#756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin

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0:04:36 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:04:41 The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field
0:04:46 imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply
0:04:52 and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast
0:04:58 recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past 1 billion downloads.
0:05:03 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:05:09 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these
0:05:14 super combo episodes, and internally we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes,
0:05:19 because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks,
0:05:25 but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars. These are people who have
0:05:30 transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps
0:05:35 they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one,
0:05:41 we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests,
0:05:49 you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy,
0:05:56 and thank you for listening. First up, Anne Lamotte, New York Times best-selling author
0:06:03 of 20 books, including Operating Instructions, An Account of Her Son’s First Year, Bird by Bird,
0:06:11 Her Classic Book on Writing, Help, Thanks, Wow, A Celebration of Prayer, and Her Latest,
0:06:18 Somehow, An Exploration of the Transformative Power of Love. You can find Anne on Twitter,
0:06:25 @annlamotte. I’ll tell you a funny story. When Sam’s little boy, who’s 12 now, was 5,
0:06:30 I was teaching his kindergarten class a writing workshop. And instead of saying shitty first
0:06:35 drafts, I said really poopy first drafts. But after, and the kids loved me, and after I was done,
0:06:41 my little grandchild came up to me and he leaned in and he sounded like Tony Soprano. He said,
0:06:47 “Oh, Nana, that was terrible.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “You told people you would teach him
0:06:53 how to write a book, but you only taught us how to write one page.” And that’s really what I can
0:06:58 help you do is one chapter is on shitty first drafts. I don’t try to teach kids or grown-ups
0:07:03 how to write really, really well. I just teach them to stop not writing. I teach them to keep their
0:07:09 butt in the chair and to write badly. And that all first drafts of any book you’ve ever read by the
0:07:15 authors you esteem most began as unreadable first drafts. And I teach people to take it
0:07:21 really small, you know, bird by bird. Is it okay if I tell the story? Oh, please, please. I would
0:07:26 love for you to tell the story just so people know the genesis. Well, my older brother, I was like a
0:07:31 superstar achiever in school. My older brother hated school and he was kind of a rebel. And in
0:07:37 California in the 50s and early 60s, in fourth grade, you wrote two term papers. One was the
0:07:42 Sacramento paper. That’s our state capital. And the other was on birds. And you had to write it
0:07:48 all year, all semester of paper on birds. And my brother hadn’t started. It was due on a Monday
0:07:53 and on a Saturday. He admitted to my dad that he hadn’t started. My brother was a tough guy.
0:07:58 And he was in tears. And my dad sat down with him and put his arm around him. And he said,
0:08:04 just take it bird by bird, buddy. You know, first you read about chickadees. And then you write a
0:08:09 paragraph in your own words about chickadees. And then you draw a picture. And then you take
0:08:15 pelicans and you study up on pelicans. And then you write a paragraph or a passage on pelicans.
0:08:22 I never, ever forgot that. And then years later, probably 20 years ago, so in my 40s, I heard EL
0:08:27 doctor say that writing was like driving at night with the headlights on. You could only
0:08:33 see a little ways in front of you. But you could make the whole journey that way. And I think that
0:08:40 is the most profound advice I can offer anyone on any topic, that you can only see a little ways
0:08:46 in front of you. And you can make the whole journey that way. And another thing that I think helped
0:08:53 people when they read bird by bird was the chapter on perfectionism and how perfectionism is the voice
0:08:58 of the oppressor. It’s the voice of the enemy. And if you listen to it, keeps you crazy for your
0:09:03 entire life because we all fall short. You know, you’ve written books and you think you’re creating
0:09:09 this golden and crystal palace that people can walk inside of and see all of truth and beauty
0:09:16 and reality. And you kind of end up, your books and my books, all of them, are kind of shanty towns,
0:09:22 you know, in life in peace during the peace marches where people set up tents and thought it made
0:09:28 sense to bring their dogs, you know, during the rainstorm. And that’s a miracle to have written
0:09:34 a shanty town. And so I think these ideas of not knowing what you’re doing and of letting yourself
0:09:41 do it really badly and to try to help grind down that critical voice. I’ll just mention my husband’s
0:09:47 work here. He’s Neil Allen. He wrote Shapes of Truth. And the work he does with people in these
0:09:52 Shapes of Truth is taming the inner critic. And what his position is, you’re never going to get
0:09:57 rid of it. You know, we don’t get over very much here. What he does with people is he has them
0:10:03 bring forth the inner critic and actually just put it on the table in front of him. And he,
0:10:09 he thanks them for keeping them, him alive when he was six and seven because it kept him small
0:10:14 and controllable. So he didn’t run out into the street. He didn’t swim out past his ability to
0:10:19 stay afloat. But that at the age of six year, whatever, we probably don’t need it anymore.
0:10:26 And so he has his clients give the inner critic a great new job, which might be ethical consultant
0:10:32 for the project so that the inner critic can go off to the library where there’s an incredibly
0:10:37 comfortable chair and a good reading light and 2000 books. And he will sit there and read what
0:10:42 he loves to do. And when we need an ethical consultation, it will come get him. But we
0:10:49 don’t need that constant. Is it a lot okay to say the F word on? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, please.
0:10:54 In bird by bird, there’s a whole chapter on K fucked radio, K F K D. And without a lot of
0:11:00 help and a lot of transformation and healing, K fucked radios on 24 seven. It’s telling you
0:11:06 how far short you’re falling. It’s telling you how great you started out and what a disappointment
0:11:10 you’ve turned out to be. It’s telling you that what you’re in the middle of is beating a dead
0:11:17 on and on and on. And so the shapes of truth work and the inner critic work and bird by bird
0:11:24 is 90% about turning down K fucked radio. Anyway, out of the left hand speaker is all this stuff
0:11:30 about that you can’t do it perfectly. And that why bother and that this has been blah, blah, blah.
0:11:34 But out of the right hand speakers, it’s like the voice of the people who love you most,
0:11:39 the voice of like for me, Sam or my husband or my two best girlfriends. And they’re saying,
0:11:46 I love your story. So I love how you write. I can’t wait to read more. So but you can turn
0:11:52 down the left hand speaker and it’ll always be there to some degree. There are many different
0:12:00 directions I could go. And thank you for that context. I am going to sit down and reread
0:12:06 bird by bird. In fact, which I’ve read at least, I would say a dozen times, but I’d always written
0:12:13 nonfiction. And I’m beginning to experiment with fiction, which is a whole different sport,
0:12:21 it would seem free in many ways. I can help. If you want someone to help you, I will help you.
0:12:28 Because I would love that. You sit down, you keep your butt in the chair, you take one passage,
0:12:33 one memory, one vision, one bit of dialogue, one character, and you do it badly.
0:12:45 So if we look back to your childhood, my understanding is you had a role model for
0:12:50 this button chair time. Could you tell us a bit about your childhood?
0:12:55 The model was my father, who was a writer, Kenneth Lamott, and he had a lot of books
0:13:01 published and a lot of magazine articles. And I heard him down at his desk at that old Olympia
0:13:07 at 5.30 every morning, rain or shine or hangover. He just did it. And that was what he taught me,
0:13:13 was that you don’t wait for inspiration. It’s an illusion. And in fact, I gave a talk once on
0:13:20 inspiration and on how I don’t believe in it and how what gets me going is death, mental illness,
0:13:27 and fire for revenge. But my dad just did it. And that’s what I learned. And that’s what I passed
0:13:33 on to my son. And my house was very, very tense. My parents didn’t love each other. My father drank
0:13:39 a lot. My mother was very, very overweight and a black belt codependent from Liverpool. And I
0:13:44 was the middle child. I have an older brother and a younger brother. And it was up to me to help make
0:13:49 sure dad kept coming home because he didn’t like mom, but he loved me. I had a rebellious older
0:13:55 brother and an infant baby brother. And I needed to try to help raise the baby brother. I mean,
0:14:01 my parents really would have been better off raising orchids or tea cup poodles or something.
0:14:07 And so what I did at the age of five was to try to raise the baby and to try to keep my brother
0:14:13 from imploding. And it was exhausting. And I got migraines at five years old. And no one,
0:14:20 it was fifties, no one quite noticed that children had mental health diagnoses and stress. It was
0:14:24 really life or death. But I’ll tell you, my family worked better when I had a migraine,
0:14:30 because families do well if there’s one sick person, that’s not them. So when I had to be in
0:14:36 the total darkness with cold compresses, the family thrived, you know, but I learned a couple of
0:14:41 rules. And I know you’ve written about stuff like this, but I learned some survival tools. And one
0:14:46 was to think that I was defective and that I was the reason that the family wasn’t doing well,
0:14:51 because if I was the problem, that meant I had some measure of control, right? I could do better.
0:14:57 And I couldn’t do better. I was an A student. I was a tennis star. But if I believed I could
0:15:03 do better, and I could need less. And if I did better and needed less, then it seemed to make mom
0:15:08 and dad better. And it was completely Reaganomic trickle down. Like if dad was okay, and we helped
0:15:15 dad pump up, then mom would be able to nurture the three of us. So born to die, people pleaser.
0:15:21 I got all of my self-esteem from outside, from good grades, from being the star of the classroom,
0:15:25 and from being a great conversationalist that my parents like to have around, and that my parents
0:15:31 friends like to chat with. And I was not only defective, and this is where it gets dicey, but I
0:15:38 was in charge of everybody’s happiness. You know, I was in charge of helping mom not feel so put down
0:15:43 by dad. I was in charge of making dad come home because I was so adorable and I rubbed his feet.
0:15:49 I’m a lot older than you, but when I was coming up in the 50s, the men, they all were socks with
0:15:55 garters, these little sock garters. And I was like a little gay sugar with curly kinky hair,
0:16:00 and I’d sit and I’d take off his little garter on the couch and I’d take off his sock and I’d
0:16:06 rub his feet. And I thought he would come home for that and he drank a lot. So what I got good at
0:16:13 was pleasing people, being a stratospheric achiever, but not quite so bright that it ruined my older
0:16:18 brother’s life and it made him feel like a loser. And I know how to raise babies. And I know how to
0:16:24 get by on the leftovers, on whatever was left over after I gave everybody the very, very best
0:16:29 parts of me. So all of my books, including Bird by Bird and Operating Instructions, everything
0:16:37 has to do with that coming into radical self-care and becoming my own priority.
0:16:42 This is kind of funny. My mom, who is a black belt, as I told you, codependent, always took the
0:16:48 broken Friday. My entire life, I can swear on the stack of Bibles my mother never once said,
0:16:54 “Here’s somebody else takes the goddamn broken egg yolk. Can you take the, you know, my mother
0:16:59 ate the broken egg yolk?” And that’s what I was raised to believe women did. And I had to have
0:17:05 enough therapy, enough recovery. I’ve been clean it’s over 35 years now and enough in the women’s
0:17:11 movement and a lot of outside help so that I could be my own priority. And if there was a
0:17:17 broken egg yolk, maybe it wasn’t my turn again. Maybe Sam should have the broken egg yolk. Sam
0:17:24 loves a perfect fried egg. You know what? Tough shit. I know that sounds like a loving Christian
0:17:30 thing to say, but it had to do with becoming my own priority. So that was the childhood I had. I
0:17:35 was very afraid. I had migraines. I was too smart. It’s very good at math. Girls weren’t supposed to
0:17:41 be. I skipped a grade. I made the boys feel bad because I was better at math than they were.
0:17:48 I was small and I looked funny. I had this crazy pure white blonde kinky hair and these huge green
0:17:56 eyes. I weighed about 20 pounds till eighth grade. And, you know, all I knew to do was to do better
0:18:01 and to try to do it perfectly. And that’s why I think the chapter in bird by bird is something
0:18:08 that people so relate to because, like in my family, all of us in the American way in fact,
0:18:14 but in my family, the theme was forward thrust that no matter what was going on, you keep going.
0:18:20 You keep going forward. You thrust forward so that the abyss doesn’t open up at your feet,
0:18:25 you know? And if the abyss threatens to you, you get to Ikea and you buy a cute throw rug,
0:18:30 you know, you kick out the abyss. They call the abyss the abyss because it’s pretty abysmal.
0:18:35 It’s a nightmare so you try not to land in it. What my family did was drink and overeat and
0:18:41 diet. My dad had a million affairs and it turned out, and you’ve written about this,
0:18:48 that the abyss or in the Christian theology of St. John the Divine, it’s the dark night of the soul
0:18:55 is where transformation most often happens and that if you can just bear being somewhere that
0:19:01 you’ve never been before where you don’t really have any kind of owner’s manual or a clue of how
0:19:08 to proceed, then you’re really teachable, you know? And from that place, something magical might just
0:19:12 grow. You asked me a question before we began recording. You asked me several questions. You
0:19:17 asked me how I was doing. You also asked me if I was spiritually fit or feeling spiritually fit.
0:19:22 I don’t remember the exact wording, but I’d like to hear to you what that means.
0:19:29 And then after that, what it means to you current day, after that, I’d love for you to tell us the
0:19:38 story or any story of a dark night of the soul experience that you’ve had that helped to catalyze
0:19:44 this radical self-care. But let’s start in the present tense, spiritually fit. What does that
0:19:52 mean to you? Well, spiritually fit means I’m in my body paradoxically. It doesn’t mean I’m in some
0:19:59 ether world of, you know, divine enlightenment. And it means I heard a preacher years ago say
0:20:06 the 23rd Psalm, which is the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. But she said, the Lord is my
0:20:12 shepherd, I shall not trip. And I just love that because when I’m spiritually not fit, I’m just
0:20:20 tripping. You know, I’m making up stories. I’m in fear. I’m in anxiety. I have a tremendous anxiety
0:20:26 disorder for which I’m successfully treated most of the time. But I’m just tripping on something
0:20:33 somebody said that stuck in my craw on something I’m afraid of, of something, a lot of fear in
0:20:39 recovery. There’s some great acronyms for fear, because people like my cokehead friends, I mean,
0:20:44 I’m my own cokehead friend. But they would say that the false evidence appearing real,
0:20:48 which usually means that you’re at the window peering through the drapes thinking that there’s
0:20:53 a SWAT team on your lawn at four in the morning, you know, and that the best idea you have is
0:20:58 another cool refreshing beer. But some of the ones I love is one is the frantic effort to appear
0:21:04 recovered. That’s my main thing is that when I need to look good, when I need to appear to be doing
0:21:12 well is when I’m at my most spiritually lost. And another one I love is future events already
0:21:17 ruined. And so I’m just tripping out of it. Like I was tripping out this morning about what if I
0:21:23 screwed up with Tim, you know, and, and you’re so illustrious and your listenership I think is
0:21:29 younger and why would they want this old lady with dreadlocks Sunday school teacher, where do our
0:21:34 Zen diagrams meet? And I was tripping and then I remembered, you know, future events already
0:21:41 ruined. That’s not true. That’s just kfuck radio. And another one I love is fear expressed allows
0:21:48 relief. And so I told Bill, and he said, you know, you, you are so wonderful at this. Just
0:21:53 breathe and go for a walk first and do what you do. And you’ll be sitting there with Sam and Tim is
0:21:58 great. And you’re going to love it. It’s going to go by so quickly. But so fear expressed allows
0:22:05 relief. So spiritually fit for me is that I’m not tripping and that I’m breathing. When I was a child,
0:22:10 I didn’t breathe, you know, I held my breath because for all the reasons I told you. And I remember,
0:22:18 I used to pass out on the boardwalk in town at three years old and my dad would nudge me and say,
0:22:25 Annie, Annie, and I blink away. But if you breeze, you may end up in your body. And it may be that
0:22:32 in your body, terrible things happen to you. And if you’re a girl addict and alcoholic like I am,
0:22:38 you know, until 1986, you let terrible things happen in your body, you encourage terrible
0:22:43 things. If you let people do anything at all that they want, they seem to like you better
0:22:48 briefly, you know. And so breathing will bring you into your body. So for that reason,
0:22:55 you may resist it. But for me to do what I call the sacrament of ploppage and to sit down
0:23:05 and for one minute to breathe into my heart cave and do the do the sighing, I get my sense of humor
0:23:13 back, you know, and laughter, even at my own quirky, fearful, darling self, laughter I’ve written in
0:23:20 a number of places, this carbonated holiness. So if I’m breathing, and I’ve gotten my sense of humor
0:23:28 back, I’m in something spiritual, I’m something that has to do with my human spirit and the divine.
0:23:35 I mean, I believe and I’ve heard that we have dual citizenship, you know, we’re children of the
0:23:41 divine, we’re children of sons and daughters of God. And we also have these kind of screwed up
0:23:47 biographical details. We’ve got genetic details that we would have maybe not preferred.
0:23:53 We have predispositions to alcoholism and mental illness or to weight gain in our
0:24:00 thighs or whatever. But I have to remember that I can toggle back between dual citizenship, between
0:24:09 being a child of God or of the great universal spirit and Annie Lamont, 67, Sunday school teacher
0:24:16 and left-wing activist, mother and grandmother. And, you know, I got married at 65. I got married
0:24:23 three days after I got Medicare. And those are my true biographical details. And I also am a person
0:24:30 of spirit. So that’s what spiritually fit means for me is that I remember that I’m not this terrible
0:24:36 pinball machine in my mind cranking out new ideas about how I can do life more perfectly so that
0:24:45 everybody will think more highly of me. Annie, I want to tell you, I am enjoying this tremendously.
0:24:53 So you are exceeding every expectation. So I’m very, very happy that you’re here. And thank you
0:24:57 for making the time to be here. You mentioned this radical self-care and having written a lot
0:25:03 about radical self-care and what a contrast that is to your early experiences or earlier experiences
0:25:10 in life. Was there or is there a particular catalyzing event that brought radical self-care
0:25:16 into focus as a imperative for you? Well, two things spring to mind. I mean, I could write a
0:25:23 whole book on the dark night of the soul. And every book I’ve written is about it to some degree,
0:25:31 but it’s my favorite topic. And I just had a million dark nights of the soul while I was drinking
0:25:37 and using. And usually the solution then was to have eight or nine social vodka and maybe a
0:25:44 little amyl nitrate just to socialize. But then in 1986, the fourth of July weekend,
0:25:51 I had a three-day blackout, which is so unfair. I’m not kidding, because usually you have a
0:25:56 blackout and, you know, it’s like a wet chalkboard eraser has come by and there’s nothing left on
0:26:01 the chalkboard of what you did that evening. And it’s very scary, but usually they don’t happen
0:26:10 all that often. I had three in a row, July 4th, July 5th, and July 6th. And I woke up in terror
0:26:18 the morning of July 7th. And I had run out of any more good ideas. All I could think of was how I
0:26:25 could figure out a way to learn to drink more successfully. And I knew that I wasn’t going
0:26:30 to be able to break that code. And I was already a believer. I mean, I’ve pretty much been a believer
0:26:36 my whole life. I already had a church by then. I was just done. I’d reached the end of my rope.
0:26:42 That’s what the dark night is. You’ve run out of any more good ideas. And in that space of total
0:26:50 emptiness and lostness, I was lost and something found me. And I have to think of it as grace.
0:27:01 I understand grace to be spiritual WD-40. And that it stretches you. Maybe a really quick
0:27:07 spritz or maybe you get that little thin red straw inserted into you and you get a sustained
0:27:14 spritz of it. But it was like water wings. I suddenly understood that I wasn’t going to sink
0:27:19 completely, but that I needed a lot of help. And that was the hugest breakthrough for me.
0:27:27 Well, the help I got first, I got a couple of sober women who said, “I have what you have.”
0:27:34 And I found a way out one day at a time, not drinking just for the day. And if your ass falls
0:27:41 off, we can help pick it up and carry it to where we are and we’ll sit together and we’ll
0:27:45 share our truth. And you won’t have to drink for the rest of the day and we’ll help you get through
0:27:53 the day just without a butt. The amazing thing about grace is that it meets you exactly where you are
0:27:59 and then it doesn’t leave you where it found you. It sort of tricks you into getting into its wheel
0:28:05 barrel and then it moves you to someplace where maybe there’s just a shaft of light or maybe
0:28:12 there’s cool water. And the cool water I found was other sober people. But that was the darkest
0:28:20 night I can remember. And then here’s a recent example. My son and his son live here in a barn
0:28:26 on the property and his son lives with him half time and with the child’s mother half time. And
0:28:33 I was in major, major people pleasing and I was dancing as fast as I could to make sure
0:28:38 everybody’s needs were met. And I was taking the leftovers and the broken egg yolks and I was
0:28:45 exhausted. I was in existential exhaustion and it had been going on for a while. And I finally,
0:28:50 I know, I shared it with my older brother who’d stopped by who’s a fundamentalist Christian and he
0:28:55 sort of basically done the equivalent of handing me some nice Christian bumper sticker about how
0:29:00 God never gives you more than you can handle, which I think is a total crock. And I think what
0:29:05 you got to do with God is to convince him that you really can’t bear all that much. Like when
0:29:09 you deal with a trainer at the gym, you don’t want them to know how much you can lift. I guess
0:29:14 they’ll make you lift it and that what you have to do is instead to just pretend you can’t and hint
0:29:20 at liability from another gym you went to where they made you lift too much. When my brother handed
0:29:28 me this stupid word bumper sticker, I lost it. And I said to him, like one of the cone heads,
0:29:34 I said, “I have to go right this minute now and go for a ride. I have an errand to do.” And my older
0:29:41 brother looked at me like, “What?” And I got in my car and I drove out to the woods and screaming
0:29:48 and shouting and pounding the steering wheel and saying, “I hate you, Sam. I hate you.”
0:29:55 To his mother, “I hate you, John. Who’s my older brother? I hate you, mom and dad. You taught me
0:30:01 that I’m a piece of shit unless I’m getting A’s and unless the entire world.” And I hated everybody.
0:30:08 And it was half hour. I turned around, half hour, same record. And then finally I pulled over to
0:30:14 Ciderode and I called my spiritual mentor whose name is Horrible Bonnie and that’s what I call her
0:30:21 anyway. And I said, “I hate, I cannot stand it. All I do is be there for everybody else.”
0:30:27 And I get nothing. And I went on and on and she listened, which is the miracle that somebody
0:30:33 listens and they don’t try to save or rescue or fix you or horse you into submission to what they
0:30:40 think would be a good path for you. And she said, “Annie, this is what we paid for. This is where I
0:30:47 hoped you would get someday.” And I wasn’t in cute, adorable crying. I was in red faced, swollen
0:30:53 nose, carol, mauled and snotty crying. I said, “No, but I don’t have any, I don’t have, I’ve tried
0:30:59 everything, blah, blah, blah, blah.” She let me cry and she said, “You are, everybody else is your
0:31:04 priority, that your son and your grandson and your mom and your relatives and that your best friends
0:31:09 and that your people at church and the blah, blah, that everybody else is taking care of and you get
0:31:16 leftovers.” And it was the darkest, snottyest, wettest, dark night of the soul. And it wasn’t
0:31:22 like God reached down with this magic or his or her magic wand and tapped me. It really hurt.
0:31:28 I was really angry about what I’ve put up with. And I was sad and angry and freaked out and we
0:31:34 just stayed on the phone. And then all of a sudden I could breathe again. And I drove back to my house
0:31:39 and I became my own priority. And my older brother was there and he goes, “Hi, you seem kind of…”
0:31:43 I said, “Oh, no, I didn’t, you know, oh, no, I’m fine.” And frantic effort took care of me.
0:31:50 But from that point on, I can tell you what date that was because three months later I met the
0:31:57 man who became my husband. I did three months of this radical self-love of being my own priority,
0:32:02 of letting everybody else take the leftovers, of putting myself first, of structuring my days
0:32:09 around what would make me happiest, what I needed to do and what I hope to do and what I love to do.
0:32:14 And then I would find time for everybody else. And three months to the day later,
0:32:20 I met Neil for our first coffee date. And that was five years ago. We haven’t been apart
0:32:26 for a day since. So that was the most recent dark night of the soul. My son, who’s right here,
0:32:32 had a very long stretch of math and alcohol where I thought he would die. That was the most
0:32:37 terrifying thing to think I could lose him because he’s my outside heart. You know,
0:32:42 I think children are our outside heart. And I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t fix him. I couldn’t
0:32:48 rescue him. I couldn’t really help him. But the dark night of our soul was that he had a two-year-old
0:32:55 child. He had a baby at 19. And the mom and my grandchild were living with me. And Sam was around,
0:33:01 but he had a house in the Tenderloin. He had an apartment and he showed up wasted. And I had reached
0:33:07 my bottom. That’s what the dark night is. You’ve run out of any more good ideas. And so what I did
0:33:13 was I took a sharpened pencil and I held it to his throat. I mean, this does not jive with my
0:33:21 spiritual books, my persona and my being. And I said, “You’re as bad as any junkie I know.
0:33:27 And you cannot be back on this property with your baby if you so much as have a hit of marijuana.”
0:33:33 And we just looked at each other. And he looked at me like with such hatred. And for your child to
0:33:39 hate you is about as bad as it ever gets. And then I got some sort of Holy Spirit nudge or
0:33:45 something, you know, the great universal spirit. And I said, “Do you want to ride back to the city
0:33:49 and to the Tenderloin?” I don’t know if you know what the Tenderloin is.
0:33:53 Oh, I do. I live in San Francisco a long time, but a lot of people don’t. So could you describe it,
0:33:59 please? It’s not lovely. It’s where all the crackheads and heroin are. It’s a really deprived,
0:34:07 depleted, addicted, prostitute, pimp, terrible, terrible place. And anyway, so I drove him back
0:34:14 to his house and he got out of the car and he hated me. And I walked over to him and I reached
0:34:20 for him. I took a chance. You know, they say courage is fear that has set its prayers.
0:34:25 We hadn’t said a word in the car. It’s an hour drive. And I just kept praying in silence in the
0:34:32 car and we stood together and I reached for him and he reached for me. And I said, “I’ll see you.”
0:34:38 And he said, “I’ll see you.” And then he called me three weeks later and he said, “I’ve got a week
0:34:43 clean and sober.” And the guys who could actually be there for him, which was not his incredibly
0:34:49 crazy mother who had had it, these guys in San Francisco who were clean and sober had fished
0:34:54 him out of the trough, you know. And one day at a time had helped him get clean and sober. And he
0:35:01 has had a drink or a drug for 10 years now. So those three things that I’ve described are the
0:35:06 darkest nights of the soul that I’ve been to. But the thing with Sam and with my child in general
0:35:12 is that I had thought up till then that I had some really, I have a disease of good ideas,
0:35:18 usually for other people. And I believe that my ideas will really help them have better lives
0:35:24 and at least make me less uncomfortable when I’m around them. And I learned that my help was not
0:35:32 helpful to Sam and that help is the sunny side of control. And I was trying to control him and
0:35:38 that was making him worse. And I still, you know, I’m 67, he’s going to be 32 this year. I still,
0:35:45 he’s on his hero’s journey with his podcast, “Hello Humans” that you’ve listened to. And he’s doing
0:35:51 a beautiful job. And I would still like to get on his hero’s journey, just maybe 10 feet behind him
0:35:57 with juice box and sunscreen, maybe, and just be there in case he needs me. But when I do that,
0:36:02 it’s injuring him. It’s not helping him. It’s certainly not helping me. But what I have to do
0:36:07 is this, the awareness that I’m doing it again and grip myself gently by the wrist and say, “Annie,
0:36:15 stop. Get back onto your own emotional acre. He’s doing great. He is a miracle.”
0:36:21 That’s what has come from the Dark Knights are the greatest truths I know, that my help is not
0:36:29 helpful, that when I’m in the darkest, most scared place on earth, if I can not try to do the forward
0:36:35 thrust and try to redecorate the abyss, then I’m going to get blushing and light and I’m going to
0:36:44 get fresh air. And my life is, if I can tough it out or let somebody into it with me and breathe
0:36:50 and do left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, then my world is going to become more spacious.
0:36:57 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:38:18 And now, Josh Waitzkin, best-selling author of The Art of Learning, an inner journey to
0:38:24 optimal performance, a trainer of elite mental performers in business and finance, an eight-time
0:38:32 national chess champion, a two-time world champion in Tai Chi Chuan push hands, and the first Brazilian
0:38:39 Jujitsu black belt under nine-time world champion, Marcelo Garcia. You can learn more about Josh and
0:38:47 his projects at joshwaitzkin.com. Joshua. Yes, Tim Bo. Welcome back, buddy. I’m so happy to be here.
0:38:53 I’m thrilled you’re here, man. I’m hanging with you. And I thought we could maybe start just for
0:38:57 the complete non-sequitur, which is a book you just mentioned to me that I know nothing about,
0:39:02 which is Dreaming Yourself Awake. Can you talk about this? Oh, I didn’t think we’re going to begin
0:39:07 here. It’s a book that I explored a couple years ago. 20 years ago, I started studying
0:39:13 Tibetan dream yoga and lucid dreaming, not deeply, but exploring. And this was during the period where
0:39:17 I was first getting involved with my Sadevi’s Asian philosophy. And then a dear friend of mine
0:39:22 recommended this book. It’s actually funny. We kind of made a mistake together. I recommended
0:39:27 another book that he texted back confirming that it was the name. He texted me back that name that
0:39:32 I didn’t intend, but then I picked up and read and it was extraordinary. It’s just a phenomenal
0:39:37 discussion, very systematic discussion of the art of lucid dreaming in this way that fuses
0:39:44 East Asian philosophy with Western science. And you were competing then at the time. You were
0:39:47 in the midst of competition. Two years ago, you mean? Oh, this was two years ago. Yeah,
0:39:51 this was two years ago. Oh, I said 20 years ago. 20 years ago was when I started studying East Asian
0:39:55 philosophy. I got it. I was competing in chess then and then to the martial arts.
0:39:59 I need a little more caffeine. Working on it. You’ve had a rough night. And I wanted to thank
0:40:04 you. I’m just, this is like Tim’s stream of consciousness podcast intro. We’re looking
0:40:11 at a slack line. This is an indoor gibbon classic slack. It’s about 12. No, not even 10 feet long,
0:40:19 maybe we have it’s surrounded by kettlebells and Indoboard and a triceratops, which I don’t think
0:40:25 is yours. Got the bozu ball there and the bozu ball. And that I want to thank you for actually
0:40:30 getting me to bite the bullet and grab a slack line, which I set up on Long Island. Yeah, absolutely.
0:40:35 I’ve loved, I’ve had some fun on your slack line on Long Island too. I love, right now I’m in the
0:40:40 period, you know, I kind of oscillate between these and my son, Jack was four and a half. We have a
0:40:43 great time. I’m on the Indoboard rock and he’s on the bozu ball. We’re having a catch back and
0:40:49 forth while on these things. We’re always integrating these interesting kinds of physiological
0:40:54 awareness training. Speaking of which, I feel like maybe we should throw a cautionary tale
0:41:01 into this follow up podcast. So we obviously trade stories and findings all the time. Would you like
0:41:10 to talk about your recent experience with Wim Hof and breathing training? Wow. Yeah. Well,
0:41:16 had an extremely scary experience. Some of a lifetime meditator and kind of experimental subject
0:41:20 like yourself around all these things. You tend to have better self preservation instead. I tend
0:41:27 to, although I’ve had a lot of close calls in life. When I heard you speak to Wim, I was extremely
0:41:30 intrigued. Actually, when I heard someone mention Wim to you on your podcast, and then we spoke
0:41:34 about it, then you spoke to Wim, I thought he sounded like a fascinating guy. I started digging
0:41:39 into his work, so powerful. And I started doing, he’s going through his course, his online course.
0:41:44 I loved it. I mean, the energetic feeling, the electric surging through the body. I’m also a
0:41:48 lifetime freediver since I was four, five years old. I’ve been freediving and so breath hold.
0:41:52 And just to put that in perspective, I mean, you spend about a month a year in the water.
0:41:56 Used to be, used to be three months when I was younger. Now it’s about, yeah,
0:42:00 diving usually about a month of the year. But I spent a lot of time now, as we know, surfing,
0:42:04 stand-up paddle surfing, swimming, diving. I mean, ocean is a huge part of my life. We had to talk
0:42:07 about our stand-up paddle adventures together. Those are pretty hilarious. We’ll definitely come
0:42:11 to that. Timbo and I have been having some fun with that. But I started playing with the Wim Hof
0:42:16 method and I thought it was incredibly powerful. The intensity that you’re experiencing internally,
0:42:21 it’s very similar to training in Tai Chi, Tai Chi Chuan moving meditation for 10,
0:42:26 15, 20 years, and then being an hour long into a session. And you have this feeling of energetic
0:42:30 flow inside your body with the Wim Hof. You do, you know, a few rounds of his breath method and
0:42:33 you’re experiencing these things. And it was incredible that the gain and strength were
0:42:38 mind-boggling, the length of the breath holds were fascinating. But then I made a big technical
0:42:43 error. I ignored all the signs on Wim’s site and that you spoke about, you know, do not do this
0:42:47 in water, which is, they were all over the place. But I thought, you know, freediving is a way of
0:42:52 life for me, no problem. And the major technical error was not realizing, which is absurd after
0:42:56 a lifetime of freediving, that it’s carbon dioxide buildup that gives you the urge to breathe and
0:43:02 not oxygen deprivation. Hugely important thing. Please, everyone, burn that in. It’s CO2 buildup
0:43:08 that makes you want to breathe. And so I did the, after a long swim at the NYU pool a few months ago,
0:43:13 I started doing my Wim breathing and did a series of underwater swims. I did about eight, 25 meter
0:43:18 swims. And I think it was on my fourth 50 underwater. And I, this was after a long workout.
0:43:23 And I went from this ecstatic state to unconsciousness. And I was actually on the bottom of the pool
0:43:27 after blacking out from shallow water blackout for three minutes before someone pulled me out.
0:43:32 And, you know, the doctors have told me usually it’s 40 seconds to a minute to
0:43:37 perhaps permanent brain damage death. I got very lucky. My body saved my life. And they said that
0:43:41 if I hadn’t been off all the training I’ve done for so many years, I would have been gone.
0:43:46 And more specifically, you correct me for wrong, you didn’t for, and this strikes me as so odd,
0:43:54 you didn’t have the reflexive inhalation of water. Is that right? Yeah, I didn’t take any water into
0:43:59 my lungs, which is hugely fortunate because fresh water in the lungs can be terrible. So my lungs
0:44:03 had no water in it pretty much after they pulled me out. I was unconscious for 25 minutes. I started
0:44:07 breathing on my own though. When I came to 25 minutes later and I was blue everywhere else,
0:44:12 my body sent all my, all the blood to my brain and my heart saved my life. And I’m here. And it’s
0:44:18 been, it was a life changer on a lot of levels. You know, the idea of my four year old boy four
0:44:21 blocks away sitting on the rug waiting for daddy to come home and me on, you know, unconscious on
0:44:28 the bottom of a pool blue, just that’s the kind of experience that is shattering. How did that
0:44:33 change? How you think about training and these types of experiments or life in general? I know
0:44:37 it’s a very broad question. How does it change your decision making? Well, first of all, how it’s
0:44:43 influenced my life in general is I’ve never lived with such a consistent sense of gratitude,
0:44:46 beauty and love in my life. It’s just flowing through my body,
0:44:51 presence to the exquisite little ripples of beauty and everything I do. And a sense of
0:44:56 gratitude for the little things. It sounds cliched, but it’s embodied and I really feel it. And in
0:45:02 terms of that’s something I’m really grateful for. It’s exquisite. You know, my little boy,
0:45:08 my wife is pregnant, another son coming in June. And it’s made me rethink these questions of risk.
0:45:12 But on the other hand, it’s been very important not to oversteer. I mean, one of the most important
0:45:16 learning lessons that I’ve learned for myself and training elite mental performers is people
0:45:21 oversteer all the time. They over calibrate. And so I’ve been very careful to sit with this and try
0:45:25 to draw the right lessons out of it. Not the wrong and not too big a lesson and not too small
0:45:29 lesson. And so for example, this was a huge technical oversight I had. I didn’t realize
0:45:33 I was taking a big risk here. And there’s a lot of big risks that I’ve taken in life, some with you.
0:45:39 And I think I’m actually pretty good at navigating those, but I’ve been thinking about them quite a
0:45:43 bit. And, of course, cognizant of the level of danger, risk. But of course, it’s very important
0:45:47 for me to be cognizant in a group risk, because we’ve discussed it’s important to be present to
0:45:49 your own level and the level of everyone else around you. We can get into some of those.
0:45:54 You don’t get into that. But I’ve been really sitting with this. Since I was a really young boy,
0:45:58 I started playing chess when I was six years old. And by the time I was seven, I was the top
0:46:02 ranked player. So I had in the country, so I had all this pressure on me. And a big part of the
0:46:09 way that I found my therapy was flow. Can you explain that? Yeah, like when I was under huge
0:46:13 pressure, external pressure for this little boy, you know, my style as a chess player was to create
0:46:18 chaos. I loved the game. I love the battle of chess. Attacking chess. Right. Right. Attacking
0:46:21 chess. And most players, you know, when they have a lot of pressure on them in the scholastic
0:46:25 chess world, for example, and it’s true in many fields, they learn how to memorize their way to
0:46:30 victory. Right. They find shortcuts to getting good fast and be controlling the game all the
0:46:33 way. They think about reading points and think about rankings. They think about winning. They
0:46:38 have parental pressures. They have, you know, school pressures. They have sometimes publicity
0:46:41 pressures as they’re doing well. So they want to control their way. I had a different approach.
0:46:45 I like to mix it up. You know, I grew up playing in Washington Square Park with the hustlers
0:46:51 who taught me to battle. It fit my personality. And it was, you know, a core part of my competitive
0:46:57 style to create chaos and find hidden harmonies and find flow in chaos. And as I’ve reflected on
0:47:06 this in recent years, a big part of how I’ve dealt with stresses has been to put myself into a flow
0:47:11 state. And this is an element of risk that I’ve been thinking about. It’s different when you’re
0:47:15 20 and 25 and 30 years old as a professional competitor or professional fighter. And then,
0:47:20 you know, now I’m 39 years old, dad, which is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life,
0:47:25 being a father. And I’m so committed to it. So I have to be quite cognizant of the distinction,
0:47:32 for example, between, between risk competitively and risk mortally. When you’re playing chess,
0:47:35 it feels like life and death. It really does feel like life and death. When you lose a
0:47:39 chess game, it feels like you’ve been shattered on the most fundamental level. And so I was
0:47:43 quite comfortable mixing it up profoundly, creating chaos. And I’d be willing to take those risks.
0:47:48 But actually, it isn’t life and death, right? And then when you’re a professional fighter,
0:47:52 martial artist, you know, you can break arms and legs in a second if you’re if you’re not in deep
0:47:57 focus, or you can break your neck. But again, the stakes are it’s you out there. And then when
0:48:01 you’re a dad, it’s a little bit different, right? And like when you’re surfing or when you’re rock
0:48:05 climbing or whatever you’re doing, it’s an extreme state. So it’s very important for me to be clear
0:48:11 about the distinction between what felt like life and death as a chess player and why actually is
0:48:16 life and death metaphorical and literal, right? And then there’s the state of being someone who’s
0:48:20 found deep flow as the ultimate therapy. There are a number of different questions I want to ask
0:48:27 related to everything you just said. The first is how do you initiate or facilitate a flow state?
0:48:32 And how would you describe it? Maybe we could hit that first? Well, I’ve had a lot of different
0:48:37 ways of playing this over the years. For me, I can describe it in terms of myself and I can then
0:48:43 we can go into how when I train people how I’d work with them. Great. For me, love has been a
0:48:49 huge part of flow. You know, I fell in love with chess and I found flow in the self expression
0:48:55 through an art form that I absolutely loved. And I think this is really important with children to
0:48:59 find something that they feel connected to and that they can express themselves through. They
0:49:03 can bring out the essence of their being through some art. And then there was tremendous competitive
0:49:07 intensity. And of course, stretching yourself to your limit is a huge part of it’s a very important
0:49:11 precondition to flow. And I was always playing as people who were at my level or above. And so I
0:49:15 was always stretched. And then I was integrating in my teenage years, sort of integrating meditation
0:49:20 to my practice, right? So I got very good at increasing my somatic awareness, my physiological
0:49:24 introspective sensitivity. I began to feel the subtle ripples of quality in my process. I could
0:49:28 feel when I moved from a nine or a 10 out of 10 down to back down to a nine or eight. You’re talking
0:49:34 about in the meditation itself. In like through my meditation practice, you became more tactily
0:49:39 sensitive when doing push hands or some other type of practice, chess initially, chess and then into
0:49:46 push hands, right? Why is the tactile component important in chess? I think it’s hugely important
0:49:51 in mental disciplines. So for example, you know, in chess and today, a lot of what I do today is
0:49:55 I have this laboratory of training elite mental performers, largely in finance investors.
0:50:00 And a huge part of the training is in their physiological introspective sensitivity. That’s
0:50:06 the their somatic awareness. That’s the foundational training. Why? Well, first of all,
0:50:11 we can’t just separate our mind in our body. Totally. Cartesian duality makes, right? I mean,
0:50:18 this is your way of life as well. But we intuitively can feel things way before we are
0:50:22 consciously aware of them, right? The chess player always senses danger before he sees it,
0:50:26 just like, you know, the hunter will sense the shark or the jaguar before he’ll see it and he’ll
0:50:31 look for it. So the chess player’s process is often to be studying a position to sense opportunity
0:50:36 or danger, and then to start looking for it, deconstruct what it is and then find what it
0:50:40 probably is and then start calculating, right? But that sense comes before. Or if you’re a great
0:50:44 decision maker, if you’re an investor, you can sense danger, right? You can sense opportunity.
0:50:51 But you need to have still your waters internally to feel the subtle changes inside of you
0:50:56 that would be opportunity or the crystallization of complex ideas or danger or instead of a cognitive
0:51:00 bias, for example, which is hugely important as a chess player or as an investor or as anything
0:51:04 else. You know, this is one of the areas where we’ve had this ongoing dialogue and our friendship
0:51:08 around what I call armchair professors, philosophologists. Right, philosophologists. Yes.
0:51:12 So the people, this is a, the philosophologist is the term of Robert Persig, the author of
0:51:16 Zen and the Artemisical Maintenance is one of my favorite books and thinkers. He’s a friend of mine.
0:51:21 You know, the difference between the philosopher and the philosophologist is what Tim is referring
0:51:28 to, or the writer and the literary critic or the man in the arena and the armchair professor.
0:51:32 Or Remy from Ratatouille and Anton Ego. Okay, I don’t know that one. Who’s the food critic?
0:51:38 Okay, yeah. There it is. Good. Yes. There it is. And so when we think about, for example, cognitive
0:51:43 biases, the academics who study cognitive biases, who speak about them. And just for people who have
0:51:48 no context on cognitive biases, an example to like the sunk cost fallacy. Right. I’ve spent this
0:51:53 amount, therefore I should put good money after bad because I feel like I’ve, I need to somehow try
0:51:58 to salvage this money that I’ve put into a given position. Right. I just wanted to give people
0:52:04 some examples. And who, we’ve had a number of meals with them. There’s a gent would think twice.
0:52:07 What was the author’s name again? Do you recall? Mabusan. Yeah, Michael Mobusan is who you’re
0:52:11 thinking about. Mobusan. There we are. For people interested. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah.
0:52:16 And so one of the interesting things about the dialogue, the academic dialogue of cognitive
0:52:22 biases is that there’s the idea that the biases have to operate completely separately from the
0:52:25 intuitive process. We have an intuitive process. And then we have to go through a checklist of
0:52:30 cognitive biases. In my experience, really high level thinkers have integrated cognitive biases
0:52:34 or an awareness of cognitive biases into their intuitive process. Right. So this is a constant
0:52:39 process. We’ve discussed this a couple of years ago, actually, where you’re, you’re deconstructing
0:52:44 technical awareness into something that, and so this process, for example, of building a pyramid
0:52:47 of knowledge, we have a certain technical foundation, we have a high level intuitive leap,
0:52:51 we can then deconstruct the intuitive leap into something that we can understand technically
0:52:54 and replicate technically. And then we’re raising our foundation of higher and higher
0:52:58 level intuitive leaps. Right. This is this pyramid of knowledge, which in my, in my process
0:53:04 is built upon by the intuitive leaps are what’s guiding it. Similarly, we can learn how to take
0:53:09 technical material and integrate it into our intuitive understanding, but we aren’t going to
0:53:14 intuit the cognitive bias. We’re going to intuit the feeling that it corresponds.
0:53:18 The corresponds with the bias being present. And so we think with this relative to the language,
0:53:22 again, Robert Persig, I like the language of dynamic versus static quality. If you think about
0:53:27 the timeline in a competitive state, for example, in a chess game, there’s a certain objective
0:53:31 truth to a chess position. If you go, that is a timeline, which is moving. I think about Persig’s
0:53:35 term of being at the front of the freight train of reality, right? Freight train is pushing through
0:53:38 dynamic qualities right at the front of that freight train. Think about that as a timeline.
0:53:42 And then the other is the chess player’s mind studying the position. When the chess player is
0:53:47 present to the position, it’s continuing. You’re just running parallel to the truth of the position,
0:53:51 to the dynamic quality of the position. But if something changes, you make a slight mistake,
0:53:54 you move from having a slight advantage to a slight disadvantage, but you’re emotionally
0:53:59 still connected, attached to having the slight advantage. Then what’s going to be happened is
0:54:03 that you’re sort of stopping. Your dynamic quality is becoming static. But the timeline
0:54:06 of the chess position is continuing. The game is continuing. But what’s going to happen then
0:54:10 is that you’re going to subtly reject positions that you should accept. And you’re going to stretch
0:54:14 for positions that you can’t for evaluations that you can’t really reach. And you’re going to fall
0:54:18 into a downward spiral. That’s the onset of a cognitive bias. In that case, the cognitive bias
0:54:24 would relate to the emotional clinging to a past evaluation. But if you had the present state
0:54:28 awareness, which you trained through different tools and approaches that you use with these
0:54:32 elite performers, for instance, you would sense the feeling of that cognitive dissonance and not
0:54:37 get caught up in sort of the slipstream of that dislocation. Exactly. And the way that you would
0:54:44 sense that, in this case, is that you would feel the slip away from dynamic quality. And then you
0:54:48 would deconstruct that feeling. And then you would see what the bias is at setting in. So this is
0:54:52 really important to say, right? It’s not that we’re going to intuitively develop the ability to know
0:54:57 exactly what bias might be setting in the moment. But we’re going to cultivate the ability to have
0:55:01 presence, right? I think about cultivating quality as a way of life, cultivating presence as a way
0:55:04 of life in little moments and small when we’re holding our babies, when we’re reading a book,
0:55:08 when we’re having a conversation with a friend, when we’re meditating. How do you help people to
0:55:15 identify that feeling to become more sensitized to it? And just as a, as a, maybe not a counter
0:55:21 example, but an example of not listening to intuition or instinct. So we were both in
0:55:27 Costa Rica recently doing paddleboarding. Last meal, last meal of the trip, we go out to celebrate,
0:55:34 we go to this seafood restaurant, food comes out, it’s a Sunday. And I leaned over the plate and
0:55:40 smelled the food and immediately knew that it was something I shouldn’t eat. And despite that,
0:55:45 you know, everybody’s ordering drinks, everybody’s celebrating, went into the food and about a third
0:55:50 of the way through, I stopped and I just pushed the plate away. And then lo and behold, everybody
0:55:56 gets severe, severe food poisoning, except for the two people who, I guess we tried to narrow
0:56:01 it down to whether it was the garlic dip or any number of other things. But yeah, we were,
0:56:06 we were on the toilet each like every five minutes for the next 12 hours minimum.
0:56:09 And the great part of it is you and I were joining bedrooms, we were sharing the same toilet. So that
0:56:13 was a hell of a night. And we never saw each other. It was amazing. But I heard that flushing
0:56:18 happening. It was a brutal experience. I remember watching you sniffing, you had this
0:56:22 like expression of concern come over you at the dinner table. And like I saw that moment,
0:56:26 maybe I wasn’t present enough to you and you didn’t, it’s a great example of you didn’t fully
0:56:32 trust your gut. But you were right on is amazing. Or I felt a sort of social pressure to conform and
0:56:38 not rock the boat. So how do you help someone say in the world of investing just as an example,
0:56:46 develop, not only develop the sensitivity to separate that signal from the noise,
0:56:51 but also to actually listen to it, right? These are two different points, right? So let’s talk
0:56:54 about developing it and then let’s talk about listening to it because they’re both so hugely
0:57:00 important. And I’d frame them both thematically in different ways. And I’d build training systems
0:57:04 around them both that would be quite different. So when we’re thinking about cultivating the
0:57:11 awareness, I mean, I think that a lot of this relates to a return to a more natural state.
0:57:15 This isn’t so much about learning as unlearning. Agreed. Getting out of our own way, releasing
0:57:19 obstructions. I think about the training process as the movement toward unobstructed self-expression,
0:57:23 right? Obstructedness. We have so many habits that are fundamentally blocking us, right? From
0:57:27 the phone addictions. People are constantly distracted. People don’t have the ability to
0:57:31 sit in empty space anymore. People are bombarded by inputs all the time. They’re in a constantly
0:57:36 reactive state. So one way that you could frame this out is cultivating a way of life which
0:57:40 is fundamentally proactive in little things and big. And you can build day architectures that
0:57:44 are fundamentally proactive. But then getting into the weeds a little bit more, I think it’s
0:57:50 most foundational to develop a mindfulness practice, to cultivate the ability to sense
0:57:55 the most subtle ripples of human experience. Now, I’ve been trying to onboard people in,
0:57:59 specifically in the finance space, for example, into meditation for a bit over eight years now.
0:58:02 Initially, I would just try to get guys to meditate. They’d look at me like I was crazy.
0:58:07 Then what I realized, I had this breakthrough, which was that I had them start doing stress
0:58:13 and recovery interval training. So oscillating heart rate between 170s and 140s say, so let’s
0:58:17 say someone does a six or eight or 10 minute warm up and then they’re on a heart rate interval doing
0:58:20 some kind of cardio bike or whatever, moving their heart rate up and down between 170s and
0:58:25 140s when they become aware of the quality of their focus on their breath during their recovery
0:58:31 intervals, enhancing their ability to lower their heart rate more quickly. And they start to feel
0:58:35 their heart rate, listen to it. When that awareness would kick in, I’d start, I’d layer in meditation.
0:58:39 And the on ramp was just much more successful people just, and then what I started to refine that
0:58:43 with is, is biofeedback. So now what I’ll do is I’ll have them do the stress and recovery interval
0:58:47 training, then I’ll have them do some form of biofeedback, often with, for example,
0:58:52 heart rate variability through heart math or working with a specialist. And then when they begin to
0:58:58 have a certain kind of consistency of their ability to, to enhance their emotional regulation,
0:59:04 to observe these subtle ripples between stress and coherence. And you can see the biometric data,
0:59:08 then you layer in meditation and then the on ramp is even more powerful. And so then they
0:59:12 embedded layer in a meditation practice. I think headspace is a wonderful tool for
0:59:18 layering in meditation. And I think for a lot of people also starting with headspace before bed is
0:59:25 another kind of gateway drug approach to then building into or leading into the morning meditation,
0:59:29 which a lot of people have trouble with because they wake up, they feel rushed. It’s another thing
0:59:34 to layer in on top of the brushing of the teeth, the getting the kids ready, etc. And so sometimes
0:59:38 the evening approach, but I agreed that headspace is really useful. And I think it’s really important,
0:59:43 I think, I think you’re absolutely right there. And I think it’s really important to have a core
0:59:49 meditation practice, which is at least in the beginning in the conditions in your life that
0:59:53 are most conducive to deep focus and to not being distracted. Later in life, we want to be able to
0:59:59 tap our meditation under complete in chaos. But we want to cultivate it initially in the most
1:00:04 peaceful time possible. So if you have kids waking up before the kids are up or in the evening once
1:00:08 they’re asleep, or if you don’t have kids, then life is much simpler. Or during your commute,
1:00:13 I’ve found a lot of people who will just like throw on headspace or some song that they meditate to
1:00:17 and they know they have 20 minutes on the subway. And it’s like, all right, that’s my 20 minutes.
1:00:22 Right. I enjoy meditating on the commute a lot personally. You’ve been meditating for a long time.
1:00:26 I mean, I’m not sure how you feel about this. I find that if people can have the first two,
1:00:31 three months of meditation practice in a quiet room, then if they start doing it in their commute,
1:00:35 they’ve sort of built the foundation of it in this really quiet space.
1:00:40 I think from what I can tell, it appears to depend a lot on what type of concentrator you are. And
1:00:47 what I mean by that is if you look at writers, for instance, there’s some writers who want to be
1:00:54 in a quiet environment in order to hear whatever the muse is whispering. And they’ll go to a library,
1:00:58 they’ll go to someplace like that. I can’t do that. For whatever reason, I thrive in noisy
1:01:05 environments because if I have the noise, I feel like it forces me to focus inward. So for me,
1:01:11 studying languages even in a loud environment, writing in a loud environment, for whatever
1:01:18 reason is a forcing function for me. But I can definitely see why for even perhaps a majority
1:01:22 of people, it would be, I think it’s partially due to the fact that for instance, I’m looking at your
1:01:27 wall right now and the fact that that picture is tilted like five degrees to the right is
1:01:32 making me totally bonkers. You think we should fix it? We fix it. This is training for me.
1:01:39 Look at that. The rest of the time. But the same is true auditorily. So if I have a controlled
1:01:47 noise like music or the chuk-a-chuk-a-chuk of the car in the subway, I can focus on that repetitive
1:01:53 noise. But if I’m sitting in a space that I want to be quiet and I have that controlling
1:01:58 aspect of my personality trying to impose itself on something I can’t control, and then there’s
1:02:03 like somebody hitting reverse in a truck and I can hear that outside, it will drive me nuts.
1:02:12 Long observation to a short comment, but I do think that if you can drop in in a quiet environment,
1:02:16 the point being, as you said, I think to stack the deck in the beginning, like learn how to do
1:02:23 this in a controlled, unstressful environment, and then you can ratchet up over time to when you
1:02:28 can use it in the most stressful of environments. Because we don’t ultimately want to be meditating
1:02:32 in a flower garden. We want to be able to meditate and have a meditative state throughout our life
1:02:37 in a hurricane, in a thunderstorm, when sharks are attacking you any moment.
1:02:44 Paddleboarding, when you’re paddleboarding the last day on a first trip, and Josh is like, “You’ll
1:02:51 be fine,” and then three leashes snap, and all hell breaks loose. That’s a long story. The killer
1:02:56 set comes in. So that’s just the little context here. Timbo and I have been on this great adventure,
1:03:00 stand up paddle surfing, taking it on together, and we found this, we got a great friend down in
1:03:05 Costa Rica, Eric Antonsen, who actually has the other podcast other than yours that listened to
1:03:10 in life, the Paddlewook. Eric’s awesome. He’s a great dude. He runs the Blue Zone Sup. He’s a
1:03:14 brilliant teacher, really fascinating mind, deconstructing, stand up paddle surfing on
1:03:18 increasingly small boards for us, and we’ve been going out there. We’ve had some hilarious close
1:03:24 calls. The last trip a couple weeks ago, we almost destroyed each other. There’s this one
1:03:30 like witching hour where the juju is really weird. Almost everybody either got decapitated,
1:03:35 impaled by a board, or just head on jousting collision, which is what.
1:03:39 But the point that you bring up, I think, is right on about meditation, that when you’re
1:03:43 building training programs for elite mental performers, the most important thing is to
1:03:48 understand them so deeply and build programs that are unique to their funk, embrace their funk.
1:03:54 That’s a term, my buddy Graham, who’s a dear friend of ours who comes on our surf adventures
1:03:58 with us. He’s a brilliant thought partner. Embrace the funk. Could you explain that?
1:04:02 Yeah, we have to embrace our funk. We have to figure out, you think about the entanglement of
1:04:06 genius and madness, right? Or brilliance and eccentricity. Understanding that entanglement
1:04:10 is always a precursor to working with anybody who’s trying to be world-class at something,
1:04:15 because that entanglement is fundamental to their being. And they have to ultimately embrace
1:04:20 their funk, embrace their eccentricity, embrace what makes them different, and then build on it,
1:04:23 right? And so we think about self-expression. It’s not trying to take everyone and put them
1:04:27 into the same mold. It’s trying to understand someone very deeply and build a training program,
1:04:31 a way of life that helps them bring out the essence of their being through their art,
1:04:35 whatever their art is. I mean, and that’s how I relate to the path to excellence in
1:04:39 chess and martial arts, in different arts, very actively in the investing space. When I work in
1:04:45 education with children through my nonprofit, it’s again the movement to unobstructed self-expression.
1:04:49 But the problem is the teachers don’t listen. They don’t know how to listen, right? They don’t
1:04:54 know how to sit or parents to sit in empty space and observe the nuance of their child’s mind or
1:04:58 their student’s mind, and then build a way of life around that. People are used to teaching the way
1:05:03 they learned. Think about martial arts instructors. Almost all of them trained in a certain way and
1:05:08 then teach that way, which alienates 65, 70 percent of the students by definition. It’s very rare that
1:05:13 you have someone who can take the time to, and it takes a lot of time to know someone deeply enough
1:05:18 to build a training program and a way of life around who they are. I mean, for me, and what I
1:05:23 only work with, with eight teams, I don’t take on new clients. Very seldom do I take on a new
1:05:27 client. I won’t work with more than eight people. You also don’t do a lot of PR for everybody listening.
1:05:32 I always get these emails and texts like, “Hey, could you intro me to Josh? I want to
1:05:37 my show,” and I’m like, “He’s not, he’s not going to do it.” Tim, you’re the only person
1:05:42 once a year or two. You’re the one guy who brings me out of my hermetic cave. I live a bit of a
1:05:47 strange life because I’m not on a strange, doesn’t feel strange to me. It feels completely natural,
1:05:51 but I’m not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of these things. I don’t even know the
1:05:58 names of most of them. I have an email account, though. Do you have that? I cultivate empty space
1:06:02 as a way of life for the creative process. So, Timbo, you’re the one guy who brings me out of
1:06:06 the cave where we have a lot of fun together. So, you were talking about these top performers and
1:06:14 getting to know them on a very deep, subtle level so that you can help them express the combination
1:06:20 of their madness and genius or at least embrace it, among other things. How do you think about
1:06:25 parenting? Yeah, let’s dig into this one. All right. So, and then let’s remember to loop back
1:06:29 after this to finish this discussion of, first of all, you were talking about how to cultivate the
1:06:33 somatic awareness and then how to listen to it. So, let’s go back to how to train to listen to it.
1:06:38 Okay, parenting, Jack. Well, Jack’s the love of my life. I mean, this kid is such an awesome dude,
1:06:43 and parenting has been the most fantastic learning experience I’ve ever gone through.
1:06:49 So, from when he was born, I tried very hard not to go in with a lot of preconceived ideas.
1:06:54 And to be attuned to him, to listen to him. From when he was just days, weeks old,
1:06:58 he was teaching me. You know, you talk about teaching presence. Our eyes would be connected,
1:07:02 and if I would think about something else, his eyes would pull me back. If there was any
1:07:06 distraction that set in, he would pull me back. And he’s got a little older, he would just take
1:07:12 your face and pull it back in the sweetest way. And so, the depth of connection, you know, being
1:07:19 deeply attuned to a young spirit that hasn’t become blocked, that isn’t that state of unobstructed
1:07:26 self-expression. That is just this unbelievably game learner, unblocked learner. Jack is the
1:07:30 game this little person I’ve ever known in my life. But of course, I’ve been thinking about
1:07:36 learning and education for a lot of years. And so, I had some thoughts. And so, for example,
1:07:43 I think that control is, the need for control is something that inhibits people in life. The need
1:07:48 to have external conditions be just so, in order for them to be able to, Timbo is pointing at the,
1:07:51 at my grandmother’s painting. That was my grandma’s painting. It’s a beauty, right?
1:07:54 Yeah, Stella, Stella Waitskin. That’s her self-portrait.
1:07:58 Okay, we’re going to leave it messed up. We’re working on control. So, like, from a young age,
1:08:02 for me, when I started playing chess, I would create the chaos on the board like I described,
1:08:06 and then I would play in chess shops with people blowing smoke and playing music,
1:08:10 and I’d play chess with like loud guillotine monk chants bursting into my head from speakers.
1:08:15 When I play cards, I would never, playing general me, I’d always keep the melds out of order.
1:08:19 So that again? When I would play cards, I would cards like a card game, playing like
1:08:22 general me, a card game. I would never organize my hand. I’d always keep it.
1:08:26 Do you say meld? Yeah, like, if you have like three sevens.
1:08:28 Oh, okay. Right? Or like, all right.
1:08:32 Jack Queen, Jack Queen, Queen of Hearts or whatever. I would keep everything out of order,
1:08:35 so I’d have to reorganize it in my mind. I’d keep my room messy.
1:08:39 Oh, you wouldn’t gather your, I see, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t move your cards around to
1:08:44 organized. Right. I was creating chaos everywhere to train at being able to be at peace in chaos.
1:08:49 And organize things in, that was kind of part of my way of life. And I found it to be a huge
1:08:53 advantage that I had competitively. And so one of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first
1:08:57 year of Jack’s life or year or two of Jack’s life that I observed with parents is that they do that,
1:09:01 have this language around weather, whether being good or bad. When it was raining, they’d be like,
1:09:05 it’s bad weather. You’d hear, you know, moms, babysitters, dads talk about it’s bad weather,
1:09:08 we can’t go out, or it’s good weather, we can go out. And so that means that somehow we’re
1:09:12 externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time.
1:09:16 So Jack and I never missed a single storm. Every rainstorm, I don’t think we’ve missed
1:09:22 one storm, other than maybe one when he was sick. I don’t think we’ve missed a single storm,
1:09:26 rain or snow, going outside and romping in it. And we’ve developed this language around how
1:09:29 beautiful it was. And so when now, whenever there’s a rainy day, Jack says, look, that day,
1:09:33 it’s such a beautiful rainy day. And we go out and we play in it. And, you know, I wanted him
1:09:39 to have this internal locus of control, to not be reliant on external conditions being just so.
1:09:43 And now he’s four, he’s getting older, so we’ve been playing with these things. We began meditating
1:09:48 together when he was a little over a year, just doing breathwork. Initially, we started doing
1:09:54 meditation work when he was in that kind of most pure states. When he’d be taking a warm bath and
1:09:58 he was lying on his back and being completely relaxed, blissed out, we would just naturally
1:10:02 breathe together. I wanted the habit to be formed in something that was the initial experience
1:10:09 to be in conditions that were most conducive to just natural peace. And then we have, in recent
1:10:15 months, been taking it to an interesting, funky place. So he would watch me do the
1:10:18 Wim Hof training and I’d be putting my hands in ice buckets and doing this interesting
1:10:22 breathwork through cold water. And he would initially watch me come over, stick his finger
1:10:26 in and put his hand in. So this is a great moment. A couple months ago, we were out romping in this
1:10:31 huge snowstorm and Jack, about 10 minutes into it, we just got on this long search for the right
1:10:37 carrot to put on to make the snowman with. We found the, the nose. We found it. And then Jack got,
1:10:40 he was in this huge drift and he got his boots just loaded up with snow and he looked at me
1:10:43 and he said, “Daddy, my feet are cold. They’re filled, my boots are filled with snow, but that’s
1:10:48 okay. I’ll just do the Wim Hof and make them warm.” And he looked at him and then he, for an hour and
1:10:52 a half, we played after that. Feet just covered with snow and he was completely fine. Never mentioned
1:10:58 it again. And then he got increasingly interested in, in this internal terrain. And we would take
1:11:01 hot baths together. We’d take a bath together every night. And then he would want to turn on
1:11:06 the cold shower and get in it. And he would, we’d play what we call the it’s a good game.
1:11:11 And so we kind of reframe this thing. You know, I have this, you know, people tend to bounce off
1:11:14 of discomfort, whether it’s mental or physical. And so they run up at, whether if they run into
1:11:18 internal resistance, whether it’s a meditation training or someone exposing a weakness, or
1:11:21 if they’re training and someone might be better than them, whatever, whatever it is,
1:11:26 they bounce away from things that might expose them. They’re repelled from it. Right. Right.
1:11:30 But, you know, the flip side of this is to learn the way I talk about living on the other side of
1:11:35 pain, pain being like mental or physical discomfort and much of life that’s so rich comes from the
1:11:40 other side of it. The other side of challenge, internal or external challenge. And with Jack,
1:11:45 of course, I’m not using that, but it’s a little child’s embodiment of it. We, we started to play
1:11:49 with turning on the cold water and he would say, it’s so good dad. And we’d kind of be in the hot
1:11:54 bath and play in the cold. And he would say, it’s so good. It’s so good. And he began to have this
1:11:59 gorgeous, blissful smile meditating through it. And we, you know, he would say, I’m meditating
1:12:05 through it. It’s so good. And we were reframing cold. Cold was, is a metaphor from something
1:12:09 that you just, you bounce away from to something that you can learn to sit with, to be neutral in,
1:12:13 to find pleasure in, just like the weather. And then we had this experience the other day where he
1:12:18 said to me, you know, dad, will you tickle me slowly? And I always tickle me laughs uproariously.
1:12:22 But we were lying in bed and I was tickling him very slowly. And he was, he said, I’m going to
1:12:25 do my meditation. He would meditate. And then he said to me, then the next day he said, dad,
1:12:28 will you tickle me slowly? And I did it. And then he said, can you pick him a little bit faster?
1:12:32 And I didn’t suggest it to him. He suggested it to me. And then we played this game where we would
1:12:36 say one to 10. And I would tickle him slowly and he started doing his meditation. And we’d move it
1:12:41 from one, two, and we’d go up to, he’d like be doing his meditation. And finally I’d be full tilt
1:12:46 tickling him. He’d normally be in hysterics and he was just sitting there meditating and not laughing.
1:12:50 And he found this so interesting. And he’s now guiding the process in this, in this beautiful way.
1:12:56 Now we’re turning it to talking about question. Just to interject. Did you at any point condition
1:13:02 to him to be proactive in that way? Or was it just an organic now I’m in the driver’s seat?
1:13:06 I think I encourage him to grab the wheel all the time. I’m in a huge part of my relationship to
1:13:10 parenting. And this is from my mom. And I watched my mom with Jack. And I think this is maybe the
1:13:14 greatest gift that my mom gave me is just having a sense of agency in the world. You know, the idea
1:13:21 that having a sense that I can impact the world. And that my, that my compass really matters.
1:13:25 Right. So when I grew up, I was, I wasn’t, you know, seen but not heard. I was from, I was five
1:13:29 and six years old there having adult conversations with friends. And I was part of it. They wanted
1:13:33 to hear my ideas. And I felt that they mattered. And that’s a big part of how I believe in, and my
1:13:38 wife and I believe in raising Jack. And so he plays a really active role in everything that we do.
1:13:43 And so it was sort of a natural thing. And it was all fun and play. I wasn’t pushing any of these
1:13:47 things on him at all. This is stuff that he wanted to do. But then him naturally, I’ve been,
1:13:52 I’ve been kind of blown away by how he’s been transferring this stuff over. I mean, lateral
1:13:55 thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it over
1:14:00 to another, I think is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate or ways
1:14:04 of being. And it’s something that Jack and I have from a really young age. We began to cultivate
1:14:09 this from when he was really small around this principle of go around. Initially it was like,
1:14:12 the first thing that happened is that he was really tiny. He was trying to get in.
1:14:16 We were in a little cottage, singing a little cottage on Martha’s Vineyard,
1:14:21 tiny little cottage in a big field. And he was trying to get in one door and he couldn’t,
1:14:25 but he could get in the other door. And I said, “Jack, go around.” And he looked at me and he went
1:14:29 around. And then go around became a language for us physically. If you can’t go one way,
1:14:32 go around in another way. But then it became a language for us in terms of solving puzzles and
1:14:36 in terms of any way, time you were running an obstacle, go around. And then working with the
1:14:42 metaphor of go around opened up this way that we would just have dialogue around connecting things,
1:14:45 right? Taking away of principle from one thing and applying it to something else.
1:14:50 And we’ve had a lot of fun with that. And so it’s fascinating to see you, this game little dude,
1:14:55 if you have this thematic dialogue, principle driven dialogue, and we’re cultivating somatic
1:14:59 awareness, cultivating the ability to feel these little ripples inside. I mean, Jack’s telling me
1:15:05 his dreams in this beautiful way. He tells me how his emotions feel in his body. It’s a great
1:15:09 journey. I’m learning so much from him. There’s a book you’ve mentioned to me a number of times,
1:15:14 or at the very least a researcher, and I’m probably going to massacre this name as well.
1:15:19 Is it Carol Dweck getting that right? Mindset? Yeah, Carol Dweck mindset. Yeah. Yeah. Entity
1:15:23 theories of intelligence versus incremental or growth mindset. Yeah, Carol Dweck is one of the
1:15:27 most important foundational developmental psychologists, I think, around this distinction
1:15:35 of a fixed perspective on how good somebody is. Let’s frame it like this. Most children,
1:15:41 unfortunately, are educated to believe that they have a certain ingrained level of ability in things.
1:15:46 You are smart, you’re dumb, you’re effigy. Right. And they’re told, and the sad thing is that when
1:15:50 they are even when they’re praised, they’re told how smart they are, right? Or you’re such a good
1:15:55 writer, you’re so good at math, and the kids will say, I’m smart at this or I’m dumb at that, right?
1:16:00 And so, but if you’re very smart at one thing, then that means that if you fail, then you must
1:16:06 be dumb at it. And so, it becomes very static. And the kids are often quite brittle when they
1:16:10 have a fixed mindset, right? Or an entity theory of intelligence. Well, a growth mindset or a
1:16:14 mastery oriented mindset is one where we understand that the path to mastery involves
1:16:21 incremental growth. We don’t have an ingrained level of ability at something. We’re going to have
1:16:25 successes and failures. We’re going to work at things. And it’s work, it’s practice. And it’s
1:16:29 an open-mindedness to life experiences that makes us succeed. How would the praise differ?
1:16:34 You would praise a kid for the process versus the outcome. And so, you would say, I’m so proud of
1:16:40 how hard you worked at your math, not you’re so smart at math. Or if someone, if someone has a
1:16:44 failure, the other side of it is not to say that, don’t worry about it, you’re just not good at math,
1:16:48 you’d do something else. It’s to say, well, how can we practice at this to get better? And so,
1:16:52 we’re focusing on the process and not the outcome. That’s like the fundamental principle. And it’s
1:16:57 so easy to say it, but it’s very hard for people to live it as parents, especially if they don’t
1:17:02 embody it themselves. What you see often with kids and parents is that the parents, they have an
1:17:06 entity theory of intelligence themselves. They’re fixed, they’re stuck. But they’ve read the material
1:17:09 of Carol Dweck or somebody else, they want to parent their kids around a growth mindset. But
1:17:14 the kids see what they embody, not what they say. So we have to embody it. I mean, one of the most
1:17:18 important things that I think that we do with my foundation and our work with schools, with programs
1:17:22 around the world is that we, when we’re working with teachers, it’s not just this is the material
1:17:26 you should teach your students, it’s working with these core principles and embodying it
1:17:31 themselves first. And then, through that embodied intelligence, working with the kids and how they
1:17:36 can embody it. You have to walk the talk. Let’s go back to what you said should go back to at some
1:17:42 point, which is somatic sensitivity, those sort of dimples of light in the darkness that most
1:17:50 people overlook. How do you train that? Well, thematically, the first thing I would say is that
1:17:53 we need to think about cultivating an internal locus of control or an internal orientation versus
1:17:58 an external one, right? So as an artist or performer, we have all these external pressures
1:18:03 on us. Let’s say, for example, again, let’s talk about investors again, or say investor is running
1:18:08 a $1 billion investment vehicle, and they have partners, they have people who invest in that,
1:18:12 and they have to write investment letters, they have all the partners, say they have 30 or 40
1:18:16 or 50 partners who are institutions, maybe endowments, educational endowments, charities,
1:18:22 whatever, who have put their money into this investment vehicle. And maybe that person has
1:18:27 his own money as well or her own money in this investment vehicle. Well, for them to be successful,
1:18:31 they have to operate from the inside out. They have to bring out the essence of who they are
1:18:36 as a performer, like we’re discussing, or as a human being, to bring that out through their art.
1:18:42 But if they are constantly feeling pressured by what others expect from them, what others want
1:18:47 from them, how they’ll be perceived, or how people are looking at their Facebook post or
1:18:55 how their tweet is being responded to, tweet, that’s what it is. It’s so interesting for me,
1:19:00 watching people watch their Instagram accounts, I see it with buddies all the time. It’s natural,
1:19:06 it’s completely human. But then we’re aware of how we’re perceived. One of the major reasons that
1:19:09 I stay away from these things is because I can feel how susceptible I am to this stuff. You
1:19:15 publish a book and it’s on Amazon, it’s so hard not to go look at the Amazon numbers. And then
1:19:18 the book comes out and you’re tracking them, even if you know it’s ridiculous and you shouldn’t
1:19:22 be doing it. Now, someone like you, you’re such a world class and you’ve so systematically
1:19:26 trained at and cultivated the ability to market these things. This is actually a very important
1:19:31 scientific input for you. It’s not for most authors. Most authors is an addiction. So that’s
1:19:35 a completely different point in my opinion. You’re actually gathering data and using it. Most people
1:19:40 are just constantly feeling… Tapping the vein. Right, tapping the vein. So with investors, what
1:19:45 this often relates to is P&L checking, profit and loss checking. So most investors check P&L
1:19:49 hundreds of times a day. In fact, it’s constantly because it’s on their screen all the time.
1:19:53 And so having these little adrenal hits all the time, whether it’s dopamine or cortisol,
1:19:57 whether they’re making money or losing money, they’re constantly bouncing off of these things.
1:20:04 That’s the ultimate external orientation. So if you think about internal plus proactive versus
1:20:09 external plus reactive, this is how I would tend to frame this out. We want to build a proactive
1:20:14 way of life that’s fundamentally moved from the inside out versus a reactive way of life. We’re
1:20:18 constantly reacting to all of these inputs, which we may or may not want. And where we’re
1:20:24 constantly beleaguered by or oppressed by a sense of how we’re going to be perceived, social pressures.
1:20:29 Right? And so when you’re talking about a really high level artist who might have a really subtle
1:20:33 intuition about something and they should listen to that intuition or they should at least deconstruct
1:20:38 that intuition and investigate it and see if it’s the right way to go. But they’re aware that that
1:20:44 intuition might not be perceived as impressive by others. The problem is that the others usually
1:20:48 aren’t world-class artists. They’re the armchair professors. They’re the philosophologists.
1:20:53 And so you have the man in the arena who’s compromised by a sense of self-consciousness
1:20:58 of how the critics are going to perceive him or her, which is ridiculous because it’s like an A
1:21:04 player thinking about the approval of a C player. And that’s disastrous. That’s external orientation.
1:21:08 That’s like thinking that we’re going to get food poisoning from something, that something’s off,
1:21:14 and then dismissing it because of… I mean, first of all, there’s the incredibly subtle sense of how
1:21:17 strongly intuition is. No one else at that table there. And we had some pretty high-level dudes
1:21:20 sitting at that table that had that feeling that we were about to eat something that had food poisoning.
1:21:24 Right? So it was very subtle. You had a very subtle sense. It wasn’t bang you over the head.
1:21:28 Right? And then there’s the feeling of the social pressures and everything. It’s a very
1:21:33 interesting subtle example. The subtle pressures were louder in that case than the really subtle
1:21:38 intuition that you had. And then there’s having the attitude of, I don’t care about the social
1:21:43 pressures, but that’s really hard. Which I was able to do a third of the way through, but not before.
1:21:48 Right. I think you’re actually really… In my observation, you’re really evolved with this. I
1:21:54 mean, you have so much external pressure and external awareness on you. I’m consistently
1:21:59 finding it stunning and impressive how you’re able to embrace your funk, how to live a life that
1:22:04 is attuned to your inner ripples. I mean, I think it’s actually rather unique. I think it’s a core
1:22:09 strength of yours in my opinion. Thanks, Ben. I think that one element that’s been very helpful
1:22:19 in trying to mitigate the risks and dangers in the paradox of trying to be introspective while
1:22:26 having a very public-facing life is stoicism. And I remember reading at one point, I want to say it
1:22:33 was Cato, who was considered by his contemporaries and his successors in stoic thought leadership
1:22:39 to be the perfect stoic in a lot of respects. And I’m going to get the colors wrong here, but he
1:22:47 would deliberately… I think it was a blue tunic as opposed to a purple tunic to encourage people
1:22:51 to ridicule him because he wanted to be embarrassed about only those things worth being embarrassed
1:22:59 about. So, training himself not to be overly sensitized to the critiques of the C players
1:23:04 around him. So, I constantly… I remember, for instance, this is such a silly example,
1:23:10 but I was just in Montana and I went into the ski shop to get some light gloves just for walking
1:23:14 around, not for skiing. And I looked at the whole rack and I was like, “Ooh, I like these.” And they
1:23:21 were like the most ridiculous Dr. Seuss-striped nonsense gloves you’ve ever seen. They will not
1:23:25 match with anything, just ludicrous looking. And I asked the woman at the front desk, I’m like,
1:23:28 “What do you think of these?” Or, “Should I get a different one?” She’s like, “I think you should
1:23:31 get the black ones.” And I thought about it. I sat there and I thought about it. I was like,
1:23:37 “Nope, I’m getting the Dr. Seuss gloves.” And that expresses itself for me in a lot of different
1:23:42 places because I will, for instance, do… And this is not something I recommend to everybody.
1:23:47 So caveat, Ampitor, you can’t be… You’re in control of your own life. So, if you do this,
1:23:53 you can face some dire consequences. But I’ll do drunk Q&As on Facebook and I’ll have a bunch
1:23:56 of booze and I’ll go on. Something will come out that will embarrass me, but it’s not going to be
1:24:04 life-destroying. And so it’s kind of systematically create an environment in which I feel like I
1:24:09 don’t have a reputation to protect, which is another reason why I talk about the psychedelics.
1:24:15 And I’ll talk very openly about monogamy versus non-monogamy. And I’ll throw all these things
1:24:20 out there to basically ensure, A, that I never become a politician. And, B, that I don’t feel
1:24:27 like I have a fixed identity to cling to that I need to protect because I see how disastrous that
1:24:32 can be. That’s really powerful. You know, the fire of competition plays that role as well.
1:24:37 I mean, you look at people who compete. Let’s talk about martial artists. So, I own a Brazilian
1:24:41 school with Marcelo Garcia. We’ve discussed Marcelo a lot. Definitely. And just as I mentioned,
1:24:48 creating chaos and training yourself to operate optimally in chaos compared to others. And,
1:24:52 of course, Marcelo, who’s what, ten-time? Nine-time? Yeah, nine-time. World champion
1:24:57 is the master of scramble. Yeah, they call him the king of the scramble. Right. The king of the
1:25:01 scramble. I mean, he’s the greatest transitional player in the history of sport, maybe. He’s
1:25:07 incredible. I mean, the essence of his game is to not hold, to allow people to move and to,
1:25:12 again, embrace the chaos and get there first. He just has cultivated the transition so systematically
1:25:16 that he has ten frames in a transition where somebody else will just be moving from one position
1:25:21 to the next. But that transition itself is something which is like, that’s his ocean. It’s a beautiful
1:25:24 thing to see. But if you look at the school, Marcelo runs the school so beautifully. And we’ve
1:25:29 got, at this point, a lot of world-class competitors. A lot of school tends to win pretty much all the
1:25:32 tournaments. A lot of the guys who you’ve trained with, with the Tim Ferriss experiment, that was
1:25:38 hilarious. Oh my god. That was awesome. Day one. I’m like, “Okay, I think I broke my rib.” He did
1:25:41 great, man. You did great. That was pretty. Guys, you should check that out. That was pretty. The
1:25:46 TV show. If you want to see me get my ass handed to me and have a great time training with guys like
1:25:53 John Stava, who’s an incredible athlete and teacher, that’s a TV show worth checking out.
1:25:57 Well, if you look at the learning curve of the people in the school, the ones who put themselves
1:26:00 in the line as a way of life, just learn much faster than the ones who are protecting their
1:26:07 egos, right? Most schools, what happens is someone gets good and then they have to win to protect
1:26:12 their status as being very good or dominant. It usually happens with martial arts instructors,
1:26:17 which is that they reach a certain level, they open a school, they get a little bit older,
1:26:20 they get a little fatter, they have a reputation, so they stop training because they don’t want to
1:26:24 be exposed by the young students who are coming up and they sit in the sideline, but their egos
1:26:30 get increasingly large but riddled with insecurity and this brittleness tends to then splay down to
1:26:35 the students and the whole school becomes a joke, right? Versus, you know, Marcello, the way Marcello
1:26:39 runs our school is so magnificent. Everyone’s on the mat training so hard as a way of life.
1:26:44 Everyone’s on a world-class growth curve and it’s very interesting to observe who the top
1:26:49 competitors pick out when they’re five rounds into the sparring sessions and they’re completely
1:26:53 gassed. The ones who are in the deepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there, the one who
1:26:56 beat them up, who might beat them up, while others will look for someone they can take a break on,
1:27:02 right? And so there’s that constant search for exposure. That’s kind of a parallel to what
1:27:09 you’re describing in terms of not having an ego to protect or you said not having a reputation
1:27:12 to protect. Yeah, a fixed identity to protect. Right, so this is a way as a competitor to
1:27:17 constantly put yourself into the fire. Here’s a question I have for you because I feel like
1:27:21 particularly in jiu-jitsu I could get better at this. You remember when we did that one day,
1:27:27 we had the gi on and you’re like, “Timbo, your lips are purple. I thought I was going to die.
1:27:31 I thought I was going to have a heat stroke and have to be carted off.” But is it correlation
1:27:37 or causation? Meaning are the guys who on round five pick the hardest guy in the room?
1:27:44 Have they already self-selected by coming to this school in a sense or did they start off perhaps
1:27:48 when they walked in the door, the guy who would pick the easiest person in the room at round five
1:27:53 and have been converted into the guy who will pick the hardest person?
1:28:00 You see both. You see both. In the latter case, how do they cultivate that transition?
1:28:04 I think that Marcello is a great role model. I think it’s a good, I mean, it’s a fantastic
1:28:09 metaphor for life. You need this everywhere. 100%. I mean, I think that we think about this
1:28:13 principle of cultivating quality as a way of life and the big things and the little things and you
1:28:18 look at the way Marcello runs that training environment is pretty exceptional. I mean,
1:28:20 if people don’t have… He puts his ass on the line all the time.
1:28:25 His ass is on the line all the time and he’s getting a little bit older. He has two kids
1:28:31 and he’s a wonderful dad. His life is not just 100% Jiu Jitsu anymore. He has all of these,
1:28:35 you know, young 20s at this point, world-class students who want to go at it hard with him
1:28:39 and he goes at it hard with them. He wants to. He doesn’t mind getting exposed. He brings it.
1:28:43 He’s living it, but he’s also creating an environment where people are present to quality
1:28:47 and little things. If someone is, it doesn’t have their gi on straight. If they haven’t tied
1:28:51 their belt, if they’re sitting in a way that’s sloppy, what happens? He tells them to straighten
1:28:56 their gi. I love that. I love that. When people are doing the warm-up, if they’re cutting the
1:29:00 corner a little bit, he tells them to run the full circle. If people are doing a certain drill
1:29:05 in a sloppy way, he refines it. It’s the little things, right? And as you watch Marcello doing
1:29:09 the warm-up, there’s a way that he’ll have his hand and just brush against the mat as he passes it.
1:29:15 Like you can feel him engaging his tactile, feeling for the room. He’s someone who embodies and teaches
1:29:19 qualities a way of life. So if you’re in your fourth or fifth round and you are looking for a
1:29:25 way out, you feel that you’re fundamentally violating this principle which you’ve been cultivating.
1:29:29 Right. Attending it to the school. Right. And you know, this is so important. We think about
1:29:36 a core part of how I train people is around the interplay of themes or principles and habits.
1:29:39 The habits are what we can actually train at. The principle is what we’re trying to embody.
1:29:44 And so we’ll train it two or three or four or five habits, which are the embodiment of a core
1:29:47 principle. But the idea is to burn the principle into the hundreds of manifestations of that
1:29:50 principle become our way of life. And so in this case, we’re talking about,
1:29:55 Marcello talking about or embodying the principle of quality in all these little ways.
1:29:58 These little ways you could say don’t matter, but they add up to matter hugely.
1:30:02 Oh, I think the little things are the big things, right? Because they’re a reflection. I mean,
1:30:05 this might sound cliched, but it’s like how you do anything is how you do everything.
1:30:09 It’s such a beautiful and critical principle. And most people think they can wait around
1:30:14 for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don’t cultivate turning it on as a way of life,
1:30:17 the little moments, there’s hundreds of times more little moments than big,
1:30:22 and there’s no chance in the big ones. Yeah. Okay. So if people listening don’t take
1:30:28 anything else from this interview, I think that’s so key to who you are. It’s so key to why you’ve
1:30:33 been good at what you’ve been good at. That’s it right there. Here, let me mangle another name
1:30:38 since that seems to be one of our themes for the show. This episode is, I think it’s Archelechus,
1:30:43 Archelechus perhaps. I’m going to get this wrong, but it was a quote, got to be a Roman,
1:30:48 maybe a Greek who knows, who said, “We do not raise the level of our hopes. We fall to the
1:30:54 level of our training.” Yeah. And you can’t just do one every five years waiting for the
1:30:58 big event. You’re not going to have the training necessary.
1:31:03 As a principle that I’ve been thinking about a lot around parenting, you see so often people
1:31:08 with their second child are not as present. Unfortunately, in today’s world, people are
1:31:13 often not present with their first child either. I was taking a walk yesterday with a dear friend
1:31:17 of mine in Central Park at dusk. We were just talking about what other ideas we’ve been thinking
1:31:25 about. And we walked past this woman who had three children in a stroller and was walking her dog,
1:31:29 and the children were all talking to her. And she was on the cell phone having a conversation with
1:31:33 a friend. And it wasn’t like a quick, it was like a long gossipy conversation. And I was just watching
1:31:39 this. It was an exquisite external environment, like the embodiment of distraction. Three children
1:31:44 in a dog, the children looking, trying to pull her, but she was just in this other world. We
1:31:48 think about the distraction of parenting. And then you think about what often happens with
1:31:52 parents with the first child, they’re completely tapped in because this is all new, they’re present.
1:31:57 And the second child, they just will relatively neglect. We see that all the time. I’m thinking
1:32:00 about this a lot because we’re about to have our second child. And so I’m thinking about how
1:32:04 important it is to not take for granted the things that you’ve done right and think they’ll just be
1:32:10 there because they’re not going to be there unless you’re present, equally present. And we see this
1:32:16 in the martial arts as someone who trains twice a day, you know, as a way of life for 10 years,
1:32:20 training until they drop and doing external training as well with strength and conditioning
1:32:24 and stretching and everything else. And then they get to a place where they’re consistently
1:32:28 winning. And then they think they can train seven times a week instead of 10. And it’ll be the same.
1:32:33 It’s not the same. Like that’s what it shows. There’s something incredible about going into
1:32:39 competition, knowing that there’s no way that anyone else trained as hard or as good as you,
1:32:44 as smart, right? There’s nothing about training quantitatively, there’s nothing about training
1:32:48 qualitatively, right? The confidence that comes out of knowing in any discipline that you’re at,
1:32:52 that you gave it your all, that when I work with someone, I say that, you know, one of my many
1:32:57 filters is looking at someone in the eye and saying that working with me is living as if you’re
1:33:01 training qualitatively as if in a world championship training camp, qualitatively. But I look at them
1:33:05 in the eye and some people, you see a fear, you see the fear of exposure. Other people,
1:33:09 you see a lean in, an eagerness, a gameness, a hunger for what that exposure will lead to,
1:33:16 right? Those are two very, very different paths. Maintaining presence to that quality even after
1:33:20 we’ve assumed that we’ve got it now, right? You see this with people around presence. You see,
1:33:26 there’s so much bullshit in the meditation world, for example. So much bullshit. Because people
1:33:30 might have meditated wonderfully for four or five years or six years or eight years and years,
1:33:34 but then they get ego involved with it. They put together their schools and they’re not embodying
1:33:38 it anymore. And then it becomes hollow. That kind of slipped from the philosopher to the
1:33:41 philosophologist without even knowing that it happened. They weren’t even present to the question.
1:33:48 Firewalking process. Yeah, that’s important. What is the firewalking process? This is new
1:33:52 to me too. I’m not sure I’ve heard you discuss this. Yeah, this is something I’ve been really
1:33:57 for the last year and a half or so developing intensely. I think it’s been a core part of
1:34:01 my process for a long time, but training people. I’ve been on this really intense learning curve
1:34:07 on how to work with people on this. So the core to the principle is that people tend to learn from
1:34:12 their own experiences with much more potency than they learn from other people’s experiences.
1:34:19 And the firewalking process is what I call, that’s my term for a gateway to cultivating the ability
1:34:26 to learn with the same physiological intensity from other people’s experiences as we learn from
1:34:30 our own. So for example, if you’re a jiu-jitsu fighter and you slightly overextend your arm and
1:34:35 you get armbarred, and let’s say in the world championships, your arm is being separated from
1:34:38 your body. You feel like your shoulder is disconnecting, your arm is breaking. If you don’t tap,
1:34:41 you’re going to break. So you have the combination and often guys will fight it. They won’t want to
1:34:47 tap. It’s the world. So they’ll have the combination of huge disappointment, all the adrenal reactions
1:34:53 to being caught and having being wounded and maybe torn ligaments or tendons, depending on how the
1:34:58 injury sets in or maybe a bone. And they will burn that lesson to themselves and they will not
1:35:02 overextend their arm that way again. That’s been burned in on an animalistic level. But if they
1:35:05 watch somebody fighting and they watch them overextend and get caught on armbar, that’s just
1:35:09 like nothing. That’s an intellectual knowledge that has no impact on whether or not they’ll overextend.
1:35:15 But if we can cultivate the ability to learn from other people’s errors or experiences with the same
1:35:18 intensity as we can learn from our own, it’s unbelievable how that can steep in the learning
1:35:24 curve. What would be an example of that beyond Jiu Jitsu? Well, for example, a really interesting
1:35:29 live example that I’m playing with today is that we are working actively with investors
1:35:37 is that we are a brilliant investor recently used the term the Pavlovian impact or the Pavlovian
1:35:42 influences have grown up in a bull market. So most investors, most relatively young investors,
1:35:50 grew up in a post 2008 world. So all of their subtle responses have come from growing up in
1:35:53 a bull market. So for the most part, they’ve experienced pleasure when they put the foot on
1:35:56 the gas and they’ve experienced pain when they’re taking the foot off the gas. For the most part,
1:36:01 it’s oversimplified. It’s really interesting to sit down and think about all of the cognitive
1:36:06 biases, all of the subtle associations that come with growing up in a bull market. Now,
1:36:08 traditionally, what people will say is you have to live through certain business cycles,
1:36:12 you have to school of hard knocks, right? We have to learn from the pain of the other side.
1:36:19 But can you take a highly talented young investor who has grown up in a bull market and give them
1:36:23 the wisdom? You think about the journey from pre-consciousness to post-consciousness competitor
1:36:28 around a certain theme, give them the wisdom of living through many market cycles when they
1:36:32 haven’t, right? So then you can deconstruct systematically, what does a bear market look
1:36:35 like? Now, I’m not sure if we’re in the beginning of a bear market now, but let’s just say that
1:36:40 we are maybe in the first or second inning of a bear market now. Maybe we’re in the tail,
1:36:45 like the eighth or ninth innings of a bull market. Maybe we’re in the ninth inning of a bull market
1:36:48 and we’re going to see some huge round of intervention and we’re going to go into extra
1:36:51 innings of a bull market, right? No one really knows. Maybe there’s some other dynamic at play.
1:36:55 Even the great macroeconomists don’t know, but they have a sense through this deep study of
1:37:00 either macroeconomics or valuation. But we are at one point someday, relatively soon,
1:37:03 we’ll probably enter a bear market. So it’s going to be very important. And so if you haven’t lived
1:37:07 through one, one thing you can do is you can deconstruct what a bear market looks like,
1:37:10 and you can have them fire walk it. And so what that means is suddenly all of the,
1:37:16 and a bear market doesn’t just mean going down. It actually means the subtle undulation of,
1:37:20 it’s often going down for three weeks and then a really steep two week rally and then going down
1:37:24 again for three weeks and two week rally. So people often even bear, people who are betting,
1:37:28 think the market will go down, get really hurt in bear markets, right? Because it’s violent.
1:37:33 It’s, there’s a volatility to it. Volatility. Yeah. Right. And so the question is, how can,
1:37:39 in this case, an investor who’s grown up in a post 2008 world fire walk market cycles,
1:37:43 so that he can burn that wisdom into himself or herself. And then the question is how you do
1:37:50 this, right? And so there, a lot of the things that we discussed around physiological awareness,
1:37:53 right, somatic awareness, cultivating the sensitivity that’s happening inside of us,
1:37:59 right? What comes with that is the ability to switch state emotionally, adrenally.
1:38:03 And so if we visualize something very painful to us, if we visualize with tremendous potency,
1:38:08 we can have a physiological response to that. True, even of exercise training. People who,
1:38:14 say, take a 10 minute meditation visualization session in lieu of, oh, there we go. All right.
1:38:17 That means we have to go pick up Jack from school. We have to go pick up Jack, but they
1:38:21 take a break and keep going. They get the benefits of the exercise in large part just from the
1:38:26 visualization over 10 minutes, but we have to go grab Jack. And well, to be continued. To be
1:38:37 continued. Awesome. Okay, so we’re back. We are back. Reclaimed the boy from school, ate some
1:38:44 Japanese food, talked about life. And now here we are for the continuation, fire walking,
1:38:48 visualization. We’re going to talk about casts. Let’s continue with fire walking.
1:38:54 Yes. You were just bringing up the physical dynamics that are possible with intense
1:38:58 visualization, right? I had this formative experience I wrote about years ago where I
1:39:05 broke my hand seven weeks before a national championship when I was training in Chinese
1:39:12 martial arts, push hands. And I was in a cast for six weeks up until I think three days before the
1:39:17 nationals. And the docs said I couldn’t compete in everything except the atrophied, but I was
1:39:21 committed to doing it. And it was really interesting because I was just doing all of my training one
1:39:26 handed and visualizing the weight work that I was doing from on the one side, passing over to the
1:39:29 other, the weight work, weight work resistance training. Yeah, I was doing some, I was, I was
1:39:33 doing my martial arts training one handed, which was fascinating on its own to just work on being
1:39:36 able to do with one hand and what you can do with two. That was tremendous. But I was also
1:39:41 visualizing the resistance training I was doing on one side, passing over to the other,
1:39:45 but really intense visualization, not just like thinking it, but burning it in. It’s kind of
1:39:49 when I move my fire walking, the distinction between kind of thinking about intellectually,
1:39:55 sort of trying to visualize it or versus burning it in. With every sort of sensory simulation.
1:40:00 Yeah, like with your whole like spirit burning it in deeply. And it was fascinating to see when
1:40:04 I took off the cast, I had basically not atrophied and I competed the next two days, three days later
1:40:08 in one. The doctors, I mean, they were pretty surprised by it. A lot of Western medicine is
1:40:13 pretty surprised by, I mean, they’re closed-minded about these kinds of things. What would you do
1:40:20 to translate that to something less obviously physical? Like we were talking about training
1:40:25 people who’ve never been through a bear market to have the wisdom or the lessons learned of those
1:40:30 who have been through. So pragmatically, how do you simulate that? Do you have them interview
1:40:35 someone who’s gone through it and then try to relive those stories through visualization? Or
1:40:38 what would the process potentially look like? Cultivation of empathy, to be able to do what
1:40:43 you just described very deeply is one thing. To be able to live someone else’s experience
1:40:47 profoundly. First of all, we have to really be clear about the distinction between intellectual
1:40:52 knowledge and somatic knowledge. When we’re having something burned in, there’s an adrenal
1:40:57 response. So there’s a physiology to having an experience very intensely. We have to learn how
1:41:03 to create that physiology. So we can do biofeedback training, undulating between states of physiological
1:41:08 coherence and states of extreme stress, so that we build up the ability to kind of move between
1:41:13 them at will. And then when we’re studying, for example, the experience of somebody getting burned
1:41:19 extremely intensely time and again in a bear market during the volatility, the ups and downs of a
1:41:24 bear market, right? You can look at it and it can feel like just like a chart where you can experience
1:41:28 the anxiety that comes with it, the pain that comes with it, like the shattering of your previous
1:41:35 conceptual scheme. You can almost fire walk the experience of the Pavlovian influence of growing
1:41:39 up in a bull market and then having that shattered. You could fire walk that shattering
1:41:43 and then open your mind to the reality of the broader cyclicality over the long term. And there’s
1:41:47 a lot of, in terms of how you do it, the foundation is in a lot of things we’ve been discussing,
1:41:51 right? Intense meditation training, ways of becoming increasingly attuned to these subtle
1:41:56 ripples inside your body, stilling your waters, having a lifestyle which is less reactive,
1:42:04 less input addicted, being really aware of how we fill space addictively in life. Whenever there’s
1:42:07 empty space, we just fill it as opposed to maintaining the emptiness. And the emptiness is
1:42:12 where we have the clarity of mind and the perception of these little micro ripples inside of us,
1:42:17 cultivating the ability to observe in us and in others the subtlest undulations of quality
1:42:24 or of physiology. Well, you and I talked a lot about maintaining slack and trying to build
1:42:32 slack into the system and how important that is. I was told by someone, I respect a lot recently,
1:42:41 find the silence because you have to listen from the silence. And that might sound very vague,
1:42:46 but I found that if you really meditate on it, I mean, it can apply to just about anything. I mean,
1:42:51 if you really want to separate the signal from the noise, you need the space to do that.
1:42:56 Right. It’s such an important principle. You know, this principle of slack
1:43:00 is so interesting. I mean, for me, a lot of it relates to the empty space
1:43:04 for the learning process and my way of life. I mean, I’ve built a life around having
1:43:10 empty space for the development of my ideas for the creative process and for the cultivation
1:43:15 of a physiological state, which is receptive enough to tune in very, very deeply to people,
1:43:20 to people I work with. And so like, I can see how I could triple the amount of people that I work with
1:43:25 very easily with the systems that I have. But my growth curve would get much, it would change
1:43:30 fundamentally. And my internal physiological training would take a hit, right? I wouldn’t
1:43:34 have enough time for meditation, for reflection afterwards, for developments of the thematic
1:43:40 takeaways of every session that I have. And the creative process, it’s so easy to drive for
1:43:45 efficiency and take for granted the really subtle internal work that it takes to play on that razor’s
1:43:51 edge. I think in part, it comes back to the limiting of input since selective ignorance that you
1:43:55 talked about, right? Because if you triple the number of clients you have in a high tech and
1:44:01 high touch business, you’re going to have to juggle 17 chainsaws instead of two chainsaws.
1:44:06 And then I’m reacting. I’m not embodying the core principles that we’re working on. And so much of,
1:44:12 I find really high level training is kind of sort of somatic transmission. You’re embodying
1:44:16 a certain state, and then you’re helping someone embody that state as well.
1:44:21 Totally agreed. And I think that if you want a good example of that, just as a relatively new
1:44:27 dog owner as an adult, you can look at dogs or children who are fundamentally unblocked
1:44:35 in that somatic read reading ability. And you can see just as you said, like as a parent transmits
1:44:41 their state of being to their child, despite or with the assistance of whatever they might say.
1:44:48 Similarly, if you’re interacting adult to adult, you need to sort of return to that state to be
1:44:53 maximally effective in what you do in particular. And then we’re talking about sort of dancing
1:44:57 on the razor’s edge. When you’re moving up the growth curve in a certain discipline,
1:45:03 there’s a lot of things that you can do to reach the first 80th or 90th or 95th percentile
1:45:07 of something. When you’re talking about the last 0.001%, you’re talking about this,
1:45:12 these arenas where the greatest insight will be right next to the greatest blunder. You have to
1:45:16 be willing to go just to just right on that razor’s edge, right? So you think about like,
1:45:19 I was having this great conversation with the sports psychologist, Michael Gervais,
1:45:23 a couple of weeks ago, and he used language of thrusting into big waves, right? The experience
1:45:28 he had to go into like to push himself as a surfer to thrust into big waves. I love that
1:45:32 expression. But of course, if you’re thrusting into big waves, then you can easily push yourself
1:45:36 into the wave you shouldn’t take. So big wave surfers have to be able to navigate that just
1:45:44 the most finely tuned in the moment, just intuitive decision making process of whether the moment is
1:45:48 just right or whether it’s a moment that will kill you. And then if you’re working with people as a
1:45:52 coach or as a trainer of people who are navigating that terrain, you have to be in a state where you
1:45:56 can navigate that terrain. You have to have an embodied state there. And I think that’s a mistake
1:46:00 that a lot of people make in everything that they do, they just scale. They scale and dilute quality.
1:46:04 And when they dilute quality, you lose the ability to successfully navigate the razor’s edge. And then
1:46:08 by definition, you’re probably more destructive than you are helpful. And so when I think about
1:46:14 training people who are in that place, it’s like 99.9% listening. And ideally, you can make the most
1:46:21 potent suggestions with the lightest touch feasible. So the notes, I took some notes beforehand here
1:46:27 or borrowed some notes beforehand. And one of them touches on the principle of scarcity in
1:46:34 A, habit creation, B, the learning process, C, the creative process. Could you just elaborate on
1:46:40 the principle of scarcity? So if we think about the idea of subtraction or essentialism or scarcity,
1:46:46 I mean, you frankly are as good as it gets, in my opinion, at harnessing the principle of scarcity
1:46:50 in your learning process, learning how to deconstruct something, focusing on what’s
1:46:55 absolutely most essential and zoning on it, as opposed to just throwing huge amounts of resources
1:47:03 at things and just having a diluted quality of approach. Most people, when they become successful,
1:47:06 they have the opportunity to have more resources and they keep on layering more and more resources
1:47:10 on things. And so they’re not very potent in how they go about things. If you cut those resources
1:47:14 down 99%, then you find yourself just zoning on what’s most essential. And then if you can
1:47:19 learn to add resources incrementally, maintaining that potency, it’s incredible what you can do.
1:47:23 But it takes a lot of discipline to maintain that principle of scarcity. So in habit creation,
1:47:28 taking on the right amount, not too much, not too little, but not too much. People tend to think
1:47:32 about layering on, you know, they get excited when they realize, if I go through a diagnostic
1:47:36 process and we realize that there’s 10 areas they can take on, they want to take on all of them at
1:47:41 once, right? You can really take on one or two things at once. Ideally, one theme, then you take
1:47:44 on two or three manifestations of that theme to burn that theme on, then you keep on layering.
1:47:48 In the creative process, I mean, you talk about limiting inputs, right? We’ve been talking about
1:47:51 limiting inputs. Positive constraints, yeah. Right, positive constraints. Listen,
1:47:53 me speaking about this principle to you, I mean, you embody this principle.
1:47:56 Profounder, what are your thoughts on it? Well, there are a few things just to
1:48:03 maybe add a couple of anecdotes to what you just said. The first thing that came to mind was
1:48:08 quote, and I’m going to butcher this, but it’s from Jack Ma of Alibaba who said,
1:48:12 you know, in the beginning, we had an advantage. We had no experience, no business plan and no
1:48:18 money. So it forced us to make all of our decisions very carefully. And I do think that
1:48:24 people tend to, and I’m also borrowing this, overestimate what they can accomplish in a week
1:48:30 and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year, which leads to theoretically appealing
1:48:38 decisions like trying to adopt 10 new behaviors at once that are kind of hour-wise and year-foolish
1:48:45 in the sense that they’re doomed to fail from the outset in many respects. And to your point also
1:48:49 about scaling, you know, I friends would call this the S word because it’s romanticized,
1:48:55 kind of a worshipped notion in Silicon Valley. Scale, scale, scale. You’ve got to be bigger,
1:49:01 hire more people, ship more product. And if you are looking to kind of optimize your craft,
1:49:08 your art, that may or may not be the right path to doing that. And to my mind, you need to look at
1:49:14 exemplars or you can look at examples of people who have scaled who are still critics of scaling,
1:49:19 in the sense that Bill Gates, I believe, said, you know, if you add people to an inefficient
1:49:24 process, it just makes the problem worse. You have to add people to an efficient process.
1:49:32 And to that end, like whether you are looking to build a, for instance, lifestyle business,
1:49:36 like a healthy cash flow based business that represents in some way your craft,
1:49:41 let’s just say you make, this is a real example, actually like 20 customized
1:49:50 rifles a year. That’s all you do. And you sell to the top 0.001% of marksmen in the United States.
1:49:54 You never ship more than that. That’s the constraint that you apply.
1:50:00 Whether you’re trying to do that or build Microsoft, that lesson can apply,
1:50:04 whether it’s adding one person or adding the next 1000 people. So for me,
1:50:08 I think it’s very easy to create a false dichotomy in your mind when you look at, say,
1:50:14 a small scale craftsman who’s perhaps like making, let’s just say,
1:50:23 oil paintings in rural Alaska versus a startup in Silicon Valley with 1000 employees and think
1:50:28 them as totally different. But in fact, if you look at the top performers in either environment,
1:50:32 they’ll have a lot in common with each other. And I think one of those commonalities is applying
1:50:36 a lot of positive constraints, even when you have an embarrassment of resources available.
1:50:39 And we think about this in terms of the creative process.
1:50:44 One of the most important things to train is the ability to ask the right question,
1:50:49 to know where to look. And if you look at people in most creative fields who are extremely high
1:50:54 level versus in currently lower fields, it’s knowing what the most critical area is for thinking.
1:51:02 Yeah, think over this principle of scarcity. One of the ways that I have myself trained at this
1:51:07 in the creative process or harness the principle of scarcity, and I have everyone who I work with
1:51:14 live in this routine, is forcing yourself to end of each day, think about what the most important
1:51:17 question is and what you’re working. We discussed this last time. It’s really interesting because
1:51:20 you’re studying complexity all the time. And if you’re a really high level think you’re slicing
1:51:24 through most of it like butter, but then there’s usually one or two or three areas of stuckness.
1:51:28 And most people I find tend to live in the creative process by kind of surfacing,
1:51:31 deciding where they want to go, putting their head down and just grinding their way toward it,
1:51:36 and then surfacing later on. They don’t surface enough to reflect on what’s the most potent
1:51:40 direction to go. You think about like the human versus the computer playing chess 10 years ago.
1:51:44 Now the computers are getting really good at knowing where to look. But 10 years ago,
1:51:48 the human knew that one of these two or three directions was the right essential direction.
1:51:51 Intuitively, we sense that, right? And we cultivate the ability to know where to look.
1:51:54 The computer had to look at everything. If we’re looking at everything, then we’re just operating
1:51:58 like really, really bad computers. But if we cultivate the ability to ask the most potent
1:52:03 question systematically, right? So how do we do this? Well, we have a routine where we end
1:52:06 each work day thinking, what’s the most important question in what I’m doing right now?
1:52:10 Pose the question to the unconscious and wake up first in the morning and brainstorm on it.
1:52:13 Do you have them pose it again? No, actually, I think it’s pretty important not to do that.
1:52:17 Because then we’re kind of consciously ruminating on it. I have them. Hopefully,
1:52:20 they haven’t thought about it for a few hours before they go to bed. This is the one Hemingway
1:52:24 wrote about in his writing process really beautifully. Yeah, Hemingway would stop writing
1:52:31 mid-sense and provide a foothold for continuing the next day. Right, which we could also look at
1:52:35 from the framing of that internal versus external framing, right? If you’re kind of held by a sense
1:52:38 of guilt, whenever you’re not working, then you’re going to feel like you have to write everything
1:52:42 you have to write. But if you’re nurturing from the inside out, your creative process,
1:52:45 you’re going to be comfortable stopping with a sense of direction, even when you’re mid-sentence
1:52:50 or mid-paragraph, right? When I’ve talked to people who have started journaling successfully for the
1:52:59 first time, the most consistent pattern that I see is I write less than I feel I can each day.
1:53:06 They’re never pushing to max capacity or feeling like they’re pushing to max. They always write
1:53:11 less than they feel they should write. Right, that’s very interesting. That’s very interesting.
1:53:16 And if we think about taking this and then turning it into a systematic training of the
1:53:20 ability to be potent in the creative process, if we’re working on a given project and we’re
1:53:24 reflecting on what’s the most important question here. And we’re journaling on it in the brainstorming
1:53:28 in the morning. We’re doing a lot of things. We’re opening the channel systematically between
1:53:31 the conscious and the unconscious mind. We’re waking up in the morning and beginning our day
1:53:35 proactively, all of these things which we discussed in the past. Then if you sit back
1:53:40 after, say, a month and you look back at your, say, three or four or five journals,
1:53:46 brainstorms, Q&As are on a given subject. And you think about, okay, so in the moment,
1:53:50 this is what I thought was most potent. But now I realize this, in fact, would have been most potent.
1:53:55 What’s the gap? Deconstruct the gap between your understanding, then your understanding now,
1:54:00 and then design your training process around deconstructing that gap and training at what
1:54:06 that gap revealed. It’s a really powerful way for individuals. What assumptions underlie that
1:54:11 gap, the creation of the gap or that blindspot. That misperception about what was most important.
1:54:17 And so you’re training yourself day in and day out, like water, to be an increasingly potent,
1:54:20 and that this is manifesting scarcity, and that we are forcing ourselves, no matter how many
1:54:25 resources we have, to think about what is the most important question and what I’m working on
1:54:34 right now. Do you journal every day? Yes. When do you journal? I journal throughout. So I
1:54:40 I’ll wake up in the morning, meditate, take a cold, then hot, cold, undulation shower,
1:54:46 and then meditate. And then I will journal. I’ve had periods where I’ve just moved right,
1:54:49 especially when I was working in Lucidream, where I’d move straight from sleep into journaling. But
1:54:53 that’s my rhythm today. And then when I have insights throughout the day, I’ll do quick journals
1:54:59 about them. And then after I have sessions with clients, I’ll do a journaling session on the
1:55:03 most important takeaways. Do you do that in a notebook, or do you do it digitally? I do it
1:55:07 on Evernote. And then I tag everything thematically, which is hugely important for me. I have all of
1:55:13 my journals and all of the resources, you know, that I find valuable, tagged thematically, and
1:55:17 through habits in the language of my training process. And so this is incredibly powerful for
1:55:22 being able to give people resources for me reviewing the ideas without having recency bias
1:55:27 impede how I communicate. Can you say that one more time? So if I have a client who I think has to
1:55:30 work on a certain theme, and I want to give them resources, they can read on it, I can just click
1:55:34 on the tag on Evernote and all of the resources, things that I’ve written and things that I’ve
1:55:39 read circling that theme are right there. And it’s also really powerful because it’s really hard to
1:55:43 overcome recency bias. I see without recency bias, right, meaning like the primacy and recency effect.
1:55:47 So you’re recalling what it is you read most recently, not necessarily the best resource.
1:55:51 Right. And not necessarily the foundation of my relationship to the theme. And you want to
1:55:54 communicate it from the, you know, what someone has learned from the foundation up. So really
1:55:58 powerful. The tagging, I mean, I find on, I’m sure Evernote isn’t the, I’m not a big tech wizard,
1:56:03 as you know, but just, just to put this in perspective. So we were looking for, well, we,
1:56:07 I’m using the Royal Weed. Josh was looking for dinosaur train for like 10 minutes. And then
1:56:11 he’s like, you know what, I think I’m going to search this thing. And I was like, and you say
1:56:20 you’re not good at tech. It was a good showing. No, I was, that was a big discovery. And then
1:56:26 Jack’s like, there’s dinosaur train. Amazing how this search function works. Should we talk about
1:56:32 thematic interconnectedness? Yes, let’s talk about it. I’d love to talk about in the context of
1:56:36 education a little bit. This is one of the thematic interconnectedness is one of, maybe that’s the
1:56:40 essence of my relationship to the world or beyond. I think it’s, I mean, you and I have
1:56:46 as our eccentric conversations all over the world on surfboards and wherever else. This has been a
1:56:50 big topic for us, right? Yeah. It’s been a huge part of how I’ve approached learning, you know,
1:56:55 from my foundation and looking at the relationships between chess and life, learning about life
1:57:00 through chess, then in transferring level over from chess into the martial arts and then first
1:57:05 Chinese martial arts and into Brazilian jiu jitsu. And then when I work with people, it’s really
1:57:09 how I learn. And it’s how I’ve found it’s really powerful to help people amplify their growth curves
1:57:14 to teach them to be able to learn the many from the few or from the one, right? Learn the macro
1:57:18 from the micro break down the boundaries between disparate pursuits or disparate parts of life,
1:57:22 but between the personal, the professional, the technical and the psychological. And if we have
1:57:27 an experience where, you know, we’re on surfboards and we have some little thematic breakthrough
1:57:31 and we can apply it to every other aspect of our life. It’s really interesting what can happen because
1:57:34 we’re pretty well calloused over in our areas of strength, but in areas where we’re
1:57:38 less advanced, we can be more raw and we might be more conducive to breakthrough sometimes.
1:57:43 Oh, 100%. I mean, you can see things with beginner’s mind because you have another choice.
1:57:50 Right. You don’t have to try to simulate beginner’s mind because you are a beginner. It’s like the
1:57:55 race to the bottom experience. And so for those who are wondering what the hell that means,
1:58:01 the race to the bottom is an expression that Eric of Paddlewoo, our paddled surfing instructor,
1:58:09 uses to refer to constantly dropping in board size, often measured in leaders for buoyancy purposes.
1:58:18 And Josh and I and everyone who is there really very quickly realized that you are to use your
1:58:22 expression kind of dancing the razor’s edge and trying to find a balance between the race to
1:58:27 the bottom, but also maintaining motivation. So you’re not just slipping on banana peels for five
1:58:34 hours straight. And to what extent do you focus on the board size and the race to the bottom versus,
1:58:39 which gives you more maneuverability in surfing versus actually working on say the footwork and
1:58:42 the other technical aspects of the game on a board that you can manage.
1:58:45 And it’s very interesting to think about this theme of the race to the bottom combined with
1:58:50 this other wonderful principle that we were all talking about with Eric, which is the swapping
1:58:54 of boards between. So he had these camps where I think the 18 top stand-up paddle surfers in the
1:58:58 world together with them, all riding these ridiculously small boards that are deep underwater
1:59:01 when you’re standing on them. And I mean, it’s incredibly hard to balance in these things.
1:59:05 So they’ve internalized this race to the bottom theme so deeply, which we are working on. And
1:59:10 then they’re also, they had this experience where they were all together. And initially,
1:59:13 that was sort of competitive, but then it became much more collaborative and they were just sharing
1:59:17 ideas. And then they began to swap boards. And they began to have this interesting experience
1:59:22 where, you know, every surfboard kind of carves its own lines, right? There’s the practitioner
1:59:25 who carves his lines. But then there’s also the board that has, you know, a unique rocker
1:59:29 will find new lines in the wave. And what these guys would find is that if they swap boards,
1:59:32 they could see new lines in the wave. Because if they listen to the board, some guys would swap
1:59:37 boards and try to force the new board to carve their lines. Others would sort of be open to what
1:59:41 this new board could do. And then they would learn from it. And then they’d go back to their board
1:59:44 and their minds would open up. That’s another way of thinking about this idea of the beginner’s
1:59:48 mind, right? The new board forced them, helped them see new lines if they were open-minded
1:59:51 enough. So anyway, this is an example of thematic interconnectedness, right? So when I came back
1:59:55 from that, this was our last, our previous trip where we were talking about the swapping boards
1:59:59 theme. And I came back and I was red hot on fire with how to apply this theme in the investment
2:00:04 process with my guys, right? So you have these teams that are so private and that are so magnificent
2:00:08 in what they do. But if you could get teams to mix, to share ideas with a sense of abundance,
2:00:11 like for example, if a world-class portfolio manager could swap analysts with another
2:00:15 PM for a week or two or three, it would be interesting. If they were truly,
2:00:20 everyone was sharing openly, you’d be doing swapping boards, seeing new lines, right? It’s
2:00:23 forcing the beginner’s mind, but forcing the beginner’s mind not only with an open-mindedness,
2:00:29 but also tapping somebody who is truly exceptional at a very different style of what you do. So
2:00:32 there’s an example of just having an experience in surfing and applying it to something else.
2:00:36 And converting it potentially into a simple question, right? Like, where can I swap boards?
2:00:36 Right.
2:00:41 It could be something that is used for fodder, for people listening in a journaling exercise.
2:00:45 Wake up, have your coffee, or I was going to say have your coffee, then meditate, probably not the
2:00:51 right order. Meditate, have your coffee, sit down, you know, drop that question at the top and just
2:00:56 where can I swap boards? Beautiful, exactly. That’s an magnificent journaling, like brainstorm
2:00:59 question to Riff on. I love it. So how do you apply that to education?
2:01:03 So this thematic interconnectedness, I don’t think that we can do much more
2:01:10 important work with children than help them love learning, help them learn to bring out the essence
2:01:14 of who they are in the learning process. So to express the core of who they are through learning,
2:01:19 which obviously will help them love learning, and then help them discover thematic interconnectedness,
2:01:26 how the world is interconnected via principles, themes. People are really siloed right now.
2:01:31 People think about disciplines in an increasingly data-driven, segregated way.
2:01:35 A segregated way, in a closed-minded way, and it’s kind of heartbreaking. And so, you know,
2:01:40 I have this nonprofit I’ve been running for a lot of years and a huge amount of what we do.
2:01:43 So all of our work is in education. We’ve got hundreds of programs around the world,
2:01:48 mostly in the US, but international as well. The art of learning project.org is our website.
2:01:53 And the programs that are most exciting to me are the ones where we really are systematically
2:01:58 working with schools to help children experience thematic interconnectedness.
2:02:02 So the way we’ll do this, for example, is that we’ll be working with five teachers
2:02:06 in five different subject matters, four or five or six or three, whatever the number is,
2:02:14 in the same age group. What are you smiling at, man? Sorry, guys. I was just looking at the URL,
2:02:18 so it’s the artoflearningproject.org. And I was laughing because I remembered when we were
2:02:24 filming the TV show and we were walking up the stairs to the jujitsu, maybe to the Marcel
2:02:29 Garcia gym. And you kept on saying, towel this, towel that. And I thought you were saying towel
2:02:34 T-O-W-E-L. And I’m like, what the fuck is towel? And you’re like, it’s my goddamn book. And you
2:02:39 got all upset. I’m like, the art of learning. I’m like, how did you expect me to piece that together?
2:02:48 Anyway, that’s why I was smirking. Sorry. Now I know the acronym and I won’t anger Josh any
2:02:54 further. You didn’t anger me. I know. I’m just fucking with you. So anyway, I don’t remember
2:02:58 that conversation. I’m trying to put this up. It was great. towel, towel, towel. For like five
2:03:02 flights of stairs, I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about? Anyway, my bad.
2:03:08 So the way that we do this is that we have, for example, five teachers in different subject
2:03:16 matters working with my team to weave the same principle of learning into, for example, math,
2:03:22 English history, social studies, volleyball, soccer at the same time. And so you’ll have kids
2:03:25 who are studying their subject matter. They’re studying also the way a certain principle of
2:03:29 learning or the creative process of performance psychology manifests in each of these disciplines
2:03:32 at the same time. And so they’re, by definition, breaking down the walls between these different
2:03:36 pursuits. And it’s a really interesting systematic way of doing this. So they’ll be studying the
2:03:40 same principle in math and they move to the next subject and they’re experiencing it
2:03:43 through another lens and then through another lens and they’re experiencing it in sport.
2:03:48 Are these borrowed from the Art of Learning book in so much as you’re talking about smaller and
2:03:52 smaller circles, or you’re starting, you’re talking about learning the macro from the micro,
2:03:56 etc. Yes. Yeah. The root of these are in core themes of learning, creativity, and performance
2:03:59 psychology that I wrote about in my book and that I’ve developed since. Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve
2:04:03 spoken about a lot of them together. And so it’s a kind of a combination of individualized
2:04:08 self-expression. Well, a lot of these themes that we’ve been discussing today and last time.
2:04:12 And so can people learn more about this at theartoflearningproject.org?
2:04:16 They can. So everybody please come check out the site. We’ve got some really wonderful programs
2:04:19 around the world and it’s a good timing for this right now because I’d love it if
2:04:25 any educators out there, we’re on the verge of launching about 10 really high level programs
2:04:29 is what we want to launch, all thematically driven right now and preparing them in the next months.
2:04:35 And so anyone who is in the educational world who’d love to touch base with us about applying
2:04:43 for this kind of program, Katie on my team can be reached at katy@jwfoundation.com.
2:04:47 Jwfoundation is the name of my non-profit that houses the art of learning project.
2:04:59 So katy@jwfoundation.com. Katy@jwfoundation.com. Yes. What type of educators should check this out
2:05:05 and email her? Teachers or people running schools or school systems. Any minimum number of students?
2:05:11 Or any other parameters? Well the essence of these programs would be a school system
2:05:17 that’s open-minded around for example engaging like I described teachers in different disciplines
2:05:21 working at the same time in a collaborative way so that the kids can be embodying the same
2:05:24 principle in multiple disciplines at the same time. I mean that’s the essence of it. So it’s a
2:05:28 bit of a coordinated program. We’ve had wonderful success doing this and it’s what really excites
2:05:34 me and I think about education. How to build systematic training in creativity through thematic
2:05:38 interconnectedness into the way kids learn these days because kids get so excited when they can
2:05:42 see connections. I mean this is a big part of what I’m experiencing as a dad with Jack is how
2:05:47 red hot he gets when he can learn something and then apply it to many other things. This is a
2:05:52 core part of my approach to learning. I think it’s been a I mean it’s maybe my biggest strength is
2:05:57 the ability to find hidden harmonies between disparate parts of life. Seemingly disparate.
2:06:03 Yeah seemingly right. Well Josh this is always so much fun to drag you kicking and screaming at
2:06:12 your cage. You did it. Cage. Or cave. I like cave more. I like cave more. I don’t know why I was
2:06:18 thinking cage. I guess that’s just my inner primate coming out but the people have asked me
2:06:24 often about education following my TED talk where at the end I close out talking about tackling
2:06:32 different facets of education and I feel like your approach and principle based lens through which
2:06:38 you can not only spot but teach interconnectedness is just so incredibly valuable like you said
2:06:45 in an educational system where fields are increasingly siloed and viewed as separate and
2:06:50 you have political turf wars between departments and whatnot which only exacerbates that problem and
2:06:55 I feel like this is a massively powerful step in the right direction. So number one thank you for
2:07:00 that and number two educators listening to this or if you’re just curious to check it out and might
2:07:07 be able to help in some way theartoflearningproject.org and then if you get a taste of that and it
2:07:14 seems compelling and you want to try to apply or jump into the fray then kdky@jwfoundation.com
2:07:19 I’ll put this in the show notes for everybody listening these will be many of the other things
2:07:24 that we mentioned will be in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast but Josh I would
2:07:28 usually ask where can people find you online but they can’t find you. Can’t find me. So I won’t ask
2:07:36 that is there anything that you would like people to besides visiting the resources we just mentioned
2:07:42 anything that you would like people to take away consider do any action anything that comes to
2:07:46 mind you’d like people to to walk away with just as a closing comment or question.
2:07:55 That’s a big question yes absolutely it’s funny as I sit with this now for so many years my primary
2:08:01 identity was as a fighter a competitor and I’ve transitioned in recent years and I find my primary
2:08:10 identity now is self identity the way I experienced myself is as a nurturer of people my family the
2:08:16 people I work very closely with and children as I work more broadly in education and when I think
2:08:21 about it through the context of nurturing people and nurturing ourselves I think that we’re living
2:08:28 in a world of so much noise and so much distraction out of the space being constantly filled that it’s
2:08:35 rather remarkable what can happen if we cultivate a mindfulness a stillness of the waters as a way
2:08:39 of life and we find the beauty in that there’s so much beauty that can come from silence we can learn
2:08:43 so much by feeling the inner ripples of our internal experience and as parents embodying
2:08:48 what we want our children to embody living it right walking the talk putting away our phones
2:08:52 living a life of deep presence with our children with our students with the people we work with
2:08:57 cultivating empathy cultivating compassion it scares the hell out of me how powerfully I see
2:09:01 the world moving in another direction from this and there’s so much that we can learn from from
2:09:06 the speed of what computers can do where AI is headed of what big data can reveal it’s thrilling
2:09:12 to me as long as we we stay in touch with the essential parts of our humanity and when I experience
2:09:19 what happens working with people with adults or with children when we’re just completely present
2:09:23 and we cultivate that presence as a way of life it’s incredible what can happen between people
2:09:30 and when I experience the scars in children that I see everywhere that come from the anxiety that
2:09:35 comes from the lack of attachment secure attachment the lack of the attunement of the parent the lack
2:09:39 of the embodiment of the parent or the teacher and these things that are spoken about it’s heartbreaking
2:09:47 maybe I’m really really old school but there’s something about the cultivation of deep presence
2:09:51 and quality as a way of life which just rings all through me and honestly the other thing I’ll
2:09:54 say is that after having the experience I had a few months ago coming as close as you can come to
2:10:00 dying as you can basically I mean first of all on a tactical level please if anyone’s experimenting
2:10:04 with different forms of breath hold work like the Wim Hof method which I think is very interesting
2:10:08 and quite powerful please don’t do it in any water even an inch of water because if you go out
2:10:12 you don’t want to be in water I should say if you practice this stuff enough and your type a
2:10:16 personality you are going to go out it’s not just a high probability it’s almost a certainty
2:10:22 that you’re going to go out and to think otherwise is really courting disaster so do not do it
2:10:27 in or near water yeah and when we talk about fire walking about living learning from other
2:10:31 people’s experiences with the same physiological intensity that you can learn from your own
2:10:36 there’s something about when you go over that edge over that cliff if I could take the experience of
2:10:41 love gratitude and beauty that I’ve been living with ever since I had that experience and I could
2:10:47 give it to my brothers and sisters you know holy smokes I mean what a beautiful thing and so there’s
2:10:54 any way that we can live with that deep sense of beauty that’s a rich place to find the stillness
2:11:00 to cultivate not just find but create that stillness and practice like you said the calming of the
2:11:10 waters I think is it’s underestimated because of its perceived simplicity just as not all things
2:11:17 that are simple are easy not all things that are simple are low in value right sometimes what’s
2:11:22 right in front of you within grasp that is most important to grasp onto and make use of yeah
2:11:27 it doesn’t have to be extremely esoteric and it’s so easy to think we’ve got it nailed you know like
2:11:31 we can meditate for 15 years and think we’ve got presence nailed and then we stop meditating and
2:11:36 then six months pass and we’re distracted there’s a constancy to it yeah and a presence to the
2:11:41 sense of the real sense of danger that it can slip speaking for me personally it’s also building it
2:11:47 in as a habit just like brushing your teeth for those people who brush your teeth in so much as
2:11:54 for me I know this is true for many of my friends meditation doesn’t really work well as a batched
2:12:00 process in other words like meditating 10 minutes a day for 10 days is much more valuable than
2:12:05 meditating once in 10 days for 100 minutes for most people it’d be less painful too and once
2:12:12 you get into that habit it becomes a ingrained part of your being in your practice you will see
2:12:18 the value particularly once you have a critical mass of for me it’s typically five to seven days
2:12:23 and then i’m just i cannot believe i wasn’t doing this i can’t believe i stopped for four weeks or
2:12:29 whatever it is it’s incredibly valuable and uh brother josh thanks brother this was a blast man
2:12:35 thanks buddy hey guys this is tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is
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