Josh Waitzkin
Appearances
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
He's a beautiful soul. He's a real brother. He's a kindred spirit. Like every once in a while, you run into someone, you're like... In his book, Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, he has this gorgeous quote, which is the words of a master tracker, Reneas. I have no idea where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there. When I read those words, I was just like, they resonated very deeply in my soul.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think those words are really good. I would take out the exactly. I don't know anything exactly. So I don't know where I'm going, but I have a really beautiful sense that I'm tracking my way there.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I have a big part of me, and it's a strength and a weakness. And I think a lot when I meet people, I think a lot about the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity, or their genius and their dysfunction. And when you're working with peak performers, you need to understand it. And it's entanglement is often very, very complex.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And people can think, oh, I can make this person more efficient by just removing this. But that will be connected to their genius. And you'll be like cutting some of it away, right? And so when you're working with like crazy, brilliant, and anyone who's really a virtuoso has some craziness built into what they're doing.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And the entanglement of their brilliance and their dysfunction is so complex and nuanced. And one should be very careful to not do anything until one understands that entanglement with huge nuance. And so the art of coaching people of that nature is like 99.9% listening, observing, not doing.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And one of the biggest mistakes that coaches make is doing, doing too much because they need to show that they're valuable, right? And so I think a lot about We need to really understand the nature of that entanglement. And in me, that entanglement's complex. And I have a profound allergy to being untrue to myself. Why?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Well, I think a big part of the reason is that period when I was 15, 16, 17, 18 years old that I described where I got pulled into this externalized thing from the film and the public scrutiny when I wasn't ready for it. And being urged and not having the maturity to resist it, because that's ultimately on me, to take on chess outside of my self-expression. Like what would Karpov do here or not?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
What would Josh do here? And I didn't have the understanding of learning Karpov through Kasparov, right? And so I moved into, like my first love was taken away from me or I allowed myself to have it taken away from me, which is how I'd actually frame it. And it was made static and stale and corrupted and externalized.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And there's so much existential heartbreak in me about the loss of that first love. That I have the gift of being just fucking allergic to being untrue to myself. And so that's part of how I track through life is if I don't love someone, I don't work with them, no matter what the temptation is. If something feels untrue to me, I don't do it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Now, sometimes we have to sit in the unknowing for a while and something can be off for a Right? It's like there's peaks and valleys of everything, right? And we're so in the learning process, right? We can have long plateaus.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like when I stopped playing chess, I felt like I'd lost the love, but I sat for two years with the question to be clear on whether I was in a plateau of the love or if I'd lost the love. And then I gained clarity. No, no, you've lost the love. And then I was done. Never played again. Never played a chess game again. So that factored in. Like I have this...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
this it's so interesting how our like some of the like our our most powerful guiding principles or voices in us can come from our deepest wounds right they absolutely do i mean i think it's a because i think
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So they're like the diving birds. Those birds, yeah.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I'm going to do a study there. I want to learn about them.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Well, how I relate to that personally, I've spent a lot of time thinking about day architecture. I call it, I call it day architecture. And, and yeah, And I think there's some very systematic things we can do. But I think like anything, they should be individualized, right? I don't think that everyone should follow a certain model because we're all very different.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
You know that old book that Tim actually produced, the audio book, Daily Rituals?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like one of the best things about Daily Rituals is how few patterns there are through them. I love that book.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Well, he published the audio book of it, right? And I think I told Tim, he'll remind me, I think I might have, I think I told Tim about that book, like many, many years ago, and he did the audio book. And It's so good. It's so good. And it just follows the daily routine. It breaks down the daily routine.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's like two to three to four page chapters on like a hundred some brilliant artists and scientists and creators. And they're just so random how they live.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So I think we need to have like that awareness and that sense of humor and humility about it. And we can get systematic and structured at the same time. I think it's important to hold both of those. I mean, what you just asked, I do believe that that beautiful period when we first wake up. And that dream state is so powerful.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I think that people, almost all people immediately pick up their phone and start checking messages, which just shuts down one's awareness of what's been happening beneath the surface all night. So I think that that's a real... lost opportunity. I remember when I was 11 years old, I read this, my dad actually gave me this Hemingway essay on his creative process.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And there's one of my favorite, one of the most, sometimes there's like an insanely potent book that's put together. And it's two that come to mind are Lessons of History, which is this short compilation of Will and Ariel Durant, two of the greatest historians who've published tens of thousands of pages, This is a short compilation of a handful of thematic essays.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's only like 100 pages of all their life's work boiled down to a few themes. It's unbelievably potent. And Hemingway on Writing is another book of that nature, which takes all of Hemingway's – from his books, from his letters, private letters, from his articles and essays and
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
notebooks, like everything he's written about the creative process and boils it into this like short book on his principles of creativity. Just unbelievable. But before that book came out, I read this piece, this short thing he'd written about the creative process, which was essentially he'd always leave a sentence unwritten. He'd end his workday with a sentence like half written.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So leaving with a sense of direction. And then he would let it go. You know, he would go out drinking. He would do all the things that Hemingway did. And then he returned to it first thing in the morning. And that like unwritten sentence had become a paragraph and a page in his mind, and it would be a way to hit the ground running.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And that's what really spurred me to start creating this process in my chess life of always ending my chess study with something left, like posing my unconscious a question, like studying the complexity and then releasing it, which later became, and then tapping into it first thing in the morning, pre-input. which later became my MIQ process. And then I developed team-wide MIQ processes.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
The teams that I work with all have versions of the MIQ that they utilize as individuals, but then as teams.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And it's an amazing way to develop a shared consciousness in a team, to have everybody be able to tap into the question that's top of mind for every member of their team, or for a leader to be able to be aware of what is the most important question for every one of my scientists or my analysts or anything. It's a really powerful way to cultivate shared consciousness, and it becomes our game tape.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Because if we're tracking our MIQs, let's say I'm studying something for three weeks or for four weeks, and what do I think is most, if I'm tracking the questions that I think are most critical for that thing and I'm deepening my analysis of it, What I arrive at, what I think in day one will be very different from the MIQ in day 14. And then we can study the gap.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then we can study the patterns of the gap, the gaps. And this is what I call MIQ gap analysis. So if I'm setting a chess position, like if I play a chess game against you and it's incredibly complex and I don't quite understand this position and then I do a deep, deep analysis of it, what I'll arrive at after 14 or 16 or 18 hours of study will be different from what I felt during the game.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Now, what's interesting is, this is a cool thing about chess study. If my understanding was here during the chess game, after like a few hours, I might be like really far away from that. But after I've completed the study, I'll usually be like very similar but deeper. So it's often like... Deeper, like closer than where you were after a few hours of study, but it's like a deeper level in.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But what's the gap between that and that, between where I was in the game and what are the patterns in the gaps? And then if you think about those patterns in the gaps through those lenses of the technical, the thematic, and the psychological. right? We deconstruct it in that way. Then that becomes our game tape, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
One of the hardest things for mental athletes is to actually have game tape the way basketball players do or foilers do or fighters do, where you can see the actual game tape. We need to create our mental game tape. So this is a way that I, it both enhances the creative process and creates the game tape for the training process.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then studying the gap analysis we do reveals what we need to focus our deliberate practice on.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's funny, I wore an Apple watch training a little bit on the ocean and it was good for me because I wanted to like align my intuition on speed with what actually it was showing and it was good to calibrate myself, but man, I took it off. It's so much better being on the ocean without technology. Like being liberated from it, tracking, but yeah.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think that you can – I mean it's a tool that one can utilize tactically or strategically, right? So it can be like if you're in creative flow, just leaving yourself with a sense of direction. Or it can actually be zooming out and thinking about like what is the highest order question. that I'm grappling with, right? But I think it's like one wants to stretch for the, if one is doing the latter,
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
the higher order of strategic thinking. It's like, you can think of like one is stretching for the question that matters most with the same kind of intellectual or cognitive intensity that one is experiencing, for example, pushing yourself from like 168 to 176 in cardiovascular interval training, right? Like you're really stretching mentally. So you need to be at your stretch point.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Growth comes at the point of resistance, right? So we – but intellectually, we're not used to really feeling when we're at our stretch point. So we're thinking about a question, but that's a question. What's the higher order question? What's the higher order question? What's the question that really matters?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And one way to frame it is like our mind, if we're good at something, slices like a knife through butter through most things. But then there's a place we're stuck. Like those stuck points are the MIQs. Those stuck points are like, right? Like we don't need to wait. We don't need, like mind will just get there. Like, oh, but that's the thing. And then we explore there.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like what, how do, that stretch within that stuck point.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
That's why we do our cold water training. Like that's where we like, we train at living on the other side of pain, of enjoying it. Like that place, that place that like itches, like bounce away from that, but that's where you need to sit. Right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But we can practice that thematically, like loving that discomfort, wanting it, hunting for it, like finding the place where we're stuck, and then letting it sit, and then not bouncing away from it, but just releasing it and returning to it. And we have insights, right? Because often in those moments, like where we have our insights are like when we wake up in the morning are those stuck points.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I find it's very interesting. I'm sure you've done this. Like I've done like hundreds of diagnostics with people on my teams. Like where do they have most of their creative breakthroughs? And so many of them are in the shower. It's really interesting.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think a big part of that is that like the full body somatic immersion moves them out of conscious thinking into like, because their mind is experiencing. And then the release of the conscious mind allows the unconscious to run and then they tap into it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I 100% agree with you. And like, so first of all, I agree. First thing in the morning, that's the juice. And the whole MIQ process is geared toward harnessing that, like tapping into that, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like feeding the mind, because that just happened to me so many dozens of times where I would just have the insight in the morning, but then I realized I should be finding the areas of stuckness and feeding it to myself to have the insight about. So it's like directing that creative process.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But then if we open up our phones, like the moment we start to see emails without reading them or see anything, we're unconsciously solving for what's in the emails.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And if it's four and a half hours, it's not like that's, the rest of the day is feeding into those being brilliant, right? So if it's four and a half hours of creative output time, Then there are other periods where one can have inputs that feed it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think it's very good for people to have an awareness of what their peaks and valleys are of their energy throughout the day and then align their peak creativity work with their peak energy periods. I think it's really important to not be in a constantly reactive state.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
One of the things I find fascinating is how people will have meetings scheduled everywhere and then fit their thinking between meetings and how liberating it is for them when they actually block out their time for creative output time right? They might be color-coded in their calendar and then have meetings fit around there.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So their day is driven by their self-expression as opposed to by a constant set of reactivity and just more and more and more and more, right? I think harnessing the undulation of stress and recovery throughout the day is hugely important.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think having workouts throughout the day, even micro-workouts during their day, meditation periods during the workday, everything being quality over quantity, right? We can get so much more done. And if you think about it, like, I mean, you talk about, like, Elite performing competitive teams.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's all about – like if you saw how much video analysis and time the Boston Celtics coaching staff puts into what ends up being like a 35-second clip that's shown to a player or the team. Like it's so much work to then the most potent thing, right? It's like when you're an elite, because like the players are doing something so intense, right? Like it's all about quality, not quantity.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
They're not training basketball 17 hours a day. They could not possibly play then. Or they're training brilliantly for like, you know, maybe an hour and a half a day. Brilliantly, but like with scientifically. or if they're playing for a two-and-a-half to three-hour game, then what's the way to optimize for that? You don't stack six hours of training in before a three-hour game, no.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So much of it is body work and studying some tape and then being primed in the right way to remember what you're looking at on tape and then taking breaks and returning to it and then understanding exactly how much load is in your body and your mind and having your sleep right and your nutrition right and getting everything optimized and then being a peak performer when it's on.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But we don't have that discipline as mental beings very often, but we should in our creative process, in our relationships, in the art of being a mom or a dad or a husband or a wife or a friend. Why wouldn't we be cultivating ourselves and being brilliant at that? I really believe in quality as a way of life. That's another very important principle for me.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
We're either practicing sloppiness or practicing quality. If we do something shitty, then we're practicing shitty quality. And that will, just how like we can harness them, like thematic interconnectedness on the positive side, we can also really harness it brilliantly on the negative side. Every time we practice being sloppiness, we're using thematic interconnectedness to be sloppy in everything.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I really believe that. So quality is a way of life is a beautiful way to practice quality everywhere because it will manifest everywhere, right? Not in a way that's like robotic or constrictive, no, in a way that's self-expressive and beautiful.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Absolutely, man. Thank you for what you've just said. It's an honor. And I've learned so much from this jam. It feels like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. So just the beginning.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I look forward to it. Thank you, man.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Now, there's sort of like 15 really big questions.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
There's some many delectable things to select there. Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, one-on-one competition is so interesting in 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 and what is his strategic plan, short term and long term?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Well, if they don't have a strategy, then they're not going to be a good chess player. And so then very quickly, if you're evolving in that art, you're only playing against people who are at your level or better if you're growing. If you're always playing down, then you're not improving.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And there's a beautiful filtration process in, like, 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, like, I spent my life against, you know, playing against strong players.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I always played a little up, except for when I was in youth competition, I always played up, which was important for me. And so... People had a plan. And they were very deceptive about their plans. And there are 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And in fact, their strategy is to have misdirection. around what their strategy and their tactics are, and there are layers to it, and it can go many, many layers deep. Same thing in the martial arts, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So obviously, you need to have a theory of mind to play that game, at least the way I played chess at a high level, because you're, and there's this very interesting shared consciousness between players. You and I are sitting a little further apart than we would sit if we were playing chess.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
The connectedness of minds is fascinating, and it's through chess. It's directly – like energetic, it's through eye contact, it's through body language, it's 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Then you also learn, like I often would have tells on purpose and I'd 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, you know, you, you, you, you give someone comfort in a lean, right? And you give them a rep of something. They can lean on it. They can lean here.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, right? So you're, this is happening in chess. It's happening in all of these things. And one-on-one competition is a relentless truth teller. If you have a weakness, it will be exposed. If your opponent has a weakness, you will expose it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Right away. When I was, I mean, just 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
They didn't kid gloves 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 was a lot of, like, you know, fights in the park. I mean, these guys took me under 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like, I was their protege. So they did. They did. But they also, you know, did not wear thick gloves. And the gloves were thinning out all the time. And I was getting better fast. Then we'd go to war. They were my teachers. They were my friends. I'm super grateful for, like, they – and then –
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 Fischer, because Bruce is still a dear friend of mine.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Ben 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 there was one like youth competition where I made a move instead of trap and went, oh, shit. I mean, it was like that obvious, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's like the worst, like, and then it gets increasingly subtle, right? But like, as my opponent said, Oh, he's unhappy, take 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 falling into crisis. And, you know, 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. The heartbreak of your mother and your father and your coach and your friends. 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And that's a pattern in my chess life and 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah. Well, I think the study you sent me yesterday speaks to this.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. I'm not a scientist, but I'm like my own laboratory. You said to me yesterday at the game, like,
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think the way that I, like if I think about the most painful losses of my life, the most devastating injuries of my life. I think about dying, drowning. I drowned on the bottom of doing hypoxic breath work in a pool. I was on the bottom of the pool four and a half minutes after that. It led to arguably the best decision of my life to move into the jungle.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. Fell into an opening trap.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like that's the loss that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. You were how old? I think I'd just turned eight or maybe 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. And actually, the kid who beat me in that game, David Arnett, became, two years later, we became best friends. For all of our childhood, we were on the same chess team and best friends.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I think he gave me the greatest gift of my competitive life by kicking my ass that game. The most devastating loss of my chess life Was – so I was 17 years old. I was competing in the world under 18 chess championship in Szeged, Hungary. Every – so every year there's another 12, 14, 16, 18, 21 world championship and I was always representing the US in those tournaments around the world and I –
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 had just picked up On the Road three weeks before Jack Kerouac. I had become – I was just on fire with Kerouac's vision and I was –
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
just so like appreciating life with this freshness and intensity than 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 – 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I wasn't sure, but basically the world championship would be determined or the gold medal would be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round. But I hadn't calculated it out before, but I had a feeling it – It was like – maybe it was like 40-60 or 30-70 against me. But it was my style. I never accept a draw first. That wasn't my style. I always wanted to fight.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 like if you're, we should talk about tension at one point. It's a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, the 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 tournament's over and then it's out of our hands what happens. So in that moment, I have to also make a critical chess position.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So the urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chess decision. And in that move, I declined the draw and I made a slightly overaggressive 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. You're shattered, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in a little town in Slovenia and we broke up and 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 was before chess computers were rampant and you had chess engines that could always just tell you the answer to, um,
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 –
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 chess 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 the 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 want to defend your king. What I didn't realize is like harnessing the power of empty space against aggression.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So I was studying Taoist meditation, Taoist philosophy, the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, the inner chapters. And then I get into Tai Chi, I started moving meditation, and I started doing Tai Chi Chuan, push hands. without making the connection. Push hands is the martial art, which is like the essence of push hands is learning to utilize empty space against aggression.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But I hadn't connected it to that moment. Then 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 wanting me to be destroyed in the biggest fight of my life.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space, by letting him feel my weakness, by leaning on him, and then disappearing. So it's very interesting how there was no mental process. There's no conscious processing of that connection. But the biggest loss of my chess life and then the principle, which I wasn't ready to understand yet,
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
was how I won the world championship in the martial arts so many years later in a completely different discipline, right? So it's an example of, like, and of course that principle is manifest 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I think that one of the biggest challenges that we have, it's so interesting that the loss of a world chess championship final leads to the win, direct lesson, leads to the win of a world championship in a fighting realm. And how common that is.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. Oh, and love.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I was going to play on monkey bars and I ran over and I 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 like 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It was like I was wiping away the dust or the cobwebs between something, between me and something 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Right. And 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
One of the things I feel badly about in, like when I wrote The Art of Learning, I spoke a lot about process and outcome and it had a big impact in the chess world. And then what happened is there were generations of parents who had 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It doesn't matter if you win or lose. And the kids are like putting on their armor to go to battle Mental battle. And chess is fucking intense. Like when you're playing chess, you're putting your mind, your body, your psyche, everything like on the line. And if you lose, you feel shattered. Like that's just how you feel.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
If you're not trying your hardest, then we can't even, we shouldn't even be talking about you. So let's say you are trying your hardest. You're putting it all on the line. It's on the line. And you lose and you're shattered. Like every part of you didn't, 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 kid's 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
That's the hilarious thing is you get an eight, 10, 11 year old, like they see it all. And 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And it is something about putting our egos on the 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 experience the simultaneity of being shattered and having the perspective that this is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, right? I mean, I...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I live at this point with a trying to be at max stretch without snapping, right? 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 I'm, yeah, if you're just succeeding all the time, then you're not pushing yourself enough.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, and then 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 7 to 23, my whole chess career. So it was a very strange...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 And I had these experiences both in chess and in fighting. One time I was fighting against a super heavyweight dude in a competition and my hand shattered. And I broke my hand right here.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's adrenaline. Adrenaline. Yeah. Adrenaline and that tunnel vision and then the frames are fat.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So then the question then became 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, or maybe I can learn to have that physiological response. You can deploy it. Right, so then how can I deploy it, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, he's known as the king of the scramble, he spends his whole time in transition. So if you're training jujitsu with most people, they're always finding a position and holding it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And so, like, if you're competing in national championships, you know, I would compete in youth national and world championships, and 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 –
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 positions that they see, but the real high level art is the space in between the positions.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So if we have this position leads to this position, that's going to be like, there's going to be no frames in between for most people. For some people that might be four frames, but if I have a hundred 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Notice the amount of time static versus in motion. Marcelo was always in motion. There's a beautiful clip of him that you got, people can look up. It's in Arte 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 can't, you're like, you're giving up on dominating people all the time. Cause when you're in a dominant position in jujitsu, you want to hold it cause you've won.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 and you stop holding, then you're moving and you're getting nonstop 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
That's 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, a high-level martial artist can do to a lower-level martial artist or someone who doesn't train, it feels mystical.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's all about that principle manifest in interesting ways. And 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 then it becomes a beacon.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So for example, there was a moment I was playing in a world chess championship in Calicut, India, and I was deep into a calculation, couldn't find the solution, and then there was an earthquake. And everything started, in the actual world, everything started shaking, right? But I experienced the earthquake from inside of the chess position, And I knew there was an earthquake, but I also was lost.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. Then 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,
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 and surface.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
One of the best ways, by the way, to prevent, to minimize chess blunders with like 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Almost all chest blunders, you realize you've blundered instantly. You can think for 20 minutes, make your move, you know instantly you've 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 realize the screw-up right as we complete it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, because 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I mean, you think about the heartbreaking literature, you know, studies in how people who have jumped off a bridge relate to it the moment after they've jumped off the bridge, those who have survived, right, the interviews afterwards. Yeah, they report wishing they hadn't jumped. Right.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. Being in the public eye.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's interesting. So I have this term I use called firewalking, which for me what it means is cultivating the ability to learn from experiences one doesn't have with the same somatic intensity that one learns from really intense experiences that we have.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 gonna overextend your arm that way again. You've learned that that lesson is burned in.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. Super. Yeah. And I've never been on social media in any way, which has been a choice. Yeah. So when I was 11, the book Searching for Robbie Fisher came out. And then when I was 15, the movie came out. And at that point, I was completely in love with chess. It was my first love. I was an unobstructed learner. I loved competition.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But like, if you're watching a jiu-jitsu fight and someone overextends their arm and gets armbarred and then taps out, it's 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then combining that with my own experience of things. And it's such a, I mean, if we can 100x or 1,000x 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I'm deconstructing my, you know, my approach to training in mental and physical disciplines. And it's really interesting to go through that process myself. Like, what do I do? What have I done? And what have I helped others do? And it's interesting that the art of learning kind of was a birthing process. That's what it felt like to me. I took notes to it for five years.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 on 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think of one thing, people who are very talented in arts 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 meta skill to learn. People haven't taken on all of the skills around physiological triggers, around changing one's physiological state at will. People haven't practiced visualization very intensely. There are all of these...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 in chaos. And I love that. So 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I love the fight. And then my chess life in many ways was free-flowing. And then the movie came out when I was 15. And then you can imagine what that was like as a young teenager, all the attention, the media, cameras everywhere, groupies, all the temptations. And I didn't ask for it. And it was a really, it was an alienating period for me relative to chess.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, you know, 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 want to, they're all in, they're motivated.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
they'll take themselves on and it's a great place for me to over the last couple decades to like refine the art of training 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 of always being the target and so never having Like not taking on my weaknesses was outside of my conceptual scheme.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And so in many ways, I don't – 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And, like, you're working with world-class investors, and, you know, they're grinding themselves out 14, 15, 16 hours a day. Doing less is a huge part of doing much more. And you start to see, like, they might be at, like, if you think about a 10 out of 10 as being, like, in terms of, like, when they're at their very best creatively, they could slip from, like, a 10 to a 2 and not even notice.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Right? And then you begin to cultivate an awareness of where one is in one's creative spectrum, right? And then you start to 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's so – that oscillation, that range is so huge, right? 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 –
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Most potent way 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 like a great chess player actually looks at less than a lower level chess player, but they look at the right direction.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 a level, but in the style of like Bobby Fischer or Gary Kasparov or Mikhail Tal, world champions who were like hot-blooded.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So if you're working with, let's 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 workday with like a recovery period with full intensity in a peak performance state, stretch one's mind for what matters most and then release it. Release the workday completely.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Don't work all night grinding yourself out at a low level. 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
You're feeding critical questions to the unconscious, which is processing overnight. And I know you know all this. 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,
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Instead of going, when you're gonna go to the bathroom in the day, instead of like checking your phone while taking a piss, you pose yourself at MIQ, 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, right?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 lifestyle is based on that.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I was being urged to study the more cold-blooded, prophylactic side of chess, Petrosian, Karpov, more conservative defensive players. So I was being told, instead of saying like, what does Josh feel here? What would Karpov play here? Who's the opposite of me?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And so the combination of that public eye and then the movement away from my self-expression led to a period of obstructedness and self-consciousness. And 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 that freedom of pre-conscious competition into the tunnel of existential crisis.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, it was 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 my chess 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And 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, Joe Mazzulla and I spent the day a couple days ago with Sean McVay, who's the head coach of the LA Rams, who just a few days after this big, the big loss against the Eagles, and we had this
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
We actually ended up watching the tape. It was his first watching of the tape of this heartbreaking playoff loss he had and watching him process it. And, you know, he's such a great leader. Both Joe and Sean, like, lead. They both take themselves on more intensely than anything, but they lead with vulnerability. Like, they go up against their stains.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Now, of course, there's also the tender balance of how much we should cultivate our strengths and how much we should be spent shoring up our weaknesses. And one of the most important principles which I learned too late in my chess life is that we can take on our weaknesses through the lens of our strengths, right?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Remember this brilliant sage Russian coach, Yuri Razovayev, said to me at one point, you can learn Karpov through Kasparov. His point being, you can learn about the great 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?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
like learn defense through offense, right? So it was part of my self-expression. I learned that principle too late for my chess 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 were not fundamentally It's not shame. I don't relate personally.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
That's a word I don't, like shame. It's not shame. It's like when it becomes just like a breath pattern, like we lose, we put ourselves on the line, we lose. We go at it. We study it. We study how. We study about what.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
The other thing that's incredible to me is that when you study your losses, when you go up against what you're calling, like that's a beautiful image, like the shadow of the lighthouse, right? Yeah. The interconnectedness of the technical, the psychological, and the thematic is so powerful in the learning process.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 in anything, like any technical mistake I made will have a psychological dimension because I most likely, my technical weakness was
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
emerged because I was so psychologically pressured that I wasn't able to solve the technical position, right? Or if I make a psychological error, it's often because I was a little technically out of my water. And so it put extra pressure on my psyche that then you were able to exploit, right? And every technical... Mistake is local, right? But there's themes.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
then the growth curve is incredibly explosive because we recognize – we make a technical mistake and we learn the theme. We take on the theme that houses 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 that we take on. And then we're studying thematic interconnectedness as a way of life. Because then that lesson we learned through that chest, like I made a subtle chest mistake, but that connects to my love life.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It connects to my fatherhood. It connects to my, like my foiling, my jujitsu, 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, in the ocean, with people, with humans. But we always get isolated. We get siloed. Oh, yeah, is this chess mistake? One of the things I've found so confusing...
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I have no identity in being a prodigy. Just to be clear. So I don't relate to that word at all. I mean, that word's been put on me from the outside, but I have, 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But then very early in my, like, 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, I mean, I had to work my ass off. And I won and I lost and I got my ass kicked.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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're 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Because it's just like, that means you're just, and of course he was the one kid who didn't want to play against me, right? Because if you haven't lost 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
At the time, it was called LGE, Laird, Groppel, and Etcheberry. It was a performance training, cross-disciplinary performance training center that Jim Laird opened up. And then it became the HBI later on.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. You can just break them, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
There's so many chinks in the armor. So there's a brittleness there. Like you can just find where their mind stops in false constructs, where the energy stops, where their body's crimped, right? Like you can just find their connection to the ground and explode through it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
in mental and physical disciplines, if someone has that kind of identity in being the more brilliant one, the more gifted one, whatever, they're 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. Okay, so let's say I was teaching you to play chess, right? I could teach you to play chess with a language that is chess-specific, right?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Or I could teach you chess principles. I could teach you very effectively with chess principles. But I could also teach you just as effectively or maybe somewhat more effectively. But it's to say just as effectively with chess principles that are also life principles. Right? And it's interesting when you watch most chess teachers, they teach in a localized manner.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 to chess, but also seeing how it connects to life.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I'll 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 quarterback at the time of the Colts NFL team. And we got into this amazing dialogue about performance.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Everything transfers, first of all. 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 a piece in many, many, many years, right? So, but okay, to be specific. So I could give you many examples, but all right.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 knight 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But knights are, and I can just say to you, but like knights are a little bit better in closed positions because they can jump over things. Bishops are a little better if the pawns, if your pawns are on the opposite color from them, right? But you should also know that rooks and bishops are more, The bishops and knights are about the same.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 a rook, and the knight's value is a little bit stronger with a queen, and pawn structure influences them, right?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So I could teach you a very simple set of principles through which you can understand how to evaluate bishops and knights, right? And there's many other layers to that, but that's some of it, right? I could also teach you the same thing and be teaching you the nature of relativity. I could be teaching you the nature of interdependence.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I could teach you the nature of, I could teach you 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's like matchups with humans or in basketball. This team is better than this team. But again, there's some matchups that are hugely favorable. A lot of the inside game of basketball 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And how do you deal with lineups? How do you deal with rotation patterns? 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And it was a real eye-opening moment for me because I realized that we spoke the same language. I was 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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And you can think about Robert Persick's work in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle 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. And then you can expand into the study of the metaphysics of quality.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then you can have a seven-year-old student who's learning chess or a 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
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I observe that people who are at the pinnacles 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
This is a really important theme, and it's a gateway into so much. We can explore a lot through this tunnel. When I use this term pre-conscious and post-conscious artist or competitor, it's my own language, so I'll describe what I mean by it. Well, you think about myself in the chess world, right?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I'm kind of compressing a life into a minute or two, but I... In my early 20s, I ultimately moved away from chess, and I'm happy to talk about why and that journey. And then I moved into the martial arts. My study of East Asian philosophy moved me into the study of Taoism and Tai Chi and then into Tai Chi push-hands. And I had this really interesting experience where...
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Or if you're fighting, like, what am I doing? I'm spending my life in combat. Like, 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, right? And one's liberated from those kinds of things.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
starts reading existentialist 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?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 has shifted. The things that motivated you no longer motivate you.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And often when someone becomes self-aware, or when someone becomes less liberated, or like the chains set in, or when one, I guess you 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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're foiling on top of a long mass, which is a carbon mass, which is very sharp.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then a wing, which is sharp. So you're basically going 40, 45 miles on top of a 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like you can die at any minute if you get something wrong, which is very different from just like foiling straight or e-foiling. We're 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? But then suddenly like you have a terrible injury.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Or let's just say you're – like I drowned on the bottom of a pool yesterday. Um, some 11 years ago, 10, 11 years ago.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 gives 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. Yeah.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
At that point, the introspective process of studying chess had become much more about studying life. And so I was in an 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 Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Research.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Or drive a car. Don't do it while driving a car.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I know people who have done that. Right. Actually, rather exceptional people who I know.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But I wasn't doing hypoxic breath work 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. I should have, which I know because- You should be dead. I should be dead or brain damaged in a big way. Yeah. I know the time it was because there was an old man who I knew who was in the locker room who saw me in the bottom of the 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then he did his fourth lap, pulled me and his laps were 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I was like testing, I remember doing, like remembering old chest variations, like testing my mind in any way, like was I ruined? And I somehow survived and I survived intact.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And that's one of those moments, shattering moments, which I am ultimately grateful for, because it's what catalyzed me to, 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then soon after we moved to the jungle and we lived life, we live now, which is awesome for my family. 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 preconscious state.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 than
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I feel that way. And I think it's also pretty... You can't go back. You can't pretend you're not... Dying is impossible. You can't pretend that you're unbreakable. We are breakable. Some people do it without being really reflective. But I think that if you ask anyone who really...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But like you ask a great Navy SEAL, they work with their fear. You ask like a great MMA fighter, they're not without fear. Of course they have fear. If they don't have fear, they have a problem, right? And there are some examples of people who might be wired a little bit differently, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But the integration of the more complex worldview into one's liberation is the post-conscious performer, right? And it can play in lots of ways, right? It can also play. And so like one thing that when you think about a sports team that has accomplished like everyone's dreams, right? and now we want to win a championship again.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I don't think we ever want to hold on to, like that's static. Like we need to, we want to, like you think about predator and prey dynamics in the world or in competition or in anything. Like you want to be competing with, 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
The moment we're trying to hold on to something we already have, we're falling into the static quality, right? Or you think about, for example, brilliant investors, right? They'll have success. Then they'll try to figure out how to replicate their success. So they'll build mental models, frameworks to replicate their success. And those become grooves, like neural pathways.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So then they follow those grooves, but then the grooves become a rut and the water stops. And they get stuck in an old, like, so they succeeded. They built mental models. They recreated the patterns. It was beautiful. But then it got static. And then it's that stuck energy. It doesn't apply to the world because the world's changing.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And what actually made them succeed was dynamic quality, was being at what Robert Persick would call the front of the freight train, driving through space-time, pre-intellectual consciousness, right? 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And you have huge industries that emerge from static quality later on top of static quality, which is most of humanity, right? 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 most... One of my favorite moments of Marcelo was...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So we were – so Marcelo, nine-time world champion in the grappling arts, five-time ADCC – five-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu, 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, jiu-jitsu, right?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And it was like I was winning all these 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 winning competing and then I won in the fighting application and I started winning national championships and then
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Everything comes together and you see who's the strongest grappler in all the different arts. He's 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 trained together for a very, very long time. He's in an amazing moment right now.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 He's the innovator that led to much of what is modern grappling today.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. And we were training all the time. He had this innovative repertoire.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
He goes into ADCC, dominates it, and it's a very specific repertoire, 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 grappling. We were setting, we were just learning to recreate it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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, Marcelo never, I never, in all the years I had of training with Marcelo, I never saw him miss a Monday training after winning a major competition on Sunday. Wow. Everyone takes time off.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then I began to think about, 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, and taking me all over the world. And I won some world championships.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I never saw him miss a Monday. You talk about dynamic quality and humility and a way of life, right? Yeah. The Monday he was on the mats, 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And he was playing this omoplotic game, which he then went on the next ADC two years later and won again with this brand new thing. Just shedding the snake skin or shedding the old shell, right? It's such a beautiful example of like pushing one's limits as a way of life, not being stuck in old mental models. right? Breaking new ground as a way of life, dynamic quality. That's what it takes.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Jordan had just an incredible competitive drive, incredible competitive drive. It's very hard to replicate success in an art because one that shouldn't replicate, one should drive to rediscover, right? It's like a recreation of something new, not old, right? I think the impulse once one wins is to do what one did before. But the world changes.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like one of the gifts the Celtics have this year is that everyone is targeting us, right? Because 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 growing pains. You work through it all.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
The Celtics have, you know, one of the most – Joe Mazzulla is the head coach of the Boston Celtics, and he's one of – he and I are dear friends, and for the last two and a half years or so, we've been thought partners and brothers in this journey –
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I've never seen anyone in my life better at turning weaknesses into strengths than Joe, which is a huge statement because I spent my life with these 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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. This is after winning worlds in the Tai Chi Chuan. And I broke my back in a training camp. I own a school with Marcelo Garcia, who's a dear friend, who's nine-time world champion, perhaps the greatest grappler, pound for pound, to ever live.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And that's something that Joe trains harder than anybody else. And he leads by example. And he leads with vulnerability. And there's something, he embodies dynamic quality. And that's really special. And that's something I have unbelievable respect for. And you look at Joe now, like Joe just has learned to just thrive in pain and discomfort in his limits, in living at his limits.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And that's like the leadership, which I think will lead to beautiful things.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Well, going back to back is an approach way of framing that. Like going back to back is different from protecting the title.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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 old 405 disc. And it was the first time I'd been moved away from an art Not on my own terms.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
very difficult in modern society and in the life of a professional athlete or team in modern society is that, you know, you think about NBA players, they're always being interviewed by the media and the media is always trying to drum up drama and always trying to ask, the media always asks the question that is exactly what the performance psychologist of the player would not want the player to think about.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So for example, like they might ask something about like, how do you feel knowing the expectations of you are so large you can never live up to them? Right? Like, or is it shameful? Do you feel ashamed about your performance now because of the expectations on you? The questions like that will be framed.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Right. There's something, because like you want a player to be liberated from self-consciousness. You don't want a player to be playing with an awareness or a fixation on external emotions. expectations or the external eye.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like I remember the feeling in my chess life when I transitioned from losing myself in thought to thinking about how I looked thinking to the cameras or the groupies or whatever on the outside. Like wildly different mindsets as a chess player, right? And so you have all these pressures that are trying to pull you out of an ideal performance state.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And so one needs to learn, develop thick skin or a way of integrating it or be playful with it. And I really believe in Embracing adversity. We have this theme, hunting adversity on the team, which is like these things that could be seen as detrimental or problems or things that could get in the way of our liberation. We welcome them, like cold water.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Getting in cold water every day is a very important, I think it's a beautiful opportunity to train it so much. But we don't want to get in cold water gritting our teeth and hating it. No, we want to love the fact that we're about to suffer in that cold water. I've been cold plunging for many, many years, maybe 15 years.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And it's not like when you get into 34 degree water, even if you've been training for a very long time, you're thrilled about this five minute or 10 minute plunge you're about to do.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And it was a brutal injury that I ended up, as we do and we're madmen, coming back and training for a year and a half with the broken, 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I agree. I have this principle I call living on the other side of pain. And I think that pain, mental discomfort, physical discomfort, or confronting some issue one doesn't want to think about, or taking on one's bias pattern, or if you're, let's just say, a professional decision-maker, taking on whatever
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
the network of your cognitive biases tends to lead to... Like these are all forms of pain, right? I think the cold water training is such an exquisite way to practice living on the other side of pain in a way that is thematically resonant. And you can train at that... Doing that physical practice can liberate you in your mental arenas to...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
to take on shit you don't want to take on one thing i've found is that when you're training peak performers there can be the impulse to go right at their weakness in the place they're they're making the error but it's usually much less potent to do it that way because they're well calloused over in that area so if you're like a poker player who has like some control issue right
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
It's – you could like take on the control issue in poker. But they're so brilliant at poker. Like they've built calluses around it. They've built ways of dealing with it and they're able to play at a high level despite – but like – but they're probably very controlling at home as well with their spouse or their kids or whatever.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And if you take on the control issues in places they're much less developed, it will be much easier to take it on because it's less calloused. and it will be massively liberating in their poker game. So I often, like this is this idea of interconnectedness and thematic interconnectedness.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I'll identify a theme someone needs to work with, but then we'll practice that theme in other areas of their life. And then you could have core habits which manifest that theme. And then there comes this amazing moment where the theme just becomes like internalized because one practices it in things that are away from where it manifests professionally. And then it just releases.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then all the manifestations of that theme just become your way of life. So for example, Like if one wants to take on one's resistance to discomfort, to pain, to pushing one's limits, right? One can practice things like cold plunging, like cardiovascular interval training, like, you know, other things like withholding orgasm, whatever.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
You can have ways of practicing like the theme that are completely separate from where it's manifesting or hindering you in your professional life where you're probably very good at dealing with it. And then the unlock will just happen. And you'll be liberated from it. Right? This is one of the most powerful ways that I've found to train.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I said, okay, if I can't be all in training as a competitor, as an athlete myself, I'd been training elite competitors in mental and physical performance 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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I also find cold plunging is just unbelievable for sleep quality, for – I do contrast training now. And I agree with you. Like I've spent a lot – for years I was doing like really long, cold, like 36-degree water for 11 or 12 minutes. And I pushed myself really hard. Wow. And man, 11 minutes is so different from nine minutes. Different world. And now I found that I have a practice of...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I'll do three to four rounds of 42 to 44 degrees between that and the sauna. And I'll do like one longer plunge a week. But like in daily practice, I don't feel the urge to do very long breath holds or very long cold plunges.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I'm asking you because you know this stuff.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And we're on the West Coast. You can think what time that is East Coast time.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
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.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
We had, so Graham Duncan, my dear friend, joined us at the game last night. And Graham, I consider to be in the realm of like elite mental talent, mapping and assessment to just be in the league of his own. He's such a genius in the realm of... of just finding and identifying people who have world-class potential in mental arenas in really quirky ways. He's a beautiful soul.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And one of the ways he frames this in the investment space when he's looking at high potential investors is he doesn't want to find people who have too specific an identity in the way that they relate to what they do, to make money, to invest, to whatever.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
because there's something static in I am a X, Y, or Z, versus I am something more broad, which leads to one's relationship to dynamic quality, to rediscovery, to changing as the world changes. I think that this relates a little bit to what I was describing in terms of learning chess locally versus learning chess in a way that connects to all of life, which is so dynamic.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I spent many years studying Aryamaka Buddha's philosophy, and so I come from both a Western and Eastern perspective when I think about the question of ego. And I think that one of the things that happens in the West when we talk about East Asian philosophy is that we oversimplify it, and we create, we kind of polarize things.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And so I'm in my really intense training lifestyle myself. And I train elite mental and physical competitors around the world 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 the journey in a nutshell. Happy to dig into any of it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I think, so it's easy to, people talk so quickly about being egoless, right? Or say someone is low ego. And when they say they're low ego, they don't actually mean that they're low ego. They mean that they have a sound egoic structure.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like they're not, like if they say they're low ego, they're usually saying that they are, they're not expressing insecurity all the time, which means that it's not that they have a low ego. It's that their ego is not like, is not fundamentally secure. Like there's not a rupture in the structure that's leaking all the time.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So the way I relate to ego from like a competitive perspective or from like a artistic perspective or a self-cultivation perspective is that I relate to it around dynamic versus static, constant exploration as opposed to being stuck in how one relates to old patterns.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I relate to understanding the emptiness of our egoic dynamics, understanding the non-absolute nature of our ego, the relational nature of things, the interconnectedness and the interdependence of all things. I think it's so easy to have an identity which we think is like, I am this. but we're not this. This doesn't exist out of relation to that.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And that doesn't relate in relation to this other thing. So understanding the chain of relationality and then how our ego manifests in all of that. So having the ability to both dissolve one's relationship to like static egoic dynamics, but also having a sense of identity and having a sense of what one's self-expression is and having like when we are, there is this thing about will
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
When you're competing, you can feel when someone has an unbreakable will. When you're matching up against somebody and they're wishy-washy, you can just blow through them. But when their will is just like – I'll never forget Marcelo Garcia against Colossans in a big world championship match.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Colossans was wrist-locking everybody, and Marcelo put his hand right into the wrist lock and looked into his eyes. It's like, try it. He just put his hand into it. And you can break someone by being unbreakable. You can see a lot of fights where somebody tries to submit someone and someone is unsubmitted.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And the person who has the huge advantage gets broken because they realize, holy shit, this guy is unbreakable. And so they become broken, right? So there's having the ability to have that, like when you touch a fighter, like fighters all rub up against each other. You learn a lot, like feeling someone. So if you meet fighters that hug, you learn so much on the touch.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And you can feel when someone is brittle. You touch them, you can feel how much contact they've taken, how much they've been hit, how much they've absorbed, how much they've been abused, how much they've received. And you can feel where their energy stops. You can feel if there's just static things in them. And then you can also feel when the earth is moving inside of them.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
When it's just like this molten energy, it's just moving in them. And when you feel a body that like, like it just can envelop you and it can be a mountain or it can be like water. So I relate to ego in that. You want to be able to be like water and be like a mountain. I've never answered that question before. I just riffed on that. But that's like the essence of how I relate to it.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I really respect Lex. I think what he does is awesome. I love his podcast. He's brilliant. And the way he, in really prickly issues, has got people on both sides of things and welcomes everyone in and has dialogue. I have a huge amount of respect for how Lex handles himself in the public world.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
He has a courageousness with which he, in my observation from afar, comports himself in the world that I have a lot of respect for.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I mean, of course that's my way of life. I mean, it's funny as a, as a chess player, even like I used to study people off the board all the time. I'd watch them. Like you watch, I remember you used to play these tournaments in Bermuda and And once a year, an invitational high-level tournament, and then you'd watch someone walking, and they'd get caught in the rain.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And watching someone in the rain, you learn so much. Would they just stand and embrace it? Would they put something over their head and run away? What would they do, right? And in general, if someone has a negative relation to the rain, they're usually pretty controlling, and then you have a feel for how to handle them on the board, create chaos on the board. Right.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Like just like mix it up, make it uncontrollable.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Or if someone is like full free spirit in the rain like me, like maybe you wanna make the game like a little bit more quiet, conservative, like strategic, not so chaotic, like where one has to find exact precise solutions in specific kinds of positions where like you can't improvise, you're not finding hidden harmonies in chaos, you're finding specific thing, right? control and reign.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And then in the fight game, man, you're watching people all the time. I mean, you watch fighters watching one another. You see a lot. Feeling one another, watching one another. And I love watching people away from what they do, because all those themes are much more visible than when they're doing what they do.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I've utilized competitive fields as beautiful laboratories for refining my relationship to the training process because of how relentlessly truth-telling they are. But I also come from a family of artists. My grandmother was a brilliant abstract expressionist, painter, and sculptor. Stella Waitzkin, amazing woman. She was good friends with Hans Hoffman and Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I mean, that was her crowd. She was part of the the early beat generation back in the day. And I come from a family of artists. A lot of what I'm thinking about in recent years is how to channel my life's work into making the biggest positive impact possible on the world. And I'm really worried in this moment around what's happening in human consciousness the depths of distraction?
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
How can we enhance the human ability to make decisions in an increasingly complex world where there's so much misinformation? And also, how can we take on humanity's biggest challenges? And so, for example, one of the projects that I'm really excited about that I've been working on for the last couple of years is called Lila Science. And these aren't competitors, these are scientists.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And we're essentially, so I was sitting with this question for two or three years, like who should I partner with to try to take on humanity's biggest challenges? And I met this guy, he ended up renting Graham's house who we were at the game with yesterday, next door to mine in Costa Rica. And his name is Jeff Van Montselen. And Jeff is just a brilliant scientific visionary and creator.
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And we ended up having three weeks of dialogue. And I incidentally invested in one of his companies years before, which was interesting. But we had this incredible three weeks of dialogue while he was standing next door. And then we looked at each other and realized we should be teaming up. And I've also been...
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
think very close to and observing the world of artificial intelligence for a long time. Um, partially because Demis Hassabis was a childhood friend of mine. We grew up playing chess together from when you're like 11 years old. And so I've observed, I observed his journey and, um,
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The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I think that it's very interesting in chess, like the seat that I had watching the impact on chess of first computers, increasingly powerful machines, and then artificial intelligence was fascinating. Because if you imagine like what it's like to see one's life's work be overcome in three hours of experimentation, like what AlphaZero did, just breathtaking.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
and to give some perspective on things, there's an ELO system in chess, right? There's a ranking system. The highest rated chess players in the world, human chess players, are rated, you know, from Garry Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, all the world champions are rated somewhere in the 2,800 to 2,900 level, right? ELO. The strongest AI engines now are north of 3,800 ELO.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And just for context of how wild that gap is, when I was eight years old, my rating was 1,800. So the gap between me at eight, which is like I was ridiculous, and the world champion, human, is the same gap as the world champion and the strongest AI engines in the world. And so it's very hard for humans to conceive of being the ants, relative to the humans.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
We are the ants now in terms of, or we soon will be, what is possible. And I think that that could be channeled for the good or it could be channeled for the bad. And the question, what are the motivations of the people who are really driving these companies? So I've been thinking for a long time of how to, combine, like, what's the light side of the force of the artificial intelligence world?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And what Jeff and I and a dear friend, Chris Fussell, who is a brilliant man who, he wrote Team of Teams and One Mission. He was an elite Navy SEAL, and then he ended up running Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC with Stan McChrystal. Then he was president of the McChrystal Group, and now he's president of Lila Science.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Jeff, Chris, and I and a brilliant man named Jack Millwood, who's the chief cultural officer, have been And I brought together this tribe of a few different brilliant friends who were part of this. And it's basically taking cutting edge science and taking cutting edge AI, bringing them together to create scientific superintelligence.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
focused on, and we're creating these AI science factories where the entire scientific process can be replicated, can be driven nonstop. The way AlphaZero was driving nonstop iteration in the chess world, what if this is happening in the scientific process?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And experimental design and experimental execution and then study of experimental results and study of the entire scientific literature. And imagine all of that happening with robotics, with 3,800 ELO-rated scientists, AI scientists, and then millions of them networked. And now if you have this, from my perspective, the most important thing is the safety.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And I think that a lot of these AI companies aren't prioritizing safety first, we are. And I think for me, it's been a really important thing thinking about this, because I've been sitting with this question for a lot of years. In order to do something like this, you have to trust that the people who are driving it, if they have max temptation,
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But something could be, like the Manhattan Project, could be potentially negative for humanity. That they would not push the button. They would lead to the satisfaction of all their dreams if it would be taking an existential risk for humanity. And this team, I really believe in that way. And so what's most exciting to me about this is the material science side.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I mean, the life sciences, the eradication of disease, it's unbelievable what could happen. I think we'll be blown away by what happens in the coming years. But the material science part of it, for me personally, is what matters most because I really don't think it matters if humans are all living for 150, 200 years if we have no climate to live on. Right.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
And the material innovations that could be emerging in the coming years to take on the climate crisis are – are breathtaking. So it's a project I'm deeply involved in and it has nothing to do with competition. I mean, I guess everything is competitive from one perspective, but this is about driving discovery, driving innovation.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
To me, what you just said really hits home. Like, But I think while one is taking on all these different things for me personally, it's important to always be in the fire. Like I need to be training myself, like what I'm doing on the ocean every day in my own training. Like the thing that drives me crazy are armchair quarterbacks or what Robert Persig used to call philosophologists, right?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
which are like, or like the literary critics versus the writer or the philosophologist versus the philosopher or the armchair quarterback versus the quarterback. So for me, like my way of life, like I just don't know, it's hard for me to believe in anybody in these things who isn't putting themselves on the line as a way of life.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
So like my own ocean training and my own competitive training and like being immersed in the truth telling nature of the competitive world is something that I feel is really like, We never have the truth nailed. We're never liberated from our egoic dynamics. We're always susceptible to becoming static. I've really come to feel that. And I don't believe – so like it's a big value system for me.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
There's nothing like the ocean to expose any little micro inkling of like the illusion of control because you cannot control the ocean. You can't overcome the ocean. The ocean is going to kick your ass. So you need to blend with her and receive her and honor her. Yeah, like that's where I do my inner work out there. Okay, your study, go ahead and do it.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
That's an awesome question. I mean, so we have to, we're basically taking all the macro and all the micro and we're going to boil it down right here. That's beautiful. That was a very expansive, elegant question.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
I think the true answer, it's interesting, there's, I find this distinction between how, like when I think about a question like that, between how I actually relate to the question and how I might deconstruct how I actually relate to the question to make it relatable. But is the deconstructed version actually true to how I really relate to the question? right?
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
Because accurate deconstruction is so nuanced and difficult, right? So how I experientially relate to that question is that I want to live my life with just relentless truth to myself, with authenticity, with love, with receptivity. I want to deepen my
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
my connection to what I'm doing, the arts I'm practicing specifically, and tapping into my relationship to the universe through the artistic exploration. I have not planned out the next 10, 20, 40, 50, 60 years. I do have a long time horizon on how I think about plans and developments and projects I'm working on.
Huberman Lab
The Art of Learning & Living Life | Josh Waitzkin
But it's like this fusion of the cultivation of full presence right now and playing the long game. But I don't – I'm not clear on where the long game is going. One of my dear friends, Boyd Vardy. Do you know Boyd? I know of him and I'm a huge admirer of his work. Oh, you should have him on. He's awesome. He's a beautiful – or you should go to South Africa and go – Martha Black connected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
He told me recently that right before that fight, his grips had locked up. So he went into that fight. It looks incredible. Just that arm drag, take the back, choked him out in seconds.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It was nuts. This theme of transitions and developing frames where other people don't have them, like it's so interesting how it's manifest in every art.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like I remember when I was playing chess because I was a chess player from age 6 to 23. That was my first art.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, his grips from the fight before were like... Oh, wow. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So the book came out when I was 11 years old. My dad actually wrote the book. He was a writer, and he ended up just writing about the journey from me starting to play chess to winning my first national championship. And when the book came out, it felt like I read it, and it felt true. I was a little pissed off because I didn't want people to know when I cried. I was an 11-year-old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I didn't want to be vulnerable. But that felt like – and that was my first real thrust into some degree of spotlight. And I was the national champion at that point, and I was each year for those years. So I was at the top of the chess world, the youth chess world, and then I had the movie come out. the book came out. And then when the movie came out, it was a shit show.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
because I thought it had nothing to do with my life. Years later, I was able to see it as a work of art separate from my life and see it that way. And I was able to see how it was thematically true in many ways to themes in my life. But my first teacher, Bruce Pendolfini, who's still a very dear friend of mine, Ben Kingsley played him as this mean guy. And I've had terrible coaches in my life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I've had coaches who were super destructive. But Bruce wasn't. He was beautiful and loving and helped me discover my love for chess. My first coaches were the hustlers in Washington Square Park and Bruce Pendolfini together. And the way that was represented, I didn't like it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
They also combined a bunch of characters in Washington Square Park, the hustlers that combined them into one in a way that, you know, was thematically true but didn't feel... So, like, when you're a kid, you're a teenager, you see all the difference. A movie comes out about your life. You see all the differences as opposed to the similarities. And it was...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, and I felt really guilty about it relative to Bruce. That was a big part of it, because I love Bruce. Did you talk to him about it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, he was named Bruce in the movie, and honestly, he loved it. It put him in the spotlight as the chess teacher in the country, in the world. So he rolled with it really well. I was just sensitive to... all these mean-spirited things that happened between us in the film that never happened in life. And years later, those things did happen to me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Amazing. Amazing. Dude. That's epic. So it's funny. My background, we have a lot of overlap in our early jujitsu education because my first teacher was John Machado.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And actually, during those years, when it came out, they were happening to me then. What was interesting is I had some really destructive coaches during that time. And I didn't put that on Bruce. But also what happened with the movie is that I loved chess so deeply. It was my first form of self-expression. And up until the film came out, it was just sort of this pre-conscious, innocent form of...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
of play of battle of, of like it was, it was my, it was my jujitsu mats. It was, it was, I fucking loved it. And, and then the, the, the movie is what pulled me into self-consciousness for the first time. I started thinking about, instead of losing myself in thought, I started thinking about how I looked to groupies, to cameras, to the rest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And so like I, I moved from self-expression to self-consciousness to being locked up. And then, you know, And I didn't ask for it. I didn't decide I want to have a movie. This thing was done. It was ultimately, I mean, I'm grateful for it. From my perspective now, the existential crisis that happened was awesome for me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It forced me to become more complicated as a human and integrate a sense of consciousness into my relationship to something. So my perspective on it now is that it was a beautiful journey. It made me grapple with a lot of shit. I didn't become reliant on a flower garden in order to have a deep relationship to an art. But at the time, I was very conflicted about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then when I graduated high school, I took off and left the US for a couple of years, lived in Slovenia with my girlfriend at the time to get away from the spotlight, to get away from the media, get away from all the shit that was connected to the movie. And that was when I started studying East Asian philosophy and meditating and started reading Jack Kerouac and existentialist literature and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Trying to figure myself out, figure the world out, figure out how I related to these things in some empty space.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. And I spent years training with John in L.A. Long before, and then I'm, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And they think they know you very intimately. Which is weird. But they don't. Same with you. You're so public, right? Probably most people think they know who you are and what you think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
That's fake. And also when you're a teenager, you're susceptible to all of the temptations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I mean, suddenly you've got groupies everywhere, and that's awesome. And it's a lot of fun. But it's not necessarily consistent with sitting for six hours at a time in competition playing chess. No. It's probably destructive to it, right? Quite destructive. Yeah. Which is interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So I moved to New York. I think I started training with John. So I was doing Chinese martial arts for a bunch of years before that, competing everywhere. Then I started training, cross-training with John in I think 2001, 2002. And then early 2005. Moved back to New York, started training with Marco Santos in his school in New York. And I was training with Jucao and Alisson Britis.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I already had a very strange life because, and I think a foundational part of my psychology came from, so I started playing chess when I was six years old. By the time I was seven, I was the top rated player for my age in the country. My first national championship, I got my ass kicked, which was tremendous. It was great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Last round of my first nationals, I lost to the guy who later became my best friend for many, many years, David Arnett.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Because I didn't learn that I could win without getting my ass kicked first. I had to grapple with my demons. And I relate – the year from then to winning my nationals, my first nationals the next year was when I really developed a love for chess. And I had to work very hard. And I didn't associate winning the nationals with –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
talent, or a smooth trip, or all the bullshit that people can connect when they're called a prodigy from the outside. It's not a term I ever related to myself at all, but these labels are put on from the outside, and if you win too fast to... too young, you can just develop this relationship to, this brittle relationship to success and to training and to everything, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You don't realize that getting your ass kicked is a huge part of the journey.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Jucao is an amazing old school Bracey Baja, like, you know, amazing fighter. And I was also cross training with Lucas Lepre at the time. And I was I needed I was just ready to. And then I met Marcelo and I was and he had moved from New York to Florida and I was traveling to Florida to train with Marcelo a bunch. And I I wanted to be pushed all in. And Marcelo and I gotten really close.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And so consistently, the biggest losses, the most crushing losses are what lead to the biggest wins later. Sometimes many years later. And people often... I remember I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition for a charity in my 20s somewhere. And this guy introduced his son and he said his son hadn't lost a chess game in two years. And he was so proud.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And it's just like, I knew it was a fucking train wreck. I mean, the kid obviously just was only choosing people to play who he could beat, wouldn't compete up in tournaments, would only play down. And he was the only kid who didn't want to play against me in the simul. And so his life was protecting this perfect thing, right? People who don't lose.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So in my chess life, the interesting thing that happened in my psychology is that I was the top-rated player for my age in the country from a young age, but I always played up. I always played against adults. Except for nationals and worlds, I played up. And all of my rivals were targeting me because I was the top seed in youth events. But their coaches were much stronger players than me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
They were adult international masters, grandmasters, and they could see all my weaknesses. Right. psychological, technical, everything. And so if I ever made a mistake, the weakness was exploited until I took it on. And so I developed from really young age this relationship to training, which was if I didn't take on my weakness, I got my ass kicked and I felt pain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And so not taking on my weakness became outside of my conceptual scheme. So from age eight, I just – and it can be a blind spot. Like today in life, like a criticism of me that some loved ones would have is that I'm just – I'm always – I love training. I love pushing my limits as a way of life in whatever I'm doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
If it was chess, if it was fighting, now it's foiling, surfing and then foiling in the biggest waves I can find. And like just if I'm playing at my edge, I feel – It feels beautiful. It feels like where I want to be. But the comfort zone doesn't feel beautiful. And to me, that works really well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But it's a big part of my foundation in that was being 8 years old and being targeted 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, my whole life. And it wasn't until recently that I realized that it was actually outside of my conceptual scheme not to take on the weakness because it was just connected to pain from such a young age as a competitor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
There's no fucking luck in chess. If you're playing chess, if you have an opening repertoire that's massive and you go into a game and there's one little place that there's a weakness and you don't want your opponent to go, he always fucking finds it. You don't know why.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You never like make a move and hope he doesn't see it or I'll play – let's hit this trap and it's not the best move but maybe he'll fall into it. No, that never works at a high level. So you just – you have to take your shit on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, I don't anymore. I did young and now I don't associate it with anything. I just don't do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right. But if it's kind of driving you – for me, I think it's healthier for me to recognize that pattern in myself and then roll with it as opposed to just not even see like that it's – That it's there. That it's there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like if I'm cooking a turkey, I have to cook a world-class turkey. I have a friend, Jim Detmer, who says to me, Josh, what you have to do is cook a terrible turkey. Just cook an average turkey. Don't crush it. In other words, it's an interesting thing when you become present to the fact that you have this youthful story running through everything you do. And you can choose to live that way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then I I just said to him, hey, man, you know, you want to you want to come back to New York and open a school together. And he really loved New York, and we'd gotten very close.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
He was in Florida. He was in New York before. He loved New York, but then he had to move to Florida. There was just a lot of jiu-jitsu politics flowing everywhere, as it does. Jiu-jitsu politics. The worst. Yeah, anyway, long story short, we opened a school together after that, and it was amazing. Then I spent so many years all in training with him. Mo's such a beautiful, beautiful martial artist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Jiu-Jitsu was the art I had to move on from not on my own terms. Because I ruptured my L405 disc. There it is. Trained on it like a crazy person for a couple years. And then the doctors looked at that and they were just like, if you keep on doing this, you're not going to be able to walk. You're not going to be able to play ball.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. I mean, I've done a lot of stuff. I mean, I spent – I never had surgery. They all told me to, but I didn't have surgery. Good for you. And I did tons of – I mean, I've been doing total immersion swimming and foundation training and everything I could do for the back. And – The foiling feels – I'm training like I'm all in on this art and I'm doing it in a way that feels healthy in the back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I train jiu-jitsu now but light. I mean I can't train all out like I'd love to. It was heartbreaking to give it up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I was so madly in love and all in with Marcelo and – I was at that part of the learning process, which is where I get good at the learning process, which is toward the higher levels of something. That's where I'm best at learning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I was so stupid. No, it was a significant moment. I was position sparring. Marcello was at our school in New York. It was a week before my eldest son, Jack, was born. So it was a bit over 13 years ago. We were – Marcello was gone. I was at the school. Paul Schreiner was running –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
class that day, I think, and there was this 240-pound blue belt visiting, just this ripped dude, and Paul had everyone doing position sparring, half guard position sparring, and this guy was matched up against one of our guys. I had that hubristic, invincible feeling about me in that moment. I was just, when you're feeling at your very best in martial flow, and I was like,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And it ended up where we were doing half guard position sparring where I was holding half guard and he was doing this pass twisting the spine. And it was so fucking stupid to do it. I mean, I was just holding half guard in position sparring. And I just felt it go. And then, like, you know, it was I couldn't. move, it was fucking terrible. And it was- Did it herniate? Yeah. And all the fluid gone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Oh yeah. And yeah, it was brutal. It was, and I remember- So how is the disc now? I couldn't lift up my child for the first three, four months of his life. And then I had this strange period where I couldn't, I couldn't, standing and walking was the toughest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But then I had this period, like if I would go into the corner store to get milk, like three, four months later, I'd have to bike to the corner store and come back. And I can't explain this, but I had a period where I couldn't walk, but I could ski because of the angle. So Marcel and I were going to the mountains out around New York, just bombing down. I was just trying to get my fix in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Just skiing without turning was my goal. Yeah. He was snowboarding, I was skiing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, I was a dumbass for the first two years after the injury. And then I realized I had to... What does the disc look like now? I haven't looked at it in a long time. It doesn't trouble you anymore? It does trouble me. I take care of it all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You know, your point about, I remember I was studying back in the early 2000s, studying Eddie's game, studying the rubber guard, studying all the twister stuff, just trying to wrap my head around it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
How do you feel about Ryan Hall's game in MMA? Because he also, he's entering the MMA game.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, I know. But I mean, when he entered the game, he came into it with a repertoire that was so unusual for him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And he spends his whole jiu-jitsu life, he spent in the scramble, in transition. And that was really a philosophy of his. Have you seen that old school Artesuave clip? Remember the old documentaries, Artesuave, from back there around him as a young teenager training at Faber-Guzel School in Sao Paulo. And it was so interesting because even then you could see him. He never held position.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. He's a brilliant guy. He trained at our school in New York, I think from 2010, 2012, that range. And it was so interesting watching him and Marcelo. Because Ryan had a huge amount of humility relative to Marcelo. And he wanted to train with him. And Marcelo was so curious about Ryan's game. But Marcelo never studied anyone's game.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
A core principle of Marcelo is if you study my game, you enter my game, and no one will be better at my game than me. And so in competition, the guys would be studying tape of everybody. He would never study one's tape, never study one's fights, but he'd watch them, the fight before they went against him, and he'd pick up on some kind of elemental read. He's what I call a low-rep learner.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
His ability to learn from a single repetition is just unbelievable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And it was really interesting watching him and Ryan because Ryan just came and visited me in my home a month ago. And we were talking about how formative those training experiences with Marcelo were. And it was like one way that Ryan described it is that he had this like layers of traps seven steps in. But Marcelo had this deep understanding upstream of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And it was like watching Marcelo put himself like right next to the fire, like right next to Ryan's game. He wanted to learn the edges of Ryan's game but never enter it. And his ability to play right at the threshold of all of Ryan's traps, which he could pull almost everyone else into in just pure grappling. But not just – his ability to learn. It felt like a cat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
putting its paw right up against the edge of a fire and just like learning about what heat was and deconstructing it, but then not ever getting into the heat, you know? And I, and you'd watch Ryan will roll anyone else. He just pulled them into the fire, into the spider web. That's fascinating. Marcello has a really incredibly deep, almost simian physical intelligence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And his ability to learn from a single rep is unique in my observation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I mean, tons of stuff with his knee, with his hip. I think he's starting to come back. I think his shoulder's something now. He's still, you know. He's had like nine surgeries. I think 23. I think it was 23. I think he's had 23 surgeries. And the bad one happened with someone just falling on him in training.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I don't know. That was a hip. Oh, God. Yeah, I don't know exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
He always let opponents move. Be fun to pull that up maybe at one point. Interesting. A core principle of his was to allow the opponent to move and spend as much training time as possible in transition. And while most jiu-jitsu guys, as you know, as they're coming up the ranks, egos are controlling, they're holding guys.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
No, he was training with somebody and he was taking it easy on them in a transition, trying to not hurt them. And then they just collapsed on him, on his hip in a certain way, as he described it. Yeah, brutal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. Yeah. I did a lot of – I tended to do weightlifting that was consistent with the movement patterns of the arts that I was training in. So I would do a lot of biking, lower body strength and then I would do – I didn't have – I think if I did it now, I would do much more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
weightlifting um but when I was rolling usually twice a week six days a week and um and I was I would do cardio work in addition and then some like some resistance work but I didn't I wasn't like I'm doing a lot of work with the Boston Celtics now and I'm seeing how they're for the last few years and I see how they're a brilliant their sports science team and their physical trainers are and like I don't think that I was when I was training jiu-jitsu I was
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
at the level of, for example, the Boston Celtics in the resistance training that I was doing to supplement it. And Marcelo didn't do weight training. That was part of it. When I was training with him, I was just saying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
How did he get those legs? He just rolls, man. He was biking. He was able to bike into those bikes without brakes. We were biking all over New York. Bikes without brakes? Yeah. What do you mean? What are they called?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You got to slow. You put your foot on the edge of the wheel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, fixed wheel biking. He loved fixed wheel around New York, and I was biking. Then I switched over.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
People love it. But, man, in New York, it's quite something. I mean, in New York, when you're going down a hill in New York City in traffic, there's some adventures. You're going down a hill. How are you fucking slowing down?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Let's have a bike with no brakes. The dumber thing was what I did after this, which is that when I fell in love with surfing, I was one-wheeling all over New York.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Breaks, you fucking freaks. My last two years living in New York, I had fallen so in love with surfing. And I knew ocean arts were my next chapter. And I was so heartbroken not to be able to do it. So I got a one-wheel. It was like the first generation. You know the one-wheel electronic skateboards?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, we had one of those. It just came out, first generation. And I was just like... thousands of miles biking one wheeling all over New York. And then, um, but it was at the early one. If you push past the pushback, It had this pushback thing, which would slow you down, but you could push past it and go faster. But if you pushed past the final pushback, it just bottomed out. Wham!
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And you just went 23, 24 miles an hour. It was a whack, right? Over taxi cabs, under taxi cabs, through taxi cabs, everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I never did it, but it's really beautiful to watch when it's done well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
There's lots of things that can go wrong. There are lots of things that go wrong. Foiling, there's a lot of fucking things that can go wrong. 35, 40 miles an hour on top of a guillotine, big waves. I mean, shit can go wrong fast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, this is after he moved to start training with Fabio in Sao Paulo. And it's such a beautiful thing because if you watch his style, he's not in this moment actually.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
E-foiling is the best way to learn how to foil because they weigh 90 pounds, the E-foils do. Like a high-performance big wave, a high-performance foil will... The whole setup will weigh four or five pounds. Really? Yeah, I mean, E-foil, you have a battery, it's heavy, and you've got electricity to learn how to, to learn foil dynamics.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Foiling, when you're high-performance foiling in big surf, you're just on a, like, if you're towing in, you're on a three-and-a-half-foot board. No batter. It's not powered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You can paddle in, but if you're towing in to bigger waves, you're on a small board. You're getting towed in behind a jet ski, whipped in, and then you're just riding. It's epic. It's frictionless.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You're above the water. If you think about the glassiest surf day possible, the frictionless feeling, it's more frictionless than that because you're above the water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
The foiling is interesting because it's like the ultimate receptivity because the foil picks up on underwater wave circulation. So it's picking up on lift when you're going very fast. And also when you're in a wave, the waves have – have upward circulation at the face of the wave. And you get to the top of the wave, it accelerates. And so your foil is riding the underwater currents.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And you're receiving it. It's so amplified. So tiny little movements have big effect on the thing. So the surf movement will be very big. And the foil movement is very subtle, the body mechanic. And then you learn to really crank into it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
um and it's limitless you can do open water foiling crossing oceans on long high aspect wings riding open ocean swells and you can wow you can push like high performance foiling is just like high performance surfing that the lines you can draw the turns are epic the g's are crazy so you're just all in on this oh yeah oh yeah i'm all on this is it an everyday thing for you yes every day same as jiu-jitsu six days a week twice a day if possible
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Really? Wow. Yeah. Wow. Do you have goals? Virtuosity. Yeah, I competed my whole life. And so now I live... I train the way I would if I was in a world championship training camp.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, he's scrambling. Did he explain why? Well, you're maximizing time spent in the in-between. I mean, I think in the martial arts, people are so focused on position when they're learning position, position, position. But the in-between is where the real virtuosity happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. But the interesting thing is like I... Yeah, I love it. But all these arts to me are connected. That's the strange thing about my art, like chess, Chinese martial arts, jiu-jitsu, surfing, foiling. To me, the fascinating thing when you get toward the pinnacle of an art is that you start to experience, at least in my...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
from my perspective, that the apexes of these arts are much closer to one another than lower down in the mountain of the same art. So people who are virtuosos in various fields are often speaking a much more similar language than people who are at lower levels of the same art than they're training. And...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like when I think about chess, I related to chess through core principles, and those principles manifest in the martial arts. I remember that I had this, when I wrote my first book, or my second book, The Art of Learning, it was about my experience of crossing over my level from chess into the Chinese martial arts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I had this really interesting experience where I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition, playing 40 games at once in a charity for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. But at that point, I'd been training martial arts for two years, and I was in the transition away from chess during that period.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I had this realization that I was winning these chess games, playing 40 games at once, but I was not playing chess. I was Feeling flow, riding space left behind. I was riding the energetic wave of the game like I would if we were flowing on the mats. But I was making chess moves. And I realized that these arts had become fundamentally connected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then that became like an area of interest and of exploration. I started making what I was doing unconsciously more and more conscious. And now when I relate to the chess, I don't move chess pieces anymore, but chess is manifest in everything that I do, as is jiu-jitsu. And as is in the ocean arts, I'm manifesting these other arts, the core principles I've experienced through them all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And that's one of the things that I've been puzzled by. for many years is why chess is so fucking hard. Chess has no luck. The best chess players in the world are so brilliant at what they do. I listened to your episode with Magnus Carlsen. Enjoyed that. He was great. Yeah, it was cool. Someone like Magnus, he's so fucking good at what he does, such a virtuoso.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And so he spent he maximized his time in the in-between.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But if you look at like the top 100 or top 1,000 chess players, they're tremendously strong. But when they try to translate their ability to other fields, they often can't. And it's surprising.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I've tried to figure out why for a lot of years because you think like if you're able to just be so excellent at something that's super hard, you could take on something that's relatively easier and become very good at it. And I think that the reason that people often can't cross level over from one thing to the other is that they learn it in a localized language.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So you can learn chess in a way which is very specific to chess, like principles that are just chess principles, or you can learn chess in a language which Connects to all of life. And that won't slow down. It might accelerate your chess learning. And if children are taught games like chess or gymnastics or music or whatever else, so they're learning about that art very deeply.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
They're touching quality. They're pushing their limits. They're living a life of training, as I know you value very much. But they're doing so in a language which connects to the rest of life. Then they're studying thematic interconnectedness while they're studying chess. chess or jiu-jitsu or anything else. And then they're just learning the language of excellence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And it's interesting because if you watch chess players, chess teachers teaching students, many of them don't do this. They teach it within like the confines of the chessboard, like a prison. And if you learn chess that way, then it's like you're living on an island and the ocean around you is like prison walls, right? But if you study chess in a way that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You're learning how each chess principle connects to every other art you could ever study. Then this web of interconnectedness is forming in your mind. Then when you take on something else, you're able to cross the level over really naturally. In many ways, that's a big part of my life's work is the study of that interconnectedness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, a language I use for this is the passage from the pre-conscious to the post-conscious competitor or artist. And up until 15, I would relate to myself as the pre-conscious competitor. I love chess. It was free-flowing. I love the battle. I love the competition. I love the ass-kicking and the kicking ass. I just love the fucking battle of the thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then I fell in love for the first time when I was 15. The movie came out after that. And I started studying existentialist literature. I started reflecting on the absurdity of it all. I started to become present to the fact that these were just 64 squares and 32 pieces. Like I was spending my life studying this fucking box, wooden box.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like the construct, the absurdity of being stuck in that construct became clear to me. And then I was... becoming more and more self-conscious about how what I was doing was perceived by others. And I got lost in all of that. And in many ways, the journey, some people don't run into that for a long time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
There are some chess players that just become insanely strong without ever reflecting on the absurdity of the fact that they're just playing chess. And that's a great liberation. The moment you become aware of the fact that you're mortal, that you can get your ass kicked, that your arm can break, that you can die, That what you're doing is absurd. Like you get locked up by that knowledge. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And there's so many different forms that can take or the moment you like, for example, Boston Celtics, like they like you're hungering to win a world championship and then you win the NBA finals. Suddenly everything changes. Your relationship, your motivation changes, all the reasons you're doing it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
are no longer valid in some ways because now you've accomplished the thing you always dreamed of and you have to discover. It's true in any form of competition or art, in my experience, is that there comes a moment where someone's consciousness becomes more complicated and they can't just return to the innocence they had before because you can't do that. You can't put it back in the box. It's out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So then you have to work through that journey, which is a lot of what I did from like my late teenage years, leaving and studying philosophy and then moving into other fields and started relating to art in a way that was integrating that self-awareness, integrating that sense of mortality. Um, it's like when I, I, I, a very powerful example of this was I, I die, I drowned in a pool. Um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I guess like nine, 10 years ago, I was doing hypoxic breath work, Wim Hof training in a pool. Jesus Christ. And never do Wim Hof training, everybody please, in a pool because you're flushing the CO2 from your body, but CO2 is what gives you the urge to breathe. And so without carbon dioxide in your being, you don't feel the urge to breathe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I'd been a lifetime free diver, spearfishing from when I was five, six years old, but I was never doing hypoxic breath work before free diving. So if you're diving 80, 90, 100 feet, You're not flushing the CO2 from your body before you do so. So you still have that sense for when you need to breathe. But I was in a NYU pool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I was just swimming 50 meters back and forth underwater and then doing this hypoxic breath work in between. And then my last recollection is being stretched out in bliss that those tingles through your body you get from – have you done Wim Hof training? Yeah, those tingles. I had those fucking tingles. And then I woke up. 30 minutes later, what happened was that I blacked out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I was in the bottom of the pool for over four minutes after blacking out from shallow water blackout.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It should be 45 seconds to a minute, and you should be brain dead or dead because you're post shallow water blackout. I know the time it was because there was an old man at the pool who saw me in the bottom of the pool and swam one lap. His laps were a little bit over a minute, so I'm a second lap. After his third lap, he said, I'll check on him if he's still down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
He thought I was holding my breath, but I was only holding my breath while swimming. So if I was still, I was fucking out. His fourth lap, after his fourth lap, he pulled me up. I was blue. My whole body was blue. My head was red. My body saved me. My training saved me and almost killed me. Sent all the blood to my brain. My eyes were blown out red, like bloodshot for three weeks that followed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I remember waking up and having this, looking at everyone around me and like, what the fuck is everyone, what's going on guys? Like, what's the drama? I was the fucking drama. And I spent that night in the hospital going through old chest variations, trying to like test my brain. Is my brain ruined? Like, do I remember things?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Somehow my brain, maybe it's fucked up, but it seems to be working pretty well. And that was also a big part of me realizing I had to spend my life in the ocean. Because I could feel the potential for some PTSD response. I could actually feel the potential trauma response like a cloud that was washing away. Like I could see the cloud coming and I just fucking decided not to let it in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I got back in the water the next day. And I just fucking, and I think that's a big part of my relationship with the ocean is having died in water. I need to spend my life in the water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
What's really fucked up about it is no. That's what's really wild. It went just black. That's what's crazy is that I went – my last memory is of just tingles and bliss and then waking up. And so if I hadn't been pulled out, there would have been no flash, no seeing my life pass before my eyes, no tunnel on the other side, nothing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You know what's really fucking wild though is that many years later, I was doing this –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
this guy Brandon Powell is a brilliant guy who's a top Wim Hof trainer and a trainer of trainers of his guys and I was doing some retreats with teams of mine and we were doing some Wim Hof work and he had this methodology of kind of accelerated hypoxic work where that he said, I'm not sure if it's true, but he said release DMT in your body, inhibited the DMT inhibitors in your body and I did these journeys with him twice through pure breath work, no psychedelics and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I experienced these two times months apart. I experienced one time I experienced the center of my consciousness as my busted disc. And I experienced the world through like the electrical connections emerging from my L4, L5. It's very strange. And the other one was the only memory I have of that. And I'm not sure if this is accurate or some kind of illusion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But I saw the drowning experience from above, the whole thing. I watched the 20 minutes that I was on the bottom of the pool and then up in 25 minutes and then on the pool deck and I saw the whole thing from above. But that was like years after it happened. So I can't explain that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I don't know. My memory of it consciously from what actually happened is so fuzzy, right? Because I just died and came back. And then I saw it from above. I think I was mostly focused on the memory of myself. Yeah, so I relate to myself now like I've died. And I'm living and I live with a sense of gratitude and commitment. That's a big part of why we moved to the jungle with my family.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I emerged from that with a commitment to living life as beautifully and deeply and truly as I possibly could and to not let anything slip. Just all in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
No warning. I've done so many stupid fucking things in these extreme sports I've done. So many times I almost died free diving. But that one was different, man. The crazy thing was it was a technical blind spot. I just didn't know this thing about carbon dioxide. I didn't know I was taking a risk in that moment. I thought I was just taking a swim.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Who taught you to do this? Nobody. I did Wim Hof breathing on land and I was like, you know, I'll fucking do it. I'll do it fucking on the swim right now. Sounds like a great idea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, they have. And most people who die from shallow water blackout are highly trained Navy SEALs because they're very good at inhibiting the urge to breathe, but you can get too good at it. Or you can just not feel it at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And you can't dominate the ocean. You have to receive her. And if you have any brittleness in your ego, she will kick your ass until you just blend.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Wave pools have revolutionized surf training. Because for foiling, you have the ocean. And foiling is much more abundant. The surf community is quite scarce in some ways because you can only surf in specific kinds of waves. And if you're trying to make one turn, you might not see that section again for two years. You can't replicate conditions in the ocean.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
foiling you can because you can pump a foil you can drive it down let it float back up and drive it down so you can and you can or you can whip yourself behind a jet ski into a certain kind of wave so if I want to work on like a certain turn I can get 40-50 reps in a given day while surfing pre-wave pool you couldn't at all so most great surfers I would
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
are brilliant low rep learners because by necessity in the ocean you don't get tons of reps so in my observation the greatest competitive surfers in the world are excellent at learning from one or two reps like Marcelo Garcia is on the mats um I'm not naturally a great lower rep learner. I'm a higher rep learner.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Foiling is, one could say it's more technically complex than surfing because everything that surfing is, but also you have a foil which has lift dynamics and a tail and you can change the foil shape, the tail shape. If you change the angle of attack on your tail by a quarter degree, it changes the whole feel of everything. It's super technical. And so many ways one could argue that it's harder
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I wouldn't say – not that it's hard. Any of these arts are infinitely deep because you can refine anything forever. But it's more technical shit to deal with, but it's more trainable because you can replicate conditions like you now can in wave pools. Wave pools for surfers now, you can hit the same section 30, 40 times. So I do think it's incredible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But the interesting thing is that most surfers – of this generation aren't – they don't train in the same way that chess players do or jiu-jitsu fighters do because it's a low rep art that you can't replicate conditions in. So surfers aren't – Most surfers aren't constructed psychologically in a way that they will take advantage of wave pools the way a jiu-jitsu guy would.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You can't just take a low rep learner and tell them to live like a high rep learner. It's a different fucking thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right? And it's very interesting to me that – so surfers crossing over to foiling is very interesting because they – a lot of surfers – Some surfers do it and they're all in and they want to take it on. A lot of the best surfers in the world are crossing over. But it's a different lifestyle. The ones who cross over are the ones who can embrace the high rep training life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You have to. Especially in the early... Think about learning as a kid. Everything you're exposed to, the ocean's always moving, always changing. But if you can learn from one rep and burn it in, then that just... Well, in jujitsu, for example, you can say I'm going to drill this arm bar 40 times today, 40 times like this afternoon, hundreds of times, thousands of times over the next two weeks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right. So you can get as many reps as you need. It's not true in the ocean.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, beautiful question. I think a lot about unlearning, right? So my life's work is in learning, and I think a lot about unlearning because so much of what high-level learning is is being unblocked, which is getting rid of the blocks, the egoic blocks, the false constructs we have, the fucking bullshit we put on everything we do. trying to control the situation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
We should just embrace the lack of... Children don't have to unlearn that. They haven't learned it in the first place. So they're unblocked. Like my little boy, Charlie, learning how to surf was so beautiful to watch. He just, like, he grew up in the ocean. He grew up in the jungle and ocean and he just, from a young age, was swimming and tumbling and we made... a game of tumbling.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then when he first got on the surfboard, it was like, it wasn't, we didn't make it technical. It wasn't like he should telling him what to do. It was like, he could be right foot forward or left foot forward. It wasn't, we didn't impose things on him. He just like danced on the board and would find his way. And he started doing things that were very technical that he would just create.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It was pure playfulness and, Well, if you watch people come to a surf, like a surf break who are like New Yorkers who travel down for five days and they've got all this gear. The gear is amazing. They've got like gloves and booties and knee guards and like everything is covered. White face. Everything is just like not a part of their body is designed to touch the ocean.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
They're trying to keep the ocean away. And they're like they want to be super controlling about everything they learn. They're like everything is so regimented in their minds. But they're trying to control their relationship with the ocean themselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But the way to learn on the ocean is to not control it, to embrace it, to listen to it, to observe it, to feel it, to like let it envelop you, right? Well, kids will just play. They're not afraid of failing. They'll – They'll just – like the moment a kid becomes afraid of looking bad, like you see that wash over kids when they're like 9, 10, 11, 12, different ages.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And they become – oh, they don't want to fall. They don't want to look bad. And then that's when they get locked up. The freedom of – I mean to me a lot of what like the beacon is as adults is being the post-conscious – discovering the post-conscious freedom as a learner. Like how can we learn without the egoic blocks, right? Without having to look good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So if you're crossing over, like if you're a world-class striker and you're getting on the jiu-jitsu mats and you're getting your ass kicked, or if you're a great jiu-jitsu fighter and you get onto an MMA gym and suddenly the guys can just beat the shit out of you. Like having, or a great surfer switching over to foiling, right? Or a great chess player moving into the martial arts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So you're fucking, or if you're like training in some esoteric, you know, Chinese martial art like I was, and then you're moving to the jiu-jitsu mats, you might have some ego, but you're just tapping out to everybody all the time. Right? And like having the freedom to learn without egoic blocks is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I actually think that culturally this is one of the most important things that we need to cultivate because we're living in a world now where the pace of technological disruption is accelerating so fast. I know you've done a bunch of explorations on this with Tristan Harris and others in terms of what AI is bringing to society. It's been a big focus of mine for many, many years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And it's an area where I'm working. AI is better at everything than we are, right? So if you think about it in the context of chess, I grew up in the world of where chess was crossing over into the computer realm. So computers are first, like I began playing chess in the pre-computer era, computer chess era. Then computers entered, and I initially was very resistant and romantic to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I remember at 19, I started developing Chess Master, this computer chess program. And I developed this academy of mine for the next 10 years that followed teaching the human side of chess through computers. But when they first approached me, I didn't want to do it because I felt like it was going to disrupt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It was going to kill the beauty of human chess, the art of chess, which is so much about imperfection. But chess players, when I grew up, had to sit in the unknowing. They had to have a tolerance of cognitive dissonance. I might study a chess position and go three months without knowing what the solution is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So our psychologies had to be constructed so that we could sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for long, long periods of time, days, weeks, months, sometimes years. Now chess players can click on a button and they've got a supercomputer right by their side. We'll tell them the answer instantly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's interesting to think about how different that is psychologically and the different kinds of people that that draws in. But what happened then is that you had Deep Blue entered the game like supercomputers, and then you had the movement of AI entering into chess. And we had AlphaGo and then AlphaZero, which came out of DeepMind. So Demis Hassabis was the developer of DeepMind.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
He was a childhood chess friend of mine. So Demis and I from age 11 on were good friends and we had dialogue about the birth of DeepMind, which was this AI company he began. And then he developed AlphaGo and AlphaZero. And to give a feel for what AlphaZero did in chess.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
AlphaZero was able to, without being taught anything about humans playing chess, no education of the history of human chess playing, within three hours of experimentation, was stronger than any human or computer in history. So imagine your life's work. I was a pretty good chess player. Someone like Magnus Carlsen is a much, much stronger chess player. He's a world champion. Garry Kasparov.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer. Think about people who are world champions. AlphaZero, within three hours of experimentation, without being taught anything, was stronger than them. So the strongest AI engine in the world today is rated 3700 ELO. So to give a sense for what that means, when I was nine years old, my rating was like 1900 or so, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Magnus Carlsen, like the strongest human players in the world now are rated somewhere about 2800, 2850-ish ELO. The strongest AI is 3700 ELO. So just like the absurdity of the fact, the gap between like a strong nine-year-old and the human world champion is the same ELO gap as between the world champion and the strongest AI. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It gets so hard for us to really wrap our heads around what that means. That means that everything – like chess players had a front row seat to that happening early. When I listen to some of your dialogues with these guys and I could feel you and them trying to grapple with how to communicate what it means to – to have these insanely powerful intelligences in the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I think that if you can imagine an art like chess having millennia of development, people studying it, like you train jiu-jitsu, right? So imagine people training 10 hours a day for 30, 40 years, being the greatest human in the world at it. And then something can come in and within three hours of experimentation be much stronger than them. And imagine that's gonna be in fucking everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right? So... Like we have to be like children in how we learn. We're going to have to release the egoic relationship that we have to our level, to our knowledge, to everything. You know the great – you know Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right. So like you think about what happens, what the human has to do to – The internal resistance we have to overcome to embrace the new paradigm. So let's say you're a Newtonian physicist, right? You've been studying physics your whole life. You've got tenure. You've got 40, 50 years of knowledge built up. Everyone reveres you. And now there's this new thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Quantum mechanics enters the picture, right? Like to embrace this new thing is to admit to oneself and everybody else that your life's work is – kind of, you have to release it. It's wrong. It's old, right? This new paradigm is, but we resist it individually and ego and societally, right? Because we will fight tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
That's one of our strongest drivers of all humans, right? And so I think we're moving into a world now where you're going to have 37, 3800 ELO rated everything, kicking our ass at everything. So we have to become like children to go back to your question. in my opinion, and how we relate to learning, right? We can't, decision-making, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like when we think about like social media, imagine a 3,800 ELO rated networked, imagine a million networked, 3,800 ELO rated super intelligences,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
utilizing everything that they can gather about you on social media to manipulate to manipulate you to do whatever they it wants or whoever is controlling it wants they can have you do anything right but we have to like it's so hard for us to admit that we are the ant relative to the human right like we are the ant we have to have that humility and one of the things that um
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I think that that's the most important question today as that we face as a species is like, what do we do?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But when you say we don't, I mean, I would argue we should operate as if it's already happening. It's an inevitability.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
My feeling about it is that, I mean, there are places where it's going to be incredibly, it's going to be beautiful. Like just how computer chess raised the level of human chess game, chess players, right? And now AI chess has made chess players much, much stronger.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And part of it is because great chess players are partially great because they have had, they're excellent at knowing where not to look. Great chess players don't actually look at more, they look at less, but they look in the most potent directions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And what's fascinating is that AI entering the picture has forced really strong chess players to unlearn where they've been correct to learn not to look. So in other words, areas where they were well-trained not to look because humans couldn't play those positions, AI can now play those positions. And actually, those are the right positions to play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
They're the objectively correct positions to play. But now humans studying with an AI can be much better at playing those positions. And so, for example, I'm working on this fascinating project called Lila Science, which is focused on combining cutting-edge science, the best scientists in the world, and cutting-edge AI to try to have huge breakthroughs in material science and life sciences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And now that can only be done, in my opinion, with just best, best, best in class safety practices. And in my view, that involves having a higher level AI running safety than you have running the actual science. When you say safety, what are you referring to?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Making sure that we don't do that doesn't go wild, that you create that you don't create things that get out there that could be terribly destructive. I think that the part of the AI race that's happening is that people are driven by ego and there's like a game theory of a race going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And when you have a race, everyone's just running as fast as they can, but they're not, if they slow down to think about what's safe, they might fall behind in the race. And I believe ethically if we're in the AI scene at all, then we must be developing safety practices that are making it responsible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, that's why I don't, you know, when I hear people say things like that 80 to 90% positive, I feel like they're jumping to the destination without thinking about the journey to it. Because the journey to it is going to involve so much disruption, so much pain, so much chaos. And I think what you just said about grids and everything is true. I mean, you think about...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
about how many people had the ability to disrupt in that way 15 years ago, a handful of countries. Now it's gonna be hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals who just have access to super coders. And so how could it be 80 to 90% positive when There is just going to be limitless humans who have the ability to disrupt armed with 3,800 ELO rated coders that can do anything you want. Hackers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's much easier to destroy than to create. You can create for thousands of years and you destroy instantly. So it only takes one terribly destructive act or a handful of them. to overcome all the positive. I don't believe that that 80, 90% thing is right. I think that there are areas like science where we could easily create materials that could have a massively positive impact on the climate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
We could have life science breakthroughs that eliminate cancer, eliminate diseases, make the human lifespan hundreds of years. I think those things could happen, which is great. I also think that we could be manipulated into doing increasingly destructive things. And we could have horrific things happen like the grid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You know, there's a guy who's very brilliant in the espionage world years ago who said to me, he said to me, you know, he's someone who would know. And he said, you know, Josh, what you don't realize is
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
A strong AI, and this was years ago, armed with the information that the social media companies have about you could convince 99% of Americans to move to Alaska or Antarctica or anywhere within two weeks easily. Easily. I mean, just like it's so hard to have the humility that we are the ant relative to the human. Yeah. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
If you have a 3800 ELO, I'm just using that rated intelligence trying to manipulate you and it's armed with everything. I mean, humans can manipulate you with what's on social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, no problem. Show some leg, you're gone. Yeah. I mean, it's just so hard to have the, so we have to have the real humility that we are manipulatable. And a super intelligence, which is out there, and there are humans controlling the super intelligence so far. Maybe that will end. So I personally feel – I know everyone should get the fuck off social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I just think it's – I think that's the most important thing because everything that we're feeding in – I've never been on social media. I made that decision a long time ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I was never on it. I made it right at when – I remember when MySpace came out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. It felt off to me. It felt like something I didn't want to be involved with. I'm not saying that I was prescient and I saw everything that would happen, but there was some people who were impersonating me on social media, but I was never on any form of social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's hilarious. When I was flying here, I was listening to your conversation with Tristan Harris while the dude next to me was scrolling TikTok on the plane. And it was amazing listening to this dialogue here and watching him just like –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
An hour and a half straight. It was incredible. I've never actually seen someone fucking do that. It was the most brainless thing I've ever seen in my life. It's so brainless and so addictive. And so manipulative. It can guide you to anything. But why don't we... There's one thing I kind of disagreed with you on this talk.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You were saying that you just don't think that humans are going to do anything about it until we're forced to. But I don't know, man. I think that what if we just... Wake the fuck up and take ourselves off of this thing that can be used to steer us anywhere this other humans or AI wants to steer us. Why don't we just remove ourselves from it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But most people aren't rational. But why don't we help people be rational and just get the fuck off it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But think about the first time that somebody experiences jujitsu, right? They get on the mats and they realize, they might have some hubris, they're an athlete, maybe they've done some standup, maybe they haven't, they're a football player or whatever, and they suddenly are like a fish out of water. They're flopping on the sand, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And their joints are being popped and they're being choked out. And the humility that they experience, right? I think we need to culturally experience that humility before it's too late. Because that's how manipulatable we are. Just how, like, a first-day grappler is on the jiu-jitsu mats against a decent fighter, a decent grappler.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like, that's how helpless we are next to a 3800 Elo, which exists. It'll be stronger than 3800. I'm just saying that because that's where it is now. It'll be much the fuck stronger than that tomorrow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
The question is, what should we do? And like as individuals, societally, I mean, I know you're having dialogue with people who have a lot of ideas about the society societally. I'm thinking about it on the individual level. as well. And it goes, like your question about children and learning, right? I feel that there's something about having that beginner's mind, which is so liberating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right? And it's very difficult for adults to release their egoic addiction to what they do, to their habits, right? To what props up their identity. But I think that what we could do is is take on thinking, take on learning, take on the art of decision making, for example, with a beginner's mind.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
One way I relate to the transitional training is through frames. It's like it's like a process of building more frames. We have position. We position. And for some people, there'll be no space in between. But if you spend your time playing in the transitional space between you build up frames like an illusionist. I know you remember you spoke to Darren Brown back in the day. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
For the world that's coming, like you think about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it was or what it used to be, right? So what does it mean to be a human in the world that we're a year or two or three away from, right? Where there's a super intelligence out there that can manipulate us, where so many jobs are lost. Well, let me throw that at you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
What do you think the world will look like? What do I think it will look like?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I think that we're going to have thrillingly exciting discoveries being made. We're going to have problems solved that we are, as humans, unable to solve. And so there'll be amazing technological innovations that are going to make things much more convenient. I think there'll be huge life science breakthroughs. I think there'll be huge material science breakthroughs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I think there will be wild competition for who controls it. I completely agree with you about that. And I think that as that unfolds, it's going to be really messy. I think that there's going to be like unbelievable amounts of jobs are going to be lost and people are going to not have jobs. So what the fuck are they going to do? Right. So this is part of what I'm describing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
People need to train at the ability to recreate themselves. Right. Like how some people can move from one art to another and others can't. I think we have to train at the art of rediscovery. Right. So I think we're going to be tested as a species in our ability to. To recreate our identities and to live in a state of dynamic flux, of embracing new paradigms.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Paradigms are going to be shifting all the fucking time. The pace of change is going to be radically accelerating for the rest of our lives. The rest of our lives, right? So if that pace of change is accelerating, then we need to have the ability to recreate ourselves as things shift. We all know that like... You can't be solving the problem that was important in a fight a minute ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's a different fucking problem than we have right now. Or in a chess game an hour ago, or 10 minutes ago, or one minute ago. As a society, we need to be solving the problems that are and that are coming, not the ones that were 10 years ago that we're emotionally addicted to. But humans don't fucking do that. We tend to cling to our ideas, the decisions we've made.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Then we try to justify our ideas. We cling to our identities. I mean, I think that this question of identity is a really important one, whether it relates to a belief system, a decision you've made. Like this idea of humans fighting tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes is something that you think about someone who has like what one might frame as like a fear of success, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like that's a term people use, fear of success. The way I understand fear of success is that why do people undermine themselves when they are close to something that they want? To a breakthrough that they yearn.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I think the reason is because if their conceptual scheme, if their identity is in not being the person who wins the big game or who succeeds, it is more terrifying to succeed than it is to give up that old identity. That's a core driver of human psychology. Right. In competition, that's a lot of what we do. Right. We plant identities in people, tells in people, little egoic addictions in people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like, you know, great illusionist magicians, mind control guys. They have the ability to see in frames that we don't. have the ability to see and so it seems like magic it seems like illusion yeah when martial artists are called mystical right it's because people don't understand what they're doing for the most part technically and they have frames where others don't have frames
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then we exploit the mind being stuck there because it's not dynamic. It can't keep on moving. Right. Like Robert Persig, my favorite, the most important philosopher in my life, Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Have you read? Have you read that book? Yeah, I did. Awesome. He was a really important person in my life. I could tell you an interesting story about him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
His idea of dynamic quality. I think we have to live in a state of dynamic quality, not static quality. You think about the front of the freight train surging through space-time versus sitting in the restaurant car. We want to be strapped to the front of the freight train as reality is unfolding and adapting to the new realities. And I think we need to build
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
the way of life that allows us to do that. And I have a lot of ideas about what that way of life looks like. I think if we don't do that, then we're gonna be dinosaurs in a fucking world with a comet coming, and it's gonna blow us the fuck up. So we need to create the ability to reinvent ourselves, to be creative, to adapt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Well, I think that like. In dialogue that I've had over the past 10 years or so with people who are AI optimists, there's this jump to the utopian future, land of abundance, no more resource scarcity. Everything is beautiful. People have the ability to study art and poetry and opera. They don't need to work anymore. They don't need to be grinding anymore.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
They can think about philosophy, et cetera, et cetera. That's the argument. Let's just like assume that that would be a positive end. I'm not so sure. I think that we have some other energies flowing through us that we might want to express. But let's just like say that that would be great. The problem is getting there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So in chess, there's this interesting dynamic between strategy and tactics all the time. We need to liberate ourselves to be strategic and to think ahead, like think about what would be the ideal place to go, but then we also have to get the tactics right, the math right to get there. We can't just hang our queen or hang our bishop or hang our rook on the path to our strategic dream.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I think that's right. It's like if you think about you're engaging with an illusionist who has done something, has spent hundreds of hours in a certain specific routine, and you're seeing it for the first time. They just have immense knowledge where you have none. They have more frames, and they can play in frames that you don't have, and it seems like... Something's coming from the sky.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
We need to integrate execution with strategic dreaming. Because often if we're thinking too much tactically, we can't see the long-term plan we want to utilize, right? Like the end result we want to move toward. And so when I think about this path of AI, I think there's going to be so much disruption along the way to that place of resource abundance and utopia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Even if that was a positive place, I think it's going to be a really messy path to get there. But for us to navigate the path, the question to me now is – What should we be doing as individuals, as a species, in order to allow us to navigate that path?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
There's something so powerful about being grounded in – and a path to being grounded is being immersed in an art like, for example, like jiu-jitsu or chess where if you – If you're on the jiu-jitsu mats and you overextend your arm and you get armbarred, you're not going to say, that's not my fault. That was his fault.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Or like, that's... Then you just don't fucking get better and you get armbarred again. Right. You only get better by taking your shit on. Right. Or if you're a chess player and you make a mistake and you lose, you...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
you if the people who say that's not my fault don't they fucking they're irrelevant very very quickly they just get blazed by and they're just like everyone else's race has passed and they're not in the race anymore and if you're if you think about a community for example of of fighters let's think about jiu-jitsu as as like a vision like the one of the things that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
separates people as they get deeper into an art is whether they want to take themselves on as a way of life, whether they're hungry to have their weaknesses revealed, right? You think about a school where somebody... I always found it interesting to watch people when they're four or five rounds into sparring. Do they look for the blue belt to rest with or do they look for the...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
like 240 pound fucking bruiser to beat the shit out of them or the high level brown belt to exploit them or the black belt to like kick their ass, right? Who do they look for? Who does like the up and coming purple belt look for when like the young competitor? Is he looking for the egoic rest or the place to be exposed? Like the people who hunger for exposure to get better, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's like seeking accountability as a way of life. I think there's something really powerful to do that with decision making. Because we're making decisions and we're making decisions in a higher and higher stakes world. And if we train at the art of decision making in something that's grounded in reality, like for example, the chess rating system is just a fucking thing. It's objective.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
There's no bullshit to it. But I hear people, like I know people who play chess online and then they're like, yeah, this is my rating, but I'm actually much stronger than that because of this and this. It's like, no, you're not. You just haven't taken your shit on. Right? You're not stronger than your rating. Your rating is how strong you are as a chess player.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But there's something about, there's something so beautiful about an accurate feedback loop. And that can be with a coach, training with you could be on the, just getting tapped out, getting your ass kicked, getting hit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Losing, whatever it is, I think that there's something so powerful about people cultivating some way of life where they're grounded in some kind of feedback loop in their training life. that there's no bullshit involved. They learn to accept accountability as a way of life. They seek feedback loops. I think that we can do this in decision making.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I mean, my view is that we're going to be making decisions as a species in an increasingly complex world where there is a super intelligence. So we need to track our decisions and we need to see objectively when they are good and when they're bad. Like just how you can studying tape as a basketball team or as a jujitsu fighter or whatever. Like we need to create game tape in our decision making.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
We have to stop deluding ourselves about the fact that we're actually better than everything shows we are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like if you make a decision, write down what the decision is and write down why you made the decision and then look back on it in a week or two or three and create like a spreadsheet, a log or whatever the fuck you want to use of all of your decisions and why you made them and look back on them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then if the reasons for making the decision no longer are valid, but you're holding to the decision, which is what everyone does, then don't do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, I try to see what they do. So I've been training for the last 15, 16 years. elite mental and physical athletes, right? Decision makers, investors, athletes, fighters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Well, at my school with Marcelo, we had a huge group of fighters, jiu-jitsu fighters. And so I've been in dialogue with people who are like the pinnacles of different fields my whole life. And One thing is that I love working with people who want to take themselves on. So it begins with them being all in on the process. I'm not great at motivating people to take their shit on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I love to begin once we're taking our shit on. And then it's individualized. I get to know someone's patterns. It's 99% listening, observing. A lot of what I try to do is understand the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction. I think so quickly people try to come in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
If you come in with some kind of formula for how things will be done, you're going to be slicing away the brilliance of individuals, right? Like all of our most brilliant creations are interwoven with the dysfunctional parts of our mind. Everyone wants to normalize people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
like most in the realm of like trainers or coaches of different fields i think it's mostly bullshit because mostly armchair professors who don't understand what it actually means to be playing on that razor's edge of peak performance where you have to make a decision which is taking a risk that's right on the edge of something catastrophic but that's the thread the needle solution and so when i start working with someone i try to get to know them very very deeply their patterns their
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Their patterns of success, their patterns of failure, where their genius and their dysfunction are entangled. I often go into what I call a cave process, which is trying to understand what their self-expression is. Like going into the cave with them metaphorically, try to understand what their self-expression would be liberated from reactivity and inertia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So not reacting away from what they did before and not being subject to the inertia of what they did before. Mm-hmm. But just blue-skying what the ideal solution would be, what the most pure self-expression for them would be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. And not their approach, the individual and the patterns of their approach. Not that we would do things the way they did before, but I have a lot of humility. Like I don't think that I know the way. I don't think there is a way. I think we all have our own way we need to discover.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
The coaches who have been most damaging to me, for example, when I was in that same period when I was 15, 16 years old, I had a coach who was part of the Russian school of chess who essentially had me move away from my self-expression, move away from my style. My style of chess play at that point my whole life had been creative, attacking, improvisational.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I loved to create chaos and find hidden harmonies in chaos. I loved to battle. he urged me to stop playing that way, stop studying that style of play, play like these cold-blooded prophylactic chess players like Petrosian or Karpov.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I played much more in the style, not the strength, but the style of like Garry Kasparov or Mikhail Tal or Bobby Fischer, like players who were aggressive, who had a lot of red blood flowing through their body, like I was hot-blooded. And he urged me to play in the opposite style from what was natural to me. Think, what would Karpov do here? Not what would Josh do here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yes. There is absolutely a benefit to that. But there's also the movement of a young competitor away from their self-expression, a love from their love for the game, a love from their passion. Right. I think I had this there's this brilliant man named Yuri Razdavaev, who is on the other pillar of the Russian school of chess, who said this amazing thing to me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
He said to me, Josh, you can learn Karpov through Kasparov. And I didn't understand what he meant for many, many years after that. And it was a little too late in my chess life to take that in. But what he was saying is that you can learn the great defense of chess by studying the defense of the great attackers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Well, good question. It's just when he said it to me, like I was in my early 20s and I'd lost my love for chess. Like it had gotten static, stale. You know, good challenge. It probably wasn't late, but I couldn't hear it. I didn't... Like I would have had to go into the cave, go away, go through an existential crisis and come back to chess.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But there were a lot of things that were moving me away from chess at that point in addition to that. I didn't want to be trapped inside of the confines of 64 squares anymore. I felt like a lion in a cage. So it was like if I had known him when I was 14, 15, it would have been a different arc for me in the chess life. But maybe it would have been much worse for my life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
If I had known him when I was 15, I might have fucking played chess for the rest of my life. And I'm so grateful I didn't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I mean, for me, I love the life that I live. Like, I'm so grateful for the life that I've lived. And I was moved away from chess in many ways by this alienating experience that I just described and then also the dynamics of the movie and everything. But I played just for eight years after the movie. And so my results were very good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But I was moving into this internal, I was in an existential crisis. But every catastrophic injury or heartbreaking loss or losing a world championship when you're a millimeter from winning the finals, all of those losses that were so heartbreaking to me, every big loss, I'm grateful for now. And led to the biggest wins and led to the biggest insights and transitions and everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And my life today, the crises that I had in many ways have armed me to help people express themselves in their arts. And a lot of the reads that I made as a competitor, to go back to your question, I invert now. So the way I would read chess players, find where their minds were stuck, find where their bias patterns were, find where their energy was stuck, find where they were static.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Now, then I would exploit them, right? Same thing you do in the fight game. You find where someone's pattern is static and exploit it, right? Then what I do in training people is I find those, I have a very good nose for those because I spent my life as a competitor sniffing them out, feeling my way to them. But then I work on liberating them, releasing the obstruction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So a lot of what I do today in my work with brilliant performers is work on unleashing what I used to exploit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. It's interesting. I don't use that. I don't teach people. I don't know it. I'm not teaching some people something I know. But you're teaching what you know. Well, I'm kind of discovering their path with them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like I don't go in thinking like this is the way you fucking should do it. I don't believe that I know what they should do. And I believe that any coach who thinks that they know what someone else should do without listening to the self-expression of that person very, very deeply is just wrong and they should not be. They can reject that coach.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But the amazing thing is you find the hitch. Then you see, oh, that hitch is interwoven with your biggest. Like I sent you that thing I wrote about Marcelo. Right. And like there was this incredible moment that I had with with Marcelo. Such an emotional moment. You know, so he's in I describe him as like this great lower up learner.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And he's someone who uniquely in my life, I've never seen anyone better at learning from one experience, big or large. Right. And then there was this moment we were sitting, I guess it was six years ago. We were sitting just talking about life and our journey and everything. And he started he started weeping. And he said to me, you know, Josh, I never forget my pains.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And he said, you know, Marcelo had a real tragedy. He lost a baby. Marcelo and Tachi, his wife, they lost, they had twins and they lost their baby, Joey. Olivia and Joey were born premature and Joey died. It was a terrible tragedy. It was just devastating for, I mean, just beyond belief, devastating. And like the loss of his son, the loss of his mother, the loss of his father.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
every moment someone looked at him a certain way, every moment somebody like raised their voice at him and it triggered him into like a fight place, every time he'd been submitted, every time he'd been swept, every time, I realized as he was saying this, like all of his pain, is with him every moment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And as he described this to me, it was this incredibly emotional scene where he was just weeping in his exploration, in his like just brother to brother talking to me about like he walks around with every wound he's experienced in life present all the fucking time. And so we think of this brilliant low rep learner, the guy who has a superhuman ability to learn from one experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And it's a superpower, but also it ravages him all the fucking time. And you can't just remove that. You can't be like, yeah, release your pain. It'd be great. Then you're also releasing the genius.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, so you can be like, Mike, just take it fucking easy on the pool table. What do you care? But you can't say that. Gary Kaspar was the same way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But you can't just remove that. You're removing the genius with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I'll never forget this chess coach, Mark Dvoretsky, he said to me this unbelievably hubristic thing when I was 15, 16 years old. He said to me, if he had had Bobby Fischer as a student, as a seven-year-old, he could have made Fischer a much, much stronger chess player without any of the craziness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Without the craziness. And I was just like, as a teenager, my hands started sweating when I just said that. Because to me, it's just not fucking true.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's a crazy thing to say. Yeah, it's hubris, right? And this is the same guy who was urging me into that direction. But that's the opposite of my approach. And if we are going to try to disentangle the dysfunction from the genius, we need to understand it very deeply. We need to plant the seeds patiently for that genius to sprout somewhere else. We need to water those seeds.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
We need to observe them coming. We have to very, like, slightly sand away the dysfunctional patterning while observing. Like, it's a very delicate process, right? You can't just fucking excise the tumor, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Well, that's why great coaches, great fighters often aren't great coaches, right? Because most teachers teach the way they learned.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
which will alienate 70 or 80 percent of their students by definition right great coaches can well great coaches for a large group need to be able to teach different ways for different kinds of learners yeah different modalities of learners are they are they visual are they somatic are they Are they auditory? Like, what makes them tick?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And you have to know, if you're teaching a chess class, I started teaching a group of kids chess when I was in my teens. I taught them from kindergarten through fifth grade, and we ended up winning in New York. It was a beautiful journey with kids at PS116. And from moving the pieces to winning city, state, and national championships. And it was so interesting, because I'd be like, teaching...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
eight, 10 kids at once. And I would be teaching. It was like giving a simultaneous exhibition. Like each one had their own language. And it was, I w I was like so involved with this theme that I would be, it was exhausting because I was teaching 10 chess lessons at the same time, the 10 kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I remember I had this moment, this heartbreaking moment where I had this one student named Ivan, who I, who I just charismatic, intense, you know, we had a very close relationship. I love the kid. And like, I was, he was at the national championship. I was giving him this, this, um, this pep talk. And I was just like firing him up and speaking to him in the way he needed to be spoken to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then he was like, he ran off like stoked, fired up to go kick some ass. And then this other kid who was on the team, this beautiful sensitive boy came over and I looked at him with the same energy that I'd just been speaking to Ivan and I brought it to him. And I was like 15 seconds into speaking to him and I looked at his eyes and I realized like this is a disaster. This is terrible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then I stopped. And I like gave him a hug and we like slowed it down. He needed to go in a very different way than Ivan went in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But coach, think about how often you see cornermen fucking up fighters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right? Yeah. I mean, so as a coach, I think we have to like put our own egos aside and our idea that we know how one should learn.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
When they were grabbing his gi, they had a huge advantage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But they were entering his terrain. And then when we were training in the early days, there was so much closed-mindedness about leg locks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Well, I took on this interesting challenge when I broke my back. Because I was already doing this, but I was training people. But when I broke my back, I remember I said, okay, during this healing process, after the year and a half to two years of denial and training through it, when I stopped, I tried to take on training people with the same passion and love that I had for training myself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I wanted to see if I could love it as much. And I never got there. And then I got into, that's part of what moved me into discovering the ocean arts and being all in on training. So a big part of my relationship with training other people is training myself as a way of life. I'm always, I'm living at my limit in the arena myself. The moment I think a coach leaves,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
the arena where they're putting their own ego on the line all the time or their life on the line or whatever the fuck they're putting on the line, then they become static and they start to think they know the answer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's like the, the fat, you know, martial arts instructor who's many years past training and is smoking a cigarette on the sideline telling people what to do and no longer is like actually dynamic than putting their, the moment our egos get protected. Yeah. Right. So my relationship to training is something that I live all the time. Um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So the leg lock game was outside of the conceptual scheme to so many jiu-jitsu guys. It was forbidden. It was forbidden. So they'd get caught. It's like that dogma. Yeah. It's so interesting competitively finding where someone's dogma is, where their constructs are, their false constructs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I think also becoming a dad was a big part of it, like the nurturing. And a lot of what I've done is invert what I used to do to break people. Now I invert to heal them or to unleash them. Being a father is about the most humbling thing I've ever heard. I thought I had ideas about education until I became a dad, and then I realized I didn't know anything I had to start over. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah, and also the wound pattern. Like I think understanding people's wound patterns is very important. And a lot of my wound pattern is in loving something very, very deeply, being alienated from it, and then finding a post-conscious relationship to it and a self-expression within it. And I think that helping people with that journey is important. is really important.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And also, I love engaging with all-in motherfuckers. I just love whether my current projects are like cutting-edge science and AI, just brilliant scientists. It's just incredibly interesting. And being deeply involved with the Boston Celtics, just the very top of the NBA world and my relationship with Joe Mazzullo, the head coach, and kind of coaching the coaches, a modality that I've been
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
develop playing in for a long time helping the leader of an organization express themselves as the coach of their people is a big part of what I do and a couple other interesting investing and tech projects and like just helping some like it allows me to play in in fascinating realms and then studying the interconnectedness. I mean, a big part of my passion is thematic interconnectedness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Like how is what's happening with the Boston Celtics the same as what's happening in this cutting edge science program? The same as what's happening in this wildly interesting tech investing program, right? And how do those principles, those interconnecting fibers relate to culture more broadly and relate to me and what I'm doing every day on the water, boiling?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
yeah that's miyamoto musashi yeah once you understand the way broadly you can see it in all things so the book of five rings right like to me i feel that i cannot believe how few people have studied musashi deeply right i mean whether you're reading the novel about his life and then studying like book of five rings i think everyone should read like 10 times maybe a day a page yeah 10 times over
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You know, one of my favorite cadences of Musashi is in so many chapters of Book of Five Rings, how he comes back and says, like, essentially, these words are empty. You have to practice it as a way of life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Again and again. And people just skip these things, but they don't realize. And everyone wants to be told what to fucking do, as opposed to understanding they have to work for the path to figure out what the fuck they should do. And you have to practice as a way of life. Right. Right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And he was fighting to the death. To the death. So there was no bullshit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You can't say like, oh no, that wasn't my fault. That doesn't fucking work. No, you take your shit on. But there's something so beautiful about the truth-telling nature of living. You know when you're in a jiu-jitsu team and you watch someone who doesn't think they're competing for a while, but then suddenly they're competing next week?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
How the repertoire compresses, like all the fat just flies off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
There's something so beautiful about that process and the cadence. And if we live putting ourselves in the flame, then we're not gonna be bullshitting ourselves all the time because there's this truth-telling modality. So the question is, how can we, as many of us as possible, live in some form that's true to us
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
where there's this grounded, truth-telling, accurate feedback loop in what we're doing, what we're practicing as a way of life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But when things are hard, that's beautiful. That's the beginning. We want things to be hard. So the first thing is I think we want people to love the discomfort of being hard. It's hard. Everything worthwhile is hard. What have you done that's been interesting that hasn't been hard? Every time you get in an ice plunge, it's fucking hard. Like I cold plunge every day. I think you do too, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. Like it's a way of life. It's fucking hard every time. Yeah. It's not easy. Hard is beautiful. Living on the other side of pain. That's where things get valuable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's like you go foiling and you don't fall. That's a terrible day, man. Because you're not pushing your turns hard enough. You're not breaching enough. You're not ripping it around hard enough, right? Like, everyone finds these, it's like one thing that happens with investors, right? They they become successful and then they develop a mental model to replicate the success.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So they figure out a mental model to become a groove that they can follow. But then the groove becomes a rut they get stuck in and then it starts to collect water and it's stagnant water and then they hold to an old mental model based on a success 10 years ago or 20 years ago and they're trapped in it for the rest of their lives. It happens again and again in every field.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Heel hook is why I started training jiu-jitsu. Really? Yeah, because I was doing stand-up stuff and I was competing everywhere. I was doing Chinese martial arts and my teacher's son, Max Chen, he was a sansho fighter on the U.S. national team, really good stand-up fighter. And he was studying UFC before I had even looked at it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Some early success creates, you make a framework, you make a modality, you create a mental model You replicate the success. It's not working, but you stick to it because your identity gets connected to that mental model. And you're not living with dynamic quality. Your qualities become static.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Right. Then you're playing not to lose. You're not playing to win. It happens all the time in sports. Like if you're a basketball team and you've been dominating the game and you're up eight or 10 in the fourth quarter, then you start to protect the lead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
No, you didn't get the lead because you were protecting the fucking lead. You were dominating with aggression.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
The moment it's like the prevent defense, in my opinion, is the worst thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
ever created in sports strategy right like you know prevent defense i've heard of it yeah it's like if you're a football team and you're and you you you have a 14 point lead in the fourth quarter or an eight point leave in the fourth quarter and you stop doing the dominant things that got you the lead but you start protecting the lead so your defensive back sit back
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
You start allowing eight or 10 or 12 yard completions. It is now you're protecting the lead versus dominating the opponent. But then you let the opponent feel their strength, feel their greatness. They're not dominated anymore. A moment a fighter stops feeling dominated and starts to tap into their greatness, then your fucking opponent's a beast again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. It's very interesting in the surf world. So many people I've observed who are great surfers, they want to learn to foil because foiling opens up so much. You can foil all the time in different conditions, in sloppy conditions, in ocean, big waves, small waves. It's so abundant. And they can see how epic it is. But then they try once, and they get their ass kicked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It doesn't matter how good a surfer you are. I'm not talking about e-foil. I'm talking about wave foiling and high-performance gear. You're going to have two, three months of ass-kicking as part of it. It doesn't matter how good you are as a surfer. But now you have to look like a beginner again. You have to go from being the coolest guy in the lineup –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
if you're socialized, to being the quote-unquote kook, being the guy who's just getting his ass kicked who's falling all the time. And they don't want to do that. So their ego of the excellent surfer prevents them from learning this art they want to learn because they're unwilling to look bad for a while in front of the people who they're used to looking good with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And then he was studying, I think it was Frank Shamrock's double heel hook shit from way early days. And he was just like, let's just continue to the ground. And I had never ground fought before. And I ended up on the ground, and he just put me in heel hooks and double heel hooks, and my knees were exploding. He had no idea what the fuck he was doing. Oh, no. Terrible idea. Oh, no.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So the foilers are people who, it's a very interesting microculture inside of surfing, is that foilers have been people who learned how to foil because they were willing to get their ass kicked and look bad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I don't have an escape strategy. I never did. I never had like a this is going to be plan B. I've never been a plan B guy. I know I could recreate myself. But I love this art profoundly, and I love being in the ocean. There's something about this. To me also, this is not about destroying anything. It's not about beating anybody.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's about self-discovery, pushing my limits in the ocean, which is an element. And the foil taps into ocean energy so fucking potently. And the other thing is that the art is at such an early stage of technological growth that foil gear is progressing so quickly, and the people who are actually at the bleeding edge of foil performance-wise
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
can ride this gear, which is increasingly difficult to ride. But the hardest gear to ride is the gear which can do the most epic shit. And so the sensitivity is like, as the gear requires more and more sensitivity, the sensitivity is cultivated. And very few people in the world can do it on this gear, and it's just so sublime. So I'm so fucking in love with this art.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I do not have a plan B. But, you know, fuck, who knows what happens. I love when people love things. Oh, me too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I've loved some arts really fucking deeply in my life. Foiling is number one. I've never loved an art more. Maybe it's because I'm at this moment of life where I'm at and I'm integrating everything I've learned from different arts and bringing it into this one and this one's manifesting all of it. But in terms of the day-to-day experience of it, oh yeah, man, I'm a lunatic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I do. That's beautiful. I live right where the jungle meets the ocean.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Oh yeah. That was before I started, um, before I started foiling, I was surfing. Um, and I, it was like 5am and I was, um, I was flying back to New York that day, so I went out for just pre-sunrise, right at sunrise, surf, and I was on this glassy head-high wave, and this gnarled log came up in front of me, this piece of fucking wood. And I saw it, and I hit it and jumped off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
My knees were just screaming. And I would throw him on the floor, and then I'd be tapping. I didn't even know what tapping out was. I had never grappled before.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It just emerged right in front of me. I didn't know how I didn't see it. I thought it was a big tree. And when I hit the water, my brain was still thinking log. But it was so interesting. My skin lit up, goosebumps, and I just realized, like, red alert, like prehistoric danger. And I jumped back on my board, and this, like, 10, 11-foot croc came swimming just a few feet away from me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It was so interesting. Whoa. I spent my life, like I spent a lot of, since I was six years old, I've been free diving, spearfishing with a Hawaiian swing, Hawaiian sling, like bow and arrow underwater, deep, deep water diving. And like, I, I spent tens of thousands of sharks, but this was so different. Like croc energy. And I haven't, I don't know crocs. Like I know sharks. I don't know crocs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It was interesting. When I hit the water, my body lit up like... Like I was in the water with a dinosaur. And then it came up. And it's interesting that my body, this speaks to the nature of the intuition, right? Because my mind still thought it was a log. I hit the water. Something energetically told me something. Get the fuck out. And then it came swimming right up next to me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And like the feeling of the snout, the eyes, like it just came. And then another wave was coming in. And I managed to just pop up and ride the next wave to the beach. God damn. That would have been the last day I foiled. Yeah. Well, maybe if I knew the language of Crocs, like I know language of sharks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
The first submission I felt in my life was like the heel hook 20 times. Somehow my ACL didn't shred. And I was like, I have to fucking train this jiu-jitsu because Max is kicking my ass and I didn't like it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
So the feeling of humility and danger that you have relative to crocs. Yeah. I have about AI relative to the ability to manipulate humans unless we take on our ability to be manipulated as a way of life. I feel it that much in my skin.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
I want to make one other point, which is that I think that when we talk about like training as decision makers, it doesn't matter how good you are at something. It matters that you're on the road. You're on the journey. So let's just say people started to play chess. It doesn't matter how strong a chess player you are or if you're good or if you suck. That doesn't matter. It's a journey, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
If you're putting yourself in any arena that's objective and you're trying your hardest and you have a feedback loop, like the mats, like the jiu-jitsu mats, whatever they are for you,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
and you look at the quality of your decisions, and you jot down why, and you are willing to change your mind, and you take on that training as a way of life, then you're on the road to being grounded in a way that we're not today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I think that being grounded in reality, in something, like feeling the earth beneath our feet in our process, is a big part of how we're going to be able to navigate a world where everything is being deconstructed all the time by a superior intelligence because we're going to need to recreate ourselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
But we have to have – you know how like when you're deep into an art – like think about you with your knowledge of MMA. Like you have this intuition about where the truth is, right? You have a sense for where it is, right? We need to cultivate that sense in an increasingly chaotic world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And I do feel that being involved in some kind of truth-telling arena, whatever it is, is a hugely important practice. And then taking on the art of training as a way of life is... I feel like it's one of our – and that combined with getting the fuck off social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
It's an amazing idea, right? Like they had no idea that they were entering his game. They thought they were controlling him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
And he was so used to people grabbing him. He spent his life people grabbing his game. They entered his river.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2292 - Josh Waitzkin
Yeah. Wow. Man, you've been on that journey from the beginning.