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Craig Foster

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2024-05-01

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2024-05-01

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1. “And we just need to go and harvest a tiny bit each day, and there'll be plenty for everybody, for the family. And you feel, oh, everything's all right. Everything will be fine. This is good. This is the good life.”

   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

2. “I think what it is, it might be connected to when we know there's enormous biodiversity and health in the ecosystem around us. You must remember we've had in our species 300,000 years as hunter-gatherers. So when you're in an environment like that, you know you can survive. There's plenty of food. You don't have to work very hard to get all your needs. So you feel very relaxed. If you're in an environment where there's almost no biodiversity, your ancient creature that's living inside you, your deep design, is terrified because it doesn't know you can go to the supermarket. It just looking and feeling and hearing and smelling. There's no life around. So the experience of going to these wilderness places tells that wild part of us that everything is okay. There's plenty for everybody.”

   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

3. “How that near pristine biodiversity affected my psyche and the people around me. It was as if I'd been given some magic elixir and I felt so much calmer, so much more present, so much more at home. And that feeling lasted for months and months and months. So I think it's depending on how much nature is around you and how much you're able to access it and your experience of, it deeply affects a psyche in a very, very profound way. So I absolutely, I mean, it's so great that you're doing those experiences on a regular basis and you feeling, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You come back and it feels like you've been rebooted.”

   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

4. “Could I just say something to add to that? I'd had exactly those experiences, like you're saying. It just suddenly got the fuel to be able to operate well for weeks or even months after that experience, like one of those experiences. But it hit so hard home when I had this very fortunate experience to spend a month on this research station, on this very, very remote island thousands of kilometers off East Africa. It's a near pristine environment. So it looks and feels like the earth was 50,000 years ago. Everywhere you look, the animals, it is teeming. It is mind-bending in terms of what is there. But what was most fascinating to him was”

   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

5. “I love this science. So I love the tame world as well. But if I get drawn too much in that, I feel my nervous system just ratchets up and I can't sleep properly and I feel odd. So it's just about trying to find that balance. And I'm very passionate about this subject.”

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6. “I'm a wild animal. These creatures that I interact have taught me I'm a wild animal. So how could I find that balance? And it was almost like I was walking along the shore and then that ocean to the one side was my wild self and the land to the right was this tame self and I was trying desperately to find a balance because you can't go back to a fully wild existence. That door is completely shut for us now. But how could I find this balance and certainly not easy. I don't pretend to have found this incredible perfect balance, but I must say when I practice all these things that I've tried to put in the book about retaining the wildness, I do feel a lot more centered and a lot calmer. Don't get me wrong, I love a good cup of coffee. I love watching movies. I love all the incredible things and science.”

   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

7. “I didn't even know what it meant at the time, but it kept coming up this amphibious soul. What the hell is that? And it felt like, much like I think you maybe feel, that I was living a double life. Part of my life was wild and connected to three million years of deep evolution in all my incredible ancestors from Africa. And then part of my life was very connected to all the tame world and all the comforts and all the wonderful technologies and things that come with that. And it was like very hard to reconcile the two. How do I find the balance between these two extremes and the pull of the tame world and all the technology and these phones and all this stuff was so strong? But yet I could feel in my deep design that I was completely, I was born while I was”

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8. “I went through a pretty tough period after the film came out. I wasn't in any way expecting or be ready to be exposed to hundreds of millions of people on Netflix. It was a huge shock for me. And part of it was trying to come out of that space and just to get down on paper what was in my head. But I also had this feeling of this relationship with all these animals that I mentioned to you. I just wanted so much to tell their stories. I'd learned so much beyond the octopus. Obviously, that film was very much focused on that one animal, that one story. And I had this strange feeling, Tim, of this.”

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9. “Super clipfist. It's a rock fish Type of rock fish, and they follow the octopus hunting around and they pick off and scavenge. It's not too clear exactly what the octopus might get out of it. They're probably acting as in the same way like the bird's alarm call. So if a bigger predator comes in, then the fish will tell the octopus.”

   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

10. “So the story actually came through my wife Swati who grew up for all her life in India. So conservation journalist had her own wildlife show on TV and she knew people from Bangladesh, the last few people who was still practicing this in some form and they hunt for fish and then the fish get shared between the humans and the otters. But I think it goes back much, much deeper, deep, deep in time. If your imagination, you start going, imagine these early humans, how many interactions they would have had with wild creatures and the possibilities that what they would have got up to, I think, could be pretty extraordinary.”

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11. “And it reached out and started touching my face. It was so overwhelming that I was actually in a shed a few tears in the mask and it was very powerful. And then animals swimming around and bouncing off the ocean floor. They were very playful, beautiful animals. And it was just, oh my God, now I know why I'm here. High pitched sound is almost to call me back in. It was very strange and I didn't really know what was going on. And afterwards, I did a lot of research and found out that there's a very long tradition of humans hunting with wild otters. It goes back deep into prehistory. And I wondered, I mean, I don't know for sure at all if this animal had a deep memory and was somehow trying to reconnect with that heritage, or if it was just curious and wanted to look and feel the strange sort of primate flopping around in the water.”

    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

12. “Lives have never seen one. So it was very exciting. And my instinct was to keep still and not turn to face the animal because I know that, you know, from working with a lot of wild animals, they see them, our mouths and our fronts as the aggressive part that maybe will bite them. So I just kept quite still and just looked out the corner of my eye. And this animal became more and more curious and I was amazed to actually feel it starting to touch my feet. They've got these incredible dexterous hands, clawless front paws, three claws on the back. And it was just this electric energy of this animal actually making physical contact without me doing anything. And I kept still, and then it moved up my side, and then I just saw this unbelievable whiskered face and these incredible bright eyes just looking straight into my mark.”

    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

13. “That's amazing your ability to dig things out from the deep past. Good tracking, Tim. That's a long time ago. So this was actually in the early days. I was probably, I'm guessing now three years into diving every day. And I was questioning myself. I was going in the early morning, was freezing middle of winter. And I was thinking, what the hell am I doing here? doing this. Is it really going to pay off? Am I just going mad? And I was about halfway through the dive and I suddenly felt a fairly large animal under my sort of periphery vision and thought, oh my goodness, this is a Cape Trauless Otto. And especially in those days it's changed slightly now, but these animals are super shy. Some people who've lived here their whole”

    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

14. “Because I have this, it feels like family like kin in the water after a while, many years. You just feel this tremendous love for these creatures. And they've taught me so much. They're real teachers for me. So I love them. And then I have these bonds. So the human relationships on land, I don't feel I need as much from them. So I think my relationship with my wonderful wife has become better because of that and with a lot of close friends, family. Something happens in the psyche. And if you imagine like we've throughout prehistory for countless hundreds of thousands of years, we've had these relationships with all these species. Now in many cases it's totally taken away. But where's that going to go? Where's all that relationship going to go? And it mostly goes, I think, to put more pressure on human relationships.”

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15. “A seven gill shock or a great white shark, tiger shark, that kind of thing. So it's fairly safe to be with those animals and sometimes there's enormous number of them together in the case of the seven gills. I've been with 55, 60 of them. And they're each the size of a lion. And they hunt seals, they hunt dolphins, but they don't know that I'm prey. So it's quite safe to be with them. What has happened, and I've got a lot of relationships with these smaller creatures. And because of that, it feels as if I'm not as reliant on my human relationships.”

    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

16. “What has happened to me is that through the tracking underwater, I've been very fortunate and privileged to have these special relationships with a lot of different wild animals. And remember, the animals in the water are not afraid of people like they are on land. You know, this primate on land on two legs is very dangerous. A lot of animals are very scared. That didn't happen in the water. So these animals are quite curious. A lot of time they're not scared. So I can get very close to a lot of animals. And for instance, an animal equivalent size and a ferocity to a lion, I can be right next to it, one meter away and I'm safe.”

    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

17. “First of all It made my desire to be better tracking on land stronger. So now I've got a wonderful friend, JJ Minya, Cosser Master Tracker, who I work with and who's teaching me on a weekly basis. So that's been very profound on land and I sometimes take him into the intertidal in the water and show him what I know there. So it's exciting. But I think what you're asking is...”

    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

18. “You know, once you know all the drill holes, you can tell who's been in an area, who's been eating who by the shininess of the shell and a whole lot of things, you can tell the timing, their bite marks everywhere. They are literally thousands and thousands of these subtle signs, but it's taken me 10 years to slowly put together because there's no manuals on this. There's no books. As far as I know, nobody's really done this in the bigger aquatic picture. So it did take a very long time to figure it all out.”

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19. “At first, in our struggled for several years, I had this idea, I got incredibly inspired by the San in the Kalahari and I thought, could I ever track underwater? And it just seemed impossible because a track gets put there and then the next swell washes it away. So there's nothing there. And then I started to notice the slime trails. So a lot of the mollusks leave very subtle slime trails and those collect tiny particles of sand. And if you're not looking very carefully, you'll never notice those, but they're actually everywhere. It's like, oh gosh, you know, so that was the first track I saw. I was very excited. And then I started seeing all these tracks on the backs of animals like that ray that I told you about. So the mollusks are interacting with that ray and I could tell how long that animal has been resting because of that, their enormous number of tiny little marks that the predators make.”

    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

20. “How the body's ability to thermoregulate tells you how your mind is feeling so that can plummet radically. So if it's a foregoing well, then I can stay in for quite a long time. And what I love about the cold is that it feeds the brain with these extraordinary chemicals, you know, dopamine and no adrenaline and all these beautiful chemicals that make you feel really good and motivated and set the day up beautifully. It also helps the underwater tracking because it's somehow the cold makes your mind sharper. And I try and relax a lot so I don't get much cortisol going in. It actually, even though I could obviously spend longer in the water with a wetsuit, I prefer an hour or so and with all these amazing chemicals from the coal that help me focus and understand the secret lives of these animals.”

    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

21. “So many of them. And I do this because it makes one feel very relaxed. It builds the immune system. And of course, it helps with the diving. But one's got to be very careful never to do any of these breathing techniques close to actually going in the water. You probably want at least half an hour more away from that. I never do these breathing things and then go into the water. And, you know, any free diving, I will only take two or three deep breaths before I go on a dive. You've got to be so careful with that. The cold exposure, I've spent the last 12 years pretty much diving every single day. So I've climatized myself to the cold, feel mostly very comfortable in cold water for an hour or so. But if I haven't slept or if I'm particularly stressed about something or not feeling well, that changes radically. It's amazing.”

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22. “Absolutely right. Every morning I do a breath hold practice where I do deep breathing and then I hold my breath for, say, three to five minutes, do it three or four times. And I quite like having some really interesting distractions. I don't feel like the desire to breathe and your podcasts have been the sort of favorite thing to listen to. I love”

    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

23. “And it's just about persistence. You don't have to have any great intellect or anything. You just have a little cell phone camera, some notes, and you just start observing these things. And suddenly this incredible invisible world becomes visible to you. And it becomes very fascinating. And then you think after a year or two of doing it, okay, I really know what's going on. And then if you persist, oh my goodness, there's another incredible layer. And it just keeps going on and on and on. And you basically fall in love with this extraordinary biasphere that is keeping us alive. And you start to have this conversation, this incredible wild conversation with this environment that's around us.”

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24. “Can do it in cities. I've seen incredible trackers in America doing this. I've got a great friend John Young, who's incredible tracker, bird language expert, who wrote the definitive book on bird language. But even on a simple level, Tim, if you just start to look at a small area where there are few insects and maybe a few birds, maybe one or two amphibians, and you start to just take notes and observe every day, just say for half an hour. And after a while, you'll be absolutely shocked at what you couldn't see before. It'll be like so obvious and it was totally invisible to you before. It's like, can't believe I missed all these things. And it's not just about the leaves changing color, but there are thousands of these things going on that unless you take notice, you will miss. Nature then becomes this incredible teacher.”

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25. “Language story works. What makes them so incredible is I think this incredible legacy, sort of their lineage goes back 120,000 years. So it's this tradition that's been passed down for an enormous time period, longer than any other group of people on the planet. And I think that is one of the many factors that make them so extraordinary.”

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26. “It was fascinating to see that they could observe animals with their technique moving up to one and a half kilometers away. So they can feel a predator moving one and a half kilometers away and you can't see more than 100 meters. And they're doing that by listening to the ripples of sound that the small birds are giving off. So these ripples come through and these incredibly subtle sounds, they then feel and see in their mind's eye in this oral picture that predator moving. And they can feel a big raptor flying as well from a long distance away. And then they will pinpoint sometimes when it makes a kill and they'll even know what animal's being killed by these reactions a lot of the time. So it's just, it feels at first like total magic until you realize how this whole bird”

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27. “And that summarize deeply satisfying. So you could, in your environment, say you got very close to even a single group of insects, you could be much closer to wild nature and to what I call the mother of mothers than if you were in an area that was in the middle of Africa where it's just teeming with game. So it does very much depend on your ability to immerse and see these what I often refer to as the secret lives of these animals. So it's even possible. It's more about your observance and your detailed look. It obviously helps a lot if you're surrounded by these things, but it's the intimacy that makes all the difference. And this is this idea of mine of like, well, you feel you kind of outside or inside of nature. And you can get inside. Even through a tiny animal, an ant, an insect, if you spend enough time.”

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28. “More relaxed, more at home, and there's all sorts of reasons for that. But there's another factor to this as well, Tim. I mean, I've sort of searched for wildness my whole life and struggled actually to find it in many ways. And I've done very extreme things to try and get close to wildness, like diving with crocodiles and this kind of thing. But strangely enough, when I've sometimes felt the closest to wild nature is when I've just spent time with some small animals, say like limpets, which look really like little stones on the rocks, they hardly move. But I've got to know those little animals intimately. I've got to know how they move away from the sun. I've seen them looking after their gardens. I've seen how they broadcast spawn. I've got incredible intimacy with them. And that has let me sort of slip inside their lives.”

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29. “It gave me time to think, which is great. Of course, there is a big advantage to being close to areas which are filled with biodiversity. The human psyche somehow knows that and it reacts and it does feel”

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30. “This kind of what has been coined by some researchers I've worked with called Wilderness Rapture. And a lot of other people have noticed this in Indigenous societies as extraordinary sense of joy that seems to be connected to being very embedded in the natural world. So that's, I mean, I've met also very joyful people in our society. And obviously some people have just got more or less of that. But it seems to be very apparent in some of these people who deeply connected to the wild.”

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31. “Was fascinating to me was an immediately classy clock neck comes to mind, this incredible bow hunter that we worked with. And a lot of the other son I've worked with over the years. You'll be walking along tracking, looking for sign, looking for tracks. And suddenly there will just be this beautiful laughter that boils up inside him and just comes out. And you're looking around to see what is funny or what's amused him. It's not something from the outside world. It's this primal joy of being in that space and being so connected to the wild that just comes out. And it happens quite often. And this is tremendous joy despite, if you think about it, many of the lives of the people I've worked with are very hard and they're extremely poor and it's difficult sometimes to survive, yet there's this innate joy.”

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32. “Yeah, it's extraordinary. And then there's really, if you make a mistake, you're dead. Exactly the same kind of thing. And in fact, I spoke to Nainoa an incredible day with him here in False Bay. We dived together when he circumnavigated the world. I spoke to him about the son trackers and he was like, yes, that's exactly what we're doing. We're using our bodies and obviously the stars and everything as this navigation device. And you might recall his great teacher, Papa Mao, used to lie asleep. And when that ocean-going canoe moved one degree, of course, his body would wake up and he'd tell them. So even asleep, he was able to do this extraordinary navigation.”

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33. “Into an altered state and was somehow mysteriously locked onto that animal. And these kudoo are like the ghosts of the bush. They're impossible to follow unless you're at a master level. But the kudoo is doing everything to outwit him. And he would just go straight across the tracks and find it in this impossibly dense bush, the central Kalahari, you can't see more than 100 meters. You can't see the animal at all. 90% of the time he's running at quite a high speed and he can't see anything. His body is like a radar system. And I've come across this ability with other indigenous people, even ocean navigators, that the body in its primal state is got this incredible ability to be able to follow things and find things. So that's how it worked.”

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34. “It's basically because we can sweat and keep ourselves cool, whereas those animals overheat. And this is, I mean, just to be clear, this is not something that happens very often. This is a sacred hunt that maybe happens once every three or four years. And it's done almost a religious experience. And it's very dangerous for the humans as well. They've got almost no water. they can also quite easily die. So it's this testing of their ability and their strength and their incredible ability to track. What is the most fascinating thing to me was that after a certain point in time and the hunt that we managed to film took over four hours and for I'd say at least three of those hours, Karuha, the tracker, was not following the physical tracks. He had gone”

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35. “Very, very, very extreme. We were like skeletons after their shoots. We were just lost so much weight and was so intense. But we eventually managed to get this sacred hunt, this hunt by running. And we met these extraordinary trackers who became real mentors, you know, and they've always stayed with me for my whole life that they immersed us in a wild existence that was, it felt like they'd taken us back 10,000, 20,000 years in time. And everything started lighting up in me. It was incredible, but it was also disturbing because I realized how far outside of nature I was compared to them. And that started this niggling in my head to try and get eventually inside of her.”

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36. “That's going back a long time. So, this was the late 90s. And my brother and myself had been living on remote islands in different parts of the world, just living wild for many, many months. And we came back to Southern Africa, to South Africa. And we'd always been fascinated by the San and these incredible trackers from the Kalahari. And we'd heard of this extraordinary, almost thought it was a myth that there were these last master trackers who could still run down animals and put themselves against the animal without bone arrow. And they could only run in the extreme heat over 40 degrees or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So we had this crazy wild mission to go up there and see if we could be the first people to film this. And it was very extreme.”

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37. “Apparently, yes, and I did the same with my son, but I wasn't felt that I couldn't take him immediately. I waited till he was, I think, a week or so old. And his little belly button actually broke off and washed out to sea when I took him in.”

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38. “I mean, obviously, I don't remember it, but I've been told this story many times by my parents. They brought me home from the nursing home and we lived in a little wooden bungalow that was actually half the house was below the high watermark. So it was a crazy place to live, you know, the waves used to smash the windows. But they took me straight from the nursing home and dunked me in that Atlantic Ocean, which was probably 12 degrees centigrade, which is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And I mean, you know, it's quite a shock, obviously, for a young child. I screamed like hell. But that was our kind of family tradition. And then I, from a very early age, was in the intertidal diving at three years old. My mother, when I was in the womb, would be pretty much in the water every day while she was pregnant. So that Atlantic Ocean has just always been.”

    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

39. “And this massive animal in the kelp forest. And then it actually was watching me for a while and you have to be incredibly careful with these animals. They're gentle. But if they do get agitated and they get a spine in you, it's pretty much game over. It's a necrotic poison that rots out your organs. So you've got to be super careful. They teach you to move very slowly in the water. And then the animal came up right to the surface. And this way it's weighing about a ton. So it was actually like weighing down part of the kelp forest and I was just managed to glide with it for maybe 10 minutes right next to just trying to keep my vibrations right down. So it was just such an incredible feeling to be in that wild space with this giant beautiful animal. And this, you know, I've never seen a white one like that in all my time.”

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40. “I said just before coming on, I went for my swim in the Great African Sea Forest. It was just 50 meters to the right of here. It's a very wild, windy day today so that the technique is to swim long distances along the coast because that underwater tracking is quite difficult. And you're hoping to pick up something interesting. I was thinking, oh, there's not much happening. And suddenly I saw this enormous white shape. And just below me was the biggest stingray in the world. I mean, it's the biggest species in the world. They're up to 16, 17 feet long, 14 feet wide. Incredible animal. And what is strange about this animal, Tim, was it was absolutely white. They normally dark gray or black, and it was covered in a very fine layer of sand that was over the slime that's on the skin. So it was this dark wild forest with a 30 knot wind above.”

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41. “Incredible to be here, some have had the same thing. I've listened to so many of our podcasts and I've always wanted to talk to you, so it's very exciting.”

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