Craig Foster — South African filmmaker, naturalist, and co-founder of the Sea Change Project; creator of the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher and author of Amphibious Soul.
The gist
Craig Foster joins Tim Ferriss for a wide-ranging conversation spanning the Great African Seaforest off Cape Town to the Kalahari Desert. He describes daily cold-water free diving, the lost art of persistence hunting by San master trackers, and how he pioneered underwater tracking by reading slime trails and bite marks. Foster shares deeply personal experiences: an intimate encounter with a Cape clawless otter, an octopus that turned his camera around to film him, losing his home to a fire, and the psychological toll of My Octopus Teacher's sudden global fame. The episode closes with an extended exchange on conservation strategy, language, and how to find common ground across political divides to protect biodiversity, framed through Foster's idea of nature as the 'mother of mothers.'
Big reveals
- An octopus grabbed Foster's camera, dragged it to its den, then turned it around and filmed Foster and his colleague, producing images of the world from the octopus's perspective.
- The sacred San persistence hunt happens maybe once every three or four years; the four-hour hunt they filmed saw the tracker Karoha enter an altered state, locked onto a kudu without following physical tracks for about three of those hours.
- Foster developed underwater tracking over roughly 10 years with no manuals, learning to read mollusk slime trails, drill holes, and bite marks to tell who has been in an area and how long an animal rested.
- A super-shy Cape clawless otter touched Foster's feet, climbed up his side, and reached out to touch his face, moving him to tears; afterward it followed him into the shallows calling him back.
- Foster's bluff about 'song catching' led to Yo-Yo Ma coming to South Africa; the team improvised underwater instruments (a whale ear bone, abalone shells, a kelp 'octopus drum') and performed for him.
- Foster lost his home of 16 years to an electrical fire in roughly an hour, escaping with his son amid exploding glass; the loss taught him the ocean and planet were his true home.
- After My Octopus Teacher reached 100+ million Netflix homes during COVID, Foster's nervous system collapsed; he barely slept for months, his beard went gray, and he rebuilt himself using cold water and nature.
- Foster proposes ranking the octopus as species number one and Homo sapiens as 1,001 among the kelp forest animals Sea Change studies, to remind humans they are part of the wild world.
Things worth remembering
- Foster encountered the world's largest stingray species (up to 16-17 feet long, 14 feet wide, weighing about a ton), and uniquely it was pure white, covered in fine sand over its skin slime.
- Family tradition had newborns dunked in the roughly 12 degree Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) Atlantic; when Foster took his week-old son in, the baby's belly button washed out to sea.
- San trackers can sense a predator moving up to 1.5 kilometers away by reading the ripples of alarm sounds from small birds, despite visibility under 100 meters; their lineage goes back 120,000 years.
- Foster does a daily breath-hold practice holding 3-5 minutes, three or four times, and warns never to do breathing techniques within at least half an hour of entering water due to shallow-water blackout risk.
- Foster says the body's ability to thermoregulate in cold water reflects mental state, plummeting when stressed, sleep-deprived, or unwell, and that cold exposure releases dopamine and noradrenaline that sharpen the mind.
- Foster can safely be one meter from sevengill, great white, or tiger sharks underwater, and has been among 55-60 sevengill sharks at once because they do not perceive him as prey.
- Foster and Professor Charles Griffiths have named three new species of shrimp, including Heteromysis fosteri; one species lives inside octopus dens in a likely mutual relationship.
- A whale ear bone about the size of a fist made no sound on land but produced a deep booming sound that went straight through their bodies when struck inside an underwater cave.
- Foster warns that if ocean phytoplankton communities collapse, humans stop breathing, arguing biodiversity is the planet's life-support system and immune system, not just a climate issue.
- Tim cites the book Words That Work by Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who coined 'death tax' as a rebrand of inheritance tax, as an example of how language shapes behavior and policy.
Recommended in this episode
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The Great Dance
Craig Foster (inferred)
“The Great Dance, and I found the video of The Great Dance and found it endlessly fascinating.” — Tim Ferriss 00:06:31Find it on Amazon
My Octopus Teacher
Craig Foster (inferred)
“as we speak and also as well-documented in My Octopus Teacher, fantastic film. Of course, I'm not the only person who feels that way.” — Tim Ferriss 00:15:48Find it on Amazon
Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World
Craig Foster
“Why did you decide to write Amphibious Soul, subtitled Finding the Wild in a Tame World?” — Tim Ferriss 00:42:27Find it on Amazon
Words That Work
Frank Luntz
“this book like Words That Work, which was recommended to me by a friend, Matt Mullenweg, who thinks deeply about these things, is something I would encourage people to check out” — Tim Ferriss 01:52:00Find it on Amazon
Of Wolves and Men
Barry Lopez
“there's a book, Of Wolves and Men, by Barry Lopez... It's a beautiful book and it is incredibly well-written. And it pulls people in” — Tim Ferriss 01:40:06Find it on Amazon