Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Josh Waitzkin. Josh Waitzkin is a former child prodigy who began playing chess at six years old. By the time he was 16, he had become a national champion many times over, as well as an international champion. In fact, he achieved the level of International Master, which is one of the highest levels of achievement in chess for anyone, regardless of age.

His early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer." He then quit playing chess and moved on to martial arts, the study of philosophy at Columbia University in New York, and eventually foiling, which is essentially surfing over water.

Josh is not only a high performer; he has now become perhaps the most sought-after professional coach in the domains of finance, creative endeavors, professional sports, and the military. Today's episode is one of my favorite Huberman Lab podcast episodes ever. I know as a podcast host you're not supposed to say that, but it's absolutely true.

Not only is Josh Waitzkin highly accomplished, but he is also an exceptional teacher of the learning process. He took what he learned in chess and about learning chess and applied that to martial arts, foiling, etc. From participating in all those endeavors, he was able to distill the essential elements of learning and how to tailor one's learning process to one's own unique personality, style, flaws, and tendencies to make mistakes.

He teaches how to leverage all of that in order to learn better. In fact, throughout today's episode, I promise that you will constantly reflect on where you experience things like tension and fear in your personal, professional, and educational life—whatever it is that you're trying to learn and pursue.

Today's conversation, thanks to Josh, will allow you to look at that, understand it better, and know where to apply work, when to relax, and when to push forward. In effect, you'll learn how to become a better learner, both of yourself and whatever it is that you happen to be pursuing in life.

We have a saying in science: sometimes you encounter somebody who is truly an "N of one," meaning a sample size of one in a category all by themselves. Josh Waitzkin is truly an N of one. I know of no other person like him or even close to him in terms of his ability to live a unique life path and to take what he learns and put it out into the world so that others may benefit.

He lives with a tremendous amount of intentionality for the people he loves, for the things he loves, and with the intention of helping others learn how to learn better. I must say it was a true honor to sit down with Josh. I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time. You'll also learn that he's a really nice person.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this podcast episode does include sponsors.

And now, for my discussion with Josh Waitzkin.

Josh Waitzkin, welcome!

Thank you, man. Great to be here. I feel like I've known you a long time because I saw "Searching for Bobby Fischer," and I learned about the real human that was about you. I read "The Art of Learning," and I must say I'm a fan and somewhat obsessed with the uniqueness of your arc, the choices you've made, and your understanding of learning as a process and its universal properties and specific properties in different contexts.

So I'm excited to dive in. I think for people who perhaps are not familiar with you, maybe you could just give us a broad overview of your backstory—like the things that you've really focused on in chunks, if you will—just for a couple of minutes so that people can get familiar with the incredible things you've done. I think that reflects the uniqueness of your choice-making process, which then we'll get into.

Yeah, sure. Well, thank you, man. It's an honor. I appreciate what you said.

Yeah, so I started playing chess. I grew up in New York City, downtown Manhattan. I started playing chess when I was six years old. I discovered chess walking through Washington Square Park with my mom. I remember watching for a day or two, and then at one point, I broke away from her. I was going to play on the monkey bars, and I ran over and asked an old man if I could play. He said yes, and my mom was surprised.

We started playing. I played my first game of chess, and I remember the very distinct feeling of it being as if I was discovering or rediscovering a lost memory. It wasn't like I was learning something new; it was like I was wiping away the dust or the cobwebs between me and something I had known very deeply at one point. It was a very strange feeling for a six-year-old boy.

Then I just fell in love with the game. I got really intensely into it. My first teachers were the hustlers in Washington Square, so it was just a raucous crowd of guys who took me under their wings and started teaching me the tactical street side of the game. I was just unhindered as a learner, which is interesting from my perspective now as a dad because my little boy, Charlie, is taking on surfing with that same kind of freedom—just that liberated, uncomplicated, out-of-his-own-way kind of vibe.

By the time I was seven, I started competing, and I was a top-rated player for my age in the country for most of the years from age seven to 23—my whole chess career. So it was a very strange upbringing in some ways, which has led to some quirky elements in my psychology. I was living in a pressure cooker of competition from age six on, and my whole childhood was spent as the target.

If you're competing in national championships, I would compete in youth national and world championships, and otherwise, I'd be competing against adults. But then you're the target, so any mistake you make—kids make mistakes all the time; we all do—my rivals and their coaches, who were strong masters and international masters and grandmasters, would be able to study. Strong adult players can see very easily the weaknesses in a child, and they would be prepared for them.

If I didn't take on a weakness, it would be exploited, and I would experience pain. So from a very young age, not taking on my weaknesses became outside of my conceptual scheme, which is a really interesting thing to grow up with. In many ways, it laid the foundation for a lot of what I've done since.

There are lots of things about that upbringing that could be unhealthy. Being in the public eye is very bizarre. Luckily, it was before social media. I have never been on social media in any way, which has been a choice.

When I was 11, the book "Searching for Bobby Fischer" came out, and when I was 15, the movie came out. At that point, I was completely in love with chess; it was my first love. I was an unobstructed learner. I loved competition. A lot of my opponents were trying to control the game, memorize openings, and figure out how to win by force, but I loved the battle.

My style was to create chaos, like in Washington Square Park—find hidden harmonies in chaos. I loved that. As the game went on and they moved away from their opening preparation and controlling things, we moved into my power zone, which was the fight.

My chess life, in many ways, was free-flowing. Then the movie came out when I was 15, and you can imagine what that was like as a young teenager—all the attention, the media, cameras everywhere, groupies, all the temptations. I didn't ask for it, and it was a really alienating period for me relative to chess.

Around the same time, I started training with a Russian chess trainer who urged me to move away from my self-expression as a chess player and to study the players who were the opposite of me. I was an attacking player, aggressive. I played kind of in the style—not at the level, but in the style—of Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov or Mikhail Tal, world champions who were hot-blooded.

I was being urged to study the more cold-blooded, prophylactic side of chess—Anatoly Karpov, more conservative, defensive players. I was being told, instead of asking, "What does Josh feel here?" to ask, "What would Karpov play here?"—who's the opposite of me.

So the combination of that public eye and then the movement away from my self-expression led to a period of obstructed self-consciousness. What an interesting theme we could talk about at one point is that passage from a preconscious to a post-conscious competitor. In many ways, I went from the freedom of preconscious competition into the tunnel of existential crisis, and I grappled with it for many years.

When I was 18, when I graduated high school, I was still the top-rated player in the country. I was winning the national championships every year, so from the outside, it looked good, but from the inside, I was in turmoil. I was fighting with myself; I had all these demons.

Then I left the U.S. and spent a number of years after high school studying East Asian philosophy, meditating, reflecting. During that grappling, I was still deeply in love with chess. It became much more of an introspective process. I was competing as intensely as ever, but chess became connected to life.

When I was 19 years old, I started training at the Human Performance Institute. At the time, it was called LGE—Lair, Grapple, and Eberly. It was a performance training, cross-disciplinary performance training center that Jim Lair opened up.

I never forget the moment I was working with these performance psychologists, and I was at the gym working with nutritionists. I was doing this intense workout, and I looked next to me, and there was Jim Harbaugh, who was the head coach at the time of the Colts NFL team. We got into this amazing dialogue about performance, and it was a real eye-opening moment for me because I realized that we spoke the same language.

I was like, "Holy, this guy's an NFL quarterback, and I'm this crazy chess player, but we're doing the same thing." It was this crystallization moment where I realized that all of these arts are fundamentally connected at the highest levels. What we're doing is much more similar.

If you're at the pinnacle of different arts, you're often doing things that are much more similar than people who are in the same art but at lower levels. There's something in that qualitative experience. Then I began studying the principles that connected these things.

Then I had this interesting experience. I'm kind of compressing a life into a minute or two, but in my early 20s, I ultimately moved away from chess. I'm happy to talk about why and that journey. I moved into martial arts. My study of East Asian philosophy moved me into the study of Tai Chi and then into Tai Chi Push Hands.

I had this really interesting experience where, at that point, I'd been in the introspective process of studying chess, which had become much more about studying life. I was in an exploration of interconnectedness, but I was not playing chess anymore. I was all in on martial arts, but I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition, which I did every year for many years for the Duan District Research.

I was playing 50 chess games at once, walking around this big square playing against 50 young, up-and-coming strong players at the same time. I realized at one point that I wasn't playing chess; I was moving chess pieces, but I was thinking in Tai Chi language. I was feeling flow, feeling space left behind, riding energetic waves of the game.

It was like I was winning all these chess games, but I hadn't played chess in a long time. I wasn't playing chess, and it became like... and then my study of Tai Chi became extremely accelerated. I started winning, competing, and I won in the fighting application. I started winning national championships.

Then I began to think about or become more deeply involved in the study and exploration of thematic interconnectedness, which has really become a life's work. My martial arts life took me all over the world, and I won some world championships. I moved into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and trained in that art for many years.

I was training for the world championship for Brazilian jiu-jitsu after winning worlds in Tai Chi Chuan. I broke my back in a training camp. I own a school with Marcelo Garcia, who's a dear friend and a nine-time world champion—perhaps the greatest grappler pound-for-pound to ever live. I was training at a really high level, and I was getting ready to begin my surge toward black belt world championships in jiu-jitsu when I ruptured my L4-5 disc.

It was the first time I'd been moved away from an art not on my own terms. It was a brutal injury. Then I ended up, as we do when we're mad men, coming back and training for a year and a half with a busted-up back. The doctors told me I had to let this one go or I'd be crippled for life.

Around that period is where I started to go all in on the art of training others. I said, "Okay, if I can't be all in training as a competitor, as an athlete myself, I've been training elite competitors in mental and physical performance for some time." I wanted to take on the challenge of loving training others with the same intensity that I love training myself.

I went all in on that art, and I'm still all in on that art. But I never actually got to the place where I love not being in the arena myself as much as being in the arena myself. In this chapter of my life now, I fall in love with the ocean arts—initially surfing and now foiling.

For the last eight years, I've been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family. I train three to five hours a day in foiling, so I'm in my really intense training lifestyle myself. I train elite mental and physical competitors around the world in finance, science, technology, and sports. I've been doing some amazing work with the Boston Celtics for the last few years.

So that's the journey in a nutshell. Happy to dig into any of it.

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Yeah, thank you! We'll definitely revisit certain time points and themes there. I can imagine as a young boy playing chess, you have your own strategies. You're developing an understanding of what works for you, but of course, as a young kid, you're also getting into the mind of the other player.

You described that your coach or coaches were encouraging you to get into a different mindset—one that was not your default or trained-up mindset, less focused on chaos and aggression, and more in this other mode of playing by thinking about these other types of chess players and ways to play chess.

I can imagine that most kids are not weaned; their brain isn't developing around a game. It seems that your brain was built—the developmental neuroplasticity that's so robust in early childhood was built around this game that we call chess.

It seems to me that you were encouraged to develop a theory of mind that wasn't just your own, which is itself, I think, really unique. Most six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve-year-olds might be told, "Hey, listen, the reason they were mean to you at school is they just hate themselves," or "They just didn't think about whether or not to pick you first or last for the game," or whatever it is.

You know, you get told to do that, but for you, it became an intense practice of trying to learn to get into the mind of another while holding on to your own sense of what's you versus them. As a developmental neurobiologist, I understand this is perhaps one of the most important events in the development of our brain.

It seems that your brain was built up around that dynamic. Now you coach peak performers, and so much of coaching and teaching or being a parent is to get into the mind of another. The difference is when you're a parent, you can think back to being a child and at least get some general sense of what that's like.

Stepping back from what I just said, and I realize there's a lot of words there, but do you think that what you're doing when you approach a practice like Tai Chi or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or science or math or music from the perspective of a performer or a teacher is that you're getting into the mind of someone else?

Are you trying to stay in your own mindset? I'm sorry I'm not being more succinct with this, but I think you know as humans we do this. I'm sure our dogs look up at us and say, "Oh, they're happy with me," or "They're sad with me," but their algorithms are more simplistic.

We, as the most sophisticated Old World primates, do this spectacularly well, and it seems that much of your career and your life has been built around these kinds of dynamics. So, put simply, what is your mindset when you approach a practice that's just you in the practice versus your mindset when you approach your practice when it's you and another—a competitor—versus when you're trying to teach something to a bunch of different minds but there's a common goal?

Okay, so there's really three big questions wrapped in there, and now there's sort of like 15 really big questions. My audience gets upset at the length of these questions, but I think for me it's important to just kind of set this out there as a buffet from which you can select anything or discard anything that you like. There are so many delectable things to select from.

Yeah, so I mean, first of all, one-on-one competition is so interesting in mental and physical arenas. If we think about Brazilian jiu-jitsu or chess as two of them, let's zone in on chess because that's when I was a kid. You're thinking about what your plan is, and you're also thinking about what your opponent's plan is.

Every move your opponent makes, you have to think, "Why did he do that? What's his plan? What is his tactical plan? What is his strategic plan, short-term and long-term?" So you're trying to unpack his strategy always, and you're assuming that he or she has a strategy.

If they don't have a strategy, then they're not going to be a good chess player. Very quickly, if you're evolving in that art, you're only playing against people who are at your level or better if you're growing. If you're always playing down, then you're not improving.

There's a beautiful filtration process in that the people who accelerate in their growth curve in the chess world are the ones who are challenging themselves all the time, playing up, pushing their limits. I spent my life playing against strong players, and I always played a little up, except for when I was in youth competition.

I always played up, which was important for me. People had a plan, and they were very deceptive about their plans. There are layers to the plans. There's the tactics they're trying to set up, their long-term strategy, but then there's what they want me to think their strategy is, which it isn't.

In fact, their strategy is to have misdirection around what their strategy and their tactics are. There are layers to it, and it can go many layers deep. The same thing in martial arts, right? You need to have a theory of mind to play that game at least the way I played chess at a high level because you're constantly...

There's this very interesting shared consciousness between players. You and I are sitting a little further apart than we would sit if we were playing chess. If we were half the distance we are from one another and we're just sitting for six hours with a three-foot chessboard at three feet between us, studying this thing, our minds become connected.

We often will share the same illusion. You might see something, and then I see it when you see it. If we have the same... we might have the same blind spot; we might have the same insight. The connectedness of mind is fascinating.

It's through chess; it's directly energetic. It's through eye contact, body language, and micro-expressions. You're always reading the opponent. As you get really good, you learn what your tells are, what your opponent's tells are.

Then you also learn that I often would have tells on purpose, and I'd have predictable tells that I would let people lean on for a long time until I didn't let them lean on it anymore. It's like in martial arts where you give someone comfort in a lean, right? You give them a rep of something they can lean on here, they can lean here, then they can lean here very comfortably five or six or eight or ten times in a row until they're on the floor.

This is happening in chess; it's happening in all of these things. One-on-one competition is a relentless truth-teller. If you have a weakness, it will be exposed. If your opponent has a weakness, you will expose it.

If you go into a chess game and you've got a huge opening repertoire that's extremely complex, but there's one little place that you just hope he doesn't go there—he always goes there. It's so bonkers; you can't hope your opponent's not going to see it. You can't make the second-best move because maybe he'll blunder and I'll win. That never works if you're playing real competition.

You need to understand your mind, your opponent's mind, and your opponent's understanding of your mind. That's a lot of plates to spin. What I guess I said before, not so clearly, is that for a young mind to be able to learn to spin all those plates is incredible.

It's clearly possible; it's unique, but it's possible. You did that, but it takes a young mind or an adult mind out of its own unique experience. This is eventually how we'll circle back to preconsciousness versus post-consciousness.

But in the meantime, when was it that you first recall thinking, "Not, oh, I'm going to beat this guy," but sensing, "You know, he's getting nervous," or "He's confident," or "He can sense that I'm nervous," or "I'm going to set a trap," and just feeling out whether or not they detect the trap? I mean, that's just a lot.

Right away, when I was... I mean, you have to keep in mind my first teachers were hustlers—chess hustlers in Washington Square. They would mess with my mind all the time, and then they would teach me what they were doing, and they would do it again at a higher level.

They didn't kid-glove you at all. I wouldn't say at all. I mean, this was a rough-and-tumble crowd. There were a lot of drugs in the park; there were a lot of fights in the park. These guys took me under their wing.

There were moments where some guy would be going off, and the guy was like, "Hey, Josh is here! Cut that out!" I was their protegee, so they did, but they also did not wear thick gloves. The gloves were thinning out all the time, and I was getting better fast.

Then we go to war. They were my teachers; they were my friends. I'm super grateful for that. Then what's interesting is that my first classical chess teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, saw me playing in the park and asked my father if I could work with him.

Then we started training together. One of the things that I feel really badly about is the way he was portrayed in the film "Searching for Bobby Fischer." Bruce is still a dear friend of mine. Ben Kingsley played him as a much more severe person than he was. He was a beautiful teacher, and he really wanted me to express myself, as did the guys in the park.

But he was also filling in the holes and teaching me a classical chess foundation. We were studying chess from the endgame first principles, studying positions of reduced complexity to touch high-level principles and then learn to apply them to more and more complex positions.

So my early chess education had both the classical study with Bruce and the street-smart game with the hustlers at the park. But to answer your question, right away when I was six years old, my opponents would mess with my mind and trap me and trick me and make me think here, and then they go there.

Then I would learn to do that. I remember there was one youth competition where I made a move in a trap, and it was like that obvious, right? It's like the worst. Then it gets increasingly subtle, right?

My opponent said, "Oh, he's unhappy," took the pawn, and then your opponent sees it, and then you learn. Those things keep on... the circles get smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter and more and more refined.

This is the opposite of Asperger's or autism, by the way. What you're describing is a hypertrophied set of circuits for theory of mind in a very young kid. To be able to understand what's happening around you, I think for many people, the joys of childhood are really about not being aware of what's going on around you.

The psychologist would refer to this as a lack of impingement. Impingement is when a kid is playing and they're really enjoying something, and then suddenly they decide they don't want to play anymore, and the parent doesn't want to be bothered.

So they say, "No, no, no, keep playing." They're impinging on the kid's reflexive desire to do something or not do something. This isn't about keeping them safe; this is in the domain of safety.

But at least within the channel of chess, it seems that you developed your entire understanding of the psychology of human beings, except for, of course, you had an experience at home of family and friends. But chess certainly cut a wide trough through your development.

Well, I'm really grateful for my early chess life, and I also would never choose to put that on my children. I mean, it worked out really well for me. I have my wounds, right? There are lots of things that I've had to grapple with.

But I think if you put a lot of children through the pressures that I went through, it wouldn't work out well. I watched a lot of my young rivals—almost all my young rivals—end up quitting and falling into crisis.

Then you have parents and coaches who are expressing their own egoic needs through the children, and the children are shouldering that, and then that becomes very difficult to deal with. You're dealing with heartbreak, and you're putting your everything on the line, and you're losing.

You're dealing with your own self-doubts and the heartbreak of your mother and your father and your coach and your friends. There are so many. As the pressures get more and more intense in chess, you really are putting your heart and soul on the line through that chessboard in casual games, let alone in national and world championships.

You're being shattered when you lose. I was shattered many times over. I lost the last rounds of national chess championships and world championships multiple times over. Those were the greatest moments of my life in retrospect. They taught me the most important lessons of my life.

I would never take it back. It's been a pattern in my chess life, my fight life, and everything I've gone through. The most heartbreaking, devastating moments ultimately were the ones that catalyzed the most growth, and they were beautiful.

I really relate to them that way, but they can also be brutal for young minds, and they can destroy people.

What do you think it is about failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change? I always say that your brain has no reason to change if you're just trying to learn something and you're in flow. Most people associate being "in flow" with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly.

I don't think that was the original definition that Csikszentmihalyi intended, but the neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do—like even, you know, this has been studied in terms of reaching for an object and there's a mirror displacement or a prism displacement or something—you eventually can learn to error-correct because the cup is actually over there as opposed to where you see it.

But it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us—adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine in particular, those three, their cousins, the catecholamines—that tells, at a neurochemical level, the synapses, "Wait, something needs to change."

The brain doesn't have any reason to change unless there's frustration, agitation, or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration and agitation. So do you think these big, what feel like cataclysmic fails set a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change?

I often think that it's only through the devastation of a huge loss that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning. Certainly, we wouldn't want to design the system that way, but as I always joke, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, and you weren't either. We just had to work with what's there.

Yeah, like big failure—why do you think that sets a wavefront of change?

It's a great question. Well, I think the study you sent me yesterday speaks to this.

Yeah, maybe we should talk about that.

Yeah, maybe I'll answer that question experientially, and maybe you could then talk about the study, and we can riff on it a little bit. This is so much fun, by the way, because I've lived my life in the arena, just like pushing myself. I'm my own laboratory.

You said to me yesterday at the game, "I'm not a scientist," but I'm looking forward to tomorrow, and I said, "Trust me, you're a scientist." I do science through the lens of a certain understanding of mechanism and structure-function and some processes, and you do science through the lens of experience and drawing core parallels and principles in different domains and at different levels—from unskilled all the way up to virtuosity. That's kind of how I see it.

I think about the most painful losses of my life, the most devastating injuries of my life. I think about dying—drowning. I drowned on the bottom of a pool doing hypoxic breath work for four and a half minutes. After that, it led to arguably the best decision of my life to move into the jungle.

I think about losing the last round of the Under-18 World Chess Championship on the first board. That's a very interesting story I could describe a little bit. Or I think about my first national championship I lost when I was seven or eight—first board, last round—just unobstructed learning until then.

Then I lost the last round for the title to an opening trap. That's the loss that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

You were how old?

I think I just turned eight, or maybe I was late seven. That was it. It was because if I had won that game, I easily could have associated winning with just no pain, no heart—just cruising up to the end.

That was the moment that I got my ass kicked. I had to go back, deal with these demons, come back, train for the next year, and then I won the next year. Then it was off to the races. My life might look very different if I'd won that game.

Actually, the kid who beat me in that game, David Arnett, became—two years later, we became best friends. For all of our childhood, we were on the same chess team and best friends. I think he gave me the greatest gift of my competitive life by kicking my ass that game.

The most devastating loss of my chess life was when I was 17 years old. I was competing in the World Under-18 Chess Championship in SE Hungary. Every year, there's an Under-12, 14, 16, 18, and 21 world championship, and I was always representing the U.S. in those tournaments around the world.

I was playing the tournament, and I was just playing very inspired chess. I had just picked up, on the road three weeks before, Jack Kerouac. I was just on fire with Kerouac vision, and I was just so appreciating life with this freshness and intensity more than I'd ever had.

I was totally on fire in chess, in life, in love, in everything. I was paired against Peter Svidler, who was the Russian. We were on the first board, last round. We were playing for the world championship. Every country sends their national champion, so it's a long tournament to get there.

Early in the game, I think it was move 12, he offered me a draw. If I had accepted the draw offer, it would have gone to the tiebreaks. I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I thought that he was slightly favored in tiebreaks. I wasn't sure, but basically, the world championship would be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round.

But I had a... but I hadn't calculated it out before, but I had a feeling it was like maybe it was like 40-60 or 30-70 against me. It was my style; I never accept a draw offer first. That wasn't my style. I always wanted to fight, so I declined and pushed for a win.

Now, the beauty of his decision was also that he offered me a draw in the critical position where I had to make a very specific decision, which is a trick that chess players play on one another. If you're... we should talk about tension at one point; it's a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports.

One thing that happens in chess games is that you have this building tension between minds, and often the tension on the chessboard and the tension on the minds are mounting together. The urge, the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release chess tension in the chess pieces.

When you release chess tension, usually the person who releases the tension will be on the wrong side of tactics. A lot of chess is about putting mental pressure on the opponent to force them to break the tension on the chessboard.

In that game, he offered me a draw. So you think about it: we're 17 years old, we're ten days into a world championship battle. Even no matter how much we love the battle, some piece of ourselves wants a way out. We want to release the tension; it's just elemental to who we are when we're living with that much pressure.

So all I have to do then is accept the draw, shake hands, and the tournament's over. Then it's out of our hands what happens. In that moment, I have to also make a critical chess position.

The urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chess decision. In that move, I declined the draw and made a slightly over-aggressive move, which turned... and he ended up playing a beautiful game, big attack, beating me. I lose the world championship just like this close to your dream, and you're shattered.

I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in a little town in Slovenia, and we broke up. I ended up meeting again at a street corner in Brazil at the World Under-21 Championship three weeks later. Lots of drama, you know, being a 17-year-old kid.

I didn't study that chess loss for two and a half months; it was so painful to me. I always studied games immediately afterward, and you might study a chess game for anywhere between three and 15 hours, studying one chess game.

Let's say 10 hours is focused on the two or three critical positions of the game. This was before chess computers were ramping up, and chess engines could always just tell you the answer to the move. That's also something we should talk about later—how chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional distance for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer.

But we'll come back to that maybe. I didn't study that loss for two and a half months because it was so painful to me. My family spent a lot of time at sea, which was an interesting part of my life and my chess life—living on a little boat, catching our own food, doing our own engine work.

I was at sea after competing in both of those world championships and some other things, and I sat down to study that game. I spent a dozen-plus hours studying that one critical position of the game, and then I realized what the move I should have made was outside of my conceptual scheme in that critical position.

I wasn't ready to make that move. He was also, I think, a slightly stronger chess player than me. I was a great fighter; I loved the battle, but I think if objectively he was a better... his name is Peter Svidler. He ended up becoming a world-class grandmaster and is just an incredible chess player today.

At the time, he was just an amazingly brilliant, beautiful, fluid mind. But I was confident going into the game. I had to make this move that would essentially be... his attack was on the king's side; my expansion was on the queen's side.

I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king, away from my king's side, which is super counterintuitive because you think you want to defend your king. What I didn't realize is that harnessing the power of empty space against aggression—his attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn.

Moving my last defensive piece, his attack couldn't break through. But that principle was something I didn't understand at all. It was a real pop in my mind, right?

So then I was 17, 18 years old. Then a year later, I started studying Tai Chi, started sitting, doing Tai Chi meditation, Tai Chi philosophy, the Dao De Jing, the inner chapters. Then I get into Tai Chi, I start moving meditation, I start in Tai Chi Push Hands without making the connection.

Push Hands is the martial art which is the essence of Push Hands—learning to utilize empty space against aggression. But I hadn't connected it to that moment.

Then you fast forward to the 2004 World Championship, which is what "The Art of Learning" ended with. The final chapter of that is the world championship finals. I'm playing, I'm fighting this guy bigger than me, stronger than me. He's been training since childhood.

Final fight in a big stadium, everyone wanting me to be destroyed in the biggest fight of my life, and I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space—by letting him feel my weakness, by leaning on him, by letting him... and then disappearing.

It's very interesting how there was no mental processing, no conscious processing of that connection. But the biggest loss of my chess life and then the principle, which I wasn't ready to understand yet, was how I won the world championship in the martial arts so many years later.

It's a completely different discipline, right? It's an example of how a loss spurs an insight, which might consciously or often unconsciously lead to something incredible down the road.

I think that one of the biggest challenges that we have... but it's so interesting that the loss of a world chess championship final leads to the win—direct lesson is the win of a world championship in a fighting realm.

How common that is! One of the things that I think about when you sit down with great competitors again and again, when you hear their inner journey, the most heartbreaking losses lead to the transformational change that leads to the biggest wins of their life—whether it's in basketball, fighting, business, finance, writing, love.

Oh, in love! Oh my God, in love! Breakups are devastating; they're a death of sorts.

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I have a friend who's a trauma therapist and addiction expert, and occasionally you'll hear these tragedies of typically young guys whose girlfriend breaks up with them, and they commit suicide. For years, he would work with families of these young guys, and he finally connected the dots.

He realized that in every case, it was as if there was no future whatsoever because it was their first relationship. When you hear it, you just go, "Oh, it makes so much sense." But the 16-year-old, 18-year-old brain—however old these kids were—it's devastating.

I want to make sure that I ask about devastation because you said that you were devastated. You experienced a tremendous amount of pain from these losses, in particular the one that you just described. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about what that was like.

I don't want to spin off into a discussion about the science of grief, but I did an episode about grief, and it was really surprising to learn that most of what you hear about in pop culture—that there are these very specific stages of grief and you progress through them linearly—none of that is true.

All of modern research says that it's not disbelief, anger, acceptance. It's like a hodgepodge of different emotions depending on the time of day and the middle of the night. But the core feature—and I find this so interesting—is that grief, whether or not it's what I would consider kind of trivial grief, like losing your favorite pen or a watch that you really love, okay, an object versus somebody extremely close to you—a parent, a loved one, a child, God forbid—that the brain systems that map memory onto action are disrupted in grief.

Such that, you know, you wake up each day and you want to go see the person or call them. So what grief really represents is a remapping of your understanding about what you can do with your physical body to create action and interaction with this person that's now gone.

The remapping is one of the nervous system having to do all this no-go. We talk in terms of action systems and the basal ganglia of the brain. You have go-go programs and no-go programs—there's some other stuff too, but it's mostly go or no.

Basically, grief is this taking of a, depending on how long and how deeply you knew the person, a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms that were all go. You could text them, you could call them, you could hug them, you could kiss them, you could listen to them, you could smell them, and now it's all no.

That we think is what we experience as grief. Now, in terms of losing a very important chess match, when you talk about being in pain and in grief, what was that like? Was it sleepless nights, disbelief? At what point do you think you were able to say, "Okay, you know what? I'm going to start thinking about this constructively. I'm going to turn this into a go," as opposed to just trying to get in your time machine and travel back in time, which of course is impossible?

What was that early experience of devastation like, and how did it transmute into growth?

Well, even sitting with you now, thinking about it, it seems ridiculous for a chess game to be losing a chess game to be anywhere near the absolute heartbreak of losing a loved one. Yet we can make things very large in our minds and in our beings, right?

I think that human... I mean, one thing I think about is how hard we fight to maintain our conceptual schemes, our identities, even if they're torturing us. Loss isn't relative. I mean, the fact that we're sitting right now not far from hundreds, if not thousands, of homes that have been wiped away doesn't change other losses.

We sometimes will say, "Well, at least we have our health; we have our things." Okay, and then we can do this, but it's not how the human emotional system responds reflexively to our own losses.

So I don't think it's dismissive or sociopathic to experience a big loss in one's life as a big loss, even if it's not the worst possible loss. It's just not how we're wired. One of the things that I reflect on and that I've cultivated—it's very hard—but that I work to cultivate is when you're in those moments of rupture to both be in the rupture and have the perspective that we will have later about the rupture.

This is not to say not being in the rupture. One of the things I feel badly about in "The Art of Learning" is I spoke a lot about process and outcome, and it had a big impact on the chess world.

Then what happened is there were generations of parents who had young kid chess players, and their kids would go to compete, and the parents would say, "It doesn't matter if you win or lose; all that matters is the process." It doesn't matter if you win or lose, and the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle—mental battle.

Chess is intense. When you're playing chess, you're putting your mind, your body, your psyche—everything—on the line. If you lose, you feel shattered. That's just how you feel. If you're not trying your hardest, then we can't even be talking about you.

So let's say you are trying your hardest; you're putting it all on the line, and you lose, and you're shattered. Every part of you feels destroyed. So the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle, and the parent tells them, "It doesn't matter if you win or lose." It's deeply confusing.

The kids actually usually know that the parents are full of it. The parents actually care so much, and they feel guilty about how much they care about their kid's result. They're telling their kid that to feel less guilty about the fact that they're putting their own egoic needs on their child, and it's all like... and the kids see it all.

That's the hilarious thing. An 8, 10, 11-year-old sees it all, and they're like, "Mom, give me a break." The parents are just stuck in their guilt and absurdity. I've seen this so many times.

So the discussion of process and outcome is so subtle, right? Because yes, it's about the process; it's about the journey; it's about the long-term process. But if we don't care about the results, the process won't work.

We need to put ourselves on the line enough to be shattered, and the process is what really matters. But it's not that we can liberate ourselves from caring enough to be shattered because then we're not engaged.

There is something about putting our egos on the line that is what leads to the growth surges that great competitors have—the ones who become virtuosos.

Then that stated, how can we experience the simultaneity of being shattered and having the perspective that this is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me? You have to be in a mode of theory of mind with yourself about your future self somehow.

This is what I think losses are so beneficial for. If you've had a couple of breakups, you realize that you can fall in love again. If you've only had breakups, perhaps you think, "Well, it always leads to a breakup." But you know that the process of moving forward is the only way to test that hypothesis again, right?

I think repeated failure is essential, right? Because with repeated failure means that there was also repeated fighting one's way back after failure.

So, yeah, I think sometimes—not to take us into a different course of story, but just very briefly—my first manuscript I ever submitted in graduate school took forever to get published. It went from the highest of journals down to a good journal, a solid journal.

But it took forever, and I was crushing at the time. My reward circuitry is built up around very long latency between effort and final outcome. I'm just used to long waits between figuring out what's going to happen.

Actually, one of the weirdest things about podcasting or social media is that I feel like you go to "publication" so fast. It's like, "Whoa! Projects used to take two years, and then you get reviews."

So I think your early devastating failure or failures—because you had a few of them in there, at least more than a few—probably set you up for tremendous frustration tolerance.

This not just hearing, "This too shall pass,"—they're helpful, but that's really something that needs to be experienced, in my view.

It's a very interesting thing when you're talking about competitors: what is the right balance between playing up and playing down? How much do you want to build the confidence of a young competitor, artist, or person, or any of us, young or whatever age?

How much do you want to be stretched a little bit beyond your ability so that your weaknesses are exposed? You have to take them on, and you have to grow. Getting that balance right is hugely important, and it's not simple.

A lot of boxing training camps are based around the boxer's confidence being everything, and you want them to feel invincible going into the ring. From another perspective, there's something very powerful about having a training camp that's so intense that all your weaknesses are exposed.

You have to take them on. If you're not sparring against people who can expose your weaknesses, then you don't know what they are, and you don't have the chance to grow.

I live at this point with a trying to be at max stretch without snapping. For example, if I look at my foiling, if I'm not falling enough during a foil session, then I'm not pushing my turns hard enough.

If you're just succeeding all the time, then you're not pushing yourself enough. Do you believe in optimal levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game?

Autonomic arousal is something that I've worked on for many years. One of the most impressive features, I think, of our brains as humans, first, would be our ability to think into the past, present, or future, or a combination of those two.

If other animals do that, they don't do it nearly as well, and they certainly don't create technologies to bridge those different time scales. That's number one.

But the other one is our visual and temporal aperture of focus. When we are in a state of elevated arousal, our visual aperture shrinks. I'm sure you're familiar with this, and we slice time more finely—much like a higher frame rate.

That's why people who, for instance, see a devastating traumatic car crash report seeing things in slow motion, right? Because their frame rate is high, like a slow-motion video.

Whereas when we are relaxed, our frame rate is larger, bins of time. I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and optimal states for learning assumes that there's one optimal state of arousal.

But I feel like in every endeavor I've ever been involved in, it's about learning the transitions between the arousal states that allows us to pull back a little bit as things—as you said—get tense, just relax just a little bit to be able to see a different perspective or ratchet up our level of tension, or aka arousal, in order to slice the micro-expressions of a competitor.

These two cameras on the fronts of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted to this process of shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness. It could be talked about in terms of space—just vision, like tunnel vision versus panoramic vision.

It can be talked about in space-time—tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader slice. But then when you start getting into the... then you map that onto the past, present, and future mapping, and that's where I feel like we're into the game of skill learning and chess and strategy.

So forgive me for the kind of top-contour neuroscience description, but that's how I see the human primate as so different from all the other creatures in the world.

That's how we're different because we can learn chess or ballet or foil. Gibbons are pretty amazing at what Gibbons do, but if they're trying to learn other stuff, they've been failing so far.

I spent a lot of time playing with frame rates, and I had this experience that I wrote about in the "Slowing Down Time" chapter of "The Art of Learning." I had these experiences both in chess and in fighting, but it was one time I was fighting against a super heavyweight dude in a competition, and my hand shattered.

I broke my hand right here, and it was interesting because the fight was very intense, reasonably hard, and my hand broke. Instantly, time slowed down, and he was moving in slow motion.

I was able to just so easily play with someone with a broken hand compared to what had been a war before. We know what that is, right? We do know adrenaline.

Adrenaline and that tunnel vision, and then the frames are fast. If I inject you with just a little bit of adrenaline, it stays in your periphery, but it activates systems in your brain in parallel to that.

You're going to experience an immediate dilation of your pupil. You'll have more tunnel vision. I mean, every process is sped up in the direction of higher frame rate.

So then the question then came for me, and this would be fun to talk about. I've never spoken to a scientist about this process: how do I learn to do that?

And then how can I train? Because I can't just pump myself with adrenaline all the time, although maybe I can learn to have that physiological deploy it, right?

So then how can I deploy it? What are triggers for having that chemical change? And then also, how can I train so that I have the experience of more frames than my opponent?

Marcelo Garcia, who I... he's known as the king of the scramble. He spends his whole time in transition. If you're training jiu-jitsu with most people, they're always finding a position and holding it.

Marcelo, one of the unique things about his training life for most of his life was that he never held positions. He was always moving. He was always in the in-between.

It's true in most arts that people think that the art is the positions that they see, but the real high-level art is the space in between the positions. If you have this position that leads to this position, there's going to be no frames in between for most people.

For some people, there might be four frames, but if I have 100 frames, then I can play in pockets that you don't see. If you're living your life in the training process in the in-between, in the transition, if you're always...

The way that manifests in actual, like, for example, jiu-jitsu training or submission grappling training is if you're not holding positions, you're always moving. You're spending all of your time in the in-between while people who are holding position are always static.

If you go to a jiu-jitsu school and you sit and watch, it's interesting to look for this one thing: notice the amount of time static versus in motion. Marcelo was always in motion.

There's a beautiful clip of him that people can look up. It's in "Suave," an old documentary back in the day—like 25 years ago, I think it was. It's on YouTube. It's like an eight-minute clip of him training as an 18-year-old.

You watch him just in the early days of him learning this transitional approach, and he's just never stopping. He's always allowing the person... But you have to get past the egoic dynamics because you can't...

You're giving up on dominating people all the time because when you're in a dominant position in jiu-jitsu, you want to hold it because you've won. There's all this passing between men who are fighting or women who are fighting each other who want to dominate.

But if you release that and you're thinking about the learning process, then you're moving, and you're getting nonstop exposure to the in-between. If you spend your life training in the in-between, then you have more frames than other people do.

That's what a lot of what illusionists are doing, right? They spend all of their time training in the spaces that other people don't look at. It's not magic; it's brilliant training. It's the art of illusion at the in-between, right?

A lot of the things that high-level martial artists can do to a lower-level martial artist or someone who doesn't train feel mystical. It's all about that principle manifesting in interesting ways.

In general, for me—and this goes back to the question you asked two or three brilliant, expansive questions ago around intense moments—a lot of what my training has been is having some serendipitous intense moment and then learning, and that becomes a beacon.

For example, there was a moment I was playing in a World Chess Championship in Calicut, India, and I was deep into a calculation, couldn't find the solution, and there was an earthquake. Everything started shaking, right?

But I experienced the earthquake from within the chess position. I knew there was an earthquake, but I also was lost in the labyrinth. I found the solution, and then I got up and left, vacated because we had to leave the playing hall.

We came back, and I made my move and went on to win. It was so interesting because it was like... and then the earthquake—my... and a lot of what happens in chess is that you're reaching so deep into the complexity, like into the cupboard, but the solution is right here at the front.

All you have to do is come back out and surface. One of the best ways, by the way, to prevent chess blunders with talented young players or players of any level, any age, is to shift the order of decide, make the move, and then write it down.

Because you notate your chess games, you decide, write it down, and then make the move. The write-it-down is a resurfacing, and you have common sense. You look at the position, and almost all chess blunders, you realize you blundered instantly.

You can think for 20 minutes, make your move, and you know instantly you blundered because there's not that surfacing. But then you can learn to just do the surfacing before making the actual move.

It's true with human decision-making in general, right? We realize that the scrub, right, as we complete it.

Because we're caught up in all of our... we make the move, and then we've left our thought process, and like, "Oh, that was just absurd," right? We see it.

You think about the heartbreaking literature, studies, and how people who have jumped off a bridge relate to it the moment after they've jumped off the bridge—those who have survived, right? They report wishing they hadn't jumped.

Right? Immediately, like they jump, and then they wish they hadn't jumped. That's such an important message. We hear all this stuff about suicide prevention, and you know, but just that knowledge—I mean, I don't know how conscious of that sort of thing people are as they're headed down the trench.

I mean, what of suicidal depression? But these apertures that we're talking about, these time-space apertures where frame rate is set and visual aperture is set, I think for most people, we experience them as sort of notches.

So it's like, you know, you're in a high state of arousal, and you have high frame rate. And then, just like being a ball bearing down in a trench, you can't really see out the other sides. You're literally in there at a certain frame rate of, let's say, an argument—an intense argument with somebody where you want to win, and you're frustrated with them and the whole situation.

You're in the trench. Whereas when you're relaxed, it's more, you know, a broad concave or a flat table where the ball bearing can move around at will.

If it sounds like Marcelo and people that train these different transition states, you're really learning to access the different frame rates, but from a place of like kind of like a little dimple in a table and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple and kind of moving from dimple to dimple as opposed to like these trenches of brain states.

I think that most bad decisions are made from a high frame rate, high arousal state. Most of the terrible things that humans have done to one another, you know, I suppose there's sociopathy and pre-planned things, but they tend to be associated with high arousal states where people regret what they did.

All second-degree murder, for instance.

In any event, I think the ability to move through these different arousal states at will is possible. You asked earlier, like, how would one do that?

Well, the beautiful thing about the visual system in these different frame rates and states of arousal is that it works in both directions. So when you're in a higher state of arousal, your visual aperture shrinks; you go to a higher frame rate.

But it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture, you go to a higher frame rate. The converse is also true. If you deliberately, for instance, as we're looking across one another right now, if I start to take in the fullness of the picture here—the walls, etc.—there's a natural relaxation of the autonomic arousal system.

So parasympathetic activity goes up, and what's incredible is that anytime we view a horizon, that naturally happens because you're not setting to a single fixation point.

So anytime you see a horizon, you relax, and it's not a coincidence. The visual system can drive it inward, and your autonomic arousal can drive it toward your visual system.

The other thing is there's a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago that showed that people who do a biofeedback game where they're watching a little, you know, it's like a more kind of like a sine wave, and they're deliberately trying to increase their level of arousal as the curve goes up—for those that are just listening—within a few days, they can learn to control their pupil size, which sets their arousal and their aperture for segmenting time.

So you can learn this through biofeedback, and I think that the script for that is available online. I haven't tried it yet, but have you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil sizes, even independently of one another?

That's amazing because it's not supposed to be able to occur, but they can. So you can learn to, you know, I guess the poor man's version of this would be to look in the mirror, stare at yourself, and try and ramp up your level of autonomic arousal and watch your pupils get bigger, and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller.

That practice, it seems in biofeedback, allows people to do it without staring into the mirror, so to speak. So it can be done; it's just that it hasn't been parsed by science that finely until recently.

It's interesting. I have this term I use called "firewalking," which for me means cultivating the ability to learn from experiences one doesn't have with the same somatic intensity that one learns from really intense experiences that we have.

So for example, let's just say you're a jiu-jitsu fighter, and you overextend your arm, and you're in a world championship, and you get your arm broken or your shoulder ripped off or something. So you've lost the world championship, and you got a shattered arm.

You're not going to overextend your arm that way again. You've learned that lesson; it's burned in. But like if you're watching a jiu-jitsu fight and someone's arm gets armbarred and then taps out, it's very, very different experience.

How can we cultivate the ability to study other people's worst, most heartbreaking blunders, worst moments, etc., and learn from that with the same somatic intensity that they learned from it?

Right? So much of that is physiological. So I've spent a lot of time doing biofeedback and a lot of time doing visualization practices and doing very intense visualization practices.

Many, many years working with triggers for my own psychology and physiology so that I can get my physiology primed to have an intense learning experience while studying something that might otherwise just feel intellectual.

Then combining that with my own experience of things, it's such a—I mean, we can 100x or 1000x or 10,000x our learning curve by being able to learn from other things with the same intensity that we can learn from our own things.

But people don't harness that. Why do you think they don't? Is it just that it takes time and it doesn't seem as intuitive as going out and shooting free throws or something?

I think people are really amazingly unreflective about the training process. I told you, I'm working... I haven't written a book since "The Art of Learning," and I'm a couple of years into this beautiful process of writing my next book, which is going to be called, I think, "The Art of Training."

It's really what I've been cultivating for the last decades, and I'm deconstructing my approach to training in mental and physical disciplines. It's interesting to go through that process myself—what do I do, what have I done, and what have I helped others do?

It's an interesting... the art of learning kind of was a birthing process; that's what it felt like to me. I took notes for five years, and then after the 2004 worlds, I wrote it in nine months. It just kind of came out of me, and I'm kind of in that process now with this.

It feels really organic and intrinsic, the creative process. I don't know; it's very interesting when you talk to people who are really playing at elite levels of different fields or who are just below full self-expression or like they're just on the edge of virtuosity but not quite there.

You start to deconstruct what they do, and there's so much low-hanging fruit that they can do. Why? I don't know. I think in many ways, people—there are lots of reasons.

For one thing, people who are very talented in arts don't have to be so deliberate about their training often to reach a certain level. Often, people have other people building their training process, and they're not reflective about their own training process because they have big teams of coaches who are creating it for them.

People haven't cultivated the art of deconstruction, which is an art that's very important. People haven't cultivated the art of loving training.

which is a hugely important meta skill to learn. People haven't taken on all of the skills around physiological triggers, around changing one's physiological state at will. People haven't practiced visualization very intensely. There are all of these skills that we can put together in order to train at a world-class level, but it takes patience and creativity. It's about not just being subject to what everyone else does, but being able to look expansively at everything.

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We had a guest on this podcast, Jim Hollis, an 84-year-old probably 85-year-old analyst. He’s a brilliant guy who has written some really important books, like "Under Saturn's Shadow," and he said, you know, he has a real kind of "suit up, show up, get to work" mentality, but he is also a very reflective person. He said, you know, if there's one simple key to life, it's to understand that most of our daily lives, our waking lives, are in stimulus-response.

But it's so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out of stimulus and response, either to let stuff geyser up out of our unconscious or subconscious mind, or to put some real thought into something. Most everybody is in stimulus-response. I wonder these days, with social media and so many things filling the space between walking to the car or with the pro players that you work with. I'm guessing the moment they're on the plane, they're on their phones and texting.

All these things are wonderful technologies, but they fill all the space with stimulus-response. Yeah, they fill all the space with stimulus-response. It's not unless you go to a place with no Wi-Fi accessibility that you suddenly realize, like, wow, in most of modern life, we're just constantly in this tennis or ping-pong match with this trivial thing and that trivial thing. Some of it's essential, but there's no "space" anymore.

In many ways, my life is built around creating that space. It's interesting; when I was playing chess, I experimented with studying chess from everywhere between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day to see where the sweet spot was. What I came to was about four and a half hours a day. But that four and a half hours a day was like a 10 out of 10—just on fire. Then the rest of the day became about cultivating those four and a half hours. My life today has that kind of rhythm as well.

Training, like I've spent many years working with people who are just brilliant in the investment space, has been a really interesting way to refine the art of training. It's a great laboratory because people are very driven; they want to be all in, they're motivated, and they'll take themselves on. It's a great place for me, over the last couple of decades, to refine the art of training.

I don't like solving for motivation; that's one thing. I think part of that relates to that quirky dynamic from when I was seven that I described of always being the target and never having to take on my weaknesses outside of my conceptual scheme. In many ways, I haven't really had to struggle with motivation myself, for better or worse. I love working with people who are all in and want to take themselves on. I don't love having to motivate people.

A great laboratory for me is with people who have all sorts of problems, who might be obstructed, but who are all in. Like you're working with world-class investors, and they're grinding themselves out 14, 15, 16 hours a day. Doing less is a huge part of doing much more. You start to see that they might be at, like, if you think about a 10 out of 10 as being when they're at their very best creatively, they could slip from like a 10 to a 2 and not even notice.

Then you begin to cultivate an awareness of where one is in one's creative spectrum. You start to cultivate the art of stress and recovery, like amping oneself up and then releasing. You see that the ability to turn it on is directly connected to the ability to turn it off. If you walk into a fight gym and study a bunch of fighters on the mats, one great read you can make is looking at the depth of physiological relaxation when the guys aren't fighting.

You'll see who the highest-level fighters are. The best guys can turn it on with wild intensity, but their bodies are so mellow when they're not going. That oscillation, that range, is so huge. But people don't cultivate the art of turning it off in order to learn how to turn it on. For many, many years, decades, I've been practicing what I call the MIQ process—Most Important Question process.

The essence of it is what I came to as the most potent way so far that I've found to train analysts or thinkers in mental arenas. You're training people in the art of discovering what matters most. If you talk to a great chess player, they actually look at less than a lower-level chess player, but they look in the right direction. You might think a great chess player can calculate 50 moves deep, 100 moves deep; it's all irrelevant if move two was inaccurate.

So it was just all an illusion. The great chess players might look much less, but they're looking in the most potent directions. The lower-level chess players are lost in a sea of complexity. If you're working with a scientist or an investor, you want them to strain their mind for what is the most important question. Ideally, begin the practice toward the end of their workday with a release recovery period, with full intensity in a peak performance state.

Stretch one's mind for what matters most, and then release it. Release the workday completely; don't work all night grinding yourself out at a low level. Release, and then first thing in the morning, waking up pre-input, return one's mind to the critical question and brainstorm on it. It's very powerful because you're systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind. You're feeding critical questions to the unconscious, which is processing overnight.

I know you know all this; the consistency with which you come up with an insight in the morning is incredible. Interestingly, you'll probably know why much more than me. Improved dream recall often happens simultaneously when one starts to have more and more insights about the MIQ in the morning, which is fascinating.

Then over time, you can have micro-manifestations of this throughout the day. Before going for a workout, before taking a walk, before taking a break, before taking a piss—instead of checking your phone while taking a piss, you pose yourself in MIQ, you release it, you do not do anything but piss in the bathroom and breathe, and then return to the question, and you'll have an insight.

You're learning to oscillate between the conscious and unconscious states, and you're opening up that channel. You're practicing stress and recovery. Then your physiological workouts are also stress and recovery all the time, so you're building that theme in everything that you do. You realize that when you're at your very best for four or five hours a day, you're doing multiples of the work that you're doing if you're just grinding yourself at what I've called in the past a simmering six or whatever for 15 or 16 hours a day.

People can do so much more in less time. My lifestyle is based on that. I'm training very intensely physically, and I'm doing really intense mental work, and I oscillate between them in beautiful ways. I have a lot of empty space for reflection, for meditation, for zoning my mind on what matters most. It's about quality, not quantity.

But it's so interesting how we live in this culture where just quantity is consuming everyone. It's, well, as Hollis said, the stimulus-response thing dominates. It dominates, I think, because I have several reflections. First of all, I just have to say you're absolutely a scientist; you just proved it to us through a description of this process, which I might ask you to describe once again.

I think there's so much value in each of the pieces and how it's put together. Three things come to mind. First of all, yes indeed, as you know, and listeners of this podcast will know, it is during sleep that we reorganize our neural connections and actual neuroplasticity occurs. The stimulus is provided in wakefulness and focus and attention, but the actual rewiring occurs during sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep.

One little fun, I think, but also powerful tool that I learned from maybe you know him as well, I'm blessed to have Rick Rubin as a very good friend. Oh yeah, Rick! I've had beautiful gems, amazing, wonderful, such a wise guy. I've been spending more and more time with Rick, and he taught me something extremely valuable, which was the process of taking some time to just lie completely still and let your mind go as wild as it needs to or as calm as it needs to while keeping the body completely still.

This mimics rapid eye movement sleep when we're paralyzed and the mind is very, very active. I actually think that practices such as Yoga Nidra and non-sleep deep rest are also mimics of rapid eye movement sleep, and there are data starting to emerge now that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep but in wakefulness.

So put simply, lying still, relaxing the body as much as possible, and letting the mind be extremely active. Rick also taught me a little trick for which I don't know any science, but it certainly seems to work for me, which is that if you wake up from a dream and you want to continue having that dream, keep your body completely still. Whereas if you wake up from a dream and it was a troubling or anxiety-provoking dream, move your body. It seems to work extremely well, and I have my theories about why this works.

I have to ask about this process of reflecting on one's own mistakes, deliberately addressing one's own pain points or shame points, as such a key feature of your upbringing and your practice around learning. Forgive me for going a little bit longer here, but recently somebody taught me something extremely useful. She said, you know, our consciousness is sort of like a lighthouse, and we have this beam of light sweeping around 360 degrees.

But where we have places of shame about whatever—things that were done to us, things that we've done, whatever—just points of shame, things that we don't want people to know about us, that we don't even like to think about, it's like a stain on that lighthouse. When that light passes through that stain, it casts a shadow in the shape of a wedge. She described it in somewhat mystical terms. She said, you know, it's through that shadow that evil things enter us and that the world can hurt us.

The process of getting over our shame, but also experiencing life in much more fullness and being able to cultivate our craft and be more present for ourselves than for others, is a process of going right up to that lighthouse window and looking at the stain and going, "That's what it is," and that's the process of wiping it off.

Now, that's just an illustration for us to understand what I think is the process you're describing, which is that you get right up next to your worst nightmares, your worst mistakes, the things you don't want to think about, and in doing so, you learn to relax in their presence, and they sort of disappear as points of shame.

It's interesting; when I wrote "The Art of Learning," it was in many ways cathartic for me because there were parts of my life that I felt like I had let myself down. There were parts, like my chess life, that I moved away from, and there were certain moments of it where I felt like I hadn't fully expressed my potential. I just wrote them all; I just shared it all, and it was so beautiful. It was so cathartic.

When I think about leadership, I think that it's so important to lead with vulnerability. I spent a couple of days ago with Sean McVay, who's the head coach of the LA Rams, who just a few days after this big loss against the Eagles, we actually ended up watching the tape. It was his first watching of the tape of this heartbreaking playoff loss he had. Watching him process it, you know, he's such a great leader.

Both Joe and Sean lead; they both take themselves on more intensely than anything, but they lead with vulnerability. They go up against their stains, and being authentic there, as opposed to being a leader or a father or a mother or a coach who just keeps it in the pocket as if they're perfect, there's something so inauthentic about that, I think, in human relationships and in the cultivation of oneself as an artist.

Going right at one's weakness is so powerful. Now, of course, there's also the tender balance of how much we should cultivate our strengths and how much we should be spending shoring up our weaknesses. One of the most important principles, which I learned too late in my chess life, is that we can take on our weaknesses through the lens of our strengths.

Remember this brilliant sage, Russian coach Yori Radv, said to me at one point, "You can learn Karpov through Kasparov." His point being you can learn about the great defensive chess through the great defense of great aggressors like you, as opposed to just studying Karpov and thinking, "What would Karpov do here?" which was urged to do by other people—learn defense through offense.

It was part of my self-expression. I learned that principle too late for my chess life, but it's manifest everywhere else. While we're cultivating our strength, which I think we should do as a way of life, how do we go up against our stains but in ways that we're not fundamentally—it's not shame. I don't relate to personally; that's a word I don't like.

It's not shame; it's like when it becomes just like a breath pattern. We lose; we go; we put ourselves on the line; we lose; we go at it; we study it; we study how we look. We study about what the other thing that's incredible to me is that when you study your losses, when you go up against what you're calling that beautiful image, like the shadow of the lighthouse, the interconnectedness of the technical, the psychological, and the thematic is so powerful in the learning process.

Almost every technical mistake that we make in an art, if we're pushing ourselves to our limits, if you and I are around the same level and we're competing in something, any technical mistake I made will have a psychological dimension because my technical weakness emerged because I was so psychologically pressured that I wasn't able to solve the technical position right.

Or if I make a psychological error, it's often because I was a little technically out of my water, and so it put extra pressure on my psyche that then you were able to exploit. Every technical mistake is local, but there are themes—there's a theme that houses hundreds of those technical manifestations.

If we are always thinking about the technical, the thematic, the psychological, and we have what I call a six-dimensional introspective process, and we're looking at all these interconnected parts of the human experience of an art or anything else, then the growth curve is incredibly explosive.

We recognize we make a technical mistake, and we learn the theme. We take on the theme that housed that one but also houses dozens of others. As we turn that theme into a strength, into a power zone, then that technical mistake goes away, but so do the other manifestations of that theme.

If we're also studying the psychological weakness that allowed that technical weakness to manifest, we unearth itself, then that psychological dimension becomes something we take on. Then we're studying thematic interconnectedness as a way of life because then that lesson we learned through that chess—that I made a subtle chess mistake—but that connects to my love life, it connects to my fatherhood, it connects to my jiu-jitsu, my everything because it connects to the theme and it connects to my psychology.

I don't believe in compartmentalization; I believe in thematic interconnectedness. The core themes of my life, I would say, if I had to boil it down, would be love, interconnectedness, and receptivity. I only do what I love, and I spend time with people who I love, and that's how I live.

The study of interconnectedness is my way of life in some of the ways I've been describing, and receptivity is what I cultivate every day in my life and the ocean with people, with humans. But we always get isolated; we get siloed.

Is this chess mistake? One of the things I've found so confusing is why don't more great chess players successfully translate their level from chess to other things? Because chess is so hard, and chess is such a relentlessly truth-telling art. If you become a world-class chess player, you're good because there's no luck in chess, especially if you become very good very young.

I think this is true of most prodigies. I don't want to name them, but I have a colleague, a very smart guy. His science is very solid, and I remember I met with him, and I said, "Is it true that you're a child prodigy?" He said, "Former child prodigy." I was like, "Okay, well, here we're getting technical."

But yeah, okay, I think we're— and I asked my dad because my dad lived in the same building as Daniel Barenboim, the musician who, if you've ever seen the movie "Hilary and Jackie," was one of the world's most accomplished piano players at a very young age. My dad used to hear him playing when he was a kid, and they wouldn't let him play with other kids.

I mean, Barenboim is a ser for classical musicians and pianists in particular; it's serious stuff. So I asked my dad, "What's the deal with this child prodigy thing?" He said, "Yeah, very few of them go on to do much in their adult careers in any field." I was like, "Wow."

I thought, okay, so what's missing there? It's clearly not a lack of ability or focus. I mean, you could just say raw talent, but you still have to have kids' L to focus. So what's missing is this transfer of understanding, it seems, or what you're talking about—the interconnectedness of things.

I probably will get myself in trouble with this colleague, but hey, listen, maybe he'll take on something new and do something additionally spectacular. He's got a lot of things on his plate. But you know, that struck me. I was like, oh, you know, it's not clear that being a "child prodigy" is such a good thing for the long arc of one's life.

But you have seemed to bring in these other elements—love. I'd like to talk more about that. I would also add, at least from an outsider's perspective, you seem to have broken the mold with what's expected of you based on your prior accomplishments.

Just to speak, I have no identity in being a prodigy, just to be clear. I don't relate to that word at all. I mean, words have been put on me from the outside, but I just don't associate with it. I don't relate to it at all because I was, you know, maybe somewhat talented in chess compared to most people, but then very early in my life, by the time I was six or something, I was only competing against people who were better than me and kids who were as talented as me, and then on the world stage, kids who were more talented than me.

I couldn't rely on my talent at all because I had to work my ass off, and I won and I lost, and I got my ass kicked. For me, it was all about the battle and taking myself on. I think what happens—it's funny. Many years ago, I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition, and I showed up at this place, and all these kids were there, and they were all excited to play against me.

Then the organizer of it said, "My son hasn't lost a chess game in two years." That's all you need to know because it just means you're just—of course, he was the one kid who didn't want to play against me, right? Because if you haven't lost a chess game in two years, you're not taking yourself on; you're finding people who you can beat, and you're only playing against them.

So there's a couple levels to this. Let's dig into it. I think that people who have identity in being a prodigy develop a brittleness often because they associate their level of mastery with talent, with something innate, with being smarter, more brilliant, more gifted, whatever.

Then that is—you think about Carol Dweck's work in entity versus incremental theories of intelligence, right? That's an entity theory of intelligence. I think there's something fundamentally brittle about that. Then what happens is one doesn't take risks; one doesn't expose oneself. One associates one's great moments with something ingrained or innate versus the hard work that it took to get there.

There are all sorts of paralyzing dynamics there. There's also a tendency to lie. Carol's early papers referred to this in the discussion section. She describes how the students who did not have a growth mindset, who really identified and held so much of their ego with their performance, were at a significantly greater tendency to lie about their performance when they didn't do well, to themselves and to others.

That's right, but the lying to oneself is the really interesting part, right? So there's that dimension, right? Which you and I have both seen just countless manifestations of. Believe me, when you're competing against someone who you see has that kind of psychological construction, they're done. You can just break them.

There are so many chinks in the armor; you can find where their mind stops with false constructs, where the energy stops, where their body is crimped. You can find their connection to the ground and explode through it. In mental and physical disciplines, if someone has that kind of identity in being the more brilliant one, the more gifted one, whatever, they're prey from a competitive perspective, which is ultimately good for them if they expose themselves to it because then they have to take themselves on.

But the dynamic that I was reflecting on in chess players is a little next door to this, which is that I think that if you're learning how to play chess, and let's just say I was teaching you to play chess—do you play chess? Trivially? Okay, so let's say I was teaching you to play chess, right? I could teach you to play chess with a language that is chess-specific.

I can teach you chess principles; I can teach you very effectively with chess principles. But I could also teach you just as effectively, or maybe somewhat more effectively, but to say just as effectively with chess principles that are also life principles. It's interesting when you watch most chess teachers; they teach in a localized manner.

So people can spend 20 years inside of chess but never break beyond the 64 squares, or they can, from the age of six or seven on, be learning that principle as it connects to chess but also seeing how it connects to life. Could you give me an example of one such principle? Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs.

Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of molecules. The names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally, but otherwise, the principles and verbs are what's most important.

So what's an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers? Everything transfers, first of all. I mean, if we're open to it, then everything in chess connects. So when people ask me, "Do you still play chess?" I say metaphorically. I mean, I play chess all the time; I just have not moved a piece in many, many years.

But okay, to be specific, I could give you many examples. All right, so in chess, there's a bishop and there's a knight. They're both worth about three pawns. Now, I could teach, okay, so the knight moves like an L and can jump over pieces. The bishop moves diagonally and is stuck on one color for its whole life.

They're both worth about three pawns, but knights are—and I can just say to you, but like knights are a little bit better in closed positions because they can jump over things. Bishops are a little better if your pawns are on the opposite color from them. You should also know that rooks and bishops are much stronger than rooks and knights, and you should also know that queens and knights are a bit stronger than queens and bishops.

So the bishop's value is a little bit stronger compared with a rook, and the queen knight's value is a little bit stronger with a queen. Pawn structure influences them, right? So I could teach you a very simple set of principles through which you can understand how to evaluate bishops and knights, right?

And there's many other layers to that, but that's some of it, right? I could also teach you the same thing and be teaching you the nature of relativity. I could be teaching you the nature of interdependence, right? I could teach you the nature of pawn structure play that influences bishops and knights in ways that are chess-specific or in ways that just allow you to understand dynamic quality and static quality.

You know what leaps to mind when you made that description? I didn't follow all of it to memorization, but family feud. I just imagine two families in a feud, right? You get two brothers together; they can do certain things, but you get a brother and sister together. I have a sister; she can do certain things that are powerful and diabolical in ways that two brothers can't, right?

Yes, you get two big strong brothers, but maybe one that can't creep through small places. You can map to different— that's sort of more of an analogy for it all. But I started to immediately think about, oh, it's like a family feud. If I were to view the pieces as sibling dynamics and parent-sibling-cousin dynamics, it's like matchups with humans or in basketball.

This team is better than this team, and this team, but against—there are some matchups that are hugely favorable. A lot of the inside game of basketball is around which teams thrive against which other teams, even though they might be inferior because of the nature of the construction of the team. You have networks of those teams.

Then how do you deal with lineups? How do you deal with rotation patterns? The inner game of basketball is all based on the same stuff that dictates the bishop and the knight and the rook and the queen and how they influence it, right? It's interdependence. Beautiful. It's relativity. It's dynamic quality.

Then you could think about Robert Pirsig's work and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" around dynamic quality versus static quality. You can be teaching a student while you're teaching about rook and bishop and rook and knight or knights and bishops. You can be teaching them about dynamic quality, right?

Then you can expand into the study of the metaphysics of quality, and then you have a seven-year-old student who's learning chess or a 12-year-old who's learning chess or who's learning about life and philosophy and everything. You can do it in the same amount of time, but you're trapping a mind inside of 64 squares, or you're teaching a mind about life through the 64 squares.

I think so many of the reasons that people who become excellent in one thing can't translate it into other places is not will later on in life; they have the will. It's because they didn't learn with universal principles. They didn't study their art with a presence to the importance of interconnectedness, which is a lot of what my life's work is in.

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Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. When I think about interconnectedness, I think the word mapping comes to mind. I define a map of any kind as a transformation of one set of points into another set of points—points along the Earth transferred onto a page or an electronic map.

What's missing from a kind of basic understanding of a transformation of points into another transformation of points are these verb actions. It's the algorithm, if you will, that's not present in how we map one context onto another context. It requires a lot of thinking to do what you describe.

I don't think it's reflexive for most people to watch a game of basketball and think about the emotional dynamics and the consistencies of the emotional dynamics. Last night, I had the great gift of Josh bringing me to a Celtics game. He brought me to a Celtics game, and they were playing the Clippers. I was cheering against the hometown crowd here in Los Angeles, but it was friendly.

You were describing the players and their recent history, and you said something about the difference between preconscious effort and postconscious effort. Yes, maybe we could talk about that as a gateway into ego, which is like a term that the moment you throw out the word ego, it's like saying sex. People make all sorts of assumptions about what it is and what it isn't.

But let's talk about preconscious and postconscious. Because we'll get back to the Celtics and the game that was played last night. By the way, the Celtics won in overtime by a good size margin. There's something very beautiful that I think all of us are drawn to as observers, but hopefully everyone gets to experience this at some point in their life as well firsthand.

When somebody in art, music, sport, or whatever is just being themselves, and this seeming virtuosity comes out. If I think about what Rick Rubin does, a lot of what Rick has done historically is to find artists and work with artists and just bring out what they're already doing—like the core elements.

When the Beastie Boys started, it was like a joke, he said, and they were kind of making fun of, had wrestling elements and hardcore and punk and all this stuff and hip-hop. He tends to work with artists early on when they're in that really pure state of not thinking about the returns on their investment and all that.

He said many times before to me and publicly that after people achieve a certain level of fame, it's much harder to get back to that pure picture of oneself—preconscious expression. Just Josh being Josh as an eight-year-old, you just happen to be in Washington Square Park learning chess or, you know, pick any number of different examples.

It's very different than when people now reflect on their trophies on the wall or their platinum records or the fact that they won and lost or that there's another champion in the house. The real virtuosos seem to be people that can get back to that over and over again—the Yo-Yo Mas, the, you know.

People live longer now, so it used to be the Mozarts, the Bachs; they could make their contribution, and then they died. Now we live longer lives, so people have many more chances, but there's also that longer window for lack of productivity.

This is a really important theme, and it's a gateway into so much. We can explore a lot through this tunnel. When I use this term preconscious and postconscious artist or competitor, it's my own language, so I'll describe what I mean.

You think about myself in the chess world, right? One discovers an art; one feels a passion for it. It's beautiful; it's joyous; it's self-expressive. I love the battle. I'm winning; I'm losing; I'm having fun; I'm just letting it rip. There's a naiveté to that; there's a freedom; there's a playfulness.

There's a lack of complexity, a lack of self-awareness, a lack of awareness of my own mutability, a lack of awareness that I can be shattered or I can die, a lack of awareness of the existential absurdity of the fact that I'm devoting my life to 64 squares and 32 pieces of wood on top of 64 squares. I haven't reflected on the fact that this is ridiculous, right?

Or if you're fighting, like, what am I doing? I'm spending my life in combat. What about love? What about saving the planet? What about everything else? I haven't reflected on the fact that this is just a joke and its absurdity, right?

One's liberated from those kinds of things, and then there comes this moment. For me, it was triggered by the movie, by losing that sense of self-expression, by thinking, "What would someone else do here?" instead of "What would my freedom, my playfulness tell me to do?"

It can happen when one has a near-death experience. It can happen when one has one's heart broken. It can happen when one starts reading existential literature and reflecting on the absurdity of things, or one has a friend who starts pointing out over and over, like, "This is ridiculous; you're just playing chess. What are you doing?"

It can happen when one wins the world championship or the NBA Finals because suddenly the thing that you have oriented yourself around your whole life—the goal you had your whole life—you've now accomplished, and now you're on the other side of it. Suddenly your world is shifted; the things that motivated you no longer motivate you.

The things that felt so important to you now seem somewhat trivial because you've already accomplished that. Where's the intrinsic motivation? Where's the deep self-expression? You think about, as we gain complexity in our psychology—and we can gain that complexity in many different ways—we hit this tunnel.

Often when someone becomes self-aware or when someone becomes less liberated, or like the chain sit in, or when one—let's just say you're an extreme athlete, but you feel invincible, and then suddenly you have a terrible accident. You realize, holy, I could actually die. I can break.

Then how do you get back to that freedom of taking the wild risks that you've been taking as that extreme athlete with an awareness of the fact that you can die? For me, I had, you know, I foil now in the biggest waves that I can find in where I live in Costa Rica. You have big hold downs; you can have—you're foiling on top of a long mast, which is a carbon mast, which is very sharp, and then a wing, which is sharp.

So you're basically going 40, 45 miles on top of a guillotine. If you're trying to, you know, you're really cultivating high-performance foiling, you're pushing turns really hard, you're breaching wing tips, like you can taco and have the thing come right at your head or your neck. You can die at any minute if you get something wrong, which is very different than foiling straight or EF foiling.

Talking about high-performance training, by definition, you have to be risking these things in order to push the limits of what's possible. If you're not, you're not at that stretch point, right? But then suddenly, like, you have a terrible injury, or let's just say I drown in the bottom of a pool.

Some 11 years ago, 10, 11 years ago, I heard about this. It was a—I was doing hypoxic breath work. I did not realize, which maybe if you could have taught me, if I'd known you, that carbon dioxide is what gives you the urge to breathe. I didn't realize that, so I had all the CO2 flushed out of my body. I felt blissful swimming underwater.

Yeah, exhale. I guess we should save a few lives here or prevent a few deaths, rather. Anytime you emphasize the duration or intensity of your exhales, you're going to blow out more carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the trigger for the gasp reflex. So yes, you'll be able to hold your breath longer above or below water if you first do cyclic hyperventilation and then a long and dump all your air.

But never, ever, ever do cyclic hyperventilation, folks, or any long exhale emphasized breathing, even standing in a puddle. Because that gasp reflex is the thing that makes you shoot for the surface, and if you don't do that, you feel pretty peaceful until lights out. Or drive a car—don't do it while driving a car.

I know people who have done that, actually, rather exceptional people who I know have done that. Yeah, dumping carbon dioxide lets you hold your breath longer, but that's part of the problem. Shallow water blackout usually happens to very high-level athletes, Navy SEALs, right? Because they're training at pushing their limits.

They're learning to suppress the urge to breathe. If you're flushing CO2, you're learning; you're training yourself not to feel it. I've been a free diver my whole life. I grew up free diving and spear fishing in the southern Bahamas, but I wasn't doing hypoxic breath work while free diving.

I was at the NYU pool. I drowned; I was in the bottom of the pool for four and a half minutes after blacking out, which I know because there was an old man who I knew who was in the locker room who saw me in the bottom of the pool lying there. He timed his laps, and he did four laps.

After the third one, he said, "I'm going to check on him," and then he did his fourth lap, pulled me, and his laps were for a little bit over a minute. I was unconscious for 25 minutes. I was totally blue, except my face was blown out red, my eyes, my body. My training almost killed me and also saved me.

My body handled it really well; I had no water in my lungs. I spent that night in the hospital, of course, and I was testing. I remember doing like remembering old chess variations, like testing my mind in any way, like was I ruined? I somehow survived, and I survived intact.

That's one of those moments—shattering moments—which I'm ultimately grateful for because it's what catalyzed me to—I emerged with more of a commitment, and I've had this kind of commitment in my life for many years, but a more intense commitment to live life as truly and beautifully and authentically as conceivable.

Soon after, we moved to the jungle, and we live life now, which is awesome with my family. But I bring that up now because imagine how one relates to big wave surfing or big wave foiling pre- and post-drowning, right? There's like one has to have an integrated sense for one's own mortality versus being naive to the fact that it can happen.

That tunnel from the preconscious to the postconscious performer is a passage where, during that passage, most people are locked up; they underperform where they were when they were more naive. I don't personally relate to it as a return to the preconscious state; I relate to it as an integration of one's mortality, of the existential absurdity into one's consciousness, and then a discovery of a deeper sense of liberation of freedom.

But that is not in denial of what we've learned in that tunnel or what triggered that tunnel, but that is more complex. Trying to be our previous selves is not a great strategy. Trying to integrate our previous experiences in our current and future selves seems like a good strategy.

I feel that way, and I think it's also pretty—you can't go back. You can't pretend you're not that dying is impossible. You can't pretend that you're unbreakable. We are breakable. Some people do it without being really reflective, but I think that if you ask anyone who really has been in life-and-death situations as a way of life for a long time, whether they relate to the idea of fearlessness, if they really reflect on it, they'll say no.

Because fearlessness isn't a thing; it's how one works with fear. Usually, what locks people up isn't fear; it's the fear of fear, right? We're afraid of our fear; we're afraid of being afraid. But you ask a great Navy SEAL; they work with their fear. You ask a great MMA fighter; they're not without fear. Of course, they have fear. If they don't have fear, they have a problem, right?

There are some examples of people who might be wired a little bit differently, right? But the integration of the more complex worldview into one's liberation is the postconscious performer. It can play in lots of ways, right?

It can also play—and so like one thing that when you think about a sports team that has accomplished everyone's dreams, and now we want to win a championship again, we can't go back to what worked before because they're different men, right? One needs to find a different kind of mission, a different kind of internal relationship to the mission, a different kind of freedom.

How important do you think it is to attach language to these things of identity and source of motivation? In other words, let's say, okay, you're working with the Celtics. They won the championship last year. This year, they are in a completely different mental frame as a consequence. They're quote-unquote dominant in the sense that they hold the crown; they hold the trophy.

But they're more vulnerable too because the only place to go from there is either stay or you're going down a notch or more. So do you think it's important for them to create a verbal label for where they're at, like, "We're the champs, and we're going to hold on to the belt"?

I realize there's not a belt in basketball, but they're going to hold on to their status. Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Because the game is played through verbs; it's not played through adjectives. I don't think we ever want to hold on to—like that's static.

We want to—like you think about predator and prey dynamics in the world or in competition or in anything. You want to be competing. Now, there's a fusion of the predator and prey. You want to have the awareness that that prey has, but one wants to be playing to win, not to lose.

The moment we're trying to hold on to something we already have, we're falling into the static quality, right? Or you think about, for example, brilliant investors. They'll have success, then they'll try to figure out how to replicate their success. So they'll build mental models, frameworks to replicate their success, and those become grooves, like neural pathways.

Then they follow those grooves, but then the grooves become a rut, and the water stops, and they get stuck in an old—like so they succeeded; they built mental models; they recreated the patterns. It was beautiful, but then it got static, and then it's got stuck energy, and it doesn't apply to the world because the world's changing.

What actually made them succeed was dynamic quality, was being at the front of the freight train driving through space-time, pre-intellectual consciousness, right? Then they're trying to recreate; they're getting too stuck in things, and they create mental models that are stale.

Then other people replicate those stale mental models, and you have huge industries that emerge from static quality later on top of static quality, which is most of humanity, right? So I think that as a world-class competitor who's trying to win after winning, one needs to have the same dynamic mindset one had when one was hunting forth in the first place.

Rediscovery. Marcelo Garcia, one of my most favorite moments of Marcelo was—so we were—Marcelo, nine-time world champion in the grappling arts, five-time ADCC, five-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu, four-time ADCC. ADCC is when all the different grappling arts come together. It happens every two years, so Russian judo, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, right? Everything comes together, and you see who's the strongest grappler in all the different arts.

He's known by many as the greatest pound-for-pound grappler to ever live, just for context. Marcelo is one of my dearest friends. We own a school together in New York. We trained together for a very long time. He and his wife, Tachi, who's also one of my dearest friends, had a terrible tragedy years ago; they lost a baby.

It was a devastating period, and then Marcelo had cancer. He had stomach cancer; he had surgery, eight rounds of chemotherapy. He hasn't competed in 13 years, and he's actually competing tomorrow for the first time in, I think, it's 13 years in Bangkok. It was going to be in Denver, and I was going to fly there between the Lakers and the Mavs games, but it's in Bangkok, so I can't get there.

But he's weighed in; he's doing great; he's feeling awesome. The story I'm about to tell is about this epic, beautiful human being who, in many ways, created—he's the innovator that led to much of what is modern grappling today. Back in, I think it was 2005 and 2007, this story—or maybe it's 2007 and 2009. I think it's 2005 and 2007; chronology is not a strong point for me in terms of my recollection in general.

We were in a training camp; we were training all the time. He had this innovative repertoire. He goes into ADCC, dominates it, and it's a very specific repertoire—guillotines—just dominates, blows the grappling world away. For the two years that followed him winning that ADCC, the entire grappling world was studying what he had just done, or a lot of the grappling world was studying what he had just recreated.

It was so beautiful, innovative, powerful, playing up weight classes—just unbelievable. I was on the mats with Marcelo the next day, the Monday after he fought Sunday. I also want to say Marcelo never—I never in all the years I had of training with Marcelo, I never saw him miss a Monday training after winning a major competition on Sunday.

Wow! Everyone takes time off; I never saw him miss a Monday. You talk about dynamic quality and humility and a way of life, right? The Monday he was on the mats, he shed the entire repertoire. He just won the World Championship. Everyone spent the next two years chasing his quality, which was dynamic. They turned it static.

He shed the whole repertoire and created a whole new repertoire, and he was playing this omoplata game, which he then went on the next ADCC two years later and won again with this brand new thing—just shedding the snake skin or shedding the old shell, right? It's such a beautiful example of pushing one's limits as a way of life, not being stuck in old mental models, right?

Breaking new ground as a way of life—dynamic quality. That's what it takes, and it's so hard for people to do. I mean, I think about Michael Jordan and the fact that he wanted to be a pro baseball player, so he had a brief stint at that, and it was underwhelming, certainly compared to his basketball career.

But of course, his basketball career was so spectacular that the expectation wasn't there. But nonetheless, you know, it's so rare to find people that are super successful repeatedly within a domain, let alone across domains. It's just, you know, Richard Feynman—yeah, he could paint a little bit and draw a little bit, but I don't know.

I've seen those pictures of the roosters, and they're kind of first-year art school. Yeah, so it's cool; like, cool, you learned to draw and paint, but you weren't—if his name wasn't on them, like, no one would care. Well, Jordan had an incredible competitive drive—an incredible competitive drive.

The amount of—like, it's very hard to replicate success in an art because one shouldn't replicate; one should drive to rediscover, right? It's like a recreation of something new, not old, right? I think the impulse once one wins is to do what one did before, but the world changes.

One of the gifts the Celtics have this year is that everyone is targeting us, right? Because we're the champions; we won it last year. So everyone brings an extra 30% every night. Every team in the NBA is stacked with brilliant athletes. Even the lower-level teams from the outside in are filled with amazing athletes who, if you're the game of the week or the month for them, they bring it all.

So all of our weaknesses are being exposed, which is what we want, right? There are growing pains you work through it all. The good thing about the competitive truth-telling world is that our competitors, our rivals, help force us to take our weaknesses on, which makes it very hard to sit in static quality unless we're happy with mediocrity.

The Celtics have, you know, one of the most—Joe Mazzulla is the head coach of the Boston Celtics, and he's one of—he and I are dear friends. For the last two and a half years or so, we've been thought partners and brothers in this journey. I've never seen anyone in my life better at turning weaknesses into strengths than Joe, which is a huge statement because I spent my life with these all-in performers—not taking weaknesses and making them less weak or leveling them out, but turning an area of core weakness into a core power zone.

That's a superpower, and that's something that Joe trains harder than anybody else, and he leads by example, and he leads with vulnerability. He embodies dynamic quality, and that's really special, and that's something I have unbelievable respect for. You look at Joe now; Joe just has learned to thrive in pain and discomfort, in his limits, in living at his limits, and that's the leadership which I think will lead to beautiful things.

I feel like there are at least three components to what you're describing. One is that maybe in this preconscious phase, people are thinking about what they have to gain from this process that they're in, and the process is natural, at least to the extent that they're motivated to do it. It comes from some source.

This seems to be the stage and the thing that Rick Rubin is trying to tap into in the artists that he works with, whether or not they're established or new. It's the identification of that preconscious energy, which is so pure and so beautiful by definition, as opposed to the second thing, which is when people have something to lose.

You know, they went from poverty to having a really nice home; they bought their mom a home; they're loving this life; they don't want to lose it. They don't want to go back to where they were before, even though where they were before probably played a key role in that preconscious state that allowed them to get to that next level versus something to protect.

You know, trying to not lose everything you've got is very different than trying to protect certain elements of what one has. So like in terms of the Celtics, they hold the championship title now, so they have something to lose. Frankly, they could not get it again, but it's in the record books.

So it's nuanced, right? It's not like—in a fight, you can get knocked out or worse, but you know, you're still a champion if you were a champion once. I mean, certain fields are like that. Well, going back to back is an approach way of framing that.

Going back to back is from protecting the title, right? Because then the words like reigning champions, you know, it's like even though you're already the reigning champion, you know? Or you think about dynasties. Like I grew up in the—when the 49ers were kind of in multiple dynasties. It was like the Joe Montana era and the Steve Young era, and like, you know, these dynasties where they were just considered such an important team overall because of how long they were able to do what they did—the Bulls, right?

You know, Tiger Woods, right? There seems to be a kind of obsession with this process, at least in the United States, where we love to see the rise of somebody from, you know, ignominy to fame or rags to riches. But there also seems to be this kind of obsession with their fall, their demise, and then coming back again.

I think the most prominent example of this in my mind is Mike Tyson, whose life is, as a friend described it, almost Shakespearean in the way they came from nothing, then youngest heavyweight champion, then all these issues, you know, legal and financial, then back again. Now he seems to be in kind of—he's at least at a level of status where he can wear his own shirt, and no one thinks it's weird.

It actually looks cool. He's probably the only guy who can wear a shirt with his own name on it, and it just seems right. Like he earned that one, you know? I think it ironically was "The Hangover." It was him pretending to have a—you know, act as an actor that kind of brought him back as a lovable character.

It's kind of interesting; he seems to now be on the Mount Rushmore of famous American athletes. I only wish the best for him, but whatever happens next, like that, his legacy is cemented. At some point, people's legacy is cemented, and I wonder how that feels too.

So maybe we could talk about these different stages of the sine wave that hopefully is upward and drifting, right? One of the things that I think is very difficult in modern society and in the life of a professional athlete or team in modern society is that, you know, you think about NBA players. They're always being interviewed by the media, and the media is always trying to drum up drama.

They're always trying to ask if you—like the media always asks the question that is exactly what the performance psychologist of the player would not want the player to think about. For example, they might ask something about, like, "How do you feel knowing the expectations for you are so large you can never live up to them?"

Or, "Is it shameful? Do you feel ashamed about your performance now because of the expectations on you?" Questions like that will be—or, "Your wife is eight months pregnant. How do you feel being 5,000 miles away right now?" That would be pretty benign, right?

Yeah, it's like, "Thanks." You know, right? There's something—because you want a player to be liberated from self-consciousness. You don't want a player to be playing with an awareness or a fixation on external expectations or the external eye.

I remember the feeling in my chess life when I transitioned from losing myself in thought to thinking about how I looked, thinking to the cameras or the groupies or whatever on the outside—like wildly different mindsets as a chess player, right?

So you have all these pressures that are trying to pull you out of an ideal performance state, and so one needs to learn to develop thick skin or a way of integrating it or be playful with it. I really believe in embracing adversity. We have this theme, hunting adversity on the team, which is like these things that could be seen as detrimental or problems or things that could get in the way of our liberation as we welcome them, like cold water.

Getting in cold water every day is a very important—I think it's a beautiful opportunity to train. It's so much like—but we don't want to get in cold water gritting our teeth and hating it. No, we want to love the fact that we're about to suffer in that cold water.

I've been cold plunging for many years—maybe 15 years—and it's not like you get into 34-degree water, even if you've been training for a very long time. You're thrilled about this 5-minute or 10-minute plunge you're about to do. Most consistent stimulus for adrenaline release and noradrenaline release in the brain that is safe if done properly, right?

You never really habituate. I maybe we just really quickly double-click on this thing of cold plunging. I don't go for time; I think only in terms of walls of adrenaline. So some days, like just getting in the thing is a big wall.

I think of that just for lack of a better word as a wall. On a hot day, I'm happy to get into the cold plunge. But then what I think is so valuable about cold plunging is that if you start to focus on what neuroscientists call interoception—everything, our perception of everything from our skin inward—you can start to feel the deployment of adrenaline in your body or at least its effects.

You can see here's another wall of adrenaline. You watch your frame rate go up. The impulse to stay still, because as you move, you break up that thermal layer, gets even colder. But then you also want to get out, and then that wall passes, and then you start to notice that the distance between the walls changes.

Playing with that in one's mind, as you know, when I distract myself, the walls come suddenly, or when I'm focused on the walls, they seem like big swells. As opposed to when I relax myself, they seem like just kind of more sharp peaks. Learning those dynamics of how adrenaline impacts us cognitively and frame rate and all that, I think, is an immensely valuable practice.

I can't think of anything else—not sprinting, not lifting weights, not real-life arguments because that can be destructive. I can't think of any other kind of venue for exploring one's ability to work through stress and tension than the cold plunge. I agree, and I have this principle I call living on the other side of pain.

I think that pain—one can like mental discomfort, physical discomfort, or confronting some issue one doesn't want to think about, or taking on one's bias pattern. If you're, let's say, a decision-maker, taking on what the network of your cognitive biases tends to lead to—these are all forms of pain, right?

I think that cold water training is such an exquisite way to practice living on the other side of pain in a way that is thematically resonant. You can train at that. Doing that physical practice can liberate you in your mental arenas to take on—you don't want to take on.

One thing I found is that when you're training peak performers, there can be the impulse to go right at their weakness in the place they're making the error, but it's usually much less potent to do it that way because they're well calloused over in that area.

So if you're like a poker player who has some control issue, you could take on the control issue in poker, but they're so brilliant at poker. They've built calluses around it; they've built ways of dealing with it, and they're able to play at a high level despite it.

But they're probably very controlling at home as well with their spouse or their kids or whatever. If you take on the control issues in places they're much less developed, it'll be much easier to take it on because it's less calloused, and it will be massively liberating in their poker game.

So I have this idea of interconnectedness and thematic interconnectedness. I'll identify a theme someone needs to work with, but then we'll practice that theme in other areas of their life. You could have core habits that manifest that theme, and then there comes this amazing moment where the theme just becomes internalized because one practices it in things that are away from where it manifests professionally.

Then it just releases, and then all the manifestations of that theme just become your way of life. For example, if one wants to take on one's resistance to discomfort, to pain, to pushing one's limits, one can practice things like cold plunging, cardiovascular interval training, you know, other things like withholding orgasm.

You can have ways of practicing the theme that are completely separate from where it's manifesting or hindering you in your professional life, where you're probably very good at dealing with it. Then the unlock will just happen, and you'll be liberated from it.

One of the most powerful ways that I've found to train. I also find cold plunging is just unbelievable for sleep quality. For—I do, you know, I do contrast training now, and I agree with you. Like I've spent a lot—for years, I was doing like really long cold, like 36-degree water for 11 or 12 minutes, and I pushed myself really hard.

Man, 11 minutes is so different from 9 minutes. Oh, different world. Now I don't—I found that like I have a practice of, you know, I'll do three to four rounds of, you know, 42 to 44 degrees, between that and the sauna. I'll do like one longer plunge a week, but like in my daily practice, I don't feel the urge to do very long breath holds or very long cold plunges.

I don't necessarily—yeah, same. I'll do cold plunge for one to three minutes, and I love contrast with heat. So I'm very heat tolerant. I love, love, love the sauna. I don't love the cold, but I love the long arc of dopamine that comes after the cold.

I always say no one really enjoys being in the thing. Is there a better sleep hack? I'm asking you because you know stuff. Well, there are supplements that could support sleep and that kind of thing, and people learning how to deliberately relax their body can help with the transition to sleep and back to sleep.

But, you know, one core principle that I haven't really talked about in the podcast is that the more adrenaline, norepinephrine, noradrenaline, and dopamine that you experience early in the day, as well as cortisol from bright light, exercise, caffeine, and cold, the better you're going to sleep at night.

It also sets your circadian rhythm around kind of like a big—you know, instead of arousal-promoting stimuli early in the day, and then, you know, the last third of your day, you're very parasympathetic, for lack of a better way to put it, and that eases the transition of sleep.

I mean, you know, dimming the lights, parasympathetic bright lights increases the amount of cortisol with your morning cortisol pulse by 50%, which is great. It keeps you less susceptible to infection all day, these kinds of things. We're meant to be in oscillation, obviously, across the 24-hour cycle, but even within the day.

It's a little bit tougher when people have evening activities. Last night, I was watching these guys play a hard game of basketball at, you know, 8 to 10 p.m. That's a lot of late-night work. We're on the West Coast; you can think what time that is East Coast time—middle of the night, right?

So is there a better sleep stack? Not really. I mean, if you want to increase your rapid eye movement sleep non-pharmacologically, yeah, I would say, meaning not exogenous pharmacology, the cold plunge in the morning, early part of the day for evening.

Anything that moves blood out to your periphery, so sauna, hot shower, that sort of thing, is going to drop your core body temperature when you get out, right? It's a little paradoxical to people, but you know, you warm up to then cool off at the level of core body temperature, and it'll ease the transition as sleep.

Yeah, it's a wonderful practice, and people who pick at cold plunging are like, "Well, it blocks hypertrophy." Okay, yeah, okay, that's true. So in the six hours after you're trying to get your, you know, a little more peak on your biceps or something, it's going to block that.

But most people have not experienced control over their physiology at the level that comes from doing consistent cold plunging in the early part of the day, warming up, and becoming more parasympathetic later in the day. It's like they start to feel a level of control over their mood and energy that's so striking with basically zero-cost tools.

I agree. Yeah, sorry to riff on that, but people will probably wonder about specifics. I want to make sure that we talk about two things, and you can decide which one to talk about first. One is ego, and then the second one is earlier you described a set of dynamics across the day and some concrete things about how one picks the most important question, like what am I working on today, and how to kind of push that into certain portions of the day, how long to do that, and then how to stay out of stimulus and response and the transition points so that you can make the most of that work or extract the most from that work as you head into the evening, dinner with your family, sleep, and then wake up, repeat.

Which one do you think would be most valuable? Games go wherever you want to go. Where should we go? All right, let's—before we get practical, let's get a little bit more theoretical and then get back to practical. Ego, like the constriction is what comes to mind.

The idea that I want to impose my will on something, I want a certain outcome, and if I don't get it, it's going to hurt in some way. There's some punishment mechanism internally that might drive me to work even harder. It's not always bad, but how do you frame ego?

I will say that the words "I am" seem very important. Like when people identify as, "I am the champion," "I'm part of a champion team in the NBA," "I'm a Celtic," you know, "I'm a player," you know, "I'm a Celtics player." Clearly, I'm not, but you know, when we attach identity to ego, that's also where it seems like it kind of deepens the trench a bit.

But maybe it can be more relaxed than the way I'm describing it. How do you think about ego? We had So Graham Duncan, my dear friend, join us at the game last night. I consider Graham to be in the realm of elite mental talent mapping and assessment to just be in a league of his own.

He's such a genius in the realm of just finding and identifying people who have world-class potential in mental arenas in really quirky ways. He's a beautiful soul, and one of the ways he frames this in the investment space when he's looking at high-potential investors is he doesn't want to find people who have too specific an identity in the way that they relate to what they do to make money, to invest, to whatever.

Because it leads to one's relationship to dynamic quality, to rediscovery, to changing as the world changes, right? I think that relates a little bit to what I was describing in terms of learning chess locally versus learning chess in a way that connects to all of life, which is so dynamic.

I think, you know, I spent many years studying Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, and so I come from both a Western and Eastern perspective when I think about the question of ego. I think that one of the things that happens in the West when we talk about East Asian philosophy is that we oversimplify it, and we create—we kind of polarize things.

I think it's easy to have people talk so quickly about being egoless, right? Or say someone is low ego, and when they say they're low ego, they don't actually mean that they're low ego. They mean that they have a sound egoic structure. They're not insecure all the time, which means that it's not that they have a low ego; it's that their ego is not fundamentally—there's not a rupture in the structure that's leaking all the time.

The way I relate to ego from a competitive perspective or from an artistic perspective or a self-cultivation perspective is that I relate to it around dynamic versus static, constant exploration as opposed to being stuck in how one relates to old patterns. I relate to understanding the emptiness of our egoic dynamics, understanding the non-absolute nature of our ego, the relational nature of things, the interconnectedness, and the interdependence of all things.

I think it's so easy to have an identity which we think is like, "I am this," but we're not this. This doesn't exist out of relation to that, and that doesn't relate in relation to this other thing. So understanding the chain of relationality and then how our ego manifests in all of that.

So having the ability to both dissolve one's relationship to static egoic dynamics but also having a sense of identity and having a sense of what one's self-expression is and having—when we are—there is this thing about will. When you're competing, you can feel when someone has an unbreakable will.

Like when you're matching up against somebody, and they're wishy-washy, you can just blow through them. But when their will is just like—I'll never forget Marcelo Garcia against K Kasan in a big world championship match. Kasan was wrist-locking everybody, and Marcelo put his hand right into the wrist lock and looked into his eyes.

It's like, "Try it." He just put his hand into it. You can break someone by being unbreakable. You can see a lot of fights where somebody tries to submit someone, and someone is unsubmitted, and the person who has the huge advantage gets broken because they realize, "Holy, this guy is unbreakable," and so they become broken, right?

So there's having the ability to have that—like when you touch a fighter, like body fighters all rub up against each other, like you learn a lot. Feeling someone—so if you meet fighters that hug, you'll learn so much on the touch. You can feel when someone is brittle; you touch them, you can feel how much contact they've taken, how much they've been hit, how much they've absorbed, how much they've been abused, how much they've received.

You can feel where their energy stops. You can feel if there's static things in them, and then you can also feel when the earth is moving inside of them, when it's just like this molten energy just moving in them.

Can envelop you, um, and it can be a mountain or it can be like water. So I relate to ego and that you want to be able to be like water and be like a mountain. Um, I've never answered that question before; I just riffed on that, but that's like the essence of how I relate to it.

And, um, as I walked in here to take a seat at my chair, I got a good hard slap on the back from you, and I was wondering if you were testing me. Um, I felt you last night too. Yeah, I, I, I, I won't ask what your read of my ego was, but, um, I felt it as a slap of camaraderie, like, let's do this, um, which felt great.

I was also thinking about my good friend Lex Fridman, who is a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a very intense guy who wears his heart on his sleeve publicly. People sometimes will take, um, shots at him for that, which really upsets me. I really respect Lex; I think what he does is awesome. I love his podcast and the way he, in really prickly issues, has got people on both sides of things and welcomes everyone in and has dialogue.

I have a huge amount of respect for how Lex handles himself in the public world. Yeah, you guys are a fun conversation. He, uh, he's going to be, uh, jealous that we got a chance to sit down here, but, um, you know, Lex is, uh, at home and with his friends exactly how he appears to be—like all that intense, um, self-torture around what to do and how to frame something, who to talk to, how to talk to them.

And, um, that's the world he lives in. And, um, in terms of his physicality, like, I think it's hard to understand, like, just how, um, like he's like dense, like dark matter, you know? Like, it's the—and I think a lot of guys that roll jiu-jitsu, like you shake their hands and like, there's a solidity there that's very, very different, um, than, uh, just muscle. It's like people that are just like, um, they're used to being up against bodies, apparently, you know?

So it's an experience, you know? Um, these are subtle things, but clearly they matter. Um, and as you've pointed out, one brings them to their professional life; you bring it to friendships. You know, I can't think of—I have many super, quote-unquote, solid friends, but Lex is among the most solid of them. He's just beautiful in his presence.

Yeah, he has a courageousness with which he, in my observation from afar, comports himself in the world that I have a lot of respect for. And Rick Rubin, you know, uh, we both know Rick, and people know Rick as this bearded, uh, icon of creativity, and he is indeed that.

The fluidity that he moves through life with is just—it's astonishing. I've spent a lot of time with him, and I don't want to, like, get into my observations of Rick, the Rick-isms, uh, if you will, but, um, it's astonishing how much attention and, uh, he puts into creating this thing that we're talking about—space.

Like getting out of stimulus and response, it's—I don't think he'd mind me sharing this—it's not uncommon for me to, like, go over to hang out with him, and he'll just say, like, "Hey, like, before we, like, talk, you want to just, like, do this meditation?" We just, like, sit there and meditate, and you quickly go into a mindset of, like, "Oh my goodness, like, this is like a thing where..."

And then, but like, nope, you just get into being present, and then, I don't know, then you hang out and you talk about, if you're us, you know, the Ramones, because we both love the Ramones.

Yeah, so, um, I love the way you frame ego. I think that that's very helpful, um, because a physical embodiment of something that is largely psychological to most people, at least the concept, I think is very helpful.

K, do you ever, um, just as a practice, just look at how people walk or how they interact or, um... Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, of course, that's my way of life. I mean, it's funny, as a chess player, even, like, I used to study people off the board all the time. I'd watch them, like, you watch—I remember I used to play these tournaments in Bermuda, and once a year, an invitational, like, high-level tournament, and then, like, you'd watch someone walking, and they'd get caught in the rain.

And you watch someone in the rain; you learn so much. Like, would they just stand and embrace it? Would they put something over their head and run away? What would they do, right? Like, and in general, like, if someone has a static, like, negative relation to the rain, they're usually pretty controlling.

And then you have a feel for how to handle them on the board—create chaos on the board, like just mix it up, make it uncontrollable. And then, or if someone is like a full free spirit in the rain, like me, like maybe you want to make the game like a little bit more quiet, conservative, like strategic—not so chaotic—like where one has to find exact, precise solutions in specific kinds of positions where, like, you can't improvise.

You're not finding hidden harmonies in chaos; you're finding specific things, right? Control and rain. And then in the fight game, man, you're watching people all the time. I mean, you watch fighters watching one another; you see a lot of feeling one another, watching one another.

And I love watching people away from what they do because all those themes are much more visible than when they're doing what they do. What about in non-competitive endeavors like ballet, opera, um, uh, music, where certainly it's competitive in that, you know, you're competing for people's attention, time, and money, but you're not—it's not direct competition?

Uh, do you spend time working with performers in these domains where, um, you know, like, I heard from someone recently who, uh, she said, you know, "I'm a good dancer, but then I went to New York and I discovered that I'm not such a good dancer." Like, the level of who gets to actually dance in some of the premier venues there is like so unbelievably high that, um, and by the way, that shouldn't discourage anyone; that should encourage people.

It's, uh, show them what's possible. Do you work with people like that, or is it usually competitive arenas? I've utilized competitive fields as beautiful laboratories for refining my relationship to the training process because of how relentlessly truth-telling they are.

But I also come from a family of artists. My grandmother was a brilliant abstract expressionist painter and sculptor, Stella Waitzkin—amazing woman. Um, she was in the—she was good friends with Hans Hofmann and Tuning and Jackson Pollock. I mean, that was her crowd. She was part of the early Beat Generation back in the day.

And I come from a family of artists, and, um, yeah, I mean, one of the, you know, a lot of what I'm thinking about in recent years is how to channel my life's work into making the biggest positive impact possible on the world.

And I'm really worried in this moment around what's happening in human consciousness—the depths of distraction. Um, how can we enhance the human ability to make decisions in an increasingly complex world where there's so much misinformation?

Um, and also, you know, how can we take on humanity's biggest challenges? And so, for example, one of the projects that I'm really excited about that I've been working on for the last couple of years is called Lila Science. And these aren't competitors; these are scientists.

And we're essentially—we've—so I was sitting with this question for two or three years, like, who should I partner with to try to take on humanity's biggest challenges? And I met this guy, um, he ended up renting Graham's house, who we ate the game with yesterday, next door to mine in Costa Rica.

And, um, his name is Jeff V. Monel, um, and Jeff is a just a brilliant scientific visionary and creator. And, um, we ended up having three weeks of dialogue, and I incidentally, like, invested in one of his companies years before, which was interesting.

But we had like this incredible three weeks of dialogue while he was standing next door, and then we looked at each other and realized we should be teaming up. And I've also been very close to and observing the world of artificial intelligence for a long time, um, partially because Demis Hassabis was a childhood friend of mine.

We grew up playing chess together from when we were like 11 years old, and so I've observed his journey. And, um, I think that it's very interesting in chess, like the seat that I had watching the impact on chess of first computers, increasingly powerful machines, and then artificial intelligence was fascinating.

Because if you imagine, like, what it's like to see one's life's work be overcome in three hours of experimentation, like what AlphaZero did—just breathtaking.

Um, and to give some perspective on things, there's an ELO system in chess, right? There's a ranking system. The highest-rated chess players in the world, human chess players, are rated, you know, from Garry Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer—all the world champions are rated somewhere in the 2800 to 2900 level, right?

ELO. The strongest AI engines now are north of 3800 ELO. And just for context of how wild that gap is, when I was 8 years old, my rating was 1800, right? So the gap between me at 8, which is like—I was ridiculous—and the world champion human is the same gap as the world champion and the strongest AI engines in the world.

And so, like, it's very hard for humans to conceive of being the ants, right, relative to the human. We are the ants now in terms of—or we soon will be—what is possible. And I think that that could be channeled for the good or could be channeled for the bad.

And the question is, what are the motivations of the people who are really driving these companies? So I've been thinking for a long time of how to combine, like, what's the light side of the force of the artificial intelligence world?

And what Jeff and I, and a dear friend, um, Chris Fussell, who is a brilliant man—he wrote Team of Teams and One Mission. He was an elite Navy SEAL, and then he ended up running Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) with Stan McChrystal. Then he was president of the McChrystal Group, and now he's president of Lila Science.

Um, Jeff, Chris, and I, and a brilliant man named Jack Milwood, who's the chief cultural officer, have been teaming up. And I brought together this tribe of a few different brilliant friends, um, who are part of this.

And, um, it's basically taking cutting-edge science and taking cutting-edge AI, bringing them together to create scientific superintelligence focused on—and we're creating these AI science factories where the entire scientific process can be replicated, can be driven nonstop the way AlphaZero was driving nonstop iteration in the chess world.

What if this is happening in the scientific process? From, suppose, a hypothesis, experiment, isolate variables, test hypothesis, feedback to hypothesis, confirm or deny hypothesis, and just an experimental design and experimental execution, and then study of experimental results, and then study of the entire scientific literature.

And imagine all that happening with robotics, with 3800 ELO-rated scientists, AI scientists, and then millions of them networked. And now, if you have this, from my perspective, the most important thing is the safety, right?

And I think that a lot of these AI companies aren't prioritizing safety first; we are. And I think for me it's been a really important thing thinking about this because I've been sitting with this question for a lot of years.

Like, in order to do something like this, you have to trust that the people who are driving it, if they have max temptation, but something could be like the Manhattan Project, could be potentially negative for humanity, that they would not push the button.

They would lead to the satisfaction of all their dreams if it would be taking an existential risk for humanity. And this team, I really believe in that way.

And so, like, what's most exciting to me about this is the material science side. I mean, the life sciences, we could, you know, the eradication of disease—it's unbelievable what could happen. I think we'll be blown away by what happens in the coming years.

But the material science part of it, for me personally, is what matters most because I really don't think it matters if humans are all living for 150, 200 years if we have no climate to live on, right?

And we—the material innovations that could be emerging in the coming years, um, to take on the climate crisis are breathtaking. So it's a project I'm deeply involved in, and it has nothing to do with competition.

I mean, I guess everything is competitive from one perspective, but this is about, um, driving discovery, driving innovation. I love it. It also reflects your, uh, clearly repeating pattern of, um, being willing to segment your life into different goals and different, um, different pursuits—applying what you've learned previously, learning new things, and incorporating those.

It brings me back to two things that we touched on earlier, uh, one that if we don't close the hatch on, we're going to get it from the listeners, uh, which is this paper that we both read.

I just want to, um, or took a look at before the paper. Let me just say one important thing to me: what you just said really hits home.

Like, I think while one is taking on all these different things, for me personally, it's important to always be in the fight. Like, I need to be training myself, like what I'm doing on the ocean every day in my own training.

Like, the thing that drives me crazy are armchair quarterbacks or what Robert Persig used to call philosophists, right? Which are like—or like the literary critics versus the writer, or the philosophist versus the philosopher, or the armchair quarterback versus the quarterback.

So for me, like, my way of life, like, I just don't know—I—it's hard for me to believe in anybody in these things who isn't putting themselves on the line as a way of life.

So, like, my own ocean training, um, and my own competitive training, and like being immersed in the truth-telling nature of the competitive world is something that I feel is really, like—we never have the truth nailed.

We're never liberated from our egoic dynamics; we're always susceptible to becoming static. That's—I’ve really come to feel that, and I don't believe so. So, like, it's a big value system for me.

And the daily physical interactions with the ocean, with fear, with, uh, uncertainty, with the just variables that you can't control, yeah, and trying to identify what are the variables I can control in this context and work with those, um, to try and tease out new learning, um, that running those algorithms every day seems absolutely essential.

There's nothing like the ocean to expose any little micro inkling of, like, the illusion of control because you cannot control the ocean. You can't overcome the ocean; the ocean's going to kick your ass.

So you need to blend with her and receive her and honor her. Um, yeah, like that's where I do my inner work out there.

Okay, your study, go ahead, do it. Well, so it's not my study, but this paper that I sent you, I think is really interesting.

Um, it's a paper published in the journal Neuron—very fine journal, excellent paper. We'll post a link to it, but, um, it has many interesting features about—it's really about the study of surprise and the dopamine system.

But they use, uh, as the experimental context, um, people watching a game of basketball, and they observe that the reset on, um, sort of the interval timer is essentially set anytime there's been a reversal of which team has the ball.

So a drive down court, you know, um, uh, by one team, then the other team, and you know, if there's a, you know, rebound and then it switches direction, whatever might not switch direction.

Ian basketball provides the perfect dynamic to study this while people are being, um, uh, while there's some detection of brain activity going on.

And one of, I think, the most interesting questions about this paper and implications are that just as we can set the aperture of our vision or the frame rate of our—of how well we're clocking time, how finely we're clocking time, or how coarsely we're clocking time, there's this big question, which is kind of a philosophical question, really, which is how do we segment time in our life?

Earlier, you mentioned that one of the major kind of, uh, timestamps, if you will, is a bad event, like a—oh, like the things went completely differently than I would have preferred them to.

It could be the death of another; it could be the death of a dream; it could be a, you know, a setback, a re—whatever that—it marks time.

And we just had these fires—I mean, LA will be before and after the fires of 2025. Yeah, um, you know, I remember, uh, early in 2020, Kobe Bryant dying, right?

So, so these things—I remember the Challenger explosion—like negative events, you know, occupy a, uh, a certain place in our memory more easily than positive events.

But no one will forget the birth of their first child, or hopefully their second child too if they had a second child, or their wedding day, right? These things segment time.

You seem to be able to segment your life into a series of pursuits where you cut ties with the practice of something like chess, and you take what you learned and move it forward into what seems to be a very different lifestyle and way of being.

I think one of the major challenges for a lot of people, it seems, is how to thread the different elements of their life forward in a way that feels, um, contiguous.

And I think it's probably true that most people would prefer to not have loss—major losses be necessary in order to segment their life in the most, um, fulfilling way.

So how do you think about the segmentation of time? And maybe we'll run this backward from the scale of your lifetime. We don't know how long you'll live, but hopefully a long time.

Let's assume, by way of standard genetics, somewhere in the neighborhood of between 90 and 110 if you take good care of yourself, which you seem to. Sounds good.

Okay, um, and then let's compare that to how one structures a day that will allow us to bring us back to what you talked about before with this most important question dynamic and focus and, and replenishing and dynamic between conscious and unconscious mind.

So when you think about your life, you're 48 years old? Yeah. Okay, I'm 49, so we're more or less the same, uh, point, uh, looking backward anyway.

Um, our lives are very different, but same age roughly. If you think you're going to live to be about a hundred, how are you thinking about your time frame?

Are you thinking, okay, here's what I'm going to do for the next five years, ten? I'll allow the whatever is happening in my life to dictate what I do next? I mean, how are you running this analysis?

That's an awesome question. I mean, you—so we have to—we're basically taking all the macro and all the micro, and we're going to boil it down right here. It's beautiful.

Um, that was a very expansive, elegant question. I think the true answer—it's interesting, there's—I find this distinction between how, like, when I think about a question like that, between how I actually relate to the question and how I might deconstruct how I actually relate to the question to make it relatable.

But is the deconstructed version actually true to how I really relate to the question, right? Um, because accurate deconstruction is so nuanced and difficult, right?

So if I—how I experientially relate to that question is that I'm living—I want to live my life with just relentless truth to myself, with authenticity, with love, with receptivity.

I want to deepen my connection to what I'm doing, the arts I'm practicing in specifically, and in utilizing and tapping into my relationship to the universe through the artistic exploration.

I have not planned out the next 10, 20, 40, 50, 60 years. Um, I do have a long time horizon on how I think about plans and developments and projects I'm working on.

Um, but it's like this fusion of the cultivation of full presence right now and, um, and playing the long game. But I don't—I'm not clear on where the long game is going.

One of my dear friends, Boyd Vardy—you know Boyd? I know of him, and I'm a huge admirer of his work. Oh, you should have him on; he's awesome.

He's a beautiful—or you should go to South Africa and go connect with him. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to—yeah, so he's an awesome—I've been connected to him through Martha Beck, a previous guest on this podcast, and she spent a—they're good friends.

They've spent a lot of time in LA, a lot of time in Leli together, and I'd love to get Boyd Vardy on here. He's a beautiful soul; he's a real brother; he's a kindred spirit.

Like, every once in a while, you run into someone, you're like, um, he—in his book, Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, he has this gorgeous quote, um, which is the words of a master tracker, Reneas: "I have no idea where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there."

When I read those words, I was just like—they resonated very deeply in my soul. I think those words are a really good—I would take out the "exactly." I don't know anything exactly.

So I don't know where I'm going, but I have a really beautiful sense that I'm tracking my way there. You've got a process that seems to work very well, at least up until this point.

There's no reason to think it wouldn't work well, especially given that you said—not exactly leaving that openness to changes in our biology, life events, and for people around us.

I have a big part of me, and it's a strength and a weakness, and I think a lot when I meet people. I think a lot about the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction.

And when you're working with peak performers, you need to understand it, and its entanglement is often very, very complex. And people can think, "Oh, I can make this person more efficient by just removing this," but that will be connected to their genius, and you'll be, like, cutting some of it away, right?

And so when you're working with, like, crazy brilliant—anyone who's really a virtuoso has some craziness built into what they're doing.

Um, and the entanglement of their brilliance and their dysfunction is so complex and nuanced, and one should be very careful to not do anything until one understands that entanglement with huge nuance.

And so the art of coaching people of that nature is like 99.9% listening, observing, not doing. And one of the biggest mistakes that coaches make is doing too much because they need to show that they're valuable, right?

And so I think a lot about, like, we need to really understand the nature of that entanglement. And in me, um, that entanglement is complex, and I have a profound allergy to being untrue to myself.

Why? Well, I think a big part of the reason is that period when I was 15, 16, 17, 18 years old that I described, where I got pulled into this externalized thing from the film and the public scrutiny when I wasn't ready for it.

And being urged and not having the maturity to resist it because that's ultimately on me to take on chess outside of my self-expression.

Like, what would Karpov do here, not what would Josh do here? And I didn't have the understanding of learning Karpov through Kasparov, right?

And so I moved into, like, my first love was taken away from me, or I allowed myself to have it taken away from me, which is how I would actually frame it.

And it was made static and stale and corrupted and externalized, and there's so much existential heartbreak in me about the loss of that first love that I'm—I have the gift of being just allergic to being untrue to myself.

And so that's part of how I track through life is I—I—if I don't love someone, I don't work with them, no matter what the temptation is.

If something feels untrue to me, I don't do it. Now, sometimes we have to sit in the unknowing for a while, and something can be off for a while, right?

So, like, there's peaks and valleys of everything, right? Or so in the learning process, right? We can have long, long plateaus.

Like when I stopped playing chess, I felt like I'd lost the love, but I sat for two years with the question to be clear on whether I was in a plateau of the love or if I'd lost the love.

And then I gained clarity—no, no, you've lost the love. And then I was done. Never played again. Never played a chess game again.

Um, so that factored in. Like, I have this, um, this—it's so interesting how our, like, some of the, like, our most powerful guiding principles or voices in us, they come from our deepest wounds, right?

They absolutely do. I mean, I think it's a—because I think, you know, that this concept of energy is a complicated one, and there's no clear definition anyway.

But when I think about energy, I don't think about caloric energy; I think of neural energy. And I think about certain neural circuits like that.

Um, like if you, uh—like I love the feeling of, um, excitement and tension that then is funneled into a specific activity that then yields some new vista, repeat. You know, it's just—that's science, and that's learning.

The day I realized that I'll never, you know, saturate all the knowledge that I could gather, organize, and disseminate through the podcast, I was like, "FPS," like that's just great because there's—but I realize also that thing—we can saturate ourselves internally.

We can drive ourselves to the point of no replenishment. We can, you know, get so narrow-focused—that's why I think so much about aperture in time and space.

We can get so narrow-focused that we end up, you know, like a gopher that, you know, dug our way into a desert, and then we're like, uh, or you're just far from your family or far from home, you know, because you just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.

So, you know, I think, uh, what is it, you know, like eagle vision, you know? Um, what I would—I think that the diving birds are probably the ultimate in terms of having panoramic vision.

Do you know this? They have a horizon viewing density of cells so they can view the horizon, and they have a pupil to view the fish so that they can dive and grab the fish despite the refraction of the light under the water.

Because the fish isn't actually where they see—when people say eagle vision, uh, versus, you know, like, uh, you know, what's it—what, you know, like predator vision up close or something like that?

Comant, like they—so they're flying, and they're tracking the horizon, and they're also tracking things right below them simultaneously. That, to me, is the ultimate state to try and achieve in terms of space and time tracking.

That's a beautiful metaphor. And they have to also adjust for, right, the refractory. And if you've tried, like, archery from above water, underwater, which