Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life
en
January 27, 2025
TLDR: Discusses Josh Waitzkin's journey as a child chess prodigy and world champion martial artist, delving into the principles unifying diverse pursuits and optimizing learning strategies. Covering creativity, generativity, overcoming flaws, handling competition loss, mindset, tools for stress recovery, decision-making, and more.

In this enlightening episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast, renowned chess prodigy and martial arts champion Josh Waitzkin discusses his transformative journey from chess to martial arts, emphasizing the underlying principles of learning and personal growth. Here are the key insights and takeaways from the discussion.
The Journey of a Prodigy
- Early Beginnings: Josh started playing chess at six in New York City, rapidly climbing to the top ranks by the age of 16, gaining national and international recognition. His memoir, The Art of Learning, explores how his childhood shaped his understanding of competition and learning.
- Transition to Martial Arts: After stepping away from chess, Josh pursued martial arts, drawing connections between the mental and physical disciplines. He highlights how the principles learned in chess translated to martial arts, enhancing his performance.
Principles of Learning
- Interconnectedness of Disciplines: Josh argues that the highest levels of performance in diverse fields share common principles. This interconnectedness allows individuals to apply strategies learned in one discipline to another, fostering versatility and adaptability.
- Learning from Failure: A significant theme in the conversation is the importance of embracing failure as a critical aspect of the learning process. Josh emphasizes that the most profound lessons often arise from moments of defeat, as they challenge us to reflect and grow.
Structuring Time for Creativity
- Daily Routine: Josh discusses how vital it is to structure one’s day to tap into creative potential. He stresses the importance of identifying peak hours of focus and allowing for mental breaks throughout the day to enhance productivity and creative thought.
- Embracing Transition Times: He advocates for the mindful use of transition times—for instance, moments spent in the shower or during walks—to foster clarity and insight.
The Role of Mindset
- Theory of Mind: Josh explores the concept of a 'theory of mind', where understanding others' perspectives enhances our competitive edge. In chess and martial arts, predicting opponents' strategies relies heavily on awareness and empathy.
- Preconscious vs. Postconscious States: The transition from a carefree, instinctual approach (preconscious) to a more self-aware, analytical state (postconscious) can hinder performance if not managed correctly. He encourages listeners to cultivate a liberated mindset even amidst the pressures of competition.
Stress, Recovery, and Quality of Life
- Living with Intention: Josh emphasizes the importance of living with clarity and purpose, particularly in the face of life’s challenges. He discusses tools for stress management, such as cold plunging and mindfulness, advocating for recovery as a crucial aspect of high performance.
- Quality Over Quantity: He asserts that in both physical and mental endeavors, the focus should be on quality actions rather than sheer volume, arguing that true progress is marked by intentional, high-quality engagements with our pursuits.
Conclusion
Josh Waitzkin’s insights challenge us to reflect on our learning processes, embrace challenges, and understand the interconnected nature of our experiences. His journey illustrates the power of adaptability and self-discovery, inviting us all to become better learners and individuals across our diverse pursuits.
This episode serves as a powerful reminder of the inherent chaos and order in the learning process and how embracing both can lead to extraordinary growth.
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Josh Waitskin. Josh Waitskin is a former child prodigy who began playing the game of chess at six years old, and by the time he was 16 years old,
had become a national champion many times over, as well as an international champion. In fact, he achieved the level of international master, which is one of the highest levels of achievement in the game of chess for anyone of any age. His early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie, Searching for Bobby Fisher. He then quit playing the game of chess and moved on to martial arts, the study of philosophy at Columbia University in New York,
and eventually foiling, which is essentially surfing over the water. Josh is not only a high performer, he has now become perhaps the most sought after professional coach in the domains of finance, in the domains of creative endeavors, professional sports and military. Today's episode is one of my favorite Huberman Lab podcast episodes ever. I know as a podcast host, you're not supposed to say that, but it's absolutely true.
because not only is Josh Waidskin so highly accomplished, but he is an exceptional teacher of the learning process. He took what he learned in chess and about learning chess and applied that to martial arts, to foiling, et cetera. And from participating in all those endeavors, he was able to distill out the essential elements of learning and how to tailor one's learning process to one's own unique personality and style, flaws and tendency to make mistakes and how to leverage all of that
in order to be able to learn better. In fact, throughout today's episode, I promise that you will constantly be reflecting on where you experience things like tension and fear, both in your personal life, your professional life, your educational life, whatever it is that you're trying to learn and pursue in life. Today's conversation, thanks to Josh, will allow you to look at that, understand it better,
and know where to apply work, when to relax, when to push forward, and in effect, how to become a better learner, both of yourself and whatever it is that you happen to be pursuing in life. We have a saying in science, which is that sometimes you encounter somebody who is truly end of one, meaning a sample size of one in a category all by themselves. Josh Waidskin is truly an end of one.
I know of no other person like him or even close to him in terms of his ability to live a unique life path and to take what he learns and to put it out into the world so that others may benefit. He lives with a tremendous amount of intentionality for the people he loves, for the things he loves and with the intention of helping others learn how to learn better. I must say it was a true honor to sit down with Josh. I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time.
You'll also learn that he's a really nice person. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this podcast episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Josh Waitskin. Josh Waitskin, welcome. Thank you, man. Good to be here.
I feel like I've known you a long time because I saw the search for Bobby Fisher and I learned about the real human that was about you and I read the art of learning and I must say I'm a fan and somewhat obsessed with the uniqueness of your arc and the choices you've made and your understanding of learning as a process and its universal properties, its specific properties and different contexts. So I'm excited to dive in. I think for people that
perhaps are not familiar with you. Maybe you could just give us a broad overview of your backstory, like the things that you've really focused on in chunks, if you will, just for a couple of minutes so that people can get familiar with the incredible things you've done. And I think that reflects the uniqueness of your choice-making process, which then we'll get into. Yeah, sure. Well, thank you, man. It's an honor. I appreciate what you said.
Yeah, so I started playing chess. I grew up in New York City, downtown Manhattan. I started playing chess when I was six years old. And I discovered chess walking through Washington Square Park with my mom.
And I remember watching a day or two and then at one point I broke away from her. I was going to play on monkey bars and I ran over and asked an old man if I could play. And he said yes and my mom was surprised and we started playing. I played my first game of chess and I remember the very distinct feeling of
It was as if I was just discovering or rediscovering a lost memory. It wasn't like I was learning something new. It was like I was wiping away the dust or the cobwebs between something, between me and something that I had known very deeply at one point. Very strange feeling for a six year old boy. And then I just fell in love with the game. I got really intensely into it. My first teachers were the hustlers in Washington Square. So it was just like a raucous crowd of guys who took me under their wings, started teaching me the tactical street side of the game.
And I was just unhindered as a learner. Which is interesting from my perspective now as a dad, because my little boy Charlie is taking on surfing with that same kind of freedom. Just that liberated, uncomplicated, out of his own way, kind of vibe. Yeah, and by the time I was seven, I started competing, and then I was a top-rated player for my age in the country. For most of the years, from age seven to 23, my whole chess career. So it was a very strange
upbringing in some ways, which has led to some quirky elements in my psychology, which was that I was living in a pressure cooker of competition from age six on, and my whole childhood was spent as the target. And so if you're competing in national championships, and I would compete in youth national and world championships, then otherwise I'd be competing against adults, everything else. But then you're the target. So any mistake you make, and kids make mistakes all the time, we all do,
My rivals and their coaches who are strong masters and international masters and grandmasters would be able to study and adult strong players can see very easily the weaknesses in a child. And so they would be prepared for them. So if I didn't take on a weakness, it would be exploited and I would experience pain. And so from a very young age, not taking on my weaknesses was outside of my conceptual scheme.
which is a really interesting thing to grow up with. And it's, in many ways, like lay the foundation for a lot of what I've done since. And there are lots of things about that upbringing, which could be unhealthy. I think in the public eye. Yeah, so then very bizarre. Luckily it was before social media. Yeah, super, yeah. And I've never been on social media in any way, which has been a choice. So when I was 11, the book Searching for Robbie Fisher came out, and then when I was 15, the movie came out.
At that point, I was completely in love with chess. It was my first love. I was an unobstructed learner. I was a love competition. A lot of my opponents were trying to control the game, memorize openings, figure out how to win by force, but I love the battle. My style was to create chaos, like in Washington Square Park. Find hidden harmonies and chaos, and I love that.
As the game went on and they moved away from their opening preparation and controlling things, we moved into my power zone, which was the fight. I love the fight. And then my chest life in many ways was, was free flowing. And then the movie came out when I was 15. And then you can imagine what that was like as, as a, you know, a young teenager, all the attention, the media, cameras everywhere, groupies, all the temptations.
And I didn't ask for it. And it was an alienating period for me relative to chess. And around the same time, I started training with a Russian chess trainer who started urging me to move away from my self-expression as a chess player and to study the players who were the opposite of me.
attacking player, aggressive. I played kind of in the style, not at the level, but in the style of like Bobby Fischer or Gary Kasparov or Mikhail Tal, world champions who were like hot blooded. And I was being urged to study the more cold blooded prophylactic side of chess, patrosian, carp of more conservative defensive players. And so I was being told instead of saying like, what, what does Josh feel here? What would carp of play here? Who's the opposite of me?
And so the combination of that public eye and then the movement away from my self-expression led to a period of obstructiveness and self-consciousness. And what an interesting theme we could talk about at one point is that passage from a pre-conscious to a post-conscious competitor. In many ways, I went from like that freedom of pre-conscious competition into the tunnel of existential crisis. And I grappled with it for a lot of years. And when I was
18, when I graduated high school, and during that grappling, I was still the top rated player in the country. I was winning national championships every year, so like from the outside, it looked good, but from the inside, I was in turmoil. I was fighting with myself. I had all these demons. And then I left the US. I spent a number of years after high school studying East Asian philosophy, meditating, reflecting.
And then my study of chess in those years, and I was deeply in love with chess still, it became much more of an introspective process. It became, I was competing as intensely as ever, but chess became connected to life. And then when I was 19 years old, I started training at the Human Performance Institute. At the time it was called LGE, Layer, Grapple, and Echeberry. It was a performance training, cross-disciplinary performance training center that Jim Layer opened up.
And then it became the HPI later on. And I never forget the moment that I was working with these performance psychologists, and I was at the gym, and I was working with nutritionists, and I was doing this intense workout, and I looked next to me, and there was Jim Harbaugh, who was the head coach at the time of, who was the quarterback at the time of the Colts, NFL team. And we got into this amazing dialogue about performance. And it was a real eye opening moment for me, because I realized that we spoke the same language.
It's like, holy shit, this guy's an NFL quarterback and I'm this crazy chess player, but we're doing the same thing. And it was this crystallization moment where I realized that all of these arts are fundamentally connected at the highest levels.
And what we're doing is much more similar. I observe that people who are at the pentacles of different arts are often doing things that are much more similar than people who are in the same art from them, but at lower levels. There's something in that qualitative experience. And then I began studying the principles that connected these things. And then I had this interesting experience. I'm kind of compressing a life into a minute or two, but I
In my early 20s, when I ultimately moved away from chess, and I'm happy to talk about why in that journey. And then I moved into martial arts. My study of East Asian philosophy moved me into the study of Taoism and Tai Chi, and then into Tai Chi push-ins. And I had this really interesting experience where
At that point, I'd been the introspective process of studying chess had become much more about studying life. And so I was in my next exploration of interconnectedness, but I was not playing chess anymore, and I was all in on the martial arts, but I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition, which I did every year for many years, for Dushan Maslow District for your research. And I was playing 50 chess games at once.
And I was walking around this big square, playing against 50 young up-and-coming strong players at the same time. And I realized, at one point, I wasn't playing chess. I was moving chess pieces. But I was thinking in Tai Chi language. I was feeling flow, feeling space left behind, riding energetic waves of the game.
And it was like, I was winning all the chess games, but I hadn't played chess in a long time, and I wasn't playing chess. And it became like, and then my study of Tai Chi became extremely accelerated, and then I started competing, and then I won in the fighting application, and I started winning national championships, and then...
And then I began to think about like, like, or become more and more deeply involved in the study and the exploration of thematic interconnectedness, which has really become a life's work. And then my martial arts life ended up ending, you know, taking me all over the world and won some world championships. And I moved into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and trained in that art for many years and was training for the world championship for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is after winning worlds in the Tai Chi Quan.
And I broke my back in a training camp. I own a school with Marcella Garcia, who's a dear friend, who's a nine-time world champion, perhaps the greatest grappler, pound and pound to ever live. And I was training at a really high level. And I was thinking about this, like I was getting ready to begin my surge toward black belt world championships in Jiu Jitsu. And I ruptured my L4L5 disc. And it was the first time I'd been moved away from an art
not on my own terms. And it was a brutal injury that I ended up, as we do when we're mad men, coming back and training for a year and a half on it with the broken, the busted up back, and then the doctors told me I had to let this one go. Or I'd be crippled for life.
And around that period is where I started to go all in on the art of training others. And I said, okay, if I can't be all in training as a competitor as an athlete myself, I've been training elite competitors in mental and physical performances for some time then. But I wanted to take on the challenge of loving training others with the same intensity that I love training myself.
And I went all in on that art. And I'm still all in on that art, but I never actually got to the place where I love not being in the arena myself as much as being in the arena myself. And then in this chapter of my life now, I fall in love with the ocean arts, initially surfing and now foiling. And for the last eight years, I've been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family.
And I train three to five hours a day in foiling. And so I'm in my really intense training lifestyle myself. And I train elite mental and physical competitors around the world. And in finance, in science, technology, and in sports, I've been doing some amazing work with the Boston Celtics for the last few years. So that's a journey in a nutshell. I'm happy to dig into any of it.
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Yeah, thank you. We'll definitely revisit certain time points and themes there. I can imagine as a young boy playing chess, you have your own strategies, you're developing an understanding of what works for you. But of course, you as a young kid are also getting into the mind of the other player. You actually described that your coach or coaches were encouraging you to get into a different mindset, one that was not your default or trained up mindset, less focused on chaos and aggression, and more in this
this other mode of playing by thinking about these other types of chess players and ways to play chess. So I can imagine that most kids are not weaned. Their brain isn't developing around a game. It seems that your brain was built. The developmental neuroplasticity that's so robust in early childhood was built around this game that we call chess. And it seems to me that you were encouraged to develop a theory of mind.
that wasn't just your own, which itself I think is really unique. I mean, most six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12-year-olds might be told, hey, listen, the reason they were mean to you at school is like they just hate themselves or they just didn't think about whether or not to pick you first or last or the game or whatever it is, that you get told to do that. But for you, it seems an intense practice of trying to learn to get into the mind of another while holding on to your own
sense of what's you versus them. And so as a developmental neurobiologist, I understand this is like perhaps one of the most important events in the development of our brain. It seems that your brain was built up around that dynamic. And so now you coach peak performers and so much of coaching and teaching or
being a parent is to get into the mind of another. The difference is when you're a parent, you can think back to being a child and at least get some general sense of what that's like. Stepping back from what I just said, and I realize there's a lot of words there, but do you think that what you're doing when you approach a practice
like Tai Chi or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or science or math or music from the perspective of a performer or a teacher is that you're getting into the mind of someone else.
you're getting it, you're trying to, or you're trying to stay in your own mindset. I'm sorry I'm not being more succinct with this, but I think that, you know, as humans, we do this. Like I'm sure our dogs look up at us and say, oh, like they're happy with me or they're sad with me or, but they're, you know, the algorithms that are running are more simplistic and we, we as the most sophisticated old world primates do this so spectacularly well.
And it seems that much of your career in your life has been built around these kinds of dynamics. So put simply, what is your mindset when you approach a practice that's just you in the practice versus your mindset when you approach your practice, when it's you and another, a competitor versus when you're trying to teach something, you and a bunch of different minds, but there's a common goal. So there's really three big questions wrapped in there.
Now, it's sort of like 15 really big questions. 15 really big questions. And my audience gets upset at the length of these questions. But I think for me, it's important to just kind of set this out there as a buffet from which you can select anything or discard anything that you like. There's some many delectable things to select there. Yeah, so I mean, first of all, one-on-one competition is so interesting and mental and physical arenas. So if we think about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or chess as two of them, let's zone in on chess, because that's when I was a kid.
You're thinking about what your plan is and you're also thinking about what your opponent's plan is. And you have to, every move your opponent makes, you have to think, why did he do that? What's his plan? What is his tactical plan? What is his strategic plan? Short-term and long-term. So you're trying to unpack his strategy. Always. And you're assuming that he has or she has a strategy. Well, if they don't have a strategy, then they're not going to be a chess player.
And so then very quickly, if you're evolving in that art, you're only playing in people who are at your level or better. If you're growing, if you're always playing down, then you're not improving. And there's a beautiful filtration process in the people who accelerate in their growth curve in the chess world are ones who are challenging themselves all the time, playing up, pushing their limits. And so I spent my life against playing in strong players. And I always played a little up, except for when I was in youth competition, I always played up, which was important for me.
People had a plan, and they were very deceptive about their plans, and they had their layers to the plans. There's the tactics they're trying to set up. There's their long-term strategy, but then there's what they want me to think their strategy is, which it isn't. And in fact, their strategy is to have misdirection.
around what their strategy and their tactics are and their layers to it and it can go many many layers deep same thing in the martial arts right so obviously you need to have a theory of mind to play that game at least the way I play chess at a high level because you your con and there's this very interesting shared consciousness between players you and I are sitting a little further apart than we would say if we were playing chess
So if we were like half the distance we are from one another and we're just sitting for six hours with like a three foot chessboard, three feet between us, studying this thing. Our minds become connected. We often will share the same illusion. You might see something and then I see it when you see it. If we have the same, we might have the same blind spot. We might have the same insight. The connectedness of mind is fascinating and it's through chess. It's directly
like energetic, it's through eye contact, it's through body languages, by seeing micro expressions, it's everything. So you're always reading the opponent. And as you get really good, you learn like what your tells are, what your opponent's tells are. And you also learn like I often would have tells on purpose and I have predictable tells that I would
Let people lean on for a long time until I didn't let them lean on it anymore. It's like in the martial arts where you give someone comfort in a lean. You give them a rep of something. They can lean on it. They can lean here. Then they can lean here very comfortably, five or six or eight or 10 times in a row, until they can't. Then they're on the floor. This is happening in chess. It's happening in all of these things. One-on-one competition is a relentless truth teller.
You know, if you have a weakness, it will be exposed. If your opponent has a weakness, you will expose it. If you go into a chess game and you've got a huge opening repertoire that's extremely complex, but there's like one little place that I just hope he doesn't go there. He always goes there. It's so bonkers. You can't hope your opponent's not going to see it.
You can't make the second best move because maybe he'll blunder and I'll win. That never works if you're playing as real competition. And so you need to understand your mind. You need to understand your opponent's mind. You need to understand your opponent's understanding of your mind. That's a lot of plates to spin. And what I guess what I said before, not so clearly, is that for a young mind to be able to learn to spin all those plates is incredible.
It's clearly possible. It's unique, but it's possible. You did that. But it takes a young mind or an adult mind out of its own unique experience. So this is eventually how we'll circle back to pre-consciousness versus post-consciousness. But in the meantime,
When was it that you first recall thinking, not, oh, I'm going to beat this guy, but sensing, you know, he's getting nervous or he's confident or he can sense that I'm nervous or I'm going to set a trap and just, you know,
feeling out whether or not they detect the trap. I mean, it's just a lot. Right away. To keep in mind, my first teachers were hustlers, were chess hustlers from Washington Square. So they would mess with my mind all the time, and then they would teach me what they were doing, and they would do it again at a higher level, right? So you're distracting. They're distracting. They're setting traps. They're using Jedi mind tricks of every sort. They didn't kick it off as you at all.
I wouldn't say at all. I mean, this was a rough and tumble crowd. You know, there were a lot of drugs in the park. There's a lot of, like, you know, fights in the park. I mean, these guys took me into their wing. I mean, there were moments where, like, some guy would be going off and the guy would say, hey, Josh is here. You know, cut that out. Like, they, I was their protege. So they did, they did, but they also, you know, did not wear thick gloves and they, the gloves were thinning out all the time and I was getting better fast. Then we go to war. They were my teachers. They were my friends. I'm super grateful for, like, they, and then,
And then what's interesting is that my first classical chess teacher, Bruce Pendolfini, saw me playing in the park and asked my father if I could work with him. And then we started training together. And one of the things that I feel really badly about is the way he was portrayed in the film, Searching for Bobby Fisher, because Bruce is still a dear friend of mine. He's been Kingsley played him as a much more severe person than he was. He was a beautiful teacher.
And he really, he wanted me to express myself as did the guys in the park, but he was also filling in the holes and teaching me a classical chess foundation. And we were studying chess from the end game, first principles, studying positions of reduced complexity to touch high level principles and then learning to apply them to more and more complex positions. So my early chess education had both the classical study with Bruce and it had the street smart game with the hustlers at the park. And
But to answer your question right away, when I was six years old, like my opponents would mess with my mind and trap me and trick me and make me think here and then they go there. And then I would learn to do that. And then I remember when there was one youth competition where I made a move and set a trap and went, oh.
I mean, it was like that obvious, right? It's like the worst, like, and then it gets increasingly subtle, right? But like in my opponent said, oh, he's unhappy to the pawn, then you, and then your opponent see it. And then you learn, you know, those things keep on the circles get smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter and more and more refined. This is the opposite of Asperger's or autism, by the way. What you're describing is a hypertrophy set of circuits for theory of mind in a very young kid. So to be able to understand what's happening around you and
I think for many people, the joys of childhood are really about not being aware of what's going on around you. The psychologist would refer to the, you know, this is like a lack of impingement. Impingement is when like a kid is playing and they're really enjoying something. And then suddenly they decide they don't want to play anymore and the parent doesn't want to be bothered. So they say, no, no, no, like keep playing. You know, they're like impinging on the kids reflexive desire to do something or not do something.
This is about keeping them safe. This is in the domain of safety. But at least within the channel of chess, it seems that you developed your entire understanding of the psychology of human beings, except for, of course, you had an experience at home of family and friends, but chess certainly cut a wide trough through your development. Well, I'm really grateful for my early chess life, and I also would never choose to put that on my children.
I mean, it worked out really well for me. I mean, I have my wounds, right? I mean, there's lots of things that I've had to grapple with. But I think if you put a lot of children through the pressures that I went through, it wouldn't work out well. And I watched a lot of my young, I mean, almost all my young rivals, or I mean, like very close to all of my young rivals, ended up quitting and following the crisis. And then you have parents and coaches who are
Expressing their own egoic needs through the children and the children are shouldering that and then that becomes very difficult to deal with and then You're dealing with heartbreak and you're putting everything on the line and you're losing and you're dealing with your own self doubts and
the heartbreak of your mother and your father and your coach and then your friends. And I mean, there are so many, and then as the pressures get more and more intense in chess, like you really are putting your heart and soul on the line through that chessboard in casual games, let alone in national and world championships. And you're being shattered. When you lose, I was shattered many times over. I mean, I lost last rounds of national chess championships and world championships multiple times over. And I had, and those were the greatest moments of my life in retrospect. They taught me,
the most important lessons of my life. I would never take it back. It's been in a pattern in my chest life, my fight life, and everything I've gone through the most heartbreaking, devastating moments ultimately were the ones that catalyzed the most growth. And they were beautiful. And I really relate to them that way. But they also can be brutal for young minds and they can destroy people. What do you think it is about failure or missing the mark in some way that
catalyzes change. I always say that your brain has no reason to change if you're just trying to learn something in your inflow. Most people associate being quote-unquote inflow with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly. I don't think that was the original definition that cheeks am high intended.
The neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do like even you know like this has been study in terms of reaching for an object and there's a mirror displacement or a prism displacement or something you eventually can learn to error correct Because the cup is actually over there as opposed to where you see it But it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us adrenaline
noradrenaline and dopamine, in particular those three, they're cousins, the catecholamines that tells the, at a neurochemical level, tells the synapses, wait, something needs to change. I mean, the brain doesn't have any reason to change unless there's frustration, agitation, or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration and agitation. So do you think these big, what feel like cataclysmic fails, set a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change? I often didn't think that.
that it's only through like the devastation of a huge loss that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning. Certainly we wouldn't want to design the system that way, but as I always joke, you know, I wasn't consulted the design phase and you wouldn't either. We just have to work with what's there. Like big failure. Why do you think that sets a wave front of change? Yeah, it's a great question.
Well, I think, I think the study you sent me yesterday speaks to this. Yeah, maybe we should talk. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll answer that question experientially. Maybe you could then talk about the study and we can riff on it a little bit. This is so much fun, by the way, because I've lived my life in the arena, just like pushing myself. Like I'm my own, I'm not a scientist, but I'm like my own laboratory. You said to me yesterday at the game, like,
You said, I'm not a scientist, but I'm looking forward to tomorrow. And I said, trust me, you're a scientist. Yeah. You know, I do science through the lens of a certain understanding of mechanism and structure function and some processes and you do science through the, through the lens of experience and drawing core.
parallels and principles in different domains and at different levels of from unskilled all the way up to virtuosity. That's kind of how I see it. I think the way that I think about the most painful losses of my life
the most devastating injuries of my life. I think about dying, drowning. I drowned in the bottom of doing hypoxic breath work in a pool. So on the bottom of the pool to four and a half minutes after that, it was led to arguably the best decision of my life to move into the jungle. I think about losing the last round of the under 18 World Chess Championship on the first board.
That's a very interesting story I could describe a little bit. Or I think about my first national championship I lost when I was seven, eight, first board, last round, just unobstructed learning until then. And then I lost the last round for the title, found an opening trap.
Like, that's the loss that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. You were how old? I think I just turned eight, where I was late seven. And like, that was, it was, because if I had won that game, I would, I easily could have associated winning with just no pain, no heart, just cruising up into the end. That was the moment that, like, I got my ass kicked. I had to go back, you know, deal with these demons, come back, train for the next year, and then I won the next year, and then it was off to the races.
My life might look very different if I'd won that game. Actually, the kid who beat me in that game, David Arnett, two years later, we became best friends. For all of our childhood, we were on the same chess team and best friends. I think he gave me the greatest gift of my competitive life by kicking my ass at that game. The most devastating loss of my chess life.
So I was 17 years old. I was competing in the world under 18 chess championship in second Hungary. So every year, there's under 12, 14, 16, 18, 21 world championship. And I was always representing the US and those tournaments around the world.
You know, travel to India or Brazil or Hungary or Germany or somewhere and compete in the world championship. And under 18 worlds, I played the tournament. I just was playing very inspired chess. I would just picked up on the road three weeks before Jack Kerouac. I had become, I was just on fire with Kerouac's vision.
just so like appreciating life with this freshness and intensity that I'd ever had, more than I'd ever had. I was like totally on fire, in chess, in life, in love, in everything. And I was paired against Peter Svidler, who was the Russian. We were on the first board last round. We were playing for the World Championship. Every country sends their national champion, so it's a long tournament to get there. Early in the game, I think it was move 12, he offered me a draw.
So if I'd accepted the draw for, um, it would have gone to tie breaks. I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I thought that he was slightly favored in tie breaks. I wasn't sure, but basically the world championship would be determined where the gold medal would be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round. But I had a, but I hadn't calculated it out before, but I had a feeling it, it,
It was like maybe it was like 40, 60 or 30, 70 against me. But I, it was my style. I never accept a draw first. That was my, I always wanted to fight. So I declined, pushed for a win. Now the beauty of his decision was also, he offered me a draw in the critical position where I had to make a very specific decision.
which is a trick that chess players play on one another, which is that if you're, we should talk about tension at one point. It's a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports. So one thing that happens in chess games is that you have this building tension between minds and often the tension on the chess board and the tension on the minds are mounting together. And the urge, the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release chess tension.
in the chess pieces. And when you release chess tension, usually the person who releases the tension will be on the wrong side of tactics. So a lot of chess game is about putting mental pressure on the opponent to force them to break the tension on the chess board. So in that game, he offered me a draw. So you think about it. We're 17 years old. We're 10 days into a world championship battle. Even no matter how much we love the battle, some piece of ourselves wants a way out. Like we want to release the tension.
It's just elemental to who we are when we're living with that much pressure. So all I have to do then is like accept the draw, shake hands, and the term is over, and then it's out of our hands what happens. So in that moment, I have to also make a critical chest position. So the urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chest position. And in that move, I declined the draw and I made a slightly over aggressive move.
which turned and he ended up playing a beautiful game. Big attack beating me. I lose the world championship. Just this close to like your dream. And you're shattered, right? And then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in a little town in Slovenia and let me broke up and all that. And then I ended up meeting again in a street corner in Brazil, the world under 21 championship three weeks later.
lots of drama, you know, being a 17 year old kid, I didn't study that chess loss for two and a half months. It was so painful to me. I always studied games immediately afterwards. And I always, you might study a chess game for anywhere between three and 15 hours studying one chess game. And that's that say 10 hours is focused on the two or three critical positions of the game. And this is before chess computers were rampant. You had chess engines that could always just tell you the answer to
that's also something we should talk about later. How chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer. But we'll come back to that maybe. So I didn't study that loss for
two and a half months because it was so painful to me. Then I was, my family spent a lot of time at sea, which was an interesting part of my life and my chest life, living on a little boat, catching our own food, doing our own engine work. And I was at sea after competing in both of those world championships and some other things. And I sat down to study that game. And I spent, you know, dozen plus hours studying that one critical position of the game. And then I realized what the,
Like, the move I should have made was outside of my conceptual scheme in that critical position. I wasn't ready to make that move I had to make. And he was also, I think, a slightly stronger chess player than me. I was a great fighter. I loved the battle, but I think objectively he was a better... His name is Peter Svidler. He ended up becoming a world-class grandmaster and is just an incredible chess player today. At the time, he was just amazingly brilliant, beautiful fluid mind. But I was confident going into the game. So I had to make this move
that would essentially be his attack was on the king's side, my expansion was on the queen's side. I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king, away from my king's side, which is super counterintuitive because you think you wanted to defend your king. What I didn't realize is like harnessing the power of empty space against aggression. His attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn. Moving my last defensive piece, his attack couldn't break through. But that principle was something I didn't understand at all.
And so it's not like I would have found that move. But it was a real pop in my mind, right? So then I was 17, 18 years old, and then a year later, I started studying Tai Chi. So I started daoist meditation, daoist philosophy, the dao dishing, chuang, so Lao Tzu, the inner chapters. And then I get the Tai Chi. I started moving meditation, and I started studying Tai Chi Chuan, push hands.
without making the connection. Push Hands is the martial art, which is the essence of Push Hands is learning to utilize empty space against aggression. But I hadn't connected it to that moment. And you fast forward to 2004 World Championship, which is what the art of learning ended with the final chapter of that is the World Championship finals. I'm fighting this guy bigger than me stronger than me. He's been training since childhood. Final fight in a big stadium. Everyone wanted me to be destroyed in the biggest fight of my life.
And I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space, by letting him feel my weakness, by leaning on him, by letting it, by letting it, by, and then I just end then disappearing. So it's, it's very interesting how there was no mental process. There's no conscious processing of that connection, but the biggest loss of my chest life and then the principle, which I wasn't ready to understand yet.
was how I won the world championship in the martial arts so many years later. And it's a completely different discipline, right? So it's an example of like, and of course that principle is manifested in every part of my life today. But like that's one of many stories in my life where like a loss spurs an insight which might consciously or often unconsciously lead to something incredible down the road. And I think that it, one of the biggest challenges that we have, but it's so interesting that the loss of a world chess championship final
is leads to the win, direct lesson, leads to the win of a world championship in a fighting realm. And how common that is. And one of the things that I think about, like when you sit down with great competitors, again and again, when you hear their inner journey, the most heartbreaking losses lead to the transformational change, which leads to the biggest wins of their life.
Whether it's in basketball, whether it's in fighting, whether it's in business, it's in finance, it's in writing, love and love. Oh my God, love. Yeah. And the breakups are devastating. They're a death of sorts. Yeah.
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the girlfriend breaks up with them and they commit suicide. And for years, he would work with families of these people, these young guys. And he finally connected the dots. And he realized that in every case, it was as if there was no future whatsoever because it was their first relationship. And when you hear it, you just go, it makes so much sense. But the 16-year-old and the 18-year-old brain, however these kids were, it's devastating.
want to make sure that I ask about devastation, because you said that you were devastated. You experienced a tremendous amount of pain from these losses, in particular the one that you just described. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about what that was like.
I don't want to spin off into a discussion about the science of grief, but I did an episode about grief. And it was really surprising to learn that most of what you hear about in pop culture, that there are these very specific stages of grief and you progress through them linearly. None of that is true. All of modern research says that it's not disbelief, anger, acceptance. It's like a hodgepodge of different emotions depending on time of day and middle of the night. But the core feature, and I find this so interesting, is that grief, whether or not it's
what I would consider kind of trivial grief, like losing your favorite pen or a watch that you really love, okay? An object versus somebody extremely close to you, a parent, a loved one, a child, God forbid, that the brain systems that map memory onto action are disrupted in grief such that, you know, you wake up each day and you want to go see the person or call them. And so it's a,
What grief really represents is a remapping of your understanding about what you can do with your physical body to create action and interaction with this person that's now gone. And so the remapping is one of the nervous system having to do all this no-go. We talk in terms of inaction systems and the basal ganglia of the brain. You have go programs and no-go programs. There's some other stuff too, but it's mostly go or no-go. And basically grief is this taking of a
depending on how long and how deeply you knew the person, a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms that were all go. You could text them, you could call them, you could hug them, you could kiss them, you could listen to them, you could smell them, and now it's all no go. And that, we think, is what we experience as grief. Now, in terms of losing a very important chess match, when you talk about being in pain and in grief,
What was that like? Did that mean sleepless nights, disbelief? And at what point do you think you were able to say, okay, you know what, I'm going to start thinking about this constructively. I'm going to turn this into a go, as opposed to just trying to, you know, getting your time machine and travel back in time, which of course is impossible. What was that early experience of devastation like and how did it transmute into growth?
Yeah. Well, even sitting with you now, thinking about it, it seems ridiculous for a chess game to be losing a chess game to be anywhere near the absolute heartbreak of losing a loved one. And yet, we can make things very large in our minds and in our beings, right? I think that human... I mean, one thing I think about is how hard we fight to maintain our conceptual schemes, our identities.
even if they're torturing us. And loss isn't relative. The fact that we're sitting right now not far from hundreds if not thousands of homes that have been wiped away doesn't
change other losses. We sometimes will say, well, at least we're, I have a lot of friends that lost their homes, they'll say, well, at least we have our health, we have our things. And so we can do this, but it's not how the human emotion system responds reflexively to our own losses. So I don't think it's dismissive or sociopathic to experience
big loss in one's life as a big loss, even if it's not the worst possible loss. It's just not how we're wired. One of the things that I reflect on and that I've cultivated, it's very hard, but that I work to cultivate is when you're in those moments of rupture to both be in the rupture and have the perspective that we will have later about the rupture, which is not to say,
not being in the rupture. One of the things I feel badly about when I wrote The Art of Learning, I spoke a lot about process and outcome, and it had a big impact on the chess world. And then what happened is there were generations of parents who were young kid chess players, who their kids would go to compete, and the parents would say, it doesn't matter if you win or lose. All that matters is the process. It doesn't matter if you win or lose. And the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle
mental battle and the chess is fucking intense. Like when you're playing chess, you're putting your mind, your body, your psyche, everything, like you're on the line. And if you lose, you feel shattered. Like that's just how you feel. If you're not trying your hardest, then we can't even shouldn't be talking about you. So let's say you are trying your hardest. You're putting it on the line. It's on the line and you lose and you're shattered. Like every part of you didn't, didn't you? You feel destroyed.
So the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle, and the parent tells them it doesn't matter if I win or lose. It's deeply confusing. And the kids actually usually know that the parents are full of shit. The parents actually care so much, and they feel guilty about how much they care about their kids' result. They're telling their kid that to feel less guilty about the fact that they're putting their own egoic needs on their child. And it's all like, and the kids see it all. That's the hilarious thing. It's like an eight, 10, 11 year old. They see it all. They're like, Mom, give me a break. And the parents are just stuck in their guilt and absurdity.
seen this so many times. So like the discussion of process and outcome is so subtle, right? Because yes, it's about the process. It's about the journey. It's about the long term process. But if we don't care about the results, the process won't work. So we need to put ourselves on the line enough to be shattered and the process is what really matters. But it's not that we can
liberate ourselves from caring enough to be shattered because then we're not engaged. And it is something about putting our egos on a line that is what leads to the growth surges that great competitors have, the ones who become virtuosos, right? And so then that stated how can we have experienced the simultaneity of being shattered and having the perspective that this is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
You have to be in a mode of theory of mind with yourself about your future self somehow. And this is what I think losses are so beneficial for is that if you've had a couple of breakups, you realize that you can fall in love again. If you've only had breakups, perhaps you think, well, it always leads to a breakup, but you know that the process of moving forward is the only way to test that hypothesis again. And so I think repeated failure
is essential, right? Because with repeated failure means that there was also repeated fighting one way back after failure. So yeah, I think sometimes not to take us into a different course of story, but just very briefly, the first manuscript I ever submitted in graduate school took forever to get published. And it went from the highest of journals down to a good journal, solid journal, but it took forever.
And that was so beneficial. I was crushing at the time, but my reward circuitry is built up around very long latency between effort and final outcome. I'm just used to long waits between figuring out what's gonna happen. And actually one of the weirdest things about podcasting or social media is that I feel like you go to quote-unquote to publication so fast. It's like, whoa, things used to, projects used to take two years.
and then you get reviews and then you know, so I think your early devastating failure or failures, because you had a few of them in there at least. Oh, a lot more than a few. Probably set you up for tremendous frustration tolerance. And this, not just hearing, I mean, the words this too shall pass, they're helpful, but that's really something that needs to be experienced in my view.
It's a very interesting thing when you're talking about competitors. What is the right balance between like playing up and playing down, right? Like how much do you want to build the confidence of a young competitor or artist or person or any of us, young, whatever age and how much do you want to be stretched a little bit beyond your ability so that your weaknesses are exposed, you have to take them on and you have to grow and getting that balance right.
is hugely important. And it's not simple. Like a lot of boxing training camps are based around the boxer's confidence being everything. And you want them to feel invincible going into the ring. And then from another perspective, it's something very powerful about having a training camp that's so intense that all your weaknesses are exposed. You have to take them on. If you're not sparring against people who can expose your weaknesses, then you don't know what they are. You don't have the chance to grow.
I live at this point with a trying to be at max stretch without snapping. Like for example, if I look at my foiling, like if I'm not falling enough during a foil session, then I'm not pushing my turns hard enough. And if you're just succeeding all the time, then you're not pushing yourself enough.
Do you believe in optimal levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game? Autonomic arousal is something I've worked on for many years and one of the most impressive features I think of our brains as humans. First would be our ability to think into the past, present or future or combination of those two. If other animals do that, they don't do it nearly as well and they certainly don't.
create technologies to bridge those different time scales. That's number one. But the other one is our visual and temporal aperture of focus. So when we are in a state of elevated arousal, our visual aperture shrinks. I'm sure you're familiar with this. And we slice time more finely. Much, you know, it's like a higher frame rate.
which is why people who, for instance, see a devastating traumatic car crash report experiencing things in slow motion, right? Because their frame rate is high, like a slow motion video. Whereas when we are relaxed, our frame rate is larger bins of time. And I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and optimal states for learning have to do with
Assuming that there's one optimal state of arousal, but I feel like in every endeavor I've ever been involved in, it's about learning the transitions between the arousal states that allows us to pull back a little bit. As you said, like get tense, just relax just a little bit to be able to maybe see a different perspective or ratchet up our level of tension or AKA arousal.
in order to be able to find slice the, you know, the micro expressions of a competitor. Um, I mean, this, these two cameras on the fronts of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted to this process of, of, you know, shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness. And it can be talked about in terms of space, just vision, like tunnel vision versus panoramic vision. Yeah. We talked about it space time, you know, tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader slice.
But then when you start getting into like the, then you map that onto the past, present and future mapping. And that's where I feel like we're into the game of, of, uh, skill learning and chess and strategy. So forgive me for the kind of, you know, top contour, neuroscience, but that's how I see the human primate as so different than all the other creatures in the world.
That's how we're different because we can learn chess or ballet, foil, you know, gibbons are pretty amazing at what gibbons do. But if they're trying to learn other stuff that they've been failing so far, I spent a lot of time playing with frame rates. And I had this experience that I wrote about that slowing down time chapter of the art of learning where I
When I had these experiences both in chess and in fighting, it was one time I was fighting in a super heavyweight dude in a competition in my hand shattered. And I broke my hand right here. And it was interesting because the fight was very intense, reasonably hard, and my hand broke and instantly time slowed down.
And he was moving in slow motion. And I was able to just so easily play with someone with like a broken hand compared to what had been a war before. We know what that is. Right. We do know adrenaline. Yeah. Adrenaline and that tunnel vision and then the frames are fat. So if I inject you with just a little bit of adrenaline, it stays in your periphery, but it activates systems in your brain and parallel to that. And you're going to experience an immediate dilation of your pupils.
you'll have more tunnel vision. I mean, every process is sped up in the direction of higher frame rate. So then the question then what came for me, and this would be fun to talk, I've never spoken to a scientist about this process, like how do I learn to do that at will, right? And then how can I train, because I can't just pump myself with adrenaline all the time, although maybe I may or maybe I can learn to have that physiological response. You can deploy it. Right, so then how can I deploy it, right? What are triggers for having that chemical change? And then also how can I train so that
I have the experience of more frames than my opponent. And so Marcelo Garcia, who he's known as the King of Scramble, he spends his whole time in transition. So if you're training Jiu Jitsu with most people, they're always finding a position and holding it. Marcelo, one of the unique things about his training life for most of his life was that he never held positions. He was always moving. He was always in the in-between. And it's true in most arts is that people think that the art is the position that they see, but the real high-level art is the space in between the positions.
So if we have this position, leads to this position, that's gonna be like, there's gonna be no frames in between for most people, for some people there might be four frames, but if I have 100 frames, then I can play in pockets that you don't see. And so if you're living your life in the training process in the in between,
in the transition. If you're always the way that manifests in the actual like, for example, jujitsu training or submission grappling training is if you're not holding positions, you're always moving and you're spending all of your time in the in between while people who are holding position are always static. So if you go to a jujitsu school and you sit and watch, it's interesting to look for this one thing. Notice the amount of time static versus in motion. Marcelo is always in motion. There's a beautiful clip of him that you got people can look up. It's an art de suave. It was an old documentary back in the day.
Like 25 years ago, I think it was, it's on YouTube. It's like an eight minute clip of him training as an, I think an 18 year old. And you watch him just like in the early days of him learning this transitional approach and he's just never stopping. He's always allowing the person, but you have to get past the egoic dynamics. Cause you'd, you're like you're, you're giving up on dominating people all the time. Cause when you're in a dominant position in Jiu Jitsu, you want to hold it cause you've won. And there's all this bullshit passing between men who are fighting or women who are fighting each other. We want to dominate, but
If you release that and you're thinking about the learning process, then you stop holding, then you're moving, and then you're getting non-stop exposure to the in-between. So if you spend your life training in the in-between, then you have more frames than other people do. That's what a lot of what illusionists are doing. They spend all of their time training in the spaces that other people don't look at. And so it's not magic. It's brilliant training. It's the art of illusion at the in-between.
And a lot of the things that you can do, high level martial artists can do to a lower level martial artist or someone who doesn't train that feels mystical. It's all about that principle manifest in interesting ways. But in general, like for me, and this goes back to the question you asked two or three brilliant, expansive questions ago around intense moments.
A lot of what my training has been is having some serendipitous intense moment and then learning and that becomes a beacon. So for example, there was a moment I was playing in a world chess championship in Kalakut, India. And I was deep into a calculation, couldn't find the solution and there was an earthquake and everything started like in the actual world. Everything started shaking, right? But I experienced the earthquake from within inside of the chess position.
And I knew there was an earthquake, but I also was lost. My brain was lost in the labyrinth. And I found the solution. And then I got up and left vacated because we had to leave the playing hall and we came back and I made my move and went on to win. And it was so interesting because it was like, and then I
The earthquake, like a lot of what happens in chess is that you're reaching so deep into the complexity, like into the cupboard, but the solution is right here at the front. And all you have to do is come back out on the surface. One of the best ways, by the way, to prevent to minimize chess blunders with talented young players or players of any age is to shift the order of decide, make the move, and then write it down, because you notate your chess games, to
Decide, write it down, and then make the move. The write it down is a resurfacing, and you have common sense, look at the position. Almost all chest blunders, you realize you've blundered instantly. You can think for 20 minutes, make your move, you know instantly you blundered. Because there's not that surfacing, right? But then you can learn to just do the surfacing before making the actual move. It's true with human decision making in general.
Right, we realized that the scrub, right as we, yeah, completed. Yeah, because like we're caught up in all of our bullshit, we make the move and then we've left our thought process and like, oh, that was just absurd, right? And we see it. And when you think about, I mean, you think about the heartbreaking literature, you know, studies in how people who've jumped off a bridge relate to it the moment after they've jumped off the bridge, those who have survived to write the interviews afterwards. Yeah, they report wishing they hadn't jumped. Right. Immediately.
They jump and then they wish they had such an important message. You know, we hear all this stuff about suicide prevention, you know, but just that knowledge. I mean, I don't know how conscious of that sort of thing people are as they're headed down the trench. I mean, what of suicidal depression, but
These appatures that we're talking about, these time space appatures where frame rate is set and visual aperture is set. I think for most people, we experience them as sort of notches. So it's like, you're in a high state of arousal and you have high frame rate. And just like being like a ball bearing down in a trench, you can't really see out the other side. You're literally in there at a certain frame rate of, let's say an argument, an intense argument with somebody where you want to win and you're frustrated with them and the whole situation and you're in the trench.
Whereas when you're relaxed, it's more a broad concave or a flat table where the ball bearing can move around at will. It sounds like Marcello and people that train these different transition states as you really
learning to access the different frame rates, but from a place of like kind of like a little dimple in a table, and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple and kind of moving from dimple to dimple as opposed to like these trenches of brain states. And I think about this a lot, a lot, because I feel like most bad decisions are made from a high frame rate, high arousal state. Most of the terrible things that humans have done to one another
I suppose their sociopathy and pre-planned things, but they tend to be associated with higher arousal states where people regret what they did all second degree murder, for instance. In any event, I think the ability to move through these different arousal states at will
is possible. You asked earlier, like, how would one do that? Well, the beautiful thing about the visual system in these different frame rates and states of arousal is that it works in both directions. So when you're in a higher state of arousal, your visual aperture shrinks, you go to a higher frame rate. But it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture, you go to a higher frame rate. The converse is also true. If you deliberately, for instance, as we're looking across one another right now, if I start to take in the fullness of the picture here, the walls, et cetera,
There's a natural relaxation of the autonomic arousal systems or parasympathetic activity goes up. And what's incredible is that anytime we view a horizon,
that naturally happens because you're not setting to a single fixation point. So anytime you see a horizon, you relax and it's not a coincidence. So the visual system can drive it inward and your autonomic arousal can drive it toward your, your visual system. The other thing is there's a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago, which showed that people who do a biofeedback game where they're watching a little, you know, it's like a more kind of like a sine wave.
And they're deliberately trying to increase their level of arousal as the, as the curve goes up for those that are just listening. Within a few days, they can learn to control their pupil size, which sets their arousal and their aperture for a segmenting time. So you can learn this through biofeedback. And I think that the script for that is available online. I haven't tried it yet, but if you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil sizes, even independently of one another, that's amazing because
So it's not supposed to be able to occur, but you can. So you can learn to, you know, I guess the poor men's version of this would be look in the mirror, stare at yourself and try and ramp up your level of autonomic arousal, watch your pupils get bigger, and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller. That practice, it seems in biofeedback, allows people to do it without staring into the mirror, so to speak. So it can be done.
It's just that it hasn't been parsed by science that finally until recently. It's interesting. I, um, so I have this term I use called fire walking, which for me, what it means is, is cultivating the ability to learn from, from experiences one doesn't have with the same somatic intensity that one learns from really intense experiences that we have. So for example, let's just say you're a Jiu Jitsu fighter and you overextend your arm and you're in a world championship and you get your arm broken.
or your shoulder ripped off or something. So you've lost the world championship and you got a shattered arm. You're not going to overextend your arm that way again. You've learned that that lesson is burned in. But like, if you're watching a jiu-jitsu fight and someone over since their arm gets armed and taps out, it is very, very different experience. How can we cultivate the ability to study other people's like worst, most heartbreaking blunders, worst moments, et cetera, and learn from that with the same somatic intensity that they learned from it, right?
So much of that is physiological. So I spent a lot of time doing biofeedback and a lot of time doing visualization practices and doing very intense visualization practices and many, many years working with triggers for my own psychology and physiology so that I can get my physiology primed to have an intense learning experience while studying something that might otherwise just feel intellectual.
And then combining that with my own experience of things. And we can 100x or 1000x or 10,000x our learning curve by being able to learn from other things with the same intensity that we can learn from our own things, but people don't harness that.
Why do you think they don't? It takes time and it doesn't seem as intuitive as going out and shooting free throws or something like that. I think people are really amazingly unreflective about the training process. I told you, I haven't written a book since The Art of Learning, and I'm a couple of years into this beautiful process of writing my next book, which is going to be called, I think, The Art of Training, which is really what I've been cultivating for the last decades.
And I'm deconstructing my approach to training in mental and physical disciplines. And it's really interesting to go through that process myself. What do I do? What have I done? And what have I helped others do? And it's interesting that the art of learning was a birthing process. That's what it felt like to me.
I took notes to it for five years, and then after 2004 Worlds, I wrote it in nine months. It just kind of came out of me, and I'm kind of in that process now with this, so it feels really organic and intrinsic, the creative process. And I don't know, it's very interesting when you talk to people who are really playing at elite levels of different fields, or who are just below full self-expression, or they're just in the edge of virtuosity, but not quite there, and you start to deconstruct what they do. There's so much low hanging fruit that they can do.
Why, I don't know, I think in many ways people, I mean there's lots of reasons I think of one thing, people who are very talented and archs don't have to be so deliberate about their training often to reach a certain level. Often people have other people building their training process and they're not reflective about their own training process because they have big teams of coaches who are creating it for them.
People haven't cultivated the art of deconstruction, which is an art that's very important. People haven't cultivated the art of loving training, which is a hugely important, like meta skill to learn. People haven't taken on like all of the skills around physiological triggers, around changing one's physiological state at will. People haven't practiced visualization very intensely. They're all of these, like,
these skills that we can put together in order to train at a world-class level. But it takes patience and creativity and not just being subject to whatever else does, but being able to look expansively at everything.
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Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to function. We had a guest on this podcast, Jim Hollis is an 84 year old probably 85 year old Jungian analyst on and he just brilliant guys written some really important books under satin shadow and
not, et cetera. And he said, you know, so he has a real kind of like suit up show up, you know, get to work kind of mentality. But he also is very reflective person. And he said, you know, if there's one simple key to life, it's that one. Understand that most of our daily lives are waking lives are in stimulus response, but that it's so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out of stimulus and response.
And either to just let stuff guys are up out of our unconscious subconscious mind or to just put some real thought to something that, you know, most everybody is in stimulus response. I wonder these days with social media and so many things filling the space between walking to the car or with the pro players that you work with, you know, I'm guessing the moment they they're on the plane, they're on their phones and texting and
All these things are wonderful technologies, but they fill all the space with stimulus response. Yeah. They fill all the space with stimulus response. And, um, you know, it's not unless you go to a place with no Wi-Fi accessibility that you suddenly realize like, wow, like in most of modern life, we're just constantly in this tennis or ping pong match with this trivial thing and that trivial thing. And some of it's essential.
but that there's no quote-unquote space anymore. In many ways, my life is built around creating that space. And it's interesting, when I was playing chess, I experimented with studying chess from everywhere between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day to see where the sweet spot was. And what I came to was about four and a half hours a day. But that four and a half hours a day was like a 10 out of 10, like fucking just on fire. And then the rest of the day became about cultivating those four and a half hours.
And my life today has that kind of rhythm as well. And training, like I've spent many years working with people who are just brilliant in the investment space has been a really interesting way because it's a great laboratory because people are very driven. They're all in, they're motivated.
Um, they'll take themselves on and it's great place for me to over the last couple of decades to, to like refine the art of training. Um, because I don't like solving for motivation. That's one thing. And I think part of that relates to that quirky dynamic from when I was seven that I described as always being the target and so never having.
Like not taking on my weaknesses was outside of my conceptual scheme. And so in many ways, I haven't really had to struggle with motivation myself for better or worse. And I love working with people, partnering with people who are all in, who want to take themselves on. I don't love having to motivate people. And so a great laboratory for me is with people who have all sorts of problems, who might be obstructed, but who are all in.
And you're working with world-class investors and they're grinding themselves out 14, 15, 16 hours a day. Doing less is a huge part of doing much more. And then you start to see, if you think about a 10 out of 10 as being in terms of when they're at their very best creatively, they could look from a 10 to a two and not even notice.
And then you begin to cultivate an awareness of where one is in one's creative spectrum, right? And then you sort of cultivate the art of stress and recovery and like amping oneself up and then releasing and you see that the ability to turn it on
is directly connected to the ability to turn it off, as you know. If you walk into a fight gym and you study a bunch of fighters in the mats, one great read you can make is looking at the depth of physiological relaxation when the guys aren't fighting, and you'll see who the highest level fighters are. The best guys, man, they can turn it on with wild intensity, but their bodies are so mellow.
when they're not going. And then men, they're so efficient. And so that oscillation, that range is so huge. But people don't cultivate the art of turning it off in order to learn how to turn it on. For many, many years, decades, I've been practicing what I call now the MIQ process, most important question process. And the essence of it is, it's what I came to as the
Most potent ways so far that I've found to train analysts or thinkers in mental arenas, you're training people in the art of discovering what matters most. If you talk to a great chess player, it actually looks at less than a lower level chess player, but they look in the right direction.
So you might think a great chess player, people often think like, oh yeah, I can calculate 50 moves deep, 100 moves deep. It's all irrelevant. Move two was inaccurate. So it was just all an illusion. The great chess players might look at much less, but they're looking in the most potent directions. The lower level chess players are lost in a sea of complexity.
So if you're working with, like I say, a scientist or an investor or whatever, them straining their mind for what is the most important question, ideally to begin the practice toward the end of their work day with release, like recovery period with full intensity in a peak performance state, stretch one's mind for what matters most and then release it.
Release the work day completely, don't work all night grinding yourself out at a low level. Release, and then first thing in the morning waking up, pre-input, return one's mind to the critical question and brainstorm on it. It's very powerful because you're opening up the, you're systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind. You're feeding critical questions to the unconscious, which is processing overnight. And like, I know you know all this, like the consistency with which you come up with an insight in the morning is incredible. Interestingly, and you'll probably know why much more than me,
improved dreamer call often happens simultaneously when one starts to have more and more insights about the MIQ in the morning, which is fascinating. Then over time, you can have micro manifestation of this throughout the day before going for a workout, before taking a walk, before taking a break, before taking a piss.
Instead of going to the bathroom the day, instead of checking your phone while taking a piss, you pose yourself in a IQ, you release it, you do not do anything but piss in the bathroom and breathe and then return to the question and you'll have an insight. So you're learning to just oscillate between the conscious and unconscious states and you're opening up that channel and you're practicing stress and recovery. And then your physiological workouts are also stress and recovery all the time. So you're building that theme in everything that you do.
And you realize that like when you're at your very best for four or five hours a day, you're doing multiples of the work that you're doing. If you're just grinding yourself at, you know, what I've called in the past, a simmering six or whatever at, you know, for 15 or 16 hours a day. And so people can do so much more in less time. And my life, my life, my lifestyle is based on that. You know, I'm training very intensely physically and I'm doing really intense mental work and I oscillate between them.
in beautiful ways, and I have a lot of empty space for reflection, for meditation, for like zoning my mind on what matters most. It's about quality, not quantity. But it's so interesting how we live in this culture where just quantity is just consuming everyone. Yeah, well, it's as Hollis said, you know, with the stimulus response thing dominates. And it dominates, I think, because, well, I have several reflections. First of all, I just have to say,
You're absolutely a scientist. You just proved it to us through a description of this process, which I might ask you to describe once again, because I think there's so much value in each of the pieces and how it's put together. Three things come to mind. First of all, yes, indeed, as you know, and listeners of this podcast will know that yet is the it is during sleep that we reorganize our
neuroconnections and actual neuroplasticity occurs. The stimulus is provided in wakefulness and focus and attention, but the actual rewiring occurs during deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. One little fun, I think, but also powerful.
A tool that I learned from, maybe you know him as well, I'm blessed to have Rick Rubin as a very good friend. Oh yeah, Rick and I've had beautiful gems. Amazing. Wonderful, such a wise tool. Spending more and more time with Rick. But he taught me something extremely valuable, which was the process of taking some time to just lie completely still and let your mind go as wild as it needs to or as calm as it needs to while keeping the body completely still. This mimics rapid eye movement sleep.
when we're paralyzed and the mind is very, very active. And I actually think that practices such as yoga nidra and non-sleep deep rest are also mimics of rapid eye movement sleep. And there are data starting to emerge now that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep, but in wakefulness. So put simply lying still, relaxing the body as much as possible and letting the mind be extremely active.
Rick also taught me a little trick for which I don't know any science, but it certainly seems to work for me, which is that if you wake up from a dream and you want to continue having that dream, keep your body completely still. Whereas if you wake up from a dream and it was a troubling or anxiety provoking dream, move your body. And it seems to work extremely well. And I have my theories about why this works. I have to ask about this process of
of reflecting on one's own mistakes deliberately, kind of addressing one's own pain points or shame points as such a key feature of your upbringing and your practice around learning. Forgive me for going a little bit longer here, but recently somebody taught me something extremely useful. She said, our consciousness is sort of like a lighthouse and we have this beam of light sweeping around 360 degrees.
But where we have places of shame about whatever, things that we're done to us, things that we've done, whatever, just points of shame, things that we don't want people to know about us, that we don't even like to think about. It's like a stain on that lighthouse. And when that light passes through that stain, it casts a wedge, a shadow in the shape of a wedge. And she described it in somewhat mystical terms. She said, you know, it's through that shadow that evil things enter us.
and that the world can hurt us and that the process of getting over our shame, but also experiencing life in much more fullness and being able to cultivate our craft and be more present for ourselves and for others is a process of going right up to that lighthouse window and looking at the stain and going, that's what it is. And that's the process of wiping it off. Now that's all.
You know, that's just an illustration for us to understand what I think is the process you're describing, which is that you get right up next to your worst nightmares, your worst mistakes, the things you don't want to think about. And in doing so, you learn to relax in their presence and they sort of disappear as points of shame.
Yeah, it's interesting. When I wrote The Art of Learning, it was in many ways cathartic for me. Because there were parts of my life that I had felt like I had let myself down. Like there were parts like, like my chest life I moved away from and like there were certain moments of it where I felt like I hadn't fully expressed my potential. And I just wrote them all. I just shared it all.
And it was it was so beautiful. It was so cathartic. When I think about leadership, I think that it's so important to like leading with vulnerability is such an exquisite I spent on Joe Missoula and I spent today a couple days ago with Sean McVay, who's the head coach of LA Rams who just just a few days after this big the big loss against the Eagles and we have this
We actually ended up watching the tape. It was his first watching of the tape of this heartbreaking playoff loss he had. And, um, and watching him process it. And you know, he's such a great leader. Um, both Joe and, um, and Sean, like lead, they both take themselves on more intensive than anything, but they lead with vulnerability. Like they go up against their stains.
And like being authentic there as opposed to being a leader or a father or a mother or a coach who just keeps it in the pocket as if they're perfect. There's something so inauthentic about that. I think in human relationship and in the cultivation of oneself as an artist going right at one's weakness.
is so powerful. Now, of course, there's also the tender balance of how much we should cultivate our strengths and how much we should be spent showing up our weaknesses. And one of the most important principles, which I learned too late in my chest life,
is that we can take on our weaknesses through the lens of our strengths, right? Remember this brilliant sage, Russian coach, Yuri Razavayev said to me at one point, you can learn Karpov through Kasparov, his point at being, you can learn about the great defense, the defensive chess through the great defense of great aggressors like you. As opposed to just studying Karpov and thinking, what should I, what would Karpov do here? Which was urged to do by other people?
like learn defense through offense, right? So it was part of my self-expression. I learned that principle too late for my chest life, but it's manifest everywhere else, right? So while we're cultivating our strength, which I think we should do as a way of life, how do we go up against our stains, but in ways that we're not fundamentally
It's not shame. I don't, I don't relate to personally. Like I don't, that's a word. I don't like shame. It's not shame. It's like, like when it becomes just like a, like a breath pattern, like we lose, we, we put ourselves in the line. We lose. We go at it. We study it. We, you know, we, we study how we look. We, we study about what the other thing is incredible to me is that when you study your losses, when you go up against what you're calling like that, that, that as a beautiful image, like the, like where, like the shadow of the lighthouse, right? The,
The interconnectedness of the technical, the psychological and the thematic is so powerful in the learning process. Almost every technical mistake that we make in an art, if we're pushing ourselves to our limits, if we're like, if you and I are like around the same level and we're competing in something where we're about this in anything, like any technical mistake I made will have a psychological dimension because I most likely, my technical weakness was,
emerged because I was so psychologically pressured that I wasn't able to solve the technical position, right? Or if you, if I make a psychological error, it's often because I was a little technically out of my water. And so it put pressure, extra pressure on my psyche, then you were able to exploit, right? And every technical
Mistake is local, right? But there's themes. There's like a theme that houses hundreds of those technical manifestations. So if we are always thinking about the technical, the thematic, the psychological, and we have what I call a six dimensional introspective process, right? And we're looking at all of these, the interconnectedness of those different parts of the human experience of an art or anything else.
then the growth curve is incredibly explosive because we make a technical mistake. And we learn the theme. We take on the theme that housed that one, but also houses dozens of others. And so as we turn that theme into a strength, into a power zone, then that technical mistake goes away. But as do the other manifestations of that theme.
And if we're also studying the psychological weakness that allowed that technical weakness to manifest to, like, unearth itself, then that psychological dimension becomes something we take on. And then we're studying thematic interconnectedness as a way of life, because in that lesson we learned through that chest that, like, I made a subtle chest mistake, but that connects to my love life. It connects to my fatherhood. It connects to my, like, my foiling, my jiu jitsu, my everything.
Because it connects to the theme and it connects to my psychology and it manifests, I don't believe in compartmentalization. I believe in thematic interconnectedness, right? And like the core themes of my life, I would say if I had to boil it down would be love interconnectedness and receptivity. I only do what I love and I spend time with people who I love. And that's how I live.
The study of interconnectedness is my way of life in some of the ways I've been describing. And receptivity is what I cultivate every day in my life and the ocean with people, with humans. And we always get isolated. We get like siloed. Oh, yeah, is this chess mistake? Like one of the things I've found so confusing
is why don't more great chess players who try successfully translate their level from chess to other things? Because chess is so hard. And chess is such a relentlessly truth-telling art. If you become a world-class chess player, you're fucking good. Because there's no luck in chess. Especially if you become very good, very young. I mean, I think this is true of most prodigies. I don't want to name them, but I have a colleague
very smart guy, his science is very solid. And I remember I met with him and I said, is it true that you're- He's gonna love that. That's okay. He's done nice work. I just wouldn't say that it's like transformed our understanding of like everything in that field. He's made some very important contributions. He's a fabulous teacher and a nice person. But he's said, one day I was meeting with him and I said, you're a child prodigy, I heard. And he said, former child prodigy.
And I was like, OK, well, there we're getting technical. But yeah, OK, I think we're. And I asked my dad, because my dad lived in the same building as Daniel Barrambaum, the musician who has ever seen the movie, Hillary and Jackie, who's one of the most accomplished piano players at a very young age.
And, um, and my dad used to hear him playing when he was a kid and like they wouldn't let him play with other kids. And he was like, I mean, Baron Baum is a seer for classical musicians and pianists in particular. It's like a serious stuff. And I, so I asked my dad, I was like, what's the deal with this child prodigy thing? And he said, um, yeah, very few of them go on to do much in their adult careers in any field. Right. And I was like, wow. And, um,
Okay, so what's missing there is clearly not a lack of ability, focus. I mean, you could just say raw talent, but you still have to, kids still have to focus. So what's missing is this transfer of understanding. It seems or what you're talking about, the interconnectedness of things.
Yeah, I probably will get myself in trouble with this colleague. But hey, listen, maybe he'll take on something new and do something additionally spectacular. He's got a lot of things on his plate. But that struck me. I was like, oh, it's not clear that being a quote unquote child prodigy is such a good thing for the long arc of one's life. But you have seen to bring in these other elements. Love. I'd like to talk more about that.
And I would also add, at least from an outsider's perspective, you seem to have broken the mold with what's expected of you based on your prior accomplishments. I have no identity in being a prodigy, just to be clear. I don't relate to that word at all. I mean, that word's been put on me from the outside, but I just don't associate with it. I don't relate to it at all.
Because I was, you know, maybe somewhat talented in chess compared to most people. But then very early in my, by the time I was like six and something, I was only competing against people who were better than me and kids who were as talented as me. And then on the world stage, kids who are more talented than me. And I couldn't rely on my talent at all because ever, I mean, I had to work my ass off.
and I won and I lost and I got my ass kicked. And so for me, it was all about the battle and taking myself on. And I think what happens, it's funny, many years ago, I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition and I showed up at this place and all these kids were there and they were all excited to play against me. And then the organizer of it said, my son hasn't lost a chess game in two years.
And like, that's all you need to know. Because it's just like, that means you're just, and of course he was the one who didn't want to play against me, right? Because even if it was a chess game in two years, you're not taking your shit on. You're finding people who you can beat and you're only playing against them. So there's a couple levels to this. Let's dig into it. So I think that people who have identity in being a prodigy,
develop a brittleness often, because they associate their level of mastery with talent, with something innate, with being smarter, more brilliant, more gifted, whatever. And then that is, you think about Carol Dweck's work in entity incremental theories of intelligence, right? That's an entity theory of intelligence. So I think there's that, and there's something fundamentally brittle about that. And then what then one doesn't take risk.
one doesn't expose oneself, one associates, one's great moments with something ingrained or innate versus the hard work that it took to get there. And there's all sorts of paralyzing dynamics there. Oh, there's also a tendency to lie. Carol's early papers referred to this in the discussion section. So you have to read deep into those papers, but she describes how the
students who did not have growth mindset that really identified and held so much of their ego with their performance were at a significantly greater tendency to lie about their performance when they didn't do well. To themselves and to others. That's right. But the lying to oneself is the really interesting part, right?
So there's that dimension, right, which you and I have both seen just countless manifestations of. And believe me, like when you're competing against someone who you see has that kind of psychological construction, they're done. And you can just break them, right? You can, there's so many chinks in the armor. You can, it's like, so, and it, so there's a brittleness there. Like you can just find where the, their mind stops when false constructs where the energy stops, where their bodies crimped, right? Like you can just find their connection to the ground and explode through it.
in mental and physical disciplines, if someone has that kind of identity in being the more brilliant one, the more gifted one, whatever, their prey from a competitive perspective, which is ultimately good for them if they expose themselves to it because then they have to take themselves on.
But the dynamic that I was reflecting on in chess players is a little next door to this, which is that I think that if you're learning how to play chess, and let's just say I was teaching you, do you play chess? Trivially. So I was teaching you to play chess, right? I could teach you to play chess with a language that is chess-specific.
I can teach you chess principles. I can teach you very effectively with chess principles. But I can also teach you just as effectively or maybe somewhat more effectively. But it's just as effectively with chess principles that are also life principles. And it's interesting when you watch most chess teachers, they teach in a localized manner. So people can spend 20 years inside of chess but never break beyond the 64 squares.
Or they can, from the age of six or seven on, be learning that principle as it connects a chest, but also seeing how it connects to life. Could you give me an example of one such principle? Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs. Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of
Yeah. Molecules and the names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally. But otherwise, the principles and verbs are what's most important. So what's an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers? Everything transfers, first of all. Okay. Like, I mean, if we're open to it, then everything in chess connects. So when people ask me, do you still play chess? I say metaphorically.
I mean, I play chess all the time. I just have not moved to peace in many, many, many years, right? So, but, okay, to be specific. So, I could give you many examples, but, all right. So, in chess there's a bishop and there's a knight, right? They're both worth about three pawns.
Now I can teach you, okay, so the night moves like an L and can jump over pieces. The bishop moves diagonally and is stuck on one color for its whole life. They're both worth about three pawns. But knights are, and I can just tell you, but knights are a little bit better in closed positions because they can jump over things. Bishops are a little better if your pawns are on the opposite color from them, right? But you should also know that rooks and bishops
The bishops and knights are about the same. Rooks and bishops are much stronger than rooks and knights. And you should also know that queens and knights are a bit stronger than queens and bishops. So the bishop's value is a little bit stronger compared with the rook and the queen, knights value a little bit stronger with the queen and pawn structure influences them. So I could teach you a very simple set of principles through which you can understand how to evaluate bishops and knights. And there's many other layers to that, but that's some of it.
I can also teach you the same thing and be teaching you the nature of relativity. I could be teaching you the nature of interdependence. I could teach you the nature of the pawn structure play, the way you can play with pawn structure that influences bishops and knights in ways that are chess-specific or in ways that just allow you to understand dynamic quality and static quality.
You know what leaps to mind when you made that description and I didn't follow all of it to memorization was family feud.
I just imagine two families in a feud, right? You get two brothers together, they can do certain things. If you get a brother and sister together, I have a sister. She can do certain things that are powerful and diabolical in ways that two brothers can't. Yes, you get two big strong brothers, but maybe one that can't creep through small places. And so you can map to different, that's sort of more of an analogy for it all. But I started to immediately think about like, oh, it's like a family feud. If I were to view the pieces as sibling dynamics and parents, sibling cousin dynamics,
It's like match ups with humans or in basketball like this team is better than this team. And this team, but against there's some matchups that are much are hugely favorable. A lot of like the inside game of basketball is around is around which teams thrive against which other teams, even though they might be inferior because of the nature of the construction of the team. And you have networks of those teams and how do you deal with lineups? How do you deal with rotation patterns? Like the inner game of basketball is all based on
the same stuff that dictates the bishop and the knight and the rook and the queen and how they influence it, right? It's interdependence. Beautiful. It's relativity. It's dynamic quality. And you can think about Robert Persock's work and then there are most local maintenance and Lila around dynamic quality versus static quality. And you can be teaching a student while you're teaching about rook and bishop and rook and knight or knights and bishops. You can be teaching them about dynamic quality.
Right? And then you can expand into the study of the metaphysics of quality. And then you can have a seven-year-old student who's learning chess, or 12-year-old who's learning chess, or who's learning about life and philosophy and everything. And you can do it in the same amount of time. But you're trapping a mind inside of 64 squares, or you're teaching a mind about life through the 64 squares. And I think so many of the reasons that
People who become excellent in one thing can't translate it into other places. It's not will later on in life. They have the will. It's because they didn't learn with universal principles. They didn't study their art with a presence to the importance of interconnectedness, which is a lot of what my life's work is in.
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When I think about interconnectedness, I think the word mapping comes to mind and I define a map of any kind as a transformation of one set of points into another set of points.
along the earth, transferred onto a page or an electronic map. What's missing from a basic understanding of a transformation of points into another transformation of points are these verb actions, like it's the algorithms, if you will. That's not present in how we map one context onto another context. It requires a lot of thinking to do what you describe. I don't think it's reflexive for most people.
to say, watch a game of basketball and think about the emotional dynamics and the consistencies of the emotional dynamics. Last night, I had the great gift of Josh brought me to a Celtics game. They brought me to a Celtics game and they were playing the Clippers. I was cheering against the hometown crowd here in Los Angeles. He was friendly. You were describing the players in their recent history and the last season, the season. You said something about
the difference between pre-conscious effort and post-conscious effort. Maybe we could talk about that as a gateway into ego.
which is like a term that the moment you say throughout the word ego, it's like saying sex. It's like people make all sorts of assumptions about what it is and what it isn't. But let's talk about pre-conscious and post-conscious. Yeah. Because we'll get back to the Celtics and the game that was played last night. By the way, the Celtics won in overtime by a good size margin. So there's something very beautiful.
that I think all of us are drawn to as observers, but hopefully everyone gets to experience this at some point in their life as well. First hand, when somebody in art, music, sport, or whatever is just being themselves and this seeming virtuosity comes out. If I think about kind of what Rick Rubin does, a lot of what Rick has done historically is to find artists and work with artists and
just bring out what they're already doing, like the core elements. Like when Beastie Boy started, it was like a joke, he said, and then we're kind of making fun of had wrestling elements and hardcore and punk and all this stuff and hip hop. But he tends to work with artists early on when they're in that really pure state of not thinking about the returns on their investment and all that.
You know, he said many times before to me and publicly that, you know, after people achieve a certain level of fame, it's much harder to get back to that, just pure picture of oneself, pre-conscious expression. Just Josh being Josh as an eight year old, you just happen to be in Washington Square Park learning chess or, you know, pick any number of different examples. So very different than when people now reflect on their trophies on the wall or their platinum records or the fact that they won and lost or that there's another champion in the house that, you know,
And the real virtuosos seem to be people that can get back to that over and over again. The yoyo más, you know, and people live longer now. So it used to be the Mozart's, the box, you know, they could make their contribution and then they died. Yeah, now we live longer lives.
people have many more chances, but there's also that longer window for lack of productivity. This is a really important theme, and it's a gateway into so much that we can explore a lot through this tunnel. When I use this term pre-conscious and post-conscious artists or competitors, it's my own language, so I'll describe what I mean by it.
Will, you think about myself in the chess world, right? Like one discovers an art, one feels a passion for it, one, it's beautiful, it's joyous, it's self-expressive, I love the battle, I'm winning, I'm losing, I'm having fun, I'm just letting it rip, right? There's a naivete to that. There's a freedom, there's a playfulness, right? There's a lack of complexity, a lack of self-awareness, a lack of awareness of my own mutability, a lack of awareness that I can be shattered, or I can die.
A lack of awareness of the existential absurdity of the fact that I'm devoting my life to 64 squares and 32 pieces of wood on top of 64 squares. I haven't reflected on the fact that this is ridiculous. Or if you're fighting, what am I doing? I'm spending my life in combat. What about love? What about saving the planet? What about everything else? I haven't reflected on the fact that this is just a joke in its absurdity. Anyone's liberated from those kinds of things.
And then there comes this moment. And for me, it was triggered by the movie, by losing that sense of self-expression, by thinking what would someone else do here instead of what's my freedom, my playfulness, tell me to do. It can happen when one has a near-death experience. It can happen when one has one's heart broken. It can happen when one
starts reading existential literature and reflecting on the absurdity of things or one has a friend who starts pointing out over and over like, this is fucking ridiculous. You're just playing chess. What are you doing? Right? Or it can happen when one wins the world championship or the NBA finals because suddenly the thing that you have oriented yourself around your whole life, the goal you had your whole life, you've now accomplished.
And now you're on the other side of it. And so suddenly your world is shifted. The things that motivated you no longer motivate you. The things that felt so important to you now seem somewhat trivial because you've already accomplished that. Like where's the intrinsic motivation? Where's the deep self-expression, right? You think about
Like as we gain complexity in our psychology, and we can gain that complexity in many different ways, we hit this tunnel, right? And often when someone becomes self-aware, or when someone becomes less liberated, or like the chain sit in, or when one, I got to say you're an extreme athlete, but you feel invincible. And then suddenly you have a terrible accident. You realize, holy shit, I could actually die. I can break.
Then how do you get back to that freedom of taking the wild risks that you've been taking as that extreme athlete with an awareness of the fact that you can die? Like for me, I had, you know, I foil now in the biggest waves that I can find in where I live in Costa Rica. And, you know, you have big hold downs. You can have, you're foiling on top of the long mass, which is carbon mass, which is very sharp and then a wing, which is sharp. So you're basically going 40, 45 miles on top of the guillotine. And if you're trying to, you know, you're really cultivating high performance foiling, you're pushing turns really hard.
You're breaching wingtips like you can taco and have the thing come right at your head or your neck. Like you can die at any minute if you get something wrong, which is very different. It's like foiling straight or e foiling talking about high performance training. Like you by definition have to be risking these things in order to push the limits of what's possible. And if you're not, you're not at that stretch point, right? And then suddenly like you have a terrible injury or let's just say you're like I drowned on the bottom of a pool.
Um, some 11 years ago, 10, 11 years ago. I heard about this. Yeah. It was a, I was doing, um, hypoxic breath work. I did not realize which maybe if I'd, you could have taught me if I'd known you that carbon dioxide will give you the urge to breathe. I didn't realize that. So I had all the CO2 flushed out of my body. I felt blissful. I was swimming underwater.
Um, yeah. Exhale, I guess we should save a few lives here or prevent a few deaths rather. Anytime you emphasize the duration or intensity of your exhales, you're going to blow out more carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the trigger for the gas reflex. So yes, you'll be able to hold your breath longer above or below water. If you first do cyclic hyperventilation and then along and dump all your air.
But never, ever, ever do cyclic hyperventilation, folks, or any long, exhale emphasized breathing, even standing in a puddle because that gas reflex is the thing that makes you shoot for the surface. And if you don't do that,
You feel pretty peaceful until lights out or drive a car. Don't do it while driving a car or drive a car. I know people who have done that right actually rather exceptional people who I know don't yeah, don't think carbon dioxide is let you hold your breath longer. But that that's part of the and shallow water blackout usually happens to very high level athletes Navy seals right because they're training at pushing their limits. They're learning to suppress the urge to breathe.
And if you're flushing CO2, you're learning, you're training yourself not to feel it. And I've been a free diver my whole life. I grew up free diving, spearfishing in the Southern Bahamas. But I wasn't doing hypoxic breathwork while free diving. Here I was at the NYU pool. I drowned. I was in the bottom of the pool for four and a half minutes after blacking out. Switch. Four and a half minutes. Yeah, I should have, which I know because you should be dead. I should be dead or brain damaged the big way.
The I know the time it was because there was an old man who I knew who's in the locker room who saw me in the bottom pool lying there and he timed his laps and he did four laps and he said after the third one I'm gonna check on him and then he just fourth lap pulled me in his lap laps or a little bit over a minute and I was unconscious for 25 minutes. I was totally Blue except my face was blown out red my eyes my body my training
almost killed me and also saved me. My body handled it really well. I had no water in my lungs. I spent that night in the hospital, of course. And I remember doing, remembering old chest variations, testing my mind in any way, was I ruined. And I somehow survived, and I survived intact.
And that's one of those moments, shattering moments, which I am ultimately grateful for, because it's what catalyzed me too. I emerged with more of a commitment, and I've had this kind of commitment in my life for most, for many years, but a more intense commitment to live life as truly and beautifully and authentically as conceivable. And then soon after we moved to the jungle and we live life, we live now, which is awesome in my family. But, but I bring that up now.
Because imagine how one relates to big wave surfing or big wave foiling pre and post drowning. One has to have an integrated sense for one's own mortality versus being naive to the fact that it can happen. So that tunnel from the pre-conscious to the post-conscious performer is a passage where during that passage, most people are locked up. They underperform where they were when they were more naive.
And I don't personally relate to it as a return to the pre-conscious state. I relate to it as an integration of one's mortality, of the existential absurdity, into one's consciousness and then a discovery of a deeper sense of liberation, of freedom, but that is not in denial of what we've learned in that tunnel or what triggered that tunnel, but that is more complex.
Yeah, trying to be our previous selves is not a great strategy. Trying to integrate our previous experiences and our current and future selves seems like a good strategy. I feel that way. And I think it's also pretty, you can't go back. You can't pretend you're not dying as impossible. You can't pretend you're unbreakable. We are breakable. Some people do it without being really reflective, but I think that if you ask anyone who really
has been in life and death situations as a way of life for a long time, whether they relate to the idea of fearlessness, if they really reflect on it, they'll say no. Because fearlessness isn't a thing. It's how one works with fear. Usually what locks people up isn't fear, it's the fear of fear. We're afraid of our fear. We're afraid of being afraid. But like you asked a great Navy SEAL, they work with their fear.
You ask a great MMA fighter. They're not without fear. Of course, they have fear there. If they don't have fear, they have a problem. And there are some examples of people who might be wired a little bit differently. But the integration of the more complex worldview into one's liberation is the post-conscious performer. And it can play in lots of ways. It can also play. And so one thing when you think about a sports team that has accomplished everyone's dreams
and now we wanna win a championship again. We can't go back to what worked before because they're different men, right? One needs to find a different kind of mission, a different kinds of internal relationship to the mission, a different kind of freedom. How important do you think it is to attach language to these things of identity and source of motivation? In other words, let's say, okay, you're working with the Celtics, they won the championship last year. This year, they are in a completely different mental frame as a consequence.
They're quote-unquote dominant in the sense that they hold the crown, they hold the trophy, but they're more vulnerable too because the only place to go from there is either stay or you're going down a notch or more. So do you think it's important for them to create a verbal label for where they're at? Like, we're the champs and we're gonna hold on to the belt. We're gonna hold on to, I realize there's not a belt in basketball. By the way, that they're gonna hold on to their status
Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Because the game is played through verbs. It's not played through adjectives. I don't think we ever want to hold on to. That's static. You think about predator and prey dynamics in the world or in competition or in anything. You want to be competing
Now, there's a fusion of the predator and prey. You want to have the awareness that prey has, but one wants to be playing to win, not to lose. The moment we're trying to hold on to something we already have, we're falling into the static quality. Or you think about, for example, brilliant investors. They'll have success. Then they'll try to figure out how to replicate their success. They'll build mental models, frameworks to replicate their success. And those become grooves, like neural pathways. So then they follow those grooves, but then the grooves become a rut, and the water stops.
And they get stuck in an old, so they succeeded. They built mental models. They recreated the patterns. It was beautiful. But then it got static. And then it stuck energy. And it doesn't apply to the world, because the world's changing. And what actually made them succeed was dynamic quality, was being at what Robert Percy would call the front of the freight train, driving through space-time, pre-intellectual consciousness.
And then they're trying to recreate it. They're getting too stuck in things. And they create mental models that are stale. And then other people replicate those stale mental models. And you have huge industries that emerge from static quality later on top of static quality, which is most of humanity. So I think that as a world-class competitor who's trying to win after winning, one needs to have the same dynamic mindset one had when one was hunting for it in the first place. Rediscovery. Marcelo Garcia, one of my favorite moments of Marcelo was
So Marcelo, nine-time world champion in the grappling arts, five-time ADCC. Five-time Brazilian Jiu-Tsu, four-time ADCC. ADCC is when Abu Dhabi Combat Championship when all the different grappling arts come together. It happens every two years. So Russian Sambo, Judo, wrestling, Judo, Jiu-Tsu, right? Everything comes together and you see who's the strongest grappler in all the different arts. He is known by many as the greatest pound-for-pound grappler to ever live.
Just for context, Marcelo is one of my dearest friends. We own a school together in New York. We train together for a very, very long time. He and his, he's in an amazing moment right now. He and his wife, Tachi, who's also one of my dearest friends, had a terrible tragedy years ago. They lost a baby. And just devastating period. And then Marcelo had cancer.
He had stomach cancer. He had surgery, eight rounds of chemotherapy. He hasn't competed in 13 years, and he's actually competing tomorrow for the first time in, I think it's 13 years, in Bangkok. It was gonna be in Denver, and I was gonna fly there between the Lakers and the Mavs games, but it's in Bangkok, so I can't get there. But he's weighed in, he's doing great, he's feeling awesome. So the story I'm about to tell is about this epic, beautiful human being who, in many ways,
created, he's the innovator that led to much of what is modern grappling today. So back in, I think it was 2005 and 2007, this story, or maybe 2007, 2009. I think it's 2005 and 2007. Chronology is not a strong point for me in terms of my recollection in general. We were in a training camp,
We were, you know, training all the time. He had this innovative repertoire. He goes into ADCC, dominates it, and it's a very specific repertoire, but back-taking repertoire, guillotines, just dominates, blows the grappling world away. For the two years that followed him winning that ADCC, the entire grappling world was studying what he had just done.
or a lot of the Grappler was setting me to just let him rip recreate it. It was so beautiful, innovative, powerful, playing up weight classes, just unbelievable. I was on the mats with Marcelo the next day, the Monday after he fought Sunday.
I also want to say Marcello never, I never, in all the years I had of training with Marcello, I never saw him miss a Monday training after winning a major competition on Sunday. Wow. Everyone takes time off. I never saw him miss a Monday. You talk about dynamic quality and humility and a way of life, right?
The Monday he was on the mat, he shed the entire repertoire. So we just won the world championship. Everyone spent the next two years chasing his quality, which was dynamic. They turned it static. He shed the whole repertoire and created a whole new repertoire. And he was playing this omoplotic game, which he then went on the next day, DC, two years later. And one again, with this brand new thing, just shedding the snake skin or shedding the old shell. It's such a beautiful example of pushing one's limits as a way of life, not being stuck in old mental models.
Breaking new ground as a way of life, dynamic quality. That's what it takes. And so hard for people to do. I mean, I think about Michael Jordan and the fact that he wanted to be a pro baseball player. So he had a brief stint at that and it was underwhelming, certainly compared to his basketball career. But of course, his basketball career was so spectacular that the expectation wasn't there.
Nonetheless, you know, it's so rare to find people that are super successful repeatedly within domain, let alone across domains. That's just, yeah. Now, Richard Feynman, yeah, he could paint a little bit and draw a little bit, but I don't know, I've seen those pictures of the roosters. They're kind of first year art school. Yeah. So it's cool. Like, cool, you learn to draw and paint, but he weren't like, if his name wasn't on them, like no one would care.
Jordan had just an incredible competitive drive, incredible competitive drive. And it's very hard to replicate success in an art because one that shouldn't replicate, one should drive to rediscover. It's like a recreation of something new, not old. I think the impulse once one wins is to do what one did before.
But the world changes. Like one of the gifts the Celtics have this year is that everyone is targeting us. Right? Cause we're the champions. Like we won it last year. And so everyone brings like an extra 30% every night, every team and the NBA is stacked with brilliant athletes. Even the lower level teams from the outside in are filled with amazing athletes who if you're the game of the week or the month for them, they bring it all. So all of our weaknesses are being exposed, which is what we want. Right? And so you have, there's like, there's growing pains. You work through it all.
And so the good thing about the competitive truth-telling world is that our competitors, our rivals, help force us to take our shit on, which makes it very hard to sit in static quality unless we're happy with mediocrity. The Celtics have, you know, one of the most... Joe Mazzoula is the head coach of the Boston Celtics, and he's one of... He and I are dear friends for the last two and a half years or so. We've been thought partners and brothers in this journey.
And I've, I've never seen anyone in my life better at turning weaknesses into strengths than Joe, which is a huge statement. Cause I spent my life with these, with all in performers, not taking weaknesses and like making them less weak or like leveling them out, but turning like an area of core weakness into a core power zone. That's a superpower. And that's something that Joe, Joe trains harder than anybody else. And he leads by example and he leads with vulnerability. And there's something, he embodies dynamic quality.