, and I would say to him, “I don’t want to get out.” He’d say, “Hey, man, get out. Stop being a nafta,” is what he would call us. I get out, push the boat. And then one day he found a young dead elephant. He was kind of maniacal about getting shots. He found a young dead elephant that had been washed down the river. And he decided what he wanted to do was tow the elephant towards the bank where he could tie it to the bank and then he would lie in the grass and he would get great shots of crocodiles coming in to feed on the elephant.
So we get in the boat, he’s got this piece of rope, we get up to the elephant and he says, “Okay, Buddy, tie the rope around the elephant.” And then he heads off upstream in the boat. And Tim, when I tell you he took full throttle of the boat and with the drag of the elephant, we went absolutely nowhere for 45 minutes. And only I realized this because I was looking at the bank and I could see that we weren’t going anywhere. The boat was in a full plane, and he was just rigorously committed to trying to get the elephant to the bank. So eventually that didn’t work. We ran out of gas in exactly the same spot. So then he sent me to the shore to get some spades because we didn’t have oars for the boat. So he sent me get a couple of spades and we used spades and we managed to —
Tim Ferriss: Spades, meaning like a shovel?
Boyd Varty: Shovels. Yeah. We managed to row the elephant to the shoreline where we tied it to the bank and for the next four days, lay in the long grass there while he shot films of crocodiles feeding on this elephant. So it was just a baptism into the ramblings of an incredibly wild person.
Tim Ferriss: So here’s a question I may not have ever asked you. I don’t think I have. But listening to these stories, I can’t help but wonder how do you orient towards safety? I think about people, for instance, in a modern environment, doom-scrolling every day. They just have this slow IV drip of cortisol with no real imminent danger, but this perceived threat that is just infused into their daily experience 24/7. And then you listen to these stories and you’re like, okay. And certainly some of the stories in our first conversation for the podcast where you’re almost dying, being attacked by crocodiles and this, that and the other thing, and there’s no short list of these incidents. And then you listen to your adventures with JV or the firefighting. It’s like, okay, on any given Tuesday you flip a coin and those could have gone sideways in some capacity. How do you orient towards safety or danger? And how has that changed over time?
Boyd Varty: It’s certainly something I’ve wrestled with because after all those years with my uncle, there was a double-edged sword to it. On the one side, when I think back of how old I was during a lot of those incidences, I remember feeling tremendously out of my depth. And I remember feeling like, wait, what are we doing? And I don’t know how to handle this. And he was of the mindset that you should be able to handle anything. I mean, he would walk off into a dangerous situation and he would hand me a rifle and he would say, “Buddy, if I get into trouble out there, I’m expecting you to help me.” And so then I would be left with this eight-year-old sense of responsibility and feeling like I am going to need to take action against this, but I’m ill-prepared to take action against this. And so I found myself quite split in some ways.
On the one hand, I would feel very apprehensive about certain things. And then in other instances, the apprehension was always prior to the incident, but then in a situation, I always felt very calm and felt like I actually had capability. And I’ve thought a lot about that now because I always have a sense that whatever’s going to happen, I can handle it. And that is a gift he gave me, a sense that we will figure it out in a very instinctual game time, live way. I can be in pretty high octane situations, but I am nervous of it. I still have a part of me that feels like I’m going to be ill prepared for what is coming. And I feel those two places in myself all the time. And I think a lot about recently, obviously I just had a son, and I think a lot about what it would be like to build capability in him because I feel like I have a sense of capability.
I listened to your interview with Chris Sacca where he was talking about just young people needing to have more incidences in their life, needing to have been in a bar and bumped a car and lived life. And I feel very full of that. But I also feel like some of that stuff was over my head and that I’ve had to manage some of that. So how do I orientate towards it now? I think trying to build a sense of capability and confidence in whatever I’m doing has become ground zero and not just expect things of myself, but actually take the time to realize if I’m doing something new, my approach to it would be like, I should just be able to handle this. And I think what I’ve learned is that I need to go slower and build confidence and build capability. And that has been the ultimate healing on those ones.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. So I’m looking at this. I want to make sure we layer in stories, but we can intersperse with other things. So we’re going to get to perhaps lunch, maybe Toby Pheasant, no idea what that refers to at all. But there’s one that I want to pull out here just to see where this goes. Learnings from 10 years of wilderness retreats. I mean, you’ve taken so many different types of people on wilderness retreats. Certainly you’ve had many varieties of experiences yourself as a participant, as a guide, as a tracker, as a facilitator. What are some of the kind of main entries in the diary of lessons learned after a decade of doing these types of retreats in the bush?
Boyd Varty: I feel like I run the retreats every year through the winter months. And I feel like every year we get more aware of what we’re actually trying to do on the retreats and we get better at them. And I think the primary thing that I’ve come to really value is that the faster we can put people into what I would call the natural state, the speedier the uptick of transformation. And I think when I initially started creating transformational spaces in nature, I wanted something to happen. And I felt like my job was to quickly try and figure out where a person was blocked or where there was a kink in the energy, and try and rapidly help them develop awareness around how that particular blockage, trauma, belief system could be transformed.
I feel like I’ve become way more relaxed with it now. In fact, on our retreats now, the first day is into silence and nature. And the speed at which — I have this idea that comes from Martha Beck, where her take on the natural world is that it’s a wordless environment. And so if you look at the animals, they don’t have verbal minds. So you don’t see them thinking past and future. You don’t see lions lying there thinking, “Oh, Janine messed up that hunt yesterday. And so we can’t trust her going forward.” And so if you can go into wordlessness, then very quickly people start going into oneness. And so the key thing I have found now is get people to be quiet, get them into more wordlessness, create an opportunity for them to interact and receive lessons from the natural world, and then things rapidly start to happen.
The other thing is that I would say is that, I say now that when people come, they enter into the Londolozi time war, because if you can take away their tech, which we now enforce, I absolutely will not allow any tech, because what happens is, even if a person who’s running a company comes and they go into silence the first afternoon, and then we go out the next morning and we are tracking an animal and then they get back and they pick their phone up, and they’ve got a human resources issue back at the company, they start to pop out, because I also think that there’s a profound chemistry to it.
As people go into wordlessness and the soundscape starts to work on them, as they start to put their attention on living things and start to feel those archetypal energies that are in the natural world, literally their brain starts to cascade different neurochemistry. Their nervous system starts to go generally more parasympathetic, and they start to enter into a different state of awareness. In that state, their natural inner knowing starts to spit out by — I would say within the first 24 hours, something in them will start to know and it’ll start to spit out insights, and you don’t have to work too hard at it.
The other is, if you say to people, “I want you to go and open yourself to receiving lessons from the natural world,” the psyche is so intelligent, especially in a retreat space. It’s funny, if you have a 10-day retreat, people will orientate perfectly to that 10 days and what will need to occur in that 10 days will occur. If you said it’s a two-day retreat, they will get aspects of the same thing, but the psyche will know how much time it has. In the same way, the psyche will start to interact with the natural world and they will start to see and receive messages that are particular to what they are working on. Really, the lesson from 10 years of retreats is don’t work too hard, allow the space, allow people’s psyche to start to be in relation with the natural world, and then insight will start to naturally develop very, very quickly, and people can do this at home.
If you start saying, “I want to go out into the local park, I want to go out into my garden and I have a specific question,” and you write that question down and you start asking, specifically nature, “Could you help me answer that question?” It’s almost like a Zen koan. You’re holding an intention and a desire for certain answers. Then what you see, your psyche will run that through a specific matrix and insight will start to develop.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There are a few things that come to mind as you’re saying all this. I took a number of notes. One is that I think people bias, or certainly, I’ll speak for Americans, but this is I think common in a lot of countries bias towards the question of what should I do? It’s an immediate tilt towards addition, if that makes sense, but sometimes you get to where you want to go, or achieve a certain state by removing the obstacles to that state.
When you were talking about natural state, I was thinking of, for instance, when I was on this Montana trip, I had a few friends with me, some of them had phones, some of them didn’t, even just for taking photographs and I left my phone behind very deliberately, and I feel like if for instance, you’re not in the bush in South Africa, if you’re not in the mountains of Montana, if you simply take a digital Sabbath, remove, say bright light after sundown, do a few things where you’re simply removing modern conveniences that are actually very unnatural from an evolutionary perspective, you start to access this natural state and what the hell does that mean?
It can mean a lot of different things, but one for me at least that I noticed at Londolozi, I noticed it certainly in Montana, you can notice it simply walking around without a lot of the modern technologies that we are very much ill-adapted for at this point is that these older faculties, these very well-developed capacities that we depended on for so many millennia come back online. Maybe they’re always online, but the volume is very low, and so you start to notice a lot more, and it just fundamentally changes your perceptual lived experience on a day-to-day basis.
I would say another thing that Londo nails and what’s so cool about it is that it is a function of being synchronized with wildlife activity, and that is really early morning drives. So you have the game drives, which are typically what time would you say, people are waking up in the morning?
Boyd Varty: You want to go out at dawn and you want your circadian rhythm to be affected by that sunrise and the cool of the morning.
Tim Ferriss: People are generally, to get a bite to eat and a cup of coffee waking up, let’s just call it 30 minutes before sunrise, something like that. What that means is you are typically jet-lagged, and I think that actually works to the benefit of a lot of folks because you get this incredible time dilation. Your experiential feels like two or three days because you wake up, it’s dark, then it gets light, then you come back and have a bite to eat and probably take a nap.
Then you wake up, you do another drive, it gets dark and you have this very full spectrum experience that makes a week at Londo as you feel like two weeks, which is very similar to being in the Montana mountains, or really anywhere in nature where you are waking up with light, you are going to generally winding down with the sunset. I just find that natural state, and I’ll shut up in a second, but bringing those very, very mission-critical for millennia faculties online, whether it’s by turning them on or just simply turning up the volume so you notice them to be nurturing and recharging in a way that is hard to put words to, and you carry that back into the modern world with you.
Boyd Varty: It’s spot on, Tim. A few things on what you said there, one is, so many people arrive on the retreats with a sense of what to do next? Sometimes someone’s built a company and sold it. Sometimes someone is changing careers. Sometimes someone is going through a relationship change and they arrive, as you say, with this desire of what’s next? What has struck me so much is in order to open to the natural state, so often the first thing to do is to let go of needing to know what that next thing is. Often when I say to people, “Stop trying to know and stop trying to use this retreat to get the next thing, and in fact let yourself not know and just enter into the circadian rhythm of seeing the sun rise and seeing the sun set, watching it go from stars to stars.”
We work a lot now on this rhythm that you’re describing. I like to go out early, drop into meditation, let the dawn break around you, then intensity. You need to switch on and track and we need to operate well on our feet. We need to be tuned in. We need to listen. Then get back to the camp and drop the energy again. It’s only this Western culture in which is like level 10 energy all the time. Everything in nature moves through intensity, rest, intensity, rest. And as people feel themselves allowed to rest, another insight is I think we used to try and do too much on retreats, giving people high intensity moments and then spaciousness to be more like an animal. That starts to conjure it, and then sit around the fire at night and then let the natural world be your teacher.
The other thing is that, and I know that you’ve had these experiences. It’s really become quite remarkable to me how many mystical things happen. When I first met Martha and I started to understand transformational processes, I was still like a drink of beer, punch someone in the face type of person. I was 20 years old, South African. I did not consider transformational processes or coaching or inner work. I had no grounding in that. Then also just like the animals are going to bring messages, that was all quite woo for me, but I’ve seen now the most remarkable things.
One thing that comes to mind is, on every retreat there will be magical occurrences with the animals. A woman will sit in the circle and she will say, “I grew up in a family of alcoholics, and when you grow up in a family of alcoholics, it’s incredibly dangerous all the time. So what I learned, I’ve learned to make myself invisible. I’ve learned to hide and I’ve never let myself be seen, because being seen was dangerous.”
That afternoon we go out and she’s sitting on the back of an open Land Rover, and a male lion that’s been sleeping, rouses himself, stands up, walks towards the back of the Land Rover, stops, and he looks up at her and he looks into her eyes and is just breathing, gazing at her, and it’s so intense to be looked at by a 400-pound serial killer like that. It’s something so kind and powerful and the presence that that animal projects. She looks away initially and I say to her, “You can look back,” and she turns and she looks back, and I can feel it’s the most profound revealing, psychologically, that she’s ever been involved in. After that, something shifts in her and she’s able to start allowing herself to step forward.
Another one that comes to mind is we had a guy come on a retreat and he’s sitting in the circle and he says to me, “One thing that has happened is since my father died, I’ve been totally unable to grieve. I know that I want to break open, but I can’t get to it. I just can’t cry.” For the first few days, that’s the case. On the third day, I’m talking to him, I’m checking in on him, and we’re sitting — Londo’s has these decks that you sit out on, but there’s a thatched area, but it’s open and a bird flies into the thatched area and it lands on the little gum pole over his head. It looks down on him and it starts calling intensely. Very unusual.
Sometimes a bird will fly through, but this bird flies into the area where there are people and starts calling. He looks up at this bird, and at the moment he sees it, I see tears come to his eyes and he starts to weep, weep, weep, and for 10 minutes he can’t talk. Then he looks at me and he says, “This is going to sound so weird, guys, but my father was an avid bird watcher, and this bird, the southern boubou, was his favorite bird.” Stuff like that is happening so regularly that I can’t deny it. I just know that things will happen, magic will occur.
Look, we also had one woman who was describing her trauma and how in her life everything gets taken from her. While she’s describing that, she’s eating a piece of toast at breakfast, and a monkey literally jumped down and snatched the toast out of her hand.
But there’s definitely a sense, and I think that native cultures knew this, and I think it’s woo-woo to us, but if you intentionally start working with the natural world, it knows, on some level, a field of living sentience, it starts to sense that intentionality and that awareness and then things start to happen. I think people need to be re-enchanted.
I think one of the things that we’re afflicted with is that we are dulled down and we are disconnected from magic. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be that woo-woo, just to see a leopard and her cubs leap up into the branches of a marula tree and to feel like, “God, this is the beauty of it,” and to have that affect you in some profound way. I’ve just seen so much of it now. I’m a real believer that nature wants us to heal, and nature knows when we come to her with the desire to mend our soul.
Tim Ferriss: It also strikes me that, and I think I’m speaking to myself as much as anyone else, that sometimes we tend to want to fight fire with fire, and I’ll explain what I mean by that, and it doesn’t always work. In the sense that we have a problem or we perceive a problem through our thinking, and so we want to use more thinking to fix that problem or we think I just need to try harder. It’s like, “Well, if trying harder would’ve solved this, it would’ve been solved by now in some way.” There’s so much canvas to explore that is, as you mentioned, wordless.
If you’re able to even entertain the question of what if the path or the relief could be found outside of words and concepts, what might that look like and what it might look like is spending time in nature.
One of my favorite experiences at Londolozi, and as you know, I’ve been a bunch of times now, is the silent morning drives. Just to explain that briefly, or do you want to explain that briefly?
Boyd Varty: Yeah. Well, maybe I could say two things about that. The other is a story comes to mind of a very silly anecdotal story, but when I was — one of the things that led me to probably all the way to this conversation is prior to my firefighting days, when I was on the Londolozi sales and marketing team, I found myself in London and by day I was seeing different agents and I was telling them about Londolozi. Then we got invited — myself and a friend who I was traveling with — we got invited to a party that night. At that time I was struggling with very, very severe depression, and we did that childish thing that you sometimes do when you’re in your 20s where we decided we would go to the party and we would make up fake backstories and be in character for the night.
When people asked me what I would do at that time, out of nowhere, I started saying, “I’m a writer.” I hadn’t got even close to writing anything at that stage. I would be totally daunted by the process, but when I said it at this party, this total bullshit story I had made up, every time I said it, I felt a little uptick of energy in my body. Not in my mind, not a rational sense that this is what you should do. I just literally felt like this little kick of energy, and I decided to follow that little kick of energy. When I got back to South Africa, I sat down at my old computer and I started writing down stories.
I noticed that whilst I was engaged in the process of writing, the depression would lift, or I would not be aware of how much just gray I was carrying around. I would wake up in my bed and I would have that feeling where you wake up and you just feel like, “Oh, my God, I’m going to fight to get through this day.” I would do my duties. I would do all the things I needed to do like with this gray cloud around my head. Then I would sit down at the computer and I would start to write out some silly anecdotal story and suddenly something would lift. I would follow that. Literally, everything that has brought me to here has been following that non-rational energy in my body. I’m aware of what makes me feel a little more energized, a little more expansive, and I just figure out how to move towards that.
Now, in order to do that, you do need some stillness. One thing that has become so profound for us is, the safari business is evolving, and I think that we’re working hard to change what it is. It used to be, you come there, you have your guide who gives you an interpretive wilderness experience. He tells you about all the animals. He describes their habits, their gestation periods. He taps you into the biological sciences. That can be so wonderful, and all of that information can be more information.
What we started to do in the attempt to take people into deeper wordlessness was to say, “You’re going to go out and you are going to be in silence, and hopefully, that silence pulls you into a deeper place. But what you’re also going to do is you’re going to watch your mind, and you might be looking at something, and you might find yourself saying, what’s going on there? Why is that animal doing it? What animal is that? What’s even happening here? Just be aware of that and try and come out of needing to know which is the primary state of our society.” Only in Eastern philosophy do we find our way to don’t know mind. The whole Western mind is structured around needing to know.
If you find yourself needing to know, let that go and just be in pure experience of it. Let the silence work on you. Feel how everything is unfolding with an intelligence, and you don’t really need to rationally know it. Try and feel it at a deeper level. To a man, people report coming back — some people report feeling incredibly frustrated. Some people said, “I found my mind wondering to wait, when I’m at home, should I catch the six train or the five train downtime?” Some people’s minds go to, “Did I turn the tap off? Who’s looking after the cat?” But if you can keep them in it, eventually you drop through to a different sense.
Then as you watch the animals, you drop into a different layer of language, and it’s what I would call the first language, and it’s the language of energy. You start to feel how when a leopard turns and looks at you with the shape of its body, with the look in its eyes, with the way it moves it head, it is conveying energy. You can watch the prey species move through different nervous system states, from totally relaxed, to listening in a way, to attuned to potential danger. As they move their bodies, every one of those states in their body has a feeling to it, and you can feel that feeling in your own body, and getting to know that feeling is where I think it’s definitely more where native cultures operated. Inside of it is a deep sense of connectivity, because you can feel yourself relating to every creature once you know that language. When you can look at a leopard and without any words between you feel its energy, feel what it’s conveying to you, you can be in a dialogue like that.
I’m sure you’ve heard this, Tim, but in shamanic ceremonies, and when I’ve been around healers, I remember once asking to my teacher in the medicine space, “Will you teach me? Why won’t you teach me?” He said to me, “Well, the feeling is not there yet.” I said to him, “No. I’m asking you.” He said, “Yeah. I can feel your distrust, and whatever you say to me, the feeling you energetically are giving off, there’s still too much distrust and only the feeling is different between us will I start to teach you.” To me, that space was so full of that first language energy, the energy between things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I want to also maybe underscore for folks that this might sound very abstract or esoteric, but there are real direct applications of what we’re talking about to everyday modern life as well, and a few names that we know in common come to mind. One is Diana Chapman, who we both know of course, and the Whole-Body Yes, and really tuning into your kinesthetic, your bodily sensations for making decisions of various types, for choosing things. It could be as simple as something on a menu. Could be something as high stakes as to say yes or no to a potentially huge business partnership with a given person, let’s just say. A pattern on the podcast, people can listen to that episode for more on the Whole-Body Yes, and how to navigate that if we don’t get into it now.
Another that comes to mind as you said, that the — particularly, I’ll limit it to the United States for now because other cultures are quite different in this respect with CS does and so on. But the idea that you wake up and you just go 10 out of 10 from when you wake up to when you close your laptop is anathema to the natural world. That’s just not how things work at all, and if you engage in say, going on safari, if you spend time in the natural world, certainly if you do any type of hunting, you realize there are these natural rhythms. If you go on, let’s just say an elk hunt or something like that, you may spend a few hours doing X, Y, Z, and then just bed down. You’re like, “The animals are bedded down, we’re not going to find them. They’re inactive. It’s going to be incredibly difficult, so instead of waste our energy, we’re going to have a snack, and take a nap.”
I recognize that having a snack and taking a nap may not make sense in between your Zoom calls, but the point is, that if you talk to someone like Josh Waitzkin, another mutual friend of ours, who for those who don’t recognize the name, he was my second ever podcast on this podcast out of 800 something plus — he’s going to hate this, but he’s known best for Searching for Bobby Fischer. He was a very high-level chess player beginning at a very young age, but has applied his learning approach to mastery in a number of different fields. World champion in tai chi push hands, first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, nine-time world champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Now, foiling at a very, very high level on huge waves. What does Josh say?
When he looks at all of these world-class performers in these different disciplines, when he looks at the people he works with directly ranging from sports at a very high level — I don’t know if it’s public yet. I think it is. Yeah. The Celtics, for instance, all the way to the absolute one percent of one percent in, say, the finance world. One of his mantras, and I don’t think he’ll mind me paraphrasing this, is “Avoid the simmering six.” And avoiding the simmering six is if you look at, say, Marcelo Garcia before he’s going to compete in a world championship mat, they’re running around trying to find him, because it’s five minutes to go time, and where is he? He’s sleeping under the bleachers. He’s taking a nap. He’s at zero.
Then he wakes up, shakes it off, and then in the 200 feet before he gets on the mat, he switches it to a 10, and he’s going from rest to full engagement. He’s not sitting in the middle with that IV drip of 24/7 cortisol and sympathetic overdrive. That is deliberately what he’s avoiding, and that is in large part how he’s able to partition resources to engage so fully and dominate competitively. That’s also true for people in the finance world who are working in very high-stakes environments for making decisions around placing trades and so on.
What we’re talking about — this is just my somewhat clumsy way of saying that I — every day, I’m sitting in New York City for God’s sake. It is the concrete jungle, but it is the city that never sleeps. It is in some ways the antithesis of living at Londo. Nonetheless, I can take a lot of the lessons learned that you see so clearly there, and you have to squint a little bit to apply it here in such an intense environment, but you can, and you actually really could benefit very quickly from doing so. Diana Chapman, Josh Waitzkin, I just want to point out how broadly these themes apply, even if they seem, to some people listening, maybe a bit exotic.
Boyd Varty: That’s well said.
Tim Ferriss: Fire, I felt like you were just about to jump into something.
Boyd Varty: No. Just the information — all roads in personal transformation lead to the information inside you. You actually know it’s in you in the way that lions know how to be lions and leopards know how to be leopards. If you want to find your way to your fullest expression, it’s in you. It’s subtractive making the space to that information to come forward. A big part of that is just letting yourself follow the energy of the non-rational energy of people, places, experiences where you literally feel your body full of an expansive, alive energy, and getting good at following that is the ultimate tracking.
Tim Ferriss: Full aliveness, another Joshism. Fully alive. Jim Dethmer, too, who’s also been on the podcast, a mutual friend of ours. As promised, we’re going to hop between these tracks. I’ve got Lunch and Toby Pheasant. Where do you want to go? Or we could choose option C, if there’s another one that comes to mind.
Boyd Varty: Well, let me tell you about my friend Toby and I. Toby was an Englishman, and I’m sure he won’t mind me telling the story to millions of people, but Toby came on safari with his family, and this is quite some time ago now, maybe a good 20 years ago. Came on safari with his family, and he had such a great time and he had such a great energy and attitude about him that he managed to convince us to let him stay on as a general hand around the camp. When his family flew off, Toby stayed on, and he immediately got integrated into the village of Londolozi, and he picked up all of the worst jobs. He had to clean the lanterns that get put out every evening. At one stage, he was painting an ablution block and just every time I saw him, he was on some errand around the camp.
One day, Toby and I were sitting down at the staff canteen and a radio called in that some guests had reported that they had seen a snake in their room. Myself and another ranger said, “Okay. We’ll go handle this.” Toby said, “Guys, do you mind if I come along?” I said, “Toby, come with us.” We jumped into a golf cart, which is how people get around in the back of house of the Reserve. We jumped into a golf cart and we went up to the ranger’s room to fetch our snake catching stick, which had picked up the name 50/50, because it was a bit of a Heath Robinson. It was a piece of PVC pipe that someone had run a lamp cord through that had made a noose. The way that it worked is you would get the loop at the end of the stick around, and then you would pull on the cord, and technically it should tighten up and catch the snake in the noose, but it was a little bit niggly in certain places. Sometimes it wouldn’t close all the way, so it had picked up the nickname 50/50.
We grabbed 50/50 and a big black dustbin, and we jump into the golf cart and we drive down to the room, Toby’s hanging on the back of the vehicle. We get down to the room and there are two German guests who are looking somewhat shocked, and I’m going to be honest with you, Tim, I gave them my most powerful, “Don’t worry, I’m here now. The safari guide of the year has arrived. You don’t need to worry. I’m going to go in there and sort the situation out.” They were left standing at the door and myself and Toby and the other guide went in, and we’re expecting to — it’s very rare to have a snake in a room, but sometimes a little house snake or a green variegated bush snake will get in. We are walking around and I noticed the suitcase on the rack, an empty suitcase, and I flipped the lid open, and what rose out of the suitcase was one of the biggest black mambas I’ve ever seen in my life. It levitated out of the case.
Tim Ferriss: Do you want to explain why that isn’t your garden variety [garter] snake?
Boyd Varty: A black mamba, not only is an extremely venomous snake, but it is highly mobile and very difficult to handle in a confined space. If it bites, you die quickly. Myself and Toby and the other guide, we went for the door at the same time, and I remember the three of us jammed in it as we were trying to exit the room at high speed.
Tim Ferriss: Three Stooges.
Boyd Varty: I might’ve reached forward to grab their faces, to pull myself through. We got outside and I said to the Germans, “There’s a big snake in there.” They said, “Yeah. We told you.” Now, we’re faced with a bit of a dilemma and they’re watching us. We decide, “No, okay. We know what we are dealing with now. We must go back in.” We make our way back in, and now we are tiptoeing around the room and we’re flipping up cushions and we’re pulling bedspreads off, and what the Germans see standing outside is they see a pillow fly out the room because you don’t want to lift it slowly. You want to rip it open and see what’s under it. Then they see a chair fly out, then they see a duvet come flying past them.
Toby at this stage has positioned himself for maximum discomfort. He’s close enough to be in the way, but he’s not close enough to be fully helpful, and he giving us a running commentary on the dangers of black mambas. He’s saying, “If they bite you, you will die instantly. Their venom is deadly in tiny quantities.” I’m like, “Toby, you are not helping the situation. Can you please shut up?” I remember at one stage we pulled the duvet cover off the bed and the bed — it had an electric blanket on it, and the cable of the electric blanket came off and it made a snake-like motion, and all of us reared backwards. Eventually, we saw the snake under the bed and my friend managed to get 50/50 down there, and he gripped the mamba.
Now, what you normally want to do is you want to get it behind the head, then you grab it behind the head and then you put it in a bag. He managed to grab it mid-body, and it was maybe a 2 1/2 meter snake. That mamba went full propeller on the end of the snake catching stick. It was like whipping around, and part of them is they’ve got this incredible elastic, powerful body. It was like a lot of snake whipping around the end of the stick. Then it turned and it curled its way up the stick, but 50/50 held it, and eventually, its head was about that far from my friend’s hand, but he had it.
Tim Ferriss: Like, six inches from the hand?
Boyd Varty: Terrifying. We decided it’s going to be too much to try and get it into the bucket, so we’re just going to ride it out the camp. Now, we make our way up past the perturbed-looking Germans, and we go to the golf cart and I’m driving, and you have to imagine a standard golf cart. I’m driving, my friend is standing next to me and he’s holding the stick out with the giant snake on it. Then Toby jumps onto the back of the golf cart and we start making our way out of the camp, and we’re bouncing along. Just as you exit the camp, there’s a gateway where there’s an electric fence that keeps the elephants and the buffalo out.
As we approach that, my friend, who’s thinking about the snake that’s six inches away from his hand, he pulled the stick in to allow for us to pass through these two pillars of the gate. When Toby on the back looked to his left, the black mamba was now fully adjacent to his face with about three inches between him and the snake. Tim, from where I was driving, I remember looking to my left and the golf cart was going quite fast, and I saw Toby take off in my peripheral vision. And as I looked to my left, his feet were passing where the roof of the golf cart was. He had exploded off the back of that golf cart. It looked like someone had shot a rocket into space. As I drove off, because I kept moving, I looked back, he was still hitting in a vertical direction over a bush. It must have been a good, in a high jump turn, it was a good solid five to six-foot vertical explosion. And the last I saw of him, he was like petering out and disappearing over the bush like a frisbee falling. And I remember we got out of the camp and we released the snake, and the snake went off into the bush and my friend and I looked at each other, we were absolutely wide-eyed, and we turned and we began to make our way back into the camp.
And as we came through the gate of the camp, standing in the middle of the road with a look of shock and awe on his face was Toby. And we drove up to him and the first thing he said to me, I’ll never forget it, he looked me dead in the eye and he said, “That was incredible.” Shortly after that, he went back to England and he had to, I think he went and studied briefly, but very quickly he came back to South Africa and he became a safari guide. And he actually now runs a travel company. You can look him up if you’re in the UK and you want to come to Africa, I think it’s called Bonamy Travel.
And I always think that so often what emerges out of these stories is not what you think. You would think that an encounter like that would be like, “I’m packing up and moving back to the UK.” But it is actually quite the opposite. He moved back to Africa, became a safari guide, and still runs a safari company to this day. And I think about that often, things that have gone wrong that I would have thought that would be the end of people turn out to be the adventure that everyone’s looking for.
Tim Ferriss: So just to talk about calibrating danger differently, you like running. Alex, also master tracker, likes running, and you guys just go running outside of the gates. You just go for a long, nice run. Now, typically, for instance, if you run into a bear or a wolf or a big cat, you don’t want to run. Run is what prey do.
Boyd Varty: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: This is a strong prey drive signal. But you guys were training very intensely for what? Can you talk about this?
Boyd Varty: Yeah, we can.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is fucking wild. And in any case, I’ll let you introduce it because it’s so, on some levels hard to believe and hard to envision also.
Boyd Varty: You mean persistence?
Tim Ferriss: Yes, I do.
Boyd Varty: So my friend Alex is one of the best trackers in the world, in my opinion. He’s authored many books on it. He’s the founder of the Tracker Academy and his singular mission, Alex van den Heever, his singular mission has been to preserve indigenous wisdom, particularly the art form of tracking. And I think in Southern Africa, he’s done more to teach, train and preserve tracking than anyone else. And what started our journey to be with the Bushman people in the Kalahari was he went up and he ended up spending a few days with a group of Bushmen. There’s a lot of different names. Some people refer to them as the San people. They asked us to call them Bushmen. They said, “We are the Bushman people, please call us Bushmen.” So that’s how I will refer to them. And during that time with them, he was blown away by the ecological intelligence of this group of people.
These guys tracked a porcupine one day for 10 kilometers. They would sleep around the fire at night. Now, normally when you sleep out in the wild at night, someone keeps watch. And so, Alex asked them, “Who’s going to keep watch?” And they were actually sort of perturbed by this. They would say, “Well, why would we need to keep watch?” And this is in a full-on wilderness area. Alex said, “Well, what if an animal comes.” And they’re like, “An animal will never come here without us not being able to feel it.” And literally if a hyena walks by or something, one of them will wake up. So they’re attuned at a very different level. And Alex saw this and he was blown away by it. And so, that was the initial trip. And what resulted in that is a request was made that we would come back as a group, an expedition, and we would assess the skills that were still kind of alive and functioning.
We wanted to get a sense of what was possible still and what people still knew how to do because the Bushman people are probably the most persecuted native people on the planet. They’ve been displaced from everywhere. And so, it was to go and say, “Has their initial tracking knowledge been lost or what still exists?” So, that was what initially called us to the area. And we spent a few days starting to assess that process. And it is quite remarkable because Bushman people now are living in a very interesting way. They mostly live in the towns. They’ve been pushed off a lot of their land and they do various jobs in farm labor, et cetera. The governments of some of those Southern African countries provide a stipend of $400 or pula or rand.
So you would think that a lot of the indigenous skills had been lost because a lot of people are on this, like, it’s not the dole, but it’s like a government supplement. And yet about 70 percent of the food that most Bushman communities are still getting, they’re gathering from the desert. And so they’re living in this kind of urban way. And yet underneath the surface, if you connect in, there’s still this way that they are living in tune with the desert. One thing about the Bushman people is that they never stored food, unlike other various tribes who would have a storehouse where they kept food. To them, the desert is their storehouse, which is quite an amazing idea. There’s just like there’s no sense of needing to hold or store because it’s an abundance psychology that everything you need is there.
Tim Ferriss: And when you say desert, just for people who are trying to conjure an image, I mean it’s desert, it’s like a little scraggly bush here or there, at least based on the video I’ve seen, but it’s very much a desert environment.
Boyd Varty: There’s areas where it’s like semi-arid where you have these harsh bushes, and then there’s other places where you are in red beach sand. It would be akin to walking on the beach that’s so sandy. There’s places where ground squirrels have these huge colonies. So, as you walk, you fall down because the ground underneath has been hollowed out. So, it can be very, very tough operating there. And so we spent a few days with different groups of Bushmen and we were taken out into the desert and we watched this incredible energy of people moving very slowly through the desert. And they will dig up a tuber or a root, they’ll cut a section of it, everyone will eat some of it, and then they will replant it back into the desert and they will never take a whole piece of food. They’ll take a portion of it and then they’ll put it back under the soil to grow.
And walking, particularly with the woman as they gather, I had this feeling that we could have been 300 years in the past or 300 years in the future. There was such a strong sense that whatever happens, these people are attuned to their environment at a different level.
And then what emerged out of that is we were invited to participate in probably the oldest practice of hunting that exists on the planet, which is persistence hunting. Persistence hunting, there’s accounts of it across many, many different terrains, including in the snow where the snowshoe tipped the advantage towards people. But it is the pursuit of an animal until the animal tires. And so, in order to do it, you need an incredible skill set.
One, you need an unbelievable fitness. You need to be able to move for a long period of time, and in the peak heat of the desert. Two, you need to be able to track at a level where you’re tracking it at a run. Now, that can be easy in parts of the desert, but man, it is not easy at midday in the — I thought it would be easier in desert sand, it’s not easy because as the sun gets to 12 o’clock, which is when you want to be doing it at peak heat, it throws no contrast onto the ground.
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, no shadows, right?
Boyd Varty: No shadows. So, we were invited to be a part of this, and this is something that, and we were seeing is this still alive? Who knows how to do this?
Tim Ferriss: And just to throw some numbers out there, if you can indulge people with Fahrenheit — well, we’ll give people Celsius and Fahrenheit if that’s possible. It’s asking a lot. But when we’re talking about a persistence hunt for the Bushmen, what type of distances or time are we talking about? How long does it take? And then what kind of temperatures are we talking about?
Boyd Varty: Tim, it’s really interesting because I think in the one that Craig Foster filmed, it was around 30 kilometers over about five or six hours, something like that. But what I discovered being there is that there’s this incredible equation and the equation is heat on one axis and time on the other. So, as the heat climbs, the amount of time reduces.
Tim Ferriss: The distance goes down, yeah right.
Boyd Varty: The distance reduces. But then there’s also an interesting factor, which is what type of season has it been? Has it been dry for a few seasons in a row? Or have you had a rainy season because the condition of the animal has a huge effect. So, one thing that happened while we were there is that they’re on the back end of a number of years of droughts. And so, that was a big kind of factor. So, that’s all going on and what emerged is that we were invited to be a part of this, but it hadn’t been done in a very, very long time. And so there was some discussion around who knows how to do it and whether it’s still alive. People who we had asked around had said, “No, no one does that anymore. The older generation who knew how to do it was lost.” So there was conjecture around whether anyone even knew if this was still possible. So, we go out on the first day, and what was amazing about it is to the Bushman people, it’s called the Great Dance.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the name of the doc, isn’t it?
Boyd Varty: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: The Great Dance.
Boyd Varty: It’s a spiritual practice.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Craig Foster, just for people who are like, “Do I know that name?” My Octopus Teacher was his most famous work.
Boyd Varty: It’s a great dance because there’s a tremendous act of faith in it, and it’s part of the mythology and the spirituality of the Bushman people because it involves being engaged with the animal at a very deep level and transferring the animal’s energy to you. That is ultimately what happens. So, you are moving with the animal, you’re tracking it, you’re running it, and you are with the spirit of that animal, and you are with spirit itself. And then spirit is as you are closing in on the animal, it’s giving its energy to you. And the final act of giving from great spirit and from the spirit of that animal is the actual killing.
And one thing that’ll happen is as guys are involved in it, they won’t — it’s a very funny superstition, but it’s symbolic. They won’t jump over a log because if you jump over a log, you are expending energy and you’re pushing energy back at the animal, whereas actually you want to be drawing the animal’s energy to you. So there’s this very interesting rhythm that guys get into. So anyway, we go out and we are looking for tracks in this huge area, and there’s no tracks. There’s no tracks, and the energy of everything is kind of dialed down. And there’s one guy wearing a Barcelona FC t-shirt. There’s one guy in full traditional gear. It’s a full mix. It’s not out of some idealized sense of how this is done. It’s like game time, real-life situation. And then we come onto a herd of kudu’s fresh tracks.
Tim Ferriss: What is a kudu? Can you paint a picture?
Boyd Varty: A kudu, it’s a very tall, regal antelope, and it has kind of large spiraling horns and kudus, there are desert adapted antelope. A kudu is not that well adapted for the desert. So, there are certain animals that you wouldn’t try and do this with because they’re just too adapted to the desert. For example, a gemsbok, literally the way that it breathes, it cools air through its nose. Kudus are not adapted, so they’re susceptible to the heat. And when this group that we were with of incredible trackers got onto the track of this herd of kudu, the whole energy shifted and it went from quite lackluster to someone had flipped a switch and suddenly these guys started to switch on and they went into archetypal hunting energy. And when I say to you that I’ve become very interested in energetic archeology, I feel like there is so much energy latent underneath anything that modern life allows us to get close to.
And when you see these guys switch into hunting energy, you feel this energy that is in every single one of us, but we never need, we don’t access it because we don’t need it. And suddenly the first guy shifts into a dog trot, he starts kind of trotting on the track, and then the second guy starts to run and these guys start to move. And now you have to do a lot of complex things. One, you have to track, you have to stay on your kudu because the herd quickly breaks and a single kudu breaks away. That’s the weakest one. So, the guys are onto that one. Then you have to navigate, you have to run.
There’s such an equation, you have to have a sense of where you’re going. And all of this together, at a certain point, it becomes this incredible act of faith because you have to fully commit. “I’m running into that desert, I’m running away from water, I’m going in that direction, and I don’t really know what the outcome’s going to be. I don’t know the condition of this animal, I don’t know the heat, I don’t know the terrain. I’ve got to just go and follow.” So, it becomes a real act of faith. And as I say, you’re running away from water in the desert and that can be a big factor and you don’t know how far you’re going.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s hot.
Boyd Varty: Yeah. And on the day we did it, I don’t know what the Fahrenheit is, but it was 47 degrees when we started.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s hot.
Boyd Varty: And so at the front of that group, Tim, there’s an energy that develops amongst that group of hunters. And I can tell you that if you drop out of it, it’s kind of like a Peloton. If you fall out of it, you’ll never catch that group again. But if you find yourself in it, it’s almost like you can ride the energy of the group. How would I describe it? It’s kind of like a ceremony. You don’t know what’s going to happen once you’re in it. And so, I managed to find myself on this occasion in the center of the group, and these guys were tracking so fast and they’re running. And as a group, if the animal cuts one way, someone on the left will pick up the track and as it cuts to the other way that someone else will cut onto it. So, they’re working as a team. But as you run, you’re also dropping people because the heat is building too much, and it’s just so intense.
And then also people are going into different psychological states. So, one of the Bushman religious practices is to go into trance and you can feel yourself wanting to go there. For the first hour of it, I was in a totally neurotic state. I was in my head and I was thinking to myself, “It’s too hot. I’m going to die of heat stroke.” There was this voice running, “We’re going too far. We are not going to find our way back. I’m going to get separated from these guys too far out. There’s no water.” It was just total neuroses. And then somewhere in there, I started to feel myself going into a different energy. And I felt that the only way to do this was to let go of these thoughts and let my body just go until it couldn’t go anymore.
And it was weird because it’s not often that you — I mean, great athletes talk about this, which I am not, but there’s kind of like you are reaching for a place and some athletes know how to get to that place. And I felt myself go through the layer of mind neuroses and let go into like, “I’m just going to let my body do what it knows to do.” And from that place, I tapped into a level of energy that felt like it was coming out of the earth that felt like it was coming from the group that felt like it was coming from the animal. And we went for about another two and a half hours from there.
And you just like you’re glowing red, the guys are tracking. At one stage, I found myself on the front of the track, and you can feel the animal moving up ahead of you, and you have to keep moving. You have to keep it moving. And then we got a glimpse of the kudu, and then it disappeared for another 40 minutes, and we’re just on the tracks. Then we’ve got another glimpse, and it disappeared for another 40 minutes. And then as it gets closer, the guys start to feel that the energy is transferring. They are starting to get the upper hand. And as they feel themselves getting the upper hand, the younger guys start to run harder and faster. And at this stage, I had lost my teammates, my friend James and Alex. I had lost them. And then suddenly Alex was in front of me, which is a classic Alex move.
And what I didn’t realize is the kudu had run in a dog leg. And so, where he had been behind me, suddenly he was in front of me and suddenly the kudu was directly in front of him. And as that happened, the entire energy shifted again and the guys just found another gear. And it’s quite amazing to witness it.
And then eventually the animal is so tired that it literally just stops and it gives itself to the hunter. And those moments where the animal will run no more and the Bushmen spear it, there is something so profound about it because you can’t be there and not be in a profound state of respect and receiving. And you are also so close to the truth of where your food and the survival of the village comes from. You’re not strolling down the meat section at Whole Foods. You are right on the cold face of what it means to take life and to take the energy of another creature.
And after the animal goes down, they put sand on it, which is symbolic of a blessing onto the animal and thanking the animal for what it has given them. But when you eventually emerge out of that energy, it could have been one hour, it could have been 10 hours, you’re in such a different psychological space, and you have been involved in an energetic — that is totally primal, and that is, it’s ceremonial. There’s no other way to describe it. You are in a current of energy from the earth.
Tim Ferriss: How much does that particular kudu, how much would you guess it weighed? Any idea?
Boyd Varty: Yeah, so probably around the 180 kg mark.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s a big boy. Yeah. Okay.
Boyd Varty: Yeah, I would need to check that.
Tim Ferriss: Like 400-ish pounds. Yeah.
Boyd Varty: Yeah, a little bit less than that. When it’s cut up, every single piece of that animal is taken and eaten. And it was from the time the guys started working on the carcass, it must’ve been 15 minutes to —
Tim Ferriss: Wow, that’s fast.
Boyd Varty: — every single piece of that animal.
Tim Ferriss: And then are they just carrying it on shoulders? I mean, how are you guys actually getting that back to camp?
Boyd Varty: Yeah. And then you put the haunches on your all different array of carries and everyone and walks it out. And then you still obviously got a long way to go from there.
Tim Ferriss: What happens when you guys get back to home base?
Boyd Varty: Well, what was amazing about it is there was a strong sense of pride amongst the hunters. They hadn’t done it in a long time, and they wanted to show that they still knew how to do it. And it was almost like that they had remembered an aspect of something that they had done for many, many generations. So, there was a beautiful energy to it. And then back at camp, it’s just immediately that food starts to get eaten.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I bet.
Boyd Varty: Yeah. So, what I came away with is that if you were to look at Bushman culture now, on the surface it appears very diffuse, but the actual skills are very much alive. And they simmering just under the surface. This incredible ecological knowledge of how to live in harmony with the desert. And if AI does wipe us all out, I’m pretty sure that the Bushman people will just walk back into the storehouse of the desert and be really, really comfortable there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you want to see modern polite behavior disintegrate very quickly, just go to a place like San Francisco. I remember the power went out for two days, two and a half days, and people were very, very civil in the beginning and walking around the street greeting one another. And then people realize their food is going to thaw, their food is going to spoil, and agitation and aggression start to percolate very, very, very quickly because people don’t know what to do. They have no idea what to do if the basic architecture of convenience is removed.
Boyd Varty: I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think that all the things we imagine to happen, people are so much closer to primal wildness than they ever realize. And survival starts to kick in. And then I think there’ll be a wide junction. Some people will go into survival of the fittest, and then others will move into states of collaboration for good reason, protection, food, safety. So, it’ll be interesting to see how it breaks down. You can get into some good prepper stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Just pro-tip, make sure you have water. Water is number one. You’re going to need water a lot sooner than you’re going to need canned lentils, just — or, and by the way, if you have any dried, canned food, you’re going to need some water typically for a lot of that. So, make sure you have your water and your Jetboils or something along those lines.
Boyd Varty: Yeah. It is also amazing to see how little water the Bushmen people can operate on.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, it must be absurd, just like their evolutionary track must have prepared them so well for that. I would be dead within 24 hours.
Boyd Varty: We had one morning on the same trip where we found tracks of a cheetah, and we were quite keen to show the guys some of our tracking skills. And it was like a camaraderie amongst trackers. And we were with this 70-year-old man and we’re following this single cheetah, and it kind of turned into mildly competitive at the front to, if someone lost the track, the next person would be on it. And then if you stepped off it, someone else would be on it. And for the first two hours we were quite effective. And then these guys just started to put a clinic on us as it got hotter and hotter. We ran out of water. We were climbing under these thorn bushes, lumbering along, and they were just cruising through the desert. And by 11 o’clock, the 70-year-old guy was walking us off our feet and we had drained our water bottles and we were like, “We need to get back home because we need to get water.” And he hadn’t had a sip all morning. And we were like, “Okay.”
Tim Ferriss: Wow. “Yeah, you win.” No contest.
Boyd Varty: Yeah. No contest.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. All right. So, I want to hop to two different potential leaping off points. You can tell me if one of these makes sense or if there’s something else we want to hop to, you can follow whichever track is appealing. Being a resolved figure, seeking the wild man. You want to pursue either of these, what do you think? Or we could take option C off menu.
Boyd Varty: No, I mean I think the wild man is a powerful theme, and it comes down to this idea that there is so much energy. I’ve come to think of the wild man as awareness, like self-awareness, awareness of all the different layers of energy that are inside you, and then also access. And so, when those two things start to come together, you start to see a real type of presence, the type of presence that you see in the natural world. And I’m really become interested in conjuring more of that in my own life. How do you liberate different layers of energy in yourself and how do you develop — in my definition of presence would be access to the moment, and particularly now working in a lot of these men’s groups, the idea of conjuring the wild man is its wildness in the sense that it is in tune with life force, but it is also wildness in that it is access to the moment.
And what I mean by that is to have your wild man fully available means that if you are required to front up in some ways and protect something and be able to be assertive and aggressive, you have access to that. But if the moment is calling for a tremendous amount of softness or tenderness, you also have access to that. And so, trying to figure out how to develop access to as many moments as possible has become kind of a central piece of exploration for me at the moment. And to become resolved within that is now as a father, I think a lot about figuring out how to be available through a full spectrum of the masculine experience to my son, to my wife, to my family. Where do I run into blockages in myself? Where do I start to feel like I really want to be here, but I don’t know how to show up in this moment? And so that’s what that exploration has become primarily about.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me ask you a question related to that. So, if we think about access to the moment and sort of full spectrum access to these different emotional sensitivities, let’s just say, I know that’s a bit of a clumsy way to word it, but let’s just say that. How do you personally think about co-locating you and your family? And here’s what I mean by that. The way that I have tried to solve for this, what I’ve realized is that in a place like New York City where I’m sitting, and it’s got accosted by this very aggressive, probably mentally unstable person yesterday and huge crowds of people, a lot of a feeling of collective cauterization, if that’s a word, but people have dropped down walls. And I put on sort of a protective armor that seemingly disallows me to access all of these different sensitivities because it just seems like suicide to be too porous in an environment like this.
So, whether I wanted to be open or not, I don’t think it would be good for me necessarily in New York City in most places to have that level of openness. So I do spend a lot of time in cities. I find cities exciting, but I block out a few weeks of the year where I’m just completely off the grid and hopefully at the very least, keeping these sensitivities from atrophying too horribly, right? Like I’m working the muscle in these blocks of time that I put out. There are other people, of course, who just live in a more peaceful, perhaps, environment that allows for this type of exploration and expression and experience. And it doesn’t need to be the middle of South Africa. It doesn’t need to be in the middle of the mountains in Montana. It could just be in a peaceful suburb. It doesn’t need to be, or in a chiller city than New York City potentially. How do you think about this for yourself?
Boyd Varty: I think about it probably through discernment. I think that it’s wise to be somewhat armored in the environments you’re describing, but what I see in groups now a lot, and this has become the core thing, is I see particularly in men’s groups, a desire to be more available, but actually not knowing how to, not having the access and the literacy to know what that would even look like. And so, now you don’t want to go into extreme tenderness in the middle of New York City, you probably want to be exactly where you are, but you want to know that you can open to deeper levels in the right context. And you want to know what has kept you out of that, which would usually be some kind of conditioned response, something that you learn to do away. The way you learn to freeze or shut down when things became overwhelming.
And then you want to figure out how to develop more options for yourself in that moment. The trauma to me is freezing, right? Anytime you’ve been forced into some kind of traumatic situation, it’s characterized by a reduction of options. And so, in order to cultivate more presence, one is you have to be present to the fact that you’re frozen and actually be able to feel like, “Okay, in this moment, I want to be more connected, but I don’t know how.” So, first to be present to that, and then second to start to figure out what other choices would look like and literally other things you could do in that moment to move out of the frozen state.
And that’s where I think the men need other men. Then the wild man is somewhat a collective exploration. Men being with men, particularly in wild places, that it just naturally starts to emerge. You don’t have to work at it too hard and it doesn’t have to turn into a drum circle, if you take a bunch of guys out into a wild place, their psyche starts to relate to that wild place, and they start saying, “I can’t tell you why. It’s intangible, it’s energetic, but something about this has something to do with me.” I can feel myself in a way here in the presence of that waterfall and that mountain and that lion and the process of being archer, I can feel myself.
Boyd Varty: The process of being out here, I just feel I can feel myself. And then the conversation starts to open and you’re able to start to say, “Okay, where are the places where we run into blockage?” And if we want to be wild, we need access to the moment, just like in the way that an innocent animal has access to it knows what to do in any given situation. Leopards are not in their heads. If they want to be aggressive, they’re aggressive. If they’re caring for their young, they’re caring for their young. If they need to set a territory, they do it. It flows out of them. And so creating spaces in which that can naturally start to occur has become really interesting to me.
Tim Ferriss: How do you think about, well, side note for people, I don’t know why this popped into my head, but if you’re like, “Man, I’m never going to see a leopard,” I was like, “You can get a little whiff of leopard if you go to the movie theater and the popcorn is burnt, it smells like leopard urine.” So that’s just if you want to take a big, big inhale.
Boyd Varty: Yeah. When leopards mark their territory, they spray, and it has the almost exact scent of popcorn.
Tim Ferriss: That’s really wild. I remember I was like, “Nah, that’s not possible.” And then we were driving at one point, and I think maybe it was Sersant, but one of the trackers that we were with was held up a hand to stop the car. And I was like, “Holy shit. There it is. I feel like I’m sitting in the movie theater. That’s crazy.” And in any case, I’ll leave that there.
But what do you think the trappings of some personal development or men’s groups are? And the reason I ask, and this is not a strong position I’m taking, but it’s just a thought, is that there are many side effects to, and many benefits too, of a highly individualistic society. So in the case of the US, you take this Protestant work ethic, rugged individualism, this lionizing of the self-sufficient independent person, there’s a lot of production that can come from that, productivity, but there is frequently some degree of collateral damage and from a collective perspective.
And that’s not too woo-woo. Collective could just mean in your family. If you’ve trained yourself to be sort of a cold-blooded business killer with blinders on, and that’s the gear you learn to use, a sixth gear, if you don’t have some degree of flexibility and you’re very good, which is very common, this applies to, I think, men in a lot of fields, women probably too, but I think especially men, compartmentalization. So when you’re able to increase your pain threshold, compartmentalize certain things, lock certain things away, can make you very, very, very effective as a performer, but in an interpersonal respect, it can be compromised.
Okay. The reason I’m bringing all this up is that I think about, say, let’s just take, for example, men who want more access to different states and sensitivities. And I’m like, “Okay, well, why do they want that?” Well, they might want it because they want to be able to better listen and interact with their partner. And just for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s a female partner. And I’m like, “Okay, well, I agree with that,” right? This has been one of my homework assignments for the last two decades is getting better at conflict deescalation, which I never had a good model for. I’ve made a lot of progress, but quite more work to be done. But there’s also, I feel like, maybe that this perceived necessity on the part of men is a reflection of also a society in which you have a couple within which each person expects the other to be kind of everything for them.
So it’s actually, we need more community solutions where it’s like, okay, look, if you expect your man to be just like one of your girlfriends you’re going to have a chat with, you got the wrong animal probably, right?
Boyd Varty: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: And then if the dude is like, “Why can’t you just be a dude? Let’s be dudes,” it’s like, well, maybe you got the wrong animal, and which is part of the reason why I block out for these weeks when I do these trips. They’re almost always all-men trips, right?
Boyd Varty: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because that type of experience in modern-day I think is largely absent or disallowed outside of maybe a few sports context.
And similarly, if a couple is in isolation, putting aside the child-rearing aspect of this and the challenges that entails, I suppose this is very meandering, but I haven’t verbalized this before, to what extent do you feel like personal development for, let’s just take the men’s group as an example, should focus on the individual and that kind of access versus trying to figure out some structural solutions and scheduling and blocking things out so that they have access to more people outside of their partner?
Does that make sense?
Boyd Varty: Yeah, I think it does. I think there’s steps to it. I think the first step is both partners developing more literacy away from the partnership. So I think it’s first work in the I. There’s an inevitability and a necessity to that.
Then once you start to get more skills in the I, you want to bring that to the we, and you want to start to practice. And I actually think that one of the issues with relationship is that our model for it is still built on the romantic traditions and it’s like you’re going to fall in love and then here’s this beautiful thing. Whereas relationship to me now is way more an active practice space. And so I think — but you have to be working yourself and together. So those two things have to go together at some stage.
The problem is is that you need your blind spots revealed, and you need people who have more access to help guide you into new choices and new ways of being. You need something from the outside to help you see what your blind spot was. Very often you need something to offend your own pattern or your own blindness and help you see it in a different way. And then you bring those awarenesses to the group.
And then I think hopefully what starts to emerge out of that is there’s what the relationship wants to be for others, and ideally it should turn into a place of service, not just for your direct family, but for the larger community where you start to know we have something unique to give to the community. And I think when enough people start to take that up, that’s where you could see systemic models for change. But I think masculine essence needs other men to liberate itself more, whereas the same with feminine essence needs other women to liberate itself more, and then to bring those two together with more awareness becomes part of the funness of the game, I think.
Tim Ferriss: Look, I’m a junkie for personal development stuff, so I feel like I’m in an AA meeting for personal development addicts. But what I would say, I’ll tell just a brief story.
So on this Montana trip, and keeping in mind, I keep using that example because it’s most recent, but this is, I’d say, at least three or four times a year there’s a trip of some type with guys, and in this case, a small group. It’s like four or five guys. And at one point, we’re sitting around a fire at night and just rapping and talking and talking and talking. And then one of the guys said, he’s like, “I just figured out why fire is so important for guys.” And we’re like, “Why is that?” And he goes, “Because we don’t have to make eye contact. We just look at the fire and we can have all these really deep conversations,” whereas in most circumstances, if you’re staring deeply into another guy’s eyes, it’s kind of an aggressive, it’s just this ingrained kind of aggressive, defensive dynamic.
Boyd Varty: Yeah. If you’re staring in someone’s eyes, you’re going to make out or kill each other.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. And —
Boyd Varty: You know that old joke of you say to your buddy, “Hey, do you want to go and sit by the lake and talk for six hours?” It’s like, “No.” It’s like, “Do you want to go fishing?” “Yeah, let’s do that.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right, exactly. And so harkening back to what you said about don’t try too hard, right?
Boyd Varty: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Like knowing, and this is more an open question, but as I get older and as I see some of the trappings and weaknesses or insufficiencies, both the necessity of and the insufficiency of direct head-on personal work, I wonder what the ratio is between deliberate microscope work, so to speak, and the indirect work, this is going to sound really crass, which is like building a raft and going fishing, which we did with handmade lures and all this stuff, while telling fart and dick jokes. It doesn’t seem serious. No one would put that in a book and be like, “Okay, step number one, come up with three of your favorite dick jokes.” It’s not going to be in any self-help book. But nonetheless, it seems to do a lot of lifting, right?
Boyd Varty: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And there’s the bonding. And the older I get, the more I think that it’s like, okay, we can look at the 27 different options for improving ourselves. And ultimately, what is all that? Why are we doing that? Well, it’s probably to achieve some emotional state to improve our quality of life and the quality of life of, say, our family members around us. Okay.
Well, having, in the case of these trips that I’m describing, some guy time where you’re not necessarily — I mean, there is some goofing off, but there’s generally shared projects and shared suffering of some type and a lot of exertion. Like you said, it’s like, “Yeah, let’s sit by the lake and talk for six hours.” “No, thanks.” But, “Let’s go fishing, and by the way, kind of do the same thing.” “Okay, great. Let’s do it.” That the answer is it’s the relationship, stupid, and the content is secondary to the spending of time in a particular way.
Boyd Varty: A hundred percent. And you don’t have to work hard. Once you get there, and the only thing that I would say is a little bit of context to it. If you have a few guys in the group who have done the work of developing a little bit more access and can make reads, then you don’t have to club it. You can mostly be talking shit floating down the river, but then occasionally, with a little bit of context, someone can say, “Hey, here’s what I see you being blind to. You can tell me to fuck off. You can take it on board, it can go any way, but here’s how I notice you show up. Do you know that you do that?”
Now, if you just try and weigh in on that, it’s like, “Fuck you, leave me alone,” but if you’ve had some time together doing some real stuff, there’s an opening there that I found the rate of download to be incredibly high. And everyone, the community piece is that no one has all the answers. Personal development work for personal development work’s sake is just fucking self-indulgent. But once you add in the dynamic of relationship, as you said, then there’s love and then there’s care. And it’s like, “What I’m saying to you is coming out of care, it’s coming out of a piece of my journey,” and what you find is everyone has a piece for everyone then. The community is more intelligent than the individual.
And that’s where the major unlocks start to have, where someone who’s not even in the role of facilitator or leader says, “Hey, there’s a way in which you show up that makes me not feel like I can trust you and I’m just telling you by way of feedback. I don’t know whether you want to take that on board or not,” things start to happen, and if you’ve rafted a river together, you tend to take more than you were just jettison.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and with the example that you just gave, there are lots of ways to communicate that, right?
Boyd Varty: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, you might just be like, “Hey, man, I could be making this up as a story, but have you ever considered A, B, or C?” Right?
Boyd Varty: A hundred percent.
Tim Ferriss: Because if you’re going to use the language of, say, the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, you better fucking make sure the other person has an idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Amazing toolkit, but you have to agree on the language beforehand.
So we’re coming up on roughly time, but I want to make sure that we do perhaps two things. One is maybe add one more story and then cover anything that you’d like to touch on that we haven’t covered. What do you think is a good kind of bookmark story here? I have “Lunch the baboon” down.
Boyd Varty: Let me tell you about Lunch. Lunch was a baboon that picked up the nickname Lunch because he started showing up at lunchtime and he started causing absolute havoc around the camp.
And Lunch even worked out how to break into the kitchen. And I remember once being in the kitchen and the chefs had barricaded one of the doors with some rocks and the door was literally vibrating. And every time, it was being forced from the outside, every time the rock would slide and the door would open a little bit more, and then this furry hand came in and gripped the handle, and then Lunch burst into the kitchen and he walked across to the counter where there was a cake and he picked up the cake and walked off on his hind legs holding the cake in his hands.
Tim Ferriss: And just for people who don’t have a picture of a baboon, I mean, I find those things pretty fucking terrifying. I mean —
Boyd Varty: A baboon is a formidable, he’s like a three-foot muscular, hairy dude with long canines. And there’s this thing in animal intelligence, and you probably even know this better than me, but there are these modes of awareness. There’s “I know,” then there’s “I know you know,” then there’s “I know that you know.” So it’s like the first awareness is just “I’m aware of you,” then it’s “I’m aware that you’re aware of me.” That’s higher level.
So sometimes I would walk through the camp and Lunch would be involved in some kind of mischief. He would be breaking into a guest’s minibar, and then he would see me and he would know that I knew that he was up to mischief. And then he would kind of pretend to just be loitering around, “Nothing to see here. Just being a baboon in my natural environment.”
I remember another day I was going through some notes on my desk and I found a minute from a meeting, and the literal minute was like, “We need to get new crockery and cutlery for tree camp. Land Rover number eight needs to be repaired. His troop needs to fear our troop.” And basically it was like someone deciding that they needed to try and scare Lunch out of the camp.
And so for a period of days, I decided I was going to chivvy him out of the camp, and it was elaborate because every time I tried to chase him, he would hide. He got into the minibar, he drank some booze. I found him sitting in the pool one day. He was just causing general chaos. I had a little BB gun that I decided that I would shoot him with. And the one day I found him, he was sitting on a guest’s Audi that was parked in the car park, and when I aimed the gun at him, he just lay flat against the Audi like, “I dare you.” So he was up to no good.
Anyway, one day I’m sitting in the office and the phone rings and my sister picks up the phone and she starts talking in that very intent way, “Oh, really? I can’t believe that. Royalty. Yes, of course we can.” And everyone in the room was eavesdropping because it sounded so intense. So she hangs up the phone and she says, “Boyd, a prince is coming to Londolozi,” and this is a tremendous amount of excitement.
And there’s months and months of prep and set up to the arrival of the prince. There’s an endless amount of logistics. A satellite dish has to be put up so that the prince can stream certain sports games. There’s a special chef that has to come in. There’s a whole lot of things that need to come into the boutique so that there can be unique shopping experiences. At one stage, there’s talk of lengthening the runway so that a jet can land going backwards and forwards, and you liaise with these entourage liaisons so it’s all happening.
And eventually the day arrives that the prince is arriving, and we were quite pleased with ourselves because we were on top of all of the logistics. A special face cream had been flown in. And I remember the first three or four planes that landed were just entourage and luggage. And then eventually the prince was coming into land and Bronwyn said to me, my sister, she said, “Boyd, you need to run down to the room. Final thing we need to do, and you need to put these cold face cloths in the room.”
So I grabbed my radio and I run down to the suite, and as I’m running down, the walkie-talkie’s going off, “The prince is 10 minutes out, 10 minutes out. The prince has landed. He’s now eight minutes out, eight minutes out.” And I get down to the suite and I open it and it opens into a kind of living room and then you go through a lock area where there’s a cupboard into the main bedroom and then into the bathroom. And as I get there, I notice that the door is slightly adjacent. So I think to myself, “It must just be that the housekeeping had left the door open.”
I walk through, I come through the bedroom, and as I get to the bathroom, standing at the bathroom counter with a bottle of papaya hand lotion in his hand is Lunch, and as he sees me and I block the doorway, he starts downing hand lotion and starts chugging it into his mouth. It’s like mango papaya hand lotion. He even gets a streak of lotion across his top jowl. And then he realizes that he’s in a confined space and he drops the jar of lotion, stands in the glass, cuts his feet a little bit, and launches himself in a full dive across the bathroom at the giant panel of glass across the bath where you can look out onto the river.
He smacks the glass, his hands come down, he puts a bloody handprint on it. He pushes back off the glass, he flies onto the ceiling, and now he starts to make baboon noises. And at the same time, he starts to use the patented baboon technique for getting out of dangerous situations, which is to massively release your bowels. And so for a few seconds, this baboon bounces around causing absolute chaos, knocking over bath salts. He’s standing on the faucet, his hands are bleeding. There’s lotion, there’s crap everywhere. He’s barking at me.
Then he turns and he comes at me. And Tim, I remember I let out a little scream, “Ah!” And I leaned back and he flew in slow motion past me. And in midair, he turned and he looked at me as he went past, and he had a look of savage glee on his face and lotion down across his jowl. Then he landed on the bed and he bounded across the bed with these bloody handprints, released another massive turd, and then ripped the front veranda doors open and dived off the front veranda like a stockbroker in a recession, and the whole time he still screams, and he disappeared into the river.
The room, as I looked around the room, I cannot tell you what a baboon in a confined space does, the room looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There is blood and shit and lotion and baboon hair. There’s a turd on the pillow. It smells strongly of baboon, and it looks quite human-like because baboons have very similar pores to humans. So there’s a bloody hand on the wall and like someone’s grabbed the faucet with it, so it looks like someone’s been murdered in there.
And the walkie-talkie goes off, “The prince is now five minutes out. Five minutes out.” I called my sister on the radio. I said, “Bronwyn, you’ve got to get down here with the housekeeping team. This is an absolute shit show.”
So she comes down with a group of chambermaids and housekeeping ladies, and they start to go ham on this room, trying to get it back into working order. Meantime, a massive pantomime breaks out on the main reception area of the lodge as the staff of Londolozi try and delay the prince from coming to his room. “Hello, your Majesty. Could we offer you a quick wine tasting?” He’s like, “No, I just arrived. I want to go to my room.” “We would like to take you straight out on a safari right now. There’s a leopard with a kill nearby.” “That sounds good, but I’d like to go to my room.” “Okay, what about the ladies choir who like to sing songs and do traditional dancing?” He’s like, “No, I’m going to my room.”
And what saved us, Tim, was in the middle of this elaborate Fawlty Towers, this pantomime, a hippo walked out onto the rocks in front of the camp in the midday light, and the people of Londolozi acted like they had never seen a hippo in their life. People started screaming, “Oh my God, a hippo! We never see hippos out of the water. Someone go and fetch a spotting scope!” Someone brought a telescope down, and that brought us about 15 minutes while the prince took in the hippo. Staff were acting like the hippo was the most amazing thing the world had ever seen.
Anyway, eventually we can stall him no longer. He comes down to the room and literally as he comes in the room, the chambermaids slip out of the sliding door in the bathroom, and they get into the long grass around the suite, and they’ve got mops and buckets and baboon shit in their hair. And as one, they just drop down into the grass. They just disappear and lie there in absolute possum status.
And there’s this incredible moment where the prince comes into his room and it smells of room spray and everything’s clean, and the mirror has been put straight. And he walks out onto the front veranda and he looks out over the river and a hippo calls nearby, and it’s just everything is quiet. And he’s like, “Wow, it’s so good to be out here alone for a thousand miles in every direction.” And he turns and walked back into his room and 12 chambermaids rise up out of the grass around his suite.
And that is the day that Lunch really got us.
Tim Ferriss: Lunch the baboon.
Boyd Varty: Lunch the baboon.
Tim Ferriss: Holy shit. What a story.
Boyd Varty: One day we were out, and this is another true story, one day we were out, a bunch of guides. Talking about a bunch of guys out together. And we drive out on the second afternoon we’ve all got off, we’re drinking some beers, and there’s a rocky outcrop. And the rocky outcrop is like a small hill, and it’s silhouetted against the skyline. And we see Lunch literally silhouetted on a rock up against the skyline. And he’s with a lady baboon, and he’s doing some very naughty things to her. And I swear, Tim, when he saw us, he put his one hand up in the air like this and gave us kind of a high five, like —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Londolozi, protector of all things. There have to be moments when you’re like, “Ah, I just want to — could we just blast him off that rock and be done with Lunch?”
Boyd Varty: No, it’s amazing to live amongst the animals. The other, I mean, the other day I was sitting watching a warthog. He was grazing up on the runway, and then I literally saw a thought occur to him, and he turned and he began to walk, and he walked like two kilometers down to the camp, and I followed him the whole way. And he made his way to where a woman was washing some clothes and she was hanging them on a washing line, and the water is dripping off the clothes onto the ground, and it’s making this little flush of green grass. And literally, he knows that’s a good place to go and get some green grass.
And so there’s this thing about living close to the animals like that, that you notice there’s an intelligence to it. And it’s almost like your community expands to include the trees and the animals and these unique personalities that you get to know. And it’s not just a random baboon, but it’s like that’s Lunch. And it’s not just a random leopard, but we know this leopard. She allows herself to be seen. We have a relationship with her, and that’s a very, very deep and beautiful way to live.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And just to underscore what you just said about leopards, if you see a leopard, that leopard is allowing you to see them. And if they want to vanish, even in short grass, snap of the fingers, they’re gone.
Boyd Varty: Gone.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just beyond incredible to see that happen where you’re like, “Okay, they couldn’t hide themselves if they wanted to. That grass is too short.” And then they turn back and they’re like, “Eh, had enough of you guys,” and boom, they’re just completely invisible. It’s remarkable to see.
Boyd, anything you’d like to say before we wind to a close? Where can people find you? Where should people go to learn more about all things Boyd?
Boyd Varty: Yeah, thanks, Tim. People can go to boydvarty.com to find out about retreats and books, Cathedral of The Wild and Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life. And yeah, that’s the best place to figure out if you want to come on a safari or if you want to come to Africa, that’s also a good way to do it.
Tim Ferriss: Boyd Varty, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y dot-com. Good to see you, buddy. Thanks for making the time.
Boyd Varty: Good to see you, man. Thanks so much for having me on.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, absolutely. And everybody listening, we will link to, I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to link to, but we’ll link to some names and other things. We’ll link to the highlight reel of Lunch the baboon. I’m kidding. We’ll link to all things mentioned that can be linked to in the show notes as always at tim.blog/podcast. If you just search Boyd, B-O-Y-D, both episodes will come up. This is episode number two. Definitely if you enjoyed this, also listen to episode number one.
And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary. Why not? It doesn’t take a whole lot of extra effort, and the payoff is enormous, kinder to others, and also just a tad bit kinder to yourself because it goes both ways, and you can work those muscles on both sides. And thank you for tuning in.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Return of The Lion Tracker — Boyd Varty on The Wild Man Within, Nature’s Hidden Wisdom, and How to Feel Fully Alive (#832) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-10-25 04:53:43
Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) is a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur. Scott has founded nine companies and served on the boards of The New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Panera Bread, and Ledger.
His latest book is Notes on Being a Man, and I deeply believe in Scott’s mission and messages with this book. We are sitting on a tinderbox and need to address the elephant in the room: young men need help.
In high school, I won the lottery by chancing upon one coach whose influence saved me from the fates of many of my male friends: jail, overdoses, DUI deaths, and more. Ever since, I’ve searched for ways that we might nudge young men towards optimism and better lives. Left unaddressed, the potential for violence and societal disaster is also high. Testosterone and aggression will go somewhere, so best to channel it.
I’m hoping Scott’s book will act as a virtual mentor for young men who are feeling lost, stuck, angry, or despondent about the future.
But what am I so worried about? Here are just a few stats from Scott’s book and appearances:
I asked Scott if I could reprint “The Scott Method” from his new book, and he and his publisher kindly agreed. It does a good job of highlighting the no-BS tough love + practical tactical combo that makes Scott who he is.
When friends ask if I’ll mentor their sons, I always say yes. We focus on four things—fitness, nutrition, money, work. Master these and they’ll be in a place to start exploring relationships.
It’s worth repeating: many men think they have to be a mix of Aristotle, Gandalf, and Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid to mentor a younger person. That’s horseshit. The questions I get asked are easy, and a cat could give the advice I do.
I ask questions as mundane as: When’s the last time you ate a real meal? What do you eat and drink during an average day? Red Bull, Cheetos, sativa gummies? How do you think those might affect your body and brain? So . . . you work in retail, and/or you earn four hundred bucks a week at Chipotle? How much of that goes to online sports betting? A hundred dollars a week? That means you’re spending a quarter of your income on gambling. How are your relationships? Are you dating? What’s your relationship with your parents like? What about your relationship with yourself? What’s your story? Do you have a plan, a blueprint, a map? If not, let’s come up with one. You can adjust it, swap it out in six months or a year—nonetheless, you need one. Do you want to apply to junior college? Skip college, enter the workforce? Move out of your childhood bedroom and start having sex with strange women? First you need to make some money.
Young men have a single source of capital: time. Where to find it? On their phones. By tracking their activities, we reallocate those hours to more productive places.
I’m eternally amazed by the number of college-age kids who live at home and who are convinced their parents are the enemy. Yes, your parents can be tone-deaf, uncool, a source of frustration, but give me a fucking break—they’re not trying to undermine you or wreck your life. Unless home is a hellscape, and they’re abusing you, assume everything they do comes from a good place. Don’t want to obey house rules? Then stop taking your parents’ money and find a fifth-floor walk-up. Accepting their support means taking their advice.
Next, we unlock their phones. Not so I can judge them or be absolute—I watch porn and spend too much time on TikTok, too. By analyzing screen time, we free up eight to twelve hours a week. From now on, they’ll agree to spend thirty minutes a day, not two hours, on TikTok. Two hours a week watching porn are reduced to forty-five minutes, and six-plus hours spent on Reddit, Discord, Coinbase, Robinhood, are distilled to two.
Many young men don’t take advantage of their muscle mass, bone structure, and testosterone to get physically strong. From now on, they’ll work out three, later four, times a week—we download an app to track progress. The goal is to start small and build up.
Get to Work . . .
These days, anyone with a phone and a driver’s license can make money driving for Lyft or doing chores on Taskrabbit. If you want to make money, you first need to start earning some via a part-time job. A nice thing about making money is that you start developing a taste for it—think Dracula and blood. Money, you realize, is fun and interesting, and making it is a good feeling. Why not see if you can make more? If you work at CVS, do you have the skills and organization to get a job at Whole Foods and earn even more money?
Along with fitness and work, I also ask young men to place themselves in an unfamiliar situation in the company of strangers three times a week in the agency of something bigger—a writing or cooking class, a nonprofit, church, a sports league. The only rule is that within the month, they have to introduce themselves to everyone there. Starting with hello, then asking a stranger out for coffee. The other person might say no. The next day, they have to call and tell me how they feel. It might hurt, but guess what? They’re not mortally wounded, or bankrupt, they’re still standing, and that’s everything. Now do it again until they start developing a callus. The more nos they get, the more they can calibrate what works and doesn’t. The key, the skill, the talent, the mastery, the ninja artisanship no one teaches, is that the greatest, most specific skill a young man can develop is his willingness to endure rejection.
The above works for most young men—others need more of a sounding board. It’s freakishly easy to add value to a young man’s life. One young man in his twenties told me he planned to move from Washington, DC, to Alaska. Not sure why—I think he saw a special on the Discovery Channel once.
SCOTT: Do you have a job in Alaska?
YOUNG MAN: No.
SCOTT: Friends? Relatives? Any support system?
YOUNG MAN: No, it’ll be a fresh start. Wait, I forgot to tell you—my mom was just diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
SCOTT: Parkinson’s?
YOUNG MAN: I think that’s what the doctor said.
SCOTT: Why are you being such an idiot right now? Don’t quit your job in DC, you’re making a hundred grand a year!
YOUNG MAN: Oh, okay, good point.
SCOTT: Also, it sounds like your mom is really sick. I’ll bet she needs you. Is this really the right time to move?
YOUNG MAN: Hadn’t thought of that. Probably not.
SCOTT: Here’s some more advice. Bank enough money so you have six months of cushion. Take a week off, fly to Alaska, and see if you like it—you might really hate the place. Also, if I were you, I’d get a job there first, before you move. Also, your mom needs you.
YOUNG MAN: Wow. I didn’t think of any of this. Thanks, Scott.
A lovely colleague once asked if I’d be willing to mentor her son, a college sophomore, pre-med. Dan was feeling low because he’d torn his Achilles tendon playing football and was out for the season.
SCOTT: Are you on the fast-track to playing in the NFL?
DAN: [laughs hysterically]
SCOTT: In that case, everything’ll work out. How’s college overall?
DAN: Really good. I’m having second thoughts about med school, though.
SCOTT: Stick it out another year. The world won’t end if you quit and do something else.
DAN: Okay.
Dan was fine, I told his mom. The Achilles injury was a setback, but college was good, he had strong relationships, went to church, and was in regular touch with family members. As a successful professional, his mom expected him to follow a certain groove, and right now her son wasn’t grooving—so what? Parents across the United States would pray for problems like these.
Finally, I remind young men to cut themselves slack and stop being so hard on themselves. Reminded daily of their own perceived physical and financial shortcomings in a numbing, dumbing, deep-pocketed digital ecosystem designed to make them feel like screwups and cultural outsiders while simultaneously persuading them they can have a viable social and work life on their phones—while other voices online whisper that the world is against them thanks to women, trans athletes, and immigrants—their judgment and sense of reality take a beating. Adolescence is hard, the twenties harder, as one’s potential begins narrowing, more is at stake, perspective is limited, and any/all career decisions feel dispositive (see above, limited perspective).
One high school senior I met got rejected by his parent’s alma mater. It devastated him. I told him he would still go to college, that there are a hundred great schools in America that double as the best hundred schools in the world. He would get into one, move into a dorm, drink too much beer, hang out with his friends, meet and have sex with women, test his limits, and have a thoroughly amazing time. In five years, when he and I caught up, the only thing he’d be upset about would be how upset he once was.
My anger and depression issues started when I was in my thirties, probably passed down from my dad. I’ve never been clinically diagnosed for depression, never taken an SSRI. In my thirties, though, I began developing grudges against myself and others. I had a hard time moving past things, would get triggered by something trivial, could feel my blood thickening, and I’d feel hollow and down. I still have trouble getting past things, and periods when I feel nothing—my average daily mood doesn’t always sync with my privilege and blessings.
It’s not one issue or trigger that makes me anxious, it’s more about me. The nerve fibers of the spinal ganglia penetrate our guts, where they identify pain, pressure, and more. What makes me go dark is less a function of a bad phone call or a shitty investment decision than my own brain and body chemistry. Once, I was on the phone with my sister when she remarked I always seemed pissed off about something. “I have to be honest,” she said. “You have less right to be angry and upset than anyone I know. I mean, look at your life.”
She was right, though I’m still a long way from mastering happiness. These days, I pick up the warning signs more easily that I need to pay more attention to myself. If I haven’t exercised, the intensity and frustration that builds up in my body and brain are displaced. I get snappish, monosyllabic, and self-absorbed. I start role-playing aggressive situations in my head that never happened, like a face-off with a coworker, a cab driver, or an unfriendly barista. These simulations are verbal, never physical. The biggest giveaway is I start thinking about the Holocaust.
I realized certain behavioral changes could help snap me out of it. I came up with the terrible mnemonic SCAFA, short for Sweat, Clean eating, Abstinence, Family, and Affection—my five pharmaceuticals.
Sweat and exercise are good for resetting my system. They’re the closest thing we humans have to a cheap, indiscriminately available youth serum—and they make me a nicer person, too. Clean eating means I try to eat home-cooked food versus gorging on trans fats or too many over-seasoned restaurant meals. Abstinence means no alcohol and weed—a short ban against whatever hits my pleasure sensors. Finally, I spend time with my family, even if my sons are being awful and demanding, absorbing as much affection as possible from them, my wife, and our dogs. Love my dogs.
Note: If you feel low, go back to the basics: Sweat, Clean Eating, Abstinence, Family, and Affection. Take care of your brain and body and the rest will follow.
****
From Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway, published by Simon & Schuster. ©2025 Scott Galloway. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
More on Scott:
Scott has won multiple Webby and Best Podcast awards, and his New York Times–bestselling books have been translated into 28 languages. Across his Prof G Pod, Prof G Markets, Raging Moderates, and Pivot podcasts; his No Mercy / No Malice newsletter; and his YouTube channel, Scott reaches millions. His prior bestselling books include The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift: America in 100 Charts, and The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security.
Photo credit: Lukas Rychvalsky
The post Notes on Being a Man, and Advice for Young Men Who Are Feeling Lost — Scott Galloway appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-10-23 02:27:43
Boyd Varty (@boyd_varty) is the founder of Track Your Life. As a fourth-generation custodian of Londolozi Game Reserve, Boyd grew up with lions, leopards, snakes, and elephants and has spent his life in apprenticeship to the natural world. He is a lion tracker, storyteller, and literacy and wildlife activist. At the intersection of his two greatest passions, tracking and personal transformation, Boyd uses ancient wisdom to help people create a purpose-driven, meaningful life and to discover their most authentic, essential self.
Boyd is a TED speaker, the author of Cathedral of the Wild and The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, and the host of the Track Your Life podcast. Using wilderness as a place for deep introspection and personal transformation, Boyd has taught his philosophy of “Tracking Your Life” to companies and individuals all over the world.
Please enjoy!
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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.
“The natural world is not just where meaning constellates. It is meaning in some fundamental way.”
— Boyd Varty
“I have this idea that comes from Martha Beck, where her take on the natural world is that it’s a wordless environment. If you look at the animals, they don’t have verbal minds. You don’t see them thinking past and future. You don’t see lions lying there thinking, ‘Oh, Janine messed up that hunt yesterday; we can’t trust her going forward.’ If you can go into wordlessness, then very quickly people start going into oneness. The key thing I have found now is get people to be quiet, get them into more wordlessness, create an opportunity for them to interact and receive lessons from the natural world, and then things rapidly start to happen.”
— Boyd Varty
“I think people need to be re-enchanted. One of the things that we’re afflicted with is that we are dulled down and we are disconnected from magic. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be that woo-woo, just to see a leopard and her cubs leap up into the branches of a marula tree and to feel like, ‘God, this is the beauty of it,’ and to have that affect you in some profound way. I’ve just seen so much of it now. I’m a real believer that nature wants us to heal, and nature knows when we come to her with the desire to mend our soul.”
— Boyd Varty
“All roads in personal transformation lead to the information inside you. You actually know it’s in you in the way that lions know how to be lions and leopards know how to be leopards.”
— Boyd Varty
“To [The Bushmen], the desert is their storehouse, which is quite an amazing idea. There’s no sense of needing to hold or store because it’s an abundance psychology that everything you need is there.”
— Boyd Varty
“It’s not just a random leopard, but we know this leopard. She allows herself to be seen. We have a relationship with her, and that’s a very, very deep and beautiful way to live.”
— Boyd Varty
“The natural world is a story machine. It’s a meaning machine. It’s a symbolic machine.”
— Boyd Varty
“If you start saying ‘I want to go out into the local park; I want to go out into my garden and I have a specific question’ and you write that question down and you start asking, specifically nature, ‘Could you help me answer that question?,’ it’s almost like a Zen koan. You’re holding an intention and a desire for certain answers. Then, what you see, your psyche will run that through a specific matrix and insight will start to develop.”
— Boyd Varty
“I say to people, ‘Stop trying to know and stop trying to use this retreat to get the next thing, and in fact let yourself not know and just enter into the circadian rhythm of seeing the sun rise and seeing the sun set, watching it go from stars to stars.'”
— Boyd Varty
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Want to hear Boyd’s first appearance on the show? Listen to our original conversation, in which we discussed the origins of Londolozi Game Reserve, the ancient lineage of Shangaan trackers, living 40 days and 40 nights in a tree, crocodile attacks, the killer bee story, tracking as a philosophy for life, and much more.
The post The Return of The Lion Tracker — Boyd Varty on The Wild Man Within, Nature’s Hidden Wisdom, and How to Feel Fully Alive (#832) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-10-21 04:46:22
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Frank Miller, regarded as one of the most influential and awarded creators. Frank began his career in comics in the late 1970s, first gaining notoriety as the artist, and later writer, of Daredevil for Marvel Comics. Next, came the science-fiction samurai drama Ronin, followed by the groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One with artist David Mazzuchelli.
Following these seminal works, Miller fulfilled a lifelong dream by doing an all-out crime series, Sin City, which spawned two blockbuster films that he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. Miller’s multi-award-winning graphic novel 300 was also adapted into a highly successful film by Zack Snyder. His upcoming memoir, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling, is now available for pre-order.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.
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Tim Ferriss: Frank. So nice to see you.
Frank Miller: Good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: And just got off the phone with our mutual friend, Robert Rodriguez. I’m sure that name is going to come up again.
Frank Miller: I heard of him, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m sure that’s going to come up again. And before we even get close to Robert. Thank you, Robert, for the introduction. I want to pick up on something we were chatting about briefly before we started recording. And this is Aristotle.
Frank Miller: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Why did Aristotle come into the conversation?
Frank Miller: Aristotle’s definition of happiness was a devotion of all of one’s energies along the lines of excellence. And I believe that that is a general application that in an ideal life, would apply that every moment you have, but it is a guiding principle to a creative life.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s then take maybe some of my props that we have here. And I’m going to go to my phone because I was reading an early copy of Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling. And I took a lot of highlights and I had to take photographs of my, the PDF of my Kindle to look at some of them, and I wanted to go through a little list. This might seem strange, but I tend to obsess on the specifics. These are some of the tools of your trade. Blackwing graphite pencils, white paint, India black ink, liquid frisket, erasers, and sable brushes. And then it goes through a description of a lot more. Winsor & Newton Series Seven, mostly sizes three to 12, et cetera. A few questions that I want to ask about, including the toothbrush, my trusty spatter maker. What is liquid frisket?
Frank Miller: Liquid frisket is essentially glue, but it was first called that and used by oil painters to create highlights. What the painter would do, he would lay down strokes of this glue across the paint, then paint across it, and then before declaring the painting finished, he or she would then wipe up frisket and you would have this sparkling piece of the underpainting showing through. And so it creates a very dramatic highlight. I like to use it with ink because it creates an element of chaos.
Tim Ferriss: An element of chaos. So you seem to be, in a sense, someone who thrives in chaos or by creating certain types of chaos. And this monster that I’m holding, for those who are listening and not watching, I’m holding something in my lap that feels like it’s 20 to 35 pounds. I was carrying it around, walking through New York City, getting a lot of odd looks because it’s a rectangle about the size of an x-ray plate you would use to take an x-ray of both lungs. It’s gigantic.
Then this is Frank Miller’s Sin City: The Hard Goodbye. And I want to just open this up and I’m going to read something from right inside. This is from Jim Lee, another legend in the space, another hero of mine for another time. I used to have his job at the same college as graphic editor of the Princeton Tiger found some old sketches of his in one of the desks, in fact. But here’s his quote, “Even after 25 years, Frank Miller’s Sin City: The Hard Goodbye showcases the full potential of the comic’s medium. A stark brilliant chiaroscuro. It remains a defiantly timeless, handcrafted love letter of the days of old in an increasingly slick and digital world.”
And I segued from the tools because when I look at some of these pages, and I’ll provide some of these as B-roll and so on, looking at something like this, I’ll just show that to, it is a masterpiece. Any one of these could be on a wall by itself, but this is sequential storytelling. And I have many questions, but one of them is about aliveness and that channeling all of your energies into excellence because, and I think this came up in the documentary about you, as well, American Genius, that you attack the page. There seems to be a real kinetic channeling of energy into the page, which you can see in this particular version, The Curator’s Collection. What did it feel like when you were making this that I’m holding?
Frank Miller: Very physical.
Tim Ferriss: Very physical.
Frank Miller: Yes. It’s Sin City was a real breakthrough that way because it was the first time I decided to work so damned big. The book you’re holding is the actual size of the pages I did.
Tim Ferriss: So what is this size?
Frank Miller: It’s called twice up, it’s four times the size of the published comic book.
Tim Ferriss: It covers my entire body on video.
Frank Miller: Only about half of it, but that is the size that comic books were originally drawn back in the 1940s. And over time, in order to pick up the speed of production and just lower the price of making comics, they made them smaller and smaller and smaller until finally they decided they ought to fit into an 11 by 17 photocopier and made the pages very, very tiny to work on, which was about the time I came in. And when I discovered these old originals from the forties, I went, that’s why they looked so damned good. And I decided with Sin City, I was going to correct the error.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. And toothbrush.
Frank Miller: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: I mentioned this at the end of your list. How do you use the toothbrush? Because I feel like this, at least in my mind, is one of the hallmark signatures in the minds of many of some Frank Miller artwork is this particular element. So how do you use the toothbrush?
Frank Miller: Well, what I do is the lid of a bottle of Indian ink has a little squirter thing on it, and I squirt some of that onto the bristles of a toothbrush, run my thumb across a toothbrush, and it splatters across, an effect that could be texture on a wall, texture in the sky, splurting blood, whatever you choose to make it.
Tim Ferriss: Just dragging your thumb across it.
Frank Miller: Yes, spraying it like as a child would.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Frank Miller: What I love is that it gives you that lovely element of chaos across picture. Across time, I would combine or replace that with simply snapping a brush across my wrist, which would create more of an elongated, stretchy —
Tim Ferriss: Slash?
Frank Miller: Well, it creates, again, something that’s unpredictable but very organic. That’s just playing with the materials.
Tim Ferriss: What was your motto? This is from the book, as well, your senior year of high school. I think it was —
Frank Miller: Get the hell out of my way.
Tim Ferriss: Get the hell out of my way.
Frank Miller: I was impatient to leave school and get to work.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I don’t know if the impatience ended there. So I say that as someone who’s also a very impatient, it has pros and cons. And I’m wondering the visceral violence that is channeled into creating, say what we see on the page in Sin City, it’s the kinetic aspect of it is so palpable. How do you relate to anger using it, the right dose, if there is a right dose, channeling it versus being controlled by it? How do you think about that fire, maybe, is a better way to put it within?
Frank Miller: No, anger is a good word, too. It’s an important and powerful component. Drama. Drama is, essentially, conflict. And if you go all the way back to the Norse myths — but you could take it all the way from the Norse myths through to Terms of Endearment or whatever else — those are all full of Sturm und Drang.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Frank Miller: And comics are a purely visual medium, and also, not very on the face of it, powerful. That is, there’s no way a comic book can compete with the sheer, spectacular firepower of cinema. That is, you do — cinema completely envelops so many of your senses and it involves images that are perceptively real, and real people expressing these emotions at you. And then when they want to do spectacle, they started proving it way back with D. W. Griffith and sealed the deal with Star Wars. Nobody can touch them. And they can out do anything in stage and in any other form. So comics had to come out with little Jack Kirby swaying in and just showing, okay, we can’t really do that, so we’re going to go even more crazy. And he made up characters who could eat planets. And in the case of what I’ve been after with my comics is to have the drawing itself be so emotional and extreme that I’m trying to make it outact an actor.
Tim Ferriss: Well, what I love about your comics, so first of all, I should just point out to people that don’t know anything about this world, you seem to me to be an outlier on a number of different levels. One of which is that you’re very well known for your art and you are very well known for your writing. How common is that in the US comic world?
Frank Miller: It’s not that common.
Tim Ferriss: In Japan, it’s a little more typical, but in the US, where would you?
Frank Miller: It’s more common than it used to be because it used to be almost not allowed. There were a few exceptions. There was Will Eisner, for instance, who was really outstanding in that he clearly ran the whole show.
Tim Ferriss: For people who have no context whatsoever, why is Eisner such an important figure?
Frank Miller: He’s one of the founding fathers, for one thing, but because he could do the entire thing and other people could, as well, but he decided to keep doing the entire thing rather than just becoming part of a factory. Of course, he ran his own factory, but that’s a whole other story. But ultimately, he settled on doing his one series, The Spirit, which is known as the — Will Eisner’s The Spirit. And even though he employed other people along the way, he always ran the show and supervised it completely. And as he got older, he started doing work that he did inch, top to bottom, by himself. That was a much more personal nature that where he, once again, turned comics in a new direction.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s explore other figures who have helped showcase the potential of this medium through innovating, because I love this terrain — because people listening may not be comic lovers, but there’s some medium that they’re fascinated by.
And whether it’s in the realm of fiction and, let’s just say novels, whether it’s in film, whether it’s in comics, there are things that we might take for granted now that were not at all obvious a decade or two ago. And it seems like a good time to maybe talk about Jack Kirby and how he impacted the world of comics. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I was reading, and this is straight from your book, that for a long time, comics were set panels, in a sense, and you filled in the blanks to the extent that artists would sometimes get pre, I don’t want to say cut, but outlined pages within which to place the cardboard.
Frank Miller: There were a lot of various ways they were restricted, in various ways. And a lot of this happened before I was around, so I don’t know. But I think the reason you bring Kirby up in this respect was he was the guy who came in when comics were — all had either a nine-panel grid or a six-panel grid. They were — all the panels were the same page. And more than anybody, he blasted that to pieces and he was like our D. W. Griffith, he just ripped the camera off the floor and all of a sudden he would use two pages for a single image. For a kid like me, it was mind-expanding. This one guy just kept coming back decade after decade after decade. He started way before I was born. He served in World War two with my parents. It’s not side-by-side. And so when he had several comebacks and each time, he seemed to reinvent the whole megillah.
Tim Ferriss: You have, it seems like, a few different guiding phrases. We have one, of course, from the book title itself, Push the Wall. Another one that comes to mind is defy the code. Can you expand on both of these please? Why these two?
Frank Miller: Well, the pushing the wall, or pushing the walls, is just, colleagues have always been this strangely schizophrenic field where on the one hand, you have artists, cartoonists, writers or such people who want to explore and try new things. The nature of these fantasies is exploratory. But the business has always been very conservative and his comics, people who grew up on comics became themselves very tradition bound. And so they would fret over things like what we call continuity, worrying about if you’re working on issue number 385 of a Spider-Man, you can’t contradict something that was done in issue 14, which is, on the face of it, absurd because the character would be 85. They’ve been around that long. And so you had this hide bound on one side and this enthusiastic experimental field on the other. And I’ve always just wanted to pull more toward the people looking for a future and for trying out new stuff.
Tim Ferriss: How did you — and we’re going to jump around chronologically.
Frank Miller: All right.
Tim Ferriss: But let me see if I can find this particular paragraph from your book. Relates to a name that you will recognize, and that is Neal Adams. So, “Neal was a hard taskmaster, utterly ruthless in his criticism. He was a godsend.” I just want to read another paragraph. So we’ll get into the description of who this is, but you cold called his office, is that right?
Frank Miller: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Cold called his office. This is when no one knows who you are. And then ultimately, I think it was his daughter who answered the phone, she says, “Dad, we got another one.”
Frank Miller: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Somehow you ended up in the office, you show him your work and then, and I’ll quote here, “He told me just how awful my stuff was and didn’t bother with using any sugar-coating, either. ‘Where’d you say you were from? Vermont? Go back to Vermont, pump gas, get married. You’re no good and you never will be.'”
Frank Miller: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: “I gulped,” this is referring to you, and then asked, “Can I fix it and show you again tomorrow?” To which Neal responds, “Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re out.” Who is Neal and why did you reach out to him?
Frank Miller: Well, that’s Neal Adams.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, who is he?
Frank Miller: He was the outstanding artist of, he was, in a way, a one-man generation because there was a long period where nobody entered the comics business because it didn’t pay well. And believe me, the common wisdom would be out of business soon. We’d just been through the horrors of the comics code and just the public humiliation and the self-censorship of that time, and been disgraced going from a mass medium and being turned into just a dirty punch line. And there were just a few people keeping the light alive and still doing these old titles like The Flash and so on. But the books were looking pretty crummy. But there were these glimmers, there was these guys, some of the old guys just stayed there and kept doing great stuff — an artist named Gil Kane, for instance.
But there was Neal Adams. He was this new guy who came in young and brought such enthusiasm and a whole new look, he had a whole new take-me-seriously look. It was a much more realistic look. And he dragged the whole generation with him in a lot of ways, but not just with his work. He did it with his speech and with his actions. He opened up a studio in Manhattan called Continuity, which did advertising work, and essentially became a halfway house for comic book artists to come in and get his training, and then where he became the guru at this place. So when I called up, I looked up his number in the phone book, as you said, spoke to his daughter, got to see him that day, and started hanging out there. And I started living on little advertising jobs. Sometimes I’d just color them, and then eventually I get to draw them and so on. And then he lined up my first comic book work, and I was hardly the only one.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m so fascinated by this exchange and his willingness to help for a few different reasons. Number one is I wonder how did this guy muster the bandwidth to do his own work, run a business, and also mentor? Just that question alone. And then I also think about the Sliding Doors moment of what if he had just had a really bad day and he was like, “You’re not coming back tomorrow, kid. Sorry, I’m too busy.” What a different life.
Frank Miller: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve got to blow my own horn.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, blow your own horn.
Frank Miller: I was a pretty determined little bastard, so I would’ve been back anyway.
Tim Ferriss: You would’ve been back anyway?
Frank Miller: Yeah. I had banged on many doors before his.
Tim Ferriss: Well, okay. So this was actually going to be my next question, which was why do you think he agreed to let you come back after he was like, “Go pump gas, go back to Vermont.” And then you were like, “Let me fix it and come back tomorrow.” And he is like, “Oh, okay, fine.” Right? So what did —
Frank Miller: Actually no, it was because I asserted that I wanted to fix it.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.
Frank Miller: It was because I didn’t cry and leave.
Tim Ferriss: How many interactions like that, many different visits showing him work, did it take for him to finally say that your work was not for throwing away?
Frank Miller: It wasn’t all that many, I don’t think. And then I worked on short little jobs for Gold Key Comics, that was an old publisher a long time ago, and so on, where they would let you do, they would hire you for a three-page job where you got $25 a page, that kind of thing, and that was what they called paying your dues.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to hop around a little bit, but people need to read the book, they need to see the doc, but I know a lot of people have covered certain aspects of your bio. You first gained notoriety in the late ’70s for your transformative work on Daredevil. Now I also, and this is pulling from the book, read a bit, and this is, I’m putting a character, you’ll have to explain, but “[Elektra]” in brackets because I’m inserting that, but now I’m quoting you, “was the true genesis of my career in comic books.” Could you speak to that chapter of your life that involved Elektra and what the significance of that was?
Frank Miller: Oh, I think that was because that was, I didn’t come in as the writer on Daredevil, I just simply came in as an artist for hire and realized fairly early on that this was no way to do it.
Tim Ferriss: Why not?
Frank Miller: Because the pictures and the words are one thing. The words were obvious once I drew the pictures and I very quickly took over plotting the stories and so on. And so I felt that Daredevil needed a counterpoint, a femme fatale, really. And I came up with Elektra, but I realized I was going to hold her back until I was writing the book myself. And I did it that way.
Tim Ferriss: I suppose what I’m trying to unpack is, and maybe I’m overstating the importance, but was that introduction of Elektra an important inflection point for you in some way?
Frank Miller: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: In what way was it important?
Frank Miller: Well, if you look at those old comics, that’s when, in a way, I started understanding what a Marvel comic was. A Marvel comic isn’t a story every month. A Marvel comic is an ongoing soap opera that you’re following. And as soon as, with my first issue that I wrote, it was called Elektra, and it was all about them. From then on, the whole thing becomes one sprawling. I mean, sprawling in both good and bad ways, epic, where characters come and characters go, but it’s focused around a pretty small cast. There’s a diabolical Kingpin who runs all the gangs, there’s the deadly enemy, Bullseye, neither of whom I made up. And there’s Daredevil and Elektra, and all of this is like a tortured romance that the hero was in love with a psychotic assassin, so it’s bound to have some trouble.
Tim Ferriss: Bound to have some tears involved at some point.
Frank Miller: It was very adolescent. It came from a very adolescent state of mind. But I’m very proud of it.
Tim Ferriss: I loved Elektra.
Frank Miller: It was really inspired.
Tim Ferriss: I have a lot of comics with Elektra at my childhood home on Long Island. To this day, polybagged with backing and the whole nine.
Frank Miller: Whenever I’m asked to draw her or anything, it’s just great.
Tim Ferriss: So for folks who don’t have any familiarity, and also because I want to better understand it, there are different approaches to making a comic and also crafting a story. So I want to pull up something that I have here, and it’s going to take me a second to read, but I’d love you to walk people through this after I read at least some of it.
All right. “Everything starts with and proceeds from story. Some simple story rules. Number one, start your story as late into the action as possible. End it as early into the action as possible. Two, get your hero into trouble fast. That, or give the hero a pressing problem to solve. I work on the spine of the story.” That’s a phrase that I’d love for you to define. “Work on the spine of the story and figure out how it starts and ends, and then roughly plot the in-between.” And I’ll just read one more sentence and then I’ll let you fill.
“To do this, I make notes and create scenes that will advance the storyline, but allow room for digressions and narrative side streets.”And then you talk about preliminary sketches and so on. Can you expand on this and just maybe give an example of how you would do that, whether it’s with a book like Sin City or any other that comes to mind?
Frank Miller: How I do what?
Tim Ferriss: How you actually start from step one in creating a story, and then proceed through that. It seems like also in the introduction that having a very good idea of where your story ends is a critical piece of that.
Frank Miller: I knew at the beginning of Sin City that Marv was going to die, for instance. It’s very important. Of course, when I started Dark Knight, I thought Batman was going to die. It didn’t work out that way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Frank Miller: But yeah, my methodology has changed over time. It used to be as rigid, more rigid than what you just read. I mean, I used to really believe there was a way and I was seeking the way to do it. Now I do believe in letting a story nudge me in another direction. I believe in trusting the muse more than I used to.
Tim Ferriss: How does that show up then in practice? Do you have, you know the starting point, you know the end of the story, you have characters in a situation, do you draw your way through and then figure out kind of the narrative arc? What is the proper blend for you now of structure and serendipity?
Frank Miller: Commenting on yourself as being the generator of the story, surely, and saying that these are the pieces of clay and this is what I want to do with them. But to realize that the artistic process is not at its best when it’s an egomania, egomaniacal process. And sometimes the characters talk back and sometimes they know more than you do. And always be aware that there will be that just that flash, that thing that happens where all of a sudden you’re in a different story and you realize this is the one, you know. No, this isn’t the one I was looking for, but this is where I want to be. And I don’t know. To me it’s sort of like being a space explorer and being ready for things and knowing that the whole job is trying to figure out what to ignore and what to follow. I like the mystery of storytelling more than the power I used to see in it.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about picking and choosing, and specifically would love to hear — I lived in Japan as an exchange student and learned to read and speak Japanese largely from reading comic books.
Frank Miller: Kozure Ōkami must have kept you busy.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, I was busy reading all sorts of comic books with my little electronic dictionary.
Frank Miller: I would love to read Kozure Ōkami in Japanese.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. It’s a different experience, of course.
Frank Miller: I’ll bet.
Tim Ferriss: How did you first get exposed to, for instance, Moebius, Otomo, any others you want to mention? How did you get exposed to those influences and who were, who are they?
Frank Miller: Okay, the two main invasions in American, well, three. There were three actually. The first was the English because DC Comics started publishing Brian Bolland and Mike McMahon and all the rest. But they were the easiest for everybody to see because they were all American comics fans and the language was the same and everything. It started getting a lot wilder when Forbidden Planet Comics opened.
Tim Ferriss: Man —
Frank Miller: In New York.
Tim Ferriss: Do I love Forbidden Planet.
Frank Miller: Yeah. And when Marvel started publishing Moebius, and then the floodgates opened because it was Europe just knocked everybody’s socks off. It was Moebius, Moebius, Moebius, Moebius, Moebius, but there were the other guys too that nobody was paying attention to. And Moebius obviously was a tidal wave that swept through culture. I mean, it’s adult cinema and so on.
And for me, the other event was I had a girlfriend and her father was a businessman who did a lot of business in Japan. And she tossed me a phone book that was a Japanese comic, and it was Kozure Ōkami, and I opened it and studied it and fell in, and Ronin was born that day. And my storytelling style changed everything. And from that, I helped bring the title over and helped with the Asian invasion. Seeing it all become so much more international has just been fascinating because — and with the Asian stuff, you’ve got just a completely different sense of time and space. I mean, it’s the dead opposite of the European.
Tim Ferriss: When was Moebius at his peak of influence? What would’ve been the timing roughly on that?
Frank Miller: Oh, geez. Geez. I couldn’t name the exact dates. Certainly, certainly —
Tim Ferriss: This is decades.
Frank Miller: He’s up there with Jack Kirby in terms of being one of those people who, I mean, people will be on, it’s like a realistic Beethoven and Mahler and all that.
Tim Ferriss: Trying to figure out if the timing is such, because I’ve looked at tons of Moebius artwork that Moebius could have —
Frank Miller: When did Alien come out?
Tim Ferriss: When did —
Frank Miller: Alien come out.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Alien. Good question. I mean, it would’ve been post-Star Wars. I was just trying to think, because Moebius also, a lot of his artwork makes me think of Tatooine and some of these things in Star Wars, so I’m wondering what the directionality is.
Frank Miller: Well, Moebius’ influence on Star Wars is huge.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, that’s what I was trying to answer for myself because it seems so obvious when you look at it. And to come back to the Japanese, the comic book that I use, it’s not a well-known title, certainly outside of Japan, even within Japan. A lot of Japanese people scratch their head when I tell them what it’s called, Rokudenashi Blues, which is Rokudenashi Blues, which is about high school gangs, which aren’t really a thing, but they pretend like it is. The bad kids wear different types of uniforms called Choran. But it’s hyper-violent. There are a lot of fight scenes in this, which made it a little less intimidating for someone who couldn’t yet really read Japanese. So my translating burden was lower with this comic, and the art was spectacular.
And what blew my mind, because I had read comics all the way through my childhood up to that point, and I was 15 when I got to Japan, like you said, it was how time and space and speed and motion were depicted so differently, and how they captured, say, the swing of a leg, or created the effective blur was so captivating to me. It was unlike anything I had seen.
Frank Miller: One of the things I’ve got to say that amazes me about the manga stuff is that they could draw people relaxed so well, that so much of the drawing in Lone Wolf and Cub, people are lazing around and stuff. And even in combat, what they’re capturing is the fluidity and grace of the movement rather than — I mean, it’s the opposite of Kirby where everything is angles and force. And so it’s a very Asian violence. And also in Europe, you’ll often see a very alien, you know — Moebius is violence. When he went really violent, it would be jarring and horrible, but it would still be gorgeous and it would still be — the wrist would be crooked just that much as it slammed into the person’s face and so on. And it’s just the difference of culture is reflected in every aspect of cartooning. It’s fascinating.
Tim Ferriss: How did the European and Japanese styles that would incorporate Lone Wolf and Cub influence, then, how your approach changed after that?
Frank Miller: I was very young. I was in my twenties, and so I sat down and I did a book that imitated them shamelessly in Ronin. I did Kojima with the Samurai scenes, we did Moebius with the science-fiction scenes. Then I discovered Enki Bilal and did him all over the place.
Tim Ferriss: What was that experience like for you in doing that? Did you find it energizing?
Frank Miller: Oh, it was great. It was like — any transition that big is a rebirth.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I’m going to ask you a lot more about Ronin, which I have in my suitcase back at my hotel. But before we get there, I want to talk about — because I believe I saw this in the book as well. Effectively, if you’re boring yourself or if you’re bored, you’re going to bore your audience and throw it out and start over. When do you know if something is working? And I’ll pull out an example of what seems like something that was working. And what was the name of the colorist? Is it Glynis? Is that how you say her name?
Frank Miller: There was Glynis. Yeah, Glynis Oliver, Glynis Wein.
Tim Ferriss: So during some of the work on Daredevil, would call you up and say how excited she was.
Frank Miller: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Working on it.
Frank Miller: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That seems like a signature of something working.
Frank Miller: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: How do you tell if something is working or not working?
Frank Miller: Whether you want to get out of bed and do it or not. I mean, it’s not really a problem I have had. So long I can’t remember.
Tim Ferriss: If you look back at what you’ve ended up being happiest with or less happy with with hindsight 20/20, this doesn’t necessarily mean audience response, right? Not talking about market response.
Frank Miller: Right. No, I understand. I understand.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like intrinsic working for you. I suppose what I’m looking for is just any thoughts for folks who have trouble throwing things away because they just have a high default level of excitement? So they get wedded to something and they’re like, “I’m not going to throw this away.” And they have trouble killing their darlings or murdering their darlings, which is another line that you like.
Frank Miller: I love that line.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe some way of backing into this would be, what are some examples of things that you have thrown out? How do you decide when it’s time to cut your losses or get rid of something?
Frank Miller: When I feel like I’m walking down a familiar road or somebody else’s road, you know, I don’t know. It’s like when it doesn’t get me out of bed, it’s that simple.
Tim Ferriss: It’s that simple. All right.
Frank Miller: This is my primary function on Earth. If I’m not enjoying it, then there’s no reason to do it.
Tim Ferriss: Time to switch gears. So this, you know Ronin seemed like such an all in, bold adventure on a lot of levels. And I just — this is lesson six in your book, “The Dark Knight Cometh: Smash Expectations.” But here’s where it starts. And there’s a quote from Rudyard Kipling from If, which is, “If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” Now, here’s the first part that I wanted to quote, and I won’t do the whole thing, “There’s nothing like a broken nose to clarify the mind. As a creative experience, Ronin was a fascinating, exhilarating exploration.” And it goes on. So why was Ronin a broken nose?
Frank Miller: Oh, because I got excoriated for it. I had an angry audience, people who wanted it to be like Daredevil.
Tim Ferriss: Yep. They wanted more of the same from you.
Frank Miller: And after initial high sales, they dropped. It was not the reception DC wanted. They were playing funeral music and they would go on. And I’d had nothing but a run of successes before, so —
Tim Ferriss: So how did you feel after that? I mean, I’m not comparing my books to anything you’ve done. These are iconic pieces of work that you’ve produced. But I remember having my first two books succeed, expectations for the third, sky high, initially does really well, and then for whatever reason, just doesn’t meet expectations, and I took it so incredibly personally. I had a really hard time with it. And I’m just wondering —
Frank Miller: End of the world.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What was it like for you?
Frank Miller: End of the world.
Tim Ferriss: End of the world?
Frank Miller: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: How long did it feel like the end of the world?
Frank Miller: I don’t know. It was a while. But the thing is is that it was useful because I started examining it and said, “What didn’t work? You didn’t connect.” It’s like, “You did something.” And it made me go, “Okay, let’s go for broke and put something together and develop the theories, do something that’ll work.” And I ended up doing the most ruthlessly structured thing I’ve ever done in my life, which was Dark Knight, which is — I mean, it’s so structured, it’s ridiculous.
Tim Ferriss: What were —
Frank Miller: It breaks into 16 page increments across four 48-page books. And each one has a three x structure. So it’s a four x structure with three three X structures. Basically it’s a tetralogy.
Tim Ferriss: And that was a conclusion or a direction you chose after analyzing Ronin or — why didn’t Ronin work? What do you think are some of the reasons it didn’t work?
Frank Miller: I think that it drifted into surrealism, and it was also — I think that it was a fantasy and it was out of its time, without question.
Tim Ferriss: So you lick your wounds, it’s the end of the world for a little while, but then you do a post-mortem.
Frank Miller: Yeah. And you come out of it better [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: And you come out of it. And then moving into The Dark Knight Returns. How are you thinking about getting back in the ring and working with this? You mentioned the structure as one aspect of it. Anything else that was important for you to keep in mind personally as you moved into working on that particular project?
Frank Miller: I was into it. The complexity of it was something I had never attempted before. There’s so many goddamn characters in that thing, and they’re all moving in 18 directions. But once I was into it, I was into it. I wasn’t thinking about Ronin or anything else.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, it’s a hell of an all consuming scope, right? You have to keep your hand on the wheel and pay attention. Am I getting the timeline right that you were working on The Dark Knight Returns at the same time that Alan Moore was working on Watchmen? Or am I getting that timeline —
Frank Miller: It was a little before, but they overlapped.
Tim Ferriss: They overlapped because —
Frank Miller: Yeah, they overlapped.
Tim Ferriss: And the reason that that —
Frank Miller: Because they kind of started affecting each other in subtle ways.
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Frank Miller: I think they started affecting each other in subtle ways.
Tim Ferriss: In what types of ways?
Frank Miller: I don’t know exactly because Alan and I knew each other. We met while we were doing those two books. I had launched Dark Knight and he was boiling over with Watchmen, and his British stuff is all over the place, and it was all part of this whole, you know, sort of the, I don’t know what you can call what we did to the superhero, but it was reconstruction, deconstruction, whatever it was. And so his approach seemed more to really go at the underbelly of it, and mine was to reconstitute. In an uglier world, to reconstitute the —
Tim Ferriss: The hero.
Frank Miller: Basic, just to the hero.
Tim Ferriss: And I know why this came to mind for me. And to give credit again, where credit’s do, Frank Miller: American Genius, Len Thomas, sitting about 15 feet away.
Frank Miller: Glowering.
Tim Ferriss: Always making amazing —
Frank Miller: Glowering at us. Making ugly faces.
Tim Ferriss: She’s behaving for the time being. But got some great footage from Alan who basically said he heard these murmurs about what you were working on and that it was amazing, and he was like, “Oh, shit,” Basically, “Better really up my game.”
Frank Miller: That sounds like Alan.
Tim Ferriss: And the reason I wanted to bring this up is that I just find having at least some other player on the field who’s really good forces you —
Frank Miller: Oh, God, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: To improve.
Frank Miller: Oh, Alan made me so much better at so many things because — when I came back to Daredevil, for instance, all of a sudden it was like, oh, my God, I’m just writing, and there’s Alan Moore out there now. And all of a sudden I was just trying so hard to be a writer. He brought back horror.
Tim Ferriss: He brought back horror.
Frank Miller: Yeah. There hadn’t been horror in comics for a generation.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, what makes Alan interesting to you? Just to take a sidebar on that.
Frank Miller: Okay. He’s the smartest fan there ever was.
Tim Ferriss: The smartest fan.
Frank Miller: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?
Frank Miller: That he really — he said inside all of that, he’s a guy who grew up on comics, okay? But he’s just so smart that he’s able to take the stuff of his childhood joy and to take it down into places that nobody’s ever dreamt it could go before and transform — anything he’s ever done, he’s transformed, utterly. I mean, the first time he sat down to write Swamp Thing, he changed the entire precept of the character. That’s something a lot of people miss, is that it had always been this guy who, this guy who fell into the muck and got transformed into a swamp guy. And in his very first issue of Swamp Thing, Alan transformed him into a collection of swamp weeds that used this human as a model to construct a new body for itself. There was no human in there at all. And he did it first time at bat, the first time I ever saw his name.
Tim Ferriss: Just completely reinvented the character.
Frank Miller: Scared the crap out of me. Yeah. No, he was something when he shot up.
Tim Ferriss: I promised I would bring back Robert at some point.
Frank Miller: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: And certainly we can — and feel free, if there’s anything you’d like to dive into that I’m bouncing around and not hitting, let me know. But you’ve described Robert as an angel of sorts. Why is that? Robert Rodriguez.
Frank Miller: Well, for one thing is, to be around him, you’re around a man of constant goodwill and generous energy.
Tim Ferriss: He’s very generous. Just a quick — sorry to interrupt, but people might find this funny. When I moved to Austin in 2017, the very first person I had over for dinner at my house, and I was very excited about it, it was Robert, who I’d known for a while. And invited him over, he was on his way and then I realized, wait a second, I have no plates and I have no silverware. So he brought over two plates from his house plus silverware, which I still have to this day. So that’s Robert. That’s Robert. He’s like, “Keep the plates and the silverware. I think you’re going to need it next time.”
Frank Miller: Oh, my God.
Tim Ferriss: So Frank, you were mentioning Robert’s generous spirit. I wanted to underscore something that I only learned after watching the documentary, which is that Rodriguez, as I understand it, quit the Director’s Guild so that you could receive co-director credit. I had no idea. That seems wild.
Frank Miller: I remember the day, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, can you describe what happened on that day?
Frank Miller: No, he just told me, he just did it. He said, “You didn’t have the…” What was the word for it?
Tim Ferriss: What, the credentials?
Frank Miller: It wasn’t credentials, it was something along those lines. He just grinned and he said, “So I quit,” because he didn’t want anything to stand in the way of us just moving ahead. He knew that I needed the authority on the set, because they were his people. And everybody there, they were so loyal to him that he needed to be able to bequeath that to me, for things to really work the way both of us needed them to.
Tim Ferriss: What was it like working on that film with Robert? How did you divide or mesh your duties?
Frank Miller: At one point, somebody in production made this ridiculous poster of the two of us as a two-headed beast, because we were working right on top of each other the whole time. There was another point where we were shooting orders right past each other — although we were almost always saying the same thing. But there was one point where we weren’t saying exactly the same thing, and there was Brittany Murphy in the middle of her scene —
Tim Ferriss: One of the actors.
Frank Miller: — yeah. There she was as a scantily clad barmaid and she just tossed up her — I think she tossed her tray in the air and says, “There’s two of them.” But generally it was just a dream. After a while, they tended to know which one to go to for which kind of problem.
Tim Ferriss: The actors did?
Frank Miller: Oh, yeah, and so did production.
Tim Ferriss: So what were those different types of problems? I’m so curious.
Frank Miller: Well, certainly anything to do with really the mechanics of making the movie was Robert.
Tim Ferriss: Robert, right.
Frank Miller: But when it came to the internal workings of the characters —
Tim Ferriss: Motivations of the characters.
Frank Miller: — the histories, or if they wanted to try something out, I could really quickly tell them whether it was in character or not. And then we would often just get together, the two of us, to go over a bunch of stuff. And then there were any number of cases where Robert would come to me and say, “I need a new shot here. I need a new scene here.” I remember one time he said, “I need something new here, Frank. It’s got to be quick, it’s got to be cheap and it’s got to be brilliant.” We just sat down with a sheet of paper. It was some of the most fun I ever had, working so damned fast.
Tim Ferriss: And knowing Robert, having spent a good amount of time with him — we both live in Austin, I can see both of you working together. It’s very easy for me to see. I encourage people to listen to my episodes I’ve done with Robert, start with the first one about his creative process and bio. But he used to draw comics. He drew comics. He’s very unorthodox, he doesn’t feel like he has to follow a fixed set of rules. I don’t know if he did this on set for Sin City, but he’ll often have actors painting. He’ll be playing guitar.
Frank Miller: Oh, no, that was so important. Yeah, he always wanted to keep the creative juices flowing. There was one time when he rented out a hall in Austin and Bruce Willis and his band played.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, really?
Frank Miller: Yeah. So there’s Bruce Willis up there pounding it out, like he’s doing his Springsteen.
Tim Ferriss: He’d keep the creative juices flowing and he really walks the talk. And also — I may be stating the obvious for people, but when I look at, say, Sin City as you created it here, it’s so inherently cinematic and directorial in terms of angles, framing. I’ve always felt that way. Even looking at say storyboards, I’m like, okay, well, they’re not the same certainly, I mean, but there’s a lot that rhymes. So when I’m looking at these innovations, whether it’s back in the day with Jack Kirby or looking at some of the Japanese influences and how they capture motion differently, it makes me think of innovations in film at the same time, where you think of a Kurosawa doing a Rashomon and inserting multiple perspectives. You’re like, okay. I mean, you’re solving a lot of the same problems and exercising seemingly a lot of the same creative muscles.
Frank Miller: Yeah. Well, and that’s the way media works though. That’s the way art forms work, is that — it’s funny because it’s like, so many people strive so hard to act as if they work in a vacuum, and no one does. The influences are constant and inexorable, and that’s kind of the beauty of the beast really. I mean, occasionally this one piercing person will come through, but even Hitchcock came from somewhere. You can even cut back to what he sprung from, or Welles or whatever. And even those two were in pretty tight competition and did a lot of the same tricks. So it’s like, it’s all a big mishmash.
Tim Ferriss: Outside of the films you’ve been involved with, what are some of your favorite films, whether they are scripted, documentary or otherwise?
Frank Miller: Well, I’m a big fan of all black and white, that’s no secret, but that’s not just all the film noir. I can give you chapter and verse on film noir, but that’s all over the book and everywhere else. But occasionally I’ll see an absolute masterpiece. The Caine Mutiny comes to mind.
Tim Ferriss: I’m not familiar with it, what is The Caine Mutiny?
Frank Miller: The Caine Mutiny is a World War II story, featuring an absolutely brilliant Humphrey Bogart playing exactly the opposite of the kind of character you’d expect him to play. He plays an almost Richard Nixonian figure of a World War II destroyer-minesweeper pilot who is completely paranoid. Fred MacMurray plays a character you would never expect him to play. This is not My Three Sons. This is Fred McMurray as a very serious actor playing a military lawyer. It’s a study in paranoia on high seas.
Tim Ferriss: What appeals to you about the movie, or do you just get swept on it? Is it that these actors are doing what seems diametrically opposed to what people associate them with? Is it something —
Frank Miller: Well, not particularly. I just love high drama, and I often do love to see an actor like Bogart play a character who you don’t expect. Maltese Falcon typecast him for the rest of his career. Before that he played many, many roles, which were often shifty, nasty little men. He played a paranoid killer once in an adaptation, I believe of a James M. Cain novel. I love to see the actors when they aren’t trapped by the audience’s expectations, the things that Robert Mitchum was capable of. He was pretty extraordinary. But also, I like to see the movies that really were discovering what they could do.
Tim Ferriss: Pushing the edges?
Frank Miller: Well, or finding them.
Tim Ferriss: Finding the edges.
Frank Miller: Finding, if you look at Grapes of Wrath, that movie is haunting for what it is, but it’s doing so in such a compelling way, in such an aching way. I mean, Henry Fonda is extraordinary in that movie. And also, I just like to get in the hands of a great director. That’s why I do keep getting back to Hitchcock. I love falling back into one of his old movies. I could watch Rebecca, I swear, every night.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve never seen it, so that’s got to be on my —
Frank Miller: Oh, it is so good.
Tim Ferriss: — to watch.
Frank Miller: It is one of the most romantic movies you’ll ever see, and it’s occasionally very spooky. It’s a date movie.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Well, done, thanks for doing my homework for me. What artists or art forms have influenced the work you do, outside of comics themselves?
Frank Miller: Well, movies a lot and beyond that, lots of books.
Tim Ferriss: Lots of books, what types of books?
Frank Miller: Oh, I grew up reading Mickey Spillane novels, and from that all the other crime stuff. And somewhere along the line, I fell in love with ancient history and that’s where I got 300 and all of that.
Tim Ferriss: Probably, right.
Frank Miller: The history is just endless wealth. It’s like, everywhere you turn there’s more and more to get. It’s very breathtaking. When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV but I don’t now.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s come back to 300 and your other adventures in Hollywood. What have you learned — because, I ask this selfishly, when I work on my stuff, I’m a control freak, a complete control freak, and a lot of my friends are control freaks. I’ve just seen a number of different train wrecks when Hollywood and the structures in Hollywood collide with a creative who has a story or something they view as their baby. I’ve just seen a lot of messes, and I’m wondering what you have learned about working in entertainment or Hollywood.
Frank Miller: Oh, boy, I’ve got one overriding thing, which is just, I mean, more important than anything else is the right people. The right people. It’s like, when I’ve worked with the right people, the experiences have been wonderful and the results have been wonderful.
Tim Ferriss: How do you know, for you, who the right people are? Because there are so many slick folks in L.A., no offense to anyone in L.A.
Frank Miller: I know.
Tim Ferriss: But man, do you get told what you want to hear. I’d love to know how you identify, having spent some time in the trenches.
Frank Miller: I don’t know, man. All I can tell you is that I’ve been exceedingly lucky once and I’ve been unspeakably lucky the other time. I was exceedingly lucky with Zack Snyder because in his case, he was taking control. He was going to do it, okay? He did a brilliant job. In the case of Robert Rodriguez, that was Heaven because it was the adventure of, as I said, a lifetime. And when it’s been more distant than that, it’s been bye, bye, baby, that’s been the same thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. More distant, meaning?
Frank Miller: That it just happens.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Frank Miller: But it’s something I did in a Marvelistic comic that gets adapted, that I end up seeing pieces of what I did, mixed in with things that feel like they came out of a Dirty Harry movie, mixed with things that came out of Scooby-Doo. It all gets a little less exciting.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s just say you created a masterpiece in the next 12 months that everyone in Hollywood is fighting over, how do you make some of the important decisions about who to work with? Do you call Robert and you’re like, “Hey, what do you think about these people?” Do you call Zack Snyder and ask him the same question?
Frank Miller: The answer is right across the room. I mean, Silenn Thomas runs my company and she really knows what she’s doing. And before I really hear about anything, she already knows all these people and what they’re doing and everything.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, a good hire.
Frank Miller: I wouldn’t even call it a hire, it’s a partnership.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, all roads lead to Silenn. She’s bowing in the background.
Frank Miller: She’s waving us away.
Tim Ferriss: I want to ask about alcohol, what is your relationship to alcohol? What has it done for or against you?
Frank Miller: Oh, that’s, I wouldn’t call it an easy question but it’s a simple enough one, especially the way you phrased it. Okay. Simple answer, against me, a lot. For me, nothing.
Tim Ferriss: Nothing?
Frank Miller: Nothing. It’s taken a long time to come to that conclusion. It’s a big old aspect of my life. Again, it’s a genetic condition that I allowed to get out of control. I would say, I did use it to disinhibit me and probably worked very, very productively because of it, and did stuff that was inspired and occasionally reckless. But the deleterious effects and the ways it’s affected other parts of my life, no, it hasn’t done me a goddamn bit of good.
Tim Ferriss: How did you stop?
Frank Miller: I was coerced to stop. Silenn and others decided I was going to die, and arranged for me to be put in a place and watched. The time had to pass, medicines given and that sort of thing. It takes a while.
I will tell you this in all sincerity — this is not posturing a bit for either one of you. I’m having the time of my life in that respect. I’m creatively — now I’m going like, okay, now I can get serious. Okay. One thing is, what happens when you get off the sauce — I imagine any addiction is like this, you don’t realize how much anger has been bottled up in it. And how what you thought was fuel — I mean, I thought I was fueled by all this, this kind of fire. Oh, it doesn’t fuel you. It doesn’t fuel you. It’s like saying, “Oh, it’s great to have my stomach feel this way” when you’re constipated. It’s a lot better to be focused and moving. Clarity is quite lovely.
Tim Ferriss: So did the getting off of alcohol in and of itself dissipate the fire or the anger, or did the getting sober allow you to better deal with that in some way?
Frank Miller: It helps you understand when and where it’s appropriate. There’s plenty to be angry about but it’s not this free floating, “Am I mad at myself? I’m mad at the world.”
Tim Ferriss: What advice would you give to a dedicated novice who’s looking to get into comics?
Frank Miller: I thought, well, you could get into drinking.
Tim Ferriss: You get into drinking. Wait, what’s your favorite cocktail? No, comics. They’re a student of the craft, they’re obsessed, they’re dedicated. They have the raw ingredients that maybe Neal saw in you. What advice would you give to them?
Frank Miller: It’s what I said in the book, which is story, story, story. First, think of it as one craft, don’t think of writing and drawing. It’s one thing and it will become clear what it is. But beyond that, cartooning is taking things that are very complicated and making them quite simple. That’s where your mind should be going, more than anywhere else. At this stage, complication is not your friend. Convey information but then learn — I mean, pick up Scott McCloud’s book on understanding comics —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have it.
Frank Miller: — and see how he breaks down how comics work. At the same time, pick up Syd Field’s book on screenplay —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good advice.
Frank Miller: — and get a good sense for a simple approach to three-acts storytelling. You’ll use it for a year or two, and then you won’t be using it anymore but it gets you somewhere. Learn how to draw.
Tim Ferriss: How do you learn how to draw? I think this is in the book, Neal Adams telling you to go out and buy some toy cars so you can learn how to draw cars correctly.
Frank Miller: That was great advice.
Tim Ferriss: Great advice, right? What great advice or what a simple solve, what a simple solution. How does someone —
Frank Miller: Learn how to draw, like humans? Humans are the big problem and, oh, man, every dirty trick there is. I mean, I can give you some names of some books.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’d be great. Please.
Frank Miller: Okay, let’s see. George Bridgman.
Tim Ferriss: George Bridgman?
Frank Miller: Yeah. There’s no E in it, in Bridgman. There is one in George, but no in Bridgman. It’s The Complete Guide to Drawing from Life. It’s only about the figure.
Tim Ferriss: Why do you like that book? There’s so many books on drawing, why do you like this one?
Frank Miller: Because he’s at heart a cartoonist, because he treats the body like a machine so it’s easier to understand. You do get the gesture, but you’ll have to bring that yourself anyway. Stuff’s completely non-photographic. It’s somewhere between the thinking of Michelangelo and the thinking of a comic book artist.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. So the non-photographic, that seems critical here.
Frank Miller: There is another person people like a lot named Andrew Loomis.
Tim Ferriss: Andrew Loomis?
Frank Miller: Yeah, it’s L-O-O-M-I-S. I favor him less because his work has a sleeker, smoother look. I favor the more mechanical, muscular style. But usually any aspiring comic book artist will have both those books on the shelf.
Tim Ferriss: How did you learn perspective, structures? How did you learn how to work with perspective?
Frank Miller: Okay. The trick to perspective is to realize that it is a trick. It’s a complete lie, perspective does not exist. I mean, it’s an invention by mathematicians, so do keep that in mind when you worry about perspective. It’s a device that you apply to a drawing. But you know that when you look down this room, that lines seem to converge and so on. So what you do is, you rough out the basic shape of what you think something is, and then you converge a couple of those lines. They hit at a point and that becomes the horizontal. You can keep your verticals straight up, or you can give it an upper —
Tim Ferriss: Tilt.
Frank Miller: — or a lower tilt, and so on. There are books on perspective too, I just don’t know the names.
Tim Ferriss: But how did you develop your abilities with perspective?
Frank Miller: Imitating other comic book artists.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I have to say, and hopefully this doesn’t sound strange, but looking at this gigantic beast here, looking at, for instance — this is one of many, many different pages that I captured just to revisit. But when I look at some of these — this is the one I showed before, I’ll show it again. This one here. So you look at this two-page spread, and I’ll describe it for folks, but these are really stark, very, almost inversed color palettes, but although they’re black and white, of a dancer. And the elegant minimalism and some of the line work in this book makes me think of certain really old school illustrators like Leyendecker. And there’s an archetypal energy to this type of work.
And I remember in the documentary, to invoke Jim Lee’s name again, he said something like — he was talking about, I don’t know if it was Sin City or your work in general or you, but he said, “And then I could try A, B, or C, and then I’m sure that Frank would tell me I’m using too many lines.” It was something like that. And I thought it was —
Frank Miller: I did not!
Tim Ferriss: It was something like that.
Frank Miller: I can’t do what he does, so I make fun of it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and so I recall collecting — people should check out Jim Lee’s penciling too. Back in the day I collected, when he was working on the X-Men and stuff. Just looking at the anatomical work he did with Colossus and stuff.
Frank Miller: Jesus Christ.
Tim Ferriss: It’s amazing, amazing.
But this seems to access something different. And I’m wondering how you developed the economy of elegant line use and use of negative space like this use of black and white. Because part of the reason I asked about the perspective is I noticed, which is something you can only really notice in something that’s large format and produced this way is all of the perspective lines that have been erased. There’s a million perspective lines that have been erased in this, and —
Frank Miller: But the thing is that makes you feel the —
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. And then you have something like this here.
Frank Miller: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right. And this, if you can see this one I’m hitting with my knee?
Frank Miller: Now I see how he got those arms.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Your mind is creating all the perspective you need to make sense of this as a three-dimensional experience in your brain. But it looks like probably 40, 50, 60 lines of perspective have all been erased. How did you develop this style?
Frank Miller: I remember one time, I was early on in Sin City and I was talking with Dick Giordano. You know who he was?
Tim Ferriss: I know the name.
Frank Miller: Yeah, he was a comic book artist for a long time, mostly known as being an associate of Neal Adams. And he was looking at the early Sin City stuff, and you noticed the early Sin City work has much more line work in it than the later stuff. He was the best teacher in comics. He was a good artist and everything, but he was a great editor.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Frank Miller: And he mentored Klaus Janson for instance, and was a terrific influence over a lot of people. And he said, “Frank,” real New York/Italian, all the way to this guy. He said, “Frank, I’m looking at this Sin City you’re doing.” And he said, “And I’m thinking about some of the old guys. And I’m thinking, there was this old guy,” and he names — I can’t remember right now. And he said, “And he was doing stuff kind of like yours and eventually he just started laying in all the black areas first, put the lines in later. And he found I didn’t need so many lines.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s interesting.
Frank Miller: I went home, and the real look of Sin City was born because once the black was down, I went, “Hey, I’m more than halfway home. I’m there. I’ll just add a few little things here and there.” And I have worked that way ever since on everything.
Tim Ferriss: And at what point did you also, it seems like innovate with a, as I understand it, start to finish, first to last page, batch processing where instead of doing the penciling, the lettering, the inking, and the coloring on a per page basis, you’re basically doing the penciling for the entire book.
Frank Miller: That was Sin City as well.
Tim Ferriss: That was Sin City as well.
Frank Miller: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just so mind-blowing. It seems to me, in retrospect, that it makes so much sense to do it the way that you did it.
Frank Miller: Yeah. I decided I do all the tissue layouts, trace them all off into pencil drawings, then do all the panel borders. You don’t want to be around me on those days. And then lay on all the flat black areas. And what this did was it made it more fun every step of the way, and it sped the whole thing up like crazy.
Tim Ferriss: It must’ve sped it up.
Frank Miller: And it made the work so much better, it was idiotic.
Tim Ferriss: What is the —
Frank Miller: By the end of it, the line work was so spontaneous.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Frank Miller: Man.
Tim Ferriss: What is that first step that you mentioned with tissue?
Frank Miller: Well, I solved the basic compositional and drawing issues on a separate piece of tissue. And then my drawing —
Tim Ferriss: Which is just a type of paper with the tissue?
Frank Miller: It’s a vellum. It’s not really a tissue, it’s stronger than that. And it’s a type of drawing paper, but it’s nearly transparent. And I place that marker rough on — and my drawing board is a light table. And I put the actual piece of Bristol board on top of that and traced that off.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Frank Miller: So that I can move things around, I can change the size, I can replace things, and so on.
Tim Ferriss: So that was also done on Sin City. That’s wild. So a lot of innovation happened on Sin City.
Frank Miller: Oh, yes. That was a transformative piece of work.
Tim Ferriss: Why did so much coalesce during Sin City in that way?
Frank Miller: Well, therein lies a tale.
Tim Ferriss: I love tales.
Frank Miller: Well, no, it’s because everything was happening. I had broken away from the major publishers, was working with the then young Dark Horse Comics, and we tested the waters with each other, with the Martha Washington series, and with Hard Boiled. And I decided I was going to take my baby there. And so I just decided, “Okay, it’s time to reinvent the wheel. I’m not going to approach, I’m going to apply. Apply the stuff that I’ve been told.” Because I said to Mike Richardson, I said, “Look, we’ve done two science-fiction series and I know everything is superhero science fiction. I want to do a crime comic and in black and white.” And he didn’t flinch, and so we were rolling with that.
Tim Ferriss: So was it the ability to take that creative leap that seems like had been building inside you for a very long time? Is that the kind of inner creative unlock that then led to these various innovations? Is that the way that you would think about it? Or was it —
Frank Miller: Well, one thing does lead to another, but most of creative work is problem solving. It’s not, “God is speaking to me.” It’s, “How do I get that nose to look right?” It’s that sort of thing. And in this case it was how to get the look I’m after as efficiently as possible.
Tim Ferriss: I won’t show it again. I can pull it up on the screen as B-roll, but that right-hand page in particular of that female figure and the black, left portion of the torso, which is framed with black lining, and the right side from our perspective, framed with the white. Just the economy, the amount of meaning that is transmitted with such a relatively small amount of ink, I know it’s in some cases a lot of black in the background.
Frank Miller: There’s a lot of ink.
Tim Ferriss: — actually. It’s a lot of ink, I don’t know, but in terms of line work, that is sort of the latticework of the perception, it’s just so incredible.
Frank Miller: And in the early pages in Sin City, there was a lot of line work underneath all that. Towards the end, it was clicking along, just that was what it was going to be from birth.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Also something that comes to mind, at least for me, in the Japanese way of doing things. And there’s a lot of variability, of course, among Japanese artists and so on, but it’s very interesting how they apply detail. You might see a ton of detail in a small portion of a panel and then very little on the rest. You might see —
Frank Miller: I love that.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Or you might see a page —
Frank Miller: It’s like the [inaudible] approach to it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. And then you might have a page where it’s very fast-paced, the line works pretty sparse, and then there’s one panel that has a lot of detail. And the beauty in this comes also up in Understanding Comics with McCloud is how much work the brain does really effortlessly between the panels.
Frank Miller: Well, it’s also to where McCloud was applying behind McLuhan.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Frank Miller: Because there’s a lot of McLuhan thinking in McCloud.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve been loving the book, so thank you for sending me an early copy, Silenn. And I can’t wait until I can actually export all my highlights because there’s so many highlights that I’ve put into it. And what I want to also emphasize for folks, I really believe this, is that if you want to be good at anything, study people who are excellent at something. It does not have to be the same thing you are hoping to pursue.
Like if you study Jiro Dreams of Sushi or something like that, in an effort to become better at X and aim for the top of your field. That seems totally disparate, there’s still so many lessons you can take. And if humans are storymaking machines and that we often create meaning almost always from stories, then studying your work within the realm of comics and film, even if someone is not involved explicitly in comics or film, the lessons can still be applied. And I’ll be very curious and excited to see how people in industries and areas that can’t even be guessed at this point will implement some of the life lessons from the book. I’ll be very curious to see. It’ll be very fun.
I have to also mention, and I’ve wanted you to pronounce this name for me. Well, I’ve never thought I would meet you, but since I was a little kid, the Elektra that you did, that I want to say it was a lot of watercolor artwork, Bill, how do you say his last name?
Frank Miller: Sienkiewicz.
Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz?
Frank Miller: Sienkiewicz.
Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz.
Frank Miller: No, Sienkiewicz.
Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz. Okay. Ish.
Frank Miller: Sienkiewicz.
Tim Ferriss: Sienkiewicz. Exactly.
Frank Miller: Think Russian. Pretend you’re Russian. Pretend you’re Russian.
Tim Ferriss: That is a beautiful piece of work.
Frank Miller: Pretty amazing, pretty amazing.
Tim Ferriss: It’s amazing.
Frank Miller: And it was a berserk experience for both of us.
Tim Ferriss: Tell me, because that was —
Frank Miller: We had such a time.
Tim Ferriss: You had such a time, a good time.
Frank Miller: Oh, we were like two 12-year-olds just making a crazy comic.
Tim Ferriss: What was the experience like and why did you work well together? Maybe that’s worth digging into.
Frank Miller: Well, first of all, we like each other a lot.
Tim Ferriss: Great starting point.
Frank Miller: And it was one of those times that happened that you live for, in that, comics had been very restrictive for a very long time. And things like Dark Knight had started busting things open, Watchmen was out, and so on. And Bill had gone from being the guy who draws like Neal Adams to being more and more the guy was pulling in Ralph Steadman and doing all this stuff and really becoming his own man. He had just worked with Alan Moore and was looking for a much looser kind of arrangement because Alan’s a very dominating writer.
Tim Ferriss: Dominating in the sense that he has an idea of panel one, panel two…?
Frank Miller: He writes a very tight — he’s a clockmaker when he writes the story. Watchmen plays off that constantly. And Bill is a bucking bronco. So when Bill and I got together, they just opened Epic Comics at Marvel, back when Marvel was actually trying to loosen up a little bit before it became Marvel again.
Tim Ferriss: It’s easy for people to forget. Marvel went through some very hard times before the technology caught up sufficiently to end up with Marvel Studios and so on, but —
Frank Miller: No, I’m talking about when Marvel was really trying to bring in the European influences and stuff like that. It was quite an exciting time. Archie Goodwin was running a fascinating division there. I came up with a miniseries, supposed to be four issues of Elektra for Marvel Comics. And Marvel, when they saw what it was, the script was, they went, “This can’t be part of Marvel Comics. This is just, like, too goddamn weird.” And so it bumped over to the Epic division and, got to give them credit, they didn’t just say, “We won’t do it.” And then it went from four issues to eight issues. You know, whatever it was, and the whole, it’s like the lid flew off the pot that was on the stove.
Tim Ferriss: How did you give Bill enough rein as a bucking bronco?
Frank Miller: I didn’t.
Tim Ferriss: You didn’t?
Frank Miller: I wrote full scripts. He just drew whatever the fuck he wanted and I had to pull the whole thing back.
Tim Ferriss: Can you explain what full script means in this?
Frank Miller: Well, full script is like a screenplay.
Tim Ferriss: It is, yeah.
Frank Miller: Only a little stricter because he tells you what each panel number is and what exactly what goes in it and what the captions are.
Tim Ferriss: So you would send that to Bill and he’d be like, “Thanks, appreciate the effort, let me just…”
Frank Miller: But just what would come back would be much more abstract and much more daring and —
Tim Ferriss: It wouldn’t break the clock, it would still work.
Frank Miller: No, I wouldn’t send him an exploding tank and get back a bunch of tomatoes rolling down the street. No, but it required reinterpretation of my script. And I welcomed it though because I saw —
Tim Ferriss: That sounds fun.
Frank Miller: I saw brilliance was happening and it was fun. And just because of that though, the excitement grew, and I kept expanding the story. There’s all these unexpected elements that he’d throw in. I want to turn them into characters and stuff. And luckily Archie Goodwin was along for the ride. It was an absolute gas. I love that book.
Tim Ferriss: I still have it. I literally still have it on Long Island.
Let me ask you a question. It may go, no. This may be a dead end of a question, but I’m going to ask you anyway, and this is a question I often ask as we start to whine towards landing the plane here. If you had a billboard on which you could put anything non-commercial, metaphorically to get a message or something in front of billions of people, could be a statement, a quote, a word, an image, combination, what might you put on that billboard? Does anything come to mind?
Frank Miller: Whoa.
Tim Ferriss: A motto, a mantra, anything.
Frank Miller: I’m going to get very broad on this.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Frank Miller: Just say “Ask every question.”
Tim Ferriss: Ask every question.
Frank Miller: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean to you?
Frank Miller: Just means that we live in a time of silence and that people are leaving things unquestioned and unspoken. It’s not a good line, I can’t come up with a good one it seems.
Tim Ferriss: I think “Ask every question” is pretty good, but we can take a couple bites at the apple if you like.
Frank Miller: Yeah. How about “Just challenge?”
Tim Ferriss: Challenge?
Frank Miller: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, what does that mean to you?
Frank Miller: When you are confronted with things that everybody says, “Be ready to challenge,” something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Challenge. Challenge, push the wall, defy the code. If everybody says, “Do X,” if everybody says, “You must do Y.”
Frank Miller: At least say, “Why?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, why?
Frank Miller: “Why” is a pretty good one too. If you want to go with that.
Tim Ferriss: Why is a good one.
Frank Miller: It’s just why.
Tim Ferriss: I guess they go together. Both of them go together.
Frank Miller: Why don’t you go “Why?” with the question mark.
Tim Ferriss: Why? Ask — where’s the camera? There it is.
Frank Miller: Or, “Why’s it got to be that way?” Why’s it got to be that way? Why’s it got to be that way?
Tim Ferriss: And they all converge sort of in the same theme.
Frank Miller: Just trying to go against an age of pathological conformity.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, yes. Often subconscious too. Pathological conformity.
Frank Miller: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Ask why? Why does that have to be this way? Also with your own thinking. It applies everywhere.
Frank Miller: Everywhere.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, everywhere.
Frank, thank you so much. It’s great to see you again.
Frank Miller: Real pleasure, man.Tim Ferriss: And everybody, you can find Frank on Instagram @frankmillerofficial. The website is frankmillerink.com. Where’s the camera? You can now pre-order, so absolutely check out Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling. I’ve been reading it. I’m going to finish it over the next couple of days. Have really been taking a lot of notes, I also took a bunch of notes from this conversation, and we will have links to everything that we talked about in the show notes, as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. Frank Miller will be the only Frank Miller. If you search by name for guest, you will find this episode. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself and ask “Why? Why? Why?” Thanks for tuning in, everybody.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, and Much More (#831) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-10-20 22:02:41
Frank Miller is regarded as one of the most influential and awarded creators. He began his career in comics in the late 1970s, first gaining notoriety as the artist, and later writer, of Daredevil for Marvel Comics. Next, came the science-fiction samurai drama Ronin, followed by the groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One with artist David Mazzuchelli.
Following these seminal works, Miller fulfilled a lifelong dream by doing an all-out crime series, Sin City, which spawned two blockbuster films that he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. Miller’s multi-award-winning graphic novel 300 was also adapted into a highly successful film by Zack Snyder.
His upcoming memoir, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling, is now available for pre-order.
Please enjoy!
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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.
“Aristotle’s definition of happiness was a devotion of all of one’s energies along the lines of excellence. … In an ideal life, that would apply to every moment you have, but it is a guiding principle to a creative life.”
— Frank Miller
“I like to use [liquid frisket] with ink because it creates an element of chaos.”
— Frank Miller
“Get the hell out of my way.”
— Frank Miller
“Drama is, essentially, conflict. And if you go all the way back to the Norse myths—but you could take it all the way from the Norse myths through to Terms of Endearment or whatever else—those are all full of Sturm und Drang.”
— Frank Miller
“A Marvel comic isn’t a story every month. A Marvel comic is an ongoing soap opera that you’re following.”
— Frank Miller
“My methodology has changed over time. … I used to really believe there was a way and I was seeking the way to do it. Now I do believe in letting a story nudge me in another direction. I believe in trusting the muse more than I used to.”
— Frank Miller
“Ask every question.”
— Frank Miller
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Want to hear from Frank Miller’s creative partner who quit the Director’s Guild just to ensure Frank got co-director credit? Listen to my conversation with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, in which we discussed the “fear-forward” way of life, burning bridges then running across them, how limitations fuel creativity, journaling as a superpower, the legendary $7,000 financing of El Mariachi, and much more.
The post Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, and Much More (#831) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
