Ancestral Health for Women: Hunter-Gatherer Lessons with Eric Edmeades

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Rated PG. Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, Mom— turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health. Into actionable strategies that help you thrive. Want an ad-free experience? You can now subscribe to my exclusive VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. It's like your daily latte, but better for your health. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual Virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review. Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. My Virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, This will make your day. So subscribe now at SubscribeToJJ.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together. You are in for a treat today. Okay, little known fact. I about 20 years ago was fortunate enough to be in a small room with a group of health experts Burt's, learning from Dr. Loren Cordain, who went on to write The Paleo Diet. And he gave us all of this insight into what might be known— called ancestral nutritional, primal nutrition, or Paleolithic nutrition. And it really got me going down some rabbit holes. So I was super excited a couple years later to meet Eric Niedies. Who had the opportunity, which you're gonna hear about, to spend time with the Hadza tribe. And from what he's learned after going and spending time over 15 years with the Hadza tribe, he has taken that information to create the highly transformative WildFit program, which is now a book, The WildFit Way. He also has written The Post-Diabetic and The Evolution Gap. And, you know, this is interesting, really interesting information about beyond just nutrition, but nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, executive functioning, all the lessons learned that we can then take and apply into our modern-day life and kind of go, look, look where things have really messed up here and created a lot of the diseases we have now. So He— it— what's interesting, he's actually now an honorary member of the tribe, but this is just kind of a side fun thing for him. He's a serial entrepreneur. He has a background in technology, medical simulation, military R&D, and Hollywood film production. I mean, all over the place. And by the way, in Hollywood he worked on Avatar, Elysium, and Transformers, Iron Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises. So really fun background. Also, he's a big speaker trainer, does a lot of work with Mindvalley. So I'm going to put all of the links for all the cool stuff he's up to and books and his Instagram and everything else at jjvirgin.com/eric. This is a fascinating discussion and there are some really key takeaways that you can grab too. And I will be back at the end also to emphasize those. So I'll be right back with Eric. Hang with me.

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1, 0, let's go! Eric, so glad you're here.

Glad to be here.

I can't believe it's taken this long. I would love now, this is where I wanna start because I think this really sets the tone for everything and has really led to you creating the books that you've created, everything from Post Diabetic, which is such a provocative name, to The WildFit Way. To the evolution gap. So I'd love to start with you out in the wild, and I don't even know how you first came to start visiting the Hadza people, but that's really what I'd love this, this whole conversation to be about, are the lessons that you've learned from the Hadza. How did you end up there in the first place?

Yeah, that's, that's a fascinating story. I'll first start with these days. I mean, I've been visiting them for 15 years, and these days it's kind of been popularized. A couple of guys like to go visit them once and then they got on Joe Rogan. And the joke is, one of the guys that did that, I'm the guy who took him. You know, I've been visiting them for 15 years. I'm not an Instagram tourist. Um, and how that happened, uh, to your question, is that, um, I used to run these leadership programs that involved taking people up Kilimanjaro. I, I figured firewalking, fine, but what about a real metaphor?

And, uh, so, so I've got to one-up that.

Here we go. And, and it was super effective, great program. And one day we were coming down the the mountain and my logistics partner in the country said to me, hey, I Googled you while you were on the mountain and, you know, I think you'd be interested in meeting some Bushmen. And I'm like, the only ones that I was aware of at that point are the Khoisan that you might have seen the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. I don't know if it's one of the best independent films in the history.

I've actually never seen it. I obviously have heard the name.

Okay.

All right. I'm writing it down.

The Gods Must Be Crazy. It is truly magical. But in any event, there are some San Bushmen that are living in that part of the world. There are still some there, and I've not been to visit them. But all of a sudden he starts talking about Bushmen up in this East Africa area, and I start learning about them and the Hadza people. And he said, would you like to try and find them? Like, yeah. And he goes, let's go. We got in a Jeep with machetes and camping gear and trekked our way through the bush. And we stumbled upon one group of them, but they had surrendered to agriculture, like, in that generation. Like, they grew up learning to hunt and then learned how to farm in that one generation, and they, they had little potbellies, they were smoking cigarettes, and their teeth were— I mean, it was, it was sad to see how quickly that happened. But, um, about a week later, we actually bumped into and found one of the Hadza families, and my life was changed forever from that moment. I knew I would be back, and I knew I'd be back many, many times. And now I have been, you know, I, I've done embedded stays with them, I've, I've done deep interviews with them, I've lived with them, and I've taken many, many interesting people to go and meet with them. It's just been one of the greatest Really one of the greatest upgrades of my life.

Yeah, you said something interesting that I think people may not be aware of. I've been fascinated, early on in my nutrition learning, I got to sit with a small group of people for a lecture by Loren Cordain. There were literally like 8 of us, right? And they had paid him to do this lecture on paleonutrition, ancestral nutrition, primal nutrition, call it what you want. But he really talked about the difference, you know, hunter-gatherers, and then when agriculture started, and all the shifts in our health that happened. And so you said something, you're like, yeah, you know, I got to see the group that were— that had started all the agriculture and the shift in their body composition. I think people don't realize this and the big differences. So it would be interesting to walk through these modern-day true hunter-gatherers, what their health is like, what their lifestyle is like, what can we learn from them, because we already know what happens on the other side. And, you know, the worst extreme, of course, is what we've managed to do with agriculture. But, you know, take us back.

It's a journey. And one of the interesting things to ask about that journey is how long did it take, you know, and how did we get tricked into it? First, I'll go back. I met Loren some years ago, and there's a little backstory here is I discovered paleo before he published his book. And what I mean by that is that my great-grandfather had found the oldest sapiens skull in the history of Earth. And so I'd already been down that track and I'd gotten Vince for my whole health recovery. And one day I asked him what inspired him to write the original Paleo book. And he said, oh, it was an article by S. Boyd Eaton. And I read that article in the years before. And so, you know, we had such a great synergy about that. And of course, you know, we'd been on that same track for so many years. The question about the— the question about sort of the transition thing is really interesting. One of the things I would put to you is that in order to trick us into this current lifestyle. And I know that sounds silly. I mean, we have air conditioning and heat and regular water and what have you. But let's be really clear, as good as life is today, we have more anxiety, more depression, more suicide, more psychoactive prescription drug use, more alcoholism. I mean, we're clearly struggling with our wonderful life and they're not. And so the question is, how do you trick those people into surrendering their liberty and freedom to become slaves to first agriculture and then mobile phones? How do you do that? And I would say to you, you do that one very slow step at a time. You can't do it quickly. Even today, you take the Hadza, and the missionaries do this— misguided missionaries do this all the time— take them, go, hey, you could come live in our village. We have food, and you don't have to go hunting every day. And of course, the allure of free food, right, because that's their biggest thought process, is initially attractive. But then they get there and they find out that that food comes with other responsibilities, like washing dishes or adopting certain religious beliefs or having to change their family structures. And they realize that the cost of the food is, is, is much higher than they were led to believe, and they go back unless alcohol gets them. So what happens is they either discover alcohol and then they're devastated, or they go, screw this, and they go back to living in the bush. You can't— it's, it's too big a jump. So here's how you trick humans into this. Imagine you and me 40,000 years ago. We've been out hunting and gathering, you know. It was a little gender-specific back then. I might have been hunting, you might have been— knowing you, you, you would have been—

I think.

But, but the point is, we get back to one of the villages that routinely travel to because we're nomadic and we're sitting on a rock and I go to you, JJ.

Yeah.

You see those bushes there? Those are those bushes that make those red berries, aren't they? Yeah, they are. Wait, wait a minute. Do you remember last year we were sitting there eating berries and we were throwing them? You don't suppose we did that, do you? And you have to imagine that there was this moment that they saw it for the first time. And so we can blame the food industry for everything that happened, except I want you to be honest with me now. If it's you and me and we discovered that, are we now focusing on growing the yummy stuff or the bitter stuff that we only eat when we're hungry? It starts right there. Mm-hmm. Right there it begins. We begin messing with the food supply even then. So what the food industry is doing now is just an extension of human nature. It just happens to be more devastating today.

Yes. Well, I mean, and you look at the food, then you look at— you talked about, oh, the house and the temperature. And it's, it's all of it. We have made ourselves so comfortable. I love that book by Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis. We had him on the show, and it was like, you start to look and go, oh boy, we've taken out all of our need to adapt.

Yeah, absolutely.

And now we have to put, put those things in place. Go lift heavy things to mimic what we used to do, you know, intermittent fast to mimic what we used to do. It's like, okay, so, so walk us through what, what a day in life is like.

It, it, it really is fascinating. Um, uh, I, I— before I do that, I just want to put to you— I want you to imagine for a moment what it would have been like to be a savanna primate without fire. And I want you to think about that 2 million-ish years ago. You know, you're sleeping, um, probably elevated because of the cats that are hunting you, and they're all nocturnal and, and they're big. And we would have lived with a sense of constant hypervigilance and terror because it would have just been scary all the time. And now simply add one thing to it, and that is fire. And all of a sudden fire comes along and for the first time ever you can actually sleep like you can. You don't have to sleep with one eye open. The fire is keeping you safe. Sure, you're probably— your body's naturally going to wake you up at about 1 or 2 in the morning so you can put more wood on the fire, but you're going to sleep and it's going to be beautiful. And that's what it's like. And so I've done many embedded overnight stays, and I can tell you that You go to bed the night before and you are tired because of what you did. Like, you're tired and you sleep and the stars are stunning and it's just amazing. And you wake up in the morning because the birds start making a bunch of noise and the sun is up. And the very first thing you do is you, you head out for food because there's no pantry, there's no fridge, there's no Uber Eats. You know, you, you, you have to go and get food and then you head out. Now the men will, in, in the Hadza community, they'll rile themselves up, grab their bows and arrows, and they head out. And the women, by the way, who do the same number of miles every day as the men do— it's— this is really fascinating. They've been geotagged and tracked. And if you look at the maps, you can see that if you look at the men's maps, it's like a giant big star with these huge outward points and returns. The women do the same mileage, but they do it within the camp area and they move just as much. And, and so you get up in the morning and there's moving. You're going and looking for root vegetables, berries. And in the case of men, really focused on tracking and hunting. One morning I woke up for one of these trips. We did 27 miles, and I've run an official marathon before. I can tell you that's a walk in the park compared to 27 miles of Bushmen hunting. Like, you're climbing, thorns are shredding you, there's cliffs, there's like—

what are they wearing on their feet?

They now wear, um, these sort of, uh, Maasai-influenced sandals that are made from old car tires that have been found on various roads around there. Um, when we first went to go see them, some of them still occasionally were actually barefoot, but now they, they're pretty much all wear these masks, which I don't blame them. Have you seen the buffalo thorns? You know, they can go through hiking boots, so they definitely go through bare feet. And so, um, the, the, uh, that day we did 27 miles, and when we got back to camp, we didn't score much. Not enough to justify 27 miles. The next morning, the chief— his name is, in our world, it would be Nona. In, in theirs, it's like more like And he says, he comes to me and goes, hey, like, we got to go hunting again today. And we did 17 miles that day and we killed a big bush pig and we ate very, very well.

And, and did you eat all, like, did you guys just feast?

Well, actually, it's really fascinating. The first thing they do is they grab a bunch of, uh, um, they've grabbed a bunch of, uh, um, wood to make a fire and they make fire with friction. They, you know, they rub two sticks together and they make that fire faster than you or I could with a lighter. I mean, they're, they get it going and, and, um, and then they throw the pig onto that fire and as it is, and they burn off.

So the whole pig goes on the fire?

Yeah, yeah. And, and what that does is it burns the hair off and then it tenderizes it. And so if then they take that, they don't cook it like that, they take it and then they put it on a big bed of greens that they've laid out, a big bed of leaves that they've laid out. Not for eating, don't worry, Dave Asprey, they weren't eating the leaves. And so, so in any event, they, they then they start the process of butchering. So, you know, they do the incision up the inside, they grab the organ meats out immediately, and they immediately put the organ meats on the, on the coals in the fire and like sear them and eat them, like immediately. Um, the, the, the logical fallacy that the average social media influencer deducts when they watch this is, oh my gosh, they must understand nutrition and they've gone after the— no, no, they, they went after them because they spoil really fast. And maybe after millions of years, that's why we have a nutritional dependency on organs, you know, maybe. But, but it's a bit reverse logic from what most people observe. And then they take the ribs and break them off the spine, and they build like a picket fence around the fire. The ribs are their own cooking stick, and the ribs cook like that. And then you cut the rest up into quarters, basically the hind quarter, back quarter, front quarter, and then the head. And those get handed out to hunters to carry back. And in my case, I was carrying one of them back, very, very heavy. Um, but we ate the ribs, and I asked why we're eating the ribs but not the other meat, and they said, oh, the bone-to-meat ratio isn't worth carrying them home. Ah. So we just eat the ribs right then and there, and then we head back. Then, JJ— Oh my God, this was so cool.

How were the ribs? I gotta ask.

Were the best ribs in the history of ribs ever. And there was no salt, and there was no sauce. There was nothing. But that pig was eating beetles, and it was eating the roots that it's supposed to eat, and it just didn't need any flavoring at all. But we'd also done a combined 40 kilometers.

Right. And you didn't eat the day before. So did you— The day before, Did you not eat at all?

Basically, no. I mean, we killed a couple of small birds and I think a little mammal.

And this is really an important thing to note that people don't— wouldn't think about. You wouldn't have the context, but you— if you're out doing all of that and spending all those calories and you don't get what you need in return, you're now negative. It's like you just took more money out than you had in your bank account. You have a problem.

The truth is they spend more time in the negative than they do in the positive. And, and, you know, that, that's just the reality. I saw Roger Federer talking once and he goes something about like he won something like 80% of his matches and that's how he became that. But they— but then he asks, how many of my points do you think I won? And it turns out in his whole career he only won 52% of his points, right? Like, it's not that you— it's not that you win so much more than somebody else, it's that you win in the right moment. And with hunting, that's never more true than there, you know. They, they, they— most days they would run a calorie deficit, and then every now and again they'll have this huge big calorie win and calorie payoff. Or nutritional payoff is probably a better way to put that.

And so when they have the huge nutritional payoff, since really unless you made something into jerky, you've— it's going to go bad. Yeah, everything—

they do now know how to dry the meat, and they do that, but mostly they do that for trade. They, they'll dry the meat and trade with the local, um, Datoga people. And there's another tribe they call the blacksmiths who, who rework metal, and they'll, they'll sell the meat to the blacksmiths for, um, arrowheads. And ganja occasionally, apparently. Okay. But I wanted to tell you, though, we would know about that, though. Who know? But they, they, they, they at one point the chief says to me, you know, here he hands me this big chunk of meat we've got back to camp and he hands it to me to take it over to the women because there are two fires. The women, men and women do not interact at the same fire at all. This doesn't happen. So if you want to know why Mars Venus, you know, our good friend John, why he's right most of the time about this, because we lived at two fires and we have different cultures and language patterns. And so he goes, would you take take this to the women. And all I'm thinking is, my dad used to do this when we were little, and he'd hand the fish to me and say, take these to your mom, because he wanted my mom to clean the fish. And she would be unhappy about that. She did not like that. I'm thinking, he's asking me to basically do the same thing.

Damn.

So, so I'm walking over the women's fire, half expecting some kind of rebuke. And when I got there, they treated me like a king. They were like— they were grateful and thankful that I'd come back from the hunt and that I was sharing my meat with them and the kids. And it was— I'm telling you, It was a highlight moment of my entire life.

At what point does a boy get out of the girls' camp and come over to the men?

You know, they don't track their birth. They don't track their birth. So, you know, exact ages are really difficult. From experience, the little boys at around about 3 are already using a bow and arrow. They have a mini bow and arrow and they're already using it. It and playing with it and trying to use it and what have you. And they are free to walk between the fires. Um, it's a little tricky because the women are not— it's not that they're not, it's just, it's not like the men are subjugating them. It's just they're— they just don't do that. And so when the kids are little, it's a little bit more complicated because when the father wants the, you know, the, like, to go hunting or what have you, it's like, well, the kid's here, you know. I've been— but then the other thing, JJ, is try as you might to figure out whose kid it is And I mean, once you're there a week, you'll get it, right? But in a day, you won't know it because they're being raised in the village. They don't, they really like, they really are being raised in the village and you see them. Oh, and also JJ, they have a different approach to parenting, man. Like they don't, they do not bubble wrap their kids. There's no helicopter parenting. I see this little kid, maybe 2, walking toward the fire and I turn to my guide and I'm like, he's a good friend of mine, Gaspar. I go, Gaspar, The kid's going to get burnt. He's like, yeah, probably. And I, you know, let's do something about it. He goes, no, don't interfere. I go, but they're not noticing. They're so busy talking. Oh, they see everything. There's no— they're not— they're noticing it all. Let it go. And the kids walk into the fire. Now, I spent 6 weeks in the hospital with third-degree burns when, you know, and had to have skin grafting. So I'm aware of burning in a way that most people really aren't. And I'm like, I want to see it. I just like want to save this kid.

I was gonna say, all your PTSD got triggered.

Yeah. The kid walks up to the fire, picks up— he's 2-ish or something, maybe 3. Picks up a stick, sticks it in the fire, lets it on fire, waves it around, puts it back, walks away. Totally understands fire, knows the rules, doesn't have an issue. And why? Because if you look at his fingers, you can see the scars. He's already burnt himself a couple of times and he's learned the lesson. And what they explained to me is they don't regard children as a lesser form of human. They regard children as smaller humans. In other words, they will help them where their size is a physical limitation, but they will not overly parent or instruct Wow.

Huh. Do they— do the— we're getting off the diet side of things, we'll come back to it, but just curiously, like at night, do the men and women sleep together or do they sleep apart? And then does the kid— do the kids sleep with their parents or do they sleep with—

yeah, they have these shelters made out of, um, ultupai plants, and, and they're not waterproof or anything, they're mostly, mostly sun shelter really. And at night, if they are coupled, they'll go and sleep in that together, and their kids will come in and sleep with them.

Okay. All right, so back over to the Hadza and the pig. And so what does their diet look like?

Well, according to CNN—

yeah, like, let's get past like Blue Zones and like—

but, but kidding aside, according to CNN, they are a plant-based people.

And they're— what? Come on.

No, no. And they're called the bird hunters. And so let me tell you why that's the case. So they're called the plant-based and bird hunters because the average Instagram follower who goes to visit them gets a tourist thing, just like you do with the Maasai. Barely anything real about it. And they walk you around the camp a little. They show you some of the roots they eat. Here's the baobab things that you get. And then they want to show you what hunting looks like. And with you as a tourist, the only thing they can hunt are birds because that's the only thing that's close enough. And so CNN calls them the bird hunters. I will tell you, they are not plant-based, or they're plant-based in the way that I'm plant-based, and that is that the animals I eat eat plants.

Well, the reality though is if they were really plant-based and the only, uh, animal protein they got was birds, they'd have what— and I, you know, Lauren Credaine called it rabbit starvation. They'd starve.

Yeah, it would never work. No, they are definitely meat-based, and there's a few ways of, of doing that. One is to actually examine their crows over a week rather than on a simple hour-long tourist visit, that helps a lot. But the other way is to look at their, even their emotional response. Like if you're, say, walking, you know, 20 miles that day, the first couple of miles you walk at quite a pace because you need to get away from camp because no animals come anywhere near the camp, right? So you got to get away from the camp. During that window of time, if they spot berries, they will stop and eat them. Then when they pick up tracks you can watch a shift happen, and that is that if the tracks are fresh enough, they will not stop for berries, but they might grab them in passing. You can see immediately the prioritization shift. If animals' meat is not available, then they'll go to root vegetables, they'll eat berries, and they'll grab them passing. But if they're in the hunt, they clearly disregard just about anything with the exception of honey. And what I mean is, they won't— if they're really late stage in the hunt, of course they won't let honey interrupt that that. But pretty much any other time, if they see honey, it's, it's a big deal. They'll, they'll, they'll risk life and limb for honey.

Hmm. Okay, so then let's look at a week of macros and what's typical.

Uh, you know, um, what's typical is they, uh, they prioritize meat whenever they can. They hunt everything from birds to small rodents to bush pigs, warthogs, antelope when they can get them. These days that's getting harder and harder for them. Um, they also eat, uh, seasonally available fruits, uh, which are tiny, tiny. There's some little tiny little red berries that we've eaten a lot. There's something that we call the sour plum because they also have it in South Africa, and we've had it there in the bush. Beautiful. One of the yummiest fruits I've ever had. And then there's baobab, um, fruit, which is seasonal as well. And there are root vegetables, a couple of different kinds that they dig up and eat, which you can eat raw, or you can put them in the fire and caramelize them, and then they're even yummier.

And what are they?

They're the root vegetables. I don't know the exact species. I mean, I have the name somewhere, but I don't know off the top of my head.

Similar to what?

They're like if you imagine, say, a hybrid between a sweet potato and a red onion, something in the middle of that. So you can eat them raw and they're quite watery, which is great, of course, because water is rare there. And then when you cook them, they caramelize and they become quite sweet. So they're quite high in carb content. But they're super seasonal. They're available when they're available, and then they're gone, like every other seasonal plant that they eat.

And what do they do about water?

Well, the— there is water around. Um, there are— they, they live in a region called Lake Eyasi. So there's a very, very big lake, but they don't go down there very often because the farming and, and that kind— they don't go to that area. They're way far away from it. But the area they live in is pretty arid. There are rivers— or perennial— there are rivers that are seasonal, and I think there's like— there is one permanent river they can get to. It's kind of gross because it's, it's like huge mud runoff. So they'll drink it. It's like brown water and they'll, and they'll drink that. But they're also unbelievably good at not drinking water. And I got a powerful lesson on this. That same hunt where we did 27 miles, it was my first long-term embedded stay with them ever. And we got up to go for the hunt and I was grabbing my water bottle. But the trouble with water bottles when you're hunting is they make a lot of noise. And so I looked at them and they weren't carrying water at all. And I thought, well, they must have a water plan.

Oh boy.

So I left my water bottle. It camp. And off we went. And we did not—

how hot is it?

It's hot. It's Africa hot. I mean, you know, I don't know, I can't remember how Fahrenheit works really, but it's 100 degrees. It's 40 centigrade or something like that. It's hot. And we're walking and we're riding and we're hiking and we're climbing and we're crawling and we're, you know, under bushes. And it's unbelievably intense.

Are you the only white guy?

I'm on that particular one. Yeah, I was embedded. So I was like, I didn't have anybody with me. I had my guide Gasper with me, but that that, you know, he's a Tanzanian guy. And anyway, so no water, no water, no water. And then as we're getting back to camp, we cross through a Datoga camp. The Datoga people are a bit like the Maasai pastoralists. They keep livestock, so they have goats and cattle. And there's a cattle trough built into this boma, you know, just built out of thorn trees and there's water in it. And the Bushmen, they have kind of a deal with the Datoga guy that it's okay to drink the water. And so they, they just drop down on their knees and they move the cow slime out of the way and just start drinking this water. And I'm like, I am 26 miles into a 100-degree day of hunting. You're like, I'm not drinking that. I'm not doing it. So I didn't. Luckily, we were only a mile from camp at that point. So we got to camp and I I drank in a single— like, I drank a 2-liter bottle of water.

I didn't throw up.

I, I don't know. I, I don't know. I was very— my body wanted that water. But what was really interesting about it is, is that I learned from them a different relationship with water. For example, you've probably done Bikram yoga at some point.

No.

Is that hot yoga? The 90-minute hot yoga?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So when you go in there, they're like, oh, it's time to have a sip of water, time to have a sip of water. I went to one in England where the instructor was like super militant, was like, you're not allowed to drink water in my And well, the truth is, what's really fascinating is, you know this, I mean, if you're drinking now, you're only doing it to satisfy your mouth. The water will not begin to hydrate you until tomorrow. Like, it has to pass through you, right? So the key to those long hunts is pre-hydration. It's being ready for them. The same with, you know, flying and altitude change and all that kind of stuff. Expedia and VisitScotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland. The sweep of wild coastline, Quiet lochs and untamed landscapes. Fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land. Come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave. Plan your Scottish escape today at expedia.com/visitscotland.

Yeah. Wow. So then comparing them, because I was just listening to, I'm trying to remember who it was. It was fascinating about how they still expend about the same amount of calories as we expend. Like, they've adapted to the amount of exercise, etc., that their bodies become very efficient. Is that the case?

Um, I mean, they, they, uh, they really are energy conservationists. They don't do anything that doesn't have a purpose. Um, and, um, but, you know, they, their endurance capacity is unlike anything I've ever seen.

I know, it'd be great to— has someone done like body composition and VO2 max and all the testing on them to see what they look like.

Let's say that, um, you're not allowed to do that kind of thing without really extensive permits. Like, we wanted to take some CGMs at one point in, and immediately this PhD wrote to us and said you're not allowed to do that without getting— because they're— because they're covered under, like, weirdly under some kind of wildlife laws or what have you. And even with their consent, you can't, you know. Wow. But, um, we did bring on On one of our trips, we brought a good friend of mine, Ara. He's a surgeon and a celebrity doctor in Florida. You actually should meet Ara, but he's a great guy.

Huh, what's his last name?

I can't pronounce it. Okay, where does he live?

You know, I want to say Florida's a big state.

Tampa or Orlando, but I'll connect you with him.

He's a great guy. Connect me.

We took him on a trip and he, um, uh, and he he, you know, really examined one of them, like, just looking at their musculature. And he talked about the level of alignment. Like, you know, we see most people, like, one shoulder's out and their hip isn't right, and they have— they got to go see the osteopath. And like, he just saw solid alignment and really, you know, clean, lean musculature. They're, they're in unbelievably good shape. And, um, yeah, but other than that, no VO2 max, that kind of stuff would be fascinating to know.

We don't know. Yeah, God, I'd love to know that. Like, the things I'd love to know is what is their average lifespan? If we don't really know when they were born, we don't really know how long they're living. That's what I heard about the Blue Zones, is one of the big, you know, sources of debate in the Blue Zones is the people didn't have births, like they were faking their birth certificates.

Yeah, um, well, listen, the thing on lifespan, and this is, I mean, as, as I've been like, you know, visiting them, and, and I, I'm just going to say that immediately what comes along, anybody who wants to try to debunk the idea of ancestral diet, saying, yeah, but those people only they live to an average age of 35 years old. Well, first of all, we don't know.

Where did that BS come from?

We don't know. And but then secondly, it's, uh, it's probably not far off the truth, but you have to understand how statistics work. They have something like 80% infant mortality, or let's say 80% of their children don't make it to 5 years old. So to achieve an average age of 35, how old do the other 2 people have?

Right.

Yeah, right. And, and this is a lying with statistics thing that's done all Another way to look at it, which is really fascinating, I wrote about this in The Evolution Gap, is that pretty much when you take an animal out of captivity and you put it in a zoo, you would expect that it would do better there because, I mean, it has food, it has water, it has no predation, it has medical, it has dental. I mean, it's an incredible life. And yet, if you take elephants out of, say, the Kruger National Park where they're facing poachers and lions and hyenas and starvation and bushfires and they don't have medical and dental, and then you put them into a zoo, you would think, well, well, that's got to be good for them. But the truth is, their lifespan in the zoo is worse than it is in a forest slave camp in Thailand, which is, which is worse than it is in nature with the lions and hyenas. And I would argue that we're kind of— we're in that position where we were removed from nature and placed in the zoo, and we live in the zoo today. And the zoo is controlled by the food industry and the pharma industry and the government, what have you. And what the government's done to prove to us that our zoo is great is they figured out how to artificially keep us alive. So the vast majority majority of us will spend the last 20 of our years artificially alive with tubes and prescription medications and surgeries, which creates an appearance of a longer lifespan, but which really is a much-shortened health span. Yeah, you know, and, and so what, what, what I would suggest is the optimal situation is to combine what we can observe from our ancestral past with what we can learn about modern technology, and then we can create an optimal existence. And by the That's what it seems to me you and I have been doing for the better part of the last few decades is really trying to bridge that gap for people.

Well, if you look at it, so the Hadza or any, Hadza or any of these other groups or groups 5,000 years ago, it would've been childbirth, you know, first couple of years of life. Falling out of trees. You know, getting eaten by a predator, getting injured. You know, yeah. Or, you know, some kind of infection. But if you didn't have those things, you didn't have the diseases we now have, which are entirely new things. Things. Like, I'd love to know, what is the rate of cancer in the Hadza? What is the rate of heart disease in the Hadza? Is there any diabetes in the Hadza? Like, how could there possibly be? What about autoimmune disease? What about all these things that we see now? Dementia, etc. Are these all things that we've managed to create with our crappy lifestyle? And the reality is, if you lived this way— and I know this is part of your argument in the post-diabetic, it's like if you live this way, a lot of these things just are non-issues, which is really the goal. So let's get Eric's top, your top list from everything you've learned experiencing this that are in WildFit and in "The Evolution Gap." What would be your key takeaways that someone go, "All right, these are the things you wanna bring into modern life." Sure.

So I'd like to define "The Evolution Gap" for that answer. "The Evolution Gap" is a metaphorical exploration of what we might now call evolutionary mismatch mismatch theory. The idea is, is that we evolved for a certain environment, and then we change that environment sufficiently that our, our biological reality doesn't match our environment anymore. And, and I would put you— I would suggest to you that almost all of the psychological and physiological pain and suffering we have lies inside that gap.

Yeah, it seems like— I mean, it's almost all— it's like 99.9, like, you know, something that isn't in that gap.

And I mean, I'll give you, I'll give you a crazy For example, racism is in that gap. And the way that racism is in that gap is really fascinating. So if you consider, I look at you and I go, oh, JJ, I can roughly tell that you are from Northern Europe. I mean, roughly speaking, I mean, Viking, Viking, Viking. Yes. You could look at me and go, oh, probably Southern Europe, right? Why do you know that? Skin color, hair color, eye color. Why is that? When you live equatorially, you develop much darker skin to protect you from the excessive level of sun that you're living with. But as you move away from the equator, north or south, you become lighter and lighter so as to allow more sun in, in order to allow more vitamin D stimulation and antimicrobial action on your blood and all the stuff that the sun does. And if you didn't do that, you wouldn't survive. So if you take somebody, you know, like as a good example, the Khoisan or the Hottentots that lived in the southern part of South Africa, South Africa, they were very, very light-colored. They were very light-colored. We would not consider them, quote, black today. They were, they were so light-colored that when apartheid regime ended and the wealth redistribution programs and their, you know, their, their kind of programs of, of, let's say, reinstituted fairness kicked in, they excluded the Khoisan and the Khoisan people because they were too light. By the way, they were probably the original settlers of that area, which is a weird irony Right now, that's evolution. Where's the gap? The gap is that it used to take multiple generations to move 1,000 miles. So you would move very slowly. It would take multiple tens of thousands of years. And in that time, the lightest kids would have a better breeding advantage and they would give birth to lighter kids and it would continue. So that's evolution. The gap is you now take somebody from Eritrea and put them in Norway. Norway, they're going to have a problem and they're going to develop possibly rickets and they're going to have vitamin D deficiencies and that's going to affect their immune response and so on. Equally, if we take somebody from Norway and take them to Uganda and we don't protect them from the sun, they're going to have a problem, right? So that's the gap— evolution and then the gap. But here's how it relates to racism, which is so interesting. In the hunter-gatherer world, the village next to you— no, let me put another way. The people safest to you were family. They looked like you, they smelled like you, they acted like you, they were culturally similar to you. The rest of the people in your village were slightly less safe, but they were medium safe, and they, they still looked a fair bit like you and looked a fair bit like you and smelled a fair bit like you. But the next village over, they were medium safe people, but they didn't look and smell and, and, and sound much like your people. I mean, anybody else would think they look very similar, but you know the difference, and they're only from a few miles away. The village that's 15 miles away. Those people are decidedly dangerous, and they smell different, and they look different, and they sound different. Racism is an instinctive response. It's, it's a, it's an evolved response that probably should be referred to as differentism, which is to say that for most of our history, people that were different from us were intriguing and possibly dangerous. And, and so what's interesting about that is that now in our current political correctness environment, the idea is that if you have a racist thought, you're a bad human being. And I'm like, hold on, we can understand the difference we have in instinctive responsive to somebody who's a little different than me and subjugating somebody because of the race. There's a difference. And, and so, you know, that's, that's where the gap comes out.

And weren't those villages or tribes, weren't they like average, like 50, 60 people?

It, it, it, it's, it's hard to say. I'm— I, I can tell you that with the Hadza people, it depends a great deal on how good the hunting conditions are and how good the hunter is. They have a very interesting form of democracy. Uh, they— you know what I mean by that is that if if you're a very good hunter, you will attract more people to live in your village. But if the hunting starts to fade away, or if you become tyrannical or what have you, then people will opt out of your village and go live in another kingdom. And so there's this kind of, you know, it's, it's, uh, what a great political system that is. Well, and, and frankly, don't we see a version of that today? I know there are states in America that are losing population. Yes, people are perceiving a level of tyranny, and it's not, not dissimilar. But to real— to your real question, like, what are some of the top tips? I— this is, this is what I would suggest, is that, um, our, uh, bodies and our psychologies evolved for a particular environment. And what we want to do as best possible is mimic that environment in our behavior and in reality as best, as best we can. So there's a reason that running water causes people to feel calm, and the reason is, is that it's indicative of safety and abundance. Benefits. The reason that beachfront property is so very valuable is not because people want to get a tan, it's because there's vitamin D. But it's also because it means that 180 degrees in front of you is a source of abundant food and safety because nobody can attack from that direction. So when we look at the way we set up our lives, there's feng shui, but then there's also evolutionary biology. If you've ever walked into a Thai restaurant or a spa and you've heard birds cheeping, you know, on a recording system. There's something very calming about that. Why is that calming? Well, because, JJ, if you and I were walking through the bush and all the birds suddenly went quiet, it would mean we were in danger. So there's, there's some of these environmental considerations, and then there's the nutritional consideration. And this is, this is the big thing that we've done in WildFit that's so very different. It's, it's— bear with me— it's spurred by a really interesting conversation with my guide. My third, second or third visit, he said, said, Eric, why did you come back? Most people come and take their pictures and leave. Like, why did you come back? And I explained the idea of the evolution gap to him. And he says, so you're saying that if we lived a little bit more like the Hadzabe people, you think that we might be better off? And I'm like, that's an oversimplification. But yeah, basically that's what I'm saying. I went back years later and after many, many visits and he talked me into going to visit this school that he started. And every guide has a school or an orphanage. Every single one of them has one. And I'm just jaded by the whole thing. I've— we've built schools there. We visited all of them, many of them. You know, but he tricks me into going to his school and I get there, JJ, and the kids are amazing. They are the healthiest kids I've ever seen in that country. No yellow eyes, no distended bellies. They're just amazing kids. And I go, Gasper, what's going on with your kids? Why do they look so good? And he goes, you don't remember? I go, what do you mean, don't remember? And he goes, you don't remember our conversation around the fire 5 years ago? Maybe I don't.

That's right. Refresh my memory.

Maybe. What was that all about? And he goes, you told me me that we used to live the way the Hadza did in our instincts and our nutritional requirements and our lymphatic systems and our— and basically we need to live more like them. And so our kids get regular exercise, they get meat twice a week, they get fresh fruits and vegetables. The rest of the children in Tanzania are subsiding on twice a day ugali, which is cornmeal and wheatmeal. Oh. And so these kids are getting a Hadzabe-influenced diet, and that's why they're so healthy. I believe that we need to do the same thing. But the big modification that I think is beginning to become better understood is that it is not simply what we eat. It's not simply what we don't eat, but it's also a matter of when we eat it. And I'm not— I don't mean in terms of the day. Sure, we can do natural ancestral rhythms, which is similar to, say, you know, intermittent fasting type thing. But it's more a recognition that we have 3 metabolic modes. And if we don't run all three of those modes, we're asking for trouble. And the average American right now is stuck in what you might call junk food fall. And the consequence of that is, well, look at the health system.

Yeah, we can see the consequence. And what, what exactly is junk food fall?

Well, fall is the season of accumulation, and junk food fall is accumulating junk. But from an instinct perspective, junk food fall is indicated by root vegetables and berries becoming prolific. And so we start eating them, and the pancreas jumps into full gear, floods us with insulin, and, and, and, and then we end up with low-grade insulin shock because, you know, we ate some and then the insulin came along and we're left with, uh, low blood sugar, which drives us to eat more, and we feel compelled to eat the whole bush and distend our bellies. We even produce endorphins to numb the pain of stretching our bellies so that we can stretch our bellies, because if we don't stretch our bellies at this time of year, we're going to die in the next season that comes. And so that's the fall season, is the accumulation of carbohydrate foods in order to create low-grade insulin sensitivity, to become better at gaining weight, to put your body into a metabolic hibernation because winter's coming.

Right. That is the, like, if you look at summer, this has always been my argument, it's like summer, all these ripe fruits, all this stuff, so you can gorge it all and get through winter, except that winter is never coming.

Exactly. Not in North America anyway. It's not in the developed world. I said this on podcast here, it's like, if I look around America, it's like they're preparing for the next ice age, never mind winter.

So then you have the winter, which would be, you know, now you're gonna sleep more, you're gonna become more insulin sensitive 'cause you've got more sleep, you're doing more fasting 'cause you don't have the access to as much food, you're using your fat stores.

And serious autophagy. Like your body is going to go, I don't wanna burn my fat stores. You know how it is, right? First day of a fast, you might burn a little. You get out past 48 hours and the body goes, shit, man, this is serious. Serious, I don't know if I want to eat my fat. Is there any furniture around here we could burn? And so it starts looking for broken protein chains and aminos and, and, and, and, you know, old dead cells, and, and it starts burning that stuff out. And I, I mean, I think you and I, I, I would argue that that type of fasting is probably the single best anti-cancer protocol that you could probably undertake at all. And it used to be imposed upon our ancestors every year by Mother Nature, which is likely why—

well, that plus, you know, to me, the best autophagy of all, the most predictable is move your body. Move your body, right? So you look at how to get rid of damaged cells. Exercise is so great. I think of cancer, I'm like going, just up your exercise dramatically. How many— like, you don't see amazing big athletes coming down with cancer.

So I think that I shared this with you when we met last time, but I want to— this is another great example of the evolution gap, okay? Evolution Evolution is climbing mountain probable, you know, to use Dawkins, right? It's this arriving at an unbelievably unlikely, you know, organism like the cheetah that can accelerate faster than just about any car other than a Tesla. And as an example, do you know those black marks on the cheetah's face? You know, the makeup? Do you know what those are for? Same reason football players put the black under their eyes. It's because a glint of sun off their yellow skin at 100 miles an hour would kill kill them. They're an incredibly unlikely being. And then alongside them are the gazelles that can outrun them. I mean, it's, it's absolutely phenomenal. Now, now let's talk about evolution. You have a heart and you have lungs, you have a diaphragm, and your body has a— has developed the ability to move fluids that are not only important but also urgent around your body. In this case, particularly blood and air as far as the diaphragm is concerned. You evolved the pumps because the need was important and urgent. Lymphatic flow is important but not urgent, and so we never evolved a pump for that because one was not necessary. It wasn't necessary because our daily requirements made us move. And so lymphatic flow is stimulated by muscular contraction and expansion and stretching and what have you. And so a normal hunter-gatherer is running, walking, climbing, lifting, digging, stretching all the time and pumping lymphatic fluid through their system every day. The average person in the developed world is spending 4 hours in front of Netflix, not moving their lymph at all.

Yeah. And if they do move in very controlled patterns, not in all the planes of movement.

Right. Right.

Yeah. So interesting.

And this has an impact, as you said, on cleaning out the dead stuff, preventing cancer, general health, general immune. But it also, like, look at, look what's going on with men and testosterone. Like, it's bloody frightening. Well, guess what? Those big legs that we're supposed to be using, those legs drive testosterone production. You didn't have a choice about legs day back then.

Right. Every day is legs day or it's complete rest. It's like there's no slight switch there. You'd have to do these things, you know, jumping. And I literally am doing now the hardest things that I can think of doing and pushing myself to do. 'Cause I'm like, I figure I'm a big snowball going down a hill. The hill is aging. The snowball's trying to pick up speed. I'm like, oh no, no, no, we don't. I'm gonna flatten it out. Flatten that hill or make myself go the other way. So it's like, what are the hardest things you can do? Like, pistol squats are my latest thing I'm trying to master. Those are so hard, I can't believe it. I haven't tried them, but oh my goodness, like, I was like, why did I ever not— like, these are things they should start you as a little kid and you never stop.

Yeah, no kidding.

No, right? Never stop the pull-ups, never stop the push-ups, never stop jumping, never stop sprinting. Just keep doing the things.

I, I had a really embarrassing situation where one of my videos, um, my publisher picked it up and they started pumping traffic into it and it got up to like 20 million views. And it was me saying, stop, don't exercise. And the reason I was saying stop, don't exercise is that while I believe exercise is as important as nutrition, it is secondary to nutrition. One way to think of it is really powerful exercise with terrible nutrition is a disaster. Really great nutrition without exercise is a drag. And so I was kind of making the argument, you got to get your, your nutrition right in order to be able to exercise. Anyway, the video goes crazy, and this kid— I made the mistake, JJ, of looking in the comments.

Oh no, you— we never look at the comments. That's what your team's for. That will make you crazy.

I looked in there. I have to say, I've been really lucky with that, you know? Like, I've had, I've had some videos go absolutely crazy, and, and it's 90% good. And I—

and by the way, don't read your book reviews either.

Don't read your book reviews.

No, don't do that.

So anyway, I, I did read the comments, and this one kid, I imagine he's some acne-faced video game playing junkie from Wichita, Kansas, sitting down there, and he And he goes, I don't understand why this guy's talking about exercise. He doesn't look so fit to me. And it hurt. And I suddenly realized it would only hurt if it were a little true. And so I was like, shit, I've let it go. I used to do martial arts. I used to run. I used to do all these things. And I just had let it go. I was dependent.

How great that you got that little input.

It was so amazing. So what did I do? I said, that's it. I used to do, uh, knuckle, knuckle-based push-ups with martial arts all the time. I'm gonna do it again. So I got down, I got down to do my JJ. I'm here.

I wish we had a video of this, Eric. This would have been the video.

I'm so embarrassed to admit this to you. I, I will tell you that I actually really struggled to complete the 5th one. I was 45 years old. I, I struggled to complete the 5th one, and I was horrified because it used to be 50 on my knuckles per I'm so upset what happened to me.

Yeah, well, how old were you when you were doing that before?

Like, into my mid-30s.

But it is amazing. The whole use it or lose it happens— Damn, it happens fast.

It's really fast, but there's good news about it. And I learned a lot about this, and I mean, you know this, but the thing is, is that when you lose it, you don't lose it in material right away. You lose it in function. And you know, you can turn muscle fibers back on.

Yeah, the whole muscle memory is absolutely true.

It's amazing. And even the blood flow and muscle density. I made a commitment that I would add 1 push-up a day and keep going. Well, I was within 2 to 3 months. I can't remember exactly. I journaled a bit. I was back to 3 sets of 50 super fast, and it completely changed my life. In fact, we tried to do a social media campaign to out the guy who did this. I said, look, this concept—

Oh, you are so funny.

It's worth $5,000 to me. I want to give you the $5,000 for making that. We couldn't find them.

Well, it is interesting, you know, I started out as an exercise physiologist and I started, I discovered very quickly, excited people, I just, I just want to get in better shape, but I don't want to change my diet. Well, you figure out very quickly that if you want somebody to get in better shape, the fastest needle mover is diet. And you can't, and to try to do it without changing diet is like, forget it.

Dangerous, I would argue.

However, I will tell you that where I was always is like diet first. And I still say diet first because I know that you're going to get a change quickly and feel so much better that then you'll be more fired up to do the other. However, like, you look at what happens, and, you know, it's interesting that you were doing push-ups in your 30s, then you stopped. Well, you look at the statistics of when muscle starts to drop and strength and power stop to start to drop. And now it is— when I was in grad school, they literally taught us— this will make you vomit— that you should never lift weights till you lose the weight. And I am like on a crusade now going, oh no, no, No, no, that's the absolute worst. And back then I was like, that's the wrong advice. That's bad advice.

But it's like— Like, honestly, I think of like growing muscles as a little bit like growing children. These days we all wanna teach our children how to succeed. And I'm like, no, let's teach our children how to fail and how to struggle.

Exactly.

It is only by failing that they will get smarter and stronger. And it's the same with your muscles. The way I always put it to our clients is your muscles have 3 days. There's only 3 days that your muscles have. There's one day where you tell your muscles, muscles that you don't need them. And if you don't need them, they won't assign resource to them. Then you have another day where you tell your muscles, I care about you mostly. And that's the day where you use them, but you don't do anything to stimulate, repair, and build. Then there's a day where you damage their self-esteem. You say, you're not good enough. You're not big enough. You're not strong enough. And those are the days that they grow.

I just had one of those this morning with pistol squats.

Now I'm gonna have to look up pistol squats.

Yeah, you're gonna have to look up pistol squats. And I'm like, this is so unbelievably hard that I went, this is it, this is now my complete, I will master this pistol squat, which I will tell you, I'm so far away from mastering right now, Eric, that I'm having to do it over a bench. So when you see this, look at a way for it to be able to do it, 'cause it's literally you doing a squat, but you have a leg out in front. Well, just standing with the leg out in front front is freaking hard enough. Now try to squat. Now try to squat.

Like that, huh? There's a yoga pose like that.

There's a yoga pose like that. There's— you go high mountain and lift the leg out. This is high mountain, lift your leg out, now go down all the way down to the ground. Well, the problem is with me, my left foot's broken, has been broken for 30 years, so, so it's a little wonky to stand on. And my right knee's replaced and my left hip's replaced. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to do this. I don't chair, I can do it. But I am literally starting by doing it and sitting down on a bench. That's how I can do it to start. But I'm like, this bench will be gone. I will be doing this. So let's— we'll pistol squat in July.

I'm gonna look it up and see.

I'm throwing down to you. We'll be in Canada, pistol squat. Let's see. I may still be doing it over a chair, but damn.

You know what you're saying? I'm at the point now where I'm seeking to do the hardest things. And you were talking in this context about exercise. But what I want to suggest, and it relates back to something you asked, like, what did I really learn, you know, from the Hadza people? Sure, there's nutrition, and, and sure, there's parenting and relationships and all kinds of fascinating things that, that are there, but one of them is executive function. And that is, they don't require any. And they don't require any executive function because they have to do what they have to do, and their neurotransmitter neurotransmitters are perfectly attuned to reward them for everything good. There's nothing that they do in a day to achieve serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, any of these things that isn't functional. They track, they get serotonin.

They— so no project managers there making sure that they got up to go on the hunt?

So there's no need for executive function. It's— it's— they don't have that, and they don't need to have that. Um, and, and to the degree they do, you might say it's things like, well, they do spend a huge amount of time making bows and arrows, and that's about the closest thing because they have to invest in the future. In the level of, say, development prior to bows and arrows, there was literally none. Now there's some investment in the future. Now we live in a world where executive function is the only thing that will help us to survive. It is the only thing that will help us to navigate the danger of modern civilization in these Paleolithic bodies. So I like to describe it like this, and it really is like we right now spend our entire time trying to make things easier. Why did we invent agriculture? So we didn't have to chase the food. Why do we get the bow and arrow? So we didn't have to throw the spear. Why do we have the plow? So we didn't have to dig in the soil. All of these seem like good ideas. Why did we develop AI? So we don't have to think. Like each of these things seems like a good idea, but in every case, what it's doing is making life easier for us. And by every measure, Easier isn't better. Again, more suicide. More— suicide's in the top 10 now, you know, of killers of Americans. It's insane.

And I'm sure in the younger— in, in younger, it's in top 5.

It's awful. And by the way, I asked Nono one day, I said, do you guys have depression here? And he says, you know, depression— I got long-term sadness. Do you have long-term sadness? And he goes, oh yes, yeah. I mean, here you could be sad for like 3 days. I go, okay, why, why, why, why only 3 days? What happens at the end of the 3 days? And he goes, well, then you get hungry and you have to get up and move. And then when you move, it's—

oh my gosh.

I mean, the simplicity, right? Then, then I said to him, okay, but do you guys have suicide? What, what is— what is this thing? Okay, in our world, occasionally people end their own lives. He busted out laughing, like literally busted out laughing. And there was a guy sleeping on an animal skin in the cave behind us. This is all— I have this all on video. And, and he's in the cave behind, and he busts out laughing, belly laugh, like what I've just said is the most ridiculous thing they've ever heard in the world— suicide. But then once the laughter subsided, he's like, how do they do it? You know? And so I told him, I go, well, I mean, some people use guns. They don't have guns, but they know what they are. And they're like, that, he recoiled. And then I go, and some people jump off very high things like buildings. And he doesn't understand buildings, but he understands falling. It's one of their most common causes of death. He thought it was horrifying. That day, we had spent the entire day learning how to make poison for hunting, for hunting big game. And then I mentioned to him, well, some people take pills or poisons. And he goes, you can see him thinking. He goes, well, if I had to do it, that was his preferred method. It, it really— that, that whole idea is alien to them. And I, and I think part of it comes down to the fact that they don't require executive function. So ice baths, right? I want to talk about ice baths, but not for all the reasons. I don't care about the shock proteins and the flooding of the blood in and out, and I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the, the, the, the, the cingulate— what do they call it— the anterior cingulate cortex. I want to talk about executive function. This is somebody doing their first ice bath. The body and the, and the the captain, the captain and the crew. The captain being executive function. Captain says, get in the water. And the crew's like, no, we're not doing that. Come on, man, get in the water.

Really?

You think we should? I've heard that it's good for us. Get in the water. And so finally the crew is like, well, shit, I'll tip a toe in. And the crew tips a toe in. We're not doing this. This is insane. If the captain is successful, finally the crew finds themselves immersed in the ice water and arguing about it the entire time. When can we get out? We want to get out. This is terrible. This is awful. This is awful. The entire time, blood is being flooded into that part of the brain. It's being flooded into that part of the brain like a muscle, and it's growing the longer they stay in. And then finally, at the 3-minute mark, if that's, say, the recommended goal, the captain finally releases the crew and says, hey, you can get out now. And what does the crew invariably say at 3 minutes?

I can keep going.

I'll keep going. Then the crew gets out of the water and salutes the captain for its brilliance and its wisdom. And that's the building of self-esteem, and that's the building of executive function. And so the idea that we should all at this point be seeking the harder things, the harder exercises, the more difficult behaviors, the bigger projects. If we aren't going to do that stuff, we're going to be doomed.

Yeah. Thank you. Amazing. That actually gave me like Goosebumps, that last bit there. That was a great way to tie a bow on it, Eric. You've got 3 books, Post-Diabetic, The Evolution Gap, and The WildFit Way, that are all, I'll put links to all of this at jjvirgin.com/eric, plus your Instagram that you actually will respond to people with a voice note. Now I'm telling this and now you're probably gonna get—

Getting harder and harder, but I do my best.

It's not clone Eric, it is real Eric responding to you. So ask him ridiculous questions. That's what I'd love to see. Go throw down a ridiculous question or a question about the Hadza, which is so fascinating. And I super duper appreciate you. Plus we'll put links. You're also a speaker trainer.

So yeah, that'd be great.

You know, it's like as another thing, there's so many things that you do. I'm sharing all of that in your bio at the beginning. So everybody already knows, but this has been absolutely fantastic and fascinating. I'm never going to say that I'm going to go there. I know you keep telling me you need to come. I'm like, yeah, Yeah.

And you guys would love it. You really would. You gotta know, like, most of it would just be super high-end safari and a great trip and then an amazing cultural experience that would change your life forever.

Well, what's cool is I would be at the girl fire and Tim would have to be out doing all the stuff.

You're allowed— when we bring our guests, the women, Kirstie has spent many hours at the men's fire.

Oh, okay. 'Cause I was like, hey, this is great. I'm totally happy to be over at that women's fire.

You're allowed to be at both.

Oh, okay. Well, that changes things, 'cause I was like, I don't have to go out on the 27-mile blah, blah, blah, blah, blah with no bathrooms, no water, and no, and cow slime in it.

You do not have to have any of those things. We will take very good care of you.

We'll see. It's not a no, it's a, the door is slightly open.

All right, you're giving me the pistol squat throwdown. I'll give you the, let's record a part 2 podcast in Africa with the Hadzabe Bushmen in the background one day. There's my throwdown for you.

For you. Oh boy. Okay, we'll talk more.

Yeah, watch, she's gonna edit that out, you guys, you watch.

Thank you, I appreciate you.

Thanks, JJ Virgin.

All right, so true story, Eric has been trying to get me and Tim to go, uh, to the Hadza for years, and I was like, I'm one of those people that freaks out about not having, um, you know, a real bathroom. I mean, so you can imagine the stretch that this is. I went on a trip with Dr. David Perlmutter and Dr. Jeff Bland last summer, and they were teasing me because I had a luggage restriction of 25 pounds. I'm like, 25 pounds? I paid extra, by the way, and was able to get past that. So I don't think of myself much as a camper, and this is camping at the extreme. However, you know, You never know. But let's talk about what you can take away from this because I think that's the most important thing is that, you know, obviously move as much as possible and do different things and do hard things. I thought what Eric said at the end was so breathtakingly beautiful is that, you know, when we do hard things, we teach our bodies to be able to know that we can do hard things. And this this thing that we've done over the years, which is making things easier and more comfortable, is really devastating our physiology. So make it a point to do hard things, and, uh, they can be physical, they can be mental, but I just make it a point to do hard things every single day. That whole idea of doing one thing a day that scares you, yeah, that's something I live by. So do hard things. For me right now, you heard it, it's pistol squatting. I've got to get some videos of that. It's really— my pistol squats are— they'd be very inspiring for you because you'll look at that and go, oh, I can totally do better than that. So do hard things. That's number one. Number two, really, uh, look at how you can eat as close to nature as possible, how you can do more minimally processed stuff. And don't eat all the time either, right? You know, I, I'm personally I only eat a couple hours after waking up in the morning. I stop eating before bed. I don't traditionally fast. I just never done well with that, but I think that there is a case to be made for adding in a day, one meal a day fast in the week depending on what your health goals all are. I always like to go back to that. But again, biggest thing here is look at how you can add more movement and more different movement, more challenging movement into your life every day. Okay, that's it for today. I will see you on the next episode. And by the way, if you've loved this one just as much as I did, I'd love comments on that. And, and if, you know, on the comments, I might share them with Eric, especially if you heard that, especially the nice ones. Don't, don't write a mean one challenging Eric to do something. You've already seen what happens there. If you're doing squats, hit me up on Instagram. I'd love to see, see what you're doing there. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Would you prefer an ad-free experience? Join my VIP podcast at subscribetojj.com for just $4.99 a month, or $49.99 a year to unlock uninterrupted ad-free access to all the episodes and insights you love. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text to 2-813-565-2666. 2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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