Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin

Josh Waitzkin was the basis for the book and movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer." Considered a chess prodigy, he has learning strategies that can be applied to anything, including his other loves of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (he's a black belt under Marcelo Garcia) and Tai Chi Push Hands (he's a world champion). Now, he spends his time coaching the world's top performers, whether Mark Messier, Cal Ripken Jr., or hedgefund managers. This episode is DEEP in the best way possible. And for a change from Episode 1, I'm totally sober.

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello you sexy people out there, this is Tim Ferriss and this episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast has a very special guest, Josh Waitzkin, whom I met in 2007 after reading his spectacular book, The Art of Learning. Josh you may know from Searching for Bobby Fischer. He was the subject of both the book and the movie. He's thought of as a chess prodigy, although that term prodigy, I don't believe applies to him well at all because he has a method for learning, mastering, refining any skill, whether that is chess, whether that is Tai Chi, in which he's multiple-time world champion, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, in which he's a black belt under the phenom, the Michael Jordan of the sport, Marcelo Garcia. And he's worked

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  with people ranging from Mark Messier, six-time Stanley Cup winner, to Cal Ripken Jr., to the top hedge fund managers in the world. He is a performance specialist and also a very dear friend of mine now at this point. And I ended up loving his book, The Art of Learning, so much that I acquired the rights to his audiobook, if you want to find that. It's read by Josh himself and you can just go to fourhourblog, F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G dot com and search for Tim Ferriss Book Club, or go to Google and do the same. So without further ado, let's get straight to the meat of the interview. I hope you enjoy it. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:28Josh Waitzkin?

  No, we're just sitting in front of each other.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 1:42Tim Ferriss?

  So Josh, I figure we might as well start at the top and do a little retrospective. What led you initially to write The Art of Learning? And of course, that's how I was in many ways introduced to your work and then through our mutual friend Max ended up connecting. But what was the, what was the reason you decided to write that book?

• 2:03Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, you know, I initially started thinking about, about the idea of the book about two years into my martial arts life. Um, so I transitioned from chess into studying, into meditating, into studying East Asian philosophy. Then I started getting into Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately into the martial application of it, push hands. And I started to experience this very interesting transition from, from the principles, my level in chess just began to translate directly over into the martial arts. And I thi- I think it was primarily one experience I had, it was something around two years into my Tai Chi training, I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition in Memphis, Tennessee, at a fundraiser, fundraiser for muscular dystrophy. And I was playing forty-five or fifty boards at once.

• 2:47Josh Waitzkin?

  I was, so I'm walking down the middle of this big square of chess tables, everyone's playing one game, I'm playing each of them. And about forty minutes into the simul, I had this experience that was so interesting. I began to feel like I was riding the energetic wave of the game like I was in my push hands training. I wasn't playing chess, I wasn't thinking in chess language, I wasn't calculating variations, I was feeling the flow, feeling the space behind like I would in the martial arts. And I had this realization, you know, I was playing beautiful chess, but I wasn't consciously playing chess, that the barriers between these two different arts had dissolved in my mind. And that's when I started to conceive of the idea of the book. And a lot of the process of, I spent five years taking notes, maybe four or five hundred pages of notes in the book before I actually sat down and wrote it.

• 3:32Josh Waitzkin?

  And a lot of that process was deconstructing what I'd been doing rather intuitively. Um, so essentially what it felt like was translation of, well, in parallel learning, these are two rather abstract terms, that's the language that I was using internally when I was first thinking about the book, because it felt like I was just taking the essence of one art and translating it over into another. And then the process of writing it involved deconstructing what I'd been doing, um, somewhat abstractly into something that could be replicated more systematically.

• 3:58Tim Ferriss?

  So the question that jumps out in my mind, which is a bit of a side note perhaps, but is Simals, playing your ten, twenty, thirty, forty boards simultaneously. I'll try to ask a better question than how does someone do that, but at what point, what happens to a chess player when they go from an inability to play multiple boards simultaneously to being able to play multiple boards simultaneously? What is the sort of framework or thinking or experience that someone built up that allows them to do something like that, which to the average person seems like a Rain Man-like feat?

• 4:37Josh Waitzkin?

  You know, I think it's different for every chess player. I mean, one of the beautiful things about chess is that you can approach it so many different ways, and to be world-class, what you need to do essentially is express the core of your being through the art. I think that's just, this is true of many arts, and that's probably something we'll get into more deeply. So you can have a very mathematical person who plays chess mathematically, you can have a very musical person who plays chess musically, someone might be much more kinesthetic, like myself, and sort of a feeling for flow and hidden harmonies and almost a physically energetic relationship to chess. When I first learned to play chess, when I was six years old in Washington Square Park, it was, it was a battle. I love the feeling of, of just going to, into a fight with someone and finding these

• 5:22Josh Waitzkin?

  hidden harmonies and finding where these animal passions mixed with this technical complexity. And when I get, much later, when I got much better, playing Simals, it, it was sort of a higher level manifestation of that same kind of dynamic. I mean, for me, playing Simals was, it's something akin to juggling a lot of balls and, and all of the, to each chess, I wasn't playing forty different games, for example, separately. The flow of all forty games would sort of coalesce into one larger sense of flow. And it was actually really interesting, whenever, often when I'd, I'd give a Simal and there'd be a youth competition, and the winners of the youth competition would play against me. And so sometimes kids would cheat, they'd really wanna beat me, so they would cheat.

• 6:06Josh Waitzkin?

  So I'd be walking around this big thing and then I'd get to the table and they'd have shifted the position to try to win, because if they could win it would be a big thing. And my experience when that happened was of as if you had, imagine you had like forty balls up in the air and suddenly they'd all crash onto the floor.

• 6:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Josh Waitzkin?

  And I would know that they had changed the position, not by reaching the board and remembering what the position was and then seeing they changed it. It would initially be this feeling of the energetic flow had been interrupted. Um, and then I'd have to reverse engineer myself back to that one, that one game, that one component of the flow, and then I'd remember the game and then I would remember exactly what the vision had been and then I'd say, "Ha ha, this was the position." Um, and then it would take me two or three times going back around to get that, all the balls back up in the air and to get back to the energetic flow. So actually, for me, giving Simuls sort of felt similar to playing chess, one chess game. Um, but that was my own relationship to it. I think that probably if you asked ten different, very strong chess players, they'd all give somewhat different answers.

• 7:01Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Yeah, this, you know, one thing that blew me away, uh, was spending time with a friend of yours, Maurice, uh, when we went to Washington Square Park and, uh, seeing him play a game, uh, at least for the first portion without looking at the board. And I'm not gonna, I won't give away too much of the, too much of the punchline since we, uh, we captured it all on a film, it was pretty amazing, but just his ability to track the board, uh, it seemed like by chunking portions of the board into sort of larger, uh, like Gestalt pieces, I, I don't know if that's the best way to express it, but it seemed like his ability to seemingly remember all these disparate pieces was because he

• 7:45Tim Ferriss?

  had it, uh, broken, the, the board broken down into sort of, uh, component chunks, as it were, but, uh, I don't wanna take us too down, uh, that, that fine line. Um, let's, let's shift gears. I wanna, what I'd be very curious to know is, um, you know, at this point, what, what, because I, I know of course a little bit of the background, but, uh, I wanna dig into the details. What, what type of people do you personally work with these days and why do they work with you? What type of things do you do with them?

• 8:18Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. Well, I have three major dimensions to my, my creative life right now. Uh, well, maybe four. I guess the most important one is, is my son, Jack, who, who, he's a little over two years old and love of my life. So that's maybe the most important part of my life, no question about it. Um, I run an unproven educational foundation and we have, um, called it JW Foundation, The Art of Learning Project. Um, and we have a couple hundred programs in schools around the country, internationally as well. And so this is integrating these principles that I've been developing in, in, in schools, working with teachers, parents and children around this individualized and thematic relationship to learning that I've been developing. So this is one dimension. The other one is I own a, a martial arts school, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school with, um, Marcelo

• 9:02Josh Waitzkin?

  Garcia, who's the nine-time world champion, you know him well, Tim. He's just made really the Michael Jordan of the grappling world. Um, so this is world-class athletes training there. And then I, I run a consulting business where I'm training people who are at the cutting edge of the finance worlds. And this is really interesting work because we're focusing on that last one or point one percent of the learning process, which is really my specialty. It's, it's highly individualized, it's cutting-edge work on their learning process, their idea generation, their creativity, their performance psychology, their resilience. Um, fascinating work and, you know, what, what I've discovered, it's interesting because I, I wrote this book called The Art of Learning years ago. And so people are always coming to me to speak about learning, but much of what I've been focused on in recent years has been on learning.

• 9:47Josh Waitzkin?

  When I think, when I think about that last, that last movement, you know, from the equivalent of being, say, number 10 to number one in the world, or number five to being number one in the world. It, it's much more about finding subtle obstructions, finding friction points, releasing them. Um, identifying cognitive biases that may be blocking your way. It's, it's sort of, it's the movement towards unobstructed self-expression. So if you think about, about your creative process as a hose with, with a big crimp in it, if you're released, it's just unbelievable pressure can be released. Um, and a lot of what I'm doing with people is trying to move them from, from very good to greater, from great to truly elite. Um, but just deeply individualized work on helping them really...

• 10:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Find ways to express the core of their being through their art, which is, as you know, a big theme in my life from when I played chess at my highest level, that's what I was doing when I had a period of being really locked up in my chess career, which we can go into in more detail if you want, I was doing the opposite, I was trying to fit into someone else's mold, and then ultimately when I transitioned away from chess into the martial arts, I returned to that experience of self-expression, and that's when I really started to understand it very deeply. I think it was the crisis towards the end of my chess career which really laid the foundation for the work that I do today with brilliant mental performers who are just trying to make that movement to the equivalent to world champion.

• 11:07Tim Ferriss?

  To jump actually back to Marcelo for a second, because I've of course met Marcelo, and he's just...

• 11:15Josh Waitzkin?

  And you've gone to war with him, and I've watched you.

• 11:17Tim Ferriss?

  I've gone to war with him, which I, if there's anything at stake, I don't recommend.

• 11:24Josh Waitzkin?

  He's a tough guy, he's caused me a lot of pain over the years.

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  He's a tough guy, but also a sweetheart of a guy, and he's so fluid. What I'd love to hear from you, of course, because in the art of learning, which some people might be familiar with, they read about your experiences in chess, your experiences in tai chi, the parallels between them, and this sort of overarching framework for optimizing mental and physical performance, if that's a fair way to put it, which is the art of learning, these different techniques and strategies. What have you learned through this third art

• 12:07Tim Ferriss?

  of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? What are some insights or strategies that you've had since moving from tai chi, which is in some ways similar, but also very different from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which a lot of people will be familiar with through the UFC and mixed martial arts?

• 12:25Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, right. Yeah, I mean, to put it in context relative to my life, so the art of learning ends with the 2004 world championship, it ends with describing the narrative of that, it was just absolutely harrowing, crazy experience. I won't give the punchline, but it was really intense. And after this, I decided I wanted to be a beginner again to put on a white belt, literally and figuratively, and so I... Took on this third major mountain in my life, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I was training out in the west coast for about a year when I was actually writing the Art of Learning, I was training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu twice a day. This was after I'd spent five years taking notes, then I had the 2004 Worlds, then I was writing it. I started training with John Machado out there, then I came back to New York, I started

• 13:10Josh Waitzkin?

  training with Marcos Santos here, and I started, developed this relationship with Marcelo, who is just the greatest grappler to ever live. And we were doing a lot of private lessons, we developed a friendship, then he moved to Florida and I would travel to Florida to work with him. And ultimately, I made the decision, I wanted to bring him to New York, mostly because I, I was at that point, planning to make a run for the world championship in this art. And there was no better way to do it than to get my ass kicked by the very best to ever live in the sport. He's just a wonderful guy. And he's just unbelievable martial artist. And so we opened up the school together, and I've been on the mats with him, you know, other than when one of us has been injured, and it's been, a lot of injuries in these sports, just all the time.

• 13:53Josh Waitzkin?

  And it's been a fascinating experience, and Marcelo is so profoundly different from me. I'm a really conceptual guy, I think abstractly, of course my foundation in chess. Marcelo is one of the most, well, he's the most kinesthetically overdeveloped person I've ever met. And of course, overdevelopment and underdevelopment tend to come hand in hand, conceptually.

• 14:11Tim Ferriss?

  So can you give me an example of that? What would be an example?

• 14:17Josh Waitzkin?

  Of overdevelopment, underdevelopment?

• 14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Of kinesthetic, of what it means to be kinesthetically.

• 14:23Josh Waitzkin?

  His physical intelligence, his mind boggling, I mean, when he'd come fishing with me, you know, you throw him on a stand-up paddleboard, in three-foot chop, and everyone just flies off of paddleboards when they just stand up on them. And he's just beautiful, I mean, he just finds the balance points. I've never seen someone learn so quickly how to handle waves, boats, handling fishing lines, being, you know, freediving, being on, riding waves on paddleboards. You know, when you're in the martial, I've been a stand-up fighter for many years, I mean, throwing is my core, my core art. When I was doing stand-up training with Marcelo, I caught him with most of the throws in my repertoire. One time. I don't think I've ever caught him with a throw twice. Wow. Which is amazing.

• 15:08Josh Waitzkin?

  I mean, and I have guys who are world-class who I was training with, you know, I catch them thousands of times. This is a guy, he, he, he, he just, you, you almost never see Marcelo get caught more than once with something. Um, and i- it's amazing to see how he relates the world through his kinesthetic intelligence. So, for example, if you're looking, when we were looking for spaces for our school, we'd walk into a big room and I'd be thinking about the dimensions, you know, square footage where the, this would be where that would be, Marcelo would know if it felt good or felt bad. Yeah. If he meets you, he's gonna know whether he feels good about you or he feels bad about you. And his intuition is incredibly dead-on, but he, he navigates the world through this kinesthetic intelligence. Yeah. And it's been a really fascinating having a school with him and diving deep with him.

• 15:49Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, because we've been having conceptual dialogues for tho- these three and a half years or so, and he's really deepened con- um, conceptually. Um, but I've learned even more deeply the, the importance of the lesson that there are many paths to greatness. And to take a guy like Marcelo and to try to fit him into a chess player's, you know, hyper-conceptual mold would be terrible. Yeah. Because he'd be killing his shine. And he is so great because of his just unbelievable commitment to doing it his way. Mm-hmm. And he's done things in, in extraordinary ways. I mean, for example, you know how in these competitive arts, everyone's very secretive about their repertoires? Yeah. Um, we have this program, which you know well, called MG in Action, where people, jiu-jitsu guys from around the world log in to watch all of Marcelo's

• 16:34Josh Waitzkin?

  training sessions, his, his sparring sessions, his lessons, everything. When he was competing in Abu Dhabi, submission grappling world championship, and Munjals, which is the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championship, we were spur- we were streaming his sparring sessions every night. So he was basically showing his competitors what he was about to use against them in two weeks, in three weeks, in four weeks. And his attitude about this, which is completely unique, is if you're studying my game, you're entering my game, and I'll be better at it than you. So simple, so sure. And if you think about it, it's really deep. Yeah. Um, the opposite of what most chess players would do, and most jiu-jitsu guys would do. And so he's wide open to... Constant learning. And the other beautiful thing about Marcelo is, you know, people call him the king of scrambles, and if you watch his training style, he's always in transition,

• 17:19Josh Waitzkin?

  which is a really interesting idea to think about in a cross-disciplinary manner. Because most people get their egos involved in their training, and they're trying to dominate all the time. And to dominate in almost anything, you find a position of dominance, and you keep it. But Marcelo always lets his opponents move, and so he's constantly playing in transition. And so, if you think about what world-class martial arts means, and you brought up, for example, Maurice Ashley, playing chess and Washington Square, it's similar. If you're at a much higher level than someone, you can always seem mystical, because you're doing things which are outside of their conceptual scheme. The way that operates in the martial arts is, if you think about it through the lens of frames, right? If you and I are looking at a position, and in your mind, there's this position leads to this position, and

• 18:00Josh Waitzkin?

  to this position. So there's three positions. In my mind, if I'm constantly training at the transitions between these positions, these actually expand into these transitional frames become positions to me. And so, if I'm seeing a hundred positions, when you're seeing, say, two, then I can play in your blind spots, and it can seem mystical to you, because you haven't trained there. And that's what Marcelo does. By spending all of his time in transition, he's cultivated the art to play in the in-between, which is really what Level is all about, or one of the core things that World-class Martial Arts is all about, playing in transition.

• 18:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 18:38Josh Waitzkin?

  In gaps, you know, in your opponent's sight pattern.

• 18:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, I mean, observing and practicing with Marcelo, say, on the guillotine, or the Marcelo team, just blew me away, because if you look at it as an uninformed spectator, or even just a moderately informed spectator, you're blown away by how fast he is, how effective he is, but the nuance of...

• 19:03Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of eliciting movement, allowing space to open, manufacturing space by, say, applying pressure and then leaving it is so subtle and so incredibly effective. I mean, then you start to notice it from these principles that carry over to many, many hundreds of possible positions, let's just say. It's really, yeah, it's really amazing. I mean, it reminds me of something I heard once from a musician, which was, I don't know who the original quote is from, but he said that, you know, "Music is the space between the notes." And I was like, huh, that's a really interesting way to look at it. But what were you gonna say?

• 19:42Josh Waitzkin?

  I was gonna say, I mean, I think that's just a gorgeous quote. I think that's, most great arts are defined by that space in between.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, it's like, writing is the same way, right? It's like, you know, when in doubt, leave it out. It's just like, you know, it's, I think, yeah.

• 19:59Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful point. And of course, the thing about Marcello is that it can often seem initially that he's moving so fast, but what's incredible is that he can also move very slow and do things that you don't see. Just like a great side of hand artist who's just practicing the art of illusion when we're not practicing it. It's amazing what can be done with intention, with controlling someone's intention. And this is a lot of my training in push hands, related to finding ways to, to essentially control someone's intentions, so that you were ahead of them, even if they were ultimately moving first. You were there before they arrived. It's a fascinating psychological

• 20:43Josh Waitzkin?

  component of really high-level training in anything.

• 20:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I remember an interview, or it wasn't an interview, no, it was an interview, actually, with one of the top K-1 fighters back in the day.

• 20:54Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Tim Ferriss?

  And they were talking about Peter Ertz. I don't know if you remember, the Dutch lumberjack, huge guy. And he seemed fast. And I remember what people said, a number of opponents said, you know, "He's actually not that fast. He's kind of a big lumbering guy," but- He's so good at predicting timing that he sees you telegraph before you even have the thought to throw the punch and he beats you to the punch as a result of that, but it's because he's he picks up on the cues faster than other people. I thought that was very interesting. To to try to bridge this to something else, I mean, what you work with, of course, I'm not gonna mention names, but you work with some of the most

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  stunningly successful and famous traders and people in finance. I mean, some real kind of masters of the universe type folks. What have you what have you found unique about that group of people? Let's let's just start with that. I'm curious to know kind of what you've what you've noticed, being as observant as you are, about that group of folks.

• 22:06Josh Waitzkin?

  Oh, it's a big question.

• 22:07Tim Ferriss?

  It is a big question.

• 22:09Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, I mean, first of all, I I think a core principle to start with is that there are many paths to greatness. I mean, each one of these guys who's really world-class is doing it his way. And he's harnessing his eccentricities, he's cultivating or his or her strengths as a way of life. There's not an excessive focus on weakness. There's just an embracing of deep, deep study of the preconditions to someone's finest moments of expression and building lifestyles around it. And that's a lot of what I do is help people understand what makes them tick on a very, very deep level relative to, you know, their cognitive biases, where they're locked up, and where their greatest days come, what kind of external conditions, what kind of internal conditions. And the

• 22:54Josh Waitzkin?

  ones who are really at the top are people who who have mastered this art of deep introspection and taking the result of these introspective processes and turning them into training systems and into a way of life. And it's fascinating how how, you know, the process works. And what I do with these guys is I I if after I do my initial diagnostic process, I have ways of revamping their daily architecture, the way they live their life, so that they're, for example, Aligning their peak energy periods with their peak creativity work. They're building lifestyles that are just relentlessly proactive. Um, as opposed to reacting to inputs.

• 23:36Josh Waitzkin?

  They're building a daily architecture which is based on maximizing the creative process. And if you think about this relative to most people, um, a simple case in point is email checking. Right? Most people, when they finish a break, even, even top guys in industries, when they finish a break, whether they wake up first thing in the morning, what do most people do? They check their email. Um, when they come back from a workout, whether they check their email. Um, when, you know, they come back from lunch, whether you, they check their email. And so what you see is this, whenever they're coming back from something after a break, they're soaking in inputs and so they live this reactive lifestyle. Their, their creative process is dominated by external noise as opposed to internal music. Um, and a lot of what I work on with guys is, is creating rhythms in their life

• 24:21Josh Waitzkin?

  that really are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is really, which is the wellspring of, of creativity. Information, um, and then tapping it. So for example, ending the workday with high quality focus on a certain area of complexity where you could use an insight and then waking up first thing in the morning, pre-input, and applying your mind to it, journaling on it. Um, not so much to do a, a, a big brainstorm, but to tap what you've been working on unconsciously overnight, which of course is a principle that Hemingway wrote about when he spoke about the two core principles in his creative writing process were one, ending the workday with something left to write. Yep. Often mid-sentence even. Right. So not doing everything he had to do, which most people do because they feel this sense of guilt if they're not working.

• 25:06Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, you and I have discussed this at length. But leaving something left to write and then waking up, and then second principle, release your mind from it. Don't think about it all night. Really let go. Have a glass of wine, then wake up first thing in the morning and reapply your mind to it. And it's amazing because you're basically feeding the mind complexity and then tapping that complexity or tapping what you've done with it and, I mean, this rhythm. You know, the, the, the large variation of it is overnight, then you can do micro bursts of it throughout the day before workouts, pose a question, do a workout, release your mind after a workout, return to it, and do a creative burst before you go to the bathroom, before you go to lunch, before anything. And there's ways of systematically training yourself to generate the crystallization experience, the aha moment, that can happen once a month or once a year.

• 25:49Josh Waitzkin?

  A lot of what I do is work on systems to help it happen once a day or four times a day. Um, and when you're talking about guys who run financial groups of twenty to thirty billion dollars, for example, if they have a huge insight, that can, that can have unbelievable value. And so if, if you can really train people to get systematic about nurturing their creative process, it's unbelievable what can happen. And most of that work relates to getting out of your own way at a very high level. It's, it's unlearning. It's the constant practice of subtraction, reducing friction.

• 26:20Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example, you've mentioned cognitive biases a few times. For those people who may not be familiar with that term, what would be an example of, uh, cognitive biases and how someone might work on them?

• 26:35Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. Well, there are a lot of cognitive biases that are, that are specific to certain disciplines like chess, or finance, or philosophy. Um, but if we just think about it in terms of everyday life, um, let's say we make a decision, and we then feel the need to justify that decision. And so we make more decisions to justify that initial decision. And then we basically get ourselves into this deep wormhole, which is caused by the attempt to justify.

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

  The sunk cost, like sunk cost policy.

• 27:07Josh Waitzkin?

  Exactly. So this is in the financial group, group in the world talking about it, this is sunk cost policy, right? Um, but this is very interesting for, for example, a chess player who makes a certain decision, and there's a certain.

• 27:22Josh Waitzkin?

  Emotional and intellectual and time component to the value we put into the thought process behind that decision. And what we often have to do is release it because the position changes shape. A very interesting way that this manifests in chess, which you can think about rather universally, is let's say that there's a certain evaluation to the position, right? You and I are playing ten and I have a slight advantage in the position and I'm nurturing that advantage, I'm nurturing it, I'm nurturing it. In a lot of complexity, I make a slight error and suddenly the position is equalized, right? So if I'm holding on to the past evaluation emotionally, where I have the advantage, then what I'm gonna do very subtly is I'm gonna reject positions that don't give me that advantage.

• 28:01Josh Waitzkin?

  But if objectively I no longer have an advantage, then I'm going to be reaching too far, right? And then I'm gonna be rejecting things I should accept, which will make my position slip more and more and more and you fall into what I call a downward spiral. Yep. So this relates to a lack of presence, which really connects to a cognitive bias, an addiction to a past evaluation as opposed to a present one. Mm-hmm. So that's a very simple example of a cognitive bias. A mental addiction, a thought construct, something that we hold to be true because of some complicated twist in our mind, but it's no longer actually true. And so, of course, a very simple antidote to most of this is presence. If we can look at a moment or a chess position or an investment decision or any decision

• 28:44Josh Waitzkin?

  with very clean presence outside of emotional inertia, then we can often slice through just amazing amounts of fat with just very, very simple decisions. If you think about the learning process, for example, and this is one of the things I love about your approach to learning, a language that you and I use is, you know, I call you a master of deconstruction. You look at the way people approach different sports and you find the biases, the false constructs. Right. And you find a way to learn A very straight path to learning as opposed to people getting mired in all sorts of tangled webs of complexity which which are you know essentially caused by cognitive biases. Wouldn't isn't that how you'd put it?

• 29:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, I think that's I think that's true and I obviously appreciate the the kind words. I mean, I think you and I have very complimentary approaches and like you've I think said before, I tend to focus on the sort of eighty twenty analysis as it as it applies to people getting up and off the ground as quickly as possible to say, you know, top whatever five to ten percent in the general population, whereas what's so cool about our conversations, what I enjoy so much in part is that you're really focusing on that that that final leap. How do you go from being great to being the best, right? And they're they're very they're they're very complimentary skill sets.

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  I I think that, yeah, what I'm looking at, and this is a is a is a way to unearth cognitive biases, and just as a side note for people who want to look into this, you can just go to Wikipedia and search list of cognitive biases and there's a there's a long list, which is pretty fun to read. And there are a number of books about these types of things, too. Think Twice, I think, is another one. The the question that I ask myself, and I I'm always interested in the questions that people ask themselves, because I find it in my to my mind that those that internal dialogue is what defines your day to day thinking and what you think you become. So it's so critical that you ask yourself the right questions.

• 30:47Tim Ferriss?

  And in my mind, what or I should say rather, when I'm trying to deconstruct, say, a sport, all I'll ask is to start with, you know, what what rules are people following that are not required, right? So, you know, outside of the law and science, and even within science and within law, reality is kind of negotiable. So, I mean, a good instance of that is the high jump and the Fosbury flops. Dick Fosbury was really the first guy to go backwards over the the high jump. And up to that point, there'd been straddle kicks and all sorts of different approaches. And he was ridiculed at first and then he was called a cheat because he won the gold medal and now everybody uses that approach.

• 31:31Tim Ferriss?

  And so having a list of questions, right? Who's good at this? Who shouldn't be is another one that I love to ask because you might find someone, for instance, you were talking about the different styles in chess or jujitsu or in chess, you know, as sort of a reference to your first book, you have attacking chess players, right? Then you have, you have very different stylistic differences and you're very quantitative players. And for the TV show, for the Tim Ferriss Experiment, I did an episode on poker and I've avoided poker my whole life because I viewed it as a game of chance. And I had a former computer science guy who said, no, no, no, I'm not going to teach

• 32:12Tim Ferriss?

  you to be lucky because I can't teach you to be lucky, but I can teach you to run some probabilities and only bet when you have a good likelihood of a positive, positive outcome, right? And what was so fascinating is you look at a guy like that and you'll find highly quantitative, say hedge fund managers, for instance, or investors of different types, tech investors who go to the World Series of Poker and they run the numbers. That's how they play. And then there are other guys who are completely, seemingly flying by the seat of their pants. I mean, they're very kinesthetic, they're playing an intimidation game, they're very physical.

• 32:49Tim Ferriss?

  And so asking myself, for instance, who's good at this? Who shouldn't be? If the assumption is you have to be very good at math to be good at poker, right? Who admits to using no math, which might be misinformation, but, and let me look into how they do it. And then the second question is, have they replicated their results? Are there other people they've taught to do what they do to try to separate out the nature from the nurture where possible? But I want to come back to the finance guys, just for a second. Yeah. And to ask you about rituals and routines, then I'm going to ask you about your own. But what are some habits? And it doesn't have to be across the board with all these guys because they have such

• 33:32Tim Ferriss?

  different personalities and approaches, but with some of these really super high level finance guys who are managing tens of billions of dollars, what are some of the habits that you've observed that you find interesting or rituals?

• 33:47Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, let me answer that by describing some of the, maybe the keystone habits that I recommend for people to internalize in the field. Sure, yeah. Is that a good approach? Well, I mean, first of all, meditation. I mean, we're speaking about this theme of cognitive biases, or basically observing your mental addictions the moment that they set in. Meditation is as deep and as powerful a tool as I could possibly describe. I mean, it's, and maybe six or seven years ago, when I was first talking about meditation with guys in the finance world, it seemed like some woo-woo, strange thing for them to take on. But as more and more people are integrating it into their process, I mean, you wouldn't believe how many of the most powerful players in the world are meditating very deeply.

• 34:32Josh Waitzkin?

  It's just an amazing way of deepening, deepening the creative process, deepening presence, expanding your energetic relationships to the world, gaining insight, and realizing that most of the thinking that we do basically springs from mental addiction. And much of people's lives are spent in an emotional swirl, which is a reactive one. And having a relationship's presence, which allows you to see through the illusion of that emotional swirl, or of those mental addictions. I mean, meditation is an incredibly powerful tool, which I know you know quite deeply. I've been meditating since I was seventeen, eighteen years old. I know it's a big part of your life as well, Tim. So that's a very, very important habit.

• 35:13Josh Waitzkin?

  The idea of waking up first thing in the morning and turning your mind to creative work, pre-input, as opposed to checking email and getting reactive, opening up your channel to the unconscious mind first thing when you wake up in the morning, doing the same, ending the workday with quality, hugely important. I remember I went skiing with Billy Kidd, who, as you might recall, is one of the great downhill racers from back in, I think, the sixties Olympic ski team. Awesome dude, now he's out in Colorado wearing a cowboy hat. Just a timeless guy, brilliant dude. And, you know, he was saying to me years ago, when I first skied with him, "Josh, what do you think are the three most important turns of the ski run?" And, you know, I've asked that question to a lot of people since. And most people will say the middle, because it's the hardest, the beginning, because they're getting momentum.

• 35:58Josh Waitzkin?

  Billy describes the three most important turns of the ski run are the last three before you get in a lift. And it's a very, very subtle point. And for those of you who are skiers, you know that, you know, that's when the slope is leveled off, there's less challenge. Most people are very sloppy then, they're taking the muscles off of, um, they're taking the weight off the muscles they've been using, they have bad form. Problem with that is that on the lift ride up, unconsciously, you're internalizing bad body mechanics. As Billy points out, if your, your last three turns are precise, then what you're internalizing on the lift ride up is precision. So, I carry this on to, you know, the guys who I train in the finance world, for example. Ending the workday with very high quality, which opens up, you know, for one thing, you're, you're internalizing quality overnight. And we're nurturing themes as well as skills, right?

• 36:43Josh Waitzkin?

  It's one thing to learn skills, but the higher art is to learn themes or, or meta-themes that will ultimately spontaneously up into the, into the internalization of hundreds of, of what I would call local habits. Um, and, and so if you're practicing quality, you're, you're deepening the muscle of quality. And you're also focusing the unconscious mind in an area of complexity which you'll then tap first thing in the mornings. This is a core habit. Um, journaling, certain post-mortem processes, reflecting on the, you know, doing, ending your day with a reflection on, of the quality of the work. Um, what are the core areas of complexity that you're, that you're wrestling with? Um, hugely important, you know, one of the-

• 37:22Tim Ferriss?

  Would you do that, would you do that immediately after the end of the workday per se, before bed? How would you time that? If someone wanted to try this themselves?

• 37:31Josh Waitzkin?

  I time it at the end of the workday before, the problem with doing these things end of, right before bed is that then you're sort of consciously going to bed thinking about these things.

• 37:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 37:40Josh Waitzkin?

  At that point, I find you want to release, so, and I mean, a very core idea is- You know, when you go home as best you can, unless you're red hot inspired, release your mind from the work. Um, it's very important to give your stress and recovery, um, core habit, right? You wanna be turning it on and turning it off. And teaching people to turning it off is a huge part of teaching them to turn it on much more intensely. And so, stress and recovery workouts, interval training, um, and meditation together are beautiful habits to develop, to cultivate the art of turning it on and turning it off. So if you're undulating your heart rate, for example, between one seventy, one seventy-two, one seventy-four, and say, one forty-four, the practice of lowering your heart rate over the course of, say, forty-five seconds is akin to falling asleep, releasing your tension.

• 38:25Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, and then, as you're pushing your heart rate back up, you're learning to turn it on, so you're using a physical metaphor to train at the art of turning on incredible intellectual energy. And then turning it off. Marcelo Garcia, who we were talking about, one of my most beautiful memories of him in, you know, world championship, right before going into the semifinals, raucous bleacher, everyone screaming, yelling, he's sleeping, sleeping in the bleacher. You wake him up, he sort of stumbled into the ring, you've never seen a guy more relaxed before going into a world championship fight. Um, and then, he can turn it off so deeply, and man, when he goes in the ring, you can't turn it on with any more intensity than he can. And his ability to turn it off is directly aligned with how intensely he can turn it on. So, training people to do this, have stress and recovery, undulation throughout their day.

• 39:10Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, and then, you know, thematically, this ties into, again, this internal, um, proactive orientation. And, you know, building a daily architecture, which is around understanding your creative process, as opposed to reacting to things, feeling guilty that you're not working, really teaching people to tap into their internal compass.

• 39:28Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:29Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, so those are some of the core themes and habits that I would, that I would, um, bring up first. But I could go on, I could spend three hours talking about this subject.

• 39:37Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it. Uh, this, I, uh, I, we'll, we'll, we'll have, we'll have a part two. Uh, the- The meditation, I want to touch on for a second. I mean, as you know, I've been taking that very seriously for particularly, particularly the last six months or so. And I received an email the other day from the, the teacher that I used for transcendental meditation. And there are many different types of meditation. I'm, I'm curious, I'm gonna ask you about what, how you format your own meditating in a second, but there are many different types. I have my issues, my likes and dislikes as it relates to almost all of them, but I received an email with a link to an article and the, the title is Bridgewater Founder Ray Dalio

• 40:21Tim Ferriss?

  Credits Transcendental Meditation for His Success. And for those who don't know, he's the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. They have what, a hundred billion plus under, under management, I think. And his quote, his quote is meditation more than any other factor has been the secret to whatever success I've had. That is a hell of an endorsement. So it's, for me, it's been getting over that resistance to what I perceived as sort of a woo woo, new agey type thing. And the, the ability to sort of view it almost as just a warm bath for the mind, where I'm taking a, a mini-vacation from my own brain in a way, which may or may not, depending on who you ask, be the most helpful way to look at it.

• 41:05Tim Ferriss?

  But I found that a very, a very kind of useful lens through which to, to view it. But how do you, what, if there is a particular type of, of meditation you follow, what is it? Or how do you personally meditate? I mean, what do you think of or not think of? How long do you do it, et cetera?

• 41:25Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, I mean, when I was in seventeen, eighteen, I started studying very simple contemplative and quiescent Buddhist sitting meditation, where I would focus on my breath.

• 41:39Josh Waitzkin?

  And, you know, this is when I was a late teenager. And then I, I, I started getting involved with Tai Chi. And I started studying East Asian philosophy very deeply. And this is where I got increasingly into moving meditation, which, which is the, the most deep practice, or the practice that I've personally done most deeply. Mm-hmm. Um, Tai Chi form meditation. Tai, so the, the, the meditative form of Tai Chi is sort of the, the essence of the art, and then the fighting application is what I was competing in. Mm-hmm. And, and so, I spent many years meditating four, five, six hours a day through Tai, with Tai Chi. Um, today, I combine my, my Tai Chi practice with sitting meditation again. Mm-hmm.

• 42:22Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, I mean, I, w- most people, when they, when they enter meditation, what I, what I suggest, they just practice very simple sitting meditation, um, following their breath. And it, it, it's a practice which doesn't have to be very complex. They can, for example, just sit either cross-legged or comfortably in a chair and have their, and follow their breath. And it's very interesting, because they'll notice after one or two seconds that their mind starts racing off. And usually what happens, when you have really driven guys who are trying to meditate for the first time, and their mind races off, they get, they get all pissed off. They're just like, ah! Angry frustration. They feel like they're failing at meditation. And one of the most important things to, to do is to embrace the fact that meditation isn't about perfection. It's about the return to breath.

• 43:05Josh Waitzkin?

  So when you find your mind racing, you observe that and you return to your breath. And that's a tough emotional hurdle for a lot of guys. And i- i- it's very interesting, because over time, you know, you, you know the metaphor of, of basically, the mind is a, is a wild stallion that over time, you're, you're taming. And you, you ultimately learn to still it. It's racing, it's, it's bucking, it's, it's pulling against anything you put it, any kind of line you put on it. Um, but ultimately, i- i- the circles get smaller and smaller, and, and you, you learn to, to observe. When your mind is getting caught up in some kind of mental or emotional addiction, more and more quickly and fluidly, and the return to breath becomes easier and easier. And it's very interesting, by the way, as a competitor, because I relate to the theme

• 43:49Josh Waitzkin?

  of channeling emotion, or fear, whatever is rising, you know, as a world-class competitor, in very much the same way we might speak about meditation. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, I spoke at a conference on grit recently, and it was very interesting for me, because for the most part, when I listen- G R I T. Resilience. Got it. G R I T, yeah, which is of course core educational principle in a lot of charter schools these days, hugely important, teaching kids to be resilient. Mm-hmm. Um, and it's very interesting, because when I hear people speak about resilience, um, from, and this is sort of a, we're moving a little bit aside from meditation, but we'll bring it back, um, the focus is on, for example, overcoming difficulty, um, suffering, learning

• 44:33Josh Waitzkin?

  to, to basically push through. What people don't realize is that world-class performers, what they've done is they've reoriented their relationship to suffering, or to the point of resistance. They've learned to embrace it, they've learned to see, um, the beauty in these moments where there's pain, because that's incredible room for growth. And I think that a lot of what you learn to do in meditation is observe the addictive way you might be defining something. And if you want to, you can simply alter that definition, so you can change your relationship to pain, or the rain, or a huge storm, or fear, or anger. Mm-hmm. So, for example, people from the outside will use the term fearlessness, right? Mm-hmm.

• 45:13Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, but if you speak to any great soldier, or SEAL Team member, or fighter, or UFC guy, they'll tell you, mixed martial arts, right, great, you know, world-class fighter, they'll tell you that they feel fear, they just know how to sit with their fear, and how to work with it, and how to channel it. So the idea of fearlessness is sort of a false idea which is imposed from the outside by a spectator. Um, and when you observe world-class performers, what they've learned how to do is harness fear, nerves, anxiety, bring them in, embrace them, have a working relationship with them, and channel them into intensity. And meditation is an incredible forum, or vehicle, which you can do this, because you learn to observe where you have addictive relationships, and you realize that they're

• 45:55Josh Waitzkin?

  not absolute, and you can actually transform your relationship to any of these, um, thought patterns, thought constructs, cognitive biases, or emotional patterns.

• 46:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was looking up a quote as you mentioned that because I wanted to get it right, but it's one of my favorite quotes from Customato, who trained boxers like Floyd Patterson, Jose Torres, most famously, perhaps Mike Tyson. And he would say, "The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters." I love it. And I started meditating and gave up meditating many, many times because I had the response that you mentioned about type A personalities, where I'd be sitting there and I thought the objective was to quiet my mind, and I'll come back to that in a second.

• 46:47Tim Ferriss?

  And so when I failed at quieting my mind, because it would be ticking off the to-do list or being like, "Oh, that fucker who said A, B, and C to me the other day," and it would just harp on these ridiculous things, and I'd get then pissed, and then I'd get pissed that I was getting pissed, and then I'd get up and have a cup of coffee and storm out of the house, which didn't seem like a productive meditation session. I actually started doing it consistently when I kept it really short, and a friend of mine recommended this, where I would, number one, be comfortable, so I would sit down, but to avoid back pain, I would actually lean against a wall, which is very commonly thought of as a big no-no. So I would lean against a wall to keep my back straight, and I would listen to one music track.

• 47:30Tim Ferriss?

  I would listen to one song every morning, the same song as a cue, and I would just pay attention to my breath and focus on being an observer of my thoughts, but not trying to control them at all. So if all I did was think about my to-do list the entire time, that's fine, as long as I'm paying attention to my breath. And that non-attachment to an outcome, i.e. controlling my thoughts, was very helpful. And the format that... I followed subsequent to that, and you know, we can have a longer conversation about, you know, why it finally clicked, but the short answer is accountability. I had a teacher who was going to give me a hard time if I didn't do my meditating and then report back.

• 48:10Tim Ferriss?

  Was twenty minutes, let's just say ten to twenty minutes twice a day. And what I found was by allowing the thoughts to occur and not judging myself, because let's say I'm thinking about email or the grocery shopping I need to do or whatever, just letting that happen, but getting good at observing it, I was able to then have more emotional awareness later, which would prevent cognitive biases and bad judgment. So what I mean by that is, as a concrete example, I'm a, I'm an impatient guy. I always have been, ever since I was a little, literally little kid, like twelve, thirteen years old, if I was at the restaurant with my mom and dad and, and the server didn't come over and pour water after

• 48:52Tim Ferriss?

  we'd been gone dry for like five minutes, I'd just get up and walk into the kitchen and like grab a pitcher and walk out. And I'm really impatient and I get angry. I, I mean, I get angry about things that I view as deliberately slow and sloppy. So for me, and, and that anger can be harnessed sometimes into really productive aggression, but it's also it wears you down at both ends. And so what I found is after meditating consistently for even a week or so, when that anger would start, I was better at not just become, I, I was better at observing Tim as a third person, right? Like, oh, look at that. Like,

• 49:37Tim Ferriss?

  Tim's getting angry about something really small and stupid. As opposed to simply becoming angry and then causing problems for myself, whether it's just internal or interacting with other people. So, yeah, I, I agree with you completely on, on the meditation and...

• 49:52Josh Waitzkin?

  I love that image of you as a twelve-year-old racing to the kitchen, bring out the water. Such a great metaphor for your life today.

• 50:01Josh Waitzkin?

  You find different examples of that, it's in the process and you race in there and you get the water and you slice right through. I love it.

• 50:08Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, so, uh, let's, let's do a couple of rapid fire questions that are, that are all tied into this, this, this stuff. But we can just do short questions with a couple of, of short answers. Um, uh, so complete the following statement. Uh, my favorite time of day is blank.

• 50:25Josh Waitzkin?

  My favorite time of day is holding my son in my arms after I've done my, I've woken up, I've done a twenty, thirty minute journaling session. I get my son, I, and I bring him downstairs and I give him his bottle of milk and I hold him and I, and I look him in the eye and I tell him how proud I am of him and we talk about what he's thinking about and what he's working on while he has the milk. And I think it's the most magical part of my day these days.

• 50:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's in the morning?

• 50:51Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, that's, I, I wake up, I, I, I wake up about half an hour before him. I do a big creative burst. Um, this is a big, you know, he, he, as a parent, your sleep patterns change, uh, you know, pretty dramatically. But I, I found this rhythm where I wake up and I do that burst and I, and I just love that first morning energy time with him. And we have this deep connection while he's having his, um, his milk and, um.

• 51:15Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you wake up?

• 51:16Josh Waitzkin?

  Talk about that. I usually wake up around seven, seven oh five. And he's usually waking up around seven thirty, seven thirty five.

• 51:25Tim Ferriss?

  I'm endlessly fascinated by morning routines, so this might seem really digging, like I'm digging into the minutia. But when you wake up, it sounded like you wake up and you have thirty minutes to journal before bringing your son downstairs. Do you brush your teeth, drink a cup of coffee, any of that before you journal? Or do you just roll out of bed, walk into the office and sit down to write?

• 51:49Josh Waitzkin?

  My routine is that I, I roll out of bed, I brush my teeth, I go downstairs and I sit down, um, with my journal and I start writing. And I immediately apply myself to, to a reflection that I'd sort of targeted my mind at in the, um, in the evening or late afternoon before. Um, and then I, when, after, and I just let it rip. I have a big creative surge. Um, and then once I hear my son, I go get him and then. Then I have my breakfast, um, usually a bowl oatmeal, um, while he has his, you know, after he has his milk, and then I have a cup of coffee about half an hour after that.

• 52:27Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. Related to, uh, you know, you strike me as a happy guy. Obviously, we all have our challenges then and again.

• 52:37Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, like, uh, the place I'm getting remodeled at the moment.

• 52:42Josh Waitzkin?

  I've been down that road.

• 52:45Tim Ferriss?

  I won't go into a diatribe at the moment. I'm very excited about it, but it's my, uh, you know, twelve-year-old Tim wanting to go get the water pitcher that's not being very helpful right now. Uh, the, what are three things, could be two, three things that you believe you need in order to be happy? And that could be for you, uh, could be for people in general. I'm just curious, uh, what, how, how you would think of that question or answer that question?

• 53:11Josh Waitzkin?

  One of the great things about you and I being dear friends and having these conversations is that you tend to be very good at thinking in bullets, in lists of three things, and that's not how my brain works. And I can tell you the essence of how I relate to that question.

• 53:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Josh Waitzkin?

  So I, I'm not gonna give you a three, three bullet answer, because I just, that's just not how this brain operates. I, I mean, I, I've built a lifestyle around being true to myself. Uh, largely, maybe a big reason is because of, you know, my mom used to always tell me as a kid to follow my heart, follow my dreams. Um, I never made decisions for money or for external things. Um, I always trusted if I was true to myself, these things would follow. And so, you know, my professional life, my foundation, my school, I, I, I only work with people who I feel are, are ethically aligned, who have a good energy, who I feel really good about intuitively. Um, I keep empty space in my life. Um, I rarely have

• 54:08Josh Waitzkin?

  more than one or two meetings a day. Um, my life is about quality and not quantity. It's about depth and not breadth. Um... My business is based on doing very, very deep and very excellent work with just a handful of people. And so I, I really like to cultivate quality as a way of life. And I, I believe that when you're not cultivating quality, you're essentially cultivating sloppiness.

• 54:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 54:32Josh Waitzkin?

  And so, you know, the idea of building the musculature of quality and, and being like a heat-seeking missile for me, I take great pleasure in observing the beauty of the little moments in life.

• 54:41Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:42Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, and so for me, my lifestyle is based on, you know, I'm working out every day. I, I just focus on structuring a day that will allow for my creative process to be rich. I'm present with my son. I have, my office is at home. I'm with him in the morning, I'm with him, see him throughout the day, I'm with him, give him his bath and read him his story at night, I'm with him. I've eliminated almost all travel that takes me away, um, from, from my boy. I'm going to a conference weekend, I'm taking my wife and my baby are coming with me. Um, and I, I really build a life around being true and I don't build it around anything material. And, and that's really the essence of how, how I personally relate to this question. Of course, there's different solutions for everybody, but, um, but that's what works for me.

• 55:24Tim Ferriss?

  This is something that, that is being true to oneself, I think, that most people struggle with, right? And I think it's, it's a, I think it's a goal that most people have, at least in the abstract, but I'd love to dig into, uh, some concrete details of that. And perhaps you could share, uh, an example of something you changed, like maybe where you got slightly off the path and made a correction to be true to yourself and what that looked like.

• 55:51Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 55:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, I mean, for me, a, a very clear example is, is my public life. So I, I was a young kid, fell in love with chess. Um, when I was, you know, I, I won my first national championship when I was late eight, early nine. Um, when I was eleven, a book came out, um, Searching for Bobby Fischer. Um, and then when I was fifteen, a movie came out about my life, based on the same book that my dad initially wrote. And so I was really thrust into the spotlight. And so I, you know, without me wanting to, I was just, you know, a young, passionate artist. I loved playing chess and competing in chess. I was put out there and I had paparazzi following me everywhere. I was, um, You know, I was really living in the spotlight in a way I wasn't necessarily emotionally prepared for.

• 56:38Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:39Josh Waitzkin?

  And I felt in my teens how that challenged my love for this art, because my love for it was so pure initially. Um, and, and that tension, you know, that, that fight, that fight to stay true to my art, um, taught me some very deep lessons. And then I, you know, after I finished high school, I, I took off and I left the country, largely to study chess very deeply, undistracted from publicity. I, I moved to Eastern Europe. Um, my girlfriend at the time was from Slovenia. Um, no one knew me out there, and it was a beautiful life, and I just left the public world. And since then, I've, you know, when I came back, I've had these periods where I've been exposed to publicity, and I've been in periods where I've been, you know, deep in a cave and, and moved away from it.

• 57:21Josh Waitzkin?

  And, and I think that this is a very clean example of, of, I mean, other than you, very few people drag me out of the public eye.

• 57:29Tim Ferriss?

  Throw, throw a net over the bear and drag him out of the cave.

• 57:32Josh Waitzkin?

  You have a way of doing that to me. Um, but, but in a beautiful way. And I mean, I, I've found that the privacy of my life, um, not doing things, not getting caught up in, in, you know, the swirl of fame or, or seeking external adulation is a very important thing for me personally. And everyone's different, but, but for me, I mean, I, and maybe, maybe I have a little bit of a, um, an oversensitivity to this because of, of my, my youth, because I was out there so intensely as a young, as a young guy. And I think it really challenged my love for the game. Um, this is an example of, of the kind of decision that I'll make. I mean, I, I think it's very important for me to, to, to live the, the vast majority of my life privately.

• 58:17Josh Waitzkin?

  I, I don't do very much that will allow me to be recognized on the street and live my life as a celebrity.

• 58:22Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:23Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, because I've gone down that path, and I, I love my privacy.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, and I also have built, you know, a career around, my business is working with people who are similar, who are not seeking the limelight, who are not out there on television every day, who are world-class, but are, no one around them, um, other than people, you know, very close, have any idea that they have been so incredibly successful from a monetary way. They try to raise their kids, um, not to be spoiled. Um, the kids are gritty kids, that they're, you know, great philanthropists, um, really good people.

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:56Josh Waitzkin?

  And, and I, I love, I'm very drawn to people who have been enormously successful, um, But don't get caught up in the external crap that comes with success.

• 59:04Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:05Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, and a real, you know, who are living their life tapped into the love. Um, and that's how I try to live.

• 59:12Tim Ferriss?

  What are, uh, what are some of your, what are the books? Let's just stick with books for a second, that you've uh, either most gifted to other people or most recommended to other people. Uh, because there, there are many people listening to this probably who, uh, won't necessarily have the opportunity, uh, to interact with the types of, of high level folks, uh, that, that you and I are, are so fortunate to have the chance to interact with. But they can do that vis a vis books or narratives, uh, documentaries, et cetera. What, what are some books that have had a formative impact on you?

• 59:52Josh Waitzkin?

  I mean, so, so if we go back to when I was seventeen, eighteen, Jack Kerouac had a huge impact on my life, On the Road, Dahmer Bums. This was, this was just, you know, his books were, initially kind of tapped me into the idea that life could be ecstatically beautiful. And I moved into studying, um, Taoism, so Lao Tzu, um, the Tao Te Ching hugely, um, just unbelievably deep, but of course the translation of that book that you read will be formative. And I, my favorite translation is the Jia Fu Fang in Jane English, translation of, um, the Tao Te Ching. Um, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think one of the most important books ever written by Robert Persig, who has become a, a very dear friend over the years. He, he, when my, when The Art of Learning came out, my publisher asked me, who, would you love to read this book?

• 1:00:36Josh Waitzkin?

  And I said, well, the one person I'd really want to read that book is, um, Robert Persig. And, but he, to me, that was just, you know, he, he lived like a deeply secluded life.

• 1:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:47Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, but they somehow managed to get him a copy of the book. He got it in a big bushel from his publisher and he read it and he contacted me and wrote, I mean, I was so honored that he, that he was moved by it. And he and I, and over the years it developed really interesting dialogue.

• 1:00:58Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:59Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, so that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one, I think, one of the most important books in the world, the focus on quality, dynamic quality, um, finding art in, learning to find art in anything. Deeply, deeply brilliant, um, philosophical book. Um. Shantaram, one of the most beautiful novels I've um I've ever read. Gregory David Roberts is also someone I've gotten to know very well. Um, just ecstatically beautiful, beautiful book. And, you know, of course, I'm also a lover of fiction. I mean, Hemingway has been, he's probably the most important writer of my life. Um.

• 1:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  Any particular, any particular novel stand out for you of his?

• 1:01:38Josh Waitzkin?

  Oh, I, I mean, I think that For Whom the Bell Tolls, just exquisite novel, Green Hills of Africa, amazing. Um, his short stories are utterly magnificent. Um, I think Green Hills of Africa is one of the most, is one of the most underrated books that he's written. Um, his, his complete collection of short stories, I mean, there's one magnificent gem after the next. Um, of course, Old Man in the Sea is, is the one everyone speaks about and beautiful book. Um, I guess if I had to have a favorite, it would be, it would be For Whom the Bell Tolls.

• 1:02:14Tim Ferriss?

  For Whom the Bell Tolls, yeah. For those people listening who also want insight into his writing style, uh, A Moveable Feast is.

• 1:02:23Josh Waitzkin?

  Oh, magnificent book, yes.

• 1:02:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, also.

• 1:02:26Josh Waitzkin?

  And that's where Hemingway really speaks to his writing process. Fantastic book.

• 1:02:29Tim Ferriss?

  So fascinating.

• 1:02:30Josh Waitzkin?

  You know, there's a great book, by the way, Tim, which I think, I think you've read, um, which is, I think it's, it's Hemingway on writing. Have you read this book?

• 1:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  I did read it, yep. I also read that, yeah, the.

• 1:02:43Josh Waitzkin?

  Oh, I mean, if you want to, if someone's get to know Hemingway, it's just, it's just a fantastic compilation of all of Hemingway's writing in letters, in his books, in his articles, everywhere, um, put together thematically, basically Hemingway on the writing process. I think it's one of the most important little collections of, of, um, on creativity that I've ever run into. Absolutely brilliant book.

• 1:03:02Tim Ferriss?

  And it's really, and it's really short. I remember I read it on, I read it on Kindle on a short flight that I had and just like jammed right through the whole thing. The, one of the recommendations was, uh, Write Drunk, Edit Sober. And I realized that Write Drunk, Edit Sober does not translate to podcasts very well. The last podcast that I did with a buddy, Kevin Rose, if you record drunk and try to edit sober, it doesn't really actually work the same way. Oh, man. What's up? And we'll just do a couple more questions because this has been fun.

• 1:03:45Tim Ferriss?

  The, uh, but if you had to run out of your house and just take a handful of things with you, obviously, your family is safe, so that that's accounted for. Uh, what would you take and why?

• 1:03:58Josh Waitzkin?

  In what kind of situation? In some kind of, like, in a very dangerous situation?

• 1:04:04Tim Ferriss?

  Not, you don't have to fend for yourself with with weaponry or or create fire with flint or anything like that. Um, uh, there's a, there's a fire in your house, you just have to get out to the street and then you're going to obviously sort things out later. But assuming your family is safe, um, what would you, what would you take with you? Just what you can carry, basically?

• 1:04:32Josh Waitzkin?

  That's a really great question. I, I, I actually had that experience years ago when I was playing chess and speaks to how crazy I was. I was, um, there was a, I was studying chess with this brilliant Russian grandmaster named Yuri Razovaya, who actually wrote about my book. And there was a, I was in the fifth, fifth floor of a, of a walk-up. There's a old one-bedroom I had in my, my first apartment. And, um, and there was, suddenly we were deep, deep into chess study and there was a huge fire. And I, I looked out, there were like five fire engines and dudes screaming at us and, and we had to go out to fire escape. And I ended up going back in and grabbing my computer with all of my chess analysis, which is such a random thing to do. It was so unimportant. I mean, speaks to how different I've become. Um, yeah, and then ended up being, we were, it had been seconds from being an updraft and blowing the whole building up.

• 1:05:17Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, yeah, so I wouldn't do that. I don't know, man. I, I think I might, honestly, when you ask me that question now, if I think that my family was safe, I, I have nothing material that I would, um, that I would grab.

• 1:05:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's great, man. That's, uh, it's a very stoic response in the most positive way. Uh, all right, my man, I'm going to ask you one more. Uh, actually, and I'll, I'll give you a choice of two questions. Let's do that.

• 1:05:44Josh Waitzkin?

  All right, let's do it.

• 1:05:45Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, so the, uh, the first option is, what did you want to be when you grew up? So, when you were a kid and what now, how would you answer the question? What do you want to be when you grow up? That's, that's question number one. Uh, question number two is if you had a committee of three people, living or dead, to help you make decisions, who would you choose and why?

• 1:06:04Josh Waitzkin?

  These are great questions, man.

• 1:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks. By the way, I'm borrowing liberally from like every good interviewer I've ever come in contact with.

• 1:06:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 1:06:16Tim Ferriss?

  But so it goes.

• 1:06:17Josh Waitzkin?

  You want me to answer them both, or you want me to answer one of them?

• 1:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, you can answer them both.

• 1:06:20Josh Waitzkin?

  Those are two very different questions. I mean, this is tough, man.

• 1:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, if they, uh, I'm just trying to be respectful of your time, but if you have time and you have some thoughts on both, let's, let's, let's go for it.

• 1:06:29Josh Waitzkin?

  When I grew up, I wanted to, when I was, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I just loved, I loved, um, so there was something about sport. Um, so I, I, I think that there was a, I mean, and I spent a lot of my life as a, as a competitor from age basically six until, you know, thirty-five, I was basically a professional competitor in different fields.

• 1:06:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:06:51Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, today, you know, but my mom always said to me that she felt like that was a phase and that I was a healer. That was her language. And, and a lot of what I do today is try to figure out how to help people, well, express themselves in as pure a way as possible, artistically, um, in a way that gives them joy. I mean, I think that my plan is sometime in the next four or five year, years, I'm, I'm thirty-seven now, I'm thinking about it when I'm forty, forty-one, um, I guess that'd be three, four years now, I'm getting old.

• 1:07:23Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing).

• 1:07:23Josh Waitzkin?

  To, to, to turn my mind to everything, taking everything I've been doing in these different laboratories and apply it to a, a world-changing education initiative.

• 1:07:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, helping children in a, just fulfill themselves in a very deep way, I think is a, is a central calling, which I'm, that's, that's, I'm not gonna say it's my end game, but that's, that's the next, um, major chapter, I think, of my life that I'm building towards. Uh, I've been running my foundation for, for many years now, and we do beautiful work, but I have an allergy to scaling if it's gonna dilute quality in any way. And so I've been sort of building up the, the, the, the foundate, like the, the groundwork to ultimately be able to, to do something hugely important in education. So I think that that's gonna be, um, the core of how I would, I would, um, I'm building towards that in a few years. Um, in terms of the committee of three people.

• 1:08:14Tim Ferriss?

  Just to, just to interject for a second, that's, that's also, I think, my calling, and of course, we've spoken at length about this, so. If you need a co-conspirator, count me in for that one, certainly.

• 1:08:26Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah dude, let's plan on this. Let's say four or five, we have to figure out when it's gonna be. Maybe four or five years we'll team up and we'll take the world by storm. Education, I think that's a great plan.

• 1:08:33Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like a plan, man.

• 1:08:34Josh Waitzkin?

  I love it, I love it. This sort of taps that movement away from self. I mean, as a competitor, you're constantly, you're fighting and in many ways you're, you know, you're, there's something about, there's a focus inward on oneself and I, and becoming a parent, I've definitely felt this movement, um, away from that. I mean, my, my son is, just my love for him just so transcends anything I ever, I ever felt before. It's been really, really important to experience. When you become a dad, man, then we're gonna have some fun.

• 1:09:05Tim Ferriss?

  I can't wait.

• 1:09:06Josh Waitzkin?

  I'm looking forward to your sleepless nights.

• 1:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh man, yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna see, uh, battle weary Timbo. I got, I need to, I need to work on my polyphasic sleep. Uh, so.

• 1:09:17Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's a committee of, of three people. What are your thoughts?

• 1:09:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, one person who, who, who would be on that committee is someone who, um, I, I, who I know, a very, very deep friend of mine who happens to be in the, in, in the finance world. Um, his name is Dave. I can't speak about what his last name is, but just a deeply meditative spirit, great wisdom, um, as insightful a human being as I've ever known in my life. And I think that that, he would definitely be on, um, on that list. Um, I mean, can we go, can we go into, can I say outrageous characters like, like Gandhi?

• 1:10:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go, go for it, yeah.

• 1:10:06Josh Waitzkin?

  I mean, I, I think about, about Gandhi, Lao Tzu, the Buddha. I mean, my, my God, what, what a, what a, um, but you see, there's a certain, yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know if I can answer this question very intelligently. You can put a.

• 1:10:22Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's the perfect way to end.

• 1:10:25Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. I don't know. And Tim, of course, you, man. I mean, you, you, you give me, you give me so much crap in life. That I'd have to call you because you'd be the one just to, just to keep, you'd definitely be the one to slice through all the nonsense, yeah. And my mom, that's the most important one, my mom.

• 1:10:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Josh Waitzkin?

  She's given me the most, um. Deep advice in my life. I mean, my mom is the one person who has really embraced these crazy decisions that I've made when I've left arts, when I was at the tops of their field, of those fields, and because of some strange calling I had inside. I think, um, my mom would have to be the top of any list like that. She's my hero. My mom's the greatest person I've ever known in my life.

• 1:11:06Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome, man. Well, this is, uh, this has been a lot of fun. Obviously, we're gonna have a lot more conversations. Uh, is there anything you want to, any parting thoughts, advice, suggestions, anything like that you'd, uh, you'd like to impart? If not, we can, we can, we can call it a day, but, uh, the mic is yours if you have anything you'd like to add.

• 1:11:27Josh Waitzkin?

  No, I love this. It's been really interesting. I mean, I, I, um, I, I guess if I, if I'm gonna close with a thought, it would be that, you know, when I, when I, one thing that I've been doing in the last years, um, after, since writing The Art of Learning, is I've been exposed to some of the most brilliant thinkers in these different fields. Um, and I've, I've studied the patterns behind them, and I've studied the people who study them. And one of the things we have to be wary of in life is studying the, the people who study the artist as opposed to the artist himself. Um, Persig, who the author of Zem and the Art of Most Psycho-Maintenance that I mentioned, he uses this great term, the philosophers and the phil- phil- philosophologists, right? The philosophologists are the ones

• 1:12:10Josh Waitzkin?

  who are basically philosophizing about the philosophers as opposed to doing philosophy. And the vast majority of philosophers today actually are just philosophers. Similarly, as, you know, you and I have discussed, there's the writers, and there's the literary critic, there's the artist and the art critic. And I think that we have to be very careful when we, when we study excellence, uh, and we're thinking about our own path to excellence, um, that we're studying, that, and we're tuning in to the direct experience of people who've actually been there as opposed to the armchair professors who are talking about it.

• 1:12:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:12:38Josh Waitzkin?

  Um, because, you know, i- i- if we spend our life in the trenches and we spend our life studying that last like point one percent of the learning process, what we see is that, that, that final passage to excellence Is really about navigating that razor's edge where you have to be willing to go right up against a potential enormous blunder. You have to improvise, for example, trust your intuition in moments where all the objective mathematical faculties you've developed are telling you something else, but your intuition is operating at a higher level. You have to really be willing to go up to the brink of disaster to succeed, you know, in moments where you're, for example, fighting in the finals of a world championship or

• 1:13:20Josh Waitzkin?

  in the very last seconds of a Super Bowl or an NBA Finals. And in navigating these things, the armchair professors will often have the exact opposite of good advice.

• 1:13:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:13:32Josh Waitzkin?

  And so, so what I would say is, for one thing, you know, listen deeply internally to the core of your being and build your game plan from there, trust your gut, and then build a lifestyle around listening to that and cultivate the love. And that's the other thing I'd say, is that whether you're talking about the beginning of the learning process or the very, you know, the very final surge or surges, it's about the love. We're thinking about parenting, cultivating resilience, cultivating excellence, cultivating creativity. What the armchair professors all forget about is the love. And that's what I see consistently with people who have found the most pleasure, the most

• 1:14:14Josh Waitzkin?

  happiness, and created the greatest art, is that they have a profound passion for what they do, not only the big moments, but the little moments, the moments that others would call pain. They learn to love practice. They learn to love the point of resistance. I said, "Don't forget about the love." I guess that's what I'd like to say.

• 1:14:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's a, that's a beautiful way to end this, man. Well, Josh, I'm sure we will be talking next time. We'll have some wine and...

• 1:14:40Josh Waitzkin?

  Sounds good, Timbo.

• 1:14:42Tim Ferriss?

  And, yeah, I hope everybody checks out, obviously, The Art of Learning and really keeps an eye on what you have coming when you decide to push stuff out of the cave. So...

• 1:14:55Josh Waitzkin?

  Thanks, brother. This was blast, man. Enjoy it.

• 1:14:58Tim Ferriss?

  All right, buddy. I'll talk to you soon.

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• 1:15:13Speaker 03

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