Yeah, that's what I was going

to ask you.

Yeah, no, running 25 miles, which I did once a week for seven years, whether or not I raced a marathon, I ran at least 25 mile run one day, once a week.

And it chewed me up.

It was normal.

Part of my training, it made me a better performer.

But it cost me my joints.

What is it?

So I think that's an important part of this conversation, which is working from a place where you give your nervous system a break in some parts of the day.

So where we see this in large numbers is in the running community, right? So this book Born to Walk came about as sort of a response to the running boom of the last 50 years that has engaged tens of millions of people, if not hundreds of millions of people over that period of time, who engaged in running thinking it was going to be the best thing they could do for themselves.

It was going to be a way to lose weight.

It was going to be a way to improve their cardiovascular fitness.

It was going to be a way to improve their health and perhaps extend their lives.

And it's turned out to not be true.

And it turns out that most people who run... should not be running.

But this feels like a very specific intention.

Mm-hmm.

And I suffer a little bit as a result of it now.

I over-trained.

I damaged my heart from the hard work that I did.

What you re- realize is that most people who run today, um, are not genetically predisposed to being able to run long distances.

We were born to walk.

We were not born to run metronomically seven, eight, nine-minute miles every day for 45 minutes or an hour and a half.

Yeah.

Give us sort of the three minute overview of what this is all about, if you can.

The primal blueprint is actually a way of regaining control of your own health and fitness by understanding how the body works and how we can literally manipulate gene expression on a minute-to-minute, day-to-day basis in the way in which genes rebuild, renew, regenerate, and recreate ourselves.

Now, the clues to how we switch on certain genes and turn off other genes is found in evolutionary biology in two and a half million years of human evolution and confirmed by modern genetic science.

So what we've really done is we've accessed information where people can choose certain types of foods to eat, certain ways to move or exercise, sun exposure or not, ways to sleep, that allow the body to repair damage it's done, to regain good health, to maybe improve energy levels.

The idea is that each of us is born with a recipe for a perfect, happy, healthy, productive, lean, fit, strong human being.

Each of us possesses this wonderful recipe that is the result of two and a half million years of human evolution.

But unfortunately, through the influences of our trustworthy government, wink, wink, and other major agencies and special interest groups, we've gotten into this pattern, this conventional wisdom where we assume that certain types of foods are good for us that are not.

They always had a long ferment or long soaking to make them more digestible.

So you went to the physical product business, would love to hear like, like how you were doing information, a lot of like training information business, like, you know, teaching people, educating them, and then pivot that into a physical products business would love to hear like, like, what were your learnings in doing something like that? Because I'm actually starting to move into a physical products business myself.

You know, if I'd listened to my advisors, I'd never have done any of this because they said, you're crazy.

You don't know anything about food.

Why are you going to start a food company? And it was my naivete and my hubris that kind of got me to where I was because I made a bet that there were other people like me who were willing to pay two or three times as much for a particular product on a shelf in the grocery store than because it had an impeccable ingredient list, right, that you could scrutinize the ingredient list and go, oh, yeah, I've never seen this before.

This is a product that does not have this, this, this, and this, has only good ingredients in it.

I'm willing to buy this.

I'm willing to pay up for this.

And it looks like yours is a more modern version or more – I wore

[chuckles]

... um, have, um, you know, have, have had our best interests in mind with their so-called tech platforms that they're building.

Well, really what this has done is it, it has encased our feet, um, and, uh, taken a lot of the burden off the small muscles of our feet to do what their feet are supposed to do, which is, number one, feet are supposed to feel the ground.

We're supposed to sense the ground underneath us.

Um, that's what informs the brain on exactly how to organize your kinetic chain.

So if you can't get that information from the bottoms of the feet, from the 200,000 nerve endings that are on the bottom of the feet, the brain cannot figure out exactly how to scrunch the arch, how much to articulate the toes, how much to roll the ankle out a little bit to offset the tilt on the, on the particular, uh, uneven ground you're stepping on, how deeply to bend the knee.

All of that information is transmitted to the brain by the time you weight the foot when you, when your foot lands if you're barefoot or if you're wearing minimalist shoes.

What's the best way for them to go about, and how long would it take them to start to see some positive benefits of strengthening a foot?

Mm-hmm.

But we didn't realize at the time that elevating the heel and putting that padding in and getting rid of some of the ground feel that you get from your contact with earth every ti- every step you take, whether you're walking or running, um, ge- getting rid of that sensory input confuses the brain, and the brain now no longer, um, is able to orchestrate your entire kinetic chain perfectly.

And s- you do that enough, and many...

So many miles over so many years, and you get injured, and, and that's what happened to me.

So I knew that, um, I had been at the effect of, uh, shoes that I'd been wearing.

Um, but there was no solution at the time.

I me- I went on with the rest of my life [clears throat] started talking about diet, wrote some books on exercise, on fitness, on diet, Primal Blueprint, uh, keto, intermittent fasting, and then started Primal Kitchen and was really, you know, all about helping people realign their, their, uh, health through dietary choices and making, uh, healthy food taste great.

Mm-hmm

So can we start there? Can you, can you tell us about persistence hunting?

Well, first of all, Born to Run was a great book and Christopher McDougall is a great author and he weaves a compelling narrative.

And in it, he talks about this notion that what makes us human, what allowed us to survive the rigors of a harsh environment and to outlive our the predators that were surrounding us and to become top of the food chain was this persistence hunting ability.

Now, part of it in the in the in the You know, the anatomy of a human, we have this nuchal ligament in the top of our neck that allows us to run without our head bouncing like you would see in other animals.

We have this elongated Achilles tendon, which separates us from other apes.

So we can run longer distances and take longer strides as a result of this extended Achilles tendon.

You know, we have an opposing thumb, which gives us tool... use and the combination of all those created the opportunity for us to track down other beasts one other thing that you just brought up is this um this this cooling mechanism that we have the ability to sweat profusely to cool ourselves down in the heat of the um you know african jungle or the sahara or whatever planes that our ancestors were trying to chase an animal you You put these all together and it sounds pretty cool.

So can you talk about some of the issues with the modern shoes that are sold to runners and why they have created a lot of problems.

Like how did that reconfigure your identity?

Well, my identity was formed as an endurance athlete, generic endurance athlete in my teens, and I was a runner for a while.

And then I got injured from all the training, and there were some dietary implications there as well, which factored in.

And I qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials in 1980, and I couldn't go to the trials because I was so badly injured.

I couldn't train enough to even toe the line.

So I just – as an endurance athlete and as that was my identity, it's kind of harsh to just be 26, 27 years old and have that be the end of your career.

A friend of mine who had been – I'd seen him out on the roads.

So how did you go about navigating that? Like, okay, I have a lot of intangibles that I can take from sports, but it's not necessarily with the same result.

So what's the latest with PuLuBa?

Oh, my God.

We're just having s- so much fun.

I mean, this, uh...

I get, every day I get testimonials that are basically tear-jerking testimonials about how we're changing lives, about people who had real foot issues, couldn't really walk without discomfort or couldn't, you know, work out in the gym without discomfort, now able to do so comfortably-You know, fixing problems over time because they're reacquiring a, a good, strong, balanced gait, rewiring their perfect kinetic chain that had been rendered imperfect by the shoes they were wearing before.

We have a lot of people in the trails.

Uh, we have a, a sh- trail shoe called the ATR.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... from the leg through and down across all the way out to the end of the toes.

That, that blood flow is restricted, and that's when that tissue starts to die.

It starts to...

And so no amount of rolling or stretching, sometimes the worst thing you can do for, for plantar fasciosis.

It's just opening up.

It's, uh, once you are b- are able to abduct the toe away and regain some of that circulation and improve it just through, not through running, not through necessarily doing all kinds of, you know, P- PT, uh, rehab stuff for your feet.

... to the, to your toe.

I just couldn't stop eating.

That's the thing.

Running, if you're not, again, if you haven't trained for it to burn fat preferentially, then running at a reasonably high heart rate, and by reasonably high, it's not even...

It's like zone three.

You burn this glycogen off in your muscles, and, and it's a, it's a, it's a survival mechanism that the brain has at the end of a run because our, our ancestors didn't run every day.

That, that was antithetical to health.

That would be stupid to run every day.

Hmm.

So walk us through the sugar problem.

Well, uh, you know, I would say, um, if...

I've been asked in the past, you know, like, "What's the one thing you would change about your diet that would, um, maybe decrease your risk for pretty much all-cause mortality?" And it would be, um, getting sugar out of your diet.

But, you know, when we talk about sugar, we're talking...

There are a lot of variants of this.

There's, you know, um, obvious pies, cakes, candies, cookies, uh, sweetened beverages, sweetened drinks, and then a- sugar added to everything else.

There's also, by the way, um, the concept that, you know, most, uh, processed grains convert to glucose almost immediately in the body.

There's something about being barefoot and our footwear and how we go through life on these two little things we call feet that you think is being overlooked and that is really important to our long-term health.

And exhausts you.

And exhausts you.

And meanwhile, you're continuously building upon your fat storage and you're never drawing it down.

You're never taking it out.

You're never burning it for energy.

Another irony of ironies is every time you eat something like that, every time your insulin is high, it locks the fat in the fat cells.

Fat can't come out of storage unless insulin is low.

You know, it doesn't mean it was-