In this episode, my guest is Josh Waitzkin, former child chess prodigy and the subject of the movie and true story Searching for Bobby Fischer. Josh is also a world champion martial arts competitor and the author of the book The Art of Learning. We discuss Josh’s childhood as a chess prodigy and how he learned to train and compete at the highest levels by facing his fears and overcoming points of weakness. He explains the principles that unify disparate physical and mental pursuits and how understanding the interconnectedness of the learning process enables ultra-high-level performance across disciplines. We explore how to structure one’s day to tap into the most creative, generative, and unique capabilities. Josh shares his approach to learning, including how to address flaws and mistakes and how to harness the subtle and overt energies of the learning and peak performance process. He also discusses how he structures his life and makes decisions related to career and family. This episode is sure to inspire deep thinking and practical life changes for all who listen. Read the full episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Wealthfront**: https://wealthfront.com/huberman Our Place: https://fromourplace.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman **This experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients of Wealthfront, and there is no guarantee that all clients will have similar experiences. Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC. The Annual Percentage Yield (“APY”) on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY. Promo terms and FDIC coverage conditions apply. Same-day withdrawal or instant payment transfers may be limited by destination institutions, daily transaction caps, and by participating entities such as Wells Fargo, the RTP® Network, and FedNow® Service. New Cash Account deposits are subject to a 2-4 day holding period before becoming available for transfer. Timestamps 00:00:00 Josh Waitzkin 00:03:21 Chess, Competition & Performance 00:10:50 Martial Arts, Tai Chi, Jiu-Jitsu, Foiling, Training Others 00:14:41 Sponsors: Wealthfront & Our Place 00:17:43 Theory of Mind, Chess, Strategy & Mindset 00:26:39 Early Chess Training 00:32:30 Failure & Change, Chess, Tension, Power of Empty Space 00:43:22 Sponsors: AG1 & Joovv 00:48:06 Grief, Competition Loss, Growth, Frustration Tolerance 00:57:22 Arousal, Frame Rates, Intense Moments 01:06:17 Frame Rates & Pupil Size; Firewalking, Training 01:13:12 Sponsor: Function 01:15:58 Stress & Recovery, Tools: Doing Less, Most Important Question (MIQ) 01:23:24 Tool: Still Body, Active Mind; Shame, Strengthening Weaknesses 01:32:02 Child Prodigies, Brittle; Chess Principles & Transfer to Life 01:43:22 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 01:44:48 Preconscious vs Postconscious 01:52:02 Hypoxic Breathwork Caution & Drowning; Foiling, Fear, Postconscious 01:57:05 Static vs Dynamic Mindset, High Performers 02:05:48 Comebacks, Hunting Adversity, Living on Other Side of Pain, Tool: Cold Plunge 02:19:20 Ego, Identity, Unbreakable Will 02:29:18 Studying People; Chess, Computers; Science & AI; Ocean & Control 02:40:37 Time, Future Direction, True to Self, Wounds 02:51:07 Daily Routine, Individualization, Waking Up, Tool: MIQ Gap Analysis 03:00:21 Tool: MIQ; Stuck Points, Distraction 03:05:58 Reflective vs Stimulus-Response, Optimize Quality not Quantity 03:14:12 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Social Media, Protocols Book, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Josh Waitzkin. Josh Waitzkin is a former child prodigy who began playing the game of chess at six years old. And by the time he was 16 years old,
had become a national champion many times over as well as an international champion in fact he achieved the level of international master which is one of the highest levels of achievement in the game of chess for anyone of any age his early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie searching for bobby fisher he then quit playing the game of chess and moved on to martial arts the study of philosophy at columbia university new york
and eventually foiling, which is essentially surfing over the water. Josh is not only a high performer, he has now become perhaps the most sought after professional coach in the domains of finance, in the domains of creative endeavors, professional sports, and military. Today's episode is one of my favorite Huberman Lab podcast episodes ever.
I know as a podcast host, you're not supposed to say that, but it's absolutely true. because not only is Josh Waitzkin so highly accomplished, but he is an exceptional teacher of the learning process. He took what he learned in chess and about learning chess and applied that to martial arts, to foiling, et cetera.
And from participating in all those endeavors, he was able to distill out the essential elements of learning and how to tailor one's learning process to one's own unique personality and style, flaws and tendency to make mistakes, and how to leverage all of that in order to be able to learn better.
In fact, throughout today's episode, I promise that you will constantly be reflecting on where you experience things like tension and fear, both in your personal life, your professional life, your educational life, whatever it is that you're trying to learn and pursue in life. Today's conversation, thanks to Josh, will allow you to look at that, understand it better,
and know where to apply work, when to relax, when to push forward, and in effect, how to become a better learner, both of yourself and whatever it is that you happen to be pursuing in life. We have a saying in science, which is that sometimes you encounter somebody who is truly N of one, meaning a sample size of one in a category all by themselves. Josh Waitzkin is truly an N of one.
I know of no other person like him or even close to him in terms of his ability to live a unique life path and to take what he learns and to put it out into the world so that others may benefit. He lives with a tremendous amount of intentionality for the people he loves, for the things he loves, and with the intention of helping others learn how to learn better.
I must say it was a true honor to sit down with Josh. I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time. you'll also learn that he's a really nice person. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this podcast episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Josh Waitzkin. Josh Waitzkin, welcome. Thank you, man. Great to be here.
I feel like I've known you a long time because I saw the search for Bobby Fischer and I learned about the real human that was about you. And I read The Art of Learning and I must say I'm a fan and somewhat obsessed with the uniqueness of your arc and the choices you've made and your understanding of learning as a process and its universal properties, its specific properties in different contexts.
So I'm excited to dive in. I think for people that perhaps are not familiar with you, maybe you could just give us a broad overview of your backstory, like the things that you've really focused on in kind of chunks, if you will, just for a couple of minutes so that people can get familiar with the incredible things you've done.
And I think that reflects the uniqueness of your choice-making process, which then we'll get into.
Yeah, sure. Well, thank you, man. It's an honor. I appreciate what you said. Yeah, so I started playing chess. I grew up in New York City, downtown Manhattan. I started playing chess when I was six years old. And I discovered chess walking through Washington Square Park with my mom. And I remember watching a day or two and then at one point I broke away from her.
I was going to play on monkey bars and I ran over and 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.
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.
So it was just like a raucous crowd of guys who took me under their wings, started teaching me the tactical street side of the game. And I was just unhindered as a learner, which is interesting from my perspective now as a dad because my little boy, Charlie, is taking on surfing with that same kind of freedom, just that liberated, uncomplicated, out-of-his-own-way kind of vibe.
Yeah, and 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...
upbringing in some ways, which has led to some quirky elements in my psychology, which was that I was living in a pressure cooker of competition from age six on, and my whole childhood was spent as the target.
And so, 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 –
My rivals and their coaches who are strong masters and international masters and grandmasters would be able to study. And adult strong players can see very easily the weaknesses in a child. And so they would be prepared for them. So if I didn't take on a weakness, it would be exploited and I would experience pain.
And so from a very young age, not taking on my weaknesses was outside of my conceptual scheme. which is a really interesting thing to grow up with. And it's in many ways like lay the foundation for a lot of what I've done since. And there are lots of things about that upbringing, which could be unhealthy. Being in the public eye.
Yeah. Very bizarre. Luckily it was before social media.
Yeah. Super. Yeah. And I've never been on social media in any way, which has been a choice. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
And I was playing 50 chess games at once. And I was walking around this big square playing against 50 young up and coming strong players at the same time. And I realized at one point, I wasn't playing chess. I was moving chess pieces, but I was thinking in Tai Chi language. I was feeling flow, feeling space left behind, riding energetic waves of the game.
And it was like I was winning all 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I never actually got to the place where I love not being in the arena myself as much as being in the arena myself. And then in this chapter of my life now, I fall in love with the ocean arts, initially surfing and now foiling. And for the last eight years, I've been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family. And I train three to five hours a day in foiling.
And so I'm in my really intense training lifestyle myself. And I train elite mental and physical competitors around the world 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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Yeah, thank you. We'll definitely revisit certain time points and themes there. I can imagine as a young boy playing chess, you have your own strategies, you're developing an understanding of what works for you, but of course you, as a young kid, are also getting into the mind of the other player.
You actually described that your coach or coaches were encouraging you to get into a different mindset, one that was not your default or trained up mindset, less focused on chaos and aggression and more in this this other mode of playing by thinking about these other types of chess players and ways to play chess.
So I can imagine that most kids are not weaned, their brain isn't developing around a game, right? It seems that your brain was built, the developmental neuroplasticity that's so robust in early childhood was built around this game that we call chess. And it seems to me that you were encouraged to develop a theory of mind that wasn't just your own, which is itself, I think is really unique, right?
I mean, most six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 year olds might be told, hey, listen, you know, the reason they were mean to you at school is like, they just hate themselves. Or, you know, they just didn't think about whether or not to pick you, you know, first or last for the game or whatever it is, right? You know, that you get told to do that.
But for you, it became a, it seems an intense practice of trying to learn to get into the mind of another while holding onto your own sense of what's you versus them. And so as a developmental neurobiologist, I understand this is like perhaps one of the most important events in the development of our brain. Seems that your brain was built up around that dynamic.
And so now you coach peak performers and so much of coaching and teaching Being a parent is to get into the mind of another. The difference is when you're a parent, you can think back to being a child and at least get some general sense of what that's like.
Stepping back from what I just said, and I realize that there's a lot of words there, but do you think that what you're doing when you approach a practice – like Tai Chi or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or science or math or music from the perspective of a performer or a teacher is that you're getting into the mind of someone else
you're getting it, you're trying to, or you're trying to stay in your own mindset. I'm sorry I'm not being more succinct with this, but I think that, you know, as humans, we do this. Like I'm sure our dogs look up at us and say, oh, like they're happy with me or they're sad with me, but they're, you know, the algorithms they're running are more simplistic.
I mean, we as the most sophisticated old world primates do this so spectacularly well. And it seems that much of your career and your life has been built around these kinds of dynamics.
So put simply, what is your mindset when you approach a practice that's just you in the practice versus your mindset when you approach a practice when it's you and another, a competitor, versus when you're trying to teach something, you and a bunch of different minds, but there's a common goal? Okay, so there's really three big questions wrapped in there.
Now, there's sort of like 15 really big questions.
15 really big questions. And my audience gets upset at the length of these questions. But I think for me, it's important to just kind of set this out there as a buffet from which you can select anything or discard anything that you like.
There's some many delectable things to select there. Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, one-on-one competition is so interesting 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.
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?
So you're trying to unpack his strategy. Always. And you're assuming that he has or she has a strategy.
Well, if they don't have a strategy, then they're not going to be a 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So if we were like half the distance we are from one another, and we're just sitting for six hours with like a three-foot chessboard, three feet between us, studying this thing, our minds become connected. We often will share the same illusion. You might see something, and then I see it when you see it. If we have the same – we might have the same blind spot. We might have the same insight.
The connectedness of 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.
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.
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.
If you go into a chess game and you've got a huge opening repertoire that's extremely complex, but there's like one little place that I just hope he doesn't go there, he always goes there. It's so bonkers. You can't hope your opponent's not going to see it. You can't make the second best move because maybe he'll blunder and I'll win. That never works if you're playing as real competition.
And so you need to understand your mind. You need to understand your opponent's mind. You need to understand your opponent's understanding of your mind, right?
That's a lot of plates to spin. And I guess what I said before, not so clearly, is that for a young mind to be able to learn to spin all those plates is incredible. It's clearly possible, it's unique, but it's possible you did that. But it takes a young mind or an adult mind out of its own unique experience.
So this is eventually how we'll circle back to pre-consciousness versus post-consciousness. But in the meantime, when was it that you first recall thinking not, oh, I'm going to beat this guy, but sensing, you know, he's getting nervous or he's confident, or he can sense that I'm nervous, or I'm going to set a trap and just, you know, feeling out, you know, whether or not they detect the trap.
I mean, it's just a lot.
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.
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.
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 –
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.
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.
Principles, studying positions of reduced complexity to touch high level principles and then learning to apply them to more and more complex positions. So my early chess education had both the classical study with Bruce and it had the street smart game with the hustlers at the park. And
But to answer your question right away, when I was six years old, like my opponents would mess with my mind and trap me and trick me and make me think here and then they go there and then I would learn to do that. And then I remember 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?
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.
This is the opposite of Asperger's or autism, by the way, what you're describing is a hypertrophy set of circuits for theory of mind in a very young kid. So to be able to understand what's happening around you, and I think for many people, the joys of childhood are really about not being aware of what's going on around you. The psychologist would refer to, this is like a lack of impingement.
Impingement is when like a kid is playing and they're really enjoying something and then suddenly they decide they don't want to play anymore and the parent doesn't want to be bothered. So they say, no, no, no, no, like keep playing. You know, they're like impinging on the kid's reflexive desire to do something or not do something. This isn't about keeping them safe.
This is in the domain of safety. But at least within the channel of chess, it seems that you developed your entire understanding of the psychology of human beings, except for, of course, you had an experience at home of family and friends. But chess certainly cut a wide trough through your development.
Well, I'm really grateful for my early chess life. And I also would never choose to put that on my children. I mean, it worked out really well for me. I mean, I have my wounds, right? I mean, there's lots of things that I've had to grapple with. But I think if you put a lot of children through the pressures that I went through, it wouldn't work out well.
And I watched a lot of my young, I mean, almost all my young rivals, or I mean, like very close to all of my young rivals ended up quitting and 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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you think it is about failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change. I mean, I always say that, you know, your brain has no reason to change if you're just in trying to learn something and you're in flow, you're getting, you know, most people associate being quote unquote in flow with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly.
Um, I don't think that was the original definition that Cheeks and I intended, but, um,
the neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do, like even, you know, like this has been studied in terms of reaching for an object and there's a mirror displacement or a prism displacement or something, you eventually can learn to error correct because the cup is actually over there as opposed to where you see it.
But it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us, adrenaline and noradrenaline and dopamine, in particular, those three, they're cousins, the catecholamines that tells the, at a neurochemical level, tells the synapses, wait, something needs to change.
I mean, the brain doesn't have any reason to change unless there's frustration, agitation, or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration and agitation. So do you think these big, what feel like cataclysmic fails set a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change? I often didn't think that.
That it's only through like the devastation of a huge loss that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning. Certainly we wouldn't want to design the system that way, but as I always joke, you know, I wasn't consulted the design phase and you weren't either. We just had to work with what's there. Like big failure. Why do you think that sets a wave front of change?
Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah. Well, I think the study you sent me yesterday speaks to this.
Yeah, maybe we should talk about that.
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,
You said, I'm not a scientist, but I'm looking forward to tomorrow. And I said, trust me, you're a scientist. Yeah. I do science through the lens of a certain understanding of mechanism and structure function and some processes. And you do science through the lens of experience and drawing core concepts.
parallels and principles in different domains and at different levels of from unskilled all the way up to virtuosity. That's kind of how I see it.
I think the way that I, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 –
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 –
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.
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.
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.
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.
So one thing that happens in chess games is that you have this building tension between minds and often the tension on the chess board and the tension on the minds are mounting together. And the urge, the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release chess tension. in the chess pieces.
And when you release chess tension, usually the person who releases the tension will be on the wrong side of tactics. So a lot of chess, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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,
That's also something we should talk about later, how chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer. But we'll come back to that maybe. So I didn't study that loss for –
two and a half months because it was so painful to me. Then I was, my family spent a lot of time at sea, which was an interesting part of my life and my 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.
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.
But I think objectively, he was a better... His name is Peter Svidler. He ended up becoming a world-class grandmaster and is just an incredible chess player today. At the time, he was just amazingly brilliant, beautiful, fluid mind. But I was confident going into the game. So I had to make this move...
that would essentially be his attack was on the king's side, my expansion was on the queen's side. I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king, away from my king's side, which is super counterintuitive because you think you want to defend your king. What I didn't realize is like harnessing the power of empty space against aggression.
His attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn. Moving my last defensive piece, his attack couldn't break through. But that principle was something I didn't understand at all. And so it's not like I would have found that move, but it was a real pop in my mind, right? So then I was 17, 18 years old. And then a year later, I started studying Tai Chi.
So I 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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
Oh, my God, and love. Yeah. I mean, breakups are devastating. They're a death of sorts. Yeah. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs, and it tastes great.
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Again, that's Juve, J-O-O-V-V.com slash Huberman to get up to $400 off. I have a friend who's a trauma therapist, addiction expert. And, you know, occasionally you'll hear these tragedies of typically it's young guys who the girlfriend breaks up with them and they commit suicide. And for years he would work with families of these people, these, these young guys.
And he finally connected the dots and he realized that in every case it was as if there was no future whatsoever because it was their first relationship. And it, when you hear it, you just go, Oh, it makes so much sense. But you know, the 16 year old and 18 year old brain, however old these kids were, it's, it's devastating. I, I,
I want to make sure that I ask about devastation, because you said that you were devastated. You experienced a tremendous amount of pain from these losses, in particular the one that you just described. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about what that was like.
I don't want to spin off into a discussion about the science of grief, but I did an episode about grief and it was really surprising to learn that most of what you hear about in pop culture, that there are these very specific stages of grief and you progress through them linearly. None of that is true. All of modern research says that it's not disbelief, anger, acceptance.
It's like a hodgepodge of different emotions depending on time of day and middle of the night. But the core feature, and I find this so interesting, is that grief, whether or not it's
what I would consider kind of trivial grief, like losing your favorite pen or a watch that you really love, okay, an object versus somebody extremely close to you, a parent, a loved one, a child, God forbid, that the brain systems that map memory onto action are disrupted in grief such that, you know, you wake up each day and you want to go see the person or call them. And so it's a
what grief really represents is a remapping of your understanding about what you can do with your physical body to create action and interaction with this person that's now gone. And so the remapping is one of the nervous system having to do all this no-go. We talk in terms of inaction systems and the basal ganglia of the brain. You have go programs and no-go programs.
There's some other stuff too, but it's mostly go or no-go. And basically grief is this taking of a – depending on how long and how deeply you knew the person, a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms that were all go. You could text them, you could call them, you could hug them, you could kiss them, you could listen to them, you could smell them. And now it's all no go.
And that we think is what we experience as grief. Now, in terms of losing a very important chess match, when you talk about being in pain and in grief, What was that like? Was it, did that mean sleepless nights, disbelief? And at what point do you think you were able to say, okay, you know what, I'm going to start thinking about this constructively.
I'm going to turn this into a go as opposed to just trying to, you know, get in your time machine and travel back in time, which of course is impossible. What was that early experience of devastation like and how did it transmute into growth?
Yeah. Well, even sitting with you now thinking about it, it seems ridiculous for a chess game to be, losing a chess game to be anywhere near 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.
even if they're torturing us.
And loss isn't relative. You know, I mean, the fact that we're sitting right now not far from, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of homes that have been wiped away doesn't change other losses. Like we sometimes will say, well, at least we're, you know, I have a lot of friends that lost their homes. They'll say, well, at least we have our health, we have our things, you know, okay.
And so we can do this, but it's not how the human emotion system responds reflexively to our own losses. So I don't think it's like dismissive or sociopathic to experience big loss in one's life as a big loss, even if it's not the worst possible loss. It's just not how we're wired.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if we don't care about the results, the process won't work. So we need to put ourselves on the line enough to be shattered and the process is what really matters. But it's not that we can liberate ourselves from caring enough to be shattered because then we're not engaged.
And it is something about putting our egos on 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?
You have to be in a mode of theory of mind with yourself about your future self somehow. And this is what I think losses are so beneficial for is that if you've had a couple of breakups, you realize that you can fall in love again. If you've only had breakups, perhaps you think, well, it always leads to a breakup.
But you know that the process of moving forward is the only way to test that hypothesis again. And so I think repeated failure – is essential, right? Because with repeated failure means that there was also repeated fighting one ways back after failure.
So yeah, I think sometimes not to take us into a different course of story, but just very briefly, the first manuscript I ever submitted in graduate school took forever to get published. And it went from the highest of journals down to a good journal, solid journal, but it took forever. And that was so beneficial.
I was crushing at the time, but my reward circuitry is built up around very long latency between effort and final outcome. I'm just used to long waits between figuring out what's going to happen. And actually, one of the weirdest things about podcasting or social media is that I feel like you go to, quote unquote, to publication so fast. It's like, whoa. Projects used to take two years.
And then you get reviews and then this, you know. So I think your early devastating failure or failures, because you had a few of them in there at least. Oh, a lot more than a few. Probably set you up for tremendous frustration tolerance. And this, not just hearing, I mean, the words, this too shall pass, they're helpful, but that's really something that needs to be experienced in my view.
It's a very interesting thing when you're talking about competitors. What is the right balance between like playing up and playing down, right? Like how much do you want to build the confidence of a young competitor or artist or person or any of us, young, whatever age? And how much do you want to be stretched a little bit beyond your ability so that your weaknesses are exposed?
You have to take them on and you have to grow. And getting that balance right. is hugely important. And it's not simple. Like a lot of boxing training camps are based around the boxer's confidence being everything. And you want them to feel invincible going into the ring, right?
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...
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.
Do you believe in optimal levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game? Autonomic arousal is something that I've worked on for many years, and one of the most impressive features, I think, of our brains as humans. First would be our ability to think into the past, present, or future, or combination of those two.
If other animals do that, they don't do it nearly as well, and they certainly don't Create technologies to bridge those different time scales. That's number one. But the other one is our visual and temporal aperture of focus. So when we are in a state of elevated arousal, our visual aperture shrinks. I'm sure you're familiar with this. And we slice time more finely. It's like a higher frame rate.
which is why people who, for instance, see a devastating traumatic car crash report experiencing things in slow motion, right? Because their frame rate is high, like a slow motion video. Whereas when we are relaxed, our frame rate is larger bins of time. And I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and optimal states for learning have to do with
Assuming that there's one optimal state of arousal, but I feel like in every endeavor I've ever been involved in, it's about learning the transitions between the arousal states that allows us to pull back a little bit as things, as you said, like get tense, just relax just a little bit to be able to maybe see a different perspective or ratchet up our level of tension or AKA arousal.
in order to be able to fine slice the micro expressions of a competitor. I mean, these two cameras on the fronts of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted to this process of shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness. And it can be talked about in terms of space, just vision, like tunnel vision versus panoramic vision.
It can be talked about at space time, tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader slice. But then when you start getting into like the, then you map that onto the past, present and future mapping. And that's where I feel like we're into the game of skill learning and chess and strategy.
So forgive me for the kind of, you know, top contour neuroscience, but that's how I see the human primate as so different than all the other creatures in the world. That's how we're different because we can learn chess or ballet, foil. Gibbons are pretty amazing at what gibbons do. But if they're trying to learn other stuff that they've been failing so far.
I spent a lot of time playing with frame rates. And I had this experience that I wrote about that slowing down time chapter of The Art of Learning where I 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.
And it was interesting because the fight was very intense, reasonably hard, and my hand broke and instantly time slowed down. And he was moving in slow motion. And I was able to just so easily play with someone with like a broken hand compared to what had been a war before. We know what that is.
Right.
It's adrenaline. Adrenaline. Yeah. Adrenaline and that tunnel vision and then the frames are fat.
I mean, if I inject you with just a little bit of adrenaline, it stays in your periphery, but it activates systems in your brain in parallel to that. And you're going to experience an immediate dilation of your pupils. you'll have more tunnel vision. I mean, every process is sped up in the direction of higher frame rate.
So then the question then 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?
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.
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.
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.
If you're always, the way that manifests in the actual, like, for example, jujitsu training or submission grappling training is if you're not holding positions, you're always moving and you're spending all of your time in the in-between while people who are holding position are always static. So if you go to a jujitsu school and you sit and watch, it's interesting to look for this one thing.
Notice the amount of time static versus in motion. Marcelo 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Immediately, like, they jump and then they wish they hadn't jumped. Such an important message. You know, we hear all this stuff about suicide prevention and, you know, but just that knowledge. I mean, I don't know how conscious of that sort of thing people are as they're headed down the, the, the trench. I mean, what, um, of, of suicidal depression, but, um,
These apertures that we're talking about, these time-space apertures where frame rate is set and visual aperture is set, I think for most people, we experience them as sort of notches. So it's like you're in a high state of arousal and you have high frame rate. And just like being like a ball bearing down in a trench, you can't really see out the other side.
You're literally in there at a certain frame rate of, let's say, an argument, an intense argument with somebody where you want to win and you're frustrated with them and the whole situation and you're in the trench. Whereas when you're relaxed, it's more a broad concave or a flat table where the ball bearing can move around at will.
It sounds like Marcelo and people that train these different transition states as you really learning to access the different frame rates, but from a place of like kind of like a little dimple in a table and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple and kind of moving from dimple to dimple as opposed to like these trenches of brain states.
And I think about this a lot, a lot, because I feel like most bad decisions are made from a high frame rate, high arousal state. Most of the terrible things that humans have done to one another... I suppose there's sociopathy and pre-planned things, but they tend to be associated with high arousal states where people regret what they did. All second degree murder, for instance.
In any event, I think the ability to move through these different arousal states at will is possible. You asked earlier, like, how would one do that? Well, the beautiful thing about the visual system in these different frame rates and states of arousal is that it works in both directions. So when you're in a higher state of arousal, your visual aperture shrinks, you go to a higher frame rate.
But it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture, you go to a higher frame rate. The converse is also true if you deliberately, for instance, as we're looking across one another right now, if I start to take in the fullness of the picture here, the walls, There's a natural relaxation of the autonomic arousal systems or parasympathetic activity goes up.
And what's incredible is that anytime we view a horizon, that naturally happens because you're not setting to a single fixation point. So anytime you see a horizon, you relax and it's not a coincidence. So the visual system can drive it inward and your autonomic arousal can drive it toward your visual system.
The other thing is there's a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago, which showed that people who do a biofeedback game where they're watching a little, you know, it's like a more kind of like a sine wave and they're deliberately trying to increase their level of arousal as the curve goes up, for those that are just listening.
Within a few days, they can learn to control their pupil size, which sets their arousal and their aperture for a segmenting time. So you can learn this through biofeedback. And I think that the script for that is available online. I haven't tried it yet, but have you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil sizes even independently of one another? That's amazing because
It's not supposed to be able to occur, but you can. So you can learn to, you know, I guess the poor man's version of this would be look in the mirror, stare at yourself and try to ramp up your level of autonomic arousal, watch your pupils get bigger, and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller.
That practice, it seems in biofeedback, allows people to do it without staring into the mirror, so to speak. So it can be done. It's just that it hasn't been parsed by science that finely until recently.
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.
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.
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.
So I spent a lot of time doing biofeedback and a lot of time doing visualization practices and doing very intense visualization practices and many, many years working with triggers for my own psychology and physiology so that I can get my physiology primed to have an intense learning experience while studying something that might otherwise just feel intellectual.
And then combining that with my own experience of things. And 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.
Why do you think they don't? It takes time and it doesn't seem as intuitive as going out and shooting free throws or something?
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.
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.
And then after 2004 Worlds, I wrote it in nine months. It just kind of came out of me. And I'm kind of in that process now with this. So it feels really organic and intrinsic, the creative process. And I don't know.
It's very interesting when you talk to people who are really playing at elite levels of different fields or who are just below full self-expression or they're just 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.
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.
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...
these skills that we can put together in order to train at a world-class level. But it takes patience and creativity and not just being subject to whatever else does, but being able to look expansively at everything.
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Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. We had a guest on this podcast, Jim Hollis. He's an 84-year-old, probably 85-year-old Jungian analyst on, and he, just brilliant guy.
He's written some really important books under Saturn's shadow and And he said, you know, so he has a real kind of like suit up, show up, you know, get to work kind of mentality. But he also is a very reflective person.
And he said, you know, if there's one simple key to life, it's that one understand that most of our daily lives, our waking lives are in stimulus response, but that it's so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out of stimulus and response.
And either to just let stuff geyser up out of our unconscious, subconscious mind, or to just put some real thought to something that, you know, most everybody is in stimulus response.
I wonder these days with social media and so many things filling the space between walking to the car or with the, you know, pro players that you work with, you know, I'm guessing the moment they're on the plane, they're on their phones and texting and All these things are wonderful technologies, but they fill all the space with stimulus response. They fill all the space with stimulus response.
And it's not unless you go to a place with no wifi accessibility that you suddenly realize like, wow, like in most of modern life, we're just constantly in this tennis or ping pong match with this trivial thing and that trivial thing. And some of it's essential, but that there's no quote unquote space anymore.
Many ways my life is built around creating that space. And it's interesting, when I was playing chess, I experimented with studying chess from everywhere between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day to see where the sweet spot was. And what I came to was about four and a half hours a day. But that four and a half hours a day was like a 10 out of 10, like fucking just on fire.
And then the rest of the day became about cultivating those four and a half hours. And my life today has that kind of rhythm as well. And, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 –
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.
So you might think a great chess player, people often think like, oh yeah, I can calculate 50 moves deep, 100 moves deep. It's all irrelevant. Move two was inaccurate. So it was just all an illusion. The great chess players might look at much less, but they're looking in the most potent directions. The lower level chess players are lost in a sea of complexity.
So if you're working with, 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.
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.
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,
improved dreamer call often happens simultaneously when one starts to have more and more insights about the MIQ in the morning, which is fascinating. Then over time, you can have micro manifestation of this throughout the day before going for a workout, before taking a walk, before taking a break, before taking a piss.
Instead of going, 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?
So you're learning to just oscillate between the conscious and unconscious states and you're opening up that channel and you're practicing stress and recovery. And then your physiological workouts are also stress and recovery all the time. So you're building that theme in everything that you do.
And you realize that like when you're at your very best for four or five hours a day, you're doing multiples of the work that you're doing if you're just grinding yourself at, you know, what I've called in the past a simmering six or whatever at, you know, for 15 or 16 hours a day. And so people can do so much more in less time. And my lifestyle is based on that.
You know, I'm training very intensely physically and I'm doing really intense mental work and I oscillate between them. in beautiful ways. And I have a lot of empty space for reflection, for meditation, for zoning my mind on what matters most. It's about quality, not quantity. But it's so interesting how we live in this culture where just quantity is just consuming everyone.
Yeah, well, it's as Hollis said, the stimulus response thing dominates. And it dominates, I think, because, well, I have several reflections. First of all, I just have to say, you're absolutely a scientist.
You just proved it to us through a description of this process, which I might ask you to describe once again, because I think there's so much value in each of the pieces and how it's put together. Three things come to mind. First of all, yes, indeed, as you know, and listeners of this podcast will know that it is during sleep that we reorganize our
neural connections and actual neuroplasticity occurs. The stimulus is provided in wakefulness and focus and attention, but the actual rewiring occurs during sleep, deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. One little fun, I think, but also powerful tool that I learned from, maybe you know him as well. I'm blessed to have Rick Rubin as a very good friend. Oh, yeah.
Rick and I have had beautiful jams. Yeah, wonderful. Such a wise tool. I've been spending more and more time with Rick. But he taught me something extremely valuable, which was the process of taking some time to just lie completely still and let your mind go as wild as it needs to or as calm as it needs to while keeping the body completely still. This mimics rapid eye movement sleep.
when we're paralyzed and the mind is very, very active. And I actually think that practices such as yoga nidra, non-sleep deep rest are also mimics of rapid eye movement sleep. And there are data starting to emerge now that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep, but in wakefulness. So put simply lying still, relaxing the body as much as possible and letting the mind be extremely active.
Rick also taught me a little trick for which I don't know any science, but it certainly seems to work for me, which is that if you wake up from a dream and you want to continue having that dream, keep your body completely still. Whereas if you wake up from a dream and it was a troubling or anxiety-provoking dream, move your body. And it seems to work extremely well.
And I have my theories about why this works. I have to ask about this process of of reflecting on one's own mistakes deliberately, kind of addressing one's own pain points or shame points as such a key feature of your upbringing and your practice around learning. Forgive me for going a little bit longer here, but recently somebody taught me something extremely useful.
She said, you know, our consciousness is sort of like a lighthouse and we have this beam of light sweeping around 360 degrees. but where we have places of shame about whatever, things that were done to us, things that we've done, whatever, just points of shame, things that we don't want people to know about us, that we don't even like to think about. It's like a stain on that lighthouse.
And when that light passes through that stain, it casts a wedge, a shadow in the shape of a wedge. And she described it in somewhat mystical terms. She said, you know, it's through that shadow that evil things enter us. And that the world can hurt us.
And that the process of getting over our shame but also experiencing life in much more fullness and being able to cultivate our craft and be more present for ourselves and for others is a process of going right up to that lighthouse window and looking at the stain and going, that's what it is. And that's the process of wiping it off. Now, that's all.
That's just an illustration for us to understand what I think is the process you're describing, which is that you get right up next to your worst nightmares, your worst mistakes, the things you don't want to think about. And in doing so, you learn to relax in their presence and they sort of disappear as points of shame.
Yeah, it 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.
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
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.
And like being authentic there as opposed to being a leader or a father or a mother or a coach who just keeps it in the pocket as if they're perfect. There's something so inauthentic about that. I think in human relationship and in the cultivation of oneself as an artist, going right at one's weakness. is so powerful.
Now, of course, there's also the tender balance of how much we should cultivate our strengths and how much we should be spent 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There's like a theme that houses hundreds of those technical manifestations. So if we are always thinking about the technical, the thematic, the psychological, and we have what I call a six-dimensional introspective process, right? And we're looking at all of these, the interconnectedness of those different parts of the human experience of an art or anything else.
then the growth curve is incredibly explosive because we 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.
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.
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.
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...
is why don't more great chess players who try successfully translate their level from chess to other things? Because chess is so hard. And chess is such a relentlessly truth-telling art. If you become a world-class chess player, you're fucking good. Because there's no luck in chess.
Especially if you become very good very young. I mean, I think this is true of most prodigies. I don't want to name them, but I have a colleague... Very smart guy. His science is very solid. And I remember I met with him and I said, is it true that you're- Jerry's going to love that. That's okay. He's done nice work.
I just wouldn't say that it's like transformed our understanding of like everything in that field. But he's made some very important contributions. He's a fabulous teacher and a nice person. But he's said, one day I was meeting with him and I said, you're a child prodigy, I heard. And he said, former child prodigy. And I was like, okay, well, here we're getting technical.
But yeah, okay, I think we're – and I asked my dad because he – my dad lived in the same building as Daniel Berenbaum, the musician. It was if you've ever seen the movie Hillary and Jackie. He was one of the world's most accomplished piano players at a very young age. And, um, and my dad used to hear him playing when he was a kid and like, they wouldn't let him play with other kids.
And he was like, I mean, Berenbaum is a seer for classical musicians and pianists in particular. It's like serious stuff. And I, so I asked my dad, I was like, what's the deal with this child prodigy thing? And he said, um, yeah, very few of them go on to do much in their adult careers in any field. Right. And I was like, wow. And, um,
Okay, so what's missing there is clearly not a lack of ability, focus. I mean, you could just say raw talent, but you still have to – a kid still has to focus. So what's missing is this transfer of understanding, it seems, or what you're talking about, the interconnectedness of things. And so – Yeah, I probably will get myself in trouble with this colleague.
But hey, listen, maybe he'll take on something new and do something additionally spectacular. He's got a lot of things on his plate. But, you know, that struck me. I was like, oh, you know, it's not clear that being a quote unquote child prodigy is such a good thing for the long arc of one's life. But you have seemed to bring in these other elements. Love. I'd like to talk more about that.
And I would also add, at least from an outsider's perspective of you seem to have broken the mold with like kind of what's expected of you, you know, based on your prior accomplishments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So I think that people who have identity in being a prodigy, develop a brittleness often because they associate their level of mastery with talent, with something innate, with being smarter, more brilliant, more gifted, whatever. And then that is, you think about Carol Dweck's work in entity incremental theories of intelligence, right? That's an entity theory of intelligence.
So I think there's that, and there's something fundamentally brittle about that. And then what, then one doesn't take risk, One doesn't expose oneself. One associates one's great moments with something ingrained or innate versus the hard work that it took to get there. And there's all sorts of paralyzing dynamics there.
Oh, there's also a tendency to lie. Carol's early papers referred to this in the discussion sections. You have to read deep into those papers. But she describes how the – students who did not have growth mindset that really identified and held so much of their ego with their performance were at a significantly greater tendency to lie about their performance when they didn't do well.
To themselves and to others. That's right. But the lying to oneself is the really interesting part, right? So there's that dimension, right, which you and I have both seen just countless manifestations of. And believe me, like when you're competing against someone who you see has that kind of psychological construction, they're done. You can just break them, right?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Could you give me an example of one such principle? Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs. Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of verbs. And the names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally.
But otherwise, the principles and verbs are what's most important. So what's an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers?
Everything transfers, first of all. 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You know what leaps to mind when you made that description, and I didn't follow all of it to memorization, was family feud. I just imagine two families in a feud, right? You get two brothers together, they can do certain things. But you get a brother and sister together, I have a sister, she can do certain things that are powerful and diabolical in ways that two brothers can't.
Yeah, so you get two big strong brothers, but maybe one that can't, you know, creep through small places. And so you can map to different, you know, that's sort of more of just kind of an analogy for it all. But I started to immediately think about like, oh, it's like a family feud. If I were to view the pieces as sibling dynamics and parent-sibling-cousin dynamics,
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.
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.
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.
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
People who become excellent in one thing can't translate it into other places. It's not will later on in life. They have the will. It's because they didn't learn with universal principles. They didn't study their art with a presence to the importance of interconnectedness, which is a lot of what my life's work is in.
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Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. When I think about interconnectedness, I think the word mapping comes to mind. And I define a map of any kind as a transformation of one set of points into another set of points, right? points along the earth transferred onto a page or an electronic map.
What's missing from a kind of basic understanding of a transformation of points into another transformation of points are these verb actions, like it's the algorithms, if you will. That's not present in how we map one context onto another context. It requires a lot of thinking to do what you describe. I don't think it's reflexive for most people.
to say, watch a game of basketball and think about the emotional dynamics and the consistencies of the emotional dynamics. Last night, I had the great gift of Josh brought me to a Celtics game. So he brought me to a Celtics game and they're playing the Clippers. So I was cheering against the hometown crowd here in Los Angeles, but it was friendly.
And you were describing the players and their recent history and the kind of last season, the season. And you said something about the difference between pre-conscious effort and post-conscious effort. Maybe we could talk about that as a gateway into ego. which is like a term that the moment you throw out the word ego, it's like saying sex.
It's like people make all sorts of assumptions about what it is and what it isn't. But let's talk about pre-conscious and post-conscious. Because we'll get back to the Celtics and the game that was played last night. By the way, the Celtics won in overtime by a good size margin. So there's something very beautiful
that I think all of us are drawn to as observers, but hopefully everyone gets to experience this at some point in their life as well firsthand, when somebody in art, music, sport, or whatever is just being themselves and this seeming virtuosity comes out. If I think about kind of what Rick Rubin does, a lot of what Rick has done historically is to find artists and work with artists and
just bring out what they're already doing, like the core elements. Like when Beastie Boys started, it was like a joke, he said, and they were kind of making fun of, had wrestling elements and hardcore and punk and all this stuff and hip hop.
And, you know, but he tends to work with artists early on when they're in that really like pure state of not thinking about the returns on their investment and all that. And you know, he said many times before to me and publicly that, you know, after people achieve a certain level of fame, it's much harder to get back to that just pure picture of oneself, pre-conscious expression.
Just Josh being Josh as an eight-year-old, you just happen to be in Washington Square Park learning chess or, you know, pick any number of different examples. So very different than when people now reflect on their trophies on the wall or their platinum records or the fact that they won and lost or that there's another champion in the house that, you know,
that, um, and the real virtuosos seem to be people that, um, can get back to that over and over again. The yo-yo mas, the, you know, um, and people live longer now. So it used to be the, the Mozart's, the box, you know, they could make their contribution and, and then, uh, they died. Yeah. Now we live longer lives. So, um,
People have many more chances, but there's also that longer window for lack of productivity.
This is a really important theme, and it's a gateway into so much. 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?
Like one discovers an art, one feels a passion for it, one, it's beautiful, it's joyous, it's self-expressive, I love the battle, I'm winning, I'm losing, I'm having fun, I'm just letting it rip, right? There's a naivete to that. There's a freedom, there's a playfulness, right?
There's a lack of complexity, a lack of self-awareness, a lack of awareness of my own mutability, a lack of awareness that I can be shattered or I can die. A lack of awareness of the existential absurdity of the fact that I'm devoting my life to 64 squares and 32 pieces of wood on top of 64 squares. I haven't reflected on the fact that this is ridiculous, right?
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.
And then there comes this moment, and for me it was triggered by the movie, by losing that sense of self-expression, by thinking what would someone else do here instead of what's my freedom, my playfulness tell me to do. It can happen when one has a near-death experience. It can happen when one has one's heart broken. It can happen when one...
starts reading 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?
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.
The things that felt so important to you now seem somewhat trivial because you've already accomplished that. Like where's the intrinsic motivation? Where's the deep self-expression, right? You think about... Like as we gain complexity in our psychology, and we can gain that complexity in many different ways, we hit this tunnel, right?
And often when someone becomes self-aware, or when someone becomes less liberated, or like the 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I heard about this.
Yeah. It was a, I was doing, um, hypoxic breath work. I did not realize, which maybe if I'd, you could have taught me if I'd known you that carbon dioxide will 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.
Exhale, I guess we should save a few lives here or prevent a few deaths rather. Anytime you emphasize the duration or intensity of your exhales, you're going to blow out more carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the trigger for the gas reflex. So yes, you'll be able to hold your breath longer above or below water if you first do cyclic hyperventilation and then a long dump all your air.
but never, ever, ever do cyclic hyperventilation, folks, or any long exhale emphasized breathing, even standing in a puddle, because that gasp reflex is the thing that makes you shoot for the surface. And if you don't do that, You feel pretty peaceful until lights out.
Or drive a car. Don't do it while driving a car.
Or drive a car.
I know people who have done that. Right. Actually, rather exceptional people who I know.
Dumping carbon dioxide will let you hold your breath longer, but that's part of the problem.
And shallow water blackout usually happens to very high-level athletes, Navy SEALs, right? Because they're training at pushing their limits. They're learning to suppress the urge to breathe. And if you're flushing CO2, you're learning, you're training yourself not to feel it. And I've been a free diver my whole life. I grew up free diving, spearfishing in the Southern Bahamas.
But I wasn't doing hypoxic 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.
Four and a half minutes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yeah, trying to be our previous selves is not a great strategy. Trying to integrate our previous experiences in our current and future selves seems like a good strategy.
I feel that way. And I think it's also pretty... You can't go back. You can't pretend you're not... Dying 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...
has been in life and death situations as a way of life for a long time, whether they relate to the idea of fearlessness, if they really reflect on it, they'll say no. Because fearlessness isn't a thing. It's how one works with fear. Usually what locks people up isn't fear. It's the fear of fear. We're afraid of our fear. We're afraid of being afraid.
But like you 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?
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.
We can't go back to what worked before because they're different men, right? One needs to find a different kind of mission, a different kinds of internal relationship to the mission, a different kind of freedom.
How important do you think it is to attach language to these things of identity and source of motivation? In other words, let's say, okay, you're working with the Celtics. They won the championship last year. This year they are in a completely different mental frame as a consequence.
they're quote unquote dominant in the sense that they hold the crown, they hold the trophy, but they're more vulnerable too because the only place to go from there is either stay or you're going down a notch or more. So do you think it's important for them to create a verbal label for where they're at? Like we're the champs and we're going to hold on to the belt.
We're going to hold on to, I realize there's not a belt in basketball, by the way, that they're going to hold on to their status. Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Because the game is played through verbs. It's not played through adjectives.
I don't think we ever want to hold on to, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
He and his wife, Tachi, who's also one of my dearest friends, had a terrible tragedy years ago. They lost a baby. And just devastating period. And then Marcelo had cancer. He had stomach cancer. He had surgery, eight rounds of chemotherapy. He hasn't competed in 13 years and he's actually competing tomorrow for the first time in, I think it's 13 years, in Bangkok.
It was gonna be in Denver and I was gonna fly there between the Lakers and the Mavs games, but it's in Bangkok, so I can't get there. But he's weighed in, he's doing great, he's feeling awesome. So the story I'm about to tell is about this epic, beautiful human being who in many ways He's the innovator that led to much of what is modern grappling today.
So back in, I think it was 2005 and 2007, this story, or maybe 2007, 2009. I think it's 2005 and 2007. Chronology is not a strong point for me in terms of my recollection in general. We were in a training camp. And we were training all the time. He had this innovative repertoire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And so hard for people to do. I mean, I think about Michael Jordan and the fact that he wanted to be a pro baseball player. So he had a brief stint at that and it was underwhelming certainly compared to his basketball career. But of course his basketball career was, you know, so spectacular that, you know, the expectation wasn't there. But, um,
Nonetheless, you know, it's so rare to find people that are super successful repeatedly within domain, let alone across domains. It's just. Yeah. Richard Feynman. Yeah. He could paint a little bit and draw a little bit, but I don't know. I've seen those pictures of the roosters. They're kind of first year art school. Yeah. So it's cool. Like, cool.
You learn to draw and paint, but he weren't like, if his name wasn't on them, like no one would care.
Jordan had just an incredible competitive drive, incredible competitive drive. 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.
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.
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.
And so the good thing about the competitive truth-telling world is that our competitors, our rivals, help force us to take our shit on, which makes it very hard to sit in static quality unless we're happy with mediocrity.
The Celtics have, you know, one of the most – Joe 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 –
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.
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.
And that's like the leadership, which I think will lead to beautiful things.
So I feel like there are at least three components to what you're describing. One is that, you know, maybe in this pre-conscious phase, people are thinking about what they have to gain from this process that they're in. And the process is natural, at least to the extent that they're motivated to do it. It comes from some source.
This seems to be the stage and the thing that Rick Rubin is trying to tap into in the artists that he works with, whether or not they're established or new, is that it's the identification of that preconscious energy, which is so pure and so beautiful by definition. As opposed to the second thing, which is when people have something to lose, They went from poverty to having a really nice home.
They bought their mom a home. They're loving this life. They don't want to lose it. They don't want to go back to where they were before, even though where they were before probably played a key role in that pre-conscious state that allowed them to get to that next level versus something to protect. And trying to not lose everything you've got is very different than trying to protect your
certain elements of what one has. So like in terms of the Celtics, they hold the championship title now. So they have something to lose, frankly. They could not get it again, but it's in the record books. So it's nuanced, right? It's not like in a fight, you can get knocked out or worse, but you're still a champion if you were a champion once. I mean, certain fields are like that.
Well, going back to back is an approach way of framing that. Like going back to back is different from protecting the title.
Right. Because then the words like reigning champions, you know, it's like, even though you're already the reigning champion, you know, or you think about dynasties. Like I grew up in the, when the 49ers were like kind of in multiple dynasties, it was like the Joe Montana era and the Steve Young era.
And like, you know, like these dynasties where they were just considered such an important team and,
overall because of how long they were able to do what they did the bulls right you know um so tiger woods right and there seems to be a kind of obsession with this process at least in the united states where we love to see the rise of somebody from uh you know ignominy to fame or rags to riches and then but there also seems to be this kind of obsession with their fall their demise and then coming back again and i think the the the most um
You know, prominent example of this in my mind is Mike Tyson, whose life is like, as a friend described it, is almost Shakespearean in the way that he came from nothing, then youngest heavyweight champion, then all these issues, you know, legal and financial, then back again. And now he seems to be in kind of...
He's at least of a level of status where he can wear his own shirt and no one thinks it's weird. It actually looks cool. He's probably the only guy who can wear a shirt with his own name on it and it just seems right. Like he earned that one. And I think ironically it was the hangover. It was him pretending to have a – as an actor that kind of brought him back as a lovable character.
It's kind of interesting. Like he seems to now be on the Mount Rushmore of famous American athletes who – You know, like, I only wish the best for him. But whatever happens next, like, it's cemented. His legacy is cemented. At some point, people's legacy is cemented. And I wonder how that feels, too.
So maybe we could talk about these different stages of the sine wave that hopefully is upward and drifting right.
One of the things that I...
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.
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.
Or your wife is eight months pregnant. Like, how do you feel being, you know, 5,000 miles away right now? That would be pretty benign compared to, right? Yeah. It's like, thanks, you know?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most consistent stimulus for adrenaline release and noradrenaline release in the brain. that is safe if done properly. And you never really habituate. Maybe we'll just really quickly double click on this thing of cold plunging. I don't go for time. I think only in terms of walls of adrenaline. So some days like just getting in the thing is a big wall.
I think of it just, for lack of a better word, as a wall. On a hot day, I'm happy to get into the cold plunge. But then what I think is so valuable about cold plunging is that If you start to focus on what neuroscientists call interoception, our perception of everything from our skin inward, you can start to feel the deployment of adrenaline in your body, or at least its effects.
And you can say, here's another wall of adrenaline. You watch your frame rate go up, the impulse to stay still, because as you move, you break up that thermal layer, it gets even colder. But then you also want to get out, and then that wall passes. And then you start to notice that the distance between the walls changes. And then playing with that in one's mind as
You know, when I distract myself, the walls come, you know, suddenly. Or when I'm focused on the walls, they seem like big swells as opposed to when I relax myself, they seem like just like kind of more sharp peaks. And learning that those dynamics of how adrenaline impacts us cognitively and frame rate and all that, I think is an immensely valuable practice.
And I can't think of anything else, not sprinting, not lifting weights, You know, not real life arguments because that can be destructive. I can't think of any other kind of venue for exploring one's ability to work through stress and tension than the cold plunge.
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
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I don't necessarily. Yeah, same. I'll do cold plunge for one to three minutes. Yeah. And I love contrast with heat. Oh, so beautiful. And I'm very heat tolerant. I love, love, love, love the sauna. Yeah. I don't love the cold, but I love the long arc of dopamine that comes after the cold. I always say no one really enjoys being in the thing. Is there a better sleep hack?
I'm asking you because you know this stuff.
Well, there are supplements that can support sleep and that kind of thing. And people learning how to deliberately relax their body can help with transition to sleep and back to sleep. But, you know, one core principle that I haven't really talked about in the podcast is that if you – the more adrenaline nor –
epinephrine, noradrenaline, and dopamine that you experience early in the day, as well as cortisol from bright light exercise, caffeine, and cold, the better you're going to sleep at night. It also sets your circadian rhythm around kind of like a big set of arousal promoting stimuli early in the day.
And then, you know, last third of your day, you're very parasympathetic, for lack of a better way to put it. And that eases the transition to sleep. I mean, you know, dimming the lights, parasympathetic, bright lights, Increases the amount of cortisol with your morning cortisol pulse by 50%, 5-0, which is great. Keeps you less susceptible to infection all day, these kinds of things.
I mean, we're meant to be in oscillation, obviously, across the 24-hour cycle, but even within the day. It's a little bit tougher when people have evening activities. Like last night, I was watching these guys play a hard game of basketball at 8 to 10 p.m., That's a lot of late night work.
And we're on the West Coast. You can think what time that is East Coast time.
Right. So is there a better sleep stack? Not really. I mean, and if you want to increase your rapid eye movement sleep non-pharmacologically, I would say, meaning not exogenous pharmacology. Yeah, the cold plunge in the morning, early part of the day. For evening, anything that moves blood out to your periphery.
So sauna, pot shower, that sort of thing is going to drop your core body temperature when you get out. It's a little paradoxical to people, but you warm up to then cool off at the level of core body temperature and it'll ease the transition to sleep. Yeah, it's a wonderful practice. And people who pick at cold plunging, they're like, well, it blocks hypertrophy. Okay, yeah, okay, that's true.
So in the six hours after you're trying to get a little more peak on your biceps or something, it's going to block that. But most people have not experienced control over their physiology at the level that comes from doing consistent cold plunging in the early part of the day. warming up and becoming more parasympathetic later in the day.
They start to feel a level of control over their mood and energy that's so striking with basically zero cost tools. I agree. Yeah. Sorry to riff on that, but people will probably wonder about specifics. I want to make sure that we talk about two things and you can decide which one to talk about first. One is ego and
And then the second one is earlier you described a set of dynamics across the day and some concrete things about, you know, how one picks the most important question, like what am I working on today?
And how to kind of push that into certain portions of the day, how long to do that, and then how to, you know, stay out of stimulus and response and the transition points so that you can make the most of that work or extract the most from that work as you head Into the evening dinner with your family, sleep, and then wake up, repeat. Which one do you think would be most valuable?
The game is go wherever you want to go. Where should we go? All right. Before we get practical, let's get a little bit more theoretical and then get back to practical. Ego. The constriction is what comes to mind. The idea that I want to impose my will on something. I want a certain outcome. And if I don't get it, it's going to hurt in some way.
There's some punishment mechanism internally like that might drive me to work even harder. It's not always bad. But how do you frame ego? And I will say that the words I am seem very important. Like when people identify as I am the champion, I'm part of a champion team in the NBA. I'm a Celtic, I'm a player, I'm a Celtics player. Clearly I'm not.
But when we attach identity to ego, that's also where it seems like it kind of deepens the trench a bit, but maybe it can be more relaxed than the way I'm describing it. How do you think about ego?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, and as I walked in here to take a seat at my chair, I got a good hard slap on the back from you. And I was wondering if you were testing me. I thought you last night too. I won't ask what your read of my ego was, but I felt it as a slap of camaraderie. Like, let's do this. It felt great. And I was also thinking about my good friend, Lex Friedman, who is a
black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a very intense guy who wears his heart on his sleeve publicly. And people sometimes will take shots at him for that, which really upsets me.
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.
Yeah. You guys would have a fun conversation. He, uh, he's going to be jealous that we got a chance to sit down here, but, um, you know, Lex is, uh, at home and with his friends exactly how he appears to be that like all that, that intense, um, self-torture around what to do and how to frame something, who to talk to, how to talk to them. And, um, that's, that's the world he lives in. And, and, um,
But in terms of his physicality, like I think it's hard to understand like just how – I mean like he's like dense like dark matter. You know, like it's the – and I think a lot of guys that roll jujitsu, like you shake their hands and like there's a solidity there that's very different than just muscle. It's like people that are just like –
They're used to being up against bodies, apparently, you know, so it's an experience, you know. These are subtle things, but clearly they matter. And as you've pointed out, one brings them to their professional life. You bring it to friendships. You know, I can't think of many super, quote unquote, solid friends, but Lex is among them. the most solid of them. He's just beautiful. His presence.
Yeah.
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.
And Rick Rubin, you know, we both know Rick and people know Rick as this bearded icon of creativity. And he is indeed that. The fluidity that he moves through life with is just, it's like, it's astonishing. I've spent a lot of time with him and I don't want to like get into my observations of Rick, the Rickisms, if you will.
But it's astonishing how much attention and he puts into creating this thing that we're talking about space, like getting out of stimulus and response. I don't think he'd mind me sharing this. It's not uncommon for me to like go over to hang out with him and he'll just say like, hey, like before we like talk, you want to just like do this meditation? And we'll just like sit there and meditate.
And you quickly go into a mindset of like, oh my goodness, like this is like a thing. And then, but like, nope, you just get into being present. And then, I don't know, then you hang out and you talk about, if you're us, you know, the Ramones, because we both love the Ramones. Yeah. So I love the way you frame ego. I think that that's very helpful because a physical embodiment of something that is
largely psychological to most people, at least the concept is very helpful. Do you ever just as a practice, just look at how people walk or how they interact? Oh yeah.
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.
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.
Like just like mix it up, make it uncontrollable.
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.
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.
What about in non-competitive endeavors like ballet, opera? music where certainly it's competitive in that, you know, you're competing for people's attention, time and money, but you're not, it's not direct competition.
Uh, do you spend time working with performers in, in these domains where, um, you know, like just, I heard from someone recently who, uh, she said, you know, I'm a good dancer, but then I went to New York and I discovered that I'm not such a good dancer. Like, like the level of, of who gets to actually dance in some of the premier venues there is like so unbelievably high that, um,
And by the way, that shouldn't discourage anyone. That should encourage people. Show them what's possible. Do you work with people like that or is it usually competitive arenas?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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,
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
So pose a hypothesis, isolate variables, test hypothesis, feedback to hypothesis, confirm or deny hypothesis, and just...
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
I love it. It also reflects your clearly repeating pattern of being willing to segment your life into different goals and different pursuits. applying what you've learned previously, learning new things and incorporating those. It brings me back to two things that we touched on earlier.
One, that if we don't close the hatch on, we're going to get it from the listeners, which is this paper that we both read. I just want to, or took a look at. Before the paper, let me just say one important thing.
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?
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.
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.
And the daily physical interactions with the ocean, with fear, with uncertainty, with just variables that you can't control. And trying to identify what are the variables I can control in this context and work with those to try and tease out new learning. that running those algorithms every day seems absolutely essential.
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.
Well, so it's not my study, but this paper that I sent you, I think is really interesting. It's a paper published in the journal Neuron, very fine journal, excellent paper. We'll post a link to it, but it has many interesting features about, it's really about the study of surprise and the dopamine system, but they use as the experimental context, people watching a game of basketball
And they observed that the reset on sort of the interval timer is essentially said anytime there's been a reversal of which team has the ball. So a drive down court by one team, then the other team. And if there's a rebound and then it switches direction, whatever, it might not switch direction. Basketball provides the perfect dynamic to study this while people are being
while there's some detection of brain activity going on. And one of, I think, the most interesting questions about this paper and implications are that just as we can set the aperture of our vision or the frame rate of how well we're clocking time, how finely we're clocking time or how coarsely we're clocking time,
There's this big question, which is kind of a philosophical question, really, which is how do we segment time in our life? Earlier, you mentioned that one of the major kind of timestamps, if you will, is a bad event. Like, oh, shit, like the things went completely differently than I would have preferred them to. It could be the death of another. It could be the death of a dream.
It could be a setback, a reason, whatever. that it marks time. And we just had these fires. I mean, LA will be before and after the fires of 2025. You know, I remember early in 2020, Kobe Bryant dying, right? So these things, I remember the Challenger explosion, like negative events, you know, occupy a certain place in our memory more easily than positive events, but no one will forget
The birth of their first child or hopefully their second child too if they had a second child or their wedding day, right? These things segment time. You seem to be able to segment your life into a series of pursuits where you cut ties with –
practice of something like chess and you take what you learn and move it forward into what seems to be a very different lifestyle and way of being, I think one of the major challenges for a lot of people, it seems, is how to thread the different elements of their life forward in a way that feels contiguous. And I think it's probably true that most people would prefer to not have
major losses be necessary in order to segment their life in the most fulfilling way. So how do you think about the segmentation of time? And maybe we'll run this backward from the scale of your lifetime. We don't know how long you'll live, but hopefully a long time.
That's assumed by way of standard genetics, somewhere in the neighborhood of between 90 and 110, if you take good care of yourself, which you seem to. Sounds good. Okay. And then let's compare that to...
how one structures a day, and that will allow us to bring us back to what you talked about before with this most important question dynamic and focus and replenishing and dynamic between conscious and unconscious mind. So when you think about your life, you're 48 years old? Okay, I'm 49, so we're more or less the same point, looking backward anyway.
Our lives are very different, but same age, roughly. If you think you're going to live to be about 100, how are you thinking about your timeframe? Are you thinking, okay, here's what I'm going to do for the next five years, 10, I'll allow whatever's happening in my life to dictate what I do next. I mean, how are you running this analysis?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to. Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's an awesome... I've been connected to him through Martha back, the previous guest on this podcast. And she spent... They're good friends. They've spent a lot of time in Londolozi together. And I'd love to get Boyd Vardy on here.
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.
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.
You've got a process that seems to work very well, at least up until this point. There's no reason to think it wouldn't work well, especially given that you said not exactly, leaving that openness to changes in our biology, life events in and for people around us.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
You know, this concept of energy is a complicated one and there's no clear definition anyway. But when I think about energy, I don't think about caloric energy. I think of neural energy. And I think about certain neural circuits like that. Like if you, like I love the feeling of excitement and tension that then is funneled into a specific activity that then yields some new vista repeat.
You know, it's just, that's science and that's learning. The day I realized that I'll never, you know, saturate all the knowledge that I could gather, organize and disseminate through the podcast. I was like, F yes. Like, that's just great because there's, but I realize also that thing, we can saturate ourselves internally. We can drive ourselves to the point of no replenishment.
We can, you know, get so narrow focus. That's why I think so much about aperture in time and space. We can get so narrow focus that we, we end up, you know, like a, like a gopher that, you know, dug our way into a desert. And then we're like, or you're just far from your family or far from home, you know, because you just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.
So, you know, I think, what is it, you know, like eagle vision, you know? I think that the diving birds are probably the ultimate in terms of having panoramic vision. Do you know this?
They have a horizon viewing density of cells so they can view the horizon and they have a pupil to view the fish so that they can dive and grab the fish despite the refraction of light under the water because the fish isn't actually where they see it. So when people say eagle vision versus, you know, like... you know, like predator vision up close or something.
So they're like the diving birds. Those birds, yeah.
Yeah, so they're flying and they're tracking the horizon And they're also tracking things right below them simultaneously. That to me is the ultimate state to try and achieve in terms of space and time tracking. That's a beautiful metaphor. And they have to also adjust for, right, the refractory.
Yeah.
To calculate.
Yeah. Diving seabirds are the ones that really just... I'm going to do it. They're the ultimate.
I'm going to do a study there. I want to learn about them.
Okay, great. Yeah, I can send you some literature there. I'd love it. The time unit of a day is what most people can manage in their minds. Maybe you could return to this cycle of conscious focus, stimulus response and getting out of that. I love the example of going to take a piss because everyone does it. I do think too many people do it holding a phone. Yeah.
Can't be good for a number of reasons. Maybe just walk us through that. So do you think it's – let me ask a series of short questions. So when I wake up in the morning, for instance, like many people, I'm not – I don't feel immediately alert. I don't feel like I could just dive into writing if writing is the most important thing I need to do that day or – I have some transition time.
Do you think that people should embrace natural transition times on the time scale of a day or that they should train themselves to like, you know, bounce into effort, like go with the flow or, or force oneself through, through the door?
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.
You know that old book that Tim actually produced, the audio book, Daily Rituals?
Oh, yeah.
Like one of the best things about Daily Rituals is how few patterns there are through them. I love that book.
We'll put a link to it. Such a good book. So good. I'm so glad that Tim Ferriss, as who we're referring to, collected all these habits of different writers. And like, some of them are so quirky and crazy, and some are downright dangerous.
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.
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.
Some are out partying all night, drugs, alcohol, caffeine. Others are super regimented and monk-like. It's the range of daily architectures is so vast.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The teams that I work with all have versions of the MIQ that they utilize as individuals, but then as teams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And then studying the gap analysis we do reveals what we need to focus our deliberate practice on.
this difference between physical endeavors and cognitive endeavors, I think is so key. Nowadays, most people are involved in cognitive endeavors and there's so much, it's basically like being in a glass house with windows everywhere. I mean, social media, texting, windows, internet connection on the computer. There's just so many points of entry and where one can become distracted.
Whereas if you paddle out to ocean, you know, sure you could bring your phone perhaps, but you're limited by the environment and the need for safety of the number of things that you can think about.
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.
I'm learning to turn stuff off while I work. Um, I mean, I have had to learn to just fight things back because when I started in science, I mean, I didn't have a smartphone or I didn't any of that. And, um, yet one really has to fight nowadays for their freedom from these interruptions. So it's something that people really have to cultivate.
And so in terms of the structure of that day, you pose a question for the day, like the most important question, would it be like, let's say, like I'm working on a revision of this book. that I delayed release on because I wanted to add a bunch of things to it. So would one say the most important question is how do I finish this book today or is there – I'm guessing it's more conceptual than that.
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,
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.
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?
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.
Like what, how do, that stretch within that stuck point.
And that's usually where people, including myself, pivot away. I'm thinking outside of the work domain now. Like, like, ah, like I don't want to think about, like it's when we tend to, I noticed that there's an infinite amount of distraction available nowadays, right? if we want it.
And, you know, audio books and podcasts, and I think podcasts are wonderful, but, you know, they can be a source of distraction from the critical question we need to be asking, or they can be a source of answers for perhaps the critical questions we're asking. But there's just so many of these opportunities to just look away from something that is like a – it's like a emotional infection.
It's different than an infection in your skin that's nagging because you can feel it there and you want to get that thing out, right? Very primal instinct, like get that thing out, get the infection out. This is like an emotional infection that you can just kind of not see if you choose to turn away. But those are the things that really get you over time.
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?
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.
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.
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.
First thing in the morning is when I get my insights or understanding or when the truth hits me square in the face. Like there's no avoiding. I wake up, I think about like, okay, that's the thing I got to deal with. And I tend to write it down right away. Try not to write it down on my phone. I think having a point of capture that doesn't offer any other distractions.
That's why I'm a big believer in pen and paper.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, it's all stimulus response. You're going into stimulus. If people can start to think about being reflective versus in stimulus response, I think that's sort of like the widest binning of all this. I have to say the shower. I've talked about this thing about why people have insights in the shower with my friend. I'd love to introduce you to him at some point.
We've been friends since we were seven years old. My friend, Dr. Eddie Chang, he's a neurosurgeon and the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. And he studies speech and language. And he's taken people with locked-in syndrome and developed AI algorithms so that they can speak through a screen with their face moving in real time by decoding human speech or human speech cortex.
And a truly brilliant individual. He's been on this podcast. He'll come back again. Ask him about the shower thing because he used to work on neuroplasticity of the auditory system. We think, we wonder if it's the kind of white noise of the shower as well. Yeah.
Because Eddie's done beautiful work showing that it's the signal to noise in the auditory system that defines whether or not a certain pattern of speech or auditory cue gets remembered. So when you have this in the background, let's just put this in the terms that we've been referring to this up until now, the thoughts that surface above that noise have a big sharp peak relative to the background.
So it's the signal to noise. Whereas certainly the opposite would be when you're on your phone and you're scrolling through and you're looking at all the thoughts and feelings and stuff of other people. So how do you capture your own thoughts in terms of which are and filter them through what's meaningful and what's not meaningful? is I think actually a really important question to begin with.
And white noise background with very deprived visual stimulation, most showers aren't that interesting. It's white noise, blank walls, a few things that are familiar to you, so they basically disappear from your visual field. And the idea is that thoughts then can that are constantly geysering up through your unconscious mind can be captured because everything else is noise.
Perhaps, this is a hypothesis. And maybe I'll put you and Eddie together sometime and just be an observer. That's powerful. So, I mean, that's how we learn language. It's the error signals against the background noise. This is how you fix stutter. You create background noise. You increase noise, which actually elevates signal in the auditory system, oddly, in any case.
So you found that four and a half hours... was the sweet spot of a focused work. But for some people, it might be an hour. They might need to train up that level of focus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Living one's life like a work of art.
Yes.
Beautiful.
Amen.
Let's do it. Well, clearly you are. I'm in the fight, man. You're in the fight and you're setting an incredible example. and you have your entire life, which is remarkable and so deeply appreciated.
I have to say, and now I will reveal this, that when I started this podcast, I had a short list of people that would be kind of like pinch me guests, not because I want the guests to pinch me, but like, wow, like I can't believe I'm sitting down with blank. And you were on that list. I've read the art of learning. I've, you know, I watched and read everything I could about your, your work.
And, um, I did see that the search for Bobby Fisher with the understanding that that's accurate about certain things and probably inaccurate about others. So if people choose to watch that, they should keep that in mind. It is Hollywood. Yep. Um, more importantly, um, we've had this chance to sit down and do this. And I have to say, I, uh,
I gained so much from your incredible precision, but also scope of observation in the world. Because I'm not a basketball player, I don't know how to play chess. and yet I've learned so much from you and your writings and your teachings, and just the chance to sit down here and to learn from you. I know I'm speaking on behalf of myself and literally millions of people.
I just want to say thank you for living your life like a work of art and for incorporating public education, which is what we're doing here, into this set of pursuits that you've been after, one after the other, but that are bound by this set of core themes. So without getting too abstract, I just want to say thank you so much for coming here, for educating us, for making us think.
I know it's going to change people's thoughts and behavior for the better. And the only question left is to say, would you please come back and talk to us again more?
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.
I feel the same way.
I look forward to it. Thank you, man.
Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Josh Waitzkin. To learn more about Josh's work and to find a link to his book, The Art of Learning, which by the way, I highly recommend, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.
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