#73: A Chess Prodigy on Mastering Martial Arts, Chess, and Life

Josh Waitzkin was the basis for the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. This episode is DEEP, in the best way possible. Considered a chess prodigy, he has perfected learning strategies that can be applied to anything, including his other loves of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (he's a black belt under phenom Marcelo Garcia) and Tai Chi Push Hands (he's a world champion). These days, he spends his time coaching the world's top performers, whether Mark Messier, Cal Ripken Jr., or hedgefund managers. I initially met Josh through his incredible book, The Art of Learning. Our first long conversation on the podcast (#2) can be found on iTunes or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaMtGuCgm8

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, we'll see in an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, you sexy little munchkins. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are billionaire investors, celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, musicians, or, for instance, chess prodigies. And this episode is a much-awaited, much-requested follow-up to my second podcast, the number two of The Tim Ferriss Show with Josh Waitzkin, who is a close friend of mine. He was the basis for the book and the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. He is considered a chess prodigy, but I don't think that word "prodigy" applies to him very well, because it's not a mutation. He doesn't have alien genetics. He has perfected, instead, learning strategies

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  and frameworks that can be applied to anything, including some of his other loves, like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, in which he's a black belt under the phenom Marcelo Garcia, considered the Michael Jordan of the sport, and oftentimes called the best grappler to ever walk the planet, or Tai Chi push hands, for instance, in which Josh became a world champion. These days, he spends a lot of his time coaching other top performers in the world, whether Mark Messier, Cal Ripken, or top-performing hedge fund managers. And Josh and I have very complementary approaches. He tends to focus on getting people from, say, 99% to top 99.999%. But we have very complementary approaches, a lot of overlap. And I initially met Josh through his book, The Art of Learning, and loved it so much that we made an audiobook

• 1:51Tim Ferriss?

  together, which you can hear in its entirety at audible.com/timsbooks. But I wanted to feature one particular piece that's highly relevant to some big news coming soon. And this is an essay, a chapter by Josh, called "Making Smaller Circles or Creating Smaller Circles." And this is about how to... Focus on the micro, something very, very small, whether it's in chess, martial arts, or elsewhere, to learn extremely powerful macro principles that apply everywhere. So, principles over tactics, if that makes sense. Flexible principles over memorization. And I am really excited to provide this to you guys for a few reasons.

• 2:32Tim Ferriss?

  Number one, it's one of my favorite concepts of Josh's, and he uses it with incredible results in so many different areas. And really listen to the details in this. And if you're like, "Ah, this doesn't relevant to me," just keep listening, because there are a lot of gems in this episode. And also, I'm excited because as of April 28th, you will be able to see in-depth video of me working with Josh on the chessboard and on the mats, getting my ass kicked by Marcelo Garcia and his warriors in New York City. So if you want to see me get choked, get my ribs broken, but occasionally pull off miracles, which Josh and I then deconstruct to show you how you can replicate them, then I can't

• 3:15Tim Ferriss?

  give you too much info right now, but on the 28th, that's April 28th, or any time after, this is 2015, go to iTunes.com/TimFerriss, T-I-M-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, or go to 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, /tv. And I promise you, you will not be disappointed. So, without any further preamble, I would like to mention just a few other things. The first is, this episode is brought to you by Vimeo. And Vimeo is a love of mine for several years. I've been an avid user, and I love movies.

• 3:54Tim Ferriss?

  I am a movie fanatic, and consume a lot of documentaries, a lot of shorts, and use fiction, or scripted, movies to turn off my problem-solving mind before I go to bed, oftentimes. And I am going to mention a couple of movies that are available on demand on Vimeo, and you can watch this certainly on your laptop, your device, but also on Apple TV. Vimeo is on Apple TV, for instance. And a few that... Have been super popular with you guys that I've recommended. So World of Tomorrow, which is the most incredible 16-minute sci-fi short I've ever seen. It's one of the most thought-provoking things you could take 16 minutes to watch, believe me, is one. And you can check this out if you just go to fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, forward slash Vimeo,

• 4:39Tim Ferriss?

  V-I-M-E-O. The other one that really took off with you guys, which is not too surprising, was Waking Up with Sam Harris, which is an incredible lecture by Sam Harris, PhD, neuroscience expert, and just all-around genius, character, and a good friend. If you want to learn more about meditation, but not in the woo-woo way, if you really want to learn how to wake up, per se, you got to check this out. And this is a list that I'll continue to update. Another one that some of you saw, which is extremely shocking and extremely brilliant, is The Act of Killing. The new one that I'll mention, which I am planning on watching this weekend, is Valley Uprising. And Valley Uprising, so I have sweaty palms just thinking about this movie. And I actually went to the climbing gym today, so it's very relevant, for the

• 5:23Tim Ferriss?

  first time in about a year. This is an award-winning, award-winning, award-winning film that tells the story of explorers and madmen, emphasis on madmen, who've been drawn to climb Yosemite's massive cliffs. These are the big walls in California. And I've seen the trailer, you should check out the trailer. This is an exclusive to Vimeo, so you have to check it out on Vimeo. And I am looking forward to it, because I think that some of the most incredible athletes, and most insane athletes in the world, are the people who do big wall climbing. So I'm going to check that out. And I'm going to continue to add to this list as I see things and find things that are of interest to me, or that really, really

• 6:01Tim Ferriss?

  impact me. So check it out. Go to fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo, V-I-M-E-O. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The Four Hour Body, did not get paid for that. And I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases if I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my God, 50% off, yes, 50% off if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 6:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional planning. So for me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body. And check it out, athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 7:06Josh Waitzkin?

  Making smaller circles. My search for the essential principles lying at the hearts of and connecting chess, the martial arts, and in a broader sense, the learning process, was inspired to a certain extent by Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'll never forget a scene that would guide my approach to learning for years to come. The protagonist of Persig's story, a brilliant, eccentric man named Phedrus, is teaching a rhetoric student who was all jammed up when given the assignment to write a 500-word story about her town. She can't write a word. The town seems so small, so incidental. What could possibly be interesting enough to write about? Phedrus liberates the girl from her writer's block by changing the assignment.

• 7:48Josh Waitzkin?

  He asks her to write about the front of the opera house outside her classroom, on a small street, in a small neighborhood of that same dull town. She should begin with the upper left-hand brick. At first, the student is incredulous, but then a torrent of creativity unleashes, and she can't stop writing. The next day, she comes to class with 20 inspired pages. I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention deficit culture.

• 8:28Josh Waitzkin?

  We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cellphones, video games, the internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we're like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally-induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect.

• 9:08Josh Waitzkin?

  Let's return to the martial arts. I think it's safe to say that many people consciously or unconsciously associate the term "martial art" with legend and film. We think of ninjas passing invisibly through the night, or shrouded heroes running up walls and flying through the air in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. We see wild leaping Van Damme kicks and Jackie Chan flips. We watch completely unrealistic choreography, filmed with sophisticated aerial wires and raucous special effects. And some of us come away wanting to do that stuff too. This leads to the most common error in the learning of martial arts: to take on too much at once. Many kung fu schools fuel this problem by teaching numerous flowery forms, choreographed sets of movement, and students are rated by how many forms they know.

• 9:53Josh Waitzkin?

  Everyone races to learn more and more, but nothing is done deeply. Things look pretty, but they're superficial, without a sound body mechanic or principled foundation. Nothing is learned at a high level, and what results are form collectors with fancy kicks and twirls that have absolutely no martial value. I had a different approach. From very early on, I felt that the moving meditation of Tai Chi Chuan has the primary martial purpose of allowing practitioners to refine certain fundamental principles. For example, shifting weight by releasing the hip joints, ever-deepening relaxation, the coordination of mind, breath, and body, awareness of internal energies, winding up to deliver a strike,

• 10:36Josh Waitzkin?

  coiling incoming force down into the ground, rooting, emptying one part of the body while energizing another. Many of them can be explored by standing up, taking a stance, and incrementally refining the simplest of movements. For example, pushing your hands six inches through the air. With the practice of this type of simplified motion, you can feel the subtlest ripples inside the body. You become aware of all the tension that resides in your feet, legs, back, and shoulders. Then you release the tension, step by step, hour by hour, month by month. And with the fading of tension comes a whole new world of sensation. You learn to direct your awareness inside the body, and soon enough your fingers come alive with tingling. You feel heat surging up your back and through your arms.

• 11:21Josh Waitzkin?

  The Tai Chi system can be seen as a comprehensive laboratory for internalizing good fundamentals, releasing tension, and cultivating energetic awareness. I practice the Tai Chi meditative form diligently, many hours a day. At times, I repeated segments of the form over and over, honing certain techniques while refining my body mechanics and deepening my sense of relaxation. I focused on small movements, sometimes spending hours moving my hand out a few inches, then releasing it back, energizing outwards, connecting my feet to my fingertips with less and less obstruction. Practicing in this manner, I was able to sharpen my feeling for Tai Chi. When through painstaking refinement of a small movement, I had the improved feeling, I could translate it onto other parts of the form, and suddenly everything would start flowing at a higher level.

• 12:07Josh Waitzkin?

  The key was to recognize that the principles making one simple technique tick were the same fundamentals that fueled the whole expansive system of Tai Chi Chuan. This method is similar to my early study of chess, where I explored endgame positions of reduced complexity. For example, king and pawn against king, only three pieces on the board. In order to touch high-level principles, such as the power of empty space, Zugzwang, where any move of the opponent will destroy his position, tempo, or structural planning.

• 12:36Josh Waitzkin?

  Once I experienced these principles, I could apply them to complex positions because they were in my mental framework. However, if you study complicated chess positions and middle games right off the bat, it's difficult to think in an abstract, axiomatic language because all your energies are preoccupied with not blundering. It would be absurd to try to teach a new figure skater the principle of relaxation on the ice by launching straight into triple axels. She should begin with the fundamentals of gliding along the ice, turning, and skating backwards with deepening relaxation. Then, step by step, more and more complicated maneuvers can be absorbed while she maintains the sense of ease that was initially experienced within the simplest skillset. So, in my tai chi work, I savored the nuance of small morsels.

• 13:20Josh Waitzkin?

  The lone form I studied was William Chen's, and I took it on piece by piece, gradually soaking its principles into my skin. Every day, I did this subtle work at home, and then tested it in class that night. It was easy to see whether something worked or not because training with advanced players like Evan usually involved one of us getting smashed onto the wall. In these intense sparring sessions, showy moves didn't work. There was no margin for idealized fanciness. Things happened too quickly. It soon became clear that the next step of my growth would involve making my existing repertoire more potent. It was time to take my new feeling and put it to action.

• 13:59Josh Waitzkin?

  When skilled martial artists face off, it's very different from choreographed Hollywood fight scenes. High-level practitioners rarely overextend, and they know how to read incoming attacks. Large fancy movements like cinematic spinning back kicks usually don't work. They're too telegraphed and take too long to reach the target. A boxing jab is much more effective because it covers little distance, it's quick, and it's fundamentally sound.

• 14:23Josh Waitzkin?

  A critical challenge for all practical martial artists is to make their diverse techniques take on the efficiency of the jab. When I watched William Chen spar, he was incredibly understated and exuded shocking power. While some are content to call such abilities "chi" and stand in awe, I wanted to understand what was going on. The next phase of my martial growth would involve turning the large into the small. My understanding of this process, in the spirit of my Numbers to Leave Numbers method of chess study, is to touch the essence, for example, highly refined and deeply internalized body mechanics or feeling of a technique, and then to incrementally condense the external manifestation of the technique while keeping true to its essence. Over time, expansiveness decreases while potency increases.

• 15:08Josh Waitzkin?

  I call this method "making smaller circles." Let's combine Persig's brick with my concept of making smaller circles and see how they work.

• 15:19Josh Waitzkin?

  Let's say that I'm cultivating a certain martial technique. For a simple example, a classic straight punch. I stand with my left leg forward, my hands up by my head to protect my face. The jab is a short punch coming from the left forward hand. The straight is the power punch coming from the ground, generating through my left foot and moving through my left leg, torso, diagonally across and up to the right side of my back, through the shoulder, tricep, and finally delivered by the second and third knuckles of my right hand. First, I practice the motion over and over in slow motion. We have to be able to do something slowly before we can have any hope of doing it correctly with speed. I release my left hip, wind up, and spring the right hand into motion as my left foot and hip joint

• 16:04Josh Waitzkin?

  spin my waist and upper body into action. Initially, I'll have tension in my shoulder or back, but then I'll soothe it away, slowly repeating the movement until the correct body mechanics are in my skin. Over time, I'm not thinking about the path from foot to fist. I'm just feeling the ground connecting to my fingertips, as if my body is a conduit for the electrical impulse of a punch. Then I start speeding things up, winding up and delivering, over and over. Eventually, I start using a heavy bag, practicing these body mechanics with increasing power, building resistance in my body so I can deliver more and more force without hurting myself. My coiling gets stronger, and sometimes I hit the bag with a surprising pop, a dangerous moment. When hitting something instead of moving through empty space,

• 16:49Josh Waitzkin?

  I might start to get excited and throw my shoulder into the punch. This is a classic error. It breaks my structure and destroys the connection from foot to fingertip. Many boxers make this mistake and come away with shoulder injuries. I want a punch without punching, no intention. My teacher, William Chen, sometimes teaches punching by telling students to pour a cup of tea. It's a beautiful thing. Pouring tea creates the perfect punch because people's minds don't get in the way.

• 17:18Josh Waitzkin?

  Okay, so now weeks and months, maybe years, pass with the cultivation of the right straight punch. I know how to wind up properly. When I hit the bag, nothing hurts. There are no breaks in my structure. It feels as if the ground is smashing the bag through my fist, and my body mechanics are smooth and relaxed. I've also built up quite a bit of power from all the work with winding up, coiling, and releasing the body into motion. When throwing my right, I don't think about anything technical anymore. My body just knows the right feeling and does it. No mind, it's in the blood. I've learned how to throw a straight right, but not really. The thing is, unless they're flustered or caught in an awkward moment,

• 18:01Josh Waitzkin?

  a good fighter is rarely going to get caught with a big, old, long, wound-up straight punch. It's just too obvious. This is where making smaller circles comes into play. By now, the body mechanics of the punch have been condensed in my mind to a feeling. I don't need to hear or see any effect. My body knows when it's operating correctly by an internal sense of harmony. A parallel would be a trained singer, who through years of practice, knows what the notes feel like vibrating inside. Then she's giving a concert in a big venue, and the sound system is a nightmare. From onstage, she can't hear herself at all, a surprisingly common occurrence. The great performer can deliver a virtuoso performance without hearing a thing because she knows how the notes should feel coming out,

• 18:46Josh Waitzkin?

  even if her primary monitor, her ears, are temporarily unavailable. So, I know what a properly-delivered straight right feels like. Now I begin to slowly, incrementally, condense my movements while maintaining that feeling. Instead of a big wind-up in the hips, I coil a little less. And then I release the punch. While initially I may have thrown my straight from next to my ear, now I gradually inch my hand out, starting the punch from closer and closer to the target, and I don't lose power. The key is to take small steps so the body can barely feel the condensing practice. Each little refinement is monitored by the feeling of the punch, which I gained from months or years of training with the large, traditional motion.

• 19:29Josh Waitzkin?

  Slowly but surely, my body mechanics get more and more potent. My waist needs little movement to generate speed. My hand can barely move and still deliver a powerful blow. Eventually, I can deliver a straight punch that looks nothing like a straight punch. If you've ever watched some of the most explosive hitters in the boxing world, for instance, Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali, you've seen fights where knockouts look completely unrealistic. Sometimes you have to watch in slow motion, over and over, to see any punch at all. They've condensed large circles into very small ones and made their skills virtually invisible to the untrained eye. The Chessic manifestations of this phenomenon are quite interesting. For example, arguably the most fundamental chess principle is central control.

• 20:13Josh Waitzkin?

  At all levels of play, the competitor who dominates the middle of the chessboard will usually have an advantage because from this placement, his or her pieces can influence the entire battle. Curiously, if you study the games of some very strong grandmasters, they seem to completely disregard this principle. The British star, Michael Adams, might be the clearest case in point. His pieces are often on the flanks, and he appears to casually give opponents central dominance. And yet, he wins. The secret behind this style of play is a profound internalization of the principles behind central domination. Michael Adams knows how to control the center without appearing to have anything to do with the center. He has made the circles so small, even grandmasters cannot see them.

• 20:58Josh Waitzkin?

  This concept of making smaller circles has been a critical component in my learning process in chess and the martial arts. In both fields, players tend to get attached to fancy techniques and fail to recognize that subtle internalization and refinement is much more important than the quantity of what is learned. I think it was this understanding that won me my first push hands national championship in November of 2000, after just two years of Tai Chi study. Surely, many of my opponents knew more about Tai Chi than I did, but I was very good at what I did know. I had condensed my body mechanics into a potent state, while most of my opponents had large, elegant, and relatively impractical repertoires. The fact is that when there is intense competition, those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the rest.

• 21:43Josh Waitzkin?

  It's rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather, a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skillset. Depth beats breadth, any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

• 22:03Tim Ferriss?

  I'm back, ladies and gents. This is Tim Ferriss, otherwise known as Tim Timbo Ferriss Esquire. And I want to reiterate that if you want to see Josh in action with me collaborating to try to look at the micro in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to master the macro, and there are a lot of bumps along the way, but including a lot of principles from chess, it is so worth watching. Go to, after April 28th, at any point, iTunes.com/TimFerriss, T-I-M-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. I really encourage you to check it out. You will not be disappointed. The guy is a master, and it's very rare to get the kind of footage that I was able to get, so check it out.

• 22:44Tim Ferriss?

  And if you missed it the first time around, my favorite movies, some of my favorite movies, new obsessions, things like Valley Uprising, which I'm going to be blocking out time to watch, World of Tomorrow, which I mentioned, 16 minutes, well worth your time, Waking Up, Act of Killing, there are others, and I'm going to be adding movies as I fall in love with them to this page. Go to...

• 23:07Tim Ferriss?

  Vimeo.com/ondemand/discover/TimFerriss, but that's really long. So, go to 4hourworkweek.com/vimeo instead. 4hourworkweek, all spelled out. 4hourworkweek.com/vimeo. V-I-M-E-O. And you can watch these on your Apple TV. There are a bunch of different ways to watch stuff. And some of the movies are exclusive to Vimeo. So, definitely check them out. That's number one. And my favorite green supplement, Athletic Greens. I've used them for many years. Anyone who's read The 4-Hour Body knows this. Never got paid to endorse them. That's not how I work. So, also, just a side note. Check out athleticgreens.com/tim and you can get 50% off for a very limited time. This stuff is not cheap, but it is a very good investment for avoiding sickness and health. That's how I use it.

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  But let me take a step back because some people are like, you know, oh, my God. Like, Tim is getting paid to promote stuff. What the fuck? And let me just clarify something here. I don't need sponsorship money. So, when things appear on this podcast, I fall in love with them first. And then, sometimes, they approach me to be on the podcast because I've developed a relationship with them after using their product. I do not promote stuff that I don't use myself. End of story. That's how it works. So, think of it as just me sharing things that I have used and gotten value from. So, there you have it. Athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance plan. Check it out. And Vimeo. Good stuff.

• 24:35Tim Ferriss?

  There's another one I'm going to be checking out. I think it's the Greasy Hands Preachers. Oddly enough, Greasy Hands Preachers, which may or may not be on my page, but I'm very excited about it because I think it's looking at sort of manual literacy and really working with your hands, which is something I'm striving to do more of. Anyway, that's it, guys. As much as I love talking to myself in my kitchen and broadcasting out to the interwebs, I'm going to save my breath for another episode. And until then, thank you for listening.