Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / From Horses to Human Rights: Rupert Isaacson’s Journey of Service, Healing & Self-Actualization | Ep 34

Transcript

From Horses to Human Rights: Rupert Isaacson’s Journey of Service, Healing & Self-Actualization | Ep 34 · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

• 0:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
• 0:01
  Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
• 0:03
  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
• 0:06
  The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
• 0:08
  Before I jump in with today's guest, I want to say a huge thank you to you, our
• 0:13
  audience, for helping to make this happen.
• 0:15
  I have a request.
• 0:16
  If you like what we do here, please give it a thumbs up,
• 0:19
  like, subscribe, tell a friend.
• 0:22
  It really, really helps us to make the pro.
• 0:24
  To find out about our certification courses, online video libraries,
• 0:29
  books, and other courses, please go to rupertisaacson.com.
• 0:34
  So now let's jump in.
• 0:36
  Okay.
• 0:37
  I realize that I have not really given a good recounting of why this
• 0:48
  live free, ride free idea came about and what my own journey was here.
• 0:53
  So, I'm just gonna take an opportunity in between my fascinating guests
• 1:01
  to give you guys an bit of an update on what brought me here.
• 1:06
  What's my own trajectory of self-actualization.
• 1:10
  So the idea came for this web this website, this this podcast from
• 1:18
  a trip to Yellowstone National Park in 2015, no, 14 when my.
• 1:27
  Son Ian was still inside Iliana's abdomen, but we were taking Rowan, my oldest son,
• 1:37
  who many of you know from the horse boy on this trip to see wolves in Yellowstone as
• 1:42
  part of a project that he had going at the time called End Dangerous, about animals
• 1:48
  that are both endangered and dangerous.
• 1:50
  And we wanted to look at the reintroduction of wolves in
• 1:53
  Yellowstone, amazing trip.
• 1:56
  And we went in March and it was all snowed up.
• 2:00
  So you can imagine how iconic it was to see the wolves against the snow and
• 2:07
  to share this with one child born and really coming into the light because
• 2:13
  Rowan was, you know, coming out of those years of, severe autism and
• 2:18
  really into this total engagement with the world and another child unborn and
• 2:24
  all of that adventure going through his mother, Hmm, excuse me, into him.
• 2:34
  And it was in the course of walking a trail, I think we were actually
• 2:39
  snowshoeing Eliana being very pregnant at the time where we came up with
• 2:45
  this idea of talking to people who had lived self-actualize lives.
• 2:51
  Because we had just run into a guy called Rick McIntyre, who
• 2:58
  many of you may know, wrote.
• 3:01
  Books about bestselling books, about the Wolfly introductions in Yellowstone.
• 3:06
  And we had just met him and interviewed him sort of there on the side of the road.
• 3:12
  And I was thinking, gosh, this is a guy who's really lived a
• 3:15
  self-actualize life, and by the way, he's gonna be a guest on this show.
• 3:18
  And I thought, yeah, but there's so many people out there doing this, and also
• 3:24
  so many people out there just wondering how to live through their dreams and
• 3:29
  manifest the reality that they want.
• 3:32
  So that's where the idea for this podcast came.
• 3:35
  And it took a few years for it to come to fruition, but now here it is.
• 3:39
  And of course we're talking to all these incredible people who do all these
• 3:42
  incredible things, some of whom are well known and some of whom are not.
• 3:45
  But my story.
• 3:46
  Alright, so that's where the idea came, but.
• 3:51
  My own story is this.
• 3:52
  I'll just sort of go through the biography really.
• 3:55
  I was born in London in 1967 to two parents from Southern Africa.
• 4:02
  My father's from Zimbabwe was then Rhodesia.
• 4:05
  My mother is South African.
• 4:07
  And it was an interesting family because it was one that sat really
• 4:13
  at the crossroads of many cultures.
• 4:15
  On my dad's side, we were Ashkenazi Jews originally from Lithuania,
• 4:22
  who had immigrated to Africa.
• 4:26
  On one side almost by, by mistake.
• 4:29
  It goes the legend.
• 4:30
  And on the other side by design.
• 4:32
  On my, I'll return to that story in a minute 'cause it's funny.
• 4:36
  On my mother's side, they'd been out there since I think the late
• 4:40
  18th, very early 19th century.
• 4:43
  Part English part, Scottish part Dutch ants.
• 4:47
  And in the course of the few hundred years of living there, the family of
• 4:53
  course spread out through society.
• 4:58
  And we were kind of represented out there in southern Africa at kind of every
• 5:03
  level from really, really poor there was a sort of poor white class right up to
• 5:08
  sort of almost a blue blood class there.
• 5:11
  And we also had a whole side of the family that, well still today is not
• 5:15
  white, is, is of mixed race, which in South Africa they call colored.
• 5:21
  And that's still an official designation.
• 5:23
  That's not necessarily a racist term.
• 5:25
  People refer to themselves that way.
• 5:29
  And so we had family that were kind of.
• 5:35
  The evil architects of apartheid.
• 5:38
  We had family who were in jail because they were fighting against apartheid.
• 5:43
  We had family who were not white, we had family who were Jewish, we
• 5:47
  had family that were afri speaking.
• 5:49
  We had family that were only English speaking.
• 5:52
  And I grew up in this household in North London where my parents had
• 5:56
  moved in the sixties with this kind of constant procession of all these
• 6:00
  different characters coming through the house and afri cans often being spoken
• 6:04
  in the house and everything on the walls, all the furniture and all the,
• 6:09
  the artifacts and objects around those all being kind of Southern African.
• 6:13
  So it's a weird bubble of this kind of culture within North London.
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  And there was a certain amount of back and forth to Africa as well.
• 6:22
  So.
• 6:24
  I grew up very much seeing these, as I said, crossroads of cultures.
• 6:30
  And I was connected to them all.
• 6:33
  I was part of them all, but I wasn't fully any one of those things.
• 6:38
  And at a very young age that didn't matter.
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  When I hit my teens, I felt a great sense of needing to belong
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  and wishing that I could belong and not belonging really anywhere.
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  And it was, took me a while to see that that actually was a place of
• 6:56
  power that, that crossroads of cultures allows you to take from each one what
• 7:04
  is good, leave alone, what is not good.
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  And it means that while it's true, you don't quite belong anywhere,
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  you also sort of belong everywhere.
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  And if you think of yourself as a, as a, you know, citizen of the
• 7:18
  planet, that's actually a very real position to be in rather than to
• 7:23
  feel what I'm rooted in one culture.
• 7:26
  But I was lucky enough to be connected to many different cultures.
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  Okay, so that was the Southern African side.
• 7:32
  Then I also had this great love for horses.
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  It was kind of born into me and there'd been lots of cavalry officers
• 7:38
  in the past, in the family, and sometimes it skips a generation.
• 7:42
  A lot of you who are horsey listeners will know this, so my
• 7:45
  parents are not horsey at all.
• 7:47
  But I had a great aunt who, my mother's aunt, south African, again, who had
• 7:52
  married into an English horsey family up in a place called Leicestershire, which is
• 7:56
  about an hour and a half north of London.
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  And, she had re old retired horses.
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  And we used to go up and spend weekends frequently at that farm.
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  And I was just always to be found from the age of about three, just sitting
• 8:10
  in the field talking to the horses.
• 8:13
  And my parents were very, very urban, so they were not sympathetic to the idea that
• 8:20
  maybe I would want to ride, but my great aunt said that, boy, he's gonna ride.
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  And my parents are like, no, no, no, no, no, we're not gonna.
• 8:27
  And they're like, no, he will.
• 8:28
  You'll see.
• 8:30
  So in the event she was right.
• 8:33
  But before we get to that there was another aspect of my childhood, which
• 8:38
  I think has helped to fuel this whole adventure, which is that I had this deep,
• 8:43
  deep, deep craving and longing for nature.
• 8:46
  My parents lived and still live in an area of London that is incredibly.
• 8:52
  Urban, it's right in the middle.
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  It's called Islington.
• 8:56
  It's quite a handsome area, but it's by no means, you know, connected to
• 9:03
  nature as we would like to think of it.
• 9:06
  Ideally, you know, open fields forest, no.
• 9:09
  There's actually, oddly enough, quite a lot of wildlife in it,
• 9:12
  urban foxes, that sort of thing.
• 9:14
  But it's very built up and where I was sent to school was right in the middle
• 9:19
  of the financial district of London.
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  So concrete, concrete, and more concrete.
• 9:24
  So I had this burning desire to get out, to get into nature,
• 9:31
  to get on horseback and.
• 9:34
  At the same time I was drafted into a choir, a singing choir.
• 9:39
  And the school that I went to, which is called, still exists
• 9:43
  today, the City of London School.
• 9:44
  It's an ancient school that was founded 600 years ago or so.
• 9:48
  It provides the boys for both the Chapel Royal, which is the King's Chapel,
• 9:56
  and the Temple, which is where the Knight's Temple were based in London.
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  It's the second oldest building in London.
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  And it's steeped in law.
• 10:08
  The Magna Carter sits there, the tombs of the old Knights Temple, the Marshall
• 10:13
  family that were there, you know, with the effigies of the Knights on top of them.
• 10:18
  You think it sounds kind of Hogwarts ish, but it wasn't.
• 10:24
  It was just.
• 10:26
  All rather unpleasant and nasty and actually quite violent.
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  If you've read the Lord of the Flies where the boys in that story that from
• 10:37
  a choir and they get stranded on a desert island and, you know, revert
• 10:41
  to a not very nice way of treating each other, it was a bit like that.
• 10:45
  And the reason was there wasn't a lot of really good adult supervision.
• 10:49
  So between the school itself, which was in the heart of the sort of brutal financial
• 10:55
  district in terms of the aesthetics, and then the school itself was quite brutal
• 10:59
  because we were the last generation of boys to be regularly beaten at school.
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  And then the choir, which although on the face of it was all very,
• 11:11
  very clean cut and lovely, there was lots of nasty violence behind the,
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  the scenes and this great longing to get out and get into nature.
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  I had a nervous breakdown.
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  And in this nervous breakdown, I was about, I was guess I was 11.
• 11:29
  I couldn't get outta bed for about, ooh, three months or more, six months maybe.
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  And I was deeply upset and sort of unable to overwhelmed, unable to, to function.
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  And what got me out of bed was horses.
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  At that point my parents really listened to me and I said, look,
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  I think this would help me.
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  So that's how I ended up getting riding lessons.
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  And it was true.
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  It brought me out of bed and into the light and out into nature.
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  And it was literally as if a switch had been flicked.
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  I'd had all sorts of, you know, medical examinations and so on, and no one
• 12:20
  could find the cause of, you know, why I had no energy and so on and so on.
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  But as soon as horses were brought into the picture, boom,
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  there I was writer's reign.
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  So that began my equestrian life, life
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  now I wanted a horse.
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  And that of course presented its own set of issues and challenges.
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  So the deal I made with my folks was that if I could raise the money, we could
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  get one and keep it at my aunt's farm, even though that was a couple of hours
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  north of London and I would just go up there every weekend and all holidays.
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  Just live that life and be there and be useful on the farm.
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  Because by then I was getting a bit bigger, a bit stronger, you
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  know, useful for shoveling poo and doing all the myriad, endless
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  chores that I needed around a farm.
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  So, I got a gig self, a sort of self-created gig.
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  So my sort of be beginning of entrepreneurship really.
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  I used to go it occurred to me that if I were to empty all the crap that
• 13:34
  was in our neighbor's garages that they always wanted to get rid of, but
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  never could, and took it up to a local flea market in North London at a place
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  called Swiss Cottage, which doesn't exist anymore than a flea market there.
• 13:46
  It's all become too gentrified now.
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  But back then in the late seventies, early eighties, it did, and
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  I could sell at the weekends.
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  All this old
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  kind of rubbish really at very, very cheap prices that eventually I could
• 14:05
  make enough money to buy a horse.
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  So for two years, every weekend I sat in my own market stall aged
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  between 12 and 14, and I flogged as much gear as I could get out of all
• 14:22
  the garages in the neighborhood.
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  And I did actually make enough money from this to buy a horse.
• 14:28
  And the horse that I bought was a horse off the racetrack.
• 14:34
  That's how you get cheap horses.
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  He was cheap and there was a reason he was cheap.
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  He was, he was, oh God, not very manageable.
• 14:43
  And he scared the bejesus out of me, and I had to learn to ride well quite quickly.
• 14:48
  I had been taking lessons of course, for a couple of years at this point,
• 14:52
  but this was a whole other level.
• 14:54
  And luckily for me, there was someone who could mentor me who was living on
• 15:00
  the farm and she was a radiographer.
• 15:03
  Who was also horsey who exchanged the, she was called Trudy and she exchanged living
• 15:10
  in the farm cottage and doing the horses and other work through the week before
• 15:16
  and after work in return for free rent.
• 15:18
  And then I, at the weekend, the deal was, would take over the
• 15:21
  chores when I came up, which I did.
• 15:23
  And she was quite knowledgeable and she showed me how to retrain and
• 15:29
  make manageable this extremely hot, unmanageable horse who actually taught me
• 15:33
  so much that that was what set me on my professional track with horses because if
• 15:39
  you can learn to manage a horse like this.
• 15:43
  We do all kinds of crazy stuff but was also brilliantly talented in many ways.
• 15:48
  If you could learn to handle a horse like this in the competition arena and
• 15:52
  in, out in the hunt field, it's a big fox hunting area then you could kind
• 15:58
  of train any horse, any other horse after this would be kind of easy.
• 16:03
  So he really set me on my professional path, even though
• 16:07
  I didn't know it at the time.
• 16:09
  So that was sort of my boyhood of having these dreams and thinking how do I
• 16:15
  possibly manifest my way out of being in the middle of the city, not having
• 16:21
  access to nature, wishing that I could ride and be with horses wishing myself
• 16:26
  into a, a more sensory, not just sensory friendly, but let's say sensory possible
• 16:33
  environment and by hook and by crook.
• 16:36
  Quite early in my life I manifested this.
• 16:39
  And when I'm thinking back, remember where we started with my African
• 16:44
  family constantly coming through.
• 16:46
  I would hear all these different perspectives on life and I would see
• 16:51
  how the people who were fighting against apartheid and who were the sort of
• 16:55
  freedom fighters within the family were consistently gaining ground.
• 16:59
  They were always further ahead each time one met them and the people who were
• 17:06
  within the family who were more resistant to that were always losing ground.
• 17:11
  And I realized quite early, oh, I see nature.
• 17:15
  The world, the universe wants harmony injustice.
• 17:20
  It doesn't last.
• 17:21
  It can go on for quite a long time, but always the world is
• 17:25
  gonna return to harmony if it can harmony as the natural state.
• 17:28
  And somehow this really came into me, I think, through the constant arguments
• 17:35
  and s that all these different sides of the family constantly brought.
• 17:40
  'cause a lot of my non-white family too, by the way, they couldn't go to
• 17:42
  university in and the good universities in South Africa 'cause of apartheid.
• 17:47
  So they would come to the UK and do that, and of course they would stay with
• 17:49
  us in our house in London and so on.
• 17:51
  So I really did get all these different perspectives.
• 17:54
  Okay.
• 17:55
  And, and so that people could create their own realities if
• 17:58
  they wanted to into the bargain.
• 18:01
  There was also always this spiritual side where the earliest memories that
• 18:05
  I've got are of walking in the garden.
• 18:09
  I think I must have been.
• 18:12
  Between three and five, somewhere there, maybe even younger, maybe.
• 18:17
  No, it's hard.
• 18:18
  It's hard to to tell.
• 18:19
  But I'm very, very young and it's a sunlit garden and I'm up early on a summer
• 18:24
  morning and none of the adults are awake.
• 18:28
  So I'm walking in the garden and there are bees buzzing, there's
• 18:33
  flowers growing outta the brick wall.
• 18:35
  There's sun on the brick wall.
• 18:37
  And somehow I can hear God talking through those bees and those flowers.
• 18:42
  And the message is very reassuring.
• 18:45
  The message is you are loved.
• 18:48
  Every, everyone is love.
• 18:49
  Everything is love.
• 18:51
  And I had little reminders of this all the way through my boyhood.
• 18:56
  I remember being in the school chapel.
• 18:59
  Even though school was not nice, as I had talked about, there was this sign on
• 19:04
  the on, on the wall of, of the chapel, as there often is in these things,
• 19:07
  said, God is love and love is God.
• 19:10
  And I remember having this deep resonant relationship with just that
• 19:15
  little text on the wall of that chapel.
• 19:17
  This is absolute truth.
• 19:20
  Yes, this is truth.
• 19:21
  God is love, and love is God.
• 19:23
  And somehow even in the, the darkest time of that breakdown period, I never felt
• 19:30
  abandoned by God or by the universal love.
• 19:33
  It felt more like a descent into the underworld, like a journey into the
• 19:38
  underworld that needed to be made in order to come out, into the light,
• 19:43
  into another place, a better place.
• 19:45
  And then I also frequently would have this recurring dream.
• 19:49
  Of being in a place where there was threat and danger, even a sense of being
• 19:56
  hunted and being able to manifest a doorway, a portal that took me immediate
• 20:05
  and sometimes me and people I loved immediately out and away and into
• 20:11
  this other dimension in which was pure safety, pure love, and this feeling
• 20:18
  of great relief and joy and surprise, but also not surprise, this feeling
• 20:24
  of, of, well, like a return home.
• 20:26
  And, and this, this dream came up constantly through
• 20:29
  my, through my childhood.
• 20:31
  So all of these elements sort of came parallel.
• 20:34
  And I remember too when I was about seven on a trip back to Africa, seeing
• 20:40
  on my grandfather's farm, my grandfather was not particularly nice, man.
• 20:44
  He was one of the.
• 20:46
  People on the reactionary end of the family.
• 20:50
  But there were lots and lots of people working on his farm and big cattle farm in
• 20:56
  the compound where all the workers lived.
• 20:57
  There was a witch doctor at work, what they called an in ganga.
• 21:02
  And I remember seeing a healing happen at about seven years old.
• 21:07
  A big ritual and the drums going all night and the people dancing all night
• 21:12
  and the ang hands on the sick one.
• 21:18
  And again, having this feeling of, oh, I see there are more ways to healing.
• 21:26
  There are more ways to love than we might think.
• 21:31
  And even though all the grownups were just like, oh, that's just
• 21:35
  sort of superstition, that's just what these people do.
• 21:38
  I could see that people were getting better.
• 21:42
  Getting sick and getting better through this.
• 21:44
  And it helped me to think, yes, you can look for alternatives
• 21:53
  within the spirit world.
• 21:54
  In fact, you should always look for alternatives within the spirit
• 21:58
  world as much as you look for anything within the material world.
• 22:01
  So all of these things sort of came together very much when I was a boy.
• 22:08
  And then a lot of these family stories too from previous generations.
• 22:12
  This idea of ancestry and ancestors.
• 22:16
  So I, I had said that there was a funny story that on my father's side,
• 22:20
  the people going to Africa one of them had ended up there by mistake.
• 22:24
  It, the, the family law was that my great uncle Harry Shapiro, Herschel
• 22:29
  Shapiro had actually run away from his wife Minnie in, lithuania and had
• 22:35
  gotten on a boat to he wanted to go to the USA but it turned out he got
• 22:42
  on the wrong boat and he ended up on a boat to Port Elizabeth in South Africa.
• 22:47
  So he kind of went, oh, well, and learned English on the way down.
• 22:50
  And when he arrived there, he realized that there was, what he'd heard, I
• 22:56
  suppose, on the voyage about all the findings of the gold fields and the
• 22:59
  diamond mines, which were all happening around that time in the late 19th century.
• 23:03
  So he was thinking, well, maybe I could get up there and make my fortune.
• 23:06
  But as he arrived in Africa, the poor war broke out and he found himself
• 23:11
  drafted into the English army in Port Elizabeth, and he joined the Johannesburg
• 23:16
  mounted rifles, even though it was a thousand miles from Johannesburg.
• 23:20
  And there was, you know, no horses.
• 23:23
  And he tramped up and down.
• 23:24
  South Africa for two or three years without seeing a
• 23:27
  shot fired, luckily for him.
• 23:28
  And then ended up in Johannesburg where the mines were.
• 23:32
  But of course, you know, they'd already already been taken over
• 23:36
  by big, you know, corporations.
• 23:38
  So he ended up getting a job in the kitchens as a butcher and his wife managed
• 23:43
  to track him down and find him there.
• 23:46
  So he was making a bit of money eventually by buying and selling
• 23:50
  cattle as part of the butchery thing.
• 23:52
  And then he ran away again up to the up to the newly formed at that point colony
• 23:59
  of Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, and began to deal in cattle up there in this
• 24:05
  sort of slightly wild west atmosphere.
• 24:07
  Then his wife mini tracked him down again and he then capitulated and
• 24:12
  they stayed to together and he.
• 24:16
  Had a daughter, Frida, who was my grandmother my grandfather Robbie, who
• 24:23
  married her, his parents had come out to Africa from also from Lithuania.
• 24:29
  And their name was Schmid Ovitz.
• 24:31
  And they changed their name when they got to German, Southwest Africa, what
• 24:36
  is now Namibia, the young colony of German, Southwest Africa at that point.
• 24:41
  'cause they were German speaking.
• 24:42
  And they hoped to integrate more into the German society there.
• 24:47
  So they changed their name to Isaacson.
• 24:50
  The logic there, I don't see, I mean, fa berg or something, but Isaacson is like,
• 24:56
  he go from one Jewish thing to another Jewish thing, and of course they found
• 25:01
  that it was a bit too antisemitic there.
• 25:03
  And so my grandfather, Robbie, in the 1920s went across to Rhodesia
• 25:08
  and joined the company, the cattle auctioneering company that my great
• 25:13
  uncle Harry had by then founded, sorry, great Greatuncle and married Frida.
• 25:21
  And eventually took over that company and that was his life.
• 25:24
  Cattle ranching and so on.
• 25:26
  My, on my mother's side the family stories were very, very strong.
• 25:31
  So on the Scottish side, we had cousins who had.
• 25:36
  Ancestor cousins who had fought at the Battle of Aladdin, if any
• 25:40
  of you know your Scottish history, we've been watching Outlander.
• 25:43
  That was the big battle in which the British finally smashed up the
• 25:46
  Scottish clans because they just couldn't deal with any more civil
• 25:50
  wars happening on British soil.
• 25:52
  They were trying to build the empire and they're like, okay, we've had enough.
• 25:54
  Now, you know, there've been plenty of these uprisings.
• 25:58
  We're gonna just really smack 'em.
• 26:00
  And they did.
• 26:01
  And they smashed the clans at Aladin.
• 26:03
  And then there was something called the Highland Clearances where they
• 26:06
  basically put them all on boats and sent them to either two the Americas
• 26:11
  or Australia, which is why we have, you know, a lot of Scot's influence
• 26:15
  in the, in Appalachia and, you know, Celtic influence in music there.
• 26:19
  Also Irish settlers and of course out in Australia as well.
• 26:24
  And in that battle our family with a Clark family, who were part of Clan
• 26:29
  McPherson, who of course fought on the wrong side, fought on the Scottish side.
• 26:33
  And McPherson himself didn't do so well after that.
• 26:38
  But we had another cousin on the English side at the same time called
• 26:42
  Judge Jeffries, who hanged all of our cousins on the Scottish side.
• 26:47
  So again, it's this sort of weird dichotomy within the family ancestral
• 26:53
  line of goodies and baddies and really knowing these stories.
• 26:57
  And then that was the Scottish line on the English line.
• 27:00
  There were four brothers who went out from a village called Luxton, which is, you can
• 27:06
  see it on a sign off the M five if you're driving in southwest England in Somerset.
• 27:12
  The Luxton brothers and L-O-X-T-O-N four brothers went out from the
• 27:17
  village of Luxton, same name, and went to make their fortunes.
• 27:22
  And this was during this depression, which happened in England after
• 27:25
  the Napoleonic Wars where the old wartime economy had crashed.
• 27:30
  And, you know, things were not looking so good for a lot of people.
• 27:33
  So out they went, three, went to South Africa, one went to Australia, and there
• 27:39
  is to this day a town of Luxton in South Africa and a town of Luxton in Australia.
• 27:43
  So they were busy guys.
• 27:44
  They got involved in things and, you know, became adventurous and business people.
• 27:49
  And one of them, another great, great uncle Henry Lockton
• 27:55
  did an interesting thing.
• 27:56
  He went north of the Orange River, which at that time was the northern boundary
• 28:04
  between like civilized land and the great.
• 28:08
  African hinterland of, you know, danger and mystery beyond.
• 28:13
  And at the time there was something happening called the Umani.
• 28:17
  And the Umani, some people call it Dani, was the explosion of the Zulu Empire in
• 28:24
  which the Zulus kind of went on a massive, you know, killing spree across Southern
• 28:32
  Africa, subjugating all the other tribes.
• 28:34
  They could find a bit like, you know, the Huns and the Mongols when they
• 28:38
  exploded out very, very war-like people.
• 28:41
  Very, very organized.
• 28:43
  And the British wanted to keep the Zulus and the sort of all these tribes
• 28:48
  who are being displaced outta the British zone, south of the Orange River.
• 28:53
  So there were a bunch of escaped slaves of mixed race.
• 28:58
  They were called the carass, the bastard, literally meaning bastards.
• 29:02
  The qua and some other related groups who were of mixed race and they, they
• 29:09
  had run away from the British and Dutch Cape Colony and created their own sort
• 29:15
  of free mount mounted on horseback, but sort of iCal raiding cultures along the
• 29:23
  North Bank of the Orange, orange River.
• 29:26
  And the British made a deal with them and said, look, you guys can operate
• 29:33
  up here and you can live on these fertile islands in the Orange River
• 29:37
  'cause it's desert on either side.
• 29:38
  And we'll kind of leave you alone, provided you kind of act as a buffer
• 29:44
  zone, like a military buffer zone between the farming areas south
• 29:48
  of that and the great beyond.
• 29:50
  And that deal was struck.
• 29:53
  These groups, Greek was busted, runners were organized.
• 30:01
  Militarily under the leadership of what we call caps, literally
• 30:06
  captains AFRI speaking, but not white.
• 30:10
  And my great-great uncle Henry fell in love with the daughter of one of these
• 30:18
  bastard captains, a woman called Anna Boy.
• 30:22
  And he stayed up there and had children with her.
• 30:27
  And of course that meant he was, and that side of the family
• 30:29
  was then forever cut off this.
• 30:31
  Remember this is 150 years ago from the white side of the family further south.
• 30:38
  But what he did was quite clever.
• 30:42
  He managed to get a deal brokered.
• 30:45
  Between the Cape government, basically directly with Queen Victoria through
• 30:49
  official channels for his family to retain that land along those islands
• 30:56
  in the Orange River in perpetuity.
• 30:59
  And to this day, the Luxton family still farm cattle and wine in that
• 31:05
  area and are non-white to this day.
• 31:09
  And under apartheid they resist it.
• 31:12
  Managed to resist every, every attempt to move them because under apartheid,
• 31:19
  all the good areas were taken for whites and all the not so good areas.
• 31:23
  That's where the non-whites were shunted into.
• 31:26
  And, they managed to hold onto it because of this old ratified deed.
• 31:32
  And in fact, the apartheid government even tried to get my family there to
• 31:39
  reclassify themselves as white so that they would, that the government wouldn't
• 31:43
  lose face by letting them stay there.
• 31:45
  But my family on that side said, no, no, we are colored
• 31:48
  and we're gonna stay colored.
• 31:49
  We're not gonna be white.
• 31:50
  We're not white.
• 31:52
  And they managed to hold on and survive just through like sheer grit.
• 31:57
  Why is all this important?
• 31:59
  Because all this informs the next point in my life.
• 32:03
  So, I school, I take a year off.
• 32:06
  I travel, I work I spend a lot of time in the states and I get into training
• 32:11
  horses in the states in my year off.
• 32:16
  I go to university in York and England and I study history.
• 32:21
  And I started with archeology and I then I go to history.
• 32:24
  And while I'm at university, I pay my way by riding horses on movie sets.
• 32:31
  I, we have a, a family friend who's a stunt man and he managed to get me
• 32:36
  a union card and I used to manage to make enough money to pay my rent and
• 32:44
  travel by working on these movie sets.
• 32:47
  And if any of you have seen the film, Willow that you'll
• 32:49
  see me quite a lot in that one.
• 32:51
  Hanging out in various backgrounds of battle scenes riding horses around, but
• 32:55
  many films from the mid late eighties and TV stuff with horseback horses.
• 33:00
  Alright.
• 33:01
  And I'm in Africa quite a lot through each summer.
• 33:06
  Just traveling, just traveling, hitchhiking around, experiencing
• 33:09
  it while I'm down there.
• 33:12
  Aged 19.
• 33:15
  'cause I went to university quite young.
• 33:16
  I I, I finished school at 17, went up to university at 18, I'm 19 and
• 33:21
  I'm in one of my summer travels.
• 33:24
  I'm in Africa and I hitchhiked from Zimbabwe across into Botswana.
• 33:29
  I got cousins in Botswana and my cousin Frank meets me at the sort
• 33:36
  of road head where I've come in.
• 33:39
  And at that time, the, it was before the big diamond thing
• 33:44
  really took off in Botswana.
• 33:46
  So it was still very, very, very, very remote and poor.
• 33:49
  And just donkey carts and, you know, people really.
• 33:54
  Living at survival level and he was pioneering out there.
• 33:59
  My cousin, Frank Taylor, something called Agroforestry, which is now
• 34:04
  a thing, but no one had heard of it then Dry Land Agroforestry.
• 34:08
  And he was finding groups of bushman hunter gatherers who'd
• 34:12
  been displaced usually by more aggressive cattle owning tribes.
• 34:17
  And all the game had been shot out and all the wild foods had been,
• 34:21
  you know, take eaten by cattle.
• 34:23
  And these people were destitute and he got into put up fences and then inside
• 34:30
  those fences, plant the wild foods that normally they would've gathered.
• 34:35
  And he started finding a market for these.
• 34:39
  If you've ever seen the product Devil's Claw, which people use for
• 34:44
  arthritis a lot, my cousin Frank Taylor was the first person to get
• 34:47
  that onto the international market.
• 34:49
  And so he's a very, very Christian man.
• 34:52
  And quite, quite dour, quite scary, big tall, lean rangey, pissing
• 34:59
  blue eyes, sort of, you know, dude.
• 35:02
  And when he picked me up and he was driving me out to his place on
• 35:08
  that trip, he said, where in your spiritual journey are you Rupert?
• 35:12
  And it was the first time anyone had asked me that.
• 35:16
  And what was weird is I'd had a, a dream just not so long before that
• 35:23
  in, in the dream I'd met the devil.
• 35:25
  And the devil was this man playing a violin, standing on a hillside and had
• 35:36
  sort of let me know that there were choices to be made and in the world.
• 35:43
  And I'd said.
• 35:46
  Okay, well, I dunno where I am in my spiritual journey, Frank, but if it's
• 35:49
  any use, I, I had this dream, the, you know, not so long ago and he said,
• 35:53
  ah, yes, ah, yes you are, you're going to be tested sort of thing, you know?
• 35:57
  And when, if you get tested and you want to go towards the light, you can
• 36:01
  always expect resistance from the dark.
• 36:03
  And this is normal and, you know, but just pay attention to this.
• 36:06
  And so I thought, well that's interesting, isn't it?
• 36:08
  You know, no one I know back in England, you know, ever talks like that.
• 36:12
  And okay, didn't think much more of it.
• 36:16
  Go back to university graduate.
• 36:19
  And then afterwards I'm like, well, what do I want to do?
• 36:21
  I thought, well, what I really wanna do is write.
• 36:24
  I always loved stories, always loved storytelling.
• 36:26
  I guess that's something I left out was I'd always been an avid reader and
• 36:30
  I'd started experimenting with writing and storytelling in my mid-teens.
• 36:35
  And.
• 36:37
  I through university, put out a, wrote a, a group of short stories and
• 36:44
  found, and they never got published, but I found an agent in London who
• 36:48
  was actually interested in them.
• 36:49
  And he said, look, you know, if you were to take a bit more of a
• 36:52
  perfectionist approach and actually edit these things properly, you know,
• 36:55
  they're kind of publishable, so you know, you should think about this.
• 36:59
  So I thought, well, maybe I, I'd like to write.
• 37:03
  And all my friends at that point were going off into corporate jobs many
• 37:07
  of them in banking and immediately starting to make a lot of money.
• 37:11
  I didn't do that.
• 37:12
  I, I went out to North America again to horse train and to see if I could
• 37:19
  begin to establish myself as a writer.
• 37:22
  And I was also in love.
• 37:24
  I was deeply in love with a girl from Canada who, we'd had an idyllic time
• 37:32
  for one year, and then through various events had broken up and she dumped
• 37:39
  and well, she dumped me once and then we got 'em back together again.
• 37:42
  And then I went out to North America largely to follow her,
• 37:46
  and it was all completely crazy.
• 37:48
  I had no work and work permit, no nothing.
• 37:51
  And I, but I had, you know, connections in the horse world.
• 37:53
  So I went out, started training horses in Virginia and then ended
• 37:57
  up going up to Toronto where she was hoping that she would sort of
• 38:02
  take me back and that somehow I'd sort of become a writer in this.
• 38:06
  And it was winter and she said, no, actually I'm dumping you.
• 38:10
  And so I'm like, oh, okay.
• 38:11
  Well I guess I, I have a choice.
• 38:14
  I can either go back to England or I can see I can take the adventure.
• 38:21
  And I had this gut feeling.
• 38:23
  Rupert take the adventure.
• 38:24
  You should take the adventure.
• 38:26
  No.
• 38:26
  No matter how difficult it is.
• 38:28
  As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm an autism dad and we have
• 38:33
  a whole career before this podcast in helping people with neurodivergence,
• 38:40
  either who are professionals in the field.
• 38:42
  Are you a therapist?
• 38:44
  Are you a caregiver?
• 38:45
  Are you a parent?
• 38:47
  Or are you somebody with neurodivergence?
• 38:50
  When my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004,
• 38:55
  I really didn't know what to do.
• 38:57
  So I reached out for mentorship, and I found it through an amazing adult
• 39:02
  autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
• 39:05
  Temple Grandin.
• 39:06
  And she told me what to do.
• 39:08
  And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
• 39:13
  That not only is my son basically independent, but we've helped
• 39:17
  countless, countless thousands of others reach the same goal.
• 39:21
  Working in schools, working at home, working in therapy settings.
• 39:26
  If you would like to learn this cutting edge, neuroscience backed
• 39:31
  approach, it's called Movement Method.
• 39:34
  You can learn it online, you can learn it very, very simply.
• 39:37
  It's almost laughably simple.
• 39:40
  The important thing is to begin.
• 39:44
  Let yourself be mentored as I was by Dr.
• 39:47
  Grandin and see what results can follow.
• 39:51
  Go to this website, newtrailslearning.
• 39:57
  com Sign up as a gold member.
• 40:00
  Take the online movement method course.
• 40:03
  It's in 40 countries.
• 40:05
  Let us know how it goes for you.
• 40:07
  We really want to know.
• 40:08
  We really want to help people like me, people like you, out there
• 40:13
  live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
• 40:17
  So I did and I survived by snow shoveling and working on construction
• 40:25
  sites and finding whatever under the table work I could.
• 40:28
  And I managed to find shelter to live in an old museum, a private museum
• 40:36
  where the guy who ran it let me sleep under a glass case full of sea turtle
• 40:42
  skulls on a bed roll for a while.
• 40:45
  And I managed to kind of survive my way through that winter.
• 40:52
  And then at the same time I began to write and place my first published
• 40:59
  articles in magazines, which I'd sent, sent off to editors and.
• 41:04
  Managed to get them published.
• 41:05
  Stuff about horses, stuff about travel, stuff, about experiences in Africa.
• 41:12
  And I thought, wow, actually, I guess I could do this.
• 41:15
  So I then moved up to, from Toronto up to Montreal and managed to
• 41:22
  find a gig as a window cleaner.
• 41:24
  And that actually paid not so bad money and we were living in abandoned
• 41:28
  buildings and squatting in abandoned warehouses so we could survive by then.
• 41:33
  Had a group of friends.
• 41:34
  We were all doing this together since the nineties.
• 41:37
  Lots of rock and roll, lots of partying, lots of sex, drugs,
• 41:40
  and rock and roll and getting by.
• 41:44
  I found out while I was doing this about a story that was unfolding
• 41:51
  in Northern Quebec where the Cree Indians were under threat of having.
• 41:59
  An area the size of France, of that land, the size of Quebec alone is
• 42:04
  the size of Western Europe, right?
• 42:06
  An area the size of France flooded in order to create hydropower was a
• 42:11
  government company called Hydro Quebec was gonna do this to sell that electricity
• 42:17
  to New York and the New England states.
• 42:21
  And the threat to the people up there was existential.
• 42:27
  It was basically that would've been kind of the end of them.
• 42:30
  And they were still people that lived really traditionally hunting
• 42:33
  caribou and moose trapping beaver fur, trapping also trapping for
• 42:40
  meat and living under canvas in tps.
• 42:43
  Even in the midst of the winter and Northern Canada, the winters, I mean,
• 42:47
  you might think, you know, winter, but until you've been up there, it's
• 42:50
  just like, it's a whole other thing.
• 42:52
  And I got wind of the story.
• 42:55
  That the Cree Indians had actually had a previous run in, back in
• 43:01
  the seventies with Hydro Quebec.
• 43:04
  And although they'd lost, they'd been given a, a big government
• 43:09
  settlement and they were clever.
• 43:13
  They'd used this money partly to send a lot of their kids away
• 43:17
  to law school so that 'cause they knew it would happen again.
• 43:21
  And so that now it had happened again.
• 43:23
  They had a whole bunch of lawyers who were Cree and who were busy fighting this.
• 43:27
  I said, this is a fascinating story.
• 43:29
  And it was all over all the papers in Canada all the time 'cause it was
• 43:33
  a, a big like Native Canadian versus, you know, the establishment story.
• 43:40
  And I realized that nobody back in the UK or Europe at all was.
• 43:46
  Reporting on this.
• 43:47
  But it was huge because if, if the thing went through, it was gonna
• 43:51
  cause the volume of water was gonna, cause that was being shifted, it
• 43:55
  was gonna cause the earth's crust to shift and that was gonna release.
• 43:59
  All these scientists were saying massive amounts of mercury from the bedrock
• 44:03
  that would not just poison everything up there, but poison everything, you
• 44:07
  know, downstream of there, including, you know, water in New England
• 44:10
  and the Great Lakes and all this.
• 44:13
  So I managed to get up there to that area and I published the story and that's an
• 44:23
  easy thing to say, but when you are a homeless window cleaner, to publish a
• 44:29
  story in a big national paper is not easy.
• 44:32
  What happened was I called a big national newspaper in the uk, the
• 44:38
  independent on site, the Sunday Independent, and I said, look.
• 44:44
  If you don't know me, I'd like to get up there and do this story for you.
• 44:49
  And they said, we do indeed not know you.
• 44:53
  But it is an interesting story if you can bring something back that's publishable.
• 44:59
  Let's see.
• 45:00
  So I had to take a punt on it, and it's incredibly expensive
• 45:02
  to get up into these areas.
• 45:04
  Me and a, a friend, a photographer friend went up.
• 45:07
  It's not just once you're up there, you have to get like planes into these areas.
• 45:12
  There's, there's no roads, you know, and snowmobiles and stuff.
• 45:15
  Like, I don't have this money, but I managed to contact the tribal
• 45:18
  council and say, look, you know, I would like to try to get this,
• 45:23
  you know, into the British press.
• 45:25
  I can't guarantee that I'll publish it, but you know, would you help me have a go?
• 45:30
  And they, they did.
• 45:31
  And when me and my friend Ryan arrived up there and we were living,
• 45:34
  you know, in the winter in Montreal, which is damn cold in all our
• 45:39
  winter gear, and they looked at us.
• 45:42
  They said, where's your winter gear?
• 45:43
  And we're like, well, we're wearing it.
• 45:44
  And they just laughed at us, took us off, kitted us out with caribou, skin
• 45:49
  parkers, moose skin, mittens, you know, halfway up the arm and moose
• 45:54
  skin boots up to the top of the thigh.
• 45:56
  And then you get on these snowmobiles and out you go really fast.
• 46:01
  And the wind chill factor, it's like even, even you've only got this much
• 46:07
  of your skin exposed because you've got goggles and you've got balaclava.
• 46:12
  It's like someone takes a hot knife and just puts it to you there.
• 46:16
  Incredibly cold.
• 46:17
  And we managed you know, we were allowed to see, privileged to see this life,
• 46:24
  this traditional life, really unchanged.
• 46:28
  People were using snowmobiles and people were using rifles, but people were
• 46:33
  living off the forest, under canvas in their tribal system and holding
• 46:41
  to their culture and holding to the ecology and looking after the ecology.
• 46:47
  Not just for themselves, but for us because they were protecting us from
• 46:50
  all getting poisoned with Mercury.
• 46:52
  And I managed to get a story back to the UK and I got it published
• 46:59
  and that was my breakthrough.
• 47:01
  It also, let me see something about manifestation because although
• 47:08
  all the odds were against the Cree winning this land claim,
• 47:15
  they won.
• 47:17
  They managed to persuade New York and all of the states that were gonna buy this
• 47:22
  hydropower to not buy it in advance and the government shut the project down.
• 47:29
  It was an extraordinary landmark win.
• 47:33
  And it made me realize, oh my gosh, you really can win against the odds like that.
• 47:38
  Okay, so I end up back in England because, you know, there's only
• 47:45
  so long you can exist as an under the table homeless window cleaner.
• 47:50
  And by then I'd had my first thing published.
• 47:53
  So I went back and I began to.
• 47:57
  Work on newspapers and magazines.
• 47:59
  And I ended up co-founding a very short-lived magazine about
• 48:05
  ecology and hunting together.
• 48:08
  It's called International Field Sports and Conservation, or IFC.
• 48:11
  And, but it was operational for a couple of years and we managed to get national
• 48:15
  distribution and I got to see what it was like to actually run, edit, sell the
• 48:20
  advertising, bootstrap up something that could go like international news agents
• 48:27
  and you know, you could buy it wherever.
• 48:31
  And we had to do everything.
• 48:32
  We had to write the copy, sell the advertising, design everything up
• 48:36
  for the printers, get it to the printers, learn about color offset
• 48:39
  printing, blah, blah, blah, blah, bu raise the money from issue to issue.
• 48:45
  And although in the end it did fold after, but it only folded
• 48:48
  after about two years and it.
• 48:53
  Again, made me realize that you can do these things.
• 48:56
  And of course, I was at the same time still always horse training on the side.
• 49:03
  Right about the time that it folded, I got a job to go and
• 49:09
  write a guidebook to South Africa.
• 49:12
  And at the time, that was just when South Africa, this is 1992.
• 49:17
  This is just when South Africa did the changeover finally
• 49:21
  from apartheid to Black rule.
• 49:26
  And everyone had been boycotting traveling there for, you know, decades and now
• 49:32
  suddenly it was gonna open up to tourism.
• 49:34
  So get out there and write the first guidebook.
• 49:37
  So I, so I did for a guidebook company called Kagan who don't exist anymore, but
• 49:43
  who did really beautifully illustrated guides and similar to the Lonely Planet.
• 49:48
  Or rough guides, but much more beautifully produced and with
• 49:52
  more of an emphasis on culture.
• 49:54
  And I went out and basically lived in my car in South Africa and Namibia
• 50:01
  for about a year and a half or a year.
• 50:05
  Yeah.
• 50:05
  Year, year and a half.
• 50:07
  And of course I spent a lot of time in Africa before,
• 50:09
  so that's why I got the job.
• 50:09
  I knew the place quite well.
• 50:11
  But this was different 'cause I had to see it in real detail.
• 50:13
  And of course the guy book job itself didn't pay enough to fully live on.
• 50:19
  So I, because I'd published this first big story, I managed to get
• 50:24
  journalistic assignments to go out and cover, you know, the changeover
• 50:28
  of apartheid into, into Black Rule.
• 50:32
  And it was an incredibly violent year in Africa.
• 50:36
  And I'd never had any bad experiences in Africa, even when
• 50:39
  I was hitchhiking around before.
• 50:41
  And I'd run into, you know.
• 50:44
  Armed areas where there was civil war going on.
• 50:49
  And even when I was very young at seven, you know, we'd been out there
• 50:52
  during the, the War of Independence but it hadn't really touched us except
• 50:58
  having to go around in, you know, armored, armored convoys and things.
• 51:02
  But this year it did, oh my gosh, did it?
• 51:05
  I got several direct assaults on my life in a really short period of time, in
• 51:12
  about a six week period, I had about as many really violent episodes in which
• 51:18
  I either had to fight, plead, hide, or run or take a massive beating, not
• 51:25
  knowing if I was gonna be killed or not.
• 51:27
  And I didn't know what post-traumatic stress disorder was back then.
• 51:32
  But when I had completed that year and came back to England to write the
• 51:40
  thing up and deliver it, I was just jumpy as all hell and getting all
• 51:46
  these weird viral diseases and like colds all the time and flus and things.
• 51:51
  And I never got that.
• 51:52
  I was always like so robust and you know, having fights with my girlfriend and
• 51:56
  getting into fights in pubs and things like that, stuff, I just never did.
• 52:00
  All classic symptoms of PTSD.
• 52:03
  Fortunately for me, at the time I was riding semi-professionally for
• 52:08
  a, so I always had this parallel track with horse training for
• 52:12
  a lady outside London eventing.
• 52:16
  And so of course what I was doing was I was getting up from the.
• 52:20
  A place in London that I was renting, getting on my bicycle, this is most
• 52:25
  days, cycling across London to Paddington Station through all the traffic and
• 52:31
  then getting on a train, going out into the countryside, cycling again
• 52:33
  out to the farm, saddling up, being with the horses, being out in nature
• 52:38
  with the horses, then going home.
• 52:39
  What I didn't know then was what I was doing is I was filling myself with
• 52:43
  something called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which you get when
• 52:47
  you move and problem solve, and it creates new neural pathways and oxytocin, the feel
• 52:54
  good and communication healing hormone by being with the horses all the time.
• 52:58
  So, slowly I healed from the PTSD of all these, i, i, I really violent
• 53:04
  incidents, you know, had a guy climb through the, my window with a kitchen
• 53:07
  knife in his hand, and you know, what followed there was not nice and so on.
• 53:11
  So, I.
• 53:14
  Recovered.
• 53:16
  And although I didn't quite know why, there's a little part of me that
• 53:18
  clocked it and went, just hold onto this knowledge, but I didn't quite know why.
• 53:23
  And I'd also had a really, another really interesting spiritual experience out in
• 53:27
  Africa that year where I'd been on Table Mountain and I had gotten a fever and been
• 53:33
  delirious and had this revelation back to the God is love, love is God thing.
• 53:38
  I'd remembered that up on Table Mountain.
• 53:41
  And then I realized, oh well if that's true and that is true
• 53:44
  then, and if everything is God, then everything must be love.
• 53:47
  So the shirt that I'm wearing, the, the, the, the cotton fibers of it
• 53:52
  must be actually made of love matter.
• 53:54
  Must be love.
• 53:55
  And even the, even the car, the metal of the car that I'm driving and the fuel
• 54:00
  that's running it, which is made from fossil forests, is actually all love.
• 54:04
  So everything is love.
• 54:06
  And this base faith.
• 54:08
  Had also, I think, kept me going through this time of great fear that I'd undergone
• 54:15
  out there that in, in that violent year.
• 54:19
  I then got another job right after that to go and do a guidebook in India.
• 54:27
  And India, as anyone knows, who's ever spent a long time out there, because
• 54:34
  when you go write a guidebook, you've got to really immerse yourself in
• 54:36
  those, you're out there for a long time.
• 54:38
  India will change you because.
• 54:42
  It's incredibly spiritual and at the same time it's really brutal.
• 54:45
  People are just horrible to each other.
• 54:48
  And at the same time it's so sublime and the spirituality is actually very pure.
• 54:53
  It's both at the same time.
• 54:55
  It makes you really have to become comfortable with ambiguity that things
• 55:00
  are both dark and light together.
• 55:03
  And that is useful because that is just sort of how life is.
• 55:07
  It's just pumped through a really amplified lens when you're out there.
• 55:12
  And I came back from India and got another job in Africa.
• 55:19
  It was while doing this other guidebook that I began to hear a story about the.
• 55:28
  A group of Bushmen, Kalahari, sun bushmen, hunting and gathering peoples who had
• 55:35
  been in South Africa under apartheid and had been kicked out of a national park.
• 55:41
  What's now the second biggest national park in South Africa, the
• 55:43
  Halal Khari National Park on the border of Botswana and Namibia.
• 55:47
  They'd been kicked out in the seventies when the park had been created and been
• 55:51
  living by the side of the road ever since.
• 55:53
  And what was interesting was the bushmen were a big part of my family
• 55:57
  mythology in that my that great, great uncle I told you about before,
• 56:03
  who'd gone north of the Orange River.
• 56:05
  He had spent a lot of time interacting with the Coi Sun and.
• 56:12
  My grandfather, who was a journalist had also spent quite
• 56:16
  a lot of time up there with them.
• 56:17
  And everyone who'd gone up there had in the family had
• 56:20
  always sort of reported back.
• 56:21
  These are just the purest people.
• 56:23
  These are the best people in the world.
• 56:25
  They, they, they don't make war.
• 56:27
  They're like a sort of, almost like an elusive fairy folk.
• 56:30
  And there was always this sort of mythology about these people.
• 56:34
  And part of that mythology was that there were none of them left in South Africa.
• 56:39
  They'd all been wiped out at the end of the 19th century.
• 56:43
  And you know, if you wanted to find those people, you had to go up to very
• 56:46
  remote parts of Botswana or Namibia much deeper into the Kalahari desert.
• 56:53
  Well, it turned out that no, there were actually bushmen living in.
• 56:59
  South Africa all along, they'd just been displaced, but a very,
• 57:02
  very small group of them had left just literally an extended family.
• 57:08
  Around that time too, I ran into my first group of Sun Bushmen up in Namibia.
• 57:16
  Literally, I'd, I'd found out where to go.
• 57:18
  I'd finally been able to get my hands on a four by four, and they're very
• 57:22
  expensive and driven out to this place called in Eastern Namibia and
• 57:31
  parked under a big bear Bab tree and two Bushman had walked out of the
• 57:39
  thickets and one of them spoke English.
• 57:44
  A guy called Benjamin and he said, yeah, you know, I can absolutely introduce
• 57:50
  you into the culture a little bit.
• 57:53
  You've made it all this way.
• 57:54
  And I had my first taste of that life, of that hunting and gathering
• 57:59
  life that still exists up there.
• 58:03
  And seeing how functional those people are with each other.
• 58:09
  No chiefs gender equality children have a voice.
• 58:15
  They're hunters, but they have a deep ecological sense and the
• 58:20
  entire culture based around healing.
• 58:23
  Healing and conflict resolution.
• 58:25
  Because if you're hunting and gathering in an area where you're not the top
• 58:28
  predator, if you fragment as a group, if, if, if conflict within the group
• 58:34
  gets beyond a certain point, then the highness is gonna get you all.
• 58:39
  So you actually have to stick together.
• 58:41
  So you have a, a healer who sits at a shaman, healer who
• 58:44
  sits at the middle of the.
• 58:46
  Culture whose job it is to kind of constantly resolve conflict,
• 58:50
  not just heal physical ailments.
• 58:52
  And this is regarded as incredibly important.
• 58:55
  And I, I remember thinking, gosh, if this is how humans actually are, 'cause
• 58:59
  this is the oldest culture on the planet, then that's actually a really
• 59:02
  good advertisement for our species.
• 59:04
  And it means that all of that stuff that we think of as normal human
• 59:09
  behavior like war or organized violence or that sort of thing, it's not
• 59:14
  actually, it's an aberration, which is why we, why we know it's wrong.
• 59:18
  That's why we bother with having a justice system.
• 59:21
  And it seems to have all come in quite recently, like the last 10,000 years with
• 59:25
  the domestication of plants and, you know, animals, agriculture and owning stuff
• 59:31
  and overpopulation and all these things.
• 59:32
  And it's driven us nuts, but it's not who we really are.
• 59:38
  And right at that time that that happened, and I found out that this group of
• 59:42
  bushmen in South Africa still existed.
• 59:45
  This group of bushmen in South Africa instituted a land claim very
• 59:50
  similar to the one in Canada that I'd followed, where they said we
• 59:56
  would like our land back, please.
• 59:59
  We were kicked out of that national park under apartheid,
• 1:00:02
  and they managed to find a lawyer.
• 1:00:04
  And I found out about this and the journalist in me just went, oh my
• 1:00:07
  gosh, you have to follow this story.
• 1:00:09
  And then the personal side of me said, Yar ru, and this is where your non-white
• 1:00:16
  family used to operate and still do.
• 1:00:21
  I bet you there's a family connection to this story.
• 1:00:25
  So I dug a little further and I found out that the bushman up
• 1:00:30
  there were actually being opposed.
• 1:00:32
  Their land claim by another non-white group who said, we were also
• 1:00:36
  displaced from this area and we, you know, why should they get the land?
• 1:00:40
  We want the land.
• 1:00:41
  And you know, there was a, there's a kind of a conflict going on between these two
• 1:00:46
  groups who'd been displaced and of course the national park was having none of it.
• 1:00:53
  I found out of course, that the second group were cousins of mine and then
• 1:00:59
  I found out that many of them had married into the group of bushmen and
• 1:01:05
  that therefore I was cousins in law, cousin-in-law to this group of bushmen.
• 1:01:12
  So I went to find them and
• 1:01:18
  found their camp by the side of the road, sat with them, talked with them, and
• 1:01:26
  was immediately just taken in as family.
• 1:01:30
  Now this group had been displaced.
• 1:01:32
  So I talked about a very beautiful life up there in Namibia with those
• 1:01:39
  bushmen that I'd run into up there.
• 1:01:42
  But down here in South Africa, it was not like that.
• 1:01:45
  Because they'd been displaced and victimized and
• 1:01:50
  predated upon in every way, and alcohol and drugs and all of that had crept in.
• 1:01:59
  This was the antithesis.
• 1:02:01
  Yet there was still something really gentle and beautiful
• 1:02:06
  and wounded about this group.
• 1:02:09
  And what they said to me is, Ru we've lost our healers.
• 1:02:13
  We lost our healing tradition when we lost the land.
• 1:02:17
  And we are now, we, it, it, it's almost pointless us getting the
• 1:02:22
  land back if we, if we don't, you know, recover our healing tradition
• 1:02:26
  because we'll just destroy ourselves.
• 1:02:29
  It's quite wise.
• 1:02:31
  And at the time I was going then between there and deeper Kalahari
• 1:02:42
  to write a book about these cultures, which eventually became a work called
• 1:02:48
  The Healing Land, which was published here and in the US the healing Land.
• 1:02:53
  And in the course of this, I became initiated into more and
• 1:02:58
  more into this healing tradition.
• 1:03:00
  And I got to see things that just bogle the mind hunting magic in
• 1:03:07
  which the animal is brought to you shapeshifting in which the healer
• 1:03:14
  turns themselves into a leopard.
• 1:03:17
  Cancer's being pulled out of people's bodies.
• 1:03:20
  I, I, I saw all this, it's all recounted in that book, and I'm not the only one.
• 1:03:27
  I mean many anyone who's spent any time, you know, in a, in a culture like that,
• 1:03:34
  they've all got their stories of this.
• 1:03:37
  And what you realize is that these kinds of miracles are actually the norm in
• 1:03:44
  human society, in, in true human society that's living in nature, that's living
• 1:03:48
  the old way, that's living close to animals and plants we're supposed to live
• 1:03:52
  in, you know, constant connection and relationship with up to about 300 species.
• 1:04:00
  In, in really supportive groups in which the predators are
• 1:04:03
  outside of the human thing.
• 1:04:05
  And the predator is never your fellow man.
• 1:04:07
  And now we've replaced that with no relationship with any other
• 1:04:11
  species unless we're lucky enough to live on farms or whatever.
• 1:04:15
  And the only, the predator is always our fellow man.
• 1:04:21
  Now this sends us completely crazy.
• 1:04:24
  So I follow the land claim
• 1:04:28
  and I help the group in South Africa to connect with the healers by their
• 1:04:35
  own request to connect with the healers up in Botswana and Namibia.
• 1:04:40
  In fact, the group in South Africa, the, they're called.
• 1:04:47
  Asked, said, war Ru.
• 1:04:49
  You know, you're a journalist, you've gotta get us to the West
• 1:04:52
  so we can tell our story there.
• 1:04:54
  You've gotta get us to the United Nations and you've gotta connect
• 1:04:58
  us with these healers up there.
• 1:05:00
  Oh, and you, it was your mother and your mother's stories about
• 1:05:04
  Africa, which largely kept Africa alive in your heart, even when you
• 1:05:09
  were a boy growing up in London.
• 1:05:10
  So you have to get, get your mother and bring her out here.
• 1:05:14
  When we got to see the healers to dance for the land to be returned,
• 1:05:21
  and you gotta get us to the un.
• 1:05:24
  And remember that thing I talked about about adventure Sometimes
• 1:05:27
  when an adventures in front of you and you feel this, pull in
• 1:05:32
  your solar plexus in your throat.
• 1:05:35
  I'd felt it in in Canada that time.
• 1:05:39
  I'd felt it many times on the back of a horse going into a dangerous situation.
• 1:05:45
  I'd felt it.
• 1:05:47
  When you must, you must take the adventure in front of you,
• 1:05:49
  even though you're scared.
• 1:05:52
  And so I said, okay, I'll, I'll try.
• 1:05:56
  And I had no idea how to do any of these things because
• 1:06:00
  they all cost a lot of money.
• 1:06:02
  I didn't, you know, to hire, set up expeditions to hire vehicles
• 1:06:08
  to get a load of people up into Botswana or get someone to the un.
• 1:06:12
  How anesthesia that and what do you even do when you're at the UN and
• 1:06:15
  get these people from Africa to, you know, to, okay, okay, I'll try.
• 1:06:22
  So I did and I founded a nonprofit called the Indigenous Land Rights
• 1:06:33
  Fund, and we raised some money to
• 1:06:41
  begin to.
• 1:06:42
  Create a fund to bring a group from South Africa, a group from Botswana
• 1:06:48
  over to America and get to the un.
• 1:06:53
  But while that was in the very early stages of development, my mum did come
• 1:07:01
  out and the bushman stripped her naked.
• 1:07:06
  She was such a sport on the sand dunes in the area in South Africa.
• 1:07:10
  Covered her with a sacred pollen called Mao.
• 1:07:16
  And then we sang songs to her and honored her.
• 1:07:21
  And then we went up into Botswana.
• 1:07:24
  And by then I had, I had forged a relationship with a heer called Besa.
• 1:07:31
  And those of you who know my book about Rowan, my son autistic son,
• 1:07:36
  know that his middle name is Besa.
• 1:07:38
  And I'd heard stories about Bess.
• 1:07:41
  All over the Kalahari.
• 1:07:42
  And when I finally met him living under a thorn tree in Western Botswana, near a
• 1:07:50
  settlement called Hansi this man saw me got up from where he was sitting went.
• 1:07:57
  There are two, be
• 1:08:00
  two two.
• 1:08:01
  And he pointed himself.
• 1:08:02
  He went, oh, Besa, old Besa.
• 1:08:05
  You Klein Besa, little besa.
• 1:08:08
  So I was always little Besa in the Kalahari.
• 1:08:12
  And those of you who know my website, the Long Ride Home website, know that
• 1:08:17
  we have a program on there called Little Besa about how to bring everyday
• 1:08:21
  Shamanism into and healing into your life.
• 1:08:24
  And that's why it's called that because that was the name I was given and Besa
• 1:08:29
  was the one who showed me Shapeshifting.
• 1:08:32
  Besa was the one who showed me a lot of the more extreme healing techniques
• 1:08:37
  and the Bushman in South Africa.
• 1:08:38
  When they heard that I found Besa, they said this, man, this is the man we need.
• 1:08:43
  We've heard about him too.
• 1:08:45
  This is the man we need to dance for us to help us restore our own
• 1:08:48
  healing tradition and secure the land.
• 1:08:51
  So up we went and we held the healing.
• 1:08:58
  And
• 1:09:01
  it was a real anticlimax.
• 1:09:02
  I'd been at, I'd been at healings where there'd been high drama, you
• 1:09:08
  know, healers bleeding from the mouth, from the eyes, from, you know, as they
• 1:09:13
  pulled sickness out of people and diving into the fire and swallowing coals and
• 1:09:21
  nothing like this.
• 1:09:22
  In fact, Bea turned up drunk dance for maybe it's all done through
• 1:09:28
  Dance the ceiling for maybe
• 1:09:33
  hour and a half.
• 1:09:37
  And then that was it.
• 1:09:39
  And then the next day we had to drive out and I said to Avi Kpa, who was the,
• 1:09:44
  the sort of representative of the Bushman and the land claim for South Africa.
• 1:09:49
  Do you think, do you think it was worth coming?
• 1:09:51
  Do you, do you think it?
• 1:09:53
  And he, he looked at me, he said, Rupert Besa showed up drunk because I'm a drunk.
• 1:09:59
  He was showing me what I need to change in myself to make this happen.
• 1:10:05
  And he said, Rupert, a year from today, I'm going to sit down with the president
• 1:10:10
  of South Africa and I'm going to sign the land claim for half the National Park
• 1:10:16
  would've been the largest land claim in African history
• 1:10:22
  a year and a day.
• 1:10:24
  It was off by one day a year and a day after that conversation, he did indeed sit
• 1:10:30
  down with the president of South Africa, Tavo and Becky at the time, and he signed
• 1:10:34
  the largest land claim in African history,
• 1:10:39
  manifestation, self-actualization.
• 1:10:46
  On the way back from that healing in Botswana to South Africa, we camped in
• 1:10:52
  a canyon on the Namibian border that had been part of the Kani land ancestrally.
• 1:11:01
  And at four in the morning I was seeping in the back of a pickup truck.
• 1:11:06
  I woke up fault, upright and saw what looked like a little white,
• 1:11:10
  whirlwind, little white wind going like that across the canyon floor.
• 1:11:15
  And instinctively I thought, oh, that's death.
• 1:11:17
  And I just went back to sleep again.
• 1:11:20
  At the morning fire making coffee.
• 1:11:25
  The lady who I was doing a lot of that work with Belinda, she
• 1:11:30
  said, did you see that thing at about four o'clock this morning?
• 1:11:34
  And I said, yeah.
• 1:11:35
  I said, what do you think it was?
• 1:11:37
  She said, well, I think it was death.
• 1:11:38
  What do you think?
• 1:11:38
  I was like, yeah, I think it's death too.
• 1:11:40
  And then David Ropa comes along and says did you guys see that
• 1:11:45
  thing at four in the morning?
• 1:11:47
  And we both said, yeah, what do you think it was?
• 1:11:49
  Do you, was it death?
• 1:11:50
  And he said, well, almost.
• 1:11:52
  And he said it was a departing soul.
• 1:11:54
  'cause this is where we used to, this is where we used to bury our dead in
• 1:11:59
  the answer before we lost all this land.
• 1:12:01
  And that's a, that's a soul returning from where we live now, to here.
• 1:12:07
  When we get back to the village, we will find that somebody has died.
• 1:12:11
  And indeed, when we got back to the village.
• 1:12:15
  A whole day to drive.
• 1:12:16
  Later we found that somebody had drive, I had in Indeed died.
• 1:12:21
  So I got a real window on these parallel worlds and fields of consciousness
• 1:12:32
  and realities that exist altogether.
• 1:12:37
  And right about that time, as the bushmen in South Africa became
• 1:12:44
  successful with their land claim, a bigger threat to a larger group
• 1:12:48
  of bushmen up in Botswana happened.
• 1:12:50
  Whether Botswana government with DeBeers Diamonds decided to kick
• 1:12:56
  another group off their land in order to make way for diamond mines.
• 1:13:01
  And this was the point at which they, they then said, could you help us too?
• 1:13:05
  And this was the point at which we decided, okay, this UN thing, we
• 1:13:09
  need to see if we can make that.
• 1:13:13
  Okay, so how to get this delegation of Sun Bushman, hunter gatherers
• 1:13:22
  have no power, no power at all, who are being put in jail and tortured.
• 1:13:31
  This is up in Botswana.
• 1:13:32
  If they go up against the government in any way
• 1:13:39
  and me, this freelance journalist with no backing private funds, I
• 1:13:46
  have no organization behind me, no big newspaper, no nothing.
• 1:13:51
  I'm just a freelancer.
• 1:13:54
  What to do?
• 1:13:55
  As you may know, if you've been following my work, we are also horsey folk here.
• 1:14:00
  And we have been training horses for many, many years in the manner of
• 1:14:05
  the old classical dressage masters.
• 1:14:08
  This is something which is often very confusing for people.
• 1:14:11
  We shine a light on that murky, difficult stuff and make it crystal clear.
• 1:14:17
  If you'd like to learn to train your horse in the manner of the old masters and
• 1:14:22
  really have fun and joy for you and your equine, go to our website, heliosharmony.
• 1:14:27
  com Sign up as a premium member.
• 1:14:30
  and begin to take the Helios Harmony course, which will take you from zero
• 1:14:34
  to the Piaf, where the horse is dancing on the spot in hand on the ground.
• 1:14:40
  And then from there, you can develop out to anywhere you want to.
• 1:14:45
  Heliosharmony.
• 1:14:46
  com to unlock the secrets of the old masters.
• 1:14:50
  Well, I published this book, the Healing Land.
• 1:14:53
  So I thought by this point, so I thought, okay, maybe I could
• 1:14:57
  use that as a bit of a platform.
• 1:14:58
  So I.
• 1:15:00
  Go to a big independent bookstore in the US and I say, can I do a book talk?
• 1:15:12
  And they say, yeah.
• 1:15:13
  And I think, well, maybe, you know, so this costs me about 500 bucks
• 1:15:17
  that I don't really have to put on.
• 1:15:20
  And by now I'm also a new parent and
• 1:15:28
  five people show up to my talk.
• 1:15:33
  Okay.
• 1:15:35
  Then I find that there's an actual department in the United Nations a
• 1:15:39
  sort of private group attached to the United Nations that have their,
• 1:15:43
  they have their office in the United Nations Tower in New York who deal
• 1:15:48
  with exactly this type of issue.
• 1:15:52
  So I contact them and they give me a.
• 1:15:56
  An audience and I walk into this boardroom and I've got RO in my, I
• 1:16:00
  don't know it at the time, but autistic child in a baby Bjorn around my neck.
• 1:16:06
  And I make a case.
• 1:16:07
  I tell them what's going on and they say, yeah, yeah, we know, we know.
• 1:16:10
  We know that they're all being kicked off their land in the Kalahari.
• 1:16:13
  There's nothing we can do about it.
• 1:16:15
  You have no power, you have no clout.
• 1:16:17
  So you know, hippie like you, no way is that anything gonna work.
• 1:16:21
  And they laugh at me and they kick me out.
• 1:16:26
  They kick me out of the office
• 1:16:30
  like, okay, what do I do now?
• 1:16:38
  Right about then is when autism comes into my life, like a hurricane, like a tsunami,
• 1:16:49
  and I'm just beginning to.
• 1:16:53
  Come to grips with what this is gonna mean for me.
• 1:16:58
  And I'm driving, living in Austin, Texas by now, driving to a therapy appointment,
• 1:17:07
  early therapy appointment with my son, wondering, panicking, what am I gonna do?
• 1:17:12
  What am I gonna do?
• 1:17:13
  Autism.
• 1:17:14
  Autism.
• 1:17:17
  And I get a phone call.
• 1:17:20
  And the phone call is from someone who says, you don't know who I am.
• 1:17:23
  But a friend of mine was at that
• 1:17:28
  talk that you did at that bookstore, and they've talked to me and I've
• 1:17:32
  researched what you were talking about and I believe that this is
• 1:17:35
  indeed something worth backing.
• 1:17:37
  And I'm, tell me what your budget is that you need.
• 1:17:40
  So I told, told her, she, she said, I'm gonna give you a third of it.
• 1:17:46
  And when you go out to raise money, tell everybody that.
• 1:17:50
  I and my organization are backing this, and you'll probably
• 1:17:55
  get the rest of the money.
• 1:17:56
  I'd never met or heard, heard of this person ever before.
• 1:18:03
  And I did, and we raised the money and in, in, you know, most people's
• 1:18:11
  fundraising terms, it wasn't a lot, it was about a a hundred thousand, which
• 1:18:16
  was to hopefully cover not just bringing a group of bushmen to the USA, but also
• 1:18:23
  helping them begin a, a legal process.
• 1:18:26
  But the legal process in Botswana was gonna have to be in their own high court.
• 1:18:32
  And because this area that they were, had been kicked out from,
• 1:18:39
  had actually been given to them under British rule in perpetuity.
• 1:18:45
  So, and it had been written into the constitution of.
• 1:18:48
  The Botswana government, so they Botswana government.
• 1:18:51
  Now were going against their own constitution.
• 1:18:53
  But the judge in this case was gonna be, of course, a cousin of the president.
• 1:18:57
  So what would you know?
• 1:18:58
  And all with the billions and billions of Debi DARS behind them.
• 1:19:03
  So what to do?
• 1:19:07
  Well, we did everything.
• 1:19:11
  I managed to make contact with a group called Journey to the Heart, who ran
• 1:19:16
  something called the Gathering of the Shamans every year in California,
• 1:19:21
  healers from all over the world.
• 1:19:23
  And I managed to get that group to formally invite the bushmen over and
• 1:19:27
  raise some money also to be part of their, you know, against part of their travel.
• 1:19:34
  And then partly through the same organization, we managed to make
• 1:19:39
  contact with an organization called Artists for Amnesty, which was the like
• 1:19:44
  Hollywood Wing of Amnesty International.
• 1:19:46
  And they got behind it.
• 1:19:49
  And we managed to get by hook and by crook.
• 1:19:53
  Dave Matthews, those of you who were around during the nineties may remember
• 1:19:57
  that Dave Matthews was the kind of the big singer-songwriter of that era.
• 1:20:04
  Don't hear about him anymore.
• 1:20:06
  But he was huge back then.
• 1:20:07
  Him and Jackson Brown to host a party in Hollywood for the Bushman.
• 1:20:16
  And this went out to news outlets and so on.
• 1:20:21
  And it was a, you know, big do, we got the Bushman over, we're in California,
• 1:20:28
  and then we go around after this.
• 1:20:30
  We go and do everything we can.
• 1:20:31
  We, we, the Bushman, a lot of them ride, ride really well hunt
• 1:20:35
  kudo off horses with spears.
• 1:20:37
  So I took them fox hunting with there's, there's, there's packs
• 1:20:41
  of hounds in California and on the east coast in America.
• 1:20:45
  And, you know, you get lots of like high powered lawyers and people
• 1:20:48
  like that out with these hunts.
• 1:20:51
  So I thought maybe if I take them there, they can network.
• 1:20:54
  And they did.
• 1:20:54
  And they picked, they of course rode incredibly well.
• 1:20:56
  Everyone was, you know, impressed.
• 1:20:58
  And then next thing you know, we have some lawyers coming forward saying,
• 1:21:01
  Hey, I'll represent you pro bono.
• 1:21:04
  And we then went from there across to the Navajo reservation.
• 1:21:14
  We thought we'd go from the west coast to the east coast, Navajo reservations
• 1:21:17
  on the way and the Hopi reservation to talk to groups of Native Americans
• 1:21:22
  to talk about, well what do you do with the land when you've got it back?
• 1:21:25
  There are, you know, gonna be their own sets of challenges then.
• 1:21:32
  So, we are camping in Canyon Dee, which is the second biggest canyon
• 1:21:41
  in the USA after the Grand Canyon in Arizona on the Navajo reservation.
• 1:21:46
  And we're talking with the Navajo about, you know, land stewardship and
• 1:21:53
  how it all works for them and so on.
• 1:21:56
  While we're camping, a medicine man shows up and he says, Hey,
• 1:21:59
  I hear you guys are here to get the land back for these people.
• 1:22:03
  Would you like me to do a ceremony, a sweat healing for that?
• 1:22:09
  And we said, yeah, of course.
• 1:22:10
  So we do, and we do these rounds of prayers for the return of the land.
• 1:22:14
  And at the end of it, the healer says, has anyone else got anything that they wanna.
• 1:22:21
  Asked for healing for, and I said, yeah, my son's just been diagnosed
• 1:22:23
  with autism and he's, it's really severe and I don't know what to do.
• 1:22:27
  So we do a round of prayers for that, and as we're cooling down after the sweat, the
• 1:22:33
  healer comes to me and says, do you hunt?
• 1:22:36
  I said, yeah, yeah, I do, but maybe not in a way that you're familiar with.
• 1:22:40
  And he said, yeah, well, that's not important, he said, but I'm just getting
• 1:22:42
  it loud and clear from the spirit world that you have to stop and it's somehow
• 1:22:47
  connected with your son's autism.
• 1:22:50
  And I thought, of course, of course, this thing that I love doing, fox
• 1:22:54
  hunting was such a huge part of my life.
• 1:22:56
  And it was one of the great early loves.
• 1:22:58
  And even though it was so morally ambiguous it's such a madly beautiful,
• 1:23:05
  pagan dangerous, incredible thing to do.
• 1:23:10
  And I actually, you know, used to write for the equestrian press and go round
• 1:23:14
  with these different hunts and hunt and.
• 1:23:17
  Of course this is gonna be taken from me.
• 1:23:19
  Of course I must give this up.
• 1:23:21
  Makes perfect sense.
• 1:23:24
  So I said, okay, okay, I'll do it.
• 1:23:27
  I'll do it.
• 1:23:29
  And
• 1:23:33
  I had to tell a friend of mine who was the head of the masters of
• 1:23:38
  Fox Sounds Association in America about this because he and I were
• 1:23:42
  working quite closely together.
• 1:23:43
  And when I did tell him, he said, oh, Ruper, I knew you'd always turn on us.
• 1:23:47
  You're bloody hippie.
• 1:23:48
  You know, you, you always, you know, I knew you'd turn into an antique.
• 1:23:52
  I said, look, it's got nothing to do with that.
• 1:23:53
  It's just a personal decision.
• 1:23:55
  It's based, you know, outta this weird shamanic thing.
• 1:23:58
  I dunno what to tell you.
• 1:23:59
  And as I'm having this conversation with him on the phone, this
• 1:24:03
  is, I was briefly back home.
• 1:24:06
  It was at night.
• 1:24:07
  The sitting on my porch, the porch light threw out a.
• 1:24:13
  Light into my front field.
• 1:24:14
  And as I'm talking to him, a fox comes walking outta the dark into that porch
• 1:24:18
  light, and about 25 feet away from me just stops and just starts barking, going,
• 1:24:26
  well, I'm on the phone, this guy, I put the phone up like
• 1:24:29
  this and say, can you hear that?
• 1:24:31
  And he's like, yes.
• 1:24:33
  I'm like, well, that's what's going on.
• 1:24:34
  When I'm having this conversation with you.
• 1:24:36
  He's like, okay, well maybe, maybe something, something
• 1:24:39
  is going on, as you say.
• 1:24:41
  So, and one of, one of the things that the Bushman had really taught
• 1:24:45
  me was always, always, always look for what wildlife is showing you.
• 1:24:51
  When wildlife shows up in your path, it's the ancestors talking
• 1:24:55
  to you that keep your ears open.
• 1:24:58
  Ask what are you here to tell me?
• 1:25:02
  And this is an important thing.
• 1:25:04
  Okay.
• 1:25:06
  All right.
• 1:25:07
  So we get now to the East Coast and we get to the un.
• 1:25:11
  Finally, we find ourselves there in the United Nations and we testify before
• 1:25:15
  Congress for the Human Rights Commissions.
• 1:25:17
  And uh uh, we do all these things.
• 1:25:23
  But what really makes a difference is that we get to the State Department.
• 1:25:29
  And when we walk into the State Department, what is weird is there's
• 1:25:33
  pictures on the wall blown up, pictures of the wall indigenous
• 1:25:37
  peoples and among them are portraits of my friends in South Africa, some
• 1:25:45
  of whom are on this delegation.
• 1:25:48
  'cause it's half Bushman from Botswana, half from South Africa.
• 1:25:52
  What are the odds of that?
• 1:25:53
  And we walk into an office, we're shown to an office, and the guy
• 1:25:56
  who's dealing with us in the State Department is Apache Indian.
• 1:26:01
  He says, I grew up on the reservation.
• 1:26:02
  I know exactly what's going on with you.
• 1:26:04
  And right in front of us, he picks up the telephone calls the land
• 1:26:07
  minister in Botswana and says, I've got four guys sitting in here
• 1:26:10
  in my office saying they've been tortured, you know, for protesting
• 1:26:13
  illegal evictions from their land.
• 1:26:14
  You're supposed to be an ally of ours.
• 1:26:16
  What's going on?
• 1:26:19
  And that was something that began the game change.
• 1:26:24
  Well, it wasn't the end of the road by any means, but it pushed us over the line.
• 1:26:30
  And that was through that happened through the help of an organization
• 1:26:34
  called First Nations Development Institute, run by an amazing woman
• 1:26:38
  called Rebecca Adamson who, whose Lumbee Indian and who helped us massively.
• 1:26:44
  It was her contacts that got us there for the next two to three years.
• 1:26:49
  We just kept it up.
• 1:26:51
  We managed to get through artists for amnesty.
• 1:26:53
  The Bushman invited to back across to to California to to be at the premier of the
• 1:26:59
  Blood Diamond movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Morgan Freeman is there and so on.
• 1:27:04
  And we're protesting outside the DeBeers Diamonds Shop in Fifth Avenue in New York.
• 1:27:12
  And we're doing everything we can and we are, we're protesting in London as
• 1:27:17
  well through an amazing organization there called Survival International.
• 1:27:22
  And we're helping the lawyer and helping to raise money.
• 1:27:27
  Interestingly, through the Fox hunting world, it was the fox hunting world
• 1:27:30
  that really came out and donated money for the lawyers, for the Bushman.
• 1:27:38
  And there are many, many little sub stories to be told in this.
• 1:27:43
  But suffice to say that these lawyers began to go out.
• 1:27:50
  To Botswana, which is where the new land claim is being fought,
• 1:27:53
  which is an even bigger area at stake than the South African one,
• 1:27:57
  rather similar to the one in Quebec.
• 1:28:00
  It's the size of a European country.
• 1:28:01
  It's about the size of Belgium or Switzerland.
• 1:28:03
  This area called the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
• 1:28:05
  Only about 3,500 people living in it.
• 1:28:08
  And the Botswana government saying, we've got to displace you all to
• 1:28:10
  make di way for diamond mines.
• 1:28:13
  No way.
• 1:28:14
  I mean, we could say, look, there's lots of people in Belgium and Switzerland,
• 1:28:17
  millions of people and they have mines and no one needs to be displaced.
• 1:28:21
  The Bushman Aren even asking for money.
• 1:28:24
  They just don't wanna be kicked off their land.
• 1:28:27
  And eventually we managed to get, I managed to get again through artists
• 1:28:34
  for amnesty, invited to a get together of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Rome.
• 1:28:42
  And there are.
• 1:28:45
  In the room.
• 1:28:45
  It's Mical Gorbachev, it's Sting, it's Bob Geldoff.
• 1:28:48
  It's even though they're not laureates lek, Jose Ramos Ter from
• 1:28:53
  East Timor, all these amazing people.
• 1:28:57
  Bishop Tutu, Desmond Tutu.
• 1:29:00
  And they hear me out and they write a joint letter to the Botswana government
• 1:29:07
  saying, let these people alone.
• 1:29:12
  And then I also managed to get Gloria Steinem, who's the sort of godmother
• 1:29:16
  of feminism in, in the USA and Abby Disney, who's Walt Disney's granddaughter
• 1:29:22
  and Warren Buffet's daughter-in-law.
• 1:29:25
  It all came in through us amnesty to come out on a safari to
• 1:29:28
  Botswana, to this disputed area.
• 1:29:31
  And while we are there with the Bushman, the Botswana government come in with
• 1:29:35
  troops armed and, and they kick us out.
• 1:29:38
  It's a big international embarrassment 'cause these are big
• 1:29:41
  cheeses that they've done this to.
• 1:29:44
  And
• 1:29:47
  then finally kept the court cases going on the court cases going on court
• 1:29:53
  cases going on about 2005, early 2006.
• 1:29:58
  The prosecutor on behalf of the government in Botswana does
• 1:30:02
  something monumentally stupid.
• 1:30:04
  He has an indiscretion with the wife of the judge.
• 1:30:10
  And suddenly, just despite the fact that they're all cousins at, in the
• 1:30:13
  same noble family, suddenly it becomes personal and the judge rules in favor
• 1:30:21
  of the bushman against all odds.
• 1:30:27
  Now I realized what was happening with these lawyers that was go
• 1:30:31
  going out to Botswana, was that the.
• 1:30:36
  Lawyers were briefing the community, and the community were then going
• 1:30:40
  and relaying this to their healers.
• 1:30:43
  And the healers were going into the spirit world and getting a series of instructions
• 1:30:47
  there and coming from the ancestors and coming back out and briefing the community
• 1:30:52
  who were then briefing the lawyers.
• 1:30:54
  And what we kept getting from the healers was keep hanging on,
• 1:30:58
  keep hanging on, keep hanging on.
• 1:31:00
  Something unexpected will happen.
• 1:31:03
  Well, something unexpected did happen, and the Bushman won the
• 1:31:07
  largest land claim in African history.
• 1:31:09
  Again, I didn't even expect to win.
• 1:31:13
  When people were asking me, Rupert, why are you devoting
• 1:31:16
  so much of your life to this?
• 1:31:19
  What happens if you don't win?
• 1:31:20
  Like your, your, your ego will collapse?
• 1:31:22
  And, you know, and I was like, you, you've got me completely wrong.
• 1:31:25
  I'm in it for the crack.
• 1:31:26
  I'm in it for the adventure.
• 1:31:27
  I will give it my best shot.
• 1:31:31
  But.
• 1:31:32
  I'm in it because the adventure has called me.
• 1:31:34
  The ancestors have called me.
• 1:31:37
  If it doesn't work out well, how lucky and fortunate and privileged was I
• 1:31:44
  to be part of an adventure like this?
• 1:31:48
  But I have a gut feeling that we will be successful.
• 1:31:54
  And indeed it happened.
• 1:31:56
  And I was lying on my couch in Texas, exhausted from a series of autism
• 1:32:04
  tantrums, still at the early stages of wondering what to do, but beginning
• 1:32:09
  to find my way with that a bit.
• 1:32:11
  And I got a call from the BBC in London saying, can we have a comment?
• 1:32:17
  And I'm like, on what?
• 1:32:19
  And they said, well, you've won.
• 1:32:20
  I said, we've won.
• 1:32:20
  What?
• 1:32:21
  They said, you know, the Bushman case, you're involved.
• 1:32:25
  You know, can we have a statement from you?
• 1:32:27
  I'm like, yeah, the statement is beep beep.
• 1:32:31
  You know, bleep, bleep, bleep.
• 1:32:33
  Just 'cause I was so surprised
• 1:32:39
  and that did not conclude my journey in the Kalahari.
• 1:32:49
  But this, my focus at that point then could shift completely to my
• 1:32:56
  son whose autism was so severe, nonverbal, incontinent, tantruming.
• 1:33:03
  Now I tried all the orthodox therapies, they didn't work.
• 1:33:10
  So the journalist in me said, well, you know what you don't know, which
• 1:33:19
  is, you dunno what to do here.
• 1:33:21
  You need mentorship, someone to show you.
• 1:33:25
  None of these therapists that you reaching out to seem to
• 1:33:27
  really know what they're doing.
• 1:33:30
  If there's going to be a mentor who's that mentor, what
• 1:33:33
  qualities must that mentor have?
• 1:33:35
  And I thought, well, that mentor needs to be autistic, adult
• 1:33:40
  autistic who started life in the same place as my son, incontinent,
• 1:33:44
  tantrumming, that sort of thing.
• 1:33:48
  Self-harming, unable to make friends nonverbal and has somehow made it.
• 1:33:53
  Who's that person?
• 1:33:55
  And I realized actually that person exists.
• 1:33:56
  That's Dr.
• 1:33:57
  Temple Grandin.
• 1:33:58
  She's a well-known autistic author, a neuroscientist and professor
• 1:34:05
  of animal scientists, and.
• 1:34:11
  Why don't I contact her?
• 1:34:13
  'cause she was nonverbal, wiping her poo on the wall, age three, and
• 1:34:17
  they were gonna institutionalize her, but she found her way.
• 1:34:20
  How did she find her way?
• 1:34:22
  So I asked her for an interview and I went up and talked to her.
• 1:34:29
  And when I went into her office, she was stemming and doing, you
• 1:34:33
  know, the repetitive movements and behaviors and like really autistic.
• 1:34:38
  And I'll say, oh my gosh, you can be like that and still be like totally successful.
• 1:34:45
  And so I said, how does my son become you?
• 1:34:49
  And she said, Rupert, do three things.
• 1:34:50
  Follow the child, follow their interests, follow what
• 1:34:57
  upsets them, and avoid that and follow what makes them happy.
• 1:35:01
  And go with that.
• 1:35:02
  Follow their, follow them physically so that you can observe what they
• 1:35:07
  get into, follow them intellectually, check out their obsessions and
• 1:35:11
  just go down those rabbit holes.
• 1:35:14
  Do your stuff outside as much as you can.
• 1:35:16
  'cause there's no bad sensory triggers in nature.
• 1:35:18
  'cause that's where our organism is supposed to be.
• 1:35:21
  And your sun, like most people on the spectrum, has a oversensitive
• 1:35:25
  nervous system that's triggering his amygdala all the time.
• 1:35:28
  His fight, flight, freeze, they filling himself with cor, him
• 1:35:31
  with cortisol stress hormone.
• 1:35:32
  So he can't learn.
• 1:35:33
  He's unreachable, but in nature, this will be less.
• 1:35:37
  And let him move.
• 1:35:38
  Don't confine him to desks, chairs, therapy rooms.
• 1:35:44
  Do your stuff out in nature where he can move because he's a pri,
• 1:35:46
  he's, he's a kinetic learner.
• 1:35:48
  Kinesthetic learner.
• 1:35:50
  Whew.
• 1:35:50
  That made sense.
• 1:35:52
  I said, well anyway, look, if that's resulted in you, let me try that.
• 1:35:56
  So I went home and I did, and those of you who know my story know
• 1:36:00
  that that resulted in me following him to a horse called Betsy.
• 1:36:06
  Him becoming verbal on that horse and me realizing that it was in certain rhythms
• 1:36:12
  that he was verbal and that those rhythms, if I produced them, I got more speech.
• 1:36:19
  And we lived in the saddle together for three or four years and I was so broke.
• 1:36:26
  And
• 1:36:29
  he became verbal, literate and numerate
• 1:36:35
  in about 18 months.
• 1:36:37
  And then I thought, okay, is it just him or is it other children too?
• 1:36:42
  So I started throwing unofficial play dates on the farm for other
• 1:36:47
  kids on the spectrum, and they started having the same result.
• 1:36:50
  And then I had to homeschool him because the local school, the special
• 1:36:53
  ed department was, was not good.
• 1:36:56
  And I thought, well, if I can use these rhythms.
• 1:36:59
  Feed in information on the horse.
• 1:37:00
  What about off the horse?
• 1:37:01
  So what about on my shoulders?
• 1:37:02
  What about on a yoga ball?
• 1:37:03
  What about on a swing?
• 1:37:04
  What about on play equipment?
• 1:37:05
  And I did that and it worked, and then I got curious and I went to
• 1:37:11
  neuroscientists and said, please, can you explain why it's working?
• 1:37:15
  And I got a similar explanation from quite a few saying, yeah,
• 1:37:18
  what's happening is you're creating oxytocin through hip rocking rhythmic.
• 1:37:22
  Hip rocking oxytocin is a feel-good hormone that's calming down this
• 1:37:26
  oversensitive nervous system, but it's also a communication
• 1:37:29
  hormone makes us communicate.
• 1:37:33
  Oh, and it's switching off the amygdala, telling it to stop
• 1:37:36
  producing cortisol, which is giving you access to the intellect.
• 1:37:40
  And then because the kid is moving and problem solving all the time,
• 1:37:44
  that creates neuroplasticity.
• 1:37:45
  That creates a, a, a protein in the brain called brain derived
• 1:37:51
  neurotrophic factor BDNF.
• 1:37:54
  That's basically like miracle growth for the brain.
• 1:37:58
  And in these billions of brain cells that are being produced are
• 1:38:03
  these ones of particular interest called perkin cells that among many
• 1:38:10
  other things, govern social skills.
• 1:38:12
  So you're taking a kid with autom auto, Greek word for the self
• 1:38:16
  selfism, filling him with a,
• 1:38:20
  a soothing to the nervous system communication hormone
• 1:38:26
  for someone who doesn't want to communicate.
• 1:38:28
  They're now fooled with a communication hormone and social skills brain cells.
• 1:38:34
  You're gonna see change.
• 1:38:36
  And we went, oh my gosh, yes you can.
• 1:38:39
  That means we can replicate this.
• 1:38:41
  So we began teaching people how to do this with horses and that
• 1:38:45
  became something called a horse Boy method and do this without horses.
• 1:38:50
  And that became movement method.
• 1:38:52
  And then how to train the horse, how to do this as its own
• 1:38:55
  therapy for adults with trauma.
• 1:38:57
  Remember back to when I'd had all that PTSD and I'd been out in Africa and I'd
• 1:39:02
  been out with those horses and it had all sort of gone away that had never left me.
• 1:39:06
  Now I understood the neuroscience and I realized, yeah, we could pair up
• 1:39:10
  veterans, first responders, adult artists, people who've suffered abuse and help
• 1:39:15
  them to train the horses like this.
• 1:39:17
  And sure enough, it turned out to be its own therapy, and that's
• 1:39:19
  called Tachin, T-A-K-H-I-N, equine integration, these three programs.
• 1:39:26
  And in the course of this, I had to learn a lot of dressage, so we ended up
• 1:39:34
  teaching a lot of dressage as well, and running this from this ranch in Texas.
• 1:39:40
  Meanwhile, that word tahin, T-A-K-H-I-N, it's actually a Mongolian word.
• 1:39:46
  It means the wild horse, the PKIs horse who was never domesticated.
• 1:39:51
  It means honored one or revered one.
• 1:39:54
  I always liked that word 'cause I felt that as a rider, as someone who
• 1:39:59
  works with horses, I like the idea of honoring the horse's wild nature.
• 1:40:06
  And those of you know my story know that I also did something rather crazy having
• 1:40:13
  seen that my son had this amazing response to the horse and having this background
• 1:40:19
  in this shamanic healing with the bushman, I wondered if there was a place that
• 1:40:23
  combined these two things on earth.
• 1:40:24
  And so, yeah, that's Mongolia gut feeling again.
• 1:40:28
  That sent that, that pull at the solar plexus.
• 1:40:31
  Gotta go there.
• 1:40:33
  So I did
• 1:40:37
  and I wrote a book about it called the Horse Boy,
• 1:40:42
  and made a documentary about it called The Horse Boy.
• 1:40:46
  And this is back in we, we put out the first
• 1:40:53
  little proposal about maybe doing it when YouTube was very young in 2005.
• 1:40:58
  We made the journey in 2007
• 1:41:02
  and it went viral.
• 1:41:03
  It's one of the first things that ever went viral.
• 1:41:05
  I think the ancestors were at work and
• 1:41:11
  a book deal resulted that was big enough to not just fund the expedition
• 1:41:16
  and make the movie, but also to, for us to open up a therapy center doing
• 1:41:22
  horse boy method and movement method.
• 1:41:25
  And that book, the Horse Boy, if you've read it or if you've seen the film,
• 1:41:33
  you'll know that we ended up at the end of it with the reindeer people
• 1:41:39
  in Southern Siberia where it borders.
• 1:41:43
  On the steps in Northern Mongolia and the healer of the reindeer people ghost.
• 1:41:50
  Two days after doing the healings on Rowan Rome did his first intentional
• 1:41:54
  poop and cleaned himself, which was like watching England win the World Cup.
• 1:41:59
  And he said to me, you have to do three more journeys to confirm it.
• 1:42:05
  So in 2008, I went back out to the Bushman and Besa
• 1:42:13
  came and healed my son.
• 1:42:15
  But we had to do it in Namibia because after we had helped the Bushman win
• 1:42:19
  the land claim in 2006, I and a group of 16 journalists and human rights
• 1:42:24
  workers had been banned from Botswana.
• 1:42:28
  Can't go back.
• 1:42:29
  It's like winning an award.
• 1:42:31
  So we had to get, we had to do it in the neighboring country,
• 1:42:34
  Namibia, and get a passport organized for Besa who lived under a tree.
• 1:42:40
  Can imagine how.
• 1:42:42
  That was not a straightforward process so that he could come across into Botswana.
• 1:42:49
  Into Namibia, sorry, and heal his namesake, my son, Rowan Besa Isaacson.
• 1:42:55
  And he did, along with another legendary healer called from the Quai
• 1:43:01
  Bushman in Namibia, a beautiful man and his friend, we, his three healers
• 1:43:11
  collaborated on, on my son over three days.
• 1:43:13
  And then the year after that, we were in the Daintree rainforest in Queensland
• 1:43:20
  with a cuckoo langi shaman from the Aboriginal Kuku Langi people there.
• 1:43:25
  And the year after that on the Navajo Reservation, remember we'd
• 1:43:29
  been there before, that's where I'd with the Bushman, where I'd
• 1:43:32
  been made to give up hunting the.
• 1:43:35
  At the end of each of these healings, there was a massive leap forward.
• 1:43:38
  And I tell that story in a book called The Long Ride Home.
• 1:43:46
  And now here I sit talking to you.
• 1:43:50
  My son is now 23.
• 1:43:53
  He is independent.
• 1:43:56
  He just came out of the bath in the other room there.
• 1:43:59
  He travels all over by himself.
• 1:44:01
  He has his own house, his own car, couple of jobs.
• 1:44:06
  He's doing very well.
• 1:44:08
  He's got two younger siblings now, Ian and Freya, who
• 1:44:16
  are both a source of great annoyance and a source of great joy to him
• 1:44:20
  just as all siblings should be.
• 1:44:23
  And we continue to do this work now in about 40 countries.
• 1:44:27
  Serving, I can't count how many families through these methods and also the
• 1:44:34
  parallel horse training, and I still write books and make films and so on.
• 1:44:42
  So that's a sort of potted version of my story of self-actualization.
• 1:44:52
  I think what really comes out for me with it is that what really
• 1:44:57
  makes self-actualization happen is when it's about service.
• 1:45:00
  Somehow
• 1:45:05
  the horses brought me out of my depression as a child and brought me into nature,
• 1:45:13
  and I had to earn my way to them
• 1:45:17
  running that market stall and stuff.
• 1:45:20
  They really also served, served me so generously and, and have ever since.
• 1:45:25
  And then I got involved in service with the first Dec Cree and then with the
• 1:45:33
  Bushman, and then of course with autism.
• 1:45:38
  And I think many of you can probably trace parallels in your own lives.
• 1:45:46
  That service seems to be at the key here.
• 1:45:52
  So I want to leave you with this, and some of you have heard me say this before.
• 1:46:01
  There can be no real happiness, I think, unless one is in service to
• 1:46:04
  a community, to one's community.
• 1:46:05
  And that is how we're wired because we're hunter gatherers.
• 1:46:10
  We're supposed to be constantly looking out for each other.
• 1:46:18
  In our current society, we've been told we need to be in competition with
• 1:46:21
  each other, and it brings us misery.
• 1:46:26
  However, if you are in service, it is exhausting.
• 1:46:32
  There's no question it's exhausting.
• 1:46:34
  So how do you not burn out?
• 1:46:37
  Well, the people that you serve, or the planet, if you're serving the
• 1:46:42
  planet, acts as a shamanic prism for your dreams, because if your dreams are
• 1:46:52
  put into the service of the dreams of people more vulnerable than yourself,
• 1:47:00
  then your own dreams start to come true.
• 1:47:04
  And this is done because this will stop you from burning out.
• 1:47:07
  This is what will allow you to keep getting up day after day.
• 1:47:13
  Year after year to do the work.
• 1:47:16
  And in my position as an autism dad, I can never, never stop.
• 1:47:21
  In fact, even beyond the grave, I have to set up structures for Roman.
• 1:47:29
  And so I, I can't burn out.
• 1:47:32
  I can't fail.
• 1:47:35
  But my dreams of horses and riding and living free and riding free
• 1:47:48
  are tied up in service to him and people like him.
• 1:47:56
  And also to some degree with human rights and the ecological offshoots of
• 1:48:01
  human rights, indigenous rights, it.
• 1:48:06
  So here's the deal, guys.
• 1:48:09
  If you put your dreams.
• 1:48:11
  Into the service of the dreams of people more vulnerable than yourself, then
• 1:48:17
  your dreams will start to come true.
• 1:48:21
  You may have forgotten what your dreams are, and you may have pushed
• 1:48:23
  them away because a lot of us have this experience is a dream.
• 1:48:27
  Life comes along, goes, takes a big pool over it, and then stomps on it and
• 1:48:32
  buries it, and it breaks our hearts.
• 1:48:34
  But actually, the dream didn't go anywhere.
• 1:48:36
  It just got fertilized and and planted, and now it requires moisture,
• 1:48:42
  blood, sweat, tears, and up it comes.
• 1:48:47
  So what I want to leave you with my friends is what are your dreams?
• 1:48:52
  Just this question, what are your dreams?
• 1:48:53
  And if you have forgotten, you've pushed them away.
• 1:48:57
  Just asking yourself the question is enough, because then you'll push
• 1:49:03
  your subconscious and in an unguarded moment, 36 hours or so after you ask
• 1:49:09
  yourself that question, you'll be sitting in traffic with your mind
• 1:49:13
  wandering or on the loo, and it will go bubble bubble ping, and you'll
• 1:49:17
  go, oh, yes, that was it, that dream.
• 1:49:21
  And then almost immediately you'll push it away again, you, but I can't have it.
• 1:49:24
  But actually this time you can.
• 1:49:28
  The rules are different if you've, in fact, you must.
• 1:49:30
  In fact, you will.
• 1:49:31
  That's the contract with God.
• 1:49:32
  That's the contract with the universe.
• 1:49:34
  If you put that dream out there and you say very clearly that you want
• 1:49:39
  to put that dream, you will put that dream into the service of the dreams of
• 1:49:43
  people more vulnerable than yourself,
• 1:49:47
  then I look forward to hearing your feedback, particularly a year maybe
• 1:49:54
  after watching this or listening to this and telling me how those
• 1:50:01
  dreams are starting to come true.
• 1:50:04
  So what are your dreams?
• 1:50:07
  You listening right now.
• 1:50:08
  You watching right now, what are your dreams?
• 1:50:12
  What are your dreams?
• 1:50:15
  And that my friends, is all I've got till next time.
• 1:50:20
  I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
• 1:50:24
  If you did, please help us to make more.
• 1:50:28
  Please like, subscribe, tell a friend, give us a thumbs up.
• 1:50:32
  If you'd like to support us on Patreon, please go to my website, rupertisakson.
• 1:50:38
  com.
• 1:50:38
  And if you'd like to find out about our certification courses with.
• 1:50:42
  autism, education, horsemanship, everyday shamanism.
• 1:50:46
  There's a whole range of cool stuff.
• 1:50:49
  Putting a show together like this is not an easy task.
• 1:50:53
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• 1:50:58
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• 1:51:00
  Even the smallest donation, it really helps us to keep the good content coming.
• 1:51:06
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• 1:51:08
  com and click on the Patreon link.
• 1:51:12
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• 1:51:14
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• 1:51:19
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• 1:51:20
  T shirts, hoodies, all that sort of thing.
• 1:51:23
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• 1:51:24
  com, it's all there.
• 1:51:25
  I can't wait for our next guest and also to meet you there.
• 1:51:29
  In the meantime, remember, live free.
• 1:51:34
  Ride free.