PNTV: The Healthy Deviant by Pilar Gerasimo (#412)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Healthy Deviant by Pilar Gerasimo. Subtitle A Rule Breaker's Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World the Healthy Deviant Pilar Gerasimo is one of my dearest friends. I love Pilar. She's one of the wisest people I know. We've been friends for well over a decade now. We were doing an interview recently for her podcast called the Living Experiment that she does with Dallas Hartwig, the co founder of the Whole30 movement. Another one of my favorite guys, very cool human being who has also influenced me deeply. But Pilar and I did an interview recently for their show we were trying to remember when do we connect? It was when I was running my last business. She was running her magazine, Experience Life magazine, which she built into an award winning magazine with millions of people that subscribed. And I was running a social platform called Zodz back in the day for.

People who wanted to change the world.

Kind of a early version of what we're now doing with Optymyze. Check it out. Optimize Me. But I have been waiting for this book forever. So it was the first one we covered January 1, 2020. We kicked off the year with this book, which is interesting because then you look at everything that's going on in the world, which further proves her point. We do not live in a healthy world and it takes healthy deviance in order to be healthy in a profoundly sick world. As always, we've got a six page PDF, 600 plus of these now at Optimize Me, the team set up a free two week trial. Check it out. Pilar also joined us as one of our guest faculty, one of our luminaries for our Optymyze Coach program. Check that out at Optimize Me Coach. So get a bunch of big ideas. We're going to start with the lead quote that Pilar kicks the book off with, which happens to be probably the quote I share the most with our optimized coaches in our Mastery series. It's from Krishnamurti, who tells us that it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. So it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. The reality is, and Pilar walks us through the numbers, it's crazy. The vast majority of us are overweight or obese. Half of us will get a chronic disease like cancer, heart disease, et cetera, anxiety, depression, all the other things that we don't want to experience are being experienced in pandemic proportions. She calls it the udr, the unhealthy default reality is that we're sick. And she walks through all the numbers of how many people out there are actually healthy. What would you guess? Out of 100 people, how many people would you say are truly flourishing, coming alive and practicing basic health things like eating and moving and sleeping, feeling engaged in work, not having anxiety levels beyond a certain limit, etc. What would you guess? What out of 100? Pilar walks us through and says, it's about one out of 100. You're going to find one healthy person out of every hundred people. That's crazy. And if you want to be healthy in the modern world, you need to practice what she calls healthy deviance. So imagine you've got a little bell curve, right? And if you're anywhere in this zone right here, a standard deviation, maybe even like two standard deviations from the mean, you have a very high likelihood of being unhealthy. So you want to deviate from. From the norm. Now, we don't want to conflate it with unhealthy deviance. We want to be up here. I like to play in, like, the third standard deviation. Let's get asymptotic about it. Get as far away from normal as we possibly can. Again, it's no measure of health to be well adjusted to play in this standard area. No measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Again, Mark Twain, I love to quote him. He tells us whenever he finds himself on the side of the majority, he pauses and reflects, we don't want to hang out there. We want to have the courage to make some heroic decisions and be different, be willing to not conform. And the reality is, this isn't a new idea. We named our son Emerson after ralph Waldo Emerson. 150 years ago, he wrote an essay called Self Reliance. If you haven't read that yet, please check it out. We've got a philosopher's note on that particular essay and his collected works. But he says, look again. He says the exact same thing. 150 years ago. It was no measure of health to be well adjusted to that society. He says, you need to rely on yourself, trust thyself, but that it takes godlike courage to be willing to get away from the mean and to trust yourself out here. And he says, for your nonconformity, society will whip you with its displeasure. But yet still we need you to lead, to be iconoclastically different to be a healthy deviant. And then as I was preparing for this note, one of the ways I like to think of Pilar, every time I see her, I'm lit up because she's so lit up. She's a radiant exemplar of this wisdom, grounded, practical, inspiring. And she happens to have this amazing silvery hair, curls, silver locks, and she's Greek. Pilar Gerasimo.

Right.

Her father, Greek, et cetera. So I think of her as like our Greek goddess. And then when I was thinking about the challenge of being a healthy deviant, I thought of Emerson and then I thought of Socrates, who used to tell a story about the choice of Hercules, which we talked about in our PNTV recently on Donald Robertson's how to Think Like a Roman Emperor, in which we talked about. Was it in that one?

Yeah, I think it was in that one.

Donald Robertson shared the story, Marcus Aurelius, biography, philosophy, but he shares the story that Socrates shared. So 2,500 years ago, we had the same challenge. It was no measure of health to be well adjusted to society. 2,500 years ago. And Socrates talked about the choice of Hercules. And in the Choice of Hercules, young Hercules, before he's our hero, is cruising down a path and two goddesses approach him. He says that one of the goddesses Socrates does, telling the story, kind of pushes the other one aside and goes up in front and she's overly made up. And this is 2,500 years ago. He says that she was like all overly made up and kind of preening. And you can almost perfectly see the plastic surgery and all the kind of Instagram selfie stuff from this particular goddess. And she says, my friends call me Happiness Eudaimonia, but her real name was Vice. And she said, just follow me. Life's going to be awesome. It's going to be easy. And she's presenting Hercules with the hedonic pursuits, which again is the unhealthy default reality. We're going after all the extrinsic stuff. We want everything quick, we want it easy. And that leads to chronic disease, unhappiness, etc. Now the other goddess sits there patiently while Vice tells her story. Then she steps up and she has a bit more of an austere look. Beautiful, radiant, but she has a more grounded, calm look. And I think of Pilar as I was preparing for this. She steps up. Now her name is Arete, is virtue. She says, it's not going to be easy. You're going to have to do Hard work, Hercules, if you want to earn the praise of the gods. But that's why you're here. To do noble deeds, to live heroically, and to meet your challenges head on. And again, I'm going to. Not only am I not going to tell you it's going to be easy.

I'm going to promise you it's going to be hard.

But we need you to do the hard work. That's what I feel like. Pilar is whispering to us as that Greek goddess. Check out her beautiful silver curls. We need to have the courage to live heroically and to play at this end of the bell curve. Get out of the unhealthy default reality, be a healthy deviant. And then how do we do that? Well, again, that's what the book is all about. Setting us up with the. This is the problem and this is how we solve it. But let's define. Let's have Pilar define for us what it is to be a healthy deviant. She says this A healthy deviant is any person who willingly defies unhealthy norms and. And conventions in order to achieve a high level of vitality, resilience and autonomy. And of course, then, as we move there, we bring as many people as we can with us as radiant exemplars, etc. She also tells us, quoting Ayn Rand, the hard who said the hardest thing to explain? Philosopher Ayn Rand once wrote is the glaringly evident, which everybody has decided not to see. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident, which everybody has decided not to see. Now, when I reread that this morning, I thought of a conversation. Pilar and I have had many, many conversations. She's deeply influenced my thinking on a range of subjects, particularly health, nutrition, environmental issues, et cetera. But as I was reading that, I was thinking of my brother's experience and my experience with my brother and as he went through pancreatic cancer, right? So in our eating session for the Mastery series, and I talk about this a little bit in conquering cancer 101 and conquering cancer 102, which you can check out at Optimize Me, I think it's cancer or conquering cancer. We have all that stuff for free. I've got 10 notes on great books on conquering cancer there. We've got these two classes, et cetera. But my brother's going through stage three, stage four pancreatic cancer, and he's going to a certain event put on by an organization called Pancan, which I'm sure has noble intentions. But I'm going there raising money for their community, et cetera. And the sponsor of the event is a company called Wienerschnitzel. Now, Wienerschnitzel, if you don't know, sells hot dogs and sodas. Now, there are a few things that people agree on other than the fact that processed meat is highly correlated to cancer, particularly pancreatic cancer. Now, as it turns out, the CEO, founder and CEO of Wienerschnitzel died of pancreatic cancer. But for some reason, they thought the way to give back was to feed people trying to conquer cancer with the very thing that actually exacerbates the problem. Hot dogs, soda. Again, the sugar in soda. As Tom Rath, who's been battling cancer for his entire life, says in Eat, Move, sleep, Sugar is cancer candy. It's candy for cancer cells. Sugar is toxic. That's what cancer cells feed on. So there's just this blindness to the reality of what's driving the show. And I talk about in our eating session for mastery series of. It's like that gorilla. Have you ever seen the experiment where they ask people to count balls while they're being passed between people in a white T shirt? There's white people, people in white T shirts and people in black T shirts. And they say to the subject, hey, you watch the people in the white T shirts pass the ball, Count how many times they pass the ball. And you got to pay attention because you're going to miss them between the white shirts and the black shirts. And then in the middle of doing that, a gorilla walks into the middle of the experiment and pounds his chest. I'm giving away the punchline here of the story, but if you watch the. The video and you're intently focusing on the basketball being passed, a crazy number of people never see the gorilla. It's right there. Comes in and beats its chest. But you're so focused on something else, you don't even see the gorilla in the middle of that screen. And the idea here is, this is so obvious how we're living. What we're doing is so dysfunctional. It's so obvious. Yet it's like the gorilla sitting there in the middle that no one sees. So we need, again, step back, be willing to be iconoclast and break the icons of our society and stop doing things like drinking sodas at and eating pizza at pizza parties for kids after their baseball game. That's the most ridiculous thing we could possibly do to celebrate. Create disease. Yeah, it takes years and decades for it to come to its actualization. But these are the things that create an unhealthy default reality and why we need to be healthy deviants. And again, embracing the fact that it's not going to be easy, but yet it's extremely important. Here's another quote Pilar quotes now. James Aggie AG Rather, adjustment to a sick and insane environment is of itself not health, but sickness and insanity. So again, look around you. Do you want to be like everyone around you? No. Then you need to behave differently than everyone around you. Healthy deviants. I think I've made my point. Pilar gets me fired up. Renegade rituals is how we actually engage in this. Pilar tells us, imagine the most healthy version of you. What would that version of you do? Then she encourages us to create rituals. Actually, this is another great quote. I loved, loved, loved this quote. Here we go. So where is it? Oh, yeah. Derek Walcott, Nobel prize winning poet, tells us any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. Any serious attempt to try to do anything worthwhile, whether that's becoming the best version of you, or becoming a poet in Walcott's example, or a healthy deviant or an entrepreneur, or a great mother or father, requires any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. You need to have rituals. So Pilar sets the stage. And then she tells us three different things she encourages us to do. 1am two ultradians and 3pm she calls the a.m. rituals morning minutes and encourages you to start your day in a healthy, restorative way. Don't start your day checking out your smartphone. Start your day with a minute or three or ten of meditation or journaling or movement or connecting with your family or something that creates energized tranquility rather than enervated anxiety. Then she talks about ultradian rhythms. We need to oscillate during the day. So ultradian means more than a day. Ultra dian circadian is every day, right? Every 24 hours. Ultradian is more often then every 24 hours. So you want to be intensely on and then you want to be intensely off. Most people go through life never fully on. They're kind of distracted. Partial attention, continuous partial attention, never there in their work or in their love, et cetera. But they're also never off. And that leads to burnout, that leads to innervated anxiety vis a vis what we like to call energized tranquility. So ultradian rhythms, every 60, 75, 90, 120 minutes, you want to oscillate because your energy is going to sustain itself for a period, then it needs to be renewed and you want to renew it, not by doing more online stuff. You want to go deep and then you want to recover, go into nature, meditate, do whatever it is that's truly deeply restorative. Then she has what she calls a nightly wind down ritual where you do healthy behaviors at night. Now, for us in our optimized community and coach program, we would say digital sunsets. Turn off your electronic at least an hour before bed, otherwise your cortisol is going to be still blasting when you need your melatonin to come in. But that works as a seesaw. If one's up, the other's down. So you got to turn your cortisol down to turn your melatonin up. What are your healthy am, Ultradian and PM rituals? When Pilar and I chatted for her podcast, I said, you know, I love that, of course. And I think your day actually started the night before. So as we talk about all the time, your PM bookend, how you end your day actually creates your am. If you're up all night blowing yourself up with stimulation technology, email, binge watching, whatever you wake up feeling, not so great. So your day began the night before. Boom. Pm, AM ultradians. This is actually exactly how we run through our carpe diem session. We spend two months in our Mastery series for our coaches, helping them become masters at creating masterpiece days. We start with the big picture, then PM bookend, then AM bookend, and then energy, work and love. And energy is all about essentially energy management and ultradian rhythm. So we need to have rituals. If you're serious, you have rituals. In the note, we talk about Talmud, Shahar and some other ideas. We'll leave it at that for now. Then Pilar tells us, ditch your diet. All you need to do is basically eat real food, focus on quality, and the rest can take care of itself. So she's all about not being dogmatic. When I was vegangelical back in the day, she was very patient with me and helped me kind of step back and see a broader perspective and do a little less cherry picking and have a little bit less dogma. Super powerful grounding for me at that time and throughout the last 10 years or whatever it's been. But we want to ditch the diet and follow some very basic, I would say follow some very basic rules. As we evolve our protocol with Optymyze, we've come up with three food rules, which we've been talking about in different contexts. Number one, ditch the sugary drinks Quit drinking sugar. This is actually a Mark Hyman inspired idea from Food Fix. But Robert Lustig, all the other great teachers tell us, sugar is a toxin. Don't drink it. Rule number one, check in. Are you drinking sugar? If so, you can radically change your life by simply doing that. We're going to do a Stop doing that. We're going to do a PNTV on positive psychology in the body and talk about the effects of sugar on depression. It's crazy what sugar does. It did not exist in our diet 500 years ago. Now we eat 150 pounds of it. You tell me if that's a good idea. Ditch the drinking of sugar. We'll ditch the diet, but we'll add a few different guideposts, rules perhaps, et cetera. The second one we have is eat real food, which is what people are saying here. Throw out the factory food, which would include ultra processed food, flour, again, more sugary stuff, all of the stuff that didn't exist pre industrial revolution. Then we have in factory farmed animals as well in factory fats, all the vegetables, etc. Then we have give yourself the night off, eating sunsets, having a nice long window between your last meal and your first meal. And then we have the plus one rule. Eat like your favorite philosopher who is 300 years old. Again, we talk about that more in different contexts, but for now, focus on the quality. Quit eating ultra processed food and you're 80, 20 there. Finally we got is something wrong? If something's wrong in your life, she says, make it right. Actually step back and see that. Your ability to see the problem in and of itself is a really powerful step of actually stepping back and then moving forward. In our Mastery series, we playfully say that Neo got the red pill from Morpheus. We give the blue optimized pill. Seeing reality, seeing what's wrong, but then being able to make the connection between, oh, that poor habit, lack of ritual, etcetera, Conformity, etcetera, led to this sickness and illness. Perfect. Literally. That's my response to anything perfect. Jocko Willink has his good. Anything happens to him. Good, bad, particularly bad. Good. It is what it is. As Pilar tells us, referencing Byron Katie Love, what is? Don't argue with reality. It is what it is. Make it right. Whatever's wrong, make it right. Amor Fatih, love your fate. The art of acquiescence is how the Stoics put it. And by the way, the Stoics also said you want to have contempt for conformity again 2000 years ago, contempt for conformity and then a noble indifference to the consequences of that lack of conformity. And again, Emerson tells us, for your nonconformity, society will whip you with its displeasure. Are people going to be happy that you choose to do something different? Probably not. In the beginning, at least that is what it is. We need to make a choice. And again, this is why being healthy in an unhealthy world is a radical act. Here we go. I think that's it. Healthy deviants, everything is what it is. How do we get antifragile on it? Use whatever's quote wrong right now to get right to actually step out, be willing to be a healthy deviant, seeing the unhealthy default reality for what it is, creating our renegade rituals and showing up as the best version of ourselves today and a little bit more tomorrow, etc. Etc. There you go.

Pilar.

Thanks for a great book. Love you and I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, check out the note, check out the book, check out everything Pilar does. Thehealthydeviant.com she's got a bunch of classes. The podcast she does with Dallas Hartwig again, co founder of the Whole30 movement, the Living Experiment. Check that out. It's a great, great podcast. Two of the wisest, most grounded, beautiful.

People on the planet.

Right behind you. What'd you get out of today? How can you move from theory to practice to mastery? Think about that. Get on it. Make today another awesome day. See you tomorrow. Hey guys, this is Bry.

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