What Would You Ask the Bushman? Conversations with the Hadza That Changed Everything

Imagine you could sit across from someone whose daily life looks almost identical to the way humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years. No calendar. No mortgage. No news feed. Just the raw, unfiltered experience of being a human animal on the African savanna.

Now imagine you could ask that person anything.

What would you want to know?

Fifteen Years with the Hadza

I have been visiting the Hadza people of northern Tanzania for over fifteen years. Not as a tourist. Not on a weekend safari add-on. I have lived with them, hunted with them, slept on the ground beside them, eaten what they eat, and walked the same trails they have walked for generations. Over time, they made me an honorary member of the tribe. They call me KuKuRu.

That relationship has changed my life in ways I did not expect. It changed the way I think about food, about fear, about purpose, about relationships, about health, and about what it actually means to be human. All three of my books, including The Gap book, have been shaped by those experiences. And the further I go into this work, the more I realize that the Hadza do not just offer a window into the past. They offer a mirror for the present.

When you spend enough time with people who live the way our ancestors lived, you start to see just how far the modern world has drifted from the conditions we were designed for. That drift is what I call evolutionary mismatch. And it touches everything. Our diets. Our sleep. Our social structures. Our sense of meaning. The Hadza do not suffer from the same epidemic levels of obesity, depression, anxiety, or chronic disease that we do. And that is not a coincidence.

The Questions That Started It All

Years ago, Tony Robbins asked me to bring two questions to the Hadza chief. Simple questions on the surface. Profound in what they revealed.

The first: What do you believe happens when we die?

The second: What do you believe is the purpose of life?

I will not spoil the answers here. But I will tell you this. They were not what I expected. They were not what Tony expected. And they cut through layers of philosophical complexity with a clarity that only someone living close to the earth can deliver.

That experience planted a seed. If Tony's two questions could produce answers that powerful, what would happen if I brought more questions from more people? What if some of the sharpest thinkers I know could sit, virtually, across from a Hadza elder and ask whatever was on their mind?

The Experiment

So on a later visit, I did exactly that.

I asked friends and colleagues to record video questions for the Hadza chief. People like Jay Shetty, Daniel Priestley, Bruce Muzik, Shelly Lefkoe, Greg Wells, and Helena Houdova. Each of them brought a different lens. Relationships. Leadership. Consciousness. Health. Purpose.

I played their video questions for the chief, Nona, and recorded his responses.

What came back was remarkable. Not because the answers were sophisticated in the way a university professor might deliver them. But because they were honest in a way that sophisticated answers almost never are. There was no posturing. No attempt to impress. Just a man answering from a lifetime of living in deep connection with his environment, his people, and the rhythms of the natural world.

Nona's answer to Greg Wells, in particular, cracked me up. Sometimes the most unexpected humor shows up when two completely different worldviews collide.

Why These Conversations Matter

Here is what I think most people miss about the Hadza.

We are not visiting them to romanticize their lifestyle. I am not suggesting anyone abandon electricity and go live in the bush. That is not the point. The point is that these people represent a living, breathing reference point for what human life looked like before the modern world reshaped everything.

When a Hadza elder answers a question about the purpose of life, he is not drawing from a book he read or a TED talk he watched. He is drawing from an unbroken lineage of human experience that stretches back further than any written record. That perspective is extraordinarily rare. And it is disappearing.

Every year, the modern world encroaches a little further into Hadza territory. Every year, the gap between their way of life and ours narrows slightly. Which means every conversation we have now, every question we ask now, carries a kind of urgency.

These are not casual interviews. They are time capsules.

What You Will Hear

The full series of these conversations is now available on my podcast. Here is what has been released so far:

Part 1: Shelly Lefkoe, Greg Wells, and Helena Houdova. Three very different people with three very different questions. Shelly brings her deep curiosity about beliefs and the mind. Greg, a human performance researcher, asks about health and longevity. Helena, a model and humanitarian, goes somewhere unexpected. And Nona delivers.

Part 2: Bruce Muzik on Relationships. Bruce is the founder of Love at First Fight, and he understands relationship dynamics at a level most people never reach. His questions for the chief explore love, conflict, and partnership through a lens that the Hadza rarely encounter. The answers are striking.

Part 3: Daniel Priestley on Life and Leadership. Daniel is one of the most gifted entrepreneurs I know. He is the founder of Key Person of Influence and a regular voice on shows like Diary of a CEO. True to form, he asked questions that led to answers none of us saw coming.

Part 4, featuring Jay Shetty, is coming very soon.

The Real Question

So let me turn this around.

If you could ask a Hadza elder one question, what would it be? Not a clever question. Not a question designed to sound smart. A real one. The kind of question that keeps you up at night or sits quietly in the back of your mind during a long drive.

Because here is what fifteen years of these conversations has taught me: the quality of the answer you get is directly proportional to the honesty of the question you ask. The Hadza do not respond to cleverness. They respond to sincerity.

And in a world that rewards performance over authenticity at almost every turn, that might be the most important lesson of all.

Stay wild.