PNTV: Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall (#332)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall. Natural born heroes Subtitle Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance. Awesome book. Christopher wrote Born to Run as well and, and this book was recommended in Spartan fit. Picked it up, loved it and I'm excited to share some of my favorite big ideas. Philosopher's Note Bunch of them, handful of them here. We'll start back at the top. So this is a book about natural born heroes where we look at a number of different heroes. And the basic theme of the book is we all have the ability, ordinary people have the ability to do extraordinary things. And he shares a number of those stories in the book which with two primary themes. One, he kind of looks at the natural movement movement and he also looks at some fascinating stories from World War II and particularly resistance fighters on Crete, the island Crete, who did some extraordinary things with some unlikely British soldiers. So natural born heroes, we all have the potential to be heroes. Begs the question, what is a hero? Do you know what the word hero literally means in ancient Greek? I did not until I read this book and I absolutely love it. Can you guess what it means? Think about that while the Jeopardy music plays. This is what the word hero literally means. Means protector. Does not mean killer of bad guys or one who does great things. It means protector. A hero is someone who, who serves someone else, who protects someone else. And that's an important theme throughout the book, is that it's not about being a hero so that you can just kind of be great. It's about being a hero and particularly in this case, being fit so that you can be useful. Which is our second big idea. Be fit to be useful. The founder of the old school natural movement, a fascinating French guy, came up with this slogan for his natural movement theories. Be fit to be useful. This isn't about being fit so you can snap a selfie and go put it up on social media or even win a gold medal or win races. The idea here is be fit so you can be a hero, so you can be a protector. Have this strength for two. And in the book a lot of it is about having the physical strength to do things that might come in handy if you want to do something heroic and protect someone, whether it's carrying them out of a burning building or whatever. But the underlying theme persists throughout all aspects of our lives. If we want to be heroes, if we want to be able to protect those we love in our community and Make a contribution to the world. We need to. And be useful in general. We need to be strong physically, emotionally, mentally. We need to be fit such that we can be useful. And again, this is the juxtaposition between intrinsic motivation of making a conscious being useful and extrinsic motivation, where it's snapping another selfie and it's all about me, right? So be fit to be useful. Think about who you get to serve. And there's not just the typically heroic moments of carrying someone out of a burning building, but being there for your family and being strong emotionally so you can deal with life's challenges, being energetically fit so you can give yourself most fully to your creative work and to your world. It talks a lot about Teddy Roosevelt and JFK and how important they thought fitness was for the health of our nation. Individuals need to be fit so we can be useful. Third, big idea. Well, how do we go about doing that? A big part of the book is to look at how did these unlikely British soldiers, fascinating guys and fascinating stories, do extraordinary things. What they did, in addition to a ton of other things, with these resistance fighters in Crete during World War II. And they kidnapped a German Nazi general, literally kidnapped him from the middle of wherever he was stationed. The only time in history that's happened where an acting serving general kidnapped at the front lines. Extraordinary feat. And then they had to take him, so they had to actually get him, right? Then take him, then take him up into the Cretan landscape, which was just crazy rough, right? Straight uphill and down and do all these amazing things that required incredible strength and endurance to get them to shore and then get them off the island, right? And he says, how did they do this? And as it turns out, these natural born heroes tapped into some Cretan superpower secrets, which included weeds and fat, right? So first, weeds, their diet. It was extraordinarily important that they ate well and they ate a ton of wild weeds, which shockingly, are full of all the things we need. An Alphabet of soup, of vitamins, right? Omega 3 to Omega 6, balances, et cetera. Christopher walks us through all this in the book. Quick highlights. You'll recall in our discussion on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. He talked about the consequences of industrialization. Five of them. One of the main ones was we went from eating a ton of leaves to to eating a ton of seeds. Now the cretins didn't. The cretins continue to eat a ton of leaves back in the day. Researchers believe that our ratio between omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids was one to one. Now, omega 3s are anti inflammatory, omega 6s are inflammatory. Now you need a certain level of inflammation in order to deal with challenges in your body, right? Christopher tells us, but you want to have like a small burning fire in your house to keep it warm, right? You don't want a bonfire that sets the whole house on fire. That's not the level of inflammation you want. But since we switched from leaves to seeds, right, the seeds have a ton more omega 6s. So our ratio went from 1 to 1 omega 6 to omega 3 to 16 omega 6s to 1 omega 3s. That's not a healthy ratio. It creates a ton of inflammation. And you're literally setting your house on fire. The house being your body, which leads to heart disease, diabetes, all the other things that we don't want to experience in our lives. The way to counter that, go cretin style on it. Eat a ton of weeds. In the note I mentioned in my interview with David Perlmutter, I asked him what he eats and he literally lit up as he talked about the weeds that he eats. Dandelion greens, mustard greens, all kinds of other wild greens that we can eat. We want to focus on more leaves, less seeds. Another little tangent fact. Remember that these days, 66% of our calories, the average American's calories, 66% of them come from four seeds, corn, soy, wheat and rice. Four seeds, 66% of our caloric intake is officially crazy. So bring back the weeds. Fourth, big idea in terms of how these natural born heroes came to be is they used fat as fuel. They had to go up, they took this general and all the other missions they went on, and they had to run up and down these mountains, which were truly incredibly intense and challenging, right? And they did so essentially on what he calls a starvation diet. They were fueled by their own body fat and by the fat in the food they eat. If you ask, what's the healthiest diet on the planet? Most people will say the Mediterranean diet. You say, okay, well where's the Mediterranean diet? What specifically? And people will say Greece. And he says, Christopher does. Well, more specific than that, it's Crete. Crete is the source of this incredibly healthy diet. 50% of their diet comes from fat, olive oil and other healthy fats. And he talks about how these guys used fat for fuel. And some other fascinating stories of a guy who, mysterious guy who talked about using fat for fuel back in the day. He turned Mark Allen, who's the world's greatest triathlete onto these ideas and he used his fat for fuel. Won six Ironman triathlons or something crazy. World's greatest athlete in 1997. And a ton of other athletic stories of how changing from burning sugar and carbs to burning fat is the solution. And he talks about the guy who literally was the biggest advocate of carbohydrate intake, carb loading, all that stuff. I think his name is Dr. Noakes. And that guy, after 40 years of going off on the importance of carbs, changed his perspective. He's now all about fat as fuel. So we think that carbs are the ideal fuel. They're not. Christopher walks us through how evolutionarily fat is the best primary source for fuel. We've been talking about this in a ton of notes and he basically applies the wisdom from Always Hungry by David Ludwig and Mark Hyman's Eat Fat, Get Thin into an athletic performance arena. Super fascinating. He talks about not only how we want to switch from fast acting carbs, right? High glycemic carbs, turning that out of our diet and turning on the fat burning. And then so we take in more fat, less refined carbs, and then we learn how to use that fat as we go out and train. Really cool stuff about how to get into a fat burning state. Not going into an anaerobic state where we trigger the carb burning, but getting better and better and better at consistently going faster and faster and faster and at a slow burn rate. More in the note more in the book for that. And then the fifth big idea here is the fact that natural born heroes, again, the theme of the book is we all the ordinary can do the extraordinary, right? And he uses examples like Hercules. We think of Hercules these days and we think of him as like this he man, this huge he man. But in ancient mythology, he wasn't the strongest guy. He was never the strongest guy in the fight. There were always people that were bigger than him and his strength wasn't his primary asset. His primary assets included his unbending will and his openness to learning, basically to constantly optimizing and get a little bit better and a little bit better, having a growth mindset in service to something bigger than himself and being a true hero and protector. But the important point here is that, and again, Christopher talks about in the book that we've got this weird mythology these days where everything is outsized. You've got Arnold Schwarzenegger and his testosterone and steroid pumped up body as the ideal heroic sense of what we should be aspiring to. He says that doesn't make any sense. That's useless fitness. You want to have a useful fitness. You want to be strong, you want to have endurance, you want to have flexibility, and you want to do so naturally, not with all these bizarre senses of what's powerful and what's beautiful. And so come back to Hercules. It's the strength of will, the unbending will, it's his willingness to learn, his growth mindset, all of which are things that we can cultivate. We don't need to be that impossible crazy vision of the hero. Each of us can cultivate our desire to serve, our desire to protect. And I didn't mention in the first big Idea, but the essence of that desire to protect is very straightforward. It's love. Heroes have compassion. Heroes are driven by something bigger than themselves to be useful. And then in this context, they're also willing to be fit in order to be useful. And they do things like optimizing their diet using eating more greens, less seeds and using fat as fuel and making it all one big experiment. That's the final or one of the final big ideas. In the note I talk about is this should all be. When he talked to the guy who became his mentor on the Fat as Fuel and he gave him like an overview of his program, he said, look, this is super simple. You need to do this and this and this and this. But what he wrote at the top was test. He didn't write diet. He thought diets are absurd, right? It assumes that you do something in order to get something quick and there should be shame involved. He said, look, just run a test as we talked about and it starts with food experiment of one. Run the test, see what works for you, get 1% better day in and day out, incrementally optimize and aggregate and compound all those little gains over time and see what you can do. That is ultimately what it's all about. We all have the ability to be natural born heroes. Let's tap into that latent power and be useful and also have another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101 confidence 101 business 101 meditation 101 that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern science plus Common sense plus virtue plus mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.