If you’ve ever wondered how the Aghori sadhus in Varanasi are able to stand on one leg for years together, Todd Sampson, who presents the show Body Hacks, might just have the answer. The show, which Todd describes as an ‘adventure documentary series’, will see the presenter meet some of the “most extraordinary people in the world. I deconstruct and decode how these people live and what they do differently from the rest of us and how this impacts the human body,” says the 49-year-old Australian.
Ranked as one of the most influential marketing executives in Australia, Sampson worked as a strategist with a marketing and advertising agency in Sydney, following which he began to work as a host and presenter of documentary and adventure series full time. His first show, Redesign My Brain (that won Documentary of the Year in 2013) focused on how to improve one’s thinking speed, memory, and creativity; while his second show Life on the Line, shows the audience how the world around us is basically defined by science and physics.
Science meets adventure
His Body Hack series (currently filming its third season), meanwhile, has him exploring different cultures around the world, and sees him trying to understand these cultures using science. “The process is that I identify a culture or a sub group that I find interesting, and they do things differently. I then make sure they have a cultural spread around the world and then I put a veil of science over it. I look at it and go, ‘Do those people use science or can I use science to explain what they do differently,” says Sampson adding, “I have a running list of 40 or 50 cultural societies that are unique and every year, I start the research process on three or six of them, and I just see if there is a good story there. If there is, we just go explore,” he offers.
Ask him what makes this show different and he says, “If you look at the kind of shows in a similar genre — like Man vs Wild for instance, the formats are quite simple — they focus on adventure for young people, while science shows tend to be overly complicated sometimes, and not interesting to young people. On my show, we join both those genres together — we create an adventure science show — primarily an adventure show with a backbone of science. What we found is that a lot of young people are interested because it is a way of learning about culture, diversity, human performance, in a way that is fun. They get to travel the world, and even learn something.”
Sadhus and stuntmen
Through the course of the show, Sampson has visited only one country twice — India. “India was one of the most eye-opening places I have been and I experienced some things one can only experience there. The Indian episodes cover a lot of things — the ability to manage pain, the ability to use meditation, the power of faith to overcome fear and push yourself beyond. A lot of these are relevant in our daily lives,” he says.