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

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Hello boys and girls, ladies and gyrms. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview world-class performers across many different disciplines.

My guest today I've wanted to have on the podcast for many years, and we finally did it. Craig Foster has many adventures, many lessons to share, including experiences with the Kalahari Bushman, legendary trackers and hunters. His experiences with great white sharks in kelp forests. His experiences with octopus, yes it's octopus is not octopus pie. Perhaps you've seen his film, my octopus t-shirt.

There are so many lessons to be learned from Craig, and so many things that you can do in your life, in your backyard today based on this conversation. But who is Craig? Let me give you his bio. Craig Foster is an Oscar and BAFTA winning filmmaker, naturalist author and ocean explorer. His films have won more than 150 international awards.

He's the co-founder of the sea change project, an NGO dedicated to the long term conservation and regeneration of the great African sea forest. His film that I mentioned, which became a mega mega hit on Netflix, my octopus teacher has led to making the great African sea forest a global icon. His new book is amphibious soul, finding the wild in a tame world.

He's the one who can find him online at seachangeproject.com and we will link to everything in the show notes. Two caveats, number one, I got very excited in this conversation because many of the topics we explored are really top of mine for me and of deep, deep personal interest and our very high priorities in my life. So what does that mean? I talked a lot at a couple of points. Sorry in advance, that's what happens sometimes I get nervous. I talk too much. We all do it or at least I do.

So sorry about that. Number two, we actually had an equipment malfunction. Now that doesn't really affect your learning experience because the audio quality will be high, but we switched from backup to primary or primary to backup at least once. And so the tone changes slightly, but it's still very, very high quality and yet again, two is one and one is none. So always have a backup. Thank you, Jocco, Willink and others for teaching me that lesson as well as Morgan Spurlock. Thank you, Morgan.

Now with our further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging, very practical conversation with Craig Foster where we talk about rediscovering nature, we talk about rebuilding your nervous system, the oldest language on earth, we'll describe and define what that means, adventures of all types, different approaches you can take, experiments you can run, there's so much to this conversation. So enjoy.

Craig, so nice to finally meet I have wanted to connect with you for quite a few years. So thank you for making the time. Incredible to be here to my the same thing. I've listened to so many of our podcasts and I've always wanted to talk to you. So it's very exciting.

I thought we would start with just a slice of life. We had our first text exchange this morning and I shot you a quick note and I said I'm really looking forward to connecting and would you mind describing for the audience your response and your morning perhaps or at least what you were doing prior to texting.

Sure, so just before coming on, I went for my swim in the Great African Sea forest was just as 50 meters to the right of yeah it's a very wild windy day today so that the technique is to swim long distances along the coast because that underwater tracking is quite difficult and you're hoping to pick up something interesting.

I was thinking I was not much happening in suddenly I saw this enormous white shape and just below me was the biggest stingray in the world and this is 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 term was it was absolutely white they normally dark gray or black and it was covered in a very fine left sand that was over the slime that's on the skin.

So it was this dark wild forest with a you know, 13 not wind above me 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 they're gentle. But if they do get agitated and they get a spine in you it's pretty much came over it's a necrotic poison that rots out your organs so.

You 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 it's way it's weighing about a ton so it is 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 never seen a white one like that in all that all my time. We're going to cover a lot of ground literally and metaphorically in this conversation so it's not going to be all underwater but it seems like your underwater experiences started very very very early.

Could you describe the day of your birth please me and obviously I don't remember it but I've been told the story many times by my parents that brought me home from the nursing home and we we lived in a little wooden bungalow that was actually half the house was below the high water mark service a crazy.

I was in a place to live in other waves used to smash the windows in but they took me straight from the nursing home and dumped me in that Atlantic ocean which is probably 12 degrees centigrade which is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and I mean in it's quite a shock obviously for young child a 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 room would would be pretty much in the water every day while it was pregnant so that Atlantic ocean has just always been part of my life so when you say family tradition that means that prior generations are also dumped in the ocean right after being.

I was currently apparently yes and I did the same with my son but I wasn't felt that I couldn't take him immediately so I waited till he was I think a week or so old and his actual his little belly button actually broke off and washed out to see when I took him in. So we're going to span from the ocean to the Calahari here and I'm front loading a couple of stories just to give people a buffet a few tastings of different dishes.

I was actually I wouldn't say introduced to your work but harshly introduced to your work by a friend mutual friend well actually was boy. I'm a party who's been on the podcast the lion tracker is a guy to life is one of his books and also separately a friend of mine and Alex who lives in South Africa as a master tracker. Oh wow yeah. Alex I name well he's a wonderful guy. There you go all right so I've spent a bunch of time with Alex and Renys. Amazing.

And this is fun to explore with you because we're just meeting each other but we've been exposed to the others work the great dance. And I found the video of the great dance and found it endlessly fascinating but since this is a bit of inside baseball would you please describe this film and how it came to be I don't really genus this story.

You know 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 sun and these incredible trackers from the Calahari and we'd heard of this extraordinary almost sort of a myth that there were these last master trackers who could still run down animals and put themselves against the animal without bone error and there be 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 form this and it was very extreme very very very extreme we were like skeletons after these shoots we were just lost so much weight and was so intense but we eventually managed to get the sacred hunt this hunt by running and we met these extraordinary trackers who became real mentors you know they've always stayed with me.

And my whole life that they immersed us in a wild existence that was it felt like they're taking us back 10,000 20,000 years in time and everything started lighting up in me I was it was incredible but it was also disturbing because I realized how far outside of nature was compared to them and that started this niggling in my head to try and get eventually inside of her.

And inside of her referring to mother nature alright so let's take a closer look at the sun bush hunters for a moment there are few scenes that really stuck out to me and this is not necessarily be threading together cohesive narrative but one of them was after a day of tracking and hunting assembling I guess I wouldn't say they're

thorn bushes but some type of brush around the fire so that they can tell stories recount the day and then sleep while there are other animals certainly about not all prey necessarily at night and it really did strike me that that scene could have been from thousands of years ago more or less unchanged and for definition sake you said run down animals I want to paint a picture for folks so this is

also called persistence hunting and the reason the temperature is important please correct me if I'm neglecting any aspect of this is that for instance if you are in new England in the United States and you tried to run down a white tail deer good luck it's going to be very very challenging

but when the temperatures are high enough why can humans on an endurance basis and survival basis outlast something like a kudo or an antelope how's that possible it's basically because we can sweat and keep ourselves cool

and this is not something that happens very often this is a sacred hunt that maybe happens once every three or four years and it's done almost a religious experience so and it's very dangerous for the humans as well they've got almost no water so they can also quite easily die so it's this testing of their ability and their strength and their incredible ability to live in the world

incredible ability to track what is the most fascinating thing to me was that after 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

you know the tracker was not following the physical tracks he had gone into an altered state and was somehow mysteriously locked onto that animal and these kudo are like the ghosts of the bush they impossible to follow unless you're a master level but kudo is doing everything to artwork him

and he would just go straight across the tracks and find it in this impossibly dense bush the central calahari you can't see more than a hundred meters you can't see the animal at all so 90% of the time he's running at quite a high speed and he can't see anything and his body is like a radar system

and I've come across this ability with other indigenous people even ocean navigators that the body in its primal state is this has got this incredible ability to be able to follow things and find things so that's how it worked I recall just to give people a reference as well if they're interested in digging into this there's a book called The Wayfinders by Weight Davis that has a long chapter on Polynesian navigation which blew my mind I won't go into great detail with that now

I know that book and I know those Polynesian voyages I know and I know Thompson well it's unbelievable yeah it's extraordinary and then there's really if you make a mistake you did that's exactly the same kind of thing in fact I spoke to 9 know a had incredible day with him you in falsepay we dive together when he circumnavigated the world I spoke to him about the song trackers

and he was like yes that's exactly what we're doing we're using our bodies and obviously the stars and everything as this navigation device and you might recall his great teacher Papa mile used to lie asleep and when that ocean going can you moved one degree of course his body would wake up and you tell him so even asleep he was able to do this extraordinary navigation

and I know that our laws are really striking to me even though I have had no contact with Polynesian navigators and I'm probably getting my terminology wrong but one thing that really stood out is as a westerner who also has zero sailing experience but as someone who has certainly read a story here

I think of a captain as navigator but it seems like in these older Polynesian traditions and certainly skill sets you have the navigator and then you have something akin to as opposed to captain who's running other aspects of the ship minus the navigation component

and the reason I say parallels is that thinking of I've never met the color of bushman but watching your film and then reading these accounts of the Polynesians strikes me that they're experienced their cognitive experience their experience of consciousness the way that they parallel process is I think something that would seem very foreign to most people who live 18 inches away from laptop screen or in an urban jungle most of the time

how would you describe their mode of existence and by that I don't mean what they do what type of house they live in but more how they experience the world how is that different from what most people say I'm sitting in a high rise in Austin, Texas sure a lot of people listening to this are in a Los Angeles or in New York

how are those experiences of the world most different in your mind what was fascinating to me was an immediately classy cocknet comes to mind this incredible bow hunter that we worked with and a lot of the other son of 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 up and you're looking around to see what is funny or what's amused him and 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 it just comes up and it's happens quite often and this is a tremendous joy despite if you think about many of the lives of the people I've worked with are very hard and extremely poor and it's difficult sometimes to survive yet they're not going to be able to do that

yet there's this innate joy this kind of what has been coined by some researchers I've worked with a called wilderness rapture and a lot of other people have noticed this in indigenous societies there's extraordinary sense of joy that seems to be connected to being very embedded in the natural world

so that's a I mean I've met also very joyful people in our society and obviously some people have just got more or less of that but it seems to be very apparent in some of these people who deeply connected to the wild when I think about your physical location as we speak and also as well documented in my octopus teacher fantastic film of course not the only person who feels that way you have within striking distance and you have had it seems for a lot of your life within striking distance

and this is a term I've ended up using a lot in the last few years when people ask me where I most want to live say when I have a family in or around immersive nature and I would draw distinction for me at least experientially between say where I'm now where I am within a few blocks of walking on a dirt trail around a man-made lake which is a section of a river

and there are some beautiful trees around town like here in Austin and you feel like you are around nature but it doesn't have the vastness that you might perceive when you are say in the mountains when you're in an alpine environment where you feel dwarfed by your surroundings or I would imagine in a kelp forest in the ocean and you see a 14 foot sting right

and which is not say everyone needs to have these experiences all the time but I'm wondering how your proximity to that affects your life your mental health contrasted maybe with times when you have not been close to that because when I think about what I would love to have family not just for myself but also for kids I would really love to be within very easy access of this type of immersive experience

and I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts on that very long-winded mini TED Talk that I just gave. It gave me time to think which is great. I think of course there is a big advantage to being close to areas which are filled with biodiversity. The human psyche somehow knows that and it reacts and it does feel more relaxed more at home and there's all sorts of reasons for that but there's another factor to this as well Tim.

I've sort of searched for wildness my whole life and struggled actually to find it in many ways and have 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 limps which look really like little stones on the rocks they hardly move.

But I've got to know those little animals intimately. I've got to know how they move away from the sun. I've seen them looking after their gardens. I've seen how they broadcast spawn. I've got incredible intimacy with them and that has let me sort of slip inside their lives and that somehow is deeply satisfying. So you could in your environment say you got very close to even a single group of insects.

You could be much closer to wild nature and to what I call the mother of mothers. Then if you were in an area that was in the middle of Africa where it's just you're teaming with game so it does very much depend on your ability to immerse and see these what I often refer to the secret lives of these animals that's even possible.

It's more about your observance and your detailed look. It obviously helps a lot if you surround it 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 and ant and insect if you spend enough time.

Let's talk about maybe an extreme example of intimacy and then I'm going to pull in an example that I believe you've given of one tree in New York so we're going to bring it to New York but we're going to go back to the Calahari Alex who I mentioned earlier Alex Vanden Heaver I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly I don't speak African but it's probably close enough for the purposes of.

And I there we go. I knew it was. I knew it was going to be one of those folks fog in type of situations. I know that's not Dutch by the way folks but we're offer guns in any case. Alex I encourage people to check out tracker Academy which is an NGO nonprofit which Alex is deeply involved with which I've also supported and they do they do fantastic work on a number of levels.

He has incredible respect and admiration for the tracking abilities of the sun or the sun I'm not sure how to pronounce that correctly what makes them so impressive. Alex he himself I mean he is a master tracker what he can do below is my mind when I watch him identify tracks and follow tracks at high speed.

It is almost incomprehensible although I have some basic vocabulary now because I've spent time with him and others studying tracking at a very very one or one level what makes the hunters you spend time with in the Calahari so particularly impressive at least to you. It was fascinating to see that they could observe animals with technique moving up to one and a half kilometers away so they can feel a predator moving one and a half kilometers away and you can't see more than a hundred meters.

And they're doing that by listening to the ripples of sound that the small birds are giving off so these ripples come through and these incredibly subtle sounds they then feel and see in their minds eyes in this oral picture that predator moving and they can feel a big.

A 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 animals being killed by the three actions a lot of the time so it's just it feels at first like total magic until you realize the how this whole bird language story works what makes them so incredible as I think this.

Incredible legacy as of their lineage goes back 120,000 years so it's a tradition that's been passed down for in a 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.

We pull back and try to bring that say to people listening in the US there are a lot of people listening internationally but plenty of people in the US I recall coming back from South Africa from the sobri sands reserve and the fauna certainly the floor going to be totally different in the United States but even in my backyard.

I could or near anyone's house if you have some greenery even in urban environment coyotes raccoons like you can actually start to try to notice these small things that do change and if you develop a basic vocabulary you can start to try to figure out possible gender direction speed and it seems to just give you a greater fidelity of perception and these experiences you said.

I believe you can't believe everything you read on the internet so please feel free to fact check this but you said that if person took one tree in New York and figured out how that tree changed over 365 days what animals interacted with it but insects live in there how the tree is surviving et cetera you can have quite a large effect and this really rings true for me I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that or give other examples of how people even if they are in a largely urban environment.

How they can cultivate this type of awareness and feeling of interconnectedness you can do it in cities I've seen in a incredible trackers in America doing this I've got a great friend John Young is incredible tracker bird language expert to you wrote the definitive book on bird language.

But even on a simple level to him if you just start to look at a small area where there are few insects and maybe a few birds maybe of one or two amphibians and you start to just take notes and observe every day to say for half an hour and after a while it will be you'll be absolutely shocked at what you couldn't see before it'll be like so obvious and it was totally invisible to you before it's like can't believe I missed all these things.

And it's not just about the leaves changing color but there are thousands of these things going on that unless you take notice you will miss nature then becomes this incredible teacher and it's just about persistence you don't have to have any great intellect or anything you just have a little cell phone camera some notes and you just start observing these things and suddenly.

This incredible invisible world becomes visible to you and it becomes very fascinating and then you think after a year or two of doing it okay I really know what's going on and then if you persist oh my goodness there's another incredible there and it just keeps going on and on and on and you you basically fall in love with this extraordinary biosphere that is keeping us alive and you start to have this conversation this incredible wild conversation.

Incredible wild conversation with this environment that's around us. I bounce around a lot in these conversations so please forgive me with what might seem like a non sequitur but I want to make sure that I don't forget to ask you a bit about free diving and breath holds and then we're going to come back to the thread that we're behind temporarily you have perhaps a unique experience in listening to episodes of this podcast.

I believe you mentioned prior to us recording that you've listened to something you know dozens are close to a hundred episodes but while holding your breath and I was hoping you could elaborate on that and also perhaps share and this is not prescriptive advice people have to be very very careful in the water and especially if they're doing any type of breath training to avoid shallow water blackouts and things like that but I'm wondering if you could just describe your breath holds and cold exposure practice but maybe it's not explicitly for cold.

And then perhaps add to that how much of the breath hold capability you think is. Inbuilt because I believe both of your parents have done quite a lot of diving and how much of it is trainable if you could speak to that you absolutely right and as 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 three or four times and I'm going to do that.

And I quite like having some really interesting distractions I don't feel like the desire to breathe in your podcasts have been the sort of favorite thing to listen to I love so many of them and I do this because it makes one feel very relaxed it builds the immune system and of course it helps with the dive.

But once going to be very careful never to do any of these breathing techniques close to actually going in the water and 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 in a dive you got to be so careful with that the cold exposure I'm always I 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 how the body's ability to thermoregulate tells you how your mind is feeling so that can plummet radically so if it's a full going well.

And I can stay in for quite a long time and what I love about the cold is that it feeds the brain with these extraordinary chemicals you know do you mean the nor adrenaline and all these beautiful chemicals that make you feel really good and motivated and set the day up beautifully so it also helps the underwater tracking because it's somehow the cold makes your mind sharper and I try and relax a lot so I don't get much cortisol.

Going in it actually even though I could obviously spend longer in the water with a way to it I prefer the an hour or so and with this all these amazing chemicals from the cold that help me focus and understand the secret lives of these animals.

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I would love to hear a little bit more about underwater tracking because that would be you know Greek is hard enough for me let's call that terrestrial tracking and then I imagine that underwater is like jumping from Greek to Chinese if you've never read Chinese in the sense that inside Africa with Alex and Reneas you have smell.

So turns out that at least male leopard urine smells like bird popcorn and you can smell it pretty clearly it smells exactly like bird popcorn it's unbelievable uncanny and then you see the alarm calls from

it monkeys or different types of birds franklings and based on that they can identify whether it's a python or this or that in which direction how far away it is it's unbelievable so you have those auditory cues as well and much more as you know what are some of the components are indicators in underwater tracking.

At first you know struggled for several years I had this idea I got incredibly inspired by the song in the calorie and I thought could I ever track underwater and it's just seemed impossible because track gets put down in the next world washes it away so there's nothing there.

And then I started to notice the slime trails 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 like oh questioner so that was the first track I saw and 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 mollus are interacting with that ray and I could tell how long that animals has been resting because of that the enormous number of tiny little marks at the predator's make you know once you know all the drill holes you can tell who's been in an area who's been eating who.

And by the shininess of the shell and the hot order things you can tell the timing their bite marks everywhere they are literally 10,000 and thousands of these subtle signs that 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.

And the big aquatic picture so did take a very long time to figure it all out how is in this leading question of course maybe the answer is it hasn't but how is that transfer to experiences outside of the water not necessarily in a tracking capacity but how have those experiences transcended underwater tracking.

First of all it's made my desire to be better tracking on land stronger so now I've got a wonderful friend J. J. Minier closer 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 taking him into the into title in the water shame what I know there so it's exciting but I think what you're asking is what has happened to me is that.

Through the tracking underwater I've been very fortunate and privileged to have these special relationships with a lot of different wild animals and remember though animals in the water are not afraid of people like they are on land you know this primate on land is on two legs is very dangerous a lot of animals are very scared.

That didn't happen in the water so these animals are quite curious a lot of time they're not scared so I can get very close to a lot of animals and for instance an animal equivalent size and a ferocity to a lion I can be right next to it one meter away and I'm safe what would be an example of that like a seven gill shark or a great white shark Tiger shark that kind of thing so it's fairly safe to be with those animals.

Sometimes there's enormous number of them together in the case of the seven gills is a being with 55 60 of them and they 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 but what has happened and I've got a lot of relationships with these smaller creatures and because of that it feels as if I'm not as reliant on my human relationship.

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 and they have a real teachers for me so I love them and then I have these bonds so that 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 it's something happens in the psyche and if you've imagined like we've throughout pre history for you know countless hundreds of thousands of years we've had these relationships with all these species.

Now in many cases is Turkey taking away but where's that gonna go where's the all that relationship can go and it mostly goes I think to put more pressure on human relationship so that's one of the things I felt quite profoundly.

Maybe you can tell a story if you wouldn't mind I came across a story I'd love for you to tell it and hopefully this will be enough of a cue this was from an interview you did with Scott Ramsey I believe about a Cape call us order very intimate encounter and I'd look for you to perhaps tell that story because I may have some follow questions. Amazing the ability to dig things out from the deep past good tracking them. 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 think what the hell am I doing here. This is a really going to pay off am I just going mad and I was halfway through the dive and I suddenly felt a fairly large animal on my sort of periphery vision and.

I thought oh my goodness this is a Cape call us also and especially in those days it's changed slightly now but these animals are super shine some people who have lived here their whole lives have never seen one so it was very exciting and my instinct was to keep still and not turn to face the animal because I know that you know from working with a lot of wild animals they see them our mouths and our front as the aggressive part that maybe we'll buy.

So I just kept quiet 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 pause 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 mask and it reached out and started touching my face.

It was so overwhelming that I was actually in a shed a few tears in the mask and it was very powerful and then animals swimming around and bouncing off the ocean floor they're very playful beautiful animals and it was just oh my god now I know why I'm here this is just incredible and I actually was so overwhelming I couldn't take it for too long it was so much and so powerful I got out the water.

And this ought to followed me right into the shallows and was popping its head out and making this high pitch sound is almost to call me back in 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 that goes back deep into prehistory and I wondered I'm going to 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 I wanted to look and feel the strange the sort of primate flopping around in the water.

That's incredible and by hunting with you mean some type of partner hunting kin to maybe coyotes and badgers in North America which for a long time people considered a myth and it had been passed down through oral tradition among some Native American tribes and loan behold with various trail cams and remote triggers you can now see this type of footage of these two species cooperate. It's wild. I didn't know that.

You see it there's there's footage people can find it online I'll try to put in the show notes of a coyote comes into frame and it jumps down much like a domesticated dog kind of a downward dog tail wagging like a puppy might do to a lot of a lot of the most recent play and then there's this badger waddling around behind it there off to go do some night hunting together as a remarkable.

So when you say hunting with humans give any more details on what that might have looked like or what otters and humans would hunt. And why did it make sense to hunt together. And she was a wild life showing TV and she knew people from Bangladesh the last few people who were still practicing this in some form and they hunt for fish and then the fish get shared between the humans and otters but I think it goes back.

And it's a huge deeper deep deep in time and if your imagination 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.

And I think fascinated by inter species cooperation when it's sort of the most unlikely of combinations or things you wouldn't expect I want to say and I'll put this in the show notes I'll get the proper reference but then an Ethiopia you see examples of baboons and I want to say jackals cooperating.

It's not typical very often the jackals eat the baby baboons and their sort of sworn enemies but they have temporary cease fires to hunt together and similarly you see I want to say it's the horn bill Alex is is you give me a slap on the rest if I get this wrong and the dwarf mangoes who will also cooperate and these I want to say it's the horn bell it could be another bird but they'll they'll go harass the colonies of these dwarf.

Mungus to wake them up the mungus will come out the birds will in effect through alarm calls and so on protect them against airborne predators while the the mungus kick up the insects and the birds get the insects. Nice to be fascinating to me. See it in the club forest these are lion says we see it with the octopus and the super clip first. What was the second animal that you mentioned.

Yeah super clip first it's a rock fish. Mm hmm. A 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 birds alarm call so the bigger predator comes in and the fish will tell the octopus.

Why did you decide to write amphibious soul subtitle finding the wild in a tame world and it's rare that a book exactly resonates with what has been deeply on my mind for certainly last few years but could you just speak to the Genesis of this. How did this come about writing books is hard at least for me. How did this come about for you. I went through a pretty tough period off to the film came out.

I wasn't in any way expecting or be ready to be exposed to you know hundreds of millions of people on Netflix. It was a it was a huge shock for me and part of it was trying to come out of that space and just to get down on paper what was in my head. But I also had this feeling of this relationship with all these animals that I mentioned to you I just wanted so much to tell their stories.

I'd learned so much beyond the octopus obviously that film was very much focused in on that one animal that one story. And I had this strange feeling of this. I didn't even know what it meant at the time but it kept coming up this amphibious soul what the hell is that and it felt like much like I think you maybe feel that I was living a double life part of my life was wild and connected to three million years of deep evolution and all my incredible ancestors from Africa.

And then part of my life was very connected to all the tame world and all the comforts and all the wonderful technologies and things that 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 pool of the tame world and all the technology and these phones and all this stuff was so strong.

But yet I could feel in my deep design that I was completely I was born wild I'm a wild animal these creatures that I interact with taught me I'm a wild animal. So how could I find that balance and was almost like I was walking along the shore and then the ocean to the one side was my wild self and the land to the right was this tame self and I was trying desperately to find a balance because you can't go back to fully wild existence.

That door is you know completely shut for us now but how could I find this balance and certainly not easy I don't pretend to 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 in science I love the science.

So I love the tame world as well but I if I get drawn too much in there I feel my nervous system just ratchets it 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 the subject it strikes me that this has become more perhaps salient for me in the last 10 to 15 years in particular but to be really well adapted to a almost exclusively modern existence requires you to somewhat be a freak of nature if that makes sense in the same way that there are super sleepers people who have the genetic predisposition and capability to feel fully rested on from.

So I feel fully rested on four hours of sleep four and a half hours of sleep and these people do exist there's predictive power and looking at their say genotype and it is something that you see but it is not something that is common or the default by any stretch and in the last list is called decade and particularly in less five years each year scheduling I don't have the access that you have on a daily basis but scheduling a week say for an annual.

I've gone for a long time now and I go once a year typically and blocking out another week or 10 days for a rafting trip and another segment of time for a group trip with friends to spend time in the mountains doing ski touring those points of reconnection or reactivation of that felt sense of connectedness.

I've seen to me to be so critical for their carryover effect into the rest of the year that it's hard to overstate at least for me the importance as part of the reason why I'm so excited about this book and I'm wondering I'm going to give you a few cues and I'd love to hear you expand on any of these.

But I just say something to add to that I've had exactly those experiences like you saying it's just suddenly you got the fuel to be able to operate well for weeks or even months after that experience like you know one of those experiences but it hits so hard when I had this very fortunate experience to spend a month on this research station on this very very remote island thousands of kilometers of 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 teaming it is mind bending in terms of what is there but what was most fascinating term was how that near pristine biodiversity affected my psyche and the people around me it was as if I'd been given some magic Alexa and I felt so much more than I was doing.

I felt so much calm is so much more present so much more at home and that feeling lasted for months and months and months so I think it's depending on how much nature is around you and how much you're able to access it and your experience of it deeply affects the psyche in a very very profound way so I absolutely I mean it's so great that you're doing those experiences on a regular basis and you you feeling

you know exactly what I'm talking about you come back and it feels like you've been rebooted so the dance is working in the sense that literally the first queue I was going to give you as pristine wilderness so it seems to be working. I'd love for you to say a bit more about the feeling that endured for months afterwards can you put more words to that so people can perhaps begin to envision what that is like.

I think what it is it might be connected to when we know there's enormous biodiversity and health in the ecosystem around us you must remember we've had you know in our species 300,000 years as hunter gatherers so when you an environment like that you know you can survive this plenty of food you don't have to work very hard to get all your needs so you feel very relaxed.

If you're 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's 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 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 everything's alright everything will be fine this is good this is the good life.

That strikes a chord with me I think it would surprise perhaps a lot of folks who think of the hunter gather life is very austere and brutal which it certainly can be I mean if you watch in some respects it can be from a nutritional perspective depending on where you are right in the calahari you see I would imagine symptoms of certain nutrient deficiencies and say the hair on some of the bush men and so on.

However, when you're in a very, very dense area with high degrees of biodiversity and I experienced this in October I was in serenom spending time with some indigenous groups like the trio as part of actually exploring work sites or partner communities of non-profit called the Amazon conservation team and man or these guys relaxed guys and gals because they could go fishing and hunting they walked out into the forest for any given.

Any given need I mean the sophistication of their pharmacists let's call them who could walk out night and every plant every tree every turn was known it was as you put it mind bending happen to be out with them they would always bring a shotgun with them these days it's more shotguns than bows although some of the old time are still use bows and if they ever went for walk that was brought.

And got to see a peckery hunt and they dismantled field dress the entire animal created backpacks out of various vegetation and vines and so on and there's a certain ease there's a certain calm that permeated the entire village which isn't too overly romanticize it either because prior to the a lot of the missionary work the intertribal warfare.

It's just non stop unseasing so there issues with any groups of humans because humans are humans are asked some of the old song you know which do you prefer this new life all the old ways when you were nomadic yeah and like you said it wasn't an obvious answer half of them said you know we

desperate to go back to the old life it was incredible and such an adventure so powerful and half of them said no it was just too difficult and we much prefer being static and we've got a water supply we not going thirsty for weeks and they prefer that so as you say it's is not all rosers depending where you were but I think some

of those early lives are just incredible. I'm very energized by this conversation I rarely get the chance to connect with someone who spent so much time as you have in deep close proximity both out of water and underwater which is a for me at least a rare combo few questions so the first is how much of this deep transfer after this immersive experience is activating something very old almost like birds know how to build

birds nest without having to go to bird school my experience the first time I ever went for a hunt which was for my third book which related to food and I thought it was an obligation for me to at least forage and garden and hunt as part of understanding the entire kind of supply chain of food was my first time

what during an animal in the field I felt like my hands kind of knew what to do and it was shocking to me there was some type of for lack of a better descriptor like ancestral knowledge which makes sense given our history is that a component for you of this activation for lack of a better term and then that the second piece is to what extent this is getting perhaps into some mystical areas all I think it's going to be a better

tool but my experience in the jungles also one of maybe a density of consciousness or activity in addition to that feeling of ease there's a density that has such a distinct impact on my inner experience that I can't really describe to my own satisfaction but could you bounce off of either of those in any way that makes any sense

with me to me 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 long wrong I love science I love marine biology especially paleontology but what happens as you immerse is what you 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 what I found is if I just actually relax and release to it 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

I spent three years trying to find this animal occasionally I'd find a dead shell of this magnificent kind of germ and I just didn't know where they were coming from I didn't know probably from the deep ocean I thought none of the scientists knew and then one day I did what I've described and it just said to me it's underneath the sand

and that's what you're talking about you know this is this conversation it's underneath the sand and I dug about that deep in the sand and out came this incredible live heart urchin this extraordinary animal and I realized okay this is how it's working this is where they're coming from

and then I was able to put together all the clues and now I can find them quite easily they have these very very subtle detritus traps that is a very subtle trap 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 now I've had some maybe another time for a bottle of wine but I think you and I've had a number of bizarre experiences that if you try to put words to them end up sounding like you should be put in an institution

just because they're hard to verbalize does not mean that it's magical thinking in the example you gave in the example that I gave with the field dressing it's not implying magic just because it's hard to verbalize and if you think about our evolution language is a pretty recent arrival at least to the extent that we're talking right now

this level of before being generous for sophisticated communication is a pretty new on the scene there's a lot of machinery and a lot of perceptual faculties that developed very very well prior to that so I think that in part it's becoming attuned to different ways of knowing even if you can't explicitly explain those things in a conversation like this

could you speak to any number of other things that I would love to hear more about nature as mirror is one that I'm very curious about play and song catching specifically which direction would you like to go first?

It's working because I wanted to talk about the mirror because of what you said and this is like you almost feeling some of that magic right here so what I've noticed is of course there's attention bias if you're looking for certain animals a tuberculative 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 and 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 there is something which is very hard to explain that seems to come about in the natural world that feels just incredible

that 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 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 going on that I find very difficult to explain but it feels like this mirror and that sometimes when I've been in dark difficult spaces I see some pretty tough difficult things and then reflecting back at me and things are tough

I'm really so enjoying this conversation in part because you're an explorer and you have deep, deep consistent contact with nature and just to draw a quick maybe analogy the coaches and athletes at the highest level of sport are always a few steps ahead of say the published exercise scientists

of course because there's so many barriers number one to publication as there should be peer review and so on the coaches and athletes don't necessarily get everything right but they are the experimentalists so they're always going to be a few years ahead when they find something that works or something that clicks and my experiences that that's true in many different fields field biologists are going to see things that they can't explain that might seem ridiculous

that ultimately bear out as incredibly valid and important it just might take 10 years you have discovered how many new species of shrimp we've lost count but we've actually been able to name and identify three species of shrimp

the most interesting one for me was the one that actually lives inside the octopus stands 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

so 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 that's going to take to describe it so you should have almost ignored hetero-mysus-fosteri that'll be one right? good tracking that's another little shrimp that lives inside the shells of a discarded shells of animals and for people who don't know the naming convention very often the discoverer per se will have their last name appended to the end

much like Lafofra, William C probably pronouncing that wrong but I don't speak Latin better known as peyote although certainly there were many people well before fister William or Williams who were intimately familiar with he could hear peyote so coming back to play what is song catching?

song catching was introduced to me by the idea by John Young he's a wonderful tracker in California and he used to go out with bullman row I think was the father of loose music 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 they used to be able to somehow catch a song of a tree or a landscape or an animal and they'd frantically write down the song before it disappeared and you know John's played some of these songs to me

and that's in really strange coincidence as where people have got a very similar song about the same species of tree so it was quite 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

we involved the time of the world man, this is the benefit of a long format podcast so let's not skip any of the juicy bands okay so as a pathetic song catcher first just for sake of explaining this for the audience so I think his name is John that you mentioned

song catching this is in effect and waiting for inspiration to strike such that you feel like you have felt an appropriate song surface to your conscious awareness that matches whatever you are focusing on is that a fair way to describe it?

That's a wonderful way of describing it absolutely yes and I think it goes deep into our deep past and you know their famous songs at the song of the Kalahari have caught at night in dreams or envisions 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 this is going to, I'm going to get a beautiful song coming out and I went into the Kalahari 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

and then I got a few little words and phrases and then out of the blue strange coincidence someone from the Yo-Yo Mar Foundation called me from New York and said Yo-Yo Mar is coming to South Africa and is interested in some of the work and is anything you've got that you 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 because you didn't have a song

and they're the greatest musician on this planet it's not coming to listen and I was like, oh what have I done, absolute idiot so then we've got this amazing group that I work with the nonprofit C-Change project and I said guys we've got a problem and 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 Wales earbone that I'd found many years ago

and didn't make any sound on land and we just intuitively took it into the water and struck this freedived 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 Wales earbone about the size of my fist and it was like, unbelievable and we recorded this we used Abelone 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 Pepper got hold of some good musicians I think it was Roland Skillin who was one of the best percussionists in the country and he got hold of Solani Mahola, this incredible process singer and we all got together and said, Yoha Mahola's coming, what can we do?

and Solani, of course, being an amazing performer, was able to connect onto this idea and I took her diving and literally I was so amazed on her first dive she was able to catch songs from the Kelt Forest and we had these incredible instruments we made a octopus drum from eight stripes of the kelp that washed up what is this?

sorry, that's the long stem of the kelp so they 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 wrote, tuned them and he played these incredible tubes made from the kelp like a drum

so it would be like playing water glasses of different heights in a sense exactly, but he was striking the top like a xylophone yeah, that kind of thing but the tubes of the different lengths exactly, you see I've had my music 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 Yoha Mahola quickly arrived at Mahola and it was terrifying, I was really stressed out and Solani was so cool and calm and then we performed for him and this group and it was very, very magical

and then he played the cello on our deck it was very, very magical and helped us afterwards wonderfully with our NGO and our conservation works as a through that idea of play and song catching these beautiful sort of relationships formed with these amazing people who were sort of committed to this strange idea what does the word home or concept of home mean to you?

About a year and three months ago we lost our home because of a electrical fire and literally from one hour to two hours later I had this beautiful home that my wife and I and my son had nurtured for 16 years was, you know, ashes we lost everything, I didn't have my passport

one pair of shorts in a t-shirt, nothing absolutely nothing, everything was gone and 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

and 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 past that was no longer there and it struck so hard in my heart that this ocean but also this pretty much this planet this original deep mother

that burst 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 for me for me, is my deep home and I can always rebuild my home which I am doing now, my my house that's since like a possibly terrifying and dangerous experience

was anyone in the house when that happened my son, his friend and myself were in the house swathe my wife was in India about to come back and we literally ran out with the glass exploding around us and we were lucky not to get seriously injured it was so fast it was just crazy

they say that this fire scientist to come and look said if you don't catch it especially if a bed or something catches within 30 seconds you're not going to put that fire that is so lucky terrifying and tragic and very lucky that no one was injured yeah that was the main thing

yeah that was a big factor when a man gets injured then you can quite easily I think get over that sort of that process how have you thought about especially when your son was younger how did you think about parenting and that's very broad but I'm wondering of any kind of lessons learned

or things you feel like you did right or things you would do again you didn't belong to these lines asking for a friend as a father as he may be I think certainly for me a huge turning point was when I felt I was inside of the natural world I really had something to pass to him I didn't want to try

and in a overly push him or teach him as such I just wanted to 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 learn those where he got that from but definitely not for me but he has a deep love for nature and it was amazing to pass that on and I think I think the main thing for a child rarely is it sounds like a cliché but

if they truly know that you really love them it's like that's the most critical thing my parents were very loving but particularly my great grandmother and my grandmother had this incredible love and I can still feel that sitting in me today very strongly and when I'm in I have great difficulty

I can draw on that and just time like dedicated time I made sure I dedicated focus time to doing things with him but things I also enjoyed doing that we both enjoyed doing and we still today this morning we had an incredible game of Frisbee together and he helped me set up this podcast

he's much better technically useless with that so he says it's just you know very special to spend time I go diving with him a lot swimming with a lot we exercise together so I think it's just the love of the time and also having you've got so many incredible experiences and so much to share

with a child there a child would be I'd love to be your child thanks for saying that yeah I would love to be your child also from the sounds of it I must ask two things I guess do people in your family tend to have kids young because you said grey grandmother and my grandparents passed away

when I was very young that's part one part two is how did they show that love I'm just wondering how that was expressed such that it was made such an indelible mark on you I didn't have my son that early but they were having children in their early twenties So my great grandmother used to walk seven miles every day to her house. She was very active and she lived till 96. She was strong until 94. But the way she showed their love and my grand as well was with amazing attentiveness.

So they used to come to our house when I was very young. I used to go out with my brother into the 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 being distracted with other things.

That was immensely powerful. It gave meaning to those stories and it was a tremendous act of love to have that attention and a true interest in our naive young minds. It felt like an unconditional type of love and care. And then we were sick. They looked after us. And it was just very, very special. My parents had to work and they had enormous distractions of trying to survive and didn't have much money. So it was much harder for them. But the grandparents were just job phenomenal.

You mentioned earlier having a tough time after the success and vast global exposure of my octopus teacher. Could you say more about why that was hard with that experience until? I guess you can imagine. We hear on the end of the planet I'm right at the end of the tip of Africa, fairly isolated in a way. I mean, at that point I'd made 25 films. I'd know a lot of documentaries. Some of them like the Great Dawn. Some you'd managed 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 in a few months later than 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. Now you've got this giant Netflix, this enormous reach. And suddenly, absolutely like nobody on the end of the planet just fascinated by these animals.

And you're in a hundred million homes plus whatever the crazy number is. And it's enormous shock for the psyche to suddenly realise 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 it just, I think there's also a factor where, I know if you've thought about this, but going back to our design and where we come from, you know, these soren societies and my soren teachers, it's a very egalitarian society to even have a competition for someone who's better than somebody else would be absolutely out of the question. So we come as humans from this vast lineage where these people knew it was good to keep everybody on the same level and not have competition.

Now suddenly you're winning awards or the stuff, it's somehow, it's very exciting, but it's also very disturbing for the psyche. And for me, my nervous system was completely knocked out of kilter. So the main way it showed that was by not sleeping. My steps extremely badly. Sometimes just a few minutes a night for weeks and for months. And that does a horrible thing. Yeah, that's just your, your, your psyche. Yeah, that's the same 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, you know, three months. So it adds to the whole madness. So it was very difficult, but also, of course, that adversity is powerful because I mean, 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. It may be so felt that deep humility of that adversity. And I realized 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 had been moved by the film and it 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'm glad I went through it. I'd hate to ever repeat that. It was very traumatic in some ways. But I'd 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, it could have been bad. If it had continued, I think it would have been. I mean, it's eventually you die if you don't sleep. Not ideal. Not ideal. Yeah. No. No. No. So what stopped it was it just the natural kind of decay rate of fame when people moved on to Tiger King or whatever the next hot thing happened to be or was it something else? Was it a set of decisions you made or other factors? What finally got you back to sleeping in addition to rebuilding your nervous system?

It was just focusing on nature and tracking and the cold and my ancestors and all I'd learned from working with indigenous people for years and years and years. Drawing on all those things, breathing, just calming everything down. It was breathing sometimes for an hour or more day. All these things that I learned and, of course, it eventually people quickly forget.

If you don't feed that system as you know, then it goes, starts getting quiet and people start forgetting you very quickly, which was a huge relief because it was very intense when it first came out and it was that perfect storm with COVID and everybody thinking about storm. Perfect storm really was. It was a strange. It was so strange to him. I don't know with your trajectory and you've got this huge following and everything.

It was slow, but it was from literally as that thing went out, it was just an explosion. Mine was similar. It wasn't of the magnitude of 100 million plus on Netflix, but with the first book when it hit the New York Times was pretty quickly and then stayed there for a few years, four or five years, I suppose. That was zero to 100 for me, certainly, in my own scale. It's a shock to the system. It was a shock to the system and I wouldn't trade it. It certainly provided opportunities like this.

It's at the stage for growing the blog, which is at the stage for having the podcast, which sits at the stage for having conversations like this. I'm very grateful and we are not evolved to handle that type of dynamic at all. At least there's nothing in the industry and that big spot. I mean, I mean, I mentioned people who, for me, I was thinking of people who, this is a tiny little thing in many ways. People are big actors and Holly would, 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 to are famous. They know that it's a difficult thing. But as you say, I think it's also a huge privilege and I've met so many incredible people through it, amazing opportunities. Of course, there's the flip side of that, which is very special. When you get, and then everything quiet and down, it's much easier. Who is the new book for?

How should people think about that? Then what should they expect to get from reading this book, amphibious soul? The few people who have read the sort of advanced copies have felt this real sense to start some of these practices, to start learning what I call the oldest language on earth and to start observing this wild world around them, even if they live in a city. And it has been excitingly for 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 positively. So it's for, I guess, people who want to have more of a relationship with this incredible world we live in, even though 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 animals, 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 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. Yeah, that is remarkable. I'm very excited about this book and I do not say that lightly.

As you would imagine, I get offers to have hundreds of books sent to me every month just about it feels and the extent that I had to put a blog post up saying I'm not reading any books in the same year they're published, but I might make an exception for this one.

This one is right down the fairway, as we would say, in terms of the convergence of my current interests because I feel like it will give words to experiences I've had and also experiences I hope to find patterns within so that I can cultivate more of them if that makes sense. And I'm very excited about it. Would you like to say anything about C-Change project? That is our not-for-profit organization that's focused on ocean conservation.

We've been going for about 10 years and so started with an amazing group of volunteers. We've volunteered a lot of their time for five years. One of the big focuses is of course the Great African Sea Forest and one of our methods has been, how do you protect something? It was not even known. Nobody knows about the cult 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. It's much easier to protect it and the animals in that space. We're studying a thousand and one animals in the cult forest bringing their stories out.

And we're also trying to get this idea across that and this way I'm quite fascinated by your sense of this. It is enormous emphasis on climate change and all the carbon problems and everything. There's absolutely critical and that must go on absolutely. But I feel there's not enough emphasis on biodiversity. 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.

If the fighter plants and communities in the ocean collapse, we stop breathing. We literally that's it. So every single investment that you might have in the bank or any property you might own or any future children that you might want to have, that's game over for all that. That investment is worth zero if biodiversity collapses.

So what I can't understand is why businesses and governments are not putting much more attention on looking often 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 kind of like a child who's forgotten that it mother exists, but we are completely dependent on her in every single way.

Why do you think it is that a lot of that tension is not on looking after her? I mean, I can dig a stab with that if you like. I pretty bring this up. I think about this quite a bit. And I would say that as you and your wife have done so brilliantly, I think words matter a lot and labels matter a lot. This sounds self evident.

But what I mean by that, I'll give an example that'll probably piss off a bunch of folks in the US who might identify as liberals, but there's, and I, by the way, I would say I'm pretty apolitical and I'm issue by issue, right? I don't like to pick teammate or team B because if you agree with everything in your party, then you're probably not thinking for yourself. However, I tend to be, I just lived in the Bayer for 17 years for God's sake.

So I would say that in a lot of ways, I would point myself in that direction. However, there's a book called Words that Work by Lund, some blanking on his first name. He is a Republican strategist who, for instance, came up with the phrase Death Tax, which is a rebrand of sorts of inheritance tax. And he's very good at using words to catalyze or create narratives and stories that can then change behaviors, which can then change beliefs and policy. Right?

So I think there's a lot to be learned from people like that. And as I think about, for instance, our long-term best interests and perhaps a bias towards short-term thinking that is evolved and how to reconcile those two, I think a lot about a few different things. One is incentives. So how can we possibly create or modify incentives such that or add incentives that help to bend behavior towards longer-term outcomes?

For instance, if we have, and this is painting with a broad brush, but if we have, let's just say, the CEOs of public companies who are being judged on a quarterly basis, who have their various payouts and bonuses and so on, pegged to relatively short-term goals, then you have policymakers who might be more focused on re-election in one year or two years than they are on any type of long-term game.

If it means they're going to potentially face political opposition or lose constituent support, how do you try to thread that needle? And you, I think, have an advantage in thinking about this because you are on some level, and I suppose we all are, but you're a very well-practiced storyteller. And what I've tried to do is find compelling stories that have some short-term payoff, hopefully, maybe it's just that they're grouping stories.

I can give some examples that then act as Trojan horses for getting people to take actions that serve certain long-term goals, if that makes any sense. That's very abstract. So I'll give a concrete example. You might choose, for instance, and what I'm dancing around here is the word conservation.

I'm dancing around the word conservation because at least in the U.S., that has become, and I think it's kind of silly, a polarizing word that gets associated with like bleeding heart liberals in Berkeley. Whereas if you go way back to Teddy Roosevelt and others, hunters, historically, a lot of people on the right would also be, and still are, in fairness, conservationists, fundamentally, but that word has become tainted on some level. So I dance around it.

You might choose, say, a very charismatic species and tell stories around that species, which lead people to read a book, watch a YouTube video, enjoy a documentary that then leads them to think about personal changes in terms of behaviors. Let's just say I'm making this up, but we use that single tree example. They end up taking an interest in perhaps the oldest tree in their neighborhood in Austin, which happens to be an oak tree in a park.

And all of a sudden, they're on this sort of benevolent slippery slope of becoming more engaged with their surroundings, and then they become involved with a foundation that does trail repair and so on and so forth. So I'm always thinking about how to get someone to just try the appetizer, right? I'm not going to sell them on the 20 course tasting menu. They've cost $1,000 off the bat. It's just too much of a commitment. And I'll give you an example.

Wolves are a very controversial species in the United States. They become an ideological battleground and very politicized. And I'm going to leave that third rail alone for a second, although I've been very involved in a lot of these conversations on a national level, including policymakers and man-o-man to people get upset. But the reason I bring up Wolves is this book by Barry Lopez of Wolves and Men. And it was such a genre-busting, category redefining book when it was published.

It's beautiful book. And it is incredibly well written. And it pulls people in whether they want to be pulled in or not. And it's apolitical. That type of art has the potential to move people in a way that lecturing does not. Does that make sense? I can soon as you start lecturing people turn off. And I feel so fortunate and I'll shut up in a second. But I know this is something we chatted a bit about before recording. How do you reconcile evolved short-term interest?

And you see this by the way, for instance, the South America, a lot of indigenous groups are making really bad long-term decisions because they're getting seduced by mining companies with concessions, we're giving them free electricity and ATVs and various bribes effectively to completely rape and pillage their ancestral land resources. And so we're all susceptible to this. How do you try to reconcile these? So I don't know if any of this resonates, but I think about it a lot.

For instance, with respect to mental health in the United States, I've been very involved with psychedelic-existed therapies. Historically, half of this country, at the very least, would be viewed as very anti-drug, anti-psychedelic.

Let's just say if we're painting with a broad brush on the right and then you have the hippies and so on and the lefties who are pro-drugs, but you can get around that if you look at certain sub-populations who have a certain degree of sympathy from both sides who are politically immune, for instance, veterans with complex PTSD.

There are ways that you can find common ground and bipartisan, in the case of the US support, it's something that if you approach it the wrong way, if you take a sanctimonious lecturing position, it's doomed to fail. That is the biggest weakness with a lot of attempts at conservation. It's a positioning failure and it's a high-horse failure. So at the end of the day, if you ask anyone, do you want to see all green disappear from your world?

Do you want to have a silent spring where you hear no birds? No one's going to say yes. Right? It's like, okay, let's start there. Then try to work backwards and find some common ground. It's actually been a wonderful experience for me and I'm going to stop in a second. But I don't talk about this much publicly because I don't really want to show my cards. I don't have some ulterior motive.

It's just like this is part of the craft that I take so seriously, which is how do you help to shape, hopefully, benevolent long-term beliefs and behaviors that serve the individual and collective good? Not in some socialist way. Right? It's just like an existential way. We not completely drive ourselves in the planet to catastrophe. And I think there are ways to do it. So, for instance, getting into hunting, I grew up hating hunters and hunting.

I grew up on Long Island and guys would just get shit-faced and these red necks would go out and just make a mess and animals were injured and it was very disrespectful. The whole thing was terrible. I was lying large, but when I met really responsible ethical hunters and I was very lucky that a pretty well-known guy now, amazing author, also Steve Vernella, took me on my first hunt.

White Tildere in the Caroline-ness and from soup to nuts, it was approached in such a responsible way, cooked heart that evening, harvested some organs in addition to doing the butchering and then had that meat that I felt so unconflicted about. Versus, say, cellophane wrapped meat of questionable origins in the supermarket, it was surprising to me how deeply unconflicted and good I felt about it.

And that has been an opportunity because most folks on the left view hunting as some barbaric exercise and indulgence of blood lust, which for some people it might be, but for a lot of people it's not. And that's been a foot in the door for me to connect with a lot of people who, at face value, might identify, say, on the right and that does not mean I need to have any conflict with these people whatsoever.

And I also have an issue by issue basis, I would say, probably lean conservative in a bunch with. And having that common language is what I'm almost always looking for. What is the foot in the door where we can say something that really has no grounds for disagreement. How can we start there? What is that thread? Well, stop there because that's a whole lot that I just spewed out. But what have you learned about this?

Because you've had wide ranging conversations, you've had a chance to talk about, say, sea change project and other things through the blessing in the curse, which was the mega success of your film. What have you learned as you've had these conversations? It aligns in quite a few ways to what you're saying. And I think that, you know, there is this massive pandemic of mental health throughout the world that'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 biodiversity. You keen on looking after the insects. You 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 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 it's not new. We know this for an enormously long period of time. So it's not something...if we start remembering it, it's transformative. Yeah. But I totally agree. And I'll just say a few more things now that I'm all warmed up.

The first is that here I am in Austin. In Austin, it's sometimes called the blueberry and the tomato soup because it's mostly liberal outposts in a predominantly Republican state. And I'm going to say something that a lot of my friends on the left will not like to hear, which is first yelling on the internet is not actually taking effective action. That's first thing I'll say. Just because you're screaming on Twitter does not mean that you're moving the needle on the things that you care about.

The second is that many of the folks I've seen with direct action take steps to conserve wildlife and land are Republican hunters. And there is common ground to be found. There's a lot of common ground. Much more. You just have to look for it and avoid the third rails which are often specific phrases. So I'll give you an example. I was on a trip recently and I was having a great conversation with this gentleman in the hydrocarbon business. So he's involved with petroleum and gas and energy.

And we're having a great conversation and he wanted to have a sparring match. So he said, what's your opinion on climate change? I was like, oh, here we go. Open shot fired. OK. And I said, well, look, do you want to have a conversation about this or you just send us up for a rock and sock and robots fight here. So this is where we're getting ready to do. I thought we were having a perfectly nice conversation.

I just said all this explicitly and he got a chuckled because he knew exactly when he was doing it. And I said, OK, look, first of all, let's not use that word because I can tell where this is going. I said, what I would say if I give you an answer is that number one, let's put aside whether humans had anything to do with contributing to what we're about to discuss because that's a huge point of contention. Did we do it? Now, people have strong opinions about this.

But let's put that completely aside to avoid those strong opinions. OK. Well, we can observe, I would say, pretty uncontroversially is more extreme weather events. So flooding events, mudslides, wildfires, et cetera. Are we on board? Great. We're on board. OK, cool.

So if we want to avoid catastrophic destruction of property and this, this, and this, and this, even if we had nothing to do with the growing frequency of these phenomena, it is probably our responsibility, or at least in our best interest, to take some human action to try to figure out how to deal with these things. It's like, OK, cool. Then there was, there was a lot less room to fight, if that makes sense.

And so I would just say to people out there, number one, don't take the bait, don't fight easily. It's so simple to fight. See if you can do the harder thing, which is fun to figure out. And that is dance around the words that are automatically going to set off a fist fight and use different language, use different language, because the language, if you use different language, it is how you change thought. It's how you convey thought. And then you can actually get somewhere.

So that's something that I think a lot about, which is why this book like Words That Work, which was recommended to me by a friend, Matt Mullinwag, who thinks deeply about these things as well, is something I would encourage people to check out just so they can start to train their brain to at least identify where they are using, basically, not words that work, but words that incite some kind of immediate nature.

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. Yeah. And look, I'm not saying I'm the paragon of equanimity and I'm walking around like the Dalai Lama just constantly turning of the archie.

Like, I get fired up and pissed off and say stupid things and send emails I shouldn't send. Like, I do these things, but just aspirationally, I think it's worth paying attention to. So out of those 1,000 and one species, we're going to step out of the octagon for a second, is one of them octopuses that steal cameras? Am I getting this right? No, we had this fascinating experience not that long ago. I was with my friend and marine biologist who works with sea change, Janus.

And we were going out to study the shaggy sea hairs that hardly ever come to this area. And very focused on the sea hairs and the next moment is 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 an unsettled animal. So it was like, OK, I've got to be a bit careful there. So drag the camera through the gravel back to its den.

And then I thought, OK, I'll just wait and hopefully the animal will give my camera back. But it was so fascinating. I happened to be recording at the time. This curious octopus looked at the camera, looked at the camera, then turned the camera and started forming us. And its arms were draped over the lens. So you get these incredible images of these suckers and arms right over the lenses and us in the background. And eventually the octopus came the camera back.

And when we looked at these images, it had this amazingly profound effect on us. It is suddenly looking through this world from the octopus's perspective. It was so powerful. And we both came up with this idea. Octopus should be number one. And Hermes Appians, the human animal, should be one thousand and one. We forget that we are part of this wild world. We born wild, we had this incredible heritage. So it was such a simple but profound experience that this animal kind of taught us.

And yeah, I mean, I think you may have seen some of the images. It's a quite wonderful to turn around and see it from that. And imagine what that animal's life is like. Imagine what its consciousness is like. We can't obviously quite get into that, but we can start to sense it. We're all made of the same stuff. We come from the same original mother. So we bonded more closely than we think. So it was a wonderful lesson from the wild.

And you've mentioned and also alluded to something that I would like to put into words for myself as a reminder as much as anything else. And that is, it's so easy as the skin encapsulated egos that we are walking around, particularly in urban environments, staring at screens, deforming our eyeballs one Zoom meeting at a time, that we are separate. And this comes back to language.

There's a reflection of thinking that if we say we need to conserve nature, it's almost we're implying a separation that at least from my felt experience isn't quite capturing what I take to be true at this point, which is almost for me. We've told a number of stories. I have experiences. It's an extension of us. We evolve to operate in this environment.

They're not separate things, which is a part of the reason why uploading consciousness to the cloud and so on, I think is a flawed objective to begin with because disembodied consciousness and we're already seeing this in actually AI research and robotics requires some type of form moving through space.

So it's fundamental to who we are and who we evolve to be as Homo sapiens, I suppose is what I'm saying, which is why this book is for anyone who feels like, and I say this without having read the book. So I'm taking a leap here, but I feel like based on this conversation, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Well, it seems like it's for anyone who feels like maybe something isn't quite right or there's maybe something that is missing or perhaps the mode of living that feels divorced from nature is producing some eerie sense of incompleteness or unease that this is a guide to finding ways to reintegrate that feeling of completeness, which is available. It is available. It's not magical. It is not out of reach.

It is with in reach, but it does take some changes of perception and behavior and interaction. Is that fair to say? Absolutely spot on. 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.

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. Great people can find the book amphibious soul finding the wild in a tame world. I recommend people check this out. I think thematically it is so deeply important. It has been so transformative for me. So I can't wait to get my hands on it.

People can find CChangeProject. That's CChangeProject.com. And we'll link to everything that we discussed in the show notes. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about in the additional comments or formal complaints against me or the podcast or anything that you would like to point my audience to anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind up. Close for this first conversation.

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, you know, 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 was just so special talking to you and getting to know you in a small intimate way, not just through the podcast. So there's been very special.

And to all that amazing big audience that you know, I believe is so supportive of this and it seems like you've 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 that gave birth to us and has nurtured us in this extraordinary way and to feel her there all the time. And just in the back of mine just sense her. If we can somehow gently begin to look after that mother and to find ways to regenerate her, I think that we'll do ourselves a great service.

I mean we really, that idea of saving the planet is, the planet is fine with art, she'll last easily without us. She's tough as nails and can handle anything. We are the fragile ones. So we almost need to look at our place and all the other animals that are sharing the space with us and just feel that at least that gratefulness for this amazing planet that has looked after so beautifully. So that's really anything.

And yeah, just absolutely wonderful talking to you Tim and very special for me, a real privilege. Likewise Craig, thanks so much for saying that. And I've admired you and your work for a long time. Been meaning to connect. Also glad to have the book as a wonderful excuse to have this conversation and hope to meet in person. Maybe I'll have a chance to graze my fingertips across some kelp with you at some point. I would enjoy that. I'd love to take your diving as being credible.

I would absolutely love to do that. I will put that on the to-do list. And once again, thank you for the time. Thank you for being so open about your experiences and capturing them in the book, which is amphibious soul finding the wild in a tame world and sea change projects. I see change project.com. Everybody listening, we will link to everything and we discussed in the show notes as per usual at Timed Up Vlog slash podcast, just search Craig or Foster and he will pop right up.

And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary. Two others, but don't forget to yourselves. And now, maybe to that squirrel outside, maybe that oak tree. Go take a look, sip a cup of coffee outside. Maybe it's just an insect mound, but you can really study the macro through the micro. So take a small step and enjoy. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday.

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It often includes articles on reading, books on reading, albums perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on. They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts, guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by One Password. I have been using One Password for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products. I met the founding team early on, loved those guys and I have made this product and requirement for everyone on my team. Data breaches affect everyone.

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I strongly endorse and a business solution that I use myself. So check it out. Get a free two week trial at onepassword.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Viori Clothing spelled V-U-O-R-I. Viori, I've been wearing Viori at least one item per day for the last few months and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case.

I feel very comfortable with it, super comfortable, super stylish and I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete, she is quite technical, although she would never say that. I asked her if she had ever used or heard of Viori and this was her response. I do love their stuff and using them for about a year.

I think I found them at REI, first for my partner, T-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff and then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have last their stylish enough I can wear them out and about the material is just super soft and durable. I just got their Clementine running shorts for summer and loved them.

The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out, enclosing and I'm abbreviating here, but enclosing with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running lounge wear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discrete logo. So that gives you some idea that was not intended for the sponsor read, that was just her response via text.

Viori, against called B-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands or in my case again going out to dinner, really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and it looks so good and it's not offensive, you don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You just want to be in them all this time.

Their men's core short K-O-R-E, the most comfortable line athletic short is your one short for every sport I've been using it. Kettable Swings for runs, you name it. The Banks short, this is their Go-To-Land to see short is the ultimate versatility it's made for recycled plastic bottles and when I'm wearing right now, which I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there or at least to men out there is the Ponto Performance pant and you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys.

You can check out what I'm talking about but when I'm wearing them right now, they're thin performance sweat pants but that doesn't do the justice. So you got to check out P-O-N-T-O Ponto Performance pant. For your ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Diori isn't just investment, you're clothing, it's an investment and you're happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off of your first purchase.

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