Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.720 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.860 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.240 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.480 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.480 | My guest today is Josh Waitzkin.

00:00:17.800 | Josh Waitzkin is a former child prodigy

00:00:20.040 | who began playing the game of chess at six years old.

00:00:22.840 | And by the time he was 16 years old,

00:00:24.920 | had become a national champion many times over,

00:00:27.680 | as well as an international champion.

00:00:29.720 | In fact, he achieved the level of international master,

00:00:32.640 | which is one of the highest levels of achievement

00:00:34.800 | in the game of chess for anyone of any age.

00:00:37.880 | His early life achievements were the topic and focus

00:00:40.320 | of the book and movie, "Searching for Bobby Fischer."

00:00:43.360 | He then quit playing the game of chess

00:00:45.440 | and moved on to martial arts,

00:00:47.240 | the study of philosophy at Columbia University, New York,

00:00:50.360 | and eventually foiling,

00:00:52.120 | which is essentially surfing over the water.

00:00:54.680 | Josh is not only a high performer,

00:00:56.400 | he has now become perhaps

00:00:58.240 | the most sought after professional coach

00:01:00.680 | in the domains of finance,

00:01:02.880 | in the domains of creative endeavors,

00:01:05.000 | professional sports and military.

00:01:07.080 | Today's episode is one of my favorite

00:01:08.920 | Huberman Lab podcast episodes ever.

00:01:11.560 | I know as a podcast host, you're not supposed to say that,

00:01:13.680 | but it's absolutely true.

00:01:15.760 | Because not only is Josh Waitzkin so highly accomplished,

00:01:19.360 | but he is an exceptional teacher of the learning process.

00:01:22.720 | He took what he learned in chess and about learning chess

00:01:26.080 | and applied that to martial arts, to foiling, et cetera.

00:01:29.600 | And from participating in all those endeavors,

00:01:31.840 | he was able to distill out the essential elements

00:01:34.760 | of learning and how to tailor one's learning process

00:01:37.920 | to one's own unique personality and style,

00:01:41.280 | flaws and tendency to make mistakes,

00:01:43.800 | and how to leverage all of that

00:01:45.840 | in order to be able to learn better.

00:01:47.960 | In fact, throughout today's episode,

00:01:49.840 | I promise that you will constantly be reflecting

00:01:52.440 | on where you experience things like tension and fear,

00:01:55.920 | both in your personal life, your professional life,

00:01:57.920 | your educational life, whatever it is

00:01:59.640 | that you're trying to learn and pursue in life.

00:02:01.840 | Today's conversation, thanks to Josh,

00:02:04.240 | will allow you to look at that, understand it better,

00:02:07.720 | and know where to apply work, when to relax,

00:02:11.020 | when to push forward, and in effect,

00:02:13.440 | how to become a better learner, both of yourself

00:02:16.440 | and whatever it is that you happen to be pursuing in life.

00:02:19.480 | We have a saying in science,

00:02:20.840 | which is that sometimes you encounter somebody

00:02:23.320 | who is truly N of one, meaning a sample size of one

00:02:26.680 | in a category all by themselves.

00:02:29.500 | Josh Waitzkin is truly an N of one.

00:02:32.200 | I know of no other person like him or even close to him

00:02:35.860 | in terms of his ability to live a unique life path

00:02:39.400 | and to take what he learns and to put it out into the world

00:02:42.420 | so that others may benefit.

00:02:43.860 | He lives with a tremendous amount of intentionality

00:02:46.440 | for the people he loves, for the things he loves,

00:02:48.960 | and with the intention of helping others

00:02:51.240 | learn how to learn better.

00:02:53.080 | I must say it was a true honor to sit down with Josh.

00:02:55.600 | I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time.

00:02:58.680 | You'll also learn that he's a really nice person.

00:03:01.780 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:03:04.480 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:03:07.160 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:03:09.140 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:03:11.640 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:03:14.280 | In keeping with that theme,

00:03:15.640 | this podcast episode does include sponsors.

00:03:18.540 | And now for my discussion with Josh Waitzkin.

00:03:21.520 | Josh Waitzkin, welcome.

00:03:23.440 | - Thank you, man, great to be here.

00:03:25.280 | - I feel like I've known you a long time

00:03:26.640 | because I saw the search for Bobby Fischer

00:03:28.600 | and I learned about the real human that was about you.

00:03:33.600 | And I read "The Art of Learning,"

00:03:36.600 | and I must say I'm a fan and somewhat obsessed

00:03:40.620 | with the uniqueness of your arc and the choices you've made

00:03:44.280 | and your understanding of learning as a process

00:03:46.680 | and its universal properties,

00:03:48.480 | its specific properties in different contexts.

00:03:50.880 | So I'm excited to dive in.

00:03:53.440 | I think for people that perhaps are not familiar with you,

00:03:57.100 | maybe you could just give us a broad overview

00:04:00.360 | of your backstory,

00:04:02.560 | like the things that you've really focused on

00:04:05.120 | in kind of chunks, if you will,

00:04:07.700 | just for a couple of minutes

00:04:08.680 | so that people can get familiar

00:04:10.520 | with the incredible things you've done.

00:04:12.400 | And I think that reflects the uniqueness

00:04:14.920 | of your choice-making process, which then we'll get into.

00:04:18.120 | - Yeah, sure.

00:04:19.280 | Well, thank you, man.

00:04:20.120 | It's an honor.

00:04:20.940 | I appreciate what you said.

00:04:21.780 | Yeah, so I started playing chess.

00:04:24.860 | I grew up in New York City, downtown Manhattan.

00:04:27.380 | I started playing chess when I was six years old.

00:04:29.600 | And I discovered chess

00:04:31.880 | walking through Washington Square Park with my mom.

00:04:34.940 | And I remember watching a day or two,

00:04:36.960 | and then at one point I broke away from her.

00:04:38.560 | I was going to play on the monkey bars,

00:04:39.800 | and I ran over and I asked an old man if I could play.

00:04:43.680 | And he said yes, and my mom was surprised.

00:04:47.180 | And we started playing.

00:04:48.600 | I played my first game of chess.

00:04:50.320 | I remember the very distinct feeling of,

00:04:53.780 | it was as if I was discovering

00:04:58.400 | or rediscovering a lost memory.

00:05:00.080 | It wasn't like I was learning something new.

00:05:02.520 | It was like I was wiping away the dust

00:05:05.480 | or the cobwebs between something,

00:05:07.080 | between me and something I had known very deeply at one point.

00:05:09.580 | Very strange feeling for a six-year-old boy.

00:05:11.680 | And then I just fell in love with the game.

00:05:13.040 | I got really intensely into it.

00:05:14.460 | My first teachers were the hustlers in Washington Square.

00:05:17.280 | So it was just like a raucous crowd

00:05:18.680 | of guys who took me under their wings,

00:05:20.160 | started teaching me the tactical street side of the game.

00:05:23.500 | And I was just unhindered as a learner.

00:05:27.240 | Which is interesting from my perspective now as a dad,

00:05:28.980 | 'cause my little boy Charlie is taking on surfing

00:05:31.680 | with that same kind of freedom.

00:05:33.240 | Just that liberated, uncomplicated,

00:05:35.880 | out of his own way kind of vibe.

00:05:38.280 | Yeah, and then by the time I was seven,

00:05:39.880 | I started competing and then I was a top-rated player

00:05:42.040 | from my age in the country.

00:05:43.760 | Most of the years from age seven to 23,

00:05:47.000 | my whole chess career.

00:05:48.160 | So it was a very strange upbringing in some ways,

00:05:51.400 | which has led to some quirky elements in my psychology,

00:05:54.840 | which was that I was living in a pressure cooker

00:05:58.200 | of competition from age six on.

00:06:01.360 | And my whole childhood was spent as the target.

00:06:04.600 | And so if you're competing in national championships,

00:06:08.560 | I would compete in youth national and world championships,

00:06:11.400 | then otherwise I'd be competing against adults,

00:06:13.600 | everything else.

00:06:14.420 | But then you're the target,

00:06:15.800 | so any mistake you make,

00:06:17.440 | and kids make mistakes all the time, we all do.

00:06:19.880 | My rivals and their coaches who are strong masters

00:06:22.600 | and international masters and grandmasters

00:06:23.960 | would be able to study,

00:06:24.960 | and adult strong players can see very easily

00:06:27.840 | the weaknesses in a child.

00:06:29.320 | And so they would be prepared for them.

00:06:30.700 | So if I didn't take on a weakness,

00:06:32.120 | it would be exploited and I would experience pain.

00:06:34.800 | And so from a very young age,

00:06:36.800 | not taking on my weaknesses was outside

00:06:39.440 | of my conceptual scheme.

00:06:41.280 | Which is a really interesting thing to grow up with.

00:06:44.200 | And it's in many ways like lay the foundation

00:06:46.800 | for a lot of what I've done since.

00:06:49.640 | And there are lots of things about that upbringing,

00:06:51.280 | which could be unhealthy.

00:06:53.600 | - Being in the public eye.

00:06:55.120 | - Yeah, so then--

00:06:55.940 | - Very bizarre.

00:06:56.780 | Luckily it was before social media.

00:06:58.440 | - Yeah, super, yeah.

00:06:59.720 | And I've never been on social media in any way,

00:07:01.640 | which has been a choice.

00:07:03.040 | So yeah, so when I was 11,

00:07:04.320 | the book "Searching for Robby Fisher" came out.

00:07:06.480 | And then when I was 15, the movie came out.

00:07:08.520 | And at that point I was completely in love with chess.

00:07:12.000 | It was my first love.

00:07:13.520 | I was an unobstructed learner.

00:07:14.960 | I loved competition.

00:07:16.520 | A lot of my opponents were trying to control the game,

00:07:19.200 | memorize openings, figure out how to win by force.

00:07:21.760 | But I loved the battle.

00:07:22.600 | My style was to create chaos,

00:07:24.480 | like in Washington Square Park.

00:07:26.040 | Find hidden harmonies in chaos.

00:07:28.480 | And I loved that.

00:07:29.320 | So as the game went on and they moved away

00:07:31.200 | from their opening preparation and controlling things,

00:07:33.080 | we moved into my power zone, which was the fight.

00:07:35.960 | I loved the fight.

00:07:37.440 | And then my chess life in many ways was free flowing.

00:07:42.160 | And then the movie came out when I was 15.

00:07:43.720 | And then you can imagine what that was like

00:07:45.200 | as a young teenager, all the attention,

00:07:49.200 | the media, cameras everywhere, groupies,

00:07:51.800 | all the temptations.

00:07:53.480 | And I didn't ask for it.

00:07:54.840 | And it was a really, it was an alienating period

00:07:58.640 | for me relative to chess.

00:07:59.520 | And around the same time I started training

00:08:01.800 | with a Russian chess trainer who started urging me

00:08:05.280 | to move away from my self-expression as a chess player

00:08:08.000 | and to study the players who were the opposite of me.

00:08:10.480 | I was a attacking player, aggressive.

00:08:13.000 | I played kind of in the style, not at the level,

00:08:15.160 | but in the style of like Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov

00:08:17.560 | or Mikhail Tal, world champions who were like hot-blooded.

00:08:21.000 | And I was being urged to study the more cold-blooded,

00:08:24.160 | prophylactic side of chess, Petrosian, Karpov,

00:08:27.680 | more conservative defensive players.

00:08:29.960 | So I was being told, instead of saying like,

00:08:31.760 | what does Josh feel here?

00:08:34.000 | What would Karpov play here, who's the opposite of me?

00:08:36.840 | And so the combination of that public eye

00:08:38.800 | and then the movement away from my self-expression

00:08:41.600 | led to a period of obstructedness and self-consciousness.

00:08:45.240 | And an interesting theme we could talk about at one point

00:08:47.600 | is that passage from a pre-conscious

00:08:49.120 | to a post-conscious competitor.

00:08:50.720 | In many ways, I went from like that freedom

00:08:52.720 | of pre-conscious competition

00:08:54.840 | into the tunnel of existential crisis.

00:08:57.360 | And I grappled with it for a lot of years.

00:09:00.400 | And when I was 18, when I graduated high school,

00:09:04.160 | I, and during that grappling,

00:09:05.800 | I was still the top-rated player in the country.

00:09:07.660 | I was winning national championships every year.

00:09:09.160 | So like from the outside, it looked good.

00:09:11.040 | But from the inside, I was in turmoil.

00:09:12.760 | I was fighting with myself.

00:09:13.800 | I had all these demons.

00:09:15.280 | And then I left the US.

00:09:16.480 | I spent a number of years after high school

00:09:19.040 | studying East Asian philosophy, meditating, reflecting.

00:09:22.780 | And then my study of chess in those years,

00:09:25.440 | and I was deeply in love with chess still,

00:09:27.040 | it became much more of an introspective process.

00:09:29.880 | It became, I was competing as intensely as ever,

00:09:32.920 | but chess became connected to life.

00:09:35.480 | And then when I was 19 years old,

00:09:37.280 | I started training at the Human Performance Institute.

00:09:39.800 | At the time, it was called LGE,

00:09:41.600 | Lehrer, Groppel, and Echeverry.

00:09:44.600 | It was a performance training,

00:09:48.800 | cross-disciplinary performance training center

00:09:50.520 | that Jim Lehrer opened up.

00:09:51.960 | And then it became the HBI later on.

00:09:54.040 | And I'll never forget the moment

00:09:55.440 | that I was working with these performance psychologists,

00:09:57.680 | and I was at the gym,

00:09:59.640 | and I was working with nutritionists,

00:10:00.760 | and I was doing this intense workout,

00:10:02.680 | and I looked next to me, and there was Jim Harbaugh,

00:10:04.120 | who was the head coach at the time of,

00:10:06.480 | who was the quarterback at the time of the Colts NFL team.

00:10:10.880 | And we got into this amazing dialogue about performance.

00:10:14.000 | And it was a real eye-opening moment for me,

00:10:15.480 | 'cause I realized that we spoke the same language.

00:10:18.000 | It was like, holy shit, this guy's a,

00:10:19.600 | he's an NFL quarterback, and I'm this crazy chess player,

00:10:22.760 | but we're doing the same thing.

00:10:24.320 | And it was this crystallization moment

00:10:25.800 | where I realized that all of these arts

00:10:28.240 | are fundamentally connected at the highest levels.

00:10:31.720 | And what we're doing is much more similar.

00:10:33.500 | Like if you're at the, like I observed that people

00:10:36.080 | who are at the pinnacles of different arts

00:10:37.640 | are often doing things that are much more similar

00:10:40.200 | than people who are in the same art from them,

00:10:42.400 | but at lower levels.

00:10:44.160 | There's something in that qualitative experience.

00:10:46.320 | And then I began studying the principles

00:10:48.200 | that connected these things.

00:10:49.740 | And then I had this interesting experience.

00:10:52.060 | I'm gonna, I'm kind of compressing a life

00:10:54.720 | into a minute or two, but I,

00:10:56.600 | in my early 20s, when I ultimately moved away from chess,

00:11:02.400 | and I'm happy to talk about why and that journey,

00:11:05.080 | and then I moved into the martial arts.

00:11:07.320 | My study of East Asian philosophy moved me

00:11:09.040 | into the study of Daoism and Tai Chi,

00:11:11.560 | and then into Tai Chi push hands.

00:11:15.240 | And I had this really interesting experience

00:11:17.320 | where at that point I'd been,

00:11:19.680 | the introspective process of studying chess

00:11:22.720 | had become much more about studying life.

00:11:24.920 | And so I was in an exploration of interconnectedness,

00:11:29.040 | but I was not playing chess anymore,

00:11:31.000 | and I was all in on the martial arts,

00:11:33.040 | but I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition,

00:11:35.160 | which I did every year for many years,

00:11:37.080 | for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Research.

00:11:39.080 | And I was playing 50 chess games at once,

00:11:41.560 | and I was walking around this big square

00:11:44.080 | playing against 50 young, up-and-coming,

00:11:46.600 | strong players at the same time.

00:11:48.240 | And I realized at one point, I wasn't playing chess.

00:11:51.280 | I was moving chess pieces,

00:11:53.040 | but I was thinking in Tai Chi language.

00:11:54.460 | I was feeling flow, feeling space left behind,

00:11:57.360 | riding energetic waves of the game.

00:11:59.120 | And it was like, I was winning all these chess games,

00:12:01.520 | but I hadn't played chess in a long time,

00:12:02.720 | and I wasn't playing chess.

00:12:04.080 | And it became like, and then my study of Tai Chi

00:12:08.400 | became extremely accelerated,

00:12:09.680 | and then I started winning, competing,

00:12:11.120 | and then I won in the fighting application,

00:12:12.920 | and I started winning national championships.

00:12:14.520 | And then I began to think about,

00:12:17.300 | or become more and more deeply involved in the study

00:12:22.120 | and the exploration of thematic interconnectedness,

00:12:24.860 | which has really become a life's work.

00:12:27.640 | And then my martial arts life ended up

00:12:30.400 | taking me all over the world,

00:12:31.440 | and I won some world championships,

00:12:32.960 | and then I moved into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,

00:12:35.040 | and trained in that art for many years,

00:12:38.760 | and was training for the world championship

00:12:41.160 | for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:12:42.080 | This is after winning worlds in the Tai Chi Quan.

00:12:45.640 | And I broke my back in a training camp.

00:12:47.640 | I own a school with Marcelo Garcia,

00:12:49.720 | who's a dear friend, who's a nine-time world champion,

00:12:52.880 | perhaps the greatest grappler, pound for pound, to ever live.

00:12:55.760 | And I was training at a really high level,

00:12:57.680 | and I was thinking about this,

00:12:59.880 | like I was getting ready to begin my surge

00:13:01.960 | toward black belt world championships in Jiu-Jitsu.

00:13:04.960 | And I ruptured my L4, L5 disc.

00:13:07.180 | And it was the first time I'd been moved away from an art,

00:13:11.260 | not on my own terms.

00:13:13.620 | And it was a brutal injury that I ended up,

00:13:18.720 | as we do when we're madmen,

00:13:20.720 | coming back and training for a year and a half

00:13:22.480 | with the broken, busted up back,

00:13:24.880 | and then the doctors told me I had to let this one go,

00:13:29.000 | or I'd be crippled for life.

00:13:31.040 | And around that period is where I started

00:13:34.000 | to go all in on the art of training others.

00:13:36.320 | And I said, okay, if I can't be all in training

00:13:38.600 | as a competitor, as an athlete myself,

00:13:40.840 | I'd been training elite competitors

00:13:43.040 | in mental and physical performances for some time then,

00:13:45.600 | but I wanted to take on the challenge

00:13:47.160 | of loving training others with the same intensity

00:13:49.080 | that I love training myself.

00:13:50.840 | And I went all in on that art.

00:13:53.600 | And I'm still all in on that art,

00:13:55.360 | but I never actually got to the place

00:13:57.840 | where I love not being in the arena myself

00:14:00.400 | as much as being in the arena myself.

00:14:02.400 | And then in this chapter of my life now,

00:14:05.000 | I've fallen in love with the ocean arts,

00:14:07.040 | initially surfing and now foiling.

00:14:09.360 | And for the last eight years,

00:14:11.940 | I've been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family.

00:14:14.880 | And I train three to five hours a day in foiling.

00:14:18.840 | And so I'm in my really intense training lifestyle myself,

00:14:23.840 | and I train elite mental and physical competitors

00:14:27.080 | around the world in finance, in science, technology,

00:14:31.720 | and in sports.

00:14:32.640 | I've been doing some amazing work with the Boston Celtics

00:14:34.360 | for the last few years.

00:14:35.520 | So that's the journey in a nutshell.

00:14:39.160 | Happy to dig into any of it.

00:14:40.680 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:17:42.580 | - Yeah, thank you.

00:17:44.560 | We'll definitely revisit certain time points

00:17:47.240 | and themes there.

00:17:48.880 | I can imagine as a young boy playing chess,

00:17:51.080 | you have your own strategies,

00:17:54.320 | you're developing an understanding of what works for you,

00:17:57.080 | but of course you, as a young kid,

00:17:59.280 | are also getting into the mind of the other player.

00:18:01.080 | You actually described that your coach or coaches

00:18:03.460 | were encouraging you to get into a different mindset,

00:18:05.740 | one that was not your default or trained-up mindset,

00:18:08.960 | less focused on chaos and aggression,

00:18:11.040 | and more in this other mode of playing

00:18:16.000 | by thinking about these other types of chess players

00:18:21.000 | and ways to play chess.

00:18:23.240 | So I can imagine that most kids are not weaned,

00:18:28.240 | their brain isn't developing around a game, right?

00:18:31.240 | It seems that your brain was built,

00:18:34.240 | the developmental neuroplasticity that's so robust

00:18:36.440 | in early childhood was built around this game

00:18:38.480 | that we call chess.

00:18:39.600 | And it seems to me that you were encouraged

00:18:43.080 | to develop a theory of mind

00:18:45.080 | that wasn't just your own,

00:18:46.360 | which is itself I think is really unique, right?

00:18:50.360 | I mean, most six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12-year-olds

00:18:53.400 | might be told, "Hey, listen,

00:18:54.640 | the reason they were mean to you at school

00:18:55.940 | is like they just hate themselves,"

00:18:57.300 | or, "They just didn't think about

00:19:00.960 | whether or not to pick you first or last for the game,"

00:19:03.840 | or whatever it is, right?

00:19:04.920 | You know, that you get told to do that.

00:19:07.120 | But for you, it became, it seems, an intense practice

00:19:10.160 | of trying to learn to get into the mind of another

00:19:12.520 | while holding on to your own sense

00:19:15.680 | of what's you versus them.

00:19:18.160 | And so as a developmental neurobiologist,

00:19:20.300 | I understand this is like perhaps

00:19:21.600 | one of the most important events

00:19:23.080 | in the development of our brain.

00:19:24.820 | Seems that your brain was built up around that dynamic.

00:19:30.760 | And so now you coach peak performers,

00:19:36.440 | and so much of coaching and teaching or being a parent

00:19:39.840 | is to get into the mind of another.

00:19:41.200 | The difference is when you're a parent,

00:19:42.320 | you can think back to being a child

00:19:43.680 | and at least get some general sense of what that's like.

00:19:46.880 | Stepping back from what I just said,

00:19:48.280 | and I realize that there's a lot of words there,

00:19:52.200 | but do you think that what you're doing

00:19:55.500 | when you approach a practice like Tai Chi

00:20:00.500 | or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or science or math or music

00:20:05.800 | from the perspective of a performer or a teacher

00:20:09.040 | is that you're getting into the mind of someone else,

00:20:13.500 | or you're trying to stay in your own mindset?

00:20:19.520 | I'm sorry I'm not being more succinct with this,

00:20:21.400 | but I think that as humans, we do this.

00:20:24.040 | Like I'm sure our dogs look up at us and say,

00:20:26.360 | oh, like they're happy with me or they're sad with me,

00:20:29.280 | but the algorithms they're running are more simplistic.

00:20:33.160 | I mean, we as the most sophisticated old world primates

00:20:39.120 | do this so spectacularly well.

00:20:41.680 | And it seems that much of your career and your life

00:20:43.620 | has been built around these kinds of dynamics.

00:20:45.400 | So put simply, what is your mindset

00:20:49.920 | when you approach a practice,

00:20:52.160 | that's just you in the practice

00:20:54.200 | versus your mindset when you approach a practice,

00:20:56.980 | when it's you and another, a competitor,

00:20:59.700 | versus when you're trying to teach something,

00:21:03.320 | you and a bunch of different minds,

00:21:05.980 | but there's a common goal.

00:21:07.360 | Okay, so there's really three big questions wrapped in there

00:21:10.320 | and now-

00:21:11.660 | - There's sort of like 15 really big questions.

00:21:13.600 | - 15 really big questions.

00:21:14.840 | And my audience gets upset at the length of these questions,

00:21:17.800 | but I think for me, it's important to just kind of

00:21:19.840 | set this out there as a buffet

00:21:21.360 | from which you can select anything

00:21:23.440 | or discard anything that you like.

00:21:25.280 | - There's some many delectable things to select there.

00:21:28.400 | Yeah, so, I mean, first of all,

00:21:31.500 | one-on-one competition is so interesting

00:21:33.320 | in mental and physical arenas.

00:21:34.920 | So if we think about Brazilian jiu-jitsu or chess

00:21:36.960 | as two of them, but let's zone in on chess

00:21:38.760 | 'cause that's when I was a kid.

00:21:40.560 | You're thinking about what your plan is

00:21:43.600 | and you're also thinking about

00:21:44.440 | what your opponent's plan is.

00:21:46.160 | And you have to, every move your opponent makes,

00:21:47.920 | you have to think, why did he do that?

00:21:50.000 | What's his plan?

00:21:50.840 | What is his tactical and what is his strategic plan,

00:21:53.480 | short-term and long-term?

00:21:54.560 | - So you're trying to unpack his strategy-

00:21:56.440 | - Always.

00:21:57.280 | - And you're assuming that he has or she has a strategy.

00:21:59.880 | - Well, if they don't have a strategy,

00:22:00.920 | then they're not gonna be a good chess player.

00:22:02.400 | And so then very quickly, if you're evolving in that art,

00:22:05.320 | you're only playing against people who are at your level

00:22:07.720 | or better if you're growing.

00:22:08.560 | If you're always playing down, then you're not improving.

00:22:10.160 | And there's a beautiful filtration process

00:22:12.120 | in the people who accelerate in their growth curve

00:22:15.720 | in the chess world are ones who are challenging themselves

00:22:17.720 | all the time, playing up, pushing their limits.

00:22:19.880 | And so I spent my life against playing against

00:22:23.560 | strong players and I always played a little up,

00:22:27.080 | except for when I was in youth competition,

00:22:28.360 | I always played up, which was important for me.

00:22:31.360 | And so people had a plan and they were very deceptive

00:22:35.000 | about their plans and they had their layers to the plans.

00:22:36.920 | There's like, there's the tactics they're trying to set up,

00:22:39.480 | there's their long-term strategy,

00:22:40.840 | but then there's what they want me to think

00:22:43.400 | their strategy is, which it isn't.

00:22:45.600 | And in fact, their strategy is to have misdirection

00:22:49.820 | around what their strategy and their tactics are

00:22:51.720 | and their layers to it.

00:22:52.560 | And it can go many, many layers deep.

00:22:54.280 | Same thing in the martial arts, right?

00:22:56.040 | So obviously you need to have a theory of mind

00:22:57.960 | to play that game, at least the way I played chess

00:23:00.840 | at a high level, because you're...

00:23:02.960 | And there's this very interesting shared consciousness

00:23:05.200 | between players.

00:23:06.040 | You and I are sitting a little further apart

00:23:08.060 | than we would sit if we were playing chess.

00:23:09.800 | So if we were like half the distance we are from one another

00:23:12.200 | and we're just sitting for six hours

00:23:15.280 | with like a three foot chess board,

00:23:17.840 | three feet between us, studying this thing,

00:23:20.520 | our minds become connected.

00:23:22.340 | We often will share the same illusion.

00:23:24.240 | You might see something and then I see it when you see it.

00:23:27.920 | If we have the same, we might have the same blind spot,

00:23:31.640 | we might have the same insight.

00:23:33.560 | The connectedness of minds is fascinating.

00:23:35.760 | And it's through chess, it's directly like energetic.

00:23:39.040 | It's through eye contact, it's through body language,

00:23:41.040 | it's by seeing micro-expressions, it's everything.

00:23:43.240 | So you're always reading the opponent.

00:23:44.880 | And as you get really good, you learn

00:23:47.080 | like what your tells are, what your opponent's tells are.

00:23:49.480 | Then you also learn, like I often would have tells

00:23:52.660 | on purpose and I'd have predictable tells

00:23:54.600 | that I would let people lean on for a long time

00:23:57.860 | until I didn't let them lean on it anymore.

00:24:00.120 | It's like in the martial arts where you give someone

00:24:04.680 | comfort in a lean, right, and you give them a rep

00:24:07.120 | of something, they can lean on here, they can lean here.

00:24:08.680 | Then they can lean here very comfortably,

00:24:10.080 | five or six or eight or 10 times in a row

00:24:11.680 | until they can't, then they're on the floor.

00:24:13.680 | Right, so this is happening in chess,

00:24:15.300 | it's happening in all of these things.

00:24:16.480 | And one-on-one competition is a relentless truth teller.

00:24:19.440 | You know, if you have a weakness, it will be exposed.

00:24:22.800 | If your opponent has a weakness, you will expose it.

00:24:24.880 | If you go into a chess game and you've got

00:24:26.400 | huge opening repertoire that's extremely complex,

00:24:29.260 | but there's like one little place

00:24:30.480 | that I just hope he doesn't go there, he always goes there.

00:24:33.880 | It's so bonkers.

00:24:34.720 | You can't hope your opponent's not gonna see it.

00:24:37.720 | You can't make the second best move

00:24:39.480 | because maybe he'll blunder and I'll win.

00:24:40.940 | That never works if you're playing as real competition.

00:24:44.560 | And so, like you need to understand your mind,

00:24:48.120 | you need to understand your opponent's mind,

00:24:49.680 | you need to understand your opponent's

00:24:50.720 | understanding of your mind, right?

00:24:53.280 | - That's a lot of plates to spin.

00:24:55.320 | And I guess what I said before, not so clearly,

00:24:59.700 | is that for a young mind to be able to learn

00:25:03.240 | to spin all those plates is incredible.

00:25:06.780 | It's clearly possible.

00:25:08.140 | It's unique, but it's possible.

00:25:10.380 | You did that.

00:25:11.220 | But it takes a young mind or an adult mind

00:25:16.020 | out of its own unique experience.

00:25:18.100 | So this is eventually how we'll circle back

00:25:20.540 | to pre-consciousness versus post-consciousness.

00:25:24.220 | But in the meantime, when was it that you first

00:25:28.880 | recall thinking not, "Oh, I'm gonna beat this guy,"

00:25:32.560 | but sensing he's getting nervous, or he's confident,

00:25:37.560 | or he can sense that I'm nervous,

00:25:40.600 | or I'm gonna set a trap, and just feeling out

00:25:45.600 | whether or not they detect the trap.

00:25:47.680 | I mean, it's just a lot.

00:25:49.360 | - Right away, when I was, I mean, just to keep in mind,

00:25:51.520 | my first teachers were hustlers,

00:25:53.540 | were chess hustlers from Washington Square.

00:25:55.220 | So they would mess with my mind all the time.

00:25:57.900 | And then they would teach me what they were doing,

00:25:59.140 | and they would do it again at a higher level, right?

00:26:01.180 | So you're distracting, they're distracting,

00:26:02.860 | they're setting traps,

00:26:03.740 | they're using Jedi mind tricks of every sort.

00:26:06.060 | - They didn't kid gobs you at all.

00:26:07.760 | - I wouldn't say at all.

00:26:10.060 | I mean, this was a rough and tumble crowd.

00:26:11.980 | There were a lot of drugs in the park.

00:26:13.180 | There was a lot of fights in the park.

00:26:15.180 | I mean, these guys took me under their wing.

00:26:17.020 | I mean, there were moments where some guy

00:26:18.220 | would be going off, and the guy would say,

00:26:19.280 | "Hey, Josh is here, cut that out."

00:26:21.100 | Like they, I was their protege.

00:26:22.700 | So they did, they did, but they also, you know,

00:26:25.980 | did not wear thick gloves.

00:26:27.340 | And the gloves were thinning out all the time,

00:26:29.340 | and I was getting better fast.

00:26:30.380 | Then we'd go to war.

00:26:31.380 | They were my teachers, they were my friends.

00:26:35.780 | I'm super grateful for like, and then,

00:26:38.340 | and then what's interesting is that

00:26:39.340 | my first classical chess teacher, Bruce Pendolfini,

00:26:41.420 | saw me playing in the park,

00:26:43.120 | and asked my father if I could work with him.

00:26:45.420 | And then we started training together.

00:26:47.580 | And one of the things that I feel really badly about

00:26:51.860 | is the way he was portrayed in the film,

00:26:53.540 | Searching for Bobby Fischer,

00:26:54.420 | 'cause Bruce is still a dear friend of mine.

00:26:55.860 | He's, Ben Kingsley played him

00:26:57.620 | as a much more severe person than he was.

00:26:59.780 | He was a beautiful teacher.

00:27:01.660 | And he really, he wanted me to express myself,

00:27:04.300 | as did the guys in the park.

00:27:05.260 | But he was also filling in the holes,

00:27:07.460 | and teaching me a classical chess foundation.

00:27:09.100 | And we were studying chess from the endgame first.

00:27:11.420 | Principles, studying positions of reduced complexity

00:27:15.340 | to touch high-level principles,

00:27:16.540 | and then learning to apply them

00:27:17.580 | to more and more complex positions.

00:27:18.820 | So my early chess education

00:27:20.940 | had both the classical study with Bruce,

00:27:24.100 | and it had the street-smart game

00:27:26.220 | with the hustlers at the park.

00:27:28.060 | And, but to answer your question right away,

00:27:30.460 | when I was six years old,

00:27:31.820 | like, my opponents would mess with my mind,

00:27:34.780 | and trap me, and trick me, and make me think here,

00:27:36.880 | and then they'd go there,

00:27:37.720 | and then I would learn to do that.

00:27:38.560 | And then, I remember there was one youth competition

00:27:41.020 | where I made a move inside a trap and went, "Oh!"

00:27:44.180 | I mean, it was like that obvious, right?

00:27:45.900 | Like, it's like the worst.

00:27:47.260 | Like, and then it gets increasingly subtle, right?

00:27:50.100 | But like, and my opponent said,

00:27:51.220 | "Oh, he's unhappy, he took the pawn."

00:27:52.460 | Then you, and then your opponents see it,

00:27:54.060 | and then you learn, you know,

00:27:55.940 | those things just keep on,

00:27:56.860 | the circles get smaller, and smaller,

00:27:58.220 | and tighter, and tighter, and more, and more refined.

00:28:00.100 | - This is the opposite of Asperger's or autism, by the way.

00:28:03.920 | What you're describing is a hypertrophy set of circuits

00:28:07.460 | for theory of mind in a very young kid.

00:28:09.820 | So to be able to understand what's happening around you.

00:28:13.060 | And I think for many people,

00:28:14.780 | the joys of childhood are really about

00:28:16.980 | not being aware of what's going on around you.

00:28:19.660 | The psychologists would refer to the,

00:28:22.820 | this is like a lack of impingement.

00:28:25.140 | Impingement is when like a kid is playing,

00:28:26.740 | and they're really enjoying something,

00:28:27.940 | and then suddenly they decide

00:28:28.940 | they don't wanna play anymore,

00:28:30.460 | and the parent doesn't wanna be bothered.

00:28:32.220 | So they say, "No, no, no, no, like keep playing."

00:28:34.700 | You know, they're like impinging on the kid's

00:28:36.620 | reflexive desire to do something or not do something.

00:28:40.140 | This isn't about keeping them safe,

00:28:41.320 | this is in the domain of safety.

00:28:43.080 | But at least within the channel of chess,

00:28:48.080 | it seems that you developed your entire understanding

00:28:51.340 | of the psychology of human beings,

00:28:53.220 | except for, of course, you had an experience

00:28:54.820 | at a home of family and friends.

00:28:56.740 | But chess certainly cut a wide trough

00:28:59.860 | through your development.

00:29:03.300 | - Well, I'm really grateful for my early chess life.

00:29:06.740 | And I also would never choose to put that on my children.

00:29:09.700 | I mean, it worked out really well for me.

00:29:13.020 | I mean, I have my wounds, right?

00:29:15.140 | I mean, there's lots of things that I've had to grapple with.

00:29:18.500 | But I think if you put a lot of children

00:29:19.940 | through the pressures that I went through,

00:29:22.140 | it wouldn't work out well.

00:29:23.420 | And I watched a lot of my young,

00:29:24.780 | I mean, almost all my young rivals,

00:29:26.940 | or I mean, like very close to all of my young rivals

00:29:30.460 | ended up quitting and falling into crisis.

00:29:33.020 | And, you know, then you have parents and coaches

00:29:36.820 | who are expressing their own egoic needs

00:29:39.460 | through the children, and the children are shouldering that,

00:29:41.580 | and then that becomes very difficult to deal with.

00:29:44.180 | And then you're dealing with heartbreak,

00:29:46.860 | and you're putting everything on the line,

00:29:48.420 | and you're losing,

00:29:49.260 | and you're dealing with your own self-doubts,

00:29:50.660 | and the heartbreak of your mother, and your father,

00:29:53.860 | and your coach, and then your friends.

00:29:55.940 | I mean, there are so many,

00:29:58.020 | and then as the pressures get more and more intense in chess,

00:30:00.020 | like you really are putting your heart and soul on the line

00:30:02.460 | through that chess board, in casual games,

00:30:05.020 | let alone in national and world championships.

00:30:07.540 | And you're being shattered when you lose.

00:30:09.120 | I was shattered many times over.

00:30:10.580 | I mean, I lost last rounds of national chess championships,

00:30:13.620 | and world championships, multiple times over.

00:30:16.940 | And those were the greatest moments of my life

00:30:18.940 | in retrospect.

00:30:19.780 | They taught me the most important lessons of my life.

00:30:21.940 | I would never take it back.

00:30:23.160 | It's been, and that's a pattern in my chess life,

00:30:25.500 | in my fight life, and everything I've gone through.

00:30:27.940 | The most heartbreaking, devastating moments

00:30:31.580 | ultimately were the ones that catalyzed the most growth.

00:30:34.440 | And they were beautiful.

00:30:35.640 | And I really relate to them that way.

00:30:38.820 | But they also can be brutal for young minds,

00:30:42.060 | and they can destroy people.

00:30:43.380 | - Yeah, what do you think it is about failure

00:30:46.300 | or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change?

00:30:50.900 | I mean, I always say that, you know,

00:30:52.100 | your brain has no reason to change

00:30:53.860 | if you're just trying to learn something,

00:30:57.100 | and you're in flow, you're getting, you know,

00:30:58.900 | most people associate being quote-unquote in flow

00:31:00.940 | with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly.

00:31:04.100 | I don't think that was the original definition

00:31:06.660 | that Csikszentmihalyi intended, but the neuroscience

00:31:10.680 | of brain plasticity tells us that it's only

00:31:12.740 | under conditions in which there's some mismatch

00:31:15.420 | between what you're trying to do, like even, you know,

00:31:17.260 | like this has been studied in terms of reaching

00:31:18.940 | for an object and there's a mirror displacement

00:31:21.060 | or a prism displacement or something,

00:31:22.940 | you eventually can learn to error correct

00:31:25.180 | because the cup is actually over there

00:31:28.020 | as opposed to where you see it.

00:31:29.580 | But it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us,

00:31:33.740 | adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine in particular,

00:31:37.020 | those three, they're cousins, the catecholamines

00:31:39.380 | that tells the, at a neurochemical level,

00:31:43.120 | tells the synapses, wait, something needs to change.

00:31:45.280 | I mean, the brain doesn't have any reason to change

00:31:47.420 | unless there's frustration, agitation,

00:31:49.140 | or at least some neurochemical change associated

00:31:51.460 | with those things that we call frustration and agitation.

00:31:53.960 | So do you think these big,

00:31:55.420 | what feel like cataclysmic fails set a sort of window

00:32:00.420 | of plasticity in which we can change?

00:32:02.740 | I often didn't think that,

00:32:04.420 | that it's only through like the devastation of a huge loss

00:32:07.380 | that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning.

00:32:10.880 | Certainly we wouldn't want to design the system that way,

00:32:14.220 | but as I always joke, you know,

00:32:15.740 | I wasn't consulted at the design phase

00:32:17.860 | and you weren't either.

00:32:19.140 | We just had to work with what's there.

00:32:21.580 | Like big failure.

00:32:22.540 | Why do you think that sets a wave front of change?

00:32:25.740 | - Yeah, it's a great question.

00:32:32.580 | Well, I think the study you sent me yesterday

00:32:35.780 | speaks to this.

00:32:36.620 | - Yeah, maybe we should talk about that.

00:32:37.820 | - Yeah, maybe I'll answer that question experientially.

00:32:40.580 | Maybe you could then talk about the study

00:32:42.020 | and we can riff on it a little bit.

00:32:43.360 | This is so much fun, by the way,

00:32:44.260 | 'cause I've lived my life in the arena,

00:32:47.100 | just like pushing myself.

00:32:48.140 | Like I'm my own, I'm not a scientist,

00:32:49.700 | but I'm like my own laboratory.

00:32:51.100 | You said to me yesterday at the game, like-

00:32:52.700 | - You said, I'm not a scientist,

00:32:53.860 | but I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

00:32:55.060 | And I said, trust me, you're a scientist.

00:32:57.340 | You know, I do science through the lens

00:32:59.440 | of a certain understanding of mechanism

00:33:01.420 | and structure function and some processes.

00:33:04.880 | And you do science through the lens of experience

00:33:07.740 | and drawing core parallels and principles

00:33:12.740 | in different domains and at different levels

00:33:16.360 | from unskilled all the way up to virtuosity.

00:33:18.380 | That's kind of how I see it.

00:33:19.760 | - I think the way that I,

00:33:22.060 | like if I think about the most painful losses of my life,

00:33:26.500 | the most devastating injuries of my life,

00:33:28.100 | I think about dying, drowning.

00:33:29.260 | I drowned in the bottom of doing hypoxic breath work

00:33:32.180 | in a pool.

00:33:33.020 | I was on the bottom of the pool four and a half minutes

00:33:34.900 | after that, it led to the arguably the best decision

00:33:38.940 | of my life to move into the jungle.

00:33:40.700 | I think about the losing the last round

00:33:43.640 | of the under 18 world chess championship on the first board.

00:33:46.640 | That's a very interesting story I could describe

00:33:50.980 | a little bit.

00:33:52.140 | Or I think about like my first national championship

00:33:54.820 | I lost when I was seven, eight, first board,

00:33:59.820 | last round, just unobstructed learning until then.

00:34:03.340 | And then I lost the last round for the title,

00:34:07.340 | fell into an opening trap.

00:34:08.900 | Like that's the loss that was the greatest thing

00:34:10.500 | that ever happened to me.

00:34:11.620 | - You were how old?

00:34:12.460 | - I think I'd just turned eight or I was late seven.

00:34:14.860 | And like that was, 'cause if I had won that game,

00:34:18.780 | I easily could have associated winning with just no pain,

00:34:22.940 | no heart, just cruising up until then.

00:34:25.300 | That was the moment that like I got my ass kicked.

00:34:27.860 | I had to go back, deal with these demons,

00:34:30.620 | come back, train for the next year,

00:34:31.980 | and then I won the next year.

00:34:32.900 | And then it was off to the races.

00:34:35.260 | My life might look very different if I'd won that game.

00:34:37.460 | And actually the kid who beat me in that game,

00:34:39.380 | David Arnett, became, two years later,

00:34:42.780 | we became best friends.

00:34:44.020 | For all of our childhood, we were on the same chess team

00:34:46.640 | and best friends.

00:34:47.480 | And I think he gave me the greatest gift

00:34:49.380 | of my competitive life by kicking my ass that game.

00:34:53.380 | The most devastating loss of my chess life was,

00:34:58.380 | so I was 17 years old.

00:35:00.740 | I was competing in the World Under 18 Chess Championship

00:35:04.260 | in Szeged, Hungary.

00:35:05.300 | Every, so every year there's an Under 12, 14, 16, 18, 21

00:35:10.940 | World Championship.

00:35:11.780 | And I was always representing the US

00:35:12.740 | in those tournaments around the world.

00:35:13.900 | And I traveled to India or Brazil or Hungary

00:35:19.040 | or Germany or somewhere and compete

00:35:20.420 | in the World Championship.

00:35:21.660 | And Under 18 Worlds, I played the tournament.

00:35:26.660 | I just was playing very inspired chess.

00:35:28.820 | I had just picked up On the Road three weeks before,

00:35:31.460 | Jack Kerouac.

00:35:32.300 | I had become, I was just on fire with Kerouac's vision.

00:35:35.740 | And I was just so like appreciating life

00:35:38.760 | with a freshness and intensity than I'd ever had,

00:35:41.140 | more than I'd ever had.

00:35:42.020 | I was like totally on fire.

00:35:43.940 | In chess, in life, in love, in everything.

00:35:47.100 | And I, I was paired against Peter Svidler,

00:35:52.100 | who was the Russian.

00:35:53.860 | We were on the first board last round.

00:35:55.700 | We were playing for the World Championship.

00:35:58.860 | Every country sends their national champion,

00:36:00.340 | so it's a long tournament to get there.

00:36:02.300 | Early in the game, I think it was move 12,

00:36:05.780 | he offered me a draw.

00:36:06.820 | So if I'd accepted the draw offer,

00:36:10.700 | it would have been the tie breaks.

00:36:11.860 | I didn't know exactly what was happening,

00:36:13.380 | but I thought that he was slightly favored in tie breaks.

00:36:15.660 | I wasn't sure, but basically the World Championship

00:36:17.940 | would be determined, or the gold medal would be determined

00:36:20.180 | by how our opponents in previous rounds

00:36:22.060 | did in the last round.

00:36:24.260 | But I hadn't calculated it out before,

00:36:26.340 | but I had a feeling it was like,

00:36:29.140 | maybe it was like 40-60 or 30-70 against me.

00:36:32.620 | But it was my style.

00:36:33.560 | I never accepted draw offers.

00:36:34.660 | That wasn't my style.

00:36:35.500 | I always wanted to fight.

00:36:36.620 | So I declined, pushed for a win.

00:36:39.220 | Now the beauty of his decision was also

00:36:41.260 | he offered me a draw in the critical position

00:36:43.280 | where I had to make a very specific decision,

00:36:45.580 | which is a trick that chess players play on one another,

00:36:47.480 | which is that like if you're,

00:36:49.340 | we should talk about tension at one point.

00:36:51.300 | It's a really beautiful theme to explore

00:36:53.100 | in different sports.

00:36:54.380 | So one thing that happens in chess games

00:36:55.960 | is that you have this building tension between minds,

00:36:59.140 | and often the tension on the chess board

00:37:00.860 | and the tension on the minds are mounting together.

00:37:04.320 | And the urge, the need to release psychological tension

00:37:07.520 | often leads to the decision to release chess tension

00:37:11.040 | in the chess pieces.

00:37:13.140 | And when you release chess tension,

00:37:15.100 | usually the person who releases the tension

00:37:17.700 | will be on the wrong side of tactics.

00:37:19.860 | So a lot of chess, a chess game

00:37:22.220 | is about putting mental pressure on the opponent

00:37:23.860 | to force them to break the tension on the chess board.

00:37:26.340 | So in that game, he offered me a draw.

00:37:27.700 | So you think about it, we're 17 years old.

00:37:29.940 | We're 10 days into a world championship battle.

00:37:33.560 | We, even no matter how much we love the battle,

00:37:36.420 | some piece of ourselves wants a way out.

00:37:38.500 | Like we want to release the tension, right?

00:37:40.380 | It's just elemental to who we are

00:37:41.900 | when we're living with that much pressure.

00:37:43.660 | So all I have to do then is like accept the draw,

00:37:45.700 | shake hands, and the tournament's over,

00:37:48.280 | and then it's out of our hands what happens.

00:37:50.420 | So in that moment,

00:37:51.260 | I have to also make a critical chess position.

00:37:52.980 | So the urge to release the tension

00:37:56.140 | is subtly entering into my chess decision.

00:37:59.340 | And in that move, I declined the draw,

00:38:01.760 | and I made a slightly overaggressive move,

00:38:03.980 | which turned, and he ended up playing a beautiful game,

00:38:09.840 | big attack, beating me.

00:38:11.860 | I lose the world championship,

00:38:13.700 | just this close to like your dream.

00:38:16.540 | You're shattered, right?

00:38:18.940 | I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe

00:38:23.180 | to meet my girlfriend at the time

00:38:24.800 | in a little town in Slovenia,

00:38:26.140 | and then we broke up and all that.

00:38:28.700 | Ended up meeting again in a street corner in Brazil,

00:38:30.340 | the world under 21 championship three weeks later.

00:38:32.820 | Lots of drama, you know, being a 17 year old kid.

00:38:36.300 | I didn't study that chess loss for two and a half months.

00:38:41.580 | It was so painful to me.

00:38:42.740 | I always studied games immediately afterwards.

00:38:45.340 | You might study a chess game

00:38:46.820 | for anywhere between three and 15 hours,

00:38:49.980 | studying one chess game.

00:38:51.220 | And that, say 10 hours,

00:38:53.220 | is focused on the two or three critical positions

00:38:55.420 | of the game.

00:38:56.500 | And this was before chess computers were rampant,

00:38:58.220 | and you had chess engines

00:38:59.060 | that could always just tell you the answer to the move.

00:39:02.140 | That's also something we should talk about later,

00:39:03.860 | how chess engines and AI chess engines

00:39:06.780 | change the nature of who chess players are

00:39:08.660 | because you can have the answer right away

00:39:10.120 | versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance

00:39:12.780 | for sometimes weeks or months at a time

00:39:14.820 | without knowing the answer.

00:39:16.060 | But we'll come back to that maybe.

00:39:18.440 | So I didn't study that loss for two and a half months

00:39:23.100 | 'cause it was so painful to me.

00:39:24.380 | Then I was, my family spent a lot of time at sea,

00:39:27.980 | which was an interesting part of my life and my chess life,

00:39:30.740 | living on a little boat, catching our own food,

00:39:32.640 | doing our own engine work.

00:39:33.940 | And I was at sea after competing

00:39:36.980 | in both of those world championships and some other things.

00:39:40.060 | And I sat down to study that game.

00:39:42.560 | And I spent a dozen plus hours

00:39:46.600 | studying that one critical position of the game.

00:39:49.560 | And then I realized what the,

00:39:51.580 | like the move I should have made

00:39:53.900 | was outside of my conceptual scheme

00:39:55.520 | in that critical position.

00:39:56.440 | I wasn't ready to make the move I had to make.

00:39:59.000 | And he was also, I think,

00:39:59.840 | a slightly stronger chess player than me.

00:40:01.440 | I was a great fighter.

00:40:02.480 | I loved the battle.

00:40:03.560 | But I think if objectively, he was a better,

00:40:05.600 | his name is Peter Svidler.

00:40:06.560 | He ended up becoming a world-class grandmaster

00:40:08.200 | and is just an incredible chess player today.

00:40:10.680 | At the time, he was just amazingly brilliant,

00:40:13.700 | beautiful, fluid mind.

00:40:16.040 | But I was confident going into the game.

00:40:18.040 | So I had to make this move

00:40:21.520 | that would essentially be,

00:40:24.340 | his attack was on the king's side,

00:40:26.440 | my expansion was on the queen's side.

00:40:28.040 | I had to remove my final defensive piece

00:40:30.240 | from in front of my king, away from my king's side,

00:40:32.880 | which is super counterintuitive

00:40:34.000 | 'cause you think you want it to defend your king.

00:40:36.140 | What I didn't realize is like

00:40:37.280 | harnessing the power of empty space against aggression.

00:40:40.080 | His attack needed my defense,

00:40:42.040 | like fire needs fuel to burn.

00:40:44.120 | Moving my last defensive piece,

00:40:45.560 | his attack couldn't break through.

00:40:47.520 | But that principle was something

00:40:48.520 | I didn't understand at all.

00:40:50.700 | And so it's not like I would have found that move,

00:40:54.160 | but it was a real pop in my mind, right?

00:40:59.240 | So then I was 17, 18 years old.

00:41:02.800 | And then a year later, I started studying Tai Chi.

00:41:05.560 | So I was studying Taoist meditation,

00:41:07.200 | Taoist philosophy, the Tao Te Ching,

00:41:09.360 | Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, the inner chapters.

00:41:11.520 | And then I get into Tai Chi.

00:41:15.560 | I started moving meditation,

00:41:16.560 | and I started in Tai Chi Chuan, push hands.

00:41:18.720 | Without making the connection,

00:41:21.760 | push hands is the martial art,

00:41:23.320 | which is like the essence of push hands

00:41:26.760 | is learning to utilize empty space against aggression.

00:41:29.380 | But I hadn't connected it to that moment.

00:41:31.160 | Then you fast forward to 2004 World Championship,

00:41:33.520 | which is what the art of learning ended with,

00:41:35.240 | the final chapter of that is the World Championship finals.

00:41:37.920 | I'm fighting this guy bigger than me,

00:41:39.480 | stronger than me, he's been training since childhood.

00:41:42.080 | Final fight in a big stadium,

00:41:44.880 | everyone wanting me to destroy it

00:41:46.080 | in the biggest fight of my life.

00:41:48.200 | And I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space,

00:41:52.680 | by letting him feel my weakness,

00:41:54.080 | by leaning on him, and then disappearing.

00:41:58.480 | So it's very interesting how there was no mental process,

00:42:01.640 | there's no conscious processing of that connection.

00:42:05.020 | But the biggest loss of my chess life,

00:42:07.760 | and then the principle,

00:42:08.620 | which I wasn't ready to understand yet,

00:42:10.620 | was how I won the World Championship in the martial arts

00:42:14.480 | so many years later.

00:42:15.760 | And it's a completely different discipline, right?

00:42:17.600 | So it's an example of like,

00:42:19.820 | and of course that principle is manifest

00:42:21.320 | in every part of my life today.

00:42:22.880 | But that's one of many stories in my life

00:42:24.860 | where like a loss spurs an insight

00:42:27.040 | which might consciously or often unconsciously

00:42:29.040 | lead to something incredible down the road.

00:42:32.020 | And I think that one of the biggest challenges

00:42:34.320 | that we have,

00:42:35.160 | but it's so interesting that the loss

00:42:36.320 | of a World Chess Championship final leads to the win,

00:42:40.320 | direct lesson leads to the win of a World Championship

00:42:42.560 | in the fighting realm.

00:42:44.140 | And how common that is.

00:42:47.920 | And one of the things that I think about,

00:42:49.980 | like when you sit down with great competitors,

00:42:52.760 | again and again, when you hear their inner journey,

00:42:56.840 | the most heartbreaking losses

00:43:00.080 | lead to the transformational change

00:43:01.680 | which leads to the biggest wins of their life.

00:43:04.060 | Whether it's in basketball,

00:43:07.580 | whether it's in fighting,

00:43:09.500 | whether it's in business, it's in finance,

00:43:11.460 | it's in writing.

00:43:14.560 | - Love. - In love.

00:43:15.880 | Oh my God, in love, yeah.

00:43:18.000 | - I mean, breakups are devastating.

00:43:19.400 | They're a death of sorts.

00:43:21.400 | - Yeah.

00:43:22.600 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:46:19.980 | I have a friend who's a trauma therapist, addiction expert,

00:46:24.820 | and occasionally you'll hear these tragedies of,

00:46:28.940 | typically it's young guys who the girlfriend

00:46:31.900 | breaks up with them and they commit suicide.

00:46:34.100 | And for years, he would work with families of these people,

00:46:38.260 | these young guys, and he finally connected the dots

00:46:42.740 | and he realized that in every case,

00:46:45.720 | it was as if there was no future whatsoever

00:46:48.220 | because it was their first relationship.

00:46:50.740 | And when you hear it, you just go,

00:46:52.340 | "Oh, it makes so much sense."

00:46:53.780 | But the 16-year-old and the 18-year-old brain,

00:46:56.460 | however old these kids were, it's devastating.

00:46:58.720 | I wanna make sure that I ask about devastation

00:47:03.500 | because you said that you were devastated.

00:47:06.360 | You experienced a tremendous amount of pain

00:47:08.740 | from these losses,

00:47:09.900 | in particular the one that you just described.

00:47:12.540 | If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you

00:47:14.540 | about what that was like.

00:47:17.480 | I don't wanna spin off into a discussion

00:47:19.040 | about the science of grief,

00:47:20.360 | but I did an episode about grief

00:47:22.520 | and it was really surprising to learn

00:47:24.440 | that most of what you hear about in pop culture,

00:47:26.260 | that there are these very specific stages of grief

00:47:29.920 | and you progress through them linearly.

00:47:31.600 | None of that is true.

00:47:32.720 | All of modern research says

00:47:34.000 | that it's not disbelief, anger, acceptance.

00:47:35.800 | It's like a hodgepodge of different emotions

00:47:37.760 | depending on time of day and middle of the night.

00:47:40.260 | But the core feature, and I find this so interesting,

00:47:42.480 | is that grief, whether or not it's what I would consider

00:47:45.920 | kind of trivial grief, like losing your favorite pen

00:47:48.640 | or a watch that you really love, okay,

00:47:50.440 | an object versus somebody extremely close to you,

00:47:52.720 | a parent, a loved one, a child, God forbid,

00:47:56.080 | that the brain systems that map memory onto action

00:48:01.080 | are disrupted in grief such that you wake up each day

00:48:06.000 | and you wanna go see the person or call them.

00:48:09.080 | And so what grief really represents

00:48:12.360 | is a remapping of your understanding

00:48:14.160 | about what you can do with your physical body

00:48:16.800 | to create action and interaction

00:48:18.920 | with this person that's now gone.

00:48:22.120 | And so the remapping is one of the nervous system

00:48:24.760 | having to do all this no-go.

00:48:26.160 | We talk in terms of inaction systems

00:48:27.920 | and the basal ganglia of the brain.

00:48:29.160 | You have go programs and no-go programs.

00:48:31.900 | There's some other stuff too, but it's mostly go or no-go.

00:48:35.200 | And basically grief is this taking of a,

00:48:37.860 | depending on how long and how deeply you knew the person,

00:48:41.080 | a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms

00:48:44.360 | that were all go.

00:48:46.240 | You could text them, you could call them,

00:48:47.680 | you could hug them, you could kiss them,

00:48:49.180 | you could listen to them, you could smell them.

00:48:51.800 | And now it's all no-go.

00:48:54.480 | And that we think is what we experience as grief.

00:48:58.680 | Now, in terms of losing a very important chess match,

00:49:02.900 | when you talk about being in pain and in grief,

00:49:07.160 | what was that like?

00:49:08.960 | Did that mean sleepless nights, disbelief?

00:49:11.200 | And at what point do you think you were able to say,

00:49:13.240 | okay, you know what?

00:49:14.080 | I'm gonna start thinking about this constructively.

00:49:15.720 | I'm gonna turn this into a go

00:49:17.480 | as opposed to just trying to get in your time machine

00:49:20.720 | and travel back in time, which of course is impossible.

00:49:23.160 | What was that early experience of devastation like

00:49:26.400 | and how did it transmute into growth?

00:49:29.420 | - Yeah.

00:49:30.320 | Well, even sitting with you now thinking about it,

00:49:32.880 | it seems ridiculous for a chess game to be,

00:49:37.000 | losing a chess game to be anywhere near

00:49:39.860 | like the absolute heartbreak of losing a loved one.

00:49:43.240 | And yet we can make things very large in our minds

00:49:47.280 | and in our beings, right?

00:49:48.900 | I think that human, I mean, one thing I think about

00:49:51.520 | is how hard we fight to maintain our conceptual schemes,

00:49:55.240 | our identities, even if they're torturing us.

00:49:57.960 | - And loss isn't relative.

00:49:59.840 | You know, I mean, the fact that we're sitting right now

00:50:02.000 | not far from, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of homes

00:50:07.000 | that have been wiped away, doesn't change other losses.

00:50:12.480 | Like we sometimes will say, well, at least we're, you know,

00:50:15.640 | I know I have a lot of friends that lost their homes.

00:50:17.520 | They'll say, well, at least we have our health.

00:50:18.720 | We have our things, you know, okay.

00:50:19.840 | And so we can do this, but it's not

00:50:24.840 | how the human emotion system responds reflexively

00:50:28.240 | to our own losses.

00:50:29.320 | So I don't think it's like dismissive

00:50:32.000 | or sociopathic to experience a big loss in one's life

00:50:37.000 | as a big loss, even if it's not the worst possible loss.

00:50:41.520 | It's just not how we're wired.

00:50:43.240 | - Right, and one of the things that I reflect on

00:50:46.080 | and that I've cultivated, it's very hard,

00:50:49.360 | but that I work to cultivate is when you're

00:50:51.240 | in those moments of rupture, to both be in the rupture

00:50:56.240 | and have the perspective that we will have later

00:50:59.120 | about the rupture, which is not to say

00:51:02.040 | not being in the rupture.

00:51:03.760 | One of the things I feel badly about in,

00:51:06.720 | like when I wrote "The Art of Learning,"

00:51:08.200 | I spoke a lot about process and outcome,

00:51:10.120 | and it had a big impact in the chess world.

00:51:11.800 | And then what happened is there were generations

00:51:14.400 | of parents who had young kid chess players

00:51:18.680 | who their kids would go to compete,

00:51:20.640 | and the parents would say, it doesn't matter

00:51:22.160 | if you win or lose, all that matters is the process.

00:51:24.880 | It doesn't matter if you win or lose.

00:51:25.800 | And the kids are like putting on their armor

00:51:28.000 | to go to battle, mental battle.

00:51:30.120 | And chess is fucking intense.

00:51:31.760 | Like when you're playing chess, you're putting your mind,

00:51:34.360 | your body, your psyche, everything on the line.

00:51:38.680 | And if you lose, you feel shattered.

00:51:40.760 | Like that's just how you feel.

00:51:42.560 | If you're not trying your hardest,

00:51:44.240 | then we shouldn't even be talking about you.

00:51:46.080 | So let's say you are trying your hardest.

00:51:48.600 | You're putting it all on the line.

00:51:50.280 | It's on the line, and you lose and you're shattered.

00:51:52.280 | Like every part of you, you feel destroyed.

00:51:57.640 | So the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle,

00:51:59.300 | and the parent tells them,

00:52:00.140 | it doesn't matter if I win or lose.

00:52:00.960 | It's deeply confusing.

00:52:01.800 | And the kids actually usually know

00:52:03.600 | that the parents are full of shit.

00:52:04.700 | The parents actually care so much,

00:52:06.600 | and they feel guilty about how much they care

00:52:08.400 | about their kid's result.

00:52:09.240 | They're telling their kid that to feel less guilty

00:52:11.040 | about the fact that they're putting their own egoic needs

00:52:13.120 | on their child.

00:52:13.960 | And it's all like, and the kids see it all.

00:52:16.360 | That's the hilarious thing.

00:52:17.240 | It's like an eight, 10, 11 year old.

00:52:18.800 | Like they see it all.

00:52:19.640 | They're like, mom, give me a break.

00:52:21.840 | And the parents are just stuck in their guilt and absurdity.

00:52:25.760 | Seen this so many times.

00:52:27.120 | So like the discussion of process and outcome

00:52:30.000 | is so subtle, right?

00:52:32.160 | Because yes, it's about the process.

00:52:33.560 | It's about the journey.

00:52:34.400 | It's about the long-term process.

00:52:36.640 | But if we don't care about the results,

00:52:38.440 | the process won't work.

00:52:40.320 | So we need to put ourselves on the line

00:52:42.440 | enough to be shattered,

00:52:43.920 | and the process is what really matters.

00:52:46.920 | But it's not that we can liberate ourselves

00:52:50.560 | from caring enough to be shattered,

00:52:52.640 | because then we're not engaged.

00:52:54.320 | And it is something about putting our egos on the line

00:52:57.200 | that is what leads to the growth surges

00:53:00.280 | that great competitors have,

00:53:01.880 | the ones who become virtuosos, right?

00:53:04.400 | And so then that stated,

00:53:06.280 | how can we experience the simultaneity of being shattered

00:53:10.120 | and having the perspective that this is probably

00:53:11.920 | the greatest thing that ever happened to me?

00:53:14.080 | - Well, you have to be in a mode of theory of mind

00:53:17.640 | with yourself about your future self somehow.

00:53:20.040 | And this is what I think losses are so beneficial for,

00:53:23.120 | is that if you've had a couple of breakups,

00:53:27.020 | you realize that you can fall in love again.

00:53:29.920 | If you've only had breakups,

00:53:32.160 | perhaps you think, well, it always leads to a breakup,

00:53:34.160 | but you know that the process of moving forward

00:53:36.680 | is the only way to test that hypothesis again.

00:53:39.360 | And so I think repeated failure is essential, right?

00:53:44.360 | Because with repeated failure means that

00:53:48.520 | there was also repeated fighting one ways back after failure.

00:53:53.520 | So, yeah, I think sometimes,

00:53:56.780 | not to take us into a different course of story,

00:53:58.720 | but just very briefly,

00:54:00.440 | the first manuscript I ever submitted in graduate school

00:54:03.220 | took forever to get published.

00:54:06.740 | And it went from the highest of journals

00:54:09.160 | down to a good journal, solid journal,

00:54:12.040 | but it took forever.

00:54:14.640 | And that was so beneficial.

00:54:16.400 | I was crushing at the time,

00:54:18.280 | but my reward circuitry is built up

00:54:21.560 | around very long latency between effort and final outcome.

00:54:26.560 | I'm just used to long waits

00:54:29.720 | between figuring out what's gonna happen.

00:54:32.240 | And actually one of the weirdest things about podcasting

00:54:35.140 | or social media is that I feel like

00:54:36.920 | you go to quote unquote to publication so fast.

00:54:39.920 | It's like, whoa, like things used to,

00:54:41.720 | projects used to take two years

00:54:43.800 | and then you get reviews and then this, you know.

00:54:46.060 | So I think your early devastating failure or failures,

00:54:51.060 | 'cause you had a few of them in there.

00:54:52.560 | - Oh, a lot more than a few.

00:54:54.160 | - Probably set you up

00:54:55.000 | for tremendous frustration tolerance.

00:54:57.280 | And this, not just hearing,

00:55:01.520 | I mean, the words this too shall pass, they're helpful,

00:55:06.080 | but that's really something

00:55:07.960 | that needs to be experienced in my view.

00:55:10.600 | - It's a very interesting thing

00:55:11.880 | when you're talking about competitors,

00:55:14.240 | what is the right balance between

00:55:16.160 | playing up and playing down, right?

00:55:18.760 | Like how much do you want to build the confidence

00:55:20.440 | of a young competitor or artist or person

00:55:22.840 | or any of us young, whatever age,

00:55:24.760 | when how much do you want to be stretched

00:55:26.440 | a little bit beyond your ability

00:55:28.200 | so that your weaknesses are exposed,

00:55:29.440 | you have to take them on and you have to grow.

00:55:30.680 | And getting that balance right is hugely important.

00:55:33.160 | And it's not simple.

00:55:34.920 | Like a lot of boxing training camps

00:55:36.520 | are based around the boxer's confidence being everything.

00:55:39.240 | And you want them to feel invincible going into the ring.

00:55:42.120 | Right, and then from another perspective,

00:55:44.320 | it's something very powerful

00:55:45.320 | about having a training camp that's so intense

00:55:48.160 | that all your weaknesses are exposed,

00:55:49.840 | you have to take them on.

00:55:50.680 | If you're not sparring against people

00:55:52.240 | who can expose your weaknesses,

00:55:53.320 | then you don't know what they are.

00:55:54.720 | You don't have the chance to grow, right?

00:55:57.200 | I mean, I live at this point

00:56:00.240 | with a trying to be at max stretch without snapping, right?

00:56:05.240 | Like, for example, if I look at my foiling,

00:56:09.640 | like if I'm not falling enough during a foil session,

00:56:12.360 | then I'm not pushing my turns hard enough.

00:56:14.460 | And if I'm, yeah, if you're just succeeding all the time,

00:56:21.120 | then you're not pushing yourself enough.

00:56:23.360 | - Do you believe in optimal levels of arousal

00:56:26.600 | for different aspects of practice or game?

00:56:29.520 | Autonomic arousal is something

00:56:31.760 | that I've worked on for many years.

00:56:33.440 | And one of the most impressive features,

00:56:36.320 | I think, of our brains as humans.

00:56:38.720 | First would be our ability to think into the past,

00:56:41.800 | present, or future, or combination of those two.

00:56:44.520 | If other animals do that, they don't do it nearly as well.

00:56:46.800 | And they certainly don't create technologies

00:56:49.480 | to bridge those different time scales.

00:56:51.680 | That's number one.

00:56:52.520 | But the other one is our visual

00:56:54.860 | and temporal aperture of focus.

00:56:58.880 | So when we are in a state of elevated arousal,

00:57:01.440 | our visual aperture shrinks,

00:57:03.120 | I'm sure you're familiar with this,

00:57:04.800 | and we slice time more finely.

00:57:07.560 | Much, you know, it's like a higher frame rate,

00:57:10.200 | which is why people who, for instance,

00:57:11.680 | see a devastating traumatic car crash

00:57:15.080 | report experiencing things in slow motion, right?

00:57:18.760 | 'Cause their frame rate is high, like a slow motion video.

00:57:21.600 | Whereas when we are relaxed,

00:57:25.360 | our frame rate is larger bins of time.

00:57:29.720 | And I feel like so much of the discussion

00:57:31.740 | around things like flow and optimal states for learning

00:57:36.560 | have to do with assuming

00:57:39.700 | that there's one optimal state of arousal.

00:57:42.800 | But I feel like in every endeavor I've ever been involved in

00:57:45.800 | it's about learning the transitions

00:57:48.960 | between the arousal states

00:57:51.040 | that allows us to pull back a little bit as things,

00:57:54.360 | as you said, like get tense, just relax just a little bit

00:57:57.340 | to be able to maybe see a different perspective

00:58:00.280 | or ratchet up our level of tension or AKA arousal

00:58:05.560 | in order to be able to find slice the, you know,

00:58:07.960 | the micro expressions of a competitor.

00:58:10.140 | I mean, these two cameras on the fronts of our skull

00:58:16.300 | and the rest of our brain are really devoted

00:58:18.920 | to this process of, you know,

00:58:20.840 | shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness.

00:58:24.120 | And it can be talked about in terms of space,

00:58:26.080 | just vision like tunnel vision versus panoramic vision.

00:58:29.920 | It can be talked about as space time, you know,

00:58:31.440 | tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader slice.

00:58:35.320 | But then when you start getting into like the,

00:58:38.360 | then you map that onto the past, present and future mapping.

00:58:41.520 | And that's where I feel like we're into the game

00:58:43.520 | of skill learning and chess and strategy.

00:58:48.520 | So forgive me for the kind of, you know,

00:58:50.280 | top contour neuroscience description,

00:58:52.320 | but that's how I see the human primate as so different

00:58:57.320 | than all the other creatures in the world.

00:59:00.720 | That's how we're different

00:59:02.180 | because we can learn chess or ballet, foil.

00:59:06.480 | You know, Gibbons are pretty amazing at what Gibbons do,

00:59:10.000 | but if they're trying to learn other stuff

00:59:12.360 | that they've been failing so far.

00:59:14.280 | I spent a lot of time playing with frame rates

00:59:18.140 | and I had this experience that I wrote about

00:59:20.640 | that slowing down time chapter of the art of learning

00:59:23.040 | where I, when I had these experiences

00:59:26.280 | both in chess and in fighting,

00:59:28.320 | it was one time I was fighting against a super heavyweight

00:59:32.200 | dude in a competition and my hand shattered.

00:59:34.600 | And like I broke my hand right here.

00:59:37.440 | And it was interesting 'cause the fight was very intense,

00:59:42.340 | reasonably hard and my hand broke

00:59:44.080 | and instantly time slowed down.

00:59:46.000 | And he was moving in slow motion

00:59:48.040 | and I was able to just so easily play with someone

00:59:50.640 | with like a broken hand

00:59:52.160 | compared to what had been a war before.

00:59:53.880 | - We know what that is.

00:59:54.920 | - Right, we do know that. - That's adrenaline.

00:59:56.440 | - Adrenaline. - Yeah.

00:59:57.760 | - Adrenaline and that tunnel vision

00:59:59.400 | and then the frames are fast.

01:00:01.000 | - Or so if I inject you with just a little bit

01:00:02.880 | of adrenaline, it stays in your periphery,

01:00:05.160 | but it activates systems in your brain

01:00:06.760 | in parallel to that.

01:00:08.160 | And you're gonna experience an immediate dilation

01:00:11.560 | of your pupils, you'll have more tunnel vision.

01:00:15.000 | I mean, every process is sped up

01:00:17.260 | in the direction of higher frame rate.

01:00:19.520 | - So then the question then became for me,

01:00:21.220 | and this would be fun to talk,

01:00:22.320 | I've never spoken to a scientist about this process.

01:00:24.440 | Like how do I learn to do that at will, right?

01:00:27.920 | And then how can I train,

01:00:29.120 | 'cause I can't just pump myself with adrenaline all the time

01:00:31.040 | although maybe I can learn to have

01:00:33.760 | that physiological response. - You can deploy it.

01:00:35.360 | - Right, so then how can I deploy it, right?

01:00:37.880 | What are triggers for having that chemical change?

01:00:40.120 | And then also how can I train

01:00:42.080 | so that I have the experience of more frames

01:00:46.400 | than my opponent?

01:00:47.720 | And so Marcelo Garcia, he's known as the king of the scramble

01:00:51.080 | he spends his whole time in transition.

01:00:53.520 | So if you're training jujitsu with most people,

01:00:55.400 | they're always finding a position and holding it.

01:00:57.600 | Marcelo, one of the unique things about his training life

01:01:00.320 | for most of his life was that he never held positions.

01:01:02.840 | He was always moving, he was always in the in between.

01:01:05.160 | And it's true in most arts is that people think

01:01:07.360 | that the art is the positions that they see,

01:01:09.840 | but the real high level art is the space

01:01:11.480 | in between the positions.

01:01:12.720 | So if we have this position leads to this position,

01:01:16.440 | that's gonna be like,

01:01:17.340 | there's gonna be no frames in between for most people.

01:01:19.360 | For some people that might be four frames.

01:01:21.280 | But if I have a hundred frames,

01:01:22.620 | then I can play in pockets that you don't see.

01:01:25.000 | And so if you're living your life in the training process

01:01:27.120 | in the in between, in the transition,

01:01:29.840 | if you're always, the way that manifests in actual,

01:01:32.720 | like for example, jujitsu training

01:01:34.320 | or submission grappling training is,

01:01:35.720 | if you're not holding positions, you're always moving

01:01:37.640 | and you're spending all of your time in the in between,

01:01:39.920 | while people who are holding position are always static.

01:01:42.880 | So if you go to a jujitsu school and you sit and watch,

01:01:44.680 | it's interesting to look for this one thing.

01:01:46.600 | Notice the amount of time static versus in motion.

01:01:50.800 | Marcelo was always in motion.

01:01:52.160 | There's a beautiful clip of him that you got,

01:01:54.560 | people can look up, it's an art de suave.

01:01:56.480 | It was an old documentary back in the day,

01:01:58.220 | like 25 years ago, I think it was.

01:02:00.600 | It's on YouTube.

01:02:01.440 | It's like an eight minute clip of him training

01:02:03.760 | as an, I think an 18 year old.

01:02:05.120 | And you watch him just like in the early days

01:02:07.360 | of him learning this transitional approach.

01:02:09.480 | And he's just never stopping.

01:02:11.160 | He's always allowing the person,

01:02:12.560 | but you have to get past the egoic dynamics.

01:02:14.640 | 'Cause you can't, you're giving up

01:02:16.480 | on dominating people all the time.

01:02:18.440 | 'Cause when you're in a dominant position in jujitsu,

01:02:19.880 | you wanna hold it 'cause you've won.

01:02:21.360 | And there's all this bullshit passing between men

01:02:24.200 | who are fighting or women who are fighting each other.

01:02:25.840 | We wanna dominate.

01:02:27.280 | But if you release that,

01:02:29.200 | and you're thinking about the learning process,

01:02:30.840 | then you stop holding, then you're moving,

01:02:33.040 | and then you're getting nonstop exposure to the in between.

01:02:36.720 | So if you spend your life training in the in between,

01:02:38.480 | then you have more frames than other people do.

01:02:40.160 | That's what a lot of what illusionists are doing, right?

01:02:42.680 | They spend all of their time training

01:02:44.880 | in the spaces that other people don't look at.

01:02:47.480 | And so it's not magic, it's brilliant training.

01:02:49.880 | It's the art of illusion at the in between, right?

01:02:53.360 | And a lot of the things that you can do,

01:02:55.160 | a high level martial artist can do

01:02:56.520 | to a lower level martial artist

01:02:57.960 | or someone who doesn't train that feels mystical.

01:03:00.240 | It's all about that principle manifest in interesting ways.

01:03:04.760 | But, and in general, like for me,

01:03:06.760 | and this goes back to the question you asked

01:03:08.320 | two or three brilliant, expansive questions ago

01:03:12.440 | around intense moments.

01:03:17.160 | A lot of what my training has been

01:03:19.240 | is having some serendipitous intense moment

01:03:23.040 | and then learning, and then it becomes a beacon.

01:03:25.780 | So for example, there was a moment I was playing

01:03:28.440 | in a world chess championship in Calicut, India,

01:03:32.800 | and I was deep into a calculation,

01:03:35.820 | couldn't find the solution, and there was an earthquake.

01:03:39.120 | And everything started like in the actual world,

01:03:42.200 | everything started shaking, right?

01:03:43.560 | But I experienced the earthquake

01:03:45.060 | from the inside of the chess position.

01:03:47.480 | And I knew there was an earthquake,

01:03:48.760 | but I also was lost, my brain was lost in the labyrinth.

01:03:51.760 | And I found the solution.

01:03:55.380 | And then I got up and left, vacated,

01:03:58.600 | 'cause we had to leave the playing hall,

01:03:59.480 | then we came back and I made my move and went on to win.

01:04:02.140 | And it was so interesting 'cause it was like,

01:04:03.680 | and then the earthquake, like my,

01:04:06.200 | and a lot of what happens in chess

01:04:07.620 | is that you're reaching so deep into the complexity,

01:04:09.860 | like into the cupboard,

01:04:10.960 | but the solution is right here at the front.

01:04:13.120 | And all you have to do is come back out on the surface.

01:04:14.560 | One of the best ways, by the way,

01:04:15.920 | to prevent, to minimize chess blunders

01:04:19.760 | with like talented young players

01:04:21.160 | or players of any level, any age,

01:04:23.720 | is to shift the order of decide,

01:04:26.920 | make the move, and then write it down,

01:04:28.560 | 'cause you notate your chess games,

01:04:30.320 | to decide, write it down, and then make the move.

01:04:34.540 | The write it down is a resurfacing,

01:04:37.320 | and you have common sense, look at the position.

01:04:39.300 | Almost all chess blunders,

01:04:40.420 | you realize you've blundered instantly.

01:04:41.760 | You can think for 20 minutes, make your move,

01:04:43.420 | and you know instantly you blundered,

01:04:45.480 | 'cause there's not that surfacing, right?

01:04:47.560 | But then you can learn to just do the surfacing

01:04:50.200 | before making the actual move.

01:04:51.880 | It's true with human decision-making in general.

01:04:54.240 | - Right, we realize that the screw up

01:04:56.480 | right as we complete it.

01:04:58.560 | - Yeah, because like we're caught up in all of our bullshit.

01:05:00.740 | We make the move, and then we've left our thought process

01:05:02.680 | and like, oh, that was just absurd, right?

01:05:05.080 | And we see it.

01:05:05.960 | I mean, you think about,

01:05:07.760 | I mean, you think about the heartbreaking literature,

01:05:10.720 | you know, studies in how people

01:05:12.420 | who've jumped off a bridge relate to at the moment

01:05:14.540 | after they've jumped off the bridge,

01:05:15.860 | those who have survived, right?

01:05:17.140 | The interviews afterwards.

01:05:17.980 | - Yeah, they report wishing they hadn't jumped.

01:05:19.900 | - Right.

01:05:20.820 | - Immediately, like they jump,

01:05:22.820 | and then they wish they hadn't jumped.

01:05:24.040 | - Such an important message.

01:05:25.660 | You know, we hear all this stuff about suicide prevention,

01:05:27.700 | and you know, but just that knowledge.

01:05:29.020 | I mean, I don't know how conscious of that sort of thing

01:05:32.220 | people are as they're headed down the trench.

01:05:34.820 | I mean, what, of suicidal depression,

01:05:37.700 | but these apertures that we're talking about,

01:05:40.960 | these time-space apertures where frame rate is set

01:05:43.800 | and visual aperture is set,

01:05:45.600 | I think for most people,

01:05:47.080 | we experience them as sort of notches.

01:05:51.240 | So it's like, you know, you're in a high state of arousal

01:05:53.400 | and you have high frame rate, you know?

01:05:54.680 | And then, and just like being like a ball bearing

01:05:57.520 | down in a trench,

01:05:58.760 | you can't really see out the other side.

01:06:00.120 | You're literally in there at a certain frame rate

01:06:02.040 | of let's say an argument,

01:06:03.320 | an intense argument with somebody where you want to win

01:06:05.600 | and you're frustrated with them,

01:06:06.960 | and the whole situation and you're in the trench.

01:06:09.420 | The, whereas when you're relaxed,

01:06:11.060 | it's more, you know, a broad concave or a flat table

01:06:14.020 | where the ball bearing can move around at will.

01:06:17.300 | It sounds like Marcello and people that train

01:06:20.180 | these different transition states

01:06:21.720 | is you're really learning to access

01:06:24.940 | the different frame rates,

01:06:27.460 | but from a place of like,

01:06:28.780 | kind of like a little dimple, you know, in a table,

01:06:32.780 | and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple

01:06:34.820 | and kind of moving from dimple to dimple

01:06:37.280 | as opposed to like these trenches of brain states.

01:06:40.440 | And I think that, you know, I think about this a lot, a lot,

01:06:44.160 | because I feel like most bad decisions are made

01:06:47.000 | from a high frame rate, high arousal state.

01:06:49.980 | Most of the terrible things

01:06:50.880 | that humans have done to one another, you know,

01:06:54.280 | I suppose there's sociopathy and like, you know,

01:06:57.000 | pre-planned things, but it tends to,

01:06:58.360 | they tend to be associated with high arousal states

01:07:00.560 | where people regret what they did.

01:07:02.280 | All second degree murder, for instance.

01:07:04.500 | In any event, I think the ability to move

01:07:09.740 | through these different arousal states at will is possible.

01:07:14.300 | You asked earlier, like, how would one do that?

01:07:16.700 | Well, the beautiful thing about the visual system

01:07:18.440 | in these different frame rates and states of arousal

01:07:20.700 | is that it works in both directions.

01:07:22.660 | So when you're in a higher state of arousal,

01:07:24.180 | your visual aperture shrinks, you go to a higher frame rate,

01:07:27.240 | but it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture,

01:07:29.740 | you go to a higher frame rate.

01:07:31.340 | The converse is also true.

01:07:32.480 | If you deliberately, for instance,

01:07:34.600 | as we're looking across one another right now,

01:07:36.680 | if I start to take in the fullness of the picture here,

01:07:39.080 | the walls, et cetera,

01:07:41.160 | there's a natural relaxation

01:07:42.480 | of the autonomic arousal systems,

01:07:43.960 | or parasympathetic activity goes up.

01:07:46.880 | And what's incredible is that anytime we view a horizon,

01:07:51.880 | that naturally happens,

01:07:54.260 | because you're not setting to a single fixation point.

01:07:56.920 | So anytime you see a horizon, you relax,

01:07:59.120 | and it's not a coincidence.

01:08:00.560 | So the visual system can drive it inward,

01:08:03.560 | and your autonomic arousal can drive it

01:08:05.640 | toward your visual system.

01:08:07.880 | The other thing is there's a really beautiful paper

01:08:10.000 | that came out about two years ago,

01:08:11.920 | which showed that people who do a biofeedback game,

01:08:14.760 | where they're watching a little,

01:08:16.200 | you know, it's like a more kind of like a sine wave,

01:08:19.560 | and they're deliberately trying to increase

01:08:21.600 | their level of arousal as the curve goes up,

01:08:24.880 | for those that are just listening.

01:08:27.220 | Within a few days, they can learn to control

01:08:30.380 | their pupil size, which sets their arousal

01:08:34.480 | and their aperture for a segmenting time.

01:08:38.660 | So you can learn this through biofeedback,

01:08:40.540 | and I think that the script for that is available online.

01:08:42.860 | I haven't tried it yet,

01:08:43.700 | but if you ever heard of these yogis

01:08:44.940 | that could control their pupil sizes,

01:08:46.380 | even independently of one another, that's amazing,

01:08:48.580 | because it's not supposed to be able to occur,

01:08:51.960 | but you can.

01:08:53.060 | So you can learn to, you know,

01:08:55.300 | I guess the poor man's version of this

01:08:56.740 | would be look in the mirror, stare at yourself,

01:08:58.660 | and try and ramp up your level of autonomic arousal,

01:09:00.860 | watch your pupils get bigger,

01:09:01.940 | and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller.

01:09:04.700 | That practice, it seems, in biofeedback,

01:09:07.260 | allows people to do it without staring into the mirror,

01:09:09.540 | so to speak.

01:09:10.640 | So it can be done.

01:09:12.340 | It's just that it hasn't been parsed by science

01:09:14.580 | that finely until recently.

01:09:16.300 | - It's interesting.

01:09:17.140 | So I have this term I use called firewalking,

01:09:21.300 | which for me, what it means is cultivating the ability

01:09:26.140 | to learn from experiences one doesn't have

01:09:29.580 | with the same somatic intensity

01:09:31.740 | that one learns from really intense experiences

01:09:35.140 | that we have.

01:09:35.980 | So for example, let's just say you're a jiu-jitsu fighter

01:09:37.300 | and you overextend your arm

01:09:38.840 | and you're in a world championship

01:09:40.420 | and you get your arm broken,

01:09:41.820 | or your shoulder ripped off or something.

01:09:43.020 | So you've lost the world championship

01:09:44.180 | and you got a shattered arm.

01:09:45.580 | You're not gonna overextend your arm that way again.

01:09:47.740 | You've learned that that lesson is burned in.

01:09:50.420 | But like if you're watching a jiu-jitsu fight

01:09:53.400 | and someone overextends their arm

01:09:54.240 | and gets an arm barred and then taps out,

01:09:55.660 | it's a very, very different experience.

01:09:59.500 | How can we cultivate the ability

01:10:00.740 | to study other people's worst, most heartbreaking blunders,

01:10:05.380 | worst moments, et cetera,

01:10:06.520 | and learn from that with the same somatic intensity

01:10:08.820 | that they learned from it, right?

01:10:10.760 | So much of that is physiological.

01:10:12.180 | So I spent a lot of time doing biofeedback

01:10:14.220 | and a lot of time doing visualization practices

01:10:16.580 | and doing very intense visualization practices

01:10:18.220 | and many, many years working with triggers

01:10:20.140 | for my own psychology and physiology

01:10:24.220 | so that I can get my physiology primed

01:10:27.260 | to have an intense learning experience

01:10:30.140 | while studying something

01:10:31.320 | that might otherwise just feel intellectual.

01:10:34.300 | And then combining that with my own experience of things.

01:10:36.820 | And it's such a, I mean, if we can 100X or 1,000X

01:10:39.960 | or 10,000X our learning curve

01:10:41.860 | by being able to learn from other things

01:10:44.220 | with the same intensity that we've learned

01:10:45.500 | from our own things, but people don't harness that.

01:10:48.100 | - Why do you think they don't?

01:10:49.580 | Is it, it takes time and it doesn't seem as intuitive

01:10:53.780 | as going out and shooting free throws or something like that?

01:10:57.120 | - I think people are really amazingly unreflective

01:11:00.220 | about the training process.

01:11:01.940 | But I told you, like, I'm working,

01:11:04.340 | I haven't written a book since "The Art of Learning"

01:11:06.100 | and I'm a couple years into this beautiful process

01:11:09.940 | of writing my next book, which is gonna be called,

01:11:13.480 | I think, "The Art of Training,"

01:11:14.500 | which is really what I've been cultivating

01:11:15.860 | for the last decades.

01:11:18.020 | And I'm deconstructing my approach to training

01:11:22.060 | in mental and physical disciplines.

01:11:24.060 | And it's really interesting to go through that process

01:11:27.300 | myself, like, what have I, what do I do?

01:11:29.700 | What have I done?

01:11:30.620 | And what have I helped others do?

01:11:32.260 | And it's interesting, like, "The Art of Learning"

01:11:35.940 | kind of was a birthing process.

01:11:37.900 | That's what it felt like to me.

01:11:38.740 | I took notes to it for five years

01:11:41.240 | and then after "2004 Worlds," I wrote it in nine months.

01:11:43.900 | It just kind of came out of me.

01:11:45.380 | And I'm kind of in that process now with this,

01:11:47.380 | so it feels really organic and intrinsic,

01:11:49.540 | the creative process.

01:11:50.860 | And I don't know, it's very interesting

01:11:53.500 | when you talk to people who are really playing

01:11:55.260 | at elite levels of different fields

01:11:57.420 | or who are just below full self-expression

01:12:00.020 | or they're just on the edge of virtuosity

01:12:01.780 | but not quite there, and you start to deconstruct

01:12:04.140 | what they do, there's so much low-hanging fruit

01:12:06.020 | that they can do.

01:12:07.500 | Why, I don't know.

01:12:08.980 | I think in many ways people, I mean,

01:12:10.940 | there's lots of reasons.

01:12:11.780 | I think, for one thing, people who are very talented

01:12:16.380 | in arts don't have to be so deliberate

01:12:17.720 | about their training often to reach a certain level.

01:12:20.180 | Often people have other people building

01:12:21.580 | their training process and they're not reflective

01:12:23.260 | about their own training process

01:12:24.680 | because they have big teams of coaches

01:12:26.900 | who are creating it for them.

01:12:28.340 | People haven't cultivated the art of deconstruction,

01:12:32.900 | which is an art that's very important.

01:12:35.340 | People haven't cultivated the art of loving training,

01:12:38.180 | which is a hugely important meta-skill to learn.

01:12:41.400 | People haven't taken on all of the skills

01:12:46.600 | around physiological triggers,

01:12:49.080 | around changing one's physiological state at will.

01:12:52.360 | People haven't practiced visualization very intensely.

01:12:54.620 | There are all of these skills that we can put together

01:12:59.000 | in order to train at a world-class level.

01:13:02.080 | But it takes patience and creativity

01:13:05.080 | and not just being subject to whatever else does

01:13:09.040 | but being able to look expansively at everything.

01:13:11.540 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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01:15:00.220 | We had a guest on this podcast,

01:15:04.480 | Jim Hollis, he's an 84-year-old,

01:15:06.840 | probably 85-year-old Jungian analyst on,

01:15:09.840 | and he, just brilliant guy,

01:15:12.080 | he's written some really important books

01:15:14.120 | under Saturn's shadow and et cetera,

01:15:17.800 | and he said, you know,

01:15:19.360 | so he has a real kind of like suit up, show up,

01:15:22.080 | you know, get to work kind of mentality,

01:15:24.440 | but he also is a very reflective person,

01:15:27.280 | and he said, you know, if there's one simple key to life,

01:15:30.480 | it's that one understand that most of our daily lives,

01:15:34.660 | our waking lives are in stimulus response,

01:15:36.600 | but that it's so critical

01:15:37.920 | to take 10 to 15 minutes each day

01:15:40.700 | to just get out of stimulus and response,

01:15:43.520 | and either to just let stuff geyser up

01:15:45.600 | out of our unconscious, subconscious mind,

01:15:49.360 | or to just put some real thought to something

01:15:53.120 | that, you know, most everybody is in stimulus response.

01:15:56.060 | I wonder these days with social media

01:15:58.320 | and so many things filling the space

01:16:00.720 | between walking to the car

01:16:02.040 | or with the, you know, pro players that you work with,

01:16:04.520 | you know, I'm guessing the moment they're on the plane,

01:16:06.840 | they're on their phones and texting,

01:16:08.420 | and all these things are wonderful technologies,

01:16:10.580 | but they fill all the space with stimulus response.

01:16:14.120 | - Yeah.

01:16:15.040 | - They fill all the space with stimulus response,

01:16:17.560 | and, you know, it's not unless you go to a place

01:16:21.060 | with no Wi-Fi accessibility

01:16:23.740 | that you suddenly realize like, wow,

01:16:25.160 | like in most of modern life,

01:16:27.640 | we're just constantly in this tennis or ping pong match

01:16:32.640 | with this trivial thing and that trivial thing,

01:16:35.080 | and some of it's essential,

01:16:36.600 | but that there's no quote unquote space anymore.

01:16:40.200 | - Many ways my life is built around creating that space.

01:16:43.560 | And it's interesting, when I was playing chess,

01:16:45.320 | I experimented with studying chess

01:16:47.400 | from everywhere between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day

01:16:50.080 | to see where the sweet spot was.

01:16:51.600 | And what I came to is about four and a half hours a day,

01:16:55.680 | but that four and a half hours a day was like a 10 out of 10,

01:16:58.360 | like fucking just on fire.

01:17:00.180 | And then the rest of the day became about cultivating

01:17:03.920 | those four and a half hours.

01:17:05.760 | And my life today has that kind of rhythm as well.

01:17:08.920 | And, you know, training,

01:17:10.960 | like I've spent many years working with people

01:17:12.640 | who are just brilliant in,

01:17:14.520 | the investment space has been a really interesting wave

01:17:16.600 | 'cause it's a great laboratory,

01:17:17.560 | 'cause people are very driven.

01:17:19.040 | They wanna, they're all in, they're motivated.

01:17:21.960 | They'll take themselves on.

01:17:23.000 | And it's a great place for me to,

01:17:24.280 | over the last couple of decades,

01:17:26.160 | to like refine the art of training

01:17:28.640 | because I don't like solving for motivation.

01:17:32.200 | That's one thing.

01:17:33.040 | And I think part of that relates to that quirky dynamic

01:17:35.520 | from when I was seven that I described

01:17:37.080 | of always being the target.

01:17:38.200 | And so never having, like not taking on my weaknesses

01:17:40.920 | that was outside of my conceptual scheme.

01:17:43.320 | And so in many ways, I don't,

01:17:46.280 | I haven't really had to struggle with motivation myself

01:17:49.240 | for better or worse.

01:17:52.280 | And I love working with people,

01:17:54.200 | partnering with people who are all in,

01:17:56.040 | who want to take themselves on.

01:17:57.320 | I don't love having to motivate people.

01:17:59.360 | And so a great laboratory for me

01:18:00.840 | is with people who have all sorts of problems,

01:18:03.960 | who might be obstructed, but who are all in.

01:18:07.000 | And like you're working with world-class investors

01:18:11.120 | and what, you know, they're grinding themselves out

01:18:13.400 | 14, 15, 16 hours a day.

01:18:15.480 | Doing less is a huge part of doing much more.

01:18:19.240 | And then you start to see, like,

01:18:21.720 | they might be at, like, if you think about a 10 out of 10

01:18:23.560 | as being like, in terms of like,

01:18:25.880 | when they're at their very best creatively,

01:18:27.520 | they could slip from like a 10 to a two and not even notice.

01:18:30.440 | And then you begin to cultivate an awareness

01:18:34.400 | of where one is in one's creative spectrum, right?

01:18:37.760 | And then you start to cultivate the art

01:18:39.000 | of stress and recovery and like amping oneself up

01:18:41.960 | and then releasing.

01:18:42.800 | And you see that the ability to turn it on

01:18:45.120 | is directly connected to the ability to turn it off,

01:18:47.500 | as you know.

01:18:48.500 | If you walk into a fight gym

01:18:49.760 | and you study a bunch of fighters in the mats,

01:18:52.160 | one great read you can make is looking at the depth

01:18:55.960 | of physiological relaxation when the guys aren't fighting.

01:18:59.200 | And you'll see who the highest level fighters are.

01:19:01.200 | The best guys, man, they can turn it on with wild intensity,

01:19:03.620 | but their bodies are so mellow when they're not going.

01:19:06.760 | And then, man, like- - They're so efficient.

01:19:08.640 | - It's so, that oscillation, that range is so huge, right?

01:19:12.080 | But people don't cultivate the art of turning it off

01:19:13.920 | in order to learn how to turn it on.

01:19:16.280 | You know, for many, many years, decades,

01:19:19.180 | I've been practicing what I call now the MIQ process,

01:19:21.540 | most important question process.

01:19:23.020 | And the essence of it is,

01:19:24.540 | it's what I came to as the most potent way so far

01:19:29.020 | that I've found to train analysts or thinkers

01:19:33.180 | in mental arenas.

01:19:36.420 | You're training people in the art

01:19:38.260 | of discovering what matters most.

01:19:41.920 | If you look at, if you talk to like a great chess player

01:19:44.540 | actually looks at less than a lower level chess player,

01:19:48.040 | but they look at the right direction.

01:19:49.920 | So you might think a great chess player,

01:19:51.280 | people often think like,

01:19:52.120 | "Oh yeah, I can calculate 50 moves deep, 100 moves deep."

01:19:54.320 | It's all irrelevant, move two was inaccurate.

01:19:56.640 | So it was just all an illusion.

01:19:58.160 | The great chess players might look at much less,

01:19:59.820 | but they're looking in the most potent directions.

01:20:01.600 | The lower level chess players

01:20:02.600 | are lost in a sea of complexity, right?

01:20:05.060 | So if you're working with like, let's say a scientist

01:20:08.300 | or an investor or whatever,

01:20:11.200 | them straining their mind

01:20:13.500 | for what is the most important question,

01:20:16.320 | ideally to begin the practice

01:20:18.380 | toward the end of their work day

01:20:19.500 | with like release, recovery period with full intensity

01:20:23.140 | in a peak performance state,

01:20:24.540 | stretch one's mind for what matters most

01:20:26.860 | and then release it.

01:20:27.860 | Release the work day completely.

01:20:30.140 | Don't work all night grinding yourself out at a low level.

01:20:32.660 | Release and then first thing in the morning,

01:20:34.020 | waking up pre-input,

01:20:35.340 | return one's mind to the critical question

01:20:37.220 | and brainstorm on it.

01:20:38.580 | It's very powerful 'cause you're opening up the,

01:20:41.680 | you're systematically opening the channel

01:20:43.080 | between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

01:20:44.880 | You're feeding critical questions to the unconscious,

01:20:46.840 | which is processing overnight.

01:20:48.320 | And like, I know you know all this,

01:20:49.840 | like the consistency with which you come up

01:20:51.720 | with an insight in the morning is incredible.

01:20:53.680 | Interestingly, and you'll probably know why

01:20:55.360 | much more than me,

01:20:57.160 | improved dreamer call often happens simultaneously

01:21:02.160 | when one starts to have more and more insights

01:21:04.360 | about the MIQ in the morning, which is fascinating.

01:21:06.520 | Then over time, you can have micro-manifestation

01:21:08.380 | of this throughout the day before going for a workout,

01:21:10.140 | before taking a walk, before taking a break,

01:21:11.940 | before taking a piss.

01:21:13.260 | Instead of going, when you're gonna go to the bathroom

01:21:14.900 | in the day, instead of like checking your phone

01:21:17.340 | while taking a piss, you pose yourself in MIQ,

01:21:20.340 | you release it, you do not do anything but piss

01:21:23.340 | in the bathroom and breathe and then return

01:21:25.900 | to the question and you'll have an insight.

01:21:27.580 | Right, so you're learning to just oscillate

01:21:29.100 | between the conscious and unconscious states

01:21:31.140 | and you're opening up that channel

01:21:33.740 | and you're practicing stress and recovery.

01:21:35.420 | Then your physiological workouts are also stress

01:21:37.320 | and recovery all the time.

01:21:38.640 | So you're building that theme in everything that you do.

01:21:41.280 | And you realize that when you're at your very best

01:21:43.840 | for four or five hours a day,

01:21:45.600 | you're doing multiples of the work that you're doing

01:21:48.840 | if you're just grinding yourself at what I've called

01:21:51.160 | in the past a simmering six or whatever

01:21:53.400 | at for 15 or 16 hours a day.

01:21:56.360 | And so people can do so much more in less time.

01:21:58.760 | And my lifestyle is based on that.

01:22:02.200 | I'm training very intensely physically

01:22:03.640 | and I'm doing really intense mental work

01:22:05.120 | and I oscillate between them in beautiful ways.

01:22:07.840 | And I have a lot of empty space for reflection,

01:22:10.080 | for meditation, for zoning my mind on what matters most.

01:22:14.920 | It's about quality, not quantity.

01:22:16.960 | But it's so interesting how we live in this culture

01:22:19.440 | where just quantity is just consuming everyone.

01:22:24.440 | - Yeah, well, it's as Hollis said,

01:22:27.680 | the stimulus response thing dominates.

01:22:31.100 | And it dominates, I think, because,

01:22:33.560 | well, I have several reflections.

01:22:34.860 | First of all, I just have to say,

01:22:36.720 | you're absolutely a scientist.

01:22:40.040 | You just proved it to us

01:22:42.000 | through a description of this process,

01:22:43.360 | which I might ask you to describe once again,

01:22:46.520 | because I think there's so much value

01:22:48.200 | in each of the pieces and how it's put together.

01:22:50.960 | Three things come to mind.

01:22:53.080 | First of all, yes, indeed, as you know,

01:22:54.760 | and listeners of this podcast will know that

01:22:57.640 | yet it is during sleep that we reorganize

01:23:00.360 | our neural connections and actual neuroplasticity occurs.

01:23:03.920 | The stimulus is provided in wakefulness

01:23:05.980 | and focus and attention.

01:23:07.580 | But the actual rewiring occurs during sleep,

01:23:10.420 | deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep.

01:23:12.620 | One little fun, I think,

01:23:15.700 | but also powerful tool that I learned from,

01:23:19.860 | maybe you know him as well.

01:23:21.180 | I'm blessed to have Rick Rubin as a very good friend.

01:23:23.540 | - Oh yeah, Rick and I have had beautiful jams.

01:23:25.220 | - Yeah, wonderful. - He's amazing.

01:23:26.180 | Such a wise soul.

01:23:27.020 | - I've been spending more and more time with Rick,

01:23:29.740 | but he taught me something extremely valuable,

01:23:32.540 | which was the process of taking some time

01:23:34.420 | to just lie completely still

01:23:37.080 | and let your mind go as wild as it needs to

01:23:39.740 | or as calm as it needs to

01:23:40.920 | while keeping the body completely still.

01:23:43.060 | This mimics rapid eye movement sleep

01:23:47.320 | when we're paralyzed and the mind is very, very active.

01:23:49.840 | And I actually think that practices such as yoga nidra,

01:23:53.360 | non-sleep deep rest are also mimics

01:23:55.220 | of rapid eye movement sleep.

01:23:56.600 | And there are data starting to emerge now

01:23:58.560 | that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep,

01:24:00.480 | but in wakefulness.

01:24:01.300 | So put simply lying still,

01:24:03.160 | relaxing the body as much as possible

01:24:04.780 | and letting the mind be extremely active.

01:24:06.840 | Rick also taught me a little trick

01:24:09.320 | for which I don't know any science,

01:24:10.680 | but it certainly seems to work for me,

01:24:11.900 | which is that if you wake up from a dream

01:24:14.680 | and you want to continue having that dream,

01:24:17.020 | keep your body completely still.

01:24:19.240 | Whereas if you wake up from a dream

01:24:20.600 | and it was a troubling or anxiety provoking dream,

01:24:23.240 | move your body.

01:24:24.240 | And it seems to work extremely well.

01:24:25.680 | And I have my theories about why this works.

01:24:29.800 | I have to ask about this process

01:24:32.980 | of reflecting on one's own mistakes deliberately,

01:24:36.740 | kind of addressing one's own pain points or shame points

01:24:39.960 | as such a key feature of your upbringing

01:24:43.420 | and your practice around learning.

01:24:46.180 | Forgive me for going a little bit longer here,

01:24:48.540 | but recently somebody taught me something extremely useful.

01:24:53.140 | She said, our consciousness is sort of like a lighthouse

01:24:58.460 | and we have this beam of light sweeping around 360 degrees,

01:25:02.840 | but where we have places of shame about whatever,

01:25:06.800 | things that were done to us,

01:25:07.800 | things that we've done, whatever, just points of shame,

01:25:10.160 | things that we don't want people to know about us

01:25:12.920 | that we don't even like to think about.

01:25:14.980 | It's like a stain on that lighthouse.

01:25:18.120 | And when that light passes through that stain,

01:25:20.100 | it casts a wedge, a shadow in the shape of a wedge.

01:25:24.920 | And she described it in somewhat mystical terms.

01:25:28.040 | She said, it's through that shadow

01:25:30.120 | that evil things enter us and that the world can hurt us.

01:25:33.880 | And that the process of getting over our shame,

01:25:36.240 | but also experiencing life in much more fullness

01:25:39.460 | and being able to cultivate our craft

01:25:41.920 | and be more present for ourselves and for others

01:25:44.080 | is a process of going right up to that lighthouse window

01:25:46.800 | and looking at the stain and going, that's what it is.

01:25:49.760 | And that's the process of wiping it off.

01:25:52.600 | Now that's all, that's just an illustration

01:25:56.660 | for us to understand what I think

01:25:59.460 | is the process you're describing,

01:26:00.920 | which is that you get right up

01:26:02.600 | next to your worst nightmares, your worst mistakes,

01:26:07.600 | the things you don't want to think about.

01:26:10.280 | And in doing so, you learn to relax in their presence

01:26:15.160 | and they sort of disappear as points of shame.

01:26:18.020 | - Yeah, it's interesting.

01:26:20.520 | When I wrote "The Art of Learning,"

01:26:23.200 | it was in many ways cathartic for me

01:26:26.160 | because there were parts of my life

01:26:28.280 | that I had felt like I had let myself down.

01:26:33.060 | Like there were parts, like my chess life I moved away from

01:26:38.960 | and like there were certain moments of it

01:26:42.280 | where I felt like I hadn't fully expressed my potential.

01:26:45.640 | And I just wrote them all.

01:26:47.380 | I just shared it all.

01:26:49.040 | And it was so beautiful.

01:26:50.960 | It was so cathartic.

01:26:52.600 | When I think about leadership,

01:26:54.200 | I think that it's so important.

01:26:56.160 | Like leading with vulnerability is such an exquisite.

01:26:59.400 | I spent, Joe Mazzullo and I spent today,

01:27:01.840 | a couple days ago, with Sean McVay,

01:27:03.880 | who's the head coach of the LA Rams,

01:27:05.200 | who just a few days after the big loss against the Eagles.

01:27:09.000 | And we actually ended up watching the tape.

01:27:12.640 | It was his first watching of the tape

01:27:14.060 | of this heartbreaking playoff loss he had.

01:27:16.200 | And watching him process it.

01:27:19.320 | And you know, he's such a great leader.

01:27:22.720 | Both Joe and Sean like lead,

01:27:27.600 | they both take themselves on more intensely than anything,

01:27:29.800 | but they lead with vulnerability.

01:27:31.280 | Like they go up against their stains.

01:27:33.640 | And like being authentic there,

01:27:35.960 | as opposed to being a leader or a father or a mother

01:27:39.480 | or a coach who just keeps it in the pocket,

01:27:41.240 | as if they're perfect.

01:27:42.640 | There's something so inauthentic about that.

01:27:44.560 | I think in human relationship

01:27:47.040 | and in the cultivation of oneself as an artist,

01:27:50.700 | going right at one's weakness is so powerful.

01:27:55.020 | Now, of course, there's also the tender balance

01:27:57.360 | of how much we should cultivate our strengths

01:28:00.520 | and how much we should be spent shoring up our weaknesses.

01:28:03.080 | And one of the most important principles,

01:28:04.520 | which I learned too late in my chess life,

01:28:07.320 | is that we can take on our weaknesses

01:28:09.340 | through the lens of our strengths, right?

01:28:11.120 | Remember this brilliant sage Russian coach,

01:28:13.840 | Yuri Razaev, said to me at one point,

01:28:15.560 | "You can learn Karpov through Kasparov."

01:28:18.040 | His point being, you can learn

01:28:20.780 | about the great defensive chess

01:28:23.840 | through the great defense of great aggressors like you.

01:28:27.660 | As opposed to just studying Karpov and thinking,

01:28:29.300 | what should I, what would Karpov do here?

01:28:30.900 | Which was urged to do by other people.

01:28:33.180 | Like learn defense through offense, right?

01:28:36.340 | So it was part of my self-expression.

01:28:38.380 | I learned that principle too late for my chess life,

01:28:40.480 | but it's manifest everywhere else, right?

01:28:42.060 | So while we're cultivating our strength,

01:28:43.700 | which I think we should do as a way of life,

01:28:46.900 | how do we go up against our stains?

01:28:48.280 | But in ways that we're not fundamentally,

01:28:50.560 | it's not shame.

01:28:55.640 | I don't relate to, personally, like I don't,

01:28:57.680 | that's a word I don't, like shame.

01:28:59.720 | It's not shame.

01:29:00.560 | It's like, when it becomes just like a breath pattern,

01:29:04.280 | like we lose, we put ourself on the line, we lose.

01:29:07.200 | We go at it, we study it.

01:29:08.320 | We, you know, we study how, we study about what,

01:29:12.920 | the other thing that's incredible to me

01:29:14.120 | is that when you study your losses,

01:29:15.320 | when you go up against what you're calling,

01:29:16.440 | like that, that's a beautiful image,

01:29:18.800 | like the shadow of the lighthouse, right?

01:29:21.840 | The interconnectedness of the technical,

01:29:26.840 | the psychological, and the thematic

01:29:31.160 | is so powerful in the learning process.

01:29:34.160 | Almost every technical mistake that we make in an art,

01:29:38.180 | if we're pushing ourselves to our limits,

01:29:39.480 | if we're like, if you and I are like around the same level

01:29:41.820 | and we're competing in something,

01:29:42.960 | we're about this in anything,

01:29:45.160 | like any technical mistake I made

01:29:48.000 | will have a psychological dimension

01:29:49.400 | because I most likely, my technical weakness was,

01:29:53.240 | emerged because I was so psychologically pressured

01:29:55.560 | that I wasn't able to solve the technical position, right?

01:29:58.960 | Or if you, if I make a psychological error,

01:30:02.680 | it's often because I was a little technically

01:30:05.120 | out of my water.

01:30:06.600 | And so it put pressure, extra pressure on my psyche

01:30:09.120 | that then you were able to exploit, right?

01:30:11.280 | And every technical mistake is local, right?

01:30:16.280 | But there's themes, there's like a theme

01:30:18.840 | that houses hundreds of those technical manifestations.

01:30:23.700 | So if we are always thinking about the technical,

01:30:25.680 | the thematic, the psychological,

01:30:27.200 | and we have what I call a six dimensional

01:30:28.960 | introspective process, right?

01:30:30.640 | And we're looking at all of these,

01:30:32.480 | the interconnectedness of those different parts

01:30:35.240 | of the human experience of an art or anything else,

01:30:38.520 | then the growth curve is incredibly explosive

01:30:40.620 | because we recognize, we make a technical mistake

01:30:42.680 | and we learn the theme.

01:30:44.240 | We take on the theme that houses that one,

01:30:46.280 | but also houses dozens of others.

01:30:48.200 | And so as we turn that theme into a strength,

01:30:50.960 | into a power zone, then that technical mistake goes away,

01:30:53.520 | but as do the other manifestations of that theme.

01:30:56.460 | And if we're also studying the psychological weakness

01:30:58.520 | that allowed that technical weakness to manifest,

01:31:01.380 | to like unearth itself,

01:31:03.180 | then that psychological dimension

01:31:04.560 | becomes something that we take on.

01:31:05.540 | And then we're studying thematic interconnectedness

01:31:07.840 | as a way of life,

01:31:08.680 | because then that lesson we learned through that chest,

01:31:10.560 | that like I made a subtle chest mistake,

01:31:12.560 | but that connects to my love life.

01:31:15.060 | It connects to my fatherhood.

01:31:16.280 | It connects to my foiling, my jujitsu, my everything,

01:31:20.940 | because it connects to the theme

01:31:22.680 | and it connects to my psychology and it manifests.

01:31:25.080 | I don't believe in compartmentalization.

01:31:26.800 | I believe in thematic interconnectedness, right?

01:31:29.360 | And like the core themes of my life,

01:31:31.840 | I would say if I had to boil it down would be love,

01:31:34.800 | interconnectedness, and receptivity.

01:31:37.300 | I only do what I love

01:31:39.000 | and I spend time with people who I love.

01:31:40.560 | And that's how I live.

01:31:41.780 | The study of interconnectedness is my way of life

01:31:46.400 | in some of the ways I've been describing.

01:31:48.520 | And receptivity is what I cultivate every day in my life,

01:31:51.280 | in the ocean, with people, with humans.

01:31:53.540 | And we always get isolated.

01:31:58.000 | We get like siloed.

01:31:59.920 | Oh yeah, is this chest mistake?

01:32:01.260 | Like one of the things I've found so confusing

01:32:06.120 | is why don't more great chess players

01:32:09.440 | who try successfully translate their level

01:32:12.900 | from chess to other things?

01:32:14.300 | 'Cause chess is so hard

01:32:17.360 | and chess is such a relentlessly truth-telling art.

01:32:19.280 | If you become a world-class chess player,

01:32:20.560 | you're fucking good 'cause there's no luck in chess.

01:32:23.720 | - Especially if you become very good very young.

01:32:25.700 | I mean, I think this is true of most prodigies.

01:32:28.120 | I don't wanna name them, but I have a colleague,

01:32:30.400 | a very smart guy, his science is very solid.

01:32:33.320 | And I remember I met with him and I said,

01:32:34.560 | "Is it true that you're-" - He's gonna love that.

01:32:36.200 | - That's okay, he's done nice work.

01:32:39.200 | I just wouldn't say that it's like transformed

01:32:41.040 | our understanding of like everything in that field,

01:32:43.280 | but he's made some very important contributions.

01:32:44.840 | He's a fabulous teacher and a nice person.

01:32:47.820 | But he's said, one day I was meeting with him

01:32:52.520 | and I said, "You're a child prodigy," I heard.

01:32:56.360 | And he said, "Former child prodigy."

01:33:00.280 | And I was like, okay, well, here we're getting technical,

01:33:02.280 | but yeah, okay, I think we're.

01:33:03.440 | And I asked my dad, 'cause he, my dad lived

01:33:07.320 | in the same building as Daniel Barenboim, the musician,

01:33:11.720 | who's if you've ever seen the movie "Hillary and Jackie,"

01:33:13.640 | he was one of the world's most accomplished piano players

01:33:17.560 | at a very young age.

01:33:19.480 | And my dad used to hear him playing when he was a kid

01:33:22.880 | and like, they wouldn't let him play with other kids.

01:33:24.600 | And he was like, I mean, Barenboim is a,

01:33:26.880 | for classical musicians and pianists in particular,

01:33:29.240 | it's like serious stuff.

01:33:30.440 | And I, so I asked my dad, I was like,

01:33:31.740 | "What's the deal with this child prodigy thing?"

01:33:33.760 | And he said, "Yeah, very few of them go on to do much

01:33:37.960 | "in their adult careers, in any field."

01:33:41.200 | - Right.

01:33:42.040 | - And I was like, wow.

01:33:43.880 | And I thought, okay, so what's missing there

01:33:47.680 | is clearly not a lack of ability, focus.

01:33:51.160 | I mean, you could just say raw talent,

01:33:52.480 | but you still have to, kid still has to focus.

01:33:54.960 | So what's missing is this transfer of understanding,

01:34:00.600 | it seems, or what you're talking about,

01:34:02.540 | the interconnectedness of things.

01:34:04.380 | And so, yeah, I probably will get myself in trouble

01:34:07.860 | with this colleague, but hey, listen,

01:34:09.260 | maybe he'll take on something new

01:34:10.540 | and do something additionally spectacular.

01:34:14.740 | He's got a lot of things on his plate.

01:34:16.720 | But that struck me, I was like, oh, it's not clear

01:34:21.260 | that being a "child prodigy" is such a good thing

01:34:23.980 | for the long arc of one's life.

01:34:26.300 | But you have seemed to bring in these other elements, love.

01:34:31.300 | I'd like to talk more about that.

01:34:33.520 | And I would also add,

01:34:35.120 | at least from an outsider's perspective of,

01:34:37.840 | you seem to have broken the mold

01:34:40.720 | with kind of what's expected of you,

01:34:43.240 | based on your prior accomplishments.

01:34:45.400 | - Well, I have no identity in being a prodigy,

01:34:49.240 | just to be clear.

01:34:51.160 | So I don't relate to that word at all.

01:34:53.480 | I mean, that word has been put on me from the outside,

01:34:55.480 | but I just don't associate with it.

01:34:58.600 | I don't relate to it at all.

01:35:00.100 | Because I was maybe somewhat talented in chess

01:35:06.140 | compared to most people.

01:35:09.900 | But then very early in my,

01:35:12.260 | by the time I was like six and something,

01:35:14.780 | I was only competing against people

01:35:18.700 | who were better than me,

01:35:19.700 | and kids who were as talented as me.

01:35:21.980 | And then on the world stage,

01:35:23.380 | kids who are more talented than me.

01:35:25.140 | And I couldn't rely on my talent at all,

01:35:26.960 | because I mean, I had to work my ass off.

01:35:29.840 | And I won, I lost, and I got my ass kicked.

01:35:31.840 | And so for me, it was all about the battle

01:35:34.320 | and taking myself on.

01:35:35.500 | And I think what happens, it's funny,

01:35:37.960 | many years ago, I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition

01:35:42.960 | and I showed up at this place,

01:35:44.940 | and all these kids were there

01:35:45.780 | and they're all excited to play against me.

01:35:47.040 | And then the organizer of it said,

01:35:48.480 | "My son hasn't lost a chess game in two years."

01:35:51.820 | And that's all you need to know.

01:35:55.340 | 'Cause it's just like, that means you're just,

01:35:57.420 | and of course he was the one

01:35:58.260 | 'cause he didn't wanna play against me, right?

01:35:59.880 | 'Cause if you haven't lost a chess game in two years,

01:36:01.440 | you're not taking your shit on.

01:36:02.720 | You're finding people who you can beat

01:36:04.060 | and you're only playing against them.

01:36:05.700 | So there's a couple levels to this, let's dig into it.

01:36:07.600 | So I think that people who have identity

01:36:09.740 | in being a prodigy develop a brittleness often,

01:36:13.540 | because they associate their level of mastery with talent,

01:36:17.880 | with something innate, with being smarter,

01:36:19.860 | more brilliant, more gifted, whatever.

01:36:22.820 | And then that is, you think about Carol Dweck's work

01:36:24.880 | in entity incremental theories of intelligence, right?

01:36:26.680 | That's an entity theory of intelligence.

01:36:28.680 | So I think there's that,

01:36:30.840 | and there's something fundamentally brittle about that.

01:36:32.480 | And then one doesn't take risk, one doesn't expose oneself,

01:36:35.800 | one associates one's great moments

01:36:38.780 | with something ingrained or innate

01:36:40.680 | versus the hard work that it took to get there.

01:36:43.840 | And there's all sorts of paralyzing dynamics there.

01:36:46.000 | - Oh, there's also a tendency to lie.

01:36:47.780 | Carol's early papers referred to this

01:36:50.400 | in the discussion sections.

01:36:51.480 | You have to read deep into those papers,

01:36:52.980 | but she describes how the students

01:36:56.860 | who did not have growth mindset,

01:36:58.360 | that really identified and held so much of their ego

01:37:03.360 | with their performance,

01:37:06.040 | were at a significantly greater tendency

01:37:08.840 | to lie about their performance when they didn't do well.

01:37:11.560 | - To themselves and to others.

01:37:13.440 | - That's right.

01:37:14.280 | - But the lying to oneself

01:37:15.100 | is the really interesting part, right?

01:37:16.800 | So there's that dimension, right?

01:37:19.800 | Which you and I have both seen

01:37:21.400 | just countless manifestations of.

01:37:22.840 | And believe me, when you're competing against someone

01:37:24.460 | who you see has that kind of psychological construction,

01:37:27.480 | they're done.

01:37:28.320 | You can just break them, right?

01:37:30.440 | You can, there's so many chinks in the armor.

01:37:32.680 | So there's a brittleness there.

01:37:37.960 | Like you can just find where their mind stops

01:37:40.760 | when false constructs, where the energy stops,

01:37:42.680 | where their bodies crimped, right?

01:37:44.320 | Like you can just find their connection to the ground

01:37:46.080 | and explode through it.

01:37:47.200 | In mental and physical disciplines,

01:37:48.560 | if someone has that kind of identity

01:37:52.420 | in being the more brilliant one,

01:37:54.360 | the more gifted one, whatever,

01:37:56.080 | they're prey from a competitive perspective,

01:38:00.360 | which is ultimately good for them

01:38:02.840 | if they expose themselves to it

01:38:04.080 | 'cause then they have to take themselves on.

01:38:06.840 | But the dynamic that I was reflecting on in chess players

01:38:10.240 | is a little next door to this,

01:38:12.960 | which is that I think that,

01:38:14.880 | like if you're learning how to play chess,

01:38:16.960 | and let's just say I was teaching you,

01:38:18.120 | do you play chess?

01:38:19.020 | - Trivially.

01:38:21.200 | - Okay, so let's say I was teaching you to play chess.

01:38:23.000 | I could teach you to play chess

01:38:24.920 | with a language that is chess specific,

01:38:28.840 | or I could teach you chess principles.

01:38:30.040 | I could teach you very effectively with chess principles,

01:38:32.340 | but I could also teach you just as effectively

01:38:34.320 | or maybe somewhat more effectively,

01:38:36.040 | but let's just say just as effectively

01:38:37.800 | with chess principles that are also life principles.

01:38:40.680 | And it's interesting when you watch most chess teachers,

01:38:43.160 | they teach in a localized manner.

01:38:45.400 | So people can spend 20 years inside of chess

01:38:47.400 | but never break beyond the 64 squares.

01:38:50.320 | Or they can from the age of six or seven on

01:38:52.800 | be learning that principle as it connects to chess,

01:38:54.680 | but also seeing how it connects to life.

01:38:56.200 | - Could you give me an example of one such principle?

01:38:58.380 | Because I love in biology teaching not names,

01:39:02.400 | not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs.

01:39:05.560 | Because ultimately, if you want to understand,

01:39:07.320 | for instance, how the nervous system works

01:39:08.960 | or the immune system,

01:39:10.200 | you teach the verb actions of molecules.

01:39:13.480 | And the names of the molecules are important

01:39:15.480 | if you decide to go into that field professionally,

01:39:17.200 | but otherwise the principles and verbs

01:39:19.640 | are what's most important.

01:39:20.520 | So what's an example of a principle of chess

01:39:23.480 | or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers?

01:39:27.960 | - Everything transfers, first of all.

01:39:29.440 | Like, I mean, if we're open to it,

01:39:31.040 | then everything in chess connects.

01:39:33.080 | And so when people ask me, do you still play chess?

01:39:34.640 | I say metaphorically.

01:39:36.280 | I mean, I play chess all the time.

01:39:37.540 | I just have not moved a piece in many, many, many years.

01:39:40.880 | Right, so, but okay, to be specific.

01:39:42.480 | So I could give you many examples, but all right.

01:39:46.180 | So in chess, there's a bishop and there's a knight, right?

01:39:50.080 | They're both worth about three pawns.

01:39:52.640 | Now I could teach you, okay,

01:39:54.000 | so the knight moves like an L and can jump over pieces.

01:39:56.240 | The bishop moves diagonally

01:39:57.400 | and is stuck on one color for its whole life.

01:40:00.240 | They're both worth about three pawns.

01:40:03.200 | But knights are, and I could just say to you,

01:40:05.800 | but like knights are a little bit better

01:40:07.120 | in closed positions 'cause they can jump over things.

01:40:09.240 | Bishops are a little better if the pawns,

01:40:11.080 | if your pawns are on the opposite color from them, right?

01:40:15.640 | But you should also know that rooks and bishops are,

01:40:20.640 | the bishops and knights are about the same.

01:40:22.680 | Rooks and bishops are much stronger than rooks and knights.

01:40:25.600 | And you should also know that queens and knights

01:40:27.920 | are a bit stronger than queens and bishops.

01:40:30.660 | So the bishop's value is a little bit stronger

01:40:32.440 | compared with a rook and the queen,

01:40:33.600 | knight's value a little bit stronger with a queen

01:40:35.460 | and pawn structure influences them, right?

01:40:38.040 | So I could teach you a very simple set of principles

01:40:40.400 | through which you can understand

01:40:42.100 | how to evaluate bishops and knights, right?

01:40:44.720 | And there's many other layers to that,

01:40:46.320 | but like that's some of it, right?

01:40:48.520 | I could also teach you the same thing

01:40:50.120 | and be teaching you like the nature of relativity.

01:40:54.120 | I could be teaching you the nature of interdependence, right?

01:41:00.600 | I could teach you the nature of,

01:41:04.260 | like I could teach you the pawn structure play that,

01:41:06.680 | like the way you can play with pawn structure

01:41:08.760 | that influences bishops and knights

01:41:11.000 | in ways that are chess specific

01:41:12.560 | or in ways that just allow you

01:41:14.060 | to understand dynamic quality and static quality.

01:41:16.340 | - You know what leaps to mind when you made that description

01:41:18.440 | and I didn't follow all of it to memorization

01:41:22.000 | was family feud.

01:41:25.320 | I just imagined two families in a feud, right?

01:41:27.700 | You get two brothers together, they can do certain things.

01:41:29.720 | We get a brother and sister together, I have a sister.

01:41:32.160 | She can do certain things that are powerful

01:41:33.800 | and diabolical in ways that two brothers can't.

01:41:36.300 | Yeah, so you get two big strong brothers,

01:41:38.520 | but maybe one that can't creep through small places.

01:41:41.000 | And so you can map to different,

01:41:43.200 | that's sort of more than just kind of an analogy for it all.

01:41:46.000 | But I started to immediately think about like,

01:41:47.280 | oh, it's like a family feud.

01:41:48.800 | If I were to view the pieces as sibling dynamics

01:41:52.440 | and parent-sibling-cousin dynamics,

01:41:54.340 | it's like matchups with humans or in basketball.

01:41:58.060 | Like this team is better than this team and this team,

01:42:00.640 | but again, there's some matchups

01:42:02.420 | that are hugely favorable.

01:42:04.400 | A lot of like the inside game of basketball

01:42:06.240 | is around which teams thrive against which other teams,

01:42:09.760 | even though they might be inferior

01:42:11.460 | because of the nature of the construction of the team.

01:42:13.440 | And you have networks of those teams

01:42:14.780 | and how do you deal with lineups,

01:42:16.160 | how do you deal with rotation patterns?

01:42:17.720 | Like the inner game of basketball is all based on

01:42:21.080 | the same stuff that dictates the bishop and the knight

01:42:24.040 | and the rook and the queen and how they influence it.

01:42:26.560 | It's interdependence. - Beautiful.

01:42:27.920 | - It's relativity, it's dynamic quality.

01:42:29.680 | And you can think about Robert Persik's work

01:42:31.240 | in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

01:42:32.520 | and Lila around dynamic quality versus static quality.

01:42:35.120 | And you can be teaching a student,

01:42:36.640 | while you're teaching about rook and bishop

01:42:38.680 | and rook and knight or knights and bishops,

01:42:40.360 | you can be teaching them about dynamic quality, right?

01:42:43.800 | And then you can like expand into the study

01:42:46.780 | of the metaphysics of quality.

01:42:48.000 | And then you can have a seven-year-old student

01:42:49.720 | who's learning chess or a 12-year-old who's learning chess

01:42:51.880 | or who's learning about life and philosophy and everything,

01:42:54.080 | and you can do it in the same amount of time.

01:42:56.360 | But you're trapping a mind inside of 64 squares

01:42:59.280 | or you're teaching a mind about life through the 64 squares.

01:43:03.000 | And I think so many of the reasons

01:43:04.380 | that people who become excellent in one thing

01:43:07.000 | can't translate it into other places,

01:43:09.400 | it's not will later on in life, they have the will,

01:43:12.300 | it's because they didn't learn with universal principles.

01:43:14.920 | They didn't study their art with a presence

01:43:17.700 | to the importance of interconnectedness,

01:43:20.000 | which is a lot of what my life's work is in.

01:43:22.200 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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01:45:00.400 | When I think about interconnectedness,

01:45:03.480 | I think the word mapping comes to mind,

01:45:05.640 | and I define a map of any kind

01:45:07.200 | as a transformation of one set of points

01:45:09.000 | into another set of points, right?

01:45:10.600 | Points along the earth transferred onto a page

01:45:12.960 | or an electronic map, you know?

01:45:14.240 | And what's missing from a kind of basic understanding

01:45:17.520 | of a transformation of points

01:45:18.600 | into another transformation of points

01:45:20.360 | are these verb actions,

01:45:21.440 | like it's the algorithms, if you will.

01:45:23.880 | That's not present in how we map one context

01:45:29.060 | onto another context.

01:45:30.400 | It requires a lot of thinking to do what you describe.

01:45:33.440 | I don't think it's reflexive for most people

01:45:36.680 | to say, watch a game of basketball

01:45:38.240 | and think about the emotional dynamics

01:45:40.560 | and the consistencies of the emotional dynamics.

01:45:43.040 | Like last night, I had the great gift

01:45:44.600 | of Josh brought me to a Celtics game.

01:45:46.140 | So he brought me to a Celtics game

01:45:48.480 | and they were playing the Clippers.

01:45:49.600 | So I was cheering against the hometown crowd

01:45:51.920 | here in Los Angeles, but it was friendly.

01:45:55.440 | And you were describing the players and their recent history

01:45:57.920 | and the kind of last season, the season.

01:45:59.480 | And you said something about the difference

01:46:02.320 | between pre-conscious effort and post-conscious effort.

01:46:07.000 | Maybe we could talk about that as a gateway into ego,

01:46:10.680 | which is like a term that the moment you said,

01:46:12.880 | throughout the word ego, it's like saying sex.

01:46:14.960 | It's like people make all sorts of assumptions

01:46:17.120 | about what it is and what it isn't.

01:46:19.200 | But let's talk about pre-conscious and post-conscious.

01:46:22.480 | Because we'll get back to the Celtics

01:46:24.800 | and the game that was played last night.

01:46:26.400 | By the way, the Celtics won in overtime

01:46:28.720 | by a good size margin.

01:46:30.080 | So there's something very beautiful

01:46:33.920 | that I think all of us are drawn to as observers,

01:46:37.800 | but hopefully everyone gets to experience this

01:46:40.040 | at some point in their life as well firsthand.

01:46:43.800 | When somebody in art, music, sport, or whatever

01:46:47.000 | is just being themselves

01:46:48.960 | and this seeming virtuosity comes out.

01:46:53.000 | If I think about kind of what Rick Rubin does,

01:46:55.940 | a lot of what Rick has done historically

01:46:59.120 | is to find artists and work with artists

01:47:02.080 | and just bring out what they're already doing,

01:47:05.440 | like the core elements.

01:47:06.600 | Like when Beastie Boys started, it was like a joke, he said.

01:47:09.120 | And then we're kind of making fun of had wrestling elements

01:47:11.400 | and hardcore and punk and all this stuff and hip hop.

01:47:13.800 | And, you know, but he tends to work with artists early on

01:47:16.840 | when they're in that really like pure state

01:47:19.020 | of not thinking about the returns on their investment

01:47:21.580 | and all that.

01:47:22.420 | And, you know, he said many times before to me

01:47:25.200 | and publicly that, you know,

01:47:26.800 | after people achieve a certain level of fame,

01:47:29.200 | it's much harder to get back to that

01:47:30.780 | just pure picture of oneself, pre-conscious expression.

01:47:33.720 | Just Josh being Josh as an eight-year-old,

01:47:35.960 | you just happen to be in Washington Square Park

01:47:37.460 | learning chess or, you know,

01:47:39.960 | pick any number of different examples.

01:47:41.840 | So very different than when people now reflect

01:47:45.000 | on their trophies on the wall or their platinum records

01:47:47.560 | or the fact that they won and lost

01:47:49.640 | or that there's another champion in the house that,

01:47:51.840 | you know, and the real virtuosos seem to be people

01:47:56.840 | that can get back to that over and over again.

01:48:03.240 | The Yo-Yo Ma's, the, you know,

01:48:06.120 | and people live longer now.

01:48:07.640 | So it used to be the Mozart's, the Bach's, you know,

01:48:10.080 | they could make their contribution and then they died.

01:48:14.360 | Yeah, now we live longer lives.

01:48:17.680 | So people have many more chances,

01:48:21.640 | but there's also that longer window for lack of productivity.

01:48:26.040 | - This is a really important theme

01:48:28.440 | and it's a gateway into so much.

01:48:29.840 | Like we can explore a lot through this tunnel.

01:48:32.480 | When I use this term pre-conscious

01:48:34.240 | and post-conscious artist or competitor,

01:48:35.920 | it's my own language.

01:48:37.160 | So I'll describe what I mean by it.

01:48:38.920 | When you think about myself in the chess world, right?

01:48:43.000 | Like one discovers an art, one feels a passion for it,

01:48:46.720 | one, it's beautiful, it's joyous, it's self-expressive,

01:48:49.240 | I love the battle, I'm winning, I'm losing,

01:48:50.900 | I'm having fun, I'm just letting it rip, right?

01:48:53.200 | There's a naivete to that.

01:48:55.080 | There's a freedom, there's a playfulness, right?

01:48:58.760 | There's a lack of complexity, a lack of self-awareness,

01:49:02.240 | a lack of awareness of my own mutability,

01:49:06.080 | a lack of awareness that I can be shattered or I can die,

01:49:09.560 | a lack of awareness of the existential absurdity

01:49:12.240 | of the fact that I'm devoting my life

01:49:13.840 | to 64 squares and 32 pieces of wood on top of 64 squares.

01:49:17.920 | I haven't reflected on the fact that this is ridiculous,

01:49:20.820 | right, or if you're fighting, like what am I doing?

01:49:24.020 | I'm spending my life in combat.

01:49:25.180 | Like what about love?

01:49:26.420 | What about saving the planet?

01:49:27.420 | What about everything else?

01:49:28.960 | I haven't reflected on the fact that this is just a joke

01:49:33.100 | in its absurdity, right?

01:49:34.900 | And one's liberated from those kinds of things.

01:49:37.860 | And then there comes this moment,

01:49:39.340 | and for me it was triggered by the movie,

01:49:42.580 | by losing that sense of self-expression,

01:49:45.780 | by thinking what would someone else do here

01:49:47.460 | instead of what's my freedom,

01:49:50.780 | my playfulness tell me to do?

01:49:52.400 | It can happen when one has a near-death experience, right?

01:49:56.400 | It can happen when one has one's heart broken.

01:49:59.880 | It can happen when one

01:50:01.120 | starts reading existentialist literature

01:50:05.360 | and reflecting on the absurdity of things,

01:50:07.260 | or one has a friend who starts pointing out over and over,

01:50:09.680 | like this is fucking ridiculous.

01:50:11.200 | You're just playing chess.

01:50:12.040 | What are you doing, right?

01:50:13.660 | Or it can happen when one wins the World Championship

01:50:17.740 | or the NBA Finals because suddenly the thing

01:50:20.060 | that you have oriented yourself around,

01:50:22.620 | your whole life, the goal you had your whole life,

01:50:25.340 | you've now accomplished.

01:50:26.540 | And now you're on the other side of it.

01:50:29.300 | And so suddenly your world has shifted.

01:50:31.180 | The things that motivated you no longer motivate you.

01:50:33.680 | The things that felt so important to you

01:50:34.980 | now seem somewhat trivial

01:50:36.260 | because you've already accomplished that.

01:50:38.220 | Like where's the intrinsic motivation?

01:50:39.780 | Where's the deep self-expression, right?

01:50:42.940 | You think about,

01:50:43.840 | like as we gain complexity in our psychology,

01:50:48.460 | and we can gain that complexity in many different ways,

01:50:50.820 | we hit this tunnel, right?

01:50:52.540 | And often when someone becomes self-aware,

01:50:54.640 | or when someone becomes less liberated,

01:50:59.420 | or like the chains set in,

01:51:01.760 | or when one, I guess you say you're an extreme athlete,

01:51:03.860 | but you feel invincible.

01:51:05.220 | And then suddenly you have a terrible accident.

01:51:06.860 | You realize, holy shit, I could actually die.

01:51:08.940 | I can break.

01:51:09.860 | Then how do you get back to that freedom

01:51:12.200 | of taking the wild risks that you've been taking

01:51:14.020 | as that extreme athlete

01:51:15.460 | with an awareness of the fact that you can die?

01:51:17.780 | Like for me, I foil now in the biggest waves

01:51:21.400 | that I can find in where I live in Costa Rica.

01:51:24.540 | And you have big hold downs.

01:51:27.140 | You're foiling on top of a long mass,

01:51:29.740 | which is a carbon mass, which is very sharp,

01:51:31.420 | and then a wing, which is sharp.

01:51:32.460 | So you're basically going 40, 45 miles

01:51:34.220 | on top of a guillotine.

01:51:35.580 | And if you're trying to,

01:51:37.340 | you're really cultivating high-performance foiling,

01:51:38.900 | you're pushing turns really hard.

01:51:40.620 | You're breaching wingtips.

01:51:41.620 | Like you can taco and have the thing

01:51:42.860 | come right at your head or your neck.

01:51:44.260 | Like you can die at any minute if you get something wrong,

01:51:46.680 | which is very different from just like foiling straight

01:51:48.340 | or e-foiling.

01:51:49.580 | We're talking about high-performance training.

01:51:52.220 | Like you, by definition, have to be risking these things

01:51:54.580 | in order to push the limits of what's possible.

01:51:56.860 | And if you're not, you're not at that stretch point, right?

01:51:59.580 | But then suddenly, like you have a terrible injury,

01:52:01.580 | or let's just say you're,

01:52:02.620 | like I drowned in the bottom of a pool

01:52:04.580 | some 11 years ago, 10, 11 years ago.

01:52:08.180 | - Yeah, I heard about this.

01:52:09.020 | Yeah, it was a, I was doing hypoxic breath work.

01:52:11.820 | I did not realize, which maybe if I'd,

01:52:14.100 | you could have taught me if I'd known you

01:52:15.780 | that carbon dioxide is what gives you the urge to breathe.

01:52:18.420 | I didn't realize that.

01:52:19.380 | So I had all the CO2 flushed out of my body.

01:52:21.780 | I felt blissful.

01:52:22.620 | I was swimming underwater.

01:52:23.780 | - Yeah, exhale, I guess we should save a few lives here

01:52:27.340 | or prevent a few deaths rather.

01:52:29.800 | Anytime you emphasize the duration

01:52:31.860 | or intensity of your exhales,

01:52:33.780 | you're gonna blow out more carbon dioxide.

01:52:35.780 | Carbon dioxide is the trigger for the gasp reflex.

01:52:38.860 | So yes, you'll be able to hold your breath

01:52:40.260 | longer above or below water

01:52:41.580 | if you first do cyclic hyperventilation

01:52:43.860 | and then a long, and dump all your air,

01:52:46.740 | but never, ever, ever do cyclic hyperventilation, folks,

01:52:50.340 | or any long exhale-emphasized breathing,

01:52:52.820 | even standing in a puddle,

01:52:54.180 | because that gasp reflex is the thing

01:52:57.420 | that makes you shoot for the surface.

01:53:00.640 | And if you don't do that,

01:53:02.420 | you feel pretty peaceful until it lights out.

01:53:05.100 | - Or drive a car.

01:53:05.920 | Don't do it while driving a car.

01:53:06.980 | - Or drive a car.

01:53:07.820 | I know people who have done that.

01:53:08.900 | Actually, rather exceptional people who I know have done it.

01:53:11.340 | - Dumping carbon dioxide will let you

01:53:13.420 | hold your breath longer, but that's part of the problem.

01:53:15.780 | - And shallow water blackout usually happens

01:53:17.700 | to very high-level athletes, Navy SEALs,

01:53:19.860 | 'cause they're training at pushing their limits.

01:53:21.660 | They're learning to suppress the urge to breathe.

01:53:24.740 | If you're flushing CO2, you're learning,

01:53:26.220 | you're training yourself not to feel it.

01:53:27.540 | And I've been a free diver my whole life.

01:53:28.820 | I grew up free diving, spearfishing

01:53:30.180 | in the Southern Bahamas,

01:53:31.700 | but I wasn't doing hypoxic breath work while free diving.

01:53:34.580 | Here I was at the NYU pool.

01:53:36.020 | I drowned, I was in the bottom of the pool

01:53:37.500 | for four and a half minutes after blacking out, which--

01:53:39.820 | - Four and a half minutes.

01:53:40.860 | - Yeah, I should have, which I know because--

01:53:42.900 | - You should be dead.

01:53:43.740 | - I should be dead or brain damaged in a big way.

01:53:46.140 | I know the time it was because there was an old man

01:53:49.340 | who I knew who was in the locker room

01:53:50.540 | who saw me in the bottom of the pool lying there,

01:53:52.700 | and he timed his laps, and he did four laps.

01:53:55.500 | And he said, "After the third one, I'm gonna check on him."

01:53:57.880 | And then he did his fourth lap,

01:53:59.180 | pulled me in his lap for a little bit over a minute.

01:54:01.940 | And I was unconscious for 25 minutes.

01:54:04.620 | I was totally blue, except my face was blown out red,

01:54:09.300 | my eyes, my body, my training almost killed me

01:54:13.620 | and also saved me.

01:54:14.500 | My body handled it really well.

01:54:15.780 | I had no water in my lungs.

01:54:18.020 | I spent that night in the hospital, of course.

01:54:20.300 | And I was like testing my, I remember doing,

01:54:23.460 | like remembering old chest variations,

01:54:25.180 | like testing my mind in any way, like was I ruined?

01:54:27.740 | And I somehow survived, and I survived intact.

01:54:32.660 | And that's one of those moments, shattering moments,

01:54:36.600 | which I am ultimately grateful for

01:54:38.500 | 'cause it's what catalyzed me to,

01:54:40.340 | I emerged with more of a commitment,

01:54:42.500 | and I've had this kind of commitment in my life

01:54:44.220 | for most, for many years, but a more intense commitment

01:54:47.340 | to live life as truly and beautifully

01:54:49.460 | and authentically as conceivable.

01:54:51.340 | And then soon after, we moved to the jungle,

01:54:53.920 | and we lived life we live now,

01:54:55.380 | which is awesome for my family.

01:54:57.780 | But I bring that up now because like imagine how one relates

01:55:02.780 | to big wave surfing or big wave foiling

01:55:06.780 | pre and post drowning, right?

01:55:09.900 | There's like one has to have an integrated sense

01:55:12.460 | for one's own mortality versus being naive

01:55:16.900 | to the fact that it can happen, right?

01:55:18.940 | So that tunnel from the pre-conscious

01:55:21.140 | to the post-conscious performer is a passage

01:55:24.080 | where during that passage, most people are locked up.

01:55:26.900 | They underperform where they were

01:55:28.500 | when they were more naive.

01:55:30.340 | And I don't personally relate to it

01:55:32.580 | as a return to the pre-conscious state.

01:55:34.860 | I relate to it as an integration of one's mortality,

01:55:39.020 | of the existential absurdity into one's consciousness,

01:55:44.020 | and then a discovery of a deeper sense

01:55:46.100 | of liberation, of freedom,

01:55:47.500 | but that is not in denial of what we've learned

01:55:50.020 | in that tunnel or what triggered that tunnel,

01:55:52.340 | but that is more complex.

01:55:55.820 | - Yeah, trying to be our previous selves

01:55:57.660 | is not a great strategy.

01:55:59.280 | Trying to integrate our previous experiences

01:56:01.660 | in our current and future selves seems like a good strategy.

01:56:04.780 | - I feel that way.

01:56:05.820 | And I think it's also pretty, you can't go back.

01:56:08.880 | You can't pretend you're not, dying is impossible.

01:56:11.700 | You can't pretend that you're unbreakable.

01:56:13.500 | We are breakable.

01:56:14.660 | Some people do it without being really reflective,

01:56:17.600 | but I think that if you ask anyone who really

01:56:20.960 | has been in life and death situations

01:56:22.700 | as a way of life for a long time,

01:56:25.340 | whether they relate to the idea of fearlessness,

01:56:28.100 | if they really reflect on it, they'll say no,

01:56:31.100 | because fearlessness isn't a thing.

01:56:33.980 | It's how one works with fear.

01:56:35.840 | Usually what locks people up isn't fear.

01:56:37.500 | It's the fear of fear.

01:56:38.800 | We're afraid of our fear.

01:56:41.020 | We're afraid of being afraid,

01:56:42.340 | but you ask a great Navy SEAL.

01:56:45.040 | They work with their fear.

01:56:46.620 | You ask a great MMA fighter.

01:56:48.500 | They're not without fear.

01:56:49.540 | Of course they have fear.

01:56:50.500 | If they don't have fear, they have a problem, right?

01:56:52.900 | And there are some examples of people

01:56:54.460 | who might be wired a little bit differently, right?

01:56:57.300 | But the integration of the more complex worldview

01:57:01.740 | into one's liberation is the post-conscious performer, right?

01:57:06.060 | And it can play in lots of ways, right?

01:57:08.140 | It can also play, and so one thing

01:57:09.780 | when you think about a sports team

01:57:10.860 | that has accomplished everyone's dreams

01:57:15.340 | and now we want to win a championship again,

01:57:17.460 | we can't go back to what worked before

01:57:19.180 | because they're different men, right?

01:57:21.940 | One needs to find a different kind of mission,

01:57:23.760 | a different kinds of internal relationship to the mission,

01:57:26.540 | a different kind of freedom.

01:57:28.060 | - How important do you think it is to attach language

01:57:30.820 | to these things of identity and source of motivation?

01:57:35.380 | In other words, let's say, okay,

01:57:36.620 | you're working with the Celtics.

01:57:37.580 | They won the championship last year.

01:57:39.780 | This year, they are in a completely different mental frame

01:57:43.500 | as a consequence.

01:57:45.420 | They're "dominant" in the sense that they hold the crown,

01:57:49.340 | they hold the trophy, but they're more vulnerable too

01:57:52.620 | because the only place to go from there is either stay

01:57:55.560 | or you're going down a notch or more.

01:57:58.640 | So do you think it's important for them

01:57:59.920 | to create a verbal label for where they're at?

01:58:01.960 | Like, we're the champs and we're going to hold on

01:58:04.000 | to the belt, we're going to hold on to,

01:58:05.240 | I realize there's not a belt in basketball, by the way,

01:58:07.880 | that they're going to hold on to their status,

01:58:11.280 | or is that the wrong way to think about it?

01:58:13.220 | Because the game is played through verbs.

01:58:16.160 | It's not played through adjectives.

01:58:20.080 | - I don't think we ever want to hold on to,

01:58:22.120 | like, that's static.

01:58:23.620 | Like, we need to, we want to,

01:58:25.420 | like, you think about predator and prey dynamics

01:58:27.420 | in the world or in competition or in anything.

01:58:31.780 | Like, you want to be competing.

01:58:34.340 | Now, there's a fusion of the predator and prey.

01:58:35.940 | You want to have the awareness that prey has,

01:58:38.340 | but one wants to be playing to win, not to lose.

01:58:42.100 | The moment we're trying to hold on

01:58:43.700 | to something we already have,

01:58:44.540 | we're falling into the static quality, right?

01:58:47.440 | Or you think about, for example, brilliant investors, right?

01:58:51.180 | They'll have success.

01:58:52.880 | Then they'll try to figure out how to replicate their success

01:58:54.600 | so they'll build mental models,

01:58:55.540 | frameworks to replicate their success.

01:58:57.280 | And those become grooves, like neural pathways.

01:58:59.920 | So then they follow those grooves,

01:59:01.140 | but then the grooves become a rut and the water stops.

01:59:04.120 | And they get stuck in an old, like,

01:59:06.500 | so they succeeded, they built mental models,

01:59:09.400 | they recreated the patterns, it was beautiful,

01:59:11.640 | but then it got static.

01:59:14.000 | And then it's that stuck energy

01:59:15.920 | that doesn't apply to the world

01:59:17.440 | 'cause the world's changing.

01:59:18.840 | And what actually made them succeed was dynamic quality,

01:59:21.260 | was being at what Robert Persik would call

01:59:23.260 | the front of the freight train,

01:59:24.620 | driving through space-time,

01:59:25.900 | pre-intellectual consciousness, right?

01:59:28.360 | And then they're trying to recreate it.

01:59:30.220 | They're getting too stuck in things

01:59:31.540 | and they create mental models that are stale,

01:59:33.300 | and then other people replicate those stale mental models,

01:59:35.180 | and you have huge industries that emerge

01:59:36.640 | from static quality later and on top of static quality,

01:59:39.500 | which is most of humanity, right?

01:59:41.700 | So I think that as a world-class competitor

01:59:43.540 | who's trying to win after winning,

01:59:46.340 | one needs to have the same dynamic mindset one had

01:59:48.700 | when one was hunting for it in the first place.

01:59:50.600 | Rediscovery.

01:59:51.480 | Marcelo Garcia, one of my most,

01:59:54.320 | one of my favorite moments of Marcelo was,

01:59:56.380 | so we were, so Marcelo, nine-time world champion

02:00:00.840 | in the grappling arts, five-time ADCC,

02:00:04.120 | five-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, four-time ADCC.

02:00:07.920 | ADCC is when Abu Dhabi Combat Championship,

02:00:10.080 | when all the different grappling arts come together.

02:00:11.640 | It happens every two years.

02:00:12.840 | So Russian Sambo, Judo, Wrestling, Jiu-Jitsu, right?

02:00:17.320 | Everything comes together and you see

02:00:19.000 | who's the strongest grappler in all the different arts.

02:00:22.060 | He's known by many as the greatest

02:00:25.640 | pound-for-pound grappler to ever live.

02:00:27.480 | Just for context, Marcelo is one of my dearest friends.

02:00:31.940 | We own a school together in New York.

02:00:34.260 | We trained together for a very, very long time.

02:00:36.500 | He and his, he's in an amazing moment right now.

02:00:39.520 | He and his wife Tachi, who's also one of my dearest friends,

02:00:43.660 | had a terrible tragedy years ago.

02:00:45.420 | They lost a baby, and just devastating period.

02:00:50.420 | And then Marcelo had cancer.

02:00:53.020 | He had stomach cancer.

02:00:55.860 | He had surgery, eight rounds of chemotherapy.

02:00:59.900 | He hasn't competed in 13 years,

02:01:01.540 | and he's actually competing tomorrow

02:01:03.100 | for the first time in, I think it's 13 years, in Bangkok.

02:01:07.340 | It was gonna be in Denver, and I was gonna fly there

02:01:09.100 | between the Lakers and the Mavs games,

02:01:11.260 | but it's in Bangkok, so I can't get there.

02:01:12.880 | But he's weighed in, he's doing great.

02:01:14.900 | He's feeling awesome.

02:01:15.740 | So the story I'm about to tell

02:01:18.140 | is about this epic, beautiful human being

02:01:20.500 | who in many ways created, he's the innovator

02:01:24.640 | that led to much of what is modern grappling today.

02:01:27.260 | So back in, I think it was 2005 and 2007,

02:01:31.300 | this story, or maybe 2007, 2009.

02:01:32.860 | I think it's 2005 and 2007.

02:01:34.820 | Chronology is not a strong point for me

02:01:36.700 | in terms of my recollection in general.

02:01:39.020 | We were in a training camp.

02:01:43.460 | We were training all the time.

02:01:45.460 | He had this innovative repertoire.

02:01:47.220 | He goes into ADCC, dominates it,

02:01:49.820 | and it's a very specific repertoire,

02:01:51.540 | back-taking repertoire, guillotines.

02:01:53.460 | Just dominates, blows the grappling world away.

02:01:57.580 | For the two years that followed him winning that ADCC,

02:02:00.740 | the entire grappling world was studying

02:02:02.740 | what he had just done, or a lot of the grappling world

02:02:05.340 | was studying what he had just done and recreated.

02:02:07.380 | It was so beautiful, innovative, powerful,

02:02:10.180 | playing up-weight classes, just unbelievable.

02:02:13.100 | I was on the mats with Marcelo the next day,

02:02:15.860 | the Monday after he fought Sunday.

02:02:17.560 | I also wanna say, Marcelo never, I never,

02:02:21.580 | in all the years I had of training with Marcelo,

02:02:23.580 | I never saw him miss a Monday training

02:02:25.860 | after winning a major competition on Sunday.

02:02:28.380 | - Wow.

02:02:29.220 | - Everyone takes time off.

02:02:30.420 | I never saw him miss a Monday.

02:02:31.700 | You talk about dynamic quality and humility

02:02:34.040 | and a way of life, right?

02:02:35.680 | The Monday he was on the mats, he shed the entire repertoire.

02:02:40.260 | So he just won the world championship.

02:02:42.500 | Everyone spent the next two years chasing his quality,

02:02:44.900 | which was dynamic, they turned it static.

02:02:46.720 | He shed the whole repertoire

02:02:47.820 | and created a whole new repertoire.

02:02:49.220 | And he was playing this Omoplata game,

02:02:50.900 | which he then went on the next ADCC two years later

02:02:53.700 | and won again with this brand new thing,

02:02:55.420 | just shedding the snakeskin or shedding the old shell.

02:02:59.020 | It's such a beautiful example of pushing one's limits

02:03:02.780 | as a way of life, not being stuck in old mental models.

02:03:06.340 | Breaking new ground as a way of life, dynamic quality.

02:03:08.620 | That's what it takes.

02:03:09.460 | - And so hard for people to do.

02:03:10.900 | I think about Michael Jordan and the fact

02:03:12.700 | that he wanted to be a pro baseball player.

02:03:14.380 | So he had a brief stint at that and it was underwhelming,

02:03:17.940 | certainly compared to his basketball career.

02:03:19.660 | But of course his basketball career was so spectacular

02:03:24.100 | that the expectation wasn't there.

02:03:27.300 | But nonetheless, it's so rare to find people

02:03:32.180 | that are super successful repeatedly within domain,

02:03:37.100 | let alone across domains.

02:03:39.380 | It's just- - Yeah.

02:03:40.420 | Richard Feynman, yeah, he could paint a little bit

02:03:43.860 | and draw a little bit, but I don't know.

02:03:45.900 | I've seen those pictures of the roosters.

02:03:47.740 | They're kind of first-year art school.

02:03:51.300 | So it's cool.

02:03:52.140 | Like, cool, he learned to draw and paint,

02:03:53.620 | but he weren't like, if his name wasn't on them,

02:03:56.940 | like no one would care.

02:03:58.420 | - Well, Jordan had just an incredible competitive drive,

02:04:02.820 | incredible competitive drive.

02:04:03.900 | And like the amount of, like, it's very hard

02:04:06.620 | to replicate success in an art

02:04:08.460 | because one that shouldn't replicate,

02:04:09.820 | one should drive to rediscover, right?

02:04:13.340 | It's like a recreation of something new, not old, right?

02:04:17.700 | I think the impulse once one wins

02:04:21.980 | is to do what one did before.

02:04:24.900 | But the world changes.

02:04:26.060 | Like one of the gifts the Celtics have this year

02:04:27.820 | is that everyone is targeting us, right?

02:04:30.260 | 'Cause we're the champions.

02:04:31.700 | Like we won it last year.

02:04:32.620 | And so everyone brings like an extra 30% every night,

02:04:36.420 | every team, and the NBA is stacked with brilliant athletes.

02:04:39.980 | Even the lower level teams from the outside in

02:04:42.380 | are filled with amazing athletes who,

02:04:44.140 | if you're the game of the week or the month for them,

02:04:46.780 | they bring it all.

02:04:47.900 | So all of our weaknesses are being exposed,

02:04:50.340 | which is what we want, right?

02:04:51.820 | And so you have, there's growing pains.

02:04:53.900 | You work through it all.

02:04:55.300 | And so the good thing about the competitive,

02:04:57.220 | truth-telling world is that our competitors,

02:05:01.500 | our rivals help force us to take our shit on,

02:05:05.460 | which makes it very hard to sit in static quality

02:05:07.180 | unless we're happy with mediocrity.

02:05:09.540 | Like the Celtics have, you know, one of the most,

02:05:13.060 | Joe Mazula is the head coach of the Boston Celtics,

02:05:15.060 | and he's one of, he and I are dear friends.

02:05:17.100 | And for the last two and a half years or so,

02:05:18.860 | we've been thought partners and brothers in this journey.

02:05:23.680 | And I've never seen anyone in my life better

02:05:28.000 | at turning weaknesses into strengths than Joe,

02:05:31.520 | which is a huge statement,

02:05:32.500 | 'cause I spent my life with these all-in performers.

02:05:35.700 | Not taking weaknesses and like making them less weak

02:05:38.220 | or like leveling them out,

02:05:39.460 | but turning like an area of core weakness

02:05:41.220 | into a core power zone.

02:05:42.820 | That's a superpower.

02:05:44.180 | And that's something that Joe,

02:05:45.380 | Joe trains harder than anybody else.

02:05:46.980 | And he leads by example, and he leads with vulnerability.

02:05:50.420 | And there's something, he embodies dynamic quality.

02:05:53.600 | And that's really special.

02:05:54.940 | And that's something I have unbelievable respect for.

02:05:57.500 | And you look at Joe now,

02:05:58.340 | like Joe just has learned to just thrive in pain

02:06:00.980 | and discomfort in his limits,

02:06:04.940 | in living at his limits.

02:06:06.260 | And that's like the leadership,

02:06:08.380 | which I think will lead to beautiful things.

02:06:11.020 | - So I feel like there are at least three components

02:06:14.460 | to what you're describing.

02:06:16.460 | One is that, you know, maybe in this pre-conscious phase,

02:06:19.920 | people are thinking about what they have to gain

02:06:24.180 | from this process that they're in.

02:06:26.020 | And the process is natural,

02:06:27.340 | at least to the extent that they're motivated to do it.

02:06:29.340 | It comes from some source.

02:06:30.420 | This seems to be the stage and the thing

02:06:32.460 | that Rick Rubin is trying to tap into

02:06:34.480 | in the artists that he works with,

02:06:36.220 | whether or not they're established or new.

02:06:37.660 | It's that, it's the identification

02:06:39.600 | of that pre-conscious energy,

02:06:41.740 | which is so pure and so beautiful by definition.

02:06:44.860 | As opposed to the second thing,

02:06:48.340 | which is when people have something to lose.

02:06:51.140 | You know, they went from poverty

02:06:52.780 | to having a really nice home.

02:06:54.100 | They bought their mom a home.

02:06:56.260 | They're loving this life and they don't wanna lose it.

02:06:58.660 | They don't wanna go back to where they were before,

02:07:00.420 | even though where they were before

02:07:01.740 | probably played a key role in that pre-conscious state

02:07:05.020 | that allowed them to get to that next level

02:07:07.180 | versus something to protect.

02:07:11.080 | And, you know, trying to not lose everything you've got

02:07:15.060 | is very different than trying to protect

02:07:17.820 | certain elements of what one has.

02:07:20.460 | So like in terms of the Celtics,

02:07:21.940 | they hold the championship title now.

02:07:25.580 | So they have something to lose, frankly.

02:07:28.320 | They could not get it again, but it's in the record books.

02:07:33.180 | So it's nuanced, right?

02:07:35.020 | It's not like in a fight you can get knocked out or worse,

02:07:40.020 | but you're still a champion if you were a champion once.

02:07:43.900 | I mean, certain fields are like that.

02:07:45.980 | - Well, going back to back

02:07:47.020 | is an approach way of framing that.

02:07:50.820 | Like going back to back is different

02:07:51.940 | from protecting the title.

02:07:53.120 | - Right, 'cause then the words like reigning champions,

02:07:56.420 | you know, it's like,

02:07:57.260 | "Oh, you're already the reigning champion."

02:07:58.700 | Or you think about dynasties.

02:08:01.980 | Like I grew up in the,

02:08:02.820 | when the 49ers were like kind of in multiple dynasties,

02:08:05.780 | it was like the Joe Montana era and the Steve Young era.

02:08:08.300 | And like, you know, like these dynasties

02:08:09.780 | where they were just considered such an important team

02:08:12.540 | overall because of how long they were able

02:08:15.660 | to do what they did, the Bulls, right?

02:08:18.220 | You know, so Tiger Woods, right?

02:08:22.620 | And there seems to be a kind of obsession with this process,

02:08:25.620 | at least in the United States,

02:08:26.860 | where we love to see the rise of somebody

02:08:29.740 | from, you know, ignominy to fame or rags to riches.

02:08:34.220 | And then, but there also seems to be

02:08:35.900 | this kind of obsession with their fall, their demise,

02:08:38.860 | and then coming back again.

02:08:39.960 | And I think the most, you know,

02:08:43.220 | prominent example of this in my mind is Mike Tyson,

02:08:46.100 | whose life is like, as a friend described,

02:08:48.180 | is almost Shakespearean in the way that he came from nothing,

02:08:51.660 | then youngest heavyweight champion,

02:08:53.500 | then all these issues, you know, legal and financial,

02:08:56.100 | then back again, and now he seems to be in kind of,

02:08:59.460 | he's at least of a level of status

02:09:01.280 | where he can wear his own shirt

02:09:02.880 | and no one thinks it's weird.

02:09:03.980 | It actually looks cool.

02:09:04.820 | He's probably the only guy who can wear a shirt

02:09:07.660 | with his own name on it.

02:09:09.260 | And he just, and it just seems right.

02:09:11.140 | Like he earned that one, you know?

02:09:13.000 | And I think ironically it was the hangover.

02:09:14.860 | It was him pretending to have a, you know,

02:09:17.060 | as an actor that kind of brought him back

02:09:19.300 | as a lovable character.

02:09:21.140 | It's kind of interesting.

02:09:21.980 | Like he seems to now be on the Mount Rushmore of,

02:09:25.740 | you know, famous American athletes who, you know,

02:09:30.140 | like I only wish the best for him,

02:09:32.500 | but whatever happens next, like that, it's cemented.

02:09:37.500 | His legacy is cemented.

02:09:38.820 | At some point people's legacy is cemented.

02:09:40.700 | And I wonder how that feels too.

02:09:42.420 | So maybe we could talk about these different stages

02:09:44.180 | of the sine wave that hopefully is upward

02:09:46.420 | and drifting right.

02:09:47.500 | - One of the things that I,

02:09:49.020 | that's very difficult in modern society

02:09:52.940 | and in the life of a professional athlete or team

02:09:55.120 | in modern society is that, you know,

02:09:57.260 | you think about NBA players,

02:09:58.500 | they're always being interviewed by the media

02:10:01.540 | and the media is always trying to drum up drama

02:10:05.260 | and always trying to ask.

02:10:07.580 | The media always asks the question

02:10:10.360 | that is exactly what the performance psychologist

02:10:12.700 | of the player would not want the player to think about.

02:10:15.900 | So for example, like they might ask something about like,

02:10:19.540 | how do you feel knowing you can,

02:10:20.900 | the expectations of you are so large

02:10:22.860 | you can never live up to them, right?

02:10:24.800 | Like, or is it shameful?

02:10:26.940 | Do you feel ashamed about your performance now

02:10:28.980 | because of the expectations on you?

02:10:30.700 | The questions like that will be framed.

02:10:32.100 | - Or your wife is eight months pregnant.

02:10:33.720 | Like, how do you feel being, you know,

02:10:35.660 | 5,000 miles away right now?

02:10:37.660 | - That would be pretty benign compared to, right?

02:10:39.340 | - Yeah, it's like, thanks, you know.

02:10:40.860 | - Right, there's something because like,

02:10:41.980 | you want a player to be liberated from self-consciousness.

02:10:44.340 | You don't want a player to be playing with an awareness

02:10:46.860 | or a fixation on external expectations or the external eye.

02:10:51.140 | One, like I remember the feeling in my chess life

02:10:53.220 | when I transitioned from losing myself in thought

02:10:56.140 | to thinking about how I looked thinking to the cameras

02:11:00.540 | or the groupies or whatever on the outside,

02:11:02.660 | like wildly different mindsets as a chess player, right?

02:11:06.780 | And so you have all these pressures

02:11:08.820 | that are trying to pull you

02:11:09.940 | out of an ideal performance state.

02:11:12.460 | And so one needs to learn, develop thick skin

02:11:14.580 | or a way of integrating it or be playful with it.

02:11:17.020 | And I really believe in embracing adversity.

02:11:20.500 | We have this theme of hunting adversity on the team,

02:11:22.820 | which is like these things that could be seen

02:11:27.260 | as detrimental or, you know, problems

02:11:31.140 | or things that could get in the way of our liberation

02:11:34.100 | is where we welcome them, like cold water, right?

02:11:36.880 | Getting in cold water every day is a very important,

02:11:39.180 | I think it's a beautiful opportunity to train it so much.

02:11:42.220 | But we don't want to get in cold water,

02:11:43.460 | gritting our teeth and hating it.

02:11:44.540 | No, we want to like love the fact

02:11:46.100 | that we're about to suffer in that cold water.

02:11:48.060 | I've been cold plunging for, you know,

02:11:49.900 | many, many years, maybe 15 years.

02:11:52.020 | And like, it's not like when you get into 34 degree water,

02:11:55.900 | even if you've been training for a very long time,

02:11:57.320 | you're thrilled about this five minute

02:11:58.820 | or 10 minute plunge you're about to do.

02:12:00.700 | - The most consistent stimulus for adrenaline release

02:12:04.560 | and noradrenaline release in the brain

02:12:06.980 | that is safe if done properly.

02:12:09.500 | - Right.

02:12:10.340 | - And you never really habituate.

02:12:12.660 | I maybe would just really quickly double click

02:12:15.540 | on this thing of cold plunging.

02:12:18.140 | I don't go for time.

02:12:19.860 | I think only in terms of walls of adrenaline.

02:12:22.700 | So some days like just getting in the thing is a big wall.

02:12:26.300 | I think that just for lack of a better word, there's a wall.

02:12:28.980 | On a hot day, I'm happy to get into the cold plunge.

02:12:31.840 | - Yeah.

02:12:32.680 | - But then what I think is so valuable about cold plunging

02:12:35.240 | is that if you start to focus

02:12:38.180 | on what neuroscientists call interoception,

02:12:40.400 | everything, our perception of everything

02:12:42.180 | from our skin inward,

02:12:43.580 | you can start to feel the deployment of adrenaline

02:12:45.980 | in your body, or at least its effects.

02:12:48.220 | And you can say, here's another wall of adrenaline.

02:12:50.140 | You watch your frame rate go up,

02:12:51.940 | the impulse to stay still, because as you move,

02:12:54.500 | you break up that thermal layer, it gets even colder.

02:12:56.700 | But then you also want to get out.

02:12:58.860 | And then that wall passes.

02:13:00.420 | And then you start to notice

02:13:01.540 | that the distance between the walls changes.

02:13:03.820 | And then playing with that in one's mind,

02:13:05.660 | as when I distract myself, the walls come suddenly,

02:13:10.260 | or when I'm focused on the walls,

02:13:12.100 | they seem like big swells,

02:13:13.720 | as opposed to when I relax myself,

02:13:17.640 | they seem like just like kind of more sharp peaks.

02:13:20.060 | And learning that those dynamics

02:13:21.980 | of how adrenaline impacts us cognitively,

02:13:26.100 | and frame rate and all that,

02:13:27.140 | I think is an immensely valuable practice.

02:13:29.140 | And I can't think of anything else,

02:13:30.620 | not sprinting, not lifting weights,

02:13:32.520 | not real life arguments, because that can be destructive.

02:13:36.220 | I can't think of any other kind of venue

02:13:38.900 | for exploring one's ability to work through stress

02:13:41.860 | and tension than the cold plunge.

02:13:44.820 | - I agree.

02:13:45.660 | I have this principle I call

02:13:47.280 | living on the other side of pain.

02:13:49.120 | And I think that pain,

02:13:50.800 | like mental discomfort, physical discomfort,

02:13:53.680 | or confronting some issue one doesn't want to think about,

02:13:56.880 | or taking on one's bias pattern,

02:13:59.200 | or if you're, let's just say,

02:14:00.640 | like a professional decision maker,

02:14:02.120 | taking on what the network of your cognitive biases

02:14:06.440 | tends to lead to.

02:14:08.000 | Like these are all forms of pain, right?

02:14:09.800 | I think the cold water training is such an exquisite way

02:14:12.760 | to practice living on the other side of pain

02:14:14.560 | in a way that is thematically resonant.

02:14:17.380 | And you can train at that,

02:14:18.720 | doing that physical practice can liberate you

02:14:21.340 | in your mental arenas to take on shit

02:14:25.300 | you don't want to take on.

02:14:26.420 | One thing I've found is that

02:14:27.900 | when you're training peak performers,

02:14:29.860 | there can be the impulse to go right at their weakness

02:14:33.140 | in the place they're making the error.

02:14:35.940 | But it's usually much less potent to do it that way

02:14:39.860 | because they're well calloused over in that area.

02:14:42.180 | So if you're like a poker player who has,

02:14:44.380 | like I said, some control issue, right?

02:14:46.740 | It's, you could like take on the control issue in poker,

02:14:50.640 | but they're so brilliant at poker,

02:14:51.920 | like they've built calluses around it,

02:14:53.480 | they've built ways of dealing with it,

02:14:55.320 | and they're able to play at a high level despite,

02:14:56.840 | but like, but they're probably very controlling at home

02:14:59.120 | as well with their spouse or their kids or whatever.

02:15:02.600 | And if you take on the control issues

02:15:03.920 | in places they're much less developed,

02:15:05.780 | it'll be much easier to take it on

02:15:07.080 | 'cause it's less calloused,

02:15:08.720 | and it will be massively liberating in their poker game.

02:15:11.060 | So I often, like this is this connect,

02:15:13.000 | this idea of interconnectedness

02:15:14.240 | and thematic interconnectedness.

02:15:15.620 | I'll identify a theme someone needs to work with,

02:15:18.320 | but then we'll practice that theme

02:15:20.540 | in other areas of their life.

02:15:22.320 | And then you could have core habits

02:15:23.960 | which manifest that theme,

02:15:25.040 | and then there comes this amazing moment

02:15:26.320 | where the theme just becomes like internalized

02:15:29.160 | because one practices it in things

02:15:30.640 | that are away from where it manifests professionally.

02:15:32.760 | And then it just releases,

02:15:34.160 | and then all the manifestations of that theme

02:15:36.080 | just become your way of life.

02:15:37.640 | So for example, like if one wants to take on

02:15:41.000 | one's resistance to discomfort, to pain,

02:15:44.400 | to pushing one's limits, right?

02:15:46.040 | One can practice things like cold plunging,

02:15:48.040 | like cardiovascular interval training,

02:15:49.960 | like other things like withholding orgasm, whatever.

02:15:54.320 | You can have ways of practicing

02:15:56.400 | like the theme that are completely separate

02:16:01.960 | from where it's manifesting or hindering you

02:16:04.520 | in your professional life

02:16:05.600 | where you're probably very good at dealing with it,

02:16:07.200 | and then the unlock will just happen,

02:16:09.280 | and you'll be liberated from it, right?

02:16:11.040 | This is one of the most powerful ways

02:16:12.280 | that I've found to train.

02:16:14.060 | I also find cold plunging is just unbelievable

02:16:16.520 | for sleep quality, for, I do contrast training now.

02:16:21.280 | And I agree with you, like I've spent a lot,

02:16:23.440 | for years I was doing like really long,

02:16:25.480 | cold, like 36 degree water for 11 or 12 minutes,

02:16:29.840 | and I pushed myself really hard.

02:16:31.520 | And man, 11 minutes is so different from nine minutes.

02:16:35.120 | Oh, different world.

02:16:36.880 | And now I found that like I have a practice

02:16:40.540 | of I'll do three to four rounds of 42 to 44 degrees

02:16:45.540 | between that and the sauna,

02:16:48.200 | and I'll do like one longer plunge a week.

02:16:50.080 | But like in daily practice,

02:16:51.200 | I don't feel the urge to do very long breath holds

02:16:54.360 | or very long cold plunges, I don't necessarily.

02:16:58.280 | - Yeah, same, I'll do cold plunge for one to three minutes,

02:17:01.320 | and I love contrast with heat.

02:17:03.720 | - Oh, so beautiful.

02:17:04.560 | - I'm very heat tolerant, I love, love, love the sauna.

02:17:08.400 | I don't love the cold,

02:17:09.880 | but I love the long arc of dopamine

02:17:12.160 | that comes after the cold.

02:17:14.240 | I always say, no one really enjoys being in the thing.

02:17:17.200 | You'd be feel-

02:17:18.320 | - Is there a better sleep hack?

02:17:19.800 | I'm asking you, 'cause you know this stuff.

02:17:21.460 | - Well, there is supplements that could support sleep

02:17:23.260 | and that kind of thing,

02:17:24.100 | and people learning how to deliberately relax their body

02:17:26.840 | can help with the transition to sleep and back to sleep.

02:17:29.280 | But, you know, one core principle

02:17:31.160 | that I haven't really talked about on the podcast

02:17:32.760 | is that if you, the more adrenaline,

02:17:35.040 | nor epinephrine, nor adrenaline,

02:17:37.960 | and dopamine that you experience early in the day,

02:17:39.900 | as well as cortisol from bright light,

02:17:41.720 | exercise, caffeine, and cold,

02:17:44.600 | the better you're gonna sleep at night.

02:17:46.040 | It also sets your circadian rhythm

02:17:47.800 | around kind of like a big set of arousal,

02:17:52.800 | promoting stimuli early in the day,

02:17:54.460 | and then, you know, last third of your day,

02:17:56.720 | you're very parasympathetic,

02:17:58.720 | for lack of a better way to put it,

02:18:00.220 | and that eases the transition to sleep.

02:18:02.080 | I mean, you know, dimming the lights,

02:18:03.280 | parasympathetic, bright lights,

02:18:05.560 | increases the amount of cortisol

02:18:06.960 | with your morning cortisol pulse by 50%, five zero,

02:18:10.120 | which is great.

02:18:11.140 | Keeps you less susceptible to infection all day,

02:18:14.140 | these kinds of things.

02:18:14.980 | I mean, we're meant to be in oscillation,

02:18:17.560 | obviously, across the 24-hour cycle,

02:18:19.200 | but even within the day.

02:18:21.080 | It's a little bit tougher

02:18:21.960 | when people have evening activities,

02:18:23.500 | or you put, like last night,

02:18:24.400 | I was watching these guys play a hard game of basketball

02:18:28.280 | at, you know, eight to 10 p.m.

02:18:31.000 | That's a lot of late-night work.

02:18:32.840 | - And we're on the West Coast.

02:18:33.800 | You can think what time that is East Coast time, right?

02:18:36.040 | - Right, right.

02:18:36.880 | So is there a better sleep stack?

02:18:37.920 | Not really.

02:18:38.760 | I mean, and if you want to increase

02:18:40.040 | your rapid eye movement sleep non-pharmacologically,

02:18:42.400 | I would say, meaning not exogenous pharmacology,

02:18:45.720 | yeah, the cold plunge in the morning,

02:18:46.920 | early part of the day.

02:18:47.760 | For evening, anything that moves blood out to your periphery,

02:18:52.760 | so sauna, pot shower, that sort of thing,

02:18:57.800 | is gonna drop your core body temperature

02:18:59.240 | when you get out, right?

02:19:00.700 | It's a little paradoxical to people,

02:19:02.020 | but you know, you warm up to then cool off

02:19:04.240 | at the level of core body temperature,

02:19:05.480 | and it'll ease the transition to sleep.

02:19:07.680 | Yeah, it's a wonderful practice.

02:19:09.840 | And people who pick at cold plunging,

02:19:11.600 | they're like, "Well, it blocks hypertrophy."

02:19:13.360 | Okay, yeah, okay, that's true.

02:19:14.840 | So in the six hours after you're trying to get your,

02:19:17.000 | you know, a little more peak on your biceps or something,

02:19:19.000 | it's gonna block that.

02:19:19.900 | But most people have not experienced control

02:19:23.000 | over their physiology at the level

02:19:26.080 | that comes from doing consistent cold plunging

02:19:28.280 | in the early part of the day,

02:19:29.800 | warming up and becoming more parasympathetic

02:19:32.720 | later in the day.

02:19:34.080 | It's like, they start to feel a level of control

02:19:36.120 | over their mood and energy that's so striking

02:19:38.920 | with basically zero cost tools.

02:19:41.640 | - Yeah, I agree.

02:19:42.480 | - Yeah, sorry to riff on that,

02:19:43.720 | but people will probably wonder about specifics.

02:19:47.060 | I wanna make sure that we talk about two things,

02:19:51.440 | and you can decide which one to talk about first.

02:19:55.240 | One is ego, and then the second one is,

02:19:58.120 | earlier you described a set of dynamics across the day

02:20:02.240 | and some concrete things about, you know,

02:20:04.600 | how one picks the most important question,

02:20:06.760 | like, "What am I working on today?"

02:20:09.240 | And how to kind of push that into certain portions

02:20:13.420 | of the day, how long to do that,

02:20:14.760 | and then how to, you know, stay out of stimulus and response

02:20:18.160 | in the transition point so that you can make the most

02:20:21.000 | of that work or extract the most from that work

02:20:23.640 | as you head into the evening dinner with your family,

02:20:26.640 | sleep, and then wake up, repeat.

02:20:28.800 | Which one do you think would be most valuable?

02:20:30.480 | - Games go wherever you wanna go, where should we go?

02:20:32.160 | - All right, before we get practical,

02:20:34.360 | let's get a little bit more theoretical,

02:20:38.720 | and then get back to practical.

02:20:42.060 | Ego, like the constriction is what comes to mind,

02:20:46.560 | like the idea that, like, I wanna impose my will

02:20:49.520 | on something, I want a certain outcome,

02:20:53.000 | and if I don't get it, it's gonna hurt in some way,

02:20:55.360 | there's some punishment mechanism internally,

02:20:58.160 | like, that might drive me to work even harder,

02:21:00.880 | it's not always bad.

02:21:02.240 | But how do you frame ego?

02:21:04.640 | And I will say that the words I am seem very important,

02:21:09.640 | like when people identify as I am the champion,

02:21:14.320 | I'm part of a champion team in the NBA,

02:21:16.760 | I'm a Celtic, you know, I'm a player,

02:21:19.560 | you know, I'm a Celtics player, clearly I'm not.

02:21:22.280 | But, you know, when we attach identity to ego,

02:21:26.700 | that's also where it seems like

02:21:29.400 | it kinda deepens the trench a bit.

02:21:31.200 | But maybe it can be more relaxed

02:21:32.560 | than the way I'm describing it.

02:21:33.640 | How do you think about ego?

02:21:35.160 | - We had, so Graham Duncan, my dear friend,

02:21:37.800 | joined us at the game last night,

02:21:39.400 | and Graham, I consider to be in the realm

02:21:42.080 | of, like, elite mental talent mapping and assessment

02:21:46.000 | to just be in the league of his own.

02:21:47.120 | He's such a genius in the realm of just finding

02:21:51.800 | and, like, identifying people who have world-class

02:21:56.800 | potential in mental arenas in really quirky ways.

02:21:59.880 | He's a beautiful soul.

02:22:02.080 | And one of the ways he frames this in the investment space

02:22:06.680 | when he's looking at high-potential investors

02:22:09.400 | is, like, he doesn't want to find people

02:22:12.240 | who have too specific an identity

02:22:14.360 | in the way that they relate to what they do,

02:22:17.640 | to make money, to invest, to whatever.

02:22:20.840 | Because, like, there's something static

02:22:22.800 | in, like, I am a X, Y, or Z,

02:22:25.820 | versus I am something more broad,

02:22:27.760 | which leads to one's relationship

02:22:30.480 | to, like, dynamic quality, to rediscovery,

02:22:32.520 | to changing as the world changes, right?

02:22:35.100 | I think that, and this relates a little bit

02:22:39.440 | to what I was describing in terms of learning chess locally

02:22:41.640 | versus learning chess in a way that connects

02:22:43.900 | to all of life, which is so dynamic.

02:22:49.360 | I think, and I spent many years studying

02:22:51.940 | Ayamaka Buddha's philosophy,

02:22:53.160 | and so I come from both a Western and Eastern perspective

02:22:57.400 | when I think about the question of ego.

02:22:59.240 | And I think that one of the things that happens in the West

02:23:01.520 | when we talk about East Asian philosophy

02:23:03.240 | is that we oversimplify it,

02:23:04.800 | and we create, we kind of polarize things.

02:23:08.120 | And I think, so it's easy to,

02:23:09.860 | people talk so quickly about being egoless, right,

02:23:12.400 | or say someone is low-ego.

02:23:14.440 | And when they say they're low-ego,

02:23:15.880 | they don't actually mean that they're low-ego.

02:23:17.440 | They mean that they have a sound egoic structure,

02:23:19.480 | like they're not, like if they say they're low-ego,

02:23:23.280 | they're usually saying that they are,

02:23:25.200 | they're not expressing insecurity all the time,

02:23:30.800 | which means that it's not that they have a low ego.

02:23:32.760 | It's that their ego is not fundamentally,

02:23:37.520 | like there's not a rupture in the structure

02:23:38.800 | that's leaking all the time.

02:23:40.200 | So the way I relate to ego

02:23:45.400 | from a competitive perspective

02:23:47.440 | or from an artistic perspective

02:23:50.040 | or a self-cultivation perspective

02:23:52.080 | is that I relate to it around dynamic versus static,

02:23:57.080 | constant exploration as opposed to being stuck

02:23:59.760 | in how one relates to old patterns.

02:24:02.360 | I relate to understanding the emptiness

02:24:04.080 | of our egoic dynamics,

02:24:06.400 | understanding the non-absolute nature of our ego,

02:24:11.400 | the relational nature of things,

02:24:13.760 | the interconnectedness and the interdependence

02:24:15.920 | of all things.

02:24:17.120 | I think it's so easy to have an identity

02:24:18.840 | which we think is like I am this,

02:24:20.600 | but we're not this.

02:24:22.760 | This doesn't exist out of relation to that,

02:24:25.000 | and that doesn't relate in relation to this other thing.

02:24:28.000 | So understanding the chain of relationality

02:24:30.460 | and then how our ego manifests in all of that.

02:24:33.680 | So having the ability to both dissolve one's relationship

02:24:37.120 | to like static egoic dynamics,

02:24:40.120 | but also having a sense of identity.

02:24:43.920 | And having a sense of what one's self-expression is,

02:24:45.960 | and having like when we are,

02:24:47.880 | there is this thing about will.

02:24:50.240 | Like when you're competing,

02:24:51.520 | like you can feel when someone has an unbreakable will.

02:24:54.720 | Like when you're matching up against somebody

02:24:56.320 | and they're wishy-washy,

02:24:58.120 | you can just blow through them.

02:24:59.920 | But when their will is just like,

02:25:03.760 | like I'll never forget Marcello Garcia

02:25:05.520 | against Calassans in a big world championship match.

02:25:09.480 | Calassans was wrist-locking everybody,

02:25:10.920 | and Marcello put his hand right into the wrist-lock

02:25:13.000 | and looked into his eyes.

02:25:14.040 | It's like, "Try it."

02:25:15.560 | He just put his hand into it.

02:25:17.840 | And you can break someone by being unbreakable.

02:25:21.280 | You can see a lot of fights

02:25:22.400 | where somebody tries to submit someone

02:25:23.860 | and someone is unsubmitted,

02:25:27.020 | and the person who has the huge advantage gets broken

02:25:29.160 | because they realize, "Holy shit, this guy is unbreakable."

02:25:31.400 | And so they become broken, right?

02:25:33.440 | So there's having the ability to have that like,

02:25:35.840 | when you touch a fighter,

02:25:38.760 | like fighters all rub up against each other.

02:25:40.880 | You learn a lot feeling someone.

02:25:43.000 | So if you meet fighters that hug,

02:25:44.320 | they'll give each other,

02:25:45.160 | you learn so much on the touch, you know?

02:25:47.720 | And you can feel when someone is brittle.

02:25:51.160 | You touch them, you can feel how much contact they've taken,

02:25:54.600 | how much they've been hit, how much they've absorbed,

02:25:56.740 | how much they've been abused, how much they've received.

02:25:59.480 | And you can feel where their energy stops.

02:26:01.460 | You can feel if there's just static things in them.

02:26:06.360 | And then you can also feel

02:26:07.780 | when the earth is moving inside of them,

02:26:10.000 | when it's just like this molten energy

02:26:11.640 | is just moving in them.

02:26:12.480 | And when you feel a body that like,

02:26:15.260 | like it just can envelop you,

02:26:17.020 | and it can be a mountain or it can be like water.

02:26:21.440 | So I relate to ego in that.

02:26:22.760 | You wanna be able to be like water and be like a mountain.

02:26:25.280 | I've never answered that question before.

02:26:28.200 | I just riffed on that.

02:26:29.280 | But that's like the essence of how I relate to it.

02:26:31.000 | - I mean, and as I walked in here

02:26:32.920 | to take a seat at my chair,

02:26:34.080 | I got a good hard slap on the back from you,

02:26:36.000 | and I was wondering if you were testing me.

02:26:39.000 | - I felt you last night too.

02:26:40.880 | - I won't ask what your read of my ego was,

02:26:43.860 | but I felt it as a slap of camaraderie.

02:26:47.160 | Like, let's do this, which felt great.

02:26:50.020 | And I was also thinking about my good friend,

02:26:51.280 | Lex Friedman, who is a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu

02:26:54.800 | and a very intense guy

02:26:56.680 | who wears his heart on his sleeve publicly.

02:26:58.520 | And people sometimes will take shots at him for that,

02:27:01.760 | which really upsets me.

02:27:02.640 | - I really respect Lex.

02:27:03.720 | I think what he does is awesome.

02:27:05.080 | I love his podcast.

02:27:06.760 | - He's brilliant.

02:27:07.600 | - And the way he, in really prickly issues,

02:27:10.960 | has got people on both sides of things

02:27:13.520 | and welcomes everyone in and has dialogue,

02:27:15.200 | I have a huge amount of respect

02:27:16.460 | for how Lex handles himself in the public world.

02:27:19.560 | - Yeah, you guys are gonna have a fun conversation.

02:27:21.280 | He's gonna be jealous

02:27:23.200 | that we got a chance to sit down here.

02:27:24.560 | But Lex is at home and with his friends

02:27:29.560 | exactly how he appears to be.

02:27:32.880 | Like, all that intense self-torture

02:27:37.000 | around what to do and how to frame something,

02:27:39.520 | who to talk to, how to talk to them,

02:27:40.960 | and that's the world he lives in.

02:27:44.440 | And, but in terms of his physicality,

02:27:47.320 | like, I think it's hard to understand,

02:27:49.440 | like, just how, I mean, like,

02:27:52.560 | he's, like, dense like dark matter, you know?

02:27:54.680 | Like, it's the, and I think a lot of guys

02:27:57.200 | that roll jiu-jitsu, like, you shake their hands

02:27:59.440 | and, like, there's a solidity there

02:28:02.800 | that's very different than just muscle.

02:28:07.160 | It's, like, people that are just, like,

02:28:09.520 | they're used to being up against bodies, apparently,

02:28:11.960 | you know, so it's an experience, you know?

02:28:14.840 | These are subtle things, but clearly they matter.

02:28:18.540 | And as you've pointed out,

02:28:21.060 | one brings them to their professional life.

02:28:23.120 | You bring it to friendships.

02:28:24.680 | You know, I can't think of,

02:28:25.700 | I have many super, quote, unquote, solid friends,

02:28:28.320 | but Lex is among the most solid of them.

02:28:31.080 | He's just, like, his presence.

02:28:32.640 | - Yeah. - He has a courageousness

02:28:34.000 | with which he, in my observation from afar,

02:28:37.200 | comports himself in the world

02:28:38.440 | that I have a lot of respect for.

02:28:40.440 | - And Rick Rubin, you know, we both know Rick,

02:28:42.980 | and people know Rick as this bearded icon of creativity.

02:28:47.880 | And he is indeed that.

02:28:50.060 | The fluidity that he moves through life with is just,

02:28:54.260 | it's, like, it's astonishing.

02:28:55.960 | I've spent a lot of time with him,

02:28:57.220 | and I don't wanna, like, get into my observations of Rick,

02:29:00.040 | the Rickisms, if you will,

02:29:01.940 | but it's astonishing how much attention

02:29:06.940 | and he puts into creating this thing

02:29:11.480 | that we're talking about, space,

02:29:12.520 | like getting out of stimulus and response.

02:29:14.640 | It's, I don't think he'd mind me sharing this.

02:29:16.120 | It's not uncommon for me to, like, go over

02:29:18.240 | to hang out with him, and he'll just say, like,

02:29:19.920 | "Hey, like, before we, like, talk,

02:29:22.800 | you wanna just, like, do this meditation?"

02:29:24.760 | And we'll just, like, sit there and meditate.

02:29:26.040 | And you quickly go into a mindset of, like,

02:29:28.200 | "Oh my goodness, like, this is, like, a thing."

02:29:30.700 | But, like, nope, you just get into being present.

02:29:33.920 | And then, I don't know, then you hang out,

02:29:35.780 | and you talk about, if you're us, you know, the Ramones,

02:29:38.580 | 'cause we both love the Ramones.

02:29:39.880 | Yeah, so I love the way you frame ego.

02:29:43.860 | I think that that's very helpful

02:29:45.620 | because a physical embodiment of something

02:29:50.700 | that is largely psychological to most people,

02:29:54.300 | at least the concept, I think is very helpful.

02:29:57.260 | Do you ever, just as a practice,

02:29:59.040 | just look at how people walk, or how they interact?

02:30:02.700 | - Oh, yeah, I mean, of course, that's my way of life.

02:30:05.380 | I mean, it's funny, as a chess player, even,

02:30:07.900 | like, I used to study people off the board all the time.

02:30:10.140 | I'd watch them, like, you watch,

02:30:12.220 | I remember you used to play these tournaments in Bermuda,

02:30:14.700 | and once a year, invitational, like, high-level tournament,

02:30:17.500 | and then, like, you'd watch someone walking,

02:30:19.460 | and they'd get caught in the rain.

02:30:21.140 | And you, watching someone in the rain, you learn so much.

02:30:24.820 | Like, would they just stand and embrace it?

02:30:26.900 | Would they put something over their head and run away?

02:30:29.040 | What would they do, right?

02:30:29.880 | Like, and in general, if someone has a static,

02:30:34.360 | like, a negative relation to the rain,

02:30:36.140 | they're usually pretty controlling,

02:30:37.480 | and then you have a feel for how to handle them on the board,

02:30:39.600 | create chaos on that board.

02:30:41.160 | Like, just mix it up, make it uncontrollable.

02:30:43.680 | And then, or if someone is, like, full free spirit

02:30:46.600 | in the rain, like me, like, maybe you wanna make the game,

02:30:50.840 | like, a little bit more quiet, conservative,

02:30:53.520 | like, strategic, not so chaotic,

02:30:55.800 | like, where one has to find exact, precise solutions

02:30:59.980 | in specific kinds of positions,

02:31:01.720 | where, like, you can't improvise.

02:31:03.200 | You're not finding hidden harmonies in chaos.

02:31:04.800 | You're finding specific thing, right?

02:31:07.320 | Control in rain.

02:31:10.080 | And then, in the fight game, man,

02:31:11.760 | you're watching people all the time.

02:31:13.400 | I mean, you watch fighters watching one another.

02:31:15.920 | You see a lot.

02:31:17.240 | Feeling one another, watching one another.

02:31:19.460 | And I love watching people away from what they do,

02:31:22.440 | 'cause all those themes are much more visible

02:31:26.040 | than in when they're doing what they do.

02:31:28.460 | - What about in non-competitive endeavors,

02:31:31.400 | like ballet, opera, music,

02:31:36.400 | where certainly it's competitive in that, you know,

02:31:39.280 | you're competing for people's attention, time, and money,

02:31:41.440 | but you're not, it's not direct competition.

02:31:44.420 | Do you spend time working with key performers

02:31:46.920 | in these domains where, you know, like,

02:31:50.160 | just, I heard from someone recently who,

02:31:53.120 | she said, "You know, I'm a good dancer,

02:31:54.520 | but then I went to New York and I discovered

02:31:56.240 | that I'm not such a good dancer."

02:31:57.800 | Like, the level of who gets to actually dance

02:32:00.780 | in some of the premier venues there

02:32:02.200 | is, like, so unbelievably high that,

02:32:04.820 | and by the way, that shouldn't discourage anyone.

02:32:07.800 | That should encourage people, show them what's possible.

02:32:11.240 | Do you work with people like that,

02:32:12.400 | or is it usually competitive arenas?

02:32:14.200 | - I've utilized competitive fields

02:32:17.080 | as beautiful laboratories for refining

02:32:20.800 | my relationship to the training process

02:32:22.560 | because of how relentlessly truth-telling they are,

02:32:24.320 | but I also come from a family of artists.

02:32:26.320 | My grandmother was a brilliant

02:32:27.760 | abstract expressionist painter and sculptor,

02:32:30.360 | Stella Waitzkin, amazing woman.

02:32:32.360 | She was in the, she was good friends

02:32:33.800 | with Hans Hoffman and Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

02:32:37.000 | I mean, that was her crowd.

02:32:37.840 | She was part of the, like, the early beat generation

02:32:40.800 | back in the day, and I come from a family of artists,

02:32:44.160 | and yeah, I mean, one of the, you know,

02:32:49.160 | a lot of what I'm thinking about in recent years

02:32:52.240 | is how to channel my life's work

02:32:53.960 | into making the biggest positive impact

02:32:58.680 | possible in the world, and I'm really worried

02:33:01.480 | in this moment around what's happening

02:33:04.480 | in human consciousness, the depths of distraction.

02:33:07.520 | How can we enhance the human ability

02:33:11.520 | to make decisions in an increasingly complex world

02:33:14.520 | where there's so much misinformation,

02:33:17.240 | and also, you know, how can we,

02:33:19.160 | how can we take on humanity's biggest challenges?

02:33:21.120 | And so, for example, one of the projects

02:33:22.480 | that I'm really excited about

02:33:24.400 | that I've been working on for the last couple years

02:33:26.200 | is called Lila Science, and these aren't competitors.

02:33:29.440 | These are scientists, and we're essentially,

02:33:32.480 | we've, so I was sitting with this question

02:33:35.480 | for two or three years, like,

02:33:37.720 | who should I partner with to try to take

02:33:42.360 | on humanity's biggest challenges?

02:33:44.640 | And I met this guy.

02:33:46.440 | He ended up renting Graham's house,

02:33:48.920 | who we were at the game with yesterday,

02:33:51.080 | next door to mine in Costa Rica,

02:33:53.360 | and his name is Jeff Van Montzel,

02:33:55.440 | and Jeff is a, just a brilliant

02:33:59.560 | scientific visionary and creator,

02:34:02.000 | and we ended up having three weeks of dialogue,

02:34:06.220 | and I incidentally, like, invested

02:34:07.840 | in one of his companies years before,

02:34:09.400 | which was interesting, but we had, like,

02:34:11.080 | this incredible three weeks of dialogue

02:34:12.680 | while he was standing next door,

02:34:13.720 | and then we looked at each other

02:34:14.560 | and realized we should be teaming up,

02:34:16.400 | and we've, and I've also been very close to

02:34:20.320 | and observing the world of artificial intelligence

02:34:23.120 | for a long time, partially because Demis Hassabis

02:34:27.200 | was a childhood friend of mine.

02:34:29.440 | We grew up playing chess together

02:34:30.600 | from when we were, like, 11 years old,

02:34:32.040 | and so I've observed his journey,

02:34:34.960 | and I think that it's very interesting in chess,

02:34:39.960 | like, the seat that I had watching

02:34:44.780 | the impact on chess of, first, computers,

02:34:48.740 | increasingly powerful machines,

02:34:50.040 | and then artificial intelligence was fascinating,

02:34:52.940 | because if you imagine, like, what it's like

02:34:55.660 | to see one's life's work be overcome

02:34:58.540 | in three hours of experimentation,

02:35:00.660 | like what AlphaZero did, just breathtaking,

02:35:04.540 | and to give some perspective on things,

02:35:06.100 | there's an ELO system in chess, right?

02:35:08.020 | There's a ranking system.

02:35:09.740 | The highest rated chess players in the world,

02:35:12.800 | human chess players, are rated, you know,

02:35:14.200 | from Garry Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer,

02:35:16.720 | all the world champions are rated

02:35:18.160 | somewhere in the 2800 to 2900 level, right, ELO.

02:35:21.820 | The strongest AI engines now are north of 3800 ELO,

02:35:27.380 | and just for context of how wild that gap is,

02:35:29.900 | when I was eight years old, my rating was 1800, right?

02:35:33.380 | So the gap between me at eight,

02:35:35.220 | which is like, I was ridiculous,

02:35:36.900 | and the world champion, human,

02:35:39.020 | is the same gap as the world champion

02:35:40.780 | and the strongest AI engines in the world.

02:35:43.260 | And so, like, it's very hard for humans

02:35:45.140 | to conceive of being the ants, right,

02:35:48.800 | relative to the humans.

02:35:49.900 | We are the ants now, in terms of,

02:35:51.460 | or we soon will be, what is possible.

02:35:53.140 | And I think that that could be channeled for the good,

02:35:55.780 | or it could be channeled for the bad,

02:35:57.060 | and the question, what are the motivations

02:35:58.740 | of the people who are really driving these companies?

02:36:00.340 | So I've been thinking for a long time

02:36:01.340 | of how to combine, like, what's the light side of the force

02:36:05.740 | of the artificial intelligence world?

02:36:08.060 | And what Jeff and I, and a dear friend,

02:36:11.060 | Chris Fussell, who is a brilliant man who,

02:36:14.620 | he wrote "Team of Teams" and "One Mission."

02:36:16.180 | He was an elite Navy SEAL,

02:36:18.980 | and then he ended up running

02:36:19.980 | Joint Special Operations Command,

02:36:21.340 | JSOC, with Stan McChrystal,

02:36:22.420 | then he was president of the McChrystal Group,

02:36:23.800 | and now he's president of Lila Science.

02:36:26.780 | Jeff, Chris, and I, and a brilliant man named Jack Millwood,

02:36:29.260 | who's the chief cultural officer, have been teaming up,

02:36:31.900 | and I brought together this tribe

02:36:33.180 | of a few different brilliant friends who were part of this.

02:36:36.900 | And it's basically taking cutting-edge science

02:36:41.900 | and taking cutting-edge AI,

02:36:43.940 | bringing them together to create

02:36:46.100 | scientific superintelligence,

02:36:48.060 | focused on, and we're creating these AI science factories,

02:36:50.720 | where the entire scientific process can be replicated,

02:36:53.460 | can be driven nonstop.

02:36:55.140 | The way AlphaZero was driving nonstop iteration

02:36:58.620 | in the chess world,

02:36:59.700 | what if this is happening in the scientific process?

02:37:01.140 | - So pose a hypothesis.

02:37:02.980 | Isolate variables, test hypothesis,

02:37:06.380 | feedback to hypothesis, confirm or deny hypothesis,

02:37:09.780 | and just-- - And experimental design,

02:37:11.420 | and experimental execution,

02:37:12.820 | and then study of experimental results,

02:37:14.500 | and then study of the entire scientific literature.

02:37:17.260 | And imagine all of that happening with robotics,

02:37:20.280 | with 3,800 ELO-rated scientists, AI scientists,

02:37:25.280 | and then millions of them networked.

02:37:28.080 | And now, if you have this, from my perspective,

02:37:30.220 | the most important thing is the safety, right?

02:37:32.180 | And I think that a lot of these AI companies

02:37:33.820 | aren't prioritizing safety first, we are.

02:37:36.460 | And I think, for me, it's been a really important thing,

02:37:38.660 | thinking about this,

02:37:39.500 | 'cause I've been sitting with this question

02:37:40.320 | for a lot of years.

02:37:41.780 | In order to do something like this,

02:37:43.060 | you have to trust that the people who are driving it,

02:37:46.500 | if they have max temptation,

02:37:48.340 | but something could be, like the Manhattan Project,

02:37:51.760 | could be potentially negative for humanity,

02:37:54.460 | that they would not push the button,

02:37:55.720 | they would lead to the satisfaction of all their dreams,

02:37:58.860 | if it would be taking an existential risk for humanity.

02:38:00.820 | And this team, I really believe in that way.

02:38:03.380 | And so, like, what's most exciting to me about this

02:38:05.620 | is the material science side.

02:38:06.660 | I mean, the life sciences, we could, you know,

02:38:08.260 | the eradication of disease,

02:38:09.460 | it's unbelievable what could happen.

02:38:11.220 | I think we'll be blown away

02:38:12.260 | by what happens in the coming years.

02:38:14.000 | But the material science part of it,

02:38:15.820 | for me personally, is what matters most,

02:38:17.500 | because I really don't think it matters

02:38:19.980 | if humans are all living for 150, 200 years,

02:38:21.820 | if we have no climate to live on.

02:38:23.740 | - Right.

02:38:25.540 | - I mean, the material innovations

02:38:27.800 | that could be emerging in the coming years

02:38:29.740 | to take on the climate crisis are breathtaking.

02:38:32.220 | So it's a project I'm deeply involved in,

02:38:34.500 | and it has nothing to do with competition.

02:38:36.260 | I mean, I guess everything is competitive

02:38:37.660 | from one perspective,

02:38:38.500 | but this is about driving discovery, driving innovation.

02:38:42.780 | - I love it.

02:38:43.860 | It also reflects your clearly repeating pattern

02:38:47.260 | of being willing to segment your life

02:38:49.680 | into different goals and different pursuits,

02:38:54.140 | applying what you've learned previously,

02:38:55.780 | learning new things and incorporating those.

02:38:57.540 | It brings me back to two things that we touched on earlier.

02:39:00.900 | One, that if we don't close the hatch on,

02:39:02.840 | we're gonna get it from the listeners,

02:39:04.980 | which is this paper that we both read.

02:39:06.820 | I just want to, or took a look at.

02:39:09.220 | - Before the paper,

02:39:10.060 | let me just say one important thing.

02:39:11.660 | To me, what you just said really hits home.

02:39:13.820 | But I think while one is taking on

02:39:16.800 | all these different things,

02:39:17.640 | for me personally, it's important to always be in the fire.

02:39:20.360 | Like I need to be training myself,

02:39:22.100 | like what I'm doing on the ocean every day,

02:39:24.020 | in my own training.

02:39:25.260 | The thing that drives me crazy are armchair quarterbacks,

02:39:28.540 | or what Robert Persik used to call philosophologists.

02:39:31.140 | Which are like the literary critics versus the writer,

02:39:34.500 | or the philosophologist versus the philosopher,

02:39:36.260 | or the armchair quarterback versus the quarterback.

02:39:38.420 | So for me, my way of life, I just don't know.

02:39:42.380 | It's hard for me to believe in anybody in these things

02:39:44.940 | who isn't putting themselves on the line as a way of life.

02:39:47.620 | So my own ocean training, and my own competitive training,

02:39:51.940 | and like being immersed in the truth-telling nature

02:39:54.580 | of the competitive world,

02:39:56.420 | is something that I feel is really like,

02:39:59.260 | we never have the truth nailed.

02:40:01.900 | We're never liberated from our egoic dynamics.

02:40:04.220 | We're always susceptible to becoming static.

02:40:07.420 | That's, I've really come to feel that.

02:40:10.020 | And I don't believe, so like,

02:40:12.340 | it's a big value system for me.

02:40:14.020 | - And the daily physical interactions with the ocean,

02:40:17.580 | with fear, with uncertainty,

02:40:20.620 | with just variables that you can't control,

02:40:23.900 | and trying to identify what are the variables

02:40:25.540 | I can control in this context,

02:40:27.380 | and work with those to try and tease out new learning.

02:40:30.980 | That running those algorithms every day

02:40:36.660 | seems absolutely essential.

02:40:37.980 | - There's nothing like the ocean

02:40:39.180 | to expose any little micro inkling

02:40:42.940 | of like the illusion of control.

02:40:45.220 | 'Cause you cannot control the ocean.

02:40:46.660 | You can't overcome the ocean.

02:40:48.180 | The ocean's gonna kick your ass.

02:40:49.780 | So you need to blend with her, and receive her,

02:40:52.220 | and honor her.

02:40:53.060 | Yeah, like that's where I do my inner work out there.

02:40:58.900 | Okay, your study, go ahead, do it.

02:41:00.260 | - Well, so it's not my study,

02:41:01.820 | but this paper that I sent you,

02:41:03.100 | I think is really interesting.

02:41:04.900 | It's a paper published in the journal "Neuron,"

02:41:06.460 | very fine journal, excellent paper.

02:41:08.340 | We'll post a link to it,

02:41:09.340 | but has many interesting features about,

02:41:12.260 | it's really about the study of surprise

02:41:13.820 | and the dopamine system.

02:41:14.860 | But they use as the experimental context,

02:41:18.420 | people watching a game of basketball,

02:41:22.780 | and they observe that the reset

02:41:24.980 | on sort of the interval timer

02:41:28.780 | is essentially said anytime there's been a reversal

02:41:31.220 | of which team has the ball.

02:41:32.260 | So a drive down court, you know,

02:41:34.020 | by one team, then the other team.

02:41:37.380 | And, you know, if there's a rebound

02:41:39.000 | and then it switches direction, whatever,

02:41:40.300 | might not switch direction.

02:41:41.580 | I mean, basketball provides the perfect dynamic

02:41:44.600 | to study this while people are being,

02:41:46.440 | while there's some detection of brain activity going on.

02:41:50.400 | And one of, I think, the most interesting questions

02:41:54.100 | about this paper and implications are that

02:41:56.340 | just as we can set the aperture of our vision

02:42:00.660 | or the frame rate of how well we're clocking time,

02:42:03.380 | how finely we're clocking time

02:42:04.740 | or how coarsely we're clocking time,

02:42:06.700 | there's this big question,

02:42:07.660 | which is kind of a philosophical question really,

02:42:09.660 | which is how do we segment time in our life?

02:42:12.380 | Earlier, you mentioned that one of the major

02:42:15.080 | kind of timestamps, if you will,

02:42:18.020 | is a bad event, like a, oh shit,

02:42:23.020 | like the things went completely differently

02:42:25.400 | than I would have preferred them to.

02:42:26.760 | It could be the death of another,

02:42:27.680 | it could be the death of a dream,

02:42:28.800 | it could be a, you know, a setback or whatever,

02:42:32.640 | that it marks time.

02:42:34.280 | And we just had these fires.

02:42:35.380 | I mean, LA will be before and after the fires of 2025.

02:42:41.280 | You know, I remember early in 2020, Kobe Bryant dying, right?

02:42:45.540 | So these things, I remember the Challenger explosion,

02:42:47.580 | like negative events, you know,

02:42:49.980 | occupy a certain place in our memory

02:42:53.140 | more easily than positive events,

02:42:54.540 | but no one will forget the birth of their first child

02:42:57.860 | or hopefully their second child too

02:42:59.820 | if they had a second child or their wedding day, right?

02:43:02.420 | These things segment time.

02:43:04.220 | You seem to be able to segment your life

02:43:09.100 | into a series of pursuits where you cut ties

02:43:12.960 | with the practice of something like chess

02:43:16.640 | and you take what you learn and move it forward

02:43:19.040 | into what seems to be a very different lifestyle

02:43:22.160 | and way of being.

02:43:23.560 | I think one of the major challenges

02:43:25.840 | for a lot of people, it seems,

02:43:27.740 | is how to thread the different elements of their life forward

02:43:30.320 | in a way that feels contiguous.

02:43:33.440 | And I think it's probably true

02:43:38.480 | that most people would prefer

02:43:40.260 | to not have major losses be necessary

02:43:44.580 | in order to segment their life in the most fulfilling way.

02:43:49.280 | So how do you think about the segmentation of time?

02:43:53.540 | And maybe we'll run this backward

02:43:54.940 | from the scale of your lifetime.

02:43:57.340 | We don't know how long you'll live,

02:43:58.620 | but hopefully a long time.

02:44:00.100 | Let's assume by way of standard genetics

02:44:02.340 | somewhere in the neighborhood of between 90 and 110,

02:44:04.820 | if you take good care of yourself, which you seem to.

02:44:06.660 | - Sounds good.

02:44:07.500 | - Okay?

02:44:08.340 | And then let's compare that to how one structures a day

02:44:15.020 | and that will allow us to bring us back

02:44:17.100 | to what you talked about before

02:44:18.280 | with this most important question,

02:44:19.700 | dynamic and focus and replenishing

02:44:22.120 | and dynamic between conscious and unconscious mind.

02:44:24.980 | So when you think about your life, you're 48 years old.

02:44:28.260 | - Yeah. - Okay, I'm 49.

02:44:29.140 | So we're more or less the same point

02:44:32.020 | looking backward anyway.

02:44:33.940 | Our lives are very different, but same age, roughly.

02:44:37.400 | If you think you're going to live to be about 100,

02:44:41.020 | how are you thinking about your timeframe?

02:44:43.860 | Are you thinking, okay,

02:44:44.700 | here's what I'm going to do for the next five years.

02:44:47.220 | 10, I'll allow that whatever's happening in my life

02:44:50.540 | to dictate what I do next.

02:44:52.340 | I mean, how are you running this analysis?

02:44:55.120 | - That's an awesome question.

02:44:57.260 | I mean, so we have to,

02:44:58.300 | we're basically taking all the macro and all the micro

02:45:00.660 | and we're going to boil it down right here.

02:45:02.460 | That's beautiful.

02:45:04.120 | Um.

02:45:04.960 | That was a very expansive, elegant question.

02:45:13.080 | I think the true answer, it's interesting.

02:45:17.680 | There's, I find this distinction between how,

02:45:22.680 | like when I think about a question like that,

02:45:25.100 | between how I actually relate to the question

02:45:28.440 | and how I might deconstruct how I actually relate

02:45:31.080 | to the question to make it relatable.

02:45:33.680 | But is the deconstructed version actually true

02:45:36.840 | to how I really relate to the question, right?

02:45:40.360 | 'Cause accurate deconstruction is so nuanced

02:45:47.240 | and difficult, right?

02:45:49.320 | So if I, how I experientially relate to that question

02:45:53.360 | is that I'm living, I want to live my life

02:45:57.540 | with just relentless truth to myself,

02:46:00.860 | with authenticity, with love, with receptivity.

02:46:05.620 | I want to deepen my connection to what I'm doing,

02:46:09.800 | the arts I'm practicing in specifically,

02:46:13.580 | and in utilizing and tapping into my relationship

02:46:16.980 | to the universe through the artistic exploration.

02:46:20.000 | I have not planned out the next 10, 20, 40, 50, 60 years.

02:46:27.200 | I do have a long time horizon on how I think about plans

02:46:30.040 | and developments and projects I'm working on.

02:46:32.340 | But it's like this fusion of the cultivation

02:46:39.380 | of full presence right now, and playing the long game.

02:46:44.380 | But I don't, I'm not clear on where the long game is going.

02:46:47.620 | One of my dear friends, Boyd Vardy, you know Boyd?

02:46:50.740 | - I know of him and I'm a huge admirer of his work.

02:46:53.380 | - Oh, you should have him on, he's awesome.

02:46:54.980 | He's a beautiful, or you should go to South Africa

02:46:56.980 | and go on a lion track with him.

02:46:58.660 | - Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to.

02:46:59.780 | - Yeah, so he's an awesome--

02:47:01.620 | - I've been connected to him through Martha

02:47:02.700 | back, a previous guest on this podcast,

02:47:04.340 | and she spent, they're good friends.

02:47:05.860 | They've spent a lot of time in Londolozzi together,

02:47:09.340 | and I'd love to get Boyd Vardy on here.

02:47:11.580 | - He's a beautiful soul.

02:47:12.980 | He's a real brother, he's a kindred spirit.

02:47:15.380 | Like every once in a while, you run into someone,

02:47:16.780 | you're like, [laughs]

02:47:18.940 | In his book, "Lion Tracker's Guide to Life,"

02:47:24.940 | he has this gorgeous quote,

02:47:27.060 | which is the words of a master tracker, Reneas.

02:47:32.200 | "I have no idea where I'm going,

02:47:35.120 | "but I know exactly how to get there."

02:47:37.020 | When I read those words, I was just like,

02:47:41.440 | they resonated very deeply in my soul.

02:47:43.900 | I think those words are a really good,

02:47:46.060 | I would take out the exactly,

02:47:47.140 | I don't know anything exactly,

02:47:49.220 | so I don't know where I'm going,

02:47:50.500 | but I have a really beautiful sense

02:47:53.620 | that I'm tracking my way there.

02:47:55.820 | - You've got a process that seems to work very well.

02:48:00.340 | At least up until this point,

02:48:01.460 | there's no reason to think it wouldn't work well,

02:48:03.780 | especially given that you said not exactly,

02:48:05.940 | leaving that openness to changes in our biology,

02:48:09.740 | life events in and for people around us.

02:48:14.300 | - I have a big part of me,

02:48:16.140 | and it's a strength and a weakness.

02:48:17.180 | And I think a lot, when I meet people,

02:48:18.700 | I think a lot about the entanglement

02:48:19.940 | of their brilliance and their eccentricity,

02:48:21.700 | or their genius and their dysfunction.

02:48:23.460 | And when you're working with peak performers,

02:48:25.300 | you need to understand it,

02:48:26.380 | and its entanglement is often very, very complex,

02:48:28.540 | and people can think,

02:48:29.360 | "Oh, I can make this person more efficient

02:48:30.300 | "by just removing this,"

02:48:31.500 | but that will be connected to their genius,

02:48:33.120 | and you'll be cutting some of it away, right?

02:48:35.660 | And so when you're working with crazy, brilliant,

02:48:38.500 | and anyone who's really a virtuoso

02:48:40.340 | has some craziness built into what they're doing.

02:48:43.160 | And the entanglement of their brilliance

02:48:47.400 | and their dysfunction is so complex and nuanced,

02:48:51.620 | and one should be very careful to not do anything

02:48:54.240 | until one understands that entanglement with huge nuance.

02:48:56.900 | And so the art of coaching people of that nature

02:48:59.680 | is like 99.9% listening, observing, not doing.

02:49:03.340 | And one of the biggest mistakes that coaches make

02:49:04.860 | is doing, doing too much,

02:49:07.020 | 'cause they need to show that they're valuable, right?

02:49:09.180 | And so I think a lot about,

02:49:11.300 | like, we need to really understand

02:49:13.200 | the nature of that entanglement.

02:49:14.800 | And in me, that entanglement's complex.

02:49:19.660 | And I have a profound allergy

02:49:24.260 | to being untrue to myself.

02:49:25.860 | Why?

02:49:27.820 | Well, I think a big part of the reason

02:49:29.440 | is that period when I was 15, 16, 17, 18 years old,

02:49:32.740 | and I described where I got pulled

02:49:34.620 | into this externalized thing from the film

02:49:36.620 | and the public scrutiny when I wasn't ready for it,

02:49:38.760 | and being urged and not having the maturity to resist it,

02:49:43.760 | 'cause that's ultimately on me,

02:49:45.540 | to take on chess outside of my self-expression.

02:49:48.140 | Like, what would Karpov do here, not what would Josh do here?

02:49:51.340 | And I didn't have the understanding

02:49:52.620 | of learning Karpov through Kasparov, right?

02:49:56.180 | And so I moved into,

02:49:57.860 | like, my first love was taken away from me,

02:49:59.660 | or I allowed myself to have it taken away from me,

02:50:02.700 | which is how I would actually frame it.

02:50:05.500 | And it was made static and stale

02:50:08.260 | and corrupted and externalized.

02:50:10.020 | And there's so much existential heartbreak in me

02:50:13.580 | about the loss of that first love

02:50:17.520 | that I have the gift of being just fucking allergic

02:50:22.440 | to being untrue to myself.

02:50:25.560 | And so that's part of how I track through life,

02:50:28.540 | is if I don't love someone, I don't work with them,

02:50:32.480 | no matter what the temptation is.

02:50:34.620 | If something feels untrue to me, I don't do it.

02:50:37.720 | Now, sometimes we have to sit in the unknowing for a while,

02:50:40.320 | and something can be off for a while, right?

02:50:43.680 | It's like there's peaks and valleys of everything, right?

02:50:46.280 | And we're still in the learning process, right?

02:50:48.200 | We can have long plateaus.

02:50:50.280 | Like, when I stopped playing chess,

02:50:52.960 | I felt like I'd lost the love,

02:50:54.160 | but I sat for two years with the question

02:50:57.560 | to be clear on whether I was in a plateau of the love

02:50:59.640 | or if I'd lost the love.

02:51:00.960 | And then I gained clarity.

02:51:01.800 | No, no, you've lost the love.

02:51:03.040 | And then I was done.

02:51:03.880 | Never played again.

02:51:05.120 | Never played a chess game again.

02:51:06.680 | So that factored in.

02:51:10.560 | Like, I have this...

02:51:15.040 | - It's so interesting how our, like, some of the,

02:51:17.200 | like, our most powerful

02:51:19.760 | guiding principles or voices in us

02:51:27.480 | can come from our deepest wounds, right?

02:51:29.480 | - They absolutely do.

02:51:32.320 | I mean, I think it's a, because I think, you know,

02:51:35.560 | this concept of energy is a complicated one,

02:51:38.240 | and there's no clear definition anyway.

02:51:40.080 | But when I think about energy,

02:51:41.080 | I don't think about caloric energy.

02:51:42.360 | I think of neural energy.

02:51:44.160 | And I think about certain neural circuits like that.

02:51:47.160 | Like, if you, like, I love the feeling of excitement

02:51:52.160 | and tension that then is funneled into a specific activity

02:51:56.320 | that then yields some new vista, repeat.

02:51:59.560 | You know, it's just, that's science, and that's learning.

02:52:02.680 | The day I realized that I'll never, you know,

02:52:05.040 | saturate all the knowledge that I could gather,

02:52:07.560 | organize, and disseminate through the podcast,

02:52:09.680 | I was like, "F yes."

02:52:12.640 | Like, that's just great because there's,

02:52:13.960 | but I realize also that thing,

02:52:16.000 | we can saturate ourselves internally.

02:52:18.240 | We can drive ourselves to the point of no replenishment.

02:52:21.280 | We can, you know, get so narrow focus.

02:52:24.240 | That's why I think so much about aperture in time and space.

02:52:26.880 | We can get so narrow focus that we end up, you know,

02:52:29.400 | like a gopher that, you know, dug our way into a desert.

02:52:32.880 | And then we're like,

02:52:34.360 | or you're just far from your family or far from home,

02:52:36.720 | you know, because you just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.

02:52:39.560 | So, you know, I think I, what is it?

02:52:42.040 | You know, like eagle vision, you know.

02:52:44.040 | I think that the diving birds are probably the ultimate

02:52:49.440 | in terms of having panoramic vision.

02:52:51.040 | Do you notice they have a horizon viewing density of cells

02:52:53.960 | so they can view the horizon

02:52:55.000 | and they have a pupil to view the fish

02:52:57.440 | so that they can dive and grab the fish

02:52:59.940 | despite the refraction of light under the water

02:53:03.600 | 'cause the fish isn't actually where they see it.

02:53:05.800 | When people say eagle vision versus, you know,

02:53:08.560 | like, you know, what's it, you know,

02:53:10.580 | like predator vision up close or something.

02:53:12.880 | - Like cormorants, so they're like the diving birds.

02:53:16.280 | Those birds, yeah.

02:53:17.380 | - Yeah, so they're flying and they're tracking the horizon

02:53:21.280 | and they're also tracking things

02:53:24.680 | right below them simultaneously.

02:53:26.520 | That to me is the ultimate state to try and achieve

02:53:29.000 | in terms of space and time tracking.

02:53:30.920 | - That's a beautiful metaphor.

02:53:31.760 | - And they have to also adjust for, right, refractory.

02:53:35.800 | - If you've tried like archery from above water,

02:53:37.760 | underwater, which I used to paddle board

02:53:39.480 | while I spear fishing above water with a bow,

02:53:43.600 | that refraction is hard to calculate.

02:53:46.200 | - Yeah, diving seabirds are the ones that really just-

02:53:49.640 | - I'm going to do it.

02:53:50.800 | - They're the ultimate.

02:53:51.640 | - I'm going to do a study there.

02:53:52.480 | I want to learn about them.

02:53:54.520 | - Okay, great. - That's beautiful.

02:53:55.560 | - Yeah, I can send you some literature there.

02:53:57.120 | - I'd love it.

02:53:58.160 | - The time unit of a day

02:54:00.200 | is what most people can manage in their minds.

02:54:06.160 | Maybe you could return to this cycle

02:54:09.040 | of conscious focus, stimulus response,

02:54:14.040 | and getting out of that.

02:54:15.620 | I love the example of going to take a piss

02:54:17.400 | 'cause everyone does it.

02:54:18.600 | I do think too many people do it holding a phone.

02:54:23.120 | - Yeah, oh my God.

02:54:24.280 | - Can't be good for a number of reasons.

02:54:25.920 | [both laughing]

02:54:28.680 | Maybe just walk us through that.

02:54:30.560 | So do you think it's,

02:54:33.400 | let me ask a series of short questions.

02:54:35.000 | So when I wake up in the morning, for instance,

02:54:36.560 | like many people, I don't feel immediately alert.

02:54:39.240 | I don't feel like I could just dive into writing

02:54:42.140 | if writing is the most important thing

02:54:43.520 | I need to do that day,

02:54:44.360 | or I have some transition time.

02:54:46.720 | Do you think that people should embrace

02:54:48.480 | natural transition times on the timescale of a day,

02:54:52.440 | or that they should train themselves

02:54:54.360 | to bounce into effort,

02:54:56.760 | like go with the flow or force oneself through the door?

02:55:01.760 | - Well, how I relate to that personally,

02:55:04.040 | I've spent a lot of time thinking about day architecture.

02:55:06.120 | Well, I call it day architecture.

02:55:08.240 | And I think there's some very systematic things we can do,

02:55:13.240 | but I think like anything,

02:55:16.800 | they should be individualized, right?

02:55:18.480 | I don't think that everyone should follow a certain model

02:55:20.520 | 'cause we're all very different.

02:55:21.720 | You know that old book that Tim actually produced,

02:55:23.920 | the audio book, "Daily Rituals"?

02:55:26.240 | - Oh yeah.

02:55:27.080 | - Like one of the best things about "Daily Rituals"

02:55:28.440 | is how few patterns there are through them.

02:55:30.520 | It's just-- - I love that book.

02:55:31.680 | - Hilarious and brilliant. - We'll put a link to it.

02:55:33.080 | - Such a good book. - So good.

02:55:34.520 | - I'm so glad that Tim Ferris, who we're referring to,

02:55:37.400 | collected all these habits of different writers,

02:55:39.600 | and like some of them are so quirky and crazy,

02:55:41.880 | and some of them are downright dangerous.

02:55:43.560 | - Well, he published the audio book of it, right?

02:55:45.960 | And I think I told Tim, he'll remind me,

02:55:48.840 | I think I might've, I think I told Tim about that book

02:55:51.200 | like many, many years ago when he did the audio book,

02:55:53.040 | and it's so good. - It's so good.

02:55:55.280 | - And it just follows the daily routine.

02:55:57.640 | It breaks down the daily routine.

02:55:59.560 | It's like two to three to four page chapters

02:56:01.680 | on like a hundred some brilliant artists

02:56:04.680 | and scientists and creators,

02:56:06.560 | and they're just so random how they live.

02:56:08.400 | - Some are out partying all night, drugs, alcohol, caffeine,

02:56:11.880 | others are super regimented and monk-like.

02:56:14.200 | It's the range of daily architectures is so vast.

02:56:19.040 | - So I think we need to have like that awareness

02:56:21.880 | and that sense of humor and humility about it,

02:56:24.160 | and we can get systematic and structured at the same time.

02:56:26.440 | I think it's important to hold both of those.

02:56:28.760 | - I mean, what you just asked,

02:56:30.400 | I do believe that that beautiful period

02:56:34.720 | when we first wake up and that dream state is so powerful.

02:56:38.840 | And I think that people, almost all people

02:56:42.160 | immediately pick up their phone and start checking messages,

02:56:44.840 | which just shuts down one's awareness

02:56:47.920 | of what's been happening beneath the surface all night.

02:56:50.720 | So I think that that's a real lost opportunity.

02:56:54.240 | I remember when I was 11 years old, I read this.

02:56:56.960 | My dad actually gave me this Hemingway essay

02:57:01.360 | on his creative process.

02:57:02.280 | And there's one of my favorite,

02:57:04.120 | sometimes there's like an insanely potent book

02:57:06.240 | that's put together.

02:57:07.520 | And two that come to mind are "Lessons of History,"

02:57:10.040 | which is this short compilation of Will and Ariel Durant,

02:57:13.920 | two of the greatest historians

02:57:14.960 | who've published tens of thousands of pages.

02:57:17.700 | This is a short compilation of a handful of thematic essays.

02:57:21.240 | It's only like 100 pages of all their life's work

02:57:23.760 | boiled down to a few themes.

02:57:24.920 | It's unbelievably potent.

02:57:26.160 | And "Hemingway on Writing" is another book of that nature,

02:57:28.720 | which takes all of Hemingway's from his books,

02:57:32.640 | from his letters, private letters,

02:57:34.480 | from his articles and essays and notebooks,

02:57:38.300 | like everything he's written about the creative process

02:57:40.080 | and boils it into this like short book

02:57:42.400 | on his principles of creativity, just unbelievable.

02:57:44.920 | But before that book came out, I read this piece,

02:57:47.900 | the short thing he'd written about the creative process,

02:57:49.580 | which was essentially,

02:57:50.420 | he'd always leave a sentence unwritten.

02:57:52.560 | He'd end his workday with a sentence like half written.

02:57:56.680 | So leaving with a sense of direction.

02:57:58.680 | And then he would let it go.

02:58:00.800 | You know, he would go out drinking,

02:58:01.880 | he would do all the things that Hemingway did.

02:58:04.720 | And then he returned to it first thing in the morning

02:58:06.120 | and that like unwritten sentence

02:58:07.640 | had become a paragraph and a page in his mind

02:58:09.240 | and it would be a way to hit the ground running.

02:58:11.520 | And that's what really spurred me

02:58:13.080 | to start creating this process in my chess life

02:58:15.960 | of always ending my chess study with something left,

02:58:18.440 | like posing my unconscious a question,

02:58:20.400 | like studying the complexity and then releasing it

02:58:22.480 | which later became,

02:58:23.520 | and then tapping into it first thing in the morning,

02:58:24.960 | pre-input, which later became my MIQ process.

02:58:27.640 | And then I developed team-wide MIQ processes.

02:58:30.240 | The teams that I work with all have versions of the MIQ

02:58:34.280 | that they utilize as individuals, but then as teams.

02:58:36.520 | And it's an amazing way to develop

02:58:37.760 | a shared consciousness in a team,

02:58:39.320 | to have everybody be able to tap into the question

02:58:42.640 | that's top of mind for every member of their team

02:58:44.720 | or for a leader to be able to be aware

02:58:46.560 | of what is the most important question

02:58:48.580 | for every one of my scientists or my analysts or anything.

02:58:50.800 | It's a really powerful way

02:58:52.760 | to cultivate shared consciousness

02:58:54.120 | and it becomes our game tape.

02:58:56.320 | Because if we have an, if we're tracking our MIQs,

02:58:59.960 | let's say I'm studying something for three weeks

02:59:02.280 | or for four weeks.

02:59:03.320 | And what do I think is most,

02:59:06.520 | if I'm tracking the questions

02:59:07.880 | that I think are most critical for that thing

02:59:09.720 | and I'm deepening my analysis of it,

02:59:11.920 | what I arrive at, what I think in day one

02:59:14.680 | will be very different from the MIQ in day 14.

02:59:16.880 | And then we can study the gap

02:59:18.300 | and then we can study the patterns of the gap, the gaps.

02:59:20.900 | And this is what I call MIQ gap analysis.

02:59:23.060 | So if I'm setting a chess position,

02:59:24.860 | like if I play a chess game against you

02:59:26.700 | and it's incredibly complex

02:59:28.180 | and I don't quite understand this position

02:59:31.140 | and then I do a deep, deep analysis of it,

02:59:33.600 | what I'll arrive at after 14 or 16 or 18 hours of study

02:59:38.020 | will be different from what I felt during the game.

02:59:41.140 | Now, what's interesting is,

02:59:42.840 | this is a cool thing about chess study.

02:59:44.500 | If my understanding was here during the chess game,

02:59:47.260 | after like a few hours,

02:59:48.580 | I might be like really far away from that.

02:59:50.780 | But after I've completed the study,

02:59:52.300 | I'll usually be like very similar, but deeper.

02:59:55.860 | So it's often like deeper,

02:59:57.940 | like closer than where you were after a few hours of study,

03:00:00.700 | but it's like a deeper level in.

03:00:02.700 | But what's the gap between that and that,

03:00:05.620 | between where I was in the game

03:00:07.820 | and what are the patterns in the gaps?

03:00:09.440 | And then if you think about those patterns in the gaps

03:00:11.660 | through those lenses of the technical,

03:00:13.500 | the thematic and the psychological, right?

03:00:16.420 | We deconstruct it in that way.

03:00:18.960 | Then that becomes our game tape, right?

03:00:21.000 | One of the hardest things for mental athletes

03:00:22.700 | is to actually have game tape

03:00:23.920 | the way basketball players do or foilers do or fighters do.

03:00:27.180 | We can see the actual game tape.

03:00:28.660 | We need to create our mental game tape.

03:00:30.660 | So this is a way that I,

03:00:32.220 | it both enhances the creative process

03:00:34.220 | and creates the game tape for the training process.

03:00:36.480 | And then studying the gap analysis we do

03:00:40.420 | reveals what we need to focus our deliberate practice on.

03:00:43.500 | - This difference between physical endeavors

03:00:46.000 | and cognitive endeavors, I think is so key.

03:00:48.460 | Nowadays, most people are involved in cognitive endeavors

03:00:51.560 | and there's so much,

03:00:53.020 | it's basically like being in a glass house

03:00:55.060 | with windows everywhere.

03:00:56.720 | I mean, social media, texting, windows,

03:01:00.620 | internet connection on the computer.

03:01:01.980 | There's just so many points of entry

03:01:03.420 | and where one can become distracted.

03:01:05.900 | Whereas if you paddle out to ocean,

03:01:07.940 | sure, you could bring your phone perhaps,

03:01:10.580 | but you're limited by the environment

03:01:15.380 | and the need for safety

03:01:16.900 | of the number of things that you can think about.

03:01:18.700 | - Funny, I wore an Apple watch training a little bit

03:01:21.300 | on the ocean and it was good for me

03:01:23.740 | 'cause I wanted to like align my intuition on speed

03:01:26.460 | with what actually it was showing

03:01:28.100 | and it was good to calibrate myself.

03:01:29.380 | But man, I took it off.

03:01:32.160 | It's so much better being on the ocean without technology.

03:01:34.820 | - Yeah. - Like being liberated from it.

03:01:36.220 | Tracking, yeah.

03:01:37.980 | - I'm learning to turn stuff off while I work.

03:01:40.980 | I mean, I have had to learn to just fight things back

03:01:44.220 | because when I started in science,

03:01:45.620 | I mean, I didn't have a smartphone, I didn't any of that.

03:01:48.180 | And yet one really has to fight nowadays

03:01:50.880 | for their freedom from these interruptions.

03:01:54.500 | So it's something that people really have to cultivate.

03:01:57.940 | So in terms of the structure of that day,

03:01:59.820 | do you pose a question for the day?

03:02:01.260 | Like the most important question, would it be like,

03:02:02.940 | let's say, like I'm working on a revision of this book

03:02:05.900 | that I delayed release on

03:02:07.260 | 'cause I wanted to add a bunch of things to it.

03:02:09.240 | So would one say, you know, the most important question is,

03:02:11.660 | you know, how do I finish this book today?

03:02:13.140 | Or is there, I'm guessing it's more conceptual than that.

03:02:16.420 | - I think that you can, I mean, it's a tool

03:02:18.740 | that one can utilize tactically or strategically, right?

03:02:22.080 | So it can be like, if you're in creative flow,

03:02:24.500 | just leaving yourself with a sense of direction

03:02:26.340 | or it can actually be zooming out

03:02:28.260 | and thinking about like, what is the highest order question

03:02:31.260 | that I'm grappling with, right?

03:02:34.860 | But I think it's like, one wants to stretch for the,

03:02:37.100 | if one is doing the latter,

03:02:38.580 | the higher order of strategic thinking,

03:02:41.420 | it's like, you can think of like,

03:02:43.500 | one is stretching for the question that matters most

03:02:46.340 | with the same kind of intellectual or cognitive intensity

03:02:50.420 | that one is experiencing, for example,

03:02:52.420 | pushing yourself from like 168 to 176

03:02:55.380 | in cardiovascular interval training, right?

03:02:57.860 | Like you're really stretching mentally.

03:02:59.380 | So you need to be at your stretch point.

03:03:00.400 | Growth comes at the point of resistance, right?

03:03:02.580 | So we, but intellectually,

03:03:05.140 | we're not used to really feeling

03:03:06.660 | when we're at our stretch point.

03:03:07.660 | So we're thinking about a question, but that's a question.

03:03:09.540 | What's the higher order question?

03:03:10.580 | What's the higher order question?

03:03:12.140 | What's the question that really matters?

03:03:13.420 | And one way to frame it is like,

03:03:14.940 | our mind, if we're good at something,

03:03:16.100 | slices like a knife through butter through most things,

03:03:19.820 | but then there's a place we're stuck.

03:03:21.760 | Like those stuck points are the MIQs.

03:03:24.260 | Those stuck points are like, right?

03:03:26.060 | Like we don't need to wait.

03:03:26.900 | We don't need, like the mind will just get there like,

03:03:28.660 | oh, but that's the thing.

03:03:30.420 | And then we explore there, like what,

03:03:31.820 | how does that stretch within that stuck point?

03:03:33.820 | - And that's usually where people,

03:03:35.960 | including myself, pivot away.

03:03:37.740 | I'm thinking outside of the work domain now.

03:03:39.520 | Like, I don't want to think about it.

03:03:41.500 | Like it's when we tend to,

03:03:42.940 | I noticed that there's an infinite amount

03:03:46.620 | of distraction available nowadays, if we want it.

03:03:50.140 | And, you know, audio books and podcasts.

03:03:52.640 | And I think podcasts are wonderful, but you know,

03:03:54.780 | they can be a source of distraction

03:03:56.080 | from the critical question we need to be asking,

03:03:57.800 | or they can be a source of answers

03:03:58.940 | for perhaps the critical questions we're asking.

03:04:01.380 | But there's just so,

03:04:05.200 | there's so many of these opportunities

03:04:07.180 | to just look away from something that is like a,

03:04:10.580 | it's like a emotional infection.

03:04:12.900 | It's different than an infection in your skin

03:04:14.900 | that's nagging 'cause you can feel it there,

03:04:17.020 | and you want to get that thing out, right?

03:04:18.820 | Very primal instinct, like get that thing out,

03:04:21.180 | get the infection out.

03:04:22.460 | This is like an emotional infection

03:04:23.540 | that you can just kind of not see

03:04:25.780 | if you choose to turn away.

03:04:27.220 | But those are the things that really get you over time.

03:04:30.540 | - That's why we do our cold water training.

03:04:32.180 | Like that's where we like, we train at living

03:04:34.660 | on the other side of pain, of enjoying it.

03:04:36.660 | Like that place, that place that like itches,

03:04:38.820 | like ah, so you bounce away from that,

03:04:40.220 | but that's where you need to sit, right?

03:04:43.580 | But we can practice that thematically,

03:04:44.980 | like loving that discomfort, wanting it, hunting for it,

03:04:47.660 | like finding the place where we're stuck,

03:04:49.220 | and then letting it sit,

03:04:51.260 | and then not bouncing away from it,

03:04:52.540 | but just releasing it and returning to it.

03:04:56.180 | And we have insights, right?

03:04:57.140 | 'Cause often in those moments,

03:04:58.300 | where we have our insights are,

03:05:01.220 | like when we wake up in the morning,

03:05:02.260 | are in those stuck points.

03:05:03.500 | And I find it's very interesting.

03:05:05.140 | I'm sure you've done this,

03:05:06.260 | I've done like hundreds of diagnostics

03:05:09.540 | with people on my teams,

03:05:10.980 | like where do they have most of their creative breakthroughs?

03:05:13.780 | And so many of them are in the shower.

03:05:16.280 | It's really interesting.

03:05:17.120 | I think a big part of that is like the full body,

03:05:18.700 | somatic immersion moves them out of conscious thinking

03:05:23.100 | into like, 'cause their mind is experiencing,

03:05:26.580 | and then the release of the conscious mind

03:05:28.180 | allows the unconscious to run,

03:05:30.240 | and then they tap into it.

03:05:31.500 | - First thing in the morning

03:05:32.340 | is when I get my insights or understanding,

03:05:34.380 | or when the truth hits me square in the face.

03:05:37.460 | Well, like there's no avoiding,

03:05:38.580 | I wake up, I think about like,

03:05:39.620 | "Okay, that's the thing I got to deal with."

03:05:41.260 | And I tend to write it down right away,

03:05:42.980 | try not to write it down on my phone.

03:05:44.700 | I think having a point of capture

03:05:46.060 | that doesn't offer any other distractions,

03:05:48.700 | that's why I'm a big believer in pen and paper.

03:05:50.540 | - I 100% agree with you.

03:05:51.380 | And like, so first of all, I agree,

03:05:53.140 | first thing in the morning, that's the juice,

03:05:54.380 | and the whole MIQ process is geared toward harnessing that,

03:05:57.540 | like tapping into that, right?

03:05:59.660 | Like feeding the mind, 'cause that just happened to me

03:06:01.760 | so many dozens of times,

03:06:02.900 | where I would just have the insight in the morning,

03:06:04.740 | but then I realized I should be finding

03:06:06.700 | the areas of stuckness and feeding it to myself

03:06:08.380 | to have the insight about.

03:06:10.020 | So it's like directing that creative process.

03:06:13.420 | But then if we open up our phones,

03:06:15.080 | like the moment we start to see emails

03:06:17.140 | without reading them or see anything,

03:06:19.020 | we're unconsciously solving for what's in the emails.

03:06:21.060 | - Yeah, it's all stimulus response.

03:06:22.800 | You're going into stimulus.

03:06:23.640 | If people can start to think about being reflective

03:06:26.600 | versus in stimulus response,

03:06:28.040 | I think that's sort of like the widest binning of all this.

03:06:31.140 | I have to say the shower.

03:06:33.000 | I've talked about this thing

03:06:34.100 | about why people have insights in the shower with my friend.

03:06:36.660 | I'd love to introduce you to him at some point.

03:06:38.100 | We've been friends since we were seven years old.

03:06:40.580 | My friend, Dr. Eddie Chang, he's a neurosurgeon

03:06:42.580 | and the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,

03:06:44.140 | and he studies speech and language.

03:06:46.100 | And he's taken people with locked-in syndrome

03:06:47.980 | and developed AI algorithms

03:06:49.220 | so that they can speak through a screen

03:06:51.740 | with their face moving in real time

03:06:53.780 | by decoding human speech or human speech cortex.

03:06:56.380 | And a truly brilliant individual.

03:06:58.240 | He's been on this podcast.

03:06:59.200 | He'll come back again.

03:07:00.860 | Ask him about the shower thing,

03:07:02.060 | 'cause he used to work on neuroplasticity

03:07:03.660 | of the auditory system.

03:07:04.860 | We think, we wonder if it's the kind of white noise

03:07:10.540 | of the shower as well.

03:07:11.860 | - Yeah.

03:07:12.760 | - Because Eddie's done beautiful work

03:07:14.880 | showing that it's the signal to noise in the auditory system

03:07:17.720 | that defines whether or not a certain pattern of speech

03:07:20.540 | or auditory cue gets remembered.

03:07:23.340 | So when you have this in the background,

03:07:26.540 | let's just put this in the terms

03:07:27.820 | that we've been referring to this up until now.

03:07:30.260 | The thoughts that surface above that noise

03:07:32.740 | have a big, sharp peak relative to the background.

03:07:35.180 | So it's the signal to noise.

03:07:36.560 | Whereas certainly the opposite would be

03:07:38.300 | when you're on your phone and you're scrolling through

03:07:39.920 | and you're looking at all the thoughts and feelings

03:07:41.700 | and stuff of other people.

03:07:43.600 | So how do you capture your own thoughts

03:07:46.460 | in terms of which are,

03:07:47.300 | and filter them through what's meaningful

03:07:48.940 | and what's not meaningful?

03:07:50.900 | Is I think actually a really important question

03:07:53.440 | to begin with.

03:07:54.660 | And white noise background with very deprived,

03:07:59.660 | you know, visual stimulation,

03:08:01.100 | most showers aren't that interesting.

03:08:02.820 | It's white noise, blank walls,

03:08:05.300 | a few things that are familiar to you.

03:08:07.080 | So they basically disappear from your visual field.

03:08:10.460 | And the idea is that thoughts then can,

03:08:12.580 | that are constantly geysering up through

03:08:14.620 | your unconscious mind can be captured

03:08:17.060 | because everything else is noise.

03:08:19.260 | Perhaps this is a hypothesis.

03:08:21.060 | And maybe I'll put you and Eddie together sometime

03:08:23.180 | and just be an observer.

03:08:25.020 | - Yeah, that's powerful.

03:08:26.600 | - So, I mean, that's how we learn language.

03:08:28.740 | It's the error signals against the background noise.

03:08:31.980 | It's all, that's just how you fix stutter.

03:08:34.540 | It's a, you create background noise.

03:08:37.700 | You increase noise to,

03:08:39.360 | which actually elevates signal in the auditory system.

03:08:41.860 | Oddly, in any case.

03:08:44.940 | - So you found that four and a half hours

03:08:48.980 | was the sweet spot of a focused work.

03:08:50.940 | But for some people, it might be an hour.

03:08:52.620 | They might need to train up that level of focus.

03:08:54.780 | - Well, and if it's four and a half hours,

03:08:56.060 | it's not like that's like a lot,

03:08:57.820 | the rest of the day is feeding into

03:09:00.300 | like those being brilliant, right?

03:09:01.940 | So if it's four and a half hours of creative output time,

03:09:04.300 | then there are other periods where one can do,

03:09:06.220 | have inputs that feed it, right?

03:09:08.080 | I think that's very good for people

03:09:08.920 | to have an awareness of what their energy,

03:09:10.780 | like what their peaks and valleys are

03:09:12.260 | of their energy throughout the day.

03:09:13.860 | And then align their peak creativity work

03:09:15.600 | with their peak energy periods.

03:09:17.220 | I think it's really important

03:09:18.140 | to not be in a constantly reactive state.

03:09:20.840 | One of the things I find fascinating

03:09:21.860 | is how people will have meetings scheduled everywhere,

03:09:23.620 | and then fit their thinking between meetings,

03:09:25.940 | and how liberating it is for them

03:09:27.300 | when they actually now block out their time

03:09:29.100 | for creative output time, right?

03:09:31.260 | Like it might be color-coded in their calendar,

03:09:32.740 | and then have meetings fit around there.

03:09:34.800 | So their day is driven by their self-expression,

03:09:38.900 | as opposed to by a constant set of reactivity,

03:09:41.580 | and just more, and more, and more, and more, right?

03:09:44.060 | I think harnessing the undulation of stress and recovery

03:09:46.420 | throughout the day is hugely important.

03:09:48.260 | I think having workouts throughout the day,

03:09:49.580 | even micro-workouts during the day,

03:09:51.580 | meditation periods during the workday,

03:09:53.140 | everything being quality over quantity, right?

03:09:55.740 | We can get so much more done.

03:09:57.960 | And if you think about it,

03:09:59.260 | like I mean, you talk about like

03:10:01.660 | elite performing competitive teams.

03:10:04.100 | It's all about, like if you saw how much video analysis

03:10:10.100 | and time the Boston Celtics coaching staff puts in

03:10:13.460 | to what ends up being like a 35-second clip

03:10:17.020 | that's shown to a player or the team,

03:10:19.300 | like it's so much work to then the most potent thing, right?

03:10:24.300 | It's like when you're an elite,

03:10:25.980 | 'cause like the players are doing something so intense,

03:10:30.980 | right, like it's all about quality, not quantity.

03:10:34.860 | They're not training basketball 17 hours a day.

03:10:37.340 | They could not possibly play then.

03:10:39.940 | Or they're training brilliantly for like,

03:10:43.020 | you know, maybe an hour and a half a day, brilliantly,

03:10:46.540 | but like scientifically, right?

03:10:48.900 | Or if they're competing, if they're playing

03:10:50.180 | for a two and a half to three hour game, right?

03:10:52.820 | Then what's the way to optimize for that?

03:10:54.400 | You don't stack six hours of training in

03:10:56.060 | before three hour game, no.

03:10:58.420 | So much of it is, you know, body work and setting some tape

03:11:00.900 | and then being primed in the right way

03:11:03.020 | to remember what you're looking at on tape

03:11:05.260 | and then taking breaks and returning to it.

03:11:07.120 | And then you're like understanding exactly

03:11:09.540 | how much load is on your body and your mind

03:11:11.060 | and having your sleep right and your nutrition right

03:11:12.740 | and getting everything optimized

03:11:13.940 | and then being a peak performer when it's on, right?

03:11:16.860 | But we don't have that discipline

03:11:18.380 | as mental beings very often,

03:11:20.220 | but we should in our creative process,

03:11:22.140 | in our relationships, right?

03:11:24.340 | In the art of being a mom or a dad

03:11:26.380 | or a husband or a wife or a friend.

03:11:29.380 | Like why wouldn't we be cultivating ourselves

03:11:31.220 | and being brilliant at that?

03:11:32.860 | Like I really believe in quality as a way of life.

03:11:34.700 | That's another very important principle for me.

03:11:36.820 | That we're either practicing sloppiness

03:11:38.760 | or practicing quality.

03:11:40.600 | If we do something shitty, then we're practicing shitty.

03:11:44.040 | And that will, just how like we can harness

03:11:45.920 | the thematic interconnectedness on the positive side,

03:11:48.880 | we can also really harness it brilliantly

03:11:50.240 | on the negative side.

03:11:51.660 | Every time we practice being sloppiness,

03:11:53.160 | we're using thematic interconnectedness

03:11:55.280 | to be sloppy in everything.

03:11:57.440 | I really believe that.

03:11:58.940 | So quality as a way of life is a beautiful way

03:12:00.680 | to practice quality everywhere

03:12:01.760 | 'cause it will manifest everywhere, right?

03:12:04.600 | Not in a way that's like robotic or constrictive.

03:12:06.560 | No, in a way that's self-expressive and beautiful.

03:12:09.360 | - Living one's life like a work of art.

03:12:11.720 | - Yes, beautiful, amen.

03:12:14.200 | Let's do it.

03:12:15.680 | - Well, clearly you are.

03:12:16.960 | - I'm in the fight, man.

03:12:20.160 | - You're in the fight and you're setting

03:12:22.360 | an incredible example and you have your entire life,

03:12:26.880 | which is remarkable and so deeply appreciated.

03:12:31.120 | I have to say, and now I will reveal this,

03:12:33.960 | that when I started this podcast,

03:12:35.940 | I had a short list of people

03:12:37.920 | that would be kind of like pinch me guests,

03:12:40.880 | not because I want the guests to pinch me, but like, wow,

03:12:42.960 | like, I can't believe I'm sitting down with blank.

03:12:45.480 | And you were on that list.

03:12:47.720 | I've read "The Art of Learning".

03:12:49.160 | I've, you know, I watched and read everything I could

03:12:52.000 | about your work.

03:12:53.420 | And I did see the "Search for Bobby Fischer"

03:12:56.960 | with the understanding that that's accurate

03:12:59.420 | about certain things and probably inaccurate about others.

03:13:01.600 | So if people choose to watch that,

03:13:02.680 | they should keep that in mind.

03:13:03.680 | It is Hollywood.

03:13:04.720 | More importantly, you've had this chance

03:13:09.440 | to sit down and do this.

03:13:10.440 | And I have to say, I gained so much

03:13:15.360 | from your incredible precision,

03:13:20.360 | but also scope of observation in the world

03:13:25.480 | because I'm not a basketball player.

03:13:27.240 | I don't know how to play chess.

03:13:28.400 | And yet I've learned so much from you

03:13:31.760 | and your writings and your teachings

03:13:33.960 | and just the chance to sit down here and to learn from you.

03:13:37.480 | I know I'm speaking on behalf of myself

03:13:39.320 | and literally millions of people.

03:13:41.520 | I just want to say thank you for living your life

03:13:44.080 | like a work of art and for incorporating, you know,

03:13:49.080 | public education, which is what we're doing here

03:13:53.840 | into this set of pursuits that, you know,

03:13:57.520 | you've been after one after the other,

03:14:00.440 | but that are bound by this set of core themes.

03:14:05.120 | So without getting too abstract,

03:14:07.280 | I just want to say thank you so much for coming here,

03:14:09.560 | for educating us, for making us think.

03:14:11.960 | I know it's going to change people's thoughts

03:14:13.920 | and behavior for the better.

03:14:15.940 | And the only question left is to say,

03:14:19.280 | would you please come back and talk to us again more?

03:14:22.280 | - Absolutely, man.

03:14:23.120 | Thank you for what you've just said.

03:14:24.320 | It's an honor.

03:14:25.160 | And I've learned so much from this jam.

03:14:28.240 | It feels like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

03:14:29.880 | So just the beginning.

03:14:31.400 | - I feel the same way.

03:14:32.760 | I look forward to it.

03:14:33.600 | - Thank you, man.

03:14:34.420 | - Thank you.

03:14:35.260 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

03:14:36.960 | with Josh Waitzkin.

03:14:38.280 | To learn more about Josh's work

03:14:39.640 | and to find a link to his book, "The Art of Learning,"

03:14:41.760 | which by the way, I highly recommend,

03:14:43.880 | please see the show note captions.

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03:15:40.200 | For those of you that haven't heard,

03:15:41.340 | I have a new book coming out.

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03:15:44.160 | It's entitled "Protocols,

03:15:45.560 | an Operating Manual for the Human Body."

03:15:47.720 | This is a book that I've been working on

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03:16:09.080 | at protocolsbook.com.

03:16:11.260 | There you can find links to various vendors.

03:16:13.640 | You can pick the one that you like best.

03:16:15.400 | Again, the book is called "Protocols,

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03:16:36.540 | We also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure,

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03:16:55.420 | Thank you once again for joining me

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Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life

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