If you've ever wondered how the classic animal scenes in movies get made, Terry Kuebler, has has a lifetime of experience behind the scenes in Hollywood.

Starting as an animal trainer and horsewoman at home in California she entered the movie industry in the 1980s and helped create some very iconic movies- listen on to hear about that.

But there's way more to Terry than simply animal training. After a lesson from a very particular lion - a story that will leave you breathless- Terry realized that she- and the industry- needed a radically different approach.

She learned not to train animals but to listen to them- and from that point on her life was transformed. As you're will be too once you hear what the animals have to say.

Contact Terry:

• https://www.terrykuebler.com

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• https://rupertisaacson.com

If you haven't watched the film My Octopus Teacher, then stop reading this right now and go to Netflix. (Trailer here on YouTube)

An extraordinary work, which chronicles the relationship between South African diver and director Craig Foster and, yes, a wild octopus, the film won an Oscar and rightly so. The link between man and nature shown in the movie - or rather the clear reminder that man is nature and not removed from it in some way, as we may erroneously sometimes think, is shown with startling intimacy and a sense of wonder that brings you straight back to childhood.

Just watching My Octopus Teacher is very healing, but there is much much more to Craig Foster and his work than this one extraordinary movie.

I have been lucky enough to Craig for...well, a long time. When we first met i was campaigning for the San Bushmen of Botswana as a human rights activist - a story that is told in my books The Healing Land and the Long Ride Home - he and his brother Damon had recently completed a film called The Great Dance, following the firtunes of three master hunters of the San people and capturing seemingly impossible footage of, for example, a hunt in which the hunter must 'become' the animal - effectively shape-shifting.

A further film, Cosmic Africa, took us into astronomy through the eyes of a black South African astro-physicist and a journey into the way the universe is interpreted through the African mind.

Other movies included scuba diving into a crocodile's lair in the Okavango Swamps, and swimming with man eating sharks...the list goes on.

Recently, Craig published a book - Amphibious Soul, about his own relationship with the cold water kelp forest - the African Sea forest - where his encounter with his octopus teacher happened, and also about the fact because our species , homo sapiens sapiens, evolved at the margins of land and water where the most food is, we developed an amphibious nature at the dawn of our evolution.

Because of this, water brings out play, joy, exploration, wonder in us and connects us direct to nature, perhaps to the divine, more directly than almost any other means. Then there's tracking, the need for following patterns and signs in nature and beyond, which seems completely linked to happiness and fulfillment... but let's hear this and more from the mouth of the man himself. Listen on, Craig Foster has spent a lifetime doing the impossible and making a living through bringing wonder into the lives of people worldwide.

This conversation is no exception.

Books, Films, Causes & Contact:

• Amphibious Soul: https://amzn.to/3WrMJ6L
• My Octopus Teacher:
  • Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s0LTDhqe5A
  • Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81045007
• The Great Dance
• The Sea Change Project: https://seachangeproject.com/

Find our other shows and programs:
https://rupertisaacson.com

There are people out there in the world who make good things happen. The good things you see on your news feeds - not the doom scrolling.

The good documentaries you might have watched, the projects fighting climate change, AIDS, human rights abuses and the like - its often easy to forget that there are actual individuals behind the scenes making these things happen, then helping them get out to the audiences that need them, and finally leveraging those projects into actual change both at a policy level and for real lives of real people living in those conditions.

Ginny Jordan is one of these behind the scenes individuals - whether it was pioneering alternative education in the USA, helping women and children - first in Africa, and then all over the world living with HIV to form businesses, through Bead for Life and Street Business School, whether it was bringing Climate Change to cinemas and televisions around the world through the groundbreaking movies Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral, and then helping to support the organizations finding the solutions to these pressing issues of our times, or whether...well you'll have to listen to find out what she's up to now.

It can sound like a grand litany of successes, but in ever self actualized life there is, well, a life. Ginny has battled multiple bouts of cancer, crippling fights with Meuniere's Disease, and has had large parts of herself cut away. She knows what it is to be a mother battling these challenges and at the same time trying to make sure the kids are OK.

Bottom line, Ginny Jordan is one of the most effective people on the planet, while at the same time living daily with the very human realities of frailty and physical limitation. How do people like her do it? Listen on and be inspired.

Books, Films, Causes & Contact:
Book: Clear Cut. It's by Ginny Jordan
Bead for Life: www.beadforlife.org
ginnyjordan53@gmail.com
Films:

• Social Dilemma
• Chasing Ice
• Chasing Coral

Find our other shows and programs:
https://rupertisaacson.com