The Tim Ferriss Show - Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin

Episode Date: April 18, 2014

Josh Waitzkin was the basis for the book and movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer." Considered a chess prodigy, he has learning strategies that can be applied to anything, including his other loves of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (he's a black belt under Marcelo Garcia) and Tai Chi Push Hands (he's a world champion). Now, he spends his time coaching the world's top performers, whether Mark Messier, Cal Ripken Jr., or hedgefund managers. This episode is DEEP in the best way possible. And for a change from Episode 1, I'm totally sober.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/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, 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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the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Hello, you sexy people out there. This is Tim Ferriss. And this episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast has a very special guest, Josh Waitzkin, whom I met in 2007 after reading his spectacular book, The Art of Learning. Josh, you may know from Searching for Bobby Fischer. He was the subject of both the book and the movie. He's thought of as a chess prodigy. Although that term prodigy, I don't believe applies to him well at all because he has a method for learning, mastering, refining any skill, whether that't believe, applies to him well at all because he has a method for learning, mastering, refining any skill, whether that is chess, whether that is Tai Chi, in which he's

multiple-time world champion, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, in which he's a black belt under the phenom, the Michael Jordan of the sport, Marcelo Garcia. And he's worked with people ranging from Mark Messier, six-time Stanley Cup winner, to Cal Ripken Jr., to the top hedge fund managers in the world. He is a performance specialist and also a very dear friend of mine now at this point. And I ended up loving his book, The Art of Learning, so much that I acquired the rights to his audiobook. If you want to find that, it's read by Josh himself. And you can just go to 4hourblog.com and search for Tim Ferriss Book Club or go to Google and do the same. So without further ado, let's get straight to the hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Me, Tim, Ferris, Joe. So Josh, I figure we might as well start at the top and do a little retrospective. What led you initially to write The Art of Learning? Of course, that's how I was in many ways introduced to your work and then through our mutual friend Max ended up connecting.

But what was the reason you decided to write that book? I initially started thinking about the idea of the book about two years into my martial arts life. So I transitioned from chess into studying, into meditating, into studying East Asian philosophy. Then I started getting into Tai Chi Chuan and the principles, my level in chess, just began to translate directly over into the martial arts. And I think it was primarily one experience I had. It was something around two years into my tattoo training, I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition in Memphis, Tennessee at a fundraiser for muscular dystrophy. And I was playing 45 or 50 boards at once. So I'm walking down the middle of this big square of chess tables.

Everyone's playing one game. I'm playing each of them. And about 40 minutes into the simul, I had this experience that was so interesting. I began to feel like I was riding the energetic wave of the game like I was in my push-hands training. I wasn't playing chess. I wasn't thinking in chess language. I wasn't calculating variations.

I was feeling the flow, feeling the space behind like I would in the martial arts. And I had this realization. I was playing beautiful chess, but I wasn't consciously playing chess. But the barriers between these two different arts had dissolved in my mind. And that's when I started to conceive of the idea of the book. And a lot of the process of... I spent five years taking notes, maybe four or five hundred pages of notes in the book before I actually of the process of I spent five years taking notes me four five hundred pages of notes in the book before I actually sat down and wrote it

and a lot of that process was deconstructing what I've been doing rather intuitively so essentially what it felt like before his translation of what in parallel learning these are two rather abstract terms that that's the language that I was using internally when I was first thinking about the book because it felt like I was just taking the essence of one art and translating it over into another. And then the process of writing it involved deconstructing what I'd been doing somewhat abstractly

into something that could be replicated more systematically. So the question that jumps out in my mind, which is a bit of a side note perhaps, but is similes, playing 10, 20, 30, 40 boards simultaneously. I'll try to ask a better question than how does someone do that, but at what point,

what happens to a chess player when they go from an inability to play multiple boards simultaneously to being able to play multiple boards simultaneously? What is the framework or thinking or experience in someone built up that allows them to do something like that, which to the average person seems like a Rain Man-like feat?

You know, I think it's different for every chess player. I mean, one of the beautiful things about chess is that you can approach it so many different ways. And to be world-class, what you need to do, essentially, is express the core of your being through the art. I think this is true of many arts, and that's probably something we'll get into more deeply. So you can have a very mathematical person who plays chess mathematically.

You can have a very musical person who plays chess musically. Someone might be much more kinesthetic, like myself, and sort of a feeling for flow and hidden harmonies and almost a physically energetic relationship to chess. When I first learned to play chess when I was six years old in Washington Square Park, it was a battle. I love the feeling of just going into a fight with someone and finding these hidden harmonies and finding where these animal passions mixed with this technical complexity. And much later when when I got much better playing Simles,

it was sort of a higher level manifestation of that same kind of dynamic. I mean, for me, playing Simles, it's something akin to juggling a lot of balls. And all of the, to each chess, I wasn't playing 40 different games, for example, separately. The flow of all 40 games would sort of coalesce into one larger sense of flow. And it was actually really interesting. Whenever, often when I'd give a simul and there'd be a youth competition

and the winners of the youth competition would play against me. And so sometimes kids would cheat. They'd really want to beat me, so they would cheat. So I'd be walking around this big thing, and then I'd get to the table, and they'd have shifted the position to try to win because if they didn't win, it would be a big thing. My experience when that happened was as if you had,

imagine you had like 40 balls up in the air, and suddenly they'd all crash onto the floor. I would know that they had changed the position not by reaching the board and remembering what the position was and then seeing they changed it. It would initially be this feeling of the energetic flow had been interrupted. And then I'd have to reverse engineer myself back to that one game, that one component

of the flow, and then I'd remember the game, and then I would remember exactly what the position had been, and then I'd say, ha-ha, this was the position. And then it would take me two or three times going back around to get all the balls back up in the air to get back to the energetic flow. So actually, for me, giving similes sort of felt similar to playing chess, one chess game. But that was my own relationship to it. I think that probably if you ask 10 different very strong chess players, they'd all give somewhat different answers. Got it.

Yeah, you know, one thing that blew me away was spending time with a friend of yours, Maurice, when we went to Washington Square Park and seeing him play a game, at least for the first portion, without looking at the board. I won't give away too much of the punchline since we captured it all in a film. It was pretty amazing. But his ability to track the board, it seemed like by chunking portions of the board into sort of larger gestalt pieces. I don't know if that's the best way to express it, but it seemed like his ability to seemingly remember all these disparate pieces was because he had it broken, the board broken down into sort of component chunks, as it were. But I don't want to take us too down that final line. Let's shift gears. I want to, what I'd be very curious to know is, you know, at this point, what, because I know, of course, a little bit of the background, but I want to dig into the details. What type of people do you personally work with these days, and why do they work with you?

What type of things do you do with them? I have three major dimensions to my creative life right now. Well, maybe four. I guess the most important one is my son, Jack, who is a little over two years old and love of my life. So that's maybe the most important part of my life, no question about it. I run a non-profit educational

foundation, and we have, called the JW Foundation, the Art of Learning Project. And we have a couple hundred programs in schools around the country internationally as well. And so this is integrating these principles that I've been developing in schools, working with teachers, parents, and children around this individualized and thematic relationship to learning that I've been developing. So this is one dimension.

The other one is I own a martial arts school, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school, with Marcel Garcia, who's the nine-time world champion. You know him well, Tim. He's really the Michael Jordan of the grappling world. So this is world-class athletes training there. And then I run a consulting business where I'm training people who are at the cutting edge of the finance world. And this is really interesting work because we're focusing on that last 1% or 0.1% of the learning process, which is really my specialty.

It's highly individualized. It's cutting-edge work on their learning process, their idea generation, their creativity, their performance psychology, their resilience. Fascinating work. And, you know, what I've discovered, it's interesting because I wrote this book called The Art of Learning years ago. And so people are always coming to me to speak about learning, but much of what I've been focused on in recent years has been unlearning. When I think about that last movement, from the equivalent of being number 10 to number 1 in the world to number 5 to being number 1 in the world, it's much more about finding subtle obstructions,

finding friction points, releasing them, identifying cognitive biases that might be blocking your way. It's the movement towards unobstructed self-expression. So if you think about your creative process as a hose with a big crimp in it, if you release it, just unbelievable pressure can be released. And a lot of what I'm doing with people is trying to move them from very good to great or from great to truly elite by just deeply individualized work and helping them really find ways

to express the core of their being through their art, which is, as you know, a big theme in my life from when I played chess at my highest level. That's what I was doing when I had a period of being really locked up in my chess career, which we can go into in more detail if you want. I was doing the opposite.

I was trying to fit into someone else's mold. And then ultimately, when I transitioned away from chess into the martial arts, I returned to that experience of self-expression. And that's when I really started to understand it very deeply. I think it was the crisis towards the end of my chess career which really blew the foundation for the work that I do today

with brilliant mental performers who are just trying to make that movement to the equivalent to world champion. To jump actually back to Marcelo for a second, because I've of course met Marcelo and he's just... And you've gone to war with him and I've watched you. I've gone to war with him, which if there's anything at stake, I don't recommend. He's a tough guy. He's caused me a lot of pain over the years he's a tough guy but also a sweetheart of a guy and

he's so fluid what I'd love to hear from you of course because in the art of learning which some people might be familiar with they read about your experiences in chess your experiences in Tai Chi

the parallels between them and this sort of overarching framework for optimizing mental and physical performance, if that's a fair way to put it, which is the art of learning, these different techniques and strategies. What have you learned through this third art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? What are some insights or strategies that you've had since moving from Tai Chi, which is in some ways similar but also very different from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which a lot of people would be familiar with through the UFC and mixed martial arts? Right, right. Yeah, I mean, to put it in context relative to my life, so the art of learning ends with the 2004 World Championship.

It ends with me describing the narrative of that. It was just absolutely a hard-on-crazy experience. I won't give the punchline, but it was really intense. And after this, I decided I wanted to be a beginner again, to put on a white belt, literally and figuratively. And so I took on this third major mountain in my life, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I was training out in the West Coast for about a year when I was actually writing The Art of Learning. I was training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu twice a day.

This was after I'd spent five years taking notes. Then I had the 2004 Worlds, then I was writing it. I started training with John Machado out there. Then I came back to New York. I started training with Marco Santos here and I started to develop this relationship with Marcelo, who is just the greatest grappler to ever live. We were doing a lot of private lessons.

We developed a friendship. Then he moved to Florida and I would travel to Florida to work with him. Ultimately, I made the decision I wanted to bring him to New York, mostly because I was, at that point, planning to make a run for the world championship in this art. There was no better way to do it

than to get my ass kicked by the very best to ever live in the sport. He's just a wonderful guy. He's just an unbelievable martial artist. We opened up the school together. I've been on the mats with him other than when one of us has been injured. There's been a lot of injuries in these sports just all the time. And it's been a fascinating experience.

I mean, Marcelo is so profoundly different from me. I'm a really conceptual guy, I think abstractly. Of course, my foundation in chess, Marcelo is one of the most, well, he's the most kinesthetically overdeveloped person I've ever met. And, of course, overdevelopment and underhetically overdeveloped person I've ever met. And of course, overdevelopment and underdevelopment tend to come hand in hand conceptually. So can you give me an example of that? What would be an example? Of overdevelopment and underdevelopment?

Of kinesthetic, what it means to be kinesthetically. His physical intelligence is mind-boggling. I mean, when he'd come fishing with me, you know, you throw him on a stand-up paddleboard in three-foot chop, and everyone just flies off of paddleboards when they just stand up on them. And he's just beautiful. I mean, you just find the balance points. I mean, I've never seen someone learn so quickly

how to handle waves, boats, handling fishing lines, being, you know, free diving, being on, riding waves on paddle boards. You know, when you're in the marsh, I've been a stand-up fighter for many years. I mean, throwing is my core, my core art. When I'm doing stand-up training with Marcelo, I caught him with most of the throws in my repertoire one time.

I don't think I've ever caught him with a throw twice. Wow. Which is amazing. I mean, and I have guys who are are world class who I was training with, you know, I catch them thousands of times. This is a guy he just, you almost never see Marcelo get caught more than once with something.

And it's amazing to see how he relates to the world through his kinesthetic intelligence. So, for example, if you're looking, when we were looking for spaces for our school, we'd walk into a big room, and I'd be thinking about the dimensions, you know, square footage, where this would be, where that would be.

Marcello would know if it felt good or felt bad. If he meets you, he's going to know whether he feels good about you or he feels bad about you. And his intuition is incredibly dead on, but he navigates the world through his kinesthetic intelligence. And it's been really fascinating having the school with him

and diving deep with him, because we've been having conceptual dialogue for these three and a half years or so, and he's really deepened conceptually. But I've learned even more deeply the importance of the lesson that there are many paths to greatness. And to take a guy like Marcelo and to try to fit him into a chess player's

hyper-conceptual mold would be terrible because he'd be killing his shine. And he is so great because of his just unbelievable commitment to doing it his way. And he's done things in extraordinary ways. I mean, for example, you know how in these competitive arts everyone's very secretive about their repertoires.

We have this program, which you know well, called MG in Action, where people, jiu-jitsu guys from around the world log in to watch all of Marcelo's training sessions, his sparring sessions, his lessons, everything. When he was competing in Abu Dhabi's Mission Grappling World Championship and Munjals, which is the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championship, we were streaming his sparring sessions every night. So he was basically showing his competitors what he was about to use against them in two weeks, in three weeks, in four weeks.

And his attitude about this, which is completely unique, is, if you're studying my game, you're entering my game, and I'll be better at it than you. So simple, so pure. And if you think about it, it's really deep. The opposite of what most chess players would do, and most jiu-jitsu guys would do. And so he's wide open to constant learning. And the other beautiful thing about Marcelo is, people call him the king of scrambles,

and if you watch his training style, he's always in transition, which is a really interesting idea to think about in a cross-disciplinary manner. Because most people get their egos involved in their training, and they're trying to dominate all the time. And to dominate in almost anything, you find a position of dominance, and you keep it. But Marcello always lets his opponents move, and so he's constantly playing in transition. And so if you think about what world-class martial arts means, and you brought up, for example, Maurice Ashley playing chess in Washington Square.

It's similar. If you're at a much higher level than someone, you can always seem mystical, because you're doing things which are outside of their conceptual scheme. The way that operates in the martial arts is if you think about it through the lens of frames, right? If you and I are looking at a position and in your mind there's this position, leads to this position, leads to this position.

So there's three positions. In my mind, if I'm constantly training at the transitions between these positions, these actually expand into these transitional frames become positions to me. And so if I'm seeing 100 positions when you're seeing, say, two, then I can play in your blind spots and it can seem mystical to you because you haven't trained there. And that's what Marcelo does. By spending all of his time in transition, he's cultivated the art to play in the in-between, which is really what level is all about, or one of the core things that world-class martial arts is all about,

playing in transition, in gaps in your opponent's sight pattern. No, I mean, observing and practicing with Marcelo, say, on the guillotine or the marcello team just blew me away because if you look at it as an uninformed spectator or even just a moderately informed spectator you're blown away by how fast he is how effective he is but the the nuance of sort of eliciting movement allowing space space to open, manufacturing space by, say, applying pressure and then leaving it is so subtle and so incredibly effective. I mean, then you start to notice it from these principles that carry over to many, many hundreds of possible positions,

let's just say. It's really amazing. I mean, it reminds me of something I heard once from a musician, which was, I don't know who the original quote is from, but he said that, you know, music is the space between the notes. And I was like, huh, that's a really interesting way to look at it. But what were you going to say? I was going to say, I mean, I think that's just a gorgeous quote. I think that most great arts are defined by that space in between. Yeah, well, it's like writing is the same way, right? It's like, you know, when in doubt, leave it out.

It's just like, you know, it's, I think, yeah. Beautiful, beautiful point. And, of course, the thing about Marcello is that it can often seem initially that he's moving so fast, but what's incredible is that he can also move very that he's moving so fast, but what's incredible is that he can also move very slow and do things that you don't see. Just like a great side of hand artist who's just practicing the art of illusion when we're not practicing it. It's amazing what can be done with intention,

with controlling someone's intention. And this is a lot of my training in push hands related to finding ways to essentially control someone's intentions so that you were ahead of them, even if they were ultimately moving first. You were there before they arrived. It's a fascinating psychological component of really high- level training in anything. Well, I remember an interview, or it wasn't an interview, no, it was an interview actually with one of the top K-1 fighters back in the day. Yeah. And they were talking about Peter Ertz.

I don't know if you remember the Dutch lumberjack, huge guy. And he seemed fast. And I remember what people said, a number of opponents said you know he's he's actually not that fast he's kind of a big lumbering guy but he's so good at predicting timing that he sees you telegraph before you even have the thought to throw the punch and he beats you to the punch as a result of that but it's it's because he picks up on the cues faster than other people. And I thought that was very interesting. To try to bridge this to something else, I mean, you work with, of course, I'm not going to mention names, but you work with some of

the most stunningly successful and famous traders and people in finance. I mean, some real kind of masters of the universe type folks. What have you found unique about that group of people? Let's just start with that. I'm curious to know kind of what you've noticed being as observant as you are about that group of folks. Oh, that's a big question. It is a big question. Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all,

I think a core principle to start with is that there are many paths to greatness. I mean, each one of these guys who's really world-class is doing it his way. And he's harnessing his eccentricities. He's cultivating his or her strengths as a way of life. There's not an excessive focus on weakness.

There's just an embracing of deep, deep study of the preconditions to someone's finest moments of expression and building lifestyles around it. And that's a lot of what I do, is help people understand what makes them tick on a very, very deep level relative to, you know, their cognitive biases, where they're locked up, and where their greatest intents come, what kind of external conditions, what kind of internal

conditions. The ones who are really at the top are people who have mastered this art of deep introspection and taking the result of these introspective processes and turning them into training systems and into a way of life. And it's fascinating how the process works. What I do with these guys is, after I do my initial diagnostic process, I have ways of revamping their daily architecture, the way they live their life, so that they're, for example, aligning their peak energy periods with their peak creativity work. They're building lifestyles that are just relentlessly proactive as opposed to reacting

to inputs. They're building a daily architecture which is based on maximizing the creative process. And if you think about this relative to most people, a simple case in point is email checking, right? Most people, when they finish a break, even top guys in industries, when they finish a break whether they wake up first thing in the morning, what do most people do? They check their email. When they come back from a workout, whether they check their email. When they come back from lunch, whether they check their email. What you see is whenever they're coming back from something after a break, they're soaking

in inputs and so they live this reactive lifestyle. Their creative process is dominated by external noise as opposed to internal music. And a lot of what I work on with guys is creating rhythms in their life that really are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity, information, and then tapping it. So, for example, ending the workday with high-quality focus on a certain area of complexity where you could use an insight, and then waking up first thing in the morning pre-input

and applying your mind to it, journaling on it. Not so much to do a big brainstorm, but to tap what you've been working on unconsciously overnight, which, of course, is a principle that Hemingway wrote about when he spoke about the two core principles in his creative writing process were, one, ending the workday with something left to write. Yep. Often mid-sentence, even. Right. So not doing everything he had to do, which most people do because they feel the sense of guilt if they're not working. You and I have discussed this at length.

But leaving something left to right and then waking up. And then the second principle, release your mind from it. Don't think about it all night. Really let go. Have a glass of wine. Then wake up first thing in the morning and reapply your mind to it. And it's amazing because you're basically feeding the mind complexity and then tapping that complexity or tapping what you've done with it.

And, I mean, this rhythm, you know, the large variation of it is overnight. Then you can do microbursts of it throughout the day before workouts, pose a question, do a workout, release your mind after a workout, return to it and do a creative burst before you go to the bathroom, before you go to lunch, before anything. And there's ways of systematically training yourself to generate the crystallization experience, the aha moment, that can happen once a month or once a year. A lot of what I do is work on systems to help it happen once a day or four times a day.

When you're talking about guys who run financial groups of $20 to $30 billion, for example, if they have a huge insight, that can have unbelievable value. If you can really train people to get systematic about nurturing their creative process, it's unbelievable what can happen. And most of that work relates to getting out of your own way at a very high level. It's unlearning. It's the constant practice of subtraction, reducing friction.

What would be an example? You've mentioned cognitive biases a few times. For those people who may not be familiar with that term, what would be an example of cognitive biases and how someone might work on them? Right. Well, there are a lot of cognitive biases that are specific to certain disciplines like chess or finance or philosophy. But if we just think about it in terms of everyday life, let's say we make a decision and we then feel the need to justify that decision. And so we make more decisions to justify that initial decision.

And then we basically get ourselves into this deep wormhole, which is caused by the attempt to justify... The sunk cost fallacy. Exactly. So this is in the financial group or in the world, we're talking about this as a sunk cost fallacy. Exactly. So this is in the financial group or in the world we're talking about, this is the sunk cost fallacy, right? But this is very interesting for, for example,

a chess player who makes a certain decision and there's a certain emotional and intellectual and time component to the value we put into the thought process behind that decision. And what we often have to do is release it because the position changes shape. A very interesting way that this manifests in chess,

which you can think about rather universally, is let's say that there's a certain evaluation to the position, right? You and I are playing, Tim, and I have a slight advantage in the position. I'm nurturing that advantage. I'm nurturing it. I'm nurturing it.

In a lot of complexity, I make a slight error and the position. I'm nurturing that advantage. I'm nurturing it. In a lot of complexity, I make a slight error and suddenly the position is equalized. If I'm holding on to the past evaluation emotionally where I have the advantage, then what I'm going to do very subtly is I'm going to reject positions that don't give me that advantage. If objectively I no longer have

an advantage, then I'm going to be reaching too far. Then I'm going to be rejecting things I right and then I'm going to rejecting things I should accept which will make my position slip more and more and more and you fall into what I call a downward spiral yeah so this relates to a lack of presence which really connects to a cognitive bias an addiction to a past evaluation as opposed to a present one mm-hmm so that's a very simple example of a cognitive bias a mental addiction a thought construct something that we hold to be true

because of some complicated twist in our mind that it's no longer actually true. And so, of course, a very simple antidote to most of this is presence. If we can look at a moment or a chess position or an investment decision or any decision with very clean presence outside of kind of emotional inertia um then we can often slice through just amazing amounts of fat with just very very simple decisions if you think about the learning process for example this is one thing i love about your approach to learning i i a language that you and i use is you know i call you a master of deconstruction you look at the way people approach different sports

and you find the biases, the false constructs. Right. And you find a way to learn, a very straight path to learning as opposed to people getting mired in all sorts of tangled webs of complexity which are essentially caused by cognitive biases. Isn't that how you'd put it?

Yeah, no, I think that's true and I obviously appreciate the kind words. I mean, I think you and I have very complementary approaches, and like you've, I think, said before, I tend to focus on the 80-20 analysis as it applies to people getting up and off the ground as quickly as possible to, say, top, whatever, 5% to 10% of the general population. Whereas what's so cool about our conversations, what I enjoy so much in part is that, you know,

you're really focusing on that, that, that final leap. How do you go from being great to being the best, right? And they're, they're very, they're, they're very complimentary skill sets. I think that, yeah, what I'm looking at and this is a, is a, is a way to unearth cognitive biases. And just as a side note for people who want to look into this, you can just go to Wikipedia and search list of cognitive biases. And there's, there's a long list, which is pretty fun to read. And there are a number of books about these types of things to think twice,

I think is another one. The question that I ask myself, and I'm always interested in the questions that people ask themselves because I find, to my mind, that internal dialogue is what defines your day-to-day thinking and what you think you become. So it's so critical that you ask yourself the right questions. And in my mind, or I should say rather, when I'm trying to deconstruct, say a sport, all I'll ask is to start with, you know, what, what rules are people following that are not

required, right? So, you know, outside of the law and science, and even within science and within law, reality is kind of negotiable. So I mean, a good instance of that is the high jump and the Fosbury flops, Dick Fosbury, who was really the first guy to go backwards over the high jump. And up to that point, there'd been straddle kicks and all sorts of different approaches. And he was ridiculed at first, and then he was called a cheat because he won the gold medal. And now everybody uses that approach. And so having a list of questions, right? Who's good at this? Who shouldn't be? Is another one that I love to ask because you might find someone, for instance, you were talking about the different styles in chess or jujitsu or in chess, as sort of a reference to your first book, you have attacking

chess players, right? Then you have very different stylistic differences and you have very quantitative players. And for the TV show, for the Tim Ferriss experiment, I did an episode on poker. And I've avoided poker my whole life because I viewed it as a game of chance. And I had a former computer science guy who said, no, no, no, I'm not going to teach you to be lucky because I can't teach you to be lucky. Uh, but I can teach you to run some probabilities and only bet when you have a good likelihood of a positive, uh, positive outcome. Right. And what, what was so fascinating is you look at a guy like that, and you'll find highly quantitative, say, hedge fund managers, for instance, or investors of different types, tech investors who go to the World Series of Poker, and they run the numbers. That's how they play. And then there are other guys who are completely, seemingly flying

by the seat of their pants. I mean, they're very kinesthetic. They're playing an intimidation game. They're very physical. And so asking myself, for instance, who's good at this, who shouldn't be, if the assumption is you have to be very good at math to be good at poker, right? Who admits to using no math, which might be misinformation, but, and let me look into how they do it. And then the second question is, have they replicated their results? Are there other people they've taught to do what they do to try to separate out the nature from the nurture where possible? But I want to come back to the finance guys just for a second. And to ask you about rituals and routines, then I'm going to ask you about your own. But what are some

habits? And it doesn't have to be across the board with all these guys, because they have such different personalities and approaches. But with some of these really super high level finance guys who are managing tens of billions of dollars, what are some of the habits that you've observed that you find interesting, or rituals? Well, let me answer that by describing some of the keystone habits that I recommend for people to internalize in the field. Is that a good question? Well, I mean, first of all, meditation. I mean, we're speaking about this theme of cognitive biases,

or basically observing your mental addictions, the moment that they set in meditation is as deep and as powerful a tool as, um, as I could possibly describe. I mean, it's, it's in an, in maybe six or seven years ago when I was first talking about meditation with guys in the finance world,

it seemed like some strange thing for them to take on. Um, but as more and more people are integrating into the process, I mean, you wouldn't believe how many of the most powerful players in the world are meditating very deeply. It's just an amazing way of deepening the creative process, deepening presence,

expanding your energetic relationship to the world, gaining insight, and realizing that most of the thinking that we do basically springs from mental addiction. And much of people's lives are spent in an emotional swirl, which is a reactive one. And having a relationship's presence, which allows you to see through the illusion of that emotional swirl, or of those mental addictions. I mean, meditation is an incredibly powerful tool, which I know you know quite deeply.

I've been meditating since I was 17, 18 years old. I know it's a big part of your life as well, Tim. So that's a very, very important habit. The idea of waking up first thing in the morning and turning your mind to creative work pre-input, as opposed to checking email and getting reactive, opening up your channel to the unconscious mind first thing when you wake up in the morning, doing the same, ending the workday with quality, hugely important. I remember when I went skiing with Billy Kidd, who, as you might recall,

was one of the great downhill racers from back in, I think, the 60s Olympic ski team. Awesome dude. Now he skis out in Colorado wearing a cowboy hat. Just a timeless guy. Brilliant dude. And he was saying to me years ago when I first skied with him, Josh, what do you think of the three most important turns of the ski run? And, you know, I've asked that question to a lot of people since.

And most people will say the middle because it's the hardest, the beginning because they're getting momentum. Billy describes the three most important turns of the ski run are the last three before you got in the lift. And it's a very, very subtle point. And for those of you who are skiers,

you know that that's when the slope is leveled off. There's less challenge. Most people are very sloppy then they're taking the muscles off of they're taking the weight off the muscles they've been using. They have bad form. The problem with that is that on the lift right up, unconsciously you're internalizing bad body mechanics. As Billy points out, if your

last three turns are precise, then what you're internalizing when you lift right up is precision. I carry this on to the guys who I train in the finance world, for example, ending the workday with very high quality, which opens up, for one thing, you're internalizing quality overnight. And we're nurturing themes as well as skills, right? It's one thing to learn skills, but the higher art is to learn themes or meta-themes that will ultimately spontaneously up into the internalization of hundreds of what I would call local habits. And so if you're practicing quality, you're deepening the muscle of quality.

And you're also focusing the unconscious mind in an area of complexity, which'll then tap first thing in the morning. So this is a core habit. Journaling, certain post-mortem processes, reflecting on the, you know, ending your day with a reflection of the quality of the work, one of the core areas of complexity that you're wrestling with. Hugely important. Would you do that immediately after the end of the workday, per se, before bed? How would you time that if someone wanted to try this themselves? I time it at the end of the workday. The problem with doing these things right before bed is that then you're sort of consciously going to bed thinking about these things. At that

point, I find you want to release. A very core idea is when you go home, as best you can, unless you're red hot inspired, release your mind from the work. It's very important to give your stress and recovery core habit. You want to be turning it on and turning it off. Teaching people to turning it off is a huge part of teaching them to turn it on much more intensely. Stress and recovery workouts, interval training, and meditation together are beautiful habits to develop to cultivate the art of turning it on and turning it off.

So if you're undulating your heart rate, for example, between 170, 172, 174, and say 144, the practice of lowering your heart rate over the course of, say, 45 seconds is akin to falling asleep, releasing your tension. And then as you're pushing your heart rate back up, you're learning to turn on. So you're using a physical metaphor to train at the art of turning on incredible intellectual energy and then turning it off. Marcel Garcia, who we were talking about, one of my most beautiful memories of him in the World Championship, right before going into the semifinals, raucous bleacher, everyone screaming, yelling, he's sleeping. Sleeping in the bleacher. You wake him up.

He sort of stumbled into the ring. You've never seen a guy more relaxed before going into a world championship fight. And then he can turn it off so deeply. And man, when he goes in the ring, you can't turn it on with any more intensity than he can. And his ability to turn it off is directly aligned with how intensely he can turn it on. So training people to do this, have stress and recovery, undulation throughout their day.

And then thematically this ties into, again, this internal proactive orientation and building a daily architecture which is around understanding your creative process as opposed to reacting to things, feeling guilty that you're not working, really teaching people to tap into their internal compass. So those are some of the core themes and habits that I would bring up first.

But I could spend three hours talking about this subject. Let's do it. We'll have a part two. The meditation I wanted to touch on for a second. I mean, as you know, I've been taking that very seriously for particularly the last six months or so. And I received an email the other day from the teacher that I used for transcendental meditation. And there are many different types of meditation. I'm curious. I'm going to ask you about how you format your own meditating in a second, but there are many different types. I have my issues, my likes and dislikes as it

relates to almost all of them, but I received an email with a link to an article and the title is Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio credits Transcendental Meditation for his success. For those who don't know, he's the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. They have, what, 100 billion plus under management, I think. His quote is, meditation more than any other factor has been the secret to whatever success I've had. That is a hell of an endorsement. For me, it's been getting over that resistance to what I perceived as sort of a woo-woo, new-agey type thing. And the ability to sort of view it almost as just a warm bath for the mind, where I'm

taking a mini vacation from my own brain in a way, which may or may not, depending on who you ask, be the most helpful way to look at it. But I found that a very kind of useful lens through which to view it. But how do you, if there is a particular type of meditation you follow, what is it or how do you personally meditate? What do you think of or not think of? How long do you do it, et cetera? Yeah, I mean, when I was 17, 18, I started studying very simple contemplative and quiescent

Buddhist sitting meditation, where I would focus on my breath. And, you know, this is when I was a late teenager. And then I started getting involved with Tai Chi. I started studying East Asian philosophy very deeply. This is where I got increasingly into moving meditation, which is the most deep practice or the practice that I've personally done most deeply, Tai Chi for meditation. The meditative form of Tai Chi is the essence of the art, and then the fighting application is what I was competing in. And so I spent many years meditating four, five, six hours a day with Tai Chi. Today, I combine my Tai Chi practice with sitting meditation again.

I mean, most people, when they enter meditation, what I suggest is they just practice very simple sitting meditation following their breath. And it's a practice which doesn't have to be very complex. They can, for example, just sit either cross-legged or comfortably in a chair and follow their breath. And it's very interesting because they'll notice after one or two seconds that their mind starts racing off. And usually what happens when you have really driven guys who are trying to meditate for the first time and their mind races off, they get all pissed off. They're just like, ah, angry, frustration.

They feel like they're failing at meditation. One of the most important things to do is to embrace the fact that meditation isn't about perfection. It's about the return to breath. When you find your mind racing, you observe that and you return to your breath.

That's a tough emotional hurdle for a lot of guys. And it's very interesting because over time, you know the metaphor of basically the mind is a wild stallion that over time,

you're taming and you ultimately learn to still it. It's racing. It's bucking. It's pulling against anything. You put it, any kind of line you put on it.

But ultimately, the circles get smaller and smaller, and you learn to observe when your mind is getting caught up in some kind of mental or emotional addiction more and more quickly and fluidly, and the return to breath becomes easier and easier. And it's very interesting, by the way, as a competitor, because I relate to the theme of channeling emotion or fear, whatever is rising as a world-class competitor, in very much the same way we might speak about meditation. I spoke at a conference on grit recently, and it was very interesting for me

because for the most part, when I listen to resilience, GRIT, which is of course a core educational principle in a lot of charter schools these days, it's hugely important teaching kids to be resilient. And it's very interesting because when I hear people speak about resilience from, and this is sort of a, we're moving a little bit aside from meditation, but we'll bring it back. The focus is on, for example, overcoming difficulty, suffering, learning to basically push through. What people don't realize is that world-class performers, what they've done is they've reoriented their relationship to suffering or to the point of resistance.

They've learned to embrace it. They've learned to see the beauty in these moments where there's pain because that's incredible room for growth. And I think that a lot of what you learn to do in meditation is observe the addictive way you might be defining something. And if you want to, you can simply alter that definition. So you can change your relationship to pain or the rain or a huge storm or fear or anger. So, for example, people from the outside will use the term fearlessness, right?

But if you speak to any great soldier or SEAL team member or fighter or UFC guy, they'll tell you, mixed martial arts, right, great world-class fighter, they'll tell you that they feel fear. They just know how to sit with their fear and how to work with it and how to channel it. So the idea of fearlessness is sort of a false idea which is imposed from the outside by a spectator. And when you observe world-class performers, what they've learned how to do is harness fear, nerves, anxiety, bring them in, embrace them, have a working relationship with them and channel them into intensity. And meditation is an incredible forum or vehicle in which you can do this because you learn to observe where you have addictive relationships,

and you realize that they're not absolute, and you can actually transform your relationship to any of these thought patterns, thought constructs, cognitive biases, or emotional patterns. Yeah, I was looking up a quote as you that, because I wanted to get it right, but it's one of my favorite quotes from Customato, who trained boxers like Floyd Patterson, Jose Torres, most famously perhaps Mike Tyson. And he would say, the hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters.

And I started meditating and gave up meditating many, many times because I had the response that you mentioned about type A personalities where I'd be sitting there and I thought the objective was to quiet my mind. And I'll come back to that in a second. And so when, so when I failed at quieting my mind, because it would be ticking off the to-do list or being like, oh, that fucker who said A, B, and C to me the other day. And it was just like harp on these ridiculous things. And I'd get then pissed. And then I'd get pissed that I was getting pissed and get up and have a cup of coffee and like storm out of the house, which didn't seem like a productive meditation session. I actually started doing it consistently when I kept it really short.

And a friend of mine recommended this where I would, number one, be comfortable. So I would sit down, but to avoid back pain, I would actually lean against a wall, which is very commonly thought of as a big no-no. So I'd lean against a wall to keep my back straight. And I would listen to one music track. I would listen to one song every morning, the same song as a cue, and I would just pay attention to my breath and focus on being an observer of my thoughts, but not trying to control them at all. So if all I did was think about my to-do list the entire time, that's fine as long as I'm paying attention to my breath. And that non-attachment to an outcome, i.e. controlling my thoughts, was very helpful.

And the format that I followed subsequent to that, and we can have a longer conversation about why it finally clicked, but the short answer is accountability. I had a teacher who was going to give me a hard time if I didn't do my meditating and then report back, was 20 minutes, let's just say 10 to 20 minutes twice a day. And what I found was by allowing the thoughts to occur and not judging myself because let's say I'm thinking about email or the grocery shopping I need to do or whatever, just letting that happen, but getting good at observing it, I was able to then have more emotional awareness later, which would prevent cognitive biases and bad judgment. So what I mean by that is, as a concrete example, I'm an impatient guy. I always have been, ever since I was a little, literally little kid, like 12, 13 years old, if I was at the restaurant with my mom and dad and the server didn't come over and pour water after we'd been gone dry for like five minutes, I'd just get up and walk into the kitchen and

grab a pitcher and walk out. And I'm really impatient and I get angry. I mean, I get angry about things that I view as deliberately slow and sloppy. So for me, and that anger can be harnessed sometimes into really productive aggression, but it's also, it wears you down at both ends. And so what I found is after meditating consistently for even a week or so, when that anger would start, I was better at not just become, I was better at observing Tim as a third person, right? Like, oh, look at that. Like Tim's getting angry about something really small and stupid, as opposed to simply becoming angry and then causing problems for myself, whether it's just internal or interacting with other people. So, yeah, I agree with you completely on the meditation. I love that image of you as a 12-year-old

racing into the kitchen to bring out the water. It's such a great metaphor for your life today. You find different examples of that in the process. You race in there and you get the water and you're sliced right through. I love it. So let's do a couple of rapid-fire questions that are all tied into this stuff,

but we can just do short questions with a couple of short answers. So complete the following statement. My favorite time of day is blank. My favorite time of day is holding my son in my arms after I've done my, I've woken up, I've done a 20, 30 minute journaling session. I get my son, I bring him downstairs and I give him his bottle of milk and I hold him and I look him in the eye and I tell him how proud I am of him. And we talk about what he's thinking about and what he's working on while he has his milk.

And I think it's the most magical part of my day these days. That's in the morning? Yeah, that's that. I wake up about half an hour before him. I do a big creative burst. As a parent, your sleep patterns change pretty dramatically, but I found this rhythm where I wake up and I do that burst, and I just love that first morning energy time with him.

And we have this deep connection while he's having his milk. I love it. What time do you wake up? Talk about that. I usually wake up around 7, 7.05, and he usually wakes up around 7.30, 7.35. I'm endlessly fascinated by morning routines. So this might seem really like I'm digging into the minutia.

But when you wake up, it sounded like you wake up and you have 30 minutes to journal before bringing your son downstairs. Do you brush your teeth, drink a cup of coffee, any of that before you journal? Or do you just roll out of bed, walk into the office, and sit down to write? My routine is that I roll out of bed walk into the office and sit down to write my routine is that i i roll out of bed i brush my teeth i go downstairs and i sit down um with my journal and i start writing and i immediately apply myself to to a reflection that i sort of targeted my mind at in the um in the evening or late afternoon before um and then when i when after and i just let it rip i have a big creative search um and then once i hear my son i go get him and then

then i have my breakfast um usually a bowl oatmeal um while he has his you know after he has his milk and then i i have a cup of coffee about half an hour after that. Cool. Related to, you strike me as a happy guy. Obviously, we all have our challenges then and again, like the place I'm getting remodeled at the moment, which I won't go into a diatribe at the moment. I'm very excited about it,

but it's my 12-year-old Tim wanting to go get the water pitcher that's not been very helpful right now. What are three things, could be two, three things that you believe you need in order to be happy? And that could be for you, could be for people in general. I'm just curious how you would think of that question or answer that question. One of the great things about you and I being dear friends and having these conversations is that you tend to be very good at thinking

in bullets and lists of three things, and that's just not how my brain works. And I can tell you the essence of how I relate to that question. I'm not going to give you a three-bullet answer because that's just not how this brain operates. I mean, I've built a lifestyle around being true to myself. Largely, maybe a big reason is because of, you know, my mom used to always tell me as a kid to follow my heart, follow my dreams. I never made decisions for money or for external things. I always trusted if I was true to myself,

these things would follow. And so my professional life, my foundation, my school, I only work with people who I feel are ethically aligned, who have a good energy, who I feel really good about intuitively. I keep empty space in my life. I rarely have more than one or two meetings a day. My life is about quality, not quantity. It's about depth and not breadth. My business is based on doing very, very deep and very excellent work with just a handful

of people. And so I really like to cultivate quality as a way of life and I believe that when you're not cultivating quality you're essentially cultivating sloppiness and so the idea of building the musculature of quality and being like a heat-seeking missile for me I take great pleasure in observing the beauty of the little moments in life and so for me my lifestyle is based on I'm working out every day

I just focus on structuring a day that will allow for my creative process to be rich. I'm present with my son. I have my offices at home. I'm with him in the morning. I'm with him. I see him throughout the day. I'm with him. I give him his bath and read him his story at night.

I'm with him. I've eliminated almost all travel that takes me away from my boy. I'm going to a conference this weekend. I'm taking my wife and my baby are coming with me. And I really build a life around being true and I don't build it around anything material. And that's really the essence of how I personally relate to this question.

Of course, there's different solutions for everybody, but that works for me. This is something that is being true to oneself, I think, that most people struggle with. I think it's a goal that most people have, at least in the abstract. But I'd love to dig into some concrete details of that. And perhaps you could share an example of something you changed, like maybe where you got slightly off the path and made a correction to be true to yourself and what that looked like.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, a very clear example is my public life. So I was a young kid, fell in love with chess. When I was, you know, I won my first national championship when I was late eight, early nine. When I was 11, a book came out, Searching for Roy Fisher. And then when I was 15, a movie came out about my life based on the same book that my dad initially wrote.

And so I was really thrust into the spotlight. And so I, you know, without me wanting to, I was just, you know, a young, passionate artist. I loved playing chess and competing in chess. I was put out there and I had paparazzi following me everywhere. I was really living in the spotlight in a way I wasn't necessarily emotionally prepared for. And I felt in my teens how that challenged my love for this art, because my love for it was so pure initially. And that tension, you know, that fight, that fight to stay true to my art,

taught me some very deep lessons. And then I, you know, after I finished high school, I took off and I left the country, largely to study chess very deeply, undistracted from publicity. I moved to Eastern Europe. My girlfriend at the time was from Slovenia. No one knew me out there

and it was a beautiful life and I just left the public world and since then when I came back I've had these periods where I've been exposed to publicity and I've been in periods where I've been deep in a cave and moved away from it and I think this is a very clean example

of other than you very few people drag me out of the public eye. Throw a net over the bear and drag him out of the cave. You have a way of doing that to me. But in a beautiful way. And I mean, I've found that the privacy of my life, not doing things, not getting caught up in the swirl of fame or seeking external adulation is a very important thing for me personally.

Everyone's different, but for me, maybe I have a little bit of an oversensitivity to this because of my youth, because I was out there so intensely as a young guy. I think it really challenged my love for the game. This is an example of the kind of decision that I'll make. I think it's very important for me to live the vast majority of my life privately. I don't do very much that will allow me to be recognized in the street and live my life as a celebrity because I've gone down that path and I love my privacy. I also have built a career around my businesses working with people who are similar,

who are not seeking the limelight, who are not out there on television every day, who are world-class but no one around them other than people very close have any idea that they have been so incredibly successful from a monetary way. They try to raise their kids not to be spoiled. The kids are gritty kids.

They're great philanthropists, really good people. And I love, I'm very drawn to people who have been enormously successful but don't get caught up in the external crap that comes with success. And are real, who are living their life tapped into the love. And that's how I try to live.

What are some of your, what are the books, let's just stick with books for a second, that you've either most gifted to other people or most recommended to other people? Because there are many people listening to this probably who won't necessarily have the opportunity

to interact with the types of high-level folks that you and I are so fortunate to have the chance to interact with. But they can do that vis-a-vis books or narratives, documentaries, etc. What are some books that have had a formative impact on you? I mean, so if we go back to when I was 17, 18, Jack Kerouac had a huge impact on my life, On the Road, Dahmer Bums, this was just, these are the, you know, his books were what initially kind of tapped me into the idea that life could be ecstatically beautiful. And I moved into studying Taoism, so Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching, hugely, just unbelievably deep.

But of course, the translation of that book that you read will be formative. And my favorite translation is the Jia Fu Feng and Jane English translation of the Tao Te Ching. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think one of the most important books ever written by Robert Persick, who has become a very dear friend over the years. When The Art of Learning came out, my publisher asked me, who would you love to read this book?

And I said, well, the one person I'd really want to read that book is Robert Persick. But to me, that was just, he lived like a deeply secluded life. But they somehow managed to get him a copy of the book he got in a big bushel from his publisher, and he read it, and he contacted me and wrote, I mean, I was so honored that he was moved by it. And he and I, over the years, have developed really interesting dialogue.

So Zenly Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most important books in the world to focus on quality, dynamic quality, finding art in, learning to find art in anything. Deeply, deeply brilliant philosophical book. Shantaram, one of the most beautiful novels I've ever read. Gregory David Roberts, also someone I've gotten to know very well. Just an ecstatically beautiful, beautiful book. And, you know, of course, I'm also a lover of fiction.

I mean, Hemingway has been, he's probably the most important writer of my life. Almost everything of his, I've read. Any particular novel stand out for you of his? Oh, I mean, I think that For Whom the Bell Tolls, just exquisite novel, Green Hills of Africa, amazing. His short stories are utterly magnificent. I think Green Hills of Africa is one of the most underrated books that he's written.

His complete collection of short stories, I mean, there's one magnificent gem after the next. Of course, Old Man and the Sea is one everyone speaks about, and beautiful book. I guess if I had to have a favorite, it would be For Whom the Bell Tolls. For Whom the Bell Tolls, yeah. For those people listening who also want insight into his writing style,

A Moveable Feast is... Oh, magnificent book, yes. Yeah, also. And that's where I mean it really speaks to his writing process. Fantastic book. So fascinating. You know, there's a great book, by the way, Tim, which I think you've read, which

is, I think it's Hemingway on Writing. Have you read this book? I did read it, yep. I also read that. I mean, if you want to get to know Hemingway, it's just a fantastic compilation of all of Hemingway's writing in letters, in his books, in his articles, everywhere, put together thematically, basically,

Hemingway on the writing process. I think it's one of the most important little collections on creativity that I've ever read into. Absolutely brilliant book. And it's really short. I remember I read it on Kindle on a short flight that I had and just jammed right through the whole thing. One of the recommendations was write drunk, edit sober.

And I realized that write drunk, edit sober does not translate to podcasts very well. The last podcast that I did with my buddy Kevin Rose, if you record drunk and try to edit sober, it doesn't really actually work the same way. That's interesting. Oh, man.

We'll just do a couple more questions because this has been fun. If you had to run out of your house and just take a handful of things with you obviously your family is safe so that that's accounted for uh what would you take and why in what kind of situation uh in a very dangerous situation not you don't have to fend for yourself with weaponry or create fire with flint or anything like that. There's a fire in your house.

You just have to get out to the street, and then you're going to obviously sort things out later. But assuming your family is safe, what would you take with you? Just what you can carry, basically. That's a really great question. I actually had that experience years ago when I was playing chess, and it speaks to how crazy I was. I was studying chess with this brilliant Russian grandmaster

named Yuri Razovayev, who actually wrote about my book. And I was on the fifth floor of a walk-up. This was an old one-bedroom I had in my first apartment. And suddenly we were deep, deep into chest study, and there was a huge fire. And I looked out. There were like five fire engines and dudes screaming at us.

And we had to go out to the fire escape. And I ended up going back in and grabbing my computer with all of my chest analysis, which is such a random thing to do. It was so unimportant. I mean, it speaks to how different I've become. Um, yeah. And then ended up being, it had been seconds from being an updraft and blowing the whole building up. Um, yeah, so I wouldn't do that. I don't know, man. I think I might, honestly, when you asked me that question now, if I think that my family was safe, I have nothing material that I would grab.

That's great, man. That's a very stoic response in the most positive way. All right, my man. I'm going to ask you one more. Actually, I'll give you a choice of two questions. Let's do that. All right, let's do it. So the first option is what did you want to be when you grew up?

So when you were a kid and now how would you answer the question, what do you want to be when you grow up? That's question number one. Question number two is if you had a committee of three people, living or dead, to help you make decisions, who would you choose and why? These are great questions, man. Thanks. these are great questions man thanks by the way I'm borrowing liberally from like every good interviewer I've ever

come in contact with right but so it goes you want me to answer one of them there's two very different questions I mean this is tough man yeah I mean if they I'm just trying to be respectful of your time but if you have time and you have some thoughts on both let's

go for it. When I grew up, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I loved them. So there was something about sport. So I think that there was a... I mean, and I spent a lot of my life as a competitor from age basically six until, you know, 35.

I was basically a professional competitor in this field um today you know but my mom always said to me that she felt like that was a phase and that i was a healer that was her language and and a lot of what i do today is try to figure out how to help people will express themselves in as pure a way as possible, artistically, in a way that gives them joy. I mean, I think that my plan is sometime in the next four or five years, I'm 37 now, I'm thinking about it when I'm 40, 41, I guess that would be three, four years now, I'm getting old, to turn my mind to everything,

taking everything I've been doing in these different laboratories and apply it to a world-changing education initiative. Helping children just fulfill themselves in a very deep way, I think, is a central calling, which I'm not going to say is my endgame, but that's the next major chapter, I think, of my life that I'm building towards.

I've been running my foundation for many years now, and we do beautiful work, but I have an allergy to scaling if it's going to dilute quality in any way. And so I've been sort of building up the groundwork to ultimately be able to do something hugely important in education. So I think that that's going to be the core of how I would... I'm building towards that in a few years. In terms of the committee of three people...

Just to interject for a second, that's also, I think, my calling, and of course we've spoken at length about this. So if you need a co-conspirator, count me in for that one, certainly. Yeah, dude, let's plan on this. Let's say four or five. We have to figure out when it's going to be.

Maybe four or five years, we'll team up, and we'll take the world by storm. Sounds like a plan, man. I love it. I love it. It sort of taps that movement away from self. I mean, as a competitor, you're constantly fighting. In many ways, there's something about there's a focus

inward on oneself and i i'm becoming a parent i've definitely felt this movement um away from that i mean my my son is just my love for him just so transcends anything i ever i ever felt before it's been really really important to experience when you become a dad man then we're gonna have some fun i can't wait forward to your sleepless to your sleep this night. Oh, man, yeah. You're going to see battle-weary Timbo. I need to work on my polyphasic sleep.

This is a committee of three people. What are your thoughts? Well, one person who would be on that committee is someone who I know, a very deep friend of mine who happens to be in the finance world. His name is Dave. I can't speak about what his last name is, but just a deeply meditative spirit, great wisdom, as insightful a human being as I've ever known in my life. And I think that he would definitely be on that list.

I mean, can we go into, can I say outrageous characters like Gandhi? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go, go for it. Yeah. I mean, I think about Gandhi, Lao Tzu, the Buddha. I mean, my God, what a, but you see, there's a certain, yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know if I can answer this question very intelligently.

That's the perfect way to end. Yeah. I don't know. And Tim, of course, you, man. I mean, you give me so much crap in life that I'd have to call you because you'd be the one just to keep – you'd definitely be the one to slice through all the nonsense. Yeah. You'd be the one to slice through all the nonsense.

And my mom, that's the most important one, my mom. Yeah. She has given me the most deep advice in my life. I mean, my mom is the one person who has really embraced these crazy decisions that I've made when I've left arts, when I was at the tops of those fields. And because of some strange calling I had inside, I think my mom would have to be the top of any list like that. She's my hero. My mom's the greatest person I've ever known in my life. Awesome, man.

Well, this has been a lot of fun. Obviously, we're going to have a lot more conversations. Is there anything you want to, any parting thoughts, advice, suggestions, anything like that that you'd like to impart? If not, we can call it a day, but the mic is yours if you have anything you'd like to add. No, I love this. This has been really interesting. I guess if I'm going to close with a thought, it would be that one thing that I've been doing in the last years since writing The Art of Learning is I've been exposed to some of the most brilliant thinkers in these different fields. I've studied the patterns behind them, and I've studied the people who study them. And one of the

things we have to be wary of in life is studying the people who study the artist as opposed to the artist themselves. Persig, who is the author of Zemne Ardor and Mose, Psycho-Maintenance, that I mentioned, he uses this great term, the philosophers and the philosophologists. The philosophologists are the ones who are basically philosophizing about the philosophers as opposed to doing philosophy. And the vast majority of philosophers today actually are just philosophologists. Similarly, as you and I have discussed, there's the writers and the literary critic. There's the artist and the art critic.

And I think that we have to be very careful when we study excellence and we're thinking about our own path to excellence, that we're studying and we're tuning in to the direct experience of people who have actually been there as opposed to the armchair professors who are talking about it. Right. Because if we spend our life in the trenches and we spend our life studying that last 0.1% of the learning process,

what we see is that that final passage to excellence is really about navigating that razor's edge where you have to be willing to go right up against a potential enormous blunder. You have to improvise, for example, trust your intuition in moments where all the objective mathematical faculties you've developed are telling you something else,

but your intuition is operating at a higher level. You have to really be willing to go up to the brink of disaster to succeed in moments where you're, for example, fighting in the finals of a world championship or in the very last seconds of a Super Bowl or an NBA finals. In navigating these things, the armchair professors will often have the exact opposite of good advice and so what I would say is for one thing

listen deeply internally to the core of your being and build your game plan from there, trust your gut and then build a lifestyle around listening to that and cultivate the love. And that's the other thing I'd say, is that whether you're talking about the beginning of the learning process or the very final surge or surges,

it's about the love. We're thinking about parenting, cultivating resilience, cultivating excellence, cultivating creativity. What the armature professors all forget about is the love. And that's what I see consistently with people who have found the most pleasure, the most happiness and created the

greatest art is that they have a profound passion for what they do. Not only the big moments, but the little moments. The moments that others would call pain. They learn to love practice. They learn to love the point of resistance. I say don't forget about the love. I guess that's what I'd like to say.

That's a beautiful way to end this, man. Well, Josh, I'm sure we will be talking. Next time we'll have some wine. Sounds good to me. And yeah, I hope everybody checks out, obviously, The Art of Learning and really keeps an eye on what you have coming when you decide to push stuff out of the cave. Thanks, brother.

This was a blast, man. Enjoyed it. All right, buddy. I will talk to you soon. If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to 4hourblog.com. F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G.com. Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories

with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com slash tferriss. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Or on Facebook at facebook.com slash timferris. Until next time, thanks for listening.