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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/2aa46efbab30285a

This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing, spelled V-U-O-R-I. Viore. I've been wearing
Vore.
At least one.
item per day for the last few months and
You can use it for everything. It's performance apparel is
But it can be used for working out, it can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it.
super comfortable, super stylish, and uh
I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever
used or heard of Viore and this was her response. I do love their stuff, been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI, first for my partner, T-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger.
Sweatpants.
I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their Clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing
With the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also.
I like the discrete logo. So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. Uh that was just her response via text. Vori, again spelled V-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility.
you can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing.
Their clothing
It's so comfortable.
And uh look so good and it's non offensive that you don't have a huge
brand logo in your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. They're men's core short K-O-R-E. The most comfortable lined athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it the Banks short. This is their go to land to see short.
is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now
Which I had to pick one to recommend to
folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm gonna give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now.
their thin performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice. So you gotta check it out. PONTO Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger.
is the softest jogger you'll ever own.
Vore.
isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.
It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this.
And so am I.
VioryClothing.com forward slash Tim. That's V U O R I clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over$75 and free returns. So check it out.
VoryClothing.com slash Tim, that's V-U-O-R-I Clothing.com slash Tim, and discover the versatility.
Of Viore clothing.

This episode is brought to you by One Password. I have been using One Password for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products.
I met the founding team early on.
Love those guys and I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team.
Data breaches affect everyone. They can be catastrophic. And my feeling is
Since that is the case.
You need one password. One password combines industry leading security with award winning design to bring private, secure, and user-friendly password management.
To everyone I use this
dozens of times a day. It is an award winning password manager trusted by millions of users
And more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack, even including my little team. It beat out forty other options.
To become Wirecutter's top pick for password managers.
One password lets you securely switch between iPhone, Android, Mac, and PC.
with convenient features like autofill for quick sign-ins.
All you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects everything else. Your logins, your credit cards, secure notes, or the office Wi-Fi password. One password creates as many strong unique passwords as you need and securely stores them in an encrypted vault that only you have access to. You can also use it for one time passwords.
Where you scan the QR code and it gives you
Two factor authentication with the countdown with unique numbers, that type of thing. So instead of using a separate app for those types of authenticator,
Type functions you can use one password. Plus
Regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty keep one password at the forefront of security. So start protecting your business today with one password. Companies suffer from data breaches daily.
All the time, losing time and money dealing with extortion, stolen customer data, and more. I have personally dealt with a lot.
of these headaches.
You don't want them. It is why using one password is a business best practice.
I strongly endorse
and a business solution that I use myself.
So check it out. Get a free two week trial at one password.
dot com slash Tim
That's
One, the number one.
Password.com slash Tim.
Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So nothing else will be put some question.
Now it is.
My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton.
No
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview
World class performers across
many different disciplines. My guest today I have wanted to have on the podcast for many years.
And
We finally did it.
Craig Foster. Craig Foster has
many adventures, many lessons to share, including experiences with the Kalahari Bushman.
legendary trackers and hunters, his experiences with great white sharks in kelp forests.
His experiences with
Octopuses, yes, it's octopuses, not octopi, perhaps you've seen his film My Octopus Teacher. There are so many lessons.
To be learned from Craig.
And so many things that you can do in your life in your backyard today based on this conversation. But who is Craig? Let me give you his bio. Craig Foster is an Oscar and BAFTA winning filmmaker, naturalist, author, and ocean explorer.
His films have won more than one hundred and fifty international awards.
He's the co-founder of the Sea Change Project, an NGO dedicated to the long term conservation and regeneration.
of the great African Sea Forest. His film that I mentioned, which became a mega, mega hit on Netflix, My Octopus Teacher
Has led to making the great African Sea Forest a global icon. His new book is Amphibious Soul Finding the Wild in a Team.
World. You can find him online at CCHangeProject.com and we will link to everything in the show notes. Two caveats. Number one.
I got very excited in this conversation because many of the topics we explored are really top of mind for me.
and of deep, deep personal
interest and are very high priorities in my life. So what does that mean? I talked a lot at a couple of points.
Sorry.
In advance. That's what happens. Sometimes I get nervous. I talk too much. We all do it. Or at least I do. So
Sorry about that. Number two, we actually had an equipment malfunction. Now that doesn't really affect your learning experience because the audio quality will be high, but we switched from backup to primary or primary to backup at least once. And so the tone changes slightly, but it's still very, very high quality. And yet again.
Two is one and one.
is none. So always have a back up. Thank you, Jocko Willink, and others for teaching me.
That lesson, as well as Morgan Spurlock.
Thank you, Morgan.
And now, without further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging, very practical conversation with Craig Foster, where we talk about rediscovering nature. We talk about rebuilding your nervous system, the oldest language on earth. We'll describe and define what that means. Adventures of all types, different
Approaches you can take.
Experiments you can run. There's so much to this conversation. So
Enjoy.

Craig so nice to finally meet. I have wanted to connect with you for quite a few years. So thank you for making the time.
Incredible to be here, Tim. I've had the same thing. I've listened to so many of our podcasts and I've always wanted to
Talk to you, so it's very exciting.
I thought we would start.
With
Just a slice of life.
We had our first text exchange this morning.
And
I shot you a quick note and I said, I'm really looking forward to connecting.
And would you mind describing for the audience
Your response
And
Your morning.
Perhaps, or at least what you were doing prior to texting.
Sure. So just before coming on
I went for my swim in the great African Sea forest was just as fifty meters to the right of yeah.
It's a very wild, windy day today, so that the technique is to swim long distances along the coast because that underwater tracking is quite difficult.
And you're hoping to pick up something interesting.
I was thinking, Oh, it's not much happening and suddenly I saw this enormous white shape.
And just below me was
the biggest stingray in the world. I mean it's the biggest species in the world. They're up to
sixteen, seventeen feet long.
Fourteen feet wide. Incredible animal. And what is strange about this animal, Tim, was it was
Absolutely why. They normally
Dark gray or black.
And it was covered in a
very fine layer of sand that was over the
Slime that's on the skin.
So it was this dark, wild forest with a you know, thirty knot wind above me.
And this massive
animal in the Celp forest. And then
It actually was watching me for a while and you have to be incredibly careful with these animals. They 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
Right side your organs, so
You gotta be super careful. They teach you to move very slowly in the water.
And then the animal came up right to the surface.
And that's where it's weighing about a ton.
So it's actually like weighing down part of the
the kelp forest and I was just managed to glide with it for
Maybe ten minutes right next to just
Yeah, trying to keep my vibrations right down. So it's
Just such an incredible feeling to be in that wild space with this giant
beautiful animal and the sp never seen a white one like that in all the all my time.
We're gonna cover a lot of ground.
Literally
And metaphorically in this conversation. So it's not gonna be all
Underwater. But
It seems like your underwater experiences started very, very, very
Early.
Could you describe
The day of your birth, please.
I mean I obviously I don't
Remember it, but I've been told the story many times by my parents.
They brought me home from the nursing home and we
We lived in a little wo wooden bungalow that was actually half the houses below the high water mark.
Seven.
A crazy
place to live, you know, the waves used to smash the windows in. But they took me
Straight from the nursing home.
And
Dunk me in that Atlantic Ocean, which is probably
twelve degrees centigrade, which is about
Fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
And I mean, you know, it's uh quite a shock, obviously, for a young child, I 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 would would be pretty much in the water every day while while she was pregnant, so
That Atlantic Ocean has just always been
part of my life.
So when you say family tradition, that means that prior generations were also dunked in the ocean.
Right after being holding.
Apparently, yes. And I did the same with my son, but I wasn't
I felt that I couldn't take him immediately. So I waited till
He was uh I think a week or so old and his actual his little belly button actually broke off.
And washed out to sea when I took him in, yeah.
Okay, so we're going to spam from uh
The ocean to the Kalahari here. And I'm frontloading a couple of stories just to give people a buffet.
Yeah.
A few tastings of different dishes.
I was actually I wouldn't say introduced to your work, but harshly introduced to your work.
By a friend, mutual friend.
Well actually it was Boyd.
Vardy, who's been on the podcast.
The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life is one of his books.
And
Also separately.
A friend of mine named Alex, who lives in South Africa as a master tracker.
Oh wow, yeah, Alex and I am well. He's a wonderful guy. There you go. All right, so I've spent a bunch of time with Alex and Rennius.
We're just meeting each other, but we've been exposed to the others.
Work.
The great dance.
And I found the video.
of the great dance and found it endlessly fascinating, but since
This is a bit of inside baseball. Would you please
describe this film and how it came to be. I don't know the Genesis story.
Yeah, that's uh going back a long time. So this was the late nineties.
And
My brother and myself had been
Living on remote islands in different parts of the world, just living wild for
Many, many months.
And we came back.
to southern Africa, to South Africa.
And we'd always been fascinated by the song and these incredible trackers from the Kalahari.
And we'd heard of this
Extraordinary. We almost thought it was a a myth.
that there were these last master trackers who could still run down animals.
And put themselves against the animal.
Without
Bon arrow.
And uh be
Could only run in the extreme heat over forty degrees or over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
So we had this crazy wild mission to go up there and see if we could be the first people to film this.
And it was very extreme. Very, very, very extreme. We were like skeletons after these shoots. We were just lost so much weight and was so intense.
But we eventually managed to get the sacred hunt this.
Hunt by running.
And
We met these extraordinary trackers who

real mentors, you know, and they've always stayed with me.
My whole life. That
They immersed us in a wild existence that was it felt like they'd taken us back ten thousand, twenty thousand years in time.
And everything started lighting up in me. I was
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.
An insight of her referring to Mother Nature.
All right, so let's take a closer look at the sun.
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.
Guess I wouldn't say they are
thorn bushes, but some type of brush around the fire.
So that they can tell stories, recount the day.
And then sleep while there are
Other animals certainly about. Not all prey necessarily. At night. And it really did strike me that
That scene could have been from
Thousands of years ago.
More or less.
Unchanged.
And for 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 uh
New England in the United States and you tried to run down a white tailed deer.
Good luck. It's gonna be very, very challenging.

But when the temperatures are high enough, why can humans
On an endurance basis.
And survival bases outlast.
Something like a a kudu or an antelope. How's that possible?
It's basically because we can sweat and keep ourselves cool.
Whereas those animals overheat.
And this isn't I mean, just to be clear, Tim, this is not something that happens very often. This is a sacred hunt that maybe happens
Once every three or four years. And it's done
Almost a religious experience. So
And it's very dangerous for the humans as well. They've got almost no water.
So
They can also
quite easily die.
So it's this testing of their ability and their strength and their
Incredible ability to 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.
Karuha, the tracker, was not following the physical.
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
Kulu is doing everything to outwitch him.
And he would just go straight across the tracks and find it in this impossibly dense bush, the central Kalahari
You can't see more than a hundred meters. You can't see the animal at all. So
Ninety percent of the time he's running.
At quite a high speed and you 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 is this ha got this incredible ability to be able to follow things and find things.
That's how it works.
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.
I know that book and I I know those Polynesian voyages. I know Nina Thompson well.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah, it's extraordinary. And then then there's really if you make a
Mistake, you you did.
That's exactly the same kind of thing in it.
In fact, I spoke to Nina.
Had incredible day with him here in False Bay. We dive together when he circumnavigated the world.
I spoke to him about the song trackers and he was like, Yes, that's exactly
What we're doing. We using our bodies and obvious the stars and everything has this
Navigation device and
You might recall his great teacher Papa Mao used to lie asleep.
And when that ocean going canoe moved one degree off course, his body would wake up and he'd tell him.
So even asleep.
he was able to do this extraordinary
Navigation.
The parallels are s are really striking to me, even though I have had no contact with Polynesian navigators. 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
Oh.
I 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.
And
The reason I say parallels is that
Thinking of I've never met the Kalahari Bushman but
Watching your film and then reading these accounts of the Polynesians, it strikes me that their experience, their cognitive
experience. Their experience of consciousness, the way that they parallel process is
I think something that would seem very foreign to most people who live eighteen inches away from a laptop screen.
Or in an urban jungle most of the time.
How would you describe their
mode of existence. And by that I don't mean what they do, what
type of house they live in, but more how they experience the world.
How is that different from what most people
Say I'm sitting in
A high rise in Austin, Texas. Sure, a lot of people listening to this are in Los Angeles or New York.
How are those?
Experiences of the world.
Most different in your mind.
What was fascinating to me was
And immediately Classy Clockner comes to mind, this incredible bow hunter that we worked with. And a lot of the other song I've worked with over the years. You'll be
Walking along
Tracking
Looking for sign, looking for tracks, and suddenly
There will just be this
Beautiful laughter that boils up.
Inside him.
And just comes out and you're looking around to see what is funny or what's amused him.
And
Hm.
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 that just comes up.
And it's happens quite often, and this is tremendous joy.
The spite.
If you think about it, many of the lives of the people I've worked with are very hard and extremely poor and it's difficult sometimes to survive.
Yeah, there's a
Innate.
Joy. This kind of what has been coined by some
Researchers I've worked with are called Wilderness Rapture.
Mm.
And a lot of other people have noticed this in indigenous societies, this extraordinary sense of
Joy that seems to be
Connected to
Being very
embedded in the natural world. So that's uh I mean, I've met also very joyful people in our society, and obviously some people have just got more or less of that, but it seems to be very apparent.
In some of these.
People who deeply connected to the wild.
When I think about your
Physical location.
As we speak.
And also as well documented in
My octopus teacher.
Fantastic film. Of course, I'm not the only person who feels that way.
You have
Within striking distance, and you have had it seems
For a lot of your life within striking distance.
And this is a term I've ended up using.
a lot in the last few years when people ask me where I most want to live, say, when I have a family.
In or around immersive nature.
And
I would draw distinction for me at least experientially between say
Where I am now, where I am.
Within a few blocks of walking on a dirt trail around a
man made lake, which is a section of a river.
And there are some beautiful trees around town like here in Austin, and you feel like you are
Around nature, but it
Doesn't have the
vastness that you might perceive when you are
Say
In
the mountains when you're in an alpine
environment where you feel dwarfed by your surroundings, or I would imagine
in a kelp forest.
In the ocean.
And you see a fourteen foot sting.
And which is not to say everyone needs to have these experiences all the time, but I'm wondering
How your
proximity to that.
affects your
Life, your mental health.
Contrast it 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.
Ha ha ha.
It gave me time to think, which is great.
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 mean
I've sort of searched for wildness my whole life.
and you know 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.
Then if you were in an area that was
In the middle of
Africa where it's just, you know, teeming with game. So
It does very much depend on your ability to immerse and see.
These what I often refer to as the secret lives of these animals. So it's even possible
It's more about your
Observance and your
Detailed look.
It obviously helps a lot if you're surrounded by these things, but it's the intimacy.
That makes all the difference. And this is this idea of mine of like
Well you feel you kinda
Outside or inside of nature.
And you can get inside even to a tiny animal, an ant, an insect.
If you spend enough time.
Let's talk about maybe an extreme example of intimacy and then uh I'm going to
Full
In an example.
that I believe you've given of one tree in New York. So we're gonna bring it to New York, but we're gonna go back to the Kalahari.
Alex, who I mentioned earlier, Alex Vandenhever. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. I don't speak Afrikaans, but it's probably close enough for the purposes of Van De Heaven, yeah. And uh there we go. I knew it was I knew it was gonna be one of those.
Volkswagen type of situations. I know that's not Dutch, by the way, folks, but
Or Africans. In any case.
Alex, I encourage people to check out Tracker.
Academy, which is an NGO or nonprofit, which uh Alex is deeply involved with, which I've also supported.
And uh they do they do fantastic work on a number of levels.
He has incredible
respect and admiration for the tracking abilities
Of the sun or the sand, I'm not sure how to pronounce that correctly.
What makes them
So impressive.
Alex he himself, I mean he is a master tracker. What he can do blows my mind when I watch him
Identify tracks and follow tracks at high speed.
It 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 oh one level.
What makes the hunters you spent time with in the Kalahari so particularly impressive?
At least to you.
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 a hundred meters.
And they're doing that.
By listening to the ripples.
of sound that the small birds are giving off.
So these ripples come through and these incredibly subtle sounds.
They then feel
And see in their mind's eye in this oral picture.
That predator moving.
And they can feel a big
a raptor flying as well, from a a long distance away.
And then they will pinpoint
Sometimes when it makes a kill and they'll even know
what animals being killed by these reactions a lot of the time. So it's just
It feels at first like
Total magic.
Until you realise the how this
Whole bird language story.
What
What makes them so incredible as is I think this
incredible legacy uh so their lineage goes back a hundred and twenty thousand years.
So it's this tradition that's been passed down for in an enormous time period.
longer than any other group of people on the planet. And I think that is
One of the many factors that make them so extraordinary.
If we pull back and try to bring that say
to people listening in the US. There are a lot of people listening internationally, but plenty of people in the US.
I recall coming back from South Africa.
from the Asabi Sands Reserve.
And
the fauna, certainly the flora are gonna 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.
Coyote.
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.
Uh
Perception in these experiences. You've said, I believe you can't believe everything you read on the internet. So please feel free to fact check this. But
You said that if a person took
one tree in New York and figured out how that tree changed over three hundred sixty five days, what animals interacted with it, what insects live in there, how the tree is surviving, et cetera, you could have quite a large effect.
And this really rings true for me. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that or give other examples of how people, even if they are in a largely
urban environment.
How they can cultivate this.
type of awareness.
And feeling of
Interconnectedness.
You can do it in cities. I've seen
In a incredible trackers.
In America.
doing this, I've got a great friend John Young, who's an incredible tracker, bird language expert who
He 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 of 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 it'll be you'll be absolutely shocked.
at what you couldn't see before.
It'll be like so obvious and it was totally invisible to you before. It's like
Can't believe I missed all these things.
And it's not just about the leaves changing color, but there are thousands of these things going on.
And unless you take notice, you will miss.
nature then becomes this incredible teacher. And it's just about
Persistence. You don't have to have any
Great.
intellect or anything, you just have a little cell phone camera, some notes, and you just start observing these things and suddenly
This incredible invisible world becomes visible to you.
And it becomes very fascinating and
Then you think after a year or two of doing that, okay, I really know what's going on.
And then if you persist, oh my goodness, there's another incredible layer.
And it just keeps going on and on and on and you
Yeah basically.
Fall in love.
With this extraordinary
biosphere that is keeping us alive. And you start to
have this conversation, this incredible wild conversation with
This environment that's around us.
I
bounce around a lot in these conversations. So please forgive me with a what might seem like a non sequitur, but I want to make sure that I don't forget
To ask you a bit.
About
free diving in breath holds and then we're gonna come back to the threat we're leaving behind temporarily. You
Have
Perhaps a unique experience in listening to episodes of this podcast, I believe you'd mentioned prior to us recording.
that you've listened to something you know dozens or close to a hundred episodes, but while holding your breath.
And I was hoping you could elaborate on that and also perhaps share and this is not
prescriptive advice. People have to be very, very careful in the water.
And especially if they're doing any type of breath training to avoid shallow water blackouts and things like that. But I'm wondering if you could just describe
Your
Breath hold and cold exposure.
practice, although maybe it's not explicitly for cold.
And then
Perhaps.
Add to that how much of the breath hold capability you think is
inbuilt because I believe both of your parents have done quite a lot of diving and how much of it is trainable.
If you could speak to that.
You're absolutely right. Um every morning I do a breath hold practice.
Where I do deep breathing and then I hold my breath for
Say three to five minutes, do it three or four times.
And I quite like having
Some really interesting distractions. I don't feel
Like the desire to breathe. And your podcasts have been the
sort of favorite thing to listen to. I love so many of them.
And I do this because it makes one feel very relaxed.
It builds the immune system and of course it helps with the diving.
But one's got to be very careful never to do any of these breathing techniques.
close to actually going in the water.
You probably want at least half an hour more away from that. I never do these breathing things and then go into the water.
And you know, any free diving I will only take.
Two or three deep breaths before I go and dive. You've got to be so careful with that.
The cold exposure, I'm I've always I've spent the last twelve years pretty much diving uh every single day.
So I've
Climatise myself to the cold.
feel mostly very comfortable in cold water for an hour or so.
But if I haven't slept or if I'm
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 they can plummet radically. So
If it's a full going well
And 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.
Yeah, dopamine, the and no adrenaline and all these beautiful chemicals that make you feel
Really good and motivated and set the day up.
Beautifully.
So
It also helps the underwater tracking because it's somehow the cold makes your mind sharper.
And I try and relax a lot so I don't get much cortisol going in. It actually even though I could
Obviously spend longer in the water with a wetsuit. I prefer the
An hour or so
And with this all these amazing chemicals from the coal that help me focus and
understand the secret lives of these animals.

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
This episode is brought to you by Mementis. Mementus offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few.
that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentus Mag3N8 L theanine and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients.
Mementous also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high quality ingredients that are third party tested.
Which in this case means informed support and or NSF certified. So you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out.
Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for twenty percent off. That's LivMomentous.
L-I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for twenty percent off.
I
I would love to hear a little bit more about underwater tracking because
That would be, you know, Greek is hard enough for me. Let's call that terrestrial tracking. And then I imagine
that underwater it's like jumping from Greek to Chinese if you've never read Chinese in the sense that
In South Africa with Alex and Renius.
You have smell.
So turns out that at least Male
Leopard urine smells like burnt popcorn and you can smell it pretty clearly. It smells exactly like burnt popcorn. It's unbelievable, uncanny. And then you see the alarm calls from
Vervet monkeys or
different types of birds, franklines, and based on that they can identify whether it's a Python or this or that in which direction, how far away it is. It's unbelievable. So you have those auditory cues as well.
And much more, as you know.
What are some of the components or indicators
in underwater tracking.
At first.
And I struggled for several years. I had this idea, I got incredibly inspired by the
Son in the Kalahari and I thought could I
ever track underwater and it just seemed impossible because
Yeah, 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 molluscs 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
So that was the first track I saw
Was very excited.
And then I started seeing all these tracks on the backs.
Of
Animals like that, right?
that I I told you about. So the mollusks are interacting with that ray and I could tell how long that animal's been resting because of that.
The enormous number of
Tiny little marks that the predators make.
You know, once you know all the
Draw hole you can tell.
Who's been in an area
Who's been eating who
And by the shininess of the shell and a whole lot of the things, you can tell the timing.
There are bite marks everywhere.
They are literally Tim Thousands and thousands of these subtle signs.
But it's taken me ten years to slowly put together'cause there's no manuals on this. There's no
Books. As far as I know, nobody's really done this.
in the bigger aquatic picture. So it did take a very long time to figure it all out.
How is
And this is a leading question, of course. Maybe the answer is it hasn't, but how is that transferred to experiences out
side of the water.
Not necessarily in a tracking capacity, but
How have those experiences
Transcended.
Underwater tracking.
First of all.
It's made my desire to be better tracking on land stronger.
So now I've
Got a wonderful friend J J Minya.
Calls a master tracker who I work with and who's
Teaching me on a weekly basis. So that's
Yeah, 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
Climate on land is 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.
What would be an example of that?
Like a seven gill shock.
Or uh
A great white shot.
Tiger Shaw.
That kind of thing. So
It's fairly safe.
to be with those animals and sometimes there's
Enormous number of them.
Together in the case of the seven gills, there's I've been with fifty five, sixty of them.
And they're each the size of a lion.
And they hunt seals, they hunt dolphins, but
I don't know that I'm
Right.
So it 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.
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, you know, they're real teachers for me. So I love them and then
I have these bonds, uh
the human relationships on land, I don't feel
I need as much from them.
So I think my relationship with my wonderful wife is
Become better because of that.
And with a lot of
Close friends.
Family.
It's something happens in the psyche. And if you imagine like we've
To act.
prehistory for you know countless hundreds of thousands of years. We've had these relationships with all these species.
Now in many cases there's turkey taken away. But where's that?
gonna go. Where's the all that relationship gonna go? And it mostly goes, I think
to but more pressure on human relationships. So
That's one of the things I've felt quite profoundly.
Maybe you could tell.
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.
Three.
intimate encounter and I'd love for you to
Perhaps tell that story because I may have some follow up questions.
That's amazing your ability to dig things out from the deep past. Good tracking, Tim. That's a long time ago. So
This was actually in the early days, I was probably
I'm guessing now three years into diving every day.
And I was questioning myself. I was going in the early morning, was freezing, middle of winter, and I was thinking, What the hell am I doing here?
Doing this, is it really gonna pay off?
Am I just going mad?
And
That 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 a Cape Tweler's archer.
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, you know, from working with a lot of wild animals, they see them our mouths and our front as the aggressive part that maybe we'll 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 physic without me doing anything.
And I kept still and then it moved up my side.
And then I just saw this unbelievable whiskered face and these incredible bright eyes.
Just looking straight into my mask.
And it reached out and started touching my face.
It was so overwhelming.
that I was actually in a
Shed a few tears in the mosque and it was
Very powerful. And then animals swimming around and bouncing off the ocean floor they're very
playful, beautiful animals and it was just
Oh my God, now I know why I'm here. This is just incredible. And I actually it was so overwhelming. I
couldn't take it for too long. It was so much and so powerful. I got out the water.
And this otter followed me right into the shallows and was popping its head out and making this
high pitched sound, it's almost to call me back in. It was very strange and I
Didn't really know what was going on.
And afterwards I did a lot of research and found out that there's a very uh long tradition of
Humans hunting with wild otters.
It goes back deep into prehistory and I wondered, I mean I don't know for sure at all.
If this animal had a deep memory and was somehow trying to
reconnect with that.
heritage or if it was just curious
And you know, wanted to
Looking
Feel the strange
A sort of primate flopping around in the water.
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
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 of these two species cooperating. It's wild. And you see it is I didn't know that. It's incredible. You see it, there's 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's
Jumps down, much like a domesticated dog, kind of a downward dog, tail wagging like a puppy might do to
illicit play. And then there's this badger waddling around.
behind it. And they're off to go do some night hunting together. It's remarkable. Wow. So when you start hunting with humans
Give any more details on what that might have looked like or what otters and humans would hunt?
And why did it make sense to hunt together?
So the story actually came through my wife Swati who

All her life in India.
So conservation journalists had owned
Wildlife show on TV and she
New people from Bangladesh.
The last few people who
We're still practicing this in some form and they hunt
for fish and then the fish get sharen the humans and the otters. But I think it goes back
I mean a much, much deeper, deep, deep in time and
If your imagination you start
going, imagine these early humans, how many interactions they would have had with wild creatures and the
possibilities that what they would have got up to I think could be pretty extraordinary.
I'm fascinated by it.
Inter species.
Cooperation.
When it's sort of the
most unlikely of combinations or things you wouldn't expect. 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 that 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 is uh you should give me a slap on the wrist if I get this wrong, and the dwarf mongoose, who will also cooperate in these I want to say it's the hornbill.
The hornbell. It could be another bird, but they'll 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 the mongoose kick up the insects and the birds get the insects.
Oh nice fascinating to me.
I see it in the Kelp Forest, these alliances.
We see it with the octopus and the superclip fus.
What was the second animal that you mentioned?
A super Clipfish. It's a a rock fish.
Mm-hmm. A type of rockfish and they follow the octopus hunting around and they pick off
And scavenge.
It's not too clear exactly what the octopus might.
Get out of it.
They're probably acting as
In the same way like the bird's alarm call. So if a bigger predator comes in then the fish will
Telloctopus.
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. How did this come about for you?
I went through a pretty
Tough period after the film came out. I wasn't
in any way expecting or be ready to be exposed to, you know, hundreds of millions of people on Netflix. It was a it was a huge shock for me.
And
Part of it was
Trying to come out of that.
space and just to
Get down on
Paper, what was in my head.
But I also had this feeling of this relationship with all these animals that I mentioned to you. I just wanted so much to tell
Their stories.
I'd learn so much beyond
The octopus. Obviously that film was very much focused, you know, on that one animal and that one story.
And I had this strange feeling.

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 and all my incredible ancestors from Africa.
And then part of my life
Was
Very
Connected to all the
Tame world.
And all the comforts and all the
Wonderful technologies and things that
I'm with that. And it was like
Very hard to
reconcile the two. How do I find the balance between these?
Two extremes and the
pull of the tame world and all the technology and these phones and all this stuff was so strong.
But yet I could feel in my deep design.
That I was
Completely. I was born wild. I'm a wild animal. These creatures that I interact with taught me I'm a wild animal.
So
How could I find that balance?
And it was almost like I was walking along the shore and then the ocean to the one side was my wild self and the land
to the right was this tame self and I was trying desperately to find
a balance'cause you can't go back to a fully wild existence. That door is, you know, completely shut.
But 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
practise all these things that I've tried to put in the book about
Retaining the wildness.
I do feel a lot more centered.
And a lot calmer.
Don't get me wrong, I love
A good cup of coffee. I love watching movies. I love all the incredible things and science. I love the science.
So I love the tame world as as well, but I
If I get drawn too much in that I feel my nervous system just ratchets it up and I can't sleep properly and I feel
Hard.
So it's just about trying to find that balance and I'm very passionate about.
The subject.
It strikes me that.
This has become more perhaps salient for me in the last.
Ten to fifteen years in particular. But
To be really well adapted.
Two A
almost exclusively modern existence requires you to somewhat be a freak of nature, if that makes sense. In the same way that there are super sleepers, people who have the genetic predisposition and capability to feel fully rested on four hours of sleep, four and a half hours of sleep. And these people
Do exist.
There's predictive power 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 ten days for
A rafting trip and another segment of time for a group trip with friends to spend time in the mountains doing ski touring. Those points of reconnection were
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 important reason why I'm I'm so excited.
About this book.
And I'm wondering, I'm gonna give you a few cues and I'd love to hear you expand on any of these.
Could I just say something?
To add to that.
I'd had exactly those experiences, like you're saying. It's just suddenly you got the fuel to be able to operate.
well for weeks or even months after that experience, like you know, one of those experiences. But
It hit so hard, hone when I had this
Very fortunate experience to
Spend them months.
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 fifty thousand years ago.
Everywhere you look, the animals it is
teeming, it is mind bending in terms of
What is there?
But what was most fascinating to him was
how that near pristine biodiversity affected my psyche and the people around me. It was as if
I'd been given some magic elixir and I felt so much calmer, so much more present, so much more at home. And that feeling lasted for months and months and months. So
I think it's
Depending on how much
nature is around you and how much you're able to access it and your experience of
It deeply affects the psyche in a very, very profound way.
So I absolutely I mean
It's so great that you're doing those experiences on a regular basis and you you're feeling, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You come back and it feels like
You've been rebooted.
So the dance is working in the sense that literally the first cue I was gonna give you is pristine wilderness. So it seems to seem to be working.
I'd love for you to say a bit more about the feeling.
That endured for months afterwards.
Can you put more words to that?
So people can perhaps begin to envision
What that is like.
I think what it is.
It might be connected to
When we know there's enormous biodiversity in health
in the ecosystem around us.
You must remember we've had
You know, in our species three hundred thousand years has hunt together.
So when you're in an environment like that, you know you can survive. There's plenty of food.
You don't have to work very hard to get all your needs.
So you feel very relaxed.
If you're in an environment where there's almost no biodiversity, your ancient creature that's living inside you, your deep design.
It's terrifying because
It doesn't know you can go to the supermarket. It's just looking and feeling and hearing and smelling.
There's no life around.
So
The experience of going to these wilderness places tell that
While part of us
That everything is okay.
There's plenty for everybody.
And we just need to go and harvest a tiny bit each day and there'll be plenty for everybody for the family.
And you feel oh
Everything's alright.
Everything will be fine.
This is good. This is the good life.
That strikes a chord with me. I think it would surprise
Perhaps a lot of folks who think of
The
Hunter, gatherer.
life is 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 and say the hair on some of the bushmen and so on.
However, when you're in a
very, very dense area with high degrees of biodiversity. And I experienced this in October. I was in Suriname spending time with
Some indigenous groups like the trio as part of actually
exploring work sites or partner communities of a nonprofit called the Amazon conservation team 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 I and every plant, every tree, every turn was known. It was
As you put it, mind bending.
happened to be out with them. They would always bring
A shotgun with them. These days it's more shotguns than bows, although some of the old timers still use bows. And if they ever went for a walk, they always brought a shotgun and got to see a peckery hunt and they dismantled, field dressed the entire animal, created backpacks out of various vegetation and vines and so on. And there's a certain ease.
There's a certain
Calm that permeated.
the entire village, which isn't to overly romanticize it either, because prior to the 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. Some of the old song
You know, which should you prefer, this new life?
Or the old ways, when you were nomadic.
Yeah. And like you said.
It wasn't an obvious answer. Half of them said.
You know, we're 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 our water supply. We're not
going thirsty for weeks and they preferred that. So as you say, it's
Is not all rises.
Depending on where you were, but I think some of those early lives were just incredible.
I'm
very energized by this conversation.
I rarely get the chance to connect with someone who's spent so much time as you have in deep
Close proximity.
both out of water and underwater, which is uh 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 kind of supply chain of food.
was my first time
butchering an animal in the field, I felt like my hands kind of knew what to do. And it was shocking to me.
There was some type of, for lack of a better descriptor, like ancestral knowledge, which makes sense given our history. Is that a component for you of this?
activation for lack of a better term.
And then the the second piece is
To what extent.
This is getting perhaps into some
mystical areas, although I d 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.
It turkey resonates.
with me to men the the struggling to say it.
Is
I love that because
It's mysterious.
So much of
This is mysterious to us because we are
program to see the world through the window of science.
Don't get me long wrong, I love science. I love marine biology, especially.
Paleontology, but
What happens as you immerse
Is what you're saying, there's this remembering.
And
I think what I've experienced is
My eyes and my brain are looking around and they're seeing an enormous number of things.
enormous number of signs.
Some of which now I can identify.
but some of which my conscious mind is not recognising.
But the unconscious is taking everything in.
So when I then
I'm looking for something or trying to find something.
What I've found is if I just actually
Relax and release to her.
And let that enormous unconscious
That's connected.
to the deep ancestry.
It's connected to
three million years in our genus as Homer and three hundred thousand years as Sapiens.
Let that connect with my unconscious and just
Come up to the surface.
And then it's like
It's there.
And it feels magical, but it's actually a process.
that all the sensory system and all these memories are coming together
When you were talking, I was thinking of the heart urchin.
I spent three years trying to find this animal.
occasionally I'd find a dead shell of this magnificent uh kinoderm and I just didn't know where they were coming from. I didn't know
Probably from the deep ocean, I thought none of the scientists knew.
And then one day I did what I've described.
And it just said to me, it's underneath the sand.
And that's what you're talking about, you know, this is this conversation. It's underneath the sand.
And I dug about that deep in the sand and out came this incredible live
Heart urchin, this extraordinary animal.
And
I realized, okay, this is how it's working, this is where they're coming from.
And then I was able to put together all the clues.
And now I can find them.
quite easily they have these very, very subtle detritus traps and uh
That is a a a very subtle
T. 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.
I've had some you know, maybe another time for a bottle of wine, but I think you and I have had a number of bizarre experiences that
If you try to put words to them.
End up sounding
Like you should be put in an institution. Just because they're hard to verbalize does not mean that it's magical thinking. In the example you gave in the example
that I gave with the field dressing.
It's not
implying magic just because it's hard to verbalize. And if you think about our evolution, language is a pretty recent arrival, at least to the extent that we're talking right now. This level of if we're being generous, 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.
Two.
Different ways of knowing even if you can't.
Explicitly.
Explain those things in a conversation like this.
Could you speak to
Any number of other things that I would love to hear more about. Nature as mirror is one that I'm very curious about.
Play and song catching specifically?
Which direction would you like to go first?
It's working because I wanted to talk about the mirror.
Because of what you said. And this is like yeah, almost feeling some of that magic, right? Yeah.
So
What?
I've noticed is
Of course there's attention bias. If you're looking for
Uh certain animal say
Tuberculate cuttlefish comes to mind.
Oh my God, you keep seeing them everywhere, but it's often because your mind is just
Focused on that shape, on that animal, on that movement.
And of course you're gonna see more of them than you you usually do.
But there's some other fascinating factor that I've just seen again and again and again, and when I've spoken to
Some of the scientists even I work with, certainly some of the cinematographers.
There's a strange thing.
That's
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.
Yeah.
When we are attentive
When we care, when we focus.
There is
Something which is very hard to explain.
Yeah.
seems to come about in the natural world that feels
Just incredible. Like
the behavior, especially animal behavior that I would
often have I've 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.
But maybe
And there's never been recorded before. And that's happened again and again and again. And it eventually forced me to realise.
There's some extraordinary relationship between
Us humans.
And the natural world and probably
The entire world is natural in in many ways. But especially
In these areas of high biodiversity, there's this
strange, mysterious processes going on that I find very difficult to explain.
But it feels like this
mirror and that sometimes when I've been in dark, difficult spaces
I see some pretty
Tough, difficult things. And then reflecting back at me, you know.
Things are tough.
I'm really so enjoying this conversation in part because you're an explorer.
And you have deep, deep, consistent contact.
With
Nature.
And
Just to draw a quick
Maybe an analogy, the
Coaches and athletes at the highest level of sport are always a few steps ahead.
I've say the
Published.
Exercise scientists.
Of course. Because there's so many
barriers number one to publication as there should be, peer review and so on.
The coaches and athletes don't necessarily get everything right, but they are the experimentalists. So they're always going to be a few years ahead when they find something that works or something that clicks and
My experience is that that's true in many different fields. Field biologists are going to see things that they can't explain that might seem ridiculous.
that ultimately bear out as incredibly valid and important. It just might take ten years. You have
Discovered how many new species of shrimp?
We've
lost count but we've actually been able to
name and identify three species of 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
Self.
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
Yeah, sometimes when I'm with my amazing prof.
Charles Griffiths.
We find a new species and we almost don't want to look at it because we know how much work
It's gonna take to describe it. So you should have almost ignore it.
Heteromyces fosteri.
That would be one, right?
Good tracking. That's another another little shrimp that lives inside the shelves of
Uh discarded shells of animals. And uh 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 the Fafra William C.
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 equity or peyote. So coming back to
Play.
What is song catching?
Song catching
was introduced to me by
The idea by John Young. He's a wonderful tracker.
In California.
And he used to go out with
Bullman, right.
I think was the father of
lose music, or I could have got that wrong, but they used to go out into the wilderness.
And
Spend
Sometimes weeks aren't 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 then frantically write down the song before it disappears.
And you know, John's played some of these songs to me and
That's some really strange coincidences where people have got a very similar song about the same species of tree. So it's
Quite f it was fascinated me.
And
I thought, Oh, I'd love to try and catch the song of the Celp Forest.
John's a great musician and knows all about songwriting and I'm actually
pathetic with all these things. That was extremely difficult for me.
And that is a long and involved story. I don't know how far you want to go, but uh we eventually managed to
catch a song, but I had to have a lot of help and it involved yeah yeah. We have all the time in the world, man. This is this is the benefit of a long format podcast. So yeah, let's not skip any of the juicy bit. Okay. So so as a pathetic song catcher, first just for the sake of
Explaining this for the audience. So
I think his name is John.
That you mentioned. Song catching this this is ineffect and
Waiting for inspiration to strike such that you feel like
you have felt an appropriate song surface to your
Conscious awareness that matches
Whatever you are focusing on. Is that a fair way to describe it?
That's a wonderful way of describing. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah.
And I think it goes deep into our deep past and you know, their famous songs that the Son of the Kalahari have caught at night in dreams or in visions.
that make up the trance dance. It goes deep
Back in time.
So
I thought, Oh, I'm just gonna go and you know, this is gonna I'm gonna 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.
Um
And I was like, Well, this is not gonna happen.
And then I got a few little words and phrases and then I just
Out of the blue, strange coincidence.
Someone from the Yo Yo Ma Foundation.

Yeah, Mars coming to
South Africa.
And
He's interested in some of the
work and is anything you've got that we might do together and that sort of
Stupidly said, Oh, we're catching songs.
We're 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 realised a huge mistake. I didn't have because you didn't have a song. Yeah, and the greatest, you know musician on this planet's not coming to
Listen, I was like, Oh, what have I done, absolute idiot.
So I then
We've got this amazing group.
that I work with a nonprofit uh Sea Change project.
That's it guys, we've got a problem. I desperately need your help.
How can we do this?
And they all came on board very kindly and helped.
Me and we started to have these strange experiences where
We weren't catching so many lines or songs, but we were finding these amazing instruments
That could be played underwater.
So there was a 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.
Pre dive 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
Whales, yeah, but about the size of my first. And it was like
Oh unbelievable. And we've recorded this
We used abalone shell 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 Pepa.
Got hold of
Some good musicians.
Roland Skillen is one of the best percussionists in the country and he got hold of Solani Mahola, this incredible
Closest thing uh
And we all got together and said
Yoya Ma's coming, what can we do?
And Solani, 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 Celtic Forest.
And we had these incredible instruments. We made a octopus drum from eight
Styles of
The kelp had washed up.
What is a stipe?
Oh, sorry, that's a long
stem of the kelp. So they're up to fifteen meters, forty five feet long, but we
We had them washing on the shore after the storm and we got like ten meter long ones and
My son and wrote.
Tune them.
And he played these incredible
Tubes made from the kelp.
Like a drum.
Water glasses of different heights in a sense.
Exactly, but he was striking the top like a xylophone. Yeah, that kind of thing.
But the with the tubes of the different lengths. Exactly.
Yeah.
You see how bad my 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 Yama Luckily arrived at my house.
I was terrifying. I was really stressed out.
And the Zelani was so cool and calm. And then we performed for him.
and this group and it was very, very magical. And then he played the cello on our deck. It was very, very magical and and helped us afterwards wonderfully with our NGO and our
Conservation works as a
Through that that idea of play and song catching
these beautiful sort of relationships formed with these amazing people who
We're sort of committed to this strange idea.
What does the word home or concept of home mean to you?
About a year and three months ago, we lost our home.
Because of a electrical fire.
And literally
From one.
hour to two hours later, I had this beautiful home that my wife and I and my son had nurtured.
Oh
Sixteen years was
You know, caches.
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, uh incredible friends and care and love.
from people around us helped us tremendously to get over that shock.
Quite quickly.
But the day of the fire that was
Listers everywhere and everything and
Walk down to the ocean.
And I went in that kelp forest and I looked back towards the
House that was no longer there.
And it struck so hard in my heart.
That
This ocean but also this
Very much this planet. This
Original deep mother that birthed our species and it
Nurtured me from
My my whole life was actually my home.
And I would be absolutely fine as long as that
Biodiversity and that biosphere.
was functioning well and was healthy.
It struck so hard.
And it was such a
It's a pity that I had to, you know, learn it by losing the house.
But it was a profound lesson that this place
This wildness.
The health of this place is our
Oh, Fertney for me is my
Deep home. And I can always rebuild my home, which I am doing now.
I'm a house.
That sounds like a possibly terrifying and dangerous experience. Was anyone in the house when that happened?
My son uh his friend
And myself were in the house. Swati, my wife was in India about to come back.
And we literally ran out with the you know glass exploding around us and we were lucky enough to get
uh seriously injured. It's 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 if a bed or something catches within thirty seconds, you're not gonna put that fire out.
That is so lucky.
Terrifying and
Tragic and very lucky that no one was no one was injured. Yeah, that was the main thing. Yeah. I that was a big factor to
If no man gets injured, then you can quite easily I think get over that sort of
And that process.
How have you thought about especially when your son was younger, how
Did you think about parenting?
And that's very broad.
But I'm wondering.
of any kind of lessons learned or things you feel like you did right.
Or the things you would do again.
Anything along these lines. Asking for a friend.
Aspiring father as he may be.
Yeah.
I think
Certainly for me
Was certainly a huge turning point.
was
When I felt
Uh
was inside of the natural world.
I rarely had something to pass to him.
I didn't want to try and in a
overly push him or teach him as such. I just wanted to
Install the love.
For that.
In M, but I knew I could only really do it.
If I knew it in my own self.
So that was a big
Factor and
I can see that it's in him now. He doesn't have the mad crazy passion. He's actually ironically a incredible musician.
And does music for film.
Godland knows where he got that from, but
Yeah.
Definitely not for me, but
He has a deep love for nature and it was amazing to pass that on. And I think I think the main thing for a child
Really is.
It s sounds like a cliche, but
If they truly know that you
Really love them.
It's like the that's the most critical thing. I had
My parents were very loving, but particularly my great
grandmother and my grandmother had this
Incredible love, and I can still feel that.
Sitting in me today very strongly and when I'm in
I have great difficulty I can draw on that. And just time, like
Dedicated time. I made sure I
Dedicated.
Focus time.
to doing things with him, but things I also enjoyed doing.
That we both enjoyed doing and we
Still today, this morning.
We had an incredible game Frisbee together.
And yeah, he helped me set up this podcast because he's much better technically. I'm useless with that. So he's uh he's uh it's just you know very special to spend time I go diving with him a lot, swimming with a lot, we exercise together.
So
I think it's just the love, the time and also having
You've got so many incredible experiences and so much to
Share with the
Child there the child would be
I'd love to be your child. Thanks that. Yeah. I would love to be your child too from the sounds of it. My must ask.
Two things, I guess. Do people in your family tend to have kids young because you said great grandmother and my grandparents passed away when I was very, very young.
That's part one. Part two is how did they
Show that love. I'm just wondering.
How that was
Expressed.
Such that it was
Made such an indelible mark on you.
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 her house. It was very
active and she lived till ninety six. So she was you know, and she was strong until ninety four.
But the way she showed their love and my grand 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 intertitle.
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 gonna be able to go back to the house
And my grand and my great grand would sit and totally focus on our silly little
Kid story.
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
It was a tremendous act of love.
to have that attention and that true interest.
In our naive young minds.
It felt like an unconditional type of love and care. And then we were sick, they looked after us and
It's just
Very, very special.
My parents had to work and they had uh enormous distractions and
trying to survive and didn't have much money, so it was much harder for them.
But uh the grandparents were just ja phenomenal.
You mentioned earlier having a tough time after
The
success and vast global exposure of my octopus teacher. Could you say more about
Why that was hard, what that experience.
I guess you can imagine some you know
You're here on the end of the planet. I'm right at the end of the the tip of Africa.
fairly isolated in a way. I mean I've made at that point I'd made twenty five films I'd
Yeah, done a lot of documentaries.
Some of them like the great sons, some are you'd manage to see because you were very interested in that subject, but
We'd had some
level little levels of success and
The films would go on and
You know, a few months later then you know, they'd go away and so on.
So
I was expecting maybe a few people to be interested in this little octopus film and
Now we're either used to these smaller channels also like, you know, National Geographic or BBC or whatever, and it goes on and it comes off.
Now you've got this giant Netflix, this enormous reach.
And suddenly
Absolutely like nobody on the end of the planet just
Fascinated by these animals.
And you in
In a hundred million
Home 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
you know, reply it to everybody, of course that becomes impossible.
And it just
I think there's also a factor where
And then if you've
thought about this, but
Going back to our design and our and where we come from, you know, these science societies and my San teachers, it's a very egalitarian society.
To even have a competition for someone who's better than somebody else.
would be absolutely out of the question. So we come as humans from this vast lineage
Where these people knew it was good to keep everybody on the same level and not to have competition now suddenly
You're winning awards, all the stuff it 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
Mm the main way it showed that was by not sleeping.
I've slept extremely badly, sometimes just a few minutes a night for
Weeks and for months. And that does a horrible thing. Horrible thing. 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.
Yeah, three minutes.
So it adds to the whole madness.
So it was very difficult, but also
Of course that adversity is powerful'cause I'm in in in an altered state for twenty four hours a day.
And you're trying to deal with that.
And then you start to see into the deep psyche and to see
parts of your mind that you've never glimpsed before. And then I slowly used
Wild nature.
Just going into that sea. I couldn't last for very long because my system was so shattered and I lost so much weight.
My beard went grey overnight, kind of thing.
But
I used nature
And I used all these things I'd learnt from the wild.
To rebuild my nervous system.
And
Just gentle access to the cold and to the spaces and
to these animals and I was able to
kind of rebuild my system, but
It kind of helped.
It just crushed me so much. It made me so
It felt that deep humility of that adversity.
And
I realised 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 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 on to and it was very beautiful. And
Very, very grateful to those people.
Is that what
kind of kept me going and
If I
You had to go back and say, would I want to go through all that hell of not sleeping
Again.
In retrospect, I am glad I went through it. I'd hate to ever repeat that,'cause it's very
Traumatic in some ways.
But I learnt a great deal from it. I learnt
A lot and I managed to I think heal parts of my psyche in certain ways.
It ended well, it could have been bad. If it continued I think it would have been
I mean it's eventually you die if you don't sleep. Not ideal.

So what stopped it? Was it just the natural kind of decay rate of fame when people moved on to Tiger King or whatever the next hot thing happened to be? Or was it something else? Was it a set of decisions you made or other factors? What finally got you back to sleeping?
In addition to rebuilding your nervous system.
It was just
Focusing on nature.
And tracking.
and the cold and my ancestors and all I'd learned from
Working with indigenous people for years and years and years, drawing on all those things.
Breathing.
Just calming everything down, just breathing sometimes for
An hour more a day. All these things that I learnt.
And of course it
You know, eventually
People quickly forget. If you don't feed that
The system as you know, then it goes starts getting quiet.
And people start forgetting you very quickly, which is a huge relief.
Because it was very intense when it first came out. And it was that perfect storm with COVID and everybody thinking about storm things. It really was. 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.
Yeah, mine mine was similar. Wasn't of the magnitude of a hundred million plus on Netflix, but with the first book when it hit the New York Times list pretty quickly and then stayed there for a few years.

Four or five years, I suppose.
And that was zero to a hundred for me, certainly, in my own.
Scale.
And
It's a shock to the system. It is a shock to the system.
And I wouldn't trade it. It certainly provided opportunities like this. It set the stage for growing the blog, which set the stage for having the podcast, which sets at 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 I mean there's no there's nothing in the prehistory in that big spotlight camp. And I mean imagine people who re uh for me, I was thinking of people who
This is a tiny little thing in many ways, you know, people are big actors in Hollywood and how they manage.
I do not know. I had a tiny taste of that.
In a small, small way. But I
I believe that Buddhists have got a special prayer for people in the spotlight who are famous, you know they know that it's a a difficult thing. But as you say, I I think it's also a it's a huge privilege and
I've met so many incredible people through it, amazing opportunities. Of course, there's the flip side of that, which is
Very special. And when you get
And then everything quietens down. It's it's
It's much easier.
Who is the new book for?
How should people think about that?
And what should they expect?
to get from reading.
This book.
Amphibious soul.
A few people who have read the sort of advanced copies.
have felt this real sense to
start some of these practices to start learning what I call the oldest language on earth.
And to start observing this wild world around them, even if they live in a city.
And it has been
excitingly for the just a few people quite transformative in that way. They started to look at the wild world in a different way and it sort of affected them
Right, positively.
So it's four, I guess.
People who want to
Have more of a relationship.
With this incredible world we live in. Even the
You know, the universe that we live in that gave birth to us.
thirteen point seven 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
His
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 and groups of them just slipped through. They almost went extinct a few times. So it's
Quite incredible that we're sitting here talking.
Yeah, that is remarkable.
I'm very excited about this book. And I do not say that lightly, as you would imagine. I get
offers to have hundreds of books sent to me every month, just about it feels. And to the extent that I had to put a blog post up saying I'm not reading any books in the same year they're published, 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.
Two
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 um very excited about it. Would you like to say
Anything about Sea Change Project?
That is our
not for profit organization that's focused on ocean conservation.
Been going for about ten years.
And so
Started with the amazing group of
Volunteers who volunteered a lot of their time for five years.
One of the big focuses, of course, the great African sea forest. And one of our methods has been
How do you protect something if it's not even known? Nobody knows about the cul forest.
So
My wife Swati gave it this name, the great African Sea Forest, and through the film Artopus Teacher, we've now
by some miracle managed to make this place a sort of global icon and it's been referred to
in scientific papers by this name all over the world. So it's much easier to protect it and the animals in that space.
Be studying a thousand and one animals in the Kelp forest, bringing their stories out.
And we're also trying to
Get this idea across that
And this way I'm quite fascinated by your
Sense of this.
Is it?
There's enormous you know emphasis on climate change and all the carbon problems and everything, and that's absolutely critical and that must go on absolutely. But
I feel there's not enough.
emphasis on biodiversity. And when I talk about biodiversity, I'm talking about all the plant and animal species on this planet.
But they actually form our immune system. They are the life support system of everything. So
If the phytoplankton communities in the ocean
Collapse. We stop breathing. We literally that's it. So
Every single investment
that you might have in the bank or any property you might own or
Any future children that you might want to have.
That's game over for all that. That investment is worth zero if biodiversity collapses.
So what I can't understand is why businesses and governments
are not putting much more attention.
On
Looking after and regenerating.
The
Deep
foundation that keeps every single investment and every single enterprise on this planet going.
So it's like this.
Mother of Mothers is just sitting there.
Looking after everything.
We're kind of like a child.
He's forgotten that it mother exists.
But we are completely dependent on her.
In every single way.
Why do you think it is that
A lot of that tension is not
On looking after her.

I mean I can take a stab at that, if you like. I
I think about it.
This quite a bit.
As you and your wife have done.
So brilliantly, I think.
Words matter a lot and labels matter a lot. This sounds self evident, but what I mean by that, I'll give an example that'll probably piss off a bunch of
folks in the US who might identify as liberals, but there is and I, by the way, I would say I'm pretty apolitical and I'm 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.
However, I tend to be I just lived in the Bay Area for seventeen 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
Lunch I'm blanking on his first name. He is a Republican strategist who, for instance, came up with the phrase death tax.
Which is a rebrand of sorts of inheritance tax. And he's very good at using words to catalyze.
Or create narratives and stories that they can then change.
behaviors which can then change beliefs and policy.
Right. So
I think there's 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, if we have
And this is painting with a broad brush, but if we have
Let's just say
The COs of public companies who are being judged on a quarterly basis.
You have their
There is.
payouts and bonuses and so on pegged to
relatively short term goals than 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.
Yeah.
Maybe it's just that they're grouping stories. I can give some examples.
But 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 like
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.
Then leads them to think about
personal changes in terms of behaviors. Let's just say I'm making this up, but we use that single tree example, they end up taking an interest in perhaps the oldest tree in their neighborhood in Austin, which happens to 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? I'm not gonna sell them on the
twenty course tasting menu that costs a thousand dollars off the bat. It's just too much of a commitment. And I'll give you an example. Wolves are very controversial.
species in the United States. They've become an ideological battleground and very politicized. And I'm gonna
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 with policymakers, and man oh man do people get upset. But the reason I bring up wolves is there's a book by Barry Lopez.
of wolves and men. And it was such a genre busting category redefining book.
when it was published. It's a beautiful book and it is incredibly well written. And it pulls people in whether they want to be pulled in or not. And it's a political
That type of art has the potential.
to move people in a way that
Lecturing does not.
Does that make sense? Like as soon as you start lecturing people to 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 is would be viewed as
Very anti drug.
antipsychedelic, let's just say.
If we're painting with a broad brush on the right, and then you have the hippies and so on and the lefties who are
Pro drugs. But you can get around that if you look at certain
sub populations who have a certain degree of sympathy from both sides.
who are politically immune, for instance, veterans with complex PTSD.
There are
ways that you can
Find common ground.
And
bipartisan in the case of the US support.
With something that if you approach it the wrong way.
If you take a sanctimonious lecturing position
It's doomed to fail.
That is the biggest weakness with a lot of attempts at conservation.
It's a positioning failure and it's a high horse failure.
So
At the end of the day, if you ask anyone, like, do you want to see all green?
Disappear from
your world. Do you want to have a silent spring where you hear no birds? No one's gonna say yes.
Right. So it's like okay, let's start there.
And then try to work backwards.
And find some common ground.
And it's actually been
A wonderful experience for me.
And I'm gonna stop in a second, but I I I don't talk about this much publicly because I I don't really wanna 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 we not completely drive ourselves and the planet to a catastrophe.
And I think there are ways to do it. So for instance
Getting into
Hunting. I grew up hating hunters and hunting. Because I grew up on Long Island and guys would just get shit faced and these rednecks would go out and just make a mess and animals were injured. And it was very disrespectful and the whole thing was terrible.
By and large, but when I met really responsible ethical hunters, and I was very lucky that a pretty well known guy now.
amazing author also, Steve Renella, took me on my first hunt, why Tildeer and the Carolinas, and from soup to nuts, it was approached in such a responsible way.
Cooked heart that evening.
harvested some organs in addition to doing the butchering and then had that meat that I felt so unconflicted about.
versus say cellophane wrapped meat of
questionable origins in the supermarket. It was surprising to me how
Deeply
unconflicted and good I felt about it. And that has been an opportunity because most
Folks on the left.
view hunting as some barbaric exercise and just an indulgence of bloodlust, which for some people it might be, but for a lot of people it's not.
And that's been a foot in the door for me to connect with a lot of people.
Phew.
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 a issue by issue basis, I would say I probably lean conservative in a bunch of ways.
And having that common language is what I'm almost always looking for.
What is the foot in the door where we can say something that really
has no grounds for
disagreement. How can we start there? What is that thread? So I'll stop there because that's a whole 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?
It aligns in quite a few ways to what you're saying. And I think that
You know, it is this massive
Pandemic of mental health.
Throughout the world, let's face it.
And I feel that part of that
Is
That's
Underlying
Disconnection from nature.
From this original mother.
So I think it's a
A wonderful idea to reintroduce people, as you say, very gently.
Two.
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

harm your family, that harm
biodiversity. You're keen on looking after the insects. You're keen on looking after the birds. They
It become
Precious to you.
So it's a slow, gentle process, as you say, of
storytelling in a way that is not
It's so easy in this thing.
this conservation game to point fingers, and I'm very, very wary of that, because the finger can point back at me so easily. We all are involved in this.
process and we all do things that aren't great for the planet, let's face it.
I've never met a single person who does it.
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 too.
Enjoy some of them.
But by giving up and sacrificing some of those things we can actually
create a much better life for ourselves in many ways. And so I think it is quite attractive.
And people are struggling a lot. And these are
It's something that is not new. It's we known this for enormously long period of time. So it's not something it's if we start remembering it just
It's transformative.
Yeah, I totally agree. And I'll just say a few more things now that I'm all warmed up.
Mm-hmm.
The first is that
Here I am in Austin, and Austin is sometimes called the blueberry and the tomato soup because it's a mostly liberal outpost in a predominantly republican state.
And
I'm gonna say something that a lot of my my friends on the left will not like to hear, which is
First.
Yelling on the internet.
is not actually taking effective action. That's 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.
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? And I was like, Oh, here we go.
Open shot fired. Okay. And I said, Well, look, do you want to have a conversation about this? Or are you just setting us up for a rock and sock and robots fight here? Is this what we're getting ready to do? I thought we were having a perfectly nice conversation. I just said all this explicitly and he kinda chuckled because he he knew exactly what he was doing. And I said, Okay, look.
First of all, let's not use that word because
I I can tell where this is going.
I said, What I would say.
If I give you an answer is that
Number one, let's put aside whether humans have anything to do with contributing to
what we're about to discuss because that's a huge point of contention.
Did we do it? Did we not? No.
People have strong opinions about this, but let's put that completely aside to avoid those strong opinions. Say, okay.
What we can observe, I would say, pretty uncontroversially, is more extreme weather events.
So
Flooding events.
mudslides, wildfires, et cetera.
Are we on board? Great, we're on board. Okay, cool. So if we want to avoid
catastrophic destruction of property and this, this, and this and this.
Even if we had nothing to do.
with the growing frequency of these phenomena.
It is probably
Our responsibility, or at least in our best interest, to take some human action.
to try to figure out how to deal with these things. It's like, okay, cool. Then there was there was a lot less room to fight, if that makes sense.
And so I would just
Say to people out there, number one, don't take the bait. Don't fight easily. It's so
Simple to fight.
See if you can do the harder thing, which is
fun to figure out and that is dance around the words that are automatically gonna set off.
A fist fight?
And use different
Language.
Use different language.
Because the language.
If you use different language, it is how you change thought. It's how you convey thought. And then you can actually get somewhere. So that's something that I
Think a lot about
Which is why.
this book like Words That Work, which was recommended to me by a friend, Matt Mollenwig.
Who thinks deeply about these things as well.
is something I would encourage people to check out just so they can start to train their brain.
to at least identify where they are using
Basically.
Not words that work, but words that incite some kind of immediate knee jerk. You're never going to persuade anybody by going in hard or
Having
Straight line opinions. I mean
Our whole nature is so contradictory.
human nature and to accept that and to
Just
Try and work together rather than apart. I totally agree with you. I like that a lot.
Yeah, and look, I'm not
Saying I'm the paragon of equanimity and I'm walking around like the Dalai Lama just
you know, constantly turning of their cheek. Like I get fired up and pissed off and say stupid things and send emails I shouldn't send. Like I do these things. But
Just aspirationally, I think it's worth paying attention to. So of those one thousand and one species, we're gonna
Step out of the octagon for a second. Is one of them
Octopuses that steal cameras?
Am I getting this right?
We we had this fascinating experience not that long ago.
I was with
My friend and
Marine biologist who works with sea change yet.
And we were going out to
Study these shaggy sea hairs that hardly ever come to this area.
And very focused on the sea hairs. And the next moment this very curious octopus.
rushed out of its den and
Grab my camera.
No, 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, okay, I've got to be a bit careful there. So drag the camera.
Through the gravel back to its den.
And then I thought, Okay, I'll just wait.
And hopefully the animal will give my camera back. But what was so fascinating.
I happened to be recording at the time.
This
A curious octopus looked at the camera, looked at the camera, then turned the camera.
And started filming us.
And it's
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
You're suddenly looking through this world.
From the octopus's perspective.
It's so powerful and we both came up with this idea.
Octopus should be number one.
And her sapiens.
The human animal should be one thousand and one.
We forget that we're part of this wild world. We're born wild, we
had this incredible heritage. So it was such a
simple but profound experience that this animal kind of
Taught us.
And yeah, I mean I think you may have seen some of the images. It's a
Quite wonderful to turn it around 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
Sort to sense it.
We're all made of the same stuff. We come from the same
Origin.
So we bonded more closely than we think. So it was a wonderful lesson.
From the wild.
And you've mentioned and also alluded to something that
I would like to put into words for myself as a reminder as much as anything else. 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.
Just a reflection of thinking.
That if we say
We need to
conserve nature. It's almost we're implying a separation that
at least from my felt experience, isn't quite capturing
what I take to be true at this point, which is almost for me, you've told a number of stories, I've experienced this, it's an extension of us, right? We evolved to operate in this environment. They're not separate things.
Which is part of the reason why uploading consciousness to the cloud and so on, I think is
A flawed objective.
to begin with, because disembodied consciousness, and we're already seeing this in 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, but 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?
Absolutely. Uh spark time.
Yeah, thank you.
Described it better than I can.
So it's uh it's very much
The case and
You know, I don't always feel that
Wonderful feeling of not being separate.
That tame world pulls me all over the place. But I have
had these times where I've really felt very connected like that and I've felt that
That separation drop away and that that there really feels like there's no other. And it is a
It's deeply
Transformative and invigorating. And when
I try to keep that with me and I try to be um very grateful for that. And I think we all, as you say, all have
access to that. You just have to
Just try and put in uh a little bit of that time and then it comes.
Great people can find
The book Amphibious Soul Finding the Wild in a Team World. I recommend people check this out. I
Think
Thematically, it is so deeply important, has been so transformative for me.
So I c I can't wait to get my hands on it. People can find
CCH Project at CCHangeProject.com and we'll link to everything that we discussed in the show notes. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about? Any additional comments or
formal complaints against me or the podcast or
Anything that you'd like to point.
My audience too.
Anything at all that you'd like to add before we
Wine to a close for this first conversation.
I'd like to thank you for
All your uh
And your dedication.
Talking about so many subjects that are certainly
helped me and inspired me so much and
For your braveness and openness, yeah.
Think that's what attracted me to your podcast is honesty you have and the
The braveness to say things that are sometimes difficult.
I mean, I think you know it made uh a difference to a lot of people's lives. So it's just
Yeah, 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 a
an excuse to do that. It's just so special.
Talking to you and getting to
Yeah, know you in this more intimate way, not just through the podcast. So that's been very special.
And to all that that amazing big audience that you know uh believe is so supportive.
of this and seems like you've
Got this amazing community that are
A kind hearted
sort of giant group that I think
Inspire.
All of that. So
I'd just like to thank that amazing community for tuning in and listening and putting their time and hear into this and
I guess that's just a a very gentle
Asked them to just sometimes just
Feel.
That's enormous.
Extraordinary.
Mother
That is just sitting out there, that original mother.
Yeah.
gave birth to us and has nurtured us in this extraordinary way and to feel
Her there all the time.
And just
In the back of her mind just sense her and
If we can somehow gently
Again to
look after that mother and to
Find ways to regenerate a
I think that uh
We'll do ourselves a great service. I mean, we really this idea of saving the planet is the planet's fine without us still lost.
Easily without us. She's as tough as nails and can handle anything. It's we are the fragile one.
So we almost, you know, we almost need to look at
Our place and all the other animals that are
sharing the space with us and just
feel that I at least that gratefulness for
This amazing planet that
has looked after so beautifully. So that's really uh
anything and uh yeah just absolutely wonderful talking to you Tim and
Very special for me, a real privilege.
Likewise, Craig. Thanks so much.
for saying that and I've admired you and your work for a long time.
Been meaning to connect.
Also
Glad to have the book as a
Wonderful excuse to have this conversation and uh hope to meet in person. Maybe I'll have a chance to
Graze my fingertips across some kelp with you at some point. I would enjoy that.
I'd love to take you diving. It'd be incredible.
I would absolutely love to do that. I will put that on the to do list. And once again
Thank you for the time. Thank you for being so open.
about your experiences and capturing them in the book, which is Amphibious Soul Finding the Wild in a Tame World.
And CCH Projects at CCHEProject.com. Everybody listening, we will link to everything.
And we discussed in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash
podcast, just search Craig or Foster and he will pop right up.
And until next time.
Be just a bit kinder than is necessary.
Two others, but
Don't forget.
To yourselves and now.
Maybe to that squirrel outside. Maybe that oak tree.
Go take a look, sip a cup of coffee outside. Maybe it's just an insect mound, but you can really study the macro through the micro. So take a small step. Enjoy. And thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Fi Bold Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out.
every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading,
albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then
I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash.
Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.
Thanks for listening.
This episode is brought to you by OnePassword. I have been using OnePassword for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products.
I met the founding team early on.
Love those guys and I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team.
Data breaches affect everyone, they can be catastrophic. And my feeling is, since that is the case,
you need one password. One password combines industry leading security with award winning design to bring private, secure, and user-friendly password management
To everyone, I use this dozens of times a day. It is an award winning password manager trusted by millions of users and more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack, even including my little team. It beat out 40 other options.
to become Wirecutter's top pick for password managers.
OnePassword lets you securely switch between iPhone, Android, Mac, and PC with convenient features like autofill for quick sign-ins.
All you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects everything else. Your logins, your credit cards, secure notes, or the office Wi-Fi password. One password creates as many strong unique passwords as you need and securely stores them in an encrypted vault that only you have access to. You can also use it for one time passwords.
where you scan the QR code and it gives you
two-factor authentication with the countdown with unique numbers, that type of thing. So instead of using a separate app for those types of authenticator type functions, you can use one password.
Plus, regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug about to keep one password at the forefront of security. So start protecting your business today with one password. Companies suffer from data breaches daily, all the time, losing time and money dealing with extortion, stolen customer data, and more. I have personally dealt with a lot.
Of these headaches.
You don't want them. It is why using OnePassword is a business best practice I strongly endorse and a business solution that I use myself.
So check it out. Get a free two week trial at onepassword.com slash Tim.
That's one the number one, password.com slash Tim.
This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing, spelled V-U-O-R-I. Viore. I've been wearing...
Viore. At least one
item per day for the last few months and
You can use it for everything. It's performance apparel.
but it can be used for working out, it can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it.
Super comfortable, super stylish, and uh I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete, she is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever
used or heard of Viore and this was her response. I do love their stuff, been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI, first for my partner, T-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants.
I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their Clementine running shorts for summer and love them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I bought in the last year or so for yoga.
running lounge wear that lasts and that I think look good also.
I like the discrete logo. So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text. V Ori, again spelled V-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training.
doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner, it really doesn't matter what you're doing.
Their clothing is so comfortable.
and uh look so good and it's it's non-offensive, you don't have a huge brand logo in your face. You'll just want to be in them all the time. They're men's core short K-O-R-E.
The most comfortable line athletic short is your one short for every sport I've been using it. Kettleball swings or runs, you name it, the Banks short. This is their go-to land to see short is the ultimate in versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to.
folks out there or at least men out there is the ponto performance pant and you'll find these at the link I'm gonna give you guys you can check out what I'm talking about but I'm wearing them right now they're thin performance sweatpants but that doesn't do them justice. So you gotta check it out. PONTO Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger.

Fury.
isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.
It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this, and so am I.
VioryClothing.com forward slash Tim. That's V U O R I clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over$75 and free returns. So check it out.
VioreClothing.com slash Tim, that's B-U-O-R-I Clothing.com slash Tim, and discover the versatility of Viore Clothing.