The Art of Manliness - #195： How to Live Like an Ancient Greek Hero

00:00:00.000 Brad McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:18.820 So during World War II, the mountain island of Crete off the coast of Greece was occupied

00:00:23.880 by the Nazis and it was actually a very, it was a strategic point during the war.

00:00:28.640 And there was this small group of resistance fighters that consisted of Brits as well

00:00:33.580 as native Cretans that decided, they came with this audacious plan to abduct a German 0.81

00:00:40.820 general and take them off the island. 0.82

00:00:44.180 And here's the thing, these resistance fighters, they weren't like SEAL commando types or paratroopers.

00:00:49.300 One was a penniless artist, another was a young shepherd, and another was a playboy poet.

00:00:54.420 Yet somehow they're able to pull off this amazing feat of strength and endurance and wits.

00:00:59.140 And my guest today wanted to figure out, how did these guys do it?

00:01:02.720 His name is Christopher McDougall, and his book that he retraces the steps of these resistance

00:01:07.540 fighters is called Natural Born Heroes, How a Daring Band of Misfits Masked the Lost Secrets 1.00

00:01:12.380 of Strength and Endurance.

00:01:13.540 And in it, he follows the steps of these resistance fighters and along the way finds out and discovers

00:01:20.160 this ancient art of heroism that the Greeks developed thousands of years ago that consisted

00:01:24.960 of skills, but as well as virtues that a hero should develop and that they taught one another.

00:01:30.980 Really fascinating.

00:01:32.620 If you love Greek history, you're going to love this podcast.

00:01:35.520 We talk about Pankration, which is this brutal form of martial arts that the Greeks developed.

00:01:41.120 We talk about endurance running and fascia and the power of fascia.

00:01:46.380 We talk about intuitive aiming and shooting.

00:01:50.260 We talk about the skills and the virtues the Greeks developed, like Erete and Paideia and Zinia,

00:01:56.460 and we'll discuss what those all mean.

00:01:58.540 And then how we today, even below average Joe Blows, can develop this lost art of heroism as well

00:02:06.220 in our own lives.

00:02:07.340 Really fun podcast.

00:02:08.480 I think you're going to enjoy it and be sure to check out the show notes after you're done

00:02:13.160 listening for links to resources and things we mentioned in the podcast so you can delve

00:02:17.340 deeper into the topic.

00:02:18.840 You can find that at AOM.

00:02:20.440 You can find those show notes at AOM.IS slash heroes.

00:02:25.400 And as always, if you enjoy the podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you give us a review

00:02:28.960 on iTunes or Stitcher.

00:02:30.380 All right.

00:02:39.360 Chris McDougal, welcome to the show.

00:02:41.480 Delighted to be here, Brett.

00:02:42.440 So your book is, your latest book is Natural Born Heroes, Mastering the Lost Secrets of

00:02:49.440 Strength and Endurance.

00:02:50.100 It's now available on paperback.

00:02:52.220 And this, I love this book.

00:02:53.760 It's just jam-packed.

00:02:54.920 It's got a great story, but then it's jam-packed with all these rabbit holes of interest into

00:03:00.080 ancient Greek culture, which I love.

00:03:02.040 Um, so it's about the, the secrets of strength and endurance that the Greeks understood and

00:03:09.260 taught.

00:03:10.220 Um, and you try to find out about these things, how to read, how we can recover them today.

00:03:14.380 But you start the book off talking about this group of resistance fighters on the island

00:03:19.100 of Crete during World War II that consisted of, uh, natives, but as well as this ragtag group

00:03:26.060 from, uh, I didn't know this organization existed.

00:03:29.360 It was the British Special Operations Executive.

00:03:32.600 Right.

00:03:32.820 Can you tell our listeners the backstory of what this, you know, who these people were,

00:03:37.420 why they were unique and how they managed to kidnap a Nazi general?

00:03:42.160 You know, it's fascinating.

00:03:43.600 And I think it's what makes your site so important is it's remarkable how short-sighted humanity

00:03:51.020 is, how short-sighted we are as a species.

00:03:54.240 Because if anything predates like 15 years ago, it's as if it never happened.

00:04:00.760 And, you know, we keep rediscovering stuff like, oh my God, like kettlebells, you know,

00:04:05.340 Indian clubs, like what an amazing invention.

00:04:07.560 Like, dude, these have been around forever.

00:04:10.500 And yet we just keep forgetting about them.

00:04:12.880 And that's what I think initially led me to this whole saga because I stumbled across this

00:04:20.460 story about a Cretan shepherd who became a foot messenger during World War II.

00:04:26.780 And as I'm reading about his adventures, I suddenly like hit the brakes and said, wait a

00:04:30.520 second.

00:04:30.940 There's no way.

00:04:31.620 There's no way anybody runs 50 miles through mountainous terrain on a starvation diet,

00:04:38.740 delivers a message, has a shot of moonshine, and then turns around and runs back another

00:04:43.740 50 miles.

00:04:44.380 Forget it.

00:04:44.720 It's 100 miles of ultra endurance athletics off trail with no caloric intake.

00:04:51.420 It's physically impossible.

00:04:53.040 So I began researching that, like, you know, physiologically, how can you pull off something

00:04:56.780 like that?

00:04:57.760 And what led me across, again, was this whole bizarre adventure story that is a drama in

00:05:04.020 its own right.

00:05:04.580 But to me, what was much more interesting was unpacking all the fitness and health and,

00:05:11.000 I guess, social psychology secrets that are new to us, but basically everyday life for

00:05:17.620 every indigenous culture on the planet that has not been exposed to modern technology.

00:05:23.260 Gotcha.

00:05:23.520 So this adventure story you talk about is amazing.

00:05:26.980 And you weave it throughout your book.

00:05:28.360 And then you take, you know, there's stopping points where you go on these segues about exploring

00:05:34.600 the physiology, the nutrition, you know, what made it possible that these guys were able

00:05:39.520 to do this.

00:05:41.980 So let's start there.

00:05:43.240 I mean, you, you, kind of the main premise of this book is these, this, these resistance

00:05:48.180 fighters were harnessing this idea of heroism that existed since the times of ancient Greece,

00:05:55.220 since Odysseus, Achilles, Plato, Aristotle.

00:05:59.080 So can you tell us how did the ancient Greeks define heroism and how is it different from

00:06:04.580 how we think of heroism today?

00:06:06.920 Sure.

00:06:07.340 Well, again, this was a perfect learning laboratory because, you know, one thing about World War

00:06:11.340 II was you don't get any more higher stakes than that.

00:06:15.360 There's, there's no thinner margin of error than fighting the most deadly killing force in

00:06:21.520 human history, you know, opposing the Nazi regime.

00:06:23.660 So, well, again, one thing which was important for me at the beginning was realizing that

00:06:29.480 the group you mentioned, the special operations executive, this kind of stuff was brand new

00:06:33.800 because prior to World War II, warfare was conventional.

00:06:37.440 You know, you had your army, I had mine.

00:06:39.320 I dug my trenches, you dug your trenches.

00:06:41.020 And we sat there and we shot each other until we were all dead.

00:06:44.220 Well, then Churchill, who was a veteran of the colonial wars, and he'd been getting his 0.99

00:06:49.320 ass handed to him by Boer fighters, by, you know, Punjabis, by the IRA. 0.68

00:06:54.740 He'd had him personally and also the forces under his command had constantly been sniped

00:07:00.520 at by guerrilla forces, you know, in disguise in the colonies.

00:07:06.980 So World War II, he created innovation.

00:07:10.260 He's like, you know what?

00:07:10.680 Why don't we just fight undercover?

00:07:12.260 But, again, you didn't want to take your best soldiers and put them undercover behind

00:07:16.300 enemy lines because you actually needed those guys to man the artillery.

00:07:19.840 So they took basically the has-beens, the misfits, you know, the 45-year-old history professors 0.55

00:07:24.700 and the 37-year-old librarians, the guys who spoke a little bit of a foreign language.

00:07:29.960 They stuck those guys behind enemy lines.

00:07:32.540 So for me, this became the perfect learning laboratory.

00:07:36.040 If you take somebody who is not fit to be a hero, can that person undergo some kind of

00:07:42.640 process where they go from sort of zero to hero in as limited time as possible and out

00:07:48.660 of the greatest possible stress?

00:07:51.060 And that's basically led me back to the ancient Greek art of the hero, which, again, unfortunately,

00:07:56.840 I didn't really realize existed.

00:08:00.420 I mean, I'm a product of my culture.

00:08:02.080 So I believed a hero was the guy with the six-pack abs and the double guns kicking down

00:08:08.080 the door.

00:08:08.600 You know, it was the strongest, toughest guy in the room.

00:08:11.280 I didn't realize that, and again, it should have been obvious, but why let heroism be a

00:08:19.080 product of chance?

00:08:20.760 Why not make it a statistical probability by teaching everybody the fine art of how to be

00:08:25.680 a hero?

00:08:26.560 And that's essentially what these misfit soldiers underwent when they went to Crete.

00:08:31.820 They basically learned the ancient Greek art of the hero.

00:08:34.860 So your question was, what is it?

00:08:36.900 You know, essentially, it comes down to three things.

00:08:39.440 You take the lowest common denominators of your culture and things that everybody shares,

00:08:45.760 and you find ways to burnish those common skills so that they're practical in a crisis.

00:08:52.420 And for the Greeks, that relied on three things, all three of which were indispensable, strength,

00:08:59.460 skill, and compassion.

00:09:01.420 And when you look at those three things, they've been ritualized in every major culture and

00:09:06.140 religion throughout history.

00:09:07.800 You know, they are mind, body, and soul.

00:09:10.520 They are all the tenets of major religion.

00:09:12.760 Have to do with the fact that you have to be physically capable, you have to have intellectual

00:09:18.240 skills, and you have to have a connection to your fellow humans.

00:09:22.440 So that's basically what it is, strength, skill, and compassion.

00:09:25.560 If you have any two overwhelming the third, then the stool topples over.

00:09:31.280 So all three of those things have got to be harnessed and polished and perfected.

00:09:35.260 Gotcha.

00:09:35.520 So strength was erite, right, in Greek?

00:09:38.580 Exactly.

00:09:39.200 Skill is paideia?

00:09:41.360 Paideia, exactly.

00:09:42.360 And then compassion, or another way it translates, hospitality, zinia.

00:09:47.260 Yeah, exactly.

00:09:48.020 And I guess the Greeks looked to their heroes, like from the great myths, that they had heroes

00:09:56.960 that embodied each of these traits.

00:09:58.760 So, I mean, I guess Achilles would be the strength guy, the erite guy, the excellence

00:10:02.620 and strength.

00:10:04.560 Odysseus, the skillful guy, the wily guy.

00:10:07.600 I don't know who would—I guess all of them exhibited zinia to some extent. 0.95

00:10:11.580 Even Hercules, all of them for sure.

00:10:13.220 But, you know, it's funny, so, is it Gregory Nagy or Nagel?

00:10:18.240 Nagy, right?

00:10:19.080 The Harvard professor who specializes in Greek mythology and heroes.

00:10:23.540 He wrote an entire book about Odysseus called The Best of the Achaeans.

00:10:27.020 And I believe Homer would identify Odysseus as the best of the Achaeans.

00:10:31.820 You know, he is the hero of heroes.

00:10:34.500 But you look at Odysseus, he's kind of a—you know, he's the guy that's always trying to,

00:10:40.240 like, get out of combat, doesn't want to fight, always pulling some fast one on somebody. 0.98

00:10:46.440 And in some ways, he's kind of the biggest scumbag of the Greek pantheon. 0.99

00:10:51.280 But from the Greek perspective, he is the hero of heroes because he's connected to his people. 0.98

00:10:58.920 I mean, he is fighting his way back home to get to his wife and son, no matter what.

00:11:04.820 He is tied in with his people.

00:11:06.220 And the people who come to him to fight with him are his servants, you know, the people who are underneath him.

00:11:11.260 They love him because he loves them.

00:11:13.840 He uses his brain first and his muscle second.

00:11:16.920 But both of them are pretty formidable. 0.93

00:11:18.520 Like, you don't want to f*** with Odysseus. 0.98

00:11:20.140 But anyway, you know, Odysseus is a guy that you push him, man, he will destroy you. 0.97

00:11:24.160 But he'll try and scheme his way out of trouble first.

00:11:26.340 When you look at all of the Greek heroes and demigods, we tend to think of them as loners.

00:11:33.760 But without exception, every single one of them has some very tight sibling bond or filial bond with somebody else.

00:11:44.380 With Achilles, it was Patroclus.

00:11:47.080 You know, he loved him like a brother and would not go into battle, you know, without Patroclus by his side.

00:11:52.100 But Hercules had his close friends and a half-brother that he was completely devoted to. 0.69

00:11:58.340 So the idea is that you have to be tightly knit to your group or you're kind of useless.

00:12:05.460 Right. 0.92

00:12:05.680 And going back to that being useless, I mean, you talk about this in the book.

00:12:09.200 For the Greeks and for other indigenous cultures, ancient cultures, the defining mark of manhood or adulthood was you had to be able to rescue someone.

00:12:18.060 You had to be able to help people.

00:12:19.080 That was what made you an adult in that culture.

00:12:22.640 But somehow we've lost that concept today.

00:12:25.320 Yeah, you're right.

00:12:27.620 And again, I'm sort of stuck with remorse because I feel like I am the symptom that I'm talking about.

00:12:35.400 I feel like I was raised that way.

00:12:37.180 The idea is, you know, unfortunately, we are creatures that are perfectly evolved to deal beautifully in an emergency.

00:12:44.960 The human animal is fantastic at adapting, at all kinds of quick physical responses.

00:12:52.900 Yet we also have a brain which tries to conserve energy at all costs.

00:12:56.940 And so what we've done is we've outsourced all of our emergency crisis control to other people.

00:13:02.960 And so, you know, right now, you know, if someone steals my car, I don't chase the guy.

00:13:06.660 I call the cops.

00:13:07.340 If my house is on fire, I don't get a hose.

00:13:09.280 I call the fire department.

00:13:10.780 If I want food, I pick up my phone and have someone bring me food.

00:13:13.940 You know, again, the most basic elemental need in human life to sustain yourself with food.

00:13:20.580 We have other people do it for us.

00:13:21.960 So that, unfortunately, is a situation we've gotten ourselves into, which is that we don't realize anymore that we are responsible, not just for ourselves, but for others.

00:13:33.840 And to be responsible for others means that you have to know stuff.

00:13:36.700 You know, you have to be ready to pick up a child.

00:13:40.500 And, you know, it sounds easy, but if you ever actually try to pick up a kid, you know, a 10-year-old kid, they're kind of hard to pick up.

00:13:45.280 You know, like they're not properly balanced.

00:13:46.880 They don't come with the right handles.

00:13:47.940 And, you know, most of us have gotten away from a sense of fitness as being something useful, and we've turned it into something that is just purely self-glamorizing.

00:13:57.960 Right.

00:13:58.200 Yeah, you want to sculpt the perfect body. 0.93

00:14:00.740 That's what it's about now.

00:14:03.100 So these British resistance fighters, they were steeped in this culture of heroism that still existed on the island of Crete at the time, even though this was thousands of years after the heyday of the ancient Greeks.

00:14:18.940 And so along the way, they picked up these skills, this idea of physical fitness, this idea of compassion.

00:14:25.980 So let's kind of get into the physiology that you explore in this book.

00:14:30.620 So you talk about that runner who was able to run across these rugged Cretan mountains, 50 miles, starvation diet, but still managed to do it, drink some moonshine, then go back.

00:14:40.600 And you have a chapter in your book about the Cretan bounce is what you call it, and you use it to explore the power of our fascia.

00:14:50.060 So what can we learn about the Cretan bounce, about the ability to use this power in our fascia?

00:14:57.460 It's not muscle.

00:14:58.240 It's not bone.

00:14:58.860 It's sort of like chickens.

00:15:00.480 I don't know.

00:15:00.760 It's kind of weird stuff.

00:15:01.840 Can you explain what fascia is and like the power that's in it?

00:15:05.040 I'm going to use your definition.

00:15:06.040 It's kind of weird stuff.

00:15:07.180 Let's just go with that.

00:15:08.980 Yeah.

00:15:09.240 So here's the deal with this.

00:15:11.800 There are a couple of threads which became braided together.

00:15:15.380 One was when I heard about this bizarre operation on Crete where the resistance decided, you know what, rather than getting chased by the Germans, let's go get one of them for ourselves. 0.98

00:15:26.340 And they decided to go kidnap the commanding German general on the island of Crete, which, again, is just a really stupid idea. 0.98

00:15:33.060 It's a bad idea. 0.97

00:15:34.500 No one has ever tried it in modern military history.

00:15:36.820 It's just way too high risk.

00:15:38.800 But it's a very Cretan thing to do, right?

00:15:41.340 It's a very Cretan thing to do, which is – yeah.

00:15:44.060 Yeah, and I guess that's the reason why these guys tend to pull this kind of stuff off.

00:15:47.420 It's so brazen.

00:15:48.420 It is so anti-intellectual.

00:15:50.860 It throws the textbook away.

00:15:52.920 But, again, that's what was winning the war was throwing away the textbook.

00:15:56.500 And what was so cool about it, though, was in some ways these guys kind of overlooked an obvious problem, which is like you're on an island, dude.

00:16:03.340 There's nowhere to go.

00:16:04.640 You get this guy like – then what?

00:16:06.520 What's the next move?

00:16:07.760 Which is basically you go on the run in a confined space.

00:16:10.060 So, again, it's a totally brazen move.

00:16:12.100 And they were on the run for more than a month.

00:16:15.000 So imagine that.

00:16:16.140 You are in a race that goes on 24-7 for 40 days being pursued by attack dogs and pissed off German soldiers.

00:16:25.340 So the thing about this was – again, so I wanted to know how they could physically pull this off.

00:16:32.140 And when I would read up on battles and guerrilla warfare and colonial fights on Crete, I kept coming across these references to a unique way that the Cretans would move.

00:16:45.720 And anybody could always spot a Cretan across the landscape because they move like mountain goats.

00:16:50.600 These guys are bouncing as quickly uphill as they're going downhill.

00:16:54.300 And I was finding this in military accounts dating back in the 1700s and 1800s.

00:17:00.080 And then when I was on Crete myself, I went over there to recreate the exact footsteps of these guys who ran through the mountains.

00:17:07.240 And I saw the same thing.

00:17:08.400 I'd be 10,000 feet up a mountain and I look above me and there's some shepherd just bouncing along like he's in one of his kid moon bounces.

00:17:16.440 So I became fascinated by what is – how do these guys do this?

00:17:20.800 And it led me to a whole new field of research into human fascia.

00:17:25.900 And there was a guy named Tom Myers, an anatomist.

00:17:30.280 And he really sort of revolutionized the perspective on human strength by turning his scalpel sideways.

00:17:39.240 You know, ordinarily when you would dissect a cadaver, you cut through all this sort of – the skin, the filmy stuff until you get down to all like the meat and muscle below.

00:17:49.920 Well, what Tom Myers realized is that anywhere you're cutting a cadaver, you're coming across this same filmy kind of like exo-webbing.

00:17:58.520 So rather than cut through it, he turned his scalpel sideways and began to essentially skin bodies to see what is between the muscle and the skin.

00:18:07.780 And what he found is this really fascinating kind of like web – it's like a wetsuit coating throughout our bodies of this very strong sort of tensile resisting rubbery substance called fascia.

00:18:24.580 And what Myers realized is the fascia is like the cat gut in a tennis racket.

00:18:32.800 It's the string on the bow.

00:18:34.540 So you can use your muscular force to pull back the bowstring, but the real thrust comes from the string itself, comes from that rubbery tendon.

00:18:44.700 So what he began to look at the human body is instead of it being something dominated by muscle, the muscle is a minor player, which is essentially just pulling the fascia back into position.

00:18:55.140 And it's the recoil and the snap of the fascia, which really provides the power and force.

00:19:01.180 So the Cretans were – with their sort of – their bounce they used were taking advantage of their fascia, which allowed them to go long distance without tiring, I guess, is what's going on.

00:19:11.380 Precisely.

00:19:11.920 And I see it myself now too.

00:19:13.560 I'm kind of a poor student of my own theories because I'll learn something, I'll do it.

00:19:20.480 But as fatigue sets in, lessons go out the window.

00:19:24.340 So if I'm on a trail run right now, I'll be going great.

00:19:27.680 I'll be bouncing over rocks.

00:19:28.780 I'll be leaping over logs.

00:19:29.840 But then you get tired and I start to revert back to this heavy, plodding, muscular-driven gait.

00:19:36.700 And I'll start to wonder, man, why does my groin hurt?

00:19:39.280 Why are my legs so tired?

00:19:40.940 And I'll look down and realize that I'm no longer using that Cretan bounce.

00:19:44.560 And I've got to remind myself to get back to that much more bouncy stride.

00:19:49.000 Yeah, we'll get back to fascia later when we talk about MoveNet because I'm a big fan of MoveNet and Erwan LaCour's work that he's doing.

00:19:55.120 But that fascia, I mean that's kind of what – that's what Bruce Lee used, right, with his famous punch, one-inch punch.

00:20:01.420 Like it wasn't muscle.

00:20:02.420 It was just he was using this elasticity to deliver that blow and be able to knock someone down.

00:20:09.240 Yeah, I know.

00:20:09.680 It's funny too how we've again approached martial arts and fighting.

00:20:14.080 We've gotten this very – I mean we look at like MMA as being the ultimate – like no rules combat.

00:20:20.040 But there's a ton of rules.

00:20:21.220 There's a ton of stuff you can't do.

00:20:22.760 It's a sport.

00:20:23.680 In the octagon.

00:20:24.260 Exactly.

00:20:24.760 It's a sport.

00:20:25.480 Yeah, it's a sport slash performance.

00:20:26.960 We don't want to – you don't want to repel your viewers by gouging out somebody's eyeball.

00:20:31.680 So things are kept within a certain level of decorum.

00:20:35.140 But in real fighting, those rules don't exist.

00:20:37.620 And the idea is you want to use maximum force and minimum energy.

00:20:41.580 And Bruce Lee, again, was the perfect embodiment of that, a relatively small guy who learned how to use what he called the one-inch punch.

00:20:48.600 He would say that his punch with his right fist began with his left toe and everything would twerk and twist and unload like a slingshot.

00:20:59.100 Right, using his body like a bow.

00:21:00.820 Yeah.

00:21:01.980 So let's – going on to this fighting thing, let's continue this fighting theme.

00:21:05.480 You talk about this fellow named Rex Applegate.

00:21:08.860 Yeah.

00:21:09.460 World War II, he taught – he wrote the manual for hand-to-hand combat for I guess the Marines.

00:21:15.760 I guess is how it was during World War II.

00:21:18.340 And he had this intuitive understanding of the best way to fight with weapons and hand-in-hand that you argue is what the Greeks understood as well.

00:21:29.040 So he tells a little bit about Rex Applegate and the way he approached fighting both with weapons and with your hands.

00:21:38.600 This is one of the fascinating stories that I came across completely by accident.

00:21:42.420 And I think it worked backwards.

00:21:45.100 I was looking to the special operations executive.

00:21:49.740 So here you got Churchill.

00:21:50.880 He wants to create this whole new undercover special forces thing, but it's never existed before.

00:21:56.640 And so he had to find some trainers.

00:21:58.280 And what he did was he brought back these guys, Fairbairn and Sykes, these basically cops who were serving in Shanghai, British cops serving in Shanghai.

00:22:08.060 And Shanghai was just like the gutter, man.

00:22:09.840 It was like the dirtiest, toughest part of town of the world.

00:22:13.060 It was like the world's like fighting capital.

00:22:14.660 So he brings these two guys back to teach real street combat to his newly recruited misfits. 0.83

00:22:22.680 And they were unbelievably effective.

00:22:24.980 They were just transforming these guys because they were basically teaching them how to fight in a real gutter situation.

00:22:29.740 Now, Rex Applegate was over in the U.S. at the same time.

00:22:32.880 And he was going through basic training and he's being taught how to fire a weapon in the U.S. Army style.

00:22:43.100 But his uncle was a champion trick shooter, you know, the kind of guy from the old Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley.

00:22:50.960 You know, you throw a bunch of dishes in the air and this guy's firing from the hip.

00:22:55.900 He's blasting these things out of the air.

00:22:58.120 So Rex Applegate is listening to his drill instructors teach him how to shoot.

00:23:04.220 He's like, yeah, that's not the way Uncle Bob shot.

00:23:06.680 Uncle Bob shot from the hip and he's way more effective than these guys.

00:23:09.700 So Applegate got a commission to start studying the old trick shooters to find out what they knew.

00:23:17.020 And one of the guys he went to research was Wild Bill Hickok.

00:23:19.880 And he went back to like the last known address of Wild Bill Hickok, which is almost like Saloon out somewhere in Idaho.

00:23:27.360 And he found a letter that Hickok had written but hadn't been mailed where he's describing his shooting technique.

00:23:35.400 And basically what Wild Bill Hickok said is it's the same as pointing a finger.

00:23:38.880 Like your finger knows where the target is.

00:23:41.200 You don't have to tell your finger.

00:23:42.840 So like right now, Brett, if someone startled you and you turn around really quickly, your hand would know exactly where to go.

00:23:48.420 You don't have to order your hand.

00:23:49.720 Your hand is going to fly in the direction of the threat.

00:23:53.400 So Applegate realizes there's something here about this idea of instinctive aim.

00:23:57.680 So he hears about these guys, Fairbairn and Sykes in the UK. 0.97

00:24:02.240 So he flies over, ships over to see them.

00:24:05.260 And not only are they teaching him shooting, they're also teaching him this street gutter style of fighting.

00:24:13.240 And essentially it comes down to two things.

00:24:15.660 One is you go for the vulnerable spots immediately.

00:24:18.380 But secondly, you use a lot of body torque and twist to use the minimum amount of muscular force to disable your enemy.

00:24:28.220 Right.

00:24:28.360 So you're not going for style of points with the awesome uppercut.

00:24:31.560 You are just going for the jugular right away.

00:24:35.020 Yeah.

00:24:35.280 I mean one of Fairbairn's favorite moves is what you call like the bronco stomp, which was that once you get your guy on the ground, you then jump up and down on his rib cage as hard as you can.

00:24:43.580 I mean, exactly.

00:24:45.940 You would get flagged pretty quick for that.

00:24:48.400 You know, recently it's become Wing Chun has come into vogue, not least because Robert Downey Jr. has become a devotee of Wing Chun.

00:24:56.060 And if you saw him in like the Sherlock Holmes movie where he's in that bare knuckles match, he uses some beautiful Wing Chun moves to disable this like gigantic brute.

00:25:06.400 So, you know, Wing Chun is a very – and Bruce Lee also was a student of Wing Chun.

00:25:10.640 It's a very elegant, almost dance-like approach to martial arts.

00:25:16.340 And what's beautiful about Wing Chun is it's said to be the only martial art created by a woman.

00:25:22.340 And there is a myth that there was a Chinese nun in a monastery.

00:25:28.520 And when the monastery was attacked, everyone was slaughtered except her.

00:25:31.420 And she escaped into the wilderness and there by observing the animals, she learned to fight, you know, with the grace, elegance, and speed of a jungle animal.

00:25:40.980 So it's a great myth, but actually it seems to be just that, just a myth.

00:25:45.440 It's much more likely that Wing Chun and all of the Asian martial arts are derivatives of the ancient Greek art of Pancrasian.

00:25:54.480 And Pancrasian was originated on the Greek island – this is where all the conspiracy theories come together.

00:26:02.400 So the whole myth of the minotaur, right, of jumping the bulls and getting yourself out of the labyrinth, that actually happened in the kingdom of Minos on Crete, which really was the birthplace of all Greek culture.

00:26:16.760 It was on the island of Crete.

00:26:18.760 Pancrasian began, perfected on Crete.

00:26:21.300 It was then brought to Alexander the Great, who trained his troops in Pancrasian, and then brought it into Asia as he began his eastward expansion.

00:26:31.820 And so essentially this one island nation created the basis of the martial arts, which then flowered throughout Asia and then came back to us today.

00:26:41.220 That's crazy.

00:26:41.640 So Pancrasian was the no-holes-bar type of fighting. 0.90

00:26:45.280 Like you weren't going for style points.

00:26:46.660 You were just – you were trying to maim and kill your opponent. 0.72

00:26:50.620 Yeah, yeah, it's funny.

00:26:52.180 So when you read some of the accounts of Pancrasian, which was always like in and out of the Olympics, they would be in the ancient Olympics and they would take it back out again.

00:26:58.800 Then they'd put it back in again just because it was so brutal and also not really spectator-friendly because sometimes a bout would end in like three seconds.

00:27:06.980 So you just grab the other dude's fingers and bend his fingers back and break his fingers and he's done.

00:27:11.780 Or you get him by testicles and tear and he's out.

00:27:15.120 So Pancrasian, they would always like take it out of the Olympics and the Spartans would scream bloody murder and like, all right, we got to appease the Spartans. 1.00

00:27:23.600 It's back in again.

00:27:25.140 But again, that was the idea was you remove the gloves, you remove the rules, and you let people fight exactly as they would if they're trying to survive in a combat situation.

00:27:34.660 That's nuts.

00:27:35.560 I guess when they revived the Olympics in the modern era, there was debate, should we put this in here?

00:27:41.200 And I guess they didn't put Pancrasian in it.

00:27:43.140 They decided not to.

00:27:44.740 Well, you know, the beautiful thing is and what made these British Special Forces guys so perfect as students of the Cretan way of going about things was, you know, the Brits are raised, steeped in ancient Greek culture and Roman culture.

00:27:57.880 So for us, it's like, you know, it's the mandatory course you got to take your like junior year in high school or something.

00:28:04.560 But the, you know, British school system was based on ancient Greek culture and, you know, the perfect flowering of that was Lawrence of Arabia.

00:28:14.560 You know, you take little old T. Lawrence and you stick him out in a hostile situation in the Mideast and he draws back on this sense of the transformative art of the hero.

00:28:25.380 So not only were British kids brought up on, you know, the myth of the ancient Greek hero, but then they actually saw it actually work when T.E. Lawrence brought it to life himself.

00:28:36.820 Right.

00:28:37.000 Because they were turned into warriors.

00:28:38.580 I like that.

00:28:39.240 There was Hector.

00:28:40.940 If we're going back to Odysseus or the Iliad, some would say that Achilles was a natural born warrior, right?

00:28:47.560 He just had it in him.

00:28:48.460 And Hector, another great warrior, I think there's like a, there's a phrase in Greek that said he had to learn how to become a warrior.

00:28:55.660 And that's what actually made him probably a more superior warrior because he had that sense of compassion, but then that headiness about it.

00:29:02.640 But then he added the skill to it.

00:29:04.240 And so these are what these like Greek, these British resistance fighters were doing.

00:29:07.840 I love that.

00:29:08.760 So you have the, you dovetail in the parkour, which is this, you know, it started in France as this like underground urban, guys just having fun.

00:29:21.240 But how did your tracing the footsteps of these British resistance fighters lead you to jumping across rooftops in France?

00:29:29.880 You know, so there are a couple of guidelines I always have when I'm looking at this kind of stuff.

00:29:36.520 You want to avoid two things.

00:29:39.660 You want to avoid something that is basically useless in the modern world.

00:29:43.760 So if it's a fitness tip, but it relies on like eating living goat hearts, like, all right, there's not a whole lot of practical takeaway for most people today.

00:29:53.700 You know, we're not going to be eating any live beating goat hearts. 0.98

00:29:56.760 And the second thing I try to avoid is anything that is trendy, that doesn't have a legacy and a long timeline that can be traced.

00:30:06.080 So, again, if it's like, you know, PX90, it might be great, but it's something that we just kind of created for ourselves.

00:30:12.640 And there's no long, deep historical taproot that demonstrates that this has been effective in real life situations for a long time.

00:30:20.720 So whenever I'm researching this kind of stuff, I'm looking for those two things.

00:30:24.480 What's the practical takeaway and what is the long historical lineage that proves that it actually has worked?

00:30:31.200 So when I'm looking at the Cretan Bounce, for instance, I'm looking at this ability to, you know, race across mountaintops.

00:30:38.440 I thought, OK, but what's the takeaway?

00:30:40.500 How can we learn this kind of stuff?

00:30:41.920 And it immediately draws you toward parkour.

00:30:44.760 And in me specifically, what made the light bulb go off was I was in the middle of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you know, like Amish country. 1.00

00:30:53.360 And I'm coming out of like a Rite Aid drugstore.

00:30:56.480 And as I'm at the checkout line, out the window, I see these guys are kind of like flying through the air, just like leaping through the air, back and forth.

00:31:03.120 And I read a little bit about parkour by that point, but I'd never actually seen it.

00:31:08.540 And so I hustle out of the drugstore and these guys are like doing these like long jumps, these precision jumps back and forth on the handicap railings outside the drugstore.

00:31:18.100 And they said, yeah, yeah, you know, we do parkour.

00:31:20.120 And, you know, if you want to come learn, come learn with us.

00:31:22.440 And they said, but if you really want to learn, you want to go to London to Parkour Generations, which is the great learning school, you know, the French masters, the Yamakaze who first created parkour.

00:31:35.240 They passed on their knowledge to these teachers in London.

00:31:38.720 So I ended up going there and actually studying with a women's only class because, again, I was interested in something else, too.

00:31:44.700 So the third thing I always sort of look for is that if something I think is really native to the human species, it's got to be native to both sides of the species.

00:31:53.140 It can't just be just dudes only or women only.

00:31:55.700 And one thing about parkour is it is an egalitarian sport.

00:31:59.340 Women are just as good at it as guys are. 1.00

00:32:01.680 So that was it.

00:32:02.240 I basically apprenticed myself to the parkour teachers to see if what they were doing was a good modern approximation of what the Cretans have been doing for thousands of years.

00:32:12.420 So they're taking advantage of the fascia again.

00:32:15.300 Yeah, again, it's a fascinating thing to do.

00:32:17.400 You know, when the first time I try to do what's known as a turn vault, it's a very simple vault.

00:32:23.500 And you see a parkour dude do it.

00:32:25.200 It looks like nothing.

00:32:26.160 And then you try to do it and you're banging the crap out of your knees and you're not getting off the ground. 0.85

00:32:29.540 And then they just show you the way of just changing your center of balance, about lifting your butt and balancing yourself and essentially letting your own natural balance take over.

00:32:40.820 And it's really amazing how in a span of like 90 seconds you go from feeling something is impossible to feeling something is easy and you can fly.

00:32:51.360 And so this discussion about parkour leads naturally to MoveNAT.

00:32:56.640 So how is MoveNAT?

00:32:59.940 Well, first, can you explain what MoveNAT is for our listeners?

00:33:02.460 We've written about MoveNAT.

00:33:03.460 We've had Erwan write an article or two for us on the site about it.

00:33:06.520 But for our listeners who aren't familiar with it, what is MoveNAT?

00:33:09.180 And how is what they're doing, resurrecting this idea of ancient Greek physical fitness?

00:33:16.840 Well, I got a great story about MoveNAT, Brett, which I think is sort of unique to anyone who's become familiar with Erwan LaCour.

00:33:24.080 I first heard about Erwan because of Barefoot Ted, the guy that I wrote about a good bit in Born to Run.

00:33:31.920 Right.

00:33:32.080 So when I first came back, we were down the Copper Canyons in 2006 for that ultra marathon with the Tatumati Indians.

00:33:40.480 And when I came back, I thought, you know what, this could be a really good book.

00:33:44.180 So I went around to spend time with every person who'd been down on the trip with us and re-interview them and learn more about their lives.

00:33:52.700 So I went out to Burbank where Barefoot Ted was living at the time and hung out with him for a couple of days.

00:33:58.660 And while I was with him, you know, one day he opens up his email and he's like, huh, this is interesting.

00:34:03.480 He goes, hey, you know, you might want to take a look at this.

00:34:05.620 And it was an email from some French guy named Erwan LaCour who was living down in Brazil.

00:34:10.920 And he had seen some posts by Barefoot Ted about minimalists running.

00:34:15.660 And so Erwan had contacted Ted to just get more information.

00:34:18.460 So I became pretty fascinated and I contacted Erwan myself.

00:34:22.880 And a few months later, I was heading out to Brazil and he was like taking me through the Brazilian rainforest,

00:34:28.800 training with him and a bunch of like UFC fighters, you know, these Brazilian jiu-jitsu dudes who were training with Erwan,

00:34:35.280 literally like in the rainforest along the beach down in Brazil.

00:34:40.040 So that was, I think, my first intro.

00:34:42.740 I don't think it was even called MoveNet at the time.

00:34:44.880 It might have been.

00:34:45.260 So what Erwan was doing was modernizing the idea of the natural method, the méthode naturelle, of a guy named Georges Hebert.

00:34:58.760 And, you know, Georges Hebert was a French naval officer back in the early 1900s.

00:35:03.220 And he was stationed in a troop ship off the coast of the island of Martinique when the volcano exploded.

00:35:08.540 And he led the rescue operation trying to get people off the island, but he was just horrified to see people die because they couldn't like swim a few yards offshore or they were struggling to pick up a child or they couldn't climb up a rope.

00:35:22.020 These basic physical reactions that every other species would handle no problem, yet for some reason humans couldn't do these things.

00:35:31.100 So he began to develop this thing called the natural method, which is based on the 10 natural human movements that every human should be able to master.

00:35:38.560 And very basic things, you know, to run, to walk, to climb, to jump, to throw, to catch, to defend, to attack.

00:35:46.600 And he created these obstacle courses in France to train first French naval officers and then everybody else in the natural method.

00:35:55.260 Unfortunately, you know, after World War I, most of the natural method teachers were killed during the fighting.

00:36:01.960 And the natural method essentially disappeared except for in two locations.

00:36:07.900 One was with David Bell, who was the son of Raymond Bell, who was a French firefighter, and the French firefighters were still training in the natural method.

00:36:17.060 And the other place was with Erwan Lacour down in his, like, wacky, hippie ultimate fighting camp in Brazil.

00:36:22.840 Right. And what's interesting is that the natural method, I mean, there's these strands of what the ancient Greeks did, right?

00:36:31.420 It was very kind of bodyweight, calisthenics, learning how to use your body efficiently and effectively.

00:36:36.540 And he was able to pick that up and incorporate it.

00:36:39.600 And, like, I guess Erwan is continuing that tradition as well.

00:36:43.200 And the sad thing, too, Brad, is, like, when you start to examine this stuff, you just feel like, dude, why is there even any debate about this?

00:36:50.200 Like, why is there even any question about the best way to exercise and get in shape?

00:36:55.040 If you do one MoveNet session, to me, essentially, the conversation's over.

00:36:59.080 Like, that's all you need to do.

00:37:00.580 And, again, the best evidence is Erwan himself.

00:37:03.920 You know, if you check out his video of him just racing around Corsica, like, leaping into rivers and pushing logs and stuff, like, that's the dude I want to be.

00:37:11.660 Right. Yeah.

00:37:12.060 I mean, he looks like Tarzan.

00:37:14.400 I mean, it's awesome.

00:37:16.120 And my wife and I have been doing MoveNet.

00:37:17.720 So has my son.

00:37:18.340 And we love it.

00:37:18.960 And it's a lot of fun.

00:37:20.740 It's like play.

00:37:21.460 I mean, you're playing, but you're getting a good workout.

00:37:24.160 How old is your son?

00:37:25.300 He's five.

00:37:27.100 Do you – where are you based?

00:37:28.960 Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

00:37:30.600 Hmm.

00:37:31.060 So I guess I was trying to think.

00:37:32.660 There are usually parkour communities everywhere.

00:37:35.040 I'm not sure.

00:37:35.820 There is a small one here in Tulsa.

00:37:38.540 But, yeah, we have some really good – we have two good MoveNet instructors here, fortunately, which is great.

00:37:43.280 Because usually Tulsa doesn't have things like that, but we do.

00:37:47.040 And what's interesting, too, the MoveNet thing and talking about the natural method, I had two guys on my podcast a few months ago or about a month ago.

00:37:55.740 So they did a documentary about La Sierra High.

00:37:58.380 Have you heard about this place?

00:38:00.600 No.

00:38:01.120 No.

00:38:01.440 Okay.

00:38:01.660 You need to check this out.

00:38:02.600 So there was this high school called La Sierra in California during the 1960s.

00:38:08.040 They had this intense physical education program, and it was basically the natural method movement.

00:38:13.360 And it was –

00:38:13.760 Right, right.

00:38:14.340 And it's what JFK – like JFK saw what they were doing.

00:38:17.080 It was body weight.

00:38:17.800 They were doing these obstacle courses.

00:38:19.660 And JFK said, like, that's the program we need in all of our high schools.

00:38:24.080 And it's fine.

00:38:24.540 But then it died.

00:38:25.260 It went away because people started spending less time on physical education.

00:38:28.760 They want to spend more time preparing for tests and whatnot.

00:38:32.860 But, I mean, it's a fascinating – again, it's just this idea.

00:38:34.980 They're taking this ancient ideal, and, like, the guy who invented – who was leading this program, he went to the Greeks.

00:38:40.880 Like, he actually would study Greek philosophy, study the Greek text to figure out what they need to be doing in the gym to create strong people.

00:38:49.880 And, yeah, going back to MoveNet, going back to this idea, this heroic idea the Greeks had was you had to be useful.

00:38:55.540 I mean, that's the theme.

00:38:56.400 That's the motto of MoveNet, right?

00:38:58.040 Be strong to be useful.

00:38:59.680 That's it.

00:39:00.120 You know, the funny thing is, Brett, you've got to slow down on your content, man.

00:39:03.560 You guys pump out so much great stuff.

00:39:06.160 I actually had that La Sierra High School page from your website bookmarked, but I haven't read it yet.

00:39:11.540 But that's how I know about it from you.

00:39:13.900 I've just got to catch up, man.

00:39:15.060 I'm still lost in Jack London right now.

00:39:19.520 Yeah, but that was – and the funny thing about it was – so George Huber's motto was be fit to be useful.

00:39:25.660 And I thought, you know, man, you can actually boil that down to two words and these two words become the perfect motto for your life, which is just be useful.

00:39:35.540 And when you think about that, if you apply that test to everything you do in your life, you know, be useful.

00:39:41.220 You know, as I'm going out for fast food, am I really being useful?

00:39:46.020 Wouldn't it be better if I actually learned to cook, to prepare a meal and picked up something that's a real food instead of this, you know, bread and sugar concoction?

00:39:55.480 When I go out to exercise, if I'm doing bicep curls, am I really being useful, you know?

00:39:59.560 Or maybe I should just climb a rope instead.

00:40:02.520 And I love that as a two-word test for every action in your life.

00:40:08.080 Be useful.

00:40:08.560 And the amazing thing is when you make that your motto, not only are you going to probably have benefits personally, but like on a physical level, but it transforms you like psychologically and emotionally, right?

00:40:21.520 It does.

00:40:22.240 And it doesn't turn you into like Quang Chai King, you know, like one of these like abstemious monks. 0.98

00:40:28.600 It just is an awareness.

00:40:31.160 And even today, you know, when I eat something – like I just ate four Oreos like about two seconds before we went on this podcast.

00:40:37.440 And at least I was mindful, like, all right, I'm going to eat these Oreos.

00:40:40.860 My blood sugars are going to spike.

00:40:42.820 I'm going to slump afterwards.

00:40:43.980 But you know what?

00:40:44.460 I feel like having some Oreos.

00:40:46.380 In the past, I would have just eaten the Oreos without blinking.

00:40:49.280 But at least now, if you're aware and you're making decisions, you're doing informed movements.

00:40:57.140 You're not just reacting to impulse.

00:40:59.260 So we've talked a lot about the physical, you know, the physical feats of this Greek heroic ideal.

00:41:07.080 But you also explore the diet because, like you said earlier, these guys were able to go days without food, but they were not just sitting around doing nothing.

00:41:15.320 They were trekking over mountains.

00:41:17.440 So what was it about the diet on Crete that allowed these individuals to do that?

00:41:23.940 So, you know, one of the first accounts when I was reading this amazing account of George Sikandakis, the Cretan foot messenger, he writes this one story about how he was lost in the mountains for a couple of days delivering these messages.

00:41:39.520 And, you know, there's a death sentence hanging over his head.

00:41:42.640 If he's spotted, he's dead.

00:41:44.080 There's no interrogation. 1.00

00:41:45.600 The German force is going to put a bullet in his head and kick his body off a cliff. 0.80

00:41:48.620 So he's got to stay off the trails, which often meant just foraging for food on his own. 0.97

00:41:54.240 And at one point, he describes being in this little cave and the only food he could find was some leftover horse feed, you know, some hay.

00:42:03.860 So he takes the hay and he knew the dried grass in his own state would be toxic.

00:42:08.660 So the only way, the old Cretan shepherd trick was to boil it seven times and then drink the water.

00:42:13.780 So this guy takes the hay, he boils it seven times and then he drinks the water.

00:42:19.400 Now, if you've ever eaten dried grass, there is zero caloric outtake from dried grass you boil seven times.

00:42:28.180 This guy's put nothing in his body except for like Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

00:42:32.060 And so that's my question.

00:42:33.340 How the hell is this guy surviving?

00:42:34.760 And I think the thing was he was relying on the idea of using fat as fuel.

00:42:39.780 He was able to change his metabolism.

00:42:42.100 So instead of being on a constant sugar cycle that most of us are on, he was on a fat as fuel cycle where he could tap into his own natural body fat, which, you know, at this point in my life, I could probably walk to California from Pennsylvania without a bite of food with, you know, the 18% body fat I've got on my body.

00:42:58.880 So, yeah, they had a high fat diet, so a lot of goat, a lot of goat meat, goat fat, and it's still like that today.

00:43:07.160 That's how the Cretans are still eating today.

00:43:08.720 And I guess they're one of the healthiest people on the planet.

00:43:10.880 Yeah, again, you know, all the threads ultimately connect, you know.

00:43:15.860 So you look at what the paleo diet is today and its connection to the Mediterranean diet, which essentially was the Minoan diet.

00:43:22.780 And essentially it's the same diet that Michael Pollan talks about, you know, eat real food, mostly vegetables, not too much.

00:43:28.820 You know, eat a palm-sized chunk of some kind of high-fat food with a bunch of vegetables and you're good to go.

00:43:37.060 And that's basically the Cretan diet.

00:43:38.320 The Cretans will butcher a goat, they will preserve the meat, they will eat the meat on the fly, and they will forage for what's known as orta.

00:43:46.340 And orta, anywhere you go on Crete today, you will see people walking around like picking wheeze and sticking them into those blue plastic shopping bags.

00:43:54.660 That's orta.

00:43:55.540 And orta is just wild greens that are cultivated.

00:43:59.220 And, you know, we did a great thing.

00:44:00.380 We did a series on Outside Magazine, Outside Online, where I had this woman from Brooklyn come down to my house and forage with us. 1.00

00:44:08.780 And she is Greek by heritage.

00:44:11.160 And Leda, she went out literally like two steps out my back door to something that I just look at as a little bit of lawn.

00:44:17.520 And she said, oh, you know, here's mustard greens, you know, here's clover, here's dandelion.

00:44:21.100 And she was just picking all these calorically dense, you know, phytonutrient-rich foods, literally arm's reach from my back door.

00:44:32.920 It's amazing.

00:44:33.540 Yeah, and the eating on the fly with the Cretans, I guess part of the reason is that because I remember reading a book about Cretan shepherd life, is that if you stole a goat, like you had to eat it right away to destroy the evidence.

00:44:47.160 You had to make a fire and eat it really fast so no one can know that you stole the goat.

00:44:52.380 Yeah.

00:44:53.160 It's interesting.

00:44:54.940 Well, again, all those things go hand in hand, too, because, you know, you don't want the meat to spoil.

00:44:59.480 You don't want to be carrying it around.

00:45:00.800 You want to be quick and loose on the fly.

00:45:02.900 So get the fat in your belly, hide the remains, and be on your way.

00:45:06.420 Keep going.

00:45:07.220 So, Chris, I'm curious.

00:45:08.560 How did writing this book change you?

00:45:12.100 Are you still doing move-nap, parkour?

00:45:14.120 I mean, you ate some Oreos.

00:45:16.000 Yeah, we delete that part about the Oreos.

00:45:18.860 Give it that part.

00:45:20.780 In a lot of ways.

00:45:22.120 But I tell you, Brett, the most important impact was, again, the mindfulness.

00:45:27.020 It's just being aware.

00:45:28.120 When I went through, this guy named Phil Maffetone, who essentially took the fattest fuel secret of the ancient Greeks and he applied it to top Ironman triathletes, well, he created something called the two-week test.

00:45:41.740 And what I love about Phil is, you know, he's not one of these hardcore in-your-face gurus.

00:45:49.180 He's more of like a 1970s hippie.

00:45:52.400 He's like, hey, man, I'm not going to try and change your mind.

00:45:53.980 You need to change your own mind.

00:45:55.340 And the way he does that is, instead of telling you what to eat, he says, do the two-week test.

00:46:00.320 And the two-week test means you remove all the high glycemic foods from your diet for 14 days.

00:46:06.380 And on the 15th day, go ahead and have yourself a piece of bread and see how you feel.

00:46:10.460 What I love about it is it strips away all the variables.

00:46:13.620 It gets you back to the basic, you know, factory preload.

00:46:17.020 And then as you add the variables, you can assess how you physically feel.

00:46:22.200 And the beauty of this to me, by the time I was done with Natural Born Heroes, after having learned parkour and MoveNet and doing the two-week test, understanding about my fascia is that it just made me so much more mindful that everything has a cause and an effect.

00:46:39.880 If I eat the Oreos, I'm going to pay the price for it.

00:46:42.080 If I don't eat the Oreos, I'm going to feel better.

00:46:44.160 If I, for breakfast, for instance, eat a high-fat, almost zero-carb breakfast, I'm going to feel really good to bang out the door for a good two-hour trail run a little while later.

00:46:54.980 If I eat a bunch of oatmeal with honey on top, I'm going to feel sluggish the rest of the morning.

00:47:00.460 Prior to doing Natural Born Heroes, I never really connected those cause and effects.

00:47:05.780 If I felt sluggish, well, I just drank some coffee.

00:47:07.880 I tried to combat it that way.

00:47:09.040 I didn't try and preload by understanding what was causing my body to react in a certain way.

00:47:15.100 Here's another little example.

00:47:16.720 So recently, I was doing this 50K trail run and started to get a real sort of severe pain in my groin.

00:47:24.620 Now, in the past, I would have assumed, okay, well, you got a pain in the groin.

00:47:27.000 That's the way it goes.

00:47:27.700 You pull the muscle.

00:47:29.480 But then I stopped, analyzed what I was doing, and realized I'm not bouncing anymore.

00:47:33.440 I'm trudging, and even though I was tired, I made the effort of adding that quick, sharp fascia, cretin bounce back to my stride. 0.97

00:47:42.260 And in a matter of a couple of seconds, the pain, which ordinarily would have caused me to drop out of the race, just disappeared.

00:47:49.460 That's awesome.

00:47:50.500 Well, Chris, this has been a fascinating conversation.

00:47:52.740 We literally scratched the surface.

00:47:54.740 There's a lot more we could dig into.

00:47:56.480 So I highly recommend listeners to go out and get your book.

00:47:59.520 But where can people learn more about your book?

00:48:01.360 We did a really cool series on Outside Online, which looked – we broke down a bunch of the different skills.

00:48:08.080 I did something on parkour, on foraging for food, on – again, one of the guys we didn't even talk about, that crazy Stoughton warrior Percy Sardy of Australia.

00:48:18.280 So check out Outside Online for the Natural Born Heroes series and then the book itself.

00:48:24.440 And then anybody who wants to ask me questions, honestly, fire away.

00:48:26.940 I got an email address on my website.

00:48:28.680 Awesome.

00:48:28.920 Well, Chris McDougal, thank you so much for your time.

00:48:30.440 It's been a pleasure.

00:48:31.720 Brett, I'll do this anytime, man.

00:48:32.820 I had a blast.

00:48:33.780 My guest today was Christopher McDougal.

00:48:35.240 He's the author of the book Natural Born Heroes.

00:48:37.440 You can find that on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:48:39.960 And really, go pick up a copy.

00:48:41.080 It's a really fun, informative read.

00:48:44.300 And also, make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is slash heroes.

00:48:47.980 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:49:06.140 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.

00:49:10.600 And if you enjoy the podcast, I'd appreciate it if you'd give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever it is you use to listen to the podcast.

00:49:17.060 Help spread the word.

00:49:17.860 And if you can't give us a review, just recommend us to a friend.

00:49:20.600 I'd really appreciate it.

00:49:21.540 As always, I appreciate the continued support.

00:49:24.160 And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - April 25, 2016

#195： How to Live Like an Ancient Greek Hero

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