Rupert Isaacson

Rupert Isaacson is a British-South African film producer, writer, and Autism awareness advocate who has dedicated his life to helping his son, Rowan, by working with horses. In addition to founding The Horse Boy Foundation, which helps connect autistic children with equine-assisted therapists who practice the Horse Boy method of healing and transformation, Rupert has traveled the world with his son to places like Africa, Australia, and a Navajo Reservation. Along the way, he discovered the healing power of shamanism and how there are spiritual ways individuals with autism can become empowered members of society. In 2004 he founded the Indigenous Land Rights Fund, which helps hunting and gathering peoples of the Kalahari gain legal access to their ancestral lands. He has spent years documenting the way they interact both within their communities and with the environment around them and is a proponent of the ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our past.

The Horse Boy Movie: http://www.horseboymovie.com/

The Horse Boy Foundation: https://www.horseboyfoundation.org/

You can reach out to Rupert here: info@ntls.co

Transcript

Speaker 1: (00:08)
You're listening to the journey on podcast with Warrick. Schiller Warrick is a horseman trainer, international clinician and author, whose mission is to help people achieve a deeper connection with their horses through his transformational training program. Just be causing that

Warwick: (00:34)
G'day everyone. Welcome back to the Journey On Podcast. I'm your host Warwick Schiller and I have mentioned a time or two that every once in a while, people randomly send me books. And recently I was sent a book, came in the mail and it's a book called the long ride home by Rupert Isaacson, author of number one, bestseller, the Horse Boy. Well, I did not read the horse boy or really heard much about the host boy. And so I just kind of set this book aside. And then a while, a while later I had the light of that sent me the book actually emailed me and told me I really should watch the movie, the horse boy. And so I watched the movie, the horse boy, and then I was in thrilled. And the host boy is about this gentlemen, Rupert Isaacson, who has a son who's autistic.

Warwick: (01:24)
And he takes him to Mongolia to visit the, the shamans up there in Mongolia to, to help with some of the, the problems he encounters with his autism and having been to Mongolia with my son it really struck a chord with me. And so I watched the movie. And so this lady said, if you want to check with him, I can hook you up with him. And so I contacted [inaudible] and asked him if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast, which he agreed to. But since then, I, I kinda got blindsided because I just thought he was the guy that did the movie, the horse boy, there's so much more to this guy and I'm lucky enough to interview him today. But before we do, I suggest you guys watch the movie, the horse boy it's available on. I think it's available in a lot of platforms, but you can actually watch it for free on, on YouTube.

Warwick: (02:18)
And before we get Rupert on, he, let me read you this guy's biography. Rupert Isaacson was born in 1967 in London to a South African mother and his embalmed, we and father, and grew up half in London, half on a remote horse farm in the British countryside. And also with Africa looming large in his life, coming from a family of pioneers and adventures, Russian Jews who went to Africa on his mother's side, British Dutch and mixed race settlers on his mother's side. Rupert's grandparents would journalists walk, correspondents, cattle, ranches, and artists. His father is an architect and his mother is a sculptor. So making your own destiny something, he grew up with a journalist for the British and American press from the early

Warwick: (03:00)
19 hundreds, the daily mile to sorry, the daily and Sunday Telegraph, the daily mile, the mile and Sunday independent on Sunday, quiet national and national geographic magazine is also publish several guidebooks to Africa and India. And he's the author of three non-fictional memoirs, the healing land, a New York times notable book, which tells the story of his family in Africa and a zone. Tom spent living with the bushmen of the Kalahari desert, the horse boy, a New York times and Sunday times bestseller, which tells the story of his journey across Mongolian horseback with his autistic son Rowen and the long ride home, which tells of the three subsequent healing journeys. He and his son made to Africa, Australia and the Navajo reservation, as well as his discovery of how horses can help autism and special needs. In general. Rupert also runs the horse boy foundation from his new trails, ranch near Austin, Texas, which offers service. This is to autism family and helps direct several satellite centers offering similar services in North America and Europe in partnership with someone else. He teaches the horse boy method, horse boy learning, which is a homeschool technique aimed at autism add and ADHD families among others. And now the kinetic learning techniques along with stress-free dressage, a way of introducing riders to the high levels of equitation without being screamed at. And that's funny as successful

Warwick: (04:23)
Documentary film, Micah, the host boy, and in dangerous and writer and conceive of TV shows the quest and reality TV shows the quest, which aired on ABC in 2014, which was his original concept. And he helped produce the show. And in addition, he's mainstream Hollywood projects include the host boy feature film, and the goth loads sounds interesting. A career in human rights runs parallel to all this. In 2004, he founded the indigenous land rights fund, which helps hunting and gathering tribes, gain legal title to the ancestral lanes and hope the bushmen Botswana when the largest land claim history in Africa, Largest land came in African history in 2006 as a result of which he is now banned from Botswana. And finally, there's these first love horses, both cross country riding and classical dressage. He works closely with the Valencia family and Portugal. And if you remember, when I talked to Patrick King, He recently, he goes to Portugal once a year and spends time with the Valencia family and studies with Christian backing of the Spanish riding school of Vienna, a small-time breed of Lusitano horses, Rupert relaxes by reading historical novels, planting trees and drinking B, especially IPA's. He quite likes wine too, and food. So what An amazing sound, a human being. I cannot wait to get Rupert on the phone and learn more about Rupert Isaacson

Speaker 3: (05:55)
And welcome to the journey on podcast

Rupert: (05:58)
Thank you for having me on,

Warwick: (05:59)
Oh, thank you so much for being on here. I, you know, full disclosure here, I, I watch the horse boy movie and was fascinated by the whole thing. And so I immediately contacted you through a mutual friend and asked if you'd like to be on the podcast and you agreed to, and then I kind of took a deep dive into all things, Rupert Isaacson, and I realized you're probably a much bigger deal than I done. I thought you were. So I'm very, very humbled to have you here on the podcast with us.

Rupert: (06:28)
Well, you're kind I'll be the first to say, I'm no big deal and I'm honored to be here. So Thank you.

Warwick: (06:35)
Yeah. I'm excited for this, you know, just so many if people are aware of who you are, it's probably through the movie, the horse boy and the horse boy method and your, you basically an autism activist, you could say that's something we, we, we can talk about, but there's so much other stuff to what you, your life experiences that I'm so interested in talking about. Horses is one going to Mongolia with your son, which I've done with my son is one the San bushmen of the Kalahari is another one. That's something that fascinates me. And I'm really fascinated by all like indigenous coaches that really have this have never lost that connection to earth and whatever the divine, you know yeah, so many things I want to talk about. I'm not even sure where to start. Why don't we start? Why don't we start with, start with, why don't we start with the horse boy, hell how is he has ruined these days

Rupert: (07:37)
Runs. Great. I was we were just I don't know if any of you are following there's just been a major freeze in Texas. They've had 150 year weather event and so I just, a couple of days had to go. I had to drive him from his house, which he now owns in Elgon Texas into Austin on roads that were a sheet of ice. We had no brakes. I was just praying the whole way. It took us two and a half hours to complete a journey of 30 miles and cars just going off the road left right. And center. And him just holding it together in a way that a year or two ago with his autism, no way. But more than that, I mean, here's the bottom line. He owns his own house. He drives his own car. He cooks, cleans and shops for himself. My son who was incontinent non-verbal at tantruming, unable is now a house center, a car owner is that high school, but he's thinking about maybe studying abroad next year. And that to me is frankly miraculous.

Warwick: (09:00)
Yeah. That's, that's amazing. After, after having watched the horse boy movie yeah, he's, he's come a long way. How old is he now? He's 19. Okay. And in high school what, what grade is he in high school?

Rupert: (09:19)
He is in the, you know, I was getting the American grades mixed up he's he's in the grade of his year. But obviously a lot of people graduate at 19. He only started going to high high school at 17 because we homeschooled up until that point. And he has, he went into a special ed program where he hasn't until he's 22 that he can graduate. However, in the last year he has just gone into the general ed classes. He's no longer really in the special ed classes. So it's not so much the grade level. It's more that he will graduate in three years and then we'll think

Warwick: (09:57)
That's that's. That's awesome. So what's he, what's he interested in these days?

Rupert: (10:01)
He's a polymath. He always was certain interests really stay with him, like nature, like animals and so on, but he's really interested in art. He's a good artist is a particularly good still life artist, interestingly. He's interested in semantics and grammar and language in a really interesting way that I think that perhaps if you were born non-verbal you don't take language for granted in the same way that you and I might. So we have long and involved conversations about not just what a word means and the multiple meanings of words, but the origins of words, you know, that this word might come from the French, which comes from the Latin, which comes from, or might come from the Greek. This word might come from the Germanic, which might come from Gothic or Scandinavian pre-med eval roots, et cetera.

Rupert: (10:59)
These are often the conversations we have and he's got a huge interest in humor. One of the really interesting things was that he always, one of our mutual languages was always humor. And I realized that humor was the way to teach everything. But especially the non-academic stuff, especially the life skills stuff, especially the stuff that you needed to understand ambiguity when people say one thing, but neat, but mean another thing which, you know, can be tricky for someone with autism or tricky for any of us or paradox when something means what it means, but its own opposite. And so little by little, we began to explore that kind of humor over years, toilet humor Monty Python, the obvious things and really irony, irony and sarcasm. And he has a great fascination with this as well. So the conversations are intense.

Warwick: (12:02)
Yeah. The whole toilet humor, I, you know, watching the horse boy maybe there was, there was a, you know, well maybe it was written the book the long, the long ride home. There was a lot of toilet humor. And then as I've taken a dive into looking up all things, Rupert Isaacs, and I've seen a lot of your presentations at autism conferences and things like that. And there's, there's a lot of poop humor in, in that

Rupert: (12:28)
Really I'm amazed. Yeah, there is. It totally humor is a really important thing. I'll tell you why, particularly for kids on the autism spectrum, because the majority of the Orthodox therapies and approaches to education, take someone who's special needs. And they basically say to this person you're not right. You're not normal. You need therapy. And to say this to a child from the age of two onwards is a terrible message to give to a child. It says to them, basically you're not okay the way you are. And what happens over time is it destroys their spirit. It destroys their self-respect it's oppressive. It makes them compliant, but compliance is no way to get through life, to get through life. You need to learn how to ask questions. So the great thing about toilet humor as a tool is it's an act of rebellion in a straight-laced conservative society like our own.

Rupert: (13:38)
You talk about, you are automatically rebelling. If you are oppressed, the only way that you can recover your broken self-respect is through an active rebellion. So by encouraging toilet humor, you encourage an active rebellion, which reestablish yourself respect. That's one side of it. The other side of it is of course you teach irony, which is an, which is a useful tool, an essential tool. But the other thing which is really interesting is of course the gut, the digestive system, because that's what toilet humor is, is science. So it's the immune system, it's the brain it's how it's physics, something, it goes in and goes down and it goes up around again, you know, gravity and hydraulics. Something happens in there that's chemistry. Something goes out and something stays in that's biology. And so you can teach all the natural sciences and math actually through toilet humor in a way that restore self-respect teachers are only ambiguity and paradox, which is a life skill, a survival skill without child, really knowing that they're being taught anything because they'll never resist anything that you teach them this way while laughing.

Rupert: (15:00)
And what laughter of course is, is verbal communication and oxytocin and oxytocin is the hormone of happiness and communication, which counteracts the hormone, cortisol the stress. And dang, you know, I'm in danger, hormone fight flight freeze, which of course so many people on the spectrum and with other neuro difference suffer from so is in an interesting way totally here, but can synthesize all these very positive things into one, easy to do, effortless to do hot or string to pun territory. Yeah. And that's why once you do it, plus it's just funny.

Warwick: (15:44)
Yeah. Everybody loves a good fat joke, don't they?

Rupert: (15:46)
Hey. And if you don't think Pooh is funny and particularly if you're working with kids, you really shouldn't work with kids because kids know it's funny. So if you're the adult who stands in front of them and says, that's not funny, then they just know that you're full of the thing that you're saying is not funny and therefore are not to be trusted because you don't have clarity of vision.

Warwick: (16:08)
That's funny, you know, you said before about the compliance thing, and I think there's just so many parallel lessons with your journey with Rowan and, and understand autism and just really understanding behavior in general, you know, like I'm a big fan of polyvagal theory these days and compliance, you know, I've, I've kind of gone with my horse training journey from being very, very good at teaching horses to be compliant. And I don't, I do not mean in any you know, not really an oppressive way or anything like that. I was, I, I think I was very, very good at getting a horse to be compliant where they thought it was their idea without, without, you know, kind of overruling them. But I've taken a really big in the last five years taking a really big like backflip on that. And these days it's more about the connection and the relationship and allowing them to have a voice, allowing them to say, no, I'm blending in a lot more with what their idea is instead of presenting your ideas and just watching the horse boy movie. I was just, you know, I think when we first connected, I said, you need to get dead or the year award because that, that movie, I mean, it was just the thing I really got out of. It was like, wow, that's what I'm starting to do with the horses is whatever their idea is. That's a great idea, you know, instead of having, instead of having a judgment about what's going on, you just can kind of blend in and flow with it and you

Warwick: (17:41)
Yeah. I mean, what you're talking about is listening, you know, and whether it's a horse or a human cause we're all mammals. The reasons why one doesn't take time to listen is fear. You know, with, with horses, people are like, Oh my God, it's a big animal. You know, if I, if I'm not like in control, then I'm going to die. And there's a certain logic to that. That's why people come to these conclusions. But of course it's not a conclusion that actually keeps you alive. And it's certainly not a conclusion that brings you to any meaningful relationship with horse. And similarly with humans you know, you'll get a lot of teachers therapists, you'll say, yeah, I've just got to be in control. I got to have these, you know, very strict boundaries and I've got it. And that's really coming from fear of saying, well, what happens if I lose control?

Rupert: (18:33)
But of course in relationship, you have to be willing to take the risk, always to lose control. And you also have to understand on a deeper level that you never have control. There is no control, there's no control with horses. Everything is about negotiation. There's no control with another human being unless it's, you know, enforced slavery or something. So the giving up of control of course, is the crucial component for anything meaningful to happen. And of course this sparks great fear and anxiety yet, of course, if you go into it as the quote unquote teacher or trainer or parent with this desire for control, as natural as that may be paradoxically, all it will do is create fear in the person or horse or whatever that you're trying to work with. And similarly you know, if the person or course that we're trying to work with is just freaking out at this point.

Rupert: (19:38)
Well, the very thing that you were worried about happening getting bucked off, slammed into the wall, a child, having a meltdown running towards the highway, whatever it is is probably going to happen. So unless one makes that contract with one's own heart, that one is willing to give up control in order to reach cooperation, which is very different to compliance. Cooperation is simply extending a series of skills from a mentor to a men mentor. Well, that's a very different thing. And of course this can, that's when education or training or parenting is working at its best. But it, it can be a bumpy process to get there. Yeah,

Warwick: (20:32)
Yeah. You know, and I see in parenting and horses, I'm seeing it like a big shift, a global shift back to back to more of a

Warwick: (20:48)
I don't know, probably, you know, probably more like a first nations indigenous people, their way of life, their way of thinking their inclusiveness, their connection to the world, their connection to each other, their connection to other animals. I'm starting to see things go that way just a little bit.

Warwick: (21:08)
Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. We've, we've reached a period in our history where we can see that what we think are the old ways don't really work so well anymore. We know for example that if two countries have a dispute and they decided to go to war, that's probably not a great outcome. Whereas, you know, a hundred years ago, people were very happy and willing to go to war 50 years ago in certain parts of the world today, but less and less than less. And this idea of conflict, this idea of asserting your will through conflict. We think of it as an old way, whether it's with animals or people, it's actually not an old way. It's kind of a new way. In our human history, we were about 190,000 years as hunters and gatherers who crucially do not make war.

Rupert: (22:20)
There are farming and hurting cultures that also hunt who do make war, but true hunting and gathering cultures. For example, the bushel where the Kalahari, they don't, it's not in their rock art, it's not in their stories. It's not in them ecologies. It's not that the idea that two individuals can come into conflict. Sure. But the idea of one group arming themselves against another group, not there. So interestingly, that seemed to come in with agriculture a bit with hurting and then in a massive way through agriculture and ownership created scarcity and overpopulation to get a crop in the ground and out of the ground. And that sort of thing with which came, you know, epidemics, living in cities, organized religion warfare pestilence, you know, that's but, and slavery, but we had had 190,000 years of not doing that. And now only about 10,000, is it doing that? So does that mean that we are toddlers or confused teenagers now starting to realize that what we think of as the old ways, because 10,000 years seems to us like a long time, it's not really the old way, the original ways, not that. And we're groping our way back to these ethics.

Rupert: (23:47)
And so I'm quite excited by the point that we are at as a global society now. Because it seems that we're moving that way. Yeah.

Warwick: (23:57)
I'm reading your book, the long ride home. There was a passage in there when you go to the Kalahari and you talk about, I was going to try to find it, read it here, but you talk about the, like the political structure of, of the bushmen, but the, you know, the children have a voice. There is no, there's no hierarchy. It's, you know, it's very good. Yeah,

Rupert: (24:21)
Absolutely. There's no, it's not so much community based. It's consensus based, which of course you are, it requires a community to have consensus, but a community can also create fascism. A community can create, you know, a hierarchy achieve and under the chiefs and under, under chiefs and blah, blah, blah, and a community can also create something better than that. But consensus is, it's really the best thing that one can have. So when I was, when I was really spending intensive time with the bushmen what I really noticed was that it didn't matter the gender, it didn't matter the age, it mattered who had expertise in what area and people deferred to the individual or the group of individuals that had that type of experience that they would just go and look for leadership and mentorship from those people. And of course, inevitably those people tended to be elders because they've just been around longer, had more experience.

Rupert: (25:28)
So what you ended up having was a sort of, you know, group of council, of elders that people would defer to whether they were male or female. No matter which family they were from, depending on the situation that was in front of them. And that of course is a super rational way of going about life. So it's this idea of consensus and how you arrive at consensus, of course, is torturous. You have to be patient. It's a, it's a, it's a buttload of talking. It's think people are not going to make snap decisions. People are not going to say, okay, just do this because that's not really how you make a good decision. You, well, they'll say let's sleep on it, let's discuss it and sleep on it. But it appears that these cultures are more successful than ours. And what I mean by that is they've been around longer, an awful lot longer hundreds of thousands of years longer, really. And there'll be around after we're gone. We know that the climate crisis is showing us very clearly. We know that the way we're living now, isn't really sustainable that we going have to

Warwick: (26:45)
Look after the planet and nature in the same way that these Hunter gatherers do. If we're going to survive at all, we know that we have to move away from warfare and the idea of endless growth economies and organized, you know, conflict, whether it's economic, political, or, or physical as a way of doing things. And luckily we have the tools for this because our original societies, which are luckily still on the planet work this way. And so in our hearts, we work this way too, but now it's become critical. And so there's an acceleration and you know, you and I we're all farts. I mean, I don't know how old you are, but I'm 54. So my opinions, my stuff, okay. They have some value, but the next generation is going to be the one that counts. And if we don't at our age point to the Hunter, gatherer ethics as the good ones to follow, then we don't really help the next generation coming along, you know, in terms of tools that they might be able to use to get through the crisis, that sure as hell are coming I'm optimistic. I'm a born optimist. So I think that is, that is happening. That's why this podcast is happening. That's why this conversation is happening because this is the global conversation right now. How do we get back to our Hunter gatherer ethics while retaining the benefits of the technology that we've accrued through those years of doing the wrong thing. And are we therefore at the crossroads of a leap forward in our species? I kind of think we are,

Warwick: (28:35)
You know, something I hear from people a lot that are kind of following, you know, they have horses and following my journey and, and, you know kind of doing what I'm doing with the horses. So making a change about how we deal with their horse, how we work with their horses and things like that. And what I'm finding is it doesn't just change with the horses. It changes your outlook on life. It changes how you view the world, how you view your husband, how you view your wife, how you view your children, your coworkers, or that sort of stuff. And I think, you know, I think our interest in horses may be helping. A lot of people start to look at the world the way you were just talking about, because you can't make that leap from not looking at it that way to just jumping in with two feet and being all the board, you've got to have something that kind of drags you in that direction. And for me personally, it's been the horses. And I think a lot of people who are following what I do, it's kind of kind of happening to them too. No, I, I mean, well,

Rupert: (29:42)
You know, is our relationship and horses also represent something to us as humans in an iconic sort of mythological way. Why, for example, are we still so engaged with horses in an age where we don't quote unquote need them, you know, most of the world's, we don't need them for transport anymore. We don't need them for warfare anymore. We aren't, you know, hurting livestock much anymore. It's not that there aren't Cowboys out there. Of course there are, but it's not the driving force of the economy. So why do we engage with horses outside of the pure sport arena. And I think that what horses main for people is two things, freedom. They mobilize us, they make us more bigger, stronger, faster, able to go longer distances. They are beauty. Therefore they lender their beauty and that power. When you sit upon a horse, you are more beautiful than when you're a monkey standing on the ground next to a horse.

Rupert: (30:59)
And you're more powerful. You're bigger, stronger, taller, you know, you've got horsepower, but unfortunately, what does power do to humans, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts? Absolutely. So that's why you have this sort of thing that creeps into a horse culture. And that's why, you know, the amount of warrior liters so forth, so forth, it's been associated with horses, but at its purest form, what horses represent to us as a dream of, of freedom and liberation. And I think that the way that people are beginning more and more to, to, to interact with horses is a source of respect, whether it's conscious or unconscious that this is what horses give us and that we should be pretty grateful for this. We shouldn't take it for granted. We shouldn't be in feel that we're entitled to it necessarily. And so we're entering a new conversation with horses at the same time as we're entering a new conversation with ourselves and our own species, which is a healthy one.

Warwick: (32:17)
Yeah. I, I think that this kind of new way of new, old way of looking at horses is becoming a lot more mainstream. Like, I dunno, it's, for me a degree for me, it wasn't out there before, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't out there. It was hard to find. I, I kind of stumbled upon it, just working with horses and, and you know, I stumbled upon it because my wife bought a horse about five years ago that needed to have some changes made. And I thought, yeah, I can, I can do that. You know, I'd been traveling around the world doing clinics and all sorts of things and people listen to what I say and it works and it didn't work with this particular horse. And I kind of had, Whoa, what, you know, I, I thought I knew what I was talking about and it doesn't work with this horse. What else is there? But it seems like in this last five years that, that and, and, you know, it's maybe the observer effect, maybe it's just quantum physics, you see what you're looking for sort of thing that it's so much easier to find this whole relationship stuff with horses than it seemed to use to be able to be. And like I said, maybe it's just, I'm now looking for it. And you, you see what you're looking for, you know?

Rupert: (33:33)
Well, I, yeah, I think it's become accepted. A woman that I, a person that I work closely with is someone called Linda Tellington Jones, for example. And it's interesting. A lot of, a lot of the listeners I'm sure familiar with her. But when she was first starting her stuff she was really regarded as a Weaver lieu, hippie outsider. And then of course, you know, German dressage, Olympians, like class Balkin hall and people like that got interested in what she was doing. So we, you know, this this lady clearly gets results through this relationship based approach. And so I think that we're lucky that there was a previous generation that came through in the seventies and so on, who pioneered a lot of this. But it wasn't in the mainstream except for the maybe upper echelons of the elite, because the really successful sport riders that the really successful ones of course are willing to look at anything that's how sports psychology came into play and that sort of thing to improve their game.

Rupert: (34:43)
And they're not necessarily just going to blindly adhere to you know, the previous generations techniques if they can get an edge by using something different, even if, especially if something else is, is softer and easier. And but unfortunately, you know, at the time that people like Linda were doing her thing, you know, the, the, the mainstream of horses remain quite coercive. Now, as you say, that's beginning to change to my mind was an interesting conversation though, is the interplay between the old classical system, which is a good system when it's done well. And the new system of ethics, which is it actually a new system of ethics, or is it actually what the original people, 6,000 years ago, who training horses on the Eurasian step and formulating the, the system that we now call classical dressage actually knew because they were their lives depended on these horses.

Rupert: (35:50)
They like in Mongolia, they were not just riding them, but eating them, drinking them that wearing them. If you, if your horses were not doing well, you were simply going to die horses where your culture, your life, not a sport, not a thing that you do, not a hobby but your, everything, your entire universe. And I suspect that what we think of as a new approach to horses rather like a new approach to the ethics with which we treat each other is not so new at all. It's probably a return to something more original after a bit of time lost in the wilderness. That's what I suspect, but I'm obviously in the realm of speculation there. Yeah.

Warwick: (36:44)
I think, you know, I've been, since my wife bought that horse five years ago and I had to look at things a bit differently for him. You cannot, I think I mentioned it before. You cannot look at things differently with your horse and have that be a standalone event from the rest of your existence. And now look at a lot of things quite differently. And so that led me into like, you know, going to a therapist, trying to figure out childhood stuff things like that. And I read a lot of books, listen, a lot of audio books. And it's funny, like modern neuroscience is kind of learning that the old ways, you know, things that, that, that, that the first nations people used to do is actually now being scientifically like sciences is catching up with the, with the spiritual side of things.

Rupert: (37:40)
No, I agree. And it's interesting people think often in not just in the West, but in cultures that have gone through the agricultural posts, agricultural and industrial and post-industrial process, which is not just the West, it's also China. It's also India. It's also large chunks of Africa. These cultures think that, or let's say we think that hunting and gathering cultures, for example, as something ancestral, well, they all for us, but actually they're still around. They're right there happening. They survived, you know how the hell they've managed to survive the purposeful genocides that wanted and wholesale destruction of their environments yet they have survived. And what I was very lucky was that I worked for many years with one of those groups the, in the Kalahari the Koyczan bushmen of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, and learned an awful lot from them.

Rupert: (38:59)
But one of the things I learned was that this never went away and it never went away from the planet in that there were people living that original way. Let's not say the old way, let's say the original way. Even while we went through this crazed, you know, psychopathic, Viking type, you know, completely nuts way of looking at the world over some hundreds of years or thousands of years. But that also of course, that in a set of ethics based really on love, love, and respect never left us because it's who we are. And that's why for example, with war government still feels to this day that they have to justify a war to their populace. They don't just say, Hey, you know, let's go fight a war with those guys. Cause be fun. Let's go them up. Cause it'd be fun.

Rupert: (39:55)
If it was really endemic to human nature to go and behave in that way, it would need no justification. We wouldn't need the justice system. We wouldn't need to justify murder or fat. We just do it because Hey, you know, fun, why not? But we don't, we know it's wrong. And so that ethical system has come down to us through these highly cooperative original hunter-gatherers hunter-gatherer societies, which thank God us to fill on the planet. And I do feel that we're returning to that. And what we in the West field is a return to the old thing is in fact, simply I think listening at last to what really practically works at the fundamental human level, everybody knows in a relationship, everybody knows in a family scale that communication and cooperation is better than coercion and tyranny. Everybody knows this, whether they ignore it or not, but everybody knows this.

Rupert: (41:10)
Of course it works on a societal level. Of course, this is actually the way humans are designed to live, but we just took this really weird path for the last 10,000 years since the development of agriculture. Now we're sort of coming out on the other side of this and going, well, look, we've got this really practical and benign system of ethics that is in our DNA really. And we've got all this technology that we've accumulated through this 10,000 years since we began experimenting with this type of technology, but we've got this much better way of living that we were doing 190,000 years before that. And luckily has still survived. Is it possible that we could meld those two things? Is it possible that we could have all the goodies without each other up? I do believe so actually. And I think we're groping our way there.

Warwick: (42:16)
Yeah. And that's a, that's a pretty exciting possibility. And, you know, for someone like you, like for me, I have a, I have a huge interest in like the connection that, that all first nations people kind of had to the, to the land, to each other, to just basically energy itself, you know, the divine sort of thing. But for me, it's all for me, it's all secondhand, you know, it's, I've read it in books and things like that. But for someone like you, you, you spent quite a bit of time with the Koyczan bushmen. Tell us a bit about, well, how did you, how did you get into, into that? Cause you've done some, some human rights activism. How did you get into that stuff? Because you were a journalist initially, where are you?

Rupert: (43:04)
Yeah. okay. Here's what happened? My family's from Africa. I was born in England, but my sister and I were the first ones born in England and in some generations my mum and my dad have different sides of my African family, my mom's side. Okay. Arrived from the UK and Holland around the late 17 hundreds in South Africa. And because of that sort of infiltrated into every level of society that so I've got English speaking family who are Scots and English in their descent. I've got, Afrikaner speaking family who had Dutch and Hugo French in their descent and German. I've got, what's called colored family, nonwhite family who are offered. Can't speak because I've got nonwhite family who are English speakers and architects of apartheid. And some of them were in jail fighting against apartheid. And I grew up in a highly politicized family with fists being thrown across the dinner table.

Rupert: (44:16)
And also our house was a safe house for our nonwhite family, who would who could not go to the good universities in South Africa. So they would come to the UK, some of them and stay with us, you know, while they found their feet before going on to study, et cetera. And then on my dad's side, they were Jews. They were Russian Lithuanian Jews who were escaping the pogroms, the, the, the, you know killings of Jews that were going on in the 19th century there and got on boats and went to England and went to America and went to South Africa and went to Namibia. And when they were down there, they sort of behaved as badly, sadly as any other white person, they swapped their oppressed tap for oppressors, but it meant that my, when I became a journalist, it was very natural for me to gravitate down to Africa for stories.

Rupert: (45:16)
And while I was down there shortly after Nelson Mandela came into power and apartheid had had fallen a story came up where there was a group of bushmen who had been kicked out of what is now a national park, big national, but second biggest national park in South Africa in the seventies, there was a myth in apartheid, South Africa, that there were no more bushmen left, turned out there were, they just been living by the side of the road for about 25 years. And it turned out they were cousins of mine. And I found this out and I went down there to cover the story and we got to know each other and they said, okay, we're family, albeit extended family, but we are family. So what are you Rupert going to do to help us get our land back? And I said, I don't know what he wants you to do. And they said, get us to the UN. And you're talking about a bloke in his twenties, you know, sitting on a sand dune, you know, talking to old Darvid, Kliper the at that time, the sort of spokesperson for the bushmen. And I said, well, how do I do that? And he said, you'll figure it out.

Rupert: (46:38)
I sort of did figure it out over about five years. And we didn't just get to the UN. We got to the state department, we got to Hollywood, we got to every power center we could think of also in the UK. And we ha we managed to get really good human rights lawyers on board. And what happened was both the South African Bushman and a group up in Botswana. We managed with those guys, a huge, a big team of us, not just me to win the largest land claims in African history and that the people went home. I felt that I had fulfilled to some degree comic debt in my family because my family had done bad things as whites out there. By went much deeper than that. I, in the time that I was with the bushmen, which is over years, was mentored, I was mentored in parenting.

Rupert: (47:48)
I saw that they gave completely unconditional love to children and that they listened to, to children and children had a voice that they co-slept with the infants, because there's just no way you'd put your infant across the hall from you when you are surrounded by hyenas who will silently come in at night while you were dead asleep and remove that child from even right next to you, you're going to sleep with that kid surrounded by adults. So that, that just doesn't happen. You're going to carry that child on your body as you walk through the Bush, because there's all sorts of things that can snatch your kid and dah, dah, dah, you're going to create safe spaces, surrounded by adults for those children to play. What happened was these kids did not grow up dependent. It's like they had so much love poured into them that when they were 16, they could take a spare, go into the Bush and survive.

Rupert: (48:48)
And not just that they could go out of their culture and survive. They could that this resilience they had, they could go down to Johannesburg and work in the mines where they were regarded as almost non-human and survive it and make money and come back. And they could have this lightheartedness with the whole thing. And it may be, think about how we were brought up. You and I am sure a lot of listeners, when we were kids, we were put in cribs across a room or in another room and left to cry it out. Why does a child cry when it's left alone by itself? Because in our DNA, we know over some millions of years of humanity, that if you are left alone at night, the hyenas might come and get you. So you must scream as loudly as you can for the adults in your group to come and get you.

Rupert: (49:42)
Now, this is a risk because a crying child can attract predators. So if you are left to cry for too long, you know, a despair creeps in and you know that the th the clan is dead was gone. He doesn't have your back anymore, and you're going to be eaten. So how much of a Western or, and other cultures darkness and despair, and a sort of angst comes from having been made to cry out as babies, you know on a DNA level. And then the holes we have to go and fill later in our lives through alcohol and other addictions. This is not really there in those older original cultures. I looked at this and I took it to heart. And then I also saw of course how they addressed their own dysfunctions, because these people are not saints they're people.

Rupert: (50:46)
And so they, they, they do all the things, all the wrong things that we do, but why doesn't this then fracture them as a group? Why are they not all fighting on Facebook or, you know you know, impeaching each other or whatever, because they know that cohesion within the group is the secret of survival. And therefore the center of that Stan spirituality. And there is usually a person who has that role. We could call them a shaman or a healer. And interestingly, that person often is the type of person that in our society would be relegated to the margins of society because they exhibit symptoms of neuro psychiatric difference, adult autism epilepsy, bipolar, depression schizophrenia, et cetera. And in those cultures, it's not regarded as a as a disqualification from participating in society are at a central level. It's regarded as a qualification for participating in the central role.

Rupert: (52:12)
So those people are usually targeted for training when they reach puberty because they have a fro already in the spirit world because of their acute sensitivity. And they are then trained over some decades and they hit their stride. They really hit Australia's healers in their fifties. And it's a fairly rigorous process, but these cultures are not woo, woo, hippy. They, they don't know what the word we were in hippie means. They're just people that know how to survive really well. They're very practical. If something doesn't work, they don't do it. Why would they waste their time? So I learned a lot. I was mentored a lot by these people. And I consider myself very fortunate in that regard,

Warwick: (53:03)
You know, what you were saying about how they are with their children, that whole sense of community. And, and I, I'm a big fan of polyvagal theory these days since I discovered it and the word attunement, which there's a professor of psychology from UCLA named Daniel Siegel. Who's written quite a few books and he calls it attunement to the sense of being seen and being, and there's a trauma therapist named Sarah schlocky from Canada that I know, and she went one step further. And she says, it's the sense of being seen, being heard, feeling felt, and getting gotten. And I've also read a lot of stuff by you ever heard of Gebel Matay no, please tell me. So I gave him a Metta is a, he's a doctor from Vancouver, Canada, but he's like one of the world's leading experts on addiction. And he basically says all addiction comes from trauma. And a lot of that trauma is just a lack of attunement. It's just a lack of that being heard as a child that, You know, crying, Crying it out, and that whole, you know, stop crying. I'll give you something to cry about that,

Rupert: (54:12)
Crying it out as a baby only gets worse as you get older. Right. as you say, stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about. The violence with which I was raised in a school system. I was the last generation of boys in the UK to be regularly beaten at school, for example. And you learned that this was how it was, and it was deliberate. They told us when we went into the school, you know, we're going to break you down to build you up in our image. These were military schools, all that type of those types of schools in England are all military schools. They're all attached to a regimen of the regular army. And the idea was, you know, well, yeah, it's a British empire, even though the British empire didn't exist, you know, the point that I was being educated, it was still anachronistically, you know, being adhere to.

Rupert: (55:16)
And the idea was that you needed to create people that were thinking can fodder. That would be the administrators and offices that would, you know, go out to, you know, some area of the Sudan at the age of 21 and, you know, administer it while catching malaria and dying in some tribal conflict and sort of doing it with some sense of manifest destiny. For this, you've got to brainwash people and part of the brainwashing is brutalization. And you know, you're a nosy out of that generation. I'm sure you went through very similar things. And the problem with this is it works, it works on a, on a, on an immediate level, but of course, you know, for every officer that went out to do that in the British empire, who helped to create tax revenue for the British empire, that was another officer just shot himself because he couldn't with it. And at the despair. And what we're talking about here is despair. And when you despair, you do bad things because you have nothing to lose.

Rupert: (56:38)
That's the risk that warrior societies take and worry societies are you know, hurting agricultural and post agricultural societies. But the idea is you, you create scarcity because you need so many people to put a crop in the ground and pull it out of the brand that you, you have to enslave people to do this. You have to enslave women to do this. So they no longer have control of how many kids they have. You, you have rigid hierarchies, you have a belief system that comes in to justify or that's and make people just knuckle under that's of course, organized religion. And you promise people something better in the afterlife and you make them despair. And when they despair they'll do anything, anything at all, March into the cannon fire, wipe out a village or whatever gets the job done and brings the tax revenue to the Roman empire, to the British empire, to the American empire, to the Chinese empire, to whoever it is.

Rupert: (57:48)
And we are now, I think, as a, as a species that experiencing a grand fatigue with this, so that there are conversations happening now that were not happening when I was, well, I guess they were happening, but not on a, not on the level they're happening now, where neuroscientists and academics and cultural leaders are coming in and saying, maybe this isn't such a great idea. Maybe if we do keep going like this, we'll wipe ourselves out and we should give ourselves a little bit of kudos as a species. We're not doing what we were doing 80 years ago. So I, we were having this conversation. I'm in Germany, you're in California, right? I'm in a, I'm in a medieval house right now in Germany having this conversation with 80 years ago in Germany, I would not personally have been having this conversation with you I'd have been in a concentration camp cause I'm half Jewish, but I'm not anymore.

Rupert: (59:07)
And 80 years ago my British and South African forebears, my grandfather was fighting against the Germans. In fact, my wife's grandparents to stop a great atrocity from happening. And then after out of that came the EU. And we've even that Brexit is a weird hiccup in this. But we are trying as a global culture to move away from that stuff. Now you know, you talking about Mongolia, it's not the first time this has happened. Obviously people that have read the host, but I know that I went across Mongolia with my, my boy from shaman to shaman. You've done a journey across Mongolia with your son Mongolia. In the medieval period was the culture that every generation or two generations would explode out of the central Asian step and from the Pacific to the Mediterranean kill everybody in that path.

Rupert: (01:00:19)
And then in the 17th century, some monks, some Tibetan monks wandered over the outside plateau into Mongolia and started talking about this thing called Buddhism. And in one generation, the Mongolians went, you know what that thing about exploding out every generation and killing everybody from the Pacific. Ah, maybe that's not such a good idea and they start boom like that. So I, I do feel that since in that 10,000 years, since we went wrong as a society, we've been heading back towards the light and now it's become existentially imperative that we do this with climate change and with what we've done to the planet. And I think that the great benefit of the current climate crisis is that it will force us to go the, the next step and do things we don't want to do, like listen to each other, you know, live in a way that isn't quite so goody oriented. And we'll we'll, I think we'll make it, I do. And of course it will be our children that bring us there. And so whether we're involved in parenting or autism or horses or any relationship, I think the key is that we need to look to those original ethics for how to get through these seemingly insurmountable challenges. But if we allow ourselves to be mentored, we've got a sporting chance.

Warwick: (01:02:14)
Yeah. I really think the tide is changing you. You probably know who Eckhart totally is. Him and Eckhart. Totally. And Oprah Winfrey did a thing called SuperSoul Sunday. Think it was in, I forget when it was, but I think it was live on YouTube or something or other, and they had the first one, they did that 11 million people watching, which I think at the time was supposedly the biggest, the world's largest ever spiritual gathering and the things that AerCap totally was talking about there if he had, if he had a stood on a soap box on a corner 20 years ago and was saying those things, he would have been arrested.

Warwick: (01:03:02)
Put in a psychiatric unit. And and I really think that, you know, you said like with the shamans, they all tend to have some autism or some schizophrenia or some you know, the bipolar type things. And they're the people who they would groom to become the shamans. Cause they have that, that thing that can connect them to the, the divine sort of thing. And if you think about in our society, they're the people that we've, we've shut away. And I really think a lot of that has to do with there's a, there's a really good book I read called stealing fire, which is about altered States of consciousness. And in that book, they talk about the, the, the pile of the church and the pail of the state. And it talked about it. I think it was in Wales back in the day or in England, back in the day, there was a piling fence between England and Wales and out there in Wales was where all the wild people lived and you don't go beyond the pale, but if you did get to be on the pile, when you came back, you weren't really trusted because you'd seen things that we don't want you to see.

Warwick: (01:04:07)
And, and this book talks about, you know, how that, that this, the pale of the church and the pail of the state try to stop you from seeing things a certain way, because then they, they lose control of you. And, and I think that that control, it's getting given up bit by bit, like I watched a documentary a little while ago about some of the secret CIA experiments during the cold war to get people to do like remote viewing. You know, they had people who could see in rooms in, you know, in the KGB headquarters, in Moscow and stuff like that. And that's just being released now, like the government is finally saying, Oh yeah, there's, there's more to the world than what we've led you to believe sort of thing. And I think it's, it's, it's the, you know, and this is where it comes back to the whole, they're like the, say the shamanism and, and the, the, the older coaches that, you know, that stuff, just all the whole thing just fascinates me. Well, what we know is that life is not entirely rational. We know that life's about 50%

Rupert: (01:05:18)
Rational and 50% irrational. I think this is within everybody's experience. So we all know that we fall in love, but we can't say what that is. You know, we can say, Oh, there's a, you know, a process of oxytocin and there's a process of dopamine and there's a process of, of serotonin and it gets triggered like this, but we can't still really say why it happens in this state. And it doesn't happen with this person. And it doesn't happen with that person or whatever, but it's within our experience. We can't say why we feel a kinship to the divine. We can't say why healing works. So for example we talked about this before, but I'm going to talk about it again. I have a an uncle who was one of the heads of pathology research pathology at university college hospital in London, hard scientist.

Rupert: (01:06:25)
When I made the horse boy film, I thought he would think I was fellowship. And that was a private viewing pro-family. And at the end of the movie, I came up to him, we were chatting, everyone was chatting and S opened this imaginary umbrella and said, okay, take a. Cause I know you're going to do your worst gone. You're going to think I'm so full of, the list shamanism business. And he said, actually, well, Rupert, this time, I'm not going to do that. And I said, well, that's interesting. Why not? And he said, well, because you've hit on, you're talking about something that is of real interest to a research to like me. And I said, well, go on. And he said, well, you're talking about the placebo effect. He said, most people misunderstand the placebo effect. They think that something doesn't work because it's the placebo, Oh, that's just the placebo effect.

Rupert: (01:07:24)
He says, they got it wrong. They got it backwards. They, they, it means they fundamentally misunderstand is that the placebo effect, the entire edifice of allopathic, Western medicine rests upon the placebo effect. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, you get sick. You go to a doctor. He prescribes you a drug that drug has gone through a trial before it's allowed to go to market in that trial. There's a double-blind study in that study. There is a population that is given a placebo echo and they, the drug has to make more people get better than the placebo. And these people who get better on the placebo, they don't just think they get better and die later. They actually get better. And nobody knows quite why this happens. And many drugs fail because they don't make more people better than the placebo. And they have to go back to the drawing board.

Rupert: (01:08:26)
And he said, is it possible that there is a technology of spiritual technology out there, which is as old as humanity where people can learn how to activate the immune system the vagal nerve, when you talk about polyvagal theory, which connects the gut with the brain and touches every organ and makes your immune system actually work, rather than not working makes your emotional communication work or not work. Is it possible that these people have hundreds of thousands of years figured out a way to make this happen through certain types of rhythm and ritual and repetitive song and movement and interaction with the divine, whatever that is. He said, well, quite possibly, you said we don't yet understand it, but because we don't yet understand, it doesn't mean it's not real because the entire pharmaceutical industry rests upon this this, he said, well, that, that's interesting.

Rupert: (01:09:27)
So it's clear that we know we as humans know in that instinctive way, what works and what we know is that it's love when you go and talk to a chairman, a good chairman, they will say, and you say, what is this thing? Like the Bush we'll call it. What is this healing energy? And they will say, Oh, it's just love. But with a certain training process, you can learn how to direct it. That's a big understatement because that training process takes a few decades, but Hey, but they says it's pretty simple actually. And we all know how to love. You know, you talk about this with horses, what is a relationship, a good relationship to the human and all us other than love. What does a good relationship between humans other than love? What is a bad relationship, love gone wrong, but it's still love.

Rupert: (01:10:34)
In fact, everything is love, right? Just that hate or the desire to control is love gone through a twisted and corrupted process. But at the end of the day, it's the same raw material. And I think that that now finally is a conversation that's creeping into the mainstream, at least in the West. That is helpful because I think everyone knows it's a truth. And if we can operate from there, then we have a chance to use our science and our, and our quote unquote rational stuff. The other 50% in a way that is beneficial to us, not just, long-term not short-term and might get us through the crisis that we're in currently. I'm optimistic. I think we will get through it that way. So, so whether you're an Aussie horse trainer or a South African journalist, it's interesting that suddenly now it's sort of somewhat safe to have a conversation about love and God where it wasn't 20 years ago. Absolutely. So I called Teles, right? Yeah. They'd have put us all in the funny farm. And thankfully now the funny farm has become a bit global about time.

Warwick: (01:12:03)
Yeah. It really makes you think about the people that were institutionalized many years ago and that know the stuff that day.

Rupert: (01:12:14)
Kidding. No kidding. Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. Well they always say, you know, kill the profits are killed, right? Because they come along with uncomfortable truth. Without a doubt, we've try to enact a sort of a genocide, I think, on the truth tellers and the, of our society in the last 10,000 years. And by true tellers, I don't mean the people that say it's all wrong. We need to get Eve. And, and we're going to get really angry about this. I mean, the people that say it's about love and it's about forgiveness and it's about compassion. I mean, look what they did to Jesus. Right?

Warwick: (01:13:04)
I think about it in the middle ages. If you were good with animals, especially if you're a female, you're a, which you have been at the stake because without a doubt, and I've actually heard this story, I don't know how true it is that the term horse whisperer didn't come from a like horse whisper as a, you could do all we stuff. It actually came from long ago. When, if you were good with horses, you didn't tell everybody about it. You only whispered to people about it because you didn't want people to know you're good with animals because that would endanger you of being branded a witch and burned at the stake. So I don't know how much truth there is to that story, but it makes sense.

Rupert: (01:13:47)
Well, I give you, I'd give you a a story actually from own boyhood. If you have any if you have any listeners right now who are British and horsey, they might know what I say. When I talk about the black box, anyone out, I know what the black box is, put it in the comments below. The black box was a thing that was whispered about in horse circles in the UK. Post-War where if you had a real problem with your horse, that you couldn't deal with, there were certain people who you could send a box of horses, hair, and other DNA from your horse to, and you would get a phone call or a message or a lecture. And it would say, do this, do this and do this. And very successful racehorse trainers, very successful show jumpers, blah, blah, blah, would know what the black box was.

Rupert: (01:15:02)
Okay. When I was staring to my horse life here, when I was about 25, I was venting a horse semi professionally for a family in that lived West of London. And this horse was an incredible horse. This horse went international Brett presented the UK, but also was the type of horse that you could put anybody on, like really anybody. And he would take them around the farm and just be really cool with them. He was a better horse. He was an incredible horse. And he got this weird kidney failure. He just started to pee all the time. And then he began to lose weight. And then he became a skeleton. And this all happened in, Oh, I don't know six to 10 weeks. And the vets all gave up and said to that owner at this point I recommend you either try the black box or find a faith here.

Rupert: (01:16:18)
I like the vets said this couldn't figure out who to do with the black box. Try to find a faith healer. Couldn't find one. The horse ended up being put down about two weeks after the horse was put down. I was at a party, a journalist party in London. And I was having a conversation with a woman and I said, Oh, what are you working on? She said, Oh, I'm working on a TV series about animal healers. I said, where were you two weeks ago? And I said, tell me who you met. She said, well, most of them I think were charlatans, but there was this one dude who was this funny little guy who was living in a caravan North of London and called Charles Siddle. And he had been hired by the queen to help with a race horse that had lymphoma, a racehorse, a brood mare, a very, very valuable Burma.

Rupert: (01:17:26)
And he worked with this horse and not only did it survive, it went on to have other files. And we follow this guy. He says, she said, this guy seemed to be the real deal. And he didn't care whether he was on television or not all the others did. And I said, do you have this guy's contact? You gave it to me. I contacted him. And I, I followed him for about a year as he took on several cases that were bullet jobs, all of which interestingly had been referred to him by vets. There were a bunch of vets that knew about him and that when there were things that they were just flat out scratching their heads over, they said, you know, you could do worse than contact. Charles said, one was a horse that had run into a gate posts and fractured his scapular. Another one was a host that had been in a bond farm, burned its lungs very badly. And I'm trying to think now back down to here's what the third one was. Anyway, I followed these cases and each one of these horses not only was rehabbed in a matter of weeks, but then went on to have successful careers. And Charles was an interesting dude. He had been a commando in world war two and he said, I'm making up for all the people I killed.

Rupert: (01:18:56)
He was one of the first people to tell me about love. And I saw long before I got involved in the bushmen long before any of this, just this in rural England, suburban England, really the effects of this kind of thing at work. And I count him to this day as one of my best mentors. And he changed my entire outlook on first on horses and then on the, you know, human interaction. And I'd say he really prepared me for my interaction, with the Bushman who then prepared me for my interaction with autism. So I'm lucky I've been sort of mentored along the way by some very interesting people.

Warwick: (01:19:45)
That's fascinating. You know, I don't know if you've ever had an experience with animal communicators, but one of my podcasts I did, it was on a manifesting animal communicators and other woo stuff. But I told a story there that I'll tell you really quickly. I used an animal communicator here locally, and she seemed like she knew what she was doing. And a friend of mine in Australia wanted it. I told a friend of mine in Australia and she said, well, I wonder if she'll do my horse over the phone. This friend of mine in Australia is had been diagnosed with with chronic fatigue syndrome because she was tired all the time had different symptoms, but the first, the best thing they could come up with is chronic fatigue syndrome. And so they kind of treating it for that. So I gave this animal communicator, my friend's number in Australia.

Warwick: (01:20:33)
And so she knew my friend's first name, which is Meagan. And so she calls me and she goes, hi, it's Holly Jones here. Sally Jones was the name of the animal communicator. And no, I cannot track it down anymore. Cause I wish I could. So this is, what's your horses name? Megan says my horse, his name's tally. And so Holly Jones starts telling Megan about Kelly. You know, he hurts here. He hurts there, but then she says, but Telly's not really worried about his problems. He's worried about you and your sickness. And Megan's like, what do you mean my sickness? And she says, well, he's telling me you've been bitten by a tick and say your title the time. It sounds like Lyme disease to me. Well, Lyme disease does not exist in the medical medical community in Australia is not recognized Lyme disease. So basically they say we don't have lung disease in Australia, they don't test for it. So she then found a rogue doctor who would test for it and she has lung disease. So she's diagnosed with a disease that doesn't officially exist in her country, over the phone from an animal communicator in America. Who's talking to her horse in the backyard.

Rupert: (01:21:42)
One of the experiences I've had with shamanism is that distance is no is no boundary. And when you getting into sort of quantum fractal type of ways of looking at the world, why, why should it be? I mean, after all here are you and I talking through technology, we happen to sort of understand we don't, I don't think you, and I really understand how it works, but we accept that it's available to us. You're in California, I'm in Germany right now. Yeah, here we are communicating. So the idea of distance healing, distance communication is older than telephones and internet and that sort of thing. What's interesting to me though, about the animal communicates at the thing like the human shaman thing is, there's a very beautiful side of it, a pure side of it, and there's a dark side of it.

Rupert: (01:22:40)
What do I mean by that? So it can be used to manipulate people. So I am wary when someone tells me they're an animal communicator, because I've noticed in the last 20 years, there's suddenly a plethora of them, not a small number of them anymore. Well, maybe that's a good, maybe, maybe it's just that there actually are a plethora of them. And you know, just before that, it wasn't a safe conversation to have, but I have also noticed that sometimes it's about telling people that they're not good and making them feel bad about themselves and that sort of thing. And when it's like that, it automatically trips a switch with me because when I've been working with really good healers like Charles or the Bushman healers, or some of the other first nations Steelers I've worked with, they never put it in that language.

Rupert: (01:23:46)
They never put it in the language of well it's because you're an, you know, that's not even relevant. W what they'd say is go and do this thing, like which I'll settle. It would be really simple. It'd be like, change the water three times in this time, change the rugs three times in this time, and it will get better. It would be like that impersonal. And with a, with a, with a good chairman, there'll be like, well, okay, there's this ancestral thing happening here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, do this, do this and do this. And it will be okay. And then come back again in 18 months or something like that. There's no, that they're much more professional that they don't use the language of emotional to make you feel this way, make you feel that way. In fact, they deliberately shy away from it because they know that if they freak you out like that, you might not be able to benefit from the guidance. And they also know that these things are much bigger than one individual with another individual, they involve ancestral processes and so on. So the same thing can happen of course with human to human shamanism. And there's a reason for this. We talked in the history about how hunting and gathering cultures in many parts of the world gave way to herding cultures and farming cultures that were about control.

Rupert: (01:25:23)
Sadly shamanism got co-opted into this. And that's what black magic is. If you try to use the shamanic process to emotionally influence, to gain advantage or privilege to harm somebody to think, how can I, how can I this person up? How can I hurt this person deliberately, even if they seem to deserve it, but how do I that's black? And what it can do is it can get a short term seemingly effective thing, but long-term, it will destroy both the shaman that does it. So is there any really insane chairmans that get involved in this? And certainly the person that goes along and says, I will, malevolently try to harm somebody. It's really one of the reasons why social media, which is a new form of shamanism is so, is so powerful, negatively as well as positively then. And people that, that sort of get involved in trying to destroy people through social media.

Rupert: (01:26:50)
You know it's, it's, it's, it's messy in black magic because it's putting intentional malevolence into trying to harm somebody at long distance without, without personal repercussions back to yourself. And of course that always actually happens, but it happens indirectly. So unfortunately shamanism got co-opted this way, war Schamens, blood shamans, you know, black magic witchcraft to the point that in countries like South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, even in New York now in London, you have whole wings of the police force that aren't entirely dealing with witchcraft related murder. Either people being killed because they're being accused of this or people who are actually, you know, killing people, buying body parts, to do these horrible rituals about trying to make someone's business, make more money or trying to harm somebody, or, and this is sort of shamanism gone wrong. And because of that, people now have a great mistrust of what was the original process of love and healing.

Warwick: (01:28:14)
But what I can tell you is that if you go to a good chairman saying the Kalahari, which is a hunting and gathering culture, you will not find a single halo that will touch with a bargepole. Even if you offer them a million quid, a ritual based around, say, making your business more money, or bringing an enemy down, or making somebody fall in love with you, or otherwise perverting the course of nature. And but unfortunately if you go into cultures that are hurting and agricultural, you will absolutely find the odd person who will do that stuff. And generally they live very long. Generally the negativity of it all takes them out at a certain point, but they have some sort of crazy insanity that makes them do that. And the people who do it might get some sort of voodoo might get some short term benefit, but long-term, it, it will, it will creep in and, and not do such good things.

Rupert: (01:29:25)
So there's a reason also what I, and then of course, you know, the, the church and, and other organized religions could capitalize on this and say, well, you know, we are the only spokespeople for God, because look at all this bad stuff that's going on. Well, of course, no bad stuff that goes on through the church. What, what a good shaman would do is, would look at all of that and say, all of that stuff over there is irrelevant to what shamanism is. Chairman has Ms. Purely about healing. It's only about making good come from the situation, if that is your motivation. No problem. If that is not your motivation problem, therefore I won't touch it. And luckily that's at the root of human experience in the hunting and gathering cultures. So but it's very difficult when you're, when you're somebody say, you know, coming out of the West and looking at shamanism, or, you know, how do I use the chairman?

Rupert: (01:30:25)
You know, let's say for example, you want to go to a native American group and she's a shaman, well, native Americans are warrior societies, which means there's a great darkness in that as well as a great light. You have to look very closely at the individual that you're working with. Are they themselves using the language of negativity? Are they themselves using the language of this person is my enemy. This person is my friend. Or do they seem somehow above that? And then look at the, the, the results. They get. Two people seem to be healed that come away from, you know, and that, that whole process is, you know, takes a lot of research and time. And it's difficult and daunting and confusing. It's a labyrinth that one has to negotiate. So it's, it's, it's not surprising that people get lost in that labyrinth.

Warwick: (01:31:27)
So in your book, the long ride home, I'm not up to the part where you, so I'm just up to the part where you've gone to Australia to the right, the Daintree rainforest. So I haven't read the part about your experience with his name was Harold wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And then later on you go to is it the Navajo you visit or the Lakota, the Navajo. So what were your experiences let's start in the Daintree with, with heroin heroin. Yeah. Whoa, Whoa. Well, I don't

Rupert: (01:32:00)
Want to spoil your reading of the book, but obviously they were good or I wouldn't have put them in the book. So the Daintree, the aboriginals in the Daintree area were warriors. Not purely hunter-gatherer in fact as you know, there's a, there's a great myth among the, the, the English and subsequently white Australian historians to sort of justify the genocide that when they arrived, it was just sort of Australia was just sort of empty and there were these, you know, black chaps dancing about, but there really wasn't anybody, but it's not really true actually. It turns out that there were rather like in the Americas very advanced agricultural societies living around the coasts. And of course, as you moved into the interior, less so, more to the Hunter gatherer and systems of farming and villages and towns and all of that.

Rupert: (01:33:00)
The, so when I knew I was going to go into Australia, that there were a couple of reasons why we were going, that I knew I had to be careful because it was a warrior society, like the Navajo I was going to deal with. So I thought, what is my best way to find a healer? There, there is not going to be coming at it from a warrior mentality, because just because you come out of a warrior society doesn't mean that you individually have a warrior mentality. And what I did was I began a process that I've found works quite well when I'm going to an area to find a Sharman where I don't know the people individually. So for example, when I went to the Kalahari, what I knew, I knew the healers, well, I already knew them personally. Like I knew where they lived.

Rupert: (01:33:52)
I knew where to go. I could sit and have a beer. I mean, we'd known each other for years. We were friends, but in, in, in the danger room for us not. So what I did was I was began to contact local hospitals. Again, here's the interesting mix between allopathic chronic rational medicine and irrational medicine. And say, is there somebody who comes on the ward who your local indigenous people who they asked to come on the ward and does it seem to be a good thing? And I, I, I emailed around and I got some answers. Yes, yes, there's this person, there's this person that was consensus. And I said, well, how, and we don't know who he is or what he does, but the people seem to get better. So, Hey, you know, and you find this story a lot in hospitals, in tribal areas. And so then I thought, well, how do I get a message to this person? And I found a way through a, this is outlined in the book through, through, through a sort of eco lodge where, cause this guy was also giving guidance. He still is giving guided trips into the forest.

Rupert: (01:35:13)
And but hook, and by crook, over some months, I managed to get a series of messages to him because he didn't have a cell phone, didn't have email and it felt right. So we went and you could argue that that's what I did in, in, in Mongolia too, and subsequently on the Navajo reservation. And the healers that I found were, were extraordinary people by the way, not saints to be a good healer, you don't have to be a monk in fact, quite the opposite. If you haven't had experience of getting it wrong in life, how can you understand the pain of getting it wrong in life and of what possible you saw you to someone coming in and saying, I'm in physical slash mental slash emotional slash spiritual pain, unless you've been through that process, you haven't got much to offer.

Rupert: (01:36:23)
I mean, if you're an alcoholic and you, and you want to go through rehab, you would hope that the people running your program were alcoholics because otherwise, how can they possibly understand what you're going through? You know? So otherwise it's all just opinion. So these people are very human but they have a real talent. And it's interesting. If I've talked to the Bushman about this, they'll often say about 50% of people can heal, but only a smaller percentage of people feel a vocational pull to do that at great cost to themselves. Because here's the thing when you actually are a healer, the cost is huge, emotional and physical. When you show up to ask a Bushman Haleigh, to conduct a ritual for you to go into the spirit world, go into trance and do that. You have to show up with a couple of goats or the meat from a couple of goats, because the sheer effort physically of what it's going to cost them to do that we'll lay them out for three or four days.

Rupert: (01:37:46)
They need the protein to recover. So it's, it's an immensely costly process. Them, it's, it's physically painful. It's not so easy. It's not done lightly. And that's why indigenous societies will absolutely use Western mentor. Like if you've got a cold use, a plant, we'll use a drug, don't bother the chairman with that, you know, because why would you ask them to put that kind of effort in when it's not necessary? Wait until you're in a real crisis before you do that. So, and also that there's a thing in shamanism. Good. Schamens can never turn anybody away or refuse anybody. So if you can pay, you must pay. If you can't pay, they will absolutely do it for free, but it's not honorable to ask them to do that if you can because of the cost to them. So w w w with Harold in the Daintree rainforest, I went through this process and he had an extraordinary effect on my son as did the Navajo healer, who I call blue horse in the, in the book it's to protect his actual identity. And he didn't want me to use his actual name. But both of them came out of these warrior societies, but we're bringing a gentler ethic. And, and even within their societies, these, these people are the people that are sought out by the locals, not just by the outsiders like me.

Warwick: (01:39:36)
Wow. you know, I've got a friend of mine, who's a, she's an, a question mindset coach, but her husband is a, is a he used to work for national geographic is a filmmaker for national geographic. And he's been all over the world, excuse me, and Benin with all, you know, with tribes of different places everywhere. And he told me a story one time, but he was in the Congo staying with this, in this village with with a tribe. And you know, he's doing the film and the sound, and there's another guy who's doing the talking and they stayed with them for four or five days or something or other, and every day they'd go off into the jungle with the main hunting. And they, he said, if you walk 10 feet into the jungle, out of the clearing where the village is, you don't know where you are.

Warwick: (01:40:24)
You're lost, there's no trash on the ground, the canopy. So I think, and he'd said, they'd walk for hours. And they might come back to the village from the opposite direction and what they left. And it seemed like there was just no way of how did they do it. And so the, the guy who was doing the talking, he actually could headlamp the local dialect. And so Giles is my friend's husband said, I asked him, asked the chief how they find their way back to the village, because I can't figure it out. I've been watching and I I'm trying to figure it out. I figure it out. And he asked the chief and the chief said, well, that's easy. We, we asked the animals. Yeah. And Joel said, well, well, I've been filming him. And I have not seen him stop look up at a monkey and go [inaudible].

Warwick: (01:41:07)
And the chief realized back and goes, no, no, we don't talk to the animals. And, and vet gestures with his mouth. He says, we don't talk to the animals. He gestures kind of, from the top of his head, he goes, we talk to the animals. And Giles said, you mean, you can, you can mentally communicate with the animals. And this goes, like your can't you. And when Joe said, no, the chiefs like children, children come over here, this guy can't talk to the animals. So have you, in your experience with all your travels and with like, with the Bushman stuff, have you ever seen you know, things like that

Rupert: (01:41:46)
All the time,

Warwick: (01:41:48)
Correct? Correct.

Rupert: (01:41:52)
Not just with my, with the Bush firm, but in my daily life. But let's start with the bushmen and, and others. All right. So I'll give you an example. I'm 27, I think. And I'm in Botswana. And this, this story is told, I think in the healing land, I actually think I told some talks about in the long ride home too. And with a group of bushmen in this area that I've been displaced from, and they want to show me their old hunting techniques. And they say, look, Rupert, you know, we track like this. So it's not just about tracking. It's about communication with the animal. And we were tracking a Hamm's book, which is a type of RX with very long, straight horns, which is a notoriously dangerous animal to hunt. Cause it will hunt you back when it knows that you're hunting and it will come for you.

Rupert: (01:42:44)
And you know, it's coming for you with two swords. So I was scared because I knew this, that we were on the trail of this particular intellect. And but I also knew the answer. That was a long way ahead. We saw him, we glimpsed him from time to time. And at a certain point this guy said, who was the, the, the, the, the main Hunter said he, he looked down on and there was a fresh dropping animal dropping from the HubSpot that he'd obviously done some minutes before where his tracks, when he said, okay, he said, he pointed him. So says a senior doctor like this, he's smiling at me. You berries the Pooh in the back slot, the back track of the, the back, the hind hoof print of the hams book. And then he makes me, and the other guy has turned around and he goes, okay, shut your eyes.

Rupert: (01:43:54)
And we have to stay there like this for about 10 breaths. And then he goes, okay, okay. And he turns me around and there's the HomeSpot bull standing exactly a bowshot away about 30 yards presenting its shoulder for the error. These guys are no longer allowed to hunt because they've been displaced. They take these two imaginary arrows, and they Bose and they mined the shot. And in the time it takes for the imaginary arrow to reach the spot bull it flinches. It has, it runs away. And he goes, Oh, blue. That was his nephew. This was our way. I don't know how many stories like that. I have. I've seen leopards called out of the Bush to the transpires during healing ceremonies. I've seen people say I'm going to become leopard and that happening. And then the person falls down and loses consciousness. And then you see a leopard get up and run away in the direction of the place where the heat, the person is that needs healing.

Rupert: (01:45:08)
And then the next morning that person, the swellings and the cancer seems to have gone. I mean, I don't know how many experiences I've had like this, but also in my own life. I mean, working with horses, for example if I run into a problem, I ask the horse, I say, look, can you please tell me what's up? Cause I, I don't know. And I wait for an answer. I don't expect an answer immediately. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm okay with it taking a while. And then I also will go through an ancestral process. I had an ex-girlfriend, who was one of the best horsemen I ever knew. And she was, she, she, she was beginning to compete internationally for the UK women called of thorn. And I knew her at university and she died. She was killed in an accident on an event course.

Rupert: (01:46:09)
And I found myself a year or two after her death. And just automatically saying to her sometimes when I ran into a problem with the horse while riding pizza, what do you think? What do you think I should do right now? And inevitably I would give in somewhere, I'd give in my hip. So I'd give in my hand or I'd give in my shoulders or I'd given my lower back and would come. And I wish, I wish I could say this is where it's so crazy. I wish I could say that with all this knowledge, I still don't get it wrong sometimes, but I do still get it wrong. Sometimes I do sometimes find myself in situations with a horse or, or, or a person where I'm engaging in conflict unnecessarily by that I don't mean we're like whipping each other, but just, I have to remember, Oh, there's this other way. I can see that, you know, despite decades of experience that it doesn't always happen immediately. I wish I could say it did, but I just going to be completely honest. It doesn't, but when it does it works and what can I say? And I'm not the only person out there that's having this type of experience. I mean, I think you could get hundreds of people on your podcasts that are having this type of experience. But what I can say is that it's efficacious. If it works here and I,

Warwick: (01:47:52)
You know, I'm, I'm pretty new to this. I'm pretty new to this stuff fully on board, but pretty new to it. And, you know, I think you've just got to have that one, what I call a sixth sense moment, you know, if you've ever watched the movie, the sixth sense with Bruce Willis, have you seen that movie? Yeah. Yeah. You know, when, when all of a sudden you realize, Oh, he's dead. And then you're like, hang on, hang on five minutes ago. If I think back, I kind of on some sort of level knew he was dead, but I didn't know it was dead, but I kind, but what about, what about in the restaurant when he's talking to his wife, that's where the conversation was interesting because she doesn't know he's there and kind of, you know, I think you have, when people have one of those moments happen, it, it opens you up to the possibility of, yeah, it does the experience, but until you have that, and if you're not open to it, it kind of doesn't show itself. But once,

Rupert: (01:48:48)
How would you know? Right. So you were talking about your friend in the Congo. I mean, if you're lucky enough to be, and that guy calling all the kids over say, Hey, this guy come towards the animals. Well, imagine if you grew up, you know, with a series of adult mentors who knew how to do that, well, you would take it for granted. You would, but we didn't. But yet the people that do grow up in a situation where there happened to be adult mentors who know how to do this, my, my kids guess what? They're surviving in more difficult situations where they can't take shortcuts or like go to the store for food or get in a car to go somewhere. So they had better be able to tune in because if not everyone's dead. So obviously this is the, this is the authentic human experience.

Rupert: (01:49:39)
That's why they were so flabbergasted when they realized that he couldn't do that. And, and it was Charles settled by the way, who turned me on to this. But remember that, that dye I told you about in suburban England, the black book with the, yeah, well beyond the black box that he could just heal these horses. Okay. So I asked him, how are you doing it? You ready to get your mind blown by the way, I'm only hitting you with it. Okay. Hold on. I'm just gonna, someone's trying to call me, are you, are you hearing this call? That's trying to come in or let me try to let me try to okay. It's gone. All right. It'll probably happen again. Okay. So I said to Charles, how are you doing this? Because it was working. And these horses were bullet jobs, real bullet jobs, broken legs, burns out lungs lymphoma.

Rupert: (01:50:46)
He said, Rupa, if I tell you, you won't believe me. And you'll think I'm mad. I said, try me. It's the right. You said, I'm the hands of a friend of mine who died 18 years ago, who was a vet? Okay. This man was a vet. He was called Buster Lloyd Jones. He was in a wheelchair 18 years after his death, I was in a stable with a horse. That was a race horse that I had a part share in that had a terrible problem. And gusta appeared to me in the stable. After the other people had left in his wheelchair 18 years after his death and said do this. He said, you're going to be my hands no, a day after his death, not a year after his 18 years after his death and said, you're going to be in my hands and do this and do this.

Rupert: (01:51:51)
And the horse will be okay. And Charles says to me, Rupert, you know, then he disappeared. But I looked down in the store and I could see the depression of the wheels, of his wheelchair in the straw. And I did the thing because why wouldn't you while questioning my sanity in the horse got better. And then Buster started appearing to me regularly and not just busted, but my mother telling me what to do with animals and people, by the way. So I then said to Charles, well, what are these people doing? Hanging around after death? I mean, surely when you die, you die. I mean, you, you go to wherever you go. And he said, well, yes, that's true. But he said, if you feel that you have some unfinished business, you can hang around for a while and get that done. But at a certain point, you are going to pass over.

Rupert: (01:52:48)
Yes. and so that's sort of what these people are doing. And I said, that sounds crazy. He said, well, I told you you'd say it was crazy. We said, Rupa. Honestly, it doesn't matter to me whether you think I'm crazy or not. Is that I've been through world war two. I was a commando. I killed many people. I, I feel I'm making up for what I did. I, it makes no difference to me, whether you believe me, whether you don't believe me, I'm going to go on doing what I do. And before you met me that were these people that's referring these cases to me. And after you go, there will be vets referring these cases to me and I will do them until I die. So it doesn't matter whether you believe me or not. I'm not trying to convince you, but you asked me.

Rupert: (01:53:37)
So I told you, and it was obviously that type of a conversation coupled with the results, stayed with me. And, you know, and then shortly after that, I met the bushmen and, but it all came down to, you know, I asked him about it and he also said, it's just love. It's just love. It's just love with a directed process. He said this to me. The best Bushman healer, I know Besser. And [inaudible] said this to me, Navila said this to me. Aboriginal healers said this to me. Others have said this to me, that this seems to be universal truth that, that love, but real love, not, not, not, not love. I will love you if you do what I want you to do, but real love, unconditional love to truly unconditional love. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Even if I don't like you, even if I hate you, even if I think you're a bad person. So you think about the Hippocratic oath, you know, a doctor has no choice, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You must, you, it doesn't match up. Is that all fell short in front of you. You've got to,

Warwick: (01:54:52)
That's the thing I go got watching the movie, the horse boy, that's the thing I got from you watching you with Rohan was that, that unconditional love, like, and that, that whole following thing now the whole bit, but, you know, whatever he did was perfectly fine. It was, it was amazing. It was, yes, let's do whatever it is you're doing. And I just, yeah, that, that, I think that's the thing that really stood out to me in the movie is just your ability to do, just to be present and not wish it was different, but just embrace it and accept it as it is.

Rupert: (01:55:34)
Luckily I was mentored in this you know, by the bushmen. Yes, but also by Dr. Temple Grandin, when I was first trying to find my way and the Orthodox therapies were not working actually were very coercive, actually were causing harm, not just not working. I thought who can, who can help me with this has to be an adult autists who somehow made it in the world who was as severe as my son, non-verbal incontinent. Who is that person? That's Dr. Temple. Granted when she was three, she was rocking it in a corner. Non-Verbal wiping her poo on the walls. And so I contacted her and I said, how does my son become you? And she said, follow the child, follow him physically. So you can observe, follow him emotionally. So you can see which sensory you talk about that the vagal nerve, which sense?

Rupert: (01:56:40)
Cause the vagal nerve is your sensory system. What upsets him? What makes him happy? Try to eliminate the things that upset, try to accentuate the things that cause happiness and then also follow him intellectually any interest he has followed us. And I wouldn't say that it it came perhaps more naturally to me because of my background with Charles and the bushmen and other people. But obviously I had many, many moments and I talk about these in the books where I up, where I try to coerce or force or lost my patience or became angry or was just to share lack of sleep or whatever, you know? But they were, no, they were less than the times that I followed the mentorship. What I do know is that mentorship is really important. You, you can never think, you know, you must look to the elders, whether it's temple Grandin, whether it's a Bushman healer, whether it's a really good horse trainer, you know, and then if you and the elders are also ancestors.

Rupert: (01:57:50)
So whether it's my, you know, dead girlfriend who I feel somehow instructs me sometimes with horses or whatever, or Charles settle thing, it's my dead friend and my mother. And what, what Schamens will say is that they ask the ancestors to intercede with the divine, to help with the problem and the ancestors and the divine give them a series of instructions, which when they come out of their trance, they give to you. And if you follow them, generally, it seems that things work well. So, but if, whether you look at it as a shamonic process with ancestors, or whether it's me reaching out to temple Grandin or going talking to, to, or Charles settle, it's still mentorship. And we were talking about, you know hunting and gathering societies where things are done by consensus. But the consensus means that you look to the people who have the most experience, right? So it's always a council of elders, male and female who have particular experience in this area or that area at the end of the day, it's very practical. You simply go to the people, who've got the experience and ask them what to do, whether they're dead or alive, that's where it gets funky.

Warwick: (01:59:10)
That's where it gets funky. We'll speak in a funky, I guess we better tell them the story about what happened earlier on. So this is our second attempt at this podcast. And the earlier today we had our first attempt and we were about an hour in and Rubin was talking about shamanism quite a bit and the good and the bad, which he's recovered again. But for some reason I lost his voice into my, all my audio stuff here. And we had to stop and recalibrate and all sorts of stuff. And the audio that we'd recorded wouldn't record. I mean, I had the spinning wheel of death on my computer, but I also, the I've got a box here on the side of my computer that rolled the audio runs through and my son, who's a musician set it up and it's all set up to where it's supposed to work in, in the middle of this, this not only did the session stop recording at the same time, Rupert's voice disappeared at the same time from my audio books.

Warwick: (02:00:14)
Anyway, I couldn't figure it out. I had to wake up, my son he's in Hawaii. So it was early there. I had to wake him up and go through the whole thing. And then I get back on with Rupe and I go, I have no idea what happened. And Rupert says, I do. He says, when we, when we've been like having a Sharman help with Rowan, and we've been trying to film it a lot of times, if the Sharman says you can film. Cause sometimes I say you don't, you can't. But a lot of times when you have perfectly good electronic equipment that works, it will not work when that energy or whatever is going on. Is that basically the crux of the whole thing? Yeah.

Rupert: (02:00:51)
Yeah. That the energy is so strong that it will short circuit electronic equipment. And if you talk to anybody I'm worried it's gonna happen again. Now

Warwick: (02:01:07)
[Inaudible] screws up. Yeah.

Rupert: (02:01:09)
But if you talk to anyone, who's had an experience of working doing this kind of thing with indigenous healers and chairmans, you'll find that they all tell that story. They were even when the Shannon said, yeah, no problem, you know, run your camera, but they will often warn you they'll say, but it might short out. And it does it, it appears that the energy is, is, is so strong. And that the energy is also mischievous. The energy wants you to go the extra mile to find out on an individual level challenge, your own beliefs, challenge your prejudices and kind of with you a bit. And this is sort of part of nature, right? This is nature at work. And what is nature, but God, I mean that there is a, a sort of affectionately mischievous process and, you know, so what was it saying to us, well, maybe saying, well, don't just do some glib podcasts about shamanism. Are you really that, are you really willing to go the extra mile? Cause you, you could have abandoned it. Or, you know, you could have said, sorry, you know, my equipment failed, you know, can't do it. But no, you persevered. And you said, look, I still want to know this information. And hopefully it won't show it to us again, but it's very normal. When you're working in a shamonic contest for your equipment to fail. Yeah.

Warwick: (02:02:56)
Yeah. Well that was, that was my spooky thing for the day. So we've been going on just on two hours and Rupert, I could talk to you for 16 hours. You have one of the most fascinating human beings I've ever spoken to. But we probably should wrap it up there. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Rupert: (02:03:15)
Well thank you for having me. And listen, it's kind of you to say something like that, but honestly, you know, and I know that every human being on the planet is equally interesting and equally fascinating. It just happens to be, is there a particular story in this particular moment, the story that, you know, I need to hear let me just reiterate, there's nothing special about me and there's nothing special about everything, anyone, but yet we're all special. Does that make sense?

Warwick: (02:03:48)
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So how do people learn more about you? How do people learn about the horse boy method? The movie, the whole, the books let's, let's give them the spiel.

Rupert: (02:04:02)
Well, if they, if they file on this long okay. Horseplay method, just go to horse boy, horse boy method.com or N T L S, which stands for new trials landing systems. And for November T for territory, L for love S for sugar.com, not.com.co. We couldn't afford the.com. It will give all that information. If they want to access the books, just type Rupert Isaacs and into Amazon, and, you know, stuff will come up the healing land with the bushmen, a long ride home in Mongolia, the long ride, the horse boy in Mongolia, the long ride home in the subsequent stories with healers, but also people just want to contact, make contact. If you honestly are in a, in a tricky position with your autistic kid or with your horse or whatever, just go info@andtlssforchicago.co info. NTLS socio. And just say what the dilemma is, and we'll do our best to help you. We haven't talked about the horse training side of what we do. It's not important right now. It's not important here, but that there is that too. And yeah, just hope to have meaningful and interesting conversations.

Warwick: (02:05:27)
Well, there's certainly has been one of the most meaningful and informative conversations I've ever had. So thanks so much for joining me and a few listeners listening. Thanks so much for joining us on the journey on podcast. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 1: (02:05:43)
Thanks for listening to the journey on podcast with work Schiller Warrick has over 650 full length training videos on his online video library at videos dot [inaudible] dot com. Be sure to follow Warrick on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, to see his latest training advice and insights.