#375: Josh Waitzkin — How to Cram 2 Months of Learning into 1 Day

"From my perspective, the goal is unobstructed self-expression." — Josh Waitzkin Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Learning-Journey-Performance/dp/0743277465/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, is an eight-time US National Chess Champion, a two-time World Champion in Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands https://contentgalaxy.com/video/tai-chi-push-hands/josh-waitzkin?af=joshwaitzkin, and the first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=472027749828725 Black Belt under nine-time World Champion Marcelo Garcia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcelo_Garcia_(grappler). For the past 12 years, Josh has been channeling his passion for the outer limits of the learning process toward training elite mental performers in business and finance, and to revolutionizing the education system through his nonprofit foundation, The Art of Learning Project http://theartoflearningproject.org/. Josh is currently in the process of taking on his fourth and fifth disciplines, paddle surfing and foiling, and is an all-in father and husband. The audio and video were recorded at The Sohn Investment Conference http://sohnconference.org in the David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts https://www.lincolncenter.org/venue/david-geffen-hall. The Sohn Conference Foundation http://sohnconference.org is dedicated to supporting innovative initiatives to cure and treat pediatric cancer. The Sohn Conference Foundation raises its funds through a unique strategy: Wall Street's most successful investors offer their expertise on stage and inspire large audiences to give to the foundation's cause. You can learn more about it at sohnconference.org http://sohnconference.org. Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2019/06/27/josh-waitzkin/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, we're just seeing an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. The audio for this episode was recorded live at the David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. The event was the SOHN Conference, S-O-H-N, which is dedicated to supporting innovative initiatives to cure and treat pediatric cancer. The SOHN Conference Foundation raises its funds through a unique strategy. They invite Wall Street's most successful investors to offer their expertise on stage. And you get to hear all sorts of interesting theses, different positions, and so on. And they use these presentations and this insight to inspire large audiences to give to the foundation's cause, which is supporting curing and treating pediatric cancer.

• 2:08Tim Ferriss?

  You can learn more about it at sohnconference.org. That's S-O-H-N conference.org.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Please welcome to the stage, Tim Ferriss, everybody.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 2:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's Macho Duck, 1979. You can look it up, please enjoy. Thank you all for sitting around after a break to listen to the conversation I'm about to have with my good friend Josh. Thank you Graham for having us. And I'm gonna jump into it. I usually use a much more embarrassing intro for Josh when we're recording something in private, so I'll use something a little less embarrassing. Josh Waitzkin has perfected learning strategies that can be applied to anything, which I've seen him do many times, including his loves of chess, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, he's a black belt under Phenom and multiple-time world champion Marcelo Garcia, Tai Chi Push Hands, he's been a world champion, and now paddle surfing and foiling. Josh spends his time coaching many of the world's top performers in many different fields,

• 3:22Tim Ferriss?

  and he is the author of The Art of Learning. Please welcome to the stage Josh Waitzkin.

• 3:41Josh Waitzkin?

  Alright. Hey everybody.

• 3:44Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, let's get to it, shall we?

• 3:46Josh Waitzkin?

  That, um, that song was my trigger song for the 2004 World Championship in Tai Chi Push Hands, and Graham thought it would be fun to jack up my physiology walking out. And it's amazing how well it works. Like, I just hear two bars of that song and I'm ready to fight like ten dudes. So, here we are.

• 4:02Tim Ferriss?

  You can pick 'em out, anybody volunteering?

• 4:04Josh Waitzkin?

  I listened to that in the three months of training camp for the Worlds, and then during the competition, and then between the finals and the sudden death playoff of the Worlds. And so, which was the wildest state of my life, maybe? So, it has a powerful triggering impact.

• 4:19Tim Ferriss?

  So you are really a master of triggers and cues and systems. I mean, you, more than perhaps anyone I know, has spent a high percentage of your life in what I think people here and what I would consider the zone. And you said something to me yesterday when we were catching up a bit, which was, "You feel like you've been cramming two months of learning into each day recently", which sounds incredible, sounds almost unbelievable, especially knowing you as well as I know you, because it's not like you just sit around watching paint dry all day. So, why and how is that? How could that be?

• 4:54Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, my training recently has been, has been super exciting. So I fell in love with surfing a few years ago and really took it on all in. But I was living in New York City, so it was difficult. And so I had to figure out how to take on surfing in a really intense way, living here. So the first thing I did is I, I hadn't spent a life skateboarding or snowboarding or going sideways forward at all. And so I had to, so the first thing I did is I got a one-wheel electronic skateboard with a big wheel in the middle. It's an amazing invention. And I, that's how I started getting around New York City. So I spent about a year and a half, maybe 2,300 miles of one-wheeling, 20, 25 miles

• 5:37Josh Waitzkin?

  an hour through New York traffic, which was a lot of fun, had some amazing wipeouts. But that was how I just initially got used to burning in the experience of, of being in surf stance and moving forward. And it was, it was really powerful. And then I, a year and a half ago, my fam, my, my wife was game and moved my family down to a really, my favorite place on earth, beautiful place in Latin America where the jungle meets the Pacific Ocean. And, and took on stand-up paddle surfing and foil training all in. Initially it was just stand-up paddle surfing and recently it's been foiling. And so in the past, this past fall, so late August, September, I fell in love with foiling. And that's when things really went to overdrive for me. I've been using this, this invention called an e-foil, which is, so foiling is, I'm not

• 6:22Josh Waitzkin?

  sure if you imagine like a five-foot surfboard with a 29 and a half inch mast going down and there's a wing. And so when you're in wave energy or you're moving forward quickly, your, all that's in the water is the wing. And so you're, it's frictionless, it's way faster than surfing, it's incredibly intense. Yeah, Grandma asked me to put together a little video. This was from a few days ago, just so you could see what foiling is. So you see the board is above the water. This is in one of my favorite spots. And you're going 25, 30 miles an hour. And the wing is all that's touching the surface. And it's super, it's crazy intense feeling. And, but this device I'm using, an e-foil, is really incredible. It's made by this company called Lift. The guy, Nick, who runs it is a real pioneer in, in the foil world.

• 7:07Josh Waitzkin?

  And he's built this thing called a folding prop. And so what I'm using is entering the wave under power as a propeller, but then, once in wave energy, the propeller folds and I'm just foiling as, just purely wave energy. So what it opens up is the possibility of... Of entering waves under power, like as if you're being towed in by a jet ski. And this is, this kind of moment is hairy, because if the wave, like after the entry, this wave catches you. The white, here it's like near wipeout and then adjusting back up. If the whitewater catches you, it's like getting shot out of a cannon and then you're on top of a guillotine. And, and so you don't want to have, or you have to dial in the brake falls, like with one wheeling. And so what's been interesting is that as opposed to having two to four minutes of wave time a session surfing,

• 7:49Josh Waitzkin?

  I'll have 54 minutes or so of wave time at faster speeds. And what's, what's interesting is it also opens up the ability to, um, to do deliberate practice in surfing. It's really difficult to, similar to investing, you have to be really creative in, in how you create deliberate practice in the surf world, because the ocean is so unpredictable. It's really difficult to replicate sections, um, to hit the same thing 10, 15, 20 times. In martial arts, you can just say, I'm going to drill this thing 30 times today, um, or 100 times or 200 times, whether it's a throw or a technique, a submission, and then you can try it in training. In surfing, it's very difficult to replicate the same condition once, even in a couple times in a few months. And so the foiling is really interesting, is it allows me to, the e-foil allows me to enter the wave, um,

• 8:34Josh Waitzkin?

  and then prop folds and I'm just foiling the wave and I'm, I'm 20 to 30 X-ing the amount of wave time per session. But it also allows me to do really interesting things with deliberate practice, like for example, when you're under speed on a foil and you go over a, a big boil and you've got a, you're in a big wave. A boil is like this huge, just upsurge of water pressure. If it hits the wing or hits one side of the wing, you get catapulted out of, out of control. So most people, if they're foiling, you don't have many chances to train at boils. And when they happen, it's just catastrophic. It's a massive wipeout. Now, I, I did a session, I did two sessions where I went over 200 boils at top speed. Doing tons of reps of boils or tons, tons of reps of steep sections. And then just, the learning curve is incredible. And it feels physiologically like...

• 9:17Josh Waitzkin?

  Between one and two months of training per session. Afterwards, I feel like I have to lie in a dark room with my eyes closed for 10, 15 minutes just to process. The brain feels like it was plugged into the matrix. It's really intense. So it's kind of, the foiling is at the cutting edge of the surf world, then the e-foiling with folding props is at the tip of the spear. And it's really powerful to feel what the brain feels like doing that and how fast the learning curve can be. I love it.

• 9:43Tim Ferriss?

  And how well the brain responds to intentional, well-structured practice. And one thing I've observed with you since we met eons ago, in these different disciplines, how well you think about the, in a sense, the micro-practice, like per session, let's call it, the meso-practice, maybe on a weekly basis, and then the macro-practice, how that then can evolve and be programmed over many months. We're gonna get into how people can structure their days, how you structure your day, but what I'd love to ask you about is perhaps to reiterate a story that you've told me before that relates to deliberate practice and skiing. I don't know if you know what I'm referring to, but the most important portion of a run,

• 10:28Tim Ferriss?

  the most important run when skiing. Do you know what I'm referring to?

• 10:32Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, way back in the day, I had some fun days skiing with Billy Kidd, who was a just brilliant Olympic champion many decades ago. And he asked me, "What were the three most important turns of the ski run?" And it's an interesting question to sit with, because most people will think it's the middle where it's most, like where it's, you know, it's most intense, most speed, or the beginning to get your rhythm. He talks about the last three turns before you get on the lift, which is where most people are sloppy. Most people kind of lift up, their body mechanic relaxes. But the thing is, the last three turns are what you're gonna be internalizing unconsciously on the lift right up. It's true with martial arts training my whole life, always finishing strong, always finishing, executing a technique very well.

• 11:14Josh Waitzkin?

  Whether it's reps drilling, or a strong sparring session, or foiling, surfing, always finishing strong, so that the last thing you do is what's gonna probably burn into you most deeply overnight. So harnessing unconscious learning is a huge part of what I do and what I train people to do. And that's something I think it's really important to be deliberate about.

• 11:34Tim Ferriss?

  Another thing you're really good at is making the subconscious or the unconscious, or just the hidden conscious. And a big part of your learning, as I observe it, is mastering feedback and measurement. So before we get to how people can structure things, because this informs it, what types of biomarkers do you track in your coaching clients? Because I think it's very common for people to think of, say, chess as a mental pursuit, to think of something like foiling as predominantly, or jujitsu especially, as a physical pursuit. But that's really a false separation. So what type of biomarkers do you track on your coaching clients, whether they're in the investment world or elsewhere?

• 12:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, I've experimented with a lot over the past decade. And what I've come to focus on most deeply is heart rate variability. I have a brilliant HRV specialist, Dr. Lea Lagos, who, on my team, who works really closely with all of my teams. And so she does HRV training with, if I'm working with a team of top decision makers, for example, with everyone on the team ideally. And HRV is a really powerful way of training someone to get into a state of deep concentration, relaxed, deep concentration, away from stress very quickly. And then tracking people's HRV, tracking people's sleep patterns. We, of course, also track nutritional patterns, physical training patterns. For me, it's really interesting to just, I don't like bringing technology out into the water

• 12:59Josh Waitzkin?

  very much, but from time to time I do, and just track wave time, heart rate in different situations. I've been playing, I had a really interesting period a month and a half ago, where I was foiling this big wave that I've discovered in offshore reef break. And it's sort of like a non-stop drop. It just keeps on going. It mounts up and then you're just accelerating for 30 seconds straight. And your body has this innate physiological, it feels like an evolutionary response to bail out because you're going so fast, you're accelerating, your body wants to jump out. So I started doing HRV breathing to my resonant frequency while accelerating down this wave.

• 13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Could you just explain what that means to your resonant frequency? What does that mean?

• 13:36Josh Waitzkin?

  Everyone has a unique resonant frequency. If you're doing heart rate variability breathing, and you're breathing to your resonant frequency, it'll maximize to your unique frequency in your physiology. It will have the biggest... Impact and raising alpha waves, relaxing your body, moving you from a stressed state to a deep state of relaxation. So the ideal way to train HRV is to work with a brilliant specialist

• 13:59Josh Waitzkin?

  and find out what your frequency is and then do breath work 20 minutes twice a day at that rhythm. And over time, it's incredible what it can do. And then you get to a place where you can just take a breath and be in resonance. And I did a lot of meditation work for years before this and a lot of trigger work before this. But the HRV I found to be-

• 14:14Tim Ferriss?

  What was that?

• 14:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Trigger work.

• 14:16Tim Ferriss?

  Trigger work, what's that?

• 14:16Josh Waitzkin?

  Trigger work would be essentially

• 14:20Josh Waitzkin?

  using something like a song, like Lose Yourself, Eminem song. So one thing I started doing decades ago would be getting myself into a peak performance state and then attaching a trigger to it, like a song or a scent. So then ultimately I could, as opposed to doing a 30-minute or 40-minute routine, which I might have had to do back in the chess days, being able to listen to a couple beats of a song or smell something or take a breath and enter into a peak performance state. I learned this lesson from a lot of years in competition where you can't predict when you're actually going to have to fight. And so you might have to do a- Like I remember going to a world championship in 2000 and I thought I- I knew it was gonna- It's a long story, which I've actually, you know, I've discussed before.

• 15:02Josh Waitzkin?

  But long story short, I thought I would have a 30-minute warning before I competed. And then, this is in a world championship in Taiwan. And everything changed and I was after, I was like eating lunch and then they changed the rhythm and I had to compete like one minute later. And it really taught me I had to learn how to enter a peak performance state with a breath, like instantly.

• 15:21Josh Waitzkin?

  So HRV is really powerful and I've been playing with it in this steep wave and it's fascinating how quickly it takes me from the state of like needing to bail to just complete calm while making that steep drop. And then your baseline rises and then you can keep on just getting acclimatized to more intense conditions.

• 15:37Tim Ferriss?

  What type of tools do you use for tracking these days? HRV, that is. Do you have a preferred tool for-

• 15:47Josh Waitzkin?

  Dr. Lagos has experimented with a lot of things and that's sort of her terrain. I've played with a lot of different tools. I haven't actually found, to be perfectly frank, the software that I think is A++ and so I'm thinking about building some of my own. But I don't, at this point, feel like there's the ideal peak performance training HRV software out there for a bunch of reasons. Nothing has exactly what I want.

• 16:12Tim Ferriss?

  So people can DIY the search for a tool that, as a stopgap measure, might help, but let's translate it to, say, the world of investing. How would someone use their HRV to inform how they plan their day, for instance? Might they, like an athlete, wake up and look at their HRV and their sleep pattern and say, "Wow, I am not recovered," whatever that means, "I'm going to defer, to the extent possible, important decisions for today." Or would they use it to, like you said, track if they are in a sympathetic fight-or-flight state and then moderate that before taking a particular phone call

• 16:53Tim Ferriss?

  or whatever it might be? How do you take that data and translate it into the world of, say, investing?

• 16:59Josh Waitzkin?

  Well, you know, the way I personally relate to biofeedback or any kind of technological tool is to use it to train my own somatic ability, to feel where I am. And so, I don't personally want people to become dependent on technology. I want them to use technology to develop the ability to feel. So if you're sitting, you know, I started meditating when I was 18 years old and it's very difficult to have feedback. Then in the meditation process, someone might start thinking for eight or 10 minutes before they can realize they're thinking. One thing that's really great about using biofeedback is that you'll have something tell you that you're starting to slip and you're focused. But ultimately, from my perspective, the idea is to train your intuition, your somatic introspection,

• 17:44Josh Waitzkin?

  to feel when your quality of presence, your quality of energy, is slipping from like a 10 to a 9. When I start working with people with top mental performers, very often they could go from a 10 to a 2 before they even feel the slip. So really, I like to use these tools to train someone to sharpen their intuition, to sharpen their somatic sense for where they really are. And then, you know, for me personally in my training, that's what I go with. I go with how I feel. In chess, for example, you know, you have to make so many decisions and your physiological state is always changing and you can't...

• 18:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Take a break and take a look at what a machine tells you, how you're doing. But you can use the machine to train your ability to feel where you are. And for investors or decision makers, chess players, poker players, anyone who's in a really high stakes, intense, time-sensitive discipline, you want to have the ability to feel where your performance state is and adjust it on your own independently.

• 18:38Tim Ferriss?

  This is so important, and I'm glad we ended up exploring this because it applies to a lot, right? It really applies to a lot. And I've seen this in, for instance, the exploration of dietary ketosis and using devices like the Precision Extra during times when it doesn't matter. Let's just say on weekends or during vacations, so you're able to see that, I won't get into ketosis right now, you guys can look it up, but it's very interesting for a number of reasons. And you realize, oh, at 0.5 millimolars on this device, I feel like this. And then at 1.5 millimolars, I feel like this. And you get to a point where you're no longer dependent on the device. And you have that sensitivity so that you can say, you know what? I'm feeling cranky.

• 19:23Tim Ferriss?

  I'm probably not yet working off of fat and I'm a low blood sugar. Probably shouldn't send that really sensitive email right now.

• 19:30Josh Waitzkin?

  Right.

• 19:31Tim Ferriss?

  Because I'll do damage control for the next week.

• 19:32Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think about structuring a performer's day? And you could give examples from any field, but how should someone think about that? Because you are, to me, and I, as a job, I guess, interview top performers in different fields. You are so exceptional at focusing and crafting your days and weeks and months in a way that you can focus. What suggestions or examples might you describe for people who are looking to better structure their days?

• 20:05Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah, it's a really important question. I mean, first thing I'll say is that everything that I do in a coaching capacity is individualized. So the essence of what I, if I'm working with someone who is a world-class decision-maker in some realm, by definition, I have to know them so intimately before I start making suggestions to what they do. Because I think that the entanglement of genius and eccentricity, or brilliance and madness, is so complex and so critical for people who are in the top 0.1% or so of what they're doing. And so, I've seen, there are so many dysfunctional habits that I've seen drive brilliant creations. And then there are so many people who are doing things by the book, who are just mediocre. So that's one initial caveat that I'll say, is that if I'm training somebody one-on-one,

• 20:49Josh Waitzkin?

  I will understand them with tremendous nuance before I'll start tweaking what they're doing. That said, there are some core principles around day architecture that I think are really important, and that are really challenging to embody in this technological age, where everyone is distracted, everyone is just constant inputs. Everyone's so busy, everyone feels that they should be so busy, and everyone's pulled into the external all the time. And people are, find it very challenging to structure their days or do what they want to do because of an internal relationship to their creative processes, as opposed to how it will look from the outside. And so, I think that a proactive day architecture versus a reactive one is hugely important. I think most people will have lots of meetings scheduled, and then maybe they'll try to jam thinking in between the meetings, so they'll have like two minutes of thinking

• 21:33Josh Waitzkin?

  time in between, which is, from my perspective, disastrous, because people are, their brilliance comes from thinking. So I'll block out time, thinking time, in someone's calendar, and then meetings will be put in between this. An alignment of peak energy periods, we pick creativity work, like thinking time is hugely important. Usually, it's the reverse, people will, like, do their thinking on the walk back from lunch when they're a little bit lethargic, as opposed to do their thinking first when they wake up in the morning, when their, when their energy and their creativity is most intense. How do people, how do people identify their peak?

• 22:06Josh Waitzkin?

  They can feel it. I have people, I mean, I find, in my diagnostic process, I find pretty consistently, people are right about, I ask people to rate one through 10, how their creative, how their energy levels and creative state is at different parts of the day, and then, of course, I examine it, but people tend to have a pretty good sense for this. I think it's really important, you know, one of the things that I have, everyone that I do, and that I've been doing my whole life, is ending my day thinking about the most important question in what I do, and then waking up in the morning first thing, pre- input, and brainstorming on it. This is an incredibly powerful tool that I learned from my dad, who's a great writer, in his creative process when I was, you know, seven, eight years old, and Hemingway wrote about it in his writing process. It's been a huge part of my life for decades.

• 22:51Josh Waitzkin?

  Focusing the mind, ending the day strong, like I mentioned before, and focusing on what matters most, and building the musculature of focusing your, like, your being on not all this ancillary stuff that just comes at you, but what really matters the most. Releasing it, not stressing out about it all night, sleeping well, and then, first thing in the morning, pre-input, not after checking the news, or checking Bloomberg, or checking Twitter, or checking any, checking stock prices, pre-input, brainstorming on it. Because what you're doing that way is you're systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind. And that's something that is something, you can do it systematically, day in and day out, rhythmically.

• 23:28Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's give a specific example, and it could be a real-world example from your life, it could be a hypothetical, it could be a composite. What time, give the example, and when you would write it down? You put it at the top of a page in a notebook before dinner, and then put it away? What does it concretely look like?

• 23:48Josh Waitzkin?

  Again, I think that, the expression of it is individualized. Some people will write it down on a piece of paper, and write it down, some people will write it in their Evernote, and return to it. I, I wake up usually around 4:30, and I, I journaled for many years physically, but then, I had so many journals, and it was so difficult to get through them. I actually now use Evernote myself, and I just pop it open and start riffing on it.

• 24:15Josh Waitzkin?

  This is something that you can, like, you know, I use this term "making smaller circles", that initially when we do something, we do it in this big way, and then we can kind of refine it, make the circles tighter and tighter and tighter. It's sort of a reference to, in the martial arts, you learn to body mechanic in a big motion, then you learn to condense it and make it more and more potent. So this is the kind of thing that you can do at night and then in the morning, but then ultimately, I think, throughout the day, it's very important to do this. Before you go to the bathroom, pose yourself a question. And then don't check your phone while walking to the bathroom. Release your mind, and then come back from it, and then think about, return your mind to the question. Because what you're doing this way is you're training your ability to focus on what matters most. This is what I call the MIQ, Most Important Question.

• 24:56Josh Waitzkin?

  And I have, you know, I think that MIQ training is one of the most important things that a decision-maker can do, because the best way to train an analyst in a discipline is to train them in knowing where to look, what matters most. And so, there's a system that emerges from this day architecture. Imagine the evening/morning rhythm, and then three or four reps of it throughout the day. And then imagine you have a team where you've got a leader who's, say, is at a higher level in a certain discipline, and you've got a group of analysts beneath. If you have the system I call MIQ gap analysis, where everybody is doing this most important question training, initially one rep, but then multiple reps throughout the day. There's transparency throughout the team. And then, there's a periodic review, you talked about feedback. This is a really powerful way to bring in healthy feedback in an organization, or in

• 25:41Josh Waitzkin?

  your own internal structure. There's a review of what you, if you're doing it on your own, what was, what did you think the MIQ was now, and then a week later, two weeks later, from this elevated perspective, after you've done much more work, what do you think the MIQ was? And then, the gap is often where you'll devote your work. And in a team structure, you can have somebody overseeing the MIQs of a group of analysts, and then sometimes tweaking it, sometimes making suggestions. And then, team training, deliberate practice, can be focused on the gaps that emerge, where they become clear, between what seemed like the most important question then, and what later on, it became apparent was the most important question.

• 26:19Tim Ferriss?

  So if we're looking at the most important questions, MIQ is... Is it always, or does it tend to be something very specific? Like, how do we mitigate risk? Or how can I mitigate risk? And position X, or whatever it might be? Or are there, when in doubt, or when unsure, are there other types of most important questions that people can ask? Such as, I'm not really even sure. Where might I be neglecting risk? Or something like that? Are there broader questions that you find are very useful when someone isn't sure on a very specific level? Where to focus for a most important question? If someone's, say, struggling to come up with the MIQ?

• 27:03Josh Waitzkin?

  I mean, I use this tool for big thematic meta questions. I sometimes will use it for tactical questions. I'll use it sometimes to get a clear read on how I intuitively feel about somebody. Sometimes the MIQ, so I can ask myself, do I intuitively feel that this is an ethical person? Right? Or if someone is interviewing a leader of a company, you know, what's my intuition about the quality of his or her thinking? Or it can be a much more tactical question. It can be, I study video of a surf or foil session I had, and then I might leave the whole question in my mind and just sleep on it, and then emerge, what feels most, like, what's the biggest lesson to be taken out of this?

• 27:48Josh Waitzkin?

  Or I might look at one thing and drill in, like, a very specific technical idea and try to refine it. I used to do this with theoretical opening questions in the chess world, where often I would be stuck, and there'd be an area of stuckness. Most great thinkers, I find, are like a knife through butter, through most things, but then there's one or two places they're stuck. Those areas of stuckness are a really powerful place to focus this tool. And it's really breathtaking what happens. I mean, you just get into the rhythm of waking up with the solution, and you get used to, after you do this, you might have three or four times a day the kind of crystallization miraculous realizations in your creative processes that you might have had once every two, three months, otherwise.

• 28:25Tim Ferriss?

  And you said letting go as part of this process. Does that mean that, in your case, I know it's individualized, but that you're not doing it... Right before bed, you're doing it earlier in the day? How do you do that?

• 28:37Josh Waitzkin?

  It's not right before bed, and that's a great point. Hemingway used to end his writing session, leaving something left to write. It was his version of it.

• 28:44Tim Ferriss?

  Like mid-sentence or mid-parAGR.

• 28:45Josh Waitzkin?

  Mid-sentence, mid-parAGR, mid-theme, mid-story, mid-something. So like not being a writer who just writes everything. It's interesting to look at that idea through the internal versus external framing. He would, like, sometimes people feel, because they feel guilty if they don't do everything they could possibly do, so they finish, you know, they blow it out. As opposed to Hemingway always finished, leaving something left to go, so leaving a sense of direction, like, activated. And then he would drink wine, he'd release, he'd relax. Maybe I would recommend doing, you know, meditating, working out, having a great night's sleep, listening to music, enjoy, don't stress out about the question all night, don't think about it in bed, but then waking up first thing in the morning and then returning your mind to it. So you really are releasing your conscious mind from it. And the art of letting go is a big one, I think it's one that people in this industry

• 29:30Josh Waitzkin?

  have not taken on as intentionally as they should. This is an industry which people are on all the time, constant inputs, people are on their phones all the time, people are listening to you while looking at their phones. Learning to release that, to focus extremely deeply on what you're doing. And then, like, one more point. If you look at the greatest competitors in the world, greatest physical athletes, Marcelo Garcia, who I trained with for many years, who I own a jiu-jitsu school within the city, he's probably the greatest grappler to ever live, and if you watch Marcelo win a world championship, he would be sleeping, literally, minutes before a Mungia's semifinal or final, sleeping. But you've never seen anyone turn it on more intensely.

• 30:13Josh Waitzkin?

  And if you look at great fighters, people think fighters are like jacked and tense, nah, but they're not, they're actually very relaxed. The greatest fighters are super relaxed when they're not fighting, but when they're in the battle, you wouldn't believe the intensity. And even to deconstruct that further, if you watch a great, for example, boxer... The relaxation before a strike is delivered is incredible. So it's the undulation, like, most people in high-stress, decision-making industries are always operating at this kind of simmering six, or four. As opposed to the undulation between just deep relaxation and being at a 10. And being at a 10 is like millions of times better than being at a 6. It's not, it's just a different universe. Same as being all-in on a discipline is millions of times more intense than being,

• 30:57Josh Waitzkin?

  you know, 98 or 99%, let alone, you know, I can take it or leave it.

• 31:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and just having observed you, observed Marcelo.

• 31:06Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Tim Ferriss?

  Certainly heard stories about, say, Floyd Mayweather before gigantic fights.

• 31:10Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I heard a friend of mine who knows him said, he walked into his dressing room after Floyd was like, "Yeah, sure, come on in." He's like, "I don't want to interrupt you, you must be prepping." And he's like, "No, I'm either ready or I'm not." And he was just sitting down watching some TV.

• 31:24Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Tim Ferriss?

  That it's, it's, in a way, your ability to avoid the simmering 6 directly affects your ability to then ratchet up to turn on to the 99% or the 100%. And if you're always at a simmering 6, you're just at 50% battery all the time.

• 31:46Josh Waitzkin?

  100%, and at 50% intensity.

• 31:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Josh Waitzkin?

  And you cannot, you have no idea what your 10 is.

• 31:51Tim Ferriss?

  And you have, as you mentioned earlier, moved to Latin America. I was convinced, a someone kind of born and bred here. I thought the weight-skin clan, like a group of hobbits, was just gonna live in this little corner of Manhattan for forever, as long as the human race would survive. And, and yet, you moved to a very remote location, and you have, in many areas, now in a very clear way, created a lot of slack and sort of white space for deep work. How would you...

• 32:30Tim Ferriss?

  Sell that, not necessarily moving to the jungle, but how would you train or how do you train some of your performers to stay away from the siren song of FOMO, fear of missing out, the temptation to distraction? Because you're very good at deliberately blocking it out. What do you say to people who are tethered to phones, locked in front of a Bloomberg, who have trouble creating those broader blocks of time?

• 33:00Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. Well, the art of saying no, which you and I have spoken about a lot, is a really important one to take on. I mean, in my life today, I'm training as intensely as I've ever trained. I'm training, but the goal is virtuosity, not a world championship, but I'm training as intensely as if I was training for a world championship. So my ocean training is maxed out, intensity, four or five hours a day. And I love the work that I do with my core partnerships in the decision-making space. And it's really beautiful to feel how my game and all of it has risen as I've moved away from everything. I think I was pretty good at saying no before, living in New York, but in New York, there's just so much incoming. But now I'm so far away.

• 33:44Josh Waitzkin?

  And it's been, you know, this is a principle that I've cultivated for many years, but that I feel like I've only begun to see the potency of in the past couple of years, since I've experienced the power of the empty space. So much of what we're trying to do as idea generators is get away from the thought constructs, the group think, the group biases, you know, where everyone is clustered. And it's really interesting to get away from it all. And for me, coming into New York City, I've lived much of my life in New York, but now, coming into New York City after not having been here for three, four months and living in a place which is just so different. I'm listening to monkeys and ocean sounds and rain falling. You know, it's amazing how much I feel here

• 34:30Josh Waitzkin?

  that I didn't feel before, because living in a city, you have to close down a lot of your pores because of the ambulance sounds, the technology, the constant noise. So living here, you have to shut some a lot down. It's very interesting if you open your pores, getting away from it and coming in, how much more receptive you are. I think it's true mentally with ideas. I think that if you get away from... From a lot of the noise, it's much easier to take that 30,000-foot view and see what really matters.

• 34:54Josh Waitzkin?

  And see the core patterns that are operating. It's like that idea, you know, that great David Foster Wallace discussion around "this is water," built around the metaphor of a fish swimming in water doesn't know what water is. I mean, it's very important to see what our water is. And I think getting away, we're structuring a day. So you have, I mean, meditation is an incredibly powerful internal tool for cultivating this. If you're meditating 30 minutes or an hour in the morning, and then again later on, and I have some dear friends in this industry who are,

• 35:23Josh Waitzkin?

  it's like that. It's like moving to the jungle in some sense. You have the ability to just see through so much of the crap and focus on what matters most.

• 35:33Tim Ferriss?

  And what matters most, we don't have a whole lot of time left, but I think is is your ability to determine what matters most is affected by your ability to identify your zone of genius

• 35:46Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Tim Ferriss?

  in a way, right? And that also your excitement about, or predilection to go from zero to 100 is also dependent on operating in your zone of genius. You've been very, very good at that. How do you suggest, or do you have any words of wisdom for people who are trying to determine in their world, whether that's sports, investment, you can pick one or it could be general, like how they determine where that zone of genius is?

• 36:15Josh Waitzkin?

  Yeah. That's a great question. You know, I've started writing

• 36:22Josh Waitzkin?

  15 years, I wrote "The Art of Learning" 15 years ago, and I've just started writing again recently. And it's been beautiful to kind of re-enter that terrain. And a lot of what I've been starting is this question of why self-expression? Because a lot of what I'm writing about is a life of how to live a life of self-expression, which is what you're asking about. And then why self-expression? And then how do we get there? And I think that learning who you are as a learner is incredibly difficult. And I think, obviously, it's great to have an ecosystem around you that can help you understand it. If you've got people who can really take you for who you are, as opposed to putting their own constructs on you, which is very difficult, because people are trying to maintain, to justify their own decisions, so they're trying to box you into those. I think that

• 37:06Josh Waitzkin?

  I mean, there's so many frames in order to understand who we are. I mean, are we a visual, kinesthetic, or auditory processor? Most people don't even ask this question. Do you love mountains, or ocean, or city? Do you like the rain? Do you like to control things, or let things rip in a more relaxed way? What are the patterns behind your greatest successes? What are the patterns behind your biggest errors? I like to look at that personally, professionally, technically, and psychologically. In other words, breaking down the boundaries between your personal life and your professional life. And think breaking, and looking at things both in terms of technical, specific errors, and brilliant creations, and more thematic and psychological,

• 37:51Josh Waitzkin?

  kind of meta manifestations of that tactical example. What are the things that have driven our greatest insights? And what are the things that have locked us up most in life? And understand those, and look at what the seeds of each one of these. And this is a big part of what I do in my work. And I think it's so important to be patient with this process. I think it's very easy for people to follow the mental models of others, or follow the paths of others.

• 38:16Josh Waitzkin?

  And it's usually disastrous. If the goal of, from my perspective, the goal is unobstructed self-expression. So first, we have to understand what self-expression is, and who we are as a learner. We have to embrace every little, you know, element of our funk, and build around it.

• 38:34Josh Waitzkin?

  And I tell you, like, it's such a beautiful thing that happens. And I think that a big part of being all in on something, and falling in love with something so deeply that you're eating it, you're breathing it, you're sleeping it. You wake up in the morning wanting to do it, you want to train at it. Being just on fire, stoked out of your mind on the thing, is feeling like you're expressing yourself through what you're doing. Like, if you're a writer, or a chess player, or you're writing books and doing brilliant podcasts like yourself. If you feel like you're expressing the core of your being through what you're doing, then it's beautiful. If you feel like you're living in someone else's model. Or even if I'm taking on an art, like surfing,

• 39:10Josh Waitzkin?

  and I'm doing it in a way that someone else tells me to do it, versus a way that expresses the core of my being, it's a different world. So it's not so easy to get to know ourselves, but I think the art of introspection, psychologically, somatically, is one of the most important that we can take on.

• 39:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I just want to thank you personally, we're out of time, but for helping me to take the snow globe of life and just to put it down long enough to let it settle so that you can see more. I think that's one, I wouldn't say a gift that you have. I mean, it is a gift in a sense, but it's a talent and a skill you've developed. It's like putting the snow globe down long enough so that you can see through it. And thank you for making the time, coming out of your reclusive jungle habitat and sharing with us today.

• 39:57Josh Waitzkin?

  Thank you, man. And I want to thank Graham Duncan, who's co-chairing this, who's a dear friend of mine. And I think I've been observing this event for so many years. It's an important cause. And I think it's awesome what you guys are doing. And Graham, much love, man.

• 40:10Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Thanks, everyone.

• 40:11Josh Waitzkin?

  Thank you, guys.

• 40:12Tim 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,

• 40:53Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. 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.