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[00:00:00] JJ Virgin: Hey, I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout. Sorry, mom. Turn four 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.

[00:00:27] JJ Virgin: 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 JJ packed with my book Speeches and Wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here’s how you do it.

[00:00:45] JJ Virgin: Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review, text it to 8 1 3. 5 6 5 2 6 2 7. That’s 8 1 3 5 6 5 2 6 2 7. My virtual JJ will reply directly and trust me this will make your day. So subscribe now at, subscribe to jj.com and text me your review. Let’s keep thriving together.

[00:01:20] JJ Virgin: 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. Uh, health experts learning from Dr. Lauren 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.

[00:01:49] JJ Virgin: And it really got me going down some rabbit holes. So I was super excited a couple years later to meet Eric Edmeades who had the opportunity, which you’re gonna hear about, to spend time with the Hothead tribe. And from what he’s learned after going and spending time over 15 years with the Hadza Drive, he has taken that information.

[00:02:16] JJ Virgin: 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.

[00:02:50] JJ Virgin: So he, it, 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 and d and Hollywood Film production, I mean all over the place. And by the way, in Hollywood he worked on Avatar, Elysium and, uh, transformers, Ironman and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises.

[00:03:15] JJ Virgin: So really fun background. Also, he is a big speaker trainer, does a lot of work with Mind Valley, so I’m gonna put all of the links for all the cool stuff he’s up to and books and his Instagram and everything else at jj virgin.com/eric. This is a fascinating discussion and there are some really key takeaways that you can grab too.

[00:03:38] JJ Virgin: When, and, and I will be back at the end also to emphasize those. So I’ll be right back with Eric. Hang with me.

[00:03:52] JJ Virgin: Eric, so glad you’re here.

[00:03:54] Eric Edmeades: Glad to be

[00:03:55] JJ Virgin: here. I can’t believe it’s taken this long. I would love, now this is where I wanna start because I think this, 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.

[00:04:15] JJ Virgin: 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 Haddah 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 za, how did you end up there in the first place?

[00:04:36] Eric Edmeades: Uh, yeah, that’s, that’s a fascinating story.

[00:04:38] Eric Edmeades: 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 went 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, I’ve been visiting them for 15 years.

[00:04:52] Eric Edmeades: I, 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, I’ve gotta

[00:05:07] JJ Virgin: one up that, here we go.

[00:05:09] Eric Edmeades: And, and it was super effective, great program.

[00:05:12] Eric Edmeades: And one day we were coming down the, the mountain and, uh, my logistics partner in the country said to me, Hey, I, I Googled you, but while you were on the mountain, and, uh, you know, I think you’d be interested in meeting some bushman. And I’m like, the only ones that I was aware of at that point are the koan that you might have seen the movie that Gods must be Crazy.

[00:05:29] Eric Edmeades: I dunno if you, it’s one of the best independent films in the history. I’ve actually

[00:05:32] JJ Virgin: never seen it. I, oh my God, obviously have heard the name. Okay. Alright. I’m writing it down.

[00:05:37] Eric Edmeades: Gods must be crazy. It is Note to sell. Truly magical. But uh, in any event, there are some, you know, some son bushmen that are living in that, in that part of the world.

[00:05:45] Eric Edmeades: And there are still some there and I’ve not been to visit them, but all of a sudden he starts talking about Bushman up in, in this East Africa area and, and I start learning about them and this, you know, the HODs of people and he said, would you like to. Try and find them, like, yeah. And he goes, let’s go.

[00:05:58] Eric Edmeades: We got in a Jeep with machetes and camping gear and trekked our way through the bush, and we stumbled upon one group of of them, but they had surrendered to agriculture, like in that generation, like, like they grew up learning to hunt and then learned how to farm in that one generation. And they, they had little pot bellies.

[00:06:14] Eric Edmeades: 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, um, SZA 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.

[00:06:32] Eric Edmeades: And now I have been, you know, I, I, I’ve done embedded stays with them. I’ve, I’ve done in 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.

[00:06:46] JJ Virgin: Yeah, you said something interesting that I think people may not be aware of.

[00:06:50] JJ Virgin: I’ve been fascinated. I, early on in my nutrition learning, I got to sit with a small group of people for a lecture by Lauren Cordain. There were literally like eight of us, right? And they had paid him to do this lecture on paleo nutrition, ancestral nutrition, primal nutrition, call it what you want. But he really talked about the difference, you know, the hunter gatherers, and then when agriculture started and all the shifts in our health that happened.

[00:07:20] JJ Virgin: 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 though, 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.

[00:07:47] JJ Virgin: And you know, the worst extreme, of course, is what we’ve managed to, to do with agriculture, but. You take us back.

[00:07:54] Eric Edmeades: It’s a journey. And, and one of the interesting things to ask about that journey is, um, how long did it take, you know, and, and, and how did we get tricked into it? Uh, first I’ll go back. I, I, I met Lauren some years ago, and I, and there’s a little backstory here is I discovered Paleo before he published his book.

[00:08:10] Eric Edmeades: And what I mean by that is that my great-grandfather had found the oldest sapien skull in the history of Earth. And so I’d already been down that track and I’d gotten bins from my whole health recovery. And one day I asked him what inspired him to, to write the original Paleo book. And he said, oh, it was an article by Es Boy and Eaton.

[00:08:26] Eric Edmeades: Mm-hmm. And I read that article in the years before. And so, you know, we had such a great synergy about that. And, and of course, you know, we’d been on that same track for so many years. The, the question about the, uh, um, the question about sort of the transition thing is really interesting. One of the things I would put to you is that.

[00:08:44] Eric Edmeades: 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, uh, prescription drug use, more alcoholism.

[00:08:58] Eric Edmeades: I mean, we are 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, I would say to you, you do that one very slow step at a time.

[00:09:17] Eric Edmeades: You can’t do it quickly. It, even today, you take the hazah 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 mm-hmm.

[00:09:33] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:09:50] Eric Edmeades: And they go back unless alcohol gets them. Ooh. 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 that 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, uh, you know, it was a little gender specific back then.

[00:10:11] Eric Edmeades: I might’ve been hunting. You might’ve been. And knowing you, you, you would’ve been. But, but the point is, we get back to one of the villages that we 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. They make those red berries, aren’t they?

[00:10:29] Eric Edmeades: Yeah, they are. Wait, wait a minute. Do you remember last year we were sitting there eating berries and we were throwing. 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, and, 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?

[00:10:56] Eric Edmeades: It starts right there.

[00:10:57] JJ Virgin: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:58] Eric Edmeades: Right there. It begins. We, 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.

[00:11:08] JJ Virgin: Yes. Well, I mean, and you look at the food than you look at, you talked about, oh, the house and the temperature.

[00:11:14] JJ Virgin: And it’s, it’s, it’s all of it. We have made ourselves so comfortable. Yeah. 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, yeah, we’ve taken out all of our need to adapt.

[00:11:30] Eric Edmeades: Yeah, absolutely. And now

[00:11:31] JJ Virgin: we have to put, put those things in place.

[00:11:33] JJ Virgin: 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 the life is like.

[00:11:44] Eric Edmeades: It, it, it really assassinating. 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’ve been like to be a Savannah primate without fire.

[00:11:59] Eric Edmeades: And I want you to think about that two 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’ve lived with a sense of constant hypervigilance and, and, and terror because it would’ve just been scary all the time.

[00:12:18] Eric Edmeades: 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. Yeah, 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 gonna wake you up at about one or two in the morning, so you can put more wood on the fire, but you’re gonna sleep and it’s gonna be beautiful.

[00:12:37] Eric Edmeades: And that’s what it’s like. And so I’ve done many, um, embedded overnight stays. And I can tell you that you go to bed the night before and you are tired ’cause 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.

[00:12:54] Eric Edmeades: And the very first thing you do is you, you head out for food because there’s no pantry there, there’s no fridge, there’s no Uber Eats. You know, you, you, you, you have to go and get food and then you head out. Now the men will, in, in, in the HODs community, they’ll row themselves up, grab their bows and arrows and they head out.

[00:13:11] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:13:31] JJ Virgin: Hmm.

[00:13:31] Eric Edmeades: And they move just as much. And, uh, and so you get up in the, 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. Um, one morning I woke up for one of these trips. We did 27 miles, and I’ve run an official marathon before.

[00:13:47] Eric Edmeades: I can tell you that’s a walk in the park compared to 27 miles of, of bushman hunting. Like you’re climbing thorns are threat shredding. You, there’s cliffs, there’s like, it’s what, what are they wearing on their feet they now wear? Um, these sort of, uh, Maasai influenced, um, sandals that are made from old car tires that have been found on various roads around there.

[00:14:09] Eric Edmeades: 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 maasi, 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, uh, the, the, uh, that day we did 27 miles, and when we got back to camp, we didn’t score much, not, not enough to justify 27 miles.

[00:14:32] Eric Edmeades: The next morning, the chief, his name is in our world, it would be known, uh, in, in theres, it’s like more like, and he says, he comes to me and goes, Hey. We gotta go hunting out 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?

[00:14:53] Eric Edmeades: Well, actually it’s really fascinating. The first thing they do is they grab a bunch of, uh, um, they grab a bunch of, uh, um, uh, wood to make a fire. And they make fire with friction. Like, 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 all, I’m just gonna ask,

[00:15:15] JJ Virgin: so the whole pig goes on the fire?

[00:15:16] Eric Edmeades: Yeah, yeah. And, and what that does is it burns the hair off and then it tenderizes it. And so 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.

[00:15:31] Eric Edmeades: And so, so in any event they, they then they start the process. Butchering. So, you know, they do the incision up, the 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 beneath 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.

[00:15:57] Eric Edmeades: And they’ve gone after the no, no, they, they went after them ’cause 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 of a 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.

[00:16:16] Eric Edmeades: The ribs are their own cooking stick and the ribs cook like that. And then you cut the rest up the 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.

[00:16:34] Eric Edmeades: 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 uh, 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.

[00:17:04] Eric Edmeades: 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, we killed a couple of small birds and I think a little mammal and, and, and

[00:17:15] JJ Virgin: this is really an important thing to note that people don’t, wouldn’t think about, you wouldn’t have the context.

[00:17:20] JJ Virgin: 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.

[00:17:32] Eric Edmeades: You have a problem. The truth is they spend more time in the negative than they do in the positive.

[00:17:36] Eric Edmeades: And you know that, that’s just the reality. I, 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.

[00:17:50] Eric Edmeades: 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 dare, 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.

[00:18:05] Eric Edmeades: And calorie payoff or nutritional payoff is probably a better way to put that.

[00:18:10] JJ Virgin: And so when they have the huge nutritional payoff, since really, unless you made something into jerky, you’ve, it’s gonna go bad.

[00:18:17] Eric Edmeades: Yeah. Is everything getting new? But they do now know how to dry the meat and they do that. But mostly they do that for trade.

[00:18:23] Eric Edmeades: They, they’ll dry the meat and trade with the local, um, uh, detoga people. And the, 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, and and ganja occasionally. Apparently.

[00:18:37] JJ Virgin: Hmm. Okay.

[00:18:38] Eric Edmeades: Apparently. But, but I wanted to tell you though, who would

[00:18:39] JJ Virgin: know about that though?

[00:18:41] JJ Virgin: Who

[00:18:41] Eric Edmeades: know? But they, they, they, they, at one point, the, 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 take it over to women. ’cause there are two fires. The, the women, men and women do not interact at the same fire at all. This just doesn’t happen.

[00:18:54] Eric Edmeades: Oh, they to, if you wanna know why Mars, Venus, you know, our good friend John, why he’s right most of the time about this. ’cause we lived at two fires and we have different cultures and language patterns. And so he goes, would you 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.

[00:19:13] Eric Edmeades: ’cause 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 to 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.

[00:19:35] Eric Edmeades: And it was, I’m, I’m telling you, it was a highlight moment of my entire life.

[00:19:42] JJ Virgin: At what point does a boy get out of the girls camp and come over to the men?

[00:19:48] Eric Edmeades: You know, they don’t, they don’t track their birth. Um, they don’t track their birth. So I, you know, exact ages are, are really difficult from experience.

[00:19:57] Eric Edmeades: Um, the little boys at around about three are already using a bow and arrow. They, they have a mini bow and arrow and they’re already using it, 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 ’cause 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.

[00:20:19] Eric Edmeades: And so when the kids are little, it’s a little bit more complicated. ’cause when the father wants the, you know, the like to go hunting or what have you, it’s like, well the kids here, you know, I, 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, you’ll get it right.

[00:20:35] Eric Edmeades: But in a day you won’t know it because they’re, they’re being raised in the village. Wow. They don’t, they really like, they, they’re, they’re, um, they really are being raised in the village and you see them Oh, and oh also. Jj, they, they, they, they have a different approach to parenting man. Like, they don’t, they don they do not bubble wrap their kids in.

[00:20:52] Eric Edmeades: There’s no helicopter parenting. I see this little kid, maybe two walking toward the fire and I turned to my guy and I’m like, he’s a good friend of mine. Gasper Jasper. The kid’s gonna get burnt. He’s like, yeah, probably. And I had, let’s do something about it. And he goes, no, don’t interfere. I go, but they’re not noticing.

[00:21:08] Eric Edmeades: They’re so busy talking out. They see everything. There’s, they’re not, they’re noticing it all. Let it go and the kids walk toward the fire. Now I spent six 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.

[00:21:21] Eric Edmeades: And I’m like, I wanna see, I just like, want save this kid.

[00:21:24] JJ Virgin: I was gonna say, all your PTSD got triggered.

[00:21:28] Eric Edmeades: Yeah. And the kid walks up to the fire, picks up, he’s two-ish or something. Oh. Maybe picks up a stick, sticks it in the fire, lets it on fire. Waves it around, puts it back, walks away. Totally understands fire.

[00:21:38] Eric Edmeades: 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 you know, they, they, what they explained to me is they don’t regard children as a lesser form of human. They regard children as smaller humans.

[00:21:55] Eric Edmeades: In other words, they will help them where their size is a, um, physical limitation, but they will not overly parent or instruct them.

[00:22:03] JJ Virgin: Wow. Hmm. Do the, 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?

[00:22:18] JJ Virgin: And then does the kid, do the kids sleep with their parents or do they sleep with

[00:22:23] Eric Edmeades: Yeah, they have these shelters made out of, um, ulti pi plants. And, and, and they’re not waterproof or anything. They’re more sleep. 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.

[00:22:37] JJ Virgin: Okay. All right. So back over to the HUD and the pig. And so what does their diet look like?

[00:22:46] Eric Edmeades: Well, according to CNN Yeah, like, let’s skip past like blue zones and CCN, like, but but kidding aside, according to CNN, they are a plant-based peoples and they’re called what? Come on. No, no. And they’re called the bird hunters.

[00:23:03] Eric Edmeades: And so let me tell you why that’s the case. So they’re called the, the, um, 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.

[00:23:21] Eric Edmeades: Here’s the baobab things that you get. And, and, and then they wanna 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’re not. Plant-based, or they’re plant-based in the way that I’m plant-based.

[00:23:38] Eric Edmeades: And that is that the animals I eat eat plants.

[00:23:41] JJ Virgin: And so, 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 Kine called it rabbit starvation. They’d starve.

[00:23:53] Eric Edmeades: Yeah. They would never work. They are definitely meat based and there’s a few ways of, of doing that.

[00:23:58] Eric Edmeades: One is to actually examine their macros 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, um, 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. ’cause you need to get away from camp.

[00:24:16] Eric Edmeades: ’cause no animals come anywhere near the camp. Right. So you gotta 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.

[00:24:35] Eric Edmeades: 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 in 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, but pretty much any other time, if they see honey, it’s, it’s a big deal.

[00:24:56] Eric Edmeades: They’ll, they’ll, they’ll risk life and limb for honey.

[00:25:00] JJ Virgin: Hmm. Okay. So then let’s look at a week of macros and what’s typical.

[00:25:06] Eric Edmeades: 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, uh, bush pigs, warthogs, antelope. When they can get them these days, that’s getting harder and harder for them.

[00:25:20] Eric Edmeades: 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 plumb ’cause 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.

[00:25:34] Eric Edmeades: And then there’s baobab, um, fruit, which is seasonal as well. And there are root vegetables, a a couple of different kinds that they dig up and eat, which you can eat raw. Hmm. Or you can put them in the fire and caramelize them. And then they’re even yummier. And what, what, what are they? They’re, they’re the root vegetables.

[00:25:49] Eric Edmeades: I don’t know the exact species. I mean, I, I have the name somewhere, but I, I don’t know off the top of my head similar to what they’re like. Um, they’re like, if you imagine, say a hybrid between a. Like sweet potato and a red onion, you know, something in the middle of that. So you can eat them raw and they’re quite watery and they, they, which is great of course, ’cause water’s rare there.

[00:26:10] Eric Edmeades: And then when you cook ’em they caramelize and they becomes quite sweet. So they’re, you know, 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.

[00:26:23] JJ Virgin: And what do they do about water?

[00:26:25] Eric Edmeades: Well, the, there is water around.

[00:26:27] Eric Edmeades: Um, there are, they, they, they live in a, a region called Lake Kisi. So there’s a very, very big lake, but they don’t go down there very often because the farming and, 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.

[00:26:48] Eric Edmeades: It’s kind of gross ’cause 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.

[00:27:03] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:27:13] JJ Virgin: Oh boy.

[00:27:14] Eric Edmeades: So I left my water bottle at camp and off we went.

[00:27:18] Eric Edmeades: And we did not. And 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 a hundred degrees. It’s, it’s 40 centigrade or something like that. It’s hot. And we’re, and we’re walking and we’re riding and we’re hiking and we’re climbing and we’re crawling and we’re, we’re, you know, crawling under bushes.

[00:27:35] Eric Edmeades: And it’s unbelievably, I intense. Are you

[00:27:36] JJ Virgin: the only, uh, white guy

[00:27:38] Eric Edmeades: I’m in on that, on that particular one? Yeah. I was embedded, so I was like, I didn’t have anybody with me. I had my, uh, I had my guide gasper with me, but that, that, you know, he’s, he’s a Tanzanian guy. And anyway, so no water? No water, no water, uhhuh.

[00:27:51] Eric Edmeades: And, um, and then a, as we’re getting back to camp, um, we cross through a detoga camp. The Detoga people are a bit like the Maasai pastoralists. They keep livestock, so they have goats and cattle, and there’s a, there’s a cattle trough built into this boma, you know, just built out of thorn trees and what, and there’s water in it.

[00:28:11] Eric Edmeades: And the bushman. They have kind of a deal with the do toga 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.

[00:28:24] JJ Virgin: Yeah.

[00:28:24] Eric Edmeades: And I’m like, I am 26 miles into a a hundred degree day of hunting. Yeah.

[00:28:30] Eric Edmeades: You’re like, I’m not drinking that. I’m not doing it. Wow. And so I didn’t, and luckily we were only a mile from camp at that point, so we got to camp and I drank in a single, like, I drank a two liter bottle of water. That’s why you

[00:28:44] JJ Virgin: didn’t throw up.

[00:28:45] Eric Edmeades: I, I don’t know. I, I don’t know. I was very, my body wanted that water.

[00:28:49] Eric Edmeades: 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 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.

[00:29:05] Eric Edmeades: Time to have a sip of water. I went to one in England where the instructor was like super militant and was like, you’re not allowed to drink water in my class. And well, the truth is what’s really fascinating is you’re, you know, this, I mean, if you’re drinking now, you’re only doing it to satisfy your mouth.

[00:29:17] Eric Edmeades: The water will not begin to hydrate you until tomorrow. You like it has to pass through you. Right. So the key to those long hunts is, um, is dehydration. Yeah. It’s ready for them. The same with, you know, flying and altitude change and all that kind of stuff.

[00:29:31] JJ Virgin: 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, et cetera, that their body’s become very efficient.

[00:29:51] JJ Virgin: Is that the case? Um,

[00:29:55] Eric Edmeades: I. 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, they, their endurance capacity is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

[00:30:09] JJ Virgin: I know it’d be great to, has someone done like body composition and VO two max and all the testing on ’em to see what they look like.

[00:30:17] JJ Virgin: Let’s say

[00:30:18] Eric Edmeades: 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 Uhhuh immediately this PhD wrote to us and say, 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.

[00:30:33] Eric Edmeades: And even with the consent, you can’t, you know. Wow. But, um, we did bring on one of our trips, we brought a, a good friend of mine, aura, he’s a, a surgeon and a celebrity doctor in Florida. You actually should meet Aura. But he, he’s a great guy.

[00:30:45] JJ Virgin: Huh? What’s his last name?

[00:30:47] Eric Edmeades: I can’t pronounce it, but where does he live?

[00:30:51] Eric Edmeades: You know, I wanna say. Florida, big state Tampa, Orlando. But I’ll connect you with him. He’s a great guy. Yeah. Connect me. We took him a trip and he, um, uh, and 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 haven’t, they gotta go see the osteopath and like, he just saw solid alignment and really, you know, clean, lean musculature.

[00:31:18] Eric Edmeades: They were, they’re in unbelievably good shape. And, um, yeah. But other than that, no VO two max and that kinda stuff would be fascinating to know. We don’t know.

[00:31:26] JJ Virgin: 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.

[00:31:35] JJ Virgin: That’s what I heard about the Blue Zones is one of the big, you know, sources of debate in the Blue Zones is that people didn’t have birth, like they were faking their birth certificates.

[00:31:46] Eric Edmeades: Yeah. Um, 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 gonna say that immediately what comes along?

[00:31:56] Eric Edmeades: Anybody who wants to try to debunk the idea of ancestral dice saying, yeah, but those people only 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.

[00:32:15] Eric Edmeades: They have something like 80% infant mortality, or let’s say 80% of their children don’t make it to five years old. So to achieve an average age of 35, how old do the other two people have? Right? Yeah. Right. And, and this is a, a lying with statistics thing that’s done all the time. Another way to look at it, which is really fascinating.

[00:32:31] Eric Edmeades: Uh, 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, it would do better there because I mean, it has food, it has water, it has no predation, it has no, it has medical, it has dental. I mean, it, it’s, it, it, it’s an incredible life.

[00:32:48] Eric Edmeades: And yet if you take elephants out of, say, the Kruger National Park where they’re facing poachers and lions and hyenas and, and, and starvation and bushfires, and they don’t have medical and dental, and then you put them into a zoo, you would think, well, that’s gotta 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.

[00:33:09] Eric Edmeades: Wow. 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 are in that position where we were removed from nature and placed in the zoo, and we live in the zoo today. Mm-hmm. And the zoo is controlled by the food industry and the pharma industry and the government and what have you.

[00:33:25] Eric Edmeades: 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 of us will spend the last 20 of our years artificially alive with tubes and prescription medications and surgeries, which creates a appearance of a longer lifespan, but, which really is a much shortened health span.

[00:33:45] JJ Virgin: Yeah.

[00:33:45] Eric Edmeades: 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 optical existence and, and optimal existence. And by the way, 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.

[00:34:08] JJ Virgin: Well, if you look at it so. The hus or any hus or any of these other groups or groups. 5,000 years ago it would’ve been childbirth, you know, first couple years falling outta trees, uh, 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.

[00:34:34] JJ Virgin: Like, I’d love to know what is the rate of cancer in the za? What is the rate of heart disease in the cancer in, in the za? Is there any diabetes in the Za? Like, how could there possibly be? What about autoimmune disease? What about all these things that we see now, dementia, et cetera. Are these all things that we’ve managed to create with our crappy lifestyle?

[00:34:55] JJ Virgin: And the reality is, if you live this way, and, and I know this is part of your argument in the, in, uh, the post diabetic, it’s like, if you live this way, a lot of these things just are non-issues. Yeah. Which is really the, the goal. So let’s get Eric’s top, your top list from everything you’ve learned experiencing this that are in wild fit and in, uh, the evolution gap.

[00:35:18] JJ Virgin: What would be your key takeaways that someone go, all right, these are the things you wanna bring into modern life.

[00:35:23] Eric Edmeades: Sure. So I, I, I’d like to define the evolution gap for that answer. The, the evolution gap is, um, uh, is a, uh, metaphorical exploration of what we might now call evolutionary mismatch theory.

[00:35:35] Eric Edmeades: The idea is, is that we evolved for a certain environment and then we change that environment sufficiently that our, our e our biological reality, um, doesn’t match our environment anymore. And, and I would put you, I would suggest you that almost all of the psychological and physiological pain and suffering we have lies inside that gap.

[00:35:52] JJ Virgin: So, yeah, it seems like, I mean, it’s almost all, it’s like 99.9, like,

[00:35:57] Eric Edmeades: you know, it’s quite something that isn’t in that gap. And I mean, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a crazy example. Racism is in that gap. And, and the way that racism is in that gap is really fascinating. So if you consider, I, I look at you and I go, oh, jj, I can roughly tell that you are from Northern Europe.

[00:36:14] Eric Edmeades: I mean, roughly speaking, I mean biking, you, you biking? Biking. 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.

[00:36:31] Eric Edmeades: 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 uh, uh, uh, 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, um, you know, like as a good example, the, the, the, the Kuisan or the Hot and Tots that lived in the southern part of, of South Africa, they were very, very light colored.

[00:36:59] Eric Edmeades: 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 kuisan and the ha uh, the kuisan people because they were too light, by the way, they were probably the original sellers of that area, which is a weird irony right now.

[00:37:26] Eric Edmeades: That’s evolution. Where’s the gap? The gap is that it used to take multiple generations to move a thousand 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.

[00:37:46] Eric Edmeades: So that’s evolution. The gap is you now take somebody from Eritrea and put them in Norway, they’re gonna have a problem and they’re gonna develop possibly rickets, and they’re gonna have the vitamin D deficiencies, and that’s gonna 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 gonna have a problem.

[00:38:06] Eric Edmeades: 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, lemme put it another way. The people safest. You were your family. They looked like you. They smelled like you, they acted like you. They were culturally similar to you.

[00:38:23] Eric Edmeades: 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, and sound much like your people.

[00:38:38] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:38:56] Eric Edmeades: It’s, it’s a, it’s an evolved response that probably should be referred to as different, 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.

[00:39:14] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:39:27] JJ Virgin: And weren’t those villages or tribes, weren’t they like average, like 50, 60 people?

[00:39:33] Eric Edmeades: It, it, it, it, it’s, it’s hard to say. I’m, I, I can tell you that with the HODs of 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 you’re a very good hunter, you will attract more people to live in your village.

[00:39:50] Eric Edmeades: 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, in another kingdom. And so there’s this kind of, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, what a great political

[00:40:00] JJ Virgin: system that is.

[00:40:01] Eric Edmeades: Well, and, and, and frankly, don’t we see a version of that today?

[00:40:04] Eric Edmeades: Mm-hmm. I know there are states in America that are losing population Yes. Because people are perceiving a level of tyranny, and it’s not, not dissimilar, but to your real, to your real question. Like what are some of the top tips? I, this, this is, this is what I would suggest is that, um, our, uh, bodies. And our psychologies evolved for a particular environment.

[00:40:25] Eric Edmeades: And what we wanna do as best possible, is mimic that environment in our behavior and in reality as best po as best we can. So, uh, 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. The reason that beachfront property, uh, is so very valuable is not because people wanna get a tan.

[00:40:45] Eric Edmeades: 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, cheaping, you know, on a recording system, there’s something very calming about that.

[00:41:09] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:41:27] Eric Edmeades: And it’s, it’s, bear with me. It’s, it’s spurred by a really interesting, um, conversation with my guide. My third, second or third visit, he said, Eric, why did you come back? Most people come and get, 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 hijabi people, you think that we might be better off?

[00:41:48] Eric Edmeades: And I’m like, that’s an oversimplification. But yeah. Uh, basically that’s what I’m saying. I ca I went back years later and after many, many visits and he, and he talked me into going to visit this school that he started in. Every guide has a school or an orphanage. Every single one of them has one. And I’m just jaded by the whole thing.

[00:42:02] Eric Edmeades: 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’re the healthiest kids I’ve ever seen in that country. No yellow eyes, no distended bellies. They’re, they’re just amazing kids. And I go, Casper, what’s going on with your kids?

[00:42:20] Eric Edmeades: 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 five years ago? Maybe I don’t. That’s right. That’s refresh my memory. Maybe. What, what was that all about? And he goes, you told me that we used to live the way the Hadza did in our instincts and our nutritional, uh, requirements and, and, and our, and our lymphatic systems and our, and, and, and basically our, we need to live more like them.

[00:42:45] Eric Edmeades: 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 go, which is cornmeal and wheat meal.

[00:42:56] JJ Virgin: Oh.

[00:42:57] Eric Edmeades: And so these kids are getting a, a zabe influenced diet and that’s why they’re so healthy. I believe that we need to do the same thing.

[00:43:05] Eric Edmeades: But the big modification that, 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, uh, uh, uh, intermittent fasting type thing.

[00:43:26] Eric Edmeades: But it’s more a recognition that we have three 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.

[00:43:41] JJ Virgin: Yeah, we can see the consequence.

[00:43:44] JJ Virgin: And what, what exactly is junk food fall?

[00:43:47] Eric Edmeades: Well, fall is the season of accumulation and, um, 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, uh, blood, low blood sugar, which drives us to eat more and we feel compelled to eat the whole bush and distend our bellies.

[00:44:17] Eric Edmeades: 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 gonna 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.

[00:44:39] Eric Edmeades: Because winter’s coming,

[00:44:40] JJ Virgin: right. That is the, like, if you look at summer, it’s 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. So Yeah,

[00:44:52] Eric Edmeades: exactly. Not, not, not, not North America anyway. It’s, well, not in the developed world.

[00:44:56] Eric Edmeades: It’s the, they, they’re, I, I said this on podcast theater. It’s like it’s, if I look around America, it’s like they’re preparing for the next ice age. Nevermind winter.

[00:45:04] JJ Virgin: So then you have the winter, which would be, you know, uh, now you’ve, now you’re gonna get, you’re gonna sleep more, you’re gonna become more insulin sensitive ’cause you’ve got more sleep, you’re doing more fasting.

[00:45:16] JJ Virgin: ’cause you don’t have the access to as much food. Yeah. You’re using your fat stores

[00:45:20] Eric Edmeades: and then, and serious autophagy. Like your body is going to go, I don’t wanna burn my fat source. You know how it is, right? First day of a fast, you, you, you might break, you might burn a little. You get out past 48 hours and the body goes, shit man, this is serious.

[00:45:33] Eric Edmeades: 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 are, I, I would argue that that type of fasting is probably the single best anti-cancer protocol that you could probably undertaken at all.

[00:45:53] Eric Edmeades: And it used to be imposed upon our ancestors every year by mother nature,

[00:45:58] JJ Virgin: 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. Uh, I think of cancer, I’m like going just up your exercise dramatically.

[00:46:16] JJ Virgin: How many, like, you don’t see amazing big athletes coming down with cancer. So I think

[00:46:23] Eric Edmeades: that I shared this with you when we met last time, but I, I want, this is another great example of the evolution gap, okay? Evolution is climbing mountain probable it that, you know, to, to, to use Dawkins, right? It’s this arriving at an unbelievably unlikely, uh, you know, organism like the cheetah that can accelerate faster than just about any car other than a Tesla.

[00:46:43] Eric Edmeades: And, and as an example, do you know those black marks on the cheetahs 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 a hundred miles an hour would kill them. They’re an incredibly unlikely being, and then alongside them are the gazelle that can outrun them.

[00:47:03] Eric Edmeades: 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 abil, 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’s concerned, you evolved the pumps because the need was important and urgent.

[00:47:29] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:47:59] Eric Edmeades: Uh uh, the average person in the developed world is spending four hours in front of Netflix not moving their lymph at all.

[00:48:06] JJ Virgin: Yeah. And if they do move in very controlled patterns, not in all the planes of movement.

[00:48:11] Eric Edmeades: Right, right. Yeah.

[00:48:13] JJ Virgin: So interesting. And

[00:48:14] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:48:23] Eric Edmeades: Like it’s, it’s bloody frightening. Well, guess what? Those big legs that, that we’re supposed to be using, those legs drive testosterone production. You didn’t have a choice about legs day back then,

[00:48:33] JJ Virgin: right? Every day’s, legs day or it’s complete rest. It’s like there’s no, no slight switch there. You’d have to do these things, you know, jumping and, um, I literally am doing now the hardest things that I can think of doing and pushing myself to do.

[00:48:50] JJ Virgin: ’cause I’m like, I, I figure out, 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 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.

[00:49:11] JJ Virgin: Those are so hard. I can’t believe it.

[00:49:13] Eric Edmeades: I haven’t tried them, but there’s a, oh my

[00:49:15] JJ Virgin: goodness. I guess like, why did I ever not like, these are things they should start you as a little kid and you never stop.

[00:49:21] Eric Edmeades: Yeah. No kidding. No kidding. Right.

[00:49:23] JJ Virgin: Never stop the pullups. Never stop the pushups. Never stop jumping, never stop sprinting.

[00:49:27] JJ Virgin: Just keep doing the things

[00:49:29] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:49:48] Eric Edmeades: Exer, 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 make the argument, you gotta 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,

[00:50:05] JJ Virgin: oh no, you, we never look at the comments.

[00:50:07] JJ Virgin: That’s what your team’s for. That will make you crazy.

[00:50:10] Eric Edmeades: I looked in the, 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,

[00:50:17] JJ Virgin: and by the way, don’t read your book reviews either.

[00:50:19] Eric Edmeades: Don’t read your book reviews. No, don’t do

[00:50:20] JJ Virgin: that.

[00:50:21] Eric Edmeades: 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, he goes, I don’t understand why this guy’s talking about exercise. He doesn’t look so fit to me. And, um, and it hurt. And I, and I, I suddenly realized it would only hurt if it were a little true, you know, like, and, and, and so I was like, shit, you know, I really, I’ve let it go.

[00:50:45] Eric Edmeades: I used to, I used to do martial arts. I used to run, I used to do all these things and I just, I just had let it go, you know? I was dependent. Well, how great that you got that little input was so amazing. So what did I do? I said, that’s it. I used to do, uh, knuckle n knuckle based pushups with martial arts all the time.

[00:51:00] Eric Edmeades: I’m gonna do it again. So I got down, I got down to do my, jj I’m, I’m, I wish we had a video of this, Eric.

[00:51:07] JJ Virgin: This

[00:51:07] Eric Edmeades: would’ve been the video. I’m so embarrassed to admit this to you. I, I, I will tell you that I actually really struggled to complete the fifth one. I was 45 years old. I, I, I struggled to complete the fifth one and I was horrified because it used to be 50 on my knuckles per set, what happened to me.

[00:51:27] Eric Edmeades: Yeah. Well, how old were you when you were doing that

[00:51:29] JJ Virgin: before? Like into my third, into my mid thirties. But it is amazing the whole use it or lose it. It’s happened. Damn. It happens fast. It’s really fast,

[00:51:37] Eric Edmeades: but there’s good news about it and, and, and I learned a lot about this and I mean, I’m, you know, this, but the, the, the, the thing is, is that when you lose it, you don’t lose it in material right away.

[00:51:46] Eric Edmeades: You lose it in function and you know, you, you can turn muscle fibers back on. Yeah. You’re, you, the whole muscle memory is absolutely true. It’s amazing. And even, even the blood flow and muscle density. So I, I made a commitment that I would add one pushup a day, you know, and keep going. Well, I was within two to three months, I can’t remember exactly, I, I journaled it, but I was back to three sets of 50 super fast and it completely changed my life.

[00:52:11] Eric Edmeades: In fact, we tried to do a social media campaign to out the guy who did this, we, I said, look, this, this can, oh, you’re

[00:52:17] JJ Virgin: so funny. It’s worth

[00:52:18] Eric Edmeades: $5,000 to me. I want to give you the $5,000 for making that. And we couldn’t find him.

[00:52:26] JJ Virgin: Well, it is interesting. You know, I started out as an exercise physiologist and I started, I discovered very quickly ’cause I had people, I just, I just wanna get in better shape and I don’t wanna change my diet.

[00:52:35] JJ Virgin: 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 like. Diet first, and I still say diet first ’cause I know that you’re gonna get a change quickly and feel so much better that then you’ll be more fired up to do the other.

[00:52:59] JJ Virgin: However, like you look at what happens and you know, it’s interesting that you are doing pushups in your thirties, then you stopped. Well you look at the statistics of when muscle starts to drop and strength and power stopped and 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.

[00:53:19] JJ Virgin: 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. Um. But

[00:53:30] Eric Edmeades: 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 and to exactly like it is.

[00:53:40] Eric Edmeades: 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 three days. There’s only three days that your muscles have, there’s one day where you tell your muscles that you don’t need them and, and if you don’t need them, they won’t assign resource to them.

[00:53:55] Eric Edmeades: 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.

[00:54:15] JJ Virgin: I just had one of those this morning with pistol squats. Now I’m gonna have

[00:54:18] Eric Edmeades: to look up pistol squats.

[00:54:19] JJ Virgin: 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, having to do it over a bench.

[00:54:35] JJ Virgin: So when you see this, look it a way for, to be able to do it. ’cause it’s, it’s literally you doing a squat, but you have a leg out in front. Well, just standing with the leg out in front is freaking hard enough. Now try to squat now. Try to squat. Where you there pose

[00:54:49] Eric Edmeades: like that?

[00:54:50] JJ Virgin: Huh?

[00:54:50] Eric Edmeades: There’s a yoga pose like that.

[00:54:52] JJ Virgin: There’s a yoga po 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.

[00:55:09] JJ Virgin: So I’m like, all right, I’m going to do this. I don’t care. I can do it, but, but I, 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.

[00:55:26] Eric Edmeades: I’m, I’m, I, I’m, that’s it. I’m gonna look it up and see.

[00:55:28] JJ Virgin: I’m, I’m throwing down to you. We’ll be in throwing down Canada pistol squat.

[00:55:33] Eric Edmeades: Let’s, let’s see. I may still be doing

[00:55:35] JJ Virgin: it over a chair, but damn. It’s, uh, I wanted

[00:55:37] Eric Edmeades: to, 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, from the HUDs of people, I’m sure there’s nutrition and, and sure there’s parenting and relationships and all kinds of fascinating things that, that are there.

[00:55:57] Eric Edmeades: 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 neurotransmitters are perfectly attuned to reward them for everything. Good. Yeah, there’s nothing that they do in a day to achieve serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, any of these things that isn’t functional.

[00:56:21] Eric Edmeades: They track, they get serotonin, they see it. So no

[00:56:24] JJ Virgin: project managers there making sure that they, they got up to go on the hunt.

[00:56:27] Eric Edmeades: No. 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.

[00:56:46] Eric Edmeades: In the genera, in, in the, in the level of, say, development prior to bows and arrows, there is literally none. Now there’s some investment in the future, some now. Uh, we, 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 paleo bodies.

[00:57:07] Eric Edmeades: And so I, 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 did we get the bow and arrow so we didn’t have to throw the spear? Why did we have the plow so we didn’t have to dig in the soil?

[00:57:20] Eric Edmeades: 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. Mm-hmm. Suicide’s in the top 10. Now, you know, of killers of Americans, it’s insane.

[00:57:41] Eric Edmeades: And, and I’m sure in the younger in

[00:57:43] JJ Virgin: in younger, it’s in top five, not top. It’s

[00:57:46] Eric Edmeades: awful. And by the way, I asked Nona one day, I said, do you guys have depression here? And he says. And depression. I go, long-term sadness. Do you have long-term sadness? And he goes, oh, yes. Yeah. I mean, here you could be sad for like three days.

[00:58:01] Eric Edmeades: I go, okay, why? Why? What, why only three days? What, what happens at the end of the three days? And he goes, well, then you get hungry and you, you have to get up and move. And then when you move it’s,

[00:58:11] JJ Virgin: oh my gosh.

[00:58:14] Eric Edmeades: I mean, the simplicity of Right. Wow. Then, then I said to him, okay, but do you guys have suicide? What, what is, what is this thing?

[00:58:21] Eric Edmeades: 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, 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.

[00:58:45] Eric Edmeades: But then once the laughter subsided. How do they do it? You know, he, 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, and then I go, and some people jump off very high things like buildings and, and he doesn’t understand buildings, but he understands falling.

[00:59:04] Eric Edmeades: It’s one of their most common cause 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, and then I mentioned to him, well, some people, you know, 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.

[00:59:22] Eric Edmeades: So, wow. 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 wanna 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 wanna talk about that.

[00:59:39] Eric Edmeades: I wanna talk about the, the, the, the, the cingulate, what do they call it? The anterior cingulate cortex. I wanna talk about executive function. This is somebody doing their first ice bath, the body and the, and the captain. The captain and the crew, the captain, being executive on the captain says, get in the water.

[00:59:55] Eric Edmeades: And the crew’s like, no, we’re not doing that. Come on, man. Get in the water. Really? You, you think we should? I’ve heard that it’s good for us. Get in the water. And so finally the crew is like, oh 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.

[01:00:19] Eric Edmeades: When can we get out? We wanna 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 three minute mark, if that’s say, the recommended goal, the captain finally releases the crew and says, Hey, you can get out now.

[01:00:40] Eric Edmeades: And what does the crew invariably say at three minutes,

[01:00:42] JJ Virgin: I can keep going,

[01:00:43] Eric Edmeades: 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, the, the more difficult behaviors, the bigger projects.

[01:01:07] Eric Edmeades: We, if we aren’t gonna do that stuff, we’re, we’re gonna be in trouble. We’re doomed. Yeah.

[01:01:13] JJ Virgin: Thank you. That amazing that, that actually gave me like goosebumps, that last bit there. A great way to tie a bow on it. Eric. You’ve got three books. Uh, post diabetic, the Evolution Gap and the WildFit Way that are all, I’ll put links to all of this at jj virgin.com/eric+your Instagram that you actually will respond to people with a voice note.

[01:01:38] JJ Virgin: Now I’m telling this, and now you’re probably gonna

[01:01:39] Eric Edmeades: get getting harder and harder, but I do my best.

[01:01:42] JJ Virgin: 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, throw down a ridiculous question or a question about the HODs though, which is so fascinating and I super duper appreciate you.

[01:01:57] JJ Virgin: Plus we’ll put links. You are also a speaker trainer, so

[01:01:59] Eric Edmeades: Yeah, that’d be great.

[01:02:00] JJ Virgin: You know, it’s like as another thing. There’s so many things that you do. I’ll, I’ll, I’m sharing all of that in your bio at the beginning so everybody already knows, but. Um, this has been absolutely fa fantastic and fascinating. I am never gonna say that.

[01:02:14] JJ Virgin: I’m gonna go there. I know you keep telling me you need to come. I’m like, yeah, you guys would love

[01:02:19] Eric Edmeades: 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 an amazing cultural experience that would change your life forever. Well,

[01:02:27] JJ Virgin: what’s cool is I would be at the girl fire and Tim would have to be out doing all the stuff.

[01:02:31] JJ Virgin: So you’re allowed

[01:02:33] Eric Edmeades: when, when we bring our guests, the women, Kirsty has spent many hours at the men’s fire.

[01:02:36] JJ Virgin: Oh, okay. ’cause I was like, Hey, this is great. I’m totally happy to be over at that women’s fire. You can,

[01:02:41] Eric Edmeades: you’re allowed to be at both.

[01:02:42] JJ Virgin: Oh, okay. Well that, that changes things. ’cause I was like, I don’t have to go out on the 27 mile blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[01:02:48] JJ Virgin: With no bathrooms, no water and no and cow slime in it.

[01:02:52] Eric Edmeades: You do not have to have any of those things. We will take very good care of you.

[01:02:56] JJ Virgin: We’ll see.

[01:02:57] Eric Edmeades: Alright. It’s not

[01:02:58] JJ Virgin: a no, it’s a, it’s a, the door is slightly open. All right.

[01:03:00] Eric Edmeades: You’re giving me the pistol squat throwdown. I’ll give you the, let’s record a, a part two podcast in Africa with the Zabi Bushman in the background one day.

[01:03:10] Eric Edmeades: That’s my throwdown for you.

[01:03:11] JJ Virgin: Oh boy. Okay. We’ll talk more.

[01:03:15] Eric Edmeades: Yeah. Watch. She’s gonna edit that out. You guys, you watch.

[01:03:19] JJ Virgin: Thank you. I appreciate you.

[01:03:21] Eric Edmeades: Thanks jj.

[01:03:23] JJ Virgin: All right. So true story. Eric has been trying to get me and Tim to go, uh, to the hot stuff for years. And I was like, I’m one of those people that freaks out about not having, um, you know.

[01:03:37] JJ Virgin: 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 25 pounds. Um, I paid extra by the way, I was able to get past that. So I, uh, don’t think of myself much as a, um, camper.

[01:04:00] JJ Virgin: And this is camping at the extreme, however, you never know. Uh, but let’s talk about what you can take away from this. ’cause 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.

[01:04:26] JJ Virgin: And this, this thing that we’ve done over the years is just 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.

[01:04:46] JJ Virgin: Yeah, that’s something I live by. So do hard things for me right now. You heard it. It’s pistol squatting. I’ve gotta 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. Okay.

[01:05:05] JJ Virgin: That’s number one. Number two, really, uh, look at how you can eat as close to nature as possible, how you can do a more minimally processed stuff and don’t eat all the time either, right? You know, I, I’m personally eat a couple hours after waking up in the morning. I stop eating before bed. Um, I don’t traditionally fast.

[01:05:28] JJ Virgin: Um, I just never done well with that. But I think that there is a case to be made for adding in a day, uh, one meal a day, um, fast in the week depending on what your health goals all are. I always like to go back to that. But again, um, biggest thing here is look at how you can add more movement and more different movement, more challenging movement into your life.

[01:05:52] JJ Virgin: Uh, 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.

[01:06:13] JJ Virgin: What happens there? If you’re doing pistol squats, hit me up on Instagram. I’d love to see, uh, see what you’re doing there.

[01:06:24] JJ Virgin: 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. 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 at 2 8 1 3 5 6 5 2 6 2 7.

[01:06:53] JJ Virgin: That’s 8 1 3 5 6 5 2 6 2 7. When you do, I’ll reply using my brand new virtual jj, 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.

[01:07:19] JJ Virgin: 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.

[01:07:36] JJ Virgin: If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare 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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