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.
Welcome back to Live Free Ride Free.
I've got possibly the one of the most, without a doubt, one of the
most interesting people I've ever met.
It's Craig Foster.
If you haven't watched the movie My Octopus Teacher, then you're
lucky because you have a great, great treat in store for you.
He's a filmmaker.
He's an author.
He's an activist.
He's an activist on behalf of nature.
And.
really the planet and our own species.
He's made numerous films.
worked with indigenous cultures all over the world, won thousands of awards,
blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.
Sure.
And he's also just written a book and it's a really good book.
And I'm going to let him talk about this book and what it
means for us as a species.
But it's a book you've got to read.
I just read it.
So Craig Foster, hello.
Tell us who you are and tell us about this book.
Craig Foster: Wonderful to be with you, Rupert.
So great to be talking to you and we've known each other for a long time.
So it's just great to be with you again.
Thanks for the wonderful introduction.
My book is called Amphibious Soul, Finding the Wild in a Tame World.
And I, I spent the last 12 years diving every day in the great African sea forest.
And I've been privileged enough to build these relationships
with a lot of different animals.
And after many years with them.
I, they started to teach me and change me.
And I had this really strong sense that as humans, we were living these double lives.
And I called the one life or almost, I can almost sense that
inside of each of us, there's this wild person and this tame person.
And the tame person I see as related to all the wonderful comforts
and technology that we all enjoy.
And I certainly indulge in a lot of those and enjoy them.
And then this incredible wild person that remembers.
3 million years of extraordinary wild memories of our genus on this
planet, and then more recently, 300, 000 years living as Homo sapiens, 98
percent of that time fully wild in a very sophisticated, powerful way.
And I sensed that the balance between the wild and the tame person was way off.
We said a smothering, this beautiful wild person in all of us with the tame.
So I was interested in exploring that and learning from these incredible
animals, learning from my indigenous teachers learning from science and human
origins, and try to put a story together that, you know, could be made a case
for getting this beautiful wild person to, to come out more in, in many of us,
Rupert Isaacson: you know, obviously you're preaching to the converted here.
I.
am a great believer in the need for the rewilding of the human soul.
I feel that that's at the root of the despair, which I think has
overtaken our culture, but also it's the light that can lead us out of it.
What's interesting about the title of your book though, amphibious, amphibious
soul, not just wild soul, just rewilding, not, you know, getting in touch with
the ancestor or hunter gatherer.
Amphibious.
It's very specific.
Why?
Craig Foster: Yeah.
That's a great question.
I mean, I,
I literally from the first day I was born, I went into the ocean.
My parents took me in on the very first day I was born and we lived in the half
the house was in the intertidal zone.
So my whole life has been one of ocean.
And even my mom.
You know, when I was, she was pregnant, would go in diving three or four
times a week while I was in her belly.
So, diving in the ocean and water is a big part of my life and that's
where I've found true wildness.
So that's what I use, but it doesn't mean that, you know,
Other people have to do that.
So I was interested in this amphibious nature that we have.
So many people are drawn to water and we are in crit.
I mean, compared to most animals on land, we pretty useless, we slow, we
weak, but in the water, we actually surprisingly good, we can outdive.
Almost every land animal and outswim them.
So we have this incredible amphibious nature as humans.
And I've, you know, I'm just,
I've felt that pull to the water so strongly.
And I know many people who've had that and it's a push as well.
It's a, it's a pull and there's fear associated with this as well.
Rupert Isaacson: You know, you're from South Africa and the ocean for those
listeners who don't know that part of the world, the ocean that Craig is talking
about is the down right at the bottom of the Cape of Good Hope on the Atlantic
side or which really divides actually the Atlantic from the Indian Ocean
because it's wild, it's cold water, it's mountains to the sea, it's rough it's
not necessarily an inviting ocean when you look at it from the outside and my
family's also partly from down that way and so I've spent bits of time along that
coast and I'm intimidated, you know, and I know that there's quite great whites off.
In fact, I had a cousin who was taken by one.
And so I'm always intrigued when I see people, there's obviously a big surfing
culture there, but when I see people able to commit their frail bodies to this.
On the face of it, quite hostile looking ocean.
It's not the calm Mediterranean.
It's, it's, it's scary.
I would, you know, I would be scared to go in.
Tell us about that.
Why
does that sea with those rough ways breaking on the rocks and why do you not
feel I will be broken upon those rocks?
What makes you feel, yeah, I can go in there?
And I can thrive and actually make this my home
and how much I mean, I do that.
Craig Foster: I mean, as you, you're right in that it is the Cape of storms.
I think they're more shipwrecks here than in, than in most places.
And it's very much about getting to know the ocean.
And you know, know her moods, you know, on, when there's a big Atlantic swell
coming in, you know, you're not going to choose that part that's just, you know,
directly open to that, unless you into big wave surfing or something like that.
Or unless you want a really wild swim, which we sometimes do, but by watching
very closely, I mean, a lot of the places I'm choosing are in protected bays.
I'm watching the swell, I'm watching the tides sometimes even
diving on, you know, extreme days in very shallow protected water.
Sometimes I do like, you know, swimming between those, those rocks and then
these giant waves are crashing against the rocks and like literally, you know,
breaking over the rocks over my head.
And, but I know the little areas so well that there are these big ones.
Pockets of safety.
And that only comes from going many, many, many times.
So I could take you there and you'd probably depending on your level of
comfort in the water and your ability to relax, probably be, be fine.
As soon as you tense or Get scared.
Then it's a different story.
And I've almost lost a few people like that.
It's amazing how it can change.
So I have, you know, I can go with my son who's been diving with me since, you know,
very, very young and we can swim in these, what looks like an impossible ocean.
And it's perfectly safe, but then the ocean can look quite similar,
but it's changed and then it's incredibly dangerous for us.
So you have to know the difference and sometimes it can be quite subtle.
So, and I don't always get it right, but most, most of the time.
Mostly now I can read it and know when it's safe and when it's not and it depends
on someone like say if you if you're not used to it, then you start in the tidal
pools, you get your strength up, you swim, you get used to going down, you used
to holding your breath, you get used to water in your mouth, swallowing water in
your nose, you just get used to all that.
And you slowly venture out, you go out on the calm days.
Then you go out on the medium days, then you practice body surfing and
dealing with waves and you just slowly, you know, get to know her.
Rupert Isaacson: I do believe that we have an amphibious
soul for evolutionary reasons.
You're living there on the Cape of Good Hope.
It's one of the earliest places of human settlement that we know of.
You know, there are, there are archeological, pre
archeological sites there.
Going back hundreds of thousands of years, it always seems to be, you know, a bit of
a rivalry going on between Southern Africa and East Africa about which is the cradle
of mankind, but we know it's, it's there.
And it seems that all the earliest settlement sites, Our coastal and to
me that would make sense because well, that's where the most food is, right?
You've got food from the land food from the water.
There's a beach You've got a long sight line perhaps may be more difficult for
predators to creep up on you I don't know But if there's more abundance does
that give you more time for culture more time for nature more time to create art
To have conversation and to sort of do the things that we think of as civilized
which we know that hunter gatherer people do as well Do you think that we have?
You That our soul is amphibious because we've actually evolved next in this
margin of land and water and perhaps then gone up from Africa into the rest of the
world, following the coast, following the rivers, following the water courses.
So are we in fact an amphibious ape, you know, or, or certainly have been
for hundreds of thousands of years.
And at what point do you think we became amphibious?
Craig Foster: I mean, I think you could I agree with you that, I mean,
there are a lot of incredible coastal sites a few of which I've been able
to, you know, study thanks to the amazing scientists that I've worked with
but there also are equivalent sites.
But certainly, I mean, if you just take this idea, you are now living on the coast
and, you know, one of the big things, as you know, a hunter gatherers need is
protein and they need, especially fat.
So you're walking along the coast and the, you know, the common thing for a whale
to be washed up, that's 20 tons of fat.
Delivered to you with no energy.
I mean, it's just 20 tons of meat, 20 tons of fat.
I mean, it's just incredible feast.
And then you've got all the carbohydrates on the land.
You've got all your shellfish, you've got all your other fish, you've got your You
know, all the terrestrial food as well.
So absolutely.
And we see in the archeological remains a tremendous amount of shellfish.
And you see evidence of the whales, actually the barnacles that grow on the
whales you see in the archaeological sites so you can determine the
exact species they've been eating because only certain barnacles
grow on certain species of whales.
But you can go back a lot further.
I mean, it, it appears that Homo erectus was highly amphibious and actually did
some pretty massive ocean crossings.
There is some evidence to suggest that.
So, you know, if you are moving as a nomadic hunter gatherer, which we've
done for a very, very long time, even before Homo sapiens came into being,
you're walking along a coast or any area and there's suddenly a river.
It's so much easier to cross that river than to now, you know, walk miles and
miles up to find somewhere where you can.
If you're gathering food by the ocean and you can't swim, and a
wave takes you out, you're dead.
It's such a survival advantage to be able to swim.
We would have seen other animals swimming, and we have very curious species.
We would have certainly I think, learned to swim and dive.
We've got quite a good evidence for Neanderthals diving 90, 000 years ago.
What we're seeing in the caves here suggests strongly that people were
diving, were probably diving and probably swimming more than 100, 000 years ago.
And I think this aquatic nature, this amphibious part of our being probably
extends way back into Homo erectus and the early parts of our evolution.
Rupert Isaacson: But those people who aren't non, the non divers.
Paleontologists amongst us, can you give us a date on Homo erectus?
When would we be talking?
Craig Foster: Two million years ago.
Rupert Isaacson: And when you say ocean crossings, how would they be doing that?
How are they?
Are they building at that point?
Surely not.
So how are they?
Craig Foster: Yeah, probably going getting, you know, big
logs, big pieces of wood.
Somehow you know, I must've had some knowledge of currents, wind at it's, yeah,
I was stunned when I read about this.
You know
Rupert Isaacson: where they were doing this, that they've, where, where
have they found evidence of this?
Craig Foster: I'm trying to, I can't remember the exact spot.
I'd have to look it up again.
It's a while since I've seen it, but it's seemed to be you know, that they couldn't
have got across at that time period.
We know these massive fluctuations in the coastline and it, it appears
that they, they, they crossed.
I can't remember how long ago, I mean, Homo erectus came into
existence 2 million years ago.
And then I think.
A few hundred years, a thousand years ago you know, became extinct.
So it was somewhere during that time, maybe 800, 000
years ago, I can't remember.
It's funny, actually, I'm
Rupert Isaacson: just doing a quick Google on it because I'm, I'm intrigued by this.
Um, because I think I, like a lot of people have, have assumed, right, that
we would have been the first navigators.
And you're, you're, look, you're right.
I've, I've found here in, Thing on the Guardian.
Um, Homo erectus may have been a sailor.
Um, and I had no idea.
Fossil Homo erectus have turned up not only in Southern Europe, but as
far afield as China and Indonesia.
Craig Foster: I could have been Indonesia at that.
Yeah.
Oceans, oceans,
Rupert Isaacson: says it oceans were never a barrier to the travels of erectus.
Sorry, that's my, my infantile humor just comes out there.
Oceans were never a barrier to the travels of Erectus.
He traveled all over the world, traveled to the island of Flores.
Well, right.
So if they are pre human humanoids doing this, then yeah,
then we must be amphibious.
And it's interesting too, to me that you know, if you take pretty
much, Anyone, I'd say it's the vast majority of the population.
And so where do you want to go on vacation when you want to go and relax?
You want to feel like you're most authentic?
Where's your happy place?
Most people will say the beach.
Most people will gravitate to a beach holiday, and as soon as they take
their shoes off and their bare feet are in the sand, let alone before they
get in the water, that seems to be the nervous system reset, doesn't it?
The kind of, ah, moment, the exhalation.
So, but it's, you, you, to my knowledge, are the first person who's written a
book drawing our attention to this.
What do you think it does to us?
To then be removed from this amphibious life.
Craig Foster: I mean, I think that
where I see it, I see it like this Rupert, is that, you know, for this
incredibly long time period, we've had these, deep relationships with
so many animals, with so many plants.
Rupert Isaacson: So
Craig Foster: even even as you know, you know, you've worked with a sign
fairly young child starts to develop quite strong relationships with the
wild and with all these animals.
As a person gets older, there are these threads going out into the wild
and these incredible bonds build.
And these get passed down from generation to generation.
So you've got this amazing network going out from your being to
these animals, to these plants.
Now it's almost, I can always imagine a huge pair of shears just
coming in and cutting that off.
What does that do to the psyche?
I mean, and, and what do we replace that with is her relationship
with a cell phone and a computer.
Yeah.
And of course, those people have an amazing, you know, social network.
They in the wild having these amazing experience with their, with their group.
And often people today don't have that.
They have maybe some friends in that, but they're not having
these powerful experiences in a wild landscape with those people.
Rupert Isaacson: So
Craig Foster: it, it, it.
It has a massive traumatic effect on the psyche, in my mind, this is what
every person who's born is expecting.
And we haven't had a chance to change yet, expecting a wild existence, expecting
a relationship with masses of different creatures and all sorts of other things.
And then that doesn't materialize.
It is.
Unconsciously very disturbing and I think as you mentioned earlier, it, I think
it's definitely connected to this pandemic of mental health that we're seeing now.
Rupert Isaacson: I would agree.
I sort of feel, honestly, it's not possible in our culture
to not be mentally ill.
I mean, I think I'm mentally ill.
I think most people I know are mentally ill.
And what I mean by that is they're not lacking in any way.
They're not.
I don't know.
There's no deficit other than nature deficit that I think, I think that
we're all suffering from a, the trauma of being like zoo animals, just not
living in the environment that our organism, as you said, is expecting
or needs or is designed for, but yet, which we have cleverly constructed
for ourselves a very nice cage with, you know, Alexa to tell us what to do.
But it seems to make us desperately unhappy.
And then if we are coming out of, you know, generation upon generation upon
generation of immediate ancestors who were also cut off from nature, we can't
even know what it is that ails us.
We can't even know what it is we need.
Not everyone can live in the intertidal zone on the Cape of Good Hope.
Obviously, a lot of people live in not that.
How do you think People can basically rewild themselves while still having
to, you know, maintain the livelihoods and living conditions that they're in.
How can they, how can they begin?
And maybe they don't even have access to the ocean.
How can, how can they begin?
Craig Foster: So, I'm glad you asked that question because now recently, you
know, I've had this privileged experience of, as I said, you know, living this
life here and for the last 12 years, literally every day going in the water.
But in the last while I spent a month traveling to speak about my
book in America to all the, a lot of the big cities and to England.
So I actually tried to test out and see if I could access the same state
of mind in New York and in London.
And what I tried to do is what I've developed is the
system of underwater tracking.
I was inspired by the song in the Kalahari, they Taught me the
essence of tracking, you know, had these incredible master trackers.
So I taught myself to track underwater and that's, I got to know a lot
of the animals in the kelp forest.
So what I tried to do was like, okay, can I actually do this in these cities?
And I purposely, I didn't go to central park or to a nice park in London.
I went to the harshest places where those terrifying tall buildings are.
And at first I was like.
It was just nothing.
I felt that it was impossible.
And I was, you know, um,
yeah, felt I felt not good at all.
And then I just started to try and get into that same
mode and really concentrate.
And I was lucky in New York, I had a little bit of help.
It had been raining.
And there were puddles and this cold concrete, and they started to,
people started to, people and dogs and animals were walking everywhere,
and they were actually leaving these incredibly clear tracks on the concrete.
So that really got me excited, and I could see how people were moving, I
could see from their soles of their shoes, I got a sense of how fast they
were moving, but also How wealthy they were, how much their shoes had worn
down how strong they were, the dogs.
It was very interesting to see where the dogs were moving.
They were very interested in the smells all along the edge.
I then started tracking some rats.
I started tracking the, the birds.
And I even started tracking the, the chewing gum where people
had dropped the chewing gum.
These wear patterns, there were some fascinating tracks that I had no
idea what they were at first and took quite a while to, to figure them out.
They actually turned out to be baby strollers, a very
strange track that they leave.
And after about an hour, I got into, I was suddenly.
looked up almost expecting to see the kelp canopy above me.
I was in the same mode, that deep nature detective mode that comes with tracking.
And I'd, I'd seen some, I was obviously largely tracking
humans, but we are an animal.
And I was quite fascinated by the rats and how the birds were
alarm calling for the rats.
And this was just an hour.
I knew that if I stayed there, I could uncover a lot of
incredible probably wild animals.
Or domesticated semi domesticated wild animals surviving in that environment.
And I could most importantly replicate that oldest language on earth, that
feeling of pattern recognition that you get with tracking in London.
It was far more radical that cause it's an old city.
I was looking at the tooth marks of animals all over the sidewalks.
They turned out to be slugs, fascinating shapes created by their, their.
Rupert Isaacson: What does the slug tooth mark look like?
How do you know what it is?
Craig Foster: That, so every mollusk has a radula, which is a toothed tongue.
So I could recognize the tracks instantly because they were the same type of tracks
as the limpets, which is also a mollusk, leave on the kelp in the kelp forest.
So these slugs were feeding on the microalgae that grows along the pavements
and leaving these magnificent patterns of their toothed tongues and now
followed this little silvery trails.
That's, that's
Rupert Isaacson: what the trail of goo is.
It's from the toothed tongue.
Craig Foster: No.
No.
Okay.
So the the body leaves the, the trail of goo.
Okay.
And the, and the, if you look more closely, you'll
see these incredible shapes.
I can send you a picture.
I'd love that.
That the, that the, the, the teeth leave and as soon as you
notice it, it's just incredible.
And I was doing this, yeah, I'm sorry.
I'm, I'm,
Rupert Isaacson: I'm, I'm, I'm suddenly obsessing on this.
A slug can leave a tooth mark on concrete.
Craig Foster: Absolutely.
Because it, the concrete has a thin layer of micro algae that's green on it.
Rupert Isaacson: And when
Craig Foster: it scrapes it off, especially if it's painted, there's
a perfect clear track of the teeth.
And it, you basically go into the world of these mollusks in the inner city
and you can see the young feeding.
You can see the adults, you can see the patterns of the feeding.
We started tracking squirrels.
We found where they were, had their, their young.
We started tracking trees and how they were self cleaning in London.
And then all the Victorian engravings on the curb stones were fascinating.
So it, and I can go on and on and on.
So I could replicate the sense of this oldest language and this connection.
And of course you can see through the animals, how they're reacting in
the city, and they're obviously more nervous and so on than they could be.
It was very interesting to be able to do this.
And I took other people because and I took certain people who were good
trackers and people who weren't people who knew nature very well.
And they were totally blown away.
They'd never bothered to look in a city like this.
And they had the same feeling I did.
So it's apps and they were like.
You know, I think Jackie Higgins is a very accomplished natural history
writer, naturalist, and natural history filmmaker said who could, something's
amazing said here, like I went into this world of nature on a grubby curbstone.
I couldn't believe it.
It was that kind of thing.
And, and it was all the more fascinating because it was
quite, A challenge to access.
And that was only, you know, one day in London or one and a half days.
If you had more time, of course, there are foxes there, many in London, as you
know, living, you could, it's amazing what you could actually get into and replicate
this feeling it's about replicating a primal sense of belonging because.
Tracking is world making, it basically creates your world.
You put together all these clues like a detective and you
construct this fascinating world.
So we walked past, I'll give you an idea, we walked past a cathedral, a thousand
year old cathedral in London and the entire surface was covered in flintstone.
Thousands of these pieces and every piece had been napped by a stonemason.
So of course, you know, for me that was fascinating because
Flint is made of the spicules of sponges from the ancient ocean.
And then I had this, you know, the whole flint knapping you know, thing that
goes back 3 million years in evolution.
So, you know, you're starting to see all these incredible
connections inside a major city.
It, it, it Westminster Cathedral is made
Rupert Isaacson: from old sea sponges.
Craig Foster: It was I'm trying, it was what in Westminster I can't
remember the name of the cathedral.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
I know, I know a very old one, St.
Bartholomew's church, which is basically made of flint.
I didn't know that was, and that's about a thousand years old.
I didn't know that flint was old sea sponges.
Craig Foster: Yeah.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Thank you.
I'll look at it completely differently next time.
It seems what you're saying, tracking, tracking is the original human activity.
Okay.
Therefore tracking is story, right?
And what are we if not the storytelling ape, right?
We have the larynx, we, we, you know, other animals sort of vocalize
and sometimes in very complex ways.
But I haven't yet read a play written by another mammal.
I might at one point as we learn to maybe read what whales do better.
But it seems that that's down to us.
But yet so many animals do track.
So, is tracking, is tracking, does tracking help reconnect us with
ourselves because it is story and we're the storytelling, and also
it connects us with the wild, because what else is there to track?
The environment around us.
Is that, is that what tracking does?
Is it that dual purpose of reconnecting us both with nature?
What is outside of ourselves and what and and ourselves at the same time is it?
Craig Foster: Yes, I think you think you've got it.
So the the key word here is I think is belonging,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
Craig Foster: So what it does is it attunes you and connects
you to the subtle things?
That are going on it in your environment and you can also it's almost like
magic because you can go Into the past.
So I could see the tracks of those slugs and I knew that they had been
feeding that night and I could see the paths and everywhere they were, and I
could predict that they would be back.
You know, when there was a lot of moisture and that does that algae would grow again,
so you could look into the past and the future but it connects you to their lives.
So the act of forcing your mind and pushing your mind into the
track creates an enormous amount of empathy for that animal.
You sense the young coming, those little slugs coming out, the young,
you know, coming out to feed for some of their first days on the planet.
You see, you know, the, the adults near them, you, you, you, you start
this incredible act of empathy, but you are creating your whole
world from these, these signs.
And that is such an ancient practice.
It goes to the.
the heart of the origin of our species and how we managed to survive,
but also how we built our world.
So when you replicate that, the ancient being, the wild person in you remembers
who you are, and it remembers that this is the way of belonging, and this is
the way of survival, and you feel good.
You feel good when you connect the dots and you tell the stories of the
animals that are there laid out for you on the ground in this cryptic way.
Rupert Isaacson: It seems that what you're talking about here
is actually a really effective therapeutic practice for mental health.
You, you know, I could see how learning to do this in an urban environment,
transform oneself from the inside.
What one's one's neurology.
And I could see how that would absolutely be
an amelioration for say depression or something.
Craig Foster: Can I just just before I forget this thought, sorry, Rupert,
you've reminded me of something.
So normally if I'm in a big city like that, and I haven't remember,
I'm not used to that at all.
So, you know, admittedly, I'm not very Used to it, but say in a place
like New York in the middle of the city there with normally within half
an hour, I'm absolutely exhausted
Rupert Isaacson: and
Craig Foster: my nervous system is a bit shattered after two hours
of doing the tracking, I felt good
Rupert Isaacson: and
Craig Foster: the same with London and it's almost like I got hyper
focused and the, the, the sounds and everything that normally be kind of
like an acoustic torture for me, kind of quiet and, and I was able to, it.
Being a completely different mindset in that space, it
would normally debilitate me.
Rupert Isaacson: Really, we should be teaching tracking to
at risk youth, shouldn't we?
Well, to anyone.
It ought to be taught to us in schools.
Okay, so you mentioned belonging, and you mentioned empathy,
and story through tracking.
Tracking builds a world, you said.
And I remember, for those people listening, if you have not seen
Craig and his brother Damon's movie, it's a documentary from 20 years
ago or so, called The Great Dance.
You got it.
You have to watch it.
There with three son, Bushman, Khoisan master tracker,
hunter gatherers in Botswana.
And I remember you, you filmed a particular hunter, a man called Karawa.
Running down over hours and hours an animal that he shouldn't really
have been able to keep up with.
A kudu, running as fast as a horse and going for all day, and yet he could.
And I remember in your film when you interviewed him, he said at
a certain point, you must become the animal, you must become kudu.
And then at a certain point, you go inside its mind.
And you're no longer yourself.
And of course, what is that but shape shifting?
Craig Foster: And extreme empathy.
Rupert Isaacson: Extreme empathy.
Is shape shifting empathy?
Craig Foster: I think it would be I would prefer, yeah, maybe the idea of empathy.
But you, you, and it's a lifetime, you know, he's done this for his whole life.
So he knows that animal, he knows its ways through the tracks, through
tracking that animal for years.
He knows it so intimately and he's continually, you know, from
a young age, putting his mind into the tracks, into that animal.
What is it thinking?
Where is it going?
And then one day he just steps into it.
It's a natural thing.
And I think in a many, in many ways, that's the origin of.
Of altered states of trance and continual throwing your mind into the track and
then one day you find yourself inside that animal sounds quite esoteric, but
I think if, if you look at it in a, in that, in that way, that practice
again and again and again, I think I could see it as being quite possible.
Well,
Rupert Isaacson: for sure.
And, you know, as you know, There are no psychotropic plants really that grow
in the Kalahari area, so yes, you can find an altered state of consciousness
through a mushroom or through a plant like ayahuasca or something
that has dimethyltryptamine in it.
And of course there are shamanic cultures that use those, but the people that you
were filming had no access to anything like that, so they could only go in.
Through the method that you described
Craig Foster: and well then they, although in the transplants, they're
using breathing, right, hyper ventilation, you know, and the, they're using
Rupert Isaacson: the drug, right?
They, they're, they're only exactly their physiology.
And,
Craig Foster: and how does that start?
You know, you don't, you're not, how does, how does that whole thing start?
And I think the origin of, of trance could well be tracking
this original form of putting your mind into the mind of another.
So if you track,
Rupert Isaacson: are you de facto a more empathetic person?
Craig Foster: I guess everybody's affected differently, but I think it
would definitely increase empathy.
And I think we also, there are quite a few studies that show that, you know,
a lot of deep nature connection sensing or in nature creates empathy for others.
You know, that amazing professor at Berkeley, Ducker Keltner has done
amazing work on this and they've shown how this has actually occurred.
Rupert Isaacson: Tell us the name of this professor again, just so that
we can write it down more slowly.
Craig Foster: Ducker, that's D A C H E R, Keltner, K E L T N E R.
I had a fascinating conversation with him recently.
He's a Berkeley professor who studies the effect of awe in nature
on people, or awe in, in general.
But he, he's very connected to these nature experiences, and they've
actually tracked the brain chemistry and the shift in cognition of
people experiencing these things.
And one of the things he says is it creates this, this care for others,
this empathy and less focus on the self.
Rupert Isaacson: It makes perfect sense.
And of course, if one is divorced from environments that provide that sense
of awe, not, not, not confusing awe with fear or stress but actual awe,
yes, that standing in the presence of something awe inspiring, it's very
hard to have that outside of nature.
Craig Foster: And of course, what we were talking about earlier, you
know, the, the less you have that, the less you're connected with all
these other creatures, the less you doing these ancient practices,
the more it throws you on yourself.
And then, you know, you're fighting those demons of the underworld
that we spoke about earlier.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Yeah.
We all, we all do our time in the underworld.
Sometimes the company can be quite good though.
Craig Foster: Rupert and Craig said, clutching the
wooden desk in front of them.
That's right.
Rupert Isaacson: As I reach for my wine glass but okay.
So on this business tracking and empathy the altered state of consciousness and
Yeah, I guess one could argue that.
When you feel great empathy for somebody else, it, it is an altered
state of consciousness and it just might be in ones that we have familiar,
but they always feel miraculous.
Like, for example, when we fall in love, right?
Or when we feel deep friendship and connection with someone, is that not in
itself an altered state of consciousness?
And are we then beginning to track that person?
The acute observation that the deep, Listening, the desire to
understand that person, you know,
Craig Foster: I love that idea.
That's a great idea.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
That, that person, perhaps that person become nature, you know,
those of us who spent a lot of time, I'm sure a lot of listeners have
experienced these states of all and
felt transcendent altered your book.
So amphibious soul, you're there in the African sea forest, as you call it, which
is a beautiful name that this kelp forest.
On this wild coast, can you take us into there and can you take us into
there when you, the first time you can remember feeling that you stepped
into this state of auto consciousness?
What went on?
What brought you in?
How did you access it?
Had you been diving and swimming in there for a long time before that happened?
Or has that actually been happening to you since you were a child?
But if so, can you, can you bring us in there a little bit?
Craig Foster: Yeah, that's great.
, I think that, I mean, I definitely noticed as a very young child, I was
very shy sometimes overly shy child that there was something about that
cold water that made me feel good, but it just didn't have any idea of what it
was or why, or, you know, a child you don't think like that funny enough, I
mean, what I just on Friday, it's now.
Um, Wednesday, just on this last Friday I had a very powerful transcendent
experience and it was, and I tried to really track it and look at it.
And I wouldn't mind just telling you a little bit about that.
So, and I, I almost sensed the ingredients of, of what made it occur.
So it was just a, a winter's day here.
It was a very nice, calm day.
I was with my.
Tracking friends, my close friends.
And we know when you're with close friends, a little bit like we had
earlier, you could have teased, start teasing each other, you're laughing
at each other, there's a, there's a great openness and there's a lot of
laughter, and then we started, we went to this little piece of coast.
We know well, and we did some very.
In depth tracking, really looking at the micro tiny little amphipods
making little holes and the tiny little amazing intricate tracks they
were leaving even a person who'd picked up a shell and dropped it.
And the, the, we analyzed the, the drops and what height the person dropped it
from and everything was quite fascinating.
And then we entered the water.
We did some underwater tracking and found some really interesting
stuff with cat sharks and crabs.
And then we did a long swim and it was particularly clear water.
And then we, we got out after about 45 minutes and then
walked back along the coast.
And then we lay on this hot rock in the sun.
And suddenly, I felt my whole nervous system just dropping right down.
And I could feel that massive altered state.
Obviously my, my body was flooded with, with dopamine and
noradrenaline from the cold.
So we died without wetsuits.
And it was extraordinary powerful feeling of what happened was all
sense of wanting to do anything, be anywhere went away completely.
All, all sense of purpose went away.
All kind of niggling things that I have to do this and that entirely vanished in that
and what I had a strong, strong sense of.
Of is what it was like to live 10, 000, 50, 000 years ago, when, and I just
imagine, imagine having a life where you've never done a single email and never
done a payment, never had tax to do, never had appointment, never had a meeting.
Of course your life is hard and harsh and you see death all around and you
haven't got a pharmacy or hospital or you've never had a cup of coffee, you've
never had watched a a wonderful film, you know, all the luxuries we have.
You've slept cold many nights.
But you've also got that enormous freedom of being in that present state.
And you've got nowhere to be, all you have to do, especially in this environment is
survive and have enough food for that day.
And that only takes about two hours.
So we come out of this place of incredible freedom and transcendence.
And I'm sure you've heard of this term wilderness rapture or primal joy.
And this has been a lot of, you know, people who've spent a lot of time with
indigenous people have come across.
People who have this in immense joy that bubbles out of them for no good reason.
And we sat there in the rock as our tracking team, just laughing
for no good reason, just from the sheer joy of existence.
It's not like we have that every time, you know, these are moments
of grace, but that's what it's like.
When you reconnect with the wild with the right people in the right space.
And I can go on and on, but I don't want to
Rupert Isaacson: like, like doing murmurations.
Sometimes seemingly just from the pure joy of moving in the currents.
Hmm.
What's interesting, these, these ideas of connection, because we are mid
level weak, mid level predators that if we don't connect with each other
and strategize, hyenas tend to eat us.
Is there also in us a great sense of safety?
Like the brain is always asking this question.
Am I safe?
And, you know, if I.
Looked at your ocean and went I'd look at it and go, no, I'm fucking not safe.
Not no, no, no fucking way am I safe.
You would look at that ocean and say In this context, in this ocean, because
I'm intimate with this ocean, I am safe.
Because I've spent the time to develop that relationship.
You can then make me safe.
Does tracking and the competence that it gives one, the intimacy that it
gives one, with the environment and the inhabitants of that environment, does
that say to our brain, you're safe?
And therefore allow us
to feel safe together, because there's some of the parts of our
Group competence makes us safer.
Craig Foster: I think you've hit on a very
Rupert Isaacson: core of social wellbeing.
Craig Foster: I think you've hit on a very important point is that when you
know your environment and you know, you can survive off that environment,
that is a primal indicator of safety.
But another big factor here is I think we have a way of measuring biodiversity.
in our being.
We, we listen to what bird activity, we, we, we smelling a whole lot of things.
All our senses can determine very, very quickly what levels of biodiversity
we are that are surrounding us.
And I've had the privilege of spending some time in these
near pristine environments.
And the effect that has on the psyche is unbelievable because you feel extreme
safety because you know, if everything's taken away, you can easily survive.
So it's a, it's, I think it's a combination of being able to track.
Knowing the physicalities of how to survive, who's, what animals, what plants
are moving around growing, whatever, and then the levels of biodiversity,
because biodiversity is that,
you know, life force that animates us, but also allows us to survive
even today, no matter where you live.
Rupert Isaacson: It's the, it's the diverse investment portfolio, isn't it?
It's like looking at your bank accounts and saying, Oh, I've got lots of bank
accounts in these different places, drawing money from these different things.
That's replacing is that replacing biodiversity in the way a hunter
gatherer would look at the landscape and say, I have such a plenitude of
food here that is at my fingertips.
I could go to this cash, this cash withdrawal machine.
That cash withdraw, this cash withdrawal machine is living
on, has limpets on this rock.
That cash withdrawal machine is moving in a herd across the hill there.
And there's another one swimming past me in the shallows.
Therefore, I feel security, therefore.
Craig Foster: I think, I think you're absolutely right.
But the fascinating and interesting and, you know, scary thing is that we
think we, you know, we think we can live independent of nature and you're
absolutely right that, that, you know, money has replaced biodiversity and,
and, and skills in many ways, but, or hunting or tracking skills, but what we've
forgotten, Rupert, is that, and I'm sure you know this well, The foundation of
all our economics, all our politics, all our bank accounts is biodiverse nature.
If we have biodiversity collapse, you can have as many bank accounts
as you like, and as many millions of dollars as you like, and they
will be worth zero, nothing.
Less
Rupert Isaacson: than a limpet.
Craig Foster: Less than a limpet because you won't be able to breathe.
You won't be able to eat.
You will die very quickly.
That
Rupert Isaacson: should be, that should be our new website.
Less than a limpet dot com.
You can't eat the fucker.
Craig Foster: Less than a limpet's tooth tongue.
So the, that's why, um, what we talking about and this, this,
this, The, the collection of plants and animals and their amazing
interrelationships, that is the most precious thing we ever will come across.
That's what's allowing every person on this planet to breathe and to
eat and that's what we've forgotten.
I mean, that's what allows
Rupert Isaacson: the creation of symbol of money in the first place, as you say.
Craig Foster: Yes, everything is, everything is, is allowed by that.
And that's why we have to desperately look after that if we want to continue
as a species living on the planet.
Rupert Isaacson: This brings me to thinking about symbology, symbols
because tracking, when one sees tracks, they appear as symbols, right?
We know that this three toed symbol is this type of bird.
And we know that this The other one in this cluster with these
dots and these little pointy bits on the end is that kind of mammal.
And then we can take those things and make images of them.
And, you know, we see this in rock art.
We've also seen this in our alphabet, right?
We, we've created writing.
We're also the storytelling, eh?
If storytelling also comes from tracking.
And then we created art and symbology from the tracking.
And then we've created.
Writing from that and then writing it
allows us to storytell and track in other ways.
Is, is, is that, is that what, is that the best thing of our
civilization that we've taken the
symbology of tracking through biodiversity and turned it into
a whole world of symbolism?
Craig Foster: That is such an interesting idea that tracking
and, and, and as you say, pattern recognition could have in some way
inspired the first art or symbol making.
I have not.
Thought too much about that, but I love that idea very much.
I'll have to look at that in more detail, but it's a fascinating idea.
I mean, what I, what I'm working with, I'm working with these amazing
group of scientists headed up by professor Christopher Henshelwood.
There's a, a friend of mine and he's discovered in Lombos cave along
the, just along the coast here.
The oldest collection of engravings on earth together with
a whole lot of other interesting things like the oldest drawing.
What is interesting is this is the oldest out
Rupert Isaacson: of interest, everyone will want to know.
Craig Foster: Yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
So the one of the oldest is gravings is 100, 000 years and they're 14 of them and
the youngest ones about 75, 000 years.
And there's a whole lot of other fascinating corroborating
evidence that goes with this.
But to talk to your point.
At some point, someone had to think and make a huge jump in cognition to have an
idea inside their brain and to be able to put it onto a physical object and
engrave it onto that piece of red ochre.
That's a massive jump in cognition.
And To actually create a symbol in the real world.
It's one thing looking at symbols and interpreting them, making them is massive.
And that is probably one of the greatest changes in our entire history as a
species, because once you've got a symbol, then you can communicate at
a very profound level across time.
And.
Those, those engravings at that hundred thousand years are really the first proto
books and the first proto computers.
So what you're saying is absolutely true about, you know, that that's how we have
the sophisticated, you know, storytelling.
We've got all our technology is based on that.
You can't build a car unless those people in Africa had done that a hundred thousand
years ago, but whether that It's still a mystery as far as I know is how that
person first thought that African person thought to do that momentous thing.
But I love this idea that it could have been through this, you know, long
period of patent recognition that you could, that maybe that inspired that.
It's, it's been an interesting thing to question to throw at the
archaeologists and anthropologists.
Rupert Isaacson: And as you're talking, of course, it makes one
think of mathematics as well.
Because, you know, what is that but measurement?
What else can you measure?
But the stuff around you, you know, that you see, what is that the product of
biodiversity, whether it's in the stars you're seeing above you or the sand that's
under your feet or the distance you have to throw the spear or, or there's no way
when one looks at it that way that any of this cannot have come from tracking.
Now you though, and you talk about this really well in your
book, you were not always.
Diving to track.
A certain point came when you did.
Can you tell us that story?
When and why did that happen?
And then how did that open up this African seaforest to you and your perception?
That's quite
Craig Foster: a fundamental thing.
So, I mean, I don't know if this ever happened to you Rupert, when you spent
your time in the Kalahari, but when I was first there in the late 90s.
It was both enthralling and terrifying because I had spent
so much of my life in nature.
I thought I was connected to nature.
And when I met Karawa, as you pointed out, Kwasi and Ngate, and I saw what they
could do and how they could understand the wild, I felt pretty useless.
And I felt Outside of nature, and it bothered me for a long time.
So when I started diving again every day after a few years, I wanted to
get deeper and I remembered this incredible time in the Kalahari.
And then I thought there must be a way of tracking underwater.
There must be a way.
Cause I knew that tracking was the way of getting into deep water.
Nature.
And I saw these first tracks of the whelk, the whelks left on the rock
where they leave the slime trails and the tiny particles of sand
collect, and I was, oh, so excited.
And then from that moment, I just started seeing more and more tracks.
And now I've got, you know, thousands of underwater tracks in
my head and I can, every time I dive, unless it's very, very rough.
I, you know, I'm just looking at them and they, they're telling me so much about
what's going on and on the land as well.
It's like a, a secret key, this golden key you're given to
unlock the door of wild nature.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, what's interesting too, is you've used it
to unlock the, the key of nature.
What appears to be non nature too, in that I love that your first tracking experience
with the seaforest was the whelk.
And then you just talked about your first tracking experience in London of the slug.
Yeah.
But you wouldn't have been able to do the slug without the whelk, right?
The whelk.
Exactly.
Slug.
Craig Foster: Exactly.
Rupert Isaacson: What do you do when you can't track?
What do you do when the ground is too hard to show us a sign,
when the water is too murky?
How do you then track?
Craig Foster: So then what you do is you use your knowledge.
of animals and their behaviors to try and interpret where they may be.
So, you know, if there's a certain wind blowing on land, then you
know that they will be using that.
They will be going normally, if they're hungry, towards where their prey animals
are likely to be or to where shelter is.
In the water depending on what animal you're tracking, if it's really rough,
for instance, you know, a lot of the animals will either be going into
their cave shelters or they'll be going into the deeper water, where
it's, there's less movement they will be following certain smells, they'll
be following so many different things.
So you can then make predictions based upon what you know about their behaviors.
Rupert Isaacson: You describe,
you know, you're, you're, you're a beautiful nature writer and you
describe some encounters with.
animals, not just the ones we would have expected with, for example,
the octopus that you had your relationship with, with the film, but
you, you, you talk about some really profound moments with other animals.
I remember you, you wrote, About an early dive, I think you said you
were 15 where an octopus took you.
And you had to react to that in a certain way.
You were always observing, you were always, as you said, you know, you
were put into the water as a baby.
Your parents dove, you dove.
At what point, I would like you to tell us that first story with the octopus
that could have drowned you.
And then how
did that transform into the later encounters with not just the octopus,
but the other creatures that in this more intimate way, I know you might
say, well, I learned to track Rupert and then I became more observant, but
it's not just that something internal.
Must have driven you to not just to want to make that change in
relationship, but to be able
to be ready somehow to cross that threshold.
Could you just tell us that first octopus story and then just however
it comes to you, how did that transform into the relationships
with animals that you have now?
Craig Foster: Sure.
I was, yeah, 15 or 16 we were in a a very sort of.
volatile estuary way up the coast.
It was a calm day.
And I slipped into the water.
It wasn't too deep and went down and saw the by far the
biggest octopus I'd ever seen.
It was quite a lot bigger than myself.
It was probably a Southern giant octopus, which is a species
one very rarely sees here.
And I was just completely mesmerized by it and went a bit too close and
I think the animal got a little bit perturbed and it grabbed hold of me and
pulled it in pulled me into its den.
And the strength of this animal was just unbelievable.
I mean, it was, I don't know, five times my strength easily.
And I remember all the skin being scraped off my arms as it pulled me in.
And I couldn't, I could hardly move.
It was so powerful.
And instinctively I knew to relax.
If I tried to fight and I wouldn't have been able to, and we'd certainly be dead.
So I was pretty fit and used to diving.
So I could hold my breath for quite a long time.
So I just had no choice, but to totally relax.
And then probably within about 30 or 40 seconds.
Maybe a little longer.
This, this very powerful animal let me go and I was able to go to the surface.
And strangely, I was not in any way traumatized, never
had a bad dream about it.
It just was, you know, Fine.
And then, you know, lesson learned, don't go, you know, too
close to a massive cephalopod.
So that, how that connected to the other question I'm not totally sure.
What did pop into my mind was, strangely enough, when you were asking the question
was, you know, how do you track an otter?
And that took me a long time to figure out because they're extremely cryptic animals.
And I eventually realized that I could watch the birds very closely
and see where they were flying and see where they were looking.
And then I would just follow their, their eyes and use them
like you would use a drone.
And then I could follow an otter through the kelp forest.
And then when I got close, I could follow the bubble trails that are
coming out of the otter's fur and eventually find that animal, very
cryptic animal, and I was able to observe some of the secret hunting behavior.
I think the desire.
The big driver, what you're asking for, I just had a enormous desire to be able
to speak this oldest language on earth.
I couldn't even articulate that.
I just, it was a deep yearning to be able to somehow connect
with that wild person inside me.
And I knew eventually that this tracking and this Repetition of being in the,
in nature was the key and it was enormously, um, hugely relieving, a
massive relief to be able to do that.
And I'm still, you know, like to go a lot further and get a lot better at this.
I still feel I'm learning a lot and nowhere near the skill of.
You know, some of those master trackers that I were my mentors.
Um, but it's very, very gratifying.
And, you know, I've learned so much through it that.
Um, it's a lifelong passion to be able to do this and to be able to pass it
on to people who are serious about it.
It's not something that you can learn too quickly, but you can actually
accomplish quite a lot in a very short time and be very satisfied in a very short
time, but to master takes a long time.
Rupert Isaacson: To your reaction to the, that first octopus that grabbed
you reminds me of a question which I wanted to ask a little way back.
You talked about awe.
And how awe and empathy seem to be connected through this
work that's been done at the University of California, Berkeley.
Is that correct?
Craig Foster: Correct.
Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: You know, what's interesting to me is that
by the time you get into Greek civilization, a new word creeps
in, and that word is panic.
And the God Pan, you know, the God of nature panic is,
originates in a feeling of panic.
irrational fear of being the hunted prey, almost a madness that can come upon you.
In the wild panic, but it's interesting to me that that word is
coined in a one of the first big civilizations that was actively
trying to remove itself from nature.
They were certainly more connected to nature than we were the ancient Greeks,
but they were definitely creating all the technologies and city states and
so forth and so forth that, you know, have led us to the path we're on today.
It's you did not panic.
It seems that when the octopus took you, you actually accessed a state of awe,
a certain, I don't know.
Craig Foster: I was pretty frightened, but I knew that I it was a pure
survival instinct of knowing that I really needed to relax.
And I've had, I've been in situations like that again, but not with an animal.
being stuck underwater.
And what saved me was just relaxing and waiting for that swell to pop me back
out because I was stuck underwater.
So I think there's a, you have to be, I think it's hard not to panic underwater
if you don't spend a lot of time there.
But if you spend a lot of time, I think one realizes, okay this is what you need
to do because you also know that, of course, as soon as you start panicking,
your consumption of oxygen goes up so radically that you minimize your time.
You know that very clearly.
So you don't really have a choice.
I, I don't think I was feeling necessarily or in the, I was feeling
quite a lot of fear, but I had to just suppress that and physically relax my
whole body and try and just, you know.
Not move a muscle.
Rupert Isaacson: It it's,
Craig Foster: but what, what, what, what, what I did think about when you
said that was, you know, the irony of this sort of scenario is as we
try to control mother, big mother,
Rupert Isaacson: you
Craig Foster: know, nature, all this biodiversity, as we, as we
try to control her ironically.
We put her more and more in control, and that's what we're feeling today.
We're feeling you know, the, the, the implications of that as she just
starts to exert her force upon us.
And we see that even in the climate now in so many ways.
Rupert Isaacson: Oh, that's just what the political liberals are saying.
You know, if you were a true Republican, Craig, you'd see
through all that climate stuff.
Craig Foster: Good luck with that.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, I think a lot of the people sadly who, who, who feel
that won't be around to see the the changes that are coming or in place.
Yeah, well, that's, that's actually where I wanted to go next.
Obviously we should preserve all biodiversity because we just can't
survive without it, you know, just for purely selfish reasons.
We should preserve it for the, for the reasons of connection,
happiness, and awe, and just justice.
We should preserve it as well.
But, Everyone has a part of the planet.
Everyone has a,
an environment that's dear to them.
And I know that the sea forest is dear to you.
Can you, just as, I, I, I know that you will need to go fairly soon.
And I want to make this just the first of two more, because there's, there's so much
more I want to ask you on these topics.
Um, we, we haven't discussed them.
the ancestors and that spirit world and so on and so on.
Um, let alone the altered state of the cold water and what that does.
But, and I want to do that why should we give a shit about some seaweed off
the coast of a little spit sticking off a bit of rocky land over there?
Why should we give a fuck about that?
Surely it could use a nice big McDonald's, you know, overlooking
the, we could clear that those rocks.
The beach, obviously we keep for obvious reasons, but, you know,
why, why, why should we give a shit about this patch of seaweed?
Craig Foster: I think first of all so I'm just laughing because the way
you said it was so funny, but it is what we have here is one of the great
biodiversity hotspots in the world.
And these hotspots are where there's an enormous amount of biodiversity and they
are really these places of Extreme hope, because if we can, what we desperately
need to do, if we want to survive as a species into the future, we need to allow
this incredible biological intelligence and this biodiversity to regenerate and
the best places to allow the biodiversity regenerate are from these hotspots.
And just remember that 65 percent plus of the oxygen that all of us are
breathing is coming from the ocean, coming from the phytoplankton in the ocean.
You can be living in the, you know, deepest city in the world and you'll
still be breathing oxygen created by phytoplankton plants that live in the
ocean on the surface of the ocean.
So these biodiversity hotspots are where, you know, this phytoplankton
is blooming at a very high level.
So it's literally, you give a shit if you want to.
survive as a species, or if you care in any way about any young people and their
survival and their quality of life, that would be another major important factor.
And also if you care about these incredible animals, These, this,
these wild kin that we've lived with from the beginning of time,
they literally are our family.
They are our ancestors.
We come from them and we only survive and live because they exist.
Um, so there are, you know, And just because of the magnificence of the
system, this extraordinary, mysterious thing that's happened where in 13.
7 billion years, galaxies and giant cosmic clouds of the Dust and brimstone
have turned into millions upon millions,
millions of these incredible creatures and plants that keep us alive.
I mean, it's literally, we're living in a miracle.
Why would you want to destroy that miracle and us in the process?
There's no, what's the logic of that to have, you know, another
car or a bigger bank account that there's no, there's no good reason.
Rupert Isaacson: When you're in the forest there, what does it look like?
What does it feel like?
Craig Foster: It's a three dimensional underwater space.
So you imagine being in an underwater forest where there's reverse gravity.
So you can dive down and then just push gently and off the
bottom and fly into the canopy.
Um, there are creatures moving around in that three dimensional space.
They live in all parts of the three dimensions.
It's not like a coral reef.
It's two dimensional in comparison.
Some of the kelp is You know, 45 feet deep.
So, you know, three dimensional 45 foot space.
The light is even in the middle of the day is being cut into.
Beams by the leaves of the, and the canopy and there's coming down in these beams
and as the water moves, the beams flash.
So it's very powerful lighting in this kind of cathedral like, experience.
Um, you know, the the, the water is generally quite cold.
So you've got all the.
The amazing brain chemicals rushing through you that, that occur in the
cold, you get quite used to it after a while and these amazing creatures with
extraordinary sensory systems living in this space that are watching you.
And they are measuring your heartbeat, they're measuring your muscle tension,
and they are reacting based upon your body language and the way you are moving.
Rupert Isaacson: You've written about the need to, and you've talked here
about the need to learn relaxation.
This is difficult.
in cold.
So the first thing, and then first thing is how do you learn
to relax in cold like that?
And I don't just mean ice baths because I know lots of people who take ice
baths and I've watched them do it and I wouldn't say they're necessarily
terribly relaxed when they do it.
Some seem to learn how to do it, but you're talking about a very different,
it's a type of relaxation that can let an octopus let go of you or allow
yourself to not panic when wedged.
Underwater.
How do you survive in this cold without bracing?
That's the question number one.
The second question is,
can you describe some interactions
beyond, say, the escape from that octopus, that have allowed
you to use that relaxation
to enter the world of the creatures in this forest?
And what, what have they shown you?
So how do you relax?
How do you learn to relax in that cold water?
And then when you have this relaxation, where does it bring you?
Craig Foster: So, I mean,
of course you have to get your body used to the water.
So ideally you start in summer, you go in for short periods of time.
You don't want to put too much cold stress on the system.
So you adapt your body slowly to that environment.
What I do is I visualize, I don't try to push the cold away, I, I imagine
the cold actually going through inside my body and flowing through
it and activating a kind of heat, and that's kind of what is happening.
They are brown fat adipose tissue.
That develops when you expose yourself to cold and that acts like a internal heating
system and it actually heats your body up.
And this is something that all early people would have had.
If you, if you living indoors a lot and you're not exposed to cold,
these, this, this brown fat dwindles.
So the body is totally adapt, you know, it's ready for this process.
And then you can visualize this just flowing through you and you
just have to actively just calm oneself and not tense the body.
You just, just relax every limb.
If people aren't used to it, they'll hold themselves and they'll tense their arms.
One's got to do the opposite because you don't want that
cortisol to flood the system.
That's not great for you.
You want that dopamine and the noradrenaline and so
on to, to be going there.
So I've had amazing experiences with say a cap clawless otters numerous
occasions they have approached me.
And this is a very, normally a very, very shy animal.
And then if you keep still enough and your body's relaxed enough
very, very occasionally they will then make physical contact.
And when an animal like that makes physical contact, and then even you
know, one of the Most profound times is when an animal started touching
my feet and then moved up my body and then looked in my eyes and started to
touch my face with its amazing little dexterous hands, their clawless hands.
It does affect one quite radically.
And if that animal then,
feels that you aren't a threat, it will allow you to hunt with it.
And that's when the real teaching and learning happens, because then you can
see how these animals are hunting, how incredibly powerful they are, how clever
they are, and all these amazing techniques they use to catch different animals and
how clever the prey is in avoiding them.
And I mean, the otters took me years to figure out that there were these species
of fish that were hiding themselves upside down in the caves in the algae and they
turn upside down so that their eyes can look out of the algae to see the otters
as they're coming through the cave.
So you learn about not just the animal that has trusted you, but of course
about all their prey and their predators.
And you just, these animals teach you about all the animals
that they interact with.
So if you're just getting to know an otter or an octopus or a limpet.
They will naturally, if you just chose only those three, you would
learn about the lives of hundreds of these animals because they're the web
of life is connected in every way.
There's no thread that's not connected.
And that's why if we pull on one thread, we pull on everything.
And that's what we've got to be so much more careful of as humans.
We've been pulling on all the wrong threads for too long.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
We've been like, like.
Somebody anxious and fidgety in a wool jumper pulling at the threads
of the garment that keeps us warm and unraveling it as we wear it.
When you, when you, an animal shows you how it hunts and you can stay with it,
then they begin to move athletically.
How do you, how do you stay with them with that same relaxation
without pulsating your body?
in ways that will spook the animal.
How do you keep that relaxation going even when there's a need to move strongly or
at least to stay close to this animal?
Craig Foster: See, what you've got to try and do is not they're quite
they're very sensitive to pressure waves and to sound so you don't ever want
to slap a hand on top of the water.
You are very careful how you put your hand into the water and pull.
You're very careful to never slap a fin on top of the water.
You, each thrust is long and slow and gentle.
You're often pulling yourself along.
So what's nice about the kelp forest is it's, you know, it's, you've
got, you know, Reverse gravity.
So you can pull yourself along.
I'm making myself neutrally buoyant with a weight belt.
And then you can pull yourself along from strand to strand from,
from stipe to stipe as well.
So you, you're trying to reduce all the pressure waves, reduce all
the sounds and try not to have too much muscle tension, especially the
sharks can feel the muscle tension.
Some of the other animals, less so.
Rupert Isaacson: Sharks.
There's a lot of them on your coast, including some pretty big gnarly ones.
You have great whites there.
How do you interact and stay safe with them?
and relax around.
Craig Foster: So I mean, a thing with sharks is it's quite important
to make a visual contact with them.
So as soon as you've made visual contact, then they generally, it's pretty
safe, no matter what species they are.
Why is that?
Because they're a predator, and they know that you're looking at them,
you know that you've seen them, and they rely often on sneak attacks.
But you're quite safe, luckily, as a human with sharks, because their
search image, when they look at you with all their sensory system, you're
not generally coming up as prey.
You're a strange thing.
You're moving wrongly.
You don't look right.
You don't smell right.
You've got a strange electrical signature.
They generally don't come up as prey.
But, You want to be often upright in the water that, that makes them, you
look even less like a prey and you want to be generally keeping quite still.
You don't want to be moving fast away from them, you know, like a, a cat,
you know, if you pull a string and it wants to go for it just keeping.
Your heart rate down, keeping your breathing down cause they
can sense a lot of these things.
And as I say, keeping your muscles relaxed, then they will see you not,
not as prey and they'll see you also not as necessarily maybe another predator
there, but you don't want to push them or intimidate them too much as well.
You'd want to be kind of neutral in that space.
And eye contact
Rupert Isaacson: doesn't trigger them.
Like it might other types of predator.
Craig Foster: No, I mean, it's good to have eye contact because then they
know you've seen them, they know you there it's when you're not looking
that they'll be, they'll come closer.
Um, and sometimes, you know, we've been say trying to film these bigger animals
and you actually have to try and make your body small and not very intimidating
to try and get closer to them.
They, they, they quite wary.
It's not sharks are not you know, how they've been, you
know, depicted on television.
That's not, they're not like that.
Rupert Isaacson: You describe in the book a, an episode where you're, I believe it
is Great Whites, and you're close to them.
And again, this theme of relaxation seems to come in.
But then you say at a certain point, they, open their mouth, they gape as a
way of saying, okay, that's enough now.
Or
what made you feel that that was a safe situation to put yourself in?
And how do you know to navigate it?
Craig Foster: So with the white sharks and I've had, you know, help
from people who spent many years just concentrating on that species.
And this applies to quite a few sharks as well.
If the water is clear, it's much safer.
And especially with white sharks, if you can see the bottom where you're
diving, it's much safer because they can like to come underneath.
So if you, if the water's clear, it's calm, the animals are relaxed.
You know, it's not I believe overly dangerous if you're used to being in
the water and you're not overly fearful.
To dive with a great white shark.
It's not overly dangerous.
But you also have to know the signs.
And as you say, this, this gaping, this, this fairly subtle opening of
the mouth is a very clear indication that they don't want you there anymore.
And then you have to slowly slowly and very gently move out of their space.
But, you know, I've, I've dived with so many different species
of shark, big sharks, great whites, tiger sharks, bull sharks.
And I've never been threatened by one of those animals or, you
know, in any way aggression shown to me in fact, quite the opposite.
And many people who've dived with sharks will tell you the same story.
It's the absolute aberration.
You know, when someone gets attacked and it's often, you know,
curiosity or a shark that's maybe highly compromised or blind or.
Starving or something.
It's very, very, it's a very rare thing.
These sharks are not, we're not on their prey list.
So it's it's far more dangerous driving down to the beach than
to be diving with these animals.
Rupert Isaacson: There is of course, a waterborne predator that we know does
take people pretty regularly in Africa.
I myself was attacked by one when I was seven.
Oh, only got.
Away.
We were in Zimbabwe which where my dad's from.
And a biologist had penned some, including a big 14 footer,
and they took us into the pen.
They were observing them for us.
I can't remember what they were studying.
Because what happened next obliterated everything else from my mind.
And we're supposed to keep our distance.
And for some reason I didn't for some reason, I, I walked too close and
I remember the rush of the water.
luckily the biologists had run up behind me and grabbed me by the
collar, pulled me up the back.
This, of course, we're talking is a crocodile, the Nile
crocodile, immensely dangerous.
You open your book with a
very exciting passage in which you are going into the water to
film one of these in the water.
You've been warned by the guide who's taking you in, who knows them
quite well, that It's possible that you might not survive the dive.
And again, it seems to me that this theme of relaxation comes in here.
Can you just describe
what, what happened there?
What you did?
Sure.
Craig Foster: I mean, you, you're right.
Crocodiles are very, very different to shark.
This is an animal that does see humans very much as prey.
We're the perfect size.
We're nice and slow.
You know, it's, they're perfect.
So, and I certainly would never dive with crocodiles again.
Um, this was a time earlier in my life where I don't think I was as
sensible as I am now, but we were still using a lot of knowledge of,
of animals we were doing a film.
With my brother Damon Roger Horrocks, who's a great close
friend, and Didier Noureau.
And we were in the Okavango Delta and the idea in the film was to see if we could
get inside what we call the dragon's lair where these crocodiles drag their prey.
And it seemed to be a pretty interesting idea.
nine impossible thing and then this one extraordinary animal we encountered
and we thought it might be possible and we followed this animal down this long
tunnel into the back of its lair and it was very powerful interesting experience
and this animal allowed us to be in that place but it was absolutely terrifying.
Um, and certainly Roger and Didier and to some extent my brother were
sort of doing more of the diving.
I did several dives with these crocodiles, but it was I think what is happening,
Rupert, is I was, I was desperate to find this wildness that I was, I'd
be, we've been talking about, and I felt that maybe I could find it there.
And the great irony was it was lying in those little limpet shells, right
where I, on the coast where I, where I'd left, you know, the, the real connection
to deep nature comes not from extreme experiences that you have very seldom.
It's from repeated experiences with animals.
You get to know better and better in environments that are easy to access.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
I think for the young male, there is this rite of passage thing,
this desire to test oneself.
That's also part of the hunter gatherer thing, I suppose.
It must be.
You know, there you are, at a certain point you have to
take your spear and now go.
But is that what was going on with you at that point?
Was it, was it part of almost seeking initiation somehow to
put yourself consciously at risk?
Understand more to connect more.
Craig Foster: I mean, it was partly as our job was wildlife filmmaking
and human animal interaction.
So it was part of the job in some ways.
I, I think the young ego is certainly looking for affirmation.
But I think that.
That ego can often be, like we talked about earlier, can be
imbalanced by the strange world that we find ourselves in.
You know, this is the most, this is the strangest environment that any
human has ever tried to live in.
This is utterly foreign to us.
So what is that psyche?
What does that ego try to do in this very strange world?
It tries to reconnect with the wild and sometimes it might do very
stupid things to try and do that.
It's not just about initiation, because I had had quite a
few initiations before that.
So I think it's it's about not knowing where to turn in many ways, and
certainly a big sense of adventure.
And luckily, you know, no one was hurt, but it could have, it could have been,
I don't think it's in a It's certainly something I wouldn't try again so,
we were fortunate and we did take as many precautions as we could, but it,
you know, there's not much you can do.
Why did this particular crocodile
Rupert Isaacson: let you into its den and why didn't it attack you?
Craig Foster: It's partly mysterious and it's partly because I think we
look very strange to that animal, you know, you, you're on scuba, you're
breathing bubbles you've got this, you know, strange equipment, there's
a strange sound coming off you.
This animal is probably thinking, what is this thing?
It doesn't know what you are.
It doesn't know if you're dangerous.
You're not, you're not running away from it.
Almost everything runs away from a giant crocodile.
So if we're not running away from it, when it approaches, we're not backing away
because that's asking for big trouble.
So it's thinking, well, maybe this thing is dangerous, but this particular animal
is something was special about it.
It was hard to say exactly.
But we had encounters with many of the other crocs and some of them were
you know, a bit more, I wouldn't say aggressive, but just came really close,
but many of them were quite submissive.
And I think it was because, and we had lights as well.
And these cameras, there's a very strange thing to, for them to be seeing underwater
unfamiliar and not backing away.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: But like aliens coming down.
Craig Foster: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
It does make one wonder though I mean, I know from knowing you, but also
seeing the work that you've done and the place you've done it, that you
seem to have been allowed to experience
the shamanic at work through animals, whether it, and nature in general, just
Numerous times in a way that defies rational logic, whether it's that
sharing space with a crocodile in the den, whether it's being able
to witness Karoa doing that running hunt, which really one ought not to
be able to film or capture on film.
And somehow it happened for you guys to be able to witness that, that,
and I'm sure many other things.
Just to conclude here, because I want to pick this up again.
The next time we talk, you, you also describe a very particular combination of
the indigenous African world with the sea.
You'd mentioned Otters and it was in that you were having a relationship with
a lady called Charmaine, I believe, and who happened to be also Zulu and Ganga.
Can we, I know we're running down on time here.
Can we leave this part of the conversation?
Can you tell us?
what happened there and why you think.
You were able to witness something like that and what
did it, what did it teach you?
Craig Foster: I think, yeah, this is a tough one to try and explain.
Maybe describe is better than explain.
You left the hard one to last.
So, Edouard spent um, incredible three years with Charmaine Joseph Guaza, who
was a, as you say, a traditional healer.
Um, and I repeatedly witnessed
quite a few things that were
not explainable by my Western sort of scientific upbringing.
It was impossible to understand or explain them through that window of reference.
And today, still today, many of these things remain extremely mysterious.
I think it's worth noting that
even as accomplished and extraordinary as science is, science still only understands
quite a small part of our world.
Recently, you know, scientists have discovered dark matter and dark
energy that apparently make up.
I think 95 or more percent of.
our world.
And this, they see that there's this invisible world that has gravity, it
has mass, it's there, but they can't even they can't, they can't see it.
They can't measure it very easily.
They can't even capture a few grams of it.
So
I think what we,
We can easily get lulled into thinking that we understand reality and we
understand the nature of our existence.
The more one looks into it and the more one spends time with indigenous people,
and especially in my case, indigenous people in Africa, you realize that the
less and less one knows, and that the mysterious grows bigger and bigger, and
that many of the things that one witnesses are not easily fitted into the world of
science, but I'm quite fascinated in I think what is is called two eyed seeing,
where you combine science and indigenous wisdom to try to figure out our reality.
That becomes so interesting and so much more you can see
a bigger picture of reality.
And I'm not saying that all indigenous knowledge is mysterious.
Of course it isn't.
But I think there's so much to learn from people who are deeply connected.
To the wild, to the ancestors, to the sacred that.
Yeah, I mean, it's just a much richer world for that.
And I also find it fascinating that, you know, 80 percent of the
biodiversity on this planet is protected by indigenous people.
So they, they, they know what is valuable.
In the deepest, deepest sense.
So we got so much to learn from that.
And I think a lot of the hope, you know, it's easy to just look through the world
of science and see this environmental crisis and be absolutely devastated by it.
But I think a lot of the hope that certainly I draw from is from this
wilder self from this indigenous wisdom that I've been privileged enough to,
you know, be, be, be given access to.
That there is this mystery that's out there that actually makes up quite a
large part of our, our reality and that we're not sure what's going to happen.
And certainly I think,
There are a lot of forces at play that we have no idea what's going on.
Yeah.
I don't know if that skirts your question or answers it.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm going to nail you down.
I've seen obviously too, a lot of things which I can't compute from a,
from a, you know, from a Western point of view, for example, I I've seen.
A Cuckoo Yalanji Aboriginal shaman on my son, just with his fingers going up and
down the spine, up and down the spine, up and down the spine, and the man wearing
no shirt, so he couldn't hide anything, you know, and he was flicking his fingers
into a ceramic cup, a chipped teacup, and as he was doing it, you know, I couldn't
help but want to have a look inside, so I look in there, so does my ex Kristen,
and what we see is, The cup is slowly filling with viscous, with little bloody
filaments in it, like he snot, you know.
And it's visibly before our eyes
as he flicks his fingers from my son's spine into there.
And at a certain point he chucks it into the fire, and Rowan gets
up and says, my son, and says, I feel better, I feel clear headed.
Which for him at that time to say something like that in his level of autism
was, Not, you know, jaw dropping enough.
We came back two successive days.
And second day, less in the cup, the third day, almost none.
And then he said, okay, it's fine.
You know, he'll be, he'll be right.
And then we had tea and toast cause as you know, with these mysterious
things, it always comes to the mundane because there's no separation.
That's the wonderful thing I love about indigenous culture.
So I saw that I can't explain it.
But there it was.
And I also didn't just observe it happening, but I observed
its ameliorative effect.
That's obviously, and so many of us have spent any time.
You know, I've been lucky enough to spend time with people who are less
out of touch with their wild souls.
have these stories.
Tell us what happened on the beach that
Craig Foster: day with Charmaine.
So I think what you're referring to, cause there are a number of these occasions,
but it was very early in the morning.
It was kind of misty.
We went down to a remote part of the, the coast And
she asked me to be part of this ritual where essentially we were, we were
supposed to be calling what she called them Dao, which is the water spirit, which
is a an entity or a force that she'd been working with for a long time and was part
of her culture and part of her training.
Um, and I was still pretty skeptical in some ways of all these things, even though
I'd seen some pretty strange things, but I was happy to go along with it.
And I was very interested in the culture and what it meant.
And I was had to have some of her blood in my one hand and
a scorpion in the other hand.
And I was went into the water.
Rupert Isaacson: How do you hold a scorpion in your hand?
Lisa.
Oh, I just had a scorpion in my hand.
Well, you pulled it out of your trousers.
Craig Foster: That's so funny.
So it was, I knew the scorpions in the area quite well, and there's a, a species
that doesn't you know, sting very easily.
And if you're calm with them, they, they, they're pretty chilled.
So there was one there and then she just advised me what to do.
So very carefully held that didn't in any way hurt it, went
into the water up to my chest.
She was intoning her the prayers behind and I was asked to, to connect to this
water spirit in the best way I could.
And then I came out thinking nothing was going to happen.
Let the scorpion go.
Very gently and we were walking back and the next minute I heard
the splashing behind me and I looked around and there was a Cape Clawless
otter right in the shallows staring straight at us and splashing water
everywhere, which was very strange.
And then Charmaine said, okay, let's go down to the water.
And we walked and I thought the otter was just going to leave which it didn't.
And we sat right next to it and this otter just flung water all over our bodies.
And it appeared to be, strangely enough, the otter appeared to be quite frightened.
It was, I've never seen anything like it before or since.
It seemed to be being held in that space and it didn't want to be there.
And it was splashing around in a very small area.
And then Charmaine did some more prayers and suddenly this animal kind of,
I don't know realized it could leave and it just shot away.
And we were absolutely covered in water and I was just absolutely terrified.
gobsmacked and know what was going on.
Germaine was not in any way surprised.
It was just like a normal day at the office for her.
And you know, she just gently gave thanks and I was like, didn't know what the
hell was going on and was fascinated.
And then we, you know, left the area.
Rupert Isaacson: Did she say what the purpose of the ritual was?
Craig Foster: Yes, it was to basically give thanks and acknowledge this
water spirit, this Mdao that she'd been working with for a long time.
And she interpreted this otter as Being connected or being
brought in by this, this force.
It was very hard to understand and to interpret in any way.
But it was, it was very powerful experience and I can't deny
that that's what happened.
It sounds, you know, I've seen artists before and they've been,
you know, I've been close to them, but never an animal in that state.
And it was completely different to anything I'd seen before.
Rupert Isaacson: Was the splashing of the water over your bodies significant to her?
Craig Foster: It was quite a long time ago, so it's hard to remember.
It sounds almost like
Rupert Isaacson: baptism or benediction.
Yeah.
Craig Foster: Yeah.
And they do use, I mean, she used to use water a lot in that way.
So it does, it did feel, it did feel like that.
Rupert Isaacson: And ultimately is she, was she connecting with
that water spirit for healing?
Craig Foster: Yes,
Rupert Isaacson: exactly.
Why scorpion?
Why not a sea creature or water I think it
Craig Foster: was what, you know, sometimes spontaneously what was
happening in the moment I think it was as part of it, she observed
Rupert Isaacson: that that was there and yes, okay.
It wasn't that this is a ritual that always involves a scorpion.
Craig Foster: No, I don't think so.
You hadn't
Rupert Isaacson: been scouring
Craig Foster: the
Rupert Isaacson: pet shop.
No, no, no, no.
It was
Craig Foster: a wild, a wild scorpion that was just there.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Interesting.
Yeah.
It's funny when, when you, there, there is a similar story I'll share on when
we next talk, which happened to me with a fox that was not a million miles
from that and had, was tied up with my son's autism in an interesting way.
and a Navajo healer.
So when I read that in your book, it resonated very deeply with me.
Times of transformation, you know, messages that way.
Well, I've kept you for A long time, and I know that you have to
get up early to make your dive.
So, can I get you back on?
Craig Foster: Wonderful, yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: A deeper dive, I had to say that, didn't I?
There's a lot more I want to ask.
For those of you listening, the book is Amphibious Soul.
It's Craig Foster.
You also need to see his film, My Octopus Teacher.
You may well have already.
You certainly also need to see his film, The Great Dance.
Um, just give us where they can find you online and all of that.,
Craig Foster: I, I personally don't use social media to, for lots of
reasons, but I our NGO Sea Change Project are very active and we use
that for conservation and everything.
So it's seachangeproject.
com and it's also worth noting that.
I don't know if you were able to access this or if you did Rupert, but when
you read the book, there's a QR code in the book that connects you to 27
short films I made that show you some of the crocodile diving and some of
these interactions with these animals.
And each chapter has about three of the films and They're connected
to certain pages in the book.
And I, my son, Tom did all the sound for that.
And so it was a really fun process to do.
It's just there's no extra cost.
It's just like a passion part of the whole project of trying to
immerse people through the book and through these these short films.
Rupert Isaacson: There's also in, in the book, an amazing color section
of a tracking photo images from one of your tracking doc from your
tracking diaries over the years with.
Some fairly pretty extraordinary moments.
I don't want to spoil them for people but showing how tracking and animals
and the sea forest come together We also have not in this conversation
really touched on the work of sea change at all So I want to talk about that.
I want to talk about what's actually being done with this story.
Story is healing healing is story This is The healing work of the story,
the sea change project and helping to not just to preserve the coast of the
forest itself, but to bring people into touch with it for their own healing.
So I'd like to talk about that
Craig Foster: next time if we can.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Rupert.
Really great reconnecting with you and I love your work and so appreciate your
fabulous intellect and creative ideas.
Thank you.
Rupert Isaacson: It's I'm, I'm, I'm glad you labor under the illusion that
I have an intellect, but I can certainly introduce it to the people who can put
you on right on that one, but thank you.
No, I mean, you.
It's just always such a brilliant pleasure just to be in your company.
Thank you for joining us.
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