Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Live Free Ride Free, where we talk to people who
have lived self-actualized lives on their own terms, and find out how they
got there, what they do, how we can get there, what we can learn from them.
How to live our best lives, find our own definition of success,
and most importantly, find joy.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson.
New York Times bestselling author of the Horse Boy.
Founder of New Trails Learning Systems and long ride home.com.
You can find details of all our programs and shows on Rupert isaacson.com.
Hey, I'm back with Craig Foster.
Those of you who listened to the previous podcast with him know that
we went fairly deep into the idea of how human beings are trackers.
And how important this kind of is for our well being and our happiness in the
fact that it connects us with the world and the universe, our habitat as an
organism, we are organisms around us, but those of you who haven't listened
to that, please go and listen to it, those of you who know Craig Foster's
work, Then he needs no introduction.
But those of you who don't, your homework immediately is to go and
watch the film My Octopus Teacher.
And if you can also watch a film called the great dance and his book amphibious
soul But now I want to dive in because I want to pick the conversation up
from where we left it before welcome back craig Thank you for coming on.
Can you Tell us what you've been thinking of since the last time around this
idea Of tracking and the human soul.
Craig Foster: Thanks, Rupert.
Good to be chatting to you again.
I guess there's such a deep desire in me to
feel that wildness and I have been traveling a lot this year.
Unusually.
So, so, it, it's When I'm not practicing that tracking every
day, I can feel the difference.
I can feel the, you know, my mind wanting to hold onto those connections.
And the only way of doing that is by being in the wild and doing that.
So I've, I've missed that.
That old way, I've missed those, that reciprocity with the wild, I've missed
practicing that oldest language on earth.
I mean, I do it in the cities, I do it inside, I'm always looking for
little marks that people have left, or little scuff marks, or dust particles.
I'm looking for Sign, I'm looking for patterns everywhere because it satisfies
my psyche, but I've kind of thought, well, this year I really want to get back into
some serious communication with these wild creatures and it's an amazing way
of doing it because, I mean, I had a on Friday, I had this, you know, full day
in the wild with my tracking friends and we were just picking up the subtlest of
things, but the amount of information that I got, you know, took me three or
four days just to process and figure out and I'm going to give you an example,
I found this piece of an ant's nest.
I found a tiny bit of a baboon scat and a couple of very faded baboon prints.
And from that came this This incredible, interesting, possible story of these
baboons raiding this cocktail ant's nest.
And the, they have these amazing commensals these little larvae of
animals that they protect in the nest.
And then they feed.
nectar to the ants.
And I think that maybe the baboons were after these, these larvae.
And that they opened the nest.
But of course, through the baboons, through this, these little signs, I
learned all about these cocktail ants and their incredible lives and how they
have these battles against other ant colonies and how they protect their
Species that they harbor in the nest and then allied to that was how these
lizards get attracted to the Baboon feces because it's attracts flies and
they're catching the flies around it And it's just the story just gets bigger
and bigger and more complex Suddenly in the world of baboons in the world of
ants and you part of this wild system And, but you wouldn't even imagine that
if you weren't tracking, if you weren't open to these little tiny signs that 99.
9 percent of people are passing.
So there's, there are these incredible stories and these
teachings just right there.
So I want to, my main thought is now is to get back to that because I've
never felt better When I'm tracking as often as possible and it's probably
Rupert Isaacson: listening to you just recount that first question is
what's a cocktail and so I'm going to ask you to tell us what a cocktail
and is, but I felt, as you were describing that, an intrinsic sense
of satisfaction simply hearing the report of your tracking discovery.
And it occurs to me more and more as I age that quality of life, quality
of mental health seems to be quite dependent on us behaving as our species
wants us to, which is as trackers.
And I, I, I make the distinction between tracking and hunting there.
Because I think when we use the word hunting, people mistakenly
assume one's always talking about trying to kill something.
Whereas tracking can involve hunting, but tracking is reading, as you, No,
the ecosystem in a much broader way, and as you say, our interaction with it.
And you also said something at the very beginning there, that tracking
is the oldest language in the world.
So, can you, first tell us what a cocktail ant is, because I'm curious,
and then be, elaborate on this oldest language in the world thing, please.
Craig Foster: So the, the cocktail ant, which I've only kind of, you
know, recently understood through thanks to the baboons, are these
fascinating ants that build, that chew plant material and they build these
amazing nests where their, their saliva and the material glue together in
these incredible nests inside bushes.
And they're called cocktail ants because the back of the ant, when they get
aggressive, turns upwards like that.
So the little tail is cocked, and they, you know, they, they, they
protect and feed these other about five different forms of lava.
And then they on harvest nectar from the lava and the lava
get the amazing protection.
Lava of
Rupert Isaacson: other species, not lava.
Of totally, totally different species.
So it's like they're farming.
The lava of other insects.
Craig Foster: Yes, yes.
But they kind of, that lava, those lava know that they're protected there.
The Ansel protect them and in exchange they hand out the nectar.
Yeah.
And yeah.
So, in terms of the oldest language, you know,
it is a whole language.
So you, you're looking for patterns, you're looking for sign, you're looking
for spu, you're looking for hundreds of these little patterns that then link up.
and make sense and allow you to survive if you were living fully wild.
But from, I don't hunt in any way, but it allows me to psychologically survive
because I need to understand and know and feel I belong in the ecosystem I'm in.
And I mean, just to give you an idea, that's just, I mean, there
are like, 10 stories like that from Friday but they're very subtle.
You just get a flash of something and then this, because you know the
ecosystem, then you're putting together all these possibilities that then suddenly
click into place and you, ah, the puff adder's hunting right next to the sea.
in the kelp, the dried kelp, because the little rodents live in there
and eat the amphipods, and then you just feel this whole language.
Nature's speaking to you, and you're speaking back, and there's an incredible
dialogue that you're having with the wild, and you can feel that old
language moving your body, moving your mind, and you just feel alive.
Invigorated and in touch with that old way, that design
that you're talking about.
And that makes you feel that you're doing something worthwhile.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm going to just describe for listeners a little bit
what I know of your life in Cape Town.
So although although Craig lives near, close to a large city those of you
who know Cape Town know that it's.
Bordered by large protected areas of that are very, very wild.
A large proportion of which is coastline and okay.
Craig is lucky enough to live on that coastline and to go down to the beach
and into the sea every day and track.
And he's also part of protecting that ecosystem through his organization,
Sea Change which is protecting the kelp forest, which is a
vitally important ecosystem there.
You mentioned basically that tracking for you is psychological survival.
I think most people obviously don't live your life and they don't live
my life either with the horses.
And I think most people are suffering, including those of us who
live with the horses and those of us who, like you, can go down and
track at least some of the time.
Why is this oldest language in the world tracking?
integral to psychological survival?
Craig Foster: Yeah, I think there are many ways of answering that.
And ironically, the closer you get to nature, the closer you get to
animals, and the more you understand the massive environmental threats.
potentially more your mental health could be affected negatively.
So that's an interesting thing to talk about, how to get close to the wild,
fall in love with biodiversity and our, our big mother, and then realize, Oh
my goodness, she's, you know, we, we are killing her at a terrifying rate.
How do you, how do you deal with that and not lose hope?
That's another interesting thing to look at.
But no, sorry, I've just forgotten the, the, yeah, why, why is this
Rupert Isaacson: why, so we're talking about you, you, you, you,
you had this phrase, psychological survival, and I think this is,
we've, we've hit the knob here.
In fact, that's why I'm going to title this podcast tracking a
psychological survival, mental health.
It's a pandemic.
It probably always has been, but I think we're just putting
our attention on it now.
But as you say, things have become very acute because we, we feel many of us
that we're in a state of slight despair with the way we're treating the planet.
As you say, No sooner does one fall in love with nature than one
begins to see that become, you know,
alarmed understatement by the damage we're doing to it.
But you said tracking as psychological survival.
And I just want you to elaborate on that because I think that's useful for
people when they're If we're going to then start talking about well, what
strategies or mechanisms could we use, particularly if we're not going down to
the beach in Cape Town every day, or not going out to the horses or living on a
farm every day, and we're just living the normal suburban or urban life.
So, can you just, yeah, elaborate around why it is psychological survival tracking,
and then we can go into some solutions.
Craig Foster: I think, I mean, one of the reasons would be that There's this
tremendous sense of not belonging.
We get this, it's, a lot of people feel they're kind of alone, they don't belong.
And what happens when you start tracking and observing, details of animals.
It forces you to really start to understand the world that you're in and to
know these little incredible secret lives and all these thousands of signs that
are around you that are speaking to you and have been, you know, spoken to people
at a very deep level for a long time.
So while people are absolutely fluent in this language, they
don't even have to think.
So What that eventually does, it forces you to feel part of the wild, integrated
into it, woven into it, so you feel part of nature, part of this world,
you totally belong, you're another one of these wild animals that are moving
on the landscape or in the water.
And if you then learn enough from the animals and move accordingly,
they allow you into their space.
occasionally even come and physically interact with you on their terms.
And then that makes you feel integrated into the wild.
And that is a feeling that, You know, every child would have had since
the beginning of time up till, you know, the beginning of the industrial
revolution or whenever it started to all change, even the agricultural
revolution changed us fundamentally.
So, you, you just feel part of this incredible kinship of all these
species and that's very affirming.
Is tracking the cure for loneliness?
I think you can't you know, just expect to be a kind of lone ranger,
solitary person, and then get all your sustenance from nature.
You will get a lot from her, but we are social beings.
So the ideal thing, and I found the most Powerful and invigorating is to
have a close group of friends, which I do have, and we go out tracking
together and then, you know, the, the five minds is so powerful because
you're getting all these inputs and you're thinking, ah, okay, that's it.
This is what's happening here.
And the, the feeling of moving in that group on that landscape.
and being taught by these wild creatures.
It's unbelievable how it bonds you.
So you, you, you have kinds of friendships that are for me,
impossible to get in other ways.
It's, it's so ancient and old and primal that it just completely like
connects your minds in that wild.
And it's, what's interesting is some of the young people who've,
you know, come with us, they 20, 30 years younger than me, I would.
battle to be friends with them, but because of this shared awe and
wonder of tracking it in the wild, you actually have so much in common.
So it's, it's cross generational.
And then of course, it's a lovely feeling to be passing that on to a
younger person and their mind is often working really well, better than mine.
So they learn very fast and they can add a lot to the, you know, the thinking part.
Rupert Isaacson: So tracking is the cure for loneliness if we behave as our still
living ancestors, because there's lots of hunter gatherers still on the planet.
If we behave as they do, i.
e.
going out into nature to track in cooperative groups, right?
Because that's the nature of our species.
Craig Foster: It doesn't get more connected in a way.
And yeah, and it does, there's something about those relationships
that are very, very powerful.
Rupert Isaacson: When you, when you described what was going on with the
baboons and the cocktail ants, and then the lizards, and then being attracted to
the insects on the baboon feces, and that
despite the fact that there was.
Faeces involved, or perhaps because of it, because obviously I'm a toilet
humor guy, but there was obviously something very poetic about that.
Is poetry,
is true poetry, tracking the environment in which we live?
And interacting with it in this way.
Is that why it's so deeply satisfying because it's
effectively living inside poetry?
Is that the nature of poetry?
Craig Foster: When you say that, I think of
like the elegance of the natural system itself feels deeply poetic.
You know, when we, when we, When we just what pops into my mind, when we
started to decimate the great whale populations, you know, you would think
that the krill that they feed on would, you know, expand in numbers dramatically,
but their numbers drop dramatically.
And it's quite funny because they rely on the whale poop and the whale poop
makes all the phytoplankton bloom.
And that's what feeds the krill.
So, I mean, there's this, this, this extraordinary.
Poetry in that, that system that is, I mean, it's mind blowing that you could
have so much biodiversity, so many animals and plants kind of, and there's
a lot of predation yet there's this unbelievable life that springs from that.
It's, it, you know, it's pure poetry in many ways.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So if the soul of poetry Is rooted in our interaction with the
natural world, which it has to be right because we're an organism.
What else can we interact with?
Even when we're interacting with each other, even when we're intellectualizing
things, we're still operating within the frame of an organism.
Just, we're limiting the number of organisms, i.
e.
human to human.
But there it is, it's still there, that natural thing.
This brings up the question which, before we hit record, You were posing, which I
think would be very good for listeners to think on too, which is what happens
to the mind when we become literate?
So, to frame that question, 300,
000 years, more or less, of species, as far as we know, sapiens sapiens,
and certainly about 290 something, four years of it not literate.
And then about 6, 000 years ago, we seem to have the first cuneiform scripts.
The archaeological thing is being rewritten all the time.
Maybe, who knows, maybe we've been literate in previous iterations
before, but not for as long as We've not been literate.
And we use that word illiteracy as a pejorative.
We definitely, if, oh, illiterate, that's a bad thing.
But you made the point that the master trackers, and listeners, what we mean
by master trackers is if you go into places like the Kalahari in southern
Africa, where there are Sun Bushman Hunters trackers, who can read the
land in a way that makes Craig's previous description sound illiterate.
incredibly simplistic, because they're just on a meta level with this.
That the vast majority of them are not literate.
And that the trackers that are within their communities that are
literate don't seem to be able to reach that same deep level.
So what happens to the mind when we become literate?
And then, The question that you posed, Craig, was does literacy
compromise deep cognition?
Can you give us your thoughts on that?
Craig Foster: So I'm certainly no expert on this, but it is
something that's fascinating me.
Very young children seem to be just incredibly bright.
They can learn a language without even trying.
As soon as they start this whole education system I think it's quite
well known that their brains get sort of fairly heavily compromised
and the cognition drops radically.
And it is interesting that quite a large percentage of master trackers, and it's,
it's, it's, it's, it's an incredible thing to witness don't seem to have
the literacy and the people in those communities who are literate cannot do
this incredible master tracking techniques and ideas and, and, but, you know,
Admittedly, it takes 20 years to learn.
So,
and as you say, you know, for 95 percent of our time on this
planet, we have not been literate.
So suddenly introducing this enormous amount of energy that's
required for our reading and writing.
What does that do?
to our deeper thinking?
What does it do to radical pattern recognition, etc?
I don't know the answers, but I'd be very interested to try
and find out more about that.
And some indigenous writing that I've recently read, an amazing book called
Sand Talk, hints at a similar thing that
Intrinsically, we know so much, and no one's saying that people
shouldn't learn to read and write.
It's absolutely critical for survival in our culture today.
But it is very interesting to think about what is actually doing to
this incredible, wild human being.
brain that has been forged in this crucible of nature for so long.
What is it doing?
All these really strange inputs.
I mean, we know what the technology is doing.
It's messing us up properly.
But what is all the other stuff doing as well?
And it's certainly, as I go, Deeper into these spaces.
I get a very strong sense that we have to be very, very careful,
especially in the education system.
How we bring all this so called knowledge to young people.
Rupert Isaacson: I think we need to bring some neuroscientists into this
conversation because as you were talking, I just grabbed my phone and I started
I just typed the question into Google, you know, does education compromise.
And of course everything pops up saying, no education, you know, is vital for
cognition, you know, across the entire adult range individuals with more
education show higher levels of cognitive function than individuals with less.
Education and this, you know, coming from, of course, the government website
in the UK, but I think we need to define here what we mean by cognition, because
I think this is a really interesting point, as you say, we can't get by in our
culture now without interaction with the cash economy, without literacy digital
literacy, we have to have it, even the son that I know who I still interact with a
lot in the Kalahari, they, they use cell phones, they, you know, I mean, they're,
they, they have to, or they get overrun by people that have that kind of technology.
So, when you say cognition, given that Any sort of educational psychologist
probably would say no, you've got to have literacy for cognition.
Why are you posing something that's a little, what do you mean by
cognition that might be different to what they mean by cognition?
Craig Foster: No, as you say, how they're measuring that, you know, the level of
thinking and understanding it takes to be able to look at.
You know, very, very faint marks in the earth and put together this
unbelievably complex story and then follow animals that are unseen is
one of the hardest things it takes.
I mean, it's.
a thousand times easier to fly a jumbo jet or be an astronaut or anything like that.
Anybody can eventually learn to do that.
This is not something that's, this is something that's very,
very difficult and the variables are massive and it's so subtle.
So it's one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in my whole life.
This ability to figure out these incredibly complex secrets of nature.
It is absolutely remarkable.
I mean, you have witnessed it.
It's, it's mind blowing.
And I've tried, I mean, I've tried for, you know, decades and I can get by now.
I can do some fairly good tracking.
I've taught myself to track underwater, but I'm nowhere near as good after
15 years of doing it every day and my entire childhood doing it, I'm nowhere
near as good as a master tracker.
It's, it's something that is.
Requires the brain to be working at a extremely high level.
So whatever that is, or whatever the terms are, I, I'm, as I said,
I'm absolutely no expert on any of this neuroscience or how it works,
but I have a, a, a strong hunch that
the Our brains are being rewired when we learn to read and write.
And when we learn to track other neural pathways are opening up and you can,
I mean, after this now intensive 15 years of tracking I've done now, I
noticed my My thinking is way better and especially in things like storytelling
And writing funnily enough but in the story structure side of things, so, and
I've noticed people like my friend John Young have taken young people out who say
struggling in school with math or science.
And after three months of tracking, without doing any extra math or science,
those kids are suddenly fine with that.
Who is John Young?
Tell us about John Young.
John Young is an incredible tracker, storyteller you know, written
many books on bird language.
Where's he from?
He is from he's from America.
He now lives in California, but he was from the Pine Barrens.
I can't remember exactly where that is, but on the East coast, New Jersey.
That's right.
So, and he spent his whole life tracking from nine years old.
Okay.
In very interesting childhood.
And so there are these hints everywhere that there is something,
there's something extraordinary here.
You know, so much of, I think the way forward, the future of our relationship
with the planet our way of telling the story of who we are and how we
should interact with the planet.
I think so much knowledge is bound up in the indigenous peoples of this planet.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: where else can it be?
Yeah,
Craig Foster: exactly.
So, and this tracking is this fundamental base for our whole relationship.
with ourselves, with our minds, with our environment, with
animals, with all the kinship.
It is the, the binding language that takes us back to the
beginning and pre human as well.
I mean, definitely Homo erectus and these early hominids we're tracking.
So it's part of our deep Way of thinking and interacting, right?
And it must
Rupert Isaacson: be true of every organism, right?
Because every organism has to track, right?
Every organism either predates or is prey has to read the environment
around them all the time.
Otherwise, they don't survive
Craig Foster: exactly.
And they've got these incredible sensory systems.
But we've developed this incredible system because our senses are
not normally often that good.
But we've got this unbelievable system of tracking that has kind of, you know,
made us as good as animals in many ways.
And we've used our big brain to do that.
Well,
Rupert Isaacson: some neuroscience comes into my mind actually with this, which is
that this we're still in 2024 as we make this podcast just a university study from,
I think University of Shanghai came out that seems to prove a theory, an older one
from the eighties and early nineties by a guy called Roger Penrose, that the brain
is a quantum, human is a quantum computer and that we're capable of storing.
Thought as energy in different parts, like throughout the brain.
I'm paraphrasing, I'm trying to make sure I get this right.
And I'll, I'll, I'll get on Google in a moment and give a link for the study.
And that where, so we store as potential or this potential
thought on any particular thought.
And it's only when we bring our attention onto a particular thought that it
becomes, if you like, a photon rather than a wave no longer in potential,
but then it can go back to potential.
And that we store this energy in our myelin.
The wrapping that goes around the neural pathways that connect the fatty tissue
that ends up making them into a secure insulated cable similar to a plastic cable
around an electrical wire, that's myelin.
Myelination is when we produce that and we have to take pauses, downtime,
naps, daydreaming for our brain to have the chance to have this myelin.
And apparently within this myelin, there are these microtubules.
And it's being posited that within these microtubules in the myelin, which is
insulating every neural pathway we have in our brain, that it's here, that
we store this quantum potentiality.
And it seems that they've kind of proved this now.
And I'm wondering if that's what you're talking about.
I'm wondering if when you are in a, if you like a pure state, as
you say, early childhood, before you learn to read and write.
Your
access to that potentiality and thought is unhindered.
And then, of course, as we learn to read and write, we learn to
follow and track, because it is still tracking, I think, reading
and writing, one particular animal.
It's like saying we're only now going to track kudu, or horse, or something.
Or maybe we do it in several languages, so we can do seven species.
But what we then lose the capa and then we think, oh, everything is in the written
word, and I'm guilty of this because I'm a writer, and you're a writer too,
so the written word is, is, is to some degree everything to us, and a lot of my
greatest joy is in reading and writing.
However, listening to you, I can now begin to see how limiting that can be.
Because If I could read and write in every language in the world, well,
okay, but I can't, I can really do it well in one language, middling
in another one and at kindergarten level and a third and that's it.
Is a master tracker in the indigenous sense of a human being, i.
e.
an original sense, an authentic sense of a human being, is a master tracker
effectively somebody who can read and write in every language in the world
because There you are interacting.
How many species are you interacting with?
If you're a master tracker, I mean take a guess.
What do you think?
Craig Foster: Over a thousand and sure so that's what you I think you need.
I think John worked it out I think you need at least a working knowledge of sort
of 400 species To be able to obviously depends on the environment but if you you
have to have a sense of all the phylum to be able to you Put together these stories.
So you, you, you need to know insect language.
You need to know antelope language.
You need to know bird language.
You need to know you know, bone language.
You know, you find one little piece of bone.
You have to have a sense of what animal it's from.
Or you need to know scat language.
You need to know all of these things to be able to put together the complex pictures.
And the smallest thing can give you the whole, you know,
a whole lot of information.
So it's a nice way of looking at it.
You need to No, a lot about a lot of your wild kin.
And the more, you know, the more interesting the dialogue becomes with
the wild but it's hard to emphasize how satisfying and powerful it is.
And there's nothing better for me than a day out doing that.
There's just, it's, it's, it's impossible to beat with, with anything that I.
And of
Rupert Isaacson: course, you're not just talking about animal species.
We're talking about plant species, fungal species, and then the interact,
the interactions from one plant species to another or through a fungal network
or through an animal to another plant.
Craig Foster: And wind, I mean, we see wind tracks everywhere here.
You know, the wind is cutting the plants in an amazing way.
It's cutting the rocks.
So you get a, you know, a million, five million year old wind track on a rock.
You get a A wind track on plants that's maybe, you know, 20, 30 years old.
This everywhere, it's just speaking to you in this beautiful way.
Rupert Isaacson: So, if, if back to your point about John Young taking kids who are
struggling, say, with math and science out into, tracking and then Them coming back
and without having had to take any extra tutorials in math and science suddenly
They're better at math and science.
What you're really saying is that one type of if you go to deep
cognition It's going to help all the slightly less deep cognitions
that we call our education system.
And that's in line with what they do in Finland.
So Finland, as you know, has the highest math and science scores
of any school system in the world.
And they achieve this by cutting two thirds of their classroom time
and upping two thirds of their
Craig Foster: nature.
That's great.
Isn't it?
I didn't know.
I didn't know that.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: they're the world leaders and nobody follows them.
Because everyone's terrified that anything but the devil they know you know, we're
afraid of what's unfamiliar, but for some odd reason, the Finns were able
to take that leap because they, it's a culture that's relatively close to nature.
If that type of tracking can affect our learning cognition so
well, what about mental health?
Craig Foster: That's probably where it could be, you know, in,
in my thinking, the most profound it gives you this strange sense.
of purpose.
You know, if you really think about it, life feels pretty purposeless.
But for some reason, doing such a primal activity it just feels right.
I mean, and, and what I like to do, I say, go out to a day of tracking and then, then
there's all these questions that come up.
The animals start to teach you, you start asking hundreds of questions
and then you can do some research.
So, and then you can, you know, somehow quantify that.
These stories that come out and it's, it's so satisfying and then reshare them
and dialogue with your fellow trackers.
Oh, I wonder about that.
What did you think of, you know, we saw this the same Friday we saw the tracks
of some of the first tracks I've ever seen of isopods solidified in salt.
So these are small creatures that live in their billions in the
intertidal, they're fascinating.
What is an isopod
Rupert Isaacson: for those of us that don't know?
It's
Craig Foster: a, it's a crustacean, a small flat looking crustacean
with ten legs and little antennae.
That lives in the intertidal, feeds on kelp, and they migrate in their millions.
And we were walking along the coast, and we just looked up, and there was
this river of creatures coming from the water, or near the water, across
the rocks as the tide was rising.
I'm talking about, you know, 500, 000 animals.
And it was just incredible.
The whole rock.
felt like it was moving.
And I actually lay underneath one of the rocks and started
photographing them and the river started running over my whole body.
I had a thousand animals on my body and they were just moving.
And but what was so fascinating is these, they had obviously moved
across this little area on their journey down to the shore through
a saturated solution of salt water.
Because these animals are so light, they weigh a few grams,
they don't really leave tracks.
But they had altered the structure of the salt, and then when it
had solidified and crystallized, there was a perfect solution.
Tracks of these animals, but they were different and You could see they were
both made by isopods But they were two of them coming next to each other were
very different and that made us think about how these animals Moving some of
them almost dragging themselves some are walking and that was like a three day
Discussion with our tracking group and but it forces you to think about these
and the next time we're going to go back We're going to watch exactly how they're
moving you And try and figure out how that once in a, in a million track occurred.
I've never seen it before.
So it's these, it's like these crazy details that force you
into the lives of these animals.
And you become intimate with them.
You, you.
And of course you fall in love with them.
It might be a strange thing to, to think, but I really love these isopods.
I mean, most people would probably find them, you know, disgusting.
They kind of feel like tiny cockroaches, but they, these animals,
without them, we'd basically die.
I mean, this, these small creatures are keeping us alive.
This is a reason.
Rupert Isaacson: Why, why would we die without them?
Craig Foster: So biodiversity, which is the complexity of all animals and plants.
Is the, the basically makes the oxygen that we breathe and makes all the, the
food and water purifies everything.
So it's our, it's our living biological life support system.
So if you start taking out a fundamental animal like this, that provides food
for all the other creatures, birds eat them, fish eat these animals,
otters eat them, everything eats them.
You will have a, a, a, a trophic cascade, you'll have a large
amount of animals dying, and fairly quickly we will not be able to live.
There will be no life support system left on this planet.
So, it's a fundamental thing we've forgotten, that biodiversity, this
mother, of, of, of all the creatures and plants together is literally
keeping us alive from second to second.
And when you feel that, and you look at this river of creatures,
I mean, in large parts of the world, there, there are none left.
You just think, Oh my God, I can actually, During this apocalypse, I'm lying and
this river of these animals, thousands of legs are moving across my body.
Isn't that a privilege?
Isn't that a something to celebrate?
And you know, as I get up, I'm so careful not to squash one or whatever, you know,
and just gently knock them off my shirt and try and, you know, get them out of
the socks and everything so that none are injured, even though they're millions.
They're just so precious.
Each one is this.
is a part of our life support system.
So it forces you to, to feel deep empathy.
This is what tracking does.
It forces you into these other, Into the other's lives and makes
you appreciate them at such a deep level that you feel uplifted.
You feel that this is a good thing to be doing you know, for no
particular end, you know, just in doing it for itself and nothing else.
And everybody in the group feels it, you know, it's like,
Rupert Isaacson: was it Confucius who said to for happiness, practice
the arts, basically not with the.
intention of being a master artist or selling your work, just
the sheer joy of the practice.
Is, is, is that what we're talking about here with the mental health?
It's the sheer joy of the practice, the empathy.
Craig Foster: Yeah, so you don't, you, what it does, it forces you into
the present because if you've got a goal, you're always thinking, Ooh,
I'm now going to be, I don't know, making an artwork from these tracks
or writing a book or something.
Then you're going to be living in that future space, but you,
what it does, it's incredible how it forces you into the present.
There's no cell phones, there's nothing.
We're just out in the wild.
We're trying to figure out what.
The land what the animals are saying and you absolutely present
and that makes you feel and you get a very distorted sense of time.
We go in and you're in that world of say the isopods and you pop out and it's three
hours later and it feels like 15 minutes.
If so it forces you to be so present and that is deeply healing and of
course you you know All the sounds of the wild are there everything's making
you feel lowering your nervous system.
Put it that way.
Your whole nervous system feels, just seems to come down and feel,
Rupert Isaacson: you know, you talked about the sense of belonging.
Which of course we all long for because we're social animals and you know, it's
it's a well known but true cliche that you can be surrounded by Thousands or
millions of people but feel very lonely because you're not connected and we
are supposed to live in these hunter gatherer groups Where we're very connected
so is is tracking like this so good for the mental health because It's actually
good for our physical bodies, right?
So our mental health is still an extension of our physicality.
But also is it linked with survival in some way in that if I can read the
environment to that degree, then I know that I have a kind of security.
Because I just, I don't need to worry, right?
Craig Foster: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And what's so interesting, I've noticed, if I'm in a place of very
high biodiversity, I feel really good.
And I think it's the case, because my primal being, who doesn't know I can
go to the shop and buy food and that, knows that, ooh, this is an easy place
to survive, I don't need to worry.
I can actually, you know, I can, I can survive and I've been to places
had the privilege of working in near pristine islands where almost
all the biodiversity is intact.
And I have been absolutely shocked at how that affected my mental health.
I've never felt better in my life.
And so many of the other people around me had the same feeling.
It's like, deeply, deeply healing to be in a place where the
biodiversity is fully intact.
And I think that's because this wild creature inside us, the primal
mind absolutely knows that it knows.
I've even had the feeling here in the kelp forest swimming and across a reef
where there's much more biodiversity for a whole lot of reasons and you just
suddenly feel this amazing feeling and you don't quite know where it's coming from.
But I think our whole mental health, our whole levels of anxiety, our
nervous system is all woven into the biodiversity of our planet.
It, it just makes total sense that it would be.
And we would gravitate in, in, in most of our time on this planet
towards places of higher biodiversity.
And we'd, we, we, I mean, as you know, we're very nomadic by nature.
We'd be moving continually towards places and staying in places of higher
biodiversity and then moving to another place as that diminished, we follow the
rains, we follow the herds, we follow the rains, we follow the biodiversity.
That's, that's our whole way our psyche is structured.
So it's tied in, in the most magnificent way, our life support system, our mother,
our big mother, and our wellbeing, our mental health, it's all inseparable.
Rupert Isaacson: It's interesting that our brains, you know, they're so
efficient and they're so inefficient.
So, you know, they we've we've come up with these Shortcuts now, you know, so
we invented writing then we invented money and we invented agriculture
and we invented all these things to
take out variables To make survival efficient and then it seems that we've
done this at the cost of our mental health I'm just thinking that you
know, we follow the rains we follow the herds now we follow the money We
have to we have to follow the money.
Craig Foster: Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: I have to I have to and at the same time it's One thing to follow.
Interestingly, you know, I have, like you, parallel careers.
I've got a career in horses, a career in mental health, a career in writing
and creative stuff, da da da, education.
You have a career in, you know, filmmaking, storytelling.
Conservation, biodiversity, tracking, and other things too.
I am never at my happiest and when I've got several parallel projects going on
that seem to me to be working towards
fruition, not as in the goal, but just as in developing nicely.
Because that, I suppose, from what you're saying, that kind
of reflects biodiversity.
That sort of reflects me as a wild person saying, Oh, look, you know,
the wild plums are coming out and I see that the red deer are coming
down from the hills into the valley.
That's going to make life easier.
And oh gosh, that look at the medicinal herbs.
They're coming up well over there and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And.
So in a weird way, it's exactly the same process, isn't it?
But we've made it abstract.
We've intellectualized it and that by doing that, we then get into this big,
amazing brain that you talked about.
That's allowed us to develop this amazing tracking thing.
What's gone wrong?
Where did we diverge from our brain working in our favor to make us almost as
good as these animals that are stronger and more resilient than we are in many
ways through this tracking ability.
And Where did it go wrong that, that it began to work against us and that mental
health now is even a, a discussion?
What's your theory on that?
Craig Foster: I just want to come back to that thing before I answer that, that,
it's so powerful what you said, you know, we followed the reins for so long, and
now we follow the money, and then, but how much have we sacrificed for that?
And that's, I think the fundamental question.
You know, we actually thrive on certain levels of hardship as well.
I mean, you know, the cold, the exposure to the wild, the, the intense
exercise of resilience of resilience of following we, we, we, we actually derive
tremendous pleasure from that through delayed dopamine release and so on.
Rupert Isaacson: Oh yeah.
Craig Foster: So, so that's.
When you make things so easy and everything's just, just one example
would be, you know, temperature control.
We love as a species being cold and then making a little fire
and feeling warm and so on.
But.
If you've got a temperature controlled house and you never feel that, your whole
hormonal system starts to be compromised.
Your dopamine release is far less, etc, etc.
So the, this, in my book, what I've talked about, this whole tame existence
it's wonderful in some ways, and a beautiful cup of coffee and an amazing
book and whatever can be great, but it takes so much away from that wild spirit.
That if it's become so imbalanced like we have now and that you just have
this, all this technology everywhere, it is so frightening for that wild
psyche, that wild psyche is desperate to get back to these primal activities.
But at some.
It's going so far down this sort of tame road that it's very
difficult in many cases to do that.
I don't know if that's answered much of your question, but it certainly I
mean, where did that all start changing?
I mean, I think we know very well that as soon as we move to agriculture, there's
a massive change in the whole psyche.
And you start to lose this connection with the wild, you stop being nomadic.
The whole.
You know, 300, 000 years of, of living takes a huge knock and that, that is
pretty traumatic for the wild psyche.
Then we kind of get used to that and then all this other stuff thrown at us.
And now we've, you know, can't think straight because our lives
are ruled by you know, a little cell phone hand grenade in our hands.
So it's it's a very strange world that way.
And so we've become the aliens.
In our own world, and the tracking and these primal activities basically
reconnects us with who we are and we stop feeling like aliens and we
start feeling like we actually belong.
And that makes you, it's, it's, it's mentally very challenging to feel
like an alien on your own planet.
And that's what's happened.
It's not a good feeling.
Rupert Isaacson: Before we go there, because obviously that
brings up.
For me, the question of people on the spectrum like my oldest son, Rowan,
who would say can feel like being an alien, being in the neurotypical world.
But even we neurotypicals feel alienated.
Something that came up in what you just said, And again, on the
subject of mental health and why is tracking so good for mental health?
It strikes me, from what you're saying, that tracking is intrinsically playful.
In that, when you said, well, there's no specific purpose, if you look at
the way kids play, before they get told that they've got to play win or lose a
game, But when they're playing like tag or trying to hit that rock out there
in the pond with this other rock Which is of course, these are all hunting and
tracking preparatory games that kids play
Tracking seems to be like that and that therefore the hunter
gatherer life And I've noticed this with the hunter gatherers.
I've been privileged to spend time with there's an intrinsic
light heartedness That's
Craig Foster: very, very observant.
And that's exactly the whole, as we start to go tracking.
I don't know what it is, but the, the whole, we become childlike in a
way, there's this jokes, there's this teasing, there's this, this, it just
has such a, so much laughter, you know, sometimes rolling on the floor laughter.
And strangely enough, during the tracking, we always take some time to play frisbee.
And it's, it's something about the throwing, you know, you're
throwing a, like throwing a boomerang, throwing a spear.
It's like that.
Yeah.
And it's, there's no, there's no just chucking it back and forth.
There's no purpose, but it's playful and it goes into that fun laughter.
I mean, it's so much laughter.
On each one of those days, and often, especially if we have rain or we
get all wet or we, it's a bit, you know, tough for the water's freezing
and everyone's cold, we always make a little fire at the end of the day
and huddle around it and make a meal.
It's, you know, just these basic primal activities are just priceless.
And it's often a, you know, it's a privilege in a way, you know, so
many people, it's such a sad thing.
It's very, very hard for them to get to a place.
With enough biodiversity to do this.
And certainly most people on the planet will never see a
near pristine environment.
It's deeply saddening for me.
Yet every person before a few thousand years ago would have seen a fully
intact world with all that, you know, that immensity, a boiling ocean, a
sky darkened by the bird life, you know, literally blocking out the sun.
the whole earth shaking with antelope hooves.
This is the, this was the norm.
So it's a, it's quite a, a change, but I'd almost like to touch on that.
Well, how do you now?
With what we are facing, how do you keep that hope and playfulness
and that, you know, yeah.
Now that mental toll in place.
So I've thought about it a bit and instead of, there is a desire when you
start to fall in love with the wild, there's a big desire to say, okay,
now I'm gonna try and save this planet
And it's, it's a giant impossible task, especially with everything going on to, to
even consider, but you can certainly, if there are enough islands of biodiversity,
enough islands of hope, enough islands of people, and there are many incredible
people and groups of people around this world, and especially indigenous people
who, as you know, are protecting, I think, 80 percent of the biodiversity
on this planet, even though they only make up 5 percent of human beings.
There's enough of those islands and this growing.
Understanding of how crucial this is that whole communal psyche can shift, but we
have to change the story, the story of, of great extraction and capitalism and
increased growth is that has to change to a story of reciprocity and, and living
with the wild and regenerating the wild, but for the mental health side of it, I
think what's very powerful is to celebrate the Each interaction with each creature
or plant you come in contact with, instead of focusing on, Oh my goodness, you know,
90 percent of the big fish are gone.
And every time you go in the water, you feel downtrodden, but every time
you see a fish, or at least when I do, it feels like a miracle to me
that I'm swimming with a big fish or a big shark in during the apocalypse.
It's like, oh my god, this is a miracle.
Like when I had those isopods moving over my body, it's a miracle.
that this is still ongoing and this place is so resist, you know, resilient that we
have these islands of biodiversity still, despite this unrelenting extraction.
It's a miracle.
And that of course it will all come back.
We are knocking it down at a rate that's never been seen on this planet.
None of our ancestors will ever, ever had to go through the
kind of climate change we will.
It's more volatile now in the near future than it's ever been
in our 300, 000 year old history.
And it's never changed as far.
So we are up against serious stuff.
But we have to remain and keep that hope and keep that love
there because that's what we have.
That's the, the only.
thing we have.
And it is, it is a miracle that we're living in.
It is literally a miracle and to see that, but you cannot allow
oneself to be taken down that, you know, the loss of so many things.
It's not easy.
That's the, the thing.
So it's a, it's a strange balance that one has to find, but it does
help a lot, of course, to be seeing these, It's magnificent things.
Some parts of the world, unfortunately, you know, it's so compromised,
especially in the Northern Hemisphere, the insects are gone.
It is tough.
That is a tough scenario.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, it's interesting.
I mean, so obviously, yeah, you're, you're able to go and do these things
because you live, despite the fact that you live near a large city, there's
a, you, you live on the edge of a.
Very large protected area.
You are in one of those islands of biodiversity.
I'm just thinking, as you were talking, I'm sitting here in the
northern hemisphere in Germany.
It's very, very cold and I'm looking out at what we call a hoarfrost, which is,
you know, the entire, everything is white.
All the trees are white, everything is white.
And as we've been talking, I think I've counted 20 species
of birds outside the window.
And while you were talking about, you know, swimming with a giant fish,
you know, I was watching a large blue heron fly across the window.
My window, but down below my garden here, there's a main road.
And if I were to go another, Oh, kilometer in that direction, I would
hit a highway, like a proper one that goes, you know, but in between are
all these islands of biodiversity.
So the reason why there's this 20 species of birds outside my window is because
Despite the fact that there's houses here, there's also some water meadows
between the main road and the motorway.
And then there's forest as well.
And
I could look outside at that and say, oh, that's a peri urban landscape.
Or I could look out at that and say, how wonderful that in this peri urban
landscape, there's all this biodiversity.
It's up to how I see it.
And I do feel that back to this idea of playfulness and belonging and the feeling
of security that the wild mind has.
One of the difficulties with agriculture, which of course has come over into the
industrial world and capitalism, and so on, is it's not just capitalism.
It's anything post agriculture is that it's, it's all about toil.
It's all about repetitive.
Unpleasant work that one does for money that makes people, makes the soul angry.
We know that warfare, for example, begins with agriculture
and then it creates scarcity.
So that creates warfare, creates overpopulation, which creates warfare.
Okay, we understand these things.
But it means that I could then be in this landscape, which actually is very nice.
large village, small town that I live on the edge of in Germany.
It's very beautiful.
But I could be looking at it as, oh, the nature's gone.
Or I could be looking at it as, wow, there's so much nature here.
Depending on what my outlook is, I would posit that I was taught, I
have a certain inherent optimism.
It's part of my nature.
But I would posit that I got really taught it by the years that I
was lucky enough to spend in and around the Kalahari with the sun.
Bushman, who really showed me how important this light heartedness and
looking for the glass half full type Optimism of the tracker the hunter
Assuming a good outcome because if you go out pessimistic, you're
probably gonna miss opportunities
But if one's mind is trained to not be wild then it seems that perhaps we're
training ourselves into pessimism and pessimism Can go to despair and despair.
Well, we know that leads to So, okay, you are there in Cape Town.
I'm up here in the Northern Hemisphere, but I'm still looking
at a pretty nice place outside.
If we are living in a place like, and you can be in the, in the Southern hemisphere.
If I'm in the middle of urban Johannesburg or if I'm in the middle of urban
Queens or London, what am I gonna do?
How can I rewild?
How can I track?
How can I begin to have these experiences?
And I know you wrote about this in your book, Amphibious Soul.
So I'd like you to take us through some of those specifics that you noticed when
you found you were out there having to walk around in New York and London and
find a way to do this, but maybe we could then with that take it further.
What are the strategies?
that we can use to rewild the brain in the non wild settings.
Craig Foster: Yeah, that's a, that's a, obviously a large percentage of the
human population lives in these cities.
Yeah.
So it's quite critical.
And I was pretty worried because I'd spent, years outside the city, years
in, I spent 10 years every single day in the, in the great African
sea forest, in the kelp forest.
And I was pretty skeptical to see if it was even possible to access
or any of this in a, in a city.
And I was very pleasantly surprised in the middle of London.
To be able to actually do some pretty amazing tracking and there's something
weirdly more satisfying About being able to find things in the middle
of a city because you expect Yeah, yeah, of course, you're going to find
it, down here in the kalahari and it tracks everywhere It's pretty obvious,
but in the city you're thinking.
Oh my goodness.
This is just going to be a disaster And I was amazed at how much information I
could get about animals, about humans.
And I was able to, I don't do well in cities normally feel very, very tired,
but when I went into this tracking mode, I was given a lot of energy.
And I think we spoke about this before, but if we found, I found these amazing
tracks of slugs in London, the teeth marks all over the algae, absolutely beautiful.
Markings,
Rupert Isaacson: where did you find them?
How did you find them?
How did you know they were teeth marks and how did you know slugs had teeth?
Craig Foster: Okay.
That's a cool, cool question.
So, you know, I don't know too much about slugs and I'm
certainly not tracking them here.
But.
They're in the mollusk family and so slugs are very similar to our sea
snails and I'm very very familiar with all the little teeth marks that
the different sea snails leave on the kelp and the algae and whatever.
So as I was in the middle of London in I think it was Bloomsbury or wherever
it was the heart of London they told me and on this kind of edge of the sidewalk
there'd been some water running and it was covered in this very fine mossy
algae, and there, Clara's Day, were these tracks of the teeth of a mollusk.
I mean, I knew it immediately, because I know them like, I know that
language so well in the kelp forest.
So, it had to be some kind of mollusk.
I knew the size as well because I know the, the teeth.
The size of the teeth.
They're called a radula.
It's a tooth.
I'm just looking it
Rupert Isaacson: up right now on Google.
Craig Foster: So every snail, every snail has a radula.
Every sea snail has a radula tooth.
Flexible
Rupert Isaacson: band of thousands of microscopic teeth called a radula.
Yeah,
Craig Foster: exactly.
So, and you know, even even an octopus has it.
Because it's a mollusk.
So it had to be some kind of mollusk.
Then I saw the little silvery slime trails, and I saw the tiny little
holes that they were going in.
There couldn't be a shell fitting in that hole, so it had to be Basically,
it had to be a slug but I can't tell you how beautiful these tracks are.
I mean, they're like absolute artworks.
They're like these incredible ancient braille that have been laid down by the
teeth, and it's in this beautiful bright green algae, so they'd look magnificent.
And there were thousands of them, and I could see the, the youngsters
feeding next to the adults, and you know, all happening at night, but
I was seeing it during the day, and then they retreat, and it's awesome.
And literally, I mean, nobody except the old slug scientists
would be noticing that.
But there were thousands of other tracks as well.
Even dog and fox tracks left in the concrete permanently or semi permanently.
Amazing.
ancient signs carved on the old sidewalks that apparently represented
the old churches and places.
Beautiful crosses and other symbols, many different symbols.
So ancient human tracks, almost like rock art, on the actual pavements.
When it was wet and there were puddles, there were incredible tracks of rats
and squirrels moving and leaving temporary And I followed some of them
and found their little holes and layers.
Strange tracks of like that looked but weren't obviously big snakes moving
and they were turned out to be baby strollers because when those things turn
a corner they leave the weirdest tracks.
Took me about an hour to figure that out.
You could tell I was fascinated by the chewing gum that had been thrown down
on the sidewalks because you could tell where people had stopped to eat.
Or places that they would the gum would accumulate before they
entered a building or whatever.
You could tell a lot about, and certain areas had been cleaned where that
was like, the gum wasn't accepted.
So there was sort of more highfalutin areas.
So, I mean, it was, it was so much.
And this was only a day.
two days of tracking.
So in an unfamiliar environment, I would be able to accumulate an
enormous amount of information if I spent a few months there.
So, you know, a small bird living in a city like that can
teach you an enormous amount.
That animal is a master of survival, especially in a
cold environment like yours.
How the hell is it keeping alive?
You know, just to know how that works would teach you an enormous amount
about birds, but also about yourself.
And you'd appreciate that animal at a deep level.
I mean, every, you know, bird you see is a kind of master of survival and with all
the predators and everything going on.
So I think it could even be more satisfying because You just looking
at this fragments of life in these, you know, deeply urban areas.
Right.
And it,
Rupert Isaacson: go ahead.
Sorry, please finish.
Craig Foster: And, and I mean, people don't like rats, but and they cause,
can cause a lot of havoc, but I mean, those guys are masters of survival.
You could learn so much from them all living in the underground salaries.
Bats.
I don't
know.
I mean, you could just.
It would be fast.
The lichens growing on buildings.
It's just endless what you could do,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
It's like somebody has to open one's eyes to it.
When I was a kid, I was my parents lived and still live in central London.
But that area, Islington, which is not far from where you were, there's
a lot of green, a lot of nature that snakes in to those areas.
There's the areas along the railway.
There's the areas along the canal.
I would be drawn to those.
The squares with the large trees, and the thousands of starlings that would come
and roost at night, that sort of thing.
But even those environments, you could argue, those older city environments
are relatively natural in certain ways.
Let's go one stage deeper.
So you, you've been traveling a lot lately, which means you've been
spending a lot of time in airports.
I spend a lot of time in airports.
Let's take that environment.
Okay.
You are in the airport in Dubai.
You're in the, in Frankfurt airport, right?
Now, how are you going to track?
Now, how are you going to satisfy this part of your brain?
And let's say your office building with its cubicle or your, most
kids have no choice in the environments that they're put into.
Let's take a shitty school.
Concrete for my microplastic, okay, so airport office school,
not walking around Bloomsbury, not walking the canals in Islington.
Now how are we tracking?
Craig Foster: So now we almost have to, I mean, I was last in the this
airport, I don't know where it was, and I was fascinated, I was looking around
me and I could not see a single thing that a wild person would recognize.
Not one.
But the sounds were, were pretty interesting and the
smells were pretty interesting.
So they would, they would recognize the, obviously the sounds of children.
They didn't recognize the sounds of feet.
So, What you'd be looking, you'd be mostly be tracking animals.
I mean, I mean, human animals.
So, I mean, there's almost no, you get the odd dog that someone's carrying in
a crate or whatever, but it's amazing almost to appreciate the tremendous
lack of biodiversity and wildness.
I mean, it is startling and scary and.
Kind of horrific, but it's also fascinating.
And I mean, there really are.
And you just think about that as an environment that you've created.
It's kind of madness.
It really is.
Why would you want to do that?
But you of course can track There's a lot of wear marks in the these airports.
There's a lot of places where people drop money, like tracks,
money tracks, in certain places.
There's stains.
You can, there are you can see a lot of little things where
people are touching doors, where, what places they're touching.
Why?
The various smells that different types of shoes people are wearing will tell them
a lot, tell you a lot about who they are.
Just look and then observe and trying to see, you know, types of luggage
will tell you about a person's personality or what they're doing
or, you know, so much about cultures.
I mean, there's endless things to be,
to be looking at.
But it is basically
Rupert Isaacson: down to one species that you're, you're, you're down to the human.
Craig Foster: Yes, I mean some airports have got birds, but it's pretty limited
you basically down to you know, basically
There's still a lot of creatures, of course, they're just microscopic.
Yeah on our bodies inside our bodies I mean with thousands of Different creatures
that are actually keeping us alive as well in our biome and on our skins everywhere.
And I guess you could try and tap into it.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, it's interesting.
You bring that one up.
So Smells.
The smells of other humans.
When we are pressed together in close proximity, airplane is one
of them, and busy airport, the full bathroom, smells of shit.
And people sometimes smell good and sometimes don't smell good.
I'm not talking about the scents, the artificial scents
they put on, I'm just talking.
And then I became fascinated, well, why am I reacting well
to the scent of that person and not to the scent of that person?
Why do I find that person's breath or sweat?
Repugnant, why don't I get curious about that?
Why?
Or if I'm waiting in the bathroom and I go, Oh God, it smells of shit in here.
It's like, well, yes, of course, because that's where we're all shitting,
but each shit smells different.
Why does it smell different?
And what's it telling me?
And I became fascinated with this.
And then of course I wrote, it's all about gut flora.
And then I realized that there's, that gut flora not only produce, of course,
all these different sulfury, nitrogeny chemicals, which stink like poo, but.
They send out more subtle signs so that, for example, they can tell you if
you think someone is ill or not, which can have an effect on one's emotional
reaction to them, and this is happening on a subconscious level, or that they're
very healthy, or that perhaps their gut biome is is complementary to your
gut biome and therefore it smells good to you and therefore you're attracted.
And it, the last six months or so of my travel, I've been kind of trying
to look through that olfactory lens a little bit in these step, quote unquote,
sterile environments, partly as a way to just find them more interesting.
And I found that my curiosity was indeed satiated because it led me
into an area of science that I knew a bit about, because I work with
autism, so gut brain is important.
Dietary, but I was looking at that much more from a, how, how good is this type
of diet for your neurons or not, you know.
This went sort of deeper, but I would, I was forced to do that,
because I was forced to look for things to be interested in.
I, however, like you, have been taught how, I've been mentored in curiosity.
I've been mentored in how to find curiosity in places
where it's not obvious.
How do we help people who are suffering with the sense of alienation that
you talked about, the sense of non belonging that you talked about who
have not been mentored in this rewilding process, this curiosity process.
What's your, if you were to write a basic one, two, three, Curiosity, tracking
for dummies, curiosity for dummies, rewilding for dummies to like hand out
as a user manual to people in this.
What would be like the three to five things that you would say?
Here's the, this leads to this, this leads to this, this leads to this,
and this leads to that, and therefore you will find happiness and belonging.
What do you reckon?
What would you do just as a mental exercise here?
Craig Foster: I would maybe challenge him a little bit to say, you know,
can they name even 10 species of wild animals in their backyard?
And then most people almost can't do that.
Maybe they're not, not necessarily interested.
Well that's the question.
I
Rupert Isaacson: don't care about animals in my backyard.
Craig Foster: They suck.
How do we get past that?
So we get past that I think by saying, well, you know, if you're perfectly happy
and you feel content you know, spending enormous amounts of time on your cell
phone and, you know, watching TV, that's great, but it's, you, you'd be in the 0.
001 percentile.
So we know that this this technology and this lifestyle most of the time
produces a human being that is going to be struggling with mental health.
It's just, I mean, it's hard to argue against that.
Would you agree?
Rupert Isaacson: No, a hundred percent.
I think that one of the things about being in depression, I've been in depression.
I know you've been in depression is one isn't always aware of it, right?
And then you also want to stick with the devil, you know, and your
fear of change gets even greater.
So yes, you could point out to me Yeah, well Rupert look you're not happy.
I might react.
Well, yes, I am actually or I might say well fuck off That's none of your
business or some sort of defensive reaction where I justify staying here
So yes, you've drawn my attention to these species in the backyard or
in the park or outside the window.
I've then reacted predictably with resistance.
Now what?
And then you've responded with logic.
Yes, but look, mental health is suffering.
Bum, bum, bum.
I then give you some more resistance.
What's the next phase to help me through that?
Do you think out into the wild?
Craig Foster: I mean, you're pushing me beyond my, but I would say that
one could gently, quite an interesting thing would be to You know, cause
you got to sort of just change the brain chemistry a little bit.
Okay.
And what I found is very useful is, okay, we're going to just challenge
ourselves a little bit and we're going to go and get a little bit cold.
Ah, and we're going to do something strange and you might
be out of your comfort zone.
But why don't you just try it?
Because Guarantee you 100 percent you will feel markedly better afterwards
and that gets their curiosity.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Craig Foster: Because to go straight into like trying to track or do animal behavior
is quite difficult for some people.
So just say, okay, let's just find a body of water, easier in a colder
climate and let's just get water.
Pretty cold for a short while, you don't want to push their immune system too much.
And what happens when you get into that discomfort and you get in the cold and
you, you kind of guide people through it.
And the first two, two or three minutes is pretty tough.
And then finally you feel okay for a while.
They get out the water and then there's a 250 percent increase in dopamine.
Suddenly they feel.
Rupert Isaacson: Give us that stat again.
You said that very fast.
250
Craig Foster: percent increase in dopamine.
Rupert Isaacson: From going from very cold to warming up?
Craig Foster: No, from going from nice and warm to the cold.
To the cold
Rupert Isaacson: gives you the dopamine?
Craig Foster: Yeah, so when you get into the cold, it releases
not only dopamine, but masses of noradrenaline and adrenaline.
You just suddenly feel far more alive.
So then you've changed the whole brain chemistry.
It's in an incredibly powerful, quick way.
And then when they're in that altered state.
You'd say, oh, look at that little bird.
Amazing, that guy's surviving without any clothes out in the cold all night.
I wonder what that animal could teach us.
And they're in that heightened state, so there might be some interest.
And that's how you, it's a whole body scenario.
It's not just about just tracking an animal.
And you suddenly, you start to paint a picture of what
it was like, how we designed.
And if we do these little primal activities, Just how much better we feel
and how we'll get to know ourselves.
And then you start maybe a little bit of tracking in after that experience
and the brain chemistry shifted, and you'd have to slowly repeat that.
And then you'd see a few marks and you'd ask that person what you think that could
be, and then they would normally have no idea, and then you could interpret the
tracks and slowly build up a repertoire.
And an interest.
And if someone will suddenly, they will suddenly get it like, Oh my goodness,
this feels really good, but to do it in a playful way, like you were talking
about a fun, playful, non serious, almost joking way where you just get uplifted.
And it's like this purposeless endeavor, but it's actually.
You know, deeply serious in many ways, because you can
find your way back to yourself.
You know, we, we, we have got totally lost.
We've forgotten who we are and we need this oldest language on earth
to bring us back to ourselves.
Rupert Isaacson: What you've hit on, of course, is the
altered state of consciousness.
which is an authentically human thing.
The wild human seeks out altered states of consciousness, right?
So there's the shaman or the healer in the middle of the community who might
use as in the Kalahari strenuous dance to enter an altered state of consciousness
for healing, or in the Amazon, they might use a plant with the same effect.
Dimethyltryptamine in it to affect the brain in that way, but either
way this pursuit of the altered state of consciousness is as old as
humanity, hence alcohol, hence drugs.
If I'm in that environment where I'm feeling depressed, I
will turn to alcohol and drugs.
I mean, alcohol is drugs, right?
So I will turn to drugs.
You could argue that so did my ancestors, but perhaps in a way to
celebrate life rather than in a way to
deal with despair.
So I would say that a lot of people in those non ideal environments
do actually turn to that quest for an altered state of consciousness.
But what I hadn't put two and two together was, is that you saying, yes,
look, if you can change the state of consciousness through the sensory World
ie let's go get cold or let's go get sweaty or let's go run up something So
we pant a little bit and so whatever happens we're going to put our bodies
through a type of a stress that releases dopamine Then we're going to alter in
that particular way Then we're going to begin that altered state of consciousness
and adrenaline and things as well that give us a chance to change our perception
And then you can begin to introduce.
So you said that I was pushing you outside your comfort zone.
I think you answered that absolutely brilliantly, practically, which.
leads me to the next question, which is therefore should tracking, I think should
tracking be part of school curriculum?
I think we could answer that one, but should it be part also of like,
let's say I'm running a company.
What if I had tracking days?
For my employees, would they be better employees and would they be more
productive employees because they would they be more holistic thinkers
and would they be happier in their bodies and minds and would they be
there for better able to also track solutions in the business world?
What do you think?
Craig Foster: I think it would radically.
Change their way of thinking.
It does seem to rewire neural networks in a very positive way.
And it does, to me, seem to improve thinking radically.
So if, if you could introduce that into schools or businesses I think
it would make a massive difference, but of course one would have to put
that to the test and one would have to do it in quite a creative way
that it was fun for people as well.
Cause that makes such a difference.
So, you know, it's just like the story we're told in Sweden or whatever,
I think wherever people have been exposed to nature In a deep way, we
see massive increases in well being.
We see increases in energy.
We see, we see massive positivity.
I mean, it's not surprising when we are designed to be wild creatures and
we're given a bit of our primal food.
Of course, we're going to react well.
So why aren't we doing more of that?
I mean, that is what we've given up for what we've gained is, is a joke.
I mean, let's face it, you think we've got all this, you know, all these
trinkets, but what we've given up is this absolute awe and magnificence
and wonder and all this diversity.
I mean, it's just, it's ridiculous to think what we've done.
You know, you go into the middle of a you know, I was recently in, at Climate Week
in, New York, busiest time of year, in the middle of the busiest part of the city.
I'd just come in from, you know, diving in the great African sea
forest, and I looked around, and it was like, I could not actually
believe what I was seeing and hearing.
It was so shocking, I cannot tell you.
And we've given up, you know, this, and the, if you plonked yourself in
the middle of that city, and then you plonked yourself in a place
of near pristine biodiversity, and just notice the difference.
It is.
I mean, it's like, it's not even night and day.
It's more than that.
Rupert Isaacson: It's happiness to unhappiness.
Yeah.
Craig Foster: It's, it's, it's, it's, it's like torture to the primal joy.
Yes.
Now I would agree.
It's absurd.
What we've given up.
What's
Rupert Isaacson: interesting too is our tolerance, you know, because
as you say, you know, we're able to tolerate extremes, right?
So.
Tolerating extreme cold can be quite good for us, or tolerating extreme
heat can be quite good for us.
If it goes beyond a certain level, obviously it's not good for us.
But, we do crave it to some degree, but it seems like we've almost taken this.
To an extreme of living inside the amygdala, living inside stress, living
inside cortisol to a degree where I'm astonished by our resilience.
I mean, as you say, you could look around there in New York and go, wow, it's awful.
Or you could look around and go, wow, it's kind of amazing that
our species can tolerate this.
But what are we tolerating?
Noise pollution.
Craig Foster: Yeah.
That's the, that's the.
The thing, the, the, the reward doesn't in any way match the sacrifice.
Rupert Isaacson: So people listening might be thinking, all right, I'm sold.
But I'm living not close to an area of great biodiversity, but I do
hear about learning how to change my nervous system a bit, put my nervous
system in slightly unfamiliar.
And things that will change my brain a bit, which will help my curiosity.
And I will start looking for species and tracking the wind or tracking
people or tracking people's stink or what, you know, all of these things.
Okay.
Like it or not, Craig, you are becoming a guru in this field.
You are a mentor, so mentor us.
I'm now listening to this podcast, I'm driving my car,
perhaps I'm sitting in traffic.
I might think, what is the basic minimum that you as Craig Foster
know that you need on a given day to tip the balance towards happiness?
Because you're a sensitive dude, you can be tipped into unhappiness pretty quickly.
So, you're quite a good measure of this.
How, what's the ba, the basic minimum of tracking type activity that you
would say for you in the course of a day tips the balance to the positive?
Craig Foster: Well, for me, I do need a lot and I crave a lot, so I want
to put as many hours of the day into that, but other people might not need
as much, but what I would say is that if you could just, it feels very.
Difficult at first and vast and open just take one creature I mean this morning
before the podcast I was watching some dragonflies eco pool I have and the female
was laying eggs on the surface and the male was doing this guarding behavior and
they basically fly and hover to make sure that other males don't come in while this
activity is going on and protect the area.
And I shot a bit of it in slow motion on my little cell phone and just watched
it and the amount of joy that brought.
And then of course.
Say you've got a dragonfly in your backyard, the amount of fascination
that that animal can bring to you.
Observe it, photograph it, draw it, read up on it.
Just become obsessed with dragonflies for three months.
Find out, I mean, they, they, you know, this triphobus animal that
can both fly, swim, and walk.
It's a pretty incredible creature and you will be amazed if you start
to read up on them and know them and observe them, you, you will
start to see insane animal behavior.
Aerial fights, you'll see unbelievable predations they make on other insects.
You will be blown away.
You'll suddenly think, Oh my God, I'm inside National Geographic
in my backyard and a dragonfly.
It's a small insect, will blow your mind completely, and will change
the way you're looking at nature.
So just start with one creature that's easy for you to access.
Even a fly is mind blowing, that that thing can, can operate, I mean, on
that amount of, small amount of energy and do the kind of aerial acrobatics
and how wind and gravity affect it.
I mean, it's just totally mind blowing.
So just focus on one thing.
And also then what will force you to do is you'll, say you took dragonflies,
you'll understand their prey, you'll understand their predators, you'll
understand the ecosystem they need, you'll understand Be forced to understand
a lot of other things, but just focus on the one thing that helps a lot And
then you might want to I don't know move on to frogs or whatever it is It's
interacting in the same environment
Rupert Isaacson: as you were talking.
I was getting curious about dragonflies So it occurred to me that dragonflies
fly vertically and can make the kinds of turns at speed And That normally most
things in flight can't do without breaking up, like, that's, you know, when you get
to sort of UFOs and unidentified aerial phenomenon and all that stuff, and they
describe things moving in ways that defy the laws of physics as we know them.
Because they shouldn't be able to stop or move or turn that fast given how
fast they're going blah and apparently dragonflies do this And apparently they
do this By creating vibration inside the body inside these tubules back to
tubules again inside the wing That create lift in a way that the people who think
that perhaps the pyramids were built by creating sound vibration things that
lifted objects which you can actually levitate, you can look it up on YouTube,
there's people levitating stuff with sound waves right there in front of you.
But apparently this is how dragonflies actually fly.
And so one could go into a hundred different mythological or scientific
places from how does a dragonfly fly?
Craig Foster: Exactly.
But you see, you've been trained in curiosity and that's what you
need to have with the training.
You need to be having that curiosity and just starting to
ask yourself questions like that.
And you can take yourself down these fantastic roads
and it's deeply satisfying.
And then of course, and of course connect with people who.
You know, do it a lot.
But there's something about doing it yourself for a while and then doing that.
You could join a group of people who like to do this or whatever, and then you would
learn fast, but it is very satisfying to know about animals in your environment.
It will change you fundamentally.
There's no question, but you have to have the deep curiosity.
It can't just be, okay.
You know, I know one or two simple facts.
You've got to step into that animal's world.
Right.
And then feel your own psyche changing in that process.
Feel your own psyche
Rupert Isaacson: changing, I love that.
Craig Foster: So we have done this from the beginning of time.
We have had these incredible relationships with wild creatures and
plants from the beginning of time.
We're expecting that, every wild child is expecting that.
Now you take that away, there's some weird level of trauma.
When you start to make those connections again and re establish that kinship
with these creatures, with these plants, something happens in the
psyche that makes you feel much better.
Some of that's mysterious, some of it's kind of obvious.
And it's just a fundamental.
So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful thing to do.
Rupert Isaacson: As you say, curiosity is something which requires training.
I think of it like a muscle.
That one has to, it's just like one's body, one, one has to train it.
One of the nice things about, you know, we, we've talked
about the ills of technology.
Okay.
But you and I are able to use this technology of the zoom.
You're sitting down there in Cape town.
I'm sitting up here in Germany.
We couldn't do that.
We couldn't produce this podcast without that technology.
And of course, as you were talking about the dragon
flight, I got out my cell phone.
For the about the fourth time in this conversation and started looking up
stuff around what you were talking about that cell phone Has basically
all of human knowledge at my fingertips if I want it I could also use it for
really inane things and that's also alright sometimes But I think we often
forget now we have access to so much more curiosity fodder than we ever
had, if we can use it in the right way.
But we still have to ally it to the organism.
So I love what you were saying about get curious about one
thing that you can observe.
outside of your window or in your immediate environment that will change.
Craig Foster: And the critical thing is, sorry to just, we mustn't forget this, is
it's the regular observing of the animal that's so critical, because that gives you
access to, you know, It's secret world.
So, so for instance, if you had a million dollars and you went on the best safari
in the world and saw the big five and everything for two weeks, that would
have a way less effect than observing a dragon fly for six months, way, way less.
All those millions of dollars spent doing that.
It's the intimacy.
And I made that mistake a bit.
Intimacy.
Good word.
So I made that mistake when I was younger, I went off and wanted these wild
adventures, went diving with crocodiles, great white sharks, the whole thing.
But I, you can't do that.
every day.
It's very difficult.
Ironically, my relationship with limpets, which are little creatures,
molluscs that live in the intertidal, I can visit them every day.
They're always there and watch them every day.
They seem to not be moving, but their lives are absolutely fascinating.
And they changed my whole understanding of the intertidal zone.
They've changed my whole mind.
So it's that kind of thing that you need to do.
It's the regular connection With these wild creatures and going deep and
you will think, Oh, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing.
And if you just keep, you've got to get bored as well.
Got to sit there.
Don't go to the cell phone for the entertainment, get bored, watch, watch.
And then suddenly, boom, I'm into deeper world, deeper,
deeper into their secret lives.
Oh, there's nothing going on for a couple of weeks.
And suddenly you drop in and you're just completely blown away.
By what they're teaching you and that is Incredibly satisfying
Rupert Isaacson: you you hit on something very good there that you have to be
prepared Yes to be bored and to go a couple of weeks without it seeming, you
know in our netflix, Cell phone worlds.
We're used to immediate Constant dopamine stimulation and this is a tricky thing
to get around we have a relationship at where I keep my horses with a with
the local crows You So they started interacting with us in an interesting way
because they were looking for obviously little bits of grain in the horse poo.
And as we move the horse poo into the pick it up off the field and put it
on the muck heap, they begin to follow because they know we'll break it up.
And they can find things in there, this become became fun.
So we started playing with them and leaving little peanuts out for them
to see what they do with those.
Now we're getting to the point where we're wondering, will they
start to bring stuff back to us?
But we've also observed that they now interesting hierarchies within their
own group about who gets to show up to be with us where and when, and
then how they are territorial with other birds in the area, ba ba bum.
But we are out there looking for this kind of thing.
I I I love Your idea of looking for a slug or a dragonfly keeping
it to the insect world at first
Craig Foster: What's cool about sorry the corvids?
I mean, is they are so intelligent so intelligent I I recently met
amazing guy George Buman who actually speaks Raven language.
Tell us the name again George Buman How do I spell his his I think
it's B U M A N N B B U M A N N Yes.
And he's written a fantastic book on a lot of what we're talking about, but he
has taken the time to actually understand these calls of the ravens in his area.
And they tell him about the deer, they tell him about the coyotes,
they tell him about the bears.
And he can actually mimic.
These sounds and communicate with them.
It's absolutely fascinating, very inspiring.
So you can take it, but it's taken many years and that's the thing.
This is a complexity that's hard to imagine, and that's
what makes it so exciting.
You're not going to.
You know, if you're learning a lot of things in our society today, after a
few years, it's like, okay, that's it.
But this is a deep complexity that will keep you entertained for your whole life.
And you can go further and further.
I mean, as you know, the crows are, they make tools they fish for lava with hooks.
They make, I mean, it's just incredible what they can do.
So.
Yeah, I think that there's this whole world out there that most people aren't
accessing that is deeply enriching.
Rupert Isaacson: I think we have taken this conversation to where
I was hoping to take it, which is
why does tracking enrich?
You just use that word enrich our lives.
How do we achieve?
I like the fact that you use this word intimacy.
That it's this intimate contact with nature that's so deeply satisfying.
More so than, okay, the initial excitement of going on safari and seeing
Big Five, yes, of course, of course.
But, as you say, it's, even when you're on those big safaris, it's often the
small things that people point out to you that are the real takeaway memories.
Something about the spiders, something about the bats,
something about the beetles.
I want to just recap for the, for the listener, that what Craig took us
through on that process, even though he said he couldn't do it, he actually
did do it was this idea of challenging oneself when one's in a non active state.
ideal natural environment for one's mental health.
To change one's sensory environment, right?
So you were saying get a little cold, get a little hot, get a little tired.
Go through that type of stress that creates that bigger dopamine
release that will cause a change in your brain chemistry.
And if at the same time you can look for some very small insect life, would you say
that and then as you're beginning to track that over, say, three months, that make
that partly a solo process, but then also begin to look for a small group of people.
I could also be online where you get together to discuss
what could be going on and that.
First step of the sensory change, plus the observation tracking change, with
the third stage of the social group.
Getting together around that tracking.
I think, Craig, you might have cracked the secret of human happiness right now.
I think you might have.
Craig Foster: And what's critical is to have a tracking journal.
A tracking journal.
Okay.
So to have a tracking journal where you Writing down these
observations and growing them and looking back and collecting
photographs, sketching, and you, you build, you're building a language.
You're basically, you, you're relearning the oldest language on earth.
And I guarantee you, when you start to speak that language,
it's going to take a few years.
It will fundamentally change your life.
There's no question, but you need to work at it.
Like any language, you need to work at it.
Like any relationship.
Exactly.
You need to work at it and you will, that little tracking journal that
becomes thicker and thicker will be your, you know, your, your deep
inspiration and you keep growing it.
And, and, you know, might eventually have many of them.
Did somebody
Rupert Isaacson: tell you to create a tracking journal or was that
something that you evolved yourself?
Craig Foster: Pretty much.
Yeah, I was doing it intuitively.
And I was using the camera and the photographs and the notes and
everything to, to teach myself that that's how the animals taught me.
But you know, your memory is not good enough to hold it all in.
So you need the journal to keep the kind of the master trackers.
That's what's so amazing.
They've got these unbelievable photographic memories.
They can help, but it's also practicing every day, every day.
And then at night you're talking about the stories and that's, what's so cool
is you, you You know, to talk about the tracking mysteries, that's the oldest
storytelling on earth, you know, the, the, the, the stories of the track of the hunt.
It's it's so satisfying.
Rupert Isaacson: I would be very interested to know what's the
rate of dementia in this, these populations of master trackers.
Is this type of intimate.
tracking constantly and then the interpretation of it with your peer group.
Is this what the brain needs to stay young in the same way that it needs
the physical tracking in order to, for the body to stay sort of young?
Is this what we need as, as we age more and more?
Craig Foster: Yeah, I mean, I would, I would be, I would so love to have
that, that data, that science, but I don't know if anyone's done that.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm, well, I happen to know some people that are studying it, so
I'm going to, Go off and talk to them and see if we could, because now I'm thinking,
well, what if you had this kind of, okay, we talked about schools and offices.
What about old people's homes?
You know, we put people, old people in old people parking now.
Crazy, right?
Those are our tribal elders.
They're the people with all the knowledge, they've lived through everything before.
And what do we do?
Do we consult with them?
No, we isolate them.
And then it seems that they don't move.
They're sitting.
So the brain dies.
And then we lose out, right?
Because we don't have the tribal elder to guide us.
Should that be?
built into like, you know, some people have started, there's a couple of
projects which have worked really well about putting kindergartens into
old people's homes, which causes all this movement and problem solving
and keeps, keeps the brain young.
But yeah, yeah.
I'm wondering those of us who are listening, who are 50 and up and
approaching 60 and all that, you know, is it even more acute for us to
start thinking along these lines to keep our brains fluid and flexible?
And I'd posit it.
How could it not be?
Craig Foster: I mean, I think the, the, the few real elders I work with
who are biologists or naturalists.
I mean, it's incredible how agile they are, how full of energy they
are and how much knowledge they have.
We actually, you know.
We go to them for all the, the deep questions, you know, so, they, they
absolutely invaluable because it takes a lifetime to know a lot of these
things, actually multiple lifetimes of information passed down as it
happened in, you know, wild people and that's what you actually need.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So now I think we have an idea about how to rewild the brain.
First, we've got to start with the nervous system.
We have to change the environment a bit.
We have to change our nervous system's way of being.
A little stress is not a bad thing, physically.
And then we need to observe something.
Insects are good.
Then we need to, together with groups of people, who are also observing, but as
you say, we need to create the journal.
I have not done this.
You know, I've written books, but I haven't journaled.
I'm going to now.
I'm going to do a controlled experiment.
What it does seem to me is that you've given us an actual step by
step formula for happiness here.
We now need to put it to the test.
I think we know what the results will be, but I think it'd be very
interesting to put it to the test.
And there's a challenge for listeners.
I want a few of you to do this.
Do exactly what Craig said.
I'll do it with you.
I'm going to do it.
So maybe we'll get a little group, maybe, which of us listening,
who's listening now, who wants to join with me to create that group?
We can do it virtually.
We'll have to because let's, let's use the technology to our benefit.
That doesn't mean we can't get together sometimes physically but let's do this
stuff in journaling and see what happens.
Craig Foster: Such a great idea, Rupert, and thank you so much for kind of guiding
this through in such an interesting way.
Well, thank you for guiding us, you know, this is it strikes me the last
chapter in my book amphibious soul does try and lay out What to do?
Mm hmm in a more detailed way and obviously got to think about it a bit and
there is a Example of the tracking journal a few pages in the middle of the book.
That is true.
And then I Also created a 27 part short film series that goes with
the book and my, my, my way of, and this is a very interesting thing.
And I think you might like this.
So what I try and do, if I've got enough energy after every tracking session with.
My friends and team.
I create a little tracking report, so if I've got a lot of energy I quickly
edit the still pictures and then I put a voice on that and I put the stories
down and as you do that what happens is curiosity questions everything
come up from the subconscious and then you think oh what about that what
about that and the whole thing grows.
And then after a few years of doing it with them, I challenged them to
start doing the tracking reports.
And the two or three guys who did it, their tracking improved radically.
Because as soon as you do the report, you're, you have to think about it
in a much more sort of profound way.
And that is such a fun thing.
And then you've always got that tracking report to refer back to 10 years later
when you've forgotten a lot of that.
So you can do it in any way you like.
The sort of lazy way is just a string of still pictures and then a voice.
Or you can write it out in a journal.
You can do it, you can put the two together.
Some of them are even putting music on them and making fancy graphics.
And we had a lot of fun with that.
But the ma They immediately got it, like it was this language
that could be translated.
And it was, yeah, it's a pretty satisfying thing to actually do.
But it's amazing how much you learn when you actually do the tracking report
and try to also make a story of it.
You know, there's often this story that is coming from the wild, so the
story of the day might be, you know, One about reciprocity, or survival,
or mutualism, or whatever it is.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm making notes as we go.
I'm going to do it.
And I'm going to do it for,
I want to do it for say, I think the minimum period would be like three
months, because that's the season.
So we're heading into about midwinter, so I could do midwinter
into spring, going to do that.
And the snow
Craig Foster: is awfully great for the tracks, if you have frost or snow.
Rupert Isaacson: And as you say, how the hell do those birds that I was looking
at outside my window stay alive in this supposedly, so now I know a little bit
about what they're eating, but there'll be a lot more that I don't know.
And how do
Craig Foster: they thermoregulate at night, you know, all that kind of stuff.
It's really interesting.
Rupert Isaacson: And it's funny, even as you ask these questions, I'm taken out
of myself, I'm taken out of my own head.
One feels immediately better.
Craig Foster: Interesting.
Yeah, exactly.
Empathy is tremendous when one builds up with these creatures.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, and that's sort of true empathy, really.
I think we often think about empathy as being something that's specifically
human to human, and although that is a great thing, it's left out, I think,
of that psychological conversation, the empathy with the world around us.
Craig Foster: Sorry to interrupt, I can't remember if we spoke about this
before, but this act of tracking, of throwing the mind into the tracks is
tremendously empathic because you're throwing your mind into the mind of that
animal and what it might be thinking.
Eventually, I think that's what started the first, you know,
trance or out-of-body experience.
You keep doing that enough times and suddenly you are inside that.
So it's this, this activity of tracking is the fundamentals of so many of the major
cultural activities that we undergo today.
It's a, it's a really, it's a origin of so much of our, our being, our
thinking and our our deep activities.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And what's in it for us?
Happiness, mental health.
Craig Foster: Yeah.
Tremendous belonging to just, that's the key.
It's like, okay, I belong in this place.
I feel like I'm part of this.
Exactly.
Tremendous sense of belonging, security, and oneness.
Rupert Isaacson: Brilliant.
All right.
As always, I'm going to ask you in about three months, will you come back on?
Because I want to go through this journal, which I'm going to do, and I
want to track the mental health, but also I want to pick up this conversation
about empathy and take it further.
Craig Foster: Thanks so much, Rupert.
Such a joy talking to you.
Rupert Isaacson: Always.
Always.
Here's a question to leave it with.
We empathize.
If we can learn to empathize with, through tracking with.
The world around us
for this mental health benefit, which is in our modern age.
So necessary.
I think we can assume that our empathetic skills with our
fellow humans will be better.
But, and perhaps our care for our environment, maybe.
But we empathize out
if we do that and we don't have to answer this question.
I want to pose this question for.
The next conversation.
But listeners, I want you to think about this.
If we throw our psyche into the tracks, as Craig said, to the
tracks, does the natural world throw its psyche back into us?
Are we being observed by the landscape?
And by the animals?
Obviously, the animals observe us, but is even the landscape
is the wind of the trees?
Are we being observed as we walk through the landscape and
track through the landscape?
Are we being tracked at the same time?
If that's true, how might the Our act of empathy create an act of empathy back.
And what does that do?
Beautiful.
Craig.
An honor.
Always.
Craig Foster: It was a fascinating conversation.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm so lucky to have you as a friend.
Really.
Seriously.
Who gets to have these conversations?
It's incredible.
It's such a delight.
Craig Foster: Yeah.
And I love the way you're thinking about it.
And it would be really great if some of the people take it up.
You know, I think this is what we need to actually do, actually start something
like this and see what stories come back.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, I've got to do it myself to lead from the front, right?
But, but as you know, we have all these places around the world that are doing
what's called movement method, which is to do with movement in the brain and nature.
And I'm always looking for what, how do we make it better?
How can we, you know, what more can we learn?
I think you've just given me.
An amazing thing to bring into the program.
And I would love to be able to begin to develop this a little bit down in South
Africa with you down in the kelp forest.
You know, we did not talk, Oh, this is what we need to get back to you.
You talked about before we switched on record.
It seems that certain people on the spectrum.
The autism spectrum can hack past these barriers with
literacy and the tamed brain.
And we got sidetracked and we didn't go there.
And, of course, that's the exact population I'm mostly working with.
And, as you know, when you're in, say, the Kalahari and you're with
Healers, almost always they're exhibiting these neuro psychiatric
symptoms of, say, autism and so on.
So can we pick that up a little bit next time as well?
Brilliant.
Okay.
Look forward to that.
Me too.
All right.
Thank you for joining us.
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