0:00:04 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools
0:00:06 for everyday life.
0:00:13 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
0:00:15 School of Medicine.
0:00:17 My guest today is Dr. Ellen Langer.
0:00:22 Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and one of the world’s
0:00:27 leading pioneers in the mind-body connection, more specifically, how our thoughts impact
0:00:28 our health.
0:00:33 Dr. Ellen Langer was one of the first people to systematically explore the mind-body connection
0:00:34 with scientific rigor.
0:00:39 Her laboratories made a large number of truly fascinating findings.
0:00:43 For instance, today you’ll learn about a study that Dr. Langer did in which she brought
0:00:48 quite old people into her laboratory, or rather she designed a laboratory such that people
0:00:54 lived in this laboratory, but the laboratory itself was designed to resemble the environment,
0:00:59 everything from the types of furniture, the types of dishes, the types of music, etc.,
0:01:02 that those people had lived in 20 years prior.
0:01:07 When those subjects lived in that laboratory for less than one week, the change in the environment
0:01:12 and their interaction with that environment led them to have far more mobility, better
0:01:18 cognitive function, and a large number of other markers of biological aging reversed,
0:01:23 which is absolutely remarkable and speaks to the incredible power that the mind has
0:01:24 over our biology.
0:01:28 That’s just one example of the sorts of experiments that Dr. Langer has done, again, with a tremendous
0:01:30 amount of scientific rigor.
0:01:34 So today, Dr. Langer and I talk about how the acquisition of knowledge, just simply learning
0:01:39 about certain biological mechanisms, as well as your mindset about various aspects of your
0:01:44 health and well-being, can powerfully dictate your health and well-being.
0:01:45 We talk about longevity.
0:01:48 We talk about exercise and weight loss.
0:01:49 We talk about infectious disease.
0:01:55 In fact, we also talk about how mindset can impact cancer outcomes, or rather, overcoming
0:01:56 cancer.
0:02:01 We discuss examples, mechanisms, and practical application of those mechanisms.
0:02:06 By the end of today’s episode, I assure you that Dr. Ellen Langer will change the way
0:02:10 that you think about the mind-body connection, the way you think about your health, and I
0:02:13 assure you it’s not all just about positive thinking.
0:02:18 In fact, Dr. Ellen Langer gets us to think differently about scientific questions, our
0:02:22 health, and just about everything else in the world.
0:02:26 You’ll soon see she has a quite unique way of thinking, not just about science and health,
0:02:30 but also about life in general and what makes for a truly good life.
0:02:36 Dr. Ellen Langer is a true luminary and pioneer in this area of mind-body health, and she’s
0:02:38 a fabulous teacher as well.
0:02:42 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching
0:02:43 and research roles at Stanford.
0:02:48 It is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information
0:02:51 about science and science-related tools to the general public.
0:02:55 In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors.
0:02:58 And now for my discussion with Dr. Ellen Langer.
0:03:00 Dr. Ellen Langer, welcome.
0:03:01 Thank you, Andrew.
0:03:02 It’s great to have you here.
0:03:07 There’s so many topics that you’ve worked on and shed light on that impact our daily
0:03:13 lives and our internal world and our external world and how they interact.
0:03:20 I want to know your definition of mindfulness, and it could take on practical forms, theoretical
0:03:21 forms.
0:03:26 Make it very simple, that when most people hear the word “mindful,” sadly, they think
0:03:28 of meditation.
0:03:29 Meditation is great, but it’s not mindful.
0:03:35 You meditate in order to result in post-meditative mindfulness.
0:03:37 So it’s a practice.
0:03:39 Mindfulness as I study it is a way of being.
0:03:41 It’s not a practice.
0:03:43 It’s the simple process of noticing.
0:03:46 Now, you can get there in one of two ways.
0:03:52 Bottom-up, actively notice three new things about the person you live with, walk outside,
0:03:54 notice three new things.
0:03:59 Each time you do this, you see that you didn’t know the thing you thought you knew as well
0:04:00 as you thought you knew it.
0:04:03 But you can also do it top-down.
0:04:10 Top-down is recognize that everything is always changing, everything looks different
0:04:14 from different perspectives, uncertainty is the rule, it’s not the exception.
0:04:18 So when you know you don’t know, then you naturally tune in.
0:04:23 So one of the things, I’ve said this so many times, maybe this will be the last, one of
0:04:26 the things we think we know best is how much is one plus one, Andrew?
0:04:29 I’m going to assume it’s still two.
0:04:30 Two.
0:04:31 Not always.
0:04:35 You add one watt of chewing gum to one watt of chewing gum, one plus one is one.
0:04:40 You add one cloud to one cloud, one plus one is one.
0:04:41 This is interesting.
0:04:42 Somebody sent this to me the other day.
0:04:46 You take one pizza and you add one pizza, one plus one is two.
0:04:51 You take one lasagna and you add one lasagna, one plus one is one.
0:04:53 It’s just a bigger lasagna.
0:04:59 You take one puddle and you add, let’s say I have two puddles there and you add some
0:05:04 water in between and then you have one plus one plus one is one.
0:05:05 Okay.
0:05:10 So the point of it is that in the real world, one plus one probably doesn’t equal to as
0:05:12 a more often as it does.
0:05:18 And since you’re an educated individual, you might know that one plus one equals two if
0:05:20 you’re using a base ten number system.
0:05:24 If you’re using a base two number system, one plus one is written as ten.
0:05:25 Oh my goodness.
0:05:27 Somebody asked you how much is one plus one?
0:05:32 Should you say one, two, ten?
0:05:36 And the point is that when you know you don’t know, then you pay attention.
0:05:43 In this context, let me see, I’ll be a smart ass and I’ll say one or in this context, I
0:05:49 know the person wants me to be obedient and I’ll say two, so on and so forth.
0:05:52 So when you don’t know, you pay attention.
0:05:57 When you pay attention, you have choices that otherwise you’re blind to.
0:05:59 It makes a very big difference.
0:06:04 So when you’re mindful, you don’t know, you actively notice as you’re noticing the neurons
0:06:11 of firing and 50 years of research has shown that it’s literally and figuratively enlightening.
0:06:14 And if you’re going to do something, show up for it.
0:06:20 Now, the problem is that most people are mindless almost all the time and they’re totally oblivious
0:06:21 to it.
0:06:24 When you’re not there, you’re not there to know you’re not there.
0:06:26 And most people are just not there.
0:06:29 Now you want to ask me, how does that happen?
0:06:31 Well, we taught that.
0:06:34 Schools, I think, are the biggest culprits.
0:06:38 Schools are teaching us absolute answers, one plus one is two.
0:06:43 Virtually, everything that we’re taught is as if the world is constant and going to stay
0:06:45 that way.
0:06:49 And the answer today is going to be the same answer as tomorrow.
0:06:53 And so that certainty leads us not to notice.
0:06:58 How did you come to realize this thing that we call mindfulness?
0:07:03 I mean, certainly in the last 20 years, the notion of meditation as a valuable practice
0:07:08 has become pretty common.
0:07:13 And prior to that, it was considered a little bit an alternative hippie-dibby.
0:07:14 Let me answer it.
0:07:15 Okay.
0:07:16 So it’s very funny.
0:07:23 I’m glad in some ways I don’t remember who this person was, but I started studying mindlessness.
0:07:28 And I found myself, I’d walk into a mannequin, I’d apologize, you know, all sorts of things
0:07:29 like that.
0:07:31 Well, this is kind of interesting to me.
0:07:36 I’m speaking to somebody, we don’t know who it was anymore, who said to me, “You know,
0:07:37 you are what you study.”
0:07:38 I said, “Okay.”
0:07:41 So then I switched it around from being mindless to being mindful.
0:07:48 At that point, then I found out about meditation and Buddhism and all of this and started to
0:07:51 learn about another way of being.
0:07:58 What was exciting to me was that I had gotten through this Western scientific mode, so to
0:08:05 speak, to the same, many of the same consequences as the Buddhists had talked about for thousands
0:08:07 of years.
0:08:14 It’s interesting how now in Western society we embrace this idea of presence, but it gets
0:08:19 merged with these kind of more rigid terms like focus and attention.
0:08:20 Yeah.
0:08:23 Now, focus is actually mindless, you know.
0:08:28 So it’s interesting, focus on your finger.
0:08:34 Now if you’re concentrating, focusing, what you’re going to notice is that your fingers,
0:08:38 the image is moving around, right?
0:08:42 And so when we try to hold something still, that’s the wrong thing, you shouldn’t tell
0:08:43 people to focus.
0:08:48 Now, instead of focus, look at your finger mindfully, that means you’re going to notice
0:08:52 new things, “Oh, that’s an ugly little finger, and what is that line there?
0:08:53 Why is this red?”
0:08:59 And when you’re doing that, when you’re actively noticing, the image stays still.
0:09:05 So when we give people instructions in school, you know, focus, they think as a camera, hold
0:09:06 it still.
0:09:10 And whenever we’re trying to hold ourselves, the image, anything still, we’re going to
0:09:14 be performing suboptimally.
0:09:17 Need to let things vary, things are always changing.
0:09:23 So what happens is we confuse the stability of our mindsets, we’re holding something still
0:09:26 in our heads, with the stability of the underlying phenomena.
0:09:34 So mindfulness as a practice of exploration, presence and exploration is perhaps a slightly
0:09:35 better perhaps way to think about it.
0:09:36 Yeah, but it’s not a practice.
0:09:43 You see, once you accept that everything is uncertain, then you just tune in.
0:09:46 You only don’t tune in when you think you know.
0:09:51 So if you are going to come visit me in Cambridge, you’ve never been to my house, you don’t have
0:09:56 to practice anything, you’ll walk in, you’ll notice things, “Did she do that thing?
0:09:57 What is that?”
0:09:59 You know, “Oh, look what she’s reading.”
0:10:00 There’s two dogs here.
0:10:05 You’ll just, exactly, exactly, you’ll notice without having to do anywhere.
0:10:09 And that’s the important thing, because in the way I keep differentiating mindfulness
0:10:15 as I study it, with meditation, meditation is a practice for some people to sit still
0:10:18 20 minutes twice a day is work.
0:10:22 Mindfulness as I study it is what you’re doing, you’re having fun.
0:10:27 You can’t have fun unless you’re actively noticing.
0:10:34 So in fact, this act of noticing is energy begetting, not consuming.
0:10:36 So it feels good.
0:10:39 It’s the essence of when you’re doing, when you’re having the most fun.
0:10:46 It’s good for you, and it’s so easy that I can’t see any reason why anybody wouldn’t
0:10:52 embrace it, you know, that it’s good for you.
0:10:56 When you’re mindful, people find you more appealing, charismatic.
0:11:03 When you’re mindful, the products you produce are enhanced, and it’s healthier.
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0:13:51 I think for a lot of people, a practice of meditation feels like the best or most obvious
0:13:54 gateway into this thing that we’re calling mindfulness.
0:13:56 It’s one way, and I’m not demeaning me.
0:13:59 I did some research in the ’80s on meditation.
0:14:00 It’s wonderful.
0:14:04 It’s just different, and they’re not mutually exclusive.
0:14:05 You can do both.
0:14:13 When part of the advantage of meditating possibly has nothing to do with the meditation, why
0:14:14 are you going to meditate?
0:14:16 You want to be a kinder, nicer person.
0:14:20 You can just be kinder or nicer, but now if you’re going to go to this trouble 20 minutes
0:14:26 twice a day, you’re going to sit up and take notice and be a kinder, nicer person.
0:14:31 Maybe it’s the time investment as opposed to something specific about the meditation
0:14:32 practice.
0:14:39 That’s a heretical idea in the world of wellness, but they’re not mutually exclusive, so I’m
0:14:46 not denying some of the more inherent properties, let’s say, but there’s this other piece to
0:14:47 it.
0:14:52 I love the way that you look at things that we take for granted as operating one way through
0:14:54 this different perspective.
0:14:59 Our mutual friend, Allie Crum, told me the story that at one point she was in a conversation
0:15:04 with you and you said, “Well, maybe exercise and all its effects on our health is just
0:15:05 an epiphenomena.”
0:15:07 Could you talk a little bit more about that?
0:15:12 First of all, I don’t think most people are familiar with what epiphenomena are, but this
0:15:17 idea of looking at things through a different portal seems so valuable regardless of what
0:15:21 the experimental outcome turned out to be, and perhaps we should touch on that experimental
0:15:25 outcome about labor versus non-labor.
0:15:27 There’s so much there.
0:15:29 I don’t know where to go.
0:15:32 I mean, we want to talk about that, the research with Allie.
0:15:34 Let’s talk about the study.
0:15:39 Before we go to the study, though, let’s go to the reason for the study, way back when.
0:15:44 All right, so there’s so many paths I can take here.
0:15:45 Let’s take them all.
0:15:46 Okay, we’ll start with one.
0:15:52 So I did some research back in the ’70s with people in nursing homes, and why did I do
0:15:53 that?
0:15:58 Because I had somebody in the family who was in a nursing home, it was very distressing
0:16:04 to see people just sitting there doing nothing and barely existing.
0:16:11 And so we had the idea that if we gave people choices, that might get them more engaged in
0:16:12 their living.
0:16:13 And so we did that.
0:16:19 We gave people encouragement to decide where to see people, whether to visit them in your
0:16:21 room, in the lounge.
0:16:25 You have to remember, you can’t go into an establishment, a business, and turn the whole
0:16:27 power structure around.
0:16:32 And so within reason, we came up with choices people could make.
0:16:36 We gave them an opportunity to see a movie, you could see it on Tuesday or Thursday.
0:16:39 We gave them a plant to take care of.
0:16:43 All right, it’s a comparison group, the Tender Loving Care Group.
0:16:50 We told them, people will be visiting you, and we’ll set it up so you’ll be visiting
0:16:51 in the lounge.
0:16:52 Everything was controlled in that way.
0:16:57 You can see a movie, and we’ll let you know if you’re going to see it on Tuesday or Thursday.
0:17:02 Here’s a plant, and the nurses will care for it for you.
0:17:04 So we do this.
0:17:12 We come back, I think it was three weeks, actually I don’t remember, it’s been so long, 18 months
0:17:14 later, first we took initial measures.
0:17:25 Come back 18 months later, those people who were given these choices live longer.
0:17:31 And that was the beginning of all of my work on health, in some sense.
0:17:37 How could it be that making choices results in a longer life?
0:17:40 All right, so what is there about choice making?
0:17:48 And then the choices were Mickey Mouse choices, you know, and you always have choice available
0:17:49 too.
0:17:53 You can turn on a light switch, you can do it with your right hand, your left hand,
0:17:58 one finger, three fingers, lift your foot like so many choices that you can bring to
0:17:59 the table.
0:18:03 If choice making is good for you, why don’t people do this?
0:18:09 And that got me more into the mindlessness and mindfulness work now.
0:18:12 So we have people living longer.
0:18:20 How can it be that you’re making choices, your mind is active, and your body complies?
0:18:28 And so then I thought about it, not in one felt swoop, but realized that this whole notion
0:18:31 of mind and body, these are just words.
0:18:39 We come together, here I am, all of me, my fingers, my shoulders, my thoughts, as one
0:18:40 thing.
0:18:47 And if we put the mind and body back together, then the amount of control we have is enormous,
0:18:48 right?
0:18:52 If I put my mind, I’m also putting my body.
0:18:58 So in the mindful body, which started off as a memoir, I have lots of stories that
0:19:01 show the leading up to this idea.
0:19:04 Let me just tell you two very quickly.
0:19:09 One was I got married, Andrea, you won’t believe it, I was obscenely young.
0:19:13 And you’ll find that if you read the book, I was even younger than admitted because I
0:19:15 was secretly married years before that.
0:19:16 Okay.
0:19:22 So until I’m 19 years old, I think I go to Paris on my honeymoon, we go into this restaurant,
0:19:24 I order a mixed grill.
0:19:27 One of the foods there was a pancreas.
0:19:31 My then husband, who was more sophisticated than I, more worldly, I said, “Which of these
0:19:32 is the pancreas?
0:19:33 This is that.”
0:19:36 So I ate everything, I’m a big eater.
0:19:38 Now comes the moment of truth.
0:19:40 Can I eat the pancreas?
0:19:45 Why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas, I still haven’t figured
0:19:46 out.
0:19:52 But anyway, I start eating it and he starts laughing, not good for newlyweds.
0:19:54 And I ask him, “Why are you laughing?”
0:19:55 He said, “Because that’s chicken.
0:19:58 You ate the pancreas a long time ago.”
0:20:00 So I made myself sick.
0:20:02 Okay.
0:20:09 The other side of that, my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas.
0:20:12 And then magically it was gone.
0:20:15 Somehow she had made herself well.
0:20:19 So I had many of these sorts of experiences and talk about, you know, mine, I’ve been
0:20:26 talking about this since, gosh, when did we first, since ’79.
0:20:29 So now people are talking about mind-body connection.
0:20:31 It’s not a connection.
0:20:35 If you’re talking about a connection between two things, it says they’re separate, and
0:20:38 you still have to deal with what’s connecting them.
0:20:45 When you put them back together, it’s one thing you don’t have to deal with that mediator.
0:20:50 And so the study you’re asking me about, which I’m surprised, I’m having a junior moment,
0:20:57 but I actually remembered the question you asked rather than a senior moment, that before
0:21:03 I tell you about the study with Ale, the first study we did testing this mind-body unity
0:21:05 was a counterclockwise study.
0:21:10 So here what we did was we took elderly men, we were going to have them live in a retreat
0:21:14 that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier, and had them live there as if they were their
0:21:16 younger selves.
0:21:20 So they talked about things from the past as if they were just unfolding.
0:21:22 The results were incredible.
0:21:26 Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked
0:21:28 noticeably younger.
0:21:34 So that was very exciting and began all this mind-body unity work.
0:21:41 Now comes the study that you’re talking about with Ale, where in the conversation that she
0:21:49 and I had, she was my student, and she made proclamations about exercise and any proclamation,
0:21:54 this is the short answer to your question, anybody proclaims anything in my mind immediately
0:21:56 goes, “So when might not that be true?”
0:21:59 I’m starting to pick up on that.
0:22:00 It’s a gimmick, I guess.
0:22:03 It’s a gift is what it is.
0:22:12 And so the question was that how important was the understanding of exercise to the effects
0:22:14 of exercise.
0:22:19 So we take chamber maids, and interestingly the first question we ask is how much exercise
0:22:25 do you get, and they say they don’t get very much exercise, because to them exercise is
0:22:29 what you do after work, because that’s what the surgeon general who sits behind a desk
0:22:31 will do.
0:22:35 So you would imagine whether they realize they were getting exercise or not, since
0:22:40 they’re getting so much exercise that they’re going to be healthier than other people who
0:22:43 are not getting them, and they weren’t.
0:22:44 That’s interesting.
0:22:47 So now we divide them into two groups, very simple study.
0:22:53 Randomly divide them into two groups, in one group we simply teach them their work is exercise.
0:22:58 Making a bed is like working in this machine at the gym, doing the windows, whatever.
0:23:04 So you have two groups, one who thinks their work is exercise, one who doesn’t realize.
0:23:10 We take many, many measures, and they’re not eating any differently from one group from
0:23:11 the other.
0:23:17 They’re not working any harder, nevertheless the group that changed their mind and now
0:23:20 saw their work as exercise lost weight.
0:23:24 There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came
0:23:25 down.
0:23:26 Remarkable.
0:23:27 Yeah, yeah.
0:23:32 And what I don’t usually talk about when I start talking about this is that this was
0:23:35 a test of the no-cebo effect.
0:23:37 Most people know what a plus-cebo is.
0:23:41 You take something that’s nothing and it has the effect as if it’s something.
0:23:47 You take a sugar pill thinking it’s strong medication and it plays out as if it was.
0:23:53 A no-cebo is the reverse, you’re taking something, so here you’re doing the exercise, but you
0:23:56 don’t realize it and it gets rid of the effect.
0:24:02 An early study on this was, I don’t remember who did it, now it was a senior moment.
0:24:08 People were given ipecac and ipecac is supposed to make you vomit, so if you accidentally had
0:24:11 poison or whatever, you take ipecac and vomit.
0:24:17 So people are given ipecac, people who have a problem vomiting and they’re told the ipecac
0:24:22 will stop their vomiting and it stops their vomiting.
0:24:27 So many plus-cebo studies where you take people, they’re rubbed with a leaf that they think
0:24:33 is poison ivy, so it is either is poison ivy or it’s not poison ivy.
0:24:38 You think it’s poison ivy or you don’t think it’s poison ivy and your body reacts to your
0:24:39 thoughts.
0:24:43 If you think it’s not poison ivy, you don’t get the rash.
0:24:46 If you think it is poison ivy, you do.
0:24:47 Spectacular.
0:24:53 And so we’ve been studying this for forever, I think that plus-cebos are probably our
0:25:01 very strongest medicine, although it’s interesting that when people think that they were given
0:25:05 a plus-cebo, they get very upset.
0:25:10 They should be excited because if the plus-cebo didn’t cure you, who cured you?
0:25:12 You did it yourself.
0:25:19 So plus-cebos have gotten a bad rap, I think primarily because of the pharmaceutical companies.
0:25:21 You want to bring a drug to market.
0:25:28 The way you do that is you have to run an experiment where the drug outperforms the
0:25:30 plus-cebo.
0:25:35 And when it doesn’t, damn it, I can’t make all those billions of dollars without saying,
0:25:39 wow, this sugar pill is mighty, mighty strong.
0:25:42 I want to talk about three themes that you raised.
0:25:45 The first one is this mind-body notion.
0:25:50 And now, even as I say it, mind-body, I feel like a hint of guilt because I completely
0:25:58 agree that the division of mind and body is one of the greatest mistakes of thinking in
0:26:01 psychology and Western medicine that ever existed.
0:26:08 In fact, a lot of my secret mission in this podcast is to remind people every single episode,
0:26:13 it seems, that the brain and body are connected bi-directionally through the nervous system,
0:26:14 but other systems too.
0:26:22 There’s no single system, hormone system, nervous system, immune system that doesn’t
0:26:24 cross the blood-brain barrier and go back and forth.
0:26:25 That’s all because of Descartes.
0:26:31 Descartes was out to dinner and the waitress asked him if he wanted a salad and he said,
0:26:32 “I think not.”
0:26:35 And he disappeared.
0:26:36 I think they were right.
0:26:38 I was about to ask, I was like, “How was it?”
0:26:42 And after that, Andrew, I say, “This is not my day job, so I don’t have to be funny.”
0:26:43 I love it.
0:26:44 I love it.
0:26:49 I’ve spent a lot of time trying to learn the history of medicine and the merge of philosophy
0:26:50 in medicine.
0:26:53 There’s a wonderful book that if anyone is suffering from insomnia, they should check
0:26:57 out because it’s extremely detailed and difficult to listen to or read, but it’s called The
0:27:02 Prince of Medicine, which basically details all the reasons why we are so confused about
0:27:04 how medicine is done and should be done.
0:27:08 And it has to do with rules and restrictions and cultural conventions, and it’s a whole
0:27:10 barbed wire mess, basically.
0:27:17 But it includes this mess that was created for us, which is this idea that somehow, because
0:27:23 the brain is perhaps the seat of our consciousness, to many people, they believe that.
0:27:30 But certainly, if I were to lose a few fingers on my left hand, I’m not sure I would fundamentally
0:27:35 be a different person, but if I lost a few millimeter or the equivalent amount of real
0:27:41 estate in my brain, my personality could very well change perhaps for the better, some would
0:27:44 say, and I’m probably not hoping for that event.
0:27:51 But all kidding aside, I think the mind-body distinction has really poisoned our thinking
0:27:57 about what’s possible, and the other experiments that you described point to what’s possible,
0:27:58 and I want to talk about those.
0:28:03 But maybe if we could just hover on this notion of mind and body as a single thing, that there’s
0:28:04 an us.
0:28:09 I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but that there’s an us, and our body carries
0:28:14 us forward in motor behavior, but how should we conceptualize the self if we don’t have
0:28:16 a mind-body distinction?
0:28:21 I don’t know why that’s a problem.
0:28:25 I am who I am, period.
0:28:33 How does that change whether we want to see me as having a mind, body, and elbows?
0:28:35 Explain to me, and then I will explain to you.
0:28:41 What I love is, I’m going to first reflect, what I love is the flexibility of your thinking
0:28:42 around these things.
0:28:48 Again, it’s like maybe exercise, the effects of exercise are epiphenomena, or so in thinking
0:28:56 about mind-body, I can’t get my head around this distinction that if I lose a certain
0:28:59 piece of my body, I’m not fundamentally changed.
0:29:03 But if I lose a piece of neural real estate, I’m fundamentally different.
0:29:05 That’s the only thing that anchors me to the idea that they’re separate.
0:29:06 Why is that true?
0:29:13 I mean, if, let’s say you’re an athlete, and you lose two of your fingers, you’re not going
0:29:17 to be performing in the same way that you performed in the past, and surely you’d end
0:29:18 up different.
0:29:20 Yeah, I’ll buy that explanation.
0:29:21 Yeah.
0:29:25 I mean, I’m just trying to probe this because I think nowadays people think, oh, you know,
0:29:30 if I breathe in a certain way, I’ll change my state of mind, which is true.
0:29:34 If I think differently, get stressed or relaxed, I’ll change the way that I breathe.
0:29:38 I mean, I think that we’re starting to understand the bidirectionality of these things.
0:29:45 I think some of the, even the work with the brain, where to assess this neuroscience now
0:29:51 is crazy with fMRIs, and we want, no matter what happens, you want to see what’s going
0:29:53 on in the brain.
0:30:00 And I think that implicitly in a backwards way, that leaves people away from realizing
0:30:05 that whatever you’re looking for is probably manifested every place.
0:30:14 You know, I had this experience, I like doing strange things, and I was out in Kansas City.
0:30:17 And so somebody said, there’s an iridologist.
0:30:18 What is an iridologist?
0:30:21 Sure, if a fun, we’ll go to the iridologist.
0:30:29 So this person is looking in my eye, my iris, that’s the iridologist part, and she said,
0:30:32 you have a problem with your gallbladder.
0:30:37 I thought, okay, that’s great, you know, in case we leave and have my time, I go back
0:30:42 home and I had a problem with my gallbladder.
0:30:43 Really?
0:30:44 Everything is everywhere.
0:30:48 The problem is, we don’t have the technology to notice it.
0:30:54 You know, so when you’re happy, your skin is different from when you’re not happy.
0:30:56 But who can see such small distinctions?
0:30:58 But it’s there.
0:31:01 All we do is look to see where the brain is different.
0:31:03 It’s all one.
0:31:09 Anything, I believe, anything that’s happening on any level is simultaneously, simultaneously,
0:31:14 and sequentially, more or less happening on every level.
0:31:22 So a teardrop of sadness biochemically is different from a teardrop of joy.
0:31:25 And so it’s all there, we just have to notice.
0:31:30 I have no memory now of what it was you said that led to that on my part, but I’m glad I
0:31:31 said it anyway.
0:31:35 Well, we’re probing mind, body, and their interconnectedness.
0:31:39 So this iridologist, I’ve never heard that term before.
0:31:44 This iridologist, it could be, based on what we were discussing a few moments ago, it could
0:31:49 be that the suggestion that there was a problem with your gallbladder led to a problem with
0:31:56 your gallbladder or do you think that she had some or he had some diagnostic knowledge?
0:32:00 I hadn’t even considered the former, which is strange to me.
0:32:11 No, I just assumed that she was seeing something, but your idea, but either way is fascinating.
0:32:16 By somebody suggesting you have a gallbladder problem, to have a gallbladder problem, yeah.
0:32:19 What are your thoughts on things like acupuncture?
0:32:22 And when I think about acupuncture, I’m not just thinking about the needles.
0:32:26 The few times I’ve been to an acupuncturist, the first thing they do is they ask you to
0:32:27 stick out your tongue.
0:32:32 They are able to diagnose tongue texture and color, and maybe they’re …
0:32:38 I think everything is everywhere, although there’s … I teach health psych at Harvard,
0:32:45 and there’s some data on it being mostly placebo, and that sounds like a downer, but most of
0:32:47 everything is placebo.
0:32:48 What does that mean?
0:32:55 That virtually everything is controlled by our thoughts, and we need to embrace that,
0:33:00 to make the changes that most of us desire.
0:33:07 So another, so going to an acupuncturist itself means I want to find the answers, and seek
0:33:14 and you are more likely to find, and then you’re in a position to improve.
0:33:20 Might I ask what happened with your mom’s mindset, or life, or psychological life that
0:33:22 you think led to the …
0:33:26 It’s an N of one.
0:33:27 It’s very hard to know.
0:33:36 I knew that when she got sick, I believed at that point that anything negative was going
0:33:44 to work in the opposite direction, and so I wouldn’t let anybody in to see her who wasn’t
0:33:50 uplifting, that was … There’s no way of knowing if any of that mattered or not.
0:33:56 I went and got her a very expensive set of golf clubs.
0:34:02 She wasn’t a big golfer, but my reasoning was that I must believe she’s going to be
0:34:05 better or why would I have spent the money.
0:34:11 Her reasoning was my reasoning must be that if I get these, she’ll think that … So it
0:34:16 didn’t work, but we had these golf clubs that were never used.
0:34:18 I don’t know.
0:34:23 I believe that we have more control.
0:34:29 At that point, I hadn’t done all of these experiments that might have led me to push
0:34:30 even harder.
0:34:35 It was kind of funny, though, because the way I had cognized everything back then was
0:34:40 the importance of perceived control, which I had these data people living longer and
0:34:48 so on, and yet mindlessly, I virtually took over her life, decided who can see or what
0:34:51 she can do.
0:34:56 I don’t know, and I don’t think there would have been with just one person any way of
0:35:04 knowing what led to the disease going away, but the fact that it went away was crucial
0:35:05 to me.
0:35:15 I think that we have to talk about the myths in medicine, that what people need to understand
0:35:22 is that all science are probabilities, and experiment doesn’t give you absolute facts.
0:35:29 We teach these probabilities as if they’re absolute, and give up a great deal of control
0:35:32 by doing so.
0:35:36 You asked me before about how I came to certain things.
0:35:40 Let me go back to an answer I should have given you.
0:35:46 Many years ago, I was at a horse event, and this man asked me what I watched his horse
0:35:49 for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog.
0:35:50 A hot dog.
0:35:51 I’m a straight A student.
0:35:52 What is it?
0:35:53 Crazy?
0:35:54 Horses don’t eat meat.
0:35:56 Sure, I’ll watch your horse.
0:36:00 He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it.
0:36:05 That’s when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong, and I thought, “What
0:36:06 does it mean, horses don’t eat meat?
0:36:10 How many horses were tested, and what were they tested with?
0:36:15 How much meat mixed with how much grain, and what kind of grain, and how big are these
0:36:16 horses?”
0:36:20 And so on, and it all opened up, and I said, “How could we make such a statement, horses
0:36:21 don’t eat meat?”
0:36:26 But when you think about science, that imagine if you did the experiment, and you’re trying
0:36:32 to teach somebody what you found, you say, “These particular horses who hadn’t eaten
0:36:38 for three days were given this grain, and under those circumstances, 80% of them didn’t
0:36:39 eat meat.”
0:36:41 That’s a mouthful.
0:36:47 You can’t communicate that way, so you abbreviate it, “Horses don’t eat meat.”
0:36:52 So it’s not in the telling that’s the problem, it’s in the receiving of the information.
0:36:59 We have to know that these things are just not true to the one, but it’s very important
0:37:05 because every time you’re given a diagnosis, you take the diagnosis as real, well, it’s
0:37:12 not the case that they can be sure that all of these symptoms mean you have this disease,
0:37:17 and if you have, quote, “This disease,” we don’t know that all of the people who have
0:37:18 it are going to follow.
0:37:23 It becomes very unlikely when you turn it all inside out that way.
0:37:31 And so another part of this that we can get into or not is people’s understanding, probabilities
0:37:35 in general, and that you can’t predict.
0:37:44 Now, people ask for answers all the time, even the how much is one in one, should I have
0:37:52 the surgery, what is the disease that I have, and by recognizing that all information that’s
0:37:57 given is for the group, not for the individual.
0:38:01 A few examples of this is kind of funny.
0:38:06 I say, “So Michael Jordan and I are going to have a foul shooting contest.
0:38:08 We each get to shoot one basket.
0:38:10 Who’s going to win?”
0:38:14 Well, most people are just going to quickly say Michael Jordan, all right?
0:38:16 How much money are you willing to bet on this?
0:38:19 One shot each, million dollars.
0:38:23 I’ll give you a million dollars if Ellen Langer wins.
0:38:28 You give me, or I’ll give you a million dollars if Michael Jordan wins.
0:38:31 You give me half a million dollars if Ellen Langer wins.
0:38:35 First, you think you’ll take the bet, but when you think about it, no, he sometimes
0:38:36 misses.
0:38:44 He sometimes makes the basket, maybe had a fight with his wife, didn’t sleep well, maybe
0:38:49 she’s in top form, and this is now the moment she’s going to make that basket, or make it
0:38:50 simple.
0:38:53 He said to himself, “Let the older woman win.
0:38:54 Why not?”
0:38:55 Really?
0:38:59 And when you think of all the reasons why it could be the case that I could win, all
0:39:02 of a sudden you become less certain.
0:39:07 Now, certainly, if we were shooting 100 baskets, he would win.
0:39:12 I’ll give you another example I use too often because I don’t know which of these will feel
0:39:14 right.
0:39:21 You go to a Mercedes parking lot, or pick your favorite car, and I’m going to say there
0:39:22 are 100 cars there.
0:39:28 You choose one, and if it starts, I will give you a million dollars.
0:39:36 If it doesn’t start, you give me your full life savings, assuming it’s under a million,
0:39:38 capped at a million.
0:39:41 Now, Mercedes are wonderful cars.
0:39:43 Nobody is going to take that bet.
0:39:47 Everybody knows sometimes it doesn’t work.
0:39:49 Sometimes the genius gets something wrong.
0:39:52 Sometimes the car is a lemon, and so on.
0:39:58 So what we mean when we say, if you were going to start 100 cars, most of them are going
0:40:02 to start, but you can’t predict which one isn’t going to.
0:40:07 Well in life, I’m happy if an operation is good for most people.
0:40:12 I want to know is it going to work for me, and there’s no way to know that.
0:40:17 You can never predict the individual case, but Andrew, we don’t have to worry about
0:40:25 that because you can always predict or control your reaction to whatever is happening.
0:40:28 So it doesn’t matter as much.
0:40:35 If I can be happy, whether this occurs or the opposite occurs, I care less about which
0:40:37 way it turns out.
0:40:41 But right now we’re all brought up in a world where we have these good things, we have these
0:40:45 bad things, you’ve got to kill yourself to get the good things, step over whoever you
0:40:47 can to avoid the bad things.
0:40:52 Once you recognize that’s all in your head, then just be still.
0:40:59 My favorite example, this for me was so funny, I’m doing one of these podcasts over Zoom,
0:41:07 and I’m trying to explain that evaluation is in your head, not in the things you’re evaluating.
0:41:13 I say as an example, so if the internet went out right now, wouldn’t be terrible, I’d go
0:41:15 have lunch.
0:41:20 The internet went out just at that moment, and I did have lunch because I had put the
0:41:22 suggestion in my mind.
0:41:24 These things don’t matter.
0:41:30 We don’t recognize that, and I think, I have a few one-liners that if people understand
0:41:34 or care about nothing else that I’ve said, take this to heart.
0:41:40 That next time you’re stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?
0:41:42 It’s almost never a tragedy.
0:41:49 And so when you breathe, you know, I failed the test, I got indented the car, I missed
0:41:51 the bus, whatever it is.
0:41:53 So what?
0:41:59 And so, you know, you take a deep breath and come back to yourself and realize that most
0:42:04 of the things that make us crazed are unnecessary.
0:42:09 You get a lot of this as you get older, but I teach my students this early on.
0:42:10 Why wait?
0:42:17 You know, why wait to recognize that you’re the one who’s almost always your worst enemy?
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0:44:51 So much of our developmental wiring is based on learning how to predict what’s going to
0:44:52 happen next.
0:44:56 I mean, you think about object constancy that kids, you know, of a certain age you put a
0:45:00 ball behind your back, they think it disappeared, eventually they realize just because you moved
0:45:04 your arm and the ball behind your back doesn’t mean that the ball is gone, this kind of thing.
0:45:11 But sadly though, then they believe the ball is still there when in fact the ball may be
0:45:12 gone.
0:45:13 True.
0:45:14 Right.
0:45:18 There’s always a portal to a different outcome.
0:45:19 And I’m catching on to your mode of thinking here.
0:45:25 This is actually what I’m trying to do, because I think, you know, the brain is a prediction
0:45:26 making machine.
0:45:29 In addition to doing other things, it regulates heartbeat, all the autonomic stuff, right?
0:45:31 The digestion, et cetera.
0:45:36 It remembers things and it’s a prediction making machine, at least those three things.
0:45:42 I feel like the prediction making aspect of our neural circuitry is what leads us to this
0:45:48 notion of having control or wanting control, because I think a lot of what’s happening
0:45:55 in our conversation in the backdrop of these experiments is to what extent do we have control
0:45:56 over outcomes.
0:46:04 Well, it’s interesting because our mindlessness, which results, I think, in part, to hold onto
0:46:09 things to have control is the very thing that deprives us of control.
0:46:14 Because again, things are changing, you’re holding it still in your mind and, you know,
0:46:19 so you’re living with somebody or you meet somebody and, you know, right away you decide
0:46:23 what, you know, size that person up.
0:46:29 So now you can control your interactions with them, but what you’re doing is ignoring all
0:46:37 the times the person is not like that and all the ways that the relationship could have
0:46:45 otherwise grown, you know, that we, in general, and this is, you know, I have a psychological
0:46:47 treatment for chronic illness.
0:46:50 It’s all based on the same idea of change.
0:46:56 Things are changing, we’re always holding it still, and so you have the illusion that
0:47:05 you’re controlling things, you know, but in fact, you’re giving up control by not recognizing
0:47:12 for yourself or somebody else, you know, all of our statements of we can do or we can do.
0:47:13 You can’t know whether you can or you can’t.
0:47:16 The fact that you did it doesn’t mean that you can do it again.
0:47:19 The fact that you couldn’t do it doesn’t mean you couldn’t do it in the future.
0:47:25 I feel like close to the end of each year, which we just, you know, passed recently,
0:47:26 these lists come out.
0:47:32 Oh, these resolutions are so mindless, but they’re more than just mindless.
0:47:39 They deny that what we did made sense or else we wouldn’t have done it.
0:47:44 That one thing that I told you is more important to me than anything else that I came to over
0:47:46 all these years of studying.
0:47:52 So, you know, you’re going to resolve that you’re going to, I don’t know, stop drinking,
0:47:58 you’re going to go to the gym, whatever these New Year’s resolutions are, suggests that
0:48:04 what you were doing instead of that thing you think you should be doing was not something
0:48:09 you should have been doing, and I think that’s never the case.
0:48:13 I woke up early this morning, and my first thoughts of the day, I like to think have
0:48:20 some importance for something, who knows, it’s when my mind seems clearest for at least
0:48:22 a nanosecond.
0:48:27 And my first thought was that the pattern that I seem to be perpetually in is one of
0:48:34 whatever I’m doing, unless I’m podcasting or reading a research paper, that my mind
0:48:38 is constantly flitting to the other things that I think I should be doing.
0:48:39 Yeah, that’s sad.
0:48:43 It’s sad, and it’s something I’ve been working on for a very long time, and I’m able to hold
0:48:48 my, for lack of a better word, attention on things to accomplish tasks in my life, and
0:48:51 to be present with people as it were.
0:48:52 But I thought…
0:48:55 No, no, no, let’s go back a step, because we both said it was sad.
0:48:57 Why is it sad?
0:49:03 Re-considering, you know, that to be able to think of five different things instead of
0:49:04 one…
0:49:05 It’s dreadful.
0:49:06 … could be an asset.
0:49:07 Right, it could be an asset.
0:49:13 I think that for me what I realize is most of the shoulds are just total lies.
0:49:14 They don’t…
0:49:15 And also they don’t…
0:49:16 Exactly, exactly.
0:49:17 They’re just lies.
0:49:18 They’re not actually coming from…
0:49:22 I’m not hearing other people’s voices in my head, “You should do this,” it’s not parental
0:49:24 narrative or anything.
0:49:32 It’s just contamination of a useless type.
0:49:33 It’s not like listening to the radio…
0:49:36 I used to listen to the radio while I’d make dinner or something, and it was so pleasant,
0:49:37 right?
0:49:42 I hear an evening discussion about the news or talk show or whatever on the radio while
0:49:46 cooking, and so that kind of “distraction” felt really meaningful.
0:49:50 I felt like what I lived alone that I had other people in the room with me.
0:49:52 This is different.
0:49:58 It feels as if it detracts from some essence of the behavior that I’m in, even if the behavior
0:50:00 is just getting out of bed in the morning.
0:50:02 Wait, so let me be clear.
0:50:07 You get out of bed, or start to get out of bed, and you have several thoughts.
0:50:08 And those thoughts bother you?
0:50:12 Will they prevent you from getting out of bed?
0:50:15 No, but they feel intrusive.
0:50:19 They don’t feel welcome.
0:50:20 Because I know what I’m going to do each day.
0:50:25 I have a policy for myself of doing one work thing each day, maybe in one or two blocks,
0:50:28 and I try and really put everything I have into those.
0:50:33 It’s kind of a recent evolution of not trying to do three things in a day.
0:50:37 Maybe it’s a function of getting older, but I get so much more satisfaction and get truly
0:50:41 so much more done from just doing one thing in my work life each day.
0:50:45 I don’t even understand the one thing I did.
0:50:50 People talk about multitasking, which is what you’re saying, and you’re better not to multitask,
0:50:52 but you’re always multitasking, right?
0:50:58 I mean, I’m moving my hands while I’m talking to you, and I’m sort of thinking and fixing
0:51:00 my back in the seat.
0:51:04 There are always lots of things going on.
0:51:10 I think that also tasks, so let’s say you’re a kid, and you’re doing your social studies
0:51:18 homework, and then you’re doing your math homework, and you go back and forth.
0:51:20 Are you multitasking?
0:51:21 It depends.
0:51:26 If you see yourself as multitasking, then you’re drawing boundaries between your math and your
0:51:27 social studies.
0:51:33 If you see yourself as doing homework, it’s all part of the same thing.
0:51:39 And so, there’s always a way that the task can be grouped as a single unit, or you can
0:51:41 see anything as multitasking.
0:51:47 When you see it as multitasking, you’re suggesting to yourself that there’s going to be some
0:51:48 conflict.
0:51:51 There’s some reason I’m leaving this to go to this.
0:51:58 Well, maybe I’m running the script backwards, let me put it differently.
0:52:05 The level of satisfaction that I feel from having, say, worked on a chapter of my book
0:52:11 for a couple of hours, or even 45 minutes, or from going for a run without my phone and
0:52:22 just enjoying the run, it still blows me away how much I enjoy things that would fall into
0:52:28 the category of simple things or things that I experience in isolation.
0:52:37 As compared to how little I enjoy and sometimes reflect on how punishing, quote-unquote, “multitasking”
0:52:41 is, like being in a text conversation while I’m walking on the beach.
0:52:47 No, no, but when you’re texting while you’re on the beach, probably it’s some kind of work
0:52:48 text.
0:52:54 There’s something about it, and why you’re doing it when you’re on the beach, because
0:52:58 I can easily imagine how I’m on the beach, it’s wonderful.
0:53:00 Let me text Andrew and say, “Andrew, you’re right.
0:53:06 This time on the beach is wonderful,” and texting wouldn’t take away from it.
0:53:09 My life is much simpler.
0:53:12 To me, all you have are moments.
0:53:13 That’s it.
0:53:17 If you make the moment matter, then the moment matters, and you can’t make it matter more.
0:53:20 It matters, or it doesn’t matter.
0:53:26 The question, when you’re lost doing, or found really, I don’t want to say lost when we’re
0:53:27 writing.
0:53:33 I find myself when I’m writing, but when you’re engaged in an activity, you’re making each
0:53:39 of those moments matter, but they should matter as well.
0:53:45 I had this thought that I would help people who are stressed, and I would say to them,
0:53:54 so assuming that their vision is reasonable, I would just thread a needle, and then I’d
0:54:00 ask them how they felt, and everybody’s going to feel fine, because you’re actively engaged
0:54:02 and doing something.
0:54:07 You’re not engaged in what people call monkey brain or whatever, worrying about tomorrow,
0:54:11 worrying about so on.
0:54:19 To go back to your three things, it’s like the text on the beach is not, and I love
0:54:24 you, text, because I don’t see why that would distract you.
0:54:30 I can imagine being anywhere doing multiple things where I’m sharing what I’m doing, but
0:54:37 I’m not seeing them, “Oh, I have to do this work thing,” and then the question is, why
0:54:42 I see the work thing that way, and especially someone like you where you don’t need any
0:54:44 of this anymore anyway.
0:54:47 Yeah, that’s a discussion into itself.
0:54:53 No, but it’s important, and so that if it’s all fun, it doesn’t matter.
0:54:59 I was on this panel in Australia, well, first each of us gave a talk, some big shots, and
0:55:05 then unbeknownst to us, they brought us all out, and so we’re sitting there, and I’m the
0:55:11 last one to be asked, and the question was, what’s on your bucket list, and so the first
0:55:14 person answers, what’s on the next person, and we get five.
0:55:19 Now it’s my turn, so I’ve had some time to think about this.
0:55:22 My first thought, I don’t have a bucket list, but of course you know that I’m going to say,
0:55:26 well, it’s good not to have a bucket list or else I’d have a bucket list, so then I’m
0:55:30 able to say why I don’t have a bucket list.
0:55:38 If you imagine you’re like a glass, and the water is full, or whatever you’ve bought
0:55:41 you in this case, that it’s full, it’s full.
0:55:47 You can’t do more than that, and so if the moment is meaningful, you don’t have to be
0:55:57 writing that book, being in love on a vacation in Paris, and so I think we have all these
0:56:03 crazy notions, even the idea of, and I’ve talked about this before, work-life balance.
0:56:06 Ooh, that’s scary to me.
0:56:13 What that says, what life really means is some joy, right, other than just being, you
0:56:21 know, doing work 24/7 or however long people work, not 24/7, what is it, three and a half
0:56:32 hours. Anyway, it suggests that the work that we’re doing has to be aversive, and because
0:56:39 it’s aversive, the only way to have a good life is to add this fun time, and I think
0:56:40 that’s sad.
0:56:48 I think it’s sad that people think life has to be stressful, that work has to be unpleasant,
0:56:53 you know, that no matter what you’re doing, I believe there’s a way of doing it so that
0:56:54 it’s fun.
0:57:01 Well, I love that notion. I mean, I will routinely find these articles just get served up to
0:57:06 me in my Google feed or something, like the five things that people regret most on their
0:57:08 deathbed. I think these lists are terrible.
0:57:09 I do too.
0:57:14 I think they’re terrible because without fail, number one, two or three is always, I wish
0:57:20 I hadn’t worked as much. I’ve derived tremendous pleasure from my work, but also tremendous
0:57:26 relationships, tremendous, excuse me, levels of insight into what I think are insights
0:57:27 anyway.
0:57:29 Well, clear. You wouldn’t be having the experience now.
0:57:36 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I’m constantly in pinch me moments with the podcast. That
0:57:39 was also true when I was running my lab, and then I decided to transition more to this
0:57:45 and other things. But I mean, this notion that one wishes they’d worked less, it’s such
0:57:52 a sad thing to even think about, but it also implies that somebody who enjoys their work
0:57:57 doesn’t enjoy their family or their relationships, and that certainly isn’t true either. So there
0:58:00 are all these assumptions that are written into these lists. I’m actually quite opposed
0:58:08 to lists of that sort in a short media article form because I think, A, it clearly doesn’t
0:58:12 change behavior. I mean, people have been talking about drink less. Well, smoking was
0:58:19 eradicated mostly from this country through different mechanisms, but sleep more, stress
0:58:24 less. I mean, these lists come out and they don’t change behavior at all.
0:58:29 Not only that, but even a discussion about, let’s say something like sleep, I find it
0:58:36 outrageous. We might even disagree on this here. But when people say, how much sleep
0:58:45 do you need? Now, to me, if I just ran a marathon, that night, I probably need a different amount
0:58:55 of sleep than if I stayed in bed eating candy, watching movies all day. And my age, everything
0:59:01 should play a part in this. If I relax in the two or three hours before going to sleep,
0:59:06 that’s it. Especially if I dim the lights, I actually require a full two to three hours
0:59:10 less of sleep to wake up feeling refreshed. My criteria is, what does it take to wake
0:59:15 up feeling reasonably refreshed? So to go back to the mind body unity studies, we have
0:59:21 a study where we have people in a sleep lab, they wake up and the clock tells them they
0:59:26 got two hours more sleep than they actually got, two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep
0:59:32 they got. Biological and cognitive functioning follow perceived amount of sleep.
0:59:35 This is such an important study. I was going to bring it up later, but I’m so glad you
0:59:39 brought it up now. These days, a tremendous number of people are tracking their sleep.
0:59:43 I do it through my sleep mattress cover. I love getting my sleep score. I like to see
0:59:49 what I got. People do with the aura ring or the whoop band or pick your favorite technology
0:59:56 nowadays or Apple Watch, whatever. If I understand this study correctly, the perception of how
1:00:03 much sleep people got based on their knowledge of a number, a score, et cetera, dictates the
1:00:09 cognitive performance and their physical well being. This runs countercurrent to everything
1:00:15 in the wellness biohacking movement. It jibes, however, with the data that I’m aware of.
1:00:21 I think it was a sleep lab at Stanford that, for instance, positive anticipation of next
1:00:27 day events reduces your sleep need and improves the quality of your sleep. Just being excited
1:00:31 for the next day can make it such that the five hours you got is sufficient.
1:00:36 The funniest thing is that if you have to wake up early in the morning to make a flight,
1:00:41 okay, so you have to get up at 4.30 in the morning to make a flight, what most people
1:00:47 will do is go to sleep early the night before so they can wake up early. But they’re not
1:00:52 going to be able to fall asleep because the amount of sleep they need is dictated by the
1:00:54 day before, not the day to come.
1:00:59 Well, I do think that there was a “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” mindset that was diminishing
1:01:05 people’s health for a while. I do think it’s great that books like Matt Walker’s “Why
1:01:09 We Sleep,” et cetera, came out, although that book focused more on the bad things that
1:01:13 happen if you don’t sleep enough. And I think Matt, who’s done a series on here about sleep,
1:01:18 would now say, “It’s great that we’re now focused largely on the things that one can
1:01:22 do to get agency over one’s sleep.” But I think that there’s such a thing as creating
1:01:28 a sleep-need anxiety and then people can’t sleep because we’re not going to dissolve
1:01:31 into a puddle of our own tears on one poor night’s sleep.
1:01:39 Yeah, but it’s also that if you’re not sleeping, what is the reason for that? And if you’re
1:01:44 stressed, obviously it’s the stress that’s the problem, not the number of hours sleep
1:01:45 you’re getting.
1:01:50 Well, I always say if you’re going to get less than your typical or required night sleep,
1:01:54 hopefully it’s for good reasons. Hopefully you’re having a good time. It’s when you get
1:01:58 the fire alarm in the middle of the night that it becomes, as you said, stressful. I’d
1:02:04 like to just briefly go back to the counterclockwise study. Could you describe a little bit more
1:02:11 about the practical aspects of that study? These were people who, let’s say, were on
1:02:14 average how old? Was it somewhere between like 30 and 50?
1:02:18 No, no, no, no. Counterclockwise, these were people who were 80.
1:02:20 Oh, 80. Okay, excuse me.
1:02:27 But also that was when 80 was 80, not the new 60. They were old. In fact, I remember
1:02:33 when I was interviewing people to see if they could be in the study. So they’re down
1:02:40 the hall, I’m in my office and I see them and they look like they’re not going to make
1:02:46 it down the hall to the office. And I’m saying to myself, why am I doing this? That I’m taking
1:02:53 on too much. In fact, had I realized all the responsibility at that point that I was actually
1:02:56 assuming I probably wouldn’t have done it. I mean, I was in charge of these people’s
1:03:02 lives, everything about them for this five days without knowing these people, without
1:03:06 a full medical support system or whatever. Yeah, one or two of them had died, you could
1:03:10 end up in a mess. Yeah, so I was fortunate that none of that
1:03:20 happened. So they were old and it was interesting because they show up and they look really,
1:03:27 now it probably would be somebody 105. That’s the way they presented. And you’d speak to
1:03:33 the person and usually the adult daughter would do the answering rather than, you know,
1:03:41 so they were coddled, they were presumed to have all sorts of problems and so on. Almost
1:03:48 instantly when they got there, they changed. The feeling was almost palpable. Now I did
1:03:55 this thing, it wasn’t good science, but so the first group that we took there was the
1:04:01 reminiscent group. This was a group where they were going to reminisce for that week.
1:04:07 So they always knew now was now and then was then, right? That was a control group. We
1:04:16 get to the retreat and I’m in this van. Oh, people need to understand the study was back
1:04:23 before Google, before we had the internet. So when I am playing music in the van going
1:04:29 to the event, music from the past, this was a major thing to find this. Now it takes two
1:04:37 minutes to ask Chad lately and give me the 10 best songs back 20 years ago at any rate.
1:04:44 So I’m on the bus with them, music playing from the past playing. We get very close to
1:04:51 the retreat and all of a sudden I realize that I was sexist at the time, oblivious,
1:04:58 but none of my male graduate students were with me. That meant I had seven old men and
1:05:05 at least seven heavy suitcases. There was no way I was going to carry their suitcases
1:05:12 upstairs. So unplanned for we get off the bus and I say, “You’re in charge of your
1:05:17 own suitcase. I don’t care if you move it an inch at a time to get it to your room
1:05:23 or you unpack it here, a shirt at a time, however you want to do it.” Now imagine nothing
1:05:29 else, the difference between somebody who’s cuddled, who’s not even thought to be able
1:05:34 to respond to a question, you know, where the daughter or son would answer for them
1:05:43 to now they’re in charge of their whole lives. And that meant that even the comparison group
1:05:48 was going to do well, which they did just not quite as well as the other group. And
1:05:53 for me that was fine because as you mentioned before, my work is all about possibility.
1:06:01 I’m not interested in describing what is. I’m interested in seeing what may be. So if
1:06:09 I got one monkey to say, “Hey, Ellen, that’s nonsense,” that would be fine if we couldn’t
1:06:15 train the rest of them, you know, but it would lead us to different views of language.
1:06:19 I love this approach to science of seeing what may be. I have to say there’s this little
1:06:24 script running in the back of my mind and now I’m not going to judge it. The sorts of
1:06:29 experiments and the general line of inquiry that you’ve been involved in for, you know,
1:06:37 some time now, to me runs countercurrent to my perception of, I’m just going to be honest
1:06:42 because I’m a West Coast guy, the Harvard campus, and the idea that science is done
1:06:48 in a particular way. You know, a very brief anecdote, you know, the folks that founded
1:06:54 at the Esselen Institute in Big Sur were at Stanford at one point, they weren’t professors,
1:07:00 but there’s a story and I believe the story that they had proposed at that time, a class
1:07:06 on mindfulness and breathing to bring Stan Graf through and some other people. And this
1:07:12 was probably the late ’70s, early ’80s, and whatever the cultural norms were at Stanford
1:07:16 at that time, they claimed they were basically runoff campus when it started at Esselen.
1:07:21 I don’t know if it’s a true story, but I like the story anyway. My lab at Stanford
1:07:26 ran a study on particular patterns of breathing along with David Spiegel and how it can be
1:07:31 used to, you know, self-adjust stress levels and reduce stress levels. Okay, so nowadays
1:07:35 there’s grants given for this kind of stuff and meditation. So there’s been a huge shift
1:07:42 in the academic cultural milieu. But given that you’ve been running these sorts of, you
1:07:47 know, seeing what may be types of studies for a number of years at a campus that I consider
1:07:53 as more kind of like East Coast died in the wool notions of how science is done, I want
1:08:01 to know, A, how was it received early on? B, did you care? C, is it in your nature and
1:08:06 has it always been in your nature to kind of test the elements? Because I sense, but
1:08:13 I could be completely wrong because I’m not a psychologist, that you delight in not poking
1:08:20 the bear but playing with ideas that are kind of heretical. Well, I would use the methods
1:08:26 of the field. It was just the questions that were different. So they weren’t seen to be
1:08:32 quite as different as you’re suggesting. Did any of your colleagues think like, great,
1:08:38 okay. No. I love hearing that. Does it shatters my notions of kind of East Coast Ivy League
1:08:41 academic? No, it gets to me. I mean, perhaps behind my back, but. Well, clearly it’s worked
1:08:45 out and nowadays, you know, there are multiple labs at Harvard working on happiness, you
1:08:50 know, working on mindfulness. And I mean, you’ve pioneered an entire field and a way,
1:08:56 but I’m more interested in the way of thinking that was. Well, so it’s interesting. Eight-year-old
1:09:02 Ellen Langer, like, well, maybe cookies are the nutritious stuff. No, I understand. So
1:09:08 I seem to be, you know, come hell or high water. I’m going to do it. I’m not like that
1:09:13 at all. Interesting. More now that I’m older, but I tell a story. I don’t remember what
1:09:19 the point of it, the exact point was in the mindful body where I’m at the dentist. I’m
1:09:24 a little kid. I don’t remember how old. And I remember my mother came in and the dentist
1:09:29 told my mother what a good patient I was. And all I remember was my saying, what were
1:09:35 the other kids doing? You know, so it wasn’t as if I made a choice. I could do this or
1:09:41 I could do, you know, it never occurred to me. And so lots of these ideas, you know,
1:09:46 are not against or what, you know, I don’t know where they come from. I know Lee Ross
1:09:51 when, you know, so Lee was a professor at Stanford. And I remember having a conversation
1:09:57 where he said, Ellen, you know, you’re from Mars. And I said, I’m not so different. He
1:10:04 says, okay, so you’re a normal, not an exceptional Martian, but you’re still a Martian. And then
1:10:10 a colleague had a conversation with us. And I was flattered by this, but I think it wasn’t
1:10:14 meant to be flattering because they were worried what my reaction was, was that, you know,
1:10:23 I’m from a different time. And, you know, so that plays differently if you’re aware.
1:10:30 You know, so like when I started painting, you know, I was breaking the rules to some
1:10:36 people’s minds, but no, I didn’t know the rule. And so I was just doing what felt natural.
1:10:41 Well, I have to introduce you to my good friend, Rick Rubin, who’s been on this podcast a few
1:10:46 times because he wrote the creative act. He’s basically, his life has been spent, you know,
1:10:50 trying to pull out the best creative works from musicians, and he’s been involved in
1:10:54 other things too. And he’s just as a, you know, a kind of supernatural level of ability
1:10:58 to do this. And he keeps coming back to this thing in our discussions, but also in his
1:11:06 book and elsewhere about how the impediment, the greatest impediment to the creative process
1:11:11 is to think about the publicity or cultural milieu that it’s going to exist in, that
1:11:18 he really believes that these things are offerings to God, to the universe, to whatever, that
1:11:25 come through us and that the barrier is, it’s almost like the self-awareness is the barrier.
1:11:32 So one of the earlier titles of “The Mindful Body” was “Who Says So?” And, you know, realizing
1:11:38 that everything that is was at one point a decision, made by people with different motives,
1:11:44 different histories, different needs. And when you put people, as I say, back in the
1:11:51 equation, everything becomes mutable, everything. You know, so there are things, here’s where
1:11:56 I am different from many other people, better or worse, I think in this case, for better,
1:12:02 you know, that everything can be changed. You tell me and meet this woman and she’s
1:12:08 too heavy, weight can be lost, hair can be grown, everything can be changed. So I give
1:12:15 a talk when I was very young and I’m here on the stage and the audience is all the way
1:12:21 back here. And I knew that was going to make me nervous. So what I did was move all the
1:12:27 chairs to be closer to me. Now, if you said to anybody, can you move the chairs? Everybody
1:12:33 would say, of course. But mindlessly, it doesn’t occur to you. It doesn’t occur to you that
1:12:42 what is doesn’t have to be as it is. And, you know, the older I get, the more malleable
1:12:47 everything seems to be. Even a thing, you know, to go back, I don’t know why this comes
1:12:55 to mind, but it does. If an insurance company is making a decision about what drugs to ensure.
1:13:00 Now, who said that this disorder is better or more worthy than that does? I say, so these
1:13:07 are people making this decision. So imagine that you have a group of nuns, they’re the
1:13:13 committee making the decision, versus a group of lusty 50-year-old men. And they’re deciding
1:13:20 whether people should be reimbursed for Viagra, for example. And that’s what it’s all about.
1:13:25 You know, that when you recognize that whatever is could be different as meetings, and I deal
1:13:32 with this when I give lectures, you know, at some point I might say, look in the audience
1:13:37 and see if there’s usually a man. Is there a man here? It’s about six-five. There’s somebody
1:13:43 always there. I don’t know why. Six-five men find me attractive. I don’t know what. Anyway,
1:13:49 I invite them to the stage, and then we look ridiculous. I’m five-three, he’s six-five.
1:13:54 And I ask them to put his hand up. His hand is three inches larger than mine. And then
1:14:00 I just raise the question, should we do anything physical the same? And it’s ridiculous. You
1:14:06 know, but one of us is teaching how to do it. You know, so the more different you are
1:14:12 from the person who wrote the rule, the more important it is for you not to mindlessly
1:14:19 follow the rule. So you don’t hold the tennis racket like this if your hand is half the
1:14:24 size of the person who worked twice the size or, you know, or anything else. And people
1:14:30 don’t realize it. That everything that is was a decision for something to be a decision
1:14:36 means there was uncertainty. As soon as the decision is made, we forget all that uncertainty
1:14:42 and act as if this is the way it’s supposed to be. An example I often use, you know, tennis.
1:14:47 So you have, and everybody, when you think about this, nobody’s going to argue that,
1:14:51 of course, the rules to tennis weren’t handed down from the heavens. Somebody decided it
1:14:57 should be two serves, and that’s fine. But for me, three serves would be better. The
1:15:02 first time I kill it doesn’t go in. Now I’m afraid to try to kill it again and learn from
1:15:07 that because I don’t want to double fold. So I have a little whoosh, second serve, three
1:15:11 serves, I kill it, it doesn’t go in. Now I learn from it, I kill it again, but I’m getting
1:15:16 a little better. And I still have my backup third serve. All right. So what is the point
1:15:23 of that? That if I wrote the rules to the game, I would be a better tennis player. You
1:15:28 would be better at whatever you’re writing the rules to. So you think differently about
1:15:32 yourself. You don’t feel bad about it. In fact, you know, when people play tennis with
1:15:39 me, we often play three serves. Why not? You know, everything about it is up for grabs.
1:15:45 And you know, so what happens is the lower down you are on the totem pole, the fewer
1:15:51 of these things, games, ways of being that you yourself have created, the more you’re
1:15:59 trying to fit yourself into some form that done isn’t so comfortable. So we need to appreciate
1:16:08 that rules, laws, everything was just somebody’s decision about how things should be. And you
1:16:14 know, don’t violate them purposely. But if they don’t fit, you know, legality is not
1:16:21 the same thing as morality. You know, by law, one was not allowed into racial marriage.
1:16:27 By law, one was not allowed to be gay. By law, you know, so on and so forth, one wasn’t
1:16:32 allowed to drink at one point and so on. These are not moral issues. These are a group of
1:16:40 people who are making a decision for the rest of us. If it doesn’t hurt, fine. But you know,
1:16:47 if it does, bite it, deviate, at least live the life you want to live.
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1:18:16 As a consequence, I decided to join their Scientific Advisory Board, and I’m thrilled
1:18:20 that they’re sponsoring the podcast. If you’d like to try Function, you can go to
1:18:26 functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a waitlist of over 250,000 people, but
1:18:33 they’re offering early access to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that’s functionhealth.com/huberman
1:18:39 to get early access to Function. I feel like one of the major detriments to living the
1:18:47 way that you’re describing, which by the way, has tremendous gravitational pull in my mind.
1:18:54 It’s such a better way to go through life. I subscribe also to this notion that pretty
1:19:02 much everything was made up besides the laws of nature. To me, physics is real, and chemistry
1:19:06 is real. Biology is real. It gets tricky because …
1:19:13 They’re all real, but it’s our understanding of them that varies. We haven’t worked out
1:19:20 all of physics yet, or biology or any of these other things. I don’t think that we should
1:19:27 set these aside and say, “Those rules, we should follow.” Come hell or high water.
1:19:31 Seeing what may be … I mean, I could say, listen, because of the laws of gravity, objects
1:19:39 fall down, not up. We could create exceptions to that, but that humans make up all sorts
1:19:46 of rules. Culture dictates, group think dictates. It seems that one of the major detriments
1:19:52 to living in this freer way, this more exploratory way that we’re talking about today, is this
1:19:59 whole thing of theory of mind, that we are able, for better or worse, to get into the
1:20:05 minds of others, and in some cases, create ideas, true or not, about how we will be judged
1:20:11 if we do A, B, or C. In doing so, we give up some real estate. We give up some …
1:20:19 See, that’s … Okay, so that’s perfect, Andrea, because we think we know, but are oblivious
1:20:27 to the fact that every single is a big statement. Behavior can be understood in equal dimensions,
1:20:34 equal potency, as good or bad. Now, so that I can control what you’re thinking. You think
1:20:39 that I’m gullible. You could persuade me that I’m gullible. I can try my hardest not to
1:20:45 be gullible, but I’m going to eventually be gullible. The reason for that is that I value
1:20:52 being trusting. And as long as I value being trusting, I’m going to be seen as gullible.
1:20:57 As long as you value being flexible, you’re going to be inconsistent. As long as you value
1:21:03 being stable, you’re going to be seen as boring, and so on. And so, this is what I said to
1:21:11 you before in different terms, that with all that I’ve studied, found interesting over
1:21:17 all these decades, the thing that meant the most to me was the realization that behavior
1:21:22 makes sense from the actor’s perspective, or the actor wouldn’t do it. Now, if you think
1:21:29 about that, that means every single time you’re demeaning somebody, or yourself, or you’re
1:21:35 coming up with a New Year’s resolution, what you’re doing is denying the sense of what
1:21:43 you were doing, and saying, “Oh, you should have done something different.” Okay. Once
1:21:50 you realize that your behavior makes sense, you like yourself more when you’re realizing
1:21:57 that in any relationship, anything that’s difficult is difficult because one of you
1:22:01 thinks there’s a right way and is denying the other person’s perspective. We did this
1:22:07 thing so many years ago. I gave people a list of, I don’t remember, two or three hundred
1:22:13 behavior descriptions. I said, “Circle those things about yourself that you keep trying
1:22:20 to change, but you keep failing it.” So, for me, I’d circle impulsive, gullible, I won’t
1:22:26 tell you the rest. Okay. Then you turn the page over, and in a mixed up random order are
1:22:32 the positive versions of each of these. Now people are asked, “Circle those things you
1:22:39 really value about yourself, my spontaneity and my being trusting.” As long as I value
1:22:48 being spontaneous, I’m going to appear impulsive and so on. Now that I have more respect for
1:22:55 myself because what I did made sense, I carry myself differently. I’m not doing what you
1:23:04 were just suggesting before, where I’m tormenting myself and so on. The people I’m with, there’s
1:23:11 a lot in the mindful body that deals with language and only a fraction of the sensitivity
1:23:18 I seem to have to language in a different way from the way linguists would study it.
1:23:25 You have things on, let’s say, forgiveness. We have all these terms that seem good, and
1:23:30 you know because you figured me out now that if you say it’s good, I’m going to find a
1:23:36 way it’s bad. If you say it’s bad, I’m good. Okay, so this is one of those. I don’t want
1:23:46 anybody, certainly not the person closest to me, to ever forgive me. I want to be understood,
1:23:50 and if you understand, there’s no reason to forgive me because my behavior will make
1:23:53 sense or else I wouldn’t do it.
1:23:59 Okay, so how did this come about? I was asked to give a sermon. Sermon, I’m Jewish, I have
1:24:04 to go to this church because I say yes to everything, and I’m going to give a sermon.
1:24:10 What am I going to talk about? I know nothing about religion. Forgiveness. It’s not religion,
1:24:15 but it sounds religious. All right, I’ll think about forgiveness. I think about forgiveness,
1:24:20 and what I came up with was sacrilegious. Some would think, if you ask 10 people, is
1:24:23 forgiveness good or bad, what are they going to tell you?
1:24:28 They’re going to tell you it’s good. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad, what
1:24:34 are they going to say? It’s bad. But you know, you can’t forgive unless you first blame.
1:24:39 So our forgivers are our blamers. That’s interesting. Now, do you blame people for good things or
1:24:44 bad things? You blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves aren’t good
1:24:50 or bad. So what happens is the people who see the world negatively, who blame, then
1:24:57 forgive, hardly divine. Now, if you blame, it’s better to forgive than not forgive. But
1:25:03 if you understand why the person did what they did, it obviates the necessity for blame,
1:25:07 which then obviates the necessity for forgiveness.
1:25:08 I’d love to bypass blame.
1:25:17 Yeah, well, I think that’s the way to do it, is to recognize, in a more open-minded way,
1:25:26 the motivations that people have vary, the consequences. No matter what you do, whatever
1:25:33 negative thing it seems, positive things will follow if you allow them and you look at it
1:25:34 that way.
1:25:36 Can I ask you to…
1:25:39 No. Oh, that’s right. It’s your podcast. Yes, you can.
1:25:45 It’s definitely not my podcast. We’re here together. Could I ask you for any reflections
1:25:55 that come up around this recent thought train I was on? I was laughing at the fact that
1:26:03 our species, for whatever reason, seems to keep wanting to build technologies. And much
1:26:08 of our effort these days is focused on trying to undo some of the ills of the technologies
1:26:12 that we’ve developed. So I use smartphones and I love them and I use social media and
1:26:15 I think it’s terrific for certain things. But of course, these things have issues just
1:26:21 like the automobile created issues, the television created issues and on and on. Okay, fossil
1:26:25 fields and all of this. People will debate fossil fields, but anyway, you get the point.
1:26:32 Every technology brings with it some convenience or some way that humans have been able to overcome
1:26:39 nature in some way or work with nature. We can’t fly, so we build planes. Okay. And
1:26:46 I just decided to look at this through a different lens. This is amazing. We’re sending rockets
1:26:50 into space. We’ll probably colonize Mars not too long from now. If Elon figures it out
1:26:53 and I get the sense that he probably will, we’ve got AI just this last week. There’s
1:26:55 this whole AI thing.
1:27:01 And so then I started thinking like, at what point do we just kind of stop? And the answer
1:27:05 is pretty clear. It’s unlikely that humans are ever going to stop this kind of itch to
1:27:13 develop technology. And I thought, wow, we’re the only species that does this. If the raccoons
1:27:17 get together and they think, okay, let’s figure out how to pick locks, like actually
1:27:21 how to pick locks as opposed to just go in through crawl spaces. If they’ve been working
1:27:25 on that, they’re still failing miserably as far as I know.
1:27:30 So it’s something so unique to our species among the old world primates to develop technologies
1:27:39 — other animals do it, crows do it, other primates do it. But we are really the utmost
1:27:45 example of this. And I just wondered, what do you think the human compulsion is to develop
1:27:46 technologies?
1:27:50 I don’t think there’s a compulsion to develop anything in particular. I think there’s a
1:27:55 compulsion to develop. There’s a compulsion, I wouldn’t call it compulsion because that
1:27:58 sounds negative. But I think that —
1:27:59 A drive.
1:28:07 Yeah. All mindfulness is noticing new things, creating new things. With that creation, we’re
1:28:15 maximally alive. And so if we happen to be on the technology train, then it’s technology
1:28:22 that’s going to get our attention. The people who are in other areas, whether it’s creating
1:28:28 logic, doing what you and I do, it doesn’t seem to me any different in principle.
1:28:32 What do you think that’s about? I’m not asking us to go into evolutionary psychology, but
1:28:38 what do you think it is that humans have this generative spirit in their mind body, the
1:28:44 same thing, to express and to create things that have some durability and time or that
1:28:48 are just an expression of where we are? I mean, it’s so unusual.
1:28:55 But I don’t think that it’s durability is what matters. I think then that becomes a
1:29:04 social construction. What is the group, the Asians, monks who are going to create art,
1:29:10 and as soon as it’s finished, then you bring it down to the water and to show that nothing
1:29:11 lasts.
1:29:16 Sandcastle no selfie, I call it. Sandcastle no selfie. You’re just doing it to do it.
1:29:20 I actually do a lot of writing these days that in my brain, I’ve always called sandcastle
1:29:24 no selfie. It’s getting washed away, and then someone says, “Well, you could take a photo
1:29:28 of it.” It’s like, “No, actually, I just do it just to see.” It’s just a practice
1:29:32 of getting out what I feel I need to get out.
1:29:39 So for my mindfulness book, which I wrote way back when, the secretary I had then was
1:29:44 a wonderful guy, but didn’t know anything about computers, and I knew less. So I would
1:29:51 give him something and I’d say, “Insert this, page 20,” whatever. And he would just sort
1:29:57 of randomly, because he didn’t know what he was doing either. And then at some point,
1:30:06 he lost an entire draft of the book, to sort of imagine. And my first thought was probably
1:30:12 more typical in my second thought, which is, “Oh my God.” And then I said to myself, “What
1:30:17 makes me think that that draft was better than the next draft that I can come up with?”
1:30:25 In some sense, a version of your who cares. And then I just started working on it again.
1:30:29 At some point, when you’re writing these research papers, I think most people come to the point
1:30:36 where first numbers count, right? How many publications? Then at some point, the game
1:30:43 changes, and you don’t care about the number, and that’s freeing. And so it seems a little
1:30:50 similar. I think that for people to recognize that that excitement can be gotten, the threading
1:30:57 of the needle, as I said before, would make much of life feel different.
1:31:05 So we did, this is going to seem strange kind of answer here, but we took people who didn’t
1:31:12 like rap music, people who didn’t like football, people who didn’t like art. Okay, so a lot
1:31:18 of haters, people don’t like anything. One group is just given the activity. The next
1:31:23 group is asked to notice one new thing about it. The next group, three new things about
1:31:24 it.
1:31:25 They’re doing it or observing it?
1:31:28 It doesn’t matter if it’s football, they’re observing. It doesn’t matter if you’re observing
1:31:34 the rear ends of the football players. Just noticing new things. And the more you notice,
1:31:39 the more you like what you’re noticing. And to recognize that that’s how simple it is.
1:31:45 Now, most people, especially when you’re younger, you’re waiting for something to pull you,
1:31:51 something to grab me and get me all excited. And how freeing if people were taught that
1:31:58 you could grab it, whatever the it is, just by noticing. You don’t have to hold on to
1:32:03 the thing you’re holding on to when you’re recognizing that you could hold on to the
1:32:04 next thing.
1:32:09 I saw the Seinfeld. This was so funny. I thought, “It must have been old Seinfeld.” And after
1:32:15 the show, he does a five-minute stand-up. And I’m going to not do it as well as he,
1:32:20 but nor should I. And he says, “What is this thing with appetites?” You know, he’d go out
1:32:23 to dinner and people say, “Don’t eat the bread. You’re going to spoil your appetite.”
1:32:28 There’s so many appetites. “You spoiled this one. There’s another one right behind it.”
1:32:35 And if you realize that that high, that total engagement, the passion you were feeling was
1:32:43 not a result of anything particular about the person, the context, the context, how
1:32:49 freeing it would be. It’d be easy to let things go knowing that you can have that a moment
1:32:51 later.
1:32:57 This is why at some point in my life, I’m going to tell my team six months and I’m done.
1:33:04 And I’m going to go do art. And I just don’t want to scare anybody. But I love the idea
1:33:12 of being able to switch venue and possibly to even change identity, which is something
1:33:14 I’d like to talk to you about.
1:33:18 Well, the art is just kind of interesting. You know, that I started painting when I was
1:33:24 about 50. And I was one of those kids who couldn’t draw. And I’m going to have someone think
1:33:29 of education. What mark might I have made on a page that would have led an elementary
1:33:37 school teacher to lead me to believe that I had no artistic ability? When you think
1:33:45 of a difference between a Mondrian or Rembrandt, people so different that it’s sinful for people
1:33:51 to think they know how things should be, so they know who can do it and who can’t, as
1:33:54 if there’s only one way to do whatever it is.
1:34:00 And I had this experience, and it was very clear in my mind. So I have this painting,
1:34:07 and I have this friend who is an art collector. She drinks a little too much. She came over
1:34:13 for a visit and she saw the painting, very early painting of mine. And she looks at it
1:34:19 and just, “Ellen, there’s something there.” This is the important part, just, “Now don’t
1:34:24 go thinking you’re Rembrandt.” Which wasn’t nice, but you had a little too much, but it
1:34:29 didn’t matter. But my response was so important to me. I didn’t say it because I didn’t think
1:34:37 it would go over well, but I said, “And Rembrandt isn’t me.” Now, I would rather be the very
1:34:45 best Ellen Langer than the 500,000th, 5,000,000th, whatever Rembrandt. And when you recognize
1:34:53 that quality is a decision people are making, there is no absolute standard. If you know
1:34:58 anything about art, I mean, let’s take even the impressionists, where people who pay so
1:35:07 much money today, they were all rejected in their day. When you realize that in some ways
1:35:12 and my work has suggested this to me, that if you’re present when you’re doing it, you’re
1:35:21 mindful when you’re doing it, somehow that reveals itself in what you’re doing. And whether
1:35:29 or not it does, you’re putting yourself on that canvas and it’s great fun, it’s exhilarating.
1:35:43 And when somebody belittles it, it’s strange to me, where are those criteria coming from?
1:35:52 No different from in schools. I’m very much in favor of trying to create mindful education
1:35:58 because, as I said before, I think that it’s our system of education that has caused most
1:36:06 of the mindlessness and a slide that I put on, but I give some of these talks in my view
1:36:12 that virtually, I don’t really mean virtually, I have to say because I’m an academic, right,
1:36:20 all, I believe all of our ills, all of them, Andrew, personal, interpersonal, professional,
1:36:26 global, are the indirect or direct effect of our mindlessness.
1:36:34 So here we have schools all over the country teaching these absolutes, propagated in magazines,
1:36:42 newspapers, taught by our parents, taught to each other, all that are limiting us and
1:36:49 causing the problems that we keep trying to solve. And how easy it would be if we just
1:36:55 acknowledge everybody doesn’t know something, everybody knows something else, everybody
1:37:01 can’t do something, everyone can do something else. So when you’re grading that paper and
1:37:10 you’re so sure that this paper just doesn’t make it, to presume that every smart person
1:37:17 in the world would evaluate that the same way I find this tasteful.
1:37:22 So constantly, you give tests in school to find out what people don’t know, give tests
1:37:26 to find out what they do know. Turns out it’s the best way to learn. I’d
1:37:32 researched an episode of a solo episode of this podcast I did and to figure out what
1:37:35 are the best ways to study and learn. It was based on a course that I’d guest lectured
1:37:40 in at Stanford. It turns out we have to be careful now. I have to be careful with saying
1:37:45 things like the best. One of the most effective ways to learn is to self-test for what one
1:37:51 knows and doesn’t know, but not for sake of evaluation, but for sake of enhancing recall
1:37:56 and depth of consolidation. And I think all of us, at least in this country…
1:38:00 But what I’m saying something a little different is you’re saying how to remember, which I
1:38:07 agree with that completely, but I’m saying that when we’re testing people, we, whoever
1:38:14 the we is, decided what is important to know to see does that student know that, ignoring
1:38:22 all the other things that student must know. I said this before that and I was lecturing
1:38:27 in South Africa and they put me up in this very fancy hotel and I had taken a few hours
1:38:35 off and I was down by the pool. And there was this enormous amount of the hotel space,
1:38:41 the real estate, that was totally unused. The only person who knew that was the lowly
1:38:49 Kibana boy, who nobody is going to ask what his opinion is. Everybody has a perspective
1:38:56 that can add to the larger piece. And by having this idea of there are those of us on top,
1:39:02 we really know people… And I’ve given this genius award and shortly afterwards, every
1:39:05 time and you’re supposed to be a genius, I never claimed.
1:39:12 The danger of awards that carry titles like genius or even Nobel, I’m not going to poke
1:39:17 at my few friends that happen to have no bells because they’ve done beautiful work, but it’s
1:39:22 rare that people who get no bells do much after that. They become great sources of fundraising
1:39:28 for universities, so you get leveraged for that. And I don’t think anyone’s going to
1:39:33 shed a tear for a Nobel Prize winner here, but this brings me to this notion of labels,
1:39:37 not just rankings and performance, but labels.
1:39:46 Labels hide all the ambiguity. So we can use grades. When I give a student an A versus
1:39:54 a B, it sounds like they’re very different. But imagine, and I’ve studied this with respect
1:40:03 to health, that the person who gets an 89, so you go from an 80 to an 89, you get a
1:40:10 B, a 90 to a 100, you get an A, nobody in the right mind would think there’s a real
1:40:16 difference between the person who’s gotten the 89 and the person who’s gotten the 90.
1:40:23 But their worlds become very different. All the ambiguity is hidden. We studied this.
1:40:28 It’s the borderline effect, as we call it, where so imagine, let’s say you and I take
1:40:37 an IQ test, and for argument’s sake, that you get a 70, so you’re normal. I get a 69,
1:40:43 so I’m cognitively deprived. I could have sneezed and read the question wrong. I could
1:40:47 have come up with multiple answers that could have been better than the one that got the
1:40:50 question and the person who wrote the question and so on.
1:40:57 But now, we’re put into two different categories, and because I’m cognitively deficient, I’m
1:41:04 not given the training that I should be given. I no longer think well of myself, and so if
1:41:09 you asked me to read certain things, I’d probably opt out and so on. And in a very short time,
1:41:17 the difference between us becomes very real. Well, it’s the same thing with a medical diagnosis.
1:41:24 There is always somebody who’s right below the border who has it, or we’ll say who doesn’t
1:41:30 have it on above and below, and the person right above or at that has it, where the two
1:41:36 scores are not meaningfully different, but where one then is told they have the disease
1:41:43 and the other not, and the difference becomes real over time. So we have data supporting
1:41:51 that, and it’s almost just a gedonkin experiment, a thought experiment. At some point, you have
1:42:03 to put a limit. But you need to always know that it’s made up. So what is the expiration
1:42:08 date for this can of food? Well, I mean, there are people who actually go through their shells
1:42:15 and throw these things out because it’s two weeks old, not realizing how did they come
1:42:23 up with that date in the first place? Anyway, I’m going to go back to what you were saying.
1:42:29 Let me remind you now, because I’m having the junior moment, that labels, names of things,
1:42:39 categories, help us organize things, but more often, or as often, hold things still and
1:42:45 cause problems. I did that first study way back when I called a patient by any other
1:42:57 name, and we made a videotape of a person being interviewed and showed it to therapists
1:43:03 who were either behavior therapists or Freudian types, and the person on the tape was called
1:43:09 either a patient or a job applicant. So the exact same tape. When we called the person
1:43:15 a patient, they were seen as having hiddenness and problems and that and so on. When the
1:43:19 person was called a job applicant, they were seen as well adjusted.
1:43:26 I have a friend who was in elite, elite special operations for a number of years, very smart
1:43:31 guy, very philosophical, and he once said to me for reasons that I don’t recall. He said,
1:43:37 “You know, the two most powerful but also dangerous words in the English language are
1:43:43 ‘I am’ because anything that follows the words ‘I am’ will completely constrain your
1:43:48 notions of what’s possible and what’s not possible.” And I said, “Why are you telling
1:43:52 me this?” Because I pointed out that he was from special operations. He said, “You know,
1:43:59 that he and his teammates had a mode of refreshing their mindset around particular operations
1:44:03 that were because of the division of the military he was in, etc. It was quite varied. It wasn’t
1:44:08 like they were just sort of doing one type of thing. They had to be very adaptive.” And
1:44:15 he said that they had to completely wipe away this ‘I am’ component of their vocabulary,
1:44:20 except as it related to the word ‘adaptive’. It was like, “I am adaptive.” But there was
1:44:26 never a title to who they were, what they were once they entered the context of a planning
1:44:32 execution of one of these operations. A very interesting way of thinking about identity,
1:44:38 how it shapes mindset, how it constrains it and opens doors, and converts things into
1:44:47 action or failure to execute. I found it very intriguing because here’s a guy that wouldn’t
1:44:52 normally think of this stuff. But it turned out, he said that was a very potent tool for
1:44:53 them.
1:45:01 Well, I think that as soon as you’re learning something, and if you have your sense of,
1:45:08 as if you’re going to be the same person over the next 70 years, for example, we don’t actually
1:45:13 cognize that, but without literally realizing that you’re not going to be the same person,
1:45:20 you take in whatever you’ve just learned and continue doing it the exact same way. You
1:45:26 know, you go back to tennis, you learn the game of tennis when you’re 15, and now you’re
1:45:30 40. You shouldn’t be doing any of it the same way.
1:45:31 Why do you think we can’t say?
1:45:37 No, now you’re 80. Again, and so what happens is your performance is not going to be as
1:45:42 good as it could be because the 80-year-old body is trying to do it as if it’s a 15-year-old.
1:45:48 Rather than taking advantage of their positive things that happen as you get older, they’re
1:45:56 not all negative. You know, that I mean, if I’m playing tennis with, I don’t know, 15-year-old
1:46:01 kid, I’m going to win without having to move very much because they don’t know what they’re
1:46:09 doing, you know, so that you don’t need the same skills, the more experience you have
1:46:15 with the task necessarily, at least. You see what I’m saying is that we freeze, we freeze
1:46:21 our own behavior. Every time you learn, the way we learn everything, it just toggles the
1:46:27 mind. You learn how to drive, and then you freeze the way you’re learning how to drive
1:46:33 when you know the least about how to drive, you know, and that’s the way you’re going
1:46:40 to do it for the rest of your life. A driving thing, just as I’m not really apropos of anything
1:46:48 except in the car, that if you’re driving on ice, what do you do? A car starts to skid.
1:46:54 You’re driving on ice. I know what you don’t do. You don’t slam on the brakes. You slowly
1:46:59 come off the gas. I’m driven on the East Coast a little bit. That’s exactly wrong, Andrew.
1:47:07 That used to be the case. This is the way we learn everything. The way things are right
1:47:13 now, that when you skid, we were told that what you’re supposed to do is gently hit the
1:47:20 brake and turn into the brake. Now that there are anti-lock brakes, the only way, the safest
1:47:25 way to stop that car is to jam on those brakes. We just think about it because this is the
1:47:31 way we learn everything. In this case, you’re learning how to drive for safety’s sake, and
1:47:38 then you mindlessly continue that and it becomes very unsafe.
1:47:40 I didn’t get the memo.
1:47:45 No, most people don’t. That’s why I brought it up now, seeming apropos of almost nothing,
1:47:51 but we need to understand that things are changing and pay attention to the way that
1:47:58 they’re changing and change with it. The more you hold yourself, you’re talking about identity,
1:48:08 the more you hold yourself still, the harder that’s going to be. I’m much older, as most
1:48:14 people are, than I used to be, but I don’t have any sense of age. I really don’t. In
1:48:20 fact, the other day, and the other day now means years ago, I was helping this woman
1:48:26 with something, and somebody dear to me said, “You’re probably 20 years older than she
1:48:33 is.” I had no sense. I thought I was helping this old person. Age is just not a relevant
1:48:34 factor for me.
1:48:42 Sometimes you want to be aware of age. We did some research where we have people who,
1:48:49 they’re accused in the environment that often tell us how old we are, and those are not
1:48:58 always so good. For example, if I, at my age, I’m in a fancy store and I go to buy, let’s
1:49:06 say, a dress or a skirt, it would be inappropriate for me to buy a mini skirt. I’m too old to
1:49:16 be wearing almost nothing there. Clothing tells you how old the person is. Now, we did
1:49:24 research, just archival research, with people who wore uniforms. If you’re wearing a uniform
1:49:31 from the first day you start working, you’re there 30 years, there’s no difference. There’s
1:49:38 no age-relevant queue, and in those situations are healthier.
1:49:39 Really?
1:49:44 Yeah, because they’re not getting the cue that they’re old.
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1:50:59 savehuberman20 to claim the offer. If one has parents, let’s say who are quote-unquote
1:51:04 slowing down a bit, and they’re talking a little bit about it, so make some pains and
1:51:10 there’s a stairwell in the house, for instance. They’re starting to say things like, “At some
1:51:14 point, we’re either going to have to move into a place that doesn’t have a stairwell
1:51:21 or put one of those chair lifts things or maybe just move into the downstairs.” Do you
1:51:27 think that in just thinking about that, they’re going to accelerate the demise of their local
1:51:28 motor ability?
1:51:35 I do, actually. I think that when we start entertaining these negative thoughts and evaluating
1:51:40 ourselves, we’re always going to find evidence. As you get older, you start to say, “Oh my
1:51:46 God, am I forgetful?” You pay attention each time you forget, and that makes it even worse.
1:51:54 When I said to my students in this health class, smart kids at Harvard, this is on Thursday,
1:52:00 I teach Tuesday and Thursday, I said, “What was the last thing I said in class on Tuesday?”
1:52:07 Nobody remembers. I said, “You must be getting dementia.” When a young person forgets, it’s
1:52:12 okay. They don’t pay any attention to the forgetting. As you get older and you forget,
1:52:16 you get less involved in what you’re doing. If you’re trying to learn something, you have
1:52:24 the competing part of you saying that you’re not going to remember this and so on. Independent
1:52:33 of all of this, I think a lot of the loss in memory has nothing to do with memory. When
1:52:39 I was young, you’re introducing me to people. I thought it was important for me to remember
1:52:44 their names. Andrew, I know it doesn’t speak well of me. I don’t really care. You’re going
1:52:48 to introduce me to five of your … What do I care? If I’m going to need their names,
1:52:55 chances are I will meet them again. Afterwards, if you say to me, “Remember Jim,” and I say
1:53:00 to you, “Which one was Jim?” It wasn’t that I forgot. To forget means I had to have learned
1:53:06 it in the first place. If you don’t learn it in the first place because you don’t care,
1:53:14 because your values change as you get older, then it’s not a matter of forgetting when you
1:53:20 don’t know it in the second place. I think that if we turn it around, because now I’m
1:53:24 doing this because I know you expected it of me, and we say, “What if you remembered
1:53:30 everything, everything?” How would you get through … You wouldn’t get to experience
1:53:42 anything new. Forgetting serves a purpose. I used to think … I never tested this. Now,
1:53:46 we came up with this years ago, and I think it’s probably wrong, but it’s kind of fun,
1:53:53 that people as they get older, they become hard of hearing. But it also happens that
1:53:59 the older you get, the more you realize nobody is really saying anything. Being hard of hearing
1:54:06 protects you from a lot of that noise. My grandfather turned off his hearing. I’ve
1:54:11 always had glasses for reading at night when my eyes would get fatigued or something, but
1:54:17 recently I came to my awareness that my vision at a distance is very, very sharp. I’m like
1:54:26 an eagle. I can read numbers very far away, but my vision up close has been diminishing.
1:54:29 I find myself straining a bit more even the day, so I started wearing eyeglasses.
1:54:31 Or you should have the book further away.
1:54:36 Or I should have the book further away, but I just have defaulted to eyeglasses. But I
1:54:41 realized that because I understand the neuroplasticity of the visual system, that I’m certainly
1:54:47 accelerating the demise of my near vision by wearing glasses. So I’m trying to balance
1:54:48 the two.
1:54:53 Well, do you know our vision study? This is kind of fun. I’m in the doctor’s office,
1:54:57 and like everybody else, I’m given the Snelling Eye Charge.
1:54:58 The letters.
1:54:59 The letter is …
1:55:00 The letters.
1:55:01 Exactly.
1:55:02 The letters.
1:55:03 The letters.
1:55:04 Exactly.
1:55:05 The letters.
1:55:06 Exactly.
1:55:13 And I resent that the letters are getting smaller and smaller because it’s creating an expectation
1:55:19 that soon I won’t be able to see. So I ask, “What would happen if the letters got larger
1:55:25 and larger?” Which would be to change the expectation that soon I will be able to see.
1:55:31 So when we do that, people are able to see what they weren’t able to see before. Now,
1:55:38 most of us have trouble around two-thirds of the way down the chart. So what we did was
1:55:45 start the chart a third of the way down. So letters are smaller than on top. So now two-thirds
1:55:50 of the way down, that starting point, the letters are really small. And what happens
1:55:54 is again, people can see what they couldn’t see before. Awesome.
1:56:04 Yeah. So the idea that your vision has to get worse, I think there are many, many instances
1:56:10 where that’s not the case. But also, the whole test division is bizarre. How often in your
1:56:16 life are you looking at letters that make no sense? If I don’t want to see you, I’m
1:56:20 going to see you a lot sooner be able to run away from you. If I’m hungry, I can see the
1:56:27 restaurant sign much quicker than if I’m not hungry. I see things in color that are different
1:56:33 in black and white, so on and so forth. And to lose all of that with a two-dimensional
1:56:40 eye test seems to me. And again, we haven’t touched on this, but it’s probably important
1:56:47 with respect to vision. It’s true with everything. In fact, I tell people, you’re wearing glasses.
1:56:55 Try it without glasses. You want to see when you can see and when you can see. With almost
1:57:06 everything, we again hold things still when they are varying. Now, what I mean by this
1:57:14 is that, let’s say with vision, my guess is that 11 o’clock in the morning, my vision
1:57:20 is better than at seven o’clock at night. The date is, yes. Okay. I’m going to be hard
1:57:27 for it. So what does this say? This says maybe I should either have a nap. I don’t nap, so
1:57:31 I should have an energy bar, and even an energy bar is cute. It’s just a candy bar, but you
1:57:35 call it an energy bar, you’re allowed to eat it. It’s like you take a piece of cake,
1:57:40 put it in a muffin tin. It’s called a muffin. It’s healthier than the piece of cake. Anyway,
1:57:52 I’ll be that as it may, that control, a great amount of control over our physical well-being
1:57:58 comes about by attention to variability, which is just a fancy way of talking about mindfulness.
1:58:01 Mindfulness is noticing change. That’s what it means to be variable.
1:58:07 All right. So if you took your glasses off and you saw for yourself, what are the times,
1:58:11 what are the moments that you’re having? I’m not talking about people who are almost
1:58:17 blind, where I can see and when I can see. And then you ask yourself why, and then it
1:58:24 may be the case that it’s a particular font or more likely that you’re tired and then
1:58:30 you have other options. But once you start wearing them, it’s like taking a laxative.
1:58:34 Take a laxative once. It’s fine. If you’re taking a laxative all the time, you’re teaching
1:58:42 your body to depend on the laxative. You teach ourselves by some of these things that are
1:58:48 supposed to be helpful that we teach ourselves to need them in ways we otherwise wouldn’t.
1:58:53 And so we did this attention to symptom variability with big diseases.
1:58:59 So when you have a chronic illness, the first way most people understand chronic illness
1:59:02 is that there’s nothing that can be done about it.
1:59:04 Yeah, the word chronic implies that.
1:59:07 Exactly. But all it means is the medical world doesn’t have a fix.
1:59:10 It doesn’t mean there’s nothing can be done.
1:59:15 Now, you have your symptoms of the chronic illness. The presumption most of the time,
1:59:20 I would think, is that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse.
1:59:27 Nothing only moves in one direction. Sometimes it’s a little better, sometimes the stock market,
1:59:32 if it’s going up, it doesn’t go up in a straight line, it goes up down a little, and so on.
1:59:40 All right. So when it’s better, why is it better? So we do this. We call people periodically,
1:59:48 and we simply ask them, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time we called
1:59:54 and why? Several things happen. The first, by engaging in the whole process, people feel less
2:00:01 helpless, and that turns out to be good for your health. Second, once you start noticing that now
2:00:05 it’s a little better, or it can even be a little worse, you feel better because you thought that
2:00:11 it was always maximally, I’m always in pain, I’m always stressed, whatever it is. Third,
2:00:17 or whatever I’m up to, by asking the question, why now is it better or worse than before,
2:00:24 you engage in a mindful search. And I have decades of evidence that that mindfulness itself,
2:00:29 the neurons of firing, that itself is good for your health. And then finally, I believe you’re
2:00:36 more likely to find a solution if you’re looking for one. So we’ve done this with multiple sclerosis,
2:00:43 chronic pain, Parkinson’s, stroke, biggies, and in each case have very positive results.
2:00:48 And the good thing about these sorts of things is that there are no negative side effects.
2:00:55 And it doesn’t mean that you have to stop doing any medical procedures you may be doing.
2:01:01 But you’re asking, you’re back in charge of your own health care. Why does this hurt now?
2:01:06 You know, stress, there are some people who think they’re stressed all the time. Nobody
2:01:13 has anything all the time. So I call you, Andrew, and I say, how stressed are you now? And why?
2:01:17 And we go through this over time. And then you find out, you know,
2:01:21 you’re stressed when you’re talking to Ellen Langer. Well, then the solution is easy. Don’t
2:01:29 talk to me. I’ve been thinking about deadlines a lot lately. And we hear stories of, you know,
2:01:35 people being told, I need this done in 15 days. And if people are forced to do it in 15 days,
2:01:40 somehow they’re able to get it done in 15 days or certainly there are limits to this.
2:01:45 If you told me I need to write a thousand pages in five minutes, there would be very little on
2:01:50 each page. But staying within the bounds of reason of what we’re talking about when we say
2:01:55 there’s a deadline in X number of days, why do you think it is that our perception of what’s
2:02:01 possible tends to scale with, A, what’s been done before, so precedent or no precedent,
2:02:06 the four minute mile, for instance, until banister broke it, you know, no one else broke it,
2:02:11 he broke it, lots of people have broken it since and did immediately afterwards.
2:02:15 So what do you think about this notion of what’s possible in terms of
2:02:22 preordained human decision constraints? Like no one can break the four minute mile,
2:02:29 someone breaks four minute mile, now we reset to a new reality in time and in sort of capability.
2:02:35 Because I feel like much of what we believe about ourselves is also constrained by our beliefs about
2:02:41 the outside world. And as you pointed out earlier, all of that’s just a human script that is the
2:02:51 play we’re all in. Yeah, I think that the first part is what guides most of us is what’s been done
2:02:58 before. And the fact that nobody has done it to me means nothing but to a lot of people.
2:03:04 People create theories working backwards, you know, which is they often take what is
2:03:10 and then derive rules to explain why it has to be like that. Once you believe it has to be like
2:03:18 that, then it doesn’t occur to you to do anything other than that. But if we start off with the
2:03:25 notions of science that I was talking about before, that it’s all just probability, no absolutes,
2:03:31 then it wouldn’t occur to you to stay within the rigid boundaries.
2:03:35 Not the best answer, but the only one that came to mind.
2:03:41 That’s a great answer. I’m trying to think about the use of the scientific method, which is what
2:03:51 you use in your lab and in your research. And why it is that you haven’t, it seems, challenged the
2:03:55 scientific method itself, except at the level of like what hypothesis you’re going to test.
2:04:01 I mean, in order to do great science, I mean, at some point you need statistics,
2:04:07 you need sample size to be sufficient. The rigor of your studies is as important as the
2:04:13 originality of the questions you’re asking. And so it seems that you’ve embraced the scientific
2:04:20 method as at least useful. Yeah, that’s the key. That to me, it’s a means of speaking to certain
2:04:29 people and it carries with a certain gravitas. But I by no means feel that it’s giving answers that
2:04:35 are any more absolute. Well, as I said before, that all of the answers are probabilities.
2:04:45 So it’s just a language to use. The counterclockwise study was criticized because I didn’t publish it
2:04:53 in a standard journal because my assumption of the, it’s very hard if you’re doing something
2:05:01 over a week’s time to control every possibility. And what I was trying to do in that study was
2:05:11 to show that vision, for example, can be improved. That lots of the things that people presume are
2:05:18 wired in as you get older, it gets worse and worse, that just doesn’t have to be that way.
2:05:25 But I’m having trouble remembering now because I know that I was going to write a paper
2:05:34 taking the whole science of science apart and never did. And if I had written the paper,
2:05:39 I’d probably remember what I was going to say and answer your question. Well, it’s a good one,
2:05:49 but I don’t think that there’s anything that is described as absolute that’s going to be right.
2:05:57 Whether it’s physics, even physics, biology, psychology, anything, that our methods can only
2:06:06 take us so far. And the people who get beyond that are the people who don’t presume that that’s
2:06:11 as far as you can go. If you can go this way, you can go a little further. I was a chemistry major
2:06:17 when I was an undergraduate. And the problem was I practiced Jewish chemistry, which was
2:06:24 a little as good, a little more is better, which is not the way to do chemistry. But I don’t know
2:06:33 what it is that leads some people to be rigid and to take everything that is told to them as
2:06:43 if it must be. And what it is that led me to a different way of being and testing it or just
2:06:49 thinking that some of the things that people say just made no sense to me. Not long ago, we went
2:06:57 through one of the biggest public health crises of at least my lifetime. And at least two major
2:07:04 controversies arose. One was the extent to which masks should or shouldn’t be worn and are useful
2:07:12 or no. The other is about the so-called vaccines. Yeah. And I think those are beautiful examples
2:07:20 because one can make an argument that you should wear a mask, but the other side also makes sense.
2:07:26 The way masks were preventing even nonverbal communication, which is very important and
2:07:31 important to people’s health, right? Your relationships are not an inconsequential part
2:07:40 of your well-being. And vaccines, there is no treatment that’s going to be good for everybody.
2:07:45 Somebody very close to me, if given dexadrine, puts her to sleep.
2:07:55 Dexadrine is basically speed. Exactly. And so when we recognize the uncertainty inherent in
2:08:01 all of these things, I think we don’t mandate things in quite the same way. Now, you can mandate
2:08:08 that people wear masks, but it shouldn’t be that people wear masks because we’re absolutely certain
2:08:15 that masks should be worn. There are other arguments to be made why people should wear masks or not
2:08:23 wear masks or not wear masks, whatever the case is going to be. And I think it’s important that
2:08:31 in the medical world that I think, I gave this talk at one point and I thought I was talking to
2:08:40 5,000 women with breast cancer, and it turned out there were lots and lots of physicians there.
2:08:44 If I had known that, I might have spoken a little differently.
2:08:52 And then afterwards, I said, oh my goodness, because I was not flattering. I had great respect for
2:08:58 most of these people. But then I found it afterwards that they were thrilled because
2:09:07 they know they don’t know. And operating on the world with an awareness that you can’t be sure
2:09:13 leads to a different humility, a different way of appreciating other people when they disagree
2:09:21 with you and so on. And I don’t know how you do that at the higher level, government and so on.
2:09:31 But this is maybe a silly example, but meaningful to me. So I spent a lot of time in Mexico and
2:09:39 there’s this very busy intersection. And there are no stop signs, there are no traffic lights,
2:09:46 and there are no accidents. Because everybody knows there’s no traffic light, there’s no
2:09:54 stop sign, you have to pay attention to what’s going on. So lots of these rules and laws divert
2:10:01 attention to as if there’s only one thing that matters. So when you’re told to drive 60 miles
2:10:09 an hour, what does that mean? And that if you drive 70, you’re going to get a ticket. Okay,
2:10:14 so if you’re not afraid of getting the ticket, but there were other considerations to how fast
2:10:20 you might go. The quality of your car, the quality of the roads is it raining at the moment,
2:10:29 how uncomfortable or comfortable the passengers are. And all of this gets and much more gets lost
2:10:36 by having the rule 60 as if that somehow is an absolute truth.
2:10:42 Yeah, and experience matters, at least in my view, because so for instance, going back to
2:10:48 vaccines, I’m not trying to create unnecessary controversy here, but it’s absolutely clear to
2:10:52 me that there are people who believe that for instance, the COVID vaccines were immensely
2:10:57 valuable on the whole, it saved lives, et cetera. And there are other people who are absolutely
2:11:03 convinced that the vaccines caused injury, perhaps to them or to people that they know.
2:11:11 And both sides, as it were, seem to know a lot about their side. And so the discussions aren’t
2:11:17 really discussions because the people that felt that they had a vaccine injury know an immense
2:11:25 amount about that injury, the context and others who had it. The people who had a different experience
2:11:29 of the vaccines or have a different stance of the COVID vaccine know a tremendous amount about
2:11:35 the statistics and mass of what the general outcomes were as a consequence. Okay, so it’s
2:11:40 futile, right? Like it’s not a meaningful discussion and then what ends up happening-
2:11:45 But it didn’t have to be that way. That we go back to the beginning and in school,
2:11:51 you’re asked a question and expected to give a single answer. Life would be so different for us
2:11:57 as we grow up if you gave multiple answers to whatever the question was that immediately would
2:12:05 make clear that there are alternative perspectives. So just a very simple change in schools.
2:12:09 Well then, I’d like to challenge an idea since that seems to be a challenging assumption.
2:12:10 One of my ideas, no.
2:12:15 No, not one of your ideas. I’d like to challenge the assumption that as people get older,
2:12:21 they become more set in their ways. Because many times today, I’m hearing that as one,
2:12:26 and I’m getting older, I’m now can say I’m so happy I can say I’m almost 50. I actually love
2:12:33 getting older. I feel better now at almost 50 than I did in my 20s. And psychologically and
2:12:39 physically. And I felt great then. So I challenge the assumption that we get worse with age.
2:12:43 Yeah, no, I’m with you and I’m much older than you are.
2:12:47 So do we get set in our ways or maybe we’re more flexible in our thinking?
2:12:54 I think that the older you are, let’s say you’ve tried different ways of doing something,
2:13:01 and there’s a particular way that works for you. And it doesn’t matter if the other way
2:13:08 is faster, is prettier, is whatever, this works. And so you can be seen as set in your way,
2:13:12 because you’ve made it, because you know it doesn’t really matter. I could do it that way,
2:13:17 that way, or this way. I’m going to continue to do it this way. I think as you get older,
2:13:23 presumably you’ve had more mindful experience because if you’re a robot,
2:13:30 you’re not going to be learning anything and getting more set or less set is an irrelevant
2:13:38 question. I remember, you know, this goes back to the pancreas. You know, am I not eating the
2:13:44 pancreas? Like, I really believed I had to eat that pancreas to show that I was all grown up.
2:13:51 So you get a little older and you realize, you know, I wrote this blog once a long time ago,
2:13:55 where you’re two years old and you fall and you’re screaming bloody murder because you
2:14:01 scraped your leg. And then you’re seven years old and Johnny or Janie didn’t send you a Valentine,
2:14:06 and you’re distressed, you know, distressed. And then you’re 13 years old and you have a
2:14:10 pimple and, oh my God, you know, no one’s ever going to find me attractive. And it goes on and on.
2:14:18 And at some point, this was all kind of silly. And, you know, and with that, you become easier.
2:14:24 But sometimes that easier can be misunderstood by others. So let me give you an example. And I
2:14:32 talk about this in the book when I talk about three levels on, you know, that in the example I use,
2:14:39 I have, The New Yorker is a wonderful magazine. But let’s say we have three levels. Level one,
2:14:45 people who don’t read The New Yorker. Level two, people who read The New Yorker. Level three,
2:14:50 people who don’t read The New Yorker anymore. We could have them read it again, but let’s just
2:14:57 first. Okay. Level one, not reading. And those not reading it anymore are very different.
2:15:04 But they’re seen as the same by the level twos. Level two, people are the being of my existence.
2:15:11 All right. So let’s say you have your young, you’re uninhibited, level one. Then you’re like
2:15:17 most people, you become very inhibited. Then hopefully you get to a certain point in life.
2:15:25 Who cares? And you become disinhibited. Not uninhibited because you know the rule. You’re
2:15:31 just choosing not to follow it. But those at the level two will see the level three and think
2:15:36 they’re level ones. Because you can’t see beyond your own level of development. When, you know,
2:15:42 when I was young, especially if I’m on an important show like yours, Andrew, and we just took a break
2:15:48 for a minute and I, if I had eaten something and I got a spot on my sweater, I’d sit like this.
2:15:54 No, not even realizing how stupid does this look, right? But that no one should see that I got,
2:16:02 you know. Yeah. God forbid you’re human, you spilled a piece of food. Who cares? So I do this thing
2:16:09 with my students. It’s very simple, but it has a very big effect on them. Where I tell them,
2:16:13 you can’t come to class next week unless you’re wearing two different shoes.
2:16:21 It’s very hard. Some won’t come to class. Most come. Then a large majority wear two different
2:16:25 shoes that look the same. You know, two different black sneakers that are, you know, and then you
2:16:33 have the bold, red and a black sneaker. That’s cool. And we talk about these. Nobody even noticed.
2:16:38 And if they notice, what are they noticing? Somebody who knows you is not going to judge
2:16:40 you differently because you’re wearing two different. They’re going to assume there’s some
2:16:45 reason for it. And those who don’t know, you don’t know you. So what do you care? Sir,
2:16:50 this wonderful young woman, I did this in my seminar as well. That was in the lecture class.
2:16:55 She comes in just, “Professor Lange, you won’t believe what happens. What happens?” I’m in the
2:17:02 elevator. There’s this guy. He looks at my feet. He looks at my face. He looks at my feet. He looks
2:17:08 at my face. He looks at my feet and he points and he says, “Was that intentional? You know what I
2:17:14 did?” I said, “No, what did you do?” She said, “I looked at his feet. I looked at his face. I looked
2:17:23 at his feet. I pointed to his feet and said to him, “Was that?” You know, and when people recognize
2:17:29 that everything is sort of in some sense up for grabs, you know, that none of it really matters.
2:17:36 It’s so freeing. And there’s so many ways that we constrict ourselves. And to make
2:17:42 it an answer to your question, hopefully you get older and you realize that most of this,
2:17:50 it just doesn’t matter. Now, you can learn that when you’re younger. All you need to do is recognize
2:17:56 that those people who you think are thinking you’re ex, there are other people who are going to go,
2:18:04 “Yay, you’re ex,” you know, that you may love me because I’m trusting. You may dislike me because
2:18:11 I’m gullible. So, you know, you can’t please everybody, not because your behavior is unpleasant,
2:18:16 but because all of it is up for their own definition and you can’t control the way they’re going to
2:18:22 see it. It’s like our sense of justice kind of gets in the way sometimes. I mean, sense of justice
2:18:27 can be very important in society, so don’t get me wrong. But for instance, recently I had the
2:18:34 experience where a news story came out. It wasn’t about me. But… And those are the only ones you
2:18:43 read, right? It came out and the headline was, I’m just going to say what it was, that so-and-so’s
2:18:50 home, this famous person’s home, was destroyed in the LA fires, had a description of what had
2:18:58 happened, had a photograph of the home before and after, the devastation, and I immediately got upset
2:19:04 because that was not their home. That was my home. Oh my goodness. Okay, now, I hadn’t lived in that
2:19:09 home in a while, so there was no reason for them to say that it was my home. I wasn’t upset that
2:19:15 they didn’t say it was my home. But there was my Toyota 4Runner parked in the driveway. Oh wow.
2:19:20 Like, basically the whole thing was made up. And I actually know the reporter because they
2:19:25 had tried to contact me once before. They had somehow got a hold of my phone number, which
2:19:33 frustrates me in addition to that. And I realized they’re just making up lies. They’re not even
2:19:38 attempting to fact check. Now, this was a minor thing whose home it was, perhaps. But they made a
2:19:42 bunch of issues around this, and then another article came out about this person and another one.
2:19:47 And basically, I don’t believe anything that I read, certainly from
2:19:55 that particular venue. And then I started to realize that probably half or more of what we
2:20:01 read in traditional popular press is just made up. And no one’s fact checking this stuff because
2:20:04 how could they? Like, how could they know? And of course, I’m not going to pursue this in any kind
2:20:10 of legal way. I don’t really care. But my sense of justice is what frustrated me. And as soon as I
2:20:18 went, but that’s actually kind of funny. Like, this reporter so desperate for a story and to
2:20:24 capitalize on the horrible events, like it felt that they needed to do. And I thought,
2:20:29 this is like ridiculous. And our species is just so weird. This is what I always default to in the
2:20:33 end, whether or not it’s about technology, about something else. I mean, real tragedies are real
2:20:39 tragedies. And when those happen, as the fires were, it upsets me. But so much of like what grabs
2:20:47 our attention in the drama of things is just humans being ridiculous. Sometimes lying, sometimes in
2:20:52 service to one thing or pretending it’s in service to justice. When in fact, it’s in service to
2:20:58 themselves or a combination of things. And I think as I’ve hit this, like what I hope is a new
2:21:07 vista in my life, I’m thinking myself like, wow, we’re really obvious. Like, we’re so obviously
2:21:12 silly. Like the game that I bring up Rick Rubin again, he has this saying that he repeats over
2:21:17 and over to me. He said, like, there are only two truths, nature and professional wrestling. He
2:21:22 loves professional wrestling. He watches hours and hours of professional wrestling. And I said,
2:21:30 why do you do that? He said, it’s made up and everyone knows it’s made up, which is why it
2:21:34 actually is one of the few things that’s real. Because we all know it’s made up. So whether
2:21:38 or not they become allies or they become enemies in a given match, or whether or not somebody
2:21:44 breaks the rules and the ref pretends they don’t see, it’s theater. And it’s designed to show you
2:21:49 the theater that is human nature. I never had any appreciation for professional wrestling. But
2:21:54 he’s right. And so once you start looking, it’s all made up. If you ask yourself, well, it doesn’t
2:22:00 have to be made up or not. If you ask yourself what difference does it make? The wrestling?
2:22:05 No, any of it. So it’s your house. It’s somebody else’s house. Exactly. I realized I was the one
2:22:10 being ridiculous. I’m upset because there’s some injustice because what? Because I don’t want my
2:22:14 forerunner in a news article about someone else’s home. Maybe that person had a home that looked
2:22:21 very similar. But I guess it was the break with my assumption that the traditional media tries to
2:22:26 get things right, that they at least try. And in this case, the person clearly didn’t even try.
2:22:30 They had access to the real information. They chose to lie. If you say there’s something to be
2:22:37 learned regardless of whether it’s true or not. I thought you were going someplace else with this.
2:22:46 I thought you were talking about the tragedy of the fire, which as an example I use in the
2:22:54 mindful body to show that events are not good, bad. Rather, our view of the event is what makes
2:23:01 it good or bad. And so I had this experience. I was at a friend’s house for dinner. I come back
2:23:09 late, which never happens. And all of my neighbors were outside because my house had burned down.
2:23:18 And just pretty scary. A couple of funny things happened. They said they were able to save my
2:23:25 dogs, which that wasn’t funny. That was wonderful. But they couldn’t save the parrot. Well, Roger
2:23:31 Brown, when he was live, gave me the stuffed parrot that was in a cage. It was a kid who owned
2:23:38 parrots. I was like frightened for a moment. So now I stay at a friend’s house. And the next day,
2:23:47 I call the insurance company. And the person comes over. And he said this was the first time
2:23:55 in his 20-year career that the damage was worse than the call. Most people, oh my god, oh my god,
2:24:01 it’s not so bad. Here, I had already lost everything. So it didn’t make sense to throw my sanity away
2:24:07 after it. Okay, so that was the first thing. I move into the Charles Hotel. And I’m a sight to be
2:24:15 seeing with my two little dogs. And it’s Christmas, all of the presents coming in. We’re burned,
2:24:24 all the ones going out. It’s now Christmas Eve. And I go out for dinner. And I come back to the
2:24:31 hotel room, and it’s full of gifts. Not from the owner of the hotel, not from the management,
2:24:37 but from the so-called little people, the chambermaids, the people who parked my car,
2:24:43 the waiters and waitresses. Andrew, I tell you, I could not tell that story for months,
2:24:50 maybe years without it bringing tears to my eyes. It was beautiful. Every Christmas, I’m reminded
2:24:56 of what feels to me the basic goodness of people. And I couldn’t tell you except for one thing,
2:25:04 what I lost in that fire. So, you know… One stuffed parrot. No, no, that. I don’t remember
2:25:10 that until right now. No, it was kind of fun. I was teaching, going to be teaching, and it was
2:25:17 soon as school began again, a large lecture class, and all my notes were burned. So, oh my God, what
2:25:24 am I going to do? And so what I did was I called a student who got an A in the course the year
2:25:31 before, borrowed her notes and admitted those and taught the course. But, and it was the best
2:25:40 course I ever taught because I was not relying on anything that I would then repeat and, you know,
2:25:49 in any absolute… I was totally there for each lecture. What do you think it is about hard events
2:25:58 that are life-changing that anchor our mindfulness? I don’t think that they necessarily are. I think
2:26:07 that, you know, if something happens, you know, you should take advantage of it and learn something
2:26:13 from it. And, you know, so there’s data, not from my lab or yours, but that people who have
2:26:19 heart attacks and you live through a heart attack or a stroke, all of a sudden you realize, gee,
2:26:26 this is not going to go on, you know, forever. I’ve got to start living. And it’s a shame. I mean,
2:26:33 I think most people are sealed and unlived lives and, you know, that you need a heart attack to
2:26:41 wake you up or somebody else’s death, you know. My postdoc advisor, well, all three of my advisors
2:26:48 died. Suicide, cancer, cancer. So the joke is you don’t want me to work for you. But in all
2:26:54 seriousness, and I was very, very close with the middle one, but the last one as well. And he died
2:27:02 of pancreatic cancer, as it were. And we did multiple flesh thrifts for him, celebrations
2:27:05 of life, right? You know, there’s like an academia, they can’t get enough flesh thrifts and this,
2:27:11 you know, and I’ll never forget Ben getting up his, the celebration of life in front of
2:27:15 all the big ups at Stanford and all these people and editors flew in. I mean, they were like over
2:27:22 200 people there, president of Stanford was there. And he said, you know, if I had known that I was
2:27:25 going to be so celebrated and that people were going to be so kind to me, I would have, you know,
2:27:30 died a lot earlier, you know. That was the first thing he said. And the second thing he said is,
2:27:36 you know, if I could do it over again, he know one of these, if I could do it over again,
2:27:44 things, he said, I would have never agreed to review so many papers, review so many grants,
2:27:50 and I would have eaten a lot more sushi and a lot more ice cream. And that was it. He had a good
2:27:55 relationship with death. I interviewed him for hours, even before I had a podcast. Yeah, I don’t
2:28:00 think people, when people are afraid of death, I don’t think it’s really death that they’re
2:28:06 afraid of. They’re afraid of pain and that, you know, and having no control at that moment.
2:28:13 The old people I know, and studying this for so long, I know lots of very old people,
2:28:20 none of them seem to be afraid of death. In fact, I ended my counterclockwise book with a
2:28:26 conversation I was having with a friend who was 90 something. And she said, you know,
2:28:32 Ellen, I’m not afraid of dying, but living is such fun. And I think that that’s the way
2:28:38 most of us should be. But there’s something I wanted to say that we touched on before, and I
2:28:43 don’t think it’s not really relevant now, but you’ll find a way to, I’ll find a way to make it
2:28:51 relevant about spontaneous remissions. You know, I said that with my mother, there was a spontaneous
2:28:57 remission and the medical world can’t study spontaneous remissions or doesn’t study. So
2:29:06 they seem infrequent. And I think, you know, that how frequent does something have to be
2:29:12 to give people a sense of hope that it’s possible? You know, I don’t think it has
2:29:16 to be an everyday occurrence. Of course, the more frequent it is, the more likely. And then,
2:29:24 but when I think about spontaneous remissions, I personally think that they’re much more common
2:29:32 than the medical world was likely to believe. You know, once you’re in a hospital, life is
2:29:38 very different from the way your health is once you’re out of the hospital. I don’t mean that
2:29:44 you’re sick in one case and not sick in the other. But the attention that’s given to it, the
2:29:51 degree to which things become self-fulfilling prophecies, you know, I think that if you believe
2:29:58 that cancer is a killer, which is what people used to believe, then I think there are many ways that
2:30:08 the cancer becomes a death sentence. You know, that the body learns to, you know, even in a very
2:30:13 mundane way, if you think you’re going to die, you don’t do those things that keep you alive.
2:30:17 You know, you’re not going to go out and get exercise, for example, if you thought that was
2:30:22 good for you. I mean, I’m going to die anyway. The will to live is a very interesting thing.
2:30:28 The super-agers, the people that fall into that category. Oh, I hate that. You know,
2:30:34 I’m sure it’s super-memorizer, super-tasters. As soon as we make a group of people, the super-group,
2:30:41 that says that whatever they’re able to do is not available to everybody else. And I don’t think
2:30:46 that there’s any evidence for that. Yeah. Well, I align with you on that stance. I mean, I used the
2:30:52 name only because they’re sometimes referenced as such. But a focus of the podcast recently has
2:30:58 been to emphasize that in that group and others, there’s a brain area that’s available to everybody
2:31:03 because everybody has it, which is the santer mid-singulate cortex, which is activated when people
2:31:08 embrace new forms of learning and challenges. And it does seem to correlate with maintaining
2:31:14 cognitive function into later age. And it’s roped into, excuse me, knurly it is roped into.
2:31:19 It’s linked up with the dopamine reward circuitry and other circuitries in a way that
2:31:26 ties it somewhat to this notion of the will to live being related to the embracing new
2:31:31 learnings or at least new challenges. You know, that there was a story way back when,
2:31:41 so there’s this mental facility and people are on what’s, you know, they have a vernacular called
2:31:48 the hopeless ward. And then they wanted to renovate the ward so they move all of the people. So
2:31:51 you’re in the hopeless ward, now you’re in a hopeful, you know, without it being called that.
2:31:58 Then the renovation is finished and people are returned to their old rooms and many unexpected
2:32:03 deaths occurred. This makes me wonder why we have names for hospitals like Hospital for Sick
2:32:09 Children. Yeah. I’ve always been bothered by that title. Sorry for anyone that’s been treated
2:32:12 there and had a great experience, because I imagine it’s a great hospital.
2:32:17 Did you read the mindful body? I talk about a mindful hospital, which would be different from
2:32:30 the ground up. And I’m now trying to, in Mexico, Canada, and in the states, Minnesota,
2:32:37 trying to put up at least start with a mindful emergency ward and then become a whole mindful
2:32:42 hospital. It should be very different. Finding for the reasons that I’m presuming you’re getting
2:32:47 that. But, you know, do you know anybody who’s ever walked through a hospital door that isn’t
2:32:56 stressed? I mean, no. Only walking out. Yeah. No, but, and I believe that stress is by far the
2:33:01 major killer. It’s a very extreme position, Andrew. I believe, I was going to do this work
2:33:06 with people in China before COVID. We take, let’s say a few hundred people who are just diagnosed
2:33:13 with cancer, vary the cancer. And we find out how stressed they are. And nobody’s going to be happy
2:33:18 being told they have cancer. So we give them a little while. It’s been three weeks
2:33:25 to adjust to it. Then we measure this stress level every three, four weeks. I believe the stress
2:33:33 level will predict the course of the disease over and above nutrition, genetics, and treatment.
2:33:40 And stress is psychological, which takes me back to how all of this can be controlled
2:33:45 by our minds. But anyway, say you go to a hospital, the first thing you are is stressed.
2:33:52 You have the people working in the hospital who’s especially during COVID, but it was always the
2:33:58 case suffering enormous amount of burnout. Well, what is burnout? You don’t get burnout if you’re
2:34:04 mindful. You know, if I’m seeing you every day and I’m presuming you’re the same Andrew I’ve seen
2:34:09 before, your symptoms are basically the same. I was, how are you, Andrew? I take your temperature.
2:34:14 Everything is pretty much the same. It can be exhausting because I’m not getting anything.
2:34:20 If on the other hand, I’m noticing all the new things about you, then I’m being fed,
2:34:27 and my neurons are firing, and I’m not going to burn out. Then we have lots of simple things.
2:34:32 So when I was talking to Atul Gawande, he did some wonderful work on checklists. And, you know,
2:34:36 the, in surgery, for instance, if they have a checklist, there are many fewer errors that are
2:34:43 made. But he had just, you know, sent the last draft to the publisher, so he wasn’t going to be
2:34:47 able to change that. I said, we need a mindful checklist. What is a mindful checklist? And you
2:34:53 remember when we used to travel, and you come back to the states and you had to fill out these forms,
2:34:58 and you’re bringing any livestock nodes, you have any fruits and vegetables. You answer three of
2:35:01 these, and you don’t answer any of the other. You just know it’s no, no, no, all the way down the
2:35:10 list. So a checklist, and even the checklist in aviation, you know, the pilot copilot flaps up,
2:35:22 throttle open, anti-ice off. It becomes mindless. So remember the plane that was going from their
2:35:29 Florida flight, going from Florida to Washington, D.C. So that’s one warm climate to another warm
2:35:37 climate. And they go, flaps up, throttle open, anti-ice off. But there was snow in D.C., an
2:35:42 unusual event. The plane crashed because the de-icer was turned off and people were killed.
2:35:49 And the point of it is that a checklist, well, better than no checklist, there’s a better than
2:35:56 better way. I talk a lot about that in the mindful body, that the checklist needs to be a mindful
2:36:04 checklist. So not, is Andrew in bed? Yes. What position is Andrew in in the bed? You know,
2:36:11 not, does Andrew have two eyes, but, you know, how much liquid can you see?
2:36:15 So not yes or no, going beyond yes or no. Where you can only answer the question
2:36:20 if you’re actually looking at the person. So then you’re noticing, now the wonderful thing
2:36:27 about that is, if I’m noticing you and being mindful about aspects of you, you feel noticed.
2:36:32 And that’s the way you feel cared for. And then the relationship grows.
2:36:41 It keeps coming back to powers of observation, asking questions, depth as opposed to speed.
2:36:49 These seem to be the kind of basic contour. Yes, but it all follows from recognizing you don’t know.
2:36:55 So how do we get people to actually look for the changes in people? When I was talking about
2:37:01 attention to symptom variability, and I said before, imagine you’re with somebody who is,
2:37:07 you think they’re losing it, they’re forgetting. Now, if you think they’re forgetting,
2:37:12 you become intolerant every time they forget something, because you forgot that it’s not
2:37:18 willful. They really just don’t remember. Number one, number two, the only time you’re paying
2:37:22 attention is when they’re forgetting. So you’ve not attended to all the times they’re remembering.
2:37:31 So the problem seems worse. But if you were, in fact, attending to when are they
2:37:38 misremembering, what are the circumstances? And you catch it early, you say that the person
2:37:44 doesn’t forget everything. They forget, I don’t know, questions about restaurants, for example.
2:37:49 Well, then probably they don’t care. I’m going to be happy. I’m an eater. I’m going to be happy
2:37:56 wherever we go. And so unless we’re going to someplace that’s phenomenally expensive, or we
2:38:02 have to travel, whether we went to a restaurant A, B, or C, I might not remember. For you,
2:38:07 since you’re very discerning, you’re going to know you had a wonderful meal here and a horrible
2:38:13 meal in the other three places. So for you, it matters. The point is, when somebody doesn’t know,
2:38:20 why don’t they know? And if you immediately assume it’s because of dementia, you have a catchall
2:38:25 and are missing all of the subtleties that, in fact, would lead to different diagnoses.
2:38:33 And so if the, you know, the same thing in the nurse or doctor attending to the patient,
2:38:38 if they’re attending to the changes and asking themselves why, the smaller changes and the
2:38:47 things that are not changing. I had a student many years ago who had MS. And when somebody
2:38:53 would ask her how she is, she’s great. And then one person then said, but how could you be gracious?
2:38:59 My arms work. My head is working. And went through all the parts of her that are not suffering.
2:39:05 So you can always attend to what’s wrong. You can’t attend to everything. You’re playing tennis.
2:39:09 You could attend to the wonderful shots you made. You can attend to the false,
2:39:16 you know, and that’s going to lead to very different states, right? If I attend to,
2:39:20 every time I hit that ball in a way I didn’t think I could hit it, I’m going to learn something
2:39:26 from it and be motivated to try it again. If I attend to every time I screwed up, I’m going to,
2:39:33 you know, be embarrassed. I’m going to be afraid to expand and experience new things.
2:39:38 I feel like… I’ve just combined 12 different areas.
2:39:42 Yeah. And masterfully. Masterfully, yeah. Masterfully. And what I realize
2:39:47 is that we’re always to some extent in choice, as they say. Yeah.
2:39:52 And I think to some people that will feel freeing, like, you know, I’m always in choice. I can,
2:39:58 my house burned down. Well, you know, who knows what newness that will bring, these kinds of things.
2:40:03 But to some people… Only if they believe that there’s a right answer.
2:40:08 If you don’t believe there’s a right answer. If you believe there’s a right answer, you want
2:40:12 someone give me that answer. Which surgery should I have? Oh my God, I’m supposed to have a house,
2:40:20 the house burned. You know, life is over. But if you realize that any experience is only experience
2:40:29 through you and provides opportunities. I can certainly adopt that. I also can feel the parts
2:40:35 of me that I assume are what other people experience as well. Which is that when one has so many
2:40:41 degrees of freedom over how to respond, that itself can feel a bit overwhelming.
2:40:48 No, of course. You know, so when Eric Frome wrote Escape from Freedom, it was that same idea that
2:40:54 you can be paralyzed by so many choices. But I think that’s wrong. I think you’re only paralyzed
2:41:01 by the choices if implicitly you believe there’s a right and a wrong choice. And when you recognize
2:41:07 that they’re all equal, it just doesn’t matter. It’s easy to choose them. So it’s choose your own
2:41:13 adventure. Exactly, yeah. Or make whatever you’re doing an adventure. And if I can’t be near the
2:41:19 one I love, I should love the one I’m near. And at one time that was considered, okay, nowadays…
2:41:23 Well, nowadays, there are a couple of things that are more complicated, I would argue. One,
2:41:32 earlier you mentioned coddling of people that are, you know, aged, elderly. I hate that word now
2:41:41 that I’m 77. Well, you are, no one would guess that you’re 77. And yeah, your vitality is undeniable.
2:41:46 This notion of coddling, you know, Jonathan Haidt wrote the coddling of the American mind,
2:41:51 anxious generation. I have to wonder what it’s like for kids growing up nowadays and teenagers
2:41:57 constantly being told about this disorder and that disorder and the idea that, you know, if you
2:42:04 meet five out of 10 of the, you know, menu of criteria that you are, you might even be this thing.
2:42:08 You are blank as opposed to just having blank or struggling with blank. Everything is, yeah.
2:42:15 Yeah. And we certainly over prescribe medication in this country, certainly compared to other
2:42:20 countries, you know, the vast amount of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication is consumed in the
2:42:26 United States. And certainly those medications can be valuable for people, I would argue.
2:42:35 But they are over prescribed, I would also argue. So my question is if one grows up being told that
2:42:40 they are fragile, that there’s threat everywhere, or even that there’s threat everywhere on social
2:42:47 media. Let’s just like push into that dent a little bit too, because that’s Jonathan’s idea.
2:42:56 You know, sitting here talking to you that now has me thinking, well, maybe my 18-year-old niece
2:43:02 is perfectly capable of navigating this online landscape. And it’s just me who’s not capable
2:43:06 of it. And so I’m going to decide that she’s struggling. But maybe kids aren’t getting enough
2:43:11 physical activity, one could argue, but on the basis of data. But do you see where I’m going
2:43:17 here? When one can kind of pivot to different lenses to look at something through, it increases
2:43:22 the number of options. But then at some point we have to decide, are we coddling our kids too much?
2:43:28 Or are we not coddling them too much? It reminds me of an argument back, I guess,
2:43:37 when I was your age. And the question was violence on TV. And were kids being exposed to this
2:43:45 violence, becoming more violent? And I never quite understood it, because if you were my child and
2:43:51 we were sitting there watching this violence, and you would see my reaction to it was negative,
2:44:00 and you’d learn not to engage in that or to recognize the effects on other people.
2:44:10 What I’m saying is that rather than the medium being the message, people say to me,
2:44:16 is technology good? Technology isn’t anything, the tools. And if they’re used mindfully,
2:44:25 they’re good. If they use mindlessly, they’re not good. And so I think it’s silly. There’s data
2:44:33 showing that kids who are on college kids, for example, who use a lot of social media,
2:44:37 have lower self-esteem and all of this. And I present this to them. And I say,
2:44:43 this is silly. You’re not now going to get off Facebook because of these data. But let’s look
2:44:49 at it. You’re Harvard students for God’s sakes. Why is it that you’re only going to post the picture
2:44:56 where you look the prettiest, have the nerve to turn it around? Hey, would you believe what I
2:45:03 looked like last night when you’re having that bad hair day or something didn’t go well? Just
2:45:12 have the guts to do that. So it’s not the social media. It’s the lying or the mistaken assumption
2:45:19 when you see all of the successes that that’s the more general truth. Everybody but you is
2:45:28 having these successes. Well, certainly, social media gives a literal score for followers and
2:45:34 likes and things of that sort. So it’s thumbs up, thumbs down. I mean, literally scoring performance
2:45:40 in terms of what other people think. It’s certainly training those circuits very robustly, whereas…
2:45:46 But if people learn the three levels that I was explaining before, then you’d see
2:45:55 that what looks like is not very good. In fact, maybe quite something. You have people who are poor
2:46:01 and they can’t spend a lot of money on their appearance. And then you have everybody else
2:46:05 who’s spending a lot of money on their appearance. They have some of these very, very rich people
2:46:15 who… I had this editor for Mindfulness, a wonderful woman. She’s recently died.
2:46:23 And the first time we went out, this is when I was young and it was wonderful how they’re going
2:46:27 to send me all these free books and they take me out all the time to get me to publish with
2:46:32 this company as opposed to that company. And I’ll never forget this. We go for this meal
2:46:40 and she looked poor. So I didn’t eat anything. I chose the cheapest thing on the menu
2:46:44 because I knew she was paying… I found out she was one of the richest people in New England.
2:46:49 So that’s the level three where you have so much. You hide it and…
2:46:55 Well, this is interesting because when I was growing up, unless people had money to purchase
2:47:00 things, they would drive older cars and things like that with credit that changed.
2:47:07 And I have friends who like to wear very, very fancy watches. I also have friends who
2:47:14 have far more money than them and choose to wear no watch. So it’s getting harder to discern,
2:47:20 except at the extremes, of course. It’s getting harder to discern who has what and maybe that’s
2:47:26 a good thing. Again, at the extremes, it’s obvious that the homeless issue in Los Angeles and
2:47:34 everywhere in California is so troubling and so sad what’s happening. But setting that aside,
2:47:39 I think nowadays we have less information about people’s values even just by looking at them.
2:47:43 When I was growing up, if somebody wore a particular t-shirt with a particular band,
2:47:46 you knew if you were part of the same group, all of that’s gone now. It’s all leveled.
2:47:54 But people could be asked at any stage, why is somebody dressed this way? Why is somebody
2:47:59 doing what they’re doing? And when asked now, you’re only given a single answer.
2:48:04 When you’re given multiple answers, you see the three levels. They’re doing it for this
2:48:09 wonderful reason, for this awful reason. It has this meaning, that meaning. And that’s what you
2:48:15 want, things to be obscured. You don’t want to be pigeonholed. Because if you think you know what
2:48:21 I’m going to say because of this belief of who I am, you’re not going to listen to me. And then
2:48:26 we’re not going to have a conversation that’s going to be interesting and that’s a waste.
2:48:32 I know that you’re not a fan of particular activities as a way to increase longevity or
2:48:38 particular activities as a way to increase mindfulness. But could we say that having somewhat
2:48:45 of a mindset of playfulness with ideas and one’s environment could potentiate longevity?
2:48:51 So I have these lyrics in the books. A friend of mine, Zoe Lewis, wonderful entertainer,
2:48:54 and she sings a song that I just love. “You’re never too old to be young.”
2:49:03 And sure, I think that one should be playful to be playful. Now, a side effect of that
2:49:07 is I think you’ll be happier and healthier. And if you’re happier and healthier, I think you’ll
2:49:12 live longer. But the reason to do it, the problem with most people now is that everything they’re
2:49:19 doing is for some other reason. I’m taking this medication so that eventually. I’m going to
2:49:25 the gym so that eventually. I think, who knows what’s going to happen eventually?
2:49:30 I feel lucky that I enjoy exercise and always have. But if I didn’t, I don’t know.
2:49:36 Oh, how do you get yourself? Yeah, I don’t like exercise. That’s exercise. I was telling somebody
2:49:44 the story actually just yesterday. So I was visiting friends many, many years ago in Vero Beach
2:49:48 and they said in the morning, “Let’s go to Captain Jacks.” I’m thinking, “Oh, Captain Jacks is going
2:49:52 to be breakfast.” And I’m thinking, “I don’t have a big breakfast. Why not take a long walk to get
2:49:57 there?” And I’m very excited. So we get down to the beach and we’re walking to Captain Jacks.
2:50:04 And then there’s this stick in the sand that says on it, “Captain Jacks.” All it is was
2:50:12 the endpoint to our walk. Well, for me, if I had known the walk was just for the walk,
2:50:19 I probably would have enjoyed it much less. If I’m in Paris and shopping or window shopping,
2:50:26 I walk 10 miles a day and enjoy myself thoroughly. But if you said, “Let’s go for a walk of even
2:50:31 five miles and it’s just to walk,” no, this is mindless. I’m not suggesting this is a good thing.
2:50:38 But activities that are meant to be fun and that are easy to engage in are fun
2:50:47 or will be good for you. And if you see it as exercise, if you’re doing it for some other reason,
2:50:55 it’s a shame because even the exercise for exercise, I won’t do it if it isn’t fun.
2:51:02 I don’t know if that’s a privileged position, but now that’s not that… I say, “I won’t do
2:51:09 it if it isn’t fun.” I think that this is something that I do well is to make almost anything be fun.
2:51:14 Well, that’s a great skill. I was talking to my mom last night and she was saying,
2:51:18 “Not much is happening here.” And I kept saying, “No, tell me, what are you guys up to?”
2:51:23 It’d been a while and she said, “Well, I don’t have this big exciting life.” And I said,
2:51:27 “What’s going on?” And she said, “Okay, well, if you really want to know,
2:51:32 there’s this new plant weed that’s growing in the garden.” And she started explaining to me
2:51:36 this really interesting weed that has these little yellow flowers and my mom loves gardening and so
2:51:40 she delights in gardening and I was delighting in her delight. And when she was done, I said,
2:51:46 “That’s actually the kind of thing I’d love to talk about and hear more about because
2:51:50 I also know my own experience.” So I didn’t need to talk about what’s going on on the podcast or
2:51:55 what’s going on in my daily life or the incredible breeds of dogs that I’m considering getting maybe
2:52:01 all of them because I was interested in what was going on in her garden. And so what was trivial
2:52:06 to her was actually interesting to me and it represented a really good bridge to a number of
2:52:15 things. I have to say that we were talking earlier about how one frames past, present, and future.
2:52:20 I don’t know if we were talking about it in that way, but in thinking about age, longevity,
2:52:26 and what’s possible, the word that came to mind that I’d like to just pressure test a little bit
2:52:32 is nostalgia. And I have this feeling, and I hope I’m wrong because I’ve been wrong about most
2:52:39 things today in a way that I’ve been learning from, that nostalgia can be perhaps kind of a
2:52:44 dangerous line of thinking. This idea that things used to be great, but now they’re not-
2:52:45 Why can’t they be like-
2:52:53 And I thought to myself, what a terrible sense or emotion. And it led me to some
2:52:57 practical questions like, should we go to high school reunions? And I thought, well,
2:53:03 no, if we’re all we’re going to do is embrace nostalgia. Yes, if it makes us feel like we’re
2:53:10 19 again. This kind of thing. And here you can substitute reunions with, should I look at photo
2:53:16 albums? I don’t know how I feel about photos from the past. I used to collect them and cherish them.
2:53:22 And now, sometimes when I look at them, it just makes me long for something. I think I need to
2:53:26 learn how to pivot through that. So what are your thoughts on nostalgia and just notions of how we
2:53:31 think about our past in general? Well, I don’t think they’re very different from what you already
2:53:38 covered. In that fire, I lost all the photos. And it didn’t occur to me that I had lost all of them
2:53:45 for years because I didn’t look at them. So I could laugh a lot of that. That’s very true.
2:53:56 I think when I was young, some of my friends were keeping a diary. And I never kept a diary.
2:54:03 And so then my feeling was, I’d rather just be living than recording. But it depends on how
2:54:08 you record it. If you’re reliving it while you’re recording it, then you’re living. It’s the same
2:54:14 thing. One activity is really no better than another if you’re doing it mindfully. Now,
2:54:19 this is hard for people to accept. If I say to you that if you’re cleaning a toilet,
2:54:26 that the distinctions you’re drawing are no better or worse than if you’re trying to come up with a
2:54:32 theory of relativity or understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. A distinction is a distinction
2:54:40 is a distinction. And so that’s why these little things that you’re noticing, your mother’s weed,
2:54:46 is no less important, although she thought you might see it as less important than you’re having
2:54:55 just interviewed somebody that she thought was phenomenal. Once you notice, you notice,
2:54:59 and that’s the whole ball game. And there’s always something to notice. And if you’re noticing it
2:55:06 without the stress overlay that some people add to their lives, which I can’t understand,
2:55:14 it’s no different from a game. I use this example, and I think that my students must think I’m crazy.
2:55:23 So if I believe that, I should come up with a different example. But you’re flossing your teeth.
2:55:29 Now, you can floss your teeth mindlessly, in which case you resent being there,
2:55:34 you’re spending the time because you’re thinking that it’s good for you, but you’d rather be doing
2:55:41 something else. You’re not there, you’re flossing, but your mind is thinking about
2:55:49 a party you’re going to go to, for example. To me, make it fun. It’s so easy. I mean,
2:55:55 you play little games. Can I predict how much junk is going to come out? And which teeth,
2:56:03 which part, everything can be made into a game. I had this, you can maybe figure out how to bring
2:56:11 this product to market, but it was called, I have so many of these called WeGo, a way of training
2:56:18 your child to use the toilet. And so it’s not very hard. We’d sell, you could sell these little
2:56:25 vials of chemicals that when you add it, a few drops to urine, it changes color. But so each of
2:56:29 these vials will change the color to a different color. I think adults would buy that. Yeah. And
2:56:35 the kid has to guess, either to the parent or just for themselves, is this going to be yellow,
2:56:44 green, blue? It becomes fun. Gamifying things is one of the great pleasures of parenting.
2:56:51 Earlier, you were talking about what do your grandkids call you? Cosmic leader.
2:56:59 Cosmic leader. You can play these games with them. And then they reach their adolescent
2:57:05 and teen years, and then they claim they don’t like those games. But as a former child and then
2:57:09 teen, now I delight in some of the games that my parents played with me when I was little,
2:57:16 because it brings me back to the notions of imagination. Yeah. No, I think that
2:57:25 one of the worst things that the world teaches us is that we have work and we have play,
2:57:30 as if these are two distinct categories. In fact, I think if you were to ask somebody just one
2:57:37 question to determine how mindful they are, it might be, how much do you need a vacation?
2:57:44 I mean, I’ve never taken one. But need and want are two different things. And if I really need a
2:57:52 vacation, that means my working is being done mindlessly. And that’s a shame. If you can’t find
2:57:57 a way to do it so you enjoy it, go someplace else. It’s not worth the price you’re paying.
2:58:03 And for people that say, well, that’s a luxury. I need to work in order to
2:58:07 survive and feed my family, et cetera. How does one reconcile that?
2:58:16 Well, then learn how to make it fun, that anything can be made fun. Just you make it a game. You
2:58:21 try to figure out, guess what’s going to happen. Can you do it differently from the last time?
2:58:29 Can you do it with your eyes closed? I mean, it’s fun. Get down on, not related to your work,
2:58:33 but you get down on all fours and see the world that your cat or your dog sees.
2:58:41 Close the lights and see what it’s like being blind. Try to get through the day without hearing.
2:58:51 I wanted to do this thing 50 years ago, which was to create a building that simulated old age.
2:58:59 And so if you took the 50-year-old and they spent even a short time in that building where
2:59:04 it’s colder than usual because there’s less oxygen in your blood, your field of vision arrows,
2:59:12 that they would expand each of their abilities at a time that it’s easy. But the problem with
2:59:17 that was a 50-year-old doesn’t want to imagine being 80 years old.
2:59:21 You’ve done some beautiful studies on healing and time perception. Could you just describe
2:59:24 that experiment? I love this paper. I love this experiment so much.
2:59:31 Peter Ungle and I did this when I was a graduate student. We inflict a wound. Now, it would have
2:59:37 been more dramatic if we could really cut you up. We’re not sadists, and even if we were,
2:59:43 the review committee wouldn’t let us do it. So it’s a minor wound, but it’s still a wound.
2:59:48 And we have people individually sitting in front of a clock. Unbeknownst to them, for a third of
2:59:54 the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For another third of the people,
2:59:59 it’s going half as fast as real time. And for the last third, it’s going real time.
3:00:05 And the question is, most people would assume that wound’s going to heal. How that wound heals
3:00:11 has nothing to do with the perception of time. But it turns out that it healed based on clock time.
3:00:15 Now, when you add that to some of the things that we’ve already said,
3:00:21 you end up with a very different picture. You broke your arm and you asked the doctor,
3:00:27 how long is it going to take to heal? How does he know? Or she know? I mean, it’s a ridiculous
3:00:33 question. Lots of people had broken arms. Even if this were somebody who studied broken arms,
3:00:39 and he stopped studying yesterday, today there are new people with broken arms that might have
3:00:45 different rates of healing. But people give an answer. And depending on the way the doctor gives
3:00:49 that answer, I think it’s important. The doctor says it’s going to take you, and I’m making this,
3:00:54 I don’t know how long it’ll take. It’s going to take you a month. You organize yourself in such a
3:01:00 way that it’s going to take a month. But I think if the doctor instead, which is what I would recommend,
3:01:06 said, we really don’t know. Some people heal faster than others. The fastest healing time that I
3:01:14 personally know of is, let’s say two weeks. And if you can heal faster than that, or that’s been
3:01:20 good for you, and if not, it’s fine also. Because there are advantages to not healing
3:01:27 that people don’t realize. If you’ve broken your right arm, and it’s taking a long time to heal,
3:01:32 that means you’re using your left arm. And if you’re using your left arm, you’re exercising
3:01:40 the right side of your brain, which is going to be good for many tests. I don’t know how we ended
3:01:48 up right-handed or left-handed. Are you ambidextrous? I’m right-handed. I’ll occasionally go into hook
3:01:53 righty, but I’m a righty. My dad was naturally left-handed. They forced him to be right-handed.
3:01:59 Oh, interesting. I’m sort of ambidextrous, mostly right-handed. But people don’t realize that if
3:02:04 you’re using your right hand, it’s controlled by the left part of your brain, your left hand,
3:02:08 the right part of your brain. And wouldn’t it be nice to exercise both parts of our brain?
3:02:15 And so we’re doing research where we get people. This is really interesting because not just
3:02:21 using, so this work was begun, gosh, I can’t tell you how many years ago, and for one reason or
3:02:27 another never got finished. Initially, it was just getting people to use their right or of a left
3:02:34 hand. Now it’s more sophisticated, where it’s using your left hand with an awareness that you’re
3:02:43 using it or not. And I think that the effect on the brain will only obtain if you’re aware.
3:02:48 Oh, this fits so beautifully. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, and you’re probably aware
3:02:53 of these experiments, but just for sake of our listeners, you probably know that your colleagues
3:02:59 at Harvard, David Hewland and Torrance Eviesel, won the Nobel Prize for Brain Plasticity, Critical
3:03:04 Periods of Vision, et cetera. And they had this sort of doctrine that they stated in the ’80s,
3:03:11 and it lasted until the, gosh, until the early and mid-2000s, that there was no significant
3:03:16 brain plasticity in adult humans, that it literally shut down. Mike Mersinich and a guy
3:03:21 named Greg Reckonzone at UCSF did these beautiful studies. I’ll try and describe this really quickly,
3:03:28 where they would have their subjects pay attention to little bumps on a rotating drum.
3:03:33 Of different coarseness or fineness. And then there was a tone playing in the room,
3:03:40 and if they were told to discriminate when the bumps were changed from course to just slightly
3:03:46 less course or more course, the subject would signal, okay, that happened. And then over time,
3:03:52 the area of the brain responsible for touch in adults expanded the map of that. So adult
3:03:58 plasticity was very interesting, however, is if they did the exact same thing, but they were
3:04:03 told to attend to slight changes in the frequency of the tone, it didn’t matter what they were
3:04:08 doing with their fingers. The auditory cortex changed, and the somatosensory, the touch map
3:04:13 didn’t. And so it’s proof positive that it’s not just a behavior in adulthood, but the combination
3:04:19 of behavior and awareness of the shift in perception that drives adult plasticity.
3:04:23 And I find those studies to be, well, first of all, they aren’t discussed enough,
3:04:28 but that feature isn’t discussed enough. And second of all, it basically says that
3:04:33 awareness is the gate to brain change. And I think that fits perfectly with everything
3:04:37 that you’ve been talking about. I don’t see how it could be otherwise, actually.
3:04:44 But to go back to the doctor telling you how long it’s going to heal, it tends to be now
3:04:49 self-fulfilling prophecy. So given that doctors have the symptoms over us, they need to be more
3:04:55 responsible in the information they’re given. And we can’t know how long it’s going to take
3:05:01 to heal. People today are different from people 20 years ago. They ate different things. The
3:05:06 activities were different. The air was different and so on. And so from where are these norms
3:05:11 derived? In fact, whenever I speak to anybody, I get lots of calls from people who were given
3:05:19 these dread diagnoses. And the first thing I tell them is, it takes so long to do these studies.
3:05:27 And then it takes forever to analyze the data. And then it takes another forever to publish it.
3:05:31 And then eventually, when you’re going to hear about it, it’s already old news.
3:05:39 So the information you’re reading now was true for people who lived 10 years ago.
3:05:46 10 years is a lot. A lot of things happening. And always with the intention of getting people
3:05:55 to be less absolute in their understanding of any of this so that they can imagine all
3:06:00 sorts of possibilities. But even the thing that I just said a moment before, that it’s important
3:06:08 for people to realize the advantage in using their left hand if they’re right-handed or their right
3:06:16 hand if they’re left-handed. And then at the same time recognizing that when they break a leg,
3:06:24 when somebody breaks a leg, that forces you to do everything differently. And if you attend to
3:06:31 that, that can be a wonderful thing. I don’t know how I got to see these things. It’s very strange
3:06:36 to me when I think of what things have influenced me. I don’t know how old I was, Andrew, but I’m
3:06:43 watching this thing on television. And there’s this woman who has no arms, who’s got a knife between
3:06:52 her toes, who’s slicing a tomato. And it’s a lot of years. I’ve seen and done a lot of things,
3:06:59 but for me to remember that. And that even when we’re taught to do something, we’re taught a
3:07:06 single way. It’s so much more fun to be taught multiple ways. I mean, when I hurt my right arm,
3:07:10 I’m playing tennis poorly, but I’m still playing with my left hand.
3:07:16 We have such a deficit model of life. And this also fits with the Kahneman stuff,
3:07:21 right, that people work much harder to avoid a loss than they will for a gain. And it seems to be…
3:07:29 Now that’s interesting because when I go to teach that, I have so much trouble keeping track of what’s
3:07:35 the loss and what’s the gain, because I don’t see the world that way. You’ve transcended the typical
3:07:41 notion of loss. Whether I’ve transcended or not, I just think differently. But everybody accepts
3:07:47 that. And to see the gain in the so-called loss or the loss in the so-called gain,
3:07:57 you just end up with a very different world. Well, I’m not as evolved in that aspect, certainly
3:08:02 others as well as you are. But when I started my lab, I used to teach my students something,
3:08:06 which was, okay, we’re going to get a lot more rejections and have to do a lot more revisions
3:08:11 than we are going to get acceptances on papers and grants. So the best thing that you can do,
3:08:15 which is what I had to do for myself, one of the best things you might consider would have been a
3:08:18 gentler way to say, but I said, one of the best things you can do, because that’s the way I talk
3:08:30 sometimes, is to create a long arc of positive feedback loops when something good happens,
3:08:35 but that when something negative happens, let yourself feel acutely and then move on fast.
3:08:40 So far, I would applaud this. It would basically be like an accepted paper will delight me and
3:08:47 motivate me for many, many months, if not years, but a rejection or a tough revision where we’re
3:08:52 looking at another year or two of experiments. I’d allow myself maybe a day and a half of just
3:08:58 being utterly crushed and then right back to it. Yeah, but another way, when I say put people back
3:09:04 in the equation, that’s what you need to teach them, which is the responses you’re getting,
3:09:11 these reviews are not from a bunch of sages in the sky, they’re just a group of people,
3:09:19 a group of people with different biases and so on. And it doesn’t mean you were wrong.
3:09:26 And reviews, I learned from my postdoc advisor and I love this, is to say reviews always make
3:09:29 papers better, even if you hate them. They always make papers better, they never make
3:09:33 papers worse. Sometimes they make papers a little bit harder to track because there’s this
3:09:38 weird figure put in just to satisfy a reviewer. You’re like, what is this? But everyone eventually
3:09:45 realized what that figure is about anyway. And so I adopted the idea that reviews, red ink,
3:09:50 critical feedback are just ways of getting better, which has also been essential in the podcasting
3:09:54 sphere because if I’ve ever gotten anything wrong, believe me, I hear about it in the comments. And
3:09:58 sometimes it can be embarrassing, but you just look at it as an opportunity to address your
3:10:02 humanness and move forward, correct it and move forward. But I think a lot of people try and
3:10:08 maintain this air of perfection, like there’s some sort of Fabergé egg that instead of living life
3:10:14 like a work of art where it has dimples and cracks and acne and all the rest and it’s human,
3:10:19 I think a lot of people want to present themselves to the world like a Fabergé egg,
3:10:23 like that’s just absolutely flawless. But the problem with that is going out the next day.
3:10:30 You can be that Fabergé egg on day one, but now you’ve got to maintain that. I mean, the first
3:10:37 paper that I published came back without a comment, without a comment, not a correction,
3:10:41 not a typo. What a dangerous thing to happen. Exactly, it was awful. Yeah, that was not my
3:10:49 experience. No, it set me up for expectations. What do you mean for the next one? But I think also
3:10:58 that it’s, once you recognize that this is an opinion rather than a statement of fact,
3:11:07 and then when you, what I tell my students is that when you get a comment, it doesn’t mean
3:11:13 that the comment is right. It means that whatever you wrote wasn’t appreciated and the way you
3:11:19 wanted it to be appreciated. And they’re guessing at, well, if you did it this way rather than that
3:11:27 way. Papers that are not accepted today may be accepted tomorrow, the same paper. I can’t tell
3:11:34 you how many times people say can’t be, and then it becomes the standard. You mean in terms of a
3:11:40 field and what’s acceptable? Yeah, things have certainly changed. And look, you’ve done a tremendous
3:11:46 amount to pioneer that change. I mean, it’s not one study or 10 study or 20 studies. I mean,
3:11:51 there’s now a catalog of incredibly groundbreaking work that you’ve, I don’t know if you used
3:11:55 intentionally or you’re just following your interests, but that have transformed the way that
3:12:01 we think about the mind and its role in our physiology and so on. I was hoping to get your
3:12:07 reflections on something that I sometimes say that’s probably wrong, but that is helpful to me
3:12:12 because, and hopefully to other people too, because it, I think, captures some of the
3:12:16 circuit dynamics related to reward and reinforcement. And it sometimes resurfaces on the internet
3:12:22 that addiction, among other things, is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring
3:12:28 someone pleasure. And I used to attach to that statement, enlightenment, if there is such a
3:12:33 thing, is a progressive broadening of the things that bring us pleasure. And one thing that struck
3:12:39 me throughout today’s conversation is that it seems like you’re able to look at pretty much
3:12:45 anything through a bunch of different facets, take on other points of view, so strong theory of mind,
3:12:52 while holding onto your own perceptions, right? You’re not drifting off from yourself. You’re
3:13:00 remaining of self, but taking on other perspectives. And that flexibility of thinking and that
3:13:05 expansiveness, like looking at things as good, bad, maybe, I don’t know, I don’t know what’s true
3:13:11 or what could be true and really challenging preconceived notions. It seems very powerful.
3:13:15 Do you believe in enlightenment? And was the description I just gave anything
3:13:22 like what the way you engage in it? No, I’m very flattered. You know, I think that when you’re
3:13:27 walking around and you don’t see and all of a sudden you see, you can say that you’re enlightened.
3:13:43 I guess in a not so grandiose way, that simple thing that I keep saying, recognizing that behavior
3:13:49 makes sense, leads you to such a different view of people. You don’t have people who are good
3:13:57 and bad, people who are addicted and not addicted. You know, you don’t have A students and failing
3:14:03 students, everything just organizes itself differently. And you come to appreciate the
3:14:11 individual talents that people have. And when you can do that, I don’t know if you want to
3:14:21 call the person enlightened, but life just is easier and nicer. You know, it’s nicer to walk
3:14:29 outside and be trusting of people and not to be afraid of this bastard, that one who’s going to
3:14:35 come and get you. I mean, I went to with a friend, this was so many years ago, to an AA meeting to
3:14:43 see what it was like. And I had left my pocketbook over here, wherever that is, which you can see.
3:14:49 And we walked over here and for whatever reason. And I said, I left my pocketbook over there.
3:14:55 And then I thought, you know, so what? If somebody takes it, they probably need it
3:15:03 more than I do. And it was so freeing. You know, just not to care about all these things that
3:15:09 somehow we’re implicitly, sometimes explicitly taught to care about, and always evaluating
3:15:18 ourselves. You know, that little song, feeling that let me sing. I enjoy singing. I can’t carry a
3:15:26 tune so much. Why should somebody make me feel bad about singing? And maybe I’ve become a better
3:15:31 singer, or maybe I’ll sing in some way that’ll teach somebody, you know, some new trick that they
3:15:39 hadn’t thought about before, because of my inadequacy. Why are people evaluating themselves at every
3:15:46 moment, rather than feeling good about the things they know that they can do? And who decides
3:15:52 what’s important to be able to do? I don’t know how to most articulately share it,
3:15:59 but it’s just a very different life. You know, a life where you don’t, I just don’t believe that
3:16:06 stress is necessary. I don’t believe that there’s anybody in this world that’s better than I am.
3:16:12 But I also don’t believe I’m better than anybody else. It’s very different. Where everything,
3:16:18 especially among, you know, those of us who are academics, where every minute you’re given a
3:16:23 grade, and even, you know, the number of papers you got accepted, you know, determines your pecking
3:16:30 order, and so on. It’s also silly, you know, and then you have the money people, and I have 20
3:16:35 billion dollars, you know, so I’m better off than people. I’m a better person than people have 10
3:16:44 billion dollars. It’s sad to me when, in fact, I think all of it is engaged in order to feel
3:16:50 good about yourself. That’s all. You know, why do I need that money? Why do I need those A’s?
3:16:57 Why do I need those successes so that I’ll like myself? Just like yourself. Recognize that you’re
3:17:05 likable. Why not? That may seem simple-minded, but it’s gotten me to wherever I am.
3:17:11 It has indeed, and it’s helped a tremendous number of people, both in the form of scientific
3:17:20 findings, which are then shared with people through books and through podcasts. And I’m
3:17:25 just so grateful that you came here today to share with us. This is really as vast as it’s been,
3:17:32 you know, just a subset of the discoveries that you’ve made. So, you know, a couple of things.
3:17:38 First of all, thank you for coming here today. It’s been my pleasure. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed
3:17:44 this, and I love, love, love your work, and it’s caused me to think differently about things. And
3:17:49 today’s discussion is going to make me, and I know so many other people think differently about
3:17:56 everything. I mean, very few discussions that I’ll hold will make me rethink my thinking about
3:18:02 everything. This one certainly will. And also for continuing to do the work that you’re doing.
3:18:09 I mean, it’s clear that you embody and live the discoveries that you make, and it’s not
3:18:14 just an academic pursuit that then, you know, allows you to collect all the, appropriately,
3:18:20 collect all the amazing awards and titles, but that it really serves and that you live it.
3:18:26 So, thank you for that as well. And then two more questions very briefly. The first one is,
3:18:31 doesn’t matter how long the question is, is the answer that matters, right? Sorry,
3:18:35 ask me the brief question for a long answer. The floor is yours, but would you consider coming
3:18:41 back? Again, to share with us some additional findings is the second to last question. And then
3:18:46 I’m just thinking that maybe the last question is so that it sticks in people’s minds.
3:18:54 Would you be willing to share the song? Oh, Andrew. All right. Yes, I’m going to sing this.
3:19:01 Now, you have to remember, though, that I’m singing this because I think singing is fun,
3:19:06 and it shouldn’t matter how good a voice you have. Okay, so here we go. This is to the old
3:19:12 Sarah Lee commercial. And everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sarah Lee.
3:19:21 Everybody doesn’t know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can’t do something,
3:19:27 but everyone can do something else. So what have I lost by singing that? I know I can sing,
3:19:34 now you know I can sing, but do you think my not being able to sing means I can’t write, think,
3:19:39 or do whatever it is that I do better than singing? No, of course not.
3:19:45 I love the song. And thanks for saying you’ll come back again. Thank you so much.
3:19:50 Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Ellen Langer.
3:19:54 I hope you found it to be as fascinating as I did. To learn more about Dr. Langer’s work,
3:19:59 to find links to her books and workshops and other resources, please see the show note captions.
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3:20:36 haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out. It’s my very first book. It’s entitled Protocols,
3:20:39 an operating manual for the human body. This is a book that I’ve been working on for more than
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3:20:57 And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
3:21:04 The book is now available by presale@protocallsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors.
3:21:09 You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual
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3:21:41 newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we
3:21:47 call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize
3:21:51 your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness
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0:00:04 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools
0:00:07 for everyday life.
0:00:14 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
0:00:15 School of Medicine.
0:00:17 My guest today is Josh Weitzkin.
0:00:22 Josh Weitzkin is a former child prodigy who began playing the game of chess at six years
0:00:23 old.
0:00:28 And by the time he was 16 years old, had become a national champion many times over, as well
0:00:29 as an international champion.
0:00:33 In fact, he achieved the level of international master, which is one of the highest levels
0:00:38 of achievement in the game of chess for anyone of any age.
0:00:42 His early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie “Searching
0:00:43 for Bobby Fisher.”
0:00:48 He then quit playing the game of chess and moved on to martial arts, the study of philosophy
0:00:53 at Columbia University in New York, and eventually foiling, which is essentially surfing over
0:00:54 the water.
0:00:59 Josh is not only a high performer, he has now become perhaps the most sought after professional
0:01:06 coach in the domains of finance, in the domains of creative endeavors, professional sports,
0:01:07 and military.
0:01:11 Today’s episode is one of my favorite Huberman Lab Podcast episodes ever.
0:01:16 I know as a podcast host, you’re not supposed to say that, but it’s absolutely true.
0:01:21 Because not only is Josh Weitzkin so highly accomplished, but he is an exceptional teacher
0:01:22 of the learning process.
0:01:27 He took what he learned in chess and about learning chess and applied that to martial
0:01:33 arts, to foiling, et cetera, and from participating in all those endeavors, he was able to distill
0:01:38 out the essential elements of learning and how to tailor one’s learning process to one’s
0:01:44 own unique personality and style, flaws and tendency to make mistakes, and how to leverage
0:01:47 all of that in order to be able to learn better.
0:01:52 In fact, throughout today’s episode, I promise that you will constantly be reflecting on
0:01:57 where you experience things like tension and fear, both in your personal life, your professional
0:02:01 life, your educational life, whatever it is that you’re trying to learn and pursue in
0:02:02 life.
0:02:06 Today’s conversation, thanks to Josh, will allow you to look at that, understand it
0:02:13 better, and know where to apply work, when to relax, when to push forward, and in effect,
0:02:18 how to become a better learner both of yourself and whatever it is that you happen to be pursuing
0:02:19 in life.
0:02:25 Now, a saying in science, which is that sometimes you encounter somebody who is truly N of one,
0:02:29 meaning a sample size of one in a category all by themselves.
0:02:32 Josh Waitskin is truly an N of one.
0:02:37 I know of no other person like him or even close to him in terms of his ability to live
0:02:43 a unique life path and to take what he learns and to put it out into the world so that others
0:02:44 may benefit.
0:02:48 He lives with a tremendous amount of intentionality for the people he loves, for the things he
0:02:52 loves and with the intention of helping others learn how to learn better.
0:02:55 I must say it was a true honor to sit down with Josh.
0:02:58 I’ve been a huge fan of his work for a very long time.
0:03:02 You’ll also learn that he’s a really nice person.
0:03:05 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching
0:03:07 and research roles at Stanford.
0:03:10 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information
0:03:14 about science and science-related tools to the general public.
0:03:18 In keeping with that theme, this podcast episode does include sponsors.
0:03:21 Now for my discussion with Josh Waitskin.
0:03:23 Josh Waitskin, welcome.
0:03:24 Thank you, man.
0:03:25 Great to be here.
0:03:29 I feel like I’ve known you a long time because I saw the search for Bobby Fisher and I learned
0:03:34 about the real human that was about you.
0:03:42 I read the art of learning and I must say I’m a fan and somewhat obsessed with the uniqueness
0:03:46 of your arc and the choices you’ve made and your understanding of learning as a process
0:03:51 and its universal properties, its specific properties in different contexts.
0:03:53 I’m excited to dive in.
0:03:59 I think for people that perhaps are not familiar with you, maybe you could just give us a broad
0:04:06 overview of your back story, like the things that you’ve really focused on in chunks, if
0:04:11 you will, just for a couple of minutes so that people can get familiar with the incredible
0:04:16 things you’ve done and I think that reflects the uniqueness of your choice-making process,
0:04:18 which then we’ll get into.
0:04:19 Yeah, sure.
0:04:20 Well, thank you, man.
0:04:21 It’s an honor.
0:04:22 I appreciate what you said.
0:04:24 Yeah, so I started playing chess.
0:04:27 I grew up in New York City, downtown Manhattan.
0:04:32 I started playing chess when I was six years old and I discovered chess walking through
0:04:37 Washington Square Park with my mom and I remember watching a day or two and then at one point
0:04:38 I broke away from her.
0:04:43 I was going to play on monkey bars and I ran over and I asked an old man if I could play
0:04:48 and he said yes and my mom was surprised and we started playing.
0:04:56 I played my first game of chess and I remember the very distinct feeling of it was as if
0:05:01 I was discovering or rediscovering a lost memory.
0:05:05 It wasn’t like I was learning something new, it was like I was wiping away the dust or
0:05:09 the cobwebs between me and something I had known very deeply at one point.
0:05:13 Very strange feeling for a six-year-old boy and then I just fell in love with the game.
0:05:14 I got really intensely into it.
0:05:18 My first teachers were the hustlers in Washington Square, so it was just like a raucous crowd
0:05:22 of guys who took me under their wings, started teaching me the tactical street side of the
0:05:28 game and I was just unhindered as a learner, which is interesting from my perspective now
0:05:33 as a dad because my little boy Charlie is taking on surfing with that same kind of freedom,
0:05:38 just that liberated, uncomplicated, out of his own way kind of vibe.
0:05:41 Yeah, and then by the time I was seven, I started competing and then I was a top-rated
0:05:47 player for my age in the country for most of the years from age seven to 23 in my whole
0:05:48 chess career.
0:05:54 So it was a very strange upbringing in some ways, which has led to some quirky elements
0:06:00 in my psychology, which was that I was living in a pressure cooker of competition from age
0:06:05 six on and my whole childhood was spent as the target.
0:06:10 So if you’re competing in national championships, I would compete in youth national and world
0:06:14 championships, then otherwise I’d be competing against adults, everything else.
0:06:18 But then you’re the target, so any mistake you make, and kids make mistakes all the time,
0:06:23 we all do, my rivals and their coaches who are strong masters and international masters
0:06:27 and grandmasters would be able to study and adult strong players can see very easily the
0:06:29 weaknesses in a child.
0:06:30 And so they would be prepared for them.
0:06:35 So if I didn’t take on a weakness, it would be exploited and I would experience pain.
0:06:40 And so from a very young age, not taking on my weaknesses was outside of my conceptual
0:06:44 scheme, which is a really interesting thing to grow up with.
0:06:49 And it’s in many ways like lay the foundation for a lot of what I’ve done since.
0:06:54 And there are lots of things about that upbringing, which could be unhealthy, I think in the public
0:06:55 eye.
0:06:59 It’s very bizarre, luckily it was before social media.
0:07:02 And I’ve never been on social media in any way, which has been a choice.
0:07:06 So when I was 11, the book “Searching for Robbie Fisher” came out and then when I was
0:07:08 15, the movie came out.
0:07:13 And at that point, I was completely in love with chess, it was my first love.
0:07:17 I was an unobstructed learner, I was a love competition, a lot of my opponents were trying
0:07:22 to control the game, memorize openings, figure out how to win by force, but I love the battle.
0:07:27 My style was to create chaos, like in Washington Square Park.
0:07:29 Find hidden harmonies and chaos, and I love that.
0:07:32 So as the game went on and they moved away from their opening preparation and controlling
0:07:35 things, we moved into my power zone, which was the fight.
0:07:37 I love the fight.
0:07:43 And then my chess life in many ways was free-flowing, and then the movie came out when I was 15.
0:07:49 And then you can imagine what that was like as a young teenager, all the attention, the
0:07:55 media, the cameras everywhere, groupies, all the temptations, and I didn’t ask for it.
0:07:59 And it was a really, it was an alienating period for me relative to chess.
0:08:05 And around the same time, I started training with a Russian chess trainer who started urging
0:08:09 me to move away from my self-expression as a chess player and to study the players who
0:08:10 were the opposite of me.
0:08:13 I was a attacking player, aggressive.
0:08:16 I played kind of in the style, not at the level, but in the style of like Bobby Fisher
0:08:21 or Gary Gasparov or Mikhail Tal, world champions who were like hot-blooded.
0:08:27 And I was being urged to study the more cold-blooded prophylactic side of chess, Petrosian, Karpov,
0:08:29 more conservative defensive players.
0:08:34 And so I was being told, instead of saying like, “What, what does Josh feel here?
0:08:35 What would Karpov play here?
0:08:37 Who’s the opposite of me?”
0:08:41 And so the combination of that public eye and then the movement away from my self-expression
0:08:45 led to a period of obstructedness and self-consciousness.
0:08:49 And an interesting theme we could talk about at one point is that passage from a pre-conscious
0:08:50 to a post-conscious competitor.
0:08:55 In many ways, I went from like that freedom of pre-conscious competition into the tunnel
0:08:57 of existential crisis.
0:09:00 And I grappled with it for a lot of years.
0:09:06 And when I was 18, when I graduated high school, and during that grappling, I was still the
0:09:07 top rated player in the country.
0:09:09 I was winning national championships every year.
0:09:12 So like from the outside, it looked good, but from the inside, I was in turmoil.
0:09:13 I was fighting with myself.
0:09:15 I had all these demons.
0:09:16 And then I left the U.S.
0:09:21 I spent a number of years after high school studying East Asian philosophy, meditating,
0:09:23 reflecting.
0:09:27 And then my study of chess in those years, and I was deeply in love with chess still,
0:09:29 it became much more of an introspective process.
0:09:35 It became, I was competing as intensely as ever, but chess became connected to life.
0:09:39 And then when I was 19 years old, I started training at the Human Performance Institute.
0:09:42 At the time, it was called LGE.
0:09:50 Lair, Grapple, and Etchaberry, it was a performance training, cross-disciplinary performance training
0:09:52 center that Jim Lair opened up.
0:09:54 And now it became the HBI later on.
0:09:58 And I never forget the moment that I was working with these performance psychologists, and
0:10:02 I was at the gym, and I was working with nutritionists, and I was doing this intense
0:10:03 workout.
0:10:05 And I looked next to me, and there was Jim Harbaugh, who was the head coach at the time
0:10:11 of the, who was the quarterback at the time of the Colts NFL team.
0:10:14 And we got into this amazing dialogue about performance.
0:10:16 And it was a real eye-opening moment for me, because I realized that we spoke the same
0:10:17 language.
0:10:22 I was like, holy shit, this guy’s a, he’s an NFL quarterback, and I’m this crazy chess
0:10:24 player, but we’re doing the same thing.
0:10:28 And it was this crystallization moment where I realized that all of these arts are fundamentally
0:10:32 connected at the highest levels.
0:10:35 And what we’re doing is much more similar, like if you’re at the, like, I observed that
0:10:39 people who are at the pinnacles of different arts are often doing things that are much
0:10:44 more similar than people who are in the same art from them, but at lower levels.
0:10:46 There’s something in that qualitative experience.
0:10:49 And then I began studying the principles that connected these things.
0:10:54 And then, then I had this interesting experience, I’m going to, I’m kind of compressing a life
0:10:56 into a minute or two.
0:11:03 But I, in my early 20s, when I, I ultimately moved away from chess, and I’m happy to talk
0:11:05 about why and that journey.
0:11:08 And then I, I moved into the martial arts, the, my study of East Asian philosophy moved
0:11:15 me into the study of Taoism and Tai Chi, and then into the, into Tai Chi push hands.
0:11:20 And I had this really interesting experience where at that point I’d been, the introspective
0:11:25 process of studying chess had become much more about studying life.
0:11:30 And so I was, I was, I was in my exploration of interconnectedness, but I was, I was not
0:11:31 playing chess anymore.
0:11:35 And I was all in on the martial arts, but I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition,
0:11:38 which I did every year for many years, for Duchenne Muscleau de Shruti research.
0:11:41 And I was playing 50 chess games at once.
0:11:46 And I was walking around this, this big square playing against 50, you know, young up and
0:11:48 coming strong players at the same time.
0:11:51 And I realized at one point, like I wasn’t playing chess.
0:11:54 I was moving chess pieces, but I was thinking in Tai Chi language.
0:12:00 I was feeling flow, feeling space left behind, riding energetic waves of the game.
0:12:02 And it was like, I was winning all these chess games, but I hadn’t played chess in a long
0:12:05 time and I wasn’t playing chess.
0:12:09 And, and, and it became like, and then my study of Tai Chi became extremely accelerated.
0:12:12 And then I started winning, competing, and then I won in the fighting application and
0:12:14 I started winning national championships.
0:12:21 And then, and then I began to think about like, like, or become more and more deeply involved
0:12:26 in the study and the exploration of thematic interconnectedness, which has really become
0:12:27 a life’s work.
0:12:31 And then my martial arts life ended up, you know, taking me all over the world and won
0:12:32 some world championships.
0:12:40 And I moved into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and trained in that art for many years and was training
0:12:44 for the world championship for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is after winning worlds in the Tai Chi
0:12:45 Chuan.
0:12:47 And I broke my back in a training camp.
0:12:52 I own a school with Marcello Garcia, who’s a dear friend who’s nine time world champion,
0:12:56 perhaps the greatest grappler pound per pound to ever live.
0:12:59 And I was training at a really high level and I, and I was thinking about this, like
0:13:04 I was getting ready to run begin my search toward black belt world championships and
0:13:05 Jiu Jitsu.
0:13:07 And I ruptured my L4L5 disc.
0:13:14 And it was the first time I’d been moved away from an art, not on my own terms.
0:13:20 And it was a, it was a, you know, brutal injury that I ended up as we do when we’re mad men,
0:13:24 you know, coming back and training for a year and a half on with the broken, the busted
0:13:25 up back.
0:13:29 And then the doctors told me I had to, I had to let this one go or I’d be crippled
0:13:31 for life.
0:13:36 And around that period is where I started to go all in on the art of training others.
0:13:41 And I said, okay, if I can’t be all in training as a competitor as an athlete myself, I’d
0:13:44 been trained, I’d been training elite competitors and mental and physical performance for some
0:13:49 time then, but I wanted to take on the challenge of loving training others with the same intensity
0:13:50 that I love training myself.
0:13:53 And I, I went all in on, on that art.
0:13:58 And I’m still all in on that art, but I never actually got to the place where I love not
0:14:02 being in the arena myself as much as being in the arena myself.
0:14:07 And, and then in this chapter of my life now, I, I fall in love with the ocean arts, initially
0:14:09 surfing and now foiling.
0:14:15 And for the last eight years, I’ve been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family.
0:14:18 And I train three to five hours a day in foiling.
0:14:25 And so I’ve, I’m in my, my, you know, really intense training lifestyle myself and I train
0:14:31 elite mental and physical competitors around the world and in, in finance, in science technology
0:14:32 and in sports.
0:14:35 I’ve been doing some amazing work with the Boston Celtics for the last few years.
0:14:41 Um, so that’s a nut, a journey in a nutshell, happy to dig into any of it.
0:14:45 I’d like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Wealthfront.
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0:17:44 Yeah, thank you.
0:17:48 We’ll definitely revisit certain time points and themes there.
0:17:55 I can imagine as a young boy playing chess, you have your own strategies, you’re developing
0:17:59 an understanding of what works for you, but of course, as a young kid or also getting
0:18:03 into the mind of the other player, you actually described that your coach or coaches were
0:18:07 encouraging you to get into a different mindset, one that was not your default or trained-up
0:18:16 mindset, less focused on chaos and aggression, and more in this other mode of playing by
0:18:24 thinking about these other types of chess players and ways to play chess.
0:18:28 I can imagine that most kids are not weaned.
0:18:31 Their brain isn’t developing around a game.
0:18:37 It seems that your brain was built, the developmental neuroplasticity that’s so robust in early childhood
0:18:40 was built around this game that we call chess.
0:18:45 It seems to me that you were encouraged to develop a theory of mind that wasn’t just
0:18:50 your own, which itself, I think, is really unique.
0:18:55 This six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12-year-olds might be told, “Hey, listen, the reason they
0:19:00 were mean to you at school is they just hate themselves,” or they just didn’t think about
0:19:06 whether or not to pick you first or last or the game or whatever it is that you get told
0:19:11 to do that, but for you, it seems an intense practice of trying to learn to get into the
0:19:18 mind of another while holding on to your own sense of what’s you versus them.
0:19:22 As a developmental neurobiologist, I understand this as like perhaps one of the most important
0:19:26 events in the development of our brain.
0:19:36 Seems that your brain was built up around that dynamic, and so now you coach peak performers
0:19:41 and so much of coaching and teaching and being a parent is to get into the mind of another.
0:19:44 The difference is when you’re a parent, you can think back to being a child and at least
0:19:47 get some general sense of what that’s like.
0:19:52 Looking back from what I just said, and I realize that there’s a lot of words there,
0:20:02 but do you think that what you’re doing when you approach a practice like Tai Chi or Brazilian
0:20:09 jiu-jitsu or science or math or music from the perspective of a performer or a teacher
0:20:18 is that you’re getting into the mind of someone else, or you’re trying to stay in your own
0:20:19 mindset.
0:20:24 I’m sorry I’m not being more succinct with this, but I think that as humans, we do this.
0:20:28 I’m sure our dogs look up at us and say, “Oh, they’re happy with me, or they’re sad with
0:20:34 me,” but the algorithms they’re running are more simplistic.
0:20:42 We as the most sophisticated old world primates do this so spectacularly well, and it seems
0:20:46 that much of your career and your life has been built around these kinds of dynamics.
0:20:52 Put simply, what is your mindset when you approach a practice that’s just you in the
0:21:01 practice versus your mindset when you approach a practice when it’s you and another, a competitor
0:21:06 versus when you’re trying to teach something you and a bunch of different minds, but there’s
0:21:07 a common goal.
0:21:10 Okay, so there’s really three big questions wrapped in there.
0:21:13 There’s sort of like 15 really big questions.
0:21:17 15 really big questions, and my audience gets upset at the length of these questions, but
0:21:21 I think for me, it’s important to just kind of set this out there as a buffet from which
0:21:25 you can select anything or discard anything that you like.
0:21:28 There are some many delectable things to select there.
0:21:34 Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, one-on-one competition is so interesting in mental and
0:21:35 physical arena.
0:21:38 So, if we think about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or chess as two of them, let’s zone in on
0:21:42 chess because that’s when I was a kid.
0:21:44 You’re thinking about what your plan is, and you’re also thinking about what your opponent’s
0:21:50 plan is, and every move your opponent makes, you have to think, “Why did he do that?
0:21:51 What’s his plan?
0:21:52 What is his tactical plan?
0:21:53 What is his strategic plan?”
0:21:54 Short-term and long-term.
0:21:59 So, you’re trying to unpack his strategy, and you’re assuming that he has or she has
0:22:00 a strategy?
0:22:02 Well, if they don’t have a strategy, then they’re not going to be a good chess player.
0:22:06 And so, then very quickly, if you’re evolving in that art, you’re only playing as people
0:22:08 who are at your level or better if you’re growing.
0:22:10 If you’re always playing down, then you’re not improving.
0:22:15 And there’s a beautiful filtration process in the people who accelerate in their growth
0:22:18 curve in the chess world are ones who are challenging themselves all the time, playing
0:22:19 up, pushing their limits.
0:22:25 And so, I spent my life against playing as strong players.
0:22:28 And I always played a little up, except for when I was in youth competition, I always
0:22:31 played up, which was important for me.
0:22:35 And so, people had a plan, and they were very deceptive about their plans, and they had
0:22:37 their layers to the plans.
0:22:40 There’s the tactics they’re trying to set up, there’s their long-term strategy, but
0:22:46 then there’s what they want me to think their strategy is, which it isn’t, and in fact,
0:22:51 their strategy is to have misdirection around what their strategy and their tactics are,
0:22:52 and their layers to it.
0:22:54 And it can go many, many layers deep.
0:22:56 Same thing in the martial arts, right?
0:22:59 So obviously, you need to have a theory of mind to play that game, at least the way I
0:23:05 played chess at a high level, because you’re, and there’s this very interesting shared consciousness
0:23:06 between players.
0:23:09 You and I are sitting a little further apart than we would sit if we were playing chess.
0:23:13 So, if we were like half the distance we are from one another, and we’re just sitting for
0:23:20 six hours with like a three-foot chessboard, three feet between us, studying this thing,
0:23:22 our minds become connected.
0:23:25 We often will share the same illusion.
0:23:28 You might see something, and then I see it when you see it.
0:23:34 If we have the same, we might have the same blind spot, we might have the same insight.
0:23:39 The connectedness of mind is fascinating, and it’s through chess, it’s directly energetic,
0:23:42 it’s through eye contact, it’s through body language, it’s by seeing micro expressions,
0:23:43 it’s everything.
0:23:47 So, you’re always reading the opponent, and as you get really good, you learn like what
0:23:51 your tells are, what your opponents’ tells are, and you also learn, like I often would
0:23:56 have tells on purpose, and I’d have predictable tells that I would let people lean on for a
0:24:00 long time, until I didn’t let them lean on it anymore.
0:24:06 It’s like in the martial arts where you, you know, you give someone comfort in a lean,
0:24:08 right, and you give them a rep of something, they can lean on it, they can lean here, and
0:24:11 then they can lean here very comfortably, five or six or eight or ten times in a row, until
0:24:15 they can’t, and they’re on the floor, right, so this is happening in chess, it’s happening
0:24:20 in all of these things, and one-on-one competition is a relentless truth teller, you know.
0:24:22 If you have a weakness, it will be exposed.
0:24:24 If your opponent has a weakness, you will expose it.
0:24:28 If you go into a chess game, and you’ve got a huge opening repertoire that’s extremely
0:24:32 complex, but there’s like one little place that I just hope he doesn’t go there, he always
0:24:37 goes there, it’s so bonkers, you can’t hope your opponent’s not going to see it.
0:24:41 You can’t make the second best move, because maybe he’ll blunder and I’ll win, that never
0:24:48 works if you’re playing as real competition, and so like you need to understand your mind,
0:24:51 you need to understand your opponent’s mind, you need to understand your opponent’s understanding
0:24:55 of your mind, right, that’s a lot of plates to spin.
0:25:02 And what I guess what I said before, not so clearly, is that for a young mind to be able
0:25:08 to learn to spin all those plates is incredible, it’s clearly possible, it’s unique, but
0:25:13 it’s possible, you did that.
0:25:18 But it takes a young mind or an adult mind out of its own unique experience.
0:25:24 So this is eventually how we’ll circle back to pre-consciousness versus post-consciousness.
0:25:31 But in the meantime, when was it that you first recall thinking, not, “Oh, I’m going to beat
0:25:40 this guy,” but sensing he’s getting nervous, or he’s confident, or he can sense that I’m
0:25:47 nervous, or I’m going to set a trap and just feeling out whether or not they detect the
0:25:48 trap.
0:25:49 I mean, it’s just a lot.
0:25:50 Right away.
0:25:54 I mean, to keep in mind, my first teachers were hustlers, were chess hustlers from Washington
0:25:58 Square, so they would mess with my mind all the time, and then they would teach me what
0:26:01 they were doing, and they would do it again at a higher level.
0:26:04 So you’re distracting, they’re distracting, they’re setting traps, they’re using Jedi
0:26:06 mind tricks of every sort.
0:26:08 They didn’t kick gloves you at all.
0:26:09 I wouldn’t say at all.
0:26:12 I mean, this was a rough and tumble crowd.
0:26:15 There were a lot of drugs in the park, there’s a lot of fights in the park.
0:26:16 These guys took me under their wing.
0:26:19 I mean, there were moments where some guy would be going off, and the guy would say, “Hey,
0:26:20 Josh is here.
0:26:21 Cut that out.”
0:26:22 I was their protege.
0:26:28 So they did, but they also did not wear thick gloves, and the gloves were thinning
0:26:33 out all the time, and I was getting better fast, then we’d go to war.
0:26:34 They were my teachers.
0:26:35 They were my friends.
0:26:40 I’m super grateful for like, and then what was interesting is that my first classical
0:26:44 chess teacher, Bruce Pendolfini, saw me playing in the park and asked my father if I could
0:26:47 work with him, and then we started training together.
0:26:53 And one of the things that I feel really badly about is the way he was portrayed in the film
0:26:56 searching for Bobby Fisher, because Bruce is still a dear friend of mine.
0:26:59 He’s, Ben Kingsley played him as a much more severe person than he was.
0:27:04 He was a beautiful teacher, and he really, he wanted me to express myself as did the
0:27:08 guys in the park, but he was also filling in the holes and teaching me a classical chess
0:27:14 foundation, and we were studying chess from the end game first, principles, studying positions
0:27:17 of reduced complexity to touch high level principles, and then learning to apply them
0:27:18 to more and more complex positions.
0:27:25 So my early chess education had both the classical study with Bruce, and it had the street smart
0:27:28 game with the hustlers at the park.
0:27:33 And to answer your question right away, when I was six years old, like, my opponents would
0:27:37 mess with my mind and trap me and trick me and make me think here, and then they go there,
0:27:38 and then I would learn to do that.
0:27:42 And then I remember when there was one like youth competition where I made a move inside
0:27:45 a trap and went, oh, I mean, it was like that obvious, right?
0:27:50 That’s like the worst, like, and then it gets increasingly subtle, right?
0:27:53 But like, as my opponent said, oh, he’s unhappy to take the pawn, then you and then your opponent
0:27:57 see it, and then you learn, you know, those things just keep on the circles get smaller
0:28:00 and smaller and tighter and tighter and more and more refined.
0:28:04 This is the opposite of Asperger’s or autism, by the way.
0:28:09 What you’re describing is a hypertrophy set of circuits for theory of mind in a very young
0:28:10 kid.
0:28:13 So to be able to understand what’s happening around you.
0:28:18 And I think for many people, the joys of childhood are really about not being aware of what’s
0:28:19 going on around you.
0:28:25 Psychologists would refer to the, you know, this is like a lack of impingement.
0:28:28 Impingement is when like a kid is playing and they’re really enjoying something and then
0:28:31 suddenly they decide they, they don’t want to play anymore and the parent doesn’t want
0:28:32 to be bothered.
0:28:35 So they say, no, no, no, no, no, like keep playing, you know, they’re like impinging
0:28:39 on the kid’s reflexive desire to do something or not do something.
0:28:41 This isn’t about keeping them safe.
0:28:43 This is in the domain of safety.
0:28:51 But at least within the channel of chess, it seems that you developed your entire understanding
0:28:55 of the psychology of human beings, except for, of course, you had an experience at home of
0:29:02 family and friends, but chess certainly cut a wide trough through, through your, your
0:29:03 development.
0:29:06 Well, I’m really grateful for my early chess life.
0:29:10 And I also would never choose to put that on my children.
0:29:13 I mean, I, it worked out really well for me.
0:29:15 I mean, I’m, I have my wounds, right?
0:29:18 I mean, there’s lots of things that I’ve had to grapple with.
0:29:22 But I think if you put a lot of children through the pressures that I went through, it wouldn’t
0:29:23 work out well.
0:29:28 And I watched a lot of my young, I mean, almost all my young rivals, or, I mean, like very
0:29:33 close to all of my young rivals, I ended up quitting and falling into crisis.
0:29:39 And, and, you know, then you have parents and coaches who are expressing their own egoic
0:29:41 needs through the children and the children are shouldering that.
0:29:44 And then that becomes very difficult to deal with.
0:29:48 And then, um, you’re dealing with heartbreak and you’re putting everything on the line
0:29:52 and you’re losing and you’re dealing with your own self doubts and the heartbreak of
0:29:55 your mother and your father and your coach and then your friends.
0:29:59 And I mean, there are so many, and then as the pressures get more and more intense in
0:30:03 chess, like you really are putting your heart and soul in the line through that chess board
0:30:08 in, in casual games, let alone in, in national and world championships and you’re being shattered
0:30:09 when you lose.
0:30:10 I was shattered many times over.
0:30:16 I mean, I lost last rounds of national chess championships and world championships multiple
0:30:17 times over.
0:30:19 And I had, and those were the greatest moments of my life in retrospect.
0:30:21 They taught me the most important lessons of my life.
0:30:23 I would never take it back.
0:30:26 It’s been, and that’s a pattern in my chess life and my fight life and everything I’ve
0:30:32 gone through, um, the most heartbreaking, devastating moments ultimately were the ones
0:30:36 that catalyzed the most growth and they were beautiful.
0:30:38 Um, and I really relate to them that way.
0:30:43 But they also can be brutal for young minds and they can destroy people.
0:30:44 Yeah.
0:30:50 What do you think it is about, um, failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes
0:30:51 change?
0:30:55 I mean, I always say that, you know, your brain has no reason to change if you’re just in
0:30:59 learn, trying to learn something in your inflow, you’re getting, you know, most people associate
0:31:04 being quote unquote in flow with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly.
0:31:08 Um, I don’t think that was the original definition that cheeks and my intended.
0:31:14 Um, the neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it’s only under conditions in which
0:31:16 there’s some mismatch between what you’re trying to do.
0:31:19 Like even, you know, like this has been studied in terms of reaching for an object and there’s
0:31:24 a mirror displacement or a prism displacement or something you eventually can learn to error
0:31:25 correct.
0:31:29 Um, because the cup is actually over there as opposed to where you see it.
0:31:35 Um, but it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us, adrenaline, nor adrenaline and
0:31:41 dopamine in particular, those three, their cousins, the catecholamines that tells the,
0:31:45 yeah, the neurochemical level tells the synapses, wait, something needs to change.
0:31:49 I mean, the brain doesn’t have any reason to change unless there’s frustration, agitation
0:31:53 or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration
0:31:54 and agitation.
0:32:01 So do you think these big, what feel like cataclysmic fails set a sort of window of plasticity in
0:32:02 which we can change?
0:32:07 I often didn’t think that, that it’s only through like the devastation of a huge loss
0:32:11 that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning.
0:32:14 Certainly, we wouldn’t want to design the system that way.
0:32:19 But as I always joke, you know, I wasn’t consulted the design phase and you went either, we just
0:32:21 had to work with what’s there.
0:32:22 Yeah.
0:32:23 Like big failure.
0:32:25 Why, why do you think that sets a wave front of, of change?
0:32:29 Yeah, it’s, it’s a great, it’s a great question.
0:32:36 Well, I think, I think the, the study you sent me yesterday speaks to this.
0:32:37 Yeah, maybe we should talk about that.
0:32:38 Yeah.
0:32:39 Yeah.
0:32:40 Maybe I’ll answer that question experientially.
0:32:43 Maybe you could then talk about the study and we can riff on it a little bit.
0:32:47 This is so much fun by the way, because I’ve lived my life in, in the arena, just like pushing
0:32:48 myself.
0:32:51 Like I’m my own, I’m not a scientist, but I’m like my own laboratory.
0:32:54 You said to me yesterday at the game, like, you said, I’m not a scientist, but I’m looking
0:32:55 forward to tomorrow.
0:32:57 And I said, trust me, you’re a scientist.
0:32:58 Yeah.
0:33:02 And I do science through the lens of a certain understanding of mechanism and structure function
0:33:05 and some processes.
0:33:12 And you do science through the, through the lens of experience and drawing core parallels
0:33:17 and principles in different domains and at different levels of from unskilled all the
0:33:18 way up to virtuosity.
0:33:19 Yeah.
0:33:20 That’s kind of how we see it.
0:33:26 I think the way that I, like if I think about the most painful losses of my life, the most
0:33:29 devastating injuries of my life, I think about dying, drowning.
0:33:32 I drown in the bottom of doing hypoxic breath work in a pool.
0:33:36 So on the bottom of the pool to four and a half minutes after that, it was, you know,
0:33:41 led to the arguably the best decision of my life to move into the jungle.
0:33:45 I think about the losing the last round of the under 18 world chess championship on the
0:33:49 first board.
0:33:53 That’s a very interesting story I could describe a little bit, or I think about like my first
0:34:01 national championship I lost when I was, I was seven, eight first board last round, just
0:34:03 unobstructed learning until then.
0:34:07 And then I lost the last round of the, on the, on the, you know, for the title, fell into
0:34:08 an opening trap.
0:34:11 Like that’s the loss that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
0:34:12 You were how old?
0:34:15 I think I’d just turned eight or maybe I was late seven.
0:34:19 And like that was, it was, because if I had won that game, I would, I easily could have
0:34:26 associated winning with just no pain, no heart, just cruising up into then that was the moment
0:34:27 that like I got my ass kicked.
0:34:31 I had to go back, you know, deal with these demons, come back, train for the next year
0:34:32 and then I won the next year.
0:34:35 And then it was off to the races.
0:34:37 My life might look very different if I’d won that game.
0:34:43 And actually the kid who beat me in that game, David Arnett became two years later, we became
0:34:45 best friends for all of our childhood.
0:34:47 We were on the same chess team and best friends.
0:34:52 And I think he gave me the greatest gift of my competitive life by kicking my ass that
0:34:53 game.
0:35:00 The most devastating loss of my chess life was, so I was 17 years old.
0:35:05 I was competing in the world under 18 chess championship in second Hungary.
0:35:11 Um, every, so every year there’s an under 12, 14, 16, 18, 21 world championship and I was
0:35:16 always representing the U S and those tournaments around the world and, you know, I, you know,
0:35:22 level to India or Brazil or Hungary or Germany or somewhere and compete in the world championship.
0:35:27 And under 18 worlds, I played the tournament.
0:35:28 I just was playing very inspired chess.
0:35:32 I had just picked up on the road three weeks before Jack Kerouac.
0:35:38 I had become, I was just on fire with Kerouac’s vision and I was just so like appreciating
0:35:42 life with a freshness and intensity than I’d ever had more than I’d ever had.
0:35:47 I was, I was like totally on fire in chess, in life, in love, in everything.
0:35:53 And I was paired against Peter Sviddler, who was the Russian.
0:35:57 We were on the, on the first board last round, we were, we’d come, you know, we were playing
0:35:59 for the world championship.
0:36:02 Every country sends their national champion, so it’s a long tournament to get there.
0:36:05 Um, early in the game, I think it was move 12.
0:36:07 He offered me a draw.
0:36:11 So if I’d accepted the draw for, um, it would have been the tie breaks.
0:36:14 I didn’t know exactly what was happening, but I thought that he was slightly favored
0:36:15 in tie breaks.
0:36:19 I wasn’t sure, but basically the world championship would be determined with a gold medal will
0:36:24 be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round.
0:36:29 But I had a, but I hadn’t calculated it out before, but I had a feeling it, it was like,
0:36:32 maybe it was like 40, 60 or 30, 70 against me.
0:36:33 But I, it was my style.
0:36:34 I never accept a draw first.
0:36:35 That wasn’t my style.
0:36:36 I always wanted to fight.
0:36:39 So I declined, pushed for a win.
0:36:43 Now the beauty of his decision was also, he offered me a draw in the critical position
0:36:47 where I had to make a very specific decision, which is a trick that chess players play on
0:36:51 one other, which is that like, if you’re, we should talk about tension at one point.
0:36:54 It’s a, it’s a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports.
0:36:58 So one thing that happens in chess games is that you have this building tension between
0:37:03 minds and often the tension on the chess board and the tension on the minds are mounting
0:37:04 together.
0:37:09 And the urge, the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release
0:37:13 chess tension in the chess, chess pieces.
0:37:17 And when you release chess tension, usually the person who releases the tension will be
0:37:19 on the wrong side of tactics.
0:37:23 So a lot of chess to the chess game is about putting mental pressure on the opponent to
0:37:26 force them to break the tension on the chess board.
0:37:27 So in that game, he offered me a draw.
0:37:34 So you think about it, we’re 17 years old, we’re 10 days into a world championship battle.
0:37:38 We even, no matter how much we love the battle, some piece of ourselves wants a way out.
0:37:40 Like we want to release the tension, right?
0:37:43 It’s just elemental to who we are when we’re living with that much pressure.
0:37:48 So all I have to do then is like, accept the draw, shake hands and the tournament’s over
0:37:49 and then it’s out of our hands.
0:37:50 What happens?
0:37:53 So in that moment, I have to also make a critical chess position.
0:37:59 So the, the urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chess position and
0:38:06 in that move, I declined the draw and I made a slightly over aggressive move, which turned
0:38:11 and he ended up, um, playing a beautiful game, big attack, beating me.
0:38:13 I lose the world championship.
0:38:19 Just this close to like your dream, you’re shattered, right?
0:38:24 Um, I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in
0:38:29 a little town in Slovenia and then we broke up and all that ended up meeting again in
0:38:33 a street corner in Brazil, the world under 21 championship three weeks later, lots of
0:38:36 drama, you know, being a 17 year old kid.
0:38:41 I didn’t study that chess loss for two and a half months.
0:38:42 It was so painful to me.
0:38:46 I always studied games immediately afterwards and I always, you might study a chess game
0:38:53 for anywhere between three and 15 hours studying one chess game and that’s that say 10 hours
0:38:56 is focused on the two or three critical positions at the game.
0:38:59 And this was before chess computers were rampant and you had chess engines that could always
0:39:04 just tell you the answer to, um, that’s also something we should talk about later.
0:39:08 How chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because
0:39:12 you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance
0:39:16 for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer, but we’ll come back to
0:39:18 that maybe.
0:39:24 So I didn’t study that loss for two and a half months because it was so painful to me.
0:39:29 Then I was, my family spent a lot of time at sea, um, which was an interesting part of
0:39:33 my life and my chess life, living on a little boat, catching our own food, doing our own
0:39:35 engine work.
0:39:38 And I was, I was at sea after competing in both of those world championships and some
0:39:40 other things.
0:39:47 And I sat down to study that game and I spent, you know, dozen plus hours studying that one
0:39:49 critical position of the game.
0:39:55 And then I realized what the, like the move I should have made was outside of my conceptual
0:39:56 scheme in that critical position.
0:39:59 I wasn’t ready to make that move I had to make.
0:40:01 And he was also, I think, a slightly stronger chess player than me.
0:40:02 I was a great fighter.
0:40:06 I love the battle, but I think of objectively he was a better, his name is Peter Spidler.
0:40:10 He ended up becoming a world-class grandmaster and is, and is just an incredible chess player
0:40:11 today.
0:40:16 At the time he was just amazingly brilliant, um, beautiful, fluid mind, but I was confident
0:40:19 going into the game.
0:40:26 So I had to make this move that would essentially be his attack was on the king side.
0:40:27 My expansion was on the queen side.
0:40:33 I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king away from my king side,
0:40:36 which is super counterintuitive because you think you want to defend your king.
0:40:40 What I didn’t realize is like harnessing the power of empty space against aggression.
0:40:44 His attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn.
0:40:48 Moving my last defensive piece, his attack couldn’t break through, but that principle
0:40:50 was something I didn’t understand at all.
0:40:59 And so it’s not like I would have found that move, um, but it was a real pop in my mind,
0:41:00 right?
0:41:05 So then I was 17, 18 years old, and then a year later I started studying Tai Chi.
0:41:10 I started studying Taoist meditation, Taoist philosophy, the Tao Djing, Chuang Tzu, Lao
0:41:14 Tzu, the Inner Chapters.
0:41:17 And then I get in the Tai Chi, I started moving meditation and I started in Tai Chi, Chuang,
0:41:21 Push Hands without making the connection.
0:41:27 Push Hands is the martial art, which is the essence of Push Hands is learning to utilize
0:41:31 empty space against aggression, but I hadn’t connected it to that moment.
0:41:35 And you fast forward to 2004 world championship, which is what the art of learning ended with.
0:41:37 The final chapter of that is the world championship finals.
0:41:40 I’m playing, I’m fighting this guy bigger than me, stronger than me.
0:41:45 He’s been training since childhood, um, final fight in a big stadium.
0:41:48 And wanting me to be destroyed in the biggest fight of my life.
0:41:54 And I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space, by letting him feel my weakness,
0:41:58 by leaning on him, by letting him, by letting it, and then I just end up disappearing.
0:42:03 So it’s very interesting how there was no mental process, there’s no conscious processing
0:42:08 of that connection, but the biggest loss of my chess life and then the principle, which
0:42:14 I wasn’t ready to understand yet, was how I won the world championship in the martial
0:42:17 arts so many years later, and it’s a completely different discipline, right?
0:42:21 So it’s an example of, like, and of course that principle is manifested in every part
0:42:26 of my life today, but like that’s one of many stories in my life where like a loss spurs
0:42:30 an insight, which might consciously or often unconsciously lead to something incredible
0:42:32 down the road.
0:42:35 And I think that one of the biggest challenges that we have, but it’s so interesting that
0:42:41 the loss of a world chess championship final is, leads to the win, direct lesson that’s
0:42:48 the win of a world championship in the fighting realm, and how common that is.
0:42:52 And one of the things that I think about, like, when you sit down with great competitors
0:43:00 again and again, when you hear their inner journey, the most heartbreaking losses lead
0:43:06 to the transformational change, which leads to the biggest wins of their life, whether
0:43:12 it’s in basketball, whether it’s in fighting, whether it’s in business, it’s in finance,
0:43:17 it’s in writing, love, in love, oh my God, in love, yeah.
0:43:21 I mean, breakups are devastating, they’re a death of sorts.
0:43:22 Yeah.
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0:46:27 I have a friend who’s a trauma therapist addiction expert and occasionally you’ll hear these
0:46:32 tragedies of typically it’s young guys who the girlfriend breaks up with them and they
0:46:35 commit suicide.
0:46:41 For years he would work with families of these people, these young guys and he finally connected
0:46:48 the dots and he realized that in every case, it was as if there was no future whatsoever
0:46:51 because it was their first relationship.
0:46:53 When you hear it, you just go, “Oh, it makes so much sense.”
0:46:58 But the 16-year-old and 18-year-old brain, however old these kids were, it’s devastating.
0:47:06 I want to make sure that I ask about devastation because you said that you were devastated.
0:47:10 You experienced a tremendous amount of pain from these losses, in particular the one that
0:47:12 you just described.
0:47:16 If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you about what that was like.
0:47:21 I don’t want to spin off into a discussion about the science of grief, but I did an episode
0:47:25 about grief and it was really surprising to learn that most of what you hear about in
0:47:30 pop culture that there are these very specific stages of grief and you progress through them
0:47:31 linearly.
0:47:32 None of that is true.
0:47:35 All of modern research says that it’s not disbelief, anger, acceptance.
0:47:39 It’s like a hodgepodge of different emotions depending on time of day and middle of the
0:47:40 night.
0:47:45 But the core feature and I find this so interesting is that grief, whether or not it’s what I
0:47:49 would consider a kind of trivial grief like losing your favorite pen or a watch that you
0:47:54 really love, an object versus somebody extremely close to you, a parent, a loved one, a child,
0:48:04 God forbid, that the brain systems that map memory onto action are disrupted in grief such
0:48:09 that you wake up each day and you want to go see the person or call them.
0:48:14 And so what grief really represents is a remapping of your understanding about what you can do
0:48:22 with your physical body to create action and interaction with this person that’s now gone.
0:48:26 And so the remapping is one of the nervous system having to do all this no-go.
0:48:29 We talk in terms of inaction systems and the basal ganglia of the brain.
0:48:32 You have go programs and no-go programs.
0:48:35 There’s some other stuff too, but it’s mostly go or no-go.
0:48:40 And basically, grief is this taking of up, depending on how long and how deeply you knew
0:48:45 the person, a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms that were all go.
0:48:46 You could text them.
0:48:47 You could call them.
0:48:48 You could hug them.
0:48:49 You could kiss them.
0:48:50 You could listen to them.
0:48:51 You could smell them.
0:48:54 And now it’s all no-go.
0:48:58 And that we think is what we experience as grief.
0:49:05 Now in terms of losing a very important chest match, when you talk about being in pain,
0:49:08 and in grief, what was that like?
0:49:11 Did that mean sleepless nights, disbelief?
0:49:13 And at what point do you think you were able to say, “Okay, you know what?
0:49:15 I’m going to start thinking about this constructively.
0:49:20 I’m going to turn this into a go,” as opposed to just trying to get in your time machine
0:49:23 and travel back in time, which of course is impossible.
0:49:29 What was that early experience of devastation like, and how did it transmute into growth?
0:49:30 Yeah.
0:49:35 Well, even sitting with you now, thinking about it, it seems ridiculous for a chess
0:49:42 game to be losing a chess game to be anywhere near like the absolute heartbreak of losing
0:49:44 a loved one.
0:49:48 And yet we can make things very large in our minds and in our beings, right?
0:49:53 I think that human … I mean, one thing I think about is how hard we fight to maintain
0:49:58 our conceptual schemes, our identities, even if they’re torturing us.
0:49:59 And loss isn’t relative.
0:50:06 You know, I mean, the fact that we’re sitting right now not far from hundreds, if not thousands
0:50:13 of homes that have been wiped away doesn’t change other losses.
0:50:17 We sometimes will say, “Well, at least we’re … I have a lot of friends that lost their
0:50:18 homes.”
0:50:19 They’ll say, “Well, at least we have our health.
0:50:20 We have our things.”
0:50:21 Okay.
0:50:28 And so we can do this, but it’s not how the human emotion system responds reflexively
0:50:29 to our own losses.
0:50:38 So I don’t think it’s like dismissive or sociopathic to experience a big loss in one’s life as
0:50:41 a big loss, even if it’s not the worst possible loss.
0:50:44 It’s just not how we’re wired.
0:50:49 And one of the things that I reflect on and that I’ve cultivated, it’s very hard, but
0:50:55 that I work to cultivate is when you’re in those moments of rupture to both be in the
0:51:00 rupture and have the perspective that we will have later about the rupture, which is not
0:51:03 to say not being in the rupture.
0:51:08 One of the things I feel badly about in … Like when I wrote The Art of Learning, I spoke
0:51:11 a lot about process and outcome and it had a big impact on the chess world.
0:51:18 And then what happened is there were generations of parents who had young kid chess players
0:51:22 who their kids would go to compete and the parents would say, “It doesn’t matter if you
0:51:23 win or lose.
0:51:24 All that matters is the process.
0:51:25 It doesn’t matter if you win or lose.”
0:51:30 And the kids are like putting on their armor to go to battle, mental battle.
0:51:31 And chess is fucking intense.
0:51:37 When you’re playing chess, you’re putting your mind, your body, your psyche, everything
0:51:38 on the line.
0:51:40 And if you lose, you feel shattered.
0:51:42 Like that’s just how you feel.
0:51:45 If you’re not trying your hardest, then we can’t even … We don’t understand what you’re
0:51:46 talking about.
0:51:50 So let’s say you are trying your hardest, you’re putting it all on the line.
0:51:51 It’s on the line.
0:51:52 And you lose and you’re shattered.
0:51:56 And every part of you, you feel destroyed.
0:52:00 So the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle and the parent tells them, “It
0:52:01 doesn’t matter if I win or lose.
0:52:02 It’s deeply confusing.”
0:52:04 And the kids actually usually know that the parents are full of shit.
0:52:08 The parents actually care so much and they feel guilty about how much they care about
0:52:09 their kids’ result.
0:52:12 They’re telling their kid that to feel less guilty about the fact that they’re putting
0:52:13 their own egoic needs on their child.
0:52:16 And it’s all … And the kids see it all.
0:52:17 That’s the hilarious thing.
0:52:18 It’s like an eight, 10, 11-year-old.
0:52:19 They see it all.
0:52:21 They’re like, “Mom, give me a break.”
0:52:27 And the parents are just stuck in their guilt and absurdity, seen this so many times.
0:52:32 So the discussion of process and outcome is so subtle, right?
0:52:33 Because yes, it’s about the process.
0:52:34 It’s about the journey.
0:52:36 It’s about the long-term process.
0:52:40 But if we don’t care about the results, the process won’t work.
0:52:45 So we need to put ourselves on the line enough to be shattered and the process is what really
0:52:47 matters.
0:52:52 But it’s not that we can liberate ourselves from caring enough to be shattered because
0:52:54 then we’re not engaged.
0:52:59 And it is something about putting our egos on the line that is what leads to the growth
0:53:04 surges that great competitors have, the ones who become virtuosos, right?
0:53:06 And so then that’s stated.
0:53:11 How can we experience the simultaneity of being shattered and having the perspective
0:53:14 that this is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me?
0:53:20 You have to be in a mode of theory of mind with yourself about your future self somehow.
0:53:27 And this is what I think losses are so beneficial for, is that if you’ve had a couple of break-ups,
0:53:30 you realize that you can fall in love again.
0:53:34 If you’ve only had break-ups, perhaps you think, “Well, it always leads to a break-up.”
0:53:39 But you know that the process of moving forward is the only way to test that hypothesis again.
0:53:48 And so I think repeated failure is essential because with repeated failure means that there
0:53:54 was also repeated fighting one ways back after failure.
0:53:59 So yeah, I think sometimes, not to take us into a different course of story, but just
0:54:05 very briefly, the first manuscript I ever submitted in graduate school took forever
0:54:11 to get published and it went from the highest of journals down to a good journal, solid
0:54:14 journal, but it took forever.
0:54:16 And that was so beneficial.
0:54:23 I was crushing at the time, but my reward circuitry is built up around very long latency
0:54:27 between effort and final outcome.
0:54:32 I’m just used to long waits between figuring out what’s going to happen.
0:54:36 And actually one of the weirdest things about podcasting or social media is that I feel
0:54:46 like you go to “publications” so fast, projects used to take two years and then you get reviews.
0:54:52 So I think your early devastating failure, or failures, because you had a few of them
0:54:53 in there.
0:54:54 Oh, a lot more than a few.
0:55:01 Probably set you up for tremendous frustration tolerance and not just hearing, I mean the
0:55:08 words “this too shall pass,” they’re helpful, but that’s really something that needs to
0:55:10 be experienced in my view.
0:55:14 It’s a very interesting thing when you’re talking about competitors.
0:55:19 What is the right balance between playing up and playing down?
0:55:22 How much do you want to build the confidence of a young competitor or artist or person or
0:55:27 any of us, young, whatever age, and how much do you want to be stretched a little bit beyond
0:55:30 your ability so that your weaknesses are exposed if you take them on and you have to grow?
0:55:34 And getting that balance right is hugely important and it’s not simple.
0:55:39 A lot of boxing training camps are based around the boxers’ confidence being everything
0:55:42 and you want them to feel invincible going into the ring.
0:55:46 And then from another perspective, it’s something very powerful about having a training camp
0:55:50 that’s so intense that all your weaknesses are exposed and you have to take them on.
0:55:53 If you’re not sparring against people who can expose your weaknesses, then you don’t
0:55:58 know what they are and you don’t have the chance to grow.
0:56:07 I live at this point with a trying to be at max stretch without snapping.
0:56:12 For example, if I look at my foiling, if I’m not falling enough during a foil session, then
0:56:17 I’m not pushing my turns hard enough.
0:56:23 And if you’re just succeeding all the time, then you’re not pushing yourself enough.
0:56:30 Do you believe in optimal levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game?
0:56:35 Autonomic arousal is something that I’ve worked on for many years and one of the most impressive
0:56:41 features I think of our brains as humans, first would be our ability to think into the
0:56:44 past, present, or future, or combination of those two.
0:56:48 If other animals do that, they don’t do it nearly as well and they certainly don’t create
0:56:51 technologies to bridge those different time scales.
0:56:52 That’s number one.
0:56:58 But the other one is our visual and temporal aperture of focus.
0:57:03 So when we are in a state of elevated arousal, our visual aperture shrinks, I’m sure you’re
0:57:10 familiar with this, and we slice time more finely, it’s like a higher frame rate, which
0:57:16 is why people who, for instance, see a devastating traumatic car crash report experiencing things
0:57:23 in slow motion, because their frame rate is like a slow motion video, whereas when we
0:57:30 are relaxed, our frame rate is larger bins of time.
0:57:36 And I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and optimal states for learning
0:57:44 have to do with assuming that there’s one optimal state of arousal, but I feel like in every
0:57:49 endeavor I’ve ever been involved in, it’s about learning the transitions between the
0:57:56 arousal states that allows us to pull back a little bit as things, as you said, get tense,
0:58:01 just relax just a little bit to be able to maybe see a different perspective or ratchet
0:58:09 up our level of tension or a.k.a. arousal in order to be able to find slice the micro-expressions
0:58:13 of a competitor.
0:58:18 These two cameras on the front of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted
0:58:24 to this process of shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness.
0:58:28 And it can be talked about in terms of space, just vision, like tunnel vision versus panoramic
0:58:29 vision.
0:58:30 Yep.
0:58:34 It can be talked about at space time, tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader
0:58:36 slice.
0:58:40 But then when you start getting into the, then you map that onto the past, present and future
0:58:41 mapping.
0:58:48 And that’s where I feel like we’re into the game of skill learning and chess and strategy.
0:58:55 So forgive me for the kind of top contour neuroscience, but that’s how I see the human
0:59:01 primate as so different than all the other creatures in the world.
0:59:07 That’s how we’re different because we can learn chess or ballet, foil.
0:59:10 Gibbons are pretty amazing at what gibbons do.
0:59:14 But if they’re trying to learn other stuff that they’ve been failing so far.
0:59:18 I spent a lot of time playing with frame rates.
0:59:22 And I had this experience that I wrote about in that slowing down time chapter of the art
0:59:29 of learning where I, when I had these experiences both in chess and in fighting, I was one time
0:59:35 I was fighting against a super heavyweight dude in a competition and my hand shattered.
0:59:40 And like I broke my hand right here and it was, it was, it was interesting because the
0:59:45 fight was, was very intense, reasonably hard and my hand broke and instantly time slowed
0:59:50 down and he was, he was moving in slow motion and I was able to just so easily play with
0:59:54 someone with, with like a broken hand compared to what had been a war before.
0:59:55 We know what that is.
0:59:56 Right.
0:59:57 We do know.
0:59:58 Adrenaline.
0:59:59 Adrenaline.
1:00:00 Yeah.
1:00:01 Adrenaline and that, and that tunnel vision and then the frames are fat.
1:00:04 I mean, if I inject you with just a little bit of adrenaline, it stays in your peripheral
1:00:08 free, but it activates systems in your brain and parallel to that.
1:00:14 And you’re going to experience an immediate dilation of your pupils, your, you’ll have
1:00:15 more tunnel vision.
1:00:19 I mean, every process is sped up in the direction of higher frame rate.
1:00:22 So then the question then became for me, and this would be fun to talk, I’ve never spoken
1:00:28 to a scientist about this process, like how do I learn to do that at will, right?
1:00:29 And then how can I train?
1:00:32 Cause I can’t just pump myself with adrenaline all the time, although maybe I may, or maybe
1:00:34 I can learn to have that physiological response.
1:00:35 Or you can deploy it.
1:00:36 Right.
1:00:38 So then how, how can I deploy it, right?
1:00:40 What are triggers for having that chemical change?
1:00:48 And then also how can I train so that I have the experience of more frames than my opponent?
1:00:51 And so Marcelo Garcia, who I, he’s known as the king of the scramble, he spends his whole
1:00:52 time in transition.
1:00:56 So if you’re training Jiu Jitsu with most people, they’re always finding a position
1:00:57 and holding it.
1:01:01 Marcelo, one of the unique things about his training life for most of his life was that
1:01:02 he never held positions.
1:01:03 He was always moving.
1:01:05 He was always in the in between.
1:01:09 And it’s true in most arts is that people think that the art is the positions that they
1:01:14 see, but the real high level art is the space in between the positions.
1:01:17 So if we have this position leads to this position, that’s going to be like, there’s
1:01:21 going to be no frames in between for most people for some people that might be four frames.
1:01:25 But if I have a hundred frames, then I can play in pockets that you don’t see.
1:01:29 And so if you’re living your life in the training process in the in between, in the transition,
1:01:34 if you’re always, the way that manifests in the actual, like for example, Jiu Jitsu training
1:01:37 or submission grappling training is if you’re not holding positions, you’re always moving
1:01:41 and you’re spending all of your time in the in between while people who are holding position
1:01:43 are always static.
1:01:45 So if you go to a Jiu Jitsu school and you sit and watch, it’s interesting to look for
1:01:46 this one thing.
1:01:51 Notice the amount of time static versus in motion.
1:01:52 Marcelo was always in motion.
1:01:56 There’s a beautiful clip of him that you got, people can look up, it’s an art de suave.
1:01:58 It was an old documentary back in the day.
1:02:02 Like 25 years ago, I think it was, it’s on YouTube, it’s like an eight minute clip of
1:02:07 him training as an, I think an 18 year old and you watch him just like in the early days
1:02:11 of him learning this transitional approach and he’s just never stopping.
1:02:14 He’s always allowing the person, but you have to get past the egoic dynamics because you
1:02:19 can’t, you’re giving up on dominating people all the time because when you’re in a dominant
1:02:23 position in Jiu Jitsu, you want to hold it because you’ve won and there’s all this bullshit
1:02:25 passing between men who are fighting or women who are fighting each other.
1:02:30 We want to dominate, but if you release that and you’re thinking about the learning process
1:02:35 then and you stop holding, then you’re moving and then you’re getting nonstop exposure to
1:02:36 the in between.
1:02:39 So if you spend your life training in the in between, then you have more frames than
1:02:40 other people do.
1:02:42 That’s what a lot of what illusionists are doing, right?
1:02:47 They spend all of their time training in the spaces that other people don’t look at.
1:02:50 And so it’s not magic, it’s brilliant training.
1:02:53 It’s the art of illusion at the in between, right?
1:02:57 And a lot of the things that you can do, more high level martial artists can do to a lower
1:03:00 level martial artists or someone who doesn’t train that feels mystical.
1:03:04 It’s all about that principle manifest in interesting ways.
1:03:10 But in general, like for me, and this goes back to the question you asked two or three
1:03:17 brilliant expansive questions ago around intense moments.
1:03:23 A lot of what my training has been is having some serendipitous intense moment and then
1:03:25 learning and that becomes a beacon.
1:03:31 So for example, there was a moment I was playing in a world chess championship in Calicut,
1:03:32 India.
1:03:39 And I was deep into a calculation, couldn’t find the solution and there was an earthquake
1:03:43 and everything started like in the actual world, everything started shaking, right?
1:03:47 But I experienced the earthquake from the inside of the chess position.
1:03:49 And I knew there was an earthquake, but I also was lost.
1:03:54 My brain was lost in the labyrinth.
1:03:56 And I found the solution.
1:03:59 And then I got up and left vacated because we had to leave the playing hall and we came
1:04:02 back and I made my move and went on to win.
1:04:06 And it was so interesting because it was like, and then the earthquake, like my, and a lot
1:04:10 of what happens in chess is that you’re reaching so deep into the complexity, like into the
1:04:13 cupboard, but the solution is right here at the front and all you have to do is come
1:04:14 back out and surface.
1:04:20 One of the best ways, by the way, to prevent, to minimize chess blunders with like talented
1:04:27 young players or players of any love, any age is to shift the order of, of decide, make
1:04:33 the move and then write it down because you notate your chess games to decide, write it
1:04:35 down and then make the move.
1:04:39 The write it down is a resurfacing and you have common sense look at the position.
1:04:41 Almost all chess blunders, you realize you’ve blundered instantly.
1:04:45 You can think for 20 minutes, make your move, you know, instantly you blundered because
1:04:47 there’s not that surfacing, right?
1:04:51 But then you can learn to just do the surfacing before making the actual move.
1:04:54 It’s true with human decision making in general, right?
1:04:58 We realize that the scrub right as we, yeah, complete it.
1:04:59 Yeah.
1:05:00 Because like we’re caught up in all of our bullshit.
1:05:03 We make the move and then we’ve left our thought process and like, Oh, that was just
1:05:04 absurd.
1:05:05 Right.
1:05:06 And we, we see it.
1:05:10 I mean, you think about, I mean, you think about the, the heartbreaking literature, you
1:05:14 know, studies in, in how people who’ve jumped off a bridge relate to at the moment after
1:05:18 they’ve jumped off the bridge, those who have survived throughout the interviews afterwards.
1:05:19 Yeah.
1:05:20 They report wishing they hadn’t jumped.
1:05:21 Right.
1:05:22 Immediately.
1:05:24 Like they jump and then they wish they hadn’t jumped.
1:05:25 Such an important message.
1:05:29 You know, we hear all this stuff about suicide prevention and, you know, but just that knowledge.
1:05:33 I mean, I don’t know how conscious of that sort of thing people are as they’re headed
1:05:34 down the, the trench.
1:05:41 I mean, what, of suicidal depression, but these apertures that we’re talking about,
1:05:45 these time space apertures where frame rate is set and visual aperture is set.
1:05:51 I think for most people we experience them as sort of notches.
1:05:54 So it’s like, you know, you’re in a high state of arousal and you have high frame rate,
1:05:59 you know, and then, and just like being like a ball bearing down in a trench, you can’t
1:06:00 really see out the other side.
1:06:03 You’re literally in there at a certain frame rate of, let’s say an argument, an intense
1:06:07 argument with somebody where you want to win and you’re frustrated with them and the whole
1:06:09 situation and you’re in the trench.
1:06:14 The whereas when you’re relaxed, it’s more, you know, a broad concave or a flat table where
1:06:17 the ball bearing can move around at will.
1:06:21 It sounds like Marcelo and people that train these different transition states as you’re
1:06:28 really learning to access the, the different frame rates, but from a place of like kind
1:06:34 of like a little dimple, you know, in a table and then being able to move to the next one
1:06:38 as a dimple and kind of moving from from dimple to dimple as opposed to like these trenches
1:06:40 of brain states.
1:06:46 And I think that I think about this a lot, a lot because I feel like most bad decisions
1:06:50 are made from a high frame rate, high arousal state.
1:06:54 Most of the terrible things that humans have done to one another, you know, I suppose there’s
1:06:58 sociopathy and like, you know, pre-planned things, but it tends to, they tend to be
1:07:02 associated with, with high arousal states where people regret what they did, all second
1:07:06 degree murder, for instance.
1:07:11 In any event, I think the ability to move through these different arousal states at
1:07:14 will is possible.
1:07:16 You asked earlier, like, how would one do that?
1:07:19 Well, the beautiful thing about the visual system and these different frame rates and
1:07:22 states of arousal is that it works in both directions.
1:07:25 So when you’re in a higher state of arousal, your visual aperture shrinks, you go to a
1:07:29 higher frame rate, but it’s also true that if you shrink your visual aperture, you go
1:07:31 to a higher frame rate.
1:07:32 The converse is also true.
1:07:36 If you deliberately, for instance, as we’re looking across one another right now, if I
1:07:41 start to take in the fullness of the picture here, the walls, et cetera, there’s a natural
1:07:47 relaxation of the autonomic arousal systems or parasympathetic activity goes up.
1:07:54 And what’s incredible is that any time we view a horizon, that naturally happens because
1:07:57 you’re not setting to a single fixation point.
1:08:00 So anytime you see a horizon, you relax and it’s not a coincidence.
1:08:05 So the visual system can drive it inward and your autonomic arousal can drive it toward
1:08:07 your visual system.
1:08:12 The other thing is there’s a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago which
1:08:16 showed that people who do a biofeedback game where they’re watching a little, you know,
1:08:21 it’s like a more kind of like a sine wave and they’re deliberately trying to increase
1:08:27 their level of arousal as the curve goes up for those that are just listening.
1:08:34 Within a few days, they can learn to control their pupil size, which sets their arousal
1:08:38 and their aperture for a segmenting time.
1:08:42 So you can learn this through biofeedback and I think that the script for that is available
1:08:43 online.
1:08:45 I haven’t tried it yet, but have you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil
1:08:48 sizes even independently of one another?
1:08:53 That’s amazing because it’s not supposed to be able to occur, but you can.
1:08:57 So you can learn to, you know, I guess the poor man’s version of this would be look in
1:09:00 the mirror, stare at yourself and try and ramp up your level of autonomic arousal, watch
1:09:04 your pupils get bigger, and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller.
1:09:09 That practice, it seems in biofeedback, allows people to do it without staring into the mirror,
1:09:10 so to speak.
1:09:12 So it can be done.
1:09:15 It’s just that it hasn’t been parsed by science that finally until recently.
1:09:18 It’s interesting.
1:09:24 So I have this term I use called fire walking, which for me, what it means is cultivating
1:09:31 the ability to learn from experiences one doesn’t have with the same somatic intensity
1:09:35 that one learns from really intense experiences that we have.
1:09:39 So for example, let’s just say you’re a jujitsu fighter and you overextend your arm and you’re
1:09:43 in a world championship and you get your arm broken or your shoulder ripped off or something.
1:09:45 So you’ve lost the world championship and you got a shattered arm.
1:09:47 You’re not going to overextend your arm that way again.
1:09:50 You’ve learned that that lesson is burned in.
1:09:54 But like if you’re watching a jujitsu fight and someone overextends their arm against their
1:09:59 arm bar and then taps out, then it is very, very different experience.
1:10:05 How can we cultivate the ability to study other people’s worst, most heartbreaking blunders,
1:10:09 worst moments, et cetera, and learn from that with the same somatic intensity that they
1:10:10 learned from it, right?
1:10:12 So much of that is physiological.
1:10:16 So I spent a lot of time doing biofeedback and a lot of time doing visualization practices
1:10:20 and doing very intense visualization practices and many, many years working with triggers
1:10:28 for my own psychology and physiology so that I can get my physiology primed to have an intense
1:10:34 learning experience while studying something that might otherwise just feel intellectual.
1:10:36 And then combining that with my own experience of things.
1:10:42 And it’s such a, I mean, if we can 100X or 1000X or 10,000X our learning curve by being
1:10:46 able to learn from other things with the same intensity that we can learn from our own things,
1:10:48 but people don’t harness that.
1:10:50 Why do you think they don’t?
1:10:56 It takes time and it doesn’t seem as intuitive as going out and shooting free throws or something
1:10:57 like that.
1:11:02 I think people are really amazingly unreflective about the training process.
1:11:08 I told you, I haven’t written a book since The Art of Learning and I’m a couple years
1:11:13 into this beautiful process of writing my next book which is going to be called, I think,
1:11:18 The Art of Training, which is really what I’ve been cultivating for the last decades.
1:11:24 And I’m deconstructing my approach to training in mental and physical disciplines.
1:11:29 And it’s really interesting to go through that process myself, like what do I do?
1:11:30 What have I done?
1:11:34 What have I helped others do?
1:11:37 And it’s interesting that The Art of Learning kind of was a birthing process.
1:11:39 That’s what it felt like to me.
1:11:43 I took notes to it for five years and then after 2004 Worlds, I wrote it in nine months.
1:11:47 It just kind of came out of me and I’m kind of in that process now with this, so it feels
1:11:51 really organic and intrinsic, the creative process.
1:11:55 And I don’t know, it’s very interesting when you talk to people who are really playing
1:12:00 at elite levels of different fields or who are just below like full self-expression or
1:12:04 like they’re just on the edge of virtuosity but not quite there and you start to deconstruct
1:12:07 what they do, there’s so much low hanging fruit that they can do.
1:12:08 Why?
1:12:09 I don’t know.
1:12:13 I think in many ways people, I mean there’s lots of reasons I think of one thing, people
1:12:18 who are very talented in arts don’t have to be so deliberate about their training often
1:12:20 to reach a certain level.
1:12:23 Often people have other people building their training process and they’re not reflective
1:12:27 about their own training process because they have big teams of coaches who are creating
1:12:30 it for them.
1:12:35 People haven’t cultivated the art of deconstruction, which is an art that’s very important.
1:12:40 People haven’t cultivated the art of loving training, which is a hugely important like
1:12:43 meta-skill to learn.
1:12:50 People haven’t taken on like all of the skills around physiological triggers, around changing
1:12:52 one’s physiological state at will.
1:12:54 People haven’t practiced visualization very intensely.
1:13:00 They’re all of these like these skills that we can put together in order to train at a
1:13:02 world-class level.
1:13:08 But it takes patience and creativity and you know, not just being subject to whatever
1:13:12 else does but being able to look expansively at everything.
1:13:16 I’d like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function.
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1:15:00 Again, that’s functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function.
1:15:08 We had a guest on this podcast, Jim Hollis, is an 84-year-old, probably 85-year-old Jungian
1:15:14 analyst on and he, just brilliant guy, has written some really important books under
1:15:24 Saturn’s shadow and etc., and he said, “He has a real suit up show up, get to work mentality,
1:15:30 but he also is a very reflective person,” and he said, “If there’s one simple key to
1:15:36 life that one understand that most of our daily lives, our waking lives, are in stimulus
1:15:41 response, but that it’s so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out
1:15:48 of stimulus and response, and either to just let stuff geyser up out of our unconscious,
1:15:54 subconscious mind, or to just put some real thought to something that most everybody is
1:15:56 in stimulus response.”
1:16:01 I wonder these days with social media and so many things filling the space between walking
1:16:06 into the car or with the pro players that you work with, I’m guessing the moment they’re
1:16:09 on the plane, they’re on their phones and texting, and all these things are wonderful
1:16:15 technologies, but they fill all the space with stimulus response.
1:16:21 They fill all the space with stimulus response, and it’s not unless you go to a place with
1:16:29 no Wi-Fi accessibility that you suddenly realize, “Wow, in most of modern life, we’re just constantly
1:16:35 in this tennis or ping-pong match with this trivial thing and that trivial thing.”
1:16:40 Some of it’s essential, but that there’s no “space” anymore.
1:16:44 Many ways my life is built around creating that space.
1:16:47 It’s interesting, when I was playing chess, I experimented with studying chess from everywhere
1:16:51 between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day to see where the sweet spot was.
1:16:56 What I came to was about four and a half hours a day, but that four and a half hours a day
1:17:02 was like a 10 out of 10, like fucking just on fire, and then the rest of the day became
1:17:06 about cultivating those four and a half hours.
1:17:12 My life today has that kind of rhythm as well, and training, like I’ve spent many years working
1:17:16 with people who are just brilliant in … The investment space has been a really interesting
1:17:20 way because it’s a great laboratory, because people are very driven, they’re all in, they’re
1:17:25 motivated, they’ll take themselves on, and it’s a great place for me over the last couple
1:17:32 decades to refine the art of training, because I don’t like solving for motivation.
1:17:33 That’s one thing.
1:17:37 I think part of that relates to that quirky dynamic from when I was seven, that I described
1:17:41 of always being the target and so never having … Not taking on my weaknesses, it was outside
1:17:48 of my conceptual scheme, and so in many ways, I haven’t really had to struggle with motivation
1:17:55 myself for better or worse, and I love working with people, partnering with people who are
1:17:57 all in, who want to take themselves on.
1:18:01 I don’t love having to motivate people, and so a great laboratory for me is with people
1:18:09 who have all sorts of problems, who might be obstructed, but who are all in, and you’re
1:18:15 working with world-class investors, and they’re grinding themselves out 14, 15, 16 hours a
1:18:16 day.
1:18:22 Doing less is a huge part of doing much more, and then you start to see … If you think
1:18:27 about a 10 out of 10 in terms of when they’re out there very best creatively, they could
1:18:34 slip from a 10 to a 2 and not even notice, and then you begin to cultivate an awareness
1:18:39 of where one is in one’s creative spectrum, and then you start to cultivate the art of
1:18:43 stress and recovery, and amping oneself up and then releasing, and you see that the ability
1:18:48 to turn it on is directly connected to the ability to turn it off, as you know.
1:18:52 If you walk into a fight gym and you study a bunch of fighters on the mats, one great
1:18:58 read you can make is looking at the depth of physiological relaxation when the guys
1:19:01 aren’t fighting, and you’ll see who the highest level fighters are.
1:19:05 The best guys, man, they can turn it on with wild intensity, but their bodies are so mellow
1:19:09 when they’re not going, and then, man, they’re so efficient.
1:19:13 That oscillation, that range is so huge, but people don’t cultivate the art of turning
1:19:17 it off in order to learn how to turn it on.
1:19:22 For many, many years, decades, I’ve been practicing what I call now the MIQ process, most important
1:19:28 question process, and the essence of it is, it’s what I came to as the most potent way
1:19:37 so far that I’ve found to train analysts or thinkers in mental arenas, you’re training
1:19:42 people in the art of discovering what matters most.
1:19:47 If you talk to a great chess player, actually looks at less than a lower level chess player,
1:19:50 but they look at the right direction.
1:19:53 You might think a great chess player, people often think, “Oh, yeah, I can calculate 50
1:19:54 moves deep, 100 moves deep.”
1:19:55 It’s all irrelevant.
1:19:58 Move two was inaccurate, so it was just all an illusion.
1:20:01 The great chess players might look at much less, but they’re looking in the most potent
1:20:02 directions.
1:20:05 The lower level chess players are lost in a sea of complexity.
1:20:13 If you’re working with a scientist or an investor or whatever, them straining their mind for
1:20:19 what is the most important question, ideally to begin the practice toward the end of their
1:20:25 workday with a recovery period with full intensity and a peak performance state, stretch one’s
1:20:29 mind for what matters most, and then release it.
1:20:30 Release the workday completely.
1:20:32 Don’t work all night grinding yourself out at a low level.
1:20:36 Release and then, first thing in the morning, waking up pre-input, return one’s mind to
1:20:38 the critical question and brainstorm on it.
1:20:43 It’s very powerful because you’re systematically opening the channel between the conscious
1:20:45 and the unconscious mind.
1:20:49 You’re feeding critical questions to the unconscious, which is processing overnight.
1:20:50 I know you know all this.
1:20:53 The consistency with which you come up with an insight in the morning is incredible.
1:20:59 Interestingly, and you’ll probably know why much more than me, improved dreamer call often
1:21:05 happens simultaneously when one starts to have more and more insights about the MIQ
1:21:06 in the morning, which is fascinating.
1:21:09 Then, over time, you can have micromanifestation of this throughout the day before going for
1:21:12 a workout, before taking a walk, before taking a break, before taking a piss.
1:21:16 Instead of going, when you’re going to go to the bathroom in the day, instead of checking
1:21:22 your phone while taking a piss, you pose yourself an MIQ, you release it, you do not do anything
1:21:26 but piss in the bathroom, and breathe, and then return to the question, and you’ll have
1:21:27 an insight.
1:21:32 You’re learning to oscillate between the conscious and unconscious states, and you’re opening
1:21:35 up that channel, and you’re practicing stress and recovery.
1:21:38 Then your physiological workouts are also stress and recovery all the time, so you’re
1:21:41 building that theme in everything that you do.
1:21:47 You realize that when you’re at your very best for four or five hours a day, you’re doing
1:21:50 multiples of the work that you’re doing if you’re just grinding yourself at what I’ve
1:21:56 called in the past, a simmering six or whatever, for 15 or 16 hours a day.
1:22:02 People can do so much more in less time, and my lifestyle is based on that.
1:22:05 I’m training very intensely physically, and I’m doing really intense mental work, and
1:22:10 I oscillate between them in beautiful ways, and I have a lot of empty space for reflection,
1:22:15 for meditation, for zoning my mind on what matters most.
1:22:17 It’s about quality, not quantity.
1:22:24 But it’s so interesting how we live in this culture where just quantity is just consuming
1:22:25 everyone.
1:22:26 Yeah.
1:22:32 Well, it’s as Hollis said, the stimulus response thing dominates, and it dominates, I think,
1:22:35 because, well, I have several reflections.
1:22:40 First of all, I just have to say you’re absolutely a scientist.
1:22:44 You just proved it to us through a description of this process, which I might ask you to
1:22:49 describe once again, because I think there’s so much value in each of the pieces and how
1:22:51 it’s put together.
1:22:53 Three things come to mind.
1:22:54 First of all, yes indeed.
1:22:59 As you know, and listeners of this podcast will know that yet it is during sleep that
1:23:04 we reorganize our neural connections and actual neuroplasticity occurs.
1:23:08 The stimulus is provided in wakefulness and focus and attention, but the actual rewiring
1:23:13 occurs during sleep, deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep.
1:23:20 One little fun, I think, but also powerful tool that I learned from, maybe you know whom
1:23:23 is well, blessed to have Rick Rubin as a very good friend.
1:23:25 Oh yeah, Rick and I have had beautiful gems.
1:23:26 Yeah, wonderful.
1:23:27 Such a wise soul.
1:23:31 I’ve been spending more and more time with Rick, but he taught me something extremely
1:23:37 valuable, which was the process of taking some time to just lie completely still and
1:23:41 let your mind go as wild as it needs to or as calm as it needs to while keeping the body
1:23:44 completely still.
1:23:49 This mimics rapid eye movement sleep when we’re paralyzed and the mind is very, very
1:23:50 active.
1:23:54 And I actually think that practices such as Yoga Nidra and non-sleep deep rest are also
1:23:56 mimics of rapid eye movement sleep.
1:24:00 And there are data starting to emerge now that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep, but in
1:24:01 wakefulness.
1:24:05 So put simply lying still, relaxing the body as much as possible and letting the mind be
1:24:07 extremely active.
1:24:11 Rick also taught me a little trick for which I don’t know any science, but it certainly
1:24:15 seems to work for me, which is that if you wake up from a dream and you want to continue
1:24:20 having that dream, keep your body completely still, whereas if you wake up from a dream
1:24:24 and it was a troubling or anxiety provoking dream, move your body and it seems to work
1:24:25 extremely well.
1:24:29 And I have my theories about why this works.
1:24:36 I have to ask about this process of reflecting on one’s own mistakes deliberately, kind of
1:24:43 addressing one’s own pain points or shame points as such a key feature of your upbringing
1:24:46 and your practice around learning.
1:24:50 Forgive me for going a little bit longer here, but recently somebody taught me something
1:24:53 extremely useful.
1:24:59 She said, you know, our consciousness is sort of like a lighthouse and we have this beam
1:25:02 of light sweeping around 360 degrees.
1:25:08 But where we have places of shame about whatever, things that were done to us, things that we’ve
1:25:13 done, whatever, just points of shame, things that we don’t want people to know about us,
1:25:15 that we don’t even like to think about.
1:25:18 It’s like a stain on that lighthouse.
1:25:23 And when that light passes through that stain, it casts a wedge, a shadow in the shape of
1:25:25 a wedge.
1:25:28 And she described it in somewhat mystical terms.
1:25:32 She said, you know, it’s through that shadow that evil things enter us and that the world
1:25:38 can hurt us and that the process of getting over our shame, but also experiencing life
1:25:43 in much more fullness and being able to cultivate our craft and be more present for ourselves
1:25:47 and for others, is a process of going right up to that lighthouse window and looking at
1:25:49 the stain and going, that’s what it is.
1:25:52 And that’s the process of wiping it off.
1:25:58 Now that’s all, you know, that’s just an illustration for us to understand.
1:26:03 What I think is the process you’re describing, which is that you get right up next to your
1:26:10 worst nightmares, your worst mistakes, the things you don’t want to think about.
1:26:17 And in doing so, you learn to relax in their presence and they sort of disappear as points
1:26:18 of shame.
1:26:21 Yeah, it was interesting.
1:26:26 When I wrote the Art of Learning, it was in many ways cathartic for me because there
1:26:33 were parts of my life that I had felt like I had let myself down.
1:26:41 Like there were parts, like my chest life I moved away from and there were certain moments
1:26:45 of it where I felt like I hadn’t fully expressed my potential.
1:26:49 And I just wrote them all, I just shared it all.
1:26:52 And it was so beautiful, it was so cathartic.
1:26:57 When I think about leadership, I think that it’s so important, like leading with vulnerability
1:27:02 is such an exquisite, I spent, Joe Missoula and I spent today a couple of days ago with
1:27:08 Sean McVeigh, who’s the head coach of the LA Rams, who just a few days after the big
1:27:13 loss against the Eagles, and we actually ended up watching the tape, it was his first watching
1:27:19 of the tape of this heartbreaking playoff loss he had, and watching him process it.
1:27:28 And he’s such a great leader, both Joe and Sean lead, they both take themselves on more
1:27:34 intensive than anything, but they lead with vulnerability, they go up against their stains.
1:27:39 And being authentic there as opposed to being a leader or a father or a mother or a coach
1:27:43 who just keeps it in the pocket as if they’re perfect, there’s something so inauthentic
1:27:44 about that.
1:27:52 I think in human relationship and in the cultivation of oneself as an artist, going right at one’s
1:27:55 weakness is so powerful.
1:28:00 Now of course there’s also the tender balance of how much we should cultivate our strengths
1:28:03 and how much we should be showing up our weaknesses.
1:28:07 And one of the most important principles which I learned too late in my chess life is that
1:28:12 we can take on our weaknesses through the lens of our strengths, remember this brilliant
1:28:16 sage, Russian coach Yuri Razevayev said to me at one point, you can learn Karpov through
1:28:24 Kasparov, his point at being you can learn about the great defensive chess through the
1:28:27 great defense of great aggressors like you.
1:28:31 As opposed to just studying Karpov and thinking what should I, what would Karpov do here,
1:28:36 which it was urged to do by other people, like learn defense through offense.
1:28:38 So it was part of my self-expression.
1:28:42 I learned that principle too late for my chess life, but it’s manifest everywhere else.
1:28:47 So while we’re cultivating our strength, which I think we should do as a way of life,
1:28:48 how do we go up against our stains?
1:28:55 But in ways that we’re not fundamentally, it’s not shame.
1:28:59 I don’t relate just personally, like I don’t, that’s a word I don’t, like shame, it’s
1:29:00 not shame.
1:29:06 It’s like, like when it becomes just like a breath pattern, like we lose, we go, we put
1:29:08 ourself on the line, we lose, we go at it, we study it.
1:29:13 We, you know, we, we study how we look, we, we study about what, the other thing that’s
1:29:16 incredible to me is that when you study your losses, when you go up against what you’re
1:29:20 calling like that, that, that, that’s a beautiful image like the, like where, like the shadow
1:29:22 of the lighthouse, right?
1:29:32 The, the interconnectedness of the technical, the psychological and the thematic is so powerful
1:29:34 in the learning process.
1:29:38 Almost every technical mistake that we make in an art.
1:29:41 If we’re pushing ourselves to our limits, if we’re like, if you and I are like around
1:29:46 the same level and we’re competing in something where we’re about this in anything, like any
1:29:51 technical mistake I made, we’ll have a psychological dimension because I most likely, my technical
1:29:56 weakness was emerged because I was so psychologically pressured that I wasn’t able to solve the
1:29:59 technical position, right?
1:30:05 Or if you, if I make a psychological error, it’s often because I was a little technically
1:30:06 out of my water.
1:30:11 And so it put pressure, extra pressure on my psyche that you were able to exploit, right?
1:30:16 And every technical mistake is local, right?
1:30:23 But there’s themes, there’s like a theme that houses hundreds of those technical manifestations.
1:30:27 So if we are always thinking about the technical, the thematic, the psychological, and we have
1:30:30 what I call a six dimensional introspective process, right?
1:30:36 And we’re looking at all of these, the interconnectedness of those different parts of the human experience
1:30:38 of an art or anything else.
1:30:42 Then the growth curve is incredibly explosive because we recognize, we make a technical
1:30:44 mistake and we learn the theme.
1:30:48 We take on the theme that houses that one, but also houses dozens of others.
1:30:53 And so as we turn that theme into a strength, into a power zone, then that technical mistake
1:30:56 goes away, but as do the other manifestations of that theme.
1:31:00 And if we’re also studying the psychological weakness that allowed that technical weakness
1:31:05 to manifest, to like unearth itself, then that psychological dimension becomes something
1:31:06 that we take on.
1:31:09 And then we’re studying thematic interconnectedness as a way of life, because then that lesson
1:31:13 we learned through that chest, that like I made a subtle chest mistake, but that connects
1:31:15 to my love life.
1:31:16 It connects to my fatherhood.
1:31:22 It connects to my, like my foiling, my jujitsu, my everything, because it connects to the
1:31:26 theme and it connects to my psychology and it manifests, I don’t believe in compartmentalization.
1:31:29 I believe in thematic interconnectedness, right?
1:31:35 And like the core themes of my life, I would say, if I had to boil it down would be love,
1:31:37 interconnectedness and receptivity.
1:31:43 I only do what I love and I spend time with people who I love and that’s how I live.
1:31:48 The study of interconnectedness is my way of life in some of the ways I’ve been describing.
1:31:52 And receptivity is what I cultivate every day in my life and the ocean with people with
1:31:56 humans.
1:31:58 And we always get isolated.
1:31:59 We get like siloed.
1:32:01 Oh, yeah, is this chest mistake?
1:32:09 Like one of the things I’ve found so confusing is why don’t more great chess players who
1:32:15 try successfully translate their level from chess to other things?
1:32:19 Because chess is so hard and chess is such a relentlessly truth telling art.
1:32:22 If you become a world class chess player, you’re fucking good because there’s no luck
1:32:25 in chess, especially if you become very good, very young.
1:32:28 I mean, I think this is true of most prodigies.
1:32:31 I don’t want to name them, but I have a colleague, a very smart guy.
1:32:33 His science is very solid.
1:32:35 And I remember I met with him and I said, “Is it true that you’re…”
1:32:36 You’re just going to love that.
1:32:37 You’re referring to the solid.
1:32:38 That’s okay.
1:32:39 He’s done nice work.
1:32:43 I just wouldn’t say that it’s like transformed our understanding of like everything in that
1:32:44 field.
1:32:45 But he’s made some very important contributions.
1:32:48 He’s a fabulous teacher and a nice person.
1:32:56 But one day I was meeting with him and I said, “You’re a child prodigy,” I heard.
1:33:00 And he said, “Former child prodigy.”
1:33:01 And I was like, “Okay.
1:33:02 Well, there we’re getting technical.”
1:33:03 But yeah.
1:33:04 Okay.
1:33:05 I think we’re…
1:33:10 And I asked my dad because my dad lived in the same building as Daniel Barenbaum, the
1:33:15 musician who’s, if you’ve ever seen the movie “Hillary and Jackie,” he was one of the world’s
1:33:20 accomplished piano players at a very young age.
1:33:23 And my dad used to hear him playing when he was a kid and like they wouldn’t let him play
1:33:24 with other kids.
1:33:25 And he was like…
1:33:27 I mean, Barenbaum is a serious…
1:33:30 For classical musicians and pianists in particular, it’s like a serious stuff.
1:33:31 And I…
1:33:33 So I asked my dad, I was like, “What’s the deal with this child prodigy thing?”
1:33:40 And he said, “Yeah, very few of them go on to do much in their adult careers, in any
1:33:41 field.”
1:33:42 Right.
1:33:44 And I was like, “Wow.”
1:33:51 And I thought, “Okay, so what’s missing there is clearly not a lack of ability, focus.”
1:33:55 I mean, you could just say raw talent, but you still have to, kids still have to focus.
1:34:00 So what’s missing is this transfer of understanding.
1:34:04 It seems or what you’re talking about, the interconnectedness of things.
1:34:09 And so, yeah, I probably will get myself in trouble with this colleague, but hey, listen,
1:34:13 maybe he’ll take on something new and do something additionally spectacular.
1:34:17 He’s got a lot of things on his plate.
1:34:19 But that struck me.
1:34:24 I was like, “Oh, it’s not clear that being a ‘child prodigy’ is such a good thing for
1:34:31 the long arc of one’s life, but you have seen to bring in these other elements, love.”
1:34:33 I’d like to talk more about that.
1:34:40 And I would also add, at least from an outsider’s perspective of, you seem to have broken the
1:34:44 mold with what’s expected of you based on your prior accomplishments.
1:34:51 In fact, just because I have no identity in being a prodigy, it’s to be clear.
1:34:52 So I don’t relate to that word at all.
1:34:58 I mean, that word has been put on me from the outside, but I just don’t associate with
1:34:59 it.
1:35:01 I don’t relate to it at all.
1:35:10 Because I was maybe somewhat talented in chess compared to most people.
1:35:18 But then very early, by the time I was like six and something, I was only competing against
1:35:22 people who were better than me and kids who were as talented as me.
1:35:25 And then on the world stage, kids who are more talented than me.
1:35:30 And I couldn’t rely on my talent at all, because I had to work my ass off.
1:35:32 And I won, and I lost, and I got my ass kicked.
1:35:36 So for me, it was all about the battle and taking myself on.
1:35:42 I think what happens, it’s funny, many years ago, I was giving us a Simul and a Simultaneous
1:35:43 Chess Exhibition.
1:35:46 And I showed up at this place, and all these kids were there, and they’re all excited to
1:35:47 play against me.
1:35:53 And then the organizer of it said, “My son hasn’t lost a chess game in two years.”
1:35:58 And that’s all you need to know, because it’s just like, and of course, he was the one kid
1:35:59 who didn’t want to play against me, right?
1:36:02 Because if you haven’t lost a chess game in two years, you’re not taking your shit
1:36:03 on.
1:36:05 You’re finding people who you can beat, and you’re only playing against them.
1:36:07 So there’s a couple levels to this, let’s dig into it.
1:36:13 So I think that people who have identity in being a prodigy develop a brittleness often,
1:36:19 because they associate their level of mastery with talent, with something innate, with being
1:36:23 smarter, more brilliant, more gifted, whatever.
1:36:26 And then that, you think about Carol Dweck’s work in Entity and Corrential Theories of
1:36:27 Intelligence, right?
1:36:28 Entity theory of intelligence.
1:36:32 So I think there’s that, and there’s something fundamentally brittle about that.
1:36:38 And then one doesn’t take risk, one doesn’t expose oneself, one associates one’s great
1:36:44 moments with something ingrained or innate versus the hard work that it took to get there.
1:36:46 And there’s all sorts of paralyzing dynamics there.
1:36:48 Oh, there’s also a tendency to lie.
1:36:51 Carol’s early papers refer to this in the discussion sections.
1:36:53 You have to read deep into those papers.
1:37:00 But she describes how the students who did not have growth mindset that really identified
1:37:08 and held so much of their ego with their performance, were at a significantly greater tendency to
1:37:11 lie about their performance when they didn’t do well.
1:37:13 To themselves and to others.
1:37:14 That’s right.
1:37:18 But the lying to oneself is the really interesting part, right?
1:37:22 So there’s that dimension, which you and I have both seen just countless manifestations
1:37:23 of.
1:37:25 And believe me, like when you’re competing against someone who you see has that kind
1:37:28 of psychological construction, they’re done.
1:37:30 You can just break them, right?
1:37:37 You can, there’s so many chinks in the armor that you can, it’s like, so, so there’s a
1:37:38 brittleness there.
1:37:42 Like you can just find where their mind stops in false constructs, where the energy stops,
1:37:44 where their body’s crimped, right?
1:37:47 Like you can just find their connection to the ground and explode through it in mental
1:37:48 and physical disciplines.
1:37:54 And then someone has that kind of identity in being the more brilliant one, the more
1:38:02 gifted one, whatever their prey from a competitive perspective, which is ultimately good for them
1:38:07 if they expose themselves to it because then they have to take themselves on.
1:38:13 But the dynamic that I was reflecting on chest players is a little next door to this, which
1:38:17 is that I think that, like if you’re learning how to play chess, and let’s just say I was
1:38:19 teaching you, do you play chess?
1:38:20 Trivially.
1:38:22 Okay, so I was teaching you to play chess, right?
1:38:29 I could teach you to play chess with a language that is chess specific, or I could teach you
1:38:30 chess principles.
1:38:33 I could teach you very effectively with chess principles, but I could also teach you just
1:38:37 as effectively, or maybe somewhat more effectively, but it’s just say just as effectively, with
1:38:40 chess principles that are also life principles, right?
1:38:45 And it’s interesting when you watch most chess teachers, they teach in a localized manner.
1:38:50 So people can spend 20 years inside of chess, but never break beyond the 64 squares.
1:38:54 Or they can, from the age of six or seven on, be learning that principle as it connects
1:38:56 to chess, but also seeing how it connects to life.
1:38:58 Could you give me an example of one such principle?
1:39:05 Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs.
1:39:08 Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works
1:39:14 or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of molecules, and the names of the molecules
1:39:17 are important if you decide to go into that field professionally.
1:39:20 But otherwise, the principles and verbs are what’s most important.
1:39:26 So what’s an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you
1:39:28 think transfers?
1:39:31 Everything transfers, first of all, like, I mean, if we’re open to it, then everything
1:39:32 in chess connects.
1:39:36 So when people ask me, do you still play chess, I say metaphorically, I mean, I play chess
1:39:37 all the time.
1:39:41 I just have not moved a piece in many, many, many years, right?
1:39:42 So, but okay, to be specific.
1:39:48 So I could give you many examples, but all right, so, so in chess, there’s a bishop
1:39:50 and there’s a knight, right?
1:39:51 They’re both worth about three ponds.
1:39:56 Now, I could teach you, okay, so the knight moves like an L and can jump over pieces.
1:40:00 The bishop moves diagonally and is stuck on one color for its whole life.
1:40:03 They’re both worth about three ponds.
1:40:07 But knights are, and I can just tell you, but like knights are a little bit better in closed
1:40:11 positions because they can jump over things, bishops are a little better if the ponds,
1:40:15 if your ponds are on the opposite color from them, right?
1:40:22 But you should also know that rooks and bishops are, bishops and knights are about the same.
1:40:24 Rooks and bishops are much stronger than rooks and knights.
1:40:30 And you should also know that queens and knights are a bit stronger than queens and bishops.
1:40:33 So the bishop’s value is a little bit stronger compared with the rook and the queen, the knight’s
1:40:38 value is a little bit stronger with the queen and pawn structure influences them, right?
1:40:42 So I could teach you a very simple set of principles through which you can understand
1:40:44 how to evaluate bishops and knights, right?
1:40:48 And there’s many other layers to that, but like that’s some of it, right?
1:40:55 I could also teach you the same thing and be teaching you like the nature of relativity.
1:41:02 I could be teaching you the nature of like, of interdependence, right?
1:41:06 I could teach you the nature of, like I could teach you the pawn structure play that, like
1:41:11 the way you can play with pawn structure that influences bishops and knights in ways that
1:41:15 are chess specific or in ways that just allow you to understand dynamic quality and static
1:41:16 quality.
1:41:20 You know what leaps to mind when you made that description and I didn’t follow all of
1:41:25 it to memorization was family feud.
1:41:27 I just imagine two families in a feud, right?
1:41:28 You get two brothers together.
1:41:29 They can do certain things.
1:41:31 We get a brother and sister together.
1:41:32 I have a sister.
1:41:35 She can do certain things that are powerful and diabolical in ways that two brothers
1:41:36 can’t.
1:41:41 You get two big strong brothers, but maybe one that can’t creep through small places.
1:41:45 So you can map to different, you know, that’s sort of more than just kind of an analogy
1:41:46 for it all.
1:41:48 But I started to immediately think about like, oh, it’s like a family feud.
1:41:49 Yeah.
1:41:56 If I were to view the pieces as sibling dynamics and parent sibling cousin dynamics, it’s like
1:41:58 matchups with humans or in basketball.
1:42:02 This team is better than this team and this team, but against there’s some matchups that
1:42:04 are much, are hugely favorable.
1:42:08 A lot of like the inside game of basketball is around, is around which teams thrive against
1:42:12 which other teams, even though they might be inferior because of the nature of the construction
1:42:13 of the team.
1:42:16 And you have networks of those teams and how do you deal with lineups?
1:42:17 How do you deal with rotation patterns?
1:42:22 Like the inner game of basketball is all based on the same stuff that dictates the bishop
1:42:26 and the knight and the rook and the queen and how they influence it, right?
1:42:27 It’s interdependence.
1:42:28 It’s relativity.
1:42:29 It’s dynamic quality.
1:42:32 And you could think about Robert Percik’s work and Zenon, most local maintenance and
1:42:35 Lila around dynamic quality versus static quality.
1:42:39 And you can be teaching a student while you’re teaching them about rook and bishop and rook
1:42:43 and knight or knights and bishops, you can be teaching them about dynamic quality, right?
1:42:48 And then you can, and then you can like expand into the study of the metaphysics of quality.
1:42:51 And then you can have a seven year old student who’s learning chess or 12 years, who’s learning
1:42:54 chess or who’s learning about life and philosophy and everything and you can do it in the same
1:42:59 amount of time, but you’re just, you’re, you’re trapping a mind inside of 64 squares or you’re
1:43:02 teaching a mind about life through the 64 squares.
1:43:07 And I think so many of the reasons that people who become excellent in one thing can’t translate
1:43:11 it into other places, it’s not will later on in life.
1:43:12 They have the will.
1:43:15 It’s because they didn’t learn with universal principles.
1:43:20 They didn’t study their art with a presence to the importance of interconnectedness, which
1:43:23 is a lot of what my life’s work is in.
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1:45:06 When I think about interconnectedness, I think the word mapping comes to mind, and I define
1:45:10 a map of any kind as a transformation of one set of points into another set of points.
1:45:15 Points along the earth transferred onto a page or an electronic map.
1:45:19 What’s missing from a basic understanding of a transformation of points into another
1:45:25 transformation of points are these verb actions, like it’s the algorithms, if you will.
1:45:30 That’s not present in how we map one context onto another context.
1:45:33 It requires a lot of thinking to do what you describe.
1:45:38 I don’t think it’s reflexive for most people to, say, watch a game of basketball and think
1:45:43 about the emotional dynamics and the consistencies of the emotional dynamics.
1:45:46 Last night, I had the great gift of Josh brought me to a Celtics game.
1:45:50 He brought me to a Celtics game, and they were playing the Clippers, so I was cheering
1:45:55 against the hometown crowd here in Los Angeles, but he was friendly.
1:45:59 You were describing the players and their recent history and the last season, the season.
1:46:07 You said something about the difference between pre-conscious effort and post-conscious effort.
1:46:12 Maybe we could talk about that as a gateway into ego, which is like a term that the moment
1:46:15 you throw out the word ego, it’s like saying sex.
1:46:19 It’s like people make all sorts of assumptions about what it is and what it isn’t, but let’s
1:46:25 talk about pre-conscious and post-conscious because we’ll get back to the Celtics and
1:46:26 the game that was played last night.
1:46:32 By the way, the Celtics won in overtime by a good-sized margin, so there’s something
1:46:39 very beautiful that I think all of us are drawn to as observers, but hopefully everyone
1:46:42 gets to experience this at some point in their life as well.
1:46:51 First hand, when somebody in art, music, sport, or whatever is just being themselves and this
1:46:53 seeming virtuosity comes out.
1:47:00 If I think about what Rick Rubin does, a lot of what Rick has done historically is to find
1:47:05 artists and work with artists and just bring out what they’re already doing, like the
1:47:06 core elements.
1:47:09 Like when Beastie Boy started, it was like a joke, he said, and then we’re kind of making
1:47:15 fun and had wrestling elements and hardcore and punk and all this stuff and hip-hop, but
1:47:19 he tends to work with artists early on when they’re in that really pure state of not thinking
1:47:23 about the returns on their investment and all that.
1:47:28 He said many times before to me and publicly that after people achieve a certain level of
1:47:32 fame, it’s much harder to get back to that just pure picture of one’s own pre-conscious
1:47:36 expression, just Josh being Josh as an eight-year-old.
1:47:40 He just happened to be in Washington Square Park learning chess or pick any number of
1:47:42 different examples.
1:47:46 So very different than when people now reflect on their trophies on the wall or their platinum
1:47:54 records or the fact that they won and lost or that there’s another champion in the house.
1:48:03 The real virtuosos seem to be people that can get back to that over and over again.
1:48:10 The yoyomas and people live longer now, so it used to be the Mozart’s, the Bach’s, they
1:48:15 could make their contribution and then they died.
1:48:22 Now we live longer lives, so people have many more chances, but there’s also that longer
1:48:26 window for lack of productivity.
1:48:30 This is a really important theme and it’s a gateway into so much that we can explore
1:48:32 a lot through this tunnel.
1:48:37 When I use this term pre-conscious and post-conscious artist or competitor, it’s my own language,
1:48:40 so I’ll describe what I mean by it.
1:48:45 You think about myself in the chess world, right, like one discovers an art, one feels
1:48:50 a passion for it, it’s beautiful, it’s joyous, it’s self-expressive, I love the battle, I’m
1:48:56 winning, I’m losing, I’m having fun, I’m just letting it rip, there’s an avatite to that.
1:49:02 There’s a freedom, there’s a playfulness, there’s a lack of complexity, a lack of self-awareness,
1:49:08 a lack of awareness of my own mutability, a lack of awareness that I can be shattered
1:49:13 or I can die, a lack of awareness of the existential absurdity of the fact that I’m devoting my
1:49:17 life to 64 squares and 32 pieces of wood on top of 64 squares.
1:49:23 I haven’t reflected on the fact that this is ridiculous, or if you’re fighting, like
1:49:24 what am I doing?
1:49:25 I’m spending my life in combat.
1:49:26 Like what about love?
1:49:27 What about saving the planet?
1:49:28 What about everything else?
1:49:35 I haven’t reflected on the fact that this is just a joke in its absurdity, right?
1:49:38 And one’s liberated from those kinds of things.
1:49:44 And then there comes this moment, and for me, it was triggered by the movie, by losing that
1:49:48 sense of self-expression, by thinking what would someone else do here instead of what’s
1:49:54 my freedom, my playfulness tell me to do.
1:49:56 It can happen when one has a near-death experience, right?
1:49:59 It can happen when one has one’s heart broken.
1:50:06 It can happen when one starts reading existential literature and reflecting on the absurdity
1:50:10 of things, or one has a friend who starts pointing out over and over, like, “This is
1:50:11 fucking ridiculous.
1:50:12 You’re just playing chess.
1:50:13 What are you doing?”
1:50:14 Right?
1:50:19 Or it can happen when one wins the World Championship or the NBA Finals, because suddenly the thing
1:50:25 that you have oriented yourself around, your whole life, the goal you had your whole life,
1:50:29 you’ve now accomplished, and now you’re on the other side of it.
1:50:31 And so suddenly your world has shifted.
1:50:33 The things that motivated you no longer motivate you.
1:50:36 The things that felt so important to you now seem somewhat trivial because you’ve already
1:50:37 accomplished that.
1:50:40 Like, where’s the intrinsic motivation?
1:50:43 Where’s the deep self-expression, right?
1:50:49 You think about, like, as we gain complexity in our psychology and we can gain that complexity
1:50:52 in many different ways, we hit this tunnel, right?
1:51:00 And often when someone becomes self-aware, or when someone becomes less liberated, or
1:51:04 like the chains hit in, or when one, I guess I’d say you’re an extreme athlete, but you
1:51:06 feel invincible, and then suddenly you have a terrible accident.
1:51:08 You realize, “Holy shit, I could actually die.
1:51:10 I can break.”
1:51:14 Then how do you get back to that freedom of taking the wild risks that you’ve been taking
1:51:17 as that extreme athlete with an awareness of the fact that you can die?
1:51:24 For me, I foil now in the biggest waves that I can find in where I live, in Costa Rica.
1:51:26 And you have big hold downs.
1:51:31 You’re foiling on top of a long mass, which is a carbon mass, which is very sharp, and
1:51:32 then a wing, which is sharp.
1:51:35 So you’re basically going 40, 45 miles on top of the guillotine.
1:51:39 And if you’re trying to, you’re really cultivating high performance foiling, you’re pushing
1:51:40 turns really hard.
1:51:43 You’re breaching wingtips, like you can taco and have the thing come right at your head
1:51:44 or your neck.
1:51:47 You can die at any minute if you get something wrong, which is very different from just foiling
1:51:52 straight or e-foiling, talking about high performance training.
1:51:56 You, by definition, have to be risking these things in order to push the limits of what’s
1:51:57 possible.
1:51:59 And if you’re not, you’re not at that stretch point, right?
1:52:01 But then suddenly you have a terrible injury.
1:52:07 Or let’s just say you’re, like, I drowned on the bottom of a pool some 11 years ago, 10,
1:52:08 11 years ago.
1:52:09 Yeah, I heard about this.
1:52:11 Yeah, I was doing hypoxic breath work.
1:52:16 I did not realize, which maybe if I’d, you could have taught me if I’d known you, that
1:52:18 carbon dioxide will give you the urge to breathe.
1:52:19 I didn’t realize that.
1:52:21 So I had all the CO2 flushed out of my body.
1:52:22 I felt blissful.
1:52:23 I was swimming underwater.
1:52:24 Yeah.
1:52:30 Exhale, I guess we should save a few lives here or prevent a few deaths rather.
1:52:34 Anytime you emphasize the duration or intensity of your exhales, you’re going to blow out more
1:52:35 carbon dioxide.
1:52:39 Carbon dioxide is the trigger for the gas reflex.
1:52:41 So yes, you’ll be able to hold your breath longer above or below water.
1:52:48 If you first do cyclic hyperventilation and then a long dump all your air, but never, ever,
1:52:53 ever do cyclic hyperventilation folks or any long exhale emphasized breathing, even standing
1:53:00 in a puddle because that gas reflex is the thing that makes you shoot for the surface.
1:53:05 And if you don’t do that, you feel pretty peaceful until lights out.
1:53:06 Or drive a car.
1:53:07 Don’t do it while driving a car.
1:53:08 Or drive a car.
1:53:09 I know people who have done that.
1:53:10 Right.
1:53:11 Actually rather exceptional people who I know.
1:53:12 Yeah.
1:53:15 Dumping carbon dioxide is, let you hold your breath longer, but that’s part of the problem.
1:53:19 And shallow water blackout usually happens to very high level athletes, Navy SEALs, right?
1:53:23 Because they’re training at pushing their limits, they’re learning to suppress the urge
1:53:24 to breathe.
1:53:27 And if you’re flushing CO2, you’re learning, you’re training yourself not to feel it.
1:53:28 And I’ve been a freediver my whole life.
1:53:33 I grew up freediving, spearfishing in the southern Bahamas, but I wasn’t doing hypoxic
1:53:34 breath work while freediving.
1:53:36 Here I was at the NYU pool.
1:53:37 I drowned.
1:53:40 I was in the bottom of the pool for four and a half minutes after blacking out, switched.
1:53:41 Four and a half minutes.
1:53:42 Yeah.
1:53:47 I should have, which I know because I should be dead or brain damaged in a big way.
1:53:50 I know the time it was because there was an old man who I knew who was in the locker
1:53:52 room, who saw me in the bottom of the pool lying there.
1:53:56 And he timed his laps and he did four laps and he said after the third one, I’m going
1:53:57 to check on him.
1:54:02 And then he did his fourth lap, pulled me in his lap, so a little bit over a minute.
1:54:04 And I was unconscious for 25 minutes.
1:54:10 I was totally blue, except my face was blown out, red, my eyes.
1:54:14 My body, my training almost killed me and also saved me.
1:54:15 My body handled it really well.
1:54:18 I had no water in my lungs.
1:54:21 I spent that night in the hospital, of course.
1:54:25 And I was like testing my, I remember doing like remembering all chest variations, like
1:54:29 testing my mind in any way, like was I ruined.
1:54:33 And I somehow survived and I survived intact.
1:54:38 And that’s one of those moments, shattering moments, which I am ultimately grateful for
1:54:40 because it’s what catalyzed me too.
1:54:44 I emerged with more of a commitment and I’ve had this kind of commitment in my life for
1:54:49 most, for many years, but a more intense commitment to live life as truly and beautifully and
1:54:51 authentically as conceivable.
1:54:56 And then soon after we moved to the jungle and we live life, we live now, which is awesome
1:54:58 with my family.
1:55:05 But I bring that up now because like imagine how one relates to big wave surfing or big
1:55:10 wave foiling, pre and post drowning, right?
1:55:16 There’s like one has to have an integrated sense for one’s own mortality versus being
1:55:19 naive to the fact that it can happen, right?
1:55:24 So that tunnel from the pre-conscious to the post-conscious performer is a passage where
1:55:27 during that passage, most people are locked up.
1:55:30 They underperform where they were when they were more naive.
1:55:34 And I don’t personally relate to it as a return to the pre-conscious state.
1:55:42 I relate to it as an integration of one’s mortality, of the existential absurdity into
1:55:47 one’s consciousness and then a discovery of a deeper sense of liberation, of freedom,
1:55:52 but that is not in denial of what we’ve learned in that tunnel or what triggered that tunnel,
1:55:55 but that is more complex.
1:55:56 Yeah.
1:55:59 Trying to be our previous selves is not a great strategy.
1:56:03 Trying to integrate our previous experiences in our current and future selves seems like
1:56:04 a good strategy.
1:56:05 I feel that way.
1:56:08 And I think it’s also pretty, you can’t go back.
1:56:11 You can’t pretend you’re not, the dying is impossible.
1:56:13 You can’t pretend that you’re unbreakable.
1:56:14 We are breakable.
1:56:20 Some people do it without being really reflective, but I think that if you ask anyone who really
1:56:25 has been in life and death situations as a way of life for a long time, whether they
1:56:31 relate to the idea of fearlessness, if they really reflect on it, they’ll say no.
1:56:34 Because fearlessness isn’t a thing.
1:56:36 It’s how one works with fear.
1:56:37 Usually what locks people up isn’t fear.
1:56:40 It’s the fear of fear.
1:56:41 We’re afraid of our fear.
1:56:45 We’re afraid of being afraid, but you ask a great Navy SEAL.
1:56:46 They work with their fear.
1:56:48 You ask a great MMA fighter.
1:56:49 They’re not without fear.
1:56:50 Of course, they have fear.
1:56:53 If they don’t have fear, they have a problem.
1:56:57 And there are some examples of people who might be wired a little bit differently.
1:57:04 But the integration of the more complex worldview into one’s liberation is the post-conscious
1:57:06 performer.
1:57:08 And it can play in lots of ways.
1:57:13 It can also play in one thing when you think about a sports team that has accomplished
1:57:17 everyone’s dreams, and now we want to win a championship again.
1:57:22 We can’t go back to what worked before because they’re different men.
1:57:25 One needs to find a different kind of mission, a different kinds of internal relationship
1:57:26 to the mission.
1:57:28 A different kind of freedom.
1:57:33 How important do you think it is to attach language to these things of identity and source
1:57:35 of motivation?
1:57:37 In other words, let’s say, okay, you’re working with the Celtics.
1:57:39 They won the championship last year.
1:57:45 This year, they are in a completely different mental frame as a consequence.
1:57:51 They’re “dominant” in the sense that they hold the crown, they hold the trophy.
1:57:55 But they’re more vulnerable too because the only place to go from there is either stay
1:57:58 or you’re going down a notch or more.
1:58:02 So do you think it’s important for them to create a verbal label for where they’re at?
1:58:04 Like, we’re the champs and we’re going to hold on to the belt.
1:58:08 We’re going to hold on to, I realize there’s not a belt in basketball, by the way, that
1:58:11 they’re going to hold on to their status.
1:58:13 Or is that the wrong way to think about it?
1:58:16 Because the game is played through verbs.
1:58:20 It’s not played through adjectives.
1:58:22 I don’t think we ever want to hold on to.
1:58:23 Like that’s static.
1:58:32 Like you think about predator and prey dynamics in the world or in competition or in anything.
1:58:36 You want to be competing, now there’s a fusion of the predator and prey.
1:58:41 You want to have the awareness that prey has, but one wants to be playing to win, not to
1:58:42 lose.
1:58:45 The moment we’re trying to hold on to something we already have, we’re falling into the static
1:58:46 quality.
1:58:53 Or you think about, for example, brilliant investors, they’ll have success, then they’ll
1:58:54 try to figure out how to replicate their success.
1:58:57 They’ll build mental models, frameworks to replicate their success.
1:58:59 And those become grooves, like neural pathways.
1:59:04 So then they follow those grooves, but then the grooves become a rut and the water stops.
1:59:09 And they get stuck in an old, so they succeeded, they built mental models.
1:59:10 They recreated the patterns.
1:59:14 It was beautiful, but then it got static.
1:59:19 And then it’s got stuck energy, and it doesn’t apply to the world because the world’s changing.
1:59:21 And what actually made them succeed was dynamic quality.
1:59:24 Because being at the, like what Robert Persek would call the front of the freight train,
1:59:29 driving through space-time, pre-intellectual consciousness, right?
1:59:30 And then they’re trying to recreate it.
1:59:33 They’re getting too stuck in things, and they create mental models that are stale.
1:59:36 And then other people replicate those stale mental models, and you have huge industries
1:59:41 that emerge from static quality later on top of static quality, which is most of humanity.
1:59:46 So I think that as a world-class competitor who’s trying to win after winning, one needs
1:59:50 to have the same dynamic mindset one had when one was hunting for it in the first place.
1:59:51 Discovery.
1:59:59 Marcelo Garcia, one of my favorite moments of Marcelo was, so we were, so Marcelo, nine-time
2:00:07 world champion in the grappling arts, five-time ADCC, five-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, four-time
2:00:08 ADCC.
2:00:11 ADCC is when Abu Dhabi Combat Championship, when all the different grappling arts come
2:00:12 together.
2:00:13 It happens every two years.
2:00:19 So Russian Sambo, Judo, wrestling, Jiu-Jitsu, everything comes together, and you see who’s
2:00:22 the strongest grappler in all the different arts.
2:00:27 He’s known by many as the greatest pound-for-pound grappler to ever live.
2:00:32 Just for context, Marcelo is one of my dearest friends.
2:00:34 We own a school together in New York.
2:00:36 We trained together for a very, very long time.
2:00:41 He and his, he’s in an amazing moment right now.
2:00:44 He and his wife, Tachi, who’s also one of my dearest friends, had a terrible tragedy
2:00:45 years ago.
2:00:53 Marcelo lost a baby, and just devastating period, and then Marcelo had cancer.
2:00:56 He had stomach cancer.
2:01:00 He had surgery, eight rounds of chemotherapy.
2:01:03 He hasn’t competed in 13 years, and he’s actually competing tomorrow for the first
2:01:07 time in, I think it’s 13 years, in Bangkok.
2:01:10 It was going to be in Denver, and I was going to fly there between the Lakers and the Mavs
2:01:13 Games, but it’s in Bangkok, so I can’t get there.
2:01:14 But he’s weighed in.
2:01:15 He’s doing great.
2:01:16 He’s awesome.
2:01:22 So the story I’m about to tell is about this epic, beautiful human being who, in many ways,
2:01:27 created, he’s the innovator that led to much of what is modern grappling today.
2:01:32 So back in, I think it was, I think it was 2005 and 2007, this story, or maybe 2007,
2:01:33 2009.
2:01:35 I think it’s 2005 and 2007.
2:01:40 Chronology is not a strong point for me in terms of my recollection in general.
2:01:43 We were in a training camp.
2:01:45 We were training all the time.
2:01:47 He had this innovative repertoire.
2:01:52 He goes into ADCC, dominates it, and it’s a very specific repertoire, a bit, back-taking
2:01:53 repertoire.
2:01:57 Guillotine’s just dominates, blows the grappling world away.
2:02:02 For the two years that followed him winning that ADCC, the entire grappling world was
2:02:05 studying what he had just done, or a lot of the grappling world.
2:02:07 He was studying what he had just done and learning to recreate it.
2:02:13 It was so beautiful, innovative, powerful, playing up-weight classes, just unbelievable.
2:02:18 I was on the mats with Marcelo the next day, the Monday after he fought Sunday.
2:02:23 I also want to say, Marcelo, I never, in all the years I had of training with Marcelo,
2:02:29 I never saw him miss a Monday training after winning a major competition on Sunday.
2:02:30 Everyone takes time off.
2:02:31 I never saw him miss a Monday.
2:02:36 You talk about dynamic quality and humility and a way of life, right?
2:02:40 The Monday he was on the mats, he shed the entire repertoire.
2:02:42 We just won the world championship.
2:02:45 Everyone spent the next two years chasing his quality, which was dynamic.
2:02:46 They turned it static.
2:02:49 He shed the whole repertoire and created a whole new repertoire.
2:02:53 He was playing this alma plada game, which he then went on the next ADCC two years later,
2:02:58 and won again with this brand new thing, just shedding the snake skin or shedding the old
2:03:00 shell.
2:03:04 It’s such a beautiful example of pushing one’s limits as a way of life, not being stuck in
2:03:08 old mental models, breaking new ground as a way of life, dynamic quality.
2:03:09 That’s what it takes.
2:03:10 So hard for people to do.
2:03:14 I mean, I think about Michael Jordan and the fact that he wanted to be a pro baseball player,
2:03:19 so he had a brief stint at that, and it was underwhelming, certainly compared to his basketball
2:03:20 career.
2:03:30 Of course, his basketball career was so spectacular that the expectation wasn’t there, but nonetheless,
2:03:37 it’s so rare to find people that are super successful repeatedly within domain, let alone
2:03:38 across domains.
2:03:39 Yeah.
2:03:45 Richard Feynman, yeah, he could paint a little bit and draw a little bit, but I don’t know,
2:03:51 I’ve seen those pictures of the roosters, and they’re kind of first-year art school.
2:03:52 So it’s cool.
2:03:55 You learn to draw and paint, but he weren’t.
2:03:58 If his name wasn’t on them, no one would care.
2:04:06 Jordan had just an incredible competitive drive, incredible competitive drive.
2:04:09 It’s very hard to replicate success in an art because one that shouldn’t replicate,
2:04:19 one should drive to rediscover, it’s like a recreation of something new, not old.
2:04:26 I think the impulse once one wins is to do what one did before, but the world changes.
2:04:30 One of the gifts the Celtics have this year is that everyone is targeting us because we’re
2:04:31 the champions.
2:04:32 We won it last year.
2:04:38 Everyone brings an extra 30% every night, every team, and the NBA is stacked with brilliant
2:04:40 athletes.
2:04:44 Even the lower-level teams from the outside in are filled with amazing athletes.
2:04:48 If you’re the game of the week or the month for them, they bring it all.
2:04:52 So all of our weaknesses are being exposed, which is what we want, right?
2:04:55 And so you have, there’s growing pains, you work through it all.
2:05:01 And so the good thing about the competitive truth-telling world is that our competitors,
2:05:06 our rivals help force us to take our shit on, which makes it very hard to sit in static
2:05:10 quality unless we’re happy with mediocrity.
2:05:14 The Celtics have, you know, one of the most, Joe Missoula is the head coach of the Boston
2:05:18 Celtics and he’s one of, he and I are dear friends and for the last two and a half years
2:05:23 or so we’ve been thought partners and brothers in this journey.
2:05:30 And I’ve never seen anyone in my life better at turning weaknesses into strengths than
2:05:35 Joe, which is a huge statement because I spent my life with these, with all-in performers.
2:05:39 Not taking weaknesses and like making them less weak or like leveling them out, but
2:05:43 turning like an area of core weakness into a core power zone.
2:05:47 That’s a superpower and that’s something that Joe trains harder than anybody else and
2:05:53 he leads by example and he leads with vulnerability and there’s some, he embodies dynamic quality
2:05:57 and that’s really special and that’s something I have unbelievable respect for and you look
2:06:05 at Joe now, like Joe just has learned to just thrive in pain, in discomfort, in his limits,
2:06:10 in living at his limits and that’s like the leadership which I think will lead to beautiful
2:06:12 things.
2:06:16 So I feel like there are at least three components to what you’re describing.
2:06:23 One is that, you know, maybe in this pre-conscious phase, people are thinking about what they
2:06:27 have to gain from this process that they’re in and the process is natural at least to
2:06:29 the extent that they’re motivated to do it.
2:06:30 It comes from some source.
2:06:35 This seems to be the stage in the thing that Rick Rubin is trying to tap into in the artists
2:06:39 that he works with, whether or not they’re established or new, is that it’s the identification
2:06:46 of that pre-conscious energy, which is so pure and so beautiful by definition.
2:06:51 As opposed to the second thing, which is when people have something to lose, you know, they
2:06:56 went from poverty to having a really nice home, they bought their mom a home.
2:06:58 Their love in this life, they don’t want to lose it.
2:07:00 They don’t want to go back to where they were before.
2:07:04 Even though where they were before probably played a key role in that pre-conscious state
2:07:11 that allowed them to get to that next level versus something to protect.
2:07:16 And you know, trying to not lose everything you’ve got is very different than trying to
2:07:20 protect certain elements of what you one has.
2:07:25 So like in terms of the Celtics, they hold the championship title now.
2:07:28 So they have something to lose, frankly.
2:07:33 They could not get it again, but it’s in the record books.
2:07:35 So it’s nuanced, right?
2:07:42 It’s not like in a fight you can get knocked out or worse, but you’re still a champion
2:07:43 if you were a champion once.
2:07:45 I mean, certain fields are like that.
2:07:50 Well, going back to back is an approach way of framing that.
2:07:53 Like going back to back is protecting the title.
2:07:54 Right.
2:07:57 You know, the words like reigning champions, you know, it’s like even though you’re already
2:08:02 the reigning champion, you know, or you think about dynasties.
2:08:05 Like I grew up in the, when the 49ers were like kind of in multiple dynasties, it was
2:08:09 like the Joe Montana era and the Steve Young era and like, you know, like these dynasties
2:08:15 where they were just considered such an important team overall because of how long they were
2:08:18 able to do what they did, the bulls, right?
2:08:19 You know.
2:08:22 So Tiger Woods, right?
2:08:26 And there seems to be a kind of obsession with this process, at least in the United States
2:08:33 where we love to see the rise of somebody from, you know, ignominy to fame or rags to
2:08:38 riches and then, but there also seems to be this kind of obsession with their fall, their
2:08:40 demise and then coming back again.
2:08:46 And I think the most, you know, prominent example of this in my mind is Mike Tyson whose
2:08:50 life is like, as a friend described it, is almost Shakespearean and the way that he came
2:08:55 from nothing, then youngest heavyweight champion, then all these issues, you know, legal and
2:09:00 financial then back again and now he seems to be in kind of, he’s at least of a level
2:09:04 of status where he can wear his own shirt and no one thinks it’s weird.
2:09:05 It actually looks cool.
2:09:10 He’s probably the only guy who can wear a shirt with his own name on it and he just,
2:09:11 and it just seems right.
2:09:13 Like he earned that one.
2:09:14 And I think, ironically, it was the hangover.
2:09:19 It was him pretending to have a, you know, act as an actor that kind of brought him back
2:09:20 as a lovable character.
2:09:22 It’s kind of interesting.
2:09:30 Like he seems to now be on the Mount Rushmore of famous American athletes who, you know,
2:09:38 like I only wish the best for him, but whatever happens next, like that he cemented, his legacy
2:09:39 is cemented.
2:09:42 At some point, people’s legacy is cemented and I wonder how that feels too.
2:09:46 So maybe we could talk about these different stages of the sine wave that hopefully is
2:09:47 upward and drifting right.
2:09:54 One of the things that’s very difficult in modern society and in life of a professional
2:09:58 athlete or team in modern society is that, you know, you think about NBA players, they’re
2:10:05 always being interviewed by the media and the media is always trying to drum up drama
2:10:11 and always trying to ask, the media always asks the question that is exactly what the
2:10:16 performance psychologist of the player would not want the player to think about.
2:10:21 So for example, like they might ask something about like, how do you feel knowing you can,
2:10:25 the expectations of you are so large, you can never live up to them, right?
2:10:30 Or is it shameful, do you feel ashamed about your performance now because of the expectations
2:10:31 on you?
2:10:32 The questions like that will be framed.
2:10:33 Oh yeah.
2:10:36 Or your wife is eight months pregnant, like how do you feel being, you know, 5,000 miles
2:10:37 away right now?
2:10:39 That would be pretty benign compared to, right?
2:10:40 Yeah.
2:10:41 It’s like, thanks.
2:10:42 Right.
2:10:44 There’s something because like you want a player to be liberated from self-consciousness.
2:10:50 You don’t want a player to be playing with an awareness or a fixation on external expectations
2:10:51 or the external eye.
2:10:54 One, like I remember the feeling in my chess life when I transitioned from losing myself
2:11:01 in thought to thinking about how I looked thinking to the cameras or the groupies or
2:11:07 whatever on the outside, like wildly different mindsets as a chess player, right?
2:11:11 And so you have all these pressures that are trying to pull you out of an ideal performance
2:11:12 state.
2:11:16 And so one needs to learn and develop thick skin or a way of integrating it or be playful
2:11:17 with it.
2:11:20 And I really believe in embracing adversity.
2:11:24 We have this theme of hunting adversity on the team, which is like, like these things
2:11:32 that could be seen as detrimental or, you know, problems or things that could get in
2:11:37 the way of our liberation is like we welcome them like cold water, right?
2:11:40 Getting in cold water every day is a very important, I think it’s a beautiful opportunity
2:11:41 to train it so much.
2:11:44 Like, but we don’t want to get in cold water gritting our teeth and hating it.
2:11:48 Now we want to like love the fact that we’re about to suffer in that cold water.
2:11:54 I’ve been cold plunging for, you know, many, many years, maybe 15 years and like I, it’s
2:11:57 not like we get into 34 degree water, even if you’ve been training for a very long time,
2:12:01 you’re thrilled about this five minute or 10 minute plunge you’re about to do.
2:12:07 Most consistent stimulus for adrenaline release and noradrenaline release in the brain that
2:12:10 is safe, if done properly, right?
2:12:12 And you never really habituate.
2:12:18 I maybe would just really quickly double click on this thing of cold plunging.
2:12:19 I don’t go for time.
2:12:22 I think only in terms of walls of adrenaline.
2:12:26 So some days like just getting in the thing is a big wall.
2:12:30 I think that just lack of a better word is a wall on a hot day, I’m happy to get into
2:12:31 the cold plunge.
2:12:32 Yeah.
2:12:38 And what I think is so valuable about cold plunging is that if you start to focus on
2:12:42 what neuroscientists call interoception, everything or perception of everything from
2:12:46 our skin inward, you can start to feel the deployment of adrenaline in your body or at
2:12:48 least its effects.
2:12:50 And you can say, here’s another wall of adrenaline.
2:12:54 You watch your frame rate go up, the impulse to stay still because as you move, you break
2:12:56 up that thermal layer, it gets even colder.
2:13:00 But then you also want to get out and then that wall passes.
2:13:04 And then you start to notice that the distance between the walls changes.
2:13:10 And then playing with that in one’s mind as when I distract myself, the walls come suddenly
2:13:17 or when I’m focused on the walls, they seem like big swells as opposed to when I relax
2:13:20 myself, they seem like just like more sharp peaks.
2:13:27 And learning that those dynamics of how adrenaline impacts us cognitively and frame rate and
2:13:29 all that, I think is an immensely valuable practice.
2:13:34 And I can’t think of anything else, not sprinting, not lifting weights, not real life arguments
2:13:36 because that can be destructive.
2:13:41 I can’t think of any other kind of venue for exploring one’s ability to work through stress
2:13:44 and tension than the cold plunge.
2:13:45 I agree.
2:13:49 I have this principle I call living on the other side of pain.
2:13:55 And I think that pain, mental discomfort, physical discomfort or confronting some issue
2:14:00 one doesn’t want to think about or taking on one’s bias pattern, or if you’re, let’s
2:14:05 say like a professional decision maker taking on like what the network of your cognitive
2:14:09 biases tends to lead to, like these are all forms of pain, right?
2:14:13 I think the cold water training is such an exquisite way to practice living on the other
2:14:17 side of pain in a way that is thematically resonant.
2:14:21 And you can train at that, doing that physical practice can liberate you and your mental
2:14:26 arenas to take on shit you don’t want to take on.
2:14:30 One thing I’ve found is that when you’re training peak performers, there can be the
2:14:36 impulse to go right at their weakness in the place they’re making the error.
2:14:41 But it’s usually much less potent to do it that way because they’re well calloused over
2:14:42 in that area.
2:14:47 So if you’re like a poker player who has like some control issue, right, you could like
2:14:52 take on the control issue in poker, but they’re so brilliant at poker, like they’ve built
2:14:55 calluses around it, they’ve built ways of dealing with it, and they’re able to play
2:14:59 at a high level despite, but like, but they’re probably very controlling at home as well
2:15:02 with their, with their spouse or their kids or whatever.
2:15:06 And if you take on the control issues in places they’re much less developed, it’ll be much
2:15:10 easier to take it on because it’s less calloused, and it will be massively liberating in their
2:15:11 poker game.
2:15:14 So I often like this is this connect this idea of interconnectedness and thematic
2:15:19 interconnectedness, all identify a theme someone needs to work with, but then we’ll practice
2:15:22 that theme in other areas of their life.
2:15:25 And then you could have core habits which manifest that theme.
2:15:29 And then there comes this amazing moment where the theme just becomes like internalized because
2:15:33 when practices it in things that are away from where it manifests professionally, and
2:15:34 then it just releases.
2:15:37 And then all the manifestations of that theme just become your way of life.
2:15:44 So for example, like if one wants to take on one’s resistance to, to discomfort, to
2:15:46 pain, to pushing one’s limits, right?
2:15:50 One can practice things like cold plunging, like cardiovascular interval training, like,
2:15:59 you know, other things like withholding orgasm, whatever, you can have ways of practicing
2:16:04 the theme that are completely separate from where it’s manifesting or hindering you in
2:16:07 your professional life, where you’re probably very good at dealing with it.
2:16:11 And then the unlock will just happen and you’ll be liberated from it, right?
2:16:14 This is one of the most powerful ways that I’ve found to train.
2:16:19 I also find cold plunging is just unbelievable for, for sleep quality, for, I do, you know,
2:16:21 I do contrast training now.
2:16:22 And I, I agree with you.
2:16:27 Like I’ve spent a lot, for years I was doing like really long, cold, like 36 degree water
2:16:29 for 11 or 12 minutes.
2:16:31 And I pushed myself really hard.
2:16:35 Um, and man, 11 minutes is so different from nine minutes.
2:16:37 Oh, different world.
2:16:41 And then, and now I don’t, now I, I found that like, I have a practice of, you know,
2:16:47 I’ll do three to four rounds of, you know, 40, two to 44 degrees between that and the
2:16:48 sauna.
2:16:51 And I find I’ll do like one longer plunge a week, but like in daily practice, I don’t
2:16:56 feel the urge to do very long breath holds or very long cold plunges.
2:16:57 I don’t necessarily.
2:16:58 Yeah.
2:16:59 Same.
2:17:01 I’ll, I’ll do cold plunge for one to three minutes.
2:17:02 Yeah.
2:17:03 And I love contrast with heat.
2:17:04 Oh, so.
2:17:05 I love heat tolerant.
2:17:07 I love, I love, I love, I love the sauna.
2:17:13 Um, I don’t love the cold, but I love the long arc of dopamine that comes after the
2:17:14 cold.
2:17:17 I always say, no, no one really enjoys being in the thing.
2:17:18 I, you’d be feel.
2:17:19 10 times.
2:17:20 Is there a better sleep pack?
2:17:21 I’m asking you, cause you know this stuff.
2:17:24 Well, there are supplements that could support sleep and that kind of thing.
2:17:28 And people learning how to deliberately relax their body can help with transition to sleep
2:17:29 and back to sleep.
2:17:32 But you know, one core principle that I haven’t really talked about in the podcast is that
2:17:39 if you, the more adrenaline, nor epinephrine, nor adrenaline and dopamine that you experience
2:17:44 early in the day, as well as cortisol from bright light, exercise, caffeine and cold,
2:17:46 the better you’re going to sleep at night.
2:17:53 It also sets your circadian rhythm around kind of like a big, uh, you know, set of arousal
2:17:54 promoting stimuli early in the day.
2:17:59 And then, you know, last third of your day, you’re very parasympathetic for lack of a
2:18:00 better way to put it.
2:18:02 And that eases the transition of sleep.
2:18:07 I mean, you know, dimming the lights, parasympathetic, bright lights increases the amount of cortisol
2:18:11 with your morning cortisol pulse by 50%, five zero, which is great.
2:18:14 It keeps you less susceptible to infection all day.
2:18:15 These kinds of things.
2:18:19 I mean, we were meant to be in oscillation, obviously across the 24 hour cycle, but even
2:18:23 within the day, uh, it’s a little bit tougher when people have evening activities or you
2:18:28 put, like last night I was watching these guys play a hard game of basketball at, you
2:18:31 know, eight to 10 PM.
2:18:32 That’s a lot of late night work.
2:18:33 And we’re on the West coast.
2:18:35 You can think of what time that is east coast time.
2:18:36 Right.
2:18:37 Right.
2:18:38 So is there a better sleep stack?
2:18:39 Not really.
2:18:42 I mean, and if you want to increase your rapid dive movement, sleep non-pharmacologically,
2:18:44 I would say, meaning not exogenous pharmacology.
2:18:50 Um, yeah, the cold plunge in the morning, early part of the day for evening, um, anything
2:18:53 that moves, uh, blood out to your periphery.
2:18:59 So sauna, uh, pot shower, that sort of thing is going to drop your core body temperature
2:19:00 when you get out.
2:19:01 Right.
2:19:04 It’s a little paradoxical to people, but you know, you warm up to then cool off at the
2:19:07 level of core body temperature and it’ll ease the transition to sleep.
2:19:08 Yeah.
2:19:09 It’s a, it’s a wonderful practice.
2:19:13 And people who pick at cold plunging, they’re like, well, it blocks hypertrophy.
2:19:14 Okay.
2:19:15 Yeah.
2:19:16 Okay.
2:19:17 That’s true.
2:19:18 So in the six hours after you’re trying to get your, you know, a little more peak
2:19:22 on your biceps or something, it’s going to block that, but most people have not experienced
2:19:28 control over their physiology at the level that comes from doing consistent cold plunging
2:19:33 in the early part of the day, warming up and becoming more parasympathetic, uh, later in
2:19:34 the day.
2:19:38 It’s like, they start to feel a level of control over their mood and energy that’s, that’s
2:19:41 so striking with basically zero cost.
2:19:42 Yeah.
2:19:43 I agree.
2:19:44 Yeah.
2:19:47 Sorry to riff on that, but people will probably wonder about specifics.
2:19:54 I want to make sure that we talk about two things and you can decide which one, uh, to
2:19:57 talk about first, what is the ego?
2:20:02 And then the second one is earlier, you described a, um, a set of dynamics across the day and
2:20:06 some concrete things about, you know, how one picks the most important question.
2:20:13 Like, what am I working on today and how to kind of push that into certain portions of
2:20:18 the day, how long to do that, and then how to, you know, stay out of stimulus and response
2:20:22 in the transition points so that you can make the most of that work or, or extract the most
2:20:27 from that work as you head into the evening dinner with your family, sleep, and then wake
2:20:28 up, repeat.
2:20:30 Which one do you think would be most valuable?
2:20:31 Game is go wherever you want to go.
2:20:32 Where should we go?
2:20:33 All right.
2:20:38 Let’s, let’s, before we get practical, um, let’s get a little bit more, um, theoretical
2:20:46 and then get back to practical ego, like the constriction is what comes to mind.
2:20:53 Like the idea that like I want to impose my will on something, uh, I want a certain outcome.
2:20:55 And if I don’t get it, it’s going to hurt in some way.
2:21:00 There’s some punishment mechanism internally like that might drive me to work even harder.
2:21:07 It’s not always bad, but how do you frame ego and, and, uh, I will say that the words
2:21:10 I am, um, seem very important.
2:21:15 Like when people identify as I am the champion in the, I’m part of a champion team in the
2:21:16 NBA.
2:21:21 I’m a Celtic, you know, I’m a player, you know, I’m a Celtics player.
2:21:28 Um, clearly I’m not, but you know, when we attach identity to ego, um, that’s also where
2:21:32 it seems like it kind of deepens the trench a bit, but maybe it can be more relaxed than
2:21:33 the way I’m describing it.
2:21:35 How do you think about ego?
2:21:40 We had, so Graham Duncan, my dear friend joined us at the game last night and, um, Graham,
2:21:46 I consider to be in the realm of like elite mental talent, mapping and assessment to just
2:21:47 be in the league of his own.
2:21:56 He’s such a genius in the realm of, um, uh, of just finding and like, like identifying
2:22:00 people who have world-class potential in mental arenas in really quirky ways.
2:22:02 He’s a, he’s a beautiful soul.
2:22:07 And one of the, the, the ways he frames this in the investment space when he’s looking
2:22:13 at, at high potential investors is like, he doesn’t want to find people who have too specific
2:22:19 an identity in the way that they relate to, um, to what they do to make money, to invest,
2:22:25 to whatever he, like, because it, like there’s something static in like, I am a X, Y or Z
2:22:30 versus I am something more broad than that, which leads to one’s relationship to like
2:22:35 dynamic, to dynamic quality, to rediscovery, to changing as the world changes, right?
2:22:40 Um, I think that, that, um, this relates a little bit to what I was describing in terms
2:22:45 of learning chess locally versus learning chess in a way that connects to all of life,
2:22:49 which is so dynamic.
2:22:54 I think, I spent many years studying, um, I am a Buddhist philosophy and, and so I come
2:22:59 from both a Western and Eastern perspective when I think about the question of ego.
2:23:02 And I think that one of the things that, that happens in the West when we talk about East
2:23:08 Asian philosophy is that we oversimplify it and we, we create, we kind of polarize things.
2:23:12 And I think, so it’s easy to, people talk so quickly about being ego lists, right?
2:23:14 Or say someone is low ego.
2:23:17 And when they say they’re low ego, they don’t actually mean that they’re low ego.
2:23:21 They mean that they have a sound ego structure, like they’re, they’re not in, like if they
2:23:28 say they’re low ego, they’re usually saying that they are, um, they’re, they’re not expressing
2:23:32 insecurity all the time, which means that it’s not that they have a low ego.
2:23:38 It’s that their ego is, is, is not like, is not fundamentally like there’s not a rupture
2:23:40 in the structure that’s leaking all the time.
2:23:48 Um, so the way I, I relate to ego from like a, a competitive perspective or from a, like
2:23:55 a artistic perspective or a self-cultivation perspective is that I relate to it around
2:23:57 dynamic versus static.
2:24:02 And exploration is opposed to being stuck in how one relates to old patterns.
2:24:09 I relate to understanding the emptiness of our, our egoic dynamics, understanding the,
2:24:14 the non-absolute nature of our ego, the relational nature of things, the interconnectedness
2:24:17 and the, and the interdependence of all things.
2:24:21 I think it’s so easy to have an identity, which we think is like, I am this, but we’re
2:24:25 not this, this doesn’t exist out of relation to that.
2:24:28 And that doesn’t relate in relation to this other thing.
2:24:33 So understanding the chain of relationality and then how our ego manifests in all of that.
2:24:40 So having the ability to both dissolve one’s relationship to like static egoic dynamics,
2:24:45 but also, um, having a sense of identity and having a sense of what oneself expression
2:24:49 is and having like when we are, there is this thing about will.
2:24:54 Like when you’re competing, like you can feel when someone has an unbreakable will, like
2:24:58 when you’re matching up against somebody and they’re, and they’re, and they’re wishy-washy,
2:25:00 you can just blow through them.
2:25:05 Um, but you, when they’re, when their will is just like, like, I’ll never forget, Marcelo
2:25:09 Garcia against Colossans in a big, in a big world championship match, putting Colossans
2:25:13 was wrist locking everybody and Marcelo put his hand right into the wrist lock and looked
2:25:14 into his eyes.
2:25:15 It’s like, try it.
2:25:18 Just put his hand into it.
2:25:21 And you can break someone by being unbreakable.
2:25:26 You can see a lot of fights where somebody tries to submit someone and someone is unsubmitted
2:25:30 and the person who has the huge advantage gets broken because they realize, holy shit,
2:25:31 this guy is unbreakable.
2:25:33 And so they become broken, right?
2:25:38 So there’s having the ability to have that, like, when you, when you touch a fighter,
2:25:40 like body fighters all rub up against each other.
2:25:43 You know, like you learn a lot, like feeling someone.
2:25:46 So if you meet like fighters that hug, they’ll give you, you learn so much on the touch,
2:25:50 you know, and like you can feel when someone is, is, is brittle.
2:25:51 Like you touch them.
2:25:55 You can feel, you can feel how much contact they’ve taken, how much they’ve been hit,
2:25:59 how much they’ve absorbed, how much they’ve been abused, how much like they’ve received.
2:26:01 And you can feel like where their energy stops.
2:26:06 You can feel if there’s like, like just, just static things in them.
2:26:10 And then you can also feel when the earth is moving inside of them, when it’s just like
2:26:12 this molten energy is just moving in them.
2:26:18 And then, and when you feel a body that like, like it just can envelop you and it can be
2:26:21 a mountain or it can be like water.
2:26:25 So I relate to ego and that you want to be able to be like water and be like a mountain.
2:26:29 Um, I’ve never answered that question before and I just riffed on that.
2:26:32 So, but that’s like the essence of how beautiful I mean, and, um, and as I walked in here to
2:26:36 take a seat at my chair, I got a good heart slap on the back from you.
2:26:40 And I was wondering if you were testing me, um, I felt you last night too.
2:26:41 Yeah.
2:26:46 I, I won’t, I won’t ask what, what your read of my ego was, but, um, I felt it as a slap
2:26:48 of camaraderie, like, like let’s do this.
2:26:50 Um, it felt great.
2:26:54 And I was also thinking about my good friend, Lex Friedman, who is a black belt in Brazilian
2:26:59 jiu-jitsu and a very intense guy who wears his heart on his sleeve publicly and people
2:27:02 sometimes will take shots at him for that, which really upsets me.
2:27:03 I really respect Lex.
2:27:05 I think what he does is awesome.
2:27:12 I love his podcast and the way he in really prickly issues has gotten it, got people on
2:27:15 both sides of things and welcomes everyone in and has dialogue.
2:27:19 I have a huge amount of respect for how Lex handles himself in the public world.
2:27:20 Yeah.
2:27:21 You guys are to have a fun conversation.
2:27:25 He, uh, he’s going to be jealous that we got a chance to sit down here, but, um, you
2:27:32 know, Lex is, uh, at home and with his friends, it is exactly how he appears to be there.
2:27:39 Like all that, that intense, um, self-torture around what to do and how to frame something
2:27:41 who to talk to, how to talk to them.
2:27:47 Um, that’s, that’s the world he lives in and, um, and, but in terms of his physicality,
2:27:53 like I think it’s hard to understand like just how, um, I mean, like he’s like dense,
2:27:57 like dark matter, you know, like it’s the, it’s the, and I think a lot of guys that
2:28:02 roll a jiu-jitsu, like you shake their hands and like the, there’s a, there’s a solidity
2:28:07 there that’s very, very different, um, than, uh, just muscle.
2:28:12 It’s like people that are just like, um, they’re used to being up against bodies apparently,
2:28:17 you know, so it’s, it’s an experience, you know, um, these are subtle things, but clearly
2:28:18 they matter.
2:28:23 Um, and as you’ve pointed out, one brings them to their professional life.
2:28:27 You bring it to friendships, you know, I can’t think of, I have many super quote unquote
2:28:31 solid friends, but Lex is among the most solid of them.
2:28:32 He’s just beautiful.
2:28:33 His presence.
2:28:34 Yeah.
2:28:39 Which he, in my observation from afar comports himself in the world that I have a lot of
2:28:40 respect for.
2:28:46 And Rick, Reuben, you know, we both know Rick and people know Rick as this bearded, uh, icon
2:28:52 of create, uh, creativity and, and he, he is indeed that, um, the fluidity that he moves
2:28:55 through life with is just, it’s like, it’s astonishing.
2:29:00 I’ve spent a lot of time with him and I don’t want to like get into my observations of Rick,
2:29:09 the Rick is, um, uh, if you will, but, um, it’s astonishing how much attention and, uh,
2:29:13 he puts into creating this thing that we’re talking about space, like getting out of stimulus
2:29:14 and response.
2:29:16 It’s, I don’t think he’d mind me sharing this.
2:29:20 It’s not uncommon for me to like go over, hang out with him and he’ll just say, like,
2:29:24 Hey, like, before we like talk, you want to just like do this meditation and we’ll just
2:29:28 like sit there and meditate and you quickly go into a mindset of like, Oh my goodness,
2:29:33 like, this is like a thing where, and then, but like, nope, you just get into being present
2:29:37 and then, I don’t know, then you hang out and you talk about if you’re us, you know,
2:29:39 the Ramones cause we both love the Ramones.
2:29:40 Yeah.
2:29:43 So, um, I love the way you frame ego.
2:29:51 I think that, that’s very helpful, um, because a physical embodiment of something that is
2:29:56 largely psychological to most people, at least the concept is very helpful.
2:29:57 Okay.
2:30:02 Do you ever, um, just as a practice, just look at how people walk or how they interact
2:30:03 or, um, oh yeah.
2:30:04 Yeah.
2:30:05 I mean, of course, that’s my way of life.
2:30:09 I mean, it’s funny as a, as a chess player, even like I used to study people off the board
2:30:10 all the time.
2:30:11 I’d watch them.
2:30:12 Like you watch.
2:30:16 I remember you used to play these tournaments in Bermuda and once a year, an invitational,
2:30:19 like high level tournament, and then like you’d watch someone walking and they’d get
2:30:23 caught in the rain and you were watching someone in the rain.
2:30:24 You learned so much.
2:30:28 Like, would they just stand and embrace it when they put something over their head and
2:30:29 run away?
2:30:30 What would they do?
2:30:31 Right?
2:30:35 Like, and in general, like I, if someone, if someone has a static, like a negative relation
2:30:39 to the rain, they’re usually pretty controlling and then you have a feel for how to handle
2:30:41 them on the board, create chaos on the board.
2:30:45 Like just, just like mix it up, make it uncontrollable and then, or if someone is like a full free
2:30:51 spirit on the, in the rain, like me, like maybe you want to make the game like a little bit
2:30:58 more quiet, conservative, like strategic, not so chaotic, like where one has to find exact
2:31:03 precise solutions in specific kinds of positions where like you, you can’t improvise, you’re
2:31:04 not finding hidden harmonies and chaos.
2:31:08 You’re finding specific things, right?
2:31:12 Control and rain and, and then the fight, the fight game, man, you’re watching people
2:31:13 all the time.
2:31:18 I mean, you watch fighters watching one another, you see a lot feeling one another, watching
2:31:19 one another.
2:31:24 And I love watching people away from what they do because all those themes are, are,
2:31:29 are much more visible than in when they’re doing what, what they do.
2:31:37 What about in non-competitive endeavors like ballet, opera, music where certainly it’s
2:31:42 competitive in that, you know, you’re competing for people’s attention, time and money, but
2:31:44 you’re not, it’s not direct competition.
2:31:50 Do you spend time working with P-performers in, in these domains where, you know, like
2:31:54 just I heard from someone recently who, she said, you know, I’m a good dancer, but then
2:31:58 I went to New York and I discovered that I’m not such a good dancer.
2:32:02 Like like the level of, of who gets to actually dance in some of the premier venues there is
2:32:07 like so unbelievably high that, and by the way, that shouldn’t discourage anyone.
2:32:11 That should encourage people, show them what’s possible.
2:32:14 Do you work with people like that or is it usually competitive arenas?
2:32:21 I’ve utilized competitive fields as beautiful laboratories for refining my relationship to
2:32:24 the training process because of how relentlessly truth-telling they are, but I also come from
2:32:26 a family of artists.
2:32:31 My grandmother was a brilliant abstract expressionist painter and sculptor, Stella Wateskin, amazing
2:32:32 woman.
2:32:36 She was in the, she was good friends with Hans Hoffman and Koening and Jackson Pollack.
2:32:37 I mean, that was her crowd.
2:32:41 She was part of the, like the early beat generation back in the day.
2:32:44 And I come from a family of artists.
2:32:51 And yeah, I mean, one of the, you know, a lot of what I’m thinking about in recent
2:32:59 years is how to channel my life’s work into making the biggest positive impact possible
2:33:00 in the world.
2:33:06 And I, I’m really worried in this moment, around what’s happening in human consciousness,
2:33:13 the depths of distraction, how can we enhance the human ability to make decisions in an
2:33:17 increasingly complex world where there’s so much misinformation.
2:33:21 And also, you know, how can we, how can we take on humanity’s biggest challenges?
2:33:25 And so for example, one of the projects that I’m really excited about, that I’ve been working
2:33:28 on for the last couple of years is called Lila Science.
2:33:30 And these aren’t competitors, these are scientists.
2:33:35 And we’re, we’re essentially, we’ve, so I was sitting with this question for two or
2:33:36 three years.
2:33:44 Like, who should I partner with to, to try to take on humanity’s biggest challenges?
2:33:46 And I met this guy.
2:33:51 He ended up renting Graham’s house, who we were at the game with yesterday, next door
2:33:53 to mine in Costa Rica.
2:33:56 And his name is Jeff Van Monson.
2:34:02 And Jeff is a, a just a brilliant scientific visionary and creator.
2:34:06 And we ended up having three weeks of dialogue.
2:34:10 And I incidentally like invested one of his companies years before, which was interesting.
2:34:13 But we had like this incredible three weeks of dialogue while he was standing next door.
2:34:16 And then we looked at each other and realized we should be teaming up.
2:34:23 And we’ve, and I’ve also been very close to and observing the world of artificial intelligence
2:34:29 for a long time, partially because Demis Hassibis was a childhood friend of mine.
2:34:32 We grew up playing chess together from when you’re like 11 years old.
2:34:35 And so I’ve observed his journey.
2:34:44 And I think that it’s very interesting in, in chess, like the, the seat that I had watching
2:34:51 the impact on chess of first computers, increasingly powerful machines, and then artificial intelligence
2:34:53 was fascinating.
2:34:58 Because if you, if you imagine like what it’s like to see one’s life’s work be overcome
2:35:04 in three hours of experimentation, like what Alpha zero did, just breathtaking.
2:35:08 And to give some perspective on things as an ELO system in chess, right?
2:35:13 There’s a ranking system, the highest rated chess players in the world, human chess players
2:35:16 are rated, you know, from Gary Gasparov, Magnus Carlson, Bobby Fisher.
2:35:23 All the world champions are rated somewhere in the 2,800 to 2,900 level, right, ELO.
2:35:27 The strongest AI engines now are north of 3,800 ELO.
2:35:31 And just for context of how wild that gap is, when I was eight years old, my rating was
2:35:32 1,800.
2:35:33 Right?
2:35:37 So the gap between me at eight, which is like I was ridiculous.
2:35:42 And the world champion, human is the same gap as the world champion and the strongest
2:35:43 AI engines in the world.
2:35:49 And so like it’s very hard for humans to conceive of being the ants, right, relative
2:35:50 to the humans.
2:35:53 We are the ants now in terms of where we soon will be, what is possible.
2:35:56 And I, I think that that could be channeled for the good or it could be channeled for
2:35:57 the bad.
2:35:59 And the question, the, what are the motivations of the people who are really driving these
2:36:00 companies?
2:36:05 So I’ve been thinking for a long time, I’ve had to combine like what’s the light side
2:36:08 of the force of the artificial intelligence world.
2:36:14 And what Jeff and I and a dear friend, Chris Fussell, who is a brilliant man who, he wrote
2:36:16 team of teams in one mission.
2:36:21 He was elite Navy SEAL, and then he ended up running Joint Special Operations Command,
2:36:22 JSOC with Stan McChrystal.
2:36:26 Then he was president of the McChrystal group, and now he’s president of Lila Science.
2:36:30 Jeff Chris and I, and a brilliant man named Jack Millwood, who’s the chief cultural officer,
2:36:32 have been teaming up.
2:36:35 And I brought, I brought together this tribe of a few different brilliant friends who were
2:36:37 part of this.
2:36:44 And it’s basically taking cutting-edge science and taking cutting-edge AI, bring them together
2:36:50 to create scientific superintelligence, focused on, and we’re creating these AI science factories
2:36:55 where the entire scientific process can be replicated, can be driven nonstop.
2:37:00 The way AlphaZero was driving nonstop iteration in the chess world, what if this is happening
2:37:01 in the scientific process?
2:37:08 So pose a hypothesis, isolate variables, test hypothesis, feedback to hypothesis, confirm
2:37:10 or deny hypothesis, and just…
2:37:15 An experimental design, an experimental execution, and then study of experimental results, and
2:37:17 study of the entire scientific literature.
2:37:25 And imagine all of that happening with robotics, with 3,800 ELO-rated scientists, AI scientists,
2:37:28 and then millions of them networked.
2:37:32 And now if you have this, from my perspective, the most important thing is the safety, right?
2:37:36 And I think that a lot of these AI companies aren’t prioritizing safety first, we are.
2:37:39 And I think, for me, it’s been a really important thing, because I’ve been sitting with this
2:37:43 question for a lot of years, like in order to do something like this, you have to trust
2:37:50 that the people who are driving it, if they have max temptation, but something could be,
2:37:55 like the Manhattan Project, could be potentially negative for humanity, that they would not
2:37:59 push the button, they would lead to the satisfaction of all their dreams, if it would be taking
2:38:01 an existential risk for humanity.
2:38:03 And this team, I really believe in that way.
2:38:06 And so what’s most exciting to me about this is the material science side.
2:38:11 I mean, the life sciences, the eradication of disease, it’s unbelievable what could happen.
2:38:14 I think we’ll be blown away by what happens in the coming years.
2:38:18 But the material science part of it, for me personally, is what matters most, because
2:38:22 I really don’t think it matters if humans are all living for 150, 200 years, if we have
2:38:24 no climate to live on.
2:38:25 Right.
2:38:30 And the material innovations that could be emerging in the coming years to take on the
2:38:32 climate crisis are breathtaking.
2:38:36 So it’s a project I’m deeply involved in, and it has nothing to do with competition.
2:38:41 I mean, I guess everything is competitive from one perspective, but this is about driving
2:38:42 discovery, driving innovation.
2:38:43 I love it.
2:38:49 It also reflects your clearly repeating pattern of being willing to segment your life into
2:38:56 different goals and different pursuits, applying what you’ve learned previously, learning
2:38:57 new things, and incorporating those.
2:39:00 It brings me back to two things that we touched on earlier.
2:39:05 One, that if we don’t close the hatch on, we’re going to get it from the listeners, which
2:39:06 is this paper that we both read.
2:39:09 I just want to, or took a look at.
2:39:11 Before the paper, let me just say one important thing.
2:39:15 To me, what you just said really hits home.
2:39:18 But I think while one is taking on all these different things, for me personally, it’s
2:39:20 important to always be in the fire.
2:39:25 I need to be training myself like what I’m doing on the ocean every day in my own training.
2:39:29 The thing that drives me crazy are armchair quarterbacks, or what Robert Persig used to
2:39:34 call “philosophologists,” which are like the literary critics versus the writer, or
2:39:38 the philosopher versus the philosopher, or the armchair quarterback versus the quarterback.
2:39:45 So for me, my way of life, it’s hard for me to believe in anybody in these things who
2:39:47 isn’t putting themselves on the line as a way of life.
2:39:54 So my own ocean training, and my own competitive training, and being immersed in the truth-telling
2:40:00 nature of the competitive world is something that I feel is really, like, we never have
2:40:01 the truth nailed.
2:40:04 We’re never liberated from our egoic dynamics.
2:40:07 We’re always susceptible to becoming static.
2:40:14 I’ve really come to feel that, and I don’t believe, so it’s a big value system for me.
2:40:21 In the daily physical interactions with the ocean, with fear, with uncertainty, with just
2:40:26 variables that you can’t control and try to identify what are the variables I can control
2:40:34 in this context and work with those to try and tease out new learning.
2:40:37 That running those algorithms every day seems absolutely essential.
2:40:44 There’s nothing like the ocean to expose any little micro-inkling of, like, the illusion
2:40:46 of control, because you cannot control the ocean.
2:40:48 You can’t overcome the ocean.
2:40:52 The ocean’s going to kick your ass, so you need to blend with her and receive her and
2:40:53 honor her.
2:40:58 Yeah, like, that’s where I do my inner work out there.
2:40:59 Okay, your study.
2:41:00 Go ahead and do it.
2:41:04 Well, so it’s not my study, but this paper that I sent you, I think, is really interesting.
2:41:07 It’s a paper published in the journal Neuron, a very fine journal.
2:41:08 Excellent paper.
2:41:12 We’ll post a link to it, but it has many interesting features.
2:41:17 It’s really about the study of surprise and the dopamine system, but they use, as the
2:41:25 experimental context, people watching a game of basketball, and they observe that the reset
2:41:31 on sort of the interval timer is essentially said anytime there’s been a reversal of which
2:41:38 team has the ball, so drive down court by one team, then the other team, and if there’s
2:41:43 a rebound and then it switches direction, whatever, might not switch direction.
2:41:48 Basketball provides the perfect dynamic to study this while there’s some detection of
2:41:50 brain activity going on.
2:41:55 And one of, I think, the most interesting questions about this paper and implications
2:42:02 are that just as we can set the aperture of our vision or the frame rate of how well
2:42:06 we’re clocking time, how finally we’re clocking time, or how coarsely we’re clocking time,
2:42:10 there’s this big question, which is kind of a philosophical question, really, which is
2:42:12 how do we segment time in our life?
2:42:20 Earlier you mentioned that one of the major kind of time stamps, if you will, is a bad
2:42:26 event, like the things went completely differently than I would have preferred them to.
2:42:31 It could be the death of another, it could be the death of a dream, it could be a setback,
2:42:36 whatever, that it marks time and we just had these fires, I mean, LA will be before and
2:42:41 after the fires of 2025.
2:42:47 I remember early in 2020, Kobe Bryant dying, so these things, I remember the Challenger
2:42:54 explosion, like negative events occupy a certain place in our memory more easily than positive
2:42:59 events, but no one will forget the birth of their first child or hopefully their second
2:43:02 child too if they had a second child or their wedding day, right?
2:43:05 These things segment time.
2:43:14 You seem to be able to segment your life into a series of pursuits where you cut ties with
2:43:18 the practice of something like chess and you take what you learned and move it forward
2:43:23 into what seems to be a very different lifestyle and way of being.
2:43:28 I think one of the major challenges for a lot of people, it seems, is how to thread the
2:43:35 different elements of their life forward in a way that feels contiguous.
2:43:43 I think it’s probably true that most people would prefer to not have major losses be
2:43:51 necessary in order to segment their life in the most fulfilling way.
2:43:53 How do you think about the segmentation of time?
2:43:57 Maybe we’ll run this backward from the scale of your lifetime.
2:44:00 We don’t know how long you’ll live, but hopefully a long time.
2:44:03 That’s assumed by way of standard genetics somewhere in the neighborhood of between
2:44:06 90 and 110, if you take good care of yourself, which you seem to.
2:44:07 Sounds good.
2:44:17 Then let’s compare that to how one structures a day and that will allow us to bring us back
2:44:20 to what you talked about before with this most important question dynamic and focus
2:44:25 and replenishing and dynamic between conscious and unconscious mind.
2:44:28 When you think about your life, you’re 48 years old?
2:44:29 Yeah.
2:44:34 I’m 49, so we’re more or less the same point looking backward anyway.
2:44:37 Our lives are very different, but same age roughly.
2:44:43 If you think you’re going to live to be about 100, how are you thinking about your time
2:44:44 frame?
2:44:47 Are you thinking, “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do for the next five years.
2:44:53 10, I’ll allow whatever is happening in my life to dictate what I do next.”
2:44:56 How are you running this analysis?
2:44:58 That’s an awesome question.
2:45:02 We’re basically taking all the macro and all the micro and we’re going to boil it down
2:45:03 right here.
2:45:13 That was a very expansive, elegant question.
2:45:23 I think the true answer, it’s interesting, I find this distinction when I think about
2:45:30 a question like that, between how I actually relate to the question and how I might deconstruct
2:45:35 how I actually relate to the question to make it relatable, but is the deconstructed version
2:45:44 actually true to how I really relate to the question, because accurate deconstruction
2:45:50 is so nuanced and difficult.
2:45:59 How I experientially relate to that question is that I want to live my life with just relentless
2:46:04 truth to myself, with authenticity, with love, with receptivity.
2:46:13 I want to deepen my connection to what I’m doing, the arts I’m practicing in specifically,
2:46:20 and in utilize and tapping into my relationship to the universe through the artistic exploration.
2:46:27 I have not planned out the next 10, 20, 40, 50, 60 years.
2:46:31 I do have a long time horizon on how I think about plans and developments and projects
2:46:40 I’m working on, but it’s like this fusion of the cultivation of full presence right
2:46:45 now and playing the long game.
2:46:50 I’m not clear on where the long game is going, but one of my dear friends, Boyd Vardy, you
2:46:51 know Boyd?
2:46:53 I know of him and I’m a huge admirer of his work.
2:46:54 You should have him on.
2:46:55 He’s awesome.
2:46:58 Or you should go to South Africa and go on a light track with him.
2:46:59 Oh, sorry.
2:47:00 I didn’t mean to.
2:47:01 Yeah.
2:47:04 I’ve been connected to him through Martha Beck, the previous guest on this podcast,
2:47:05 and they’re good friends.
2:47:11 They’ve spent a lot of time in Lone Delosi together, and I’d love to get Boyd Vardy on
2:47:12 here.
2:47:13 He’s a beautiful soul.
2:47:14 He’s a real brother.
2:47:15 He’s a kindred spirit.
2:47:22 Every once in a while, you run into someone you’re like.
2:47:29 In his book, Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, he has this gorgeous quote, which is the
2:47:33 words of a master tracker, Reneas.
2:47:38 I have no idea where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.
2:47:43 When I read those words, I was just like, they resonated very deeply in my soul.
2:47:46 I think those words are really good.
2:47:47 I would take out the exactly.
2:47:50 I don’t know anything exactly, so I don’t know where I’m going.
2:47:57 But I have a really beautiful sense that I’m tracking my way there.
2:48:01 You’ve got a process that seems to work very well, at least up until this point.
2:48:06 There’s no reason to think it wouldn’t work well, especially given that you said not exactly,
2:48:14 leaving that openness to changes in our biology, life events in and for people around us.
2:48:17 I have a big part of me, and it’s a strength and a weakness.
2:48:20 I think a lot when I meet people, I think a lot about the entanglement of their brilliance
2:48:23 and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction.
2:48:27 When you’re working with peak performers, you need to understand it, and its entanglement
2:48:28 is often very, very complex.
2:48:31 People can think, “Oh, I can make this person more efficient by just removing this,” but
2:48:36 that will be connected to their genius, and you’ll be cutting some of it away.
2:48:41 When you’re working with crazy, brilliant, and anyone who’s really a virtuoso has some
2:48:45 craziness built into what they’re doing.
2:48:51 The entanglement of their brilliance and their dysfunction is so complex and nuanced,
2:48:56 and one should be very careful to not do anything until one understands that entanglement with
2:48:57 huge nuance.
2:49:03 The art of coaching people of that nature is 99.9% listening, observing, not doing.
2:49:07 One of the biggest mistakes that coaches make is doing too much, because they need to show
2:49:09 that they’re valuable.
2:49:14 So I think a lot about, we need to really understand the nature of that entanglement,
2:49:25 and in me, that entanglement’s complex, and I have a profound allergy to being untrue
2:49:26 to myself.
2:49:27 Why?
2:49:32 Well, I think a big part of the reason is that period when I was 15, 16, 17, 18 years
2:49:36 old and I described where I got pulled into this externalized thing from the film and the
2:49:43 public scrutiny when I wasn’t ready for it and being urged and not having the maturity
2:49:48 to resist it, because that’s ultimately on me, is to take on chess outside of my self-expression.
2:49:50 What would Karpov do here or not?
2:49:51 What would Josh do here?
2:49:56 And I didn’t have the understanding of learning Karpov through Kasparov.
2:50:02 And so my first love was taken away from me, or I allowed myself to have it taken away
2:50:09 from me, which is how I’d actually frame it, and it was made static and stale and corrupted
2:50:10 and externalized.
2:50:17 And there’s so much existential heartbreak in me about the loss of that first love that
2:50:26 I have the gift of being just fucking allergic to being untrue to myself.
2:50:31 And so that’s part of how I track through life, is if I don’t love someone, I don’t
2:50:34 work with them, no matter what the temptation is.
2:50:37 If something feels untrue to me, I don’t do it.
2:50:42 Now sometimes we have to sit in the unknowing for a while, and something can be off for
2:50:43 a while.
2:50:48 It’s like there’s peaks and valleys of everything, and in the learning process we can have long
2:50:49 plateaus.
2:50:56 Like when I stopped playing chess, I felt like I’d lost the love, but I sat for two years
2:51:00 with the question to be clear on whether I was in a plateau of the love or if I’d lost
2:51:01 the love.
2:51:02 And again, clarity.
2:51:03 No, no, you’ve lost the love.
2:51:04 And then I was done.
2:51:05 Never played again.
2:51:08 Never played a chess game again.
2:51:10 So that factored in.
2:51:27 Like I have this, it’s so interesting how our most powerful guiding principles or voices
2:51:30 in us can come from our deepest wounds, right?
2:51:31 They absolutely do.
2:51:38 I mean, I think it’s a, because I think, you know, that this concept of energy is a complicated
2:51:40 one, and there’s no clear definition anyway.
2:51:42 But when I think about energy, I don’t think about caloric energy.
2:51:44 I think of neural energy.
2:51:50 And I think about certain neural circuits like that, like if you, like I love the feeling
2:51:57 of excitement and tension that then is funneled into a specific activity that then yields
2:52:02 some new vista repeat, you know, it’s just that that’s science and that’s learning.
2:52:07 The day I realized that I’ll never, you know, saturate all the knowledge that I could gather,
2:52:13 organize and disseminate through the podcast, I was like, yes, like that’s just great because
2:52:18 there’s, but I realized also that think we can saturate ourselves internally.
2:52:21 We can drive ourselves to the point of no replenishment.
2:52:24 We can, you know, get so narrow focus.
2:52:26 That’s why I think so much about aperture in time and space.
2:52:31 We can get so narrow focus that we end up, you know, like a gopher that, you know, dug
2:52:35 our way into a desert and then we’re like, where you’re just far from your family or
2:52:39 far from home, you know, because you’re just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.
2:52:45 So you know, I think what is it, you know, like eagle vision, you know, what I would,
2:52:50 I think that the diving birds are probably the ultimate in terms of having panoramic
2:52:51 vision.
2:52:52 Do you know this?
2:52:55 They have a horizon viewing density of cells so they can view the horizon and they have
2:53:02 a pupil to view the fish so that they can dive and grab the fish, despite the refraction
2:53:06 of light under the water because the fish isn’t actually where they see it.
2:53:10 When people say eagle vision versus, you know, like, you know, what’s it, what, you know,
2:53:12 like predator vision up close or something.
2:53:16 Like cormorants, like they hit, so they’re like the diving birds.
2:53:17 Those birds, yeah.
2:53:18 Yeah.
2:53:24 So they’re flying and they’re tracking the horizon and they’re also tracking things right
2:53:26 below them simultaneously.
2:53:31 That to me is the ultimate state to try and achieve in terms of space and time tracking.
2:53:32 That’s a beautiful metaphor.
2:53:35 And they have to also adjust for, right, the refractory.
2:53:39 And if you’ve tried, like, archery from above water under water, which I used to paddleboard
2:53:45 while playing with a, like spearfishing above water with a bow, that refraction is hard to
2:53:46 calculate.
2:53:47 Yeah.
2:53:51 Diving seabirds are the ones that really just, I’m going to do it like they’re the
2:53:52 ultimate.
2:53:53 I’m going to do a study there.
2:53:54 Yeah.
2:53:55 I want to learn about them.
2:53:56 Okay, great.
2:53:57 That’s beautiful.
2:53:58 Yeah.
2:53:59 I can send you some literature there.
2:54:00 I’d love it.
2:54:01 I’d love it.
2:54:06 The time you did of a day is what most people can manage in their minds.
2:54:14 Maybe you could return to this, like, cycle of conscious focus, stimulus response and getting
2:54:15 out of that.
2:54:20 I love the example of going to take a piss because everyone does it.
2:54:23 I do think too many people do it holding a phone.
2:54:24 Yeah.
2:54:25 Oh my God.
2:54:28 Can’t be good for a number of reasons.
2:54:30 Maybe just walk us through that.
2:54:35 So do you think it’s, let me ask a series of short questions.
2:54:38 So when I wake up in the morning, for instance, like many people, I’m not, I don’t feel immediately
2:54:39 alert.
2:54:43 I don’t feel like I could just dive into writing if writing is the most important thing I need
2:54:46 to do that day or I have some transition time.
2:54:51 So do you think that people should embrace natural transition times on the time scale
2:54:56 of a day or that they should train themselves to like, you know, bounce into effort?
2:55:02 Like go with the flow or force oneself through the door?
2:55:06 Well how I relate to that personally, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about day architecture.
2:55:12 I call it day architecture and there’s, I think there’s some very systematic things
2:55:18 we can do and I think, but I think like anything, they should be individualized, right?
2:55:21 I don’t think that everyone should follow a certain model because we’re all very different.
2:55:26 One of, you know that old book that Tim actually produced the audio book, Daily Rituals?
2:55:27 Oh yeah.
2:55:30 Like one of the best things about Daily Rituals is how few patterns there are through them.
2:55:31 It’s just hilarious.
2:55:32 I love that look.
2:55:33 We’ll put a link to it.
2:55:34 It’s such a good book.
2:55:35 So good.
2:55:39 I’m so glad that Tim Ferriss, who we’re referring to, collected all these habits of different
2:55:43 writers and like some of them are so quirky and crazy and some of them are downright dangerous.
2:55:46 We published the audio book of it, right?
2:55:50 And I think I told Tim, he’ll remind me, I think I might have, I think I told Tim about
2:55:54 that book like many, many years ago and he did the audio book and it’s so good.
2:55:55 It’s so good.
2:55:57 And it just follows the daily routine.
2:55:59 It break down the daily routine.
2:56:04 It’s like two to three to four page chapters on like a hundred some brilliant artists and
2:56:08 scientists and creators and they’re just so random.
2:56:12 And they’re somewhere out partying all night, drugs, alcohol, caffeine, others are super
2:56:14 regimented and monk like.
2:56:19 It’s the range of daily architectures is so vast.
2:56:24 So I think we need to have like that awareness and that sense of humor and humility about
2:56:26 it and we can get systematic and structured at the same time.
2:56:28 I think it’s important to hold both of those.
2:56:35 I mean, what you just asked, I do believe that that beautiful period when we first wake
2:56:38 up and that dream state is so powerful.
2:56:43 And I think that people almost, almost all people immediately pick up their phone and
2:56:48 start checking messages, which just shuts down one’s awareness of what’s been happening
2:56:50 beneath the surface all night.
2:56:54 So I think that that’s a real lost opportunity.
2:56:57 I remember when I was 11 years old, I read this.
2:57:02 My dad actually gave me this, this Hemingway essay on his creative process.
2:57:06 And there’s one of my favorite, sometimes there’s like an insanely potent book that’s
2:57:10 put together and it’s two that come to mind are Lessons of History, which is this short
2:57:15 compilation of Will and Ariel Durant, two of the greatest historians who’ve published
2:57:17 tens of thousands of pages.
2:57:20 This is a short compilation of a handful of thematic essays.
2:57:25 It’s only like a hundred pages of all their life’s work boiled down to a few themes.
2:57:26 It’s unbelievably potent.
2:57:30 And Hemingway on Writing is another book of that nature, which takes all of Hemingway’s
2:57:36 from, from his, from his books, from his letters, private letters, from his articles and essays
2:57:41 and notebooks, like everything is written about the creative process and boils it into
2:57:44 this like short book on his principles of creativity.
2:57:45 Just unbelievable.
2:57:48 But before that book came out, I read this piece, the short thing he’d written about
2:57:52 the creative process, which was essentially he’d always leave a sentence unwritten.
2:57:56 He’d end his work day with a sentence like half written.
2:58:01 So leaving with a sense of direction, and then he would let it go, you know, he would
2:58:05 go out drinking, he would do all the things that Hemingway did, and then he returned to
2:58:06 it first thing in the morning.
2:58:09 And that like unwritten sentence had become a paragraph and a page in his mind, and it
2:58:11 would be a way to hit the ground running.
2:58:16 And that’s what really spurred me to start creating this process in my chess life of
2:58:20 always ending my chess study with something left, like posing my unconscious of question,
2:58:24 like studying the complexity and then releasing it, which later became, and then tapping into
2:58:27 the first thing in the morning, pre-input, which later became my MIQ process.
2:58:32 And then I developed team wide MIQ processes of the teams that I work with all have versions
2:58:37 of the MIQ that they utilize as individuals, but then as teams, and it’s an amazing way
2:58:42 to develop a shared consciousness and a team to have everybody be able to tap into the
2:58:46 question that’s top of mind for every member of their team or for a leader to be able to
2:58:50 be aware of what is the most important question for every one of my scientists or my analysts
2:58:51 or anything.
2:58:56 It’s a really powerful way to cultivate shared consciousness, and it becomes our game tape.
2:59:02 Because if we’re tracking our MIQs, let’s say I’m studying something for three weeks
2:59:05 or for four weeks.
2:59:09 And what do I think is, if I’m tracking the questions that I think are most critical for
2:59:15 that thing, and I’m deepening my analysis of it, what I think in day one will be very
2:59:17 different from the MIQ in day 14.
2:59:21 And then we can study the gap, and then we can study the patterns of the gaps, and this
2:59:23 is what I call MIQ gap analysis.
2:59:26 So if I’m studying a chess position, like if I play a chess game against you and it’s
2:59:32 incredibly complex, and I don’t quite understand this position, and then I do a deep, deep
2:59:38 analysis of it, what I’ll arrive at after 14 or 16 or 18 hours of study will be different
2:59:41 from what I felt during the game.
2:59:45 Now what’s interesting is, this is a cool thing about chess study, if my understanding
2:59:50 was here during the chess game, after a few hours, I might be really far away from that.
2:59:56 But after I’ve completed the study, I’ll usually be very similar, but deeper.
3:00:00 So it’s often deeper, closer than where you were after a few hours of study, but it’s
3:00:02 like a deeper level in.
3:00:08 But what’s the gap between that and that, between where I was in the game, and what are
3:00:09 the patterns in the gaps?
3:00:13 And then if you think about those patterns in the gaps through those lenses of the technical,
3:00:20 the thematic, and the psychological, we deconstruct it in that way, then that becomes our game
3:00:21 tape.
3:00:24 One of the hardest things for mental athletes is to actually have game tape the way basketball
3:00:28 players do, or foilers do, or fighters do, where you can see the actual game tape, we
3:00:30 need to create our mental game tape.
3:00:35 So this is a way that both enhances the creative process and creates the game tape for the
3:00:36 training process.
3:00:42 And then studying the gap analysis we do reveals what we need to focus our deliberate
3:00:43 practice on.
3:00:48 This difference between physical endeavors and cognitive endeavors, I think is so key.
3:00:54 Nowadays, most people are involved in cognitive endeavors, and it’s basically like being in
3:00:56 a glass house with windows everywhere.
3:01:02 I mean, social media, texting, windows, internet connection on the computer, there’s just so
3:01:06 many points of entry where one can become distracted.
3:01:11 Whereas if you paddle out to ocean, sure, you could bring your phone perhaps, but you’re
3:01:17 limited by the environment and the need for safety of the number of things that you can
3:01:18 think about.
3:01:22 It’s funny, I wore an Apple Watch training a little bit on the ocean.
3:01:27 And it was good for me, because I wanted to align my intuition on speed with what actually
3:01:29 it was showing, and it was good to calibrate myself.
3:01:32 But man, I took it off.
3:01:36 It’s so much better being on the ocean without technology, like being liberated from it,
3:01:38 tracking, but yeah.
3:01:40 I’m learning to turn stuff off while I work.
3:01:45 I mean, I have had to learn to just fight things back because when I started in science,
3:01:50 I mean, I didn’t have a smartphone, I didn’t have any of that, and yet one really has to
3:01:54 fight nowadays for their freedom from these interruptions.
3:01:58 So it’s something that people really have to cultivate.
3:02:01 So in terms of the structure of that day, you pose a question for the day, like the most
3:02:04 important question, would it be like, let’s say, like I’m working on a revision of this
3:02:09 book that I delayed release on because I wanted to add a bunch of things to it.
3:02:13 So would one say, the most important question is, how do I finish this book today?
3:02:17 Or is there, I’m guessing it’s more conceptual than that.
3:02:22 I think that you can, I mean, it’s a tool that one can utilize tactically or strategically.
3:02:26 So it can be, like if you’re in creative flow, just leaving yourself with a sense of direction,
3:02:33 or it can actually be zooming out and thinking about what is the highest order question that
3:02:35 I’m grappling with.
3:02:39 But I think it’s like, one wants to stretch for the, if one is doing the latter, the higher
3:02:45 order strategic thinking, it’s like, you can think of like, one is stretching for the question
3:02:51 that matters most with the same kind of intellectual or cognitive intensity that one is experiencing,
3:02:57 for example, pushing yourself from like 168 to 176 in cardiovascular interval training,
3:02:58 right?
3:02:59 Like you’re really stretching mentally.
3:03:02 So you need to be at your stretch point, growth comes at the point of resistance, right?
3:03:07 So we, like, but intellectually, we’re not used to really feeling when we’re at our stretch
3:03:08 point.
3:03:10 So we’re thinking about a question, but that’s a question, what’s the higher order question?
3:03:12 What’s the higher order question?
3:03:13 What’s the question that really matters?
3:03:17 And one way to frame it is like, our mind, if we’re good at something, slices like, like
3:03:21 a knife through butter, through most, most things, but then there’s a place where stuck.
3:03:26 Like those stuck points are the MIQs, those stuck points are like, right?
3:03:27 Like we don’t need to wait.
3:03:30 We don’t need to think, but mind will just get there like, oh, but that’s the thing.
3:03:33 And then we explore there, like what, how does that stretch within that stuck point?
3:03:37 And that’s usually where people, including myself, pivot away.
3:03:41 I’m thinking outside of the work domain now, like, like, I don’t want to think about, like
3:03:48 it’s when we tend to, I noticed that there’s an infinite amount of distraction available
3:03:54 nowadays, if we want it, and, you know, audiobooks and podcasts, and I think podcasts are wonderful,
3:03:57 but you know, they can be a source of distraction from the critical question we need to be asking
3:04:01 or they can be a source of answers for perhaps the critical questions we’re asking.
3:04:08 But there’s just so, there’s so many of these opportunities to just look away from, from
3:04:13 something that is like a, it’s like a emotional infection.
3:04:16 It’s different than an infection in your skin that’s nagging because you can feel it there
3:04:20 and you want to get that thing out, right, very, very primal instinct, like get that
3:04:22 thing out, get the infection out.
3:04:26 This is like an emotional infection that you can just kind of not see if you choose to
3:04:30 turn away, but those are the things that really get you over time.
3:04:34 That’s why we do our cold water training, like that’s where we like, we train at living
3:04:38 on the other side of pain of enjoying it, like that place, that place that like itches,
3:04:44 like bounce away from that, but that’s where we need to sit, right, right, but we can practice
3:04:48 that thematically, like loving that discomfort, wanting it, hunting for it, like finding the
3:04:52 place where we’re stuck, and then letting it sit and then not bouncing away from it,
3:04:56 but just releasing it and then returning to it.
3:04:57 And we have insights, right?
3:05:01 Because often in those moments, like where we have our insights are, like when we wake
3:05:03 up in the morning, are in those stuck points.
3:05:08 And I find it’s very interesting, I’m sure you’ve done this, like I’ve done like hundreds
3:05:13 of diagnostics with people on my teams, like where do they have most of their creative breakthroughs?
3:05:16 And so many of them are in the shower, it’s really interesting.
3:05:21 I think a big part of that is that like the full body somatic immersion moves them out
3:05:26 of conscious thinking into like, because their mind is experiencing.
3:05:30 And then the release of the conscious mind allows the unconscious to run and then they
3:05:31 tap into it.
3:05:35 The first thing in the morning is when I get my insights or understanding or when the
3:05:39 truth hits me square in the face, like there’s no avoiding I wake up, I think about like,
3:05:41 okay, that’s the thing I got to deal with.
3:05:44 And I tend to write it down right away, try not to write it down on my phone.
3:05:49 I think having a point of capture that doesn’t offer any other distractions, that’s why I’m
3:05:50 a big believer in pen and paper.
3:05:51 I 100% agree with you.
3:05:54 And like, well, so first of all, I agree, first thing in the morning, that’s the juice
3:05:59 and the whole MIQ process is geared toward harnessing that, like tapping into that, right?
3:06:03 Like feeding the mind, because that just happened to me so many dozens of times where I would
3:06:06 just have the insight in the morning, but then I realized I should be finding the areas
3:06:10 of stuckness and feeding it to myself to have the insight about.
3:06:13 So it’s like, it’s like directing that creative process.
3:06:17 But then if we open up our phones, like if the moment we start to see emails without reading
3:06:21 them or see anything, we’re unconsciously solving for what’s in the emails.
3:06:22 Yeah, it’s all stimulus response.
3:06:23 You’re going into stimulus.
3:06:28 If people can start to think about being reflective versus in stimulus response, I think that’s
3:06:31 sort of like the widest bending of all this.
3:06:35 I have to say the shower, I’ve talked about this thing about why people have insights
3:06:38 in the shower with my friend, I’d love to introduce you to him at some point.
3:06:42 We’ve been friends since we were seven years old, my friend, Dr. Eddie Chang, he’s a neurosurgeon
3:06:46 and the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF and he studies speech and language and he’s taken
3:06:50 people locked in syndrome and developed AI algorithms so that they can speak through
3:06:56 a screen with their face moving in real time by decoding human speech or human speech cortex
3:06:58 and a truly brilliant individual.
3:06:59 He’s been on this podcast.
3:07:00 He’ll come back again.
3:07:04 Ask him about the shower thing because he used to work on neuroplasticity of the auditory
3:07:06 system.
3:07:14 We think, we wonder if it’s the kind of white noise of the shower as well because Eddie’s
3:07:17 done beautiful work showing that it’s the signal to noise in the auditory system that
3:07:23 defines whether or not a certain pattern of speech or auditory cue gets remembered.
3:07:28 When you have this in the background, let’s just put this in the terms that we’ve been
3:07:30 referring to this up until now.
3:07:35 The thoughts that surface above that noise have a big sharp peak relative to the background.
3:07:38 It’s the signal to noise whereas certainly the opposite would be when you’re on your
3:07:42 phone and you’re scrolling through and you’re looking at all the thoughts and feelings and
3:07:43 stuff of other people.
3:07:48 How do you capture your own thoughts in terms of which are and filter them through what’s
3:07:53 meaningful and what’s not meaningful is I think actually a really important question
3:08:01 to begin with and white noise background with very deprived visual stimulation.
3:08:02 Most showers aren’t that interesting.
3:08:07 It’s white noise, blank walls, a few things that are familiar to you so they basically
3:08:10 disappear from your visual field.
3:08:15 The idea is that thoughts that are constantly geysering up through your unconscious mind
3:08:20 can be captured because everything else is noise, perhaps.
3:08:23 This is a hypothesis and maybe I’ll put you and Eddie together sometime and just be an
3:08:24 observer.
3:08:25 I’d love that.
3:08:26 That sounds, yeah.
3:08:27 That’s powerful.
3:08:28 That’s how we learn language.
3:08:32 It’s the error signals against the background noise.
3:08:35 That’s how you fix stutter.
3:08:37 You create background noise.
3:08:43 You increase noise, which actually elevates signal in the auditory system oddly.
3:08:51 In any case, you found that four and a half hours was the sweet spot of a focused work,
3:08:52 but for some people, it might be an hour.
3:08:54 They might need to train up that level of focus.
3:09:02 If it’s four and a half hours, the rest of the day is feeding into those being brilliant.
3:09:05 If it’s four and a half hours of creative output time, then there are other periods
3:09:08 where one can have inputs that feed it.
3:09:12 I think it’s very good for people to have an awareness of what their peaks and valleys
3:09:15 are of their energy throughout the day and then align their peak creativity work with
3:09:16 their peak energy periods.
3:09:21 I think it’s really important to not be in a constantly reactive state.
3:09:23 One of the things I find fascinating is how people will have meetings scheduled everywhere
3:09:27 and then fit their thinking between meetings and how liberating it is for them when they
3:09:30 actually block out their time for creative output time.
3:09:36 It might be color coded in their calendar and then have meetings fit around there.
3:09:41 Their day is driven by their self-expression as opposed to by a constant set of reactivity
3:09:43 and just more and more and more and more.
3:09:47 I think harnessing the undulation of stress and recovery throughout the day is hugely
3:09:48 important.
3:09:52 I think having workouts throughout the day, even micro-workouts during their day, meditation
3:09:55 periods during their work day, everything being quality over quantity.
3:09:58 We can get so much more done.
3:10:07 If you think about it, you talk about elite performing competitive teams.
3:10:13 If you saw how much video analysis and time that the Boston Celtics coaching staff puts
3:10:20 in to what ends up being a 35-second clip that’s shown to a player or the team, it’s
3:10:27 so much work to then the most potent thing.
3:10:31 The players are doing something so intense.
3:10:34 It’s all about quality.
3:10:35 Not quantity.
3:10:37 They’re not training basketball 17 hours a day.
3:10:40 They could not possibly play then.
3:10:48 They’re training brilliantly for maybe an hour and a half a day, brilliantly, scientifically,
3:10:53 or if they’re playing for a two and a half to three hour game.
3:10:54 What’s the way to optimize for that?
3:10:57 You don’t stack six hours of training in before a three hour game.
3:10:58 No.
3:11:03 So much of it is body work and setting some tape and then being primed in the right way
3:11:07 to remember what you’re looking at on tape and then taking breaks and returning to it
3:11:11 and then understanding exactly how much load is in your body and your mind and having your
3:11:14 sleep right and your nutrition right and getting everything optimized and then being
3:11:17 a peak performer when it’s on.
3:11:21 We don’t have that discipline as mental beings very often, but we should in our creative
3:11:27 process, in our relationships, right, in the art of being a mom or a dad or a husband or
3:11:32 a wife or a friend, like why wouldn’t we be cultivating ourselves and being brilliant
3:11:33 at that?
3:11:34 Like I really believe in quality as a way of life.
3:11:36 That’s another very important principle for me.
3:11:41 If we’re either practicing sloppiness or practicing quality, if we do something shitty, then we’re
3:11:48 practicing shitty and that will just have like we can harness them like thematic interconnectedness
3:11:49 on the positive side.
3:11:51 We can also really harness it brilliantly on the negative side.
3:11:55 Every time we practice being sloppiness, we’re using thematic interconnectedness to be sloppy
3:11:56 in everything.
3:11:59 I really believe that.
3:12:01 So quality as a way of life is a beautiful way to practice quality everywhere because
3:12:04 it will manifest everywhere, right?
3:12:09 Not in a way that’s like robotic or constrictive, no, in a way that’s self-expressive and beautiful.
3:12:11 Living one’s life like a work of art.
3:12:12 Yes.
3:12:13 Beautiful.
3:12:14 Amen.
3:12:15 Let’s do it.
3:12:19 Clearly, you are.
3:12:20 I’m in the fight, man.
3:12:27 You’re in the fight and you’re setting an incredible example and you have your entire life, which
3:12:31 is remarkable and so deeply appreciated.
3:12:37 I have to say and now I will reveal this, that when I started this podcast, I had a short
3:12:41 list of people that would be kind of like pinch me guests, not because I want the guests
3:12:46 to pinch me, but like, wow, I can’t believe I’m sitting down with blank and you were on
3:12:47 that list.
3:12:53 I’ve read the art of learning, I’ve watched and read everything I could about your work
3:12:59 and I did see that the search for Bobby Fisher with the understanding that that’s accurate
3:13:01 about certain things and probably inaccurate about others.
3:13:03 So if people choose to watch that, they should keep that in mind.
3:13:06 It is Hollywood.
3:13:14 More importantly, I’ve had this chance to sit down and do this and I have to say, I
3:13:25 gained so much from your incredible precision, but also scope of observation in the world
3:13:30 because I’m not a basketball player, I don’t know how to play chess and yet I’ve learned
3:13:36 so much from you and your writings and your teachings and just the chance to sit down here
3:13:37 and to learn from you.
3:13:41 I know I’m speaking on behalf of myself and literally millions of people, I just want
3:13:50 to say thank you for living your life like a work of art and for incorporating public
3:13:57 education, which is what we’re doing here, into this set of pursuits that you’ve been
3:14:05 after, one after the other, but that are bound by this set of core themes.
3:14:09 So without getting too abstract, I just want to say thank you so much for coming here,
3:14:11 for educating us, for making us think.
3:14:18 I know it’s going to change people’s thoughts and behavior for the better and the only question
3:14:22 left is to say, would you please come back and talk to us again more?
3:14:23 Absolutely, man.
3:14:24 Thank you for what you’ve just said.
3:14:27 It’s an honor and I’ve learned so much from this jam.
3:14:31 It feels like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, so just the beginning.
3:14:32 I feel the same way.
3:14:33 I look forward to it.
3:14:34 Thank you, man.
3:14:38 Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Josh Waitskin.
3:14:41 To learn more about Josh’s work and to find a link to his book, The Art of Learning, which
3:14:45 by the way, I highly recommend, please see the show note captions.
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3:15:42 For those of you that haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out.
3:15:44 It’s my very first book.
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3:15:50 This is a book that I’ve been working on for more than five years, and that’s based
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3:16:07 And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
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3:16:59 Thank you once again for joining me for today’s discussion with Josh Waitskin.
3:17:03 And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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