Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life

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.
0:14:49 I’ve been using Wealthfront for my savings and my investing for nearly a decade.
0:14:51 And I absolutely love it.
0:14:53 Every January, I set new goals for the year.
0:14:57 And one of my goals for 2025 is to focus on saving money.
0:15:00 Since I have Wealthfront, I’ll keep that savings in my Wealthfront cash account where
0:15:05 I’m able to earn 4% annual percentage yield on my deposits and you can as well.
0:15:10 With Wealthfront, you can earn 4% APY on your cash from partner banks until you’re ready
0:15:12 to either spend that money or invest it.
0:15:16 With Wealthfront, you also get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts every day,
0:15:18 even on weekends and holidays.
0:15:21 The 4% APY is not a promotional rate.
0:15:23 There’s no limit to what you can deposit and earn.
0:15:27 And you can even get protection of up to $8 million through FDIC insurance provided through
0:15:29 Wealthfront’s partner banks.
0:15:33 Wealthfront gives you free instant withdrawals where it takes just a few minutes to transfer
0:15:35 your money to eligible external accounts.
0:15:39 It also takes just minutes to transfer your cash from the cash account to any of Wealthfront’s
0:15:42 automated investment accounts when you’re ready to invest.
0:15:47 There are already over a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build
0:15:48 long-term wealth.
0:15:51 Earn 4% APY on your cash today.
0:15:57 If you’d like to try Wealthfront, go to wealthfront.com/huberman to receive a free $50 bonus with a $500
0:16:00 deposit into your first cash account.
0:16:03 That’s wealthfront.com/huberman to get started now.
0:16:06 This has been a paid testimonial of Wealthfront.
0:16:08 Wealthfront brokerage isn’t a bank.
0:16:09 The APY is subject to change.
0:16:12 For more information, see the episode description.
0:16:15 Today’s episode is also brought to us by Our Place.
0:16:18 Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware.
0:16:23 Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as the PFASs or Forever chemicals are still found
0:16:29 in 80% of non-stick pans, as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products.
0:16:33 As I’ve discussed on this podcast, these PFASs or Forever chemicals like Teflon have
0:16:38 been linked to major health issues such as endocrine disruption, gut microbiome disruption,
0:16:43 fertility issues, and many other health problems, so it’s really important to avoid them.
0:16:46 This is why I’ve recently fallen in love with Our Place products, especially one of
0:16:50 their cooking pans, the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
0:16:55 Our Place products are made with the highest quality materials and are all PFAS and toxin-free.
0:16:58 They’re beautifully designed and function extremely well.
0:17:01 As I mentioned, I love the Titanium Always Pan Pro from Our Place.
0:17:06 I cook eggs in it most mornings, and the Titanium Pan is designed in a way that allows the eggs
0:17:08 to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan.
0:17:12 I also cook burgers on it, and it really puts a nice sear on the burger without the meat
0:17:13 sticking to the pan.
0:17:17 It’s extremely easy to clean, and like all Our Place products, it’s nice to look at
0:17:19 when sitting out on the counter or stove.
0:17:24 For a limited time, Our Place is offering an exclusive 20% discount on their innovative
0:17:29 Titanium Always Pan Pro, designed to last a lifetime and completely toxin-free.
0:17:35 Visit fromourplace.com/huberman and use the code SAVEHUBERMAN20 to claim the offer.
0:17:40 With a 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can experience this
0:17:42 game-changing cookware with zero risk.
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.
0:43:25 I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.
0:43:31 AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens.
0:43:36 AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs, and it tastes great.
0:43:41 Now, I’ve been drinking AG1 since 2012, and I started doing that at a time when my budget
0:43:43 for supplements was really limited.
0:43:47 In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement, and I’m so glad
0:43:49 that I made that supplement, AG1.
0:43:54 The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from whole foods and
0:43:58 minimally processed foods, it’s very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins
0:44:02 and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone.
0:44:06 And I need to do that in order to ensure that I have enough energy throughout the day, I
0:44:09 sleep well at night, and keep my immune system strong.
0:44:13 But when I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my
0:44:17 mental health, and my performance, both cognitive and physical, are better.
0:44:21 I know that because I’ve had lapses when I didn’t take AG1, and I certainly felt the
0:44:22 difference.
0:44:26 I also notice, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome
0:44:30 and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, which for me means serving in the morning
0:44:34 or mid-morning, and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity
0:44:36 and more mental energy.
0:44:43 If you’d like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer.
0:44:48 For this month only, January 2025, AG1 is giving away 10 free travel packs and a year
0:44:50 supply of Vitamin D3K2.
0:44:56 Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year supply
0:44:58 of Vitamin D3K2.
0:45:04 Again go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year supply
0:45:06 of Vitamin D3K2.
0:45:08 Today’s episode is also brought to us by Juve.
0:45:11 Juve makes medical grade red light therapy devices.
0:45:16 Now if there’s one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it’s the incredible
0:45:19 impact that light can have on our biology.
0:45:22 Now in addition to sunlight, red light and near-infrared light have been shown to have
0:45:27 positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellar and organ health, including faster
0:45:31 muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, improvements in acne, meaning
0:45:36 reductions in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even
0:45:38 improving visual function itself.
0:45:42 What sets Juve lights apart and why their my preferred red light therapy device is that
0:45:47 they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near-infrared
0:45:51 light in specific combinations to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations.
0:45:55 Personally, I use the Juve whole body panel about three to four times per week, typically
0:45:59 in the morning but sometimes in the afternoon, and I use the Juve handheld light both at
0:46:01 home and when I travel.
0:46:07 If you’d like to try Juve, you can go to Juve, spell joovv.com/huberman.
0:46:11 Juve is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400
0:46:13 off select Juve products.
0:46:19 Again, that’s Juve, joovv.com/huberman to get up to $400 off.
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.
1:13:20 I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach
1:13:21 to lab testing.
1:13:25 While I’ve long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program
1:13:30 for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my
1:13:35 hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral
1:13:39 status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.
1:13:43 Function not only provides testing of over a hundred biomarkers key to physical and
1:13:48 mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from talk doctors
1:13:50 on your results.
1:13:54 For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had two high levels
1:13:55 of mercury in my blood.
1:13:57 This was totally surprising to me.
1:14:00 I had no idea prior to taking the test.
1:14:04 Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor-informed insights on
1:14:09 how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because
1:14:13 I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens
1:14:18 and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production
1:14:22 and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels.
1:14:25 Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I’ve been
1:14:29 doing it for years, I’ve always found it to be overly complicated and expensive.
1:14:33 I’ve been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting
1:14:39 the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently
1:14:43 joined their advisory board and I’m thrilled that they’re sponsoring the podcast.
1:14:48 If you’d like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com/huberman.
1:14:52 Function currently has a waitlist of over 250,000 people, but they’re offering early
1:14:54 access to Huberman lab listeners.
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.
1:43:26 I’d like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, Eight Sleep.
1:43:30 Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
1:43:34 Now I’ve spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts
1:43:36 of quality sleep each night.
1:43:39 Now one of the best ways to ensure a great night’s sleep is to ensure that the temperature
1:43:42 of your sleeping environment is correct.
1:43:46 And that’s because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually
1:43:48 has to drop by about one to three degrees.
1:43:52 And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually
1:43:55 has to increase about one to three degrees.
1:43:58 Eight Sleep makes it very easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment
1:44:02 by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle,
1:44:04 and end of the night.
1:44:07 I’ve been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly four years now, and it has
1:44:11 completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep.
1:44:15 Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod cover called the Pod
1:44:16 4 Ultra.
1:44:19 The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity.
1:44:22 I find that very useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of
1:44:27 the night, even colder in the middle of the night, and warm as I wake up.
1:44:31 That’s what gives me the most slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep.
1:44:34 It also has a snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees
1:44:37 to improve your airflow and stop your snoring.
1:44:42 If you’d like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, you can go to atesleep.com/huberman
1:44:45 to access their Black Friday offer right now.
1:44:49 With this Black Friday discount, you can save up to $600 on their Pod 4 Ultra.
1:44:51 This is Eight Sleep’s biggest sale of the year.
1:44:57 Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.
1:44:59 Again, that’s atesleep.com/huberman.
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.
3:14:49 If you’re learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube
3:14:50 channel.
3:14:52 That’s a terrific zero-cost way to support us.
3:14:56 Please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple.
3:14:59 And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review.
3:15:03 Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today’s episode.
3:15:06 That’s the best way to support this podcast.
3:15:09 If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or topics or guests that you’d
3:15:13 like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section
3:15:14 on YouTube.
3:15:16 I do read all the comments.
3:15:20 And if you’re not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social
3:15:21 media platforms.
3:15:27 So that’s Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn.
3:15:31 And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps
3:15:35 with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content
3:15:36 on the Huberman Lab podcast.
3:15:39 Again, that’s Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
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.
3:15:47 It’s entitled “Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body.”
3:15:50 This is a book that I’ve been working on for more than five years, and that’s based
3:15:53 on more than 30 years of research and experience.
3:15:59 And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols
3:16:02 related to focus and motivation.
3:16:07 And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
3:16:11 The book is now available by presale@protocallsbook.com.
3:16:13 There you can find links to various vendors.
3:16:15 You can pick the one that you like best.
3:16:19 Again, the book is called “Protocalls, An Operating Manual for the Human Body.”
3:16:23 And if you haven’t already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network
3:16:28 newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes everything from podcast summaries
3:16:32 to what we call protocols in the form of brief, one-to-three-page PDFs that cover things
3:16:36 like how to optimize your sleep, how to regulate your dopamine.
3:16:39 We also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure.
3:16:43 Get a lot of questions about that, deliberate heat exposure, and on and on.
3:16:45 Again, all available at completely zero cost.
3:16:50 You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down
3:16:51 to newsletter, and enter your email.
3:16:55 And I should mention that we do not share your email with anybody.
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.
3:17:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]
3:17:09 (upbeat music)