Episode Transcript: #1561 - Kermit Pattison

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

Welcome. Thanks for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. I'm very, very fascinated by this subject.

Well, thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

So this is a long journey for you to have written this book and to be involved in this project. Can you talk us through how you got involved in this?

Sure. It was completely unintentional. I had started off working on a different book on the evolution of human locomotion.

And I mean, just as an aside, humans are weird primates in a lot of ways.

But one way we're weird is just we were slow, we're weak, but we have this ability to walk and run long distances, which is kind of unique.

So I thought, okay, I mean, I'm not certainly a lot of other people have noted that before.

But as far as I was concerned, no one had really written the deep history of that.

So I was going to go sort of investigate the anthropology of where this weird human capacity came from.

And so I thought that the early human history like Artie would be this, you know, a little sliver of background before I got to the interesting stuff.

But anyway, I started reading the Artie papers and they kind of undercut a lot of the things that I had, the research community had taken for granted, or at least challenged them, let's say.

And so anyway, I started talking to the people on the Artie team and then thinking, oh, this, tell me about how you found this thing.

Oh, that sounds pretty interesting.

And then so I thought, okay, well, maybe Artie, maybe it'll be a page, it's more than this little line.

Then, you know, learn a little more, that's five pages.

Actually, this is a whole chapter.

No, this is three chapters.