The Tim Ferriss Show - #412: Josh Waitzkin on Beginner’s Mind, Self-Actualization, and Advice from Your Future Self

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Starting point is 00:04:09 the thought processes, the best practices, the influences, and so on that you can hopefully copy and paste into your own life in some fashion to test out the toolkits of people who are the best at what they do. My guest this episode is a return guest, Josh Waitzkin. He was in fact the second ever guest in episode two of this podcast. We've known each other a long time. Josh Waitzkin is author of The Art of Learning. He is an eight-time US National Chess Champion, a two-time world champion in Tai Chi push hands, and the first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt under nine-time world champion Marcelo Garcia, widely believed to be the greatest grappler who has ever lived, at least in the world of BJJ. For the past 12 years, maybe 13, maybe 14 now, Josh has been channeling his passion

Starting point is 00:04:56 for the outer limits of the learning process towards training elite mental performers in business and finance, or finance if you prefer, and to revolutionizing the education system through his non-profit foundation, The Art of Learning Project. Josh is currently in the process of taking on his fourth and fifth disciplines, paddle surfing and foiling, which we will discuss at some length in this episode. Josh is always a fantastic thought partner. He is constantly pushing back at anything that I say, which reflects sloppy thinking or imprecise thinking or consensus thinking. And he's a lovely guy. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with none other than

Starting point is 00:05:38 Josh Waitzkin. Joshua, good day, sir. Timbo. Good to see you yet again. And we've had a chance to spend a bunch of time together, and all sorts of questions have come to mind that I've wanted to ask you, and all sorts of discussions have come up over meals and wine and cold plunges that I've wanted to explore with you. Let's talk about, if you're open with Open2, rather, starting here, some recent explorations of learning, and specifically some insights related to someone you introduced me to

Starting point is 00:06:18 quite a few years ago, Maurice Ashley. Yeah, man. Maurice was a dear friend he's a dear friend And we became very close when I was 11 years old Playing chess And between the ages of Around 11 and 23, 24 We studied chess

Starting point is 00:06:36 5, 6 hours a week together Spared together, traveled around the world Competing together against one another And as a team, as training partners And it was actually really cool He came to visit us a couple weeks ago, and it was a really unusual life opportunity because Maurice and I haven't talked about chess in about 20 years. So imagine going all in, just deep dive with someone for 13 or 14 years in an art, not talking about that art for 20 years, growing in different directions and then coming together.

Starting point is 00:07:06 And a lot of what we were exploring were questions around, for example, what were our assumptions or our shared constructs 20 years ago, things that we agreed to be true that we now don't believe to be true. And for context, I mean, Maurice was a high level chess player. Oh, yeah. How would you, for people who don't know the chess world, how would you describe? He's a strong grandmaster.

Starting point is 00:07:29 And we, I mean, we grew up, kind of, we came up the ranks together. He was, he's older than me. He's about, I think, 10, 11 years older than me. And he's a beautiful soul. And we were, I mean, back in the day, we were just brothers, very similar to my relationship with dan caulfield that i have today in in martial arts and now foiling marise was my sparring partner in in the chess world and um i think that like i think what you're referring to

Starting point is 00:07:55 in terms of what we were exploring was was fascinating because i mean a lot of what i think about today is the emptiness of mental models or the relativity, the non-absolute nature of any kind of ideas or constructs or networks of ideas that we have. Things that we believe today will likely see as somewhat flawed five years from now. And so I work on seeing them as flawed today and seeing the holes in them. And so what was really interesting to explore with Maurice, what were the things that we believed as pretty strong chess players back in the day that we just no longer believe to be true, individually and collectively? And what came up? A lot came up. What came up for you? Well, one of the, the direction of thought that I found most interesting, it's not just what were our

Starting point is 00:08:41 false constructs 20 years ago, but what are the common root structures to my current constructs and my false constructs 20 years ago i see so in other words what did what do you now disagree with in terms of beliefs you held 20 years ago that nonetheless sprouted from sort of roots or seeds that current beliefs share that I may or may not be present to. Yeah, you may not. And then part of the challenge is to be present to them and then examine their emptiness today. One of the interesting differences between Maurice and me 20 years ago is that when Maurice studied chess, he was extremely idealistic, fanciful.

Starting point is 00:09:23 Somewhat to a fault, competitively. So there were moments where, for example, Maurice would be playing a beautiful chess game and he would make a mistake, as we all do, and he would kind of lose interest in the game because the poetic perfection or something of what he'd been creating had been marred. And his idealism was obviously so beautiful to me, but also was sometimes a little bit frustrating when we were training together. And that frustration, we both learned from, and it was really interesting to explore. So it was an example that came to mind for me, where there was a moment I recall viscerally

Starting point is 00:09:55 when I was probably 22 years old, we were studying a variation of the Neidorf Sicilian, and we saw there was this position that would come after three incorrect decisions. So in other words, in this complex opening that we were studying, there would be three mistakes that we made and it led to this fascinating position. And Maurice was like, we should study that position.

Starting point is 00:10:16 And I thought that was completely impractical. I was like, dude, what are we going to study this for? It's imprecise, right? We should spend our time studying a position we might actually see. And it was an example of me feeling that Maurice was being kind of overly fanciful or idealistic in the moment of training. And Maurice just being fascinated by something and seeing it would be cool and interesting to learn from potentially. So in that moment, I had a lot

Starting point is 00:10:39 of confidence that he was barking up the wrong tree. And when I think about that now, 20 years later, I was absolutely wrong. I think that studying that position, so much of what learning is at a high level to me today is conceptual learning, thematic learning. It's not about anything local. And so that position had so much dynamism to it. So like the convergence of different kinds of dimensions. And we would have learned so much from studying. We actually did end up studying it. We did learn so much from it. But when I up studying it we didn't learn learn so much from it but when i think about it today like that was a massive blind spot for me so there was so then how do i deconstruct that into a common root structure today well i think that i have a if you look at the way my buddy dan

Starting point is 00:11:17 and i um studied martial arts together for a lot of years we took on tai chi push hands together starting in 2000 in training camps for the 2002 and 2004 world championships and then we transitioned to brazilian jiu-jitsu reached high levels in that art and then took on now we're taking on surfing and foiling together really all in on foiling and one of the differences between the way dan and i approach learning is that i would argue that he's a much more gifted athlete than me and i'm much more of a deconstructive learner than dan is. So I tend to, early in the learning process around something, I'll tend to deconstruct it down to the component parts, which might be technical or often will be thematic. And then I'll internalize those

Starting point is 00:11:55 component parts and then I'm ready just to go all in on chaos. Dan likes to just throw himself off a cliff. And then he reaches his technical clarity by just jumping right into the chaos. And so we have different paths to a similar place. And we've learned to navigate that together. So the interesting thing is that there's a little bit of an identity or a stiffness in my approach there. So there's something about the early stages of learning a new part, for example, of foiling. For example, we've recently started dialing in toe foiling, whipping on a jet ski, whipping somebody on like the lightest possible high performance foil board and riding big waves. Can you describe for people who may

Starting point is 00:12:37 not have heard our last conversation together what a foil board is? So foiling is you're on a surf board and then beneath the surfboard is a two and a half to three foot So foiling is you're on a surfboard and then beneath the surfboard is a two and a half to three foot mast, which is sort of like a big guillotine. And then beneath that is a wing, which can be a big or small. It's like a giant razor blade. Yeah, exactly. It's a really safe part. And the wing, once you're in a wave, the wing is what you're riding. So the wing is interacting with underwater wave energy. So you get lifted off, the board is lifted off of the surface of the water for people who are visualizing this. The wing is in the water

Starting point is 00:13:08 and you're standing on a surface which is a few feet above the water. And it's crazy because it's frictionless. It's incredibly fast. It's so dynamic. It's awesome. I mean, I've never been more in love with an art in my life. And the purpose, if I am getting this right, of using a foil, aside from the different kinesthetic experience and aesthetic experience is to be able to move faster on bigger waves or to is is that how foiling came about as a as a technology well there's lots of yes i guess maybe that's that's a part of why it came out i mean you're above the surface chop so when it can be choppy weather and you're on a foil you're just above it all so you're friction. So conditions that are unsurfable are foilable because the surfboard

Starting point is 00:13:48 would be chattering on all this surface texture and the foil is above it. I think that, you know, so much of how I personally relate to it is frictionlessness. I think of learning as unobstructed self-expression. So friction is a form of obstruction. And what's fascinating is foiling, you're just, it's such a powerful physical embodiment of that principle. And I know we're going to hop around because we've both had a lot of coffee, but we were talking about these sort of labels

Starting point is 00:14:17 and inflexibility, so we may come back to that. But one thing that has really impressed me that you and Dan share in common is, I suppose you probably focus on this perhaps more, you correct me, but the use of technology and training to really accumulate focused repetitions. So for instance, you have a foil board and then you have an e-foil. So how would you use an e-foil right so so how would you use an e-foil so we we took on for so the way i took on foiling was i got an e-foil um and i spent about two months flying around 2 000 miles on flat water so i learned foil dynamics just first of all working on on flight on a motor. So an E-foil is a foil with a prop on it with a lithium battery. And, um, and I was flying in flat water at between 15 and 25 miles an hour, just getting used to flight dynamics. Cause it's being on a foil board. It's really, it's micro micro recalibration. If you back weight, you fly

Starting point is 00:15:21 up. If you front weight, you could go down. If you overweight, you crash into the floor, into the water or fly, or if the wing comes out of the water, you're catapulting. So I worked on flight dynamics, then I worked on break falls, which is a hugely important part of it, which I don't see a lot of foilers do, which is really training in the art of falling, which is something that Dan and I did, of course, for many, many years in the martial arts. And it's not just learning how to fall when you want to fall. It's actually turning a fall that's out of control into a break fall. So it's really learning how to prepare for the moments you haven't prepared for. And being good at break falls opens, like when I took on one wheeling, right,

Starting point is 00:16:02 which is an electronic skateboard with a big one wheel in the middle around New York City. You know, I had a lot of falls at 25 miles an hour into New York City pavement. And if you don't know how to break fall, you're going to get hurt. But if you do, you can just roll out of it and be fine. So I think that being comfortable falling, it's a really important principle, I would say. And we could talk about designing the learning process around principles as opposed to around techniques. So like the technical arsenal of breakfalls, like it would fall under the principle of just being comfortable falling. And then you can take a lot more risk than you can take otherwise, because the fall will be something that's part of your domain. Well, let's take an example of practice that I've never heard anyone else discuss. Maybe this is common practice. I suspect it is not.

Starting point is 00:16:43 But you've achieved world-class levels in multiple arts. That in and of itself is very uncommon. With foiling specifically, and we won't spend an hour talking about only foiling, but I think it's, I want to highlight for people that this is a discussion of learning and principles using the example of foiling. Using an e-foil to go through boils over and over and over again. Is that principle-based? Is that technique? And perhaps you could just paint a picture

Starting point is 00:17:16 of what a boil is and why you chose to practice in that way. Right. Okay, so zooming out for a moment. The way I think about taking on these arts, it's understanding what are the component parts and doing lots of reps in them so that you're comfortable with them and then putting them all together. So my learning process won't look great in the first couple of days or a couple of weeks. And I'm not concerned about that. And I think that one of the interesting parts of it is like people, I think that a lot of what's happening in surf culture and foil culture is people have these Instagram accounts and they're always posting videos of things outside of that and so for example going through boils when you're on big wave faces on a reef sometimes there's an upwelling of water that

Starting point is 00:18:09 that were like you know if the water interacts with a shallow spot or a ledge or a big rock you'll have a boil that's just like a big shooting up of water pressure from the looks like boiling water it looks like boiling water and when the wing hits that or when a piece of a wing hits that a foil wing you just can get thrown so you have to learn to absorb it. So you have to learn how to either weave around it, weave through the boils or absorb them. And so one of the things the eFoil opened up was the ability to really seek out boils and learn how to, you know, lowering level a little bit, you know, at the top of your wing, of your mast when you enter it, and then just learning what the boil does if you hit it,

Starting point is 00:18:45 if you hit the wing straight on, on the corners, lots of falling. But, for example, putting on a helmet, putting on an impact vest, those things don't look cool on Instagram. And so you can't do those things if you're going to be posting on Instagram every day, right? But if you're living kind of a bizarre hermit life, like I guess I do, and not doing that kind of thing. You guess, I can confirm. You can look, I mean, embracing looking absurd in certain moments is a very interesting hack to what

Starting point is 00:19:15 others might not be taking advantage of in the learning process. And so I spent, I mean, I went over hundreds and hundreds of boils on the eFoil and learned how to absorb them and had incredible crashes. But then I learned how to dial in those crashes. And then I learned how to hit the boils at different speeds and absorb. Sometimes I got thrown off at mid-30s, miles an hour, after then whipped me off of the jet ski on a four-pound foil board the other day. And this boil just erupted me, and I went flying. I mean, it's an ongoing process at different speeds.

Starting point is 00:19:46 But, yeah. I was just going to say, it's an ongoing process at different speeds. But yeah. I was just going to say, I remember the first time we spoke about this because it coincided with a week later, and we talked about this, me going to volunteer at something called Zendo at a festival called Lightning in a B bottle which i i wanted to attend specifically not because i'm a concert or festival goer but because it's effectively like a mini burning man that skews to younger ages and for people who don't know zendo is a peer-supported harm reduction volunteer outfit that helps people who are going through difficult drug experiences generally, or oftentimes psychedelic experiences that do not require medical intervention. So there's medical triage for people who have, who have done something that

Starting point is 00:20:36 could be physiologically dangerous, but otherwise for me, it was the equivalent of you going through boils because Because if, for instance, and I'm not a facilitator, I do not support or have not chosen as a career supporting people going through psychedelic experiences, but I wanted to develop a level of confidence that if I were in an environment where I was called upon to handle a worst case scenario, that I would at least have a certain degree of comfort and exposure to that. But it's really uncommon that you would get a lot of repetitions with that. That would in fact mean that you would in some way be manufacturing these terrible conditions. So one of the few ways to do it,

Starting point is 00:21:21 was to volunteer at Zendo, where you get these kind of red line cases and you get put in the crisis tent over and over and over and over and over again. And we had a really rich conversation about that, about this type of deliberate practice with the edge cases that are nonetheless really important to develop a degree of comfort around. And I think that you can do it thematically or non-locally. You don't have to do it specifically in the thing. So for example, one of the beautiful things that the eFoil opened up to me and Dan was the ability to just, there was this one wave that we fell in love with,

Starting point is 00:21:56 this offshore reef, and it would just mound up into this super steep ramp that just kept on going. And it was actually two converging ramps, and we called it ramps. And this wave was, it was sort of like the drop that you'd make surfing that would last a second. That drop would last 45 to 60 seconds.

Starting point is 00:22:12 And a buddy who surfed it said we should call it aneurysms because it felt like you're having an aneurysm that lasts for 60 seconds. But we did so many thousands of those waves, then it's like you get used to the aneurysm. And then the aneurysm becomes mellow, and it's just a mellow place to be. And then you translate that over to foiling on the lightest, most high-performance board possible. The drop you make down a steep face before a bottom turn, we've just done so many of those that lasted for so long that these sections

Starting point is 00:22:41 that would have felt super critical to us before just don't anymore. Similar, you can do cold plunges. So if you do, if you're cold plunging in 33 degree water, your body's going to go into that same freak out, fight or flight place. And then learning to breathe through that and come out the other side. I mean, cold plunges are in a non-local way, a great way to train at making steep drops, surfing or foiling. Yeah, it's controlling it. It may not even be controlling a panic response, but becoming familiar with the physiological response to panic on some level. And those people listening obviously can't see what's going on here, but you have a richness, a smorgasbord of cold plunge options here.

Starting point is 00:23:25 And 33 degrees is not a grand exaggeration because I unplugged one of the cold plunges a few days ago because it was turning into an entire ice block. So for the last few days, we've been getting inside and being surrounded by ice. And the, the, I think the idea of kind of non-local practice applies also to what I was mentioning, right? Because I've done, I've accompanied doctors on ER rounds for similar reasons, right? To become more comfortable with an environment that seems out of control or unpredictable. And another option within the realm of, say, psychedelic harm reduction would be engaging or facilitating in large breathwork groups where you will have people, whether it's holotropic or something else, respond in really exaggerated, outwardly expressive ways in these groups

Starting point is 00:24:35 and you have to keep them from, say, flailing and hurting themselves or hurting someone else. How do you, what types of practice have become more important to you? If you're looking back at your, uh, say competitive career in chess or your practice of jujitsu, what types of practice or thematic practice have become more important? Have you learned to value more or less? Does anything come to mind?

Starting point is 00:25:01 Conceptual practice, thematic practice. I think that, that for for example building on what you just said i would say that the tension one feels as a chess player the build-up of tension with both psychologically and technically on what's happening between the chess pieces is very similar to it might be difficult for people visualizing people sitting at a chess board and compared to like dropping down big waves but it's very similar to the feeling one has dropping down big waves. You feel the desperate urge to release the tension and similar in cold water, right? And so the path that I've worked with, so initially it's pain, it's red alert, get me out of here.

Starting point is 00:25:41 Then it's becoming at peace in that pain and then it's learning how to enjoy it. And so like the great chess players, like someone like Magnus Carlsen, one thing that's unique, fairly unique about him is he seems to really enjoy tension, right? And I've, I've trained in my life. I never got there as a chess player. Um, but I, I have gotten there. Another thing is learning to just completely love chaos. Um, so the tension isn the tension isn't grinding on you. You're not a tectonic plate moving toward eruption. You're getting stronger as the tension builds. And that's something that I think is beautiful to train at. Something like cold water is just something you can replicate every day to do it. The E4 will open that up in drops foiling right um so i think to answer your question conceptual learning has been when you learn a technique you're learning one thing when you're learning a principle that

Starting point is 00:26:32 embodies a technique you might be learning a thousand things and so designing a learning process around the meta um this is part of the reason why I think my approach to surfing and foiling has looked so strange to some buddies who are lifetime surfers. Because I'm not approaching it technically. I'm working on internalizing certain core concepts, principles. The techniques fall within the tree beneath the principle. So meta-training, I think, would be the most important answer to that question. You're also coming into foiling with a huge disadvantage slash advantage,

Starting point is 00:27:14 which is you have not spent decades surfing. Right. So you're looking at things very differently. And just to give one example, and as background, before we began recording this, you let me, you encouraged me to read through a Slack channel that you have with your team where you're bouncing different ideas off of one another. And they're stress testing your ideas also, asking you to clarify things to find things. And you mentioned at one point, front side turns,

Starting point is 00:27:48 not to get too deep in the weeds, but front side turn different from backside turn. And then realizing that you could practice that on an E foil by just effectively, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I read was kind of going in circles. Yeah in super tight circles and you're doing just hundreds and thousands of repetitions that would be impossible to replicate except over an extremely long i mean weeks months oh years years on a surfboard and so you you were able to see that, where I think perhaps others might not.

Starting point is 00:28:27 Certainly some would, but that struck me as a huge advantage that you have, that you're seeing things with beginner's eyes, and you're already technologically enabled. So you have just a greater buffet of options. I think it's really important for me to be clear. I'm just a beginner in the surf and foil world, right? I mean, most of the people who are foiling have been surfing for 20 or 30 years, their whole lives, because foiling is super hard. It's surfing much faster with an extra vertical dimension. The interesting thing about it is I'm learning how to surf and paddle

Starting point is 00:29:00 surf through foiling. The lines that I can draw foiling are much better than lines I can draw paddle surfing. And what's fascinating is I went out surfing, I'm right now foiling, you know, six days a week, maybe in surfing, paddle surfing one day a week. I went out paddle surfing yesterday because the swell dissipated a little bit and it wasn't great, foil conditions where we go. And I was amazed at the breakthroughs I've made surfing just from the four-line breakthroughs I've made over the past couple of weeks. It's really interesting. So I'm coming at this in every way backwards. I'm taking on the art of surfing and paddle surfing. I started in my late 30s, not as a six-year-old kid. And so that also speaks to some of the things that Dan and I, who this relates to Dan as well, things we need to do. Like we haven't gone sideways forward,

Starting point is 00:29:53 like been in surf stance, moving forward at high speed sideways. It's a very simple idea, right? If you're skateboarding or you're surfing or snowboarding, you're like in a sideways posture and you're going forward very fast. We haven't done that a lot in our lives. So things like the one wheel, which Dan and I both did, and then the e-foil, like that just gave us a huge amount of reps. And then the amount of waves we've been able to take e-foiling, we've been learning about surfing waves through those reps. And so, and you're right, I think it's a disadvantage in a lot of ways that we're coming at it so late, but it's also a wonderful advantage because we're not socialized by any of the assumptions that a lifetime surfer would make. Similarly, in the Chinese martial arts, taking on the Chinese martial arts, there's lots of things that Chinese martial artists who are lifetime aficionados will not consider.

Starting point is 00:30:38 That coming at it as an outsider from the chess world, I could take advantage of. Similar in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu world. We could have conversations about those. I think we actually have spoken about those over the years. But all of these arts have their blind spots. Let me just go back, just finish the circle one time because we began speaking about this exploration I was doing with Maurice relative to the chess

Starting point is 00:30:55 and the common root structure between false constructs. So just to close that loop, I think that, so what I'm exploring now is that, what was the essence of that thing I was too tight about with Maria. So I was being a little bit too local and too tight in the early stages of the learning process of something, which in that moment was a chess opening, a branch of the Nidorf Sicilian. What is that word just to spell for people, Nidorf? Miguel Nidorf was a brilliant chess player,

Starting point is 00:31:25 N-A-J-D-O-R-F, and Sicilian Defense is a chess opening, so it's a Najdorf variation of the Sicilian Defense. It was just... Sounds like something from The Princess Bride. Continue. Okay. Yes, chess openings have funny names sometimes, but yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:41 So I was... So the interesting question is, is that tightness, is there a shared root structure relative to that tightness in the learning process today? And it, for you, for me, right. And I mean, there was a moment where Dan and I were whipping into a big, a big wave called, we call mobs here, where it's a left on foil. he was on a jet ski i was behind it and he came you know he was whipping into it and there's a big bear rock that bear that just that gets sucked out and there's basically a big dry rock on the whip in and it was interesting

Starting point is 00:32:17 because this was the in the first few days of us taking on um toast toe foiling. And in that moment, there was a tightness in me, right? Now, we come close to that rock all the time, e-foiling. I think we'll be very comfortable playing right there soon, toe foiling. But in that moment, I was in the early stages of a learning process. And it was very similar because in that moment, there was an improvisational nature to that moment it was playful it was actually not such a big risk relative to what we do all the time um but there was there was a tightness in me because we were learning something new technically in that moment i wanted to work on the deconstructive component parts of toe foiling and then work on like that kind of thing so i do think that it's interesting for me to explore, is there some identity in the idea that I need to deconstruct first?

Starting point is 00:33:10 Similarly, questions like parallel learning, lateralization, I would say one of my biggest strengths as a learner has been the ability to translate from previous arts into current arts. It's interesting to invert that. Are there ways that might be holding me back? Is the idea of lateralizing or parallel learning impeding my learning process in any way? So these are assumptions that I might have that I might hold tightly. I don't know. It's very interesting to take our assumptions and examine them, flip them upside down, rip them apart.

Starting point is 00:33:41 May I ask you about one potentially backwards approach that I want to know more about? Yeah. Specific to your notes in the Slack channel. And that is a quote that also one of your team members asked you about. So the internal spirit is the teacher or myself 20 years from now. I'm most interested in the last part of that. We could talk about the whole thing, but what does that mean? Or myself 20 years from now?

Starting point is 00:34:06 Yeah, that came out of me a few months ago when I was trying to explain to a buddy of mine in the surf world, this bizarre way that, that I'm approaching this stuff. Um, cause it looks really strange to people sometimes. And, and, and what I was saying was sort of in a thematic way, it's as if myself 20 years from now is my teacher. And what I mean, first, there's two ways of looking at it. One is that I know myself decades into arts. I know myself decades into chess and into the martial arts. And so I have a feeling for what I am like

Starting point is 00:34:44 when I'm in the realm of virtuosity within an art. And so in a sense, that person is like, that's a beacon that I'm moving toward, right? And I'm nowhere near that realm as a surfer and a foiler, but I've been there. And so qualitatively, in terms of some like abstract platonic realm of quality, there's that beacon for me. And there's the other part of it, which is that no one will know me better than myself 20 years from now. And if my goal is unobstructed self-expression or self-actualization within an art, then

Starting point is 00:35:16 the person who is teaching me should be the person who knows me most deeply. And that's my person 20 years from now. The person 20 years from now is also a helpful visualization in being the person who would understand what my false constructs are today and yesterday and a year from now. And it's very easy to get stuck in the mindset, I didn't know before, but I know today. It reminds me, there was this funny moment years ago when I was first studying Tai Chi. And I was in William C.C. Chen's Tai Chi studio. This was back in, I think, I think it was 1988, 1998, 1999. And there was this guy who'd been studying for decades, and he was telling a story. And he was sort of holding court within his knowledge of wisdom

Starting point is 00:36:00 within this domain. And he said, you know, when I studied Tai Chi for a year, I thought I knew what I was doing. And I thought I was really starting to understand it. But after two years, I realized everything I thought after a year was wrong. It was just wrong. But now I understood. And then after four years, I realized everything I thought after two years was wrong. And he went on with this story and this pattern, but now I understood. Then when after eight years, the same thing, everything I thought after four years was wrong. Now I've been training for 16 years, and everything I thought after eight years was wrong, but now I finally understand.

Starting point is 00:36:33 I remember thinking at the time, man, you got it, but you didn't get it. The point is, you don't know now either. After 16 years, you've been going through this repetition. What about after 32 years? Part of that visualization is designed to help me know that I don't know. Right? And which is so important.

Starting point is 00:36:52 It's so easy to think that we were in the dark yesterday, but we're in the light today. But we're fucking in the dark today too. So I have a question about the self 20 years from now. Because a follow-up question. Part of what I enjoy about these conversations with the mics is that we get to hopefully edge into some stuff that we haven't talked about, because we talk all the time. And I don't think I've ever told you about the piece of writing I lost that pained me the most.

Starting point is 00:37:23 And the piece of writing that I lost was the following. I was, for some reason, maybe feeling under the weather or had an injury, something like that. I was unable to join some friends skiing. And I was very upset about this. I love skiing. And I was sitting in a lodge, love ski lodges, so that's the upside, and this beautiful fire, so on, got some hot chocolate because that's what I do when I'm feeling moody and want to stuff my emotions in a ski lodge. And I had paper and I wrote this long story about a guy, aka young Tim, wandering into a ski lodge, sitting down and having this older gentleman,

Starting point is 00:38:05 a 20 years older, kind of sit across the table near the fire by him and striking up a conversation. And I only realized later that this is very close to a story by, I think it's Jorge Luis Borges, but ended up being this surreal interaction between my younger self and my older self and asking my older self for advice on all these various topics over the course of a few hours of sitting there in the ski lodge. And I looked at the advice after I had been writing all of this for five to 10 pages and the advice made sense. Like a lot of the advice seemed like very probably it could be the advice that a 20 year older self would give me with some detachment from the emotions of the current situation. And somehow, some way I ended up

Starting point is 00:38:59 losing it. And that really, it bothers me to this day because I thought it was, there was so much there that I felt was really insightful and actionable. And it's wild that it came from the same head that had created so much confusion around those same situations. So beautiful. Why don't you rewrite it, man? So I have actually not rewritten it in exactly that same way, but I've asked myself, for instance, there are a bunch of decisions that I'm trying to make right now. What would my, I'm 42 right now, 47 year old or 50 year old self tell me to do right now as it relates to these decisions? There's a lot less turbulence around, a lot less kind of cloud cover when looking at it with a bit of detachment in that way.

Starting point is 00:39:47 I'm curious if you ever kind of take it that literally or have tried to look at your current decisions or situations through the lens of an older self in that fashion. You know, just a quick aside before I go there. I think it's a really interesting question to ask people. How would your 20-year-older self guide you today? Because it gives you a window into somebody's ability to perspective take and to think conceptually.

Starting point is 00:40:17 In other words, think about the old David Foster Wallace, This is Water, that story of two fish are swimming in the water and two young fish and an older fish comes by and says, how's the water, boys? And they look at one another as they swim by and like, what the hell is he talking about water, right? Most people can't see the water because they're just used to the water. But it's very different to actually be able to see our mental models, our frame. So people are usually looking at the world through their frames. We can also cultivate the ability to look through the frame but also see the frame.

Starting point is 00:40:50 And I spent a lot of my life working on examining the frame itself. I think that years ago we did one of these chats together and I described the drowning experience I had where I made some errors in um in breath hold work that's one way to put it right we've already gone there we don't have to do this all over again but just just give the give the the 30 second version oh you can do it you can do it josh the 30 second version is that I was doing um some Wim Hof inspired breath hold work I made the mistake of doing it during um um, multiple, um,

Starting point is 00:41:26 lots of reps of underwater swims, 50 meter swims at a pool in New York city. And on my like eighth or 10th rep, I blacked out in a bliss state. And I spent four minutes in the bottom of the pool after blacking out from oxygen deprivation. Um, this old guy pulled me out and, um, and which I'm eternally grateful for. And I basically drowned. All the doctors said after 45 to 60 seconds, I should have been brain dead or dead, but it was four minutes, um, on the bottom of the pool. And then my training saved me like, also you could say, put me there, but that's a whole other conversation. There was a, so that we've discussed that whole experience at length. We don't have to go there in depth.

Starting point is 00:42:06 But I think that that inspired a version of this thinking. And it led to a lot of the life decisions that I've made and our family has made. Living the life we live today, which is very much off the grid. Because I emerged from that experience just with... I mean, I was someone who felt a lot of love and appreciation for doing what one loves, but that went into overdrive. And I just decided that I would devote my life to living as fully and deeply and beautifully as I possibly can, helping my loved ones live as fully and deeply and beautifully as they could and making as large a positive impact on the world as I could.

Starting point is 00:42:41 And that was just all that mattered. And we uprooted our life and changed everything. So I think that that mortality experience, and I mean, that was the most powerful catalyst for that kind of thinking. And I should just note that thankfully, I've not had that experience, but about a year ago at a retreat, a group retreat, there were a number of writing exercises that we were instructed to do. And one of them was to respond to a prompt. And the prompt was, pretend as though, or imagine that you are going to die exactly two years from today. You will die in perfect health. Just clock will run out two years from today. You will die. What will you do in the next two years? What are the things that you would do?

Starting point is 00:43:46 And I realize that's somewhat different from having a near-death experience and then reprioritizing, but it does apply a certain pressure and a certain sense of urgency that I think you would get from either situation. And that prompt and what I wrote afterwards gave me a tremendous amount of clarity about certain things that I wanted to do. And another prompt was, if you were going to die in two years in perfect health, left undone, what would you most regret not doing? So similar question, but slightly different wording. That also provided me with a tremendous amount

Starting point is 00:44:25 of clarity about certain things that i followed through on so it can be simulated in that way absolutely yeah i think that you know i i we've over the years discussed this term firewalking that i use for physiologically embodying something we're trying to learn so for example if you're training in the martial arts and you overextend your arm and you get that I use for physiologically embodying something we're trying to learn. So, for example, if you're training in the martial arts and you overextend your arm and you get armbarred and your elbow gets broken or your shoulder gets ripped up, for example, in a world championship, you're less likely to overextend your arm next time, to say the least.

Starting point is 00:44:58 But if you watch someone else do it on a video, it's hard to learn that lesson. But if you learn how to physiologically embody the experience that you're watching someone else go through, or that you're thinking about in the abstract, right, then we can save ourselves a huge amount of pain. How does one do that? Or how might one do that? How have you, or how have you coached someone to do that effectively, whether it's chess, jujitsu, investing, otherwise? Well, I think intense visualization, really training at visualization, which one can do through meditative experience.

Starting point is 00:45:36 I think biofeedback training is really useful to help learn how to put yourself in the different physiological states at will, because you can actually use biofeedback to observe what state you're in if you just don't sense it so quickly introspectively um harnessing triggers for intense i was i was with my with my wife and a bunch of friends the other day and and um i haven't watched the oscars in years but the oscars was on and eminem's performance of lose yourself came on and i it's funny lose yourself was the song that i used in the two my training camp for the 2004 world championships in so for the three months of the last of every day of training i listened to it before every fight of the world championship in 2004 in between the semis and the finals and in between the finals and the sudden death playoff when i've been in the wildest state of my life. That song is such a deeply fucking burned in trigger.

Starting point is 00:46:28 I had my eight-year-old son in my lap. We were watching the Oscars. My three-year-old was sleeping on my other shoulder and Lose Yourself came on and my body was ready to fight 15 dudes. It was unbelievable what happened to me. I had to just leave and I took a walk for 10 minutes. Unbelievable how powerful

Starting point is 00:46:46 triggers are. Whether it's olfactory triggers with smell or music, connecting triggers, different physiological things. I'm not suggesting that one should have something

Starting point is 00:46:56 that, I mean, that's a pretty intense one. That's like the Femikita stuff. Yeah, Maturian candidate stuff. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:47:02 It was kind of amazing to feel how powerful that was so many years later, just right there. So I think that learning how to put yourself into an intense physiological state through visualization, for example, cold plunging, your body will go into an intense physiological state. You can attach a trigger to that. Then you can go into that kind of fight or flight state if you choose to. So for example, one of the things you do cold plunging is you get into, say, freezing water, and then you learn to breathe yourself. It takes a while initially, but then pretty quickly into a state of calm. Like your heart rate goes very fast,

Starting point is 00:47:37 you're hyperventilating a little bit, then you just chill it out, and then you're in a calm state. You can also choose not to go there. You can choose to get in the water and not breathe to that state of calm. And then you can sit in that state of alarm and that can become a state that you could use as a trigger for certain kinds of visualization. So there's lots of things that you can do if you're creative about firewalking. What are some of the ways that you build outside of foiling? Because I know that's a main focus, so I have to kind of grab you by the hair to pull you out of foiling, but, and you do foil a lot. Uh, what are other ways that you've built feedback loops into your life? Well, feedback loops are, are everything. I mean, you, you can, it's funny. I was talking,

Starting point is 00:48:22 one of the funny things about my conversations with Maurice, cause I really left the chess world behind and it was fascinating just talking to him about how it's evolved so much. And one of the questions that I was asking him is, how present are world-class chess players today to the networks of cognitive biases? And he said that what's interesting is that many of the great chess players today actually don't even know what cognitive biases are. And one of the reasons that they're able to do that is because chess today, you just have such unlimited accurate feedback loops because you've got computers that are much stronger than humans analyzing the position by your side. So any decisions you make, you can look over and see if it's right or wrong. And the computers are so strong that they're going to be right. And so you can basically have a feedback loop whenever you want. And so you just, if you have unlimited feedback loops and you're training six, eight hours a day,

Starting point is 00:49:08 you just learn to feel when you're thinking is good and when it's bad. So just to clarify, in other words, cognitive biases, right? This is a, we won't go too broad, but an example of that would be something like sunk cost fallacy, right? So players back in the day would have some conceptual understanding of how to define sunk cost fallacy and what that means. But today it's more a intuition built upon thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of near immediate feedback loops. Right. So the way sunk cost fallacy could operate consciously for chess player is that you're studying a chess position, you've invested 20 minutes into it, and you're starting to sense it might, you might be barking up the wrong tree,

Starting point is 00:49:51 but you put so much time into it, you want to keep on going, right? Or that could just manifest without any consciousness of the bias in just that your thinking doesn't feel good. Or in the moment your thinking starts to feel a little bit less present or less on it, then you just go the other way, right? Or like you can have a confirmation bias where you can think, okay, right now, am I or am I not searching for proof of something that I've, for a decision I've already reached, right? Or you can just not be subject to confirmation bias because you've had it burned out of you by so many reps of feedback loops just beating the shit out of you whenever you get it wrong, right? So in arts

Starting point is 00:50:30 where you have massive amounts of natural, accurate feedback loops, you don't have to be as conscious about these things. On the other end of the spectrum, something like investing, it's very, very hard to have accurate feedback loops because the decisions you make today, if you're a long-term investor, the decisions you make today, you might not actually see the result of that decision for many years. And you could have had good process and still have bad outcome, or you could have bad process and still have good outcome. So it might not be an accurate feedback loop, even if you do have the feedback loop. And so in realms like that, you have to be really creative. And I would argue that a lot of what defines the learning curve of someone in a field like investing where accurate feedback loops are

Starting point is 00:51:13 few and far between is how creative you are in manifesting them. For example, you can have somatic feedback loops. You can use biofeedback to understand when your performance state is at a high level of quality or a lower level of quality what does it correlate to physiologically exactly so when you're thinking well what does that mean what is the biofeedback saying and then you learn to feel what's the physical signature what's the signature of those good decisions right which we use biofeedback for initially but then we learn to we learn from biofeedback how to sense but then we learn from the biofeedback how to sense, how to feel it, right?

Starting point is 00:51:48 So a lot of what I, you know, when I'm training people in like elite mental performers, a lot of what we're doing is being extremely creative in designing accurate feedback loops in places where it's not so, so unruly. So you asked me about myself. Oh. It's, I mean, you told me not to speak about foiling because but but it's difficult because like that's what i'm all in on now so i'm training in paddle surfing and foiling

Starting point is 00:52:13 and so i mean i'm gonna kind of swat that deflection aside i mean because that's what i'm all in on yeah right and so what i so, I have, I've learned that feedback works for me sometimes and other times I don't want it. So for example, I have a buddy who does drone footage of us once or twice a week on a cadence relative to the swell, but also relative to where we are in the learning process. Usually I'll study video very closely and then I'll spend four or five days training

Starting point is 00:52:44 without video feedback at the thing that I'm working on. And then I'll, then I'll have drone footage again. So I will have video feedback at a pace that feels appropriate to my learning process. Cause there's sometimes you want, I find that you, you want to internalize, you want to work on what you're feeling internally without an external eye. And then sometimes you want the external eye. And I honor that. I really trust that. Similar to, for example, let's just say you're training Brazilian jiu-jitsu and you've got a tournament coming up.

Starting point is 00:53:11 Your repertoire tightens, right? It condenses down to what you're best at. But then you have a period of time where after the tournament, where they say you're not going to compete for two months, you might have an experimental repertoire that you're playing with. Things that by definition you're not as good at,

Starting point is 00:53:25 but that you're expanding, you're investing in loss a little bit, you're getting beaten up by some people who you couldn't beat up with your best repertoire, but you're working on things. So in that moment, if you're studying video in that period, you might reject what you're doing because it's not as good as you can be.

Starting point is 00:53:41 So that's an interesting period to just work on somatically dialing in something and feeling your way into something. I think I just want to underscore that because I think it's really important. And that is, it's not always true that more feedback is better. Absolutely. And if I look at a lot of the best teachers in gymnastics, in skiing, for instance, they're very, one of the terms or one of the phrases that that that i heard a lot in gymnastics was like the first three reps don't count right because if someone's trying something brand new their first few reps are gonna suck they're gonna be terrible right but they're going if they have a bit of

Starting point is 00:54:17 awareness in other techniques or other practices they're going to be getting a feel for it over those first few repetitions and if you're just hitting them with 20 different sets of instructions every rep, it's going to be counterproductive. Right, and I think that there's feedback that you're internally generating based on how you feel and how you observe, you look on video or something.

Starting point is 00:54:36 And then there's feedback that a coach or a trainer might be giving you. For a coach or a trainer to give you feedback, for you to let that feedback in, in my view, they have to know you very deeply. So there's a lot of trainers, for example, who can't get outside of their own conceptual scheme. So they tell you what you should do based on what they would do or what would work for them or what they would want to do if they were in your shoes in that moment. But that's very different from what you need to do in your learning process or you're ready to

Starting point is 00:55:02 stretch for in your learning process. When I'm working with people in a training capacity, I have ways of observing my core partners in training professionally through their journals, through their brainstorms, through their biometrics, through lots of different things. And I will, it's 99.9% observation. And I will, might see something that I would like to give feedback on or that I think I might make, you know, give some feedback on and then I'll observe it sometimes for weeks or months or even years until the moment is right. Or I will have a hypothesis that I'll test and then I'll think about what would be the way to explore this that would be most helpful and not lock somebody else up, right? So, So much of what most coaches that I observe live with

Starting point is 00:55:48 is their own ego pattern. Their ego pattern, they're stuck in their conceptual schemes, but also they want to have the egoic satisfaction of telling you you're doing something wrong or making you better. But the great coaches will actually coach without someone even being aware that they've been coached. Question for you on stress testing your own thinking.

Starting point is 00:56:12 So I read the Slack channel, which is comprised of interactions, mostly your sharing of ideas and thoughts, and then the asking for clarification by your teammates, right? Who are employees. How else do you stress test your thinking or positions on things? Do you have a proactive way of doing that? Does it just happen naturally in your interaction with various friends, because you have physically somewhat isolated yourself, right? How do you think about stress testing the integrity of your thinking and positions? Yeah, great question. So, I mean, I've physically isolated myself, as you point out,

Starting point is 00:56:59 but also somewhat technologically isolated. I mean, I'm not on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or any of those things. Yeah, stay off. I said stay off. Yeah, that's the game plan. But I have a really wonderful network of close friends and thought partners, yourself included, who I am in dialogue with and who I really trust. And I don't have a lot of dialogue with people who I don't think highly of.

Starting point is 00:57:24 And so, I mean, for example, around what I'm working on actively in my training process, Dan Caulfield, who I'm, you know, we're out there on the water four, five hours a day together. He knows me, you know, as intimately. I mean, our friendship was born in fighting one another for thousands of hours, literally. That's a hell of a way to begin a friendship, as sparring partners. And then we still spar quite a bit out there on the water. And, and, and so like, I mean, we're always stress testing things together. Um, Emily Kwok, who is just an awesome woman, who's been my right hand human for about a decade. Um, she's a Brazilian jujitsu, um, black belt women's world champion two times over. She's my chief of staff and runs our whole operation.

Starting point is 00:58:08 She's the boss of our whole thing. And she's, I mean, Emily, one thing that Emily's really brilliant at is, I mean, we have a shared consciousness. She understands me very deeply. And she is very good at pointing out to me when I'm speaking in a shorthand that other people aren't understanding. So she pushes me to deconstruct quite a bit for our dialogue within the team and, you know, more broadly. Is there a risk that if you are of the hive mind together, that you have the same blind spots and therefore are at risk of missing

Starting point is 00:58:40 flaws in thinking? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but I all have have dialogue but i have dialogue with i mean i have i have i'm not sure how many different channels of dialogue open with with um you know i have clients who i work with who are i think some of the best thinkers in the world who i'm talking about ideas with but i think just to dig in to dig into your point i think that

Starting point is 00:59:03 absolutely yes and so you need to have people in your ecosystem who push against you and i in our surf and foil ecosystem i mean it's dan and i have this kind of abstract bizarre way of going about things and almost everybody else who were in dialogue with we have a group of of six of us who are doing this together i mean three of them think we're just completely crazy the jackson pollux of the foiling world pushing back on everything we're doing relentlessly, which is awesome. And I'm sure some things they're absolutely right about. I think that we need to build pushback against us.

Starting point is 00:59:33 Resistance is a huge part of everything we do. Now, the one thing that makes it a lot easier in a competitive discipline, like jiu-jitsu, for example, or chess, is that if you get something wrong, you get your ass kicked. Yeah, right. These arts where it's not so easy. I mean, the wave can kick your ass. But in terms of other things, you get your ass kicked. Yeah, right. These arts where it's not so, and the wave can kick your ass, but in terms of other things, it's much more abstract. So there's a lot more room

Starting point is 00:59:49 for people to bullshit themselves. Well, to give a current example for myself and some of the conversations we had and are having, we don't have to get into the super specifics of positions and stuff, but as it relates to investing, right? I would say something to you as I did yesterday, like here's a statement. I want to give you a

Starting point is 01:00:10 statement and I want you to try to tear it apart. Right. And I find that extremely helpful, right? Even if you happen to agree with it, right? Just to say, all right, I want you to try to, I'm going to share my current approach or what I'm thinking. And I want you to try to, I'm going to share my current approach or what I'm thinking, and I want you to really try to tear it apart. As someone with a very powerful CPU within your head, I find that to be really valuable for me to proactively solicit that kind of feedback. I think cultivating a close ecosystem of people who you can trust to be honest with you in their pushback is really important. Because a lot of people are surrounded by yes men and yes women who will not do that. Do you find, and I mean, this is such a maybe cliched example, but it's a good example nonetheless. I mean, if you look at the partnership between Buffett and Munger, right?

Starting point is 01:01:10 A lot of the discussion I've seen about their partnership is how complementary and different their thought processes are in some respects. In the investing world, do you find as as an example, that people who might self-identify as value investors tend to just hang out with other value investors? Or are there people who are some of the better performers you meet? Do they deliberately expose themselves to people who have a different playbook to push at the edges of their assumptions? Well, first of all, it's important to note that I don't spend time with a lot of investors. I spend time with a very small group of investors who I think are awesome people and who I think approach

Starting point is 01:01:59 things in a very unusual way. So I can talk about how these people who I know very deeply operate around this question, but I think it's pretty unusual. I mean, in my observation, the people who are really operating at a world-class level, who I'm aware of in the investment world, are engaging surprisingly little with other investors. They're separating themselves. So they're not susceptible to groupthink. I mean, often their interactions with other investors will be mostly as contraindicators as opposed to indicators. And just to push back a little bit on, I mean, or to speak to the other side of what you just said, I agree wholeheartedly that it's really important to stress test what we're doing. But I think that

Starting point is 01:02:36 there's also something a little bit crazy and messianic about certain people who become really, really great at things. And like, I think about Marcelo Garcia, for example, who we've talked about a lot over the years, who's my partner in the school we own together in New York, the Marcelo Garcia Jiu-Jitsu Academy. He's a nine-time BJJ world champion, Abu Dhabi world champ. I would argue maybe, I mean, pound for pound, probably the greatest grappler to ever live. Which is an opinion a lot of people hold. Yeah, for sure um if

Starting point is 01:03:05 you just like youtube or whatever look at marcelo garcia i mean you'll be check out the marcelo team yeah he does a lot of amazing amazing shit um and what's interesting is if you when marcelo was competing if you went with him to competition and you felt him in training camps you know i've been in a lot of training camps with him and we've sparred a lot in training camps and you felt him in training camps. You know, I've been in a lot of training camps with him and we've sparred a lot in training camps and I felt him in that physiological state, which is like you're fighting an ape. It's a really simian physical intelligence. It's wild.

Starting point is 01:03:34 I mean, his lats are like hands in the precision of how they close around your neck. It's pretty amazing. But there's a confidence that he goes into things and it's the kind of thing where you can walk into a room where no one believes in you but yourself, but your self-belief is so profound that you're unstoppable. And the way I relate to that, if you try to deconstruct it,

Starting point is 01:03:54 is that that kind of sense of inevitability of success comes from self-expression, from knowing that you're playing your game and you're playing your game better than anyone else in the world could. And you build everything around the uniqueness of who you are. There are moments, I remember when Marcelo was in a Mungels and he was fighting this guy Colossans

Starting point is 01:04:11 who's a just brilliant, brilliant fighter in his own right. And Colossans went for a wrist lock and Marcelo pulled out and then Marcelo put his hand right back into a wrist lock. Looked Colossans right in the eye and let him try. And just stared him in the eye while Colossans tried to close the rip. And he just, so he didn't avoid the technique. He just tried to break this man by putting himself into the thing and saying, you will not,

Starting point is 01:04:32 like, you can't break me. And you can break someone by being unbreakable. And there's something about that kind of self-belief that is really powerful. And there's something about approaching things in really unorthodox ways that you don't really know if it's going to work until it plays out. I mean, I'll give you a very basic, much more simplistic example of that. The idea that Dan and me training in the e-foil stuff was going to translate over to the foil stuff was something I had tremendous confidence in. But, I mean, pretty much everyone who i spoke to in the surf and foil world thought we were dead wrong and thought we were just barking up the wrong tree and if you look at the footage side by side of those two different tools i could see why someone would conclude that

Starting point is 01:05:14 for sure because e4 is way heavier you're on like a 70 pound instrument um and you're you know it's got different dynamics but you're foiling and you're foiling fast and you're getting tons of reps and the e4 i would argue is much much harder to learn than a lighter foil in that it's more high consequence. If you get hit by it, it's bad. You're dealing with a machine. You can die, lots of things. But the thing is that it's an amazing creation and you get so many more reps. So learning on the thing, you just get, I'm not sure if it would be early on 100X, 500X the reps.

Starting point is 01:05:49 And so if it might be harder to learn on some level, it's actually much easier to learn because you can dial it in. But the belief that it will translate over comes from sort of a deeply intuitive thing. So if I stress tested that by talking to other people in the foil world, I would have rejected it.

Starting point is 01:06:05 And what's interesting is that when we translated it over to being whipped in on the lightest, most high-performance board possible on foil, it all translated right over. Now, I want to push back on one thing. Do it. And that is, if you had stress tested it, you would have rejected it. I'm going to offer that it's entirely possible for you to get a lot of contraindicating feedback and still hold your position. Oh, for sure. You're right.

Starting point is 01:06:35 And I did. I mean, I was getting a lot of that. So I think you're right. You just have to handle the stress testing correctly. Now those, as I've read you put it in your private journal, those were reps hidden in plain sight, right? Or there are reps hidden in plain sight, like the front side turns just by going in circles

Starting point is 01:06:54 as opposed to being on a wave at all, right? Just think about that actually, just like that front side turn thing. It's such a funny idea. Like a front side turn, let's just say you're riding a wave, you drop down the face of a wave and then you do a bottom turn.

Starting point is 01:07:03 So I mean, you're like turning on the bottom of a wave like you go into the flats in front of wave and your bottom turning back up to back up into the wave all right that would be like a front side turn you're turning on the side that you're facing on the board right meaning like your belly button is facing away from the wave when you turn just for right no your belly button is facing toward the wave oh it is that's a front side that's a front side turn oh wow that's confusing so so like i realized that my my cutbacks my backside turns on on a going on a right on a front side wave i know this is a little anyway my my front side turns were lacking so what was i was able to do on the e4 it's so ridiculous i put on a a big front wing and a very very small tail wing which allows you

Starting point is 01:07:41 to the small tail wing allows you to have maximized turn ability. And I just started to spin in circles under power. And I was using a folding prop. So if a wave came, I could enter the wave, the prop would fold and enter the wave. So in between sets, I was spinning in circles. So I would be spinning in these tight circles for two minutes at a time, just countless. I mean, if you were to add up the amount of turn time that I got in that one session to how many frontside turns you'd have to make, I mean, I don't know, thousands and thousands and thousands of waves of frontside turns, right? Then whenever a wave would come, I would just drop into it and work on that same body mechanic. And then I'd go back to spinning in circles.

Starting point is 01:08:17 I looked like a total madman. If anyone would have been watching me, it was like the ultimate, like, what the hell is this ridiculous human doing? Looney Tunes. But I made such huge growth in that moment. Can you think of other places in other arts, whether it's chess, BJJ, push hands, investing, anywhere, where you might find reps hidden in plain sight or a way to do that type of deliberate practice that is uncommon well i think i think yes everywhere

Starting point is 01:08:45 so we could get into a technical discussion of reps hidden in plain sight like the front side turn which is technical right which is i think a fairly obvious one i think that where the really potent low hanging fruit um you know hanging in plain sight um like lie are in the thematic right are in like breaking down the learning process into the core principles or themes we want to work on and doing reps of those those are just invisible to people in plain sight right so you mean this is an example maybe i'm pulling out the wrong example but the learning the macro from the micro say with the practicing of the endgame in chess, with just a handful of pieces on the board. Would that be an example? Or is that not?

Starting point is 01:09:32 Yeah, so that would be an example of, I mean, that's a great example of reps hidden in plain sight, where you're basically setting king and pawn against king to get a feel for the essence of the king and the essence of the pawn. Then you're setting rook and pawn and learning about the essence of the rook. So you're getting tons of reps of the rook of the pawn. Then you study chess tactics with rook and pawn tactics, and you're getting tons of reps of those rook. So you're getting tons of reps of the rook, of the pawn. Then you study chess tactics with rook and pawn tactics, and you're getting tons of reps of those things. So that's an example of ways that you can get reps of individual pieces, right? So that's a great example, the way I would say, of reps sitting in plain sight. When I'm thinking about conceptual or thematic reps sitting in plain sight, it's more around, I mean, for example, when we took on surfing and foiling,

Starting point is 01:10:11 one of the things that we did that was strange was, you know, I was much more comfortable in big waves than small waves initially because I was comfortable with breath holds and I was comfortable with intensity and small waves in some ways are much more technical. And I, I just simply like I hadn't. Um, and, and so I made the decision early on to, to, to surf and foil big wave, bigger waves before I really took on smaller waves. It might be a strange idea, but the kind of rep that I had to get was glide, getting used to moving fast forward sideways, right? So for example, the one wheel, the e-foil, these were getting tons of reps in just the idea of glide. Learn to feel what glide was like,

Starting point is 01:11:01 right? And just as an example that might be parallel and i please tell me if i'm i'm not getting this right but in terms of deconstructing and taking one theme like that so i am visiting you with my girlfriend and she's new to water in the in the capacity of surfing paddling etc and rather than take a bunch of surf lessons which was the kind of knee-jerk uh idea that both of us had like oh yeah that's what you do take some surf lessons and your recommendation was to consider taking out a boogie board and just getting used to the sort of force and dynamics of the wave movement yeah when i watch how people approach surf teaching i think for the most part it's crazy like people for the most surf teachers

Starting point is 01:11:57 mostly teach people to surf by just going out and surfing like let's go out and surf yeah right and they get their ass kicked because you have to learn to read the water, how to pop up on the board, where to enter a wave, then how to turn, where to stand on the board, how to shift your weight, and all this stuff. I mean, in my opinion,

Starting point is 01:12:15 like what we did with your girlfriend is we went out and pushed her into a bunch of waves boogie boarding and just learned to feel what glide was like on the water, also not traumatizer, and then learned to feel what different parts of the wave, the energy in different parts of the wave. And the last wave she got on her first day was actually in the pocket of a wave. I pushed her in right where it was breaking, right where she'd surf it. And she was so stoked. And she had a great positive first experience and she felt glide and it was awesome.

Starting point is 01:12:39 As opposed to like just getting super frustrated in the beginning. And I think that deconstructing it is really important. An interesting example of thematic deconstruction relative to reps, head, and implant site would be, for example, this idea around being at peace in chaos or learning to be okay internally or even to thrive internally when your body is in alarm. Because if you don't train at that, then when your body goes into alarm, you're just alarmed.

Starting point is 01:13:04 But if you do train at that, for example example you can train at it like we discussed through cold plunging or different things that controlled ways of putting your body into that state and breathing through it then you've trained at that meta theme right of being at peace in physiological alarm and then working through it and then when you're in a in in a for example a surf moment where you're in a, for example, a surf moment where you're in a total shit show, then you've trained at that most important part of it, how to breathe through it, right? You've learned how to literally technically breathe through the alarm, right? As opposed to trying to do that when you're also trying to read the water and figure out if you're

Starting point is 01:13:38 about to hit a rock and you're in the middle of a hold down and you've got one breath you could take between the next set and everything's freaked out. You don't know what the hell's going on. So I think that that's an example of how to deconstruct things down to component parts and work on them. And I think it's actually,

Starting point is 01:13:54 it simplifies the learning process in a lot of ways because then when you put it all together, you've learned the critical component parts, the thematic component parts. Like reading the water. I mean, that's something that I think should be done independently of just going out to learn how to surf but very few teachers

Starting point is 01:14:09 some do but very few surf teachers actually just work people with people on reading the water when they're not surfing yeah and the the best teachers i've run into on water for instance a good friend of mine kelly starrett incredible uh, physical therapist, all around hilarious guy, also former world-class kayaker. And we spent time on the Grand Canyon together with his family. And that's exactly what he did before attempting anything technical, before learning any new skills. He's like, I just want you to move with me, and I want you to watch the water. And he would explain it once,

Starting point is 01:14:48 and we'd get to the next set of rapids, and he'd go, okay, what do you see? Where's the tongue? Where would you go? It's hypothetical before just throwing me in with 20 new skills to try to juggle simultaneously. But that takes empathy as a coach. Yeah, he is an exceptional, exceptional coach.

Starting point is 01:15:05 Yeah, he's very good at it. The Buddhist technique of expedient means or liberative technique, depending on how it's translated, of being aware of what the student is ready to stretch for and going there. That's taking yourself outside of your own conceptual scheme as a teacher

Starting point is 01:15:23 and understanding what the student needs, right? I mean, I think that's principle 101 as a teacher. But very few people really internalize it. Yeah, Kelly and you are both very good also at ensuring that the first few experiences are at the very least non-threatening, right? So they may not be orgiastic celebrations of joy, but at the very least, they're not going to be traumatizing, right?

Starting point is 01:15:56 He's very good at that. Whether it's Olympic weightlifting or kayaking on what can be very, very scary rapids at different points, ensuring that the first few experiences, as you're just getting a toehold on the basic sensations of a new skill, are non-traumatizing. I've learned that. I think some people in my past might not say that was a core strength. We can let that one go for now well we're we're coming up on a very exciting afternoon here

Starting point is 01:16:31 so I know we don't have too much time left but I'd love to ask you maybe in closing about Robert Keegan am I getting the pronunciation of that name correct? yeah

Starting point is 01:16:44 who is Robert Keegan? why is he the pronunciation of that name correct? Yeah. Who is Robert Keegan? Why is he interesting to you? So our friend Graham Duncan first turned me on to Keegan many years ago. And I read his work, but I've been, in the last couple of years, just become increasingly impressed with certain core points that he's zoned in on. He's just a brilliant adult developmental psychologist and a lot of his work is around the transitions in the human mind from an opportunistic to a socialized to a self-authoring to a self-transformative kind of mindset. And if we just

Starting point is 01:17:18 zone in mostly around the transition between the socialized mind and the self-authored mind, which is... Yeah, hold that thought. May I ask, does Graham find this, is he focused on this mostly in the context of talent acquisition or finding good talent? Is this sort of part of his filter in doing that? Yes. I think that that was how he initially was drawn into it, and I think now it's just part of his worldview.

Starting point is 01:17:43 Just a lens. Yeah, just a lens yeah just a lens and it's one of many very interesting lenses I don't tend to have like think that one lens has got it all but the thing that I'm

Starting point is 01:17:51 intrigued with with Keegan's work which I have a huge amount of respect for is the exploration of the limitations of the socialized mind sometimes we can just

Starting point is 01:17:59 will somebody to be able to perspective take to release their perspective and take on someone else's perspective or the ability to hold multiple mental models that are competing with one another and be at peace with that tension between them, right? We can just want people to do that,

Starting point is 01:18:15 but there are certain developmental hurdles to that. And I think that that's an area that Keegan has really explored brilliantly. And I do encourage people to read Keegan's work. How do you spell his last name? K-E-G-A-N. I think it's important to be empathically present to the developmental obstacles that we all might have around what we can and cannot do conceptually. I mean, it strikes me that we're all blind. It's just a matter of A, accepting that we're blind and trying to figure out how we might be blind or what we might be blind to, perhaps is a better way to put it.

Starting point is 01:18:52 Keegan. Yeah, I agree. And for those interested, Graham and I had a really fun conversation on the podcast as well. So I will create a short link to that. Graham's a brilliant dude, a dear friend. I love him.

Starting point is 01:19:05 And one of, I mean, he's the best mind I've ever run into in the world around the hunt for talent and the deconstruction of potential world-class talent out there in the early stages. Best hair in the business also. Absolutely. Severe, follicle envy of Graham.

Starting point is 01:19:23 So for those people interested, I'll create a short link to that interview, that conversation at Tim dot blog forward slash Graham, G R a H a M. Joshua, anything else you would like to, to mention, discuss,

Starting point is 01:19:37 disabuse me of before we wrap up? Nope. Woodpecker is right now trying to put a hole in my office I think that's a great place to close So Josh, where can people find you? I feel like your answer is the same as Laird Hamilton In the Pacific Ocean Yes

Starting point is 01:19:56 Well, until next time Thanks for hanging, man Thanks, brother And recording something for posterity to be continued. Hey, man, this was fun. And everybody listening, for show notes, for links to everything, Robert Keegan, et cetera, that we've discussed, there's also

Starting point is 01:20:13 an incredible video that I'll try to track down of Maurice Ashley with me playing chess hustlers, which is just fantastic entertainment in New York City. So I will link to that in the show notes. Just go to Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

Starting point is 01:20:36 Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com.

Starting point is 01:21:24 That's fourhourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if I could only take one supplement, what would it be? The answer is inevitably Athletic greens. I view it as, and a lot of you now view it as, all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it way back in 2010 in the 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I've been using it since before that, and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick,

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Starting point is 01:22:46 Surprise, surprise. Most notably, the quality of my sleep, which seems to affect just about everything. This led me to revisit, you name it, my daily routine, morning routine, exercise, diet, all the way to what I slept on. And I ended up getting all new beds here in Austin, Texas, including mattresses from Helix Sleep. Helix has built a sleep quiz that takes two minutes to complete, and they use the answers to match your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress. Whether you're a side sleeper, hot sleeper, cold sleeper, or you like plush, you like firm, with Helix, there's no more guessing or confusion. Just go to helixsleep.com forward slash Tim, take their two minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a mattress that will give you the

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #412: Josh Waitzkin on Beginner’s Mind, Self-Actualization, and Advice from Your Future Self

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