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password.com slash Tim. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome
to another episode of the Tim Ferris. Show where it is my job to interview world class performers
across many different disciplines. My guest today I have wanted to have on the podcast for many
years and we finally did it. Craig Foster. Craig Foster has many adventures, many lessons to share,
including experiences with the Kalahari Bushman, legendary trackers and hunters,
his experiences with great white sharks in kelp forests, his experiences with octopus. Yes,
octopus is not octopi. Perhaps you've seen his film, My Octopus Teacher. There are so many lessons
to be learned from Craig and so many things that you can do in your life, in your backyard today
based on this conversation. But who is Craig? Let me give you his bio. Craig Foster is an Oscar
and BAFTA winning filmmaker, naturalist author and ocean explorer. His films have won more than
150 international awards. He's the co-founder of the Sea Change Project and NGO dedicated to the
long-term conservation and regeneration of the Great African Sea Forest. His film that I mentioned,
which became a mega mega hit on Netflix. My octopus teacher has led to making the Great African
Sea Forest a global icon. His new book is amphibious soul, Finding the Wild in a Team World. You can
find him online at seachangeproject.com and we will link to everything in the show notes. Two caveats,
number one, I got very excited in this conversation because many of the topics we explored are really
top of mind for me and of deep, deep personal interest and our very high priorities in my life. So,
what does that mean? I talked a lot at a couple of points. Sorry, in advance. That's what happens.
Sometimes I get nervous. I talk too much. We all do it. Or at least I do. So sorry about that.
Number two, we actually had an equipment malfunction. Now, that doesn't really affect your learning
experience because the audio quality will be high, but we switched from backup to primary or
primary to backup at least once. And so the tone changes slightly, but it's still very, very high
quality and yet again, two is one and one is none. So always have a backup. Thank you, Jaco Willink
and others for teaching me that lesson as well as Morgan Spurluck. Thank you, Morgan. And now,
with our further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging, very practical conversation with Craig Foster,
where we talk about rediscovering nature. We talk about rebuilding your nervous system. The oldest
language on earth will describe and define what that means, adventures of all types, different
approaches you can take, experiments you can run. There's so much to this conversation. So enjoy.
Craig, so nice to finally meet. I have wanted to connect with you for quite a few years. So thank
you for making the time. Incredible to be here. So I'm having the same thing. I've listened to so
many of our podcasts and I've always wanted to talk to you. So that's very exciting. I thought we
would start with just a slice of life. We had our first text exchange this morning. And I shot
you a quick note and I said, I'm really looking forward to connecting. And would you mind
describing for the audience your response and your morning, perhaps, or at least what you were
doing prior to texting? Sure. So just before coming on, I went for my swim in the Great
African Sea forest, which is just as 50 meters to the right of, yeah. It's a very wild, windy day
today. So that the technique is to swim long distances along the coast because that underwater
tracking is quite difficult. And you're hoping to pick up something interesting. I was thinking,
oh, it's not much happening. And suddenly I saw this enormous white shape. And just below me was
the biggest stingray in the world. I missed the biggest species in the world. They're up to
16, 17 feet long, 14 feet wide. Incredible animal. And what is strange about this animal
term was it was absolutely white. They normally dark gray or black. And it was covered in a very
fine layer of sand that was over the slime that's on the skin. So it was this dark wild forest with
a, you know, 30 knot wind above me. And this massive animal in the kelp forest. And then
it actually was watching me for a while. And you have to be incredibly careful with these animals.
They're gentle. But if they do get agitated and they get a spine in you, it's pretty much
came over. It's a necrotic poison that rots out your organs. So you've got to be super careful.
They teach you to move very slowly in the water. And then the animal came up right to the surface.
And that's where it's weighing about a ton. So it was actually like weighing down part of the
the kelp forest. And I was just managed to glide with it for maybe 10 minutes right next to just,
trying to keep my vibrations right down. So it was just such an incredible feeling to be in that
wild space with this giant beautiful animal. And this, you know, never seen a white one like that
in all that all my time. We're going to cover a lot of ground literally and metaphorically in this
conversation. So it's not going to be all underwater. But it seems like your underwater experiences
started very, very, very early. Could you describe the day of your birth, please? I mean, I obviously,
I don't remember it, but I've been told this story many times by my parents. They brought me home
from the nursing home. And we lived in a little wooden bungalow that was actually half the house
was below the high water mark. So it was a crazy place to live. You know, the waves used to smash
the windows in. But they took me straight from the nursing home and dumped me in that Atlantic ocean,
which is probably 12 degrees centigrade, which is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And I mean, you know,
it's quite a shock, obviously, for a young child, a screamed like hell. But that was our kind of
family tradition. And then I, from a very early age, was in the intertidal diving at three years old.
My mother, when I was in the womb, would be pretty much in the water every day while she was pregnant.
So that Atlantic ocean has just always been part of my life. So when you say family tradition,
that means that prior generations were also dumped in the ocean right after being... Apparently,
apparently, yes. And I did the same with my son, but I wasn't, I felt that I couldn't take him
immediately. So I waited till he was, I think, a week or so old. And his actual, his little belly
button actually broke off and washed out to see when I took him in. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to
span from the ocean to the Kalahari here. And I'm front loading a couple of stories just to give
people a buffet, a few tastings of different dishes. I was actually, I wouldn't say introduced
to your work, but harshly introduced to your work by a friend, a mutual friend. Well, actually,
it was Boyd, Varty, who's been on the podcast. The Lion Tracker is a guide to life as one of his books.
And also separately, a friend of mine, Alex, who lives in South Africa as a master tracker.
Wow. Yeah. Alex, I name well. He's a wonderful guy. There you go. All right. So I've spent a
bunch of time with Alex and Renys. Oh, amazing. And this is fun to explore with you because we're
just meeting each other. But we've been exposed to the others work. The great dance. And I found
the video of the great dance and found it endlessly fascinating. But since this is a bit of inside
baseball, would you please describe this film and how it came to be? I don't really genus this story.
Yeah. That's going back a long time. So this was the late 90s. And my brother and myself had been
living on remote islands in different parts of the world, just living wild for many, many months.
And we came back to Southern Africa to South Africa. And we'd always been fascinated by the
sun and these incredible trackers from the Calahari. And we'd heard of this extraordinary,
almost sort of as a myth that there were these last master trackers who could still run down animals
and put themselves against the animal without bone error. And there could only run in the extreme
heat over 40 degrees or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So we had this crazy wild mission to go up
there and see if we could be the first people to film this. And it was very extreme, very, very,
very extreme. We were like skeletons after these shoots. We were just lost so much weight and was
so intense. But we eventually managed to get the sacred hunt, this hunt by running. And we met
these extraordinary trackers who became real mentors. And they've always stayed with me
on my whole life that they immersed us in a wild existence that was it felt like they'd taken us
back 10,000, 20,000 years in time. And everything started lighting up in me. I was so far
outside of nature I was compared to them. And that started this niggling in my head to try and get
eventually inside of her. And inside of her referring to mother nature. All right, so let's
take a closer look at the sun, which hunters for a moment. There are few scenes that really
stuck out to me. And this is not necessarily me threading together cohesive narrative. But one of
them was after a day of tracking and hunting, assembling, I guess I wouldn't say they're
thorn bushes, but some type of brush around the fire so that they can tell stories recount the day
and then sleep while there are other animals certainly about not all prey necessarily at night.
And it really did strike me that that scene could have been from thousands of years ago,
more or less unchanged. And for definition's sake, you said, run down animals. I want to paint
a picture for folks. So this is also called persistence hunting. And the reason the temperature is
important, please correct me if I'm making like the any aspect of this is that, for instance, if
you were in New England in the United States and you tried to run down a white tail deer, good luck.
It's going to be very, very challenging. But when the temperatures are high enough, why can humans
on an endurance basis and survival basis outlast something like a kudu or an antelope? How's that
possible? It's basically because we can sweat and keep ourselves cool, whereas there's animals
overheat. And this isn't, I mean, just to be clear, so this is not something that happens very
often. This is a sacred hunt that maybe happens once every three or four years. And it's done almost
a religious experience. So, and it's very dangerous for the humans as well. They've got almost no water.
So they can also quite easily die. So it's this testing of their ability and their strength and
their incredible ability to trap. What is the most fascinating thing to me was that after certain
point in time and the hunt that we managed to film took over four hours. And for I'd say at least
three of those hours, Karuha the tracker was not following the physical tracks. He had gone into
an altered state and was somehow mysteriously locked onto that animal. And these kudu are like the
ghosts of the bush. They're impossible to follow unless you're at a master level. But the kudu is
doing everything to artwork him. And he would just go straight across the tracks and find it in
this impossibly dense bush. The central Kalahari, you can't see more than a hundred meters. You
can't see the animal at all. So 90% of the time he's running at quite a high speed and he can't see
anything. And his body is like a radar system. And I've come across this ability with other
indigenous people, even ocean navigators, that the body in its primal state has this
got this incredible ability to be able to follow things and find things. So that's how it worked.
I recall just to give people a reference as well. If they're interested in digging into this,
there's a book called The Wayfinders by Weight Davis that has a long chapter on Polynesian navigation,
which blew my mind. I won't go into great detail with that now.
I know that book and I know those Polynesian voyages. I know, I know Thompson Well.
It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's extraordinary. And then there's really, if you make a mistake,
you're dead. That's exactly the same kind of thing. In fact, I spoke to
Nine Nour at an incredible day with him, you know, in Falspe, we dive together when he circumnavigated
the world. I spoke to him about the song trackers. And he was like, yes, that's exactly what we do.
And we're using our bodies and obviously the stars and everything as this navigation device.
And you might recall his great teacher, Papa Mal, used to lie asleep. And when that ocean
going canoe moved one degree off course, his body would wake up and he'd tell him. So even a
sleep, he was able to do this extraordinary navigation. The parallels are really striking to me,
even though I had no contact with Polynesian navigators. And I'm probably getting my terminology
wrong with one thing that cognitive experience, their experience of consciousness, the way that
they parallel process is I think something that would seem very foreign to most people who live 18
interests away from a laptop screen or in an urban jungle most of the time. How would you describe
their mode of existence? And by that, I don't mean what they do, what type of house they live in,
but more how they experience the world. How is that different from what most people say? I'm sitting
in a high rise in Austin, Texas. Sure, a lot of people listening to this are Emma Los Angeles
or New York. How are those experiences of the world most different in your mind?
What was fascinating to me was an immediately classy cognare comes to mind, this incredible
bow hunter that we worked with. And a lot of the other son I've worked with over the years,
you'll be walking along, tracking, looking for sign, looking for tracks. And suddenly,
there will just be this beautiful laughter that boils up inside him and just comes up. And you're
looking around to see what is funny or what's amused him. And it's not something from the outside
world. It's this primal joy of being in that space and being so connected to the wild, it just
comes up. And it's happens quite often and it's this tremendous joy. Despite, if you think about
many of the lives of the people I've worked with are very hard and extremely poor and it's
difficult sometimes to survive. Yet, there's this innate joy, this kind of what has been coined by some
researchers I've worked with, called wilderness rapture. And a lot of other people have noticed
this in indigenous societies, this extraordinary sense of joy that seems to be connected to
being very embedded in the natural world. So that's, I mean, I've met also very joyful people
in our society. And obviously some people have just got more or less of that. But it seems to be
very apparent in some of these people who deeply connected to the wild.
When I think about your physical location, as we speak, and also as well documented in my octopus
teacher, fantastic film, of course, not the only person who feels that way. You have within striking
distance and you have had it seems for a lot of your life within striking distance. And this is a
term I've ended up using a lot in the last few years when people ask me where I most want to
live, say when I have a family in or around immersive nature. And I would draw distinction for me at
least experientially between say where I am now, where I am within a few blocks of walking on a
dirt trail around a man-made lake, which is a section of a river. And there are some beautiful
trees around town like here in Austin. And you feel like you are around nature, but it doesn't have
the vastness that you might perceive when you are, say in the mountains when you're in an alpine
environment where you feel dwarfed by your surroundings. Or I would imagine in a kelp forest
in the ocean. And you see a 14 foot sting, right? And which is not to say everyone needs to have
these experiences all the time. But I'm wondering how your proximity to that affects your life,
your mental health contrasted maybe with times when you have not been close to that. Because when
I think about what I would love to have family, not just for myself, but also for kids,
I would really love to be within very easy access of this type of immersive experience. And I'm
wondering if you could share your thoughts on that very long-winded mini TED Talk that I just gave.
It gave me time to think, which is great. I think of course there is a big advantage to being close to
areas which are filled with biodiversity. The human psyche somehow knows that and it reacts and it
does feel more relaxed, more at home, and there's all sorts of reasons for that. But there's another
factor to this as well, Tim. I've sort of searched for wildness my whole life and struggled actually
to find it in many ways. And I've done very extreme things to try and get close to wildness like
diving with crocodiles and this kind of thing. But strangely enough, when I've sometimes felt the
closest to wild nature is when I've just spent time with some small animals, say like limps,
which look really like little stones on the rocks they hardly move. But I've got to know those
little animals intimately. I've got to know how they move away from the sun. I've seen them
looking after their gardens. I've seen how they broadcasts spawn. I've got incredible intimacy
with them. And that has let me sort of slip inside their lives and that somehow is deeply satisfying.
So you could in your environment say you got very close to even a single group of insects.
You could be much closer to wild nature and to what I call the mother of mothers.
Then if you were in an area that was in the middle of Africa where it's just you're teaming with
game. So it does very much depend on your ability to immerse and see these what I often refer to
as the secret lives of these animals. So it's even possible. It's more about your
observance and your detailed look. It obviously helps a lot if you're surrounded by these things,
but it's the intimacy that makes all the difference. And this is this idea of mine of like,
well, you feel like you kind of outside or inside of nature. And you can get inside even through
a tiny animal and ant and insect if you spend enough time. Let's talk about maybe an extreme
example of intimacy. And then I'm going to pull in an example that I believe you've given
of one tree in New York. So we're going to bring it to New York, but we're going to go back to the
Colourary Alex who I mentioned earlier, Alex Vanden Heaver. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
I don't speak African but it's probably close enough for the purposes of
fun to hear. And there we go. I knew it wasn't. I knew it was going to be one of those
Volkswagen type of situations. I know that's not Dutch by the way folks, but we're African. In any case,
Alex encouraged people to check out tracker Academy, which is an NGO non-profit, which
Alex is deeply involved with, which I've also supported. And they do fantastic work on a number
of levels. He has incredible respect and admiration for the tracking abilities of the sun or the
sun. I'm not sure how to pronounce that correctly. What makes them so impressive?
Alex, he himself, I mean, he is a master tracker. What he can do below is my mind when I watch him
identify tracks and follow tracks at high speed. It is almost incomprehensible, although I have
some basic vocabulary now because I've spent time with him and others studying tracking at a very,
very one-on-one level. What makes the hunters you spend time with in the Colourary? So particularly
fascinating to see that they could observe animals with their technique moving up to one and a
half kilometers away. So they can feel a predator moving one and a half kilometers away and you
can't see more than a hundred meters. And they're doing that by listening to the ripples of sound
that the small birds are giving off. So these ripples come through and these incredibly subtle sounds
they then feel and see in their mind's eye in this oral picture that predator moving. And they can
feel a big, a raptor flying as well from a long distance away. And then they will pinpoint
sometimes when it makes a kill and they'll even know what animals being killed by these reactions
a lot of the time. So it's just, it feels at first like total magic until you realize the how this
whole bird language story works. What makes them so incredible is I think this incredible legacy,
so their lineage goes back 120,000 years. So it's this tradition that's been passed down for
in a enormous time period longer than any other group of people on the planet. And I think that is
one of the many factors that make them so extraordinary. If we pull back and try to bring that,
say to people listening in the US, there are a lot of people listening internationally, but plenty of
people in the US, I recall coming back from South Africa from the Sabi Sands Reserve. And the fauna
certainly in Florida are going to be totally different in the United States. But even in my backyard,
I could or near anyone's house. If you have some greenery, even in an urban environment,
coyotes, raccoons, like you can actually start to try to notice these small things that do change.
And if you develop a basic vocabulary, you can start to try to figure out
possible gender direction, speed. And it seems to just give you a greater fidelity of perception
in these experiences. You've said, I believe you can't believe everything you read on the internet.
So please feel free to fact check this. But you said that if prison took one tree in New York and
figured out how that tree changed over 365 days, what animals interacted with it, what insects live
in there, how the tree is surviving, et cetera, you could have quite a large effect. And this really
rings true for me. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that or give other examples of how people,
even if they are in a largely urban environment, how they can cultivate this type of awareness
and feeling of interconnectedness. You can do it in cities. I've seen in an incredible
trackers in America doing this. I've got a great friend, John Young, his incredible tracker,
bird language expert who wrote the definitive book on bird language. But even on a simple level,
Tim, if you just start to look at a small area where there are few insects and maybe a few birds,
maybe a one or two amphibians, and you start to just take notes and observe every day to say for
half an hour. And after a while, it will be you'll be absolutely shocked at what you couldn't see
before. It'll be like so obvious and it was totally invisible to you before. It's like,
can't believe I missed all these things. And it's not just about the leaves changing color,
but there are thousands of these things going on. And unless you take notice, you will miss.
Nature then becomes this incredible teacher. And it's just about persistence. You don't have to have
any great intellect or anything. You just have a little cell phone camera, some notes, and you
just start observing these things. And suddenly this incredible invisible world becomes visible to you.
And it becomes very fascinating. And then you think after a year or two of doing it, okay,
I really know what's going on. And then if you persist, oh my goodness, there's another incredible
layer. And it just keeps going on and on and on. And you basically fall in love with this
extraordinary biosphere that is keeping us alive. And you start to have this conversation, this
incredible wild conversation with this environment that's around us. I bounce around a lot in these
conversations. So please forgive me with what might seem like a non-sequitur, but I want to make
sure that I don't forget to ask you a bit about free diving and breath holds. And then we're going
to come back to the thread that we're looking behind temporarily. You have perhaps a unique experience
in listening to episodes of this podcast. I believe you'd mentioned prior to us recording
that you've listened to something dozens or close to a hundred episodes, but while holding
your breath. And I was hoping you could elaborate on that. And also perhaps share, and this is not
prescriptive advice. People have to be very, very careful in the water. And especially if they're
doing any type of breath training to avoid shallow water blackouts and things like that. But I'm
wondering if you could just describe your breath hold and cold exposure practice, although maybe
it's not explicitly for cold. And then perhaps add to that how much of the breath hold capability
you think is in-built because I believe both of your parents have done quite a lot of diving.
And how much of it is trainable if you could speak to that. Yeah, absolutely right.
So every morning I do a breath hold practice where I do deep breathing and then I hold my breath for
say three to five minutes, do it three or four times. And I quite like having some really
interesting distractions. I don't feel like the desire to breathe in your podcasts have been the
sort of favorite thing to listen to. I love so many of them. And I do this because it makes one
feel very relaxed. It builds the immune system and of course it helps with the diving.
But one's got to be very careful never to do any of these breathing techniques close to actually
going in the water. You probably want at least half an hour or more away from that. I never do these
breathing things and then go into the water. And you know any free diving I will only take
two or three deep breaths before I go in a dive. You've got to be so careful with that.
The cold exposure I've always spent the last 12 years pretty much diving every single day.
So I've climatized myself to the cold. Feel mostly very comfortable in cold water for an hour or
so. But if I haven't slept or if I'm particularly stressed about something or not feeling well,
that changes radically. It's amazing how the body's ability to thermoregulate tells you how
your mind is feeling. So that can plummet radically. So if it's a full-going well,
then I can stay in for quite a long time. And what I love about the cold is that it feeds the
brain with these extraordinary chemicals. You know, it dopamine the noradrenaline and all these
beautiful chemicals that make you feel really good and motivated and set the day up beautifully.
So it also helps the underwater tracking because it's somehow the cold makes your mind sharper.
And I try and relax a lot so I don't get much cortisol going in. It actually, even though I could
obviously spend longer in the water with a wet suit, I prefer the an hour or so.
And with all these amazing chemicals from the cold that help me focus and understand the secret
lives of these animals. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to
the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and
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Tim and use Code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's live momentus, livmomentos.com slash Tim
and Code Tim for 20% off. I would love to hear a little bit more about underwater tracking because
that would be, you know, Greek is hard enough for me. Let's call that terrestrial tracking and then
I imagine that underwater is like jumping from Greek to Chinese if you've never read Chinese in
the sense that in South Africa with Alex and Renius, you have smell. So it turns out that at least
male leopard urine smells like burnt popcorn and you can smell it pretty clearly. It smells
exactly like burnt popcorn. It's unbelievable, uncanny. And then you see the alarm calls from
vervet monkeys or different types of birds, frankilins. And based on that, they can identify whether
it's a python or this or that in which direction, how far away it is, it's unbelievable. So you have
those auditory cues as well and much more as you know. What are some of the components or indicators
in underwater tracking? At first, you know, I struggled for several years. I had this idea. I got
incredibly inspired by the sun in the calahari and I thought, could I ever track underwater? And
it's just seemed impossible because track gets put down in the next world washes it away. So there's
nothing there. And then I started to notice the slime trails. So a lot of the molasks leave very
subtle slime trails and those collect tiny particles of sand. And if you're not looking very carefully
or never noticed those, but they're actually everywhere. It's like, oh, question her. So that was
the first track I saw and was very excited. And then I started seeing all these tracks on the backs
of animals like that ray that I told you about. So the molas are interacting with that ray and
I could tell how long that animals has been resting because of that. They're enormous number of tiny
little marks that the predators make. You know, once you know all the drill holes, you can tell
who's been in an area, who's been eating who, and by the shininess of the shell and the hot
other things you can tell the timing, their bite marks everywhere. They are literally
10,000 and thousands of these subtle signs that it's taken me 10 years to slowly put together.
Because there's no manuals on this. There's no books. As far as I know, nobody's really done this
in the bigger aquatic picture. So it did take a very long time to figure it all out.
How is, in this leading question, of course, maybe the answer is it hasn't, but how is that
transferred to experiences outside of the water? Not necessarily in a tracking capacity, but
how have those experiences transcended underwater tracking? First of all, it's made my desire to be
better tracking on land stronger. So now I've an example of that. Like a seven-gill shark or a
great white shark, tiger shark, that kind of thing. So it's fairly safe to be with those animals
and sometimes there's an enormous number of them together in the case of the seven gills
is being with 55, 60 of them and they each the size of a line and they hunt seals, they hunt dolphins,
but they don't know that I'm prey. So it's quite safe to be with them. But what has happened?
And I've got a lot of relationships with these smaller creatures. And because of that, it feels as
if I'm not as reliant on my human relationships. Because I have this, it feels like family,
like kin in the water after a while, many years. You just feel this tremendous love for these creatures.
And they've taught me so much and they have a real teachers for me. So I love them and then
I have these bonds so that the human relationships on land, I don't feel I need as much from them.
So I think my relationship with my wonderful wife has become better because of that
and with a lot of close friends, family. It's something happens in the psyche and if you've
imagined like we've throughout prehistory for countless hundreds of thousands of years, we've
had these relationships with all these species. Now in many cases, it's totally taken away. But
where's that going to go? Where's all that relationship going to go? And it mostly goes, I think,
to put more pressure on human relationships. So that's one of the things I felt quite
profoundly. Maybe you could tell a story, if you wouldn't mind, I came across a story. I'd
love for you to tell it. And hopefully this will be enough of a cue. This was from an interview
you did with Scott Ramsey, I believe, about a keep-clawless otter, very intimate encounter. And
I'd love for you to perhaps tell that story because I may have some follow-up questions.
That's amazing. The ability to dig things out from the deep past.
Good tracking, Tim. That's a long time ago. So this was actually in the early days. I was probably
I'm guessing now three years into diving every day. And I was questioning myself, I was going
in the early morning, was freezing middle of winter. And I think, what the hell am I doing here?
Doing this is a really going to pay off. Am I just going mad? And I was about halfway through the
dive. And I suddenly felt a fairly large animal under my sort of periphery vision. And thought,
oh my goodness, this is a Cape Clawless otter. And especially in those days, it's changed slightly
now. But these animals are super shy. Some people who have lived here their whole lives have
never seen one. So it was very exciting. And my instinct was to keep still and not turn to face
the animal. Because I know that, you know, from working with a lot of wild animals, they see them
our mouths and our fronts as the aggressive part that maybe will bite them. So I just kept quite
still and just looked out the corner of my eye. And this animal became more and more curious.
And I was amazed to actually feel it starting to touch my feet. They've got these incredible
dexterous hands. Clawless front paws three claws on the back. And it was just this electric energy
of this animal actually making physical contact without me doing anything. And I kept still
and then it moved up my side. And then I just saw this unbelievable whiskered face and these
incredible bright eyes just looking straight into my mask. And it reached out and started touching
my face. It was so overwhelming that I was actually in a shed a few tears in the mask. And it was
very powerful. And then the animal was swimming around and bouncing off the ocean floor. They're
very playful, beautiful animals. And it was just, oh my god, now I know why I'm here. This is just
incredible. And I actually was so overwhelming. I couldn't take it for too long. It was so much and
so powerful. I got out the water. And this otter followed me right into the shallows and was
popping its head out and making this high pitch sound. It's almost to call me back in. It was
very strange. And I didn't really know what was going on. And afterwards I did a lot of research
and found out that there's a very long tradition of humans hunting with wild otters. It goes back deep
into prehistory. And I wondered, I mean, I don't know for sure at all. If this animal had a deep
memory and was somehow trying to reconnect with that heritage or if it was just curious and you know,
wanted to look and feel the strange, the sort of primate, flopping around in the water.
That's incredible. And by hunting with you mean some type of partner hunting, kin to maybe
coyotes and badgers in North America, which for a long time people considered a myth. And it had
been passed down through oral tradition among some Native American tribes and lone behold with
various trail cams and remote triggers. You can now see this type of footage of these two species
cooperating. It's wild. I didn't know that. That's incredible. You see it. There's footage.
People can find it online. I'll try to put it in the show notes of a coyote comes into frame and it
jumps down much like a domesticated dog, kind of a downward dog tail wagging like a puppy might do
to a illicit play. And then there's this badger waddling around behind it. Then they're off to go
do some night hunting together. It's remarkable. Wow. So when you say hunting with humans,
give any more details on what that might have looked like or what otters and humans would hunt.
And why did it make sense to hunt together? So this, Hori actually came through my wife, Swati,
who grew up for all her life in India. So conservation journalist had her own wildlife show on TV
and she knew people from Bangladesh, the last few people who were still practicing this in some
form and they hunt for fish and then the fish get shared between the humans and the otters. But I
think it goes back in a much, much deeper, deep, deep in time. And if your imagination you start
going and imagine these early humans, how many interactions they would have had with wild creatures
and the possibilities that what they would have got up to I think could be pretty extraordinary.
I'm fascinated by interspecies cooperation when it's sort of the most unlike airborne predators
while the the mongoose kick up the insects and the birds get the insects. Oh, it's amazing.
It's fascinating to me. I see it in the kelp forest. These are lion's says. We see it with the
octopus and the superclipus. What was the second animal that you mentioned? A superclipus. It's a
rockfish. A type of rockfish and they follow the octopus hunting around and they pick off and scavenge.
It's not too clear exactly what the octopus might get out of it. They're probably acting as in the
same way like the birds along call. So the bigger predator comes in and the fish will tell the octopus.
Why did you decide to write amphibious soul? Subtítital finding the wild in a tame world and it's rare
that a book exactly resonates with what has been deeply on my mind for certainly the last few years.
But could you just speak to the genesis of this? How did this come about? Writing books is hard,
at least for me. How did this come about for you? I went through a pretty tough period after the
film came out. I wasn't in any way expecting or be ready to be exposed to hundreds of millions
of people on Netflix. It was a huge shock for me. And part of it was trying to come out of that
space and just to get down on paper what was in my head. But I also had this feeling of this
relationship with all these animals that I mentioned to you. I just wanted so much to tell their
stories. I'd learned so much beyond the octopus. Obviously that film was very much focused on that
one animal, that one story. And I had this strange feeling of this. I didn't even know what it
meant at the time, but it kept coming up this amphibious soul. What the hell is that? And it felt like
much like I think you maybe feel that I was living a double life. Part of my life was wild and
connected to three million years of deep stuff was so strong. But yet I could feel in my deep design
that I was completely, I was born wild. I'm a wild animal. These creatures that I interact
have taught me. I'm a wild animal. So how could I find that balance? And it was almost like I was
walking along the shore and then the ocean to the one side was my wild self and the land to the
right was this tame self. And I was trying desperately to find a balance because you can't go
back to fully wild existence. That door is completely shut for us now. But how could I
find this balance? And certainly not easy. I don't pretend to have found this incredible
perfect balance. But I must say when I practice all these things that I've tried to put in the book
about retaining the wildness, I do feel a lot more centered and a lot calmer. Don't get me wrong. I
love good cup of coffee. I love watching movies. I love all the incredible things in science. I love
the science. So I love the tame world as well. But if I get drawn too much in there, I feel my nervous
system just ratchets it up and I can't sleep properly and I feel odd. So it's just about trying to
find that balance and I'm very passionate about the subject. It strikes me that this has become
more perhaps salient for me in the last 10 to 15 years in particular. But to be really well adapted
to a almost exclusively modern existence requires you to somewhat be a freak of nature if that makes
sense. In the same way that there are super sleepers people who have the genetic predisposition and
capability to feel fully rested on four hours of sleep, four and a half hours of sleep. And these
people do exist. There's predictive power and looking at their say genotype. And it is something
that you see, but it is not something that is common or the default by any stretch. And in the last
let's just call it decade and particularly in less five years each year scheduling. I don't have
the access that you have on a daily basis, but scheduling a week say for an annual bohunt. I've
done bohunting for a long time now and I go once a year typically and blocking out another week
or 10 days for a rafting trip and another segment of time for a group trip with friends to spend
time in the mountains doing ski touring. Those points of reconnection or reactivation of that
felt sense of connectedness seemed to me to be so critical for their carryover effect into the rest
of the year that it's hard to overstate at least for me the importance. It's part of the reason why
I'm so excited about this book. And I'm wondering I'm going to give you a few cues and I'd love to hear
you expand on any of these. Could I just say something to add to that. I'd had exactly those
experiences like you're saying. It's just suddenly you got the fuel to be able to operate
well for weeks or even months after that experience like you know one of those experiences. But
it hits so hard when I had this very fortunate experience to spend a month on this research station
on this very very remote island thousands of kilometers off East Africa. It's a near pristine
environment so it looks and feels like the earth was 50,000 years ago. Everywhere you look
the animals it is teeming it is mind bending in terms of what is there. But what was most fascinating
term was how that near pristine biodiversity affected my psyche and the people around me. It was as
if I'd been given some magic elixir and I felt so much calm as so much more present so much
more at home and that feeling lasted for months and months and months. So I think it's
depending on how much nature is around you and how much you're able to access it and your experience
of it deeply affects the psyche in a very very profound way. So I absolutely I mean it's so great
that you're doing those experiences on a regular basis and you you feeling you know exactly what
I'm talking about you come back and it feels like you've been rebooted. So the dance is working
in the sense that literally the first cue I was going to give you is pristine wilderness so it seems
to be working. I'd love for you to say a bit more about the feeling that endured for months
afterwards. Can you put more words to that so people can perhaps begin to envision what that is
like? I think what it is it might be connected to when we know there's enormous biodiversity and
health in the ecosystem around us. You must remember we've had you know in IEL species 300,000
years as hunter-gatherers. So when you're in an environment like that you know you can survive
there's plenty of food you don't have to work very hard to get all your needs so you feel very relaxed.
If you're an environment where there's almost no biodiversity your ancient creature that's living
inside you your deep design is terrifying because it doesn't know you can go to the supermarket. It's
just looking and feeling and hearing and smelling there's no life around. So the experience of going
to these wilderness places tells that wild part of us that everything is okay there's plenty for
everybody and we just need to go and harvest a tiny bit each day and there'll be plenty for
everybody for the family and you feel wow everything's all right everything will be fine this is good
this is the good life. That strikes a chord with me. I think it would surprise perhaps a lot of folks
who think of the hunter-gatherer life as very austere and brutal which it certainly can be. I mean
if you watch in some respects it can be from a nutritional perspective depending on where you are
right in the calahari you see I would imagine symptoms of certain nutrient deficiencies and say
the hair on some of the bushmen and so on. However when you're in a very very dense area with
high degrees of biodiversity and I experienced this in octobreuse and serenom spending time with
some indigenous groups like the trio as part of actually exploring work sites or a partner communities
of a non-profit called the Amazon Conservation Team and man were these guys relaxed guys and
gals because they could go fishing and hunting they walked out into the forest for any given need.
I mean the sophistication of their pharmacists let's call them who could walk out night and every
plant every tree every turn was known it was as you put it mind-mending happen to be out with them
they would always bring a shotgun with them these days it's more shotguns than bows although some
of the old-timer still use bows and if they ever went for a walk that was brought shotgun and
got to see a peckery hunt and they dismantled field dressed the entire animal created backpacks
out of various vegetation and vines and so on and there's a certain ease there's a certain
calm that permeated the entire village which isn't too overly romanticized it either because prior
to the a lot of the missionary work the intertribal warfare it's just non-stop unseasing so there
are issues with any groups of humans because humans are humans. I asked some of the old son
you know which do you prefer this new life or the old ways when you were nomadic
and like he said it wasn't an obvious answer half of them said you know we desperate to go back
to the old life it was incredible and such an adventure and so powerful and half of them said no
it was just too difficult and we much prefer being static and we've got a water supply we not
going thirsty for weeks and they preferred that so as you say it's it's not all roses
depending where you were but I think some of those early lives were just incredible.
I'm very energized by this conversation I rarely get the chance to connect with someone who
spent so much time as you have in deep close proximity both out of water and underwater which is
for me at least a rare combo. A few questions so the first is how much of this deep transfer
after this immersive experience is activating something very old almost like birds know how to
build birds nest without having to go to bird school. My experience the first time I ever went
for a hunt which was for my third book which related to food and I thought it was an obligation
for me to at least forage and garden and hunt as part of understanding the entire kind of supply
chain of food was my first time butchering an animal in the field I felt like my hands kind of
knew what to do and it was shocking to me there was some type of for lack of a better descriptor like
ancestral knowledge which makes sense given our history is that a component for you of this activation
for lack of a better term and then that the second piece is to what extent this is getting perhaps
into some mystical areas although I think at some point it won't be mystical so all
of better tools but my experience in the jungle is also one of maybe a density of consciousness
or activity in addition to that feeling of ease there's a density that has such a distinct impact
on my inner experience that I can't really describe to my own satisfaction but could you bounce off
of either of those in any way that makes any sense. It Turkey resonates with me to mean that the
struggling to say it is I love that because it's mysterious so much of this is mysterious to see
the world through the window of science don't get me wrong I love science I love marine biology
especially paleontology but what happens as you immerse is what you're saying there's this
remembering and I think what I've experienced is my eyes and my brain are looking around and
they're seeing an enormous number of things enormous number of signs some of which now I can
identify but some of which my conscious mind is not recognizing but the unconscious is taking
everything in so when I then am looking for something or trying to find something what I found is
if I just actually relax and release it and let that enormous unconscious that's connected
to the deep ancestry that's connected to three million years in our genus as Homer and 300,000
years as sapiens let that connect with my unconscious and just come up to the surface and then it's
like it's there and it feels magical but it's actually a process that all the sensory system and all
these memories are coming together when you were talking I was thinking of the heart urchin I spent
three years trying to find this animal occasionally I'd find a dead shell of this magnificent
a kind of germ and I just didn't know where they were coming from I didn't know probably from the
deep ocean I thought none of the scientists knew and then one day I did what I've described and
it just said to me it's underneath the sand and that's what you're talking about you know this is
this conversation it's underneath the sand and I dug about that deep in the sand and out came
this incredible live heart urchin this extraordinary animal and I realized okay this is how it's
working this is where they're coming from and then I was able to put together all the clues and
now I can find them quite easily they have these very very subtle detritus traps that as a very
subtle trap but I didn't know that but my unconscious and all the memories of how to do this and
put the dots together clicked into place now I've had some maybe another time for a bottle of wine
but I think you and I've had a number of bizarre experiences that if you try to put words to them
end up sounding like you should be put in an institution just because they're hard to verbalize does
not mean that it's magical thinking in the example you gave in the example that I gave with the
field dressing it's not implying magic just because it's hard to verbalize and if you think about
our evolution language is a pretty recent arrival at least to the extent that we're talking right now
this level of before being generous for sophisticated communication is a pretty new on the scene
there's a lot of machinery and a lot of perceptual faculties that developed very very well prior to
that so I think that in part it's becoming attuned to different ways of knowing even if you can't
explicitly explain those things in a conversation like this could you speak to any number of other
things that I would love to hear more about nature as mirror is one that I'm very curious about
play and song catching specifically which direction would you like to go first it's working because
I wanted to talk about the mirror because of what you said and this is like you know almost
feeling some of that magic right here so what I've noticed is of course there's attention bias if
you're looking for certain animals a tuberculative cuttlefish comes to mind oh my god you keep seeing
them everywhere but it's often because your mind is just focused on that shape on that animal
and that movement and of course you're going to see more of them than you you usually do but there's
some other fascinating factor that I've just seen again and again and again and when I've spoken
to some of the scientists even I work with certainly some of the cinematographers there's the
strange thing that the wild ecosystem is somehow mysteriously mirroring the human psyche
and almost wanting to teach us and show us things way beyond where the edge of attention bias
leaves so it's almost as if when we are attentive when we care when we focus there is
something which is very hard to explain that seems to come about in the natural world that feels
just incredible that behavior especially animal behavior that I would often have never seen in my
whole life and then I'm focusing on this one particular animal desperate to learn from it and
then I just see right in front of me this incredible behavior that maybe and there's never been
recorded before and that's happened again and again and again and it eventually forced me to
realize there's some extraordinary relationship between us humans and the natural world and probably
the entire world is natural in in many ways but especially in these areas of high biodiversity
there's this strange mysterious process that going on that I find very difficult to explain
but it feels like this mirror and that sometimes when I've been in dark difficult spaces I see some
pretty tough difficult things and then reflecting back at me in a things or tough. I'm really
so enjoying this conversation in part because you're an explorer and you have deep deep consistent
contact with nature and just to draw a quick maybe analogy the coaches and athletes at the highest
level of sport are always a few steps ahead of say the published exercise scientists of course
because there's so many barriers number one to publication as there should be peer review and so on
the coaches and athletes don't necessarily get everything right but they are the experimentalists
so they're always going to be a few years ahead when they find something that works or something
that clicks and my experience is that that's true in many different fields field biologists are
going to see things that they can't explain that might seem ridiculous that ultimately bear out
as incredibly valid and important it just might take 10 years you have discovered how many new
species of shrimp we've lost count but we've actually been able to name and identify three species
of shrimp the most interesting one for me was the one that actually lives inside the octopus
stands and probably has a mutual relationship with the cephalopods in this part of the world
and we won't believe how easy it is to find a new species it's the naming of it that's an
enormously difficult job so sometimes when I'm with my amazing prof Charles Griffiths we find a
new species and we almost don't want to look at it because we know how much work it's going to take to
describe it so you should almost ignore it hetero miceis foster eye that'll be one right good
tracking that's another another little shrimp that lives inside the shells of a discarded shells
of animals and for people who don't know the naming convention very often the discoverer per se
will have their last name appended to the end much like Lafafra William C probably pronouncing
that wrong but I don't speak Latin better known as peyote although certainly there were many people
well before this to William or Williams who were intimately familiar with hikudir peyote so coming
back to play what is song catching song catching was introduced to me by the idea by john young he's a
wonderful tracker in california and he used to go out with bullman row i think was the father
lose music i could have got that wrong but they used to go out into the wilderness and spend
sometimes weeks out there and open themselves up to the wild and they used to be able to somehow
catch a song of a tree or a landscape or an animal and they'd frantically write down the song before
it disappeared and you know john's played some of these songs to me and that's in really strange
coincidences where people have got a very similar song about the same species of tree so it's quite
it was fascinated me and i thought oh i'd love to try and catch the song of the kelp forest
john's a great musician and knows all about songwriting and i'm actually pathetic with all these
things so it was extremely difficult for me and that is a long and involved story i don't know
how far you want to go but uh we eventually managed to catch a song but i had to have a lot of
help and it involved yeah yeah we involved the time of the world man this is the benefit of a long
format podcast so yeah let's not skip any of the juicy bands okay so so as a pathetic song catcher
first just for sake of explaining this for the audience so i think his name is john that you
mentioned um song catching this this is in effect and waiting for inspiration to strike such that you
feel like you have felt an appropriate song surface to your conscious awareness that matches
whatever you are focusing on is that a fair way to describe it that's a wonderful way of
describing absolutely yes and i think it goes deep into our deep past and you know they're famous
songs at the song of the calahari have caught at night in dreams or envisions that make up the
trance dance it goes deep back in time so terrible sentence that were nowhere near a song
um and i was like whoa this is not going to happen and then i got a few little words and phrases
and then add this out of the blue strange coincidence someone from the yoyo mar foundation called
me from new york and said yoyo mar is coming to south africa and he's interested in some of the
work and is anything you've got that you might do together and that sort of stupidly said oh we
catching songs we're doing a song catching and they were fascinated by this and then he wanted to come
and listen to the song we'd caught and of course there's suddenly real as a huge mistake
i didn't have because you didn't have a song and have and the greatest you know musician on this
planet's not coming to listen i was like oh what have i done absolute idiot so i then we've got
this amazing group that i work with the non-profit sea change project i said guys we've got a problem
desperately need your help how can we do this and they all came on board very kindly and helped
me and we started to have these strange experiences where we weren't catching so many lines or
songs but we were finding these amazing instruments that could be played underwater so there was a
whales earbone that i'd found many years ago and didn't make any sound on land and we just
intuitively took it into the water and struck this freedived into a cave one of our favorite caves
when we struck it there and the sound just went straight through our bodies it is absolutely
incredible this deep booming sound from this whales earbone about the size of my fist and it was
like unbelievable and we recorded this we used abalone shells and made these incredible sounds we
found giant rocks on the shore it could be rocked and made these incredible percussive sounds
and then i think it was pepper got hold of some good musicians i think was rolling skillin
was one of the best percussionists in the country and he got hold of salani mahalas incredible
closer singer and we all got together and said yoga Mars coming what can we do and salani
was being an amazing performer was able to connect onto this idea and i took her diving and
literally i was so amazed on her first dive she was able to catch songs from the kelp forest
and we had these incredible instruments we made a octopus drum from eight stipes of the kelp
that washed up what is this stipe oh sorry that's the long stem of the kelp so they up to 15 meters
45 feet long but we we had them washing on the shore after the storm and we got like 10 meter
long ones and my son and wrote tuned them and he played these incredible tubes made from the kelp
like a drum so it would be like playing water glasses of different heights in a sense exactly but
he was striking the top like a xylophone yeah that kind of thing but the with the tubes of the
different lengths exactly what i was seeing i've had my my music and the musicians were so excited
because they'd never heard sounds like this before and we just got this thing together in time as
yoga Mars luckily arrived at my house and it was terrifying i was really stressed out and
as salani was so cool and calm and then we performed for him and this group and it was very very
magical and he played the cello on our deck it was very very magical and helped us afterwards
wonderfully with our NGO and our conservation works as a through that that idea of play and
song catching these beautiful sort of relationships formed with these amazing people who
were sort of committed to this strange idea what does the word home or concept of home mean to you
about a year and three months ago we lost our home because of a electrical fire and literally
from one hour to two hours later i had this beautiful home that my wife and i and my son had
nurtured for 16 years was you know ashes we lost everything i didn't have my passport one pair
of shorts and a t-shirt nothing absolutely nothing everything was gone and what was so fascinating
first of all incredible friends and care and love from people around us helped us tremendously to
get over that shock quite quickly but that day of the fire and there was blisters everywhere and
everything and walked down to the ocean and i went in that kelp forest and i looked back towards
the house that was no longer there and it struck so hard in my heart that this ocean but also this
very much this planet this original deep mother that burst our species and it nurtured me from
from all my whole life was actually my home and i would be absolutely fine as long as that
biodiversity and that biosphere was functioning well and was healthy it struck so hard and it was
such a it was a pity that i had to you know learn it by losing the house but it was a profound
lesson that this place this wildness the health of this place is our or for me for me is my
deep home and i can always rebuild my home which i am doing now my my house that's since like a
possibly terrifying and dangerous experience was anyone in the house when that happened my son
his friend and myself were in the house swati my wife was in India about to come back and we
literally ran out with the you know glass exploding around us and we were lucky not to get
seriously injured it was happened so fast it was just crazy they say that this fire scientist
to come and looked said if you don't catch it and especially about bed or something catches
within 30 seconds you're not going to put that fire that is so lucky terrifying and tragic
and very lucky that no one was no one was injured now that was the main thing yeah that was a big
factor time was like if no one gets injured then you can quite easily i think get over that sort of
that process how have you thought about especially when your son was younger how did you think about
parenting and that's very broad but i'm wondering of any kind of lessons learned or things you
feel like you did right or things you would do again anything along these lines asking for a friend
as a parent father as he may be i think certainly for me was certainly a huge turning point
was when i felt i was inside of the natural world i really had something to pass to him
i didn't want to try and in a overly push him or teach him as such i just wanted to
install the love for that in him but i knew i could only really do it if i knew it in my own self
so that was a big factor and i can see that it's in him now he doesn't have the mad crazy passion
he's actually ironically a credible musician and does music for film god learn those where he got
that from but definitely not for me but he has a deep love for nature and it was amazing to pass
that on and i think i think the main thing for a child rarely is it sounds like a key share but
if they truly know that you really love them it's like the that's the most critical thing i had
my parents were very loving but particularly my great grandmother and my grandmother had this
incredible love and i can still feel that sitting in me today very strongly and when i'm in
i've great difficulty i can draw on that and just time like dedicated time i made sure i
dedicated focus time to doing things with him but things i also enjoyed doing that we both enjoyed
doing and we still today this morning we had an incredible game of frisbee together and you know he
helped me set up this podcast because he's much better technically and useless with that so he's
say he's a it's just you know very special to spend time i go diving with him a lot swimming with
a lot we exercise together so i think it's just the love the time and also having you've got so many
incredible experiences and so much to share with the child there the child would be i'd love to be
a child thanks for saying that yeah i would love to be your child too from the sounds of it
my must ask two things i guess do people in your family tend to have kids young because you said
great grandmother and my grandparents passed away when i was very very young that's part one part two
is how did they show that love i'm just wondering how that was expressed such that it was made such
an indolible mark on you i didn't have my house and my grand and my great-grand would sit and
totally focus on our silly little kid stories like with an absolute wrapped attention and there's
something about that focus and not being distracted with other things that was immensely powerful
that gave our childhood meaning it gave meaning to those stories and it it was a tremendous act
of love to have that attention and a true interest in our naive young minds it felt like an
unconditional type of love and care and then we were sick they looked after us and it was just
very very special my parents had to work and they had enormous distractions and trying to survive
and didn't have much money so it was much harder for them but the grandparents were just
job phenomenal you mentioned earlier having a tough time after the success and vast global exposure
of my octopus teacher could you say more about why that was hard with that experience until
i guess you can imagine Tim you know you hear on the end of the planet i'm right at the end of
the tip of africa fairly isolated in a way i mean i've made at that point i've made 25 films i
know i've done a lot of documentaries some of them like the great dawns some are you'd managed
to see because you were very interested in that subject but we'd had some level the little
levels of success and the films would go on in a few months later then you know they'd go away and so
so i was expecting maybe a few people to be interested in this little octopus film and
now we were used to these smaller channels or so like you know national geographic or BBC whatever
and it goes on and it comes off now you've got this giant Netflix this enormous reach and suddenly
absolutely like nobody on the end of the planet just fascinated by these animals and you in
you know a hundred million poems plus whatever the crazy number it and it's enormous shock
for the psyche to suddenly realize how did that happen and then a lot of people are trying to get hold
of you you've got no method for dealing with that at all we're getting an email every four seconds
my nature is to be wanting to you know reply to everybody of course that becomes impossible
and it just i think there's also a factor where i know if you've thought about this but
going back to our design and our own where we come from you know these soren societies and my
soren teachers that's a very egalitarian society to even have a competition for someone who's
better than somebody else would be absolutely out of the question so we come as humans from this
vast lineage where these people knew it was good to keep everybody on the same level and not have
competition are suddenly you winning awards all the stuff it's somehow it's very exciting but it's
also very disturbing for the psyche and for me my nervous system was completely knocked out of
culture so the main way it showed that was by not sleeping my steps extremely badly sometimes
just a few minutes a night for weeks and for months and that does a horrible thing
horrible yeah that's your your your psyche yeah that's the serious problem
and then more people want to contact you and they're very kind and they want to talk to you and
interview and you can't even see straight because you haven't slept for you know three months
so it adds to the whole madness so it was very difficult but also of course that adversity is
powerful because i mean in an altered state for 24 hours a day and you're trying to deal with that
and then you start to see into the deep psyche and to see
parts of your mind that you've never glimpsed before and then i slowly used wild nature
just going into that sea i couldn't last for very long because my system was so shattered and i
lost so much weight my beard went gray over night kind of thing but i used nature and i used all
these things i'd learned from the wild to rebuild my nervous system and just gentle access to the
cold and to the spaces and to these animals and i was able to kind of rebuild my system but
it kind of helped it just crushed me so much it may be so it felt that deep humility of that
adversity kind of kept me going and if i had to go back and say would i want to go through all that
hell of not sleeping again in retrospect i'm glad i went through it i'd hate to ever repeat that
because it's very traumatic in some ways but i'd learned a great deal from it i learned a lot and
i managed to i think heal parts of my psyche in certain ways it ended well it could have been bad
if it continued i think it would have been i mean it's eventually you die if you don't sleep so
i don't know i don't know so what stopped it was it just the natural kind of decay rate of fame
when people moved on to tiger king or whatever the next hot thing happened to be or was it something
else was it a set of decisions you made or other factors what finally got you back to sleeping
in addition to rebuilding your nervous system it was just focusing on nature and tracking and the
cold and my ancestors and all i'd learned from working with indigenous people for years and years
and years drawing on all those things breathing just calming everything down just breathing
sometimes for an hour more day all these things that i learned and of course it
you know eventually people quickly forget if you don't feed that a system as you know then it goes
starts getting quiet and people start forgetting you very quickly which is a huge relief
because it was very intense when it first came out and it was that perfect storm with covert and
everybody thinking about storm it was strange it was so strange to him i mean i don't know with your
trajectory and you've got this huge following and everything if it was slow but it was from literally
as that thing went out it was just an explosion yeah mine mine was similar wasn't of the magnitude of
a hundred million plus on Netflix but with the first book when it hit the New York Times was pretty
quickly and then stayed there for a few years four or five years I suppose and that was zero to a
hundred for me certainly in my own scale and it's a shock to the system it is a shock to the system
and i wouldn't trade it it's certainly provided opportunities like this it's at the stage for
growing the blog which is at the stage for having the podcast which sits at the stage for having
conversations like this so very grateful and we are not evolved to handle that type of dynamic
at all at least there's nothing in the prehistory and that big spotlight comes and i mean
mentioned people who are for me i was thinking of people who this is a tiny little thing in many ways
you know people are big actors and honeywood and how they manage i do not know i had a tiny
taste of that in a small small way but i i believe that buddhas have got a special prayer for
people in the spotlight who are famous you know they know that it's a difficult thing but as you
say i i think it's also it's a huge privilege and i've met so many incredible people through
it amazing opportunities of course is the flip side of that which is very special and when you get
and then everything quiet and sound it's much easier who is the new book for how should people
think about that then what should they expect to get from reading this book amphibious soul the
few people have read sort of advanced copies have felt this real sense to start some of these
practices to start learning what i call the oldest language on earth and to start observing this
wild world around them even if they live in a city and it has been excitingly for the just a few
people quite transformative in that way they started to look at the wild world in a different way
and it sort of affected them quite positively so it's for i guess people who want to have more
of a relationship with this incredible world we live in even though you know the universe that
we live in that gave birth to us 13.7 billion years ago because i go into some of that through
an amazing cosmologist i met so it's people who want a deeper relationship with themselves and with
the wild and also you don't have to have affinity with water but of course if that is part of your
desire then there are quite a few good examples of how to deal with cold how to deal with water
how to track animals and how to actually acknowledge and benefit from these incredible ancestors
who have actually built our minds you and i talking just slipped through they almost went extinct
a few times that's quite incredible that we're sitting here talking yeah that is remarkable
i'm very excited about this book and i do not say that lightly as you'd imagine i get
offers to have hundreds of books sent to me every month just about it feels and to the extent that
i had to put a blog post up saying i'm not reading any books in the same year they're published but
i might make an exception for this one this one is right down the fairway as we would say
hey in terms of the convergence of my current interests because i feel like it will give words to
experiences i've had and also experiences i hope to find patterns within so that i can cultivate
more of them if that makes sense and i'm very excited about it would you like to say
anything about sea change project that is our not for profit organization that's focused on
ocean conservation we've been going for about 10 years and so started with an amazing group of
volunteers who volunteer to a lot of their time for five years one of the big focuses of course
the great african sea forest and one of our methods has been how do you protect something it was
not even no nobody knows about the cult forest so my wife swati gave it this name the great
african sea forest and through the film octopus teacher we've now by some miracle that you might
want to have that's game over for all that that investment is worth zero if biodiversity collapses
so what i can't understand is why businesses and governments are not putting much more attention
on looking often regenerating the deep foundation that keeps every single investment and every
single enterprise on this planet going so it's like this mother of mothers is just sitting there
looking after everything we kind of like a child who's forgotten that it mother exists but we are
completely dependent on her in every single way why do you think it is that a lot of the attention
is not on looking after her i mean i could dig a stab at that if you like i pretty bring this up
i think about this quite a bit the CEOs of public companies who are being judged on a quarterly basis
you have their various payouts and bonuses and so on pegged to relatively short-term goals then you
have policymakers who might be more focused on re-election in one year or two years then they are
on any type of long-term game if it means they're going to potentially face political opposition or
lose constituent support how do you try to thread that needle and you i think have an advantage
in thinking about this because you are on some level and i suppose we all are but you're very well
practiced storyteller and what i've tried to do is find compelling stories that have some short
term payoff hopefully maybe it's just that they're grouping stories i can give some examples
that then act as Trojan horses for getting people to take actions that serve certain long-term
goals if that makes any sense that's very abstract so i'll give a concrete example you might choose
for instance and what i'm dancing around here is the word conservation i'm dancing around the word
conservation because at least in the u.s that has become and i think it's kind of silly a polarizing
word i think it's associated with like bleeding heart liberals and Berkeley whereas if you go
way back like Teddy Roosevelt and others hunters historically a lot of people on the right would also
be and still are in fairness conservationists fundamentally but that word has become tainted
on some level so i dance around you might choose say a very charismatic species and tell stories
around that species which lead people to read a book watch a youtube video enjoy a documentary
that then leads them to think about personal changes in terms of behaviors let's just say i'm
making this up but we use that single tree example they end up taking an interest in perhaps the
oldest tree in their neighborhood in Austin which happens to species in the united states they become
an ideological battleground and very politicized and i'm going to leave that third rail alone for
a second although i've been very involved in a lot of these conversations on a national level
including policy makers and man-o-man to people get upset but the reason i bring up wolves is this
a book by Barry Lopez of wolves and men and it was such a genre-busting category redefining book
when it was published it's beautiful book and it is incredibly well written and it pulls people in
whether they want to be pulled in or not and it's apolitical that type of art has the potential
to move people in a way that lecturing does not does that make sense i guess soon as you start
lecturing people turn off and i feel so fortunate and i'll shut up in a second but i know this is
something we chatted a bit about before recording how do you reconcile evolved short-term
interest and you see this by the way for instance the south america a lot of indigenous groups are
making really bad long-term decisions because they're getting seduced by mining companies with
concessions we're giving them free electricity and ATVs and various bribes effectively to completely
rape and pillage their ancestral land resources right and so we're all susceptible to this how do
you try to reconcile these so i don't know if any of this resonates but think about it a lot for
instance with respect to mental health in the united states i've been very involved with psychedelic
assisted therapies historically half of this country at the very least is would be viewed as
very anti-drug anti-psychedelic let's just say if we're painting with a broad brush on the right
and then you have the hippies and so on and the lefties who are pro drugs but you can get around that
if you look at certain sub-popular failure so at the end of the day if you ask anyone like do you
want to see all green disappear from your world do you want to have a silent spring where you hear
no birds no one's gonna say yes right so it's like okay let's start there and then try to work
backwards and find some common ground and it's actually been a wonderful experience for me
and i'm gonna stop in a second but i i don't talk about this much publicly because i don't really
want to show my cards and i don't have some ulterior motive it's just like this is part of the craft
that i take so seriously which is how do you help to shape hopefully benevolent long-term beliefs and
behaviors that serve the individual and collective good not some socialist way right it's just like
an existential way at we not completely drive ourselves in the planet to you know catastrophe
and i think there are ways to do it so for instance getting into hunting i grew up hating hunters
and hunting because i grew up on long island and guys would just get shit faced and these red
necks go out and just make a mass and animals were injured and it was very disrespectful and the whole
thing was terrible by and large but when i met really responsible ethical hunters and i was very
lucky that a pretty well-known guy now amazing author also stevenella took me on my first hunt
white till deer in the carolinas and from soup to nuts it was approached in such a responsible way
cooked heart that evening harvested some organs in addition to doing the butchering and then had
that meat that i felt so unconflicted about versus say cellophane wrapped meat of questionable
origins in supermarket it was surprising to me how deeply unconflicted and good i felt about it
and that has been an opportunity because most folks on the left view hunting a some barbaric
exercise and just an indulgence of blood lust which for some people it might be but for a lot of
people it's not and that's been a foot in the door for me to connect with a lot of people who at
face value might identify say on the right and that does not mean i need to have any conflict
with these people whatsoever and i also have an issue by issue basis i would say probably lean
conservative in a bunch of ways and having that common language is what i'm almost always looking for
what is the foot in the door where we can say something that really has no grounds for disagreement
how can we start there what is that thread so i'll stop there because that's a whole bot that i
just spewed out but what have you learned about this because you've had wide-ranging conversations
you've had a chance to talk about say see change project and other things through the
blessing in the curse which was the mega success of your film what have you learned as you've
had these conversations it aligns in quite a few ways to what you're saying and i think that
you know there is this massive pandemic of mental health throughout the world that's facet
and i feel that part of that is this underlying disconnection from nature from this original mother
so i think it's a a wonderful idea to reintroduce people as you say very gently
to that wild person that's inside of all of us and just gently coaxing a tiny bit of that
wild person to have a look around and see what the world looks like and then once that starts happening
and the people start to build a relationship with the wild creatures with the kin with the plants
even with the minerals with the universe then the whole decision-making process changes you then
don't want to do things that harm your family that harm biodiversity you keen on looking after the
insects you keen on looking after the birds they they become precious to you so it's a slow gentle
process as you say of storytelling in a way that is not it's so easy in this thing this conservation
game to point fingers and i'm very very wary of that because the finger can point back at me so
easily we all are involved in this process and we all do things that aren't great for the planet
let's face it i've never met a single person who doesn't so we kind of need to come together as a
community and reconnect with this massive extraordinary heritage and then uplift so many of our
lives we don't need so many of the things from the tame world it's wonderful to enjoy some of them
but by giving up and sacrificing some of those things we can actually create a much better life
ourselves in many ways and so i think it is quite attractive and people are struggling a lot and these
are it's something that it's not new it's we know this for enormously long period of time so
it's not something it's if we've stalked remembering it just it's transformative yeah
but totally agree and i'll just say a few more things now that i'm all warmed up
the first is that here i am in austin in austin is sometimes called the blueberry and the tomato soup
because it's mostly liberal outposts in a predominantly republican state and i'm going to say
something that a lot of my my friends on the left will not like to hear which is first
yelling on the internet is not actually taking effective action that's first thing i'll say
just because you're screaming on twitter does not mean that you're moving the needle on the things
that you care about the second is that many of the folks i've seen with direct action take steps to
conserve wildlife and land are republican hunters and there is common ground to be found there's
a lot of common ground much more you just have to look for it and avoid the third rails which are
often specific phrases so i'll give you an example i was on trip recently and i was having a great
conversation with this gentleman in the hydrocarbon business so he's involved with petroleum and gas
and energy and we're having a great conversation and he wanted to have a sparring match so he said
what's your opinion on climate change and i was like oh here we go open shot fired okay and i
said well look do you want to have a conversation about this or you just set us up for a rock and
sock and robots fight here is this what we're getting ready to do i thought we're having a perfectly
nice conversation i just said all this explicitly and he got a chuckled because he knew exactly
when he was doing and i said okay look first of all let's not use that word because i can tell
where this is going i said what i would say if i give you an answer is that number one let's put
aside weather humans have anything to do with contributing to what we're about to discuss because
that's a huge point of contention did we do it did we not now people have strong opinions about
this but let's put that completely aside to avoid those strong opinions okay well we can observe
i would say pretty uncontroversially is more extreme weather events so flooding events mudslides
wildfires etc are we on board great we're on board okay cool so if we want to avoid catastrophic
destruction of property and this this and this and this even if we had nothing to do with the
growing frequency of these phenomena it is probably okay cool then there was there is a lot less
room to fight if that makes sense and so i would just say to people out there number one don't take
the bait don't fight easily it's so simple to fight see if you can do the harder thing which is
fun to figure out and that is dance around the words that are automatically going to set off
a fist fight and use different language use different language because the language if you use
different language it is how you change thought it's how you convey thought and then you can actually
get somewhere so that's something that i think a lot about which is why this book like words
that work which was recommended to be my friend Matt Mullinwag he would think deeply about these
things as well is something i would encourage people to check out just so they can start to train
their brain to at least identify where they are using basically not words that work but words that
incite some kind of immediate nature because you never going to persuade anybody by going in hard or
having straight line opinions i mean our whole nature is so contradictory human nature and to accept
that and to just try and work together rather than apart i totally agree with you i like that a lot
yeah and look i'm not saying i'm the paragon of equanimity and i'm walking around like the
dollar alarm i'm just you know constantly turning of the achieve like i get fired up and pissed off
and say stupid things and send emails i shouldn't send like i do these things but just aspirationally
i think it's worth paying attention to you so out of those one thousand one species we're going to
step out of the octagon for a second is one of them octopuses that steal cameras that am i getting
this right more give my camera back but we're just so fascinating i happen to be recording at the
time this curious octopus looked at the camera looked at the camera then turned the camera
and started forming us and its arms were draped over the lens so you get these incredible
images of these suckers and arms right over the lenses and us in the background
and eventually the octopus came the camera back and when we looked at these images it had this
amazingly profound effect on us that it is suddenly looking through this world from the octopuses
perspective it's so powerful and we both came up with this idea octopus should be number one
and hermissapiens the human animal should be one thousand and one we forget that we part of this
wild world we born wild we had this incredible heritage so it was such a simple but profound experience
that this animal kind of taught us and yeah i mean i think you may have seen some of the
MC in actually AI research in robotics requires some type of form moving through space so it's
fundamental to who we are and who we evolved to be as homo sapiens i suppose is what i'm saying
which is why this book is for anyone who feels like and i say this without having read the book so
i'm taking a leap here but i feel like based on this conversation please correct me if i'm wrong
well it seems like it's for anyone who feels like maybe something isn't quite right or there's
maybe something that is missing or perhaps the mode of living that feels divorced from nature
is producing some eerie sense of incompleteness or unease that this is a guide to
finding ways to reintegrate that feeling of completeness which is available it is available it's not
magical it is not out of reach it is with in reach but it does take some changes of perception
and behavior and interaction is that fair to say absolutely spot on them yeah thank you
this crablet better than i can so it's it's very much the case and you know i don't always feel that
wonderful feeling of not being separate that tame world pulls me all over the place but i have
had these times where i've really felt very connected like that and i felt that that separation
drop away and that there really feels like there's no other and it is a it's deeply transformative and
invigorating and when i try to keep that with me and i try to be you know i'm very grateful for that
and i think we're all as you say all have access to that you just have to just try and put in
a little bit of that time and then it comes great people can find the book amphibious song
finding the wild in a tame world i recommend people check this out i think thematically it is so
deeply important has been so transformative for me so i can't wait to get my hands on it
people can find sea change project at seachangeproject.com and we'll link to everything
that we discussed in the show notes is there anything else that you would like to talk about
any additional comments or formal complaints against me or the podcast or anything that you'd
like to point my audience to anything at all that you'd like to add before we winder close for
this first conversation i'd like to thank you for all your work and your dedication talking
about so many subjects that have certainly helped me and inspired me so much and for your braveness
and openness you know i think that's what attracted me to your podcast is honesty you have and the
the braveness to say things that are sometimes difficult i mean i think you know you've made a
difference to a lot of people's lives so it's just a huge privilege i've been wanting to speak to
for a long time and never really had the courage to reach out so it's nice that this book was a
an excuse to do that it was just so special talking to you and getting to
and know you in a small intimate way not just through the podcast so there's been very special
and to all that an amazing big audience that you know i believe is so supportive of this and it
seems like you've got this amazing community that are a kind-hearted sort of giant group that i
think inspire all of this so i just like to thank that amazing community for tuning in and listening
and putting their time and hearts into this and i guess that's just a very gentle
ask to them to just sometimes just feel this enormous extraordinary mother that is just sitting
out there that original mother that gave birth to us and has nurtured us in this extraordinary way
and to feel her there all the time and just in the back of mine just sense her and if we can
somehow gently begin to look after that mother and to find ways to regenerate her i think that
our we'll do ourselves a great service i mean we really this idea of saving the planet is
the planet's fine without us you'll lost easily without us she's tough as nails and can handle
anything it's we are the fragile one so we almost in a we almost need to look at our place and all
the other animals that are sharing the space with us and just feel that at least that gratefulness
for this amazing planet that has looked after so beautifully so that's really the only thing and
yeah i just absolutely want and hope to meet in person maybe i'll have a chance to
graze my fingertips across some kelp with you at some point i would enjoy that i'd love to take
your diving of being credible i would absolutely love to do that i will put that on the to-do list
and once again thank you for the time thank you for being so open about your experiences and
capturing them in the book which is amphibious soul finding the wild in a tame world and see change
projects i see change project.com everybody listening we will link to everything and we discussed
in the show notes as per usual a timmed uplog slash podcast just search cragg or foster and he
will pop right up and until next time be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others but don't
forget to yourselves and now maybe to that squirrel outside maybe that oak tree go take a look
sip a cup of coffee outside maybe it's just an insect mound but you can really study the macro
through the micro so take a small step enjoy and thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet
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