During World War II, a group of resistance fighters on the island of Crete managed to abduct a Nazi general. How did they do it? And who were they, and what made them unique? Author Christopher McDougall tells the story in his new book, "Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Masked the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance."
00:12:05.680And going back to that being useless, I mean, you talk about this in the book.
00:12:09.200For 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.
00:13:21.960So 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.
00:13:33.840And to be responsible for others means that you have to know stuff.
00:13:36.700You know, you have to be ready to pick up a child.
00:13:40.500And, 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.
00:13:45.280You know, like they're not properly balanced.
00:13:46.880They don't come with the right handles.
00:13:47.940And, 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.
00:14:03.100So 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.
00:14:18.940And so along the way, they picked up these skills, this idea of physical fitness, this idea of compassion.
00:14:25.980So let's kind of get into the physiology that you explore in this book.
00:14:30.620So 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.
00:14:40.600And 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.
00:14:50.060So what can we learn about the Cretan bounce, about the ability to use this power in our fascia?
00:15:11.800There are a couple of threads which became braided together.
00:15:15.380One 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.
00:15:26.340And they decided to go kidnap the commanding German general on the island of Crete, which, again, is just a really stupid idea.
00:15:52.920But, again, that's what was winning the war was throwing away the textbook.
00:15:56.500And 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.
00:16:16.140You are in a race that goes on 24-7 for 40 days being pursued by attack dogs and pissed off German soldiers.
00:16:25.340So the thing about this was – again, so I wanted to know how they could physically pull this off.
00:16:32.140And 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.
00:16:45.720And anybody could always spot a Cretan across the landscape because they move like mountain goats.
00:16:50.600These guys are bouncing as quickly uphill as they're going downhill.
00:16:54.300And I was finding this in military accounts dating back in the 1700s and 1800s.
00:17:00.080And then when I was on Crete myself, I went over there to recreate the exact footsteps of these guys who ran through the mountains.
00:17:08.400I'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.
00:17:16.440So I became fascinated by what is – how do these guys do this?
00:17:20.800And it led me to a whole new field of research into human fascia.
00:17:25.900And there was a guy named Tom Myers, an anatomist.
00:17:30.280And he really sort of revolutionized the perspective on human strength by turning his scalpel sideways.
00:17:39.240You 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.
00:17:49.920Well, what Tom Myers realized is that anywhere you're cutting a cadaver, you're coming across this same filmy kind of like exo-webbing.
00:17:58.520So 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.
00:18:07.780And 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.
00:18:24.580And what Myers realized is the fascia is like the cat gut in a tennis racket.
00:18:34.540So 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.
00:18:44.700So 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.
00:18:55.140And it's the recoil and the snap of the fascia, which really provides the power and force.
00:19:01.180So 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.
00:21:09.460World War II, he taught – he wrote the manual for hand-to-hand combat for I guess the Marines.
00:21:15.760I guess is how it was during World War II.
00:21:18.340And 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.
00:21:29.040So he tells a little bit about Rex Applegate and the way he approached fighting both with weapons and with your hands.
00:21:38.600This is one of the fascinating stories that I came across completely by accident.
00:21:58.280And 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.
00:22:08.060And Shanghai was just like the gutter, man.
00:22:09.840It was like the dirtiest, toughest part of town of the world.
00:22:13.060It was like the world's like fighting capital.
00:22:14.660So he brings these two guys back to teach real street combat to his newly recruited misfits.
00:24:35.280I 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.
00:24:45.940You would get flagged pretty quick for that.
00:24:48.400You know, recently it's become Wing Chun has come into vogue, not least because Robert Downey Jr. has become a devotee of Wing Chun.
00:24:56.060And 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.
00:25:06.400So, you know, Wing Chun is a very – and Bruce Lee also was a student of Wing Chun.
00:25:10.640It's a very elegant, almost dance-like approach to martial arts.
00:25:16.340And what's beautiful about Wing Chun is it's said to be the only martial art created by a woman.
00:25:22.340And there is a myth that there was a Chinese nun in a monastery.
00:25:28.520And when the monastery was attacked, everyone was slaughtered except her.
00:25:31.420And 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.
00:25:40.980So it's a great myth, but actually it seems to be just that, just a myth.
00:25:45.440It's much more likely that Wing Chun and all of the Asian martial arts are derivatives of the ancient Greek art of Pancrasian.
00:25:54.480And Pancrasian was originated on the Greek island – this is where all the conspiracy theories come together.
00:26:02.400So 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.
00:26:21.300It 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.
00:26:31.820And 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.
00:26:52.180So 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.
00:26:58.800Then 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.
00:27:06.980So you just grab the other dude's fingers and bend his fingers back and break his fingers and he's done.
00:27:11.780Or you get him by testicles and tear and he's out.
00:27:15.120So 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.
00:27:25.140But 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.
00:27:44.740Well, 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.
00:27:57.880So 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.
00:28:04.560But the, you know, British school system was based on ancient Greek culture and, you know, the perfect flowering of that was Lawrence of Arabia.
00:28:14.560You 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.
00:28:25.380So 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.
00:28:48.460And 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.
00:28:55.660And that's what actually made him probably a more superior warrior because he had that sense of compassion, but then that headiness about it.
00:29:08.760So 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.
00:29:21.240But how did your tracing the footsteps of these British resistance fighters lead you to jumping across rooftops in France?
00:29:29.880You know, so there are a couple of guidelines I always have when I'm looking at this kind of stuff.
00:29:39.660You want to avoid something that is basically useless in the modern world.
00:29:43.760So 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.
00:29:53.700You know, we're not going to be eating any live beating goat hearts.
00:29:56.760And 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.
00:30:06.080So, again, if it's like, you know, PX90, it might be great, but it's something that we just kind of created for ourselves.
00:30:12.640And there's no long, deep historical taproot that demonstrates that this has been effective in real life situations for a long time.
00:30:20.720So whenever I'm researching this kind of stuff, I'm looking for those two things.
00:30:24.480What's the practical takeaway and what is the long historical lineage that proves that it actually has worked?
00:30:31.200So when I'm looking at the Cretan Bounce, for instance, I'm looking at this ability to, you know, race across mountaintops.
00:30:38.440I thought, OK, but what's the takeaway?
00:30:41.920And it immediately draws you toward parkour.
00:30:44.760And in me specifically, what made the light bulb go off was I was in the middle of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you know, like Amish country.
00:30:53.360And I'm coming out of like a Rite Aid drugstore.
00:30:56.480And 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.
00:31:03.120And I read a little bit about parkour by that point, but I'd never actually seen it.
00:31:08.540And 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.
00:31:18.100And they said, yeah, yeah, you know, we do parkour.
00:31:20.120And, you know, if you want to come learn, come learn with us.
00:31:22.440And 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.
00:31:35.240They passed on their knowledge to these teachers in London.
00:31:38.720So I ended up going there and actually studying with a women's only class because, again, I was interested in something else, too.
00:31:44.700So 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.
00:31:53.140It can't just be just dudes only or women only.
00:31:55.700And one thing about parkour is it is an egalitarian sport.
00:31:59.340Women are just as good at it as guys are.
00:32:02.240I 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.
00:32:12.420So they're taking advantage of the fascia again.
00:32:15.300Yeah, again, it's a fascinating thing to do.
00:32:17.400You know, when the first time I try to do what's known as a turn vault, it's a very simple vault.
00:32:26.160And then you try to do it and you're banging the crap out of your knees and you're not getting off the ground.
00:32:29.540And 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.
00:32:40.820And 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.
00:32:51.360And so this discussion about parkour leads naturally to MoveNAT.
00:33:32.080So when I first came back, we were down the Copper Canyons in 2006 for that ultra marathon with the Tatumati Indians.
00:33:40.480And when I came back, I thought, you know what, this could be a really good book.
00:33:44.180So 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.
00:33:52.700So I went out to Burbank where Barefoot Ted was living at the time and hung out with him for a couple of days.
00:33:58.660And while I was with him, you know, one day he opens up his email and he's like, huh, this is interesting.
00:34:03.480He goes, hey, you know, you might want to take a look at this.
00:34:05.620And it was an email from some French guy named Erwan LaCour who was living down in Brazil.
00:34:10.920And he had seen some posts by Barefoot Ted about minimalists running.
00:34:15.660And so Erwan had contacted Ted to just get more information.
00:34:18.460So I became pretty fascinated and I contacted Erwan myself.
00:34:22.880And a few months later, I was heading out to Brazil and he was like taking me through the Brazilian rainforest,
00:34:28.800training with him and a bunch of like UFC fighters, you know, these Brazilian jiu-jitsu dudes who were training with Erwan,
00:34:35.280literally like in the rainforest along the beach down in Brazil.
00:34:58.760And, you know, Georges Hebert was a French naval officer back in the early 1900s.
00:35:03.220And he was stationed in a troop ship off the coast of the island of Martinique when the volcano exploded.
00:35:08.540And 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.
00:35:22.020These basic physical reactions that every other species would handle no problem, yet for some reason humans couldn't do these things.
00:35:31.100So 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.
00:35:38.560And very basic things, you know, to run, to walk, to climb, to jump, to throw, to catch, to defend, to attack.
00:35:46.600And he created these obstacle courses in France to train first French naval officers and then everybody else in the natural method.
00:35:55.260Unfortunately, you know, after World War I, most of the natural method teachers were killed during the fighting.
00:36:01.960And the natural method essentially disappeared except for in two locations.
00:36:07.900One 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.
00:36:17.060And the other place was with Erwan Lacour down in his, like, wacky, hippie ultimate fighting camp in Brazil.
00:36:22.840Right. And what's interesting is that the natural method, I mean, there's these strands of what the ancient Greeks did, right?
00:36:31.420It was very kind of bodyweight, calisthenics, learning how to use your body efficiently and effectively.
00:36:36.540And he was able to pick that up and incorporate it.
00:36:39.600And, like, I guess Erwan is continuing that tradition as well.
00:36:43.200And 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?
00:36:50.200Like, why is there even any question about the best way to exercise and get in shape?
00:36:55.040If you do one MoveNet session, to me, essentially, the conversation's over.
00:37:00.580And, again, the best evidence is Erwan himself.
00:37:03.920You 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.
00:37:38.540But, yeah, we have some really good – we have two good MoveNet instructors here, fortunately, which is great.
00:37:43.280Because usually Tulsa doesn't have things like that, but we do.
00:37:47.040And 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.
00:37:55.740So they did a documentary about La Sierra High.
00:38:25.260It went away because people started spending less time on physical education.
00:38:28.760They want to spend more time preparing for tests and whatnot.
00:38:32.860But, I mean, it's a fascinating – again, it's just this idea.
00:38:34.980They're taking this ancient ideal, and, like, the guy who invented – who was leading this program, he went to the Greeks.
00:38:40.880Like, 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.
00:38:49.880And, yeah, going back to MoveNet, going back to this idea, this heroic idea the Greeks had was you had to be useful.
00:39:15.060I'm still lost in Jack London right now.
00:39:19.520Yeah, but that was – and the funny thing about it was – so George Huber's motto was be fit to be useful.
00:39:25.660And 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.
00:39:35.540And when you think about that, if you apply that test to everything you do in your life, you know, be useful.
00:39:41.220You know, as I'm going out for fast food, am I really being useful?
00:39:46.020Wouldn'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?
00:39:55.480When I go out to exercise, if I'm doing bicep curls, am I really being useful, you know?
00:39:59.560Or maybe I should just climb a rope instead.
00:40:02.520And I love that as a two-word test for every action in your life.
00:40:08.560And 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?
00:40:59.260So we've talked a lot about the physical, you know, the physical feats of this Greek heroic ideal.
00:41:07.080But 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.
00:41:17.440So what was it about the diet on Crete that allowed these individuals to do that?
00:41:23.940So, 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.
00:41:39.520And, you know, there's a death sentence hanging over his head.
00:42:42.100So 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.
00:42:58.880So, 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.
00:43:07.160That's how the Cretans are still eating today.
00:43:08.720And I guess they're one of the healthiest people on the planet.
00:43:10.880Yeah, again, you know, all the threads ultimately connect, you know.
00:43:15.860So you look at what the paleo diet is today and its connection to the Mediterranean diet, which essentially was the Minoan diet.
00:43:22.780And essentially it's the same diet that Michael Pollan talks about, you know, eat real food, mostly vegetables, not too much.
00:43:28.820You know, eat a palm-sized chunk of some kind of high-fat food with a bunch of vegetables and you're good to go.
00:43:38.320The 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.
00:43:46.340And 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.
00:44:33.540Yeah, 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.
00:44:47.160You had to make a fire and eat it really fast so no one can know that you stole the goat.
00:45:28.120When 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.
00:45:41.740And what I love about Phil is, you know, he's not one of these hardcore in-your-face gurus.
00:45:55.340And the way he does that is, instead of telling you what to eat, he says, do the two-week test.
00:46:00.320And the two-week test means you remove all the high glycemic foods from your diet for 14 days.
00:46:06.380And on the 15th day, go ahead and have yourself a piece of bread and see how you feel.
00:46:10.460What I love about it is it strips away all the variables.
00:46:13.620It gets you back to the basic, you know, factory preload.
00:46:17.020And then as you add the variables, you can assess how you physically feel.
00:46:22.200And 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.
00:46:39.880If I eat the Oreos, I'm going to pay the price for it.
00:46:42.080If I don't eat the Oreos, I'm going to feel better.
00:46:44.160If 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.
00:46:54.980If I eat a bunch of oatmeal with honey on top, I'm going to feel sluggish the rest of the morning.
00:47:00.460Prior to doing Natural Born Heroes, I never really connected those cause and effects.
00:47:05.780If I felt sluggish, well, I just drank some coffee.
00:47:56.480So I highly recommend listeners to go out and get your book.
00:47:59.520But where can people learn more about your book?
00:48:01.360We did a really cool series on Outside Online, which looked – we broke down a bunch of the different skills.
00:48:08.080I 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.
00:48:18.280So check out Outside Online for the Natural Born Heroes series and then the book itself.
00:48:24.440And then anybody who wants to ask me questions, honestly, fire away.
00:48:44.300And also, make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is slash heroes.
00:48:47.980Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:49:06.140For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
00:49:10.600And 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.