Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Craig Foster (@seachangeproject). Craig 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 My Octopus Teacher has led to making the Great African Seaforest a global icon.
His new book is Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:
Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.
WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.
WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Craig Foster: Incredible to be here, Tim. I had the same thing. I’ve listened to so many of your podcasts and I’ve always wanted to talk to you, so it’s very exciting.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
Craig Foster: Sure. So just before coming on, I went for my swim in the Great African Seaforest which just is 50 meters to the right of here. It’s a very wild, windy day today. So that the technique is to swim long distances along the coast because the underwater tracking is quite difficult and you’re hoping to pick up something interesting.
And I was thinking, “Oh, it’s not much happening.” And suddenly I saw this enormous white shape and just below me was the biggest stingray in the world, I mean this is the biggest species in the world. They’re up to 16, 17-feet long, 14-feet wide, incredible animal. And what is strange about this animal, Tim, was it was absolutely white. They’re 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. Then the animal came up right to the surface and it’s weighing about a ton. So it is actually weighing down part of the kelp forest and I just managed to glide with it for maybe 10 minutes right next to it, just trying to keep my vibrations right down. So it was just such an incredible feeling to be in that wild space with this giant beautiful animal. And I’ve never seen a white one like that in all my time.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to cover a lot of ground, literally and metaphorically in this conversation, so it’s not going to be all underwater, but it seems like your underwater experiences started very, very, very early. Could you describe the day of your birth, please?
Craig Foster: Sure. Obviously I don’t remember it, but I’ve been told the 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. 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 12 degrees centigrade, which is about 50 degrees fahrenheit. And 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 born?
Craig Foster: Apparently, yes.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Craig Foster: And I did the same with my son, but I felt that I couldn’t take him immediately, so I waited until he was, I think a week or so old, and his little belly button actually broke off and washed out to sea when I took him in.
Tim Ferriss: 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. Well, actually it was Boyd Varty, 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, who’s a master tracker who pointed me to the —
Craig Foster: Oh, wow. Yeah, Alex, I know him well, he’s a wonderful guy.
Tim Ferriss: There you go. All right, so I’ve spent a bunch of time with Alex and Renias.
Craig Foster: Oh, amazing. Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And this is fun to explore with you because we are just meeting each other, but we’ve been exposed to the others’ work. The Great Dance, and I found the video of The Great Dance and found it endlessly fascinating. But since this is a bit of inside baseball, would you please describe this film and how it came to be? I don’t know the genesis story.
Craig Foster: That’s going back a long time. So this was the late ’90s and my brother and myself had been living on remote islands in different parts of the world, just living wild for many, many months. And we came back to Southern Africa, to South Africa, and we’d always been fascinated by the 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 pit themselves against the animal without a bow and arrow. 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. Wejust lost so much weight and it was so intense.
But we eventually managed to get the sacred hunt, this hunt by running. And we met these extraordinary trackers who became real mentors and they’ve always stayed with me 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 of her.
Tim Ferriss: And “inside 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’re thorn bushes, but some type of brush around the fire so that they can tell stories, recount the day and then sleep while there are other animals, certainly about. Not all prey necessarily at night. And it really did strike me that that scene could have been from thousands of years ago, more or less unchanged.
And for definition’s sake, you said run down animals. I want to paint a picture for folks. So this is also called persistence hunting. And the reason the temperature is important, please correct me if I’m 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 whitetail deer, good luck. It’s going to be very, very challenging. But when the temperatures are high enough, why can humans, on an endurance basis and survival basis, outlast something like a kudu or an antelope? How’s that possible?
Craig Foster: It’s basically because we can sweat and keep ourselves cool, whereas those animals overheat. And this is — 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. 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 is the most fascinating thing to me was that after a certain point in time and the hunt that we managed to film took over four hours and for I’d say at least three of those hours, Karoha the tracker was not following the physical tracks. He had gone into an altered state and was somehow mysteriously locked onto that animal.
And these kudu are like the ghosts of the bush. They’re impossible to follow unless you’re at a master level. But the kudu is doing everything to 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 percent 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. But that’s how it worked.
Tim Ferriss: I recall, just to give people a reference as well, if they’re interested in digging into this, there’s a book called The Wayfinders by Wade Davis that has a long chapter on Polynesian navigation, which blew my mind. I won’t go into great detail with that now, but —
Craig Foster: I know that book and I know those Polynesian voyagers. I know Nainoa Thompson well.
Tim Ferriss: It’s unbelievable.
Craig Foster: Yeah, it’s extraordinary. In there’s, really, if you make a mistake, you’re dead. And that’s exactly the same kind of thing. In fact, I spoke to Nainoa, had an incredible day with him here in False Bay. We dived together when he circumnavigated the world.
I spoke to him about the Solemn Trackers and he was like, “Yes, that’s exactly what we are doing. We’re using our bodies and obviously the stars and everything as this navigation device.” And you might recall his great teacher, Papa Mau, used to lie asleep. And when that ocean-going canoe moved one degree off course, his body would wake up and he’d tell him. So even asleep, he was able to do this extraordinary navigation.
Tim Ferriss: 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. 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.
The reason I say parallels is that thinking of, I’ve never met the Kalahari Bushmen, 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. I’m sure a lot of people listening to this are in Los Angeles or New York. How are those experiences of the world most different in your mind?
Craig Foster: What was fascinating to me was — and immediately [inaudible] comes to mind, this incredible bow hunter that we worked with and a lot of the other San I’ve worked with over the years. You’ll be walking along tracking, looking for signs, 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. 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 have called Wilderness Rapture.
A lot of other people have noticed this in indigenous societies. There’s an extraordinary sense of joy that seems to be connected to being very embedded in the natural world. So 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 are deeply connected to the wild.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Craig Foster: Thank you.
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 I’ve ended up using a lot in the last few years when people ask me where I most want to live, say, when I have a family, in or around immersive nature.
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 man-made lake, which is a section of a river. And there are some beautiful trees around town like here in Austin, and you feel like you are around nature, but it doesn’t have the vastness that you might perceive when you are, say, in the mountains. When you’re in an alpine environment where you feel dwarfed by your surroundings or I would imagine in a kelp forest in the ocean and you see a 14-foot 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 there’s another factor to this as well, Tim. I’ve sort of searched for wildness my whole life and struggled actually to find it in many ways. And I’ve done very extreme things to try and get close to wildness, like diving with crocodiles and this kind of thing.
But strangely enough, when I’ve sometimes felt the closest to wild nature is when I’ve just spent time with some small animals, say like 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 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 you’re 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.”
Tim Ferriss: So let’s talk about maybe an extreme example of intimacy and then I’m going to pull in an example that I believe you’ve given of one tree in New York. So we’re going to bring it to New York, but we’re going to go back to the Kalahari.
Alex, who I mentioned earlier, Alex van den Heever. I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly. I don’t speak Afrikaans, but it’s probably close enough for the purposes of —
Craig Foster: Close enough, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Close enough.
Craig Foster: Van den Heever, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There we go. I knew it wasn’t right. I knew it was going to be one of those Volkswagen type of situations. I know that’s not Dutch, by the way folks, or Afrikaans in any case.
Alex, I encourage people to check out Tracker Academy, which is an NGO nonprofit, 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 San or the San. I’m not sure how to pronounce that correctly. What makes them so impressive? Alex, he, himself, 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 one-on-one level.
What makes the hunters you spent time with in the Kalahari so particularly impressive, at least to you?
Craig Foster: It was fascinating to see that they could observe animals with their technique moving up to one and a half kilometers away so they can feel a predator moving one and a half kilometers away and you can’t see more than 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 animal’s being killed by these reactions a lot of the time. So 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. I think that is one of the many factors that make them so extraordinary.
Tim Ferriss: And if we pull back and try to bring that, say, to people listening in the US, there are a lot of people listening internationally, but plenty of people in the US. I recall coming back from South Africa, from the Sabi Sands Reserve and the fauna, certainly 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, right?
And if you develop a basic vocabulary, you can start to try to figure out possible gender direction, speed. And it seems to just give you a greater fidelity of perception in these experiences. You’ve said, I believe, you can’t read or you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, so please feel free to fact check this.
But you’ve 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.
Craig Foster: Yeah, you can do it in cities. I’ve seen incredible trackers in America doing this. I’ve got a great friend, Jon Young, who’s an 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. And then you start — nature then becomes this incredible teacher.
And it’s just about persistence. You don’t have to have any great intellect or anything. You just have a little cell phone camera, some notes, and you just start observing these things and suddenly this incredible invisible world becomes visible to you and it becomes very fascinating. And then you think after a year or two of doing it, okay, I 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
You have perhaps a unique experience in listening to episodes of this podcast. I believe you’d mentioned, this is 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.
Craig Foster: Sure. You’re absolutely right. 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.
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. I love so many of them. I do this because it makes one feel very relaxed. It builds the immune system, and of course it helps with the diving, but one’s got to be very careful never to do any of these breathing techniques close to actually going in the water. You probably want at least half an hour or more away from that. I never do these breathing things and then go into the water. Any freediving, I will only take two or three deep breaths before I go in a dive. You’ve got to be so careful with that.
The cold exposure, I’ve always, I’ve spent the last 12 years pretty much diving every single day. So I’ve acclimatized myself to the cold. I 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 all 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. And then actually, even though I could obviously spend longer in the water with a wetsuit, I prefer an hour or so, and with all these amazing chemicals from the cold that helped me focus and understand the secret lives of these animals.
Tim Ferriss: 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 is jumping from Greek to Chinese, if you’ve never read Chinese.
In the sense that in South Africa with Alex and Renias, you have smell. So it turns out that at least male leopard urine smells like burnt popcorn, and you can smell it pretty clearly. It smells exactly like burnt popcorn. It’s unbelievable, it’s uncanny. And then you see the alarm calls from vervet monkeys or different types of birds, francolins, 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?
Craig Foster: Yeah, it’s a great question. At first, I struggled for several years, I had this idea, I got incredibly inspired by the San 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 collect 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.
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. Their enormous number of tiny little marks that the predators make.
So 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 lot of other things you tell the timing, there are bite marks everywhere. There are literally thousands and thousands of these subtle signs but it’s taken me 10 years to slowly put together because there’s no manuals on this, there’s no books. As far as I know, nobody’s really done this in the bigger aquatic picture. So it did take a very long time to figure it all out.
Tim Ferriss: How has, and this is a leading question of course, maybe the answer is it hasn’t, 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?
Craig Foster: First of all, it’s made my desire to be better tracking on land stronger. So now I’ve got a wonderful friend, JJ Minye, Xhosa master tracker, who I work with and who’s teaching me on a weekly basis. So that’s been very profound on land. And I sometimes take him into the intertidal in the water and show him what I know there. So it’s exciting. But 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 though, animals in the water are not afraid of people like they are on land, you know, 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 the 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, one meter away and I’m safe and I can be —
Tim Ferriss: What would be an example of that?
Craig Foster: Like a sevengill shark or a great white shark, a tiger shark, that kind of thing. So it’s fairly safe to be with those animals and sometimes there’s an enormous number of them together. In the case of the sevengills, 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’m prey. So it’s quite safe to be with them. But what has happened, and I’ve got a lot of relationships with these smaller creatures, and because of that, it feels as if I’m not as reliant on my human relationships because I have this, it feels like family, like kin in the water after a while, many years you just feel this tremendous love for these creatures and they’ve taught me so much.
They’re real teachers for me, so I love them. And then I have these bonds. So the human relationships on land, I don’t feel I need as much from them. So I think my relationship with my wonderful wife has become better because of that. And with a lot of close friends, family, if something happens in the psyche, and if you can imagine, throughout prehistory for countless hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve had these relationships with all these species. Now in many cases, it is totally taken away. Well, where’s that going to go? Where’s all that relationship going to go? And it mostly goes, I think, to a bit more pressure on human relationships. So that’s one of the things I’ve 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, a very intimate encounter. And I’d love for you to perhaps tell that story because I may have some follow up questions.
Craig Foster: That’s amazing, your ability to dig things out from the deep past. Good tracking, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks.
Craig Foster: That’s a long time ago. So this was actually quite 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. 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. And it was so overwhelming that I actually shed a few tears in the mask and it was very powerful.
And then animals swimming around and bouncing off the ocean floor, they are 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 of the water and this otter followed me right into the shallows and was popping its head out and making this high-pitched sound as 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 wanted to look and feel the strange, the sort of primate flopping around in the water.
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible. 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 and you see this.
Craig Foster: I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating.
Tim Ferriss: 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 elicit play. And then there’s this badger waddling around behind it, and they’re off to go do some night hunting together. It is remarkable.
Craig Foster: Wow. That’s incredible.
Tim Ferriss: So when you stay hunting with humans, do you have any more details on what that might’ve looked like or what otters and humans would hunt and why did it make sense to hunt together?
Craig Foster: So the story actually came through my wife, Swati, who grew up for all her life in India, is a 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 gets 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’ve had with wild creatures and the possibilities that what they would’ve got up to, I think, could be pretty extraordinary.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m fascinated by interspecies cooperation when it’s sort of the most unlikely of combinations or things you wouldn’t expect. And I want to say, and I’ll put 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. 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 is, he should give me a slap on the wrist if I get this wrong, and the dwarf mongoose who will also cooperate, and I want to say it’s the hornbill, 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. That’s fascinating to me.
Craig Foster: I see it in the kelp forest, these alliances. We see it with the octopus and the super klipvis. The fish are following the —
Tim Ferriss: What was the second animal that you mentioned?
Craig Foster: A super klipvis, it’s a rockfish, a type of rock 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, but they’re probably acting as in the same way like the bird’s alarm call. So if a bigger predator comes in and the fish will tell the octopus.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you decide to write Amphibious Soul, subtitled Finding the Wild in a Tame World? And it’s rare that a book exactly resonates with what has been deeply on my mind for certainly the last few years. But could you just speak to the genesis of this? How did this come about? Writing books is hard, at least for me. So how did this come about for you?
Craig Foster: I went through a pretty tough period after the film came out. I wasn’t in any way expecting or be ready to be exposed to hundreds of millions of people on Netflix. It was a huge shock for me, and part of it was trying to come out of that space and just to get down on paper what was in my head. But I also had this feeling of this relationship with all these animals that I mentioned to you. I just wanted so much to tell their stories. And I’d learned so much beyond the octopus. Obviously that film was very much focused on that one animal and 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 three million years of deep evolution in 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 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 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. And then when I get too, and don’t get me wrong, I love a good cup of coffee. I love watching movies. I love all the incredible things in science. I love the science, so I love the tame world as well. But if I get drawn too much in that, I feel my nervous system just ratchets up and I can’t sleep properly and I feel odd. So it’s just about trying to find that balance and I’m very passionate about this subject.
Tim Ferriss: It strikes me that, and this has become more perhaps salient for me in the last 10 to 15 years in particular, but to be really well-adapted to an almost exclusive modern existence requires you to somewhat be a freak of nature, if that makes sense. In the same way that there are super sleepers, people who have the genetic predisposition and capability to feel fully rested on four hours of sleep, four and a half hours of sleep. And these people do exist. There’s predictive power 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. I’ve gone bow hunting for a long time now, and I go once a year typically and blocking out another week or 10 days for a rafting trip and another segment of time for a group trip with friends to spend time in the mountains doing ski touring, those points of reconnection or reactivation of that felt sense of connectedness 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, which is 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. So this is dealer’s choice.
Craig Foster: Can 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 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 there are animals, it is teeming, it is mind-bending in terms of what is there.
But what was most fascinating, Tim, 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, 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 be working, and 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?
Craig Foster: I think what it is, and it might be connected, Tim, 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 are in an environment where there’s almost no biodiversity, your ancient creature that’s living inside you, your deep design, is terrified because it doesn’t know you can go to the supermarket. It’s just looking and feeling and hearing and smelling. There’s no life around. So the experience of going to these wilderness places tells that wild part of us that everything is okay, that this is actually, 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, everything’s all right, everything will be fine. This is good. This is the good life.
Tim Ferriss: That strikes a chord with me. And 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 you’re 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 nonprofit called the Amazon Conservation Team. And man were these guys relaxed — guys and gals — because they could go fishing and hunting.
They walked out into the forest for any given need. I mean the sophistication of their pharmacists, let’s call them, who could walk out, and every plant, every tree, every turn was known, 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 too overly romanticized either, because prior to a lot of the missionary work, the intertribal warfare was just nonstop, unceasing. So there are issues with any groups of humans because humans are humans.
Craig Foster: I asked some of the old San, “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 are desperate to go back to the old life. It was incredible and such an adventure and so powerful.” And half of them said “No, it was just too difficult. And we much prefer being static and we’ve got a water supply. We are 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 because I rarely get the chance to connect with someone who’s 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. 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 bird’s 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 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, and this is getting perhaps into some mystical areas, although I think at some point it won’t be mystical because we’ll 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. There’s a density that has such a distinct impact on my inner experience that I can’t really describe to my own satisfaction. But could you bounce off of either of those in any way that makes any sense?
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, and 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’ve found is if I just actually relax and released it and let that enormous unconscious that’s connected to the deep ancestry, that’s connected to three million years in our genus as Homo 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, honing in and saying, and 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 echinoderm, 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 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 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. But just because they’re hard to verbalize does not mean that it’s magical thinking, right? In the example you gave, in the example that I gave with the field dressing, it’s not implying magic just because it’s hard to verbalize. And if you think about our evolution, language is a pretty recent arrival, at least to the extent that we’re talking right now. This level of if we are being generous with 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?
Craig Foster: It’s working because I wanted to talk about the mirror because of what you said. And this is 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 a certain animal, say 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 and 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 this 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 behavior, especially animal behavior that I would often have never seen in my whole life. And then I’m focusing on this one particular animal, desperate to learn from it and then I just see right in front of me this incredible behavior, that maybe and 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 that’s 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 reflecting back at me, things are tough.
Tim Ferriss: I am really so enjoying this conversation, in part because you are a — you’re an explorer and you have deep, deep, consistent contact with nature. And just to draw a quick, maybe, analogy, the coaches and athletes at the highest level of sport are always a few steps ahead of, say, the published exercise scientists. Of course, because there’s so many barriers, number one, to publication, as there should be, peer review and so on. And 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, right? Field biologists are going to see things that they can’t explain that might seem ridiculous, that ultimately bear out as incredibly valid and important, it just might take 10 years. So you have discovered how many new species of shrimp?
Craig Foster: We’ve lost count, 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 dens and probably has a mutual relationship with the cephalopods. In this part of the world, 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 prof, Charles Griffiths, we find a new species and we almost don’t want to look at it, because we know how much work is going to take to describe it. So you should almost ignore it.
Tim Ferriss: Heteromysis fosteri. That would be one, right?
Craig Foster: Yeah, yeah. Good tracking. That’s another little shrimp that lives inside the shells of — discarded shells of animals, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 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 Lophophora williamsii, probably pronouncing that wrong, but I don’t speak Latin. Better known as peyote. Although certainly there were many people well before Mr. William or Williams who were intimately familiar with hikuri or peyote.
So coming back to play, what is song catching?
Craig Foster: Song catching was introduced to me by — the idea by Jon Young, who’s a wonderful tracker in California. And he used to go out with Bill Monroe, I think was the father of bluegrass 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, 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 Jon’s played some of these songs to me and they’ve had some really strange coincidences where people have got a very similar song about the same species of trees, so it was fascinating to me. And I thought, “I’d love to try and catch the song of the kelp forest,” but Jon’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 Ma —
Tim Ferriss: 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 sake of explaining this for the audience, so — I think his name was Jon, that you mentioned. Song catching —
Craig Foster: Jon Young.
Tim Ferriss: — this is, in effect, 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?
Craig Foster: That’s a wonderful way of describing it. Absolutely, yes.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So how does —
Craig Foster: It goes deep into our deep past and the famous songs that — the song of the Kalahari have caught at night in dreams or in visions that make up the trance dance, so it goes deep back in time. So I thought, “I’m just going to go and 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, “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 stupidly said, “We’re catching songs. We are doing the 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, it was, I suddenly realized, a huge mistake.
Tim Ferriss: Because you didn’t have a song.
Craig Foster: I didn’t have, and the greatest musician on this planet’s now coming to listen. It was like, “What have I done? Absolute idiot.” So I 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, and 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 ear bone about the size of my fist, and it was unbelievable. And we’d 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 Pippa, got hold of some good musicians. I think it was Ronan Skillen, who’s one of the best percussionists in the country, and he got hold of Zolani Mahola, this incredible Xhosa singer.
And we all got together and said, “Yo-Yo Ma is coming, what can we do?” And Zolani, 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, and we tuned these —
Tim Ferriss: What’s a stipe?
Craig Foster: Sorry, that’s the long stem of the kelp. So they’re up to 15 meters, 45 feet long, but we had them washing on the shore after the storm and we got 10-meter long ones, and my son and Ronan tuned them. And he played these incredible tubes made from the kelp like a drum.
Tim Ferriss: So it’d be like playing water glasses of different heights, in a sense.
Craig Foster: Exactly. But he was striking the top.
Tim Ferriss: Like a xylophone.
Craig Foster: Yeah. That kind of thing.
Tim Ferriss: But with the tubes of the different lengths.
Craig Foster: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Whatever that is.
Craig Foster: You 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 luckily arrived at my house. It was terrifying, I was really stressed out, and Zolani 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 relationships formed with these amazing people who were committed to this strange idea.
Tim Ferriss: What does the word “home” or concept of home mean to you?
Craig Foster: About a year and three months ago, we lost our home because of an electrical fire. And literally, from one hour to two hours later, I had this beautiful home that my wife and I and my son had nurtured for 16 years was ashes. And we totally lost — 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.
I 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 very 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. And it struck so hard and it was 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. My house.
Tim Ferriss: That sounds like a possibly terrifying and dangerous experience. Was anyone in the house when that happened?
Craig Foster: 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 glass exploding around us, and we were lucky enough to get not 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, and especially a bed or something catches, within 30 seconds, you’re not going to put that fire out.”
Tim Ferriss: That is so lucky. Terrifying and tragic and very lucky that no one was injured.
Craig Foster: No, that was the main thing. Yeah, that was a big factor, Tim, was like — if no one gets injured, then you can quite easily, I think, get over that process.
Tim Ferriss: 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 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.
Craig Foster: I think, certainly for me, certainly a huge turning point was when I felt I was inside of the natural world, I rarely had something to pass to him. I didn’t want to try and 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. He has a deep love for nature and it was amazing to pass that on, and 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, 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, dedicated time. I made sure I dedicated focused time to doing things with him, but things I also enjoyed doing, not just — 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, I’m useless with that. So it’s just 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 — yeah, I’d love to be your child.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks for saying that. Yeah, I would love to be your child, too, from the sounds of it. And I must ask two things, I guess. Do people in your family tend to have kids young? Because you said great-grandmother. And my grandparents passed away when I was very, very young, so 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.
Craig Foster: I didn’t have my son that early, but they were having children in their early twenties. So my great-grandmother used to walk seven miles every day to our house, he was very active, and she lived until 96, 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 kid 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, that 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. And it was unconditional — 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 of trying to survive and didn’t have much money, so it was much harder for them. But the grandparents were just, yeah, 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?
Craig Foster: I guess you can imagine, Tim — you hear on the end of the planet, I’m right at the end of — the tip of Africa, fairly isolated in a way. I mean, at that point, I’d made 25 films, I’d done a lot of documentaries, some of them like The Great Dance, somehow 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, a few months later, then they’d go away, and so on. So I was expecting maybe a few people to be interested in this little octopus film. We’re either used to these smaller channels also, like 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, you absolutely, like nobody on the end of the planet, just fascinated by these animals and you’re in 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 four seconds. My nature is to be wanting to reply to everybody. Of course, that becomes impossible. 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 where we come from, the San societies and my San teachers, that’s a very egalitarian society. To even have a competition for someone who’s better than somebody else would be absolutely out of the question, so we come as humans from this vast lineage where these people knew it was good to keep everybody on the same level and not to have competition. Now, suddenly, you’re winning awards, all the stuff. It’s somehow — it’s very exciting, but it’s also very disturbing for the psyche.
And for me, my nervous system was completely knocked out of kilter. So the main way it showed that was by not sleeping, so I didn’t sleep. I slept extremely badly, sometimes just a few minutes a night for weeks and for months, and that does a horrible thing, horrible things to your psyche.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a problem.
Craig Foster: 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 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’d 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 I’d learned from the wild to rebuild my nervous system.
Just gentle access to the cold and to the spaces and to these animals, and I was able to rebuild my system, but it helped, because it made — 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 who’d been moved by the film and had helped their lives, and that really mattered. That was real, that was something that you could hold onto, and it was very beautiful and very, very grateful to those people, because that’s what kept me going.
And if I had to go back and say, “Would I want to go through all that hell of not sleeping again?” In retrospect, I’m glad I went through it. I’d hate to ever repeat that, it was very traumatic in some ways, but I 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’ve been — I mean, it’s eventually you die if you don’t sleep.
Tim Ferriss: Not ideal. So what stopped it? Was it just the natural 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: So 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, the people quickly forget, if you don’t feed that system, as you know, then it 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 about these things.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect storm, it really was.
Craig Foster: It 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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, 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’s certainly provided opportunities like this. It set the stage for growing the blog, which set the stage for having the podcast, which set the stage for having conversations like this, so I’m very grateful. And we are not evolved to handle that type of dynamic at all. At least —
Craig Foster: I mean, there’s nothing in the prehistory, and that big spotlight comes. And I mean, imagine people who — for me, I was thinking of people who — this is a tiny little thing in many ways, 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 the 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 also it’s a huge privilege and I’ve met so many incredible people through it. Amazing opportunities, of course, is the flip side of that, which is very special. And when everything quietens down, it’s much easier.
Tim Ferriss: So who is the new book for? How should people think about that, and then what should they expect to get from reading this book, Amphibious Soul?
Craig Foster: The few people who have read the 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 just a few people, quite transformative in that way. They started to look at the wild world in a different way and it 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 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’ve 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. Groups of them just slipped through, they almost went extinct a few times, so it’s quite incredible that we’re sitting here talking.
Tim Ferriss: 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,” 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. And I’m very excited about it.
Would you like to say anything about Sea Change Project?
Craig Foster: That is our not-for-profit organization that’s focused on ocean conservation. We’ve been going for about 10 years, and so started with an amazing group of volunteers who volunteered a lot of their time for five years. One of the big focuses, of course, the Great African Seaforest, 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, My Octopus Teacher, we’ve now, by some miracle, managed to make this place a 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. So we are studying 1001 animals in the kelp furrows, bringing their stories out, and we are also trying to get this idea across that — and this way, 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. 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, but we’re kind of like a child who’s forgotten that his 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?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, I can take a stab at that if you like. I appreciate bringing this up. I think about this quite a bit. 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. And 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 you’re probably not thinking for yourself. I just lived in the Bay Area for 17 years, for God’s sake. So I would say that in a lot of ways I would point myself in that direction.
However, there’s a book called Words That Work by Luntz, I’m blanking on his first name. He is a Republican strategist who, for instance, came up with the term or the phrase “death tax,” which is a rebrand of sorts of inheritance tax. And he’s 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 there’s 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, and this is painting with a broad brush, but if we have, let’s just say, the CEOs of public companies who are being judged on a quarterly basis and 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 they’re going to potentially face political opposition or lose constituent support, how do you try to thread that needle?
And you, I think, have an advantage in thinking about this because you are on some level, and I suppose we all are, but you’re 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. That’s very abstract. So I’ll give a concrete example. You might choose, for instance, and what I’m dancing around here is the word conservation. I’m dancing around the word conservation because at least in the US, that has become, and I think it’s 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, right? Let’s just say, I’m making this up, but we use that single tree example. They end up taking an interest in perhaps the oldest tree in their neighborhood in Austin, which happens to be an oak tree in a park. And all of a sudden they’re 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 I’m always thinking about how to get someone to just try the appetizer, right? And I’m not going to sell them on the 20-course tasting menu that costs $1,000 off the bat. It’s just too much of a commitment. And I’ll give you an example. Wolves are a very controversial species in the United States. They’ve become an ideological battleground and very politicized. And I’m going to leave that third rail alone for a second, although I’ve been very involved in a lot of these conversations on a national level, including policymakers, and man, oh, man, do people get upset! But the reason I bring up wolves is there’s a book, Of Wolves and Men, by Barry Lopez, 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? As soon as you start lecturing —
Craig Foster: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: — 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 ATVs and various bribes effectively to completely rape and pillage their ancestral land resources, right? And so we’re all susceptible to this. How do you try to reconcile these?
So I don’t know if any of this resonates, but 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, anti-psychedelic, let’s just say, if we’re painting with a broad brush on the right, and then you have the hippies and so on and the lefties who are pro drugs. But you can get around that if you look at certain 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, right? And I think that’s the biggest weakness that I see. I see that as 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, “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 the 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 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, Steven Rinella, took me on my first hunt white-tailed 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 blood-lust, which for some people, it might, 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, right? What is the foot in the door where we can say something that really has no grounds for disagreement? How can we start there? What is that thread?
So I’ll stop there because that’s a whole lot that I just spewed out. But what have you learned about this? Because you’ve had wide-ranging conversations, you’ve had a chance to talk about, say, 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?
Craig Foster: It aligns in quite a few ways to what you’re saying, and I think that 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. So I think it’s 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 conservation game to point fingers, and I’m very wary of that because the finger can point back at me so easily. We all are involved in this process, and we all do things that aren’t great for the planet, let’s face it. I’ve never met a single person who doesn’t. So we kind of need to come together as a community and reconnect with this massive extraordinary heritage and then uplift so many of our lives. We don’t need so many of the things from the tame world. It’s wonderful to enjoy some of them, but by giving up and sacrificing some of those things, we can actually create a much better life for ourselves in many ways. And so I think it is quite attractive and people are struggling a lot and it’s something that is not new. We’ve known this for an enormously long period of time. So it’s not something — if we start remembering it, just it’s transformative.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I totally agree. And I’ll just say a few more things now that I’m all warmed up. The first is that here I’m in Austin, and Austin is sometimes called the blueberry in the tomato soup because it’s a 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, here we go, open shot fired. And I said, “Well, look, do you want to have a conversation about this or are you just setting us up for a Rock’em Sock’em Robots fight here? Is this what we’re getting ready to do? I thought we were having a perfectly nice conversation.” And I just said all this explicitly. And he kind of chuckled because he knew exactly what he was doing.
And I said, “Look, first of all, let’s not use that word because I can tell where this is going.” And 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, right? 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.” Said, “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. 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.” I was like, “Okay. Cool.” And then there was a lot less room to fight, if that makes sense, right?
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 because 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’re using basically not words that work, but words that incite some kind of —
Craig Foster: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — immediate knee-jerk violence —
Craig Foster: Because you’re never going to persuade anybody by going in hard or having —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Craig Foster: — the straight line opinions. I mean, our whole nature is so contradictory in —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Craig Foster: — our 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: And look, I’m not saying I’m the paragon of equanimity and I’m walking around like the Dalai Lama and just constantly turning the other cheek. I get fired up and pissed off and say stupid things and send emails I shouldn’t send. I do these things. But just aspirationally, I think it’s worth paying attention to. And of those 1,001 species, we’re going to 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, Jannes, and we were going out to study the 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 and unsettle that animal. So I was like, “I’ve got to be a bit careful there.” So it dragged the camera through the gravel back to its den, and then I thought, “I’ll just wait and hopefully the animal will give my camera back.” But what was so fascinating, I happened to be recording at the time, this curious octopus 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 gave the camera back. And when we looked at these images, it had this amazingly profound effect on us that it is suddenly looking through this world from the 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 1,001 because we forget that we are 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 I mean, I think you may have seen some of the images. It’s quite wonderful to turn it around —
Tim Ferriss: I did. They’re wild.
Craig Foster: — and to see it from that 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 are 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 and that is, it’s 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, 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, and you’ve told a number of stories, I’ve experienced this, it’s an extension of us, right? We evolve to operate in this environment. They’re not separate things, which is part of the reason why uploading consciousness to the cloud and so on, I think, is sort of a flawed objective to begin with because disembodied consciousness, and we’re already seeing this in actually AI research and robotics, requires some type of form moving through space.
So it’s fundamental to who we are and who we evolve to be as homo sapiens, I suppose is what I’m saying, which is why this book is for anyone who feels like, and I say this without having read the book, so I’m taking a leap here, but I feel like based on this conversation, please correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like it’s for anyone who feels like maybe something isn’t quite right or there’s maybe something that is missing or perhaps the mode of living that feels divorced from nature is producing some eerie sense of incompleteness or unease that this is a guide to finding ways to reintegrate that feeling of completeness, which is available. It is available, it’s not magical, it is not out of reach. It is within reach, but it does take some changes of perception and behavior and interaction. Is that fair to say?
Craig Foster: 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. The 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 rarely feels like there’s no other. And it’s deeply transformative and invigorating, and I try to keep that with me and I try to be very grateful for that. And I think we all, as you say, have access to that. You just have to just try and put in a little bit of that time, and then it comes.
Tim Ferriss: Craig, people can find the book Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World. I recommend people check this out. I think thematically, it is so deeply important. It has been so transformative for me. So I can’t wait to get my hands on it. People can find Sea Change Project at seachangeproject.com, and we’ll link to everything that we discussed in the show notes. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about? Any additional comments or formal complaints against me or the podcast or anything that you would 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?
Craig Foster: I’d like to thank you for all your work and your dedication to talking about so many subjects that have certainly helped me and inspired me so much, and 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. And 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 you for a long time and never really had the courage to reach out. So it’s nice that this book was an excuse to do that. It’s 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’d 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 our mind just to 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, 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 at least that gratefulness for this amazing planet that has looked after us so beautifully. So that’s really the only thing. And just absolutely wonderful talking to you, Tim, and very special for me, a real privilege.
Tim Ferriss: Likewise, Craig. Thanks so much for saying that. And I’ve admired you and your work for a long time. I’ve been meaning to connect. Also, glad to have the book as a wonderful excuse to have this conversation, and hope to meet in person. Maybe I’ll have a chance to graze my fingertips across some kelp with you at some point. I would enjoy that.
Craig Foster: I would love to take you diving. It’d be incredible.
Tim Ferriss: I would absolutely love to do that. So I will put that on the to-do list. And once again, thank you for the time. Thank you for being so open about your experiences and capturing them in the book, which is Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World, and Sea Change Project at seachangeproject.com. Everybody listening, we will link to everything that we discussed in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Craig or Foster and he will pop right up.
And until next time, be just a bit kinder than as 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.
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That's how we're gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)