#2292 - Josh Waitzkin

Josh Waitzkin is a retired chess champion, martial artist, author, and foil surfer. www.joshwaitzkin.com This episode is brought to you by Intuit TurboTax. Now this is taxes. Get an expert now at TurboTax.com Don’t miss out on all the action - Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using dkng.co/rogan or with my promo code ROGAN. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 1 per new customer. $5+ first-time bet req. Max. $200 issued as non-withdrawable Bonus Bets that expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: dkng.co/dk-offer-terms. Ends 3/30/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Whenever someone is like an interesting person and then I find out they do jujitsu too, I go, "Oh, I could talk to that guy for sure."

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:21Joe Rogan?

  You know? You know, I get excited when interesting people do jujitsu because I think for the outsider, to a lot of people that are, you know, they haven't been exposed to what it's like to train and what it's like to be around high-level jujitsu people, they don't, uh, they don't know that vibe, they don't know what it's like, they don't know the, um, the beauty of jujitsu. I feel like jujitsu is beautiful for people who practice it, you know, like you see, like Marcelo is a great example, your, your coach. You know, Marcelo is probably one of the most beautiful guys to watch because he just takes advantage of these scrambles in this like really beautiful way, like fast and,

• 1:06Joe Rogan?

  and slippery, and when the opponents react, he reacts in the other way. It's all just technique and flow, it's like, "Ah!" Like, the first time I ever saw him, I saw him live in 2003 in Abu Dhabi, and it was when he fought Chow Lin. That was the first time I'd ever seen him in the flesh.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Epic, choked him out in like eight seconds, 10 seconds?

• 1:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god, this is crazy scramble, but no one even knew him, no one knew of him other than, you know, he was obviously, I think he was a brown belt at the time, I don't even think he was a black belt. I think Marcelo might have been a brown belt.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  That's interesting, I didn't, in 2003?

• 1:41Joe Rogan?

  Find that out, was Marcelo a brown belt when he won Abu Dhabi in 2003? He may have, Eddie Bravo was a brown belt when he tapped out Hojler.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  He told me recently, right before that fight, his, um, like his grips had locked up, so he came, went into that fight, it looks incredible, just that arm drag, take the back, choked him out in seconds.

• 1:58Joe Rogan?

  His like hands?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, his like grips from the fight before were like...

• 2:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, when, when Eddie beat Hojler, he was a brown belt?

• 2:05Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, John Jock took his black belt off of his own waist and put it on Eddie.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Amazing, amazing.

• 2:13Joe Rogan?

  Dude.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  That's epic. So, it's funny, my background, we have a lot of overlap in our early jujitsu education because my first teacher was John Machado.

• 2:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  And I spent years training with John in LA.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Long before and then I'm, yeah.

• 2:30Joe Rogan?

  And then when did you move to New York?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  So I moved to New York. I think I started training with John. So I was doing Chinese martial arts for a bunch of years before that, competing everywhere. Then I started training, cross-training with John in, I think, 2001, 2002. And then early 2005, moved back to New York, started training with Marco Santos in his school in New York. And I was training with Zhukov and Alison Britis. Zhukov is an amazing old-school brace Baja, like, you know, amazing fighter. And I was also cross-training with Lucas Lebri at the time. And I was, I needed, I was just ready to, and then I met Marcelo and I was, and he had moved from New York to Florida. And I was traveling to Florida to train with Marcelo a bunch. And I wanted to be pushed all in.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  And Marcelo and I had gotten really close. And then I, I just said to him, hey, man, you know, you wanna, you wanna come back to New York and open a school together? And he really loved New York. And we gotten very close.

• 3:29Joe Rogan?

  Where was he at the time?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  He was in Florida. He was in New York before. He loved New York, but then he had to move to Florida. He'd been, there was just a lot of jiu-jitsu politics flowing everywhere, as it does.

• 3:40Joe Rogan?

  Jiu-jitsu politics.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  The worst. And, yeah, anyway, long story short, we opened a school together after that. And it was amazing. And I spent so many years all in, training with him. Most, such a beautiful, beautiful martial artist.

• 3:55Joe Rogan?

  So in 2002, he was promoted to black belt. So he was already a black belt?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:59Joe Rogan?

  Because this is 2003?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:01Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Sounds right.

• 4:02Joe Rogan?

  So he had only been a black belt for a year and won Abu Dhabi, which is pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. Just that. I mean, didn't just beat Chow Lin, won the entire division, and just looked like no one, anybody had ever seen. Just the scrambles and his ability to arm drag and take the back. And then, once he gets to your side, the ability to transition to the back is just phenomenal.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And he spends his, like, his whole jiu-jitsu life, he spent in the scramble, in transition. And that was really a philosophy of his. Have you seen that old, old-school Arte Suave clip? Remember the old documentaries, Arte Suave? From back there, around him as a young teenager, training at Fabregas' school in Sao Paulo. And it was so interesting, because even then, you could see him, he never held position. He always let opponents move. Be fun to pull that up, maybe, at one point.

• 4:53Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Like, he, he, he never, is, a core principle of his was to allow the opponent to move and spend as much training time as possible in transition. And while most jiu-jitsu guys, as you know, as they're coming up, their egos are controlling, they're holding guys.

• 5:12Joe Rogan?

  No, this, is this him? This is already a black belt here.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is after he moved to start training with Fabio in Sao Paulo. And this, it's such a beautiful thing, because if you watch his, his style, he's, not in this moment, actually.

• 5:29Joe Rogan?

  Now he's fully controlling.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Now he's fully controlling.

• 5:32Joe Rogan?

  But most of the time, he's scrambling.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's scrambling.

• 5:34Joe Rogan?

  Did he explain why?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Well, you're maximizing time spent in the in-between. I mean, I, I think in the martial arts, people are so focused on position when they're learning, position, position, position, but the in-between is where the real virtuosity happens, don't you?

• 5:48Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  And so he spent, he maximized his time in the in-between.

• 5:52Joe Rogan?

  So, in stand-up fighting, that would be like footwork and angles? Be similar to that, because the most important thing about any kind of combat sport, in terms of striking sports, is to be in a better position to land a shot and be in a better position to defend. So if you're fighting southpaw to orthodox, you always want to make sure that if you're southpaw, your foot is on the outside of your opponent's leg. That way, your opponent has to kind of cross over, try to hit you, but you're in a position to hit them on the blind side. And the best ever at that is Vasiliy Lomachenko. Because Lomachenko, when he was young, his father made him stop boxing for two years and just study Ukrainian dance. Really?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:37Joe Rogan?

  So for two years, he just did Ukrainian dance and his foot, have you ever seen him box?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my god. Pull up a Lomachenko highlight. It's all about movement and position with this guy. It's all about when you punch, he's going to make you react this way, and then he's gonna go that way, and then he's gonna spin sideways and he'll be behind you. This is Lomachenko. Like, the way he moves is so different. It's almost like, it's almost like his, he's got just a radar for like where their punches are coming from, and knows exactly where to put his feet at all times. No matter what they do, he knows what they're gonna do. But when you watch his like footwork, it's the most extraordinary thing.

• 7:23Joe Rogan?

  Because his ability to give you all sorts of different reads, like incredible. I mean, he won a world title, I think it is fourth pro fight. Unbelievable amateur record.

• 7:37Joe Rogan?

  But it's just the movement, like he's never right in front of you. He's always off to the side, he's always moving around, he jumps in and out, and it's with perfect precision. Like, a lot of times when guys do a lot of footwork and movement, there's points in that transition where they're off balance, where they can't really throw a punch, or their footwork is out of position, or they're leaning too far over on this side. He's never off balance. He's never out of position. He's always slide aside, pop-pop, slide aside, pop-pop, and you never know where the fuck he is. He's a magician. It's fascinating to watch him fight. And very few people have tried to incorporate that. Like, you see some of his movement.

• 8:26Joe Rogan?

  It's just the way he's able to fool the best fighters in the world, and just have a level of movement that they just don't really understand what to do with. They just, they get baffled by it. Because everything is coming from different angles. It's never, I'm charging straight forward at you, trying to destroy you. Everything is angles and movement.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Virtuosity is so beautiful to watch.

• 8:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's incredible in anything, in anything. When you watch someone who's just unbelievably extraordinary and unique in their, whatever their discipline is, it's always fascinating to watch. This episode is brought to you by Intuit TurboTax. We're all just trying to level up, right? I'm always trying to push myself, whether it's training, learning something new, or just trying to be a better human. You put in work physically, mentally, and over time, you evolve. It's 2025, doing your taxes has evolved too. Just like we put in the work to level up, TurboTax has put in the work to make taxes effortless. Because now taxes is getting matched up with a TurboTax Live expert

• 9:37Joe Rogan?

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• 10:06Speaker 01

  One way I relate to the transitional training is through frames. It's like a process of building more frames. We have position, we have position, and for some people, there'll be no space in between. But if you spend your time playing in the transitional space between, you build up frames like an illusionist. I know you, like, remember you spoke to Darren Brown back in the day?

• 10:24Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Like, you know, great illusionists, magicians, mind control guys, they have the ability to see in frames that we don't have the ability to see. And so it seems like magic, it seems like illusion.

• 10:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  When martial artists are called mystical, right? It's because people don't understand what they're doing, for the most part, technically. And they have frames where others don't have frames.

• 10:45Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, so they have more options, more... It's like having a language and you have an access to a larger vocabulary.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's right.

• 10:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  I think that's right. And people, well, it's like if you think about you're engaging with an illusionist who has done something, has spent hundreds of hours in a certain specific routine, and you're seeing it for the first time.

• 11:06Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  They just have immense knowledge where you have none. They have more frames, and they can play in frames that you don't have, and it seems like something's coming from the sky.

• 11:16Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's where Eddie Bravo had a pretty significant contribution to jiu-jitsu, because he was so creative in some of his attacks and some of the things that he developed, particularly off his back. Like, the rubber guard variations, they were so systematic and so, like, if you got good at it, it was surprising to anybody didn't understand what you were doing, because they didn't know these positions well.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:42Joe Rogan?

  So if you got, like, there's this kid named Jeremiah Vance, who's one of Eddie's best guard players, and there's a highlight reel of his submissions off of his back, his rubber guard submissions. And if you don't have a person that you train with, if you train at a traditional school and you don't understand these positions, you don't know how good someone can be at it, there's times where you don't think you're vulnerable, where you're incredibly vulnerable. Like, the difference between a really good guard player in MMA, and like, Paul Craig, for example, he submitted some of the best, two world champions off of his back in the light heavyweight division, Jamal Hill and the current champion, Ankaliyev. Ankaliyev's only defeat is to Paul Craig, because he's just wicked off of his back.

• 12:26Joe Rogan?

  So everybody feels comfortable. In MMA, there's only a couple guys like Olivera, you gotta really watch your Ps and Qs. There's a few guys that are just wicked off of their back, but no one's like Paul Craig. And so if you're just used to fighting regular guys off of their back, and you get in guard, and you start, you get a little cocky, you extend an arm to try to land a punch, and then all of a sudden, his legs are wrapped around your fucking neck, and you're like, oh, Jesus. How did this happen so quick? Because he's just got that technique, it's just so tightened up, just, it just locks it up so fast. It's fascinating to watch the difference, between like, a really good guard player and someone who's just a regular MMA fighter who knows how to do a triangle, but really doesn't have, like, the elaborate setups.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  In many ways, that's, in a large scale, what Hoist was doing back in the day.

• 13:10Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Back in the day.

• 13:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  No one had any idea what he was going on. They were grabbing his gi, thinking they had a huge advantage.

• 13:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  But they were entering his terrain. And then when we were training in the early days... There was so much closed mindedness about leg locks. So the leg lock game was outside of the conceptual scheme to so many jujitsu guys.

• 13:26Joe Rogan?

  It was forbidden.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  It was forbidden, so they'd get caught. It's like that dogma, like you're like, it's so interesting competitively finding where someone's dogma is, where their constructs are, their false constructs.

• 13:36Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's a good argument for it with the gi with young guys.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 13:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Not shredding each other's ankles all the time.

• 13:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, ripping knees apart where they're not going to be able to be repaired. You know, I mean, how many people have ruined their knees forever from a heel hook? A large number. I would imagine if there's any technique that's sort of ruined an athlete's career, the heel hook would probably be number one.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Heel hook is why I started training jujitsu.

• 14:01Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I was doing stand up stuff and I was competing everywhere in my, I was doing Chinese martial arts and my teacher's son, Max Chen, who is a, he was a San Shao fighter and on the Olympic, on the US national team, really good stand up fighter and he was studying UFC before I had even looked at it. And then he was studying, I think it was Frank Shamrock's double heel hook shit from way early days. And he was just like, let's, let's just continue to the ground. And I had never ground fought before and I ended up in the ground and he just put me in the heel hooks and double heel hooks. My knees were exploding. He had no idea what the fuck he was doing.

• 14:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Terrible idea.

• 14:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  My knees were just screaming and, and I would throw him on the floor and then I'd be tapped. I didn't even know what tapping out was. I had never grappled before.

• 14:41Joe Rogan?

  No. You didn't even know how to grapple and he put you in a heel hook. That's so awful.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  The first submission I felt in my life was like the heel hook 20 times. Somehow my ACL didn't shred. And I was like, I have to fucking train this jujitsu like, cause Max is kicking my ass and I didn't like it. So then that's how it all began.

• 14:58Joe Rogan?

  Well, Hoist was brilliant in wearing the gi because it made people grab it.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:03Joe Rogan?

  They thought they had an advantage that he had something to grab and next thing you know, he's like clenched around you and dragged you to the ground.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  It's an amazing idea, right? Like they had no idea that they were entering his game. They thought they were controlling him.

• 15:14Joe Rogan?

  Right. And they didn't understand that all that friction from the gi was gonna make it very difficult for you to get out of anything.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  He was so used to people grabbing him. He spent his life people grabbing him. They entered his, his river.

• 15:24Joe Rogan?

  That changed the whole world, didn't it?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 15:26Joe Rogan?

  Changed the whole world. Changed what street fights look like. Changed everything.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Those first, um, those first UFC's were just.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Wild.

• 15:35Joe Rogan?

  Nuts.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Wild. Just the bizarre.

• 15:38Joe Rogan?

  The first UFC I worked was UFC 12.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:41Joe Rogan?

  In Dothan, Alabama. Yeah. I had to take a propeller plane. I had to fly into, I think we flew into Birmingham or somewhere. And then we had to take a propeller plane to Dothan. I was like, what am I doing? This is so ridiculous. But I wanted to just see it live because I'd only seen it on television. I'd only seen it, I'd never seen a live cage fight before. I'm like, this has got to be crazy.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  So UFC 12, how long after the first was that?

• 16:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's 97, so it was four years later.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Four years later.

• 16:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Wow. Man, you've been on that journey from the beginning.

• 16:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Epic.

• 16:16Joe Rogan?

  Everybody was like, what are you doing? Don't be associated with this. So many people were telling me not to be associated with it. It was, it was like I was doing snuff films or something, you know? It's like, why are you doing this? You're an actor. Like, I was like, okay, I don't know what to tell you.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:31Joe Rogan?

  I like it. I want to go watch. I needed to see it.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And you were, were you training at that point, 97?

• 16:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I'd already started doing jiu-jitsu. I'd started jiu-jitsu in 96.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  You were training at Hickson's then, right?

• 16:42Joe Rogan?

  Started at Hickson's and then I went from Hickson's to Carlson Gracie's. I didn't know. I, I thought all Gracie's were the same. Like, this Gracie, oh, this Gracie's closer. I'll go to this Gracie.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  They all love each other.

• 16:52Joe Rogan?

  And I'd also, yeah, I didn't understand. They were fighting, they were all tooth and claw at each other back then. Uh, I didn't know that, um, I, I knew, uh, Carlson's from, I think the show was Extreme Fighting, the John Peretti Show. So John Peretti, who worked for the UFC, then branched off and had another thing called Extreme Fighting. And that's where Conan Silvera came from and, um, a, a bunch of like elite, uh, UFC fighters. Mario Sperry fought his first fights over there. Um, so it was, it was like a really good competitive organization that was like right up there with the UFC back in the day. And so I, Carlson Gracie's, uh, name was on that all the time.

• 17:35Joe Rogan?

  And they showed some training footage of them training. So I found out about that place. And that was right when Vitor Belfort was emerging. So Vitor was 19, so I was training at the same

• 17:45Speaker 01

  He was amazing.

• 17:45Joe Rogan?

  gym as Vitor. It was incredible. Wa, just watching him train, you know? He was a freak. Like, just an athletic freak at 19. He was so fast. Just so fast and with his hands and everybody knew he was a black belt under Carlson Gracie. So everybody expected just jujitsu and this guy comes out with little MMA gloves on and just starts tuning people up on the feet and you're like, whoa, a black belt who can do that? Like where's this coming from? Like this is a totally new thing. So that was the first fight that I attended. And that was the first fight I worked. UFC 12. It was nuts.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  This theme of of transitions and developing frames where other people don't have them, like it's it's so interesting how it's manifest in every art.

• 18:33Joe Rogan?

  In everything.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Like I remember when I was playing chess, because I was a chess player from age 6 to 23. That was my first, my first art.

• 18:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, you weren't just a chess player. You're a chess player they made a movie about, dude.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I gotta say that too.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  That didn't have much to do with me then. They did that.

• 18:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, Searching for Bobby Fischer is about you, bro.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:54Joe Rogan?

  You know, which has gotta be weird.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Many moons ago. That was fucking weird.

• 18:56Joe Rogan?

  Was it weird, the dramatic representation of your life versus the real life? Like, what is that juxtaposition like? Is it bizarre watching a fake version of you on television and or on a screen, rather? And did you have like a feeling like, am I that person? I'm not that person. Like, I'm me. This is not really me, but it's about me.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:19Joe Rogan?

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• 22:00Speaker 01

  So the book came out when I was 11 years old. My dad actually wrote the book. He was a writer, and he ended up just writing about the journey from me starting to play chess to winning my first national championship. And when the book came out, it felt like I read it, and it felt true. I was a little pissed off because I didn't want people to know when I cried, I was an 11-year-old. I didn't want to be vulnerable, right? But like, that felt like... And that was my first real thrust into the... into like, some degree of spotlight. And then, and I was the national champion at that point, and I was each year for those years. So I was at the top of the chess world, the youth chess world, and then I had the movie come out. The book came out, and then when the movie came out, it was a shit show. I I hated the movie when it first came out.

• 22:39Joe Rogan?

  Why'd you hate it?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Because I thought it had nothing to do with my life. Years later, I was able to see it as a work of art separate from my life. And see it that way, and I was able to see how it was thematically true in many ways to theme to like themes in my life. But like my first teacher, Bruce Pendelfeeny, who's still a very dear friend of mine, Ben Kingsley played him as this mean guy. And I've had terrible coaches in my life. I've had coaches who were super destructive. But Bruce wasn't. He was beautiful and um and loving and helped me discover my love for chess. My first coaches were the hustlers in Washington Square Park and Bruce Pendelfeeny together.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  And the way that was represented, I didn't like it. They also combined a bunch of characters in Washington Square Park, the hustlers that combined them into one. In a way that, you know, was thematically true, but didn't feel so like when you're a kid, you're a teenager, you see all the difference. The movie comes out about your life, you see all the differences as opposed to the similarities and it was um.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I felt really guilty about it relative to Bruce. That was a big part of it because I love Bruce.

• 23:45Joe Rogan?

  Did you talk to him about it?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:46Joe Rogan?

  What did he, what was his take on it?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 23:49Joe Rogan?

  Was he named Bruce in the movie?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was named Bruce in the movie and he, I mean, he honestly, he loved it. I mean, he it put him in the spotlight as like the the chess teacher in in. You know, in the country, in the world. So he rolled with it really well. I was just sensitive to. All of like all these mean spirited things that happened between us in the film that never happened in life.

• 24:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  And years later, like those things did happen to me. And actually during those years when it came out, they were happening to me then. It was interesting as I had some really destructive coaches during during that time. And I didn't put that on on Bruce. But also what happened with the movie is that I loved chess so deeply. It was my first form of self-expression. And up until the film came out, it was just sort of this preconscious innocent form of of play, of battle, of of. Like it was it was my it was my jujitsu mats. It was it was I fucking loved it. And and then the the movie, the movie is what pulled me into self-consciousness for the first time. I started thinking about, instead of losing myself in thought, I started thinking about how I looked to groupies, to cameras, to. The president. So like I I moved from self-expression to self-consciousness.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  To being locked up and then, you know, and I didn't ask for it, I didn't decide I want to have a movie. This thing was done and it was ultimately, I mean, I'm grateful for it. From my perspective now, the existential crisis that happened was awesome for me. It forced me to become more complicated as a human and integrate a sense of consciousness into my relationship to something.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  So my perspective on it now is that it was a beautiful journey. It made me grapple with a lot of shit. I didn't become reliant on a flower garden in order to have a deep relationship to an art. But at the time, I was very conflicted about it. And then when I graduated high school, I took off and left the US for a couple of years. Lived in Slovenia with my girlfriend at the time to get away from the spotlight, to get away from the media, get away from all the shit that was connected to the movie. And that was when I started studying East Asian philosophy and meditating and started reading Jack Kerouac and existentialist literature and

• 25:50Speaker 01

  trying to figure myself out, figure the world out, figure out how I related to these things in some empty space.

• 25:55Joe Rogan?

  What's a tremendous burden to place upon a young person to take their life, which is essentially anonymous, you know, to the general public, you know, known in the chess world, obviously, but in the general public.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:10Joe Rogan?

  Anonymous and then all of a sudden, a movie star. And not a movie star in the sense that you're on the screen, but it's about you, which is probably even weirder. So you have these false expectations or false, false narratives of how your life played out and who the people and who the piece. And so everywhere you run into people, they have a version of you that they've seen that's not real.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  And they think they know you very intimately.

• 26:36Joe Rogan?

  Which is weird.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  But they don't. Same, I mean, with you, you're so public, right? Everyone, probably most people think they know who you are and what you think.

• 26:42Joe Rogan?

  But at least they know me from me talking.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really good point.

• 26:45Joe Rogan?

  They don't know me. Imagine if like Mario Lopez played me in a movie.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:50Joe Rogan?

  You know what I mean? There's someone, someone less handsome than Mario Lopez. But, and then you would have this thing where like, oh, you're the guy that that guy played in the movie. And I'd be like, yeah, but that's not really, I don't, that's not really me. I don't really, I didn't have that problem. This is not real. That's fake.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And also, when you're a teenager, you're susceptible to all of the temptations.

• 27:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Like, I mean, suddenly you've got groupies everywhere, and that's awesome, and it's a lot of fun. But it does not necessarily, it's not necessarily consistent with sitting for six hours at a time in competition, playing chess.

• 27:23Joe Rogan?

  No, it's probably destructive to it, right?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Quite destructive, yeah, which is interesting, and you have to integrate all of that.

• 27:28Joe Rogan?

  How old were you when the film came out?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Fifteen.

• 27:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that is a crazy time to get any kind of attention, because you're, you're just getting testosterone for the first time. You're like, what is all this? Right? And your, your body's growing.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  And it was flowing hard.

• 27:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and you're becoming a man. Now, all of a sudden, girls like you? Like, what?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:45Joe Rogan?

  What is this about? This is craziness.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  I already had a very strange life, because, and I think like a foundational part of my psychology came from, so I started playing chess when I was six years old. When I was, by the time I was seven, I was the top rated player for my age in the country. My first national championship, I got my ass kicked, which was tremendous. It was great. Last round, I lost the, last round of my first nationals, I lost. To the guy who later became my best friend for many, many years, David Arnett.

• 28:13Joe Rogan?

  And you say tremendous because was that like a jumping point for improvement for you?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Because I didn't learn that I could win without getting my ass kicked first. I, I had to grapple with my demons, and I relate, I, the year from then to winning my nationals, my first nationals the next year was when I really developed a love for chess, and I had to work very hard, and I didn't associate winning the nationals with talent, or a smooth trip, or all the bullshit that people can connect when they have, when they're, when they're called a prodigy from the outside. It's not a term I ever related to myself at all, but like, when they're, these labels are put on from the outside, and if you win too fast, too, too young, you can just

• 28:58Speaker 01

  develop this relationship to, this brittle relationship to success, and to, and to training, and to everything, right? You don't, you don't realize that getting your ass kicked is a huge part of, of the journey.

• 29:08Joe Rogan?

  That's a problem with very talented fighters as well. A lot of very talented martial artists, they never develop the discipline to truly become great. Because like, from the very beginning, they had, and whatever the advantage was, whether it's a speed advantage, a strength advantage, I mean, genetics plays such a large part in martial arts success.

• 29:30Joe Rogan?

  You know, if you have someone who's an elite mind, who is incredibly disciplined, and also has great genetics, you get a Mike Tyson.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's amazing. If you can have that combination, that's what you're looking for.

• 29:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's what you're looking for. But if you don't have that, and Mike Tyson is competing in your division, you're fucked. Like, you can be really disciplined, but like, so genetics do have, they do play a factor. Circumstances, coaching, there's a lot of different factors. But if you're a real prodigy, and there are people out there that are just extraordinary from the beginning, I find that if success comes too quickly, you don't develop the mettle to really push through boundaries and reach new levels. Because the only way you get there is through, you have to, I think oftentimes, training becomes, it becomes regimented, it becomes something you do, you see incremental growth

• 30:24Joe Rogan?

  and improvement, you get confidence, you're, but then when you compete, if you get your ass kicked, then you have to kind of reassess everything, like, okay, was I working at 10, or was I working at 8? Was I, was I studying tape, or was I fucking off and, and calling girls? You know, was I paying attention to my training routine and my recovery, or was I just training and partying? Like, what was I doing wrong? Like, what led this person to land those shots? What led this person to beat me?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:52Joe Rogan?

  And if you don't have those moments where you lose, I don't think you ever really achieve your true potential, because you have to be challenged. And the best expression of challenge is total humiliating defeat.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and so consistently, the, the biggest losses, the most crushing losses are what lead to the biggest wins later.

• 31:11Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Sometimes many years later, but it, like that, and people often, I remember, I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition for a charity when, you know, in my twenties somewhere, and this, this guy introduced his son, and he said his son hadn't lost a chess game in, in two years. And he was so proud, and it's just like, I knew it was a fucking train wreck. I mean, the kid, like, because you're, the kid obviously just was only choosing people to play who he could beat, wouldn't compete up in tournaments, would only play down, and he was just, and he was the only kid who didn't want to play against me in the simul. And so his life was protecting this perfect, perfect thing, right? People who don't lose, so in my chess life, I, the interesting thing that happened in my psychology is that

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I was the top rated player for my age in the country from a young age, but I always played up. I always played against adults, except for Nationals and Worlds, I played up. And so, and all of my rivals were targeting me because I was the top seed in youth events. But their coaches and they're, were much stronger players than me. They were adult, international masters, grandmasters, and they could see all my weaknesses. Psychological, technical, everything. And so if I ever made a mistake, the weakness was exploited until I took it on. And so I developed from a really young age this relationship to training, which was, if I didn't take on my weakness, I got my ass kicked and I felt pain. And so not taking on my weakness became outside of my conceptual scheme.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  So from age eight, I just, and it can be a blind spot, like today in life, like a criticism of me that certain loved ones would have is that I'm just, I'm always, I love training. I love pushing my limits as a way of life in whatever I'm doing. If it was chess, if it was fighting, now it's foiling, surfing and then foiling in the biggest waves I can find. And like just if I'm playing at my edge, I feel, it feels beautiful. It feels like where I want to be. But the comfort zone doesn't feel beautiful. And to me, that works really well, but it's a big part of like my foundation in that was when being eight years old and being targeted. Eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, my whole life. And I, it wasn't until recently that I realized that it was actually outside of my conceptual scheme,

• 33:23Speaker 01

  not to take on the weakness, because it was just connected to pain from such a young age as a competitor. And there's no luck in chess. There's no fucking luck in chess. If you have, like if you, if you're playing chess, if you have an opening repertoire that's massive, and you go into a game and there's one little place that there's a weakness and you don't want your opponent to go, he always fucking finds it. You don't know why. You can, you never like make a move and hope he doesn't see it. Or I'll play, let's hit this trap and it's not the best move, but maybe he'll fall into it. No, that never works at a high level. So you just, you, you have to take your shit on.

• 33:55Joe Rogan?

  So you associate not taking it on with pain.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't anymore. I did young and now I don't associate it with anything. I just don't do it.

• 34:04Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Unless I try.

• 34:06Joe Rogan?

  That's a better way to handle it, to recognize there's a real process. There's the right way to do this, it's the only way to do this. So don't even think about the other way.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Right, but if it's kind of driving you, for me, I think it's healthier for me to recognize that pattern in myself and then roll with it as opposed to just not even see. Like, that it's.

• 34:25Joe Rogan?

  That it's there.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  That it's there.

• 34:26Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah. Well, yeah, acknowledge, well, you have to have acknowledgement of it because you have memories.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Like, if I'm cooking a turkey, I have to cook a world-class turkey.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  I have a friend, Jim Detmer, who says to me, "Josh, what you have to do is cook a terrible turkey. Just cook an average turkey, you know? Don't crush it." In other words, like, don't, it's an interesting thing when you become present to the fact that you have this youthful story running through everything you do. And you can choose to live that way. But it's good for it to be a choice as opposed to just driving you.

• 34:57Joe Rogan?

  It's definitely good for it to be a choice. It's always good for it to be a choice because sometimes life will, you know, there's a curve that you have to take and you have to put something aside for a bit, or maybe forever. And you have to be able to transition to something else. And if you can't do that, then you'll be stuck.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:13Joe Rogan?

  And you see a lot of that with martial arts people, you know? Most of us, at a certain point in time, realize that injuries are not just inevitable, but at a certain point in time, you go, "Maybe I should stop doing this." Because training, no matter what you do, training is all about you using your body as a weapon and someone using their body as a weapon, whether it's martial arts, like stand-up fighting, or whether it's jiu-jitsu. It's the same thing. You're trying to, you're trying to isolate joints, you're trying to cut off blood, and you're resisting all these things, and all the weak points get exposed. Shoulders, knees, ankles, back, neck, all those things get exposed.

• 35:58Joe Rogan?

  And if you're a meathead, like I have been in the past, you train through injuries and they get chronic. And then you get to a certain point where you're like, "What am I doing?" And if you can't transition to something else, if you can't find something else to do with your time, then you're a cripple. Then, you know, then you're getting your 10th surgery on your back and you're still trying to train. And everybody's like, "Look at Bob, he's crazy. He's got all his discs fused, but he's still training." Maybe Bob shouldn't be training. Like, maybe, maybe Bob's gonna break something else now. Like, maybe, maybe it's time to move on to something else. And if you don't have this ability to constantly take on new projects and be excited by different things, you're gonna have a shallow life. Like, life has so many challenges and so many fascinating

• 36:42Joe Rogan?

  things to dive into. For you now, it's foiling. For a while, jiu-jitsu, chess, like, anything like that, you'll find something else like that. When it comes to college basketball and March mania, one thing is for sure: nothing's for sure. Upsets, buzzer beaters, Cinderella's advancing, top seeds going home early, it's all gonna happen. Bet the unexpected, every upset, every day, with DraftKings Sportsbook. With live betting, exclusive content, promos and parlays, DraftKings is the ultimate college basketball destination for March. First time? Here's something special just for you. New

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• 38:14Speaker 01

  Jiu-jitsu was the art I had to, that I, I had to move on from, not on my own terms. Cause I, I ruptured my L405 disc.

• 38:22Joe Rogan?

  There it is.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Trained, trained on it, like a crazy person for like

• 38:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  A couple of years. And then the doctors looked at that and they just like, if you keep on doing this, you're not gonna be able to walk, not gonna be able to play ball.

• 38:31Joe Rogan?

  What's it like now?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  It's great now.

• 38:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:35Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it's a little foiling, probably makes your core incredibly strong.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I've done a lot of stuff. I mean, I spent I never had surgery. They all told me to, but I didn't have surgery.

• 38:46Joe Rogan?

  Good for you.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  And I did tons of, I mean, I've been doing total immersion swimming and foundation training and everything I could do for the back. And the foiling feels, I'm training, like I'm all in on this art. And I'm doing it in a way that feels healthy in the back. I train jujitsu now, but light. I mean, I can't train all out, like I'd love to.

• 39:06Joe Rogan?

  That's good.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  It was heartbreaking to give it up.

• 39:08Joe Rogan?

  It was hard.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And I was so madly in love and all in with Marcelo and having that, like I was at that part of the learning process, which is where I get good at the learning process, which is like toward the higher levels of something. That's where I'm best at learning.

• 39:24Joe Rogan?

  Did you have a small injury that got worse over time? Or did you have a significant moment where you realized you hurt it?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  I was so stupid. No, it was a significant moment. I was, I was position sparring. Marcelo was at our school in New York. It was a week before my eldest son, Jack, was born. So it was a bit over 13 years ago. I, we were, Marcelo was, was gone. We, I was at the school. Paul Schreiner was running class that day, I think. And there was this 240-pound blue belt visiting, this is like ripped dude. And Paul had everyone doing position sparring, half-guard position sparring. And this guy was matched up against one of our guys. I've had that hubristic, invincible feeling about me in that moment. I was just, when you're feeling at your very best in martial flow. And I was like, and it ended up where we were doing half-guard position sparring,

• 40:13Speaker 01

  where I was holding half-guard and he was doing this pass, twisting the spine. And it was so fucking stupid to do it. I mean, I was just holding half-guard in a, in like, in position sparring. And I just felt it go. And then, like, you know, it was, I couldn't.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Move. It was fucking terrible.

• 40:37Joe Rogan?

  Did it herniate?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And all the fluid gone.

• 40:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And, um, yeah, it was brutal, you know. It was, and I remember.

• 40:47Joe Rogan?

  So, how is the disc now?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Couldn't lift, I couldn't lift up my child for the first three, four months of his life.

• 40:52Joe Rogan?

  Oy.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Then I had this strange period where I couldn't, I couldn't, standing and walking was the toughest. But then I had this period, like if I would go into the corner store to get milk, like three, four months later, I have to bike to the corner store and come back. And I, I can't explain this, but I, I had a period where I couldn't walk, but I could ski.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Because of the angle. So Marcel and I were going to the mountains out around New York, just bombing down. I just was trying to get my, my fix in. Just skiing without turning was my goal. He was snowboarding, I was skiing.

• 41:23Joe Rogan?

  You couldn't walk, but you could ski.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a very strange period.

• 41:25Joe Rogan?

  Dude, don't ski.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Don't, don't fucking ski. That would have been a smart thing to tell me. Yeah, I was a dumbass for the first two years after the injury. And then I, um, and then I realized I had to.

• 41:35Joe Rogan?

  What does the disc look like now?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  I haven't looked at it in a long time.

• 41:39Joe Rogan?

  It doesn't trouble you anymore?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  It does trouble me. I take care of it all the time.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:45Joe Rogan?

  They replace them now. Uh, Eddie Bravo got a fake disc in his lower back, a titanium disc. And, uh, he's able to train again. I know quite a few guys who've got them. Al Jermaine Sterling got one in his neck. And then went on to defend the UFC bantamweight championship several times. Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  They replaced them altogether.

• 42:04Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 42:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they put artificial discs now. Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  You know, your point about, I remember I was studying, back in the early 2000s, studying Eddie's game, setting the rubber guard, studying all the twister stuff.

• 42:16Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Just trying to wrap my head around it.

• 42:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he's got some wild stuff.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Wild stuff.

• 42:20Joe Rogan?

  And if you're not used to it, it's, it's really interesting to watch people that just have never encountered it before. When I would go to train in other places, like I lived in Colorado for a bit, and I trained at Amal Easton's. And, uh, when I'd go up there, there's so many positions that guys just didn't understand. They didn't know what was going on. They figured it out after a while, like, oh, if he goes this way, he's gonna try to get me in a twister.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:39Joe Rogan?

  If he goes this way, he's gonna try to set this up. But there's certain things that people do all the time, like especially like put your hands on the mat. You do, if you put your hands, pull up Jeremiah Vance, uh, highlights. This is like one of Eddie's best, uh, black belts with rubber guard. And the way he does it is phenomenal. He has incredible leg dexterity and his technique is so sharp. And he catches people and stuff where they're like, how am I even stuck here?

• 43:09Joe Rogan?

  Do you find that that flex- Yeah, here it is. Yeah. So watch, watch how quick he sets things up. It's like, right away, you're in, you're fucksville. You're fucks. Like, who does this? Who sets up a go-go plata right off the bat and then triangles it? Look how he sets this up. I mean, this is insane. And just massive crank on your fucking neck. Yeah.

• 43:34Joe Rogan?

  And he switches it to omoplata, rerolls. Mm-hmm. Yep. Omoplata crucifix finish. Yep.

• 43:45Joe Rogan?

  And everything he does involves this incredible dexterity and flexibility. There's like a whole series of highlights. That's not even some of his best stuff, but he's able to do this to people that just don't know what he's doing. Like, they don't understand some of these transitions.

• 44:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And this is just like, one of the best expressions of the techniques that Eddie's developed. So like, Jeremiah's fantastic at that. Like, this, this particular technique of being able to isolate the omoplata and then secure a choke in the transition. He does this to everybody. Look at how he, this transition right here. Brutal. It's so nasty. Yeah. It's so nasty and you just, you don't know what the fuck you're doing. How am I getting out of this?

• 44:31Joe Rogan?

  I mean, he just hits this over and over and over on people. And so many times when people go for an omoplata, people say, okay, I, worst case scenario, I might roll out of this and wind up on my back in side control. But not with him. Yeah. Like, this is like, you're really close to checkmate from the moment the, the omoplata's set up, from a position where you're defending. So you're defending correctly from the omoplata and that winds up setting up this choke.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  What was your, your, how do you feel about Ryan Hall's game in MMA? Like, he, cause he also, he's entering the MMA game.

• 45:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he's been in MMA game for quite a while.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Yeah, no, but I mean, when he entered the game, he came into it with a repertoire that was so unusual for.

• 45:10Joe Rogan?

  Very unusual. Well, he's really, really smart, honestly. And when you see his style, the, the problem with his style, in my opinion, is it's so jujitsu heavy that he's vulnerable when he's fighting world-class strikers. Like, Ilya Toporia smashed him.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:30Joe Rogan?

  And it was a horrible, horrible knockout. And it's because Ilya's a legit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, but also like way more technical on the feet. And when you're fighting a guy who's just, any one mistake you make in striking, it is a concussion. Any one mistake, boom, a big hand's coming, a knee's coming, a kick's coming. It's like something's coming if you make mistakes. It's just like being a blue belt rolling with a high-level black belt. It's the same thing. It's like you're just way too vulnerable. So, his Jiu-Jitsu's off the charts, but his stand-up is not at the level of his Jiu-Jitsu. And that's just a real problem today. It's very, you can kind of be a specialist if you're a striker.

• 46:11Joe Rogan?

  A striker, like, there's a few guys that can pull it off if they're really strong and they have good takedown defense. Like, Pereira's the best example, right? Two-division world champion kickboxer, comes over, dominates, becomes a two-division UFC champion. As a striker. Because every fight starts standing up. But if you don't know how to strike, every fight starts standing up. So, the beginning of the fight is always something you're not good at. And if you're getting tagged at the very beginning of the fight, and now you're in desperation mode, and all this person has to do, it's an enormous space they're fighting in, the octagon. And the cage of the octagon actually makes it easier to get up if someone takes you down. So, there's a lot of elements that wouldn't even exist if you had a flat surface with no walls.

• 46:53Joe Rogan?

  So, it's easier to defend, it's, it's easier to move around, cause it's an enormous surface. So, you're now chasing this person, and you might have already gotten a concussion. You might have already been rocked. So, you're already like a little out of it, and now you're like desperado mode. It's just a bad place to be. You have to have world-class striking to compete at a world-class level in MMA at this point.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:15Joe Rogan?

  You have to have, you have to have something, at the very least, you have to be really good defensively. Really good, but then you're just gonna get picked apart on the feet.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:25Joe Rogan?

  Your legs are gonna get kicked. You're gonna get brutalized. Yeah, you have to be a really good striker and Ryan is one of those guys that's a specialist and, you know, he tapped a lot. I mean, tapped BJ Penn in like 10 seconds.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:37Joe Rogan?

  He's tapped a lot of guys. He's, when he gets a hold of you, you're in this complex web of transitions and techniques that if you're just a regular MMA fighter who trains jiu-jitsu three times a week, you're not gonna know what he's doing.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's a brilliant guy. He, he trained at our school from, in New York, I think from 2010, 2012, that range. And it was so interesting watching him and Marcelo. Um, cause Ryan had a huge amount of humility relative to Marcelo. Um, and he wanted to, to train with him. And Marcelo was so curious about Ryan's game, but Marcelo never studied anyone's game. His, uh, his, a core principle of Marcelo is if, if you, if you study my game, you enter my game and no one will be better at my game than me. And so when he, in competition, he would, the guys would be studying tape of everybody. He would never study one's tape, never study one's fights, but you'd watch them to fight before they went against him. And he'd pick up on some kind of elemental read. He has this incre- he's what I call a, a low rep learner. His ability to learn from a single repetition is just unbelievable.

• 48:34Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Um, and it was really interesting watching him and Ryan, cause Ryan, and Ryan just came and visited me, um, in my home, uh, a month ago. And we were talking about how formative those training experiences with Marcelo were. And, and it was like, the way, and one way that Ryan described it is that he had this, like, layers of traps, seven steps in. But Marcelo had this deep understanding upstream of that. And it was like watching Marcelo put himself like right next to the fire, like right next to Ryan's game. He wanted to learn Ryan, the edges of Ryan's game, but never enter it. And his ability to play right at the threshold of all of Ryan's traps, which he could pull almost everyone else into, in just pure grappling.

• 49:14Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  And, but not, not just, his ability to learn, it was like, it felt like a cat putting its paw right up against the edge of a fire. And just like, learning about what heat was and deconstructing it. But then not ever getting into the heat. You know, and I, and you'd watch Ryan roll with anyone else. He could just pull them into the fire, into the spider web.

• 49:35Joe Rogan?

  That's fascinating.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Marcelo has a, a really incredibly deep.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Almost simian physical intelligence. And his ability to learn from a single rep is unique in my observation.

• 49:48Joe Rogan?

  That's amazing. Ryan has had a ton of surgeries, hasn't he?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Man, that dude has had such bad luck.

• 49:54Joe Rogan?

  What is wrong with him? What's going on?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Some shit with, I mean, tons of stuff with his knee, with his hip, with, I think he's starting to come, I think his shoulder something now. He's still, you know, he's

• 50:03Joe Rogan?

  He's had like nine surgeries?

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Twenty-three surgeries. I think it was twenty-three. I think he's had twenty-three surgeries. Dude has got, and the bad one happened with someone just falling on him in training.

• 50:12Joe Rogan?

  What was that?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't, that was the hip.

• 50:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know exactly. I haven't seen

• 50:17Joe Rogan?

  What did he get done to his hip?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Ask him. I'm not sure. Yeah, he's had a lot of surgeries.

• 50:23Joe Rogan?

  Someone just fell on him? So was he training with someone else and someone else fell on him?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  No, he was, he was training with somebody and he was taking it easy on them in a transition, trying to not hurt them. And then they just collapsed on him, on his hip in a certain way, as he described it.

• 50:36Joe Rogan?

  Oy.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, brutal.

• 50:38Joe Rogan?

  When you were training, did you do any weightlifting just to sort of supplement it, to keep your joints strong and your?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I did a lot of, I tended to do weightlifting that was consistent with the movement patterns of the arts that I was training in. So now, so I, I would do a lot of biking, lower body strength, and then I would do, I wasn't, didn't have, I think if I did it now, I would do much more. Weightlifting. But when I was rolling usually twice a week, six days a week, and, and I was, I would do cardio work in addition. And then some like, some resistance work, but I, I didn't, I wasn't, like, I'm doing a lot of work with the Boston Celtics now. And I'm seeing how they're, the last few years, and I see how they're up really, their sports science team and their physical trainers are.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  And like, I don't think that I was, when I was training jiu-jitsu, I was at the level of, for example, the Boston Celtics in, in. In the resistance training that I was doing, it supplemented. And Marcelo didn't do weight training. That was part of it. When I was training with him, we were, like, I was just.

• 51:41Joe Rogan?

  He didn't weight train at all?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:43Joe Rogan?

  How did he get those legs?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  He just rolls, man. He was biking, he was into bike into those bikes without, um, without brakes. We were biking all over New York.

• 51:52Joe Rogan?

  Bikes without brakes?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:53Joe Rogan?

  What do you mean?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  What are they called?

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Fixies?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:55Joe Rogan?

  What is that?

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Fixed wheel?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, fixed wheel. He, he just.

• 51:59Joe Rogan?

  What does that mean?

• 52:00Speaker 03

  It's just got no.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  No brakes.

• 52:01Joe Rogan?

  How do you slow down?

• 52:03Speaker 03

  You go, you go slow.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  You gotta slow, you put your hand, your, your foot on the, on the edge of the, the wheel.

• 52:07Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, fixed wheel biking. I mean, he loved fixed wheel around New York and I was biking. Then I switched over.

• 52:13Joe Rogan?

  Why would you ever get on a bike with no brakes?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  It's a.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  You control it. You're, you're, you're braking. Ah, I'll show you videos.

• 52:19Joe Rogan?

  Show me.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  People love it, but man, in New York, it's, it's quite something. I mean, in New York, when you're going down a hill in New York City and, and traffic, there's, there's some adventures.

• 52:26Joe Rogan?

  You're going down a hill. How are you fucking slowing down?

• 52:29Speaker 03

  You don't go fast.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Oh, he was going, we were going fast.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  No, I mean, that's the, you just got, you're, you gotta see a high, this isn't gonna be a good video.

• 52:37Joe Rogan?

  This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in my life. This is something only white people would figure out. Let's have a bike with no brakes.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  The dumbest thing was what I did after this, which is that I, when I fell in love with surfing, I was one wheeling all over New York.

• 52:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, five ways to stop on a fixie. How about don't get a fixie? Get brakes, you fucking idiot. This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen in my life. Why wouldn't you have brakes? Why wouldn't you have an option to control the bike better?

• 53:03Joe Rogan?

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• 53:46Speaker 02

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• 54:09Joe Rogan?

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• 54:53Joe Rogan?

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• 55:08Speaker 03

  The people that ride these, they'd argue they control it probably better.

• 55:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, look at all the white people. All white people. Ridiculous white people that are doing backflips with skateboards.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  This is a big New York thing, though.

• 55:20Joe Rogan?

  Of course it is. They like suffering over there. That's why they all live jammed on top of each other.

• 55:27Joe Rogan?

  That's so stupid. There's no good videos on that. That's a stupid thing.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  There's a movie I've seen, that's why I know about it.

• 55:32Joe Rogan?

  Breaks, you fucking freaks.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  My last two years living in New York, I had fallen so in love with surfing, and I was, I knew Ocean Art was my next chapter, and I was so heartbroken not to be able to do it every day, so I got a one-wheel. It was like the first generation, you know the one-wheel electronic skateboard?

• 55:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we had one of those.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  It just came out, first generation, and I was just like... Thousands of miles biking, one wheeling all over New York and then, but it was at the early one. If you push past the pushback, it had this pushback thing which would slow you down, but you could push past it and go faster. But if you pushed past the final pushback, it just bottomed out, wham.

• 56:03Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  And he just went like twenty-three, twenty-four miles, it was a whack, right?

• 56:07Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Over taxi cabs, under taxi cabs, through taxi cabs, everything.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  The one wheel is like when you're a kid, or sorry, the fixie, it's like you just skid.

• 56:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, oh, so there is brakes, like a kid.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess that's a better way to describe it.

• 56:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  I was thinking of it that way.

• 56:20Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so you can brake.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  You can also reverse, which you can't do on most bikes. You can ride backwards.

• 56:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  If you needed to.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  It's really beautiful. I mean, I, I, I, this wasn't, I never did it, but it's really beautiful to watch when it's done well.

• 56:33Joe Rogan?

  Okay, that makes me feel better, that you could just skid.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  You could fuck up your tire, but you could stop.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  There's lots of things that can go wrong.

• 56:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it seems like you.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  There are lots of things that go wrong. Foiling, there's a lot of fucking things that can go wrong. You're thirty-five, forty miles an hour on top of a guillotine, big waves, I mean.

• 56:50Joe Rogan?

  Dude, I learned how to foil two years ago. And it took me like three hours to get on that fucking thing for the first time, because I've never surfed.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  You were on an e-foil or?

• 56:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, e-foil, yeah. Yeah, took me forever. Just kept falling down, getting back up, falling down. Meanwhile, my kids, my youngest at the time, she was twelve, humiliated me. She just hopped on it instantly, was scooting around and, look, she knew how to do it immediately. But she, she wakeboards, she, she does a lot of that shit. She's really athletic, but she was just humiliating me and I was just like, I'm gonna figure this out. So for hours, I kept falling down, getting back up, falling down, and eventually I got it. And then once I got it, it was like easy.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:31Joe Rogan?

  Once I got it, I was like, oh, I see.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  E-foiling is the best, it's like, it's the best way to learn how to foil, because you, they weigh ninety pounds, the e-foils do. Like a high-performance, big wave, a high-performance foil, the whole setup will weigh four or five pounds.

• 57:44Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, an e-foil, you have a battery, it's heavy, and you've got electricity to learn how to, to learn foil dynamics. Foiling, when you're high-performance foiling in, in big surf, you're, you're just on a, like, if you're towing in, you're on a three and a half foot board. No, no batter, it's, it's not powered, it's just, you're just riding, hydrodynamics.

• 58:04Joe Rogan?

  Are you getting towed in to these waves?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  You're getting towed, you can paddle in, or, but if you're towing in to bigger waves, you're on a small board.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  You're getting towed in behind a jet ski, whipped in, and then you're just riding. It's epic. It's frictionless. So beautiful.

• 58:19Joe Rogan?

  And what's the benefit of that above surfing? Is that you're above the water?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  You're above the water. You're not feel like the ultimate. If you think about the the the glassiest surf day possible, um, the frictionless feeling. It's it's more frictionless than that because you're above the water.

• 58:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I get that on the efoil. When you get cooking on the efoil, you're above the water and it's wild. It just I always feel like I'm gonna fall. I'm gonna fall. I'm gonna fall.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:41Joe Rogan?

  Soon as I get above the water, like, okay, we're going too fast. You're gonna wipe out.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  The foiling is interesting because it's it's like the ultimate receptivity. Because the foil picks up on underwater wave circulation. So it's picking up on lift when you're going very fast. And also, when you're in a wave, the waves have have upward circulation at the at the face of the wave. When you get to the top of the wave, it it accelerates. And so your your foil is riding the underwater currents and you're receiving it so amplified. So like tiny little movements have big effects on the thing. So like the surf movement will be very big and the the foil movement is very subtle of the body mechanic. And then you learn to really crank into it. And it's limitless. You can do open water foiling, crossing oceans on long, high aspect wings, riding open ocean swells and you can

• 59:25Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  You can push like high performance foiling is just like high performance surfing. The the lines you can draw, the turns are epic, the Gs are crazy.

• 59:33Joe Rogan?

  So you're just all in on this, huh?

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I'm all in on this.

• 59:36Joe Rogan?

  Is this an everyday thing for you?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yes. Every day. Same as jujitsu, six days a week, twice a day if possible.

• 59:43Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:44Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:46Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Do you have goals?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Virtuosity.

• 59:49Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I competed my whole life and and so now I live like I train the way I would if I was in a world championship training camp.

• 1:00:00Joe Rogan?

  That's hilarious with foiling. Who else is doing that?

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Just a couple lunatics.

• 1:00:05Joe Rogan?

  How many other people are foiling like they're training for a world championship activity?

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a it's a but the interesting thing is like I

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love it. It's um, but all these arts to me are connected. That's the strange thing about my like chess, Chinese martial arts, jujitsu, surfing, foiling. To me, the fascinating thing when you get toward the pinnacle of an art is that you start to experience, at least in my

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  From my perspective, that the apexes of these arts are much closer to one another than lower down in the mountain of the same art. So people who are virtuosos in various fields are often speaking a much more similar language than people who are at lower levels of the same art than they're training. And like when I think about chess, I related to chess through core principles, and those principles manifest in the martial arts. I remember that I had this, when I wrote my first book, The Art of, or my second book, The Art of Learning, it was about my experience of crossing over my level from chess into the Chinese martial arts.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  And I had this really interesting experience where I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition, playing 40 games at once in a charity for Duchenne Musculature Trophy. But I was, at that point, I'd been training martial arts for two years, and I had not been, I'd kind of moved, I was in the transition away from chess during that period. And I had this realization that I was winning these chess games, playing 40 games at once, but I was not playing chess. I was feeling flow, riding space left behind, I was riding the energetic wave of the game like I would if we were flowing on the mats, but I was making chess moves. And I realized that these arts had become fundamentally connected. And then that became like an area of interest and of exploration, and I started making what I was doing unconsciously more and more conscious.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  And now when I relate to chess, I don't move chess pieces anymore, but chess is manifest in everything that I do, as is jujitsu. And as is, in the ocean arts, I'm manifesting these other arts, the core principles I've experienced through them all the time. And that's, one of the things that I've been puzzled by for many years is why chess is so fucking hard. Like chess has no luck, the best chess players in the world are so brilliant at what they do. I listened to your episode with Magnus Carlsen. He was great. Yeah, that was cool. Like, someone like Magnus, he's so fucking good at what he does, such a virtuoso. But if you look at like the top 100 or top 1,000 chess players, they're tremendously

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  strong, but when they try to translate their ability to other fields, they often can't. And it's surprising.

• 1:02:45Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  And I've tried to figure out why for a lot of years, because you'd think like if you're able to just be so excellent at something that's super hard, you could take on something that's relatively easier and become very good at it. And I think that the reason that people often can't cross level over from one thing to the other is that they learn it in a localized language. So you can learn chess in a way which is very specific to chess, like principles that are just chess principles. Or you can learn chess in a language which connects to all of life. And that won't slow down, it might accelerate your chess learning. But you can, but like, and if children are taught games like chess, or gymnastics, or music, or whatever else, so they're learning about that art very deeply. They're touching quality, they're pushing their limits, they're living the life of training, as I know you value very much.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  But they're doing so in a language which connects to the rest of life. Then they're studying thematic interconnectedness while they're studying chess, or jujitsu, or anything else. And then they're just learning the language of excellence.

• 1:03:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  And it's interesting, because if you watch chess players, chess teachers, teaching students, many of them don't do this. They teach it within like the confines of the chessboard, like a prison. And if you learn chess that way, then it's like you're living on an island and the ocean around you is like prison walls, right? But if you study chess in a way that you're learning how each chess principle connects to every other art you could ever study, then just this web of interconnectedness is forming in your mind, then when you take on something else, you're able to cross that level over really, really naturally. And that, in many ways, that's my, that's a big part of my life's work, is the study of that interconnectedness.

• 1:04:28Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that a hu, well, it had to be a huge factor for you, that you were sort of forced to reevaluate? The way you interface with life when you became famous because of the film at fifteen. So, childhood chess player, become very well recognized, then all of a sudden this movie, and now you have to kind of like grapple with things. And as you said, these challenges make you a more complex person. And then, your ability to sort of push chess aside and try other things, do you think that's because of, it has to be a factor in your, this desire to explore other things? Because you're kind of thrust into this thing where your, your

• 1:05:12Joe Rogan?

  thing is now changed. Your thing is now not just flowing and learning and getting better and, and, and doing battle with chess. Now it's image and groupies and this bizarre thing that you're living up to, and you don't like it, and you want to escape it. And so you have to reevaluate. And so this forced reevaluation from a young age, at fifteen years old, this key developmental period as a young man, sort of opens you up to the possibilities of all sorts of different ways of living life, and all sorts of different things to do with life.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, a language I use for this is the, the passage from the preconscious to the postconscious competitor or artist. And like when I, up until fifteen, I, I would relate to myself as the preconscious competitor. I loved chess, it was free flowing, I loved the battle, I loved the competition. I loved the ass kicking and the kicking ass. I, I just loved the fucking battle of the thing. And then, and then I had, I, I fell in love for the first time when I was fifteen. The movie came out, um, after that. And, um, I started studying existentialist literature, I started reflecting on the absurdity of it all. I started to become present to the fact that these were just sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces. Like I was spending my life studying this fucking box, wooden box, like the construct, the absurdity of being stuck in that construct became clear

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  to me. And then I was becoming more and more self-conscious about how what I was doing was perceived by others. And I got lost in all of that.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  And in many ways, like, the journey, like, most people, like, some people don't run into that for a long time. Like, there are some chess players that just become insanely strong without ever reflecting on the absurdity of the fact that they're just playing chess. And that's a great liberation, like, that, that the moment you become aware of the fact that you're immortal, that you can get your ass kicked, that your arm can break, that you can die, that what you're doing is absurd, like, you get locked up by that knowledge. Right. And there's so many different forms that can take. Or the moment you, like, for example, Boston Celtics, like, they, like, you're hungering to win a world championship, and then you win the NBA Finals. Suddenly, everything changes. Your relationship, your motivation changes. All the reasons you're doing it are no longer valid in some ways, because now you've accomplished the thing you always dreamed of, and you have to discover. It's true, in any form of competition or art, in my experience, is that there comes a moment

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  where someone's consciousness becomes more complicated, and they can't just return to the innocence they had before. Because now, you can't do that. You can't put it back in the box. Right. It's out. So then you have to work through that journey, which is a lot of what I did from, like, my late teenage years, leaving, studying philosophy, and then moving into other fields, and started relating to art in a way that was integrating that self-awareness, integrating that sense of mortality. It's like when I, I, a very powerful example of this was, I, I die, I drown in a pool, I guess, like, nine, 10 years ago. I was doing hypoxic breath work, Wim Hof training, in a pool. Jesus Christ.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  And, uh, never do Wim Hof training, everybody, please, in a pool. Because you're, you're flushing the CO2 from your body, but CO2 is what gives you the urge to breathe. And so without carbon dioxide, and you're being, and you're, you don't feel the urge to breathe. And so, and I'd been a lifetime freediver, spearfishing, from when I was five, six years old, but I was never doing hypoxic breath work before freediving. So if you're diving 80, 90, 100 feet, you're, you're not flushing the CO2 from your body before you do so. So you have, you still have that, that sense for when you need to breathe. But I was in a NYU pool, I was at, just swimming 50 meters, 50 meters back and forth underwater, and then doing this, this hypoxic worth, breath work in between. And then I, my last recollection is being stretched out in bliss, that those tingles through your body you get from, have you done Wim Hof training? Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, those, you know, those tingles? Had those fucking tingles? And then, I woke up, 30 minutes later, what happened was that I blacked out. I was in the bottom of the pool for over four minutes after blacking out from shallow water blackout.

• 1:09:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Which should, it should be forty five seconds to a minute and you should be brain dead or dead. Cause you're post shallow water blackout. I know the time it was because there was an old man at the pool who saw me in the bottom of the pool. And swam. One lap and his laps were a little bit over a minute, so I'm a second lap. After his third lap, he said, let me, I'll check on him if he's still down. He thought I was holding my breath, but I was only holding my breath while swimming. So if I was still, I was fucking out. His fourth lap, after his fourth lap, he pulled me up. I was blue.

• 1:09:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  My whole body was blue. Um, my head was red. My body saved me. My training saved me and almost, and killed me. Sent all the blood to my brain. My eyes were blown out red, like bloodshot for three weeks that followed. And I, um. I remember waking up and having this, everyone, looking at everyone around me and like, what the fuck is everyone, what's going on guys? Like, what's the drama? I was the fucking drama.

• 1:09:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  And I spent that night in the hospital going through old chess variations, trying to like test my brain. As my brain ruined, like, do I remember things? Somehow my brain. Maybe it's fucked up, but it's, seems like it'd be working pretty well. And, um.

• 1:10:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  But like, I can't, and, and, and that was also a big part of me realizing I had to spend my life in the, in the, in the ocean. Cause like, I could feel the potential for some PTSD response. Like I could, I could actually feel the potential trauma response, like a cloud that was washing. Over me, like I could see the cloud coming and I just fucking decided not to let it in. And I got back in the water the next day. And I, I just fucking, and I think that's a big part of my relationship with the ocean is having died in water.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  I need to spend my life in the water.

• 1:10:40Joe Rogan?

  Did you have any sort of out of body experience or anything where you're gone?

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  What's really fucked up about it is no. That's what's really wild. It went, it just blacked. That's what's crazy is that I, I went, my last memory is of just.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Tingles and bliss and then waking up. And so if I hadn't been pulled out. There would have been no flash. No. There were no seeing my life pass before my eyes, no. Tunnel on the other side, nothing. You know what's really fucking wild though, is that many years later. I was doing this, um.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  This guy Brandon Powell is a brilliant guy who's a top Wim Hof trainer and a trainer of trainers of his guys. And I was doing some retreats with teams of mine and we were doing some Wim Hof work. And he had this methodology of kind of accelerated hypoxic work where that he said, I'm not sure if it's true, but he said, "Release DMT in your body, inhibit the DMT inhibitors in your body." And I did these journeys with him twice through pure breath work, no psychedelics. And I experienced, these two times, months apart, I experienced, one time I experienced the center of my consciousness as my busted disc. And I experienced the world through like the electrical connections emerging from my

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  L4, L5. It's very strange. And the other one was the only memory I have of that, and I'm not sure if this is accurate or some kind of illusion, but I saw the drowning experience from above, the whole thing. I watched the 20 minutes that I was on the, that I was on the bottom of the pool and then up and 25 minutes and then on the pool deck, and I saw the whole thing from above. But that was like years after it happened. So I can't explain that.

• 1:12:31Joe Rogan?

  Were all the people there, the same people?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. My memory of it consciously from what actually happened is so fuzzy, right? Because I just died and came back. And then I saw it from above. I think I was mostly focused on the memory of myself. Yeah, so I relate to myself now, like I've died and I'm living. And I live with a sense of gratitude and commitment. That's a big part of why we moved to the jungle with my family. It's like I emerged from that with a commitment to living life as beautifully and deeply and truly as I possibly could and to... And to not let anything slip. Just all in.

• 1:13:13Joe Rogan?

  Isn't it fascinating that sometimes it take, again, it's the same thing as like loss propels you to a next level. Even the moment in life where you realize it all could just go away. Like that.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  So fucking fast, instantly, no warning, just gone.

• 1:13:28Joe Rogan?

  No, no warning.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  I've done so many stupid fucking things like in these extreme sports I've done. You know, like so many times I almost died freediving or.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  But that one was different, man. Because there was, like, I didn't, it was just a, and the crazy thing was just a technical blind spot. I just didn't know this thing about carbon dioxide. I didn't know I was taking a risk in that moment. I thought I was just taking a swim.

• 1:13:50Joe Rogan?

  Has, did you learn from other people who do Wim Hof breathing when they swim?

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  After or before?

• 1:13:58Joe Rogan?

  No, before.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no.

• 1:13:59Joe Rogan?

  Who taught you to do this?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Nobody. I did one Wim Hof breathing on land and I was like, you know, I'll fucking do it. I'll just do it fucking on the swim right now. Sounds like a great idea.

• 1:14:07Joe Rogan?

  I think other people have done that and died.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have. And Navy, and most people who die from shallow water blackout are highly trained.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Navy SEALs. Because they're very good at inhibiting the urge to breathe, but you can get too good at it.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Or you can just not feel it at all.

• 1:14:24Joe Rogan?

  The ocean is such a fascinating thing. It's so alive. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Believe it or not, the holiday season is here again. And that means you might need to fill some seasonal roles. Fast. Maybe you need extra cashiers or stalkers, or maybe something more unique like a lead elf, or an expert gift wrapper, or a Zamboni driver. Whoever you're looking for, whatever skills you need to power through the rest of the year, ZipRecruiter is one of the best places to start your search. Because you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. And because ZipRecruiter helps sort through thousands of resumes and applications,

• 1:15:07Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:48Joe Rogan?

  a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. It's a, it's just a strange thing when you get in the ocean, if you haven't been for a while. You climb in and you feel it moving around you and pulling and, and the water just feels different. It feels like it's a living thing. Like you're in a, you dunk your head under and you look at

• 1:16:27Joe Rogan?

  this world that's three quarters of the surface of the earth. And it's so, it's so vibrant. And you see people that are surfers that just get drawn into its spell. And it just becomes a part of their life is to ride that energy and to feel it. And, and the addiction that they get from it, guys like Laird, now guys like you. I know so many people that they, like Jaco, he won't leave San Diego. He doesn't even want to be in California. Yes, but San Diego is the ocean for him. He has to be by the ocean. Yeah. And you can't dominate the ocean at all. You have to receive her. Yeah. You just, and if you have any brittleness in your ego, she will kick your ass until you just blend.

• 1:17:12Joe Rogan?

  I know you're a favor, you're in favor of optimizing training and finding ways to learn things quicker. Would wave surf pools, those crazy ones like Kelly Slater style wave surf pools where they have, that would give you like way more

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  If you're surfing, for sure. Wave pools have revolutionized surf training because for foiling, you have the ocean. And foiling is much more abundant. Like, the surf community is quite scarce in some ways because you have to, you can only surf in specific kinds of waves. And like, if you, if you're trying to make one turn, you might not see that section again for two years. You can't replicate conditions in the ocean. Foiling, you can, because you can pump a foil, you can drive it down, let it float back up and drive it down. So you can, and you can, or you can whip yourself behind a jet ski into a certain kind of wave. So if I want to work on like a certain turn, I can get forty, fifty reps in a given day. While surfing pre-wave pool, you couldn't at all. So most great surfers, I would, my,

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  are brilliant low rep learners. They've been, because by necessity, in the ocean, you don't get tons of reps. So in my observation, the greatest, like competitive surfers in the world are excellent at learning from one or two reps, like Marcelo Garcia is on the mats. I'm not, I'm not naturally a great low rep learner. I'm a higher rep learner. Foiling is, one could say it's, it's, it's more technically complex than surfing because it's everything that surfing is, but also you have a foil which has lift dynamics and a tail, and you can change the foil shape, the tail shape, the, if you change the angle of attack on your tail by a quarter degree, it changes the whole feel of everything. It's super technical. And so in many ways, one could argue that it's harder. I wouldn't say,

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  not that it's hard. These, any of these arts are infinitely deep, as, because you can refine anything forever. But it's, it's more technical shit to deal with, but you, it's more trainable, because you can replicate conditions. Like you now can in wave pools. Wave pools for surfers now, you can, you can hit the same section thirty, forty times. So I do, I do think it's an incredible, it's incredible. But the interesting thing is that most surfers of this generation aren't, they don't train in the same way that chess players do, or jiu-jitsu fighters do, because it's a low rep art that you can't replicate conditions in. So surfers aren't. Most surfers aren't constructed psychologically in a way that they will take advantage of wave pools the way a jujitsu guy would.

• 1:19:38Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Like drilling, like you drill.

• 1:19:40Joe Rogan?

  Psychologically, that's interesting because they're accustomed to just taking what the ocean gives you.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  You can't just take a low rep learner and tell them to like live like a high rep learner. It's a different fucking thing.

• 1:19:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Right? And it's very interesting to me that, so surfers crossing over to foiling is very interesting because they, a lot of surfers, some surfers do it and they just, they're all in and they want to take it on. A lot of the best surfers in the world are crossing over, but it's a different lifestyle. The ones who cross over, the ones who can embrace the high rep training life.

• 1:20:09Joe Rogan?

  The one who can adapt, yeah.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Joe Rogan?

  That's, the low rep training thing with surfing, I never really considered, but that does make sense. You have to be able to optimize. You have to be able to take advantage of each one of those things and pick it up pretty quickly. You have to.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  Especially in the early, think about like learning as a kid and then like everything you're exposed to, the ocean's always moving, always changing, right? If you can like learn from one rep and burn it in, then that just, well, in jujitsu, for example, you can say, "I'm going to drill this arm bar 40 times today, 40 times like this afternoon, hundreds of times, thousands of times over the next two weeks," right? So you can get as many reps as you need. It's not true in the ocean.

• 1:20:49Joe Rogan?

  Right. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Why do you think that children learn quicker than adults?

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, beautiful question. I think it's, I think a lot about unlearning, right? So my life's work is on learning and I think a lot about unlearning because so much of what high level learning is, is being unblocked, which is getting rid of the blocks, the egoic blocks, the false constructs we have, the fucking bullshit we put on everything we do, trying to control the situation, we should just embrace the lack of, children don't have to unlearn that. They haven't learned it in the first place. So they're unblocked. Like my little boy Charlie learning how to surf was so beautiful to watch. He just, like, he grew up in the ocean. He grew up in the jungle and ocean and he just from a young age was swimming and tumbling and we made a game of tumbling and then when he first got on a surfboard, it was like it

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  wasn't, we didn't make it technical. It wasn't like he should, telling him what to do. It was like he could be right foot forward or left foot forward. It wasn't, we didn't impose things on him. He just like danced on the board and would find his way and he started doing things that were very technical that he would just create. It was pure playfulness. While if you watch people come to a surf, like a surf break who are like New Yorkers who traveled down for five days and they've got all this gear, the gear is amazing. They've got like gloves and booties and knee guards and like everything is covered, white face, everything is just like, not a part of their body is designed to touch the ocean. They're trying to keep the ocean away. And they're like, they want to be super controlling about everything. They learn, they're like, everything is so regimented in their minds, but they're

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  trying to control their relationship with the ocean. But the way to learn on the ocean is to not control it, to embrace it, to listen, listen to it, to observe it, to feel it, to like let it envelop you, right?

• 1:22:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Well, kids will just play. They're not afraid of failing. They'll, they'll just, like the moment a kid becomes afraid of looking bad, like you see that wash over kids when they're like nine, 10, 11, 12, some different ages and they become, oh, they don't want to fall. They don't want to look bad. And then, then that's when they get locked up.

• 1:22:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  The freedom of, I mean, to me, a lot of what like the beacon is, is as adults, is being the post-conscious, discovering the post-conscious freedom as a learner.

• 1:23:03Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Like, how can we learn without the egoic blocks, right? Without having to look good. So if you're crossing over, like if you're a world-class striker and you're getting on the jiu-jitsu mats and you're getting your ass kicked. Or if you're a great jiu-jitsu fighter and you get onto an MMA gym and suddenly the guys can just beat the shit out of you. Like having, or a great surfer switching over to foiling, right? Or a great chess player moving into the martial arts. So you're fucking, or if you're like training in some esoteric, you know, Chinese martial art like I was, and then you're moving to the jiu-jitsu mats and you might have some ego, but you're just tapping out to everybody all the time, right? And like having the freedom to learn without egoic blocks is, and I actually think that culturally, this is one of the most important things that we need to cultivate because we're living in a world now where the pace of technological disruption is accelerating

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  so fast. I know you've done a bunch of, of explorations on this with, with Tristan Harris and others in terms of what AI is bringing to society. It's been a big focus of mine for Many, many years, and it's an area where I'm working. I think that that we are going to be living in a world where AI is better at everything than we are, right? So if you think about it in the context of chess, I grew up in the world of where chess was crossing over into the computer realm. So computers are first, like, I began playing chess in the pre-computer era, computer chess era. Then computers entered, and I initially was very resistant and romantic to it.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  And I remember at nineteen, I started developing Chessmaster, this computer chess program, and I developed this academy of mine for the next ten years that followed, teaching the human side of chess through computers. But when it first, they first approached me, I didn't want to do it because I, I felt like it was going to disrupt, it was going to kill the beauty of, of human chess, the art of chess, which is so much about imperfection. And then, but like chess players, when I grew up, had to sit in the unknowing, in tolerance, they had to have a tolerance of cognitive distance. You might, and I might study a chess position and go three months without knowing what the solution is, right? So our psychologies had to be constructed so that we could sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for long, long periods of time, days, weeks, months, sometimes years.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Now chess players can click on a button and they've got a supercomputer right by their side, will tell them the answer instantly. It's interesting to think about how different that is psychologically and the different kinds of people that that draws in. But what happened then is that you had Deep Blue entered the game, like, supercomputers, and then you had the movement of AI entering into chess. And we had AlphaGo and then AlphaZero, which came out of DeepMind. So Demis Hassabis was the developer of DeepMind. He was a childhood chess friend of mine. So Demis and I, from age eleven on, were, were good friends, and we had dialogue about the birth of DeepMind, which was this AI company he began. And then he developed AlphaGo and AlphaZero. And to give, give a feel for what AlphaZero did in chess. AlphaZero was able to, without being taught anything about humans playing chess,

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  no education of like the history of human chess playing, within three hours of experimentation was stronger than any human or computer in history. So imagine your life's work, like, you know, I was a pretty good chess player, right? Like, someone like Magnus Carlsen is a much, much stronger chess player. He's a world champion. Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer, like, think about people who are world champions. AlphaZero, within three hours of experimentation, without being taught anything, was stronger than them. Right? So, like, we really need to... So, the strongest AI engine in the world today is rated 3,700 Elo. So, to give a sense for what that means, when I was nine years old, my rating was like 1,900 or so, right? Magnus Carlsen, like, the strongest, you know, the strongest human players in the world

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  now are rated somewhere about 2,800, 2,850-ish Elo. The strongest AI is 3,700 Elo. So, just like, the absurdity of the fact, the gap between, like, a strong nine-year-old and the human world champion is the same Elo rap, gap as between the world champion and the strongest AI. Wow. It gets so hard for us to really wrap our heads around what that means. That means that everything, like, chess players had a front-row seat to that happening early. When I listen to some of your dialogues with, um, these guys, and I could feel you and them trying to grapple with, like, how to communicate what it means to, to have these, these insanely powerful intelligences in the world.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  And I think, like, if you can imagine, like, an art like chess having millennia of development, people studying it, like you train jiu-jitsu, right? So, imagine people's training 10 hours a day for 30, 40 years, being the greatest human in the world at it. And then something can come in and, within three hours of experimentation, be much stronger than them. And imagine that's gonna be in fucking everything. Nuts. Right? Like, we have to be like children in how we learn. We're gonna have to like, release the egoic relationship that we have to our level, to our knowledge, to everything. You know, the great, you know Thomas Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions?

• 1:28:02Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Right, so like, you think about what happens, what the human has to do to the internal resistance we have to overcome to embrace the new paradigm. So let's say you're a Newtonian physicist, right? You've been studying physics your whole life, you've got tenure, you've got forty, fifty years of knowledge built up, everyone reveres you, and now there's this new thing, quantum mechanics enters the picture, right? Like, to embrace this new thing is to admit to oneself and everybody else that your life's work is, kind of, you have to release it, it's wrong, it's old, right? This new paradigm is, but we resist it individually.

• 1:28:36Joe Rogan?

  Ego.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Ego, and societally, right? Because we will fight tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes. That's one of our strongest drivers of all humans, right? And so, I think we're moving into a world now where you're gonna have thirty-seven, thirty-eight hundred elo-rated everything.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  Kicking our ass at everything, so we have to become like children, to go back to your question, in my opinion, and how we relate to learning, right? We can't, decision-making, right? Like, when, you know, we think about, like, social media. Imagine a thirty-eight hundred elo-rated networked, imagine a million networked, thirty-eight hundred elo-rated superintelligences utilizing everything that they can gather about you on social media to manipulate you, to do whatever it wants, or whoever is controlling it wants. It can have you do anything.

• 1:29:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  But we have to, like, it's so hard for us to admit that we are the ant relative to the human, right? Like, we are the ant, we have to have that humility.

• 1:29:40Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  And one of the things that, um... I think that that's the most important question today as that we face as a species is like, what do we do?

• 1:29:51Joe Rogan?

  Well, we won't know until it happens and we will become a different thing. We will have to admit that we are no longer the apex intelligence on the planet. We will have something that's akin to an artificial life form that's far superior to us in reasoning, access to resources, logic. It'll be far more technically proficient. It'll make far better versions of itself, probably pretty quickly. They've already seen AIs duplicating itself. It's not being prompted to do this.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  But when you say we don't, I mean, I would argue we should operate as if it's already happening. It's an inability.

• 1:30:32Joe Rogan?

  It is. It is happening, but it hasn't completely transformed life yet.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:36Joe Rogan?

  It's emerging right now.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  It's about to.

• 1:30:38Joe Rogan?

  It's a, yeah, it's a god. It's a god that's emerging. And if it's not a god yet, it'll be a god in 50 years. It just is, it's going to be attached to quantum computing. It's going to figure out ways to implement better strategies as far as utilization of energy, resources. It'll be much better at everything than we are.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00Joe Rogan?

  And then the question is, will it be used to manipulate us? Will it be used to control populations? Will it be, Elon says, his estimation says there's an 80 to 90% chance it'll have a radically positive impact on society at large. That a 90% likelihood that it'll radically improve the quality of everyone's life. But then there's 20 or 10% that it will not and that will be imprisoned. This is like 10% possibility of the Matrix, you know? 90% possibility of a technologically inspired utopia.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  My feeling about it is that, I mean, there are places where it's going to be incredibly, it's going to be beautiful. Like just how computer chess raised the level of human chess game, chess players, right? And now AI chess has made chess players much, much stronger. And part of it is because great chess players are partially great because they have had, they're excellent at knowing where not to look. Right, great chess players don't actually look at more, they look at less, but they look in the most potent directions.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  And what's fascinating is that AI entering the picture has forced really strong chess players to unlearn where they've been correct to learn not to look.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  So in other words, areas where they were well-trained not to look because humans couldn't play those positions, AI can now play those positions. And actually, those are the right positions to play, they're the objectively correct positions to play. But now humans studying with an AI can be much better at playing those positions.

• 1:32:43Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Right? And so, like, for example, I'm working on this fascinating project called Lila Science, which is focused on combining cutting-edge science, the best scientists in the world, and cutting-edge AI to try to have huge breakthroughs in material science and life sciences. And now, that can only be done, in my opinion, with just best, best, best-in-class safety practices. And in my view, that involves having a higher-level AI running safety than you have running the actual science.

• 1:33:15Joe Rogan?

  When you say safety, like, what are you referring to?

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Making sure that we don't do, that doesn't go wild, that you don't create things that get out there that could be terribly destructive. I think that the part of the AI race that's happening is that people are driven by ego, and there's like a game theory of a race going on. And when you have a race, everyone's just running as fast as they can, but they're not, if they slow down to think about what's safe, they might fall behind in the race. And I believe ethically, if we're in the AI scene at all, then we must be developing safety practices that are making it responsible.

• 1:33:54Joe Rogan?

  That's a very logical perspective. Unfortunately, we are in a race, and that's where it gets weird, right? And because we're not just in a race in America.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:02Joe Rogan?

  We're in a race internationally. And the consequences of losing the race are grave. It's akin to the consequences of losing the Manhattan Project, of not becoming to the bomb the first, not being the first to implement a bomb, which is really crazy to think. But I think it's that on steroids, I think it's the Manhattan Project on steroids, because I think it has the... If if used in the wrong way, it has the the possibility of completely imprisoning society. All you have to do is lock down resources, food, power, electricity, everything. And you you put society at a complete halt.

• 1:34:44Joe Rogan?

  If you can figure out a way to completely disable grids and, you know, every car has a computer in it now. Most cars are connected to Wi-Fi. It's most new ones have at least an option to connect it. There's a way that someone can connect to your car. And this is this is crazy. In phones, everyone's reliant completely on your phone. There's AI in your phone now. Who knows what what could happen if that got hijacked? You know, there's a guy named Robert Epstein who spent a lot of time analyzing what the impact of curated searches can do to presidential elections, to public opinion on things.

• 1:35:25Joe Rogan?

  And that when you're getting a search, where you're using Google or some of these search engines, you're getting curated search results. If you look for specific political opinions, political positions, you will get a curated result that is oftentimes skewed in whatever ideology, towards whatever ideology the people that programmed it are are, you know, they're aligned with. So if you Google something about Donald Trump, you will have as many negative responses they could possibly throw to the front of the line. It will take you page after page after page to find what you're looking for, but you'll be confronted immediately with negative stuff.

• 1:36:07Joe Rogan?

  Now, if you're a person that's in the middle and maybe a person that's undecided in an electoral process, in an electoral race, you can be swayed in a significant manner. And he estimates it's as high as thirty to fifty percent of the people that are on the fence, that are sort of undecided voters, can be swayed by search result engines, which is kind of crazy. And that's just, you know, an algorithm. That's just something that they've devised. This is not like. A purposeful changing of narratives in order to implement whatever strategy they think would be the best for them financially, whether it's a central bank, digital currency,

• 1:36:51Joe Rogan?

  or a social credit score system, or something where they could completely control behavior and have your behavior locked up to your bank account, locked up to your ability to make a living, your ability to travel. That's spooky stuff, because that's all AI. If AI can be, if someone figures out the best version of AI that can traverse these boundaries that we have with encryption and with grids and computer systems. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, it's good to prepare for the future, but when you start overanalyzing what's happening around you, dreaming up every hypothetical situation of what could happen, that's when it gets dangerous. You can start to hyperfixate

• 1:37:34Joe Rogan?

  and stress out and all over things that haven't even happened. That's no good for current you or future you. If you're struggling to stay in the present and out of your head, try talking with a quality therapist from BetterHelp. They have psychologists, family therapists, marriage counselors, social workers, and more. Whatever you need to work through, BetterHelp can match you with a seasoned professional with the specialty that you need. BetterHelp is now a network with more than 125 health plans with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance or live

• 1:38:18Joe Rogan?

  outside the US, you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com. That's better H E L P dot com.

• 1:38:30Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high. It's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan.

• 1:39:14Joe Rogan?

  Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card, provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. Just completely lock everything down. We're fucked.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why I don't, you know, when I, when I hear people say things like that, 80 to 90% positive, I feel like they're, they're, they're jumping to the destination without thinking about the journey to it. Because the journey to it is going to involve so much disruption, so much pain, so much chaos. And I think what you just said about grids and everything is true. I mean, you think about, about how many people had the ability to disrupt in that way 15 years ago? A handful of countries.

• 1:39:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Right? Now it's going to be hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals who just have access to super code, super coders.

• 1:40:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Right? And so how could it be 80 to 90% positive when there's just going to be limitless humans who have the ability to disrupt armed with 3,800 elo-rated coders? They can do anything you want, hackers. It's just like insane.

• 1:40:24Joe Rogan?

  In the hands of broken people.

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  It's much easier to destroy than to create.

• 1:40:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Right? You can create for thousands of years and you destroy instantly.

• 1:40:30Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Right? So it only takes one terribly destructive act, or a handful of them, to overcome all the positive. I, I don't believe that that 80, 90% thing is, is right. I think that there are areas, like science, where we could easily... Create materials that could have a massively positive impact on the climate. We could have life science breakthroughs that eliminate cancer, eliminate diseases, make the human lifespan hundreds of years. I think those things could happen, which is great. I also think that we could be manipulated into doing increasingly destructive things. And we could have horrific things happen like, like the grid. You know, there's a guy, there's a guy who was very brilliant in the espionage world years ago, who said to me, he said to me, you know, he's someone who would know.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, Josh, what you don't realize is a strong AI, and this was years ago, armed with the information that the social media companies have about you, could convince 99% of Americans to move to Alaska or Antarctica or anywhere within two weeks. Easily. Easily. I mean, just like, it's so hard to have the humility that we are the ant relative to the human.

• 1:41:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Right? If you have a 3,800 Elo, I'm just using that rated intelligence, trying to manipulate you, and it's armed with everything. I mean, humans can manipulate you with what's on social media.

• 1:41:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, with a British accent and an infomercial.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no problem. Show some leg, you're gone.

• 1:42:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just so hard to have the, so we have to have the, like, the real humility that we are manipulatable. And a super intelligence, which is out there, and there are humans controlling the superintelligences so far, maybe that will end. So I personally feel, I know everyone should get the fuck off social media. I just think it's, like, I think that's the most important thing. Because everything that we're feeding in, I've never been on social media. I made that decision a long time ago.

• 1:42:30Joe Rogan?

  Really? When did you make it?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  I was never on it. I made it, right? When, first, I remember when, like, MySpace came out, like-

• 1:42:36Joe Rogan?

  What did you, what did you think at the time?

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Fuck that.

• 1:42:39Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't, I didn't, it felt off to me. It felt like something I didn't want to be involved with. I didn't, I'm not saying that I was prescient and I saw everything that would happen. But I never, there was some people who were impersonating me on social media. And, but I was never on any form of social media. And, and.

• 1:42:58Joe Rogan?

  Good for you.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean.

• 1:43:01Joe Rogan?

  I'm on everything but TikTok.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  TikTok is fucked, it's hilarious. I was, I was, when I was flying here, I was listening to your, your conversation with Tristan Harris whilst the dude next to me was, was scrolling TikTok on the plane. And it was amazing, listening to this dialogue here and watching him just like.

• 1:43:17Joe Rogan?

  Watching it happen.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  An hour and a half straight, just like boom, boom. It was incredible. I've never actually seen someone fucking do that. It was the most brainless thing I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:43:26Joe Rogan?

  It's so brainless and so addictive.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  And so manipulative, like it can just, this, this, like, it can guide you to anything. But why don't we, this one thing I kind of disagreed with you on this talk, where you, you were saying that you just don't think that humans are going to do anything about it until we're, we're forced to. But I, I don't know, man. I think that, what if we just wake the fuck up and take ourselves off of this thing that can be used to steer us anywhere this other humans or AI wants to steer us? Like, why don't we just remove ourselves from it?

• 1:43:58Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's a very rational perspective.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Let's just fucking do it though.

• 1:44:01Joe Rogan?

  But most people aren't rational.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  But why don't we help people be rational and just, just.

• 1:44:04Joe Rogan?

  You'd have to change the, the whole way they interface with life. And that's a big ask. It's not as simple as logically, social media is bad for you, I'll stay off. The, this small dopamine hit that you get from opening up reels, just scrolling through and seeing people get knocked out and car accidents and big boobs. That is, for whatever reason, much more compelling than the idea of possessing autonomy. And the, the idea of, you know, having. The ability to completely remove yourself from the thing that everyone's addicted to,

• 1:44:46Joe Rogan?

  which is likes and engagement and getting an outrage. The algorithm showing you things over and over again that outrage you. It's so compelling to people and we're so averse to being bored that at any time when nothing's going on, you pick up your phone, you start scrolling. At any time, you just get nonsense just fed into your head at any time.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  But think about like the first time that somebody experiences jujitsu, right? They get on the mats and they're, and they realize, they might have some hubris, they're an athlete. Maybe they've done some stand-up. Maybe they haven't, they're a football player, whatever. And they suddenly are like a fish out of water. They're flopping on the sand, right? And their joints are being popped and they're being choked out. And the humility that they experience, right?

• 1:45:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Like, I think we need to culturally experience that humility before it's too late. Cause that's what, that's how manipulatable we are. Just how like a first day grappler is on the jujitsu mats against a decent fighter. A decent grappler, like that's how helpless we are next to a 3800 elo which exists. It'll be stronger than 30, I'm just saying that because that's where it is now. It'll be much the fuck stronger than that tomorrow.

• 1:45:55Joe Rogan?

  Once it's attached to quantum computing, it literally would be a god.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00Joe Rogan?

  And we're about to experience the most bizarre transition that I think any human civilization has ever experienced. And you know, it's electricity times a billion. It's, you know, computers times a billion. It's something completely different. And we're gonna adapt to it. We're going to have to, we're gonna have to figure it out. It's just what will that be like? What will life be like when we adapt to it? That's what things, that's when things are gonna get strange. I think the 80 to 90% improvement of, of life experience. I think what he's talking about, quality of life experience. I think what he's talking about is It'll make allocation of resources much more efficient.

• 1:46:45Joe Rogan?

  It'll be much easier to get water and and health services to third world countries. It'll be much easier to to keep power on in places. It'll be much easier for people to get sanitation, medicine, things along those lines. And then starving, poverty, nutrition, all those things could probably worked out in a far more efficient and a far more effective way. Then the problem is control. That's the problem. The problem is human beings, every single government, every single leadership position, everything involves control. The CEO controls the company. The president controls the country.

• 1:47:28Joe Rogan?

  There's Congress, there's senators, control, control, control. Everything is control and and then financial benefit from that control. That's where it gets scary. Because whoever is actually programming this thing, as we've seen with Google's AI disaster, when they programmed their AI to show you images of Nazis and it showed you multicultural, multi-ethnic, you know, multiracial Nazis, like instead of actual, like what is it though? No, Nazis with fucking dueling scars on their face, hard-looking scary German dudes. That's Nazis. These are not Nazis. This is a fever dream. This is some nuttiness that you've you've put your DEI nonsense into

• 1:48:12Joe Rogan?

  an artificial version of what the past is. That's crazy. You can't do that. Because if you start doing that with everything else, then we have a distorted version of reality itself by the most potent intelligence that we currently have at our disposal. And that's nuts.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  The question is, what should we do? And like as individuals? Societally, I mean, I know you're you're having dialogue with people who have a lot of ideas about the societally. And I'm thinking about it on the individual level as well. And it goes like your question about children and learning, right? I I feel that there's something about having that beginner's mind, which is so liberating.

• 1:48:51Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  Right? And it's very difficult for adults to release their egoic.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Addiction to what they do, to their habits, right? To what props up their identity. But I think that what we could do is take on thinking, take on learning, take on the art of decision making, for example, with a beginner's mind. For the world that's coming, like you think about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it was or what it used to be, right? So what does it mean to be a human in the world that we're a year or two or three away from, right? Where there's a superintelligence out there that can manipulate us, where so many jobs are lost? Well, let me throw that at you. What do you think the world will look like?

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  What do I think it will look like? Yeah.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  I think that we're going to have thrillingly exciting discoveries being made.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  We're going to have problems solved that we are, as humans, unable to solve. And so there'll be like amazing technological innovations that are going to make things much more convenient. I think there'll be huge life science breakthroughs. I think there'll be huge material science breakthroughs.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  I think there will be wild competition for who controls it. And I completely agree with you about that.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  And I think that as that unfolds, it's going to be really messy. I think that there's going to be like unbelievable amounts of jobs are going to be lost and then people are going to not have jobs. So what the fuck are they going to do, right? So this is part of what I'm describing. People need to train at the ability to recreate themselves, right? Like how some people can move from one art to another and others can't. I think we have to train at the art of rediscovery, right? So I think we're going to be tested as a species in our ability to recreate our identities and to live in a state of dynamic flux, of embracing new paradigms. Paradigms are going to be shifting all the fucking time. The pace of change is going to be radically accelerating

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  for the rest of our lives, the rest of our lives, right? So if that pace of change is accelerating, then we need to have the ability to recreate ourselves as things shift. We all know that like you can't be solving the problem that was important, like In a fight a minute ago. Right. Right? It's a different fucking problem than we have right now. Right. Or in a chess game an hour ago, or 10 minutes ago, or one minute ago, right? As a society, we need to be solving the problems that are and that are coming, not the ones that were 10 years ago that we're emotionally addicted to. Right. But humans don't fucking do that. Right. We are, we tend to cling to our ideas, the decisions we've made, then we try to justify our ideas. We cling to identities. I mean, I, I think that this question of identity is a, is a really important one.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  Whether it relates to a belief system, a decision you've made. Like, this idea of humans fighting tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes is something like, you think about someone who has, like, what, what one might frame as like a fear of success, right? Like, that's a term people use, fear of success. The way I understand fear of success is that, why do people undermine themselves when they are close to something that they want? Right? To a breakthrough that they yearn. I think the reason is because if their conceptual scheme, if their identity, is in not being the person who wins the big game, right? Or who succeeds, it is more terrifying to succeed than it is to give up that old identity. That's a core driver of human psychology, right?

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  In competition, that's a lot of what we do, right? We plant identities in people, tells in people, little egoic addictions in people, and then we exploit the mind being stuck there because it's not dynamic, it can't keep on moving, right? Like, Robert Persig, my favorite, the most important philosopher in my life, Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Have you read it? Yeah. Have you read that book? Yeah, I did. Yeah, awesome. He was a really important person in my life. I could tell you an interesting story about him. His idea of dynamic quality, right? I think we have to live in a state of dynamic quality, not static quality, right? Like, you think about the front of the freight train surging through spacetime versus sitting in the restaurant car. Like, we want to be strapped to the front of the freight train as reality is unfolding and adapting to the new realities.

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  And I think we need to build the, the way of life that allows us to, to do that. Right. Right? And I have a lot of ideas about what that way of life looks like. I think if we don't do that, then we're going to be dinosaurs in a fucking world with the comet coming, and it's going to blow us the fuck up. So we need to create the ability to reinvent ourselves, to be creative, to adapt.

• 1:53:21Joe Rogan?

  So what do you think happens with all these people that lose their jobs? Because most people believe that some form of universal basic income, people that study this, believe that some form of universal basic income is inevitable and necessary. I worry about that psychologically because I worry about people being dependent upon checks from the state and not having agency and not having a personal sense of worth. You know, I think people identify with what they do. If someone's a great mechanic and they have a great relationship with the people that bring their cars to them and they enjoy being able to fix things and help people, they identify with this. This is a part of who they are.

• 1:54:04Joe Rogan?

  They're a person who fixes cars and works on cars. If that's gone and now all of a sudden they just have a check, who are they?

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  What do dudes do when they have nothing to do?

• 1:54:16Joe Rogan?

  Well, it depends on the dude, you know? Some people learn new things, some people get excited and some people, there's going to be people that take advantage of it in a very positive way. If there's a, if there's like a, like a real living wage that you get from the government where you really don't have to worry about your housing anymore, you don't have to worry about your food. I mean, I think that would be, if you were an ambitious person, that would be amazing. So then you could dedicate yourself entirely to what you love, whatever that thing is, and just really dive into that and let that become your focus in life. And we're accustomed to believing that survival itself is the primary driving force. Food and shelter is the primary driving force for this intelligent species of human beings.

• 1:55:01Joe Rogan?

  But part of me says, why? Why is that? Why does that have to be your driving force? Shouldn't, if we have unlimited resources, which assumingly will, assumingly we will with AI, if it's implemented correctly, we have unlimited resources in terms of your ability to never worry about being hungry, never worry about shelter.

• 1:55:22Joe Rogan?

  You would hope that what people would do then is pursue their dreams. But some people don't have fucking dreams. Some people, they've gone too far down this journey of life with a rigid mindset and a very limited perspective. And now they're forced to change. And many will change, but many will not. And that's where it gets weird. Because then you have a whole entire class of society, an enormous swath of human beings that are addicted to TikTok, that now get checks, have no hobbies or interests, live off garbage food. And they're lost.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02Joe Rogan?

  And they're being told, probably they're being manipulated, that someone's responsible for this. That these people need to be taken down and shut down. We need to return to our old way of life. You give enormous potential for unrest.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, like,

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  in dialogue that I've had over the past 10 years or so with people who are AI optimists, there's this jump to the utopian future, right? Where everything, like land of abundance, no more resource scarcity, everything is beautiful. People have the ability to study art and poetry and opera and, right? They don't need to work anymore. They don't need to be grinding anymore. They can think about philosophy, et cetera, et cetera. That's the argument. That's just like, assume that that would be a positive end. I'm not so sure. I think that we have some other energies flowing through us that we might want to express. But let's just like, say that that would be great. The problem is getting there, right? So in chess, there's this interesting dynamic between strategy and tactics all the time, right? We need to liberate ourselves from, to be strategic and to think ahead.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  Like, think about what would be the ideal place to go. But then we also have to get the tactics right, the math right, to get there. We can't just hang our queen or hang our bishop or hang our rook on the path to our strategic dream, right? We need to integrate execution with strategic dreaming. Because often if we're thinking too much tactically, we can't see the long-term plan we want to utilize, right? Like, the end result we want to move toward. And so, when I think about this path of AI, I think there's going to be so much disruption along the way to that place of resource abundance and utopia. Even if that was a positive place, I think it's going to be a really messy path to get there.

• 1:57:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:41Speaker 01

  But for us to navigate the path, the question to me now is, What do, what should we be doing as individuals, as a species, in order to allow us to navigate that path?

• 1:57:51Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think certain people certainly, if universal income becomes ubiquitous, we're certainly going to need some sort of guidance. We're certainly going to need some, something that guides people towards a feeling of relevancy, towards a feeling of purpose. Like, you gotta, you gotta give people something.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  Training is a beautiful thing to do.

• 1:58:12Joe Rogan?

  Yes, any, any kind of training, anything where you're learning something. But, again, it comes to this comfort thing. You and I have very similar paths in life in that we've sought things that are, many people find uncomfortable and difficult. And I think there's great value in uncomfortable and difficult things and in the beginner's mindset and the learner's mindset, because there's just, you learn more about everything by learning about something. And I, I've lived my life like that, and so have you. And there's many people out there that resonate with these ideas, and they, they also live their life like that, and they get excited. But there's many people that don't. I know how chaotic things get this time of the year, between all the holidays, trying

• 1:58:54Joe Rogan?

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• 1:59:39Joe Rogan?

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• 2:00:23Joe Rogan?

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• 2:01:06Joe Rogan?

  Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com. That's better H E L P dot com. And those are the people that I really worry about. The people that just want a good job where there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with wanting a good job and being able to take care of your family and having a place where you enjoy working and being able to go there every day. And when that's taken away from people and they have to kind of restructure the entire way they interface with reality. And then there's this bizarre connection with the government now where the government, the government is now your provider. It's not just for the people, by the people. It's not, you know, representative of the people.

• 2:01:50Joe Rogan?

  It's now your provider, which is a very strange relationship to have. And, you know, we see it in welfare states and, you know, which I think social safety nets are very important. I think if we're, we're going to be a compassionate society, we need to be able to take care of people that aren't doing well because a lot of life is about fortune. And sometimes people run into horribly unfortunate situations and there's massive potential in those people. And those people can realize that potential if they're helped. And I think that's real too. But I do think there's a certain psychological aspect to having the state take care of all your food and money and resources and, and, and housing. That all of a sudden, who are you?

• 2:02:31Joe Rogan?

  And what, what do you do to give yourself meaning if you're not the type of person that seeks out difficult things and you're forty-five or forty-seven years old, or whatever you are? And this is happening to you, like, and you, you feel lost. Like, there's gonna be a lot of people like that. And throughout history, times, terrible times have been very cruel to people who weren't prepared.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:56Joe Rogan?

  And, you know, I worry about it almost like an intellectual famine. You know, like a psychological famine. That people will be deprived of the thing that they have rested their hat upon. Like, their identity, who they are, what, what it means, their, their sense of purpose, that it'll be pulled away from them. That scares the shit out of me. Especially when I know how many people get addicted to drugs and how many people get addicted to all sorts of weird lifestyle choices to provide them with some dopamine or some rush or some, just something that makes them feel like they're alive.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  There's something so powerful about being grounded. In, and, and a path to being grounded is being immersed in an art, like, for example, like jiu-jitsu or, or chess, where if you, like, if, if you're on the jiu-jitsu mats and, and you overextend your arm and you get armbarred, like, you, you're not gonna say that's not my fault, that was his fault, or like, that's, then you just don't fucking get better and you get armbarred again.

• 2:04:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  You only get better by taking your shit on.

• 2:04:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  Right? Or if you're a chess player and you make a mistake and you lose, you,

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  You if the people who say that's not my fault, don't they fucking they're irrelevant very, very quickly. They just get blazed by and they're just like everyone else's race is passed and they're not in the race anymore. And if you're if you think about a community, for example, of fighters, let's think about jujitsu as as like a vision, like the one of the things that separates people as they get deeper into an art is whether they want to take themselves on as a way of life, whether they're hungry to have their weaknesses revealed, right? You think about about a school where like somebody like you can I always found it interesting to watch people when they're four or five rounds into sparring, like, do they look for the blue belt to rest with? Or do they look for the like, like 240 pound fucking bruiser to beat the shit out of them? Or the high level brown belt

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  to exploit them? Or the black belt to like, kick their ass, right? Who do they look for? Who does like the up and coming purple belt look for? When like the young competitor? Is he looking for the egoic rest or the place to be exposed?

• 2:05:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  Like, people who hunger for exposure to get better, right? It's like seeking accountability as a way of life. I think there's something really powerful to do that with decision making, right? Because we're making decisions and we're making decisions in a higher and higher stakes world. And if we train at the art of decision making in something that's grounded in reality, like, for example, the chess rating system is just a fucking thing. It's objective. There's no bullshit to it. But I hear people like I know people who play chess online and then they're like, yeah, this is my rating, but I'm actually much stronger than that because of this and this. It's like, no, you're not. You just haven't taken your shit on, right? Like, you you're not stronger than your rating. Your rating is how strong you are as a chess player.

• 2:05:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Right? But there's something about there's something so beautiful about an accurate feedback loop, right? Whether and that can be with a coach, training with you, could be on the just getting tapped out, getting your ass kicked, right, getting hit, losing, whatever it is. I think that there's something so powerful about People cultivating some way of life where they're grounded in some kind of feedback loop in their training life, that there's no bullshit involved.

• 2:06:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  That they learn to accept accountability as a way of life. They seek feedback loops.

• 2:06:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  I think that we can do this in decision making. I mean, my view is that we're going to be making decisions as a species in an increasingly complex world where there is a superintelligence. So we need to track our decisions and we need to see objectively when they are good and when they're bad, like just how you can studying tape as a basketball team or as a jujitsu fighter, whatever. Like, we need to create game tape in our decision making. Right? We have to stop deluding ourselves about the fact that we're actually better than everything shows we are.

• 2:06:47Joe Rogan?

  Right. People love to think that way.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  They fucking love it.

• 2:06:51Joe Rogan?

  It gives them a nice little out in their accomplishments. Gives them a nice little excuse for why things haven't gone their way.

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  Like, if you make a decision, write down what the decision is and write down why you made the decision. And then look back on it in a week or two or three.

• 2:07:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  And create like a spreadsheet, a log, or whatever the fuck you want to use, of all of your decisions and why you made them. And look back on them. And then if the reasons for making the decision no longer are valid, but you're holding to the decision, which is what everyone does, then don't do that. Don't do that. Let go of it. Reevaluate.

• 2:07:22Joe Rogan?

  So when you work with people, and, you know, I know a big part of what you do is help organizations learn, and how do you instill these ideas in people? Do you have a structure that you follow when you go to work with people? Do you try to see what they do?

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I try to see what they... So I've been training for the last 15, yeah, 15, 16 years, elite mental and physical athletes, right? Decision makers, investors.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  Athletes, fighters.

• 2:07:58Joe Rogan?

  You've worked with fighters?

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  NBA teams. Well, in my school with Marcelo, we had a huge, yeah, group of fighters, jiu-jitsu fighters. And so I've been in dialogue with people who are the, like, the pinnacles of different fields my whole life. And one thing is that I, like, I love working with people who want to take themselves on. So it begins with them being all in on the process. I'm not great at, like, motivating people to take their shit on.

• 2:08:23Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  I, I love to, like, begin once we're taking our shit on. So that, and then it's, it's individualized. Like, I, I get to know someone's patterns. It's 99% listening, observing. And a lot of what I try to do is understand the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity, or their genius and their dysfunction. I think so quickly people try to come in. If you come in with some kind of formula for how things will be done, you're going to be slicing away the brilliance of, of individuals, right? Like, all of our most brilliant creations are interwoven with the dysfunctional parts of our mind. Everyone wants to normalize people. Like, most, in, in the realm of, like, trainers or coaches of different fields, I think it's mostly bullshit because it's mostly armship professors

• 2:09:03Speaker 01

  who don't understand what it actually means to be playing on, on that razor's edge of peak performance, where you have to make a decision, which is taking a risk that's right on the edge of something catastrophic, but that's the, like, thread-the-needle solution. And so when I start working with someone, I try to get to know them very, very deeply. Their patterns, their patterns of success, their patterns of failure, their, where their genius and their dysfunction are entangled. I often go into what I call a cave process, which is trying to understand what their self-expression is. Like, going into the cave with them metaphorically, try to understand what their self-expression would be liberated from reactivity and inertia. So not reacting away from what they did before

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  and not being subject to the inertia of what they did before, but just blue-skying what the ideal solution would be. It, well, what the most pure self-expression for them would be.

• 2:09:57Joe Rogan?

  So it's completely dependent upon the individual and their approach initially?

• 2:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and not, not their approach, the individual and the patterns of their approach, right? Not that we would do things the way they did before, but I have a lot of humility. Like, I don't think that I know the way. I don't think there is a way. I think we all have our own way we need to discover. The coaches who have been most damaging to me. For example, when I was in that same period when I was fifteen, sixteen years old.

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  I had a coach who was part of the Russian School of Chess, who essentially had me move away from my self-expression, move away from my style. My style of chess play at that point, my whole life had been creative, attacking, improvisational. I love to create chaos and find hidden harmonies in chaos. I love to battle. He urged me to stop playing that way, stop studying that style of play. Play like these cold-blooded prophylactic chess players like Petrosian or Karpov. I played much more in the style. Not the strength, the style of like Garry Kasparov or Mikhail Tal or Bobby Fischer, like players who were. Who were aggressive, right? Who had a lot of like red blood flowing through their body, like I was hot-blooded.

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  And he urged me to play in the opposite style from what was natural to me. Think what would Karpov do here? Not what would Josh do here?

• 2:11:09Joe Rogan?

  Is there a benefit to that, just to expand your repertoire?

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  Yes, there is absolutely a benefit to that. But there's also the movement of a young, of like a young competitor away from their self-expression, a love from their love for the game. A love from their passion, right? I think I had this, there's this brilliant man named Yuri Razhavayev, who was on the other pillar of the Russian School of Chess. Who said this amazing thing to me. He said to me, Josh, you can learn Karpov through Kasparov. And I didn't understand what he meant for many, many years after that. And it was a little too late in my chess life to take that in. But what he was saying is that you can learn the great defensive chess by studying the defense of the great attackers.

• 2:11:46Joe Rogan?

  Why was it late in your career to take that in?

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  Well, good question. It's just when he said it to me, it was like my, my, like I was in my early twenties and my, and like my love for, I'd lost my love for chess. Like it had gotten static, stale, like I would. It, it, you know, good challenge. It probably wasn't late, but I wasn't, I couldn't hear it. I didn't. Like I would have had to go into the cave, go away, go through an existential crisis and come back to chess. But there were a lot of things that were moving me away from chess at that point in addition to that. I, I didn't want to be trapped inside of the confines of sixty-four squares anymore. I felt like a lion in a cage. So it was like, if I had known him when I was fourteen, fifteen. He, it would have been a different arc for me in the chess life, but maybe it would have been much worse for my life. If I had known him when I was fifteen, I might have fucking played chess for the rest of my life and I'm so grateful I didn't. So who knows?

• 2:12:35Joe Rogan?

  Isn't it interesting when life takes you on these, or you go on your own journey? And you realize that decisions that you've made that have turned you in one way, like, those are critical decisions. If you think of the life that you're living now, is this optimal? If this is optimal, then yes, it's good that you moved away from chess. But if you had gotten that coaching when you were younger and it reignited your love of chess, then it would be good for the life that you currently have. Cause you would say, well, you know, as a person who's just like so in love with chess, I'm so grateful that I ran into this person when I was 11 years old and they sent me in this correct path.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, absolutely. I mean, for me, I love the life that I live, that like I'm so grateful for the life that I've lived. And I was moved away from chess in many ways by this alienating experience of, of um, that I just described. And then also the dynamics of the movie and everything. But I was many, I played chess for eight years after the, after the movie. And so my results were very good, but I was moving into this internal, I was in an existential crisis.

• 2:13:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  Right. And then, but every like catastrophic injury or heartbreaking loss or losing a world championship in a like, when you're a millimeter from winning the finals. Like all of those losses that were so heartbreaking to me. Every big loss, I'm grateful for now. And led to the biggest wins and led to the biggest insights and transitions and, and my life today, like the crises that I had in many ways have armed me to help people express themselves in their arts, right? And a lot of the reads that I made as a competitor, to go back to your question, like I invert now. So like the things that, the way I would read chess players, find where their minds were stuck. Find where their bias patterns were, like find where their energy was stuck. Find where they were like static. Now, then I would exploit them, right?

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  Same thing you do in the fight game. You find where someone's pattern is static and exploit it, right? Then what I do in training people is I find those, I have a very good nose for those. Cause I spent my life as a competitor sniffing them out, feeling my way to them. But then I work on liberating them, releasing the obstruction.

• 2:14:44Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  So a lot of what I do today in my work with brilliant performers is, is work on unleashing what I used to exploit.

• 2:14:53Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting. That's great. That must be very satisfying to teach people how to get better at things.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  It's interesting. I don't use that. I don't teach people. I don't know it. I'm not teaching some people something I know.

• 2:15:12Joe Rogan?

  But you're teaching what you know.

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  We're discovering. Well, I'm kind of discovering their path with them.

• 2:15:16Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  Like, I don't go in thinking like, this is the way you fucking should do it.

• 2:15:20Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  I don't believe that I know what they should do. And I believe that any coach who thinks that they know what someone else should do, without listening to the self-expression of that person very, very deeply, is just wrong and they should not be. They reject that coach.

• 2:15:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, you have to really understand someone psychologically to be able to coach them as well.

• 2:15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:37Joe Rogan?

  Because sometimes you don't know, like, what the hitch is until you run. You're like, oh, there it is. So this is your whole problem with your whole life.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  The fucking hitch. But the amazing thing is, you find the hitch, but then you see, oh, that hitch is interwoven with your biggest...

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  Like, I sent you that thing I wrote about Marcelo, right? And, like, there was this incredible moment that I had with Marcelo. Such an emotional moment. You know, so he's... I describe him as like this great lower-up learner. And he's someone who uniquely in my life, I've never seen anyone better at learning from one experience, big or large, right? And then there was this moment, we were sitting, I guess it was six years ago. We were sitting just talking about life and our journey and everything, and he started weeping. And he said to me, you know, Josh,

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  I never forget my pain.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, Marcelo had a real tragedy. He lost a baby. Marcelo and Tachi, his wife, they had twins, and they lost their baby Joey. Olivia and Joey were born premature, and Joey died. It was a terrible tragedy. It was just devastating for... I mean, just beyond belief devastating.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  And like, the loss of his son, the loss of his mother, the loss of his father. Every moment, someone looked at him a certain way. Every moment, somebody like raised their voice at him and it triggered him into like a fight place. Every, every time he'd been submitted, every time he'd been swept, every time. I realize as he was saying this, like, all of his pain is with him every moment. And as he described this to me, it was this incredibly emotional scene where he was just weeping in his exploration, in his like, just brother to brother talking to me about, like, he walks around with every wound he's experienced in life, present, all the fucking time.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  And so we think of like this brilliant low rep learner, the guy who has a superhuman ability to learn from one experience. But it, and it's a superpower, but also it, it ravages him all the fucking time. And you can't just remove that. You can't be like, yeah, release your pain.

• 2:17:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  Be great, but then you're also releasing the, the genius.

• 2:17:59Joe Rogan?

  That's the thing about people that are really amazing at something. The pain of losing is so devastating to them. Like, when you, we talk about genius and like, people use Michael Jordan as an example. Genius basketball player, but unbelievably competitive.

• 2:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:20Joe Rogan?

  Like, just can't help himself.

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  In everything.

• 2:18:23Joe Rogan?

  In everything.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  On and off the court.

• 2:18:24Joe Rogan?

  I've, I've heard if you beat him at pool, he won't talk to you for two weeks.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you could be like, Mike, just take it fucking easy on the pool table. What do you care? But you can't say that. Gary Kaspar was the same way. Competitive in everything.

• 2:18:33Joe Rogan?

  Everything.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  But you can't just like, remove that. You're removing the genius with it.

• 2:18:37Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. That you, you have a Ferrari engine and you're trying to like navigate 30 mile per hour traffic. And you're like, fuck.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  I'll never forget this, this, um, this chess coach, Mark Deveretsky, who was, he said to me this unbelievably hubristic thing. Um, when I was 15, 16 years old, he said to me, if he had had Bobby Fischer as a student, as a, as a, as a seven year old, he could have made Fischer a much more stronger chess player without any of the craziness.

• 2:19:09Joe Rogan?

  Without the craziness?

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  And I was just like. As a teenager, like I just, my, my hands started like sweating when I just said that. It's just like, cause to me, it's just, it's just not fucking true.

• 2:19:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  Like Fisher's-

• 2:19:21Joe Rogan?

  It's a crazy thing to say.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's hubris, right? And this is, this is the same guy who was urging me into that, that direction. Like, but that, that, that's the opposite of my approach. Right? I think we need, and then if we are going to try to disentangle the dysfunction from the genius, we need to understand it very deeply. We need to plant the seeds patiently for that genius to sprout somewhere else. We need to water those seeds. We need to observe them coming. We have to very, like, slightly sand away the dysfunctional patterning while observing if it, like, it's a very delicate process, right? You can't just fucking excise the tumor.

• 2:19:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's also a problem in when someone becomes very good at doing something and they have a very specific way, they've become very good at doing something. They assume that this is the way and that this is the way for everyone. And that they can impose their way on other people. And the, what led them to become great in the first place is also that hubris that makes them think that they could take Bobby Fischer and make him even better.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  Well, that's why great coaches, like great fighters often aren't great coaches, right? Because they, most teachers teach the way they learned, which will alienate seventy or eighty percent of their students by definition.

• 2:20:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  Great coaches can, well, great coaches for a, a large group need to be able to teach different ways for different kinds of learners.

• 2:20:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Different modalities of learners. Are they, are they visual? Are they somatic? Are they, are they auditory? Like, what, what makes them tick? And you have to know, if you're, if you're teaching a chess class, I started teaching a group of kids chess when I was in my teens. I taught them from kindergarten through fifth grade and we ended up winning in New York. It was a beautiful journey with kids at PS one sixteen. And we, from moving the pieces to winning city, state and national championships. And it was so interesting because I'd be like, teaching- Eight, ten kids at once and I would be teaching, it was like giving a simultaneous exhibition. Like each one had their own language and it was, I was like so involved with this theme that I would be, it was exhausting. Cause I was teaching ten chess lessons at the same time to ten kids. And I remember I had this moment, this heartbreaking moment where I had this one student named Ivan who I, who I, like just charismatic,

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  intense, you know, we had a very close relationship. I loved the kid. And like I was, he was, or at the national championship, I was giving him this, this, um, this pep talk. And I was just like firing him up and speaking to him in the way he needed to be spoken to. And, and then he was like, he ran off like stoked, fired up to go kick some ass. And then this other kid who was on the team, this beautiful, sensitive boy came over and I looked at him with the same energy that I'd just been speaking to Ivan and I brought it to him. And, and I, I was like fifteen seconds into speaking to him and I looked at his eyes and I realized like this is a disaster. I'm being, this is terrible. And then I stopped, I like, and I like gave him a hug and we like slowed it down and we, you know, he, he, he needed to go in a very different way than Ivan went in.

• 2:22:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  But coach, think about how often you see cornermen fucking up fighters.

• 2:22:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:22:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:09Speaker 01

  I mean, so as a, as a coach, I think we have to like put our own egos aside and our idea that we know how one should learn.

• 2:22:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and it's, that's what's very important is finding the right coach. You, you have to find a coach that understands you and has a style that you can implement. Cause there's some coaches that just have styles that you, you don't physically, you're not designed for, you, you don't, you can't learn the way they learned.

• 2:22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:37Joe Rogan?

  That's what's fascinating about you is that you've gone from being this hyper competitor to teaching people or coaching people to find the very best version of themselves and how to, how to acquire that. That's very rare that someone who gets really good at something also becomes really good at showing people how they can get better at things.

• 2:23:02Joe Rogan?

  Like that's a specific focus that you've had. Like why, why is that so rewarding to you?

• 2:23:15Speaker 01

  Well, I took on this interesting challenge when I broke my back. Because I was already doing this, but I was training people. But when I broke my back, I remember I said, okay. During this healing process, after the year and a half to two years of denial and training through it, when I stopped, I tried to take on training people with the same passion and love that I had for training myself. I wanted to see if I could like, love it as much. And I never got there. And then I got into the, you know, that's part of what moved me into discovering the ocean arts and being all in on training. So a big part of my relationship with training other people is training myself as a way of life. Like, I'm always, like, I'm living at my limit in the arena myself.

• 2:23:59Speaker 01

  The moment, I think, a coach like, leaves the arena where they're putting their own ego on the line all the time, or their life on the line, or whatever the fuck they're putting on the line, then they become static and they start to think they know the answer. It's like the fat, you know, martial arts instructor who's many years past training and is smoking a cigarette on the sideline telling people what to do and no longer is like, actually dynamic and putting their... The moment our egos get protected, right? So, my relationship to training is something that I live all the time. I think also, becoming a dad was a big part of it. Like, the nurturing. And a lot of what I've done is invert what I used to do to break people, now I invert to heal them or to unleash them.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Becoming, like, being a father is about the most humbling thing I've ever... I thought I had ideas about education until I became a dad, and then I realized I didn't know anything, I had to start over. Yeah, and also, the wound pattern, like, I think understanding people's wound patterns is very important. And a lot of my wound pattern is in loving something very, very deeply, being alienated from it, and then finding a post-conscious relationship to it and to self-expression within it. And...

• 2:25:17Speaker 01

  And I think that helping people with that with that journey is is um is really important. And also, I love engaging with all in motherfuckers. I mean, I just love like whether, you know, my current projects are like cutting edge science and AI. Just brilliant scientists. It's such incredibly interesting and like being deeply involved with the Boston Celtics. Like just the very top of the NBA world and my relationship with Joe Mazzola, the head coach, and kind of coaching the coaches, a modality that I've been developed playing in for a long time. Helping the leader of an organization express themselves as the coach of their people is a big part of what I do and a couple of other interesting investing in tech projects. And like just helping some like it allows me to play in in fascinating realms.

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  And then studying the interconnectedness. I mean, a big part of my passion is thematic interconnectedness. Like, how is what's happening with the Boston Celtics the same as what's happening in this cutting edge science program? The same as what's happening in this wildly interesting tech investing program, right? And how do those principles, those interconnected fibers relate to culture more broadly? And relate to me and what I'm doing every day on the on the water, boiling.

• 2:26:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's Miyamoto Musashi.

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:24Joe Rogan?

  Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things.

• 2:26:27Speaker 01

  So the Book of Five Rings, right? Like, to me, I feel that I cannot believe how few people have studied Musashi deeply. Right? I mean, whether you're reading the novel about his life and then studying like Book of Five Rings. I think everyone should read like 10 times, maybe a day a page, 10 times over. I um, you know, one of my favorite cadences of Musashi is in so many chapters of Book of Five Rings, how he comes back and says, like, essentially, these words are empty. You have to practice it as a way of life.

• 2:26:56Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:57Speaker 01

  Again and again, and people just skip these things, but they don't realize. And everyone wants to be told what to fucking do. As opposed to understanding, they have to work for the path to figure out what the fuck they should do. And you have to practice as a way of life.

• 2:27:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:27:14Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah, talk about a real motherfucker.

• 2:27:16Joe Rogan?

  Well, just fascinating that he learned this by being a swordfighter.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:20Joe Rogan?

  What is the best way to be swordfighter? You can have no bullshit in your mind, so you must be balanced. And his approach was, you must be an artist, you must be a poet, you must be a warrior, you must be in tune with all of your feelings and all of your senses and everything about you and to do everything correctly. Do all, all things.

• 2:27:43Speaker 01

  And he was fighting to the death.

• 2:27:45Joe Rogan?

  To the death.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  So there was no bullshit.

• 2:27:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:27:46Speaker 01

  There's no room for.

• 2:27:47Joe Rogan?

  Killed sixty-two men.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:49Joe Rogan?

  In one-on-one combat.

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  You can't say like, oh, no, that wasn't my fault. It doesn't fucking work. No, you take your shit on.

• 2:27:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  But that's it, but there's something so beautiful about the truth-telling nature of living. Like, if you, you know, you know, when you're on the, when you're in a jujitsu team and, and you've got some, you watch someone who doesn't think they're competing for a while, but then they're, they're suddenly like, they're competing next week?

• 2:28:08Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:08Speaker 01

  How the repertoire progresses? Like, all the fat just flies off.

• 2:28:12Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  Right? There's something so beautiful about that process and the cadence.

• 2:28:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  And like, if we live putting ourselves in the flame, then we're not going to be bullshitting ourselves all the time. Because there's this truth-telling modality.

• 2:28:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:28:23Speaker 01

  So the question is, how can we, how can we, as many of us as possible, live in some form that's true to us? Where we are, there's this grounded, truth-telling, accurate feedback loop in what we're doing? What we're practicing as a way of life.

• 2:28:36Joe Rogan?

  My fear is that there's so many of us, probably even people that are listening to this right now, that have never developed that aspect of their life. And it's very difficult to get started on that path, once you've been on this path of complacency and comfort. It's very hard for people to sort of embrace this new way of thinking and interfacing with reality.

• 2:28:59Speaker 01

  But when things are hard, that's beautiful. Like, that's the beginning. We want things to be hard. So the first thing is, I think, we want people to love the discomfort of being hard. It's hard. Fucking, everything worthwhile is hard.

• 2:29:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  Like, we, not, what, what have you done that's, that's been interesting that hasn't been hard? Every time you get in an ice plunge, it's fucking hard.

• 2:29:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  Like, I cold plunge every day. I think you do too, right?

• 2:29:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, it's a way of life. It's fucking hard every time.

• 2:29:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:21Speaker 01

  It's not easy. Hard is beautiful, living on the other side of pain. That's where things get valuable.

• 2:29:25Joe Rogan?

  Not doing it. And knowing that you didn't do it.

• 2:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:28Joe Rogan?

  That's hard. That's not good for you.

• 2:29:30Speaker 01

  No, that's not good.

• 2:29:32Joe Rogan?

  If you let that that part of you, when you're forty seconds in, you're like, let's get the fuck out now. If you let that part win, you'll feel terrible for the rest of the day. But if you just hang in there for two minutes and twenty seconds more.

• 2:29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:44Joe Rogan?

  You'll feel so good. You get out of there, you're like, alright, got this one done.

• 2:29:48Speaker 01

  It's like you go foiling and you don't fall. That's a terrible day, man, because you're not pushing your turns hard enough, you're not breaching enough, you're not ripping it around hard enough, right? Like, everyone finds these, these, it's like, one thing that happens with investors, right? They, they become successful and then they develop a mental model to replicate the success, right? So they figure out a mental model that become a groove that they can follow. But then the groove becomes a rut they get stuck in, and then it starts to collect water, and it's stagnant water. And then they hold to an old mental model based on a success ten years ago or twenty years ago, and they're trapped in it for the rest of their lives.

• 2:30:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:20Speaker 01

  It happens again and again in every field, right? Some early success creates, you make a framework, you make a modality, you create a mental model, you replicate the success. It's not working, but you stick to it because your identity gets connected to that mental model. And you're not living with dynamic quality, your qualities become static.

• 2:30:36Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's, it's so hard for people to recognize when that's happening as well. Because, you know, once people get success, then the fear of losing that success overwhelms them. And then it's sometimes it's easier to control a person who's been successful, because they don't want to let this go. They don't want to go back, they want to move forward, they want to continue. So what do I have to do to make sure that I'm, I mean, you see this in Hollywood, it's a, it's a big thing in Hollywood. People panic when they start doing well, and then they align themselves with other people doing well, and then it kind of changes the way they think and the way they, they behave. Because everything is dependent upon you being chosen for, for things.

• 2:31:15Joe Rogan?

  So your, your whole life is like wondering what your social status is and how you, how you advance that, and hey, what do I have to say? What should I tweet today to make sure everybody knows I'm on the right side and?

• 2:31:25Speaker 01

  Right, then you're playing not to lose, you're not playing to win. It happens all the time in sports, like if you're a basketball team and you've been dominating the game and you're up eight or ten in the fourth quarter, then you start to protect the lead.

• 2:31:34Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  No, you didn't get the lead because you were protecting the fucking lead, you were dominating with aggression, right? The moment, it's like the prevent defense, in my opinion, is the worst thing ever created in sports strategy. Right? Like, you know, prevent defense?

• 2:31:47Joe Rogan?

  I've heard of it, but I don't know exactly.

• 2:31:48Speaker 01

  If you're a football team and you're, and you, you, you have a fourteen point lead in the fourth quarter, or an eight point lead in the fourth quarter, and you stop. Doing the dominant things that got you the lead, but you start protecting the lead. So your defensive back, sit back, you start allowing eight or 10 or 12 yard completions. It is now you're protecting the lead versus dominating the opponent. But then you let the opponent feel their strength, feel their greatness. They're not dominating anymore. Like a moment a fighter stops feeling dominated and starts to tap into their greatness, then your fucking opponent's a beast again.

• 2:32:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  Right? We see it all the time.

• 2:32:19Joe Rogan?

  All the time.

• 2:32:20Speaker 01

  Right? So don't protect the fucking lead, dominate.

• 2:32:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:23Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:32:23Joe Rogan?

  Do what brought you to the dance.

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:32:27Joe Rogan?

  It's just, um, it's.

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  In life.

• 2:32:29Joe Rogan?

  I think that thing that you're talking about is very critical. That fear of losing once you've won.

• 2:32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  It's very interesting in the surf world, so many people I've observed who are great surfers, they want to learn to foil because foiling opens up so much. Right? You can foil all the time in different conditions and sloppy conditions and ocean, big, big wave, small wave, it's just, it's so abundant. And they can see how epic it is, but then they try once and they get their ass kicked. It doesn't matter how good a surfer you are, not talking about e-foil, I'm talking about like wave foiling and high-performance gear, you're gonna have two, three months of ass kicking as part of it. It doesn't matter how good you are as a surfer. But now you have to like be, you have to look like a beginner again. You have to be, go from being like the coolest guy in the lineup, if you're socialized, to being the quote-unquote kook, being the guy who's just getting his ass kicked, who's falling all the time.

• 2:33:18Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  Right? And they don't want to do that. So their ego of the excellent surfer prevents them from learning this art they want to learn because they're unwilling to look bad for a while in front of the people who they're used to looking good with.

• 2:33:29Joe Rogan?

  Right, they're so used to being cool.

• 2:33:31Speaker 01

  So the foilers are people who, it's a very interesting microculture inside of surfing, is that foilers have been people who learned how to foil because they were willing to get their ass kicked and look bad.

• 2:33:41Joe Rogan?

  Are there any other things that are exciting to you like that? That you think of, like if one day you can't foil any longer? Do you have like an escape strategy?

• 2:33:50Speaker 01

  I don't have an escape strategy, I never did. I never had like a this is gonna be plan B, I've never been a plan B guy. I, I know I could recreate myself. But I love this art profoundly and I love being in the ocean. Like there's something about this, this is like, to me also, this is not about destroying anything. It's not about beating anybody. It's about self-discovery, pushing my limits in the ocean, which is an element. And, and the foil taps into ocean energy so fucking potently. And the other thing is that the art is at such an early stage of technological growth that foil gear is progressing so quickly and the people who are actually at the bleeding edge of foil performance-wise can ride this gear, which is increasingly difficult to ride. But the hardest gear to ride is the gear which is, can do the most epic shit.

• 2:34:35Speaker 01

  And so the sensitivity is like, as the gear requires more and more sensitivity, the sensitivity is, is cultivated. And fewer, very few people in the world can, can do it on this gear and it's just so sublime. So I'm so fucking in love with this art.

• 2:34:50Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:50Speaker 01

  I do not have a, a plan B, but you know, fuck, who knows what happens.

• 2:34:53Joe Rogan?

  I love when people love things.

• 2:34:55Speaker 01

  Oh, me too.

• 2:34:56Joe Rogan?

  That's one of my favorite things to watch is people that are just absolutely engrossed in what they're doing and are fascinated by it and in love with it and, and on the journey. It's very addictive. It's very inspirational. It gives you something. It's like there's, there's something out of watching people and learning from people that are really, really passionate about something that's so contagious.

• 2:35:15Speaker 01

  I've never loved an art more. Like I've loved some arts really fucking deeply in my life, you know?

• 2:35:20Joe Rogan?

  Foiling is number one.

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  I've never loved an art more, well, maybe it's because I'm, I'm, I'm at this moment of life where I'm at and I'm like integrating everything I've learned from different arts and bringing it into this one and this one's manifesting all of it. But, but in terms of like the day-to-day experience of it, oh yeah, man, I'm, I'm a lunatic. I fucking just, just love it. Yeah.

• 2:35:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so you can't, you have to live by the ocean. You're fucked.

• 2:35:41Speaker 01

  I do. That's, that's beautiful. I live right where the jungle meets the ocean.

• 2:35:45Joe Rogan?

  You were telling me before we wrap this up, you were telling me about a crocodile encounter.

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, that was before I started, um, before I started foiling, I was surfing. And I, it was like 5:00 AM and I was, um...

• 2:36:02Speaker 01

  I was flying back to New York that day, so I went out for like a just pre sunrise, right at sunrise surf and I was on this glassy like head high wave and this gnarled log came up in front of me, this piece of fucking wood. And I saw it and I hit it and jumped off, just emerged right in front of me, I didn't know how I didn't see it, like I thought it was a big tree. And when I hit the water, my brain was still thinking log, but my, it was so interesting, my wa- my, my, my skin lit up goosebumps and I just realized like, like red alert, like prehistoric danger. And I jumped back on my board and this like 10, 11 foot croc came swimming just a few, a few feet away from me, it was so interesting. Whoa. Cause I spent my life, like I spent a lot of, since I was six years old, I've been freediving, spearfishing with a Hawaiian swing, Hawaiian sling, like bow and arrow underwater,

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  deep, deep water diving, like I, I've spent tens of thousands of sharks, but this was so different. Like croc energy and I haven't, I don't know crocs, like I know sharks, I don't know crocs.

• 2:36:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, crocs are actively trying to eat you. Sharks, a lot, I mean, there's a lot of people that believe that sharks are attacking people because the people are where the sharks are and they don't want the people there.

• 2:37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:08Joe Rogan?

  You know, like when they're, they're interfering with their hunting grounds and they attack people in that regard. I've heard people say that and I'm like, ooh, that kind of resonates, that makes sense. But crocodiles are different, they're just hunting everything. And if you're there, you're on the menu. They're hyper aggressive, they're very different than alligators, which are also very dangerous, but crocodiles are significantly more dangerous and more aggressive.

• 2:37:31Speaker 01

  My, it was interesting, when I hit the water, my body lit up like, um, like I was in the water with a dinosaur. And then it came up and it's interesting that my body, this speaks to the nature of the intuition, right? Cause my mind still thought it was log. I hit the water, something energetically told me, something, get the fuck out, and then it came swimming up next to me. And like the feeling of the snout, the eyes, like it just came, and then a big, another wave was coming in, I, I managed to just pop up and ride the next wave to the beach. God damn. But, yeah, and maybe if I knew the- That would've been the last day I foiled.

• 2:38:03Speaker 01

  Well, maybe like if I knew the language of crocs, like I know language of shark.

• 2:38:05Joe Rogan?

  What's the language? Murder, kill, eat. That's the language.

• 2:38:09Speaker 01

  Maybe there's an internal language.

• 2:38:10Joe Rogan?

  I do not believe that's true. I think they are, they are the waste management of the ocean and of the ground. I mean, they are there to make sure that anything that slips, anything that gets too close, anything that fucks up, it doesn't pay attention to the ripples in the water, that's a meal. They, they clean up. They're the cleaning crew. They make sure that there's no weakness in the system. And they devour and they live forever. That's the crazy thing is like the ones that they spotted in the early journeys when they were talking about, like there's talks of forty, forty foot plus crocodiles probably were real. Because crocodiles don't die of old age. They don't have like a twenty year lifespan. They just keep growing.

• 2:38:55Joe Rogan?

  And if a crocodile lived before people had guns and, you know, they weren't on the menu. And you got to imagine they could live hundreds of years, hundreds of years eating deer and wildebeest and anything that fucked up, antelopes, anything that fucked up, anything they can get a hold of. And they just keep growing. They, they could be enormous, enormous, enormous super predator dinosaurs that live amongst people.

• 2:39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:23Joe Rogan?

  I have a friend of mine who's a professional hunter, Jim Shockey. And he was flown to Africa because this particular village was being targeted by crocodiles. So they, they hired hunters to hunt these crocodiles. And while he was there, he said, every one you would meet had a chunk taken out of them. People were missing hands, some people were missing feet. And while, while he was there, one of the women in the village got taken. And they would set up these posts in the water so that the crocodiles couldn't get through to this one area where they would gather water and wash clothes and do things. The crocodiles had figured this out, so they went onto the shore and then they would go into the water where the posts are and wait for them.

• 2:40:08Speaker 01

  Oof, oof, oof.

• 2:40:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:11Speaker 01

  So the feeling of humility and danger that you have relative to crocs?

• 2:40:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:16Speaker 01

  I have about AI relative to the ability to manipulate humans unless we take on our ability to be manipulated as a way of life. Like I feel it like that much in my skin.

• 2:40:29Joe Rogan?

  I think you're correct. Yeah, I think you're correct. I think it's gonna be an incredibly, incredibly challenging time in history. And one that I don't think the brightest amongst us can truly predict the outcome.

• 2:40:43Speaker 01

  I want to make one other point, which is that I think that when we talk about

• 2:40:48Speaker 01

  like, training as decision makers, it doesn't matter how good you are at something. It matters that you're on the road, you're on the journey. So let's just say people started to play chess. It doesn't matter how strong a chess player you are, if you're good or if you suck, that doesn't matter. It's a journey, right? If you're, if you're, if you're putting yourself in any arena that's objective, and you're trying your hardest, and you have a feedback loop, like the mats, like the jujitsu mats, whatever they are for you. And you look at the quality of your decisions, and you jot down why, and you are willing to change your mind, and you take on that training as a way of life, then you're on the road to like, being grounded in like, in a way that we're not today.

• 2:41:31Speaker 01

  And I think that being grounded in reality, in something, like feeling the earth beneath our feet in our process, is a big part of how we're going to be able to navigate a world where everything is being deconstructed all the time by a superior intelligence, because we're gonna need to recreate ourselves. But we have to have, you know how like, when you're deep into an art, like, think about you with your knowledge of MMA, like, you have this intuition about where the truth is, right? You have a sense for where it is, right? We need to cultivate that sense in, in an increasingly chaotic world. And I do feel that, that like, being involved in some kind of truth-telling arena, whatever it is, is a hugely important practice. And then taking on the art of training as a way of life is, um,

• 2:42:15Speaker 01

  I feel like it's one of our, and, and like, that combined with getting the fuck off social media. Really.

• 2:42:21Joe Rogan?

  Amazing advice.

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my.

• 2:42:23Joe Rogan?

  Thank you, Josh.

• 2:42:24Speaker 01

  That's my pitch.

• 2:42:24Joe Rogan?

  It was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.

• 2:42:26Speaker 01

  This was great.

• 2:42:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I was really excited to do this, and really happy to meet you, so. Really appreciate you.

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  Awesome, Jim.

• 2:42:32Joe Rogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:42:32Speaker 01

  Thanks for your support.

• 2:42:32Joe Rogan?

  My pleasure. All right, bye, everybody. Can't find my social media, don't look.