YouSaid · the spoken record

Craig Foster

lines on the record: 91
first: 2024-05-01
most recent: 2024-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Got this amazing community that are a kind-hearted sort of giant group that I think inspire all of this. So I just like to thank that amazing community for tuning in and listening and putting their time and hearts into this. And I guess it's just a very gentle ask to them to just sometimes just feel this enormous extraordinary mother that is just sitting out there, that original mother.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd like to thank you for all your work and your dedication talking about so many subjects that have certainly helped me and inspired me so much and for your braveness and openness. I think that's what attracted me to your podcast is honesty you have and the braveness to say things that are sometimes difficult. I mean, I think you know you've made a difference to a lot of people's lives. So it's just a huge privilege. I've been wanting to speak to you for a long time and never really had the courage to reach out. So it's nice that this book was an excuse to do that. It's just so special talking to you and getting to know you in this more intimate way, not just through the podcast. So there's been very special. And to all that amazing big audience that I believe is so supportive of this and seems like you.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely spot on Tim. I think you described it better than I can. So it's very much the case. And I don't always feel that wonderful feeling of not being separate. That tame world pulls me all over the place. But I have had these times where I've really felt very connected like that and I felt that separation drop away and that there really feels like there's no other. And it is a, it's deeply transformative and invigorating. And when I try to keep that with me and I try to be very grateful for that, and I think we all, as you say, all have access to that. You just have to just try and put in a little bit of that time and then it comes.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simple but profound experience that this animal kind of taught us. And yeah, I mean, I think you may have seen some of the images. It's quite wonderful to turn it around. I did. I did. And imagine what that animal's life is like. Imagine what its consciousness is like. We can't obviously quite get into that, but we can start to sense it. We're all made of the same stuff. We come from the same original mother.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And arms right over the lenses and us in the background. And eventually the octopus gave the camera back. And when we looked at these images, they had this amazingly profound effect on us that it was suddenly looking through this world from the octopus's perspective. It's so powerful. And we both came up with this idea. Octopus should be number one and Homo sapiens, the human animal should be 1,001. We forget that we're part of this wild world. We're born wild. We had this incredible heritage. So it was such a”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I get fired up and pissed off and say We had this fascinating experience not that long ago. I was with my friend and marine biologist who works with sea change Yannis and we were going out to Study these shaggy sea heads that hardly ever come to this area and very focused on the sea hairs. And the next moment this very curious octopus rushed out of its den and grabbed my camera. Now, I know that I must be very careful with these animals. I just don't want to grab a camera back because it can really disturb and unsettle that animal. So I was like, okay, I've got to be a bit careful there. So drag the camera through the gravel back to its den. And then I thought, okay, I'll just wait. And hopefully the animal will give my camera back. But what was so fascinating, I happened to be recording at the time. This a curious octopus looked at the camera, looked at the camera, then turned the camera and started filming us. And it's arms were draped over the lens. So you get these incredible images of these”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you're never going to persuade anybody by going in hard or having. Straight line opinions. I mean, our whole nature is so contradictory, human nature, and to accept that and to just try and work together rather than apart. I totally agree with you. I like that a lot.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much better life for ourselves in many ways. And so I think it is quite attractive. And people are struggling a lot. And these are, it's something that is not new. We've known this for enormously long period of time. So it's not something. If we start remembering, it just, it's transformative.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Biodiversity, you're keen on looking after the insects, you're keen on looking after the birds, they become precious to you. So it's a slow, gentle process, as you say, of storytelling in a way that is not, it's so easy in this conservation game to point fingers, and I'm very, very wary of that because the finger can point back at me so easily. We all are involved in this process and we all do things that aren't great for the planet, let's face it. I've never met a single person who doesn't. So we kind of need to come together as a community and reconnect with this massive extraordinary heritage and then uplift so many of our lives. We don't need so many of the things from the tame world. It's wonderful to enjoy some of them. But by giving up and sacrificing some of those things, we can actually create a”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It aligns in quite a few ways to what you're saying. And I think that, you know, there is this massive Pandemic of mental health throughout the world, let's face it. And I feel that part of that is this underlying disconnection from nature, from this original mother. So I think it's a wonderful idea to reintroduce people, as you say, very gently to that wild person that's inside of all of us and just gently coaxing a tiny bit of that wild person to have a look around and see what the world looks like. And then once that starts happening and the people start to build a relationship with the wild creatures, with the kin, with the plants, even with the minerals, with the universe, then the whole decision making process changes. You then don't want to do things that harm your family, that harm.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't understand why businesses and government are not putting much more attention on looking after and regenerating the deep foundation that keeps every single investment and every single enterprise on this planet going. So it's like this mother of mothers is just sitting there looking after everything. We're kind of like a child who's forgotten that its mother exists, but we are completely dependent on her in every single way. Why do you think it is that a lot of the tension is not Looking after her.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That and this way I'm quite fascinated by your sense of this is that there's enormous emphasis on climate change and all the carbon problems and everything that's absolutely critical and that must go on absolutely. But I feel there's not enough emphasis on biodiversity. And when I talk about biodiversity, I'm talking about all the plant and animal species on this planet. But they actually form our immune system. They are the life support system of everything. So if the fighter plankton communities in the ocean collapse, we stop breathing. Literally, that's it. So every single investment that you might have in the bank or any property you might own or any future children that you might want to have, that's game over for all that. That investment is worth zero if biodiversity collapses. So what I”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is our not-for-profit organization that's focused on ocean conservation. We've been going for about 10 years and started with an amazing group of volunteers who volunteered a lot of their time for five years. One of the big focuses, of course, the great African sea forest. And one of our methods has been how do you protect something if it's not even known? Nobody knows about the Kelf Forest. So my wife Swati gave it this name, the great African sea forest, and through the film Octopus Teacher, we've now, by some miracle, managed to make this place a sort of global icon and it's been referred to in scientific papers by this name all over the world. So it's much easier to protect it and the animals in that space. We're studying a thousand and one animals in the kelp forest, bringing their stories out. And we're also trying to get this idea across.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ancestors going back to long ago, millions of years, who actually built our minds, we can only do what we do because of them and the incredible ability to come through sometimes amazingly difficult times. And groups of them just slipped through. They almost went extinct a few times. So it's quite incredible that we're sitting here talking.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's for, I guess, people who want to have more of a relationship with this incredible world we live in. Even the universe that we live in that gave birth to us 13.7 billion years ago. Because I go into some of that through an amazing cosmologist I met. So it's people who want a deeper relationship with themselves and with the wild. And also you don't have to have affinity with water, but of course if that is part of your desire, then there are quite a few good examples of how to deal with cold, how to deal with water, how to track. and how to actually acknowledge and benefit from these incredible ancestors who have actually built our minds. You and I talking now is thanks to these extraordinary”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few people have read sort of advanced copies, have felt this real sense to start some of these practices, to start learning what I call the oldest language on earth, and to start observing this wild world around them, even if they live in a city. And it has been excitingly for just a few people quite transformative in that way. They started to look at the wild world in a different way, and it sort of affected them quite positively.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least there's nothing And I mean, imagine people for me. I was thinking of people who, this is a tiny little thing in many ways, you know, people are big actors in Hollywood and how they manage, I do not know. I had a tiny taste of that in a small, small way. But I believe that Buddhists have got a special prayer for people in the spotlight who are famous. They know that it's a difficult thing. But as you say, I think it's also a huge privilege. I've met so many incredible people through it, amazing opportunities. Of course, it's the flip side of that, which is very special. And when you get, and everything quietens down, it's much easier.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was so strange, Tim. I mean, I don't know your trajectory, and you've got this huge following and everything, if it was slow, but it was from literally as that thing went out, it was just an explosion”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was just focusing on nature and tracking and the cold and my ancestors and all I'd learned from working with Indigenous people for years and years and years, drawing on all those things, breathing, just calming everything down, just breathing sometimes for an hour or more a day. All these things that I learnt. And of course, eventually people quickly forget. If you don't feed that system, as you know, then it goes, it starts getting quiet and people start forgetting you very quickly, which is a huge relief because it's very intense when it first came out. And it was that perfect storm with COVID and everybody thinks about strange”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe so it felt that deep humility of that adversity. And I realize that the awards and all that stuff really didn't matter at all. But the one thing that mattered so much was these incredible letters that we got from people all over the world who'd been moved by the film and had helped their lives. And that really mattered. That was real. That was something that you could hold on to and it was very beautiful and very, very grateful to those people. because that's what kind of kept me going. And if I had to go back and say, would I want to go through all that hell of not sleeping again? In retrospect, I am glad I went through it. I'd hate to ever repeat that because it's very traumatic in some ways. But I learned a great deal from it. I learned a lot and I managed to, I think, heal parts of my psyche in certain ways. It ended well.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In three months. So it adds to the whole madness. So it was very difficult, but also, of course, that adversity is powerful because in an altered state for 24 hours a day and you're trying to deal with that and then you start to see into the deep psyche and to see parts of your mind that you've never glimpsed before. And then I slowly used wild nature just going into that sea. I couldn't last for very long because my system was so shattered and I lost so much weight. My beard went gray overnight kind of thing. But I used nature and I used all these things I'd learned from the wild to rebuild my nervous system and just gentle access to the cold and to the spaces and to these animals and I was able to kind of rebuild my system, but it kind of helped, it just crushed me so much.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the serious problem. And then more people want to contact you and they're very kind and they want to talk to you and interview and you can't even see straight because you haven't slept for.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's also a factor where, I don't know if you've thought about this, but going back to our design and where we come from, the San Societies and my SAN teachers, that's a very egalitarian society to even have a competition for someone who's better than somebody else would be absolutely out of the question. So we come as humans from this vast lineage where these people knew it was good to keep everybody on the same level and not have competition. Now suddenly you're winning awards, all the stuff, it's very exciting, but it's also very disturbing for the psyche. And for me, my nervous system was completely knocked out of kilter. So the main way it showed that was by not sleeping. My slept extremely badly, sometimes just a few minutes a night for weeks and for months. And that does a horrible thing.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And its enormous shock for the psyche to suddenly realize, how did that happen? And then a lot of people are trying to get hold of you. You've got no method for dealing with that at all. We're getting an email every four seconds. My nature is to be wanting to reply to everybody. Of course, that becomes impossible. And”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess you can imagine you here on the end of the planet, I'm right at the end of the tip of Africa, fairly isolated in a way. I mean, I may at that point I'd made 25 films. I'd done a lot of documentaries, some of them like the Great Dance. Somehow you'd manage to see because you were very interested in that subject. But we'd had some level, little levels of success and the films would go on and a few months later, then they'd go away and so on So I was expecting maybe a few people to be interested in this little octopus film. And we were used to these smaller channels or so like National Geographic or BBC or whatever. And it goes on and it comes off. You've got this giant Netflix, this enormous reach, and suddenly, absolutely like nobody on the end of the planet just fascinated by these animals and you end whatever the crazy number is.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immensely powerful. It gave our childhood meaning. It gave meaning to those stories. And it was a tremendous act of love to have that attention and that true interest in our naive young minds. It felt like an unconditional type of love and care and that we were sick, they looked after us. It was just very, very special. My parents had to work and they had enormous distractions and trying to survive and didn't have much money so it was much harder for them. But the grandparents were just phenomenal.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't have my son that early, but they were having children in their early 20s. So my great-grandmother used to walk seven miles every day to our house. He was very active and she lived till 96. She was, you know, and she was strong until 94. But the way she showed the love and my grand as well was with amazing attentiveness. So they used to come to our house when I was very young. I used to go out with my brother into the intertidal every day and we used to look for animals and fiddle around. But what was always in the back of our minds was we were going to be able to go back to the house and my grand and my great grand would sit and totally focus on our silly little kid stories like with an absolute wrapped attention. And there's something about that focus and not”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great difficulty, I can draw on that and just time, like dedicated time. I made sure I dedicated focus time to doing things with him, but things I also enjoyed doing that we both enjoyed doing. And we still today, this morning, we had an incredible game Frisbee together. And, you know, he helped me set up this podcast because he's much better technically. I'm useless with that. So it's just very special to spend time. I go diving with him a lot, swimming with a lot. We exercise together. So I think it's just the love, the time, and also having, you've got so many incredible experiences and so much to share with a child. The child would be, I'd love to be your child.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely not for me, but he has a deep love for nature, and it was amazing to pass that on. And I think the main thing for a child really is, it sounds like a cliche, but if they truly know that you really love them, it's like that's the most critical thing. I had my parents were very loving, but particularly my great grandmother and my grandmother had this incredible love and I can still feel that sitting in me today very strongly and when I'm in”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think certainly for me, certainly a huge turning point was When I felt I was inside of the natural world, I really had something to pass to him. Didn't want to try and overly push him or teach him as such. I just wanted to instill the love for that in him. But I knew I could only really do it if I knew it in my own self. So that was a big factor. And I can see that it's in him now. He doesn't have the mad, crazy passion. He's actually ironically a credible musician and does music for film. God alone knows where he got that from.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the main thing. That was a big factor, Tim, was like, if no one gets injured, then you can quite easily, I think, get over that sort of that process.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My son his friend and myself were in the house Swati my wife was in India about to come back and we literally ran out with a glass exploding around us and we were lucky not to get seriously injured. It's happened so fast it was just crazy. They say that this fire scientist who came and looked said if you don't catch it and especially if a bed or something catches within 30 seconds you're not going to put that fire out.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ocean, but also this pretty much this planet, this original deep mother that birthed our species and it nurtured me from my whole life was actually my home. And I would be absolutely fine as long as that biodiversity and that biosphere was functioning well and was healthy. It struck so hard and it was such a pity that I had to learn it by losing the house, but it was a profound lesson that this place, this wildness, the health of this place is our, or certainly for me, is my deep home. And I can always rebuild my home, which I am doing now, my house.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About a year and three months ago, we lost our home because of an electrical fire and literally from one hour to two hours later had this beautiful home that my wife and I and my son had nurtured for 16 years was ashes. We lost everything. I didn't have my passport, one pair of shorts and a t-shirt, nothing, absolutely nothing. Everything was gone. What was so fascinating, first of all, incredible friends and care and love from people around us helped us tremendously to get over that shock quite quickly. But that day of the fire, there was blisters everywhere and everything and walked down to the ocean. And I went in that kelp forest and I looked back towards the house that was no longer there. And it struck so hard in my heart that this”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. See how bad my music is. And the musicians were so excited because they'd never heard sounds like this before. And we just got this thing together in time as yo-yama literally arrived at my house. It was terrifying. I was really stressed out. And Zelani was so cool and calm. And then we performed for him. This group, and it was very, very magical, and he played cello on our deck. It was very, very magical and helped us afterwards wonderfully with our NGO and our conservation works. So through that idea of play and song catching, these beautiful relationships formed with these amazing people who were sort of committed to this strange idea.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry, that's the long stem of the kelp. So they're up to 15 meters, 45 feet long, but we had them washing on the shore after the storm and we got like 10 meter long ones. And my son and Ro tuned them and he played these incredible tubes made from the kelp like a drum.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, ah, unbelievable. And we recorded this. We used Abalone shells and made these incredible sounds. We found giant rocks on the shore that could be rocked and made these incredible percussive sounds. And then I think it was Pippa got hold of some good musicians. I think it was Roland Skillen, who's one of the best percussionists in the country. And he got hold of Zelani Mahola, this incredible cosa singer. And we all got together and said, yo-yamas coming, what can we do? And Zelani, of course, being an amazing performer, was able to connect onto this idea. And I took her diving and literally on her first dive, she was able to catch songs from the Kelp Forest. And we had these incredible instruments. We made an octopus drum. From eight steps of the kelp that washed”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having the greatest musician on this planet is now coming to Listen, it was like, oh, what have I done, absolute idiot? So I then, we've got this amazing group that I work with, a nonprofit sea change project. And I said, guys, we've got a problem. I desperately need your help. How can we do this? And they all came on board very kindly and helped me. And we started to have these strange experiences where we weren't catching so many lines or songs, but we were finding these amazing instruments that could be played underwater. So there was a whale's earbone that I'd found many years ago and didn't make any sound on land. And we're just intuitively took it into the water and struck this, free-dived into a cave, one of our favorite caves, and we struck it there. And the sound just went straight through our bodies. It was absolutely incredible. This deep booming sound from this whale's earbone about the size of my fist.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I got a few little words and phrases and then had this out of the blue strange coincidence, someone from the Yo-Yo Ma Foundation called me from New York and said, Yo-Yo Ma's coming to South Africa and is interested in some of the work and is anything you've got that we might do together? And I sort of stupidly said, oh, we're catching songs. We're doing a song catching and they were fascinated by this. And then he wanted to come and listen to the song we'd caught. And of course, I suddenly realized a huge mistake.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a wonderful way of describing And I think it goes deep into our deep past and their famous songs of the San of the Kalahari have caught at night in dreams or in visions that make up the trance dance. It goes deep back in time. So I thought, ooh, I'm just going to go and, you know, I'm going to get a beautiful song coming out. And I went into the Kelp Forest for weeks and literally got a dribble of terrible sentences that were nowhere near a song. And I was like, oh, this is not going to happen.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be able to somehow catch a song of a tree or a landscape or an animal and then frantically write down the song before it disappeared. And John's played some of these songs to me and they've had some really strange coincidences where people have got a very similar song about a same species of tree. So it was fascinating me. And I thought, ooh, I'd love to try and catch the song of the kelp forest. John's a great musician and knows all about songwriting. And I'm actually pathetic with all these things. So it was extremely difficult for me. And that is a long and involved story. I don't know how far you want to go, but we eventually managed to catch a song, but I had to have a lot of help and it involved yo-yo. We have all the time in the world.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Song catching was introduced to me by the idea by John Young, who's a wonderful tracker in California. And he used to go out with Bull Monroe, I think was the father of Lou's music or I could have got that wrong. But they used to go out into the wilderness and spend sometimes weeks out there and open themselves up to the wild and”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've lost count where we've actually been able to name and identify three species of shrimp. The most interesting one for me was the one that actually lives inside the octopus dens and probably has a mutual relationship with the cephalopods. In this part of the world, Tim, you won't believe how easy it is to find a new species. It's the naming of it that's an enormously difficult job. Sometimes when I'm with my amazing prof Charles Griffiths, we find a new species and we almost don't want to look at it because we know how much work. It's going to take to describe it. So you should almost ignore it.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mirror, and that sometimes when I've been in dark, difficult spaces, I see some pretty tough, difficult things reflecting back at me, you know, things are tough.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is something which is very hard to explain that seems to come about in the natural world, that feels just incredible. Like the behavior, especially animal behavior that I would often have never seen in my whole life. And then I'm focusing on this one particular animal desperate to learn from it. And then I just see right in front of me this incredible behavior that maybe, and there's never been recorded before. And that's happened again and again and again. And it eventually forced me to realize there's some extraordinary relationship between us humans and the natural world and probably the entire world is natural in many ways, but especially in these areas of high biodiversity, there's this strange, mysterious process that's going on that I find very difficult to explain, but it feels like the”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I've noticed is Of course there's attention bias. If you're looking for certain animals, say tuberculate cuttlefish comes to mind. Oh my God, you keep seeing them everywhere. But it's often because your mind is just focused on that shape, on that animal, on that movement. And of course, you're going to see more of them than you usually do. But there's some other fascinating factor that I've just seen again and again and again. And when I've spoken to some of the scientists, even I work with, certainly some of the cinematographers, there's a strange thing that the wild ecosystem is somehow mysteriously mirroring the human psyche. And almost wanting to teach us and show us things way beyond where the edge of attention bias leads. So it's almost as if when we are attentive, when we care, when we focus,”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it just said to me, it's underneath the sand. And that's what you're talking about. You know, this is this conversation. It's underneath the sand. And I dug about that deep in the sand and out came this incredible live heart urchin, this extraordinary animal. And I realized, okay, this is how it's working. This is where they're coming from. And then I was able to put together all the clues. And now I can find them quite easily. They have these very, very subtle detritus traps that is a very subtle track. But I didn't know that. But my unconscious and all the memories of how to do this and put the dots together clicked into place.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I've found is if I just actually relax and release her and let that enormous unconscious that's connected to the deep ancestry, that's connected to three million years in our genus as Homer and 300,000 years as sapiens. Let that connect with my unconscious and just come up to the surface. And then it's like it's there. And it feels magical, but it's actually a process that all the sensory system and all these memories are coming together when you were talking, I was thinking of the heart urchin. I spent three years trying to find this animal. Occasionally I'd find a dead shell of this magnificent kinoderm and I just didn't know where they were coming from. I didn't know probably from the deep ocean I thought none of the scientists knew. And then one day I did what I've described.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It totally resonates with me, Tim, and the struggling to say it is, I love that because it's mysterious. So much of this is mysterious to us because we are programmed to see the world through the window of science. Don't get me wrong, I love science. I love marine biology especially paleontology. But what happens as you immerse is what you're saying. There's this remembering. And I think what I've experienced is my eyes and my brain are looking around and they're seeing an enormous number of things, enormous number of signs, some of which now I can identify, but some of which my conscious mind is not recognizing. But the unconscious is taking everything in. So when I then am looking for something or trying to find something”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asked some of the old song, you know, which do you prefer this new life or the old ways when you were nomadic? And like he said, it wasn't an obvious answer. Half of them said, you know, we're desperate to go back to the old life. It was incredible and such an adventure and so powerful. And half of them said, no, it was just too difficult. And we much prefer being static and we've got our water supply. We're not going thirsty for weeks and they preferred that. So as you say, it's not all roses depending on where you were. But I think some of those early lives were just incredible.”
2024-05-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #735: Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT