#735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher - How to Find the Wild in a Tame World

Tim Ferriss
This episode is brought to you by Viori clothing spelled v u o r I viori. I've been wearing viori at least one item per day for the last few months and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner. At least in my case.

I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish and I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viori and this was her response.

I do love their stuff. Been using them for about a year. I think. I found them at Rei first for my partner t shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants.

I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough. I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them.

The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out in closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good. Also, I like the discreet logo, so that gives you some idea that was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text vori, again spelled v u o r I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing.

Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good, and it's non offensive that you don't have a huge brand logo in your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. They're men's core short. Kore the most comfortable lined, athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it.

The banks short. This is their go to land to c short is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which if I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto performance pant and you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now.

They're thin performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice, so you got to check it out. P o n t o ponto performance pant for you ladies. The women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Viori isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase.

So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this and so am I. Vioriclothing.com Tim that's vuori clothing.com Tim not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any us orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out.

Vioriclothing.com Tim that's vuori clothing.com Tim and discover the versatility of Viori clothing this episode is brought to you by one password. I have been using one password for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products. I met the founding team early on, love those guys, and I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team. Data breaches affect everyone.

They can be catastrophic and my feeling is, since that is the case, you need one password. One password combines industry leading security with award winning design to bring private, secure and user friendly password management to everyone. I use this dozens of times a day. It is an award winning password manager trusted by millions of users and more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. Even including my little team, it beat out 40 other options to become Wirecutter's top pick for password managers.

One password lets you securely switch between iPhone, Android, Mac and PC with convenient features like Autofill for quick sign ins. All you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects everything else, your logins, your credit cards, secure notes, or the office wifi password. One password creates as many strong, unique passwords as you need and securely stores them in an encrypted vault that only you have access to. You can also use it for one time passwords where you scan the QR code and it gives you two factor authentication with the countdown with unique numbers, that type of thing. So instead of using a separate app for those types of authenticator type functions, you can use one password.

Plus regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. Keep one password at the forefront of security. So start protecting your business today with one password. Companies suffer from data breaches daily, all the time, losing time and money, dealing with extortion, stolen customer data and more. I have personally dealt with a lot of these headaches.

You don't want them. It is why using one password is a business best practice I strongly endorse and a business solution that I use myself. So check it out. Get a free two week trial@onepassword.com. Tim that's one the number one password.com Tim optimal, minimal.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Ferris hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to interview world class performers across many different disciplines. My guest today I've 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 bushmen, legendary trackers and hunters. His experiences with great white sharks in kelp forests, his experiences with octopuses. Yes, it's octopuses, 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 is the co founder of the Sea Change Project, an NGO dedicated to the long term conservation and regeneration of the great african seaforest. His film that I mentioned, which became a mega mega hit on Netflix, my octopus teacher has led to making the great african seaforce a global icon. His new book is amphibious finding the wild in a tame world. You can find him online@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 are 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, Jocko Willink and others for teaching me that lesson, as well as Morgan Spurlock.

Thank you, Morgan. And now, without 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. We'll 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, Tim. I've had the same thing. I've listened to so many other podcasts and I've always wanted to talk to you, so it'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 just is 50 meters to the right of here.

Craig Foster
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, and it's the biggest species in the world. They're up to 16, 17ft long, 14ft wide. Incredible animal.

And what is strange about this animal, Tim, 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 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 game 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 kelp forest.

And I was just managed to glide with it for maybe ten minutes right next to it, just, you know, 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 I've never seen a white one like that in all my time. Nate, 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.

Tim Ferriss
Could you describe the day of your birth, please? I mean, 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 dunked me in that Atlantic Ocean, which is probably twelve degrees centigrade, which is about 50 degrees fahrenheit.

Craig Foster
And, I mean, it's quite a shock, obviously, for a young child. I 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.

Tim Ferriss
So when you say family tradition, that means that prior generations were also dunked in the ocean right after being. Apparently. Apparently, yes. And I did the same with my son, but I wasn't. I felt it.

Craig Foster
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 sea 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 partially introduced to your work by a friend, a mutual friend.

Tim Ferriss
Well, actually, it was Boyd Vardy, who's been on the podcast. The lion tracker's guide to life is one of his books. And also separately, a friend of mine named Alex, who lives in South Africa, is a master tracker. Oh, wow. Yeah, Alex.

Craig Foster
I know him well. He's a wonderful guy. There you go. All right, so I've spent a bunch of time with Alex and Renius. Oh, man.

Amazing. Amazing. And this is fun to explore with you because we're just meeting each other, but we've been exposed to the other's 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?

Tim Ferriss
I don't know, the Genesis story. Yeah, that's going back a long time. So this was the late nineties, 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.

Craig Foster
And we'd always been fascinated by the San and these incredible trackers from the Kalahari. And we'd heard of this extraordinary. We almost thought it was a myth that there were these last master trackers who could still run down animals and put themselves against the animal without bow and arrow. And they 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 it was so intense. But we eventually managed to get this sacred hunt, this hunt, by running.

And we met these extraordinary trackers who became real mentors, and they've always stayed with me for 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. It was incredible, but it was also disturbing because I realized how far outside of nature I was compared to them. And that started this niggling in my head to try and get eventually, inside.

Tim Ferriss
Of her, an insight of her referring to Mother Nature. All right, so let's take a closer look at the San bush hunters for a moment. There are a few scenes that really stuck out to me, and this is not necessarily me threading together a cohesive narrative, but one of them was after a day of tracking and hunting, assembling, I guess I wouldn't say they are 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 definitions sake, you said rundown 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 neglecting 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 tailed 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 is that possible? It's basically because we can sweat and keep ourselves cool, whereas those animals overheat. And this is. I mean, just to be clear, tim, 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, and it's very dangerous for the humans as well.

Craig Foster
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 track. What was the most fascinating thing to me was that after a certain point in time and the hunt that we managed to film took over 4 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 koodoo was doing everything to outwit 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 100 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 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.

Tim Ferriss
There's a book called the Wayfinders by Wade 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 Nainoa Thompson well, it's unbelievable. Yeah, it's extraordinary.

Craig Foster
And then there's really, if you make a mistake, you're dead. That's exactly the same kind of thing. And in fact, I spoke to nine. Noah had an incredible day with him here in False Bay. We dived together when he circumnavigated the world.

I spoke to him about the song trackers and he was like, yes, that's exactly what we're doing. We're using our bodies and obviously the stars and everything as this navigation device. And you might recall his great teacher Papa Mao used to lie asleep and when that ocean going canoe moved one degree off course, his body would wake up and he'd tell them. So even asleep he was able to do this extraordinary navigation. The parallels are really striking to me, even though I've had no contact with polynesian navigators and I'm probably getting my terminology wrong, but one thing that really stood out is as a westerner who also has zero sailing experience, but as someone who has certainly read a story here or there, I think of a captain as navigator.

Tim Ferriss
But it seems like in these older polynesian traditions and certainly skill sets, you have the Navigator and then you have something akin to, I suppose, a captain who's running other aspects of the ship minus the navigation component. And the reason I say parallels is that thinking of, I've never met the KaLAHAri Bushman, but watching your film and then reading these accounts of the Polynesians, it strikes me that their experience, their 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 inches 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 in a 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 quasi cockney comes to mind, this incredible bow hunter that we worked with and a lot of the other song I've worked with over the years. You'll be walking along, trekking, looking for sign, looking for tracks, and suddenly there will just be this beautiful laughter that boils up inside him and just comes out and you're looking around to see what is funny or what's amused him.

Craig Foster
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 out and it happens quite often. And there's this tremendous joy, despite, if you think about it, many of the lives of the people I've worked with are very hard and they're 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, I'm not the only person who feels that way.

Tim Ferriss
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 ive 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 a 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 manmade 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 stingray, 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 with 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.

Craig Foster
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 theres another factor to this as well, Tim. I mean, ive sort of searched for wildness my whole life and struggled actually to find it in many ways.

And ive done very extreme things to try and get close to wildness, like diving with crocodiles and this kind of thing. But strangely enough, when ive sometimes felt the closest to wild nature is when ive just spent time with some small animals, say like limpets, 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 broadcast 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 than if you were in an area that was in the middle of Africa, where it's just, you know, teeming 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 kind of outside or inside of nature, and you can get inside even through a tiny animal, an ant, an 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.

Tim Ferriss
So we're going to bring it to New York, but we're going to go back to the Kalahari, Alex, who I mentioned earlier, Alex Vandenheaver. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. I don't speak Afrikaans, but it's probably close enough for the purposes. Close enough. Close enough.

Craig Foster
Van de Heerfer. Yeah. And there we go. I knew it was enough. I knew it was going to be one of those Volkswagen type of situations.

Tim Ferriss
I know that's not Dutch, by the way, folks, but we're Afrikaans. In any case, Alex, I encourage 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 blows 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 101 level. What makes the hunters you spent time with in the Kalahari so particularly impressive, at least to you? It was fascinating to see that they could observe animals with their technique moving up to one and a half kilometers away.

Craig Foster
So they can feel a predator moving one and a half kilometers away and you can't see more than 100 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 aural picture that predator moving. And they can feel a big 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 how this whole bird language story works. What makes them so incredible is, I think, this incredible legacy. Their lineage goes back 120,000 years, so it's this tradition that's been passed down for an 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.

Tim Ferriss
I recall coming back from South Africa from the Sabi Sands reserve and the fauna, certainly the flora, 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, 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 and 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 a person 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 incredible trackers in America doing this.

Craig Foster
I've got a great friend. John Young is 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 one or two amphibians, and you start to just take notes and observe every day, just say for half an hour, and after a while 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 that 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 that, okay, I already 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 freediving and breath holds. And then we're going to come back to the thread that we're leaving behind temporarily.

Tim Ferriss
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 100 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 inbuilt, 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. You're absolutely right, Tim. 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, and your podcasts have been the sort of favorite thing to listen to.

Craig Foster
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 more away from that. I never do these breathing things and then go into the water. And any free diving, I will only take two or three deep breaths before I go on a dive.

You've got to be so careful with that, the cold exposure. I've spent the last twelve years pretty much diving every single day, so I've acclimatized 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 fall 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, dopamine and 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 wetsuit, I prefer the an hour or so. And with this, all these amazing chemicals from the coal that help me focus and understand the secret lives of these animals.

Tim Ferriss
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 momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using momentous magthreonate l theanine and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset, quality and duration of my sleep.

Now, the momentous sleep pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Mementos also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Doctor Andrew Huberman and Doctor Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high quality ingredients that are third party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified. So you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out.

Visit livemomentous.com tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentous, livemomentous.com Tim and code Tim for 20% off.

I would love to hear a little bit more about underwater tracking because that would be greek is hard enough for me. Let's call that terrestrial tracking. And then I imagine that underwater, it's 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 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, franklins. 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, I struggled for several years. I had this idea.

Craig Foster
I got incredibly inspired by the saan in the Kalahari, and I thought, could I ever track underwater? And it just seemed impossible because a track gets put there and then the next swell washes it away, so there's nothing there. And then I started to notice the slime trails. So a lot of the mollusks leave very subtle slime trails, and those collections, tiny particles of sand, and if you're not looking very carefully, you'll never notice those. But they're actually everywhere.

It's like, oh, gosh, you know, 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 mollusks are interacting with that ray, and I could tell how long that animal's been resting because of that, the enormous number of tiny little marks that the predators make. 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 a whole lot of things, you can tell the timing. There are bite marks everywhere.

There are literally thousands and thousands of these subtle signs. But it's taken me ten 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 has. And this is a leading question, of course, maybe the answer is it hasn't.

Tim Ferriss
But how has 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 got a wonderful friend, JJ Minya, Xhosa master tracker, who I work with and who's teaching me on a weekly basis. So that's been very profound on land.

Craig Foster
And I sometimes take him into the intertidal in the water and show him what I know there. So it's exciting. I think what you're asking is, what has happened to me? Is that through the tracking underwater, I've been very fortunate and privileged to have these special relationships with a lot of different wild animals. And remember, the animals in the water are not afraid of people like they are on land.

This primate on land on two legs is very dangerous. A lot of animals are very scared. That didn't happen in the water. So these animals are quite curious. A lot of time they're not scared.

So I can get very close to a lot of animals. And, for instance, an animal equivalent size and a ferocity to a lion, I can be right next to it 1 meter away, and I'm safe. What would be an example of that? Like a seven gill shark or a great white shark, tiger shark, that kind of thing. 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, I've been with 55, 60 of them, and they're each the size of a lion. And they hunt seals, they hunt dolphins, but they don't know that I am 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 im 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 theyve taught me so much. Theyre real teachers for me.

So I love them. And then I have these bonds so that the human relationships on land, I dont 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, something happens in the psyche. And if you imagine 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, is totally taken away. 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.

Tim Ferriss
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 Cape 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, your ability to dig things out from the deep past.

Craig Foster
Good tracking, Tim. Yeah, thanks. 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 was thinking, what the hell am I doing here? Doing this? Is it 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've 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 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, you know, shed a few tears in the mask and it was very powerful.

And then animals swimming around and bouncing off the ocean floor, they were very playful, beautiful animals and it was just, oh, my God, now I know why I'm here. This is just incredible. And actually, it 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 pitched 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 sort of primate flopping around in the water. That's incredible.

Tim Ferriss
And by hunting with, you mean some type of partner hunting akin 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 lo and 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. It'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 illicit play. And then there's this badger waddling around behind it and they're off to go do some night hunting together. It was remarkable.

Craig Foster
Wow. So when you start hunting with humans, do you have 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 the story 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 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. Im fascinated by interspecies cooperation when its sort of the most unlikely of combinations or things you wouldnt expect. I want to say and ill this in the show notes, I'll get the proper reference. But then in Ethiopia you see examples of baboons and I want to say jackals cooperating.

Tim Ferriss
It's not typical. Very often the jackals will eat the baby baboons and they're sort of sworn enemies, but they have temporary ceasefires to hunt together. And similarly, you see, I want to say it's the hornbill, Alex. You should give me a slap on the wrist if I get this wrong. And the dwarf mongoose, who will also cooperate in these, I want to say it's the, the Hornbell.

It could be another bird, but they'll go harass the colonies of these dwarf mongoose to wake them up so that the mongoose will come out. The birds will, in effect, through alarm calls and so on, protect them against airborne predators, while the mongoose kick up the insects and the birds get the insects. It's amazing, fascinating to me. I see it in the kelp forest. These are liances.

Craig Foster
We see it with the octopus and the superclipfusion. What was the second animal that you mentioned? Superclipfus. 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 alarm call. So if a bigger predator comes in, then the fish will tell the octopus. Why did you decide to write amphibious soul subtitle 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?

Tim Ferriss
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, you know, hundreds of millions of people on Netflix.

Craig Foster
It was a. 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, Tim, 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 3 million years of deep evolution and all my incredible ancestors from Africa. And then part of my life was very connected to all the tame world and all the comforts and all the wonderful technologies and things that come with that. And it was, like, very hard to reconcile the two. How do I find the balance between these two extremes and the pull of the tame world and all the technology and these phones and all this 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 with 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 that 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 a fully wild existence. That door is completely shut for us now.

But how could I find this balance? And it's 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 a good cup of coffee, I love watching movies, I love all the incredible things.

And science. I love the science. So I love the tame world as well. But if I get drawn too much in that, I feel my nervous system just ratchets it up and I cant sleep properly and I feel odd. So its just about trying to find that balance.

And im very passionate about this subject. It strikes me that this has become more perhaps salient for me in the last ten 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 4 hours of sleep, four and a half hours of sleep. And these people do exist.

Tim Ferriss
There's predictive power in 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 the last 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 bow hunt, ive gone bow hunting for a long time now, and I go once a year typically, and blocking out another week or ten 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 seem 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.

Craig Foster
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 hit so hard home, 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 to him 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 calmer, 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're feeling, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You come back and it feels like you've been rebooted.

Tim Ferriss
So the dance is working in the sense that literally the first cue I was going to give you was pristine wilderness. So it seems to. 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 in our 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 in 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.

Craig Foster
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, oh, everythings all right, everything will be fine. This is good. This is the good life. William, that strikes a chord with me.

Tim Ferriss
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 Kalahari, you see, I would imagine, symptoms of certain nutrient deficiencies in, say, the hair on some of the bushmen and so on. However, when youre in a very, very dense area with high degrees of biodiversity, and I experienced this in October, I was in Suriname spending time with some indigenous groups like the trio as part of actually exploring work sites or partner communities of a nonprofit called the Amazon conservation team. 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, and every plant, every tree, every turn was known. It was, as you put it, mind bending happened 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 timers still use bows. And if they ever went for a walk, they always brought a shotgun and got to see a peccary 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 to overly romanticize it either, because prior to a lot of the missionary work, the inter tribal warfare, it's just nonstop unceasing. So there are issues with any groups of humans, because humans are humans. I asked some of the old song, which do you prefer, this new life or the old ways when you were nomadic? And like you said, it wasn't an obvious answer, half of them said, we're desperate to go back to the old life.

Craig Foster
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're not going thirsty for weeks. And they preferred that. So as you say it's not all roses, depending on where you were, but I think some of those early lives were just incredible.

Tim Ferriss
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 nests 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 the second piece is to what extent this is getting perhaps into some mystical areas, although I think at some point it wont be mystical because well have 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, theres 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?

Craig Foster
It totally resonates with me, Tim, and the struggling to say it is. I love that because it's mysterious. So much of this is mysterious to us because we are programmed 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 to it and let that enormous unconscious that's connected to the deep ancestry, that's connected to 3 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 cynoderm, 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. 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. That is 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.

William. Now, I've had some. Maybe another time for a bottle of wine, but I think you and I have 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.

Tim Ferriss
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 if we're being generous or sophisticated communication is 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.

Craig Foster
And this is like, yeah. 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 tuberculate 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, on that movement.

And of course you're going to see more of them than 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 a 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 leads. 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, like the 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 has 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 many ways, but especially in these areas of high biodiversity, there's this strange, mysterious process 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, things are tough.

Tim Ferriss
I'm really so enjoying this conversation, in part because you're an explorer and you have deep, deep, consistent contact with nature. 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 explain.

That might seem ridiculous, that ultimately bear out as incredibly valid and important. It just might take ten 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, the stens, and probably has a mutual relationship with the cephalopods in this part of the world.

Craig Foster
Tim, you 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 professor, 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 have almost ignore it. Heteromycus fosteri.

Tim Ferriss
That would be one, right? Yeah. Good tracking. That's another little shrimp that lives inside the shells of 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 Lefofra Williamsi, probably pronouncing that wrong, but I don't speak Latin.

Better known as peyote, although certainly there were many people well before Mister William or Williams who were intimately familiar with hikure 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 Bill Monroe, think was the father of Lou's music, or 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.

Craig Foster
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 I've had some really strange coincidences where people have got a very similar song about the same species of tree. So it quite 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 we eventually managed to catch a song, but I had to have a lot of help, and it involved yo yo we have all the. Time in the world, man. This is the benefit of a long format podcast, so, yeah, let's not skip any of the juicy bits. Okay. So as a pathetic song catcher, first, just for the sake of explaining this for the audience.

Tim Ferriss
So I think his name is John, that you mentioned song catching. 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 it, absolutely, yes. And I think it goes deep into our deep past, and there are famous songs that the song of the Kalahari have caught at night in dreams or in visions that make up the trance dance.

Craig Foster
So it goes deep back in time. So I thought, oh, I'm just going to go and, you know, this is going to. I'm going to get a beautiful song coming out. And I went into the kelp forest for weeks and literally got a dribble of terrible sentences that were nowhere near a song. And I was like, oh, this is not going to happen.

And then I got a few little words and phrases and then had this out of the blue, strange coincidence, someone from the yo Yo Ma foundation called me from New York and said, yo yo ma is coming to South Africa, and he's interested in some of the work. And is there anything you've got that we might do together? And I sort of stupidly said, oh, we're 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, I suddenly realized a huge mistake, because you didn't have a song in heaven. The greatest musician on this planet's not coming to listen. It was like, oh, what have I done? Absolute idiot.

So then we've got this amazing group that I work with, a nonprofit sea change project, and I said, guys, we've got a problem. I 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 whale's ear bone 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 free dived into a cave, one of our favorite caves, and we struck it there, and the sound just went straight through our bodies. It was absolutely incredible. This deep booming sound from this whale's earbud, 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 that could be rocked and made these incredible percussive sounds.

And then I think it was Peppa got hold of some good musicians. I think it was Roland Skillen, who's one of the best percussionists in the country and he got hold of Zulani Mahala, this incredible xhosa singer. And we all got together and said, yo yo ma is coming, what can we do? And Zulani, of course, 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 an octopus drum from eight stipes of the kelp that washed up. What is a stipe? Sorry, that's the long stem of the kelp.

So they up to 15 meters, 45ft long. But we had them washing on the shore after the storm and we got like ten meter long ones. My son Enro tuned them and he played these incredible tubes made from the kelp. Like a drum. So it'd 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 with the tubes of the different lengths. Exactly.

See how bad my music is? 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 yo yo ma Lipley arrived at my house, it was terrifying. I was really stressed out and Zelani 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 through 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 an electrical fire.

And literally from 1 hour to 2 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, our 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, 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 pretty much this planet, this original deep mother that birthed our species and it nurtured me from 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 pity that I had to 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 certainly for me, is my deep home. And I can always rebuild my home, which I am doing now by my house. That sounds 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 glass exploding around us. And we were lucky not to get seriously injured. It happened so fast. It was just crazy.

They say that this fire scientist who came and looked said, if you don't catch it, especially if a 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 injured. Yeah, that was the main thing. Yeah, that was a big factor. Tim was like, if no man gets injured, then you can quite easily, I think, get over that sort of that process.

Tim Ferriss
William, 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, aspiring 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.

Craig Foster
I really had something to pass to him. I didn't want to try and, you know, overly push him or teach him as such. I just wanted to instill 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 an incredible musician and does music for film. God alone knows where he got that from, but definitely not from 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 really is it sounds like a cliche, but if they truly know that you really love them, it's like that's the most critical thing. 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 have great difficulty I can draw on that and just time, like dedicated time, I made sure I dedicated, focused 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 he helped me set up this podcast because he's much better, technically useless with that. So he's, it's just, you know, very special to spend time, I go diving with him a lot, swimming 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 a child there.

The child would be, I'd love to be your child. Thanks for saying that. Yeah, I would love to be your child too from the sounds of it. I must ask two things, I guess. Do people in your family tend to have kids young?

Tim Ferriss
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 made such an indelible mark on you. I didn't have my son that early, but they were having children in their early twenties.

Craig Foster
So my great grandmother used to walk 7 miles every day to our house. She was very active and she lived till 96, she was, you know, and she was strong until 94. But the way she showed their love and my gran as well was with amazing attentiveness. So they used to come to our house. When I was very young I used to go out with my brother into the intertidal every day and we used to look for animals and fiddle around.

But what was always in the back of our minds was we were going to be able to go back to the house and my gran and my great gran would sit and totally focus on our silly little kids stories like with an absolute rapt attention. And there's something about that focus and not being distracted with other things that was immensely powerful. It gave our childhood meaning. It gave meaning to those stories. And 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 phenomenal.

Tim Ferriss
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, what that experience entailed? I guess you can imagine, Tim, you know, you here on the end of the planet. I'm right at the end of the tip of Africa. Fairly isolated in a way.

Craig Foster
I mean, at that point, I'd made 25 films. I'd, you know, done a lot of documentaries. Some of them like the great dance. Some are, you'd managed to see because you were very interested in that subject. But we'd had some level, little levels of success, and the films would go on and, you know, a few months later, then, you know, they'd go away and so on.

So I was expecting maybe a few people to be interested in this little octopus film. And, you know, we were used to these smaller channels also, like, you know, National Geographic or BBC or 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 end, you know, 100 million homes plus whatever the crazy number is. 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 4 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 don't know if you've thought about this, but going back to our design and our. Where we come from, you know, these saun societies and my saint teachers, it'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. Now suddenly you're winning awards, all this 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 kilter.

So the main way it showed that was by not sleeping. I slept extremely badly, sometimes just a few minutes a night for weeks and for months. And that does a horrible thing. Horrible thanks to your sight. Yeah, that's a 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'm 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 overnight, 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 made me so. Felt that deep humility of that adversity. And I realized that the awards and all that stuff really didn't matter at all.

But the one thing that mattered so much was these incredible letters that we got from people all over the world, had been moved by the film and had helped their lives. And that really mattered. That was real. That was something that you could hold on to. And it was very beautiful and very, very grateful to those people because that's what 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 am 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, eventually you die if you don't sleep. Not ideal.

Tim Ferriss
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?

Craig Foster
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 or more a day. All these things that I learned. And of course, eventually people quickly forget. If you don't feed that 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 COVID and everybody thinks, perfect storm.

It really was strange. It was so strange, Tim. 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 was similar. It wasn't of the magnitude of 100 million plus on Netflix, but with the first book, when it hit the New York Times list pretty quickly and then stayed there for a few years, four or five years, I suppose.

Tim Ferriss
And that was zero to 100 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 certainly provided opportunities like this.

It's at the stage for growing the blog, which set the stage for having the podcast, which sets the stage for having conversations like this. I'm 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.

Craig Foster
And I mean, imagine people who, for me, I was thinking of people who. This is a tiny little thing in many ways. You know, people are big actors in Hollywood, and how they manage, I do not know. I had a tiny taste of that in a small, small way. But I believe that buddhists have got a special prayer for people in the spotlight who are famous.

They know that it's a difficult thing. But as you say, I think it's a huge privilege. And I've met so many incredible people through it. Amazing opportunities. Of course, course, is the flip side of that, which is very special.

And when you get. When everything quietens down, it's much easier. Who is the new book for? How should people think about that? And what should they expect to get from reading this book, amphibious soul.

A few people who 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 the, 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 now is thanks to these extraordinary ancestors going back to long ago, millions of years, who actually built our minds. We can only do what we do because of them and their incredible ability to come through sometimes amazingly difficult times. And groups of them just slipped through. They almost went extinct a few times.

So it'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 would 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.

Tim Ferriss
But I might make an exception for this one. This one is right down the fairway, as we would say, 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. I'm very excited about it. Would you like to say anything about. Seachange project that is our not for profit organization that's focused on ocean conservation?

Craig Foster
We've been going for about ten years, and so started with an amazing group of volunteers who volunteered a lot of their time for five years. One of the big focus is, of course, the great african sea forest. And one of our methods has been, how do you protect something if it's not even known? Nobody knows about the kelp forest. So my wife Swati gave it this name, the great african seaforest.

And through the film octopus teacher, we've now, by some miracle, managed to make this place a sort of global icon. And it's been referred to in scientific papers by this name all over the world, so it's much easier to protect it. And the animals in that space, we're studying a 1001 animals in the kelp forest, bringing their stories out and we're also trying to get this idea across that. And this is where I'm quite fascinated by your sense of this, is that there's enormous emphasis on climate change and all the carbon problems and everything, and that's absolutely critical and that must go on. Absolutely.

But I feel there's not enough emphasis on biodiversity. And when I talk about biodiversity, I'm talking about all the plant and animal species on this planet, but they actually form our immune system. They are the life support system of everything. So if the phytoplankton communities in the ocean collapse, we stop breathing. We literally, that's it.

So every single investment that you might have in the bank or any property you might own or any future children 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 after and 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're kind of like a child who's forgotten that a 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 can take a stab at that if you like. I appreciate you bringing this up. I think about this quite a bit.

Tim Ferriss
And I would say that as you and your wife have done so brilliantly, I think words matter a lot and labels matter a lot. This sounds self evident, but what I mean by that, I'll give an example that'll probably piss off a bunch of folks in the US who might identify as liberals. But there is. And I, by the way, I would say I'm pretty apolitical. And I'm issue by issue, right?

I don't like to pick team a or team b, because if you agree with everything in your party, then youre probably not thinking for yourself. However, I tend to be. I just lived in the Bay Area for 17 years, for gods sake. So I would say that in a lot of ways I would point myself in that direction. However, theres a book called words that work by Luntz.

Im blanking on his first name. He is a republican strategist who, for instance, came up with the phrase death tax, which is a rebrand of sorts of inheritance tax. And hes very good at using words to catalyze or create narratives and stories that can then change behaviors, which can then change beliefs and policy. Right. So I think theres a lot to be learned from people like that.

And as I think about, for instance, our long term best interests and perhaps a bias towards short term thinking that has evolved and how to reconcile those two, I think a lot about a few different things. One is incentives. So how can we possibly create or modify incentives such that, or add incentives that help to bend behavior towards longer term outcomes? For instance, if we have, and this is painting with a broad brush, but if we have, let's just say, the CEO's of public companies who are being judged on a quarterly basis, who 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 reelection in one year or two years than they are on any type of long term game. If it means theyre going to potentially face political opposition or lose constituent support.

How do you try to thread that needle? 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 a 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 gripping 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.

Thats very abstract. So ill give a concrete example. You might choose, for instance, and what Im dancing around here is the word conservation. Im dancing around the word conservation because at least in the US, that has become, and I think its kind of silly, a polarizing word that gets associated with bleeding heart liberals in Berkeley, whereas if you go way back to, 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 it. 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. Lets just say im 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 be an oak tree in a park. And all of a sudden theyre on this sort of benevolent, slippery slope of becoming more engaged with their surroundings and then they become involved with a foundation that does trail repair and so on and so forth.

Right? So Im always thinking about how to get someone to just try the appetizer, right? Im not going to sell them on the 20 course tasting menu that costs $1,000 off the bat. Its just too much of a commitment. And ill give you an example.

Wolves are a very controversial species in the United States. Theyve become an ideological battleground and very politicized and Im 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 policymakers and man oh man, do people get upset. But the reason I bring up wolves is there's 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 a 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? Like as 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, in South America a lot of indigenous groups are making really bad long term decisions because they're getting seduced by mining companies with concessions who are giving them free electricity and ATV's and various bribes effectively to completely rape and pillage their ancestral land resources. We're all susceptible to this. How do you try to reconcile these?

So I don't know if any of this resonates, but I 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, would be viewed as very anti drug, antipsychedelic 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 subpopulations who have a certain degree of sympathy from both sides, who are politically immune, for instance, veterans with complex PTSD. There are ways that you can find common ground and bipartisan, in the case of the US, support with something that if you approach it the wrong way, if you take a sanctimonious lecturing position, it's doomed to fail.

That is the biggest weakness. With a lot of attempts at conservation, it's a positioning failure and it's a high horse 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 going to say yes.

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 going to stop in a second. But 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 in some socialist way, right?

It's just like an existential way. How do we not completely drive ourselves and the planet to a 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 rednecks would go out and just make a mess 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 Steve Ranella, took me on my first hunt, white tail 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 the 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 as some barbaric exercise and just an indulgence of bloodlust, 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, on 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 ill stop there? Because thats a whole lot that I just spewed out. But what have you learned about this? Because youve had wide ranging conversations.

Youve had a chance to talk about, say, sea change project and other things through the blessing and 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, let's face it. And I feel that part of that is this underlying disconnection from nature, from this original mother.

Craig Foster
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're keen on looking after the insects, you're keen on looking after the birds. 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, in this conservation game to point fingers, and I'm very, very wary of that because the pinga 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 for 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. We've known this for enormously long period of time.

So it's not something if we start remembering it just. It's transformative. Trey? Yeah, I totally agree. And I'll just say a few more things now that I'm all warmed up.

Tim Ferriss
The first is that here I am in Austin, and Austin is sometimes called the blueberry and the tomato soup because it's mostly liberal outpost in a predominantly republican state. And I'm going to say something that a lot of 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 the 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 a 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 were having a great conversation and he wanted to have a sparring match. So he said, what's your opinion on climate change? 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? Are you just setting us up for a rock and sock em robots fight here? Is this what we're getting ready to do?

I thought we were having a perfectly nice conversation. I just said all this explicitly and he kind of chuckled because he knew exactly what 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 whether humans had 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. Say, okay, what we can observe, I would say pretty uncontroversially, is more extreme weather events. So flooding events, mudslides, wildfires, et cetera. 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 our responsibility, or at least in our best interest, to take some human action to try to figure out how to deal with these things. It's like, okay, cool.

Then there was 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 fistfight 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 me by a friend, Matt Mullenweg, who thinks 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 knee jerk violence.

Craig Foster
Because you're 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.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah. And look, I'm not saying I'm the paragon of equanimity and I'm walking around like the Dalai lama, just constantly turning their cheek. 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. So of those 1001 species, we're gonna step out of the octagon for a second. Is one of them octopuses that steal cameras?

Am I getting this right?

Craig Foster
We had this fascinating experience not that long ago. I was with my friend and marine biologist who works with sea change, Yanis, and we were going out to study these shaggy sea hares that hardly ever come to this area and very focused on the sea hares. And the next moment, this very curious octopus rushed out of its den and grabbed my camera. Now, I know that I must be very careful with these animals. I just don't want to grab a camera back because it can really disturb an unsettle that animals.

I was like, okay, I've got to be a bit careful there. So drag the camera through the gravel back to its den. And then I thought, okay, I'll just wait, and hopefully the animal will give my camera back. But it was so fascinating, I happened to be recording at the time. This curious octopus looked at the camera, looked at the camera, then turned the camera and started filming 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 suddenly, looking through this world from the octopus's perspective, it was so powerful. And we both came up with this idea.

Octopus should be number one, and homo sapiens, the human animal, should be 1001. We forget that we're part of this wild world. We're 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 images. It's quite wonderful to turn it around. I did. I did see why and imagine what that animal's life is like. Imagine what its consciousness is like.

We can't obviously quite get into that, but we can start to sense it. We're all made of the same stuff. We come from the same original mother, so we bonded more closely than we think. So it was a wonderful lesson from the wild. And you've mentioned and also alluded to something that I would like to put into words for myself as a reminder as much as anything else.

Tim Ferriss
And that is so easy as the skin encapsulated egos that we are walking around, particularly in urban environments, staring at screens, deforming our eyeballs, one Zoom meeting at a time, that we are separate. And this comes back to language, which is a reflection of thinking that if we say we need to conserve nature, it's almost. We're implying a separation that, at least from my felt experience, isn't quite capturing what I take to be true at this point, which is almost for me, you've told a number of stories, I've experienced this. It's an extension of us, right? We evolved to operate in this environment.

They are not separate things, which is part of the reason why uploading consciousness to the cloud and so on I think is a flawed objective to begin with because disembodied consciousness and were already seeing this in actually AI research and robotics, requires some type of form moving through space. So its fundamental to who we are and who we evolved to be as homo sapiens, I suppose is what Im saying, which is why this book is for anyone who feels like, and I say this without having read the book. So Im taking a leap here, but I feel like based on this conversation, please correct me if im wrong, it seems like its 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 within reach. But it does take some changes of perception and behavior and interaction.

Is that fair to say? Absolutely spot on. Tim. I think you described it better than I can, so it's very much the case. And I don't always feel that wonderful feeling of not being separate.

Craig Foster
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 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 very grateful for that, and I think we 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. Craig people can find the book amphibious finding the wild in a tame world.

Tim Ferriss
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 seechangeproject@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 wind to a 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 for your braveness and openness. I think that's what attracted me to your podcast is honesty. You have, and 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.

Craig Foster
So it's nice that this book was an excuse to do that. It was just so special talking to you and getting to know you in this more intimate way, not just through the podcast. So that's been very special. And to all that amazing, big audience that 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 it'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 her mind, 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 we'll do ourselves a great service. I mean, we really, this idea of saving the planet is.

The planet's fine without us. She'll last easily without us. She's as tough as nails and can handle anything. We are the fragile ones, so 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 us so beautifully. So that's really the only thing.

And yeah, just absolutely wonderful talking to you, Tim, and very special for me, a real privilege. Likewise, Craig, thanks so much for saying that. And I've admired you and your work for a long time. Been meaning to connect also. Glad to have the book as a wonderful excuse to have this conversation and hope to meet in person.

Tim Ferriss
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 you diving. It'd be incredible. 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, finding the wild in a tame world, and seechangeproject. Is everybody listening? We will link to everything that we discussed in the show notes as per usual at Timblog podcast.

Just search Craig 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 Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun? Before the weekend, between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter. My Super Short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you.

So if that sounds fun. Again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out.

Just go. Go to Tim blog Friday. Type that into your browser Tim dot blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

This episode is brought to you by one password. I have been using one password for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products. I met the founding team early on. Love those guys.

And I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team. Data breaches affect everyone. They can be catastrophic. And my feeling is, since that is the case, you need one password. One password combines industry leading security with award winning design to bring private, secure and user friendly password management to everyone.

I use this dozens of times a day. It is an award winning password manager trusted by millions of users and more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to slack. Even including, including my little team. It beat out 40 other options to become Wirecutter's top pick for password managers. One password lets you securely switch between iPhone, Android, Mac and PC with convenient features like autofill for Quick sign ins.

All you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects everything else, your logins, your credit cards, secure notes, or the office wifi password. One password creates as many strong, unique passwords as you need and securely stores them in an encrypted vault that only you have access to. You can also use it for one time passwords where you scan the QR code and it gives you two factor authentication with the countdown with unique numbers, that type of thing. So instead of using a separate app for those types of authenticator type functions, you can use one password plus regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. Keep one password at the forefront of security, so start protecting your business today with one password.

Companies suffer from data breaches daily all the time, losing time and money, dealing with extortion, stolen customer data, and more. I have personally dealt with a lot of these headaches. You don't want them. It is why using one password is a business best practice I strongly endorse and a business solution that I use myself. So check it out.

Get a free two week trial@onepassword.com. Tim that's one the number one password.com Tim this episode is brought to you by Viori clothing spelled v u o r I viori. I've been wearing viori at least one item per day for the last few months and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner.

At least in my case. I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete.

She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viori and this was her response. I do love their stuff. Been using them for about a year, I think. I found them at Rei first for my partner t shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff.

And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough, I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and love them.

The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out in closing, and I'm abbreviating here. But in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good. Also, I like the discreet logo, so that gives you some idea that was not intended for the sponsor, read. That was just her response via text. Viori, again spelled v u o r I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility.

You can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good and it's non offensive. You don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time.

They're men's core short. Kore the most comfortable, lined, athletic short is your one short for for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it. The banks short. This is their go to land to sea short is the ultimate in versatility.

It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the ponto performance pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now. They're thin performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice.

So you got to check it out. P o n t o ponto performance pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Viori isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase.

So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends, I've now noticed, are wearing this and so am I. Vioriclothing.com Tim that's vuori clothing.com Tim not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any us orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out.

Vioriclothing.com Tim that's buori clothing.com Tim and discover the versatility of viori clothing.

#735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher - How to Find the Wild in a Tame World

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction to Craig Foster and His Work

2: Deep Dive into the Kelp Forest

3: Lessons from the Octopus

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Companies

Books

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript