Harvard Professor: "10,000 Steps A Day" Is A LIE! Revealing The 7 BIG LIES About Exercise, Sleep, Running, Cancer & Sugar!!! Daniel Lieberman

Dr Lieberman is the Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research focuses on how the human body has evolved to be the way it is, he also explores how humans evolved to run long distances to scavenge and hunt. He is the author of the best-selling books, ‘The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease’ and ‘Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding’. In this conversation Dr Lieberman and Steven discuss topics, such as: Sitting isn’t actually the new smoking The unseen health benefits of running The best exercises for a healthy life Why you don’t need 8 hours of sleep a night Separating the health myths from reality How the world has become too comfortable How 74% of diseases can be prevented Ways to hack and boost productivity You can purchase Dr Lieberman’s newest book, ‘Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health’, here: https://amzn.to/49udz2v Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people exercise because they believe it will help them to lose fat.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  One of the biggest debates on the planet.

• 0:05Steven Bartlett?

  What advice have you got for me?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  So this is not a well-known fact, but Daniel Lieberman.

• 0:09Speaker 02

  He studies and teaches.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  How humans are supposed to live.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Author and professor at Harvard University. Exercise. Disease. Sleep. Nutrition.

• 0:17Steven Bartlett?

  He has the answers on all of those things that most of us care about.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  We evolved to be very physically active, working in the fields, hunting, gathering. But now we live in a world where only 50% of Americans ever exercise. And the rest of the world is headed our way. Cancers, depression, anxiety can attribute that to less physical activity. In fact, women who get 150 minutes of physical activity a week have a 30 to 50% lower breast cancer risks. And it's crazy, right? Problem is that we spend 3% of our medical budget on prevention. And yet 75% of the time, the disease is a preventable disease. It's a completely backward, stupid system.

• 0:51Steven Bartlett?

  When you started writing this book about exercise, was there any instant changes that you implemented into your own life?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Strength training. The more I study, the importance of doing weights, especially as you age, the more I start kicking myself for being lazy about that. When people retire, they become less active. They tend to lose muscle and then that starts off a vicious cycle.

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  So would you say we shouldn't retire?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's a very modern Western concept. And yes, we do pay a price for it.

• 1:13Steven Bartlett?

  So how does one go from having a negative opinion towards exercise to becoming an exerciser?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  As an evolutionary biologist, there are multiple ways of doing that. So.

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel? What are some of the biggest myths within exercise?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Gosh, there are so many. One of the most common, of course, is.

• 1:31Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel Lieberman. He's been to every corner of the world, visiting native tribes to understand how humans are supposed to live. And now he has the answers on all of those things that most of us care about on sleep, nutrition, exercise, disease. You know, on disease, he says that 74% of them can be prevented. And he knows how to prevent them. Aging, running. Are we born to run? He tells me this story of a CEO that forces his employees to exercise and the impact that that's had on that company. And he talks about how as humans, we've evolved to either use it or lose it. So maybe, maybe retirement is a really bad idea for many of us.

• 2:14Steven Bartlett?

  One of the most thought provoking pivotal conversations I've had on this show. You're really going to take a lot from this one. And I suspect after listening, you'll probably start running too. For exercise or from some of the decisions you've spent your life making.

• 2:37Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel, your work is so incredibly impressive, reaches such an incredible depth, charters new territory and it's been

• 2:49Steven Bartlett?

  an unbelievable, clearly very passion driven career you had. So my first question for you is, why are you doing this?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I started off being obsessed by human evolution. Ever since I was a kid, I was really interested in human evolution. And I spent much of my early career working on skulls and heads and why they are the way they are. And then I kind of got involved in public health and issues of health and disease kind of through the back door. I sort of slowly shifted my research trajectory towards studying the evolution of running and then the evolution of physical activity and its relationship to health and disease. And I've become part of a movement that's often known as evolutionary medicine, which is how to apply evolutionary theory and data to issues of health and disease.

• 3:35Steven Bartlett?

  Evolutionary medicine, I've never heard that term before, but I love it.

• 3:40Steven Bartlett?

  Where has your work on evolutionary medicine, let's call it, where has that taken you? Where has it taken you to learn, to research, to study?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  You know, so much of what we think about in terms of health and disease comes from a tiny fragment of the world's population, almost entirely. Like 90% of all the medical information comes from people from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. So in order to study how bodies really work and how our bodies evolved to be, you have to leave places like Boston where I live and go to places like Africa or Mexico or wherever to look at other populations and look at how those populations are transitioning to lifestyles like mine. And so we've been working in Kenya for the last 15 years or so. I've travelled some other parts of the world as well, India, you know, to kind of collect some data, but mostly in Africa.

• 4:34Steven Bartlett?

  After doing all of this work and after taking in all of this information, how has it shifted your perspective on running, exercise more broadly? Have there been any sort of significant cognitive perception changes?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually had a, I mean, it doesn't happen very often, but I had kind of an epiphany moment when I was working in Mexico. We were collecting data on the Tatar Humaro, also famous for their long distance running. And there was this elderly guy, he's about seventy something years old, and he's famous for his distance running. And I was asking him how he trained. And I had asked this question of a whole bunch of other people. And the translator I was working with was always struggling to ask that question because it turns out there's no word for training in that language. The concept of training doesn't exist. So she was trying to explain to this guy what my question was. And I could, even without a translator, I could figure out just from his tone of voice. He was like, why would anybody run if you didn't have to?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  And I suddenly realized, yeah, of course, exercise is a very weird thing, right? If you're a farmer and you're working super hard every day in the field without machines and whatever, or if you're a hunter gatherer and you're walking, you know, five to 10 miles a day and digging and throwing, you know, doing all kinds of hard work and you're barely getting enough food, why on earth would you go for a needless five mile run in the morning? I mean, it's crazy, right?

• 5:54Steven Bartlett?

  The most viewed videos of yours and the most viewed moments in those videos address one question. Do you have any idea what it might be?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  No, actually.

• 6:05Steven Bartlett?

  The biggest myths in exercise.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:07Steven Bartlett?

  And I think you actually pointed out one there with the insight you got in Mexico. The way we exercise, going to gyms, practicing is the natural or human, but evidently it's a consequence of the privilege of our lives and the comfort we have of not having to seek out our dinner every day. What are some of the other biggest myths within exercise that you've come across in writing this book?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Gosh, there are so many. I had to actually limit, limit it to 10. So I think if you want to understand physical activity and exercise, you also have to understand inactivity. And I think one of the biggest myths out there is that you need eight hours of sleep a night, and that sitting is when you're smoking, you know, that basically, and if you think about those two different myths, why is it that we're constantly told to sleep more and to sit less? Actually, it seems a little contradictory to me, right? And it turns out that, let's take sitting first. So, you know, there are all these slogans like sitting is when you're smoking, and it's really bad for you, and every time you sit in your chair, you lose two hours of your life, and whatever. Turns out that all animals sit, right? My dog sits,

• 7:17Speaker 01

  cows sit, chickens sit, every animal sits, and hunter-gatherers also sit. In fact, if you, some of my students actually put censors on hunter-gatherers, and we're doing some research in farmers as well, but they sit just as much as Westerners. So, sitting is, there's nothing special about being, about today's life, it's sitting, it's that we sit all day long and don't do anything when we're not sitting, right? So if you, and furthermore, the big difference is not so much how much we sit, but how we sit. So, it turns out that people who, if you get up every once in a while, right, interrupted sitting is actually much more healthy than non-interrupted sitting for the same amount of time. So in other words, two people might, in the West, people sit for an average about 40 minutes

• 8:02Speaker 01

  at about, whereas hunter-gatherers, for example, or farmers in Africa where we work, get up every about 10, 15 minutes. And when you do that, you actually, it's like turning on the engine of your car, if you're driving around the block, you're turning on all kinds of cellular mechanisms, you lower blood sugar levels, you, all kinds of genes get activated, and it turns out that that is by far the most important way to sit. So just get up every once in a while, just pee frequently, make a cup of tea, you know, pet your dog, whatever.

• 8:31Steven Bartlett?

  Thinking when I'm on planes and I've got a long flight.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  I always sit in the aisle, right, so I can get up a lot, always.

• 8:36Steven Bartlett?

  What about sleep, then?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  So, sleep is another interesting one. So this idea that, you know, that you need eight hours of sleep. Has been around for a long time. It's been around basically since the Industrial Revolution. But if you actually, so colleagues in my field, so in evolutionary medicine, have put sensors on people who don't have, have all the things that we're told have destroyed sleep. So think about it. We're told that TV and lights and, and you know, our phones and all these things are, are preventing us from sleeping, you know? Edison destroyed sleep, right? So, so when you put sensors on people who don't have any electricity, and they don't have TVs, and they don't have phones, and they don't have, have any of these gadgetry, right? Electricity, they, it turns out, they sleep like six to seven hours a night.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  And they, and they don't nap. So this idea that natural human beings sleep eight hours a night is just, is just nonsense. It's just not true. And furthermore, when you start looking at the data, seven hours, if you actually look at, if you graph sort of how many hours a night you sleep on the X-axis, and sort of, you know, some outcome like cardiovascular disease, or just how likely you are to die, it's kind of a U-shaped curve. So people who don't get much sleep are in trouble. But the bottom of that curve is pretty much always about seven hours. So people actually do better if they sleep seven hours rather than eight hours. And yet we're told that if you don't sleep eight hours, there's something wrong, right?

• 10:04Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, so you can oversleep?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. I mean, there's also some complexity to this too, because of course, people who are ill might be sleeping more. And so there's some, there's some biases that creep into the, how you analyze the data. But, but basically, it turns out that seven is, for most people, optimal. But there's a lot of variation, right? You know, teenagers sleep more, older people sleep less. It's complicated.

• 10:24Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that are popular in culture as well is this idea of doing 10,000 steps a day.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, now that's fun. You know, that started because of a Japanese pedometer. So, but right before the, the Olympics were in Tokyo in the, in the 60s, they had invented the pedometer, and they were sitting in a boardroom, and they were discussing what to call the pedometer. And they picked, out of, just out of the blue, they picked 10,000 steps because that's apparently an auspicious number. And it sounded about right. There was no science behind it. Interestingly, it turns out, it's pretty good. If you act, if you look at, at steps per day... And health outcomes, your average hunter gather walks between 10,000 to 18,000 steps,

• 11:07Speaker 01

  depends on male, female, et cetera. And if you look at steps per day and outcomes, about around 7,000 to 8,000 steps, the curve kind of bottoms out, right? There's it doesn't seem to be a huge advantage to taking more than that per day in terms of, you know, large epidemiological studies. So it turns out to be not that bad a goal, but it's not a, there's no, it's not a perfect number like a lot of things, right? It's just a kind of a, it's a reasonable, it's a reasonable goal to shoot for.

• 11:38Steven Bartlett?

  When you, when you started writing this book about exercise and running and all these subject matters, was there any instant changes or any real lasting changes that you implemented into your own life from everything you'd learnt? I think about that all the time with this podcast. I'll have a guest on, I'll have these mini eureka moments and then something will stick. So I'm wondering, having studied all of these people all around the world and looked at their bodies and exercise and physical exertion, what have you taken into your own life that has stuck?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I would say that I've become more serious about doing some strength training. You know, I've always loved walking and running and, you know, endurance kinds of activities. And I've always sort of hated doing weights, you know, I just don't like it. And I'm a wimp, you know, I'm not a very well, I'm not a very strong person. And, you know, people tend to do what they like, right? You get reinforcement from it. And the more I study the importance of resistance training and the more I study the importance of doing weights, especially as you age, the more I've, the more I started kicking myself for, for being, being lazy about that. So now I try to do good two strength workouts out of every week at least, and take it more seriously. Because especially as you age, loss of muscle mass can be really

• 12:52Speaker 01

  debilitating. There's a, the technical term for that is sarcopenia. Sarcos is the Greek word for muscle and penea is loss or muscle loss. So as people get older, they tend to lose muscle. And when you do that, you become frail and you lose functional capacity. And then that starts off a vicious cycle, right? Once that happens, then you're less likely to be physically active. And then, of course, when you're less physically active, your muscles begin to waste away more and it's very debilitating. And so I think as we get older, and I'm getting older, it's more and more important, you know, to kind of incorporate that. So I think that's the one thing that I've, I've taken to heart.

• 13:29Steven Bartlett?

  From what you said there, it sounds like not doing resistance training, not lifting weights as you age, almost accelerates aging in any sort of superficial sense, but also in a physiological sense, you're increasing the speed of aging.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure if I'd think about it that way, but I think I'd kind of reverse it slightly, which is that aging is just the clock ticking on, right? There's nothing we can do about age, but senescence is the way our bodies degrade as we get older. And what physical activity does, effectively maybe the most important thing about physical activity, is that it slows senescence, especially for certain organs and systems. And there are different kinds of physical activities. So there's endurance physical activities, like running, walking, etc., swimming, and then strength or resistance physical activities. And they have different kinds of ways in which they slow various properties of senescence, which we colloquially call aging. And all of them are important.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  And I think one of the things that's really interesting about humans, in fact, I think it may be the most important thing about this book, and you asked about myths earlier, the most important myth, I think, by far, is this idea that as you get older, it's normal to be less active. And that is just not true. We evolved to be grandparents. We evolved to live... One of the things that's most interesting about humans, maybe, is that we evolved to live about 20 years or so after we stopped reproducing. No other animal does that, except orcas, maybe killer whales. But with the exception of killer whales, humans have this really weird life history. We evolved to be grandparents. But grandparents in the old days weren't retiring to Florida, or I don't know what they do in England or whatever, go to Mallorca or whatever, and kick up their heels and play golf or whatever with carts.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Grandparents in the olden days, or in many cultures still today, are working. They're working in the fields, they're hunting, they're gathering, they're getting food for their children and their grandchildren, they're helping with childcare, and that physical activity... Is, you know, that's what their job is to be physically active. But in turn, that physical activity turns on an amazing suite of physiological processes that counter aging. Turns on repair and maintenance processes that not only keep our muscles strong, but also keep our DNA from accruing mutations, keep our mitochondria numbers high, keep the cells in our brain from accumulating gunk so that prevents Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  I mean, for almost, for every system of the body, physical activity has benefits that slow the aging process. And so when you stop doing it, you accelerate, and that's the way in which you perceive it as accelerating aging. But really, it's the absence of physical activity which lets aging run amok.

• 16:11Steven Bartlett?

  In your first book in 2013, The Story of the Human Body, in chapter 12, you said, you use this phrase, use it or lose it, basically. We evolved to use or lose our bodies. And I was sat with someone recently, and I was trying to figure out why it appears that when people retire, or the other instance I've seen is when their elderly partner passes away, it appears as if they don't live much longer.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:36Steven Bartlett?

  It's kind of like folklore or something, that once you retire, your days are kind of numbered.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:43Steven Bartlett?

  And I was trying to figure out the evolutionary reason for that, but it sounds like it's kind of what you've explained there.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think part of that is depression, right? When you lose a partner, I mean, grief and depression, your cortisol levels go up, your immune system goes down, I mean, you know, it's really tough on your body. I mean, psychosocial stress plays a serious physiological toll. But, but also, as you just pointed out, when people retire, they become less active. And that, that loss of activity has enormous effects on every aspect of our, of our, of our body. I mean, and our, on our minds. I mean, physical activity is important not just for physical health, but also vital for mental health. And I think a lot of the problems that, a lot of mental health issues we have today,

• 17:29Speaker 01

  depression, anxiety, some of them, to some extent, we can attribute that to loss, to less physical activity. And as people age, becoming less physically active, again, makes them much more vulnerable to a wide suite of diseases.

• 17:44Steven Bartlett?

  So would you say we shouldn't retire?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Or if you do retire, I mean, retiring is, again, another modern weird thing, right? Nobody retired in the past. I mean, if you're a farmer, it's like a subsistence farmer in name it any place, right? It's not like suddenly you hit sixty-five and all of a sudden you no longer have to work in the fields. You work in the fields until you're, you know, until you're dead, right? And hunter-gatherers don't retire. They continue to be physically active until they die, right? Or until they get too sick. So it's a very modern Western concept, and yes, we do pay a price for it. But you, of course, can replace, you know, work that you do with challenging, rewarding, fun things to do. The important thing is just not to stop being physically active. One of my favorite studies ever published,

• 18:29Speaker 01

  without a doubt, is a study done by a guy named Ralph Paffenbarger. He realized that places like Harvard are fantastic for studying aging because Harvard, like other private universities, never lets go of their alumni. So until the day you die, they're asking you for money on a regular basis. And so he got the Alumni Association, the Harvard Development Office, to let him follow a series of Harvard alumni from several years and can keep asking them questions about their physical activity levels and also their diet and whether they smoked and stuff like that. And then he tracked them for twenty-five, thirty years. And what he found was that the alumni, we have to correct it for every

• 19:13Speaker 01

  factor you could think of, that as the alumni got older, the effect of physical activity on their health outcomes was bigger and bigger. So alumni who were in their twenties, thirties, and forties, for example, who were exercising, you know, four or five times a week, they had about twenty percent lower death rates. By the time they got to their sixties and seventies, the alumni who were exercising more had fifty percent lower death rates. So as you get older, so what, and this has been replicated again many times, but what he showed was that as you get older, exercise becomes more, not less, important for maintaining your health.

• 19:47Steven Bartlett?

  Been thinking a lot about this because I was saying to Jack, my dad is sixty-ish. He's very, very out of shape, very, very out of shape. And I was in Indonesia and I was with my girlfriend and we went and we were going whitewater rafting. So we had to go down this really big hill with all these stairs. It was like three hundred meters of stairs. And I remember just thinking, my dad wouldn't be able to do this at his age at sixty. And I want to be able to go down those stairs when I'm his age because at the bottom of there was a fun activity with someone I loved. And to think that I'll get to a point in my life where not so far away in the grand scheme of things, where I won't be able to go up or down some stairs because I'm sixty, because

• 20:29Steven Bartlett?

  of my sort of genetic predisposition, as I saw it, was quite sad. But having heard you say that, it really feels much more like a choice than it is genetics.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, we have this expression in my field, which is that genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger, right? Some of us have genetic predispositions towards being more likely to get diabetes or heart disease or this or that or the other. But our great, great, great grandparents in different environments weren't getting these diseases or they were getting them at much, much, much lower frequencies. It's not because they were dying earlier, it's because these diseases were less common. So I think we too often blame our genes for many of these diseases or many of these health problems. And I'm not in any way denying the role of genetics, but that environment is way more important and we have control over our environment to some extent.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  And so if you want to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, reduce your risk of diabetes, reduce your risk of Alzheimer's, dementia, exercise isn't a magic bullet. It's not going to prevent you from getting those diseases completely, but it lowers your risk quite substantially. And we know why too. I mean, we have an immense amount of data on why that's the case. For every single one of these diseases, we understand the mechanisms by which physical activity has important mechanistic effects on these diseases. So there's epidemiological data, there's mechanistic data, there's personal data. The problem is that it's hard to do, right?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  It takes willpower to overcome the inertia of doing what's completely normal, which is wanting to take it easy, right? I was just, you know, I just flew yesterday from Denver to Boston. And in the, in the, in the, in the airport, you know, there are these escalators right next to the stairway, right? And, and, and, and the escalator and the stair, it wasn't a huge stair. Everybody's lining up to take the escalator and like the stairs are totally free. So I, being me, of course, I can't, I'm not allowed to take the escalator unless, you know, I have to, right? So I run up the stairs, but you know, it's, but those people taking the escalator, there's nothing wrong with them. There's, they're not lazy. It's just an instinct, or it's an instinct to take, to take it easy when you can, right?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Because we, and we now live in a world where everybody can do that, right? Because we have escalators and, and lifts and cars and shopping carts and all these wonderful devices to make our lives easier. And now you have to overcome this fundamental, basic instinct to take it easy in order to be physically active. And that's basically what exercise is. And so, and furthermore, if you're out of, if you're unfit and you're not really, you know, exercising isn't any fun, right? It's, it's, it's, it's unpleasant. You, you know, you sweat and you get hot and you get cranky and, you know, and, and it's not that rewarding until you get fit. And so, uh, people hate it, right? And, and then we blame them for being lazy, but they're actually just being, they're just being normal.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  And I think we need to have more compassion towards, towards people who struggle to exercise.

• 23:33Steven Bartlett?

  This basic instinct to take it easy, are we evolved to be lazy, take escalator riders?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't use the word lazy, but we are evolved to take it easy, to, to rest whenever possible, right?

• 23:46Steven Bartlett?

  So we've now got ourselves into a bit of a comfort crisis here because everything has, in our lives is optimizing us for convenience and ease.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Right, right. And well, it's also, it's, it sells, right? I mean, comfort, I mean, I mean, who prefers to sit in economy as opposed to business class, right? Nobody, right? Comfort is nice, right? Who prefers shoes that are uncomfortable, right? We, we, we, you know, comforts, comforts, you know, we, we love comfort, right? But since when is comfort necessarily better for you, right? I mean, are comfortable shoes actually better for you than going barefoot? Or is comfortable chair is better for you than, or taking the, the lift better for you than taking the stairs?

• 24:20Steven Bartlett?

  It is in the short term, or at least it appears to be today.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Right, yes, because we often value the short-term benefit over the long-term cost, right? That's, you know, hyperbolic discounting is the technical term for that. But, but, um, so we, you know, we live in a world where, where we, we, you know, we pay extra for, for comfort or we, and we'll, we'll prefer it. But, um, but now we also live in a world where we have to now go out of our way. To be physically active because it's no longer necessary. And so again, I go back to my original statement, which is that people have all to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only, when it's necessary or rewarding. When we don't make it necessary, we need to figure out ways to make it rewarding. And, and that's hard. It's very hard.

• 24:59Steven Bartlett?

  Making it rewarding. So one way that you might make something rewarding is by looking at the stick. And then the other side is maybe the carrot. But just looking at the stick then, you were going through a series of diseases a second ago, Alzheimer's, um, high blood pressure, all of these kinds of things, cardiovascular diseases. I almost think we've come to assume that these are inevitabilities of life.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:20Steven Bartlett?

  We'll get cancer.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:21Steven Bartlett?

  One of us will get.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:22Steven Bartlett?

  Someone in here is going to get Alzheimer's. And that's the way we live. So we're, we're preparing to medicate when that day comes.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 25:28Steven Bartlett?

  I get, God forbid, diagnosed with something.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right. In fact, that's what medical students today are taught, right? If you go to medical school today, you're taught that as people get older, their blood pressure goes up. I can tell you that's just not true. It's in the Western world where people are physically inactive and eat crap diets that their blood pressure tends to go up. But there are plenty of people, I'm actually one of them, right? Who don't have high blood pressure as they age. And guess what's the best way to prevent getting high blood pressure as you age? It's, um, you know, it sounded like a broken record, but we have this idea that as you get older, yes, you're gonna, you're, and we're lucky, right? You know, because we don't die from smallpox when we're 30, we're lucky to get cancer when we're 60, right? What we've done is we've confused diseases that are more common with aging with age being a cause of those diseases in the first place.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And they're not inevitable, inevitable diseases. Um, and many of them are preventable. And, and the problem is that in our society, we, we don't value prevention very much. We, we may talk about it, but we don't really put our money where our mouth is, right? In the U S, which is arguably one of the worst healthcare systems, it is the worst healthcare system among the industrialized Western world. We spend approximately 3% of our budget, our medical budget on prevention. And yet, when people walk into a doctor's office, 75% of the time, the disease is according to the Center for Disease Control, a preventable disease. So we especially spend nothing. Prevent diseases that overwhelm our system and cause enormous amounts of misery.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  It's a completely backward, stupid system. And so, and, and the good news is it's not that hard to prevent a lot of these things. It takes well power and takes education and it takes access to, to good quality food and whatever. But, um, so, on the one hand, it's very depressing. On the other hand, the optimist in me says, you know, we really can do something. And people who, even if without, even if they're not wealthy or whatever, I mean, there are simple things that everybody can do to improve their health outcomes.

• 27:26Steven Bartlett?

  These diseases we, we encountered today as we age and just generally in our society. When you look at hunter gatherer, hunter gatherer communities, where you look at certain tribes around the world, maybe in Africa. Do you see the same, um, the same types of diseases in the same, um, occurrence, level of occurrence? Or is there some diseases which just don't like, I'm wondering if like, if, cause you know, cancer seems to be so popular for example, as a disease in outsiders and these kinds of things. So I wonder, has that always been the case throughout human history and is that the case in other parts of the world?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  That is such a good question. So first of all, some of these, some of these diseases are really hard to, to measure in non-Western populations. Because we don't have the diagnostic tools. So nobody really knows how common cancer is in, in, in a lot of parts of the world, right? There's just not, the data don't exist. That said, when you make estimates and you do look at the studies that are out there, and even if you're looking in, in historical records and in places like Europe where people have been keeping track of this. There is no question that cancer rates have been rising and that cancer rates are much, much more common in the Western world. There's a strong association between cancer and wealth. And that's because cancer is basically a disease of energy, right? When your cells, because cancer is basically natural selection gone awry in the body.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  It's when cells start competing with each other in ways that, that cause basically, and start, you know, going, you know, multiplying and dividing out of control, right? It's a kind of natural selection. And what is it that those cells are doing? They're competing for energy. And when you have more energy. Like when you're eating more and being less physically active, you can, you basically feed those cells. So, so cancer, high levels of insulin. Insulin is highly related to cancer. High insulin levels are carcinogenic. High levels of body, of energy, you cause women, for example, to increase the amount of estrogen and progesterone that they produce. Men produce more testosterone.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  These are, and these are, these are hormones that of course are for, good for reproduction. But they're, but again, we evolved, we evolved to be, to have as many babies as possible, right? But that doesn't mean that translates into health, right? So more estrogen, more progesterone increases risks of, say, breast cancer. More testosterone increases the risk of prostate cancer. So if you look at most diseases, right, people are more physically active. They have lower levels of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. They have lower levels of insulin. They have lower levels of blood sugar. All of these depress cancer rates. And on average, people who are physically active have much lower rates of almost every single kind of cancer that you can think of. Women who walk 150, you know, get 150 minutes of physical activity a week

• 30:09Speaker 01

  have on average about 30 to 50% lower lifetime breast cancer risks than people who are sedentary. And yet, for some reason, this is not a well-known fact. And we understand, we have, we have epidemiological data. We have mechanistic data. We understand how and why it works. And yet, and yet, how often do you hear about cancer prevention? We talk about treating cancer, which is all important. If I get cancer, I would like it treated too. Thank you very much. But why don't we spend more energy and activity and, and have more education about how to prevent cancers in the first place?

• 30:44Steven Bartlett?

  Physical activity, I mean, I've never had that before. So that's, that's really helped me to add more value to exercise in my mind. You're talking there about insulin levels and how that has, there's a link between your insulin levels and your chances of getting cancer. Sugar.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Glucose, inflammation. Bad.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, look, if you wanna, if you wanna take like the three things you should, you know, if you really care about your health, don't smoke, right? That's kind of obvious. I think everybody knows that. Get some exercise. I don't think you need me to tell you that, right? And, and cut down on sugar and foods that are high in sugar and low in fiber, right? That, you know, what we call high glycemic foods. Those are the foods that elevate your, your, your, your blood glucose levels, your, your insulin levels shoot up. And insulin, insulin, the basic function of insulin is, is, is, it's what we call an anabolic hormone. It's, its job is to, is to store energy. Glucose. Glucose, but also fat. Okay. All right. So insulin, what insulin does is to get energy into cells.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  So it's like a taxi. It's like an Uber. It's like a taxi, yeah. Well, I mean, it, it's not a taxi, it's like a, it's telling other cells to do that. So insulin, for example, binds to other cells that are the actual taxis. So it's like, it's like calling the Uber, I would say, maybe, right? And, and insulin is, is, you know, it's the fundam-- so when you, when you eat food, insulin levels go up because its job is to store that energy. And when you exercise, insulin levels go down because, because you wanna then use that energy, right? So, so, so when cells get more energy, they're more prone to going out of control, basically. And, and, and inflammation is caused by, basically by getting, you store so much fat in your cells that those fat cells start to swell.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And when those cells swell, like anything, right? They start to rupture, they get damaged. And that damage attracts the immune system, and the immune system gets turned on, and that causes inflammation. So, so too much adiposity, too much fats, you know, over swollen fat cells is the, is a primary cause of systemic inflammation. And inflammation is like the slow burn in our bodies that causes widespread damage to pretty much everything you can think of. And it turns out that, so the two ways to deal with inflammation are, one, to prevent it, right? So don't eat foods that are pro-inflammatory. Mike. Anything with a lot of sugar, basically, right? I mean, you know, the sugar is highly inflammatory. Or trans fats are highly inflammatory.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  But also, turns out, many people don't know this, but you also want to turn down your immune system, right? You want to turn the dial down. And I don't know, just give you one guess what it is that does that.

• 33:33Steven Bartlett?

  Exercise.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Exercise. And the way it does that is that when you're physically active, you're using your muscle cells. It turns out muscles are also an endocrine organ. Your muscles are producing a molecule called interleukin-6, IL-6, that in low levels is pro-inflammatory, but at high levels, it's actually anti-inflammatory. It turns down inflammation. And your muscles, because a third of your body is muscle, right? When you go for a run, or swim, or bike ride, or whatever, you're producing a ton of this stuff, and it turns down levels of inflammation. So people are physically active, even if they're overweight, are actually controlling and regulating their inflammation. We never evolved to regulate inflammation because, in this way, because we never evolved to be physically inactive.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Until recently, nobody was physically inactive, unless they were dying, right? So we never evolved an alternative mechanism to regulate our inflammation other than physical activity.

• 34:28Steven Bartlett?

  And we didn't live in a world with this much sugar?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  We never lived in a world... I mean, it's astonishing. You pay more money for foods today that have less sugar added, right? I mean, that's just ridiculous, right? Because it's so cheap. And sugar is, you know, we love, everybody loves sugar. I mean, I've gone hunting with hunter-gatherers, you know, foraging hunter-gatherers. And I can tell you that they're honey addicts, right? I mean, I've gone out with these guys, and they go from, you know, if they fail in their hunt, like by 10 or 11, if you haven't killed an animal, you know, that's it for the day, right? And then it turns from being a hunting expedition to a honey-collecting expedition. And they'll go from hive to hive to hive, get smoke, burn out the bees, and just gorge themselves on more honey than I could possibly imagine to eat.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Except, these are lean, physically active hunter-gatherers, and they handle it just fine. But it's, you know, it's the paleolithic equivalent of, you know, eating Mars bars all day long.

• 35:27Steven Bartlett?

  But they've been out doing physical activity for how long?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the average day is about 15 kilometers of walking with some running, yeah. So they're, you know, they can cope with it.

• 35:39Steven Bartlett?

  How many hours is that?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that's two to three hours, probably.

• 35:42Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so from there, I have gone it that I need to do fifteen kilometers a day for two or three hours every day.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Well, remember, it's not a prescription, right? So that's that kind of like the paleo fantasy, sort of naturalistic fantasy, that if you live like a hunter gatherer, somehow your world will be perfect, right? That's basically what the paleo diet is sort of all about, right? And that's not true either. Yes, you need to be physically active, but it turns out that a certain amount, if you're, any, any physical activity is better than none, right? And if you look at the kind of any curve of any output, any health, health, health, health outcome, like how many years you live, or whether you're likely to get cancer or heart disease or whatever, you know, any little physical activity, your curve starts to fall quickly, right? Your, your likelihood of cardiovascular disease starts, just, you know, a few minutes a day of exercise has big benefits.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  But eventually that curve flattens out, right? And it flattens out well before the hunter gatherer level. So you don't need to be a hunter gatherer in terms of physical activity to get the benefits.

• 36:44Steven Bartlett?

  This is a, I've asked a few people this question. I don't think everyone's, anyone's really answered it, but I suspect you might be able to. If, if you were responsible for redesigning the nature of our modern world to make it more matched and less mismatched, what are some of the first things you would do to help society benefit in terms of our happiness and our health?

• 37:10Steven Bartlett?

  I, I think about this all the time, because we, we, we don't seem to be turning around. We seem to be hurtling in a direction, kind of unconsciously, towards artificial intelligence and moving less and being more sedentary and taking pills more to fix everything, lonelier than ever before. And I go, you know, if we were to redesign it, blank canvas, piece of paper.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  It's a tough question because we've essentially given ourselves what we want. Right? I can go into a supermarket and, I mean, I can do something that's unimaginable until recently. I can have, I can have basically anything. I can eat better than the king of France, you know, a few generations ago. I can, I can, I mean, here, I can, New York, there's like every cuisine possibly available to me. I don't ever have to climb the stairs. I can take elevators. I mean, we've, we've, we've made our world so convenient and comfortable. And yet there are consequences to many of the things that we crave and want.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  So in an ideal world, you don't wanna, you don't wanna, I mean, you have to, you have to honor and respect people's desires, right? I'm not a, I don't believe in, in, in preventing people from taking the elevator, right? Or, or forcing them to, you know, eat, eat whole grain bread as opposed to white bread, right?

• 38:38Steven Bartlett?

  But if you banned white bread and you banned elevators, other than for those people that need it for accessibility reasons, et cetera.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  They would do better.

• 38:45Steven Bartlett?

  Over the long term, they'd be healthier and happier.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  They would, right. So it's really a balancing act between, between

• 38:55Speaker 01

  respecting people's liberties and choices and educating them and helping them. So in my world, I would, I would do more to nudge people, right? I would, instead of banning sugar, I would tax it more. Instead of pushing all kinds of foods on people, I would push, I mean, why don't we, why don't we advertise healthy foods the way we advertise unhealthy foods, right? I mean, when's the last time you saw an ad for just how amazingly healthy asparagus was, right?

• 39:31Steven Bartlett?

  But that doesn't get the part of my brain. Going, does it?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't, but um, but we could do more to to nudge and encourage and help people, right? You don't have to like ban sugar in cookies, right? The way some people, but but but simply promote um and help people help themselves, right? Most people want to eat healthier food. Most people want to exercise, um, but they live in a world where it's hard to do it, and they live in a world where um there are very few incentives. I would make it such that healthy food would be as as inexpensive as as unhealthy food and make sure that that people had incentives and and make it also fun to be physically active. Like, for example, um, every, I mean, who doesn't like to dance, right? Every culture in the world has dancing, right?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Dancing is a form of of of physical activity. It's social, it's fun, it's engaging. Why don't we have, uh, why doesn't every every town in America sponsor dancing, right? Um, you know, it would probably do an enormous amount for people's physical health and their mental health. I mean, we could do that. I mean, that's just one example, right? So I would, I would, um, I would, I would, and and why is it that in medical schools, doctors don't learn about, they don't, they don't study nutrition and they don't don't study exercise and they don't learn, um, because that's because in our medical system is designed to treat people after they get sick rather than prevent people from getting sick. So so we need to, you know, reverse how we fund healthcare, right?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  And so schools of public health are these kind of little marginalized places where, you know, where where great ideas go to die, right? And and medical school is where all the money is, right? And doctors aren't taught to to to to, I mean, their entire fields of medicine that don't have the word preventive associated with them. I mean, you ever heard of preventive orthodontics or preventive, you know, optometry or prevent, you know, the preventive orthopedics? I mean, it just doesn't exist, right? So we we could do a lot more um and and have enormous benefits.

• 41:31Steven Bartlett?

  Chapter 11 of this book, you talk about someone who has taken their own approach to getting people moving and exercising um in their own business.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  That's the Bjorn Borg Company. I love that.

• 41:43Steven Bartlett?

  Bjorn Borg Company. Can you tell me about that?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was, um, so I was, I was curious about this idea of how to get, how to help people be more physically active, right? And again,

• 41:54Speaker 01

  You know, my fundamental hypothesis is that we evolved to be physically active either when it's necessary or rewarding. And so I was curious if there was any companies in the world that have made physical activity necessary. In other words, what if we forced people to be physically active? And I found one so far. I think there's only one company in the world that I know of. Maybe there's some others, but this is the only one I've ever found so far. And it's the Bjorn Borg Sports Company in Sweden, where the CEO of the company is this crazy sort of exercise addict. And he requires every member of the company to exercise. They have Sports Hour every Friday, 11 o'clock. So I actually, when I was searching around and I was thinking, you know, working on

• 42:35Speaker 01

  the book, I actually, I got, I found an article about them and I clicked on the company website. And you know how most companies have a little contact us? So I clicked on the contact us and I wrote a little note saying, you know, dear Bjorn Borg Company, I'm a researcher and evolutionary biologist. I'm interested in exercise and I'm fascinated by how your company requires people to exercise. Can I learn more? And the next morning, there was an email from the CEO of the company saying, why don't you come and visit us? So I hopped on a plane a few months later, went to Sweden and they let me, he was so nice. He just let me just go anywhere in the company. And I went to Sports Hour and I talked to employees throughout the company. And it was fascinating.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of the employees of the company, first of all, a bunch of people apparently left the company when he took over as CEO and required this. But it doesn't matter who you are. You could be working in the mailroom, you could be the CEO, you could be a visiting board member. Whoever you are, if you're there on Friday, you have to go exercise with them. And they have this pretty serious kind of exercise thing. And apparently some people quit. But, but, but pretty much everybody else said, you know, it's actually a pretty damn good thing. Do you agree with that approach? Well, yes and no. Every university in the world used to require, and every school, right, supposedly requires exercise, right? I'm sure you had physical exercise, you know, some kind of phys ed required in your school.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Those standards are slipping around the world and more and more kids are doing less and less in school. Universities are no exception. It used to be that all universities required some degree of physical education. Mine was no exception. In fact, Harvard was a leader in that back in the, you know, a hundred and something years ago. And over the, since basically the nineteen seventies, that's basically disappeared. Although most students, if you ask them, they think, yeah, that's actually a pretty good idea. So, I don't know, maybe we can bring back exercise as a, and, and the thing is that if you get used to it, right? When you're young, you're more likely to do it when you're older, right? Cause you set, those are the, that's the age in which your habits become, become, well, your habits become your habits, right?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  And so there's a certain age where, where if you can keep, keep, yes, get that, making it, make it a habit, you're probably more likely to continue doing it for the rest of your life.

• 44:56Steven Bartlett?

  We kind of see it as overreach, don't we? I was thinking about if I was to announce one of my companies that everyone is now required to exercise. It would seem like, like tremendous overreach. If I announced that everyone is required to read a certain book, they'd do it and it'd be fine. And it might be seen as a positive thing, right? It might be a representation of our values, that we are learners and we're innovators and we keep, you know, nourishing our brains. But if you turn around to your team and said, listen, we're all required to, you're all required to go for a run every day or something. People would, it just feels personal.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:26Steven Bartlett?

  Like that's not the responsibility of an organization to tell me to go exercise.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  But we have, we have company, you know, retreats. I mean, we do all kinds of stuff where people are required to do it. So, I don't know, I challenge you, try it.

• 45:38Steven Bartlett?

  What we do and what we've always done, we even do it with this team, the Diver CEO team is about thirty people. So we have a fitness channel in the company Slack channel, the communication channel that we use. And in that channel, and we did this at my previous company as well, where we would enable and facilitate. So we, we, someone started a women's football team, so we enabled it and promoted it. Someone started a men's football team, so we enabled it and promoted it. And this, this also applies to non-physical sort of exercise-related clubs. Like someone starts the reading, reading club and we enabled it and promoted it. And we also paid for it. If they need to, if they need new kits, for example, when the women's football team needed, wanted to have their own uniforms, we paid for it.

• 46:19Steven Bartlett?

  Because we saw a huge value in terms of staff retention, connection, community and all those things that actually lead up to staff retention. If we could have more social clubs outside of the office. You know, if you're thinking about leaving a job, there's a number of things you weigh up. The pay, the job, whatever, but you also weigh up how the community, like the group of people I love and how much they bring to my life. And I actually think in the remote working world, it's something that CEOs and leaders have really not paid enough attention to, that if they really want to retain their team members, they should have them together as much as they can, even outside of the office, bonding. In a world where screens are on the rise and pubs are on the decline and social activities and churches are on the decline, there's less sort of institutions that connect us socially.

• 47:04Steven Bartlett?

  Work has a big opportunity to do that. So one of my big things always in my head is like, how can I get the team members of my companies to hang out more? And a multiplier to that is how can I get them to hang out more and move their bodies more? Cause then they'll feel better.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Right, well, well, think about it, it's play, right?

• 47:20Steven Bartlett?

  Play, yeah, exactly.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And I mean, and play is what is another thing we evolved to do, right? What kids play, and we're one of the few species that plays as adults, right? And what is play? Play is a way in which you you you learn cooperation, you you you build community, but you also move your body, right?

• 47:39Steven Bartlett?

  In the first chapter of your book, you say that you went to visit the Native American tribe, and I'm going to try and perhaps pronounce this, the Tarahumara.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Tarahumara.

• 47:47Steven Bartlett?

  And they're famous for their long running.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:50Steven Bartlett?

  What did you learn about running from them?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's, you know, they have been famous for well over a hundred years. I mean, many people have gone to study the Tarahumara and have commented on their amazing ability to run. But what I really learned from them is that for them, physical activity is spiritual. You know, there's this book Born to Run that that describes their their running and calls them a hidden tribe of super athletes. They're not hidden and they're not super athletes. And and the one thing that the book missed was that the the main impetus for the for their for the running, they do these famous long distance races, is that it's a form of prayer. It's really very beautiful and and it's a it's a metaphor for for life.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  And and and it's also an opportunity to bet in sports and all that. It's all wrapped into one. And and what I've learned was that this actually used to be. Almost universal among Native American populations, right, Native American tribes. Everybody had long distance races and ballgames and they were all had a spiritual element. It's just that they've they've retained their traditions because they're in a very remote part of of Mexico that's essentially inaccessible. We all used to do this, all humans used to do this. And in fact, if you think, if you look around the world, every population has this tradition of endurance, endurance events.

• 49:16Steven Bartlett?

  Some of the subject matter you talk about in your book, but also outside of your book is is how we used to run in terms of, you know, I was at the foot doctor. What's it called? I don't know what they're called.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Podiatrist.

• 49:29Steven Bartlett?

  That's what I said, but podiatrist. What did I say? But I went to the podiatrist the other day because I I got this, what's it called when you're going to point at on my foot? This part of my foot here started to get lots of pain.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Plantar fasciitis.

• 49:44Steven Bartlett?

  That's it. Plantar fasciitis. I started to get some plantar fasciitis.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Nice to find.

• 49:49Steven Bartlett?

  And it was just this ongoing pain and they prescribed me some insoles. I stood on a couple of machines, some soft stuff and they measured my foot and took this scan of it and said, right, basically you're standing wrong. Your arch is a bit too flat. Take these insoles and wear them in all of your shoes. And I just, I always think in these moments when someone prescribes me something that's not natural, I go, why? Like, where did I go wrong? And I think that's the key question. Where did I go wrong? Who lied to me? To the point now that at 30 years old, I have these bloody insoles that I have to put in all my shoes because presumably that's not natural. Presumably my my ancestors don't have bloody insoles.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So plantar fasciitis is what I would call a mismatched disease, right? A disease that's more common or more severe because our bodies are inadequately adapted to modern environments. And in your case, and as is the case with a lot of people, you have a weak foot. So so we, you know, you you look like you go to the gym, looks like you're a pretty fit person, right? I'll make a bet you you strengthen pretty much every muscle. Group in your body except your feet, right?

• 51:00Steven Bartlett?

  No comment.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Right. Well, but we don't, right? And one of the reasons is because we we encase our feet in stiff-soled shoes that are very comfortable. And and the reason the shoes are comfortable is that your your foot muscles have to do less work when you're using those shoes, right? We have shoes that are stiff soles, they have arch supports, right? And your your foot has four layers of muscles in them. And those muscles are supporting your arch. And at the bottom of those four layers of muscles is this layer of connective tissue, the plantar fascia. And the problem with plantar fascia is that if it stretches too much, it, like anything else, right? It gets inflamed. But it's got almost no vascularization, right? So it's very hard for it to repair itself when it gets inflamed. To prevent plantar fasciitis, the best way to preventing it is having a strong foot. A strong foot's a healthy foot.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  So the way to way to treat the disease on the long term is to strengthen your foot. But if you want to just alleviate the symptoms, that's what your podiatrist did. By giving you an insole, right? It's basically preventing your muscle, your arch from collapsing as much, making it more comfortable. So your your plantar fascia gets stressed less. And so it can kind of alleviates that that that that stretching and hence the pain, right? So that's a typical example of what I call dis-evolution. It's what what happens when you treat the symptoms of a mismatched disease rather than their causes or preventing their causes. So podiatrists are a bit like drug pushers in that sense, right? Because they're they're essentially putting your foot in a cast, right?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  And then and for the rest of your life, you kind of have to keep using them unless you strengthen your feet. So I so so there's nothing wrong with those, you know, treating the symptoms. I mean, pain is no fun. So wear the insoles, right, to kind of, you know, alleviate the pain, but also work on strengthening your foot. And I think you'll find that the plantar fasciitis will will disappear and never come back.

• 52:48Steven Bartlett?

  So the plantar fasciitis fasciitis has now healed?

• 52:55Steven Bartlett?

  After about a month of wearing the insole, I no longer have the insoles with me here in New York and I don't have them in any of my shoes because I've also taken a bit of time off running on my feet. I was playing a lot of football. So now I'm at a point where I can go to the preventable stage, prevent it happening again. And you said to strengthen my foot. How does one strengthen their foot?

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Good question. So there are some exercises. They're kind of foot doming exercises and things like that. You know, I can send you some links to videos showing you some good foot strengthening exercises. So that's one way to do it. But the other way is to wear more minimal shoes, to wear shoes that aren't stiff soled, that don't have arch supports, go barefoot a lot, right? And that will naturally strengthen the muscles in your foot because you'll have to use those muscles. So you ever gone for like a long walk or run on a beach, right? And afterwards, your feet are kind of tired, right? The reason your feet are tired is because you're now walking on a compliant surface, right? It's not stiff. So your muscles are having to work more to stiffen your foot, to push you forward, right?

• 53:56Steven Bartlett?

  Jack, could you go grab the black shoe out of my bag? I just want to show him something.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  So, so wearing shoes that aren't, has stiff soled, where they don't have arch supports, will slowly strengthen your feet. But, and this is a huge but, if you do too much, too fast, you will, your plantar fasciitis will come roaring back and you'll hate me. You'll be like, you'll never forgive me because, yeah, there's Aviva Barefoot's. Yeah, I wear the same shoes.

• 54:20Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, you've got the same shoes on?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Great shoes, yeah. Those are wonderful shoes. Those are, those are, those are exactly the kind of shoes that will help strengthen your feet.

• 54:29Steven Bartlett?

  These are fairly a new addition in my life. Yeah, they, and they feel really strange because you can kind of feel the floor.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:34Steven Bartlett?

  It's exactly what you've described is.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but you can transition. If you have weak feet, which I'm guessing you do, if you go, if you suddenly, if that's the only shoe you wear all the time, you'll probably regret it, right? So, so slowly, slowly, slowly increase the percentage of time that, just like anything else. If you, if you like suddenly decide to lift, you know, huge weights that you can't lift before, you'll hurt yourself, right? The same thing is with your feet. So, so slowly it does it. But if you do it gradually and slowly and carefully, you can build up strength in your foot and, and you'll. And you'll be a happier happier person.

• 55:08Steven Bartlett?

  And this is this goes back to everything else you've said about how choosing comfort, choosing to have a nice supportive shoe has actually just kind of deferred a problem off into the future for me. It's the same with diets, the same with avoiding exercise and being sedentary and and all these other things where when you choose the easy road in the short term, which is this wonderful cushioned shoe I've chosen, the muscle hasn't built up in my foot and I've paid the price.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 55:30Steven Bartlett?

  So I need to, again, choose discomfort more in the short term, go up the stairs, run barefoot to avoid the late the consequences later down the line.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think you have to run barefoot, but though it can be fun. But but yeah, I mean, and I can think of plenty of other examples.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  We love comfort, but comfort's not necessarily good for us.

• 55:52Steven Bartlett?

  When you when you look at these tribes, are they do you know who Liver King is? Huge, massive muscles, talks about ancestral living. What do our hunter gatherer ancestors look like in terms of their?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Not like him.

• 56:06Steven Bartlett?

  No?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  I mean, look, think about it, muscle is really expensive, right? It's actually a super expensive tissue. About a third of our body's muscle and it's using up about about, you know, a fifth or more of the calories that we're expending, right? Just just sitting there, not even using them, right? They're they're very costly tissues, right? And so if you have more muscle than you need, you're basically adding to your your cost of of living, right? And if you're and if you're a hunter gatherer or even a subsistence farmer, living on the margin of food security, having more muscle than you need is actually deleterious, right? Remember, the only thing that natural selection cares about is how many offspring you have who survive and reproduce. It doesn't care if you're strong or healthy or nice or loved or, you know, fun or whatever.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  It only cares about whether you have grandchildren. That's it, right? That's the cold calculus of selection.

• 56:58Steven Bartlett?

  My brain is going, if I have big muscles, I'll have more romantic opportunities than I'll have grandchildren.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Well, only up to a certain point, right? So if more muscles, if if they attract the opposite sex and and make them want to reproduce with you, yes, that could be a benefit. I'm not so sure how much women are attracted to the Liver King, but and that's not something I even want to know the answer to, but and certainly shouldn't ask him. But but but there's a reason we have use it or lose it, which you mentioned earlier, right? When we need, when we increase our demand, we increase our capacity, right? When you go to the gym and you work out, right? You build muscle, but if you stop using those muscles, you lose it. And that's an adaptation, right? Because you don't want to spend extra energy on muscles you're not using, right? So you want enough, but not too much. You want to be economical with muscle mass, right?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  And so if you look at the data from hunter-gatherers, and people have done that. They've done grip strength tests, et cetera, and all kinds of other fun things with, like mini Olympics. And we've done this too. People are reasonably strong, but they're not super strong. And they're not, they're not buff and built and bulked and all that sort of stuff. They've got enough muscle to do what they need to do, but no more.

• 58:10Steven Bartlett?

  And the reason why people find muscle attractive anyway is because it's this evolutionary signal, isn't it? Of reproductive value and resources, maybe, and the ability to go out and, you know what I mean? Why, why does, why does a woman, for example, find a man with muscles or in good shape attractive in 2023? When we're not hunting for gazelle?

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not a psychologist or, or, so I'm not sure if I am qualified to answer that. But I could, I could venture the guess that obviously if you're trying to, if, you know, we pair bond as a species. And we have been for, for millions of years, probably. You want to pair bond with somebody who's going to, because we also have of cooperation and food sharing, right? You want to pair bond with somebody who's going to be able to, you know, bring home the bacon, literally and figuratively, right? But, but bringing home the bacon does not mean looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger, at least back in the day. Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the day, right? Being, bringing home the bacon back in the day meant being a persistence hunter, being able to run long distances and being moderately strong. So they looked more like a marathoner or, or a football player than they did a, a weightlifter, right?

• 59:16Steven Bartlett?

  So it's conceivable, it's conceivable that someone who is really, really big is actually.

• 59:23Steven Bartlett?

  Less attractive because they wouldn't have been able to hunt and run and hunt as well as someone who was a little bit.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you also have to, you have to feed more, you have to feed them more too.

• 59:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  And that's a, you know, those are precious calories. So I'm going to guess that, uh, look, if you look in, in, in non-Western populations, uh, you don't see physiques like that. This is a, this is a privilege of people who are able to go to gyms and, um, and you know, eat, you know, you know, way powder shakes and all that kind of stuff to kind of build their crazy muscle mass. But it's not something that our ancestors were able to do on a regular basis, that's for sure.

• 1:00:00Steven Bartlett?

  There's another myth that you bust, which I thought was really interesting because I think, I know a lot of people that have used this as a reason not to run. They say it's really bad for your knees.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that gets me so mad, right? I mean, I hear this from doctors all the time, right? Oh, yeah, running is bad for your knees. Now, it is true that knee injuries are the most common running injuries. Um, but arthritis, which is really what they're usually talking about, um, it's absolutely definitively not true that running increases rates of knee cartilage damage and arthritis. So arthritis is caused by cartilage wearing away in a joint, right? And it's, it's a, it's a myth that, that running actually increases cartilage damage. If you have arthritis, running is excruciating and problematic. But if you don't have it, running actually, uh, if anything, may be slightly preventive. Um,

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  because cartilage joints, like everything else, benefits from being used, right? And so physical activity actually helps promote strong and healthy joints. We used to think that it just caused them to wear away, but actually, you know, like cars, you know, wearing away at their tires. But now we know that actually physical activity promotes, um, repair mechanisms in cartilage, just as it does in other tissues in the body. And, um, and of course, the other thing about running is that I think a lot of people run incorrectly today. So, uh, so that's why we started studying barefoot running millions, you know, along to a few, a bunch of few decades ago is because if humans have been running for millions of years, most of that time we were running barefoot. So I'm kind of curious, how did people run before shoes? And what we learned was that today shoes have these cushioned heels.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  That enable you to essentially run the way you walk, right? You land on your heel. And everybody who's barefoot sometimes lands on their heel. But people who are barefoot often, more often than not, land on the ball of their foot and then they let their heel down. It's called a forefoot strike or a midfoot strike. And when you do that, we worked out the biomechanics of that and published a paper in the cover of Nature, showing that when you do that, you actually prevent your foot from crashing into the ground, causing what's called an impact peak, a collisional force. You run lightly and gently. So if you were to take your shoes off and run up Lexington Avenue here, I guarantee you, you would not be landing on your heels. Within a few steps, you'd start landing on the ball of your foot because it hurts less. And so that's how we evolved to run.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  We evolved to run in a cushion, in a way that that doesn't involve, you know, slamming into the ground with every step. And that that causes less force around your knee. The trade off though, because nothing comes for free, everything has trade offs, is that it's harder on your ankles. Your calf muscles and your Achilles have to do now a lot more work to let your heel down. And so people who switch from heel striking to forefoot striking often have Achilles tendon problems, they get calf muscle problems. If they don't do it properly, they'll get, if their foot muscles aren't strong enough, they'll get all kinds of foot problems, right? So you can't just suddenly become a barefoot runner and start forefoot striking. If you're going to switch, you have to switch gradually and slowly and build up strength and learn to do it properly.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Another thing people do is they tend to run like a ballerina, high up on their toes. That's really hard on your ankles and your calves. So you've got to do it properly, but if you, but it can have enormous benefits. And so, and we know, again, if you run that way, that puts much less force on your knees. And again, knees are where people get injured the most. So I think a lot of knee injuries come from, um, um, from the way in which we run.

• 1:03:31Steven Bartlett?

  So would you recommend, if you can, to run more barefoot? Especially if you have those kinds of shoes we just discussed?

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think what matters is how you run, not what's on your feet. So I would say a barefoot style.

• 1:03:45Steven Bartlett?

  How do I learn to run in a new way, though?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's some tricks. So one of them is, first of all, I don't know how you run. So maybe, maybe you already run just fine. But a barefoot style tends to be a high stride rate or high stride frequency. So 90 strides per minute or 180 steps per minute, roughly.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  You know, 170 to 180 steps a minute is about right. Relatively short strides, so you're not throwing your leg out. And to me, the most important thing is not what we call overstriding. If you ask any coach on the planet, they'll say overstriding is bad. Overstride is when you throw your leg out way in front of you and you land. And that leg is a stiff leg. So a stiff leg means more force, right? And it's harder on your knees. And so a good runner lands with their shank, with their tibia vertical. So their ankle is below their knee. When you do that, pretty much everything will work out properly. It'll mean that you won't land hard on your heel.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  It'll mean that your leg will be acting like an excellent spring. You will produce a lot of braking force.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  To me, I think the most important skill in running is not to overstride. And so I actually tell them, so don't worry about how you're going to hit the ground. Just worry about your overstride. If you solve your overstride, you're more likely to run well.

• 1:05:13Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think, what's the best kind of cardiovascular exercise for the promotion of good health? Because I've been doing some CrossFit stuff. I've been doing some HIIT workouts.

• 1:05:25Steven Bartlett?

  I've been trying not to run because I've had a few injuries. I'm trying not to run as much because it seems to be a little bit more impact than if I'm bullshitting myself there. But so I've been doing some like HIIT workouts for 30 minutes a day when I leave here.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Well, you do HIIT works every single day.

• 1:05:40Steven Bartlett?

  Pretty much every day at the moment. We track it with a group of friends we have. There's 10 of us in a WhatsApp group. Whoever's last, whoever does the least workouts every month is evicted. And there's a raffle. So there's a raffle yesterday on the first, was it the first yesterday? Yeah, for a new member. And we do that every month and we've done it for three and a half years.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:05:58Steven Bartlett?

  I've been in there, I was the first ever member, so I've been in there for three and a half years.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, I mean, the most, the best exercise, the one you like doing.

• 1:06:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is there one that's like better, you know, like the?

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  You know, I think you've got to mix it up. There is no one perfect exercise, right? I mean, I think what you do sounds actually pretty good, right? You've got a mixture of, of, of, you know, low, slow intensity, some, some high intensity. You want to have some strength training, you want to have some cardio. I mean, we never evolved to do one thing and our bodies are too complex to benefit from just one thing. Mixing it up is, is the obvious way to go, right? I think the bedrock for any kind of physical, I mean, you ask anybody, right? Cardio is the bedrock of, of, of, of, of exercise, right? It promotes the most health benefits, right? It's good for your, good, you know, your burning energy, it's good for your cardiovascular system.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  It's good for controlling inflammation, but, but, but there are different kinds of cardio in high intensity versus low intensity. And there's also strength training, right? Which is also, you know, important. So, you know, there's no, yeah, look, we've tried to medicalize exercise, right? It's like, like there's a proper dose, right? You know, take this pill, this many milligrams, this many times per week, right? Exercise, it doesn't work that way. There is no, there is no optimal dose. Everybody's different. It depends on, are you more worried about heart disease or Alzheimer's or diabetes or depression or, you know, are you previously injured? Are you fit? Are you unfit?

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  There, it's impossible to prescribe exercise in this kind of medicalized way. It doesn't work.

• 1:07:35Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people exercise because they believe it will help them to lose fat.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Ah, one of the biggest debates on the planet.

• 1:07:42Steven Bartlett?

  It, it has been a huge debate, even on this podcast, I've had multiple people come and say a whole range of things about weight loss and cardio. And I'm kind of, I don't know what to believe anymore.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Well, anybody who isn't confused doesn't understand what's going on, right? You know, it's, um, it's sad that it's such a debate, but, um, but that's how science works, right? So, um, as you know, I wrote about that in this book.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Part of the explanation for the debate is that, again, what dose are you analyzing and what population, in what kind of context, right? So, pretty much every major health organization in the world recommends that you get 150 minutes per week of physical activity. That's kind of like the benchmark. That's what the WHO, the World Health Organization, considers the division between being sedentary versus active. So, and a lot of people who are unfit and overweight and struggling to be physically active have struggled to get 150 minutes a week, right? So, a lot of studies prescribe 150 minutes a week of exercise, walking, for example, a moderate intensity of physical activity,

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  and then look at its effects on weight loss. And guess what? When you walk 150 minutes a week, which is what, 20 minutes a day of walking, which is about a mile, a mile a day, you're not going to lose much weight. You're basically burning about 50 calories a day doing that, right? That's a piddling amount of calories compared to drinking a glass of orange juice, right? So, surprise, surprise, those kinds of studies show that those doses of physical activity are not very effective for weight loss. However, plenty of rigorous, controlled studies that look at higher doses of physical activity, 300 minutes a week or more, find that they are effective for helping people lose weight, but not fast and not large quantities.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  So, you're never going to lose a lot of weight really fast by exercising. It's just not going to happen. Because, you know, a cheeseburger has what, you know, 800, 900 calories. You have to run, you know, 15 kilometers to lose that, to burn the same number of calories. You're going to be hungry afterwards, too, so you're going to make some of that back. You have compensation. So, physical activity is actually, there's just no way around it. You have to be a flat-earther not to argue this way. But, you know, physical activity can help you lose weight, but it's not going to help you lose a lot of weight fast and not at the low doses that often are prescribed. But, the one thing that we do agree on, and I think this would not be controversial, is that physical activity is really important for helping people prevent

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Themselves from gaining weight or after a diet from regaining weight. And there are many, many studies which show this. One of my favorite was a study that was done in Boston on policemen. You know policemen are kind of have a reputation for, you know, having too many donuts and being overweight. Right. And Boston is no exception. So they did this great study at Boston University, right across this off across the river. Where they got a bunch of policemen on a diet, really severe diet. The policemen all lost weight, but some of the policemen were had to diet and exercise. Some just dieted alone. And as you might imagine, the ones who dieted plus exercise, lost a little bit more weight. Not a lot, just a little. But and then they tracked them for months afterwards. Because most people after a diet, the weight comes just crashing back.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  The policemen who's kept exercising even after the diet was over and they went back to eating whatever the hell they wanted. Donuts, whatever. They're the ones who kept the weight off. But the ones who didn't exercise, the weight came crashing back. Another good example would be the, have you ever seen the TV show The Biggest Loser?

• 1:11:24Steven Bartlett?

  Uh, yes, where they, where people go on and lose weight.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that, so there's crazy show, right? These people, you know, this is like totally unhealthy. They were confined to a ranch in Malibu and these guy, these people lost ridiculous amounts of weight. Guy named Kevin Hall at the National Institute of Health studied them for, for, for years afterwards and looked at. And most of them regained a lot of the weight that they lost. And there was one person on the show who did not. And that was the person who kept exercising. And that's, you know, just yet more, we said one data point. But there's lots and lots of evidence to show that physical activity, what its other important benefit when it comes to weight is, is preventing weight gain or weight regain. We talk about dieting, we talk about exercise or diet, exercise or diet. Like, why is it an or? I mean, why isn't it exercise and diet?

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  Diet is of course the bedrock for weight loss. But exercise also plays an important role and should be part of the mix.

• 1:12:16Steven Bartlett?

  On the police example and the Biggest Loser example, I. Can relate in the sense that when I exercise, when I go through the moments of my life where I'm most committed to exercise, I'm also most committed to my diet.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Steven Bartlett?

  Because I, if I go to the gym, I will not then leave the gym and have a donut or a pizza. Absolutely not. It seems like wasting the effort. So if you look at the sort of correlation between the moments in my life where I eat healthiest, they're also the moments in my life where I'm most focused on the gym. And I noticed there was a couple of months ago, I had a bit of a motivation slump. Managed to stay in our little WhatsApp group, but coasted down the bottom of the leaderboard for a couple of months on a, just like surviving every month by one.

• 1:13:02Steven Bartlett?

  And through those moments, my motivation in the gym had gone down and my diet had gone down. The minute I managed to get in the gym and do a big workout, the same day, my diet came back.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Right. And they co vary, right? And, and that's one of the reasons why when people do big studies of, of, you know, what, you know, you can look at what, what, what people die of, right? What's on the death certificate, you know, cancer, heart disease, whatever, heart attack. And then you look at what caused the cancer, what caused our disease. When people try to do that, it's almost impossible to separate diet and exercise because people who tend to eat better also tend to exercise more. They're both in our modern upside down, chop suey, terry world. They're both markers of privilege. People have money to go to the gym, also have money to buy healthy foods. And, and people who care about their physical activity also tend to care about their diet. So, so at that level, they're very hard to separate.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  However, if you're studying a particular component of a system in a randomized controls trial in a lab, you can separate them out. And so we know that they have independent and also interactive effects.

• 1:14:13Steven Bartlett?

  What is the, the most important thing we haven't talked about, Daniel?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  I think the most important thing is that we need to be compassionate towards each other. I mean, there's so much shaming and blaming and prescriptions and, you know, you know, the reason I entitled the book exercised is that people, we make people feel exercised about exercise. We make them feel. Uncomfortable and unconfident and shamed and, and you know, you and I are having this conversation, but I can tell that you you take, you know, you're, I mean, I know I've listened to enough of your podcasts, you care about your, your health and you care about diet, you care about exercise, and people may look at you and think, gosh, I wish I was like him, but it's just not me, you know, I can't, I'm not, I'm not there,

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  right? And they may feel put off by our conversation. And I think that so often, these discussions make people feel, feel bad about, about what they're doing. And I, and I, and I, and I think that what we need to emphasize is that if you put a, you know, if you put a chocolate cake and an apple in front of me here, I would want to eat the chocolate cake. And it would, I might eat the apple only because you're there. But if you weren't there, I would eat the chocolate cake, right? And, and when I'm in the, in the, in my building at, at Harvard, my office is on the fifth floor of this old Victorian building, every single day, I want to take the elevator. And the only reason I take the stairs is that if anybody catches me in the elevator, I'll be a hypocrite. It's not that I don't want to take the elevator. I do want to take the elevator, right? I guess you guys say

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  lift, right? And, and, and we make people feel bad for taking the elevator, right? They shouldn't feel bad. It's an instinct. And so I think we have to figure out ways to help people without shaming them and without blaming them and without bragging and whatever, you know, you know, talking about, you know, the marathon they ran, or this, that, or the other, make them feel less uncomfortable about the topic and realize that you don't have to swim the English Channel, or run a marathon, or, you know, join your WhatsApp group and do crazy HIIT workouts every day. By the way, you don't need to do HIIT workouts every day to get the benefit. Instead, just, you know, taking the stairs in your building every day. Anything is better than nothing, and, and you'll get benefits

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  from that. And I hope that that's the message that needs to get out, right? Anything is better than nothing. And if you can get started on that, on that, on that pathway, then it'll, it'll eventually become self rewarding. And that, and that leads me to the other topic that we didn't talk about, which is that the reward system of physical activity. You know, you and I, if we go for, like, I'm, I'm really looking forward to my run tomorrow morning in the park. I love running Central Park. It's one of the best places in the world to run, right? Fantastic view from the top, and it's just gorgeous, right? But when I run Central Park tomorrow, I'm gonna get a big dopamine hit. I'm gonna, my body's gonna produce all this dopamine, which is the molecule that says, do that again, right? It's a reward. Gamblers get dopamine hits, right?

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  People eat chocolate cake get a dopamine hit, right? But if I were unfit and overweight, I wouldn't get that dopamine hit. And so when people start exercising, they don't get the reward that people who are fit and accustomed to doing it get. And then they're made to feel bad, like you didn't enjoy your run around Central Park. Well, it takes months, if not years, before you actually get that reward.

• 1:17:32Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, because just like being overweight causes you to become insensitive to insulin, you become insensitive to all kinds of other hormones and neurotransmitters, and dopamine is one of them. So, so it's not an instant like benefit, right? It's hard. And so we need to be compassionate again towards people who are struggling to become fit and struggling to get their reward. And also, if you're overweight and you run around Central Park, it's like, like if I were carrying weights and running around Central Park, it'd be much harder, right? It's, you know, it's, it's challenging. And so we, once you get, you know, into that state, it's hard to get back to the state of activity. And so we, we need as a, as a society to, to, to help those folks rather than judge them.

• 1:18:14Steven Bartlett?

  Those folks that are struggling, and I was one of those folks that were struggling for many, many years, I would say to myself every year, pretty much all of my adult life, that this was gonna be the year that I'd get fit. I'd try all of these various different, you know, fad exercise things, buy all this stuff. I announced in 2017 that I was gonna work out every single day, and that lasted for six months, and then I yo-yoed back out of that. It never stuck with me until 2020, and that's, I've been exercising six days a week since 2020, 82% of days. And I reflect and try and diagnose how I went from someone who, what was it that changed? And if I can figure out what it was that changed at the most fundamental level in my

• 1:18:58Steven Bartlett?

  mindset, or my attitude, or my life, or whatever it was, then I can help other people figure out that too, or at least give them more sound advice, or at least be more empathetic, whatever's required to help them. You know, and I have a platform here where I speak about exercise a lot and these things. So what's your suspicion? What's your suspicion on what it is that makes people go from being, you know, maybe having a, a negative opinion towards exercise or their ability to be disciplined with it to Becoming an exerciser. Do you know?

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  I've, this is a question that obsesses me. In fact, we have a big project right now, a big grant to actually study this.

• 1:19:36Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Right now, because I, the more I study it, the more I think it's social. The more I think that, again, I think people are physically active, i.e. in our modern world, exercise for two reasons, when it's necessary or rewarding. And what makes it rewarding for most people is the social aspect. And that social aspect can take many dimensions. It can be running with a group of friends. And, you know, you might want to go only a mile, but your friends convince you to run another mile, right? And you end up running two miles, right? Or you're feeling bad and crappy and your, you know, your friends help you do it. Or I'm a running buddy, right? And I often, you know, meet, meet friends

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  for early morning runs. And I can tell you that the evening before, it seems like a great idea to meet Aaron at 6 a.m. on the corner of Mass Ave and Lanaien. The next morning at 6 a.m., I might have stayed in bed with my wife, you know, I don't want to meet this nasty, smelly guy, you know, at 6 a.m. in the cold and dark. But I, I agreed to meet him and out I go, right? And I'm usually glad I did it afterwards. Or, you know, we can go on. There are other social ways in which, which, or dancing, right? I mean, nobody thinks of dancing as exercise, but it's exercise, right? So that's one important social dimension. And the other one, though, is accountability. I describe in the book, there's a, there's a friend of mine in San Francisco who's struggling

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  to, to, to exercise. So she signed up for a, a program. It's this company called stick.com. I don't know if you've run across it, where it's a commitment contract where you send like a thousand dollars to them and they keep it in a bank account. They probably invest it and make a lot of money on it too. But you set up a referee and, and you agree that I'm going to not smoke, or this, or that, or the other, or in this case, exercise. And if you don't do it, And your referee is, you know, what, you know, keeping track of what you do.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  You get to choose something negative. So in her case, her husband is her referee and if she doesn't walk, I can't remember what, every day she has to walk a certain number of miles. Her husband will, will tell her and, and, or tell the website and it'll send fifty dollars to the NRA that week.

• 1:21:50Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  And she hates the NRA with a burning passion.

• 1:21:53Steven Bartlett?

  What is the NRA?

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  The National Rifle Association. They're the, they're the people who are trying to prevent gun control legislation in the United States. And they have effectively prevented gun control legislation in the United States, which is now kills more children than cars in the United States.

• 1:22:06Steven Bartlett?

  So if she doesn't exercise, she, sorry, she doesn't do it, then?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Then, then money goes to this organization that she hates. So this, this is a stick, if there ever was one, as opposed to a carrot. And I don't think she's, every time I see her, ask her, you know, have you kept up the walk? She says, oh, no, the NRA hasn't gotten a penny. Right? So for her, it's been very effective. So it's, she's made a commitment contract that, that stings, right? That really hurts. Now, I don't, I think that might be a little on the extreme side and I wouldn't necessarily recommend that to everybody. But, but she's accountable, right? She's made herself accountable in some ways. And I think people can find ways to make themselves accountable to a friend, a loved one, a parent, you know, priest, who knows what, right? You might, or, or hire a trainer. That's, I mean, that's kind of what a trainer does, makes you accountable, right?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  And I think, so, so those are, again, social ways to help people be more physically active. So I think there are multiple ways of doing that. And I suspect that is going to be the most effective sort of set of tools that will help people.

• 1:23:03Steven Bartlett?

  One thing I actually do is that on the screensaver of my phone, it has something that really inspires me. So I see it every day and it's that reminder for me, which reinforces my, my why across my life. It's actually my, my home screen on my iPhone is actually a bit of a mood board for me. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And I don't get to see it until I open the book. The question is, what is one aspect or feature of your life that causes you the most friction slash discomfort? And how can you change or fix it?

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  I would say it's my tendency to compare myself to others.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  I, you know, you know, life is short, life is precious. We're all experiments of one. And when I think about, when I, when I, when I engage in that, oh, so and so has such and such. That's, that's a really bad habit. It's a really bad trait. It never leads anywhere good. It only leads towards, either, either I think about how I have more of something than somebody else that leads to, I think, unhealthy feelings of pride or feelings of jealousy. You know, so and so has this award or such and such. And, and that's, that's kind of pernicious. So I think that's a bad habit that I, I work hard to, to overcome.

• 1:24:34Steven Bartlett?

  Because it changes your expectations of yourself and that takes, steals happiness?

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  It steals happiness, yeah.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  It steals happiness.

• 1:24:43Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you for the work you do, Daniel. Very important, very, very important and increasingly important, I think, when we look at the, the health outcomes, especially here in the United States of people. I mean, you actually share a number of them in the book, which I didn't, didn't, we didn't really go into, but they're just horrifying.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's scary out there.

• 1:25:02Steven Bartlett?

  Especially as it relates, relates to exercise. There was one in particular that I wrote down because it horrified me. I can't remember, it was just all the stats around the, the current healthcare epidemic.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  Only 50% of Americans ever exercise, ever.

• 1:25:15Steven Bartlett?

  Really? Ever?

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Ever.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  And only 20% meet those very minimal World Health Organization standards. We're, we're, we're a nation of couch potatoes and the rest of the world is headed our way.

• 1:25:31Steven Bartlett?

  But not if they get this book.

• 1:25:34Steven Bartlett?

  Because I think it is a real perspective changer and it's a real eye opener and it's a necessary one. So thank you so much for writing it. You're fantastic at what you do. And I'm now a huge fan of your work after delving in deeper and deeper and deeper. So I can't wait to see what you do next.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:25:48Steven Bartlett?

  And I recommend everyone to go get this book, Exercised, because yeah, I thought I knew a lot about exercise, but from reading that and having that window into hunter gatherer ancestors and tribes and other cultures, it really, the whole idea of a mismatched life, how mismatched my life is in so many fundamental ways, from diet to exercise to socializing. And these kind of books help to realign.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Although it seems that you're doing a pretty good job.

• 1:26:16Steven Bartlett?

  I'm trying, you know. I think we're so far from being human though, that there's still a long way to go for all of us. So, thank you, Daniel.