The Tim Ferriss Show - #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #522 "Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer" and #148: "Josh Waitzkin, The Prodigy Returns."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim (25–30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[04:49] Notes about this supercombo format.[05:51] Enter Anne Lamott.[06:21] What is it about Bird by Bird that has affected so many people so deeply?[07:18] Where the title of Bird by Bird originated.[09:40] How Neal Allen helps people tame (but not discard) their inner critic.[10:45] Who controls the dial when you're tuned in to KFKD radio?[11:51] How Anne recommends I pursue my fiction writing aspirations.[12:37] The pros and cons of Anne's upbringing.[19:08] What does being "spiritually fit" mean to Anne?[24:40] How radical self-care became an imperative for Anne.[32:25] The dark night that turned Anne's son Sam's life around.[38:10] Enter Josh Waitzkin.[38:43] On Dreaming Yourself Awake by B. Alan Wallace and Brian Hodel.[39:58] Casual exercise.[40:52] Josh's terrifying experience with the Wim Hof method.[45:52] How Josh uses "flow" as therapy.[48:19] Initiating a flow state.[50:45] Cognitive biases and armchair professors.[55:07] Developing high-level sensitivity and listening to your senses.[57:53] Strategies for on-boarding newcomers to mindfulness training.[1:02:40] Paddlesurfers in peril.[1:03:36] Embracing the funk.[1:06:03] On parenting.[1:15:07] Fixed perspectives and growth mindsets.[1:17:34] On training somatic sensitivity.[1:22:06] On mitigating the dangers of a fixed identity.[1:24:32] Marcelo Garcia and the principle of cultivating quality as a way of life.[1:30:19] Quality and presence in parenthood.[1:33:42] The fire-walking process.[1:40:11] Translating techniques learned from martial arts to less obvious activities (like investing).[1:42:19] Building slack into the system.[1:46:17] Scarcity in the learning process.[1:54:27] Josh's daily journaling process.[1:56:25] Thematic interconnectedness in the context of education.[2:04:08] The Art of Learning Project.[2:05:59] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And

internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening. First up, Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling

author of 20 books, including Operating Instructions, an account of her son's first year, Bird by Bird, her classic book on writing, Help, Thanks, Wow, a celebration of prayer, and her latest, Somehow, an exploration of the transformative power of love. You can find Anne on Twitter, at Anne Lamott.

I'll tell you a funny story. When Sam's little boy, who's 12 now, was five, I was teaching his kindergarten class a writing workshop. And instead of saying shitty first drafts, I said really poopy first drafts. And the kids loved me. And after I was done, my little grandchild came up to me and he leaned in and he sounded like Tony Soprano. He said, oh, Nana, that was terrible. And I said, what? And he said, you told people you would teach them how to write a book, but you only taught us how to write one page. And that's really what I can help you do is one chapter is on shitty first drafts. I don't

try to teach kids or grownups how to write really, really well. I just teach them to stop not writing. I teach them to keep their butt in the chair and to write badly and that all first drafts of any book you've ever read by the authors you esteem most began as unreadable first drafts. And I teach people to take it really small, bird by bird. Is it okay if I tell the story? Oh, please, please. I would love for you to tell the story just so people know the genesis. Well, my older brother, I was like a superstar achiever in school. My older brother hated school and he was kind of a rebel. And in California in the 50s and early 60s, in fourth grade, you wrote two term papers.

One was the Sacramento paper. That's our state capital. And the other was on birds. And you had to write it all year, all semester of paper on birds. And my brother hadn't started. It was due on a Monday. And on a Saturday, he admitted to my dad that he hadn't started. My brother was a tough guy and he was in tears. And my dad sat down with him and put his arm around him. And he said, just take it bird by bird, buddy. You know, first you read about chickadees and then you write a paragraph in your own words

about chickadees and then you draw a picture and then you take pelicans and you study up on pelicans and then you write a paragraph or a passage on pelicans. I never, ever forgot that. And then years later, probably 20 years ago, so in my forties, I heard E.L. Doctorow say that writing was like driving at night with the headlights on. You could only see a little ways in front of you, but you could make the whole journey that way. And I think that is the most profound advice I can offer anyone on any topic, that you

can only see a little ways in front of you and you can make the whole journey that way. And another thing that I think helped people when they read Bird by Bird was the chapter on perfectionism and how perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. It's the voice of the enemy. And if you listen to it, it keeps you crazy for your entire life because we all fall short. You've written books and you think you're creating this golden and crystal palace that people can walk inside of and see all of truth and beauty and reality. And you kind of end up, your books and my books, all of them are kind of shanty towns, you know, in the peace marches where people set up tents and thought it made sense to bring their dogs, you know, during the

rainstorm. And that's a miracle to have written a shantytown. And so I think these ideas of not knowing what you're doing and of letting yourself do it really badly and to try to help grind down that critical voice. I'll just mention my husband's work here. He's Neil Allen. He wrote Shapes of Truth. And the work he does with people in these Shapes of Truth is taming the inner critic. And what his position is, you're never going to get rid of it. You know, we don't get over very much here. What he does with people is he has them bring forth the inner critic and actually just put it on the table in front of him. And he thanks them for keeping him alive when he was six and seven, because it kept him small and controllable. So he didn't run out into

the street. He didn't swim out past his ability to stay afloat. But that at the age of six or whatever, we probably don't need it anymore. And so he has his clients give the inner critic a great new job, which might be ethical consultant for the project so that the inner critic can go off to the library where there's an incredibly comfortable chair and a good reading light and 2000 books. And he will sit there and read what he loves to do. And when we need an ethical consultation, we'll come get him. But we don't need that constant.

Is it allowed? Okay. To say the F word on the show? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, please. In Bird by Bird, there's a whole chapter on K-Fucked Radio, K-F-K-D. And without a lot of help and a lot of transformation and healing, K-Fucked Radio is on 24-7. It's telling you how far short you're falling. It's telling you how great you started out and what a disappointment you've turned out to be. It's telling you that what you're in the middle of is beating a dead horse, on and on and on. And so the shapes of truth work and the inner critic work and bird by bird is 90% about turning down K-fucked radio. Anyway, out of the left-hand speaker is all this stuff about that you can't do it perfectly and that why bother? And that this has been blah, blah, blah.

But out of the right-hand speakers, it's like the voice of the people who love you most. The voice of like for me, Sam or my husband or my two best girlfriends. And they're saying, I love your story. So I love how you write. I can't wait to read more. But you can turn down the left-hand speaker and it'll always be there to some degree. There are many different directions I could go. And thank you for that context. I am going to sit down and reread Bird by Bird, in fact, which I've read at least, I would say, a dozen times, but I'd always written nonfiction. And I'm beginning to experiment with fiction, which is a whole different sport, it would seem, freeing in many ways. I can help you.

You can help me. If you want someone to help you, I will help you. I would love that. You sit down, you keep your butt in the chair, you take one passage, one memory, one vision, one bit of dialogue, one character, and you do it badly. So if we look back to your childhood, my understanding is you had a role model for this button chair time. Could you tell us a bit about your childhood? The model was my father, who was a writer,

Kenneth Lamott, and he had a lot of books published and a lot of magazine articles. And I heard him down at his desk at that old Olympia at 5.30 every morning, rain or shine or hangover. He just did it. And that was what he taught me was that you don't wait for inspiration. It's an illusion. And in fact, I gave a talk once on inspiration and on how I don't believe in it and how what gets me going is debt, mental illness, and the desire for revenge. But my dad just did it. And that's what I learned. And that's what I passed on to my son. And my house was very, very tense. My parents didn't love each other. My father drank a lot. My mother was very, very overweight and a black belt codependent from

Liverpool. And I was the middle child. I have an older brother and a younger brother. And it was up to me to help make sure dad kept coming home because he didn't like mom, but he loved me. I had a rebellious older brother and an infant baby brother, and I needed to try to help raise the baby brother. I mean, my parents really would have been better off raising orchids or teacup poodles or something. And so what I did at the age of five was to try to raise the baby and to try to keep my brother from imploding. And it was exhausting. And I got migraines at five years old and no one, it was fifties. No one quite noticed that children had mental health diagnoses and stress. It was really life or death. But I'll tell you, my family worked better when I had a migraine because families do

well if there's one sick person that's not them. So when I had to be in the total darkness with cold compresses, the family thrived, you know, but I learned a couple of rules. And I know you've written about stuff like this, but I learned some survival tools. And one was to think that I was defective and that I was the reason that the family wasn't doing well. Because if I was the problem, that meant I had some measure of control, right? I could do better. And I couldn't do better. I was an A student. I was a tennis star. But I believed I could do better and I could need less. And if I did better and needed less, then it seemed to make mom and dad better. And it was completely Reaganomic trickle down.

Like if dad was okay and we helped dad pump up, then mom would be able to nurture the three of us. So born to die people pleaser. I got all of my self-esteem from outside, from good grades, from being the star of the classroom and from being a great conversationalist that my parents like to have around and that my parents' friends like to chat with. And I was not only defective, and this is where it gets dicey, but I was in charge of everybody's happiness. I was in charge of helping mom not feel so put down by dad. I was in charge of making dad come home because I was so adorable and I rubbed his feet. I'm a lot older than you,

but when I was coming up in the fifties, the men, they all wore socks with garters, these little sock garters. And I was like a little geisha girl with curly kinky hair. And I'd sit and I'd take off his little garter on the couch and I'd take off his sock and I'd rub his feet. And I thought he would come home for that. And he drank a lot. So what I got good at was pleasing people, being a stratospheric achiever, but not quite so bright that it ruined my older brother's life. And it made him feel like a loser. And I know how to raise babies. And I know how to get by on the leftovers, on whatever was left over after I gave everybody the very, very best parts of me. So all of my books, including Bird by Bird and Operating Instructions, everything

has to do with that coming into radical self-care and becoming my own priority. This is kind of funny. My mom, who is a black belt, as I told you, codependent, always took the broken Friday my entire life. I can swear on a stack of Bibles, my mother never once said, here, somebody else takes the goddamn broken egg yolk. Can you take the, you know, my mother ate the broken egg yolk. And that's what I was raised to believe women did. And I had to have enough therapy, enough recovery. I've been clean and sober 35 years now and enough in the women's movement and a lot of outside help so that I could be my own priority. And if there was a broken egg

yolk, maybe it wasn't my turn again. Maybe Sam should have the broken egg yolk. Sam loves a perfect fried egg. You know what? Tough shit. I know that sounds like a loving Christian thing to say, but it had to do with becoming my own priority. So that was the childhood I had. I was very afraid. I had migraines. I was too smart. I was very good at math. Girls weren't supposed to be. I skipped a grade. I made the boys feel bad because I was better at math than they were. I was small and I looked funny. I had this crazy, pure white, blonde, kinky hair and these huge green eyes. I weighed about 20 pounds till eighth grade. And all I knew to do was to do better and to try to do it perfectly. And that's why I think the chapter in Bird by Bird is something that people so relate to because like in my family, all of us, in the American way, in fact, but in my family, the theme was forward thrust.

That no matter what was going on, you keep going. You keep going forward. You thrust forward so that the abyss doesn't open up at your feet, you know. And if the abyss threatens to you, you get to Ikea and you buy a cute throw rug, you know, you trick out the abyss. And they call the abyss the abyss because it's pretty abysmal. It's a nightmare. So you try not to land in it. What my family did was drink and overeat and diet. My dad had a million affairs and it turned out, and you've written about this, that the abyss or in the Christian theology of St. John

the Divine, it's the dark night of the soul is where transformation most often happens. And that if you can just bear being somewhere that you've never been before, where you don't really have any kind of owner's manual or a clue of how to proceed, then you're really teachable. And from that place, something magical might just grow. You asked me a question before we began recording. You asked me several questions. You asked me how I was doing. You also asked me if I was spiritually fit or feeling spiritually fit. I don't remember the exact wording, but I'd like to hear to you what that means. And then after that, what it means to you current day. After that, I'd love for you to tell us the story or any story of a dark night of the soul experience

that you've had that helped to catalyze this radical self-care. But let's start in the present tense, spiritually fit. What does that mean to you? Well, spiritually fit means I'm in my body, paradoxically. It doesn't mean I'm in some ether world of divine enlightenment. And it means, I heard a preacher years ago say the 23rd Psalm, which is, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. But she said, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not trip. And I just love that because when I'm spiritually not fit, I'm just tripping. I'm making up stories. I'm in fear. I'm in anxiety. I have a tremendous anxiety disorder for which I'm successfully treated most of the time, but I'm just tripping

on something somebody said that it's stuck in my craw, on something I'm afraid of, of something, a lot of fear. In recovery, there's some great acronyms for fear because people like my cokehead friends, I mean, I'm my own cokehead friend, but they would say that the false evidence appearing real, which usually means that you're at the window peering through the drapes thinking that there's a SWAT team on your lawn at four in the morning, you know, and that the best idea you have is another cool refreshing beer. But some of the ones I love is one is the frantic effort to appear recovered. That's my main thing is that when I need to look good, when I need to appear to be doing well is when I'm at my most spiritually lost. And another one I love is future events already ruined.

And so I'm just tripping out of it. Like I was tripping out this morning about what if I screwed up with Tim, you know, and you're so illustrious and your listenership, I think is younger. And why would they want this old lady with dreadlocks as Sunday school teacher? Where do our Zen diagrams meet? And I was tripping. And then I remembered, you know, future events already ruined. That's not truth. That's just K-fuck radio. And another one I love is fear expressed allows relief. And so I told Neil and he said, you know, you are so wonderful at this. Just breathe and go for a walk first and do what you do. And you'll be sitting there with Sam and Tim is great. And you're going to love it. It's going to go by so quickly. But so fear expressed

allows relief. So spiritually fit for me is that I'm not tripping and that I'm breathing. When I was a child, I didn't breathe. You know, I held my breath because for all the that I'm not tripping and that I'm breathing. When I was a child, I didn't breathe. I held my breath because for all the reasons I told you. And I remember I used to pass out on the boardwalk in town at three years old. And my dad would nudge me and say, Annie, Annie, and I blink awake. But if you breathe, you may end up in your body and it may be that in your body, terrible things happen to you. And if you're a girl addict and alcoholic like I am, you know, until 1986, you let terrible things happen in your body. You encourage terrible things. If you let people do anything at all that they want, they seem to like you better briefly, you know? And so breathing will bring you into your body. So for that reason, you may resist it. But for me to do what I call the sacrament of ploppage and to sit down for one minute to breathe into my heart cave and do the sighing, I get my sense of humor back. And laughter, even at my own quirky, fearful,

darling self, laughter I've written in a number of places is carbonated holiness. So if I'm breathing and I've gotten my sense of humor back, I'm in something spiritual. I'm something that has to do with my human spirit and the divine. I mean, I believe and I've heard that we have dual citizenship. We're children of the divine. We're children of sons and daughters of God. And we also have these kind of screwed up biographical details. We've got genetic details that we would have maybe not preferred. We have predispositions to alcoholism and mental illness or to weight gain in our thighs or whatever. But I have to remember that I can toggle back between dual citizenship, between being a child of God or of the great universal spirit and Annie Lamont, 67, Sunday

school teacher and left-wing activist, mother and grandmother. And I got married at 65. I got married three days after I got Medicare. And those are my two biographical details. And I also am a person of spirit. So that's what spiritually fit means for me is that I remember that I'm not this terrible pinball machine in my mind cranking out new ideas about how I can do life more perfectly so that everybody will think more highly of me. Annie, I want to tell you, I am enjoying this tremendously. So you are exceeding every expectation. So I'm very, very happy that you're here. And thank you for making the time to be here. You mentioned this radical self-care and having written a lot about radical self-care

and what a contrast that is to your early experiences or earlier experiences in life, was there or is there a particular catalyzing event that brought radical self-care into focus as a imperative for you? Well, two things spring to mind. I mean, I could write a whole book on the dark night of the soul and every book I've written is about it to some degree, but it's my favorite topic. And I just had a million dark nights of the soul while I was drinking and using. And usually the solution then was to have eight or nine social vodkas and maybe a little amyl nitrate just to socialize. But then in 1986, the 4th of July weekend, I had a three-day blackout, which is so unfair.

I'm not kidding because usually you have a blackout and, you know, it's like a wet chalkboard eraser has come by and there's nothing left on the chalkboard of what you did that evening. And it's very scary, but usually they don't happen all that often. I had three in a row, July 4th, July 5th, and July 6th. And I woke up in terror the morning of July 7th. And I had run out of any more good ideas. All I could think of was how I could figure out a way to learn to drink more successfully.

And I knew that I wasn't going to be able to break that code. And I was already a believer. I mean, I've pretty much been a believer my whole life. I already had a church by then. I was just done. I'd reached the end of my rope. That's what the dark night is. You've run out of any more good ideas. And in that space of total emptiness and lostness, I was lost and something found me. And I have to think of it as grace. I understand grace to be spiritual WD-40. And that it spritzes you. Maybe a really quick spritz or maybe you get the little thin red straw inserted into you and you

get a sustained spritz of it. But it was like water wings. I suddenly understood that I wasn't going to sink completely, but that I needed a lot of help. And that was the hugest breakthrough for me. Well, the help I got first, I got a couple of sober women who said I have what you have and I found a way out one day at a time not drinking just for the day and if your ass falls off we can help pick it up and carry it to where we are and we'll sit together and we'll share our truth and you won't have to drink for the rest of the day and we'll help you get through the day just without a butt. The amazing thing about grace is that it meets you exactly where you are

and then it doesn't leave you where it found you. You know, it sort of tricks you into getting into its wheelbarrow and then it moves you to someplace where maybe there's just a shaft of light or maybe there's just a shaft of light, or maybe there's cool water. And the cool water I found was other sober people. But that was the darkest night I can remember. And then here's a recent example. My son and his son live here in a barn on the property, and his son lives with him halftime and with the child's mother halftime.

And I was in major, major people pleasing. And I was dancing. I was just dancing as fast as I could to make sure everybody's needs were met. And I was taking the leftovers and the broken egg yolks and I was exhausted. I was in existential exhaustion and it had been going on for a while. And I finally, I know, I shared it with my older brother who'd stopped by, who's a fundamentalist Christian. And he sort of basically done the equivalent of handing me some nice Christian bumper sticker about how God never gives you more than you can handle, which I think is a total crock. And I think what you got to do with God is to convince him that you really can't bear all that

much. Like when you deal with a trainer at the gym, you don't want them to know how much you can lift. I guess they'll make you lift it. And that what you have to do is instead to just pretend you can't and hint at liability from another gym you went to where they made you lift too much. When my brother handed me this stupid word bumper sticker, I lost it. And I said to him, like one of the coneheads, I said, I have to go right this minute now and go for a ride. I have an errand to do. And my older brother looked at me like, what? And I got in my car and I drove out to the woods and screaming and shouting and pounding the steering wheel and saying, I hate you, Sam. I hate you to his mother. I hate you, John, who's my older brother. I hate you, mom and dad. You

taught me that I'm a piece of shit unless I'm getting A's and unless the entire world. And I hated everybody. And it was half hour. I turned around, half hour, same record. And then finally I pulled over to the side of the road and I called my spiritual mentor, whose name is Horrible Bonnie. And that's what I call her anyway. And I said, I hate, I cannot stand it. All I do is be there for everybody else.

And I get nothing. And I went on and on and she listened, which is the miracle that somebody listens and they don't try to save or rescue or fix you or horse you into submission to what they think would be a good path for you. And she said, Annie, this is what we paid for. This is where I hoped you would get someday. And I wasn't in cute, adorable crying. I was in red-faced, swollen-nosed, Carl Malden, snotty crying. I said, no, but I don't have any, I don't have, I've tried everything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She let me cry, and she said, you are,

everybody else is your priority, that your son, and your grandson, and your mom, and your relatives, and that your best friends, and that your people at church and the blah, blah, blah, that everybody else is taken care of and you get leftovers. And it was the darkest, naughtiest, wettest, dark night of the soul. And it wasn't like God reached down with his magic or his or her magic wand and tapped me. It really hurt. I was really angry about what I've put up with. And I was sad and

angry and freaked out. And we just stayed on the phone. And then all of a sudden I could breathe again. And I drove back to my house and I became my own priority. And my older brother was there and he goes, hi, you seemed kind of, I said, oh no, I didn't, you know, oh no, I'm fine. And frantic effort to barely remember. But from that point on, I can tell you what date that was because three months later, I met the man who became my husband. I did three months of this radical self-love, of being my own priority, of letting everybody else take the leftovers, of putting myself first, of structuring my days around what would make me happiest, what I needed to do and what I hope to do and what I love to do. And then I would find time for everybody else.

And three months to the day later, I met Neil for our first coffee date. And that was five years ago. We haven't been apart for a day since. So that was the most recent dark night of the soul. My son, who's right here, had a very long stretch of meth and alcohol where I thought he would die. That was the most terrifying thing to think I could lose him because he's my outside heart. You know, I think children are our outside heart and I couldn't save him. I couldn't fix him. I couldn't rescue him. I couldn't really help him. But the dark night of our soul was that he had a two-year-old child. He had a baby at 19. And the mom and my grandchild were living with me.

And Sam was around, but he had a house in the Tenderloin. He had an apartment. And he showed up wasted. And I had reached my bottom. That's what the dark night is. You run out of any more good ideas. And so what I did was I took a sharpened pencil and I held it to his throat. I mean, this does not jive with my spiritual books, my persona and my being a Sunday school teacher.

And I said, you're as bad as any junkie I know. And you cannot be back on this property with your baby if you so much as have a hit of marijuana. And we just looked at each other and he looked at me like with such hatred. And for your child to hate you is about as bad as it ever gets. And then I got some sort of Holy Spirit nudge or something, you know, the great universal spirit. And I said, do you want to ride back to the city and to the tenderloin? I don't know if you know what the great universal spirit. And I said, do you want to ride back to the city and to the tenderloin? I don't know if you know what the tenderloin is. Oh, I do. I lived in San Francisco a long time, but a lot of people don't. So could you describe it please? It's not lovely. It's where all the crackheads and heroin at. It's a really deprived,

depleted, addicted, prostitute, pimp, terrible, terrible place. And anyway, so I drove him back to his house and he got out of the car and he hated me. And I walked over to him and I reached for him. I took a chance. You know, they say courage is fear that has said its prayers. We hadn't said a word in the car. It's an hour drive. And I just kept praying in silence in the car. And we stood together and I reached for him and he reached for me. And I said, I'll see you. And he said, I'll see you. And then he called me three weeks later and he said, I've got a week clean and sober.

And the guys who could actually be there for him, which was not his incredibly crazy mother who had had it, these guys in San Francisco who were clean and sober had fished him out of the trough, you know, and one day at a time had helped him get clean and sober. And he hasn't had a drink or a drug for 10 years now. So those three things that I've described are the darkest nights of the soul that I've been through. But the thing with Sam and with my child in general is that I had thought up until then that I had some real, I have a disease of good ideas, usually for other people.

And I believe that my ideas will really help them have better lives and at least make me less uncomfortable when I'm around them. And I learned that my help was not helpful to Sam and that help is the sunny side of control. And I was trying to control him and that was making him worse. And I still, you know, I'm 67. He's going to be 32 this year. I still, he's on his hero's journey with his podcast, Hello Humans, that you've listened to. And he's doing a beautiful job. And I would still like to get on his hero's journey, just maybe 10 feet behind him with juice box and sunscreen maybe, and just be there in case he needs me. But when I do that,

it's injuring him. It's not helping him. It's certainly not helping me. But what I have to do is the awareness that I'm doing it again and grip myself gently by the wrist and say, Annie, stop. Get back onto your own emotional acre. He's doing great. He is a miracle. that my help is not helpful, that when I'm in the darkest, most scared place on earth, if I can not try to do the forward thrust and try to redecorate the abyss, that I'm going to get blessing and light and I'm going to get fresh air. So, and I'm, you know, my life is if I can tough it out or let somebody into it with me and breathe and do left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, that my world is going to become more spacious. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high quality supplements and

products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag 3-in-8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Momentous also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified, so you can trust that

what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off. And now, Josh Waitzkin, bestselling author of The Art of Learning, An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, a trainer of elite mental performers in business and finance, an eight-time national chess champion, a two-time world champion in Tai Chi Chuan push hands, and the first Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt under nine-time world champion Marcelo Garcia. You can learn more about Josh and his projects at joshwaiteskin.com. Joshua. Yes, Timbo. Welcome back, buddy. I'm so happy to be here.

I'm thrilled you're here, man. Hanging with you. And I thought we could maybe start just with a complete non sequitur, which is a book you just mentioned to me that I know nothing about, which is Dreaming Yourself Awake. Can you talk about this? Oh, I didn't think we're going to begin here. It's a book that I explored a couple years ago. 20 years ago, I started studying Tibetan dream yoga and lucid dreaming. Not deeply, but exploring. And this was during the period where I was first getting involved with my study of East Asian philosophy. And then a dear friend of mine recommended this book. It's actually funny. We kind of made a mistake together. I recommended another book that he texted back confirming that it was the name. He texted me back that name that I didn't intend, but then I picked

up and read and it was extraordinary. It's just a phenomenal discussion, very systematic discussion of the art of lucid dreaming in this way that fuses East Asian philosophy with Western science. And you were competing then at the time. You were in the midst of competition. Two years ago, you mean? Oh, this was two years ago. Yeah, this was two years ago. Oh, I think you said 20 years ago. 20 years ago was when I started

studying East Asian philosophy. I got it. I was competing in chess then and then into the martial arts. I need a little more caffeine. Working on it. You've had a rough night. And I wanted to thank you.

I'm just, this is like Tim's stream of consciousness podcast intro. We're looking at a slack line. This is an indoor gibbon classic slack. It's about 12, no, not even, 10 feet long maybe. It's surrounded by kettlebells, an endo board, and a triceratops, which I don't think is yours. Got the Bosu ball there.

And the Bosu ball. And I want to thank you for actually getting me to bite the bullet and grab a slack line which i set up on long island yeah absolutely i've loved i've had some fun on your slack line along with it too yeah i love right now i'm in the period you know i kind of oscillate between these and my son jack was four and a half we have a great time i'm on the indo board rocking he's on the bosu ball we're having a catch back and forth while on these things we're always integrating these interesting kinds of physiological awareness training. Speaking of which, I feel like maybe we should throw a

cautionary tale into this follow-up podcast. So we obviously trade stories and findings all the time. Would you like to talk about your recent experience with Wim Hof and breathing training? Wow. Yeah. Well, I had an extremely scary experience. So I'm a lifetime meditator and kind of experimental subject like yourself around all these things. You tend to have better self-preservation. I tend to, although I've had a lot of close calls in life. When I you speak to whim i was extremely intrigued actually when i heard someone mention whim to you on your podcast and then we spoke about it then you spoke to him i thought he sounded like a fascinating guy i started digging into his work so powerful and i started doing he's going through his course his

online course i loved it i mean the energetic feeling the electric surging through the body i'm also a lifetime free diver since i was was four or five years old, I've been free diving. And so- And just to put that in perspective, I mean, you spend about a month a year in the water. Used to be three months when I was younger. Now it's about, yeah, diving usually about a month of the year. But I spend a lot of time now, as we know, surfing, stand-up paddle surfing, swimming, diving. I mean, the ocean's a huge part of my life. We got to talk about our stand-up paddle adventures together, which are pretty hilarious. We'll definitely come to that.

Timbo and I have been having some fun with that. But I started playing with the Wim Hof method, and I thought it was incredibly powerful. The intensity that you're experiencing internally, it's very similar to training in Tai Chi, Tai Chi Chuan, moving meditation for 10, 15, 20 years, and then being an hour long into a session. And you have this feeling of energetic flow inside your body. With the Wim Hof, you do a few rounds of his breath method, and you're experiencing these things. And it was incredible. The gain and strength were mind-boggling. The length of the breath holds were fascinating.

But then I made a big technical error. I ignored all the signs on Wim's site and that you spoke about, you know, do not do this in water, which is, they were all over the place, but I thought, you know, freediving is a way of life for me, no problem. And the major technical error was not realizing, which is absurd after a lifetime of freediving, that it's carbon dioxide buildup that gives you the urge to breathe and not oxygen deprivation. Hugely important thing. Please, everyone, burn that in. It's CO2 buildup that makes you want to breathe. And so I did the, after a long swim at the NYU pool a few months ago, I started doing my wind breathing and did a series of underwater swims. I did about eight 25 meter swims. And I think it

was on my fourth 50 underwater. And I, this was after a long workout and I went from this ecstatic state to unconsciousness. And I was actually on the bottom of the pool after blacking out from shallow water blackout for three minutes before someone pulled me out. And, you know, the doctors have told me usually it's 40 seconds to a minute to perhaps permanent brain damage, death. I got very lucky. My body saved my life. And they said that if it hadn't been all the training I've done for so many years, I would have been gone. And more specifically, you, correct me if I'm wrong, you didn't, and this strikes me as so odd, you didn't have the reflexive inhalation of water. Is that right?

Yeah, I didn't take any water into my lungs, which is hugely fortunate because fresh water in the lungs can be terrible. So my lungs had no water in it pretty much. After they pulled me out, I was unconscious for 25 minutes. I started breathing on my own though. When I came to 25 minutes later, I was blue everywhere else. My body sent all the blood to my brain and my heart. Saved my life. And I'm here. And it was a life changer on a lot of levels. The idea of my four-year-old boy four blocks away sitting on

the rug waiting for daddy to come home and me unconscious in the bottom of a pool, blue. That's the kind of experience that is shattering. How did that change how you think about training and these types of experiments or life in general? I know that's a very broad question. How does it change your decision-making? Well, first of all, how it's influenced my life in general is I've never lived with such a consistent sense of gratitude,

beauty, and love in my life. It's just flowing through my body. Presence to the exquisite little ripples of beauty in everything I do. And a sense of gratitude for the little things. It sounds cliched, but it's embodied, and I really feel it. And in terms of, that's something I'm really grateful for. It's exquisite. You know, my little boy, my wife is pregnant, another son coming in June. And it's made me rethink these questions of risk. But on the other hand,

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

But of course, it's very important for me to be cognizant. Like in a group risk, as we've discussed, it's important to be present to your own level and the level of danger or risk. But of course, it's very important for me to be cognizant in a group risk, as we've discussed. It's important to be present to your own level and the level of everyone else around you. We can get into some of those stories. Yeah, we'll get into that. But I've been really sitting with this. Since I was a really young boy, I started playing chess when I was six years old. And by the time I was seven, I was the top ranked player in the country.

So I had all this pressure on me. And a big part of the way that I found my therapy was flow. Can you explain that? Yeah. Like when I was under huge pressure, external pressure for this little boy, my style as a chess player was to create chaos. I loved the game. I loved the battle of chess.

Attacking chess. Right. Right. Attacking chess. And most players, when they have a lot of pressure on them in the scholastic chess world, for example, and it's true in many fields, they learn how to memorize their way to victory. They find shortcuts to getting good fast and controlling the game all the way.

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

And this is an element of risk that I've been thinking about. It's different when you're 20 and 25 and 30 years old as a professional competitor or professional fighter. And then now I'm 39 years old, a dad, which is the most important thing I've ever done in my life, being a father, and I'm so committed to it. So I have to be quite cognizant of the distinction, for example, between risk competitively and risk mortally. When you're playing chess,

it feels like life and death. It really does feel like life and death. When you lose a chess game, it feels like you've been shattered on the most fundamental level. And so I was quite comfortable mixing it up profoundly, creating chaos, and I'd be willing to take those risks. But actually it isn't life and death, right? And then when you're a professional fighter, martial artist, you can break arms and legs in a second if you're not in deep focus, or you can break your neck. But again, the stakes are, it's you out there. And then when you're a dad, it's a little bit different, right? And like when you're surfing, or when you're rock climbing, or whatever you're doing that's in an extreme state. So it's very important for me to be clear about the distinction between what felt like life and death as a chess player and what actually is life and death today.

Metaphorical and literal. Right. And then there's the state of being someone who's found deep flow as the ultimate therapy. There are a number of different questions I want to ask related to everything you just said. The first is how do you initiate or facilitate a flow state? And how would you describe it? Maybe we could hit that first. Well, I've had a lot of different ways of playing this over the years. For me, I can describe it in terms of myself, and then we can go into how, when I train people, how I'd work with them. Great. For me, love has been a huge part of flow. You know, I fell in love with

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

introspective sensitivity. I began to feel the subtle ripples of quality in my process. I could feel when I moved from a nine or a 10 out of 10 back down to a nine or an eight. You're talking about in the meditation itself? No, I'm talking like through my meditation practice. You became more tactilely sensitive when doing push hands or some other type of practice? Chess initially. Chess initially. And then into push hands, right.

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

first of all, we can't just separate our mind and our body. Totally. The Cartesian duality makes sense. Right. I mean, this is your way of life as well. But we intuitively can feel things way before we are consciously aware of them, right? The chess player always senses danger before he sees it, just like the hunter will sense the shark or the jaguar before he'll see it. Then he'll look for it. So the chess player's process is often to be studying a position to sense opportunity or danger, and then to start looking for it, deconstruct what it is, and then find what it probably is, and then start calculating, right? But that sense comes before. Or if you're a great decision maker, if you're an investor, you can sense danger, right? You can sense opportunity. But you need to have stilled your waters internally to feel the subtle changes

inside of you that would be opportunity or the crystallization of complex ideas or danger or the onset of a cognitive bias, for example, which is hugely important as a chess player or as an investor or as anything else. You know, this is one of the areas where we've had this ongoing dialogue and our friendship around what I call armchair professors. Philosophologists. Right, philosophologists. Yes. So the people, this is a, philosophologist is a term of Robert Persig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He's one of my favorite books and thinkers.

He's a friend of mine. You know, the difference between the philosopher and the philosophologist is what Tim's referring to, or the writer and the literary critic, or the man in the arena and the literary critic. Or the man in the arena and the armchair professor. Or Remy from Ratatouille and Anton Ego. Okay, I don't know that one. Who's the food critic? Okay, yeah, yeah, there it is. Good. Yes, there it is. And so when we think about, for example, cognitive biases, the academics who study cognitive biases, who speak about them. And just for people who have no context on cognitive biases, an example, the sunk cost fallacy.

I've spent this amount, therefore I should put good money after bad because I feel like I need to somehow try to salvage this money that I've put into a given position. I just wanted to give people some examples. We've had a number of meals with him. There's a gent, think twice, What was the author's name again? Do you recall? Mabusan?

Yeah, Michael Mabusan is who you're thinking about. Mabusan, there we are. For people interested. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. And so one of the interesting things about the dialogue, the academic dialogue of cognitive biases

is that there's the idea that the biases have to operate completely separately from the intuitive process. We have an intuitive process and then we have to go through a checklist of cognitive biases. In my experience, really high level thinkers have integrated cognitive biases or an awareness of cognitive biases into their intuitive process, right? So this is constant process. We've discussed this a couple years ago,

actually, where you're deconstructing technical awareness into something that... So this process, for example, of building a pyramid of knowledge, we have a certain technical foundation, we have a high-level intuitive leap, we can then deconstruct the intuitive leap into something that we can understand technically and replicate technically. And then we're raising our foundation of higher and higher-level intuitive leaps.

This is this pyramid of knowledge, which in my process is built upon by the intuitive leaps are what's guiding it. Similarly, we can learn how to take technical material and integrate it into our intuitive understanding. But we aren't going to intuit the cognitive bias. We're going to intuit the feeling. That corresponds. That corresponds with the bias being present.

And so we think about this relative to the language, again, Robert Persig. I like the language of dynamic versus static quality. If you think about the timeline in a competitive state, for example, in a chess game, there's a certain objective truth to a chess position. If you think of that as a timeline, which is moving, you think about Persick's term of being at the front of the freight train of reality, right? Freight train is pushing through. Dynamic quality is right at the front of that freight train. Think about that as a timeline. And then there's the chess player's mind, studying the position. When the chess player is present to the position, it's continuing. You're just running parallel to the truth of the position, to the dynamic quality of the position.

But if something changes, you make a slight mistake, you move from having a slight advantage to a slight disadvantage, but you're emotionally still connected, attached to having the slight advantage, then what's going to happen is that you're sort of stopping. Your dynamic quality is becoming static. But the timeline of the chess position is continuing. The game is continuing. But what's going to happen then is that you're going to subtly reject positions that you should accept. And you're going to stretch for positions that you can't, for evaluations that you can't really reach. And you're going to fall into a downward spiral. That's the onset of a cognitive bias.

In that case, the cognitive bias would relate to the emotional clinging to a past evaluation. But if you had the present state awareness, which you trained through different tools and approaches that you use with these elite performers, for instance, you would sense the feeling of that cognitive dissonance and not get caught up in sort of the slipstream of that dislocation. Exactly. And the way that you would sense that in this case is that you would feel the slip away from dynamic quality. And then you would deconstruct that feeling, and then you would see what the bias is that's setting in. So this is really important to say, right?

It's not that we're going to intuitively develop the ability to know exactly what bias might be setting in in the moment, but we're going to cultivate the ability to have presence, right? I think about the idea of cultivating quality as a way of life, cultivating presence as a way of life, in little moments and small, when we're holding our babies, when we're reading a book,

when we're having a conversation with a friend, when we're meditating. How do you help people to identify that feeling, to become more sensitized to it? And just as a, as a, maybe not a counterexample, but an example of not listening to intuition or instinct. So we were both in Costa Rica recently doing paddle boarding. Last meal of the trip, we go out to celebrate. We go to this seafood restaurant. Food comes out. It's a Sunday. And I leaned over the plate and smelled the food and immediately knew that it

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

So that was a hell of a night. And we never saw each other. It was amazing. But I heard that flushing happening, taking turns. That was a brutal experience. I remember watching you sniffing. You had this expression of concern come over you at the dinner table. And I saw that moment.

Maybe I wasn't present enough to you and you didn't. It's a great example of you didn't fully trust your gut, but you were right on. It was amazing. Or I felt a sort of social pressure to conform and not rock the boat. So how do you help someone, say, in the world of investing, just as an example, not only develop the sensitivity to separate that signal from the noise, but also to actually listen to it, not only develop the sensitivity to separate that signal from the noise, but also to actually listen to it, right? These are two different points, right? So let's talk about developing it and let's talk about listening to it because they're both so hugely important. And I'd frame them both thematically

in different ways and I'd build training systems around them both that would be quite different. So when we're thinking about cultivating the awareness, I mean, I think that a lot of this relates to a return to a more natural state. This isn't so much about learning as unlearning. Agreed. Getting out of our own way, releasing obstructions. I think about the training process as the movement toward unobstructed self-expression, right? Obstructedness. We have so many habits that are fundamentally blocking us, right? From the phone addictions. People are constantly distracted. People don't have the ability to sit in empty space anymore

people are bombarded by inputs all the time they're in a constantly reactive state so one way that you could frame this out is the study is cultivating a way of life which is fundamentally proactive in little things and big and you can build day architectures that are fundamentally proactive but then getting into the the weeds a bit more, I think it's most foundational to develop a mindfulness practice, to cultivate the ability to sense the most subtle ripples of human experience. Now, I've been trying to onboard people specifically in the finance space, for example, into meditation for a bit over eight years now. Initially, I would just try to get guys to meditate. They'd look at me like I was crazy. Then what I realized, I had this breakthrough, which was that if I had them start doing stress

and recovery interval training, so oscillating heart rate between 170s and 140s, say. So let's say someone does a six or eight or 10 minute warmup and then they're on a heart rate interval doing some kind of cardio bike or whatever, moving their heart rate up and down between 170s, 140s, when they become aware of the quality of their focus on their breath during the recovery intervals, enhancing their ability to lower their heart rate more quickly. And they start to feel their heart rate, listen to it. When that awareness would kick in, I'd start, I'd layer in meditation. And the on-ramp was just much more successful. People would just, and then what I started to refine that with is biofeedback. So now what I'll do is I'll have

them do the stress and recovery interval training. Then I'll have them do some form of biofeedback, often with, for example, heart rate variability through heart math and working with a specialist. And then when they begin to have a certain kind of consistency of their ability to enhance their emotional regulation, to observe these subtle ripples between stress and coherence, and you can see their biometric data. Then you layer in meditation, and then the on-ramp is even more powerful. And so then they layer in a meditation practice. I think Headspace is a wonderful tool for layering in meditation.

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

And so sometimes the evening approach. But I agreed that Headspace is really useful. And I think it's really important. I think you're absolutely right there. And I think it's really important to have a core meditation practice, which is, at least in the beginning in the conditions in your life that are most conducive to deep focus and to not being distracted. Later in life, we want to be able to tap our meditation under complete in chaos,

but we want to cultivate it initially in the most peaceful time possible. So if you have kids waking up before the kids are up or in the evening once they're asleep. Or if you don't have kids, then life is much simpler. Or during your commute. I've found a lot of people who will just throw on Headspace or some song that they meditate to and they know they have 20 minutes on the subway and it's like, all right, that's my 20 minutes. Right. I enjoy meditating on the commute a lot personally. You've been meditating for a long time. I mean, I'm not sure how you feel about this. I find that if people can have the first two, three months of meditation practice in a quiet room, then if they start doing it in their commute,

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

But I can definitely see why for even perhaps a majority of people, it would be... I think it's partially due to the fact that, for instance, I'm looking at your wall right now, and the fact that that picture is tilted like five degrees to the right is making me totally bonkers. You think we should fix it? This is training for me. Look at that. The rest of the time we're talking. But the same is true auditorily.

So if I have a controlled noise like music or the chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga of the car in the subway, I can focus on that repetitive noise. But if I'm sitting in a space that I want to be quiet and I have that controlling aspect of my personality trying to impose itself on something I can't control, and then there's somebody hitting reverse in a truck and I can hear that outside, it will drive you nuts. Long observation to a short comment, but I do think that if you can drop in in a quiet environment, the point being, as you said, I think to stack the deck in the beginning. Learn how to do this in a controlled, unstressful environment, and then you can ratchet up over time to when you can use it in the most stressful of environments because we don't ultimately want to be meditating in a flower

garden we want to be able to meditate and have a meditative state throughout our life in hurricane and a thunderstorm when sharks are attacking you any moment paddleboarding when you're paddleboarding the last day on a first trip, and Josh is like, you'll be fine. And then three leashes snap, and all hell breaks loose. That's a long story. Killer set comes in. So that's just a little context here. Timbo and I have been on this great adventure, stand-up paddle surfing, taking it on together.

And we found this, we've got a great friend down in Costa Rica, Eric Antonsen, who actually has the other podcast other than yours i listened to in life the paddle podcast yeah paddle eric's awesome he's a great dude he runs the blue zone sup he's a brilliant teacher really fascinating mind deconstructing stand-up paddle surfing on increasingly small boards for us and we've been going out there we've had some hilarious close calls our last trip a couple weeks ago we almost we almost destroyed each other yeah we had there's a this one like witching hour where the juju is really weird. Almost everybody either got like decapitated, impaled by a board or just head on jousting collision, which is what... But the point that you bring up, I think, is right on about meditation that, you know, when you're building training programs for elite mental performers,

the most important thing is to understand them so deeply and build programs that are unique to their funk. Embrace their funk. That's a term my buddy Graham, who's a dear friend of ours who comes on our surf adventures with us. He's a brilliant thought partner. Embrace the funk. Could you explain that?

Yeah, we have to embrace our funk. We have to figure out, you think about the entanglement of genius and madness, right? Or brilliance and eccentricity. Understanding that entanglement is always a precursor to working with anybody who's trying to be world-class at something because that entanglement is fundamental to their being. And they have to ultimately embrace their funk, embrace their eccentricity, embrace what makes them different, and then build on it, right? And so we think about self-expression. It's not trying to take everyone and put them into the same mold. It's trying to understand someone very deeply and build a training program, a way of life that helps them bring out the essence of their being through their

art, whatever their art is. I mean, and that's how I relate to the path to excellence in chess, in martial arts, in different arts, very actively in the investing space when I work in education with children through my nonprofit. It's, again, the movement to unobstructed self-expression, but the problem is the teachers don't listen. They don't know how to listen, right? They don't know how to sit, or parents, to sit in empty space and observe the nuance of their child's mind or their student's mind, and then build a way of life around that. People are used to teaching the way they learned. Think about martial arts instructors. Almost all of them trained a certain way, and then teach that way, which alienates 65, 70% of the students by definition. It's very rare that you have someone who can

take the time to, and it takes a lot of time to know someone deeply enough to build a training program and a way of life around who they are. I mean, for me, and what I only work with eight teams, I don't take on new clients. Very seldom do I take on a new client. I won't work with more than eight people. You also don't do a lot of PR for everybody listening. I don't take on new clients. Very seldom do I take on a new client. I won't work with more than eight people. You also don't do a lot of PR for everybody listening. I always get these emails and texts. They're like, hey, could you intro me to Josh on my show? And I'm like, he's not going to do it. Tim, you're the only person, once a year or two, you're the one guy who brings me out of my hermetic cave. I live a bit of a strange life because I'm not on... It doesn't feel strange to me. It feels completely natural. But I'm not on Facebook or Twitter or

Instagram or any of these things. I don't even know the names of most of them. I have an email account though. I do have that. I cultivate empty space as a way of life for the creative process. So Timbo, you're the one guy who brings me out of the cave where we have a lot of fun together. So you were talking about these top performers and getting to know them on a very deep, subtle level so that you can help them express the combination of their madness and genius, or at least embrace it among other things. How do you think about parenting? Yeah, let's dig into this one. All right. So so and then let's remember to loop back after this to finish our this discussion of first of all you were talking about how to cultivate the somatic

awareness and then how to listen to it so let's go back to how to train to listen to it okay parenting jack well jack's the love of my life i mean this kid is such an awesome dude and i parenting has um been the most fantastic learning experience i've ever gone through so from when he was born i tried very hard not to not to go in with a lot of preconceived ideas and to be attuned to him, to listen to him. From when he was just days, weeks old, he was teaching me. You know, you talk about teaching presence. Our eyes would be connected, and if I would think about something else, his eyes would

pull me back. If there was any distraction that set in, he would pull me back. And as he got a little older, he would just take your face and pull it back in the sweetest way. And so the depth of connection, you know, being deeply attuned to a young spirit that hasn't become blocked, that is in that state of unobstructed self-expression, that is just this unbelievably game learner, unblocked learner. Jack is the gamest little person I've ever known in my life. But of course, I've been thinking about learning and education for a lot of years.

And so I had some thoughts. And so, for example, I think that control is, the need for control is something that inhibits people in life. The need to have external conditions be just so in order for them to be able to... Timbo's pointing at my grandmother's painting. That was my grandma's painting. It's a beauty, right? Yeah, Stella. Stella Waitzkin. That's her self-portrait. Okay, we're going to leave it messed up. We're working on control. So from a young age for me, when I started playing chess, I would create chaos on the board like I described. Then I would play

in chess shops with people blowing smoke and playing music and i'd play chess with like loud gyuto monk chants bursting into in my head from speakers when i play cards i would never playing gin rami i'd always keep the melds out of order so that again when i would play cards i would cards like a card card game playing like gin rami a card game i would never organize my hand i'd always keep it you say meld yeah like if like if you have three sevens. Ah, okay. Or like Jack, Queen, Queen of hearts or whatever. I would keep everything out of order

so I'd have to reorganize it in my mind. I'd keep my room messy. Oh, you wouldn't gather your IC. You wouldn't move your cards around to organized. Right. I was creating chaos everywhere to train at being able to be at peace in chaos and organize things. That was kind of part of my way of life. And I found it to be a huge advantage that I had competitively. And so one of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack's life, or year two of Jack's life, that I observed with parents is that they have this language around weather, weather being good or bad. Whenever it was raining, they'd be like, it's bad weather. You'd hear, you know, moms, babysitters, dads talk about it. It's bad weather, we can't go out. Or it's good weather,

we can go out. And so that means that somehow we're externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So Jack and I never missed a single storm. Every rainstorm, I don't think we've missed one storm other than maybe one when he was sick. I don't think we've missed a single storm, rain or snow, going outside and romping in it. And we've developed this language around how beautiful it was. And so now whenever there's a rainy day, Jack says, look, Dada had such a beautiful rainy day. And we go out and we play in it. And I wanted him to have this internal locus of control, to not be reliant on external conditions being just so. And now he's four, he's getting older. So we've been playing with these things. We began meditating together when he was a little over a year, just doing breath work. Initially, we started doing

meditation work when he was in that kind of most pure state, so when he'd be taking a warm bath and he was lying on his back and being completely relaxed, blissed out, we would just naturally breathe together. I wanted the habit to be formed in something that was the initial experience to be in conditions that were most conducive to just natural peace. And then we have in recent months been taking it to an interesting, funky place. So he would watch me do the Wim Hof training, and I'd be putting my hands in ice buckets and doing this interesting breath work through cold water. And he would initially watch and he'd come over and stick his finger in and put his hand in. So this is a great moment. A couple months ago, we were out romping in this huge snowstorm and Jack, about 10 minutes into it, we just got on this long search for the right carrot to put on,

to make the snowman with. We found the nose. We found it. And then Jack got, he was in this huge drift and he got his boots just loaded up with snow. And he looked at me and he said, dad, dad, my feet are cold. They're filled with, my boots are filled with snow, but that's okay. I'll just do the Wim Hof and make them warm. And we looked at him and then for an hour and a half, we played after that, feet just covered with snow and he was completely fine. Never mentioned it again. And then he got increasingly interested in this internal terrain. And we would take hot baths together. We'd take a bath together every night. And then he would want to turn on the cold shower and get in it. And we'd play what we call

the it's so good game. And so we kind of reframe this thing. I have this, people tend to bounce off of discomfort, whether it's mental or physical. And so they run up it, whether if they run into internal resistance, whether it's a meditation training or someone exposing a weakness, or if they're training and someone might be better than them, whatever it is, they bounce away from things that might expose them. They're repelled from it. Right. Right. But the flip side of this is to learn the way I talk about living on the other side of pain, pain being like mental or physical discomfort. And much of life that's so rich comes

from the other side of it, the other side of challenge, internal or external challenge. And with Jack, of course, I'm not using that, but it's a little child's embodiment of it. We started to play with turning on the cold water and he would say, it's so good, Dada. And we'd kind of be in the hot bath and play in the cold and he would say, it's so good. It's so good. And he began to have this gorgeous, blissful smile meditating through it. And he would say, I'm meditating through it. It's so good.

And we were reframing cold. Cold is a metaphor from something that you bounce away from to something that you can learn to sit with, to be neutral in, to find pleasure in, just like the weather. And then we had this experience the other day where he said to me, you know, dad, will you tickle me slowly? And I always tickle him. He laughs uproariously, but we were lying in bed and I was tickling him very slowly. And he said, I'm going to do my meditation. He would meditate. And then the next day he said, dad, will you tickle me slowly? And I did slowly. And he said, I'm going to do my meditation. He would meditate. And then the next day, he said, Dad, will you tickle me slowly? And I did it.

And then he said, can you pick him a little bit faster? And I didn't suggest this to him. He suggested it to me. And then we played this game where we would say 1 to 10. And I would tickle him slowly. And he'd start doing his meditation. And we'd move it from 1, 2. And we'd go up to, he'd be doing his meditation.

And finally, I'd be full tilt tickling him. He'd normally be in hysterics. And he was just sitting there meditating and not laughing. And he found this so interesting. And he's now guiding the process in this beautiful way. Now we're turning it to talking about... Question, just to interject. Did you at any point condition him to be proactive in that way?

Or was it just an organic, now I'm in the driver's seat? I think I encourage him to grab the wheel all the time. I mean, a huge part of my relationship to parenting, and this is from my mom, and I watch my mom with Jack, and I think this is maybe the greatest gift that my mom gave me is having a sense of agency in the world. The idea that having a sense that I can impact the world and that my compass really matters. So when I grew up, I wasn't seen but not heard. When I was five and six years old, they were having adult conversations with friends, and I was part of it. They wanted to hear my ideas.

And I felt that they mattered. And that's a big part of how I believe in my wife and I believe in raising Jack. And so he plays a really active role in everything that we do. And so it was sort of a natural thing. And it was all fun and play. I wasn't pushing any of these things on him at all. This is stuff that he wanted to do. But then him naturally, I've been kind of blown away by how he's been transferring this stuff over. I mean, lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability

to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it over to another, I think is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate or ways of being. And it's something that Jack and I have from a really young age. We began to cultivate this from when he was really small around this principle of go around. Initially, it was like, the first thing that time it happened is that he was trying, it was really tiny. He was trying to get in. We were in a little cottage, single little cottage on Martha's Vineyard, tiny little cottage in a big field. And he was trying to get in one door and he couldn't, but he could get in the other door. And I said, Jack, go around. And he looked at me and then he went around. And then go around became a language for us physically. If you can't go one way, you go around to another way. But then it became a language for

us in terms of solving puzzles and in terms of any way, time you're running an obstacle, go around. And then working with the metaphor of go around opened up this way that we would just have dialogue around connecting things, right? Taking away of principle from one thing and applying it to something else. And we've had a lot of fun with that. And so it's fascinating to see this game little dude, if you have this thematic dialogue, principle-driven dialogue,

and we're cultivating somatic awareness, cultivating the ability to feel these little ripples inside. I mean, Jack's telling me his dreams in this beautiful way. He tells me how his emotions feel in his body. It's a great journey. I'm learning so much from him. There's a book you've mentioned to me a number of times, or at the very least a researcher, and I'm probably going to massacre this name as well. Is it Carol Dweck? Getting that right? Mindset? Yeah. Carol Dweck. Mindset. Yeah. Yeah. Entity theories of intelligence versus incremental or growth mindset. Yeah. Carol Dweck's one of the

most important foundational developmental psychologists, I think, around this distinction of a fixed perspective on how good somebody is. Let's frame it like this. Most children, unfortunately, are educated to believe that they have a certain ingrained level of ability in things. You are smart, you are dumb, you are average. Right.

And the sad thing is that even when are, even when they're praised, they're told how smart they are, right? Or you're such a good writer, you're so good at math. And the kids will say, I'm smart at this, or I'm dumb at that, right? And so, but if you're very smart at one thing, then that means that if you fail, then you must be dumb at it. And so it becomes very static. And the kids are often quite brittle when they

have a fixed mindset, right? Or an entity theory of intelligence. Well, a growth mindset or a mastery-oriented mindset is one where we understand that the path to mastery involves incremental growth. We don't have an ingrained level of ability at something. We're going to have successes and failures. We're going to work at things. And it's work, it's practice, and it's an open-mindedness to life's experiences that makes us succeed. How would the praise differ? You would praise a kid for the process versus the outcome. And so you would say, I'm so proud of how hard you worked at your math, not you're so smart at math. Or if someone has a

failure, the other side of it is not to say that, don't worry about it, you're just not good at math, you'd do something else. It's to say, well, how can we practice this to get better? And so we're focusing on the process and not the outcome. That's like the fundamental principle. And it's so easy to say it, but it's very hard for people to live it as parents, especially if they don't embody it themselves. What you see often with kids and parents is that the parents, they have an entity theory of intelligence themselves. They're fixed. They're stuck. But they've read the material of Carol Dweck or somebody else. They want to parent their kids around a growth mindset,

but the kids see what they embody, not what they say. So we have to embody it. I mean, one of the most important things that I think that we do with my foundation and our work with schools, with programs around the world, is that when we're working with teachers, it's not just this is the material you should teach your students. It's working with these core principles and embodying it themselves first. And then through that embodied intelligence, working with the kids on how they can embody it.

We have to walk the talk. Let's go back to what you said we should go back to at some point, which is somatic sensitivity, those sort of dimples of light in the darkness that most people overlook. How do you train that? Well, thematically, the first thing I would say is that we need to think about cultivating an internal locus of control or an internal orientation versus an external one, right? So as an artist or performer, we have all these external pressures on us. Let's say, for example, again, let's talk about investors again. Let's say an investor is running a $1 billion investment vehicle and they have partners. They have people who invest in that and they have to write

investment letters. They have all the partners. Let's say they have 30 or 40 or 50 partners who are institutions, maybe endowments, educational endowments, charities, whatever, who have put their money into this investment vehicle. And maybe that person has his own money as well or her own money in this investment vehicle. Well, for them to be successful, they have to operate from the inside out. They have to bring out the essence of who they are as a performer, like we're discussing, or as a human being to bring that out through their art. But if they are constantly feeling pressured by what others expect from them, what others want from them, how they'll be perceived, or how people are looking at their Facebook post, or how their tweet is being responded to,

right? It's tweet. That's what it is, right? That's right. See? I mean, it's so interesting for me, like watching people watch their Instagram accounts. I see it with buddies all the time. It's natural. It's completely human. But then we're aware of how we're perceived. One of the major reasons that I stay away from these things is because I can feel how susceptible I am to this stuff, right? You publish a book and it's on Amazon. It's so hard not to go look at the Amazon numbers, right? And then a book comes out and you're tracking them, even if you know it's ridiculous and you shouldn't be doing it. Now, someone like you, you're such a world

class and you've so systematically trained at and cultivated the ability to market these things. This is actually a very important scientific input for you. It's not for most authors. Most authors is an addiction, right? So that's a completely different point in my opinion. You're actually gathering data and using it. Most people are just constantly feeling- Tapping the vein. Right. Tapping the vein. So with investors, what this often relates to is P&L checking, profit and loss checking. Oh, sure. So most investors check P&L hundreds of times a day. In fact, it's constantly because it's on their screen all the time.

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

And so when you're talking about a really high-level artist who might have a really subtle intuition about something, and they should listen to that intuition, or they should at least deconstruct that intuition and investigate it and see if it's the right way to go. But they're aware that that intuition might not be perceived as impressive by others. The problem is that the others usually aren't world-class artists. They're the armchair professors. They're the philosophologists. And so you have the man in the arena who's compromised by a sense of self-consciousness of how the critics are going

to perceive him or her, which is ridiculous because it's like an A player thinking about the approval of a C player. And that's disastrous. That's external orientation. That's like thinking that we have, we're going to get food poisoning from something, that something's off, and then dismissing it because of, I mean, first of all, there's the incredibly subtle sense, is how strong the intuition is. No one else at that table there, and we had some pretty high level dudes sitting at that table, had that feeling that we were about to eat something that had food poisoning, right? So it was very subtle. You had a very subtle sense. It wasn't banging you over the head, right? And then there's the feeling of the social pressures and everything. It's a very interesting, subtle example. The subtle pressures were louder in that case than like the really

subtle intuition that you had. And then there's having the attitude of, I don't care about the social pressures, but that's really hard. Which I was able to do a third of the way through, but not before. Right. I think you're actually really, in my observation, you're really evolved with this. I mean, you have so much external pressure and external awareness on you. I consistently find it stunning and impressive how you're able to embrace your funk, how to live a life that is attuned to your kind of inner ripples. I mean, I think it's actually rather unique. I think it's a core strength of yours. Thanks, man. I think that one element that's been very helpful in trying to mitigate the risks and dangers in the paradox of trying to be introspective while having a very public-facing life is stoicism. And I remember reading at one point, I want to say it was Cato, who is considered by his contemporaries and his successors in stoic thought leadership to be the perfect stoic in a lot of respects. And I'm going to get the colors wrong here, but he would deliberately wear, I think it was a blue tunic as opposed to a purple tunic, to encourage people

to ridicule him because he wanted to be embarrassed about only those things worth being embarrassed about. So training himself not to be overly sensitized to the critiques of the sea players around him. So I constantly, I remember for instance, this is such a silly example, but I was just in Montana and I went into the ski shop to get some light gloves just for walking around, not for skiing. And I looked at the whole rack and I was like, Ooh, I like these. And they were like the most ridiculous Dr. Seuss, like striped nonsense gloves you've ever seen. Just like they will not match with anything, just ludicrousrous looking and i asked the woman at the front desk i'm like what do you think of these or should i get a different one she's like no i think

you should get the black ones and i thought about it like i sat there i thought about it i was like nope i'm getting the dr seuss gloves and that expresses itself for me in a lot of different places because i will for instance do and this is not something i recommend to everybody so caveat amputor you can't be you, you're in control of your own life. So if you do this, you can face some dire consequences, but I'll do drunk Q and A's on Facebook and I'll have a bunch of booze and I'll go on. Something will come out that will embarrass me, but it's not going to be life destroying. And so it's kind of systematically create an environment in which I feel like I don't have a reputation to protect, which is another reason why I talk about, you know, the psychedelics.

And I'll talk very openly about, you know, monogamy versus non-monogamy. And I'll throw all these things out there to basically ensure, A, that I never become a politician, and B, that I don't feel like I have a fixed identity to cling to that I need to protect because I see how disastrous that can be. That's really powerful. And the fire of competition plays that role as well. I mean, you look at people who compete. Let's talk about martial artists. So I own a Brazilian school with Marcelo Garcia. We've discussed Marcelo a lot. Definitely. And just as you mentioned, creating chaos and training yourself to operate optimally in chaos compared to others. And of course, Marcelo, who's what, 10 time? Nine time?

Nine time. World champion. Is the master of the scramble? Yeah, they call him the king of the scramble. The king of the scramble. I mean, he's the greatest transitional player in the history of sport, maybe. He's incredible. I mean, the essence of his game is to not hold, to allow people to move and to, again, embrace the chaos and get there first. He just has cultivated the transition

so systematically that he has 10 frames in transition where somebody else will just be moving from one position to the next. But that transition itself is something which is like, that's his ocean. It's a beautiful thing to see. But if you look at the school, Marcelo runs the school so beautifully. And we've got, at this point, a lot of world-class competitors. A lot of the school tends to win pretty much all the tournaments. A lot of the guys who you've trained with. With the Tim Ferriss experiment. That was hilarious.

Oh my God. That was awesome. We got to do it. Day one. I'm like, okay. I think I broke my rib. You did great, man. You did great. Thanks. That was pretty. Guys, you should check that out. That was pretty. The TV show. If you want to see me, get my ass handed to me and have a great time training with guys like uh john stava who's an incredible athlete and teacher yeah john is fantastic that's a tv show worth checking out not to

well if you look at the learning curve of the people in the school the ones who put themselves in the line as a way of life just learn much faster than the ones who are protecting their egos right most schools what happens is someone gets good and then they have to win to protect their status as being very good or dominant. Usually happens with martial arts instructors, which is that they reach a certain level, they open a school, they get a little bit older, they get a little fatter, they have a reputation.

So they stop training because they don't want to be exposed by the young students who are coming up and they sit in the sideline, but their egos get increasingly large, but riddled with insecurity, and this brittleness tends to then splay down to the students, and the whole school becomes a joke, right? Versus, you know, the way Marcello runs our school is so magnificent. Everyone's on the mat training so hard as a way of life. Everyone's on a world-class growth curve, and it's very interesting to observe who the top competitors pick out when they're five rounds into the sparring sessions and they're completely gassed.

The ones who are in the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there, the one who will beat them up, who might beat them up, while others will look for someone they can take a break on. Right? And so there's that constant search for exposure. That's kind of a parallel to what you're describing in terms of not having an ego to protect or a, you said not having a reputation to protect. or a fixed identity to protect.

Right. So this is a way as a competitor to constantly put yourself into the fire. Here's a question I have for you because I feel like

particularly in jujitsu I could get better at this. You remember when we did that one day we had the gi on and you're like, Timbo, your lips are purple. I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to have a

heat stroke and have to be carted off. But is it correlation or causation? Meaning, are the guys who on round five pick the hardest guy in the room, have they already self-selected by coming to the school in a sense? Or did they start off perhaps when they walked in the door, the guy who would pick the easiest person in the room at round five and have been converted into the guy who will pick the hardest person. You see both. You see both.

You see both. In the latter case, how do they cultivate that transition? I think that Marcello is a great role model. I think it's a good, I mean, it's a fantastic metaphor for life, right? I mean, this is, you need this everywhere. A hundred percent. I mean, I think that, you know a great role model I think it's a good I mean it's a fantastic metaphor For life right I mean this is you need this Everywhere 100% I mean I think that

You know we think about this principle of cultivating Quality as a way of life and the big things And little things and you look at The way Marcelo runs that training environment Is pretty exceptional I mean if people Don't have he puts his ass on the line all The time his ass is on the line all the time And he's getting a little bit older he has

Two kids and he's a wonderful dad. His life is not just 100% jiu-jitsu anymore. He has all of these, you know, young 20s, at this point, world-class students who want to go at it hard with him. And he goes at it hard with them. He wants to. He doesn't mind getting exposed. He brings it. He's living it. But he's also creating an environment where people are present to quality in little things. If someone is, it doesn't have their gi on straight, if they haven't tied their belt, if they're sitting in a way that's sloppy, what happens? He tells them to straighten their gi. I love that.

I love that. When people are running, are doing the warmup, if they're cutting the corner a little bit, he tells them to run the full circle. If people are doing a certain drill in a sloppy way, he refines it. It's the little things, right? And as you watch Marcelo doing the warmup, there's a way that he'll have his hand and just brush against the mat as he passes it. You can feel him engaging his tactile, feeling for the room. He's someone who embodies and teaches quality as a way of life. So if you're in your fourth or fifth round and you are

looking for a way out, you feel that you're fundamentally violating this principle, which you've been cultivating. Right. A tenet of the school. Right. And you know, this is so important. We think about a core part of how I train people is around the interplay of themes or principles and habits. The habits are what we can actually train at. The principle is what we're trying to embody. And so we'll train it two or three or four or five habits, which are the embodiment of a core principle. But the idea is to burn the principle into the hundreds of manifestations of that principle become our way of life.

And so in this case, we're talking about, Marcelo talking about, or embodying the principle of quality in all these little ways. These little ways you could say don't matter, but they add up to matter hugely. Oh, I think the little things are the big things. Because they're a reflection. I mean, this might sound cliched, but it's like how you do anything is how you do everything. It's such a beautiful and critical principle. And most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don't cultivate turning it on as a way of life, the little moments, there's hundreds of times more little moments than big, and there's no chance in the big moments.

Yeah. Okay. So if people listening don't take anything else from this interview, I think that's so key to who you are. It's so key to why you've been good at what you've been good at. That's it right there. Here, let me mangle another name since that seems to be one of our themes for the show. This episode is, I think it's Archilochus, Archilochus perhaps. I'm going to get this wrong, but it was a quote, got to be a Roman, maybe a Greek, who knows, who said, we do not raise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training. Yeah. And you can't just do one every five years waiting for the big event. You're not going to have the training necessary.

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

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

And we see this in the martial arts as someone who trains twice a day as a way of life for 10 years, training until they drop and doing external training as well with strength and conditioning and stretching and everything else. And then they get to a place where they're consistently winning and then they think they can train seven times a week instead of ten. And it'll be the same. It's not the same. Like that slip it shows. There's something incredible about going into competition

knowing that there's no way that anyone else trained as hard or as good as you, as smart, right? So when I'm talking about training quantitatively, I'm talking about training qualitatively right the confidence that comes out of knowing in any discipline that you're at that you gave it your all that when i work with someone i say that you know one of my many filters is looking at someone in the eye and saying that working with me is living as if you're training qualitatively as if in a world championship training camp qualitatively but i look at them in the eye

and some people you see a fear you see the eye. And some people you see a fear, you see the fear of exposure. Other people you see a lean in, an eagerness, a gameness, a hunger for what that exposure will lead to, right? Those are two very, very different paths. Maintaining presence to that quality, even after we've assumed that we've got it nailed, right? You see this with people around presence. You see there's so much bullshit in the meditation world, for example. So much bullshit. Because people might have meditated wonderfully for four or five years or six years or eight years, but then they get ego involved with it. They put together their schools and they're not embodying it anymore. And then it becomes hollow. They kind of slip from the philosopher

to the philosophologist without even knowing that it happened. They weren't even present to the question. Firewalking process. Yeah, that's important. What is the firewalking process? This is new to me too. I'm not sure I've heard you discuss this. Yeah, this is something I've been really, for the last year and a half or so, developing intensely. I think it's been a core part of my process for a long time, but training people, I've been on this really intense learning curve on how to work with people

on this. So the core to the principle is that people tend to learn from their own experiences with much more potency than they learn from other people's experiences. And the firewalking process is, that's what I call, that's my term for a gateway to cultivating the ability to learn with the same physiological intensity from other people's experiences as we learn from our own. So for example, if you're a jujitsu fighter and you slightly overextend your arm and you get armbarred, and let's say in the world championships, right? Your arm is being separated from your body. You feel like your shoulder is disconnecting. Your arm is breaking. If you don't tap, you're going to break. So you have the combination. And often guys will fight it. They won't want to tap.

It's the world. So they'll have the combination of huge disappointment, all the adrenal reactions to being caught and having being wounded and maybe torn ligaments or tendons, right? Depending on how the injury sets in or maybe a bone. And they will burn that lesson to themselves and they will not overextend their arm that way again. That's been burned in on an animalistic level.

But if they watch somebody fighting and then watch them overextend and get caught in an arm bar, that's just like nothing. That's an intellectual knowledge that has no impact on whether or not they'll overextend. But if we can cultivate the ability to learn from other people's errors or experiences with the same intensity as we can learn from our own, it's unbelievable how that can steepen the learning curve. What would be an example of that beyond jujitsu? Well, for example, a really interesting live example that I'm playing with today is that we are working actively with investors, is that we are a brilliant investor. I recently used the term the Pavlovian impact or the Pavlovian influences of growing up in a bull market, right? So most investors, most relatively young investors grew up in a post-2008 world. So all of their subtle responses have come from growing up in a bull market.

So for the most part, they've experienced pleasure when they put the foot on the gas, and they've experienced pain when they've taken the foot off the gas. For the most part, it's oversimplified. It's really interesting to sit down and think about all of the cognitive biases, all of the subtle associations that come with growing up in a bull market. Now, traditionally, what people will say is you have to live through certain business cycles. You have to school of hard knocks, right? We have to learn from the pain of the other side. But can you take a highly talented young investor who has grown up in a bull market and give them the wisdom? If you think about the journey from pre-consciousness to post-consciousness competitor around a certain theme, give them the wisdom of living through many market cycles when they haven't, right?

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

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

There's a volatility to it. Volatility, yeah. Right? And so the question is, how can, in this case, an investor who's grown up in a post-2008 world, firewalk market cycles so that he can burn that wisdom into himself or herself? And then the question is, how do you do this, right?

And so a lot of the things that we discussed around physiological awareness, right? Somatic awareness, cultivating the sensitivity of what's happening inside of us, right? What comes with that is the ability to switch state emotionally, adrenally. And so if we visualize something very painful to us, if we visualize with tremendous potency, we can have a physiological response to that. True even of exercise training. People who, say, take a 10-minute meditation visualization session in lieu of, oh, there we go. All right. That means we have to go pick up Jack from school.

We have to go pick up Jack. Let's take a break and keep on going. They get the benefits of the exercise in large part just from the visualization over 10 minutes. But we have to go grab Jack. And to be continued. To be continued. Awesome. Okay, so we're back.

We reclaimed the boy from school, ate some Japanese food, talked about life, and now here we are for the continuation. Firewalking. Visualization. We're going to talk about casts. Let's continue continuation firewalking visualization we're going to talk about casts let's continue with firewalking yes you were just bringing up the physical dynamics that are possible with intense visualization right i had this formative

experience i wrote about years ago where i broke my hand seven weeks before a national championship when i was training in the chinese martial arts push-hands. And I was in a cast for six weeks up until, I think, three days before the nationals. And the doc said I couldn't compete in everything because I'd be atrophied. But I was committed to doing it. And it was really interesting because I was just doing all of my training one-handed and visualizing the weight work that I was doing on the one side, passing over to the other. The weight work, resistance training. Yeah. I was doing my martial arts training one-handed, which was fascinating on its own to just work on being able to do with one hand what you can do with two. That was tremendous.

But I was also visualizing the resistance training I was doing on one side, passing over to the other. But really intense visualization, not just like thinking it but burning it it's kind of when i made my firewalking the distinction between kind of thinking about intellectually sort of trying to visualize it or versus burning it in with every sort of sensory simulation yeah like with your whole like spirit burning it in deeply and it was fascinating to see when i took off the cast i had basically not atrophied and i competed the next two days three days later and won the doctors i mean they were pretty surprised by it a lot of western medicine is pretty surprised by i mean they're closed-minded about these kinds of things what would you do to translate that to something less obviously physical like we were talking about

training people who've never been through a bear market, to have the wisdom or the lessons learned of those who have been through. So pragmatically, how do you simulate that? Do you have them interview someone who's gone through it and then try to relive those stories through visualization? Or what would the process potentially look like? Cultivation of empathy to be able to do what you just described very deeply is one thing, to be able to live someone else's experience profoundly. First of all, we have to really be clear about the distinction between intellectual knowledge and somatic

knowledge. When we're having something burned in, there's an adrenal response, right? So there's a physiology to having an experience very intensely. We have to learn how to create that physiology, right? So we can do biofeedback training, undulating between states of physiological coherence and states of extreme stress, so that we build up the ability to kind of move between them at will. And then when we're studying, for example, the experience of somebody getting burned extremely intensely time and again in a bear market during the volatility, the ups and downs of a bear market, right? You can look at it and it can feel like just like a chart, or you can experience the anxiety that comes with it, the pain that comes with it, like the shattering of your previous conceptual scheme. You can almost firewalk the experience of the Pavlovian influence of growing up in a bull market and then having that shattered. You could firewalk that shattering and then open your mind to the reality of the broader cyclicality over the long term. And there's a lot of, in terms of how you do it, the foundation is in a lot of things we've been discussing, right?

Intense meditation training, ways of becoming increasingly attuned to these subtle ripples inside your body, stilling your waters, having a lifestyle which is less reactive, less input addicted, being really aware of how we fill space addictively in life. Whenever there's empty space, we just fill it as opposed to maintaining the emptiness. And the emptiness is where we have the clarity of mind and the perception of these little micro ripples inside of us. Cultivating the ability to observe in us and in others

the subtlest undulations of quality or of physiology. Well, you and I talk a lot about maintaining slack and trying to build slack into the system and how important that is. I was told by someone I respect a lot recently, find the silence because you have to listen from the silence. And that might sound very vague, but I found that if you really meditate on it, it can apply to just about anything. I mean, if you really want to separate the signal from the noise, you need the space to do that. Right. It's such an important principle. You know, this principle of slack is so interesting. I mean, for me, a lot of it relates to the empty space for the learning process and my way of life. I mean,

I've built a life around having empty space for the development of my ideas, for the learning process and my way of life. I mean, I've built a life around having empty space for the development of my ideas, for the creative process and for the cultivation of a physiological state, which is receptive enough to tune in very, very deeply to people, to people I work with. And so like, I can see how I could triple the amount of people that I work with very easily with the systems that I have, but my growth curve would get much, it would change fundamentally. And my internal physiological training would take a hit, right? I wouldn't have enough time for meditation, for reflection afterwards, for developments of the thematic takeaways of every session that I have. And the creative process, it's so easy to drive for

efficiency and take for granted the really subtle internal work that it takes to play on that razor's edge. I think in part, it comes back to the limiting of inputs and selective ignorance that you talked about, right? Because if you triple the number of clients you have in a high-tech and high-touch business, you're going to have to juggle 17 chainsaws instead of two chainsaws. And I'm reacting. I'm not embodying the core principles that we're working on. And so much of, I find, really high-level training is sort of somatic transmission. You're embodying a certain state,

and then you're helping someone embody that state as well. Totally agreed. And I think that if you want a good example of that, just as a relatively new dog owner as an adult, you can look at dogs or children who are fundamentally unblocked in that somatic read, reading ability. And you can see, just as you said, like as a

parent transmits their state of being to their child, despite or with the assistance of whatever they might say. Similarly, if you're interacting adult to adult, you need to sort of return to that state to be maximally effective in what you do in particular. And then when talking about sort of dancing on the razor's edge, when you're moving up the growth curve in a certain discipline, there's a lot of things that you can do to reach the first 80th or 90th or 95th percentile of something.

When you're talking about the last 0.001%, you're talking about these arenas where the greatest insight will be right next to the greatest blunder. You have to be willing to go just right on that razor's edge. I was having this great conversation with the sports psychologist Michael Gervais a couple weeks ago, and he used this language of thrusting into big waves. The experience he had to go into to push himself as a surfer to thrust into big waves. I love that

expression. But of course, if you're thrusting into big waves, then you can easily push yourself into the wave you shouldn't take. All right, so big wave surfers have to be able to navigate that, just the most finely tuned, in the moment, just intuitive decision-making process of whether the moment is just right or whether it's a moment that will kill you. And then if you're working with people as a coach or as a trainer of people who are navigating that terrain, you have to be in a state where you can navigate that terrain. You have to have an embodied state there. And I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make in everything that they do. They just scale. They scale and dilute quality. And when they dilute

quality, you lose the ability to successfully navigate the razor's edge. And then by definition, you're probably more destructive than you are helpful. And so when I think about training people who are in that place, it's like 99.9% listening. And ideally, you can make the most potent suggestions with the lightest touch feasible. So the notes, I took some notes beforehand here, or borrowed some notes beforehand. And one of them touches on the principle of scarcity in A, habit creation, B, the learning process, C, the creative process. Could you just elaborate on the principle of scarcity? So if we think about the idea of subtraction or essentialism or scarcity, I mean, you frankly are as good as it gets, in my opinion, at harnessing the

principle of scarcity. In your learning process, learning how to deconstruct something, focusing on what's absolutely most essential, and zone in on it, as opposed to just throwing huge amounts of resources at things, and just having a diluted quality of approach. Most people, when they become successful, they have the opportunity to have more resources, and they keep on layering more and more resources on things. And so they're not very potent in how they go about things. If you cut those resources down 99%, then you find yourself just zoning in on what's most essential. And then if you can learn to add resources incrementally, maintaining that potency, it's incredible what you can do. But it takes a lot of discipline to maintain that principle of scarcity. So inhabit creation, taking on the right amount, not too much.

Not too little, but not too much. People tend to think about layering on. They get excited when they realize, if I go through a diagnostic process with someone, we realize that there's 10 areas they could take on. They want to take on all of them at once. You can really take on one or two things at once. Ideally, one theme.

Then you take on two or three manifestations of that theme to burn that theme on, and you keep on layering. In the creative process, I mean, you talk about limiting inputs, right? We've been talking about limiting inputs. Positive constraints, yeah. Right, positive constraints. Listen, me speaking about this principle to you, I mean, you embody this principle profoundly. What are your thoughts on it? Well, a few things. Just to maybe add a couple of anecdotes to what you just said,

the first thing that came to mind was a quote, and I'm going to butcher this, but it's from Jack Ma of Alibaba who said, you know, in the beginning we had an advantage. We had no experience, no business plan and no money. So it forced us to make all of our decisions very carefully. And I do think that people tend to, and I'm also borrowing this, overestimate what they can accomplish in a week and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year, which leads to theoretically appealing decisions, like trying to adopt 10 new behaviors at once that are kind of hour wise and year foolish in the sense that they're doomed to fail from the outset in many respects. And the, to your point also about scaling, I have friends who

call this the S word because it's romanticized, kind of a worshipped notion in Silicon Valley. Scale, scale, scale. Got to be bigger, hire more people, ship more product. And if you are looking to kind of optimize your craft, your art, that may or may not be the right path to doing that. And to my mind, you can look at exemplars or you can look at examples of people who have scaled, who are still critics of scaling in the sense that Bill Gates, I believe said, you know, if you add people to an inefficient process, it just makes the problem worse. You have to add people to an efficient process. And to that end, like whether you are looking to build a, for instance, lifestyle business, like a healthy cashflow based business that represents in some way your craft. 20 customized rifles a year. That's all you do. And you sell to the top 0.001% of marksman in the United States. You never ship more than that. That's the constraint that you apply. Whether

you're trying to do that or build Microsoft, that lesson can apply, whether it's adding one person or adding the next thousand people. So for me, I think it's very easy to create a false dichotomy in your mind when you look at, say, a small-scale craftsman who's perhaps making, let's just say, oil paintings in rural Alaska versus a startup in Silicon Valley with a thousand employees. And to think of them is totally different. But in fact, if you look at the top performers in either environment, they'll have a lot in common with each other. And I think one of those commonalities is applying a lot of positive constraints, even when you have an embarrassment of resources available. If we think about this in terms of the creative process,

one of the most important things to train is the ability to ask the right question, to know where to look, right? And if you look at people in most creative fields who are extremely high level versus incrementally lower fields, it's knowing what the most critical area is for thinking. Yeah, thinking about this principle of scarcity, one of the ways that I have myself trained at this in the creative process or harness the principle of scarcity. And I have everyone who I work with live in this routine. It's forcing yourself to end of each day, think about what the most important question is and what you're working. We discussed this last time. It's really interesting because you're studying complexity all the time. And if you're

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

The computer had to look at everything. If we're looking at everything, then we're just operating like really, really bad computers. But if we cultivate the ability to ask the most potent question systematically, right? So how do we do this? Well, we have a routine where we end each workday thinking, what's the most important question in what I'm doing right now? Pose the question to the unconscious and wake up first in the morning and brainstorm on it. Do you have them pose it again? No, actually, I think it's pretty important not to do that because then we're kind of consciously ruminating on it. I have them, hopefully they haven't thought about it for a few hours before they go to bed. This is something that Hemingway wrote about in his writing process

really beautifully. Yeah, Hemingway would stop writing mid-sentence and provide a foothold for continuing the next day. Right. Which we could also look at from the framing of that internal versus external framing, right? If you're kind of held by a sense of guilt whenever you're not working, then you're going to feel like you have to write everything you have to write. But if you're nurturing from the inside out your creative process, you're going to be comfortable stopping with a sense of direction, even when you're mid-sentence or mid-paragraph. When I've talked to people who have started journaling successfully for the first time, the most consistent pattern that I see is I write less than I feel I can each day. They're never pushing to max capacity or feeling like they're pushing to max.

They always write less than they feel they should write. Right. That's very interesting. That's very interesting. And if we think about taking this and then turning it into a systematic training of the ability to be potent in the creative process, if we're working on a given project and reflecting on what's the most important question here, and we're journaling on it in the brainstorm in the morning, we're doing a lot of things, you know, we're opening

the channel systematically between the conscious and the unconscious mind. We're waking up in the morning and beginning our day proactively, all of these things which we discussed in the past. Then if you sit back after, say, a month and you look back at your, say, three or four or five journals, brainstorms, Q&As on a given subject, And you think about, okay, so in the moment, this is what I thought was most potent. But now I realize this, in fact, would have been most potent. What's the gap? Deconstruct the gap between your understanding then, your understanding now, and then design your training process around deconstructing that gap and training at what that gap revealed. It's a really powerful way for individuals. What assumptions underlied that gap, right?

The creation of that gap or that blind spot. That misperception about what was most important. Right. Right? And so you're training yourself day in and day out, like water, right? To be an increasingly potent. And that this is manifesting scarcity and that we are forcing ourselves, no matter how many resources we have,

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

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

And it's also really powerful because it's really hard to overcome recency bias. I see, without recency bias. Right. Meaning like the primacy and recency effect. So you're recalling what it is you read most recently. Not necessarily theency bias. Right. Meaning like the primacy and recency effect. So you're recalling what it is you read most recently, not necessarily the best resource. Right. And not necessarily the foundation of my relationship to the theme.

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

as you know, but just, just to put this in perspective. So we were looking for, well, we, I'm using the Royal, we,

Josh was looking for dinosaur train for like 10 minutes. And then he's like, you know what? I think I'm going to search this in perspective, we were looking for, well, we, I'm using the wrong we. Josh was looking for dinosaur train for like 10 minutes. Then he's like, you know what? I think I'm going to search this thing. And I was like, and you say you're not good at tech. It was a good showing. Thanks, man. That was a big discovery. And then Jack's like, there's dinosaur train.

Amazing how this search function works. Should we talk about thematic interconnectedness? Yes, let's talk about it. I'd love to talk about it in the context of education a little bit. This is one of the, thematic interconnectedness is one of, maybe that's the essence of my relationship to the world or beyond. I think it's, I mean, you and I have, you and I have eccentric conversations all over the world

on surfboards and wherever else. This has been a big topic for us, right? It's been a huge part of how I've approached learning from my foundation and looking at the relationships between chess and life, learning about life through chess. Then in transferring level over from chess into the martial arts and then first Chinese martial arts, then into Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And then when I work with people, it's really how I learn, and it's how I've found it's really powerful to help people amplify their growth curves, to teach them to be able to learn the many from the few, or from the one, learn the macro from the micro.

Break down the boundaries between disparate pursuits or disparate parts of life, between the personal, the professional, the technical, and the psychological. And if we have an experience where we're on surfboards and we have some little thematic breakthrough and we can apply it to every other aspect of our life, it's really interesting what can happen because we're pretty well calloused over in our areas of strength. But in areas where we're less advanced, we can be more raw and we might be more conducive to breakthrough sometimes. Oh, 100%. I mean, you can see things with beginner's mind because you have no other choice. You don't have to try to simulate beginner's mind because you have no other choice right you don't have to try to

simulate beginner's mind because you are a beginner it's like the race to the bottom right experience so for those who are wondering what the hell that means the race to the bottom is an expression that eric of paddle woo our paddle surfing instructor uses to refer to constantly dropping in board size, often measured in liters for buoyancy purposes. And Josh and I and everyone who is there really very quickly realized that you are, to use your expression, kind of dancing the razor's edge and trying to find a balance between the race to the bottom, but also maintaining motivation. So you're not just slipping on banana peels for five hours straight. And to what extent do you focus on the board size and the race to the bottom versus, which gives you more maneuverability in surfing versus actually working on, say the footwork and the other technical aspects of the game on a board that you can manage.

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

more collaborative. And they were just sharing ideas. And they began to swap boards. And they began to have this interesting experience where, you know, every surfboard kind of carves its own lines, right? There's the practitioner who carves his lines. But then there's also the board that has, you know, a unique rock, who finds new lines in the wave. And what these guys would find is that if they swap boards, they could see new lines in the wave, because if they listened to the board. Some guys would swap boards and try to force the new board to carve their lines. Others would sort of be open to what this new board could do. And then they would learn from it. And then they'd go back to their board and their minds would open up.

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

sharing openly, you'd be doing a quick swapping board, seeing new lines, right? It's forcing a beginner's mind, but forcing a beginner's mind, not only with an open-mindedness, but also tapping somebody who is truly exceptional at a very different style of what you do. So there's an example of just having experience in surfing and applying it to something else. And converting it potentially into a simple question, right? Like, where can I swap boards? Right. That'd be something that is used for fodder for people listening in a journaling exercise. Wake up, have your coffee, or I was going to say have your coffee, then meditate. Probably not the right order. Meditate, have your coffee, sit down,

drop that question at the top, and just- Where can I swap words? Beautiful. Exactly. That's a magnificent journaling, like brainstorm question to riff on. I love it. So how do you apply that to education? So the thematic interconnectedness, I don't think that we can do much more important work with children than help them love learning, help them learn to bring out the essence of who they are in the learning process. So to express the core of who they are through learning, which obviously will help them love learning. And then help them discover thematic interconnectedness, how the world is interconnected via principles, themes.

People are really siloed right now. People think about disciplines in an increasingly data-driven, segregated way, in a closed-minded way, and it's kind of heartbreaking. And so, you know, I have this nonprofit I've been running for a lot of years, and a huge amount of what we do, so all of our work is in education. We've got hundreds of programs around the world, mostly in the US, but international as well. Theartoflearningproject.org is our website. And the programs that are most exciting to me are the ones where we really are systematically working with schools to help children experience thematic interconnectedness. So the way we'll do this, for example, is that we'll be working with five teachers

in five different subject matters, or four or five or six or three, whatever the number is, in the same age group. What are you smiling at, man? What are you thinking? Sorry, guys. I was just looking at the URLs. It's theartoflearningproject.org. And I was laughing because I remembered when we were filming the TV show and we were walking up the stairs to the jujitsu, to the Marcel Garcia the marcelo garcia gym and you kept on saying towel

this towel that and i thought you're saying towel t-o-w-e-l and i'm like what the fuck is towel and you're like it's my goddamn book and you got all upset i'm like the art of learning i'm like how did you expect me to piece that together anyway that's why i was smirking sorry right now i know the acronym and i won't anger josh any further you didn't anger me That's why I was smirking. Sorry. Right. All right. Now I know the acronym and I won't anger Josh any further. You didn't anger me. I know. I'm just fucking with you.

So anyway, the... I don't remember that conversation. I'm trying to... It was great. Tal, tal, tal for like five flights of stairs. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Anyway, my bad. So the way that we do this is that we have, for example, five teachers in different subject matters working with my team to weave the same

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

Are these borrowed from the art of learning book in so much as you're talking about smaller and smaller circles or you're starting you're talking about learning the macro from the micro etc yes yeah the root of these are in core themes of learning creativity and performance psychology that i wrote about my book and that i've developed since yeah absolutely and we've spoken about a lot of them together and so it's a kind of a combination of individualized self-expression. Well, a lot of these themes that we've been discussing today and last time. And so can people learn more about this at theartoflearningproject.org? They can. So everybody, please come check out the site. We've got some really wonderful programs around the world. And it's a good timing for this right now, because I'd love it if

any educators out there, we're on the verge of launching about 10 really high-level programs is what we want to launch, all thematically driven right now and preparing them in the next months. And so anyone who is in the educational world who'd love to touch base with us about applying for this kind of program, Katie on my team can be reached at katy, K-A-T-Y, at jwfoundation.com. JW Foundation is the name of my nonprofit that houses the Art of Learning Project. So katy at jwfoundation.com. JW Foundation is the name of my nonprofit that houses the Art of Learning Project. So K-D at jwfoundation.com. K-D-K-A-T-Y at J-W as in Joshua Waitzkin Foundation.com. Yes.

What type of educators should check this out and email her? Teachers. Teachers or people running schools or school systems. Any minimum number of students or any other parameters? Well, the essence of these programs would be a school system that's open-minded around, for example, engaging, like I described, teachers in different disciplines working at the same time in a collaborative way so that the kids can be embodying the same principle in multiple disciplines at the same time. I mean, that's the essence of it. It's a

bit of a coordinated program. We've had wonderful success doing this. And it's what really excites me when I think about education, how to build systematic training in creativity through thematic interconnectedness into the way kids learn these days. Because kids get so excited when they can see connections. I mean, this is a big part of what I'm experiencing as a dad with Jack, is how red hot he gets when he can learn something and then apply it to many other things. This is a core part of my approach to learning.

I think it's been, I mean, it's maybe my biggest strength is the ability to find hidden harmonies between disparate parts of life. Seemingly disparate. Yeah. Seemingly. Right. Well, Josh, this is always so much fun to drag you kicking and screaming out of your cage. You did it. Cage. Or cave. I like cave more. I like cave more. I don't know why I was thinking cage.

I guess that's just my inner primate coming out. But people have asked me often about education following my TED Talk, where at the end I close out talking about tackling different facets of education. And I feel like your approach and principle-based lens through which you can not only spot, but teach interconnectedness is just so incredibly valuable. Like you said, in an educational system where fields are increasingly siloed and viewed as separate and you have political turf wars between departments and whatnot, which only exacerbates that problem. And I feel like this is a massively powerful step in the right direction. So number one, thank you for that. And number two, educators listening to this, or if you're just curious to check it out and might be able to help in some way, theartoflearningproject.org. And then if you get a taste of that and it seems compelling and you want to try to apply or jump into the

fray, then Katie K T Y at JW foundation.com. I'll put this in the show notes for everybody listening. These will be many of the other things that we mentioned will be in the show notes at four hour workweek.com forward slash podcast. But Josh, I would usually ask, where can people find you online, but they can't find you. Can't find me. So I won't ask that. Is there any thing that you would like people to, besides visiting the resources we just mentioned, anything that you'd like people to take away, consider, do any action, anything that comes to mind you'd like people to walk away with,

just as a closing comment or question? That's a big question. Yes, absolutely. It's funny, as I sit with this now, for so many years, my primary identity was as a fighter, a competitor. And I've transitioned in recent years, and I find my primary identity now is self-identity. The way I experience myself is as a nurturer of people, my family, the people I work very closely with, and children as I work more broadly in education. And when I think about it through the context of nurturing people and nurturing ourselves, I think that we're living in a world of so much noise and so much distraction and of the space being constantly filled that it's rather remarkable what can happen if we cultivate a mindfulness, a stillness of the waters as a way of life. And we find the beauty in that. There's so much beauty that can come from silence.

We can learn so much by feeling the inner ripples of our internal experience. And as parents, embodying what we want our children to embody, living it, right? Walking the talk, putting away our phones, living a life of deep presence with our children, with our students, with the people we work with, cultivating empathy, cultivating compassion. It scares the hell out of me how powerfully I see the world moving in another direction from this. And there's so much that we can learn from the speed of what computers can do, where AI is headed, of what big data can reveal. It's thrilling to me, as long as we stay in touch with the essential parts of our humanity. And when I experience what happens working with people, with adults or with children, when we're just completely present and we cultivate that presence as a way of life, it's incredible what can happen between people. And when I experience the scars in children that I see everywhere,

they come from the anxiety that comes from the lack of attachment, secure attachment, the lack of the attunement of the parent, the lack of the embodiment of the parent or the teacher, these things that are spoken about. It's heartbreaking. Maybe I'm really, really old school, but there's something about the cultivation of deep presence and qualities of way of life, which just rings all through me. And honestly, the other thing

I'll say is that after having the experience I had a few months ago, coming as close as you can come to dying, as you can basically, I mean, first of all, on a tactical level, please, if anyone's experimenting with different forms of breath hold work, like the Wim Hof method, which I think is very interesting and quite powerful, please don't do it in any water even an inch of water because if you go out you don't want to be in water i should say if you practice this stuff enough in your type a personality you are going to go out it's not just a high probability it's almost a certainty that you're going to go out and to think otherwise is really courting disaster so do not do it in or near water yeah and when we talk about firewalking,

about living, learning from other people's experiences with the same physiological intensity that you can learn from your own, there's something about when you go over that edge, over that cliff, if I could take the experience of love, gratitude, and beauty that I've been living with ever since I had that experience, and I could give it to my brothers and sisters, you know, holy smokes. I mean, what a beautiful thing. And so there's any way that we can live with that deep sense of beauty. It's such a rich place. To find the stillness, to cultivate, not just find, but create that stillness and practice,

like you said, the calming of the waters, I think it's underestimated because of its perceived simplicity just as not all things that are simple are easy not all things that are simple are low in value right sometimes what's right in front of you within grasp that is most important to grasp onto and make use of yeah doesn't have to be extremely esoteric and it's so easy to think we've got it nailed you know like we can meditate for 15 years and think we've got presence nailed and then we stop meditating and then six months pass and we're distracted there's a constancy to it yeah and a presence to the sense of the real sense of danger that it can slip speaking for me personally it's also building it in as a habit, just like brushing your teeth for those people who brush your teeth

in so much as for me, I know this is true for many of my friends. Meditation doesn't really work well as a batched process. In other words, like meditating 10 minutes a day for 10 days is much more valuable than meditating once in 10 days for a hundred minutes. For most people, it'd be less painful too. And once you get into that habit and it becomes a ingrained part of your being in your practice, you will see the value, particularly once you have a critical mass of, for me, it's typically five to seven days. And then I'm just like, I cannot believe I wasn't doing this. I can't believe I stopped for four weeks or whatever it is. It's incredibly valuable. And brother Josh. Thanks, brother. This was a blast, man. Thanks, buddy. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun

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