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Episode: #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:17:52

Episode Shownotes

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.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
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00:02:05 Speaker_04
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00:02:25 Speaker_04
Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide, and I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business.

00:02:40 Speaker_04
I tell that story in the 4-Hour Workweek, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious, and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify.

00:02:48 Speaker_04
In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best e-commerce platforms around 2009, and they've only become better and better since.

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00:03:57 Speaker_04
Shopify.com slash Tim. Go to Shopify.com slash Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com slash Tim. hands start shaking.

00:04:14 Speaker_02
Can I ask you a personal question?

00:04:16 Speaker_00
Now or the sooner the better. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

00:04:32 Speaker_04
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:04:35 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:49 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:59 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:24 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:34 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:06:16 Speaker_01
You can find Anne on Twitter, at Anne Lamott.

00:06:21 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:34 Speaker_00
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?

00:06:45 Speaker_00
And he said, you told people you would teach him 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.

00:06:56 Speaker_00
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.

00:07:05 Speaker_00
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, you know, bird by bird. Is it okay if I tell the story?

00:07:19 Speaker_04
Please, please. I would love for you to tell the story just so people know the Genesis.

00:07:24 Speaker_00
Well, my older brother, I was like a superstar achiever in school and my older brother hated school and he was kind of a rebel. And in California in the fifties and early sixties in fourth grade, you wrote two term papers. One was the Sacramento paper.

00:07:38 Speaker_00
That's our state Capitol. And the other was on birds. And he had to write it all year, all semester, a 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.

00:07:52 Speaker_00
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.

00:08:04 Speaker_00
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.

00:08:17 Speaker_00
And then years later, probably 20 years ago, so in my 40s, 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.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
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 you you can only see a little ways in front of you and and you can make the whole journey that way And another 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 keeps you crazy for your entire life because

00:09:00 Speaker_00
Cause we all fall short, you know, 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.

00:09:10 Speaker_00
And you kind of end up your books and my books, all, all of them are kind of shanty towns, you know, in life.

00:09:18 Speaker_00
In pc during 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

00:09:38 Speaker_00
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.

00:09:50 Speaker_00
And what his position is, you're never gonna get rid of it. 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.

00:10:02 Speaker_00
And he thanks them for keeping him alive. When he was six and seven, cause it kept him small and controllable. So he didn't run out into the street.

00:10:12 Speaker_00
He didn't swim out past his ability to stay afloat, but that at the age of six year, whatever, we probably don't need it anymore. And so he has his clients give the inner critic.

00:10:24 Speaker_00
a great new job which might be ethical consultant for the project, so that the inner critic can go up to the library where there's an incredibly comfortable chair and a good reading light and 2,000 books, and he will sit there and read, which he loves to do, and when we need an ethical consultation, we'll come get him.

00:10:41 Speaker_00
But we don't need that constant, is it okay to say the F word on the show? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, please.

00:10:49 Speaker_00
Oh in bird by bird, there's a whole chapter on k-fucked radio kfkd And without a lot of help and a lot of transformation and healing k-fucked radios on 24 7 It's telling you how far short you're falling.

00:11:02 Speaker_00
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

00:11:14 Speaker_00
inner critic work and bird by bird is 90 About turning down k-fuck radio anyway out of the left-hand speaker is all this stuff about That you 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

00:11:34 Speaker_00
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. So but you can turn down the left hand speaker and it'll always be there to some degree.

00:11:51 Speaker_04
There are many different directions I could go, and thank you for that context.

00:11:57 Speaker_04
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.

00:12:15 Speaker_00
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 description, and you do it badly.

00:12:37 Speaker_04
So if we look back to your childhood, my understanding is you had a role model for this butt in chair time. Could you tell us a bit about your childhood?

00:12:50 Speaker_00
The model was my father, who was a writer, Kenneth Lamont, 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 five 30, every morning rain or shine or hangover. He just did it.

00:13:06 Speaker_00
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 on how I don't believe in it and how what gets me going is debt, mental illness, fire for revenge.

00:13:23 Speaker_00
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.

00:13:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:13:41 Speaker_00
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.

00:13:55 Speaker_00
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.

00:14:09 Speaker_00
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.

00:14:25 Speaker_00
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. But I learned a couple of rules. And I know you've written about stuff like this.

00:14:38 Speaker_00
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. I could do better.

00:14:52 Speaker_00
And I couldn't do better. I was an A student. I was a tennis star. But if I, 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.

00:15:04 Speaker_00
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.

00:15:15 Speaker_00
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

00:15:32 Speaker_00
In charge of everybody's happiness, you know, I was in charge of 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 50s the men

00:15:47 Speaker_00
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.

00:16:01 Speaker_00
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.

00:16:16 Speaker_00
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.

00:16:25 Speaker_00
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.

00:16:38 Speaker_00
My mom, who is a black belt, as I told you, codependent, always took the broken fried egg. My entire life, I can swear on a stack of Bibles, my mother never once said, here, somebody else take the goddamn broken egg yolk. Can you take the, you know?

00:16:54 Speaker_00
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.

00:17:01 Speaker_00
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.

00:17:16 Speaker_00
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.

00:17:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:17:49 Speaker_00
I weighed about 20 pounds till eighth grade and you know 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

00:18:06 Speaker_00
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.

00:18:17 Speaker_00
And so that the abyss doesn't open up at your feet, you know, and, 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. They call the abyss the abyss because it's pretty abysmal.

00:18:30 Speaker_00
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, or in the Christian theology of St.

00:18:45 Speaker_00
John, the divine, it's the dark night of the soul is where transformation most often happens.

00:18:51 Speaker_00
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, you know, and from that place, something magical might just grow.

00:19:08 Speaker_04
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.

00:19:17 Speaker_04
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.

00:19:26 Speaker_04
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?

00:19:45 Speaker_00
Well, spiritually fit means I'm in my body, paradoxically. It doesn't mean I'm in some ether world of, you know, 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.

00:20:04 Speaker_00
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. You know, I'm making up stories. I'm in fear. I'm in anxiety.

00:20:19 Speaker_00
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.

00:20:34 Speaker_00
There's some great acronyms for fear because.

00:20:37 Speaker_00
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.

00:20:55 Speaker_00
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.

00:21:08 Speaker_00
And another one I love is future events already ruined. And so I'm just tripping out like I was tripping out this morning about what if I screwed up with Tim, you know, and and you're so illustrious and you're

00:21:22 Speaker_00
Listenership, I think is younger and why would they want this old lady with dreadlocks is sunday school teacher Where do our zen diagrams meet and I was tripping and then I remembered, you know future events already ruined.

00:21:34 Speaker_00
That's not truth That's just k-fucked radio. And another one I love is fear expressed allows

00:21:42 Speaker_00
Relief and so I told you and he said, you know, you 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 gonna love it. It's gonna go by so quickly.

00:21:57 Speaker_00
But so fear express 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 reasons I told you.

00:22:09 Speaker_00
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.

00:22:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:22:37 Speaker_00
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,

00:22:49 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:06 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:24 Speaker_00
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, you know, we're children of the divine, we're children, sons and daughters of God, and we also have these

00:23:40 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:54 Speaker_00
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.

00:24:12 Speaker_00
And, you know, I got married at 65. I got married three days after I got Medicare. And those are my true biographical details. And I also am a person of spirit.

00:24:24 Speaker_00
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.

00:24:41 Speaker_04
Annie, I wanna 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.

00:24:54 Speaker_04
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

00:25:10 Speaker_04
radical self-care into focus as a imperative for you?

00:25:13 Speaker_00
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.

00:25:26 Speaker_00
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.

00:25:44 Speaker_00
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 erasers come by and there's nothing left on the chalkboard of what you did that evening.

00:25:58 Speaker_00
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.

00:26:17 Speaker_00
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 gonna be able to break that code. And I was already a believer. I mean, I've pretty much been a believer my whole life.

00:26:31 Speaker_00
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

00:26:45 Speaker_00
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 stretches you.

00:27:00 Speaker_00
Maybe a really quick spritz or maybe it, maybe you get that the little thin red straw inserted into you and you get a sustained spritz of it, but. It was like water wings.

00:27:11 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:28 Speaker_00
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

00:27:37 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:48 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:56 Speaker_00
It sort of tricks you into getting into its wheelbarrow, and then it moves you to some place where maybe there's just a shaft of light, or maybe there's cool water. And the cool water I found was other sober people.

00:28:11 Speaker_00
But that was the darkest night I can remember. And then here's a recent example. My son and his son live here.

00:28:19 Speaker_00
in a barn on the property and his son lives with him half-time and with the child's mother half-time and I was in major major people pleasing and I was dancing.

00:28:30 Speaker_00
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

00:28:44 Speaker_00
And I finally, I know, I shared it with my older brother who'd stopped by, who's a fundamentalist Christian.

00:28:50 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:59 Speaker_00
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.

00:29:09 Speaker_00
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.

00:29:19 Speaker_00
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?

00:29:36 Speaker_00
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?

00:29:52 Speaker_00
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 I hated everybody and I it was half hour I turned around

00:30:04 Speaker_00
Half hour same record and then finally I pulled over to the side of the road and and I I called my my spiritual mentor Whose name is horrible bonnie, and that's what I call her.

00:30:14 Speaker_00
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

00:30:31 Speaker_00
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.

00:30:44 Speaker_00
I was in red face swollen nose 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

00:30:56 Speaker_00
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.

00:31:11 Speaker_00
And it was the darkest, snottiest, 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.

00:31:26 Speaker_00
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.

00:31:36 Speaker_00
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 get recovered.

00:31:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:31:52 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:09 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:25 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:37 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:49 Speaker_00
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. Uh, he had an apartment and he showed up wasted and I had reached my bottom. That's what the dark night is.

00:33:03 Speaker_00
You've 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, my persona and my being a Sunday school teacher.

00:33:18 Speaker_00
And I said, you're as bad as any junkie I know. And you cannot be back on this property with your baby.

00:33:24 Speaker_00
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.

00:33:36 Speaker_00
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 tenderloin is, but I do.

00:33:50 Speaker_04
I lived in San Francisco a long time, but a lot of people don't. So could you describe it?

00:33:53 Speaker_00
It's not lovely. It's where all the. The crackheads and heroin is 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.

00:34:11 Speaker_00
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.

00:34:23 Speaker_00
And I, 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.

00:34:33 Speaker_00
And then he called me three weeks later and he said, I've got a week clean and sober.

00:34:39 Speaker_00
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.

00:34:54 Speaker_00
And he hasn't had a drink or a drug for 10 years now. So.

00:34:58 Speaker_00
Those three things that i've described are what are the darkest nights of the soul that i've been to but the thing with sam and with my child in general Is that I had thought up till 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

00:35:24 Speaker_00
My help was not helpful to sam and that help Is this 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

00:35:41 Speaker_00
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.

00:35:56 Speaker_00
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 this 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.

00:36:12 Speaker_00
He's doing great. He is a miracle That's what has come from the dark nights are the the greatest truths.

00:36:19 Speaker_00
I know That my 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

00:36:37 Speaker_00
So, and I forget, 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.

00:36:54 Speaker_04
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.

00:37:00 Speaker_04
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00:37:09 Speaker_04
I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentus Mag-3 and 8 L-theanine and Apigenin. all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep.

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00:37:36 Speaker_04
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00:37:42 Speaker_04
Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed support 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.

00:37:53 Speaker_04
Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's live momentous, L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off.

00:38:11 Speaker_01
And now, Josh Waitzkin, best-selling 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.

00:38:37 Speaker_01
You can learn more about Josh and his projects at joshwaiteskin.com. Joshua.

00:38:44 Speaker_04
Yes, Timbo. Welcome back, buddy. I'm so happy to be here. I'm thrilled you're here, man. Hanging with you.

00:38:50 Speaker_04
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?

00:39:01 Speaker_05
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.

00:39:12 Speaker_05
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.

00:39:22 Speaker_05
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.

00:39:31 Speaker_05
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.

00:39:41 Speaker_04
And you were competing then at the time. You were in the midst of competition.

00:39:45 Speaker_05
Two years ago, you mean? Oh, this was two years ago?

00:39:47 Speaker_04
Yeah, this was two years ago.

00:39:48 Speaker_05
Oh, I thought you said 20 years ago. 20 years ago is when I started studying East Asian philosophy. I got it. I was competing in chess then and then martial arts. I need a little more caffeine.

00:39:57 Speaker_04
Working on it. You've had a rough night. And I wanted to thank you. 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.

00:40:14 Speaker_04
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.

00:40:23 Speaker_04
And I want to thank you for actually getting me to bite the bullet and grab a slackline, which I set up on Long Island. Yeah, absolutely.

00:40:30 Speaker_05
I've loved, I've had some fun on your slack line on Long Island too. I love, right now I'm in the period, I kind of oscillate between these and my son, Jack, who's four and a half, we have a great time.

00:40:41 Speaker_05
I'm on the endo board rocking it, 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.

00:40:50 Speaker_04
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.

00:41:09 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:41:10 Speaker_05
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 instead. I tend to, although I've had a lot of close calls in life.

00:41:23 Speaker_05
When I heard you speak to Wim, I was extremely intrigued. Actually, when I heard someone mention Wim to you on your podcast, and then we spoke about it, and then you spoke to Wim, I thought he sounded like such a fascinating guy.

00:41:33 Speaker_05
I started digging into his work. It's so powerful. And I started 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 freediver.

00:41:45 Speaker_05
Since I was four or five years old, I've been freediving. And so, breath holds. Just to put that in perspective, you spend about a month a year in the water. Used to be three months when I was younger. Now it's about

00:41:56 Speaker_05
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 our life.

00:42:04 Speaker_05
We've got to talk about our stand-up paddle adventures together, which are pretty hilarious.

00:42:06 Speaker_04
We'll definitely come to that.

00:42:07 Speaker_05
Timbo and I have been having some fun with that. But I started playing with the Wim Hof. And I thought it was incredibly powerful.

00:42:14 Speaker_05
The intensity that you're experiencing internally, it's very similar to training in Tai Chi, Tai Chi Quan, moving meditation for 10, 15, 20 years, and then being an hour long into a session.

00:42:24 Speaker_05
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 in strength were mind-boggling.

00:42:34 Speaker_05
The length of the breath holds were fascinating. But then I made a big technical error.

00:42:38 Speaker_05
I ignored all the signs on WIM's site and that you spoke about, do not do this in water, which is, they were all over the place, but I thought free diving's a way of life for me, no problem.

00:42:49 Speaker_05
And the major technical error was not realizing, which is absurd after a lifetime of free diving, that it's carbon dioxide buildup that gives you the urge to breathe and not oxygen deprivation. It's a hugely important thing.

00:43:00 Speaker_05
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.

00:43:11 Speaker_05
I did about eight 25-meter swims and I think I was on my fourth 50 underwater and I – this was after a long workout. And I went from this ecstatic state to unconsciousness.

00:43:22 Speaker_05
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 the doctors have told me usually it's 40 seconds to a minute to perhaps permanent brain damage, death.

00:43:35 Speaker_05
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 dead.

00:43:41 Speaker_04
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? You didn't take it in?

00:43:53 Speaker_05
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.

00:44:03 Speaker_05
I started breathing on my own though. When I came to you 25 minutes later, I was blue everywhere else. My body sent all the blood to my brain and my heart. It saved my life, and I'm here. It was a life changer on a lot of levels.

00:44:15 Speaker_05
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.

00:44:27 Speaker_04
How did that change how you think about training in these types of experiments or life in general? I know it's a very broad question. How does it change your decision making?

00:44:36 Speaker_05
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.

00:44:47 Speaker_05
Presence to the exquisite little ripples of beauty in everything I do. and a sense of gratitude for the little things. It sounds cliche, but it's embodied, and I really feel it. And in terms of, that's something I'm really grateful for. It's exquisite.

00:45:01 Speaker_05
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.

00:45:10 Speaker_05
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.

00:45:19 Speaker_05
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.

00:45:29 Speaker_05
I didn't realize I was taking a big risk here. And there are 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.

00:45:39 Speaker_04
And of course- Being cognizant of the level of danger or risk.

00:45:42 Speaker_05
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 at your own level and the level of everyone else around you. We can get into some of those. Yeah, we'll get into that.

00:45:51 Speaker_05
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. By the time I was seven, I was the top-ranked player in the country, so I had all this pressure on me.

00:46:01 Speaker_05
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 as a little boy, you know, my style as a chess player was to create chaos.

00:46:14 Speaker_05
I loved the game, I loved the battle of chess. Attacking chess. Right, right, attacking chess. And most players, you know, when they have a lot of pressure on them in the scholastic chess world, for example, and it's true in many fields,

00:46:23 Speaker_05
They learn how to memorize their way to victory, right? They find shortcuts to getting good fast and controlling the game all the way. They think about rating points. They think about rankings. They think about winning. They have parental pressures.

00:46:34 Speaker_05
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.

00:46:42 Speaker_05
I grew up playing in Washington Square Park with the hustlers who taught me to battle. It fit my personality. And it was, you know, a core part of my competitive style to create chaos and find hidden harmonies and find flow in chaos.

00:46:56 Speaker_05
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.

00:47:10 Speaker_05
It's different when you're 20 and 25 and 30 years old as a professional competitor or a professional fighter.

00:47:14 Speaker_05
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

00:47:28 Speaker_05
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.

00:47:38 Speaker_05
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?

00:47:46 Speaker_05
And then when you're a professional fighter, a martial artist, you know, 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.

00:47:57 Speaker_05
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

00:48:09 Speaker_05
what felt like life and death as a chess player and what actually is life and death. Metaphorical and literal.

00:48:13 Speaker_04
Right.

00:48:13 Speaker_05
And then there's the state of being someone who's found deep flow as the ultimate therapy.

00:48:19 Speaker_04
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.

00:48:31 Speaker_05
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. For me, love has been a huge part of flow.

00:48:46 Speaker_05
I fell in love with chess, and I found flow in the self-expression. through an art form that I absolutely loved.

00:48:53 Speaker_05
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.

00:49:02 Speaker_05
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.

00:49:08 Speaker_05
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.

00:49:16 Speaker_05
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 9 or a 10 out of 10 back down to a 9 or an 8.

00:49:28 Speaker_05
You're talking about in the meditation itself?

00:49:30 Speaker_04
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?

00:49:44 Speaker_05
I think it's hugely important in mental disciplines. So for example, you know, in chess and today, a lot of what I do today is I have this laboratory of training elite mental performers, largely in finance, investors.

00:49:56 Speaker_05
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.

00:50:09 Speaker_04
Cartesian duality. Right.

00:50:10 Speaker_05
I mean, this is your way of life as well. But we intuitively can feel things way before we are consciously aware of them. The chess player always senses danger before he sees it.

00:50:22 Speaker_05
Just like the hunter will sense the shark or the jaguar before he'll see it. Then he'll look for it.

00:50:27 Speaker_05
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. But that sense comes before.

00:50:39 Speaker_05
Or if you're a great decision maker, if you're an investor, you can sense danger. You can sense opportunity.

00:50:45 Speaker_05
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.

00:51:01 Speaker_05
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.

00:51:09 Speaker_05
So the people—this is a—philosophologists is a term of Robert Persig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's one of my favorite books and thinkers. He's a friend of mine.

00:51:18 Speaker_05
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 armchair professor. Or Remy from Ratatouille and Anton Ego.

00:51:37 Speaker_05
And so when we think about, for example, cognitive biases, the academics who study cognitive biases who speak about them.

00:51:42 Speaker_04
And just for people who have no context on cognitive biases, an example like the sunk cost fallacy, right? I've spent this amount, therefore I should put good money after bad because I feel like I've

00:51:52 Speaker_04
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, I think twice, what was the author's name again? Do you recall? Maboussan?

00:52:07 Speaker_05
Yeah, Michael Maboussan is who you're thinking about.

00:52:08 Speaker_04
Maboussan, there we are, for people interested. Sorry to interrupt.

00:52:12 Speaker_05
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.

00:52:23 Speaker_05
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?

00:52:33 Speaker_05
So this is a constant process. We discussed this a couple years ago, actually.

00:52:36 Speaker_05
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 up higher and higher.

00:52:54 Speaker_05
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.

00:53:08 Speaker_05
But we aren't going to intuit the cognitive bias. We're going to intuit the feeling that corresponds with a bias being present. And so we think about this relative to the language, again, Robert Persig.

00:53:19 Speaker_05
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.

00:53:28 Speaker_05
If you think of that as a timeline which is moving, you think about Persig's term of being at the front of the freight train of reality, right? The freight train is pushing through. Dynamic qualities are at the front of that freight train.

00:53:37 Speaker_05
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.

00:53:44 Speaker_05
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.

00:53:54 Speaker_05
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's becoming static.

00:54:02 Speaker_05
But the timeline of the chess position's continuing, the game's continuing.

00:54:05 Speaker_05
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.

00:54:14 Speaker_05
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.

00:54:23 Speaker_04
But if you had the present state awareness, which you had 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.

00:54:36 Speaker_05
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.

00:54:48 Speaker_05
So this is really important to say, right? It's not that we're gonna intuitively develop the ability to know exactly what bias might be setting in in the moment, but we're gonna cultivate the ability to have presence, right?

00:54:58 Speaker_05
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.

00:55:07 Speaker_04
How do you help people to identify that feeling, to become more sensitized to it? And just 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 paddleboarding.

00:55:24 Speaker_04
Last meal of the trip, we go out to celebrate, we go to this seafood restaurant, food comes out, it's a sundae, and I leaned over the plate and smelled the food and immediately knew that it was something I shouldn't eat.

00:55:39 Speaker_04
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.

00:55:47 Speaker_04
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

00:55:58 Speaker_04
Dip or any number of other things, but yeah We were we were on the toilet each like every five minutes for for the next 12 hours minimum And the great part of is you and I were adjoining bedrooms.

00:56:08 Speaker_05
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.

00:56:14 Speaker_05
Yeah, they can turn I remember the look watching you sniffing you had this like expression of concern come over you the dinner table and like 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 and

00:56:27 Speaker_05
But you were right on, it was amazing.

00:56:28 Speaker_04
Or I felt a sort of social pressure to conform and not rock the boat.

00:56:34 Speaker_04
So how do you help someone, say, in the world of investing, just as an example, develop, 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?

00:56:51 Speaker_05
So let's talk about developing it and then let's talk about listening to it, because they're both so hugely important. And I'd frame them both thematically in different ways.

00:56:58 Speaker_05
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.

00:57:11 Speaker_05
This isn't so much about learning as unlearning. Agreed. Getting out of our own way, releasing obstructions. I think about the training processes, the movement toward unobstructed self-expression, right? Obstructedness.

00:57:20 Speaker_05
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.

00:57:30 Speaker_05
They're in a constantly reactive state. So one way that you could frame this out 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.

00:57:42 Speaker_05
But then getting into the weeds a little 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.

00:57:53 Speaker_05
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.

00:58:03 Speaker_05
Then what I realized, I had this breakthrough, which was that if I had them start doing stress and recovery interval training,

00:58:09 Speaker_05
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.

00:58:24 Speaker_05
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 layer in meditation.

00:58:35 Speaker_05
And the on-ramp was just much more successful. And then what I started to refine that with is biofeedback.

00:58:41 Speaker_05
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 or working with a specialist.

00:58:50 Speaker_05
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.

00:59:08 Speaker_05
And so then they embed it, layer in a meditation practice. I think headspace is a wonderful tool for layering in meditation.

00:59:13 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:59:13 Speaker_04
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.

00:59:28 Speaker_04
It's another thing to layer in on top of the brushing the teeth, the getting the kids ready, et cetera. And so sometimes the evening approach, but I agreed that headspace is really useful.

00:59:37 Speaker_05
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.

00:59:53 Speaker_05
Later in life, we wanna be able to tap our meditation under complete in chaos, but we wanna cultivate it initially in the most peaceful time possible.

01:00:00 Speaker_05
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.

01:00:07 Speaker_04
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.

01:00:18 Speaker_05
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.

01:00:24 Speaker_05
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.

01:00:35 Speaker_04
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

01:00:50 Speaker_04
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.

01:01:04 Speaker_04
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,

01:01:19 Speaker_04
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.

01:01:32 Speaker_04
Look at that. The rest of the time we're doing it. 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,

01:01:46 Speaker_04
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 me nuts.

01:02:03 Speaker_04
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.

01:02:15 Speaker_04
Like, 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.

01:02:27 Speaker_05
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 a hurricane, in a thunderstorm, when sharks are attacking you, any moment.

01:02:37 Speaker_04
Paddleboarding. When you're paddle boarding 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.

01:02:52 Speaker_05
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, um,

01:03:03 Speaker_05
Actually, the other podcast other than yours I listen to in life, the Paddlewood Podcast. Eric's awesome. He's a great dude. He runs the Blue Zone Sup.

01:03:10 Speaker_05
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.

01:03:19 Speaker_05
Our last trip a couple of weeks ago, we almost destroyed each other.

01:03:23 Speaker_04
Yeah, there was this one witching hour where the juju is really weird. Almost everybody either got decapitated

01:03:31 Speaker_04
impaled by a board or just a head-on jousting collision, which is what... But the point that you bring up, I think, is right on about meditation.

01:03:39 Speaker_05
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.

01:03:48 Speaker_05
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.

01:03:59 Speaker_05
We have to figure out, you think about the entanglement of genius and madness, right, or brilliance and eccentricity.

01:04:05 Speaker_05
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.

01:04:13 Speaker_05
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.

01:04:24 Speaker_05
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.

01:04:32 Speaker_05
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.

01:04:39 Speaker_05
When I work in education with children through a 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.

01:04:48 Speaker_05
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.

01:04:59 Speaker_05
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.

01:05:07 Speaker_05
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, I only work with eight teams.

01:05:21 Speaker_05
I don't take on new clients. Very seldom do I take on new clients.

01:05:23 Speaker_04
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 like, hey, could you interview me to Josh on my show? And I'm like, he's not gonna do it.

01:05:36 Speaker_05
Tim, you're the only person, once a year or two, you're the one guy who brings me out of my hermetic cave.

01:05:41 Speaker_05
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.

01:05:52 Speaker_05
I have an email account, though. I do have that. I cultivate empty space as a way of life for the creative process.

01:06:00 Speaker_04
So, Timbo, you're the one guy who brings me out of the cave where we have a lot of fun together.

01:06:04 Speaker_04
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.

01:06:18 Speaker_04
How do you think about parenting? Yeah, let's dig into this one.

01:06:22 Speaker_05
All right, so let's remember to loop back after this to finish 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.

01:06:34 Speaker_05
Okay, parenting, Jack. Well, Jack's the love of my life. I mean, this kid is such an awesome dude. And parenting has been the most fantastic learning experience I've ever gone through.

01:06:44 Speaker_05
So from when he was born, I tried very hard 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.

01:06:58 Speaker_05
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.

01:07:04 Speaker_05
And as he got a little older, he would just take my face and pull it back in the sweetest way.

01:07:09 Speaker_05
And so the depth of connection, 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.

01:07:26 Speaker_05
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.

01:07:34 Speaker_05
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.

01:07:49 Speaker_05
That was my grandma's painting. It's a beauty, right? Yes, Stella Waitzkin. That's her self-portrait. Okay, we're going to leave it messed up. We're working on control.

01:07:57 Speaker_05
So, like, from a young age, for me, when I started playing chess, I would create chaos on the board, like I described, and 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 my head from speakers.

01:08:11 Speaker_05
When I play cards, I would never, playing Jinrami, I'd always keep the melds out of order.

01:08:15 Speaker_04
Say that again?

01:08:16 Speaker_05
When I would play cards, I would... Cards, like a card game. Playing like Jinrami, a card game. I would never organize my hand. I'd always keep it... Did you say meld? Yeah, like if you have, like, three sevens. Ah, okay. Right, or like... Alright.

01:08:28 Speaker_05
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, so... Oh, you wouldn't gather your... I see. You wouldn't move your cards around to get organized. Right.

01:08:41 Speaker_05
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.

01:08:51 Speaker_05
And so one of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack's life or year or two of Jack's life that I observed with parents is that they do have this language around weather. Weather being good or bad.

01:09:01 Speaker_05
When it was raining, they'd be like, it's bad weather. You'd hear moms, babysitters, dads talk about it. It's bad weather, we can't go out. Or it's good weather, we can go out.

01:09:07 Speaker_05
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.

01:09:19 Speaker_05
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.

01:09:27 Speaker_05
And so now whenever there's a rainy day, Jack says, look, Dada, it's 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.

01:09:39 Speaker_05
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.

01:09:46 Speaker_05
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.

01:09:59 Speaker_05
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.

01:10:13 Speaker_05
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.

01:10:24 Speaker_05
So there's this 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.

01:10:36 Speaker_05
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, Dada, my feet are cold, they're filled, my boots are filled with snow, but that's okay, I'll just do the Wim Hof and make them warm.

01:10:46 Speaker_05
And he looked at him and then he, 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.

01:10:56 Speaker_05
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 called the it's so good game. And so we kind of reframe this thing.

01:11:08 Speaker_05
You know, I have this, you know, people tend to bounce off of discomfort, whether it's mental or physical. And so they run up, whether if they run into internal resistance, whether it's a meditation training or someone exposing a weakness or,

01:11:18 Speaker_05
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.

01:11:26 Speaker_05
But, you know, 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.

01:11:33 Speaker_05
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.

01:11:44 Speaker_05
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.

01:11:53 Speaker_05
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.

01:12:01 Speaker_05
And we were reframing cold, cold is a metaphor, from something that is just 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.

01:12:11 Speaker_05
And then we had this experience the other day where he said to me, you know, Dada, will you tickle me slowly? And I always tickle him and he laughs uproariously. But we were lying in bed and I was tickling him very slowly.

01:12:21 Speaker_05
And he said, I'm going to do my meditation. He would meditate. And then the next day he said, Dada, will you tickle me slowly? And I did it. And then he said, can you tickle me a little bit faster? And I didn't suggest this to him. He suggested it to me.

01:12:31 Speaker_05
And then we play this game where we 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 like to be doing his meditation. And finally I'd be full tilt tickling him.

01:12:42 Speaker_05
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.

01:12:50 Speaker_04
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?

01:13:02 Speaker_05
I think I encourage him to grab the wheel all the time.

01:13:04 Speaker_05
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.

01:13:13 Speaker_05
You know, 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.

01:13:24 Speaker_05
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.

01:13:31 Speaker_05
And that's a big part of how I believe in, and 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.

01:13:42 Speaker_05
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.

01:13:51 Speaker_05
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.

01:14:00 Speaker_05
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.

01:14:08 Speaker_05
Initially it was like, the first thing at the time it happened is that he was trying, he 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.

01:14:24 Speaker_05
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 another way.

01:14:30 Speaker_05
But then it became a language for us in terms of solving puzzles and in terms of any way, tell me you're running an obstacle, go around.

01:14:36 Speaker_05
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.

01:14:48 Speaker_05
And so it's fascinating to see this game little dude. have this thematic dialogue, principle-driven dialogue, and we're cultivating somatic awareness, cultivating the ability to feel these little ripples inside.

01:14:59 Speaker_05
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.

01:15:07 Speaker_04
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? Am I getting that right? Mindset?

01:15:17 Speaker_05
Yeah, Carol Dweck mindset, yeah. Entity theories of intelligence versus incremental or growth mindset.

01:15:22 Speaker_05
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.

01:15:34 Speaker_05
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. And the sad thing is that even when they're praised, they're told how smart they are.

01:15:49 Speaker_05
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. 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.

01:16:04 Speaker_05
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.

01:16:18 Speaker_05
We don't want 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.

01:16:28 Speaker_05
How would the praise differ? you would pray as 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.

01:16:38 Speaker_05
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?

01:16:48 Speaker_05
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.

01:16:58 Speaker_05
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.

01:17:07 Speaker_05
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.

01:17:13 Speaker_05
I mean, one of the most important things that I think that we do with my foundation, and I work with schools, with programs around the world, is that we, 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.

01:17:27 Speaker_05
And then, through that embodied intelligence, working with the kids on how they can embody it. We have to walk the talk.

01:17:34 Speaker_04
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?

01:17:47 Speaker_05
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.

01:17:58 Speaker_05
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.

01:18:10 Speaker_05
They have all the partners, 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.

01:18:21 Speaker_05
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.

01:18:29 Speaker_05
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.

01:18:37 Speaker_05
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?

01:18:49 Speaker_05
It's tweet, that's what it is, right?

01:18:51 Speaker_03
See?

01:18:54 Speaker_05
I mean, it's so interesting for me 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.

01:19:05 Speaker_05
One of the major reasons that I stay away from these things is because I can feel how susceptible I am to this stuff. You publish a book and it's on Amazon. It's so hard not to go look at the Amazon numbers, right?

01:19:15 Speaker_05
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.

01:19:19 Speaker_05
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.

01:19:29 Speaker_05
Most authors, it's 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.

01:19:39 Speaker_05
So with investors, what this often relates to is P&L checking, profit and loss checking. 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.

01:19:49 Speaker_05
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.

01:20:00 Speaker_05
So if you think about internal plus proactive versus external plus reactive. This is how I would tend to frame this out.

01:20:08 Speaker_05
We want to build a proactive way of life that's fundamentally moved from the inside out versus a reactive way of life where we're constantly reacting to all of 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.

01:20:23 Speaker_05
Social pressures.

01:20:25 Speaker_05
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.

01:20:36 Speaker_05
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.

01:20:48 Speaker_05
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.

01:21:02 Speaker_05
And that's disastrous. That's external orientation. That's like thinking that we're going to get food poisoning from something, that something's off, and then dismissing it because of

01:21:10 Speaker_05
I mean, first of all, there's the incredibly subtle sense is how strong the intuition is.

01:21:15 Speaker_05
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.

01:21:22 Speaker_05
It wasn't banging you over the head, right? And then there's the feeling of the social pressures and everything.

01:21:27 Speaker_05
It's a very interesting subtle example, but 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.

01:21:40 Speaker_04
Which I was able to do a third of the way through, but not before.

01:21:43 Speaker_05
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.

01:21:57 Speaker_05
how you're able to embrace your funk, how to live a life that is attuned to your inner ripples. I mean, I think it's actually rather unique. I think it's a core strength of yours, in my opinion.

01:22:05 Speaker_04
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 Stoicism and I remember reading at one point.

01:22:25 Speaker_04
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 gonna get the colors wrong here, but he he would deliberately wait I think it was a blue tunic as opposed to a purple tunic and

01:22:45 Speaker_04
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.

01:23:00 Speaker_04
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.

01:23:12 Speaker_04
And I looked at the whole rack and I was like, ooh, I like these. And they were the most ridiculous Dr. Seuss striped nonsense gloves you've ever seen. They will not match with anything, just ludicrous looking.

01:23:24 Speaker_04
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, nah, I think you should get the black ones. And I thought about it. I sat there and I thought about it.

01:23:31 Speaker_04
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.

01:23:42 Speaker_04
So caveat emptor, you can't be – 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&As on Facebook. And I'll have a bunch of booze and I'll go on.

01:23:54 Speaker_04
Something will come out that will embarrass me, but it's not going to be life-destroying.

01:23:59 Speaker_04
And so I 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 the psychedelics. And I'll talk very openly about monogamy versus non-monogamy.

01:24:14 Speaker_04
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.

01:24:28 Speaker_05
That's really powerful. You know, 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 Jiu-Jitsu school with Marcelo Garcia. We've discussed Marcelo a lot.

01:24:39 Speaker_04
Definitely. And you, just as I mentioned, creating chaos and training yourself to operate optimally in chaos compared to others. And of course, Marcelo, who's what, ten-time? Nine-time? Nine-time. World champion. Is the master of the scramble?

01:24:55 Speaker_05
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.

01:25:01 Speaker_05
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.

01:25:10 Speaker_05
He just has cultivated the transition so systematically that he has ten frames in transition where somebody else will just be moving from one position to the next. That transition itself is something which is like, that's his ocean.

01:25:21 Speaker_05
It's a beautiful thing to see. But if you look at the school, Marcello runs the school so beautifully. And we've got, at this point, a lot of world-class competitors. The school tends to win pretty much all the tournaments.

01:25:29 Speaker_05
A lot of the guys who you've trained with. That was hilarious.

01:25:34 Speaker_04
That was awesome. Day one, I'm like, okay. I think I broke my rib. You did great, man. You did great. 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.

01:25:44 Speaker_04
And have a great time training with guys like John Stava. who's an incredible athlete and teacher. That's a TV show worth checking out.

01:26:18 Speaker_05
They have a reputation, so they stop trainings.

01:26:20 Speaker_05
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?

01:26:33 Speaker_05
Versus, you know, Marcello, the way Marcello runs our school is so magnificent. Everyone's on the mat training so hard as a way of life.

01:26:40 Speaker_05
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.

01:26:50 Speaker_05
The ones who are in the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there, the one who'll beat them up, or 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.

01:27:01 Speaker_05
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. Yeah, a reputation to protect, or a fixed identity to protect.

01:27:11 Speaker_05
Right, so this is a way as a competitor to constantly put yourself into the fire.

01:27:14 Speaker_04
Here's a question I have for you because I feel like, particularly in Jiu Jitsu, 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.

01:27:27 Speaker_04
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?

01:27:42 Speaker_04
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.

01:27:55 Speaker_04
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.

01:28:06 Speaker_05
A hundred percent. I mean, I think that, you know, we think about this, this principle of cultivating quality as a way of life and the big things and little things.

01:28:13 Speaker_05
And you, you look at the way Marcello runs that training environment is, is pretty exceptional.

01:28:18 Speaker_04
I mean, if people don't have- He puts his ass on the line all the time.

01:28:20 Speaker_05
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.

01:28:30 Speaker_05
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.

01:28:40 Speaker_05
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?

01:28:51 Speaker_05
He tells them to straighten their gi. I love that. When people are running, are doing the warm-up, 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.

01:29:02 Speaker_05
It's the little things, right? As you watch Marcello doing the warm-up, there's a way that he'll have his hand and just brush against the mat as he passes it, that you can feel him engaging his tactile feeling for the room.

01:29:13 Speaker_05
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.

01:29:25 Speaker_05
Right, a tenant 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.

01:29:38 Speaker_05
The principles are what we're trying to embody. And so we'll train at two or three or four or five habits.

01:29:43 Speaker_05
which are the embodiment of a core principle, but the idea is to burn the principle into the hundreds of manifestations of that principle and become our way of life.

01:29:48 Speaker_05
And so in this case we're talking about Marcello 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.

01:29:58 Speaker_04
Oh, I think the little things are the big things, right? 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.

01:30:08 Speaker_05
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 in the little moments, there's hundreds of times more little moments than big.

01:30:17 Speaker_04
And there's no chance in the big moments. Yeah, that. Okay. So if people listening don't take anything else from this interview, I think that's

01:30:26 Speaker_04
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.

01:30:36 Speaker_04
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.

01:30:50 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:30:51 Speaker_04
And you can't just do one every five years waiting for the big event. You're not going to have the training necessary.

01:30:58 Speaker_05
That's 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.

01:31:10 Speaker_05
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.

01:31:18 Speaker_05
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.

01:31:30 Speaker_05
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.

01:31:38 Speaker_05
three children and a dog, the children looking, trying to pull her, but she was just in this other world, right? We think about the distraction of parenting.

01:31:46 Speaker_05
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 will relatively neglect. We see that all the time, right?

01:31:56 Speaker_05
I'm thinking about this a lot, because we're about to have our second child. And so I'm thinking about how important it is to not take for granted the things that you've done right, and think they'll just be there.

01:32:05 Speaker_05
Because they're not going to be there unless you're present, equally present.

01:32:09 Speaker_05
And we see this in the martial arts as someone who trains twice a day as a way of life for ten years, training until they drop and doing external training as well with strength and conditioning and stretching and everything else.

01:32:21 Speaker_05
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.

01:32:31 Speaker_05
There's something incredible about going into competition knowing that there's no way that anybody else trained as hard or as good as you, as smart. So we're not talking about training quantitatively, we're talking about training qualitatively.

01:32:45 Speaker_05
The confidence that comes out of knowing, in any discipline that you're at, that you gave it your all.

01:32:50 Speaker_05
When I work with someone, I say that 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.

01:33:00 Speaker_05
Qualitatively, but I look at them in 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

01:33:26 Speaker_05
because people might have meditated wonderfully for four or five years, or six years, or eight years, ten 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.

01:33:36 Speaker_05
They kind of slip from the philosopher to the philosophologist without even knowing that it happened. They weren't even present to the question.

01:33:43 Speaker_04
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.

01:33:50 Speaker_05
Yeah, this is something I've been really, for the last year and a half or so, developing intensely.

01:33:55 Speaker_05
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.

01:34:02 Speaker_05
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.

01:34:12 Speaker_05
And the fire walking 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.

01:34:26 Speaker_05
So for example, if you're a jiu-jitsu fighter and you slightly overextend your arm and you get on board, and let's say Mun Zhao is in the world championships, right? your arm is being separated from your body.

01:34:35 Speaker_05
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.

01:34:42 Speaker_05
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.

01:34:56 Speaker_05
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.

01:35:02 Speaker_05
But if they watch somebody fighting and they 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.

01:35:10 Speaker_05
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 jiu-jitsu?

01:35:22 Speaker_05
Well, for example, a really interesting live example that I'm playing with today is that we, working actively with investors, is that, you know, we are, a brilliant investor recently used the term, the Pavlovian impact, or the Pavlovian influences of growing up in a bull market, right?

01:35:40 Speaker_05
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.

01:35:51 Speaker_05
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.

01:35:58 Speaker_05
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.

01:36:08 Speaker_05
You have the school of hard knocks, right? We have to learn from the pain of the other side.

01:36:12 Speaker_05
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?

01:36:29 Speaker_05
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.

01:36:38 Speaker_05
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.

01:36:49 Speaker_05
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.

01:36:57 Speaker_05
But we are at one point someday, relatively soon, we'll probably enter a bear market. So it's going to be very important.

01:37:02 Speaker_05
And so if you haven't lived through one, 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.

01:37:13 Speaker_05
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 then two-week rally.

01:37:22 Speaker_05
So people often, even 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.

01:37:31 Speaker_05
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?

01:37:44 Speaker_05
And so a lot of the things that we discussed around physiological awareness, right? Somatic awareness, cultivating the sensitivity to what's happening inside of us, right? What comes with that is the ability to switch state emotionally, adrenally.

01:37:59 Speaker_05
And so if we visualize something very painful to us, if we visualize with tremendous potency, we can have a physiological response to that.

01:38:05 Speaker_04
True even of exercise training, people who say take a 10 minute meditation visualization session, in lieu of... Oh, there we go. Alright. That means we have to go pick up Jack from school.

01:38:16 Speaker_04
We have to go pick up Jack, but they get the benefits of the exercise in large part just from the visualization over ten minutes. But we have to go grab Jack. And to be continued. To be continued. Awesome. Okay, so we're back.

01:38:31 Speaker_04
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 with firewalking.

01:38:49 Speaker_05
Yes, you were just bringing up the physical dynamics that are possible with intense visualization, right?

01:38:55 Speaker_05
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.

01:39:07 Speaker_05
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.

01:39:17 Speaker_05
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?

01:39:27 Speaker_04
Weight work.

01:39:28 Speaker_05
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.

01:39:36 Speaker_05
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 in.

01:39:44 Speaker_05
It's kind of when I explain my fire walking, the distinction between kind of thinking about it intellectually, sort of trying to visualize it, or versus burning it in. With every sort of sensory simulation.

01:39:55 Speaker_05
Yeah, like with your whole 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.

01:40:05 Speaker_05
The doctors, I mean, they were pretty surprised by it. A lot of Western medicine's pretty surprised by it. I mean, they're close-minded about these kinds of things.

01:40:11 Speaker_04
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.

01:40:27 Speaker_04
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?

01:40:37 Speaker_05
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.

01:40:44 Speaker_05
First of all, we have to really be clear about the distinction between intellectual knowledge and somatic knowledge. When we've having something burned in, there's an adrenal response, right?

01:40:53 Speaker_05
So there's a physiology to having an experience very intensely. We have to learn how to create that physiology, right?

01:40:59 Speaker_05
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.

01:41:09 Speaker_05
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?

01:41:20 Speaker_05
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.

01:41:27 Speaker_05
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.

01:41:37 Speaker_05
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?

01:41:48 Speaker_05
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.

01:42:03 Speaker_05
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.

01:42:12 Speaker_05
cultivating the ability to observe in us and in others the subtlest undulations of quality or of physiology.

01:42:19 Speaker_04
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.

01:42:36 Speaker_04
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.

01:42:53 Speaker_05
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.

01:43:02 Speaker_05
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.

01:43:17 Speaker_05
And so 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.

01:43:30 Speaker_05
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

01:43:42 Speaker_05
the really subtle internal work that it takes to play on that razor's edge.

01:43:46 Speaker_04
I think in part it comes back to the limiting of inputs and selective ignorance that you talked about, right?

01:43:52 Speaker_04
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.

01:44:01 Speaker_05
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.

01:44:11 Speaker_05
You're embodying a certain state, and then you're helping someone embody that state as well.

01:44:17 Speaker_04
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.

01:44:31 Speaker_04
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,

01:44:42 Speaker_04
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.

01:45:12 Speaker_05
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.

01:45:23 Speaker_05
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.

01:45:34 Speaker_05
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.

01:45:46 Speaker_05
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.

01:45:55 Speaker_05
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 look quality, you lose the ability to successfully navigate the razor's edge.

01:46:04 Speaker_05
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.

01:46:12 Speaker_05
And ideally, you can make the most potent suggestions with the lightest touch feasible.

01:46:17 Speaker_04
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.

01:46:33 Speaker_04
Could you just elaborate on the principle of scarcity?

01:46:36 Speaker_05
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.

01:46:46 Speaker_05
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.

01:47:01 Speaker_05
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.

01:47:09 Speaker_05
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.

01:47:20 Speaker_05
But it takes a lot of discipline to maintain that principle of scarcity. So in Habit Creation, taking on the right amount, not too much. Not too little, but not too much.

01:47:28 Speaker_05
People tend to think about layering on, and they get excited when they realize, if I go through a diagnostic process and then we realize that there's 10 areas they could take on, they want to take on all of them at once.

01:47:37 Speaker_05
Right, you can really take on one or two things at once. Ideally one theme, and you take on two or three manifestations of that theme to burn that theme on, and you keep on layering.

01:47:44 Speaker_05
In the creative process, I mean, you talk about limiting inputs, right? We've been talking about limiting inputs.

01:47:48 Speaker_04
Positive constraints, yeah.

01:47:49 Speaker_05
Right, positive constraints. Listen, me speaking about this principle to you, I mean, you embody this principle profoundly. What are your thoughts on it?

01:47:55 Speaker_04
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, 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.

01:48:10 Speaker_04
We had no experience, no business plan and no money. So it forced us to make all of our decisions very carefully.

01:48:16 Speaker_04
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

01:48:29 Speaker_04
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.

01:48:42 Speaker_04
And to your point also about scaling, you know, I have friends who call this the S-word because it's romanticized kind of worshipped notion in Silicon Valley. Scale, scale, scale. Got to be bigger, hire more people, ship more product.

01:48:57 Speaker_04
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.

01:49:06 Speaker_04
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.

01:49:22 Speaker_04
You have to add people to an efficient process.

01:49:25 Speaker_04
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, let's just say you make, this is a real example, actually like

01:49:40 Speaker_04
20 customized rifles a year. That's all you do. And you sell to the top 0.001% of marksmen in the United States. You never ship more than that. That's the constraint that you apply.

01:49:54 Speaker_04
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,

01:50:09 Speaker_04
a small-scale craftsman who's perhaps like 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.

01:50:24 Speaker_04
But in fact, if you look at the top performers in either environment, they'll have a lot in common with each other.

01:50:30 Speaker_04
And I think one of those commonalities is applying a lot of positive constraints, even when you have an embarrassment of resources available.

01:50:37 Speaker_05
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?

01:50:45 Speaker_05
And if you look at people in most creative fields who are extremely high level versus incremental lower fields, it's knowing what the most critical area is for thinking.

01:50:55 Speaker_05
Yeah, thinking about this principle of scarcity, one of the ways that I have myself trained at this in the creative process, or harnessed the principle of scarcity, and I have everyone who I work with live in this routine, is forcing yourself to end of each day, think about what the most important question is in what you're working.

01:51:15 Speaker_05
We discussed this last time. It's really interesting because you're studying complexity all the time.

01:51:19 Speaker_05
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.

01:51:24 Speaker_05
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.

01:51:33 Speaker_05
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,

01:51:44 Speaker_05
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.

01:51:52 Speaker_05
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?

01:52:01 Speaker_05
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 thing in the morning and brainstorm on it.

01:52:10 Speaker_05
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.

01:52:19 Speaker_05
This is something that Hemingway wrote about in his writing process really beautifully.

01:52:22 Speaker_04
Yeah, Hemingway would stop writing mid-sentence and provide a foothold for continuing the next day.

01:52:30 Speaker_05
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 gonna feel like you have to write everything you have to write.

01:52:39 Speaker_05
But if you're nurturing from the inside out your creative process, you're gonna be comfortable stopping with a sense of direction, even when you're mid-sentence or mid-paragraph, right?

01:52:46 Speaker_04
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.

01:53:05 Speaker_04
They always write less than they feel they should write.

01:53:12 Speaker_05
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.

01:53:34 Speaker_05
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.

01:53:50 Speaker_05
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.

01:54:03 Speaker_04
Right. What assumptions underlied that gap, right? The creation of that gap or that blind spot.

01:54:09 Speaker_05
That misperception about what was most important. Right. Right. And so you're training yourself day in and day out like water, right?

01:54:15 Speaker_05
To be an increasingly potent and that this is manifesting scarcity and that we are forcing ourself 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?

01:54:30 Speaker_05
Yes. When do you journal? I journal, well, I journal throughout. So I, it's 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.

01:54:44 Speaker_05
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.

01:54:51 Speaker_05
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?

01:55:03 Speaker_05
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.

01:55:16 Speaker_05
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.

01:55:25 Speaker_05
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.

01:55:37 Speaker_05
And it's also really powerful because it's really hard to overcome recency bias.

01:55:40 Speaker_04
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 the best resource.

01:55:48 Speaker_05
And not necessarily the foundation of my relationship to the theme. And you want to communicate it from the, you know, someone's learned from the foundation up. So really powerful.

01:55:54 Speaker_05
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 to put this in perspective.

01:56:01 Speaker_04
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 thing. And I was like, and you say, you're not good at tech.

01:56:15 Speaker_04
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?

01:56:29 Speaker_05
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.

01:56:39 Speaker_05
I think it's, I mean, you and I have, as you said, our eccentric conversations all over the world on surfboards and wherever else. This has been a big topic for us, right?

01:56:48 Speaker_05
it's been a huge part of how I've approached learning, you know, 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.

01:57:03 Speaker_05
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, right, learn the macro from the micro.

01:57:15 Speaker_05
break down the boundaries between disparate pursuits or disparate parts of life, between the personal, the professional, the technical, and the psychological.

01:57:22 Speaker_05
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.

01:57:33 Speaker_05
But in areas where we're less advanced, we can be more raw and we might be more conducive to breakthrough sometimes.

01:57:38 Speaker_04
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 are a beginner. It's like the race to the bottom experience.

01:57:53 Speaker_04
So for those who are wondering what the hell that means, the race to the bottom is an expression that Eric of Paddlewoo, our paddle surfing instructor, uses to refer to constantly dropping in board size, often measured in liters for buoyancy purposes.

01:58:10 Speaker_04
And Josh and I and everyone who was 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.

01:58:29 Speaker_04
And to what extent do you focus on the board size and the race to the bottom, 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?

01:58:42 Speaker_05
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 he had, 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.

01:58:59 Speaker_05
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,

01:59:09 Speaker_05
And initially it was sort of competitive, but then it became much more collaborative, and they were just sharing ideas. And then they began to swap boards.

01:59:15 Speaker_05
And they began to have this interesting experience where, you know, every surfboard kind of carves its own lines, right?

01:59:21 Speaker_05
There's the practitioner who carves his lines, but then there's also the board that has, you know, a unique rocker who finds new lines in the wave.

01:59:26 Speaker_05
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.

01:59:36 Speaker_05
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?

01:59:45 Speaker_05
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?

01:59:50 Speaker_05
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?

02:00:01 Speaker_05
So you have these teams that are so private and that are so magnificent at what they do. But if you could get teams to mix, to share ideas with a sense of abundance,

02:00:08 Speaker_05
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?

02:00:14 Speaker_05
If they were truly, everyone was sharing openly, you'd be doing equivalent swapping boards, seeing new lines, right?

02:00:20 Speaker_05
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.

02:00:29 Speaker_05
So there's an example of just having experience in surfing and applying it to something else.

02:00:32 Speaker_04
And converting it potentially into a simple question, right? Like, where can I swap boards? Right. Could be something that is used for fodder for people listening in a journaling exercise.

02:00:42 Speaker_04
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, you know, drop that question at the top and just... Where can I swap boards?

02:00:52 Speaker_05
Beautiful. Exactly.

02:00:53 Speaker_04
That's a magnificent

02:00:55 Speaker_05
journaling, like Brainstorm Question to Riffon. I love it. So how do you apply that to education?

02:00:59 Speaker_05
So this 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.

02:01:12 Speaker_05
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.

02:01:26 Speaker_05
People think about disciplines in an increasingly data-driven, segregated way, in a closed-minded way, and it's kind of heartbreaking.

02:01:34 Speaker_05
And so 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.

02:01:45 Speaker_05
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.

02:01:58 Speaker_05
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?

02:02:08 Speaker_02
Sorry, guys.

02:02:11 Speaker_04
I was just looking at the URL, so 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, you know, to the Marcello Garcia gym.

02:02:25 Speaker_04
And you kept on saying, towel this, towel that. And I thought you were 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.

02:02:36 Speaker_04
The art of learning, I'm like, how did you expect me to piece that together? Anyway, that's why I was smirking. Sorry. 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.

02:02:52 Speaker_04
So anyway, the... I don't remember that conversation I'm trying to put together. It was great. Towel, towel, towel for like five flights of stairs. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Anyway, my bad.

02:03:03 Speaker_05
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.

02:03:21 Speaker_05
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.

02:03:29 Speaker_05
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.

02:03:35 Speaker_05
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.

02:03:43 Speaker_04
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, et cetera.

02:03:52 Speaker_05
Yeah, the root of these are in core themes of learning, creativity, and performance psychology that I wrote about in my book and that I've developed since. Yeah, absolutely. And we've spoken about a lot of them together.

02:04:01 Speaker_05
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.

02:04:08 Speaker_04
And so can people learn more about this at theartoflearningproject.org?

02:04:12 Speaker_05
They can. So everybody please come check out the site.

02:04:15 Speaker_05
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.

02:04:29 Speaker_05
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 Katie, K-A-T-Y, at JWFoundation.com.

02:04:44 Speaker_05
JW Foundation is the name of my nonprofit that houses the Art of Learning Project. So Katie at JWFoundation.com.

02:04:50 Speaker_04
Katie, K-A-T-Y, at JW, as in JoshuaWaitskinFoundation.com. Yes. What type of educators should check this out and email her? Teachers.

02:05:00 Speaker_05
Teachers or people running schools or school systems.

02:05:03 Speaker_04
Any minimum number of students or any other parameters?

02:05:07 Speaker_05
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.

02:05:23 Speaker_05
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.

02:05:29 Speaker_05
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.

02:05:39 Speaker_05
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 then apply it to many other things.

02:05:47 Speaker_05
This is a core part of my approach to learning I think it's been a 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.

02:05:59 Speaker_04
Well Josh. This is always so much fun to drag you kicking and screaming out of your cage and

02:06:04 Speaker_03
You did it. Cage. Or cave.

02:06:09 Speaker_04
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.

02:06:16 Speaker_04
But the 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

02:06:28 Speaker_04
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.

02:06:50 Speaker_04
And I feel like this is a massively powerful step in the right direction. So number one, thank you for that.

02:06:56 Speaker_04
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.

02:07:04 Speaker_04
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 kdkaty at jwfoundation.com. I'll put this in the show notes for everybody listening.

02:07:17 Speaker_04
These will be many of the other things we mentioned will be in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.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.

02:07:29 Speaker_04
Is there anything 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

02:07:44 Speaker_04
to walk away with, just as a closing comment or question? That's a big question. Yes, absolutely.

02:07:52 Speaker_05
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.

02:08:09 Speaker_05
my family, the people I work very closely with, and children as I work more broadly in education.

02:08:15 Speaker_05
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.

02:08:35 Speaker_05
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.

02:08:42 Speaker_05
And as parents, embodying what we want our children to embody, living it, right?

02:08:46 Speaker_05
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.

02:08:55 Speaker_05
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, of where AI is headed, of what big data can reveal.

02:09:05 Speaker_05
It's thrilling to me, as long as we stay in touch with the essential parts of our humanity.

02:09:11 Speaker_05
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.

02:09:24 Speaker_05
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 and these things that are spoken about, it's heartbreaking.

02:09:40 Speaker_05
Maybe I'm really, really old school, but there's something about the cultivation of deep presence and quality as a way of life, which just rings all through me.

02:09:50 Speaker_05
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.

02:09:57 Speaker_05
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.

02:10:07 Speaker_04
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.

02:10:18 Speaker_04
And to think otherwise is really courting disaster. So do not do it in or near water.

02:10:24 Speaker_05
Yeah.

02:10:25 Speaker_05
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.

02:10:46 Speaker_05
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.

02:10:52 Speaker_04
to find the stillness, to cultivate, not just find, but create that stillness and practice, like you said, the calming of the waters.

02:11:01 Speaker_04
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.

02:11:16 Speaker_04
It's sometimes what's right in front of you within grasp that is most important to grasp onto and make use of.

02:11:22 Speaker_05
Yeah, it 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 that 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.

02:11:35 Speaker_05
Yeah and a presence to the sense of the real sense of danger that it can slip

02:11:38 Speaker_04
Speaking for me personally, it's also building it in as a habit, just like brushing your teeth, for those people who brush their teeth.

02:11:46 Speaker_04
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.

02:11:54 Speaker_04
In other words, like meditating 10 minutes a day for 10 days is much more valuable than meditating once in 10 days for 100 minutes. For most people, it'd be less painful too. Once you get into that habit and it becomes a

02:12:08 Speaker_04
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.

02:12:22 Speaker_04
I can't believe I stopped for four weeks or whatever it is. It's incredibly valuable. And, uh, brother Josh. Thanks brother. This was a blast, man. Thanks buddy. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

02:12:32 Speaker_04
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 before the weekend?

02:12:42 Speaker_04
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

02:12:51 Speaker_04
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:13:02 Speaker_04
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:13:14 Speaker_04
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:13:28 Speaker_04
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

02:13:41 Speaker_04
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02:13:47 Speaker_04
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02:14:01 Speaker_04
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02:14:09 Speaker_04
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02:15:19 Speaker_04
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02:16:18 Speaker_04
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