#148: Josh Waitzkin, The Prodigy Returns

Ever since episode #2 of the podcast http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/04/22/tim-ferriss-podcast/, you've been asking for more Josh Waitzkin, so here it is! This is an in-depth jam session, and you can definitely listen to this one independently. Josh Waitzkin was the basis for the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer http://www.amazon.com/Searching-Bobby-Fischer-Joe-Mantegna/dp/6305910340/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Considered a chess prodigy, he has perfected learning strategies that can be applied to anything, including his other loves of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (he's a black belt under phenom Marcelo Garcia) and Tai Chi push hands (he's a world champion). These days, he spends his time coaching the world's top performers, whether Mark Messier, Cal Ripken Jr., or high-profile investors. I initially met Josh through his incredible book, The Art of Learning http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Learning-Journey-Performance/dp/0743277465/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which I loved so much that I helped produce the audiobook (download here http://www.audible.com/pd/Self-Development/The-Art-of-Learning-Audiobook/B00JAOOBHU/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 at Audible). If you're interested in implementing programs designed by Josh in your classroom, go to theartoflearningproject.org http://theartoflearningproject.org and find out if the program is a good fit for you. This episode is DEEP, in the best way possible. Just like last time, Josh will blow your mind. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. Have you ever wanted to be as powerful as a mullet-wearing ninja from the 1980's, or as sleek as a black panther in the Amazon? Of course you have, and that's where MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim comes in. I've spent the last 2-3 weeks wearing underwear from these guys http://meundies.com/tim 24/7, and they are the most comfortable and colorful underwear I've ever owned. Their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim http://meundies.com/tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous) and, while you're at it, don't miss lots of hot ladies wearing MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you—for free–exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim.

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

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, we're just sitting in a book, you know.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by MeUndies. If I'm not going commando, I'm in MeUndies. I have been testing these underwear for three to four months now, pretty much every day, and in fact, threw out a bunch of my other underwear this morning. And on the road, in the house, they are extremely comfortable. They look good, feel good. They are made of micro modal, two times softer than cotton, as scientifically tested using the Kawabata method. Sounds very fancy, of course. And I get a lot of compliments from ladies for these. You don't get diaper butt, you don't get the tired elastic band. They look great, and they have underwear for both men and women. Check out meundies.com/tim and you can see everything I've been wearing. The ridiculous, the sublime, everything in

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  between, including my favorite, which is called out. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention their lounge pants. This is a new thing. And I've been wearing their lounge pants when I record podcasts. I've been wearing them out and about when I'm walking the dog, meeting people for coffee. And they are extremely comfortable. They're made from the same material as the underwear, but some of them, like the blue ones I have, have pockets so you can walk about without seeming like you're off of your meds and completely crazy. So that is awesome. And if you're not happy with the first pair you try on, I assume that refers to the underwear, they'll refund you completely and you can keep the pair you tried on for free. But if you're that kind of person, you should be ashamed, because that's disgusting. MeUndies.com/tim, check it out.

• 1:54Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 2:39Tim Ferriss?

  Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc.,

• 3:21Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast.

• 4:03Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim.

• 4:43Tim Ferriss?

  Foskip Neus, my cute little darlings, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where each episode it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from many different worlds, whether they come from military, entertainment, sports, or otherwise, to dissect and collect the patterns for you that you can use to tease out the routines, habits, thought processes, et cetera, that you can apply immediately and test in your own life. And this episode is a really fun one. Ever since episode two of the podcast, we're probably around 140 or 150 now, you've been asking for a round to a follow-up with Josh Waitzkin, and this is it. Josh Waitzkin was the basis for the

• 5:25Tim Ferriss?

  book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. He is considered a chess prodigy, although we'll discuss why that term doesn't necessarily apply to him, because he has perfected learning strategies that can be applied to anything, including his loves of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He's a black belt under the phenom, nine-time world champion Marcelo Garcia, or Tai Chi Push Hands. He's a world champion. These days, he spends his time coaching the world's top performers, whether Mark Messier, Cal Ripken Jr., or investors whose names you'd recognize, or whose assets under management would blow your mind. And as context, I initially met Josh through his incredible book, The Art of Learning, which I love so much that

• 6:04Tim Ferriss?

  I helped produce the audiobook. You can find that as part of my book club, audible.com/timsbooks. And this episode is deep. Josh is always deep and he walks the talk in the best way possible. I hope it will blow your mind. We talk about flow, achieving flow states, near-death experiences, use of slack line, training elite performers, cultivating sensitivity, and I don't mean that in the most woo-woo way imaginable, rather the most practical way imaginable, using heart rate variability training, high-intensity interval training, breath awareness, et cetera. Intuition and its applications to investing, and it just goes on and on and on. So, please

• 6:47Tim Ferriss?

  enjoy my conversation with Josh Waitzkin.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  Joshua.

• 6:54Josh Waitzkin?

  Yes, Timbo.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome back, buddy. I'm so happy to be here.

• 6:58Josh Waitzkin?

  I'm thrilled you're here, man.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  Hanging with you. And I thought we could maybe start just with a complete non sequitur, which is a book you just mentioned to me that I know nothing about, which is Dreaming Yourself Awake. Can you talk about this?

• 7:12Josh Waitzkin?

  Oh, I didn't think we were going to begin here. It's a book that I explored a couple years ago. Twenty years ago, I started studying Tibetan Dream Yoga and lucid dreaming. Not deeply, but exploring. And this was during the period where I was first getting involved with my study of East Asian philosophy. And then a dear friend of mine recommended this book. It's actually funny, because it was a, we kind of made a mistake together. I recommended another book that he texted back confirming that it was the name. He texted me back that name that I didn't intend, but then I picked up and read, and it was extraordinary. It's just a phenomenal discussion, very systematic discussion of the art of lucid dreaming, in

• 7:54Josh Waitzkin?

  this way that fuses East Asian philosophy with Western science.

• 8:01Tim Ferriss?

  And you were competing then at the time, or were you not competing? You were in the midst of competition?

• 8:07Josh Waitzkin?

  Two years ago, you mean?

• 8:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, this was two years ago?

• 8:09Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, this was two years ago.

• 8:10Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I thought you said twenty years ago.

• 8:11Josh Waitzkin?

  Twenty years ago was when I started studying East Asian, yeah, philosophy.

• 8:14Tim Ferriss?

  I got it.

• 8:15Josh Waitzkin?

  I was competing in chess then, and then the martial arts.

• 8:17Tim Ferriss?

  I need a little more caffeine. Working on it.

• 8:19Josh Waitzkin?

  You've had a rough night.

• 8:22Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to thank you. I'm just, this is like Tim's stream of consciousness podcast intro. The, we're looking at a slack line. This is an indoor Gibbon classic slack. It's about 12, uh, no, not even 10 feet long, maybe. We have, it's surrounded by kettlebells, an indo board, and a triceratops, which I don't think is yours.

• 8:44Josh Waitzkin?

  Got the Bosu ball there.

• 8:45Tim Ferriss?

  And the Bosu ball. And I wanted to thank you for actually getting me to bite the bullet and to grab a slack line, which I set up on Long Island.

• 8:53Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, absolutely. I've loved, I've had some fun on, on your slack line on Long Island, too. I love, right now, I'm in the period, you know, I kind of oscillate between these and my son, Jack, who's four and a half, we have a great time. I'm on the indo board rocking it, he's on the Bosu ball, we're having a catch back and forth while on these things. We're always integrating these interesting kinds of physiological awareness training.

• 9:16Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking of which, I feel like maybe we should throw a cautionary tale into this follow-up podcast. So, we, we obviously trade stories and findings all the time. Would you like to talk about your recent experience with Wim Hof and breathing training?

• 9:35Josh Waitzkin?

  Wow, yeah. Well, I had an extremely scary experience. I'm a lifetime meditator and kind of experimental subject like yourself around all these things.

• 9:48Tim Ferriss?

  You tend, you tend to have better self-preservation instead.

• 9:51Josh Waitzkin?

  I tend to, although I've had a lot of close calls in life. Well, I had a, I, when I heard you speak to Wim, I was extremely intrigued. Actually, when I heard someone mention Wim to you on your podcast, and then we spoke about it, then you spoke to Wim, I thought, he sounded like a fascinating guy. I started digging into his work. I, um, so powerful. And I started doing, he's going through his course, his online course. I loved it. I mean, the energetic feeling, the electric surging through the body. I'm also a lifetime freediver. Since I was four, five years old, I've been freediving. And so.

• 10:24Tim Ferriss?

  And just to put that in perspective, I mean, you spend about a month a year.

• 10:27Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Tim Ferriss?

  In the water.

• 10:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Used to be, it used to be three months when I was younger. Um, now it's about, well, yeah, freedive, yeah, diving usually about a month of the year, but I spend a lot of time now, as we know, surfing, stand-up paddle surfing, um, swimming, diving. I mean, the ocean's a huge part of my life. We gotta talk about our stand-up paddle adventures together, which are pretty hilarious.

• 10:45Tim Ferriss?

  We'll definitely come to that.

• 10:46Josh Waitzkin?

  Timbo and I have been having some fun with that.

• 10:49Josh Waitzkin?

  But I started playing with the Wim Hof method and I thought it was incredibly powerful. The intensity that you're experiencing internally, it's very similar to training in Tai Chi, Tai Chi Chuan, moving meditation for 10, 15, 20 years and then being an hour long into a session. And you have this feeling of energetic flow inside your body. With the Wim Hof, you do, you know, a few rounds of his breath method and you're experiencing these things and it was incredible. The gains in strength were mind-boggling, the length of the breath holds were fascinating. But then I made a big technical error. I ignored all the signs on Wim's site and that you spoke about, you know, do not do this in water, which is, they were all over the place, but I thought, you know, freediving's a way of life for me, no problem.

• 11:34Josh Waitzkin?

  And the major technical error was not realizing, which is absurd after a lifetime of freediving, that it's carbon dioxide buildup that gives you the urge to breathe and not oxygen deprivation. Hugely important thing, please everyone burn that in. It's CO2 buildup that makes you want to breathe. And so I did the, after a long swim at the NYU pool a few months ago, I started doing my wind breathing and did a series of underwater swims. I did about eight 25 meter swims and I think I was on my 450. And I, underwater, and I, this was after a long workout. And I went from this ecstatic state to unconsciousness. And I was actually on the bottom of the pool after blacking out from shallow water blackout for three minutes before someone pulled me out.

• 12:16Josh Waitzkin?

  And, you know, the doctors have told me usually it's 40 seconds to a minute to perhaps permanent brain damage, death. I got very lucky. My body saved my life. And they said that if it hadn't been all the training I've done for so many years, I would have been gone.

• 12:30Tim Ferriss?

  And more specifically, you, correct me if I'm wrong, you didn't, and this strikes me as so odd, you didn't have the reflexive inhalation of water, is that right?

• 12:42Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, I didn't take any water into my lungs, which is hugely, you know, fortunate because fresh water in the lungs can be, can be terrible. So my lungs had no water in it, pretty much. After they pulled me out, I was unconscious for 25 minutes. I started breathing on my own though. And when I came to 25 minutes later, you know, I was blue everywhere else, my body sent all my, all the blood to my brain and my heart. Saved my life and I'm here. And it's been, it was a life changer on a lot of levels. You know, the idea of my four-year-old boy, four blocks away, sitting on the rug, waiting for daddy to come home. And me unconscious on the bottom of a pool, blue. Just, that's the kind of experience that is shattering.

• 13:20Tim Ferriss?

  How did that change how you think about training and these types of experiments or life in general? I know it's a very broad question, but.

• 13:28Josh Waitzkin?

  I've been, I've been.

• 13:30Tim Ferriss?

  How does it change your decision making?

• 13:32Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. Well, first of all, how it's influenced my life in general is I've never lived with such a consistent sense of gratitude, beauty and love in my, in my life. It's just flowing through my body. Presence to the exquisite little ripples of beauty in everything I do. And a sense of gratitude for the little things. It sounds cliched, but it's embodied and I really feel it. And in terms of, and that's a, that's a, something I'm really grateful for. It's exquisite. I have a, you know, my little boy, my wife is pregnant with, we have another, another son coming in June. And it's made me rethink these questions of risk.

• 14:14Josh Waitzkin?

  And, but on the other hand, it's been very important not to oversteer. I mean, one of the, the most important learning lessons that I've learned for myself and training elite mental performers is the, is people oversteer all the time. They overcalibrate. And so I've been very careful to sit with this and try to draw the right lessons out of it, not the wrong. And not too big a lesson and not too small a lesson. And so, for example, this was a huge technical oversight I had. I didn't realize I was taking a big risk here. I've had a lot of big risks that I've taken in life. Some with you. And, and I think I'm actually pretty good at navigating those. But I'm, but I've been thinking about them quite a bit.

• 14:52Tim Ferriss?

  Being cognizant of the level of danger or risk.

• 14:55Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. But of course, it's very important for me to be cognizant in a, like in a group risk, as we've discussed, it's important to be present to your own level and the level of everyone else around you. We can get into some of those.

• 15:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we'll get into that.

• 15:07Josh Waitzkin?

  But I've been really sitting with this. You know, since I was a really young boy, I started playing chess when I was six years old. And by the time I was seven, I was the top ranked player. So I had, in the country, so I had all this pressure on me. And a big part of the way that I found my therapy was flow. Can you explain that? Yeah, like when I was under huge pressure, external pressure as a little boy, you know, my style as a chess player was to create chaos. I loved the game, I loved the battle of chess. Attacking chess. Right, right, attacking chess. And, and most players, you know, when they have a lot of pressure on them in the scholastic chess world, for example, and it's true in many fields, they learn how to memorize their way to victory, right? They find shortcuts to getting good fast and controlling the game all the way.

• 15:51Josh Waitzkin?

  They're thinking about reading points, they're thinking about rankings, they're thinking about winning, they have parental pressures, they have, you know, school pressures, they have sometimes publicity pressures if they're doing well. So they want to control their way. I, I had a different approach. I like to mix it up. I like to, you know, I grew up playing in Washington Square Park with the hustlers who taught me to, to battle. It fit my personality. And it was, you know, a core part of my competitive style to create chaos and find hidden harmonies and find flow in chaos. And as I've reflected on this in recent years, a big part of how I've dealt with stresses has been to put myself into a flow state. And this is an element of risk that I've been, I've been thinking about. It's, it's different when you're 20 and 25 and 30 years old as a professional competitor

• 16:35Josh Waitzkin?

  or professional fighter. And then, you know, now I'm 39 years old, a dad, which is the most important thing I've ever done in my life, being a father, and I'm so committed to it. So I have to be quite cognizant of, of the distinction, for example, between, between risk competitively and risk mortally. When you're playing chess, it feels like life and death. It really does feel like life and death. When you lose a chess game, it feels like you've been shattered on the most fundamental level. And so I was quite comfortable mixing it up profoundly, creating chaos, and, and I'd be willing to take those risks. But actually, it isn't life and death, right? And then when you're a professional fighter, martial artist, you're, you know, you can

• 17:18Josh Waitzkin?

  break arms and legs in a second if you're, if you're not in deep focus, or you can break your neck. But again, the stakes are, it's you out there, right? And then when you're a dad, it's, it's a little bit different, right? And like when you're surfing, or when you're rock climbing, or whatever you're doing, it's an extreme state. So it's very important for me to be clear about the distinction between what felt like life and death as a chess player and what actually is life and death today. Metaphorical and literal. Right. And then there's the state of being...

• 17:48Josh Waitzkin?

  Someone who's found deep flow as the ultimate therapy.

• 17:53Tim Ferriss?

  How do you... There are a number of different questions I want to ask related to everything you just said. The first is, how do you initiate or facilitate a flow state? And how would you describe it? Maybe we could hit that first.

• 18:10Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, I've had a lot of different ways of playing this over the years. For me, so I mean, I can relate, I can describe it in terms of myself and I can then, we can go into how, when I train people, how I'd work with them.

• 18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 18:23Josh Waitzkin?

  For me, love has been a huge part of flow. You know, I fell in love with chess and I found flow in the self-expression of, through an art form that I absolutely loved. And I think this is really important with children, right? To find something that they feel just connected to and that they can express themselves through. They can bring out the essence of their being through some art. And then there was tremendous competitive intensity. And of course, stretching yourself to your limit is a huge part of, it's a very important precondition to flow. And I was always playing as people who were at my level or above. And so I was always stretched, right? And then I was integrating, in my teenage years, started integrating meditation into my practice, right?

• 19:04Josh Waitzkin?

  So I got very good at increasing my somatic awareness, my physiological introspective sensitivity. I began to feel the subtle ripples of quality in my process. I could feel when I moved from a nine or a 10 out of 10 down to, back down to a nine or an eight.

• 19:16Tim Ferriss?

  You're talking about in the meditation itself?

• 19:18Josh Waitzkin?

  No, I'm talking in, like, through my meditation practice.

• 19:21Tim Ferriss?

  You became more tactically sensitive when doing push hands or some other type of practice?

• 19:27Josh Waitzkin?

  Chess initially.

• 19:28Tim Ferriss?

  Chess initially.

• 19:28Josh Waitzkin?

  And then into push hands, right.

• 19:30Tim Ferriss?

  Why is the tactile component important in chess?

• 19:36Josh Waitzkin?

  I think it's hugely important in mental disciplines. So for example, you know, in chess and today, a lot of what I do today is, I have this laboratory of training elite mental performers largely in finance, investors. And a huge part of the training is in their physiological introspective sensitivity. That's the, their somatic awareness, that's the foundational training. Why?

• 20:00Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, first of all, you know, we can't just separate our mind and our body.

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  Totally. The Cartesian duality makes...

• 20:07Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. I mean, this is your way of life as well.

• 20:11Josh Waitzkin?

  But we intuitively can feel things way before we are consciously aware of them. The chess player always senses danger before he sees it. Just like, you know, the hunter will sense the shark or the jaguar before he'll see it. Right? Then he'll look for it. So the chess player's processes often to be studying a position to sense opportunity or danger, and then to start looking for it, right? Deconstruct what it is, and then find what it probably is, and then start calculating. Right? But that sense comes before. Or if you're a great decision-maker, or if you're an investor, you can sense danger, right? You can sense opportunity. But you need to have still your waters internally to feel the subtle changes inside of you that would be opportunity, or the crystallization of complex ideas.

• 20:54Josh Waitzkin?

  Or danger, or the onset of a cognitive bias, for example, which is hugely important as a chess player, or as an investor, or as anything else.

• 21:02Josh Waitzkin?

  You know, this is one of the areas where I... We've had this ongoing dialogue in our friendship around what I call armchair professors, right?

• 21:09Tim Ferriss?

  Philosophologists.

• 21:10Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, philosophologists, yes. So the people... This is a... Philosophologist is a term of Robert Persig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is one of my favorite books and thinkers. He's a friend of mine.

• 21:23Josh Waitzkin?

  You know, the difference between the philosopher and the philosopherologist is what Tim's referring to. Or the writer and the literary critic. Or the man in the arena and the armchair professor.

• 21:33Tim Ferriss?

  Or Remy from Ratatouille and Anton Ego.

• 21:36Josh Waitzkin?

  Okay, I don't know that one.

• 21:37Tim Ferriss?

  He's the food critic.

• 21:38Josh Waitzkin?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, there it is. Good. Yes, there it is. And so when we think about, for example, cognitive biases, the people... The academics who study cognitive biases, who speak about them.

• 21:49Tim Ferriss?

  And just for people who have no context on cognitive biases, an example, like the sunk-cost fallacy. Right? "I've spent this amount, therefore I should put good money after bad because I feel like I've... I need to somehow try to salvage this money that I've put into a given position."

• 22:04Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  I just wanted to give people some examples. And who... We've had a number of meals with them. There's a gent with "Think Twice"... What was the author's name again? Do you recall? Mobusun?

• 22:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, Michael Mobusun is who you're thinking about.

• 22:16Tim Ferriss?

  Mobusun, there we are. For people interested. Sorry to interrupt.

• 22:19Josh Waitzkin?

  Yep.

• 22:24Josh Waitzkin?

  And so, one of the interesting things about the dialogue, the academic dialogue of cognitive biases is that there's the idea that the biases have to operate completely separately from the intuitive process, right? As if we have an intuitive process and then we have to go through a checklist of cognitive biases. In my experience, really high-level thinkers have integrated cognitive biases, or an awareness of cognitive biases, into their intuitive process, right? So this is a constant process, we discussed this, we discussed this a couple of years ago, actually.

• 22:54Josh Waitzkin?

  Where you're deconstructing technical awareness into something that... So this process, for example, of building a pyramid of knowledge, we have a certain technical foundation, we have a high-level intuitive leap. We can then deconstruct the intuitive leap into something that we can understand technically and replicate technically, and then we're raising our foundation to have higher and higher-level intuitive leaps, right? This is this pyramid of knowledge, which in my process is built upon by... The intuitive leaps are what's guiding it. Similarly, we can learn how to take technical material and integrate it into our intuitive understanding. But we aren't going to intuit the cognitive bias, we're going to intuit the feeling that... That corresponds. That corresponds with a bias being present. And so we think about this relative to the language, again, Robert Persig.

• 23:37Josh Waitzkin?

  I like the language of dynamic versus static quality, right? When you're... If you think about the timeline in a competitive state, for example, in a chess game, there's a certain objective truth to a chess position. If you think of that as a timeline which is moving, which is moving. Think about Persig's term of being at the front of the freight train of reality, right? Freight train is pushing through, dynamic quality is right at the front of that freight train, right? Think about that as a timeline. And then there's the chess, the chess player's mind studying the position. When the chess player is present to the position, it's continuing, right? You're just running parallel to the truth of the position, to the dynamic quality of the position. But if, let's say if something changes, you make a slight mistake, you move from having a slight advantage to a slight disadvantage. But you're emotionally still connected, attached to having the slight advantage.

• 24:22Josh Waitzkin?

  Then what's gonna happen is that you're sort of stopping. Your dynamic quality is becoming static. But the timeline of the chess position is continuing, the game's continuing. But what's gonna happen then is that you're gonna subtly reject positions that you should accept, and you're gonna stretch for positions that you can't, for evaluations that you can't really reach, and you're going to fall into a downward spiral. So that's the onset of a cognitive bias. In that case, the cognitive bias would relate to the emotional clinging to a past evaluation.

• 24:47Tim Ferriss?

  But if you had the present state awareness, which you had trained through different tools and approaches that you use with these elite performers, for instance, you would sense the feeling of that cognitive dissonance and not get caught up in sort of the slipstream of that dislocation.

• 25:03Josh Waitzkin?

  Exactly, and the way that you would sense that, in this case, is that you would feel the slip away from dynamic quality, right? And so, and then you would deconstruct that feeling, and then you would see what the bias is that's setting in. So this is really important to say, right? It's not that we're gonna intuitively develop the ability to know exactly what bias might be setting in in the moment, but we're gonna cultivate the ability to have presence, right? I think about the idea of cultivating quality as a way of life, cultivating presence as a way of life, in little moments and small, when we're holding our babies, when we're reading a book, when we're having a conversation with a friend, when we're meditating.

• 25:36Tim Ferriss?

  How do you help people to identify what, that feeling, to become more sensitized to it? And just as a, maybe, not a counter example, but an example of not listening to intuition or instinct. So we were both in Costa Rica recently doing paddle boarding.

• 25:54Josh Waitzkin?

  Great story.

• 25:55Tim Ferriss?

  Last meal of the trip, we go out to celebrate, we go to this seafood restaurant, food comes out, it's a sundae, and I leaned over the plate and smelled the food, and immediately...

• 26:09Tim Ferriss?

  Knew that it was something I shouldn't eat. And despite that, you know, everybody's ordering drinks, everybody's celebrating, went into the food and about a third of the way through, I stopped and I just pushed the plate away and then low and behold, everybody gets severe, severe food poisoning. Except for the two people who I guess we tried to narrow it down to whether it was the garlic dip or any number of other things, but yeah, we were, we were on the toilet each like every five minutes for, for the next 12 hours minimum.

• 26:39Josh Waitzkin?

  And the great part of it is you and I were, we were adjoining bedrooms, we were sharing the same toilet. So that was a hell of a night.

• 26:44Tim Ferriss?

  And we never saw each other.

• 26:45Josh Waitzkin?

  It was amazing, but I heard that flushing happening, taking turns. That was, that was a brutal experience. I remember the, watching you sniffing, you had this like expression of concern come over to the dinner table and like I saw that moment, maybe I wasn't present enough to you and you didn't, it's a great example of you, you didn't fully trust your gut. You were right on, it was amazing.

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or, or I felt a sort of social pressure to conform and not rock the boat. So how do you help someone say in the world of investing, just as an example, develop, not only develop the sensitivity to, to, to separate that signal from the noise, but also to actually listen to it, right?

• 27:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. These are, these are two, two different points, right?

• 27:31Tim Ferriss?

  So, right.

• 27:32Josh Waitzkin?

  So let's talk about developing it and then let's talk about listening to it, right? Because they're both so hugely important. And I'd frame them both thematically in, in different ways. And I'd build training systems around them both that would be quite different. So when we're thinking about, about cultivating the, the awareness, I mean, I think that a lot of this relates to a return to a more natural state, right? The, this isn't so much about learning as unlearning.

• 28:01Tim Ferriss?

  Agreed.

• 28:02Josh Waitzkin?

  Getting out of our own way, releasing obstructions. I think about the training process as the movement toward unobstructed self-expression, right? Obstructedness. We have so many habits that are fundamentally blocking us, right? From the phone addictions. People are constantly distracted. People don't have the ability to sit in empty space anymore. People are bombarded by inputs all the time. They're in a constantly reactive state. So one way that you could frame this out is the study is cultivating a way of life which is fundamentally proactive, right? In little things and big. And you can build day architectures that are fundamentally proactive. But then getting into the, the weeds a little bit more, I think it's

• 28:38Josh Waitzkin?

  Most foundational to develop a mindfulness practice, to cultivate the ability to sense the most subtle ripples of human experience. Now, I've been trying to onboard people in, specifically in the finance space, for example, into meditation for a bit over eight years now. Initially, I would just try to get guys to meditate. They'd look at me like I was crazy. Then what I realized, I had this breakthrough, which was that if I had them start doing stress and recovery interval training, then when, so oscillating heart rate between 170s and 140s, say, so let's say someone does a six or eight or 10 minute warm-up and then they're on a heart rate interval doing some kind of cardio bike or whatever, moving their heart rate up and down between 170s, 140s, when they become aware of the quality of their

• 29:19Josh Waitzkin?

  focus on their breath during the recovery intervals, enhancing their ability to lower their heart rate more quickly. And they start to feel their heart rate, listen to it. When that awareness would kick in, I'd layer in meditation. And the on-ramp was just much more successful. People would just, and then what I started to refine that with is biofeedback. So now what I'll do is I'll have them do the stress and recovery interval training, then I'll have them do some form of biofeedback, often with, for example, heart rate variability through heart math or working with a specialist. And then when they begin to have a certain kind of consistency of their ability to observe, to enhance their emotional regulation, to observe these subtle ripples between stress and coherence, and you can see their biometric data, then you layer in meditation and then

• 30:04Josh Waitzkin?

  the on-ramp is even more powerful. And so then they layer in a meditation practice. I think Headspace is a wonderful tool for layering in meditation.

• 30:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I think for a lot of people also, starting with Headspace before bed is another kind of gateway drug approach to then building into, or leading into, the morning meditation, which a lot of people have trouble with because they wake up, they feel rushed. It's another thing to layer in on top of the brushing of the teeth, the getting the kids ready, et cetera, and so sometimes the evening approach. But I agree that Headspace is really useful.

• 30:36Josh Waitzkin?

  And I think it's really important, I think you're absolutely right there. And I think it's really important to have a core meditation practice, which is, at least in the beginning, in the conditions in your life that are most conducive to deep focus and to not being distracted. Later in life, we want to be able to tap our meditation under complete, you know, in chaos. But we want to cultivate it initially in the most peaceful time possible. So if you have kids, waking up before the kids are up, or in the evening, once they're asleep. Or if you don't have kids, then life is much simpler.

• 31:08Tim Ferriss?

  Or during your commute. I've found a lot of people who will just like throw on Headspace or some song that they meditate to, and they know they have 20 minutes on the subway. And it's like, alright, that's my 20 minutes.

• 31:20Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, yeah. I enjoy meditating on the commute a lot personally. You've been meditating for a long time. I mean, I'm not sure how you feel about this. I find that if people can have the first two, three months of meditation practice in a quiet room, then if they start doing it in their commute, it's a much, they've sort of built the foundation of it in this really quiet space.

• 31:41Tim Ferriss?

  I think that, from what I can tell, it appears to depend a lot on what type of concentrator you are. And what I mean by that is, if you look at writers, for instance, there are some writers who want to be in a quiet environment in order to hear whatever the muse is whispering. And they'll go to a library, they'll go to someplace like that. I can't do that, for whatever reason. I thrive in noisy environments. Because if I have the noise, I feel like it forces me to focus inward. So for me, studying languages even, in a loud environment, writing in a loud environment, for whatever reason, is a forcing function for me.

• 32:23Tim Ferriss?

  But I can definitely see why, for even perhaps a majority of people, it would be, I think it's partially due to the fact that, for instance, I'm looking at your wall right now, and the fact that that picture is tilted like five degrees to the right is making me totally bonkers.

• 32:39Josh Waitzkin?

  You think we should fix, should we fix it?

• 32:41Tim Ferriss?

  This is training for me. Look at that. The rest of the time we're talking. But the The same is true auditorily. So if I have a controlled noise like music or the chukka chukka chukka of the of the car in the subway, I can focus on that repetitive noise. But if I'm sitting in a space that I want to be quiet and I have that controlling aspect of my personality trying to impose itself on something I can't control. And then there's like somebody hitting reverse in a truck and I can hear that outside, it will drive me nuts. Long observation to a short comment, but I do think that if you

• 33:24Tim Ferriss?

  can drop in in a quiet environment, the point being, as you said, I think to stack the deck in the beginning.

• 33:31Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Tim Ferriss?

  Like learn how to do this in a controlled, unstressful environment. And then you can ratchet up over time to when you can use it in the most stressful of environments.

• 33:43Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. Because we don't ultimately want to be meditating in a flower garden. We want to be able to meditate and have a meditative state throughout our life in a hurricane, in a thunderstorm, you know, and when sharks are attacking you any moment. Because that's

• 33:57Tim Ferriss?

  Your paddle boarding. When you're paddle boarding the last day on a first trip and Josh is like, you'll be fine. And then three leashes snap and all hell breaks loose.

• 34:10Josh Waitzkin?

  That's a long story.

• 34:11Tim Ferriss?

  Killer set comes in.

• 34:13Josh Waitzkin?

  So that's just a little context here. Timbo and I have been on this great adventure, stand up paddle surfing, taking it on together. And we found this, we got a great friend down in Costa Rica, Eric Antonson, who actually has the other podcast other than you where they listen to in life, the Paddlewuk Podcast.

• 34:28Tim Ferriss?

  Paddlewuk, yeah.

• 34:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Paddlewuk. Eric's awesome. He's a great dude. He runs the Blue Zone Sup. He's a brilliant teacher, really fascinating mind, deconstructing stand up paddle surfing on increasingly small boards for us. And we've been going out there and we've had some hilarious close calls. Our last trip a couple of weeks ago, we almost We almost destroyed each other.

• 34:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there was this one witching hour where the juju is really weird. Almost everybody either got decapitated, impaled by a board, or just head-on jousting collision, which is what.

• 35:00Josh Waitzkin?

  But the point that you bring up, I think, is right on about meditation. When you're building training programs for elite mental performers, the most important thing is to understand them so deeply and build programs that are unique to their funk, embrace their funk. That's a term my buddy Graham, who's a dear friend of ours, who comes on our surf adventures with us, he's a brilliant thought partner.

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  Embrace the funk, could you explain that?

• 35:25Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, we have to embrace our funk. We have to figure out what... You think about the entanglement of genius and madness, or brilliance and eccentricity. Understanding that entanglement is always a precursor to working with anybody who's trying to be world-class at something, because that entanglement is fundamental to their being. And they have to ultimately embrace their funk, embrace their eccentricity, embrace what makes them different.

• 35:51Josh Waitzkin?

  And then build on it, right? And so we think about self-expression, it's not trying to take everyone and put them into the same mold, it's trying to understand someone very deeply and build a training program, a way of life, that helps them bring out the essence of their being through their art, whatever their art is. And that's how I relate to the path to excellence in chess, in martial arts, in different arts, very actively in investing space when I work in education with children through my nonprofit. It's, again, the movement to unobstructed self-expression, but the problem is the teachers don't listen, they don't know how to listen. They don't know how to sit, or parents, to sit in empty space and observe the nuance of their child's mind or their student's mind, and then build a way of life around that. People are used to teaching the way they learned.

• 36:36Josh Waitzkin?

  Think about martial arts instructors, almost all of them trained as a certain way, and then teach that way, which alienates 65, 70% of the students by definition. It's very rare that you have someone who can take the time to, and it takes a lot of time to know someone deeply enough to build a training program and a way of life around who they are. I mean, for me, and what I only work with, with eight teams and I, I don't take on new clients. Very seldom do I take on new clients. I won't work with more than eight people.

• 37:03Tim Ferriss?

  You also don't do a lot of PR for everybody listening. I always get these emails and texts like, "Hey, could you introduce me to Joshua on my show?" And I'm like, "He's not, he's not gonna do it."

• 37:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Tim, you're the only person, once a year or two, you're the one guy who brings me out of my hermetic cave. I live a bit of a strange life because I'm not on, uh, strange, doesn't feel strange to me. It feels completely natural, but I'm not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of these things. I don't even know the names of most of them. I have an email account, though. I do have that.

• 37:33Tim Ferriss?

  Box.

• 37:35Josh Waitzkin?

  Great. I cultivate empty space as a way of life for, for the creative process. So Timbo, you're the one guy who brings me out of the cave and we have a lot of fun together.

• 37:46Tim Ferriss?

  So you were talking about these top performers and getting to know them on a very deep, subtle level so that you can help them express, say, the combination of their madness and genius, or at least embrace it, among other things. How do you think about parenting?

• 38:04Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, let's dig into this one. All right. So, and then let's remember to loop back after this to finish our, this discussion of, first of all, we were talking about how to cultivate the somatic awareness.

• 38:15Tim Ferriss?

  And then how to listen.

• 38:16Josh Waitzkin?

  And then how to listen to it. So let's go back to how to train to listen to it. Okay, parenting, Jack. Well, Jack's the love of my life. I mean, this kid is such an awesome dude. And I, parenting has, um, has been the most fantastic learning experience I've ever gone through. So from when he was born, I...

• 38:36Josh Waitzkin?

  I tried very hard not to go in with a lot of preconceived ideas and to be attuned to him, to listen to him. From when he was just days, weeks old, he was teaching me. You know, you talk about teaching presence. Our eyes would be connected and if I would think about something else, his eyes would pull me back. If there was any distraction that set in, he would pull me back. And as he got a little older, he would just take your face and pull it back, in the sweetest way. And so the depth of connection, you know, being deeply attuned to a young spirit that hasn't become blocked, that is in that state of unobstructed self-expression, that is just this unbelievably game learner, unblocked

• 39:17Josh Waitzkin?

  learner. And Jack is the gameest little person I've ever known in my life. And so, but of course, I have been thinking about learning and education for a lot of years. And so I had some thoughts. And so, for example, I think that control is, the need for control is something that inhibits people in life. The need to have external conditions be just so, in order for them to be able to, Timbo's pointing at my grandmother's painting. That was my grandma's painting. It's a beauty, right? It's great. Stella, Stella Waitzkin. That's her self-portrait. Okay, we're gonna leave it messed up. We're working on control. So like, from a young age for me, when I started playing chess, I would create chaos on the board like I described.

• 39:59Josh Waitzkin?

  And then I would play in chess shops with people blowing smoke and playing music. And I'd play chess with like loud Gyutou monk chants bursting into, you know, in my head from speakers. I would, when I play cards, I would never, playing Gin Rummy, I'd always keep the melds out of order. Say that again. When I would play cards. Cards, like a damn cards. Cards, a card game. Playing like Gin Rummy, a card game. I would never organize my hand. I'd always keep it. Did you say meld? Yeah, like if you have like three sevens. Ah, okay. Right, or like, Jack, queen, queen of hearts, or whatever. I would keep everything out of order, so I'd have to reorganize it in my mind. I'd keep my room messy. Oh, you wouldn't gather your, I see. You wouldn't, you wouldn't move your cards around to organized. Right. I was creating chaos everywhere to train at being able to be at peace in

• 40:44Josh Waitzkin?

  chaos and organize things. And that was kind of part of my way of life. And I found it to be a huge advantage that I had competitively. And so, one thing, one of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack's life, or year or two of Jack's life, that I observed with parents, is that they do, have this language around weather, weather being good or bad. And whenever the weather, whenever it was raining, they'd be like, it's bad weather. You'd hear, you know, moms, babysitters, dads talk about, it's bad weather, we can't go out, or it's good weather, we can go out. And so that means that somehow we're externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So Jack and I never missed a single storm. Every rainstorm, I don't think we, I don't think we've missed one storm, other than maybe one when he was sick. But we, I don't think we've, I don't think we've missed a single storm, rain or snow, going outside and romping in it.

• 41:29Josh Waitzkin?

  And we've developed this language around how beautiful it was. And so when now, whenever there's a rainy day, Jack says, look, Dad, Dad, it's such a beautiful rainy day, and we go out and we play in it. And, you know, I wanted him to have this internal locus of control, right? To not be reliant on external conditions being just so. And then that kind of has, and now he's four, he's getting older, so we've been playing with these things. We began meditating together when he was a little over a year, just doing breath work. Initially, we started doing meditation work when he was in that kind of most pure states, when he'd be taking a warm bath and he was lying on his back and being completely relaxed, blissed out, we would just naturally breathe together. I wanted the habit to be formed in something that was, the initial experience to be in

• 42:11Josh Waitzkin?

  conditions that were most conducive to just natural peace. And then, we have, in recent months, been taking it to an interesting funky place. So, so he would, was watching me do the Wim Hof training, and I'd be putting my hands in ice buckets and doing this interesting breath work through cold water. And he would initially watch, and he'd come over, stick his finger in, put his hand in. So there's this great moment, a couple months ago, we were out romping in this huge snowstorm, and Jack, about 10 minutes into it, we'd just gone on this long search for the right carrot to put on, to make the snowman with. Oh, for the nose. The nose. We found it. And then Jack got, he was in this huge drift, and he got his boots just loaded up with snow, and he looked at me and he said, Dad, Dad, my, my feet are cold, they're filled, my boots are filled with snow, but that's okay, I'll just do the Wim Hof and make them warm.

• 42:56Josh Waitzkin?

  And we looked at him and then he, for an hour and a half, we played after that, feet just covered with snow and he was completely fine, never mentioned it again. And then he got increasingly interested in, in this internal terrain. And we would take hot baths together, we'd take a bath together every night. And then he would want to turn on the cold shower and get in it. And he, we'd play what we called the it's so good game. And so we kind of reframe this thing, you know, I have this, you know, people tend to bounce off of discomfort, whether it's mental or physical. And so they run up, whether, if they run into internal resistance, whether it's a meditation training, or someone exposing a weakness, or if they're training and someone might be better than them, whatever, whatever it is, they bounce away from things that might expose them. They're repelled from it. Right, right.

• 43:36Josh Waitzkin?

  And, but, you know, the flip side of this is to learn, the way I, you, I talk about living on the other side of pain, pain being like mental or physical discomfort, right? And much of life that's so rich comes from, on the other side of it. The other side of challenge, internal or external challenge. And with Jack, of course, I'm not using that, like, but it's a little child's embodiment of it. We, we started to play with turning on the cold water and he would say, it's so good, dad. And we'd kind of be in the hot bath and play in the cold and he would say, it's so good, it's so good. And he began to have this gorgeous blissful smile, meditating through it. He would, and we'd, you know, he would say, I'm meditating through it, it's so good.

• 44:17Josh Waitzkin?

  And we were reframing cold, cold was, is a metaphor, from something that is just you bounce away from, to something that you can learn to sit with, to be neutral in, to find pleasure in. Just like the weather. Just like the weather. And then we had this experience the other day where he said to me, um, you know, dad, will you tickle me slowly? And I always tickle him, he laughs uproariously, but we were lying in bed and I was tickling him very slowly. And he was, he said, I'm gonna do my meditation. He would meditate. And then he said to me, then the next day, he said, dad, will you tickle me slowly? And I did it. And then he said, can you tickle me a little bit faster? And, and I didn't suggest this to him, he suggested it to me. And then we played this game where we would say one to 10. And I would tickle him slowly and he'd start doing his meditation. And we'd move it from one to, and we'd go up to, he'd like be doing his meditation. And finally, I'd be full tilt tickling him.

• 45:00Josh Waitzkin?

  He'd normally be in hysterics and he was just sitting there, meditating. And not laughing. And he found this so interesting. And he's now guiding the process in this beautiful way. And now we're turning it to talking about, you know.

• 45:12Tim Ferriss?

  Question, just to interject. Did you at any point condition him to be proactive in that way? Or was it just an organic? Now I'm in the driver's seat.

• 45:22Josh Waitzkin?

  I think I encourage him to grab the wheel all the time. I mean, a huge part of my relationship to parenting, and this is from my mom. And I watched my mom with Jack. And I think this is maybe the greatest gift that my mom gave me is having a sense of agency in the world. You know, the idea that, you know, that having a sense that I can impact the world. Right? And that my, that my compass really matters. Right? So when I grew up, I was, I wasn't, you know, seen but not heard. I was from, when I was five and six years old, they were having adult conversations with friends and I was, I was part of it. They wanted to hear my ideas. And I felt that they mattered. And that's a big part of how I believe in, and my wife and I believe in raising Jack. And so.

• 46:01Josh Waitzkin?

  He, he, um. He plays a really active role in everything that we do. And so it was sort of a natural thing. And it was all fun and play. I wasn't pushing any of these things on him at all. This is stuff that he wanted to do. But then him naturally, I've been, I've been kind of blown away by how he's been transferring this stuff over. I mean, lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it over to another. I think is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate or ways of being. And it's something that Jack and I have from a really young age. We began to cultivate this from when he was really small around this principle of go around. We, we would, we would initially, it was like, the first thing at the time it happened is that he was trying, he was really tiny. He was trying to get in. We were in a little cottage.

• 46:46Josh Waitzkin?

  Single little cottage in a, in, um, on Martha's Vineyard. Tiny little cottage in a big field. And he was trying to get in one door and he couldn't, but he could get in the other door. And I said, Jack, go around. And he looked at me and then he went around. And then go around became a language for us physically. If you can't go one way, you go around to another way. But then it became a language for us in terms of solving puzzles and in terms of any way, time you were running an obstacle, go around. And then working with the metaphor of go around opened up this way that we would just have dialogue around. Connecting things, right? Taking away of a principle from one thing and applying it to something else. And we've had a lot of fun with that. And so it's fascinating to see this game little dude. If you have this thematic dialogue, principle-driven dialogue, and we're cultivating somatic awareness,

• 47:29Josh Waitzkin?

  cultivating the ability to feel these little ripples inside. I mean, Jack's telling me his dreams in this beautiful way. He tells me, you know, how his emotions feel in his body. It's a great journey. I'm learning so much from him. There's a book you've mentioned to me a number of times, or at the very least, a researcher, and I'm probably gonna massacre this name as well. Is it Carol Dweck? Getting that right? Mindset? Yeah, Carol Dweck, mindset, yeah. Yeah, fixed entity theories of intelligence versus incremental or growth mindset. Yeah, Carol Dweck's one of the most important foundational developmental psychologists, I think, around this distinction of a fixed perspective on how good somebody is.

• 48:13Josh Waitzkin?

  You know, let's frame it like this. Most children, unfortunately, are educated to believe that they have a certain ingrained level of ability in things. You are smart, you are dumb, you are average. Right. And they're told, and the sad thing is that even when they're praised, they're told how smart they are, right? Or you're such a good writer, right? You're so good at math. And the kids will say, "I'm smart at this," or "I'm dumb at that," right? And so, but if you're very smart at one thing, then that means that if you fail, then you must be dumb at it. And so it becomes very static, right? And the kids are often quite brittle when they have a fixed mindset, right? Or entity theory of intelligence. Well, a growth mindset, or a mastery-oriented mindset, is one where we understand that

• 48:57Josh Waitzkin?

  the path to mastery involves incremental growth, right? We don't have an ingrained level of ability at something. We're going to have successes and failures. We're gonna work at things. And it's work, it's practice, and it's an open-mindedness to life's experiences that makes us succeed. How would the praise differ? You would praise a kid for the process versus the outcome. And so you would say, "I'm so proud of how hard you worked at your math." Not, "You're so smart at math." Right? Or if someone has a failure, the other side of it is not to say that, "Don't worry about it, you're just not good at math, you'd do something else." It's to say, "Well, how can we practice this to get better?" And so, we're focusing on the process and not the outcome.

• 49:42Josh Waitzkin?

  That's like the fundamental principle. And it's so easy to say it, but it's very hard for people to live it as parents, especially if they don't embody it themselves. What you see often with kids and parents is that the the parents are fundamentally fixed. They have an entity theory of intelligence themselves. They're fixed, they're stuck. But they've read the material of Carol Dweck or somebody else, and they want to parent their kids around a growth mindset. But the kids see what they embody, not what they say. So we have to embody it. I mean, one of the most important things that we do with, I think that we do with my foundation, and our work with schools, with programs around the world, is that we, when we're working with teachers, it's not just, "This is the material you should teach your students."

• 50:24Josh Waitzkin?

  It's working with these core principles and embodying it themselves first. And then, through that embodied intelligence, working with the kids on how they can embody it. We have to walk the talk.

• 50:35Tim Ferriss?

  So let's go back to what you said we should go back to at some point, which is somatic sensitivity. Those sort of dimples of light in the darkness that most people overlook. How do you train that?

• 50:50Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, thematically, the first thing I would say is that we need to think about cultivating an internal locus of control, or an internal orientation versus an external one. Right? So as an artist or performer, we have all these external pressures on us. Let's say, for example, again, let's talk about investors again. Let's just say an investor is running a $1 billion investment vehicle. And they have partners, they have people who invest in that, right? And they have to write investment letters. They have all the partners, say they have 30 or 40 or 50 partners, who are institutions, maybe endowments, educational endowments, charities, whatever, who have put their money into this investment vehicle. And maybe that person has his own money as well, or her own money in this investment vehicle. Well, for them to be successful, they have to operate from the inside out.

• 51:35Josh Waitzkin?

  They have to bring out the essence of who they are. As a performer, like we're discussing, or as a human being, to bring that out through their art. But if they are constantly feeling pressured... By what others expect from them, what others want from them, how they'll be perceived, right? Or, you know, how people are looking at their Facebook post, or how their tweet is being responded to, right? It's tweet, that's what it is. That's right. See? I mean, it's so interesting for me, like, watching people watch their Instagram accounts, right? I see it with buddies with all the time. It's natural, it's completely human. But, but then we're, we're aware of how we're perceived, right? One of the major ways, reasons that I stay away from these things is because I can feel how susceptible I am to this stuff, right?

• 52:18Josh Waitzkin?

  You publish a book and it's on Amazon, it's so hard not to go look at the Amazon numbers, right? And then a book comes out and you're tracking them, even if you know it's ridiculous and you shouldn't be doing it. Now, now, someone like you, you're such a world-class, um, and you've so systematically trained at and cultivated the ability to market these things, this is actually a very important scientific input for you. It's not for most authors. Most authors is an addiction, right? So that's a completely different point, in my opinion. You're actually gathering data and using it. Most people are just, just constantly feeling, um... Tapping the vein. Right, tapping the vein. So with investors, what this often relates to is P and L checking, profit and loss checking. Oh, I'm sure. Right? So most investors check P and L hundreds of times a day. In fact, it's constantly, because it's on their screen all the time.

• 53:00Josh Waitzkin?

  And so they're having these, like, little adrenal hits all the time, right? Whether it's dopamine or cortisol, whether they're making money or losing money, they're constantly bouncing off of these things. That's the, the ultimate external, external orientation, right? So if you think about, about internal plus proactive versus external plus reactive, this is how I would tend to frame this out. We want to build a proactive way of life that's, that's, that's fundamentally moved from the inside out, versus a reactive way of life, where we're constantly reacting to all of these inputs which we may or may not want. And where we're constantly beleaguered by, or oppressed by a sense of, of how we're going to be perceived, social pressures, right? And so then you're talking about a really high-level artist who might have a really

• 53:45Josh Waitzkin?

  subtle intuition about something, um, and they should listen to that intuition, or they should, should at least deconstruct that intuition and investigate it, and, and see if it's the right way to go. But they're aware that that intuition might not be perceived as impressive by others. The problem is that the others usually aren't world-class artists, they're the art professor's, they're the philosopher's. And so you have the man in the arena who's compromised by a sense of self-consciousness. Of what the critics are going, how the critics are going to perceive him or her. Which is ridiculous, because it's like an A player thinking about the approval of a C player. And that's disastrous, that's external orientation, that's like looking at, you know, I mean,

• 54:29Josh Waitzkin?

  thinking that we have, we're gonna get food poisoning from something, that something's off, and then dismissing it because of, I mean, first of all, there's the incredibly subtle sense, is how strong the intuition is, right? I mean, no one else at that table there, and we had some pretty high-level dudes sitting at that table, had that feeling, that we were about to eat something that had food poisoning, right? So it was very subtle, you had a very subtle sense, it wasn't banging you over the head, right? And then, there's the feeling of the social pressures and everything, right? It's a very interesting subtle example.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, but the subtle pressures were louder in that case than like the really subtle intuition that you had. And then there's having the attitude of, I don't care about the social pressures. But that's really hard, right?

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Which I was able to do a third of the way through.

• 55:14Josh Waitzkin?

  Which you did.

• 55:14Tim Ferriss?

  But not before.

• 55:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. I think you're actually really, you know, in my observation, you're really evolved with this, I mean, I mean, I, I, I mean, you have so much external pressure and external awareness on you. I consistently find it stunning and impressive how you're able to embrace your funk, how to live a life that is attuned to your kind of inner ripples. I mean, I think it's actually rather unique, I think it's a core strength of yours, in my opinion.

• 55:45Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, man. I think that one element that's been very helpful in trying to mitigate the risks and dangers in that, in the paradox of trying to be introspective while having a very public-facing life, is stoicism. And, and I remember reading at one point, I want to say it was Cato, who is considered by his contemporaries and his successors in sort of stoic thought leadership to be the perfect stoic in a lot of respects. And I'm gonna get the colors wrong here, but he would deliberately wear, I think it was

• 56:28Tim Ferriss?

  a blue tunic as opposed to a purple tunic.

• 56:33Tim Ferriss?

  To encourage people to ridicule him because he wanted to be embarrassed about only those things worth being embarrassed about. So training himself not to be overly sensitized to the critiques of the C players around him. And so I constantly, I remember for instance, this is such a silly example, but I was just in Montana and I went into the ski shop to get some, some, some light gloves, just for walking around, not for skiing. And I looked at the whole rack and I'm like, ooh, I like these. And they were like the most ridiculous Dr. Seuss, like striped nonsense gloves you've ever seen, just like, they will not match with anything, just ludicrous looking. And I asked the woman at the front desk, I'm like, what do you think of these?

• 57:18Tim Ferriss?

  Or should I get a different one? She's like, nah, I think you should get the black ones. And I thought about it. Like I sat there, I thought about it, I was like, nope, I'm getting the Dr. Seuss gloves. And so I got the Dr. Seuss gloves. And that expresses itself for me in a lot of different places because I will, for instance, do, and this is not something I recommend to everybody, so caveat emptor, you can't be, you know, you're in control of your own life. So if you, if you do this, you can face some dire consequences. But I'll do drunk Q and As on Facebook and I'll have a bunch of booze and I'll go on and I'll do a Q and A. Something will come out that will embarrass me, but it's not going to be life destroying.

• 57:57Tim Ferriss?

  And so systematically create an environment in which I feel like I don't have a reputation to protect, which is another reason why I talk about, you know, the psychedelics. And I'll talk very openly about, you know, monogamy versus non-monogamy. And I'll throw all these things out there to ensure, A, that I never become a politician and B, that I don't feel like I have a fixed identity to cling to that I need to protect because I see how disastrous that can be.

• 58:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, that's really, that's really powerful. And you know, the fire of competition plays that role as well. I mean, you look at people who compete, let's talk about martial artists. So, so I own a Brazilian Jewish school with Marcelo Garcia, we've discussed Marcelo a lot.

• 58:42Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And you just as I mentioned. Creating chaos and training yourself to operate optimally in chaos compared to others. And of course Marcelo, who's what, 10 time, 9 time?

• 58:54Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, 9 time.

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  World champion is the master of scramble.

• 58:58Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, they call him the king of the scramble, right.

• 59:00Tim Ferriss?

  The king of the scramble.

• 59:00Josh Waitzkin?

  I mean, he's the greatest transitional player in the history of sport, maybe. He's incredible. I mean, the essence of his game is to not hold, to allow people to move, and to, again, embrace the chaos and get there first. He just has cultivated the transition so systematically that he has 10 frames in a transition where somebody else will just be moving from one position to the next. That transition itself is something which is like, that's his ocean. It's a beautiful thing to see. But if you look at the school, Marcelo runs the school so beautifully. And we've got, at this point, a lot of world-class competitors. A lot of the schools tend to win pretty much all the tournaments. A lot of the guys who you've trained with.

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  With the Tim Perez experiment.

• 59:41Josh Waitzkin?

  That was hilarious.

• 59:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my god.

• 59:42Josh Waitzkin?

  That was awesome.

• 59:42Tim Ferriss?

  Day one, I'm like, okay, I think I broke my rib.

• 59:48Josh Waitzkin?

  You did great, man. You did great. I was proud of you. Yeah, guys, you should check that out. That was pretty, pretty.

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  The TV show. If you want to see me, get my ass handed to me. And have a great time training with guys like John Stavva, who's an incredible athlete and teacher.

• 1:00:03Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, John is fantastic.

• 1:00:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's a TV show worth checking out, but not to drop.

• 1:00:06Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, if you look at the learning curve of the people in the school, the ones who put themselves on the line as a way of life just learn much faster than the ones who are protecting their egos, right? Most schools, what happens is someone gets good, and then they have to win to protect their status as being very good or dominant. Usually happens with martial arts instructors, which is that they reach a certain level, they open a school, they get a little bit older, you know, they get a little fatter. They have a reputation, so they stop training because they don't want to be exposed by the young students who are coming up, and they, you know, sit on the sideline. But their egos get increasingly large.

• 1:00:43Josh Waitzkin?

  But riddled with insecurity and this brittleness tends to then splay down to the students and the whole school becomes a joke, right? Versus, you know, Marcelo, the way Marcelo runs our school is so magnificent. Everyone's on the mat, training so hard is a way of life. Everyone's on a world-class growth curve. And it's very interesting to observe who the top competitors pick out when they're five rounds into the sparring sessions and they're completely gassed. The ones who are in the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there. The one who'll beat them up, who might beat them up. While others will look for someone they can take a break on, right? And so there's that constant search for exposure. And that's kind of a parallel to what you're describing in terms of not having an ego to protect. Or a, you said not having...

• 1:01:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Josh Waitzkin?

  A reputation to protect.

• 1:01:31Tim Ferriss?

  Or a fixed identity to protect.

• 1:01:32Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. So this is a way as a competitor to constantly put yourself into the fire.

• 1:01:36Tim Ferriss?

  Here's a question I have for you because I feel like particularly in jiu-jitsu, I could get better at this. You remember when we did that one day, we had the gi on and you're like, Timbo, your lips are purple. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna have a heat stroke and have to be carted off. But the, do the guys, is it correlation or causation? Meaning, are the guys who on round five picked the hardest guy in the room, have they already self-selected by coming to this school in a sense? Or have, did they start off perhaps when they walked in the door, the guy who would pick the easiest person in the room at round five and have been converted into the guy who will pick the hardest person?

• 1:02:21Josh Waitzkin?

  You see both.

• 1:02:22Tim Ferriss?

  You see both. In the latter case, how do they cultivate that transition?

• 1:02:28Josh Waitzkin?

  I think that Marcelo is a great role model.

• 1:02:30Tim Ferriss?

  Because I think it's a good, I mean, it's a fantastic metaphor for life, right? I mean, this is, you need this everywhere.

• 1:02:35Josh Waitzkin?

  Hundred percent. I mean, I think that, you know, we think about this principle of cultivating qualities way of life and the big things and little things. And you look at the way Marcelo runs that training environment is pretty exceptional. I mean, if people don't have...

• 1:02:47Tim Ferriss?

  He puts his ass on the line all the time.

• 1:02:49Josh Waitzkin?

  His ass is on the line all the time. And he's, you know, he's getting a little bit older. He's, he has two kids and he's a wonderful dad. His life is not just 100% jiu-jitsu anymore. He has all of these, you know, young twenties. At this point, world-class students who want to go at it hard with them, and he goes at it hard with them. He wants to. He doesn't mind getting exposed. He brings it. He doesn't. He's, he's living it. But he's also creating an environment where people are present to quality in little things. If someone is, it doesn't have their gi on straight, if they haven't tied their belt, if they're sitting in a way that's sloppy.

• 1:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  What happens?

• 1:03:26Josh Waitzkin?

  He tells them to straighten their gi.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  I love that. I love that.

• 1:03:29Josh Waitzkin?

  When people are running, are, are doing the warm-up, if they're cutting the corner a little bit, he tells them to run the full circle. If people are doing a certain drill in a sloppy way, he refines it. So it's, it's, it's the little things, right? And as you watch Marcelo doing the warm-up, there was a way that he'll have his hand and just brush against the mat as he passes it. Like you can feel him engaging his tactile feeling for the room, right? You know, when you, he's someone who embodies and teaches quality's way of life. So if you're in your fourth or fifth round and you are looking for a way out, you feel that you're fundamentally violating this principle which you've been cultivating.

• 1:04:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right, a tenet of the school.

• 1:04:06Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. And, and you know, this is, this is so important. We think about, a core part of how I train people is around the interplay of themes or principles and habits, right? The habits are what we can actually train at. The principle is what we're trying to embody. And so we'll train at two or three or four or five habits, which are the embodiment of a core principle. But the idea is to burn the principle into the hundreds of manifestations of that principle become our way of life, right? And so in this case, we're talking about Marcelo talking about or embodying the principle of quality in all these little ways. These little ways you could say don't matter, but they add up to, to matter hugely.

• 1:04:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I think the little things are the big things. Because they're a reflection. I mean, this might sound cliched, but it's like how you do anything is how you do everything, right? And.

• 1:04:50Josh Waitzkin?

  It's such a, it's such a beautiful and critical principle. And, and we don't, most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don't cultivate turning it on as a way of life in the little moments, there's, and there's hundreds of times more little moments than big, then there's no chance in the big moments.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that, okay, so if people listening don't take anything else from this interview, I think that's so key to who you are. It's so key to why you've been good at what you've been good at.

• 1:05:19Tim Ferriss?

  That's it right there. And there's a, I'm gonna, here, let me mangle another name since that seems to be one of our themes for the show. This episode is, I think it's Archilocus, Archilicus perhaps, I'm gonna get this wrong, but it was a quote, gotta be a Roman, maybe a Greek, who knows, who said, "We do not raise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training."

• 1:05:40Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  And if, you can't just do one every five years, waiting for the, the big event. You're not gonna have the training necessary.

• 1:05:50Josh Waitzkin?

  It's such, you know, it's as a principle that I've been thinking about a lot around parenting. You know, we, you, you see so often, people with their second child are not as present, right? Now, unfortunately, in today's world, people are often not present with their first child either. I was, I was taking a walk yesterday with a dear friend of mine in Central Park at dusk. We were just talking about other ideas we've been, we've been thinking about. And we walked past this woman who was, had three children in, in a stroller, and was walking her dog, and the children were all talking to her, and she was on the cellphone having a conversation with a friend. And it wasn't like a quick, it was like a long, gossipy conversation. And I was just watching this, it was this exquisite external

• 1:06:34Josh Waitzkin?

  environment, like the embodiment of distraction. Three children and a dog, like the children like looking, trying to pull her, but she was just in this other world, right? We think about the distraction of parenting. And then you think about what often happens with parents with the first child, they're completely tapped in, because this is all new, they're present. And the second child, they just, well, relatively neglect. We see that all the time, right? I'm thinking about this a lot because we're about to have our second child. And so I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about like, how important it is to not take for granted the things that you've done right, and think they'll just be there. Because they're not gonna be there unless you're present, equally present, right? We think about, and we see this in the martial arts, as someone who trains twice a day, you know,

• 1:07:18Josh Waitzkin?

  as a way of life for 10 years, you know, training until they drop, and doing external training as well, with strength and conditioning and stretching and everything else. And then they get to a place where they're consistently winning, and then they think they can train, you know, seven times a week instead of 10. And it'll be the same. It's not the same. Like that slippage shows. There's something incredible about going into competition, knowing that there's no way that anyone else trained as hard or as good as you, as smart, right? So when I talk about training quantitatively, we're talking about training qualitatively, right? The confidence that comes out of knowing, whether in any discipline that you're at, that you gave it your all. When I work with someone, I say that, you know, one of my many filters is looking at

• 1:08:02Josh Waitzkin?

  someone in the eye and saying that working with me is living as if you're training qualitatively, as if in a world championship training camp. Qualitatively. But I look at them in the eye, and some people you see a fear. You see the fear of exposure. Other people you see a lean in, an eagerness, a gameness, a hunger for what that exposure will lead to, right? Those are two very, very different paths. Maintaining presence to that quality, right? Even after we've assumed that we've got it nailed, right? You see this with people around presence, right? You see, there's so much bullshit in the meditation world, for example.

• 1:08:40Tim Ferriss?

  So much bullshit.

• 1:08:40Josh Waitzkin?

  Because people might have meditated wonderfully for four or five years, or six years, or eight years, or 10 years, but then they get ego involved with it, and then they're, they put together their schools, and they're, you know, they're not embodying it anymore, right? And then it becomes hollow. And they've, they kind of slipped from the philosopher to the philosopherologist without even knowing that it happened. They weren't even present to the question.

• 1:09:05Tim Ferriss?

  Firewalking process.

• 1:09:08Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, that's important.

• 1:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  What is the firewalking process? This is new to me, too. I'm not sure I've heard you discuss this.

• 1:09:14Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, this is something I've been really, for the last year and a half or so, developing intensely. I think it's been a core part of my process for a long time, but training people. I've been, I've been on this really intense learning curve on how to work with people on this. So the core to the principle is that, that people tend to learn from their own experiences with much more potency than they learn from other people's experiences, right? And the firewalking process is, that's what I call, that's my term for a gateway to cultivating the ability to learn with the same physiological intensity from other people's experiences as we learn from our own. So for example, if you're a jiu-jitsu fighter and you...

• 1:09:57Josh Waitzkin?

  Slightly overextend your arm and you get armbarred. And let's say Muñoz in the world championships, right? Your arm is being separated from your body, right? You feel like your shoulder is disconnecting, your arm is breaking. If you don't tap, you're gonna break. So you have the combination. And often guys will fight it, right? They won't want to tap, it's the world. So they have the combination of huge disappointment, all the adrenal reactions to being caught and being wounded, and maybe torn ligaments or tendons, right? Depending on how the injury sets in, or maybe a bone. And they will burn that lesson to themselves and they will not overextend their arm that way again, right? That's been burned in on an animalistic level. But if they watch somebody fighting and they watch them overextend and get caught in armbar, that's just like nothing. That's an intellectual knowledge that has no impact on whether or not they'll overextend.

• 1:10:42Josh Waitzkin?

  But if we can cultivate the ability to learn from other people's errors or experiences with the same intensity as we can learn from our own, it's unbelievable how that can steepen the learning curve. What would be an example of that beyond jiu-jitsu? Well, for example, a really interesting live example that I'm playing with today is that we are working actively with investors. Is that, you know, we are... A brilliant investor recently used the term, "The Pavlovian impact", or "The Pavlovian influences of growing up in a bull market", right? So most investors, most relatively young investors, grew up in a post-2008 world.

• 1:11:25Josh Waitzkin?

  So all of their subtle, you know, responses have come from growing up in a bull market. So for the most part, they've been... They've experienced pleasure when they put the foot on the gas and they've experienced pain when they're taking the foot off the gas. For the most part, it's oversimplified. It's really interesting to sit down and think about all of the cognitive biases, all of the subtle associations that come with growing up in a bull market. Now, traditionally, what people will say is you have to live through certain business cycles. You have to, the school of hard knocks, right? We have to learn from the pain of the other side. But can you take a highly talented young investor who has grown up in a bull market? And give them the wisdom, you think about the journey from pre-consciousness to post-consciousness competitor around a certain theme.

• 1:12:09Josh Waitzkin?

  Give them the wisdom of living through many market cycles when they haven't. Right? So then you can deconstruct systematically what does a bear market look like? Now, I'm not sure if we're in the beginning of a bear market now, but let's just say that we are, we are maybe in the first or second inning of a bear market now. Maybe we're in the tail, like the eighth or ninth innings of a bull market. Maybe we're in the ninth inning of a bull market and we're going to see some huge round of intervention and we're going to go into extra innings of the bull market. Right? No one really knows. Maybe there's some other dynamic at play. You know, even the great macroeconomists don't know, but they have a sense through this deep study of either macroeconomics or valuation. But we are, at one point someday, relatively soon, we'll probably enter a bear market. So it's going to be very important. Right?

• 1:12:54Josh Waitzkin?

  And so if you haven't lived through one, well, one thing you can do is you can deconstruct what a bear market looks like and you can have them firewalk it. And so what that means is suddenly all of the, and a bear market doesn't just mean going down. It actually means the subtle undulation of going, it's often going down, you know, for three weeks and then a really steep two-week rally and then going down again for three weeks and two-week rally. So people often, even bear, people who are betting, think the market will go down, get really hurt in bear markets. Right? Because it's violent. There's a volatility to it.

• 1:13:24Tim Ferriss?

  Volatility, yeah.

• 1:13:25Josh Waitzkin?

  Right? And so the question is, how can, in this case, an investor who's grown up in a post-2008 world, firewalk market cycles so that he can burn that wisdom into himself or herself? And then the question is how you do this. Right? And so a lot of the things that we discussed around physiological awareness, right? Somatic awareness, cultivating the sensitivity of what's happening inside of us. Right? What comes with that is the ability to switch state emotionally, adrenally. And so if we visualize something very painful to us, we can have the, if we visualize with tremendous potency, we can have a physiological response to that. Right?

• 1:14:07Tim Ferriss?

  True even of exercise training. People who, say, take a 10-minute meditation visualization session in lieu of, oh, there we go. All right.

• 1:14:17Josh Waitzkin?

  That means we have to go pick up Jack from school.

• 1:14:18Tim Ferriss?

  We have to go pick up Jack, but they get the benefits of the exercise in large part just from the visualization over 10 minutes. But we have to go grab Jack.

• 1:14:26Josh Waitzkin?

  And well, to be continued.

• 1:14:27Tim Ferriss?

  To be continued.

• 1:14:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Awesome.

• 1:14:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we're back. We reclaimed the boy from school, ate some Japanese food, talked about life, and now here we are for the continuation. Firewalking, visualization, we're gonna talk about casts. Let's continue with firewalking.

• 1:14:53Josh Waitzkin?

  Yes, you were just bringing up the physical dynamics that are possible with intense visualization, right? I had this formative experience, I wrote about years ago, where I broke my hand seven weeks before a national championship when I was training in Chinese martial arts, push hands. And I was in a cast for six weeks up until, I think, three days before the nationals. And the docs said I couldn't compete and everything because I'd be atrophied. But I was committed to doing it, and it was really interesting because I was just doing all of my training one-handed and visualizing the weight work that I was doing on the one side passing over to the other.

• 1:15:36Tim Ferriss?

  The weight work, like resistance training?

• 1:15:38Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, I was doing my martial arts training one-handed, which was fascinating on its own to just work on being able to do with one hand what you can do with two, that was tremendous. But I was also visualizing the resistance training I was doing on one side passing over to the other. But really intense visualization, not just like thinking it, but burning it in. It's kind of what I mean by firewalking, the distinction between kind of thinking about it intellectually, sort of trying to visualize it, versus burning it in.

• 1:16:04Tim Ferriss?

  With every sensory simulation?

• 1:16:07Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, like with your whole spirit, burning it in deeply. And it was fascinating to see, when I took off the cast, I had basically not atrophied. And I competed the next two days, three days later and won. The doctors, I mean, they were pretty surprised by it. A lot of Western medicines are pretty surprised by it. I mean, they're close-minded about these kinds of things.

• 1:16:24Tim Ferriss?

  What?

• 1:16:26Tim Ferriss?

  Would you do to translate that to something less obviously physical? Like we're talking about training people who've never been through a bear market

• 1:16:36Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 1:16:36Tim Ferriss?

  To have the wisdom or the lessons learned of those who have been through. So pragmatically, how do you simulate that? Do you have them interview someone who's gone through it and then try to relive those stories through visualization? Or what would the process potentially look like?

• 1:16:53Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, so cultivation of empathy, to be able to do what you just described very deeply is one thing, to be able to, you know, to live someone else's experience profoundly. First of all, we have to really be clear about the distinction between intellectual knowledge and somatic knowledge, right? When we've, having something burned in, there's an adrenal response, right? So there's a physiology to having an experience very intensely. We have to learn how to create that physiology, right? So how to, so we can do biofeedback training, undulating between states of physiological coherence and states of extreme stress, so that we, we build up the ability to kind of move between them at will. And then when we're studying, for example, the experience of somebody getting burned

• 1:17:38Josh Waitzkin?

  extremely intensely, time and again, in a bull market, I mean, in a bear market, during the volatility, the ups and downs of a bear market, right? You, you can, you can look at it and it can feel like, you know, just like a chart. Or you can experience the anxiety that comes with it, the pain that comes with it, the, like the shattering of your previous conceptual scheme, right? You can almost, you can almost firewalk the experience of the Pavlovian influence of growing up in a bull market and then having that shattered. You could firewalk that shattering and then open your mind to the, to the reality of the broader cyclicality over the long term.

• 1:18:18Josh Waitzkin?

  And there's a lot of, I mean, in terms of how you do it, well, I mean, this is the foundation is in a lot of things we've been discussing, right? Intense meditation training, ways of becoming increasingly attuned to these subtle ripples inside your body, stilling your waters, having a lifestyle which is less reactive, less input addicted, being really aware of how we fill space addictively in life. Whenever there's empty space, we just fill it, as opposed to maintaining the emptiness. And the emptiness is where we have the clarity of mind and the perception of these little micro ripples inside of us. Cultivating the ability to observe in us and in others, like the subtlest undulations of quality or of physiology.

• 1:19:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you and I talk a lot about maintaining slack, trying to build slack into the system, and how important that is. And I was told by someone I respect a lot recently, find the silence because you have to listen from the silence. And that might sound very vague, but I found that if you really meditate on it, it can apply to just about anything. I mean, if you really want to separate the signal from the noise, you need the space to do that.

• 1:19:35Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. It's such an important principle.

• 1:19:40Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. Baby time.

• 1:19:45Josh Waitzkin?

  Jack is up from his nap.

• 1:19:49Tim Ferriss?

  And we're back to your regular programming, Joshua.

• 1:19:55Josh Waitzkin?

  We're talking about slack while the slack is expiring in the system here.

• 1:20:01Tim Ferriss?

  Very impassioned cries from upstairs.

• 1:20:10Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, our aim today was to do this in the morning while Jack was in school.

• 1:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  The fortune intervened, changed our plans.

• 1:20:19Josh Waitzkin?

  Yes. You know, this principle of Slack is so interesting. I mean, for me, a lot of it relates to the empty space for the learning process, right? Like, in my way of life, I've built a life around having empty space for the development of my ideas, for the creative process, and for the cultivation of a physiological state which is receptive enough to tune in very, very deeply to people, right, to people I work with. And so, like, I can see how I could triple the amount of people that I work with very easily with the systems that I have. But my growth curve would get much, I mean, it would change fundamentally.

• 1:21:04Josh Waitzkin?

  And my internal physiological training would take a hit, right? I wouldn't have enough time for meditation, for reflection afterwards, for developments of the thematic takeaways of every session that I have. And the creative process, it's so easy to drive for efficiency and take for granted the really subtle internal work that it takes to play on that razor's edge.

• 1:21:31Tim Ferriss?

  I think in part it comes back to the limiting of inputs and selective ignorance that you talked about, right? Because if you triple the number of clients you have in a high-tech and high-touch business, you're going to have to juggle 17 chainsaws instead of two chainsaws.

• 1:21:49Josh Waitzkin?

  Right. And I'm reacting. I'm not embodying the core principles that we're working on. And so much of, I find, really high-level training is sort of somatic transmission. You're embodying a certain state, and then you're helping someone embody that state as well.

• 1:22:07Tim Ferriss?

  Totally agree. And I think that if you want a good example of that, just as a relatively new dog owner, as an adult, you can look at dogs, or children, who are fundamentally unblocked in that somatic...

• 1:22:21Tim Ferriss?

  Read, reading ability. And you can see, just as you said, like as a parent, transmits their state of being to their child despite or with the assistance of whatever they might say. Similarly, if you're interacting adult to adult, you need to sort of return to that state to be maximally effective in what you do in particular.

• 1:22:45Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, right. And then when we're talking about sort of dancing on the razor's edge, right? So when you're moving up the growth curve in a certain discipline, there's a lot of things that you can do to reach the first 80th or 90th or 95th percentile or something. When you're talking about the last .001%, you're talking about these arenas where the greatest insight will be right next to the greatest blunder. And you have to be willing to go just right on that razor's edge, right? Do you think about like of the... I was having this great conversation with the sports psychologist, Michael Gervais, a couple of weeks ago, and he had talked, used this language of thrusting into big waves, right?

• 1:23:27Josh Waitzkin?

  The experience he had to go into, like to push himself as a surfer to thrust into big waves. I love that expression, right? It's like, but of course, if you're thrusting into big waves, then you can easily push yourself into the wave you shouldn't take. Right? So big wave surfers have to be able to navigate that, just the most finely tuned, in the moment, just intuitive decision-making process of whether the moment is just right or whether it's a moment that will kill you, right? And then if you're working with people as a coach or as a trainer, right, of people who are navigating that terrain, you have to be in a state where you can navigate that terrain. You have to have an embodied state there. And I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make in everything that they do. They just scale.

• 1:24:10Josh Waitzkin?

  They scale and dilute quality. And when they dilute quality, you lose the ability to successfully navigate the razor's edge, and then by definition, you're probably more destructive than you are helpful. And so like when I think about training people who are in that place, it's like 99.9% listening. And ideally, you can make the most potent suggestions with the lightest touch feasible.

• 1:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  The notes, I took some notes beforehand here, or borrowed some notes beforehand. And one of them touches on the principle of scarcity.

• 1:24:46Tim Ferriss?

  In A, habit creation, B, the learning process, C, the creative process. I don't know if we'll have time to get all of these right now, but could you just elaborate on the principle of scarcity?

• 1:25:00Josh Waitzkin?

  So if we think about the idea of subtraction, or essentialism, or scarcity, right? I mean, you frankly are as good as it gets, in my opinion, at harnessing the principle of scarcity, in your learning process, learning how to deconstruct something, focusing on what's absolutely most essential, right? And zone in on it, right? As opposed to just throwing huge amounts of resources at things. And just having a diluted quality of approach. Most people, when they become successful, they have the opportunity to have more resources, and they keep on layering more and more resources on things. So they're not very potent in how they go about things. If you cut those resources down 99%,

• 1:25:45Josh Waitzkin?

  then you find yourself just zoning in on what's most essential. And then if you can learn to add resources incrementally, maintaining that potency, it's incredible what you can do. But it takes a lot of discipline to maintain that principle of scarcity. So in habit creation, taking on the right amount, not too much. Not too little, but not too much. People tend to think about layering on, and they get excited when they realize, if I go through a diagnostic process, and we realize that there's 10 areas they could take on, they want to take on all of them at once. Right? You can really take on one or two things at once. Ideally, one theme, and you take on two or three manifestations of that theme, to burn that theme on, and then you keep on layering, right? In the creative process, I mean, you talk about limiting inputs, right? We've been talking about limiting inputs.

• 1:26:28Tim Ferriss?

  Positive constraints, yeah.

• 1:26:29Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, positive constraints. I mean, you could, listen, me speaking about this principle to you, I mean, you embody this principle profoundly. What are your thoughts on it?

• 1:26:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, a few things. I mean, just to maybe add a couple of anecdotes to what you just said, the first thing that came to mind was a quote, and I'm going to butcher this, but it's from Jack Ma of Alibaba, who said, "You know, in the beginning, we had an advantage. We had no experience, no business plan, and no money. So it forced us to make all of our decisions very carefully." And I do think that people tend to, and I'm also borrowing this, but overestimate what they can accomplish in a week and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year, which leads to...

• 1:27:16Tim Ferriss?

  Theoretically appealing decisions like trying to adopt 10 new behaviors at once that are kind of hour wise and year foolish, right? In the sense that they're doomed to fail from the outset in many respects. And the, to your point also about scaling, you know, I have friends who call this the S word because it's romanticized, kind of worshipped notion in Silicon Valley. Scale, scale, scale. Got to be bigger. Hire more people. Ship more product. And if you are looking to kind of optimize your craft, your art, that may or may not be the right path to doing that.

• 1:28:01Tim Ferriss?

  And to my mind, you can look at exemplars, or you can look at examples of people who have scaled, who are still critics of scaling. In the sense that Bill Gates, I believe, said, you know, if you add people to an inefficient process, it just makes the problem worse. You have to add people to an inefficient process. And to that end, like whether you are looking to build a, for instance, lifestyle business, like a healthy cash flow based business that represents in some way your craft. Let's just say you make, this is a real example, actually, like 20 customized rifles a year. That's all you do.

• 1:28:41Tim Ferriss?

  And you sell to the top, like 0.001% of marksmen, marksmen in the United States. You never ship more than that. That's the constraint that you apply. Whether you're trying to do that or build Microsoft, that lesson can apply, right? Whether it's adding one person or adding the next 1,000 people. So for me, it's, I think it's very easy to create a false dichotomy in your mind when you look at, say, a small scale craftsman who's perhaps like making, let's just say...

• 1:29:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oil paintings in rural Alaska versus a startup in Silicon Valley with a thousand employees. And think of them as totally different, but in fact, if you look at the the top performers in either environment, they'll have a lot in common with each other. And I think one of those commonalities is applying a lot of positive constraints, even when you have an embarrassment of resources available.

• 1:29:41Josh Waitzkin?

  We think about this in terms of the creative process. You know, maybe one of the most important things to train is the ability to ask the right question, to know where to look, right? And if you look at people in in most creative fields who are extremely high level versus in greater lower fields, it's knowing what the most critical area is for for thinking. Let's pause for two minutes and then we'll continue.

• 1:30:04Tim Ferriss?

  I kind of want Jack to say hi to everybody.

• 1:30:06Josh Waitzkin?

  What are you saying? Jack's saying hi to everybody. He's saying, we're gonna get Jack playing with something and then we're gonna finish up.

• 1:30:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, to be continued. Okay. Siamo tornati. Here we are. We have dinosaur train playing for the little one. Dinosaur train creators, that one's on me.

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  And Josh has a continuation.

• 1:30:27Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, thinking about this principle of scarcity, one of the the ways that I I have myself trained at this in the creative process or harness the principle of scarcity is, and I have everyone who I work with live in this routine, is forcing yourself to end of each day, think about what the most important question is and what you're working. We discussed this last time.

• 1:30:54Josh Waitzkin?

  It's really interesting because you're studying complexity all the time. And if you're a really high level thinker, you're slicing through most of it like butter. But then there's usually one or two or three areas of stuckness. And most people I find tend to live in the creative process by kind of surfacing, deciding where they want to go, putting their head down and just grinding their way toward it and then surfacing later on. They don't surface enough to reflect on what's the most potent direction to go. You think about like the human versus the computer playing chess. Ten years ago, now the computers are getting really good at knowing where to look. But but, you know, 10 years ago, the the human knew that one of these two or three directions was the right essential direction. Intuitively, we sense that, right? And we cultivate the ability to know where to look. The computer had to look at everything. If we're looking at everything, then we're just operating like really, really bad computers. But if we cultivate the ability to ask the most potent question.

• 1:31:40Josh Waitzkin?

  Systematically, right? So how do we do this? Well, we have a routine where we end each workday thinking, what's the most important question in what I'm doing right now? Pose the question to the unconscious and then wake up first in the morning and brainstorm on it.

• 1:31:52Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have them pose it again?

• 1:31:54Josh Waitzkin?

  No, actually, I think it's pretty important not to do that because then we're kind of consciously ruminating on it. I have them, hopefully, they haven't thought about it for a few hours before they go to bed. This is something Hemingway wrote about in his writing process really beautifully.

• 1:32:05Tim Ferriss?

  Hemingway would stop writing mid-sentence.

• 1:32:11Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 1:32:12Tim Ferriss?

  And provide a foothold for continuing the next day.

• 1:32:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, which we could also look at from the framing of that internal versus external framing, right? If you're kind of held by a sense of guilt whenever you're not working, then you're going to feel like you have to write everything you have to write. But if you're nurturing from the inside out your creative process, you're going to be comfortable stopping with a sense of direction, even when you're mid-sentence or mid-parAGR for, right?

• 1:32:33Tim Ferriss?

  When I've talked to people who have started journaling successfully for the first time, the most consistent pattern that I see is I write less than I feel I can each day.

• 1:32:46Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Tim Ferriss?

  They're never pushing to max capacity or feeling like they're pushing to max. They always write less than they feel they should write.

• 1:32:56Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, that's very interesting. That's very interesting. And if we think about taking this and then turning it into a systematic training of the ability to be potent in the creative process, if we're reflecting, if we're working on a given project and reflecting on what's the most important question here, and we're journaling on it in the brainstorm in the morning, we're doing a lot of things, you know, we're opening the channel systematically between the conscious and the unconscious mind, we're waking up in the morning and beginning our day proactively, all of these things which we discussed in the past. But then if you sit back after, say, a month and you look back at your, say, three or four or five journals, brainstorms, Q and As on a given subject, and you think about, okay, so in the moment, this is what I thought was most potent, but now I realize this, in

• 1:33:41Josh Waitzkin?

  fact, would have been most potent. What's the gap? Deconstruct the gap between your understanding then, your understanding now, and then design your training process around deconstructing that gap, right? And training at what that gap revealed. It's a really powerful way for individuals. What assumptions underlied that gap, right? The accretion of that gap or that blind spot? That misperception about what was most important. Right. Right? And so you're training yourself day in and day out, like water, right? To be an increasingly potent thinker. And that, this is manifesting scarcity in that we are forcing ourselves, no matter how many resources we have, to think about what is the most important question and what I'm working on right now.

• 1:34:24Josh Waitzkin?

  Do you journal every day? Yes. When do you journal? I journal, well, I journal throughout. So I, it's like, I'll wake up in the morning, meditate, take a cold, then hot, cold, undulation shower, and then meditate, and then I will journal. I've had periods where I've just moved right, especially when I was working on Lucid Dream, where I'd move straight from sleep into journaling. But that's my rhythm today. And then when I have insights throughout the day, I'll do quick journals about them. And then after I have sessions with clients, I'll do a journaling session on the most important takeaways. Do you do that in a notebook or do you do it digitally?

• 1:35:09Josh Waitzkin?

  I do it on Evernote and then I tag everything thematically, which is hugely important for me. I have all of my journals and all of the resources, you know, that I find valuable, tagged thematically and through habits in the language of my training process. And so this is incredibly powerful for being able to give people resources, for me reviewing the ideas without having recency bias impede. Now, how I communicate. Can you say that one more time? Give. So if I have a client who I think has to work on a certain theme and I want to give them resources, they can read on it, I can just click on the tag on Evernote and all of the resources, things that I've written and things that I've read circling that theme are right there.

• 1:35:47Tim Ferriss?

  God.

• 1:35:48Josh Waitzkin?

  And it's also really powerful because it's really hard to overcome recency bias.

• 1:35:51Tim Ferriss?

  I see, without recency bias, right, meaning like the primacy and recency effect. So you're recalling what it is you read most recently, not necessarily the best resource.

• 1:35:59Josh Waitzkin?

  Right, and not necessarily the foundation of my relationship to the theme.

• 1:36:02Tim Ferriss?

  Understood.

• 1:36:03Josh Waitzkin?

  And you want to communicate it from the, someone's learned from the foundation up. So really powerful, the tagging, I mean, I find on, I'm sure Evernote isn't the, I'm not a big tech wizard, as you know, but.

• 1:36:12Tim Ferriss?

  Just to put this in perspective, so we were looking for, well, we, I'm using the royal we, Josh was looking for dinosaur train for like 10 minutes, then he's like, you know what, I think I'm going to search this thing. And I was like, and you say you're not good at tech. It was a good showing, no, I was.

• 1:36:29Josh Waitzkin?

  Thanks, man.

• 1:36:29Tim Ferriss?

  That was a big discovery. And then Jack's like, there's dinosaur train. Amazing how this search function works. Should we talk about thematic interconnectedness?

• 1:36:41Josh Waitzkin?

  Yes, let's talk about it. I'd love to talk about it in the context of education a little bit. This is one of the, I mean, thematic interconnectedness is one of, maybe that's the essence of my relationship to, to the world or beyond. I think it's, I mean, you and I have, as you said, our eccentric conversations all over the world on surfboards and wherever else. This has been a big topic for us, right?

• 1:37:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, constant topic.

• 1:37:05Josh Waitzkin?

  In various states. And it's been a huge part of how I've approached learning, you know, from my foundation and in looking at the relationships between chess and life, learning about life through chess, then in transferring level over from chess into the martial arts, and then first Chinese martial arts, then into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And then when I work with people, it's really how I learn, and it's how I've found it's really powerful to help people amplify their growth curves, to teach them to be able to learn the many from the few, or from the one, right, learn the macro from the micro. Break down the boundaries between disparate pursuits or disparate parts of life. Between the personal, the professional, the technical, and the psychological, right?

• 1:37:50Josh Waitzkin?

  And if we have an experience where, you know, we're on surfboards and we have some little, you know, thematic breakthrough and we can apply it to every other aspect of our life, it's really interesting what can happen because we're pretty well calloused over in our areas of strength, but in areas where we're like less advanced, we can be more raw and we might be more conducive to breakthrough sometimes.

• 1:38:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, 100%. I mean, you can see things with beginner's mind because you have no other choice.

• 1:38:14Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 1:38:15Tim Ferriss?

  You don't have to, you don't have to try to simulate beginner's mind because you are a beginner. It's like the race to the bottom.

• 1:38:22Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 1:38:23Tim Ferriss?

  Experience. So for those who are wondering what the hell that means, the race to the bottom is an expression that Eric of PaddleWoo, our paddle surfing instructor, uses to refer to constantly dropping in board size, often measured in liters for buoyancy purposes. And Josh and I and everyone who is there really very quickly realized that you are, to use your expression, kind of dancing the razor's edge and trying to find a balance between the race to the bottom, but also maintaining motivation so you're not just slipping on banana peels for five hours straight.

• 1:39:03Tim Ferriss?

  And to what extent do you focus on the board size in the race to the bottom versus, which gives you more maneuverability in surfing, versus actually working on, say, the footwork and the other technical aspects of the game on a board that you can manage?

• 1:39:19Josh Waitzkin?

  And it's very interesting to think about this theme of the race to the bottom combined with this other wonderful principle that Eric, and that we were all talking about with Eric, which is, which is swap, the swapping of boards between, so he had these camps where he had, I think, the 18 top stand-up paddle surfers in the world together with him, all riding these ridiculously small boards that are deep underwater when you're standing on them and it's incredibly hard to balance on these things. So they've internalized this race to the bottom theme so deeply, which we are working on. And...

• 1:39:53Josh Waitzkin?

  And then they're also, they had this experience where they were all together. And initially, that was sort of competitive, but then it became much more collaborative. And they were just sharing ideas and they began to swap boards. And they began to have this interesting experience where, you know, every surfboard kind of carves its own lines, right? There's the practitioner who carves his lines, but then there's also the board that has, you know, a unique rocker. Well, finds new lines in the wave. And what these guys would find is that if they swap boards, they could see new lines in the wave. Because if they listen to the board, some guys would swap boards and try to force the new board to carve their lines. Others would sort of be open to what this new board could do. And then they would learn from it. And then they'd go back to their board and their minds would open up. There's there, that's another way of thinking about this idea of the beginner's mind, right?

• 1:40:35Josh Waitzkin?

  The new board forced them, helped them see new lines if they're open minded enough. Right? So anyway, but this is the kind of, this is an example of thematic interconnectedness, right? So when I came back from that, this was our last, our previous trip where we were talking about the swapping boards theme. And I came back and I was red hot on fire with how to apply this theme in the investment process with my guys, right? So you have these teams that are so private and that are so magnificent in what they do. But if you could get teams to mix, to share ideas with a sense of abundance, right? Like, for example, if a world-class portfolio manager could swap analysts with another PM for a week or two or three. Wouldn't be interesting if they were both like, if they were truly, everyone was sharing openly. You'd see new, you'd be doing equivalent swapping boards, seeing new lines, right?

• 1:41:19Josh Waitzkin?

  It's forcing a beginner's mind, but forcing a beginner's mind not only with an open mindedness, but also tapping somebody who is truly exceptional at a very different style of what you do. Right? So there's an example of just having experience in surfing and applying it to something else, right?

• 1:41:34Tim Ferriss?

  And converting it potentially into a simple question, right? Like, where can, where can I swap boards?

• 1:41:40Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 1:41:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Could be something that is used for fodder for people listening in a journaling exercise.

• 1:41:46Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 1:41:47Tim Ferriss?

  Wake up, have your coffee, or I was gonna say have your coffee, then meditate, probably not the right order. Meditate, have your coffee, sit down, you know, drop that question at the top and just.

• 1:41:56Josh Waitzkin?

  Where can I swap boards?

• 1:41:57Tim Ferriss?

  Beautiful.

• 1:41:58Josh Waitzkin?

  Exactly. That's, that's a magnificent journaling, like brainstorm question to riff on. I love it.

• 1:42:03Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. So how do you apply that to education?

• 1:42:06Josh Waitzkin?

  So this thematic interconnectedness, I mean, the way, I don't think that we can do much more important work with children than help them love learning, help them learn to bring out the essence of who they are in the learning process, right? So to express the core of who they are through learning, which obviously will help them love learning. And then help them discover thematic interconnectedness, how the world is interconnected via principles, themes. People are really siloed right now. People think about disciplines in increasingly data-driven.

• 1:42:42Tim Ferriss?

  Segregated way.

• 1:42:43Josh Waitzkin?

  Segregated way, in a closed-minded way, and it's kind of heartbreaking. And so, you know, I have this nonprofit I've been running for a lot of years.

• 1:42:51Josh Waitzkin?

  And a huge amount of what we do, so all of our work is in education. We've got hundreds of programs around the world, mostly in the US, but international as well. Theartoflearningproject.org is our website.

• 1:43:04Josh Waitzkin?

  And the programs that are most exciting to me are the ones where we really are systematically working with schools to help children experience thematic interconnectedness. And so the way we'll do this, for example, is that we'll be working with five teachers in five different subject matters, or four, or five, or six, or three, whatever the number is, in the same age group. What are you smiling at, man? What are you thinking? You have this great look on your face.

• 1:43:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 1:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, guys. I was just looking at the URL, so it's theartoflearningproject.org. And I was laughing because I remembered when we were filming the TV show, and we were walking up the stairs to the jujitsu, you know, to the Marcelo Garcia gym, and you kept on saying towel this, towel that, and I thought you were saying towel, T-O-W-E-L, and I'm like, what the fuck is towel? And you're like, it's my goddamn book, and you got all upset. I'm like, oh, The Art of Learning. I'm like, how did you expect me to piece that together? Anyway, that's why I was smirking. Sorry.

• 1:44:06Tim Ferriss?

  But now I know the acronym, and I won't anger Josh any further.

• 1:44:10Josh Waitzkin?

  You didn't anger me.

• 1:44:11Tim Ferriss?

  I know, I'm just fucking with you.

• 1:44:14Josh Waitzkin?

  So anyway, the, the.

• 1:44:17Josh Waitzkin?

  I don't remember that conversation. I'm trying to put it back.

• 1:44:19Tim Ferriss?

  It was great. Towel, towel, towel for like five flights of stairs. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Anyway, my bad.

• 1:44:26Josh Waitzkin?

  So the way that we do this is that we have, for example, five, you know, teachers in different subject matters working with my team to weave the same principle of learning into, for example, math, English, history, social studies, volleyball, soccer at the same time. And so you'll have kids who are studying their subject matter, but they're studying also the way a certain principle of learning or the creative process of performance psychology manifests in each of these disciplines at the same time. And so they're, they're by definition, breaking down the walls between these different pursuits. And it's a really interesting systematic way of doing this, right? So they'll be studying the same principle in math and they move to the next subject and they're experiencing it through another lens and then through another lens and they're experiencing it in sport.

• 1:45:11Tim Ferriss?

  Are these borrowed from the Art of Learning book in so much as you're talking about smaller and smaller circles? You're starting, you're talking about learning the macro from the micro, et cetera?

• 1:45:20Josh Waitzkin?

  Yes. Yeah. The root of these are in core themes of learning, creativity and performance psychology that I wrote about in my book and that I've developed since. Yeah, absolutely. And we've spoken about a lot of them together.

• 1:45:31Josh Waitzkin?

  And so it's a kind of a combination of individualized self-expression.

• 1:45:37Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, a lot of these themes that we've been discussing today and last time.

• 1:45:41Tim Ferriss?

  And so can people learn more about this at theartoflearningproject.org?

• 1:45:46Josh Waitzkin?

  They can. So we invite everybody, please come check out the site. We've got some really wonderful programs around the world and it's a good timing for this right now because I'd love it if any educators out there, we're on the verge of launching

• 1:46:01Josh Waitzkin?

  about 10 really high level programs is what we want to launch, all thematically driven right now in the next, preparing them in the next months. And so anyone who is in the educational world who'd love to touch base with us about applying for this kind of program. Katie on my team is, can be reached at [email protected].

• 1:46:24Josh Waitzkin?

  com. JW Foundation is the name of my nonprofit that houses the Art of Learning project. So Katie at JW Foundation dot com.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  Katie, K A T Y, at JW is Joshua Waitzkin Foundation dot com.

• 1:46:37Josh Waitzkin?

  Yes. And she works.

• 1:46:40Tim Ferriss?

  What type of educators should check this out and email her?

• 1:46:44Josh Waitzkin?

  Teachers, teachers, or people running schools or school systems.

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  Any minimum number of students? Or any other parameters?

• 1:46:51Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, the essence of these of these programs would be would be a school system that's open minded around, for example, engaging, like I described, teachers in different disciplines, working at the same time in a collaborative way, so that the kids can be embodying the same principle in multiple disciplines at the same time. And that's the essence of it. It's a bit of a coordinated program. We've had wonderful success doing this. And it's what really excites me in when I think about education, how to build systematic training in creativity through thematic interconnectedness into the way kids learn these days. Because kids get so excited when they can see connections. I mean, this is a big part of what I'm experiencing as a dad with Jack, is how red hot he gets when he can learn something and then apply it to many other things. This is a core part of my approach to learning.

• 1:47:36Josh Waitzkin?

  I think it's been, I mean, it's maybe my biggest strength is the ability to find hidden harmonies between disparate parts of life.

• 1:47:44Tim Ferriss?

  Seemingly disparate.

• 1:47:45Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, seemingly, right.

• 1:47:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Josh, this is, this is always so much fun to drag you kicking and screaming out of your cage.

• 1:47:55Josh Waitzkin?

  You did it.

• 1:47:56Tim Ferriss?

  Or cave.

• 1:47:57Josh Waitzkin?

  I like cave more.

• 1:48:01Tim Ferriss?

  I like cave more. I don't know why I was thinking cage. I guess that's just my inner primate coming out. But the, people have asked me often about education following my TED Talk, where at the end, I close out talking about tackling different facets of education. And I feel like your approach and principle based.

• 1:48:25Tim Ferriss?

  Lens through which you can not only spot but teach interconnectedness is just so incredibly valuable, like you said, in an educational system where fields are increasingly siloed and viewed as separate and you have political turf wars between departments and whatnot, which only exacerbates that problem. And I feel like this is a massively powerful step in the right direction. So number one, thank you for that. And number two, educators listening to this, or if you're just curious to check it out and might be able to help in some way, theartoflearningproject.org. And then if you get a taste of that and it seems compelling and you want to try to apply or jump into the fray, then [email protected].

• 1:49:09Josh Waitzkin?

  Dot org.

• 1:49:10Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm sorry. No, my bad. You're right. Theartoflearningproject.org. And I'll put this in the show notes for everybody listening. These will be, and many of other, many of the other things that we mentioned will be in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. But Josh, I would usually ask, where can people find you online? But they can't find you.

• 1:49:28Josh Waitzkin?

  Can't find me.

• 1:49:29Tim Ferriss?

  So I won't ask that. Is there anything that you would like people to, besides visiting the resources we just mentioned, anything that you'd like people to take away, consider, do, any action, anything that comes to mind you'd like people to, to walk away with? Just as a closing comment or question?

• 1:49:52Josh Waitzkin?

  It's a big question. Yes, absolutely.

• 1:49:58Josh Waitzkin?

  It's funny, as I sit with this now, for so many years, my primary identity was as a fighter, a competitor. And I've, I've transitioned in recent years and I find my, my primary identity now is, self-identity, the way I've, I experience myself is as a nurturer of, of people. My family, the people I work very closely with, and children as I work more broadly in education. And when I think about it through the context of, of nurturing people and nurturing ourselves, I think that, that we're living in a world of so much noise and so much distraction and of the space being constantly filled.

• 1:50:45Josh Waitzkin?

  It's rather remarkable what can happen if we cultivate a mindfulness, a stillness of the waters, as a way of life, and we find the beauty in that. There's so much beauty that can come from silence. We can learn so much by feeling the inner ripples of our internal experience. And as parents embodying what we want our children to embody, living it, right, walking, the talk, putting away our phones, living a life of deep presence with our children, with our students, with the people we work with, cultivating empathy, cultivating compassion. It scares the hell out of me how powerfully I see the world moving in another direction from this. And there's so much that we can learn from the speed of what computers can do,

• 1:51:30Josh Waitzkin?

  of where AI is headed, of what big data can reveal. It's thrilling to me, as long as we stay in touch with the essential parts of our humanity.

• 1:51:44Josh Waitzkin?

  And when I experience what happens working with people, with adults or with children, when we're just completely present and we cultivate that presence as a way of life, it's incredible what can happen between people. And when I experience the scars in children that I see everywhere that come from the anxiety that comes from the lack of attachment, secure attachment, the lack of the attunement of the parent, the lack of the embodiment of the parent or the teacher, and these things that are spoken about, it's heartbreaking. So maybe I'm really, really old school, but there's something about the cultivation of deep presence

• 1:52:28Josh Waitzkin?

  and qualities of way of life which just rings all through me. And honestly, the other thing I'll say is that after having the experience I had a few months ago, coming as close as you can come to dying, as you can, basically, I mean, first of all, on a tactical level, please...

• 1:52:43Josh Waitzkin?

  You know, if anyone's experimenting with different forms of breath hold work, like the Wim Hof method, which I think is very interesting and quite powerful, please don't do it in any water, even an inch of water. Because if you go out, you don't want to be in water. And then...

• 1:52:57Tim Ferriss?

  I should say, if you practice this stuff enough in your type A personality, you are gonna go out. And there's a... It's not just a high probability, it's almost a certainty that you're gonna go out. And to think otherwise is really courting disaster. So do not do it in or near water.

• 1:53:14Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. And when we talk about firewalking, right? About living, learning from other people's experiences with the same physiological intensity that you can learn from your own, there's something about... When you come, like when you go over that edge, over that cliff, if I could take the experience of love, gratitude, and beauty that I've been living with ever since I had that experience, and I could give it to my brothers and sisters, you know? Holy smokes. I mean, what a beautiful thing. I, um... And so there's any way that we can, we can just live with that, with that deep sense of beauty. Such a rich place.

• 1:53:54Tim Ferriss?

  To find the stillness, to cultivate, not just to find, but create that stillness and practice, like you said, the calming of the waters, I think is... It's underestimated because of its perceived simplicity. And just as not all things that are simple are easy, not all things that are simple are low in value, right? Sometimes what's right in front of you within grasp that is most important to grasp onto and make use of.

• 1:54:29Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:29Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't have to be extremely esoteric.

• 1:54:32Josh Waitzkin?

  And it's so easy to think we've got it nailed, you know? Like, we can meditate for 15 years and think we've got presence nailed, and then we stop meditating, and then six months pass, and we're distracted. You know, it's, it's just a, it's, there's a constancy to it, right?

• 1:54:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:54:45Josh Waitzkin?

  And a presence to the sense of, the real sense of danger that it can slip.

• 1:54:48Tim Ferriss?

  And speaking for me personally, it's also building it in as a habit, just like brushing your teeth. For those people who brush their teeth. Inso much as...

• 1:55:02Tim Ferriss?

  For me, and I know this is true for many of my friends, you can't, meditation doesn't really work well as a batched process. In other words, like meditating 10 minutes a day for 10 days is much more valuable than meditating once in 10 days for 100 minutes. And for most people, it'll be less painful, too. Once you get into that habit and it becomes an ingrained part of your being and your practice, you will see the value, particularly once you have a critical mass of, for me, it's typically five to seven days. And then I'm just like, I cannot believe I wasn't doing this. I can't believe I stopped for four weeks or whatever it is. It's incredibly valuable. And Brother Josh? Thanks, brother. This was a blast, man.

• 1:55:47Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, buddy.

• 1:55:54Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:56:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:56:58Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 1:57:43Tim Ferriss?

  Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc.,

• 1:58:25Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast.

• 1:59:07Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim.

• 1:59:47Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by MeUndies. If I'm not going commando, I'm in MeUndies. I have been testing these underwear for three to four months now, pretty much every day, and in fact, throughout a bunch of my other underwear this morning. And on the road, in the house, they are extremely comfortable. They look good, feel good. They are made of micro modal, two times softer than cotton, as scientifically tested using the Kawabata method. Sounds very fancy, of course. And I get a lot of compliments from ladies for these. You don't get diaper butt, you don't get the tired elastic band. They look great, and they have underwear for both men and women. Check out meundies.com/tim and you can see everything I've been wearing.

• 2:00:28Tim Ferriss?

  The ridiculous, the sublime, everything in between, including my favorite, which is called out. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention their lounge pants. This is a new thing, and I've been wearing their lounge pants when I record podcasts. I've been wearing them out and about when I'm walking the dog, meeting people for coffee. And they are extremely comfortable, though they're made from the same material as the underwear. But some of them, like the blue ones I have, have pockets, so you can walk about without seeming like you're off of your meds and completely crazy. So that is awesome. And if you're not happy with the first pair you try on, I assume that refers to the underwear, they'll refund you completely and you can keep the pair you tried on for free. But if you're that kind of person, you should be ashamed, because that's disgusting.

• 2:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  MeUndies.com/tim, check it out. And until next time, thank you for listening.