Lovely to talk to you, Hitendra. Thanks for having me on your show.

I'm not sure. Sometimes I don't always feel that peaceful. But I guess if you have the privilege of spending quite a lot of time in nature, it does calm one down a lot. So perhaps that has had some influence. In my younger days, when I was more disconnected from nature, I was certainly more anxious, more tense. But as I've gotten older and just spent more time in the wild, perhaps that has helped more calmness come into my being.

Great question. What is interesting is, I spent many years in nature when I went and met these amazing San People in the Kalahari, I thought I had a good sense for nature. It was actually quite a frightening experience, because I soon realized just how little I knew. The intense tracking abilities, the ability to understand bird language and predict where predators were moving. This extraordinary knowledge of a detail of wild nature. It was both very exciting and then very disturbing for me because I realized, very quickly, that I was outside of wild nature and they were right inside. And something inside me desperately wanted to also be inside nature. I realized that for most of our time, our species on this planet has been right inside nature, completely enfolded with the wild. I realized that this was something that was quite radically missing in myself. This was a long time ago and I didn't know how to get inside. I was busy making these films. I was photographing a lot of wild animals, even diving with incredible creatures. But I wasn't immersed inside that wild world. I couldn't speak that ancient language, that's connected to tracking and deep observation. It took a long time to think, "Okay, now I'm going to stop most of everything I've been doing and just focus on seeing if I can get inside." And it was quite a frightening thing to do.

I knew I had to do it in a place that was familiar to me. So I had to do it in the ocean. I'd grown up as a small child from literally the first few days of my life being introduced to the ocean by my parents. We grew up below the high watermark, right in the force of that great Atlantic Ocean. That's the place that I felt most connected to. So I knew I had to immerse myself in the ocean. It was a bit too difficult to start on land. It takes so many years to immerse, be a good tracker and to understand deep nature. So I set out in the ocean and it was very difficult at first. But, after a long time, I got some results.

What is interesting is that, since the beginning of time, we've had these intimate relations with wild animals and that's been completely cut off for most people in the last few hundred years. It was so fascinating for me when I started to re-establish some of these relationships with these wild animals in the water here. I noticed some of my human relationships changing. I wasn't as reliant on those human relationships. I could draw so much appreciation and love from these wild kin and it took pressure off of some of the human relationships. It is quite fascinating to watch that process and it kind of makes sense that we've done this for so long and we've had this multiplicity of relationships with other species. When we cut that off, of course, we are going to rely more heavily and put more pressure on our human relationships.

Yes. You're absolutely right. If you can imagine, when every child is actually still born wild, expecting a wild existence, because we've had this huge history and pre-history of connection to the wild, and suddenly, you're faced with this very strange scenario where you're kind of an alien in your own world. You're not connected to your own world. You don't understand it. You can't survive unless you go to the supermarket and so on. So, it's quite unconsciously traumatic for the psyche. But when you start reconnecting to that and feeling that separateness drops away, it's very enriching for the being. You feel the connection and you don't feel insecure as a wild born human being. It's very enriching and exciting. That explains it a little bit better.

It's very much a meditation of sorts, especially in the water. It's very hard to think of anything else when you're immersed in this incredible, three dimensional liquid space and you're studying these incredible animals. You're dealing with the cold because I don't wear a wetsuit. I want to have no barrier between me and the wild ocean. So, you're dealing with all these things and you are very focused in that present state. You're very present. It's hard to be thinking of the past or the future. I guess my favorite meditation is tracking in the wild. In the water, even more so, but, I also love tracking on the land and in the intertidal and on the coast. It's a full immersion in this incredible bio-diverse wonderland where so much is mysterious. We know so little. But there are these amazing pieces of the puzzle that one can put together and hold onto.

Sure. We had a little wooden bungalow. You can't believe how close it was to the ocean. When there were stormy waves, the waves used to come up and sometimes break the doors down and flash the whole house up. It was very close to the ocean. It would be totally illegal to build a house that close to the ocean today. So, I was brought home and my father immediately took me down with my mother to the ocean. It's a cold Atlantic Ocean. The average temperature is about 12 degrees Celsius. I was just immersed on my first day right into that water. And apparently, I had screamed as any baby would. It's quite a shock. But, it was like a natural initiation because our whole family was so connected and loved the ocean so much. In a lot of stories from my parents and grandparents, I was absolutely fascinated by these rock pools and the intertidal from a very early age. From as early as 2 years old, I was there almost every day. I started diving when I was 3 years old by holding onto my father's back and then he dived down and I eventually learned to do the same thing. The kelp forest and this incredible Atlantic Ocean has always been in my life.

Yeah. It's like a baptism.

You're absolutely right. It's so interesting that you say that it seemed to be intuition involved. What's happening there is, they're seeing maybe the first signs of those lion tracks, but they're not exactly sure where those lions are. So what they're doing is, creating a working hypothesis. Then they're using that working hypothesis to figure out potential places where those lions could be. Sometimes it's very systematic and the tracks take you to the animals. And sometimes, one has to use intuition and obviously, knowledge of the environment.

It's an amazing combination that the mind has to put in place to be able to sometimes find these very elusive animals. It can take 20 years to become a really good tracker. It's not something that you can easily learn very quickly. But, if someone's interested in tracking, they can quite quickly get some results and certainly tap into some part of wild nature. But when you've got guests and you're looking for predators, of course, then the birds also tell you an enormous amount about where animals are. Birds give off alarm calls. Those alarm calls and the shapes that the birds are making and where they're looking can tell a good tracker, even what kind of predator that is in the vicinity and how to find them and can do it from a long distance away.

A very good tracker and some of the trackers I've worked with can tell from about one kilometer away from the ripples coming through the bird language where those predators are. It seems like magic, but it's actually a language that humans can speak with ancient tracking language that's embedded in our wild psyche.

I had this idea. I learned the essence of tracking and by no means mastered it in the Kalahari at all. Then I went back to my childhood love, the Great African Sea Forest. I thought, just in the back of my mind, is there any way it'd be possible to track underwater? And for the first year, it was totally impossible. An animal makes a track, and in 5 seconds, it's washed away by the swell. So it's impossible. I can't even begin.

What I had to do was look at tracking in a completely different way underwater. On the land, it's the tracks in the sand. It's the insect and the wind that are the timekeepers. It's a totally different story underwater. You've got slime trails that I eventually saw after two years left by animals. You've got all sorts of other little signs like eggs that are being laid, tiny marks and areas where the swell isn't, the mollusks tell you an enormous amount where animals are. There are a lot of kills around that tell us where octopus or other cephalopods are. So it's a whole different set of rules that I had to learn from scratch because nobody seems to have done much underwater tracking. I had to learn from scratch and it was really fun and interesting, but a very slow process. I still enjoy tracking on land as well. But, I enjoy the beaches and the intertidal area here. That's where I focus the land tracking and then do the underwater tracking in the kelp forest.

That's such an important thing you just said, Hitendra. It's such a critical thing. If you really want to know nature, you can fly around the whole world to these exotic places; but it would be better to just visit your own backyard again and again and again. You might spend months and you've got a reasonable sense of what's going on and you can't imagine going any further, and suddenly you make a massive breakthrough. And then it's the next layer and the next. I promise you, you can spend your entire lifetime in your own backyard and that piece of nature will keep teaching you deeper and deeper. The complexity and wild nature is more than what we could ever cope with. It's extraordinary how complex and powerful it is. There's something about visiting the same area and getting to know that at a very deep level. In my mind, it is a very powerful and perhaps one of the best teachings.

It is the ultimate teacher. There's no better teacher than learning directly from wild nature. Of course, it helps a lot to have guide books. I've been very fortunate to have amazing marine biologists around me. They've helped me tremendously. Of course, that helps so much, but the direct teaching from the wild and from the weather directly being face to face with those extraordinary animal kin, there's nothing that can replace that in my mind.

Because she was just so much more than a friend. She had such a powerful influence on me. She taught me so much about her species. I would have thought it would be undermining in a way or dishonorable to just call her my friend. I mean, a friend is a wonderful thing. But she was so much more than that. She was a real teacher. I felt so grateful to her that I wanted to honor her. I felt small in some ways in comparison to her. I felt she was the teacher and I was a little student there. Each day was a privilege to learn more and more from her. So it wasn't a friend to friend kind of thing.

Also, you never quite know what a cephalopod is thinking. Their whole cognition is very different to humans in many ways. I just knew that she was this incredible teacher, and that's what I stuck with. And I like the idea of nature as a teacher. It can teach us so much about nature itself, but also about ourselves. That's why I went that route.

It's a great question. I remember one of my incredible San teachers in the Kalahari talking about this rare, strange thing when an animal sometimes makes contact. There's an exchange that happens. When an animal trusts a human, it's fairly rare for that to happen. But when they do, it's a hard thing to describe. But for me, it was very unexpected. But I could feel it immediately, "Oh, my goodness, this animal no longer feels that I'm a threat at all." It's realized that I'm no threat at all, and then it can go about its business. That's when you get this incredible insight into this animal's natural behavior. Most animals when they see humans, immediately go into defense or threat posture because we are very intimidating to most animals. So it's an incredible privilege when that drops away and then you can just take a little bit of a step into the secret life of that creature and get insight into this animal's extraordinary existence. It was just absolutely amazing to feel that.

It's an interesting thing. If you try the same thing on land with an equivalent species, you could most probably be in a lot of trouble. You've just told the story of going into Botswana and meeting those lions. Imagine getting off your vehicle and just walking amongst them with your family. That's going to end badly. You can have a similar experience with similar sized animals in the waters, top predators as well, and 99.9% of the time, you're absolutely fine and it's very safe. That's because animals on land, especially in Africa, have evolved for an enormously long period of time to see humans as quite a threat. But because we haven't been in the water prolifically for that long, these animals don't see us as nearly as much of a threat as land animals. They also don't see our form, our shape, our smell, the way we move. They don't see us as prey. Once you get used to diving with sharks, it's pretty obvious that you can feel that they're not threatening. One can get very comfortable being with them. You don't want to take chances or necessarily go in very murky water, especially with very big animals. That's not a good idea. You also have to be respectful of them and careful. But for the most part, they are really not interested and they do not see us as food at all.

I don't say it's complete fearlessness. There's always some level of respect and some level of fear depending upon the circumstances. But I was fortunate enough to spend 2 years doing a film about sharks and free diving with great whites, with tiger sharks up close who are the biggest and supposedly the most dangerous sharks on the planet. In the right conditions, when the water is clear, calm and relaxed and you know what you're doing, it can be quite a safe experience.

I also did some diving with crocodiles and that is a completely different experience. I didn't feel that was that safe because a crocodile sees a human as prey, as food. I wouldn't go and do that again, but I'd gladly dive with sharks in the right conditions. It's a wonderful experience. Most of the time they are very gentle and if treated right, they react very nicely.

Yeah. Octopus are supposedly the most intelligent invertebrate on the planet. For their size, they're highly intelligent, fairly large brain. But what's interesting is that two-third of the cognition is actually in the body itself. The cognition is in the limbs. That's a hard one to get one's head around. And one-third in the actual brain in the head. The animal is born with an enormous amount of intelligence, and they're only living for a year or a year and a half. So that evolution can happen very fast. It's an amazing strategy to live fast and die young so they can survive very well in this world. We have longer lived species who would struggle tremendously. What they do is, they've got this intelligence they're born with, but then they can adapt that very quickly. You see that a lot when they're being threatened by a predator, a pajama shark for instance. They'll try all sorts of things. They'll try inking, they'll try hiding and they'll try swimming. If that doesn't work, they try the most incredibly innovative thing. They pick up to 60 shells and stones, and they make this temporary armor that covers the outside of their body. That is just the most extraordinary thinking you can imagine. Where did they come up with that? That's a kind of last measure to try and avoid being eaten. Then, just at the right moment, they will drop that armor, which is now covered with their smell. Remember, these sharks don't see so well and then move away. The shark often goes for the smell that's on the shells and then the octopus escapes.

You can't believe that essentially a mollusk, a snail with a huge brain, can think so innovatively who can interact with a human and realize that a human is not a threat after a while and can also realize that some humans are a threat. In areas along the coast where we've got a lot of fishing and people catching octopus, you won't see them very readily in areas where people have fished. In the marine protected areas, you can't believe the difference in their behavior. It's night and day. So these animals are highly intelligent. They can distinguish between individual humans quite easily. They really are super intelligent.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that is true intelligence. That is programmed into the animal. When she lays the eggs, she gives an enormous amount of her actual physical body to that process. She stops eating. Many animals do this. Insects do this a lot. When they actually lay eggs, the program starts to run and then they will not live for very much longer after that. I wouldn't say it's any form of intelligence or they're not thinking too much about that, it's just a process. Sometimes, they can become senile in that process. A lot of the cognition actually goes. Sometimes I see an octopus just wandering around doing strange things and not worrying about predators or anything. Then, you know it is in the end stages of its life and the brain is disintegrating as well. It's not necessarily that conscious of that whole process.

I think it was just an extension of what we spoke before. This connection to nature itself and to these species. Remember, the film is just 80 minutes, but I've spent every day in the water for years. I've got multiple relationships with multiple species, not necessarily as intimate as I had with the octopus that you develop this connection and this knowledge of all these animals. It's more the combined effect of that that breaks down this feeling of being separate from the natural world. You have this realization, "Oh, my goodness. All of us, even if we live in the middle of a city. We are completely woven into the fabric of wild nature. Every single breath we take, every mouthful of food, every ray of sunlight is thanks to her." Like, every moment that we've ever existed on this planet is thanks to the mother of all mothers, which is wild nature and biodiversity. The ocean and the land share this very powerfully. We can breathe because of the phytoplankton in the ocean and because of the trees on land and the insects. It just goes on and on. It's this incredible, complex web of wild animals that's keeping us alive from second to second, no matter where we live. And it's easy to forget that.

That was a very powerful thing that I realized through my Octopus teacher, but also through the greater biological intelligence of that Great African Sea Forest. In these tiny moments of grace, you can literally feel that giant biological intelligence just functions and gives rise to life, supporting life. Even though there are a lot of predators and animals living and dying, overall, there's just a sense of fecundity and life giving force. That's what she's been giving us for 300,000 years. She's been giving our species life. And we've forgotten that she's the mother of all mothers. We desperately need to look after her if we want to keep existing on the planet. The absolutely most crucial thing we can do is keep biodiversity together. The best way of doing that is by leaving her alone and not extracting a lot of animals or plants from a wild system, not polluting that wild system, etc.

It's quite simple. Many of the human interventions don't work very well because she's too complex for our tiny minds. But if we leave her alone, that biological intelligence flourishes and she knows what to do. It's quite a powerful thing when you immerse in nature and this hits you in your emotional being and in your spiritual being. It's a profound transformation and a change. You feel what I call the ancient heartbeat of that wild essence that's just beating outside and inside our bodies because we are wild nature. We are wild ourselves. We've just been tamed by the strange experiences. But just under the skin, we are wild as well.

Thank you, Hitendra. I'm now writing a non-fiction book, trying to articulate many of these incredible stories and experiences I've had in the Great African Sea Forest and these wonderful people that I dive with. They've also taught me so much. Then, of course, celebrating these wild animals and these wild plants that live in this environment, but also acknowledging our African ancestors. We come from Africa. Every single one of us that has ever walked this planet, has a common African family. We are African made. For about 2/3 of our time that we've been as a species on the planet, we've just been in Africa. Only relatively recently did we migrate to the rest of the world. So I'm interested in honoring our African ancestors and this extraordinary path that they followed and the incredible innovations that they invented make a huge difference to our lives today.

Hundred thousand years ago on this coast here, they were the most unbelievable inventions. They really were the genesis of art and science that make such a big difference to us today. I'm interested in that. And also I'm interested in honoring and learning from indigenous people in Africa, but in the rest of the world. I think we face massive challenges as a species today and I think quite a few of the answers to the challenges we face lie within Indigenous knowledge.

If you look around the world and places where Indigenous people are living and have had some power over what they say and what's happened, those areas are often thriving in a much better way than other places. We really need to listen to our indigenous people and to indigenous cultures. They are still connected to nature. They're still connected to the mother of all mothers. We desperately need to listen to them and also, of course, to our scientists. Some of our great scientists know so much about the wild and they've been trying to tell politicians for a long time that we really need to look after nature in a far better way.

These are the kinds of things I've been focusing on. I'm interested to eventually develop a lot of these ideas into an app where people can go to be inspired to reconnect with deep nature and learn about tracking human origins and indigenous cultures. That's on the cards for later. I want to try and do that within the Sea Change Project, which is our wonderful NGO. Also, try to just keep working at my own relationship with the wild and keep tracking every day if I can. I've got so much to learn and I just feel there's this enormous mystery in this little amount that I know. That is inspiring in itself. You're walking in this mysterious, extraordinary space, but just learning a little bit each day and trying to put those little dots together using mostly nature as the inspiration and as my teacher.

It's very kind of you. Thank you.

Absolutely wonderful!

It's a great pleasure. An image came to me when you spoke that beautiful quote. I've often had the sense with beautiful octopus moving and it's changing its colors, sometimes a thousand times in an hour or even more and each color change is this master artwork. The whole of nature is really like that. If we open, it's just the most extraordinary thing. With each sunrise, as we feel the earth tilting forward, if you really step into the mystery, power and wonder of that, it's almost too much to take in. But that is the wonder of wild nature. The wonder of this planet is overwhelming.

Thank you, Hitendra. I think one of the best places to go is the Sea Change Project. It's www.seachangeproject.com. That's our website. There's a lot of lovely material on there and we'll be developing that more and more as we go along. Also, the book you mentioned, 'The Underwater Wild,' which is out in America and other countries at the moment, there's quite a lot of deeper insights into the experiences. I'm writing this book at the moment, which will be out with HarperCollins in a year or so. These things take quite a time. I'm not the fastest producer, but hopefully I'll have the inspiration to just keep going and chip away and have these products slowly coming out.

Lovely chatting to you. Bless you! Thank you.