Born to Run with Chris McDougall and Herman Pontzer

Ever seen a chimpanzee go for a jog? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gary O’Reilly, and Chuck Nice discover how humans came to run with journalist and author of Born to Run, Chris McDougall, and evolutionary anthropologist, Herman Pontzer.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is StarTalk's Sports Edition. We're titling this one Born to Run because we're going to get to the bottom of what's going on evolutionarily, biophysically, when the human body decides to run away from things or towards things. But we're running people right here. And I got as my co-host, Gary, Gary O'Reilly. Hey Neil, good to be here again. Giving authenticity to this program, being a former professional athlete. And occasionally runner. Okay, and also you turned sportscaster before we got ahold of you. And so, great to have you on Sports Edition. And Chuck Nice, our stand-up comedian.

• 0:58Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, good to be here. Can't wait for our show on Pink Cadillac, since we're doing a show on Born to Run.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  Yay. You guys would have jumped on that if I wasn't black. You'd have jumped right on it.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Completely, that's correct. That's correct. Or it was just a failed joke. One of those two.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  You can say that. I'm just out of that conversation. Well, in this show, we're featuring my interview with Chris McDougall, who was the author of the book Born to Run. And we'll be jumping into some clips because we had some private time with him to tell us what he was about and what his research has been, and what it is to go barefoot in this world, whether or not you're running or walking. So that's kind of interesting. But as always, we bring in some academic expertise into the mix. And so, let me just introduce for you Dr. Herman Pontzer. Herman, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  I'm tickled to be here.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Very excellent. So you're an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke. And you think about what it is to be human, which I love.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, how do we get to be this way, this crazy way we are? And what does it mean for today?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  And you wrote a book. And I think for those who see this in video, that might be on your back shelf. What a coincidence. Who put it there?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  That's surprising. That's surprising.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Burn. I love single word title books. Burn. The economics of life, calories are the currency. So we did a whole explainer video on calories, by the way.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  So that'll dovetail nicely with this episode. So let's just get straight into this. So Herman, you, you got your PhD back in 2006. And what, do you remember the title of your thesis?

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Oh, God. Locomotor energetics and economy and evolution in Homo erectus. So I was all, all about how changes in the skeleton, which we can document. And, you know, humans have been split from chimps, like bonobos for about seven million years. And so there's a, this big change that happens around two million years with the evolution of our genus, genus.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait. I have to correct you because I'm the one out there fixing it when people don't understand it. It's not that that's when we split from chimps. It's that when we and chimps split from each other.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Ah, I was, I was being too simple, Neil. You're right.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  I'm just, I would be up in your face.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  That's mine. When our two lineage just split, the last time chimpanzees and us all here shared a grandparent.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Was seven million years ago. And then for, for four million years or so, four or five million years, we're kind of just these bipedal apes walking around, walking around on two legs, but basically like Ewok style. And then around two million years ago, you see these changes that happen that, that are, the anatomy changes enough, brain changes enough, that we say, oh, that's, that's us. That's more like us than animals. That's genus Homo. And along with that comes these changes in our legs and our pelvis. And, and so I was very curious as a, as a young PhD student, what that meant for how many calories it takes to walk.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  So we populated the entire Earth upon exiting Africa. And so that seems to me a lot of walking and running. At what point did we have this, if not ability, certainly the urge to do so?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's the ability to do it is, is the key thing. And here's, here's what's interesting. People often say that that has to do with running and it might in a kind of tangential way. Because the way we run, the way we're able to explore our landscape, changes the way that we can eat. Right? It changes the, the menu for us. And all of a sudden, our menu works worldwide. But it isn't like we, I mean, we, we, we did walk into Eurasia and eventually we walked into North America, but it isn't like we went there straight away, 100 meters, 100 kilometers a day kind of thing. It's more of a population expansion. So, you know, it's the same way that, that tree species expand their range is kind of the way that we expanded our range, I think. But it, but that was-

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Of course, the trees didn't, the trees didn't walk.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  But either did we, in, in the sense of, that's my point, right? So it's, you take away-

• 5:16Speaker 01

  I see.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  More and more-

• 5:17Speaker 01

  I, okay, I had not fully appreciated that. It wasn't one single nomadic tribe going thousands of miles.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  No, that's right. And this is why, this is what really separates us from the other apes, right? Because chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangs, the reason they are getting decimated with climate change and forests getting cut down is that they can't live anywhere else.

• 5:36Chuck Nice?

  They can't, right. They can't go anywhere.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  That's right. They're done. You cut down our forests, we're like, well, I guess we're gonna live in this place now.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And Chuck, I like the way Herman's on a first name basis with the orangutan. He called him the orang. The rest of us, we have to use the full name, orangutan.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  I mean, once you've handled as much orang urine as I've handled, I feel like, there's a familiarity there.

• 5:58Chuck Nice?

  And, and, and, and the cool thing is that you can brag about it.

• 6:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Now I, now I need to know if that was intentionally handled.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Oh, good. They just pee on you.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  I paid a lot of money for that orangutan urine.

• 6:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  It's, it's-

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  A little too much information there.

• 6:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Doc.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Time to go to our first clip.

• 6:16Chuck Nice?

  Please, please. Yes. Please don't tell me that this happened in a hotel in Russia. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  That is the sign that we should go to our first clip. So, again, we're featuring my interview with Chris McDougall. He's a journalist who studied anthropological tribes and their running habits. And he learned quite a bit. And so let's pick up on some of what he wanted to share with us about our transition from, what was it? Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. And, and is there anything that we still have that other animals don't?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Because I feel pretty vulnerable when I'm out there in the wild. Check it out.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  You know, there is a professor, Dr. Dennis Bramble, who was kind of curious about the same thing. You know, as a morphologist, he's wondering, why do we give up strength and speed? Because, you know, when you're on all fours, you're stronger and faster.

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, a morphologist is a person who doesn't study the genetics as much as sort of the, what you look like and your general form for how you then function. Is that a fair definition of a morphologist? Just to, so we're on the same page there.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  He's basically taking apart the tinker toys and looking at the raw parts. And so what he's looking at is the human body as an element of engineering. You know, we have all these raw parts. How do we assemble it? And what he was perplexed by is creatures that are all fours are stronger and faster. And at some point in our evolutionary history, we decided, hey, rather than being strong and fast, we'd rather be like skinny and weak. So why do we make?

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the ticket.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. That'll help us dominate the planet. Let's get skinny and weaker.

• 8:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Skinny, weak and slow.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  And slow. So he's like, this makes no sense. Why don't we stay on all fours? We could climb trees and we could compete and fight. We had a lower center of balance. And what he discovered was the second we went upright, a lot of other component factors came into place. And when we came upright, we became these hairless mammals full of springy tendons that could vent heat by perspiration as opposed to respiration. And at that moment in our lives, we made an evolutionary shift from being strong, speedy animals into being slower, but slower animals with greater stamina and endurance. And along with that came this whole other grab bag sort of engineering features, such as like the nuchal ligaments.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  And what he thought was really cool was, at the moment, the fossil evidence went from Australopithecus into Homo erectus, you see something showing up in the back of the skull, which is this little hollow groove. And that hollow groove is there to sustain a thing called the nuchal ligament. And the nuchal ligament only does one purpose. It stops your head from bobbing around when you run. And so at that moment in our lives, we, in our history, we went from being walkers into runners. And along with that became this whole new ability we never had before.

• 9:18Gary O'Reilly?

  So doctor, I have to ask, why did we give up strength and speed? This doesn't seem to be the wisest move any species could make. Because if you're out there in the wild, you're gonna need both of those to survive.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Weren't we happy with strength and speed? What gives here?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  No, the problem is that if you're an ape, right? And you live in a world full of food in these rainforests, you're, you don't have to go very far to get it. And so you can go ahead and specialize in strength and be good at getting up in the trees and bolting from a leopard if it chases you. But it doesn't give you the endurance you need to be able to cover all the ground you need to cover if you're gonna move into more barren habitats like savannas? Or for that matter, if you're gonna hunt and gathering? Because as soon as you start hunting, there's a lot less food on the landscape for you than there is if you just eat plants, because there's just fewer animals and plants around. So you gotta cover more ground. That means you need endurance. That means something's gotta give.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  So it was survival?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Well, it was food, right? So it's survival and reproduction.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  I would count that as survival.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  The energy that you're getting though, yeah, you need to survive. But the reason you need those calories is to reproduce. That's what evolution really cares about, right? It cares about making babies. So it's both, it's both sides of the coin.

• 10:25Chuck Nice?

  When we are getting smarter, isn't that like the biggest thing? You don't need to be big and strong when you're smart, as evidenced by nerds running the world today. Okay?

• 10:41Chuck Nice?

  You just don't need it. I mean, let's, let's be honest. I mean, Batman versus Superman, Batman wins? Why? Because he's smarter than Superman. You know, that's basically the deal.

• 10:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Doc, before we get to that bit of the brain kicking in, and I'm sure we're gonna do that later in the show, nuchal ligaments are one thing, but having a ligament in my neck that's stronger and keeps my head stable, doesn't really enable me to run, does it? So what, what happened between the great apes and our ancestors for us to be able to become these 50, 100 mile runners? What, what goes on? What springy tendons, what bits and bobs do we acquire?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so legs get longer, okay? The pelvis gets a bit narrower. And so all of that is helping keep the, the forces that come up through the, you know, as your, as your foot hits the ground, bam. There's an equal and opposite force, right? As we all know, that comes back up through your skeleton and keeping those, uh, keeping your pelvis narrow helps you do, helps you handle those forces. And having the longer legs means you're covering more ground per stride, which means if, if you, um, this is a fun one. If you have a, when you buy a cup of coffee, that's, you know, wherever you buy your cups of coffee to go, you get a top on that coffee. Why? Because if you don't, you slosh it around as you're walking, even though you don't notice that, cause everything seems still to you, your body's going up and down, up and down, up and down with every step.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  If you have a longer legs, there's less of that roller coaster up and down, up and down, which means less energy, cause every time you go up and down, there's energy lost there. And so, longer legs save you calories when you walk and run. Um, so the longer legs, narrower pelvis, bigger joint surfaces to handle the loads of all this stuff. All these things are changing.

• 12:20Gary O'Reilly?

  And then he talks about, here we go. There's a phrase I've just learned from this interview. Ventilation through perspiration is better than through respiration. So, so I, I sweat through my skin rather than pant like a dog or something like that. Is that where we are?

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Yes, that's another big one. We get hairless, right? And we get, we, humans are the sweatiest animals on the planet, 10 times more sweat glands per unit of area of your skin than any other primate for sure. And I think than any other mammal. Um, and-

• 12:49Speaker 01

  But horses can sweat up a storm, we've seen.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  They can, they've got a little short hair to help them do better at that. Uh, but they, they still don't sweat as well or as much per surface area as we do. And if people say you sweat like a pig, but actually pigs don't sweat.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Wow, so we're some funky folk.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Pigs don't have pores. Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  We're some funky folk.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  And that's what that gets to actually, is that it isn't just the frame that changes, right? It's also this engine. And so, one of the things that we've been looking at in my lab is, is how metabolic rate changes and how you can burn energy faster and higher, longer, right? We can rev our engines for longer, uh, than other apes can too. So that's a whole nother thing that changes, not just, not just the frame, but also the engine.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Well, let me get back to, to my interview with McDougall and I, I had to ask him, what did our ancestors do with those anatomical changes? It's one thing to have the changes, but is there something, can you do anything interesting with it? Let's check it out.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  How did the human brain get so big so fast? Because, you know, humans arrived on the planet, Homo erectus about 2 million years ago. The first projectile weapons arrived about 10,000 years ago.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Just to be clear, a projectile weapon, you don't mean cannon. You mean throwing, you mean the ability to throw.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  Or like a bow and arrow, a spear, things like that, things you're throwing. And so the problem is this, you have humans with a brain developing very quickly, getting really big and fat really fast. That kind of brain requires a lot of caloric energy. Yet the first bow and arrow only shows up about 10,000 years ago. See, more than a million years, we're eating a lot of stuff to sustain this energy sucking brain, yet we don't really have the weaponry to bring down big game. So the question becomes, how the heck are humans eating calorically dense proteins when they don't have the weapons to kill them? And the theory becomes, it was our ability to run long distances, to do what's known

• 14:40Speaker 05

  as persistence hunting, to go out there on a savanna as a group, run long distances and chase our prey into heat exhaustion. And here's the fascinating part about this is, they've actually done this in Africa and watched indigenous groups chase antelope and kudu into submission. And it takes exactly as long to run an antelope into heat exhaustion as it takes the average marathon or to run a marathon.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's interesting that, you know, we sort of recreationalize this survival behavior that maybe we've evolved to do, which is to run down animals to exhaustion, which is probably, you know, an important piece of how Homo erectus made its living.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Wait a minute, so they can improve the marathon by having them chase an antelope?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  They've got the running of the bulls the wrong way around.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  So tell me about this high density food, because you're Mr. Calorie Man. If I don't have weapons yet to take down an animal, I still need the high calories to sustain my brain, where am I getting the calories from?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're getting it from, if you're a hominid like us, you're getting it from two things that other apes don't have. You're getting it from a fair amount of meat, which, you know, hunter gatherers kind of balance about half their calories from meat, half their calories from plants, and you're getting it...

• 15:51Speaker 01

  So that's how, so that's who we got the meat from, from wearing them out?

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Well, from wearing them out, but also, so here's the other thing, we also cook our food, right, which Chris doesn't get into there, but, you know, cooking's also a really big deal because it helps you digest your food sort of externally and you get a lot more bang for your buck that way. And then also, you know, don't forget, you've still got a lot of the group that's out getting plant foods. And so that's helping to fund the whole thing, too, because even if you're really good at running, it's still a pretty risky endeavor to kind of go spend your day trying to run something down. You come home empty handed, you're done. But if you can share with people, hunt and gather, now you've got something that's a winning strategy.

• 16:28Gary O'Reilly?

  So, Doug, are we now migrating with herds, major herds? We've seen, we've all watched David Attenborough on TV show us these thousands and thousands of beasts traversing continents and countries and things. Are we now following them? Or are we just like, go out, hunt, come back to base?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Probably the second one.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, Gary, when you said now, you mean back then?

• 16:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Back then.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Okay. Now, because I know I'm not doing that.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 16:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Get in your car.

• 16:58Chuck Nice?

  But I did once follow the Grateful Dead. Does that count?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Oh, there.

• 17:03Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  I don't know. Were you feeding along with them? Were you eating the Grateful Dead as you went? I mean, that would be the question.

• 17:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Just binging on Jerry Garcia, Ben and Jerry's.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  So that's an interesting question. We don't know for sure, but probably not migrating with them. Because, again, it's hunting and gathering, right? And so the way that that works is we agree where we're going to end up at the end of the day. Right? So you have, you have, we're coming home at the end of the day to the same place. And maybe that place moves, week to week, or even month to month, or something like that. So you can kind of migrate over time. But you're probably not following herds. The way you can figure this out, this is interesting, you could actually look at the isotopes in the fossilized teeth. Right? Because there's a different isotopic signature in the rainwater and in the surface water of oxygen isotopes as you move from north to south because of the gradient of temperature and evaporation. And so, and there's also, there's other isotopes you could use also to track location. And we could do that, right? We could find out, is

• 17:57Speaker 03

  does somebody end up with a tooth isotope signature that's? Hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometers away from where they, we find them. And that would be the way to find out, but that hasn't, we, nobody's shown that yet. So that's out there waiting to be, to be just demonstrated.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so I grow my tooth earlier in my life.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Later in my life, I'm now a thousand miles from where that happened. And so that tells you a lot.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. In fact, they use it to like track wildlife finds and all this kind of stuff. Uh, you, you can do it. Anyway, that's exactly what you would do.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so just to be clear and correct me if I'm wrong, Herman. I'm going to show off my little, little bit of knowledge here. So water molecule H2O has two oxy, two hydrogens and one oxygen. And native oxygen has 16 particles in its nucleus. But isotopic oxygen has 18 in its nucleus, got two extra neutrons. And so if you have water with oxygen 18 in it, mixed together with water with oxygen 16, oxygen 16 is going to evaporate slightly more preferentially to the one with the oxygen 18 because it's lighter.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  And so if you were in more, the climates closer to the equator, the, your groundwater supply will have more oxygen 18 relative oxygen 16. Did I get that right, Herman?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  That's it. That's it. In a nutshell, exactly how it works. Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  I want a gold star for that.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Points for you.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:22Gary O'Reilly?

  I didn't know we were getting gold stars handed out. This is a new, this is a new thing.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  I think Neil's already won a bunch of gold stars. It looks like.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Okay. But Herman, what it means is you can't detect this if they only go east, west, only if they go north.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  You would have to use other things. So there are other isotopes on landscapes for like example, strontium isotopes can vary depending on the ground, on, on the, the rock in the ground and how that seeps into the water.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Okay. You have, you have many tools.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  There's, there's many isotopes you could use.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Very cool. Yeah, all right. We're gonna take a break, but any fast questions on this before we go to a break? Gary?

• 19:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this, I mean, all right, Doctor, quickly, is persistence herding, if I am running fifty-five miles to hunt down this beast? I'm doing a lot of running. Is it worth it? Because the calories I expend as to the calories I get back.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  And are you gonna haul the thing back to the tribe?

• 20:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  That doesn't sound like it makes sense.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Depends. If it's big enough, you probably move camp. Yeah, so the hunter-gatherers I work with, it's a community called the Hads in northern Tanzania. If they get something really, really big, they might move camp for a few days. But even a zebra, which is pretty dang big, they'll haul them back to camp.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  In pieces, not all at once.

• 20:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So, wow. Maybe they capture it and not kill it, then they can walk it back.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Excellent idea.

• 20:41Chuck Nice?

  Better yet, let's just ride it back. Make it do the work.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Brilliant. Chuck, that is completely brilliant. If they were only domesticatable. All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, more of my interview with Chris McDougall. And we have in studio today Professor Herman Pontzer, who thinks all about the evolution of what it is to be human.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We're talking about running, walking, how these became things that humans do. And I've got Professor Herman Pontzer, Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology of Duke University, and that's North Carolina, if I remember correctly. Is that right? Yeah. And Chris McDougall, who's a journalist who's written about this. So we've got the journalist and the scientist together, which is a brilliant and deadly combination of knowledge and insight and life experience that we're bringing to the page here. And I want to start off first thinking about our brains. And did...

• 22:08Speaker 01

  About our ingenuity outstripping evolution, is that a thing that can happen? And what and and let's go straight to our next clip with Chris McDougall and get to the bottom of it. Check it out.

• 22:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I guess it's one of those kind of mysteries of the evolutionary trail. The best kind of scenario you can come up with is that as the planet was warming, there was a new genetic offspring, a new adaptation. A homo erectus baby was born that was more comfortable standing upright. And that person was able to run. And it became those homo erecti who were able to run long distances that began to thrive on the planet. So, and as they were able to thrive, they had the protein energy which fueled the expansion of this brain.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What intrigues me is eventually our brain has other sort of smarts going for it. And then we perfect projectile weapons, right? So as you said, the bow and arrow, ultimately the gun. So we don't have to chase a damn thing. Okay? You could stand 100 meters away and take down your protein for the next week. And so there so this talent, let me call it that, this skill set, this genetic skill set that we have as humans would lose the need to continue to be honed. Once we develop tools of killing, is that a fair claim to make?

• 23:35Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. You know, once again, our ingenuity has outstripped our evolution. And it'd be kind of fun and experiment to do right now, whereas it takes three hours to catch a kudu. How long would it take for you to hit a button on your phone and have a burrito show up at your door?

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not only how long, it is what is your investment of calories to obtain those calories? If to obtain calories required more calories than what you earned, you're a dead species quickly. You will go extinct fast. So you need the so it's got to cost you fewer calories to get it than to eat it. So yeah, that's a whole, that's a whole work, a whole nother, another there.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Uh, you're absolutely right. We get a lot more calories per, you know, hour of work now than we used to. So, um, your average blue collar worker in the United States today with an hour's worth of wages can go to the store and easily buy 20,000 kilocalories of food. Um, so that's enough for like, you know, a week. If you're a Haza man or woman, like community I work with, hunter gatherers, an hour's worth of work gets you somewhere between a thousand and 2,000 calories of food. So that's 10 times less, an order of magnitude less, um, than you can get, you know, than you or I can get, uh, just kind of in our daily lives. It's a huge change. So absolutely, you know, and then we can talk about how that contributes to obesity and all these kinds of issues that we have now.

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. The one other thing I'd add is this.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Uh, weirdly, you talked about, well, you know, a species can't exist if it burns more calories to get the food than it gets in the food that it acquires. True, but do you know? But because we use fossil fuel energy to produce our food, we burn eight kilocalories of energy to produce one kilocalorie of food.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 25:25Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  We are in, we're circling the drain here. So we got to figure that one out. That's a whole separate question.

• 25:31Chuck Nice?

  One thing that we can do, not for that, what you just said, but in terms of the obesity aspect, because it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint that our bodies are kind of designed to work for food. So maybe we should have the evolutionary diet where all your food is just on a little cart that you gotta chase around for a few hours before you get to eat.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  I like it. I like it. You know, the supermarket, all the food's under two feet of dirt. You gotta get it out with a digging stick.

• 25:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is not going to catch on. Just saying right now, I'm not digging for more food. Instead of Whole Foods, it's Whole Foods.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got Whole Foods.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  I'll tell you what too, when you dig for two hours to get the carcass, because all this also has to be a carcass and not like a little chop, you're gonna eat the zebra testicles, you know? You're gonna eat the spleen. You're gonna be like, dang it, I worked for it. It's gonna change everybody's mentality about what's, what's good food.

• 26:28Chuck Nice?

  No, no. Well, Doc, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you the truth. I'm doing that anyway.

• 26:37Gary O'Reilly?

  What an insight into the nice household.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Daddy, what's for dinner?

• 26:44Chuck Nice?

  Zebra testicle.

• 26:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Whatever I can dig up.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  You're gonna eat every bit of your zebra testicles, damn it.

• 26:51Gary O'Reilly?

  So, I mean, Doc, if our brain is developing, right? At what rate is it developing in terms of our anatomy? Because we really haven't changed in about 2 million or so years. But have our brains changed in a greater way?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I guess I'd push back on Chris a little bit there because the anatomy, the running anatomy shows up, you know, 2 million years, 1.5 million years ago. Brains don't really get big, like this big, until, you know, maybe half a million years ago. Even our species doesn't show up until 300.

• 27:24Chuck Nice?

  600,000 years ago.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Well, 300, 300 million, 300,000 years ago for Homo sapiens, right? And so, and our brains are super expensive. Your brains run the equivalent, you know, it's the equivalent of running a 5K.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  A full college education is like $400,000.

• 27:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Unless in calories.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Elite, elite college education here, but go on.

• 27:47Chuck Nice?

  Unless, unless your parents are Hollywood elites, in which, in which case.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  They're all in jail now, yeah.

• 27:53Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's right. Oh, good.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Is that a case of ingenuity, getting ahead of your, where you're supposed to be? I'm not sure.

• 28:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So, once we get this brain development, Doc, do we then start to think, well, I'll hit the speed dial for the burrito. I won't have to go dig myself and chase myself my protein. I mean, what, what sort of point are we when we no longer need? Have we gone through this running phase to find our food?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, our body is designed for something that our brain has just completely rendered obsolete.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's true. I would say I'd push it back further than, than the speed dial for your pizza. I'd push it back to farming.

• 28:31Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say, domestication and farming would have to be, because at that point, your food, you're growing your food and you're growing your meat.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  And your food comes to you.

• 28:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, that's right. And we change our foods, we breed them so that they produce more calories. An animal, a domesticated livestock has twice as many fat calories on it than a wild animal does.

• 28:53Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  So we're changing their.

• 28:55Chuck Nice?

  And even what you feed it, even what you feed it, like there's grass fed and then there's corn fed and like, and the difference is one is fattier and one's more sinewy.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  You know, one Thanksgiving, I said, you know, I'm gonna get a wild turkey this Thanksgiving. I cooked that wild turkey, didn't want a damn bit of meat. I'd say, give me my Purdue chicken back.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  You should drink your wild turkey, don't eat it.

• 29:17Gary O'Reilly?

  So, I mean, at what point are we finding ourselves going from coming out of forests and woodland into savanna, to then finding ourselves herding, farming and settlements? What sort of timeline is there between?

• 29:36Speaker 03

  That's a long time, because we're moving into savannas and hunting and gathering two and a half to two million years ago, let's say. And you're not farming until 12,000 years ago. So if you, if you thought about the whole, you know, the history of the genus Homo, 95, 98% of it, you can do the math quickly, is hunting and gathering. And it's just this last blink of an eye.

• 29:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so this is a tiny bit off topic. So with respect to that whole brain thing and us getting our food, when do we see these communities dotting the earth in such a way that they stay by water and then they're fishing communities?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  That's a transition from the plain, plains, plains living to coastal living, yeah.

• 30:17Chuck Nice?

  Coastal living.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  So what's amazing about genus Homo is it isn't just on the savannas, they are everywhere. And like, as soon as we find them, they're everywhere. Like, just poof, right? Every landscape. And so we see them on coastal, coastal areas, we see them in the mountains, we see them in the savannas. That hunting and gathering strategy is a world beater. And they're just absolutely everywhere. And you're gonna see pockets everywhere doing different foods, kind of things, depending on what's around.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so in spite of Uber Eats on speed dial, the fact is there's still cultures out there where running is the kind of running you do to.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chase down an antelope, they're still doing it, just like for fun. And Chris McDougall studies just that, just check it out.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  If I'd say, hey Neil, there's one thing I can give you, a little pill, that's gonna blow out obesity and diabetes and depression and suicidal fixations. It will basically cure every leading cause of death in the United States minus one or two. Would you take the pill?

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  Okay, what if I told you that pill is for free? You don't have to spend any money, you go out your door and you can get it in 45 minutes.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know, okay, I see what you're doing there, okay. All right, so they have a level of health sustained just by this habit that they have that puts them in a very special place, especially relative to the rest of the Western world.

• 31:36Speaker 05

  So here's a fascinating thing too, another series of components, either coincidence or correlation, but the Taramata are nonviolent, they are very communal, they are not capitalistic, they don't accumulate bunches of stuff. Their cancer rates are believed to be very low, their depression rates seem to be very low, very low instances of cardiovascular disease. Basically, anything that would win you multiple Nobel prizes today, they've had for 10,000 years. And so maybe the question is, you know, why, you know, why do they run? The question is, why don't we?

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so were they all hiding under a rock? How is it that you, in this, the 21st century, end up discovering them? How come this, all this wasn't out 100 years ago, or 200 years ago? When anthropologists are running amok, or European anthropologists are running amok all around the world, riding up every culture that's even a little bit different from their own?

• 32:27Speaker 05

  Oh, I think for two reasons. One is the question that you looked at, you know, we don't wanna run, it's not fun. The thing about it is, the supposition is that running is this kinda unpleasant thing and if people do it, they're kinda weird. And where that comes from is the fact that, you know, evolutionarily, we developed two things at once, you know, a body designed for movement and a brain designed to save calories at all costs. And so, what we're always trying to do is avoid emergencies where we're gonna deplete our caloric reserves. And so, for most of our evolutionary history, it made a ton of sense for us to not run, only run when you have to. But the difficulty is, we basically removed all the emergencies from our lives as soon as we got vehicular transportation.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  Up until about 100 years ago, everything was human powered, and then suddenly, nothing is human powered anymore. And so the difficulty is our brain is still telling us, dude, stay on the sofa. You never know when a saber-toothed tiger is going to come after you. But the tigers are now gone. And the reason why anthropologists and others haven't really focused on the Tarahumara is I think that they were sort of written off as this own special little oddball group doing its own special thing, that there wasn't a universal transferable skill. And I think that's what we're starting to rediscover today.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting, very interesting. So this is kind of like an anthropological bias.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  So the Tarahumara is a tribe in Mexico that he studied. And he hung out with them and wrote about them. And I'm still amazed that they were mostly unknown to the rest of the Western world. That completely surrounds them, north and south and to the left and right of them. So I'm intrigued by that. And so, Herman, would you say that this skill that they have of just loving to run, running great distances over great amounts of time, that this is just left over from this period of time where we evolved that to chase down our antelope?

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's left over. I think it speaks to this capacity that humans have to run, that we don't always use, but that we, you know, some cultures have really taken advantage of economically to run down prey, some just do because it's fun, like the Tarahumara. I push back a little bit on what Chris was saying there. I don't think it's that people have ignored running in other cultures. I think it's very specific to where you live, right? So the Haza, who I work with, they don't run. And in fact, we-

• 34:52Speaker 01

  And where are they based? They're based where?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  They're in northern Tanzania, savanna, classic savanna landscape, exactly where you'd expect. And they might run, and they don't. And we know this because we have them wear little wearable GPS when they go out. So we have like 2,000 people days of speed and location, and we can tell they never run. And they're still as healthy as a Tarahumara. They have low blood pressure, you know, no cardiovascular disease, all of that. So you have to be active to be that healthy, but you don't have to run specifically. And, you know, I think it's like any other capacity that humans have, that not all cultures express the same degree. The Tarahumara like to run, but not everybody does.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  And plus you left out the fact that there's no Krispy Kreme vendors.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  I know. It's diet and exercise, of course, but yeah, sad.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  And every time, every time you kill a zebra, it's, it's just still testicles. There's no Krispy Kreme in there either.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  But I still, I still want to do what Chuck says. You, you don't kill them, you ride them back and then.

• 35:52Chuck Nice?

  And right.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Let them do the work.

• 35:54Chuck Nice?

  Ride them back and snack on them on the way.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Just brilliant.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  I mean, that's what, that's what dairy cattle do, right? That's basically what that is.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So let's leave the zebra testicles behind for the moment, hopefully forever. Is, is it a fact that through our evolution, humans are kind of born to do anything high energy? Is it, is it that kind of thing we've got going on here?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think that that's, that's where we're coming down now. And that's actually a lot of the work that Chris has talked about, a lot of the stuff that he, you know, motivated our field to look into more deeply is, okay, well, humans can run. Absolutely. That's true. Um, let's follow that up and see, does everybody run all the time, where, when? And it's been really fun to kind of see how that plays out. So like I said, we don't see the hogs running as much, but absolutely groups do. And what it seems to be is that, that humans, um, are evolved to be high energy apes, basically, right? We have these engines that run hot. We have these high metabolic rates. We are able to do endurance stuff that, that other apes cannot do at all, including running if we want. We also can walk a lot, you know, we can cover a lot of ground that way too. So it's kind of, uh, running is one piece of this overall endurance ape.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  But Herman, if it, so if a gorilla is chasing you and you outrun it.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  If you can make the first 50 feet, you're probably all right.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Oh, very good to know.

• 37:09Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. Good to know.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:12Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, the problem is 25 feet in, he's on top.

• 37:18Chuck Nice?

  Damn, halfway, halfway.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Oh damn, alright.

• 37:27Chuck Nice?

  Good thing is though, gorillas are not very violent. So that's, that's a good thing, you know?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Is that true? Is that true Herman?

• 37:33Speaker 03

  No. If they feel that you're a threat.

• 37:35Chuck Nice?

  No, I mean, I mean, in terms of approaching, uh, you know, being a threat or not, like if you're threatening them, you're in trouble. But, but they don't, they don't go, a gorilla is like this, hey, look, man, I'm not looking for any trouble.

• 37:51Chuck Nice?

  That's a gorilla in a nutshell.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  But if you bring me trouble, you gonna get it. Okay, alright.

• 37:56Chuck Nice?

  I'm not looking for any trouble, but if you want some.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Chuck, I'm gonna write a paper with you on this, on gorilla behavioral ecology. We're gonna, that's it. That's the paper. I love it.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Guys, we gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll have more of my featured interview with journalist and anthropology seeker, Chris McDougall, and we have in studio, Dr. Ponzer, Herman Ponzer, because he's telling us all about how we became human and what mattered having done so. And we're gonna look into Dr. Ponzer's new book, Burn, when you return.

• 38:48Chuck Nice?

  Hey, it's time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, Alex Ornellus and Albert Hulk. Guys, thank you so much for all that you do to make this show happen. Without you, we couldn't make it. And for anybody else who would like their very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/stardorkradio and support us.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, sports edition, StarTalk. We're talking about human evolution for running and walking, featuring my interview with Chris McDougall. He's a journalist and a sort of amateur anthropologist who studied the Mexican Tarahumara tribe. And all they do is run all day and night. And they never sleep, apparently. When they're not running, when they're not doing anything else, they're running, okay? And we're trying to get to the bottom of that. But Chuck Nice, you tweet at just Chuck Nice Comic?

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Thank you, sir. Yes, I do.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and Gary, you tweet at my three left feet.

• 39:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, I do, sir.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get an anthropologist to look into that.

• 40:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Please do.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we can, right? And let's go straight to that first clip, just to get to the bottom of who the Tarahumara actually are. Check it out.

• 40:10Speaker 05

  You know, Neil, every time I would go to a doctor and ask them about why I was injured, I got the same answer, which is running is bad for the body. And I believe that thing, that bias has really affected how we look at the Tarahumara.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, about them as a tribe, how mixed are they with the Spanish influence on the Americas? Going back, I guess now, 400, 500 years? Or they have a sort of a more pure lineage from those who were first peoples in the Americas?

• 40:40Speaker 05

  From a social standpoint, they are very reclusive. You know, when the conquistadors arrived, the Mayans and the Aztecs fought back and were decimated. The Tarahumara retreated and hid, and that's why they're in the copper canyons. They have deliberately isolated themselves. Physiologically, have they mixed with other peoples? Absolutely. So it's not like we're talking about some kind of like thoroughbred bloodline. That's not what the trail is here. The trail is that they maintain the same practices. It's not that their bloodline has remained separate, it's that their behavior has remained the same.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we know of any other cultures or tribes in the world that carry on this way?

• 41:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, and that's what's so cool about it is, first of all, when you look at sort of mythology and folklore, every group has a story about people running animals to death. It's universal. Every culture in the world, from Mongolia to Ohio, there are folklore about people running animals to death. So there is sort of an evidentiary trail of this going on. As far as today, you know, the San people, you know, the Kalahari Bushmen to this day still run animals to death. So that's kind of the cool thing about it is you have these myths, so it had to come from somewhere. And in those few pockets where people still live by persistence hunting, they still practice the same tradition today.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it is interesting to me that you can run them to death and this requires no weapons at all. So Herman, so in that brief exchange, we touched on some earlier topics as well. I'm just wondering, is the, this, this ability to run, we've sort of preserved in our sports, I guess, you know, I guess that was an urge because we can. Does your line of anthropological research come into modern times? Are you just back, back when, before there was the Olympics?

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'm interested in how the body got to be the way it is, you know, physiologically and anatomically, and all of that changed, you know, that changes so slowly. That kind of, that story gets boring about 10,000 years ago. You have all these really recent changes that happen with farming and being sedentary, but those aren't evolutionary changes so much as lifestyle changes in our bodies, you know, aren't, we use the same way.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you saying the all of civilization is such of a blip on your timeline? You're not even interested in it?

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, people get boring. The only thing that's interesting is that we changed the way we do our, you know, that we get energy, we start getting energy more explicitly from, from the things we farm. And then from fossil fuels, which is its own story.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a, a bias? Because for medical doctors to say, you're running too much, running is bad, you hurt your knees, you're, the musculoskeletal system, it cannot handle as much running as you're doing, even training for marathons, you don't want to run too many marathons because the one you're training for, you'll be, so I've, I've read and I've heard about all this. Meanwhile, we have the, this tribe in Mexico that's the opposite of this. So, so is this a bias? What's going on here?

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, you have a Western medical world that sees, you know, Americans, your typical American off the street, typically white Americans, by the way, typically males, as that's what normal humans are. Right? And so if that's your blinded view of what normal is, then you've got a really strange idea about what the body can handle, because it's true that if you are completely out of shape, and you start running, training for a marathon, yeah, you might hurt yourself, right? If you grow up in it, that's a level of training right there. And then if you just be careful about how you start, anybody can start. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always enjoy my trips to the doctor, because it's funny, it's the anthropologist meets the MD, and we have different perspectives on how the body ought to work.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  You just had to win a fight the whole time, right?

• 44:37Chuck Nice?

  Wouldn't it be true that, I mean, if you look at these other indigenous people, they were never running on pavement?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  That's another big thing, absolutely. Yeah, that's right, that's right. And also, they have low levels of inflammation, right? So arthritis is as much as anything, an inflammation disease. And we have high levels of chronic inflammation, which is your immune system just kicking away, being active without any reason. Here in the States and in the industrialized world, you got low levels of background inflammation in places where people are active all the time.

• 45:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you say the Olympics is a way to try to remember these roots that you study?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like it. I mean, you know, I'm not sure if like curling really gets us back to our roots.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or synchronized swimming.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  You know, when I go to the Hads, I don't see a lot of synchronized swimming, not a big thing that the Hads do. But...

• 45:28Gary O'Reilly?

  They're missing out, Doc, really. The beauty of synchronized swimming, you've got to love that.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  I'll bring some pictures next time, and try to engender that kind of appreciation.

• 45:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, man.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had a sports court here in our sports edition, one time, and the question is, should certain activities be turned into Olympic sports? And one of the questions was, should, what was it, Gary, gaming?

• 45:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, there was esports versus breakdancing. And your decision, sir...

• 46:01Speaker 03

  I forgot, I was the judge!

• 46:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, of course you were. So your decision was based on the fact, would it have appeared on the side of a Greek urn? And therefore, esports had nowhere to plug in, so it didn't get...

• 46:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can imagine breakdancing on the side of a Grecian urn.

• 46:18Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you, I've seen a few Grecian urns where it looked like they were breakdancing.

• 46:22Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But none of them hunched over, over a computer.

• 46:26Gary O'Reilly?

  But I think Neil, you've made a great point there. With the Olympics and we've always seen it as the pursuit of excellence. I think there's another thing behind it where we retain the ability to jump distance, jump over something, run further, run fastest. Stuff that basically, Doctor, you will have studied in a natural environment.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the anthropology games.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 46:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we should have.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  There you go. I got some great ideas for us, guys.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or you have a, you pull out a subset of the Olympics that come closest to what we evolutionarily developed out of what you studied for us.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then that becomes the anthropology games. I love it.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Javelin stays, for sure. Javelin stays.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Javelin stays. Wrestling definitely stays.

• 47:11Gary O'Reilly?

  So the discus, what would that be like a dinner plate?

• 47:19Gary O'Reilly?

  You just get to throw as many dinner plates towards people.

• 47:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone says, pass the fried chicken. I'm not getting up here. I'll fling it to you.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  That's right. People jump us out, though. That's ridiculous. Come on. I mean, what kind, I guess, oh, maybe that's going across the river. You skip across the stones across the river.

• 47:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So it's, it's all, it's all gonna have a natural element to it.

• 47:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, here, I, okay, my next clip with Chris McDougall is about what happens if you actually have this Mexican tribe compete against uh, anyone else who is sort of training as a runner in the traditional ways. Let's see what happens out of that. Check it out.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  You know, part and parcel with the Tadu Mara's ability to run long distances is the fact that they're not necessarily interested in what we're interested in. You know, we, we sort of glorify a gold medal and a Nike sponsorship and that means nothing to them. And so in the past, a couple of times, they have brought Tadu Mara runners to the Olympic Games and 26 miles and they would finish the 26 miles, kind of middle of the pack, unimpressed by the whole spectacle. I mean, 26 miles, dude, that's, that's the warm-up. When's the race start?

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, bring in the 50 mile race. There you go.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Which is exactly what happened. So in the mid 1990s, there was a, a race, the Leadville Trail 100, which is the premier ultra marathon in the United States at the time. And a group of Tarumara runners were brought up from the copper canyons to compete in Leadville, and they just devastated the field. It was like nine of the top 10 runners were Tarumara, and the 10th guy had to stop to like tie his shoe, otherwise it would have been a clean sweep.

• 48:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so this is a 100 mile race? I didn't even know such a race existed.

• 49:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. It actually began as a horse race. It was a horse race in California. And then one guy thought, well, my horse is sick, maybe I'll just run it myself. And he discovered that he was capable of running 100 miles. And so the mid 1990s, this began in Colorado at 12,000 feet. And when the Tarumara, who had never trained, didn't really know about the race, were brought to the starting line, it just took off and devastated the American runners. So Reebok actually sponsored the trip because they wanted to have a commercial with these indigenous tribe runners in their shoes. And instead, right before the race, they went to the town dump, got some old tires, cut out a sole, and then strapped on a pair of old car tires, and threw away the Reebok, and competed in the race in homemade sandals from the dump they made that morning.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Herman, the tribes you studied in Tanzania, what kind of similarities do you see between them and the Taharumara?

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so they're both really active all day. They're both getting, you know, as much physical activity in a day that, you know, as you and I get in a week. So they're super physically active. The difference is that, you know, the folks I work with don't run to accumulate all that activity. They're mostly walking or climbing trees to get honey or digging the ground to get tubers, that kind of thing.

• 50:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so tell me, how does this play out in calories? Because your book, Burn, is all about that. And it seems to me if I'm running all day, I'll be burning more calories than if I'm not running all day. And so what gives here? What's...

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, when we think of calories, we think of exercise. But of course, we burn a lot of calories just to stay warm-blooded, right?

• 50:39Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah, I mean, your brain... Brain burns 300 calories, kilocalories a day. Uh, your liver does the same. I mean, you know, your immune system's up and down all through the day and your stress reactivity. So you're burning calories on everything. You've got 37 trillion cells are all burning calories.

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're burning calories play or pay or play. You're burning calories.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. And so, uh, so actually some of the earliest work that we did with the Hadza group, uh, was to go out and measure how many calories you burn every day. So we use this cool isotope tracking technique that allows us to figure out how much carbon dioxide the body's expelling every day. And if you expire carbon dioxide, it has to be calories. And so it's this really precise way to get calories per day, um, with these men and women in the Hadza community. And even though they're really physically active, five times more than Americans, they burn the same number of calories every day as men and women in the U.S. and Europe and other industrialized countries. So their activity isn't changing the number of calories, it's changing the way those calories are spent.

• 51:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So pressing the button on the remote is real exercise then? That's what you're saying?

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Now, here's the problem, Neil. It's not. And so your body's going to find a way to burn that energy. So it's sort of like, it isn't sort of like, how do they spend so few calories? It's like, well, how do we spend so many? And the answer is, we've got sky high inflammation levels. Then we have, we react to stress too much. We have higher cortisol and adrenaline levels. We have, so our bodies are doing this, all this overactivity stuff. That's really bad for you.

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we burn our calories, we burn our calories through worrying?

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Yes. It's true. It's true. Absolutely. And anyway, it's bad for you to not spend those calories on exercise. You spend them on exercise. That's what we're evolved to do. If you spend them clicking your remote.

• 52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me, what is the main point in your burn book? If, if, if we're going to make this a best seller, what are people going to get most out of it?

• 52:27Speaker 03

  They are going to find out how diet and exercise actually affect your body, right? How the calories in that we take away the diet, how that, how your body burns all that off and all the things it does every day, and how things like exercise and activity actually affect the way that your body works. You gotta do both, but this book tells you how and it gets away from all the fad BS stuff because as somebody who actually does research on this, it pains me to see the diet books and the fad, you know, metabol- metabolic code and all this stuff. And it's like, come on, man.

• 52:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Herman, I have to share that sentiment. I had a task that I needed to do, which would take me 30 hours. And so, but it's a mindless task. So I said, why don't I binge every single Netflix documentary on nutrition and food. And so I watched, you know, 20, you know, 20 or so documentaries. And not only did most of them contradict each other, they were just, it was, it was sad.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of sort of mixture, I don't want to quite call it full up pseudoscience, but it was what people wanted to be true or felt like should be true or was consistent with their, with their new age philosophies. And I was very disappointed in it. And this is what people are paying attention to.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So hopefully this book is a corrective to that. I mean, there's nobody, there's so few real voices of real scientists out there in the diet nutrition spaces. There's plenty of books. There's plenty of people with MD after their name. But, you know, it's so hopefully this is a corrective to that. And people get excited. We talk about the hazard. We talk about some other fun field stuff. People get excited about the science of metabolism. Don't have to make stuff up.

• 54:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I want you to grade a tweet that I once posted. Okay. I'll tell it to you. Give me A, B, C, D, or F. Okay. Here's the tweet. If physicists, if a physicist wrote a diet book, it would contain one sentence, burn calories at a higher rate than you consume them.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. Yep. I mean, that's it. That's it. How do you get there? Yeah. The problem is you're not gonna make any money with that. No, you know, so it's been fun watching the reaction to my book. And one of the reactions I've got was this book sucks. There's no simple diet strategy. Where's my fad diet?

• 54:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Where's the cure all diet? There's one food you eat that makes the pounds melt away.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 54:54Chuck Nice?

  Everybody wants that, yeah. But that's why it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Because it's not about health. It's about psychological manipulation, you know? Which can sometimes lead to health. If somebody, you know, if somebody believes in it enough and sticks to whatever the prescription is, they might end up losing weight and looking like they won. But it's because they ended up doing what you both just said.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then they become an evangelist. That's the other side of this. Somebody finally finds what works for them to lose weight. And then that's the only thing that works. That's what everybody has to do.

• 55:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And everybody else has to do it, too, too. Well, I'm delighted that in this show, we have two sort of remarkable books that we're talking. You know, McDougall's book Born to Run. And Herman, your book Burn. You can't argue with that title. Burn, baby, burn.

• 55:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, it seems to me that some combination of those two books would do us all well to heed the insights and advice gleaned within them. So Herman, take us out with some reflective final thoughts.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Um, well, energy is really at the core of it all, right? You gotta turn energy into babies if you want to be a successful species. And humans are really good at that, which is why we are all over the planet the most dominant species. And the task for the next generation is to get responsible, not just good at getting energy out of our environments and turning it into babies, but responsible about it and do it in a way that doesn't crash us out. Because forever's a long time and there's no guarantee we'll be here in a million years.

• 56:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's a very important point. What's the average life expectancy of a mammal species?

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Uh, it is about a million years or so. So we are only, we're in the first third here of our time.

• 56:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First third. Uh, if, will our brain? Make that shorter for us or longer?

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Isn't that interesting? I mean, in one ways, it specializes us towards this way of living that could kill us because we were able to invent nuclear weapons.

• 56:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  On the other hand, it gives us this adaptability to be able to figure it out. So which wins? I don't know. You tell me.

• 57:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm asking you the damn anthropologist. That's what I'm asking you.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  We really look backwards.

• 57:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. Okay. Oh, you got it. I see. Okay. All right. So you're not going to go in the crystal ball. I will say, trauma and stress breeds wisdom and innovation. And I'd like to think that we will outlive our own our own weaknesses. And to see another day. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition. Gary O'Reilly, always good to have you and Chuck there as my co-host. I want to thank Mr. McDougall, who shared with us his wisdom and insights being a journalist, reporting on anthropological tribes in Mexico. And Professor Herman Pontzer, always good to talk to you. We've known each other before we recorded StarTalks. And it's good to have you.

• 57:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're into some really good, interesting stuff. And let this not be your last time on our show.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  That'd be great.

• 57:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Excellent. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.